Why Are Almost all of These Women White?

C'mon, Grey Lady, get it together. It's only been a few weeks since The New York Times caused an uproar for publishing Alessandra Stanley's inaccurate, clueless, and offensive piece about Shonda Rhimes and her TV creations. One of the conclusions that Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor, reached was that a lack of diversity in the ranks of culture editors could have contributed to the piece's  publication; she notes that, "among the 15 culture editors...just a few are nonwhite." 

Now this week's Sunday Book Review is focused on Women & Power, and what do you see when you scroll (or flip) through the contents? Of the 13 photos or drawings of women or girls that accompany each article, 11 are white. (I'm providing the link here although it appears that the table of contents in this order will only be available until the next Book Review replaces it). There's Diane Sawyer, Lena Dunham, Gail Sheehy, and Kirsten Gillibrand, among others, and then there's Sonia Sotomayor and a story about The Underground Girls of Kabul, which chronicles the practice of passing girls off as boys in Afghanistan (one such girl and her mother appear in the accompanying photo). Two books profiling nonwhite women, two images; that's it. This even when some stories - such as a piece about abortion rights and the origins of birth control pills - involve and affect all women and are illustrated with drawings, drawings that easily could have depicted nonwhite women.

At the end of her piece about the Stanley article, Sullivan wrote, "This contentious chapter may not seem like a welcome gift to anyone involved. But if The Times takes it seriously – looking hard at its diversity and its editing practices — it can be exactly that." It's clear that The Times isn't looking hard enough; I plan to email Sullivan to tell her just that.

Remembering the Locals

This is my mother. Isn't she cute? 35 years ago today, she was giving birth to her third and final child - me. In thanks for that, and in honor of her recent visit, I thought I'd showcase her here. (Thanks to you too, Dad).

If you're interested in the painting, you should contact The Hub.
Maybe it's still for sale. 

We had a great visit, and I learned new things about her. I'd already known that she got her first job, at the newspapers in Sturgis, SD, by pestering them until they'd hire a 16 year-old farm girl. (In the late 1950s, Sturgis had a one-sheeter called the Black Hills Press and a paper called the Sturgis Tribune, both of which were produced at the same place). But I hadn't known that she'd been assigned the Locals - the section that recounted the goings-on of residents - or that such a section had even existed. The job consisted of calling people up and asking things like, "What did you do last weekend?" and then typing, "Last weekend Mrs. Smith visited her sister in Rapid City."

Isn't that cool? I love community news like that, and I hope there are still some small papers or radio stations where you can find it. In 2009, on a trip to Devil's Tower in eastern Wyoming, I found a radio program that announced a missing collie and a man's birthday party, complete with date, time, address, and invitation. "Everyone is welcome," the announcer said. I hope that program is still airing.

"The Okies of the Great Recession"

I finished The Grapes of Wrath and the next day when I bought a copy of Harper's, I found this story about retirement-age adults who live in RVs and travel the country following seasonal work. Jessica Bruder writes:

    They call themselves workampers, travelers, nomads, and gypsies, while
    history-minded commentators have labeled them the Okies of the Great
    Recession. More bluntly, they are geriatric migrant labor, meeting demands
    for seasonal work in an increasingly fragmented, temp-driven marketplace.
    And whatever you call them, they're part of a demographic that in the past
    several years has grown with alarming speed: downwardly mobile older
    Americans.

I highly recommend reading this piece; if you're like me and had no idea about this group of people, you'll find it informative, frequently mind-boggling, and yet also an expected extension of economic and social trends. Just as the Joads find community in some places and (when there is work) hard work for little pay almost everywhere, the people Bruder interviews create communities at RV camps yet work long, exhausting days at Amazon warehouses and other sites. But one difference is that there are no Jim Casys in the 2014 story, no workers on strike.

 

The Big Chill in Columbus

OK, I'm not done re-watching Family Ties - I'm only to episode five, season five - but already there's plenty new to discuss, and I just couldn't wait. Because, of course, I am a nerd.

In keeping with that nerdiness, I started doing research to see who else has written about the show, and one of the pieces, "The American Family on Television: From Molly Goldberg to Bill Cosby" from the Journal of Comparative Family Studies includes this passage:

     In Family Ties, one of the few shows in which politics was even
     mentioned, political preference is much like having an occupation.
     The characters, especially Alex, talk about politics but hardly ever
     participate in the political process. Characters do not battle for
     social change.  

Muriel G. Cantor does overlook the season one episode where the parents, Steven and Elyse, go to jail for protesting nuclear weapons, but I concede that there's a lack of engagement in subsequent episodes.

There is some engagement: Elyse leads a group fighting a re-zoning law at the end of season one, and in season two Alex pretends to support the Equal Rights Amendment in order to get a girl to like him and goes to jail in the process, but in season five when Steven has the opportunity to be part of the revival of a political magazine named Scavenger that he and a friend started at UC Berkeley, he finds that he's no longer radical enough for his old friend Matt.

There are fascinating details that emerge in this episode. For one, Steven expresses an aversion to being arrested, stating that "getting arrested is way down on my list now. Right below being shipwrecked." He does have a young child at home and more bills to pay - with two children in college and one in preschool - none of which he had in season one when he and Elyse were arrested, but it's still a telling shift. He's thinking ahead to the election in 1988 and which Democrats might run, an interest and investment in the two-party-dominated U.S. political system that his friend disdains; Matt is far more interested in anarchy.

Scavenger seems like a misnomer for their venture; a scavenger feasts on the dead, but Matt and the other contributors clearly think that the two-party system is still in need of killing. One of them criticizes Steven in a meeting by saying, "you're suggesting that people actually go out and vote for one of the two prevailing political parties…the only vote that counts is a vote against the system." But Steven wants to be neither a vulture nor a hawk - not only in the political sense of being to the right, but also not in the general sense of wanting to hunt, to be an activist. He's in all ways a dove.

Does this turn away from the Scavenger represent an actual shift in values for the character or the show, or a continuation? After all, we know from earlier episodes that Steven voted for McGovern in 1972, so the guy who wrote "The Two-Party System: Tweedledum and Tweedledee" for the original iteration of the Scavenger hasn't been around for awhile. While it may be a continuation that the character himself is only just now noticing, it does seem like a shift for the show, signaling that we won't have any repeat prison performances, or if we do, they'll be a joke, like Alex's, not a sincere extension of ideals. Steven may still voice his concern for nuclear disarmament and hang an old Ban the Bomb sign above the fireplace to welcome Matt, but it looks like Steven won't be going to jail for this cause, or any other, again.

There's a moment when it seems like the character and the show itself may be aware of this: when Steven asks Elyse if he's changed, she replies, "I think your social conscience has held up pretty well," and he laughs shortly and says, "Right. And the tax credit from Amnesty International proves it." Writing a check is different from other kinds of activism, the show observes. But then Elyse continues:

     You do make a statement, Steven. You make a statement by the way
     you live your life, by the way you raise your children, by choosing
     a job that doesn't compromise your principles. Those are political
     acts, as strong as anything you ever did back at Berkeley.

Here we see a character endorsing an argument that politics can be lived primarily through the family. It's not quite a disavowal of the public sphere, but it does argue that raising kids and going to work are enough, and in that regard it seems to join other works that seek to placate the idealistic young people of the '60s who have become the comfortably middle class parents of the '80s. It's OK, the show says through the character of Elyse. You're still a good person.

And in case that message wasn't clear enough or the messenger was suspect for being a fellow member of that generation, after Elyse leaves the room, Alex walks in to reassure his father as well. "Listen, Dad," Alex begins. "Over the years, you and I have searched for some common political ground. We searched…and searched…and searched" (studio audience laughs). "And even though we haven't agreed on anything yet, I really respect your ideals, you know? And the fact that you respect mine. You set a good example." The child absolves the parent.

To be fair, raising children to be respectful, independent thinkers is no small thing; nor is having a job that reflects your values. There's also a point here to how people can change, how different we can be at 40 from 20, and research from Pew shows that many older adults are more conservative than they used to be. But it's impossible not to feel like the show is withdrawing politically at this point in the series, the protesting and getting arrested of 1982 replaced with the benign Reagan jokes of 1986. I'll write more about this is in a later post; in the meantime, I leave you with this great poster and some relevant Ohio ERA history...because I'm guessing if you've read this far, you're a nerd, too:

He cares about the First Amendment, but, sadly, not this one.

Twenty Years after the Band

Tonight I watched "The Normal Heart," the HBO movie based on Larry Kramer's play. It brought back a lot of memories, namely reading And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic in 1994 when I was 14.

Kramer is a pivotal character in Randy Shilts's comprehensive masterwork of journalism, and one of the many names I carried around on my tongue as an impassioned ninth grader. Others included Cleve Jones, Anthony Fauci, Gaetan Dugas. I wasn't discriminating in my enthusiasm; I talked about the activists, the doctors, and so-called Patient Zero with equal intensity. It was the first book I had read where I memorized information eagerly, of my own volition, the way some kids memorize baseball card stats, and I went around talking about Factor VIII and Kaposi's sarcoma to anyone who would listen. A lot has faded, but enough has remained that when I was watching an episode of Veep recently, and the vice president introduced her assistant as Gary Walsh, I thought, Really? You gave him the same last name? Walsh was a psychotherapist described in Shilts's book, and he died in those early years.

When it was all going on (Shilts's book focuses on 1980-85), I was a little kid in North Dakota; born in 1979, I was totally unaware of the medical fear and bravery, political stonewalling and activism, and all the other facets that played out and on and on, especially in major American cities. In 1994, when I truly became aware, it was already an old disease in some ways; Life and Time were naming it as the cause of death in their year-end issues with photos of the famous who had died. I had saved the issues from 1992 and 1993, and I taped the men from those years to my bedroom walls alongside a painting my brother had done of a cheeseburger and fries, alongside my poster for the film It's a Wonderful Life. My room became even stranger than before, a fangirl-shrine-museum for Rudolf Nureyev, Arthur Ashe, Tony Perkins, Denholm Elliott, and others. I went further back in time and taped up Roy Cohn's obituary, even though he was a known asshole. And I taped up Randy's.

When I finished his book, in January or February of 1994, I wrote Randy Shilts a letter to thank him for his work and to ask how I could help, but instead of hearing from him, his assistant wrote back: he was too sick to reply himself. Shortly later he died; my father handed me his obituary one day when I came home from school. I was stunned, blinking back tears. "People with AIDS die," he told me. "They die." Maybe he was merely trying for directness, honesty; maybe my attachment to these faces, the display of gay men in my bedroom, irritated him. Either way, I had to get out of the house. I went for a walk. The roads were lined with pristine snow, making the sudden sight of a squirrel's crushed body all the more vivid and jarring. Of course it wasn't just a dead animal; it felt significant, and I went home and wrote a bad poem about the whole thing.

Back then I wasn't allowed to volunteer at the Southeastern Connecticut AIDS Project (SECAP) because I was a minor, so I wore a red ribbon until that felt flimsy, and then I took it off and did nothing at all. Soon another phrase entered my vocabulary: protease inhibitors. AIDS, while still deadly, ceased to be the same kind of disease, and sentences like the ones my father uttered became relics of a particular time. 

"The Normal Heart" is good and sad. It reminded me of a time when I was passionate and single-minded and young and sheltered enough not to know anything of the true fight. It reminded me of those names, of the people who did the living and fighting and dying. I didn't know what to do with these feelings, so for now I'm just writing, again.

When Breaking News is not so Newsy

The Breaking News banner atop the New York Times screen makes sense for some information, such as news about Malaysia Flight 370 or the latest GM recall, but this foray into March Madness seems questionable to me.

All the News...

Tomorrow is the last day that a paper copy of the New York Times will arrive at my house.

I give that sentence its very own paragraph to underscore what a profound change this will be for me (and, well, to add some theatricality to the whole thing). For the last ten years, my father has given me a subscription as a gift - a long time to give any gift to anyone, let alone such an expensive gift, let alone to your, er, adult child. So. I completely understand that this had to end; in the past year, as he's moved from a job at the NYT itself to a copy editor position at a small paper in Rhode Island, I've reminded him several times that he no longer has to foot this bill.

But this is a man who has been a journalist his whole adult life, who has news paper ingrained in him the way some people have the union ethos or lighthouse keeping (OK, maybe that last one is a stretch). When he's on a trip, he buys the local newspaper, even if it's the Wretched City Urinal, even if the headline writing kills him, even if he finds the thing loaded with, insult of insults, "non-stories." It's as much a testament to his traditional view of how one ideally gets the news as to his love for me that he held out on cancellation for so long.

And it's an ideal that he passed on to me. If I were a typical early-30-something, I would have preferred to access my news digitally all along. But I'm an outlier. I do read websites, I have listened to podcasts, I pay some bills electronically, I write - gasp! - a blog. But I'm also that person on the bus who's filling out her rent check while trying to keep the Arts and Business sections from sliding off her lap to the floor.

It would be one thing if I were just embracing my inner grandma. But I find that looking at a screen for too long or listening to the radio without having an activity to do irritates me. And when there's technology that I don't understand, I'm just as liable to abandon it as I am to try to adapt to it. (My friend calls this falling into an Amish black hole...which is maybe name enough for this phenomenon. She is the funniest). Case in point: my laptop "died" three years ago. Why do I put died in quotes? Because I never actually brought the thing in to get diagnosed. For all I know the light is dead and the motherboard is fine.

So I'm nervous about staying as informed through the radio and Internet, but instead of, oh I don't know, swiping the neighbors' copy from their driveway on my way to work, I'm going to try to change my habits. I've already been checking the Seattle Times and other news websites almost daily for (ahem) a few months - I can add one more (though only to the tune of 20 articles a month for now). And when I move to a college town for grad school soon, I'm going to look into delivery rates for the local paper.

I don't have to completely reject being my father's daughter.

Once an Obit Writer...

At a restaurant during a recent family visit, my mother looked up from her salmon and said to me, "Maybe you should write my obituary."

"Mom," I said quickly, with a sternness that surprised me, "I don't want to talk about this now."

What brought this on? Not a known illness or the impending hereditary likelihood of one, but a conversation she'd had a week before with friends of a similar age (early to late-60s). My brother saved the moment by chiming in, "The headline could be 'Moderate Drinker Says Farewell.'"

We all laughed. "How do you remember that?" my mom asked him. It was the title of her last column for The Minot Daily News before we moved across the country when I was 7.

My mother wasn't that off base in asking me to write her obit; it was my first job, after all. When I was 17 and a senior in high school, I wrote obituaries on Sundays for a Connecticut newspaper. When I told her about my job, my best friend Sam said, not unkindly, "It sounds depressing." In contrast, she had a gig cleaning up our school's hardly-mobbed plaster cast museum. "It's the definition of 'sinecure,'" she joked. (Some of our friends were unabashed history or physics nerds; we were English nerds).

Obit writing could be depressing, but most of the time it was just fascinating to peer into - and arrange on a page - one version of the story of a person's life. And most of the time the departed were old enough that, from the perspective of a teenager, their deaths seemed timely; I remember a lot of WWII veterans.

Maybe it's the residual effect of losing two close friends, one of them Sam, by the time I was 23, but sometimes phrases for an obit or eulogy pop into my head. I'll be getting ready for work, and all of a sudden I'll think of something I want to say or write for a still-living friend or family member. The surprise - and depressing element - of the moment, like when my mother turned to me at dinner, makes me want to shake it off. But then I try to fight that reflex: as long as I don't dwell too long in farewell mode, it's good to pay attention. It's never too early for appreciation.

Voting vs. Making Babies

A few years ago, I think in 2004 for that presidential election, Paul Krugman wrote an editorial about voting. If we all think that our individual vote will make a difference in the results, he wrote (I paraphrase), then it will. Projected collective?

But what about the opposite mindset, the one that says, I know this issue is a problem and that, by my actions, I'm contributing to the problem. But I'm only one person. So my impact isn't that great.
We can justify a lot through that perspective: polluting the environment through travel, using products that will end up in landfills, eating meat when the process consumes tremendous amounts of the earth's energy and resources, even giving birth when there are already children alive, in need of care.

The mix of freedom, rationalization, and emotional distance is a powerful one.