Friday Morning Videos: "Thriller"

As if on this Halloween weekend, I could possibly choose anything else! Enjoy, everyone, and watch out for Michael Jackson's freaky eyes.

Because I Owe It to My People...

...and because to allow it to fall into obscurity would be a crime against the spirit of the holiday, I give you now, once again, for anyone who cares, a Bill Atkinson/Jonathan Green production of, truly, the greatest Mormon Halloween costume of all time.





It's beyond nerdy. It's beyond blasphemous. It's perfect. Sorry Abe, but not even getting your whole ward to dress up in Federation outfits could touch this. Star Trek may be vaguely Mormon in some ways, but Moroni is definitely moreso.

You Can't Touch This

You thought about shooting for "nerd" this Halloween? Thought about getting all ironic and cool and pop-culture and fan-boyish? Give it up, you losers. My brother Abe, sister-in-law Betsy, and their whole family, have already beat you.




It's funny; I thought Abe had gotten rid of that old Spock uniform (he wore it when he took his senior picture). Nice to know it still fits him.

Movies Without Melissa

Over the past couple of weeks, my wife has been away--first to a conference, then to a family funeral--for about six days. What have I done with myself during that time alone, besides take care of the girls the way a good husband and father should? I've watched movies my wife isn't interested in seeing, of course.

Melissa is enough of a reader that we already often retreat to different corners of the house for the hour or so we have after we put the kids down before we head to sleep ourselves. But I'll usually be using that time for grading papers or writing or reading the blogs; only occasionally will I pop in a dvd to watch one of the dozes of films on my ever-changing "to-see" list, because generally when we see movies, we see them together. But there are plenty of films on that list that Melissa has no interest in watching, so I tend to put them off until I can safely abandon her for a while and indulge in my passion for the violent, the weird, the off-beat, the rare, the historical. Since she's been abandoning me lately, it's meant late lights and lots of crossing-off of films I've meant to get around to for years. Herewith, a brief report on the past 13 days (in alphabetical order):

Aguirre, the Wrath of God: good, but not great. I suspect I would have considered it great if I'd seen it on the big screen; the power of Klaus Kinski's depiction of a soldier's descent into madness and how he drags of 16th-century expedition off down the Amazon with him seemed to depend to a great deal on the background music, and the expansive visuals of the endless, dispiriting water and jungle which Werner Herzog filmed all around him. As it was, I found it affecting, but not grandiose, and I think that's what the movie was aiming for.

The Darjeeling Limited: it started out funnier, and better, than any other Wes Anderson film I've seen (and I've seen them all). Yes, you had all Anderson's usual so-hip-it's-ironic-or-is-it? tricks: the non sequiters, the brilliantly oddball musical cues, the slow motion tracking shots. But I loved it nonetheless. It was a hipster road movie, and it had me giggling like a hyena. (Best bit: when Jack Whitman--Jason Schwartzman--goes for his mace to break-up a fight between his brothers.) But then Anderson I guess started feeling guilty about using poverty-stricken Indian villages as a backdrop to a satire of secular upper-class Americans searching for themselves, and decided to give the movie Real Meaning. Which slowed it down, made it predictable, and less fun.

Eraserhead: no one can say that David Lynch didn't start out every bit as weird as he has ever been. I've never been a huge Lynch fan, and this film--his first--didn't convert me, but my respect for him remains. It's a crude, surreal, sometimes shockingly blunt horror-film expression of some of the ugliest fears human beings have about love and sex and marriage and childbirth. It is also frankly nonsensical, especially with the brief interlude which suggests, so far as I can tell, that the main character might actually be a No. 2 pencil having a dream.

The Last Temptation of Christ: my old friend Matt Stannard recommended I see this years ago, when I went along with the huge crowds and checked out Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. My verdict is like my verdict for Aguirre above--good, but not great. The scenes of Jesus's arrest, torture, and crucifixion were handled much better than the overloaded gore of Gibson's approach--David Bowie actually made a find Pontius Pilate, I thought--but one thing you have to give Gibson credit for is that his film, from beginning to blood-drenched end, had a consistent theology throughout. Whereas Scorsese's film didn't. I'm not criticizing his choice to tell a story where Jesus is confused, struggling, filled with doubt and partly just making it up as he goes along; I just was less than satisfied with, in the wake of giving us that kind of Jesus, Scorsese gives us an ending in which Christianity appears to happen anyway, suggesting that God is really the master of the situation, an implication which isn't supported the rest of the way through. Did Jesus give in to His final temptation to leave the cross, and God later put Him back on there when He changed His mind, or was it all a dream? Scorsese kind of likes those kind of endings, but when he's talking about God, they may not be the best way to end a film.

Letters from Iwo Jima: kind of deadening, as war flicks go. Which is surely very true to life; the story of the battle of Iwo Jima, as far as the Japanese soldiers who fought and died there were concerned, was almost entirely about slowly starving to death in tunnels as the American war machine slowly, painfully, one by one, took them out. So I give Eastwood credit for putting together an ambitious, honest war film. It was just one that gave me a sinking, grey feeling throughout, and I'm not sure how intentional that was.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller: I'd put it in the middle of my personal ranking of Altman films. As with Lynch, I'm not a major fan of Altman, but I respect the kind of work he did. Some of the films he made I think are first-class stories on film: wickedly funny, stylistically unique, surprisingly (sometimes eeriely) insightful. Nashville, one of my favorite movies, a creepy and brilliantly panoramic slice of Americana, falls into this category. McCabe, by contrast, was doing Altman's frequent trick of capturing as much of life as possible on the margins of the film's supposed main story, but only succeeded about half the time. Possibly his insistence on staging and shooting the film so naturalistically became, ultimately, itself a kind of fake artiface (is it really plausible that John McCabe (Warren Beatty) will always turn away from the camera and mumble whenever he has a big line to deliver?). It's great to see the Pacific Northwest--in wintertime!--in a western, though.

Pineapple Express: much of it was very, very funny; Red (Danny McBride), the paranoid middle-man who is so high and so stupid that he keeps fighting even after he's shot and bleeding from multiple wounds, was my favorite character, and a couple of scenes--like when Dale (Seth Rogan) and Saul (James Franco)--get spooked for no reason and run like mad men through the woods--are just fall-down funny. But ultimately, I don't know. I think it just might be a fact that drunk people are funnier than stoned people. (As my friend and restauranter Nick Zukin once put it to me: "Drunk people + Hollywood = funny.")

Sweeny Todd: I have to say, a failure as a movie musical. This musical--which I've never seen live, only the filmed Broadway production with the insanely terrific (terrifically insane?) Angela Landsbury--has, in my opinion, Sondheim's greatest score, perfectly melding soaring music and sleazy, blood-soaked melodrama into a soundtrack that's an outrageous black comedy delight. Tim Burton had some fun with some of the visuals, and there was some great creative set-ups and shots for the actors, but ultimately, they just couldn't do what musicals demand: use the song to make their characters persuasive, and the story captivating. In something like Mamma Mia, this doesn't matter: we're just having fun with the songs after all, and the story is irrelevant (and completely stupid, at that). But you can't do that with Sondheim. When you're supposed to be seeing lurid madness and despair in the raw, the movie's singing can only offer you Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter looking like a couple of pissed-off Goths. And besides, couldn't Burton have at least given us that tremendous, haunting final chorus, if only over the credits?

That Was Pretty Wicked (and Other Musical Thoughts)

Melissa and I went out to Wicked on Saturday, which just opened its short run here in Wichita. What a fabulous, fun event! It's been too long since we've seen a big spectacle like this, and we miss them. Salt Lake City isn't a huge metropolis, but as it and Denver are the only really large and wealthy markets between Kansas City and the West coast, lots of shows would stop there, and we would drive up from BYU and catch a fair number of them as the years went by in the early 90s: Forever Plaid, The Secret Garden, The Will Rogers Follies. And then we were in the DC area while I was in graduate school, and we saw a ton of great stuff while there (it had just exploded into the national consciousness when we saw Riverdance, but it hadn't yet gone global; Colin Dunne was still with the show, and Irish step-dancing had not yet become a punch-line on The Simpsons). But since then, living in college towns in Mississippi, Arkansas, western Illinois and now Kansas, while opportunities for small and local theater productions have been plentiful, there generally just hasn't been sufficient critical mass to attract the big-money, big-stage shows, at least not anywhere within driving distance for us. (The last one we saw was The Lion King, when it came to Memphis.) So the fact that Wichita was able to land Wicked was awesome, and something we weren't going to miss.

How was it, as a show? There are a lot better musicals, to be sure. We're fans of musicals around here, as I wrote about years ago, and things haven't changed: our oldest girls, now 13 and 9, were jealous of and excited for Melissa and I (we bought the way-out-of-our-budget tickets back in August, as an anniversary present to ourselves), and they excitedly watched clips on Youtube, printed off the lyrics to the big songs, and took to singing "Defying Gravity" around the house. But being fans doesn't mean you worship every story that gives an actress the chance to hit a high note while in costume under the lights. For a musical to be really good, in my mind at least, it has to bring its story and its style together. A lot of folks are just kind of turned off by musicals, on stage or on screen, because they don't like the singing; or even if they don't mind the singing, it just strikes them as...well, stupid. People don't break out in song when they're sad or angry or happy or love, they say to themselves, so why should I watch a bunch of dressed-up folks do so? Well, for entertainment, of course. But that complaint has a point to it.

The modern Broadway musical--really, everything since Oklahoma or Show Boat, but nowadays especially monstrous ones which get taken on the road, and price their tickets at $80 or more a pop--generally set themselves up to something more than diversions, a variety revue with little comedy and a little dancing and music. The songs, and the singing of them, have to serve the play, and vice versa--they need to complement each other. Which means there ought to be some discernible, persuasive, dramatic or comedic (or both) arc that carries the story and characters from song to script and back again, all the way to the end. In the case of Wicked, I thought the book--the plotting and staging and spoken words--failed: not a total failure, but not a great success either. The first act was choppy, rushing from point A to point B without allowing us to get to know or emotionally relate to the main characters (Elphaba, who grows up to be the Wicked Witch of the West, and Galinda, who becomes Glinda the Good), while the second act crammed too much into too little time. So I had those complaints. On the upside, both Melissa and our friends who went with us, all who have read the original novel the musical was based on, said that the story the musical told was an improvement on the book, and so there's that. And besides: how was the music? Just stunning. Solid all the way through, with a few real break-out songs that I think will really last. (Everyone loves the show-stopper "Defying Gravity," of course, but I actually thought the smartest, wittiest number was the Wizard's "Sentimental Man.") We applauded until our arms were exhausted, and it was deserved.

What's the best musical I've ever seen? Well, I've seen so many more as movies rather than on stage, that it's hard to compare: movie musicals can do different things, and should do different things, than those on stage, and that calls for different standards of measurement. (I think the greatest movie musical of them all is Singin' in the Rain, and I suspect that would be simply atrocious and stupid on stage.) On stage, I might have to say Man of La Mancha, a play where, when it's done right, the music puts the characters both inside and outside the story they're telling, and that's just remarkable. Into the Woods is also very, very good. Unfortunately, probably the single best musical I've ever seen on stage is also the one about which I have my most embarrassing musical story to tell. When I was seventeen, my parents and older brother and I went on a trip to Israel. On our way back, we stopped in New York City, and spent a couple of days seeing plays, something my dad arranged mostly to please my mother. The highlight was that my dad got tickets--this was in the summer of 1987, remember--to Les Misérables. And I thought it was so boring I fell asleep. In retrospect, I'm simply humiliated. I mean, I saw Les Misérables in New York during its original run with its original New York cast! And I hardly remember any of it. What an idiot I was. (You were a stupid teen-ager, people say to me. That's no excuse, I reply.)

Any choices for favorite musicals out there, or good memories of musicals you've seen? Feel free to share. I have to salve my wounded pride somehow.

Friday Morning Videos: "Misunderstanding"

[Update, 10/23, 12:45pm, CST: Sorry all who contacted me about the missing FMV. I messed up; I had accidentially it scheduled to appear at 7:00pm tonight. To those who went without their morning fix, my apologies. It won't happen again.]

My very favorite early Genesis video, before Phil Collins starting getting high ambitions and hair stylings all his own. I love it because it really is just the band and a film crew driving aroung L.A., shooting footage wherever the mood strikes them. I've been told by old Los Angelos, folks that have lived in the city ever since it actually was a real city, and not just a bunch of isolated and mutually suspicious enclaves, that this video is a treasure trove: filled with shots of old restraunts and streets and drive-ins and theaters and intersections that were well-known once, and are long-since gone today. Let's bow our heads for the glory that was 1980, everybody.

Capitalism, Socialism, Localism Bleg

I haven't done one of these for a fairly long time, but it's time to call upon the wisdom of the internet once more.

Next semester I'll being teaching my Topics in Political Theory course, which I only have a chance to do here at Friends once every couple of years. I seriously considered doing Ancient and Medieval Political Thought, since I haven't taught Plato, et al, in ages, and I kind of miss them. Still, after bouncing that and a couple of other ideas around with my colleagues, I've decided the time has come for a good survey of the social and political theories behind various approaches to economic policy. Thus: "Capitalism, Socialism, Localism." I have in mind a nice announcement flyer for it as well, featuring Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, and Jesus. (Guess which one is which.)

That just leaves a question of the assigned reading material. This will be a 300-level course, so the majority of the students will be juniors and seniors, though given how small the program is at Friends, I may well end up with some sophomores in there. What should form the basic foundation of the course, and what are the best books or essays to deliver that foundation? Selections of Adam Smith (but which?) and Karl Marx are a must, of course. I also dearly want to include Rousseau's "Discourse on Political Economy" in there, if only so I can make use of the new (Jacob-Levy-recommended, and quite good) The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau, though it (and Rousseau too; I'd probably have to require them to read the "Second Discourse" first) will probably be way over their heads. G.A. Cohen's last (and simply terrific) little book Why Not Socialism? will probably also be assigned. For some introductory background, I'll probably use that stand-by, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, unless someone has a better suggestion for a general primer. As a analytical framework for the class, looking closely as libertarian, liberal egalitarian, and socialist approaches to markets, I like Stephen Nathanson's Economic Justice. As for localism, I'll probably use some Wendell Berry (Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community is probably his best collection for this purpose, though though he has other essays which address economic localism more specifically), but Bill McKibben's Deep Economy is also tempting. Some essays by Lawrence Goodwyn would also be nice to bring the explictly populist People's Party perspective into it, though there's no way I'll be able to include everything.

So, what do you think? What am I missing, and what should I throw out? Should I add something by de Soto, Friedman, Nozick, Krugman, Polanyi, or others? If so, what is expendable? I throw myself upon your good graces and knowledge, Fair People of the Internets. Guide me in my hour of need, preferably before book orders come due on November 1.

Update to Sharing the Kids Equally

One of America's more interesting and less predictable feminist public intellectual voices, Arlie Hochschild, has a few things to say about the general topic of family life and child care in a consumer capitalist world (hat tip: Laura McKenna):

Over the last 40 years, we have witnessed a profound shift in the American family, one that bears the deep footprints of a disappearing economic sector and a transformed culture....In survey after survey, Americans show up as valuing marriage more than people almost anywhere else. Yet at the same time we have the highest divorce--and romantic breakup--rate in the world, Andrew J. Cherlin observes in his highly insightful book The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. We step into and out of romantic relationships faster than couples in Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. By age 35, 10 percent of American women have lived with three or more husbands or domestic partners--a higher proportion than in any of these countries. Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden.

Why are Americans on this marriage-go-round? Is it the "restless temper" Alexis de Tocqueville observed 175 years ago? It is true, Cherlin observes, that more than people elsewhere, we move from job to job, city to city, and even church to church. Could this be linked to a missing government safety net and ­family-protective policies? Cherlin gives little credence to this idea, but he leaves us with another useful notion--that more than we realize, we’ve become accustomed to a move-along life-go-round world.

If Americans came to this country as restless seekers in search of a new and better life, capitalism made superb use of that impulse. We believe in the new....The culprit is not the absence of family values, I believe, but a continual state of unconscious immersion in a market turnover culture. It is this that sets us apart from a more stable Europe. For some adults, the search for a new partner leads to a better life. But not so for many children. Reporting on his research about the nation’s teenagers, Cherlin says: "For each partner who entered or left the household of a single parent, the odds that the adolescent had stolen something, skipped school, gotten drunk or done something similar rose by 12 percent."

Working-class families, where breakups come faster, have suffered a one-two punch. They have absorbed the decline of the industrial sector. They have also been exposed, like the rest of America, to a curiously consumerist approach to love. Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free....

So what can we do? In response to our fast-food culture, a "slow food" movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.

There is much in Hochschild's piece worth pondering (her criticisms of social conservatives wisely alert to cultural threats to family life, but unwilling to pay for the social programs they recommend in response to such in particular); so really, read the whole thing. But I do think she would have been well-served if she was somewhat more aware of the strong arguments which have taken place online, here and elsewhere, about being "slacker" parents. Meaning, not slacking off on one's responsibilities to one's spouse and one's children, but rather, refusing to let an individualistic culture and the capitalist order which sustains it (complete with demands about how work around the house is going to be divided) dictate how a family will operate. The bosses are insisting you put in longer hours at work? The neighbors' kids are embarrassing yours because of the electronic toys they lack? Rising mortgages or the expectation of owning multiple cars is turning your family into a frazzled two-income one? Slack off! Or, at least, aim to get to a situation where you can.

Friday Morning Videos: "Smooth Operator"

Here's a change of pace--somthing soft, jazzy, sultry. Ignore the pseudo-Miami Vice subplot to the video; just enjoy the music.

Sharing the Kids Equally (Thoughts on Feminism, Capitalism, and Simplicity)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

So, Melissa has flown the coop, escaping to Washington D.C. for the next four days to hang out with friends old and new, and chat in person with many of her online book-blogger peers at the KidLitosphere Conference, an annual gathering of bloggers who specialize in children's, youth, and young adult fiction. (Melissa will read and review anything, but she does have her preferences.) That leaves me at home, responsible for four girls ranging in age from 3 to 13. Which makes me wonder about a few things. But first, the obligatory "Mr. Mom" clip:



I know for a fact that I'm not that pathetic. Not quite, anyway.

The humorous reputation which most husbands and fathers in America carry around when they're--when we're; no reason to leave myself out of this--obliged to take up duties which are usually, and stereotypically, assumed by wives and mothers is pretty insulting, of course, however true it may be. Not primarily to us guys, I think; in all likelihood, when such humor is engaged in we'll find ourselves happily appropriating it as way to set ourselves up for failure, and excuse our reliance upon women to keep the family alive and the house operating normally. No, mostly it's insulting to women, in a kind of putting-them-up-on-an-inverted-pedestal sort of way. Not that women don't use the same humorous stereotypes too; of course they do. But I think when I've heard Melissa and her friends chortle about the fact that, say, I don't know the first thing about laundry, it seems to be a bit of a defense mechanism, a reluctant, self-martyring, head-shaking justification for the world of work which invariably seems their lot in life. Of course, I'm not saying anything new or original; anyone who has taken even the tiniest glimpse at the literature--hell, anyone who has ever been married, or even in a more or less permanent heterosexual relationship--knows for a fact that most women do most household and child-rearing chores, partly by choice, but also partly because apparently even the most egalitarian of husbands and fathers find it hard to fight patterns of socialization which have surrounded us for generations.

A lot of that socialization, obviously, is tied up in a particular model of the bourgeois, post-WWII, middle- and upper-class, suburban household: one bread-winner, the man, who leaves home to work in a factory or office, and then returns home to the woman, who has stayed there all day to tend the children, prepare the food, and maintain order. It's an unequal form of socialization which has been attacked by feminists at least since Betty Friedan, if not earlier. (Some conservatives have criticized this artificial division as well, but such localist or distributist "conservative" messages have never had much luck escaping the untouched from Republican machine.)

The success of the feminist attack on this arrangement has been limited, I think, pretty much exactly to the degree to which it has not, for the most part (at least outside of purely academic circles), been extended into a attack on the capitalist presumptions which underscore it. So long as women and men are going to want to have children and bring them up in an environment of at least some stability, and so long as this essentially natural and historical process has to happen in a socio-economic context which hammers home, again and again, the arbitrary demands of specialized labor and consumer acquisition, then obviously some sort of bifurcation of the home and the workplace is going to occur, and mothers and fathers are going to have to adjust their lives so as to accommodate that. So we have the SAHMs and their incompetent husbands, or we have working moms with daycare stresses and guilt, and husbands who are enlightened enough to actually help out with some of the vacuuming occasionally. Of course, there are numerous exceptions to this, and perhaps we're seeing more all the time; but still, overall those exceptions remain just that: exceptionally rare. (I just got back from picking up Kristen, our youngest, from her half-day pre-school, and I was the only man anywhere in the building. Admittedly, Wichita isn't going to be particularly rife with folks choosing to buck traditional stereotypes, but I seriously doubt that even in New York or San Francisco would you see such numbers skewed a whole lot the other way.)

I think about all this, because I think about equality, and would like to believe that, in small ways, here and there, Melissa and I have managed to make for ourselves a somewhat more egalitarian home than the ones we knew growing up. Part of our success in this, I believe, can be attributed to the fact that we've been conscientious enough, or lucky enough, or both, to develop a way of life which minimizes some of the ways which the marketplace can drive a person away from a home environment where it's possible to implement and maintain a little more balance.

As in so many things, I find Laura McKenna to be a brilliant guide to this tangle of issues, and she's contributed some sharp observations to the debate again and again. In one of the above posts, she comments about the idea of families embracing the kind of equal division of labor which opting out of consumer capitalism potentially makes possible; while she's dubious of going the whole "radical" distance, she thinks the idea has merit, point out that "[t]here is absolutely no reason that feminism should mean a devotion to capitalism." This comment of hers came back to me when I read Rod Dreher's recent post about how much he--a full-time journalist and writer, a man who has confessed several times that, despite his localist aspirations, he'd simply feel lost and useless if he had provide for his family without relying upon the broad world of information and words and ideas--depends on his wife to manage a life which dissents in even small ways from the pressures of consumer capitalism. Rod quotes at length from the always provocative Sharon Astyk, who, in the context of a discussion about dealing with economic breakdown rather trenchantly observes:

[W]hile collapse as a whole, with its radical dislocation of male roles and providers, is probably scarier and more destructive to men than to women; volunteering to live a low energy life probably is more frightening to many women than to men--and for pretty good reasons. Because there's an excellent chance that the reality is likely to be that the practical burdens of hauling groceries home on a donkey, emptying the composting toilet bucket and stoking the sauna are likely to become the wife's chores...I [do not] think it is coincidental that many women married to more traditional men are unthrilled with the vision of a low energy future, and a return to the bad old days, in which "men may work from sun to sun, but women's work is never done."

It's not unusual to get arguments from a variety of mainstream liberals--not populists or social democrats or others that can sometimes be called up short by arguments about what kind of socio-economic and cultural conditions really make democratic communities possible, but ordinary, smart progressives--that recognize Astyk's point, and as a result want to call the whole thing off. Matthew Yglesias, when talking about the way certain celebrity chefs have turned to a celebration of locally produced, home-cooked meals, observes very simply: "If...gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening." Indeded, it's not. And rightly so; the revolution which enabled women to exercise rights and develop themselves as full participants in public life has been, whatever its incidental downsides, an overwhelming moral and civic boon to Western civilization (when you've even got folks on a localist website like Front Porch Republic observing that downsizing one's involvement in consumer capitalism is harder on wives than husbands, or writing that "I'm not sure if, given the choice with the sweep of history in front of me, I would choose a century or place other than the 20th Century west, and I’m even more inclined to think I wouldn't choose anything else for my daughters"--a sentiment I completely agree with--then you know there's no going back). So clearly, there is going to be a limit to how far the great majority of us who desire the many natural and historical goods provided by your basic family unit are going to be able or willing to fight against the specialization and consumption which I mentioned above. The question, I suppose, a question without any one lasting or universal answer, will figuring out where those limits are, and whether they can be pushed in any way, in the name of a life both humble and equal.

Rod argues that the only hope for families to achieve both goals is to have a relationship that focuses on something besides each other. He has a point there. I wonder if it may be that only a higher trust can make it possible for each partner to truly trust that the other will do whatever is necessary, or learn whatever skill is necessary, to support the other as they turn, if only partly, away from systems of consumer dependence that may be truly liberating in particular (as they historically have been for most women) but which overall make any long-term equality that much more difficult to achieve. But I also wonder--in the spirit of the aforementioned compromises, or at least in the spirit of sharing the tensions involved in such--if that trust might not be productively aided by a little wise public policy. Which takes me back to one of my favorite pieces of writing: my friend Damon Linker's essay about when he first became a father, and the conclusions it brought to him in regards to family life:

Ever since the 1950s, a woman choosing the life of the stay-at-home mom has faced the prospect of isolation far more profound than would have been typical in earlier times. After her husband walks out the door in the morning, she is usually left alone with only her child for company. Such a life is hardly traditional; nor is it, for many women, appealing...Instead of asking women to suppress their desire for the goods that come from pursuing an occupation outside the home, men could begin to put somewhat less emphasis on their own careers and recognize the very real goods that flow from sharing more of the joys and the burdens of parenting--even if it means that they must live with the same tensions faced by modern women...[S]uch tensions could be somewhat diminished for both parents if the government would expand the provisions for maternity leave that are part of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. We could also follow the lead of many European countries in providing for paternity leave. Surely a nation as wealthy as ours could afford the costs of policies that would so clearly benefit the modern family.

That wouldn't solve the whole dilemma of sharing the kids equally (a dilemma particularly vexing for those of us who want to pursue a simpler, more local way of life), of course--no one thing ever could. But at the very least, Laura agrees with me that a little European-style "conservatism" might make for family relationships that are a little more equal, a little more feminist, and slightly less filled with complex and confusing competing. Worth striving for, wouldn't you agree?

All right, Kristen's done with Backyardigans; time to clean up a bit before everyone else comes home. Back to doing my bit, I suppose.