In case you were wondering, that strange sound that you heard during the third debate actually was Socrates vomiting.

The candidates sucked. The questions went unanswered. I can’t say that I necessarily blame the candidates for that, though, since the questions mostly sucked, too.

If kudos must be given out, then kudos to John Kerry for actually talking about the wage gap in a question about poverty–although I happen to fundamentally disagree with him on the means of dealing with it:

Mr. Schieffer: Next question to you, Senator Kerry. The gap between rich and poor is growing wider. More people are dropping into poverty. Yet the minimum wage has been stuck at, what, $5.15 an hour now for about seven years. Is it time to raise it?

Mr. Kerry: Well, I’m glad you raised that question. It’s long overdue time to raise the minimum wage.

And America, this is one of those issues that separates the president and myself. We have fought to try to raise the minimum wage in the last years, but the Republican leadership of the House and Senate won’t even let us have a vote on it. We’re not allowed to vote on it. They don’t want to raise the minimum wage.

The minimum wage is the lowest minimum wage value it has been in our nation in 50 years. If we raise the minimum wage, which I will do over several years, to $7 an hour, 9.2 million women who are trying to raise their families would earn another $3,800 a year. The president has denied 9.2 million women $3,800 a year. But he doesn’t hesitate to fight for $136,000 to a millionaire. One percent of America got $89 billion last year in a tax cut. But people working hard, playing by the rules, trying to take care of their kids, family values that we’re supposed to value so much in America — I’m tired of politicians who talk about family values and don’t value families. What we need to do is raise the minimum wage.

We also need to hold on to equal pay. Women work for 76 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. That’s not right in America. And we had an initiative that we were working on to raise women’s pay. They’ve cut it off. They’ve stopped it. They don’t enforce these kinds of things.

Now I think that it is a matter of fundamental right that if we raise the minimum wage 15 million Americans would be positively affected. We’d put money into the hands of people who work hard, who obey the rules, who play for the American dream. And if we did that we’d have more consumption ability in America, which is what we need right now in order to kick our economy into gear. I will fight tooth and nail to pass the minimum wage.

And kudos to Mr. Bush for achieving the single most transparent transition onto message that I’ve ever heard from a politician (and that’s saying something). On the same question:

Mr. Schieffer: Mr. President.

Mr. Bush: Actually, Mitch McConnell had a minimum wage plan that I supported that would have increased the minimum wage.

But let me talk about what’s really important for the worker you’re referring to, and that’s to make sure the education system works, it’s to make sure we raise standards. Listen, the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act, when you think about it. The No Child Left Behind Act says we’ll raise standards, we’ll increase federal spending. But in return for extra spending, we now want people to measure, states and local jurisdictions to measure, to show us whether or not a child can read or write or add and subtract.

… And so on. He talked about No Child Left Behind for the rest of the response time.

Bob Schieffer was terrible. The questions were terrible, and Schieffer breezed past opportunity after opportunity for desperately needed follow-ups. His one good moment for the night came when he actually directly asked one of my two questions for George W. Bush. A while after Mr. Bush muttered this empty platitude…

Mr. Bush: I think it’s important to promote a culture of life. I think a hospitable society is a society where every being counts and every person matters. I believe the ideal world is one in which every child is protected in law and welcomed to life.

I understand there’s great differences on this issue of abortion. But I believe reasonable people can come together and put good law in place that will help reduce the number of abortions.

… Schieffer actually came back around and asked, point blank:

Mr. Schieffer: Mr. President I want to go back to something Senator Kerry said earlier tonight and ask a follow-up of my own. He said, and this will be a new question to you, he said that you had never said whether you would like to overturn Roe v. Wade. So I’d ask you directly would you like to?

Alas, my prediction of the necessary follow-up questions also came true. Bush had a full minute and a half in which to speak; here is the entirety of what he said:

Mr. Bush: What he’s asking me is will I have a litmus test for my judges. And the answer is no, I will not have a litmus test. I will pick judges who will interpret the Constitution. But I’ll have no litmus tests.

Kerry got off to a fantastic start in his response:

Mr. Kerry: Thank you very much. Well again, the president didn’t answer the question. I’ll answer it straight to America. I’m not going to appoint a judge to the court who’s going to undo a constitutional right, whether it’s the First Amendment or the Fifth Amendment or some other right that’s given under our courts today under the Constitution. And I believe that the right of choice is a constitutional right. So I don’t intend to see it undone. Clearly the president wants to leave an ambivalence or intends to undo it.

Mate in two moves. Bush either has to answer this–in which case there is no politically acceptable answer for him to give–or else he simply refuses to answer the question again, in which case you simply point to his record and say that his silence here speaks volumes.

So what does Kerry do? Ah, yes, of course. Before he finishes he decides it’s time to insert a canned soundbite about racial equality (why? because women’s equality isn’t good enough to have a 90 second response on its own?) and No Child Left Behind:

Let me go a step further. We have a long distance yet to travel in terms of fairness of America. I don’t know how you can govern in this country when you look at New York City and you see that 50 percent of the black males there are unemployed. When you see 40 percent of Hispanic children or black children in some cities dropping out of high school. And yet the president who talks about No Child Left Behind refused to fully fund by $28 billion that particular program so you can make a difference in the lives of those young people. Now right here in Arizona that difference would have been $131 million to the state of Arizona to help its kids be able to have better education and to lift the property tax burden from its citizens. The president reneged on his promise to fund No Child Left Behind. He’ll tell you he’s raised the money and he has. But he didn’t put in what he promised. And that makes a difference in the lives of our children.

… which of course allowed Mr. Bush to spend his 30 second follow-up on talking about No Child Left Behind. And that was it for the night on reproductive rights and women’s equality.

Good job, genius.

Well, not quite. Bob Schieffer did decide to wrap up with his idea of throwing a bone to women’s issues:

Mr. Schieffer We’ve come gentlemen, to our last question. And it occurred to me as I came to this debate tonight that the three of us share something. All three of us are surrounded by very strong women. We’re all married to strong women. Each of us have two daughters that make us very proud. I’d like to ask each of you what is the most important thing you’ve learned from these strong women?

Um. Yeah.

I have returned from six weeks of teaching Logic to gifted junior high and high school students in upstate New York. Yes, if you read the New Yorker, it was that nerd camp–although it’s hard to say, from reading the article, how much of a picture you’ll actually get of what happens (it seems more interested in giving a gawking impressionistic portrait of tricks that really smart adolescents can do–rather than giving an idea of what it’s like at the camp, or taking up an argument on some of the serious ethical and educational dilemmas that a program like CTY raises. The online interview with the author, Burkhard Bilger is actually much better in some ways than the article that appeared in print.) This is one of those things that I’ll hopefully be getting to shortly. In the meantime, though, there’s still plenty to do:

1. Finish unpacking and clean up around the house
2. Finish grading post-tests and send them off to the overlords in Baltimore
3. Apply for substitute teaching jobs in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor
4. Post articles to the weblog about two or three things I’ve been meaning to post about for the past 6 weeks
5. Visit the fam in Auburn. Possibly do a bit of paid petitioning for the Libertarian Party while in Alabama.
6. Prepare applications for graduate school. Try not to gnaw my gnails down to the knuckle.
7. Post articles to the weblog about 5,000,000 things or so that I’ve been meaning to post about for the past 6 weeks
8. Finish reading Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and some other stuff. Work with Roderick on a co-authored paper on libertarianism and radical feminism for the APA Eastern Division.
9. Smash patriarchy
10. … and the State.

Cheers, all! I’m glad to be back, and you should be hearing from me again soon.

So, it’s official. I’m a Bachelor.

Saturday I graduated from Auburn University, with a B.A. in Philosophy (with a Computer Science minor tacked on for good measure). After the past few years of wandering the halls of learning (or, at least, the halls of Haley Center), I finally have to figure out a new gig. Usually at this point, someone makes some remark or another about leaving the bubble of the academy and being thrown out into the terrible freedom of the real world. You won’t hear it from me, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, I’ve been inhabiting the real world all along. I mean this in the truistic sense–Auburn University campus is no more illusory and no less material than the rest of the world–but I mean it in a deeper sense too. When people talk about school as not being part of the real world, they seem to have one of two things in mind (or, more likely, both). On the one hand, there is a particular picture of what academics do and how it relates to the world. The idea is that you’re dealing with the fabric of reality only when you’re in the midst of an active, practical life–that academics aren’t worldly wise enough to hack it in such a life–that the world of the academy doesn’t (and can’t) deal in experiential reality, because its whole purpose is to think rather than to do. On the other hand, there is a particular attitude towards school: it’s not part of the real world because it bears no deep relationship to what you intend to do with your life. At best, it’s a preparatory means, valuable purely instrumentally–it’s something that you do in order to get into a socio-economic position where you can strike off and do whatever it is that constitutes your real life–a career, a family, or what have you. At worst, it’s merely a holding pen where you wait around until you’re ready to go off the parental dole and get started on the real part of your life. The second picture is usually a direct result of the first. Going to school isn’t part of the real part of your life because the real part of your life consists of doing things, not of thinking about them.

I don’t want to deny that the second picture is an accurate empirical theory about how most people think of college in this day and age. But I think it is a pernicious picture if it is taken as a guide for how ought to spend your school years; those who act on a picture like that have basically been wasting their time and money for the past 4 years. It’s by no means necessary (however often it may be actual) for school to be cut off from the serious part of your life; such a dichotomy rests, I think, on a notion of the academic life that is completely false.

What I mean is this: in most other civilized times, we would hardly feel any need to defend the validity of the vita contemplativa, or the value of the way I’ve spent the past four years–learning and wrestling with important problems, for the sake of nothing except thought itself and knowledge of the truth. That is no small part of what I want to do with my life and to contribute to the world. The relationship between doing and thinking isn’t antagonism, or parasitism. Humans are rational animals; the very essence of how we live our lives is that we put thought into action, that thinking and doing are (for us) two sides of one coin. (Doing without thinking, in any literal and sustained sense, is a form of madness–indeed, a form of inhumanity.) So while I’m done being an undergraduate, my life for the past four years hasn’t been mere preparation for what is to follow. I’ve been doing what I want to do all along.

And I intend to keep on doing what I have been doing. But I’m out of school for the next year, and being a freelance academic doesn’t pay very well. So, I will be looking for a job, and working on graduate school applications for the academic year after the upcoming one. (If graduate school doesn’t work out, I might have to become a monk.)

In the meantime, however, I am on vacation. Right now I am reporting from Berea, Kentucky, where I’m visiting my old friend S. with the rest of my gang of friends from high school. S. pulls us into these fascinating conversations about sustainability and renewable energy and culture; we wander around the campus as if it were a swampy May night in Auburn again.

From there, it is a mere 12 hours by Greyhound bus to Detroit, where I will meet with my sweetheart. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this–to the theological inside jokes, to talking again about philosophy and movies and the Middle Ages; to just having quiet time together to spend with absolutely nothing else eating time away. We’re heading out on a trans-continental road trip out to California, where the plan is (I think) to sit on the beach, C and talk and read and do as close to absolutely nothing as possible for a few days–then to meander around a few sites in Monterey and San Fransisco. My hope is that I won’t be heading back home until early June.

In any case, the plan from there is: (1) summer work, (2) break, (3) move, and (4) fall work. (1) will consist in serving as a T.A. in Philosophy of Mind for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (except I won’t actually be at JHU; I’ll be at a program site in Loudonville, New York). After that I am moving to Ypsilanti, MI, and looking around to find out in what (4) will consist. Wish me luck!

Posting will be sporadic, but I fear that you are more than used to that already, gentle reader. I’ll try and drop a line from time to time, though, and when I get back some changes and updates the the site are in the works.

Ciao!

The folks at Insanity House, an advocacy group for single-parent and non-traditional families, has developed the Raise the Nation Foundation, a non-profit foundation helping single parent women continue their education or re-pay education expenses.

One of the most damnable things about the 1996 welfare deform package is that it gives major economic incentives to states to convert their welfare program into a government-sponsored temp agency for shitty, dead-end labor–with no particular provisions for giving single mothers (by far the largest group of TANF recipients) the time and resources to go to University or vocational schools so that they can better provide for themselves and their families in the long term. The paradigm has been either to run women’s entire lives through do-gooder government bureaucratic busybodies, or else Right-wing "reformers" who prefer to use the government bureaucratic busybodies to drive poor women into more dead-end low-wage "jobs" and ensure that they remain perpetually available to capital.

We need groups like Raise the Nation which provide grassroots mutual aid and support for women in economic need to take charge of their own education and economic well-being. Thank goodness for them.

For further reading:

• GT 5/19/2002 Government and the Pink-Collar Ghetto
• GT 5/26/2001 The Historical Failures of State-funded Religious Charities
• GT 5/15/2001 A First-Hand Look into Living in Poverty

As a preface to this post, you might want to take a glance over a mostly complete but rather alleatory sampling of the books that I was assigned to read during my high-school English career, which occurred during the heady crest days of the feminist education movement in the 1990s.^[1] (Note to English teachers: I am not complaining about this lineup in the least; the English program at AHS is one of the best parts of the school. This is intended merely as a counterpoint to certain claims made in the article being discussed.)

So, then, what have we here? Yet another heaping helping of Christina Hoff Sommers from Salon. I swear to God there must be some kind of law requiring Salon to publish one sloppy lovefest for media creation antifeminist Christina Hoff Sommers once every year (2/5/2002, 3/9/2001, 6/21/2000).

And it’s the same old thing they’ve been insisting in the last three articles: feminist education efforts in the 1990s have somehow slighted boys’ aspirations to a good education, and now it’s time to start tilting the balance back the other way or somesuch nonsense. At hand is boys’ lower performance in verbal / literary subjects, compared with the narrowing of the advantage they once enjoyed in science and mathematics classes.

In this article, at least, the author allows voices other than Christina Hoff Sommers to speak (not the case in Befner’s regrettable Battle of the Celebrity Gender Theorists, an article allegedly about Jane Fonda and Carol Gilligan, which nevertheless consisted entirely of a sympathetic interview with Christina Hoff Sommers). However, it just so happens that Hoff Sommers and those who agree with her are given the last word in every case; allowed to skewer interpretations of data by Gilligan and other feminists, but given a free pass on truly bizarre statements.

This, for example, is reported without any comment from an opposing voice:

Our English classes are strongly feminized, even in boys schools, says Hoff Sommers. We want literature to make boys more sensitive. But I’m not sure that we need to invest in literature as a form of therapy.

This claim is not just contentious; it’s downright bizarre. Look over my reading list^[1] again and ask yourself how much it’s really feminized. The reading list is packed with literature of boys, by boys, and for boys. It used to be that learning from a reading list not very different from this one was expected to be part of the ritual of a boy growing up into manly adulthood in a civilized society.

She points out that a majority of English teachers still assign fiction in the classroom, while she believes that boys prefer nonfiction. (In the PISA study, girls and boys were asked to self-report on the kind of reading materials they preferred. Boys reported reading more comic books, Web pages and newspapers, while girls read more novels.)

Of course they primarily assign fiction. It’s an English literature class! If you want more nonfiction reading in schools, push to have more primary sources included in History, Science, Mathematics, etc. classes. That’s where it belongs. (And for God’s sake. Comic books? Please.)

Boys love adventure stories with male heroes, says Hoff Sommers. Many would love books by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Clancy. Since they are so far behind in reading, why not give them texts they enjoy? Some teachers are promoting political correctness at the expense of the basic literacy of their male students.

Hoff Sommers mistakenly assumes here that the reason for not including Tom Clancy pulp in the English class is because teachers are craven p.c. slaves. This is false. The reason Tom Clancy pulp is not included in English literature class is because it’s pulp fiction written on a third grade level. And no, encouraging Reading at all costs is not worth it–what in the world is developing an appreciation for Tom Clancy novels going to do for you, other than make you spend more money at the bestseller rack and get you a knowledge of military gadgetry? Similarly, boddice-rippers and Harlequin romance novels do not deserve to be, and are not, included in the English curriculum, either, even though they are intended for, and often written by, women.

My own son had to struggle through Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club when he was in the 10th grade, she adds. It has some attractive features, but it is full of annoying psychobabble about women and their self-esteem struggles. He disliked it. If teachers are going to assign books in popular literature, they should consider the needs and interests of boys.

Hoff Sommer’s vehemence about The Joy Luck Club makes it pretty clear that she just hates the book and is projecting her own feelings of distaste for it onto a generation of boys. If she hates the annoying psychobabble so much, then isn’t her real issue that it’s simply bad literature, not that it’s cutting against boys in particular?

Moreover, for Christ’s sake, in any English curriculum, there are going to be many books which you find absolutely dreadful and which bore you to tears. I, for example, was forced to wade through such dreary wank-a-thons as A Separate Peace and A Farewell to Arms. If the mere presence of some books you find boring is enough to turn you off to all literature, then you need to learn how to stop whining and get through to the next book.

Meanwhile, Tom Mortensen makes the astoundingly bad suggestion that

If I were teaching, says Mortenson, I would get boys out of the classroom. Take them to a swamp, dig through the muck, look for pollywogs. Then maybe take them back and have them look at pond water through slides and write up a lab report. They need hands-on activities. They get bored and distracted if you ask them to sit down and reading a chapter and writing up a paragraph — the kind of work that girls excel at.

Take them to a swamp? Dig through the muck? If I were subjected to this kind of treatment in school, I would have dropped out by fifth grade. You know what I love? Sedentary desk work. Reading a chapter and writing up a paragraph about it. Boring, dry textbooks. Who does he think he is teaching, the Lost Boys from Peter Pan? This is not a way to encourage serious education amongst boys; it’s a way to get a lot of boys goofing off and throwing mud at each other. Christ, man. Pollywogs?

(Furthermore, Mortensen’s proposal about how to change science education neglects the fact that boys are doing just fine in science education relative to girls. What hands-on activities does he propose we use to deal with disparities in literature? Take boys out to the moor to muck around and fetch wittles while they read Great Expectations?)

Meanwhile, Christina Hoff Sommers ridicules the perfectly reasonable hypothesis by Carol Gilligan that In American culture, says Gilligan, children learn to associate math and science with masculinity; knowledge of the human world and emotional lives are associated with femininity. Why should this be so surprising? It’s definitely true that English curricula are perceived as feminized. But this is not a matter of the reading list being somehow weighted heavily towards girl-power-chic titles, because, well, that’s crap. There is no such bias in English curricula. The issue, rather, is that in boy culture, reading literature and poetry is seen as a feminine activity, and it’s a good way to get yourself derided as a sissy, faggot,geek, dweeb, and otherwise un-manly boy. This, I think, is the only explanation that even remotely makes sense: why else would anyone think that, say, reading John Donne in English class is a feminized curriculum? And if this is the case, then jamming Tom Clancy pulp or comic books into the curriculum isn’t the way to solve the problem. The way to solve the problem is to address the boy culture nonsense which sees reading as girly, and sees being perceived as girly as a curse to be avoided.

Finally: let’s drop the crisis rhetoric, and let’s forget this nonsense about feminist educators being responsible for the situation. Why? Because the disparity in literature education has existed as long as the Department of Education has records, since 1969 (when the organized feminist movement barely existed in politics, let alone in education). The gap has not opened out or widened in the past 10 years; there is no new crisis of boys’ verbal / literary education from feminist educators in the 1990s. There’s merely a disparity which was there before and which has not been addressed yet.

But, of course, Salon has a long history of providing an uncritical platform for media-created anti-feminists including Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young (a regular columnist), Camille Paglia, and Warren Farrell. I can’t put it better than Jennifer Pozner of FAIR did, in her letter to the editor of Salon (located at the bottom of the page):

After listing worthy topics from drug law imbalances to welfare policy to educational and workplace biases, Sweeney asks, Where is a feminist when you need one? On a beach somewhere, apparently … With all due respect, it is easy to find feminists working on those issues and a wide range of others if you look beyond what is represented in carping book reviews and academic arguments. But it is unsurprising that Sweeney or Salon readers in general might believe feminists missing in action: Salon provides a regular platform for anti-feminist pit bull Camille Paglia and feminist ankle-biter Cathy Young, but has no feminist columnists addressing the many ways in which women’s rights advocates are tackling violence against women, poverty, health care, child care, reproductive rights, media representation, workplace issues, sweatshops, trafficking in women and a host of other issues on a national and international stage (from a variety of sometimes opposing liberal, progressive and radical perspectives).

I couldn’t agree more with Sweeney’s assertion that neurotic rationalizing and self-conscious crowing is a profound waste of time in the face of the continued biases women (especially women of color and low-income women) face. To that end, I’d encourage Salon to publish fewer hit pieces on feminists, more articles about sexism in Life and in the news sections, and to balance columnists like Paglia, Young and Horowitz with a few progressive feminist writers like Molly Ivins, Laura Flanders, Katha Pollitt, Farai Chideya, Barbara Ehrenreich or Julianne Malveaux. Salon, which is often a valuable resource for perspectives not found elsewhere (Greg Palast’s election pieces were a great example), could benefit from broadening its approach to gender politics.

— Jennifer L. Pozner, Women’s Desk Director, FAIR

P.S.: While women are excelling boys at verbal and literary subjects, and now make up the majority of college students (college students being, in the majority, liberal arts students), engineering and science departments are still about 80-90% male, and men still make more money than women for equal work (the gap has widened in at least some fields, despite Salon’s claims to the contrary) and still make up the overwhelming majority of high-paid executives — whereas women still make up the overwhelming majority of low-wage service workers. So, something tells me that this educational crisis is perhaps not the biggest gender equity issue on the table right now.

For further reading:

• GT 2001/04/24: Salon, Cathy Young, and the Frilly Pink Mantle

• GT 2001/03/14: LTEs Challenge Salon’s Love Affair for Pop Anti-feminists

  Read the rest of The Weird, Wild World of Anti-feminism …

1. ^[1]Sidebar: An aleatory sampling of my high school reading list
   • The Odyssey (abridged) – male author, male protagonist
   • Great Expectations – male author, male protagonist
   • The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet – male author, male and female protagonists
   • Mutiny on the Bounty – male author, male protagonists
   • Animal Farm – male author, male protagonists
   • To Kill a Mockingbird – female author, female and male protagonists
   • A Separate Peace – male author, male protagonists, all male school, boy culture coming-of-age wank-a-thon
   • The Tragedy of Julius Caesar – male author, male protagonists
   • Oedipus the King – male author, male protagonists
   • Antigone – male author, female protagonist
   • Edith Hamilton’s Mythology – female author, but from all male sources, male protagonists
   • excerpts from Sundiata and Ramayana – male authors, male protagonists
   • One Hundred Years of Solitude – male author, mostly male protagonists
   • Ficciones – male author, male protagonists
   • The Lost Steps – male author, male protagonist
   • Ethan Frome – female author, male protagonist
   • A Farewell to Arms – male author, male protagonist, same old swaggering Hemingway crap
   • The Awakening – female author, female protagonist, proto-feminist
   • The Cherry Orchard – male author, male and female protagonists
   • The Great Gatsby – male author, male protagonist
   • Death in Venice – male author, male protagonist
   • A Streetcar Named Desire – male author, female protagonists
   • The Crucible – male author, male protagonist
   • Native Son – male author, male protagonist, overly apologetic for brutal violence against women
   • The Inferno – male author, male protagonist
   • The Taming of the Shrew – male author, male protagonist, ragingly misogynistic
   • Hamlet – male author, male protagonist
   • The Bachelor of Arts – male author, male protagonist
   • Heart of Darkness – male author, male protagonist
   • Pygmalion – male author, female protagonist
   • The Importance of Being Earnest – male author, male protagonist, strong female characters
   • Their Eyes Were Watching God – female author, female protagonist, proto-feminist
   • Things Fall Apart – male author, male protagonist
   • Bread and Wine – male author, male protagonist
   • The Metamorphosis – male author, male protagonist
   • Richard III – male author, male protagonist
   • Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead – male author, male protagonists
   • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – male author, male protagonist↩