Debbie does Paris, and Moscow, and...

It's worth remembering that monogamy isn't precisely natural, and even as a cultural artifact deviates across the globe. While the predominant narrative says that men are the prisoners of their biology, women are no saints in this one either. This isn't a gendered issue, or even just a human issue--biological imperatives are pretty indifferent when looking at any of God's creatures.

Of course, an easy argument is that marriage then represents our opportunity to rise above our bestial natures, to transcend the atavist. And there is merit to this, to be sure, but in doing so, we should be very clear that frame marriage thusly, we transform marriage and monogamy from a natural occasion to a cultural artifact (this is the thesis of Matt Ridley's fascinating The Red Queen). Culture is subject to change and evolution. It might not be pliable, but it is neither static nor universal.

If the origins of marriage are cultural, then so too are the ends, and into this gap steps Pamela Druckerman's Lust in Translation. How we as Americans frame cheating and infidelity are radically different than the rest of the world. Cheating happens everywhere, but in America, life ends. A cheating spouse demands public implosion, "my world falling down around my ears", before we can move on. We demand full accountability and full subservience--every tryst is documented, and every phone call screened by the aggrieved partner.

A not-small portion of the vitriol direction at Hillary stems from the perception that the only reason she stayed with Bill was because he was a political asset, that it was pure political machination. She disobeyed the culture code that demanded that she prioritize her broken heart before her career, and by inverting that formula, revealed herself to be the heartless beast of caricature.

So maybe, possibly, somehow, all these scandals give us an opportunity to address our narratives of marriage and relationships head on. We're in the midst of redefining both, yet our conversations largely surround norms weathering the storm of rapidly changing moderity, and we don't really articulate either the norm or the assault. Instead, we get progressively more confused and frustrated, as we struggle to define whether a single date is actually a date or if we were just hanging out. We are lost when events like those of the past few occurs begin to wash over the desk, and we try harder and harder to reify ossified standards. And given the spate of friends getting married, this seems like a topic of more than academic interest.

The essential human contradiction

Obama's speech today in Philly was something to watch, to put it mildly. What really astonishes me in reading the chattering classes and the public comments throughout the day is how often people are censoring Obama for failing to provide a full-throated denunciation of Rev. White. Instead, Obama offers that he certainly knew of White's comments, that he saw and heard them for years, yet the comments themselves are but one facet of White's identity as a black man and as an individual. He credits White with having flaws, with having complexity and contradictions, with being human. His observation about his grandmother perfectly captures this dilemma, and (to me) reveres her humanity, reveres her for being her, rather than accepting her as the archetype of a saintly grandmother.

Similarly, these criticisms are predicated on the same assumptions as Lewis' inane trifecta that Jesus could not be "just" a good moral teacher because he claimed to be the son of God; if Jesus was not in fact the son of God, then he was either lying or a lunatic. I'm more than willing to accept either label. But using the label doesn't change the essential qualities of his sermons. It only cautions us that we must remain skeptical and use reason to sift truth from falsity. Only in a binary, essentialist construction can Jesus be a liar or a lunatic yet be incapable of espousing good moral philosophy. He can be either a liar/lunatic or he can be right, but not both. He must be either Knight or Knave.

The same fallacy appears when discussing sexuality. A rather novel piece in this weekend's WaPo outlook explored Eliot Spitzer as a literary character, looking for contradictions and flaws, glorious virtue and reviled vice. Only if we assume that our moral paragons, our avatars, must be stainless, and that the presence of flaws disqualifies someone or their policies, only then can we say that Spitzer's tragic flaw invalidated all his work on human trafficking and modern slavery. By definition, a tragic flaw is tragic only because of the contradictory counterpoint between good and evil.

This same binary metric is also the same issue that poisons discussions of gendered differences.
The argument goes that if we type-cast girls as being inferior in math, it becomes FACT and in so doing we deny them an opportunity to grow, to struggle, to evolve. We have distilled their essence into the stereotype that "girls are bad at math". And this schema is equally (if not moreso) prevalent in the minds of those who fight against this stereotyping, because they want to reify the worldview that men and women should be interchangeable. That they use their own essentialist definition doesn't make it any less essentialist.

As an example, let's look at the old saw that it takes women twice as much work to get half as far. It is certainly possible this is because they aren't being recognized appropriately, as if they worked equally hard to get half as far. But it could also be because they're working really inefficiently, as if they worked twice as hard to get equally far. One doesn't preclude the other. Unless we oversimplify and stick everything into little boxes of "essential" character with nice binaries.

Anyways, in each case, we assume we can capture someone's fundamental essence in a turn of phrase (racist and anti-Semite; lair, lunatic, or Lord; viceless "Steamroller" or worthless adulterer; "anything you can do, I can do better"). We do it habitually, as a normal course of life. It is easy to think that people have some core identity from which all actions, thoughts, and beliefs flow. And constructing that heuristic obscures contradictions, complexities. We dismiss too easily, and we don't give enough people credit for simple human individuality. The fascinating, contradictory essence of the everyman is that he isn't every man.

Do I hear a cosmic snicker?

I guess the best way to capture my life at the moment is to describe what I'm about to start. As part of my training for basic and SF, I need to do ruck marches. So, starting this week, that'll be at least 2 3 mile marches in 45 minutes with a 30-lbs pack. By the time I leave for GA, it'll be around 18 miles in 4ish hours in a 50 lbs pack (yeah...).

The thing is, I don't own much of anything. I basically own clothes (which I need clean and unwrinkled for work), my workout stuff (which is a little hard to both carry and wear simultaneously), and books.

Emporer's Club, Geisha, and You

In reading through the spate of "inside scoops" on high-end prostitution, a figure has cropped up a number of times, specifically, that in as many as 40% of the rendezvouses, no actually sexual contact occurs. What gets even more interesting are the descriptions of these ultra-high tier hookers and that they are operating in effect as a paid mistress, a companion. Especially as these trysts involve repeated meetings and dating, the line between pure sexual object and someone more intimate begins to blur. As I was reading through the above article, it brought to mind nothing quite so much geisha.

I'm not even pretending to be an expert on geisha or prostitutes, but after reading Memoirs, my interest was certainly piqued, and I've flagged geisha as a topic of continual curiosity. A large reason I found geisha culture so intriguing is that it was a relationship substantially more complex than casual prostitution. Just as in any profession, there are copious tiers and classes and, as best I understand it, the lower rungs of geisha were rife with blunt sex-for-money. In those contexts, their appeal was their relative scarcity; even though a only modest income was necessary to purchase a geisha's services, a common workman could rent a prostitute. Their appeal was status, at least at the lower levels. This was a rationale put forth in the WaPo for Spitzer.

But as you start to ascend the caste system, the issues get muddier. High-priced geisha were trained in tea ceremonies, flower arrangement, art, dance, music, conversation, the finer points of sumo, politics, culture, and whatever else their patron might desire. In short, they started less like whores, and more like Whores of Mensa (also, it appears I'm not the first to make that connection). Compare that description to the one given describing the tiers of high-end prostitution, and the explicit mention of their educational attainment, not to mention their highly restricted stables of men.

So, it sounds like we're talking about a companion. For some men that is a more superficial title than for others; it really is just about the sex. But for some, and especially for those in a culture that created and venerated geisha, it wasn't. And just like the articles from last week saying that it turns out teenage boys have more on their minds than sex, so too do men.

With apologies to Mr. Lurhmann

I want to be old enough to see the wonders of the world, and young enough to be wide-eyed as I do.

I want to be old enough to see the horrors of the world, and young enough for them to sear my soul anew each time.

I want to be old enough to feel heart-wrenching suffering, and young enough that I don't have to bleed just to know that I've alive.

I want to be old enough to make a difference, and young enough to think that I actually can.

I want to be old enough to be worldly, experienced and accomplished, and young enough to invent new ways of screwing up daily.

I want to be old enough to have lived a life of adventure, and young enough that that spirit never failed me, even as my body will.

I want to see the sun rise over every continent on the planet, and young enough to wonder where I'll be tomorrow, even if I'm exactly where I was when I went to sleep.

I want to be old enough to have broken my heart many times over, and young enough to be excited about trying again.

I want to be old enough be old enough to love wisely and well, and young enough to be excited every morning when I watch you open your eyes.

I want to be old enough to live my life to the fullest, and young enough that as I do, I laugh until I cry, and cry until I laugh.

I want to be old enough to not begrudge the price of pain, and young enough to live a life of joy.

Being alive is easy. Living is hard.

Tear for Samantha Powers

So, it turns out Samantha Powers, my hope for Obama's foreign policy, has resigned her position with the campaign. To be sure, she wasn't even a whisper for SecState or NSA (as far as I know, at least), but she was certainly a high profile adviser on foreign policy. I have my doubts about Obama's FP credentials and having Powers on the staff went a long way to assuaging those concerns. After A Problem from Hell, I've started tracking down quite a few of her previous writings, and I gotta say, I've developed a bit on a wonk crush on her.

But this... I'm not at all impressed with how Clinton and Co. is handling this either. Yelling at her about "off-the-record" (which was clearly stated in the interview) is just petty and petulant. To me, this has reflected much poorer on Clinton than on Obama, and Power seems to have acted honorably throughout. This, as well as how the Clinton campaign has handled a lot of their attacks on Obama (the talking with dictator's comment from the YouTube debate last July) end up really depressing my opinion of her and her campaign.

As a person and a candidate, she's shown some very interesting sides and has made some very astute comments, but as a politician and as a campaigner, she's gone for the knees in some ugly ways. And when you're trying to steal a youth vote who seems to idolize a candidate whose platform is based on avoiding such personal attacks, who are repulsed by the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, and who think Bush's/Rove's tactics in the 2000 primaries were despicable... going after Obama in this way really sounds like a way to cripple your appeal to that group. The backlash is worse than letting the comment out there. It's dumb politics and it's petty. And it couldn't have happened to a better person.

"You don't strike me as an Army kinda guy..."

The nigh universal reaction to informing people I've signed up for the Army has been "you never really struck me as the Army type". Which confuses me, as a lot of these people (as far as I know) know very few (if any) Army people. So, that leaves me wondering (a) What is "the Army type" and (b) what qualities of mine strike others as ill-suited for the Army (b.2) what is the mismatch people are identifying between the qualities of "the Army type" and me?