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One of the most oddly vehement gripes of Casa d’Ice types is when you call a number and have to Press 1 for English (2 for Spanish, and so on).

I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to do that. I vaguely recall having to do so in the past, but it’s been a pretty long time. Despite having spent some of that time in a Hispanic-heavy state.

So, I guess what I’m wondering is if it’s a case where the complaints had their intended effect and companies have shifted to separate numbers for Spanish or (this I have experience) a brief blurt of Spanish telling people to dial 2 for Espanol? Or is it just coincidence that I have stopped running into it? Or is it the case that that the increased prevalence of Spanish-speakers have made it so that it’s cheaper and easier to have separate lines? And if it’s that last, does that constitute a victory (as they are saved of the bother of having to press 1) or a loss (because that was never really the issue)?

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I thought only SWPLS had anything to do with Slate, but here’s a woman from a working-class background being quoted in a story about friendships and the recession. (Warning: It’s an Emily Bazelon story. Brace for cluelessness.) Check out how this “bitter” woman’s friends are bleeding her dry:

And yet the e-mails I got were shot through with more bitterness than kindness. “I’m starting to think I need new friends,” writes one reader—let’s call her Anna. She is in her mid-20s, and she has had the same small group of best friends since seventh grade. They have kids and she doesn’t yet, so in the past, she says, she helped them out. “I was always helpful—back to school clothes for their kids, girl scouts, soccer, etc. I paid all the fees and shuttled them to and fro.”

But last year, to help her parents keep their house after her father’s salary was cut, Anna and her fiance moved in with them to a town about an hour and a half away from the city where she grew up and where her friends still live. Anna lost some hours at work and her health insurance and also took a pay cut. Her free time in the city, where she still works, no longer matches up well with her friends’ schedules. She doesn’t have the gas money to make a lot of separate trips in to visit. And her friends, she says, are upset with her, not for her. “My friends are talking behind my back complaining that I don’t see them anymore or that I’m a bad friend because I’m not helping them in these tough times,” she writes. “One friend is losing their house and thinks I should live with them not my parents.”

It’s clear this woman isn’t white, right? No white Slate reader would put up with this, not in this country.

She’s in her mid-20s — and all her friends already have kids. She’s had the same friends since seventh grade. (I haven’t spoken with anyone from junior high since it ended, except on stupid Facebook.) And as a childless woman, she’s expected to shuttle her friends’ kids around to activities and help pay for registration and clothes. What the hell?

Bazelon — a spoiled, delusional twit with relatives in high places — doesn’t notice this abusive dynamic. She criticizes the woman for complaining to her friends that she’s made lifestyle cutbacks while they haven’t.

This is the downside of the fabled ethnic “support network.” You’re expected to live with your parents in your mid-20s, and your huge extended family and social network think you’re supposed to turn your pockets inside out for them. Amid her hardships, “Anna” tries to rise above her circumstances by reading webmags for educated intellectuals.    Sharing her story brings her snark from a snooty sorority brat with a glamorous pseudo-job.  You go, Anna.  And shame on you, Emily Bazelon.

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Will’s post about conspicuous consumption made me reflect upon a huge privilege: I can let my toddler look like a ragamuffin, and fear no consequences.

There may be no greater luxury than not having to worry about what others think. Every day at my job, I deal with parents who don’t have it. For every scratch or bruise, there’s serious explaining at best. Every facet of their parenting is under a microscope. And it’s not just the authorities whose scrutiny they have to fear. It’s their friends, relatives and neighbors.

Those are the people who call in most of the child welfare referrals — other poor people, often ones who’ve been scrutinized by authorities themselves. (Have you ever even thought of calling in a child welfare referral? Do you have more than the haziest idea of what child welfare does? I sure didn’t, until I started this job.) They’re the same people who make most of the cop calls.

If you lived in that world, would you let your toddler wear a faded, stained old SpongeBob T-shirt with a stretched-out neck? I wouldn’t. Even if it was his favorite. I’d dress him nice all the time, like the Mexicans and black people do. And I probably wouldn’t parade him around the mall with fresh playtime injuries all over his face. But lucky me, I’m white, educated, married, have money, and a clean rap sheet. I don’t have to signal by spending lots of money and effort on immediate physical appearances. I don’t have to worry what people will think when my son bears the marks of a lost fight with his toybox hutch. I get to live in a neighborhood where the only police around are the ones who live here.

And I don’t have to worry when some immigrant standing near us at Sears clicks her tongue, nudges her man, and tells him in Spanish to look at that little boy. Yeah, that happened to me and Toddler Tone today. Even if I hadn’t understood the words, the self-righteous, disapproving tone was universal. So was the superior, suspicious glance. I fixed my eyes dead on hers, raised my eyebrows, and smiled in a way intended to shut her up. It worked. She gave me a little nervous smile, and dropped her eyes.

I’ll bet if I’d looked like another her, instead of like me, that facedown wouldn’t have ended as well.

I’ve got a trial coming up about a baby who got taken away from his Central American immigrant parents solely based upon allegations made by hostile relatives. Relatives who remind me of Sears Lady. There’s no physical evidence; no police involvement. This is what can happen when you’re poor and unsophisticated. There’s no penalty at all for the authorities yanking a kid, even if it turns out the allegation is bull. So to be on the safe side, they take the kid and leave it up to the judge to decide if it’s true.

I signal to avoid the opposite judgments. I don’t worry people will think I deprive my kid; I worry they’ll think that I spoil him. I worry not that people will think I’m a dirtbag, but that I’m vain and throw money around on frivolous things. All signals run the risk of being misunderstood out of one’s element.

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No surprises here. John Morgan is 29 years old with no college degree. When he met Johanna Justin-Jinich at a summer New York University class, he was 27. She was pretty and 19 — the right age for someone taking a summer undergrad class at NYU. They were friendly at first.

Then he got weird. She complained he was harassing her. (Guess the “negging” backfired.) He came to her job and he shot her to death.

The details are easy to fill in. And I’m sure they weren’t dating, even though some of the early reports speculated he was a jilted ex-boyfriend. No way. Not with that difference in age, status and looks. He would have been an eunuch to her. That’s really what sent him over the edge — the anti-Jewish rants were probably just an excuse.

What makes Morgan a Weasel? Remember, Weasels are an angry, resentful subset of the “beta male” group.* They’ve been raised in privileged environments, but had less than those around them (either money, popularity, or both). They feel that in compensation for their past slights, they’re entitled to huge success, including the upper hand with women far out of their league. When their lives don’t live up to their grandiose visions, they take it out on whatever women they can access.

He came from a large churchgoing family and a privileged upbringing in one of Boston’s nicer suburbs. He graduated from an elite Roman Catholic high school for boys before completing an unblemished four-year stint in the Navy.

But upon returning to civilian life in 2003, Mr. Morgan struggled, hopscotching from town to town and holding dead-end jobs, including one as a technician at a garage door company in Colorado Springs, and spending two semesters in 2007 as a nondegree student at the University of Colorado in Boulder before moving back with his parents.

Red Flag No. 1: Why would a graduate of an elite high school join the Navy instead of college? It looks like his family could afford to send him. Unless you’re an officer, the military is for working-class kids.

Red Flag No. 2: Why would a non-degreed, itinerant 27-year-old travel to NYU (expensive school, expensive city) from Colorado for the summer to take a fruity class on sexual diversity?

Because he wanted to get with young, high-status, women, that’s why. He wanted to be part of the world Johanna Justin-Jinich lived in. When that world brushed him off, he fixated on her as a symbol.

The warrant said he made a reference to seeing all the beautiful and smart people at Wesleyan University before writing, “I think it okay to kill Jews, and go on a killing spree at this school.”

I saw this rude awakening happen to people in law school. I can sympathize, up to the killing part. A lot of us from the lower-class minority went through it. We thought since we were sitting next to the high-class majority kids, we were their peers. No way.

____________________________________
For example: If Roissy is real, he’s a Weasel.

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Tags: Alpha, Beta ... or Crazy?

Funny, I’d just been thinking about the critic John Dolan when Megan’s blog linked me to his recent tale of being homeless. A sad reminder that there’s little profit in truth-telling. I was remembering how he figured out “A Million Little Pieces” was bullshit even before “The Smoking Gun” proved it was lies, damned lies.

I was ruminating on this bit in particular:

Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It’s a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: the rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.

I thought of this as I desperately scoured the Internet for critical, or at least objective, reporting about Leslie Morgan Steiner’s domestic violence memoir, “Crazy Love.” It’s not going to happen. She’s a rich writer with victim status. She’s untouchable.

I figured someone would at least talk about why it is we’re supposed to believe her. Didn’t anyone even ask her ex-husband for comment, not one single time? From what I can piece together without buying the damned thing, all we have is her word, and maybe a police report of a disturbance at a residence.

The closest thing to criticism was this delicately phrased bit in Slate, a magazine for which Steiner also writes:

In the press kit for Crazy Love, Steiner says it’s easy to see why she married someone who choked her on a regular basis. She was, she says, “kind, insecure and desperate for intimacy. … It is not difficult to understand why anyone … could become trapped in an intimate manipulative relationship.” She also relentlessly reminds the reader that she is a WASP of impeccable ancestry and therefore an improbable abuse victim.

I was first exposed to Steiner’s writing by “Seventeen” magazine in the 1980s. Under a pseudonym, she wrote a memoir of her ordeal with anorexia nervosa. She was working at “Seventeen” when she wrote the story. Anorexia was quite the newsmaker in the ’80s. There were few problems that a young, upper-class writer could have claimed that were more marketable.

She graduated Ivy League and went on to work in marketing for companies including Johnson & Johnson. She raked in the bucks as both a marketer and a writer. And she apparently went on to yet another Movie-Of-The-Week ordeal: Her husband beat her. Despite having an elite education, a glamorous career and financial resources beyond those of 99.99 percent of domestic violence victims (my estimate), she stayed with him. She says. The relationship ended with him leaving her.

And now her profitable book deal further widens the already huge gap between her and the typical domestic violence victim. Yet, we’re supposed to applaud her for “coming forward.”

Yes, this privileged princess’s story is supposed to inspire … my clients. Take, for example, the undocumented Mexican immigrant seamstress whose husband beat her while she was going through chemotherapy, then tried to get her committed and take away her kids. I’m sure Maria will be thrilled to hear Steiner got a bestselling novel out of her own mistreatment. She’ll take valuable lessons from Steiner managing to get over her jerk-digging issues and marrying a rich man who treats her great. And if Maria had Internet, which she doesn’t, I’m sure she’d feel very validated at the opportunity to share her pain on Steiner’s blog.

Meanwhile, John Dolan feels lucky to be back indoors with heat.

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Over at HS, a bunch of guys are debating whether white women are racist if they only choose to date white guys. (And the blog post they’re discussing isn’t even about that. They’re such dorks over there.)

I have the opposite ethical concern. I see white people all the time getting the upper hand in relationships by dating people of less-favored races, especially poorer ones. The white guy-Asian chick thing has been discussed to death, so let’s focus on white women, such as my former friend “Eunice.” Since I hate her now, she’s a great example.

Eunice was a Jewish girl (Sephardic, for you HBD people) from a moderately wealthy family. She wasn’t Paris Hilton, but her parents’ handouts shielded her from the consequences of her repeated career failures. She enjoyed making others accommodate her. She was only averagely attractive, and had gone to a high-status high school where looks standards were high. She’d been part of the dork group (definition: wherein no two members of the group wish to make out with each other.) She ended up at my commuter public college despite her money because that was the best place she could get in. She’d had a nose job and lied about it.

I remember trying to set her up with TL in our mid-20s. Her response? “Oh, he’s just a white guy.” Dismissively. Who the hell did she think she qualified for, Denzel Washington? Where did she get her inflated self-esteem?

From dating a poorer, older black guy, that’s where. Andre was a musician (he was actually half black, half white). He indulged her tantrums. He treated her like gold. From the beginning, she was in the driver’s seat in that relationship. None of the worrying-if-he’ll-call crap I was always going through. She was 19 when they got together, and saw him all through college and beyond. He was six years older than she was. He didn’t go to college. But he gave that untalented, average-looking dork girl entry into the cool world.

Yet she remained deliberately uncool. With him, she didn’t have to work to fit in. For most of her early adulthood, she had the favored social status of Girl with Steady Boyfriend. Women were never catty to her. She could be friends with unattractive men and not have to worry about sexual demands. All the bad stuff that happened to me, she figured was either bad luck or my fault for not being precious and innocent like she was. That’s why she thought Andre treated her so well.

The downside? Andre was poor. As he entered his 30s, it became clear he wasn’t going to be one of the few musicians who make it. Eunice didn’t want to work. Her mom didn’t. She defined herself as things that have nothing to do with earning a living. “I’m artistic! I’m spiritual!” When she was 27 — 27! — she went back to school to be a television anchorwoman. Guess if that worked out for her.

As their relationship sputtered, Andre worked harder to keep her. He proposed marriage. She wouldn’t even move in with him — her parents subsidized her own apartment. Like many poor guys with rich girls, he tried to get her pregnant. He hoped it would make her stay with him. The pregnant part worked, but the staying part didn’t. Some months later, she told me of a nightmare where her mother killed a black man. She didn’t know where it came from. I did, but I just shrugged. “Maybe he needed killing, hon.” I never rooted for Andre as a husband, even though I liked him. I never would have considered a guy with his lack of prospects. Then again, I couldn’t afford to.

As she stumbled into the single world in her mid-20s, she acted like a 12-year-old. She was like a female Beemus — she’d go to a social gathering and fixate on the hottest guy in the room. But men from families as privileged as hers didn’t treat her like Andre did. Educated men didn’t treat her like Andre did. Attractive actors didn’t treat her like Andre did. Even other black men didn’t treat her like Andre did, not the ones who owned the club anyway. She always went after the popular guys. She abruptly dismissed any discussion of a person’s desirability versus what they were seeking. Thinking that way meant you were hard and bitter.

At 31, she finally found The One. He was a divorced British immigrant 10 years older than she was. White, but an immigrant. From a working-class family. Employed, but a renter. He catered to her, but I could tell she was disappointed with the reality of looming commitment. One of our last conversations as friends was her finding picky faults with him — like, he’d worn a sweater she didn’t like, and he liked to drink Guinness. I told her to cut it out, this was as good as it was going to get. They got married. Friends report that she sulks whenever he has a beer.

As for Andre, he dated a few black American girls after Eunice and treated them poorly. He finally married a black immigrant schoolteacher from England. I was happy to hear that.

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If alpha male means good-looking, popular, and successful, then it looks like accused Craigslist murderer Philip Markoff, 22, was an alpha male. If it means aggressive obnoxious jerk, then he wasn’t. Everyone, including his attractive fiancee, says he was a nice guy.

I predict this story will be huge, similar to the Scott Peterson trial or the Amanda Knox murder trial in Italy. The public loves reading about attractive, successful perps. That’s why there are so many attractive, successful perps in fictional murder stories.

In real life, murderers are usually losers. Like Ted Bundy — he looked OK and dressed nice, but he was actually a loser. He had a spotty academic and career and employment, and around the time he started the murders was going to a pissant law school and flunking out. Boston University is not a pissant med school and so far, we’ve no indication this Markoff fellow was doing poorly. His dad was a dentist, so he didn’t grow up deprived.

The highly competent psychopath: It’s rare, but it happens. Or, maybe they’ve got the wrong guy. It’s hard to tell from those surveillance photos. And at 22, he seems kind of young to be a serial killer.

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Tags: Alpha, Beta ... or Crazy?

I haven’t had much “Alpha, Nerd … or Crazy?” fodder this year. Most of the high-profile killers, like Jiverly Wong, have been so clearly crazy it’s not worth the effort. But the Wood family were middle-class, intelligent, and until yesterday seemed happy to observers.

From MSNBC:

MIDDLETOWN, Md. - A Maryland man who killed his wife and three children before fatally shooting himself left behind five notes, including an apology to family members and hints that he suffered from psychiatric problems, authorities said.

The local sheriff said there were also signs that the family had financial problems.

Christopher Wood, 34, was a “sales accountant” (not sure exactly what that is) for a railroad operating company, CSX Corp. If he had psychological problems, there’s no sign of them in the blog kept by his wife, Francie, 33. (hat tip to True Crime Report.)

Francie seemed sweet. Aside from her crunchiness, I didn’t find anything annoying in her blog. She started it after quitting an unspecified job in 2006 to stay home with their small children. It was a standard mom blog — updates on the kids, and links to stories about subjects a granola mom would care about, like breastfeeding and organic food.

From her first post:

Well, I am now currently scared.

I have always contributed……………..And I know I will be contributing even more now being at home with the kids but who will do my quarterly evalution? How will I earn my Merit Increase? Who will call me up and ask for opinions of their work/idea/project? Who will tell me I look nice in my new Ann Taylor Suit? Funny, I may never own another new Ann Taylor Suit.

There’s very little about her husband. On April 1, the blog’s last post, she mentions disagreement over what home to buy. On March 16, the blog’s last long post, she indicates he has stress from work and from the family’s recent move from Texas back to her hometown:

Chris is trying to adjust but he is having a hard time with the new job which makes him more of a major player at work. More of a mover and a shaker. Which neither he would ever volunteer to be. While the change Chandler is going through I worry somewhat about the change Chris is experiencing I embrace. He needed to be out of his comfort zone for a while. It is currently causing him stress which in turn causes me stress but in a good way. And he sees that this move is for the best. I know he worries that the kids won’t grow up right next to their grand parents and that he is travelling may keep him away from them too much…But I think we should focus on Quality over Quantity.

It appears Chris was the perfect compliant family man on the outside. He’s the kind of guy angry Internet guys always blame women for passing up, but he was Francie’s world. Perhaps if he’d instead been one of those alpha males who yells and cheats, today Francie would be divorced but she and her three little kids would be alive.

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I saw this commercial because I am a Michael Gondry fan.

I don’t question Gondry’s work or his tools, but I question HP’s marketing strategy.

Here they are selling the potential to create and do creative things with their products–particularly a media-center PC they mention at the end. I have no doubt that you can do great things with their computers. My question is if you can do fewer things with anyone else’s. As far as I know, none of the computer assemblers have ever delivered unique innovations that put them ahead of their competitors. Sure, there was IBM’s invention of the nipple on laptops that enabled moving your mouse around without taking your hands off the keyboard. That was certainly valuable. IBM was also the first to make fingerprint sensors widely available on its line of computers. Both of those were quickly imitated though.

If Michael Gondry can do great things with HP computers, he can likely do great things with pretty much any system he chooses. People know this. And that’s a problem.

This commercial sells a non-advantage. It sells something that is not a distinguishing feature of the their product. It as if FedEx stopped advertising itself as the fastest, most-reliable service and instead decided it was important to talk up their ability to deliver a package to any of the 50 states. Yes, that is amazing and valuable. It isn’t really unique though.

And isn’t that HP’s problem actually? All the other manufacturers (save Apple) suffer from the same ill. They are flush with advertising budgets and nothing to advertise. Their products sell primarily on price, the product features on any particular model, floor appeal, and to some extent brand loyalty. 

It is difficult to market in industries like that. Basically, you can’t market in industries like that. Anything you advertise will ultimately sound hollow to anyone who knows anything about the product.

Recommendation: 

1. Stop advertising. It’s only hurts your credibility. Limit your marketing activities to working with stores on placement of your machines in their stores and circulars.

2. Define a strategy. Somehow you have to manufacture a marketable advantage in the next 5-10 years. Is it going to be a cost advantage? Probably not when you’ve already outsourced all production. What then? The assemblers have been trying to create their advantages through writing gimmicky system utilities that are proprietary, but have equivalents.

3a. If a strategy is available, execute it. Do not resume advertising again until you already see people clamoring for your products for the value you have already created. Waiting will keep you honest and prevent you from selling pretend-advantages as real ones. It is too easy for us to lie to ourselves about the attractiveness of our children.

3b. If no strategy for creating a true, sustainable advantage that has the ability to permeate the consumer consciousness and provide an identity for your products, divest. IBM did it. Why not HP? HP has a lot of talented people, and maybe having them working in this industry is not the best use of their time.

4. Profit!

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A recent article in “Food and Wine” helped me analyze my moral outrage at Will Truman’s eating habits. The article notes that vegetables used to be “poor food,” or humble fare:

For people like my parents, who had endured the Great Depression and World War II, meat was a luxury reserved for Sundays, when a chicken or a leg of lamb provided the week’s biggest meal. The French movie star Jean Gabin, who began his career in 1930, was once asked why he became an actor. “So I could eat meat every day,” he reportedly answered. Meat every day? To most people of his generation—and that included my parents—this was inconceivable, even a little obscene.

Sometime in the past few decades, that changed. Wherever Will got his meat-laden eating habits, they didn’t come from people who were poor or uneducated. But nowadays, isn’t it mostly poor people who eat like Will? The lack of vegetables contributes to their high obesity rates. I see overweight kids everywhere and worry about my son. I make sure he eats a tub of pureed vegetables every night, even if he leaves his main course behind. Maybe one-fourth of the meals I make for myself and Mr. Tone involve red meat or poultry. The rest are just vegetables, dairy, and/or seafood. This is not because I don’t like meat or keep to a strict diet.

My dad, my mom, my husband, and all my in-laws grew up eating food out of home gardens. It was rural, not ritzy. Even in the city, people practiced backyard agriculture. We had an avocado tree, lemons, oranges, and strawberries in the backyard of the rented house I grew up in. And we always had bags of frozen peas, green beans, succotash, and corn in the freezer. It never occured to me that some people considered vegetables optional — or meat mandatory. We had something with meat maybe three or four dinners a week.

But the Obamas drew hoots for being snobs when they planted a White House garden. Martha Stewart gardens. Maria Shriver gardens. Nowadays, gardening is for the rich, or at least the middle-class. Most of my vegetable-based meals are considered “gourmet.”

I’m not “one of those,” as Seinfeld said about vegetarians in that episode where he dated the hard-core carnivore. Vegetarians bug me. (Not any of you personally, just in general.) It’s an attitude that, as a Californian, I work hard to keep under wraps. But for some reason, I don’t feel any guilt for lashing out at people who avoid vegetables.

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