Book Reviews: “American Nerd” & “The Decline of Men”

“American Nerd: A Story of My People” by Benjamin Nugent explores the whole phenomenon of The Nerd. The book, while sometimes funny, was often a dry read. Big surprise. In true nerdy fashion, he chronicles the history of the nerd stereotype – he of the high-water slacks, thick glasses, pocket protectors and obsessional attention to details.  He even sends up the pop culture fad of “nerd hipsters” -  those “too cool to care about fashion” young creatives who embrace the look and ethos of nerdiness.

This last part was scary to me. Am I merely a nerd  hipster, with my thick glasses and obsession with adult animation? As a kid who came of age in the dark ages known as the ’80s, the worst thing I could think of to be called is a poser. As a former junior-high nerd who never quite grew out of it, I remain out and proud. But is my “geek cred” for real? I’ve gotten in fights over minutiae in Futurama episodes. I wear thick (really thick) glasses because I need them to see. When I see a sign proclaiming, “Jesus Saves,” I instantly complete the sentence: “and takes half damage.”

So if being a nerd isn’t so bad, why have we been so excluded and marginalized? Nugent explains that it because of a cultural belief that rationality and emotionality are separate and mutually exclusive. If nerds are super-rational, even machine-like, they must not be able to experience emotions. This is obviously horseshit, but it pervades the context of nerd-dom. And brings me to my next book:

“The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future” by Guy Garcia. I have seen an astonishing number of articles & books about this very topic. Without exception, they have all blamed feminism to some degree. But Garcia’s book took pains to point out that it’s not feminism’s fault, and that it would be unmanly to lay the blame on anyone else.

So, as the mother of a young man, I was interested to see this Guy’s take on the situation. And the situation is not good: over 80 percent of suicides are committed by men, men account for the vast majority of those behind bars, etc., etc.

I will admit now that I only got halfway through this book. It started out admirably enough: it seemed to me that Garcia seems to blame both the media (which actively promotes self-indulgence to  men at the same time they offer no truly mature role models) as well as what he perceives as a cultural neglect of boys. I can agree with him on the first point; it is nearly impossible to find a man on the television that isn’t immature, stupid, or just plain idiotic.

But I’m not so convinced that our culture has neglected boys in favor of girls. While it’s true that most special-ed classes are dominated by boys, and it’s mostly boys at the lower end of the GPA bell curve, I don’t see this as neglect. We are only now coming out of a long era where girls were not encouraged or even offered the opportunities routinely afforded boys in the educational realm. Once girls were given some of the same attention and encouragement, they naturally began making gains. Boys, being petrified of being “beaten by a girl,” simply withdrew from the educational system. This is a profoundly self-destructive behavior – which explains a lot of the other malaise Garcia is writing about. Despite how negative this is, our culture actively promotes this attitude: anything overly intellectual is derided as somehow “unmanly.” Don’t believe me? Just look back at the last eight years.

And let’s not forget that while women may be the majority of those earning B.A.s, it is still men at the top in most of the companies those educated women will work for.

As I said, he has a lot of good points, but not enough to fill 320 pages. About halfway through, it seemed like I was reading the same information, reworded, over and over again. I also take issue with his over-reliance of studies purportedly showing the vast differences between men and women. From his point of view, it’s almost as if we are two completely different species. He never even mentions the bedrock scientific truth: men and women are more alike than we are different. And perhaps that is why men are having such a hard time succeeding in any realm where women exist: that is, everywhere.

An administration where women count

The newest issue of Ms. Magazine is out, and it’s cover has created quite a stir. He’s one of the few men ever to grace its cover – with a Superman-esque pose, revealing a T-shirt proclaiming, “This is what a feminist looks like.”

In fact, according to Eleanor Smeal’s piece, “Visions of Change,” when she and the chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation, Peg Yorkin, met with Obama, he immediately offered, “I am a feminist.” What a refreshing change – for years, the F word has been so demonized that pundits would hurl it as an insult designed to damage reputations.

While I’m not happy about Pres. Obama selling poor women down the river to get his economic stimulus package passed, I understand that he still has four more years to correct that.

I’m also heartened to see the direction First Lady Michelle Obama is taking a more Hillary-Clinton style of advocacy and leadership. According to Politico, she’s taking up the banner for working women by specifically addressing the issues contributing to the work-family imbalance that plagues working parents. Let’s hope with her strong leadership, we can start seeing some basic rights, like living wages, quality affordable childcare (as eloquently stated in Cornelia Grumman’s piece “Beyond Babysitting”)  and paid sick days, soon.

Musings on the Great Ice Storm of 2009

It has been an intense week. I’m in NW Arkansas, which was one of the many places hit by the epic ice storm Monday. Arkansas has been declared a disaster area – thousands of people are without power and our local schools have been out all week.

Ice storm damage

My street lost power briefly Tuesday, from about 8 a.m. till 1 p.m. Without electricity, I had no heat or ability to cook food, so I stayed with a close friend in a nearby trailer park. While we were in his trailer, we started hearing limbs breaking off all around us. Under the weight of some 1 inch of ice, branches as thick as a man’s leg snapped off. It sounded like gunshots followed by crashing. Several limbs fell on his roof, but luckily, nothing was damaged. His neighbors weren’t so lucky – several people had their cars, roofs and sheds crushed under the heavy limbs. My friend’s elderly neighbor died trying to flee his trailer for fear of being crushed.

Right about the time my power came on, his went out. Since I’m the only one of my friends who has power, my tiny little two-bedroom duplex has become a sort of temporary storm shelter. I have three people staying with me & my son who have been here since Tuesday. I don’t mind taking care of them; I know they’d do the same for me.

Hopeful

I am surprised at the depth of emotion that I felt during the inauguration. When Aretha Franklin sang “Let Freedom Ring,” I cried – not just a tear rolling down my cheek; I bawled out loud. Her beautiful, powerful voice, along with the soulful rendering of the music and inspiring lyrics, rolling across the great mall and through the mics of thousands of media into houses all over the world – it was a “glory, hallelujah” moment for me. And I’m not even a Christian.

Even though I was all alone in my living room, I stood with my hand over my heart when Obama took the oath. I must explain just how powerful this is: I have never stood with my hand over my heart for any civic ceremony. I have never said the Pledge of Allegiance – as a child, I was a Jehovah’s Witness, and they refuse to say the Pledge. As an adult, I refused to say it because the phrase “under God” offends me as a non-Christian. So let me repeat: for the first time in my life, I stood with my hand over my  heart to hear Obama be sworn in.

I will let all the other pundits and peanut galleries pick apart his speech, the invocation, whatever. I am still in shock as to why I had such a powerful emotional response to a totally secular ceremony. Usually, I don’t go in for large displays of patriotism or group pride. They actually sort of creep me out – I always sense a whiff of the Nazi rallys underneath mobs of people all chanting, marching, waving flags, and what have you. So how did I, the most wary of non-comformists, get swept up in all this pomp and circumstance?

Perhaps a little background info would help. Progressive, dare I say liberal, values have been a part of my family for generations. My grandfather protested segregation. My grandmother was an independent working woman for many years. My mother was a hippie and a feminist. As an adult, I have surrounded myself with friends who share similar values, yet I have always felt like I was swimming against the tide. When I turn on the TV or read a newspaper, there is no-one giving voice to the values I hold dear: equality and dignity for all people, compassion, diversity.

Once in a while, someone on “our side” breaks through and gets his or her time to shine in the spotlight – Michael Moore, for example. But mostly, our leaders end up on the other end of an assassin’s bullet. When was the last time you heard of a conservative leader being assassinated by a rabid left-winger or government agents?

But today, it felt like finally, the tide was turning. Like my values – and the values of a million other Americans – were being vindicated, shouted, held  high for the world to see: We will not be ignored. It felt like a revolution.

Localism

A friend over at Coming Home just started her New Year’s resolution: to shop only at locally owned stores for one year. It’s an ambitious project, and she’s started a blog about it. It’s sort of ironic, though, that because we live in Northwest Arkansas, Wal-Mart is actually a locally  owned store. But she won’t shop there; read her first post for her explanation – one that I totally agree with.

In discussing this project with her and some other friends, it brought up what a difference people can have in their shopping habits. When she was a child, Coming Home’s author shopped with her family and they used major credit cards for those non-essential shopping trips (like, for clothes).

For me, who was a child in the ’70s, I went shopping with my grandparents. We shopped at chain stores, but there were so many different ones: OTASCO, TG&Y, Sears, Montgomery Ward, K-Mart, and yes, Wal-Mart (before it became the Evil Empire). My grandparents didn’t have a major credit card, but they had a store card for just about every department store that offered them.

As for me, I had a major credit card (as well as a Sear’s card) years ago, but had to get rid of it when I declared bankruptcy back in 2001 (due to medical bills).

So I guess my  point is that it’s interesting that a decision about where to shop can lead into so many related issues, such as how we shop, and of course, why we shop. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country that shop as a sort of recreational pastime, and I just can’t get my  head around that. To me, shopping is what you do when you need something that you can’t otherwise borrow or find in a dumpster. As a kid, we didn’t go shopping for clothes every fall – we only bought clothes or shoes when the ones we owned were literally falling apart.

So hop on over and give Coming Home a read, and maybe it will inspire you to think about shopping in your own way.

Disposable culture

This is not a new concept – it was developed in the 1920s and ’30s, and people have been railing against it since the ’60s. And yet, it still exists.

It seems there has been a rash of CD and DVD players’ deaths lately, at least among my circle of friends and family. Even though they are all different brands, the failures are similar: CDs or DVDs begin to skip, and using a laser cleaner on the player doesn’t help. These players are not that old, either. My son’s (ironically named) “Durabrand” CD/DVD/MP3 player was manufactured in December, 2006. It went out six months ago.

The three of us are all faced with the same dilemma: we have to buy a whole new player, or else do without altogether. There is not one repair shop that fixes these things. I’m not sure that they are even designed to be able to be repaired.

This is, in my opinion, bordering on criminal wastefulness. I know that planned obsolescence was originally thought to stimulate the economy by essentially coercing people into buying new stuff. But in this “new economy” (i.e., the Second Great Depression), people aren’t going to buy what they can’t afford. Wouldn’t it be better for the economy if we built more stuff here, with higher quality, and instead had repair facilities with their “mechanics” and staff? At the very least, it would keep more stuff out of the landfill.

On sugar daddies

Over on XX Factor, there’s a great discussion about that old stand-by fantasy: the sugar daddy. Particularly, how young journalists, facing such brutal economic times, might be tempted into a sort of “accidental concubine” position. You know the story: the plucky, independent-yet-starving creative girl who gets “rescued” by the knight in shining armour, enabling her to continue her artsy-fartsy ways while still enjoying a middle- (or upper-) class lifestyle.

As a child of working-class people in the ’70s, I never indulged in that fantasy. My world was filled with adult women who worked -  mostly out of economic necessity, but the idea that a man would come along and “rescue” them from work was never an option. Working was just what adults did to provide for their families. And experience had shown that you can’t depend on a man, so you’d better have some job skills, sister. As a young woman, I was expected go to college – not to snag a man, but to get an education that would bestow better earning power than my foremothers before me had.

And yet I find myself in a strange situation. Since graduating with my master’s in journalism in May, I have not been able to find a decent full-time job, which left me pretty much dependent on my husband until he left several months later. With no other support, I burned through my savings to pay the bills while working several part-time and/or freelance jobs.

I’m in a very tough situation – because I have so little left in my savings, I may well end up homeless if my income doesn’t pick up soon. And I have no family to help me; my mom & sister already share a one-bedroom apartment.

Here’s where it gets weird: I just started dating again, and the man I’m seeing makes decent scratch working for the Red Cross. My die-hard feminist pride would never allow me to ask my new boyfriend to let me move in with him. But if I got to that point – where I could no longer pay the rent – I’m sure he’d ask me to. Which brings up the burning question: which is better – living in a car with my dignity intact, or moving into my boyfriend’s house and feeling like a concubine (or at the very least, a charity case)?

The funny thing is, I’ve usually been on the other side of this equation. Quite a few of my  past boyfriends came to live with me because they were out of work. I suppose if my boyfriend and I had been going out longer – in other words, had a more established relationship – I wouldn’t be so conflicted about it. But it is what it is, and all I can do is keep my fingers crossed while I scan the want ads.

Local recognition

It’s a bit late in coming, but local blogger (and long-time friend) Richard S. Drake has acknowledged my “discovery” that Hillary Clinton wasn’t the first woman candidate to run for president. He reprints my letter to Ms. Magazine here.

Bush’s new immigration laws

I just heard the story on NPR about still-Pres. Bush’s new rules for hiring foreign farm workers. American agriculture has for decades depended on immigrant workers, but recent laws to create a legal “guest worker” visa for them have been described as “a bureaucratic nightmare,” often creating delays until past the harvest, when it’s too late.

These new laws are the subject of much controversy – labor leaders and other critics claim that they will drive down wages and essential legalize exploitation of these workers. I think it’s a damn shame that when this country is suffering from unemployment levels not seen since 1994, any industry is hiring foreign workers. Under the new rules, farmers have to show that they have recruited American workers first before hiring immigrants. It’s a common – and likely true – argument that these immigrants are only taking jobs that Americans don’t want. An honest want ad for these jobs would look something like this:

“Workers needed for short-term, heavy manual labor. Pay is below poverty level, but overcrowded, unsafe housing is provided. Must be able to tolerate pesticide exposure and heat exhaustion for long periods of time.”

Gee, what American worker wouldn’t want such a great job? Is paying these workers a fair wage and protecting them from toxic chemicals really so much to ask of our agriculture industry?

Church & state

From an NPR story this morning:

“Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pa. — Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s hometown — went further at the meeting. He suggested the bishops use ‘canonical measures’ — such as denying Communion — to make their point.”

But that’s nothing new – churches have been bullying politicians with that threat for years. Here’s where it gets scary:

“A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him ‘constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.’”

So now priests aren’t just bullying the politicians they don’t agree with, they’re putting the screws to ordinary citizens who chose to vote for politicians the priest disagrees with (note: this is only one priest. Other Catholic priests disagree with this stance).
I believe in freedom of speech and religion, so I say let the priest deny whatever rituals he chooses. However, I think this clearly violates the grounds his church stands on to claim tax-exempt status. More disturbingly, though, this also puts it closer to being a cult, where obedience to the leader is total and disagreement is forbidden.