Category Archives: Sociology

Going to the Mattresses

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In Diane Keaton: Here I Am in AARP Magazine, writer David Hochman writes that Keaton “acknowledges how challenging it is to juggle a still-busy career with a teen and a preteen at an age most women are feathering their empty nests with IKEA guest beds.”

leirvik bedThat annoyed a midwestern friend who responded, “But then I remembered: last year I bought one. For myself, true, but still…”

I had to go look up what an IKEA bed was.

My grandfather bought new beds for the Keys house but I have never bought a bed. Other than those, I think the newest bed in my inventory was bought in 1886.

“I sure hope you’ve bought mattresses for those old beds, Dick.”

Mattresses?

Horsehair lasts forever.

(I do tighten the ropes every now and then, though.)

The truth about mattresses.

I come from an old Quaker family that never threw anything away. I can about count on my fingers all the furniture I’ve bought in my life: an oak drawing table, a walnut sideboard, the double recliner, the dining room chairs we gave to our daughter, a bedside table, a hassock. Porch furniture doesn’t count. Nor do the beds I built in New Jersey or the shower seat and the built-ins in Vermont. Anne and I have never been able to agree on a sofa so we don’t have one.

My great-grandfather Enos Barnard was a very short man, so he had a full size low-post bed cut down — it is about 64 inches nose to tail. I slept in that bed as a six-foot teenager which is why I still sleep diagonally even in a California King. And my uncle convalesced in that bed when he returned from the War. He is 6’5″ tall. His feet hung over the end which is the actual etymology of that phrase.

In North Puffin I sleep in the same maple Sheraton “4-poster” bed with a flat tester frame that my parents did. That and all the other beds will just about fit a full size (54″ x 75″) mattress with only a wee little bit of slightly droopy overhang. Don’t sleep on the very edge. My guest room beds are the same size — my mother’s mother’s bed from uphome and the guest room bed from downhome. Someone Before Me removed their rope knobs.

The attic there has the three beds we aren’t using plus their mattresses and boxes. I think the newest bed, the 1886 iron frame I slept in after I outgrew my great-grandfather’s bed is also there but my cousin Terry may have it.

Box springs are more difficult with older beds that don’t fit today’s twin/full/queen/king/Cali king standards. The frame rails on my full beds are set too close together to accommodate a ready-made box so the choice is to custom make the box spring that will sit between the rails or use a sky hook to get into a bed with the frame 33″ off the floor, plus the box spring and the 14″ of poof-top modern mattress. That would be taller than the mattress is wide. It’s a good thing we have high ceilings, but I would knock that tester off with an errant elbow.

Everything I Know

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Everything I know about history, I learned from Thomas B. Costain.

That would truly annoy Frank Wright, the exceptional high school history teacher from whom I also learned a lot. I tell the Costain story often. It is mostly the truth.

Canadian journalist and editor Thomas B. Costain published his first best-selling historical novel, For My Great Folly, at the age of 57. He had toiled in the writing trenches for most of his working life before Folly. Mr. Costain’s fiction relied so heavily on historic events that one reviewer said “it was hard to tell where history leaves off and apocrypha begins.” Mr. Costain made the story of Joseph of Arimathea and the lowly Basil of Antioch come alive for millions of Americans, including me. The Silver Chalice may have been the first historical novel I ever read.

I had read Chalice, the Tontine, Below the Salt, and the Last Plantagenets before leaving for college. My mom, a Swarthmore alum, also knew American writer James A. Michener and introduced me to his work as well.

Mr. Michener penned some of the best known sagas in literature, novels that spanned the lives of uncounted generations in exotic or previously under reported locales. He was known for his meticulous research which let him work the entire history of each region into his stories. I can almost say I know more about the Chesapeake Bay from reading Mr. Michener’s Chesapeake than from growing on the water there.

The Italian government lauded biographical novelist Irving Stone for the way he highlighted Italian history in the Agony and the Ecstasy, the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

So.

How do we separate fact from fiction when our favorite novelists leaven their rising stories with actual history in search of a truth? Or in search of a good story?

It is hard, after reading Costain, not to mistake the Grail story as truth. It is hard, after reading Michener, not to mistake the many generations of the Buk, Bukowski, and Lubonski families as real.

Fast forward.

Jon Stewart is a brilliant satirist. Pew Research Center’s search for the most admired American journalist has Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, at Number 4, tied with actual news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS, and Anderson Cooper of CNN. Dan Rather? OK, it was a 2007 poll. The Daily Show does have pieces of substantive news but satire can’t handle the whole truth and Mr. Stewart has repeatedly insisted that he is only a comedian on a fake news show.

Monologist Mike Daisey played the Lane Series at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, this weekend. His The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has caused a national foofah over what is and what isn’t true in his monologue about Apple and its manufacturing practices in China. In January, NPR’s This American Life and its host, Ira Glass, published a critical 39-minute story that detailed the appalling Chinese iPhone plants, a program adapted from Mr. Daisey’s theatrical monologue.

Last weekend, Mr. Glass retracted the story.

The most admired reporter of our times, Edward R. Murrow said, “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.” From Costain to Michener to Stewart to Daisey to Survivor we’re blurring the line between truth and fiction.

We in the news business must be truthful. But most of all, we must remember that entertainment has no such need.

“Get the facts, Dick,” Frank Wright would tell me. “It’s not the truth without the facts.”

Of course, I’m not sure Mr. Wright ever watched “reality TV.”

You Can’t (Must) Do That!

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1. Whitehouse.gov has a petition to the Obama administration to “require automakers to replace the nearly useless Check Engine Light with a display that actually explains what’s wrong.” The petitioner says “we need a federal mandate…”

Say what?

“Yeah, like that’s what we want governance to do,” my friend Liz Arden said. “We really want the Administration to replace its mission for social engineering with even more automotive engineering.”

2a. Meanwhile, in the real world, America’s poor use food “stamps” to buy staples like milk, vegetables, fruits and meat. Technology update. The coupon book has morphed into a debit card. A Florida state senator wants to stop them from using the food stamp cards to buy sweets like cakes, cookies, and Jell-O™ and snack foods like chips. She also wants to limit other welfare funds, known as Temporary Assistance For Needy Families, from being used at ATMs in casinos and strip clubs and anywhere out of state.

Ya think?

“That’s something of which I would approve,” Ms. Arden told me. If our government insists on “spending our tax money helping out the poor, then social engineering in this respect is appropriate. My tax dollars are not a gift to be used by the recipient as they please — they are an investment in this country’s good. ”

The Florida bill recently passed committee. Liberal critics say the government shouldn’t dictate what people eat.

“Gummint isn’t,” Ms. Arden said. “They may use any of their own earned dollars to eat snack foods and go to strip clubs.”

But, but, they are poor. That pretty much means they don’t have their own money, yes?

“Then work hard to get off the public teat so you can afford to have Twinkies™ and Ho Hos™.”

I’m not sure I’d even call it “social engineering.” I’d simply call it a grant requirement. Or a contract. Or the law.

Grant recipients have to jump through specific hoops for their funds (a college lab can’t spend the money it gets to research norovirus on, say, staff mammograms even if that’s a good thing to do). And, just as an aside, the letter carrier who delivered the welfare check or food stamp card in the mail passed a criminal-history check, a physical examination, and a drug test.

2b. On the other hand, the ACLU here in Florida brought a class action suit last year to stop drug-testing welfare recipients. That’s probably social engineering because I’m thinking very few street dealers have the required credit card machines. That makes it hard to use food “stamps” for crack or meth.

3. At the other end of the spectrum, Liz Arden does think the Federal gummint should get out of the marriage business altogether. “It’s a contract and Congress is trying to social engineer it,” she says. “Let the churches or the Towns or even just the individuals download a form or call a lawyer and just do it.”

That’s a good Libertarian response to a Congress that is either hellbent on destroying marriage or saving it. Or both. Or not doing anything at all.

Congress is nothing if not schizophrenic.

Except contracts don’t bind parties outside the contract to their terms so a private marriage contract can’t by itself change HIPAA, can’t override probate laws, can’t affect the tax code, and can’t protect child brides, people of unsound mind, or close relatives (you cannot, for example marry a parent, grandparent, sister, brother, child, grandchild, niece, nephew, aunt or uncle in Vermont). United States federal law is supposed to assure that a marriage licensed in one state is recognized in all the others, a pretty important fiat. And the Supreme Court overturned state marriage laws that barred interracial marriages on the basis that marriage is a “basic civil right…” Not a likely outcome for a private contract.

Government must not/must mandate Idiot Lights.
Government must/must not mandate food stamp junque food.
Government must/must not mandate welfare drug tests.
Government must not/must mandate marriage.

The Check Engine or Service Engine Soon lights aren’t necessary to the well-being of American society. Period.

The junk food and drug test orders do improve the well-being of American society. Worth running through the legislature.

Marital contracts deserve the same crafting latitude as any other legal contract but the basic tenets of civil rights, inheritance, safety, and taxation are national concerns. Creating a legal umbrella that assures that both the redneck and the Brahmin recognize the contract does improve the well-being of American society.

Revolutions

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I quit smoking for my birthday in 1976.

I have mentioned since that that used up all my willpower. I don’t smoke. I still like the smell of a good cigar but I still didn’t smoke today.

I figure I have aimed my stock of willpower at not smoking which doesn’t leave much to avoid lusting after a new Android tablet or a different boat.

Researcher Roy F. Baumeister sort of agrees in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Like a muscle, willpower is fatigued or broken down completely by overuse.

We’re not talking about the Australian racer who drives for Team Penske in the IndyCar Series. Willpower is usually thought to mean self discipline, self-control, or the ability to force yourself to do something you really really really didn’t want to do.

Like keep a New Year’s resolution.

I “came of [management] age” in the 70s and 80s when the B-schools thought employees were valuable and Theory Y was king. I still believe in Management By Objectives, a program I first implemented at Harris.

MBO relies on participative goal setting in which employees decide on what business goals they can attain and the tasks they will undertake to fulfill them. The part I like best is that we measure the actual results against the standards we set at the beginning of the period so we all — managers and managees alike — always know exactly how we are doing.

The reason managers like MBO is that the employees think they have power because they are setting their own goals and are more committed to the company (and more likely to outproduce the company expectations) as a result.

The only real downside to MBO is that it is still a top-down process.

On the other hand, it doesn’t rely solely on willpower. Properly done, every goal has both an external deadline and a manager or coach or peer to make sure we do it. It’s a pretty good process to force yourself to do something you really really really didn’t want to do.

When I led a parent group at our local middle and high school, we started a goal setting club. The kids created their own goals, set milestones, and chose someone to monitor their results. We had a reward at the end. The kids did very well.

Back to Dr. Baumeister’s weight room. He has shown that we can build “new” willpower in much the same way we build muscles in the gym: practice and reps, practice and reps. And by eating properly. Our brains need fuel to make decisions, store and retrieve memories, and pass standardized tests. Dr. Baumeister found that willpower requires glucose too so we can be strengthen our willpower simply by working out and adding to the brain’s fuel stores.

Building working muscle means working with moderate weights but doing it over and over and over again.

Want to keep your New Year’s resolutions?

Take Dr. Baumeister’s advice and use what we’ve learned in MBO. Just like the 7th and 8th graders:

  • Create a goal you can reach. It is darned near impossible to lose 50 pounds but it is reasonable to lose a pound a week.
  • Set checkpoints to make sure you’re on track. That’s no different than going to the gym every day.
  • Choose someone to monitor your results. There is nothing like peer pressure to make sure you haven’t snuck out to the barn for a smoke — I told everyone I knew I was quitting and they watched me like hungry mosquitoes.
  • Build your willpower and resolutions just one or two goals at a time. You can work your biceps today and your glutes tomorrow.

Revolutionary, that is.

Sex, Sex, and More Sex

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Twenty-nine percent of ordinary Americans have had sex on a first date, and about as many have had an “unexpected sexual encounter with someone new.” Among people who are married or living in a committed relationship (or formerly married), sixteen percent have cheated on their partner (nearly twice as many men as women) — while more, thirty percent, have fantasized about it.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans who reported being happy in marriage admitted to having an affair.

Ordinary Americans are pikers.

Voice of America reports that “When U.S. businessman Herman Cain suspended his campaign [Saturday] for the Republican presidential nomination following allegations of sexual harassment and a lengthy extramarital affair, he joined a long list of U.S. presidents and presidential contenders whose personal lives have attracted scrutiny.”

The long list is pretty much all of them.

Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Dwight Eisenhower, Newt Gingrich, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Gary Hart, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then there are the Mark Sanfords, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Eliot Spitzers, Anthony Weiners. Apparently about 97.7 percent of American presidents and 110 percent of American presidential candidates.

What did we expect? From the Victorians through Viet Nam, public morality did inhibit any open acknowledgment of sexuality but things have (sort of) changed. Most American homes today probably have copies of Playboy and Fanny Hill and the Joy of Sex but the owners still keep them out of sight. On the other hand, a couple generations of soap operas have been hotbeds of in-your-face adultery. They reflected American life or at least American political life.

Now we tell ourselves stories — stories about how prim we are and how licentious our neighbors are — and those stories hurt us.

Countries with an ultraconservative attitude towards sex and sex education like the U.S. have a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy.

I have some simple advice for these people in public life:


Grow a pair!
You guys (and I mean all of you political philanderers from any affiliation) think you’re winning the dicksizing contest.

You ain’t.

You’d like We the People to believe you are King of the Bedroom or at least the oval rug but you can’t even stand up for your bigger self when your littler self gets caught standing up.

Here’s the answer. When the admittedly brain dead reporter asks, “Did you really have sex with three women, and a goat?” tell the truth.

“Yep. What’s it to you?”

About the only follow up to that is, “Was it good for the goat?”

Actually, a decent reporter should ask the spouse to comment. It would be a good teaching moment for relationship building. Maybe for polyamory. Or at least for truth in advertising.