RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s been a good month for champions of the traditional family, but don’t expect the family wars to be ending any time soon.

In recent weeks, a barrage of new evidence has come to light demonstrating what was once common sense. “Family structure matters” (in the words of my American Enterprise Institute colleague Brad Wilcox, who is also the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia).

Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution released a study that reported “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.” Why this is so is still hotly contested.

Another study, co-authored by Wilcox, found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty. On most economic indicators, the Washington Post summarized, “the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.”

Boys in particular do much better when raised in a more traditional family environment, according to a new report from MIT. This is further corroboration of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1965 warning: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Perhaps most intriguing — and dismaying — a new study by Nicholas Zill of the Institute of Family Studies found that adopted children have a harder time at school than kids raised by their biological parents. What makes this so dismaying is that adoptive parents tend to be better off financially and are just as willing as traditional parents, if not more so, to put in the time and effort of raising kids.

Zill’s finding highlights the problem with traditional family triumphalism. Adoption is a wonderful thing, and just because there are challenges that come with adoption, no one would ever argue that the problems adopted kids face make the alternatives to adoption better. Kids left in orphanages or trapped in abusive homes do even worse.

Family is no mere sociological construct, so we must stop treating it like one. It is how people live and thrive. It is natural. It carries with it certain obligations and duties. It is not malleable, no matter how hard those bent on re-defining the institution try to make it so.
The past couple of months have witnessed two extraordinary events in the history of Western moral culture. First, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a five-four decision that the right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples under the United States Constitution. The states are now required by judicial fiat to license marriages between two people of the same sex. The second is really a series of events, namely the exposure of Planned Parenthood. The practice of abortion, and the most (in)famous company practising it, have been laid bare on YouTube. These two events represent major moral flashpoints for Western society. It may seem coincidental that these crisis points have been reached almost simultaneously. However, it is hardly surprising that these two events are unfolding at the same point in history, as they share a common root.

At the root of the Obergefell v Hodges decision and the very existence of Planned Parenthood is a neglect of, and reversal in, the Western understanding of the concept of family. While there are, undoubtedly, other factors at play in these crises, the neglect of the idea of family is an important one that must be brought into the discussion. The family is here taken to be the organic community developed through and around a marriage. It usually, though not always, involves a man and a woman in marital union and their offspring. Therefore, it includes not only a married couple, but also their children. This does not exclude infertile or childless marriages from using the label of “family”; it merely requires the natural possibility of children as an outworking of a marriage. It also does not exclude single-parent households. These are families, but they are incomplete in the natural and organic sense. Just as in the childless marriage, in a single-parent family there is a component missing in the structure family.

Review In the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman,’ some works gain in meaning because of their new context.

Every large museum has a repository of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, acquired over the years, that are seldom on view. They range from minor efforts by major artists (and vice versa) to ambitious works by once well-regarded practitioners that no longer correspond to current taste, and a lot in between. Smart curators often mine these holdings for forgotten treasures—taste changes—or for what these works can tell us about the desiderata of the period in which they were made. Case in point: “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War,” the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of responses to the emotional climate of the fraught years before, during and after World War II.

Organized by MoMA’s Lucy Gallun, assistant curator, Department of Photography, and Sarah Suzuki, associate curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and drawn entirely from the museum’s collections, the show assembles paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs, many rarely—if ever—exhibited, by more than 30 artists. Some celebrated, some obscure, they come from North and South America, Europe and Asia. Each of them experienced the horrors of the war, its preamble and its aftermath differently: as combatant or victim, refugee or exile, direct witness or distant observer. Despite these variables, the mood of all the works in the exhibition is one of anxiety and pessimism, whether expressed through representation, abstraction, symbol, or metaphor. Cynics can put this down to curatorial choice or to the finiteness of the human imagination. Or we can assume that the pervasive sense of threat and bleakness conveyed by “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman” accurately reflects the devastating world-wide events of the decades under review.

America is large and diverse. So it is risky to draw conclusions based on local samples. Nevertheless, a recent conversation with the chair of one of Old Lyme’s two political parties was of interest. Each of the two main political parties have roughly 30% of registered voters. Both, however, have been losing members, while the ranks of independents (Unaffiliated, as they are known in Connecticut) have been growing. The latter comprises 40% of the electorate. Nationwide, a 2013 Gallup Poll showed Republicans with 25%, Democrats with 31% and independents with 44%. Twenty-five years ago, those numbers were, respectively, 31%, 36% and 33%. While this is not a tsunami, it is a trend.

There are myriad reasons for this shift, including a decline in the homogenous nature of our culture to less parental influence and, importantly, a decline in community social groups that once helped bind us. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, wrote of the decline in civic and community service organizations fifteen years ago. Last year the federal government sponsored a study by the Corporation for National & Community Service that identified falling rates of volunteerism. Another study by USA Today showed similar trends among college graduates. The void created by the loss of volunteers has been filled by government employees. More government workers mean increased government spending. Gerrymandering has meant less competition between parties and more among inter-party factions. The result: more people feel isolated from a expanding sense of extremism in both parties.

When it comes to movies, conservatives can be just like liberals if a film pushes their buttons. This week I saw a former CIA official on TV praise Bridge of Spies as a “great movie” but then go on to cite the continued, unresolved, post–Cold War antipathy between the U.S. and Russia — a contradiction of Bridge of Spies’ insulting, ameliorative message. Many people who consider themselves politically vigilant still look at movies as separate from propaganda — as if only the news media could be partisan. They ignore the fact that the business of contemporary Hollywood is often the business of creating ideological weapons. Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies isn’t simply an entertainment, and neither are four films released this week: Our Brand Is Crisis, Rock the Kasbah, Heart of a Dog, and The Pearl Button.

Sandra Bullock is lucky that Our Brand Is Crisis will flop. She’ll be spared the embarrassment of many people seeing her fumbling venture into George Clooney political snark (Clooney co-produced). In this film, based on Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary, Bullock trades in her niceness to portray Jane Bodine, an American political strategist who rebounds from recent career failure to manage the campaign of a presidential candidate in Bolivia. This fact-into-farce gimmick uses a Third World allegory to instruct Americans’ political naïveté. Instead of tackling the U.S. political industry head-on, the film chides the noxious influence of American dogma (and marketing) on global politics. “The truth is what I tell the electorate the truth is,” Jane dictates. This isn’t really political, just another form of media squabbling. Self-destructively ruthless, Jane informs her staff about her “soul-stealing” profession: “Yeah, it’s advertising. Give people something they don’t need, and then you profit from it.”

Sequestration has elicited garment-rending from Head Start administrators and builders of bridges to nowhere, because it has proven about the only fiscal discipline of which Washington, D.C., is capable. President Obama, eager to end his presidency in an Oprah-style spending spree, is determined to bust through the sequestration spending caps locked into place in 2011, and he is even willing to hold the United States military hostage to do it. Hence his veto, last week, of the National Defense Authorization Act.

The great flaw of sequestration has been that it cuts defense too deeply. On that point, there is bipartisan agreement. The president’s defense request, submitted earlier this year, calls for $612 billion in defense spending – $38 billion over the budget caps established by the 2011 Budget Control Act. The NDAA fulfills that request by allocating $38 billion from the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, an “emergency” fund not subject to budget caps. Using OCO to fund standard personnel expenses, such as pay raises, is not ideal; renegotiating the BCA spending caps to facilitate adequate defense funding is the only long-term solution. But a stopgap measure is far better than leaving the military underfunded, which the heads of the armed services all agree would put American soldiers at risk, and would be the consequence of not using OCO funds. The president is vetoing the NDAA less because of anything in it – although he makes fig-leaf arguments about its contents – than because he wants Congress to increase domestic spending too. He is less interested in keeping the military sufficiently funded than in using the military as leverage to end the budget caps on spending for “job training” and other of his pet programs.

So radical is this proposal that — while Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are arming themselves to the gills and seizing territory — it would reduce America’s nuclear “assets” from over 500 missiles, bombers and submarines to less than a handful of nuclear-armed submarines.

“To my knowledge, our unilateral disarmament initiatives have done little to promote similar initiatives in our potential adversaries, and at the same time, they have reduced our arms control negotiating leverage.” — Admiral Richard Mies (Ret.), former Commander of the United States Strategic Command

America’s nuclear deterrent is roughly 35-40 years old. By the time there has been a complete modernization (by 2020) of the Russian nuclear missile force, the U.S. will not have yet built a single new strategic nuclear weapon for its arsenal.

To help with modernization, Congress and administration needs to get rid of the defense budget caps. Removing them should be America’s #1 arms control and nuclear deterrent priority in the nation.

The biggest problem with our believing in “Truth” is a fatal error in casting. Though Robert Redford is not much older than Dan Rather in 2004, the formerly handsome Redford has aged badly and bears no resemblance to the network anchor whom we scrutinized at close range in our homes for so many years. To make matters worse, Dennis Quaid who plays a military consultant to CBS, does look a lot like Rather and would have been perfect casting for the lead role. As we look at Redford with his sandy blondish hairpiece and fair, sun-damaged skin, we wonder why he’s usurping Dennis Quaid’s proper place as the dark-haired, square-headed Rather who remained telegenic as a man in his 70’s.

Cate Blanchett plays Mary Mapes, an overly frenetic, Xanax-popping, boozy journalist with creds who’s on to a very big story about George Bush’s appointment to and AWOL from the National Guard. The pressures of getting this on the air to take advantage of a scheduling opening in 5 days creates the tension, inducing the Mapes/Rather team to go with the story despite imperfect and incomplete journalistic vetting. As scripted, the villains of the movie are the corporate heads of CBS who don’t want to jeopardize their relationship with the president and the heavy-handed Republican lawyers appointed by CBS to investigate this matter before the company decides how to handle it.