On Marrying A Princeton Man

 

Susan Patton, Princeton '77, wrote a letter to the Princetonian campus newspaper in 2013 advising women to find their husbands in the fertile pastures of the Princeton campus because they would never again find the concentration of men worthy of them, men intelligent, driven, competent, daring and quality enough to qualify as  spouse material.

Happy Hunting Grounds

Of course, uproar ensued, 

What she was saying was unromantic, of course, but to her mind, eminently practical--as a matchmaker in the 19th century Jewish shtetls might have said, you are looking for quality and potential. Love is just so hopelessly romantic and really, a big con.

Ms. Patton argued that once women left Princeton to swim in a sea diluted by lesser lights, and pursued a career there would be far diminished chances of meeting Mr. Right.

Susan Patton, Princeton '77

The storm she provoked had much to do with the idea that the Ivy League, and not just the Ivy League, but Princeton, was peopled by people who thought themselves superior to others much as British aristocracy thought itself peopled by superior people selected in the case of the Brits not by meritocracy but by bloodlines, which, as in race horses, simply bred for the proper traits. The Brits thought themselves selected by God; the Princeton crowd was selected by the SAT exam.

Of course, she was writing at a time when Michelle Obama (Princeton '85)  was calling the White House home, and she managed to fine a pretty good husband who did not go to Princeton, but then again, she was Black and somehow I do not think Ms. Patton was thinking much about Black Princeton women when she gave her advice.

In 2013, likely significantly more than half of the women graduating Princeton went on to graduate school, if not immediately, then eventually, where, very possibly another happy hunting ground for husbands, pre selected for quality might prevail. So maybe Princeton women did not need to pull the trigger quite so soon.

When the Phantom went to college, age 17-22, he was in no frame of mind to consider marrying anyone; he was simply too young and inexperienced.  In fact, the very experience of having a college girlfriend convinced him marriage was a very unsound idea. As the years passed, it struck him that there was "love," or more accurately, women and sex, which had to do with desire, and sometimes even emotion, and then there was the marriage contract, where you negotiated with a woman for a long-term partnership which committed you to share child raising (a very expensive commitment), home buying, wealth building, vacation planning, heath care and obligations for family gatherings, weddings, funerals etc.

Women, it was pretty clear did not look at men, at least in the world of the hospital culture in which the Phantom lived, in the same way men looked at women. Men looked at women as sex objects, who got boring quickly if they turned out to be dumb. Women looked at men as a source of economic advancement, of social security, much the way women in Jane Austen's time did.  Among hospital women, there were more and less promising males--surgeons were going to be richer than physicians, and some specialists were going to be richer than others--better find a cardiologist than a pediatrician.

Which is not to say personality did not matter, or kindness or intelligence or humor, but basically women could find a lot more signs of all that in a guy who was going to be rich.

Terri Gibbs

There was that Terri Gibbs song, which echoed Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend," but for Gibbs it was "Rich Man."

"My mamma said girl I can see that you're a woman

There's something that I want you to know

You got to get yourself a rich man

You got to marry you a rich man

You gotta live your life if you wanna be a wife

I know you got to have love

But it's just as easy lovin' you a rich man

You got to get yourself a rich man

If you're a poor man's wife

You'll live a poor man's life

You can never get your hands on a dime

And you can sing the blues

And you can pay your dues but you can never pay the rent on time

But there ain't no reason for doing without 

If you're married to the man who's got the dollar in his hand."

So, in one sense, Ms. Patton had it right: Marriage is not about romance, but it is a practical partnership with a person you project just might grow on you, but at least who won't bore you and leave you asking yourself: What did I get myself into here? 

What was I thinking? 

Ineffable: Knowing It When You See It

 "I cannot define obscenity, but I know it when I see it."

That line comes from Justice Potter Stewart's opinion in Jacobellis v Ohio, in which he held a movie in question was not "hard core pornography."

He did not actually use that exact phrase, but it has been a reasonable and widely used paraphrase ever since, as it says that some things are hard to define but that doesn't mean we cannot make a judgment.

Flower Bed Porch, Obadiah Youngblood

The same is very much true for paintings and music.

People make good livings writing and talking about artworks--what makes Van Gogh exceptional? I cannot say, but I know he is. 

Gabrielle Munter 

But the same is true for other artists, who in their own way are just as stunning, although less known.  Gabrielle Munter's paintings adorned the Phantom's previous blog post and they are wonderful, but why the Phantom is at a loss to explain.

Gabrielle Munter

So is Andre DeRain, whose paintings are shown with this post, and so is August Macke. 

Andre DeRain

Munter, Macke, DeRain were orbiting the art world in overlapping orbits, although how much each influenced the others is beyond Mad Dog's ken.  Munter lived for a time with Kadinsky, a Russian artist, who became her lover after he became her art teacher. 

Andre DeRain

They are all wonderful, and they bear a familial resemblance, but like siblings and cousins, they are distinct, not clones or twins.

Andre De Rain

Knowing What Good Is

Long before "Moneyball," John Madden, who coached the National Football League Oakland Raiders, caught my attention with a sort of rant as he was filling in some down time during a game. "You know," he said, "People think football players have to be big, intimidating guys, but really you can't win games with that. You need the quick, little guys who run so close to the ground the defensive lineman have trouble finding them; you need the big guys, sure, to protect the passer and to rush the passer, but you also need the gazelles, the wide receivers who if they weren't playing football might try out for ballet and you need a quarterback who can see the whole field and who can throw accurately sixty yards or fifteen. You can't just have one type. You need 'em all."

Gabrielle Munter 

Then came Michael Lewis's "Moneyball," where talent scouts talked about players and rated their likelihood of success not just by what they had done on their high school teams, but by how they looked, whether, as Billy Beane put it, "They look good in jeans."  In the movie adaptation, one scout doubts the prospects of a player because his girlfriend is homely. "Not even a five, I'd say. I mean guy with a girlfriend like that has no confidence."

There is no purer form of meritocracy than professional sports because you can actually keep score: You can track how the players you've selected actually perform, over time, with numbers.

Gabrielle Munter

Of course, what Moneyball demonstrated was that the people who were suppose to "know baseball" did not know what numbers to look at, which numbers were actually meaningful,  and they fell back into superstition, superficiality and gossip.

Two phone conversations highlighted the cluelessness of the men who select who gets into medical school have stuck with me: I had phoned a dean at Vanderbilt, where my son, who was a premedical student, was struggling with calculus and I remarked that in medical school I had never used calculus; beyond the final exam in calculus in college I have never seen any use for it,  and the only reason I could see it was included in the requirements set down by the American Association of Medical Colleges is that the guys on that committee got good grades in calculus and they were trying to select people who were like them. 

Gabrielle Munter

"Oh, no," the dean told me. "Math is the language of science. You have to be good at math."

"Excuse me," I asked, "But where did you go to medical school?"  He had not gone to medical school. He was a sociologist.

The other conversation was with a dean who guided undergraduate students at Wesleyan University.  I had phoned him because the son of a good friend had been told to take a year off after graduation before applying to medical school, and my friend did not understand that advice and neither did I.  My friend's son was not unusual in getting that advice: the dean at Wesleyan advised kids to take a year off after college, to work somewhere, in a lab, or even in the Park Service, before applying to medical school and the dean told me this was a good idea because it helped them mature, and to be sure medicine was really what they wanted. Wesleyan wanted only the very top students applying right out of college. 

"And," I observed, "Makes Wesleyan look good: I notice your catalogue says that 98% of your premeds graduate with an acceptance in medical school, but I can see now that high success rate is misleading, because you've already eliminated the kids who might not get in."

At Wesleyan, at least, the calculus course instructors provided the answers to the test questions before the exam, my friend's son told me, so calculus was not a gauntlet  tool used to eliminate hopeful premeds. 

Gabrielle Munter

Many, if not most medical students suffer from the imposter syndrome, when they arrive in medical school. They know they are not doctors, and they cannot quite imagine what they need to do to transform into doctors. In the old days, they got this sense of inadequacy reinforced in anatomy labs, in courses in microbiology, where an insane number of bacteria and viruses were served up to memorize.  Some, if they were lucky in the first two "preclinical years," discovered something they actually liked and were interested in, which gave them hope they might become a good neurologist or surgeon, even if they were not much good at memorizing the side effects of random drugs or the names of random bugs. 

But the point is, those who were guarding the gates, and those who were selecting for talent were simply not very good at their jobs, from college to early medical school. 

I had two conversations with deans which drove home this point. In college, I met with the dean who oversaw premedical students because I did not want to take a higher level calculus course. He told me I'd need to have that math to do the reading in my upper level courses. (He was a economist.) I replied that I had already taken those upper level courses and had not noticed any difficulty doing the reading, and, in fact, I had done well in those courses. At that point, he swiveled around in his desk chair, pulled out a drawer from his metal file cabinet (before computers), plucked out a chart and start thumbing through it. He was also the director of undergraduate admissions and he had my original application file from when I had applied three years earlier. 

"My God!" he gasped. "How did you ever even get in here?"

Gabrielle Munter

"I'm not the one to answer that," I replied. "But I've made it to the end of my junior year."

In fact, I refrained from saying, not wanting to antagonize this man who I needed for higher math dispensation, "And I've been on Dean's List every semester." The test scores this Dean had such faith in apparently were like the "he looks good in jeans" faith of the baseball scouts--really a form of a data free zone. 

The next dean conversation was less fraught. It was in fact, friendly. A medical school dean was driving me back to New York City from his Adirondack home, where he had invited five medical students. While the medical school did record grades for us, we were never told what  grades we had been awarded in the various courses. The medical school said it needed those grades so it could guide us where to apply for internships. "You were in the middle of the class, maybe just below the median,  your first two years," the dean told me, "But in your clinical years, you got honors in everything but Pediatrics. Hell, Fred Plum gave you honors, and  I can count on one hand the number of students who got honors in neurology over the past ten years. So, what got into you?"

I knew very well what had got into me, and it wasn't that I worked any harder in the clinical years.  It was the difference between multiple choice questions devised by microbiologists who asked if fungi had chitin in their cell walls and hematologists who asked you on rounds to tell them why a particular patient had anemia, what the different possibilities were and how to figure out what pertained to this patient.

The wonder to me, then and now, is how we get so many really talented people flourishing in medicine. It seems to me we get good people despite, rather than because of, the talent scouts.

Gabrielle Munter

The thing about medicine is it is a very broad arena. Like the football team, you need all sorts of different talents: the heart surgeon likely will make a terrible psychiatrist and vice versa. 

The other thing is that while you can read law, or you can read history, but you cannot just read medicine. You have to do medicine, and for that you need an organization of teachers who know medicine.

The next generation is going to be interesting. Colleges have noticed that the talent is flowing toward money. The "top students" (if we can believe the colleges even know who these are) want to go into finance, Goldman Sacks, not medicine, or even law.

These 18 to 22 year old kids are sophisticated enough to see that doctors in America now, have drifted into the social strata of British doctors: Mostly upper middle class, making $90,000 to $200,000 a year, depending on specialty, which is about what a McDonald's franchise owner or an enterprising plumber can make. 

And as this reality has sunk in, medical school classes have shifted toward majority females, who are likely to not be the sole bread winners for their families, who want to limit their hours at work and maximize time off. Women choose specialties like Radiology, Opthalmology,  Anesthesiology, Dermatology (the ROAD to happiness) which have fixed schedules, limited on call and which happen to be among the best paid.

Some doctors, in some specialties make much higher salaries, some in the millions, but the real money in medicine is, as it is in so much of industry, in administration. The managers take care of themselves first.

The current generation of doctors is not self employed. Ninety percent are working for large corporations--Partners, Beth Israel Deaconess, Mass General. They are employees getting W-2 forms. The entrepreneurial doctor, who employs workers, and who manages his own practice is gone with the dinosaurs. 

This may not be all bad--it's not clear medical care has suffered because it is no longer provided by shop keepers.

But, it is different and the talent has followed the money, however you discern "talent."

Dumb Luck

 

Sailors, if you can believe Patrick O'Brian, are superstitious. They believe in luck and they believe in things which can bring bad luck. They are at the mercy of storms which seem to blow in from nowhere, for no good reason, and it is understandable they might focus on the uncontrollable. 

Athletes, especially baseball players, are superstitious. In sports where success or failure is more controllable, like wrestling and football, players tend to be less superstitious, but baseball has a lot in it which is not in the player's control. The Phantom played baseball through the end of his sixth decade and he went to the batting cages regularly, and he was able to train himself to hit fast balls, but he could get five at bats in a game and never see a good pitch to hit. But sometimes, there it was, and he could pounce. More than half the time, though, it was just dumb luck whether he saw a good pitch. 

Driving down the road to southern Maryland, with his wife and kids in the car, the Phantom saw a wheel cover detach from a car maybe thirty yards ahead of him, and the wheel spun on its edges, zipping up the banked road side and then wheeling around and coming right back down again, crossing the Phantom's path, traveling underneath his car with a metallic clank. When he got back home, hours later, the Phantom found that wheel cover had lacerated the undercarriage beneath the transmission and what was left of the pink transmission fluid was dripping out and the transmission, and the car was toast. Dumb luck. The fickle finger of fate. God did not want the Phantom to drive a Honda Odyssey.

Every time you get on an airplane, there is that whole world of uncontrollable.

Forty-nine years ago, the Phantom was driving down a country road in southern Rhode Island and along the side of the road was a sort of garage sale, minus the garage and the Phantom spotted a wooden desk chair that looked serviceable and had some character. He plopped down some affordable amount of cash, maybe $25, loaded the chair into his car and that chair moved with him from Southern Rhode Island to Providence, to New Haven, to Washington, D.C, and ultimately to New Hampshire and he uses it to this day, and it still swivels.

                            Gabrielle Munter 

The chair turns out to be a W.H. Gunlocke chair, made in Wayland, New York. This company made chairs for multiple Presidents, for libraries and executive offices from 1902 until 2026, which will be the last year it produces chairs. For 49 years, it has seated the Phantom comfortably, admirably. Just happened to spot it driving down the road, just happened to have cash, just happened to shrug off the wife's objections to buying that old piece of junk.

Dumb luck.

Real History

 

Reading Jill Lepore in the the New Yorker about plans for the Bicentennial, has given the Phantom pause to think about his prior bumps with historical commemorations.

In 1976, the Phantom and his new girl friend walked from the East Side of Manhattan to the wild and wooly West Side to see the "tall ships" sail up the Hudson, and then fireworks. 

The war in Vietnam was over by then, and the Republic seemed safe enough, apart from Cold War threats. But nobody was talking about the end of democracy or the collapse of the rule of law or apocalypse.

History seemed to have moved on.

Years later, the Phantom got into the habit of listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes, which played on public radio as he drove out to the nearest batting cages in Drainesville, Virginia, along Georgetown Pike, past the CIA campus in Langley.

Listening to those tapes, to Johnson's voice was living history, a backstage view previously unavailable to the Phantom, and it confirmed the inferences the Phantom had drawn about LBJ: He was just as clueless and unsophisticated as he appeared on T.V.

He had one conversation which stuck with the Phantom, as LBJ spoke with the one person he clearly trusted and liked, Richard Russell, a deeply conservative Dixiecrat. LBJ was thinking about his options about pulling out of Vietnam or trying to push the war to a victorious conclusion. He actually said he was afraid of becoming the first U.S. President to lose a war, as if Madison had not actually lost the war of 1812. On the other hand, he did not fully trust the rosy assessments of his generals, and he wondered how long the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would fight on.

"Well, you know, Mr. President, Russell told him, "You don't want to stay in Vietnam forever."

"No, Suh," Johnson said. "We don't do colonies. I just want to get the Hell out.  Maybe do some business later."

"Yup" LBJ concurred. "I want to get the Goddamn Hell out."

 Russell said. "Get the Goddamn Bejesus out of that cesspool."

"Yup."

"Well, those Cong, them boys in Hanoi--they know that, too."

And I thought, "Yes! You dumbass. It's obvious. So get out." Of course, this was twenty years after the conversation. Johnson was dead. Russell, too. And I'm just driving by the CIA campus on the way to the batting cage, listening to history.

But then, on the other hand, there was a phone call from some young guy who had been sent to find out what was happening with a farm bill LBJ was interested in.  The young guy was out of the White House, some legislative liaison office.

"Well, you see, Mr. President, they are arguing over 3 cents a pound for beef and it's holding up everything. I mean, 3 cents! And neither side will give in, and the whole farm bill is being held hostage to these beef farmers, over 3 cents a pound!"

"Well," LBJ rejoined, "A head of cattle weighs maybe two thousand pounds, so that's $600 a head and you got a herd of 1000 head, that's $600,000, which is not chicken feed to a rancher."

When I saw my father I mentioned the tapes to him.

"I mean, LBJ sounded just dumb as a brick, when he's talking about Vietnam, but when it came to that farm bill, he was much sharper than this young staffer they sent over to Congress."

"Oh, Johnson was very bright," my father said. "I'd say maybe even brilliant."

"What? How would you know?"

"Well, they sent me over to brief him once, before a press conference, where they knew he was going to get grilled at length, and in detail, about some legislation concerning older workers, who, it turned out, were actually less likely to miss work, and who were more productive than most of the younger workers everyone was so eager please. And the thing is, older people vote.

And he listens and I keep pausing, so he can take some notes on his little index cards, but he writes nothing down, and just says, 'Yes, keep going.' So, I keep going, and fifteen minutes later he says. 'Okay, got it.' And he goes out to the podium in the press room and they grill him, and he hits them with everything I had just given him, no notes,  like it's all stuff he knows backwards and forwards. Mind like a steel trap. He was no slouch, mentally."

"Wait!" I stopped my father. "You went to the White House?"

"That's where he hung out. Sure. Had to go through all these tunnels with guys asking my name ever fifty yards."

So, it was no surprise to my father LBJ knew farm bills and anything else not foreign to his world.

But you take a guy who knows Texas ranches, cattle, domestic programs, and you put him on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam, and he is, figuratively speaking, lost at sea. He is just not smart enough to know what questions to ask, not widely enough read to think about a foreign culture.

When the Phantom picked up his wife at Logan airport upon her return from her holiday in Vietnam, forty years after the end of the American war there, she handed him her bag and she did not say, "Oh, good to be home!" or "I missed you!" 

She was, actually, the same woman with whom the Phantom had watched the tall ships celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976.

She said, first words out of her mouth, "There was no way in Hell we were ever going to win that goddamned war!"

Well, nice to see you back, too.

She had been given a tour of the underground "tunnels" outside Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City.) Tunnels is a gross misnomer: These were several stories deep, with hospitals and ammo dumps and plumbing and venting and HVAC and whatnot. They spread out in concentric circles for 20 miles surrounding Saigon. Those underground facilities were mute testimony to the determination of the Vietnamese to prevail. They had nowhere else to go. They lived there.

And they knew Americans weren't going to stay. 

As Richard Russell told LBJ, "You know that. And they know that, too."

The Monster and the Beast: Raising Boys

 

There wasn't much to watch, if you were from New England, during last night's Super Bowl, but the half time ads were something.

The one which struck the Phantom most was an ad showing a boy, maybe six, maybe eight, who was giving a pep talk to his stuffed animals, a talk he had clearly heard from an adult male who coached his youth football team. The ad was sponsored by the National Football League, a sort of recruitment piece, like the Army's "Be All You Can Be," ads.

"I am a monster!  I am a beast!"

This prepubescent boy was telling himself, "I'm a monster! I'm a beast!"

He was performing a self stoking ritual of dominance. 

He was parroting what he had heard from an adult male. A coach. He had been told about aspiration. 

What struck the Phantom was how very prepubescent this boy was. Clearly, his muscles had not seen a lot of testosterone yet, nor his larynx either. 

It made the Phantom think of how he had caught football fever as a six or seven year old, seeing football on TV and going out to a field with a boy, his only friend in the neighborhood who reliably wanted to throw and catch and run a football any time of the day. He would kick or pass the Phantom the ball, and the Phantom would run it at him, and he'd try to tackle the Phantom,  and the Phantom did the same for him.

The difference between lamb and mutton is puberty and neither the Phantom nor his friend were powerful enough to do much harm.

Later, post puberty, the Phantom joined his high school's wrestling team, where they built strength by having the wrestlers pull themselves up a twenty-five foot rope to the ceiling of the gym, using no legs, only arms, hand over hand. Of course, all the boys pumped iron, lifted weights in the off season, building muscle mass and power.

Wrestling is a contact sport, and in fact it is constant contact, violent, scientific and fast. You cannot be successful as a wrestler without a modicum of muscular strength, although flexibility is probably more important, but aggressiveness, tolerance for pain and relentlessness are helpful.

One of the  Phantom's sons started wrestling at age 7, which the Phantom did not encourage, but an adult--oh, those adults!--who wrestled in college, was organizing a wrestling club and he picked out this son. "He's got something to prove," he told the Phantom.  That son proved to be a hundred times better wrestler than the Phantom ever was, in part because he was trained and drilled, from age 7, by someone who actually knew the science of wrestling. 

Domination

"I really love destroying those super jacked [muscular] guys, who look so  nasty," this 15 year old told the Phantom. "They step out on the mat with this smirk but I wipe that off their faces."

The Phantom remembered that feeling. After one wrestling season was over, the Phantom had to return to regular physical education class, and the unit he returned to was wrestling. The physical education teacher, not the brightest bulb, stood in the middle of the mat with his students sitting in a circle around him, and he announced that a well trained wrestler could take a bigger, stronger opponent because of his training.  

He then told the Phantom to stand in the middle of the mat, and he pulled up Mack Shuff, a fearsome looking giant, who had a five o'clock shadow by 2 PM, a brow ridge of a Neanderthal, already balding at 17,  and he was the defensive tackle on the football team, 220 pounds, well over six feet tall. The Phantom was 145 pounds, but he was a varsity wrestler.

Of course, the Phys Ed teacher was right about one thing-- training mattered--and the Phantom pinned poor Mack in fifteen seconds. 

But what that teacher was too dim to consider is that drubbing might not be received cheerfully by Mack, who demanded a re match the next day. The Phantom could see immediately how much this meant to Mack, and it meant nothing to the Phantom, so he just rolled over and allowed Mack to win.

The Phantom, at that point, had nothing to prove.

The Phantom knew the truth, and likely so did Mack, so what was the point?  

The fact is, the real athletes, the boys who were potent and trained, and who knew what real combat demanded, did not stalk around telling themselves they were monsters or beasts.

Another son did not wrestle, but he did white water kayaking.  We lived hard by the Potomac River and this son spent summers at a camp run by members of the U.S. Olympic team and they quickly saw something in this kid, age 10--he could flip his kayak and pop it upright without using a paddle, something which usually takes adults many lessons over weeks to accomplish and many never can. Even using a paddle, it's not easy. But more amazing, he could do a "combat roll" which is to say he could go under and pop up in class 4 rapids.

The Phantom was not at all happy about this son's choice of sport. Wrestling was agonizing enough to have to watch, but you could easily die kayaking on the Potomac.

He expressly forbid his son to go off Great Falls, which is something 15 year old boys were daring each other to do, and people regularly died trying that, but, of course, one day the Phantom found on his desk a framed picture of his son doing exactly that.

Great Falls, Potomac River

Neither son ever strutted around the house barking, "I am a beast! I am a monster!"

They needed enough  testosterone and likely the encouragement of their friends.

Now both sons have children of their own--both have daughters, no sons.

Watching these girls grow up, the Phantom is struck by how very different they are from little boys. 

They rough house with their fathers and they are wonders to behold, but they are clearly not boys.

They never call out, "I am a monster!" or "I am a beast!"