"Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself."

That's a very strangely written sentence... by M. Gessen, in "What Democrats Are Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights" (NYT). 

Context:

I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.

Presumably, Gessen has one relationship with each of the children, but it's possible that Gessen really does means to claim multiple relationships with each one. I suppose the grammar was a minor distraction on the way to proclaiming the superiority of a life lived without regrets. 

Anxiety about trans people and reproduction, and the laws and rules that it produces, cut both ways...

Puzzling commas again. And why choose a cutting metaphor here? Intentional prodding of our anxiety about surgery?

There's a lot more going on in the article, which was originally titled "The Secret Behind America's Moral Panic." What's the secret? And what are "Democrats... Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights"? This is the most useful passage:

"'One of the things that’s really interesting with Hume’s Treatise is that he introduces the term "sympathy" to explain why we have esteem for the rich and the powerful'..."

"... says Neil Charles Saccamano, associate professor of English at Cornell University. 'Hume talks about how the notion of property enters into why we esteem them – that they own things like houses and gardens.' The beauty of those objects, Saccamano says, is designed to produce pleasure in the owner of the object. 'And we others, who do not own this property, and are not rich and powerful, and who are of a lower class, we simply "sympathise" with the pleasure we anticipate that the owner of the property will receive from the objects,' he says. So, when we watch Meryl Streep and Steve Martin making late-night chocolate croissants at her bakery in It’s Complicated, the sense of pleasure and anticipation we take from the scene is as much about 'sympathising' with the luxuriousness of it all: the softly lit kitchen, the pastry against the cool marble counter, the exquisite indulgence of owning a bakery at all, let alone breaking in after hours for a little erotically charged patisserie-making.... 'And in [Hume]’s analysis, part of the pleasure of the owner is knowing that others envy them – or sympathise with their pleasure,' says Saccamano...."

From "Lights, camera, comfy furnishings: why the ‘beige chic’ of Nancy Meyers is having a revival/In her hit romcoms, the director’s sets were as popular as the films. Now trending on social media more than a decade after her last movie, her coveted look is back" (The Guardian).

"There’s a lot of pent-up envy of San Francisco from a lot of other cities that think of themselves as more important."

Said an unnamed friend of Nathan Heller, quoted in "What Happened to San Francisco, Really? It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask" (The New Yorker).

[T]he city’s influence can also be measured by its long shadow in Democratic politics. San Francisco, it’s easy to forget, is a small city... Its social sphere is startlingly compressed.... From this tiny ecosystem the political careers of the nation’s Vice-President, the governor of its most populous state, the recent longtime Speaker of the House, and (until last month) the most senior Democratic member of the Senate emerged.... 

"Writers, or at least most of us, are specific types of monsters. We have the hubris to think we have something to say, that someone might read our work...."

"My older sister’s reply the last time I asked her about books: 'I just read Facebook now.' Most books don’t succeed either in terms of sales or critical unanimity. Most writers don’t earn a living wage from their writing. Tenure-track appointments (I teach college writing) are rare as unicorns. But being a writer is not a sentence handed down, it’s a choice I’ve made. I love other writers and do not want to root against them (some of my closest friends, et cetera), but there’s a desperation inherent in the state of publishing that sometimes makes this difficult...."

From "The Unbearable Envy of the Published Author" by Lynn Steger Strong (NYT).

"One lesson of feminism, surely, is that being like other women, rather than a shining unfettered exception, isn’t such a terrible thing."

Writes Michelle Goldberg reacting to this line in a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz: "I secretly wanted monogamy, that I was just like every other woman who wanted to tie her man down."

The Goldberg column is titled "When Sexual Liberation Is Oppressive" (NYT).

She's bringing up a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz, because Willis Aronowitz quoted herself in her new book "Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution."

Willis Aronowitz is the daughter of Ellen Willis, who was — as Goldberg puts it — a "pro-sex feminist writer."

Don't you have to choose what to put first, sex or feminism? If you set out to put them on equal footing, what do you get? I must be a feminist and I must be pro-sex.

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...

"The art critic John Berger once remarked that 'the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour' — and glamour, Berger thought..."

"... was what our culture (especially advertising) pushed us to aspire to. The cocktails, cars and expensive clothes that prove our superiority. Berger would have been horrified to discover how envy has triumphed, and become, perhaps, the predominant modern social emotion. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook earn our engagement (our clicks and eyeballs) by feeding our envious, self-wounding appetite for others’ achievements.... Nietzsche writes with acute psychological perception about the way the vain, self-promoting man wants 'to give joy to himself at the expense of his fellow men' by aiming at a reputation so high 'that it would have to cause them all pain by arousing their envy.'... Half the moral fury on social media is envy in disguise, something that should give pause to those who desperately seek to be envied. Inspiring envy in others is a potentially self-destructive hobby...."

From "Online moral fury is often just envy in disguise/Inspiring jealousy is considered a great achievement but it also drives others to want to tear us down" by James Marriott (London Times).

Writing this post, I discovered I had a tag called "envy shortcircuiting," but I'd only used it the time I created it, and I'd meant for it to be something I was going to keep track of. In that post, the subject was "poverty appropriation," where people who have a choice chose something associated with poor people. I wrote:

"City Hall should immediately impose a resettlement tax on all returning New Yorkers. The levy will be determined..."

"... at the very moment they touch down at J.F.K., determined by both their income level and how flagrant their desertion was. (If someone spent the entirety of their exile on the crystal waters between Monaco and Sardinia, he can expect to pay up.) That money will be used to fund a public good ascertained, through a special election, by those of us who never left.... We saw the videos from the Joshua Tree ranch, OK? You can’t just march back in here as if you own the place. Once sufficient contrition is expressed, exiles may return to their normal New York existences, so long as they promise to never vacate the city in its time of need ever again.... All the values I was taught about New York, from elementary school onward, came true last year: the solidarity, the saltiness, the stubborn resilience whenever outside voices declare the city dead and buried.... The deserters escaped all the horror that comes with living in America’s largest population center in the middle of a generational crisis, but they’ll also miss out on the brilliant, unchaining joys of what comes afterward, this great unburdening of New York City. I almost feel bad for them. Almost."

Writes Luke Wilkie in "They Escaped the Pandemic/Now They Must Pay" (NYT). 

This is one of those "modest proposal" essays. The comedy is clear if you read the whole thing. But what's real is the hostility toward the rich — the rich who could and did buy their way out of the struggles of city life. It was more obvious than usual, but people always use what money they have to ease their own suffering. Rich people get out of town all the time. They leave just because summer is hot.

"Why was [Andrew Cuomo] celebrated for so long?"

The headline for an article at New York Magazine is "Abuse and Power Andrew Cuomo’s governorship has been defined by cruelty that disguised chronic mismanagement. Why was that celebrated for so long?"

Was the "governorship" celebrated or was the governor celebrated? I rewrote the headline for my post title because it seemed perversely impersonal and inaccurate to say that people have been celebrating the abstraction. People were celebrating the man. There was some embarrassing fawning.

The NY Magazine article is by Rebecca Traister. She writes: "Cuomo was a bully, but he was our bully." He was also a liar: 

“He makes things up like I’ve never seen anyone do before,” said [Bill Lipton, a founder of the Working Families Party]. “He makes people who disagree with him feel like they’re crazy.” It’s a pattern that — like his narcissism, theatrical bombast, love of cameras, hatred of “experts,” and the fact that, as one national reporter who covered him said, “I don’t think he believes in much, except that he wants to be powerful”—makes Cuomo not the anti-Trump that many imagined him, but rather the 45th president’s Democratic twin. Or, as one person put it to me, they are “the same person” but for “two major exceptions: Fred Trump was Donald Trump’s father, and Mario Cuomo was Andrew Cuomo’s father.”

What if the hatred for Trump is really envy? The haters just want one like that for themselves. 

ADDED: These personality traits — narcissism, theatrical bombast, love of cameras, no deeper belief than the love of power — will be found in virtually all politicians. Shy, humble philosophers who shrink at imposing their will on others don't step forward and announce their candidacy. Those of you who fall for  bullies need to take responsibility for your cheesy love affairs. 

"Eddie Izzard doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. In December, it was reported that the standup comic/actor/campaigner/endurance runner had adopted the pronouns 'she' and 'her'..."

"... and wanted to be 'based in girl mode' from now on.... Actually, Izzard says, she had not intended to be so definitive about it. She had always talked about being in boy mode most of the time and girl mode part of the time, and she was still hoping to keep her options open. For her first half century, boy mode had dominated, and now it was time for girl mode to take centre stage, but on occasions she would still like the freedom to be a he. She soon discovered that wasn’t an option, though.... At the moment, Izzard is self-identifying as a trans woman. Does she think she will ever physically transition? 'I might do. I feel that boy mode has had a good innings in this one life that we get. It would be great to get up in the morning and think I look like a woman so I’m going to throw on a tracksuit and have breakfast. It is getting better and better. I do feel I can express myself in a more feminine way, which may be the age thing.' Would she like boobs? 'Yeah! I’ve had boob envy since my teens. Just when teenage girls of my age were going "I want boobs," I was thinking yeah me too. But I couldn’t say it. They talk about penis envy, and I believe some women suffer penis envy. I cannot for the life of me get my head around this. But yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.'... I ask if she is taking hormone pills. She smiles and, for once, declines to answer. 'I’m very happy to transition and I feel I have been transitioning,' she says. 'But I do feel I’ve told everybody everything in my life, so I’m going to keep a certain amount of privacy.'"

From "Eddie Izzard: 'I'm just trying to create a space for myself'/The actor and comic on making her female pronouns permanent, shouting down abuse, enduring a marathon a day – and running for Labour" (The Guardian).

"I remember seeing Mark David Chapman, Lennon’s assassin, sitting on the railing outside the porte-cochère that distinguished the Dakota as a gracious reminder of horse-and-carriage days...."

"As we settled down to watch the 11 o’clock news, a succession of loud detonations brought us to our feet. We ran to my studio window on 72nd and saw a black limousine in the driveway by the Dakota’s porte-cochère. Its lights were on, and a figure was lying by the open rear door. We identified John at a glance by his cowboy boots and round glasses, which reflected the bright lights of the entrance. He lay face up, slightly crumpled, with his feet pointing toward the street. The tremendous crashing that startled us had been the sound of the four or five gunshots reverberating within the passage.... There was a camera on the desk in my studio, and I instinctively grabbed it. For the record, it was a Nikkormat EL fitted with a telephoto lens, loaded with high-speed black-and-white film that I often used to snap photos out of the window and around town. The night was clear and the scene was lit up. With the camera cocked and my finger on the shutter release, I focused on John’s face, the face of a dying man. Then I said to myself, 'This isn’t my work. Whoever is there deserves a final moment of privacy.'"

From "The Photograph Not Taken: The Night John Lennon Died" by Robert Morgan (Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 2, 2015).

I'm reading that today because of a new item in the NYT: "The Hidden Perk That New York’s Mega-Rich Now Demand/The porte cochère, a covered entry, all but disappeared decades ago. High-end buildings catering to car owners are bringing it back." That ran in the Christmas Day paper edition with the headline, "A Revived Relic Hides the Wealthy From Prying Eyes." There's no mention of Lennon or even the Dakota.

The modern porte cochère is all about invisibility, or at least providing cover from prying eyes on city streets. Celebrities, V.I.P.s and ultra-high-net-worth types, especially those who are not regulars in the gossip columns, do not want to be seen coming and going. The porte cochère is their shield from photographers, professionals and fans or mere passers-by with cellphones held high.

Okay. The feeling of protection, sold to the rich, most of whom have forgotten or never knew "porte-cochère" in the context of the murder of John Lennon. To me, "porte-cochère" connotes a hiding place for a fiend lying in wait.

The NYT article is long, and it's one of the many articles that run counter to the usual leftish politics that otherwise permeate the newspaper. In the NYT, real estate drifts along in a dreamworld of envy and aspiration. What new thing can be ached for? Here it is, kids: a porte-cochère! It's the latest most retrograde amenity for your ugly urban palace. Now, scoot in there and read the NYT, which will tell you about the awful, filthy rich real estate mogul who cheated his way into the presidency.

"Income taxation in the United States began in public view. When Congress imposed the first income tax in 1861, during the Civil War..."

"... it required the disclosure of names, incomes and tax payments. Over the following decade, before Congress ended the tax, this data was posted in public and printed in newspapers. That practice was briefly revived in 1924. It’s time for another revival. The question is whether Americans are willing to endure a little sunlight in the interest of fairness and equality."

Writes Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of the NYT editorial board, in "Everyone’s Income Taxes Should Be Public/Disclosure of tax payments would make it easier to hold politicians accountable. It also would help to reduce fraud and economic inequality."

What about privacy?!

Calling for more disclosure may seem discordant at a time of growing concern about privacy. But income taxation is an act of government, not an aspect of private life.

So there you see. By taxing us, the government has taken away not just our money but our privacy.

The top-rated comment over there is:

I don’t want my tax return made public. I don’t want my kids, friends, clients, enemies, fraudsters seeing my business. Make politicians release. I’m not running for anything.

Second:

It seems weird that the Times would, while doing a whole series lambasting the decline of privacy, publish an op-ed calling for an end to privacy of tax returns.

Third:

What I make is none of my neighbor's business. Envy is the main driving force of unhappiness in our species and there's no better way to amplify it than to let neighbors know exactly where they stand in their neighborhood hierarchy of financial success....

Appelbaum seems to have no awareness that millions of Americans are embarrassed by how little money they make. Or may he thinks embarrassment is a small price to pay for creating pressure to equalize incomes.  Let's crank up the shame and the envy.

Because... Trump.

What does "you do you" really mean?

That's a question I had to google after reading "The Thinnest Skins In Media In 2018/Their diapers runneth over" (HuffPo). The first entry on the list is "Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor And Respecter Of Troops." And this exchange is presented as evidence:



See the relevant line, in the middle? "I'm not mad. You misquoted me, I pointed it out, and instead of correcting yourself you reacted like a child. You do you."

My Google search turned up "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture" (NYT, March 2015). Excerpt:

Haters hate; that’s them doing them. No matter how saintly you are, the kittens rescued and orphanages saved from demolition, people yearn to bring you down. Classify your antagonists as haters, however, and your flaws are absolved by their greater sin of envy. Obviously, the haters have other qualities apart from their hatred, but such thinking goes against the very nature of the hermetic tautophrase, which refuses intrusion into the bubble of its logic. The hated-­upon must resist lines of inquiry, like “Haters are inclined to hate, but perhaps I have contributed to this situation somehow by frustrating that natural impulse in all human beings, that of empathy, however submerged that impulse is in this deadened, modern world.” To do otherwise would be to acknowledge your own monstrosity....

And if you're wondering why the thin-skinned media people are depicted as corn in that HuffPo article, the answer is here, at Know Your Meme. The meme goes back to some tweet in 2011, but:

Discourse around the term grew popular again in the beginning of August of 2017. On August 2nd, journalist Yashar Ali tweeted an image of Kamala Harris, a rumored democratic candidate for the 2020 Presidential Election, that called her the "Centrist Corncob" candidate. Ali noted how it was remarkable how the "Bernie Sanders Crew" had mobilized against Harris.... Centrist pundit Al Giordano quoted the tweet stated that the term had homophobic and rape culture origins.... The same day, Neera Tanden, a chief strategist on the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2016 United States Presidential Election did the same. Both were mocked for misunderstanding the term.

References were different in the old days. If you didn't get them, you had to wonder if you weren't in the know... and how badly out of the know you were. Today, you can instantly become in the know and form a judgment about how out of the know you were. In the case of corncob, it's mindbogglingly insubstantial, but I'm glad to be forewarned against making any precipitous rape-culture allegations.

"To love travel is to love the feeling of being uncomfortable in a controlled environment. It’s a very expensive roller coaster ride."

"You board the plane knowing that maybe some new experiences will slide out of your comfort zone, but they are still choices you made. We’ve all seen the Instagram feeds of zip lines, SCUBA dives, long hikes, and drinks on the beach.... I see these pictures and feel no sense of envy or desire. I always saw travel as something anyone can do with enough money, time, and the wits to book a flight. By its nature travel is flirting. There is no commitment to the destination, only pleasure. Guest is a title travelers learn to accept. That word makes me cringe. If travel is being recreationally uncomfortable in a controlled environment ― I chose the opposite...."

From "I Don’t Want To Travel" by Jenna Woginrich — "Author, Farmer, Falconer"(HuffPo).

Here's her blog, Cold Antler Farm.

Indulge me for a moment with this separate post that pulls together something from the previous 2 posts (or don't indulge me, just move on!).

In the comments to the post about the word "editrix," Ignorance is Bliss excerpts something from the excerpt I'd provided as I was continuing my reading of Mary McCarthy's 1950 essay, "Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue":

...there appears to be some periodic feminine compulsion on the editresses’ part to strike a suffragette attitude...

That excerpt sets up IIB's quip: "I'm guessing the period is approximately every 28 days..."

First, I need to say I think Mary McCarthy meant to make you think that, because the very next paragraph is:

And as one descends to a lower level of the fashion structure, to Glamour (Condé Nast) and Charm (Street and Smith), one finds a more genuine solicitude for the reader and her problems. The pain of being a BG (Business Girl), the envy of superiors, self-consciousness, consciousness, awkwardness, loneliness, sexual fears, timid friendliness to the Boss, endless evenings with the mirror and the tweezers, desperate Saturday social strivings (“Give a party and ask everyone you know”), the struggle to achieve any identity in the dead cubbyhole of office life, this mass misery, as of a perpetual humiliating menstrual period, is patently present to the editors, who strive against it with good advice, cheeriness, forced volubility, a psychiatric nurse’s briskness, so that the reiterated “Be natural,” “Be yourself,” “Smile,” “Your good points are you too” (Mademoiselle), have a therapeutic justification.

And that description of the "BG (Business Girl)" is exactly what I was talking about at the end of the previous post, the one about "Nomadland" (a book that describes the RV life as "dark and depressing"). I said:

Perhaps all jobs could be described in words that would move readers to say oh, those poor, desperate people. A journalist can, in words, find what she wants to find. 

And look at those words McCarthy came up with! Office life is like "a perpetual humiliating menstrual period." McCarthy set herself above the women who were writing the magazines for women. She saw the office workers as living dark and depressing lives, and the editors had their own dark and depressing lives, forced to churn out prose to con the BG (Business Girl) into buying another magazine to ease "the pain of... envy of superiors, self-consciousness, consciousness, awkwardness, loneliness, sexual fears, timid friendliness to the Boss, endless evenings with the mirror and the tweezers, desperate Saturday social strivings [and] the struggle to achieve any identity in the dead cubbyhole of office life."

"Why Is Pope Francis Promoting Sin?"

There's a click-bait headline that seduced me. It's an op-ed at Bloomberg.com.

By dwelling on inequality, the pope is promoting envy. The Catholic Church, I had always understood, disapproves of envy, deeming it one of the seven deadly sins. I would have expected Francis to urge people to think of themselves in relation to God and to their own fullest potential. Encouraging people to measure themselves against others only leads to grief. Resenting the success of others is a sin in itself.

Obviously, one can say the Pope is promoting virtue, notably charity. But the pitch comes from a Harvard professor, Lant Pritchett, whose expertise is in alleviating poverty, but hear him out. This next part may win over even the Pope fans:

While Jesus repeatedly preached against the love of riches, he was urging people to respond to a call to God and to become “rich to God.” It was not an appeal for people to resent the riches of others and obsess about material inequality. Jesus, when asked to remedy inequality, turned the focus back on envy and greed.

“Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.’ He replied to him, ‘Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?’ Then he said to the crowd, ‘Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.’” (Luke 12:13-15)

I am all for reducing poverty... What I’m against is talking about “inequality” as if that term denoted any of those concerns. Poverty matters; injustice matters. Mere inequality is beside the point.

Mere inequality is beside the point.

Journalist "thinking about... birth control and the importance of reproductive freedom" steps in front of a moving car, is saved by Ryan Gosling...

... and is now annoyed that — after she tweeted about her encounter with the cinematic dreamboat — people are going on about his being such a hero, thus casting her in the retrograde role of damsel in distress.

[A]s a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him. I think that's lazy storytelling, and I'm sure Ryan Gosling would agree with me.

Why did the feminist cross the road? To swoon into the arms of a movie star, tweet about it, inspire intense envy, and then to hit those already slammed by envy a second time with the news that they are antifeminist for seeing her as a damsel in distress when she was really thinking deep thoughts about feminism.

American exceptionalism "is infused with racialized hierarchies — normative whiteness and masculinity still marking the 'worthiest' inheritors of the American dream."

Writes lawprof Patricia J. Williams, in a collection of essays in the NYT responding to a new study indicating that white people think discrimination against white people is more of a problem than discrimination against black people.

Through much of American history, blacks have been viewed as low on the competence index (negative feelings), but warm enough to be pitied (which is usually felt not as a negative but a protective, “pro-black” fuzzy emotion). As blacks have made greater symbolic strides in the last few decades, that ranking seems to have shifted: there is envy, suspicion, resentment — despite numbers, despite empirical documentation to the contrary — that blacks are “taking over” as the recipients not of due process but of undue “favoritism.”

This projected fear is a danger to the nation.

ADDED: Williams is applying this template:

1. Those stereotyped as high competence and high warmth are met with pride and admiration (like most white people).
2. Groups who rank as high warmth and low competence are treated with pity, sympathy, paternalism (like the elderly).
3. Those stereotyped as high competence and low warmth are met with envy (like Jews and Asians).
4. Those perceived as low competence and low warmth are greeted with contempt, anger and resentment (like the homeless).

You've got to admit that's provocative. Think deeply about it before you comment.