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Thu, 04 Jan 2007

Our Culture of Pandering

While raiding the KSG library for a copy of Christopher Lasch’s* The Revolt of the Elites that wasn’t falling apart (as was Lamont’s), a slim volume with “pandering” on the spine caught my eye. Since the propensity of politicians to pander is one of my (and Carlos’s) favorite laments, I pulled it.

It was Sen. Paul Simon’s Our Culture of Pandering, in which he bashes the American media, political, educational, and religious establishment. The book throws out a number of obvious and quite fair attacks: the increasingly centralized and profit-obsessed American media delivers salaciousness rather than substance, American public schools are the laughingstock of the developed world, American churches pay a lot of lip service to charity but few are willing to ask their congregations to sacrifice for it, and American politicians are decidedly unwilling to show real leadership. Regarding the last, Simon related a conversation with Rep. Richard Kelly (R-FL; later imprisoned for his role in the Abscam scandal). Kelley agreed that increasing foreign-aid spending was in the national interest, but said his constituents wouldn’t stand for it.

Simon asked how many letters Kelly received against foreign aid in the month prior.

“Probably half a dozen,” he replied.

Interestingly, the xenophobia (xeno-indifference might be a better term) theme ran through all four chapters. American colleges don’t send enough students to study abroad (Simon wonders if we would have had a war in Vietnam had LBJ spent a semester in Asia). American churches are far more willing to raise money for new buildings than for foreign or disaster aid abroad. American newspapers spend more time covering celebrity scandals than international developments (to say nothing of TV news). And American politicians (as above), even if they believe that more foreign aid spending would benefit America (to say nothing of the world), are generally unwilling to show much backbone on the issue. (After reading Easterly’s book, I’m more than a little skeptical of using raw spending as a measure of our commitment to helping the destitute abroad, but the point is well taken.)

* I also pulled Lasch’s posthumous Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism. More will follow on that one, but, before I forget, a little anecdote: On the plane back to Boston, the woman in the next seat saw the title asked what I was reading. I grasped for words, settling for “a neo-neo-neo critique of neo-feminist thought.” (Whatever that meant.) “That’s interesting. I’m a mother of four – what does he have to say?” I described the chapter on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique I’d read earlier that evening – how women and (surprisingly) children were harmed when their mothers spent so much time on home-making, including her speculation that the Chinese were able to “break” as many captured Americans in the Korean War as they did because they were weakened by that sort of parenting. I also described an earlier chapter on the suburbanization of the American family and the consequent decline of civic life (in which women did not work for pay but ran relief efforts, temperance groups, suffrage leagues, and various civic organizations) — leading to the creation of the stay-at-home mother.

My seatmate asked about Friedan’s biography (did she have kids?) It’s rather macabre to admit, but I wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t been in an Economist obituary a few months ago. I explained that she did, but I did get the number wrong – she had three children, not two.

“Ah,” she gushed, “it’s so great that you’re trying to understand women!”

That totally made my evening.

00:46 EST | permalink | /issues/culturewar