http://www.courant.com/sports/colleg...nes-huskywomen

This seems senseless to me.

Originally Posted by BigStar

Are you coming on to me?

Certainly not. If the Achillies type was what I wanted, I'd hang around jocks, not geeks. Not to mention the sort of foxes I look at are silver foxes.

Alright, it's totally cool if you were though.

My supervisor forwarded this gem from The New York Times to his underlings, never dreaming that it would end up here.

Off to Work She Should Go

Katherine Streeter

By LINDA HIRSHMAN
Published: April 25, 2007
Phoenix

THE United States Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published its long-awaited study, “Trends in Labor Force Participation of Married Mothers of Infants.” “In recent years,” the number crunchers reported, “the labor force participation of married mothers, especially those with young children, has stopped its advance.”

Sixty percent of married mothers of preschool children are now in the work force, four percentage points fewer than in 1997. The rate for married mothers of infants fell by about six percentage points, to 53.5 percent. The bureau further reports that the declines “have occurred across all educational levels and, for most groups, by about the same magnitude.”

In sum, sometime well before the 2000 recession, wives with infants and toddlers began leaving the work force. And they stayed out even after the economy began to revive.

For several years, experts have been arguing about the “opt-out” revolution — the perception that there has been an exodus of young mothers from the work force. Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research called the opt-out revolution a myth, and asserted that married mothers don’t drop out any more than other women in a bad economy. The new report is strong evidence that something really is going on.

Why are married mothers leaving their jobs? The labor bureau’s report includes some commonsense suggestions, but none that fully explains the situation. New mothers with husbands in the top 20 percent of earnings work least, the report notes. As Ernest Hemingway said, the rich do have more money. So they also have more freedom to leave their jobs. But why do they take the option? It’s easier in the short term, sure, but it’s easier to forgo lots of things, like going to college or having children at all. People don’t — nor should they — always do the easier thing.

The authors also speculate that the pressure of working and running a household is great. They do not say, however, that working hours have increased as participation has declined. Educated women, they report, work 42.2 hours a week on average and those with professional degrees, 45 — hardly the “80-hour week” of legend.

Poorer mothers can less afford child care, and because they earn less, their opportunity costs of not working are lower, the authors suggest. But for these women, lost income cuts deeper. And this factor, like the average number of hours worked, has not changed since 1997.
What has changed in the last decade is that the job of motherhood has ramped up. Mothers today spend more time on child care than women did in 1965, a time when mothers were much less likely to have paying jobs, family scholars report.

The pressure to increase mothering is enormous. For years, women have been on the receiving end of negative messages about parenting and working. One conservative commentator said the lives of working women added up to “just a pile of pay stubs.” When the National Institute of Child Health reported recently that long hours in day care added but a single percentage point to the still-normal range of rambunctious behavior in children, newspaper headlines read, “Day Care, Behavior Problems Linked in Study.”

Should we care if women leave the work force? Yes, because participation in public life allows women to use their talents and to powerfully affect society. And once they leave, they usually cannot regain the income or status they had. The Center for Work-Life Policy, a research organization founded by Sylvia Ann Hewlett of Columbia, found that women lose an average of 18 percent of their earning power when they temporarily leave the work force. Women in business sectors lose 28 percent.

And despite the happy talk of “on ramps” back in, only 40 percent of even high-powered professionals get back to full-time work at all.

That the most educated have opted out the most should raise questions about how our society allocates scarce educational resources. The next generation of girls will have a greatly reduced pool of role models.

But what is to be done? Organizations like Moms Rising and the Mothers Movement Online have stepped up the pressure for reforms like flexible work hours and paid parental leave. Such changes probably would help lower-income women in the most unforgiving workplaces. But they are unlikely to affect the behavior of the highly educated women with the highest opt-out rates.

We could make an effort to change men’s attitudes. Sociologists have found that mothers (rich and poor) still do twice the housework and child care that fathers do, and even the next generation of males say they won’t sacrifice work for home. But in the short term, it might be easier to change the tax code.

In most American marriages, wives earn less than their husbands. Since the tax code encourages joint filing (by making taxes lower for those who do), many couples figure that the “extra” dollars the wife brings in will be piled on top of the husband’s income and taxed at the highest rates, close to 50 percent, according to estimates made by Ed McCaffery, a tax professor at the University of Southern California. Considering the cost of child care, couples often conclude that her working adds nothing to the family treasury.

If married couples were taxed as the separate income earners they often are, women would be liberated from some of the pressure to reduce their “labor force participation,” as the labor bureau would say.

Labor statistics are always couched in such dry language, but it reveals a powerful reality: working mothers, rich and poor, struggle with their competing commitments. Now that we have seen the reality, it is time to address it.

Linda Hirshman is the author of “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.”

Originally Posted by Mr. Donald Pittenger

Dear Blowhards --
I'm still unpacking boxes from our move to Seattle. The process is more tedious than demanding and I have time to think -- sometimes about what I notice while unpacking.

Today I'm thinking about dishes.

For instance, I find that I've created a stack of 16 dinner plates with winter decorations around the rims. The glazing is green and the subject is alternating reindeer and fir trees.

Sixteen plates. That take up a fair amount of cupboard space. That might be used three times a year at best.

Simple male that I am, I'm thinking: Why not just use regular plates and trick things up for the holidays using seasonal paper napkins and table decorations? But apparently my wife finds a special plate collection to be much more appropriate.

...Me, I'm ignorant of and indifferent to flowers even though my mother was a gardner. Were I choosing plates, I'd get very simple decorations. Perhaps only a colored band along the rim or maybe a half-inch wide design or pattern near the rim.

Is this too a male-female thing or simply another instance of personal tastes?

Sexes and Plates

Say you're an attractive boomer chick in her thirties. It's 1989. You own a handgun. What kind do you own?

It's obvious to me that if you're an attractive xer chick you own a Glock or Beretta 9mm but I have no idea what kind the boomer ladies would own.

Originally Posted by Linus

Say you're an attractive boomer chick in her thirties. It's 1989. You own a handgun. What kind do you own?

If a boomer woman were in possession of any handgun in 1989, it would probably be some kind of Saturday night special that she didn't know how to accurately fire under duress--and if ever used, would cause more tragicomedy than anything else. But her most likely weapon would be those self-defense classes taken in 1974 (at the goading of her feminist friends--and the methods learned from which hadn't been practiced or thought about much in 15 years).

The point here is not to put down women of any generation, or to minimize the terror of violence. It's just that most people, by the time they reach adulthood, have learned how to avoid violent situations--as opposed to readying to "defend" themselves from violence with violence.

Safety is the watchword of boomers during the 3T, not vengeance.
Even mace had gone out of style by 1989.

Originally Posted by Linus

Say you're an attractive boomer chick in her thirties. It's 1989. You own a handgun. What kind do you own?

It's obvious to me that if you're an attractive xer chick you own a Glock or Beretta 9mm but I have no idea what kind the boomer ladies would own.

North of the Mesabi, it was usually a S&W (or a Taurus clone) revolver in .357 Magnum. My Euro-friends usually had .380 ACP Walther self-loaders. Glock's were pretty rare in 1989.

Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari

North of the Mesabi, it was usually a S&W (or a Taurus clone) revolver in .357 Magnum. My Euro-friends usually had .380 ACP Walther self-loaders. Glock's were pretty rare in 1989.

It's funny you should mention the revolvers because that's precisely what I was thinking (a .38 snub nose if you want to get specific about it).

Dear Dr. Ramakrishna,

This is a response to your posting in another thread.

Originally Posted by The Rani

> Mr. X. , if Clinton was a serial rapist in the manner that you
> describe, he was clearly incompetent at it. Otherwise, his DNA
> never would have ended up on the dress.

> Perhaps he should have attended the classes that you described.

I'm not sure what point you're making here, since all the various
blow jobs that Monica Lewinsky gave to Bill Clinton in the Oval
Office were consensual sex, not rape, as far as we know. However,
the incident in question must have given Clinton a lot of anxiety,
realizing that his sperm was on Lewinsky's dress. Should he have
asked her to take it off so that he could wash it? He probably
wishes he did, but that request would presumably have been quite
awkward, even for him. He must have had a near heart-attack when he
got the news that Lewinsky had put the dress away and saved it for
months without washing it, and then revealed to the FBI that she had
it. Talk about vengeful women!

Originally Posted by The Rani

> Also, I disagree with your characterization of rapists as having
> been abused by their own mothers. Most commonly, they have seen
> their own fathers, or other men, abuse women during their
> childhoods. Just an observation from my own experience from
> working with abuse victims and perpetrators.

You're a good feminist, always ready, willing and able to say that
all men are batterers and rapists and all women are victims, but
you're completely wrong. And you can't learn this stuff from the
women's "studies" crap they teach in colleges. The only way is to do
what I did -- spend ten years reading hundreds of research papers and
books, and interviewing dozens of experts.

You give two sources for your claim.

Your first source is so-called abused women. Except for a
brother-sister situation, I cannot even so much as think of a
scenario where a woman who claims to have been raped
would know whether or not the person she's accusing has been sexually
abused by his mother.

25-30% of the time, these women misidentify the alleged rapist,
unless she knew him before, as has been shown by the Project
Innocence DNA studies.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/etc/script.html

So if she can't even keep straight the person she's accusing of
raping her, then it's very unlikely that she'd know any details about
his past, or whether his mother sexually abused him.

Your second source you identified for your claim is so-called
perpetrators.

First off, no man who's been sexually abused by his mother is going
to easily admit it to anybody. This would be a deeply shameful
secret, and he knows that he wouldn't be believed anyway.

Second, when a man is accused of some gender crime by a bunch of
feminist "professionals," anything he says besides "I am guilty of
rape, battering and disrespecting women" is treated as a lie, and
proof that he's guilty.

To other people reading this: Most people don't realize this, but if
you're accused of a "gender crime" by a vengeful woman, you're not
even allowed to defend yourself. Unless you have a lot of money for
lawyers, you will simply be assumed guilty, and anything you say to
the contrary will be considered to be "proof" that you're guilty, so
you must be in denial. This has created a huge industry of feminist
"professionals" bringing false accusations against men in order to
pad their own budgets. There's an enormous amount of money involved,
tied into a criminal organization that freely practices corruption
and extortion. This is especially true of so-called domestic
violence accusations, which are easily 98%+ phony.

The recent case involving the Duke Lacrosse players illustrates how
far the corruption and extortion go, and how deeply involved feminist
organizations are in criminal activity. There's absolutely no
question at all, in my opinion, that district attorney Mike Nifong
knew, within a month of two of the accusations, that the Duke
students were totally innocent of the charges. But he was running
for office, and he needed the support of feminist organizations, so
he went on with the prosecution of young men whom he knew to be
innocent in order to satisfy his feminist masters. Nifong is a
criminal himself, though he won't be charged, but the fact that he's
received a number of civil sanctions shows that society is beginning
to turn away from feminist nonsense.
** Collapse of Duke rape case represents cultural change
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e070422#e070422

An example of a story in the opposite direction is Andrea Yates, who
murdered her five children after months of planning. When the crime
became known, feminist organizations around the country, led by Katie
Couric, used the mass murder as a fundraising tool, to raise money for
Andrea Yates' defense.

Here's what pro-feminist journalist Evan Thomas said in Newsweek:
"Most mass killers are sociopaths, utterly alienated from other human
beings. They are callous or sadistic. Andrea was the opposite; if
anything, she apparently cared too much. She may have felt she could
never do enough for her demanding husband. In a horribly twisted way,
she may have tried to be too good a mother."

And so, feminists made money by declaring violent serial rapist Bill
Clinton was NOT a rapist, by declaring that the innocent Duke kids
WERE rapists, and by declaring the violent serial murderer Andrea
Yates was "too good a mother." It really doesn't matter what anyone
does or doesn't do; it just matters what's the best way to make money
for feminists.

And so, Dr. Ramakrishna, there's no way that any so-called
perpetrator would ever try to tell you about abuse by his mother.

So both of the sources you've named are garbage, and you don't have
the VAGUEST idea about the issues involved in rape, except for what
all feminists know -- how to use rape as a tool for budget increases
and fund-raising.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

I follow this stuff pretty closely and I've never heard anyone give any credible explanation of why the 2003 ground war in Iraq was the wrong decision for the United States

Huh? In what way was it a good decision? Our armed forces are fully engaged at great expense in a war that the most informed sources say will go on for at least nine more years with no guarantee of victory. 3600 dead, hundreds of millions spent and exactly what has been gained?

Bases? Of what good are forward bases in the Middle East if the troops occupying those bases are continuously engaged?

Oil? How has this invasion served to maintain/enhance the free flow of oil? Oil prices are way up from their 2002 levels. Iraq produces less oil than it did before the war. Other countries, seeing the high prices and America stuck in the Iraqi elephant trap for the foreseeable future, are finding it advantageous to not develop their oil resources quickly (e.g. Venezuela) or to negotiate more sharply with Western oil companies (Russia) in order to maximize their return on what is a finite national resource.

Mideast stability? Iraq is being torn asunder by sectarian strife. Iran is building a nuke.

Anti-terrorism? The Iraq war has opened a new version of the 1980's superpower-mujahideen conflict that gave birth to groups like al Qaeda.

The war has accomplished nothing good for the United States. Even if America were to "win" the war 9 years from now, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Iran is being torn asunder by sectarian strife.

There is no sectarian strife in Iran, at least, none that I've heard of.

Originally Posted by sean '90

There is no sectarian strife in Iran, at least, none that I've heard of.

I think Mikebert meant "Iraq".

Quoting from Salon.com.

By Rebecca Traister

Oct. 03, 2007 | It may be pop culture heresy to rope together Susan Faludi's new book, "The Terror Dream," and Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Magic," both released this week. Faludi, author of 1991's "Backlash," is a diligent chronicler of the country's gender problems.

Springsteen is a swaggering blue-collar cult hero whose critical thinking about American culture has made him an international rock star. Yet there is a neat perfection in the pairing of these two uniquely American storytellers, as if Mars and Venus had conveniently weighed in simultaneously, after six years of consideration, on what exactly has unfolded in this country, with which they are each so critically obsessed, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Springsteen, of course, has already made one contribution to the national artistic accounting of 9/11 with "The Rising," his 2002 album that Faludi might crankily write off (as she does movies like "United 93" and "World Trade Center") as a piece of art that "seemed to have no purpose but to repeat what we already knew." On it, Springsteen gave voice to those whose lives had been damaged by 9/11: a firefighter who died, one who survived, widows both American and Arab. Five years later, he and Faludi are on related missions: to step back from the firsthand experience of events and attempt to pick out the patterns in all that's gone down since.

Faludi is characteristically grim in her reading of the country's tea leaves; she is unsurprised to report that the cultural signifiers are, as always, oppressive. Springsteen's music has always been buoyed by American symbolism; he's never been shocked by its misuse, but on this record, his grief and anger over its twisted meanings are palpable. Both "The Terror Dream" and "Magic" employ images of surrealist dread to describe the post-9/11 manipulation -- by media and politicians -- that has left us warped and brainwashed, and both deploy terrifying visions to make their points. On the title track and throughout his record, Springsteen describes the creepy carnival tricksterism of the Bush administration and the sinuous ways it has distorted his vision of America, while Faludi sees a vast national conspiracy to put women back in the kitchen and alpha males like John Wayne (or perhaps Bruce Springsteen) back in their lost positions of power.

Before she can pursue the big picture, Faludi must start where everyone else in America did: her personal experience of Sept. 11. There is her prophetic dream on the night of Sept. 10, in which she is shot while on a plane, a bullet lodged in her throat; she wakes only to discover that the world is under attack. Before the end of the day she has received the phone call that provides her book with its foundation myth: A reporter asks for her reaction to the tragedies, crowing to Faludi, "Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!"

Not 24 hours out, and Faludi has been handed the key to how this plot will unfold: To her mind, Sept. 11 will give the nation, uneasy with the strides made by women in the decades leading up to the attacks, an excuse to stuff them back into traditional boxes. That first gleeful caller is soon joined by others, all anxious to know how quickly women will abandon their corner offices and get back to tweaking their meatloaf recipes.

Apparently, Faludi has spent the past six years writing down the license plate number of every drive-by offense against gender parity, and the first two-thirds of "The Terror Dream" is her obsessive catalog -- a simply staggering one.

There are the media stories promoting a never-realized post-9/11 baby boom and the "return of the cowboy/superhero" trend pieces. Here are the fawning portrayals of the macho Bush administration (she's looking at you, Graydon Carter), the newscasters heralding the death of the "girly-man," the breezily patronizing "We're at War, Sweetheart" headlines.

You'd almost forgotten the feeling of impotence provoked by 9/11? Faludi hasn't. Here's her recounting of the people lined up at the blood banks with no one to give blood to, the police faking "live saves" to cheer up rescue dogs on the pile, because even the canines were depressed. There's the adoration of the firefighters and of the "Let's Roll!" male heroes of Flight 93 -- remembered always for their college sports achievements and their regular-guy toughness -- while the stewardesses who boiled water to throw on the terrorists were written out of the myth.

Just when you think there can't be more, Faludi concludes Chapter 3 by asking, "If women were ineligible for hero status, for what would they be celebrated?" Well, see Chapter 4: "Perfect Virgins of Grief." From here on out you'll find the victimization of Jessica Lynch, and the tale of how widows -- especially stay-at-home-mom widows, and especially widows who were pregnant -- became the golden geese of the morning shows. She recalls articles about how lonely all those haughty, self-satisfied single career women were now that we'd been attacked by terrorists and they had no one to snuggle up with at night; the Bush administration's phony interest in women's rights in the Middle East; makeup tips on how to look like a pale, pure angel; the decrease in female bylines; the nesting obsession.

All the most shoot-yourself-now memories of 2001 (and 2002 and 2003 and 2004…) collected in one long slog through the jingoism and and overreaching proclamations made by anyone with a voice box. Each chapter makes you want to bang your head against the wall harder in the hopes that you may lose consciousness and forget all this stuff again.
It's a complaint that has been lodged against Faludi before: that she's a cherry-picker, rounding up the juiciest anecdotes that suit her argument and leaving the rest to languish. On the other hand: What a bumper crop of cherries! Like the MensAction.com blog entry about how "The phallic symbol of America has been cut off ... and at its base was a large smoldering vagina, the true symbol of the American culture." Oh. My. God. How about Frank McCourt's turgid ode to firemen: "They man a hose that could be a wild animal ... They hack and smash and isolate and drown that other wild animal, the old god fire."

Faludi faithfully records the outrageous assaults against female critics like Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, Barbara Kingsolver and Katha Pollitt, who dared to consider America's role in the attacks or express ambivalence about the ensuing patriotism. "Pollitt, honey, it's time to take your brain to the dry cleaners," went one headline, while the New York Post's Rod Dreher expressed his wish to "walk barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to that despicable woman's [Sontag's] apartment, grab her by the neck, [and] drag her down to ground zero."

She more than makes her point: 9/11 unleashed a torrent of pent-up rage against women and feminism. Kingsolver tells Faludi that while the accusations hurled at her and her peers were meant to be infantilizing and patronizing, "if we were so silly and moronic, why was it so important to bring us up and attack us again and again and again? The response was not the response you would expect toward a child. It was more like we were witches." Post-feminist women had become scary, and the fury directed at them was symptomatic not simply of relief at returning them to the domestic sphere, but of the fear that they might not be willingly contained.

This collection of media moments is an invaluable document. And yet. One can't help thinking that, as in an ugly fight between lovers, some of the things that were said in the heat of the moment -- about the goodness of Rudy Giuliani; about how the attacks were retribution against the pagans, abortionists, feminists and gays; about "the end of irony" -- are better left unpacked, because if we dredged them up again, we might never get past them.

And yet, I want to thank Faludi for going to the library while the rest of us gave into baser instincts, drank a six-pack, and passed out. I want to thank her for adding it all up and making shape and sense out of six years of history. When she writes about how the attacks provoked "the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls," it's almost a relief: Of course! I knew there had to be an explanation! This must also have led to the fetishization of parenting, the mommy wars, the obsession with celebrity baby bumps, and stupidly expensive baby strollers! Wheee! Thank you Susan Faludi, for drawing the map!

Except that she hasn't. She doesn't really get to any of those things. In fact, while she has pulled through a critical thread, "The Terror Dream" does not show the full tapestry of post-9/11 gender relations.

There are oddly blank spaces in her argument. In her estimable effort to diagnose the toxicity of attitudes toward women, she eliminates events that do not fit her argument, and thus fails to tell the whole story. In the discussion of the big-dicked alpha-male Bush administration, why doesn't Faludi examine the roles of Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice and Harriet Miers? Hughes is brought up when she quits to spend more time with her family -- a move that supports Faludi's argument and merits consideration. But why not complicate the issue by exploring why, exactly, Mr. Guns Blazing president has put more women in positions of power than any chief executive before him? Faludi's argument is strong enough to withstand complexity. That she rarely acknowledges it only serves to weaken her claims.

Faludi devotes part of the book to tallying the diminished number of female bylines in papers, the paltry number of girl guests on TV. She's not the first to do this, and she's not wrong. "The silencing of women took place largely in silence," she writes dramatically at the conclusion of her passage on the media.

Eh. Sure. For a while. But in the years Faludi is describing, Jill Abramson ascended to the top of the New York Times masthead and Katie Couric took over the nightly news, albeit to ill effect. Why not explore the unearthing of feminism as a beat by young women like Ariel Levy at New York magazine, Sheelah Kolhatkar, formerly of the New York Observer, by Meghan O'Rourke at Slate, Jessica Valenti at Feministing, and by several of us here at Salon? Levy is mentioned in "The Terror Dream," but only as a cog in New York magazine's dastardly scheme to tell free-loving New York women they should be getting married; Faludi does not credit her for writing one of the better-received feminist books of the past decade, "Female Chauvinist Pigs." What about Linda Hirshman's "Get to Work" or Leslie Bennetts' "The Feminine Mistake"? It's not as though these women are working in echo chambers: Levy was on Oprah; she, Valenti and Linda Hirshman have all appeared on Stephen Colbert ... To talk about feminism! ... On television!

None of these developments make Faludi's argument less true: There was, and is, a paucity of women in major newspapers, magazines, political blogs, and on the talk shows. But it is possible to make that point while also acknowledging a simultaneous increase of women, besides Faludi, who are rattling the chains and getting heard.

Can a book that alleges that the United States re-embraced a John Wayne model of male leadership post-9/11 really only contain three references to the woman who may be the first major-party female candidate for president? What about the first female president of Harvard, the first female speaker of the house?

The first two-thirds of "The Terror Dream" offers a compendium of the offenses against gender civility without extending itself to contemplate how they have evolved and what they have come to mean now, in 2007. Faludi lays it all out, gets the reader good and riled, and then ... nothing.
That's because she is far less interested in the present or the future than she is with the past. Her real thesis (more complicated than "9/11 pushed us back into traditional roles") is laid out in the preface, but does not get fully realized until the book's bizarre structure becomes apparent. Her central idea is that Ernst Haeckel's hypothesis that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- or, as Faludi translates for us, that the development of an embryo repeats in compressed form the evolutionary stages of its species -- can be applied to American history.

Faludi wants to show how "the way we act, say, in response to a crisis can recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of our character as a society and of the mythologies we live by." But because Faludi does the recapitulation part -- the reactions to Sept. 11 -- before she gets to the evolution part more than halfway through the book, her point gets muddied, and readers may wonder, upon beginning the final section, whether they walked into a graduate thesis on America's founding conflicts.

It's a pity, because this last section -- the phylogeny -- is brilliant and exhilarating. Faludi examines with great gusto the popular captivity narratives of 18th and 19th century America, including those of Mary Rowlandson and Cynthia Ann Parker. The stories themselves are fascinating, like that of Hannah Duston, captured in 1697 by Abenaki Indians, five days after having given birth to her 12th child. Before her captors could take her to Canada, Duston took a hatchet to them (two men, two women, six children) and escaped, only to return to collect their scalps. This bravery earned her the attention of that famously easygoing Massachusetts Bay preacher Cotton Mather, who was concerned that nice, passive women might get the wrong idea about their own self-sufficiency from Duston's story.

Faludi's point is that our behaviors in the wake of the supposedly unprecedented terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were in fact practically written into our national DNA. "Our foundational drama as a society was apposite, a profound exposure to just such assaults, murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants under the flag of no recognized nation," she writes. "September 11 was aimed at our cultural solar plexus precisely because it was an 'unthinkable' occurrence for a nation that once could think of little else. It was not, in fact, an inconceivable event; it was the characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak, the shard of memory stuck in our throats. Our ancestors had already found a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since."

This argument is fluid and thrilling to read. It just should have been its own book, perhaps with Faludi's collected contemporary gripes appended as evidence of how in the narratives of the country's founding we can find the dental records of nearly every one of our modern impulses to contain femininity.

Faludi leaves us with a list of kidnappings and witch hunts that provide a fascinating tableau against which we are free to measure -- without much direct guidance from her -- our modern gender impulses. But again, the book feels unfinished, the work of connecting the dots left to the reader; Faludi has laid down a good strong drumbeat, but little melody to carry us through.

Which brings us back to Bruce Springsteen, whose album catalogs the very stuff that "The Terror Dream" is concerned with: Here is the cowboy George Bush, showing up 'round sundown on Election Day, "boot heels clicking like the barrel of a pistol spinning round" in "Livin' in the Future."

There is the image of perfect, angelic femininity in a barmaid 'round whose hair the sun lifts a halo. Where Faludi has prophetic nightmares, Springsteen imagines, in the title track, a world in which bodies hang from trees in a tableau of post-Katrina racial horror.

I'm not sure that one line from Springsteen's song "Devil's Arcade" wasn't actually written by Faludi: "You said heroes are needed, so heroes get made," and that the two of them aren't making identical points about the manipulative power of terror when Springsteen's magician in "Magic" evilly cajoles, "leave everything you know/ Carry only what you fear."

In Faludi's concluding chapter, "What If?" she takes a stab at hope, wondering, "What if the nation had responded to 9/11 differently? What if we hadn't retreated into platitudes and compensatory fictions? What if we had taken the attack as an occasion to 'confront the truth?'" Or, as Springsteen puts it in "Livin' in the Future," a song in which he retroactively reimagines Election Day: "Don't worry, darlin', now baby don't you fret/ We're livin' in the future and none of this has happened yet."

Both Faludi and Springsteen have always specialized in seeing the personal in the political and vice versa. Faludi tends to see dysfunction, in ways that have been exceedingly useful in the past, as they are here. Her failure this time is in her refusal to acknowledge the upside. Springsteen, of course, has always been a hope peddler, if not an optimist. Laced throughout both these texts are frustration, bewilderment, a desire to shake the country by its shoulders. With Faludi, the sense is that none of this comes as a surprise, she is just Charlie Brown kicking the football, only to have it yanked out from under her by a country that is still, yup, sexist. So it was written by Cotton Mather, so it will be post 9/11.

For Springsteen, the realization that "this is what will be" is both more startling and more painful. He is, like Walt Whitman before him, pained at the vision of his beloved nation torn asunder.

Both writers are furious. And I sort of want to tell them: Have a little faith. But maybe this is a moment in which there is little to believe in, and a lot to fear.

-- By Rebecca Traister

BBC News has been reporting this evening that Mrs. Clinton's crying
jag the other day has drawn the sympathy of older women, who are
turning out in large numbers to vote for her.

So if Clinton beats Obama in New Hampshire, it'll be because she
cried.

Snort!

I can't imagine Maggie Thatcher ever pulling a stunt like that and
getting away with it.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

BBC News has been reporting this evening that Mrs. Clinton's crying
jag the other day has drawn the sympathy of older women, who are
turning out in large numbers to vote for her.

So if Clinton beats Obama in New Hampshire, it'll be because she
cried.

Snort!

I can't imagine Maggie Thatcher ever pulling a stunt like that and
getting away with it.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

You should of seen the sneer and rolling eyes on my face when she pulled that crap. Sad that people fell for her little act.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

BBC News has been reporting this evening that Mrs. Clinton's crying
jag the other day has drawn the sympathy of older women, who are
turning out in large numbers to vote for her.

So if Clinton beats Obama in New Hampshire, it'll be because she
cried.

Snort!

I can't imagine Maggie Thatcher ever pulling a stunt like that and
getting away with it.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

And it worked for Hillary because she has such an Iron Lady reputation it was seen as humanizing her. Whenever you have a hard-edged thinking-type woman - or extremely hard-edged thinking-type man - in the public eye, people are just dying to "humanize" him or her - i.,e. make them break down and show some real live human feelings.

So, in this case it was excellent strategy. Besides, a lot of times women cry where a man would cuss and maybe punch something - you know what they'd say if she did THAT! It would have been another Dean's Scream, only much more so. Go, Hillary!

(Aw, Pat, you old feminazi, you're just saying that because she's a woman, Aren't you? AREN'T YOU? AREN'T YOU? Gets in face, shakes finger....)

Dear Taylor,

Originally Posted by Odin

> You should have seen the sneer and rolling eyes on my face when
> she pulled that crap. Sad that people fell for her little act.

You and I may not agree on much, but we sure agree on this. But I
have one tiny correction. It's not "people" who fell for her little
act. It's women. Right, Pat?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Dear Taylor,



You and I may not agree on much, but we sure agree on this. But I
have one tiny correction. It's not "people" who fell for her little
act. It's women. Right, Pat?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Okay - I'll retire from this debate and leave it to the Real People to analyze it and pass judgment on it.

Chopped Liver Pat

Dear Pat,

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

> Okay - I'll retire from this debate and leave it to the Real
> People to analyze it and pass judgment on it. Chopped Liver Pat

Now, now, Pat. Didn't your mommy tell you not to patronize people?

From what I've heard in network news broadcasts, Hillary's whimpering
lamentation caused women in droves to vote for her, but drove men
away, but on balance helped her win the election. What does that
tell us about Real People?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

John J. Xenakis
Now, now, Pat. Didn't your mommy tell you not to patronize people?

From what I've heard in network news broadcasts, Hillary's whimpering
lamentation caused women in droves to vote for her, but drove men
away, but on balance helped her win the election. What does that
tell us about Real People?

That they're easily fooled. Do I get my Gold Star now Prof. X?

Anyway I'm not saying their fake or not fake but in the context of what she was saying they didn't seem needed. But she may have just been tired but Bill's tears really show me my sympathy may be wasted.

Anyway, continue on with the argument I like to see a good catfight. You know women have to be there for other women that's Feminist Rule #1.

Oh yeah since we seem to be on a first name basis here mines Domanic.

*rollseyes*

She's a career politician. She'd sell her own mother if it would get her in the White House.

Originally Posted by Odin

You should of seen the sneer and rolling eyes on my face when she pulled that crap. Sad that people fell for her little act.

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Hillary is an amateur at this stuff, Bill is the master of the phony emotion. Remember the quivering lip, the sorrowful eyes, the perfectly-timed looks that he faked so well? He's giving Hillary a master-level course in faking feeling for the camera.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Dear Taylor,



You and I may not agree on much, but we sure agree on this. But I
have one tiny correction. It's not "people" who fell for her little
act. It's women. Right, Pat?

Sincerely,

John

[/url]

Who knows? My own faith in exit polling (and most of the other polling) is nil, a lot of it is badly executed and some of it is dishonest. There's really no way to ascertain who fell for the tears and by how much. They probably did help her at least some, though.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Dear Pat,



Now, now, Pat. Didn't your mommy tell you not to patronize people?

From what I've heard in network news broadcasts, Hillary's whimpering
lamentation caused women in droves to vote for her, but drove men
away, but on balance helped her win the election. What does that
tell us about Real People?

'Women' are too large a group to make very many meaningful generalizations about. To the degree Hillary aimed the tears at 'women', I suspect it was a specific demographic of women who were already wanting to find a way to support her but who find her normal image highly repellent.