Human Behavior

Marriage and Models

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 “Mrs. Palin’s marriage actually makes her a terrific role model.   One of the best choices a woman can make if she wants a career and a family is to pick a partner who will be able to take on equal or primary responsibility for child-rearing.”     Cathy Young

 Re.:   Thanks to Jay Manifold’s argument below and link to Young.   Heinlein’s women seemed to me (and I wasn’t a fan and read them long, long ago) a bit  how a man imagined a strong woman to be.   He is no Michelangelo but both  capture energy.   David’s beauty is power & grace,  the swirling power of  God awesome.   Of course, his women, too, are muscular.    But, then,  I’ll take Manifold (and Heinlein’s) model   I’d like to be  someone who pulls her weight.   Most women would.

The attraction of Democratic largesse for a woman who wants the government as mate is countered by self-reliance (and family-reliance) when a woman takes a  fallible  & loving, flesh  & blood partner.   Governor Palin  values her husband,  which  is not submissive but mature.   Franklin’s belief that “God helps them that helps themselves” is seldom more true than in marriage.    This understanding  eliminates the synthetic and sentimental drama of the Lifetime channel, “women’s issue” politics, and daily bitching sessions that  resemble spinning car wheels deep in mud.  But that  understanding, that engagement   not consciousness raising liberates.

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Quoted Without Comment

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From Goleman’s Social Intelligence, pp 120-121:

Unhealthy narcissists typically lack a feeling of self-worth; the result is an inner shakiness that in a leader, for example, means that even as he unfurls inspiring visions, he harbors a vulnerability that closes his ears to criticism. Such leaders avoid even constructive feedback, which they perceive as an attack. Their hypersensitivity to criticism in any form means that narcissistic leaders don’t seek out information widely; rather, they selectively seize on data that supports their views, ignoring disconfirming facts. They don’t listen but prefer to preach and indoctrinate.

An entire organization can be narcissistic. When a critical mass of employees share a narcissistic outlook, the outfit itself takes on those traits, which become standard operating procedures.

Organizational narcissism has clear perils. Pumping up grandiosity, whether it is the boss’s or some false collective self-image held throughout the company, becomes the operating norm. Healthy dissent dies out. And any organization that is cheated of a full grasp of truth loses the ability to respond nimbly to harsh realities.

Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin

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(UPDATE [h/t Alan Henderson]: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose)

Via the usual source … well, if Cathy Young can diagnose it, so can I. Or rather, so can Spider Robinson:

I think one could perhaps make an excellent case for Heinlein as a female chauvinist. He has repeatedly insisted that women average smarter, more practical and more courageous than men. He consistently underscores their biological and emotional superiority. He married a woman he proudly described to me as “smarter, better educated and more sensible than I am.” In his latest book, Expanded Universe—the immediate occasion for this article—he suggests without the slightest visible trace of irony that the franchise be taken away from men and given exclusively to women. He consistently created strong, intelligent, capable, independent, sexually aggressive women characters for a quarter of a century before it was made a requirement, right down to his supporting casts.

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Going to the Dogs

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I form very strong emotional attachments to my own dogs. They are all rescues that I collect starving and injured off the street. (Three at a time is my limit, so don’t get the impression that I’m like one of those crazy cat ladies.)

But speaking as someone who has actually worked in law enforcement, I can say that dogs are merely chattel. Property. My own dogs might be very dear to me in a personal sense but they are all mixed breed strays, which means that they are particularly worthless property at that.

This post alerted me to a news story where a police officer in Texas pulled a car over. It seems that the driver was rushing his choking dog to the pet clinic, and he managed to reach a speed that was close to 100 MPH (160 KPH).

The officer was uncaring and flippant, and he kept the motorist by the side of the road for 15 minutes. Both the journalists who report the story, as well as the comments at the blog post that discuss it, seem to think that an egregious breach was committed by the cop. The facts of the matter are that the officer might well have shown more tact, but he was essentially correct in his actions because he was doing his job and safeguarding lives. Human lives.

This is an example of something I’ve been noticing a lot more recently. People seem to be quicker to complain about whether or not they feel insulted when they interact with the police.

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The Country Mouse and the City Mouse

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In an earlier post, Jonathan sums up Palin as a “frontierswoman.”   This seems to me to be true, but she also represents an old tension – between the city and the country.   The distinction between Moscow and pretty much all the rest of Russia seems to be awfully important to the few Russians I know; a similar tension exists between Paris and rural France, Prague and (especially) Moravia.   One of the commuting families at U.T. in the seventies split because, the husband explained, his wife could not imagine not living on one of the coasts.  (Not surprisingly, similar commutes began happening here:   if Austin’s the sticks, how much more are the hinterlands.)     Some people identify with a city and some with the city.   I can hardly complain about such self-definitions, since I’ve always felt the powerful pull of place; it’s a key part to the identity of many of my family and friends.     Those of us from  flyover country   speak of it with some irony, but also with  pride:   all  intensified and sometimes defensive because we feel others say it with disdain.  

If, as one wit put it, McCain/Palin gets all the votes of  brides  pregnant on  their wedding days (maybe add in the grooms), then  if we can add the votes of those with strongly felt  country roots,  the favored Obama/Biden ticket will  need to resurrect all  those  dead voters Acorn was finding.   How well this  plays out  depends on how  many understand  these two and, on the other hand, how  many can’t.   They are hardly typical of “Jesusland” but in important ways they represent it.   Plain talking, for instance,  arises from  the Puritan plain style,  echoed in the American middle west & west.   (And embodied in the Laura Ingalls Wilder  books my mother gave every grandchild.)    We speak with a tough wit,  but,  aren’t ironic about duty, loyalty, resilience, perseverance, active engagement, hard work.   We  don’t consider them ambiguous; we assume  they just are, in themselves, good.  

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