I pissed off a bunch of people this weekend.
It's been a strange week. For some reason I was disgruntled, I was pissy at work where I felt put-upon every time someone did something that caused me to break my flow and work on their project (yes, it's great that you tried to bring that server up, but...). Charlene was seriously wigged out about a conference at which she was exhibiting her work, so when I went back over to Marin she was asking for time and attention. By the end of the week I was completely unable to sustain a conversation, fumbled a pass that was handed to me, and on Saturday to work this off I biked up Rocky Ridge to the top of Mount Tamalpais, a route that even really good mountain bikers eschew.
Even that didn't work.
So this weekend I took my bad attitude to two books and quite a few conversations, and this morning John publicly wondered what my take on the latest piece that Marylaine put up, titled Drifting to Virtue .
Hunker down, this might be rough.
My attitude that seems to piss off both Democrats and Republicans is that there's no substantive difference between the two candidates this year. It pisses off Republicans because most of the ones I know are holding their nose and voting for the Gore-Lieberman ticket because GW is such a drooling idiot and they know I'm right, and it pisses off Democrats because when I point out the inconsistencies and general pandering futility of the attacks on the entertainment industry it hits a nerve.
How, you may ask, does this relate to Drifting Into Virtue?
Well, I've gotten through about the first third of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, but thus far it makes a very strong case that in the last three or four decades we've gone from political participation to political consumerism; where we used to lobby our congresscritters, we now pay organizations to do so, or, here in California, cynically bypass the filtering and management effects altogether and vote on propositions and constitutional amendments which others have paid to put on ballots.
Where we used to support causes by direct action and involvement we now write checks.
I had a long protracted battle a Sunday ago with a liberal friend of mine who was on the "isn't it awful that marketers are selling to our kids" kick, with specific examples from tobacco and the Hollywood violence. I proposed that she look at the local efforts to put computers in the schools and she countered that they had filtering software.
Not even wanting to open that can of worms, I asked "Can they get to Disney.com?"
Silence.
And as I pointed out the correlations between the current pushes to put computers in the classrooms and the similar issues with color TV in the '70s I think she slowly started to realize that she really was a part of society. Yet somehow she still wanted to believe that "us versus them" existed, that it wasn't the choices in aggregate of people she knew, of friends she associated with, that created the environment in which her children are growing up.
I didn't even get into the discussion of how parents relying on the MPAA's objective measures of violence were causing the impact of the violence to be omitted, the death and gore to be glossed over, the killings sanitized as the vanquished grey guys in a Power Rangers episode. How the real issue isn't the violence, hell, the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm are as gory as they get, but the ends to which the violence are put, and in this way the sparring of Pokemon is probably as influential as any R rated movie.
And mention subjective measurements and the obvious conundrum results. "I don't want those whackos at CAP deciding what my child should see!"
Which brings me to the other book I read this weekend: The Ethical Slut.
In my early childhood my parents moved to be within a few hours drive of their parents. This was not one of the highlights of my dad's career, and in the years since then I've come to believe that I need to live where my career is most fulfilling.
Now I've chosen to eschew raising children as a project, but my situation, living thousands of miles from blood relatives and having a support structure which doesn't rely on them, isn't unique. Nor are my conclusions.
And it seems fairly obvious that while the family structure that we've had was okay for situations where women routinely died in their 20s during childbirth and even men didn't generally make it that long past getting their kids out of the nest, where people didn't move from the communities in which they were raised, where relatives were close enough that they could be relied on for a support and safety net, it's no longer relevant and we need to reinvent the social structures we use for these situations.
You may think I'm overstating the situation, but remember how recently we got germ theory. Go read histories like Intimate Matters and get a feel for how young the quoted diarists died. Look at the expected life span statistics; yes, the people we hear about did live to roughly the same age as folks today, that's because they were the ones who got remembered, not because they were the norm.
So I don't know how we're going to reinvent these social structures, but I know that we have to. That we have to be willing to forgo this snickering detachment that lets us put as much stock in the dissection of the news coverage of events as in the events themselves. We have to acknowledge that marriage is dead, and instead of trying to construct ways for people to bind themselves together in absurd ways that leave no one happy, build extended structures that let those relationships shift without causing so much discord that children grow up wondering how adults can hate each other so much.
And I need to find a way that I can share some of these support structures so that I don't spend my weekends all bitter and angry and pissed off.
Monday, October 2nd, 2000 danlyke@flutterby.com