In “Sex Is Not Our Problem” Mr. Blow says dealing with the decline of the traditional family and high single-parent birthrates means addressing broader issues. Mr. Nocera, in “Down to the Last Cigarette?”, says millions of lives have been saved, but it might be time for another surgeon general’s report about the link between smoking and illness and death. Ms. Collins, bless her heart, is “Imagining President Christie.” She says we have learned so much about how Chris Christie can handle a crisis this week. Here’s Mr. Blow:
There is often a simplistic, black-or-white, conservative vs. progressive discussion around the dissolution of the traditional family and high single-parent birthrates in America and what these trends may portend for us as a country.
I don’t see the argument as completely binary or the problem as intractable. But, I do believe that we must focus more on complex areas of causation. We can’t look longingly at the halcyon ideals of yore, where marriage held more primacy and premarital sex was considered more depraved.
Those days are gone. But there are ways for us to adjust to a new reality rather than simply bemoan it.
First, the parameters of the problems: According to the Guttmacher Institute, “about half (51 percent) of the 6.6 million pregnancies in the United States each year (3.4 million) are unintended” and “the U.S. unintended pregnancy rate is significantly higher than the rate in many other developed countries.” Among teenagers in high-income countries, those in the United States have the highest rates of pregnancy and some sexually transmitted infections, according to a report released last year by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.
This, even though young Americans are not necessarily the most sexually active youth of developed countries, according to a previous Guttmacher report. That report pointed out two important issues. First, “less contraceptive use and less use of hormonal methods are the primary reasons U.S. teenagers have the highest rates of pregnancy, childbearing and abortion.” Second, “more sexual partners, a higher prevalence of infection and, probably, less condom use contribute to higher teenage sexually transmitted disease rates in the United States.”
Now there are things that I assume most Americans still agree on. Most think young people should delay sexual activity until they are mentally and emotionally capable of reasonably consenting and comprehending the consequences. Most want fewer children born to parents unwilling to provide for those children, or incapable of doing so, emotionally or financially. Most want fewer unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. And, most want fewer women to have to face the often wrenching decisions about what to do about such pregnancies.
There are some rather simple ways to move in this direction if we can agree to be less puritanical and more practical. We could, for example, begin teaching young people to value themselves in a way that contextualizes the initiation of sexual activity as a thing fully within their control and not so easily manipulated by peer and societal pressures. Abstinence can be honorable, but it won’t be for everyone. Everyone can be affirmed, though, in the fact that they must love themselves enough emotionally to be in control of whom they allow to love them physically, and when.
Furthermore, we must provide thorough and unimpeded sex education — in the home and at school — about how to engage in sex safely and responsibly. And, we must provide a full range of reproductive services — prophylactic and contraceptive as well as post-pregnancy. Here we are moving in the wrong direction. A Guttmacher report released last week found that more abortion restrictions were enacted in the last three years than in the previous decade.
Conservatives often stress marriage as a panacea for many of these problems, and indeed, marriage has its benefits. The fewer partners one engages sexually, the lower the risk of encountering disease. And, in terms of having a child, two adults in a home can often do twice as much as one. But, we must respect all family structures and encourage all parents to be active and engaged in child rearing regardless of living arrangements.
Furthermore, much of the discussion about single-parent families and births outside of marriage is focused too heavily on young women and is simply a form of sex shaming that blames them for not being proper guardians of chastity. The shaming itself is a shame, and often inflames the pathology of patriarchy in our culture.
We teach boys, overtly and implicitly, that sexual potency is a marker of masculinity and that empathy and emotional depth are purviews of a lesser sex. The ways we force boys to adhere to a perilously narrow reading of masculinity become a form of “oppression all dressed up as awesomeness,” as Lisa Wade, an Occidental College sociology professor, put it last month in Salon.
Boys are not taught to value themselves as fully human, but only as conquerors of everything — women, the workplace, the world. And men who are incapable of valuing their own humanity are incapable of fully valuing the humanity of a love interest.
We can address our societal problems, but to do so we must first address our societal issues.
Now here’s Mr. Nocera:
This is certainly turning out to be quite the year for 50th anniversaries. Fifty years ago next month, the Beatles made their U.S. debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson started the War on Poverty. And 50 years ago Saturday, the surgeon general of the United States issued the single most important report that would ever come out of that office. It linked cigarette smoking to illness and death.
It’s hard to remember now just how prevalent smoking used to be. In the mid-1960s, around half the men in the country smoked; for women, the number was 35 percent. People smoked in their offices, smoked in restaurants, smoked on airplanes. Indeed, Paul Billings of the American Lung Association recalls that the airlines often gave passengers small packets of cigarettes when they boarded the plane.
But by the 1950s, scientists were beginning to equate cigarettes with lung cancer and other fatal diseases, a linkage the tobacco industry vehemently denied. In 1962, the prestigious Royal College of Physicians in Britain issued a report connecting smoking and lung cancer. After seeing that report, Dr. Luther Terry, who was then the surgeon general, put together an advisory board and asked it to report back to him on the potential dangers of cigarettes.
Did it ever: the advisory board’s subsequent report not only linked smoking to lung cancer but also to emphysema and cardiovascular disease. It labeled cigarettes a health hazard. “In general,” it concluded, “the greater the number of cigarettes smoked daily, the higher the death rate.”
“It was a landmark report,” says Scott Ballin, a longtime tobacco control and public health advocate. For the first time, the full weight of the federal government stood behind the notion that smoking killed. Antitobacco groups felt empowered and pressed for changes. In 1965, Congress passed legislation banning cigarette advertising on television — while also forcing the tobacco companies to put a surgeon general’s warning on every pack of cigarettes. The tobacco companies fought the legislation, while continuing to deny that cigarettes killed.
And so it went for the next 30 years. The surgeon general would issue reports on, say, nicotine addiction or secondhand smoke. The tobacco companies would deny the obvious. And antitobacco activists would push for change.
This culminated with the tobacco wars in the 1990s. With the activists continuing to push hard, and whistle-blowers leaking damning documents, attorneys general around the country sued the tobacco companies and wound up settling for a staggering $246 billion over 25 years.
And all the while, as Americans learned more about the dangers of tobacco, cigarette smoking dropped, and dropped again. By 2005, the percentage of Americans who smoked was down to 21 percent, a remarkable achievement. But since then, the percentage drops have been much smaller; today, it is estimated that around 18 percent of the country smokes. “Seven out of 10 smokers say they want to quit,” says Billings at the lung association, but their addiction is too powerful. More than 400,000 Americans still die prematurely each year from smoking.
Today, thanks to a law passed in 2009, the Food and Drug Administration has the power to regulate tobacco. (Its first set of tobacco regulations has been sitting at the Office of Management and Budget since October.) It’s a different environment now, not only because of F.D.A. regulation but because there are now “harm reduction” products, like e-cigarettes, that potentially make it easier for people who want to quit.
Yet many in the public health community have pushed for e-cigarettes to be treated the same as combustible cigarettes; when you have been fighting a war for nearly half a century, it is hard to put down your weapons. Instead of focusing on the potential for e-cigarettes to save lives, they worry instead that the new products will serve as a gateway to smoking — a fear that has yet to show up in any study.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the surgeon general’s report, the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted much of its current issue to tobacco and tobacco control. It published a study showing that the report may have saved as many as eight million lives.
Another article in the current issue of the journal is by David Abrams, the executive director of the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies. He had been among those who had fought in the tobacco wars, but, in recent years, he had come around to the idea that a new way was needed.
Yes, he wrote, there needed to be more science around e-cigarettes, and, yes, they should be kept away from minors, and, yes, their advertising shouldn’t resemble the old tobacco come-ons. But, he concluded, with proper regulation, e-cigarettes “have the potential to make the combusting of tobacco obsolete.”
Which was the whole point of the exercise back in 1964. Maybe it’s time for another surgeon general’s report.
And now here’s Ms. Collins’ fever dream:
Let us count the ways that this week’s traffic-jam scandal is actually good for Chris Christie’s presidential prospects.
First of all, he proved that he could definitely handle an international crisis that required apologizing when the United States did something really stupid. Like — let’s see. What if the secretary of commerce, in a fit of pique over a Chinese official’s refusal to endorse American seafood products, sent a flotilla of cargo planes to dump tons of surplus mackerel on a Beijing highway? President Christie would be terrific! He could apologize profusely while making it clear that his administration actually had nothing to do with the incident whatsoever and, in fact, was itself a pathetic victim of betrayal by a double agent for the fish industry.
And Christie has stamina! On Thursday, he held a press conference on the George Washington Bridge traffic-jam fiasco and talked for nearly two hours. The historian Michael Beschloss says he can’t think of any actual president who ever went on that long. It was even longer than the longest presidential Inaugural Address, which involved an hour and three-quarters of William Henry Harrison.
Of course, Harrison then died one month into office. But he did not have a personal trainer, and Chris Christie does. I must admit that I had a mixed reaction to the revelation about the trainer. Good for him on the healthy life front. But there really was something seductive about the idea of a chief executive without a physical fitness regimen. Four years bereft of jogging photo-ops or anecdotes from the pickup games in the White House gym.
Anyhow, there are lots of other ways that Christie’s press conference could be viewed as presidential.
For instance, Richard Nixon had “I am not a crook.” Chris Christie gave us “I am not a bully.”
Also, during Christie’s press conference, he referred to “mistakes” 18 times. He seemed to be channeling Ronald Reagan, who famously said “mistakes were made” after his administration got caught secretly helping arm rebels in Central America with money made from selling weapons to Iran.
O.K., that was a bigger mistake. Although having associates who create a four-day traffic jam on the world’s busiest bridge out of apparent political pique isn’t exactly a multiplication error.
Christie expressed confidence that the voters would conclude: “Mistakes were made; the governor had nothing to do with that, but he’s taking responsibility for it.” Here we have an echo of Harry Truman’s announcement that “the buck stops here.” However, Christie took the more modern approach, which is to make it clear that while you’re responsible, you are totally not at fault. The buck that stopped at Christie’s desk was not his buck, just an errant piece of currency that wound up in the office because of treacherous fools over whom he had no actual control whatsoever.
So far, so good.
Among the critical qualities for a modern president is the ability to instantly cut off old friends and cast them adrift if they become political baggage. Maybe you remember the way Bill Clinton dumped his law school pal Lani Guinier when her nomination to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division ran into trouble.
Or maybe you have no memory of that whatsoever. It doesn’t matter, because Christie’s example is much better.
The central figure in the traffic-jam scandal is a guy named David Wildstein, who is frequently described as a youthful chum of the governor’s. The two were at high school together, and Wildstein later became mayor of Christie’s hometown.
Asked about Wildstein — who spent Thursday pleading the Fifth at a legislative hearing — Christie expressed joy at having the opportunity to clear up the true parameters of their relationship. “David and I were not friends in high school. … We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school,” he said coolly. “You know, I was the class president and athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.”
Ouch.
The most fascinating part of the governor’s talkathon was his explanation of what he did when he discovered — just as he was toweling down from a workout — that his deputy chief of staff had been involved in creating the bridge crisis.
Christie claimed he swiftly axed said aide, wasting no time in attempting to find out why she had done it, who she had conspired with, or why she imagined he would think it was a good idea.
“I’m telling you that when I ask for an answer from a member of my staff and they lie … they’re gone. So I never had to get to the conduct, the underlying conduct,” he said.
What do you think about that, people? Andrew Jackson-like decisiveness? Seems more like a really eerie lack of curiosity.
But then we have had presidents who were less inquisitive than a sidewalk. Look at George W. Bush. And he got elected twice.
Well, he was elected once and foisted on us by The Supremes once.
