Why Have Kids?

No sooner had I cleaned my seven-week-old daughter’s poop off my lap the other day (don’t ask) than my two-year-old tried and failed to empty a jug of milk into a teacup she had perched atop a stack of art books (you have to understand what a book fetish I have to fully appreciate how traumatizing this was). Why, I tried to remember, did I decide to have kids?

In his new book about America’s declining birthrate, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, Jonathan Last calculates that the cost of raising just one child, when you factor in skyrocketing college tuition and hidden costs like lost second-parent income, now tops $1.1 million. “Children have gone from being a marker of economic success to a barrier to economic success.” As if that weren’t deterrence enough, Last notes correctly that “to raise a child is to submit to a staggering amount of work, much of which is deeply unpleasant. It would be crazy to have children if they weren’t so damned important.”

By “important,” Last means necessary for the maintenance of a fertility rate that won’t one day lead us to extinction. But preservation of the species isn’t what motivates most parents to have children; they have them for any number of personal reasons – when they do have them. Pets now outnumber kids in America, Last writes, by more than 4 to 1: “Pets have become fuzzy, low-maintenance replacements for children.”

It’s hard to blame people for preferring pets and freedom. Putting diapers on babies puts a damper on a freewheeling lifestyle. To be a parent – a good parent, anyway – means that from Day One the child replaces you as the center of your universe. “Having kids is, literally, no fun,” says Last. “Researchers have been studying the effects of children on their parents for decades and the results are nearly always the same. Having children makes parents less happy.”

Israeli Leftist Targets a Holocaust Organization

On the left-wing Israeli website Haaretz.com, correspondent Amira Hass posted an article recently with the unwieldy title, “On an ostensible Holocaust website, the U.S. right's opposition to Obama is the message,” in which she attacked the work of the Los Angeles-based Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (CJHS) for its pro-Israel and anti-totalitarian stance, two positions the left cannot tolerate.

Hass wrote that CJHS caught her attention a few months ago with an email containing a “hair-raising photograph of the train tracks to Auschwitz.” Hass, herself a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors, “assumed that this group that I wasn't familiar with somehow considered me one of their own… and I let myself read what the group had to say.” I’m pretty certain that CJHS does not consider Hass one of its own, since her work perpetuates the standard leftist lies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In any case, what Hass then read on the site prompted her to attempt a withering response.

“On the site of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors,” Hass wrote, “the right wing uses one of the 20th century's greatest atrocities for political gain.” This disgusting accusation is a cynical ploy to gloss over the fact that it is the unholy alliance of the left and Islamic fundamentalists who want to diminish the historical truth of the Holocaust – or deny it altogether – for their own political gain.

“The first thing I learned” from the site, she continued, “was that I should be gravely worried by Chuck Hagel's possible appointment as the next U.S. defense secretary.” Actually, Israel should be gravely worried but Hass has nothing to fear, since neither she nor Hagel is a friend of our Middle East ally. Next, she read that CJHS is “committed to the promotion of Western values against the dual threats of complacency and the spread of Islam.” Hass found this amusing, claiming “that the social and biologically-based hierarchy, white supremacy, racial purity, country above all and man in service of the state and race are Western values.” If Hass considers those to be the West’s values, then she fits right in with the deranged Islamic fundamentalists whose genocidal agenda she is abetting.

The Joylessness of Cooking

Call it the American Idolization of food television. Cooking competition shows a là the music industry’s mega-hyped, mega-successful talent showcase have proliferated in the last several years, to the point of absurdity (Cupcake Wars, anyone?). Networks have discovered that, like American Idol and its imitators like The Voice and Duets, such shows cook up booming business. But something crucial is lost in the race for ratings.

The Food Network used to thrive on the standard celebrity chef cooking instruction shows like Everyday Italian with the glamorous Giada DeLaurentiis, Paula’s Home Cooking with downhome Paula Deen, Thirty Minute Meals with superstar Rachael Ray, and Barefoot Contessa with Ina Garten, who disappointingly is not actually a barefoot contessa. Those shows, or variations thereof featuring the same hosts, still anchor the network’s weekday schedule, but its prime time lineup now is given over almost entirely to cooking competitions.

Here’s a list just off the top of my head: Top Chef, Top Chef: Just Desserts, Iron Chef, Iron Chef America, Next Iron Chef, Next Food Network Star, Throwdown, Chopped, Cupcake Wars, Dinner: Impossible, The Taste, Rachel vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-off, Bobby’s Dinner Battle, Food Network Challenge, Halloween Wars, Last Cake Standing, Food Feuds, Food Fights, Ready…Set…Cook!, Sweet Genius, Ultimate Recipe Showdown, Worst Cooks in America, Chef Wanted, Chefs vs. City, Next Great Baker – but you get the idea.

What Will Win the Best Picture Oscar – And What Should?

As the 2013 Oscar telecast approaches this coming Sunday, keep this in mind when trying your hand at predictions: Hollywood is like high school with money, as someone once famously remarked, and the Oscars are like a glitzier high school popularity contest. The film which takes Best Picture isn’t necessarily the most artful and profound, but is sometimes the one by a filmmaker that Hollywood voters simply want to reward as one of their in-crowd’s own.

With that in mind, most of the nine films from the Best Picture slate can immediately be stricken from consideration: the foreign film Amour, because it’s foreign; the controversial Zero Dark Thirty, because it has drawn very vocal disapproval from some in Hollywood with its suggestion that waterboarding might have led us to bin Laden; the magical Beasts of the Southern Wild and the fantastical Life of Pi, because they’re a bit too artsy; and Quentin Tarantino’s kill-fest Django Unchained, because it doesn’t suit Hollywood’s newly acquired sensitivity to gun violence.

Of the other contenders, Silver Linings Playbook features Hollywood’s two hottest stars at present – Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, both of whom are up for Oscars, as is its director David O. Russell. But as a quirky relationship dramedy, it lacks a big enough canvas for an Oscar. On the other hand, the epic Les Miserables has a sweeping canvas but is a musical, and only one other musical (Chicago, 2002) has won Best Picture in the past 45 years.

In Defense of Traditional Gender Roles

In her Wall Street Journal piece “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?” and her new book Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, Kay Hymowitz gives voice to the complaint from “legions of frustrated young women” that today’s twenty-something men wallow in a sort of limbo of extended adolescence she calls “pre-adulthood.” She claims that guys (as distinct from “men”) in this state are clinging to adolescence while their female counterparts are achieving professional success and looking – in vain – for a comparably mature mate with whom to build a life.

This is a complaint that goes back at least as far as the 1983 pop psych book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, and is largely the result of the massive impact feminism has had – and continues to have – on relationships between American men and women (I say “American” because in my personal experience, which is admittedly not scientifically validated, neither feminism nor the Peter Pan syndrome are problematic relationship issues elsewhere in the world anywhere near like they are in this country – but that’s a topic for another time).

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting

When I was young, one of the overarching dreads of our society was the imminent “population explosion” – the threat of humanity outstripping its planetary space and resources, a fear generated largely by Paul Erhlich’s seminal 1968 book The Population Bomb. Like global warming, we simply accepted Erhlich’s doomsday scenario as inevitable fact. But Jonathan Last, in his new book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, claims that not only did the population bomb never explode, the world’s population will soon begin shrinking. The greatest threat to American life isn’t terrorism, he asserts, or China, or the crushing debt – it is our collective reluctance to have more children.

Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, Slate, and many other publications. He is a regular commentator in the media and has appeared on ABC, CNN, Fox News, NPR and elsewhere. In his compelling short new book, Last explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.

Mark Tapson:         Mr. Last, the subtitle of your book is “America’s Coming Demographic Disaster” – exactly what disaster are we facing?

Brainwashing Kids About Guns

A spate of recent incidents in which schoolchildren were punished for unconscionable gun crimes triggering the hysteria of politically correct school officials highlights the left’s increasing insanity about guns.

A five-year-old girl from Pennsylvania was suspended from school last month after telling a friend she was going to shoot her with a pink toy gun that sprays hollow-point bullets bubbles. Despite not even having the bubble gun with her at the time of the shockingly dire threat, the kindergartener was later interrogated by school officials without her parents present. She was ultimately – are you sitting down for this? – labeled a “terrorist threat,” suspended for ten days, and required to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

At about the same time, a school in Maryland suspended two six-year-olds for making a gun gesture with their hands while playing cops-and-robbers during recess. Two weeks before that, another six-year-old was suspended for the same terrorist offense. This idiocy is reminiscent of an incident last year in which a deaf three-year-old was informed by school district officials that the signing he uses for his name too closely resembles him waving a gun. So now he is required to spell out his name letter by letter instead. That’ll teach him.

The insanity continues. Now a seven-year-old Colorado boy has been suspended for throwing a pretend grenade at a pretend box full of “evil forces” while playing “rescue the world” at recess. Again, that’s a pretend grenade he lobbed at a pretend box of evil (good thing he didn’t refer to it as an “axis of evil,” or the officials might have tarred and feathered the kid and run him and his Bush-loving parents out of town). His school maintains a list of “absolutes,” no-nos designed to keep the schoolgrounds safe, which includes “no fighting, real or imaginary; no weapons, real or imaginary.” Because it isn’t enough to ban students from playing with real weapons; it must be verboten even to think about them, even when combating evil.

Notes Toward Winning the Culture War

As my friend the late, great Andrew Breitbart was fond of pointing out, politics flows downstream from culture, and the results of the last election confirm that. Conservatives lost last November in the political arena because for decades the radical left laid the groundwork for it in the cultural arena. Politics is obviously a critical battleground, but unless and until we start thinking in terms of waging a vigorous cultural campaign, we will never win another presidential election. Following is a rough beginning of some thoughts toward that end.

There is no way the radical and insubstantial Barack Obama would ever have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate, much less be elected to two terms in the White House, if the left had not successfully infiltrated the key cultural realms – education, news media, and entertainment – and spent decades indoctrinating generations to reject traditional American values, feel shame rather than pride in our country’s history, and embrace their own enslavement to a big government, post-American, cancerous ideology rebranded as progressivism. That indoctrination runs so deep in too many American hearts and minds that not even the reality of four disastrous years under Obama was enough to shock them out of their irrational addiction to his hope-and-change snake oil. Deprogramming that indoctrination and seducing subsequent generations to a renewed vision of American exceptionalism means retaking the culture or creating a parallel one.

Kirsten Powers: The Last Liberal?

Last week Kirsten Powers, one of the more visible Democratic contributors to Fox News, wrote a lengthy piece for that organization’s website called “Obama vs. Fox News –behind the White House strategy to delegitimize a news organization.” In it she rather shockingly set herself apart from her more radical cohorts on the left by demonstrating a willingness to denounce them for their demonization of Fox and their assault on freedom of the press. She may be one of the last pundits on the left to adhere, at least in this instance, to classical liberal values.

“There is no war on terror for the Obama White House,” her op-ed began, “but there is one on Fox News.” She was referring to a recent interview with The New Republic in which President Obama complained yet again about, as she put it, “the one television news outlet in America that won’t fall in line and treat him as emperor… the media meanies at Fox News.” Unaccustomed to being held accountable by an adoring mainstream media, Obama has never even bothered to hide his frustration and irritation with Fox. In fact, the White House is brazenly open about its campaign to, as Powers wrote, “silence any dissent they detect in the press corps.”

Powers recounts some of the more recent instances of that campaign. For example, the White House excluded Fox News from conference calls dealing with the Benghazi debacle, “despite Fox News being the only outlet that was regularly reporting on it and despite Fox having top notch foreign policy reporters.” Actually, Fox was frozen out not so much despite its topnotch focus on Benghazi as because of it, since Obama and Hilary Clinton would like to bury the controversy. The fact that Powers openly acknowledged Fox’s investigative quality rather than simply accusing the network of harassing the President over an issue that “doesn’t make a difference,” to paraphrase Clinton, is unheard of from the left.

Oliver Stone’s Untold History Comes to an End

In the final episode of director Oliver Stone’s Showtime documentary miniseries entitled The Untold History of the United States, he and co-writer Peter Kuznick take aim at “Bush and Obama: Age of Terror.” It is everything you would expect from their America-hating collaboration.

Narrating in a creepily sibilant cadence like a woozy William Shatner, Stone immediately sets the stage in this episode with quotes about our “fear” and paranoia of a Muslim enemy – as if many years of accelerated Islamic attacks on America and American interests, including the World Trade Center horror (about which Stone himself made a feature film starring Nicolas Cage), were nothing more than figments of a fevered national imagination; for Stone and the left in general, the CIA are the real bad guys, of course. He paints a picture of a George W. Bush administration that didn’t want to let the 9/11 crisis go to waste, and so “leapt into action” to undertake a “global war.” Stone glosses over the fact that going to war against stateless Islamic fundamentalists was necessarily a worldwide venture not limited to bin Laden and his al Qaeda core.

True to his Hollywood roots, Stone dramatizes what he deems to be Bush’s excessive national security measures with, hilariously, footage from Showtime’s terrorism drama Homeland, showing a scene in which a character’s home is being bugged and monitored by the CIA – a character who is in fact a terrorist. Stone then goes on to use dramatized torture footage from several films, from The Battle of Algiers (1966) to Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd to the anti-extraordinary rendition film called, well, Rendition. Along the way he sideswipes the Somalia military action drama Black Hawk Down for “glorifying American heroism and technology” – yes, heaven forbid that Hollywood should ever glorify American heroism and technology.