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Sunday, April 10, 2005

The infernal book meme

Chris Clarke sent me this damn thing ten days ago, allegedly because, as he put, “he’s too busy to do it, thus limiting the damage I cause by passing this infernal memoid on.” Well, Chris is right as usual, I am too damn busy – why, I’ve already spent most of the morning dealing with David Horowitz’s latest piece of nonsense involving me, which I’ll tell you all about tomorrow.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t answer the bell when it rings.  So here goes.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Uh, actually the conclusion of Fahrenheit 451 isn’t entirely clear about the parameters of this question.  Montag offers the Book of Ecclesiastes, and his interlocutor says that he’s Plato’s Republic, but there are also suggestions that the survivors are supposed to memorize entire oeuvres rather than just one book.  But you asked just one book, so I say– Fahrenheit 451.  Only kidding! The Sound and the Fury.  Honorable mention, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  If I could combine the two into Dilsey’s defense of the priority of paradigms, that would be ideal.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Aside from wishing that I could have met Daria when I was 17?  But that doesn’t even count– she’s a fictional cartoon character.  No, this question is just too weird.  Unhealthy, even.  Maybe it’s just my preference for Borges and Pynchon talking, but I really wish that readers would remember that fictional characters are fictional characters.

I did, however, meet a person in graduate school who had ranked all of Jane Austen’s heroines in the order of their attractiveness.  I am not making this up.

The last book you bought is?

This is actually a much more difficult question than it seems.  In the past week alone, I have received about a dozen books in the mail, ranging from Jennifer Washburn’s University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education to Ian Fleming and James Bond:  The Cultural Politics of 007, edited by Edward Comentale, Stephen Watt, and Skip Willman, to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.  Why do people mail me so many books?  Do they think that I am an omnipotent reviewer like Scott McLemee?  Perish the thought!  I am not an omnipotent reviewer.  And then there are all the handfuls of books I get for doing reader’s reports and manuscript refereeing—why, it’s almost as if publishers simply will not accept my money anymore.

I did, however, hear a wonderful talk by Will Nash at Penn State’s recent conference on the African-American novel, and ran out and Amazon-ordered Clarence Major’s Dirty Bird Blues.  So there’s my answer.

What are you currently reading?

Just finished Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, a delightful and infuriating book; about to reread Stuart Hall’s The Hard Road to Renewal, the better to discuss it with a very impressive book-discussion group in Washington, D.C. later this month; peeking intermittently at Chris Rojek’s overview of Stuart Hall, titled simply Stuart Hall; and having a very fine (though slow-going) time with Richard E. Lee’s Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

Steven Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.  It’s been on my get-to shelf for a year, and will probably have to stay there for another year.  Unless I wind up on a deserted island before then.
The Riverside Shakespeare.  Yeah, I know this is cheating.  But it is one book.  Besides, that Shakespeare guy is pretty good.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.  As the best representative of that sturdy animal, the realist novel.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman.  As one of the best (and funniest) representatives of that chameleon-like creature, the antirealist novel.
Homer, The Odyssey.  Because I haven’t read it in 25 years and it’s sitting right next to Gould.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Alex Pareene of Buck Hill, because, as a college student and an intern for the media elite, he’s got nothing better to do; Rivka at Respectful of Otters, because her recent posts on Terri Schiavo have been remarkable; and Echidne of the Snakes, because I would like an actual goddess to handle this one.

UPDATE:  It appears that the goddess is spoken for.  Damn!  And after I offered all those holy hecatombs, too.  OK, then, Randy Paul, how about you?

Posted by Michael on 04/10 at 11:01 AM
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Friday, April 08, 2005

Guest blogger:  David Brooks

Many thanks to Michael for letting me join you all today.  I thought it would be fun to do a . . .

Friday random ten:  conservatives’ favorite philosophers

Which philosophers are on the average conservative pundit’s iPod?  Here are mine:

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France – Live at Leeds

Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae, Book 3 Prosa 1 (“Iam cantum illa finiuerat, cum me audiendi auidum stupentemque arrectis adhuc auribus carminis mulcedo defixerat. . . .”)

Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics”

Donald Luskin, I Have Paul Krugman’s Home Address

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (Double Live Gonzo)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment § 9, purposive purposelessness remix

Anaximander, fragment DK 12B1

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Chicago edition, Supplement, Questions 67 and 68 (“Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?” and “Of Illegitimate Children”)

Friedrich August von Hayek, Totally Tubular Cash Flow (volume two of The Road to Surfdom, illustrated version, with an introduction by Jonah Goldberg)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, final sentence

Posted by Michael on 04/08 at 06:48 AM
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Liberals in their own words

Warning:  this is a long post about disability and abortion and end-of-life care.  By “long” I mean “about three thousand words.” To all of you who came looking for the puppies and dolphins, or who were simply hoping to be this blog’s millionth visitor, hah.  This blog will never write about puppies and dolphins.

Eric Cohen’s recent Weekly Standard essay, “How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo,” is probably the best of its genre: while opposing the removal of Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube, it acknowledges the moral complexity of the case, does not fudge the medical details, and keeps the vilification of Michael Schiavo to a bare minimum.  (The contrast with Nat Hentoff’s work on the subject is stark, and not flattering to Mr. Hentoff.)

But it purchases its thoughtfulness about the case, so to speak, by means of a misunderstanding of liberalism so severe as to amount to a form of ideological ventriloquism.  The pivotal passage comes in the middle of Cohen’s biting but plausible reading of the Florida court’s rationale for supporting Michael Schiavo:

Part of the problem was simply judicial incompetence—especially the court’s decision, in direct violation of Florida law, to act as Terri Schiavo’s guardian at key moments of the case rather than appoint an independent guardian to represent her interests, separate from the interests of her husband and her parents. But the problem went deeper than incompetence: It also had to do with ideology—with a set of assumptions about what makes life worth living and thus worth protecting. Procedural liberalism (discerning and respecting the prior wishes of the incompetent person; preserving life when such wishes are not clear) gave way to ideological liberalism (treating incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living). When the district court’s decision to allow Michael Schiavo to remove the feeding tube was challenged, a Florida appeals court framed the question before it as follows:

[W]hether Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo, not after a few weeks in a coma, but after ten years in a persistent vegetative state that has robbed her of most of her cerebrum and all but the most instinctive of neurological functions, with no hope of a medical cure but with sufficient money and strength of body to live indefinitely, would choose to continue the constant nursing care and the supporting tubes in hopes that a miracle would somehow recreate her missing brain tissue, or whether she would wish to permit a natural death process to take its course and for her family members and loved ones to be free to continue their lives.  (emphasis added)

Now, one could surely read this as an effort to get inside Terri’s once competent mind. But more likely, it expresses the court’s own view of Terri’s now incompetent and incapacitated existence as a meaningless burden, a barrier to her husband’s freedom. The court’s obligation to discern objectively what Terri’s wishes were and whether they were clear – a question of fact – morphed into an inquiry as to whether she could ever get better, with the subjective assumption that life in her present condition was not meaningful life.

(My emphasis added in the passages in boldface.)

I call Cohen’s reading “biting but plausible” because it does seem that the court is phrasing its decision as a means of letting Michael Schiavo be all that he can be.  But it’s also a crabbed and ungenerous reading, on Cohen’s part, of what spouses like Michael Schiavo – or Rose Wendland, to take someone who cannot possibly be subjected to the same kind of faux moralism that infects Schiavo’s critics – go through in the course of their decisions about end-of-life care.  It’s noteworthy that both Wendland and Schiavo agreed to feeding tubes – and much, much more – for some years after their spouses’ injuries, but gradually decided that their spouses’ “lives” were little more than a legal fiction.  And it’s noteworthy that commentators – even commentators so sober and restrained as Cohen – give short shrift to the moral considerations weighed by those spouses, and construe them as people who simply want to give up and get back to their lives.  Surely this involves treating Mr. Schiavo, or Ms. Wendland, with something less than the human dignity to which they, too, are entitled.

But that’s an ancillary issue here. The real problem lies with Cohen’s identification of the real problem: his definition of “ideological liberalism” as “treating incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living.” This line will resonate with some disability rights activists, who already have good reason to believe, as Mary Johnson’s essay of last year put it, that liberals just don’t get it when it comes to disability.  I was interviewed for that essay, and I was pretty harsh on liberals myself, for their reluctance to see disability rights as central to civil rights.  But this time, I’ve got to come to liberalism’s defense.

Here’s why.  Cohen’s distinction between procedural and ideological liberalism leads him to the following conclusion:

A true adherence to procedural liberalism – respecting a person’s clear wishes when they can be discovered, erring on the side of life when they cannot – would have led to a much better outcome in this case. It would have led the court to preserve Terri Schiavo’s life and deny Michael Schiavo’s request to let her die. But as we have learned, the descent from procedural liberalism’s respect for a person’s wishes to ideological liberalism’s lack of respect for incapacitated persons is relatively swift. Treating autonomy as an absolute makes a person’s dignity turn entirely on his or her capacity to act autonomously. It leads to the view that only those with the ability to express their will possess any dignity at all – everyone else is “life unworthy of life.”

This is what ideological liberalism now seems to believe – whether in regard to early human embryos, or late-stage dementia patients, or fetuses with Down syndrome. And in the end, the Schiavo case is just one more act in modern liberalism’s betrayal of the vulnerable people it once claimed to speak for. Instead of sympathizing with Terri Schiavo – a disabled woman, abandoned by her husband, seen by many as a burden on society – modern liberalism now sympathizes with Michael Schiavo, a healthy man seeking freedom from the burden of his disabled wife and self-fulfillment in the arms of another.

Again, the gratuitous “in the arms of another,” as if Cohen or any of his compatriots would be more sympathetic to Michael Schiavo if he had joined the priesthood.  But never mind Schiavo for a moment.  What are fetuses with Down syndrome doing here?

I know, it would be more politically efficient for me to ask why “early human embryos” are refashioned here as “vulnerable people.” But the assumption that liberalism will advocate the termination of pregnancies involving fetuses with Down syndrome goes to the heart of the matter, and I know a thing or two about fetuses with Down syndrome.

So let me hit the ball back into Cohen’s court: this is what ideological conservatism now seems to believe – whether in regard to the earliest or latest stages of life: that decisions should be made not by individuals or families, but by those who have decided that their moral judgments about such matters are objectively correct, and who have made those judgments enforceable by means of the power of the state.

Cohen has a point about the insufficiency of autonomy; in fact, it’s a point that Janet and I agree with, in part, in our Boston Globe essay on the subject.  But doing away with autonomy altogether leads to truly monstrous conclusions, which are no less monstrous for being expressed tenderly and eloquently:

But the autonomy regime, even at its best, is deeply inadequate. It is based on a failure to recognize that the human condition involves both giving and needing care, and not always being morally free to decide our own fate.

In the end, the only alternative is a renewed understanding of both the family and human equality – two things ideological liberalism has now abandoned and modern conservatism now defends. Living in a family means accepting the burdens of caring for those bound to us in ties of fidelity – whether parent for child, child for parent, or spouse for spouse. The human answer to our dependency is not living wills but loving surrogates. And for those who believe in human equality, this means treating even the profoundly disabled – people like Terri Schiavo, who are not dead and are not dying – as deserving of at least basic care, so long as the care itself is not the cause of additional suffering. Of course, this does not mean that keeping our loved ones alive is our only goal. But neither can we treat a person’s life as a disease in need of a cure, or aim at death as a means of ending suffering – even if a loved one asks us to do so.

(My emphasis added in the passages in italics.)

Read those italicized passages again, folks. That’s right, even if you yourselves ask your life partner to refuse medical treatment on your behalf if you are severely and profoundly incapacitated, Cohen and his “modern conservatives” will overrule you.  Indeed, in the name of championing “loving surrogates” over “living wills” (a euphonic but horrific line), Cohen will treat you as if you are morally incapacitated and thus ineligible to decide your own fate.

OK, now while that’s sinking in, let me explain what liberalism really believes about those fetuses with Down syndrome.  In chapter two of Life As We Know It, after a long discussion of prenatal screening, I argue the following, and I aim the argument primarily at genetics counselors – among whom, I am happy to say, I have often found a sympathetic ear:

Obviously I can’t and don’t advocate abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome; indeed, the only argument I have is that such decisions should not be automatic.  A fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome should not be understood, either by medical personnel or by parents, as a finding to which abortion is the most logical response.  I believe this not only on humanitarian grounds but also as a matter of practicality:  unlike Tay-Sachs or trisomy 13, say, Down syndrome is a disability whose effects are too various to predict and often too mild to justify abortion on “quality of life” considerations for the parents and child.

Nonetheless, although this is my belief, it is only my belief.  I would not want to see it become something more than belief – something more like a coercive social expectation.  There are already plenty of social forces out there telling pregnant women that they may have an abortion only if they agree to be consumed with guilt about it, and I want to do nothing to reinforce those pressures.  I believe that no good is achieved by making some forms of childbearing mandatory, even in a matter so close to my heart as this.  But by the same token, just as I would deny that I have the right to make other parents feel guilty for aborting a fetus with Down syndrome, so too would I deny that other parents have the right to make Janet and me feel guilty for having Jamie.  This is not a “relativist” position:  it is based on the ideal of reciprocity.  I will not claim right of access to certain areas of your life, so long as you do not claim right of access to equivalent areas of mine.  If I do not want to interfere with other people’s most intimate decisions, I also want it understood that those of us who do have “disabled” children are not selfish: we are not a corporate liability, we are not a drain on health care resources, we are not siphoning money away from soup kitchens, environmental protection, or job training and day care for single mothers.

In what one might conceivably call a “hostile” review of my book (in the pages of Books and Culture: A Christian Review), Jean Bethke Elshtain not only literally put words in my mouth (quoting me but interpolating, in brackets, a passage that was entirely her own, suggesting that Janet and I would have aborted Jamie in utero had we known that he had Down syndrome, and deliberately overlooking the fact that our decision to forego amniocentesis was based precisely on our determination to go ahead with the pregnancy regardless of whether the fetus had Down syndrome), but also accused me of “subtly but inexorably blowing out the moral lights among us, as Lincoln said of Douglas’s defense of popular sovereignty in the matter of slavery.” (The review, I have since learned, was awarded first place in the “Critical Review category” by the 1999 Evangelical Press Association Meeting.  To which all I can say is, wow.) Here’s the relevant passage (I’d provide the url to the review, but Christianity Today will make you pay at least $7.95 to read the whole thing):

In his words: “If you had told me in August 1991 – or, for that matter, after an amniocentesis in April 1991 – that I’d have to feed my infant by dipping a small plastic tube in K-Y jelly and slipping it into his nose and down his pharynx into his teeny tummy, I’d have told you that I wasn’t capable of caring for such a child. [In other words, had they had amniocentesis, they would likely have opted for abortion.] But by mid-October, I felt as if I had grown new limbs and new areas of the brain to direct them.” He learned that “[y]ou can do this. You can cope with practically everything.” Many parents of children with disabilities make similar discoveries.

But, of course, my point was precisely that parents of children with disabilities make similar discoveries, and that prospective parents should be advised, by medical personnel and genetics counselors, of this fact.  Elshtain’s interpolated words – in a sentence that begins “in his words,” no less – are simply dishonest, for two reasons.  First, because few neonates with Down syndrome require this kind of care; amniocentesis would not have “told” us that we would need to feed Jamie with a gavage tube.  More important, the bracketed sentence allows Elshtain to ignore my discussion of prenatal care information about disabilities, and the reason that’s important, in turn, is that I was trying to persuade ob/gyn practitioners and genetic counselors not to think of the detection of trisomy-21 as a search-and-destroy operation.  I criticized the high abortion rate for fetuses with Down syndrome, but unlike those who rely on various invocations of divine authority to dictate the terms of life to others, I would rather decrease the abortion rate by means of persuasion than by means of state coercion.

And that’s what constitutes “blowing out the moral lights among us,” for certain moral theorists. You don’t even have to disagree with their decisions about pregnancy or end-of-life care; you simply have to point out that other people, for their own plausible reasons, might so disagree.  In the case of fetuses with Down syndrome, then, it is not enough to bring the pregnancy to term, love the child unconditionally, and encourage others to do likewise in similar circumstances; in order to be properly “moral,” one has to insist that one’s own decision should have the status of a universal law.  As a principle, this is clear enough, and for some it will be compelling.  But there should be no mystery why liberals would regard it with skepticism, and liberals who do so are not, I repeat not, betraying their best intellectual traditions.

In the course of reading (and reviewing) Rayna Rapp’s fine book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, I learned that people believe all kinds of strange things about pregnancy and disability, and that they frequently make what I would consider poor decisions, or good decisions for poor reasons, largely because they do not think the way I do.  At one point in my review, I wrote:

in a more morally nebulous zone are those prospective parents who believe, as one woman puts it, that “having a ‘tard, that’s a bummer for life” or that if the baby “can’t grow up to have a shot at becoming the president, we don’t want him.” Such beliefs are qualitatively different from the belief that a fetus can “acquire” mental retardation from contact with developmentally delayed adults, since they do not involve actual misstatements of fact; but they too are based heavily on misinformation and intellectual parochialism, and they make up a crucial part of the terrain any genetic counselor must traverse.  And then, yet again, there’s the question of how we should understand the administrative secretary who tells Rapp, “I don’t think I really believe in chromosomes, I mean, I could see the pictures, but I can’t believe everything is in the chromosomes.”

As ignorant (or as spiritually obvious) as this last remark may sound, the funny thing is that as a description of amniocentesis it’s actually quite right – and it points out the limits of the practical rigor and the hegemonic claims of this particular technoscientific practice.  Amniocentesis will not detect autism, or cerebral palsy, or deafness; it will not protect newborns from polio, rubella, diabetes, or farm machinery.  Of all the frailties to which human flesh is heir, amniocentesis can identify only Down syndrome – which “accounts for about 50 percent of the chromosome problems detected” – and a mere 800 “much rarer, arcane genetic disabilities.” Amniocentesis, in other words, sees only a tiny fraction of what can go wrong between conception and death.  Genes can code for disabilities, but not all disabilities are genetic; not everything is in the chromosomes, after all.

In both the deontological and utilitarian traditions, I believe that prospective parents who say “having a ‘tard, that’s a bummer for life” or “if he can’t grow up to have a shot at becoming the president, we don’t want him” are technically known as “assholes.” And forgive me, all you mullahs and moralists out there, if to this day I remain unpersuaded of the transcendent virtue of compelling such people to bear children with disabilities.  (For those of you interested in a more careful and patient response to this question, I recommend this book).

Liberals do not believe, pace Cohen, in treating incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living.  But we do believe in granting others a zone of privacy from state scrutiny in order to allow other people to make intimate decisions about pregnancy or end-of-life care, and we believe that we are bound to honor those decisions even when we ourselves regard them as uninformed or mistaken.  Those of us who are familiar with disability issues know that many of our fellow citizens – on the left and on the right – will regard incompetence as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living.  While we may regret this, we do not take our regret as license to override the “living wills” of persons determining for themselves the degree of medical care they wish to receive or refuse.  We do not believe that autonomy is the only or the highest good, but we do believe that the refusal to recognize the autonomy of others does violence to their human dignity.  And we believe in our own autonomy just enough to resent it deeply when our ideological adversaries try to ventriloquize us in order to misrepresent us.

Posted by Michael on 04/06 at 10:58 AM
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005

One million readers!

Barring some horrible technical disaster (and this blog has experienced only four of those to date), tomorrow, April 6, 2005, we will receive our millionth visitor.  Yeah, I know some of you have been back more than once, but you know what I mean.  Don’t forget, the millionth visitor wins a copy of this book, so if you stop by and find that my site meter reads 1000000, just let me know.  In light of recent events (cough, cough, hack) the millionth visitor should probably be given a North Carolina Tar Heels coffee mug as well, but we’ll just have to see about that.

And to celebrate this momentous occasion, I think I’ll spend tomorrow morning writing a happy, warm and fuzzy post that everyone will love.  I can’t decide whether to title it “Puppies:  Why Are They So Cute?” or “Are Some Dolphins Really Magical?” But I’ll sleep on it, because that’s what sleep is for!  See you all tomorrow!

Posted by Michael on 04/05 at 10:30 PM
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Tar Heels Claim Controversial Championship

St. Louis, MO – North Carolina defeated Illinois last night, 75-70, to claim the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championship, their first since 1993.

For UNC coach Roy Williams, the Tar Heels’ stirring 75-70 victory over Illinois on Monday night was the culmination of the two-year revival of his alma mater and his first national title.

The victory gave North Carolina (33-4) its fourth N.C.A.A. championship, and denied Illinois its first.  It also ended a string of four empty trips to the Final Four for Williams, who had lost in two national semifinals and two championship games while coaching at Kansas.

The victory did not come, however, without a measure of controversy.  Within hours of the conclusion of the title game, USCountShots.org, a Utah non-profit organization of statisticians and researchers, published a mathematical analysis of the game’s final minutes which seemed to show that the Fighting Illini had actually scored more points than the Tar Heels.

“There’s no way the Illini wound up with 70 points,” agreed Clint Curtis, an independent researcher.  “Look again at the final two minutes.  Deron Williams misses an open three with the score tied at 70?  And then Luther Head misses an open three with the Illini down 72-70, then Williams misses a two, then Head misses a three with twenty seconds left and the score 73-70?  That’s not even remotely plausible.  All of these were open shots with good looks at the basket.  But you’ve got an electronic scoreboard with no paper trail, and that’s open to all kinds of abuse.”

A spokesman for USCountShots.org noted, more tentatively, that it was possible the Tar Heels had outscored Illinois, but that the odds of Head and Williams missing all four shots down the stretch were “nearly a million to one.”

According to the group’s press release, USCountShots’ analysis of the game suggests that after the Illini had erased a 15-point deficit in the second half, the Tar Heels began to play tentatively, getting only one tip-in field goal over the final five minutes.  “Once you factor in the game’s final exit polls, which were taken during those crucial five minutes,” said the group’s spokesman, “you wind up with the Illini outscoring the Tar Heels by 3%, or roughly 77-75.”

Illini coach Bruce Weber declined to comment on the controversy, and most fans seemed to shrug off the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final outcome.  A handful of Illinois faithful, however, did question whether any championship in N.C.A.A. history had involved one team shooting only six free throws over the course of an entire game, and some asked N.C.A.A. officials whether Tar Heel standout Sean May had filed the appropriate pre-game paperwork that would entitle him to the “Shaq Exemption” under which big men are permitted to back into hapless defenders down low.

Posted by Michael on 04/05 at 07:19 AM
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Monday, April 04, 2005

Two stories about Jamie

Story one:  As we came out of the gym where he and I swim on the weekends, Jamie decided to take his own gym pass off the front counter.  “You want to hold onto that?” I asked.  “Yes,” he said.  “It’s my card.” “Cool,” I replied, “but it might be easier if you put it in my wallet, so it won’t get lost.” Jamie, you see, likes putting things in his pockets—he likes getting a few bucks or a bunch of quarters for pinball—but he usually forgets about them before too long.  So he agreed, slipping his card into my wallet—and then taking my wallet.  “Well, sweetie,” I said, ”I’ll hold your card for you.  That’s the idea.”

“I can have a wallet,” Jamie replied.  “I’m a teenager.  I’m allowed.”

That snapped me to attention.  “Yes, you are allowed,” I said.  “And that sounds like a good idea, too.  But I need my wallet, you know—see, it has my credit cards.”

“I love credit cards,” Jamie shot back.  “Hey,” he added, finding his school ID tucked behind my AAA card, “that’s my card too.  Gimme my cards, Michael.”

So Janet got him a wallet this weekend, and he’s carrying it to school today for the first time.  In fact, he walked to the bus stop with his hand on his wallet pocket all the way.  With his mind on his wallet and his wallet on his mind.

Story two:  we were watching TV, doing nothing much, and I decided to tell him how good he’d been with the younger kids of some colleagues who’d been to our house recently.  “You really are very good with little kids,” I said.  “You’re very gentle with them, and you play very carefully, and you always try to help them.  You know, you might think about doing that when you’re a big man and you have a job—you might be a good helper someplace where they work with little kids.”

”Michael,” he said with some exasperation, “I’m going to be a Marine.”

“Excuse me?  Did you say a Marine?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where did that come from?  You mean a Marine like a soldier?”

“No,” he said, waving me off, “a marine biologist.” Ah, you always have to wait for the other shoe.  A tall order, this—but he does know the differences between seals and sea lions, and he knows more about sharks than most sixth graders.  And despite his speech delays, he does say “cartilaginous fish” pretty clearly.

Now, if you want to read a really remarkable family story, check out this fine piece of work by Chris Clarke, which I recommend highly even though Chris has seen fit to send me the Infernal Book Meme (which I’ll get to when I get to it).

Posted by Michael on 04/04 at 08:55 AM
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