h/t John Scalzi

Meghan Cox Gurdon, a former conservative columnist for the National Review and the Washington Examiner, somehow managed to slither her way into a berth reviewing children’s books for the WSJ.  Predictably, her complaint is that YA fiction these days is just awful and ugly and brutal, not like the gentle, sun-touched fiction for teenagers of our own youth.

Which, setting aside the pearl-clutching, is really where I stopped. Our youth? Yes, you heard that right; as with everything else worthy in life, children’s literature was destroyed by those awful 1960s, and children’s literature turned to the Dark Side forty years ago. Apparently Gurdon’s outrage has affected her math skills; the “46-year-old mother of three” she fusses over in her opening paragraph would have barely been in kindergarten in 1967, and would have been exposed to that “dark” YA literature in her own teenage years. As would all, if not most, of Generation X. You know, the people who are now getting middle-aged and raising kids and thus supposedly having to worry about the terrible YA literature that awaits our young’uns, and the same people who grew up with that “dark” fiction of the terrible post-1960s lurking in the bookstores.

If Gurdon’s column were factual, it would be trivial to point out that there is plenty of YA fiction that isn’t “dark”, and is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff we had available as kids; I’d have loved to have Leviathan or Zoe’s Tale or White Cat to read when I was a teenager, and none of those are exactly on the level of Go Ask Alice as far as “dark” fiction went.

But it’s not. She’s simply regurgitating a pearl-clutching rant about Kids These Days and how much better things were in the innocent days of our own youth, and throwing on a steaming sprinkle of conservative ranting about how the culture imploded once those goddamn hippies showed up. Which is a pity, because it seems like even the Twilight books would be a refreshing breath of air for kids otherwise stuck listening to their mom rant about the culture wars.

And damn if the thread doesn’t immediately get clunked on by people who amaze you only by their ability to type with fingers jammed firmly in their ears, going OMFG U CALLED ME AN OPPRESSOR!! and “Racism? That’s so twentieth century, darling” and “But shouldn’t we wait for people of color to come to us before we acknowledge they have a role in SF?”

Oh Internets, just once, I would love you to surprise me.

Then they will recover, and beat you viciously and without mercy. Rhetorically speaking.

It is true that many people who aren’t lawyers to have a clear understanding of certain areas of the law, and are even able to talk about it intelligently. Unfortunately those people are vastly outnumbered by other people, who think that Wikipedia is a real legal resource, or who take one line in a judicial opinion out of context and think that’s what the law is.

It is also true that the law is full of different specialities and lawyers have different levels of competency. I’m not familiar enough with patent law to explain its complexities to you, either at a cocktail party or on the Internet. Likewise, don’t tell me that you fully understand product-liability law in California because you heard about it from your dad, a retired lawyer who used to do criminal cases in Massachusetts.

And for god’s sake don’t present your half-baked legal expertise as legal advice to others.

John Scalzi glees over the fact that Proposition 8, the California initiative to destroy same-sex marriages will, quite accurately, be titled “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry”. Since, you know, it actually takes a right that currently exists and will eliminate it. One of the spokesperson for a group that supports this amendment complains that the language is “inflammatory” and “unduly prejudicial”. (The latter phrase, by the way, is lawyer-speak for “would be bad for me.”) They want something completely uninformative and misleading, like “Marriage” or “Rules Regarding Marriage”, something that suggests a column in Ladies’ Home Journal rather than an effort to forcibly end existing marriages because they involve icky queer people.

If you think this is nuts, remember that the Prop 8 supporters are trying to pretend that kindergartners will have to be told that same-sex marriage is the same as ‘traditional marriage’. I imagine next they’ll argue that if Prop 8 doesn’t pass, it will be legal for gay people to drown adorable kittens.

There is some tedious debate going on in the Scalzi thread from people who insist it’s possible to be against same-sex marriage and not be a bigoted assjack. Well, yes, as lawyers say, anything’s possible. I can think of a couple of non-bigoted explanations: you’re an activist who feels that all marriage is wrong and should be abolished; or, you’re a complete brain-dead moron who hasn’t given enough thought to the issue to understand that bigotry is involved.

Outside of that, yep, you’re a bigoted assjack. No, a visceral reaction to gay anal sex, or the fact that your religion doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, or some blather about “judicial activism” (dogwhistle for “result liberals like”) are not exemptions. Pretty soon, people with those opinions will be regarded the way civilized people regard those who thought of black/white marriages as “miscegenation”. Isn’t that a wonderful legacy?

Although I suppose cockroaches aren’t much concerned about their legacy. Just about getting back under that nice, dark rock.

Total cost of surgery, anesthesia, surgical tubing, collar, medicines that we have to administer over the next three days, etc. etc.: over $800.

“As long as we have him under anesthesia, do you want to go ahead and have his teeth cleaning done?”

Oh sure, why not. What’s another $65 when you’re paying enough money to buy a whole new cat, perhaps one not stupid enough to get into fights with other cats half his age.

I spent another $25 on the way home to buy three big bags of potting soil, and dragged it along with months’ worth of dead leaves in mounds along the bottom edge of the fence. If he wants to sneak out and pick fights with the locals again, he’s damn well going to have to work for it.

(One wonders why Dr. Helen’s famous husband hasn’t figure out that he has, in the words of one of her fan-commenters, put his head in a noose and is essentially trusting in Dr. Helen’s goodwill that she won’t divorce him and strip him of every penny he has. But I digress.)

It is indeed amusing to hear libertarian types whine about women who only want money. Isn’t that good, capitalist behavior? If a woman is attractive, shouldn’t she hew to the advice that it’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man? And certainly you’d think that the whiners would quickly figure out that they would be more successful with less-sought-after women.

If we were talking about some kind of transaction where the whiners’ egos <I>weren’t</I> at stake, they’d laugh at somebody who went without rather than stuck to their price range. “No, the Jaguar dealer is not obligated to sell you a car just because you want one. The market allows them to charge more for a Jag. If you can’t afford one, STFU and go buy a Honda.”

But when they are talking about their sex lives–and make no mistake, the whiners think of women as not much more than clamshell containers for sex and housework–suddenly market theory and what-you-can-afford-is-what-you-deserve goes out the window.  Because, as Amanda points out, suddenly when it comes to getting laid, they’re all Communists.

The take-away message: Even evolution-denying, Talmud-ignorant, metaphor-tone-deaf, pretzel-headed Christian literalists are forced to acknowledge and honor the utter coolness of dinosaurs.

The SF Chron’s kid blog posted a couple of articles by a gentleman who, being the father of a one-year-old, is clearly an expert on parenting (no, really; you are a perfect parent before you have children and it’s downhill from there). Let’s set aside a discussion of the sexist implications of “wussification” for the moment; the article is one big, long whine about how Parents Today aren’t as stupid and careless as our parents were, and as a result of this most untoward concern for children not being maimed, killed, etc., Kids Today just aren’t having any fun at all and are coddled.

I’m not very good at nostalgia, so in addition to remembering the fun of bouncing around in a car with no seatbelts, I also remember friends who didn’t “do all right”. Kids who really did lose an eye, or a life, because somebody thought a stern warning and the threat of a whuppin’ was enough to keep the children out of the gun cabinet. There was a guy nicknamed “Shrapnel Face” because he was playing around with gunpowder and coffee cans–the doctors said his sunglasses were the only reason he still had eyes. I remember a friend of mine having to be towed around in a wagon while we played, because he’d been playing in the street and hit by a car–kind of tough to run around and play when you’ve got a shattered pelvis.

So if Hartlaub wants to live out his fantasies of being a manly, indulgent parent–and why not, he’s got a wife to dump all that “sensible and responsible” shit on–he can do it with his own kid, and I’ll expect that he won’t be flapping his lips when, say a parent buys guns for a kid who uses them unwisely. But he shouldn’t expect everyone to be dumb enough to think that the judgment of a child about what’s fun and appropriate ought to override the judgment of an adult.