Quitting motherhood

The New Neo Posted on by

This article about Rahna Reiko Rizzuto—mother of two who gave up her rights to be their custodial parent when she divorced about ten years ago, and then decided to write a book about it— has gathered over 9,000 comments as of this writing, and the comments keep coming.

From what I can see, nearly all those who took the time to write a message in response to the story think that Rizzuto’s act was selfish, and condemn her for it. It’s also probably true that she did her kids a favor by absenting herself and letting their father take over, if she was that resentful of parenthood and that self-centered.

Here’s Rizzuto:

Ten years ago, when her sons were 5 and 3, Rizzuto received a fellowship to spend six months in Japan, researching a book about the survivors of Hiroshima. Four months in, when her children came to visit, she had an epiphany: She didn’t want to be a full-time mother anymore. When she returned to New York, she ended her 20-year marriage and chose not to be her kids’ custodial parent.

Now, Rizzuto is an author and a faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, where she teaches in creative writing. Her boys are teenagers””and, she says, they’re fine. In fact, their relationship not only survived her leaving, but “has improved.”

“I had to leave my children to find them,” she writes in an essay at Salon.com. “In my part-time motherhood, I get concentrated blocks of time when I can be that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies when we got off the school bus and wasn’t too busy for anything we needed until we went to bed. I go to every parent-teacher conference; I am there for performances and baseball games.”

“I had to leave my children to find them” sounds like something out of the movies, or the apocryphal (perhaps fake) Vietnam war quote, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Rizzuto’s self-serving justification of her act, and her contention that her kids are unscarred, seem to ignore the reality of what she did when she chose her career over them.

Some women and some men are just not cut out for parenthood. It would be best if they find that out before becoming parents rather than after, unlike Rizutto. People should be aware that parenthood is both a rewarding activity and an arduous marathon. Fortunately, love for their children and the joy experienced in watching them grow, coupled with a sense of duty and responsibility, usually see people through the hard times and the sheer work of it all to the pleasure and satisfaction of parenthood.

What’s collective bargaining, and why are they saying those things about it?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written recently about a bunch of polls where Americans were asked what they think about the “right” to collective bargaining for public service union workers. Yesterday I wrote, “I’d also love to have seen a quiz accompanying the poll with some questions on what respondents think collective bargaining is,” because I doubt very many know at all.

Well, as though in response, the WSJ has this article [hat tip: commenter “csimon”] attempting to educate us. Here’s an excerpt:

Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state””or even across states””can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.

In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Remarkably, labor unions are not only immune from antitrust laws but can also negotiate a “union shop,” which requires nonunion employees to join the union or pay nearly equivalent dues. Somehow, despite many attempts, organized labor has lacked the political power to repeal the key portion of the 1947 Taft Hartley Act that allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, which now prohibit the union shop in 22 states. From the standpoint of civil liberties, the individual right to work””without being forced to join a union or pay dues””has a much better claim than collective bargaining.

Here’s more:

This “compromise” [reducing wages but allowing collective bargaining for public employees to stand unchanged] leaves intact the structure of strong public-employee unions that helped to create the unsustainable fiscal situation; after all, the next governor may have less fiscal discipline. A long-run solution requires a change in structure, for example, by restricting collective bargaining for public employees and, to go further, by introducing a right-to-work law.

My guess is that, if most Americans knew what this was all about, they would be standing with the Governor of Wisconsin. But they don’t, and most of the MSM is probably dedicated to the proposition that they remain ignorant.

In fact, come to think of it, I wonder how many members of the press who write about collective bargaining have a clue themselves what it actually is?

[NOTE: The WSJ piece is written by Robert Barro, who is an economics professor at Harvard. Interesting, no?]

Mike Huckabee, Dan Quayle, marriage, and Natalie Portman as the new Murphy Brown

The New Neo Posted on by

No, Mike Huckabee is not the father of Natalie Portman’s love child. Dancer/choreographer Benjamin Millepied is. The couple fell in love during the filming of the abominable “Black Swan” and are said to be engaged, with Portman’s pregnancy very much on sedate display at the recent Academy Awards show when she won the Best Actress award.

Huckabee is now getting a fair amount of publicity for “slamming” Portmans’ pregnancy (although if this mild rebuke constitutes a slam, language has gotten more hopelessly liberal-PC than I had thought). Huckabee has even been compared to Dan Quayle (quelle horreur!), who famously criticized the TV show “Murphy Brown” for showing Murphy as an unwed mother and thus undermining traditional values about marriage and the place of fathers.

Quayle was widely ridiculed for criticizing a fictional character, and his remarks were treated as though they were evidence that he did not know the difference between fantasy and reality. The same cannot be said against Huckabee, although that doesn’t stop people from mocking him for his remarks (just take a look at the comments section of the link I posted to the Huffington Post, or at virtually any other liberal outlet covering the story).

First up, let’s take a YouTube trip back in time and see what Quayle actually said:

Seems to me as though he fully grasped just who the fictional Murphy Brown was, and exactly what the significance of her TV pregnancy meant both as a reflection of the decline of marriage and the norming of it for viewers. The type of unwed pregnancy Portman has—in which the parents-to-be are still together, still seemingly happy, and still seemingly able to marry but choose not to right now—is so commonplace in Hollywood and elsewhere as to be almost de rigueur.

We’ve come a long way, baby, haven’t we—right to the point where it’s Huckabee who’s now seen as the dinosaur for defending marriage and fathers; or for saying that single mothers are usually not rich and famous like Portman, but poor and struggling. No wonder so many men and women are unhappily at sea about whether marriage has any function at all.

I’ve got some questions for Portman and her “fiance:” you’ve got the money, you’ve got the time, and you’ve got the baby coming. Why not get married before the delivery?

Ms. Portman, on accepting your Best Actress award at the Oscar ceremony the other night, you thanked Millepied for giving you “the greatest gift,” presumably the baby. Is it too much to ask that you both give the baby a great gift, parents who are a married couple?

And if it’s too much to ask, why? Are you so very narcissistically intent on proving to the world that you don’t need such formalities to be in love and committed to each other? If so, why call yourselves engaged, then? And if you really are engaged, why not speed up the wedding and have it performed before the birth? Is is simply a matter of the perfect caterer being all booked?

Jack Cashill, Obama, and racism

The New Neo Posted on by

Jack Cashill has recently published a book called Deconstructing Obama, in which he advances his theory that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s well-known memoir Dreams From My Father. Cashill has been called a racist for his pains.

This accusation was as predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

When I first blogged, I was stunned when I discovered that I was being accused of being a racist for one of my very first posts, which questioned the credentials of an Iranian-American journalist, not because she was Iranian-American but because she was young and inexperienced. This was six years ago, long before Obama’s candidacy, but I learned early on in my own writing life that any criticism of a person who belongs to a designated minority group, even if such criticism is connected with issues having nothing to do with race or ethnicity, elicits the “racist” charge from those who wish to discredit the argument.

Note that Cashill is very clear on what he bases his charges of ghostwriting, and it has nothing to do with race. It is those on the left who think only in terms of race—or, at least, of using race as a strategic ploy. Either they believe race is Cashill’s motive for real, in which case they are the ones thinking about whether a black man is capable of writing such a book (certainly nothing that Cashill has ever suggested, or probably even thought about), or they are cynically charging him with racism knowing it is a toxic tool that they use all the time, to great effect.

In that endeavor, Obama is a great gift to them. He mostly stands apart from such charges, but sets a tone that encourages and releases them. This was apparent even during his 2008 campaign (see this and this). About a year ago, Obama apparently did it again. No surprise, really.

[NOTE: This is probably as good a time as any to remind you that I encourage you to use the widgets here to click through to Amazon whenever you order. If you want to buy Cashill’s book or any other book I link to, just click on the link or the widgets on the right sidebar, you’ll get there.

Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t read Cashill’s book yet, although I hope to. People tell me that he mentioned my analysis of Obama’s poem “Pop” in it. That’s not the only reason I’d like to read it, of course, but I’m curious.)

Wisconsin: those pesky polls again

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a depressing Rasmussen poll out, which everyone says shows the public to be against Governor Walker’s stand on limiting public service unions’ collective bargaining rights.

I wrote “everyone says” because I can’t seem to find the actual poll results themselves—the hard data, that is—which I believe have not been released yet. I linked to Rasmussen’s summary instead, which says that, in a recent telephone survey of Wisconsin “likely” voters, “just 39% favor weakening collective bargaining rights and 52% are opposed.” But see this:

The overall sample for the survey included 30% of union households. That includes 33% with a private sector union member and 60% with a public sector union member.

Additionally, the sample includes 46% who voted for Governor Walker last November and 45% who voted for his challenger Tom Barrett. Walker actually won the election by a 52% to 46% margin.

When I read that sort of thing, I’m inclined to throw up my hands in despair. Only if 60% public sector union households is representative of Wisconsin’s population as a whole is this sort of thing even remotely valid, and the stats for Walker voters in the poll makes its sample doubly suspect. [ADDENDUM: see this.]

The strange thing is that, when Rasmussen has been criticized in the past, the charge has been that it leans more to the right than the left. So, although I tend to distrust polls in general and feel they have an agenda, I can’t quite figure out what the agenda here might be.

Maybe in the future I should just ignore polls. They don’t seem to be worth the trouble of dissecting them or even paying attention. But they do seem to grab attention, since they’re the only tool we have to gauge public opinion.

Ah, public opinion. When Rasmussen lists the questions asked in that poll, the one that grabs my attention is the very first one, “How closely have you followed recent news stories about Governor Scott Walker’s proposals to reduce the state budget deficit?” And even when we get that numbers for the answer (which we don’t have yet), my bet is that people tend to think they’re following closely when they’re not at all.

I’d also love to have seen a quiz accompanying the poll with some questions on what respondents think collective bargaining is. I’d also love to have seen question 11 (“Do you favor or oppose a proposal to weaken the collective bargaining rights of state employees?”) broken down into sections that list those “rights.” Hey, I’d like it not to have used the word “rights” at all, which seems to me to state the case that these are fundamental rights such as life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and those embodied in the Bill of Rights.

What’s more, I’d like to have seen a linkage in the question, not just the phrase “weakening of rights” floating in the air like that, untethered to the budget issue. It’s very possible that if I had been asked a question like “Do you favor or oppose a proposal to weaken the collective bargaining rights of state employees?” I might have answered “no,” in the absence of a direct connection to the actual issue involved here, which is the budget. After all, the connection is not readily apparent; how many people who answered the poll have a clue what’s actually being proposed in Wisconsin, and why?

It all comes down to the same thing, over and over: if voters are uninformed, they will be manipulated by others. Our entire system of government rests not only on voters’ common sense, but on their ability to understand what’s going on. Polls not only reflect whatever deficits exist in those traits, they also can exploit them and magnify them.

[NOTE: There’s also this WSJ/NBC poll, which indicates people want to reduce the deficit without cutting Social Security or Medicare. But again, look at what was actually asked.

Respondents were queried on whether they favored making cuts in Social Security to reduce the deficit. If I’d been asked that question, I would have said “no,” too, because I think older people who paid into the system all these years and have relied on it ought to get their money. But cutting those payments is not a Republican proposal right now, anyway; some sort of stepped phase-out is, as well as a change in the age of receiving benefits which is supported by the poll. So why ask the question that way?

I don’t think it’s because the pollsters don’t know what they’re doing.]

[ADDENDUM: It doesn’t sound as though Governor Walker is too terribly cowed by the polls.

And I’ve just noticed the use of the term “fleebaggers” to describe the AWOL Wisconsin Senate Democrats. Clever.]

The angry pro-union mob in Wisconsin

The New Neo Posted on by

Isn’t it interesting how much hype was made about angry (and racist) Tea Partiers, and yet no evidence was ever found?

And isn’t it interesting that, although there’s plenty of evidence of really viciously angry pro-union protesters in Wisconsin, it’s really only being reported in the right-wing media?

[NOTE: Ann Althouse and her husband Meade are doing yeomans’ work in covering the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, where they live.]

Obama: clothes or no?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a great exchange about Obama, found in the comments section at RealClearPolitics:

From DCD+in+Indiana:

He’s impossible to find because he is an empty suit. We are, in a word, leaderless.

Reply from Dusty:

“empty suit”
Hmmm. And all this time I thought the Emperor had no clothes. I see quite the metaphysical dilemma.

[NOTE: When I was choosing the categories with which to tag this post, I considered adding “fashion” to the list, but decided against it.]

Sirhan Sirhan up for parole today

The New Neo Posted on by

RFK’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan is up for parole today. It’s the 14th time this has occurred, and the hearing is likely to go the way of all the rest and end in denial.

When I heard the news, my first thought was, “Why is this man still alive?” After all, he assassinated a presidential candidate in full view of a crowd of people.

The answer is that, although he was sentenced to death in his trial, the California Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, before his execution had taken place. The way that sort of thing works is that, even though he was sentenced when executions were allowed, the ruling was retroactive. And even though executions were re-instituted in California in the late 70s, his re-sentencing to life in prison (with possibility of parole) during that small window of opportunity stands.

It is a common misconception that, because Sirhan was a Palestinian angry at RFK because of what he considered his pro-Israel stance, the assassin must have been a Muslim. He was not; he was a Palestinian Christian whose parents had left the area and brought him to this country when he was twelve.

Another thing I wondered when I researched this post is why Sirhan was tried under the state criminal system in California. I knew the crime was committed there, but I thought surely this would have been a federal crime as well (one of its results, by the way, is that presidential candidates are now afforded Secret Service protection). It turns out that it was not a federal crime at the time, and another result of Sirhan’s act is that the killing of a presidential candidate is now a federal crime, due to a law Congress passed after RFK’s death in 1971. This sadly extended an earlier law passed by Congress in 1965, in reaction to the shooting of his brother JFK:

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, it was not a federal crime to kill a U.S. president. Had alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald been tried, the trial would have taken place in a Texas state court. In 1965, Congress passed a law, 18 U.S.C. 1751, making it a federal crime to kill, kidnap, or assault the President or the Vice President.

That’s one extension of the power of the federal government with which I have no quarrel.

[NOTE: What do George Plimpton, Rosey Grier, and Pete Hamill have in common? They, among others, wrestled Sirhan to the ground after the assassination.

Another fact I had completely forgotten—if I ever even knew it in the first place—is that five other people were injured in the shooting, although they all lived. They were “Paul Schrade, an official with the United Automobile Workers union; William Weisel, an ABC TV unit manager; Ira Goldstein, a reporter with the Continental News Service; Elizabeth Evans, a friend of Pierre Salinger, one of Kennedy’s campaign aides; and a teenager, Irwin Stroll, a Kennedy volunteer.”]

Support for public service unions: there are pols, and then there are polls

The New Neo Posted on by

If you look at today’s memeorandum page, the top stories are all about the Times/CBS poll showing that most Americans strongly favor collective bargaining rights for public employees.

Then there are critiques of those polls and their sampling methods, by Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit, who point out that the sampling favored Democrats and union members too strongly, plus possible biases introduced by the way the questions were worded.

I noticed a couple more things when I actually looked at the poll itself rather than the hype around it. The poll’s results highlight what I think is at work in this and so many other issues of our day: ignorance.

And by “ignorance” I don’t mean “too many people disagree with me!” I mean actual ignorance, as in “barely following the story.”

Take a look at Question 2, for example, about whether the respondent has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions. 19% were undecided, 20% hadn’t heard enough to know, and 2% who cooperated with the poll enough to answer other questions refused to answer that particular one. That’s a pretty large total percentage of either fence-sitters and/or the uninformed, leaving a unrepresentatively high percentage of the highly partisan among the other responders.

Then there’s question 6, about how much the respondents have heard on the subject of the budget fights in several states proposing to cut public employees’ benefits. Only 33% answered “a lot,” 26% “some,” and the rest seemed to know virtually nothing about it. This question didn’t just involve Wisconsin, it involved the entire issue, and the answers point out just how low this topic is on most people’s radar screens. My guess is that as things heat up in more states, this will change.

Even more importantly, the questions involved collective bargaining rights for public workers in general, which in most people’s minds includes firefighters and police officers. These groups are not affected in the Wisconsin battle and are not on the list of those who will lose collective bargaining rights there if Walker prevails.

Polls are almost always designed in some partisan way, especially polls by media outlets, and this one is certainly no exception. The polls are then used to gain momentum for a particular point of view, and to intimidate opponents into losing heart and capitulating.

This particular fight is seen by the left as vital, and they are correct. So they will pull out all the stops to win it. Republicans’ task is to educate the public. Governor Christie of NJ is eminently suited to this task, and Governor Walker of WI is not bad, either. But they need to be relentless in getting the word out, and they need to not rely on the MSM to help them, because it will be seeking to hinder them instead.

[ADDENDUM: William Jacobson critiques the sampling in a Wisconsin poll.]

RIP Jane Russell

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the Hollywood icons of my youth, Jane Russell, has died at 89.

Russell was by all reports that rarity in the movie world: down-to-earth, level-headed, Republican, and religious. I was taken with her when I was a child because she was a brunette (always identified with brunettes) with a hairdo like my mother’s, a sarcastic wit, and a relaxed naturalness that came across as spunky in the movies that I saw on TV in black-and-white, such as “Son of Paleface.” Take a look at how easy she makes it all seem (and how tall and statuesque she was):

Note, also, her outfit. It was the era of the Western, and we spent a lot of time in our cowgirl outfits, like Jane. Exhibit A—young neo-neocon, cowgirl extraordinaire, although with not quite as impressive a form:

cowgirl2-6-13-2004-10-50-40-pm.jpg