“Miss” is back, ready to serve up a juicy tart of academic hijinks, scandals, and misadventures…with a whipped topping of political intrigue, hackery and hypocrisy.
Get out your knives and forks and dig in!
Category Archives for Single Women
Mills College President Janet Holmgren Dogged by Controversy
One of the perks of working for a college president is that occasionally you get to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. I, for example, once attended a Rose Garden swearing-in ceremony and met President Clinton, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan and General Colin Powell. It was thrilling. Another time I sat inches away from Stevie Wonder as he belted out his greatest hits to a private audience of 100 or so. It was a toe-tapping good time.
Of course, such moments happen but once in a great while, and a lot of mundane stuff fills the in-between times. If you have the good luck, or misfortune, to serve as the president’s executive assistant, in addition to the mundane you perform a dizzying variety of “other duties as assigned.” This can mean picking up presidential offspring at daycare, folding laundry, and taking trips to the car wash–all tasks assorted EA’s, all of the PhD’s, tell me they have undertaken.
Being an executive assistant does not require a doctoral degree (although it might help), but it does demand that the amanuensis have a high degree of stamina. The president I worked for once asked me to leap out of his car at a tollbooth on the New Jersey Turnpike in order to retrieve his briefcase from the trunk, an act for which foolhardiness, or a death wish, as opposed to stamina, was requisite, I suppose. One executive assistant I knew managed to combine foolhardiness with stamina in pursuit of her extra duties. She and the president’s spouse took two-hour liquid lunch breaks, imbibing various spirits to fuel their gossip about college employees. As you can imagine, this career move earned the EA great respect from her colleagues. And a big raise from her boss. Go figure.
Decisions, decisions...what's for lunch?
These days former Executive Assistant to the President Pamela Reid, late in service to retiring Mills College President Janet Holmgren, has a lot of time on her hands to figure out how she lost her job. Poor Pamela. One hot August day last summer her career in higher education went to the dogs. Specifically, to President Holmgren’s dogs, a pack that included Chihuahua-terrier mix Holly. Holly sank her dainty fangs into a toothsome bit of Pam’s left ankle as the EA was attempting to ready the president’s house for a fund-raising event. California law makes no bones about it: victims of snack-happy canines are to report the bite to animal control; Pamela did and that’s when things turned vicious.
Holly welcomes visitors to the president's house.
According to her wrongful-termination suit, filed in Alameda County Court, after she reported the injury, Ms. Reid soon went from top dog on the president’s staff to permanently ensconced resident in the dog house. Says Ms. Reid, “I got nasty-grams.” The torment continued for five months, until Ms. Reid was “laid-off.”
You know as well as I that at age 62, Pamela Reid will have a hard time finding a new job. In today’s market, not many employers will give an old dog even the opportunity to learn new tricks, so it’ll probably be a long time before Pam lands a new position, a dog’s age I would estimate. Her suit may be “meritless,” as the college of course claims, but I can understand her dogged pursuit for justice. She should know, though, that looking for compassion from a college president is really, really barking up the wrong tree.
Ms. Reid searches in vain to be treated fairly.
A “Chronicle of Higher Education” Expose! Kinky Sex and the English (of course) Professor!
I could retell the story of Associate Professor Lisa Chavez, the English Department’s resident dominatrix at the University of New Mexico. It’s the tale of a poor creative writing teacher who, post-divorce, turns to phone sex to raise quick cash for the mortgage payment. Phone sex soon turns to sadomasochistic photo shoots with lowly graduate students.
The story reaches its crisis when the departmental chair discovers how Professor Chavez aka Mistress Jade, “a stern teacher ready to punish unruly students,” has been supplementing her niggardly salary. When confronted with her unseemly behavior, the professor/mistress had a ready defense: DISCRIMINATION! You are discriminating against me because I am Hispanic! Because I am bixsexual!
But if I told you this story, you might think I was embellishing a boring and predictable tale of intra-departmental warfare of the kind English Departments everywhere have made their signature strife. So I am urging you to go to the source and read Chronicle yourself. You won’t be sorry you did.
And when we're done conjugating verbs, we can....
Hey Faculty! Your Priorities Need Alignment!
In June I wrote a post about Alexander Kemos, who faked his resume, landed a highly remunerative job at Texas A&M, rose quickly to an even more remunerative position, cozied up to the university president, got caught in his lies and was sent packing.
Now comes word that another senior official at A&M has lost his lucrative perch on the administrative ladder, although this time the malfeasance seems to be institutional rather than personal. Or maybe it is personal, because Robert Hash was relieved of his duties as vice dean of the medical school—and demoted to an untenured faculty position—because “he had personality differences with other administrators,” according to A&M mouthpiece/general counsel Andrew Strong.
Of course, if you ask ex-Dean Hash you get another story, one of ethics violations, real estate chicanery, sweetheart deals, and institutional retaliation for whistle-blowing. You can read all about it in the Austin, Texas statesman.com, then decide for yourself if “personality differences” constitutes a demote-able offense. You might even be moved to ask yourself if, in academic workplaces, “personality differences” play a role in getting the brass ring, tenure, the job for life. Or you can simply enjoy the farce of a lawyer saying something supremely stupid.
Dr. Hash got demoted when he wondered if the cost per-square-foot was too high.
I am interested in this all-too-familiar tale because of its similarities to what happened recently at Washburn University. There is a key difference between the two sagas, however, one well worth a few moments’ contemplation. The Washburn whistleblowers, women, were fired outright; ex-Dean Hash, a man, was demoted. For those of you out there who like to think of colleges and universities as bastions of all things enlightened, wake up and smell the sexism. When something ugly happens on a campus, you can bet the farm that punishment will be meted out along gender lines reminiscent of those found in Sharia law.
A long-time colleague of mine, a woman I respect as highly for her professional expertise as I do for her warmth and compassion, was recently given her walking papers at a small liberal arts college located in Collegetown USA. Her “supervisor”—a faculty member put in charge of my colleague’s non-academic division—let her go after subjecting her to a year of petty humiliations.
Since this scenario—a new male boss enters the picture and it’s bye-bye women of a certain age—has been replayed ad nauseum in the last few years at Liberal Arts College USA, my former colleague was not surprised by her dismissal. She, like every other member of the staff and administration, served at the pleasure of the trustees, so unemployment lurks around every corner ready to getcha at a moment’s notice.
But what, you might wonder, had this particular administrator done to incur the trustees’ displeasure? According to her boss, she was “not in alignment” with her fellow administrators. Keep in mind that this is a liberal arts institution, not a school of chiropractic, so her “alignment,” or lack thereof, should not have been an issue at all. But, just like a personality difference, a difference of alignment can be fatal when the stakes are every man for himself.
And that’s pretty much how it is these days at LAC USA: every man for himself. Women are useful so long as their alignments conform to the patriarchy’s specifications, but female administrators are about as welcome on campus as full-need students with C- averages and no claims to victimhood. As a former administrator and a woman still, I scratch my head over how so sorry a situation has come to pass.
If we can't adjust her alignment, she'll be the next to go!
Actually, I don’t. I know exactly why it happened. When former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis ran for president, he evoked what he called an old Greek proverb to describe the Reagan-Bush administration. Fish, the governor said, rot from the head first. Not a pretty image, but a compelling one and applicable today at LCA USA.
The official presidential portrait
The college has been adrift for five years now, when a new president arrived and promptly announced that he had been hired to “clean up the mistakes of the past.” And to his credit, that is what he did. Noticing that the president had to use the same toilet as the rest of the male administrators on his floor, he acted decisively: the very first bricks-and-mortar project he “tasked” the buildings and grounds department with was the installation of a bathroom, complete with shower, for his personal use. After that, construction and renovation pretty much stalled on campus, but one terrible sin of the past had been redressed. The next wrong the president righted was to cut down on the amount of driving that he did. This was not so much a go-green gesture as it was long-overdue recognition that it was absurd to expect a college president would not have a car and driver at his disposal.
The Throne Room: A President's Enduring Legacy
Having addressed his two most pressing priorities first, the president then turned to the meat-and-potatoes of college life, the mission and future of the campus. He penned a think-piece intended to stimulate the faculty and the board to begin strategic planning for the years ahead. The LCA USA, he wrote, needs to “reinvent liberal arts education,” “educate students for a global economy,” “find away to become sustainable.” Are you yawning yet? This tattered list of been-there, done-that shibboleths has floated around every college campus for decades—the only difference being some of those colleges years ago turned their rhetoric into action.
But the president’s approach to planning was two-pronged. For the board he wrote an annual retrospective chronicling his achievements of the past year and his goals for the coming academic year, thus guaranteeing that LCA USA would have an event horizon no further out than the president’s next evaluation and compensation review.
Such an iteration of incremental enhancements year-to-year can accrete to overall improvements in the college. The substitution of short-term projects for long-term aspirations and directions is worse than no planning at all, however, for it presents a convincing illusion that the long-term interests of the college are being served. Here we are five years later still waiting for a strategic planning process to begin.
In the interim, though, the president has continued his bold correction of the “mistakes of the past”: nary a woman in charge of, well, anything on campus five years ago is still present and accounted for on payday. My colleague is simply the most recent in a long line of female former LCA employees joining the queue at the unemployment office. Men who didn’t measure up were given different titles and new offices.
But let’s hold our noses and revisit Governor Dukakis’s decaying flounder. The president also worked his mojo on the LCA USA board of trustees, once a national model of diversity with a heady mix of men and women, blacks and whites, young and old. As a trustee retired (or resigned), chances are if he were a man he was replaced by a man and if she were a woman she was replaced by a man. The president convinced the board that it needed a shake-up, so a game of musical chairs began whereby the heads of various committees were replaced. When the music stopped and the chairs were filled, guess what? With one lone exception, all of the women who had led committees had been relieved of their duties so that a man could take their place. They don’t call them “chairmen” for nothing, after all, and with the men back where they belong—in charge—the president could finally say his board was in alignment with the as-yet unspecified and unplanned-for future goals of the college. Oh, happy day.
The president and his dream team study the campus map to root out the last of the female administrators. (Scene recreated using actors.)
My colleague should wear her premature retirement as a badge of honor. She has joined the ranks of some impressive professionals. More than their ouster, these women share something else: all held non-faculty positions. Their commitment to the college, their contributions, their wisdom all counted for naught, and there was no safety net of tenure to protect them from the caprices of a misogynist president.
And all the while, the faculty stands by and enjoys the show. So sad. By their failure to act, the faculty will get the administrators they deserve. And then it really will be too late.
Al and Tipper Call it Quits: Single Ladies Clear Your Calendars!
Calling Maureen Dowd! Calling Maureen Dowd! A new age-appropriate man is on the meet ‘n mingle scene. No, I am not talking about the dreamy Karl Rove, who not too long ago divorced his wife. Nor the new-to-the-secondary-market heartthrob SC Governor Mark Sanford. Rumor has it he’s already spoken for, and by an insultingly younger woman, no less. No, I mean the double dreamy Al Gore. Today Al and Tipper, some forty years wed, have announced, via email, their separation.
As a single person it always perplexes me when old marrieds call it quits. Perhaps because I do not understand the marital relationship in the first place, it’s even harder for me to apprehend why couples who literally have seen each other’s dirty underwear, maybe even sniffed it too, would bother with the chaos divorce brings to their private lives and the lives of the people who love them. Ah well, not mine to wonder why.
What I do wonder is how Al will fill out his Match.com and eHarmony.com profiles. Well, actually, first I wonder what he won’t put there. Will he shave off a few years to appeal to, ahem, a broader demographic? Will he shave off a few pounds to attract more buff hotties? Will he discard recent photos posting instead those of his senatorial days to back up his claims? I can’t wait to find out.
Where is she? Where IS Miss Right?
Or maybe he’ll try a different dating site, perhaps PlanetEarthSingles.com, which is
Created by environmentalists, for environmentalists! This is a singles dating site designed for environmentally conscious, “green singles” to meet. It is much easier to be in a relationship with someone who recycles, conserves fuel and generally lives a “green lifestyle” that is mindful of our limited resources. Our members tend to be “conscious” in general and value a holistic, healthy lifestyle, buying locally grown, organic food (many are vegetarians and vegans), gardening, spiritual growth, conservation, sustainability, alternative power and doing what they can to help “cool the planet”. Our goal is to provide you with a conducive environment where you can meet like-minded / like-hearted people and, ideally, meet that ONE, special someone to share your life with!
Should Al decide to enter the green scene, he’ll be able to search national and international data bases. That international info will come in handy as he jets from one global hot spot to another. But suppose he meets that someone special? Will he then have yet another moral dilemma to struggle with: What if sparks fly? What if unbridled passions ignite a flame that refuses to be extinguished? What if the friction of two bodies joined in urgent congress heats up to the point that all thoughts of off-setting carbons fly out the window? All that steamy romance can’t possibly be good for a rapidly warming planet.
Hey, Al: Check out that can!
It’s too much to ask, I think, to expect Al to fly solo for the rest of his life just in order to prevent climate change. Especially when PlanetEarthSingles.com promises he can meet recycling women who are “’conscious.’” (And people tell me my standards are too high!)
If I were Al, I’d forget about the dating sites and remain true to the planet-lover’s creed: reduce, reuse, recycle. Think, Al. Think about your past. Miss Right is there, waiting patiently. Go on. Do it. Give Ali McGraw a call.
Where do I begin?
With Friends Like These: Edley and Dowd Throw Kagan Under the Bus
What a brutal week Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has had. In a Washington Post op-ed Berkeley Dean Christopher Edley uses her to front an incoherent apologia on behalf of academic “elites.” Dean Edley’s essay, a gloating reminder of just how much power certain admissions officers wield, does nothing to enhance Miss Kagan’s chances for confirmation.
Dean Edley: Which one should I choose to keep out the smelly populists?
Then New York Times spinster Maureen Dowd weighs in with a column superficially taking critics to task for their curiosity about Miss Kagan’s marital status. Miss Dowd’s column is in reality a thinly veiled screed of self-loathing unmarried women everywhere would do well to avoid.
With friends like these, Miss Kagan must be thinking, who needs Republicans?
“With friends like these” is something single women everywhere wonder about all the time.
The thesis of Miss Dowd’s column is that women of a certain age undergo a transition from “single” (juicy and available) to “unmarried,” (still available, but juiceless) and Elena Kagan, at age 50, has made such a transition. If this sounds suspiciously like the “change of life” to you, then you are on to Miss Dowd’s hideously ageist indictment of her own gender, which renders an entire sex useless after its menses cease. Miss Dowd is not simply characterizing some unknown troglodyte’s perception of single women, she is describing her own.
“For some reason, Kagan’s depressing narrative,” Miss Dowd opines, “is even more depressing because it’s cast in the past tense, as if, at 50, Kagan has resigned herself to a cloistered, asexual existence ruling in cases that touch on the private lives of all Americans.” Who, besides Maureen Dowd, has decided that the accomplished Elena Kagan’s narrative is “depressing”?
Lest any reader doubt that Miss Dowd is completely in agreement with the bigoted view of single women she purports to decry, take another look at her final paragraph:
Why is there this underlying assumption that Kagan has missed the boat? Why couldn’t she be eager to come to Washington to check out the Obama-era geek-chic bachelors, maybe get set up on a date by Michelle Obama, maybe host some single ladies fiestas with Sonia Sotomayor, maybe even sign up for JDate with a new and improved job status?
In other words, Miss Dowd’s cure for the “unmarried” woman: find a man, anyone will do. We’ve come long way, haven’t we baby?
Look, Maureen, it's a MAN!
Even the most enlightened among us think that spinsterhood is condition that requires a cure. I ran across this gem in today’s Inside Higher Education. Here are the opening lines from the “Mama PhD” blog, a regular feature of IHE:
Once, years ago, I found myself at a party talking about what it would mean to divide by zero. (No wonder I was terminally single at the time!)
Fantastically, the post goes on to congratulate several about-to-be alumnae, all seniors at Ursuline College, a Catholic institution for women. The author of the blog, Rosemarie Emanuele, is a faculty member at Ursuline, and she delivers the predictable pre-Commencement palaver about the wonderful new lives these women are about to discover. Ursuline is an interesting place. Its educational philosophy, in part, commends the college to help “students achieve their educational and career goals by emphasizing the whole person.” Too bad Professor Emanuele believes the only “whole” people are the married ones, in that the unattached have a “terminal”—her word, not mine—condition and presumably won’t be around long enough to achieve their goals.
I hope I’m around long enough to see the end of this socially acceptable bigotry, the glorious day when women are judged not by what’s on the third finger of their left hand, but by…well…just about anything else would be an improvement.
More “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Hypocrisy: Why Elena Kagan Should Tell All…even if she has nothing to tell and it’s none of our business anyway…
I wish Supreme Court Justice-nominee Elena Kagan all the best, just as I do any woman being considered for a tough, important job. I even feel a passing kind of kinship with her, perhaps because she is from New England and the academy and she’s unmarried. Full disclosure: I’m pudgy, too.
But you know what? I also know if I met her, I wouldn’t like her. Because she represents the very worst of academic-lefty do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do kind of double standard. It’s OK for Miss Kagan to keep the details of her private life out of the limelight. Fine. Great. Personally I think she probably doesn’t have time to have much of a private life. But it’s not OK, then, for her to have banned ROTC recruiting from Harvard Law School, when she was dean, because of the persistence of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” President Clinton’s brilliant, Solomonesque solution to keeping homosexuals in the armed services.
Miss Kagan can keep her mouth shut to land the job of her dreams, but she does not accord G.I. Joe or Swabby Sue the same privilege. Score one for the hypocrites.
Miss Kagan has made this her motto. How times change!
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is one of the precious few policies of President Clinton that I respect. Indeed, my respect for the policy, and the president’s wisdom in promulgating it, has only deepened. Here’s why: “don’t ask, don’t tell” actually preserves the recruits’ privacy, in exactly the same way that Miss Kagan has so carefully preserved hers.
In practical terms, what I believe this policy acknowledges–and this is why it is so brilliant–is how we behave in groups and as individuals. Imagine a barracks’ full of green recruits. Some from the inner city, some from the rust belt, some off the farm. Their degrees of sophistication and of exposure to a world wider than ten city blocks or the north forty are as varied as their skin tones. What’s job one with this untested mass of muscle and testosterone? Assessing then building individual fitness, physically, mentally, and, in the sense of group cohesiveness, socially. Job one point two? Cementing that group cohesiveness, so that this company of men can, in times of duress, think and act as one. These early days of making a fighting force out of young and ignorant strangers are really hard: why make them more difficult by introducing the exotic element that even unto today homosexuality represents? Let group-think prevail, until the group is forged and the individual bonds of its member are strong. At that point, “don’t ask, don’t tell” ceases to matter, because that gay guy over there has become your point man, and you’ve learned he’s a tough fighter and a good poker player. You’ve learned something about diversity that I assure you no college kid attending LGBTQ workshops would recognize if he/she/te fell over it.
Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t change the policy. Do call Elena Kagan on her hypocrisy.
On a different subject entirely: Yes. As a single straight woman of a certain age, it annoys the heck out of me that it’s a common assumption that spinsters are lesbians. Yes. Elena Kagan is entitled to her privacy. But not at the expense of her intellectual honesty.
When Bad Proms Happen to Bad People: Constance McMillen, Yet Again
There ought to be a word that describes the avalanche of emotions that runs rampant through the mind when something nasty happens to someone for whom your opinion is low. I admit that Constance (“Is my bow tie straight?”) McMillen possesses many of the traits I find unattractive in a person. If press accounts and television appearances are to be believed, Miss McMillen is selfish and self-centered, publicity-seeking, and scorched-earth in her approach to interpersonal discord. If you read her MySpace blog, you learn that she is also foul mouthed and a lot of other things not mentioned in the steady stream of ACLU press releases issued on her behalf.
So it was puzzling indeed that yesterday I found myself feeling great sympathy for Constance McMillen. It seems that a few weeks ago—on April 2, the day the infamous Itawamba Agricultural High School prom was to have taken place, before Miss McMillen’s legal antics got it canceled—Miss McMillen and a ringer (due to parental wisdom, her girlfriend stayed home) entered the Fulton Country Club where the privately sponsored “alternative” prom was taking place. Or so she thought. Seven other students had the same thought, eight if you count her “date.” Although the “prom” was chaperoned by IAHS faculty, it was clear that the dancing action was elsewhere. As I understand this sad story, the “original” alternative prom was “canceled” by the parents who organized it, on the grounds that it would be a media circus. Some days before the “canceled” prom was to have taken place, however, the not-so-divine Miss M got wind of an uncanceled prom and asked a fellow student how to get a ticket. She was told the prom was taking place at the country club, so there she went and learned the answer to the age-old question, “what if you gave a prom and nobody came?”
Constance and the other guests had plenty of room to boogie.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town...
While the indignity Miss McMillen and the hapless seven experienced isn’t as terrible as what happened to Carrie at her prom, the machinations of the IAHS parents rival Dean Wormer’s putting Delta House on double-secret probation. Miss McMillen should not have sued her school. The school was within its rights to cancel the prom. The parents who pulled this stunt are complete idiots. Splendid role models they for their spawn.
Co-chairs of parents' prom committee
So of course, Miss McMillen has chosen to return to court. The ACLU Amended Complaint states that
Constance has suffered mental and emotional hardship, which has required medical attention. Constance also has been publicly humiliated and disparaged not only directly by Defendants, but also by students, parents and teachers in her community as a consequence of Defendants’ unlawful actions. Indeed, the stress and trauma of these events have required Constance to take medical leave from her classes at IAHS and has caused her to seek transfer out of the Itawamba County School District.
A plague on all their houses. If there is anything positive to say about this sorry tale and its pathetic cast of characters, it is that IAHS students have not ratcheted their animosity of Miss McMillen to the level directed at Phoebe Prince. The sticks-and-stones kind of comments directed at Miss McMillen, according to her Complaint, sound pretty mild and—dare I say it—age-appropriate for the classmates dissing her:
“We wanted a drama-free gathering to celebrate 3 great years and 1 lousy one together, and we wanted to lay low. We also wanted to do it without the main cause of the lousy.” “Heard you got the other prom canceled. Good job.” Other texts said, in words or substance, “You don’t even deserve to go to our school,” and “Are you going to ruin graduation too?” Later that day, another classmate sent a text message that said, in words or substance, “I don’t know why you come to this school because no one likes your gay ass anyways.” (from the ACLU Amended Complaint)
Too bad the actions of their dim-witted parents weren’t similarly age appropriate.
That tux idea is sounding better all the time.
Profiles in Racism: How Comments in The New York Times Reveal Their Writers’ Ugly Thoughts
Way back in the 1980’s I held a tea party. I broke out the Limoges, I tracked down watercress—no easy trick in 1985—for fancy sandwiches, and I spent hours baking the requisite tiny pastries. As it happens, the guest list was all female, friends and colleagues. The centerpiece of the menu was a lethal brew called “Fish House Punch,” which consisted of liberal but delicious amounts of bourbon, dark rum, and apricot brandy. As I recall, the punch also featured lemon juice and strong, cold tea. Like I said, it was a tea party, and take my word for it, a good time was had by all.
Call Me Miss's 1985 tea party.
One-quarter century later, having enjoyed all manner of tea in the intervening years, including formal tea with my delightful niece at the old Ritz in Boston and the even older Claridges in London, I fear that this fusty, anachronistic excuse to eat smoked salmon and quaff Champagne in the afternoon is in clear and present danger of being forever tarnished by the co-opting of “tea party” by latter-day grassroots activists.
I know that today’s partying Salada drinkers borrowed their moniker not from the Ritz’s menu, but from our Patriot forbearers in the mean streets of Boston. Even as I agree with the core principles of the Tea Partiers (fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, free markets), though, I cannot warm to this movement.
So I eagerly clicked on “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated,” in today’s New York Times to educate myself and perhaps pinpoint the reasons for my wariness. It didn’t tell me much that I couldn’t figure out from watching news video of a Tea Party demonstration: men and women generally 45 and up; usually but certainly nowhere near always white; relatively financially OK, judging by their apparel; and moderate to conservative in their outlook, again using sartorial guidelines. But the Times also included this point of comparison between Tea Partiers and everybody else: the partiers are far more likely to have attended college, graduated from college, and gone on to post-graduate study. So much for stereotypes.
What a typical tea party member looks like, according to the NYT.
The Times’ poll did not shed any light on my take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward the Tea Party, so to find an answer I dug deeper into the article and plumbed the depths of the 1300+ comments the poll received. And while what I found still did not resolve my inner conflict, it did surface the pulsating veins of inchoate logic and racial enmity that flow through readers’ disturbingly similar remarks.
For those of you unfamiliar with readers’ comments in the Times, a quick primer: the Times invites readers to respond to some of its articles and opinion pieces, and also lets readers endorse comments by clicking on a “recommend” button. You can get a pretty good sense of which way the public opinion wind of Times readers is blowing on a given issue by reading comments and checking their recommendations.
Let me give you a sample of the most recommended comments the Times received regarding the Tea Party poll. The numbers in parenthesis indicate the number of “recommendations” that comment received.
Now we’re polling these wackos? Making their racist, hating views even more legit in their eyes? (770)
So these yahoos haven’t figured out that there is no such thing as middle-class anymore? It isn’t about money, it’s about hate. I have always observed that there are two kinds of Republicans. Old money Republicans and selfish, conservative, redneck Republicans. The tea party being the latter of the two. They hate themselves and everyone else. Their lives have always sucked and they have had to struggle so to hell with anybody else that needs help. They’re complaining about universal health care because it benefits the poor and unemployed. Well, what do they think the initial purpose of Social Security was? Are they willing to give that back or not accept it all?? Highly doubtful. Almost everything in this country, when initially brought in to law was considered a ‘liberal’ idea, including formal education. People tried to shoot that down as well. So as far as tea party folks are concerned; shut the hell up..the Republicans were in charge for 8 years and did nothing but screw us all up. So shut your pie holes and go away. (1103)
These Tea Party folks are all racist hypocrites. All of their anger is rooted in race. Where the hell were they when President Bush massively expanded the size of the federal government, ran the country into huge deficits and recession, and cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans instead of middle-income families, as President Obama has done? Where were they when Bush threw away the surplus left by President Clinton? Only now after the election of an African-American Democrat are these tea-partiers coming out. Of course it’s about race. They just can’t stand watching a person of color lead our country. (771)
At their core, Tea Partiers resent people racially and ethnically different from themselves who — as they themselves do (Social Security, Medicare, home deductions, etc.) — receive government support, only the “bad” kind, i.e. “welfare” (as in Reagan’s “welfare queens” — code for blacks, who are the minority of recipients, by the way).
In the meantime, Tea Partiers give government the go-ahead to spend more on defense than the rest of the world’s governments combined.
Where’s “waste” to be cut? On domestic services, but only domestic services they don’t get or think they won’t need (and in this economy, they should give that a second thought).
This is a White Nationalist movement.
Fifty-seven percent of whites voted against Obama. When Tea Partiers say they want “their” country back, that “their” concerns are overlooked, that “they” aren’t represented in government, they’re speaking for that aging, diminishing demographic. (573)
Whoa. These folks are scary. To me, they are anti-American. Where is the tapestry of diversity which represents this great country? I don’t see one person of color in this group or any young people. It’s also shocking to think that so many of these folks still insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim or that he is a socialist. Frankly, I’ve not seen this kind of anger and ignorance in my lifetime and it makes me terribly concerned about our country’s future. (1612)
So according to the poll, these older white males take advantage of government services and appreciate those services and value those services and don’t mind paying what they do actually consider a “fair” price for those services … they just hate the president. Who happens to be black. This poll just points out to me that they ARE the racists they say they aren’t. (480)
Whew! It’s obvious to me that these folks did not read the same article that I did, or, if they did, simply ignored its findings while composing their comments. Even if you toss out some of the more unhinged rhetoric (“This is a white nationalist movement.”), you are still left trying to fight your way out of yards of complete and utter fabrication: “these older white males….just hate the president.” It seems to me that the real racism—and by that I mean a world view that assumes the intellectual inferiority of blacks—resides in the hearts and minds of those who seems to believe with total conviction that anyone who challenges the president is doing so simply on the basis of his skin tone. These racists—for that is what they are—are oblivious to their own logic, which categorically posits that no black man, not even the President of the United States, can be challenged on the quality of his record, agenda or beliefs. They look no further than the epidermis, either ignoring the president’s well-articulated platform or assuming that the president has only his skin color with which to lead the country.
So much vitriol, so little time.
Never let it be said that I do not search for common ground. Indeed, as dispiriting as I find these comments, I find myself in total agreement with at least one of the writers. The one who wrote, “Frankly, I’ve not seen this kind of anger and ignorance in my lifetime and it makes me terribly concerned about our country’s future.”
The Course I Wish Phoebe Prince and Her Tormenters Had Taken
A week or so ago, a report on abstinence education that originally appeared in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine made headlines. Its authors, Drs. John and Loretta Sweet Jemmott of the University of Pennsylvania, had written about the results of their research in the Philadelphia public schools, in which they found that abstinence education reduces sexual activity of teens and “tweens.” The Jemmotts also found that such a curriculum also upped the use of condoms among students who were determined to have adolescent intercourse.
A layperson’s summary, in the form of an interview with Loretta Sweet Jemmott, PhD, appears on the website of the Black AIDS Institute. I encourage you to read Dr. Jemmott’s sensible and accessible comments, which describe a program for kids that neither attempts to scare or shame them nor patronizes them nor treats them like miniature adults (which, come to think of it, is pretty patronizing too). Dr. Loretta Jemmott sounds like a very wise woman indeed.
Dr. Loretta Sweet Jemmott, a voice of reason, intellect and common sense
What made me think about the Jemmotts’ study, and take the time to track it down, was when a friend asked me why I hadn’t written anything about Phoebe Prince, the fifteen-year-old who hanged herself to escape relentless torment from a wolf pack of hormone-fueled girls and boys. Phoebe lived with her family in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and she attended South Hadley High School. The family had recently emigrated from Ireland, and Phoebe had all of three months’ exposure to US-style public schools, their unwritten rules and their impenetrable cliques before her suicide in late January. Phoebe Prince is back in the news this week because the members of the wolf pack have been charged in Juvenile Court with an assortment of crimes. If you are not familiar with Phoebe’s sad story, you can read about in many sources, but here is the Boston Globe‘s initial story; it gives a reasonable account and, like all others, describes Phoebe’s torment as “bullying” and her tormentors as “bullies.” If you are interested enough to read examples of their actual indictments, you can find them here, here, and here.
So what do abstinence education and teenage bullying have to do with one another? In Miss Prince’s case, it turns out, quite a bit. Although the news accounts of what the bullies actually said to Phoebe are hard to come by, one gleans that most if not all of the taunts were sexual in nature. She was called names that would make the mildest feminists cringe in anger and despair. She was invited to perform acts that would gross out all but the hypersexual, hypointelligent teens who suggested them.
What did Miss Prince do to deserve her fate? Nothing she did warranted the targeted, organized campaign of hate that was aimed at her. So why did it happen? Because she was pretty and the girls who went after her were jealous? Probably this was part of the story. Because she was just-off-the-boat Irish and ignorant of the rigid rules the define behavior for American teens? Yes, this probably also had something to do with it. These two factors alone might’ve earned her a few cold shoulders, and a chilly reception when she tried out for cheerleader, but they wouldn’t have led to the unrelenting assaults she endured.
Phoebe the freshman made her first mistake by accepting a date from an “older man,” a football captain who was evidently on hiatus from his usual girlfriend, the alpha female in the wolf pack. Had the “date” been a walk from school to the parking lot for a couple of smooches and a few gropes, chances are Phoebe would have been subject to a few insults and some dirty looks in the hall, but eventually would have ceased to be prey for the pack. But apparently there was more to the relationship between the freshman and the football captain. And apparently the football captain—no gentleman he—blabbed about his conquest. From then on, it was an oft-told tale of all-out war: a strange female wanders to alien land and seeks to join the pack by conjugating with the alpha male. Alpha female gathers her troops and retaliates to the death to rid the pack and its territory of the interloper. Phoebe Prince never had a chance.
Phoebe's tormentors practice their taunts.
If only. If only our society didn’t wink at teenagers having sex. If only our society attached more value to the development of reason and intellect than to the development of curves and muscles. If only we didn’t shrug our shoulders and simply let all those hormones rage because, hey, we can’t stop ‘em and besides we remember what it’s like to be sixteen.
If there were ever a morality tale that illustrates why high school kids should not have sex, it is the terrible story of Phoebe Prince, the girl who is presumed to have had sex with the football captain and paid for it with her life. The big-tough-guy captain himself who was so insecure about his prowess that he felt the need to broadcast his most intimate moments to an audience of his adoring fans. And the alpha female, who like many of her kind, confused copulating with something other than the exchange of bodily fluids, and whose hormone-drenched brain cells were washed clean of all but her most primal, basest instincts.
Until I read about Phoebe Prince and her attackers, I never really understood why teens ought to go the abstinence route. If I thought about teenage sex at all, it was only to cluck with disapproval now and then about teenagers having babies they could not, or would not, support. But if a couple of teens wanted to get it on, I figured that’s their business. I was wrong. The lethal consequences of letting kids do what they want, when they want are just too high a price to pay. More power to the Drs. Jemmott.
