Patrick M Brennan

Guess which is the best toy? My daughter knows.

The thing about changing a baby’s diaper is that it’s not a two-handed job. I need three hands, minimum, to change my daughter when she’s gone “number two". Unfortunately, I only have two hands. So without going into too much detail, please just believe me when I say it’s nigh-impossible to get away from the scene of the crime unscathed. Her little suit is going to get soiled, or the changing pad, or my hands, or more likely, all three, and it’s not a pretty sight.

I was in the middle of one these clean-up operations, and it occurred to me that all by herself, without even trying very hard, my daughter refutes the doctrine of “Intelligent Design". I mean, after all, an intelligent designer would very likely have come up with a built-in method of waste disposal which was a little neater, don’t you think? Say, something which makes it possible for me to change her diaper with only two hands, and avoid leaving streaks on her pajamas (or my hands)? In fact, if we had been intelligently designed, wouldn’t a diaper be unnecessary?

I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that not one single man in the ID camp has ever changed a diaper. It’s not the only way they’ve avoided reality, so who knows if it would help, but it sure couldn’t hurt.

I sometimes listen to the “alternative music” channel on XM radio. One of their shticks is to use the station ID break (which is wholly unnecessary on satellite radio, isn’t it?) to taunt their listeners, who are hip and ironic enough to enjoy having their hip ironic hipness ridiculed.

So the other evening, while I was driving home, my XM radio said of the alternative music channel, “…the music that used to make you cool … The way the minivan and the stock options don’t now.”

And meanwhile the XM radio display, which usually displays the artist and the track title in big bright amber letters, read:

You’re out of Huggies, alt boy.

And I thought, “I do NOT own a minivan. And we use Pampers, so there.”

They think they know me. Hah!

Thank Jesus for James Dobson! See, without insights like this, I would never have realized that I am (are you ready for this?) – gay!

…most homosexuals “…were not explicitly [so] when they were children. More often, they displayed a ‘nonmasculinity’ that set them painfully apart from other boys: unathletic … somewhat passive, unaggressive and uninterested in rough-and-tumble play. A number of them had traits that could be considered gifts: bright, precocious, social and relational, and artistically talented. Tip: Discern whether your boy struggles with feelings of ‘not belonging.’”

Say – I thought to myself when I read these words. Wasn’t I “unathletic, passive, unaggressive and uninterested in rough-and-tumble play"? I bet my gym teachers thought so! Wasn’t I “bright, precocious, …and artistically talented"? Yeah… Didn’t I feel like I “didn’t belong"? Yeah… hmmmm….

<a moment of reflection later…>

Oh My GOD! I must be GAY! And worse than that – I’ve been in deep closeted denial all these years – even though I am totally uninterested in having sex with men! My wife sure will be surprised when she finds out! (So will all those girls I dated…most of them, anyway…)

Dobson also helpfully blows the whistle (no pun intended) on the Homosexual Campaign Against Children. For a while after reading the article, I was puzzled, because it didn’t convince me that there actually is a Homosexual Campaign Against Children (outside of Dobby’s paranoid mind). See, for reasons I can’t quite discern, he doesn’t actually bother to back up his charges with any, um, you know, sources and facts. But never mind! If Crude-but-Inaccurate Stereotypes and Proof by Assertion^[*] are good enough for Jesus and Doc Dob, they’re good enough for me!

Since my recent revelation, I’ve changed my mind about Ronnie Paris, Jr., who really took James Dobson’s teachings to heart. I used to think that this man was a despicable murderer, a man who would kill his own child for the sake of his ignorant rage and prejudice. But now, I realize that Paris was only trying to help his Boy Become a Man^TM. See, I know now that thanks to Dobson and papa Paris, little Ronnie (3 years old and GAY!) has been spared the prospect of growing up and becoming a part of the Homosexual Campaign Against Children; and countless other little children, as yet unborn, have been spared the prospect of being little Ronnie’s victims. Instead, I’m confident that even now, up in Heaven, little baby Ronnie has been cured of homosexuality by Jesus’s magical touch, and the Apostles are showing him how to have some rough-and-tumble fun in the great outdoors, just like Real Men Who Aren’t Homosexual do.

This is something my wife just brought home for the baby. It kind of creeped me out.

I’m calling it the Sesame Street™ Baby’s First Gallows™.

Don’t tell me it’s a jungle gym, either, because if this was a piece of exercise equipment, the Muppets would be able to reach the floor with their legs. They also wouldn’t be permanently attached to the thing. That’s all I’m saying.

It’s pretty clear from her profile in New York Magazine^[1] that Isabel Kallman is an intensely annoying person, and I’m really glad I don’t know her. (Not that she’d get caught dead knowing me, but that’s a different story.)

This woman has found her own uniquely psychotic solution to the anxiety which faces almost everyone who becomes a parent: that we won’t be good enough, that we’re not up to the job, that we’ll fail as parents.

Her solution is equal parts denial, shameless shilling, amphetamine abuse, business contacts, more denial, and gobs of cash. She’s launching a TV network! She will become the Martha Stewart of parenting, the “Alpha Mom” who will show all the slobs out there how much better she is than they are. Her empire will grow “from television to radio, to broadband and wireless, and on into toys, beauty products, books, and music … The end goal is for the Alpha Mom brand to become like Oprah, … who is ‘the template for success in media today.’”

Oh, yeah. Somewhere in her to-do list, there was a baby. How does she find time to take care of her child while she’s out conquering the universe? Answer:

[T]he hottest experts… talked about the right way of parenting: …You wear him on your body so that he gets used to your voice, develops language skills more quickly, “becomes,"… says Isabel, “a smarter baby."… But she could never pull that one off. The more Isabela’s child demanded of her, the more she went out to learn. And the more she learned, the more she was told to stay close; and the more people she hired who could do that for her.

This was motherhood’s magic bullet, the most valuable lesson Isabel learned in her studies: “It takes a village.” Isabel quickly hired one. Her son was just 2 weeks old when she retained a night nurse. When he was 5 months, “I started realizing I needed to get out more,"… and she brought on a nanny. Then after about a year, when she started working, “I obviously needed more help,"… so she hired a regular babysitter as well; also often employing her father and an Alpha Mom intern.

Isabel began to see that all things were possible again, that with her village, she could pursue the extraordinary goals she had both for herself and for her child. While the village watched him, she set out to master motherhood.

Where “motherhood", I guess, means something other than “being a mother to your child.” To Isabel, it means, “getting rich(er) by exploiting other people’s feelings of inadeqacy.” As for the actual motherhood thing, well hey, that’s what servants do while you master motherhood.

Hey Isabel, here’s a hint. There’s a name for a village when the “villagers” are actually your employees: it’s called Potemkin.

footnote: I couldn’t honestly tell from the article whether the writer was fawning over Isabel or mocking her, even sometimes in the same sentence. Then again, they mocked Martha, didn’t they? And look where she is.

Thanks to my lovely wife for pointing out this article, via a little pregnant.

Sometime around 2:00 this morning, I was in the baby’s room (having taken the baby and left my wife in our bedroom to sleep), trying unsuccessfully to rock my daughter to sleep in the glider rocker. At least she was calm. I was only half-awake at the time, in my bathrobe and slippers, and when I looked down at my feet I saw one cat dozing next to my left foot, and the other cat soundly sleeping with her head propped on my right foot. And I thought, this is a great image. Here I am, the ur-Daddy, father and protector of small creatures.

You see now what sleep deprivation does to you?

My wife was trying to calm down our infant daughter a few nights ago, and she was walking around with the baby, singing to her. She thought I was asleep, and she was singing:

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.

What a lame song, I thought, and I picked up the next verse, singing my own version of the song, surprising my wife.

We know you’re a ball of gas
Held in tight by gravity,
Excited to incandescense by
Nuclear fusion in your core.

You are very far away,
And your light takes many years
To reach the people down on earth,
Where we watch you twinkling.

Which incidentally is caused
By turbulence up in our air,
Which differentially refracts
The light you’re shining down on us.

Our Sun is a star like you
Which our earth is circling.
Lots of planets have been found
Orbiting stars just like you.
Twinkle twinkle little star
Now I know just what you are.

I think I’ll keep cleaning this one up and adding to it in anticipation of teaching it to my daughter. In the meantime I’ll settle for having made my wife laugh so hard she had to set the baby down.

This is me and my brand-new daughter.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. – Woody Allen

Everyone thinks about their mortality. Probably, everyone thinks about how to transcend it. There sure are plenty of ideas out there, as there have been for thousands of years (many of them have plenty of currency today). Of course I’ve been thinking about this because my wife and I are about to participate in the single most popular mode of achieving immortality, that is, we’re about to have a child.

I don’t want to get specific in this post, though, because I want to do something a little different with this post. I want to solicit your opinion this time out. Since everyone brings their own assumptions to the question, I don’t want to prejudice your answers.

So: How do you plan to live forever?

Feel free to interpret the question as you like. Consider it as a spiritual problem, a philosophical problem, a metaphysical problem, or even a biological problem. Everybody has something to say about immortality, especially their own.

Post anonymously if you like, but please post. I will follow up in a later post, though I can’t promise how much later, because baby is due any day now.

I’ve always had a problem with SUVs. They’re too big, they’re too expensive, and they get lousy gas mileage. Although there are lots of legitimate reasons to own a truck, most people who buy SUVs don’t need them, and only buy them for their status value. “Look, I can afford this!” (Yeah, well probably you’re overextended.) Plus, people don’t seem to modify their driving habits when they buy SUVs, so behavior which is just dumb in a car becomes positively dangerous. People drive their SUVs too fast in all kinds of weather, they follow other cars way too closely, and they don’t know how to maneuver their trucks in tight corners.

Of course, it’s none of my business what anyone else drives. You know? I’m drive-and-let-drive. If you want to spend more money than you can really afford to buy more car than you know how to drive, hey, that’s what you want to do. It’s dumb, but it’s none of my business.

But then you had to go and rear-end my pregnant wife’s car with your giant gas-sucking monstrosity! I think that’s when it becomes my business.

My wife was flung forward in the collision, crushing our unborn child between her and her steering wheel. She was rushed to an emergency room, where I met her, and we spent an anxious day in the hospital, getting tests done and monitoring the baby to ensure that she wasn’t hurt … though of course we won’t know for sure until she’s born. In the meantime, my wife began having serious contractions, and the doctors had to give her body a pharmacological reminder that baby’s not ready yet. It was a difficult and stressful day for both of us. Needless to say, neither one of us made it into the office that day.

I feel very confident that right after you nearly killed my wife and my daughter, you got to your office only a little late. You probably resented the imposition of having to talk to the police.

You claimed that there was ice on the road. This was on the second clear and sunny morning after a light snowfall. I don’t think there was any ice on the road; there wasn’t any when I visited the site later that evening. So what does that say about you? Well, what does an SUV say about almost anyone? You just hit a pregnant woman, and what are you worried about? You’re worried about whether someone’s going to actually demand any accountability from you.

Look, I think you just weren’t paying attention. That’s not an evil thing in of itself, but for God’s sake, how can you not be paying attention when you’re driving a 3,000 pound Deathmobile? It’s irresponsible, is what it is. You have more car than you know how to drive.

You could kill somebody with that thing! And you don’t seem to care about that. Idiot!

PS: Here’s a timely link about the false economics of owning an SUV. It’s not (usually) a rational choice, but I’m not pretending people buy SUVs for rational reasons.

My wife and I went to the first day of childbirthing class this morning, where among other things, my wife is supposed to learn some techniques to help her relax. In order to put everyone in the proper frame of mind, the instructor had set up a CD player to play relaxing music for the expecting couples. Which by itself, I don’t have a problem with. I like to relax. I like it when my wife relaxes. And she’s going to have to get good at it by the time she goes into labor.

But you know what? We don’t get relaxed by any chimey-ass New Age music. When we came into the classroom, the CD player was playing something consisting of harp accompanied by pan flute. You know, yoga music, or upmarket massage music. Or downmarket massage music, for all I know. The kind of music that is usually accompanied by incense, and although it was very, very earnest, it was not soothing. It was, in fact, a little irritating. Plus, as this was the beginning of the day, we were wondering just what we had wandered into. As the harp finished plinking out its intro, and the pan flute whistled out its first few notes, like a sad little Zamfir, my wife turned to me. And she asked, “What do you suppose the name of this song is?”

“The name of the song is: ‘Pleeeeeeease’.”

My wife and I just went through the thoroughly unpleasant exercise of figuring out our household budget. We’re expecting a new member of the family in the next few months, a baby is rumored to be very expensive upfront, and the new mom will be taking some unpaid leave to get the baby off to a good start. So we needed to take a look at what was coming into the house, and what was going out, and we needed to make some decisions about how to reconcile these numbers with our desire to somehow stay solvent, save for our retirement and our baby’s education, pay our immediate expenses and pay down our debt – all at the same time!

My wife and I are very lucky people: we’ve been pretty frugal, we’ve made some good decisions, we both have good jobs, we are in good health, and we’re not deeply in debt. So, fortunately, the decisions weren’t hard. Even so, the process was a little rough, because there’s a lot of detail involved, and it literally entails generating and then analyzing several sheets covered in numbers, and not just any numbers, at that. These are numbers which have strong emotional resonance. Who wants to do that? Imagine how much harder it would have been if we had a number phobia, or if we knew we had a real money problem and didn’t want to face up to it. In the end, though, we did the responsible thing. We balanced our budget, and now we’re financially prepared for the baby’s arrival. We think.

At the same time that my wife and I are wrestling with our budget, our town is also facing an issue with its own. The town is currently projecting a shortfall of between $1-2 million this year, and nobody seems to have a good idea around that uncomfortable fact. Cutting the budget will entail real pain: the biggest single line item in the budget is the school system, which would necessarily have to bear the brunt of any cuts. The town has been covering its shortfall with its savings, but this has been a stopgap and is clearly not a long-term option.

The town can ask us to pass a property-tax override, enabling them to raise our property taxes over the 2.5% per year maximum increase allowed under Massachusetts Proposition 2 1/2. Predictably, when word of this possibility spread around, the signs sprouted on the larger lawns in town: “NO OVERRIDE.” No decision has been reached on whether to hold a vote on an override, though, so it might not happen. My wife and I aren’t sure yet how we feel about the town budget. We don’t mind paying our fair share of taxes, but we certainly want to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth for what we spend, especially since our daughter is going to be going to school here. (…or maybe not.)

Regardless of whether we’re talking about our own household budget or that of the town, however, we’re talking about operating under the same set of rules. No budget, no matter how large or small, must operate according to these rules: Income must be equal to or greater than expenses. The numbers must add up correctly. Nothing must be left out of the budget. (This was the sticking point in developing our household budget. Gathering all the receipts, adding them all together, categorizing them – does this one go under “Groceries” or “Baby Supplies"? – and ensuring that we hadn’t forgotten whole categories of spending, was probably the hardest part.) And most critically, no matter how we feel about it, the numbers are the numbers. We must make the choices that make the numbers balance. The budget must be honest. Otherwise, it’s worthless.

With those simple rules in mind, it’s useful to take a look at the US Federal Government budget which has just been proposed by George W. Bush. This document is one of the most breathtakingly dishonest documents to ever come out of an already amazingly dishonest government.

The claim that caught my eye in this part of the document was that this budget actually contributes to reducing the budget deficit. Supposedly, by 2010, the deficit – the annual amount that the government borrows, not the total debt, which is still spiraling out of control – is to be cut in half. In order to get there, however, the budget also assumes that none of the three signature George W. Bush policies – the War, the Permanent Tax Cuts, and Social Security Privatization – exist or are enacted, even though they are Bush’s own priorities in his second term.

The federal budget makes no provision – none whatsoever – for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not even a guess! These wars are officially budgeted at zero! See, instead of putting them in the real budget, they ask Congress for the money in “supplemental” requests (like this one); and they claim that since they don’t know how much, exactly, the wars are going to cost, they can’t put even an estimate in the budget. While the real cost of these wars is already about $300 billion, the official estimate of the cost is ZERO.

The budget assumes that Bush’s signature tax cuts expire, as they are currently set to. It’s really impossible to balance the US Budget with these tax cuts in place, so even though Bush is committed to making them permanent, his budget magically wishes them away, so that he can claim to be cutting the deficit.

Finally, the budget assumes that there is no Social Security privatization, even though, once again, Bush is committed to enacting his cherished private accounts this term. Here’s the rub: in order to set up Bush’s private accounts, the government will have to borrow enormous sums of money – somewhere between $750 billion and $2 trillion. Clearly, there is no way to reduce the deficit by half, let alone balance the budget, and enact Bush’s private accounts scheme, so it’s not in the budget.

How easy would my life be if we could run our household budget by W Rules?

“Honey? We’re doing great! All I have to do is take the mortgage payment out of our budget, and look! We’re running a big surplus! While we’re at it, let’s borrow a whole bunch of money and go on a spending spree. And, yes, I am buying an SUV, but since I don’t know whether I’m buying a Hummer or a Bad Boy, I’m estimating the cost as … zero. But I promise – “, with my fingers crossed behind my back, “– I promise that in five years, we’ll borrow less than we’re borrowing this year. Wheeeeee!”

Well, you know how that ends. Sooner or later, a banker (Republican, naturally) will come around and take possession of my house, my car, and anything else I have of value. We would end up in a homeless shelter, assuming those were still being funded (they’re being cut back, of course).

Because government budgets contain such enormous numbers and are difficult to read, and – frankly – because they’re being lied to, people think that governments operate under different budget rules from their households, but it’s just not true. Even the federal budget, with its dizzying heights of debt and its byzantine depth of detail, operates according to the same rules as our little household budget or our town budget: the numbers must add up, and the budget must be honest. (The biggest difference is the amount of say you get. I mean, hey, at home, I get one of two votes. In the federal budget, well, since I am not on the Bush Pioneer list of big-money donors, the Republicans let me have exactly zero votes.)

When it comes to government budgets, like our town’s, there are only two choices. Either taxes must be raised, or expenses must be cut. (Our town doesn’t sell T-Bills, and I’m betting yours doesn’t, either.) Those are the only two choices, and neither one is easy. It takes honest and brave people to face up to these problems. By borrowing madly, shifting the burden of currenly liabilities on to future generations, and by pretending that other major liabilities simply don’t exist, Bush is only demonstrating his dishonesty and his moral cowardice.

It is true that the US government has a better credit rating than you or I do, but that’s because the government can always squeeze people for more money to pay off its debt. And believe me, it will. Bush is busy piling on a mountain of debt right now, and – I’m assuming you’re not a billionaire Republican friend of W here – sooner or later, the government is going to come looking for you and me to pay it back, because whatever else a government can do, it can’t borrow its way out of debt.

(By the way, remember back when balanced budgets were a Conservative issue? Now I’m a hippie for pointing out that you can’t borrow forever. Proof that God has a sense of humor.)

“Freedom,” wrote George Orwell, “is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four.” This week, as we ponder the glorious steaming fetid lie that Bush will truck up to Congress and call his Budget Plan, that phrase resonates on more than one level.

Hey Bush Voters! Now I have something new to thank you for!

See, I have a daughter on the way. In just a couple of months, she’s going to enter this world, and thanks to years of reckless, irresponsible Republican fiscal policies, she’s going to start life already $26,000 in debt!

Thanks, Bush Voters!

You can’t blame the Democrats: as you can clearly see here, the Democrats have been the party of fiscal responsibility. Under Clinton, the deficit had nearly disappeared. We were even looking at budget surpluses when Bush came into office. Once you Bush voters had your say, that changed dramatically.

(Click the image for a larger view)

The Republicans have not only dramatically widened the budget deficit (which is only the yearly increase on the total national debt), they don’t even pretend to care about its consequences any more. With complete domination of all three branches of government, they’d do something about it if they cared to. But thanks to the free pass you’ve given them, they don’t think they have to do anything about it. In fact, Bush wants to add TWO TRILLION MORE to this pile of debt, in order to fund his Social Security piratization plan.

The result? My child already owes $26,000 to the federal government, and she hasn’t even been born yet.

Call it The Birth Tax.

Thanks, Bush voters!

Since interest is accumulating on that money every day – and since the Republicans haven’t stopped their borrowing binge – you can be sure that she’ll owe a whole lot more by the time she’s able to start paying that money back.

Bush voters, you may be too stupid to realize this, but there is only one way that money is going to be paid back. Those loans were taken out in our names, and it is our obligation to pay them back. The money will be collected in taxes and the debt will be paid. And you morons will probably think that the inevitable pain of increased taxes will be someone else’s fault, because that’s what Fox News will tell you.

There’s another reason $26,000 is actually an understatement of the real value of the Birth Tax. See, that number is simply the national debt (about 7.6 TRILLION dollars) divided by the total population of the United States (about 295 million). But since Republican policies of the past twenty years are systematically moving the tax burden off of corporations (few of which pay any tax at all any more) and rich people (ditto), and on to working people, by the time my daughter is old enough to work, her tax burden will probably be much larger than mine is.

$26,000 is an amount which doesn’t matter to a guy like Bush. If you’re already rich, after all, $26,000 isn’t so much. Daddy can write a check for $26,000 without breaking a sweat. Of course, for guys like Bush, who have never in their entire lives actually paid their fair share for anything, it’s probably something that can be taken care of with a phone call to the right people. Right this way, sir; no, of course your ticket has already been paid for. Yes, sir. See, actually paying for things, that’s for proles. Not for Bushes.

But for my daughter, $26,000 can be the difference between getting a good college education, or a mediocre one – or none at all. It can be the difference between owning her first home at 25, or 45 – or never. It can be the difference between getting first-rate care in a medical crisis, or poor care – or none at all. It might literally be the difference between a long, healthy, good life, or a short and bad life. When you’re just starting out, and you’re middle-class like me and my daughter, $26,000 is a LOT of money.

This is the Birth Tax, the Bush tax, the most durable legacy of Republican hegemony. Long after George W. Bush has faded from memory, people will stay be paying for his profligacy and irresponsibility.

Thanks, Bush voters! You got your $300 checks?

Good, because guess what? It’s not just my daughter that has to pay that back. For something like 98% of all you dopes out there, your kids will be paying it, too. And rich Republican kids will be laughing their asses off – at you. Just like Bush is right now.