Talking Back

So I spent part of the weekend reading Kosher Living, by Ron Isaacs, another of our haul from the Fayetteville library last weekend.

(The other parts of the weekend were spent celebrating the kid’s birthday and grading final portfolios for my freshman essay class – the kid had a cake from Creative Kitchen, an excellent local bakery, one of the few excellent things in Fort Smith. It had flowers and bugs on it. This bakery will do things like that. The kid looked around at all the cakes and said, “I want a cake with flowers on it. And bugs.” And the woman behind the counter said, “We can do that.” And they did. And it was perfect: sunny yellow flowers on white icing with ladybugs, blue caterpillars, green inchworms, and butterflies. Lovely. Adorable. And tasty.)

Anyway.

I’m grading portfolios, and in between grading portfolios I am reading Kosher Living: It’s Not Just the Food, which I highly recommend, not just for Jews. It’s a book on how to live right in the universe (which is what Kosher means – living right – right livelihood). Isaacs has answers (not just rules, but explanations) for how to do things in this world. I’m really liking this book, even if he does, at one point, quote Dennis Prager approvingly. (Prager apparently at some point in his career spoke approvingly of not allowing the TV to be turned on during the Sabbath. Well, I can’t argue with that. Even a blockhead is right twice a year.)

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Isaacs has a section on Arguing. My favorite!

It has this question: Is it kosher to argue with God?

What’s the answer? Huh? Huh? What do you think the answer is?

Isaacs says not only is it okay to argue with God, Jews are commanded to argue with God.

Of course long-time readers of this blog already knew this*, but I just love this answer so much.

Because this is the problem with (a) American Far-Right Levitican Christian culture and (b) Christian culture in general: this idea that God should not be questioned; that God should be obeyed blindly; that God is omniscient and omnipotent and that humanity, his creation, is, in relation to God, a powerless, useless, pointless worm.

This is not humanity’s role in the Torah. We are Israel: we are created to contend with God: and we do not lose.

Furthermore, we are commanded to contend with God. That’s why we exist. We’re here to argue with him when he gets things wrong, as Abraham did when God set out to destroy Sodom.

We’re here to point out his mistakes. Who else but us? It’s why he made us. It’s our job. If we don’t do it, how will he know?

Christians, on the other hand, define humanity’s job as to praise and to worship.

In their theology, God can’t make a mistake. It’s blasphemy, in their theology, to suggest that he might.

And it’s blasphemy, in their theology, to suggest that God might need anything from us – we’re useless, crawly, pathetic critters, filthy sinners, and it’s hard to imagine why God created such nasty things, except that he wants constant praise – and I can’t imagine why they’d want to worship a God like that, who created filthy nasty sinners like them so he can be praised non-stop by such disgusting beings. But apparently they do.

This theology explains a lot about the current government, of course, but also a lot about the child-rearing practices of Levitican Christians.

Dobson’s child-rearing practices, for instance: children are not allowed to disobey, ever. Disobedience is called defiance, and is punished by the child being, literally, beaten into submission (“until the child cries with true submission,” as he says in one of his books).

Or, as one of my students explained to me, when she was doing a paper on the proper way to raise children, “Any time my child disobeys, she gets the paddle.”

Bear in mind, her child was under two at the time.

This was a freshman comp class, so we were still working on basic things. So I hid my wince, and just said, “Define your terms. What do you mean by disobey? What do you mean by paddle?”

“Well, I paddle her good. Seven or eight good hard whacks.”

“With your hand? Or an actual paddle?”

She smirked at my liberal silliness. “An actual paddle.”

“And what do you mean by disobey? Disobeys you?”

“Me or any other adult. She’s not allowed to tell an adult no.”

I had just been working on automatic, though it was appalled automatic, up until this point. At this point I looked at her. She was looking smugly back.

“Never?” I said. “She’s never allowed to tell an adult no.”

“That’s right. Or she gets paddled.”

I kept looking at her. “You don’t want to rethink that position?” I asked.

She just looked at me.

“You don’t want your child to ever be able to say no to any adult?” I asked. “What about the uncle who tells her to hold still in the dark bedroom?”

She looked at me. “She doesn’t,” she started.

“What about the adult in the park who says, come on sweetie, come get in my car?”

She stared at me.

“I’m thinking you want to rethink your position,” I said. “Maybe just a little bit.”

After a moment, she said, “I never thought of that.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I shut up at that point, though I wanted to argue further.

Our kid, on the other hand, argues all the time. Our kid would argue with a stump, as the saying goes.

“She’s making me nuts, this kid,” I told mr. delagar the other day. “I told her I was going to buy her birthday present after school, she went into instant negotiation mode. A toy present or a book present? And I said, maybe a book present and a toy present. And she says, One present toy present and one book present from you and daddy, or one each from you and one each from daddy?”

He laughed.

“And the night before last,” I pointed out, “a half hour debate on whether she had to have her hair washed in a bath she had volunteered for, or whether we only had to wash her hair in baths that were my idea!”

“I heard that one. That one was pretty funny.”

“Oh, hilarious. She argues about everything!”

“Yiddisher kop,” he said. “What do you want?”


*http://delagar.blogspot.com/2004/09/okay-i-already-ranted-about-this-over.html

Walgreens Causes Abortions

So this pharmacist, Michelle Long, who works at Walgreens, decides its against her religion to dispense birth control measures -- she's a Catholic -- and refuses -- over and over again -- to dispense emergency contraceptive to women in need of it. (WISN 12 News has her on camera refusing to do so.)

At least one woman, a mother of six who could not afford anymore children, became pregnant as a result of being refused emergency contraception by Ms. Long, and, as a result of getting pregnant, got an abortion.

This is one we know of.

And what did Ms. Long think, exactly, was going to result from her refusing to dispense birth control?

http://www.themilwaukeechannel.com/news/4454234/detail.html

(Via DEDspace: http://www.dedspace.blogspot.com/)

Queasiness

Here's one of the reasons listening to NPR makes me uneasy lately:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200505050004

(Via Atrios: http://atrios.blogspot.com/)

Times 1500 Now And Counting

Go see this

http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2005/05/funeral-blues-stop-all-clocks-cut-off.html

Ugly Kids

Here's an interesting study that shows parents don't care for their ugly kids as well as they care for their good-looking kids.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/03/health/03ugly.html?incamp=article_popular

They also don't take as much care with good-looking girls as they do with good-looking boys.

Although the researchers were unsure why, good-looking boys were usually kept in closer proximity to the adults taking care of them than were pretty girls. The researchers speculated that girls might be considered more competent and better able to act independently than boys of the same age. The researchers made more than 400 observations of child-parent interactions in 14 supermarkets.

Dr. W. Andrew Harrell, executive director of the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta and the leader of the research team, sees an evolutionary reason for the findings: pretty children, he says, represent the best genetic legacy, and therefore they get more care.

I put forth an alternative for the researchers: (many) parents value boys more than they value girls, and they value pretty kids more than they value ugly kids, and Q.E.D.

And that does, as Harrell postulates, make a sort of evolutionary sense -- if you accept that parents think pretty=good genetic legacy and male=better genetic value (I guess because guys can defend the cave and girls hang around and gather carrots?).

I don't know -- all this environment-of-evolutionary-adaptedness thinking is still new to me.

Freedom of the Press

Well, yes, we have a free press -- much good it does us, though, when reporters don't do their jobs, for whatever reason.

Bob Herbert's column in the NYTimes today is about what those of us who have been following the Iraqi War on the blogs -- and no, not on the 101 Fighting Keyboarders' Blogs, either -- have known for some time now: the abuse of Iraqi soldiers and citizens by some of our soldiers is out of hand: this is documented, among other things, in photographs, and those photographs have not been given play by the mainstream media. That is to say, mainstream reporters have ignored them: deliberately.

Aidan Delgado is working to get the truth out.


His goal, he said, is to convince his listeners that the abuse of innocent Iraqis by the American military is not limited to "a few bad apples," as the military would like the public to believe. "At what point," he asked, "does a series of 'isolated incidents' become a pattern of intolerable behavior?"

The public at large and especially the many soldiers who have behaved honorably in Iraq deserve an honest answer to that question. It took many long years for the military to repair its reputation after Vietnam. Mr. Delgado's complaints and the entire conduct of this wretched war should be thoroughly investigated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/opinion/05herbert.html?

Oppressing them Christians again

Amanda at Pandagon has an update on the prayer issue --

You'll remember back here

http://delagar.blogspot.com/2005/04/we-need-that-prayer.html

The Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors decided they should open with a prayer, to remind everyone they were living in a nice, moral country, not a godless heathen country like Europe or Iraq or any of them other heathen places.

And, even though the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors was clearly acting in its capacity as an agent of the state, this would not, they claimed, be a violation of the establishment clause of the first amendment because they would let people from different religions give the prayer.

Dandy.

So a Wiccan woman petitions to give the prayer.

They refuse.

She sues, with the help of the Virginia ACLU.

And she has lost the case -- at least this round:

http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/05/you_have_the_fr.html

Why?

The 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield County’s Board of Supervisors did not show impermissible motive in refusing to permit a pantheistic invocation by a Wiccan because its list of clergy who registered to conduct invocations covers a wide spectrum of Judeo-Christian denominations.

As Amanda points out, this is bogus.

Nothing in the First Amendment says anything about the protecting the right to practice only Judeo-Christian religions; nothing in the First-Amendment says the state will only be responsible for endorsing or not endorsing (if it gets into the business of endorsing, which, Good Heavens, it ought not to be in the first place) only Judeo-Christian religions.

And, Chesterfield County guys? This is exactly why you don't go putting prayers into your meetings, your classrooms, your state-sponsered events of any kind. What do you think we liberals have been telling you all this time?

Not to protect the atheists and agnostics and Wiccans.

To protect you, and your delicate little Christian sensibilities, which can't bear up to sitting still and listening to a prayer to some God or Goddess who is not your own.

(Hey. How do you think some of us have felt all this time, by the way?

In Jesus Christ's name we pray. Amen.)

I'm not a racist, but...

Yikes-o-rama.

That this guy -- and some other folks, too, if you'll read the comments -- don't get what's wrong with saying, about one of your black players, "He's a good one -- there's no nigger in him!" -- it makes me choke on my coffee.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2005/05/question-of-day.html

But keep reading in the comments until you get to Patrick's comment.

Cause we got hope, people. Oh, yeah. Some of us know what's up.

Feminists & Men

Amanda over at Pandagon has an excellent post on Feminists and man-hating.

http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/05/man-hating.html#more

It's a standard strawman slander of those "traditional women" Wingers: you hear it from Rush and Dr. Laura and on the Far-Right Christian blogs all the time. (Have a look at this one for a typical strawman picture of how good Christian women paint feminists:

http://www.beverlylahayeinstitute.org/articledisplay.asp?id=3350&department=BLI&categoryid=femfacts)

I certainly heard it from my Winger students: Feminists hate men. Liberal women hate men. Lesbians hate men. Once I came out as a feminist to my Mormon students, back in Idaho, it was the talk of the campus -- not because of anything I had said, but just because of my admitting to feminism. "Dr. Jennings? Yeah, she hates men." All my women students used to defend me: "She does not! She's married!"

Because if I was married, then obviously...hell, I don't know.

But Dr. Laura claims feminists hate men? When she publishes that book on the Care and Feeding of Husbands that tells women men are "simple" and need only two things: sex and sandwiches, and that women should use sex and food to manipulate men into giving them everything they need?

Compare that to how the women over at Pandagon see the men in their lives, and tell me who actually disdains and belittles men.

Or, better yet, go borrow a copy of Amanda Bright@Home -- don't buy it, don't given Danielle Crittenden the money -- and have a look at the men in her book.

She hates her husband because he can't earn enough money for her to have a big house like her rich friends.

(He's also a loser because he can't start a fire as well as the rich Texas guy. Who she hates because he's committing adultery. So he's a sinner. But he does have good manners. Unlike her loser husband.)

She hates the stay-at-home dad because only a wimp and a loser would stay at home with his kids, unless he's a woman, because all women should stay home with their kids, because it's the right thing to do. And all males should be out earning $400,000 a year so their wives can have huge houses on 40 acres and face-lifts whenever they wants them, and still plot behind hubby's back to squirrel away money for the inevitable day when he will have an affair with a 25 year old, because that's what men are, they're only interested in fucking and sandwiches, so better plan ahead.

(May I mention here that I know, personally, two fathers who have stayed home with their kids, and one of them is, in fact, mr. delagar and both of them think it's hilarious that anyone would think a wimp could handle staying home with a kid, also mr. delagar would like me to add he has medical proof that he has the highest sperm count in the tristate area*, so Ms. Crittenden can wank the hell off.)

Of course, she hates all the woman too. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe conservatives are just hateful. I was reading a conservative blog the other night that was arguing that South Park was actually a conservative TV show, and its main argument was that SP must be conservative because it hated liberals.

So apparently conservatives define themselves wholly and entirely through the things they hate.

Which explains a lot about them, I guess.

*discovered when we were undergoing fertility counseling to find out why I wasn't getting pregnant, after the miscarriage and previous to the kid. (Endometriosis, as it turned out.) mr delagar was very impressed with his numbers, and still finds ways to work them into conversations. "Oh, by the way..." He's much more impressed with these numbers than with his (equally impressive) SAT scores.

I read an article in the Chronicle today, BTW, that claims we always remember our SAT scores, no matter how long ago we took the SAT. I asked mr. delagar what his were and he rattled the number right off. I, of course, didn't take the SAT (Jefferson Parish public school system again -- no one bothered to tell us we ought to, no one mentioned such things as the SATs existed, it was a charming school system) so I don't have my own reference point, but is this so?

I did take the ACT, and the GRE, later, both the regular and the Lit GRE, and I couldn't tell you what I made any of those tests with a gun to my head.

FOF Dittoheads Say What?

So I’m watching Supernanny with the kid, as is our wont of a Monday evening – the kid loves Supernanny, mainly because the kids that the Supernanny shows up to reform are just so appalling, and I like hanging out with the kid, so it’s become our weekly thing to do, watch Supernanny together (mr. delagar doesn’t get it, I’m afraid).

Anyway, we’re watching Supernanny, and the kids this week are not so bad, it’s the parents who are appalling, a prime example of people who really ought not to have had children – Mom obviously isn’t exactly interested in children, and he, while he is, isn’t really sharp enough to figure out how to handle her obduracy.

My advice would have been for them to invest in a good all-day pre-school, or, barring that, an excellent full-time baby-sitter, but Supernanny always visits the sort of people who have bought into Dr. Laura’s manta that it’s e-e-e-evil to send your kids to preschool or use daycare. When Supernanny suggested a few weeks ago to the control-freak mama with the two sets of twins under the age of four that, ah, she might want to bring in some sort of mother’s helper, mama had a quietly rigid fit. They were her kids and she was going to raise them—or if she couldn’t, because she was at work, then by God her husband was. Never mind what her strictures were doing to those kids, nope, that was the rule and her family was going to follow it.

Oddly enough, it’s always this sort of family, with these sorts of strictures, that ends up needing Supernanny’s help.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. So we’re watching Supernanny nearly get defeated by Mom’s utter lack of interest in Supernanny’s methods, and I’m thinking, hmm, clinical depression or just low IQ? and suddenly this commercial appears – a well-done, very cute commercial – the kid loved it – these adorable kids telling their parents to watch out, they’re going to be hard to handle, the parents need to get some help, learn how to handle them, pronto! There’s the inevitable line about throwing a tantrum in the supermarket. At the end? It’s an advertisement for Focus on the Family.

Yep, James Dobson’s organization.

Needless to say, I’m bemused. A little appalled.

“I like that commercial,” the kid says with delight.

“You wouldn’t like the organization,” I say.

“Why? Why not? Why wouldn’t I?”

“Never mind,” I said, which of course never works.

“No! Tell me! Why?”

Obviously I should have beaten her for disobeying me, beaten her until she cried with true submission and then thanked me for the beating and then apologized for challenging my authority, as Mr. Dobson advises, because otherwise she will grow up with the seeds of rebellion in her heart.

Instead, I explained briefly that Focus on the Family was an Far-Right Christian organization that believed in beating children to make them act right, and that it was a mystery to me why they were advertising during a show like Supernanny.

Back to the show, where there was one scene with Dad smack his kid on the hand, and Jo looking shocked at this action, and this action, BTW, having no good effect on the kid. Jo, in the end, managed to teach the parents something about effective discipline (which of course does not involve smacking or beating your children) and about effective parenting (which is as important as effective discipline) and things got somewhat better in this particular dysfunctional household – but I still say Mom needs to put that three year old in a nice Montessori pre-school. The three-year-old would be happier, she would be happier, and what exactly would be wrong with it?

Then the next day, I went to the FOF website, to see if I could get a clue about what James Dobson was up to, and found a few mentions of the ads, and, interestingly, a disclaimer, saying that “just because” FOF was advertising on the show Supernanny did not mean that FOF “endorsed” the Supernanny’s methods.

Heh. You can see what this means. FOF Dittoheads are writing James anxious and/or pissy emails about the ads.

And why? Because not only does Supernanny go against everything they believe, she disproves their favorite false dilemma.

Go read the reviews of Dobson’s hideous book on Amazon.com, Dare to Discipline. The negative ones are revealing, but the positive ones even more so – nearly every positive one says the same thing: “You can choose between out-of-control children or spanking – it’s up to you!”

Right. Because those are our only two options.

Oh, wait. They aren’t. And every single Monday night, at 10 Eastern time, Supernanny demonstrates otherwise.

She takes hideously out-of-control children, and without one single smack, without even raising her voice (in fact, that is her point, that one should not raise one’s voice, that one should not behave violently toward children in any way) she turns those children into well-behaved, happy kids, mainly by (hey, imagine this) working on their parents.

Not to mention Supernanny inhabits a secular universe. No praying. No church. No invoking Jesus as we whip the daylights out of six-year-olds for the high crime of looking moody as they obey their father. And yet – cheerful, happy, well-behaved kids by the time Jo Frost walks out the door.

This must disturb FOF dittoheads to no end.

(See DEDspace and Digby for more on this:

http://dedspace.blogspot.com/

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/)

Ai

Dennis Prager, in his insightful new column, claims that people of the faith have actual morality, because they know God exists, so they check their morality against God and his text, see, and can figure out what's wrong and right -- unlike us evil secular humanists, who just use our common sense to figure out what's wrong and right.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20050503.shtml

Here's an example of one of Dennis's religious boys in action, checking with God before he does what's right:

Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.

Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp

(Via Atrios: http://atrios.blogspot.com/)

Time Travelers Convention

Spread the word.

I'd do it, but (I hate to admit this) I'm weak on geography and don't actually know the latitude/longitude of MIT. (I was educated in Jefferson Parish, what do you want from me? Y'all are lucky I can read and write -- and, BTW, no thanks to JP that I can. They had nothing to do with that.)

Anyway, MIT is holding a Time Travelers' Convention, and everyone from the future as well as the present is welcome to attend, but we in the present are meant to spread the word so that them in the future can find out about it:

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.
You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

http://web.mit.edu/adorai//timetraveler/

So get busy, y'hear?

Media Bias! Media Bias!

Mona Charen takes offense at all those folk who reacted as might be expected to the late news about abstinence-only programs not actually, well, working -- and, as might be expected, she claims they do so work, it's just that that lousy liberal media refuses to reported on all the many millions of studies that prove they work.

Well, okay. One study:

Yet the results of a new study showing that abstinence programs do work to reduce sexual behavior get only two hits on Nexis -- one a UPI story and the other a PR Newswire item. So much for the idea that the media are no longer dominated by liberals.

Then we read a little further into her column, and we find out that it's one program, and it's having some success in keeping some girls off some drugs and (maybe -- because remember this is self-reported, by those same 13 year old girls) sex until they get to be 13 years old.

Wow, Mona! I'm convinced!

[T]he Journal of Adolescent and Family Health has just published a carefully crafted study of the Best Friends program and found that it does, in fact, deliver on its promise -- to promote abstinence from sex, drugs and alcohol among its school-age participants.

[snip]

Best Friends girls do not sign pledges, but do commit to abstinence through high school graduation.

The results of the program have been dramatic. Compared with District of Columbia girls of comparable age, income, race and family structure examined in the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS), Best Friends girls were eight times less likely than others to use drugs. They were six times less likely than YRBS girls to engage in premarital sex. Among eighth-graders, 65.6 percent of Best Friends girls abstained from alcohol, compared to only 37.3 percent of YRBS youngsters.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20050429.shtml

And what you want to notice is missing from that list? How many of these Best Friend 13 year olds actually did abstain from sex -- or rather, actually did claim they were abstaining from sex.

Yep, Mona. This stuff works. I believe you.

But you know what? Just the same? I'd like my kid taught abstinence-plus sex ed. If you don't mind. And just in case. Same way I'd like her using seat belts in cars, even though I'm sure she won't be driving drunk, or speeding, or any of that stuff, because I know she promised me she wouldn't.

Because I'm not an idiot, that's why.

Woolly Blog

Another post is up from Riverbend:

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

About the car bombs going off in Baghdad, mainly, but she does have this lovely paragraph about the carpets:

We have ordinary Persian rugs (which we suspect aren't really Persian at all). They aren't expensive or even particularly impressive, but they give the living room that Eastern look many Iraqi houses seem to have- no matter how Western the furniture is. The patterns and colors are repeated all over the rugs in a sort of symmetrical fashion. If you really focus on them though, you can often see a story being told by the flowers, geometrical shapes and sometimes birds or butterflies. When we were younger, E. and I would sit and stare at them, trying to 'read' the colors and designs- Having them on the ground is almost like having a woolly blog for the floor

Comparative Lit

We made our bimonthly trip up the mountain to Fayetteville this past Friday, to visit the public library there.

http://www.faylib.org/

http://www.faylib.org/new_library/floor_plans.asp

This is the finest public library I have been in, next to the one in Charlotte, North Carolina, of course, which wins, hands down – though I have to admit my experience with public libraries is limited. We’ve always lived in small university towns where the money for public libraries was not immense.

Charlotte had a blissful public library system. It was the only thing I liked about Charlotte, that public library system. We could each take out 99 items apiece on our library cards, and frequently did; we could go online and ask the library to buy things, and the library would, and then would put those things on hold for us, and send them to our branch library, and notify us when they had arrived – so pretty much any book or CD or movie I wanted? The library would fetch for me. It was paradise.

But alas. The university I worked for, whose name shall remain nameless, sucked royally – mainly because the administration seemed determined to run it into the ground – and so I voted with my feet, even if it did mean moving to Arkansas, and took this job, a much better job, in a town with a library which, frankly, even though the building is very pretty to look at, is not much:

http://www.fspl.lib.ar.us/

By “not much” I mean “sadly lacking in a wide variety of books from this century.” This is not the fault of the librarians – I am great friends with one of the main librarians, who is the kid’s stand-in grandmother, since her actual grandmother lives six hundred miles away.

It is the fault of the voters of Fort Smith, who are not interested in funding the library. There was a vote a few years back, to add a tenth of a cent to the local sales tax, so we could buy some books to put in this library, but it was voted down. What for? demanded the voters. They’s already got lots of books in that there library. Read the one you got, why don’t you? If people wants more, let’em go buy they own. I got enough trouble, buying gas for my Hummer!

Anyway, back to our trip to Fayetteville. This is a beautiful library, though not on the order of our beloved Charlotte Public Library, and we get to use it for free because mr. delagar is a graduate student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville – otherwise we’d have to pay $25.00 a year, which we would, mind you. It would be worth it.

ANYWAY.

We went up there Saturday and got piles of books. The kid got dragon books and Hank the Cowdog books. The kid is extremely into Hank the Cowdog. (I’m deeply amused by the review on Amazon.com that disapproves of Hank because he doesn’t use standard grammar. Hello! He’s a cowdog!)

I got, among other things, Daddy Longlegs, by Jean Webster, and Amanda Bright@Home, by Danielle Crittenden, neither of which I had ever read. The former was written in 1912 by a woman of charm and talent; the latter in 2003, by, well, a polemicist of neither, I fear.

Daddy Longlegs I ripped through in an afternoon. It’s an epistolary novel, which is mainly why I read it – my current novel, the one I’m attempting to market, the one I just won the Arkansas Individual Artists Award for, is an epistolary novel. (I don’t suppose anyone out there knows an agent who will represent an epistolary novel? I keep getting agents on the hook who say they love my writing, they love the idea for my novel, send fifty pages, I send 50 pages, they whiz it back so fast the mailbox spins, because they don’t represent epistolary novels.)

Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yes. Daddy Longlegs, published in 1912, is charming and clever and literate. It is full of actual characters and actual dialog that actual people might speak.

It also – in 1912 – has this bit in it:

“I have a new unbreakable rule: never, never to study at night….instead I just read plain books – I have to, you know, because there are eighteen blank years behind me [our heroine was raised in an orphanage]. You wouldn’t believe, Daddy, what n abyss of ignorance my mind is…the things most girls with a properly assort family and home and friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of. For example:

I never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or Cinderella…a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn’t know Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn’t know that people used to be monkeys or that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn’t know that R.L.S. stood for Robert Louis Stevenson or that George Eliot was a lady.”

She’s also a feminist, budding, wistful about the fact that even after she turns 21 and has a university degree she can’t vote; and, even though this is yet another Pygmalion tale, it is a mixed Pygmalion tale: Judy renames herself, is determined to support herself after marriage, to have a career of her own, and, during the course of the book, determinedly though civilly breaks away from the authority of “Daddy,” the patriarch who is the Pygmalion is question.

More importantly, this is an actual book: it has a reasonable plot and reads like someone who has seen actual humans and paid attention to them wrote it.

As opposed to Amanda Bright@Home, about which, ai.

Danielle Crittenden is, I guess, trying to make some sort of point about how evil feminists are. I guess. That’s the only thing I can suppose would explain this horrible scrawl of a book.

The main character is meant to be a liberal. But of course Danielle has never seen any liberals that she actually paid attention to – only straw men liberals in the columns of NRO – so she doesn’t actually know how one would act. So her liberal is very patchy and fuzzy and keeps shorting out and turning into a Far-Right Republican at odd moments, which is sort of amusing, in a tedious kind of a way.

Of course, all of her characters are meant to be liberals (I think – it’s hard to tell, because frankly the book isn’t very well done): she writes about a rich preschool and all the parents of the kids who attend it, and I’m thinking these are meant to be liberal parents, since they endorse things like a ban on peanuts, which, as we know, is something only silly liberal parents would do. (Amanda’s son gets suspended for bringing a peanut cookie to school, despite his extensive indoctrination against peanuts, beginning in preschool with an indoctrination camp entitled Just Say No to Nuts – Good God, I am thinking at this point in the book, who does this woman think she is fooling? She has obviously never been outside her Republican Kamp in her LIFE.)

And of course every feminist woman in the book is EVIL, including Amanda’s unnatural and wicked mother who (a) doesn’t teach her daughter a thing about housecleaning (the bitch! And it’s so hard to learn – housecleaning – you know – so what’s Amanda supposed to do, if her mommy never taught her? I mean, it’s not like she can learn on her own, can she? Not little Amanda! And (b) has this exchange when Amanda says she’s going to stay home with her kids:

Amanda: But isn’t feminism supposed to be about choice, Mom?
Mom: It is. Just not about this choice!

Uh-huh. Sure. That’s what a feminist would say.
In a Republican’s wet-dream, she would.

And all the (I guess they’re supposed to be) rich liberal mothers of the kids in the preschool do nothing but sit around planning their next face-lifts while their nannies take care of their kids and not letting their boys play with guns, so that we’ll never have soldiers to defend our country, rats, so the terrorists will WIN, and not letting their kids saying Indian (No, you’re a Native American princess, darling!), and drinking and wow, this sounds exactly like every liberal party I have ever been to – NOT.

Such a lame book this is, I can’t begin to describe it.

How we have lost so much ground since 1912, that’s what I would like to know.