No hitting: The play

Scene: Dinner at Savor in Noe Valley. I'm eating humus; Liko is eating pasta.

Me: Liko, do you want to go to the antiwar protest tomorrow?

Liko (mouth full): What's an antiwar?

Me: In an antiwar protest, people get together and they ask war to stop.

(Liko swallows.)

Liko: Why?

Me: Remember what we talked about yesterday? War is really terrible. Mommies and daddies and little kids like you get hurt really bad, sometimes they get killed.

Liko: Where is war?

Me: Tomorrow we are going to protest the war in Iraq.

Liko: Where is Iraq?

Me: I showed you yesterday on the globe. It's very far from here. The people there don't speak our language or dress like us, but they're people just like us and they don't like to get hurt.

Liko: Are we going to get dessert?

Me: I don't think so.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because you already had ice cream today. Do you want to go to the antiwar protest?

Liko: I want to be a war-guy and hurt people!

Me (flustered): What? We don't want to hurt people, Liko. We want to help them.

Liko (bashes table with his hand): I want a war-stick! [Meaning, a gun.]

Me: Liko, please don't hit the table.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because we're in a restaurant and we don't hit tables.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because it bothers the people around us.

Liko (looking around): Are those people going to antiwar protest?

Me (glancing around and feeling slightly defeated): Some of them might, sure.

Liko: What do people do at antiwar protest?

Me: We march and sing songs and hold signs.

Liko: What do signs say?

Me: They say things like "Stop the war" or "War is bad for children."

Liko: I want to make a sign.

Me: OK. What should it say?

Liko: No hitting!



Photos courtesy of our neighbor Woody Hastings.

Dads and the Dangers of Metaphysics

I doubt many folks checking in on Daddy Dialectic bother to read the Wall Street Journal, but someone (my wife, who in fact needs to understand the economy, for which I begrudge her not) forwarded me a muddled and masculinist Father's Day essay ("Boys to Men", Tony Woodlief, June 15, 2007, p.W11) by an avowedly un-masculine father of three boys who somehow feels that they should deliberately be set on the path to his preconceived idea of manhood. It's a prime collection of unexamined assumptions, pop-genetic determinism, psychological unawareness, and run-of-the-mill conservative shibboleths about the need for manly courage in a dangerous world, all rolled out like sparkly plastic trinkets and baubles in an antique store.

I can't link to it because it's subscription only. Instead, a few of the choicer excerpts:

"Many academics would consider my lack of manliness a good thing. They regard boys as thugs-in-training, caught up in a patriarchal society that demeans women. In the 1990s the American Association of University Women (among others) positioned boys as the enemies of female progress (something Christina Hoff Sommers exposed in her book, "The War Against Boys"). But the latest trend is to depict boys as themselves victims of a testosterone-infected culture. In their book "Raising Cain," for example, the child psychologists Don Kindlon and Michael Thompson warn parents against a "culture of cruelty" among boys. Forget math, science and throwing a ball, they suggest -- what your boy most needs to learn is emotional literacy."

"But I can't shake the sense that boys are supposed to become manly. Rather than neutering their aggression, confidence and desire for danger, we should channel these instincts into honor, gentlemanliness and courage. Instead of inculcating timidity in our sons, it seems wiser to train them to face down bullies, which by necessity means teaching them how to throw a good uppercut. In his book "Manliness," Harvey Mansfield writes that a person manifesting this quality "not only knows what justice requires, but he acts on his knowledge, making and executing the decision that the rest of us trembled even to define." You can't build a civilization and defend it against barbarians, fascists and playground bullies, in other words, with a nation of Phil Donahues."

Who said emotional literacy had anything to do with timidity? If this dude spent more time wondering why so many husbands beat their wives, he might have less time to get spooked about Fascism. Still stranger is how parenting, boyhood, manhood somehow all gets refracted through the lens of a value set essentially derived from paganism. No reflection on, say, the ethics of Augustine, the Church Fathers, the Rabbinical tradition, or any of the many other ethical sources that conservatism claims to know all about; instead, we have tough-guy paganism straight-out of Ben Hur and other Hollywood comics. (Those Romans, and the Empire they defended against barbarians, were, of course, pagans):

"The good father, then, needs to nurture his son's moral and spiritual core, and equip him with the skills he'll need to act on the moral impulse that we call courage. A real man, in other words, is someone who doesn't run from an Osama bin Laden. But he may also need the ability to hit a target from three miles out with a .50 caliber M88 if he wants to finish the job."

Why, the Global War on Terror is the perfect moral framework for raising my son! What a quaint little idea, the notion that warfare is an opportunity for "real men" to show valor. I think that one died sometime in August 1914, along with several million other soldiers in the trenches of France. It certainly was gone by the time of the Second Iraq War of 1990-1991, in which bombs did most of the killing. Given the reference here, one might add that "finishing the job" would also call upon skills such as an understanding of Arabic, Persian, Pashtun, Parsi, and Urdu, or perhaps the domestic politics of Arab and Central Asian states, listening to other people's ideas and information, etc....but of course all that bookish nonsense is for sissies, and what everything comes down to is whether an infantry grunt can pull the trigger when he sees a turban. Assuming he can find one to shoot.

Also of note is the way emotional literacy is downplayed when, as the author freely admits right in the first paragraph, his biological father abandoned him in childhood, and his stepfather didn't pay attention to him. Hmm. So what the author's deficient male parents really needed was the ability to shoot a .50 caliber M88? Then they wouldn't have been tempted to dump their parental responsibilities on their wives while they went off to be manly? Seems like these dudes were lacking in a few other qualities, too, like the willingness to stick around and just do the work of a parent, "finishing [a] job" which for the most part doesn't include Courage, Honor, or Gentlemanliness, and if you're lucky and don't live on the south side of Chicago, doesn't involve guns.

Which is not to say that Courage, Honorableness, etc. are bad qualities. But why do they belong only to men? I like Honorable and Courageous women. I'll take help and inspiration whenever I can get it. While this guy's kids are learning how to Honorably and Courageously fight over a rubber ball, his neighbor's daughters are probably acing the SAT and getting into better schools and landing the jobs that will drive the economy. And Gentlemanliness, if it means anything at all in this post-medieval age in which most "real men" couldn't manage to fit into a suit of armor without serious liposuction, seems to me centered on respect for the weak. This is a universal value that we should ALL aspire to, regardless of gender, age, race, or anything else. Ironic twist: the very idea of Gentlemanliness, as derived from the courtly culture of late medieval Italy and Spain, is in fact heavily influenced by the high MUSLIM culture of the period, with some pagan residues thrown in. So, dad, you want your kid to be like the noble Black Saracen in The Song of Roland? The one who kills the Christian hero? Bravo! Those particular "barbarians" were reading Greek long before your own ancestors could spell their name.

I'll give the guy credit for admitting he's a couch potato from a broken home -- this itself is an index of how far we've come -- although rhetorically-speaking, anything less would have immediately alienated the educated women who read the WSJ as well as many of the moderate men -- and for suggesting that boys need moral training in addition to open-ended physicality. But if this is the conservative version of modern fatherhood, then I'm nostalgic for the days of old-fashioned Judeo-Christian patriarchy, rather than this pagan code that essentially consists of being able to use a gun and stand up to Osama bin Laden. Let's see this guy's kids use those skills when they get laid off for the first time.

Boys, toys and militarism

It's hardly controversial to argue that war and instruments of killing are glorified in our society, and that young boys are a particular target of this promotion.

Just walk down the "boys" aisle of any toy store and you see that a huge proportion of toys are military-themed or military-related. My local dollar store, in fact, in its toy section, carries nothing but military toys for boys. Some video games also promote the sense that warfare is fun. And I do believe there is a connection between this promotion of military toys and the tendency of many Americans, especially men, to cheer and support US military action abroad without thinking about the costs to those on the receiving end of US military action, without thinking of the costs to the US soldiers who take part, without thinking about what war really is.

When my son BK was born we began facing the question of how we wanted to raise him, what kind of man did we want him to become. Part of the concern was the hyper-militaristic boy culture in our society, which was reinforced by the typical macho stereotypes foisted on boys from a very very early age.

But then we started to see that our son liked to shoot at things, even though he had no toy guns, even though he did not watch television or violent movies. He found a stick and would use it as a gun. We were quite concerned about this kind of thing.

One day I ran into the son of friends of ours who was about 20. His parents had been active in the peace and feminist movements from the time he as born. He himself is a very cool kid, not at all militaristic or macho; in fact, I'd be thrilled if my own son turned out like this kid.

I talked to him about my concerns -- BK was probably about 5 years old at the time. And he told me his own story. He'd grown up in a feminist, peace-activist household.

Yet he loved to play army and war, he loved to play violent video games. It seemed like such a contradiction.

But he explained that he knew the difference between fantasy and reality. Because his parents had actually talked to him about war, warfare, killing, and militarism, he understood that the fantasies of playing army or playing violent video games were very different than actual warfare.

And as I thought about it, I realized that as a kid I also played army. We'd divide up into opposing armies, and roam the neighborhood "killing" each other with pretend guns. Although there were no video games back then, we watched plenty of tv shows and movies that glorified military action.

And yet, I did not become a militaristic, violent guy.

The point here is that the attitudes of our kids come from many different places. Yeah, there's a lot of pressure and opportunity for our boys to adopt a militaristic mindset, to think of war as "cool" and of violence as normal. But as I wrote earlier in my post about politics and kids, we parents are our kids' first teachers.

Given this societal environment, it's so important that we actually talk to our sons about militarism and war. Of course we need to talk to our daughters about it. But our sons are the main targets, and when they turn 18, the sons of those of us in the US are required to sign up for "selective service" (military service registry).

Given US foreign policy over the past several years -- actually, over the past half-century -- and given the extent to which US military action is glorified in the news, in history books, in newspapers, it's especially important for us as Americans to talk openly and frankly with our kids, and especially our sons, about militarism.

My wife and I have done that. From the time he was little we made sure BK knew what war actually was, putting it in very human terms.

We explained the difference between doing something to defend yourself, and doing something that is closer to bullying. We explained what fighting a war means for people on the receiving end of our missiles and bullets -- not just soldiers but moms and dads and kids. We explained exactly what happens in a war -- people actually get killed and maimed, homes are destroyed -- conveying the immense sadness and tragedy that comes with violence. We explained that unfortunately sometimes leaders, including our own, do not obey the most basic rules of nursery school -- use words, not your hands.

All of this helps make it clear that playing war and "shooting" with sticks, pushing buttons on a gamecube or watching a dvd are not war. They are fantasy. And war is fundamentally different.

Our kids have to know that war is not a game, and that violence should only be used as a very last resort. They have to know that our society tries to create the false impression that war is exciting and fun and bloodless. They have to know that our leaders try to deceive us into believing that we are always justified to use bombs and guns.

Of course BK has a lot of non-violent toys, and he and his friends do a lot of other kinds of play that does not involve war or guns. But when BK plays army, when he plays with his plastic army guys, when he and his friends -- including a good friend whose parents are feminist and pacifist and pretty much on the same page as we are on those issues -- have gunfights, with sticks, with supersoakers, with toy guns (yes, BK somehow has a toy revolver, the kind I had as a kid, and his friends do too), he understands that this is not war.

BK plays with the toys, but he understands that the reality of war is not a game.

Cross-posted at daddychip2

The LibDems vs. Homophobic Bullying

The fairly mainstream Liberal Democratic party of the United Kingdom launched an online petition as part of a coordinated campaign to stop homophobic bullying:

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Education Secretary, Sarah Teather MP said:

"Our petition is calling for all schools to develop measures to tackle homophobic bullying. Taunts and name calling should be challenged immediately so that it’s clear such behaviour won’t be tolerated.

"Liberal Democrats are concerned about all aspects of bullying but are focusing the spotlight on homophobic abuse because it’s currently harder to monitor and stop..."

Liberal Democrat Higher and Further Education Spokesperson, Stephen Williams MP who organised the Education and Skill Select Committee's first ever session on bullying, added...

"If a pupil is bullied because of race, looks or a disability they are likely to at least have supportive parents. This is often not the case for young gay people and it is difficult for them to know which teacher they can confide in.

"Putting a duty on schools will ensure there is someone for the young person to turn to and will send out a message that homophobic abuse should be treated with the same zero tolerance as racist abuse. Schools should be safe places of learning for all children irrespective of their sexuality."

I'm posting this as a follow-up to my June 1 post (and the discussion it provoked) on bullying and raising boys.

I confess that as an American, with all my cultural biases, and even with my politics, I find it amusing that a national political party thinks it can legislate against bullying - on the other hand, it's good that they're doing something. No idea about the context or if this petition will have any traction in the U.K., but my God, here in the USA we're debating a fucking amendment to the Constitution that would explicitly forbid people of the same biological sex from getting married.

Our entire country is run by homophobic bullies!

Boys vs. Girls

The following is based on a comment I made at Half Changed World, in response to a question posed by Jennifer of the blog Under the Ponderosas: "What makes you say society is hard on boys who aren't conventionally masculine?" It got me to thinking and remembering, and led me to a thought about raising my son that I don't think I like very much.

When I was a kid in Saginaw, MI, I played the flute in my junior high school band, the only boy to do so. There were twelve chairs, and for the first half of the first year, I was dead last. The drum section - all macho schmucks - teased and bullied me relentlessly.

At some point - driven by an impulse that I did not consciously acknowledge - I started to practice furiously. In a single session, I zoomed past all the girls from last chair to first, and I held that first chair for the rest of my time in band.

At roughly the same time, I challenged one of the drummers to a fight. I lost, of course - of the dozen fights I was in that year, the best I could ever manage was a draw.

But a strange - or maybe just predictable - thing happened: the teasing and bullying gradually evaporated.

With hindsight, I see clearly that the end of the harassment had everything to do with dominating the girls in the flute section. It helped that I was willing to fight with my fists, even if I lost. The important thing is that I fought at all.

I just put Liko down to sleep. While I was watching him sleep, I remembered all this. I asked myself: if he faced the same level of teasing and bullying, would I want him to fight other boys and dominate girls if that meant an end to his persecution?

I'm afraid that for all my dude-feminist posturing, the answer is almost certainly yes.

Times have changed and also, Liko won't grow up in a place like Saginaw. Hopefully, he'll grow up in a more forgiving, egalitarian social atmosphere, where gender is not quite so polarized and people are more secure in difference, than the one I experienced in the Midwest in the mid-Eighties.

But it would obviously be better if my ideals weren't put to any kind of test.

Postscript: I still play the flute, but only for Liko. When I take it out and start putting it together, he scampers off to find his plastic yellow recorder. While I play little baby tunes, he tries to imitate me, his eyes watching my every move.

Odds vs. Ends

On Sunday I asked some of my fellow progressive parenting bloggers to say something to mark the third anniversary of the war in Iraq. I couldn't go to the anti-war protest here in San Francisco because it cut into Liko's naptime, but I felt like I needed to write/do something. That was my one small act. Two bloggers took me up on it: Miriam Peskowitz over at Playground Revolution (I love that name and Miriam's subtitle: "A Mom's Life is Political") and Liz Henry of Composite, a wonderful blog that is mostly about poetics, translation, and technology. (Uber-blogger Bitch Ph.D. also marked the anniversary of the war, though I had nothing to do with it. She links to some interesting resources.)

Miriam's slice-of-life post deftly shows why political activism tends to decline after children arrive, how the domestic sphere swallows us up and defines our lives, and what mainstream media do to reinforce a sense of isolation and panic. She writes:

Entanglements. We tend to think small. Our lives keep us busy. We vacuum, and we live in a vacuum. War? How come on this anniversary, what we're embroiled in are "mommy wars" not debates over the wars that kill? And cultural commentators now use the phrase "daddy wars' to talk about men's issues. What about the big war out there? We waste the word, focus on fake wars that could be fixed, that are made worse by media creation, take our eyes off the war that kills.

It's the craft of living in a vacuum, and the narrowing vision of it all that struck me as I read the New York Times this morning. The responses to Claudia Goldin's Op-ed last week, the one about how mothers aren't opting out when you actually look at statistics were singularly bad, and troped, to use a good ole literary criticism word. They came from Mommy Wars central casting, they didn't even need to be written by real people. The most amazing thing: they continue to talk about motherhood in a total vacuum. If you were reading these pieces and the letters in response, and you were from that mythical planet in outer space where miraculously you too speak and read English, you would think we are a society in which families are mothers alone with children. No one talks about fathers. No one talks about more complex dynamics than a mother and her life of paid or unpaid work. Where's the context?

Fittingly, Liz published a poem, "moon veil your mirror," which I will let speak for itself.

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A friend sent me a short essay by John Berger on the historical relationship between Hiroshima and 9/11, which I share with you as a follow-up to my March 19 post on the war. It was published in 2002 in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan (anyone still remember that?), but it is still relevant and a fitting follow-up to the Berger essay I quote on March 19.

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Today in Rebeldad, Brian takes a crack at defining the term "Daddy Wars": "The growing conflict between parents - primarily fathers - and their employers over flexible and varied work options that allow for more precise work-life balance." It's food for thought; check it out.

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Last but not least, my friend Alex asks me a perfectly legitimate question: "If you don't have time to achieve perfect domesticity, how do you have time to write your blog? Or read essays on the Nature of Evil, for that fucking matter? Is it the insomnia?"

He wasn't the first to ask this question and won't be the last. I have a couple of answers.

First: yes, insomnia is a big part of it. I sleep only about six hours a night; the actual writing of most of my entries happens in wee dark hours when only the people of China, Mongolia, etc. are awake and working. Or so it seems to me. This probably accounts for the melancholy tone of some of my entries. I read quite a bit during these hours; I also read during Liko's naptimes.

Second: I do work about 20 hours a week, and make part of my living as a writer. Most of my writing these days is for money, and I don't brag about it. More personal/political ideas do come to me, however, and so I think of "Daddy Dialectic" as an open notebook, where I can jot down notes that I can later develop into essays and magazine articles -- someday, when I have more time. In addition, the blog puts me in touch with other parents, many of whom I might interview when the time comes, as well as resources that I might draw upon later for other writing projects. A blog is also, for writers, a marketing tool; you build an audience around a topic, and in that way accrue some degree of authority and marketability. Also, on finding time to read: I see the reading as an essential part of writing. You need to read in order to write; you need to be in touch with news and different currents of thought. I fit it in where I can.

Third: on a personal level, I find writing the blog to be extremely theraputic. I write down the things that bother me about being a parent, and I feel better. Pretty simple. I also think of the blog as a public personal history, that maybe one day I can share with Liko. Finally, it's a place to think out loud about my values and philsophies of parenthood, and reflect upon my experience.

Yes, I could give up on all this and perhaps my life would be simpler and I'd be happier. In response, I would like to quote Richard Rodriguez: "St. Augustine writes from his cope of dust that we are restless hearts, for earth is not our true home. Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality. Intuition tells us we are meant for some other city." In other words, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Liko vs. War

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Protests took place throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

For years I've debated the practice and ethics of non-violence, mostly with myself. I don't think that at this point I could call myself a pacifist, precisely because I am a dad: I know that if my family was attacked, as a last resort I would respond with violence (feeble, ineffectual violence, probably; but yes, I would hit back with whatever weapon was available).

Yet at the same time, I can say, without any irony or doubt in my heart, that yesterday I realized that becoming a father has caused me to hate war. "Hate" - I use that word with full knowledge of its meaning and implications. In becoming a parent - especially since becoming a child's primary caregiver - I've realized exactly how helpless a child is, how utterly, heartbreakingly dependent. To betray a child's trust, or worse, to deliberately and knowingly hurt a child, is an act of true evil. That it happens every day, in ways large and small, does not make it any less evil. My words feel cliched, even dead, as I write them; I know that I'm not doing justice to my feelings.

This morning I read - in the dark, before the baby and Shelly were awake - an essay on Hiroshima by John Berger:

I refrain from giving the statistics: how many hundreds of thousands of dead, how many injured, how many deformed children. Just as I refrain from pointing out how comparatively 'small' were the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Such statistics tend to distract. We consider numbers instead of pain. We calculate instead of judging. We relativize instead of refusing.

This is just the way to talk about war: judging, refusing.

George Bush puts on a mask of innocence and idealism: "A victory in Iraq will make this country more secure, and will help lay the foundation of peace for generations to come." (Note that future tense; but didn't he declare the mission accomplished two years ago? Well, whatever. We - all of us who gave it any thought - knew that was bullshit.)

"The construction of hells on earth was accompanied in Europe by plans for heavens on earth," writes Berger, thinking of the Holocaust. "Evil from time immemorial has often worn a mask of innocence. One of evil's principal modes of being is looking beyond (with indifference) that which is before the eyes." Berger quotes the memory of a survivor of Hiroshima:

I was walking along the Hihiyama bridge about 3 pm on 7th August. A woman, who looked like an expectant mother, was dead. At her side, a girl of about three years of age brought some water in an empty can she had found. She was trying to let her mother drink from it. As soon as I saw this miserable scene with the pitiful child, I embraced the girl close to me and cried with her, telling her that her mother was dead.

And later, in Nagasaki:

August 9th: On the west embankment... was a young boy four or five years old. He was burned black, lying on his back, with his arms pointing towards heaven.

How many times during the past three years have such scenes played out in Iraq? How many children have been burned alive? How many have seen their parents killed and been left helpless, possibly injured and dying themselves? The evil of such acts - committed in our name as Americans - is beyond comprehension. This is why we refuse to believe it, to grasp it; we get lost in policy debates, punditry, statistics. "Only by looking beyond or away can one come to believe that such evil is relative, and therefore under certain conditions justifiable," writes Berger. "In reality - the reality to which the survivors and the dead bear witness - it can never be justified."