John and Bonnie Gray, Just Doin’ Their Jobs

Posted on August 19, 2011 by hessd

I want to poke just a little today at the way John and Bonnie Gray illustrate what communication between a husband and a wife ought to look like.  John Gray is the founder of the now vast Mars/Venus industries: books, seminars, websites, and so on.  Bonnie is John’s wife and in his books, she needs to act in ways that allow him to model how husbands should respond when their wives seem petulant and unreasonable.  So whatever Bonnie Gray is actually like, in the books, she needs to seem petulant and unreasonable.  It’s a nasty job, but somebody’s got to do it.  Here they are in much earlier days, before all the ducking and dodging and pausing and preparing.

Just a note here to clarify my position on the Mars & Venus books.  I disagree with nearly everything in them, with one exception.  It’s a very important exception.  When I do what John Gray says to do, everything works out really well.  I think his characterizations of male and female roles are stereotyped and rigid.  I think his historical grounding for those roles is preposterous.  Early man had to learn to “duck and dodge” his enemies in battle, for instance, so it should come naturally for a husband to “duck and dodge” his wife’s unreasonable tongue-lashing.  Oh, please!

On the other hand, it is not a small service he provides if, as has been my experience, doing what he says to do makes everything better.  And even if I value him only for that, I value him very greatly.

In this post, I want to look at what John Gray is supposed to do—what his job is—and at what Bonnie Gray is supposed to do.  If John does what he is supposed to do, nearly anything Bonnie does will work out.  If Bonnie does what she is supposed to do, it will make it much easier for John to respond to her.  In that sense, there is symmetry to their roles.  But only in that sense.

It can’t be all that much fun to be Bonnie Gray, the wife of John Gray, the founding genius of the Mars/Venus industry. John Gray uses his interactions with Bonnie mostly to provide instructions to men about how to deal with wives who seem petulant and unreasonable.  For that reason, Bonnie Gray, as she appears in the Mars/Venus books, comes off as petulant and unreasonable.

Here is a little clip from Mars and Venus Together Forever: Relationship Skills for Lasting Love.[1]  This was written to illustrate how John did what needed to be done—and so should we all, guys—and so resolved the crisis.  John tells her he was going to buy a new computer.  I’m adding his comments here, although they tend to excuse his choices, because he is trying to illustrate what “doing it right” looks like and he is being the example for us all.

Bonnie:           Why do you need to buy a new computer (she demanded)?  You already have one.

John:               Well, for lots of reasons. (He says he didn’t like being questioned, but by saying as little as this, he was able to prevent clashing with her)

Bonnie:           What’s wrong with the computer you already have? (She persisted).

John:               You seem upset.  (He “observes” this, after a pause.)

Bonnie:           Have you researched the market?  How much is this computer going to cost?  (She persisted, not answering my question.)

The next four exchanges are presented as a block.  He says he is ducking and dodging, continuing to hold back and not retaliate, but he is aware that he can take only so much more.  I will just present Bonnie’s four responses because she is the one who gets my sympathy today.

One.  Well I AM upset.  Whenever you want something, you just go out and get it.  I don’t know why you have to get another computer.  Yours works fine.  If we are going to spend money, there are other things we could spend it on.

Two.  It’s not like I have all this thought out (He asked what she thought they should spend the money on).  It’s just a feeling.  I feel like you get what you want and I get seconds.  Maybe I am mad that you want so much more than me.  When I want something, it doesn’t seem so important.

Three.  I don’t know.  (He asked her what she wanted to buy.)  But it feels like everything we do is for you and not me.  We always do what you want to do and you always get your way.  I’m afraid I will not get what I want.

Four.  We have been waiting six months to redo our floor.  Our couch needs to be recovered.  I still need a kitchen cupboard.  There are so many things we need to spend money on in the house and you are buying a computer.  It just feels like you don’t care about me.  You are going to buy what you want and that’s it.  What I have to say doesn’t matter at all.”

Here is the resolution of the computer argument above.

John:               I really want to understand your feelings and it really is hard for me.  It’s starting to sound like you’re saying I’m this selfish person.  Don’t I do anything nice?

Bonnie:           Of course you do.  I don’t mean to upset you.  I just have a lot of feelings coming up.  I really appreciate you trying to listen.  Just the fact that I could talk about my feelings without you getting upset with me makes me feel so loved.

So that’s how this round ends with a woman like Bonnie.  The problem is that she has feelings that prevent her from having a fact-based conversation about the computer and other household needs.  The solution is that John ducks and dodges long enough (he was getting close to the edge there at the end) that Bonnie gets the feelings out; she appreciates his listening to her; the emotional relationship is restored; and, eventually, the household purchases will be decided upon.

Now let’s look at what Bonnie Gray’s responsibilities are.  Since John’s responsibility is to “duck and dodge,” you will not be surprised to learn that Bonnie’s are to “pause and prepare.”  Women come naturally to this role because while the caveman husband was off fighting enemies—that’s where the ducking and dodging came from, remember—the cavewoman is home preparing.  Gray runs through things women prepare for: meals, children, their appearance, relationship, and so on

Women need to pause when they feel themselves cranking up the grievance machine.  So Bonnie need not respond by saying “You’re not listening” or “You just don’t understand.”  She can say, “Let me try saying that in a different way.”  That is pausing.  It gives John a chance to remember that he’s supposed to be listening to her feelings, not solving her problems.

“Preparing” comes next.  Bonnie says, “I have a lot of feelings coming up, and I would like to talk about them.  I just want you to know in advance that it sounds worse than it is.  I just need to talk for a while and feel that you care.”  In saying that, Bonnie not only prepares John for the ducking and dodging he is going to have to do, but also apologizes in advance for whatever she may say that is offensive or mean-spirited.  This approach asks his patience as a favor to her and promises that the barrage will be as brief as can be, still allowing time for the feelings to be expressed.

That’s what she should have done in the “buying the computer” scenario.  Asking for his patience (her job) and listening receptively to whatever feelings she has (his job) are both collegial acts. It could look adversarial to a bystander, but it really isn’t.  Bonnie needs to say how she feels and it isn’t going to be pretty.  She engages her husband as a helper and a hearer and promises her gratitude for his work when she is done.  John ducks and dodges while she unloads her feelings, then initiates reconciliation when the time is right.

“It could look adversarial to a bystander,” I said.  I was the bystander I had in mind and I really would not like to see that transaction, much less to be on the receiving end of Bonnie’s anger.  As a bystander, I ask the kinds of questions I am going to look at in the next post in this series.  I ask questions like, “Is it really fair that I have to put up with this kind of abuse over and over?”  I ask, “Is this really the best she can do?”  I ask, “Is it always going to be like this.”

In the next post, I am going to show you what happens when I actually act on those sentiments, rather than just asking them abstractly.  I have actually done that.  I did it for years.  It was ugly and I am glad I don’t do it anymore.  And so is Bette, although if I did let it slip and act like that, she would say, “That’s not like you at all.”  Little does she know.

 

[1] I MUCH prefer the earlier title of this book: What Your Mother Couldn’t Tell You and Your Father Didn’t Know.  His point in this book is that we don’t know what we need to know because our parents didn’t tell us and they didn’t tell us because we are living a life that would have mystified them entirely.

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Highballs and the High Road

Posted on August 18, 2011 by hessd

Imagine that this is one of the notorious “Washington Cocktail Parties.”  Maybe it is.  I don’t know.  My son, Doug, found it for me after I had spent a week looking for one.  I wanted one that played up the lavish drinks and luxurious women, but this one is close enough.  I mean, just look at those chandeliers!

What’s going on here?  There are two views.  We could call them the elite view and the populist view.  We could call them the incumbent view and the challenger view.  Or we could just call them “then” and “now.

It was a piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in Sunday’s New York Times that got me thinking about this.  Here’s the passage I had in mind.  Here is the whole article.

And the genteel Washington of yore — where lawmakers and spouses socialized across party lines, sharing cocktails and swapping ideas — has disappeared, replaced by a culture in which families stay in the district and members jet home each weekend.

Want to establish contacts across party and ideological lines?  Cocktail parties.  Want to beat the “bowling alone” problem?[1]  Cocktail parties.  Want to build the long-term relationships between committee chairs, the ordinary source of major compromises?  Cocktail parties.  The extraordinary intransigence that was apparent in Congress’s struggle to raise the debt ceiling is a result of too few cocktail parties.

And why are there now so few?  Of all the reasons that could be given—the Stolberg articles surveys them—I pick populism.  If you are the incumbent Congressman or Senator and you attend this party, that means one set of things in Washington: rag the committee’s ranking minority member about the double bogey on the 12th hole; compliment Mrs. Ranking Minority Member on her gorgeous gown (I pick the off-the-shoulder black gown of the woman standing at the left of the picture) and ask about how her kids have been doing in school since last you heard; pass along to a lobbyist who is close to a sometimes hostile committee chair a report one of your staff handed you and that might help the lobbyist press your case with the chair.

If you are a potential challenger in the district or anyone of the other party in the district or any group that hopes to stoke the anger of poor people by suggesting that their representative is living it up in Washington with their tax dollars, it means something else entirely.  Here’s the campaign. 

What is Congressman Smathers doing is Washington?  Just look at the picture.  Here in the district, there are hard-working families who are struggling to pay the mortgage, to afford their medicines, to put food on the table.  Clearly Congressman Smathers has lost touch with real folks here is Dubuque.

That would have worked in a few cases back in the old days.  There have always been campaigns like that.  But it wouldn’t always have worked in the old days.  Only if Congressman Smathers had made himself particularly vulnerable on that kind of issue: had voted against funds for the low income families of his district; was known for lavish vacations; didn’t come back to the district at all to meet with the voters, and so on.  Now, Stolberg suggests, you don’t have to do anything to be vulnerable to the populist smear.  You just have to go to the parties where a great deal of the mollification of angry opponents used to take place.

If that work still went on at cocktail parties, you couldn’t afford not to go.  In the “Washington of yore” Stolberg refers to, you couldn’t afford NOT to go.  So now, you go because your job demands it and open yourself to people who make their living riling up angry voters or you don’t go, to support your re-election bid, and you allow Congress to continue sliding in the direction of Civil War.  It’s a nasty choice.

[1] Robert Putnam put this issue on the front burner by observing that there has been no decline in the number of people who bowl, but there has been a substantial reduction in the number of bowling leagues.  The bowling league was a social institution that brought people who weren’t friends together year after year.  Familiarity, not charity or toleration or anything that big, is Putnam’s notion of increasing our social capital.

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The Touch of a Really Good Author

Posted on August 18, 2011 by hessd

Some part of the genius of Ursula Le Guin is that she hides the crucial evidence in plain sight. In her Tales From EarthSea, Le Guin gives us a little girl named Dragonfly. She first appears in a subordinate clause of the second paragraph of the story: “By the time the girl called Dragonfly was born…” In Earthsea, one has a “use name”—which everyone uses—and a “true name” which is very carefully guarded. At the end of the story, this little girl, now a young woman becomes a dragon and flies away.

I was completely dumbfounded. A dragon? How did she do that?

This post has two emphases. Le Guin is only one. I am the other—specifically, my much-maligned notion of reading strategically and repeatedly. So I read “Dragonfly” the way you are supposed to, from front to back. It is a story about a woman named Irian—that’s her true name—and I forgot immediately that she had been called Dragonfly, her use name, as a girl. I presume I was supposed to forget that. And I am taken completely by surprise when Le Guin unveils Irian’s draconic character at the end.

By the time I read this story for the second and third times, I am no longer surprised that Irian has more than one “true name” and so, more than one true character. Now I get to look at, to luxuriate in, the way Le Guin prepares us for the great revelation. That’s what I get by reading it over and over. I bear no grudge against anyone who got all this the first time through, but the fact is, I don’t get it the first time through.

How does she do that? Well, you know she isn’t going to drop a footnote that says, “Oh by the way, Irian is really a dragon.” What she is going to do is to play with the range of symbols and suggestions that are attached to “dragon.” Here’s how that works. If you are looking for something—say Kestrels, for instance—your eye is attracted to anything that might be a Kestrel. A Kestrel is a small falcon, so you might notice any bird with pointed wings. You might notice any solid object at all on the phone lines or fence posts. You might notice anything moving quickly through the air at 50 feet or less above the ground. You might notice anything that hovers or seems to hover. You might notice anything that has even a touch of that slate blue color that appears on the Kestrel’s head.

You don’t declare any of these to be Kestrels. You look at them carefully and determine each and every one of them not to be a Kestrel. But you had to look at each and every one because you are looking for Kestrels and the appearance of any aspect of a Kestrel is part of the “range of symbols and suggestions” I referred to above.

Azver, the Patterner of Roke, reassures Irian that the bad guy of the story can’t come out to the magical grove and harm her. “He cannot harm you here,” says the Patterner. “He cannot harm me anywhere,” says Irian, “fire running through her veins” the text notes. “If he tries to, I’ll destroy him.” Well…she’s angry. She’s venting. Surely she doesn’t think she can destroy the Archmage presumptive of EarthSea. And if you keep thinking about that, you will not notice that “fire” is just a little too hot a word here. It’s not inappropriate. It’s just…oh…a little much.

There was a young prince she really should have had an affair with, but didn’t. Why not, she wonders in a period of deep introspection. “Am I a sterile thing, not whole, not a woman? She asked herself, looking at her strong bare arms, the soft swell of her breasts in the shadow under the throat of her shirt.”

The Patterner comes out of the Grove while she is thinking that. “She felt herself blush, her face and throat burning, dizzy, her ears ringing.” That comes out of a coming-of-age romance novel. She’s just an ordinary teenager after all.

Then Le Guin gives us “What do I want? She asked herself, and the answer came not in words but throughout her whole body and soul: the fire, a greater fire than that, the flight, the flight burning. She came back into herself, into the still air under the trees.”

Irian herself does not know why she came to Roke Island. Azver is sure it was not by chance. The Summoner knows that too.”

“Maybe I came to destroy him,” says Irian. Azver looked at her and said nothing.

“Maybe I came to destroy Roke,” says Irian. Azver’s pale eyes blazed then. “Try,” he said.

“A long shudder went through her as she stood facing him. She felt herself larger than he was, larger than she was, enormously larger. She could reach out one finger and destroy him. He stood there in his small, brave, brief humanity, his mortality, defenseless. She drew a long, long breath. She stepped back from him. The sense of huge strength was draining out of her. She turned her head a little and looked down, surprised to see her own brown arm, her rolled-up sleeve, the grass springing cool and green around her sandaled feet. She looked back at the Patterner and he still seemed a fragile being. She pitied and honored him. She wanted to warn him of the peril he was in, but no words came to her at all. She turned round and went back to the stream bank by the little falls. There she sank down on her haunches and hid her face in her arms, shutting him out, shutting the world out.”

We’ve had the fire already. Here we have the enormous size. We have the failure of words, as often before, since Irian came to Roke. Then we have her sinking down on her haunches. Haunches! But look back. We have the size, but it is larger than she is. What? And then she feels the strength draining out of her. She sinks down on her haunches, but then she hides her face in her arms. Le Guin giveth and Le Guin taketh away.

If you were to go through, in your own mind, the little exercise I did on Kestrels above, you would find things like huge, animal, fiery, fearsome, and silent. “Dragon” makes you sensitive to every appearance of all those. As those peripheral touches add up, you begin to say that Irian “reminds you of something” but then you follow Le Guin away from it again. From “the haunches” to “hiding her face in her arms.”

Le Guin touches on—hell, she pounds on—every aspect of dragons but never says “dragon.” Good readers probably saw it coming. I was taken completely by surprise. But only the first time. I began to get it the second time—not the revelation, but the way of preparing the revelation—and the third time, I exulted in it. “I should have seen it,” I say to myself, but without any sense that I have read poorly. “How wonderful!” I think. Then I think, “Maybe I should go back and read it again.”

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The VIP Treatment

Posted on August 16, 2011 by hessd

I’m going to take a look today at practicing being old.  You can laugh, but it isn’t as simple an idea as it appears.  I have placed it in my set of categories as “Getting Old, but being old isn’t the same thing.  And “being old” and “practicing being old” aren’t the same thing either.  Here’s one of the ways to picture it.

This post amounts to a detour—a brief one, I think—on my road to Erickson’s consideration of generativity.  Let me tell you how I got here.  I’ve been working on.  Helen Q. Kivnick was listed at the third author of Vital Involvement in Old Age.  She was third behind Erik and Joan Erikson and I’d never heard of her so I didn’t pay much attention.  But it turns out she has written a great deal about the kinds of ways old people can invest themselves in their lives, even though the circumstances vary a good deal from one time to another.  The circumstances vary before and after a stroke, for instance; or before and after they take away your driver’s license; or before and after the operation that puts an end to your eating solid food. 

Those are dramatic changes of the circumstances of your life, I think you will agree, but none of them prevent your continuing to involve yourself in the vitality of your old age.  The way you will invest will change.  And learning how to invest yourself in those new circumstances will require practice—if you want to get good at it.  I really do want to get good at it so I am beginning to practice as early as I can.  Like…now.  This would be a good place to put an alternative image, I think.

Kivnick’s interest stretches from the Erikson’s epigenetic stages on the abstract side to occupational therapy on the applied side.  That’s quite a stretch.  I’m in the seventh of Erikson’s eight stages.  Self-absorption is the opponent I am playing[1] in this stage.  There is a good deal more to be said about that, but this is my detour and I am going to look at Kivnick’s application of the Eriksons’ work.  On the occupation side, we are looking at things like this.

Occupational science focuses on the study of the form, function and meaning of human activity, and it seeks to understand people as occupational beings (Yerxa, 1988).[2] Occupations may be described as individual patterns of meaningful activity that are influenced by culture and personality.[3]

The three scenarios I sketched above—the stroke, the driver’s license, and the gastrectomy—could all benefit, it seems to me from considerations of “the form, function, and meaning of human activity.”  And Kivnick’s framework for doing that is called Vital Involvement Practice, hereafter VIP.  That will mean “very important practice” to me; I have long since given up becoming a Very Important Person.  Here’s a short sketch of what she has in mind.

Vital involvement has been described as a person’s meaningful engagement with the world outside the self (Kivnick, 1999), a process of “being in relation” to elements of the environment (e.g., people, materials, animals, ideas, values, institutions, sounds). Vital involvement maybe expressed in overt behaviors that link a person’s internal (psychological) processes to entities in the external (social; physical) world.[4]

So the practicing I am thinking about is going to be about a “meaningful engagement with the world outside the self (inside, too) and of “being in relation to aspects of the environment.”  From the list, I will pick out ideas, values, institutions, and sounds.[5]  And not only am I going to be doing that; I am going to be doing it on the basis of my current strengths.  The heart of Kivnick’s emphasis is that sound practice requires that we begin with what old people are good at—I remind you that I am the old person in question—and build a pattern of engagements on those.  If I don’t do that, I am going to get myself involved in a system aimed at identifying and categorizing behavioral deficits and providing “solutions” for those deficits.  Engaging actively in some new setting, an engagement based on my strengths, sounds better to me than that.  And maybe if I get out ahead of the diagnosticians and push the pace a little, they won’t be able to catch up to me.

So what does “practicing” involve, given all that?  It seems to me that the simplest approach is to pay attention to what I’m good at—what I’ve already had success at—and start thinking about how I can vitally engage a setting in which many other options are more limited.  And if I have trouble remembering what they are, I can consult the members of my book group, which will mark its 30th anniversary in the fall of 2013.  And they’ve been watching me as long as I’ve been watching them.  They’ll know what I’m good at.

 

 

[1] This is “playing” in the sense that one plays an opponent in tennis.  I continue to think of progressing through Erikson’s stages as analogous in many respects to winning your match in a tournament, as a result of which, you get to face your next opponent.  In my previous match, my opponent was isolation—the inability to invest wholeheartedly in an intimate relationship.  I won that one, mostly, and have moved on to playing against “self-absorption.”

[2] Yerxa, E. (1998). Health and the human spirit for occupation. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 52, 412-418.

[3]: Helen Q. Kivnick PhD & Sharon A. Stoffel MA, OTR, FAOTA (2005):  Vital Involvement Practice: Strengths as More Than Tools for Solving Problems Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 46:2, 85-116

[4] Kivnick and Stoffel, op. cit.

[5] Engagement with people, one of the values I skipped over, is crucial to everything else for me, but I think of that transaction as involving collegiality and intimacy.  They are relationships.  The ones I chose are just transactions.

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Grounds for Hope

Posted on August 14, 2011 by hessd

Joe Nocera, the New York Times columnist shared with us today that Starbucks has an idea that might help us all.  Here’s the short version.

In effect, Schultz thinks the country should go on strike against its politicians. “The fundamental problem,” he said, “is that the lens through which Congress approaches issues is re-election. The lifeblood of their re-election campaigns is political contributions.” Schultz wants his countrymen — big donors and small; corporations and unions — to stop making political contributions in presidential and Congressional campaigns. Simple as that.

I have to say that a part of me likes that.  The most important thing to a congressman is continuing to be a congressman and the way to do that is to attract more political contributions than any potential opponent.

Now what is this going to accomplish?  Here’s the way Nocera puts it.  “… an idea had begun forming in his [Schultz’s]  mind about how to force the country’s dysfunctional politicians to stop putting party over country and act like the leaders they are supposed to be.

Excuse me?  He is going to force all politicians to stop putting party over country?  How?  Or is he going to force only the dysfunctional ones to stop putting party over country.  English is the kind of language where you can’t really tell which he means.

Even if Schultz’s idea worked perfectly, which it won’t, how is threatening the corporate/union source of campaign funding going to put country over party?  Does anyone think that congressmen aren’t going to bump down to the next most available source of funds?  Putting country over party, in the context of a fiercely ideological two party system in which the primaries are controlled by the most ideological members of the parties—that’s what we have now—is the surest way not to be back to the job.  So the congressmen most attracted to Schultz’s scheme will be the most likely not to return to Congress.

That doesn’t sound promising.

Further, not everyone is going to agree to practice the interdiction of campaign funds that Schultz prescribes.  And even if left wing funders and right wing funders participate in equal numbers, we will see that funding is a highly stratified business and largest sources of funding will do whatever is in their interest, no matter what the smaller sources do.

So it isn’t going to work.  There is an alternative though.  John Kenneth Galbraith provided it many years ago in his lovely little tract, A Tenured Professor.  A member of the brain trust that worked this out suggested that they be called Political Rectitude and Integrity Committees.  Probably no one will notice that they are called PRICs, right.

Here’s the idea.

If a legislator took money from a Political Action Committee, his or her opponent in the next election would get the same amount, maybe even a little more, from a committee supported by Marvin’s financial enterprises.[1]  Taking PAC money, a member of Congress would thus subsidize his or her own opposition; in a sense, corporate PAC money would pay for an opposing stand.  Maybe then the congressman or senator would have second thoughts about PACs, and that would lead to a cut in the matching cost.

[1] Marvin is the “tenured professor” of the title.  This passage and a little context can be found on page 146.

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TMI

Posted on August 13, 2011 by hessd

I want to think out loud about TMI today—“too much information.”[1]  I think we do give too much information sometimes, but I suspect that most of the time that particular way of saying “Shut up!” really means something else.  This post will speculate about what else it might mean.

I had a conversation with a friend recently in which TMI came up.  I’m going to place attribute his comments to Steve, an entirely fictional creation.  Steve is married to Martha, also fictional.  I just give them the traits I want to talk about on any given day.  It provides me with a source of good examples and they don’t seem to mind.

So Steve was thinking that he had gotten painted into a corner.  He tends to speak abstractly so a lot of the time illustrations are needed.  Martha asks for illustrations because she doesn’t understand, or isn’t sure she understands, what he is saying.  Steve sets about providing the examples Martha asks for.  At which point, she clubs him with “TMI.”

Steve speaks abstractly to me too, but I really haven’t had this difficulty with him.  I ask for examples and he gives examples.  After each one, I check to see if I have a concrete enough grasp of what he is saying.  If I do, we go on; if I don’t he gives more examples.

That doesn’t seem to work with Martha, but then this question of how much information is “enough” is harder when a conflict has already begun.  The presence of conflict made me wonder if it isn’t a lack of specificity that is bothering Martha.  Martha has a concern.  Let’s say that the concern is about whether a trip they are considering is really safe.  Steve’s answers—each and every one of them—have to do with how exciting the trip will be.  He has friends who took this trip and really loved it.  He names the friends; he names the various destinations; he tells the stories they told when they got back.  He goes on and on until finally Martha stops him—and the conversation—with the TMI club.

What is happening here—or rather, the part of what is happening here that I want to look at today—is that Steve is providing lots of information but none of it bears on Martha’s concern.  Martha may have tried and failed to get Steve to address the concerns she actually has.  It is her frustration speaking when she says TMI.

My experience says that if you don’t know what they really care about, you can waste a lot of words and give yourself a frustration headache.  When you do know what they really care about—sometimes I have taken the time to find out and sometimes not—it doesn’t take many words at all.  Not many examples; not much “clarification;” not much “explanation.”  I don’t know why it is hard, sometimes, to find this out, but I have come to the conclusion that time spend finding it out is better spent than is time piling up examples that you think are going to be relevant but aren’t.

I know that some people are just better at this than others are.  I know that I am not very good at it, that I am better at it than I used to be, and that I can do it pretty well if I remember how important it is.  In any case, it is something I value a good deal in others.

Which brings me to a first date story.  Bette and I met first for coffee at Starbucks.  I’m not calling that our first date.  That was a meeting so we could decide if each of us wanted a first date.  Our actual first date was a movie.  After the movie, we wandered around the mall and I asked Bette if I could take some pictures of her.  She said, “Sure.”[2]

So I took a few.  Nothing seemed problematic.  Then I thought of a picture of her I thought I would like to have.  This is the picture.  But getting here wasn’t easy.  The table was too high for her to sit like this.  I couldn’t figure out just how her arms should be so that her hands could be the way they are in the picture—and her chin on her hands like this was really the only part of the picture that had been clear to me.

Then a really really nice thing happened.  Bette said, “Oh.  I think I see what you’re getting at.”  And they she arranged herself exactly into the picture I had imagined and I took it and went home a very happy guy.  Bette had been able to put herself in my place and to see herself the way I was seeing her.  Based on that, she made a reasonable guess about what I was really looking for.  It was a very good guess, it turned out, but what really flipped my switch was that she tried.

I’m passing this story along partly because I like it, but I also think it is at the heart of the TMI problem.  I really think that if Steve took the time to put himself in Martha’s place, he would see what was needed.  It might be information, but it might not.  It might be reassurance.  It might be freely granted time to consider the idea.  Note: “grudgingly granted” time doesn’t work as well.  It might be conveying an understanding that Martha’s concerns are entirely reasonable.

Steve and Martha are just going to have to work it out, but when I think of their difficulty, it reminds me of this date and the great pleasure I took in Bette’s willingness to put herself in my place and help me figure out what I was asking.

[1] If you are my age, it is easy to see it as Three Mile Island, which was more destructive, sure, but this feels worse if you are involved in it yourself.

[2] Bette was my last date.  I haven’t dated anyone since I started dating her.  And no one, either, since I married her.  But my first date—the first of the series that ended with Bette—was six months before that.  Also a movie date.  I asked if I could take a picture and my date looked at me suspiciously and said, “Why would you want to do that?”  She went on at some length to describe what she feared: her picture was going to wind up on a wall along with the pictures of a lot of other women I had dated and she would feel so demeaned to have her picture in such a collection.

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“Attractive Older Women”

Posted on August 11, 2011 by hessd

Somehow, I have gotten a reputation for being narrow-minded.  Even some of my friends think that.  Of course, I don’t think so.  I do have some liabilities—well, THOSE, sure, but I was thinking of something relevant to today’s topic—and it has to do with rationales.  I’m not all that picky about positions on issues or personal opinions or “social wisdom.”  It’s the rationales that are more likely to bother me.  I have also learned that most people are more accustomed to being upset about positions taken than about rationales abused.  So when I say it is the rationale that bothers me, I get eye-rolling and incredulity.

It is experiences like that that helped me decide to write this column. Here’s the article.  The rationale that caught my attention is this one.  And here’s an example of what I would call “an attractive older woman.”

Ms. Kolstad asked herself much the same question.[1]

 “In my day, no one ever thought about breast enhancement or anything,” she said. “But nowadays women go out and they would never get a second look if they show their age. I find that you have to keep up your appearance physically, even if you just want a companion or someone to ask you to dinner.

“That’s not going to happen if you don’t have a figure that these geezers are looking for.”

So here is Ms. Kolstad’s position, as I understand it.  She wants to get that “second look.”  This is that “Say, she looks really good!” look that she attributes to older men and whatever comments among the men that would follow such a look.  Without the kind of appearance that would cause men to look at her that way, you don’t have “a companion or someone to ask you to dinner.”  She is more specific too.  She wants the “figure that these geezers are looking for.”

To get this geezer-friendly figure, “Ms. Kolstad, a widow who lives in Orange County, Calif., underwent a three-hour breast lift with implants, which costs about $8,000.”  So I’m guessing that Ms. Kolstad is a good example of the sexy old women of my title.

Let me clarify  a couple of points, I am not arguing that Ms. Kolstad is not entitled to do with her $8000 whatever she wants to do.  I’m not very happy about the amount of money our healthcare system spends on the appearance of the wealthy when basic medical care is unavailable to so many of the poor, but everyone knows that that distribution of healthcare is not going to be affected in the slightest by Ms. Kolstad’s preferences about the precise latitude of her breasts.

I’m not arguing that women who want to be sexually attractive to men—Kolstad’s notion is that “sexually attractive” is the gateway condition to all kinds of less volatile associations with men, like companionship and dinner dates—ought not do what they can to look the way “men” find sexually attractive.  If that’s what she wants and she understands what kind of a transaction it is and has the raw materials, why shouldn’t she?

I did wonder a couple of things, though.  Whatever happened to the category “attractive older woman?”  Did it just disappear?  Is it really true now that to be an attractive older woman you have to look like an attractive younger woman?  Do a lot of older men and woman feel that way or it is just the geezers Ms. Kolstad is thinking of?

As I said, I don’t care all that much how Ms. Kolstad wants to live her life, but if you read the article, you will see that there is an explosion in the number of older patients who want cosmetic surgery.  If this is being driven by considerations like Ms. Kolstad’s, then a lot of the traits that were once thought to characterize a life well led have been downgraded.[2]  Living a long time in Earth’s gravity has a certain predictable effect on what a mature body looks like.  So does extended exposure to ultraviolet rays.  So does the decline of hormones that were once crucially necessary.  And so on.  Do we really want to think that a predictable stage in being an attractive older woman is having a boob job?

I guess one of the things that bothers me about that is that Mr. Kolstad’s rationale lumps me with the geezers who, you know, only want one thing.  Well, maybe two.

Another part of this is the effect on all the other categories of women.  The other categories don’t just hold still.  If a good-looking 83-year-old woman needs breast surgery to be invited to dinner, what will be said about the women who don’t have that surgery?  Will we say that “they are just letting themselves go?”  Will we say that “they used to take real pride in their appearance?”  Will we think that the biggest reason not to have the surgery is a lack of self-esteem?

Here’s what we know.  When a new category is valued, the other related categories are devalued so as to enhance the discrepancy.  This is normal social attribution.  It doesn’t take the spending the cosmetic surgery industry has put into it to make it happen.

I have no quarrel with “attractiveness” in women.  I have no quarrel with “older women.”  I have no quarrel with the kinds of changes that living many years under Earth conditions cause.  I just don’t like to have her values generalized among the older women of my acquaintance and I don’t want to be consigned to the geezers.

 

[1] The same question Nancy Etcoff has asked in the previous paragraph.“If an older woman wants to regain eyelids or wants a breast that she doesn’t have to tuck into a waistband, then why not?”   Etcoff is the author of The Survival of the Prettiest, which is the only book my book group ever chose on my recommendation and then refused to read because of their moral distaste for the topic.  It is a superb book, by the way.  The range of reported research is really amazing.

[2] Nothing against attractive older women, by the way.  I married one of those a few years ago myself.

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Words with clean sharp edges

Posted on August 9, 2011 by hessd

I don’t usually have any trouble telling when a particular usage is wrong.  Sometimes when I try to say just what is wrong about it, it takes longer.  But then when I try to think why is it really harmful to the language—I have a tender brotherly love of the English language—I run into difficulties.  I have a case in mind and I will get to it shortly.

I know what’s wrong with “very unique.”  Unique is an endpoint word; a polar word.  It means “unprecedented” or “one of a kind,” depending on whether you want to approach it temporally or structurally.  Imagining that unique is on a sliding scale of some kind so that it could be “more” or “less” destroys the contribution it makes to the language.

I’ve been bothered lately by the warnings at the beginning of movies or previews that parental guidance is suggested because of “mild language.”  When I was young, I was taught that mild language was a good thing in most circumstances.  I was told that “a soft answer turneth away wrath,” and I infer from the Elizabethan form of the verb, that it is a quotation from the King James Bible.  The truth is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s pretty good for wisdom literature, I think.  I suppose that “mild language” is a truncated form of “mildly offensive language,” meaning that it will offend some but not others or that it will not offend anyone very much.

That’s a good thing to know.  I’m happy to have that little warning.  It does have the effect of transposing language into a setting where it is like a disease or a disability.  Like “a mild sprain,” for instance.  You could argue that there is no harm done because no one mistakes “mild language” for anything other than a warning, but that’s what they said about “tax relief,” and tax relief has the not at all benign effect of casting “taxes” as the kind of thing from which we ought to have relief, as it if were stomach acid.  Taxes, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, are “the price we pay for civilization.”  They are not like stomach acid.

This morning’s New York Times rubbed that little tender spot in my neocortex where my affection for thoughtful language use is located.  Here’s the quote.  Achal Prabhala is an adviser to the Wikimedia Foundation.  He would like to see other kinds of references serve the function that only authoritative citations now serve.

“There is this desire to grow Wikipedia in parts of the world,” he said, adding that “if we don’t have a more generous and expansive citation policy, the current one will prove to be a massive roadblock that you literally can’t get past. There is a very finite amount of citable material, which means a very finite number of articles, and there will be no more.”

 

What does a statement like that mean for finite? [this image is called “finite differences;” I don’t know why.]  I have always understood that infinite is a polar term like unique.  There is that final node on the scale—the very end of it—and then there is everything else.  There is “not finite” at the very end and then the entire rest of the scale means “finite.”  You could say it isn’t a scale at all: it’s like an off/on switch.  Things are either finite or they are not but nothing is “very finite.”

What’s the harm?  It’s hard to say.  I haven’t adjusted yet to “limited income” to mean “low income.”  Limited income?  That’s a problem?  But “very finite” seems worse, somehow.  It is as if you could have a substance that is very very finite and then one that is exactly finite and then one that is just barely finite and then, finally, one that is not finite at all, i.e., “infinite.”

Does this prepare us to hear, at a public hearing on gas prices, that the prices are high because supplies of petroleum are “finite.”  What source of power isn’t finite?  Solar power is finite.  But once the water is muddied, it is hard to see anything clearly and to me, this use of finite muddies the water.

Is there some good new use for muddy water that I haven’t heard about?

 

 

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Don’t Give Up on Electoral Politics

Posted on August 8, 2011 by hessd

There has been so much hand-wringing about the debt-limit debate.  All of it justified, in my opinion.  A few posts ago, I compared it to a “game” of Russian roulette rather than the more common metaphor of a “game” of chicken.

Then I read the New York Times/CBS Poll for August 2 and 3 and it occurred to me that it is always possible that democracy might solve our problem this time.  Maybe not.  I’m not predicting anything.  But I do want to pause briefly to talk about the much-maligned “responsible party model” (RPM).

Here’s the way I talk about it in PS 102.  In Step 1, policy-oriented parties recruit candidates who will support those policies and fund their campaigns.  If you want a policy-oriented national party, you can’t have yellow dog Democrats running in liberal districts and blue dog Democrats running in conservative districts—and then voting against each other in Congress.  In Step 2, the parties run policy-oriented campaigns (rather than personality-oriented ones).  The party that wins the majority now has an elected majority capable of fulfilling the party’s promises—more like the situation we expect in parliamentary systems.  So in Step 3, the party in power enacts and approves the policies it campaigned on.  Then, in Step 4, the crucial step, they return to their constituents with a record to talk about.  Maybe even the beginnings of actual achievements based on their legislative stewardship.  At that stage, the party says, “We did what we said.  How do you like it?  If you send us back, we’ll do more of it, so consider your policy desires carefully.”

It isn’t very realistic in modern American politics, but you can see why I like it, right?  I like that last stage particularly because it is the only circumstance under which people can evaluate actual policy-generated outcomes and say whether they like them.  Evaluating promises and intentions is uncertain work; evaluating outcomes is more the kind of thing it is fair to expect voters to do.

So what about the Times/CBS poll?  Here are some results that caught my eye.  Obama’s approval rating is at 48%.  It hasn’t been above 60% since June 2009 and it hasn’t been about 50% since April 2010 except for a one poll spike in May of this year.  That was bin Laden’s execution, I suppose.

People are not happy about the way “things are going in Washington.”  Combining the two least approving columns gets you 84%.  Combining the two most approving columns gets you 15%.

Since June of last year, the percentage of people who disapprove the way Congress is “handling its job” has been above 70%, but it has moved from 70% in June to 82% in August.  Here are some relevant additional figures.  Approve of John Boehner?  Yes, 30%, No, 57%.  The way Republicans in Congress have handled the recent negotiations?  Approve 21%, Disapprove 72%  Approve Democrats in Congress (same question)?  Approve 28%, Disapprove 66%.  Do “most members” of Congress deserve to be re-elected?  No, 74%

I see anger, frustration, and pain there.  The natives are restless.

Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about the nation’s economy?  Republicans in Congress, 33%; Barack Obama 47%.  Is it better for the parties to compromise or stick to their positions?  Compromise, 85%; hold fast, 12%.  Who is mostly to blame?  Here I’ll give you the current figure and the trend since the last poll.  The Bush administration is to blame, 44%, up 3% since April; The Obama administration is to blame, 15% up 1% since April; the Congress is to blame, 15%, up 3% since April.

Who do you blame more of “the difficulties in reaching an agreement” on the debt ceiling?  Republicans in Congress, 47%, Barack Obama and the Democrats 29%.  Did the Republicans in Congress compromise too little?  Yes, 52% (15% said “too much” and 32% said “the right amount.”)  Did Barack Obama and the Democrats compromise too much?  Yes, 26% (34% said too little and 32% the right amount.)  Those percentages are roughly thirds; that’s very good for the Democrats.  Are you optimistic about the ability of this Congress to deal with future issues?  Yes, 12%, No 66%.  Should taxes be increased above the $250,000 level to help balance the budget?  Yes, 63%, No 34%.

So that’s how Americans were feeling earlier in the week.  What if the RPM kicks in for the general elections in the fall of 2012?  People who said they absolutely would not raise taxes run into an electorate two thirds of them disagrees with them and now these “candidates” are incumbents and they are presenting what they have done, not what they promised to do.  That doesn’t seem a good prospect for Republicans in Congress who campaigned on holding firm and not compromising and who signed a no tax pledge.

If I were Barack Obama, I would make the campaign about whether you want actual adults in charge of the economy or adolescent zealots.  I would NOT make the campaign about whether I had done a good job of managing the economy over my first term, but in trying to avoid that, I would be helped by the 44% who still blame the Bush administration for what is wrong with the economy.

If the voters react in 2012 by rewarding people who promise to compromise and to include more revenue in out “living within our means” issue, then democracy will have done what it is supposed to do.  It will have registered the judgments of actual voters on actual outcomes.  If the voters felt otherwise—if they felt, for instance, that the economy wasn’t all that bad in 2009 and that Obama should have fixed it by now—then democracy would work exactly the same way and the Democrats would be slaughtered by the new round of votes.

But I don’t think they will be.

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Where Does This Issue Belong?

Posted on August 6, 2011 by hessd

It’s an “issue,” as we say.  It concerns a lot of people.  Something ought to be done about it. Let’s imagine the easiest possible resolution.  There are three leaders in this societal constellation: one of the polity, one for the economy, and one for the society  Let’s call them tyrants—meaning nothing scurrilous by the term—so that we have three “areas” to consider and a tyrant for each.

All we have to do is to decide which tyrant gets to decide on this issue.Well, that’s not entirely true.  First we have to explain the diagram.  The three colored figures are the polity (red rectangle), the economy (blue oval) and the society (green oval).  Each figure has a core—the darker color marked A—and a periphery.  The periphery—the lighter color marked B—is a kind of antechamber.  B is where an issue is when it is on its way to being a part of the core or when it is on its way out of that figure entirely.  An issue does not, in this figure, move directly from A in the polity to A in the economy.  It would first move from A to B in the polity, then from B to A in the economy.

This possibility of issue mobility is a concern to the tyrants, of course.  In most cases an “issue” belongs to me because it is something from which additional authority and additional revenue can be extracted.  When someone says, “This is a problem for Superman!” Superman smiles.  More heroics and more fame are in the offing.  There are issues, on the other hand, which are dead losers.  Sometimes they simply can’t be solved and whoever has the issue is “it” and will take the fall.  Sometimes an issue can be dealt with, but it will cost more to solve it than you will gain in revenue.  That’s a loser.  Sometimes it can be dealt with, but the only successful ways of dealing with it will make you enduringly unpopular.  That’s a loser too.

Such issues as these really belong somewhere else.  It’s about those issues that Superman says, “You know, Batman is the right person to take this job on.”  The tyrant of the economy says that each family ought to save more.  The tyrant of the polity says that consumer spending ought to increase.  The tyrant of the society says that the welfare of each family—not the aggregate demand or the aggregate savings—is the proper goal.

That much of an explanation will show why some potentially mobile issues—the ones in the B areas—are sought after while others are nearly pushed out the door.  What remains is to consider why C is there; that oddly astrocyte-shaped blob.  I wanted it irregular because problems that have not yet been placed as issues are…well…irregular.  I wanted those odd little rays to look just a little like tentacles.  I wanted the whole shape to strike you an inchoate and faintly menacing.

In C, an issue could belong anywhere.  That’s a jump ball for all the people (and their tyrant) who want it.  It is a live grenade to all the people (and their tyrant) who don’t want it.  But if we are talking about new issues—and that’s why I developed this particular image—it isn’t an “issue” until it is a “problem” that is placed somewhere.

Problems are personal.[1]  Issues are public.  It’s when someone in authority says, or when a lot of people who have no authority say, “Say, that’s really a job for ______” that it become an issue.  It could be a job for the polity, a job for the economy, or a job for the society.[2]  It doesn’t “belong” anywhere, the way a lost wallet full of one hundred dollar bills and a credit card “belongs” to its owner.  It “belongs” somewhere in the way a job belongs to the only person in the community who has the tools and the equipment to keep the river from flooding the town.

So by the time a problem is “socialized” as we say’ by the time it has become an issue, there is still the question of where it can best be dealt with.  If I am the tyrant of the economy and I can see that my ownership of this issue will benefit me, I do everything I can to claim it for myself and to render your claims—you other two tyrants—less attractive or plausible.  If it looks to me like the kind of issue that will tar the hands of anyone who tries to manage it, they I will see it belonging properly to you.  I might say you are responsible for it.  I might say only you can deal with it.  I can say that no one else has the necessary authority or popular support or access to resources to manage it properly.  What I really mean is “Anyone But Me.”[3]

A strong smoothly functioning society will have three powerful settings and a clear process for placing the right issue in the right place.  Compared to those two things, nothing else matters much.

 

[1] There is more that really should be said.  As I use the word “problem,” it is not a condition at all.  It is not like hunger.  It is a formulation.  It is built by someone to represent what would be a very confusing situation without this representation.  So all problems are artificial in the sense that someone has built them for his own purposes and it is where it is because it has been placed there.  It is problems that have been constructed and placed that are likely to become issues.

[2] “Society” is decentralized in some ways: families, communities, churches, schools, sex roles.  But it is a complete system in other ways: a rigid class-based system, a broadly “spiritual” but not institutional population, a rabidly homophobic population, depleted, one-parent families and the institutions needed to keep them together.

[3] This was, very likely, the first ABM treaty.  Two tyrants agree that whatever it is, it belongs to someone else.

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