This passage from a recent GQ piece by Andrew Corsello raises compelling issues.
… I am a separating kind of guy. To me, Jefferson’s slave-owning and -impregnating tarnishes him, but not the Declaration. Eliot’s anti-Semitism bothers me but doesn’t inform my reading of “Four Quartets.” These separations have always brought a vague assurance that I was being intellectually steely and that anyone who insisted otherwise was soppy, lazy, even dishonest—willingly viewing the world through lenses tinted with personal politics.
And yet… Though I won’t be boycotting Woody Allen fılms, when a friend asked how I’d respond if Michael Vick or Richie Incognito were traded to my beloved Denver Broncos, I realized: I’d flip. And yell: “We can’t allow that taint in our locker room!”
Yeah, I know.
Know what? Corsello continues for another few hundred words but he never addresses the larger issue. Why is he able to view Thomas Jefferson as a visionary rather than simply a slave-owning rapist (slaves cannot give consent, so don’t even start)? Why is treating human beings like dogs more historically tolerable than treating dogs like, well, how the U.S. military treats it soldiers?
And this is not just about whether you can laugh at Annie Hall. It speaks to who and why we extend our empathy. This goes to our criminal justice system (we saw just a peek of it with George Zimmerman and Marissa Alexander). This sadly occurs in our own schools (believe me, from experience). It speaks to the collective ability of the mainstream to separate certain people from the mistakes while viewing others only as their mistakes.
This requires soul-searching not shoulder-shrugging.
serhasacomplaint 
Homebodies…
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post explains why buying a house is stupid (well, she puts it slightly more diplomatically).
The fact that Americans still financially fetishize homeownership baffles me. Never mind that so many people lost their shirts (among other possessions) in the recent housing bust. Over an even longer horizon, owning a home has not proved to be a terribly lucrative investment either. Don’t take my word for it; ask Robert Shiller, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in economics who previously became a household name for identifying the housing bubble.
“People forget that housing deteriorates over time. It goes out of style. There are new innovations that people want, different layouts of rooms,” he told me. “And technological progress keeps bringing the cost of construction down.” Meaning your worn, old-fashioned home is competing with new, relatively inexpensive ones.
I suppose there’s also the emotional continuity of numerous tense holidays in the same house. I’m not a holiday or even really a celebratory person (besides my eventual funeral) so I never quite understood it but I know the sentiment exists. Unfortunately, the changing economy makes it less likely that you’ll retire in the same house you bought when you got married. People move for jobs for far more often now, as a thirty-year commitment to a company is becoming a thing of the past in our brave new world of maximizing shareholder profits. Selling a house every five years or so is not just a headache but it’s usually a financial wash.
Posted by Stephen Robinson on April 23, 2014 in Social Commentary
Tags: catherine rampell, home ownership, Washington Post