You Heard Me

This is what I grew up with. Back in the 70s and early 80s (when I was little), Sesame Street was pretty progressive. Unlike other kids shows, it was about urban life. It was about the variations that you saw in family life, the realities that little kids in cities might experience. Sure, there were little field trips to the farm or the zoo or the forest sometimes, but the thing that really set Sesame Street apart back in those days was that it related best to city kids, city life, and all the diversities of existence that implies. I think, looking back, that Sesame Street played a pivotal part in my eventual desire to live in cities.

But let’s get back to this clip and talk about the revelation I found myself turning over in my head this morning. This cute little song talks about all the different ways in which a group of people living under one roof can be a family. They care about each other, they take care of each other. Whether it’s a single mom and her kid or a multigenerational mob, they’re a family.

Not so, says the rhetoric of THE FAMILY.

The Family, capital T, capital F, is something that we hear a lot about from self-described social conservatives. They lament its diminishing presence in the American landscape. They claim, until almost literally blue in the face, that The Family is the central and most important unit in our culture, and that every attack on The Family is essentially an attack on America itself.

What I’ve come to really grasp lately is that The American Family that the American Family Association is so desperate to preserve, The Family that James Dobson focuses on, is a highly specific construct that is coded in so many ways to exclude nearly every “family” most Americans find most, well, familiar. The rhetoric of The Family presents a friendly face for the racist, sexist and xenophobic policies of the greater conservative right. Nearly every vile, hateful idea can be somehow justified if it can be executed in defense of The Family, an unquestionably sacred construct central to the Conservative American Identity.

First, it may without saying, The Family is Christian. Even a similarly structured family to the one generally accepted by The Family’s fans is essentially a non-family if they aren’t. The controversy surrounding the TLC show All American Muslim is one example. Christian faith is repeatedly invoked as an essential ingredient to The Family. Though the language is less explicit regarding this, The Family is white. There’s a bit of a chicken/egg thing here: non-white families are more likely to adopt non-nuclear family strucures due to a number of reasons (culture, economics, necessity), which are seen as subversions of the traditional mom-dad-kids unit. Since white folks are more likely to have a nuclear family, the nuclear family is more likely to be white. But while it was once much more explicitly stated that non-whites were not qualified as The Family, the economic factor is now the watermark for who does and does not count. White people who can’t afford to get married (or divorced) are now poor enough to qualify for the collective disdain of people who want to defend “traditional family values.”

What’s more troubling about this, though, isn’t just the inherent racism, classism and sexism that denies familyhood to anything that falls outside this narrow category. The ugliest part of this is that The Family could very well be abusive, oppressive, ignorant, based on lies (i.e., a closeted father or mother, extramarital affairs, hidden addictions). But as long as the structure itself remains intact, it’s the only family worth recognizing, defending or protecting. Unlike our little Sesame Street song, it’s not love that holds The Family together. It’s demographics. Rules. Order. Institutions. And yes, faith, but what good is faith alone when a family doesn’t have love at its core? Nothing about The Family as conservatives define it guarantees love or sharing or concern.

To qualify for the favor of the Religious Right, The Family must feature two married parents, children, and a guiding faith. The Family is somehow less of a Family if the parents are divorced. Certainly not a Family at all if the parents are of the same gender. Not quite a Family if there is a female breadwinner, or if there is a stay-at-home dad. And seriously lacking if the marriage occured after the children were born, or just never happened at all.

Their obsession with The Family has nothing to do with building happy, harmonious or loving families. They may believe that by virtue of simply *being* a family somehow assures happiness and mutual affection, but they do not recognize that love, affection and sharing is actually what makes a family a family worth having.

So all of these calls for a return to “family values,” all of this hand-wringing about the decline of The Family, and, most significantly, all the legislation that punishes anyone who wants to live outside the confines of “traditional family” structures (birth control and abortion restrictions, lack of equal-pay laws, bans on gay marriage, tax credits for being married or having children) are based on a structural idea of a family. It’s based on the idea that there is only one kind of family and that if everyone could build for themselves that one kind of family, that structure can somehow perform sociocultural magic. It can restore the economy. It can eliminate moral transgressions. It can improve our image among other countries. It can lower crime.

Just like most mythical creatures, The Family has special powers.

But if anything has been proven and re-re-reproven over the six millennia or so of moral legislation in the Western world, it’s been that nobody can truly legislate morality. The Lex Julia didn’t stop people from being gay or having illegitimate babies in ancient Rome, and gay marriage bans and abstinence-only education aren’t keeping people from being gay or having illegitimate babies now.  I think after so many thousands of years, it might be time to admit that trying to make every family into The Family isn’t working. And maybe, just maybe, The Family isn’t the magical, foundational, sacred structure some think it is.

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933

This sentiment used to ring hollow to me. It seemed to me to be a rather simplistic notion tracking back to the idea of bravery. Which, as my sister has explained to me, is often just the dismissal of common sense in favor of impressing others. But I think I finally understand what FDR was so presciently recognizing in this speech (and for God’s sake, go read/listen to the whole thing… it’s beautiful and so, so timelessly relevant). Because right now, far too many of us are acting on fear. Fear of people unlike themselves, fear of ancient grudges and centuries of oppression being taken to task, fear of their own diminishing primacy.

We live in a nation where we are denying individuals basic human rights rather than expanding them. We have denied citizens the right to enjoy the benefits of marriage with the partner they choose. Some states have decided to allow doctors to deny women the right to a complete understanding of their health care options if they happen to be pregnant. In many states, we have enacted policy that keeps the children of new Americans from fully realizing the opportunities this country has to offer.  These are not laws that better our nation. These are not laws that protect people or keep us from harm. These laws do nothing more than constrict liberty and the pursuit of happiness for very specific groups of people. These are fearful laws.

Those who advocate actions like this may not see them as fear-driven, but at the root of it, the denial of human rights to another human being will always stem from the fear of what they would do with such rights. Like the homophobic man, afraid that a gay man would treat him the way he’s always treated women, the straight, white American man is afraid of the consequences of being the minority. This isn’t my fancy graduate school education talking. They say it themselves. You can find it in any given comments forum on The National Review. Even public figures are baldly admitting that the fight here is not for a greater moral reality, but against the diminishing power of the hegemonic group. One of the minds/pocketbooks behind the Arizona immigration laws, John Tanton  (hate group founder and advisor, also, to the Arizona State Senator that Mitt Romney has informally named as who he would look to for immigration policy cues) has made his motivations clear:

“To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night or will there be an explosion?”

The immigrants are taking over, and there is a black man at the helm of the country. If you’re the type of person who thinks that race is a really important indication of one’s intentions, instead of an arbitrary and facile demarcation used by only the smallest of minds to make decisions on who is most fit for what types of leadership or citizenship (I think they call those types of people “racists”), you would be scared, too.

You might think the opposition to gay marriage is motivated simply by homophobia, but it’s not. While there are plenty of people who advocate against gay marriage because they hate homosexuality, this issue actually has deep roots in religion’s need for a high level of procreation. Churches need a steady population of faithful followers and contributors, into perpetuity. The objection to homosexuality is typically just the age-old objection to non-procreative sexuality of any stripe. But in America, we not only fear non-procreative sex for the power it gives people over their own destinies, we also fear being outnumbered. And this dovetails with our other pet fears. So when Senator’s wife and apparently “not political person” Jodie Brunstetter let slip that the North Carolina gay marriage ban was actually designed to “protect Caucasian marriage,” she gave voice to another fear behind such legislation.

And while the anti-woman legislation that seems to be oozing its way through far too many state houses and senates may be easy to characterize as the desperate Bible-thumping of a nation that’s lost its “moral compass,” it is about fear, too. The fear that women in control of their lives will supplant men as the leaders of our culture, our businesses, our political bodies. The fear of a world where the “natural” order of things can no longer be relied upon. The fear that women will some day have the power to denigrate and oppress men the way that women have been oppressed for so long. Sean Hannity’s BFF, the reverend Jesse Peterson has voiced this fear:

“[...]they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men, in the good old days, understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it and they understood that if they let them take over, this is what would happen.”

Emphasis added: because it implies that men are no longer men. Something fundamental has changed. Men are no longer men, women are no longer women (as we used to understand them). So, it’s probably best to try and keep as many of them from controlling their reproduction as we can… the more women in aprons, the less women telling us what to do.

Changes- the kinds worth making, anyway- are never easy. But throughout history, the trend is (eventually) toward the continued expansion of liberties, not the restriction of them. It is difficult to think of a case in which those who have advocated the restriction of liberties for a certain group have been proven to be on the right side of history. I can’t help but think that these are the death throes… this is the beginning of the end.

Yes, fear is a powerful motivator. But change only begets more change. While the fear of a browner nation may motivate some people to the polls, it will not really keep the nation from becoming more brown. While the fear of gay unions somehow diminishing straight marriages or decreasing the white birth rate may spur a few donations, it’s not going to keep people from loving who they love. While the fear of the powerful female might get a few signatures on a petition to intrude on women’s medical decisions, it’s not going to keep women from working hard, succeeding, and changing the face of the American workforce.* Much like global warming is going to continue whether one believes in it or not, these changes are going to keep happening, no matter how much they are feared.

The gays aren’t going back in the closet. The immigrants aren’t going to stop crossing borders. The president isn’t going to stop being black (or awesome). Women aren’t going to go back to their Betty Draper kitchen and decide to stop being secretaries of state or the head of the IMF. Reality marches on. And in the future, we’ll look back on this period and realize that the only thing we truly had to fear was fear itself.

OK, I know that “Video Games” sounds like a 23-year-old’s journal set to a remix of the music you hear at your massage therapist’s. And I know she takes herself far too seriously. And I know she can’t dance worth a crap. But you know what? I like Lana Del Rey. And here’s why.

Someday, I'll be able to fully articulate my regret for this haircut.

I was once a 25-year old girl who took herself too seriously.

I know, this is probably hard to believe. No? Oh, OK, then.

Del Rey’s lyrical style makes me think of the many times in my younger years when I would walk right into the slavering maw of bad decisions (shitty jobs that paid less than I’d make wearing a green apron, boys who ride fixed-gear bicycles, a taste for tequila that became an appetite) on the sole rationalization that it would one day make for a good story. And the reason her music speaks to me about these experiences even more is that her lyricism comes from that knowledge that a bad choice either has been made or is hovering temptingly within reach, combined with the lack of experience to fully articulate it. Now that I’m 30 I can look back on my early/mid 20s and the story is well-seasoned, oft-told, tempered by the passage of time. But when you’re in the thick of it and you’re so close to the bad decisions and the pain and lessons of it all, you struggle to put such stories into words. And you wind up with stuff like this:

“Don’t make me sad, don’t make me cry
Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough
I don’t know why
Keep making me laugh,
Let’s go get high
The road is long, we carry on
Try to have fun in the meantime

Come and take a walk on the wild side
Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain
You like your girls insane” (From Born 2 Die)

 How many times did I write this kind of blather when I was in my early 20s? Many times.It’s hard to reflect on the fucked-upedness of a situation when you’re kissing in the rain. And sometimes, it’s nice to think about what it’s like- that nagging feeling that something is really stupid and making the choice to ignore it. That’s what being young is about. Anyone who makes all the right decisions in their early 20s isn’t worth listening to, either at a bar or on a record. All the better if they can make it poetic, but if they can’t, there’s something about that, too. Lana Del Rey’s lyrical ineptitude, in my opinion, speaks to the immediacy of the experience she’s trying to sing about. Take this set of lines, for example, from “Video Games:”

“He holds me in his big arms
Drunk and I am seeing stars
This is all I think of

Watching all our friends fall
In and out of Old Paul’s
This is my idea of fun
Playing video games”

Conor Oberst, who is what you might call a *good* songwriter, has a similar tone in “Lua,” fromI’m Wide Awake It’s Morning.” This song also describes the casual self-destruction of youthful addiction:

“I’ve got a flask inside my pocket we can share it on the train
If you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same
We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain
But what was normal in the evening, by the morning seems insane.”

Even though Oberst’s lyrics also paint a picture of cavalier alcoholism and recklessness, he seems to come at the story with just enough perspective and experience to judge his past behavior (we sure killed all the pain!). On the other hand, Del Rey’s lyrics demonstrate that she is still swimming in the chaos of the drugs and booze and druggy, boozy “love,” to the point where she can’t see outside of the world it has constructed for her. She doesn’t see it as medication, she doesn’t see it as damaging. It’s “all she thinks of.” And from within it, she sees none of Oberst’s regret or self-reflection. She’s not there yet. And she won’t be, for a while. It may not make her a good songwriter, but to me, anyway, it makes her an evocative one.

Or maybe that song is just really fucking catchy. That could be, too.

Mitt Romney recently said, in a room full of people, that he would end federal funding to Planned Parenthood. But what he really told this room full of people, all semantic analysis aside, is that he would “end” Planned Parenthood. He carefully chose the words, “we’re going to get rid of that,” in order to get those abortion-hating primary voters who have mostly outlived their reproductive organs to hear that he would contribute to the eventual end of Planned Parenthood. He may be backpedaling on what words he actually said, but there can be no mistake about what the people he was talking to want to hear. And Mitt Romney is not good at a lot, but he is a maestro at telling those primary voters what they want to hear. Even if it is semantically subtle enough to both defend to detractors and proudly proclaim to supporters.

Let me make something absolutely clear here: Not even the president of the United States can “end” the operation of a legally operating, private organization, no matter how much you want him to end abortion.

Much like our overall political discourse has been distilled to this false-dichotomatic, simplistic football game of “my team” versus “your team,” the office of the president has been rendered into a bizarre political version of American Idol (Which is especially true of the GOP primary process this year: overlong, with upsets, weirdos, a big dollop of batshit crazy and at the end we’re still stuck with the same autotuned blandness we knew was going to win from the start. Think of Herman Cain as the “Pants on the Ground” guy, it works even better). The president, in the strictest of Constitutional terms, does not really have that large of a role in legislation, amending the constitution or foreign affairs. The president can command the military during congressionally-approved wars (with exceptions for military interventions like Libya, but proceeding militarily without congressional approval is apparently only considered by Congress to be an impeachable offense when the President is black… I digress). He can appoint judges, officers and ambassadors. He can make vacancy appointments, sign treaties, receive visiting ambassadors and issue pardons. And he can veto bills, but not if Congress *really* doesn’t want him to. So there’s like, veto power (which can be overriden), a LOT of HR, management of the process of bombing the shit out of a place (but only with prior congressional approval… mostly) and very little legislative power beyond saying, “hey if you could just, you know, pass this bill, that would be super.”

I don’t know the exact point at which the office of president became something so much more than an administrator and an appointer of officials. Maybe it was FDR’s larger-than-life, saved-the-world presence, maybe Reagan’s movie-star persona, on both sides of the aisle, our celebrity culture has mutated the role of president far beyond its actual job description. Socially-conservative voters expect the president to shine a light of moral righteousness, and exercise faith-based judgements in his work. Progressives want someone who can lead a country away from greed and inequality toward a more just and peaceful world. The presidency has become, on both ends of the political spectrum, much more about who we think the president is or should be as an individual, and much less about what he actually can do. Which is problematic for many reasons, but chief among them has to be the fact that we ignore the things we should pay attention to because we aren’t clear on just what power the president has. 

As a population, we insist on voting for someone who exemplifies ideological ideals and whose rhetoric appeals to us. But we don’t educate ourselves on exactly how “our guy in the race” could actually implement any of the things we hear him tell us about. Or even if he can. And what’s more, we don’t even bother voting for the people who check and balance that power… midterm election turnout averages 15-20% less when the top slot isn’t open, and the demographics show just who is making those midterm choices.

My point is… voters need to understand that the President is not our American Idol, he’s not supposed to represent our greatest moral aspirations or even to resemble our understanding of ourselves. And he’s definitely not in any kind of a position to “get rid of” an organization like Planned Parenthood. Americans need to know all of this not only because it’s basic civics, but because our founding fathers built this system for a reason. They wanted us to be represented by people who understood us and our principles, as only someone locally associated with the radically different regions of this country could. They wanted us to vote for these representatives, so our interests and concerns would be brought to the federal landscape. They wanted the power of that representative body to be checked by a president (Notice they chose the title of “president,” in the spirit of running the nation like you’d run a company… not a theocracy, not a serfdom, not an oligarchy. A company.) not just to prevent mob rule, but to put a face and an individual to administrative tasks like treaties and appointments. And none of this plan works well when we don’t inform ourselves and take an interest in self-representation beyond the presidential mythos.

You already knew that the contraception “controversy” wasn’t about “Religious Freedom.” You know that it’s not about reducing abortions, even if that’s what people think contraception does, because contraception prevents countless abortions that we can all agree are actually abortions, rather than prevention of implantation. But I’m going to break with my feminist sistren here and make a bigger claim… this isn’t even about making women’s health “weird” or icky, and it’s not about refusing to let women control their own sexual decisions. I would argue that, while it’s easy to get on the “All Republicans want women back in aprons and popping out a constant stream of rhythm-method-produced babies” bandwagon, it’s not actually the goal of most GOP lawmakers to force women back to the 19th century. Some, maybe, but not most. As usual, the ideology is just window dressing for something having to do with money and political capital.

Here’s what I think. The GOP’s real goal is to make absolutely certain that Obamacare is a failure. Nearly everything about the Obamacare plan threatens corporations that the GOP is tied to, and if the Affordable Care Act is something that garners the favor of the electorate, Obama scores a BIG WIN for anyone with a D after their name. The Republican Party’s corporate and political allegiances require the failure of the Affordable Care Act. But the truth is, the only way to ensure the destruction of a system that so obviously benefits most of the citizenry is to ensure that the citizenry never actually benefits from it. And in order to kill the ACA, its detractors need to keep people from feeling its benefits in their real, everyday lives.

Huge, huge numbers of women use hormonal birth control, or some kind of non-permanent birth control method. The costs for this for uninsured women can be really high. Hell, it can be high if you ARE insured. I was on an individual plan for years that didn’t cover my birth control pills… even though the prescription was for the treatment of polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was paying anywhere from $80 to $120 a month for a medication I required. For my health. I enjoyed the not-having-a-baby bonus of taking the pill, but I spent a lot of money on something that my insurance refused to cover. And this was when my finances were TIGHT. Like, doing laundry in a bathtub tight. Like, pretending not to notice the mice at Biglots when I was trying to get a week’s worth of groceries out of $15 tight.

My point? Women are going to NOTICE what they can do when they’re not spending anywhere from $40 to $120 on their birth control. They’re going to care. They’re going to be able to use that money for things they enjoy. They’re going to benefit from this. This is a part of Obama’s health care plan that will resonate with a huge number of people from ALL political backgrounds. This small part of a big bill is going to make a positive financial impact on the daily lives of women everywhere.

I paid good money for these mood swings.

By my own casual calculations, I would estimate that in the seven years that I’ve paid for my own birth control pills, whether a copay or the whole cost, I’ve spent somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand dollars on the pill. There were several months there where I could have really used that $80. And there are plenty of women right now who balance out the choice every month… can I really afford my pills? What if I just take my chances? Besides the cost savings, women will benefit from not having to make those kinds of choices. Again, win for the Affordable Care Act.

The GOP has latched on to the “Religious Freedom” argument because they know that the “what we really need is for women to keep having to pay out the ass for birth control pills so they won’t support Obama” argument won’t win them as many friends and followers. You can almost *always* bet that when the rhetoric turns to fetus-worship, “moral objections” and slut-shaming over a birth control method that almost nobody has a real problem with, there is an ulterior motive at play. And for my money, this is about keeping a giant part of the electorate from experience a tangible, real-world benefit from a piece of legislature that the GOP simply cannot allow people to enjoy.