Kathryn Harrison and D.T. Max
Obits and Funerals: For the Living
By D.T. Max
Posted Wednesday, July 18, 2001, at 1:39 PM ETI had a little personal experience once with advance obits. I was sitting with my editor at the Times when the advance obit man came by asking for the number of a noted literary critic. It wasn't him they were after. It was some lifelong friend or enemy, upon whom he would be called to comment. Who, I wonder, at the Final Accounting, will account for me? Will it be every novelist knocked, subject savaged, girlfriend jilted?
I doubt it. Obits, like funerals, are really for the living. The dead sink into their hole, and the quick do what they've always done--jockey for position. There's no percentage in being critical. "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it." Isn't that from Macbeth? What's the statement really about? Not the guy who died, the Thane of something or other, a traitor. It's about the other guy being alive, speaking, spinning the news, Malcolm, with his hopes of advancement.
That's I suppose why am not an obituary reader, in the end. Look at the Katharine Graham deluge. Graham made money, she established journalistic standards, she held her line against government pressure. She made her mark. But if you believe in anything to the right of Clinton, she was one of the biggest obstacles to your achieving your dreams, an unreconstructed liberal with a lot of power. Yet read the New York Post editorial, with its "While we may not have agreed with her, we respected her ..." sentence. And the thing actually ends with a positive quote from Richard Nixon on Graham. Nixon? It was his attorney general who said Kay Graham would have her tit in "a big fat wringer" if she didn't drop the Watergate pursuit. Now Nixon's kissing up. (From the grave, I might add. Couldn't the Post wind anything fresher?) No, obits aren't for me. I know what you mean about how they take you from point A to point B--I like that--but in the end I think they're too sanitized--as dull as, well, as dull as the Amtrak quiet car. Incidentally, and apropos of hygiene, I've noticed that Amtrak has recently begun requesting that passengers put on their shoes as "they move about the train." You have children, so I ask: Is something going on with feet that I ought to know? Taking your shoes off and walking through the Am-Burger crusts and the male misses on the bathroom floor always seemed a passenger's right to me. Why did the federal government get into our shoes? And how do we get them out?
Obits and Funerals: For the Living
By D.T. Max
Posted Wednesday, July 18, 2001, at 1:39 PM ETReader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Richard Riley lives in flyover country and has only ever come across 'Jewess' in the book Ivanhoe. A-Z says Jewish practices are matrilineal, not matriarchal. Sean Fitzgerald doesn't know what the deal would be if the intern was black, and asks for enlightenment. Whither the "Breakfast Table"? Regular readers make their comments in this thread, and have suggestions for future participants.]
First of all, it isn't about the supposedly unique attractiveness of Jewish women. Both Clinton and Condit had relationships with other women who were not Jewish. The attractive quality was not Jewishess, but availability. These guys, especially Clinton, had limited opportunities to meet available women. So how are Jewish interns available to Democratic politicians? Two American cultural traditions play a role:
First, internships go to families connected to campaign contributors, and American Jews are disproportionately represented among large contributors to the Democratic party. No surprise that many Democratic interns come from Jewish families.
Second, there is an American Jewish tradition of supporting adult children through more years of education (including unpaid internships) than is standard in other U.S. cultural communities, even at comparable parental income levels. Some connect it to the yeshiva tradition in Eastern Europe, where supporting a scholar who never holds down a job was a matter of pride for an extended family. Why this tradition stuck over the generations even among the nonreligious is an interesting question. Both Chandra and Monica were still apparently supported by their parents well into their mid-twenties.
Put these factors together, and a high proportion of young democratic DC interns are Jewish. It's not a surprise that some of the women get involved with the bosses.
This pop sociology comes from the inside, as I was young and Jewish in the DC intern world myself once, and later a parentally-supported Jewish law student.
--Arthur Stock
(To reply, click here.)
As I see it this "Breakfast Table" manages to give any Frayster a choice of ticking time bombs to try and disarm (or throw at other Fraysters). First, a discussion of the sexual mores of Jewish women. While I have identified a Jewish conspiracy to take all my money and life-force, the conspiracy appears limited to my wife and children. Moreover, a first person comment on whether I think Jewish women are easy for Presbyterian men, would leave me in a deeply compromised position if my wife read it. So I will boldly leave this issue alone. The raising of the second issue reminds me of a little boy who has forgotten what happens when you hit a hornets nest with a stick. So I will simply confine myself to saying that Republicans are low-life fascists who don't deserve to ever hold office in a free country.
--Neill Hamilton
(To reply, click here.)
It doesn't help anybody to understand these situations by pretending that the women involved were empty little china dolls broken by big, bad men. I don't know what the deal is with Levy and Condit, but anyone who read that turgid Starr report saw that Monica Lewinsky was a participant, not a puppet, in what happened.
There are women who are attracted to power, and there are women who play on the shortcomings of powerful men for their own reasons. To suppose otherwise is to deny them the very three-dimensional existence that women's empowerment is supposed to provide. To suppose otherwise is to do a shocking disservice to the thousands of young women who cycle through Washington, DC, every year, working hard and getting ahead and never once thinking that it would be all right to sleep with a married man who insisted you not bring ID on your "dates."
--Shark
(To reply, click here.)
(7/16)
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Richard Riley lives in flyover country and has only ever come across 'Jewess' in the book Ivanhoe. A-Z says Jewish practices are matrilineal, not matriarchal. Sean Fitzgerald doesn't know what the deal would be if the intern was black, and asks for enlightenment. Whither the "Breakfast Table"? Regular readers make their comments in this thread, and have suggestions for future participants.]
First of all, it isn't about the supposedly unique attractiveness of Jewish women. Both Clinton and Condit had relationships with other women who were not Jewish. The attractive quality was not Jewishess, but availability. These guys, especially Clinton, had limited opportunities to meet available women. So how are Jewish interns available to Democratic politicians? Two American cultural traditions play a role:
First, internships go to families connected to campaign contributors, and American Jews are disproportionately represented among large contributors to the Democratic party. No surprise that many Democratic interns come from Jewish families.
Second, there is an American Jewish tradition of supporting adult children through more years of education (including unpaid internships) than is standard in other U.S. cultural communities, even at comparable parental income levels. Some connect it to the yeshiva tradition in Eastern Europe, where supporting a scholar who never holds down a job was a matter of pride for an extended family. Why this tradition stuck over the generations even among the nonreligious is an interesting question. Both Chandra and Monica were still apparently supported by their parents well into their mid-twenties.
Put these factors together, and a high proportion of young democratic DC interns are Jewish. It's not a surprise that some of the women get involved with the bosses.
This pop sociology comes from the inside, as I was young and Jewish in the DC intern world myself once, and later a parentally-supported Jewish law student.
--Arthur Stock
(To reply, click here.)
As I see it this "Breakfast Table" manages to give any Frayster a choice of ticking time bombs to try and disarm (or throw at other Fraysters). First, a discussion of the sexual mores of Jewish women. While I have identified a Jewish conspiracy to take all my money and life-force, the conspiracy appears limited to my wife and children. Moreover, a first person comment on whether I think Jewish women are easy for Presbyterian men, would leave me in a deeply compromised position if my wife read it. So I will boldly leave this issue alone. The raising of the second issue reminds me of a little boy who has forgotten what happens when you hit a hornets nest with a stick. So I will simply confine myself to saying that Republicans are low-life fascists who don't deserve to ever hold office in a free country.
--Neill Hamilton
(To reply, click here.)
It doesn't help anybody to understand these situations by pretending that the women involved were empty little china dolls broken by big, bad men. I don't know what the deal is with Levy and Condit, but anyone who read that turgid Starr report saw that Monica Lewinsky was a participant, not a puppet, in what happened.
There are women who are attracted to power, and there are women who play on the shortcomings of powerful men for their own reasons. To suppose otherwise is to deny them the very three-dimensional existence that women's empowerment is supposed to provide. To suppose otherwise is to do a shocking disservice to the thousands of young women who cycle through Washington, DC, every year, working hard and getting ahead and never once thinking that it would be all right to sleep with a married man who insisted you not bring ID on your "dates."
--Shark
(To reply, click here.)
(7/16)