Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 254

When Your Parents Divorce Late In Life, Ctd

Readers join Katie Crouch in sharing their stories:

My parents divorced when I was in my mid-30s and they were about 60. It wasn’t a mutual thing; my Dad fell in love with another woman. But as I approach my mid-40s, I understand more and more how limited our time is on this planet and how spending it trapped in a relationship that isn’t working makes little sense.

However: this may sound bratty, but I refused to call my father’s new wife my “step-mother.” I even went so far as to correct people – especially him – when that term was used. I felt that at 35+ years old, I got to determine who was in my family. She was his wife and I liked her a great deal, but it seemed insulting to my mother, who was there for the actual difficult child-raising years, to call this woman who I met as an adult my step-mother. If my dad had married her when I was eight years old, and she’d driven me to Little League and taken me to the emergency room when I broke my arm, that would be a different story.

On the other hand, my younger brother and sister can’t throw out that term enough, and it bothers me. This came to a head because she passed away, and the “sorry your stepmother died” e-mails and Facebook messages started in earnest. You don’t correct the Facebook message about a woman who just died of cancer in her early 60s, and of course I feel sorry for my father and her children and grandchildren. But she still wasn’t my stepmother – I will never have one.

Another:

As an adult of 42 when my parents divorced, my biggest reaction was absolute shock. My parents had always been Ozzie and Harriet, Ward and June Cleaver, or Mr. and Mrs. Baxter. Turned out my Dad had a mistress for some 15 years, and she was getting restless.

The divorce went rather amicably under the circumstances. Even the division of the considerable assets went well after I stepped in and did it for them. However, my mother absolutely refused to meet or even be in the same room with the mistress, until the fateful day when my niece was christened. Mom was not going to miss that and she saw the mistress for the first time. Mom, like me, had always been overweight and had struggled with it all her life. She knew Dad had left her for a much younger woman. However, the mistress was significantly heavier, by over 100 pounds, and, after learning this key fact, mom was OK. Dad could leave for a younger woman, just not a thinner one.

Mom developed Alzheimer’s about two years after the divorce and eventually didn’t really remember she and Dad were divorced. She’d show up at his house (which was on the same street as hers) and chat with the mistress and Dad like they were all family, even have breakfast together. The mistress was very good about the whole thing and we went from having two of every holiday back to one with everybody together like nothing had happened except there were all these new people (more or less, as far as Mom was concerned, like they had always been there).

However, when I was a kid, I had the safety and security of a completely intact, loving family. It didn’t stop me from screwing up my life, mind you, but I still had a great childhood, something I don’t think would have been the case if the whole thing had happened when I was 12, not 42.

A brief intermission:

I can’t help thinking of the joke about the elderly couple (he 93, she 92) who go to see the divorce attorney.

“You’ve been married over seventy years, raised five children together, and now you want a divorce?” said the attorney.

“Well,” said the wife, “the first few years weren’t bad, but things went downhill after that and we haven’t been happy in decades.”

“But why now?” asked the attorney.

Answered the man, “We wanted to wait until all the kids were dead.”

Another reader’s story:

My parents divorced when I was in my late 20s. After my brother left for college, they looked at each other and asked, “Who are you?” They had been married just out of college/law school and plunged into having four kids in five years. They lost track of each other over the next 20 years and couldn’t remake what they once had, perhaps, before the hullabaloo of our family arrived.

I made it clear that my affections could be purchased by the highest bidder, but neither took me up on the offer. To their great credit, we have remained a close family, now with four spouses and eight grandchildren. My father’s second wife and her child were folded into the mix a few years after the divorce and not a beat was missed. It was a bit unnerving that my stepmother was, and is, a Republican and a Catholic. We are a tribe of agnostic/atheist Dems, but we have all come around a bit – and it made conversations at dinners and the end of docks much less monochromatic.

My mother was liberated by the divorce, traveling to Washington, D.C. for a time, then Johannesburg and Addis Ababa, where she taught ethics to local government officials, until finally ending up in Traverse City near the lake that gives her, and me, such solace and energy. She has never remarried.

My three siblings and I are all on our first spouses, each of us a decade or two into our relationships. I think watching our parents divorce when we were old enough to have a mature perspective – where it wasn’t ruining our lives or tearing apart our homes – is part of why we’re all still together. We have talked about the importance of keeping in touch with our wives and husbands, of keeping the relationship new, of not subsuming our marriages into kids.

But who knows? We’re all approaching the age when our parents split. We, too, may harbor the unhappiness that they felt and that could not be fixed, but I don’t feel it. Time will tell.

Visit Sunny Syria!

The Syrian tourism minister predicts a "prosperous tourism season" in Homs. Yes, THIS Homs: http://t.co/SuZ2Ed0Fco pic.twitter.com/LDEp7nQYJk

— Heather SouvaineHorn (@heathershorn) May 8, 2014

At the same time the war-torn country is expelling aid groups, it’s embarking on a new tourism campaign:

In early May, the regime unveiled proposals to lure visitors to the Assad heartland of Lattakia, including a public beach equipped with a fast-food restaurant, a cafe that seats at least 200, and a parking lot for out-of-towners. Now may not be the best time for a trip to the beach in Lattakia: Rebel Islamist groups marched towards the province in late March. Although they lost in the end, their offensive alarmed the regime, which had to counter them by repositioning some of its forces from other areas.

Never mind. On May 11-12, the Ministry of Tourism held a forum highlighting small and medium-sized touristic projects at Damascus’s Dama Rosa Hotel. Twenty-four proposals, which the Ministry claims are ready for investment, came out of the forum, and some of them are located in Hama, a province where the regime’s future is tenuous. The Ministry granted a license for a 42-room hotel in Hama with a restaurant and health center containing a Jacuzzi, sauna, and steam room. How guests will be able to reach the facility safely is unclear: The hotel is located on the Homs-Hama road, which was bombed by the Free Syrian Army on April 16.

Treating PTSD With Brain Implants?

DARPA is working on it:

The hope is to implant electrodes in different regions of the brain along with a tiny chip placed between the brain and the skull. The chip would monitor electrical signals in the brain and send data wirelessly back to scientists in order to gain a better understanding of psychological diseases like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The implant would also be used to trigger electrical impulses in order to relieve symptoms.

It’s just one facet of an emerging therapeutic field:

The program is inspired by deep brain stimulation, a surgery that implants a brain pacemaker to treat movement disorders like Parkinson’s and essential tremor as well as paralysis and or patients who are missing limbs.

Similar implants have been used in small trials to treat disorders like major depression but have yet to be widely approved for wider use. SUBNETS plans on demonstrating the technology it develops and then submitting those devices for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Deep brain stimulation spans approximately 100,000 worldwide patients. But it still has its glitches. The treatment recently sparked headlines when a Dutch man being treated for severe obsessive compulsive disorder developed a strong urge to listen to American country singer Johnny Cash.

Patrick Tucker explains what the program hopes to accomplish:

If the DARPA program is successful, it will yield new brain-monitoring capabilities that are exponentially cheaper smaller, more useful and that collect data when the patient is most likely to actually encounter traumatic stimuli, not just when he or she is in a lab-making data collection much easier and the data more useful. “With existing technology, we can’t really record anxiety level inside the brain. We can potentially record adrenaline and cortisol levels in the bloodstream to measure anxiety. However, if a deep brain implant is to be used (as proposed in this project), it might be possible to monitor activity in the amygdala, and this would be a direct way of monitoring anxiety,” said [University of Arizona neuroscientist Charles] Higgins.

Using that data, the researchers hope to create models and maps to allow for a more precise understanding of the electrical patterns in the brain that signal anxiety, memory loss and depression. The data from devices, when they come online, will be made available to the public but will be rendered anonymous, so records of an individual test subject’s brain activity could not be traced back to a specific person.

A World Class Police State

Like a scene from Star Wars, #WorldCup security beneath #Brazil‘s skies: http://t.co/TNq6Xf17PM (via @AJEWeather) pic.twitter.com/rd8QJoFHoH

— HospitalityLawyercom (@hospitality_law) June 1, 2014

Vac Verikaitis condemns the militarization of the World Cup:

There are 170,000 or more security troops assigned to the World Cup – not to protect the thousands of tourists who will be coming to Brazil to watch the matches, but to quell dissent. Among them are a group of 40 FBI agents, part of an “anti-terror” unit. In January, French riot police were brought in to train their Brazilian counterparts. There are several Israeli drones, the ones used to chase down suspects in the West Bank, as well as 50 robotic bomb-disposal units most recently used by US forces in Afghanistan. There are also facial-recognition goggles that police can use to spot 400 faces a second and match them against a database of 13 million.

But there won’t be that many tourists, so exactly whom, people want to know, are the police checking? At a cost of nearly $1 billion, the international composition of the security measures is not only a contentious issue among Brazilians, but a cruel irony given FIFA’s mandate of bringing the world together through football.

Meanwhile, Steven Kurczy checks in on a stadium in the Amazon rainforest:

In a competition for most improbable place to host the World Cup, the city of Manaus would surely make the finals. Its Arena da Amazônia sits in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, 900 miles up the Amazon River in Brazil’s isolated Amazonas state bordering Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. “The Amazon Arena” will host four matches [this] month—including one featuring the English team, whose coach got into a spat with the mayor of Manaus after complaining about the prospect of having to play “in the middle of the Amazonian jungle.”

So perhaps more than any other of Brazil’s 12 World Cup host cities, Manaus faces a Sisyphean task during [this] month’s influx of futebol superstars and their rabid fans: prove that it was worthwhile to build a $300 million, 42,000-seat stadium in an isolated port city lacking a serious futebol culture, or experience hosting major events.

What’s A Press Secretary Good For?

Following Jay Carney’s resignation, Weigel isn’t sure we need a White House press secretary:

Carney’s many ways of dodging questions became so infamous that former Slate-ster Chris Wilson compiled them into a usable chart format. In that exercise, he highlighted one of Carney’s most meta dodges.

We have a team here that works really hard trying to anticipate the questions you’re going to ask. The problem is, there’s a lot of you and you’re good at your jobs and you’re smart.

This basically gave the game away. The tragedy of the White House beat, as hacks like me keep pointing out, is that the White House is forever innovating ways to make it useless.

Kenneth T. Walsh observes that “the White House press secretary has increasingly become a flak catcher, policy and political debater, and public relations strategist for the president rather than the conveyor of straightforward information to the media and the public”:

During Carney’s tenure, journalists raised frequent objections to what they considered reduced access to Obama and his senior advisers. They complained that Carney sometimes didn’t seem to know the president’s thinking or what was happening in the administration on key issues. There was distress within the media over the administration’s attempt to crack down on unauthorized leaks. And there was concern among White House correspondents that White House officials were shunting them aside and dealing instead with new media or communicating directly with key constituencies via the White House website and the Internet.

Reid Cherlin contrasts Carney’s tenure with Gibbs.’ His bottom line:

The good news for Carney is twofold. As soon as his successor, Josh Earnest, assumes the job, Carney’s reputation will undergo a rehabilitation, just as Gibbs is now remembered with nostalgia by White House reporters. More important, Carney will get to step out of one of Washington’s most fruitless positions and go make more money doing something rewarding.

Tumblr Of The Day

Prepare to lose half your afternoon, poring through Terrible Real Estate Photographs. The captions push this one over the edge into edgy. So for the one above:

If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t mind defecating in a kitchen, then you probably won’t mind doing it next to a large window either.

Another fave:

Of the two options, “bless this house” is the more popular.

The World Community Doesn’t Miss Bush

Beinart gives the Bushies a reality check:

[W]hen Cheney says world opinion is “increasingly negative” and Rove detects “declining confidence” in the United States, it’s hard not to ask the obvious question: compared to when? In fact, while faith in the United States, and in Obama personally, has declined modestly since 2009, it is still dramatically higher than when Cheney and Rove roamed the West Wing.

For more than a decade, the Pew Research Center has been asking people around the world about their opinion of the United States. The upshot: In every region of the globe except the Middle East (where the United States was wildly unpopular under George W. Bush and remains so), America’s favorability is way up since Obama took office. In Spain, approval of the United States is 29 percentage points higher than when Bush left office. In Italy, it’s up 23 points. In Germany and France, it’s 22. With the exception of China, where the numbers have remained flat, the trend is the same in Asia. The U.S. is 19 points more popular in Japan, 24 points more popular in Indonesia, and 28 points more popular in Malaysia. Likewise among the biggest powers in Latin America and Africa: Approval of the United States has risen 19 points in Argentina and 12 points in South Africa. (For some reason, there’s no Bush-era data on this question for Brazil or Nigeria).

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Two stand-outs: a miraculous rendition of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean on beer-bottles; and a prayer for all of us by that remarkable Catholic/Buddhist monk of doubt, Thomas Merton.

Other posts worth checking out: the influence of John Cheever on Mad Men; how Philip Roth is still subject to the charge of anti-Semitism even today; seeing an AIDS patient in Holbein’s painting of Christ in the tomb; a charming moment between Pope Francis and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu – subsequently distorted by news headlines; a poem on frogs; and an analysis of slut-shaming.

The most popular posts of the weekend were Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer Gay? (probably), followed by Can Atheists Believe In Jesus? (yes, they can.)

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Tiger Lily Vyse, 7, with Pearl Vyse, 5, during the Hay Festival on May 28, 2014 in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. The Hay Festival is an annual festival of literature and arts which began in 1988. By Matthew Horwood/Getty Images.)

New Dish, New Media Update

Some readers have asked about – and some bloggers have written about – the kind and generous profile of yours truly in the Washingtonian. Dylan Byers concludes from the piece that blogs are dead, and that the only relevant practitioners of online journalism are beat-bloggers embedded in larger media entities … like, er, Dylan Byers, it turns out. I’d say Dylan is obviously right that the era in which blogs were the primary form of online journalism is over. Once we had charted a path, the big media companies swooped in behind us, with their current model of page-view-based revenue, paid for with “sponsored content”. But that doesn’t seem to me to mean the end of blogs, as such. They still exist and thrive all over the place – big and small. You can’t read the Dish without finding out about newer ones all the time. So it’s not either/or; it’s both/and.

Which form is best at “owning the morning” or maximizing ad revenues? Probably Politico. But – and here’s the main thing – that is not now and never has been my ambition. I blogged because it gave me a freedom no other form could. Period. As for pageviews, any site with a meter like ours is going to lose some traffic after being completely free – but gain a huge amount in stability, subscriptions, reader-support, and freedom from the pageview-dollar connection. Our loss so far – and it’s about 20 percent from our non-metered days, from about a million readers a month to 800,000 – does no harm to the product and, because we’re not solely dependent on ads for our survival, is largely irrelevant. It also jumps around with the news cycle and viral surges. So this February, for instance, we had more than 2 million uniques – double our average at the Atlantic.

But there’s an obvious difference between our independent model and the previous ones. At the Beast and Atlantic, I used to obsess over traffic numbers – because they directly correlated with income. Now, we obsess over subscription revenue, which is our business model. Yes, the Atlantic and Politico have gone on to become even bigger in terms of pageviews – and I remain proud to have played a part in creating the current, thriving Atlantic.com. But you know what? We have almost 30,000 subscribers, which is 30,000 more than Politico has, 30,000 more than the Huffington Post has, 30,000 more than the Beast has, and 30,000 more than Vox or 538.

And if Dylan thinks that’s “diminishing returns”, he’s empirically wrong. Our revenue this past year is now at $917K, and growing all the time. Here’s the latest monthly update on revenue:

Our revenue, as you can see, is now remarkably steady – and immune to ups and downs in news cycles – and at $35K this past month, after $35K in April. Last May’s total in contrast was $19K. So our monthly revenue is close to double last year’s – far from diminishing. And because our revenue comes from subscribers, not advertizers, and is on auto-renew, we are also stable enough to be free of the ethical messes that so many big sites need to keep themselves inflated, with their large staffs and traffic ambitions. So if blogs are “over”, this little one seems to show few signs of slowing down. We’re planning some more business model innovations in the near-future – to continue forging a new path for online media which isn’t in hock to the pageview, clickbait metrics which are doing so much to drag the quality of journalism down.

Who knows if we’ll succeed? But it’s incredibly interesting, fun and rewarding even if we fail. And what we have – in a way Politico never will – is a community of truly engaged and dedicate readers who now contribute as much to the blog as the staff do. That’s what makes this so much more worthwhile: in my view, one of the more eclectic, informed and diverse conversations anywhere on the web. But I’m guessing you knew that already.

“What Will Survive Of Us Is Love”

That’s how usually-more-dour Philip Larkin famously ended his poem “An Arundel Tomb.” John G. Messerly ponders what he might have meant:

Larkin may be implying that the lovers are joined in death as they were in life, at least until the ravages of time finally erase their stone figures. Maybe the joined hands were the sculptor’s idea and do not reflect a real love at all–perhaps that is the meaning of the line “transfigured them into untruth.” Larkin himself said the tomb deeply affected him, but he also scribbled at the bottom of one draft: “love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years.” Yet the poem doesn’t say that “love is stronger than death.” It says love survives us, and to survive something doesn’t make you stronger than it.

Still survival is a partial victory. But what might survive? Perhaps it is the enduring belief that love is remarkable, that its appearance in a world of anger and cruelty is so astonishing. Or perhaps it is that traces of our love reverberate through time, in ripples and waves that may one day reach peaceful shores now unbeknownst to us.

Previous Dish on Larkin and love here. Listen to my reading of Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” here.

(Image: Detail of Arundel Tomb in Chichester Cathedral, which inspired the poem, via Wikimedia Commons)