Is love a serious thing? Or is it easy and cheap? Here's what I think. Love is so serious and delicate, one should never wave its banner in public, except during weddings and catastrophic events, such as volcanic eruptions or earthquakes. "I love you!" one cries out as one slips into the crack that has just opened in the earth. In that case, it's okay if one's private devotions are displayed. I could never loudly tell someone - husband, friend, child or parent - that I loved him while I was speaking on a cell phone standing in line at a supermarket or eating in a restaurant or waiting in a packed elevator. Is there something wrong with me? This emotional promiscuity is everywhere. Perhaps I am frigid, maybe even autistic, but I say anyone who can wear his heart so visibly on his sleeve may not truly possess one. Since the advent of this amazing technology, I have heard many dozens, maybe even hundreds, of  women tell their husbands and children they loved them over the phone. I was once waiting to vote in a presidential election when a middle-aged woman told a man over the phone that she loved him. He apparently made some witty remark. She protested that she definitely did love him. But, she said, if she were living in Europe, where the men were more interesting, she probably wouldn't. I suspect people like being heard telling others that they love them. Love has become a status symbol. To fail to publicly display it is like keeping a beautiful diamond…

  There is Christmas cheer in Washington. According to this story in yesterday's New York Times: An unusual holiday message began appearing this week in the nation’s capital on the sides of buses and trains. “No god? ... No problem!” reads the advertisement featuring the smiling faces of people wearing Santa Claus hats. “Be good for goodness’ sake.” Similar campaigns by evangelical atheists have taken place in other cities in the United States and Europe. But it seems believers haven't figured out how to react yet. Should they be hurt or outraged or perhaps indifferent? According to one prominent Christian spokesman, they should be hurt. Ian Urbina reports in the Times: “It is the ultimate Grinch to suggest there is no God during a holiday where millions of people around the world celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,” said Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, a conservative religious law firm, and dean of Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Va. “It is insensitive and mean.” I don't follow Staver's thinking. Any believer who encounters strident atheism for the first time in the form of an ad on a bus has probably lived a life so sheltered and secure from secularism he can hardly be laid low by this one encounter. No, I can't see believers breaking down at the sight of these ads. Most likely they swim in a sea of un-belief. They are accustomed to strident atheism. Many have been strident atheists. They can handle one…

  When did grown women start publicly referring to themselves as "moms"? The other day, Sarah Palin said she was concerned about foreign policy as "a mom with a son in Afghanistan." Soccer moms, hockey moms, stay-at-home moms, working moms, single moms. What ever happened to 'mother'? Rule #1 of domestic nomenclature: Do not refer to a woman as a mom unless you are that woman's child.  Rule #2: Do not refer to yourself as a mom with anyone who is not your child. The less time and energy women expend being mothers, the more adorable motherhood becomes. This cornball vocabulary trivializes and demeans an exalted and timeless institution, this sacred vocation that has wrecked more lives than any other. A mom is decorative. A mother is severe and semi-official and disturbingly ever-present. A mom sits in the bleachers and yells, "Go, Buster! I love ya!" A mother takes you by the ears and scrubs your mouth out with Fels Naptha. As Florence King said, "Let's face it: We like the idea of motherhood, we like the symbols of motherhood, we like the metaphors of motherhood, and we like the cute, casual vocabulary of neo-motherhood that we have cooked up, but we don't like motherhood..."

What kind of woman calls herself a “rogue?” A liberal, feminist, roguish kind of woman. John Lofton of the American View makes this and other excellent observations about Sarah Palin in his radio show on the Oprah interview. He dares to call Palin a non-conservative and to denounce Christians for supporting her. I wonder if he has hired bodyguards.

Lofton makes a couple of points I have made. He says Palin’s comment during the Oprah interview that she felt sympathy for women who choose abortion was tasteless, improper and hypocritical.  He also calls the Palin family a model of domestic abnormality.

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In a previous post, a reader asked about the reasons for Oprah’s staggering success. I gave a few superficial reasons, and discussion followed. But I did not probe a major factor in this success: Oprah’s role as spiritual leader. 

Oprah takes trivial matters, such as fashion, relationships, shopping and cooking, and skillfully blends them with issues of ultimate meaning and destiny. This deft combination of the small and the large, the high and the low, is at the heart of her ascendancy. Oprah is more than a talk show host. She is captain at the helm of a ship heading through the troubled waters of self discovery. The spiritual answers she provides deeply appeal to women today.

Oprah is not radically new in providing these answers and American women have been tending toward these beliefs for well over 150 years. Religion in America has been in the process of being feminized since at least the nineteenth century.  But Oprah is new in the extent of her cultural reach. No American minister ever had Oprah’s audience of more than 20 million viewers five days a week.

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Mrs. N. comments on the previous post regarding the lamentable ‘Ms.’:

I grew up in a small midwestern town that in my mind’s eye was not unlike the fictional town of Mayberry. Unmarried women carried the title Miss. A married woman was addressed by her husband’s first and last name, i.e. Mrs. John Smith. If a woman was widowed, she was addressed by her own first and last name, i.e. Mrs. Jane Smith. Letters were addressed as such and many women signed their checks and other binding documents in this same manner. 

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  A commenter named Richard W. at View from the Right has a great essay on the inevitable collapse of the federal government. This event is to be welcomed, he argues, and holds out thrilling possibilities for cultural renewal. The behemoth must die. Richard writes: I view our position now as analogous to an airplane which loses its engines in flight. The pilot and copilot know the flight is over. There is no way to avoid a crash landing, only procedures to follow to increase the chances of survival. Those of us who understand the situation in America are like those pilots. One of our duties is to tell the rest of the crew and passengers what is going to happen, but it's not the main task at hand. The main task is survival. In our case survival has multiple levels. Individual and family survival must come first. We need to ensure that despite the increasing societal chaos we retain health and hearth. At the level above that is the survival of a larger group or community: one's church, one's neighbors, a close nit group of friends. At the next level is survival of critical cultural and political institutions. We must all make our own plans for family and group survival. It is at this third level of the survival of these larger institutions that we need to talk, plan, and work towards agreement. Clearly the "thing" which is failing and must be destroyed…

  Is it now shameful to be a 'Mrs.'? When 'Ms.' came into use thirty or so years ago, the idea was that it would serve as a title when the marital status of a woman was uncertain or when she preferred to not have it known. Today, it is often used as a catch-all, even for women who are clearly married. Michael S. writes: I was reading this New York Times story about Grand Central Terminal and I came upon these two paragraphs: Among those seeking assistance were Joseph and Sabina Prusan, who had planned to meet their granddaughters, Jillian Griesmer, 10, and Alexandra, 13, around noon at Pennsylvania Station, where they were informed that the girls had been rerouted to Grand Central. “We were nervous,” Ms. Prusan said after a conductor helped reunite the group. “It’s the only time the girls ever went by themselves.” The girls were more sanguine. “We had to stay seated and wait for 20 minutes,” Alexandra said with a shrug before returning to her BlackBerry. Okay, never mind that the 13-year-old has her own Blackberry. Apparently Joseph and Sabina Prusan are a married couple. Married to each other, that is, which makes them husband and wife. (Otherwise the common last name, and the practice of referring to them as "Joseph and Sabina Prusan," rather than "Joseph Prusan and Sabina Prusan," is rather a challenge to explain.) And this married couple are waiting for their granddaughters. So why does the writer…

MarkyMark writes:

My question is this: Why is Oprah so popular? Why were so many women taken in by her? Why weren’t more women able to see through her and her message? You’re one of the few who has. By the way, I agree with you: Few people have done more to damage American women than Oprah Winfrey has. 

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  See the entry, The Demented Sarah Palin Debate, for discussion of this phenomenon.

  Having announced that she's giving up her TV show in 2011, Oprah is not headed toward retirement. She is redirecting her efforts, which will include a cable TV series focused on an L.A. housewife who dumps her family to pursue a life of erotic adventure. Is this any surprise, dear reader? Oprah never was the girlfriend, true and loyal, she presented herself to be. She stands front and center with all those who would destroy any remaining shred of decency in America's wives and mothers.

In a previous entry, a reader named Joel complained that it isn’t possible for young hard-working professionals in their twenties to form families without some dramatic changes in social policy. To this, readers and I responded that young couples would be wise to accept relative poverty for the sake of having children while they are young. This, we argued, is the best way to save the West from further decline and to achieve personal happiness.

But, let’s be honest about what this advice means. It means that people such as Joel must step outside the world they live in and go it alone. The fact is, they will lose friends and status for the sake of a less materialistic way of life.

More than a hundred years ago, Thorsten Veblen, in his Theory of the Leisure Class, described our situation, a society in which large numbers of people would choose conspicuous consumption over family contentment and a higher birthrate.

He wrote:

The accepted standard of expenditure in the community or in the class to which a person belongs largely determines what his standard of living will be. It does this directly by commending itself to his common sense as right and good, through his habitually contemplating it and assimilating the scheme of life in which it belongs; but it does so also indirectly through popular insistence on conformity to the accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of propriety, under pain of disesteem and ostracism.

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  Can you imagine any portion of the male anatomy deified as the female breast has been in recent years? If there were ten-foot phallic symbols lining the mall in Washington, would we be any more in thrall to masculinity than we are to femininity in our current state of outright breast-worship? Last week, newspapers and TV news programs gave top billing to the news that women in their forties may do okay without mammograms. It was as if government officials had ordered mass mastectomies, so intense was the alarm and the widespread concern that the breast - o, sacred teat! - was not being given its due. Breast cancer is a serious and terrible scourge. But, breast cancer in women in their forties is not as pressing a concern as male heart disease or childhood leukemia and yet it is hard to believe similarly minor news about these diseases would have received such near-hysterical attention. No, the breast is sacred. But it is also profane. With the current state of women's fashion, the breast has been ironically cheapened at the very moment of its glorification. There is more exposed cleavage in the average corporate office than rump roasts in Costco's refrigerated cases. The breast spills forth from its bindings with molten overabundance. Even the female leaders of Western nations -  senators, ministers and diplomats - freely advertise their wares. Over-exposed in this way, the breast becomes something sad:  just one more piece of flesh.  And yet how beautiful it can be. How…

From Milton’s Il Penseroso:

But let my feet never fail,                                   
To walk the studious Cloysters pale,
And love the high embowed Roof,
With antick Pillars massy proof,
And storied Windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing Organ blow,
To the full voic’d Quire below,
In Service high, and Anthems cleer,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into extasies,
And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.
And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every Star that heav’n doth shew,
And every Herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like Prophetic strain.
These pleasures Melancholy give,
And I with thee will choose to live.

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