Why This Blogger Doesn’t Believe Boston Bombing Was The Work of #Occupy

Not that anyone is suggesting otherwise.  A certain guy from Barack Obama’s old Chicago neighborhood might have built bombs filled with shrapnel, and I’m not sure what the Anarchist Cookbook advises on this matter.  But that was baby boomer radicalism.

Bill Ayers might have been a rich brat, but the brats of his era grew up playing cowboys and Indians with gangs of friends and siblings.  Around the time of puberty they got jobs at fast food joints and bought cars. They were the risk takers.  I’m not saying they were good at making bombs; they weren’t.  They were mostly blowing up each other.

The parents of #Occupy alumni glued corner guards to coffee tables once babies started to crawl and shuttled their progeny from one activity to another in [improperly installed] car seats. Instead of mowing neighbors’ lawns future occupiers spent their adolescence on social media.  The only thing they thought of doing once college diplomas were placed into their hands is to demand cancellation of student loans.  And sure, they’d like to be dangerous, and from time to time #Occupy grads do get caught with explosives, one occupier was sentenced just a few days ago.  But that’s the thing: they get caught.

Radicals of the crawling helmet generation. Unlikely to be capable of much, including much evil

Whoever planted the bomb at Boston marathon (and like all normal people I suspect Islamists) was a deliberate sadist. The bombs were created to inflict maximum damage, and were placed at a location where relief effort would be difficult.  The Left today is incapable of such forethought.  They thought of targeting an iconic event that has little symbolic importance to the left.  The right, for that matter, is also not interested in the Boston marathon, but, nasty fantasies of progressives aside, most of the political violence in this country comes from the left.

War on Women: SF

In decades past San Francisco sent Nancy Pelosi to the Lower House and nurtured Dainne Feinstein.  The local electorate keeps dutifully reelecting Barbara Boxer, the other incumbent California Senator.  And yet the current political culture of this two-party (Democrat and Green) municipality smacks of misogyny.

Only 12 out of 31 elected office-holders are women.  No big deal, you say, perhaps the gals around here have better things to do with their time.  But against the background of Pelosi bragging about the number of Democratic women on the Hill, the low representation of women in politics in her hometown looks embarrassing.  And so the Democrat establishment of the City demanded that mayor Ed Lee appoint not merely an outwardly female double-X barer, but a mother to fill a vacancy on the Board of Supervisors because, it turned out, there is not a single mother among the 11 board members.  Perhaps Mayor Lee could had done one better and appoint a transsexual “mother” who was once a father or something like that, but, I guess, he didn’t know any.  So he found a 29-year-old “girl” to be the 4th double exer on the Board.

That there are no mothers on the SF Board of Supervisors is only natural.  It’s not just that we, mothers, live on tight schedules; the City is notorious for its adult ambiance.  Parents and kids are fleeing to the suburbs, the Pacific North-West and just about anywhere else, really.  San Francisco can not remain both a party mecca and a family hub, and it seems to be committed to being a party mecca.  Although this situation says something about the City, I don’t view it as a problem: hipsters are people too, and they need a place to party.  One group that sees it as a problem are the teachers unions who see the family flight and anticipate lay-offs.  The politicians beholden to the union go out of their way to make the City family-friendly, but have little to show for their efforts.  It’s a topic for a different post.

I wonder if the Dems are feeling the pressure from the likes of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.  I heard a rumor that they want to tap into the demographic of women getting a “second wind”, former stay at home moms with grown children.  That should be interesting.  Married women are generally a Republican demographic.  We are zealous about good economic outlook, worried about national security and understand the value of human life.  I’m not sure what liberal mommies are going to bring to the table besides their peculiar brand of environmentalist neurosis.

Mommie issues aside, the political culture and social life in the City by the Bay is not exactly pro-woman, and this is immediately obvious.  Walk down the streets of the Lower Mission, for instance, and watch “girls”, many of them potentially attractive, going out of their way to look ironic.  Those who partake in the prestigious hobby of biking in the hilly city streets often grow thighs.

If the “girls” get involved in grass roots politics, it’s usually through outfits like Code Pink or with that septuagenarian (what’s her face?) who can’t shut up about her reproductive organs.  Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers have a revealing picture of the former.  I hate to bring it to Code Pink, but they fall more than a little short of Inna Shevchenko.  Zombie documented some interesting vagina/abortion dances and an anti-rape rally attended by mayor Lee (and possibly the entire Board of Supervisors, though not sheriff Mirkarimi, more of which later).  This kind of assemblies are bound to repel anyone with a semblance of self-esteem, no matter how sympathetic they are to leftie causes.  And besides, grass root politics around here is a domain of dead end narcissists; it’s a lifestyle, not a way of getting ahead.

Some local women do get ahead.  A case in point is Kamala Harris, Bay Area’s most recent gift to state politics.  Kamala, a spinster in her late 40s who now occupies the office of Attorney General of California, launched her career by sleeping with then-Speaker of California State Assembly and later mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown.  In addition to appointing her to positions on several Committees, Speaker Brown bought Kamala a Mercedes.  Then he helped her launch her successful District Attorney bid.

In the nearby Alameda county, Nadiya Lockyer, the young wife of the State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, became County Supervisor in 2010.  She was considered one of the rising stars in California Democratic politics until she resigned last year after a scandal involving substance abuse and a sex tape.  Sleeping one’s way to the top hardly raises an eyebrow in the post-third wave feminist Bay Area.  We are very sophisticated here, and we don’t judge.  Still, it’s one of those things that are bound to give pause to a number of women with political ambitions, particularly those who are married and especially the ones with children.

Harris and her ex laugh

Look who else is active in San Francisco politics.  Why, the co-founder of the California Green Party Ross Mirkarimi.  In November 2011, Mirkarimi, who had no prior law enforcement experience, was elected San Francisco sheriff.  He started off 2012 with a bang, literally.  The sheriff’s wife ran off to a neighbor’s house, and the neighbor videotaped her sobbing and showing the bruises inflicted by her husband.  Unlike Lockyer, Mirkarimi managed to survive the ensuring political storm.  (The interesting thing about Mirkarimi is that, while virulently anti-2nd Amendment, the man owned three pistols.)

Don’t lose track of what matters: San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi gives away what appears to be washable grocery bags on the steps of the City Hall

There is a lot of feminist rah-rah in San Francisco, but the optics are gross.  The feminist rhetoric, sometimes goofy, sometimes over the top, covers up a culture of indifference to issues that are supposed to excite a feminist, issues like family violence or an opportunity to make an honest living.  Underlying it all is a culture alien to the women who are not single — or at least childless.  No wonder there are no mothers on San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

…And on the right we have the Tea Party, a successful grass roots organization driven to a large extent by women, many of whom are mothers, many of whom embarked on a career in electoral politics.

Sandbox State of The Union

I didn’t watch SOUT last night, and not necessarily by choice; we are just too busy here.  Leslie Loftis alerted me to another FLOTUS get up that lived up to the expectations:

This is our 21st century Amazonian beauty ideal — or something: upper arms dwarfing breasts and the lower body looking ever-ginormous thanks to too tight skirt and sparkles. Sparkles?

This is a cocktail dress.  She wore one for SOTU 2012, too; that gown was shiny and blue.  The First (if I may call her) Lady has a tendency to wear cocktail dresses all day long.  I know, I love to dress  up too.  Unfortunately, by not looking serious when seriousness is called for, Moochelle is sending a message — that she’s not taking her husband serious.  And if she doesn’t, why should we?  No need to be nervous, Marco.

Here we have the far better designed prototype. Jason Wu Pre-Fall 2013. We can observe Mobama’s fashion sense maturing in her fifth year of FLOTUS-ship.  There is a clear trend for shiny sci fi villain looks

The President’s favorability is down — not that it matters at this point.  He’s in the black on national defense only, and that’s probably because of droning.

All this SOTU news is coming against the rough LAPD ex-cop with some sort of racial grievances on a murder rampage.  Don’t you just love how Barack Hussein Obama personally solved all our race problems?  And did you know that Christopher Droner loved Michelle Obama’s bangs?

Sarah Palin already fact checked O’s speech, so I don’t really have much to add.  If you are not too busy figuring out why all of a sudden you paycheck is smaller, you might notice that in 2010 we surged in Afghanistan for some reason, and now we are for some reason leaving.  In the meantime, a recent Medal of Honor recipient former Army Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha politely declined an invitation to sit next to the Flablulous Buttness during the speech.  Three years ago, Kimberly Munley, the hero who helped stop the terrorist attack at Fort Hood, was a Presidential guest at the State of the Union.   Now she is on record saying that she felt betrayed by Obama who classified the attack as “workplace violence” thus denying proper benefits and military honors to heroes and victims.  Currently BO is making further plans to take on our military.

The two MO’s guests who did show up, and were seated right next to the Flabulous Buttness were the parents of the teenage victim of Chicago gang violence Hadiya Pendleton.  Their prominent placement signals the centrality of the anti-gun agenda to the President’s policies — nothing new here.  This morning when we were packing lunchboxes DH said that he’s glad BO keeps talking about guns.  You see, we own stock in Smith and Weston, and every time the Prez opens his mouth about guns, the stock goes up.  It’s up 3.5% today.

I did scan the text of the speech this morning.  President BO conceded that he’s waging class warfare.  Thank you.  Blabbed on about the middle class (see my notes on FLOTUS MO’s opinions of her hubby above) and called for more spending on hip grown-up toys, like windmills.

‘Bamster wants to get the states to subsidized babysitting, potentially edging out private (and often religious) pre-schools, or, as he put it politely, “high-quality preschool available to every child in America”.  In real world, a “high quality pre-school” is the one where the teachers are nice.  The wee ones don’t need any more than that.  Oh, and a mommy will do.  Anyhow, this might be a Nancy Pelosi’s idea.  Not sure how her bankrupt home state of California is supposed to afford it all, or how the millionaires in Congress will be affected.

He also feels that all state should mandate high school graduation.  While this sounds nice, universal high school graduation is not a hot idea.  Many students simple don’t have the ability, or the drive, or respect for the system.  I gather drop outs don’t care much for your little mandates, that’s why many of them drop out.  When I went to a junior college, I had many classmates who oped out for the GED, and then went the community college rout, and were doing fine.  Instead of mandating graduation, how about designing a challenging curriculum that makes their diplomas meaningful?  He topped off his education chat with call for further inflation of the higher education bubble.

The Prez believes that the state of the Union is strong.  OK.  Then perhaps we can deal without universal pre-school.

Cotton Mather Parenting

With the push for gun control under way the stories about children punished for pretend play involving guns are pouring in.  Iowahawk calls it what it is, government-sponsored and media-promoted hysteria:

Lefties are fond of lecturing (and writing books, and plays, and movies) about the famously dark days of McCarthyism, where right wing Bircher paranoiacs supposedly were looking for a ‘Red under every bed.’ I suppose to a certain extent they had a point, but the sum total impact of that brief 50′s reign of terror seems to be that a couple of Hollywood writers lost screenplay deals.

Contrast that with our new age of left wing paranoia. Now that the national boogie men are Gunnies rather than Commies, there ain’t no bed, or closet, or playground safe to hide from our brave safety crusaders. No one is above suspicion, and so holy is their cause that even crayon-scrawled representations of Demon Gun must be banned. Obviously, we have to arrest children precisely because it’s For The Children. Welcome to New Salem, with the Reverend Piers Morgan as our new Cotton Mather.

Some individuals were living this hysteria for years if not decades.  Here is last year’s advice column from J, the Bay Area Jewish weekly.   First the question:

We thought we’d skirt the issue with our pro-peace, “use your words” and gender-neutral parenting, but alas, our 4-year-old boy wants a gun.  We cringe at the thought, but can also see that he has never wanted anything else with this kind of intensity. Help! Puzzled in Piedmont (Piedmont is a tonier East Bay suburb, – ed.)

Being pro-lasting peace, pro-gun and into gender-functional parenting (I made this one up), I would advise the PIPs to think about the nature of their son’s intense emotions and question their own deeply ingrained assumptions about society.  This would be an honest thing to do because leftists profess to believe that babes have a lot to teach us about the world and that it’s always good to question received opinions.  The columnist Rachel Biale, however, issued a different verdict:

On gender issues, I advise parents to offer, as I did with my children, a full spectrum of toys and activities without gender-pegging: boys with dolls, girls with hammers, etc. I have never encountered parents flummoxed because their daughter wanted a gun. (Please let me know if your experience is different!)  I myself remember vividly how I insisted on playing soccer with the boys and wanted a bow and arrow for Lag B’Omer.  My father was a carpenter and physicist; in those days in the kibbutz you could be both. So he made me a beautifully carved bow and explained the laws of physics governing the arrow’s trajectory and speed.  I even announced in third grade that my name was now Danny and I was going to be a boy.  It lasted till fourth grade, but never in that whole period (nor before or after) did I want a gun.

All snark aside, her dad sounds cool.

I grew up in a culture where toy weapons were commonplace.  I was a girly girl, and I don’t remember myself wanting plastic guns, but I’m pretty sure I played with them every now and then.  If Robert Louis Stevenson is any authority on the subject, boys and girls do play together, often exploring marshal themes.  His absolutely cheek-pinchingly darling poem Marching Song from “A Child’s Garden of Verses” features “great commander Jane” who gayly leads the boys on a war pass.  I take it Ms. Biale’s childhood was not much different.  For one, she implied that it would had been normal for a kid in her community to ask for a toy gun.  And for another:

Our kibbutz was on the Jordanian border and guns were part of everyday life. This is still the case in Israel today. Soldiers on their way to and from home carry a gun, as do other security personnel. But when it came to raising my children here in the United States, without even noticing, I adopted the common American Jewish aversion to guns. (Jews have the lowest gun ownership rate in America.) I, too, felt very uncomfortable with the idea of my son playing with guns.

Whatever happened to multiculturalism?

I do believe boys love toy guns so much because they offer an important avenue for mastering aggression through play. Pretend combative play — cowboys and Indians, space aliens and humans, cops and robbers and superheroes armed to the teeth — is important for  the maturation and “civilizing” of boys.  Allowing opportunities  for play that channels aggressive fantasies reduces the amount of actual aggression toward other kids.

Do tell.  It probably helps to reduce the amount of inwardly aggression as well — if am to take a guess.

That said, it’s important to uphold your values and recognize when something is too uncomfortable and disturbing for you.  It’s perfectly fine to let your child know there are things you find objectionable and don’t want in your house. For example, some parents feel this way about pet rats.  We told our son: “We really, really don’t like guns.  They hurt and kill people.  We don’t want one in our house, not even a play gun.”

The antiquated United States Constitution tells us nothing about the rodents, but, for all I know, the vastly superior founding document of the European Union might have something to say on that subject.  I can see not wanting a rat, but, on the other hand, what if there is a near-extinct specie of rat, and a family gets both a male and a female vermin and tries to get them to breed?  What do we think about that?

But we did let him get a  sword. Why?  Mainly, because it didn’t make us cringe in the same way a gun did and let him deal with aggression through play.  We explained: “Swords are a bit like old tales from ‘Once upon a time.’ A long, long time ago, people used them to fight. But, nowadays, people don’t use swords to kill.” No doubt there is a bit of rationalizing here, but this offered a middle ground we could live with.  Our son, after graduating from swords to the World Wrestling Federation, abandoned these pursuits and grew into a very peaceful, unaggressive person, who does his “fighting” for justice and civil rights in the court of law.

Just about every family I know is cool with plastic swards, but wants no gun toys.  Why, what’s the difference?  One is a lethal weapon and another can shoot blanks?  Nothing against swords or wrestling, but target shooting does promote patience and concentration.

I have no idea what Ms. Biale means by “‘fighting’ for justice and civil rights in the court of law”, but countless books were written on the subject of verbal aggression in Ashkenazi diaspora.  No amount of verbal aggression absolves a man (or a woman) of the moral responsibility to defend himself, his friends and family.  And by “defend” I don’t mean “litigate”.

What does the sword-and-wrestling diet do to children anyway?  I’m not claiming to know what the youth of today think about the 2nd Amendment, but it’s useful to turn to the guardians of the illicit, namely Urban Outfitters, for clues.  Here, at Edge of the Sandbox, we don’t pretend to understand where irony ends and self-loathing begins when it comes to Urban, but the firearms-related gimmicks, currently occupying their sale racks, are hard to ignore.

Shot glasses — Get it? Get it? — are on sale for $7.99

A cooler. I don’t know about that one.

“Freeze!” ice tray is my personal favorite. On sale for 7.99, accompanied by a very interesting video

For a good measure they had a grenade decanter. Being a middle age vino, I don’t know about this one either.

Either the kids sense that guns are not as bad as their parents told them, or they are being defiant or both, but they are not indifferent to the allure of fire arms.

Here is my previous post on anti-gun agenda placement in Parents magazine.  Koch brothers, either one of you, where art though?

UPDATE: Linked by Legal Insurrection — many thanks to Professor Jacobson.

No Country for R&B

Leslie Loftis requested “that heaping scorn” on account of Vladimir Putin’s hiring of Boyz II Men to combat Russia’s sub-European birth rates.  I’ll try to not disappoint.

The R’n'B band is to play some sort of a part in Russian state’s ongoing effort to convince ordinary men and women to be fruitful and multiply:

The story comes from the Moscow Times, which writes: “The stylish trio of Boyz II Men, the most successful R&B group of all time, is coming to Moscow on Feb 6. The group will perform a selection of their classic and new romantic ballads, hopefully giving Russian men some inspiration ahead of St. Valentine’s Day.” The Times insists that the band will be lending their “powerful voices” to Putin’s fertility campaign. Whether or not the Russian kingpin personally got on the phone, tracked down their agent and demanded that they “do the show right here” is pure speculation on the newspaper’s part. It’s a little hard to believe … but it’s also not impossible to imagine. [My guess is Boyz have no clue about Europe's demographic woes.  Russian newspapers, however, are prone to overstatements. -- ed.]

For Putin has declared war on empty cots with classic Putin bravado. He’s often insisted that having lots of babies is key to Russia’s internal security, to Russia becoming more “influential” on the world state. Why have a great democracy or a flourishing economy when you can simply outnumber everyone else? Putin puts the desirable figure at three babies per household and, in 2007, one province helped things along by declaring a Day of Conception. The idea was that if Russians got the day off work then they might stay at home, put on some Boyz II Men, close the curtains and help bring back the good old days of Soviet hegemony. Women who gave birth 9 months later could win a refrigerator.

Which makes sense.   I can’t think of another top 40 band that’s all soft light and kitchen counters.

Boyz’s 1994 hit “I’ll Make Love to You”

If you, my reader, are a snob like me, you probably spend countless Friday nights complaining about the current sorry state of American popular music.  I hope you realize that much of today’s American pop sells very well abroad, and that even if Americans suddenly abandoned their music idols, many performers would do just fine.  Truth be told, American pop in decline does not sound that bad compare to what musicians around the world have to offer.

Russia one horrid example of horrid taste in horrid popular music.  The country’s President is a noted connoisseur of “popsa” (Russian slang for particularly annoying tunes).  Remember his inspirationally sexed-up 2012 Presidential campaign?  Well, in 2007/2008 it was Putin copying Obama, not the other way around.  Shortly after Obama girl went viral, Putin lent his likeness to a video with two babes who singing ditties about him:

A few years ago I went on a facebook-like Russian site where I found some old friends and made a few new ones.  Most of them were Russian-speaking Ukrainian women, about my age, college educated, either gainfully employed or with a husband providing for the family, and with a kid or two.  Often times our conversation turned to the little ones; specifically they wanted to know how much does the United States government pay to have a baby.  I got the impression that their sole reason for striking a conversation with an American woman was to pose that particular question.

Turns out, all Ukrainian women are promised a one-time stipend for each child — “promised” is the operative word here because in their experience the money doesn’t always materialize.  They were bitter, which was understandable.  I’m not sure how much sense it makes for the state to beguile its citizens short term.  Our government is also making promises on which it’s not going to deliver (think Social Security), but those are long term promises.  By the time the the populace realizes that its been had, the politicians who designed the system are long dead and buried.  Anyhow, Russia touts fertility measures similar to Ukraine’s, with second baby currently worth 9K.  Russian women find it equally easy to discuss such prizes.

Now, I’m all for people being practical about breeding.  People other than myself that is (I got pregnant with my first while on our honeymoon).  It’s just that on the surface of it, at least, the women in Russia and Ukraine do not appear to be practical enough.  I had to explained that in the US children are seen mainly as expenses.  It costs upwards of a half a mil to raise a child, which dwarfs any tax write off a middle class American family can possibly take advantage of.  Kitchen appliances are a sorry compensation when you have another mouth to feed.

What is interesting is when middle class American women think “how can I afford it”, their Russian speaking counterparts think “who pays better”.  That’s the difference between freedom and personal responsibility on the one hand and slavery and hand outs on the other.  Arguably, American fertility subsidies are obscured through our tax code.  We still have subsidies (as we should as long as the government provides for retirement), they are just not obvious.  Yet I don’t know a single family that would calculate exemptions prior to trying to conceive.

The fertility rate in Russia is up from under 1.2 child per woman at its 1999 low to about one and a half child for each woman of childbearing age.  The rate of population decline is down, and Putin is claiming victory.  I remember Russians here, in Cali, being surprised by that Russian style baby boom, and quipping that maybe it’s caused by mothers too drunk to get themselves to abortion clinics.  They were not too far off.  Then there is the argument that the uptake in fertility is partially caused by the increase in the number of ethnic minorities and the calls for awarding “maternal capital” to ethnic Russians only.  Still, the current fertility uptake is partially caused by the women born during the 1980s mini-boom now reaching peak childbearing age.  Once they age, Russia is due for another bust.

From Putin’s point of view it must be now or never.  He really does need to get as many children as he can out of Russian women today because, he must realize, there is no tomorrow.  The generous sums of money offered to moms at the time when state revenues are declining are really a sign of desperation.  Putin bought off Russia’s middle class with petroleum money, but with development of new technologies of oil and gas extraction, the world is not willing to pay top dollar for Russia’s resources.  Russian mothers might be looking for another owner.

Putin’s goal is to encourage every Russian woman to have three children, and this billboard, photographed in Moscow metro, is a part of the state’s natalist campaign. “Your country needs your heroic achievements,” reads the top. “Every minute, three people are born in Russia”. I don’t see Russians reacting to this poster with anything but laughter.  The talk of “heroic accomplishments” is reminiscent of the Soviet era mythical mother-heroines who gave birth to a large number of children.  Ordinary Soviet people didn’t know anyone like that.

And Putin might do better if he had a whole different population of women to work with.  Russian-speaking women are just not that into large families.  I personally know of five Russian-speaking women of my generation who had more than two kids, and by more than two I mean three.  Two of them live in Israel (one is an ethnic Russian), one is in New Jersey, but spent several years in Israel.  Another is in the Bay Area, and her third child was an accident.  And, by the way, had she stayed in Belarus, the boy would had been summarily aborted, and so would had been several of his siblings.  Only one lives (and has always lived) in Ukraine, but she was always a bit odd. Not that there is anything wrong with being odd.

It’s not just that tough economic times drove families to postpone parenting.  Russians have an easy attitude about divorce and out-of-wedlock birth.  A sizable number of Russian women would rather stay single than marry Russian bachelors.  Even those who marry and stay married simply don’t want large families.  One or two kids were a norm for generations, and it’s hard to imagine that this norm can change in the near future.

Odd Pen-pals

For some mysterious reason American politicians are required to kiss babies.  We might be increasingly skeptical as a people, and we distrust both major parties, but, evidently, it’s still advantageous for the politicians to put their lips to germ factories.

Cuties!

I hope Obama’s latest use of children as props to advance specific agenda will backfire, and our leaders will stop stop hanging out with kids in general.  When announcing his executive orders intended to curb gun rights, Obama lined up a handful of kids.  The kids, evidently, sent letters to the President asking him to curtail the 2nd Amendment.

The first time I heard of an American kid writing letters to world leaders was in 1982.  I was 9 and the very photogenic Samantha Smith was 10.  The uninhibited Samantha sent a letter to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov asking him to not have a war with the United States.  Although Andropov didn’t personally answer Samantha, her note was printed in Pravda.  Samantha persisted, contacting the Soviet ambassador to the United States.  After that Andropov printed his answer to Samantha in Pravda, and the girl’s family was invited to visit the Soviet Union.  The Smith family went on a guided tour of Moscow and Leningrad, and the girl spent a few day in Artek, the camp for the children of nomenklatura.

Samantha Smith holds up a letter

She was a minor TV celebrity and a news sensation in the States, but I doubt many Americans remember the girl, or even had heard of her.  She was, however, a huge star in the Soviet Union.  Since she had enormous propaganda value for the Soviet regime, she was put on state TV on heavy rotation.  An average Soviet person was taken with the affable American girl.  Andropov said that she reminded him of Becky Thatcher, and the country digged the comparison.  (Do American kids still know who Becky Thatcher is?)

I couldn’t understand how a girl of 10 could write to world leaders.  Unlike everyone else I knew, I did have a foreign pen-pal, a cousin in San Francisco, whose letters, when they arrived, arrived pre-read — it was obvious that somebody messed with the envelope.  I knew better than to write to foreign politicians, and I certainly wouldn’t correspond with our own Soviet higher ups.

Irina Tornopolsky did.  She was about the same age and, like me, lived in Kharkov.  Irina signed a letter to Andropov asking him to release her dad, a political prisoner, and allow her family to emigrate to Israel.  Although the letter was printed in the Western press, and it’s hard not to sympathize with her family’s predicament, Irina did not become a glob-trotting international celebrity.  Let her travel abroad, and she’ll defect.  Without strategically staged photographs, she was merely a footnote to a footnote in Cold War history.  Tornopolsky’s family later admitted that the message was written by a friend, and that the friend wanted to attract attention to the plight of refuseniks at the time when Samantha Smith was giving gushing interviews about Lenin being just like George Washington.

The very photogenic Katya Lycheva became the Soviet peace prodigy a la Samantha Smith.  She “wrote” to Reagan, and traveled around the world as a young “goodwill ambassador”.  Katya, of course, was widely believed by her compatriots to be a KGB stooge.

Promotional picture of Katya Lycheva. In case you are wondering, no Soviet kids didn’t play with stuffed globes and doves. We had normal toys, meaning all boys were encouraged to engage in imagination play with plastic guns. What do you do with a globe and a dove, anyway? The bird is not even half as good as your average Teddy bear, and the globe is a poor cousin of a soccer ball

I had questions about Samantha Smith, and my dad explained that Americans generally don’t feel constrained about approaching their politicians, but that particular girl was probably encouraged by her parents.  The girl didn’t live to figure out that she was used.  Samantha Smith and her father died in a plane crash in 1986.  The Soviet press immediately declared that the tragedy was a result of foul play — it wasn’t.  Anyhow, I doubt Samantha Smith’s surviving mother would agree with my dad’s assessment.

Gosh, what do I know?  Girls certainly like to exchange notes, and some American girls particularly unself-conscious.  I certainly don’t see my children approaching world leaders any time soon, and I see it as a good thing.  Their scribbles are most likely to be ignored.  Should they be particularly unlucky, they can be used as stage props, as Obama did to the anti-gun kiddos a few days ago.

We all know that the kids were thrust in front of the cameras in order to mix up our cool logic with emotion — or, to spell out the particulars, to get the wingnuts to shut up already — how in the world are the correct-thinking individuals suppose to win an argument?  I doubt any of these kids would be hanging out with the ‘Bamster, should their parents not approve and encourage their epistolary habits.  “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen” is what we say about politics.  And yet it’s perfectly appropriate to drag kids into it.

Royal Pregnancy Envy

I am not writing about the upcoming tax hikes because a) I don’t expect them to affect my single income family and b) they are likely to affect those who voted for them, i.e. the miseducated professionals.  I don’t expect this class of people to change their opinion on anything as a result of what is about to hit them — the progressive will always produce an issue along the lines of gay marriage or global warming to keep the faithful on the straight and narrow — but the upcoming spectacle of taxing “the rich” might be entertaining.  It’s about time that they pony up anyway.  What makes them think each one of their children can have a bedroom when families the world over are crowded into little huts and why does each spouse need a car, one of which is an SUV?

I’d rather talk ladies’ stuff.  Catherine nee Middleton was hailed as Britain’s first truly modern princess, but it turned out she subscribes to totally outdated notions of pregnancy.  She evidently checked into a hospital for severe morning sickness.  It must be nice to be the Duchess of Cambridge.  When I was in my first trimester, I screwed up royally at work and snubbed a few people socially just because I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.  I hadn’t thrown up once, and I wouldn’t want to be in an institution or anything, but lying in bed all day would had been great.

Kate does seem to take pregnancy seriously.  Allegedly, she postponed childbearing by more that a year because she was busy with events like the Olympics.  A-ha.  And there I was, looking at Kate’s pictures on magazine covers at check out counters, thinking that the reason for lack of baby news was an eating disorder.  But enough picking on Kate; we have our own royalty.

But theirs dress better

In any event, the game many women play here is pretending that the state of being pregnant is just like not being pregnant.  I had it relatively easy with both of my kids, which in reality means that the middle part of my pregnancy went swimmingly.  Towards the end I was getting tired of dragging my uterus around, and I had to go on maternity leave a bit early because I was worried about my bladder in the transbay commute.  I wished the seats and parking spaces reserved for the disabled were also available to expecting mothers, or that people would know to give up their sits to women who look like they are about to pop a baby.

I found that middle age black women do just that.  They never noticed me in my pre-baby stage, which was just fine, it’s not like I was aching to talk to them, but as soon as I got pregnant — oh my! — they pretty much rolled out the red carpet for me.  The demographic less interested in pregnant women were the white men, which, I suppose, makes sense because they don’t encounter that many pregnant women, and many were taught that women can do everything that men can do under any circumstances.  I suppose it’s all good as long as we don’t put pregnant women on the frontlines.