Self Interrupting

"Knock knock."

Mrs. G. knows that a dumb joke is coming. Probably one she has heard before. Often. Nonetheless, she gamely counters, "Who's there?"

"Interrupting Starf-"

I have to digress here a moment. This is, indeed, one of my favorites. The knocker says "Interrupting starfish." Before the knockee can finish saying "Interrupting starfish who?" the knocker grabs the knockee's face with one spread, five-fingered hand. Hence the starfish. Also the interruption.

So I got as far as "Interrupting Starf-" when my wife, realizing which dumb joke she would have to put up with, put her face in her hand. And then realized that she had completed the joke for me. Self-interrupting starfish!

She suffers much for art.

Five for Fighting: A Few Fighting Dems Break Through This Time

Of the 55 Fighting Dems – veterans of various wars chosen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to run for the House of Representatives – five won. This is actually a pretty good showing for a batch of newbies, most of whom were against incumbents and/or in Republican districts. The biggest winner among the veterans was not, strictly speaking, a Fighting Dem at all, but a Senate candidate, former Navy Secretary Jim Webb. In the race we followed most closely, the Pennsylvania 7th, the Eldest Gruntling took to the hustings in favor of Vice Admiral Joe Sestack, who unseated a ten-term incumbent.

As Garance Franke-Ruta points out in the New Republic, it did seem to matter which war the veterans were veterans off . Iraq and Afghanistan vets were better able to address the current war issue than Vietnam veterans were, a problem John Kerry had. I am hopeful that these winning younger veterans will have an immediate impact on how the Congress addresses the Iraqi quagmire that we have created.

I also hope that the other 50 Fighting Dems, and many more behind them, run again and stay in the party leadership and in the policy argument. Tammy Duckworth, the wounded helicopter pilot who drew the unenviable assignment of trying to win Henry Hyde's old seat, was the face of this group. If I were running the party, I would find a way for her to be prominently involved still. And perhaps she can run again. We will never run out of wars, and we will never run out of a need for veterans in both parties.

We Elected a Centrist Government – Now Let it Govern

David Brooks has another sensible centrist column about who really won this election, "The Middle Muscles In." Since this is the rare week when his New York Times columns are freely available to all, I urge you to have a look.

I think the next two years could be a great era for government. The Republicans have the White House, Democrats have Congress, and the Supreme Court seems about even. The choices for our leaders are to work together, or to get nothing done. I vote for getting something done. This will mean compromise on both sides. The activists of both extremes hate compromise, and have long memories for politicians who they think have "sold out." Centrists, on the other hand, know that politics requires compromise. An uncompromising politician is not a leader, but an ineffective ideologue.

The presidential race has also begun in earnest. Today Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack became the first Democrat to declare for president. Vilsack is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist/conservative wing of the party to which I belong. The DLC is committed to working with Republicans to get something done, as they did so well under the first DLC president, Bill Clinton. I hope Vilsack and others of both parties who begun to run for president in earnest will continue to push for actual achievement from the government we have now, without waiting for the promise of pie later when the other party is magically gone. Because the other party will never be gone. We will always have to work together.

Agenda for the Democratic Congress: Action, Not Recrimination

We won, and I am delighted. Democrats have retaken the House. We may even get the boon of the Senate, too.

The self-destruction of the Republican Party lately has been so spectacular that it has been hard to keep up with. One website showed films of people trying to read a list of indicted Republicans in one breath for a $100 prize. No one could do it.

A new era is upon us.

It might be natural, now that the Congress can actually find out what went on for the last six years, to spend the next couple of years in investigations. I hope, though, that they will not. Leave that to the historians. We are stuck with the mess now, no matter who created it and why. We need to do something about illegal immigration, and the trade deficit, and the federal debt, and global warming, and most of all about Iraq.

I hope Speaker Pelosi and (perhaps) Majority Leader Reid spend the next two months working with their new leadership to come up with a rich 100 Days legislative plan. Use the honeymoon to do something, and the rest of the term may be productive as well. Personally, I would start with the minimum wage.

In any case, I hope that the new government will simply move ahead, and let Tom DeLay bury the dead.

The Glorious Day Is Finally Here!

Vote Centrist!

Go, Fighting Dems!

Anti-Abortion/Pro-Choice Democrats Can Win

Amy Sullivan has a fine piece in the New Republic about the unexpected rise of anti-abortion Democrats. She profiles Bill Ritter, the Democratic candidate for Colorado governor, with asides about Senate-candidate Bob Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, and Ohio Representative Tim Ryan. They are Democrats who support legal abortion and want to seriously reduce the number of them that women choose to have.

Tomorrow we will see how they, and others like them, do. A year ago you would not have predicted a big year for anti-abortion Democrats, or Fighting Democrats (the veterans who are remaking the party), or even that Democrats in general might have a big year. But Providence smiles on the party to take a centrist turn. And thus on the nation.

The Gruntleds will be following the election with intense interest.

A Surprise Wiggle in the Haggard Scandal: Evangelicals Say National Association of Evangelicals is Irrelevant.

Ted Haggard, who resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals in a gay sex and drugs scandal, poses a problem for other evangelical leaders. Some, like James Dobson, stand by him as a friend. I was curious to see what Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, the loosest cannons of the evangelical movement, would say. And of course Haggard, as NAE president and megachurch pastor, was part of the famous White House conference calls with evangelical leaders – what would they do?

The White House, not surprisingly, said Haggard's part of those weekly calls was not important. As David Kuo, former #2 in the White House Faith-Based Initiatives Office has recently revealed, the White House viewed those calls as a tool for pacifying, rather than listening to, evangelical leaders.

More surprising is the tack taken by Robertson and Falwell: they have attacked the National Association of Evangelicals itself as irrelevant. The NAE under Haggard has been more politically moderate that Falwell's Moral Majority or Robertson's Christian Coalition had been. Still, they had worked with the NAE for years as the umbrella under which many evangelical projects and ministries were shaded. That both men would distance themselves from Ted Haggard personally is not surprising; that they would dismiss the NAE at the same time is.

Hating Hume?

Mrs. Gruntled was driving Endub and a friend to the big city. They saw that the highway was fast and full during rush hour, so they were trying to take the back roads to get to an unfamiliar location in time for a fast-approaching deadline. Mrs. G. said she was making a series of sensible turns that would take her northeast to her destination. Unfortunately, they were actually heading southwest.

In the middle of this slightly testy moment, the cell phone rang. Mrs. G., a very sensible driver, handed it to one of her passengers. The call was from Junior Gruntled #1, off at college. This was the message relayed from her: "Mom, do I hate David Hume?"

That broke the tension. When the girls had been dropped off, my wife settled in to a coffee house to call our daughter back for a long conversation about good philosophers and bad.

Oh Lord, No: The Leading Evangelical Quits in Gay Sex Scandal

Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of a 14, 000 member church in Colorado Springs, has quit both. A gay prostitute, Mike Jones, says he has been having sex regularly with Haggard for three years. And, just to make it perfect, Jones says Haggard took meth to make the sex better.

Haggard has been one of the leading opponents of gay marriage. Jones says when he saw Haggard on t.v., he realized that the "Art" who was his regular John and Ted Haggard were the same guy.

Haggard denies all of it, and I will presume him innocent until proven guilty. It is a little suspicious that he quit both of his jobs, but that may be standard procedure in evangelical sex scandals. There will be an investigation, which I hope will be quick. And I hope he is cleared, if only so that I can maintain my faith that some leaders tell the truth.

Jon Stewart says the rule is simple: everyone who makes a big deal about opposing homosexuality is a homosexual. In the wake of Foleygate, this seems too believable.

Heavy sigh.

First Female Circumcision Trial in the U.S.

Female circumcision, in which parents cut off their tiny daughter's clitoris so she won't experience orgasm as an adult, is very widespread in eastern and southern Africa. Perhaps 130 million girls have been cut this way. The practice horrifies most Americans. Indeed, I find it the most reliable way to cure students of a sophomoric "anything goes" cultural relativism. The practice is so revolting here that it is against federal law.

Khalid Adem, an Ethiopian immigrant, has been convicted of circumcising his daughter, now seven, when she was two. He denies it, and blames his South African ex-wife's family. His ex, with the ironic name of Fortunate Adem, says that she did not notice that her little daughter had been cut up for a year. His lawyer says this is so implausible that it shows she knew about it all along.

Absent any reason to doubt the verdict, I accept the jury's conclusion that the father did it. I think it is probably a significant measure of the power of moral outrage, as well as the threat of jail time, that Khalid Adem not only denies doing it, but says anyone who would is a "moron" with his "mind in the gutter."

Georgia, where the trial was held, passed a state law against female circumcision after the case began, though it was not relevant in this trial. If there are other trials, I expect that other states will follow suit.

The silver lining of this horror is that however much the culture war may have advanced in our society, Americans still unite in rejecting female genital mutilation and the very idea that women (alone) should be denied sexual pleasure.

Africa Has Less Promiscuity, But More AIDS

A new study in the Lancet has produced the interesting finding that the well-known high rates of AIDS in Africa do not simply track a high rate of promiscuity. In fact, a larger proportion of people in industrialized countries have multiple partners than do Africans.

The Lancet study suggests two reasons that African men might spread sexually transmitted diseases more often and more efficiently than do their counterparts in industrialized nations. First, those African men who do have multiple sex partners are much more likely to have sex with prostitutes. In southern Africa, where AIDS rates are highest, about 12% of men report having had sex in exchange for money or gifts, whereas the European rate (which is a decent proxy for the American rate) was under 3%. Second, African men who do have sex with prostitutes or mistresses are much more likely to have overlapping sexual relationships with their wives. Add to this the fact that African wives are most likely to say that they cannot refuse sex with their husbands, nor insist on condoms, and we can seen how less promiscuity could nonetheless translate into more AIDS.

The Clash of Civilizations Over Women

I think Samuel Huntington is right that there is a clash of civilizations going on between the West and Islam. People I respect think otherwise. And I certainly know that both the West and the Islamic world and hugely complex. There are many points of connection between the two. I hope the connectors prevail.

But on one issue there clearly is a clash: whether women and men are equal. Indeed, in the furthest reaches of the Islamic world, the issue seems to be whether or not women are people.

A case in point is Afghanistan. Under the Taliban, Afghan women were the most oppressed in the world. Since we overthrew that regime and installed one with at least the trappings of parliamentary democracy and gender equality, the formal rules for men and women have been made more equal. Women make up 25% of the Afghan legislature.

But things haven't really changed there. A new human rights report says that most Afghan women are still pushed into arranged, even forced marriages. Worse, most of those brides were married before the legal age of 16. Western civilization has fundamentally rejected that way of treating women. Muslim civilization, even the more moderate parts, has not. That is a clash. And that is a clash worth fighting.

The 80% Minority Doesn't Shop Alone

The New York Times has a quite interesting article by Mickey Meece on the increasing attention that sellers are paying to women, the "80% minority" who make most household purchasing decisions. For example, when Best Buy figured out that women were shaping more like 90% of consumer electronics decisions, and outspending men $55 billion to $41 billion on the kind of gadgets they sell, they redesigned their selling strategy to be more female-friendly.

The article has examples of smart sellers in industry after industry who are figuring out who they should be selling to. And more power to them. I hope they all reap a competitive advantage, and that more women get better service.

What is surprising to me about this article, though, is that all of these women are presented as doing their buying alone. No husbands or boyfriends figure in these purchasing stories. It is one thing to recognize the great importance of women buyers, and likewise to recognize the importance of women earners, who spend their own money. But it seriously distorts the picture of purchasing reality to leave men out altogether. Women do make most household purchasing decisions. But they do so mostly in married, or marriage-oriented, households, working together with their husbands.

The next step, therefore, should be when retailers figure out how to sell to couples purchasing together.

Form of Government Revision I: Welcome and Openness

The Presbyterian Church's Form of Government Task Force has just released the first draft documents of their ambitious revision of this core section of the church's constitution. The most extensive of these drafts documents is chapter one, "Particular Congregations and Their Membership."

One section that has grown and grown in liberal church constitutions has been the list of groups who are not excluded from the church. Since the church officially welcomes all, it may seem peculiar that they have developed long lists specifying who they don't exclude.

The historical reason for making such lists, though, is clear: at a certain moment the church had to say "we welcome people of all races." This was important and necessary at the time. For many of the oldest church leaders, the civil rights movement was the clearest and most heroic moment in their life in the church, which they have been reliving ever since. All subsequent struggles have been seen as replays of the civil rights struggle, and each has added another term to the non-exclusion list.

At some point, though, the non-exclusion list gets so long, that it is numbing, if not a little silly. Especially since no one is really excluded, anyway – all are welcome. So I was curious what the revised non-exclusion list would look like in the new Form of Government. Here is the relevant paragraph.

1.0302 Welcome and Openness
The congregation shall welcome all persons who respond in trust and obedience to God’s grace in Jesus Christ and desire to become part of the membership and ministry of his Church. No persons shall be denied membership because of race, ethnic origin, worldly condition, or any other reason not related to profession of faith. Each member must seek the grace of openness in extending the fellowship of Christ to all persons. Failure to do so constitutes a rejection of Christ himself and causes a scandal to the gospel.

So what made the cut? Only race and ethnic origin. Everything else is covered by the capacious expression "worldly condition." This has the advantage of being more succinct. But it does raise the question; why do we still include race and ethnic origin? Why not just say this:

No persons shall be denied membership for any reason not related to profession of faith.

I am guessing that race and ethnic origin are still included so no one would forget the civil rights movement. But really, I don't think anyone will. We won. And we can show we won more powerfully if we don't even suggest that racial exclusion is possible.

My recommendation to the FOG Task Force: when it comes to reasons we don't exclude people from the church, less is more.

When the Toes Stand Up

Mrs. Gruntled is very fond of having her feet rubbed. Fortunately for my thumbs, Junior Gruntled #2, the wonderful Endub, is gifted at Reflexology, the art of relaxing the body through foot massage. Often at the end of the day Mrs. G. will find an artful way to request a Reflexology treatment from her teenager. This week's dialogue was wonderfully topical.

Mrs. G.: So, what’s the policy on reflexology? Is it “stay the course” or “cut and run”?

Endub: When the toes stand up, I’ll stand down.

Very Religious State Universities

Princeton Review publishes a bunch of fun college lists every year. One list, Students Pray on a Regular Basis, is based on their campus survey question, "Are students [here] very religious?"

The top of the list is a not-very-surprising collection of church-related schools: Brigham Young, Wheaton, Pepperdine, Notre Dame.

The top twenty does include, though, four state-related universities. This fact is a little surprising at first. Looking at the four, though, perhaps it isn't.

9. University of Utah
10. Texas A&M
17. U.S. Air Force Academy
19. Auburn University

Utah is a world unto itself religiously – even the state university is effectively Mormon. I am not surprised that many Texans are religious; I think the Aggies make the list, but not UT, because the higher a school's engineer-to-humanities ratio is, the more religious it is likely to be. The Air Force Academy, located in the Western Capital of Evangelicaldom, Colorado Springs, has been so religious lately that it has gotten into hot water. Why Auburn is the sole representative of the Southern state schools, I don't know, but I am not surprised to see the Deep South on this list.

Interestingly, the parallel list, Students Ignore God on a Regular Basis, based on the lowest scores on the same survey question, has no state schools in the top 20, with the possible exception of the New College of Florida.

New Jersey Judicial Activism is Still Wrong

Most people accept gay civil unions, but not marriages. The New Jersey Supreme Court agreed with the majority of Americans on that point yesterday.

But most people oppose judicial activism. We want our legislation made by the legislature, not the court. The New Jersey court screwed that up. Worse, they did so right before the election. In 2004, when the Massachusetts high court mandated gay marriage, they threw the national election to the Republicans.

If the Republicans don't manage to get a bounce out of this latest example of liberal overreaching, it will only be because it gets buried under the mountain of GOP scandal.

Regardless of what you think of the merits of this issue, I hope everyone can see that when the court mandates the conclusion that the legislature must reach, it undermines democracy.

Parents are Productive Sociologists

The American Sociological Association's researchers Roberta Spalter-Roth and William Erskine did a study of which sociologists use family-support policies, such as flextime and delayed tenure clocks. They wanted to see if mothers were more productive than their childless counterparts when they used such policies.

The results are striking. Mothers, not surprisingly, used family-support policies much more than childless women do. And it is also not surprising that mothers who didn't use family support were less productive than childless women. Thus, in 2003, these were the median number of peer-reviewed publications for the two groups:

unsupported moms: 4
childless women: 5

And now comes the interesting part. Family support closed the gap between moms and single women. And then doubled the gap, in favor of the moms. Average number of peer-reviewed publications by supported moms: 9.

Having kids is not career death for academics. On the contrary, with a bit of support from the school, mothers can be much more productive than childless women, just as fathers have long been more productive than childless men.

The Rising Radical Center

E.J. Dione has a hopeful piece in the Washington Post about the great Democratic hope of reclaiming centrist voters from the Republicans. There is, indeed, a notable group of moderate, even moderate-conservative Democratic candidates – most importantly, Bob Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania. I have already written about the Fighting Democrats, the 50-plus veterans running for the House and Senate. This is good all around.

My only quibble with Dione's argument is that the center needs to be radical to rise. More exactly, centrists don't have to be mad to vote as a group. The moderate center is always here. It votes regularly for someone. I think the main feature of the "centrist voting bloc" is that we want to vote for centrists.

Premium-Blend Culture

There is a fascinating New York Times article being widely circulated on "The Starbucks Aesthetic." It is not about the coffee or the store, but the music, movies, and now books that the chain has taken a big role in marketing. In my seminar on "Class Culture," we look at the words and phrases that sum up the style of social class. So I was interested in exactly how they pick which art to promote, and what words they use to describe their choices.

So what art does Starbucks sell? Ray Charles' duet album Genius Loves Company sold 800,000 at Starbucks alone. Frank Sinatra's The Wee Small Hours was big. Just now they are pushing Meryl Streep reading The Velveteen Rabbit, Mitch Ablom's book For One More Day, and the movie "Akeelah and the Bee." And who do they sell to? Starbucks' core customers are educated forty-somethings making in the high five figures.

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz describes the "halo effect" that Starbucks gives to the art it promotes, which in turn generates a halo in customers' minds about Starbucks. His terms for their artistic choices: “quality, good will, trust, intelligence.”

Nikkole Denson, who runs Starbucks' entertainment division, said she chose "Akeelah and the Bee" and Ablom's book because they were “all about community and inspiration,” "socially relevant,” and “almost an education without being preachy” -- “not racy or dark, but thought-provoking.” Timothy Jones chooses the music Starbucks sells, such as Charles, Sinatra, and newer artists such as Madeleine Peyroux because they have “a believable sound that isn’t too harsh.”

The best clue that the Starbucks' aesthetic is bobo or knowledge class comes from Mr. Jones' description of where Starbucks itself looks for cultural validation: “We do our best with a new artist when there’s sort of an NPR [National Public Radio] buzz going on around him, the stars-in-the-making.”

Starbucks has even speculated about making its wireless connection the basis of a new network or channel. Here, though, I think their current business plan creates a bottleneck that they might fix. Starbucks' wifi is not free, but is part of a telephone company package. Most independent coffee houses (like the one in which I am writing this) offer free wifi to outcompete Starbucks. If the Big Green Machine wants to become a total edutainment platform for the knowledge class, they will have to offer their instructions as freely as NPR does.