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semiotic_pirateFirst, I would like to start out saying that I have finally gotten the chance to start reading the news again in earnest. So far, all of the articles that I'll be either posting below or linking to are from the New York Times. They publish a lot of the stuff that I consider thought provoking even though I know I must keep in mind the fact that depending one source of news can lead to a myopic view of the world.
That said, let us get on to the articles, commentaries, and (hopefully) conversations.
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My favorite part of the following article is the bit about 401K plans and the importance of employer matching contributions. Calling those contributions "in effect, an instant 50 or 100 percent “return” on your savings" and "Consider this an optional raise. Turning it down would be a real shame. Nor will it cost you as much as you think. Saving 3 percent out of an annual salary of $36,000 amounts to roughly $20 a week." which made me go make a calculation: $2,750. Nice. I am surprised that he didn't mention the possibility of more of the benefits package premiums being taken out pre-tax. It made me appreciate even more what I know to be a very well set-up and extremely generous benefits package. As Crush would say: Righteous!
June 14, 2008
Your Money
A Primer for Young People Starting Their First Job
By RON LIEBER
To the hundreds of thousands of young people who have landed entry-level jobs that come with health insurance and a retirement plan, I offer my congratulations. Things are tough out there right now, so you must be doing something right.
To the employers who are about to put them to work, however, I urge you to take another look at the pile of employee manuals that detail all your fabulous benefits. They’re boring. They’re confusing. And they start in the middle instead of defining things from the beginning.
Benefits administrators, from health insurance companies to 401(k) providers, are trying to help improve the situation, but most employers still have a long way to go.
So below, I offer a proper primer on health insurance, taxes and retirement plans for employees starting their very first jobs. Please pass it out with my regards.
Health Insurance
Priority No. 1 is to protect yourself from some huge expense that you cannot possibly afford. That is what insurance, in any form, is supposed to do.
As for health insurance, most of you probably won’t run up big bills anytime soon. But some of you will get appendicitis or crash your cars or end up in a psychiatric hospital for a stretch of time. And if any of those things happen, insurance should pay for a big chunk of the treatment.
Health insurance is expensive. Employers generally pay for some or most of it, but usually not all. You’ll probably pay your share of the cost in at least two ways.
First, your employer will probably take some money out of your paycheck regularly. This is called the premium. Then, there’s something called a deductible, where each year you have to pay at least the first couple of hundred dollars toward many kinds of medical expenses, like prescription drugs or doctor fees or payments to mental health practitioners. Finally, there’s the co-payment, a $15 (or $50 or $100) fee you pay for every doctor visit or prescription.
You may be able to choose from a few different types of insurance plans.
If you do, you will almost certainly be confused by the options. Most employers have a human resources or benefits staff member who can help. Don’t be shy. The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask. Ignorance can easily cost you hundreds of dollars.
For some more background, I’d also check out allaboutthebenefits.com, a Web site that the health insurance giant Aetna and the Financial Planning Association created for the young and confused.
Many employers now offer a new kind of insurance that pairs high deductibles (often more than $1,000) with some sort of savings account that you can use to pay for health expenses before your insurance starts contributing. Critics complain that these plans work only for the young and healthy. If you’re young and healthy, though, there’s no shame in signing up.
These new plans may not be ideal if you have a chronic condition, like asthma or diabetes, or see a chiropractor or psychologist regularly. If you do, add up the cost of your office visits and make a list of the prescription drugs you take. Then, see what your plans will cover and what kind of deductibles and co-payments are involved. Also, be sure to check if there is any kind of annual or lifetime limit on what the insurance will cover.
Taxes
Sadly, a $36,000 annual salary won’t turn out to be anything close to $3,000 a month. One big reason is that your employer takes money out to send directly to the government for taxes.
When you start work, you’ll need to fill out a form called the W-4. This tells your employer how much money to take out of your check to pay federal income taxes. (Companies also usually hold back money for Social Security and Medicare taxes and state and local income taxes where they exist.)
If you’re young, single and don’t have any student loan debt, the W-4 is fairly straightforward as tax forms go, but it contains at least one line that may be confusing. Line A instructs you to enter a “1” if no one else can claim you as a dependent. Ask your parents whether they intend to do so this year.
If you do have student loan debt and plan to deduct the interest you’re paying, it gets a bit more complicated. There’s a good worksheet at paycheckcity.com that will take you through some questions and then fill out the W-4 for you. From the home page, look under “basic” and click “Form W4 Assistant.” To complete the worksheet, you’ll need to know how much interest you’ll be paying this year. Your student loan provider should be able to tell you what part of your monthly payment is interest.
Retirement
Depending on how high your student loan bill is, putting something away for retirement may seem impossible. Vanguard, a mutual fund company that also administers 401(k) plans for employers, ran a survey that suggested that credit card debt was an even bigger impediment for those under 35. High rent can make saving seem daunting as well.
You may be facing down all three of these bills. Your student loans might average 6 or 8 percent interest, while your credit cards might run at 18 percent. Always make at least the minimum payment on time, since that will make it easier to get other loans later.
But if your employer offers a 401(k) or other similar retirement plan where it matches your contribution, pay careful attention. With these plans, you tell your employer to set aside a small portion of your paycheck before payroll takes out federal and other taxes (you don’t have to pay any taxes on this savings until much later).
Your employer may contribute one dollar for every dollar you put in, up to 3 percent of your salary. Or maybe it chips in 50 cents for every dollar you save up to 6 percent of your salary. The amount varies by employer, but this match is, in effect, an instant 50 or 100 percent “return” on your savings.
Consider this an optional raise. Turning it down would be a real shame. Nor will it cost you as much as you think. Saving 3 percent out of an annual salary of $36,000 amounts to roughly $20 a week. If you want to run your own numbers and test the impact of different amounts of savings, try the Salary Paycheck Calculator at paycheckcity.com, under “basic.”
Once you decide how much to save, you’ll have to figure out where to invest the money. Fidelity, another big 401(k) plan administrator, notes that in recent years the company worried about bombarding people with too much investment information. “Someone inside said that it was like we were trying to create a nation of Warren Buffetts,” said Michael Doshier, vice president for marketing for the retirement services division.
The fact is, the majority of Fidelity’s 401(k) customers don’t adjust their investments for years at a time once they put money in. If you think you may leave yours alone too, consider investing in something called a lifecycle or target-date fund, which is fast becoming a standard offering in retirement plans. These funds will have names like the 2050 fund, which correspond to the year when you’ll probably be thinking about retiring. Managers allocate the money (mostly in stock mutual funds now, though the investments get more conservative over time), and all you have to do is shovel more in.
Want to learn more or invest in other types of funds? An increasing number of employers offer one-on-one retirement savings advice.
Charles Schwab, which runs retirement plans and can also provide this sort of counsel, says the company has done well with younger workers. In 2006, among employees 25 and under, those who got 401(k) advice from Schwab achieved a 14 percent rate of return on average, according to the company. People under 25 who did not ask for help earned just 9.3 percent.
Past performance is no guarantee of future prowess. But hey, the advice is free. It can’t hurt to bounce your own plan off someone who actually thinks about all this for a living.
What do you wish had been in your manual? E-mail rlieber@nytimes.com
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This also makes me very thankful that life has turned out the way it has and that I came out of college as a "returning adult student" who has a completely different situation than the typical graduate. I have CoB - that is the most important of the differences (he's my rock) - and I already have a wealth of experience in the "Work Force" (as the Pitt of Hell would call it).
Another resource that I think might've been a good addition to the article would have been a link to the Motley Fool personal investment and retirement sections.
On another note - which may also be applicable to recent graduates - is this amazing, and very long article about the concept of "shared-care-parenting" where the model for relationships and parenting styles morphs into a form where the couple "would create their own model, one in which they were parenting partners. Equals and peers. They would work equal hours, spend equal time with their children, take equal responsibility for their home. Neither would be the keeper of the mental to-do lists; neither of their careers would take precedence." This is IMHO one of the primary reasons that the women's movement was created. In actuality, this whole situation seems to epitomize the ideals that the women's movement was founded on. The only caveat is that the article (I am assuming, I haven't read it in its entirety yet) doesn't address those couples (regardless of gender or sex, pairings or groupings) who decide not to have children but who also embrace the relationship of equals standard.
This is an article that I had mentioned to a coworker the other day (oooh, I love being able to say that) after being told that the company considers annual leave a mandatory event. They must have done their own research, or just used common sense. Just like the reason they based their decision on getting the dual monitor set up for their credit analysts, it results in an increase in productivity and happiness in the workplace environment. So here's to increasing evidence of the importance of the "respite effect" - which does not involve butterflies causing tornadoes, hurricanes, or any other form of natural disaster.
June 7, 2008
Shortcuts
Vacations Are Good for You, Medically Speaking
By ALINA TUGEND
GAS prices are going up, the economy is going down, and it seems hard to justify a vacation when many of us are glad just to have jobs. But now, more than ever, we need to take a break — a real break, not just a long weekend — from our stressed-out lives.
But, it turns out, even before the downturn, a lot of Americans were working through their vacation time, taking fewer and shorter holidays.
A global study by Expedia.com found that about a third of employed Americans usually do not take all the vacation days that they are entitled to, leaving an average of three days on the table.
This is not so unusual. About a quarter of the workers in Britain do not take all their vacation time, and in France a little less. The only difference is that the British get an average of 26 days of vacation and the French about 37 — compared with our 14 days, Expedia.com said.
According to John de Graaf, executive director of Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit organization that studies issues related to overwork, 137 countries mandate paid vacation time. The United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t.
Here are some more depressing figures: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about a quarter of all workers in the private sector do not receive paid vacation. And the Conference Board, a private research group, said the number of Americans who said in April that they were going to take a vacation in the next six months is at a 30-year low, according to their regular consumer survey. Only 39 percent of those responding said they would go away on holiday over the next half year.
That is the lowest figure since 1978 and reflects a general decline since 2000, when, in April of that year, 49 percent said they were planning a getaway in the next six months.
But really, should you just stay home, relax in front of the television, read a novel, do a few day trips?
Well, vacations are not simply a luxury. There is increasing evidence that they really are necessary for good health.
Using information from the Framingham Heart Study, which started in 1948, researchers looked at questionnaires women in the study had filled out over 20 years about how often they took vacations. Those women who took a vacation once every six years or less were almost eight times more likely to develop coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than those who took at least two vacations a year, said Elaine Eaker, a co-author of the study and president of Eaker Epidemiology Enterprises, a private research company.
The study, published in 1992, was controlled for other factors like obesity, diabetes, smoking and income, Ms. Eaker said, and the findings have been substantiated in follow-up research.
“It shows how the body reacts to a lifestyle of stress,” she said. “This is real evidence that vacations are important to your physical health.”
Another study, published in 2000, looked at 12,000 men over nine years who were at high risk for coronary heart disease. Those who failed to take annual vacations had a 21 percent higher risk of death from all causes and were 32 percent more likely to die of a heart attack.
So forget about cutting down on cholesterol and exercise — I’m off to the Bahamas.
Well, no. But even if you don’t have heart problems, a vacation of at least one week — and preferably two weeks to really unwind — can help you relax and sleep better. Mark Rosekind, president and chief scientist at Alertness Solutions, a scientific consulting firm, has worked with NASA pilots and astronauts on sleep issues.
In 2006, he was commissioned by Air New Zealand to see if he could scientifically measure the benefit of a vacation. He asked a group of 15 people who were flying from the West Coast of the United States to New Zealand for vacations lasting a week to 12 days to wear a wrist device that monitored quantity and quality of sleep — for three days before the trip, during the vacation and three days afterward.
They kept a sleep diary and took a vigilance test to determine how good their reactions were before, during and after the holiday.
The participants were also hooked up to a brain monitor during the 12-hour flight, and other variables, like health, jobs and gender were factored in.
Here’s what he found. After a few days on vacation — and it usually took two to three — people were averaging an hour more of good quality sleep. And there was an 80 percent improvement in their reaction times.
“When they got home, they were still sleeping close to an hour more, and their reaction time was 30 to 40 percent higher than it had been before the trip,” Mr. Rosekind said.
The trick, these days when going on vacation, is not only to physically remove yourself from your normal routine, but mentally as well. Checking your BlackBerry every few hours or rushing to the nearest Internet cafe doesn’t cut it.
For 10 years, the Faculty of Management at Tel Aviv University has conducted a study looking at what is called “respite effects,” which measure relief from job stress before, during and after vacations.
Professor Dov Eden, an organizational psychologist who has conducted the study, found that those who are electronically hooked up to their office, even if they are lying on the Riviera, are less likely to receive the real benefits of a vacation and more likely to burn out.
Here’s one trick. My neighbor Mark had a colleague who was a workaholic. But when he went on vacation, he made sure to go where there was no cellphone or Internet service.
Mr. de Graaf sees a solution to the vacation deprivation problem, even if it’s a long shot. His organization is working with Congress to consider national legislation requiring paid vacation time. He is hoping that such legislation, currently called the Minimum Leave Protection, Family Bonding and Personal Well-Being Act, will be introduced next year. It calls for a mandated three weeks of vacation every year.
“It’s tough, there’s no question about it, but there’s a lot of interest in it,” Mr. de Graaf said. “There’s less business opposition for this leave than sick leave or parenting leave because it’s more predictable.”
He estimated that it could add an extra 2 percent to 4 percent to the labor costs of a business, but “that would be balanced by less turnover and maybe less sick days.”
Now that I’ve made such a case for vacations, maybe it’s time to acknowledge that in some cases, these trips — particularly with entire families in tow — can be stressful in their own way. The joys of a holiday can also include lugging around a ridiculous amount of paraphernalia, jet-lagged children sobbing on airplanes, hotels that looked wonderful on the Web but are in reality next to a construction site.
Back in 1979, a journalist, Lance Morrow, wrote an article in Time magazine about how rising gas prices were curtailing the annual family vacations. (Sound familiar?) He noted that “the real danger of the vacation lies in its capacity to compress all family conflicts into an exquisitely focused drama.”
And some years before that, the humorist Robert Benchley wrote that “traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria.”
William Doherty, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, said that “vacations tend to create memories more than any other family activity, and the bad times are some of the best memories.”
He said he remembers, for example, being at the Jersey Shore when he was a child and his father stepped on a shell that sent him to the hospital.
“I got to ride in the ambulance,” Mr. Doherty said. “That was great.”
The trick, then, is to have a vacation that enhances family bonding, but not too much. I’ll let you know how that works out after our Cape Cod trip this summer, where we will be joined by my sister, her husband and three children and my parents.
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This article got me to thinking just how scary, end of the world like scary, a McCain presidency could be. It also made me think of the need for a change in POW training. You could be given two options as to how you would act in the situation: 1) Name, rank, serial number, silence. Refusal to cooperate. Stoic. and 2) Cooperate in some ways and covertly gather information so that when you are released you can then brief your superiors about what you learned. and finally, an option only the masochistic will choose 3) Bitterly resist and taunt your captors so that you are tortured night to death, hoping that while you are enduring this crap you are increasing the morale of the men and women who have to hear you scream through the night during those "sessions" with the torturer.
I have listened to many stories and watched many television shows and movies about different POW situations, and I say the above with the utmost respect to any who have had to endure a brutal hostage situation. We can not all be John McClain's nor should we be expected to. And I think McCain's 'veiled' hints of brainwashing as training rather than teaching different methods according to disposition is appalling. I'm not surprised that many parents across the nation are considering the different ways they can get their children out of the country to safety if another draft is initiated. Hell, and those adults, too, who are now affected by the increased age limit that was slipped in a while back. *Nods to CoB* (If this article becomes unavailable, I do have it saved as a PDF.)
That article has direct bearing on the two Op-Ed article that I found at the same time. One is about the rumors being spread by the neocon talking heads concerning Senator Clinton's supporter being bitter, angry bitches and taking a stereotypical self-defeating revenge upon the Senator Obama candidacy by planning on voting for McCain... The other is an article detailing how by electing Senator Obama, we as women would be making strides toward gender equality. Because he refuses to conform (or contort) himself into an image of the macho-manly-man stereotype in order to be seen as electable.
June 15, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Angry Clinton Women ♥ McCain?
By FRANK RICH
TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.
In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.
How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.
But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.
How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.
The real question is how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle. Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama lost only the oldest female voters to Mrs. Clinton.
But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the way. Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate.
Our new bogus narrative rose from the ashes of Mrs. Clinton’s concession to Mr. Obama, amid the raucous debate over what role misogyny played in her defeat. A few female Clinton supporters — or so they identified themselves — appeared on YouTube and Fox News to say they were so infuriated by sexism that they would vote for Mr. McCain.
Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.
The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer her to Mr. Obama in the primaries.
This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats.
Yet the myth of Democratic disarray is so pervasive that when “NBC Nightly News” and The Wall Street Journal presented their new poll results last week (Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 41 percent) they ignored their own survey’s findings to stick to the clichéd script. Both news organizations (and NBC’s sibling, MSNBC) dwelled darkly on Mr. Obama’s “problems with two key groups” (as NBC put it): white men, where he is behind 20 percentage points to Mr. McCain, and white suburban women, where he is behind 6 points.
Since that poll gives Mr. Obama not just a 19-point lead among all women but also a 7-point lead among white women, a 6-point deficit in one sliver of the female pie is hardly a heart-stopper. Nor is Mr. Obama’s showing among white men shocking news. No Democratic presidential candidate, including Bill Clinton, has won a majority of that declining demographic since 1964. Mr. Kerry lost white men by 25 points, and Mr. Gore did by 24 points (even as he won the popular vote).
“NBC Nightly News” was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede. Mr. Obama swamps Mr. McCain by 62 percent to 28 percent — a disastrous G.O.P. setback, given that President Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to exit polls. No wonder the McCain campaign no longer lists its candidate’s home state of Arizona as safe this fall.
There are many ways that Mr. Obama can lose this election. But his 6-percentage-point lead in the Journal-NBC poll is higher than Mr. Bush’s biggest lead (4 points) over Mr. Kerry at any point in that same poll in 2004. So far, despite all the chatter to the contrary, Mr. Obama is not only holding on to Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic constituencies but expanding others (like African-Americans). The same cannot be said of Mr. McCain and the G.O.P. base.
That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.
The conservative hostility toward McCain heralded by the early attacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and James Dobson is proliferating. Bay Buchanan, the party activist who endorsed Mitt Romney, wrote this month that Mr. McCain is “incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls” and “has a personality that is best kept under wraps.” When Mr. McCain ditched the preachers John Hagee and Rod Parsley after learning that their endorsements antagonized Catholics, Muslims and Jews, he ended up getting a whole new flock of evangelical Christians furious at him too.
The revolt is not limited to the usual cranky right-wing suspects. The antiwar acolytes of Ron Paul are planning a large rally for convention week in Minneapolis. The conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec has endorsed Mr. Obama, as have both the economic adviser to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Lawrence Hunter, and the neocon historian Francis Fukuyama. Rupert Murdoch is publicly flirting with the Democrat as well. Even Dick Cheney emerged from his bunker this month to gratuitously dismiss Mr. McCain’s gas-tax holiday proposal as “a false notion” before the National Press Club.
These are not anomalies. Last week The Hill reported that at least 14 Republican members of Congress have refused to endorse or publicly support Mr. McCain. Congressional Quarterly found that of the 62,800 donors who maxed out to Mr. Bush’s campaign in 2004, only about 5,000 (some 8 percent) have contributed to his putative successor.
It was just this toxic stew of inadequate fund-raising and hostility from the base — along with incompetent management — that capsized the McCain campaign last summer. Now the management, at least, is said to be new and improved, but the press is still so distracted by the “divided Democrats” it has yet to uncover how that brilliant McCain team spent weeks choreographing the candidate’s slapstick collision with a green backdrop and self-immolating speech in prime time two weeks ago.
The only figure in the McCain camp who has candidly acknowledged any glitches is his mother, the marvelous 96-year-old Roberta McCain. Back in January she said that she didn’t think her son had any support in the G.O.P. base and that those voters would only take him if “holding their nose.”
The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and that young people don’t turn up to vote.
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June 15, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Think the Gender War Is Over? Think Again
By SUSAN FALUDI
San Francisco
FOR months, our political punditry foresaw one, and only one, prospective gender contest looming in the general election: between the first serious female presidential candidate and the Republican male “warrior.” But those who were dreading a plebiscite on sexual politics shouldn’t celebrate just yet. Hillary Clinton may be out of the race, but a Barack Obama versus John McCain match-up still has the makings of an epic American gender showdown.
The reason is a gender ethic that has guided American politics since the age of Andrew Jackson. The sentiment was succinctly expressed in a massive marble statue that stood on the steps of the United States Capitol from 1853 to 1958. Named “The Rescue,” but more commonly known as “Daniel Boone Protects His Family,” the monument featured a gigantic white pioneer in a buckskin coat holding a nearly naked Indian in a death’s grip, while off to the side a frail white woman crouched over her infant.
The question asked by this American Sphinx to all who dared enter the halls of leadership was, “Are you man enough?” This year, Senator Obama has notably refused to give the traditional answer.
The particulars of that masculine myth were established early in American politics. While the war hero-turned-statesman is a trope common to many countries in many eras, it has a particular quality and urgency here, based on our earliest history, when two centuries of Indian wars brought repeated raids on frontier settlements and humiliating failures on the part of the young nation’s “protectors” to fend off those attacks or rescue captives. The architects of American culture papered over this shaming history by concocting what would become our prevailing national security fantasy — personified by the ever-vigilant white frontiersman who, by triumphing over the rapacious “savage” and rescuing the American maiden from his clutches, redeemed American manhood.
Aspirants to the White House have long known they must audition for the Boone role in the “Rescue” tableau. Those who have pulled off a persuasive performance, from Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy, have proved victorious at the ballot box. Even candidates lacking in martial bona fides have understood the need to try to fake it with the appropriate accessories — riding high in the saddle (Ronald Reagan), commanding tanks (Michael Dukakis), wielding shotguns (John Kerry) or brandishing chainsaws and donning flight suits (you know who).
Senator McCain may fit the model better than anyone. After all, he actually starred in a real-life captivity narrative, having withstood five and a half years of imprisonment by non-white tormentors, declining special treatment and coming home a hero. “I have seen men’s hopes tested in hard and cruel ways that few will ever experience,” he declared from the hustings. A 12-minute video on his Web site dwells on how his faith in the “fathers” and his will “to fight to survive” got the young Navy pilot through Vietcong bayonetings, bone smashings and bondage.
The story’s appeal is evident in the flood of news media adulation. The worshipful tone of the last Newsweek cover article on Mr. McCain is typical. The subtitle: “He’s Endured the Unendurable and Survived.” As the liberal television watchdog group Media Matters for America has noted, the press is most reverent about the candidate’s humble refusal to trumpet his captivity — even as his campaign advertises it freely.
Although Senator McCain didn’t rescue any helpless maidens, he outdid even Daniel Boone in averting emasculating domination. Boone was a captive for only a few months, and was widely suspected by his contemporaries of having enjoyed his time with the Shawnees rather too much (he was adopted by the Shawnee chief and evidently passed up several opportunities for escape).
Senator Obama, for his part, will not be cast as the avenging hero in “The Rescue” any time soon — and not because of the color of his skin or his lack of military experience. He doesn’t seem to want the role. You don’t see him crouching in a duck blind or posing in camouflage duds or engaging in anything more gladiatorial than a game of pick-up basketball. If Mr. Obama’s candidacy seeks to move beyond race, it also moves beyond gender. A 20-minute campaign Web documentary showcased a President Obama who would exude “a real sensitivity” and “empathy” and provide a world safe for the American mother’s son. Mr. Obama is surrounded in the video by pacifist — not security — moms.
If Mr. Obama’s campaign has fashioned any master narrative, it’s that of the young man in the bower of a matriarchy — raised by a “strong” mother, bolstered by a “strong” sister, married to a “strong” wife and proud of his “strong” daughters. (Bill Clinton had a similar story, although his handlers highlighted his efforts to save his mother from domestic violence.)
“In many ways, he really will be the first woman president,” Megan Beyer of Virginia, a charter member of Women for Obama, told reporters. An op-ed essay in The New York Post headlined “Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?” came to a similar conclusion, if a tad more snidely: “Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel.”
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy showed that a woman, too, can play the tough-guy protector. But Mr. Obama takes the iconoclasm a step further — by suggesting that martial swagger isn’t what America needs anymore.
In the campaign ahead, expect a fierce Republican effort to reinstate the nation’s guardian myth — by demonstrating how the other party’s candidate fails to fit the formula. Had Mrs. Clinton been the candidate, she would no doubt have faced more attacks for being too mannishly abrasive or, conversely, too emotional to play the manly role. But Mr. Obama should expect similar damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t gender assaults. He will be cast either as the epicene metrosexual who can’t protect the country or else as the modern heathen with a suspicious middle name.
The attacks are already under way, as is evident if one enters the words “Obama” and “effeminate” into a search engine. The effeminacy canard lurks in Mike Huckabee’s imaginings of Mr. Obama tripping off a chair and diving for the floor when confronted by a gunman, and in the words of Tucker Bounds, Mr. McCain’s campaign spokesman, who depicted Mr. Obama as “hysterical.”
News media blatherers and bloggers are taking up the theme. On MSNBC, Tucker Carlson called Mr. Obama “kind of a wuss”; Joe Scarborough, the morning TV talk show host, dubbed Mr. Obama’s bowling style “prissy” and declared, “Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man”; and Don Imus, the radio host, never one to be outdone in the sexual slur department, dubbed Mr. Obama a “sissy boy.”
Will such attacks succeed? The wild card in the campaign drama to come is 9/11, which for a while kicked us into Daniel Boone overdrive. But in recent years, the dangers and costs of that prolonged delusion have become painfully apparent. In the primaries, a substantial portion of Democratic voters turned away from the dictates of “The Rescue.” In choosing between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain in the general election, Americans will pass a referendum on 200 years of bedrock gender mythology.
Susan Faludi is the author of “Backlash,” “Stiffed” and “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.”
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Progress is measured in small steps not big leaps. And another measure of progress for humanity (notice I did not say women, because the shaping of our society is made up by all members of our species) is the story of how rape is slowly becoming a more important issue on the global stage than pirated DVDs. At least for some of us... Finally.
Warning - content may be triggering.
June 15, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Weapon of Rape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
World leaders fight terrorism all the time, with summit meetings and sound bites and security initiatives. But they have studiously ignored one of the most common and brutal varieties of terrorism in the world today.
This is a kind of terrorism that disproportionately targets children. It involves not W.M.D. but simply AK-47s, machetes and pointed sticks. It is mass rape — and it will be elevated, belatedly, to a spot on the international agenda this week.
The United Nations Security Council will hold a special session on sexual violence this Thursday, with Condoleezza Rice coming to New York to lead the debate. This session, sponsored by the United States and backed by a Security Council resolution calling for regular follow-up reports, just may help mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign policy issue.
The world woke up to this phenomenon in 1993, after discovering that Serbian forces had set up a network of “rape camps” in which women and girls, some as young as 12, were enslaved. Since then, we’ve seen similar patterns of systematic rape in many countries, and it has become clear that mass rape is not just a byproduct of war but also sometimes a deliberate weapon.
“Rape in war has been going on since time immemorial,” said Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador who was the U.N.’s envoy for AIDS in Africa. “But it has taken a new twist as commanders have used it as a strategy of war.”
There are two reasons for this. First, mass rape is very effective militarily. From the viewpoint of a militia, getting into a firefight is risky, so it’s preferable to terrorize civilians sympathetic to a rival group and drive them away, depriving the rivals of support.
Second, mass rape attracts less international scrutiny than piles of bodies do, because the issue is indelicate and the victims are usually too ashamed to speak up.
In Sudan, the government has turned all of Darfur into a rape camp. The first person to alert me to this was a woman named Zahra Abdelkarim, who had been kidnapped, gang-raped, mutilated — slashed with a sword on her leg — and then left naked and bleeding to wander back to her Zaghawa tribe. In effect, she had become a message to her people: Flee, or else.
Since then, this practice of “marking” the Darfur rape victims has become widespread: typically, the women are scarred or branded, or occasionally have their ears cut off. This is often done by police officers or soldiers, in uniform, as part of a coordinated government policy.
When the governments of South Africa, China, Libya and Indonesia support Sudan’s positions in Darfur, do they really mean to adopt a pro-rape foreign policy?
The rape capital of the world is eastern Congo, where in some areas three-quarters of women have been raped. Sometimes the rapes are conducted with pointed sticks that leave the victims incontinent from internal injuries, and a former U.N. force commander there, Patrick Cammaert, says it is “more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier.”
The international community’s response so far? Approximately: “Not our problem.”
Yet such rapes also complicate post-conflict recovery, with sexual violence lingering even after peace has been restored. In Liberia, the civil war is over but rape is still epidemic — and half of all reported rapes involve girls younger than 14.
Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs. Yet China and Russia are resisting any new reporting mechanism for sexual violence, seeing such rapes as tragic but simply a criminal matter.
On the contrary, systematic rape has properly been found by international tribunals to constitute a crime against humanity, and it thrives in part because the world shrugs. The U.N. could do far more to provide health services to victims of mass rape and to insist that peacekeepers at least try to stop it.
In Congo, the doctors at Heal Africa Hospital and Panzi Hospital (healafrica .org and panzihospitalbukavu.org) repair the internal injuries of rape victims with skill and humanity. But my most indelible memory from my most recent visit, last year, came as I was interviewing a young woman who had been gang-raped.
I had taken her aside to protect her privacy, but a large group of women suddenly approached. I tried to shoo them away, and then the women explained that they had all been gang-raped and had decided that despite the stigma and risk of reprisal, they would all tell their stories.
So let’s hope that this week the world’s leaders and diplomats stop offering excuses for paralysis and begin emulating the courageous outspokenness of those Congolese women.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
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On a slightly lighter note (compared to the previous article): Whoever says that "Freedom Isn't Free" should take a page out of the new book internet providers are trying to write. In which they are running test programs to see how receptive people are to getting metered internet access.
“As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table, people’s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does innovation and trying new applications,” Vint Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist for Google who is often called the “father of the Internet,” said in an e-mail message.
The companies who are proponents of the caps say that their actions are only fair and are using this as an end run on those who engage in file-sharing. Yeah. I wonder if RIAA is sponsoring any of these ideas? With all of the online content that is being pushed on consumers, there is no way any of THOSE companies will allow the ISPs to start this crap. Because it would limit people's interest and usage of the internet. Because when it comes down to brass tacks, the people who are band-width hogs are far outweighed by the people who just use the internet to check their email and browse the internet for information. Even now, with usage rates going up because of more content offering live, buffered feed of their favorite show... Well. They aren't going to offer DOWNLOADS because then they can't control their product. Sheesh. Maybe the content providers should be the one paying the ISPs for clogging the lines?
Note: I started this post at around 8 AM, took off for a Father's Day brunch, went to see the Hulk, and am now finally finishing up the final touches. It's been quite a day. So, please, talk amongst yourselves if you have to here because I may be going to bed early tonight.
That said, let us get on to the articles, commentaries, and (hopefully) conversations.
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My favorite part of the following article is the bit about 401K plans and the importance of employer matching contributions. Calling those contributions "in effect, an instant 50 or 100 percent “return” on your savings" and "Consider this an optional raise. Turning it down would be a real shame. Nor will it cost you as much as you think. Saving 3 percent out of an annual salary of $36,000 amounts to roughly $20 a week." which made me go make a calculation: $2,750. Nice. I am surprised that he didn't mention the possibility of more of the benefits package premiums being taken out pre-tax. It made me appreciate even more what I know to be a very well set-up and extremely generous benefits package. As Crush would say: Righteous!
June 14, 2008
Your Money
A Primer for Young People Starting Their First Job
By RON LIEBER
To the hundreds of thousands of young people who have landed entry-level jobs that come with health insurance and a retirement plan, I offer my congratulations. Things are tough out there right now, so you must be doing something right.
To the employers who are about to put them to work, however, I urge you to take another look at the pile of employee manuals that detail all your fabulous benefits. They’re boring. They’re confusing. And they start in the middle instead of defining things from the beginning.
Benefits administrators, from health insurance companies to 401(k) providers, are trying to help improve the situation, but most employers still have a long way to go.
So below, I offer a proper primer on health insurance, taxes and retirement plans for employees starting their very first jobs. Please pass it out with my regards.
Health Insurance
Priority No. 1 is to protect yourself from some huge expense that you cannot possibly afford. That is what insurance, in any form, is supposed to do.
As for health insurance, most of you probably won’t run up big bills anytime soon. But some of you will get appendicitis or crash your cars or end up in a psychiatric hospital for a stretch of time. And if any of those things happen, insurance should pay for a big chunk of the treatment.
Health insurance is expensive. Employers generally pay for some or most of it, but usually not all. You’ll probably pay your share of the cost in at least two ways.
First, your employer will probably take some money out of your paycheck regularly. This is called the premium. Then, there’s something called a deductible, where each year you have to pay at least the first couple of hundred dollars toward many kinds of medical expenses, like prescription drugs or doctor fees or payments to mental health practitioners. Finally, there’s the co-payment, a $15 (or $50 or $100) fee you pay for every doctor visit or prescription.
You may be able to choose from a few different types of insurance plans.
If you do, you will almost certainly be confused by the options. Most employers have a human resources or benefits staff member who can help. Don’t be shy. The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask. Ignorance can easily cost you hundreds of dollars.
For some more background, I’d also check out allaboutthebenefits.com, a Web site that the health insurance giant Aetna and the Financial Planning Association created for the young and confused.
Many employers now offer a new kind of insurance that pairs high deductibles (often more than $1,000) with some sort of savings account that you can use to pay for health expenses before your insurance starts contributing. Critics complain that these plans work only for the young and healthy. If you’re young and healthy, though, there’s no shame in signing up.
These new plans may not be ideal if you have a chronic condition, like asthma or diabetes, or see a chiropractor or psychologist regularly. If you do, add up the cost of your office visits and make a list of the prescription drugs you take. Then, see what your plans will cover and what kind of deductibles and co-payments are involved. Also, be sure to check if there is any kind of annual or lifetime limit on what the insurance will cover.
Taxes
Sadly, a $36,000 annual salary won’t turn out to be anything close to $3,000 a month. One big reason is that your employer takes money out to send directly to the government for taxes.
When you start work, you’ll need to fill out a form called the W-4. This tells your employer how much money to take out of your check to pay federal income taxes. (Companies also usually hold back money for Social Security and Medicare taxes and state and local income taxes where they exist.)
If you’re young, single and don’t have any student loan debt, the W-4 is fairly straightforward as tax forms go, but it contains at least one line that may be confusing. Line A instructs you to enter a “1” if no one else can claim you as a dependent. Ask your parents whether they intend to do so this year.
If you do have student loan debt and plan to deduct the interest you’re paying, it gets a bit more complicated. There’s a good worksheet at paycheckcity.com that will take you through some questions and then fill out the W-4 for you. From the home page, look under “basic” and click “Form W4 Assistant.” To complete the worksheet, you’ll need to know how much interest you’ll be paying this year. Your student loan provider should be able to tell you what part of your monthly payment is interest.
Retirement
Depending on how high your student loan bill is, putting something away for retirement may seem impossible. Vanguard, a mutual fund company that also administers 401(k) plans for employers, ran a survey that suggested that credit card debt was an even bigger impediment for those under 35. High rent can make saving seem daunting as well.
You may be facing down all three of these bills. Your student loans might average 6 or 8 percent interest, while your credit cards might run at 18 percent. Always make at least the minimum payment on time, since that will make it easier to get other loans later.
But if your employer offers a 401(k) or other similar retirement plan where it matches your contribution, pay careful attention. With these plans, you tell your employer to set aside a small portion of your paycheck before payroll takes out federal and other taxes (you don’t have to pay any taxes on this savings until much later).
Your employer may contribute one dollar for every dollar you put in, up to 3 percent of your salary. Or maybe it chips in 50 cents for every dollar you save up to 6 percent of your salary. The amount varies by employer, but this match is, in effect, an instant 50 or 100 percent “return” on your savings.
Consider this an optional raise. Turning it down would be a real shame. Nor will it cost you as much as you think. Saving 3 percent out of an annual salary of $36,000 amounts to roughly $20 a week. If you want to run your own numbers and test the impact of different amounts of savings, try the Salary Paycheck Calculator at paycheckcity.com, under “basic.”
Once you decide how much to save, you’ll have to figure out where to invest the money. Fidelity, another big 401(k) plan administrator, notes that in recent years the company worried about bombarding people with too much investment information. “Someone inside said that it was like we were trying to create a nation of Warren Buffetts,” said Michael Doshier, vice president for marketing for the retirement services division.
The fact is, the majority of Fidelity’s 401(k) customers don’t adjust their investments for years at a time once they put money in. If you think you may leave yours alone too, consider investing in something called a lifecycle or target-date fund, which is fast becoming a standard offering in retirement plans. These funds will have names like the 2050 fund, which correspond to the year when you’ll probably be thinking about retiring. Managers allocate the money (mostly in stock mutual funds now, though the investments get more conservative over time), and all you have to do is shovel more in.
Want to learn more or invest in other types of funds? An increasing number of employers offer one-on-one retirement savings advice.
Charles Schwab, which runs retirement plans and can also provide this sort of counsel, says the company has done well with younger workers. In 2006, among employees 25 and under, those who got 401(k) advice from Schwab achieved a 14 percent rate of return on average, according to the company. People under 25 who did not ask for help earned just 9.3 percent.
Past performance is no guarantee of future prowess. But hey, the advice is free. It can’t hurt to bounce your own plan off someone who actually thinks about all this for a living.
What do you wish had been in your manual? E-mail rlieber@nytimes.com
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This also makes me very thankful that life has turned out the way it has and that I came out of college as a "returning adult student" who has a completely different situation than the typical graduate. I have CoB - that is the most important of the differences (he's my rock) - and I already have a wealth of experience in the "Work Force" (as the Pitt of Hell would call it).
Another resource that I think might've been a good addition to the article would have been a link to the Motley Fool personal investment and retirement sections.
On another note - which may also be applicable to recent graduates - is this amazing, and very long article about the concept of "shared-care-parenting" where the model for relationships and parenting styles morphs into a form where the couple "would create their own model, one in which they were parenting partners. Equals and peers. They would work equal hours, spend equal time with their children, take equal responsibility for their home. Neither would be the keeper of the mental to-do lists; neither of their careers would take precedence." This is IMHO one of the primary reasons that the women's movement was created. In actuality, this whole situation seems to epitomize the ideals that the women's movement was founded on. The only caveat is that the article (I am assuming, I haven't read it in its entirety yet) doesn't address those couples (regardless of gender or sex, pairings or groupings) who decide not to have children but who also embrace the relationship of equals standard.
This is an article that I had mentioned to a coworker the other day (oooh, I love being able to say that) after being told that the company considers annual leave a mandatory event. They must have done their own research, or just used common sense. Just like the reason they based their decision on getting the dual monitor set up for their credit analysts, it results in an increase in productivity and happiness in the workplace environment. So here's to increasing evidence of the importance of the "respite effect" - which does not involve butterflies causing tornadoes, hurricanes, or any other form of natural disaster.
June 7, 2008
Shortcuts
Vacations Are Good for You, Medically Speaking
By ALINA TUGEND
GAS prices are going up, the economy is going down, and it seems hard to justify a vacation when many of us are glad just to have jobs. But now, more than ever, we need to take a break — a real break, not just a long weekend — from our stressed-out lives.
But, it turns out, even before the downturn, a lot of Americans were working through their vacation time, taking fewer and shorter holidays.
A global study by Expedia.com found that about a third of employed Americans usually do not take all the vacation days that they are entitled to, leaving an average of three days on the table.
This is not so unusual. About a quarter of the workers in Britain do not take all their vacation time, and in France a little less. The only difference is that the British get an average of 26 days of vacation and the French about 37 — compared with our 14 days, Expedia.com said.
According to John de Graaf, executive director of Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit organization that studies issues related to overwork, 137 countries mandate paid vacation time. The United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t.
Here are some more depressing figures: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about a quarter of all workers in the private sector do not receive paid vacation. And the Conference Board, a private research group, said the number of Americans who said in April that they were going to take a vacation in the next six months is at a 30-year low, according to their regular consumer survey. Only 39 percent of those responding said they would go away on holiday over the next half year.
That is the lowest figure since 1978 and reflects a general decline since 2000, when, in April of that year, 49 percent said they were planning a getaway in the next six months.
But really, should you just stay home, relax in front of the television, read a novel, do a few day trips?
Well, vacations are not simply a luxury. There is increasing evidence that they really are necessary for good health.
Using information from the Framingham Heart Study, which started in 1948, researchers looked at questionnaires women in the study had filled out over 20 years about how often they took vacations. Those women who took a vacation once every six years or less were almost eight times more likely to develop coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than those who took at least two vacations a year, said Elaine Eaker, a co-author of the study and president of Eaker Epidemiology Enterprises, a private research company.
The study, published in 1992, was controlled for other factors like obesity, diabetes, smoking and income, Ms. Eaker said, and the findings have been substantiated in follow-up research.
“It shows how the body reacts to a lifestyle of stress,” she said. “This is real evidence that vacations are important to your physical health.”
Another study, published in 2000, looked at 12,000 men over nine years who were at high risk for coronary heart disease. Those who failed to take annual vacations had a 21 percent higher risk of death from all causes and were 32 percent more likely to die of a heart attack.
So forget about cutting down on cholesterol and exercise — I’m off to the Bahamas.
Well, no. But even if you don’t have heart problems, a vacation of at least one week — and preferably two weeks to really unwind — can help you relax and sleep better. Mark Rosekind, president and chief scientist at Alertness Solutions, a scientific consulting firm, has worked with NASA pilots and astronauts on sleep issues.
In 2006, he was commissioned by Air New Zealand to see if he could scientifically measure the benefit of a vacation. He asked a group of 15 people who were flying from the West Coast of the United States to New Zealand for vacations lasting a week to 12 days to wear a wrist device that monitored quantity and quality of sleep — for three days before the trip, during the vacation and three days afterward.
They kept a sleep diary and took a vigilance test to determine how good their reactions were before, during and after the holiday.
The participants were also hooked up to a brain monitor during the 12-hour flight, and other variables, like health, jobs and gender were factored in.
Here’s what he found. After a few days on vacation — and it usually took two to three — people were averaging an hour more of good quality sleep. And there was an 80 percent improvement in their reaction times.
“When they got home, they were still sleeping close to an hour more, and their reaction time was 30 to 40 percent higher than it had been before the trip,” Mr. Rosekind said.
The trick, these days when going on vacation, is not only to physically remove yourself from your normal routine, but mentally as well. Checking your BlackBerry every few hours or rushing to the nearest Internet cafe doesn’t cut it.
For 10 years, the Faculty of Management at Tel Aviv University has conducted a study looking at what is called “respite effects,” which measure relief from job stress before, during and after vacations.
Professor Dov Eden, an organizational psychologist who has conducted the study, found that those who are electronically hooked up to their office, even if they are lying on the Riviera, are less likely to receive the real benefits of a vacation and more likely to burn out.
Here’s one trick. My neighbor Mark had a colleague who was a workaholic. But when he went on vacation, he made sure to go where there was no cellphone or Internet service.
Mr. de Graaf sees a solution to the vacation deprivation problem, even if it’s a long shot. His organization is working with Congress to consider national legislation requiring paid vacation time. He is hoping that such legislation, currently called the Minimum Leave Protection, Family Bonding and Personal Well-Being Act, will be introduced next year. It calls for a mandated three weeks of vacation every year.
“It’s tough, there’s no question about it, but there’s a lot of interest in it,” Mr. de Graaf said. “There’s less business opposition for this leave than sick leave or parenting leave because it’s more predictable.”
He estimated that it could add an extra 2 percent to 4 percent to the labor costs of a business, but “that would be balanced by less turnover and maybe less sick days.”
Now that I’ve made such a case for vacations, maybe it’s time to acknowledge that in some cases, these trips — particularly with entire families in tow — can be stressful in their own way. The joys of a holiday can also include lugging around a ridiculous amount of paraphernalia, jet-lagged children sobbing on airplanes, hotels that looked wonderful on the Web but are in reality next to a construction site.
Back in 1979, a journalist, Lance Morrow, wrote an article in Time magazine about how rising gas prices were curtailing the annual family vacations. (Sound familiar?) He noted that “the real danger of the vacation lies in its capacity to compress all family conflicts into an exquisitely focused drama.”
And some years before that, the humorist Robert Benchley wrote that “traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria.”
William Doherty, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, said that “vacations tend to create memories more than any other family activity, and the bad times are some of the best memories.”
He said he remembers, for example, being at the Jersey Shore when he was a child and his father stepped on a shell that sent him to the hospital.
“I got to ride in the ambulance,” Mr. Doherty said. “That was great.”
The trick, then, is to have a vacation that enhances family bonding, but not too much. I’ll let you know how that works out after our Cape Cod trip this summer, where we will be joined by my sister, her husband and three children and my parents.
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This article got me to thinking just how scary, end of the world like scary, a McCain presidency could be. It also made me think of the need for a change in POW training. You could be given two options as to how you would act in the situation: 1) Name, rank, serial number, silence. Refusal to cooperate. Stoic. and 2) Cooperate in some ways and covertly gather information so that when you are released you can then brief your superiors about what you learned. and finally, an option only the masochistic will choose 3) Bitterly resist and taunt your captors so that you are tortured night to death, hoping that while you are enduring this crap you are increasing the morale of the men and women who have to hear you scream through the night during those "sessions" with the torturer.
I have listened to many stories and watched many television shows and movies about different POW situations, and I say the above with the utmost respect to any who have had to endure a brutal hostage situation. We can not all be John McClain's nor should we be expected to. And I think McCain's 'veiled' hints of brainwashing as training rather than teaching different methods according to disposition is appalling. I'm not surprised that many parents across the nation are considering the different ways they can get their children out of the country to safety if another draft is initiated. Hell, and those adults, too, who are now affected by the increased age limit that was slipped in a while back. *Nods to CoB* (If this article becomes unavailable, I do have it saved as a PDF.)
That article has direct bearing on the two Op-Ed article that I found at the same time. One is about the rumors being spread by the neocon talking heads concerning Senator Clinton's supporter being bitter, angry bitches and taking a stereotypical self-defeating revenge upon the Senator Obama candidacy by planning on voting for McCain... The other is an article detailing how by electing Senator Obama, we as women would be making strides toward gender equality. Because he refuses to conform (or contort) himself into an image of the macho-manly-man stereotype in order to be seen as electable.
June 15, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Angry Clinton Women ♥ McCain?
By FRANK RICH
TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.
In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.
How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.
But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.
How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.
The real question is how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle. Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama lost only the oldest female voters to Mrs. Clinton.
But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the way. Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate.
Our new bogus narrative rose from the ashes of Mrs. Clinton’s concession to Mr. Obama, amid the raucous debate over what role misogyny played in her defeat. A few female Clinton supporters — or so they identified themselves — appeared on YouTube and Fox News to say they were so infuriated by sexism that they would vote for Mr. McCain.
Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.
The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer her to Mr. Obama in the primaries.
This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats.
Yet the myth of Democratic disarray is so pervasive that when “NBC Nightly News” and The Wall Street Journal presented their new poll results last week (Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 41 percent) they ignored their own survey’s findings to stick to the clichéd script. Both news organizations (and NBC’s sibling, MSNBC) dwelled darkly on Mr. Obama’s “problems with two key groups” (as NBC put it): white men, where he is behind 20 percentage points to Mr. McCain, and white suburban women, where he is behind 6 points.
Since that poll gives Mr. Obama not just a 19-point lead among all women but also a 7-point lead among white women, a 6-point deficit in one sliver of the female pie is hardly a heart-stopper. Nor is Mr. Obama’s showing among white men shocking news. No Democratic presidential candidate, including Bill Clinton, has won a majority of that declining demographic since 1964. Mr. Kerry lost white men by 25 points, and Mr. Gore did by 24 points (even as he won the popular vote).
“NBC Nightly News” was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede. Mr. Obama swamps Mr. McCain by 62 percent to 28 percent — a disastrous G.O.P. setback, given that President Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to exit polls. No wonder the McCain campaign no longer lists its candidate’s home state of Arizona as safe this fall.
There are many ways that Mr. Obama can lose this election. But his 6-percentage-point lead in the Journal-NBC poll is higher than Mr. Bush’s biggest lead (4 points) over Mr. Kerry at any point in that same poll in 2004. So far, despite all the chatter to the contrary, Mr. Obama is not only holding on to Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic constituencies but expanding others (like African-Americans). The same cannot be said of Mr. McCain and the G.O.P. base.
That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.
The conservative hostility toward McCain heralded by the early attacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and James Dobson is proliferating. Bay Buchanan, the party activist who endorsed Mitt Romney, wrote this month that Mr. McCain is “incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls” and “has a personality that is best kept under wraps.” When Mr. McCain ditched the preachers John Hagee and Rod Parsley after learning that their endorsements antagonized Catholics, Muslims and Jews, he ended up getting a whole new flock of evangelical Christians furious at him too.
The revolt is not limited to the usual cranky right-wing suspects. The antiwar acolytes of Ron Paul are planning a large rally for convention week in Minneapolis. The conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec has endorsed Mr. Obama, as have both the economic adviser to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Lawrence Hunter, and the neocon historian Francis Fukuyama. Rupert Murdoch is publicly flirting with the Democrat as well. Even Dick Cheney emerged from his bunker this month to gratuitously dismiss Mr. McCain’s gas-tax holiday proposal as “a false notion” before the National Press Club.
These are not anomalies. Last week The Hill reported that at least 14 Republican members of Congress have refused to endorse or publicly support Mr. McCain. Congressional Quarterly found that of the 62,800 donors who maxed out to Mr. Bush’s campaign in 2004, only about 5,000 (some 8 percent) have contributed to his putative successor.
It was just this toxic stew of inadequate fund-raising and hostility from the base — along with incompetent management — that capsized the McCain campaign last summer. Now the management, at least, is said to be new and improved, but the press is still so distracted by the “divided Democrats” it has yet to uncover how that brilliant McCain team spent weeks choreographing the candidate’s slapstick collision with a green backdrop and self-immolating speech in prime time two weeks ago.
The only figure in the McCain camp who has candidly acknowledged any glitches is his mother, the marvelous 96-year-old Roberta McCain. Back in January she said that she didn’t think her son had any support in the G.O.P. base and that those voters would only take him if “holding their nose.”
The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and that young people don’t turn up to vote.
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June 15, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Think the Gender War Is Over? Think Again
By SUSAN FALUDI
San Francisco
FOR months, our political punditry foresaw one, and only one, prospective gender contest looming in the general election: between the first serious female presidential candidate and the Republican male “warrior.” But those who were dreading a plebiscite on sexual politics shouldn’t celebrate just yet. Hillary Clinton may be out of the race, but a Barack Obama versus John McCain match-up still has the makings of an epic American gender showdown.
The reason is a gender ethic that has guided American politics since the age of Andrew Jackson. The sentiment was succinctly expressed in a massive marble statue that stood on the steps of the United States Capitol from 1853 to 1958. Named “The Rescue,” but more commonly known as “Daniel Boone Protects His Family,” the monument featured a gigantic white pioneer in a buckskin coat holding a nearly naked Indian in a death’s grip, while off to the side a frail white woman crouched over her infant.
The question asked by this American Sphinx to all who dared enter the halls of leadership was, “Are you man enough?” This year, Senator Obama has notably refused to give the traditional answer.
The particulars of that masculine myth were established early in American politics. While the war hero-turned-statesman is a trope common to many countries in many eras, it has a particular quality and urgency here, based on our earliest history, when two centuries of Indian wars brought repeated raids on frontier settlements and humiliating failures on the part of the young nation’s “protectors” to fend off those attacks or rescue captives. The architects of American culture papered over this shaming history by concocting what would become our prevailing national security fantasy — personified by the ever-vigilant white frontiersman who, by triumphing over the rapacious “savage” and rescuing the American maiden from his clutches, redeemed American manhood.
Aspirants to the White House have long known they must audition for the Boone role in the “Rescue” tableau. Those who have pulled off a persuasive performance, from Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy, have proved victorious at the ballot box. Even candidates lacking in martial bona fides have understood the need to try to fake it with the appropriate accessories — riding high in the saddle (Ronald Reagan), commanding tanks (Michael Dukakis), wielding shotguns (John Kerry) or brandishing chainsaws and donning flight suits (you know who).
Senator McCain may fit the model better than anyone. After all, he actually starred in a real-life captivity narrative, having withstood five and a half years of imprisonment by non-white tormentors, declining special treatment and coming home a hero. “I have seen men’s hopes tested in hard and cruel ways that few will ever experience,” he declared from the hustings. A 12-minute video on his Web site dwells on how his faith in the “fathers” and his will “to fight to survive” got the young Navy pilot through Vietcong bayonetings, bone smashings and bondage.
The story’s appeal is evident in the flood of news media adulation. The worshipful tone of the last Newsweek cover article on Mr. McCain is typical. The subtitle: “He’s Endured the Unendurable and Survived.” As the liberal television watchdog group Media Matters for America has noted, the press is most reverent about the candidate’s humble refusal to trumpet his captivity — even as his campaign advertises it freely.
Although Senator McCain didn’t rescue any helpless maidens, he outdid even Daniel Boone in averting emasculating domination. Boone was a captive for only a few months, and was widely suspected by his contemporaries of having enjoyed his time with the Shawnees rather too much (he was adopted by the Shawnee chief and evidently passed up several opportunities for escape).
Senator Obama, for his part, will not be cast as the avenging hero in “The Rescue” any time soon — and not because of the color of his skin or his lack of military experience. He doesn’t seem to want the role. You don’t see him crouching in a duck blind or posing in camouflage duds or engaging in anything more gladiatorial than a game of pick-up basketball. If Mr. Obama’s candidacy seeks to move beyond race, it also moves beyond gender. A 20-minute campaign Web documentary showcased a President Obama who would exude “a real sensitivity” and “empathy” and provide a world safe for the American mother’s son. Mr. Obama is surrounded in the video by pacifist — not security — moms.
If Mr. Obama’s campaign has fashioned any master narrative, it’s that of the young man in the bower of a matriarchy — raised by a “strong” mother, bolstered by a “strong” sister, married to a “strong” wife and proud of his “strong” daughters. (Bill Clinton had a similar story, although his handlers highlighted his efforts to save his mother from domestic violence.)
“In many ways, he really will be the first woman president,” Megan Beyer of Virginia, a charter member of Women for Obama, told reporters. An op-ed essay in The New York Post headlined “Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?” came to a similar conclusion, if a tad more snidely: “Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel.”
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy showed that a woman, too, can play the tough-guy protector. But Mr. Obama takes the iconoclasm a step further — by suggesting that martial swagger isn’t what America needs anymore.
In the campaign ahead, expect a fierce Republican effort to reinstate the nation’s guardian myth — by demonstrating how the other party’s candidate fails to fit the formula. Had Mrs. Clinton been the candidate, she would no doubt have faced more attacks for being too mannishly abrasive or, conversely, too emotional to play the manly role. But Mr. Obama should expect similar damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t gender assaults. He will be cast either as the epicene metrosexual who can’t protect the country or else as the modern heathen with a suspicious middle name.
The attacks are already under way, as is evident if one enters the words “Obama” and “effeminate” into a search engine. The effeminacy canard lurks in Mike Huckabee’s imaginings of Mr. Obama tripping off a chair and diving for the floor when confronted by a gunman, and in the words of Tucker Bounds, Mr. McCain’s campaign spokesman, who depicted Mr. Obama as “hysterical.”
News media blatherers and bloggers are taking up the theme. On MSNBC, Tucker Carlson called Mr. Obama “kind of a wuss”; Joe Scarborough, the morning TV talk show host, dubbed Mr. Obama’s bowling style “prissy” and declared, “Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man”; and Don Imus, the radio host, never one to be outdone in the sexual slur department, dubbed Mr. Obama a “sissy boy.”
Will such attacks succeed? The wild card in the campaign drama to come is 9/11, which for a while kicked us into Daniel Boone overdrive. But in recent years, the dangers and costs of that prolonged delusion have become painfully apparent. In the primaries, a substantial portion of Democratic voters turned away from the dictates of “The Rescue.” In choosing between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain in the general election, Americans will pass a referendum on 200 years of bedrock gender mythology.
Susan Faludi is the author of “Backlash,” “Stiffed” and “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.”
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Progress is measured in small steps not big leaps. And another measure of progress for humanity (notice I did not say women, because the shaping of our society is made up by all members of our species) is the story of how rape is slowly becoming a more important issue on the global stage than pirated DVDs. At least for some of us... Finally.
Warning - content may be triggering.
June 15, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Weapon of Rape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
World leaders fight terrorism all the time, with summit meetings and sound bites and security initiatives. But they have studiously ignored one of the most common and brutal varieties of terrorism in the world today.
This is a kind of terrorism that disproportionately targets children. It involves not W.M.D. but simply AK-47s, machetes and pointed sticks. It is mass rape — and it will be elevated, belatedly, to a spot on the international agenda this week.
The United Nations Security Council will hold a special session on sexual violence this Thursday, with Condoleezza Rice coming to New York to lead the debate. This session, sponsored by the United States and backed by a Security Council resolution calling for regular follow-up reports, just may help mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign policy issue.
The world woke up to this phenomenon in 1993, after discovering that Serbian forces had set up a network of “rape camps” in which women and girls, some as young as 12, were enslaved. Since then, we’ve seen similar patterns of systematic rape in many countries, and it has become clear that mass rape is not just a byproduct of war but also sometimes a deliberate weapon.
“Rape in war has been going on since time immemorial,” said Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador who was the U.N.’s envoy for AIDS in Africa. “But it has taken a new twist as commanders have used it as a strategy of war.”
There are two reasons for this. First, mass rape is very effective militarily. From the viewpoint of a militia, getting into a firefight is risky, so it’s preferable to terrorize civilians sympathetic to a rival group and drive them away, depriving the rivals of support.
Second, mass rape attracts less international scrutiny than piles of bodies do, because the issue is indelicate and the victims are usually too ashamed to speak up.
In Sudan, the government has turned all of Darfur into a rape camp. The first person to alert me to this was a woman named Zahra Abdelkarim, who had been kidnapped, gang-raped, mutilated — slashed with a sword on her leg — and then left naked and bleeding to wander back to her Zaghawa tribe. In effect, she had become a message to her people: Flee, or else.
Since then, this practice of “marking” the Darfur rape victims has become widespread: typically, the women are scarred or branded, or occasionally have their ears cut off. This is often done by police officers or soldiers, in uniform, as part of a coordinated government policy.
When the governments of South Africa, China, Libya and Indonesia support Sudan’s positions in Darfur, do they really mean to adopt a pro-rape foreign policy?
The rape capital of the world is eastern Congo, where in some areas three-quarters of women have been raped. Sometimes the rapes are conducted with pointed sticks that leave the victims incontinent from internal injuries, and a former U.N. force commander there, Patrick Cammaert, says it is “more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier.”
The international community’s response so far? Approximately: “Not our problem.”
Yet such rapes also complicate post-conflict recovery, with sexual violence lingering even after peace has been restored. In Liberia, the civil war is over but rape is still epidemic — and half of all reported rapes involve girls younger than 14.
Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs. Yet China and Russia are resisting any new reporting mechanism for sexual violence, seeing such rapes as tragic but simply a criminal matter.
On the contrary, systematic rape has properly been found by international tribunals to constitute a crime against humanity, and it thrives in part because the world shrugs. The U.N. could do far more to provide health services to victims of mass rape and to insist that peacekeepers at least try to stop it.
In Congo, the doctors at Heal Africa Hospital and Panzi Hospital (healafrica .org and panzihospitalbukavu.org) repair the internal injuries of rape victims with skill and humanity. But my most indelible memory from my most recent visit, last year, came as I was interviewing a young woman who had been gang-raped.
I had taken her aside to protect her privacy, but a large group of women suddenly approached. I tried to shoo them away, and then the women explained that they had all been gang-raped and had decided that despite the stigma and risk of reprisal, they would all tell their stories.
So let’s hope that this week the world’s leaders and diplomats stop offering excuses for paralysis and begin emulating the courageous outspokenness of those Congolese women.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
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On a slightly lighter note (compared to the previous article): Whoever says that "Freedom Isn't Free" should take a page out of the new book internet providers are trying to write. In which they are running test programs to see how receptive people are to getting metered internet access.
“As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table, people’s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does innovation and trying new applications,” Vint Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist for Google who is often called the “father of the Internet,” said in an e-mail message.
The companies who are proponents of the caps say that their actions are only fair and are using this as an end run on those who engage in file-sharing. Yeah. I wonder if RIAA is sponsoring any of these ideas? With all of the online content that is being pushed on consumers, there is no way any of THOSE companies will allow the ISPs to start this crap. Because it would limit people's interest and usage of the internet. Because when it comes down to brass tacks, the people who are band-width hogs are far outweighed by the people who just use the internet to check their email and browse the internet for information. Even now, with usage rates going up because of more content offering live, buffered feed of their favorite show... Well. They aren't going to offer DOWNLOADS because then they can't control their product. Sheesh. Maybe the content providers should be the one paying the ISPs for clogging the lines?
Note: I started this post at around 8 AM, took off for a Father's Day brunch, went to see the Hulk, and am now finally finishing up the final touches. It's been quite a day. So, please, talk amongst yourselves if you have to here because I may be going to bed early tonight.
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Date: 2008-06-15 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-15 10:26 pm (UTC)OT: You get that magazine?
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Date: 2008-06-15 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-16 12:17 am (UTC)This is why I just coo over them in the check-out stands if that's where I see them and avoid them otherwise. I would start craving a home and a yard to do stuff with, knowing how much work and effort it takes to get something that nice looking and how much I would probably avoid that work. I like gardening that is extremely low maintenance. I would be one of those people who would put perennials EVERYWHERE and have barely any open grassy areas that I would mow with one of those super-simple unmotorized mowers just so I could smell the fresh cut grass and not for the affect of having a lawn.
Self-sowing gardens are my forte. ^___^