In the “Family of Politics” issue last year of The American Prospect, I suppose a liberal magazine needs the luxury of self therapy in repeating the painfully obvious — what the heck the conservatives harass us obsessively with their trite commentary. Still, I find it vexing to read such commentary as:
Portes’ “Many children of immigrant parents are not living out the American Dream. Until better jobs and schools materialize, they are at risk of becoming the next underclass.”Coontz: “The most constructive way to support modern marriages is to improve work-life policies so that couples can spend more time with each other and their kids.”
Ooms: “Poverty and unemployment can stress couples’ relationships to their breaking point.”
Sawhill: “Better-educated women are increasingly delaying both marriage andchild-bearing until they are in their mid twenties and even older.”
Gornick: Children need and deserve the time of both parents. But the current social arrangements put a disproportionate burden on women.”
Root: “Younger people, on average, are far more open to inter-marriage than those who grew up in an era of segregation. The trend is a major gain for tolerance and pluralism in America, and families that successfully navigate the challenge of interracial marriage often become more open generally. But large pockets of discrimination continue to exist.”
My, my, such penetrating observations, yet totally meaningless in the matrix of a frightening conservative nation! Portes is whistling in the wind if the professor thinks the low-life status of immigrants is going to change but for all too few that might scrape up an opportunity to enroll in a decent public school, let alone higher education. Perhaps he hadn’t heard that American politics is no longer the breeding ground for Trumans and Roosevelts. The so-called Democratic party today is pre-occupied with trying to make a go of it by desperately squeezing some half-baked compromise from the confederate blue dogs that with the drop of a hat would become Republican.
Coontz, too, is a dreamer: “work-life” policies disappeared from great possibilities of the 40s and 50s when there was much discussion about the coming of the thirty-hour work-week and how to utilize quality leisure time. But even if such wishful thinking became reality — all Republicans would have to be like Javitts and Nelson Rockefeller and Democrats like the late Senator Wellstone — the kids would turn to the internet and rap CDs while Victoria Secret and the Final Four tournament enculturate the parents. By definition poverty is stress! Gone are the days when romantic couples settled for a 25¢ movie and afterwards shared a pretzel stick with their cherry cokes. When young couples today are bombarded with news of the glamor and obscene wealth of CEOs, sports stars, and entertainers while they subsist on minimum wage and know that the political climate has become so insensitive to their needs, it is almost comical to utter the tautology of breaking point. Sawhill deserves the Oscar for stating the obvious, but forgot to mention that putatively better-educated men keep it zipped up, However, she suggests providing “flexible funding” to the states for sundry approaches to reduce teen-pregnancies as though all states were like Vermont or Massachusetts. Frankly, I would not trust Mississippi, New Hampshire or Florida to do justice.
I have news for Gornick: No matter what era women have always been disproportionately — some would say, naturally — “burdened”, though most women do not look upon time spent as “unpaid,” unless she is saddled with a typically spoiled brat for a partner who feels he is above household chores and caring for his children. The problem lies with the male ego of which, alas, most women are responsible.
As for Root, he wants to take a very personal choice — very much a matter of taste — and turn it into a case for pluralism and tolerance as if to say without blending the skin colors there can never be a tasteful melting pot.
I’ve saved Christopher for last because her stats are all too predictable. Obviously an ethically cleansed Netherlands and a greatly more liberal UK are going to come out smelling like a rose. Here, though, poverty is prevalent among immigrants and persons of color for whom there is no national empathy. Anyone with an ounce of thought knows we are Ugly Americans domestically as well as abroad. The American voter that has resisted universal health care since Truman, that goes ballistic over single mothers on welfare, that has given up on public education in blighted communities, that endorses war sacrifice by rushing to the malls, that applauds the armed services while their own children are tucked away in universities, surely does not give a damn about a “policy package that makes it easier for all parents to combine caregiving with employment.” As for dreaming about “higher rates of unionization,” unions today are dreadfully dysfunctional in light of the Reaganomics assault on the nation; and in face of the appalling number of members, fortunate enough to reap benefits by being unionized, nonetheless, vote Republican.
This professorial colloquy does no harm, but it is tiresome rhetoric that has its roots in the New Deal. We should be discussing ways of weaning the national psyche from myopic interests by educating voters to become sensitized to universal challenges that may or may not directly affect them, but is still in the national interest that every citizen gets a fair return. Liberals are whining cowards who are too lazy to put meat on their skeletal approaches. The primary thrust should be to purchase a cable channel or two supported by unions, publications, such as The New York Times, The Prospect, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, Free Inquiry, and New Republic, along with massive financial contributions from the Democratic Party, grass root and wealthy liberals and bombard the psyche with the likes of the above compassionate insights to counteract the shallow ideologies tossed out by today’s media.
Copyright © 2002 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: December 13, 2003 .