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Katha Pollitt and Sam Tanenhaus

the breakfast table
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from: Katha Pollitt

Child Fetishism and Other Sad Facts

Posted Thursday, June 3, 1999, at 5:50 PM ET

Sam, you expressed so well what is so disturbing about the Mexican child-selling story--except I think I wouldn't blame the mothers, because they are on the edge of starvation, living in a garbage dump--it's quite a sign of desperate social conditions when mothers start giving up their kids. (As you probably know, poverty has vastly increased in Mexico in recent years, "despite the rising economy" as the New York Times always puts it. As if these two facts might not be connected!) I think your Marxian analysis of child fetishism is exactly on the money--as it were! It's related to our theme of educational inequality: My kid gets the best, those other kids can make do. Speaking of which, a carpenter acquaintance claims that the new classrooms supposedly being built to lower class size in New York City are actually being created by putting up room dividers in already existing classrooms. I can believe it--that's what Pete Wilson did to lower class size in California.

Final sad note of the day: The writer Alice Adams is dead at 72, memorialized in a black-bordered publisher's notice as "beautiful, blithe, brilliant" in today's Times. I knew her a little bit, and liked her very much--a big vivid woman who'd seen a lot of life. She was a bit like one of her own characters--she smoked a lot of cigarettes and dressed in those swirly caftans elegant California women used to wear. I was just reading her new book of short stories, The Last Lovely City, which is full of melancholy sexual humor about middle-aged lovers not quite connecting in expensive settings, and last night I did what I usually forget to do when a writer is kind enough to send me her book, and wrote her a note telling her how much I was enjoying it. The letter is sitting on my desk right now, waiting to be addressed.

I've enjoyed our correspondence very much, Sam. Maybe someday we'll meet in real life, and you can tell me if you take the dead people out of your Rolodex or leave them in to remember them by.

All best,
Katha

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Katha Pollitt

Child Fetishism and Other Sad Facts

Posted Thursday, June 3, 1999, at 5:50 PM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation and the author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (click here to buy the book). Sam Tanenhaus is the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (click here to buy the book) and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.
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