Of all the habits of two legged little monsters that my daughter has recently adopted, by far the most prevalent and annoying is the phrase "Do what I want, or I won't be your friend anymore." I have no idea which of the cloven hoofed little brats from Satan's personal jungle gym first introduced her to this omnipresent schoolyard concept, but my daughter has now made it fully her own, along with clever variations like "do what I want, or I won't love you anymore," or "do what I want, or I'm not going to listen to you anymore," or the minimalist, unsubtle version, "do what I want, or I hate you." My daughter considers this to be a master stroke of manipulation, the ultimate takedown when faced with any adversary who demands that she brush her teeth or stop tying things to the dog. Of course, all it actually does is enrage the recipient of the threat, convincing them that all promised decades of bitter, loveless relationship with their child will be just fine, thank you very much, if You Will Only Brush Your God Damned Teeth This Instant.
I shudder to imagine what the schoolyard must be like, with my daughter's dozen or so second-grade friends in constant orbit around each other, each threatening at all points in time the ostracism of all of the others unless their will is adhered to at any particular moment. Every child seeks to find that delicate balance between getting what they want and over-irritating all the others to the point of potential retaliation. Every child, when faced with the threat, attempts to be placid enough to not invoke resentment, but all of them are too bent on domination to stop issuing the threats themselves. For a child in those first few years of social interaction, there are no shades of gray, there is only black and white, friend and enemy, compliant momentary footstool or bitter rival. One day "Peggy" is a bosom friend; the next day "Peggy" doesn't want to share her favorite toy, so she is now called "Piggy" and despised. Repeat until the children grow out of it, or until Peggy develops telekinetic powers and starts popping the other children's heads like grapes.
It seems difficult to imagine such stumbling social misfittery finding any home in anyone over the age of, say, ten. Surely it is a product of the most rote years of childhood, when you are learning your social balance alongside your physical balance, and only accomplishing either through trial and error. In the end, though, "do what I want, or I won't be your friend anymore" is a time-honored tradition of the highest levels of discourse. If you want to witness the interactions of eight year old girls on a school playground, you need look no farther than Bill Kristol, or Sean Hannity, or any number of devoutly conservative pundits and lawmakers.
"Hey, France. I'm going to go attack that country over there. Help me or I'm not going to be your friend anymore."
"But that's a stupid thing to do. Why would I want..."
"OK, that's it. You're a jerk and I hate you."
"All I'm saying is that--"
"Hey everybody! I say from now on we don't call french fries french fries, we call them Freedom Fries!"
"You know, french fries aren't even French--"
"Too late! Freedom Fries, Freedom Fries, Freedom Fries!"
Yes, when faced with the grade school gambit of "do what I want, or I won't be your friend anymore," the fear of every child is to end up like France, mocked and alone, with people making fun of your name in the cafeteria.
I wish I could tell my child, during those times when she herself has been declared France for the day, that eventually people grow up and that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. But then I watch CSPAN, and it seems an impossible promise to make.
The second behavioral abomination that my child has decided to make her own is the I Know Better Than You phase. My daughter is absolutely convinced -- without question -- that she is the expert on any subject, any device, any process, and any phenomenon of the physical world that she declares herself to be the expert of. I do not even know when she learned the word "expert," but now she is one, and her subject of expertise changes according to the winds and whatever anyone else is doing at the time.
My daughter has declared herself an expert driver: she has never once driven, and cannot reach the pedals, but she is insistent that she knows more than I do on the subject. She can play the piano better than I can; can play video games better than I can; can chainsaw tree branches better than I can; can program computers better than I can; can choose quality merchandise at moderate prices better than I can, and so on. She has achieved expert status on how banks work ("they give people money"), how tall trees can get ("until they poke the sky"), how big the moon is ("bigger than the whole city!"), and the full and complete definitions of any word you can show her, read to her, or make up on the spot. She can fix the plumbing under the sink using nothing more than my biggest pipe wrench, used as a hammer (crap -- excuse me one moment...)
... and is an expert on where the pipe wrench goes, after it has done its duty. My child, in other words, is that special kind of genius, the genius that does not even need to know that a field of study exists in order to have mastered it to an extent greater than all others in recorded history. She is only foiled, alas, by the fact that all other second graders in her school have acquired the exact same superpower. This, as you can imagine, leads to fights.
It is unfathomable to me how society could function if our primal young did not quickly outgrow this conceit. I can only imagine what would happen if my daughter were to, say, be suddenly placed in charge of the economy and legal frameworks of a large but damaged Middle Eastern nation. She would not even be able to speak the language, could not read a newspaper, could not so much as understand T-shirts she saw on the street, but she would insist she had a thorough and complete comprehension of the nuanced economic policies needed in order to rebuild that nation into a better place. She would not have studied economics at all, in fact, nor have a degree in anything but personal self-satisfaction, but she would be absolutely certain in her convictions, and just as certain in her dismissals of anyone who spoke to the contrary.
The result would likely be ruinous. I can only quiver at the thought of someone like my daughter, in her current state, running amok in the halls of power, whether it be in that country, in this one, or in any other. The scientists would come to her with their scientific findings; the small child would simply rewrite them, insisting she knew more about the subject than they did. The economists would tell her that her most cherished preconceptions were fundamentally flawed; the child would declare it all bunk, and insist that she knew better. Constitutional law, environmental policy, foreign policy, education, welfare, disaster relief -- imagine, if you will, a government populated at the highest levels by small children chosen for the unbudging resolve with which they hold their preconceptions, rather than any actual expertise in their assigned fields. Imagine a half-formed leader who, upon being told what the laws were, simply wrote down on a piece of paper what his or her "interpretation" of those laws were -- and asserted it loudly to be more binding than the actual law itself. Or, when faced with any dicey situation, simply ignored all dire assessments until they found a single, sole other child who said what he wanted to hear -- and elevated that person over the others, and placed that person in charge of the situation, and presumed from then on in that the problem was solved by simple virtue of their own decider-ness that it was resolved.
Someone like my own seven year old daughter, in charge of a nation, declaring with all the strength a pouting seven-year-old can muster which inviolate laws of man and nature were true and which were now to be declared false, dismissing all fields of study, all expertise, indeed all experience throughout history other than her own barely formulated, primal notions of her surroundings?
I cannot imagine the catastrophe; it boggles the mind. I am glad for my daughter's newfound self confidence, yes, but thank goodness we keep such undeveloped, emotionally primitive people away from any true power, in this country, choosing instead to elevate those that seek to study and understand their surroundings rather than recast them according their own cherished fantasies. Thank goodness we do value expertise over simple stubbornness, and science over self-serving, evidenceless declarations, and thank goodness indeed that you need to be a competent, well-functioning adult to rule the world, and not a petty, stubborn child.
And yet, I confess, I sometimes wonder whether the presumption of innate expertise ever truly goes away, in adulthood, or simply recedes into the background as actual expertise displaces those first mere perceptions of knowledge. What would happen, if a child or even young adult grew up in an environment in which fictional information was more highly prized than real information -- in which a system of beliefs was cherished over actual, provable facts? Would they ever, even as grown men and women, outgrow those claustrophobic mental confines -- or even seek to, or even understand the difference? I watch the news, on most days, and watch the unending stream of faces who seem to exhibit those very characteristics, the ones that in my daughter represent only a fleeting, passing phase, and in my darker hours I wonder if perhaps there is not a secret underground movement of people trying for exactly that environment of willfully arrested development -- a kind of Freemasons for the promotion of ostentatious idiocy, perhaps?
Certainly, the signs are plentiful: obscure websites, magazines, think tanks, famous pundits, authors of no discernible expertise or talent, all revolving around the same central vortex of studiously enforced factual illiteracy. I for one am resolved to find out whether such an underground society exists or, more to the point, why all evidence points to it existing if, as my conservative friends keep insisting, it does not.
There is one more developmental car crash that has manifested itself in my young daughter, and I suspect it is strongly related to her own aforementioned sense of supernatural expertise. My daughter remains steadfastly in the disassembly phase of development.
The most obvious and frequent manifestation is the "destroy the city" game. My daughter can build soaring, tall buildings made out of blocks, or can tame the wildest frontiers of the living room via well-planned railroad construction. Flat surfaces of all sorts become miniaturized parking lots, or superhighways, or more frequently both at the same time. Sooner or later, however, all living room civilizations must fall. Whether it be by unexpected child-shaped meteor, or horrific imaginary plane crash, or the dreaded Ballerina Godzilla, or some other natural or supernatural fate, every block building will eventually be toppled with giddy glee. Every railroad line will be wrecked by giant beasts; every crowded superhighway is fated to become an apocalyptic scene, and usually before dinnertime. I have never known any child, anywhere, who did not instinctively enjoy destruction as much as creation, and consider them the inseparable, joyous yin and yang of childhood. It is instinct, and it is a small token of much needed personal power; complete control over the fate of some small, discrete, petty thing, even though the wide outside world is unfathomably large, and unmovable, and opaque.
My own child, however, takes disassembly quite seriously: in addition to a steady stream of creative indoor apocalypses, no toy or other sufficiently tantalizing individual item is safe from a methodical, astonishingly thorough deconstruction. My daughter believes that nothing is worth playing with unless it can be carefully destroyed, reduced to its smallest, most elemental parts. Not only is this great fun, but she considers it the inexorable methodology of the universe: my daughter is entropy, born into human form.
As a recent gift, my wife and I presented my daughter with a fully posable doll, meant as diminutive rider for an appropriately sized but rather non-posable toy horse. Within twenty minutes, the floor looked like a crime scene. The first minutes were spent removing all articles of clothing, including the hair braids. That lasted only a moment; after that, the arms and legs were all somehow detached. The figure was unceremoniously decapitated, and even the posable wrists were detached from the posable forearms. And all were scattered in a small section of the floor, as if the poor doll had stumbled over a land mine buried in the living room rug.
From this, my initial deduction was that my child was going to grow up to be either an accomplished scientist, or an equally accomplished serial killer. (Which she leans towards seems to shift by the day, but for the moment I think perhaps some more abstract, non-human toys may be in order, just to give some relief to the unnerved grownups around her.)
This was not, though, an act of violence or even aggressiveness. It was a mere act of childhood entropy -- of discovering the true nature of a new thing by fully dissecting it and categorizing the remains, whether it be doll, toy car, a strand of beads, the parts of a flashlight. If something unscrews, it is meant to be unscrewed; that much seems transparently obvious, even to a child. If something is openable, it is meant to be opened. If something can be disassembled, than it was clearly meant to be disassembled.
If you are excruciatingly foolish, leave a child alone in a room with only two things: a hammer, and a vase. Any parent with a functioning cortex can predict the outcome. The answer, to the child, is obvious: if I have been given access to a hammer, that must mean something needs hammering. If I have been given access to something that can be destroyed by hammering, then it clearly is meant to be hammered. It is so transparently predictable and ingrained that the most rudimentary form of this instinct has been reduced to aphorism: give a man a hammer, and the whole world looks like a nail.
To a child, creation and destruction look like the same thing. They are merely alterations of their environment from one state to another. Who is to say that an intact doll is the natural state of the doll -- why could not the disassembled state be the more fundamental one? It certainly, if nothing else, requires more work to accomplish.
What, then, would happen if this grade-school instinct were practiced at the highest elevations of power? What if a fool were given access to a military, what would happen? An air force is like the best, shiniest, most spectacular hammer ever developed; what level of studious adult restraint would it take to not start waving the thing around? Never mind even that, reduce it further -- what if, God forbid, we were governed by children who could not tell the difference between the constructed and unconstructed states of a thing? What if "destroying the village in order to save it" actually was considered a perfectly unironic thing -- a most distinguished policy, in fact?
It is an unnerving thought because this developmental phase, too, seems to have stumbled unaccountably into the halls of power, and seems to be rolling around those halls haphazardly and unchecked. It is inexplicable due to its sheer nonsensicalness, to adult eyes: if a child does not understand the difference between an unsmashed vase and a smashed one, and does not understand why one would be any more desirable than the other, how on earth do you debate the subject? Countless adults are finding themselves in that precise predicament.
If Social Security needs "fixing", the premised modern fix is to disassemble it and scatter the pieces. If an agency is producing troublesome data, dismantle the agency. If education policy needs fixing, the asserted cure is threatened dismantlement. If the United Nations is deemed inefficient, the solution is yet again reform through disassembly. The hammer fixes all. If a nation is led by a repulsive tyrant, what possible response could their be but to disassemble the country, utterly and completely, under the presumption that the pieces will of course reassemble themselves easily into a better form?
How many vases can one country have, after all?
It seems remarkably consistent. While past recent American political regimes have claimed great accomplishments, ranging from the establishment of social safety nets to moon landings, monumental highway networks, national parks, public education and the like, the current obsession is for deconstruction, not construction. No moon landings, this decade, nor abolition of dread disease, nor great public works. After many years of governance, the sole new edifice added to the American landscape by the current hammer wielders is a desolate, fragmented wall in the desert. It seems Ozymandias has vowed to dissect himself, not content to leave the task to time and the desert winds. Even nature itself seems eager to deconstruct our cities, out from under our very feet, while we seem listless and sullen in our defenses.
I know my daughter will eventually learn self control, and moderation. She even now is beginning to grasp the difference between things disassembled constructively, and destructively, and why one is more valuable than the other. And in the meantime, I will let her be Ballerina Godzilla, in her own living room -- it is not like her explorations into the utility of destruction cost human lives. If they did I would be a monster for allowing it, but she is only a child, and her games are not real.
All of this is, as a parent, exhausting. I have been through all of the previous phases, and so far lived; I have seen through each of them the natural progress of a mind coming to terms with its environment. Temper tantrums, food-related ordeals, the slow, agonizing process of teaching a two-foot-high human to refrain from crapping in their own pants even though it is so very self-evidently the most efficient solution: all of this came, then quickly went. We are past the danger of experimental self-administered haircuts, and the dog is finally safe from being used as furniture. So if all of those developmental speed bumps have been successfully navigated, it gives hope that these will pass just as quickly -- and hope brings much-needed sanity.
In politics, however, there is no such certainty. One cannot expect legislators to refrain from the same petty verbal or social tyrannies that would be abominable behavior for a grade school child. There is no parent that can teach a political movement the difference between what is true and what is false, if the movement insists on celebrating their own lack of distinction. There is no available path to teach a pundit or leader that some acts of destruction cannot be easily undone, if they cannot intuitively grasp the notion themselves.
The only consolation is the knowledge that my daughter, at least, will outgrow it. I am at least confident of that much; the rest of the nation seems doomed to the common path. When my daughter grows up and has children of her own, perhaps she shall see the very same behaviors on her own higher-definition, thousand-channel television, and will write a similar essay.
Introducing Raven ... Our new two year old black lab. She adores the kids. She tolerates the cat. She loves to harass Kaiko and Kaiko loves to harass her in return. She slept on Jaida's bed for part of the night last night which had the pleasant side-effect of keeping Jaida in her bed last night. Her favorite game is fetch - OFF LEASH - which is fun and very entertaining for the kids. She is also an amazingly quiet dog - no whining, barking, whimpering, etc. She is a big ol' lap dog which is a bit much considering she weighs in at about 70 pounds. It almost seems as if she is tailor-made for us. She is everything we were hoping for in a dog.
Jaida simply adores Raven and I am pretty sure the feeling is mutual. Their favorite game is when Jaida runs around the loop calling Raven. Raven happily trots after her pretending like she can't possibly catch Jaida. Jaida giggles the entire time.
