Energy Givers and Energy Sinks

I saw someone pushing How To Live With Introverts yesterday as a good explanation of how introverts work, and the particular explanation of the energy conservation of introversion set off a chain of thought about the way social interactions work.

First off, I'm not big on the extravert/introvert dichotomy, simply because I'm not big on dualistic systems. A spectrum is a much more interesting and accurate way to examine how people "recharge", although that wouldn't be as convenient for cartoonists and self-help gurus who garner 100+ comment threads by caricaturing extroverts as manic monsters and introverts as idiot children. But the example in the above cartoon of introverts giving their energy in social situations made me think: spending your energy on social interactions is not the same thing as contributing energy to social interactions.

Consider: certain types of people suck the energy out of any interaction, whether it's a one-on-one situation or a group setting. They're difficult to talk to, and they're difficult to sit quietly with, because they're needy. This can manifest in various ways, and it's not confined to one side of the spectrum. A loud, dominating personality might try to drag all the energy in the room to himself, requiring people to either throw up shields or be bombarded by an excess of energy that only exhausts; a silent, parasitic personality might constantly absorb energy without giving any back. Interacting with energy sinks is wearing whether you veer toward introversion or extraversion, because there's no way to recharge energy and nowhere to hide.

By way of contrast, let me present to you my brother. He doesn't have to be loud or crazy; he gives energy to any situation he enters just by entering it, whether he's in high spirits or completely, quietly worn out after a long shift. He gives energy to a room even if he's sleeping on the floor at 2 am. He neither sits around waiting for affirmation nor gets up and demands it. He can be boisterous with the loud ones and peaceful with the quiet ones and succinct with the surly ones as needed, but in everything he just is himself, adding life to gatherings large and small, wild or solemn, simply by being there.

Social energy-givers can be active and chatty, or quiet and serene, or anywhere between these two poles. They don't demand an investment of everyone else's energy; they don't requisition attention; they are at ease with themselves and so able to put others at ease. Energy sinks, on the other hand, are often nervous and insecure, whether they're calling attention to themselves with antics or gossip, or trying to influence social perception of themselves by overstated opinions, or desperately trying to fit in, or sullenly begging for bones of affirmation. Some people shift between giving and taking; some are mostly energy-neutral; some are dependably one or the other.

This is not very technical language, of course, but merely my disorganized reactions to the hamster ball analogy of the post above. For a more systematic, virtue-based analysis of what makes a person agreeable society, see Brandon's discussion of affability.

Affability, affabilitas, is also called amicitia, friendliness, but I think that, despite the fact that 'affability' in English usually indicates a matter of temperament rather than character, it is in some ways potentially less misleading. Affability is, roughly, the virtue of making one's interactions with others suitable for friendship; it is not friendship itself, but the acquired disposition of acting outwardly in a way that does not rule friendship out. It is one of those virtues that is widely recognized as a virtue but little discussed, perhaps because it is often classified as a 'lesser virtue', as being very little more than sociable manners taken to a high degree of polish; as we shall see, it is not so clearly minor.

A Pathetic Story With Two Morals

Yesterday, whether it was wedding mania or baby's growth catching up to me, I was completely exhausted before noon. All morning long the bone-weariness of pregnancy weighed me down, making movement slow and thought difficult. When I stood, I felt too tired to walk. When I sat, I felt too tired to get up. When I laid down... but I was afraid to try that, because at that point there's no return. When I had to move, I crept up the stairs like Frodo climbing Mount Doom, bowed almost double from burdens and fatigue. It was bad.

So all afternoon the kids binged on episodes of Phineas and Ferb and Hole in the Wall and ate cold hot dogs and chips and kept the three-year-old alive while I lay half-conscious in bed and didn't even care. Not only did I not care, I was grateful for the technology that produces dumb game shows and processed meat products that don't need to be heated. But it did make me wonder about next school year. If I'm this tired at not-quite-four-months pregnant, how will it be during the school year at seven months? Eight months? Nine months? How am I going to teach these children when my head is too heavy to think? How can I run this household when I can't move?

Many plans flashed through my head, each worse than the other, but eventually I had to go with the one that made the most sense: I just went to sleep. When I woke up, I hadn't solved these problems, but Darwin was home and making dinner for everyone and the downstairs had been picked up.

So, Moral #1: don't try to make big decisions about the future while you're completely incapacitated. Moral #2: Daddy will fix everything when he comes home.

What Keeps You Reading

When I'm simply reading, I read with the consuming desire to know what happens to the characters and what it all means. This desire is undiminished by the knowledge that the people and events I'm reading about don't actually exist. Indeed, there's a sense in which I think it is stronger, knowing that I'm reading fiction, in that I have a certain faith when reading a novel that it will all mean something in the end. (If I get to the end and find that it doesn't, I'm usually angry.) The fiction writer filters through and chooses what events to portray based on the meaningful version of the world being portrayed. And thus, if the writer is good, every thing which is described in the novel has a reason for being there. Not just "that's what happened next" but an actual reason. A reason why we need to know about this.

This has been striking me in a paralyzing kind of way at the moment, because I've been reading a lot of diaries and memoirs. A diary is also a filtered version of reality. The diarist writes down what is important to her that happened that day. But a diary doesn't tend to have an overarching story.

Right now I'm reading Florence Farmborough's With the armies of the tsar: A nurse at the Russian front, 1914-18, the diary of an English woman who was working as a governess in Russia when the Great War broke out and spent the war working as a nurse in a front line field hospital, before having to escape back to England after the Russian Revolution transitioned into a civil war. It's fascinating reading. But one of the things that has had me thinking a lot is: How would this be different if it were a novel? Here's another page long anecdote I which Florence deals with a badly injured soldier who dies of wounds while she nurses him. It's different from the scores of other times Florence writes about dealing with such a situation, but in another sense it's "yet another time Florence helps a dying soldier". In a novel, would you skip a lot of the medical detail and every-day suffering because it would be repetitive? And yet, what's what Florence is dealing with every day. The incidents she deals with may be repetitive in a certain sense, but it's the sheer repetition of difficult situations which gradually changes her over the course of the war.

Sometimes it seems like very dramatic event is "part of the story". Other times it seems that if this was a novel you would cut out most of the events but come up with a clear idea of how Florence's essential changes progress because of the few events you portrayed.

Maybe both are acceptable ways of writing a novel if done right. There's a sense in which, reading a diary first published forty years ago about events which took place a hundred years ago, I'm reading it as fiction. I don't know they people involved any more than I know fictional characters. And yet, it seems to me that there must be some way in which I, as a reader, interact with the book differently than I would with a novel which relayed the same events. I make certain allowances or give it leeway because I know that the author didn't know what "the story" was as she wrote it. Her author's filter was at the day level, not the overall story level. So what keeps me reading, knowing this is a journal, is probably different from what would keep me reading if it were a novel.

As a reader it's easy to pass over the question of "should this incident have been included", but since I'm reading a diary as if it were a novel (and trying to do research related to writing a novel) the question seems to come to the fore.

It Isn't Mine

This has been a wedding-heavy summer for us, attending four in all. It's also a middle year of sorts: We just had out twelfth anniversary, and in twelve more years our oldest daughter will be the age (indeed a little older than) we were when we got married. Thus, it's perhaps natural to find myself thinking a bit about weddings, both in general and our own in retrospect.

If there was something that I could go back and tell my 22-year-old self about weddings it would be: "This really isn't yours."

Typically one has a wedding because one wants to be married. (If you're planning a wedding with someone you don't want to be married to, stop now!) Certainly, we very much wanted to be married. And one of the reasons we wanted to be married was that we were so glad to be us. I preferred MrsDarwin to all other women, I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life, and I thought virtually everything about us was wonderful and unique. Because of all this, it seemed very important that the wedding be our wedding. If we weren't like the sea of other couples, our wedding had to be different somehow.

Luckily, finances and such necessitated that our wedding be fairly small and simple, so this didn't come out in any really crazy ways. And there are obvious places where a couple quite rightly chooses what they think is best: We picked out traditional organ music for the ceremony, picked what we thought were the best readings from the options available, etc. Others were necessary choices given the venue and scope: We were having the reception in my parents house and yard, so dancing was pretty clearly out and that fit well with my lack of dancing ability.

However, even within that scope, thinking back, we spent a lot of time worrying about various details and whether they would express us. Did the food express us? We flirted briefly with not having a wedding cake because we didn't like the taste of bakery cake and icing. Some wise relative talked us out of this by sensibly pointing out, "People like and expect cake at a wedding reception."

And that was the thing that, in retrospect, was too often not at the center of things. People weren't coming to our wedding to find out whether we liked cake, or what our favorite colors were, or what foods we would put on the buffet. They were coming to celebrate the beginning of our marriage with us. The purpose of the reception was to give them food that they would like, get a chance to meet everyone, and allow everyone to enjoy themselves. We needn't have worried so much about our preferences in it all because, frankly, what with talking to everyone and the stress of making a major life change, we never got the chance to sit down and eat or think about anything at the reception.

At a wedding, the couple is there to get married, and that's most of what they're going to get out of it. The guests are there to watch the ceremony and wish them well. And the purpose of the reception is to give the guests an enjoyable time. To that end, the traditional wedding reception social structure works pretty well, and following it with only modest tweeks to fit your preferences and needs is a good way to cut down a lot of the stress of planning the whole thing.

I still think we're a wonderful and unique couple, of course, but one of the things that I see much more clearly now is that what we were doing was something all married couples do: get married. It didn't have to be different in every way and express us perfectly, because what we were doing was actually something that gave us commonality with other married couples, not set us apart. And in that sense, it wasn't even completely ours.

They Called Them Poilu

The French term for their soldiers in the Great War (the equivalent of the British "Tommy" and the American "Doughboy") was Poilu which translates as "hairy one". Nothing quite sums up that nickname like this image.

In post-WW2 America, the military abilities of the French get a bad rap, but in the Great War the poilu lived up to the reputation of their Napoleonic forbears and made "they shall not pass" (Ils ne passeront pas) a byword for a generation.

Then All Things Are Permitted

Following the recent Supreme Court rulings dealing with "gay marriage", a couple of my more liberal acquaintances were enthusiastically posting pictures from gay pride parades. These put me in mind of this old Onion piece, one of those which treads such a delicate line between satire and commentary that you wonder a bit what the author's object was in writing it.

Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years

The mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians, a hard-won civil-rights victory gained through decades of struggle against prejudice and discrimination, was set back at least 50 years Saturday in the wake of the annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade.

"I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth," said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. "Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong."

The parade, organized by the Los Angeles Gay And Lesbian And Bisexual And Transvestite And Transgender Alliance (LAGALABATATA), was intended to "promote acceptance, tolerance, and equality for the city's gay community." Just the opposite, however, was accomplished, as the event confirmed the worst fears of thousands of non-gay spectators, cementing in their minds a debauched and distorted image of gay life straight out of the most virulent right-wing hate literature.

The piece itself contains a "commentary from expert" explanation which covers the rationalization that I've heard given in real life by gay pride supporters who are nonetheless willing to sheepishly admit, "well, yeah, I guess it does get a bit over the top":

Dr. Henry Thorne, a New York University history professor who has written several books about the gay-rights movement, explained the misunderstanding.

"After centuries of oppression as an 'invisible' segment of society, gays, emboldened by the 1969 Stonewall uprising, took to the streets in the early '70s with an 'in-your-face' attitude. Confronting the worst prejudices of a world that didn't accept them, they fought back against these prejudices with exaggeration and parody, reclaiming their enemies' worst stereotypes about them and turning them into symbols of gay pride," Thorne said. "Thirty years later, gays have won far greater acceptance in the world at large, but they keep doing this stuff anyway."

"Mostly, I think, because it's really fun," Thorne added.

The Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade, Thorne noted, is part of a decades-old gay-rights tradition. But, for mainstream heterosexuals unfamiliar with irony and the reclamation of stereotypes for the purpose of exploding them, the parade resembled an invasion of grotesque outer-space mutants, bent on the destruction of the human race.

Here again we have some of the modern reliance on irony without regard to whether what you're doing is actually good. I think there's something else going on here as well, however.

When trying to make-nice to conservatives, proponents of "same sex marriage" tend to emphasize it as a way of enshrining commitment and sexual morality. However, while this tends to suggest that same sex relationships should have the same moral obligations and boundaries as traditional ones, in practice I have never known anyone who believes that same sex marriages are moral from a Christian point of view, and yet holds that sex outside of marriage (and a host of other, related sexual issues) is definitely wrong. I'm sure that a few such people do exist, but in general even the "conservative" supporters of same sex marriage tend to have adopted a significantly loosened idea of overall sexual morality: Sex is very much what you make of it. Different people have different expectations. The key thing is that everything be consensual and that people never betray the commitments they make, whatever those may be.

This Atlantic piece (which from what I can tell is written from what it terms the progressive point of view on sex) argues that sexual traditionalists and progressives in our culture have fundamentally different ideas about what sex is and what it's for.

Trad View:

As religious conservatives see it, the great mistake we make when we masturbate is to claim our sexuality as ours alone. All sexual activity must be about "mutual self-giving" between a husband and a wife, the church claims, arguing that masturbation is "an intrinsically and gravely disordered action."

Prog View:

In The Ethical Slut, perhaps the best-known "catechism" of progressive sexual morality, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy make the case that "the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable, but it does not complete anybody." Masturbation matters, they argue, not merely because it helps you learn what you want sexually from a partner, but because it helps bring "your locus of control into yourself."

Especially given the source, this struck me as surprisingly perceptive. Moreover, it suggests that if one's sexuality is fundamentally one's own, defined by oneself and limited only by the commitments one makes oneself, there's nothing necessarily wrong in engaging in "depraved" expressions of sexuality, whether ironically or seriously.

When Brothers Dwell In Unity

My sister Anna was married on Saturday, so we spent the past week in Cincinnati doing this and that to get everything in readiness for the big day. It was a busy, exhausting time, and many good things happened, but what stands out to me was the happiness of having all my siblings in the same place, and not just siblings, but their spouses and my brother's fiancee and all the grandchildren too. I played with my pretty nieces all week, and got to hold my new nephew Benj, with his perfect round head and big ears and his manly fuss. It is a constant joy to me to see my brother as a father now, or my sister as a mother, or my siblings as aunts and uncles to each individual grandbaby.

Just as wonderful is interacting with my brothers and sisters as adults, each with our own separate experience, and yet with such a strong core of mutual family life that we instinctively speak the same language. I've often wondered if children in broken family situations end up clinging to each other more firmly because they form the unshakeable heart of the family, whereas intact families have a stronger parental center and less cohesive sibling groups. There may be no marrying and giving in marriage in heaven, but after death I'll still be the sister of John, Will, Liz, Anna, and Nathanael, and being together with all of them now is like a little foretaste of eternal bliss.

Satanic Irony

Irony seems to have become one of our primarily, modern American modes of expression -- particularly among what might call the "hipster left". After all, we live in a time in which one of the most-watched political news and analysis shows is actually a parody show in which a comedian pretends to be running a news show, and actually does kind of report the news, but, you know: ironically. And another is a show in which another comedian pretends to be a rival conservative news host, but of course he's doing so ironically, to show how dumb those guys are. (Which -- ironically -- means that while in general mocking religious conservatives, via parody, Stephen Colbert is at times able to express his apparently sincere religious beliefs more plainly than any non-ironic mainstream media figure does.)

One of the ways that this ironic sensibility gets expressed is in taking the impression one's opponent has of one, acting it out, and thus thinking that one has made one's opponent look stupid. One can only assume it's some dynamic along these lines that led to the latest story out of the Texas abortion fight: Apparently in response to pro-life protesters singing religious songs such as Amazing Grace, their pro-choice opponents took to shouting "Hail Satan!"

See, it's ironic because those religious freaks think that people who just want to stand up for women's rights are spawn of Satan. So these courageous fighters for women's rights shout "Hail Satan" and the religious wingnuts get angry, and...

Yeah. As you can see, this goes nowhere but stupid.

I'm sure the "Hail Satan" shouters don't believe that Satan actually exists. They probably just think they're getting a rise out of their opponents by playing into negative stereotypes. But words and actions mean things. I suppose it would be hard to convince these people that they shouldn't call on Satan, since they probably don't think he exists, but nonetheless choosing to do transgressive things has a real cost and causes real harm even if someone thinks she's only be "ironic". Frankly I'm glad that irony does have the following on my side that it does on the other. I don't think it would be a good refutation of liberal claims that conservatives are racists of Nazis for people to go around in SS uniforms or stage mock clan rallies. That wouldn't be ironic, it would just be wrong. And so is this.

Or, looked at another way, maybe it's just truth in advertising.

Hell: Oppression or Justice?

An argument about the existence of hell broke out, and I couldn't help inserting myself into it.

Something interesting, however, struck me about how arguments were phrased. Formulations (from theists) of the belief that hell either does not exist or does not contain anyone seemed to be based on a need to avoid thinking of God as on oppressor:

"I refuse to believe that a just and loving God would condemn anyone to eternal suffering."

Defenses of the existence of hell and the idea that at least some people are in it tended to emphasize the ability of people to do wrong:

"People choose hell by utterly and irrevocably rejecting God. Given the willingness of people to choose evil in this life, even when it makes them unhappy, I don't see why it's hard to believe that some people would reject God permanently."

The more I thought about these two formulations, the more it struck me that these tied in the with Kling's "three axis model of politics" which I mentioned a while back. The three axes are:

[P]rogressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.

Here we have those who deny hell (which is, indeed, generally thought of as a "liberal" theological belief) doing so based on the argument that allowing some people to experience eternal misery turns God into an oppressor. Since they don't want to see God as an oppressor, they reject the possibility of anyone being condemned to hell. Also implicit in this is a belief that everyone is, at root, good. No one will really, really, really choose hell over the beatific vision, so obviously the only explanation for anyone being in hell is that God is a big oppressive meany who put them there.

Those who believe in hell (a belief we might term "conservative" theologically) see hell as a matter of justice and free will: Some people will reject God, and if they choose to do so, then justice and free will demand that God allow them their condemnation. Thus, the "conservative" belief is based, like many other conservative beliefs, on a conviction that we can be pretty sure that some people will do evil, and that the application of justice will necessitate those people being punished.

Kling's model is one of those things which I am a little annoyed to find working as well as it does, since it seems so utterly simplistic. Yet I have to admit, in its basic sort of way, it provides a bit of insights into a startling number of arguments.

Twelve years: On Being Married to the Right Person

Yesterday was our twelfth anniversary. This was us then, looking like babies:

This is us now, with babies:

Going around the internets a few weeks ago was an article entitled "How I Know My Wife Married the Wrong Person", which, contrary to the sensationalist title, is not a memoir of a marriage gone bad but a  plea to the youngsters to embrace commitment despite not finding one's "soul mate".

And after two years, there’s no hiding behind the dinner-and-a-movie façade of dating life any longer. I can’t buy enough flowers to conceal it. I can’t open enough doors. I can’t say enough “I love you’s.” She knows (and painfully, so do I) that she married the wrong person. 

Allow me to humbly explain (before she reads this). For quite some time now, there has been a myth floating around our idealistic individualistic society. A myth that claims that marriage will only work when you find your “smoking-hot, high-class, filthy rich, love-at-first-sight, sexually compatible, accept-me-as-I-am, Titanic-Notebook-Sweet-Home-Alabama-Twilight-esque, soul mate.”  

...That’s why I know beyond doubt, at least by society’s standards, that Lindsay married the wrong person.  I’ll never be quite as smart as a New York Times Best Seller. I’ll never make a six digit paycheck. I’ll never electrify the bedroom in the way our pornographic media culture broadcasts as the norm. I’ll never understand her quite as well as we both wish I would. I’ll continue to make mistakes. I’ll get angry over silly stuff. I’ll forget to do the dishes. I’ll raise my voice when I shouldn’t. I’ll let pride get the best of me. And I’ll probably think of myself far more often than I should… Oh yeah, and my younger days as a part-time body-builder, part-time male-model, full-time Matthew McConaughey stunt double are over. I retired this January. (Are you drowning in my self-pity yet? I am.)  Look, I’m not an astrophysicist. I’m not a movie star. I’m not a billionaire. I’m just Tyler. And Tyler does not meet the standards of the Real Housewives of Louisville.

To those of us who have known cases, so painful to all involved, of people who actually did marry the wrong person, the twee quality of these paragraphs borders on the offensive. But never mind that. Obviously no one marries the perfect person, because no one is perfect. That's so self-evident that I feel silly typing it.

I also think that it's not "idealistic" or "individualistic" to feel that your spouse actually did marry the right person. I think Darwin married the right person, absolutely. Darwin thinks I married the right person. This is not because we're “smoking-hot, high-class, filthy rich, love-at-first-sight, sexually compatible, accept-me-as-I-am, Titanic-Notebook-Sweet-Home-Alabama-Twilight-esque, soul mate[s].” I don't even know what that means, except that some people watch too many movies. I do know that whenever we're doing something onerous together -- reflooring a house, washing poopy underwear out in the toilet, having a baby, moving with five kids (including a newborn) and two cats -- he looks at me and says, "I wouldn't do this with anyone but you." And I believe that he married the right person, because I wouldn't do it with anyone else but him.

I know I have a lot of shortcomings as a wife, especially in the areas of home organization and management and cleaning. That means that I want to strive hard to be a better wife to him, not that I throw up my hands and sigh, "Oh, my husband married the wrong person." Realizing that one needs to change and improve is several orders of magnitude different from announcing, "I'm the wrong person for this job!" It's the difference between perseverance and despair. (Sometimes realizing that you're the wrong person for the job can be realism, but in the case of marriage, a life-long commitment, it's despair.)

But for anyone who feels the needs to protest, Darwin would be happy to step outside with anyone who would like to tell him that his wife married the wrong person. Pistols at ten paces, but I warn you: he's a crack shot. And I'll be right next to him with the other pistol, because my husband married the right woman.

Stuff for your Saturday

1.

Biggest thing first: January 2014 marks the publishing debut of Darwin's sister Rosamund Hodge. Her YA novel Cruel Beauty is a steampunk/Greek mythology/Victoriana retelling of Cupid and Psyche set in a world with a paper sky. Here's a sneak peek at the cover, plus an interview in which she reveals how publishing a book is just part of a grand plot to get back at Darwin.

2.

Speaking of beautiful girls with death wishes, here are some exploding Disney princesses:



3.

Speaking of things that might not make everyone laugh, here's the most intellectual jokes that Slate can compile, with explanations for those who may get it. Here's what made me laugh out loud:

 “Two women walk into a bar and talk about the Bechdel test.” 

Why it’s funny: Because “Bechdel test” is actually the name of a guy the first woman is dating.

4.

Speaking of things that people don't understand, io9 has an increasingly incensed Q&A on the Star Trek: Into Darkness plot, which sounds like a hot mess. People who've seen it assure me that it makes sense while you're watching it, but I dunno. Lots of spoilers at the link, which didn't matter to me because Brandon already totally spoiled the movie for me, except that I didn't believe him until I read it here because it sounded so ludicrous.

5.

We watched The Muppets the other night, and I thought it was a mixed bag. Overall, it was mostly sweet and feel-good, but the theme of nostalgia didn't seem in keeping with the tone of the other Muppet movies, and it wasn't as wall-to-wall funny either. I don't think that the meta-theme of Muppets as The Muppets will hold up as well as The Muppets Take Manhattan or The Great Muppet Caper, in which it was just taken for granted that these characters fit into society just as they were (except for Gonzo, of course).

It was a curious commentary that after we saw a movie with four or five new songs, the one we all hummed afterwards was "Mahna Mahna".

99 Years Ago Today: The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and His Wife

On June 28th, 1914, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, fifty-year old Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a 19-year-old Bosnian-Serb nationalist. The assassination began an at first slow-moving diplomatic crisis which would result a month later, July 28th, in Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia.

The assassination plot itself was so badly botched that its success is one of the surprising events of history. A group of Bosnian-Serb nationalists (half of them teenagers) -- who wanted Bosnia-Herzegovina to be independent from Austria-Hungary and integrated into a pan-Slavic state -- had received bombs, pistols and cyanide pills from officers in the Serbian army sympathetic to their cause. They planned an assassination attempt against the Archduke and his wife and stationed themselves along the route which their open car would travel through the city. Several of the assassins failed to make any move when the car passed and another threw a bomb at the car, however the bomb bounced off the folded convertible hood, fell behind the car, and exploded, disabling the next car in the motorcade and injuring a number of bystanders. The assassin who had thrown the bomb bit a cyanide capsule and jumped off a bridge, but the cyanide only made him sick and the fall wasn't far and the river nearly dry, so he was quickly arrest by police (though not before members of the angry crowd beat him.)

Determined to show they were undaunted by the failed attack, Archduke Ferdinand and Sophie performed their visit to the city hall, where they were formally greeted by the major and the Archduke made a brief speech in which he mentioned the attack but thanked the people of Sarajevo for their supportive response to him.

The Archduke and his wife then decided to visit those wounded in the attack and got back into their motorcade to proceed to the hospital. The motorcade took a wrong turn, and one of the would-be-assassins, Gavrilo Princip, (who had repaired to a delicatessen when the assassination attempt failed) stepped out into the street and saw the Archduke's car, which had taken a wrong turn, gone to reverse, and then stalled. Princip rushed the car and fired two shots at a distance of five feet, one of which pierced Franz Ferdinand's jugular vein and the other of which wounded Sophie in the stomach. Both were dead by the time the car reached the governor's residence where they were rushed for medical treatment. Franz Ferdinand's last words were, "Sophie, Sophie! Don't die! Live for our children!"

When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia mobilized its armies to potentially intervene in protection of Serbia. Germany demanded the Russia cease mobilizing, and when it failed to do so declared war on Russia on August 1st and France and Belgium on August 3nd. Thus began the First World War.

Princip was spared the death penalty because he was a month short of the legal age of 20 at the time of the assassination. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but died of illness in 1918.

Alive and Kicking

I'm in that nice part of pregnancy in which I can almost forget, at times, that I'm pregnant. Oh, you know what I mean. I love Baby, but it's good to be able to sit around and feel normal, not queasy or exhausted or too heavy or full of the thousand natural shocks that pregnant flesh is heir to. Particularly lovely is to be able to lay in bed in mostly comfort and to poke at the baby.

Baby is precocious. I've never felt a child quicken so early. At the tender age of 14 weeks it started giving kicks and flutters and rolls that I can discern as movement and not just intestinal rumblings or the pulse in my stomach. And I've never felt a child so articulated so soon. This is not just a blob of baby. It has a back, a head, little hands and feet, and I can feel them through my stomach. I can't imagine this is just a case of the grand multipara knowing what to prod for. This is unmistakeable. Baby floats up near the top a lot when I'm laying down, and, well, there Baby is, large as life.

Large as life, indeed. This morning my seven-year-old and I lay in my bed and looked down at the huge lopsided lump on the right side of my stomach. We poked it, feeling the long smooth back, and it gave such a lurch on the on the other side of my stomach that I yipped. Maybe it's payback -- I spend so much time laying on my back, nudging baby in amazement that I can actually feel it, that Baby is getting mad at me.

That's part and parcel of life here. I feel like I've lost control of the laundry, the cleaning, the cooking, the grocery shopping, almost everything. Not that those things don't get done, but that all system has broken down, and everything happens on an as-needed basis. And yet we have clothes to wear and food keeps appearing on the table at roughly dinner time and no one has collapsed from rickets or scurvy or an overdose of cheerios.  The kids down the street make blithe comments to the effect of, "Gee, your house sure is messy!" and yet keep coming over, day after day, to play here for hours. Baby's rapid growth is startling, but that early squdging around is a benefit I hadn't counted on. It seems life keeps on kicking whether or not I've got all my ducks in a row.

The next month is packed almost to overflowing with life-changing events: my baby sister gets married, my friend gets married and my nephew gets baptized. My little brother gets married at the end of summer. Everything is growing fast, getting bigger and livelier and more chaotic and better than anyone could have planned. None of these things require my intervention. They happen, and happen well, without my having to put a hand in, and thank God for that. All I have to do is show up and let these kids kick me around.

The Left Discovers Inheritance Taxes Are Unfair

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic has a post approving of yesterday's ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act. His jumping off point is a NY Times piece that explains the lawsuit with which the DOMA challenge originated as follows (I can't find this paragraph in the NY Times article he linked do, though I do find copies of that paragraph elsewhere, so the NYT may have edited the article since posting):

The case on the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, concerned two New York City women, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer, who married in 2007 in Canada. Ms. Spyer died in 2009, and Ms. Windsor inherited her property. The 1996 law did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse, and she faced a tax bill of about $360,000 that a spouse in an opposite-sex marriage would not have had to pay. Ms. Windsor sued, and last year the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, struck down the 1996 law.

Coates's reaction to this is:

The state repossessing a couple's wealth because it finds them icky, is wholly unjust.
...
It is wrong to strip people of wealth because you are bigot. It is wrong to strip people of the right to name their caretakers because you are afraid. It is wrong to make war on people because you can not get over yourself. And though today we may say that we have advanced, through much of this country, the wrong continues unabated.

Now, this was kind of interesting to me. Generally speaking, when people on the left talk about inherited money, they talk about it in terms of society taking a fair share of money that one rich person passes on to another rich person who doesn't deserve it. I've even heard progressives suggest that the state should automatically confiscate all money on someone's death, allowing no inheritance at all. But here we have the claim that an inheritance tax is "the state repossessing [someone's] wealth because it finds them icky".

Let's think about that one for a moment. Say that I have a child who is dependent on me long term (lives with me, I support him, etc.) I die, and I've designated him as my heir. If the estate that I leave is large enough, the state will tax that estate. Does that mean that the state finds the parent/child estate "icky"? Not to my knowledge.

How does inheritance tax work different for spouses than for other heirs?

The normal way the estate tax works is that a certain amount of inheritance is "exempt" and then the remainder of the estate above that exemption is taxed at some rate. So, for instance, in 2009 (when the partner of the plaintiff in the DOMA case died, the exemption was $3.5 million (not counting life insurance and other fully exempt source of money) and the maximum rate of the table of rates charged against the inheritance above the exempt amount was 45%.

However, because spouses are seen as forming a single economic unit, the estate tax has normally exempted occasions in which the surviving spouse inherits from a deceased spouse.

So, what is it that Ms. Windsor suffered as a result of DOMA? If the IRS refused to recognize her as a spouse, she would have been taxed at some rate on the money in excess of $3.5 million. Apparently this would have resulted in a tax of $360,000. So, Ms. Windsor would have inherited some sort of amount over $4.1 million (assuming the top rate) but instead she apparently inherited some amount over $3.8 million.

Now, I actually agree this is unfair. Money which is inherited has already been taxed when it's earned, and the really rich mostly find ways to get around the tax anyway. I think we should just abolish the inheritance tax entirely.

Assuming that we keep the estate tax, any decision as to what sort of heirs are exempt and which aren't is going to be necessarily arbitrary. Is it fair that a financially independent spouse would be exempt while a financially dependent child would not? What about a sibling? Why can someone you live with be exempt only if you have an officially recognized sexual relationship but not a non-sexual relationship?

To an extent, I think the blanked amount exemption is meant to deal with these potential unfairnesses. Sure, the rules on who can inherit without paying tax may be arbitrary, but the first $3.5 million (back in 2009, now extended to $5 million in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars) of your estate is exempt no matter who you leave it to. So even if you're impacted by the estate tax at all, you already have a fair amount of money in hand.

We Pray Always for Your Good

Perhaps many will soon find themselves in the position that my family was in recently, on the announcement of a relative's impending homosexual union, recognized in that state as marriage. The announcement could not go unanswered, and yet what could we say? This person is very aware of my family's observant Catholicism and knew that we would not endorse this behavior. However, we love our relative very much and didn't want to cause an irreparable breach in our relationship.

Some combatants in the cultural wars think that it is an ironclad defense to assert, "Well, you may be dogmatic about issue X, but if it became personal, if it was your family member who [comes out as a homosexual, gets pregnant out of wedlock, has an unhappy marriage], you'd change your views pretty quickly." Not so. Our faith is built upon a rock and does not sway with the shifting tides of circumstance or personal tragedy. The question was, not should we embrace this event, but how best to give an answer rooted in God's own love, without implying our consent to this event.

In great agitation, I went down to sit in adoration, only to find that the church was closed. So from the parking lot, which was the closest I could get to the Eucharist, I sat and tapped out this reply in the name of the family:

Dear [Name] 

We all love you very much and acknowledge what a happy time this must be for you and [partner]. Even though you know that we all believe that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, I hope you also know that we pray always for your good and that you will always know God's will for your life. Keep us in your prayers as you are in ours.

Our relative was thoughtful enough not to invite us to the ceremony, knowing we would not attend.

This matter has been a cause for intense grief and heartache for us, and though we seem to have maintained this relationship, hateful words have been hurled at my family from other quarters. Again, what can we do? We can only meet hate with love and ignorance with understanding, and pray that God's will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

"Speak the speech... trippingly upon the tongue"

...And when we hold our Shakespeare reading, we're all going to speak the way Shakespeare intended.

Inspired by working with Kevin Spacey, Sir Trevor Nunn has claimed that American accents are "closer" than contemporary English to the accents of those used in the Bard's day. 

The eminent Shakespearean scholar John Barton has suggested that Shakespeare's accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent. 

Others say that the speech of Elizabethans was much quicker than it is in modern day Shakespeare productions. 

Well, now you can judge for yourself.

 Close on twelve years ago, Darwin and I went to a production of Measure for Measure directed by Sir Trevor Nunn. The program mentioned his interest in recapturing Shakespeare's original accents, and the vocal design of the production was supposed to be based on his research. I don't remember much how it sounded; we were up in the nosebleed section, so many of the nuances of the performances were lost on us.

What strikes me on listening to the selections is not just the beauty of the voices, but how good it is to hear Shakespeare acted, and acted well. I'm used to reading Shakespeare in print, or reading it aloud to the kids, or (occasionally) hearing it recited either as monologues or in groups reading scenes or plays. But recitation is not acting, and Shakespeare is, first, for acting.

All Same-Sex Couples Are Infertile

Back in my native state of California, ever at the cutting edge of cultural change, the State Assembly has passed a bill, AB-460, which is now being considered by the State Senate. This bill (which Matthew Shadle blogs about cogently over at Catholic Moral Theology) would extend the state of California's currently requirement that medical insurance plans "offer coverage for the treatment of infertility, except in vitro fertilization" and enforce that requirement "without discrimination on the basis of age, ancestry, color, disability, domestic partner status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation."

In other words: Insurers would now be required to provide infertility treatments to same sex couples.

Of course, the thing is, no one has ever become pregnant as a result of sexual activity between two people of the same sex. It just can't happen. This is biological reality. Two men engaging in sexual activities together, or two women engaging in sexual activities together, will never result in conception. As a result, it seems like calling this problem "infertility" is more than a little odd. The reason why same sex couples do not conceive children is not that there's something wrong with how their bodies work -- it's that what they'd doing isn't capable of producing children.

As Shadle points out in the above post, classifying the failure of same sex couples to conceive children on their own represents a fascinating philosophical about-face by proponents of same sex relationships. When proponents of traditional marriage have insisted that only people of the opposite sex can get married because only people of the opposite sex can have children together, the response was that having children did not necessarily have a place in modern marriage. Marriage is just about a loving relationship. If some people choose to have children, that's their own affair.

Now, however, the tune has changed, and it's being argued that since people in loving, committed relationships can expect to have children, if they can't conceived children together there is obviously something wrong and insurance should cover medical procedures to solve it.

Teacher Fired: Blaming the Victim to Avoid Risk

In one of those local news stories that catches the popular imagination, second grade Catholic school teacher Carie Charlesworth made first local and then national news when Holy Trinity School of El Cajon, CA told her that they could not renew her contract for the next school year (and also that her four children could no longer attend the school), in order to assure the safety of the school's students. Ms. Charlesworth had been the victim of domestic violence by her ex-husband. She had a restraining order against him which he had repeatedly violated, resulting in 911 calls by her. The ex-husband then showed up during school hours in the school parking lot, resulting in the school going into "lockdown" procedures and the ex-husband being arrested.

Charlesworth and her four kids, who also attended Holy Trinity School, have not been back since the January incident. A letter was sent home to parents the following day, explaining the situation and noting Charlesworth and her children were being put "on an indefinite leave.”

While Charlesworth’s husband went to jail on two felony charges, she says she felt like a criminal too.

“And that’s what it felt like, the kids and I were being punished for something we didn’t even do,” she told NBC 7 San Diego.

Three months later, another letter arrived in the mail delivering a crushing blow. Charlesworth was fired for good, and after 14 years in the district not allowed to teach at any other Diocesan school.
The letter stated:

"We know from the most recent incident involving you and Mrs. Wright (the principal) while you were still physically at Holy Trinity School, that the temporary restraining order in effect were not a deterrent to him. Although we understand he is current incarcerated, we have no way of knowing how long or short a time he will actually serve and we understand from court files that he may be released as early as next fall. In the interest of the safety of the students, faculty and parents at Holy Trinity School, we simply cannot allow you to return to work there, or, unfortunately, at any other school in the Diocese."

When asked for a response, Tom Beecher, Director of the San Diego Diocese Office for Schools wrote in an email to NBC 7 San Diego: “The diocese does not make public comment about personnel issues.”

Source: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/holy-trinity-school-el-cajon-san-diego-teacher-fired-211244611.html#ixzz2X9V7wHqj

Obviously, only one side of the story is being covered, since the school and diocese probably can't legally air all their thoughts since they involve personnel decisions and an ongoing lawsuit, but this certainly looks like the workings of a risk-averse bureaucratic mindset failing to take into account the human problems at play. The "anything to keep the kids safe" mentality seem to be at play here. And indeed, a number of parents of other children at the school have apparently spoken up in favor of Charlesworth's dismissal on those grounds.

Some critics have tried to tie this story in with news stories about Catholic school teachers being fired for violating Church teaching. Many Catholic schools have in their contracts a clause requiring teachers to live in accordance with Catholic teaching, and thus teachers have ended up being fired for offenses such as having a "same sex marriage" or deciding to become a single mother via artificial insemination. However, that seems to do an obvious miss-use to Charlesworth's case in order to score culture-war points. The problem with what happened in this case is that, at least according to the story as we know it, the school and the diocese decided to cut a teacher (and four students) off on the theory it was safer to do so than to deal with the possibility that her ex-husband might attempt some sort of crime against her while she was on school premises. Given that the last time he even showed up on school grounds, the school successfully called the police and he landed in jail for 6+ months, it seems like the degree of threat is pretty minor, and obviously the repercussions for Charlesworth and her children were potentially very large. (A private school in the Los Angeles area has apparently now offered Charlesworth a new job, so one hopes she will, in the end, get a more secure home and job out of this.)

In cases where teachers violate the morality clause in their contracts, however, they not only break the terms of their employment, they also undermine the reason-for-being of Catholic schools, which is to provide an environment in which Catholic teaching is lived and taught. In Charlesworth's case, it seems rather that it is the school which, in its rush to avoid all appearance of risk, is failing to live and teach Catholic morals.

Seven Quick Takes for Monday

It's hot, and my big girls are out of town so it's quiet, and maybe it's pregnancy but the whole house smells like ashes despite the fact that I cleaned out the fireplace thoroughly two months ago and the window have been open ever since. I haven't had an interesting thought all day, so here's some vapidity to bring you down to my level.

1.

The Beach Boys remixed, or unmixed, or unhinged.



This is totally how it sounds when my siblings and I sing together. H/T Jen.

2.

If the world were run like airlines.

3.

Despite the less than stellar reviews, I have this urge to see The Great Gatsby on the big screen. Darwin is not necessarily pressed to do likewise, and I don't think it's worth spending babysitting capital on (a big calculation in my cinematic calculations), so what I ought to do is go see it on my own. But do you know, I don't think I've ever gone to see a movie in the theater by myself. For years I've gone, when I do go, with Darwin. Before I knew him, I went with friends. (High in the tales of ignominious movie confessions: In my youth I went with a boyfriend on his sixteenth birthday to see Waterworld, making me one of the ten people in the nation to financially support that debacle. I think I paid, too. The whole incident was a metaphor for that relationship.)

4.

Paul Giamatti is joining the cast of Downton Abbey in Season 4 as Cora's brother. The burning question: will this be enough to overcome our apathy and nudge us toward watching the last three episodes of Season 3, or are three seasons enough for any TV show?

5.

Actually, the real Downton question is: Will Season 4 show the wizards finally using their magical powers?

6.

From a list of The Ugliest Churches in the World, the very first example:

Touchdown Jesus, in front of Solid Rock Church, in Monroe, Ohio, off of I-75. I've driven past it more than once. However, this list is out of date. Touchdown Jesus was struck by lightning and burned to the  ground several years ago. Undaunted by this traditional sign of divine disapprobation, the church vowed to rebuild, but decided to tone down the camp.

Well, it's an improvement. But as we drove past it Saturday night, I was seized with pangs of nostalgia for the old statue. There's not much to look at between Dayton and Cincinnati; Touchdown Jesus was a landmark in swath of fields and flea markets.

7.

If you're looking for something a bit more substantial, check out Darwin in his radio debut, speaking about Catholicism and evolution.

A Midsummer Night's Reading

Every year, friends of mine throw a big bash on the weekend closest to Midsummer. This involves drink, zany costumes pulled from a big store kept especially for the occasion, lots of laughter, and of course, a reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream for which all participants are randomly assigned parts by pulling scrolls out of a hat. This is the sort of silliness that ensues:

I drew Titania; the scroll is tucked into the top of my dress. (No pockets, you see.) Darwin's costume and attitude are inspired by Monty Python. Photo credit to JS.

This year's party is this weekend, and we are fully prepared to have delightful times and look ridiculous and throw ourselves into bit roles, because you can't get Titania every year, though you can trade up if you catch someone with a big part who doesn't like to read in front of people.

It is events like this that make me wonder why we so seldom do the things we find most enjoyable. I've taken part in a handful of dramatic readings over the years, from Midsummer to Love's Labour's Lost to The Jeweler's Shop to Matthew Lickona's Surfing with Mel, and each one has left me wanting more. Putting together a play reading is easier and less time-consuming than throwing together a musical in one's uncle's barn, but I've never moved to organize one myself. And yet, who doesn't have access to a copy of the Collected Works of Wm. Shakes.? Everyman or Our Town or Murder in the Cathedral can be found in every library in the US.  It's slightly more difficult to organize a cadre of interested and able readers, but that's where the party comes in. Food to bring 'em in, and drink to keep 'em there, and by the second act everyone's brilliant.

Ah well. Whenever I host my own dramatic reading, you're all invited to come and raid the stash of 50s and 60s outfits in my attic, and if someone brings a record player we can play the stacks of wax up in the in the closets, and we'll horse trade until we're all kind of satisfied with our parts, and then we'll make the Bard proud.