Just glanced at the opening. A strange over-voluble voice here, which may mitigate as we go. We'll see. Most notable were a few clunky metaphors, whicJust glanced at the opening. A strange over-voluble voice here, which may mitigate as we go. We'll see. Most notable were a few clunky metaphors, which I can't imagine ever seeing in Gardner's fiction. Reads like lecture transcripts. But as I say, this is just my first glance....more
Compelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those deCompelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those decisions are made.
The author writes about how before the American Revolution there was a greater sense of community that made it possible for children to live amid large extended families. This made it easier on biological parents while allowing those with no children a chance to mother.
But we lost this strength largely because of the myth of frontier individualism. We pulled away from community. So caregiving shrank to the size of today's nuclear family. Many today still view the nuclear family as the epitome of family. In truth, the author writes, the nuclear family actually represents a diminishment of the outsize child rearing capacities of far larger, now no longer extant community-based extended families.
With those extended families no longer in existence, the author believes we have to support women by way of government programs. The European Community already does some of these things. The failure of the U.S. Congress to extend the Child Tax Credit is a good example of our own national failure to do so.
"The child tax credit (CTC) was a monthly payment of $250 or $300 per child that was given to eligible families in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. . . According to research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the CTC lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021, reducing the child poverty rate from 9.7% to 5.2%. . . [Conversely] without the CTC [when Congress failed to renew it] the child poverty rate rose sharply to 12.4% in 2022, an increase of 41% from December 2021 to January 2022. This means that 3.7 million more children fell below the poverty line." (Source: Conversation with Bing, 1/10/2024)
Add to this example our lack of daycare, Medicare cuts, food stamp cuts, school lunch programs cuts, afterschool programs cuts, etc. — and you begin to glimpse why the decision not to have children is being made by so many women. I pulled the following quote from today's NYT: "Note that more than eight million children will be left out of a new federal food assistance program for needy families . . . because they live in one of the 15 states [whose] governors . . . refuse to participate."
There is simply no support system such as existed when large, extended families were prominent. Right now we have only NGOs or states to provide relief. But as the author says.
"Over the past two centuries . . . we jettisoned expansive ideas of kinship, isolated parents, disinvested from communities, and replaced community care with a kind of care that individuals have to pay for. . . . [But] that's not to say we couldn't rebuild systems of community support if we wanted to, or that we lack examples of how we might do it." (p. 70)...more
It's about the coming into being of an Irish police state. There's been an "emergency" decree. People associated with a teachers' union march start toIt's about the coming into being of an Irish police state. There's been an "emergency" decree. People associated with a teachers' union march start to disappear. As far as I can tell it's set in Dublin, which is never named.
Americans will read it as the playbook to be used should Florida Felon win in November. The perversion of state institutions, the lie that is now truth, the facile grab for power.
Those in Hungary and other authoritarian states, or prospectively authoritarian states, will no doubt have their local take too. So it has broad appeal.
The jackboots march, but many won't believe it, or can't believe it. Society and family holds people in place. It's no time to be obtuse; it's time to flee.
"The state is supposed to leave you alone, Michael, not enter your house like an ogre, take a father into its fist and gobble him, how can I even begin to explain this to the kids, that the state they live in has become a monster?" (p. 37)
I find the comma splices annoying—not sloppy, intentional but annoying. And I'm no maven. Run on dialog without quotes, too, but surprisingly readable....more
1. A WW 1 tales that starts with a Victorian tang, but without the $10 words or lengthy exposition. At the time (1896) our hero Willie Dunne is born t1. A WW 1 tales that starts with a Victorian tang, but without the $10 words or lengthy exposition. At the time (1896) our hero Willie Dunne is born the old girl is still reigning, though fading.
"He was born in the dying days.
"It was the withering end of 1896. He was called William after the long-dead Orange King, because his father took an interest in such distant matters. On top of that, an old great-uncle, William Cullen, was yet living in Wicklow, across the mountains as they used to say, where his father himself had been reared.
"The winter sleet bit into the Dublin cab-men, where they gathered in their mucky gabardines by the Round Room in Great Britain Street. The stony face of the old building remained indifferent, with its strange decoration of ox-skulls and draperies.
"The new babies screeched inside the thick grey walls of the Rotunda Hospital. Blood gathered on the nurses white laps like the aprons of butchers.
"He was a little baby and would be always a little boy. . . When he broke from his mother he made a mewling sound like a wounded cat, over and over." (p. 1)
One of the novelist’s skill has to be the mastery of mood. As here when Barry has the lads go for a swim in the river that crosses their bit of contested turf. And there, briefly, this moment of happiness.
"It was a laughter almost painful in their throats, and the willows seemed to float now in the breeze, like green clouds, and the river water was a piercing blue, the blue of old memory, and although being young they did not know exactly the privilege of being young, yet even after long hardships their bodies felt fine, and the blood was flowing round them well, and after all in the horrible mathematics of the war, they were alive." (p. 40)...more
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