Month: August 2009

Perhaps, especially if you live in the northeast, you've been exposed to the story of Diane Schuler, the New York housewife who killed eight people in a traffic accident and became the target-of-the-day for pundit windbaggery and righteous indignation when she was found to be blind drunk at the time. She drove the wrong way up an exit ramp and collided head-on with a Suburban. All three occupants in the other vehicle died as did Schuler, her daughter, and her three young nieces.

Harpyness has an interesting commentary, albeit one with which I am not in 100% agreement, on the gender aspect of the waves of how-dare-shes raining down on the "Monster Mom." Some commentary has taken to blaming feminism for an alleged increase in alcohol abuse among women (although to be fair, it does not state that explicitly; nonetheless I tend to agree that it can be inferred). I can add nothing to the stupidity of that statement that I did not volunteer when K-Lo blamed feminism for domestic violence. It seems like a patently ridiculous claim, no? The alcoholic / pill-popping 1950s housewife is a stock character in American culture – not to mention, if you feel like going way back, the laudanum- and brandy-swilling 19th Century frontier wife. These pre-Women's Liberation movement examples seem to nod in recognition of widespread social problems throughout our history with women drinking and drugging to escape the desperate unhappiness of strict gender roles.

Beyond that, there are two things that interest me about the story and the commentary linked in the previous paragraph. First, I think the most interesting gender aspect of this issue is the idea of male denial that women in the wife/mother roles could have "that problem." Her husband has made numerous public statements to the effect of "My wife was not a habitual or heavy drinker." Now, count me lucky in that I have no alcoholics in my nuclear family.

Neither parent so much as drank a glass of wine let alone got loaded. So it is perhaps because of this non-experience that I find the husband's statements fantastic. Schuler's autopsy showed that in addition to marijuana, her BAC at the time of autopsy was 0.19%. That isn't drunk; that is John Bonham drunk. That is fucking plastered. A person of Schuler's size would need ten shots of hard liquor in an hour to reach that – and considerably more if she was in fact a habitual drinker with a high tolerance. I find it simply unbelievable, although not impossible, that this is something that flew under the radar. Sure, maybe no one saw her drinking. But when someone is that drunk – so drunk that eight year-olds are on cell phones noting something clearly aberrant about the person's behavior – how can one ignore that?

Perhaps this was a one-time bender by Schuler and there was no prior behavior to cause raised eyebrows. But assuming that is not the case, this could only fly under the radar if A) Schuler was the world's highest functioning drunk and an amazing actress or B) David Schuler either willfully ignored his wife's alcoholism or was psychologically incapable of accepting it.
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Women with alcoholic husbands can sometimes ignore the obvious and convince themselves that things are OK as long as Hubby keeps bringing home a paycheck; on the flip side, perhaps we need to spend some time asking to what extent men are deluding themselves about spousal alcoholism with the belief that if Wifey is unhappy and drinking "shuts her up" then it is OK.

Second, Harpyness comments on Ray LaHood's statement ("Sadly, the number of arrests of women driving under the influence is on the rise. This is clearly a very disturbing trend.”) about female DUIs. The author states, "No, what’s “sad” and “disturbing” is not that more women are being arrested, but that that DUI arrests are going up, period.
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" I think there is an obvious problem with both statements' assumption that this factoid means more people are drinking and driving. I have a more plausible explanation: municipal governments are broke and DUIs are costly.

Police are both eager to pull over more vehicles and more likely to write a citation after doing so.

They need the cash. Maybe in the past police officers, the large majority of whom are male, were more willing to let women off with warnings. You remember the advice your cynical parents and relatives gave you when you started driving: "If you ever get pulled over, cry." Maybe that is effective overall and even more so for women. I have no idea. But regardless, there is no logical basis for taking the fact that female DUIs are on the rise as evidence of more drinking or more drinking and driving by women and/or men. It proves that cops are giving more tickets. DUIs are a lucrative source of income. They run well over $1000 per pop. State and county governments are broke. It's not unreasonable to connect the dots. Either the underlying condition or the enforcement thereof could be responsible for the increase.

Overall, I find it somewhat ludicrous that gender and feminism have been dragged into this conversation at all. Male or female this person clearly lacked any sort of judgment and our sympathy should be for the people whose lives were ended or changed by her lack of judgment. While we are getting lathered up about her apparent alcohol problem, however, we might benefit from examining her husband's comments more closely and asking what we can learn about our society's conception of when alcoholism and denial thereof are acceptable.

Before Mike headed over to guest-blog The Baseline Scenario for a week (notice how he started taking RortyBomb seriously about 6 months ago and is already 1000 times more popular / better at blogging than me? I have a feeling I'm going to be able to say I know a lot of famous people in 20 years from my commanding perch in obscurity.) he noted that we as a society are standing on the brink of employers utilizing credit checks in hiring decisions. In other words, you're unemployed.

Your credit goes to shit. Potential employers start turning you away because your poor credit indicates "poor judgment.

" I can't wrap my head around the number of levels on which this is fucked up.

First, the vicious cycle of unemployment-to-bad-credit-to-unemployment is not hard to spot. You get canned and end up living off your credit cards and/or filing bankruptcy. When employers use that as a reason to deny you a paycheck, you live off more credit and leave a vapor trail on your way to bankruptcy court. Second, to put on our social scientist hats for a moment, they appear to use Credit Score as a proxy for an unobserved/latent variable (judgment). But is there any logical basis for doing so? To the extent that the individual's judgment is an independent variable it is highly collinear with other vague ("the housing market", "the economy") or unmeasurable (life circumstances, etc.) variables. Frankly, a standardized test for applicants would do more to shed light on decision-making skills. So might throwing darts at a board, for that matter.

Finally, have we bought into social darwinism so completely that we're going to start branding debtors with a scarlet letter – or perhaps we can tattoo their Equifax score on their foreheads – to mark them as undesirables? Of course we have. We're more than comfortable using debt as a form of social control and class stratification in this country. Consider the mid-nineties explosion of the "Intern Economy" in which employers started insisting that college graduates have internships to make their resumes "stand out." What does this accomplish? Does a summer or a year of fetching coffee and making copies really make someone more qualified for a job? No, but it does thin from the applicant pool any college kids whose parents lack the means (or the willingness) to support them while they work for free in New York, DC, or some other disproportionately expensive and happening place. Scanning credit scores, which will simply identify people who have no personal financial safety net, is the logical next step and a legally permissible alternative to writing "Sons of management only, please" in the job ads.
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Sure, this process will catch the morons who took $450,000 mortgages on a $40,000/yr salary or who routinely run up their Mastercards and file bankruptcy. In other words, it will catch the straw man debtor who lives in John Boehner's head. It will catch them even though they are a minority of people with poor credit.
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It will also catch a lot of people with excellent "judgment" who have gotten screwed. It's like fishing for tuna with depth charges. Sure, you'll get your tuna, and I guess you can ignore all of the other carcasses that float up alongside it.

(PS: This is my favorite post title ever. Out of 1200 and counting.)

So I'm still figuring out where everything is here in my new hometown, and as a rat owner it can sometimes be challenging to find a pet store with the appropriate food. After being informed that the local branch of a chain pet store (PetLand) had the kind of food we need, I proceeded to have an experience which cost me some of whatever remaining faith in humanity I have.

Without going into all of the details, I had a significant problem with the way some of the animals were being treated in the store. I got a little riled up. Both Liz and, later, other people to whom I described the incident reminded me that yelling at the clerk in the pet store isn't productive. It's some stiff making $6.50/hr who probably hates her job. And of course the only response one can get out of such people is "It's not my problem / It's store policy." Going up the chain of non-command produces similar results; no one ever has the power to fix things, no one is responsible, no one has control.

Isn't that the real problem with this country? Now that we're one enormous, identical-looking strip mall from coast to coast, we feel absolutely no obligation toward one another's interests. If I was shopping in Jim's Pet Store I could probably talk to Jim, and since Jim and I are already neighbors he might actually care when I told him that I objected to his practices.
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But shopping in PetLand, Inc., which probably has a corporate office in some bland building in Kalamazoo? They don't particularly give a shit what you or I have to say. Nothing the chain does is accountable to a person; to the extent that they are accountable to anything it is an abstraction like "the market" or "the stockholders." It's yet another example of how efficient the market is as an arbiter of our relationships with one another.

Liz worked in a restaurant before we left Bloomington, and she remarked constantly about how children no longer say "please" or "thank you" to service industry employees. It felt a little Andy Rooney, but it's a valid point. Forget about kids – does anyone say please and thank you in the faceless monstronsity that is the American retail sector v.2009? Try an experiment. Go into a Wal-Mart or a Burger King and try your hardest to give a flying fuck about anyone or anything in the establishment. It's virtually impossible, like trying to feel sympathy for a cockroach. It's nothing but shoppers who don't know one another making identical purchases (but no eye contact) and interacting only with the interchangeable employees paid squat to listlessly ring up our purchases. Then we wander back to our cars among the giant asphalt seas of nothingness which surround the commercially-zoned stucco monstrosities on the outskirts of town and drive home, transaction completed in total anonymity. Whether it's a block from home or clear across the country, every Home Depot (and the drones who staff them) look exactly the same, thus we treat them exactly the same: as strangers.
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Yes, I know the advantages, the endless choices and low prices made possible by the strip-mallification of the country and the standardization of the American retail experience. I am equally well aware of the downside: try to get someone to interact with you as one human being to another and you quickly discover that the whole thing is a big illusion. You're not in your neighborhood and you're not dealing with people.

You're in an abstract world in which the things that look like people can't think for themselves and what appears to be a store near your home is really a corporate boardroom a thousand miles away bending to the whims of a master that exists only in the minds of the Investor Class.