Taxation without insemination

Here's another article, courtesy of the current Newsweek, on how having fewer children or none at all is becoming a global trend, moving out of the wealthy and cosmopolitan urban centers and into more "traditional societies."

Though birthrates are actually just falling closer to the levels they were at before the 1950s, some, as usual, foresee impending crisis.

But whether they're just procrastinators running down their biological clocks or they're making conscious choices to remain unencumbered, the childless and child-free are beginning to change the world in ways that look pretty good to me: making it so property values drop when families with kids move into the neighborhood, sustaining vacation resorts that advertise the fact that they don't allow children–could the notion of "no children" areas in restaurants really be more than a personal pipe dream?

But of course, our dashing and virile leaders simply can't let us get away with such shenanigans for long:

At the same time, around the world it's mostly men who are at the head of a growing backlash against the childless. Politicians and religious leaders warn darkly of an "epidemic" of childlessness that saps the moral fiber of nations; they blame the child-free for impending population decline, the collapse of pension systems and even the rise in immigration. In Japan, commentators have identified the "parasite single" who lives off society instead of doing his duty to start a family.

Yes, single people are parasites–who work and pay property taxes to pay for schooling and health-care for other peoples' kids and retirements, just like everyone else in the society. How is a single person any more of a leech than anyone else, much less a family of four or six? At least in this country, you often need kids to qualify for government health care and food assistance.

And if you think the world is in a sorry state of perpetual conflict now, just imagine if societies derived their collective moralities from their children (though, arguably, on the diplomatic front many of them already do). And we're demonstrably not thinking too seriously about the futures of the children we've got here now in crafting our contemporary decisions on everything from energy to economics.

Still, the solution to all that ails the world must be plopping out more progeny. Germany, which apparently still hasn't learned that trying to control individual reproduction through government policy is perhaps not the greatest idea, is one of several nations pondering stricter economic sanctions against people with no children, in the form of either income tax increases or pension decreases, in hopes of raising national birth rates to improve the greater good:

These moves resonate favorably with voters and the media. Since a large majority of people in all countries still do have children, critics say such measures in effect serve as middle-class tax breaks in the guise of social policy.

Yeah, great idea–"Oh, man, my 'Selfish Spinster Denying her Nation the Service of her UterUS' tax bill is really high this year–hey, you, endurably attractive member of the opposite sex with functional reproductive anatomy! Impregnate me!"

Still, a tax for not having children (I can just see it coming here in the form of a sales tax on birth control–that takes care of pesky infertility write-offs) would probably be far, far cheaper than having to raise a kid. And, you know, far less likely to drive an unwilling parent to violent psychotic breakage.

Though the article goes on to debunk the notion that childlessness is the primary culprit behind low birthrates (it's actually the growing number of vile, vile families like my own that only have one child: "'It's the minimal family that lets you off the hook from parents and social expectations, but exacts the least burden on your lifestyle,' sociologist Hakim says."), practical relevance is rarely a reliable predictor of policy actions, so for the Republican-controlled legislative moment I'm just thankful enough people in this freakishly fertile country are still reproducing like bunnies to keep us in the black on the spawn tally.

Maybe we need to turn our meddling legislative pens toward another dastardly anti-child force overrunning the world's developed societies: Pets.

I just saw a story on "Nightline" about how people's refusals to leave their furriest family members behind can arguably thwart evacuation efforts during disasters like Hurricane Katrina, costing human lives. Japan's drop in birthrate has also been accompanied by an "unprecedented surge in pet ownership:"

Capitalizing on the growing status of these baby-substitutes among young Japanese, Honda is now designing cars that replace child seats with dog crates, and has even created a glove compartment with place for a Pekingese.

Perhaps concerned nations should start levying pet taxes–you know, because that will surely get the child-free to change their minds and scale back their oh-so-decadent lifestyles, for the common welfare.

Though I still fail to see what's so great about large families, anyway. In the post-Sept. 11 world, which I'm sure we'll be hearing about until our ears bleed for the next few weeks, they're sometimes just a liability that will get you stranded abroad as "stateless persons" if their members ever get involved in terrorism.

What's so terrible about finding fulfillment in other, less volatile areas of life and contributing something to your culture instead of just to your household? Obviously the market supports it.

And "Pekingese in the Glovebox" would make an awesome band name or book title.

Skipping the skulls for smilies

I don't want to upset anyone's world order here, especially not so hot on the heels of losing an entire planet from the solar system, but I'm about to quote a David Brooks column – and not wholly for the purpose of ridicule or refutation.

In Sunday's New York Times, Brooks wrote an astute, supported and uncharacteristically amusing piece on how tattoos, once novel and personal symbols of rebellion and individuality, have been all but absorbed into the flabby flesh of the mainstream middle class as a brand of decidedly conventional belonging through often tacky tableaus:

Everybody who has been to the beach this summer has observed that tattoos are now everywhere. There are so many spider webs, dolphins, Celtic motifs and yin-yang images spread across the sands, it looks like a New Age symbology conference with love handles.

A study in The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology showed that about 24 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 50 have at least one tattoo, up from about 15 percent in 2003. Thirty-six percent of those between 18 and 29 have a tattoo. Pretty soon you'll go to the beach and find that only the most hardened nonconformists will be unmarked. Everybody else will be decorated with gothic-lettered AARP logos and Katie Couric 4-EVER tributes, and Democrats will have their Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers scratched across their backs so even their morticians will know which way they voted.

After having to admit that last line was gold, I still had to wonder: Why was Brooks, the Times' token torch-bearer for conservative mores and vintage values, bothering to write about tattoos?

It couldn't just be simple schadenfreude at etched nonconformists losing a permanent and visible claim to non-standard status to a bored and bulging bourgeois trying to look bad-ass by pushing pigment; "another generation of hipsters, laid low by the ironies of consumerism" – and sure enough, putting to use that superior brain power those of us of taller stature are reportedly possessed of, I think I've nailed it.

Though I have tremendous respect and awe for the technical and artistic skill it takes to create a tattoo and have seen several I've liked in their context on other people, however much I might flirt with the idea of getting inked (for as I've been told, my paper-white skin would make a vivid canvas), I know I'd never rationally commit to it.

Tattoos, whether commemorative, expressive or works of art, are all about imparting permanence and external visibility on the inherently transitory and internal, physically and psychologically.

There's an element of gambling and sacrifice involved; trying to know yourself so well that you can predict what a future version of yourself will fancy, or trying to direct that future version of yourself to always be the sort of person who will fit the design, even though you know you're bound to change, inside and out.

They also restrict your options. It's like if I had to wear my favorite outfit every single day for the rest of my life, after a while I'd start to drive myself crazy with the desire just to have the possibility of wearing something else again. I might be perfectly content wearing that outfit forever if given the choice each day, but the minute you tell me I must, I'd be singularly conscious of that fact and make myself miserable.

So once it's done, you're going to use whatever mental mechanisms you've got at your disposal to make yourself like or at least tolerate it forever, because you know you'd have to go through something painful, scarring and expensive to be rid of it.

In short, I would almost certainly never get a tattoo for many of the same reasons I would almost certainly never get married.

And this is precisely where dear Mr. Brooks and I differ, and the old antiquated moralist we know and love bleeds through. For Brooks calls the "longing for permanence" that tattoos embody admirable, while I can't keep from wondering, why mar what's pulsing and adaptable, symbolizing the very nature of life, by letting something foreign and stubborn inextricably under your skin for everyone else to see?

Invasion of the neonatal neocons?

Here's a bit of vital and not at all horrific mental picture-inducing news for you, courtesy of the ever eloquent "Good Morning America:" "Republicans do have sex after all."

And apparently another reason liberals lose elections is because, unlike their allegedly more conservative counterparts, not enough of their amorous encounters end with popping out a wailing bag of future political disengagement to automatically "replenish their ranks" at the polls:

[Syracuse University professor Arthur] Brooks is dead serious about this. He says the baby gap will influence future elections. His message to liberals dismayed with his findings: "Have babies!"

I'd rather just pick apart his argument, thanks.

Now, I got to know the General Social Survey data, from which these findings were reportedly culled, more intimately than I would have liked in a class I took on public opinion research last year. The big take-home message there was that by getting creative with your statistics and sample sizes (which here are pretty small), you can make the data say just about anything you want to conclude.

What first jumps out at me (after the irony of so many conservatives having roundly neutered themselves of any possible natural selection arguments) is the 80 percent figure for the rate at which parental political persuasion is passed on. While it's true that parents' affiliation is often the strongest predictor of how a given American will vote, that figure seems a tad too deterministic and incongruent with notably close or landslide elections–especially given the share of the electorate, particularly its younger swath, that doesn't vote.

The older the voters, the more likely they are to actually cast ballots, and by that point they're not voting on "family" issues, they're looking out for themselves. If we're talking which group is going to have the next drastic electoral impact, I'd look to retiring baby boomers before tying to devise a way to beam campaign ads into the womb.

Setting entirely aside the power individual candidates can wield across party lines, the notion that when this supposedly lopsided cohort comes of voting age that the same issues and issue positions will still define what it means to vote "liberal" or "conservative" is also ludicrously shortsighted. It's no wonder so much of this country prefers to wrap its collective mind in allegorical but finite religious texts than stretch to fathom the notion of billions of years of random evolution.

For as usual, wanton prognostication usually ends up revealing more disturbing things about the present than it does about the future:

And Democrats such as Jenny Backus -- doing her small part by expecting her firstborn this October -- looked for the silver lining.

"It's something that you can always encourage your friends when you're doing a little matchmaking, to say, 'Hey, we got to make sure we close the fertility gap,'" she said.

Now there's a great pick-up line. It's running slightly less of a deficit on class than something about stuffing ballot boxes, swelling voter rolls or screwing two things at once, but come on–that would be almost as effective on liberal or independent women as these men who persist in toting around their drooling gene vessels like they were Labradoodles and using them to flirt with other women while their wives are shopping. Or about as effective as being Tom Cruise.

But at least now we know that those of us who don't want kids are not merely terrible human beings and, according to Forbes' recent (and so scathingly sexist it prompted a formal counterpoint) piece on avoiding career women, unsuitable for long-term relationships with comparably successful men because we have the gall to want a say in how we live our own lives–now we're sub-par citizens as well.

Yet even in the heat of culture-war battle, things just seem to have a way of balancing out: While the FDA handed the child-hating liberal whores a nice victory Thursday by allowing over-the-counter sales of Plan B, the God-fearing conservatives growing real families in labs got some good news from stem-cell researchers who announced a new technique, modeled on existing diagnostic testing, for deriving stem-cells from single blastomeres and without destroying embryos, giving more of the excessively engineered little buggers a shot at life, or continued indefinite deep-freeze.

But, naturally, the pre-female ones shouldn't stay there too long if they want a shot at snagging a husband–for in state-sanctioned declarations of love, as in astronomy, nobody wants a frigid dwarf.

Here comes the drama llama...

You knew it was coming: Following the Lieberman/Lamont race and last week's widely broadcast remarks by Sen. George Allen, R-Va., in which he rather tactlessly referred to an Indian campaign worker as a "macaca" comes the New York Times piece in which bipartisan strategists cavort with the fabled alarmist alpaca (and perhaps my newly engineered species, the hyperbole gerbil) by sputtering about the potentially seismic influence online video site YouTube could have on the electoral system:

If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate's life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?

Even Republican strategist Matthew Dowd is getting woolly, lamenting "a future where candidates must be camera-ready before they hit the road, rather than be a work in progress. 'What's happened is that politicians now have to be perfect from Day 1,' he said. 'It's taken some richness out of the political discourse.'"

Yes, because there was so very much richness and spontaneity to rob the campaign trail of before YouTube started up last year–seriously, has it ever been acceptable for someone running for public office to make offensive remarks that others might reasonably overhear and tell others about?

Of course, the optimists counter-speculate that Internet video could empower everyone by allowing voters to hold candidates more directly accountable, and candidates to bypass mediators in trafficking their messages directly to the masses, eventually making professional journalism obsolete.

Now, as time passes, to me it keeps looking more and more as though the supposed "power" the blogosphere and other online communiques wield over public opinion is really just a rationalization of their undue impact on elite opinion, put forth by leaders with too much time on their hands, too little contact with the "reality-based community" outside their own circles and serious delusions of grandeur.

Alleged "strategists" tend to grossly overestimate the power of Internet speech, often by grossly underestimating the credibility thresholds and mistaking the newsgathering habits of its propagators–many of whom are younger voters. Most of us, even those engaged in political news and who spend inordinate shares of our days on the Internet, don't usually hear about anything political that's been posted online until it's broadcast on "The Daily Show" or reported by a mainstream news source, online or off–in short, until our leaders start making a big deal over it and let us know it exists.

While it may be the death of another line of communication between citizens and officials by substituting an unrepresentative online sample for the whole, the Internet is not going to be the death of the news media–sifting, highlighting and directing consumers to content is going to be more important than ever as the volume of that content continues to grow exponentially. Mathematically, it's just too much information for individuals to sort through on their own, especially when most of it is useless crap.

And though with Katie Couric talking of distinguishing her broadcast from the competition by assuming "many viewers have already scanned the headlines of the day, giving her license to jettison some stories entirely or to dispense with others in a digest," one might be better off acting as one's own gatekeeper on YouTube, I'm sure as hell not going there for my news and current affairs analysis–I'm going for the '80s music videos, the idiots in Pac-Man costumes running through libraries and, until their generous poster was shut down and another tiny spot of joy was wrenched from the entertainment-starved little lives of those of us without cable, the new episodes of "Project Runway."

I know we'll find some way to "Carry on..." but it really is a pity that, based solely on the substance and syntax of comments people post to YouTube videos, none of them have probably heard of postmodern pastiche and the argument that nothing is original anymore, therefore cultural products distributed to mass audiences are all on the table for sampling and re-tooling.

Indeed, what the politicos seem to have forgotten is that this epidemic of viral-video madness isn't exactly a new phenomenon–rather it's one Bush White House officials, to take the most recent example, have actively used not merely to smear opponents by replaying their recorded gaffes, but also to court attention: Remember Ashcroft's serenade to the press corps, or the annual Barney videos, starring staffers and the presidential pooch? But indisputable and unrivaled pearls of amateur online moviemaking though the latter are, they haven't changed the face of democracy, either by making it harrier or more huggable.

Regardless of what Internet video means for electoral freedom, I'd be more worried about politicians posting scripted films meant to look spontaneous to score points with those modern hipsters surfin' teh Internets–and not just some misguided Democratic presidential hopeful rushing onto the Senate floor in a banana suit to declare it "PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!" or Dubya and Rumsfeld delivering a "Walker: Texas Ranger"-style pummelling to an Osama-impersonator on the White House lawn, but sneakier, more plausible yet still misleading snippets, with the most successful, as always, seeping out from those with the most plump coffers.

But still, we can all find comfort in the fact that, even though perhaps no electoral race can be said to be purely local these days, it's a safe bet that most denizens of our wired nation still won't bother to show up at the polls.

And on the diplomatic front, obviously the current course isn't cutting it in the Middle East–who knows, perhaps Dick Cheney lip-synching "Rock the Casbah" into a grainy webcam might finally be the message that changes hearts and minds.

Curating the national character

The United States is solidly, as a former history teacher might say, in the half of the world that makes the top half possible when it comes to scientific literacy–and when we can't reach consensus on matters of empirical fact, what makes us think we should be scripting in stone definitive historical narratives of events that are still politically relevant, disputed and incendiary, not to mention still remembered by their original actors and audiences?

According to this New York Times editorial, that's precisely what's being proposed for Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.:

Its eloquence and its terseness – both a product of its simplicity – have moved nearly everyone who has ever been lucky enough to visit. But why stop with perfect? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, established to raise money for the memorial, has proposed a new visitor center to help "interpret" the memorial and the war. The center, some 25,000 square feet in size, would be built underground just north of the Lincoln Memorial. The site was approved the other day, with many restrictions.

Never mind the politics of placement–what versions of the story would such a center possibly present? As it stands, the ambiguous and elegant memorial conveys a more authentic sense of what Vietnam means to American history than any literal attempt at explication ever could.

It begins with one name etched just above the ground, but before you know it you've sunk down until you can't see the sky above; only more names floating out from the blackness amid reflections of all the chattering national indifference and idiocy and insulated naivete that helped perpetuate the entire mess and its present progeny. Visitors walk through it starting from the "wrong" end, toss out half-brained theories of how the seemingly random names are patterned (it's by order of death), walk carelessly in front of others, fill any silences with whatever meaningless commentary comes to mind–for it's uncomfortable, and that's precisely the point.

I don't know what schools the Times' editorial board talked to, but there's a reason why, even at the legendarily "liberal" UW-Madison, I had to specifically seek out a course on the Vietnam wars (which I couldn't get a seat in until my senior year) to hear anything at all from the public education system about the entire period, or anything else after World War II for that matter.

In many ways Vietnam represents the most fatal fallibilities of the American spirit: blind arrogance, willful ignorance, hostility to learning and adapting, misplaced and excessive violence backing up misguided and skeletal ideology. Not that it's stopped us from doing it to every other war, but whitewashing the entire conflict to fit in with the other gleaming monuments to national righteousness speckling the capital is dishonest to all involved, not the least of which to the design integrity of the memorial itself.

An oft neglected component of any effective human creative or intellectual endeavor is knowing when to stop tacking things on and just be still, be quiet; watch, listen and be moved by what you've made or discovered.

That's precisely why the Vietnam memorial stands out among all the ostentatious, alabaster odes to one-dimensional patriotism that surround it: A work of art more than a carved decree, it's just about the only one that invites and accommodates multiple interpretations.

It doesn't mask or deny the dissonant reality of what it represents, but its design is so evocative that it leaves any visitors who are even marginally engaged with no choice but to call it out for themselves. And for everybody else who prefers to treat visual simplicity as a metaphor for substantive vacuity, it's not going to cast a big black cloud of complexity over a star-spangled tour of the monuments.

But when we let that mindset take over and have the last word on our history, we acquiesce to closing important avenues of discussion and evidence.

And at a time when justice officials are talking about looking into just how constitutional it might be to detain citizens for weeks without charge on suspicion of terrorism and the president is speaking of Iraqi civilians like they're a bunch of insolent children refusing to clean up their toys because for some reason they just don't seem to really, truly be getting on board with his supposed strategy for stability, we need all the argumentative ammo we're still free to stockpile.

What will Uncle Sam do with all that lipstick?

The one decent thing about being cut off from the Internet for a week is that you really gain some perspective on the degree to which commentary–particularly that parroted and spun by the major players following actual events–distorts the news.

For instance, until today I had no idea that the print chatter seemed to concede that Sen. Joseph Lieberman's primary defeat and the foiled British airline plot aggregated into positive PR for the Republicans on Iraq and put a fresh coat on their "tough on terror" facade.

Silly, isolated me–here I thought bringing up those issues might reflect badly on the party responsible for handling them both. Good thing Dick Cheney and his band of merry rogues have been making the media rounds to set news consumers straight. Because quite plainly, this business with religious kooks trying to blow up airliners with sports drinks and disposable cameras was really just an elaborate endorsement of more intrusive domestic eavesdropping.

But left only with the sinkhole that is network news, all I got was that Americans are finally being asked to offer up a tangible sacrifice to fight the war on terrorism–by relinquishing their toiletries to our fine transportation security professionals before going airborne. (Though I did manage to total my car the day before I was due to drive out here–rest in peace, dear, sweet Silver Bullet–at least I didn't end up flying; for if some ham-handed screener had tried to confiscate my SPF 45 or my three-quarters-full bottle of my signature Dior perfume, I just may have snapped.)

Of course, I also gleaned that Dubya made some cringe-worthy generalization on fighting "Islamic fascism" and, like, OMG, one of the would-be terrorists was a WOMAN!

To top it off, we've now got Katie Couric claiming the people have spoken, and they want the network evening news to be twice as long as its current half hour. (Strike another one against this still rather beguiling notion of mandatory voting.)

If that weren't indication enough we're in for a journalistic jewel when Katie takes the CBS helm in a few weeks, she's also alluding to including an adaptation of that dreaded scourge of local newspaper opinion pages, "a regular segment for people to give their opinions." Seriously, if I want to hear what some random jackass has to say about the events of the day, I'll ask one of the many I see on the street–is it really so much to ask that people given interview time on national news broadcasts actually have some tangible, verifiable reason we should treat their opinions as informed or particularly noteworthy? Ordinary people have the entire Internet.

But in one bright spot on the current-event horizon, your friend and mine, Tucker Carlson, is finally going to rock that bow tie like it's meant to be rocked–by serving a stint as a prancing douchebag on "Dancing With the Stars." Perhaps there's hope for the future of political punditry after all.

From one capital to another

Freak Typography is saying farewell to Madison and will resume later this month from inside the fabled Capital Beltway encircling Washington D.C.–when I'm settled into my new abode, or when I recover from being trampled by this tacky Cow Parade sculpture in a wanton and gruesome display of unprovoked fiberglass-bovine aggression; whichever comes first.

Oh, Madison, how I'll miss thee.

Great, this will free up tons of trunk space

In what just might be the single dumbest and most unnecessary invention ever, check out the "Buddy on Demand"–an inflatable man conveniently contained in a car's glove compartment that "solo female motorists" can inflate and deflate with the click of a button to make themselves "feel safer" while driving at night.

Yeah... I must have missed that quorum when it was decided that women now have to feel and act like weak, helpless victims when we're traveling alone after dark IN A FREAKING CAR.

Come to think of it, at the time I was probably busy doing something to mechanically court male approval or perpetuate society's unrealistic standards of beauty–you know, setting back all that hard work my fellow females are doing to pump up the collective strength of our sex.

Seriously, am I just weird for not fearing for my safety when I'm moving at a relatively high rate of speed encased in a cocoon of metal and glass–but without a may-un, even a plastic, creepy-ass facsimile of one, to protect me?

What remotely plausible yet still horrible vehicular calamity is going to befall me that for some reason would not happen or would play out less negatively if there were a man in the passenger seat? Is a deer going to bound out in front of my car, see that there's what appears to be a guy inside, then reverse in mid-air and change its mind about crashing through my windshield? Is that oblivious idiot on the cell phone going to wait for me and my seemingly wanted self to pass through the green light before stepping into oncoming, nocturnal loser traffic instead?

If you want to get really improbable, is a carjacker or other miscellaneous criminal going to be scared off by some Ken-doll looking, oddly stationary tool who lets the woman drive?

For if these fragile femmes want to be really safe, shouldn't the inflatable man be in the driver's seat? Everyone knows women can't drive–you're just asking for an accident if you take the wheel. Hell, while we're at it, we should just get with some of the world's more progressive nations and require women to have male escorts in order to leave the house via any mode of transport.

And for those women who are so brainwashed as to fear any form of unsolicited male attention from whatever distance and through all manner of physical and social barriers, I would imagine having an inflatable man next to you whilst idling at a stoplight would draw far more lascivious looks and cat-calls (not to mention good old-fashioned WTF?s) than you're capable of drawing solo.

Not that you should ditch your blow-up boy-toy, ladies–until he learns to deflate himself, he's probably the only sort, of either gender, that can stand you.

Indeed, this is a pretty wide detour off the already bumpy and carrion-littered highway that is contemporary feminism–and aren't women supposed to be the ones who stop and ask for directions? Apparently not if they have to exercise some of that alleged independence and do it alone.