Debbie's Hammer

The weirdest thing you will see today:

Debbie Reynolds, in full '60s cool, singing "If I Had a Hammer."



This was made by Debbie Reynolds' own production company for the Scopitone video jukeboxes, a '60s craze that didn't survive the decade. I can't find an exact year.

Update: In response to a query, Scopitone expert Bob Orlowsky wrote:

I don't have an exact date, but it was made sometime between the end of 1964 and the first half of 1965. It's great, isn't it?

Indeed.

The Church Doesn't Help Divorcing Kids

Elizabeth Marquardt told the Centre College audience yesterday one sad finding from her study of children of divorce: among those who were active in a church at the time that their parents were divorcing, only a quarter reported that anyone from the church talked to them or tried to help them deal with the divorce.

Divorced kids report that rarely do people try to talk to them or hear about their loss and pain when their parents divorce. This is sad when most people in general do it, but tragic in the church.

Some church people at the lecture went away with a conviction to do better.

The New Divorce Stigma

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, has been lecturing at Centre College this week. This morning in my family class she offered an idea that I had not heard before.

In the old days, children of divorce were stigmatized. This sentiment is pretty much gone -- she says she never experienced it personally, and the students likewise do not tell me of any stigma they express or experience. The standard view is that it is not the child's fault. This is very sensible.

However, it is becoming widely known among people who study and talk about marriage that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves. This is so despite the fact that divorced kids usually hate divorce, and vow not to inflict it on their own children.

Hence the new divorce stigma: children of divorce are sometimes treated as damaged goods on the marriage market.

It is important to say that most divorced kids who marry do stay together. Divorced kids are more likely to divorce, but are not destined to. And any individual can be the exception to the trend, even much stronger trends than this one.

The answer to the new divorce stigma is not to deny the risk. It is true: divorced kids are more likely to divorce. Rather, the answer is to turn that passion to make marriage work into the foundation of constant communication about the marriage.

Fight divorce with good marriage.

Sex-Starved Wives

Michelle Weiner Davis is interviewed in Time on her new book of this title. The empirical core of the study is a survey of 1000 married women, 60% of whom reported that they wanted sex at least as much, if not more, than their husbands. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married. This is not as helpful a statistic as it should be. In fact, I would guess that a survey of husbands would report the same result - 60% of men would report that they wanted sex at least as much or more than their wives. What we need is the spread -- more, the same, less. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married.

Nonetheless, Davis' main point is that men are not always filled with sexual desire. Their desire for their wives is affected by how they feel about their marriage, how they feel in general, and, sometimes, for physical reasons. And women often want sex for reassurance about the relationship, so they may well want it more than their husbands precisely when their emotional bond is most strained.

Sex on the Brain Makes Men Take Bigger Risks

A nifty study by Brian Knutsen and Camelia Kuhnen found that men bet higher when shown images of sexy women.

I don't know whether this means they were trying to get more resources to improve their odds of winning the desirable woman, or whether, on the contrary, the very thought of immediate sex made them throw prudence to the winds.

Honey-Colored Nation

I heard two great phrases this week that mark the generational change America is undergoing as the Race Question turns into the thousand ways of living our national ethnicity.

Jon Henke, of the libertarian QandO Blog, reprinted his post of 2006: "Martin Luther King: The Last Founding Father."

And in some other blog, which I can not now find, someone described today's America, Obama's America, Gen-X America: we are a "honey-colored nation."

Poobah

This one is all from Mrs. G.

Did you see Chris Matthews ask Barack Obama what’s going to happen after the primaries are over? And Obama saying then “the poobahs will have to decide?” I hooted.

Of course, since it’s a word I learned in family conversation, I hadn’t ever looked it up, and Trilby and Endub wanted more information. Thus:

Grand Poobah is a term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Buckhounds, Lord High Auditor, Groom of the Back Stairs, and Lord High Everything Else. The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard, who acts in several capacities at once, or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles.

The expression "The Grand PooBah" was first introduced on the television show "The Flintstones." Fred Flintstone and his friend Barney Rubble were members of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes Lodge No. 26. A high ranking elected position within this organization is Grand Poobah or Grand Imperial Poobah.

The character Howard Cunningham on the TV series "Happy Days" was a Grand Poobah of Leopard Lodge No. 462 in Milwaukee.

In the "Darkwing Duck" episode "The Secret Origins of Darkwing Duck", the title character's nefarious uncle attempts to blackmail his planet into making him "Grand Poo-bah of the World" with a giant laser.

Mokey, a primary character in the Jim Henson TV series "Fraggle Rock," wishes to join "The Secret Society of Poobahs" in an episode of the same title.

Any time you’re linking superdelegates to Gilbert and Sullivan, Fred Flintstone, Howard Cunningham, Darkwing Duck’s nefarious uncle, and Mokey the Muppet, you may not have thrown a punch, but you’ve thrown one hell of a pie.

Homeland Generation

The generations discussion by Richard Delano of Lifecourse.com that I reported on yesterday was mostly about the Millennial generation, born 1982 to 2002. He did let on, though, that they were trying on a nickname for the generation born after that: the Homeland Generation. Conceived after 9/11 and born in 2003 or later, their experience is likely to be different from that of the Millennials before them. And if the Lifecourse four-generation pattern holds, the Homeland generation should be like the Silent generation.

Millennials' Favorite Jobs

I just attended a very interesting lecture on the Millennial generation, today's young people, given by Rick Delano of Lifecourse. This is the firm founded by Bill Howe and Neil Strauss, whose work on generations I have written about before.

The Millennial generation, born 1982 - 2002, are an upbeat, standards-seeking, group-oriented, parent-following generation. They are so unlike the Gen Xers at the same age. One of Delano's interesting findings: the Millennials, now voting in their first few elections, are twice as likely to vote as the Xers were at the same age.

One finding really struck me. When the 2006 high school seniors -- the eldest Gruntled child's class -- were asked which employers they would most like to end up with, their choices were, in order:

1. Walt Disney
2. Google
3. U.S. Department of State
4. Federal Bureau of Investigation
5. Central Intelligence Agency.

(Aging Boomers, remember to retrieve your jaws from the floor.)

Good Compendium of Marriage Odds-Making

Time has a decent short article. FYI.

Eat Less Junk Internet

Another insight from the Posse Plus Retreat.

Students spend hours browsing the internet. Facebook, YouTube, TV shows, jokes, and occasionally a bit of news. They have extended their late night hours from midnight to 2. This is bad enough. They are more tired than students have always been, and avoid morning classes even when they need the subject.

The worst part of a steady diet of junk internet is that it fills your brain with trivia and drives out more important stuff. It is not simply the time that we -- students and non-students -- spend on this stuff, but the lost opportunity for better content. An hour on news and political blogs, or art sites, science speculation, religious devotions, even just social rants and grievances, is a richer diet than a steady stream of the mental equivalent of Cheesy Poofs.

I like humorous videos as much as the next person, and check I Can Haz Cheezburger? daily. Nonetheless, junk internet should be taken in moderation, just like every other kind of junk food.

Social Responsibility is the Work of Collective Actors

This weekend we had the retreat of the Posse Scholars and their guests. The theme was "social responsibility." The group was a wonderful collection of energetic young people who want to do good. The general thrust of our discussions was to find practical ways to be socially responsible right now.

As I was reflecting on this conversation, I was struck by an idea that I had not fully articulated before: social responsibility is carried out by collective actors. Individuals change the world by creating collective actors and working together. Students offered several examples of individuals who have made a difference in the world. In each case, though, a few moments' reflection made clear that they did not act alone.

Wanting to change the world yourself is a good start. But actually doing it requires that you also develop the skill of working with others. Collective actors can be responsible for re-ordering the world responsibly.

Clinton's "Black Knight" Strategy

Mrs. G. has been saying this for weeks, but Andrew Sullivan actually posted it.

The Deep Government Says Guantanamo Prisons Are a Stain on the United States

Colin L. Powell, Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright agree.

That, in itself, is amazing.

What they agree on is that the political prison camps at Guantanamo Bay are damaging our reputation in the world and are probably illegal. The Secretaries of State for Democratic and Republican administrations agree that what the current administration is doing is wrong.

Christopher and Albright, and also Baker, Powell, and Kissinger (!) together make as clear a common voice from the center of the political system as one could ask for.

Rigidity, Not Patriarchy, Makes Family Roles Rigid

An article with the eye-catching title "Feminism Keeps My Marriage Together," by Christie Church, makes the claim that patriarchy was damaging her marriage because of the rigid roles it imposed on them. Feminism, she argues, let Church and her husband get free of the rigid expectations of their wife and husband roles imposed on them by society.

A patriarchal family does normally have rigid roles for wife, husband, and other family members. But so does a matriarchal family. Even an egalitarian family can have rigid roles -- in fact, a commitment to a 50/50 split of all family work forces even more rigidity than does patriarchy.

It is not the patriarchy that makes the rigidity, though; rigidity makes rigidity.

The Beavers scale of family functioning is a five-point scale running from chaos, through tyranny, rule-bound families, and the somewhat colorlessly named adequate and optimal families at the top of the scale. The problem in the bottom half of the scale is achieving enough order to have a secure life. In the bottom half of the scale, rigidity is a step up. This is why the middle -- not the bottom -- of the scale is the "rule-bound" family. Rule-bound is, as the name suggests, characterized by rigid roles. Most rule-bound families will lean toward patriarchy, but there are other rule-systems that they can enforce rigidly on one another.

The achievement of the rule-bound family is order. The price they pay is that it is hard for family members to be intimate with one another, without upsetting the rules. This, I think, is the problem that Christie Church is really wrestling with, more than patriarchy.

What makes the higher functioning families adequate and optimal is that they can maintain sufficient order while dealing appropriately with the individual qualities of each person in the family, not just their roles.

Church and her husband seem to be moving beyond rule-boundedness to a more flexible, adequate functional system. For them, that meant dividing labor in ways that were a little less traditional. For other couples, that might mean quite different arrangements -- strict equality, or complete reverse of tradition. I expect that for most couples, flexibly dividing family labor based on the interests, skills, and resources of each half of the couple would, in fact, result in a mostly traditional sexual division of labor most of the time. But however labor might be divided in an appropriately personal family, the point is that it is being rigid about roles that creates rigid roles in a family, not patriarchy or any other social system.

Wine With Dinner for Teens?

Following yesterday's post about drinking licenses for 18, 19, and 20 year olds, I was drawn to a column in the New York Times by wine writer Eric Asimov. He is a wine professional, and grew up with teens having a little wine with meals as part of his family's normal practice. Now that his kids are coming to the age when they would normally be introduced to wine, he and his wife were torn by the school's message that kids should have zero alcohol.

Asimov read the research and talked to the experts. His conclusion:

in a household where wine is regularly served with meals, and where there is not an alcohol issue, violence or a communication problem, young people might experience some degree of protection against future alcohol abuse by being offered small tastes of wine.... the research seems to indicate that it can help by teaching children that wine is a ceremonial beverage that we drink for its taste and for how it goes with food, and that the point of drinking is not drunkenness.

This seems to me an entirely sensible conclusion. Moreover, in 30 states, including Kentucky, it is legal for parents to serve their own children alcohol. I myself am a teetotaler and don't have wine with meals, so have not had occasion to offer it to my children. But I think that it is appropriate for my older teens to try alcohol. I will argue the benefits of a teetotal life, but if they learned to be moderate drinkers -- one glass of wine or beer -- that would be OK.

Choose Responsibility at the Grass Roots

I support Choose Responsibility, a national movement to create drinking licenses for 18, 19, and 20 year olds. Tonight I got my first chance to promote the idea locally. Many communities participate in the biennial federal survey of teen drinking, which they then discuss in town meetings. Tonight Danville had its town hall meeting. This was mostly about high school drinking, which was pretty scary. 80% of high school senior reported drinking ever, and a quarter reported binge drinking recently. When I made the pitch for drinking licenses for high school graduates, this was a new idea to most present. One person said "Oh, no, then they will just drink more; that would be like giving them condoms, which makes them have more sex." But I think most were open to exploring the idea -- especially those who deal with college students.

Family Citizenship by Military Service

The Associated Press has a new story on more than 100 soldiers who are awarded citizenship posthumously. The story focuses on their families' ambivalence in dealing with this sad achievement. Truthout.org passed the story on as part of their criticism of the war.

Yet as I read the story, this is one area in which the Iraq war has actually made things better. The AP reports that there are tens of thousands of "green card soldiers" in the U.S. Armed Forces. They get U.S. citizenship in exchange for their service.

At the start of the war, these servicemen and women would only be awarded citizenship when their service ended. For the families of those who died, this was particularly bittersweet. In response to criticism, though, Pres. Bush changed the rule to allow citizenship to those who applied for it on enlistment. Since then 37,000 soldiers have been naturalized. Another 20,000 foreign nationals serve in the U.S. military who have either not applied for citizenship or not completed the paperwork.

Another important change is that the relatives of dead soldiers who are awarded citizenship posthumously have the same advantages in coming to the U.S. legally that the relatives of living citizens do. This ended the Catch-22 in which the relatives of naturalized soldiers could get on the fast track to citizenship only if the soldier survived the war.

The United States has always offered immigrants military service as the fast way to citizenship. This seems to me a good and just thing. And these improvements in the path of naturalized soldiers seems to me a silver lining of this bad war -- even for the families of the dead.

The Audacity of the Greatest Hope

A joyous Easter to you all.

"Just Do It" Do-Gooders

David Brooks has an excellent column about the new breed of social service activists who are in it for results, not for big rhetoric and lifestyle theater. He writes, "The highest status symbol in their circle is a Rand study showing that their program yields statistically significant results." These are my kind of servants of the public good.

I see this as the coming to fruition of Gen-X. Howe and Strauss, in 13th Gen, predicted when Gen-Xers were still college students that what they would bring to the commonweal was a devotion to getting a practical job done. Reacting against Baby Boomer rhetoric, they eschewed big causes in their wild youth. Now settling into years of social responsibility, they want their work to really yield results.

I was born in 1960. I am on the cusp between the Boom and Gen-X. I feel the pull of both styles. But my heart is with the Xers.

Pick a problem. Try a solution. Test the results. Git 'er done.