Sense and Sensibility

Jenny Sanford’s Pious Ramblings

More magazine named Jenny Sanford one of its 10 Women Who Wouldn’t Shut Up last month. 

At the time, South Carolina’s first lady had done a lot of shutting up, most famously not dishing dirt on her priapic husband, Mark Sanford, when the rest of the country wanted her to squish him like a bug. It was Mrs. Sanford’s decorous dismissal of her husband’s philandering

How refreshing not to have a wronged wife stand dry-eyed by her husband’s side like an anesthetized doormat. No more steely-jawed chumps pledging eternal fealty to some skirt-chasing slug who got his Dockers docked.

The more Jenny Sanford distanced herself from the bumbling bawler who claimed he lost his heart in Argentina, the classier she looked and the more farcical he looked. Jenny Sanford said a mouthful when she said next to nothing at all.Now Jenny Sanford is talking.

And it would have better for all of us if she’d just zip it.

The wronged wife is now criss-crossing the country, promoting her new book, “Staying True.” In it, she reveals what we all guessed about her: She’s an intelligent, pious, doting mother who happened to marry a sniveling, self-centered boob.

It happens.

Sanford said she wrote the book because she thought she could “help women cultivate character and faith,” which is a motivation a lot more gracious than most of us could muster.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, they say. But in what is fast developing into a separate literary genre — the wronged political wife memoir— fury has been defanged.

That’s a little deflating for the feisty among us who were dying for these martyrs to get up off the mat and deck these self-indulgent worms. Instead, most of what we get is pious homilies about the virtue of suffering and the balm that faith can bestow.

Forgive a little venomous vengeance from this woman of faith, but I was really hoping at least one of these wronged wretches would kick these rakes in the teeth. Oh, for a little Ivana Trump!

At least Elizabeth Edwards admitted wrestling with her faith:  “I cannot understand how I merited these blows,” she wrote.

If there is a tale more tawdry than the Edwards’ hillbilly hoedown, Maury Povich has yet to find it.This is Southern Gothic with DNA and video. If it wasn’t humiliating enough that Edwards’ husband was thinner and prettier than she was, he took up with a spicy blonde while his wife was still battling terminal cancer.

De Valera’s American Swing

In the summer of 1919, the man who called himself president of Ireland stole his way out of a British prison, fled to the docks of Liverpool and burrowed into the lamplighter’s cabin of the mammoth SS Lapland.

The stowaway, Eamon De Valera, hero of the failed 1916 Easter Rising and insurrectionist to the British Crown, shrank into the lower decks of the 17,540-ton passenger ship, where rats gnawed through his spare clothes.

De Valera, arguably the most powerful and divisive figures in the Irish fight for independence, might have stayed in Ireland, where his cohort Michael Collins was then waging guerilla war on English troops. But the American-born de Valera, already twice imprisoned with a death sentence hanging over his head, had his sights set on juicier prey: The estimated 5 million Irish-Americans then living in the United States. Those Irish-Americans, one million of whom had been born in Ireland, were wealthier, politically better connected and more essential to Ireland’s drive for independence than any other group in the world.

They were, says Dave Hannigan, author of “De Valera in America: The Rebel President and the Making of Irish Independence,” critical to his success.

By 1919, he said, Irish rebels had tried and failed at insurrection and were trying to “broaden out the struggle,” said Hannigan, who led a book reading and discussion of his work recently at Quinnipiac University in Hamden. “Their idea is that to take it to the British again [they] need money. They look around and say, ‘What country has money, influence and an awful lot of Irish people?’ Obviously, that’s America. Their thinking was ‘Once we get to America, surely (President Woodrow) Wilson and Washington will see the merits of our cause and row in behind us,’” he said.

Not quite. De Valera might not have received the political backing he needed, but he raised money and awareness and became a better politician in the bargain [--] a quality that would serve him well in the internecine political battles of the young Irish Republic.

Regardless of the negative coverage, Hannigan writes, 303,578 people bought Irish bond certificates, most in denominations of $5, $10 and $25.

In that financial respect [--] opening a spigot of Irish-American money for the IRA that would last for decades [--] de Valera’s trip was a success. But plenty of Americans objected to de Valera’s claim to the presidency of an Irish Republic [--] a republic that had yet to be formally recognized by the U.S. Others resented the Irish Republican’s open courting of Germany, from which it tried to obtain arms to fight the British.

“The U.S. government was not very happy about the Irish cause,” said David Valone, chairman of the history department at Quinnipiac University. “During World War I, (the U.S. government) persecuted some strong Irish nationalists in New York.” Indeed, said Valone, one of the key reasons for the failure of the Easter Uprising was that a shipment of German arms failed to arrive in Ireland in time for the revolt.

But the 18-month trip, Hannigan said, “knocked the edges off” de Valera’s naiveté and better prepared him for an Ireland in desperate need of a statesman.“His political muscles had been honed over here by going to Washington and discovering, no, you’re not going to get what you want out of them.” De Valera became prime minister in 1932, and wrote the Irish Constitution in consultation with Archbishop John McQuaid, the most influential cleric in the country. De Valera died in 1975.

chastises de Valera for not appreciating the depth of American alliance with Britain. “De Valera doesn’t realize that Wilson is in bed with Britain,” Hannigan said. “I mean, they had just fought a war together. It’s kind of naïve for de Valera to think he could get anywhere with Wilson. Wilson is no great friend of Ireland anyway, and at this point in history, he can’t fit Ireland into his agenda because he has too many other fish to fry and he doesn’t want to annoy the British.”

chastises de Valera for not appreciating the depth of American alliance with Britain. “De Valera doesn’t realize that Wilson is in bed with Britain,” Hannigan said. “I mean, they had just fought a war together. It’s kind of naïve for de Valera to think he could get anywhere with Wilson. Wilson is no great friend of Ireland anyway, and at this point in history, he can’t fit Ireland into his agenda because he has too many other fish to fry and he doesn’t want to annoy the British.”

The book tells the story of de Valera’s 18-month, cross-country visit of the U.S. to publicize Ireland’s plight, a barnstorming that eventually raised $5 million for the newly formed Irish Republican Army. De Valera packed Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Madison Square Garden.

“He got this rock star reception,” Hannigan said. In New York alone, de Valera raised $1 million from 100,000 people, a success that led the Wall Street Journal to fret that the donations had been “swindled” from “Irish domestic servants, and others of a like or lower standard of intelligence.”

Don’t wait for the school to do it

My mother told me about sex over the dinner table when I was about 12.

My brother had come home from playing in a kid’s tree fort, puzzled by a graphic hand gesture one of the boys had made. He wanted to know what it meant.

And so, over a plate of elbow macaroni and ground beef drenched in Puttanesca sauce, I learned the facts of life.

Unsurprisingly, I lost my appetite.

I was also temporarily incapable of looking anyone over the age of 20 in the eye for several weeks. For months, the convent loomed attractive. I might have joined if I wasn’t certain my mother would summarily disown me.

What I got from my mother were facts. I also got, from an unlikely source, a religious perspective on sex that I didn’t get three years later in public high school. My mother told me that sex was a “gift from God.”

Earlier this month, a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine Monday found that 12-year-olds given an abstinence-only message were significantly more likely to delay having sex than those receiving more comprehensive sex education.

As the Christian Science Monitor put it: “Abstinence-only education does work. Sometimes.”

The qualifier is critical.

A plethora of early studies, including federally funded studies by the Cochrane collaboration and the Mathematica Policy that found abstinence education had no effect on teen’s sexual behavior. Finally, a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health looked at 934 high school students, specifically scrutinizing those who took the “virginity pledge.” That study also found no difference in the rate of teens having sex between those taking the virginity pledge and those who did not. What it did find was that those who took the virginity pledge were less likely to use contraceptives.

In spite of the program’s demonstrable ineffectiveness, funding for it tripled, from $73 million a year in 2001 to $204 million per year in 2008.

So what was different about this last abstinence-only program? For one thing, the students it targeted were quite young –12—and the moralistic tone of the instruction was ripped away. Instructors,counseled participants to delay sex “until they are ready,” rather than until marriage, the Monitor reports, adding, “The program also did not include a moralistic tone or disparage condom use, and instructors discussed contraceptive use if the subject came up during the course of the class.”

The United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world, with some 750,000 teens getting pregnant annually. From 2002-2006, Waterbury’s teen pregnancy rate was either double or near double the state average. It is fourth in the teen pregnancy rate, behind Hartford, New Britain and Windham.

If we can’t figure out a way to stop kids from having kids, we’re going to have more kids living in poverty, failing in school, suffering family violence and sexual abuse, landing in jail or becoming teen parents themselves. All of these outcomes researchers say are more likely to teen parents.

And while we fulminate about whether sex education should be given with a cudgel, with a condom or with a cautionary tale, we might want to look at what, when and how we tell our own children about sex. Squeamishness about “the talk” means that more kids are learning the most crucial facts of life from anybody other than their own parents. And yet when you ask them, more teens, 38 percent, pointed to their parents as the biggest influence on their sexual behavior ‑ more than friends, the media, educators, siblings, or religious organizations.

So don’t wait for the school to tell your kid ‘No, never; Yes, sometimes” or “Sure, use this.” Have the talk. This country has the highest birthrate and abortion rate thanany other country. That can’t continue. We need a little bit of morality here and a lot of sense. That begins at home, at the kitchen table, before it ends up on the street.

Why the skies are not friendly anymore

Somewhere around the sixth concourse of Hell, I began to feel that the terrorists had already won.

I was in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, ferried from one franchise-encrusted terminal to the next by human conveyor belt that makes me feel like a box of Sugar Smacks headed for the UPC scanner. After a two-hour delay, my flight had been cancelled, and I and hundreds of other bleary-eyed, acquiescent voyagers were heading with somnolent resignation into the bleak night to lick our wounds.

“I never want to get on a plane again,” one man groaned, as a trio of red-shirted Delta salesmen proffered “free round-trip tickets” for those who sign up for its frequent flyer program. “What’s second prize?” a guy next to me quipped.

It was hard to imagine that anyone en route to this River Styx would weigh anchor again, but hope is about all the airlines have left.

American airline passengers are among the most dissatisfied in the country, according to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction index. Of the 19 industries the group asked consumers about in 2007, the only groups that scored worse were the cable and satellite TV industry, reports. Even the IRS did better than the airline industry. A similar study by JD Power Associates found that overall customer satisfaction with airlines in 2009 declined for the third consecutive year to a four-year low, in spite of a five-minute improvement in on-time arrivals. But none of that improvement has been reflected how passengers actually feel about flying.

Never mind that the U.S. Department of Transportation reports that 88 percent of flights in this country land when they say they will. People on these planes find the experience wretched. Largely, this has to do with the in-flight experience, in which airlines insist on squishing the most obese population in the world in seats designed for Giacometti sculptures. Too, the cutbacks in the meager alimentary perks make flying on an American airline a bit like being freighted by cattle car.

“It used to be we would get free snacks on a plane,” said David Van Amburg, director of ASCI. “Now, not only do we not get a meal, but we’re charged for a bag of chips. There’s a perception that we’re paying more in bits and pieces we’re not getting any more for it.”

The security that is the necessary byproduct of a precarious world feels not only onerous, but humiliating, protracted, futile and absurd to the point of inanity. Most of us are willing to endure certain personal intrusions [Dash] removal of footwear, rummaging through baggage, being irradiated metal detectors [Dash] in the interests of public safety. But when fanatics slither through seamlessly, it’s easy to feel that confiscating one’s Yoplait is somewhere between excessive and futile. The answer [Dash] additional and more intrusive scrutiny taxes [Dash] one’s logic, wallet and nerves. It can be enough to cause one to give up on air travel entirely [Dash] a crippling economic blow surely relished by our enemies.

Beyond the rigors of flawed security, though, there is this bungled logic: Capitalism is about many things, but fundamentally, it’s about choice. That’s why Starbucks has 14 types of coffee. This plethora of choice, as Barry Schwartz has noted, can be dizzying to the point of numbness. But how is it that although I have 47 types of toothpastes to choose from, when it comes to travel, I have only two: the highway, or the skyway?

Granted, the country still has Amtrak, a perpetually debt-ridden rail service that only makes money here in the Northeast. But while its trains putter on at 35 miles per hour, trains in France and Japan hum through the countryside at speeds approaching 200 miles an hour. Riding one of these trains in France was among the most pleasurable travel experiences I’ve had. The trains are clean, efficient, comfortable and prompt. When I ride Metro North into Grand Central, I feel fortunate if I can find a lavatory, let alone one with toilet tissue.

Last year, the president announced an $8 billion push for high-speed rail to begin work on 10 high-speed rail corridors as an alternative to driving or flying. He added another $8 million this year. But the money will all be spent before we see a single train in place. Perhaps some innovative capitalist, a modern-day Cornelius Vanderbilt, will see the gapping crater in the nation’s infrastructure and figure out a way to give Americans the alternative they demand – and deserve.