Marriage redux redux:

The marriage debate rages on, and I'll continue to mostly sit on the sidelines. I, at least, am going to have to agree that I have irreconcilable differences with Ms. (Sara) Butler on this score, generally. I don't like the idea of communities getting their grubby little fingers in everybody's peaceable marriages; it sends a chill down my spine. That visceral reaction is probably the reason I'm a libertarian.

But a few thoughts:

1: What's really so bad about "confusion, frustration and even heatbreak"? My working thesis is that very few people behave reasonably in romance until they've had their heart terribly catastrophically broken at least once. Obviously there's no proof that that's true, and it would be pretty silly to try to actively encourage heartbreak on that score, but all the same, people are resilient. Hearts, lives, even families and children recover. This might be another place of fundamentel disagreement between us-- I also think that Amanda's experiment has mostly been conducted, and I think that the results have been a smashing success. The fact that most people (except for a few wonderful and chivalrous souls) aren't acting out arcane and stilted courtship rituals, I take as a sign of goodness and joy. (Note: I'm not some sort of newfangled etiquette-relativist; I believe everything Miss Manners tells me, except for the bit about one's right to private information. I don't think that just because a ritual is stilted or arcane it's bad; I just think that our old courtship rituals were.)

2: What does it mean to say "Marriage, on the other hand, is meant to be a stable, life-long commitment"? Obviously, it isn't meant that way, not by all people. People say "till death do us part" but only the most credulous (or romantic) onlookers think anybody present actually means it. We know we live in a world of no-fault divorce, where you can get a divorce if your husband beats you, or if he cheats on you and gives you AIDS, or even if he doesn't do anything particularly terrible but you've met somebody else who you'd like to marry. Sara might want there to be a general consensus that marriage is til-death-do-us-part, but the very prevalence of all of these divorces is pretty darn good evidence that no such consensus exists. (We can disagree, of course, about what the "right" thing for the government to do is when reasonable people can hold differing opinions. Such disagreement is at the center of the abortion controversy).

3: Finally, I think Sara's "human" view of love is the right one. Romance is fleeting, and so on. It's a legitimately open question what to do about that, though. In the parade of horribles Sara trots out about less stable marriages-- "divorce rates soar; children suffer; illegitimacy rates rise, etc, etc"-- only one of those things isn't based on the assumption that stable marriages are good in the first place. Divorce and illegitimacy aren't particularly bad things. And the evidence that children actually suffer from divorce is questionable.

Yes, the children of divorced parents fare "worse" (whatever that means) than the children of married ones. But the conclusion that divorce is the cause of this rests on the assumption that divorced parents and married ones are statistically random samples of the general adult population. Obviously they aren't; people get divorced because of financial problems, romantic difficulties, poverty, disease, stress, adultery, or domestic abuse. It certainly isn't clear to me (nor is it clear to any researchers) that it's better to live in an abusive or unhappy household than a divorced one. (Can staying married and trying to "work it out" allieve these problems? Sometimes, but whether the costs on average outweigh the benefits is a highly empirical question). And finally, even if some children do suffer from some divorces, that isn't proof that divorces are bad; parents have value too, after all, and I'm not sure what the formula is for trading off child welfare against parent welfare, but surely it isn't an infinite scale.

So I think the world of hip attachment and random hook-up is a perfectly fine one. I've had both kinds of relationships (and intermediate ones) and each can be satisfying in its own way. In an increasingly atomized, increasingly urbanized society with increased mobility and increased communication, maybe divorce law should (as it increasingly does) account for the changing structure of the world, rather than standing guard at the gate as one of the last bastion of our former values.

Final note: My mother, who teaches family law, is probably reading this, and probably cringing in horror at some of the things I wrote. But I hope she's nodding her head in agreement with at least some of it.

Comrades-in-Arms:

Three Law Student blogs that have recently come to my attention: Another 1L, Concur in Part, and Life, Law, Libido. The first is by a U of C 1-L, the second is also by a U of C 1-L, begun to counteract the first. The last is by a DC Law Student. All are worth reading, though Another 1-L is the oldest and (thus far) the most consistent.

Against Greed:

Miss Manners is (as always) highly worth reading.

Kinda Creepy:

Maybe this is creepy. Maybe it's cool. Maybe it's neither. Go to Google and type in a phone number (with area code). I don't think cell phone numbers work. If the numbers not unlisted (and even for some that are), boom. There's the address, complete with mapquest map. Do you remember in the t.v. shows when access to a reverse directory used to be really hard?

Nauru update!

Reuters reports on "Operation Weasel: "Up to 20 high-ranking North Korean military officers and nuclear scientists have defected to the United States and its allies under a plan involving several countries including the Pacific state of Nauru, an Australian newspaper said on Saturday."

Now this is odd: so the NGO Americans offered to pay the expenses if Nauru would establish embassies in Washington and Beijing, using the better trade connections as an excuse. The nuclear scientists would then be smuggled out through consular connections. But when all was said and done, "Nauru's diplomatic cover was not used to deliver defectors to safety." It was all done by "Americans and New Zealanders operating at arm's length from their governments." Sketchy, eh?

And how is it that a country which so recently lost telephone service with the rest of the world has the where-with-it-all to make deals that involve some decently high-level covert operations? [back in February -- they went three weeks without anyone hearing from them. the articles on BBC.com and The Economist have gone to premium content by now]

Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking -- those plans we've got for what we'll do for the next couple of years? Let's just scrap them and go take over Nauru for a while, get them back on their feet, and then just bow out politely.

[thanks to Isaac for the link]

A little math:

For those of you inclined to numbers/physics puzzles, check out car talk's puzzler this week.

RAY: Probably. There are two telephone poles. Each one is 100-feet tall. They are parallel-and an unknown distance apart. We're going to attach a 150-foot rope from the very top of one of the poles, to the top of the other. This rope will, of course, droop down somewhat. That drooping rope is called a "catanary," from the Latin word for chain.

TOM: Did they have chains in ancient Rome?

RAY: Of course! The lions were chained to the floor! No, that was the Christians. So, we've got these two 100-foot poles, and a 150-foot rope. The rope is between the two poles, and it's going to droop down, making an arc. The question is, what must be the distance between the two poles, so that the lowest point of this catanary is 25-feet above the ground?

Me me me:

Dan Drezner and Glenn Reynolds are complaining about getting too much blog-related email. Feel free to email me. I promise I'll answer.

If You're Feeling Sinister:

My brother, intermittent co-blogger here, is performing in Much Ado About Nothing. If you're in Bloomington this evening, you should go see him. One almost-impartial viewer writes:

I actually did not recognize him until he spoke. Playing a villain he had such a powerful dark presence that I did not connect this actor with (a) little boy. There was a beard but mainly it was his ability to project, silently, the dark side. . .

Thanks But:

Well, at least my literary rejection letters are getting better. Work used to be rejected without comment. But last time I received:

Tunnels Where the Moon Lived," though it also was not selected for publication, did find several admirers among the staff, who appreciated its audacity, evocativeness, and evasion of sentimentality. I'm sorry I cannot be much more specific, but perhaps this response will encourage you to submit again.

Although your poem aroused considerable interest by mere dint of its craft, one also takes a very big risk with a form like the sestina; it must affect as well as amuse, and our staff seemed to feel that the former pleasure was somewhat lacking. It does not seem to transcend the conventionality of its form convincingly. I'm rejecting this poem and inviting you to submit again in the near future.