50 Things to Do in Kentucky Before You Turn 50

Today is my 50th birthday. A year ago I solicited suggestions for the 50 things you should do in Kentucky before you turn 50. A year ago today I published the top 25 suggestions. Today I will reproduce that list, and take an inventory of how many I made it to.

I picked the top ten based on intrinsic excellence and national or world impact as a symbol of Kentucky. This means there has to be some horses, bourbon, coal, and basketball. There should also be some tobacco, but I do not have an excellent nominee for that category.

Kentucky Derby: I attended last year, soon after posting this list.

Mammoth Cave: I went as a kid. I would like to go back.

UK basketball game at Rupp Arena: I had tickets to see the UK men play Drexel at Rupp Arena in what turned out to be their 2000 victory (UK2K). However, I had to give the tickets to another in order to fetch my snowed-in daughter. So Mrs. G. and I attended a UK women's basketball game, a very satisfactory victory over Ole Miss in the more intimate confines of Memorial Coliseum.

Maker’s Mark factory: Not yet, though I have been to the Labrot and Graham distillery

Lincoln Shrine: I took the kids some years ago, as well as two other Lincoln cabin sites in Kentucky.

Fort Knox - Patton Museum: Not yet. And I better go soon, as they are moving stuff out.

Louisville Slugger Museum: This is the easy one that I should have done half a dozen times already. This summer, for sure.

Red River Gorge & Natural Bridge: Yes, with the family some years ago.

Abbey of Gethsemani: I took students in my "American Religion" class there a couple of years ago.

Van Lear coal museum (& Loretta Lynn) [or something like this]: No. This was really an attempt to find some specific coal-related site that is worth visiting. I still don't have the perfect nominee in this category.

The next ten are places are perhaps a step down, but big in Kentucky:

My Old Kentucky Home: Took the kids some years ago.

Shakertown: Several times.

Keeneland: Several times. I took my "Class Culture" seminar there one year.

Moonbow at Cumberland Falls: I have been to Cumberland Falls, but not on the right night to see the elusive moonbow.

Museum of the American Quilters Society: Nope. My mom has, though.

Southeast Christian: Several times, including taking a class there.

Creation Museum: Yes, and I have even written about it in the Kentucky Humanities magazine.

Berea College: Many times.

Cane Ridge revival site: Yes, including taken classes there and attending the bicentennial celebration.

Ashland - Henry Clay's home: Yes.

I will round out this first list with five food suggestions.

Hot Brown at the Brown Hotel: Yes, recently.

Kentucky Fried Chicken at the (reproduced) original store in Corbin: Yes.

Ale-8-One at the plant in Winchester: Almost, but not yet. Soon.

Moonlite Bar-B-Q in Owensboro: Yes

Miguel’s Pizza at Natural Bridge: Yes

Keep the Healthy Marriage Initiative

One of my favorite acts of the Bush administration was the Healthy Marriage Initiative. This is a small program by federal standards - about $100 million. The money went out as grants to states, and the states did various things with it.

My idea: provide a mass wedding for couples with children who plan to marry "someday." I still think this is the biggest bang for the buck that we could get in the short run.

The Obama administration plans to cut out the whole program. I don't think, as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation does, that they are doing this because "The statist Left is not content to merely watch marriage die; it seeks to nail the coffin lid tightly shut." I think they just see it as one way to save money in a recession.

Nonetheless, promoting marriage is the most effective thing the government could do to reduce the number of children who grow up poor. Cutting the Healthy Marriage Initiative is penny-wise, but pound-foolish.

Who Represents My Race? Barack Obama

I am attending the annual Posse Plus Retreat. The Posse Scholarships bring a diverse group of student leaders from Boston to Centre College in mutual support groups (posses) of ten per class. Each year the forty Posse Scholars invite about twice that number of students, faculty, and staff to a retreat in the beautiful Kentucky countryside to talk about an important issue. This year's topic: Does Race Still Matter?

In one of the exercises designed to probe what we think race means we were each asked to consider the question "Who represents your race?" My instant answer: Barack Obama.

I am white, Obama is black. More precisely, I am descended from many of the nations and faiths of Europe, the kind of "Euro mutt" that most Americans are. My ethnicity is American. Obama is descended from that same Euro melange as well as East Africans (not the West African ancestors that most black Americans have). His ethnicity is also, I believe, American.

I take race seriously as a part of social identity. Race matters in America. As long as we are a nation of immigrants, which I hope we will always be, and as long as race matters on earth, which is likely to be a very long time, race will always matter in America.

Race is a very complex social construct, of which biology gives only one part. Race is made as much by culture as by biology. I say the American melting pot is going as strong as ever. At any given moment there are many distinct ethnic groups, some of them partly defined by race. But over time they all melt into the American ethnic alloy.

People who believe in the strength of that American alloy share my culture. If they are products of that melting pot themselves, they share my ethnicity. American ethnicity includes a faith that all the races of humans are real, but meltable.

I believe Barack Obama both shares and represents that American ethnicity, an ethnicity that ultimately includes all the "races" of the earth. He also represents the promise that even the deepest am most searing racial divisions of the American past can be overcome in the American alloy. That is my faith as well as my people's story. Obama represents my race.

Premarital Sex is the Norm - on the Way to Marital Sex

Here is an interesting statistic:

• 94: Percentage of women who have premarital sex today
• 93: Percentage who did the deed without wedding bands 30 years ago

In fact, the vast majority of women and men have had sex before marriage for much longer than that. The difference is that when women had premarital sex in the past it was normally with her soon-to-be husband. Today there is a less certain connection between sex and marriage.

A wise teacher of mine, E. Digby Baltzell, said that he thought premarital sex was OK with the person you were going to marry. Of course, there is a risk that you could be wrong about the future, a risk that is greater for women. I think that immediately premarital sex is a different category, morally and practically, from not-even-thinking-about-marital sex. To see the trends in those two kinds of nonmarital sex we need to ask different questions.

Marriage is an Achievement of Civilization, not Nature

Robert Wright, in a blog on why it is worth talking about Tiger Woods' marriage that I otherwise agree with, makes this puzzling point.

So we’re stuck with this unfortunate irony: the institution that seems to be, on average, the least bad means of rearing children is an institution that doesn’t naturally sustain itself in the absence of moral sanction — positive sanction for fidelity, negative sanction for infidelity.

I don't think this is ironic, because I don't think marriage is a bond made primarily by our biological nature. Instead, I think the mother-child bond is natural. The mother-father bond, and therefore the father-child bond, is a great achievement of culture. Indeed, I think marriage and fatherhood are the fundamental civilizational institutions.

And civilizational achievements, like marriage, are made of moral sanctions.

The Class Gap in Breastfeeding

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have released a new study on who breastfeeds.

Mom has high school diploma or GED:
starts breastfeeding 65.2%;
still at it at 1 year 19.9%

Mom has college degree:
starts breastfeeding 85.4%;
still at it at 1 year 28.6%

South Korean Sex Ratio Straightening Out

One of the world's great tragedies is the massive rate of aborting girls in Asia. Since it became easy to tell the sex of an embryo most Asian countries have seen a huge rise in sex-selection abortions aimed at killing girls and producing only boys. In some provinces in China the normal male/female ratio at birth of 103/100 has been pushed up to 120/100.

The good news is that in South Korea, after a binge of girl abortion in the 1990s, the boy/girl birth ratio is trending back to normal. Laws against sex-selection abortions are better enforced there than before, and better than they are elsewhere in Asia. More importantly, there seems to be a change in culture that values girls and boys more equally. There also appears to be less acceptance of abortion in general.

[This table is from an analysis by Christophe Guilmoto]

South Korea is the most Christian country in Asia, after the Philippines, and is the most Protestant country in Asia by a good way. I believe the Christianization of South Korea has contributed to its standout movement away from "gendercide," just as Christianization contributed to that nation's notable transition to democracy.

Traditional By Choice

I have often thought that would make a great bumper-sticker. In fact, if I ever launch my long-imagined aphorism business, that is what I would call it.

I am the product of the free-est to choose nation, generation, class, race, and sex that has ever existed. What I choose is mostly traditional, because I have come to see the wisdom of the traditions and the communities that live them.

Too much choice can be debilitating. If you try to live by keeping all your choices open, you can never actually live. And people who choose to live according to structured traditions in mutually accountable communities are the happiest.

Happy Easter!

(that is all)

(that is enough)

Manners Militia

Signe Wilkinson, one of my favorite cartoonists, expresses my sentiments exactly.

Universal Education in India

A great piece of gruntled news is that India has passed a law offering free education for all children. 70 million children who effectively had not schooling will now be educated. Millions of Dalit (untouchable) children, who India previously did not even pretend to educate, will be included.

India is so enormous that it already has almost as many college graduates as the United States has people. Nonetheless, the bottom of the Indian educational system - that is, those left out of the "system" altogether - were very very badly off indeed.

The main thrust of this law has been to educate all of the poor. One side effect will be that girls of all classes will more reliably be educated.

Threat Fighting Without Fear Mongering

Yesterday I wrote about how promoting fear undermines the social order more than terrorists do. This brought several questions about how society should appropriately deal with actual threats.

Fear is a life-saver in response to immediate threats. However, when we have a minute to respond with more reason and less adrenaline, we are better off putting our fears back in a proportionate, subordinate place.

It is rational to fear a bear when it is right in your face. It is not helpful to have that level of fear every time you go outside. If you live in bear country you rationally lock up your garbage. You don't do anyone any good by promoting a feeling of fear about a possible bear attack all the time.

Yes, there are small groups plotting attacks designed to kill and maim Americans. They use terrorism to terrify. If we respond by being terrified all the time, the terrorists, by definition, win. If we fight them with as calm, rational, and efficient a method as we can muster, we win. Our military is tracking down a real Muslim militia in Afghanistan and Pakistan without trying to terrify the U.S. population. The FBI is tracking down a real Christian militia in Michigan without trying to terrify the U.S. population. That is the right way to fight threats without promoting fear.

Fear-mongers Undermine Society More Than Terrorists Do

David Brooks has a fine column on how happiness has far more to do with good personal relations than it does with wealth, power, or success. For the community-level (as opposed to individual-level) correlates of happiness, he gives this useful summary:

If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

The opposite of trust is fear. The acid that destroys social happiness is fear. People who promote fear destroy society more effectively than do the people who commit frightful acts. The terrorist terrifies us once - and then we can pull together. The fear monger terrifies us all the time, undermining the very social asset that best helps us build a strong and happy society.

The Meaning of "Wife" is Changing, Yet Stays the Same at Heart

Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog, has a short piece in the New York Times Magazine about the changing meaning of "wife."

She notes that her mother, a divorced feminist who switched from teaching to lawyering, rejects being a wife. Belkin is a highly invested wife and mother, trying not to be too much of a helicopter parent. She thinks that the next generation of women won't know what to do with the wife role because it will be too indefinite, have too many possible meanings. She thinks the crucial change is that the men who young women marry are taking on more of the house roles, especially the parenting roles, that wives and mothers used to do almost exclusively.

I think Belkin is right that the key to changing the wife role comes from husbands taking on more of the kid-raising. Belkin also notes, though does not emphasize as a cause, that wives bring home almost half the family income among young marrieds, and a fifth of young wives make more than their husbands. I believe this latter fact is the other half of the equation of re-jiggering husband and wife roles.

On the other hand, biology will continue to make women into mothers in powerful ways. That will be the starting point for the great majority of married couples' role negotiations. I believe that the Millennial generation will differ most from the '70s feminism of their grandmothers in seeing that the crucial part of marriage is not primarily about the identity of husband and wife as individuals, but as a partnership to raise children.

Trying to Understand the American Civil Religion While Living It

Yale sociologist Philip Gorski offers a fine overview of the several traditions of American civil religion. The kind he likes, civic republicanism, is a middle ground between religious nationalism (think Sarah Palin) and secular liberalism (think Ayn Rand). In this ground-clearing essay, "Civil Religion Today," Gorski helpfully lays out the competing traditions, which was his main task. He also concludes that any kind of realistic story of American civil religion has to include the fact that hope does sometimes win.

I agree with all of this, and plan to build on it in my American religion course. I think the deep underlying idea of any study of American religion is the struggle of competing civil religions. This is a hard idea for students to get, though, so we work our way through all of the particular denominational traditions first.

What I am wrestling with now is how the tradition of civic republicanism can help me understand the particular narrative of American civil religion that I was raised in and embrace. My story sees America as a city on a hill, the nation with the soul of a church, an errand in the wilderness. The Revolution was a world-historical step forward in creating a democratic nation, which rests, as Tocqueville, said, on continuously reproducing a virtuous citizenry. The Civil War was the necessary re-making struggle of the nation to overcome our core contradiction between democracy and caste. This struggle was not fulfilled until the Civil Rights Movement. Our vocation in the world now is to be the last best hope of democracy without becoming an empire.

This narrative is a deep and real American tradition. What I am trying to suss out is whether the tradition of civic republicanism, apart from its specific American form, offers guidance and limits to how we can live out this narrative without being corrupted by the unprecedented world power that America now has.

Rodan the Stork is a Good Dad

Rodan, a stork, flies back 8,000 miles from South Africa to Croatia each year to return to his wounded mate. They raise a bunch of little storks. He teaches them to fly. Then back he goes to South Africa, to return again the next spring. He has been doing this for five years, and will likely keep returning.

Republicans vs. Democrats on Obama

A new Harris poll has some fascinating numbers on what Republicans and Democrats believe about President Obama. Since I reported earlier on some of the interesting beliefs of Republicans in a Republican-only poll, I am glad to have some comparative numbers. All the questions began "here are some things people have said about President Obama. Please indicate for each whether you believe it is true or false." I will give Republican vs. Democratic "true" answer percentages.

Let's start with some fairly straight-forward factual matters:

57 vs 15 Is a Muslim
45 vs 8 Was not born in the U.S. and so is not eligible to be president

Then let's look at his political intentions:

61 vs 17 Wants to take away Americans' right to own guns
51 vs 12 Wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government
41 vs 8 Wants to use an economic attack or a terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers
22 vs 5 Wants the terrorists to win

Finally, some global assessments of his being:

67 vs 14 Is a socialist
47 vs 12 Resents America's heritage
45 vs 8 Is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of
22 vs 6 May be the Anti-Christ

The last two questions are particularly interesting, as I believe they are, within the American civil religion, two versions of the same thing.

For the record, I believe all of these claims are false.

Recession's Silver Lining: Falling Divorce Rates

Divorce rates go down in recessions because divorces cost money. They typically go back up again afterwards. Still, we could cut the divorce rate in half if couples would just stick out difficult times. Some couples on the road to divorce before the recession will have time to reconsider while they wait out economic hard times. One of the things they can consider is that divorce is likely to make their economic difficulties permanent for themselves and their children.

Forty Years After "The Female Eunuch," Germaine Greer Celebrates Divorce

The author of one of the provocative blockbusters of '70s feminism thinks the feminist movement has been a great success. I mostly agree. I am puzzled by what she cites as evidence, though: the high divorce rate. She reads divorce as due to women heroically accepting hardship rather than acquiescing in servility. Some divorces, no doubt, fulfill this claim - much more so then than now. Still, I think she is way out of date on what drives most women to seek divorce today.

If divorce and feminism are importantly connected today, I think it is more that our high divorce rate shows the acquiescence of feminism in a false view of women and men as most fulfilled when they are most autonomous.

Obama's Big Year

Universal health insurance passed Congress last night. I believe this will be the signature achievement of the Obama administration. After all the compromises were made, both with Republicans and with fellow Democrats, the final bill was, as the president said, "straight down the center of American political thought." I think that within a few years universal health care will be as much a part of the grain of American society as Social Security and Medicare. We will look back on this debate and wonder why some people thought getting health insurance for all was such a scary idea.

I think many of the other things that President Obama wants to do have been waiting on passage of this law. Now he can go ahead with other elements of his agenda. He will be able end the war in Iraq, fight the war against our 9/11 attackers, close the Guatanamo Bay prison, end "don't ask, don't tell," draw down the war deficit, stimulate jobs in energy-efficient industries, make us less beholden to oil barons, work together with the great powers of Europe and Asia to defuse new nuclear threats. Oh, and while he is at it, improve race relations in America. I believe the president will have a big year.

President Obama's approval rating today stands at 26% strongly approve, 42% strongly disapprove. I believe that a year from now, those numbers will be reversed.