"When I first lit and inhaled a cigarette I knew I was not taking a Horlick's malted milk tablet."

And when I first began to blog I knew it wasn't open mic night at the student union. There would be, I knew, standards. Now that I've taken six months off, I may be able to fulfill them again. Thanks to Pomocon for providing a waystation for my thoughts on the virtues of machine politics. More of that to follow, plus The Brothers Bloom, shame culture, Rick Perlstein's secret advice for the conservative movement, and, of course, Tycho Brahe.

Title quote from John O'Hara.

Bookbag: The Gentleman from New York, a Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"Ljubljana is lovely, and incredibly prosperous," he wrote home to a secretary from the conference, though the meeting was "incredibly disorganized and wasteful of time and energy, but it is, I think, worth it to me." To the worldly and sardonic Dick Goodwin, he cabled a summary of the conference, saying, "I have seen the Austro-Hungarian empire, and it works."

That last line is as good as his well-known take on the Kennedy assassination ("I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually").

I know that, as a conservative, I am supposed to believe in every man's right to his own tribal loyalties, but I think people should give serious consideration to the possibility that the Irish have unmediated access to truth. Maybe they're just right and the rest of us need to catch up.

Bookbag: The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin

In practice, it is perfectly possible to be coherent without having a theory. The sculptor fashioning his statue out of marble has a coherent aim, and realizes this aim in an object which manifests and embodies that coherence, but he need not be, and generally is not, guided by any theory. So, too, a politician working to fashion concrete results out of concrete circumstances may have, and manifest in his achievements, a coherent aim without ever being guided by theory.

I tend to get hostile when I am told that "conservatism is the absence of ideology," but this quote helps me refute that fallacy with near-British calm.

Hold 'Em, NYU

As NYU's protest/"blast from the past" unravels, it would be nice to take a moment to commemorate those right-wingers who, during the "occupation" wars of the 1960's, gave as good as they got. Well, almost as good as they got:

. . . twenty-two YAF members occupied the headquarters of the Resistance, an antiwar group in Boston. Inside, eight members of the Resistance "reacted violently to the liberation. One member called the Black Panthers, constantly harassed the press . . . and, in a final rage, stomped on the California grapes brought by the YAF as a snack."

(From Gregory Schneider's Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right.)

On a related note, here's a business proposal I've been considering: A student protest-themed amusement park where teenaged revolutionaries can spend a week reenacting the Spirit of '68 without bothering the rest of us. We'd have professional reenactors, like Colonial Williamsburg, who could play administration officials. (Is Fred Thompson available? He'd be great casting.) Perhaps the land could be eminent-domained in "blighted" Manhattanville, in true university style?

"Oh, how the ghost of you clings!"

Watchmen without cigarettes—isn't it ironic?:

Where were Laurie's smokes, Zack?

"Yeah, Alan hates smoking. Alan Horn—the head of the studio—that's his biggest, biggest thing. The Comedian can smoke, because he might be a bad guy, he's the bad guy, but that's it. That was the line that he drew."

But aren't those kind of a small plot device for the character to watch her go on and off the wagon?

"I was sad, but it was either that or...the movie wouldn't have been made, literally."

More.

Follow-Up: A Story about Shame

This story from Floyd Patterson (as told to Gay Talese) combines my two obsessions—shame and boxing—and is beautiful besides:

"It is not a bad feeling when you're knocked out," he said. "It's a good feeling, actually. It's not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don't see angels or stars; you're on a pleasant cloud. After Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about our or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you're knocked out. You feel lovable to all the people. And you want to reach out and kiss everybody—men and women—and after the Liston fight somebody told me I actually blew a kiss to the crowd from the ring. I don't remember that. But I guess it's true because that's the way you feel during the four or five seconds after a knockout.

"But then," Patterson went on, still pacing, "this good feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, and what you're doing there, and what has just happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt—not a physical hurt—it's a hurt combined with anger; it's a what-will-people-think hurt; it's an ashamed-of-myself hurt, and all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring—a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room instead of having to get out of the ring and face those people. The worst thing about losing is having to walk out of the ring and face those people."

And you thought I was being figurative when I compared shame to getting punched in the face.

What If They Threw a Shame Culture and Nobody Came?

I've been having a long and glorious seizure over the blogosphere's recent interest in shame—how could I be anything but ecstatic that Douthat, Dreher, Serwer, McArdle, and Friedersdorf have all taken up my favorite topic?

Yet it seems, sadly enough, that shame needs defending from its defenders, who have the right general idea but miss some important particulars. Rather than fisk the whole lot of ya, here's a defense of shame culture written in a form that suits the blogosphere: a top ten list, in this case the Top Ten Reasons to Love "Shame Culture." I've written about most of these ideas before, so follow the links in parentheses if any of these items is unclear.

1. There can be no humility without humiliation. I can't repeat this too often.

2. Evil is sexy and exciting, but there is very little frisson to behavior that's "beneath you."

3. Guilt, unlike shame, is something a person can feel proud of. Piling self-congratulation onto sin adds insult to injury. (More, more.)

4. Shame reinforces the postmodern concept of "mutual implicatedness," which used to be called the Brotherhood of Man. This one is tough to understand, so I'll quote myself (a lazy shortcut for which I feel appropriate shame):

Virginia Burrus writes that "shame arises where we humans both honor and overflow our limits, where we recognize the limits of autonomy—where we observe, with no little alarm, the spreading stain of our mutual implicatedness."

To de-pomo-ify that sentence: We only feel shame before people because we think that we’ve somehow harmed them, even though the only harm we’ve done is to have put a little more sin into the world. If we truly believe that putting sin into the world is a meaningful kind of harm, then we’ve come to terms with one of the most difficult implications of the brotherhood of man.

5. I am inclined to be forgiving of my own faults—more so than I ought to be—whereas the public is not. With guilt, I always get less emotional punishment than I deserve. (More.)

6. Body-related shame tends to get the worst rap of all, but "a sense of shame is what safeguards the bodily privacy necessary to civility" (Jean Bethke Elshtain). If you want a culture that respects privacy and personal space, you need shame.

7. Consider this Navajo insult: "He behaves like one who has no family"—that is to say, shamelessly. Shame reinforces our "little platoon"-sized loyalties. (More.)

8. There is an important kind of courage that comes with a willingness to undergo humiliation; when shame disappears, so does this kind of courage. This is especially bad since this special courage is the virtue that philosophers, bloggers, and other truth-seekers need to have. (More, more, more.)

9. Shame is visceral and involuntary, which makes it ideal for enforcing your moral code on people who don't agree with it, and doing so in a way that doesn't involve coercion or the state. This is a feature, not a bug. (More.)

10. Guilt allows us to stay safely within our comfort zones, but shame pushes us beyond our limits. This is because shame is unforgiving, while guilt reinforces the fallacy that "to understand all is to forgive all." (This is similar to #5, but focuses less on feeling bad than on doing better. See here, especially the part about punk traditionalism forcing people to excel.)

The first and most obvious caveat is that we should take care to shame people for the right things. Good shame cultures are good and bad shame cultures are bad, obviously, although for my money either one is preferable to no shame culture.

Secondly, I'd like to point out (as I did here) that the cruelty of a shame culture can be mitigated by insisting that there should always be exceptions to it—i.e. if a girl has a child out of wedlock, she should get dirty looks on the street from strangers but never from her mother. Or, if it isn't her mother who refuses to be part of the Shame Brigade, let it be her aunt, her godmother, her best friend's family, or her pastor who takes her in. Or all of them. I want to keep shame alive, but I also want to be humane; I can eat my cake and have it by making clear that a person should have a handful of people in his life that love him unconditionally.

For an illustration of what I mean, watch this video from 5:30. (It's a scene from Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night.) I know that some people think that a person should support his friends only when he agrees with them or approves of what they've done, so I should admit that those people upset the picture of shame culture that I've drawn, as the Sports Night clip will make clear. If you don't have a robust understanding of loyalty, I can't imagine that you'll be on board with shame.

People Who Kiss in Train Stations, Local 527.

To arms, brothers and sisters! We are under attack! (Via.)

Unless the sign simply means "You may not kiss in this train station if you have weird bumpy hair, or if you are wearing a stupid hat," in which case everything's fine.

I Stole This Joke from a Canadian

Of this face-eating chimpanzee story:

Owner Sandra Herold, 70, tried to stop her rampaging pet, Travis, by stabbing him with a butcher knife and hitting him with a shovel but the chimpanzee fended off the attack and then stormed a police car that had responded to the scene, Conklin said.

The ape ripped off the side-view mirror of the police car, banged on the car and opened the driver's side door, leading the officer to shoot the chimp several times with his pistol.

The Canadian says:

This story reads like a Mad Lib.

Todd apparently thinks that Travis-gate closes the book on that classic theological question, "Trained monkey butler or trained human butler?", but I am not so sure. I certainly think that Todd's faith in trained robot butlers is misplaced; we can trust the robots, but for how long?

For an explanation of why Monkey Butler vs. Human Butler matters in a very real way, go here. For the music video of James Kochalka's "Monkey vs. Robot," go here. (It's about the duality of man, sir!)

Who Writes This Stuff, Terry Southern?

Or maybe Henny Youngman, since this story is his kind of bare-bones, set-it-up-and-knock-it-down, premise-and-punchline joke (via Jacob Sullum):

A 20-year-old Port Hope, Ont., man has been ticketed for smoking in a car in which a 15-year-old girl was one of his passengers.

While Tory Ashton was waiting for his $155 ticket, the girl—a smoker herself—got out of the car and legally lit up a cigarette of her own.

Take my civil liberties. Please.

Shame! I'm Gonna Live Forever, Baby Remember My Name . . .

And you thought I was the only one awaiting a Shame-Culture Renaissance:

It is a measure of how limited and poor our understanding of politics is nowadays that the only thing Linker envisions as an alternative to laissez-faire morality is legalistic intrusion into personal behavior by the government. This fails to take into account the possibility of social regulation through customs and concepts of honor mediated through natural and religious institutions. Social stigma, reputation, protecting the family name–these are decidedly not part of the “culture of choice,” according to which none of these things has any real importance, but they are effective means of conditioning behavior without recourse to coercion or an appeal to the law.

More.

Transgenderism was just a red herring

When I told my mother I would be sharing an apartment with two men, she shrugged. "Hey, it's your uterus." Happily, I survived the year with my maiden virtue intact and with a new appreciation for the arguments against mixed-sex housing, which, apparently, my alma mater may soon adopt. Haven't these people seen When Harry Met Sally?

That was a bit glib. To tell the truth, I don't entirely sign onto the Harry-Sally Thesis: I think it's perfectly possible to become the sort of man who can have female friends; I just don't think it's desirable. Consider what it would take: A cultivated indifference to sexual tension, a reduction of gender dynamics to routine rather than ritual, the "Buddy Christ"-ification of Eros. We're already under enough pressure to think of sex as "banal rather than sublime" because "it hurts less that way." The Yale administration doesn't need to egg us on.

As Eve Tushnet put it: "We're just roommates," says the last man, and he blinks.

(There's another model for mixed-sex households, the one that relies upon sexual tension: "We choose to live together because it is dangerous and uncomfortable." I'm not necessarily opposed to that model—you can tell by the title of this blog that I like playing with fire—but these mad tempters of fate can take their business off-campus. One doesn't want such behavior to become ordinary.)

I'll Drink to My Defeat If You'll Drink to Yours

Peter Suderman's post on civil partisanship sounds like this line from The Big Sleep: "I knew Sean Regan in the old days, when he used to run rum out of Mexico and I was on the other side. We used to swap shots between drinks. Or drinks between shots, whichever you like."

Hit That Book with a Club

If you live in New York City, please consider joining "X. Trapnel's" new libertarian book club. You'll get to learn his real name! I'll be there, in my capacity as loyal opposition.

Because Boxing is a Metaphor for Everything

For better or for worse, the “alternative” generation, and especially the alternative comic book, has been almost completely irrelevant to my comics life.

Say it ain't so, Joe! That was Leigh Walton in response to Diamond Comic Distributors' announcement that they're raising their order minimums ($1500 to $2500). I've never read serialized comics—only graphics novels, and only when the men in my life insisted on it—but for some reason I've always remembered this blurb from the back cover of Jimmy Corrigan: "Also winner of The American Book Award and The Guardian Prize 2001 (the consumer will note that these honors are generally only bestowed upon those authors who refuse to learn how to draw)." The future of alternative comics is something I have a remote but sincere interest in. So what does the news from Diamond portend? Leigh Walton again:

We’ll see fewer and fewer projects take the serial-comic-to-big-book format à la Maus, Black Hole, Box Office Poison, Local, Bone, From Hell, or Jimmy Corrigan. But the books will still come out, one way or another. Some of them will surely be underbaked, deprived of the reader feedback that serialization provides (but on the other hand, look at how many webcomics and newspaper strips have decayed into self-parodies, stunted by the shackles of constant reader feedback). Others will die stillborn, unable to find a publisher willing to risk a 400-page book on an unproven creator. Some will be published, only to find customers balking at dropping $15-20 on somebody’s debut. But, y’know, I think we’ll figure it out.

We may "figure it out," as Leigh suggests, but let's remember what happened when boxing (which I do know something about, unlike the comics industry) changed its distribution by switching to television. "In more normal pre-television times," said A. J. Liebling, "a fellow out of the amateurs would spend three years in four-, six-, and eight-round bouts in small clubs before attempting ten." When the amateur circuit dried up, it became harder for promising fighters to pay their dues; this meant lower-quality fights for fans, but it also meant more ring fatalities from dumb mistakes that seasoned boxers wouldn't have made. (If you've got your Boddy handy, see p. 319.)

In the end, boxing never did "figure it out"; no substitute for the amateur circuit emerged, and the new methods of shepherding young talent to the big time, though inferior to the old methods, stuck. I'm not sure whether this metaphor has legs—I'd be willing to accept that dues-paying is less important in comics, or that Diamond's recent tweak is less dramatic than the advent of television—but, to the extent that it does, it suggests that the predictions in bold above (emphasis mine) might come true, and stay that way.

Boxing Breaks Your Face. It is Designed to Break Your Face.

More bookbag from Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History:

The very transience of the ideal body is made all the more poignant by the less than perfect bodies that surround it. This phenomenon is foregrounded in boxing—and not in other Olympic sports such as the discus or running—by the fact that while the processes of training are all about perfecting the body, and while, at the moment of triumph, the body may move beautifully, the sport itself is all about damaging (and making ugly) the body. Apollonian form could only temporarily contain Dionysian energy.

Three Uses of Smoking

I. Brechtian Alienation

Audiences should be encouraged to smoke as "it is hopeless to 'carry away' any man who is smoking and accordingly pretty well occupied with himself." —Kasia Boddy, quoting Brecht

II. Calendar Memory

The family admires Zeno's remarkable memory for birthdays and anniversaries, not knowing that every one of them has been an occasion for his resolutions; they think it is his good nature. Making everything that happens in your life a pretext for resolving to stop smoking is not bad if it serves to endear you to your family. —Richard Klein, referring to Italo Svevo

III. Good Behavior

It’s only when you quit that you discover what your fascination with smoking has all along been about: the everyday development and maintenance of moral life. Through the filter of a cigarette, the smoker orients himself to the outside world. It’s his very personal way of relating the outside world, the world of events, to the inside one, that of desire. And it is for this reason that, when the cigarette is taken away, the smoker’s moral life seems impoverished. —David Orland, via Blackadder

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did we get our movement in your status quo?"

And that's not all Nicola Karras has to say to Sam Tanenhaus:

American conservatism has always been counterrevolutionary conservatism, whatever Russell Kirk says. Even more than that, it's always been a youth counterrevolutionary conservatism. It was born at the 1960 Republican Convention among the "young fogies" who swarmed the halls with their blue and gold balloons. National Review reported, "They greeted Richard Nixon at the airport with Goldwater signs, and did the same thing for President Eisenhower the next day. They drove one Nixon aide into muttering in exasperation: 'Those damn Goldwater people are everywhere.'"

Tanenhaus and his critics both complain that no one reads Burke and Nisbet anymore ("conservatism AND intellectually bankrupt": 91,400 hits), but it's worth asking whether there was ever a Golden Age when people did. My guess is that there never was, but we can point to a time when at least one segment of the conservative movement was reliably well-read: the young people. Used to be that ISI handed out so many free paperbacks people thought the "S" was for samizdat! My own experience was a throwback in this regard—as Dan McCarthy has pointed out, things have been going downhill since the day activists started outnumbering intellectuals on the campuses.

The lesson of Youth for Goldwater is that the hormonal radicalism of youth can be harnessed for good, even by reactionaries, but only if the twenty-somethings have the intellectual chops to play Principle to age's Pragmatism (and as long as they can avoid the trap of Hessian defection). With the current crop of young conservatives, one gets the impression they'd have been happy to settle for Rockefeller. O tempora, et cetera!

And the boat is leaking fore and aft: the young conservatives ain't intellectual, and the young intellectuals ain't conservative. I'm with Stacy McCain in being worried that so few of conservatism's Young Turks oppose gay marriage:

Now, if you talk to these bright young fellows—and I find excuses to talk to them as often as possible—one of the things you learn is how many of them are either (a) in favor of gay marriage as a matter of social justice, or (b) defeatist in conceding that the legal recognition of gay marriage is a political inevitability, even though they personally oppose it.

And I would add my suspicion that support for same-sex marriage has become a mark, not only of defeatism, but of self-conscious tokenism among young conservatives. Being publicly pro-SSM is the quickest way for a young journalist to signal that he's one of the right-wingers it's okay to like. Haven't they heard that it's better to be feared than loved? Or, to put it less glibly, the real respectability of a solid argument is preferable to the worthless respectability one gets by being on the Harmless Right.

The conservative movement used to be able to count on its twentysomethings to have whole passages from Burke's Reflections committed to memory ("It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness . . ."), on the assumption that these well-read young men would one day grow up, and grow up to matter. If Tanenhaus wants to kickstart an intellectual conservatism for the twenty-first century, he should remember that old ways are not seldom the best. He should also stand warned that these tweed-clad library rats are likely to be intensely ideological.

First one to say "heartless" can jump in a lake.

The road to success is paved with cheesecake.

How to justify such brazen-faced hit-baiting? I am rescued, again, by gender roles.



Christina Hendricks is the very flower of womanhood—you can tell by the stems. So how does it feel to see her go butch?

To ask the same thing a different way: Would the second picture be half as hot if it were a boyish girl like Audrey Hepburn? (An acceptable answer might be that gender roles have nothing to do with it, since the whole thing can be explained by the iron law that everything goes better with curves.)

'Cause He's Not Not Not Not in Your Academy

William Deresiewicz turns in an A paper:

. . . The audacity of Bolano's fiction, its disregard for convention and even probability, puts me in mind of a remark a friend once made after a jazz concert. I said I thought the keyboard player had really been taking chances, and he said, "No, he wasn't taking chances, he was doing whatever the fuck he wanted." In every sentence he wrote, every image he conceived, every compositional choice he made, Bolano did whatever the fuck he wanted.

I only know one existentialist, but I will draw his attention to this line from the same piece:

Death is just death, but to speak of oblivion as an abyss is to give it a spurious glamour, while to talk of "the abyss"—the abyss that we are all dancing on the edge of, or tragically circling, or whatever—is to seek to recover the Christian Hell, in all its metaphysical significance, under a different name.

Reminds me of the time a conservative journalist said to me, very drunkenly, "Sure, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. But, you have to understand, that's all it can do!"

Is Boxing Conservative?

Is boxing conservative? Well, do all mailmen drink bourbon? Are butchers known for their stamp collections? Are ducks susceptible to the Pelagian heresy? "Is boxing conservative"—what question could be more idle?

But there may be some interesting overlap between conservatism and pugilism, and not just in the mind of Dr. Joyce Brothers (who, if you didn't know, got her start as a boxing expert). Kasia Boddy explains:

The very ubiquity of fights throughout [Fielding's] novels is comically conservative, as if Fielding is asking, "What else can you expect from human nature?" There may be lots of bleeding, and preferably some female nudity, but the conclusion of a boxing match, for Fielding, is also comic, and conservative in its effect (a jovial handshake with the balance of power unchanged), rather than tragic and radical (epitomized by the deadly Jacobite duel).

The first kind of conservatism Boddy attributes to boxing isn't very meaty; the perfectibility of man has lost all credibility, even among liberals. The second kind, though, sounds like a cross between Victor Turner and Joseph de Maistre, a hybridization worth unpacking.

Conservatism prefers stability to meritocracy, which is to say that it embraces hierarchy even when that hierarchy is unjust. If we allow ourselves to be bothered by this injustice—which we should if we want to keep conscience alive—then we need some way to compensate for it while still keeping the hierarchy in place. Boxing, according to Boddy, permits a dock worker to pummel an aristocrat in an environment where violence is robbed of any revolutionary potential. After the fight, things return to normal; everyone's class status is conserved.

In a rare stroke of good luck, my speculations are confirmed (rather than demolished, as usually happens) by history—generally speaking, boxing has been loved by the lowest and highest classes, but held in contempt by everyone in the middle. From The Manly Art by Elliott Gorn:

. . . where the gentry and aristocracy had seen manly fortitude, healthy paternalism, and a chance for some innocent slumming, the middle class found only depravity and the debasement of the poor.

Boxing, at least in Britain, was always underwritten by aristocrats and dominated by (mostly urban) working men. There were few middle-class merchants in the Fancy, and no wonder! There is no utilitarian justification to be made for boxing; it does not square with bourgeois Protestant values.* Therefore, any conservatism that starts either with aristocratic virtue or with working-class social conservatism—in other words, the big tent of "Blame the Enlightenment First"—will find its values ritualized in the ring.

*Boddy again, speaking of Roman boxing (in contrast to Ancient Greek): "A different notion of honor emerges, one less directly attached to the virtues necessary for combat and having more to do with those essential to art. According to Richard Lattimore, it was the 'very uselessness of . . . [the athletic] triumphs which attracted Pindar'; 'A victory meant that time, expense, and hard work had been lavished on an achievement that brought no calculable advantage, only honor and beauty.'"

Wanted: Young Man, Single and Free; Experience in Love Preferred but Will Accept a Young Trainee

I notice that the music blog Mainstream Isn't So Bad has posted a copy of my favorite song as last week's bit of "Sunday Soul." I really do mean favorite song, too; I've drafted plenty of Top Ten lists, all radically different, but all listing "Want Ads" by Honey Cone at the very top. Check it out.

The rest of the top five, for interested souls: "Spazz" by the Elastik Band; "Little Sister" by Ry Cooder; "Darling Commit Me" by Steve Earle; and "Can You Get to That?" by Funkadelic. For the record, I can't remember liking anything else Steve Earle's ever done (I once tore down a concert poster of his on Franklin Street, in Raleigh, out of sheer contempt), but I fell in love with the line "You'll miss me, but there's no need to grieve—you'll get reports and the baskets I weave."

An Irishman by Any Other Name

This joke from Elinor Teele's review of The Irish Americans: A History:

My great great grandmother insisted on calling her County Dingle maid Marie, real name Catherine, since her Irish cook had the same name.

reminds me of my favorite joke from Florence King's commemoration of Lizzie Borden as the quintessential WASP:

Bridget, 26 and pretty in a big-boned, countrified way, had been in the Bordens' service for almost three years at the time of the murders.

. . . Bridget adored Lizzie. Victoria Lincoln, the late novelist, whose parents were neighbors of the Bordens, wrote in her study of the case: "De haut en bas, Lizzie was always kind." Her habit of calling Bridget "Maggie" has been attributed to laziness (Maggie was the name of a former maid), but I think it was an extremity of tact. In that time and place, the name Bridget was synonymous with "Irish maid." Like Rastus in minstrel-show jokes, it was derisory, so Lizzie substituted another.

In the Future, When We are All Bohemians

When it comes to Sarah Palin and the future of conservatism, Conor Friedersdorf can't stop, won't stop:

Americans disdain the cultural radicalism of men like Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and their ilk, and comparing their lives, rhetoric, and personas to Barack Obama, a cautious, even-keeled family man who ran the Harvard Law Review, helps to demonstrate why Sarah Palin’s charges of cultural radicalism failed to take hold. If the professional, “latte sipping” class in America backs a candidate in large numbers, he may well be a social liberal, but it is exceedingly doubtful that he is a radical.

Of course, we don't need to look any further than this morning's paper for evidence that the professionals Conor is talking about have a tendency to romanticize radicals, in this case ex-Black Panther Warren Kimbro, who died yesterday:

Q: Why did Kimbro agree to be featured in Murder in the Elm City?

A: He asked me to write the book. He wanted to come to grips with what really happened. He wanted people to understand to understand that he wasn’t a hero for committing a murder. He didn’t want young black men to follow that path. He wanted the truth to come out about the misdeeds of the federal government, the police, the Panthers, everyone. He thought the historical record needed to be set straight.

Q: Who called him a hero?

A: Everyone calls him a hero. His wife was being operated on by a doctor who came out and said, “I marched for you in the 60's. You were a hero!” He said, “No, I wasn’t!” I thought he was hero, but not in any way for killing Alex Rackley. The people romanticized that era, and he was worried that the romanticism excused violence.

Kimbro, of course, was a hero, but for what he did after getting out of prison, not for what put him there. I am reminded of the story Daniel Patrick Moynihan tells in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding of the government-sponsored community action program that "purchased telescopic sights for high-powered rifles and gave the excuse that they were going to be used for microscopes." All underwritten by middle-class bureaucrats.

And who is to say that the Democratic platform isn't itself radical? Hasn't that been the point of right-wing sociology for the last four decades? Conor seems to think that Sarah Palin's cultural appeals were nothing but naked tribalism; I wonder if he has considered the possibility that they might have been coded expressions of principle as much as allegiance. Much in the same way that the "latte-sipping" aesthetic (to run with Yuval Levin's shorthand) stands for a future in which we are all bohemians—a future in which I, a Brooklynite hipster (see photo at right), would be perfectly at home, but to which I nevertheless have strong, principled objections.

*Take this passage from Theodore Dalrymple for a footnote:

Consider Eric Hobsbawm, the famous, much feted, and unrepentantly Marxist historian. No one would feel personally threatened by him at a social gathering, where he would be amusing, polite, charming, and accomplished; if you had him to dinner, you wouldn’t have to count the spoons afterward, even though he theoretically opposes the idea of private wealth. In short, there would be no reason to suspect that he was about to commit a common crime against you. In this sense, he is what one might call a moderate Marxist.

But Hobsbawm has stated quite openly that, had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning and prosperous socialist society, 20 million deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay; and since he didn’t recognize, even partially, that the Soviet Union was not in fact on the path to such a society until many years after it had murdered 20 million of its people (if not more), it is fair to assume that, if things had turned out another way in his own country, Hobsbawm would have applauded, justified, and perhaps even instigated the murders of the very people to whom he was now, under the current dispensation, being amusing, charming, and polite. In other words, what saved Hobsbawm from committing utter evil was not his own scruples or ratiocination, and certainly not the doctrine he espoused, but the force of historical circumstance. His current moderation would have counted for nothing if world events had been different.

If D. H. Lawrence is Too Uptight for Your Tastes . . .

How should we feel about the appearance of an Edward Carpenter biography? If we are Martin Pugh, delighted. But is this wise?

Carpenter was gay before gay was chic (the late 1800's), for which he is to be applauded on the grounds of extraordinary courage if nothing else, but, as this passage from Neil McKenna's biography of Wilde should make clear, a hero and his folly are not soon parted:

John Addington Symonds firmly believed that love and sex between men could and would undermine the rigid class system that prevailed. A lord sleeping with a labourer meant that both could break free from the "cataract-blinded" destiny of their class... "The blending of Social Strata in masculine love seems to me one of its most pronounced and socially hopeful features," Symonds wrote to Edward Carpenter. "Where it appears, it abolishes class distinctions." Edward Carpenter agreed.

Gerald Early once reduced James Baldwin's platform to "the idea that if people (white, principally) were free to make love randomly across both sexual and racial lines they would be cured of their pathological behavior (racism and sexual repression)," and I haven't been able to read Baldwin since. Carpenter and Symonds on the virtues of masculine love have the same effect on my ability to read post-Stonewall gay-lib with a straight face.

The Victorian flurry of interest in homosexuality has been reduced to the Wilde trial in the twenty-first century telling of it, which is a shame: they were blunter about their dreams of class hermaphrodism then, which makes it easier to see the ways in which hermaphrodism of every kind was their ultimate goal. Unrestrained eros annihilates distinctions; that's why we should be afraid of it.

If I were writing a book about Victorian queer theory, I'd put Carpenter opposite Marc-André Raffalovich, whose theory of "uranism" Wikipedia summarizes this way: "While a heterosexual's destiny is to marry and start a family, a homosexual's duty is to overcome and transcend his desires with artistic pursuits and spiritual and even mystical friendships." Because, after all, can't every cultural controversy be retold as Catholicism vs. pantheism?

"I Only Went With Her 'Cause She Looks Like You"

Aloof from Inspiration asks a stumper:

How does pop music shape our own erotic understandings, the kind of desires that we find desirable, particularly during one’s adolescence?

Her own story:

My holy teenage triumvirate between the years of 12-16 was Joy Division, The Cure, and The Smiths. Torture, kissing and celibacy.

Owen Hatherly's, in bits and pieces:

Well, replacing the Cure with the MSP (a spectacularly sexless group, for all the glam: ‘my idea of love comes from a childhood glimpse of pornography’ etc., the physicality of their best record being more about pain, agony and prostitution rather than the other more fun things that do occur), I had the same problem . . .

But there was also Suede (the enjoyable pose of purporting to be bisexual-who-has-never-had-homosexual-experience, faded glamour in estates etc. etc.) and, more than anything else, Pulp—surely the most sex-obsessed ‘indie’ act in history. The joy of artificial fabrics (’Acrylic Afternoons’, ‘Pink glove’), sex-as-class-warfare (’I Spy’, practically all of His & Hers) 1960s architecture as setting for liasons (’Sheffield Sex City), suburban curtain-twitching (’Pencil Skirt’) the list goes on: it’s fair to say I was made permanently dubious at a formative age by their work, something for which I am never quite sure whether to have a grudge against or to thank Jarvis Cocker.

And

I will concur with a teenhood libidinally mediated through music—which is again why Pulp are important on this issue, for positing a kind of theatricalised sexuality which the likes of me [a "pale, thin socially inept indie boy"] could in some way embody without it being utterly ridiculous.

Like Owen, I am willing to take seriously the idea of "a teenhood libidinally mediated through music," and, as one who entertains secret ambitions of Catholic chastity, I am of course most interested in those bands that make modern sex sound like something less than any fun at all.

My own turn-off of choice was the Soft Boys, who, if you don't know them, sound like what you'd get if Withnail had a dog and that dog joined the Smiths. My favorite track of theirs ("Insanely Jealous") does not exist on the Internet, but here's a verse of it:

The paint is cracked and dry, the name is now illegible,
And everything is lost upon the cracked and blistered hull.
Beneath the yellow sky the lovers trip beside the ship
But all I hear when they embrace is just the kiss of skulls.

Everyone else's favorite song of theirs is "Kingdom of Love":

You've been laying eggs under my skin
And now they're hatching out under my chin
Now there's tiny insects showing through
And all the tiny insects look like you.

But Hatherly's recent essays on Pulp (I, II) will become the gold standard of pop music criticism-as-class autobiography if history's judgment coincides with my own (for instance, James on Elliott Smith gets an 8.5 on the Hatherly scale and me on Pulp gets a 4), so let's talk about Jarvis Cocker. I take Morrissey at his word when he claims to be chaste, but he nevertheless seems to inspire an awful lot of people to want to have sex with him and so is disqualified from the Poster Celibate stakes. Cocker is just the opposite: He has an awful lot of girlfriends for someone who makes you never want to have sex with anyone again.

I always imagine the narrator of songs like "Babies" and "Disco 2000" as the sort of man who spent his adolescence aware of sex only as that thing other people were doing, which squares with the fact that Cocker himself didn't lose his virginity until after he had released his first album and turned twenty. That voyeuristic fascination stays with a person for a long time (overheard at CPAC: "I'm a traditionalist because the libertarians never invited me to their sex parties in high school"), as a consequence of which every romantic scene ends like the video for "This is Hardcore"—by pulling back and seeing the cameras. The weakness of my Ladyblog post about Pulp was that I didn't demonstrate how easily love becomes a movie version of itself, but just listen to "Babies" enough times and it will become self-evident. Hatherly points out how Pulp, like Ghost World, is "marked by attempts to romanticise the mundane," but how quickly that slides into judging our indulgences by whether they're good cinema!

None of that was especially clear, perhaps because my take on Pulp is sadly un-British and therefore weak. Maybe the American translation would have something to do with Neutral Milk Hotel, the band that led a generation into thinking that the ideal love affair would be one between a two-headed boy and the ghost of a teenager fifty years dead. In each case, the effect is to make real life seem tawdry compared with our more and more stylized expectations, even as our public fantasies get more and more tawdry (and this is where Elvis Costello's second album comes in). Fairy tales are "erotic novels for children"—hear that, Jeff Mangum? For children.

I was explaining to someone the other day that my favorite moment in pop music is the third verse of "King Horse" (from Get Happy!!): a girl declines sex because she doesn't want the song that's playing on the radio to be ruined for her. The person I was talking to commented that this girl "sounds like someone who takes art seriously!" If you can understand why the girl in that verse is very shallow rather than very sensitive, you can understand the ways in which Pulp is like a Phil Spector girl group.

". . . the expectation was that, if you had a fistfight with somebody, you'd become friends afterwards."

When they asked Sugar Ray Robinson what he liked best about boxing, he said, "Getting hit." Speaking of kindred souls!

I did not expect to have my combativeness validated at last night's Opium Magazine Eighth Anniversary event, which I was promised would be full-to-brimming with "fops" and "literary types"—yet, to my surprise, the novelist with the big square head came through. Stephen Elliot, by way of explaining the infamous case of the time he threw a beer in someone's face for saying that he had "no literary merit", said that "back home in Chicago, the expectation was that, if you had a fistfight with someone, you'd become friends afterwards."

Given that this exact sort of male bonding has grown up between the Ordinary Gentlemen and R. S. McCain in the aftermath of their flame war, I thought Elliot's comments were timely. In any event, it explains why a good heart and quick fists (metaphorical or not) make a lovely trio.

Kindred Souls

The person who arrived here by way of a Google search for "if i didn't have a cigarette, they wouldn't know who i was" is my sister under the skin.

CSB Returns Tomorrow

Something to Keep in Mind

Schwenkler knows I love him, so I can ask, in response to these posts, what he would have written about this Reagan gaffe (as described by the late, great John Patrick Diggins):

A hostile journalist, determined to reveal his ignorance, asked Reagan if he knew who the leader was of some obscure country that was giving the United States trouble. "No, I don't know his name," replied Reagan, "but after the election he'll sure know mine."

Yet surely love for Reagan is more than the product of "a no-dissenters-allowed policy of lockstep groupthink?"

Bookbag: On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship

Nancy Rosenblum has my back when it comes to seeing a link between partisanship and humility:

I advocate for the moral distinctiveness of partisanship and propose reasons to elevate partisanship over its nemesis, the much vaunted pose of "Independence." Partisanship is the only political identity that does not see pluralism and political conflict as a bow to necessity, a pragmatic recognition of the inevitability of disagreement. It demands severe self-discipline to acknowledge that my party's status is just one part in a permanently pluralist politics, and hence the provisional nature of being the governing party and the charade of pretending to represent the whole.

For more on On the Side of the Angels, see Jacob Levy's ongoing symposium.

Citizenship is a Kind of Romance (But Your Crush on Obama is Still Lame)

For having compared politics and family, I stand in danger of being called lovey-dovey (i.e. comment #6), a paternalist (i.e. "Daddy State, save me from myself!"), an absolutist (i.e. "Spare the rod, spoil the citizen"), or else a credulous hero-worshipper (i.e. "President Bush was like a father to me"). A gallery of ghouls, each more horrible than the last!

Rather than any of those philosophical monstrosities, my politics-as-family metaphor was just that: a metaphor, one that can take us refreshing places, especially when applied not to the whole state but to the good kind of partisanship. But, in a perfect world, our stockpile of metaphors for democracy would make a heap, so, to that end, let me add another: the gothic romance, as defined by Bonnie Honig (quotations from Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance):

"In the typical Gothic plot, the heroine comes to a mysterious house, perhaps as a bride, perhaps in antoher capacity, and either starts to mistrust her husband or else finds herself in love with a mysterious man who appears to be some kind of criminal." While Harlequin romances trace the transformation of the young heroine's feelings for the hero from fear into love, in gothics the heroine is older and "the transformation is from love into fear." In short, Harlequins are preoccupied with "getting a man" but "in Gothics the concern is with understanding the relationship and the feelings involved once the union has been formed."

I suppose I can't assume it's uncontroversial to think of citizenship as any kind of romance, so, if I can justify that leap retroactively: In order to have any kind of relationship with his country, a man has to be able to put himself in the middle of some kind of story about it, and stories come in genres. The question, then, is which set of genre expectations we ought to bring to the story of America. Honig again:

Most theorists . . . read democratic theory according to the genre conventions of a popular or modern romance, as a happy-ending love story. (Indeed, some explicitly invoke marriage—happy marriage—as a key metaphor for social contract or social unity.) From their perspective, the problem of democratic theory is how to find the right match between a people and its law, a state and its institutions. Obstacles are met and overcome, eventually the right match is made and the newly wed couple is sent on its way to try to live happily ever after.

Which leaves us at the final shot of The Graduate.

But what genre best fits a work of political thought in which a people with a great deal in common decide to share the burdens and pleasures of a life together only to find that they have cast in their lot with a bunch of untrustworthy strangers?

So citizenship is like a marriage—we have to figure out how to live together, both because we find ourselves in the same house and, ideally, because our institutional attachment is mingled with some kind of emotional one—but is it a happy one? Well, were they happy in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

If you'd rather our American marriage didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's, Honig has a less enthusiastically self-destructive answer. This is the best quote in the whole damn book, especially the second parenthetical:

Gothic readers know that we may passionately support certain heroes (or principles or institutions) in political life while also knowing that we ought not take our eyes off them for fear of what they might do to us if we did. They know that one can be passionately attached to something—a nation, a people, a principle—and be deeply and justifiably (and even therefore!) afraid of it at the same time.

Heathcliff, it's me, Cathy. I've come home.

Bookbag: A Modern Maistre

Owen Bradley (as seen on this blog):

It is necessary to remark, however, a certain pride in failure on the part of the counterrevolution: not simply a disdain verging on disgust toward events in Paris, but a pride in not being understood as the trait of a superior sensibility.

However, Maistre was only sometimes a disdainfulcon, unlike Oakeshott, who we know was one all the time.

The Dogmatism that Can Be Spoken is Not the True Dogmatism

E. D. Kain is talking trash about my kind of conservatism:

An important thing to note when discussing various forms of conservatism is the difference, often-overlooked, between social and cultural conservatism; or perhaps better phrased, religious or fundamentalist conservatism vs. Civilization Conservativism . . .

One thing that defines cultural or civilization conservatives, and I consider myself to be one, is the ability to view the historical evolution of one’s society through the prism of change, as every cultural conservative is cognizant that for better or worse, however slowly, change has come and will continue to do so. No tradition has existed for ever. They are built on the bones of other traditions, recycled from the scrap heaps of ancient practices long forgotten; sometimes eroded, sometimes made more resilient by time. Often cultural conservatives are also religious, and consider religion to be an integral part of their civilization, but do not necessarily frame their political worldview on a vision of religious infallibility, recognizing along with the gradual changes in culture, also the gradual changes in religious outlook. Essentially, to be truly culturally conservative, one must be able to utilize history as a frame of reference.

To be a religious or fundamentalist conservative, one need only have a dogmatic approach to their particular religion. History, science, philosophy, modernity—all fall by the wayside.

There's no point in being a postmodern conservative if you can't say nice things about unpopular ideas, so I'd like to put in a good word for fundamentalist conservatism. This doesn't mean I have anything against "Civilization Conservatism." Quite the opposite; I can't imagine anyone disagreeing with it. "Take the long view, remember what your father taught you, and always pay attention to a good idea whether it's a hundred years old or brand new!" This is not the stuff counterrevolutions are made of.

Kain is wrong about dogmatism not so much in the summary he gives as in the picture he paints: the strict Christian who has no interest in testing his ideas against history, science, or logic—the very face of supreme arrogance. As I told you on this chord once before, the bloggers and thinkers I know who fit Kain's description of "religious or fundamentalist conservatism" tend to be the most humble.

The reason, I think, is this: Rather than regard tradition as simply a data point (i.e. helpful evidence of what works and what doesn't), the ideological conservative is willing to subordinate his own judgment to his tradition's. He may not understand why contraception is bad, but he trusts the Catholic Church more than he trusts himself. Left to his own devices, he might be satisfied with a mild and pleasant existence full of a nice family and entertaining diversions; however, his tradition demands something more than happiness (i.e. self-reliance, virtue, salvation). This humility before the past tends to get a man into the habit of considering the possibility that what he believes (or desires) is wrong, which makes him a good guy to have an argument with. Better, certainly, than the "Civilization Conservative," who has the arrogance to measure the past by whatever yardstick he feels like.

If Kain wants to argue that hard-core traditionalists are unimaginative, I'd say that it depends. A man who picks his traditions based entirely on what's been handed to him—the "because my father and grandfather did it" justification—certainly lacks imagination. However, speaking as a convert, I know that picking a tradition is sometimes a matter of falling in love, which is the opposite of intellectual laziness. Concrete traditions make an institution more like a person (i.e. concrete characteristics give it a personality), which is to say they turn it into something you can have a relationship with, something you can love—unlike an idea or a set of rules. See how rigid dogmatism flies out the window when you're dealing with this kind of conservative?

To offer a counter-definition to Kain's: A "fundamentalist conservative" is someone who has sworn fealty to a tradition, not because her judgment has led her to believe that it is a generally reliable one, but in response to some glimpse of beauty (or sublimity!) in it. This fealty supersedes her private opinions and judgments, and thank God for that; deliver me from the prison of my own subjectivity! This is not meant to be a comprehensive argument for my version of conservatism (which I will, after this post, never again refer to as "fundamentalist"); all I mean to point out is that, if a curious and adventurous humility is the cardinal virtue of philosophical argument, then E. D. Kain may discover it among the people who, apparently, he least expects to have it.

Brief Encounter and Adultery's Failure to Make Sense

Eve Tushnet has this to say about David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945):

The lead actress, Celia Johnson, is pretty excellent, although to be honest all she's asked to do is stare at the camera with a look of repressed misery. But I loved her huge-eyed, oddly lumpy and jawy face. She looked raw.

None of the other actors struck me at all, though the final scene was very poignant.

My main problem, watching the movie, I think was a culture-clash problem. I was strongly reminded of the Chris Ware line from Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth—

But with the inevitable forward march of progress
come new ways of hiding things,
and new things to hide.

Because we lie to ourselves differently now, it was easy to feel that the narrator of Brief Encounter was being willful and stupid to a degree and in a way which I found totally unsympathetic. Her self-deception tricks felt alien to me, and so it was hard to feel like I was implicated in her actions.

Eve is right that adultery depends upon self-deception of one kind or another; my question, then, is: what is the truth behind the self-deception?

Let's ask the director, in the person of his representative Anthony Lane:

[David] Lean was one of two sons born to Quaker parents of Cornish stock. His father, Francis (better known as Frank), was an absurdly handsome accountant, unlikely though it sounds. David’s mother, Helena, came from a family of “artists, inventors, and engineers,” as he later described them to Kevin Brownlow, whose 1996 biography remains the best and most exhaustive account we have. Lean himself described his mother as “sweet and very pretty,” although Brownlow spoke to two of his cousins, who claimed that their aunt Helena had been a woman of fury: “She had such an awful temper, it’s no wonder Frank couldn’t live with her.”

The couple split apart; Frank fell in love with somebody else, and David, then fifteen, was left with his mother to pick up the pieces. The angry wife had dwindled into a weeper: “She used to spend her time crying and to this day I cannot abide tears. If my wife starts to cry, I say, ‘Stop crying!’ in a brutal way, because it reminds me of my mother. I spent my life with tears.”

We're dealing with the product of a broken home, which means that Lean can be relied upon to understand that, sometimes, the opposite of divorce is adultery. On the other hand, we have a man who "cannot abide tears," which means that for him an affair, if it is to save a marriage, must be undertaken in a spirit of calculating pragmatism in order to preserve everyone's dry-eyed emotional discipline. If the affair turns into an adventure in boundless passion, we're back to tears again; more unbridled emotion, more women who can't stop weeping.

And that's the paradox of adultery as Lean imagines it: Affairs are only good if we're sensible about them, but, if we were entirely sensible, we would realize the folly of having affairs at all. Brief Encounter is an anti-cheating manifesto, not because of any deontological rule against cheating, but because Lean doesn't think that adultery makes sense. (Divorce, on the other hand . . .)

Compare and Contrast: Oscar Wilde and Michael Oakeshott

Renato Poggioli's theory of "decadence"—in the 19th-century literary sense—is the compare (translated from the Italian, so forgive anything that hits your ear at a funny angle):

The very notion of decadence, at least its modern version, is practically inconceivable without the psychological compulsion to become the passive accomplice of and willing victim of the barbarian... When the hour of decision comes, he [the decadent] discovers all too late that history has reverted to nature; and that the barbarian, being nature's child, is now becoming history's agent.

At this point the decadent recognizes that he is left no alternative but to play a passive, and yet theatrical, role on history's stage. That role is that of scapegoat or sacrificial victim; and it is by accepting that part, and acting it well, that he seals in blood the strange brotherhood of decadence and barbarism.

And Stefan Collini's put-down of Oakeshott the contrast:

I think the appeal of Oakeshott has often been an appeal to a kind of political snobbery, an appeal to those who aren't faced with making day-to-day decisions. It's an appeal more to those who like to present themselves as having a longer perspective, who are always somehow the voices of true conservatism which any example of everyday, existing conservatism falls short of.

When Andrew Sullivan bothers me, it is because he falls into that Oakeshottian trap.

UPDATE: An explanation of the post's title— Conservatives tend to find something aesthetically attractive about over-refined and well-dressed sophisticates, but our enthusiasm for decadence, dandyism, and mannerism might be coming from the same place as Oakeshottian withdrawal from politics. I'm all for aristocratic temperaments, but let's make sure ours is the deep superiority of Wilde and not the shallow, can't-be-bothered, dare I say lazy superiority of Oakeshott.

I Wanna Live Like Common Law People, I Wanna Do Whatever Common Law People Do

Nick writes:

MAYBE 1000 YEARS AGO. NOW, NOT SO MUCH. Helen, quoting:

Once a practice was established it could be considered a custom, and a custom, steadily exercised, was nearly as good as a right in law. The process was, however, nearly imperceptible under ordinary circumstances so as not to provoke an open confrontation.

Several qualifications are in order:

1. "Nearly as good" does a lot of work. Custom, in international law and elsewhere, is frequently a source of law co-eval with statute (assuming, for argument's sake, that we're thinking of the minority of the world that follows a common law, rather than civil law, system; this is also no longer true in most common law countries, and hasn't been for some time), but even amongst custom's strongest defenders, it is generally admitted that statutes abrogate customs more quickly and more fully than customs abrogate statutes.

2. It's nearly imperceptible unless one derogates from the custom, which happens all the time.

3. Not sure what she's quoting, but it may be reading custom as usus. So far as I'm aware, no one thinks this: either opinio juris matters just as much as usus, or one follows Blackstone et al in establishing conditions for a custom to be considered valid and binding.

If I can put up some fight against one of Nick's objections—"even amongst custom's strongest defenders, it is generally admitted that statutes abrogate customs more quickly and more fully than customs abrogate statutes"—I'll point out that the advantage of custom over legislation is that custom can be changed even by those who lack political power. Nick's right to note that it's slower and less reliable than open revolution, and he isn't the first to do so. I think it was Michel de Certeau who compared successful subversion to a winning poker hand. Or maybe it was Kenny Rogers. In any case, picking the right moment, as the original Scott quote proposes, necessarily means waiting for the perfect opportunity to arise.

As for which force is stronger, law or custom, I'm not sure either side has a conclusive case. It takes a lot of political capital to overturn a custom that has become thoroughly entrenched, and, when a custom becomes prevalent enough, it can make accompanying legislative reforms inevitable. Or seem inevitable, which is just as good if what you need are the votes of people who don't care one way or another about an issue but want to side with the winning team.

What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!

Ages ago, I wrote that "subversion is better than revolution, always." There are plenty of good reasons to qualify that claim: Nimble-minded tricksters are certainly more appealing than grabby protesters, many of whom are hippies, but it's hard to imagine how an oppressed group can use underhanded mischief to bring about structural change; subversive tricks won't alter the status quo, just make it easier to cope with.

Luckily, James C. Scott offers a picture of how subversion might (eventually!) translate into something like revolution:

Once a practice was established it could be considered a custom, and a custom, steadily exercised, was nearly as good as a right in law. The process was, however, nearly imperceptible under ordinary circumstances so as not to provoke an open confrontation. For example, villagers might secretly girdle the bark of trees just below ground level and then, when the tree inevitably died, openly take the dead tree, to which they were entitled. Alternatively, they might conceal green boughs in the center of a bundle of dead wood. Gradually, they might, if not checked, increase the proportion of green wood till it made up most of the load. This incremental process might accelerate precipitously whenever forest enforcement was lax, as those who had held back now rushed in to take the wood, game, pasturage, and peat to which they all along thought they had a right.

The chant in this post's title was conceived as satire, but, for once, I mean it.

UPDATE: That quote is from Domination and the Arts of Resistance.

"How to Serve Man" isn't a cookbook when you're a trained monkey butler!

Remember the nightmare in which our transhumanist overlords get gene-happy and engineer a slave race of idiot-men to do our master-racy bidding? Well, we can all set those anxieties aside, assuming universal assent to this basic intuition: Trained monkey butlers are better than human ones.

One more theological problem solved.

Bookbag: British Factory, Japanese Factory by Ronald Dore

A Richard Sennett favorite, as the footnotes to Authority reveal.

The importance attached to educational qualifications in recruitment has for a long time been greater at Japanese factories than at English ones. However, English Electric is becoming more like Hitachi in this respect. The change in Britain is due not only to the greater complexity of engineering and managerial technology, but also and more importantly, because there is now thought to be, thanks to the rising level of living and of parents educational aspirations for their children, a much tighter correlation between level of schooling and innate potential; the level of terminal education is seen as a much more certain indicator of ability than it was before the war when many bright working class children had no chance of a grammar school education.

No more searching for diamonds in the working-class rough? Boo, hiss.

Lawrence Lessig, James Agee, and Obsolete Telegraph Operators

I was one of the poor souls at the Lolita Bar Debate on "Is Intellectual Property Theft?" who sided with the vote-losing open-source pro-piracy types (no surprise to CSB regulars), which makes me all the more disappointed that Lawrence Lessig has joined the devil's party in opposing all graft, rather than simply opposing the bad kind:

Trust is at the center of those institutions, in the sense that if you want people to listen to you when you tell them that they should vaccinate their children against malaria, people need to trust that when you say the vaccines are safe, they are safe.

If you don't have that trust in society, what happens is that people don't vaccinate their kids against malaria, and malaria starts to take off, and as it takes off there are devastating consequences for the population. Trust is at the center of that relationship. The question is how we build trust.

"The question is how we build trust." Indeed it is. If machine politics teaches us anything, it is that personal politics does so while bureaucracy simply breeds suspicion.

I've thrown up this James Agee quote on CSB before, but it bears repeating:

The Postman Always Rings Twice is also interesting as the third current movie — the others are From This Day Forward and Deadline at Dawn — which represents the Law as an invincible and terrifying force before which mere victims, whether innocent or guilty, can only stand helpless and aghast.

When the law is impersonal, it necessarily becomes Agee's vast, inscrutable edifice. How could such an image fail to result in mistrust?

I have some sympathy for the position that suspicion of government is a good thing, but consider this quote from Ronald Dore's British Factory, Japanese Factory, which illustrates why a relationship of trust between management and labor is better than a culture of opposition:

Inability to declare redundancies hardly inhibits Hitachi's technological flexibility, whereas English Electric often was so inhibited because union strength made managers scared to resort to the redundancy dismissal solution they were accustomed to—and retraining, if it were considered as an alternative, would be severely hampered by union craft rules.

To unpack that tangled excerpt (which would make more sense if you'd read the whole book): In Japan, it is taken as a given that neither management nor labor wants to lay off workers; this allows management to do what it needs to do in order to keep "obsolete" workers on, including retraining workers or reassigning them to different factories, as a soldier might be reassigned to a different base. In England, however, the unions regard it as their job to hamper management's flexibility; this has the intended consequence of making it harder to fire workers, but it also makes it harder for dead-weight workers to be deployed productively.

A fascinatingly weird post

Watch in delight as Fastlad gets his Ibsen on.

"Conservatism for Punks" for Punks

Todd Seavey has pointed out that he and I like punk rock for entirely opposite reasons—Todd because it's individualistic, me because it's "rule-bound and tribalistic." In other words, it's fifteen rounds of punk libertarianism vs. punk traditionalism.

To understand why I am so quick to read conservatism into punk rock, take a quick look at this story of someone of "falling in love with Punk Rock," which came to me third-hand:

I fell in love with Punk Rock when I was 13 years old and snuck into a club because my classmate was sleeping with the bouncer. It was a subculture defined by rigid rules which allowed for great expression, an overwhelming ethic, high expectations, and a bareknuckled willingness for confrontation. I'll never forget that first show—seeing a guy go down hard after taking an elbow in the face, then watching him get picked up by some guy he'd never met before who said to him: "You okay? You able to walk? Good, then get back in the pit and punch somebody."

"Rigid rules which allowed for great expression"; "an overwhelming ethic"; "high expectations": about as trad as one can be short of hauling out the Pope.

I like that punk is torn between strict enforcement of its own rules on one hand and knee-jerk opposition to rules at all on the other; it's a helpful tension, and Todd seems to agree. However, I don't think his understanding of the punk coin's traditional side is quite right:

. . . the means of squaring the circle here (or scrawling a sloppy “A” in the circle, if you will), for political purposes, is to recognize that we should appreciate both the comfort people find from immersion in densely rule-bound communities and their freedom to leave such communities, the latter facilitated by not turning such communities’ particular rules into actual laws enforced by cops.

Todd can make me acknowledge the fact that some people "find comfort" in tradition, but he can't make me like it. If your traditionalism makes you comfortable, you're doing it wrong.

I'm sure it's psychologically soothing to behold a vast sea of bobbing mohawks and know that you belong, but the traditions of punk get a lot less comforting when you go beyond the dress code. The kind of person drawn to punk is probably pretty tough, but the punk ethos demands they be tougher. They probably have the beginnings of self-discipline, but the tradition demands that they have more. They're probably independent-minded, but the tradition demands that they sacrifice their last remaining attachments to conventional respectability. Punk, like all traditions, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.

But what do I know? I'm listening to Steely Dan right now. (James is wrong, by the way. Jose Cuervo, you are a friend of mine.)

IMPORTANT BONUS: Todd's instinct is to weaken the social pressures that keep people within their traditions and communities, but, given his conservative disposition, he's happiest when people make the choice to "stay on the farm." My instinct is just the opposite: I think that traditional communities should exert considerable pressure on their inhabitants, but I'm secretly delighted when the occasional exception lights out for the big city (i.e. heads to Brooklyn to become a writer). Does this shed any light on our respective readings of punk rock, and which of us is right? For the record, Florence King agrees with me. A Southern family may worry that Mary Lou will "go hog wild" once she heads north, but eventually:

. . . if she stays in New York long enough, the family will decide that she is an eccentric, which is the nicest thing any Southern family can say about one of their own.

Wilde Defamed Yet Again

Oscar Wilde's sex life is up for public debate again, this time over the question of whether it is appropriate to call him a child molester. The relevant question is the age of Alfonso Conway, which sounds as if it should be eminently verifiable, and, indeed, it seems that British journalists have put it at fourteen. But Barbara Hewson disputes:

It’s interesting that barrister Edward Carson, who cross-examined Wilde mercilessly when the playwright prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel, made no mention of Conway’s age, though he did dwell on the cigarette case and elaborate walking stick, which Wilde had given Conway. These are not things one gives to children, incidentally.

Wilde also gave Conway a copy of Treasure Island, which is not a thing one gives to an adult, "incidentally." It is also interesting to note that, during Carson's examination, Wilde twice mentioned that Conway had been a good friend not only to Wilde himself but also to his two sons, neither of whom was older than ten at the time Conway would have met them. Hewson continues:

Douglas . . . mentioned that he had noticed an ‘astounding’ male courtesan in the town: ‘about nineteen, just Oscar’s style.’ This shows that Wilde preferred older teens (who perhaps made better conversationalists), whilst Douglas preferred younger boys.

It seems from the historical record that, Edward Shelley aside, Wilde's taste in boys ran contrary to his other affinities. He preferred living Greek sculptures, Beauty being higher than Genius; conversation did not enter into it.

Still, Hewson is quite right that the present kerfuffle about "child molestation" is overblown, as can be seen from the statements of the town historian who set the matter off:

Chris Hare, a respected historian and former university lecturer, has just published Worthing, a History: Riots and Respectability in a Seaside Town. In it he points out that Wilde, a homosexual man married with children, had a documented taste for seducing teenage boys. At least one of his victims, a 14-year-old newspaper delivery boy named Alphonso, had to flee Worthing when the scandal of his relationship with Wilde became public knowledge.

"This role model, a man preying on teenage boys with little or no education—I don't think that would be regarded as heroic today. I think it would be regarded as smutty and reprehensible," said Hare.

To say that Wilde preyed on them is wide of the mark. He preferred lower-class lovers on the innocent side of twenty-five, but so did many gay Victorians. Those inclined to blame Plato may do so. Perhaps we should all go read (or watch) Maurice again, and let sleeping dogs lie with whomever they please.

Beyond the Mob Aesthetic: The Practical Virtues of Machine Politics

Reform in New York, like reform before it, has favored greater mass participation, but in terms of many unconnected individuals, each having no power of any importance. "Participation," either as taking part in insurgency or having an institutionalized share of authoritative decision making, may thus be a mechanism for reducing autonomy as easily as one for engendering it. Reform movements have frequently "liberated" the poor from machines, leaving them with less power than before. —THOMAS BLAU, THE END OF COMMUNITY ACTION

It's lucky that I was deeply and completely understood by another human being early in life; the experience, I am sure, saved me from years of ill-conceived romantic entanglements and confessional Twittering. If you are wondering who he was and what he understood, it was my friend David at the moment he said, "So, basically, your political beliefs are determined by which faction you think has better music." Take this as my way of confessing that my abiding love for urban machine politics is in part attributable to an aesthetic affinity for brawlers, bad asses, and boot-strappers.

But only in part. I am preparing to give my copy of Patrick Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding to a fellow urbanist—merry Christmas, Noah—and, in the course of copying down underlined passages into the Bookbag Binder, I found the following:

What more conclusive evidence of evil could be adduced against a local political leader during the 1950's, the more so if he were Italian, say, and had taken to wearing expensive clothes, than to charge that he was a "Boss"—that is, that he had power!

. . . In the summer of 1968, the City of New York, with the assistance of a Yale summer intern and the fullest cooperation, as it were, of the New York Times, launched a monster registration campaign in the poorer areas of the City. Had a Tammany Mayor undertaken to spend public funds for such a purpose the Times might have seen the matter differently.

And especially:

It may be that the poor are never "ready" to assume power in an advanced society: the exercise of power in an effective manner is an ability acquired through apprenticeship and seasoning. Thrust on an individual or group, the results are often painful to observe, and when what in fact is conveyed is not power, but a kind of playacting at power, the results can be absurd.

Term limits, goo-gooism, and other reform-minded follies destroy the political capital of the poor in the guise of trying to save it, as the above Blau quote points out. I may be upset with machine dismantlers for canceling a good soap opera mid-season, but there are real reasons to regard their efforts with suspicion. It is tempting to think of government—especially at the local level—as a matter of administration, not politics, but this fallacy is a luxury that only the middle class can afford. For everything else, there's TammanyCard.

The Finest Neuhaus Tribute I've Read

From the Fallen Sparrow:

As I was leaving the church, I stopped to greet the numerous members of the Sisters of Life, who have been good friends of the Notre Dame Choir over the years, and whose infectious cheer never fails to brighten my spirits even on an occasion such as this. One of them asked me, "Did you know Father Neuhaus?"

"No, I didn't, but I hope to meet him someday."

Bookbag: Moynihan on the Virtue of Political Loyalty

Daniel Patrick Moynihan discusses behind-the-scenes wrangling over LBJ's Economic Opportunity Act in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty:

In a meeting in the Speaker's Office on August 8th, 1964, members of the North Carolina delegation demanded as a price of their support a pledge that [Adam] Yarmolinsky, who as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense had energetically sought to uphold the constitutional rights of Negro servicemen in Southern states and was known for his generally liberal and progressive views, would have nothing to do with the administration of the antipoverty program. Sargent Shriver made a quick call to the White House. Yarmolinsky was sacrificed without ceremony or ado. The most effulgent promises of future preferment were made this dedicated man, who, weeks earlier, half-dead on an operating table after an automobile accident, had regained consciousness asking for details of the day's work on the antipoverty program. None were kept.

Hazlitt Postscript

Buried in the footnotes of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic:

Among the notes which Hazlitt never saw fit to publish is perhaps the most vehement dismissal of general nature in all of romantic criticism. To Reynolds's "perfect beauty in any species must combine all the characters which are beautiful in that species," he replies: "These discourses seem written by an Hermaphrodite."

William Hazlitt and Aristocratic Distance

Even if we can forgive Michael Dirda for comparing Hazlitt to "the snarkiest of modern-day bloggers," and again for calling his abruptness "Asperger's-like," we are still left wanting to read less Dirda and more Hazlitt. In that sense the review is a success.

Further to that end, David Bromwich (in Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic) on Hazlitt on Coriolanus:

"There is nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that they are likely to be so." . . . Coriolanus stands for power, "the cause of the people" for disinterested justice, and only the former commands the submission by evoking the awe of the imagination.

. . . Perhaps there is a love of justice even in the compulsion to make and remake history as "a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of poetic justice." But the only hope for some good to mankind is that now and then we shall choose a hero whose way of keeping his distance is to become our benefactor. (RTWT, from 318)

Anyone noticing the similarity between Hazlitt's mythologized hero and Burkean "decent drapery" will be interested to know that Hazlitt believed speaking "with contempt" of Edmund Burke "might be made the test of a vulgar democratical mind."

"What's My Name? Is It Marriage? What's My Name, Fool?""

The New York Sun critic who reviewed The Children's Hour in 1934 was right in his commonsense response to Martha's lament that, because she and Karen had been accused of lesbianism, "There is not anywhere we can go!"

"You immediately think of half a dozen places," he said, "including the city of New York."

—LILLIAN FADERMAN, ODD GIRLS AND TWILIGHT LOVERS: A HISTORY OF LESBIAN LIFE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA

Scott Payne gathered a couple of worthies for a nice jaw about gay marriage, and I have a couple things to add, the first being an apology for making my "last post on gay marriage" merely penultimate. Sorry, Culture11, for making a liar out of you.

Freddie points out that the Catholic Church will continue to decide its own house rules, no matter how the law shakes out: "John, when you say that there will be cultural consequences for the government accepting same-sex unions, I would say 'Only if culturally conservative people let it.' It will be up to culturally and socially conservative people to decide whether or not same-sex marriage is actually normalized beyond the legal codification of it."

Not exactly. Everybody remembers Ali taunting Ernie Terrell in 1967: "What's my name, fool?" Whether or not you sympathize with Terrell's reluctance to legitimize Ali's conversion, I think it's clear that the gentlemanly thing to do, given the situation, is to bite the bullet and call the man whatever he wants.

Legal recognition of same-sex unions is the equivalent of putting "Muhammad Ali" on the fight card. It won't force conservative churches to recognize gay marriages, but it will make every reference to a man's "partner" sound hostile. If the government calls him a husband, I can't refuse to call him one without putting myself in a class with the people who say "freedom fries."

As for Schwenk's contribution to the podcast, I have only one thing to add. He talked at length about marriage as vocabulary—Andrew Sullivan, for instance, has pointed out that referring to his "husband" gives the world a consistent way to talk about the man he intends to spend his life with, thereby avoiding the uncomfortable pause that tends to precede terms like "roommate," "partner," and "boyfriend."

After citing this argument of Sullivan's, John brought up the deep friendship of John Henry Newman and Ambrose St. John as evidence that the Victorians did have the vocabulary to describe same-sex commitments, a vocabulary that has since disappeared. He admitted to having no idea who to blame for its disintegration, but seemed to imply that moral opposition to homosexuality makes it harder to develop helpful ways of describing gay relationships. There I disagree, and would point him first to Florence King's explanation of the Southern way to deal with men who are "a little funny" (being good to your momma covers a multitude of sins), then to the Faderman quote above. If widespread condemnation of homosexuality can coexist with a substantial amount of general knowledge about it, then we can only assume that gay marriage is not a necessary precondition for developing the kind of vocabulary John wants.

More Quentin Crisp

"Love is the extra effort you make in dealing with people you don't like."

Honor among Taxidermists

The facts of this story aren't all in, but, at the moment, it seems possible that Lawton McKenzie's arrest for animal cruelty may rest on nothing more than the ordinary "mutilation" involved in being an amateur taxidermist who also butchers one's own goats for food:

A man accused of animal cruelty says those charges are blown out of proportion after authorities found dozens of dismembered animals on his property. . . "What society's saying is that it's wrong for me to eat a chicken I've raised but alright for me to go buy from the store. I don't see what's the sense," McKenzie told WITN.

McKenzie says he is studying taxidermy and that some of the animals authorities discovered were those found by him along the side of the road.

Authorities said they discovered knives, a machete and bowls of blood when they visited McKenzie's home in Fremont last month. Investigators also found dead dogs, goats, sheep, owls and other animals.

McKenzie tells WITN that he butchered goats and ate them for food, while he also raises chickens for their eggs and food.

Born in Jamaica, he says he grew up around a culture of people butchering their own meat for food. "What makes me different from you just because I'm not afraid to go clean my own food up? Maybe I should . . . get my hunter's permit and just shoot my own, just shoot the goat first."

. . . The Fremont man tells WITN that he has always complied with previous animal control requests to care for his animals and had wanted to turn his property into a animal learning center for children. "I see dead foxes all the time, I see dead owls... Other people don't pay attention to that stuff, but I do. I think it could be a learning tool," says McKenzie

McKenzie is free on bond from the animal cruelty charges and says he was fired from his job this morning at the Fremont Rest Home.

Speaking as a taxidermist who has reclaimed her share of roadkill, I find his defense to be, at the very least, plausible.

h/t My North Carolina local news aggregator, otherwise known as "Mom."

Bookbag: A Sydney Smith Grab-Bag

The eighteeth century parson beginning a literary review:

We take it for granted that Mr. Ritson supposes Providence to have had some share in producing him, though for what inscrutable purposes we profess ourselves unable to conjecture.

On the Scottish temper:

They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love metaphysically; I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, "What you say, my Lord, is very true of love in the aibstract, but—" and here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.

On two pheasants sent to a friend:

. . . curious, because killed by a Scotch metaphysician; in other and better language, they are mere ideas, shot by other ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion, called a gun.

On his fellow Protestant preachers:

Is it a rule of oratory to balance the style against the subject, and to handle the most sublime truths in the dullest language and the driest manner? Is sin to be taken from men, as Eve was from Adam, by casting them into a deep slumber?

On Madame de Staël's Delphine:

The morality of all this is the old morality of Farquhar, Vanbrugh and Congreve—that every witty man may transgress the seventh commandment, which was never meant for the protection of husbands who labour under the incapacity of making repartees.

On rural life:

Whenever I enter a village, I straightaway find an ass.

That last, as any reader of Scripture will know, is entirely ass-backwards.

Macaulay praised Smith by comparing him to the editor they shared: "In ability I should say that Jeffrey was higher, but Sydney rarer. I would rather have been Jeffrey; but there will be several Jeffreys before there is a Sydney."

"One day we'll be in an absolutely smoke-free world."

Over my dead body.

Capitalism for Preschoolers

Heard at work today: "We don't have 'sharing' in this classroom. We have negotiation."

Provocative Urbanism

If they seek long-term success, American city advocates can’t simply shoe-horn people in more urban environments with technology (light rail) or policies (smart growth), but must cultivate an urban sensibility that demands such policies and tools because they demand a certain type of lifestyle. In Sennett’s view the key to cultivating this sensibility is reinforcing what makes the city unique, including those things that many planners have long thought undesirable: complexity, disorder, and conflict. Thus the rationalizing impulse of planning to order the city—with highways, zoning, and “centers” of all types directly conflicts with what we should be encouraging in our cities. Only planning that encourages urban disorder and conflict will create dynamic, healthy cities that will attract people.

More.

Can arbitrary loyalties be morally defensible?

As a way of responding to Will's provocation on truth and particularity, I'll throw up bits from this paper I wrote for a Yale seminar on Edmund Burke. Excerpts chosen for relevance and readibility:

. . . The sketch of the accusation against Burke and his own defense against it are now both fairly clear: he believed fervently in objective ethical laws but allowed their abrogation and overrule for various aesthetic, circumstantial, and emotional reasons. Burke was a pragmatist, but not at the expense of certain overriding moral concerns. The question remains whether Burke’s compromises reveal a man trying to balance principle against pragmatism or whether his pragmatic concerns can be integrated with his moral ones in a unifying system.

. . . To accept Burke’s “sacred veil” is to conclude that a legend which breeds pride in one’s country is morally preferable to a factual story which breeds shame or humility. This preference for indirect truth may redeem Burke’s foppish ode to the age of chivalry from those of its faults that Philip Francis complained of. The drapery of legend distracts from the moral liberties taken by a country’s founders. The drapery of beauty distracts from the moral worth, good or bad, of a distressed lady. In neither case is the drapery simply a useful means to a preferable end. It is both principled and defensible to say that beauty and legend inspire feelings that are not merely useful in the way that resigning oneself to the quirks of the American spirit is useful but true in the way that compassion for one suffering is true.

. . . The moral law is one and the same for all, but just as moral duty varies from situation to situation, adherence to moral law may require vastly different actions from different men. That such differences should be based on arbitrary distinctions in no way undermines the universality of the rule. To say that a commandment is moral is to say that it is not arbitrary. However, this does not mean that arbitrariness cannot be a feature and component of a system of ethics. The political morality that can be extrapolated from Edmund Burke’s writings reveals the possibility of doing so by incorporating national loyalty, aesthetic chivalry, and family loyalty into divine moral law.

More, including a shout-out to Oscar Wilde. I think Eve will enjoy the sentence "Sublimity requires obscurity, and morality by its nature cannot be obscure."

More Quentin Crisp

If you look into your soul and find that you’re ordinary, then ordinary you must be, but, if possible, you must be so ordinary that you can imagine someone saying, "Come to my party and bring your humdrum friend," and everyone knowing that he means you.

Superlatively Queer Comedians Against Gay Marriage: Two Case Studies

Over at Ladyblog, I've thrown up a refutation of one fallacy underlying same-sex marriage (short version: gay marriage makes it harder to acknowledge gender differences, and talking about gender in our post-feminist climate is already hard enough), but there's another battle that needs fighting. The psychology of your average pro-SSM straight person goes something like this: Marriage is society's way of saying that a particular romantic relationship is awesome and important; I recognize that gay relationships are awesome and important; therefore, they should be allowed to marry. Step Two is fine, but Step One is fundamentally wrong.

Marriage isn't a stamp of approval; it's an institution designed to pressure people into making difficult but necessary (and, at the end of the day, fulfilling) choices. It's not society's way of saying something about relationships; it's about doing something to them.

Consider this joke from lesbian comedian Lynn Lavner:

There are 6 admonishments in the Bible concerning homosexual activity . . . [and] 362 concerning heterosexual activity. I don't mean to imply by this that God doesn't love straight people, only that they seem to require a great deal more supervision.

Or this from Quentin Crisp, who could never hold down any job except "Stately Old Homo of England":

Since people persist in getting married, what would your advice be to them?

Do not expect that you will be happy. Do not enter a marriage thinking this s the way in which I will be happy. If you do that you are making use of your partner. You must enter into a marriage knowing that you are sacrificing yourself. You must say, "I feel I have all sorts of things to give to a relationship and I will find somebody to whom I can give them. I only expect to die fulfilled—not happy—that I have done what little I could do."

So it is possible to be fulfilled in marriage?

If your view is that your style—your image—is to be self-sacrificing, and if you feel you have an infinite capacity for it. You may think: Will I go to India to feed the starving, or to Crimea to bind up the wounds of the injured—or will I just get married?

Marriage involves considerable self-sacrifice, but the things that make all that self-sacrifice worth it for straight couples (i.e. children, monogamy, the virtues that go along with being forced to stay with someone who, because of gender differences, you will always be somewhat baffled by) don't apply to gay couples. That's what both Lavner and Crisp are trying to say: Straight people have more sacrifices to make in their romantic relationships, and so we require "a great deal more supervision."