Moment, Linger On

When the politcal meets the personal

Laura writes a post today in which she tries to come to terms with the guilt she feels about pulling her kids out of a poorer urban school and fleeing to the suburbs:

The hardest part is telling the parents who are going to send their kids to the local public school. There will be one less middle class kid in the school. I feel like I'm letting down the cause.

She goes on to talk about how having kids forces you to really face up to whether you can live according to your principles, using Jimmy Carter's and Bill Clinton's choices about how they educated their kids as an example. At the end, though, she draws what to her is an obvious conclusion about how one should react to the unequal access to good education in our society:

If you exercise a choice, and move to the suburbs or go to Dalton, then you have to help others have a similar choice. To avoid being a hypocrite, you have to adjust your politics to reflect your life. You can't send your kid to Dalton and oppose school vouchers for the poor. You have to support school choice for everyone.

I agree with the first part of her conclusion, in that my move to the affluent suburbs (Montgomery County in my case) in no way relieves me of my obligation to ensure that all children have access to a good school. Besides being a moral imperative it is also a matter of pure self-interest. These kids will be the productive members of society when I have finished working and I have a vested interest in seeing that they are well-educated.

But I could not disagree more strenuously with the second part, which is that I have to support vouchers. In the abstract, I support the idea of vouchers in that I support the idea that kids shouldn't be forced to go to bad schools by virtue of the circumstances of their birth. But there are many ways to have school choice besides pulling money out of public schools and funnelling it to the private ones. Even if I agreed with the principle of vouchers, though, I can't say that I have seen any evidence that they would work in the way that they are intended to. I think that the outcome of a voucher program would result in the affluent being even better off, a few lower-middle class students gaining access to private schools, and the majority of the poor being stuck in public schools that are even more underfunded. There is also the question of whether vouchers are merely a vehicle for union-busting and getting around the wall separating church and state, but I won't even go there.

We were one of the first countries to have universal access to publicly funded education. It is one of the things that allowed us to become a great nation. We should be looking for ways to make our public schools better rather than ways to tear them apart.

More light posting

Up to New England this week to pick up the cats. Normal posting will (probably) finally recommence next week.

Tell your friends

Feeling sorry about the pain your existence causes your fundamentalist friends? Be sure that they know about the Christian Exodus. Don't let them miss an opportunity to live a fulfilling life far away from your evil influence.

I feel bad that we may lose so many of these people to South Carolina, but remember that our loss is their gain. After being near the bottom of most educational and economic indicators for most of the past century they deserve to be sent something nice by the rest of us. No need to thank us for it either, South Carolina. It is most certainly our pleasure.

Sticker shock

Laura at Apartment11D will apparently soon be changing the title of her blog, because over the weekend she bought a house. Good on you Laura, and I can attest from experience that the shock of paying that amount of money for a thing wears off fairly quickly.

Meanwhile, Erika at the derivative Apartment 401 ponders how she was able to do it:

And yet another part of me, the part of me that has looked at our budget this way and that, at current housing prices this way and that, that part of me just wants to know the details. How? How much? I want to look at her numbers and figure out why my calculus suggests we stay put and hers suggests they buy. I suspect, in the end, that their children's schooling costs are what tipped the scale for them. But I'm curious anyway.

I can only imagine the stomach-churning stress that buying right now must induce. Prices are so high, they induce dizziness. My significant other and I looked at a condo near our apartment last weekend. It was listed for $300,000, which piqued my curiosity - so many places don't list a price at all. I was curious what $300,000 would buy.

Here's what $300,000 will buy you in Adams Morgan right now: two small rooms plus a tiny kitchen and bath. The entire condo was the size of our current living room. The kitchen was as big as my bedroom closet. I couldn't imagine more than one person in this space. This in the same neighborhood where $1200 a month will get you twice as much space and includes utilities. If you had to move, renting the entire unit would only cover 1/2 your mortgage. Yet there was a line of people waiting to look at it. So little to be had for less than $325,000 right now.

It's not so much that things are expensive. I understand that I live in a desirable area and that incomes here are high. But we are two professionals with good salaries. We don't have any kids. Our rent seems a bargain compared to what we'd have to pay for a house. What's going on in this market? Doesn't this seem a little crazy to anyone else?

I wouldn't have thought I would need to spell it out for her, but it really isn't that hard to understand. For those readers who are unfamiliar with DC, Adams Morgan is the current hip, happening, up-and-coming neighborhood in DC. It isn't Georgetown and it isn't Dupont Circle, but it isn't cheap either and it won't ever be again in my lifetime. If you were to look for affordable housing, Adams Morgan is the last place I would look. The equivalent for Laura would be looking for an apartment to buy somewhere in Manhattan, or one of the trendier neighborhoods of Brooklyn at the very least.

Laura, on the other hand, is moving to the 'burbs, and rather far out as well. A DC area equivalent wouldn't be Bethesda or Alexandria or Rockville, but rather Laurel or maybe even Frederick. If you want to buy a condo or a house there then you can get quite a bit for yoour $300K or even less. Of course, you don't get to walk down the street to Tryst or have easy access to African restaurants, but that's the kind of compromise that Laura made. Erika can make the same compromise if she wants but hearing complaints about unaffordable housing in DC's equivalent of the Village kind of wears thin.

Waiting for something to happen

So today was the first day that gays can marry in Massachusetts. As per the warnings from religious fanatics, I was expecting to see fire and brimstone raining down on me. Nothing so far. Well, it is a bit humid out and there is a 50% chance for scattered showers later, but that's it. How anticlimactic. What does a society have to do these days to bring down violent divine retribution, anyway?

Maybe they meant brimstone and cicadas...

They're here

In the near future the mid-Atlantic is expected to be overwhelmed by untold billions of cicadas, who will spend the next six weeks decimating the foliage, being eaten by cats, being served up in local French restaurants, and (of course) enthusiastically mating. The noise generated by the hopeful males will go over 100 decibels at the height of the party, which raises the obvious question of why they don't just drive BMW convertables like all the other guys on the make in the DC area do.

The past few days I have heard various rumors of the first sightings of members of Brood X. Today I saw the first one with my own eyes in a rather unexpected place. I was sitting in the Borders in Columbia drinking coffee when one plopped onto the table in front of me. Columbia, a paved over fractal of box stores and townhouses, is a pretty unhospitable place for cicadas and I doubt that the one I saw is going to be getting any action any time soon.

Intellectual dishonesty explained

Every once in a while I mosey over to Tacitus to see what conservatives have to say about the world and their place in it. I go to his site because he is often moderately decent and almost honest, which is a trait that you won't see in many other conservatives in the blogosphere. Still, he frequently has a streak running through his posts which can be attributed only to gross ignorance or blatant intellectual dishonesty. A compulsion to be charitable would cause me to lean towards the former, but the truth is that they are usually indistinguishable from each other.

Today he writes about how he convinces himself to maintain his loyalty to the Bush administration in the light of their stupendous mismanagement of the Iraq campaign. He does so, of course, by claiming that Kerry would do far worse. This is a debatable point, of course. It is beside the point that I disagree, though, because I think that for Tacitus this isn't the real issue anyway.

He alludes to what is possibly the real reason in his post when he discusses the loyalty demanded of members of the Bush administration:

Administration, but I do know the inner workings of a few small non-Defense parts of it. In my experience, when you hit the senior levels, or the levels at which political appointees operate, loyalty is too frequently elevated to an end in itself. Two illustrative stories spring to mind, both of new hires gone bad. The first tale, anecdotal and hence possibly untrue, concerns a woman accepted as a Schedule C political appointee by her prospective workplace. The White House personnel office, alas, found that she'd written a letter to her hometown paper suggesting regret at McCain's failure to secure the GOP nomination -- in October 2000. Offer withdrawn. The second tale, assuredly true, concerns a young man who was also accepted by his workplace for a Schedule C position. Once again, the White House personnel office to the rescue: the young fellow foolishly revealed that he failed to vote in 2000. If you're not with us: offer withdrawn. Thus did the Administration lose two well-qualified Republicans (okay, at least one) who considered themselves Bush supporters to an absurdly exaggerated ideal of total fidelity. (Curiously, White House personnel never dug up my late November 2000 e-mail to the Bush campaign urging a level-headed cooldown in Florida for the good of the country. Pretty sure that would have sunk me.) (emphasis mine)

Take a look at that last parenthetical comment. Unless I am misreading what he wrote, Tacitus is admitting that he is a schedule C employee. That is, he is a political appointee who serves more or less at the discretion of the administration and who stands to lose his job if Kerry is elected. Think about that one the next time you read one of his posts where he criticizes Kerry and ask yourself whether he is truly being honest about why he says what he does or whether he just cares about keeping his gig for the next four years.

And more than a moment too soon

I'm back in the country now. Most of my worldly goods are still on a container ship somewhere in the Atlantic, but I'm back in Maryland. I have to say that my fears about the lower quality of life in the US vs. that of the UK have so far mostly been realized. The weather has been hot and sticky and either the country has become even more strip-mallified in the last year or they have just become more intolerable to deal with. Probably both. Is there some hidden law that sidewalks can't be placed in suburban areas with certain zoning? Would it kill Americans to get out of their SUVs and walk a quarter of a mile just once in their lives? Do we really need to pave over all our open spaces into huge parking lots surrounding soulless box stores? I guess we do, but I wish someone would explain why, because I'm just not getting it.