Saturday, May 24, 2003
DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE, BLOGGING ABOUT POLITICS. Neil Young mouths off about Bush in the Guardian (link found via Atrios), which collaboration will make him subject to Vidal/Mailer/Vonnegut treatment in Right-Wing World soon enough, I'm guessing.
The Brit interlocutor says that Young "has never been a political songwriter, unless you count his 1970 hit single Ohio." At first this seems absurd. Hello? "Southern Man"? "Alabama"? "Rockin' in the Free World" (and the rest of the Freedom album? The long rants in Journey Through The Past ("They think they're Roman Senators... and they're full of shit!")?
But maybe the Brit is right on another level. The line between the personal and the political in Young's stuff has often been very porous, but that doesn't make him much of an advocate. He's a crank with several bees in his bonnet, and every so often his personal grudges line up with political ones in an almost accidental way. Sometimes it's a Safeway cart or a Coupe de Ville that tickles his muse, sometimes it's George Bush.
That's why his politics, such as they are, don't follow a steady trend-line. He did defend Reagan, but that doesn't seem to have been a political statement in anything but appearance. "I don't know Ronald Reagan," he said in an interview, "but I have this feeling about him that this is a personal thing... It pisses me off to have anybody ALWAYS attacking, always putting down the leaders. My brother does the same thing."
This makes him a flake to some people who want things predictable -- like David Geffen, who sued him for his stylistic flip-flops, to use a favorite word of political observers, on records like "Trans" and "Everybody's Rockin." I saw Young during that period -- he kept crossing up the buckskinned fans at the Coliseum by playing electonic music between renditions of songs from Harvest, and they all started filing out of the place when he launched into his rockabilly set. I don't doubt Neil Young loves his fans, but he's obviously too committed to going his own way to allow that love to keep him in one place very long. That may be why so many of his songs are about travelling, and about lost love.
Political writing, of the sort we often attempt on these pages, is best when the terms are clear and the facts are straight. So it's usually a little embarrassing when artists interject themselves into that world, because their thinking is a little too free-range. But so what? No one with any sense will rely on even the most astute political art-makers for a convincing argument -- if I quote Brecht to you in defense of the labor movement, that's a filigree, not a proof point. From artists you might get images, metaphors, and turns of phrase that effect the way you think and feel about the world. And that may sustain and inspire you when you argue, under whatever debating society rules you choose to accept, about politics.
It's not bad to be reminded that behind all the online arguments are a bunch of people who go to movies, listen to songs, may have missed a car payment or lost a loved one or had a few cross words with God. That neither invalidates nor bolsters any particular argument, but it may remind us that the endlessly scrolling texts and talking points are not all our correspondents comprise, and instill in us a little merciful perspective.
Now to work up another bellyful of bile for the next fool I come across in my obssessive blogreading!
Or maybe not.
1:27 PM by roy edroso
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Friday, May 23, 2003
THIS JUST IN: ASSISTANT CONTRIBUTES CONTENT TO CEO MEMO! WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE? Andrew Sullivan continues jihad against his former employers, making a mountainous molehill out of a Times story reported from the Florida Gulf Coast. Turns out the bylined author relied on reporting from a freelancer, but didn't acknowledge it.
In terms of inside baseball, this is maybe a big deal, and the reporter should be censured. But the point is, someone did make the scene and take the notes -- the story would appear to be sound, though the attribution isn't.
The Blair scandal was about making shit up and publishing it as observed reality. Whether a name was left of the credits is not nearly so big a deal -- it sucks for the freelancer, sure, but freelancers get screwed all the time, as boy don't I know. Does it change your perception of the story that the reporter had unaccredited help?
Sullivan's been looking to get back at Raines for a while, and it would be churlish to deny him the golden opportunity presented by the Blair case. Still, I'm getting a little sick of it. It's a good thing that people are paying attention, but Sullivan and the rest of his crew seem a lot less interested in getting the Times to maintain its high journalistic standards than in discrediting it.
When the Times starts running the kind of crap Deborah Orin regularly vomits up onto the "news" pages of the New York Post, I'll worry about it, but till then it's a non-story to me.
11:35 PM by roy edroso
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A GOOD NIGHT. The Mets pulled out a one-run victory over the Braves tonight. Art Howe may be starting to earn his salary. He played a lot of pitchers tonight, and pulled them each at the right time, including the starter, Trachsel. Weathers put in a particularly gutsy performance in the eighth. And Benitez gave a great show in the ninth, balking to push a Brave into scoring position and nodding in acknowledgment of his transgression, instead of blowing smoke out of his ears like he usually does in tough spots. Shinjo saved the game by throwing out the balk-advanced runner at the plate -- boy, it's good to have him back. Howe grabbed a smiling Benitez afterwards and gleefully shouted something at him -- something along the lines of, "You'll take it, right?" I'm guessing. Bobby V probably would have made Benitez do laps or something.
I believe this was the Mets' first game of the season against Atlanta. Last year the Braves regularly mopped the floor with the Amazin's, but this game didn't look like a fluke at all. That fat lady hasn't even cleared her throat.
11:05 PM by roy edroso
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MAD MAG'S DEVIL'S BARGAIN. Bee-zarre column I just read called "The Reality of Sex Today" (what -- it changed?) from Maggie Gallagher -- I got it in the NY Post but can't find it online, so maybe I'm not the only one who thought it was over the top.
In the piece, Gallagher references sodomy laws (and Andrew Sullivan!) before devolving to what at first seems like her usual Junior Anti-Sex League stuff, but which quickly veers into deep and choppy waters.
Addressing Sullivan's "We are all sodomites now" idea, Gallagher concedes that sodomy may be well and good for some (and makes the point so mildly that a careless reader might miss the novelty of even this mild hint of toleration from one of America's leading judgment queens), but eventually all non-procreative sex must lead to "what men and women really want: a real sexual union, incarnating love, which makes man and woman one flesh." And that ain't cocksucking and cuntlapping in Maggie's book. Non-procreative sex "does not exist," she says, because once guys and gals start fooling around, vaginal intercourse is as inevitable as death and taxes. "How can normal men and women abandon themselves to sexual desire," she writes, "and expect at the same time to rigidly and ruthlessly exercise self-control to avoid what is for men and women the ultimate act of sexual union?"
Notice what she's avoiding here, besides sanity: the subject of gay sex. None of these concerns she mentions apply to same-sexers. At first I thought this was merely the result of inattention caused by a rush of crazy-juice to Gallagher's brain, but now that I think harder about it, I'm beginning to suspect it's part of a devil's bargain that she is consciously working on.
Before she gets to her final aria, Gallagher returns to sodomy laws, and makes what for her is probably a difficult admission: "Does society and law have any business regulating the sexual and intimate relationships between men? I don't know. Probably not."
Notice that it's a tentative offer -- of the sort that someone who is negotiating for something might put, as it were, on the table. Notice that we're also talking about men here, and men only.
Gallagher concludes: "Do we have any stake in shaping the meaning and purpose of sex between the men and women who yearn for one another? This I do know. The Supreme Court be damned. Yes."
"Shaping the meaning and purpose" can, given the context, only mean the abolition of abortion rights (at the very least -- she might want Griswold v. Connecticut overturned as well). Now add to this her mildly tolerant overtures toward gay men -- specifically the conservative Sullivan.
Can you not see the horse-trade that the Legion of Sex-Mad Cultural Conservatives has sent brave Maggie forth to broker?
I can see it -- her zaftig frame packed into liederhosen and a St. Pauli Girl blouse, a Valkyrie helmet pulled down to her eyebrows, Maggie whispers to the Lost Boys:
We'll let you guys have sex all you want -- if you help us overturn Roe v. Wade. Our fight is not with you. We have only come for the children.
You read (or co-fantasized) it here first!
3:14 PM by roy edroso
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FROM THE CHURCH NEWSLETTER TO DOW JONES. This is what they're publishing at OpinionJournal these days. It's not a matter of disagreeing with the guy, an apparent suburban dad ruminating about all those gol-durned R-rated movies his young'uns want to see (but he won't let 'em, except if it's "The Patriot," because there the R is earned by blood, not sex). There's nothing to disagree with. It's not an argument of any kind, and has no point of any kind; nor is it distinguished by any grace of style or of observation. It's just chatter of the sort you might see in a small-town penny-saver. And the great Dow Jones has published it.
Meanwhile I'm wearing a cardboard belt.
2:35 PM by roy edroso
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YOU CAN LOOK BUT -- WELL, YOU CAN'T LOOK EITHER. At work I can't read Matthew Yglesias, or CalPundit, or a lot of other inspirational bloggers because my company employs Websense to prevent us peasants from -- well, let me quote the Websense website: "Websense can be used to promote employee productivity. For a quick illustration of how much casual surfing of the Internet could be costing your organization, choose your currency and complete the form on the next page."
Dollars and cents vs. quality of life. The judges are all wearing expensive suits. Guess who wins?
Websense cites a category -- "gambling," "sex," "personal web site," etc. -- when one of its constituents attempts to enter a verboten site. Sometimes it's overzealous -- I can't go to Neal Pollack's site, for example, because Websense thinks it's "tasteless" -- a fair cop in any case, but Websense seems to be thinking about Polish jokes.
For a while I was actually able to get around these computer cops by adding the "www" I'd been omitting from the filtered URLs. But they caught on to that. That's the creepy thing (well, one of them) about these services -- they observe, they learn, and they adapt.
I state here for the record that I am no slacker, and I generally approve everything my company does, in spades & believe you me. But these internet handcuffs send, I believe, an unhelpful message: that any time spending goofing around with general-interest reading is stolen from the company, and locking out certain sites is like locking down the computers themselves -- a rudimentary precaution against the natural depravity of human beings.
I object. Any intellectual labor, like physical labor, requires timely breaks to keep the laboring apparatus fresh. Even Republicans will agree with that, I think. If they don't trust us to choose our own means of refreshment, maybe they should just send Party functionaries around at intervals to lead us in jumping-jacks and songs of praise to our Leader.
Well, this doesn't bear too much fretting over -- and I do have work to do. Look, Boss! I'm refreshed!
12:51 PM by roy edroso
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BACK IN THE DAY. Friend'o'mine gave me a mix CD. It has the Ramones doing "Street Fighting Man." Shit! So so so cool.
Following is the Donnas, doing "Dirty Denim." Reminds me of something Chuck D once said about the Knicks: "Yeah, you good, but you ain't winning no World Championships."
I miss Joey.
1:15 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, May 22, 2003
IT'S RIGHT WHEN WE DO IT, BUT WRONG WHEN YOU DO IT, and there ain't no more to it than that, all internal tergiversations aside.
11:43 PM by roy edroso
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THE REBA'ATHIFICATION OF SALAM PAX is near complete. He is gone from the Blogger blogroll. Matt Welch and James Lileks speak no more in his defense. And all because, anti-Saddam as he has been, he did not entirely appreciate (in the flag-waving manner of recent TV Iraqis) the takeover of his country. He reports, firsthand, on the devastation of his surroundings. He works for a group calling itself Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict -- "Who is paying them? And the organization itself appears shady," says NRO. ("He praises the local Communists, who did nothing to liberate Iraq," the NRO operative adds. No shit. Who got the money for that, Dimmy?)
The postwar does not entirely fit the millenarian scenario proposed by the erstwhile warbloggers. "There is absolutely no distribution method. The aid that is coming in gets taken by whomever and sold on the market. You could buy the whole box for 16.000 dinars (a bit more than 16 US dollars by today’s rate)," reports SP. This can't be encouraging news to the many Americans who have been inclined to wonder when the largesse lavished on the official administrators of the world's newest democracy will run off in the form of Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy! approbation unto its oldest. Some might even question the wisdom of this multimillion-dollar expedition. No surprise, then, that conservatives have put him on their shitlist.
Only those of us cursed with an inclination to follow these internecine struggles will notice, probably. But what about the bigger, more domestic propaganda efforts, like the 2004 Republican Convention, slated to be held near September 11 right here, where the planes hit and most of us despise the President? How many web sites will it take to make that work?
10:53 PM by roy edroso
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A BRIEF REPRIEVE FROM A LITANY OF FAILURES. Alicublog has been receiving props of late, some from longtime favorites and web machers like CalPundit, Tapped, and Ted Barlow, some from guys who are new to me but who obviously know something about pushing words together.
I am flattered, certainly, especially considering the sources. But you can be sure this momentary frisson will not go to my head. Indeed, in this long malaise my life I have many times seen opportunity come and go like a local train suddenly and inconveniently running express, with the conductor thumbing his nose at me as he speeds past. The angels that the Lord sends daily unto me, dressed like the ones in Wings of Desire but less inclined to touch my scalp sympathetically than to beat me with softball bats, will not suddenly change their style of ministration, and neither will my creditors grow less attentive.
And it's only blogging, after all -- not like the sure-fire career path that is rawkn roll!
But I will take my bow and be content.
8:41 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, May 21, 2003
ANOTHER THING THAT MAKES US GREAT IS OUR AWESOME MODESTY. "Anyway, I think the realism of conservative writing has grown to be more valued in part because realism itself is more valued... You could also say, as many do, that it's not realism so much as ideas that makes for good writing. Since liberalism doesn't have good ideas anymore their writing often seems to be cranky defenses of the status quo or continuation of old discredited policies." -- Jonah Goldberg, NRO's The Corner.
Elsewhere Goldberg and other members of his ass-patting society talk about how stuck up Cornel West is. Apparently West allows words of praise directed toward himself to appear on his website. Why, they must wonder, doesn't he just say them about himself, like real intellectuals do?
3:36 PM by roy edroso
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I CRIED TILL I LAUGHED. This is classic, and I would know, because I was, like, there, man.
11:59 AM by roy edroso
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HOUSING SCHLOCK. I've been seeing a lot of this kind of anti-rent-stabilization article lately. I think their point would be better expressed by colloquy:
PROFESSOR: So you see, Citizen, if we allow your landlord to charge you anything he wants, your rents will actually go down!
CITIZEN: Gosh, Professor! It sure sounds counterintuitive. How d'ya figure?
PROFESSOR: Without this socialist and stultifying rent stabilization, the market will be free to create new housing units, and when these units compete for your rental dollar, that'll drive prices down -- just like it did Cambridge, MA!
CITIZEN: Are you sure about that, Professor? My buddy lives up in Cambridge, and he says the rents are pretty steep --
PROFESSOR: I'm sure your friend is just a disgruntled hippie, Citizen, grown soft from years on the dole.
CITIZEN: Why, so he is, Prof! But that ain't me! I'll sign that bill for you now.
LANDLORD: (reading bill) Mamma mia! So I can-a charge anything I want? The rent, she a-goin' up!
CITIZEN: But, Professor, you said --
PROFESSOR: Well, you can't expect these things to work overnight. Patience, my friend!
(Two years later, they meet again on the street.)
PROFESSOR: Good to see you again, Citizen. Still living on Gunplay Terrace?
CITIZEN: Yeah. (Yawns) Sorry, Professor -- between the scuttling of the rats in my walls and the nightly artillery barrage, I hardly get any sleep. There's good news, though -- next month they're putting in a Starbucks!
PROFESSOR: It appears the genius of the market has placed us each in domiciles appropriate to our social worth.
CITIZEN: You still living in my old apartment?
PROFESSOR: Of course.
LANDLORD: And dey all live-a happily ever after! Ciao!
10:40 AM by roy edroso
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RENT-A-RESISTER. Andrea Peyser writes in today's NY Post of "two lefty activists, teachers with advanced degrees in civil disobedience" instructing "stroller-pushing moms and doting dads... proudly American, politically conservative" in Cobble Hill how to conduct themselves during a planned sit-in at a local firehouse. (Engine Co. 204 is one of those slated by our depraved Mayor Richie Rich to close.)
Peyser's tone throughout is sympathetic, and she even tugs at our sleeves, if not our heartstrings (from my experience of her writing, I don't think she knows where those are, either on us or on her), suggesting that these "proudly American" worthies were heroically placing themselves in harm's way for the good of their children. "Folks here in the most populous outer borough feel as if Bloomberg has taken out a contract on their lives," she writes. "The budding domestic protesters were told to arrange for someone to pick up their children to prevent them from being placed in foster care. These dedicated moms deserve better, Mr. Mayor."
Compare and contrast, class! Here's the selfsame Peyser covering an anti-war demo back in March:
Despite the valiant efforts of a few high school hooky players, college class-cutters, trust-funded artists and vintage radicals -- all graced with enough tongue- and nose-piercings to decorate a season of "Survivor" -- yesterday's so-called "die-in" was dead on arrival... the hundreds of cops who were diverted from real emergencies handled the idiot protesters with grace... Not that they liked it. "They took us away from the neighborhoods for this," complained one plainclothes officer. "Don't they know that it's the people who will suffer?"
"Don't they know that it's the people who will suffer?" I wonder if Mayor Rich will roll this out as a talking point, should the firehouse protest materialize. I wonder also if any of the "vintage radicals" from the earlier story were among the "teachers with advanced degrees in civil disobedience" instructing the Cobble Hill group. And I wonder if Peyser would have been nicer about the anti-war protestors if they were dressed more "proudly America" (e.g., in relaxed-fit jeans, shapeless sweatshirts, expensive name-brand athletic shoes, etc).
I do not, though, wonder how Andrea Peyser got a job at the Post. Despite their gleeful, near-daily pounding of the Times, standards at Rupert's Rag are a limbo stick, and it's really just a matter of how low you can go.
10:15 AM by roy edroso
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HOWARD BEACH. HOWARD BEACH. I was required to attend an employee testimonial out in Howard Beach. All I knew about the neighborhood prior to this evening was that a group of young white guys had chased a black kid onto the Belt Parkway there in 1986. The kid, Michael Griffith, was struck by traffic and killed. Things were ugly in New York for a while after. I remember heading home late one night around that time on the Lower East Side, and noticing some young black guys coming out of a club. As I walked on, I heard someone behind me say, "Let's get the cracker. Howard Beach. Howard Beach." Nothing happened to me, though there were a couple of incidents in that period that probably began the same way.
As Lou Reed said, those were different times.
Tonight's event was at a big old hall called Russo's By The Bay. It's one of those parkway palaces -- a large, filigreed block of stone with thin red carpet and jacketed valets out front, and ornate rooms inside -- good place for your stereotypical Queens wedding reception. As we drove to the place (the company generously spotted me to a car service), I scoped the streets of the neighborhood. Its boundary was announced by gold lettering on a wooden sign painted sky blue, like you'd expect to see at a yacht club. Strolling the streets were young Italian men, and young black men, and young Hispanic men, all in casual clothes and looking comfortable and happy. When I stepped out of the car onto the red carpet, I could smell the sea.
I was seated at a circular table (#9), surrounded mostly by women who sold goods for the company. They were nearly all black, all very well-behaved, happy to be there but not overly demonstrative. I endeavored to draw them out. I drank the wine that flowed. We chatted, had some laughs. I sat next to a very ample middle-aged woman who'd had trouble with her leg, she explained, and this had caused her weight to increase, though she did a lot of walking in her business. She was cheerful and friendly and I was glad to sit with her and hear her deep laughter, though I occasionally turned my attention to an older white woman, very compact in stature and gesture, who announced forthrightly that she had been in the Holocaust, and her son, a chubby fellow wearing a filthy striped shirt and a straw cowboy hat, who seemed primarily interested in the food.
I stepped out to the red carpet every so often to have a smoke. Other guests of the event came out there, all black women. We conversed mildly, except when they were occupied with the company of their friends. One woman sheathed in several layers of diaphonous black fabric laughed uproariously, standing barefoot and sometimes stamping with glee on the thin carpet. One woman with many, many jewel-like encrustations on her black eyeglass frames complained to me, in a good-humored way, that she had been at the job 19 years and had hardly won any of the prizes given out at these events. I wished her luck. Across the street was an Italian restaurant with its roof peaked and striped to look like a circus tent, and a circular passage inside the doorway inscribed with the words FOOD, FAMILY, and FUN.
The event was MC'd by a local bigwig with a Spanish name who looked and acted like a cross between Kevin Spacey and Tim Allen. He energetically announced a series of awards and gifts from the shallow stage, each punctuated by audio stings from a DJ at the other side of the room. The guests were only mildly attentive. They had to work the next day. So did I, but I clapped and attended very attentively, being in the communications business. I noticed that the woman with the jewel-like encrustations had been called up to receive a small box of something or other. I waved and hollered to her; she waved back with a small smile.
I got in the car somewhere between 10:30 and 11 to ride back to my apartment. The car radio played old hits, some of them from the Michael Griffith era. I watched the city roll by, its lights large and bright and imperturbable.
1:01 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, May 20, 2003
A PLEA FOR SLACK. I studied this Salon article by Steven E. Landsburg several minutes, hoping there was some Modest-Proposal satirical angle I was missing. But there was not: he really thinks we should "punish" juries that hand down verdicts that turn out to be "wrong" (more on the second set of quote marks in a bit).
The goal, says Landsburg, is to give jurors "incentive to get their verdicts right in the first place." Good verdicts win you a check; bad ones get you a fine (!).
This is wrong is so many ways it makes the head spin, but I will focus only on two:
First, the idea of a "wrong" verdict. Landsburg uses the Lemrick Nelson case to add punch to his argument -- he got away with murder! -- and another involving a wrongly-convicted, DNA-liberated guy, just to show that he's not just bloodthirsty, I guess. The injustices in both these cases would seem clear to any reader. But has Landsburg never heard of jury nullification? Supposing the jury decided to decide "wrongly" -- that is, contrary to the instructions of the court and even of the law -- in the interests of what they perceive to be justice. Fine 'em, I expect Landsberg would say, maybe twice for being bad sports.
But it's not that simple. Say a bank, acting as plaintiff, wants to attach the pay of a guy whose wife is fighting cancer. The law might be on the bank's side, but the jury might say, fuck this, we're cutting the guy a break. If you're Landsburg, this is an easy call, but If you believe, as I do, the jury retains the right to pronounce however it sees fit for whatever reason, then the idea of reward/punishment for juries is an onerous, indeed unconstitutional, imposition on their franchise -- and, in cases like this one, on justice itself.
The second point is bigger. Landsberg's threatened-jury-is-a-motivated jury concept is very close to a depressing trend of our times -- that is, bullying as an acceptable means of "improving behavior." Quite apart from our government's unconscionable behavior at the international level, there is a tendency for the powerful to leverage their advantage over the less powerful, and Landsberg even acknowledges this in his reasoning: "The way to make workers diligent, as every manager knows, is to reward them when they succeed and punish them when they fail... Every assembly line worker in America, every cab driver, every doctor and lawyer and magazine columnist, reaps financial rewards and punishments that depend on his performance." I like the conflation of line workers and doctors -- but we all know which category of worker is more likely to get canned for being a little slow on a given morning.
God dammit, why do we all have to be so efficient anyway? Our society is lousy with efficiency experts, ergonometricians, etc., but it seems to me a much less happy place than it was before these pests came onto the scene.
That may be my wider reason for disliking this idea so much. I don't think we should be looking to regulate more aspects of our lives. I think we should be doing the opposite.
11:55 AM by roy edroso
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THESE KIDS TODAY. Teen sex is, now and always, news at the Times. According to this report by Tamar Lewin on findings by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, "About 20 percent of adolescents have had sexual intercourse before their 15th birthday."
Given the subject and the source, my instinct is to take the figures less than seriously. But even so, they are shocking.
I mean, I thought the kids had to be getting laid more than that.
When I was 15, if you'd told me that my chances of imminent sex were 1 in 5, I would have jumped off a bridge. I always had to believe they were at least 2 to 1 in my favor, or I never would have got out of my semen-encrusted bed.
But the story gets worse. An AP story in the same paper says this: "One in three boys ages 15-17 say they feel pressure to have sex."
Pressure? 33 percent of these boys actually think that someone is pushing them into sex? At their age, I mostly felt resistance to the idea, especially from the maidens I woo'd.
Of course, among my fellow adolescent males, sex was always discussed, and accounted a great thing -- both by those who professed to be getting it on a regular basis, and by those of us who did not (indeed, could not with any hope of being believed) make such claims. But that wasn't pressure -- that was, to us, mercy. For even the Lotharios among us were not getting nearly enough sex to satiate the great, slavering beast that was -- in my day, anyway -- male teenage lust, and the rest of us were practically shaking with need, ready to explode like cum-bombs.
The only relief we knew from this pressure was the ribald tales, knowing winks, and coarse laughter with which we acknowledged and sympathized with each other's howling horn-dogliness. We were not spurring each other on to reckless sexual behavior, we were coping with the fact that we had no partners with whom to be reckless. (I suppose we could have beat each other off -- and, as I went to a prep school, I assume some of us did -- but, as Lou Reed said, those were different times.)
The article gives the impression that our current crop of youngbloods feel their male bonding rituals constitute some sort of emotional "bad touch." I pray this is a misapprehension by clueless social workers. That's always a good bet.
But what if it isn't? What if the boys are, in fact, such abject pussies? What if kids aren't living in sexual Valhalla as we've all assumed? What if all those movies about precocious libertines, all those rumors about rampant schoolgirl-on-schoolboy blowjobs, were bullshit?
Any opportunity to feel less jealous of the young is welcome. But it would be depressing to believe that the picture of their generation coming out of the paper is at all accurate. I prefer to think that the intensity of adult scrutiny has Heisenberged teenage behavior -- rendered it unreadably sketchy, perhaps with some help from the kids themselves who must be sick of all the poking and prodding.
I mean, people can't have changed that much. Can they?
10:31 AM by roy edroso
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AS IF MY SELF-ESTEEM weren't bedraggled enough, along comes this.
9:21 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, May 19, 2003
EQUILIBRIUM. Hey, how ya doin'? Okay? Me? Oh, can't complain. Earlier, I was briefly made angry by this guy, who has figured out on his digital slide rule that conservatives are better writers than liberals (he also says, if I'm reading him right, that conservatives are more fun, more intelligent, and more polite; have better breath, whiter teeth, and stronger erections; and their shit don't smell). Elsewhere, usual suspect Jonah Goldberg wrote, "I believe that in the far-flung future we will live in houses full of woods (real or synthetic) and greens and eat increasingly luxurious meals." Yeah, I thought, if by "we" he means himself and his fellow tenured conservatives; the rest of us will probably only see trees if our concentration camps happen to be located on National Park land.
But I was too busy to keep up my anger over things like this. I am struggling to keep many balls in the air (some of them weighing thirty pounds and studded with razor blades), and that prevents me from paying too much mind to the hoots and gibberings coming from the fever swamps. In fact, these days my best moments come when I am perfectly poised between anger at an unjust fate and anger at morons with modems. At such moments I briefly forget who to be mad at, and am content.
6:27 PM by roy edroso
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