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Katha Pollitt and Sam Tanenhaus

the breakfast table
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from: Sam Tanenhaus

The Baby Trade

Posted Thursday, June 3, 1999, at 3:39 PM ET

Well, Katha, you've got me feeling like a lout, whining about Star Wars and mooning over the dashed hopes of a multimillionaire basketball star. What gets me about the Mexican story is everyone's vauntingly crystal-pure motives: the pro-life child smuggler whose "intentions were good," the mothers who give up their kids like "tomatoes" only because they want a "better life" for them (with a few home improvements tossed in), the rich customers on Long Island desperate for children and paying major bucks for them but, as you point out, not lifting a finger for the poor homesick child languishing back in Mexico. This last is the most disturbing of all, because these people can help but won't. It's as if each of us bursts out of the womb ready to defend himself in court. Trash Marx all you like but it's hard not to feel the imprint here of "commodity fetishism." The child matters to the Libertis (ironic name!) only insofar as they possess her, their own brand of slavery. This motif recurs often in our white-bread world, too, for instance in the gruesome custody battles that ensue once a birth mother changes her mind, grabbing back her infant while the adoptive parents decide to "fight back." Same happens too with "normal" divorces. The squalid tug of war. It's mine. No, it's mine. And again, pure motives on everyone's part. They want only what's "best."

But who doesn't do the same, every day? How often do I invent some high-minded motive to explain a shabby deed and to further the interests of "that same old someone," as Philip Roth says, whose interests one is always serving? Meaning: myself. And how easy to denounce horrors one is not responsible for solving. Then again, can anyone solve them? Are they even problems to be solved? Or hideous dramas that happen wherever humans are found. Lionel Trilling says (I think in Sincerity and Authenticity) that tragedy dispenses no lessons. One is not made "better" as a result of it. There are no useful life lessons. Hey, next time, don't kill Dad and marry Mom, OK? And while you're at it, don't divvy up the kingdom three ways. Yo, brother, deal with that jealousy instead of going ape-shit. Ever consider counseling?

This applies also to Somalia and Kosovo. Your phrase "humanitarian wars" is exactly right. And it's what makes it all so dispiriting. We muddle in, trying to do right, to put our vaunted "values" on display. And what happens? To paraphrase Rabbit Angstrom as he's nearing the end: Every time he tries to help, someone else gets killed.

Which is maybe why it's easier to follow the fortunes of Patrick Ewing. But you're right to insist on facing the grimmest facts, and I honor you for that, Katha.

Sympathetically,

Sam

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Sam Tanenhaus

The Baby Trade

Posted Thursday, June 3, 1999, at 3:39 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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