Moment, Linger On

Strike Settled

And it looks like the supermarkets mostly won. I'm with Kevin Drum on this one: this is b******t.

I don't know about him or anyone else, but I'm not planning to go back to any Krogers, Albertsons, or Safeways (or any of their subsidiary chains) any time soon. If they won't do right by their workers then they don't need my business and I can afford to put my money where my mouth is on this issue.

Sex and the City: the UK experience

I've never watched a full episode of Sex and the City. In the US we never had HBO and, oddly enough, I was never invited to those SATC parties that single urban thirty-something women were throwing. Apparently there are (or were) SATC bars in the DC area so chalk that up to a missed opportunity. In the UK, though, they show it regularly on Channel Four about half a season behind the current US season. (Or maybe a season and a half behind; the distinction is meaningless to me.) I tried watching an episode with my wife once and couldn't sit through the whole thing. Giving credit where credit is due, she couldn't either.

In light of all the commotion surrounding the final episode, though, I thought that maybe I should give it another chance. If nothing else, it will give me something to talk about with my female peers when I go back to the states in a couple of months. So I looked in this week's TV Times to see what I have to look forward to tonight:

10.00 Sex and the City The Cold War: Carrie avoids the cold weather with Alexsandr; Samantha tries to quash rumors that Smith is gay; Charlotte enters Elizabeth Taylor into a dog show; and Miranda has trouble settling into her marital home.

This is what drove people into a frenzy? On second thought, perhaps I'll pass. Especially when I could take advantage of this apparently equally entertaining viewing opportunity on BBC2:

10.00 The Sack Race The two contestants pretend to be a kleptomaniac Christian in a nail bar and an ex-model in a clothing shop.

Or I could actually scrub the bathtub or do something else worthwile. The irony, of course, is that the same people who are obsessed with SATC are the ones who make fun of blue collar men for watching other blue collar men drive cars around and around and around really really fast. In all fairness, that lost its allure for me as well once I got past the age of ten, but to each his or her own.

Which Nader voter are you?

Chun the Unavoidable, who is exactly as obnoxious in his posts as his psuedonym would suggest, writes about how much it hurts his feelings that Democrats are annoyed with Nader because he is trying yet again to indulge his ego at the expense of the country. In the first comment (scroll down) Timothy Burke quite accurately points out that we shouldn't resent Nader, who has every right to run for President if he wants, but rather Nader voters, who have absolutely no excuse for doing so.

You should really read Burke's comment to get the full gist, but let me quickly offer my own summary of his points:

If you voted for Nader because you actually think he would make a good president then you are delusional.

If you voted for Nader because you think that it was the best way to empower a third party movement then you are just stupid.

If you voted for Nader out of a desire to affect some sort of revolutionary change by blowing up the Democratic party then you are misguided and engaged in an ultimately futile effort.

If you voted for Nader (as he suspects that many people did) because he was a candidate that you could feel good about voting for then you are self-centered and lacking in civic virtue.

Right on.

Where were you during the civil rights movement?

What would you have done during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s? For those of you who were adults at the time you have an easy answer to this question. But for those of us who weren't even born it is more difficult.

I periodically think about this. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have been a segregationist, but would I have been a freedom rider? Or would I have secretly admired the civil rights activists but been too busy doing other things to be bothered to join in? Perhaps I would have been too clueless to recognize the import of what was occurring and just sleepwalked through the whole thing. Or perhaps, worst of all, I would have been one of the ditherers who sat around saying things like "It's horrible what is going on down there, but things are slowly changing. We can't go around upsetting people because it just isn't the right time and we might actually set the process back by acting precipitiously." When I look deep inside I can see myself doing the latter and it isn't a pleasant thought.

Oddly enough, I haven't asked my mother, who was a college student in Texas in the early 60s, what she did during the civil rights movement. She was quite active in protesting the Vietnam war, including doing things of dubious legality (counselling people on their options to avoid the draft), so she does have some history of activism, but I realized that I know nothing about what she did a few years earlier.

Anyhow, I thought about this again when I read this post by Josh Marshall on his reaction to Gavin Newsom's issuing of marriage licenses in San Francisco and the ensuing hoopla. In his post he admits an ambivalence to supporting gay marriage, even though he agrees on the correctness of it, because he thinks that to do so would undermine not only the cause of gay marrige itself, but also progress on other progressive issues and the prospects of Democratic candidates in upcoming elections. When I read this, I thought about it for a while. Then I thought some more. And then I realized two things:

1. That I agreed with him completely.

2. And how bad that made me feel about myself.

So I've changed my mind on the issue. I'm not going to worry anymore about whether the time is right for gay marriage, just like I hope that I wouldn't have worried about whether it was the right time to give blacks voting rights in 1960.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. I've never been much of a fan of demonstrations as a way of affecting change, so you won't see me on the corner chanting "Two, four, six, eight, marriage equality is f*****g great." I've always been more of a change it from within sort of person and the guy who has set the ball rolling had to get elected mayor of San Francisco to do it. But I'm going to do a couple of things. First, I'm going to stop framing the issue as "gay marriage." Instead, I'm going to call it "marriage equality," because that's what it is. Second, I'm going to stop saying "now's not the time," because, even if I believed that myself, that is really beside the point.

History has a way of resolving these things pretty conclusively. You don't really have anybody seriously saying we should go back to the segregationist days of pre-1960. Nobody is saying these days that Truman's hotly debated order to integrate the army in 1948 was the wring thing to do. Crazed state senators in Kansas to the contrary, you don't really have anyone saying that women's sufferage was incorrect. And you don't have anyone saying that slavery was a beneficial institution that should be reinstated. All hotly debated issues at the time and yet it is obvious now that there was a right side and a wrong side to be on. And marriage equality will be one of those issues as well. And, whatever else happens, I don't want my kids to be wondering, 30-odd years down the line, if I was on the right side.

Punctuation counts too

Via Kevin Drum we find out that not only does spelling still count but punctuation counts too. Apparently the lawsuit on San Francisco's gay marriage is being held up by an incorrectly placed semicolon.

All we need is evidence that grammar still counts to make the trifecta. Anyone with evidence of incorrectly used gerunds having an effect on something meaningful is invited to contact me.

The semicolon thing may seem ludicrous but changing the punctuation in a law can completely change the provisions of the law. It's important to get this right. Or, I should say, it is important to get this right if you want your lawsuits to succeed. I'm of the opinion that opponents of gay marriage are ignorant cretins, so I suppose it is just as well that they can't do grade school punctuation either.

The sleeper issue

I've thought for a while that health care would be the sleeper issue for this election. Not that it hasn't got much attention recently, but most people seem to think that it will come down to Iraq and jobs and that if Bush can tidy things up in these two areas he will win. My opinion is that there will be a point this year where the festering health care crisis will explode. And when it does it will be very bad for Bush. How bad will depend on how well Kerry is positioned to take advantage.

Apparently Paul Krugman agrees with me.

He seems to think that some kind of universal health care system is the right way to go. Being in the UK and loving the NHS, I agree with him. I'll write about all the ways UK health care is superior to American health care sometime in the near future. For now let me address one of the common arguments against single payer healthcare: the idea that a market based system is more efficient than a government funded one. Krugman points out that the exact opposite is true:

Where is the money going? A lot of it goes to overhead. A recent study found that private insurance companies spend 11.7 cents of every health care dollar on administrative costs, mainly advertising and underwriting, compared with 3.6 cents for Medicare and 1.3 cents for Canada's government-run system.

So much for the efficiencies realized by the invisible hand.

Meet the Press

The Beeb doesn't carry Tim Russert. so I missed out on Dear Leader's supposedly impressive performance. Luckily (for me, at least) Wonkette provided a short summary.

Who does the laundry?

Short answer: both of us.

Laura at Apartment 11D asks who does the laundry (and, of course, the other housework) in families with kids. The implicit assumption she makes is that most families are arranged in the traditional fashion with a careerist father, a mostly-full-time-parent-underemployed-outside-the-home mother, and (a) young kid(s) who contribute absolutely nothing to the labor situation. In our case, that's 100% correct.

Our kid is four months old at this point, so R. stays home full time and does correspondingly more of the housework. I do some (but probably not 50%) of the laundry, some (but probably not 50%) of the cleaning, about half of the cooking and dishes, all of the shopping, and some of the paperwork/filing. We split the childcare 50/50 when I'm home which means that she does more of that as well. I'd like to think we have a fair division of labor, but then again all husbands like to think that. R. would probably have something to say on the matter.

This question was apparently inspired by her reading of Naomi Wolf's book on pregnancy and motherhood. I haven't read it, but I've read Rachel Cusk's UK version, A Life's Work. A short review of Cusk's book: Motherhood completely changed our entire life and now it's ruined. Except that it's not, because they're so cute. But I can't get away for weekends like I used to and I have to hang out with all these ill-bred mothers who didn't go to university and...I'm so confused. (Suffice it to say that I'm not impressed.)

Laura offers an obvious solution to having a careerist husband:

Girls, go for the slackers. They might not make senior partner, but they'll make your dinner and play with the kids. You might not be able to afford a house in town with a good school district, but so what. He made lasagna for dinner.

Fair enough. Being a parent, it seems to me, is all about setting priorities in your life and that is certainly one way to go, although the factors that would make a slacker husband such an attractive mate with young kids around would probably work against him before parenthood and with older kids. The problem is what I call the "wanting to have your cake and eat it too" syndrome. So many people want kids and two good careers and the cavernous house in a good school district and abundant leisure time and...sorry, not gonna happen. You have to make some changes in your life when you have kids and inertia probably causes the traditional path to be the one that is most naturally travelled down. In our case it probably actually does work best for both of us, but obviously it doesn't and shouldn't for everyone.

She also makes what seems to me to be a backhanded compliment about her own partner's contribution:

As a result of Steve's year at home, he can pack the diaper bag (if you're not too picky about sippy cups leaking all over the place). He still does the dishes at night (if you're not too picky about washing the outside of cups) and all the laundry (if you're not too picky about shrinkage).

Not really my place to psychoanalyze, but this sounds like classic passive-aggressive resentment to me, because doing laundry correctly isn't that hard and really doesn't take any more time to do well than it does to do badly. I got a PhD and learned to read a laundry tag and I know which one I found easier to do. Or maybe that's the explicit deal: "OK, I'll do the laundry but I can't be bothered to do it right." None of my business really.

My last thought on this is that nothing made me happier about leaving academia than having a kid. I can't imagine working the 20 hour days necessary to get tenure and doing my fair parenting share. I understand now why most young academics I knew who were parents and were also actually making it in academia had doormat spouses who did most of the parenting. There just aren't enough hours in a day.

Take it to the next level

I missed the Grammys this year. I never watch them, but this time I had an excuse, as they weren't televised in the UK. It is the sort of thing that Channel Five will put on at 2 a.m., but last night they showed NHL hockey instead. Whatever.

Apparently I missed something good this time around. Namely, Coldplay dedicating their Grammy to John Kerry. That's nice, but it would be much better if they took it to the next level. What about a Coldplay "Kerry for President" campaign song? For that matter, it doesn't have to be Coldplay. Could you picture "Don't send Bush back to Texas ('cause we don't want him here)" by the Dixie Chicks? How about Moby? What about Sleater-Kinney or Ani DiFranco? Kerry might not be left enough for them, but political activisim in their songs is not unprecedented.

This sort of thing used to be quite common. Frank Sinatra wrote songs for JFK in 1960, for instance. I suppose the whole music industry is more bottom line oriented these days but it would be nice to see this sort of thing make a comeback.

(Thanks to Jesse Taylor for the Coldplay reference.)

Polite vs. nice

Tacitus, who has no vested interest in the outcome of the current presidential primaries anyway (note to Tacitus: if you want a say who will be the next Democratic nominee then you should become a Democrat), nonetheless offers his advice on who we should choose.

His post has generated over 300 comments and many of them discuss the unrelated question of who are nicer, southerners or midwesterners. Having lived in Minnesota, Ohio, and Maryland(kinda southern), I can say that midwesterners and southerners aren't nice at all. They're extremely polite, which they tend to confuse with being nice, but it isn't the same thing. In fact, the less they like you the more polite they tend to be and faux politeness sort of strikes me as the antithesis of nice, to be honest.

In my experience, the people on the west coast are much nicer in general then those of the south or the midwest, although the nicest, most decent person I know is a friend of mine from Nebraska. I suppose this shows that there are nice people in the midwest. Just not as many as they think they have.