Why Do You Know That?

Let's go to the well one more time. It's the converse of "auto mechanics to quantum mechanics," where the idea now is to contribute those bits of knowledge that seem really cool even if they are not directly applicable to anything.

Mine for this week:

One to stir up the Moxy Fruvous fans out there: Delaware is the state with the second lowest highest point, Ebright Azimuth, at 442 feet above sea level. Florida has the lowest highest point, Britton Hill, which reaches 345 feet above sea level.

Charles Darwin's wife used to make fun of the overuse of commas in his writing.

The original name for the game lacrosse is "bagataway," an Ojibway word, although the game was also played by the Mohawk. The goals were about a mile apart and 100 yards wide.

So, what do you know and why do you know it?

France and the US

It seems like Bastille Day is a good time to think about our relationship with France.

On the one hand, it is odd that we would not be more Francophilic given that we most likely would not have a country without them. The French were instrumental in our revolution in terms of money, troops, and training. The French and the British were enemies and seeing the colonies break away would not only embarrass the British, but cost them gold and soldiers they then could not use elsewhere. The United States was to a degree a French proxy and we owe them a large debt. That is why major figures like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were the first American ambassadors to France. It was our most important international connection.

But perhaps this is part of the reason why we are hesitant about embracing France. The American mythology has a ragtag, underequipped band of militia men defeating the world's most powerful military because they devised the brilliant ideas of hiding behind trees and not marching in a straight line. Why don't we scoff at this absurdity? Is it because it plays to the American ideals of self-reliance and strength in avoiding the prim etiquette of the British?

There have been times when all things French were in style. It is not an accident that the historically best selling American car is called "Chevrolet" and that Julia Child was a fixture on television for decades. France is equated with culture in our collective consciousness and Americans have an awkward relationship with culture. On the one hand, we aspire to it, but there is also the deep cultural insecurity that we discussed last week. French goods are often seen as overrefined, signs of puffery, form being put before function and thereby an affront to the more pragmatic Yankee sensibility. MacGyver would never be a French hero.

But then there are more recent issues. The need to intervene on their behalf in both World Wars, especially in light of the rapidity of the Nazi success in the second after which they were deemed insufficiently grateful. Their position as an independent minded ally in the Cold War when we saw the US as team captain and the French as the pitcher who kept shaking off our signs for a fastball. Their pushing back over the invasion of Iraq leading to the wonderfully mature relabelling of "freedom fries." (Maybe for today, we ought to revert to that, only now calling them "liberte egalite fraternite fries.")

What is the reason for the odd American ambivalence towards the French?

What Is Coaching?

The Baltimore Orioles' manager Dave Trembley is serving a two-game suspension and paying a fine for coaching after being ejected from a game. In a game against the Seattle Mariners, the umps blew a call and the usually mild-manner skipper was thrown out of the game for arguing with the home plate ump. He went back to the clubhouse and during the next inning, the team's big slugger and designated hitter walked back to commiserate with his coach whom he thought was right all along. Trembley looked up and replied, "Get me a couple." For that comment, he was removed for two days.

Was it coaching? If the manager's job is to plan strategy and make moves, then surely it was completely innocuous to tell the team's biggest hitter to do the job he knows he is on the team to do. If he told Scott that because of the shift they were playing, he should surprise them with a bunt, thgen, yes, that would be clearly a case of coaching. But here, he was seemingly just trying to verbally accept the care that was being shown for him by one of his players and his comment in no way contained any information that would lead Scott to play any differently than he would have before.

One could argue that a coach's job is not only strategic and operational, but also motivational. A manager needs to get his players mentally in the game. Getting thrown out for a bad call is often seen as a way to demonstrate real fire in the belly and get the players charged up in the face of adversity. In this way, this comment could be a part of the manager's job and therefore something unacceptable.

In terms of the letter of the law, the line is drawn at contact to make sure that ejected managers don't take advantage. This is like tennis in which the no coaching rule frowns on a player on the court and his coach even having extended eye contact or a head nod. But it does raise the more interesting question here, what is coaching and would "Get me a couple" be counted under the best explication?

Passing the Plate: Take My Wife...Please Edition

My Fellow Comedists,

It is time to pass the plate again. Other religions ask you to donate money, but in Comedism we tithe jokes. So, dig deep and give to the worthiest of causes. In honor of TheWife's and my anniversary, let's do marriage jokes this week. Wedding, marriage, mother-in-law, divorce jokes, all fair game.

Some classics:

Groucho -- "Marriage is a fine institution, but who wants to live in an institution?

Rita Rudner -- "Men who wear earrings are particularly well-suited to marriage; they've bought jewelery and experienced pain."

Rodney Dangerfield -- "My wife likes to talk to me during sex. I wouldn't mind so much, but the long-distance bills are killing me."

Phyllis Diller -- "Marry a man your own age - as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight."

Henny Youngman -- "Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to."

Joan Rivers -- "The one thing women don't want to find in their stockings on Christmas morning is their husband."

Johnny Carson -- "I know you've been married to the same woman for 69 years. That is marvelous. It must be very inexpensive."

What are your favorites?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Menopause, Middle Aged Men, and Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Today is my 10th wedding anniversary (interestingly, it is also TheWife's 10th anniversary, so we decided to celebrate together). What more awkward time could there possibly be to consider Maha Barbara's post "Hormonal Rages" that considers the Sanford affair and the many like it?

I realize that anecdotes are not data. However, I have never personally met a woman of menopausal age — and I’m past that point myself — who who blew off her life because of hot flashes. But I’ve known, and have known of, a number of men aged 45-60 whose lives crashed and burned because of an affair. In some cases they didn’t just throw away their marriages; they also lost jobs and wrecked careers. Relationships with children, friends and other family members were irreparably strained or even severed.

Yes, I’m sure there are examples of older women who behaved just as foolishly, but it seems to be much less common. We women tend to go through our self-destruct phase when we’re much younger.

I remember one of my former college professors who left a wife, two children, and a tenured college faculty position to run off with a student, who then dumped him a few months later. Another academic of my acquaintance burned a plum position at a prestigious university and years of hard-won professional contacts when he left his wife for a student. A man I used to call a good friend lost every one of his friends after he abruptly left his wife (also a good friend) for a younger woman. Yes, the younger women were involved in the affairs, too, but they had nothing to lose.

Think about all the well-known politicians who either wrecked their careers or compromised their offices because they got caught messing around. What’s often remarkable to me is how reckless their behavior can be when so much is at stake in their lives, their ambitions, their work. In some cases they aren’t just taking chances with their own lives; they are taking chances with their countries. Yet they can’t seem to help themselves.

One explanation for this comes from Christine Northrop's The Wisdom of Menopause in which she contends that there is a reason why it is a time when many, many marriages go through this sort rockiness.

She argues that menopausal women are misunderstood, that it is not a period of irrationality, but actually a time of empowerment for women. The kids are no longer in need of constant care, there's a sense that life is now theirs to live. Screw the constant primping to impress men, there's a comfort with the new body and the old self. Longstanding desires that had been put on the back burner and new ideas about what to do with yourself become live options. During menopause women catch a second wind. But physically, the body change comes with a decrease in physicality that coincides with a sense that it is time for them to take care of themselves and not to take care of their spouse like his mommy any longer.

At the same time, men are going through their own changes. We are a culture that defines masculinity in terms of (a) virility and youth, and (b) bread-winner status. Men get older and suddenly the six pack abs turn into twelve pack flabs. The hair is going and certain parts don't quite do what they used to do anymore. At the same time, they think about retirement and the loss of the professional identity that they had formed over decades. No longer seeing themselves as the young, rising go-getter at work, they envision a life of leisure getting served in the way they've grown accustomed. And then they don't. Their sense of self as a man is undermined from multiple directions. How to get it back? Sexual interest from a young woman who is willing to dote on him does the trick. It makes him feel like he is still himself, like he is valuable in cultural terms again. As a result, one often sees menopause and marital strife and/or divorce coinciding.

Of course, there is a difference between an explanation and an excuse. The point here is not to say, "poor old guys, what victims," and let them off the hook for their indiscretions. Infidelity is wrong, period. But Barbara is right that there is a gender thing happening here, something conditioned by both biology and culture, something that might have an explanation.

I probably should mention that I proposed to Thewife in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia while we were hiking the Appalachian Trail -- literally, that is, we were hiking the Appalachian Trail, not "hiking the Appalachian Trail" in the Governor Sanford sense of the term...

Social Facts and the Media

Jonathan Verson of Dead Horse and Hugo Zoom made some interesting points about my claim that class-based insecurity was a motive force in contemporary American culture. (His post is titled "Security State," a double entendre that gets him instant credibility here at the Playground.) He makes two points that I think are worth playing with.

The first is a point TheWife also made when she and I discussed the idea behind this post last week. He argues,

"I think there's a bit more to it than that, since this is, to an extent, one of those "people are so X because of Y" arguments, when in fact our society is increasingly less homogeneous and that argument, irrespective of the particulars you replace X and Y with, gets increasingly harder to make."

The point here is that my claim is too broad to be true or meaningful (pick a strength), society is more complicated and when you talk about individuals there is so much variability, that social generalizations of this sort are bound to miss the mark.

I see my claim coming out of the tradition of Emile Durkheim who argues that there are social facts concerning individual behaviors that are as, if not more important than biographical/psychological facts about the individual. He argues in his book Suicide, that even this most personal of acts which no doubt every individual who attempted or succeeded undertook for his or her own reasons that were tied to his or own individual life context is conditioned by sociological factors. He considers religion and shows that suicide rates were significantly higher in Protestant countries than in Catholic countries and in countries with mixed populations, Protestants were much more likely than Catholics to take their own lives. Surely, there is a causal mechanism here related to something in the institutions, power structures, and foundational beliefs within the group that played a role.

Verson, like theWife, is arguing, if I get him right, that while Durkheim might have had something, he was dealing with much more homogeneous societies; so even if there are operative social forces, the complexity of contemporary American society makes simple claims like mine oversimplifying.

To some degree this is correct. There are places where I make the claim in a fashion that is stronger than I am entitled to. But, I do think the underlying argument is cogent. While we are a heterogeneous society, we are also a starkly polarized one, especially after the overt political intents of the last administration where the strategy was to try to do away with the political center and create a radical cleave in the population with the belief that conservative voters are more likely to turn out on election day than those constituencies that traditionally vote Democratic. Rove's strategy when combined with Luntz's wordsmithing worked. We have become a culture divided and there are, I think, definite differences in the basic stance towards life and society that are shared on either side of the divide.

There is a reason why "elite" has become a four-letter word for a significant part of the country and a goal for the other. Working class conservatives bristle at anything branded that way while at the same time middle-class parents try to send their kids to everything from pre-school through college at an institution so labeled as elite. To play David Brooks here, upper middle class families tend to prefer the more nutritious and sophisticated leafy greens like arugula where such snubbing of the flavorless iceberg variety is used as evidence of being out of touch for those in a different socio-economic place. Why does that work? Insecurity seems the best explanation. Ever been to a dinner that a bit fancier than you are used to? Feel insecure? You betcha.

My daughter was incensed when a member of my son's little league team scoffed at soccer "Who plays THAT?" Where I live (an extremely conservative working class part of Maryland), boys play football and girls cheer for boys playing football. The contact makes you a man in their eyes. It makes you base, common to the more well off where soccer is the sport, in part because it shows a worldliness, a cosmopolitanism. Football, on the other hand, is purely American and not only has the macho factor, but a provincial pull in line with the knee-jerk "we're number 1," "America: right or wrong" type attitude that comes with the nationalistic aspect of conservatism as opposed to the internationalist impulse of the liberal point of view. There is a reason why you find Indian, Thai, and Ethiopian restaurants in certain places and KFCs and McDonalds in others. Italian, Chinese, and Mexican foods have become safe, but beyond that is to be elite.

Are these generalizations overgeneralizations? I don't think so, but there's question one for everyone.

The second interesting point Verson makes is that where such homogeneity does exist, it may be artificially stoked by the media.

"it would be interesting to explore the ways that popular media reinforces our more reactionary traits and deliberately avoids discussing contrasting qualities we have."

Chicken or egg? Are these divisions here beforehand and then played to by the media, are they small rips in the pantyhose of society that the media turns into large runs, or are they created by them whole cloth for the purposes of marketing and/or pleasing certain powerful constituencies?

Hmmmm. Good stuff.

In Praise of Mulberries

Last night, after watering the garden, I laid down in the hammock for a few minutes and then wandered down to the mulberry trees for a little dessert. We're in peak mulberry season and we have four trees that produce copiously. One, in particular, has the tastiest berries of them all and I worked my way up one delightful branch. It is the perfect blend of sweet and tang, just the most delicious berry I've ever tasted -- I loves me all kinds of berries.

The thing is that you'll never buy them in a store. We have friends who have an organic farm about 25 minutes away and every year we help them harvest their blueberries. After a long day of picking we get a percentage for our freezer, which we save for frostier times of year when fresh berries are usually just an unsatisfied longing.

Last year, as we're picking and chatting about varietals and watering and what grows well where, TheWife asked why we don't see mulberries for sale given how wonderful they are. Our hosts just laughed. A few years back, they had a student working an internship on their farm to learn about organic growing practices and when he found a mulberry tree along their long, dirt driveway, he too fell in love with the fruit. He decided that he would pick and sell them at the farmers' market in DC where our friends sell their produce on weekends.

He tried. He failed. The berries just won't last off the tree long enough to get to market. They got mushy and lost their tang. It made me realize how thin of a slice of what grows that we get because our choices are dictated by that market. Fruit is apples, oranges, and bananas; maybe a peach and a plum occasionally. But how much are we missing?

I'd tried carambola before, I thought it tasted like a bland cross between a grape and an apple. Then I tried one at a little fruit stand outside of Everglades National Park ('Robert Is Here' if you are ever in south Florida). Mind blown. Again, what a shame it is that we experience food so badly.

When you think about what school cafeterias did to vegetables or even what comes out of cans, is it any wonder children won't eat them. To be honest, I wouldn't either. The only flavors Americans will tolerate are bland and sweet. It is not only sad, but a big part of the reason we have the obesity epidemic (here's an amazing animated map from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showing how obesity levels have changes across the country since 1985).

What can we do to change the way we experience what we eat?