“He’s not dead, daddy, he’s just tired and he needs a bath,” Katie pleaded.

“No, honey, he’s dead,” I explained. “See? He’s not moving.”

“He’s tired because you keep burying him. It wears him out to dig out, so he sleeps. Let’s take him back inside.”

“Honey,” suggested my wife, “Why don’t we go get you a new dog, OK?”

“OK.” And just like that, poor Solo was left to the varmints. The three of us went into Chapel Hill and drove until we saw this sign:

FREE TO A —- HOME: PUPPIES.

The word GOOD was marked out. Not a —- sign. I wondered what breed of dog I was going to bring home.

“That’s a puppy?” I asked. “It weighs 50 pounds.”

“It was a puppy,” said the farmer. “You shoulda gotten here sooner.”

“What kind of dog is it?”

“I know the bitch was a beagle,” said the farmer. “And the sire wasn’t.”

And so, we adopted Kibbles, a mutant dog who looked like a beagle from the shoulders back, but his neck, as thick as my thigh, ended in a head that resembled a ferret’s. Normally, it takes several days to gauge a dog’s personality, but with Kibbles, five minutes was enough. He loved Katie, and would allow her to sit on him, roll on him, ride him like a pony. He tolerated other humans. Every other creature he attacked, but his

was a futile offensive, because his head was so small, his teeth couldn’t do any damage. So he became the incredible, head-spearing dog.

After all the excitement of the week, (and because it was Independence Day) I thought Katie might enjoy some fireworks. We put Kibbles in the car and headed to Columbia, well known for its manly and illegal fireworks vendors. I bought bottle rockets, sparklers, various other Chinese explosives, and a 10 pack of Roman Candles.

Now, fireworks were a risky venture in Hargrovia. My father-in-law had given us the lot, two acres in the middle of a 12-acre corn field, and he continued to plant corn around our house. July is a dry month in Tennessee, and that July was no exception. The cornstalks whispered to each other in the dry wind. I had a dozen towels soaking in a tub of water, just in case. When it was dark, I followed the directions on the packet, placed the Roman Candle in a bottle in the center of our front yard, lit the fuse and ran away. There was a hiss of gunpowder, a spray of sparks, a sputtering, then glorious balls of light that shot into the air sometimes as high as 10 feet. Katie was entranced.

Kibbles was not. He went nuts and began a furious barking at the offending incendiary. The fiery orbs continued. Kibbles ran to the bottle, bit the Roman Candle, and ran off with it. Suddenly, we were under fire, as a flaming fusillade bounced off the

house, the car, my face. I tried yelling at Kibbles, but that just sent him into a panic, and he headed to the back yard with the candle still spitting sparks and fire.

“The corn! The corn!” screamed my wife. “The corn’s on fire!”

It was. Tiny but growing flames sprouted in at least four places, but I didn’t have time to stop. I couldn’t catch Kibbles. He went to the back end of our property and suddenly was face to face with a coyote who stood with the dead body of Solo in his mouth, amazed at this pyrotechnic display. Kibbles head-speared the coyote who yelped, ignited, and loped away. He came back in three seconds, grabbed Solo’s remains, and, still smoldering, headed back into the cornfield. Kibbles dropped the dying firework, took a long and satisfied gaze at the carnage he’d created, then ran back to the front porch to sit beside Katie. I ran into the cornfield with the towels to put out the flames. Twenty minutes later, I emerged, covered in soot and sweat, and staggered to the front porch. There Katie sat, with such a look of wonder and joy. Kibbles sat obediently beside her,

waiting.

“Daddy!” Katie exclaimed in breathless amazement. “That was beautiful! And we’ve still got nine Roman Candles left.”

Since then, I’ve left the fireworks to the professionals. Kibbles passed away in 1992, his life as spectacular and brief as the Roman Candles he hated so much. But I think his spirit is still out there somewhere. I buried him in Solo’s empty grave, a plot we all remembered for its inability to constrain the departed.

This week’s semifinal, which determines Steel’s final round opponent, features two very talented, but very different bands. First, the New York-based shoegaze artistry of Asobi Seksu, which dismissed Food Will Win the War in round 2. Exotic, swirling and intricate, Asobi Seksu is one of the very best of the current wave of shoegazers and dreampoppers.

Listen: MySpace / Last.FM / Lala / eMusic

Their opposition, hailing from Boulder, Colorado, is Rose Hill Drive. RHD has scored big points in previous wins over Antony & the Johnsons and Black Mountain for their no-nonsense approach to straight-ahead, roots inspired rock.

Listen: MySpace / Last.FM / Lala

If you would, give each band a listen, then use the poll below to let us know who you think should advance to the finals.

Here’s the updated ToR bracket:

He was only fifty. He had dozens of upcoming appearances planned. His sudden death this past week sent shock waves around the world. There were warning signs, but in the end few people saw it coming. The exact cause of his death is the topic of endless speculation and will not be known for some time. Until that time, the rumor mill will be in full swing on cable news shows and blog sites as this tragic story increasingly takes on a strange new life of its own.

He was an innovator. He was just entering his golden years, and perhaps his best days were ahead of him. He was as white as they come but was loved by fans of all colors. He was a household face even to little kids who weren’t around during his heyday.

He was the voice of a generation. When you heard that voice you stopped whatever you were doing. Just about everyone remembers where they were the first time they heard it. He was personally responsible for moving billions of dollars worth of product and was considered by many to be a corporate genius. But no one should ever forget what he was at heart—an artist.

Literally everyone was familiar with his work. Yet few of us can really say we knew him. Beyond his public persona, he led a quiet, reclusive life behind walls of economic privilege most of us could only imagine. His indiscretions are better left unspoken. He remains as he was—a friend, a figure larger than life, but in the end a mystery. An enigma.

His work will live on forever. He helped change the face of television. His performances—whether three minutes or fifteen—were each memorable in their own way. He executed his craft with such ease he was ultimately taken for granted.

He came from humble origins but lived the American dream. He had thousands of imitators but no equal. He was an icon. He was an original.

Infomercial pitchman Billy Mays will be missed. But he will never be forgotten.

____________

Rich Herschlag is the author of Before the Glory: 20 Baseball Heroes Talk About Growing Up and Turning Hard Times Into Home Runs (HCI, 2007). His other books include Lay Low and Don’t Make the Big Mistake (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and The Interceptor (Ballantine, 1998).

It’s an image most Westerners recognize immediately: A lone man standing in the middle of a five-lane street, blocking a line of tanks. Single-handedly, “Tank Man” prevented the tanks from advancing on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

Tank Man was one of more than a million Chinese students from universities across the country’s capital who converged on the square in April of 1989, demanding democratic reform. The resulting stand-off between students and the government lasted a month and a half and, eventually, led to a military crackdown. As many as 3,600 students died and more than twice that number sustained injuries.

The picture of “Tank Man”—taken by photographer Jeff Widener of the Associated Press—was one of the most famous stories captured during the confrontation. Now, issued to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, comes another compelling story: Lake with No Name by Diane Wei Liang.

Liang writes about her own experiences as a student during that tumultuous time, providing a first-person account of the political turmoil. Although not in the square at the time the military and police swept through, she was on hand as bloody, beaten survivors began to straggle back to Beijing University.

What makes Liang’s book so compelling, though, is the second plot that threads its way through the first, entangled with each other like a pair of long, magnificent Chinese dragons. Even as her country finds itself wrapped in tumult, so too does Liang find her heart in tumult. Lake with No Name is, at once, a first-person account of the student democracy movement, and it’s also a sad love story.

“Love without hope is the most miserable kind of love,” Liang writes. While hope seems to spring eternal for her, she still manages to seem plenty miserable.

There’s no “woa-is-me” to the book, though. It’s apparent Liang has a deeply romantic heart, but she avoids sentimentality and romanticism. Her relationship troubles stem from her own inability to communicate freely with the love of her life, Dong Yi, as much as they stem from the grand, unclear machinery of destiny.

The early part of the memoir recounts Liang’s childhood, an unhappy period marred by the notorious Cultural Revolution. The government relocated Liang’s family, and forced her parents to live separately. She was bullied at school. At one point, her home is destroyed in a massive earthquake.

Liang writes about these things with simplicity and honesty. Her personal story provides the political and cultural context that leads to the pro-democracy movement of 1989.

“I was excited to be part of life and renewal,” she writes, once the demonstrations erupt and she’s swept up by them. “I looked ahead and saw students marching in step, flags flying above their heads. I looked behind and saw tens of thousands doing the same. The enthusiasm of my generation shot excitement into my veins. ‘This will be a new world!’ I thought.”

Laing also has a talent for capturing beauty, which frequently reflects the love she has for her country. For instance, while on a mountain-climbing trip with a friend, she watches the sun rise over the plains below her. “On the horizon, the rich land of my ancestors fused into the sky, in golden rays of light, and I could see no border or limit. So this is China, my motherland,” she writes. “As the sun rose above the horizon, light exploded, radiating hundreds of thousands of rays to the earth, penetrating air, clouds, rocks, beings, everything seemed suddenly transparent.”

Liang’s memoir seems like an attempt at creating transparency, too. Lake with No Name provides an excellent glimpse of life inside one of the world’s most enigmatic countries during one of its most pivotal times. The literary face Liang gives that larger story is beautiful and sad—and ultimately wonderful.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford not only played fast and loose with the institution of marriage, but with email. However, help keeping affairs secret has arrived for not only politicians, but all of us. AshleyMadison.com just released apps for mobile phones and the Blackberry. Jeremy Caplan reports for Time that because they’re “loaded up from phones’ browsers, they leave no electronic trail.”

For those unfamiliar with it, AshleyMadison is a matchmaking service for married individuals. That’s right: It facilitates affairs. To summarize the statement of a woman Caplan quotes who consults in the online dating field, AshleyMadison is infidelity “rebranded” and made “monetizable.” Though Ashley Madison has signed up over one million users since going online in 2001, she seems concerned that it harms the online dating business for singles.

As has been noted, the Sanford case is unlike other Republican sex scandals. It’s devoid of sex with prostitutes (to which prominent Democrats, like Eliot Spitzer, are also prone), drooling over congressional pages, soliciting sex in a public rest room, or pursuing an aide’s wife. Sanford was simply a man who fell in love with another woman who wasn’t much younger than he.

As the spiritual counselor to the Sanfords and their circle, Warren Culbertson, said in a Huffington Post article:

. . . the only thing holding his friends’ marriage together right now is “their vow to God.”

“Because it’s not feelings — it’s not emotions. … For most Christians, at some point in your marriage, if you’re married long enough, you do it because that’s what we’re called to do — out of obedience instead of out of passion.”

You can almost hear the strains of a psaltery in the background. Apparently Sanford, despite his faith (not fundamentalist, actually, but Episcopal), was unable to adhere to a view of marriage as starkly medieval as Culbertson’s.

It’s not just religious principles, but romantic ideals about marriage — however strange bedfellows — that are stern taskmasters. Entering marriage, neither the man nor the woman typically understands each other’s sexuality. (Thus strengthening the case for gay marriage.)

Male needs are cyclic, like hunger or urination. Women, on the other hand, tend to be episodic. Not only don’t religion and romance acknowledge the problem this might pose, they make no provisions for when a partner (the aged aside) spurns sex entirely.

Causes most commonly cited include stress and fatigue. Compounding those, the partner suffering from one or both of those symptoms — at the risk of gender-typing, usually the wife — may resent the other for helping to cause them by not holding up his or her end of the chores or child-rearing.

Other reasons include — today especially — loss of self-respect if one loses job and, of course, weight gain. The husband blows up and turns off the wife or she packs on the pounds and no longer feels attractive.

Divorce may not be an alternative because resuming the solo life, especially with kids, isn’t feasible for most in today’s economy. Also, the person denied sex may still care deeply for his or her spouse.

Nevertheless, a life without physical intimacy is unthinkable for many. Is an affair the answer? Even if not sniffed out by the spouse, it may end the marriage. The unfaithful spouse may, a la Sanford, link up with the fabled “soul mate,” which seems to make abandoning one’s family understandable in the eyes of God. (Funny how those soul-mate sensations have a way of fading once the cheating spouse divorces and then marries his or her paramour.)

On the other hand, as hollow as married life becomes without intimacy, in lying and deception lay the path to true misery. Of course, like Sanford, the cheater can admit to the affair on the theory that confession is good for the soul. It’s just that any benefit that might accrue to the sinner comes at the expense of the one sinned against.

We invite our readers to respond to the following questions in the comments section:

• Is cheating a viable alternative to a sexless marriage?
• Do “emotional affairs” (which stop short of sex) help or make the situation worse?
• What’s the best way for the partner denied sex to deal with lack of physical intimacy in a marriage?

• Cassava, sorghum yields drop, toxicity rises with more CO₂
• Differences between aerosol effects in models vs. observations largely explained
• Methane clathrates proposed for energy and carbon sequestration

Cassava and sorghum are tubers that form the protein base for hundreds of millions of people. But while there’s a great deal of protein in the plant, there’s also cyanide in the plant’s leaves. Whether the leaves are poisonous or not depends partly on how much protein there is - more protein means that the cyanide is less toxic and the plants are safe to eat for man and beast alike. But according to a new study reported in Reuters, higher carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations means both less protein and more cyanide, a toxic combination.

According to the article, an Australian team grew cassava and sorghum under different CO₂ concentrations that approximated the various projected climate disruption scenarios for the rest of this century. What they found was that “the amount of cyanide relative to the amount of protein increases” and that “[a]t double current CO₂ levels, the level of toxin was much higher while protein levels fell.” As a result, cassava-dependent communities could be poisoned, especially when experiencing a drought.

The article pointed out a greater worry, however - at high CO₂ concentrations, the crop yields fell significantly:

[Monash University researcher Ros Gleadow said] “There’s been this common assumption that plants will always grow better in a high CO2 world. And we’ve now found that these plants grew much worse and had smaller tubers.”

CO₂ has been referred to as “plant food” in some circles. This study suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Other studies have discovered increased crop yields due to more CO₂ in the atmosphere could actually lead to more starvation as the protein content of those crops falls dramatically.

Both studies illustrate that the “plant food” meme is false, at least as it applies to the staple crops people actually eat.

———-

Differences between aerosol effects in models vs. observations largely explained

Aerosols like pollution, airborne dust, black carbon particles, even sulfur dioxide (SO₂) have many different effects. Black carbon absorbs solar radiation and heats up the air or melts the snow and ice it settles on. Sulfur dioxide cools the planet when blasted into the stratosphere by a volcano, but may heat up the Earth and produce acid rain when located lower in the atmosphere. Airborne dust and pollution increase the rate of cloud formations - except when they decrease the rate instead. Scientists know that clouds and aerosols interact greatly, and since the effects of clouds on climate - and of climate on clouds - remains one of the few major unknowns in climate models, improving scientific understanding of aerosols is similarly critical to improving climate model predictions.

One of the recent problems with aerosols is that satellite measurement-derived estimates of aerosol radiative forcing (hereafter referred to as SDRF, for satellite derived radiative forcing) have differed by from modeled predictions of aerosol RF (MRF, modeled radiative forcing) by up to a factor of two, well outside the margins of error for both measurements and models. Even worse, there was also a statistically-significant difference between two different sets of SDRFs . Scientists haven’t been able to determine why there was such a large difference between and among the SDRFs and between SDRF and MRF until now. A new paper published in the journal Science claims to have not only explained the differences between the different aerosol RFs, but to explain differences between the two satellite-based datasets as well.

According to the paper, the discrepancy is a result of two assumptions made in the process of calculating aerosol RFs. The first assumption made in the calculation of SDRF is that “there is no radiative effect of the aerosols within cloudy sky areas.” Models, on the other hand, don’t make this assumption. The second assumption is that the there was no anthropogenic aerosols prior to 1750 (defined as the start of the industrial era), a false assumption. In addition, there is a third difference between SDRF and MRF that isn’t a difference in starting assumption - the SDRFs don’t have complete earth coverage. The MODIS satellite measurements that are the basis of most calculated SDRFs can’t take measurements over highly reflective terrain like ice and desert, and so significant swaths of the Earth’s surface can’t be observed. Again, the models don’t have this problem.

There are two ways to prove that the different calculated RFs are actually statistically the same - demonstrate that SDRFs can be made equal to the MRFs, or demonstrate that the MRFs can be made equal to the SDRFs. The paper does both. First, by using model data to fill-in the places that the satellites can’t measure and then by changing the initial assumptions used in SDRF calculations, the paper illustrates that the satellite-based RFs are equal to the modeled RFs (marked in blue in the image at right). Then, by changing the model parameters to match the assumptions underlying the SDRFs, the paper illustrates that the MRFs were made to be equal to the satellite-based numbers (marked in red in the image at right). If you notice, the two MODEL lines (Int and Ext) look very similar to the MODIS (Model) line, just as the MODEL (Sat & opt obs) line looks very much the same as MODIS line.

The paper also identifies what specific aerosol is mostly responsible - black carbon, aka soot. As the image shows, there has been a massive increase in the amount of black carbon present in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times (”more than a factor of six”). As a result, the reflectivity of the Earth’s atmosphere has dropped:

The global mean annual average single scattering albedo computed in the model for all aerosols at 0.55 um is 0.986 at pre-industrial conditions and 0.970 at present-day conditions. Thus the aerosol in present times is approximately twice as absorbing as that in pre-industrial conditions.

There are two caveats, however. The first is that the SDRFs are not model independent at this time - model data is used to fill in the parts of the satellite observations that the MODIS instruments can’t detect. This means that, if the models are wildly wrong, then the SDRF calculations are going to be wrong as well, although not as wrong as the models would be alone (the error would be proportional to the area filled in with model data).

The second, and more important, caveat is that the changed assumption about the pre-industrial aerosol levels may not actually be correct. Given that the new assumption also explains differences between two different SDRFs means that the assumption is likely to be correct, but further research will be necessary to test the validity of the new assumption.

All in all, this is a valuable study that will both improve climate modelling and quell some concerns about differences between models and observations of aerosol radiative forcing.

Thanks to paper author Gunnar Myhre for a review copy of his paper.

———-

Methane clathrates proposed for energy and carbon sequestration

An article in New Scientist suggests that countries are looking to methane clathrates (methane frozen into ice) for two purposes - a source of natural gas and a carbon sequestration opportunity.

As an energy supply, the methane held in clathrate form under the Arctic, off the coast of Japan and India, and elsewhere around the world hold significant potential. The article says that these deposits are estimated to hold trillions of cubic meters of methane that could, if questions of scale and safety can be worked out, power hundreds of millions of homes for a decade or more. But there are significant problems.

The first is that the methane held in the clathrates are difficult to extract - either the ice has to be melted or the pressure that helps keep the methane locked into the ice must be lowered. The article says that researchers tried the melting method and found it took too much energy, but that the decompression technique appeared to work well, and has been powering an industrial furnace in Siberia for decades.

Which brings us to the second problem. Extracting methane from clathrates on large scales runs the risk of destabilizing the entire deposit, and depending on where the deposit is and how large it is, that could result in underwater landslides that cause tsunamies. Any life close to the “methane burp” would probably be asphyxiated as well. And if the burp was really big, it could produce short-term climate effects around the world - methane is moderately powerful greenhouse gas as compared to CO₂.

Some researchers are hoping to extract clathrate a different way, though - by replacing the methane in the ice with CO₂. This has the supposed benefit of sequestering the CO₂ - but only if you assume that there will never be such a thing as a “CO₂ burp” out of a destabilized CO₂ clathrate deposit.

I understand the interest in this, and I think additional research is warranted. But industrial scale deployment of a methane clathrate harvesting technology should not be deployed until the risks and potential safety issues have been well documented and are understood.

Image credits:
Northern Arizona University
Science Paper, “Consistency between satellite-derived and modeled estimates of teh direct aerosol effect”

Click here to view the embedded video.

So this morning’s lecture explains why fixing a broken corporate culture has something to do with angry, disoriented monkeys driving a bus on the sidewalk. Sorta.

I hope we can fix cap and trade so it doesn’t unfairly punish businesses and families in coal dependent states like Missouri. (emphasis mine)

I can’t help but wonder what happened to the Senator who dared mention that oil prices shouldn’t be allowed to fall too far at the Rocky Mountain Roundtable, Session 2, Part 3, during the DNC:

There’s a certain reality here that it is important that we don’t get gas too cheap again, and I certainly agree with what [Randy Udall] said. We will never see the days of… when people are pumping $1, $1.50 gas again. And that may not be an all bad thing because it will motivate the politics on this issue to the forefront so we have a sense of urgency.

Lest you think I’m casting dispersions here, not only was I one of only a few obvious press in attendance, but here’s the audio in question. I apologize for the audio quality - I’m hardly a professional sound person.

A more cynical person than myself might make me wonder if Sen. McCaskill’s complaint about ACES is more because coal mining giant Peabody Energy, headquartered in Missouri, supported her election to the tune of $5,000 in direct PAC contributions (equal to former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and fellow Missouri Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond). Given that’s a paltry sum compared to the donations she’s received from most other sectors, perhaps not.

Perhaps, though, it’s fair to wonder if Sen. McCaskill would have had the courage to criticize coal had coal prices spiked equivalently to oil prices last summer….

UPDATE: There has been some criticism of Sen. McCaskill for her comments about the ACES cap and trade provisions. Here’s a few links to sites that have also taken her to task for her call to weaken it even further:

Get Energy Smart NOW!
ThinkProgress
Chris Bowers of OpenLeft on AlterNet

My city, like many other municipalities these days, has a bit of a budget crunch. Expenses exceed income and so cuts must be made. One of the first things my city cut was the flower pots that decorate major intersections in the summers. To me, that seems like a reasonable cut. Yes, the flowers are beautiful. But they cost $20,000 per year (including water and labor costs). And at the same time, our library is struggling with its budget and has a hiring freeze, even with several open positions. In my opinion, if you’ve got an underfunded library it’s not wise to spend taxpayer money on flowers.

In the end, the Rotary Club took up the cause and donated money for the planters. Wonderful, I say. We get to keep the flowers without spending very much city money on them. They are still watered and tended by city workers who have been reassigned from jobs like weeding and picking up litter, but the bulk of the expense has been shouldered by the Rotary Club and private citizens.

However, (you knew there was a however coming, right?) I am a bit concerned about the attitudes of my fellow citizens on this. Clearly, not everyone shares my priorities. A sampling of the comments left on the various stories about these flowers:

Rotarians show the city what matters, even if its just flowers. Seems that the city needs a clue on what matters. Hurrah for community volunteers!

Yes, hurrah for community volunteers. But I’m thinking that the cutting of these pots from the city budget is a sign that the city DOES have a clue what matters.

Talk about out of touch with your citizens. Broomfield needs to listen to its citizens and find a way to put this in the budget.

As a citizen of Broomfield, I will support putting this back in the budget when we can fully fund our library, not before.

Eliminate a couple of part time positions and you’ve got your money. It’s all about priorities.When a city government prioritizes protecting it’s own staff versus providing for the town, somethings wrong. The core mission of a city government should be to provide services. It’s core mission is not to protect a job or two.

If the city was flush with cash, sure I could get on board with this. But we’re NOT. And yes, the city government should provide services. Like, oh, I don’t know….a staffed LIBRARY? Flowers are not a service, they are a nicety. When our family budget is in a crunch, the niceties are what get jettisoned first. And really? In this economy you put more value on some flower pots at intersections than you do on keeping people employed and off the public assistance rolls? Hmm.

Jennifer Angliss is a former teacher, now stay-at-home-mom and Tupperware lady living in the ‘burbs in Colorado.

Crosspost: Miscellaneous Musings

If you’ve snooped around at all, you know that there are lots and lots of smart people with good advice on how to run effective meetings, but you may be thinking that none of those suggestions is really helping address what seem like deeper issues (and here, think “band-aid” and “sucking chest wound”). If so, let’s ponder the possibility that the problem lies not with the conduct of the meetings themselves, but with the culture in which they occur. Consider the following issues that I’ve encountered in various organizations through the years.

(Read the rest at the Exchange Blog…)

You may have noticed Facebook’s new feature that allows everything from big companies to lowly blogs like us to reserve facebook.com/YOURNAMEHERE, and thanks to Jennifer Angliss, who manages our Facebook account for us, you can now visit us and become a fan at facebook.com/scholarsandrogues. Thanks, Jen.

In addition, you may have noticed that little Tweet widget at the top of the right column, which means that you can also follow us on Twitter, if you like. We’re @scholars_rogues.

It’s been entertaining watching American public “discourse” since the election. (I use that word in its broadest, most ridiculous sense, since nothing that hinges so completely on self-absorption, rank ignorance and pathological dishonesty can be accurately characterized by such a noble word. But indulge me. I’ve been working on my irony lately.)

On the one hand you have conservatives fainting dead away that we’re now in the clutches of a “socialist” president. Never mind that these folks wouldn’t know a real socialist if he was gnawing their balls off. Never mind that most of these folks think “socialist” is the French word for Negro. Never mind that Obama demonstrably is to socialism what Joe the Plumber is to brie-sucking Northeastern intellectualism. As arch-conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert says, “this is a fact-free zone.”

On the other you have the righteous outrage of the progressosphere, which feels six different kinds of betrayed by a president who promised them the moon and stars and has now left them to what looks like at least a four-year walk of shame. If I might borrow from an old fraternity joke, imagine the following scene from the Oval Office:

Barack: Hey everybody, what’s the difference between a progressive and a toilet?
Rahm: I give up, Mr. President.
Barack: The toilet doesn’t follow you around after you use it.
[Entire Cabinet]: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

A few days ago Chris Bowers, one of the progressive blogosphere’s smarter and more influential voices, announced that he was becoming a conservative Democrat. His reasoning was compelling. Let me sample a bit for you (and encourage you to go read the rest as soon as you’re done here).

You can “endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes” to keep you in the Party. “You get ten times the media mentions that one gets being a progressive.” You get “more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors.” You can “hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want” with no consequences at all. “You get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own.” If you bitch about it you get “threats about never hearing from the White House again.” You’re “far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama’s cabinet by 7-1.” And that’s not nearly all.

Okay, so maybe Bowers isn’t really abandoning his fellow progressives. Maybe he was just being a smart-ass to make a point. I can’t say I approve of such tactics, but hey, my old pal Jonathan Swift was known for the occasional snark, so who am I to judge?

The point is that progressives have a beef with the new fauxcialist administration, and regardless of what you think about their issues, their analysis or their personal hygiene, a review of the facts certainly justifies their pique. Think about it.

• Obama the Campaigning Man was pretty clear in his disdain for the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama the President has apparently decided that gay rights can wait. (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Don’t bother.)
• Candidate Obama was balls-to-the-wall about greening the economy, and I mean yesterday. President Obama, whose favorability rating is running better than 2-1 for, seemed unable or unwilling to expend some of that political capital on the just passed ACES bill, which many experts think will accomplish diddley (or worse). (Again, whatever the eventual reality about this bill turns out to be is irrelevant - the point is that Obama did not act in accordance with the more progressive stance he had taken earlier.)
• And what about health care? A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed overwhelming support for “a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” How overwhelming, you ask? Overall 72% were in favor of the “public option,” and 57% said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to get it. Hell, 50% of Republican respondents want it. So, you have very high approval ratings. And you certainly have a significantly greater mandate than George the Conqueror did after nipping John Kerry in 2004. You have significant majorities in both houses of Congress. You have overwhelming popular support for a public option. And you can’t get it done? Seriously?

I’m sitting here trying to figure out why corporate America, which would stand to benefit tremendously from having the burden of insuring the citizenry lifted from its shoulders, isn’t in open revolt. (That part of corporate America that doesn’t include the insurance industry, I mean.)

It has been observed that the Republicans seem to be more effective with a minority than the Dems are when they have the entire country by the balls. GOPpers derail the train by threatening a filibuster, but the Democrats can’t seem to head off a bad idea with a damned-near buster-proof majority. How the hell is this possible?

This, of course, is what’s known as a “rhetorical question.” The butt-obvious answer is that the contemporary Democratic Party is not really a party, at least not in the same way that the GOP is. Instead, it’s a bizarre amalgam of progressives, “moderates,” bipartisan fetishists, “New Democrats,” DINOs and opportunistic Republicans (see Specter, Arlen). The median at present lies significantly to the right of Richard Nixon, who despite the recent revelation that he was in favor of abortion in the case of half-breed fetuses, posted a record that would make him pretty darned progressive by 2009 standards. (Good thing you dodged that bullet, huh Mr. President?)

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence. As far as the “responsible” centrists are concerned, progressives are the late-date with no self-esteem, the unwitting fat chick at the pig party.

So, what to do?

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

I’m no expert on the rules of the American legislature, so I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing. Nonetheless, I imagine the Republican wing of the Democratic Party would wet itself. And in the short term this could be very good for the GOP, which would find itself in the plurality.

Longer-term, though, it seems like the progressives can make an argument - and one that is supported by some actual evidence - that they represent the will of a goodly slice of the American public. Even better, given how the youth vote seems to be trending, they can also argue that their hand is going to strengthen over time. Are these premises accurate? Hard to say. But they are testable hypotheses, and the posit is certainly plausible enough to be worth examining.

Maybe the remaining Dems respond by making the reality of the situation official and decamping for the GOP. Maybe the Blue Dogs and the “moderate” wing of the GOP abandon those pesky snake-handlers on the right and form a new “centrist” coalition. Who knows. If that did happen, however, America would at least have the refreshing luxury of an opposition party that, you know, opposed. We could get all that corporatist DC clutter, which thrives because it dominates both parties, up for a real referendum. What a campaign hook - America vs. the Beltway.

Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.

And so, the beginning of each school year was a trying time for me. The problem with new school clothes was that there really weren’t any return policies then, so what mom picked, we kept. “You don’t like the colors? Tough! I spent my second grade year in a dress made of burlap, and your father wore shoes made out of corn husks.” That story, again. The pants and shirts mom bought for me were always one size too large in August, but because of my freakish growth spurts, were one size too small by the following June. That gave me a four week window to be comfortably attired. The material had to be thick and long-sleeved for January’s biting cold. That part I appreciated, since the weight of the material in the August and September heat had me losing all my summer fat in pools of perspiration. It was hard to keep weight on if you were the favorite.

Did I like the clothes my mom bought for me? What difference did that make? How could I tell her to stop buying clothes that made me look like a clown in a Jimi Hendrix poster? If I looked like an idiot, it was the 60s. Everybody looked like idiots.

These were the days that would progress to leisure suits. Remember Nehru jackets? Bell bottoms? Puffy sleeves and hippy beads? I did better than fit in. I was edgy.

So it was that in July of 1966, I sat on the couch as mom pulled out the pieces of an outfit that even today is the stuff of legend.

“OK, all right,” she stammered. “Sit and look at this. First, I got you a new pair of shoes and look at them! Aren’t they cute?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. Shoes for me weren’t an everyday purchase. Usually I got Glenn’s shoes when he grew out of them. These new shoes were white and green, like golfer’s shoes, and they shined like glass. My sisters were next to mom, and Glenn had parked himself at the end of the table facing me. He was just beginning to grin.

“And look at these pants,” gushed Mom. “No, not pants. Slacks they are. Little boys wear pants, but you’re a big boy now. Do you see this design?”

I did see the design. The pants were Kelly green with gold circles interlaced like a double helix up and down the length. They were so thick, they could stand up without the benefit of a clothes hanger. Glenn’s grin was a little wider.

“And the T-shirt,” said mom. “Now, the salesman said it had to be black because that’s what they’re wearing in Nashville this year. It’s the year of the black T-shirt.”

“Can I just wear the T-shirt when it gets colder?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t have to wear it now, do I?”

“Now, honey, how are you going to own a black T-shirt and not wear it in the year of the black T-shirt? Sometimes, you don’t make any sense at all. Of course you wear it now, and over it, you’ll wear this!”

Mom pulled the shirt out of the bag with a flourish. It beamed with a magical radiance that made my eyes hurt. It was green also, a shade of green I’d not seen before or since. The long sleeves had the same golden pattern as the pants, although the gold was a different shade, but since the pants were a different shade of green, they matched in an H.P. Lovecraft sort of way. My brother’s grin was so wide, the corners of his mouth met at the back of his head. Mom insisted I try on the outfit.

When all the pieces were on, I turned to Glenn to get his honest opinion. When he was able to stop laughing, he gave it.

“While seeing you go to school looking like that would give me pleasure for, hell, for the rest of my life, I can’t let you do it. I have found the limit of my dislike for you, it seems. To dress you up like this and then send you to school, even I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with it?” laughed Glenn. But as I stared at him, his smile slowly ebbed away. He had tried to help, but I was beyond helping. “Nothing. Here, you have to wear this towel over your arm. Put your left arm in front of you like this and drape it over. And you have to tuck your pants in your socks like this. And here. Wear this Mickey Mouse hat. Look in the mirror. What do you think?”

What did I think? I looked in the mirror and I thought it wasn’t half bad. I looked like a matador. A short, slightly pudgy matador.

And as I strode to school that first day, with the black towel draped over my left arm and black plastic ears on my head, I truly believed this was a edgy as I would ever

get. I was El Terrio, the brave matador of Fourth Avenue, off to face the bull that was the sixth grade. I was in school for almost ten minutes before I realized what a terrible mistake I had made.

I sat in the front row of Mr. Bostack’s science class that day, as the chorus of moos rose up behind me. That’s the problem with being edgy. The edge is right there, and if you aren’t smart, you fall over the edge and into the abyss. As sweat poured off my face, I realized mom’s school clothes had transformed me into the matador, and I would be the matador for the next ten months of my life and beyond.

The Deproliferator

Conventional thinking holds that deterrence has kept us safe. If, that is, you don’t mind a little brinkmanship like Berlin in 1961 and the Cuban Missile crisis. The history of the Cold War was also sprinkled with accidents such as the 1966 Palomares, Spain crash of a B-52 bearing four hydrogen bombs.

Nor has the Cold War’s thaw elicited the same sigh of relief from the disarmament community as from the public at large. One state or another always seems to be looking for an excuse to develop nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, non-state actors, such as al-Qaeda or Chechen rebels, make no bones whatsoever about their nuclear avarice.

Thus does the prospect of Russia’s loose nukes falling into the wrong hands and an A.Q. Khan wanna-be replenishing the nuclear black market keep us more or less permanently on edge. Add to that conflicting reports on the security of Pakistan’s nukes. Finally, just to make absolutely sure we don’t become complacent, plenty of nuclear weapons still remain on hair-trigger alert.

This kind of peace conjures up the old sight gag about nitroglycerin — one false move and we’re blown to kingdom come. No doubt about it: Deterrence is looking a little shop-worn these days. At the same time, thanks in part to President Obama’s stated commitment, disarmament is being refurbished to the glossy finish it boasted for a brief spell in the eighties.

Let’s not forget, though, that conventional weapons do a pretty good job of mimicking nuclear weapons. Where does that leave us then? Post-nuclear disarmament, we’d still be on the road to total war, just not tailgated by nuclear weapons.

In fact, the net effects are disturbing in their similarities. To the victims of Dresden and Hamburg, on the one hand, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the other, the quantitative and qualitative differences between the two types of bombing ranged from negligible to nonexistent. Those who survived the A-bomb attacks weren’t saying to themselves: “I bet I’d be in a lot less pain if my injuries were inflicted by conventional weapons.”

The justifications commonly given for total war are either collective guilt or the argument that, because they contribute to the war effort, civilians can be classified as combatants. Total war’s unstated assumption, meanwhile, is that a state can suffer no more disastrous fate than invasion and occupation.

It’s nice to know that “Give me liberty or give me death” still lives. But, in light of technological developments in warfare, this hoary rallying cry needs an overhaul. How about “Give me liberty or give all of us death”?

Wait, What’s Behind Door Number Three?

In the Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition, Lawrence Freedman writes:

The response from those prepared to contemplate use [of nuclear weapons] tended to be based on a choice of values rather than strategic logic. It was considered ‘better to be dead than red’, to go down fighting rather than to succumb to the horrors that had come to be associated with communist rule. The nuclear pacifist might argue that [for] a particular code of honour to be applied to a whole society was an imposition more absolute and authoritarian than the type of rule it was supposed to avoid.

Freedman then quotes Lieutenant-General Sir John Cowley [writing in 1960]:

The choice of death or dishonor is one which has always faced the professional fighting man [who] chooses death for himself so that his country may survive, or. . . that the principles for which he is fighting may survive. [With nuclear weapons] we are facing a somewhat different situation, when the reply is not to given by individuals but by countries as a whole. Is it right for the government of a country to choose complete destruction of the population rather than some other alternative, however unpleasant that alternative may be?

Retaliating against an aggressor with total war will likely result in the obliteration of not only vast swaths of the population on both sides, but those very qualities with which the state earned our loyalty, such as respect for human rights. In other words, the question fundamental to total war and not often asked is: Just how much is preserving the sanctity of the state worth? The “unpleasant alternative” of which Lt. Gen. Cowley speaks is, of course, submitting to enemy rule.

Perhaps an aggressor can be repelled with another method besides an all-out preemptive attack or retaliation, whether nuclear or conventional. Let’s think of a recent example of a state that’s invaded another state and met with strong resistance. Oh, that would be us when we invaded Iraq.

Sure, the Iraqi Army’s capacity for retaliation was killed on contact. Nevertheless, as everyone knows, the citizens of Iraq have made our lives as occupiers hell. While Iraq has yet to shake us off, at least it’s reduced us to the point where we’re not getting much of anything out of their country. But what application does this have for the United States were it to be attacked?

Call me whimsical, but instead of trading apocalyptic death and destruction with a state that attacks us, what if we made an end run around mass destruction? In other words, if an attack by intercontinental missiles — whether the warheads are nuclear or non — is imminent, why not make it clear that we choose not to retaliate in kind?

Say what? Refusing to fight back is not only un-American, it runs contrary to human nature. Even if we sought to behave otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before we were caught in the death spiral of total war.

It’s true that the idea there’s a time to attack and a time to yield might better be applied to a state other than a superpower. But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend it’s the United States that’s attacked.

Upon signal, we’d disband our armed forces and they’d morph into a resistance movement with hidden caches of weapons at their disposal. It’s not, of course, as un-American as it sounds: Guerilla warfare was employed in the early days of the Revolutionary War and by select forces during the Civil War. If it makes nuclear types feel any better, think of this approach as a second-strike capability, just not nuclear.

Because total war can’t be waged on an insurgency — though Russia came close in Chechnya — not only is much less life lost, but less infrastructure demolished. Also, aside from retaining the moral upper hand, should an insurgency ultimately prevail, it would generate a national myth which, like the Revolutionary War, could sustain us for 200 years.

This may have seemed like a pointless exercise to some. But is it any more so than a method of waging war that stands to kill millions on both sides, level the landscape, and ravage the environment?

I haven’t been able to work out for myself what it means yet. Of course it’s still early.

I keep hearing Patrick Star’s voice: there’s this Sponge Bob episode where Patrick cries in despair, “Why does this keep happening!?” And Sponge Bob says in a resigned, measured tone, “I - don’t - know.”

It’s like that, if you know what I mean, which I doubt.

Here’s some random information I’m sorting through:

Item: I went to a Doco show back in January. In the middle of their song “Atmosphere,” they broke into a killer cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” Some guy behind me said, “Damn. ‘Billie Jean.’ Michael Jackson was the shit, wasn’t he?”  The chick standing next to me turned to him and said matter of factly, “Yeah, he was. Too bad he got so fucked up.”

We all caught each other’s eyes and nodded at her simple, powerful truth.

Item: I was at band rehearsal a month ago.  We took a break and decided to have a bite to eat.  My band mate is a bachelor so there wasn’t much to choose from. He offered me a peanut butter and banana sandwich. “Fry it,” I said. He burst into laughter.  “Damn, I miss Elvis,” he said.

We fried the sandwiches. They were good. Besides, they weren’t what killed The King….

Item: I timed a pharmaceutical commercial last night. In a 30 second spot 17 seconds were devoted to telling viewers about the bad shit the drug would do to them, 13 seconds to its “possible benefits.”

This is the norm now, my crap detector keeps telling me.

Item:  Lisa Marie Presley has posted a blog entry at her MySpace site telling that she and Michael Jackson had a conversation in which he indicated he feared he’d end up like Lisa Marie’s daddy.

Be sure to read the comments. As Sandburg observed: The People, Yes….

Item: CNN has an article posted about how Michael Jackson’s death nearly killed the Internet yesterday.As if  TMZ and Perez Hilton going away would be a bad thing.

They say 70% of the Internet is porn. Visit any major media site today and you’ll see why.

I don’t know any more now than I did when I started this. But I suspect a lot….

To paraphrase the old Chevy Chase line, Michael Jackson is still dead.

Last week’s quarterfinal matchup started out neck and neck, but in the end Rose Hill Drive stepped on the gas and pulled away for a resounding 88%-12% victory over Food Will Win the War. Congrats to the excellent FWWtW for making the quarters and best of luck in the future. We’ll be listening. Meanwhile, Rose Hill Drive moves on to the semis where they’ll square off with Asobi Seksu.

Now for this week’s first semifinal throwdown. Contestant #1 is 20 year-old UK Power Pop prodigy Paul Steel, who knocked off the dynamic and popular Gogol Bordello to reach the round of four. Paul recalls one of his greatest moments:

“I got in from college one day and there was a message from Andy Partridge. I just couldn’t believe it, I rang him straight back and we chatted for ages, and the whole time I was shaking like a leaf.” At a plucky 16 years old, it was just the boost of confidence Steel needed. Growing up in coastal Worthing as an XTC and Radiohead addict, his first foray into the world of music was hardly the earth-shattering debut one would hope for.

Listen: MySpace / Last.FM

Paul’s opponent, also hailing from Across the Pond, is IAMX. From the AllMusic Guide:

Sneaker Pimps founding member Chris Corner began performing as the drippingly seductive electro-pop persona IAMX in 2003. Adopting the trappings of mid-’80s electro-pop and new wave acts like New Order, the Cure, and Depeche Mode with his pounding, reverb-swathed, synth-washed compositions, Corner’s work as IAMX represented a notable departure from his work with the Sneaker Pimps. His first full-length as IAMX, Kiss & Swallow, was released on Recall in 2004; the sophomore IAMX album, The Alternative, followed on Major two years later. Both albums featured a dark, vampirish sensibility and dealt with topics like alternative sexuality and drug use.

Listen: MySpace / Last.FM / Lala / eMusic

If you’d be so kind, please sample the music by clicking on the Listen links, then register your verdict in the poll below. Your vote decides who moves on to the finals. (And what the heck, tell your friends - they like music, right?)

The updated ToR bracket looks like this:

I’d like to be writing about clean energy or debating health care policy. I wish I could add something astute to the discussion about the future of democracy in Iran. But to do so would mean investing the time to follow these issues closely enough to have something worthwhile to add. And then there’s the time needed to actually write something. I’ve already got four or five unfinished posts languishing on my laptop.

Yet, in the words of my 14-year-old son this morning, who is angry at my asking him to pitch in around the house prior to the arrival of weekend guests, and who can’t understand why I won’t just drop everything to pick him up from the lake with his friends later today, I don’t have a “real job” — so why can’t I be like a good stay-at-home mom and craft my life exclusively around his? If I didn’t have work to play at, I could keep the house up by myself and still have time to provide unlimited taxi service. He can’t understand why, if Dad is a doctor, I still “have to work.” (Never mind that my husband is a family physician in a small, self-owned private practice in a very affluent community – which makes us solidly middle-class amid the wealth of Boulder). My son thinks I ask him to do too much in exchange for offering too little – at least in comparison to most of his friends, whose mothers are not so audacious as to work.

No doubt his barbed comment struck too sharp a chord in me. It is too often I who question whether I have a “real job.” I mostly freelance, as a copywriter and editor. This past year, it’s been full time, which is why I’ve had to shortchange this blog, despite the gratification it’s provided for me intellectually and as a really-wanna-be journalist. On top of that, I teach off and on as an adjunct at the University of Colorado, where I finished a Ph.D. over a decade ago. No, I don’t have a “normal job with an office,” as my son pointed out. Nor benefits. Despite protestations, I don’t even get an “exclusively mine” desk at home – everyone’s always encroaching on it. Unlike more highly esteemed grad school peers, I did not pursue a tenure-track position, since I did not see how it could possibly fit with the life I had by the time I graduated, with a toddler and an infant and a husband who was often on call and never gets home till 6:30 or 7:00.

As a high school political junkie I had a T-shirt that said “A woman’s place is in the House…and Senate.” I grew up in the heady feminist days of the 1970s believing that, and believing that I could be a success in the house (small “h”) and the public sphere as well. Both, I felt, were integral to the life I wanted to craft as a woman.

I’ve done my best to cobble together a sorry-looking version of “having it all,” which means a half-assed pseudo-career; a lot of guilt about being a mother who is only half there, half the time, for her children; a house that despite my best, often solo, efforts to keep semi-ordered, usually looks like a small tornado blew through – and a chronic level of stress and sleep deprivation, not to mention perpetual frustration over not being able to do any of what I do as well as I could have if I were more singularly devoted.

Why didn’t I get a full-time nanny so I could pursue the full-time career? Which, theoretically, I might make enough at (though likely not, as an academic or journalist) to afford a housekeeper to do all the scut work I resent? I didn’t, because I chose to be a mom, and I felt it was better for my kids if they had at least one parent available to them at more than just breakfast and bedtime. And since my husband makes substantially more money than I am able to, it makes sense for him to be the primary earner. But what I didn’t know, when I made that seemingly obvious choice back when to “do it all,” is how hard it would be, and how little valued I would feel on every front, not least in my own estimation. (And yes, I realize these are the quandaries of a privileged Western woman – but that is my culture.)

The struggles that American women – and we are still talking primarily about women — continue to face as they pursue a multiplicity of identities, particularly parent versus professional, are every bit as relevant, entrenched and seemingly insoluble as they were when I graduated from high school nearly three decades ago. My conclusion, almost 15 years into parenthood, 11 years post-Ph.D. and the entirety of that time spent negotiating the “juggling act,” is that little has changed for women. I bought that whole ‘80s bill of goods that you can have it all and do it all well, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a load of crap. The reality is, in the vast majority of situations, that as a woman today you still must foreground either family or work or suffer the fallout of trying to combine them.

My husband gets to leave the house every day and go to a job that, while taxing, is still gratifying and comes with a good measure of status. He doesn’t worry about whether there’ll be clean underwear for the next morning or (imagine!) whether the kids will have clean underwear. He doesn’t think about what they’ll eat for lunch or negotiate daily battles with them over fruits and vegetables versus pop and ice cream. He doesn’t have to interrupt his day multiple times to admonish them to turn off the TV or the computer and do something more productive, or summon the emotional energy necessary to brace for yet another conflict if he dares ask them to unload the dishwasher, vacuum the cat hair off the sofa, or wipe the splatter off the bathroom mirror. He doesn’t stress about how he’ll make his 5:00 deadline if he has to leave to go pick up his son who accuses his mother of being a “micromanager” if she has the gall to ask him to pin down what time his social occasion might wind up, so she can work around it – even though she doesn’t really “work,” in his youthful appraisal.

I’ve had well-meaning individuals give me two versions of advice. The more traditional set says, “This is just a season. The kids will be grown before you know it (they will – and that’s also why the attitude issues and constant conflict hurt so much); make them your focus, don’t worry about work – there’ll be time for that” — as if it’s just a little hobby. The others say, “Just don’t do it.” Let the house go. Let them worry about their own laundry. Let them eat as much junk as they please. Forgot about monitoring grades; it’s their future. Don’t worry if your husband’s parents get birthday cards or Christmas presents – it’s not up to you.

There is truth in both perspectives. But I can’t seem to embrace either. I remain torn in a maelstrom of expectations: to nurture these children I’ve brought into the world and to keep a semblance of domestic order, since I have this flexible schedule and work at home. And also to use this able brain I was born with, this analytical mind, this creative energy that, even if I were to try to subordinate, will not be repressed. Despite my son’s puzzlement, I don’t work because I “have to,” to make ends meet. I have a luxury in that regard (though he might not be skiing and traveling like his peers, were that not the case).

What I’m holding out for, I guess, is that it won’t be all over for me by the time I hit 50. Once my kids are off to college, my time-balance should shift. What I’m clinging to is the hope that society might have changed enough since the early days of feminism so that midlife women can make fresh, vital contributions and be rewarded for them with the pay and status they deserve, even if they’ve chosen, by default, the silly-sounding Mommy Track.

Am I a fool to have such faith? If the past 30-40 years of feminism’s limited accomplishments are any indicator, maybe so. As long as we live in a culture in which privileged 14-year-old boys see their mother’s choice to work as self-indulgent, progress seems elusive. But I’m also holding out hope that by making the choices I have – not to abandon my children, as so many in my generation were through divorce or neglect, and not to forsake my own gifts and goals – my son and his younger sister may grow up to see the value of both sets of commitments. Whether society will evolve to support women so that they can combine them more effectively is another matter.

Wendy Redal hopes to post more regularly in the future, with a focus on the politics of everyday culture.