By DANIELA PETROFF
The Associated Press
Wednesday, February 20, 2008; 4:53 PM
MILAN, Italy -- Fashion seems to tiptoe around Milan these days, rather than strut down the runway as it did in the heyday of the "moda Milanese."
From the scarcity of glitzy parties, to the empty seats in the VIP section at the shows, to the sobriety of the styles, the current week of Italian preview showings promises a somber fall-winter 2008-2009 season.
Recession is the talk of the town, and the strong euro is visibly taking its toll. The streets usually filled with fashionistas taking advantage of the shows for an Italian shopping spree, are sadly quiet, and the once bustling stores often empty.
"It's a difficult moment," said Andrea Della Valle, vice president of the Tod's leather company, famous for its bags and shoes, at a recent meeting of high-end fashion companies in Milan. However, Della Valle expects things to improve by 2009.
The downbeat mood could not help but creep onto the winter runway, starting with the palette. It begins with basic black, and doesn't get any brighter than light gray and beige. A series of muted fall colors ranging from pomegranate red to eggplant blue, moss green and leaf yellow add a bit of spice to the bland color scheme.
The long, lean silhouette also reflects the times. Gone are the sexy styles which made Milan the hottest runway on the fashion map, to be replaced by outfits so prim they would feel more at home in a convent than a club.
That is unless you are Miuccia Prada, who transformed lace from demure to daring Tuesday night, outfitting her ladies in body-hugging black dresses. Optimism should be moderated, however. The high-collared look, worn with hair strictly pulled back in a chignon and almost no makeup, could also fill the wardrobe of the not-so-merry widow.
"I have always hated lace," said Prada, famous for her unfussy minimalist styles. "But I love a challenge, and thought it could work for my new 'femme fatale.'"
And it did, as model after model slinked down the new ramp runway in coarse lace outfits that created a peek-a-boo effect with the bare flesh below.
Roberto Cavalli returned the favor Wednesday morning, going from his trademark sexy to sugary sweet, in romantic debutante gowns decorated with flowers, and coats and vests embroidered in naif folksy patterns. There was not a zebra stripe or a leopard spot in sight.
"I wanted to create clothes that make a woman beautiful without seeming vulgar," the apparent fashion convert said before the show.
Minimalist naif is nothing new to Consuelo Castiglione, the name behind the Marni label, who presented her latest wears Wednesday. This season, she worked hard on detail in creating interesting collars and hemlines on an otherwise simple silhouette. Fun high-heeled pumps in brightly colored patent-leather offered some sorely needed humor to this serious round of collections.
The Gucci show, which ended Wednesday's presentations, seemed like a kaleidoscope of next winter's fashion issues.
The silhouette was simple enough, based on a silk tunic, belted below the waist. But when creative director, Frida Giannini, fashioned her outfits in brightly patterned silk, and decorated them with every possible embroidery _ from dangling tassels to gripping studs _ the effect was dazzling.
To make matters even more colorful, the Gucci runway was carpeted in red, white and gold, and adorned with the new gilded Gucci logo.
According to her fashion notes, Giannini's intent was to create an atmosphere of "Bohemian glamour."
Read that as an escape route from the humdrum of the current fashion scene, especially when accompanied by studded patent leather footwear and matching maxi handbag
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Bill Clinton's Legacy
How Former President Is Viewed Could Affect Vote
By Peter Baker - Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2008; A01
NORMAN, Okla. -- It fell to Mike Turpen, a former Oklahoma attorney general, to warm up the crowd, and he did so with gusto. "Bill Clinton!" he shouted to several thousand people gathered in the McCasland Field House at the University of Oklahoma. "He gave us eight years of peace and prosperity! Do you remember?"
In case they didn't, the former president bounded onstage, took the microphone and spent some of the next hour reminding them: He balanced the budget and paid down the national debt. He made student loans more affordable. He worked with the rest of the world on global warming and arms control. But, he said, "I want you to understand this is not me. This is her."
Maybe, but it seems more than a little bit about him, too. As Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama clash on multiple political fronts heading into Super Tuesday, William Jefferson Clinton's record as president has emerged as a key battleground. How Democrats define his legacy could determine which presidential candidate they choose: Hillary Clinton, to extend it, or Obama, to make a clean break from it.
Bill Clinton's attacks on Obama on the campaign trail -- and the generally negative reaction they provoked -- have helped focus attention on the former president and seem to have created misgivings about his possible return to Washington. According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 55 percent of Americans view the former commander in chief favorably, unchanged from a year ago. But just 50 percent said they would be comfortable with him back in the White House, down from 60 percent in September.
The Clinton camp has presented the former president's eight-year tenure as a modern-day era of good feelings when the United States stood tall in the world and took care of its people at home. Aides have played on nostalgia for a simpler time, before the World Trade Center fell, before U.S. troops bogged down in Iraq, before the economy reeled toward recession, before President Bush.
At the same time, they have banked on the hope that most Americans, or at least most Democrats, have forgotten or forgiven what Bill Clinton's chief of staff Leon E. Panetta calls "the dark side" of his presidency, the scandals and partisan battles that consumed so much of the 1990s. And they have pushed back against those, including Obama, who question the legacy.
But Panetta, who supports Hillary Clinton and says he believes her husband deserves credit for policy achievements, said confronting the full record of the Clinton years will be unavoidable. "Whether they like it or not, it is going to be part of the debate. Obviously, if Hillary gets the nomination . . . there's no question the Republicans are going to make that part of the debate."
Obama has approached the Clinton years somewhat gingerly, using euphemisms about not wanting to return to the battles of the 1990s and suggesting that Ronald Reagan was a more transformative figure than the 42nd president. That plays into the views of many liberals, who have long harbored ambivalent feelings toward Clinton for what they regard as his having squandered a unique historical moment by pandering to the right or indulging his personal appetites.
Other Democrats simply suffer from Clinton fatigue. Outside the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on Thursday, before the two candidates debated for the last time before Super Tuesday, an Obama supporter with a bullhorn chanted, "No more drama, we want Obama."
Inside the hall, the senator from Illinois picked up on the theme, albeit less directly. "I think what is at stake right now is whether we are looking backwards or we are looking forwards," he said. "I think it is the past versus the future." But Obama ducked a chance to elaborate. Asked whether Democrats were right to remember the Clinton era fondly, he said: "There's no doubt that there were good things that happened during those eight years."
Clinton's was a presidency often marked by turbulence, full of operatic twists and colorful characters. At times he was viewed as a transformative leader, at other times as a marginalized figure. His stumbles paved the way for Republicans to capture Congress for the first time in 40 years, yet he learned how to "triangulate" to get back on top.
As a New Democrat, he aimed to govern more from the center, declaring that "the era of big government is over," pushing a deficit-reduction package through Congress by a single vote, winning approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement and overhauling the welfare system. He presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history to date. He bombed Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein penned in and Serbia to push its troops out of Kosovo. He negotiated a peace agreement in Northern Ireland but failed to do so in the Middle East.
Along the way, Clinton warred with House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republicans and independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's investigators, fending off scandal -- the Travel Office, FBI files, Whitewater, the Lincoln Bedroom and so on. His false testimony under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky plunged his administration into a 13-month battle for survival that resulted in a party-line impeachment in the House and acquittal in the Senate. Ultimately, he acknowledged testifying falsely and became the first president held in contempt of court and disbarred.
By the time he left office amid a furor over his last-minute pardons of financier Marc Rich and a host of others, Clinton had tried the nation's patience. He left with high approval ratings, but 68 percent of Americans thought he would be remembered largely for scandal, compared with 28 percent who said policy achievements.
To judge by the people who came out to see him last week in Oklahoma, Colorado and elsewhere, Clinton's stature has grown since he left office. Many in the audiences were too young to remember all the details but recall his presidency as a simpler time.
"I remember there was very little conflict," said Elizabeth Lewis, 22, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. "He wasn't very confrontational, like Bush is now. People were pretty happy with him as president."
Added her friend Jami Thacker, 21, a pre-nursing student: "It just seemed like people felt more safe."
Still, his roguish reputation has not completely faded. "I feel like he was a good president and did a good job," said Jeff James, 20, a sophomore. "But if I had a kid -- he's known to have smoked pot and had affairs. He's not exactly a good role model for kids."
Historians have begun to teach the younger generation that Clinton was a transitional figure who led during a pause between the Cold War and the struggle with terrorism. "People remember this was an optimistic time," said Ann-Marie Szymanski, a political science professor at Oklahoma. "People had it pretty good. The more partisan remember it as a period of conflict, remember the more lurid parts."
Some Clinton associates suggested that Obama particularly angered the former president by comparing his role in history unfavorably with Reagan's. Lanny J. Davis, a Clinton White House special counsel, challenged Obama with an open letter titled, "What Exactly in the Clinton-Era Nineties Did You Not Like?"
Others have picked up the debate from the opposite end. "Obama's assessment is so obviously true: Reagan was consequential. Clinton was not," columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote last week.
The Clinton team recognizes that this debate is pocked with danger. While his strategists are happy to tout and defend his record, they understand that campaigns are about the future, not the past, and that Hillary Clinton needs to maintain her own identity. At the same time, they anticipate that Republicans will take on the former president with full force should she win the nomination.
That could be risky for the other side, too. Many leaders of the anti-Clinton camp from the 1990s have moved on, scarred by defeats at the hands of a formidable political gladiator.
Former congressman Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), one of the House managers who prosecuted Clinton in the Senate trial, said he still believes the impeachment was a noble attempt to enforce the rule of law. But he said it should not be relitigated this year. "There were some who were so personally engaged in it that they had a hard time cutting loose of it," he said. "They may try to resurrect it this year. But that would be a mistake. History has passed them by. You'll be on the losing side of history if you let this dominate your life."
By Peter Baker - Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2008; A01
NORMAN, Okla. -- It fell to Mike Turpen, a former Oklahoma attorney general, to warm up the crowd, and he did so with gusto. "Bill Clinton!" he shouted to several thousand people gathered in the McCasland Field House at the University of Oklahoma. "He gave us eight years of peace and prosperity! Do you remember?"
In case they didn't, the former president bounded onstage, took the microphone and spent some of the next hour reminding them: He balanced the budget and paid down the national debt. He made student loans more affordable. He worked with the rest of the world on global warming and arms control. But, he said, "I want you to understand this is not me. This is her."
Maybe, but it seems more than a little bit about him, too. As Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama clash on multiple political fronts heading into Super Tuesday, William Jefferson Clinton's record as president has emerged as a key battleground. How Democrats define his legacy could determine which presidential candidate they choose: Hillary Clinton, to extend it, or Obama, to make a clean break from it.
Bill Clinton's attacks on Obama on the campaign trail -- and the generally negative reaction they provoked -- have helped focus attention on the former president and seem to have created misgivings about his possible return to Washington. According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 55 percent of Americans view the former commander in chief favorably, unchanged from a year ago. But just 50 percent said they would be comfortable with him back in the White House, down from 60 percent in September.
The Clinton camp has presented the former president's eight-year tenure as a modern-day era of good feelings when the United States stood tall in the world and took care of its people at home. Aides have played on nostalgia for a simpler time, before the World Trade Center fell, before U.S. troops bogged down in Iraq, before the economy reeled toward recession, before President Bush.
At the same time, they have banked on the hope that most Americans, or at least most Democrats, have forgotten or forgiven what Bill Clinton's chief of staff Leon E. Panetta calls "the dark side" of his presidency, the scandals and partisan battles that consumed so much of the 1990s. And they have pushed back against those, including Obama, who question the legacy.
But Panetta, who supports Hillary Clinton and says he believes her husband deserves credit for policy achievements, said confronting the full record of the Clinton years will be unavoidable. "Whether they like it or not, it is going to be part of the debate. Obviously, if Hillary gets the nomination . . . there's no question the Republicans are going to make that part of the debate."
Obama has approached the Clinton years somewhat gingerly, using euphemisms about not wanting to return to the battles of the 1990s and suggesting that Ronald Reagan was a more transformative figure than the 42nd president. That plays into the views of many liberals, who have long harbored ambivalent feelings toward Clinton for what they regard as his having squandered a unique historical moment by pandering to the right or indulging his personal appetites.
Other Democrats simply suffer from Clinton fatigue. Outside the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on Thursday, before the two candidates debated for the last time before Super Tuesday, an Obama supporter with a bullhorn chanted, "No more drama, we want Obama."
Inside the hall, the senator from Illinois picked up on the theme, albeit less directly. "I think what is at stake right now is whether we are looking backwards or we are looking forwards," he said. "I think it is the past versus the future." But Obama ducked a chance to elaborate. Asked whether Democrats were right to remember the Clinton era fondly, he said: "There's no doubt that there were good things that happened during those eight years."
Clinton's was a presidency often marked by turbulence, full of operatic twists and colorful characters. At times he was viewed as a transformative leader, at other times as a marginalized figure. His stumbles paved the way for Republicans to capture Congress for the first time in 40 years, yet he learned how to "triangulate" to get back on top.
As a New Democrat, he aimed to govern more from the center, declaring that "the era of big government is over," pushing a deficit-reduction package through Congress by a single vote, winning approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement and overhauling the welfare system. He presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history to date. He bombed Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein penned in and Serbia to push its troops out of Kosovo. He negotiated a peace agreement in Northern Ireland but failed to do so in the Middle East.
Along the way, Clinton warred with House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republicans and independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's investigators, fending off scandal -- the Travel Office, FBI files, Whitewater, the Lincoln Bedroom and so on. His false testimony under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky plunged his administration into a 13-month battle for survival that resulted in a party-line impeachment in the House and acquittal in the Senate. Ultimately, he acknowledged testifying falsely and became the first president held in contempt of court and disbarred.
By the time he left office amid a furor over his last-minute pardons of financier Marc Rich and a host of others, Clinton had tried the nation's patience. He left with high approval ratings, but 68 percent of Americans thought he would be remembered largely for scandal, compared with 28 percent who said policy achievements.
To judge by the people who came out to see him last week in Oklahoma, Colorado and elsewhere, Clinton's stature has grown since he left office. Many in the audiences were too young to remember all the details but recall his presidency as a simpler time.
"I remember there was very little conflict," said Elizabeth Lewis, 22, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. "He wasn't very confrontational, like Bush is now. People were pretty happy with him as president."
Added her friend Jami Thacker, 21, a pre-nursing student: "It just seemed like people felt more safe."
Still, his roguish reputation has not completely faded. "I feel like he was a good president and did a good job," said Jeff James, 20, a sophomore. "But if I had a kid -- he's known to have smoked pot and had affairs. He's not exactly a good role model for kids."
Historians have begun to teach the younger generation that Clinton was a transitional figure who led during a pause between the Cold War and the struggle with terrorism. "People remember this was an optimistic time," said Ann-Marie Szymanski, a political science professor at Oklahoma. "People had it pretty good. The more partisan remember it as a period of conflict, remember the more lurid parts."
Some Clinton associates suggested that Obama particularly angered the former president by comparing his role in history unfavorably with Reagan's. Lanny J. Davis, a Clinton White House special counsel, challenged Obama with an open letter titled, "What Exactly in the Clinton-Era Nineties Did You Not Like?"
Others have picked up the debate from the opposite end. "Obama's assessment is so obviously true: Reagan was consequential. Clinton was not," columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote last week.
The Clinton team recognizes that this debate is pocked with danger. While his strategists are happy to tout and defend his record, they understand that campaigns are about the future, not the past, and that Hillary Clinton needs to maintain her own identity. At the same time, they anticipate that Republicans will take on the former president with full force should she win the nomination.
That could be risky for the other side, too. Many leaders of the anti-Clinton camp from the 1990s have moved on, scarred by defeats at the hands of a formidable political gladiator.
Former congressman Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), one of the House managers who prosecuted Clinton in the Senate trial, said he still believes the impeachment was a noble attempt to enforce the rule of law. But he said it should not be relitigated this year. "There were some who were so personally engaged in it that they had a hard time cutting loose of it," he said. "They may try to resurrect it this year. But that would be a mistake. History has passed them by. You'll be on the losing side of history if you let this dominate your life."
Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen.
By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, February 3, 2008; B01
One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man."
No offense to either Obama or Sullivan, but: No he isn't. No one is.
I realized that when I read this e-mail from a friend, a passionate Obama supporter who's a veteran of the anti-Vietnam War movement: "Who are you supporting for prez? You know my feelings -- and my son has been working 16-hr days for him up in NH. Kind of like his 60s . . ."
I realized it again when I saw the online ad produced by Sen. John McCain's campaign, arguing that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't deserve the presidency because she earmarked one-millionth of the federal budget ($1 million) for a museum commemorating the rock festival Woodstock.
I realized it, too, when Bill Clinton accused Obama of leaving the role of Lyndon B. Johnson out of the civil rights story, and when Sen. John Kerry announced his endorsement of Obama with a quotation from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- and both set off a strange bout of opinion-journalism shadowboxing over which camp, Clinton's or Obama's, better grasped the historical legacy of the civil rights movement.
I realize it anew just about every day of this presidential campaign -- most recently when a bevy of Kennedys stood behind Obama last week and spoke of reviving the spirit of Camelot, and when the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks responded by making fine distinctions between "the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties" -- the "early-60s," which he took Obama to represent -- and the "late-60s," defined "by drug use and self-indulgence," of which the Clintons are the supposed avatars.
The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close.
Born myself in 1969 to pre-baby boomer parents, I'm a historian of America's divisions who spent the age of George W. Bush reading more newspapers written when Johnson and Richard Nixon were president than current ones. And I recently had a fascinating experience scouring archives for photos of the 1960s to illustrate the book I've just finished based on that research. It was frustrating -- and telling.
The pictures people take and save, as opposed to the ones they never take or the ones they discard, say a lot about how they understand their own times. And in our archives as much as in our mind's eye, we still record the '60s in hazy cliches -- in the stereotype of the idealistic youngster who came through the counterculture and protest movements, then settled down to comfortable bourgeois domesticity.
What's missing? The other side in that civil war. The right-wing populist rage of 1968 third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, who, referring to an idealistic protester who had lain down in front of Johnson's limousine, promised that if he were elected, "the first time they lie down in front of my limousine, it'll be the last one they'll ever lay down in front of because their day is over!" That kind of quip helped him rise to as much as 20 percent in the polls.
It's easy to find hundreds of pictures of the national student strike that followed Nixon's announcement of the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. Plenty of pictures of the riots at Kent State that ended with four students shot dead by National Guardsmen. None I could find, however, of the counter-demonstrations by Kent, Ohio, townies -- and even Kent State parents. Flashing four fingers and chanting "The score is four/And next time more," they argued that the kids had it coming.
The '60s were a trauma -- two sets of contending Americans, each believing they were fighting for the future of civilization, but whose left- and right-wing visions of redemption were opposite and irreconcilable. They were a trauma the way the war of brother against brother between 1861 and 1865 was a trauma and the way the Great Depression was a trauma. Tens of millions of Americans hated tens of millions of other Americans, sometimes murderously so. The effects of such traumas linger in a society for generations.
Consider this example. The Library of Congress, which houses the photo archives of Look magazine and U.S. News & World Report, holds hundreds of images of the violent confrontation between cops and demonstrators in front of the Chicago Hilton at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and, from the summer of 1969, of Woodstock. But I could find no visual record of the National Convention on the Crisis of Education. Held two weeks after Woodstock in that selfsame Chicago Hilton, it was convened by citizens fighting the spread of sex education in the schools as if civilization itself were at stake. The issue dominated newspapers in the autumn of 1969 and is seemingly forgotten today.
But it's not truly forgotten. Those right-wing '60s activists were protesting a group called the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), which believed that its "age appropriate" sexual-education guidelines, devised in consultation with parents, clergy, educators and scientific experts, would help strengthen the nation's moral values. Instead, they brought about an anguished backlash among Americans who believed that to talk about human reproduction in schools was an unmitigated horror. They still do. Last summer, the conservative activist Barbara Comstock savaged none other than Obama for speaking warmly of SIECUS, which Comstock claimed -- just as the '60s activists did -- teaches that "masturbation and homosexuality are appropriate for kindergartners."
Like a patient under psychoanalysis, we still repress much that was most searing in those times, only to have it burst forth in odd moments. The after-effects of the divisions are so great that, glibly seeking to master these ghosts, we manage mostly to reproduce them.
In Sullivan's attempt to exorcise the 1960s, for example, he behaves like a textbook pundit . . . in the 1960s. Back then, pundits were always imagining magically conciliatory figures with the power to make the awful cacophony stop. Quiet and civil Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination as an antiwar candidate; columnist Mary McGrory called him "visibly and dramatically successful [in] closing the gap between the generations." Then came Robert F. Kennedy, whom the columnist Joseph Kraft likewise proclaimed to be one who held in his hands the power to unite "Black Power and Backlash."
In fact, both figures turned out to be massively polarizing. McCarthy was despised by Americans who saw all antiwar activists as harbingers of anarchy -- like the cops at the 1968 Democratic convention who were spotted vandalizing cars with McCarthy bumper stickers. Polls showed that RFK was "intensely disliked" by 50 percent more people than Johnson -- who was so intensely disliked that he had to drop out of the 1968 presidential race. Nixon, traditionally believed to be the most divisive figure in American politics, was also reinvented that year as a uniquely uniting figure; Kraft praised his ability to call the country to "charity and forbearance."
Four years later, many saw George McGovern the same way -- as "a politician of reconciliation," in the South Dakotan's own words. The Republican National Committee didn't get the memo. "He is in reality a dedicated radical extremist," declared its monthly magazine, First Monday, who would "unilaterally disarm . . . and open the White House to riotous street mobs."
A President Obama could no more magically transcend America's '60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of "family," on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. What Andrew Sullivan dismisses as "the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation" do not separate us from our "actual problems"; they define us, as much as the Great War defined France in the 1920s, '30s, '40s and beyond. Pretending otherwise simply isn't healthy. It's repression -- the kind of thing that shrinks say causes neurosis.
At least there's some comfort in knowing that our divisions aren't what they once were. Heck, in the 1860s, half the nation was devoted in body, mind and spirit to killing the other half; in the early 1930s, many sage observers presumed the nation to be poised on the verge of open, violent class warfare. We'll manage to muddle through again -- even burdened with mere flesh and blood human beings, not magical healing shamans, as our leaders.
Sunday, February 3, 2008; B01
One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man."
No offense to either Obama or Sullivan, but: No he isn't. No one is.
I realized that when I read this e-mail from a friend, a passionate Obama supporter who's a veteran of the anti-Vietnam War movement: "Who are you supporting for prez? You know my feelings -- and my son has been working 16-hr days for him up in NH. Kind of like his 60s . . ."
I realized it again when I saw the online ad produced by Sen. John McCain's campaign, arguing that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't deserve the presidency because she earmarked one-millionth of the federal budget ($1 million) for a museum commemorating the rock festival Woodstock.
I realized it, too, when Bill Clinton accused Obama of leaving the role of Lyndon B. Johnson out of the civil rights story, and when Sen. John Kerry announced his endorsement of Obama with a quotation from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- and both set off a strange bout of opinion-journalism shadowboxing over which camp, Clinton's or Obama's, better grasped the historical legacy of the civil rights movement.
I realize it anew just about every day of this presidential campaign -- most recently when a bevy of Kennedys stood behind Obama last week and spoke of reviving the spirit of Camelot, and when the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks responded by making fine distinctions between "the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties" -- the "early-60s," which he took Obama to represent -- and the "late-60s," defined "by drug use and self-indulgence," of which the Clintons are the supposed avatars.
The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close.
Born myself in 1969 to pre-baby boomer parents, I'm a historian of America's divisions who spent the age of George W. Bush reading more newspapers written when Johnson and Richard Nixon were president than current ones. And I recently had a fascinating experience scouring archives for photos of the 1960s to illustrate the book I've just finished based on that research. It was frustrating -- and telling.
The pictures people take and save, as opposed to the ones they never take or the ones they discard, say a lot about how they understand their own times. And in our archives as much as in our mind's eye, we still record the '60s in hazy cliches -- in the stereotype of the idealistic youngster who came through the counterculture and protest movements, then settled down to comfortable bourgeois domesticity.
What's missing? The other side in that civil war. The right-wing populist rage of 1968 third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, who, referring to an idealistic protester who had lain down in front of Johnson's limousine, promised that if he were elected, "the first time they lie down in front of my limousine, it'll be the last one they'll ever lay down in front of because their day is over!" That kind of quip helped him rise to as much as 20 percent in the polls.
It's easy to find hundreds of pictures of the national student strike that followed Nixon's announcement of the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. Plenty of pictures of the riots at Kent State that ended with four students shot dead by National Guardsmen. None I could find, however, of the counter-demonstrations by Kent, Ohio, townies -- and even Kent State parents. Flashing four fingers and chanting "The score is four/And next time more," they argued that the kids had it coming.
The '60s were a trauma -- two sets of contending Americans, each believing they were fighting for the future of civilization, but whose left- and right-wing visions of redemption were opposite and irreconcilable. They were a trauma the way the war of brother against brother between 1861 and 1865 was a trauma and the way the Great Depression was a trauma. Tens of millions of Americans hated tens of millions of other Americans, sometimes murderously so. The effects of such traumas linger in a society for generations.
Consider this example. The Library of Congress, which houses the photo archives of Look magazine and U.S. News & World Report, holds hundreds of images of the violent confrontation between cops and demonstrators in front of the Chicago Hilton at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and, from the summer of 1969, of Woodstock. But I could find no visual record of the National Convention on the Crisis of Education. Held two weeks after Woodstock in that selfsame Chicago Hilton, it was convened by citizens fighting the spread of sex education in the schools as if civilization itself were at stake. The issue dominated newspapers in the autumn of 1969 and is seemingly forgotten today.
But it's not truly forgotten. Those right-wing '60s activists were protesting a group called the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), which believed that its "age appropriate" sexual-education guidelines, devised in consultation with parents, clergy, educators and scientific experts, would help strengthen the nation's moral values. Instead, they brought about an anguished backlash among Americans who believed that to talk about human reproduction in schools was an unmitigated horror. They still do. Last summer, the conservative activist Barbara Comstock savaged none other than Obama for speaking warmly of SIECUS, which Comstock claimed -- just as the '60s activists did -- teaches that "masturbation and homosexuality are appropriate for kindergartners."
Like a patient under psychoanalysis, we still repress much that was most searing in those times, only to have it burst forth in odd moments. The after-effects of the divisions are so great that, glibly seeking to master these ghosts, we manage mostly to reproduce them.
In Sullivan's attempt to exorcise the 1960s, for example, he behaves like a textbook pundit . . . in the 1960s. Back then, pundits were always imagining magically conciliatory figures with the power to make the awful cacophony stop. Quiet and civil Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination as an antiwar candidate; columnist Mary McGrory called him "visibly and dramatically successful [in] closing the gap between the generations." Then came Robert F. Kennedy, whom the columnist Joseph Kraft likewise proclaimed to be one who held in his hands the power to unite "Black Power and Backlash."
In fact, both figures turned out to be massively polarizing. McCarthy was despised by Americans who saw all antiwar activists as harbingers of anarchy -- like the cops at the 1968 Democratic convention who were spotted vandalizing cars with McCarthy bumper stickers. Polls showed that RFK was "intensely disliked" by 50 percent more people than Johnson -- who was so intensely disliked that he had to drop out of the 1968 presidential race. Nixon, traditionally believed to be the most divisive figure in American politics, was also reinvented that year as a uniquely uniting figure; Kraft praised his ability to call the country to "charity and forbearance."
Four years later, many saw George McGovern the same way -- as "a politician of reconciliation," in the South Dakotan's own words. The Republican National Committee didn't get the memo. "He is in reality a dedicated radical extremist," declared its monthly magazine, First Monday, who would "unilaterally disarm . . . and open the White House to riotous street mobs."
A President Obama could no more magically transcend America's '60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of "family," on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. What Andrew Sullivan dismisses as "the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation" do not separate us from our "actual problems"; they define us, as much as the Great War defined France in the 1920s, '30s, '40s and beyond. Pretending otherwise simply isn't healthy. It's repression -- the kind of thing that shrinks say causes neurosis.
At least there's some comfort in knowing that our divisions aren't what they once were. Heck, in the 1860s, half the nation was devoted in body, mind and spirit to killing the other half; in the early 1930s, many sage observers presumed the nation to be poised on the verge of open, violent class warfare. We'll manage to muddle through again -- even burdened with mere flesh and blood human beings, not magical healing shamans, as our leaders.
The Boomers Had Their Day. Make Way for the Millennials.
By Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais
Sunday, February 3, 2008; B01
T he scene at American University last week was electric: thousands of young people filling an arena to hear venerable Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy endorse Barack Obama for president and praise the Illinois senator's ability to inspire and move a new generation of Americans.
It was the perfect setting for Obama, who has been focused on this new "millennial generation" from the start. Almost a year ago, in a speech to African American leaders in Selma, Ala., he underlined the differences between two different types of generations: the "Moses generation" that led the children of Israel out of slavery, and the "Joshua generation" that established the kingdom of Israel. The first was a generation of idealists and dreamers, the second a generation of doers and builders.
With that speech, in which he associated Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton with the former generation and claimed the mantle of the latter for himself, Obama fired the first shot in an election battle that's being fought along the dividing lines between these two generational archetypes.
American history suggests that about every 80 years, a civic (or Joshua) generation, emerges to make over the country after a period of upheaval caused by the fervor of an idealist (or Moses) generation. In 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and 1968, as members of new generations -- alternately idealist and civic -- began to vote in large numbers, the United States experienced major political shifts. This year, the civic-minded millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, are coming of age and promising to turn the political landscape, currently defined by idealist baby boomers such as Clinton and George W. Bush, upside down.
Reared by indulgent parents and driven by deeply held values as adults, members of idealist generations embroil the nation in heated debates on divisive social issues as they try to enact their own personal morality and causes through the political process. (Remember that boomer-era rallying cry, "The personal is political"?) In the idealist eras that began in 1828 and 1896, the nation divided between the forces of tradition and those advancing a more modern approach to morality. In 1828, Andrew Jackson's Democrats gave rural traditionalism a victory. In 1896, the tables were turned as Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of his day, guided Republican William McKinley to victory over William Jennings Bryan and his agricultural allies, on behalf of industrial-age companies and their urban workers.
By 1968, however, it was the Republicans' turn to take up the cause of traditional values -- and end an era of dominance by a Democratic Party that seemed increasingly unable to maintain "law and order." Richard Nixon's victory in 1968 began an era of seven Republican presidential victories and firmly established the GOP as a traditionalist, Southern-oriented party.
It may surprise some to see baby boomers, so often represented as a generation of peaceniks and civil rights activists, producing this Republican realignment. But boomers were -- and still are -- a highly divided generation that actually tilts a bit to the right. On the college campuses of the 1960s, there were twice as many members of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom as of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. It's no different 40 years later. A survey done last month by the media research company Frank N. Magid Associates found that twice as many boomers call themselves conservative as liberal. The only thing that unites this generation are its members' efforts to impose their diametrically opposed ideals, values and morality on everyone else through the political process.
Though each party has come out on top in one idealist era or another, the end result has been weaker government institutions and political deadlock. As politics becomes more polarized, voters sour on the two political parties. In the 1950s, most voters had favorable attitudes toward at least one and often both parties, but by the 1990s, most had negative impressions of both.
Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras. In the decades after the 1828 election, the country was pulled apart over slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War. After the 1896 campaign, the United States couldn't find a way to help blue-collar workers and farmers to share fully in the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took the Great Depression to usher in the sense of urgency that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, issues such as affordable health care or quality education or climate change are endlessly debated but never resolved by two sides unwilling to set aside their ideological agendas for the common good.
But now, with another civic generation emerging, the times, as boomer troubadour Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin'. Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues. Previous civic realignments occurred in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1932, when the GI generation put Roosevelt in office. It's no coincidence that these "civic" presidents, along with George Washington, top all lists of our greatest presidents. All three led the country in resolving great crises by inspiring and guiding new generations and revitalizing and expanding the federal government.
Today's millennials look a lot like the GI generation, born between 1901 and 1924, which FDR described as having "a rendezvous with destiny" -- a phrase Ted Kennedy echoed last week in his endorsement of Obama. In 1930, the GI generation was nearly twice as large as the two previous generations combined. Today's millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history -- twice as large as Generation X and numbering a million more than the baby boomers. Though nearly 90 percent of the GI generation was white, it was diverse for its time. Many members were immigrants or the children of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. About 40 percent of millennials are of African American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed backgrounds. Twenty percent have at least one immigrant parent.
Civic generations are committed to political involvement and believe in using and strengthening political and government institutions. In the 1930s, young members of the GI generation regularly voted in greater numbers than older generations. Similarly, millennials have led this year's surge in voter participation, especially in Democratic contests.
In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, turnout was up by more than 50 percent over 2000 among voters under 30, while among older voters it rose by only a bit more than 10 percent. According to one research firm that tracks millennials' civic engagement, voters 25 and under accounted for 18 percent of all Democratic voters in New Hampshire this year. In 2000, the same age group (which then consisted mostly of the disaffected Generation X) made up only 13 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote. In Iowa, according to CNN, the differences were even more dramatic: Twenty percent of Democratic caucus participants were young voters, four times the number in 2004. Similarly unprecedented levels of voter participation in this year's Democratic elections in Nevada, South Carolina and even Florida's "beauty contest" primary have been driven by the enthusiasm of millennial voters.
Millennials' political style is also similar to the GI generation's. They aren't confrontational or combative, the way boomers (whose generational mantra was "Don't trust anyone over 30") have been. Nor does the millennials' rhetoric reflect the cynicism and alienation of Generation X, whose philosophy is, "Life sucks, and then you die." Instead, their political style reflects their generation's constant interaction with hundreds, if not thousands, of "friends" on MySpace or Facebook, about any and all subjects, increasingly including politics. Since they started watching "Barney" as toddlers, the millennials have learned to be concerned for the welfare of everyone in the group and to try to find consensus, "win-win" solutions to any problem. The result is a collegial approach that attracts millennials to candidates who seek to unify the country and heal the nation's divisions.
Unlike the young baby boomers, millennials want to strengthen the political system, not tear it down. According to a study last year by the Pew Research Center, most millennials (64 percent) disagree that the federal government is wasteful and inefficient, while most older Americans (58 percent) think it is. A 2006 survey by Frank N. Magid Associates indicated that millennials are more likely than older generations to believe that politicians care what people think and are more concerned with the good of the country than of their political party.
It also showed that millennials, more than their elders, believe that U.S. political institutions will deal effectively with concerns the nation will face in the future.
Given the public's disapproval of both Congress and President Bush, we're going to need all the optimism and change we can generate to overcome those challenges. Luckily, the millennial generation, like its GI generation forebears, is arriving right on time to deliver just what America needs.
Sunday, February 3, 2008; B01
T he scene at American University last week was electric: thousands of young people filling an arena to hear venerable Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy endorse Barack Obama for president and praise the Illinois senator's ability to inspire and move a new generation of Americans.
It was the perfect setting for Obama, who has been focused on this new "millennial generation" from the start. Almost a year ago, in a speech to African American leaders in Selma, Ala., he underlined the differences between two different types of generations: the "Moses generation" that led the children of Israel out of slavery, and the "Joshua generation" that established the kingdom of Israel. The first was a generation of idealists and dreamers, the second a generation of doers and builders.
With that speech, in which he associated Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton with the former generation and claimed the mantle of the latter for himself, Obama fired the first shot in an election battle that's being fought along the dividing lines between these two generational archetypes.
American history suggests that about every 80 years, a civic (or Joshua) generation, emerges to make over the country after a period of upheaval caused by the fervor of an idealist (or Moses) generation. In 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and 1968, as members of new generations -- alternately idealist and civic -- began to vote in large numbers, the United States experienced major political shifts. This year, the civic-minded millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, are coming of age and promising to turn the political landscape, currently defined by idealist baby boomers such as Clinton and George W. Bush, upside down.
Reared by indulgent parents and driven by deeply held values as adults, members of idealist generations embroil the nation in heated debates on divisive social issues as they try to enact their own personal morality and causes through the political process. (Remember that boomer-era rallying cry, "The personal is political"?) In the idealist eras that began in 1828 and 1896, the nation divided between the forces of tradition and those advancing a more modern approach to morality. In 1828, Andrew Jackson's Democrats gave rural traditionalism a victory. In 1896, the tables were turned as Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of his day, guided Republican William McKinley to victory over William Jennings Bryan and his agricultural allies, on behalf of industrial-age companies and their urban workers.
By 1968, however, it was the Republicans' turn to take up the cause of traditional values -- and end an era of dominance by a Democratic Party that seemed increasingly unable to maintain "law and order." Richard Nixon's victory in 1968 began an era of seven Republican presidential victories and firmly established the GOP as a traditionalist, Southern-oriented party.
It may surprise some to see baby boomers, so often represented as a generation of peaceniks and civil rights activists, producing this Republican realignment. But boomers were -- and still are -- a highly divided generation that actually tilts a bit to the right. On the college campuses of the 1960s, there were twice as many members of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom as of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. It's no different 40 years later. A survey done last month by the media research company Frank N. Magid Associates found that twice as many boomers call themselves conservative as liberal. The only thing that unites this generation are its members' efforts to impose their diametrically opposed ideals, values and morality on everyone else through the political process.
Though each party has come out on top in one idealist era or another, the end result has been weaker government institutions and political deadlock. As politics becomes more polarized, voters sour on the two political parties. In the 1950s, most voters had favorable attitudes toward at least one and often both parties, but by the 1990s, most had negative impressions of both.
Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras. In the decades after the 1828 election, the country was pulled apart over slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War. After the 1896 campaign, the United States couldn't find a way to help blue-collar workers and farmers to share fully in the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took the Great Depression to usher in the sense of urgency that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, issues such as affordable health care or quality education or climate change are endlessly debated but never resolved by two sides unwilling to set aside their ideological agendas for the common good.
But now, with another civic generation emerging, the times, as boomer troubadour Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin'. Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues. Previous civic realignments occurred in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1932, when the GI generation put Roosevelt in office. It's no coincidence that these "civic" presidents, along with George Washington, top all lists of our greatest presidents. All three led the country in resolving great crises by inspiring and guiding new generations and revitalizing and expanding the federal government.
Today's millennials look a lot like the GI generation, born between 1901 and 1924, which FDR described as having "a rendezvous with destiny" -- a phrase Ted Kennedy echoed last week in his endorsement of Obama. In 1930, the GI generation was nearly twice as large as the two previous generations combined. Today's millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history -- twice as large as Generation X and numbering a million more than the baby boomers. Though nearly 90 percent of the GI generation was white, it was diverse for its time. Many members were immigrants or the children of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. About 40 percent of millennials are of African American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed backgrounds. Twenty percent have at least one immigrant parent.
Civic generations are committed to political involvement and believe in using and strengthening political and government institutions. In the 1930s, young members of the GI generation regularly voted in greater numbers than older generations. Similarly, millennials have led this year's surge in voter participation, especially in Democratic contests.
In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, turnout was up by more than 50 percent over 2000 among voters under 30, while among older voters it rose by only a bit more than 10 percent. According to one research firm that tracks millennials' civic engagement, voters 25 and under accounted for 18 percent of all Democratic voters in New Hampshire this year. In 2000, the same age group (which then consisted mostly of the disaffected Generation X) made up only 13 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote. In Iowa, according to CNN, the differences were even more dramatic: Twenty percent of Democratic caucus participants were young voters, four times the number in 2004. Similarly unprecedented levels of voter participation in this year's Democratic elections in Nevada, South Carolina and even Florida's "beauty contest" primary have been driven by the enthusiasm of millennial voters.
Millennials' political style is also similar to the GI generation's. They aren't confrontational or combative, the way boomers (whose generational mantra was "Don't trust anyone over 30") have been. Nor does the millennials' rhetoric reflect the cynicism and alienation of Generation X, whose philosophy is, "Life sucks, and then you die." Instead, their political style reflects their generation's constant interaction with hundreds, if not thousands, of "friends" on MySpace or Facebook, about any and all subjects, increasingly including politics. Since they started watching "Barney" as toddlers, the millennials have learned to be concerned for the welfare of everyone in the group and to try to find consensus, "win-win" solutions to any problem. The result is a collegial approach that attracts millennials to candidates who seek to unify the country and heal the nation's divisions.
Unlike the young baby boomers, millennials want to strengthen the political system, not tear it down. According to a study last year by the Pew Research Center, most millennials (64 percent) disagree that the federal government is wasteful and inefficient, while most older Americans (58 percent) think it is. A 2006 survey by Frank N. Magid Associates indicated that millennials are more likely than older generations to believe that politicians care what people think and are more concerned with the good of the country than of their political party.
It also showed that millennials, more than their elders, believe that U.S. political institutions will deal effectively with concerns the nation will face in the future.
Given the public's disapproval of both Congress and President Bush, we're going to need all the optimism and change we can generate to overcome those challenges. Luckily, the millennial generation, like its GI generation forebears, is arriving right on time to deliver just what America needs.
Play Money
They Work Hard, Then Party Hard. But They Don't Realize the Cost.
By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2008; F01
When Paxton Styles goes clubbing with friends, his drink of choice is Crown Royal whiskey. That, he says, is not good for his finances. In two weeks, he spent $680.43 on his social life. Much of that -- $296.16 -- went towards bar and nightclub tabs. Happy hours cost him $133. Dinners and late-night munching were another $94.92.
Styles can easily go out four or five times a week. He is 31, unmarried, and childless. He also lives in the 11th-most expensive urban area in the country, according to the Arlington-based Council for Community and Economic Research, which means that a good chunk of the $47,000 a year he earns as a meetings planner goes towards having fun.
"I spend too much money on the partying," he acknowledged after tallying his expenses.
It's a familiar refrain among young residents in the Washington region: In such a career-obsessed town, what's wrong with partying hard after working so hard? But financial planners say it's the main way young professionals in their 20s and 30s get into financial trouble in urban areas like Washington. Many have good incomes but not as good as they will be someday. Retirement seems far off, so they don't save enough. They put everything on credit or debit cards and don't keep track of their spending. All that makes it easy for them to give into the many temptations of a place like Washington and its affluent suburbs.
"We work so hard in building our careers," said Keva Sturdevant, a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch in the District. "The younger generation wants to see that immediate reward for their hard work, so they spend and hang out with friends and shop. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but there should be limits based on your particular financial situation."
How much you should spend on your social life depends on how much you make, how much debt you have and how high the fixed costs are that you have each month, financial advisers say. If you don't have many expenses, you can spend more on fun. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, it's the first thing you should cut out. It's that simple -- or not, said William Murray, a 31-year-old graphic designer who lives in the West End. "On any given night, someone's out," he said.
What are you to do if you're young, want to pay your bills on time and save for retirement but still have a social life?
The first thing is to keep track of how much your social life is costing you, advisers said. Save your receipts, and tally your expenses with an online program such as Quicken. Pay attention to your ATM receipts. Advisers said they have many clients who frequently take out cash and don't pay attention to what happens to it. "They don't know what they spend," said Rolf M. Winch, a financial planner with Lifetime Financial Partners in Rockville. "If you don't know, how do you get your arms around it if you're in financial trouble?"
Young people in the District are vulnerable to overspending on activities such as dinners, drinks and movies, advisers said.
For one thing, entertainment options have expanded with the region's economic revitalization over the past decade. For another, the District is a pricey town -- the sixth-most expensive U.S. city for dining out, according to Zagat's customer-ranked 2008 restaurant guide. The average cost of a meal for one person in the District is $34.69, above the national average of $33.42, according to Zagat. One adult ticket for a Friday night movie at AMC Loews Georgetown 14 is $10.50. An orchestra seat for a Saturday night play at the Studio Theatre in Logan Circle is $53. A glass of Pouilly-Fuisse at Ozio Restaurant and Lounge in Dupont Circle is $12.
D.C. is also a town where networking is part necessity, part hobby. It's a town of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants, a town of power lunches, happy hours and party-hopping. There are people who make tons of money and people who make so-so money, and you don't want to be shut out of the social scene even if your salary is not up to par.
"It's a town where people want to fit in, so I think sometimes people will spend in order to fit in, and that might mean dining out a little too much or buying clothes that are a little too expensive," said Kim Reed, a financial planner with Garrett Planning Network in Chevy Chase. "It's a very prestigious town. . . . If you live here, you kind of get sucked into that."
At the request of The Washington Post, four Washington area residents in their 20s or 30s agreed to keep a spending tally over two to four weeks in October and November.
"What surprised me was how much I spend on food I don't eat," said Styles, who kept tabs on his spending for two weeks. Late-night eats alone cost $49.08.
Alcohol was his other big expense. Styles is 6 feet 4 and weighs 250 pounds, so by his own admission, it takes a lot for him to feel the effects of drinking. Even trips to the liquor store to stock up for a night of watching football at a friend's house set him back $71.06.
Murray was surprised by how much he spends on friends. It's the price he is willing to pay for being a self-proclaimed "cruise director."
"I float freely between social circles, and that definitely adds to my social costs," he said while sipping beer at an Arlington bar during a Festivus celebration in December.
Murray makes about $90,000 a year, puts the maximum he can in his 401(k) and has about $20,000 in savings. He has a $400 car payment and pays about $1,000 in rent.
During his first week tracking expenses, he spent $201.30 on dinners and drinks with friends. There was the $14 pitcher of beer for friends at a bar on U Street NW, $29.56 on a birthday dinner and $16.14 for snacks to watch a football game at a friend's house. He spent quite a bit on himself, too, buying a $659.34 Xbox 360 Elite bundle with Guitar Hero II and Halo 3. He spent $154.38 on fun during the second week.
He also travels frequently. He recently paid about $4,600 for a cruise on the Queen Victoria for himself and his brother. Yes, he acknowledged, if he cut back on trips he would probably own a house by now. But he'd rather see the world than own a home.
Craig Smith, 23, also considers himself a social butterfly.
From Oct. 26 to Nov. 26, he spent $144 on alcohol and $20 on cover charges. Another $100 went toward Saturday night dinners with friends, $40 at the shopping mall food court and $60 on lunches after basketball games with his buddies. Another $325 paid for dates with his girlfriend.
His most shocking discovery? "Why in the world did I spend $112 on Baskin-Robbins?" he asked while sipping bottled water at Caribou Coffee. "On sundaes?"
Smith is a legal analyst making $36,000 a year. He has about $2,000 in credit card debt and $7,000 in student loan debt. He has no car payment and lives rent-free with his mother in Springfield. He has been able to tuck away $13,000, which means he doesn't feel so bad about going out five or six nights a week.
But he has found a hidden cost to socializing: gasoline. Because he lives in Springfield, he has to drive to meet friends. He sees people in Tenleytown, Bowie and Alexandria. They play basketball in Georgetown and Tysons Corner. The monthly tally: $280.
"Living at home gives me a lot of financial freedom," he said, "but there are trade-offs."
Trade-offs -- a word many people don't like to hear, especially Linda Dickerhoof, 31. That's what her life has been about since she decided to buy a two-bedroom duplex in South Arlington in November.
She makes about $70,000 a year as a public relations director for a company in Alexandria. Her monthly mortgage payment is $1,600. She has about $10,000 in credit card debt and pays $300 in student loans, $400 for her car and $150 for insurance.
"It's very easy for me to get $100 out of the ATM machine. The next thing you know, I'm buying a coffee, I'm buying this and that, and it's gone."
Buying a home and a late fall cold kept her from spending lavishly from Oct. 26 to Nov. 17, when she kept her tally. But she splurged some nights.
There was the $89.04 Halloween costume. She was a vampire. The cover charge for the party she went to at RFD in downtown D.C. was $10. Beer cost her $20. When she ran out of cash, she put $11 on her credit card.
One Friday night, she went to a hockey game at the Verizon Center. The ticket was $35. She arrived at the game with $60 in cash. After paying for parking for her designated driver, having pre-game beers, beers at the Verizon Center, then post-game beers, "I went home empty-walleted," she said.
Lesson learned: "I own a house now. I have a dog who requires dog food and stuff. . . . I have so many different responsibilities, and I can't go out and spend a couple of hundred dollars on a lunch tab."
Financial advisers said these four people are not necessarily being financially irresponsible. But they said that too often, young people ignore the most important rule: "The key is to fund all the obligations and the goals first and then spend the rest, but oftentimes people do the reverse," Reed said. "They have fun, they go shopping and whatever is left, they use that to pay bills and save."
Don't shun fun, but scale back, the advisers said.
At happy hour, buy two drinks instead of four. Go to a matinee instead of an evening showing of a movie, or wait for it to come out on DVD. Don't go to expensive concerts. Watch them on DVD.
Eat at expensive restaurants only on special occasions, not on nights you simply don't feel like cooking. Entertain at home, and ask your friends to bring dishes or drinks. If you're having dinner with a friend at a restaurant, try sharing two appetizers and an entree instead of ordering separate appetizers and entrees.
"You've got to pick your spots as far as the social life goes," said Frank Boucher, a financial planner in Reston with the Garrett Planning Network. "No one can live like a monk, and you shouldn't, but if you're spending $100 a week on drinks and going out with your friends, you can knock that down to $50 and have your friends over your house for a potluck."
And whatever you do, don't use credit to have fun. "You never use credit for things that are going to lose value," said Paul Richard, executive director of the Institute of Consumer Financial Education in San Diego.
After realizing how much his social life is affecting his finances, Styles has decided to make some changes. Although he has no car payment, student loans or credit card debt, he does worry about his future financial stability. Now is the time to do something about it, he said.
"I've decided for the month of February, I'm going to not drink to see how much I save and how much weight I lose," Styles said.
By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2008; F01
When Paxton Styles goes clubbing with friends, his drink of choice is Crown Royal whiskey. That, he says, is not good for his finances. In two weeks, he spent $680.43 on his social life. Much of that -- $296.16 -- went towards bar and nightclub tabs. Happy hours cost him $133. Dinners and late-night munching were another $94.92.
Styles can easily go out four or five times a week. He is 31, unmarried, and childless. He also lives in the 11th-most expensive urban area in the country, according to the Arlington-based Council for Community and Economic Research, which means that a good chunk of the $47,000 a year he earns as a meetings planner goes towards having fun.
"I spend too much money on the partying," he acknowledged after tallying his expenses.
It's a familiar refrain among young residents in the Washington region: In such a career-obsessed town, what's wrong with partying hard after working so hard? But financial planners say it's the main way young professionals in their 20s and 30s get into financial trouble in urban areas like Washington. Many have good incomes but not as good as they will be someday. Retirement seems far off, so they don't save enough. They put everything on credit or debit cards and don't keep track of their spending. All that makes it easy for them to give into the many temptations of a place like Washington and its affluent suburbs.
"We work so hard in building our careers," said Keva Sturdevant, a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch in the District. "The younger generation wants to see that immediate reward for their hard work, so they spend and hang out with friends and shop. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but there should be limits based on your particular financial situation."
How much you should spend on your social life depends on how much you make, how much debt you have and how high the fixed costs are that you have each month, financial advisers say. If you don't have many expenses, you can spend more on fun. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, it's the first thing you should cut out. It's that simple -- or not, said William Murray, a 31-year-old graphic designer who lives in the West End. "On any given night, someone's out," he said.
What are you to do if you're young, want to pay your bills on time and save for retirement but still have a social life?
The first thing is to keep track of how much your social life is costing you, advisers said. Save your receipts, and tally your expenses with an online program such as Quicken. Pay attention to your ATM receipts. Advisers said they have many clients who frequently take out cash and don't pay attention to what happens to it. "They don't know what they spend," said Rolf M. Winch, a financial planner with Lifetime Financial Partners in Rockville. "If you don't know, how do you get your arms around it if you're in financial trouble?"
Young people in the District are vulnerable to overspending on activities such as dinners, drinks and movies, advisers said.
For one thing, entertainment options have expanded with the region's economic revitalization over the past decade. For another, the District is a pricey town -- the sixth-most expensive U.S. city for dining out, according to Zagat's customer-ranked 2008 restaurant guide. The average cost of a meal for one person in the District is $34.69, above the national average of $33.42, according to Zagat. One adult ticket for a Friday night movie at AMC Loews Georgetown 14 is $10.50. An orchestra seat for a Saturday night play at the Studio Theatre in Logan Circle is $53. A glass of Pouilly-Fuisse at Ozio Restaurant and Lounge in Dupont Circle is $12.
D.C. is also a town where networking is part necessity, part hobby. It's a town of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants, a town of power lunches, happy hours and party-hopping. There are people who make tons of money and people who make so-so money, and you don't want to be shut out of the social scene even if your salary is not up to par.
"It's a town where people want to fit in, so I think sometimes people will spend in order to fit in, and that might mean dining out a little too much or buying clothes that are a little too expensive," said Kim Reed, a financial planner with Garrett Planning Network in Chevy Chase. "It's a very prestigious town. . . . If you live here, you kind of get sucked into that."
At the request of The Washington Post, four Washington area residents in their 20s or 30s agreed to keep a spending tally over two to four weeks in October and November.
"What surprised me was how much I spend on food I don't eat," said Styles, who kept tabs on his spending for two weeks. Late-night eats alone cost $49.08.
Alcohol was his other big expense. Styles is 6 feet 4 and weighs 250 pounds, so by his own admission, it takes a lot for him to feel the effects of drinking. Even trips to the liquor store to stock up for a night of watching football at a friend's house set him back $71.06.
Murray was surprised by how much he spends on friends. It's the price he is willing to pay for being a self-proclaimed "cruise director."
"I float freely between social circles, and that definitely adds to my social costs," he said while sipping beer at an Arlington bar during a Festivus celebration in December.
Murray makes about $90,000 a year, puts the maximum he can in his 401(k) and has about $20,000 in savings. He has a $400 car payment and pays about $1,000 in rent.
During his first week tracking expenses, he spent $201.30 on dinners and drinks with friends. There was the $14 pitcher of beer for friends at a bar on U Street NW, $29.56 on a birthday dinner and $16.14 for snacks to watch a football game at a friend's house. He spent quite a bit on himself, too, buying a $659.34 Xbox 360 Elite bundle with Guitar Hero II and Halo 3. He spent $154.38 on fun during the second week.
He also travels frequently. He recently paid about $4,600 for a cruise on the Queen Victoria for himself and his brother. Yes, he acknowledged, if he cut back on trips he would probably own a house by now. But he'd rather see the world than own a home.
Craig Smith, 23, also considers himself a social butterfly.
From Oct. 26 to Nov. 26, he spent $144 on alcohol and $20 on cover charges. Another $100 went toward Saturday night dinners with friends, $40 at the shopping mall food court and $60 on lunches after basketball games with his buddies. Another $325 paid for dates with his girlfriend.
His most shocking discovery? "Why in the world did I spend $112 on Baskin-Robbins?" he asked while sipping bottled water at Caribou Coffee. "On sundaes?"
Smith is a legal analyst making $36,000 a year. He has about $2,000 in credit card debt and $7,000 in student loan debt. He has no car payment and lives rent-free with his mother in Springfield. He has been able to tuck away $13,000, which means he doesn't feel so bad about going out five or six nights a week.
But he has found a hidden cost to socializing: gasoline. Because he lives in Springfield, he has to drive to meet friends. He sees people in Tenleytown, Bowie and Alexandria. They play basketball in Georgetown and Tysons Corner. The monthly tally: $280.
"Living at home gives me a lot of financial freedom," he said, "but there are trade-offs."
Trade-offs -- a word many people don't like to hear, especially Linda Dickerhoof, 31. That's what her life has been about since she decided to buy a two-bedroom duplex in South Arlington in November.
She makes about $70,000 a year as a public relations director for a company in Alexandria. Her monthly mortgage payment is $1,600. She has about $10,000 in credit card debt and pays $300 in student loans, $400 for her car and $150 for insurance.
"It's very easy for me to get $100 out of the ATM machine. The next thing you know, I'm buying a coffee, I'm buying this and that, and it's gone."
Buying a home and a late fall cold kept her from spending lavishly from Oct. 26 to Nov. 17, when she kept her tally. But she splurged some nights.
There was the $89.04 Halloween costume. She was a vampire. The cover charge for the party she went to at RFD in downtown D.C. was $10. Beer cost her $20. When she ran out of cash, she put $11 on her credit card.
One Friday night, she went to a hockey game at the Verizon Center. The ticket was $35. She arrived at the game with $60 in cash. After paying for parking for her designated driver, having pre-game beers, beers at the Verizon Center, then post-game beers, "I went home empty-walleted," she said.
Lesson learned: "I own a house now. I have a dog who requires dog food and stuff. . . . I have so many different responsibilities, and I can't go out and spend a couple of hundred dollars on a lunch tab."
Financial advisers said these four people are not necessarily being financially irresponsible. But they said that too often, young people ignore the most important rule: "The key is to fund all the obligations and the goals first and then spend the rest, but oftentimes people do the reverse," Reed said. "They have fun, they go shopping and whatever is left, they use that to pay bills and save."
Don't shun fun, but scale back, the advisers said.
At happy hour, buy two drinks instead of four. Go to a matinee instead of an evening showing of a movie, or wait for it to come out on DVD. Don't go to expensive concerts. Watch them on DVD.
Eat at expensive restaurants only on special occasions, not on nights you simply don't feel like cooking. Entertain at home, and ask your friends to bring dishes or drinks. If you're having dinner with a friend at a restaurant, try sharing two appetizers and an entree instead of ordering separate appetizers and entrees.
"You've got to pick your spots as far as the social life goes," said Frank Boucher, a financial planner in Reston with the Garrett Planning Network. "No one can live like a monk, and you shouldn't, but if you're spending $100 a week on drinks and going out with your friends, you can knock that down to $50 and have your friends over your house for a potluck."
And whatever you do, don't use credit to have fun. "You never use credit for things that are going to lose value," said Paul Richard, executive director of the Institute of Consumer Financial Education in San Diego.
After realizing how much his social life is affecting his finances, Styles has decided to make some changes. Although he has no car payment, student loans or credit card debt, he does worry about his future financial stability. Now is the time to do something about it, he said.
"I've decided for the month of February, I'm going to not drink to see how much I save and how much weight I lose," Styles said.
Healing a Troubled Mind Takes More Than a Pill
By Charles Barber
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B01
Feeling depressed? No problem, pop a pill.
That's what more and more Americans are doing these days to quell what ails their troubled souls. The use of antidepressants in the United States has exploded in the past couple of decades, and drugs such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, which didn't even exist 20 years ago, are household names, almost household staples.
And why not? The television ads make it seem so easy: An agonized man or woman stares listlessly into space or slumps on a bed or couch, holding their head in their hands. Then they take a pill and suddenly morph into a happily engaged and joyous being, back on the job or walking in a park, awash in sunshine, surrounded by grandchildren, a golden retriever nipping at their heels, while lush music plays in the background.
But recovering from mental illness is rarely that simple. I know.
As an optimistic 18-year-old freshman at Harvard in the 1980s, I found myself afflicted by indescribably disturbing and intrusive thoughts that involved repetitious words and irrational fears that I had harmed others. This assault on my mind -- diagnosed a few years later as obsessive-compulsive disorder -- led me to drop out of two colleges in as many years and made it difficult to hold down a job as a busboy.
That was the low point. After that, I began the long, arduous and at times confused process of emotional recovery. Medication was helpful -- as was cognitive behavioral therapy, particularly early on -- but what ultimately made the difference, what really made me want to get well, was finding a sense of purpose in my new life, a life that had been reconfigured by illness.
The critical moment in my own recovery was my decision -- very unpopular at the time -- to work full-time in a group home for people with severe developmental disabilities, young men my age who could not talk. Having been given all the choices, I gravitated toward a place where there were few options. But I intuitively sensed that I would find a new path there. Indeed, I found I was good at the work, and it was therapeutic for me to "get out of my own head" and serve others.
Ultimately I returned to college, went to graduate school and have spent my career writing about and working with people with serious mental illness in shelters, prisons and halfway houses. Both my work with my clients and my own prolonged and difficult yet ultimately rewarding journey have taught me lessons about what's involved in overcoming true psychological distress -- and what isn't.
In 2006, an astonishing 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants were dispensed in the United States -- up 30 million from 2002. Altogether the United States accounts for about two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants. Other proven and practical approaches to managing milder forms of depression, such as diet changes, exercise or cognitive behavioral therapy, haven't gotten the attention they deserve in our high-tech zeal for the drugs.
Antidepressants can be highly effective, particularly for the more severe forms of depression. But when you speak to people with severe mental illness who have gotten better, you learn about the reality of the recovery process, which is rarely about a pill -- even if that pill is effective. When you interview patients about how they got better, they hardly ever cite Prozac or Zyprexa or lithium. For that matter, they rarely cite a particular doctor or therapist or treatment program. Rather, they talk about a person who was kind to them when they were really down; they talk about the child they wanted to be a good parent to; they talk about God and spirituality; they talk about something that brought them pleasure even when they were cloaked in pain. Many of these reasons to live -- the reasons to seek treatment in the first place -- are highly personal and idiosyncratic, as was mine.
As I've learned, both professionally and personally, social context is critical to recovery. In other words, there's invariably a social reason to get better. This is what has been largely overlooked by the "medical model" of treatment, which proposes that you must stabilize a person with treatment (typically drugs) before they can be put back in their social roles or environment.
Larry Davidson, a Yale researcher on recovery from severe mental illness, has examined the data and found that this model is flawed, at least in the field of mental health. "In the medical model, you take a person with a mental illness, you provide treatment in the hopes of reducing symptoms, and then they're supposed to approximate some notion of normality," he told me. "Our research shows the opposite. You take a person with a mental illness, you then reduce the discrimination and stigma against them, increase their social roles and participation, which provides them a reason to get better in the first place, and then you provide treatment and support. The issue is not so much making them normal but helping them get their lives back."
Davidson's contention is supported by the provocative finding by a number of researchers that schizophrenia outcomes are better in developing countries, where, generally speaking, patients get more support from family and society, and where ill people are less likely to be excised from their natural communities.
Another thing patients will tell you is that recovery exists, or can exist, within the context of illness. In other words, recovery doesn't mean cure. It means living with the illness, managing it and getting better within certain limitations. "I define recovery as the development of new meaning and purpose as one grows beyond the catastrophe of mental illness," says William Anthony, director of Boston University's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. "My feeling is you can have episodic symptoms and still believe and feel you're recovering. It is a matter of moving beyond the debilitating phases of the illness."
The idea that recovery doesn't usually mean the removal of all symptoms is a novel and distinctly un-American way of looking at psychiatric illness, and illness in general. The fact remains, however, that most major psychiatric illnesses are episodic but chronic. Recovery involves both coming to terms with symptoms -- one hopes in the context of their gradual moderation, but that's not always the case -- and finding a meaningful life in their midst.
For many patients, this is a decades-long process of acceptance and resolve. At the end, some patients can actually say they're glad -- within reason -- that they've experienced an illness, because it has greatly enriched their lives and their appreciation of things. We do have to be careful not to romanticize suffering, but this is nonetheless something you commonly hear from those who have found the elusive meaning in the presence of sickness.
This leads us to the final lesson I've learned: Treatment is most effective when the patient is in charge and the ultimate expert in his or her own recovery. There is evidence that when patients feel in control, the results of treatment are better. Treatment works best when the doctor or therapist acts as a kind of expert consultant. As Home Depot puts it: "You can do it, we can help."
That's what I found in my own process. That my journey was a self-directed path, one in which I saw myself as the author of my recovery rather than as a passive recipient of a pill, made all the difference. Ultimately I no longer saw myself as a patient but as a writer, father and husband. Ultimately I found ways to use my obsessive ways adaptively. A little like Monk, the television detective who uses his OCD to solve crimes, I repurposed or redefined my illness to write and research with extra drive.
But these complex lessons about the arduous realities of attaining emotional health, as told not by doctors or companies but by patients, have received little traction in mainstream health care and the mainstream media. The negative reception isn't surprising. Listening to patients cuts against the establishment grain. We live in an age of experts, in which we like to cede control of our bodies and our being to others. Different parts of our bodies go to different experts. The ultimate expert, perhaps, is the pill. Our fervent and simple-minded belief is that the experts, and the pills, will take care of things for us.
The simultaneously inspiring and terrifying reality is that getting better -- the winding, agonizing road to stability -- is a little messier (and a lot more interesting) than we would like it to be.
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B01
Feeling depressed? No problem, pop a pill.
That's what more and more Americans are doing these days to quell what ails their troubled souls. The use of antidepressants in the United States has exploded in the past couple of decades, and drugs such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, which didn't even exist 20 years ago, are household names, almost household staples.
And why not? The television ads make it seem so easy: An agonized man or woman stares listlessly into space or slumps on a bed or couch, holding their head in their hands. Then they take a pill and suddenly morph into a happily engaged and joyous being, back on the job or walking in a park, awash in sunshine, surrounded by grandchildren, a golden retriever nipping at their heels, while lush music plays in the background.
But recovering from mental illness is rarely that simple. I know.
As an optimistic 18-year-old freshman at Harvard in the 1980s, I found myself afflicted by indescribably disturbing and intrusive thoughts that involved repetitious words and irrational fears that I had harmed others. This assault on my mind -- diagnosed a few years later as obsessive-compulsive disorder -- led me to drop out of two colleges in as many years and made it difficult to hold down a job as a busboy.
That was the low point. After that, I began the long, arduous and at times confused process of emotional recovery. Medication was helpful -- as was cognitive behavioral therapy, particularly early on -- but what ultimately made the difference, what really made me want to get well, was finding a sense of purpose in my new life, a life that had been reconfigured by illness.
The critical moment in my own recovery was my decision -- very unpopular at the time -- to work full-time in a group home for people with severe developmental disabilities, young men my age who could not talk. Having been given all the choices, I gravitated toward a place where there were few options. But I intuitively sensed that I would find a new path there. Indeed, I found I was good at the work, and it was therapeutic for me to "get out of my own head" and serve others.
Ultimately I returned to college, went to graduate school and have spent my career writing about and working with people with serious mental illness in shelters, prisons and halfway houses. Both my work with my clients and my own prolonged and difficult yet ultimately rewarding journey have taught me lessons about what's involved in overcoming true psychological distress -- and what isn't.
In 2006, an astonishing 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants were dispensed in the United States -- up 30 million from 2002. Altogether the United States accounts for about two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants. Other proven and practical approaches to managing milder forms of depression, such as diet changes, exercise or cognitive behavioral therapy, haven't gotten the attention they deserve in our high-tech zeal for the drugs.
Antidepressants can be highly effective, particularly for the more severe forms of depression. But when you speak to people with severe mental illness who have gotten better, you learn about the reality of the recovery process, which is rarely about a pill -- even if that pill is effective. When you interview patients about how they got better, they hardly ever cite Prozac or Zyprexa or lithium. For that matter, they rarely cite a particular doctor or therapist or treatment program. Rather, they talk about a person who was kind to them when they were really down; they talk about the child they wanted to be a good parent to; they talk about God and spirituality; they talk about something that brought them pleasure even when they were cloaked in pain. Many of these reasons to live -- the reasons to seek treatment in the first place -- are highly personal and idiosyncratic, as was mine.
As I've learned, both professionally and personally, social context is critical to recovery. In other words, there's invariably a social reason to get better. This is what has been largely overlooked by the "medical model" of treatment, which proposes that you must stabilize a person with treatment (typically drugs) before they can be put back in their social roles or environment.
Larry Davidson, a Yale researcher on recovery from severe mental illness, has examined the data and found that this model is flawed, at least in the field of mental health. "In the medical model, you take a person with a mental illness, you provide treatment in the hopes of reducing symptoms, and then they're supposed to approximate some notion of normality," he told me. "Our research shows the opposite. You take a person with a mental illness, you then reduce the discrimination and stigma against them, increase their social roles and participation, which provides them a reason to get better in the first place, and then you provide treatment and support. The issue is not so much making them normal but helping them get their lives back."
Davidson's contention is supported by the provocative finding by a number of researchers that schizophrenia outcomes are better in developing countries, where, generally speaking, patients get more support from family and society, and where ill people are less likely to be excised from their natural communities.
Another thing patients will tell you is that recovery exists, or can exist, within the context of illness. In other words, recovery doesn't mean cure. It means living with the illness, managing it and getting better within certain limitations. "I define recovery as the development of new meaning and purpose as one grows beyond the catastrophe of mental illness," says William Anthony, director of Boston University's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. "My feeling is you can have episodic symptoms and still believe and feel you're recovering. It is a matter of moving beyond the debilitating phases of the illness."
The idea that recovery doesn't usually mean the removal of all symptoms is a novel and distinctly un-American way of looking at psychiatric illness, and illness in general. The fact remains, however, that most major psychiatric illnesses are episodic but chronic. Recovery involves both coming to terms with symptoms -- one hopes in the context of their gradual moderation, but that's not always the case -- and finding a meaningful life in their midst.
For many patients, this is a decades-long process of acceptance and resolve. At the end, some patients can actually say they're glad -- within reason -- that they've experienced an illness, because it has greatly enriched their lives and their appreciation of things. We do have to be careful not to romanticize suffering, but this is nonetheless something you commonly hear from those who have found the elusive meaning in the presence of sickness.
This leads us to the final lesson I've learned: Treatment is most effective when the patient is in charge and the ultimate expert in his or her own recovery. There is evidence that when patients feel in control, the results of treatment are better. Treatment works best when the doctor or therapist acts as a kind of expert consultant. As Home Depot puts it: "You can do it, we can help."
That's what I found in my own process. That my journey was a self-directed path, one in which I saw myself as the author of my recovery rather than as a passive recipient of a pill, made all the difference. Ultimately I no longer saw myself as a patient but as a writer, father and husband. Ultimately I found ways to use my obsessive ways adaptively. A little like Monk, the television detective who uses his OCD to solve crimes, I repurposed or redefined my illness to write and research with extra drive.
But these complex lessons about the arduous realities of attaining emotional health, as told not by doctors or companies but by patients, have received little traction in mainstream health care and the mainstream media. The negative reception isn't surprising. Listening to patients cuts against the establishment grain. We live in an age of experts, in which we like to cede control of our bodies and our being to others. Different parts of our bodies go to different experts. The ultimate expert, perhaps, is the pill. Our fervent and simple-minded belief is that the experts, and the pills, will take care of things for us.
The simultaneously inspiring and terrifying reality is that getting better -- the winding, agonizing road to stability -- is a little messier (and a lot more interesting) than we would like it to be.
French Women Don't Get Fat and Do Get Lucky
By Pamela Druckerman
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B02
If I have to get old, I want to do it in Paris.
It's not because of the dank weather, the constant personal snubs or a fetish for unpasteurized cheese. It's because, quite frankly, I'd like to keep having sex.
In the United States, my odds would be grim. Through our 40s, we American women manage to arrange romps on a fairly regular basis. But the latest national statistics show that by our 50s, a third of us haven't had sex in the last year. By our 60s, nearly half have gone sexless in the previous year. Once we hit our 70s, most of us might as well hang up an "out of business" sign. (Needless to say, men fare much better.)
So much for the gym-bodied baby boomers who promised to make 60 the new 40, using Botox as an aphrodisiac. Among today's 50-plus women, the problem of sexlessness is as bad or worse than it was for older women two decades ago.
But not in France. Frenchwomen simply don't suffer from the same dramatic, post-40s slide into sexual obsolescence. Just 15 percent of Frenchwomen in their 50s and 27 percent in their 60s haven't had any sex in the past year, according to a 2004 national survey by France's Regional Health Observatory. Another national survey being released next month will report that cohabiting Frenchwomen over 50 are having more sex now than they did in the early 1990s.
Try not to hate them: Frenchwomen don't get fat, and they do get lucky.
The idea that older women are desirable goes right to the top. Before Nicolas Sarkozy hooked up with his new bride, 40-year-old Carla Bruni, a French magazine suggested some matches for the newly divorced president, including 50-ish TV presenters, writers and an extremely buff sailing champion. After all, Sarkozy, 53, had just been dumped by his then 49-year-old wife Cecilia, who had famously obsessed him and who had had no trouble finding other suitors.
This post-menopausal sexiness is palpable here. In the lingerie section of an upscale department store, I recently watched a gray-haired man earnestly inspecting the black lace bra and panties that his similarly aged companion had just picked out. "That's just what's needed," he clucked, handing his credit card to the clerk.
So why are older American women sitting around feeling bad about their necks, while their sisters across the ocean -- craggy necks or not -- are off being seduced?
For starters, Frenchwomen d'un certain âge have much better role models. Sure, Hollywood still employs a handful of preternaturally preserved actresses in their 50s and above. But even these women, such as Susan Sarandon, tend to be famous precisely because they've defied the laws of aging. And they're mostly denied unfiltered close-ups and romantic leads.
French cinema, however, is in the throes of a revival for 50-ish actresses, many of whom got their starts as fresh-faced teenagers in the early 1970s. These women aren't all airbrushed versions of their former selves, nor does the interest in them seem to be mostly nostalgic. "They have roles not as old women but as women. Which means they're still considered to be desirable," says Danièle Laufer, author of the book "50 Ans? Vous Ne Les Faites Pas" ("50 Years Old? You Don't Look It"). "Fifteen or 20 years ago, you wouldn't have seen this. I think they refuse to give up power."
The actress Nathalie Baye, who's 59 and looks it, has made some 20 films in the past decade, including romantic roles. She told an interviewer that at the 2003 César awards (France's version of the Oscars), Meryl Streep asked her whether "things were as difficult in France as in the U.S. for actresses of a certain age. I told her that thankfully, French cinema is very faithful to its women."
These French actresses are products of the generation of '68, France's sexual and social revolution. But in the French version, women weren't expected to forgo high heels and chivalry in exchange for equality. So it's not surprising here when successful women retain their charms. In the United States, the two can seem mutually exclusive. The right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh felt free to question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy in December by sneering, "Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?"
Of course, things aren't all rosy in French bedrooms. France has its share of lonely widows and divorcees. All the Frenchwomen I spoke to also stressed that older women must keep up their looks to stay appealing. Liftees are becoming a more frequent sight.
In the United States, men tend to treat older women who've done age-erasing work with either horrific awe or chaste respect. France is more sanguine. Last year, Paris Match magazine put a photo on its cover of a topless 50-something Arielle Dombasle -- looking like a reengineered 16- year-old -- to celebrate her new cabaret act.
American women seem to have internalized the message that wrinkles aren't sexy. A 2006 study called "Sex After 40?" led by Laura Carpenter at Vanderbilt University concludes that middle-aged women who live alone have trouble seeing themselves -- and others -- as potential sex partners. And then there's the famous demographic bottleneck: Men die sooner, and many of the ones left standing prefer younger women. Impotence can leave even married couples sexless.
All that happens in France, too, of course. But when the French writer Elisabeth Weissman interviewed dozens of older Frenchmen for the book "Un Âge Nommé Désir" ("An Age Named Desire"), she found that "they see in maturity a form of eroticism." French Playboy's photo spread on the 43-year-old Juliette Binoche in November carried text that gushed, "The more time passes, the more her inner beauty glows." Wisdom -- combined with regular exfoliation -- is sexy here.
Another reason older Frenchwomen have an easier time is that they're apparently less choosy about their bedmates. A study of older Americans published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 88 percent of sexually inactive women ages 57 to 64 had actually met a willing partner. But about half the women said that they hadn't met the right person.
This isn't just a matter of taste. The Vanderbilt study also found that middle-aged, unmarried men and women in the United States suffer from "sexual conservatism," even if they've been married before. For many women, the study notes, "disapproval of sex before marriage applies to every marriage."
Older Frenchwomen seem open not just to non-marital sex but also to the extramarital variety. Overall self-reported levels of infidelity are practically identical in France and the United States. But because the taboo on cheating is weaker in France, what would be guilty flings in the United States can blossom into long love affairs over here. "When [French] people have multiple partners, they have stable partners, and not one-night stands. This is not the case in the U.S.," says the French researcher Alain Giami, who co-authored a paper on French and American sexual habits.
None of the Frenchwomen I spoke to thought that married men made ideal companions. But all of them said that they could be a reasonable compromise until the "right" fellow comes along. "It saves your life, you live like a woman," says Nathalie Samson, 50, who dated a married man for six years until she met her current boyfriend. (He was single.)
Samson, who co-owns a boutique in Paris, isn't the lithe Frenchwoman of the American imagination. But she's wearing a stretchy black dress with a plunging neckline and flipping through pictures from her recent birthday party, in which her 52-year-old boyfriend gazes at her with obvious rapture. She describes this period of her life -- post-divorce, her three kids out of the house -- as her most uncomplicatedly sexy one. "Now there's just the seduction between a man and a woman," she says.
Older women in Paris don't actually look any better than the ones in New York. The difference is that the French typically don't see sex as a privilege for the young and beautiful. They see it as one of life's most basic pleasures -- something women or men would not give up without a fight . . . or in my case, perhaps a second passport.
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B02
If I have to get old, I want to do it in Paris.
It's not because of the dank weather, the constant personal snubs or a fetish for unpasteurized cheese. It's because, quite frankly, I'd like to keep having sex.
In the United States, my odds would be grim. Through our 40s, we American women manage to arrange romps on a fairly regular basis. But the latest national statistics show that by our 50s, a third of us haven't had sex in the last year. By our 60s, nearly half have gone sexless in the previous year. Once we hit our 70s, most of us might as well hang up an "out of business" sign. (Needless to say, men fare much better.)
So much for the gym-bodied baby boomers who promised to make 60 the new 40, using Botox as an aphrodisiac. Among today's 50-plus women, the problem of sexlessness is as bad or worse than it was for older women two decades ago.
But not in France. Frenchwomen simply don't suffer from the same dramatic, post-40s slide into sexual obsolescence. Just 15 percent of Frenchwomen in their 50s and 27 percent in their 60s haven't had any sex in the past year, according to a 2004 national survey by France's Regional Health Observatory. Another national survey being released next month will report that cohabiting Frenchwomen over 50 are having more sex now than they did in the early 1990s.
Try not to hate them: Frenchwomen don't get fat, and they do get lucky.
The idea that older women are desirable goes right to the top. Before Nicolas Sarkozy hooked up with his new bride, 40-year-old Carla Bruni, a French magazine suggested some matches for the newly divorced president, including 50-ish TV presenters, writers and an extremely buff sailing champion. After all, Sarkozy, 53, had just been dumped by his then 49-year-old wife Cecilia, who had famously obsessed him and who had had no trouble finding other suitors.
This post-menopausal sexiness is palpable here. In the lingerie section of an upscale department store, I recently watched a gray-haired man earnestly inspecting the black lace bra and panties that his similarly aged companion had just picked out. "That's just what's needed," he clucked, handing his credit card to the clerk.
So why are older American women sitting around feeling bad about their necks, while their sisters across the ocean -- craggy necks or not -- are off being seduced?
For starters, Frenchwomen d'un certain âge have much better role models. Sure, Hollywood still employs a handful of preternaturally preserved actresses in their 50s and above. But even these women, such as Susan Sarandon, tend to be famous precisely because they've defied the laws of aging. And they're mostly denied unfiltered close-ups and romantic leads.
French cinema, however, is in the throes of a revival for 50-ish actresses, many of whom got their starts as fresh-faced teenagers in the early 1970s. These women aren't all airbrushed versions of their former selves, nor does the interest in them seem to be mostly nostalgic. "They have roles not as old women but as women. Which means they're still considered to be desirable," says Danièle Laufer, author of the book "50 Ans? Vous Ne Les Faites Pas" ("50 Years Old? You Don't Look It"). "Fifteen or 20 years ago, you wouldn't have seen this. I think they refuse to give up power."
The actress Nathalie Baye, who's 59 and looks it, has made some 20 films in the past decade, including romantic roles. She told an interviewer that at the 2003 César awards (France's version of the Oscars), Meryl Streep asked her whether "things were as difficult in France as in the U.S. for actresses of a certain age. I told her that thankfully, French cinema is very faithful to its women."
These French actresses are products of the generation of '68, France's sexual and social revolution. But in the French version, women weren't expected to forgo high heels and chivalry in exchange for equality. So it's not surprising here when successful women retain their charms. In the United States, the two can seem mutually exclusive. The right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh felt free to question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy in December by sneering, "Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?"
Of course, things aren't all rosy in French bedrooms. France has its share of lonely widows and divorcees. All the Frenchwomen I spoke to also stressed that older women must keep up their looks to stay appealing. Liftees are becoming a more frequent sight.
In the United States, men tend to treat older women who've done age-erasing work with either horrific awe or chaste respect. France is more sanguine. Last year, Paris Match magazine put a photo on its cover of a topless 50-something Arielle Dombasle -- looking like a reengineered 16- year-old -- to celebrate her new cabaret act.
American women seem to have internalized the message that wrinkles aren't sexy. A 2006 study called "Sex After 40?" led by Laura Carpenter at Vanderbilt University concludes that middle-aged women who live alone have trouble seeing themselves -- and others -- as potential sex partners. And then there's the famous demographic bottleneck: Men die sooner, and many of the ones left standing prefer younger women. Impotence can leave even married couples sexless.
All that happens in France, too, of course. But when the French writer Elisabeth Weissman interviewed dozens of older Frenchmen for the book "Un Âge Nommé Désir" ("An Age Named Desire"), she found that "they see in maturity a form of eroticism." French Playboy's photo spread on the 43-year-old Juliette Binoche in November carried text that gushed, "The more time passes, the more her inner beauty glows." Wisdom -- combined with regular exfoliation -- is sexy here.
Another reason older Frenchwomen have an easier time is that they're apparently less choosy about their bedmates. A study of older Americans published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 88 percent of sexually inactive women ages 57 to 64 had actually met a willing partner. But about half the women said that they hadn't met the right person.
This isn't just a matter of taste. The Vanderbilt study also found that middle-aged, unmarried men and women in the United States suffer from "sexual conservatism," even if they've been married before. For many women, the study notes, "disapproval of sex before marriage applies to every marriage."
Older Frenchwomen seem open not just to non-marital sex but also to the extramarital variety. Overall self-reported levels of infidelity are practically identical in France and the United States. But because the taboo on cheating is weaker in France, what would be guilty flings in the United States can blossom into long love affairs over here. "When [French] people have multiple partners, they have stable partners, and not one-night stands. This is not the case in the U.S.," says the French researcher Alain Giami, who co-authored a paper on French and American sexual habits.
None of the Frenchwomen I spoke to thought that married men made ideal companions. But all of them said that they could be a reasonable compromise until the "right" fellow comes along. "It saves your life, you live like a woman," says Nathalie Samson, 50, who dated a married man for six years until she met her current boyfriend. (He was single.)
Samson, who co-owns a boutique in Paris, isn't the lithe Frenchwoman of the American imagination. But she's wearing a stretchy black dress with a plunging neckline and flipping through pictures from her recent birthday party, in which her 52-year-old boyfriend gazes at her with obvious rapture. She describes this period of her life -- post-divorce, her three kids out of the house -- as her most uncomplicatedly sexy one. "Now there's just the seduction between a man and a woman," she says.
Older women in Paris don't actually look any better than the ones in New York. The difference is that the French typically don't see sex as a privilege for the young and beautiful. They see it as one of life's most basic pleasures -- something women or men would not give up without a fight . . . or in my case, perhaps a second passport.
Catching Up to the Boys, in the Good and the Bad
Teen Girls' Alcohol, Tobacco and Drug Use on the Rise
By Lori Aratani
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 10, 2008; C01
She lost count of the vodka shots. It was New Year's Eve 2005, and for this high school freshman, it was time to party. She figured she'd be able to sleep it off -- she'd done it before. But by the time she got home the next day, her head was still pounding, her mouth was dry, and she couldn't focus. This time, the symptoms were obvious even to her parents.
After that night, she realized the weekend buzzes had gone from being a maybe to a must.
"Before, it was a novelty," the Silver Spring teen said. "It went from, 'Well, maybe . . .' to 'Oh, I know I'm going to drink this weekend.' "
A generation of parents and educators have pushed to ensure that girls have the same opportunities as their male counterparts, with notable results. In 2007, for example, it was girls who dominated the national math and science competition sponsored by Siemens. But a growing number of reports show that the message of equality might have a downside.
Teenage girls now equal or outpace teenage boys in alcohol consumption, drug use and smoking, national surveys show. The number of girls entering the juvenile justice system has risen steadily over the past few years. A 2006 study that examined accident rates among young drivers noted that although boys get into more car accidents, girls are slowly beginning to close the gap.
A 17-year-old Charles County girl was charged last month with reckless and negligent driving in a Nov. 28 accident in which a 15-year-old girl was killed. In June, a 20-year-old student at George Mason University traveling west on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway near the Springfield interchange drove her convertible into a tractor-trailer. She and three friends were killed. Then, in September, a 17-year-old Fairfax County girl was charged with aggravated involuntary manslaughter after she drove her sport-utility vehicle head-on into a van, killing a 59-year-old woman.
"When you take off the shackles, you release all kind of energy -- negative and positive," said James Garbarino, the Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago. "By letting girls loose to experience America more fully, it's not surprising that they would absorb some of its toxic environment."
The teenager with the vodka hangover, who is now 16, was one of several Washington region teenage girls who agreed to talk about their lives and what compels them to drink, smoke or indulge in behaviors that might make their parents blanch. They asked that their names not be used so they could speak frankly.
In the same breath, the young women talked about feeling "empowered" because they can choose from myriad colleges and careers and about how that "freedom" extends to partying at clubs, drinking and smoking. Experts worry that those feelings, coupled with a teen's natural sense of invincibility, can be a potent and dangerous combination. Indeed, the teenage girls interviewed by The Washington Post seemed almost blase about the potential consequences.
"People tell me all the time [smoking] isn't good for me," said an 18-year-old from Bethesda, rolling her eyes. But in her mind, that's 30 years down the line. Same with the drinking (she prefers champagne) and the occasional recreational drug.
"In the past, people have had this angelic picture, but girls are just as bad as boys are," she said. "We do what we want to do, when we want to do it."
"I live for now," she said, a grin spreading across her face. "It's great to be a girl."
Experts say there is no single explanation for why more teenage girls are deciding to experiment with drugs or why some are getting into fights. However, they do note that society's expectations about girlhood have changed dramatically over the years. Annette Funicello's wholesome beach blanket antics have given way to Britney Spears's latest meltdown.
"The why of what's happening is in part a direct response to the advances that we're making as a society around gender equity," said Deborah Prothrow-Stith, a professor of public health at Harvard University. If society offers girls and boys the same opportunities, that means they're exposed to the good as well as the bad, she said.
"We really have to ask the questions, 'Why wouldn't you expect girls to behave [like boys]?' Girls and women are closing all the other gaps," Prothrow-Stith said.
Experts who work with teenage girls, particularly those in the Washington region, say more options can also equal more stress. A 2005 poll, conducted by The Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard found that more than four in 10 local high school girls said they "frequently" experienced stress in their daily lives, compared with fewer than three in 10 nationally.
"Our lives are so crazy, and kids are looking for something when they feel" stressed, said Beverly Parker-Lewis, a clinical psychologist with the Fairfax County public schools. "Sometimes, the result is negative behavior."
Teenagers say pressure is a factor. The 18-year-old remembered being so overwhelmed by the pressure to be a perfect student that, at one point, she couldn't get out of bed. The 16-year-old talked about how both academic and peer pressure prompted her to take up drinking as an outlet for her stress.
Girls "work so hard to prove themselves all the time," said Christine Whitaker, a therapist with Metropolitan Counseling Associates in Bethesda. "Then, when the weekend comes, they blow it all out."
And teenagers are surrounded by a mix of messages. On one hand, their parents and teachers tell them not to drink, smoke or do drugs, but on the other hand, music and such television shows as "Gossip Girl" and "The Hills" showcase teens indulging in just such behavior.
According to a 2006 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, girls between the ages of 12 and 17 were at equal or higher risk of substance abuse compared with boys. That same year, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy found that the number of girls who smoke or abuse prescription drugs had surpassed that of boys. More troubling: The increase in drug usage among girls comes at a time when overall numbers for teenage drug abuse are on the decline.
Sue Foster, vice president and director of policy research and analysis at CASA, said these behaviors can be especially dangerous for girls because of the different ways in which their bodies process substances. One drink for a woman is the equivalent of two for a man. CASA researchers found that girls and women "are also likely to become addicted to alcohol, nicotine, illegal and prescription drugs and develop substance-abuse related diseases at lower levels of use and in shorter periods of time."
The 16-year-old said her vodka hangover made her realize that drinking was starting to dominate her life. It was affecting her grades and friendships. Slowly, with the help of a counselor, she began to set limits for herself. She stopped hanging around with friends who liked to drink and found a new crowd. She still drinks on weekends, but it has ceased to be a "must" in her life, she said.
A recent study, conducted by emergency medicine physicians at the Center for Trauma and Injury Prevention Research at the University of California at Irvine medical school, examined accident rates of young drivers between 2000 and 2004 and found that although boys have more accidents, young female drivers appear to be closing the gap.
"It used to be that girls had far fewer accidents and speeding tickets and were considered to be better risks," said Carolyn Gorman, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. "But over the last 15 to 20 years, girls have been catching up with boys."
Those who work with adolescents say that as people become more aware of the trends affecting girls, the key will be to find ways to address them.
Because teenage boys have been considered the traditional culprits, "young women are falling between the cracks," said Virginia Tsai, a physician with the UC-Irvine study.
Rebecca Kullback, a colleague of Whitaker's who is co-founder of Metropolitan Counseling Associates in Bethesda, said parents need to rethink the messages they're sending their daughters and teach them how to better manage their stresses. Other experts say that those who work with adolescents need to better tailor intervention programs to be effective for girls as well as boys.
But the real challenge of reaching the teen girl demographic might be persuading girls that their behavior could have consequences -- if not now, somewhere down the line.
When asked why they drink, the 18-year-old and a friend paused for a moment before summing up the appeal in one succinct statement:
"Life," the 18-year-old declared, as her friend chimed in, "is better with a buzz."
--------------------------------------------------------------
5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B03
As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.
So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow.
1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right.
This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals.
The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia. After World War II convinced them that the United States wasn't an imperialist power but one fighting for freedom, Kristol and his fellow travelers briefly embraced liberalism in the late 1940s. But as the convulsions of the 1960s reenergized the radical left, the future neocons kept moving right. All along, they retained the penchant for abusive invective and zest for combat that they had first honed as Trotskyists, wielding magazine articles and op-eds as weapons to discredit their foes and champion their ideas.
2 The neocons are Israeli lackeys.
Bunk. The neocon saga couldn't be more American. It's a tempestuous drama of Jewish assimilation, from immigrant obscurity on the Lower East Side to the rise of a new foreign policy establishment that sees the United States as the avatar of democracy and foe of genocide. What truly animates the neocons is what they see as the lesson of the Holocaust: that it could have been avoided if the Western democracies had found the courage to stop Hitler in the late 1930s. This helps explain Perle's and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith's antipathy toward the State Department, which tried to stymie U.S. recognition of Israel at its founding in 1948. Neocons such as Norman Podhoretz scorn the State Department as filled with WASPs who seek to cozy up to the Arab states instead of recognizing Israel's strategic value and moral importance as a bastion of democracy in a sea of tyranny.
What's more, the neocons are often to the right of Israel's government. Feith and National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams scoffed at the idea of land-for-peace talks with the Palestinians, for instance, and Wolfowitz pushed for an invasion of Iraq for which even Ariel Sharon demonstrated no particular enthusiasm. The neocons aren't Israel's best advocates, either: The Iraq war has emboldened Iran, fanned the flames of jihadism and made Israel less, not more, secure. Contrary to Wolfowitz's arguments, the road to peace in Israel turned out not to run through Baghdad.
3 The neocons had too much power and took over Bush's brain.
In fact, President Bush used the neocons for his own purposes and then dumped many of them overboard. (Of course, many liberals think Bush doesn't have a brain to take over in the first place, but leave that aside.) On the campaign trail in 2000, Bush was a realist in the mold of his father. But under the appalling pressure of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush became the leading neocon in his own administration -- which is why he didn't need them around anymore once they had done their job as lightning rods. What's more, he never gave any of them Cabinet-level positions.
Neither Vice President Cheney nor former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- the men who made the real decisions with Bush in the Oval Office -- has ever been a neocon. They are Republican unilateralists who believe in deploying U.S. power whenever and wherever the executive branch sees fit, regardless of what U.S. allies want. Cheney and Rumsfeld used Wolfowitz and other neocons to provide an intellectual patina of justification for war against Iraq, much as Cheney has been trying to do with Iran today. (One reason there was no serious postwar plan for Iraq was that no one in Cheney's office could ever decide whether the administration should have one.)
Lacking a real base in the Republican Party, the neocons got picked off as soon as Bush's handling of the war seemed to falter. They didn't have too much power; ultimately, they had too little to implement their schemes. The result has been finger-pointing and self-exculpatory memoirs from the likes of Feith. Meanwhile, the CIA (which the neocons loathe) has outflanked them on Iran by declaring that it isn't building nuclear weapons. And one of the most prominent surviving neocons, the NSC's Abrams, has proved unable to stop Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
4 The neocons are bloodthirsty ideologues, trying to impose a militant Wilsonianism on the United States that is alien to our foreign policy traditions.
Militant? Sure. But alien? Baloney. In fact, the neocons' worldview melds both of the major strands of traditional U.S. foreign policy thinking -- realism and idealism -- in a highly opportunistic fashion. This is why liberal hawks such as author Paul Berman, Washington Post columnist Peter Beinart and the editors of the New Republic signed on to the neocon crusade at the outset of the Iraq war, while the true realists, such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, blanched in horror.
5 The Iraq debacle has discredited the neocons.
This could be the biggest whopper of them all. Now that the "surge" in Iraq has brought levels of violence down somewhat, the neocons are already claiming vindication. As Iraq fades from the front pages, the neocons' hero, Arizona Sen. John McCain, is poised to become the Republican standard-bearer in 2008. (The neocons also would have happily flocked around Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recruited Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz as a senior adviser.)
The truth is that the neocons have been repeatedly declared dead before -- and, to the chagrin of their enemies on the left and the right, bounced back. At the end of the Cold War, the arch-realist George H.W. Bush relegated them to the sidelines; then the triangulating Bill Clinton seemed to deprive them of their biggest foreign and domestic policy issues. If they came back from that, they can come back from anything. Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol (who seems not to be discredited in the eyes of the New York Times, which just made him a columnist) and a host of other neocons have hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh comeback. If they make a hash of foreign policy by 2011, perhaps the familiar cycle of public scorn and rebirth might even start all over again.
By Lori Aratani
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 10, 2008; C01
She lost count of the vodka shots. It was New Year's Eve 2005, and for this high school freshman, it was time to party. She figured she'd be able to sleep it off -- she'd done it before. But by the time she got home the next day, her head was still pounding, her mouth was dry, and she couldn't focus. This time, the symptoms were obvious even to her parents.
After that night, she realized the weekend buzzes had gone from being a maybe to a must.
"Before, it was a novelty," the Silver Spring teen said. "It went from, 'Well, maybe . . .' to 'Oh, I know I'm going to drink this weekend.' "
A generation of parents and educators have pushed to ensure that girls have the same opportunities as their male counterparts, with notable results. In 2007, for example, it was girls who dominated the national math and science competition sponsored by Siemens. But a growing number of reports show that the message of equality might have a downside.
Teenage girls now equal or outpace teenage boys in alcohol consumption, drug use and smoking, national surveys show. The number of girls entering the juvenile justice system has risen steadily over the past few years. A 2006 study that examined accident rates among young drivers noted that although boys get into more car accidents, girls are slowly beginning to close the gap.
A 17-year-old Charles County girl was charged last month with reckless and negligent driving in a Nov. 28 accident in which a 15-year-old girl was killed. In June, a 20-year-old student at George Mason University traveling west on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway near the Springfield interchange drove her convertible into a tractor-trailer. She and three friends were killed. Then, in September, a 17-year-old Fairfax County girl was charged with aggravated involuntary manslaughter after she drove her sport-utility vehicle head-on into a van, killing a 59-year-old woman.
"When you take off the shackles, you release all kind of energy -- negative and positive," said James Garbarino, the Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago. "By letting girls loose to experience America more fully, it's not surprising that they would absorb some of its toxic environment."
The teenager with the vodka hangover, who is now 16, was one of several Washington region teenage girls who agreed to talk about their lives and what compels them to drink, smoke or indulge in behaviors that might make their parents blanch. They asked that their names not be used so they could speak frankly.
In the same breath, the young women talked about feeling "empowered" because they can choose from myriad colleges and careers and about how that "freedom" extends to partying at clubs, drinking and smoking. Experts worry that those feelings, coupled with a teen's natural sense of invincibility, can be a potent and dangerous combination. Indeed, the teenage girls interviewed by The Washington Post seemed almost blase about the potential consequences.
"People tell me all the time [smoking] isn't good for me," said an 18-year-old from Bethesda, rolling her eyes. But in her mind, that's 30 years down the line. Same with the drinking (she prefers champagne) and the occasional recreational drug.
"In the past, people have had this angelic picture, but girls are just as bad as boys are," she said. "We do what we want to do, when we want to do it."
"I live for now," she said, a grin spreading across her face. "It's great to be a girl."
Experts say there is no single explanation for why more teenage girls are deciding to experiment with drugs or why some are getting into fights. However, they do note that society's expectations about girlhood have changed dramatically over the years. Annette Funicello's wholesome beach blanket antics have given way to Britney Spears's latest meltdown.
"The why of what's happening is in part a direct response to the advances that we're making as a society around gender equity," said Deborah Prothrow-Stith, a professor of public health at Harvard University. If society offers girls and boys the same opportunities, that means they're exposed to the good as well as the bad, she said.
"We really have to ask the questions, 'Why wouldn't you expect girls to behave [like boys]?' Girls and women are closing all the other gaps," Prothrow-Stith said.
Experts who work with teenage girls, particularly those in the Washington region, say more options can also equal more stress. A 2005 poll, conducted by The Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard found that more than four in 10 local high school girls said they "frequently" experienced stress in their daily lives, compared with fewer than three in 10 nationally.
"Our lives are so crazy, and kids are looking for something when they feel" stressed, said Beverly Parker-Lewis, a clinical psychologist with the Fairfax County public schools. "Sometimes, the result is negative behavior."
Teenagers say pressure is a factor. The 18-year-old remembered being so overwhelmed by the pressure to be a perfect student that, at one point, she couldn't get out of bed. The 16-year-old talked about how both academic and peer pressure prompted her to take up drinking as an outlet for her stress.
Girls "work so hard to prove themselves all the time," said Christine Whitaker, a therapist with Metropolitan Counseling Associates in Bethesda. "Then, when the weekend comes, they blow it all out."
And teenagers are surrounded by a mix of messages. On one hand, their parents and teachers tell them not to drink, smoke or do drugs, but on the other hand, music and such television shows as "Gossip Girl" and "The Hills" showcase teens indulging in just such behavior.
According to a 2006 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, girls between the ages of 12 and 17 were at equal or higher risk of substance abuse compared with boys. That same year, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy found that the number of girls who smoke or abuse prescription drugs had surpassed that of boys. More troubling: The increase in drug usage among girls comes at a time when overall numbers for teenage drug abuse are on the decline.
Sue Foster, vice president and director of policy research and analysis at CASA, said these behaviors can be especially dangerous for girls because of the different ways in which their bodies process substances. One drink for a woman is the equivalent of two for a man. CASA researchers found that girls and women "are also likely to become addicted to alcohol, nicotine, illegal and prescription drugs and develop substance-abuse related diseases at lower levels of use and in shorter periods of time."
The 16-year-old said her vodka hangover made her realize that drinking was starting to dominate her life. It was affecting her grades and friendships. Slowly, with the help of a counselor, she began to set limits for herself. She stopped hanging around with friends who liked to drink and found a new crowd. She still drinks on weekends, but it has ceased to be a "must" in her life, she said.
A recent study, conducted by emergency medicine physicians at the Center for Trauma and Injury Prevention Research at the University of California at Irvine medical school, examined accident rates of young drivers between 2000 and 2004 and found that although boys have more accidents, young female drivers appear to be closing the gap.
"It used to be that girls had far fewer accidents and speeding tickets and were considered to be better risks," said Carolyn Gorman, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. "But over the last 15 to 20 years, girls have been catching up with boys."
Those who work with adolescents say that as people become more aware of the trends affecting girls, the key will be to find ways to address them.
Because teenage boys have been considered the traditional culprits, "young women are falling between the cracks," said Virginia Tsai, a physician with the UC-Irvine study.
Rebecca Kullback, a colleague of Whitaker's who is co-founder of Metropolitan Counseling Associates in Bethesda, said parents need to rethink the messages they're sending their daughters and teach them how to better manage their stresses. Other experts say that those who work with adolescents need to better tailor intervention programs to be effective for girls as well as boys.
But the real challenge of reaching the teen girl demographic might be persuading girls that their behavior could have consequences -- if not now, somewhere down the line.
When asked why they drink, the 18-year-old and a friend paused for a moment before summing up the appeal in one succinct statement:
"Life," the 18-year-old declared, as her friend chimed in, "is better with a buzz."
--------------------------------------------------------------
5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B03
As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.
So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow.
1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right.
This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals.
The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia. After World War II convinced them that the United States wasn't an imperialist power but one fighting for freedom, Kristol and his fellow travelers briefly embraced liberalism in the late 1940s. But as the convulsions of the 1960s reenergized the radical left, the future neocons kept moving right. All along, they retained the penchant for abusive invective and zest for combat that they had first honed as Trotskyists, wielding magazine articles and op-eds as weapons to discredit their foes and champion their ideas.
2 The neocons are Israeli lackeys.
Bunk. The neocon saga couldn't be more American. It's a tempestuous drama of Jewish assimilation, from immigrant obscurity on the Lower East Side to the rise of a new foreign policy establishment that sees the United States as the avatar of democracy and foe of genocide. What truly animates the neocons is what they see as the lesson of the Holocaust: that it could have been avoided if the Western democracies had found the courage to stop Hitler in the late 1930s. This helps explain Perle's and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith's antipathy toward the State Department, which tried to stymie U.S. recognition of Israel at its founding in 1948. Neocons such as Norman Podhoretz scorn the State Department as filled with WASPs who seek to cozy up to the Arab states instead of recognizing Israel's strategic value and moral importance as a bastion of democracy in a sea of tyranny.
What's more, the neocons are often to the right of Israel's government. Feith and National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams scoffed at the idea of land-for-peace talks with the Palestinians, for instance, and Wolfowitz pushed for an invasion of Iraq for which even Ariel Sharon demonstrated no particular enthusiasm. The neocons aren't Israel's best advocates, either: The Iraq war has emboldened Iran, fanned the flames of jihadism and made Israel less, not more, secure. Contrary to Wolfowitz's arguments, the road to peace in Israel turned out not to run through Baghdad.
3 The neocons had too much power and took over Bush's brain.
In fact, President Bush used the neocons for his own purposes and then dumped many of them overboard. (Of course, many liberals think Bush doesn't have a brain to take over in the first place, but leave that aside.) On the campaign trail in 2000, Bush was a realist in the mold of his father. But under the appalling pressure of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush became the leading neocon in his own administration -- which is why he didn't need them around anymore once they had done their job as lightning rods. What's more, he never gave any of them Cabinet-level positions.
Neither Vice President Cheney nor former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- the men who made the real decisions with Bush in the Oval Office -- has ever been a neocon. They are Republican unilateralists who believe in deploying U.S. power whenever and wherever the executive branch sees fit, regardless of what U.S. allies want. Cheney and Rumsfeld used Wolfowitz and other neocons to provide an intellectual patina of justification for war against Iraq, much as Cheney has been trying to do with Iran today. (One reason there was no serious postwar plan for Iraq was that no one in Cheney's office could ever decide whether the administration should have one.)
Lacking a real base in the Republican Party, the neocons got picked off as soon as Bush's handling of the war seemed to falter. They didn't have too much power; ultimately, they had too little to implement their schemes. The result has been finger-pointing and self-exculpatory memoirs from the likes of Feith. Meanwhile, the CIA (which the neocons loathe) has outflanked them on Iran by declaring that it isn't building nuclear weapons. And one of the most prominent surviving neocons, the NSC's Abrams, has proved unable to stop Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
4 The neocons are bloodthirsty ideologues, trying to impose a militant Wilsonianism on the United States that is alien to our foreign policy traditions.
Militant? Sure. But alien? Baloney. In fact, the neocons' worldview melds both of the major strands of traditional U.S. foreign policy thinking -- realism and idealism -- in a highly opportunistic fashion. This is why liberal hawks such as author Paul Berman, Washington Post columnist Peter Beinart and the editors of the New Republic signed on to the neocon crusade at the outset of the Iraq war, while the true realists, such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, blanched in horror.
5 The Iraq debacle has discredited the neocons.
This could be the biggest whopper of them all. Now that the "surge" in Iraq has brought levels of violence down somewhat, the neocons are already claiming vindication. As Iraq fades from the front pages, the neocons' hero, Arizona Sen. John McCain, is poised to become the Republican standard-bearer in 2008. (The neocons also would have happily flocked around Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recruited Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz as a senior adviser.)
The truth is that the neocons have been repeatedly declared dead before -- and, to the chagrin of their enemies on the left and the right, bounced back. At the end of the Cold War, the arch-realist George H.W. Bush relegated them to the sidelines; then the triangulating Bill Clinton seemed to deprive them of their biggest foreign and domestic policy issues. If they came back from that, they can come back from anything. Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol (who seems not to be discredited in the eyes of the New York Times, which just made him a columnist) and a host of other neocons have hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh comeback. If they make a hash of foreign policy by 2011, perhaps the familiar cycle of public scorn and rebirth might even start all over again.
I Do, but You Don't.
If One Saves and the Other Spends, It Matters to More Than the Bank Account
By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 10, 2008; F01
Alezandra Russell and James Guzman immediately bonded when they met at a barbecue in May 2004. Both grew up in suburban Maryland. Both have Latino parents. Both love to travel, go to the theater and eat out.
But it became clear, soon after they got engaged in August that year, that they were completely different in at least one way: their finances. Russell, now 26, was paying off student loans and credit cards and renting an apartment. Guzman, 35, had no debt and owned a house.
Since getting married two years ago, they have had many discussions -- and disagreements -- about money.
"I overspend. I really don't budget that well," she said.
"I'm just a little bit more disciplined when it comes to that," he said.
Money is the last thing couples want to talk about when they're falling in love. But it's one of the first things they should discuss when planning their lives together, experts said. That's because modern relationships have become so complicated. No longer are there defined financial roles, with the husband as breadwinner and the wife as homemaker. These days, there are many more two-income households, and the man isn't necessarily the one making the most money. There are also more financial pressures, what with so many households overloaded with debt and with the economy taking a turn for the worse.
People are increasingly considering a potential mate's finances before committing to a relationship. In a Money Management International survey released last week in time for Valentine's Day, 70 percent of the 1,049 respondents said they consider financial savvy an important trait when searching for a mate. Fifty-eight percent said they consider financial security more important than a person's looks, though it was women driving that phenomenon. (Men were still more inclined to consider looks more important than money.)
Once couples commit, money doesn't become any less of an issue.
"Money is one of the top three common sources of conflict that brings couples into therapy," said Karen Osterle, a licensed psychotherapist in Dupont Circle. "In fact, some people find it easier to talk about sexual matters than they do about money."
Therein lies the problem, several financial advisers, counselors and therapists said. America has become a society in which people openly dissect their sex lives but are reluctant to discuss how much money they make or how much debt they have.
Sure, it's not sexy, experts said, but people need to realize that when they cohabitate or get married, they are not only entering a romantic relationship, but also a financial partnership. There are many decisions to be made. Should they have joint or separate bank accounts? Which credit cards should they apply for? Who should pay the utilities? How should they divide the rent or mortgage? Should they buy a house? How much should they set aside for retirement? When should they start saving for their children's educations? "The couple that plans together is much more likely to stay together," said Osterle.
There are no uniform answers, experts said. One couple might be comfortable having separate bank accounts while another is not. One couple might want to buy a house; another might be happy renting. Either way, each couple has to come up with a plan. If left unanswered, these questions can cause tension, or worse, destroy a marriage. A GfK Roper poll commissioned by the Web site Divorce360.com and released last month found that money was one of the main reasons people get divorced, second only to verbal or physical abuse.
Financial differences can become even more pronounced in a weakening economy. "What comes out more strongly is that not having enough money to pay all the bills during the month is a huge source of couple distress, and for couples who are living together, it makes them less likely to get married, and for couples who are married, it makes them more likely to get divorced," said Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan who has interviewed about 300 couples.
Several therapists in the area said many couples have recently started seeking financial advice.
"I think people have been lulled into living beyond their means, and so they're overextended and that makes them feel unsafe now that things don't look as rosy," said Elizabeth Sloan, a professional counselor who practices in Glenn Dale and Frederick. "That feeling of not being safe then drives their fears, and everything that their partner does regarding money is now under scrutiny."
Kathleen and Danny Goldstein said they don't feel overextended but are certainly worried about the economy. One of their priorities, they said, is to have an emergency fund with enough money to cover three months' worth of expenses. They are also determined to remain debt-free in case either loses a job.
"The possibility of a recession makes us nervous," said Kathleen Goldstein, 33, though not to the point of therapy. Her husband, 31, sells information technology to the federal government, and "if they are not funded, it affects his job," she said.
She is a communications consultant who works on contract. "It makes me nervous because in times of recession, companies and organizations cut their communication and marketing budgets first," she said.
Jill Foster, 37, and Sean Stickle, 35, are not in couples therapy but credit premarital counseling with helping them avoid huge arguments over money. Recognizing the consequences of not talking through their financial future, Foster insisted on having a frank discussion with Stickle before marrying him eight years ago.
"I said something like, 'You know what, Sean, I know it's about happiness and love, but in addition to that, we need to talk long-term about money,' " Foster said.
Stickle, a computer programmer, was happy to relinquish most of the financial authority to Foster, a consultant for nonprofit organizations. He admits he's profligate with money when it comes to buying books. He has also, he said, failed to pay a gas bill from time to time, not because he didn't have the money but because he simply forgot.
"She is the financial manager of the family, and to the extent that we are financially secure, it is all her doing. I contribute mostly by not screwing it up," he said.
Over the years, the couple merged their bank accounts, their incomes, their debt and their financial habits. They live frugally in a 600-square-foot, one-bedroom rental in Dupont Circle. Together, they make about $75,500 a year.
In January 2006, they had an epiphany. Despite having declared saving for retirement as their priority, they spent $11,000 on restaurant meals the previous year. "We were living a contradiction," Foster said.
Foster became even more of a strict financial manager. She started using Quicken to keep track of all their expenditures. She made sure 12 percent of their income went toward retirement. She cut their restaurant budget to $1,500 a year.
Her efforts caused some tension, she said. "I wanted to be fiscally conservative, probably to a suffocating degree, and Sean wanted to probably enjoy our money a little bit more," she said.
Stickle disagrees that there were any substantial disagreements.
"The only thing we've disagreed about is when I buy a book outside of the budget, and that is usually resolved by me apologizing and not doing it again for a month or so," he said.
Therapists, counselors and financial advisers said opposites attract when it comes to money. Impulse buyers often end up with savers. "When we partner, when we mate, we look for someone who represents the other side of the emotional coin," said Marty Tashman, a counselor based in Somerset, N.J., who has treated many couples who feud over money.
That can wreak havoc on a relationship unless couples learn how to communicate in a respectful manner. That means not accusing your partner of being a financial disaster when he or she makes a poor decision or has more debt than you do. It also means being considerate when you're the partner with the higher income, and allowing your spouse to have a say in financial matters. Experts advise coming up with a household budget together and having regular money meetings. One partner can be the financial manager, but both have to have input.
"For women, if they make significantly less money than their husband, especially if they're not openly discussing it, it can create difficulties in terms of decision-making and who has more input in financial decisions," said Susan Fago, a licensed clinical social worker in Dupont Circle.
When the woman makes more than the man in the relationship, "that has its own set of problems," Fago said. "In our culture, men are expected to be the providers, so it takes a very mature and open supportive relationship for people to be able to deal with those issues."
The bottom line, she said, is that the "ability to generate income is part of our self-esteem and sense of worthiness, unfortunately."
Russell often wonders if she should get a higher-paying job. She makes $32,000 a year as a parent educator at a nonprofit youth center. She has also taken a part-time job as a nail technician so she can contribute more to the household. Guzman, her husband, makes more than $100,000 as the owner of a commercial cleaning business.
He covers the mortgage on their Silver Spring house, sets aside money for their emergency fund and finances their frequent weekend trips to Miami or jaunts to Mexico. She pays utilities and any costs associated with their dogs.
Russell could be making more money doing other work. But she loves her job, so Guzman is willing to help her keep it. "I told her what you have to do is follow your passion," he said.
At times, Russell feels guilty about that, which, in a strange twist, occasionally makes her act out. "It's mostly me feeling like I'm not able to do as much, so I get frustrated, and I probably take my frustration out on him," she said.
They used to have a joint bank account, but she bounced a few checks. "He gets super-frustrated if I bounce a check," she said.
So they decided to use separate accounts. "It became very stressful for me to try to do everything," Guzman said. He has helped her with her student loans and car payment, and she's paying her credit card bills. She tries to make up for it by taking him out on a date occasionally.
Guzman and Russell have been honest with each other about their finances, which counselors and advisers said goes a long way. Too often, one partner hides his or her debt.
"You need to have full disclosure with your partner and be transparent with your finances," Tashman said. "Later on if it's discovered, a lie of omission ends up being the same thing as a lie of commission."
Guzman and Russell get along in every other way, so an occasional dispute over money is manageable. "I view ourselves as equal in the sense that I never say to her, 'You make a lot less money,' " he said. "I never feel any resentment."
"Despite our few fights, they're nothing compared to what I hear from other people," she said. "He's my life partner."
By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 10, 2008; F01
Alezandra Russell and James Guzman immediately bonded when they met at a barbecue in May 2004. Both grew up in suburban Maryland. Both have Latino parents. Both love to travel, go to the theater and eat out.
But it became clear, soon after they got engaged in August that year, that they were completely different in at least one way: their finances. Russell, now 26, was paying off student loans and credit cards and renting an apartment. Guzman, 35, had no debt and owned a house.
Since getting married two years ago, they have had many discussions -- and disagreements -- about money.
"I overspend. I really don't budget that well," she said.
"I'm just a little bit more disciplined when it comes to that," he said.
Money is the last thing couples want to talk about when they're falling in love. But it's one of the first things they should discuss when planning their lives together, experts said. That's because modern relationships have become so complicated. No longer are there defined financial roles, with the husband as breadwinner and the wife as homemaker. These days, there are many more two-income households, and the man isn't necessarily the one making the most money. There are also more financial pressures, what with so many households overloaded with debt and with the economy taking a turn for the worse.
People are increasingly considering a potential mate's finances before committing to a relationship. In a Money Management International survey released last week in time for Valentine's Day, 70 percent of the 1,049 respondents said they consider financial savvy an important trait when searching for a mate. Fifty-eight percent said they consider financial security more important than a person's looks, though it was women driving that phenomenon. (Men were still more inclined to consider looks more important than money.)
Once couples commit, money doesn't become any less of an issue.
"Money is one of the top three common sources of conflict that brings couples into therapy," said Karen Osterle, a licensed psychotherapist in Dupont Circle. "In fact, some people find it easier to talk about sexual matters than they do about money."
Therein lies the problem, several financial advisers, counselors and therapists said. America has become a society in which people openly dissect their sex lives but are reluctant to discuss how much money they make or how much debt they have.
Sure, it's not sexy, experts said, but people need to realize that when they cohabitate or get married, they are not only entering a romantic relationship, but also a financial partnership. There are many decisions to be made. Should they have joint or separate bank accounts? Which credit cards should they apply for? Who should pay the utilities? How should they divide the rent or mortgage? Should they buy a house? How much should they set aside for retirement? When should they start saving for their children's educations? "The couple that plans together is much more likely to stay together," said Osterle.
There are no uniform answers, experts said. One couple might be comfortable having separate bank accounts while another is not. One couple might want to buy a house; another might be happy renting. Either way, each couple has to come up with a plan. If left unanswered, these questions can cause tension, or worse, destroy a marriage. A GfK Roper poll commissioned by the Web site Divorce360.com and released last month found that money was one of the main reasons people get divorced, second only to verbal or physical abuse.
Financial differences can become even more pronounced in a weakening economy. "What comes out more strongly is that not having enough money to pay all the bills during the month is a huge source of couple distress, and for couples who are living together, it makes them less likely to get married, and for couples who are married, it makes them more likely to get divorced," said Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan who has interviewed about 300 couples.
Several therapists in the area said many couples have recently started seeking financial advice.
"I think people have been lulled into living beyond their means, and so they're overextended and that makes them feel unsafe now that things don't look as rosy," said Elizabeth Sloan, a professional counselor who practices in Glenn Dale and Frederick. "That feeling of not being safe then drives their fears, and everything that their partner does regarding money is now under scrutiny."
Kathleen and Danny Goldstein said they don't feel overextended but are certainly worried about the economy. One of their priorities, they said, is to have an emergency fund with enough money to cover three months' worth of expenses. They are also determined to remain debt-free in case either loses a job.
"The possibility of a recession makes us nervous," said Kathleen Goldstein, 33, though not to the point of therapy. Her husband, 31, sells information technology to the federal government, and "if they are not funded, it affects his job," she said.
She is a communications consultant who works on contract. "It makes me nervous because in times of recession, companies and organizations cut their communication and marketing budgets first," she said.
Jill Foster, 37, and Sean Stickle, 35, are not in couples therapy but credit premarital counseling with helping them avoid huge arguments over money. Recognizing the consequences of not talking through their financial future, Foster insisted on having a frank discussion with Stickle before marrying him eight years ago.
"I said something like, 'You know what, Sean, I know it's about happiness and love, but in addition to that, we need to talk long-term about money,' " Foster said.
Stickle, a computer programmer, was happy to relinquish most of the financial authority to Foster, a consultant for nonprofit organizations. He admits he's profligate with money when it comes to buying books. He has also, he said, failed to pay a gas bill from time to time, not because he didn't have the money but because he simply forgot.
"She is the financial manager of the family, and to the extent that we are financially secure, it is all her doing. I contribute mostly by not screwing it up," he said.
Over the years, the couple merged their bank accounts, their incomes, their debt and their financial habits. They live frugally in a 600-square-foot, one-bedroom rental in Dupont Circle. Together, they make about $75,500 a year.
In January 2006, they had an epiphany. Despite having declared saving for retirement as their priority, they spent $11,000 on restaurant meals the previous year. "We were living a contradiction," Foster said.
Foster became even more of a strict financial manager. She started using Quicken to keep track of all their expenditures. She made sure 12 percent of their income went toward retirement. She cut their restaurant budget to $1,500 a year.
Her efforts caused some tension, she said. "I wanted to be fiscally conservative, probably to a suffocating degree, and Sean wanted to probably enjoy our money a little bit more," she said.
Stickle disagrees that there were any substantial disagreements.
"The only thing we've disagreed about is when I buy a book outside of the budget, and that is usually resolved by me apologizing and not doing it again for a month or so," he said.
Therapists, counselors and financial advisers said opposites attract when it comes to money. Impulse buyers often end up with savers. "When we partner, when we mate, we look for someone who represents the other side of the emotional coin," said Marty Tashman, a counselor based in Somerset, N.J., who has treated many couples who feud over money.
That can wreak havoc on a relationship unless couples learn how to communicate in a respectful manner. That means not accusing your partner of being a financial disaster when he or she makes a poor decision or has more debt than you do. It also means being considerate when you're the partner with the higher income, and allowing your spouse to have a say in financial matters. Experts advise coming up with a household budget together and having regular money meetings. One partner can be the financial manager, but both have to have input.
"For women, if they make significantly less money than their husband, especially if they're not openly discussing it, it can create difficulties in terms of decision-making and who has more input in financial decisions," said Susan Fago, a licensed clinical social worker in Dupont Circle.
When the woman makes more than the man in the relationship, "that has its own set of problems," Fago said. "In our culture, men are expected to be the providers, so it takes a very mature and open supportive relationship for people to be able to deal with those issues."
The bottom line, she said, is that the "ability to generate income is part of our self-esteem and sense of worthiness, unfortunately."
Russell often wonders if she should get a higher-paying job. She makes $32,000 a year as a parent educator at a nonprofit youth center. She has also taken a part-time job as a nail technician so she can contribute more to the household. Guzman, her husband, makes more than $100,000 as the owner of a commercial cleaning business.
He covers the mortgage on their Silver Spring house, sets aside money for their emergency fund and finances their frequent weekend trips to Miami or jaunts to Mexico. She pays utilities and any costs associated with their dogs.
Russell could be making more money doing other work. But she loves her job, so Guzman is willing to help her keep it. "I told her what you have to do is follow your passion," he said.
At times, Russell feels guilty about that, which, in a strange twist, occasionally makes her act out. "It's mostly me feeling like I'm not able to do as much, so I get frustrated, and I probably take my frustration out on him," she said.
They used to have a joint bank account, but she bounced a few checks. "He gets super-frustrated if I bounce a check," she said.
So they decided to use separate accounts. "It became very stressful for me to try to do everything," Guzman said. He has helped her with her student loans and car payment, and she's paying her credit card bills. She tries to make up for it by taking him out on a date occasionally.
Guzman and Russell have been honest with each other about their finances, which counselors and advisers said goes a long way. Too often, one partner hides his or her debt.
"You need to have full disclosure with your partner and be transparent with your finances," Tashman said. "Later on if it's discovered, a lie of omission ends up being the same thing as a lie of commission."
Guzman and Russell get along in every other way, so an occasional dispute over money is manageable. "I view ourselves as equal in the sense that I never say to her, 'You make a lot less money,' " he said. "I never feel any resentment."
"Despite our few fights, they're nothing compared to what I hear from other people," she said. "He's my life partner."
The Obama Mystery
By David Ignatius
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B07
"Why is the press going so easy on Barack Obama?" asks a prominent Democratic Party strategist, echoing a criticism frequently made by the Clinton campaign. It's a fair question, and now that Obama appears to be the front-runner in terms of his delegate count, he deserves a closer look, especially from people like me who have written positively about him.
The reason to look closely now, quite simply, is to avoid buyer's remorse later.
Obama is a phenomenon in American politics -- a candidate who has ignited an enthusiasm among young people that I haven't seen in decades. He promises a nation in which, as his supporters chant, "race doesn't matter." And for a world that is dangerously alienated from American leadership, he offers a new face that could dispel negative assumptions about America -- and in that sense boost the nation's standing and security.
But these are symbolic qualities. What Obama would actually do as president remains a mystery in too many areas. Before he completes what increasingly looks like a march to the Democratic nomination, Obama needs to clarify more clearly what lies behind the beguiling banner marked "change."
Let's start with Obama's economic policies. Like all the major candidates, he has a Web site brimming with plans and proposals. But it has been hard to tell how these different strands come together. Is Obama a "New Democrat," in the tradition of Bill Clinton, who would look skeptically at traditional welfare programs? Is he a neopopulist, in the style of his former rival John Edwards, who would make job protection and tax equity his top domestic priorities? Or is he a technocrat, whose economic answers wouldn't be all that different from those of Hillary Clinton?
I'm still puzzled about where to locate Obama on this policy map. Until the past few weeks, I would have put him somewhere between "New Democrat" and "technocrat." But as he reaches for votes in big industrial states, Obama has been sounding more like Edwards. He proposed a middle-class tax cut a few months ago that would provide a credit of up to $1,000 per family. That's a big policy change that deserves real debate.
Obama added more Edwardsian flourishes in a speech Wednesday at an auto plant in Wisconsin. He called for a $150 billion program to develop "green collar" jobs and new energy sources. Meanwhile, to fix all the highways and bridges of our automotive society, he proposed a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that would spend $60 billion over 10 years. Obama should be pressed on whether these big programs are affordable for an economy that appears to be in a tailspin.
Foreign policy is the area on which Obama has been longest on rhetoric and shortest on details. I've always liked his line about Iraq, that "we have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in." And when I asked Obama last summer what this might mean in practice, he talked about the need for a residual force in and around Iraq and for a gradual, measured pace of troop withdrawals. But in recent months, his tone has suggested a speedier and more decisive departure from Iraq. I fear that Obama is creating public expectations for a quick solution in Iraq that cannot responsibly be achieved.
With any candidate, there's always a question about the quality of his advisers. Hillary comes prepackaged as Clinton II, with a retinue of aides-in-waiting that is at once her strength and disadvantage. Obama's advisers are a mixed group, but I hear some complaints from policy analysts. One of his leading foreign policy gurus, Anthony Lake, was widely criticized as national security adviser in the first Clinton administration. His role does not reassure people who wonder what substance lies behind the "change" mantra.
To understand why Obama needs tougher scrutiny now, we need only recall his political avatar, President John F. Kennedy. Like Obama, JFK had served a relatively short time in the Senate without compiling a significant legislative record. He was young and charismatic, but uncertain in his foreign and domestic policies, and during his first 18 months JFK was often rebuffed at home and abroad. The CIA suckered him into a half-baked invasion of Cuba. And Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev concluded after an initial meeting that Kennedy was so weak and uncertain that he could be pushed around -- a judgment that led to the Cuban missile crisis.
Obama's inexperience is not a fatal flaw, but it's a real issue. He should use the rest of this campaign to give voters a clearer picture of how he would govern -- not in style but in substance.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.
Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."
This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B07
"Why is the press going so easy on Barack Obama?" asks a prominent Democratic Party strategist, echoing a criticism frequently made by the Clinton campaign. It's a fair question, and now that Obama appears to be the front-runner in terms of his delegate count, he deserves a closer look, especially from people like me who have written positively about him.
The reason to look closely now, quite simply, is to avoid buyer's remorse later.
Obama is a phenomenon in American politics -- a candidate who has ignited an enthusiasm among young people that I haven't seen in decades. He promises a nation in which, as his supporters chant, "race doesn't matter." And for a world that is dangerously alienated from American leadership, he offers a new face that could dispel negative assumptions about America -- and in that sense boost the nation's standing and security.
But these are symbolic qualities. What Obama would actually do as president remains a mystery in too many areas. Before he completes what increasingly looks like a march to the Democratic nomination, Obama needs to clarify more clearly what lies behind the beguiling banner marked "change."
Let's start with Obama's economic policies. Like all the major candidates, he has a Web site brimming with plans and proposals. But it has been hard to tell how these different strands come together. Is Obama a "New Democrat," in the tradition of Bill Clinton, who would look skeptically at traditional welfare programs? Is he a neopopulist, in the style of his former rival John Edwards, who would make job protection and tax equity his top domestic priorities? Or is he a technocrat, whose economic answers wouldn't be all that different from those of Hillary Clinton?
I'm still puzzled about where to locate Obama on this policy map. Until the past few weeks, I would have put him somewhere between "New Democrat" and "technocrat." But as he reaches for votes in big industrial states, Obama has been sounding more like Edwards. He proposed a middle-class tax cut a few months ago that would provide a credit of up to $1,000 per family. That's a big policy change that deserves real debate.
Obama added more Edwardsian flourishes in a speech Wednesday at an auto plant in Wisconsin. He called for a $150 billion program to develop "green collar" jobs and new energy sources. Meanwhile, to fix all the highways and bridges of our automotive society, he proposed a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that would spend $60 billion over 10 years. Obama should be pressed on whether these big programs are affordable for an economy that appears to be in a tailspin.
Foreign policy is the area on which Obama has been longest on rhetoric and shortest on details. I've always liked his line about Iraq, that "we have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in." And when I asked Obama last summer what this might mean in practice, he talked about the need for a residual force in and around Iraq and for a gradual, measured pace of troop withdrawals. But in recent months, his tone has suggested a speedier and more decisive departure from Iraq. I fear that Obama is creating public expectations for a quick solution in Iraq that cannot responsibly be achieved.
With any candidate, there's always a question about the quality of his advisers. Hillary comes prepackaged as Clinton II, with a retinue of aides-in-waiting that is at once her strength and disadvantage. Obama's advisers are a mixed group, but I hear some complaints from policy analysts. One of his leading foreign policy gurus, Anthony Lake, was widely criticized as national security adviser in the first Clinton administration. His role does not reassure people who wonder what substance lies behind the "change" mantra.
To understand why Obama needs tougher scrutiny now, we need only recall his political avatar, President John F. Kennedy. Like Obama, JFK had served a relatively short time in the Senate without compiling a significant legislative record. He was young and charismatic, but uncertain in his foreign and domestic policies, and during his first 18 months JFK was often rebuffed at home and abroad. The CIA suckered him into a half-baked invasion of Cuba. And Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev concluded after an initial meeting that Kennedy was so weak and uncertain that he could be pushed around -- a judgment that led to the Cuban missile crisis.
Obama's inexperience is not a fatal flaw, but it's a real issue. He should use the rest of this campaign to give voters a clearer picture of how he would govern -- not in style but in substance.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.
Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."
This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)