Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  EverQuest liberates its players from some of the dismal restrictions of real economic life. Norrath is a truer meritocracy than our own, with no one hindered or helped by personal history or family background. The game also offers the ultimate safety hatch (a superenhanced version of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection): Fail at one of Norrath's deadly challenges, and you can start over with a new avatar and new identity.

  What may be most striking about Norrath is that the virtual market doesn't require a powerful government. Norrathian economic life, conducted in PP or dollars, proceeds without laws stipulating the terms of exchanges, regulations dictating who can participate in various activities, or authorities enforcing contracts. There are no monetary or fiscal policies to manage demand and prices, and no safety net.

  In this virtual world, a powerful government appears only briefly at the start, in the iron rule that everyone starts out with roughly equal assets. Then it retreats and lets economic nature take its course. In Norrath, more equality permits freer markets. This may provide the most important lesson of all from the EverQuest experiment: Real equality can obviate much of a democratic government's intervention in a modern economy. Many of our own government's current policies—progressive taxation, securities regulation, social insurance—are aimed at offsetting some form of inequality. If EverQuest is any guide, the liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision of truly limited government.

  Tween-Age Wasteland

  Are we paying too much attention to the woes of preadolescence?

  By Ann Hulbert

  Updated Friday, Aug. 29, 2003, at 11:27 AM PT

  After a flare-up with my daughter at some point in sixth grade—when and about what, I can't remember, except that it was very minor—I found her huddled on her bed reading a little black brochure with "H.E.L.P." in bold red letters on the cover. It was a handout her teacher had distributed earlier in the year to parents. I'd at first mistaken it for an anti-drug advisory, but it was actually a preadolescent advisory—the acronym stood for How to Enjoy Living with a Preadolescent—and my daughter was not impressed. Red-eyed, she looked up and said, "I hate this pamphlet." Then she murmured to me, "I don't know why I got so mad."

  As she had just learned from Page 9 of the National Middle School Association's publication for "parents and guardians of children 10-15," hers was a classic preadolescent symptom: "Even they don't know why they are suddenly irritable. They don't know where that negative tone comes from." But one thing my daughter knew was that having her moodiness met with diagnostic solicitude only irritated her further. I don't think it helped that on Page 10 her age group was compared to toddlers: "Two-year-olds say, 'No,' middle schoolers say, 'So????' "

  For more than a decade now, it hasn't been just savvy marketers who have trained their sights on "tweens." Professionals and parents have grown increasingly obsessed with what was once dismissed as the "no man's land" of the middle school stage; a Carnegie Commission report in 1995 called "Great Transitions," which reported the latest research on rapid bodily and brain change, roused a new sense of concern and helped put the early adolescent phase on the map. This stage, experts began warning, is when children are either launched—educationally, socially, and emotionally—or get lost and left behind. Yet here, amid the stirrings of sexuality and the pressures of group conformity, is where parents first have to contend with peers as they try to retain any influence. So do teachers: Calls for more self-directed, "hands-on" learning in the "academic wasteland" of middle school alternate with exasperated sighs about terminally distracted students.

  The current pedagogically correct question to ask is whether middle schoolers themselves might have some insights to offer, if adults would only "stand by and be good listeners" (as H.E.L.P. urges on Page 13). Actually, they do, to judge by recent journalistic and cinematic dispatches from the early adolescent front. But the message from middle schoolers is not what you might think or quite what their grown-up emissaries hear. Empathetic listening and therapeutic understanding, the kids suggest, can be overrated: What they really need are adults who can help them look and think beyond the often narcissistic travails of middle school, not prod them to obsess more explicitly about every personal problem. "Don't treat me like your patients," teenage Anna shrieks at her therapist-mother in Freaky Friday, a comedy in which the pair swap bodies for a day. "Mom, stop shrinking me!"

  A similar impatience surfaces in two vérité ventures into middle school that could hardly be more different: Washington Post reporter Linda Perlstein's Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers and the recently released film Thirteen. Not Much Just Chillin', an account of a year in Maryland's Wilde Lake Middle School, traffics in early teen experiences that are as banal as Tracy and Evie's exploits in Thirteen are sensational. But for the kids involved in each, the problem isn't so much that grown-ups won't or can't begin to imagine teenage turmoil; it's that more than a few of their elders are parasitically invested in adolescent identity confusion themselves.

  At Wilde, well-meaning administrators desperate to "connect" with the kids unwittingly reinforce an ethos of shallow self-absorption. Amid a test-driven curriculum heavily dependent on dry work sheets, health class—where discussion actually occurs!—is a focal point for the kids. But even there, the teacher skirts all but the most superficial questions about sex and relationships. A sexual harassment education effort inspires more mockery than clarity, as boys keep on grabbing their classmates' butts and boobs. (What lies behind such boorish, throwback behavior—and all the suck-my-dick talk, and occasional action, that goes along with it—seems to have professionals as stumped as parents; MTV culture, I've noticed, is everybody's catch-all culprit.)

  As for efforts to probe preadolescent psyches more deeply, the kids at Wilde can't help wondering, "What's the point?" Perlstein finds. "The touchy-feely goal-setting and 'What I Have Learned' crap just feels ... like a fat waste of time" to a drifty eighth-grader named Eric Ellis. Seventh-grade achiever Elizabeth Ginsburg fumes that she's "sick of ... her parents ... talking about her in the third person and figuring out the symbolism in her every move and finding interesting ways to discuss her inner struggles." Even 15-year-old Nikki Reed, whom director Catherine Hardwicke helped rescue from an eighth-grade plummet into bad-girldom by helping her turn her saga into the harrowing script of Thirteen, shows signs of balking now that her mentor is flacking the film as "cinematherapy" for "kids and moms." The poster girl for preadolescent angst protests, "I didn't want to be a spokesperson for troubled girls."

  You can see her point. It's as hard to ferret out profound wisdom from the lurid corruption of Tracy, the Nikki character in Thirteen, as from the "chillin' " Perlstein so assiduously documents at Wilde. What is obvious from both accounts is that family breakdown and haplessly immature parents can be awful for kids—hardly news by now. Beyond that, Perlstein's and Hardwicke's fast-cutting evocations of the "flitting passions," rebellions, betrayals, and even horrors of preadolescence are a peculiar mimetic achievement: They succeed in conveying just how weightless, even tedious, and how resistant to anything but clichéd analysis, the early teen roller-coaster ride is. That's the restless kids' own refrain in their barrage of instant messages about everything and nothing—about the teacher who's "sooooooooooo annoying"; the geek who's "A LOOSER … A FAGGET … SO FUCKING GAY"; the girl who considers herself "chic yet humorus, sophisticated yet sexy"; the latest crushes and favorite phrases ("Bonermobile," "chillin shit!" "poo fuck!"). They keep saying they're "so bored," and you know what they mean. Even wild Tracy is biding her time, spinning her wheels, waiting for something.

  In narratives that refuse to build and characters who are a blur of motion and confused motives, Perlstein and Thirteen remind us that early adolescence is above all about transience. The experiments in romance and social alliances—and even in angry defiance—that dominate these accounts tend to seem either trivial or brutal but, mercifully, mostly fickle. From the outsi
de looking in, we can see that this is a period that is not so much formative as transformative, or so we can hope. But if what kids see when they dart desperate, astute glances our way is adults fearfully transfixed by all the flux, they're likely to have a harder time marshalling that dizzying energy of theirs to move on. They can make that "So????" sound very derisive, yet not far from the surface they're still deeply inquisitive. But if all we do is reflect their unhappiness back at them, where will they get any answers?

  Abolish Marriage

  Let's really get the government out of our bedrooms.

  By Michael Kinsley

  Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 8:25 AM PT

  Critics and enthusiasts of Lawrence v. Texas, last week's Supreme Court decision invalidating state anti-sodomy laws, agree on one thing: The next argument is going to be about gay marriage. As Justice Scalia noted in his tart dissent, it follows from the logic of Lawrence. Mutually consenting sex with the person of your choice in the privacy of your own home is now a basic right of American citizenship under the Constitution. This does not mean that the government must supply it or guarantee it. But the government cannot forbid it, and the government also should not discriminate against you for choosing to exercise a basic right of citizenship. Offering an institution as important as marriage to male-female couples only is exactly this kind of discrimination. Or so the gay rights movement will now argue. Persuasively, I think.

  Opponents of gay rights will resist mightily, although they have been in retreat for a couple of decades. General anti-gay sentiments are now considered a serious breach of civic etiquette, even in anti-gay circles. The current line of defense, which probably won't hold either, is between social toleration of homosexuals and social approval of homosexuality. Or between accepting the reality that people are gay, even accepting that gays are people, and endorsing something called "the gay agenda." Gay marriage, the opponents will argue, would cross this line. It would make homosexuality respectable and, worse, normal. Gays are welcome to exist all they want, and to do their inexplicable thing if they must, but they shouldn't expect a government stamp of approval.

  It's going to get ugly. And then it's going to get boring. So, we have two options here. We can add gay marriage to the short list of controversies—abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty—that are so frozen and ritualistic that debates about them are more like Kabuki performances than intellectual exercises. Or we can think outside the box. There is a solution that ought to satisfy both camps and may not be a bad idea even apart from the gay-marriage controversy.

  That solution is to end the institution of marriage. Or rather (he hastens to clarify, Dear) the solution is to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage. Or, framed to appeal to conservatives: End the government monopoly on marriage. Wait, I've got it: Privatize marriage. These slogans all mean the same thing. Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let 'em. If you and your government aren't implicated, what do you care?

  In fact, there is nothing to stop any of this from happening now. And a lot of it does happen. But only certain marriages get certified by the government. So, in the United States we are about to find ourselves in a strange situation where the principal demand of a liberation movement is to be included in the red tape of a government bureaucracy. Having just gotten state governments out of their bedrooms, gays now want these governments back in. Meanwhile, social-conservative anti-gays, many of them Southerners, are calling on the government in Washington to trample states' rights and nationalize the rules of marriage, if necessary, to prevent gays from getting what they want. The Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, responded to the Supreme Court's Lawrence decision by endorsing a constitutional amendment, no less, against gay marriage.

  If marriage were an entirely private affair, all the disputes over gay marriage would become irrelevant. Gay marriage would not have the official sanction of government, but neither would straight marriage. There would be official equality between the two, which is the essence of what gays want and are entitled to. And if the other side is sincere in saying that its concern is not what people do in private, but government endorsement of a gay "lifestyle" or "agenda," that problem goes away, too.

  Yes, yes, marriage is about more than sleeping arrangements. There are children, there are finances, there are spousal job benefits like health insurance and pensions. In all these areas, marriage is used as a substitute for other factors that are harder to measure, such as financial dependence or devotion to offspring. It would be possible to write rules that measure the real factors at stake and leave marriage out of the matter. Regarding children and finances, people can set their own rules, as many already do. None of this would be easy. Marriage functions as what lawyers call a "bright line," which saves the trouble of trying to measure a lot of amorphous factors. You're either married or you're not. Once marriage itself becomes amorphous, who-gets-the-kids and who-gets-health-care become trickier questions.

  So, sure, there are some legitimate objections to the idea of privatizing marriage. But they don't add up to a fatal objection. Especially when you consider that the alternative is arguing about gay marriage until death do us part.

  Holy Matrimony

  What's really undermining the sanctity of marriage?

  By Dahlia Lithwick

  Posted Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003, at 3:29 PM PT

  Within nanoseconds of the Massachusetts Supreme Court's declaration that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution came predictions of the end of life as we know it: The president, speaking from London, warned: "Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

  violates this important principle."

  "The time is now. If you don't do something about this, then you cannot in 20 years—when you see the American public disintegrating and you see our enemies overtaking us because we have no moral will—you remember that you did nothing," said Sandy Rios, president of the Concerned Women for America, to her 1 million radio listeners. "We must amend the Constitution if we are to stop a tyrannical judiciary from redefining marriage to the point of extinction," Focus on the Family urged in a statement on Tuesday.

  Extinction, no less. The institution of marriage—the one that survived Henry VIII, Lorena Bobbitt, Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson—is suddenly going to become extinct?

  Do you want to know what's destroying the sanctity of marriage? Phone messages like the ones we'd get at my old divorce firm in Reno, Nev., left on Saturday mornings and picked up on Monday: "Beeep. Hi? My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I'm at Circus Circus? Room—honey what room is this—oh yeah. Room 407. Thank you. Beeep."

  It just doesn't get much more sacred than that.

  Here's my modest request: If you're going to be a crusader for the sanctity of marriage—if you really believe gay marriage will have some vast corrosive, viral impact on marriage as a whole—here's a brief list of other laws and policies far more dangerous to the institution. Go after these first, then pass your constitutional amendment.

  1. Divorce

  Somewhere between 43 percent and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. If you believe gay marriage is single-handedly eroding a sacred and ancient institution, you cannot possibly be pro-divorce. That means any legislation passed in recent decades making divorce more readily available—from no-fault statutes to the decline of adu
ltery prosecutions—should also be subject to bans, popular referendum, and constitutional amendment.

  2. Circus Circus

  In general, if there is blood in your body and you are over 18, you can get married, so long as you're not in love with your cousin. (Although even that's OK in some states). You can be married to someone you met at the breakfast buffet. Knowing her last name is optional. And you can be married by someone who was McOrdained on the Internet. So before you lobby to ban gay marriage, you might want to work to enact laws limiting the sheer frivolousness of straight marriage. You should be lobbying for an increase in minimum-age requirements, for mandatory counseling pre-marriage, and for statutory waiting periods before marriages (and divorces) can be permitted.

  3. Birth Control

  The dissenters in the Massachusetts decision are of the opinion that the only purpose of marriage is procreation. They urge that a sound reason for discriminating against gay couples is that there is a legitimate state purpose in ensuring, promoting, and supporting an "optimal social structure for the bearing and raising of children." If you're going to take the position that marriage exists solely to encourage begetting, you need to oppose childlessness by choice, birth control, living together, and marriage for the post-menopausal. In fact, if you're really looking for "optimal" social structures for childrearing, you need to legislate against single parents, poor parents, two-career parents, alcoholic or sick parents, and parents who (like myself) are afraid of the Baby Einstein videos.