Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Today's Quotation:"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in astained glass window."Philip Marlowe in "Farewell, My Lovely," published on this day in1940. The line is in response to seeing a photograph; whenMarlowe meets the blonde in person he finds "a full set ofcurves" and "a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."
The New York Times recently reported that the FBI has yet to translate more than 120,000 hours of pre-Sept. 11 "terrorism-related" recordings. Even though the FBI has received an additional $48 million over the past three years to beef up its translation capabilities in "Arabic, Farsi and other languages considered critical to counterterrorism investigations," the shortage of able linguists has created what Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., calls a "translation mess" that has "obvious implications for our national security."
The 9/11 commission report pointed to the apparent source of the problem: In 2002, only six undergraduates in the entire United States earned degrees in Arabic language. Worse yet, according to the report, "very few American colleges or universities offered programs in Middle Eastern languages or Islamic studies." Actually, the 9/11 commission is mistaken about the paucity of programs, but the real situation is, if anything, more sobering. Among the many oversights of the government's antiterror policy, ignoring postsecondary education in the Islamic field isn't one of them. Yet federal efforts to support Middle Eastern studies, as the translation gap shows, haven't paid off as hoped.
There are many colleges and universities that offer instruction in a wide range of Middle Eastern languages, as well as Islamic history and culture. In fact, a portion of the federal government's $90 million of Title VI funding currently goes to 17 institutes at schools across the country*—from NYU to Michigan to UCLA—that do nothing but grant degrees in subjects touching on the Middle East. Part of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Title VI program was the product of a Cold War conviction that expertise in foreign languages and area studies was vital to the national interest—a view as popular now as ever. To qualify for fellowships under the program, students have always been required to take language courses, and indeed there are plenty of students at all degree levels now studying Middle Eastern languages as part of their curriculum. Yet over time, as the meager number of actual majors in those languages shows, the focus of Title VI subsidies has shifted to area studies.
The result, writes Kenneth Whitehead, who supervised Title VI during much of the '80s, was that "we were not getting a good value for our dollar. Many of those who studied 'hard' languages (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Chinese) in Title VI-supported programs turned out to be less proficient than they needed to be to work effectively in diplomacy, intelligence, aid-related work, and even international business." The original rationale of the program, others agree with Whitehead, is no longer being served.
One problem is that language instruction is typically not a high priority in academia, where other disciplines enjoy more prestige. "Universities have tended to relegate language pedagogues to the status of lecturers, who don't get the same salary or tenure rights as professors," Amy Newhall, the executive director of the Middle East Studies Association told me. Federal funds evidently haven't done much to change the calculus.
Perhaps the bigger problem has been Title VI's success in its second mission, to support what has proved to be a thriving academic trend in area studies. The effect has been to discourage government service as a career choice for students in the Middle East field. The radicalization of college campuses during the 1960s dramatically reshaped Islamic studies in particular. According to the post-colonial paradigm that came to dominate the flourishing field of area studies, the Muslim world must be understood largely in terms of the physical, intellectual, psychological, and political damage wrought by the Western powers—first France and England and now the United States. Moreover, as the late Edward Said argued in his immensely influential book Orientalism (1978), Western writers and scholars were complicit in the further subjugation of the region.
Whatever the merits of the post-colonial thesis, the message that writers and academics had better beware of abetting the ambitions of empire is not likely to make graduates eager to serve their government. According to one study of the career paths for graduates from the year 2000 at all degree levels who studied foreign languages in Title VI-funded centers—not just Middle Eastern ones—only 2.3 percent worked for the federal government, while another .9 percent entered the military. Since Title VI accounts for 10 percent of the overall costs of the programs it supports, 3.2 percent represents a pretty bad investment for the American taxpayer.
The good news is that between 1998 and 2002 there was a 92 percent surge in Arabic-language enrollment in postsecondary education, from 5,505 to 10,584 students, an increase that is undoubtedly due to Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the government also responded in the wake of the attacks by raising its Title VI funding for Middle Eastern studies 26 percent to the current $90 million budget. That move has stirred up what could prove to be a useful debate about how to improve the federal investment in creating the able linguists the country needs to conduct informed policy in the region and process valuable intelligence material.
Some critics—like Martin Kramer, whose Ivory Towers on Sand documents the rise and malaise of Middle East studies, and Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution—have complained that the increase amounts to throwing good money after bad. To encourage more oversight over Title VI, a bill now waiting in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions seeks to establish a seven-member independent advisory board that would "monitor and evaluate" activities supported under the program. The board would then "make recommendations" to the secretary of education and the Congress on how Title VI appropriations might better serve the national interest.
The bill's prospects are dimming, due to an overheated opposition that that has denounced the advisory board as the return of McCarthyism. As Martin Kramer points out, "every other comparable federal program"—including the Fulbright-Hays program and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar—is subject to considerably more oversight than Title VI's beneficiaries. And of course academics suspicious of government involvement can always decline to accept taxpayer money.
In any case, if the demise of the bill promotes discussion of other ways to capitalize on, and sustain, the spike in interest in Middle East languages, that will be all to the good. The bill's author, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., who was recently appointed chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, thinks the solution might be to cut out the middleman altogether. "Maybe we'll focus more on driving dollars to students rather than academic programs," he says. "If we provide incentives to students, colleges will see there's a market for creating these programs that emphasize language proficiency." Certainly students won't have to worry about jobs: Those 120,000 hours of terrorism-related recordings only cover pre-Sept. 11 chatter, and there's a lot more where that came from.
Correction, Oct. 4, 2004: The original version of this piece mistakenly stated that $90 million in Title VI funding goes to 17 Middle East institutes. In fact, only about 10 percent of that amount is directed to those institutes. Return to the corrected sentence.
Lee Smith, who lives in Brooklyn, is writing a book on Arab culture. You can e-mail him at LHS462@hotmail.com.
The 9/11 commission report pointed to the apparent source of the problem: In 2002, only six undergraduates in the entire United States earned degrees in Arabic language. Worse yet, according to the report, "very few American colleges or universities offered programs in Middle Eastern languages or Islamic studies." Actually, the 9/11 commission is mistaken about the paucity of programs, but the real situation is, if anything, more sobering. Among the many oversights of the government's antiterror policy, ignoring postsecondary education in the Islamic field isn't one of them. Yet federal efforts to support Middle Eastern studies, as the translation gap shows, haven't paid off as hoped.
There are many colleges and universities that offer instruction in a wide range of Middle Eastern languages, as well as Islamic history and culture. In fact, a portion of the federal government's $90 million of Title VI funding currently goes to 17 institutes at schools across the country*—from NYU to Michigan to UCLA—that do nothing but grant degrees in subjects touching on the Middle East. Part of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Title VI program was the product of a Cold War conviction that expertise in foreign languages and area studies was vital to the national interest—a view as popular now as ever. To qualify for fellowships under the program, students have always been required to take language courses, and indeed there are plenty of students at all degree levels now studying Middle Eastern languages as part of their curriculum. Yet over time, as the meager number of actual majors in those languages shows, the focus of Title VI subsidies has shifted to area studies.
The result, writes Kenneth Whitehead, who supervised Title VI during much of the '80s, was that "we were not getting a good value for our dollar. Many of those who studied 'hard' languages (e.g., Arabic, Persian, Chinese) in Title VI-supported programs turned out to be less proficient than they needed to be to work effectively in diplomacy, intelligence, aid-related work, and even international business." The original rationale of the program, others agree with Whitehead, is no longer being served.
One problem is that language instruction is typically not a high priority in academia, where other disciplines enjoy more prestige. "Universities have tended to relegate language pedagogues to the status of lecturers, who don't get the same salary or tenure rights as professors," Amy Newhall, the executive director of the Middle East Studies Association told me. Federal funds evidently haven't done much to change the calculus.
Perhaps the bigger problem has been Title VI's success in its second mission, to support what has proved to be a thriving academic trend in area studies. The effect has been to discourage government service as a career choice for students in the Middle East field. The radicalization of college campuses during the 1960s dramatically reshaped Islamic studies in particular. According to the post-colonial paradigm that came to dominate the flourishing field of area studies, the Muslim world must be understood largely in terms of the physical, intellectual, psychological, and political damage wrought by the Western powers—first France and England and now the United States. Moreover, as the late Edward Said argued in his immensely influential book Orientalism (1978), Western writers and scholars were complicit in the further subjugation of the region.
Whatever the merits of the post-colonial thesis, the message that writers and academics had better beware of abetting the ambitions of empire is not likely to make graduates eager to serve their government. According to one study of the career paths for graduates from the year 2000 at all degree levels who studied foreign languages in Title VI-funded centers—not just Middle Eastern ones—only 2.3 percent worked for the federal government, while another .9 percent entered the military. Since Title VI accounts for 10 percent of the overall costs of the programs it supports, 3.2 percent represents a pretty bad investment for the American taxpayer.
The good news is that between 1998 and 2002 there was a 92 percent surge in Arabic-language enrollment in postsecondary education, from 5,505 to 10,584 students, an increase that is undoubtedly due to Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the government also responded in the wake of the attacks by raising its Title VI funding for Middle Eastern studies 26 percent to the current $90 million budget. That move has stirred up what could prove to be a useful debate about how to improve the federal investment in creating the able linguists the country needs to conduct informed policy in the region and process valuable intelligence material.
Some critics—like Martin Kramer, whose Ivory Towers on Sand documents the rise and malaise of Middle East studies, and Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution—have complained that the increase amounts to throwing good money after bad. To encourage more oversight over Title VI, a bill now waiting in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions seeks to establish a seven-member independent advisory board that would "monitor and evaluate" activities supported under the program. The board would then "make recommendations" to the secretary of education and the Congress on how Title VI appropriations might better serve the national interest.
The bill's prospects are dimming, due to an overheated opposition that that has denounced the advisory board as the return of McCarthyism. As Martin Kramer points out, "every other comparable federal program"—including the Fulbright-Hays program and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar—is subject to considerably more oversight than Title VI's beneficiaries. And of course academics suspicious of government involvement can always decline to accept taxpayer money.
In any case, if the demise of the bill promotes discussion of other ways to capitalize on, and sustain, the spike in interest in Middle East languages, that will be all to the good. The bill's author, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., who was recently appointed chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, thinks the solution might be to cut out the middleman altogether. "Maybe we'll focus more on driving dollars to students rather than academic programs," he says. "If we provide incentives to students, colleges will see there's a market for creating these programs that emphasize language proficiency." Certainly students won't have to worry about jobs: Those 120,000 hours of terrorism-related recordings only cover pre-Sept. 11 chatter, and there's a lot more where that came from.
Correction, Oct. 4, 2004: The original version of this piece mistakenly stated that $90 million in Title VI funding goes to 17 Middle East institutes. In fact, only about 10 percent of that amount is directed to those institutes. Return to the corrected sentence.
Lee Smith, who lives in Brooklyn, is writing a book on Arab culture. You can e-mail him at LHS462@hotmail.com.
If network television could invent the consummate porn for women, it would probably feature a gorgeous prince on a white horse with a bouquet of roses tucked under one arm, a fabulous Los Angeles hair-colorist tucked under the other, and whatever appliance it takes to fix the damn garbage disposal wedged into the back pocket of his Levi's. Female fantasy, particularly in the post-feminist era, is a complicated blend of escapism and pragmatism. We're not so much interested in ditching our lives as we are committed to living them—but perfectly. There's a whole Real Simple Industrial Complex devoted to helping us achieve this goal, and most of us believe we may actually get there.
Now along come Wife Swap and Trading Spouses, two TV shows that cater to a woman's need to both escape her home and family and make them over. While appearing to be throwbacks to pre-feminist notions of domestic hierarchies—both shows feature a wife and mom switching place with another for a few days (and both assume that fathers' jobs are too important to fuss with)—they are, instead, the curious outgrowth of the post-feminist dilemma. Having learned the hard way that women just can't have perfect homes, kids, and jobs, we're offered a chance to escape our own impossible choices, and an opportunity to completely remodel someone else's. None of us, it turns out, can decide if we want to be Laura Bush or Teresa Heinz Kerry, but Wife Swap lets us at least try out both. Happily, women utterly failing to "have it all" with their own families, then switching lives with other women who have failed as well, makes for fabulous theater.
The husbands in Wife Swap and Trading Spouses are almost universally caught sitting on couches, looking expectant. They rarely step up to show their new "wives" the ropes, or suggest any sort of household partnership. It's not because these men are lazy. It's simply that how households run is still somehow primarily the province of women. As a study released in September by the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed, men are either congenitally unable to help out around the home, or women are congenitally unable to let them: Women still do an hour more housework a day than men do. Whether we will be a "neat" family, a "rules" family, a "fun" family, or a "takeout food" family, still depends mainly on mom's choices. Because husbands and fathers just don't have six movies screening simultaneously in their heads telling them what they ought to be, as women do. (One can't quite shake the feeling that if this were Husband Swap the dramatic apogee might come at Day 5: In Which the Big Chair in Front of the TV Is Shifted Infinitesimally.)
Both Trading Spouses and Wife Swap are based on an award-winning British series. In Trading Spouses, the wives switch homes for a week then muddle along while the cameras roll. There's a $50,000 prize doled out to each family, just so you know it's a reality show and not merely a visit to the most depressing neighbors you've ever met. Wife Swap wisely requires the wives to live according to their new family's rules for the first week before being allowed to impose their own house rules in the second.
The women on Wife Swap and Trading Spouses seem to roughly sort into "good mommies" (who shun materialism, cook, and tumble with their children) and "bad mommies" (shopaholics, neat freaks, too strict, and avoid their children). The shallow Manhattan millionairess—Jodi Spolansky—from this week's premiere of Wife Swap cheerfully admits her top priority is "me-time." Her three small kids are tended by four nannies while she shops, works out, and lunches with friends. She does try to get in an hour with the kids each day, which is more than her husband logs per week.
The compulsive Veronica Thibodeaux from the finale of Trading Spouses worries more about her immaculate home and perfect valances than her children—who consequently seem only to watch television or be taken shopping. "The only place my mom takes me is the dentist" says her 10-year-old son A.J. in surprise, when his borrowed mom, Diane, plans a picnic.
Jodi Spolansky has a master's degree and has worked as a teacher. But for the first half of Wife Swap she tosses her $500 hair in disgust and brags about her $4,000-a-week shopping habit. She clearly relishes playing the snob princess, smiling brightly as her husband puts her down for the cameras. When Jodi is confronted with the harsh new life she's expected to live—her counterpart, Lynn Bradley, lives in rural New Jersey, chops wood six hours a day, drives a school bus, and does 100 percent of the cooking and cleaning for her husband, two teenage daughters and the obligatory three-legged-dog—she sobs like Celine Dion on the first day of Outward Bound. "This is not the kind of mom I am," she weeps.
Jodi quickly finds herself in open warfare with Lynn's sullen husband, Brad. "You're supposed to be doing my wife's job!" He hollers. "You haven't dusted, vacuumed, cleaned the bathrooms. ... You sit here and pretend to be a good mother!" Jump back, Mr. Cro-Magnon guy. Jodi comes back with the winning rejoinder of divas everywhere, "I am not going there with you." She snaps, flouncing to the porch for a cigarette and a cry.
The real problem confronting both Diane Famiglietti from Trading Spouses and Lynn Bradley is that as designated "good moms" each recklessly reshapes her new family's lives and boundaries, certain these kids need nothing more than a perfect replication of what she has created for her own family. That's the makeover part of the shows. The bad moms often seem to do better, because they have observed and then attempted to synthesize their old values with the culture of the new family. Diane, the good mom on Trading Spouses, embarks on a frantic Mary-Poppins-on-Crack spree of picnics, water-fights, and doughnut-eating competitions with the stupefied Thibodeaux family. Similarly, when given the chance to set her own rules, Lynn Bradley fires the entire Spolansky staff of nannies, cleaners, and drivers and then demands that her rental husband join his kids for dinner every night. She also installs a flowered plastic tablecloth and a fuzzy Welcome Home mat that must have been murder to track down on the Upper East Side.
But since Wife Swap and Trading Spouses focus on how each mom performs on the cooking/cleaning/childcare front, it's no surprise the stay-at-home moms look like wizards, while the working (or shopping) moms bumble around like Abbott and Costello. This is, of course, hilarious, but it ignores the fact that most women work because they have to. Turning those women into villains moves the feminist debate sideways, rather than forward.
The surprise in both shows is that some people actually do change. When Jodi simply offloads all the cleaning and cooking onto Lynn's husband, Brad, he does it. And suddenly realizes what his wife has endured for years. He recognizes what a jerk he's been in expecting either Jodi, or his wife, to do all the housework alone. Even Jodi has a tender moment with the Bradley girls and some cookie batter—generously recognizing that both cooking and children are not just for poor people anymore.
Steve Spolansky has no such revelation—not even when his young son's face lights up like heartbreak in Yankee Stadium on learning his dad might actually be dining at home for a week. Steve dismisses Diane and her values as "hillbilly." He's worked hard for the right to neglect his kids and disparage his bride. Confronted with a "good mom," he writes her off as an anachronism. Steve's failure to learn anything from the swap stands in stark contrast to Brad's realization that he treated Lynn like a doormat, to Lynn's realization that she allowed herself to be treated like a doormat, and to Jodi's realization that her kids aren't short houseplants.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Wife Swap and Trading Spouses is that while each allows us to gorge on our escape fantasies, the shows seek to achieve more than just a superficial makeover. For a generation of women struggling with sometimes extreme and often heartbreaking alternatives regarding work, childcare, and home, it reminds us—as all the TV wives eventually seem to understand—that we can be wrong and self-justifying; and that we can still learn a lot from the choices made by other women.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Now along come Wife Swap and Trading Spouses, two TV shows that cater to a woman's need to both escape her home and family and make them over. While appearing to be throwbacks to pre-feminist notions of domestic hierarchies—both shows feature a wife and mom switching place with another for a few days (and both assume that fathers' jobs are too important to fuss with)—they are, instead, the curious outgrowth of the post-feminist dilemma. Having learned the hard way that women just can't have perfect homes, kids, and jobs, we're offered a chance to escape our own impossible choices, and an opportunity to completely remodel someone else's. None of us, it turns out, can decide if we want to be Laura Bush or Teresa Heinz Kerry, but Wife Swap lets us at least try out both. Happily, women utterly failing to "have it all" with their own families, then switching lives with other women who have failed as well, makes for fabulous theater.
The husbands in Wife Swap and Trading Spouses are almost universally caught sitting on couches, looking expectant. They rarely step up to show their new "wives" the ropes, or suggest any sort of household partnership. It's not because these men are lazy. It's simply that how households run is still somehow primarily the province of women. As a study released in September by the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed, men are either congenitally unable to help out around the home, or women are congenitally unable to let them: Women still do an hour more housework a day than men do. Whether we will be a "neat" family, a "rules" family, a "fun" family, or a "takeout food" family, still depends mainly on mom's choices. Because husbands and fathers just don't have six movies screening simultaneously in their heads telling them what they ought to be, as women do. (One can't quite shake the feeling that if this were Husband Swap the dramatic apogee might come at Day 5: In Which the Big Chair in Front of the TV Is Shifted Infinitesimally.)
Both Trading Spouses and Wife Swap are based on an award-winning British series. In Trading Spouses, the wives switch homes for a week then muddle along while the cameras roll. There's a $50,000 prize doled out to each family, just so you know it's a reality show and not merely a visit to the most depressing neighbors you've ever met. Wife Swap wisely requires the wives to live according to their new family's rules for the first week before being allowed to impose their own house rules in the second.
The women on Wife Swap and Trading Spouses seem to roughly sort into "good mommies" (who shun materialism, cook, and tumble with their children) and "bad mommies" (shopaholics, neat freaks, too strict, and avoid their children). The shallow Manhattan millionairess—Jodi Spolansky—from this week's premiere of Wife Swap cheerfully admits her top priority is "me-time." Her three small kids are tended by four nannies while she shops, works out, and lunches with friends. She does try to get in an hour with the kids each day, which is more than her husband logs per week.
The compulsive Veronica Thibodeaux from the finale of Trading Spouses worries more about her immaculate home and perfect valances than her children—who consequently seem only to watch television or be taken shopping. "The only place my mom takes me is the dentist" says her 10-year-old son A.J. in surprise, when his borrowed mom, Diane, plans a picnic.
Jodi Spolansky has a master's degree and has worked as a teacher. But for the first half of Wife Swap she tosses her $500 hair in disgust and brags about her $4,000-a-week shopping habit. She clearly relishes playing the snob princess, smiling brightly as her husband puts her down for the cameras. When Jodi is confronted with the harsh new life she's expected to live—her counterpart, Lynn Bradley, lives in rural New Jersey, chops wood six hours a day, drives a school bus, and does 100 percent of the cooking and cleaning for her husband, two teenage daughters and the obligatory three-legged-dog—she sobs like Celine Dion on the first day of Outward Bound. "This is not the kind of mom I am," she weeps.
Jodi quickly finds herself in open warfare with Lynn's sullen husband, Brad. "You're supposed to be doing my wife's job!" He hollers. "You haven't dusted, vacuumed, cleaned the bathrooms. ... You sit here and pretend to be a good mother!" Jump back, Mr. Cro-Magnon guy. Jodi comes back with the winning rejoinder of divas everywhere, "I am not going there with you." She snaps, flouncing to the porch for a cigarette and a cry.
The real problem confronting both Diane Famiglietti from Trading Spouses and Lynn Bradley is that as designated "good moms" each recklessly reshapes her new family's lives and boundaries, certain these kids need nothing more than a perfect replication of what she has created for her own family. That's the makeover part of the shows. The bad moms often seem to do better, because they have observed and then attempted to synthesize their old values with the culture of the new family. Diane, the good mom on Trading Spouses, embarks on a frantic Mary-Poppins-on-Crack spree of picnics, water-fights, and doughnut-eating competitions with the stupefied Thibodeaux family. Similarly, when given the chance to set her own rules, Lynn Bradley fires the entire Spolansky staff of nannies, cleaners, and drivers and then demands that her rental husband join his kids for dinner every night. She also installs a flowered plastic tablecloth and a fuzzy Welcome Home mat that must have been murder to track down on the Upper East Side.
But since Wife Swap and Trading Spouses focus on how each mom performs on the cooking/cleaning/childcare front, it's no surprise the stay-at-home moms look like wizards, while the working (or shopping) moms bumble around like Abbott and Costello. This is, of course, hilarious, but it ignores the fact that most women work because they have to. Turning those women into villains moves the feminist debate sideways, rather than forward.
The surprise in both shows is that some people actually do change. When Jodi simply offloads all the cleaning and cooking onto Lynn's husband, Brad, he does it. And suddenly realizes what his wife has endured for years. He recognizes what a jerk he's been in expecting either Jodi, or his wife, to do all the housework alone. Even Jodi has a tender moment with the Bradley girls and some cookie batter—generously recognizing that both cooking and children are not just for poor people anymore.
Steve Spolansky has no such revelation—not even when his young son's face lights up like heartbreak in Yankee Stadium on learning his dad might actually be dining at home for a week. Steve dismisses Diane and her values as "hillbilly." He's worked hard for the right to neglect his kids and disparage his bride. Confronted with a "good mom," he writes her off as an anachronism. Steve's failure to learn anything from the swap stands in stark contrast to Brad's realization that he treated Lynn like a doormat, to Lynn's realization that she allowed herself to be treated like a doormat, and to Jodi's realization that her kids aren't short houseplants.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Wife Swap and Trading Spouses is that while each allows us to gorge on our escape fantasies, the shows seek to achieve more than just a superficial makeover. For a generation of women struggling with sometimes extreme and often heartbreaking alternatives regarding work, childcare, and home, it reminds us—as all the TV wives eventually seem to understand—that we can be wrong and self-justifying; and that we can still learn a lot from the choices made by other women.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Let me tell you something, Mom," Dr. Phil lectured an "out-of-control" mother on a two-hour CBS special last week, taking his daytime doctor act to prime time. "You need to stop, and stop it right now." He was right; she was a family menace. But at least she knew it. You can't say the same about Dr. Phil in his new incarnation as the nation's "commando parenting" expert. There's a term for a guy who publicly humiliates not just parents, but kids, bombarding viewers with a high-decibel spectacle of real-life family dysfunction—all in the service of flacking a new book, Family First, that promises domestic joy and peace. It's a term Dr. Phil uses a lot: abusive.
Inside last year's antiobesity crusader—Dr. Phil's Ultimate Weight Solution soared to the top of the best-seller lists—it turns out there was a "reparenting" missionary dying to get out and indulge in some super-nannying. Entering his third solo TV season, Oprah's former sidekick was ready with a back-to-school bonanza: the CBS special heralding his new focus on the family (move over, Dr. Dobson). What more opportune moment than the launch of a book to burnish his child-rearing credentials and give viewers a mega-dose of the parenting turmoil he's now made the theme of his daily show? "Please help, Dr. Phil," is the regular plea of his frazzled guests. But when it comes to families, the truth is that Dr. Phil is an interloper who adds to the trouble.
Parenting success requires that you be consistent, according to the doctor—which is just what his book and his show aren't. Family First is supremely cool-headed. The guiding assumption of Dr. Phil's "step-by-step plan" to help parents become "system managers" at home is that families are just that: systems, in which everybody—from hubby on down to baby—has a role to play. In place of Spockian empathy, we have corporate efficiency for the dual-income family whirlwind. The manual features seven parenting "tools," checklists to fill out, "audits" to conduct—and even a downloadable "behavioral contract" so parent and kid can spell out a disciplinary deal, in the hope that neither will get angry or whiny when a party fails to comply. "Accountability" along with "consistency" are the watchwords of the behaviorist approach. The Family First ad campaign touts the originality of the doctor's strategies, but don't be fooled. The book is yet another version of the managerial parenting approach that was born 40 years ago in Carl Rogers' communication techniques and has since blossomed into business guru Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997) and countless knockoffs. All paperwork and plans and no anecdotes, Family First is pallid (except for the revelation of Dr. Phil's new trauma credential: His father, heretofore hailed as his hero, was an alcoholic). Between covers, Dr. Phil loses not just his Texan twang, but his tang.
Love comes to life. The premise (or the pretense) of Dr. Phil's show is that he's dealing with families in search of peace—families, he asserted at the start of the CBS special, that "may be a lot like yours." But then his cameras zoomed in for a tour of households from hell. One featured a rampaging mother whose husband struck back at her by not speaking to their son for a year. Another family was terrorized by a kid who displayed "nine of the 14 characteristics of a serial killer." Too many toys and too much television in your house? For his lurid prime-time show, Dr. Phil found a girl so showered with stuff by her mother that every room overflowed and a boy whose mother let him sit in front of the television nine hours a day.
As the camera cross-cut from grainy footage of their household disarray (piles of plush animals, bleeped-out cursing) to the parents now perched on his studio stage, in chairs so high their feet swung like children's, Dr. Phil presided as he does on his daytime shows, as the confrontational domestic redesigner. Have a toddler who won't go to sleep? Just cut a bedroom door in half (and lock the bottom), he instructed the stunned parents of one difficult tyke; strip a destructive kid's room, he told another couple. Dr. Phil enjoys their bug-eyed response to his no-nonsense tactics and especially likes to make the men squirm at his sway with their wives. At one point, he smugly lorded it over a screwed-up dad who admitted he hadn't wanted to get involved with Dr. Phil: "Yeah, you and every husband in America."
But in parading troubled families across his stage, Dr. Phil sabotages his own parenting principles. In a prefatory "letter to parents" in Family First, Dr. Phil proclaims himself on a mission to empower America's "disconnected" families. He wants, he says, to help parents counteract the pernicious influences—not least "a massive and slick media"—that are corroding their sense of control in a frenetic world. But his show, by its very format, vamps up alarm about America's families. It makes parents look like chumps and turns children into hapless victims, compounding precisely the ills it aims to cure.
By sandwiching pathology in between potty tips (Dr. Phil touts a one-day miracle) and practical advice about picky eaters, etc.—and spicing the mix with the refrain that "you may be scarring your children every day without knowing it"—Dr. Phil's show suggests that every household in a run-of-the-mill mess could slip into chaos at a moment's notice. It's a disconcerting message, however you take it. Balk at the notion, and you feel smugly superior to your fellow Americans. Buy into it, and you're left panicked that the country is coming apart at the seams. Waver somewhere between the two poles, as I bet most viewers do, and you'll begin to wonder, thanks to a nudge from Dr. Phil, whether you too could "be raising a criminal."
And Dr. Phil's style of setting his hapless participants straight hardly inspires confidence. By now we're all used to watching adult volunteers getting prodded, scolded, and shamed in public (on Dr. Phil's upcoming docket are both presidential candidates). But the participants on Dr. Phil's shows aren't just another crop of reality show contestants, psyched for the exhibitionistic thrill of going through contortions in front of a huge audience and then getting their comeuppance (or the jackpot). You'd think Dr. Phil might ask himself whether addressing parents as if they were impulsive 2-year-olds is a good way to convey his message that regaining parental authority entails maturity. The spectacle of adults being bullied and breaking down doesn't seem particularly edifying for kids—especially if what they need most, as Dr. Phil suggests, is to be able to respect, and rely on, parental guidance.
But that's nothing compared to dragging children themselves into the spotlight, which Dr. Phil's "systems" approach requires. Like the judges on American Juniors, he does go easier on the kids, whom he generally sees as having been dealt a raw deal in a disorderly, divorce-prone world. Still, Dr. Phil gets them spilling their guts on video and in his studio—and whatever you think of the growing trend of underage reality TV stars, public child therapy is another story. It's bad enough that the 8-year-old boy on the HBO show Family Bonds got filmed crying as he learned to ride a bike. But Dr. Phil goes considerably further. On the CBS special, a 13-year-old was cornered by the camera as he tearfully confessed that he was sure his dad, who had refused to talk to him for a year, thought he was worthless. And the decision to film the subsequent father-son rapprochement as the two communed beside a stream seems indefensible. Eyes darting uneasily toward the unseen film crew, they looked as though they would have liked to crawl under the rocks they were sitting on.
Just listen to Dr. Phil himself, who has preached about "our duty ... to make sure we are counteracting rather than contributing to the craziness" that undermines the haven of the family in a media-saturated age. In Family First, he is blunt about the deference that children deserve: "Keep your problem-solving communications and exchanges private. Don't ever take your child to task in the presence of peers, relatives or siblings, unless they're directly involved in the situation." The crowning Tool No. 7 in Dr. Phil's parenting kit, he might recall, is "walk the talk."
Ann Hulbert is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children.
Inside last year's antiobesity crusader—Dr. Phil's Ultimate Weight Solution soared to the top of the best-seller lists—it turns out there was a "reparenting" missionary dying to get out and indulge in some super-nannying. Entering his third solo TV season, Oprah's former sidekick was ready with a back-to-school bonanza: the CBS special heralding his new focus on the family (move over, Dr. Dobson). What more opportune moment than the launch of a book to burnish his child-rearing credentials and give viewers a mega-dose of the parenting turmoil he's now made the theme of his daily show? "Please help, Dr. Phil," is the regular plea of his frazzled guests. But when it comes to families, the truth is that Dr. Phil is an interloper who adds to the trouble.
Parenting success requires that you be consistent, according to the doctor—which is just what his book and his show aren't. Family First is supremely cool-headed. The guiding assumption of Dr. Phil's "step-by-step plan" to help parents become "system managers" at home is that families are just that: systems, in which everybody—from hubby on down to baby—has a role to play. In place of Spockian empathy, we have corporate efficiency for the dual-income family whirlwind. The manual features seven parenting "tools," checklists to fill out, "audits" to conduct—and even a downloadable "behavioral contract" so parent and kid can spell out a disciplinary deal, in the hope that neither will get angry or whiny when a party fails to comply. "Accountability" along with "consistency" are the watchwords of the behaviorist approach. The Family First ad campaign touts the originality of the doctor's strategies, but don't be fooled. The book is yet another version of the managerial parenting approach that was born 40 years ago in Carl Rogers' communication techniques and has since blossomed into business guru Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997) and countless knockoffs. All paperwork and plans and no anecdotes, Family First is pallid (except for the revelation of Dr. Phil's new trauma credential: His father, heretofore hailed as his hero, was an alcoholic). Between covers, Dr. Phil loses not just his Texan twang, but his tang.
Love comes to life. The premise (or the pretense) of Dr. Phil's show is that he's dealing with families in search of peace—families, he asserted at the start of the CBS special, that "may be a lot like yours." But then his cameras zoomed in for a tour of households from hell. One featured a rampaging mother whose husband struck back at her by not speaking to their son for a year. Another family was terrorized by a kid who displayed "nine of the 14 characteristics of a serial killer." Too many toys and too much television in your house? For his lurid prime-time show, Dr. Phil found a girl so showered with stuff by her mother that every room overflowed and a boy whose mother let him sit in front of the television nine hours a day.
As the camera cross-cut from grainy footage of their household disarray (piles of plush animals, bleeped-out cursing) to the parents now perched on his studio stage, in chairs so high their feet swung like children's, Dr. Phil presided as he does on his daytime shows, as the confrontational domestic redesigner. Have a toddler who won't go to sleep? Just cut a bedroom door in half (and lock the bottom), he instructed the stunned parents of one difficult tyke; strip a destructive kid's room, he told another couple. Dr. Phil enjoys their bug-eyed response to his no-nonsense tactics and especially likes to make the men squirm at his sway with their wives. At one point, he smugly lorded it over a screwed-up dad who admitted he hadn't wanted to get involved with Dr. Phil: "Yeah, you and every husband in America."
But in parading troubled families across his stage, Dr. Phil sabotages his own parenting principles. In a prefatory "letter to parents" in Family First, Dr. Phil proclaims himself on a mission to empower America's "disconnected" families. He wants, he says, to help parents counteract the pernicious influences—not least "a massive and slick media"—that are corroding their sense of control in a frenetic world. But his show, by its very format, vamps up alarm about America's families. It makes parents look like chumps and turns children into hapless victims, compounding precisely the ills it aims to cure.
By sandwiching pathology in between potty tips (Dr. Phil touts a one-day miracle) and practical advice about picky eaters, etc.—and spicing the mix with the refrain that "you may be scarring your children every day without knowing it"—Dr. Phil's show suggests that every household in a run-of-the-mill mess could slip into chaos at a moment's notice. It's a disconcerting message, however you take it. Balk at the notion, and you feel smugly superior to your fellow Americans. Buy into it, and you're left panicked that the country is coming apart at the seams. Waver somewhere between the two poles, as I bet most viewers do, and you'll begin to wonder, thanks to a nudge from Dr. Phil, whether you too could "be raising a criminal."
And Dr. Phil's style of setting his hapless participants straight hardly inspires confidence. By now we're all used to watching adult volunteers getting prodded, scolded, and shamed in public (on Dr. Phil's upcoming docket are both presidential candidates). But the participants on Dr. Phil's shows aren't just another crop of reality show contestants, psyched for the exhibitionistic thrill of going through contortions in front of a huge audience and then getting their comeuppance (or the jackpot). You'd think Dr. Phil might ask himself whether addressing parents as if they were impulsive 2-year-olds is a good way to convey his message that regaining parental authority entails maturity. The spectacle of adults being bullied and breaking down doesn't seem particularly edifying for kids—especially if what they need most, as Dr. Phil suggests, is to be able to respect, and rely on, parental guidance.
But that's nothing compared to dragging children themselves into the spotlight, which Dr. Phil's "systems" approach requires. Like the judges on American Juniors, he does go easier on the kids, whom he generally sees as having been dealt a raw deal in a disorderly, divorce-prone world. Still, Dr. Phil gets them spilling their guts on video and in his studio—and whatever you think of the growing trend of underage reality TV stars, public child therapy is another story. It's bad enough that the 8-year-old boy on the HBO show Family Bonds got filmed crying as he learned to ride a bike. But Dr. Phil goes considerably further. On the CBS special, a 13-year-old was cornered by the camera as he tearfully confessed that he was sure his dad, who had refused to talk to him for a year, thought he was worthless. And the decision to film the subsequent father-son rapprochement as the two communed beside a stream seems indefensible. Eyes darting uneasily toward the unseen film crew, they looked as though they would have liked to crawl under the rocks they were sitting on.
Just listen to Dr. Phil himself, who has preached about "our duty ... to make sure we are counteracting rather than contributing to the craziness" that undermines the haven of the family in a media-saturated age. In Family First, he is blunt about the deference that children deserve: "Keep your problem-solving communications and exchanges private. Don't ever take your child to task in the presence of peers, relatives or siblings, unless they're directly involved in the situation." The crowning Tool No. 7 in Dr. Phil's parenting kit, he might recall, is "walk the talk."
Ann Hulbert is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children.
What does the good life feel like? I mean the life worth living, the life we should and do admire. For most of the last century, that question was answered in terms derived from the study of depression, schizophrenia, and the anxiety disorders. A person in touch with the times would suffer existential angst and social anomie. To be wise was to experience ambivalence about important matters and to feel alienated from the culture.
If I am reading the tea leaves right, our fascination with emotional paralysis may be nearing an end. Philip Fisher, a literary scholar at Harvard, recently made the case for "the vehement passions" in a book of that title. Fisher is referring to emotions dear to the ancient Greeks—anger, pride, obstinacy, and rashness.
The passions are precisely not modern. Those who hold them lack double-mindedness; their perspectives are not tinged with irony. Passionate grief, for example, leads to bold action. Think of Electra or Antigone; think of Achilles roused to battle with Hector.
Of course, melancholics have always written in praise of a simplicity that they could not attain—while secretly taking pride in their own inner complexity. But we seem now to have entered an era in which intellectuals praise whole-heartedness and mean it wholeheartedly. Our aesthetics have undergone a sea change.
This shift in taste is now becoming apparent in books meant for a general audience. In January, Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist whose work is grounded in Buddhism, will offer up Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life. And this month, Kay Redfield Jamison contributes Exuberance: The Passion for Life.
Jamison, a psychologist in the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins, is best known for her account of her own manic-depression, An Unquiet Mind. She is the author of Touched With Fire, an exhaustive study of the relationship between mood disorder and creativity, and the co-author, with Frederick Goodwin, of Manic-Depressive Illness, the definitive resource on bipolar mood disorder. It is no slight to the newest book to say that it is one of Jamison's less substantial works.
Jamison does not so much argue the case for exuberance as illustrate it, through a flood of examples of men (mostly) whose optimism and energy led them to success. Exuberance opens with a thumbnail sketch of Teddy Roosevelt, our most insistently enthusiastic president. Like its subject, the portrait is relentlessly positive, praising Roosevelt's vitality, his good humor, and even his immaturity. "You must always remember," a British diplomat says, regarding Roosevelt's apparent age, "the President is always about six."
To any reader still inclined to melancholy, this opening may seem a false step. Aren't we Americans already too prone to blind optimism, not least in our military adventures? Other biographers have called San Juan Hill an unnecessary battle conducted in a fashion that put Roosevelt's men at excessive risk. Perhaps now is a time for less certainty and greater self-doubt—more waffling and flip-flopping, if you please.
As a rule, Jamison underplays exuberance's downside. She presents Carlton Gajdusek as a model of the successful exuberant scientist, and of course he is. Working with a Stone Age tribe in New Guinea, Gajdusek and his colleagues discovered the progressive brain disease kuru. They then traced its origins to a slow virus, transmitted through cannibalistic rites. This work forms the basis for our understanding of mad cow disease—and it led to a Nobel Prize for Gajdusek.
Jamison does not mention that Gajdusek later pleaded guilty to two counts of child abuse and spent over a year in jail, based on a relationship with a teenage boy he had brought to the United States from Micronesia. In his scientific journals, Gajdusek had written openly about this sort of arrangement; the striking aspect of the story is Gajdusek's unworldliness. Nor is Gajdusek the only possible example of the precept that poor judgment goes hand in hand with exuberance. A treatise on well-meaning men who made grave missteps might include many of the same characters Jamison discusses here.
Still, Jamison is hard to resist. Her writing embodies the energy it celebrates. Jamison turns her attention to children's literature (she likes Toad of Toad Hall and Tigger), physics (Richard Feynman), poetry (Byron), and warfare (George S. Patton). Example piles on example. To admire Jamison is to accede to her argument. There is something special about exuberance.
One might imagine that Jamison's thesis arises from Martin Seligman's "positive psychology," a body of writing that promotes the virtues of optimism and proposes behavioral pathways to happiness. Jamison mentions Seligman's research. But most of her book deals with temperamental traits—congenital high spirits. It may be less that Jamison has followed Seligman's lead than that, in its many forms, the current interest in active, dynamic mental health has a common source.
My suspicion is that the new enthusiasm for simple, positive emotions is a matter of ideology following technology. Toward the start of his career, Freud wrote that the aim of his procedure was to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness. This comment was mostly a quip about the human condition, but it speaks also to a frequent outcome in psychotherapy—the termination of an acute episode of mood disorder, followed by a modest amelioration of a chronic handicapping state. Until 10 or 15 years ago, a treatment that turned a major depression into a minor one was deemed a complete success.
But subsequent research found that even low-level residual symptoms carry substantial risk—of recurrent mood disorder, of suicide, and of other illnesses, such as heart disease. In the depressed, at least, personality traits that resemble symptoms look ever more like indicators of ongoing, progressive illness. These clinical findings bear an ominous relationship to research that links depression to concrete pathology—atrophy and disorganization of neurons in relevant parts of the brain.
At the same time, the occasional marked response to pharmacology, or to a combination of medication and psychotherapy, gives hints of what constitutes full recovery from depression. Remitted, major depression looks not like minor depression, but like energy, vitality, and resilience in full measure.
In this context, emotional paralysis loses much of its glamour. To the extent that angst, anomie, alienation, and ambivalence have a bad name, the vehement passions will have a good one. My impression is that books like Exuberance signal a turn in direction—a change in tastes and values—away from modern ideals of longing and brooding and toward post-postmodern (which is to say antique) ideals of fulfillment and adventure.
Observing this shift, we may mourn what is lost, in terms of respect for emotional complexity. At the same time, we may acknowledge that the change is overdue. The centuries-long romance with depression—what was that about?
Peter D. Kramer is the author of Listening to Prozac and Spectacular Happiness. His new book about depression will be published next year.
If I am reading the tea leaves right, our fascination with emotional paralysis may be nearing an end. Philip Fisher, a literary scholar at Harvard, recently made the case for "the vehement passions" in a book of that title. Fisher is referring to emotions dear to the ancient Greeks—anger, pride, obstinacy, and rashness.
The passions are precisely not modern. Those who hold them lack double-mindedness; their perspectives are not tinged with irony. Passionate grief, for example, leads to bold action. Think of Electra or Antigone; think of Achilles roused to battle with Hector.
Of course, melancholics have always written in praise of a simplicity that they could not attain—while secretly taking pride in their own inner complexity. But we seem now to have entered an era in which intellectuals praise whole-heartedness and mean it wholeheartedly. Our aesthetics have undergone a sea change.
This shift in taste is now becoming apparent in books meant for a general audience. In January, Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist whose work is grounded in Buddhism, will offer up Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life. And this month, Kay Redfield Jamison contributes Exuberance: The Passion for Life.
Jamison, a psychologist in the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins, is best known for her account of her own manic-depression, An Unquiet Mind. She is the author of Touched With Fire, an exhaustive study of the relationship between mood disorder and creativity, and the co-author, with Frederick Goodwin, of Manic-Depressive Illness, the definitive resource on bipolar mood disorder. It is no slight to the newest book to say that it is one of Jamison's less substantial works.
Jamison does not so much argue the case for exuberance as illustrate it, through a flood of examples of men (mostly) whose optimism and energy led them to success. Exuberance opens with a thumbnail sketch of Teddy Roosevelt, our most insistently enthusiastic president. Like its subject, the portrait is relentlessly positive, praising Roosevelt's vitality, his good humor, and even his immaturity. "You must always remember," a British diplomat says, regarding Roosevelt's apparent age, "the President is always about six."
To any reader still inclined to melancholy, this opening may seem a false step. Aren't we Americans already too prone to blind optimism, not least in our military adventures? Other biographers have called San Juan Hill an unnecessary battle conducted in a fashion that put Roosevelt's men at excessive risk. Perhaps now is a time for less certainty and greater self-doubt—more waffling and flip-flopping, if you please.
As a rule, Jamison underplays exuberance's downside. She presents Carlton Gajdusek as a model of the successful exuberant scientist, and of course he is. Working with a Stone Age tribe in New Guinea, Gajdusek and his colleagues discovered the progressive brain disease kuru. They then traced its origins to a slow virus, transmitted through cannibalistic rites. This work forms the basis for our understanding of mad cow disease—and it led to a Nobel Prize for Gajdusek.
Jamison does not mention that Gajdusek later pleaded guilty to two counts of child abuse and spent over a year in jail, based on a relationship with a teenage boy he had brought to the United States from Micronesia. In his scientific journals, Gajdusek had written openly about this sort of arrangement; the striking aspect of the story is Gajdusek's unworldliness. Nor is Gajdusek the only possible example of the precept that poor judgment goes hand in hand with exuberance. A treatise on well-meaning men who made grave missteps might include many of the same characters Jamison discusses here.
Still, Jamison is hard to resist. Her writing embodies the energy it celebrates. Jamison turns her attention to children's literature (she likes Toad of Toad Hall and Tigger), physics (Richard Feynman), poetry (Byron), and warfare (George S. Patton). Example piles on example. To admire Jamison is to accede to her argument. There is something special about exuberance.
One might imagine that Jamison's thesis arises from Martin Seligman's "positive psychology," a body of writing that promotes the virtues of optimism and proposes behavioral pathways to happiness. Jamison mentions Seligman's research. But most of her book deals with temperamental traits—congenital high spirits. It may be less that Jamison has followed Seligman's lead than that, in its many forms, the current interest in active, dynamic mental health has a common source.
My suspicion is that the new enthusiasm for simple, positive emotions is a matter of ideology following technology. Toward the start of his career, Freud wrote that the aim of his procedure was to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness. This comment was mostly a quip about the human condition, but it speaks also to a frequent outcome in psychotherapy—the termination of an acute episode of mood disorder, followed by a modest amelioration of a chronic handicapping state. Until 10 or 15 years ago, a treatment that turned a major depression into a minor one was deemed a complete success.
But subsequent research found that even low-level residual symptoms carry substantial risk—of recurrent mood disorder, of suicide, and of other illnesses, such as heart disease. In the depressed, at least, personality traits that resemble symptoms look ever more like indicators of ongoing, progressive illness. These clinical findings bear an ominous relationship to research that links depression to concrete pathology—atrophy and disorganization of neurons in relevant parts of the brain.
At the same time, the occasional marked response to pharmacology, or to a combination of medication and psychotherapy, gives hints of what constitutes full recovery from depression. Remitted, major depression looks not like minor depression, but like energy, vitality, and resilience in full measure.
In this context, emotional paralysis loses much of its glamour. To the extent that angst, anomie, alienation, and ambivalence have a bad name, the vehement passions will have a good one. My impression is that books like Exuberance signal a turn in direction—a change in tastes and values—away from modern ideals of longing and brooding and toward post-postmodern (which is to say antique) ideals of fulfillment and adventure.
Observing this shift, we may mourn what is lost, in terms of respect for emotional complexity. At the same time, we may acknowledge that the change is overdue. The centuries-long romance with depression—what was that about?
Peter D. Kramer is the author of Listening to Prozac and Spectacular Happiness. His new book about depression will be published next year.
