ews1 1 day ago
"I want the services"
This is the linchpin of the whole post/issue, and I suspect you're being completely dishonest, perhaps without meaning to. It's one thing to eat at the local eatery (though somewhat pointless in that I suspect 9 times out of 10 the owner of said establishment lives in a different neighborhood). It's another to be willing to send your little McSuderman's to the local public schools. If you intend to have kids, and intend to send them to the local public schools, then I take the post as genuine and really putting your money where your mouth is. However, if the opposite is true, you are otherwise like any other typical gentrifier. If gentrifiers would actually send their kids to the public schools these schools would improve and the poor local black kids would themselves get a better experience and be far better prepared for life. But if you're using your wealth to send your kids to private schools, you're making little contribution to the neighborhood who's diminishing character you purportedly lament.
You are, of course, fully within your right to send your children to a private school. (People suggesting that the Obamas pull their children from Sidwell are beyond moronic). But let's dispense with the lament.
McMegan 4 hours ago in reply to ews1
If there are any little McSudermans, my preference is to send them to public school.
(My bold.)
She might prefer to not pay school fees but she will. Her pride and vanity will demand it.
9 comments:
You are correct, but I would be surprised if McArdle decides to have kids. That would involve temporarily giving up alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, Ambien and goodness knows what other substances she abuses and doesn't tell her readers about.
But just think of all the upscale baby items you can buy! The showers, the attention, the trust funds and tax deductions!
That, and motherhood requires a certain degree of sacrifice and selflessness. I can't see Megan being capable of either.
If Megan starts writing posts about 'the economics' of raising children, then we'll know she's considering motherhood (or is already pregnant). Glass head and all that...
Innaresting. Will she or won't she?
I think she will. Having kids is, among other things, a way of feeling less bad about being not as successful as one's peers. It's an "accomplishment" no one, by definition, can devalue or top.
Plus, for all we know, the distant ticking of her bio-clock might have made young Suderman seem even more appealing than he of course already is.
Finally, Megan's self-regard might be enticing her with images of her as Inside the Beltway Mom, and (per Susan's point) all the gear, posturing, and vanity-based martyrdom that entails.
That apocryphal bus conversation is one of the more infuriating things I've read lately. What a despicable human being she is.
Megan is nothing if not conventional. Also, her career choice doesn't absolutely make having kids impossible--she's not too busy. She will definitely start trying to have children soon but she may not be successful. She's already in her late thirties. I didn't have my first child until 36 and I had my second child at 38 but I consider myself lucky--many of my friends really struggled with infertility issues.
Still, to get back to the topic at hand, Megan will definitely want children because they remain a status symbol and a way of acquiring new goods. Also its a conventional rite de passage--just like marriage and buying a house. Buying a house right now was insane, literally insane. No one who was paying attention to the mortgage issues and had the sense god gave a nematode would ever have gotten into the housing market at this point in time unless they were extremely stupid and conventional and let those two things override sense.
So, expect Megan and suderman to get pregnant and only then realize that they have bought a house in a "bad public school" area. They will then whine that they "didn't realize" that the low property values reflected poor public schools and they will begin to beg harder for private school tuition money and bitch at their commenters who point out they could have rented in a good school area ie the suburbs. They want the lifestyle of people much richer than they are: city chic *and* suburban comfort *and* elite schools.
Yes, any minute now Megan and Suderman will be writing a letter about how expensive it is to be middle class and blaming the poor for making it so tough.
aimai
"It did not occur to me that Megan McArdle lied about her now-famous bus conversation"
Not unlike David Brooks' "magic jacket" or his conversation with a cabbie in Pakistan, you have to assume it is unadulterated bullshit to begin with. Seriously, by now we should all know better than to assume honesty from some characters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/opinion/27brooks.html
Mother requires sacrifice and selflessness to be sure. But that has not stopped many women capable of neither from having children. Children are a status symbol in the realm that Mc. inhabits, and therefore she will issue a little Suderman eventually.
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