Wednesday, November 12, 2008 - Posts
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I am trying to decide why I don't share the distress that Rebecca Traister expresses on Salon in her thought-provoking essay about the "momification" of Michelle Obama. Traister criticizes the press for covering not her departure from her former job at the University of Chicago Hospitals, but her clothes and her kid-piloting and her propensity for domestic-art shortcuts. Traister blames the media for its lack of curiosity about what it's costing Michelle to become "an extension of her husband" and for assuming that she, not he, is the one sheperding her family through their actual move. Michelle Obama, Traister concludes, "will come to stand in more prominently than anyone could have imagined for the shortcomings of feminism."
For a bunch of reasons, this seems more off-base than on-target to me—and also premature. First of all, I don't buy the reflexive blaming of the media. Michelle Obama is putting her own motherhood and sisterhood and wifely virtue front and center. She did that in her speech at the Democratic Convention, she did it during the campaign, and she's doing it now. You can wish she didn't feel like she has to, but she surely knows what she's doing. To wit, Michelle Obama can't risk repeating Hillary Clinton's rocky first lady performance. And so she won't. The media is merely following her lead. To be fair, Traister acknowledges some of this. But she soft pedals Obama's own choices while kicking the press, which is a little convenient.
Also, don't we imagine that the Obamas made their bargain about their roles a while ago? Didn't Michelle Obama effectively stop working at her hospital job long before now? That is a real sacrifice, don't get me wrong, but on the other hand, her husband is president. That is an accomplishment with its own set of rules. It's also one that requires a team effort, and that gives Michelle Obama, as crack defensive end aka first lady, enormous power. A weird and retro form of power, to be sure, but power nonetheless. Before we knock all of that, let's give her a chance to wield it. She is promising to focus on the concerns of working women. Amen and hallelujah: If she does it and gets somewhere, that will be concretely groundbreaking in a way that all this image-obsession never is, and she'll come to represent not the shortcomings of feminism, but its strengths. Maybe Michelle Obama is the woman to channel Eleanor Roosevelt (without the misery of marital infidelity, of course).
And in the meantime, yes, she is the one honcho-ing their physical move, or at least whom to delegate it to. I hope so! Because I want my president-elect working on other pressing matters like our economic crisis. I am glad Traister reminded us that the Obamas used to have a different kind of partnership and that Michelle Obama had to work hard to make her peace with her current role. But hey, when quitting your day job gets you to the White House, how much can the rest of us rue the trade-off?
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Forgive me, but I can't be bothered with Palin anymore. I want to linger with the victor. As I've thought about Obama's speech on election night, and his demeanor since, the word that has stayed with me most isn't the names of the groups he said he hoped to unite (blacks, whites, gays, straights, etc.) or the particular policy proposals he reiterated. Rather, it's the name of one of the temptations he hopes we'll avoid as a nation going forward: "immaturity."
It's a striking word for a politician to use (along with the more customary "partisanship" and "pettiness" ). Reading the Newsweek series about the campaign, I was less interested in the latest revelations about Palin's wardrobe than those about the sheer childishness of the Hillary and McCain camps: the toddlerlike tantrums, the puerile infighting, the impulsiveness, the adolescent refusal to accept responsibility for anything that went wrong. Many commentators, of course, have noted Obama's self-containment, his self-discipline, his unflappability. His campaign's motto was No-Drama Obama (i.e., no teenage theatrics). But isn't this just another way of saying that Obama is that rare thing in recent American politics: a grown-up as opposed to a mere adult?
By contrast, Bush, McCain and Hillary remain, quite literally, children. One or both of their parents are remarkably still alive. Indeed, what struck me most about Obama on election night was how alone he was on that stage, except for his own wife and children. (Even an aged Biden could hold his mother's hand.) And I wonder if, even more than race, this unusual parentlessness for a man Obama's age hasn’t contributed to what I regard as his singular strength and virtue in our youth-obsessed culture: his maturity. Yes, McCain was older and more experienced, but in this election, he actually came across as less mature. The youth vote went for the grown-up.
Obama's election may have finally closed the chapter on the 1960s, by which most people mean the debates over Vietnam. But born as he was at the tail end of the baby boomers, Obama, I think, may have also turned the page on the extended adolescence of his generation. In many ways, the last eight years have felt like one of those teenage parties where the grown-ups are absent and things have spiraled dangerously out of control. Countries, like kids, need and want limits. So, while I've been overjoyed this last week as I've watched a confident and competent Obama begin to assume power, what I've felt most, I've suddenly realized, is sheer relief: A responsible adult has finally showed up to shepherd everyone home.
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There was a fascinating story in the NYT science section yesterday that I didn't fully understand. It presents a new genetic theory of major mental illness as being caused by a battle between the father's sperm and the mother's egg. The idea is that in the fetus' brain something goes wrong with children who develop either autism disorders on one end of the spectrum or mood disorders and psychosis on the other (everything from bipolar illness to schizophrenia). The researchers say these seemingly unrelated disorders are just different expressions of the same genetic glitch. If the father's contribution wins, the child will have autism: "a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development." If the mother wins, the child's brain will be wired toward "the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others'." This theory leaves me confused about people who inherit, say, bipolar disorder from their father. But more than that, it feels strangely reductive: Fathers convey an obsession with objects and systems; mothers make you hysterical.
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