I'm a fan of using kooky incidents as a jumping point to ponder the Big Questions of Our Time, but Frank Rich's half-hearted defense of Balloon Boy's dad Richard Heene counts as an overt abuse of the form, on many levels. I simply cannot accept Heene as Rich paints him, a man ground down by our economy and striving for the perceived payoffs of fame to the point of the evil misuse of his family. Rich leaves out inconvenient information about Heene that might undermine his view of Heene as the everyman gone wrong. For instance, Rich ignores that Heene is a barking-mad misogynist.

This might not immediately seem like important information when considering Frank's thesis about reality-TV shows, the economy, and the growing lack of respect for the truth. But it is relevant, and I suspect that if Heene were more of a white supremacist than a misogynist, Rich would have immediately seen the connection. All of his examples of the collapse between truth and reality on the political front come from the right, after all. More importantly, there's a long history in the West of white-supremacist groups with tendencies toward fantasy perpetrating hoaxes like  counterfeiting money or luring people into thinking income tax is unconstitutional. White supremacists have been blurring the line between fantasy and reality and using the results to get attention and even money for a long time.

Richard Heene isn't a neo-Nazi or anything like that, but his attitudes towards women are reminiscient of those groups' attitudes toward nonwhite or non-Christian people. Heene's loathing and hatred of women is something to behold, and behold it you can, because he's left a number of videos out there to document his nuttiness. He exhibits a visceral disgust toward women, and obsesses over Hillary Clinton, the calling card of misogynists. Most disturbingly, he coached his three sons into recording a video about the dangers of "pussification" and homosexuality. In other words, Heene is a right-wing crank, and his willingness to perpetuate a hoax and arrogance at thinking he could pull it off are classic traits of the right-wing crank.

The line between right-wing cranks and charlatans is thin indeed, and much of the time, it's invisible. Under his real name Michael Weiner, right-wing crank and talk show host Michael Savage peddles homeopathic medicine and trends towards denying the reality of mental illnesses such as autism. "Men's rights" activists like Glenn Sacks feature endless ads on their shows from family lawyers who make a nice living getting bitter men to sue their ex-wives over and over again. Visit some right-wing blogs and take an eyeful of the ads selling gold and survivalist supplies. Austin dwellers like myself should be familiar with our own famous paranoid conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who makes a nice living from selling books and videos about international conspiracies.

As tempting as it is to suggest that Heene represents the next step in reality-TV excesses, I'm afraid he belongs to a longer tradition of right-wing charlatans trying to turn their weirdness into financial gain.

Tags: balloon boy, misogyny, right wing nuts

Looking for a dad-themed movie to rent this Father’s Day? Most movies about dads portray them in one of two ways: as an incompetent boob (National Lampoon’s Vacation, Daddy Day Camp, Three Men and a Baby) or as a problem-of-a-father (The Great Santini, Life With Father, Father of the Bride). Recently, however, I saw two movies (both out on DVD now) that I think exemplify another kind of movie about fathers: the über-daddy movie.

One such movie is Taken, starring Liam Neeson as an overprotective father who is some sort of unexplained highly skilled former government agent and whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by a circle of white-slavers while vacationing with a friend in Paris.

With absolutely nothing to go on except a final phone call from his daughter and the address she was staying at, he uses his super-agent skills to (I don’t think I’m giving anything away here—I’m pretty sure you all could guess how it ends) save her. He is powerful, unafraid, invincible. Who wouldn’t want a daddy like that?

The other movie is Gran Torino, starring Clint Eastwood as an old-codger widower who refuses to leave his home even though the neighborhood is being taken over by Asian gangs. Not being too fond of Asians since serving in the Korean War, Clint is none too happy when a fatherless family of Hmongs moves in next door. But after they are threatened by a local gang, Clint steps in to kick some butt.

Yes, both movies have lots of violence and sensationalism, but they make a nice change from the daddy-as-loser genres.

Tags: Clint Eastwood, daddies, dads, father's, father's day, gran torino, Liam Neeson, Taken

Judith Leavitt has written a history of fatherhood, specifically about the evolution of male participation in the process of giving birth. In a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Last reports the less-than-shocking news: The 20th century saw men becoming more and more involved with the process of pregnancy, and less and less commonly banished from the premises during the birth itself. This has culminated, Last explains, in “all manner of idiocy,” from fathers who videotape the birth to fathers cutting the umbilical cord. Commence axe grinding:

Ms. Leavitt quotes one doctor's argument from the mid-1960s: "As the charm of woman is in her mystery, it is inconceivable that a wife will maintain her sexual prestige after her husband witnessed the expulsion of a baby—a negligee will never hide this apparition." Another doctor concluded: "On the whole, it is not a show to watch." We all laugh at how benighted such views are. (Even if there is, just possibly, some truth in them.) Yet today it is socially acceptable to father a child without marrying the mother or to divorce her later on if mother and father actually do bother to get hitched. And at the same time there is zero tolerance for a husband who says: "No thanks, I'll be in the waiting room with cigars." Ms. Leavitt's fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness.

And thus, as it so often does, sad-sack nostalgia for a lost era of male privilege passes for high moral seriousness. Note that the book under consideration would appear to have nothing to do with the subject of out-of-wedlock births. Last would just like to point out that it’s “unserious” to demand that men assume involvement beyond smoking in the next room, because, hey at least they’re in the vicinity. Not like those other fathers! How much do you pregnant broads expect? This is the rhetorical equivalent of your kid saying he shouldn't be forced to go to school every weekday; after all, some kids in Afghanistan never go to school. Presumably, a serious defense of Last's position would sketch some actual arguments in favor of male exile from the maternity ward. But it's surely easier to change the subject and yearn for a Mad Men-esque division of labor.

Photograph of pregnant woman from Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: childbirth, fatherhood, labor

Reading the obituaries column of the newspaper is so much cheaper than therapy, yet it's often just as effective at driving a trip down memory lane. This morning's tributes to British female impersonator Danny La Rue, who died at the age of 81, sent me back three decades to my grandma's house where the family would gather around the telly to watch his performances. (Scroll down for a video of one.)

La Rue disliked being called a "drag artist." His act was all about convincing the audience that the person on stage or screen was the most glamorous, dazzling dame in the world. Being a working-class lad himself, he knew how to tap into the ultimate British fantasy—that rich people aren't all condescending twits—as well as female audience members' hopes that male performers won't denigrate women. This understanding is what made his entrances such genius—he would stride on stage, showing off the gorgeous gown, the great gams, and the glittering jewelry, looking every inch the lady, and then he would declare in a deep voice and a Cockney accent, "Wotcher, mate." With those two words he revealed his sex and his class roots and declared, I'm not trying to deceive or mock you—I'm just going to put on a lovely show.

It was hard to dislike Danny La Rue—partly because he was such a sentimentalist. His signature song (delivered in his very mediocre baritone) was "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep," an anthem to endless love in which he wondered if Sally from the alley still remembered her childhood beau Joe—at the mention of Joe, he would point to his heaving bosom. In a modern context, the song reads like the wistful memory of a male to female transperson, but like all La Rue's work, it was just a look back to the good old days when everything was simpler.

Danny La Rue was always very discreet about his sexuality—he described his longtime manager as "the love of my life," and the Guardian obit mentions that his "companion" died of AIDS in 2000. Although La Rue was one of the most successful figures in British show business in the 1960s and '70s, he was conned and exploited and, as the New York Times put it so beautifully, at the end of his life, he "depended on the kindness of friends and the Grand Order of Water Rats, the theatrical charity, which named him King Rat in the 1980s." Fittingly enough for a man who always depended on wardrobe, he ended his days being cared for by his longtime dresser and friend Anne Galbraith.

Tags: britain, british, danny la rue, drag, female impersonator, nostalgia, obituary, sentimentalism

Greg Beato, my go-to source for weird insights into mass culture, has a very funny analysis of the DIY show Man Caves over at the Smart Set. The show is premised on the idea that men need man-friendly rooms in which to be manly, and the hosts help regular guys turn ordinary rooms into testosterone-rich dens featuring, say, stripper poles and motorcycles. But Beato thinks the masculine showboating is just the price of entry to an aesthetic realm typically reserved for women and gay men:

If today’s men don’t seem quite as grown-up as their grandfathers did, they show a much greater flair for decorating and design. Of course, men, or at least straight men, are wary about talking too enthusiastically about the way a well-proportioned ceramic tile can really open up a narrow room—so they develop strategies for masculinizing their passions. In the 1970s, their medium of extravagant creative expression was the custom van: Small block engines were the perfect beards for beaded curtains. In the 1990s, professional wrestling gave straight men a venue to unabashedly appreciate fringed Speedos; silver lamé high-tops; and greasy, fussed-over Botticellian mullets—not in a gay way, but simply as a sourcebook of ideas to use in their own efforts to unleash their inner peacocks. Now it’s Man Caves.

All of which would suggest that Man Caves is less about affirming some prior idea of maleness than expanding its scope.

Tags: Home Decor, Maleness, Reality Television

When the focus of an economy changes from making stuff to helping people—that is, manufacturing to services—low-skilled men drop out of the labor market in droves. A new study of unemployed men in Manchester, England, suggests that "idealized embodied masculinity" is partly to blame. Manual labor, claims sociologist Darren Nixon, imbues working-class men with a sense of pride that helps compensate for the very fact of being working class. They may not be financially dominant, but they feel relatively masculine compared with their white, middle-class counterparts.

The kind of low-skill jobs that service economies create—receptionists, sales clerks, retail cashiers—offer no such compensation. And the men Nixon interviews find the "emotional labor" required to perform such jobs well incredibly taxing. "I've got no patience with people basically," one interviewee says, "I can't put a smiley face on, that's not my sort of thing." You might expect this kind of reaction from men who have spent years working labor-intensive jobs, where they've adapted to a male-only working environment and rarely encounter customers. But Nixon finds that even younger men, who haven't spent years absorbing a gendered workplace culture, find the deference required to work a sales job hard to muster. "If someone [a customer] gave me loads of hassle I'd end up lamping them," one reports.

Nixon concludes that "sticking up for yourself is a defining characteristic of the working class habitus," and it's a characteristic that's incommensurate with entry-level positions of the kind that working-class men are likely to be otherwise qualified for. Their gender identities are, in a sense, maladaptive; traditional gender norms and the needs of the modern economy are at odds. On Friday, Stephanie Coontz pointed out a study showing that middle-school boys "brutally police" one another's conformity to masculine ideals. Nixon's study suggests that these kind of cultural constraints have long-term economic consequences.

Photo by Digital Image/Getty Images

Tags: economics

Science reporter Joshua Wolf Shenk describes his visit to the famous Grant Study archives (named for the dime store magnate who originally funded the experiment) in the new issue of the Atlantic and includes a video interview of George Vaillant, the longitudinal assessment project's director for the last 42 years. Vaillant's perspective on the 268 "well-adjusted" sophomore male participants' much-examined lives boils down to "loving is the most important," but, as Emily Yoffe pointed out, his conclusion, "happiness is love," seems as clichéd as one tin soldier on judgment day.

In 1937, the creators of the project, also called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, set out to discover "a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life." The study designed by experts in "medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work" measured the mental health of the participants and periodically assigned the subject of each dictionary-sized case file a happiness quotient based on his adaptive mechanisms.

Trying to get at how the men individually responded and adapted to trials in their lives and where those choices led them, subjects were quantified from worst to best as "psychotic" (paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania), "immature" (acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria"), "neurotic" (intellectualization dissociation repression), or mature (altruism, humor, anticipation). Shenk reports that over the course of the research, "almost a third of the men had...met Vaillant's criteria for mental illness." These men of great potential had power, wealth, and education, but their happiness was not guaranteed in the end. (And the end has arrived for about half of them. As Emily says "they are coming to the point at which their files are closed.")

Their identities are deeply confidential (except for a few, such as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who outted himself), but the subjects' accomplishments, failures, tragedies, and personal fortunes are documented to a fair thee well. Every era's children have their own unique challenges. Most of the Grant cohort fought in World War II. Later, several ran for U.S. Senate. One (JFK) made it to the White House, and another was a cabinet secretary. Many divorced and remarried multiple times. At least one of the men in the study acknowledged his sexual identity and came out as homosexual. (Shenk is silent on the effect of feminism on the men who, in their 40s during the 1960s, were contemporaries of the successful sexists in grey flannel suits portrayed in the AMC series Mad Men.)

Longitudinal studies, which revisit case subjects many times over a long period, (the best known are Michael Apted's Seven-Up! documentaries) have always fascinated me, particularly because of the extraordinary commitment required of those being studied. The Harvard undergrads who arranged to have their life milestones (marriages, jobs, children, divorces, illness, loss) chronicled by medical exams, psychological tests, questionnaires, and interviews for at least the next 72 years may have wanted something more useful for their efforts toward posterity than love = happy = good. But for some Grant participants, it sounds like the study was the one constant they could rely on.

Tags: Happiness, Harvard