Battle Cluck of the Rooster Father

Introduction

If you’re a parent, or otherwise tapped into the parenting zeitgeist, you’ve probably heard of the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, and/or have read her “Wall Street Journal” article titled, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Among Chua’s parenting principles: kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch TV, play video games, or have play-dates; must get all As; must be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama; and are fair game to be insulted by their parents (e.g., to be called “garbage”) in the name of motivation. If you haven’t read the article but these bold ideas sound interesting, check out the WSJ piece and then come back here.

In this post, I will explain why I think the book and article are important; describe what I like about the article; and then explain what’s wrong with it. My post will be longer than Chua’s WSJ article—not because I’m needlessly verbose, but because it’s harder to carefully analyze something than to say whatever simple, brash thing pops into your head. If Dostoevsky had spray-painted a profanity on the side of a building instead of writing Notes From Underground, I wouldn’t say his existential angst would have been better served. (No, I’m not trying to say Chua’s writing is like graffiti, nor that I’m like Dostoevsky. I’m just explaining where I am trying to land this post within the literary spectrum.)

Why “Rooster Father”? Chua calls herself a “Tiger Mother” based on her Chinese zodiac sign, and tells the reader that tigers are “powerful, authoritative, and magnetic” and inspire “fear and respect.” I’m no expert on Chinese zodiac, but as a rooster I’m said to be hard-working, honest, and blunt. And I can be pugnacious, especially when some human outfits me with spurs.

Caveat

No, I haven’t even read Chua’s book. Why should I, when a) her WSJ article gives me a strong enough taste of her perspective, and b) her writing isn’t very good? I haven’t even read At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien yet. How can I ignore a writer like O’Brien who offers up sentences like “My mother owned a cat but it was a foreign outdoor animal and was rarely seen and my mother never took any notice of it” in favor of Chua’s “Western parents worry a lot about their childrens’ self-esteem”? My time is too scarce to spend it on inferior books.

That said, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to make a case against Chua’s parenting tenets by evaluating what she wrote in her WSJ article, which I have read very carefully. It’s reasonable to assume her book is in the same spirit as the article, espousing similar views.

Why the Tiger Mother book is important

I have never encountered a more earnest bunch than parents. The intense yearning to get things right begins before the first offspring is even born, when the mother-to-be gets a copy of that accursed book What to Expect When You’re Expecting. My favorite one-star Amazon review of that book says it all: “Guys ... consider this a warning; this will be the worst book that your significant other can read and will make your life utterly miserable for the next nine months.” It’s true. The book should be called What to Dread When You’re Expecting. And then when the baby is finally born, alive and well and without gills or fangs or asbestosis, you’re still not out of the woods. Parenthood is (among other things) a long cycle of fear and dread, for both parents. When my wife and I took two-day-old Alexa home from the hospital—not just for a visit, but to live with us—I felt like a mistake must have been made: who were we to raise a child? We knew nothing! (An entire industry preys on parents’ lack of confidence; I give you the baby-wipe-warmer and baby-bottle-sterilizer.)

Doubtless there are huge pockets of America where parents pick a pacifier up off the floor, wipe the dog hair off it, and stick it back in their kid’s mouth as a standard practice beginning with the first baby, instead of only gradually reaching this point on the second or third. But here in the Berkeley area (spang in the heart of the Prius belt), parents take their responsibility very seriously, and discuss parenting techniques the way “Vogue” interns discuss fashion, or teenage kids discuss video gaming strategy. When I attended my kids’ school’s Math Night—a chance for teachers to share math teaching techniques with parents—I got there a few minutes early but barely nabbed the last seat.

Highest among parents’ virtues in progressive communities is a willingness to second-guess ourselves. Much of this is worthwhile; parents are rightly cautioned against such evils as helicopter parenting and over-praising. But then there’s the flip side too, like the myth that immunizations cause autism, or that your cat will suck the breath out of a sleeping infant. Whenever parenting culture starts to swerve around, I get really nervous.

When a parenting advice book comes out by a Yale Law School professor, whose husband is also a Yale Law School professor, and whose older daughter got into an Ivy League college and plays piano at Carnegie Hall—well, parents sit up and listen, and are primed to obey. Whether we read the book or article or not is almost immaterial—our day-to-day behavior, grounded in our thoughtful approach but subject to the whims of inevitable parental improvisation, can be easily influenced by the mere notion that ultra-strict parenting is now in vogue. Many of us are desperate to be told the right way to parent, so books like this make big waves, whether they’re shaping behavior or galvanizing parents into a spirited, defiant backlash. (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother calls itself as a memoir and pretends to be a parent-acquires-wisdom tale; the WSJ article is more blatantly a how-to guide.)

The good

Some of what Chua says I can agree with. I’ve lately felt as though parenting trends are already shifting towards greater strictness, but the signs of what I take as rampant over-permissiveness are all around us. When dining with another family I’ll occasionally witness the children being given a totally separate menu—hot dogs or chicken fingers or mac ‘n’ cheese—as though the parents are short-order cooks. (My kids eat what they’re served, even if it’s my wife’s okra-based gumbo creation.) I’m shocked, though perhaps I shouldn’t be, at kids who never say “please” or “thank you.” I’m irked by parents who append every command with “okay?” and let these quasi-commands go unexecuted. It seems to me that some parents, for whatever reason, are uncomfortable with their own authority. Their kids, needless to say, take full advantage.

On Chua’s list of rules, I find some items that loosely match the rules my kids must live by. My kids don’t get to watch TV (they’ve literally never seen it, expect perhaps at friends’ houses), and videos and PC time are strictly rationed. And like Chua, I tell my kids I expect them to get good grades (and that “good” will mean “A” once the kids are switched to the letter-grade scale). My kids are expected to practice the piano (though only twenty minutes a day). And, they will play league soccer until and unless they find an alternative sport that provides as much structure. I do get the occasional raised eyebrow when I mention these things to another parent. Chua’s book and article may reduce the number of raised eyebrows I get, or (on the other hand) may align me, in others’ eyes, with the enemy camp. Perhaps some of both.

The problem with the Tiger Mother

I’m just going to come right out and say it: Amy Chua’s parenting approach is wrong. Now, as much as we may all enjoy simple, bold statements like that, for me to convince anybody of this notion, I’m going to have to back it up. I don’t have a Ph.D., I don’t teach at Yale, I’m not a bestselling writer, this is just a humble blog and not the “Wall Street Journal,” and my daughters aren’t (yet) successful, so I can’t just declare what ought to be done and have thousands of parents scurrying around retooling their policies. But that’s okay! I relish the opportunity to take Chua on, within the (albeit obscure) pages of albertnet. When I’m done taking apart her argument, you’ll be cheering and saying, “Her fame and riches are rightfully his!”

The more responsible way of saying Amy Chua is wrong is to say that her argument fails to show a causal link between its premises and its conclusion (i.e., her argument is not valid), and/or that its premises are false (i.e., her argument is not sound). Here’s how her case, in the WSJ article, breaks down:

Premise: Chinese parents are more strict, and push their kids harder, than Western parents.

Premise: The wisdom of a parent’s approach determines, in large part, her child’s success.

Premise: Asian-American kids achieve greater success than other American kids.

Conclusion: The Chinese-style strict parenting approach works better.

I am going to first attack the premises, because they practically attack themselves. If there’s anything of the argument left after that, I’ll attack the causality (though it’s kind of latent in the second premise anyway, her argument being plagued by the petitio principii fallacy to begin with).

First premise – Chinese parents are more strict

Certainly, Amy Chua isn’t the first person to describe the strict parenting common in Chinese culture (and Asian cultures in general). At the same time, I wouldn’t be the first person to accuse her article of reinforcing unfair stereotypes. There are plenty such accusations in the reader comments on the WSJ article; I also looked at the 1-star reviews of her book on Amazon and found that sixteen out of eighty-six (32%) were from self-identified Asians. It has also been pointed out that Chua’s family actually emigrated from the Philippines, so she herself may not be an ideal spokesperson for Chinese parenting methodology.

Anecdotally, I can offer one solid counterexample to Chua’s assertions about Chinese parenting: while my own mother obviously isn’t Chinese, a prominent figure of my alma mater was (and is). In college, I took a creative writing class from bestselling writer Maxine Hong Kingston. While Chua tells her kids they have to be ranked number one, Maxine had little use for such hierarchy. All you had to do to get an A in her class was write the requisite number of pages (I think it was fifty) during the term. She told us that it was hard enough getting into her class (she offered only thirty spots per semester, with admission based on writing samples), so she felt we all already deserved As. When I graduated, Maxine gave the commencement speech, and a rather memorable moment was when she gave all of us English majors permission to get fired from our first few corporate jobs.

What kind of parent was Maxine? I can’t say, but in her new book (as quoted in a recent interview) she laments not focusing more attention on her son: “I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows, so I could have 20 minutes to write.” Hardly the slave-driver Tiger Mother Chua describes.

Chua’s characterization of Western parents is also troubling. She makes vague references to “my Western friends who consider themselves strict,” but really, how valid a cross-section of the American people is that? Is the Yale community subset of New Haven, CT the epicenter of Western family values? The only statistical evidence Chua cites in the WSJ article is a study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers—a rather small sample. (Her choice of this study also begs the question, “What about the fathers?” In her article she briefly mentions her husband’s dissenting point of view, but the clear implication is that he is routinely overruled. A review I read of her book suggests that it’s no better in giving her husband his say.)

Chua is quite bold about drawing vast conclusions from skimpy anecdotal evidence. She states, “Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can’t,” such as calling them “garbage.” I doubt the Chinese have a monopoly on verbal abuse; who knows what our nation’s parents say to their kids behind closed doors? What Chua probably means is “Rich white New Haven parents don’t call their children ‘garbage,’ or at least don’t admit to it.” Which is probably true, but really doesn’t provide much support to an examination of parenting styles nationwide. The fact is, there is no such thing as the “Western parent” such as Chua describes. Some Western parents smother their kids; others ignore them. Some bury their kids in praise; others verbally abuse them (though not necessarily with good intentions, like Chua). Some make them practice the piano; others give them all the junk food and soft drinks they want and set them down in front of the TV.

Conveniently, in the context of the WSJ article, Chua doesn’t differentiate between Chinese-American and Chinese families. If she focused on the latter, she might have to answer for the mental health problems in that country and the teen suicide rate. If Chua is really talking about Chinese-American families, then she might do well to look beyond the family and examine the role our immigration laws might have in allowing only the most hardworking immigrants into the country. (For more on the topic of immigrants having more motivation than natives, and how this pertains to Chua's book, check out this interesting essay.)

Second premise – parents’ wisdom determines kids’ success

Chua is clearly proud of her parenting: “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.... Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it.” Her authority in this realm stems from the success her kids have had. I’ll take it as given that her kids have in fact turned out great. Here is the petitio principii argument: a) great parents turn out great kids; b) my kids turned out great; c) therefore, I’m a great parent. The first premise, (a), only holds true if you also accept the conclusion it helps to present. I would look like a jerk challenging (b) or (c), and would have almost no evidence.

What I need to show, then, is that Chua’s kids would have turned out great regardless of, or even in spite of, Chua’s approach. Of course I have absolutely no view into the mechanics of Chua’s family (beyond the few shocking anecdotes she relates), but that’s actually okay. Chua makes a number of assertions about what a parent ought to do, and uses her daughters’ success to validate those assertions. To refute her ideas, I’ll attack the assertions themselves, and show that they’re absurd; from there, the reader will naturally conclude that Chua’s kids succeeded on their own merit without their mother’s crazy ideas getting in the way.

(The idea that parenting style determines the success of one’s offspring has been compellingly challenged at length: Judith Rich Harris attacked the assumption with vigor. As described in a 1998 “New Yorker” article by Malcolm Gladwell, Harris posed the question, “What if children learn the things that make them who they are—that shape their characters and personalities—from their peer group?” She ultimately concluded that “what’s important is not what children learn inside the home but what they learn outside the home.” She wrote a book on this that might make a nice counterpoint to Chua’s. It's called The Nurture Assumption. I haven’t yet read it, but it’s a lot higher on my to-read list than Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The basic gist of it is well described in Gladwell’s article.)

One suggestion that Chua’s parenting techniques are not all-important comes from her daughter Sophia, who published, in the “New York Post,” a (supportive) letter to her mom. Sophia writes, “I think your strict parenting forced me to be more independent. Early on, I decided to be an easy child to raise. Maybe I got it from Daddy — he taught me not to care what people think and to make my own choices — but I also decided to be who I want to be. I didn’t rebel, but I didn’t suffer all the slings and arrows of a Tiger Mom, either.”)

Let’s look at Chua’s pronouncements about what a Chinese parent does that works so well in raising successful kids. First, consider this business of a child who brings home a poor grade on a test. Chua contends, “If a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child.” This statement would be impossible to prove and I think really depends on the household. In my family, any single test score would have elicited no more of a response than a kid announcing he’d brushed his teeth. My parents wisely never cared how I did on an individual test as long as the final report card had an A. They voiced certain expectations (i.e., all As) but never stooped to micro-managing my education.

But wait, it gets worse: Chua goes on, “If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion.” Is this really true? Do these supposed Chinese parents actually have that little faith in their kids? Could it really be useful to create such a elaborate parenting structure that every test score must be reported? And when does this end: after high school, or does the kid have to continue reporting back every score when she’s away at college?

(When I was in college, I became exasperated at my French professor because of how he scored his quizzes. The quizzes were always worth 20 points, but given the complexity of the language, there were usually at least a hundred mistakes you could make. Each mistake cost you, arbitrarily, half a point. Thus, you could turn in a test that was 90% perfect and worthy of an A-, but would only earn a 15 out of 20—a solid C. The solution was to do flawless work, which I generally did, but after realizing how high my average must have been after seemingly endless quizzes, and having other priorities one evening, I didn’t bother studying for the next day’s quiz. I’d learn those irregular verbs later, and in the meantime, I could absorb a bad grade on a single quiz. I pulled like a D or an F on it, and the professor was shocked. He was even more shocked when I shrugged it off. Did my parents known about this? Certainly not, unless I told my mom about it to make her laugh.)

Chua also contends, “Nothing is fun until you’re good at it.” Really? Nothing? Um, Ms. Chua, have you ever heard of play? I happen to know something about fun things that you don’t have to be good at; in my blog post “In Defense of Fun” I describe how children live in the moment, cultivate fun, and defend their right to have it. In giving advice on how adults can keep having fun, I provide a list of my top twenty fun things to do, and only ten of them are things you have to be good at, or that require work. Could Chua’s daughters’ lives really be devoid of simple, unearned fun? Of course not, and I can prove it: Chua’s daughter Sophie writes about “blasting Daft Punk in the car with Lulu and forcing my boyfriend to watch ‘Lord of the Rings’ with me over and over.” Gosh, I hope she didn’t get in trouble for confessing this….

Some of my greatest delight is in watching my kids’ creative play. Here, Alexa has literally put her sister in the palm of her hand:

One afternoon my wife stumbled across a strange ritual seeming to involve feline idolatry, with several stuffies showing obeisance:

I’ve always loved how absorbed kids get in their play. Here, Lindsay completely ignores the cat and the photographer while somehow integrating an umbrella into a car ride:

These kids will have their whole adult lives to tirelessly fine-tune their skills and strive for glory. Is it truly wise to confine them to drilling themselves on schoolwork and learning an instrument instead of idly exploring their imaginations? What would Hayao Miyazaki have to say about this?

Chua goes on to say, “Children on their own never want to work.” To which I reply, “Says who?” I get the impression that Chua hasn’t given her kids the opportunity to try something on their own, without being monitored and hounded. Why not let hard work be the kid’s idea? Alexa takes her homework more seriously than I do; I often find myself assuring her it's not the end of the world if she turns it in a day late. Meanwhile, I keep finding scraps of paper with her self-initiated practice math problems on them. (From what I learned on Math Night I gather Alexa is pretty far ahead of the curve on lattice multiplication.)

Over the summer Alexa asked me to help her write a sonnet and for Christmas she asked Santa for a “Brain Quest” workbook. Both my daughters received the workbooks, and both plug away at them of their own strange volition. Of course I’ve had to pester my daughters to practice the piano, but not all the time; they’ll take it up on their own, too. (Alexa recently begged to be allowed to learn the clarinet, and although her playing so far sounds like a cat being tortured, who knows, maybe the clarinet will end up being her favorite instrument.)

By far the weirdest statement Chua makes is “Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children’s own desires and preferences.” Am I reading this right? If this policy is followed, how on Earth can a child surpass her parents in achievement? Such a child is necessarily limited by her parents’ imaginations. What if Philip Seymour Hoffman’s parents had shared Chua’s view of drama as relatively unimportant, and kept him too busy with schoolwork to discover acting? What would it mean for the US entertainment industry—entertainment being one of our main exports—if all our parents felt this way? And what if Hendrix had only been allowed to play the violin? What if Michael Jordan hadn’t time for basketball because he was studying and practicing the piano all day?

My brother Bryan, though he has loved both swimming and cycling, has not bent over backwards to encourage his son John's baseball playing. Bryan’s position is, “What value is all this athletics in our own kids’ lives? They’re not going to grow up to be über-athletes. They’ll just be has-beens. What good did all that swimming do Geoff and me?” Bryan never even bought his son a bat—John has to borrow. Though he’s right-handed, he bats left because as a kid he couldn’t get anyone to pitch to him as much as he wanted. But at least Bryan hasn’t overridden John’s choice, freeing John (now in high school) to become a great ball player. (His teammates fight over who gets to loan him a bat.)

Instead of decreeing the realms in which my kids may succeed, I say, “Surprise me.”

There’s also something to be said for a child learning to stick up for herself when her desires are being denied. I was raised by pretty strict parents, and one of my mom’s expressions would seem to be right out of a Tiger Mother’s phrasebook: “Because I said so!” I hated this expression as a kid, and vowed never to use it as a parent. And I don’t—I let my kids try to appeal my decisions, within bounds. For example, while I was out with my kids recently Alexa asked if we could stop by the video store on the way home. I said, “No, there’s no time—your mom and I have to get ready for our date. Besides, you’ve had enough videos this week already.” Alexa replied, “Please? It won’t take that long. It’ll be surgical. I know exactly what movie I want, we’ll be in and out of there in like two minutes. And besides, it’ll be easier for Grandma to babysit us if we have something to do.” This was a compelling argument, and I was flattered by her use of “surgical,” which she got from me. I relented, contingent on finding a handy parking spot.

Not only does the freedom to negotiate hone my kids’ rhetorical skills, but it actually reduces whining and other offensive behaviors. When Chua describes her effort to force her child to learn a difficult piano piece, she says, “Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed, and kicked.” Chua seems to tolerate these behaviors so long as she gets her way in the end. I will not. My kids know that their only hope at an appeal is to make it reasonable. If they whine about something, I explain, “Now that you’ve whined, there is no way you can get what you want, because then I would be rewarding your whining. So now, on principle, I have to say absolutely not.” This hasn’t eliminated all my kids’ offensive behaviors, but it has helped.

Chua cautions, “As a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up.” This is only true if your child’s self-esteem is caught up in the activity you advocate, and (particularly if you’re a Tiger parent) that’s a big “if.” I was on the swim team for years because my mom wouldn’t let me quit until I’d given it plenty of time and effort. The whole time I swam, I sucked, and I knew I sucked. But did finally quitting it damage my self-esteem? Of course not—I couldn’t have cared less how slow I was in the pool. Swimming was, and is, a stupid sport. By letting me quit, my mom gave me the opportunity to try another sport—cycling—that I cared about. And though I started off sucking in cycling, too, I gradually improved and made something of myself—with zero oversight from my parents. Cycling was my thing, I got good at it, and that built my self-esteem, from the ground up (instead of from the parents down).

Third premise - Asian-American kids achieve greater success

On a macro level, it’s widely acknowledged that American kids are scoring poorly on standardized tests, far below their Chinese counterparts. But I cannot see this as an indictment of the parenting philosophy Chua encounters among the Yale faculty mothers she has lunch with. I’m not saying we don’t have a problem; only that the mothers Chua encounters probably aren’t the ones dragging down the national average. An old dude I used to work with liked to say, “The average person has one testicle and one breast.” His point was that the word “average” is slippery. There probably aren’t many American students whose scores reflect our national average. You’ve got the top, and the bottom, and likely not much in between.

It bugs me that some parents in my community are going to be throwing up their hands over this book and saying, “Oh my god, I’m not strict enough! I’m not a good parent!” even though the kids in our town are thriving. It’s in the less fortunate communities, with greater social problems (e.g., mothers working two jobs with no husband around, and who are too busy to read parenting books), where kids are failing. The sad state of American schools is utterly relevant to society, but since the target audience of Chua’s article and book are parents who do care, and who have good schools available to their kids, the broader problem of American schools isn’t germane to her parenting argument.

Perhaps the real point Chua is trying to make is that among parents who are trying their best, the Chinese ones have a better track record with their kids. Her own kids have done well, but that’s a pretty small sample set. If we’re looking at the wider crème de la crème of parenting—the affluent, education-focused Asian-Americans vs. their Western American counterparts—maybe we should look beyond grades and musical prowess.

How about entrepreneurial success? I give you Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both Westerners who dropped out of college. Major, society-changing innovations like the light bulb, the telephone, the birth control pill, the computers, and the Internet all came from the U.S. Meanwhile, our books, music, and movies are hugely popular worldwide. I’d say our top tiers must be doing something right. I won’t attempt to draw too large a conclusion from these examples, but perhaps the utterly straightforward lifestyle structure of achieving top rankings in parent-defined realms doesn’t encourage the kind of wildly imaginative experimentation that sometimes results in major new enterprises. Maybe a blank sheet of paper is actually harder than a Sodoku.

Backpedaling

A final bit of evidence I’ll file against Chua’s parenting doctrine is her willingness to backpedal when challenged about it. In a follow-up WSJ piece she writes, “I also know of people raised with ‘tough love’ who are not happy and who resent their parents. There is no easy formula for parenting, no right approach (I don’t believe, by the way, that Chinese parenting is superior—a splashy headline, but I didn’t choose it).” First off, shouldn’t she have more authorial control over her article? Second, her original article does match the spirit of this headline. It is nothing if not a formula for parenting.

Chua continues, “It doesn’t come through in the excerpt, but my actual book is not a how-to guide; it’s a memoir, the story of our family’s journey in two cultures, and my own eventual transformation as a mother. Much of the book is about my decision to retreat from the strict ‘Chinese’ approach, after my younger daughter rebelled at 13.” Now, if Chua’s excerpt is not true to the book, whose fault is that? And if she has truly retreated from the strict “Chinese” approach, why is she so vigorously touting it in her article (which, after all, came out after she wrote the book)? If Chua had really had a change of heart, her book would be an indictment, not a celebration, of this parenting style, and her WSJ article wouldn’t get the title “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”

Another strange quote from Chua’s follow-up article: “I don’t believe that grades or achievement is ultimately what Chinese parenting (at least as I practice it) is really about. I think it’s about helping your children be the best they can be.” Give me a break! Isn’t this exactly the kind of mealy-mouthed, anything-goes, just-do-the-best-you-can approach Chua has dismissively associated with Western parents? It certainly doesn’t jibe with her unconditional directive, “Chinese parents demand perfect grades.” Look. Ms. Chua, you can either be touchy-feely or be the Terminator. You can’t be both.

Conclusion

I think Chua’s article, and I suspect her book as well, could have really benefitted from some deeper thought. Clearly her off-the-cuff, deliberately shocking style has generated enough buzz to sell a lot of books, but it didn’t convince me of anything but her own recklessness.

If you’ve made it to the end of this post, congratulations: you have a great attention span. If you think your parents deserve the credit, please thank them for me!

If I haven't convinced you that Amy Chua is wrong in her approach, that’s fine—after all, she’s the law professor with the successful kids. But you may want to check out my next post, which takes for granted that the “Tiger Mother” approach really works, while challenging the very goals Chua has for her kids in the first place.

A final note: Ms. Chua’s WSJ article has now spawned 7,740 responses. I’d be thrilled to get two or three reactions to this post. Post a comment below, or e-mail me.

amy chua battle hymn of the tiger mother dana albert blog

From the Archives - Big Ring Tale

Introduction

I did not coin the term “Big Ring Tale,” but a Google search on this phrase turns up only five results, two of which are mine. I thought it was a household term, but perhaps it’s not. Suffice to say, it refers to a story of a showdown on bikes, with the climax coming when the hero, just before launching his final, devastating attack, “throws it in the big ring”—that is, shifts into his bike’s higher gear range.

The following Big Ring Tale came to mind when I was planning my blog post about bike helmets, and recalled the last time I broke a helmet in a crash. This was in 2008, when I was hit by a car during a training ride, and suffered a third-degree separation of my shoulder. It took a long time and a lot of physical therapy before I could return to riding, and when I finally did, I was slower, heavier, and in worse shape than I’d been in many years, perhaps more than a decade. This left me vulnerable to weak assaults on my ego, one of which resulted in a bike ride showdown with a complete stranger. As it happened, part of the reason he provoked me was that he was apparently too cool to wear a helmet.

(Original art courtesy of my daughter.)

Big ring tale – September 15, 2008

It’s not looking like I’ll have any race reports to file this year, so I thought I’d make do with a humble Big Ring Tale.

So I was humping my Salsa up South Park one day last week and thinking how utterly absurd it was for me to have thought I could come back from my injury in time to ride the Everest Challenge in Bishop. I was actually feeling relieved that my physical therapist vetoed the idea, and then annoyed at myself for feeling relieved.

I clocked a slow time up South Park, and then headed down Claremont. This would be my first time doing these climbs back-to-back since my wreck, 2½ months before. I turned the ship around at the bottom and tried to get my engine going again to climb back up. I was still sputtering away when this dude passed me. He looked pretty fit, and pretty smooth, and he had that pocket climber build, and right away I decided it would be futile to try to hang with him. The wimp in my brain assured me, in soothing tones, that the outcome of any engagement with this guy had been decided at my birth, and that there was no shame in an out-of-shape old injured dude, with what felt like a woman’s butt growing out of his belly, being passed up by a young fit climber guy. I even reflected on the words of a slippery Nabokov narrator, “Fate should not jam.” Why should I mix it up with somebody who is destined to leave me far behind?

But then, as I scanned this guy for more excuses to wuss out, I noticed some things that complicated the matter. True, he was on a nice, modern racing bike, a carbon Specialized, not some 1980s Novara or something, but on the other hand he was wearing a Camelbak (not exactly the gear of a true road cyclist). And then there was the matter of his attitude. I said “Hi,” and he didn’t reply. What, the big, puffy, puffing guy doesn’t warrant a greeting, not even a nod?

His apparently snooty attitude was exacerbated by his youth. There was something too fresh in his face, some aura of having been untested, something the opposite of weathered, like he’s just some young guy who thinks the whole world is laid out before him to just take, and he cares nothing what the older, long-suffering bastards like me think of him and his insolence. If he were in an old Native American tribe, the elders would cut him down to size by giving him some humiliating name like “White Man’s Bitch” or “Forest Pansy” or something, until he did something impressive to literally make a name for himself, at which point they’d switch to calling him “Schools Lardy Has-Been” or “Spanks Happy Buddha.”

Suddenly, I marveled at how critical I was being. After all, this was simply an angry biker like myself out for a ride. And then it hit me why he bothered me so much: the guy reminded me of Riccardo Riccò, that hot-shot self-worshipping doper. Of course it wasn’t this guy’s fault he happens to bear a physical resemblance to Riccò, but on the other hand, if I looked like that I’d make sure to act really friendly and humble.

And then there was the matter of this guy not having socks. Maybe he was a tri-guy, or—even worse—a roadie who lets the tri culture influence him. And though his form was good, his pedal stroke smooth, his physique fairly toned, he was just slightly bow-legged, which interfered with my ability to chalk him up as a classy rider who deserves to drop me. And to top it all off, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. This was forgivable twenty years ago, when people raced in worthless leather hairnets and the hard-shell helmets were hot and heavy, but in 2008, when even the Europeans wear helmets on their road rides? Who does this guy think he is? It’s a given that he’s going to be descending something steep; just how sweet a bike-handler does he fancy himself? What, he’s just so damn cool he has to be the last guy on the road without a helmet? What is he, James Dean? So I decided he had to die, or at least one of us did.

Now, if this were an ABC After-School Special, I’d have pulled up next to him, stared him down like Lance did Ullrich on Alpe d’Huez, stood on my pedals, and blown him away. Or maybe he’d put up a fight but my ultimate supremacy would never be in question. Alas, in reality, in the process of my deliberations I’d let the guy drop me already. I had to claw back up to him, very slowly. By the time I reached him, my heart rate was over 170, which is pretty much redline for me. How on earth was I going to throw down on this guy? It dawned on me that the real victim of my effort would doubtless be myself. But I deserved this punishment, I figured, for ever letting things get to the point where this bow-legged, fresh-faced, sockless, antisocial helmetless little bastard could drop me so easily. So I sat on his wheel and suffered. Of course there was still a chance he’d sit up, offer a greeting, and we’d have a social ride up the hill. Or, he’d be annoyed at me, kick it up a bit, and cast me off. But instead he just stayed at it.

After a minute or two, Scotty frantically warned me, “The ship can’t take much more o’ this, Captain!” I simply didn’t have the minerals to win a war of attrition. I decided my only hope was to take a deep breath (this I was already doing) and then cruise past the guy with my best simulation of ease and infinite strength, in hope that it would break his spirit and he’d descend into a low-performance bout of self loathing. A Hail Mary, to be sure, but what else could I do? Every now and then you get lucky, and your opponent is like one of those Imperial storm troopers whose minds are putty in Obi Wan’s paws, who say, “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” So I rolled on by the guy at the first steep section, as gracefully and unhurriedly powerfully as an expert rower in a racing scull passing a kid in a paddle boat. (At least, that’s how I convinced myself I looked. I was probably more like a dancing hippo from Fantasia: fluid, and yet somehow pathetic.) I kept this up until things got really steep, and I got further into the red, and no longer had the luxury of pretense. Once out of the saddle, I was thrashing ugly, like Escartin in the early Lance years. God.

We think of roads as having a fixed length, like Pi or the wavelength of Cesium. Of course this is simply untrue. Claremont when you’re fit is pretty long. Claremont when you’re really fit isn’t so very long. Claremont when you’re getting in touch with your inner fat bastard is basically endless. Why, why, why did I do this? And why was I continuing? All the rationalizations (his bow-leggedness, helmetlessness, etc.) popped right into my mind, along with a new one: I’m going to look like a real ass if I falter now, after my big strut; this skinny little bareheaded Doogie Howser is going to laugh inwardly, or maybe even in my face, as he plucks the baton from my generation and leaves me gasping in his wake. I couldn’t let that happen. Maybe I couldn’t prevent that from happening, but I wasn’t going to sit up and welcome it. So I pressed on, absolutely murdering myself.

Then, I had the epiphany. Not “an epiphany,” which is normally how these go, but the same epiphany I have—and then forget—time after time in such situations. The realization is this: though I convince myself that I quit racing because of the time commitment involved, the traveling, the cost, the overall lifestyle and the impact that would have on my family, the truth of the matter is that I’ve had enough of this kind of suffering. Riding is fun, and riding hard is fun but hurts, and riding really hard is fun but really hurts, but racing—officially or in these desperate ego-driven throw-downs—is pure agony. There’s just this huge chasm between anything you can inflict upon yourself in the name of fitness, and this kind of searing, overwhelming pain, a thousand nerve endings crying out at once to try to get the brain to do something, anything, to rescue the organism.

I’d gone past the fine edge of what is tolerable, and every shove on the pedals increased my abject misery. “I don’t want to be here,” I thought. “I don’t want to be doing this. This sucks. Nothing is worse than this.” And yet I kept on, because I’d written a check I could not afford to bounce, because a skinny, duck-footed, helmetless Riccò-type was probably sitting right on me, or hanging just back, deciding how to best punish me for my foolish audacity.

One of the rules of these “pick-up races” (to coin a term) is that you don’t look back at your opponent. I didn’t hear him behind me, and eventually a car approached and I had an excuse to look back. He was maybe 150 feet behind. I looked again, a few minutes later, and he was maybe 200 feet back. A third look showed he was gaining. It definitely seemed he was working on catching me—but here I suddenly had some doubt: what if this entire showdown is in my head, and this dude is just pedaling his bike up the hill, oblivious to my challenge? Could I be locked in a struggle against my own shadow, my own delusion? Could it be that I’m scarcely different from those crazy people you occasionally see on the street having a loud, public argument with—nobody? Fortunately, no one would ever know. Just as modern crazies are camouflaged among all the hands-free cell phone users, I must have looked like any joe having a hard time with a tough climb.

Besides, he must have been trying to catch me. I’ve been riding long enough to know when somebody has taken the bait. I figured I’d know for sure soon enough, as soon as he came by me and accelerated. Except that, amazingly, I was going just fast enough to hold him off. Every time I glanced back, he was somewhere between gaining on me and faltering. Eventually I realized he’d run out of time, and I would make it to the top of Claremont ahead of him—that I’d actually managed to turn a clever bluff into desperation-fueled triumph. Chances were that he’d either go straight, down Fish Ranch, or right, along Skyline. He might even turn around and go back down Claremont. But the horrible possibility existed that he’d go left, like me, and drop my ass on Grizzly Peak. I shuddered at the thought, and made sure I lost no time making my left turn, just in case. I kept it floored until the first switchback, when I looked back to make sure that—oh, crap. He was turning, too, and not wasting any time about it. I’d just had a bunch more tacked onto my sentence.

Funny how the mind works. On the brink of despair, I convinced myself of a lie that, in retrospect, seems like a reasonable truth: if this little pocket climber can’t chase me down on Claremont, where the grade is steep enough to put the laws of physics squarely in his favor, he shouldn’t be able to close the gap on the shallower grade of Grizzly Peak. I even told myself that he himself would be painfully aware of this idea, and might just lose all hope. Of course it felt like a lie at the time, because my entire output was really a myth, like Wile E. Coyote running along in mid-air only because he hasn’t yet realized he’s gone off a cliff. But I willed myself to believe it, and kept the hurt on, abusing myself so badly that it almost started to feel normal, and, one pedal stroke at a time, I finally reached the part of the climb, near the steam trains, where it starts to really ease up.

Guido handed me a pistol and said, “Here—finish him.” So I threw her in the big ring. Not because I was going so fast I’d run out of small cogs or anything, but because you can’t have a Big Ring Tale without the big ring, and I was already sensing the first stirrings of this story you’re now reading. Meanwhile, with the end in sight I suddenly felt like I had a little more energy in store than I’d thought. In fact, my full awareness of how badly this had hurt was already beginning to recede, and now it is a feat of imagination for me to remember how very badly I suffered in the pursuit of this minor, possibly delusional, victory over a single nameless foe.

dana albert blog

Bike Helmets

Introduction

I bought a new bike helmet. No, you can’t see it; this is a blog, not Show & Tell. But the selection and purchase got me thinking about bike helmets. And a couple of things have been nagging me about helmets lately anyway.

First, in my New Year’s Resolution post I didn’t resolve to wear my helmet whenever I ride, though I’d thought about making this a resolution. Occasionally when riding my kids to school—on the sidewalk—I haven’t worn a helmet, and a fellow parent commented on this recently (using the phrase “bad dad,” no less). I doubt any of the school kids look up to me, but what if they did? I’m not in the habit of making resolutions I don’t intend to keep, but I’m on the verge of toppling off the fence on this one.

Second, I’ve been thinking about my comment in my last post about the dorky helmet James Bond once wore motorcycling. You may well imagine that I got a lot of heat for that, but you’d be wrong—I haven’t heard a word. Nor would I retract the statement that Bond, the fictitious and apparently invincible character, shouldn’t wear a helmet. But I guess I wasn’t really thinking about the stuntman, who, it now occurs to me, perhaps deserves head protection. (My myopia on that isn’t unique; consider the disclaimer in movie credits that says “No animals were harmed in the making of this film,” and then ask yourself, what did the crew eat on the set every day?)

This post examines my history with the bike helmet, primarily for the reader’s amusement.

What this post is not

This post is not an appeal to cyclists to wear their helmets. Why not? Is it because I don’t think helmets are necessary? No, it’s almost the opposite: the value of bike helmets is so widely acknowledged in this country, I really don’t need to make this appeal. Even the pro racers in Europe are required to wear legit, hard-shell helmets now, and every cyclist I ride with wears a helmet on every training ride. In the entire Bay Area cycling community, I know of only one rider who still goes helmetless, apparently due to vanity. (In his case, it backfires; to me, it just makes him look old, because a) riding without a helmet associates you with a bygone era, and b) he’s balding.)

(Within the shelter of these parentheses, I will concede that it would be pretty embarrassing to suffer a head injury during a short errand ride. Early last year I was riding, helmetless, to my kids’ school when the frame broke on my commuter bike. Part of my relief in managing not to crash was that I wouldn’t have to feel like an idiot for not having had a helmet on. But I’m not living up to the title for this section—I’m starting to nag. Fear not, the rest of this post will be decidedly non-didactic.)

My first helmet

Imagine my delight when I opened a gift-wrapped box on Christmas morning, 1979 or 1980, and laid eyes on my first bike helmet. I hope you have a good imagination, because there was actually zero delight. I suppose there was a bit of curiosity—this helmet, the Bell Biker, was among the first I’d ever seen—but instantly I knew I’d catch hell from other kids for wearing a helmet to ride a bike. It’s easy enough for kids now to embrace helmet use—not only are bike helmets ubiquitous now, but in many places it’s the law—but back then, bike helmets were unheard of. My brothers and I were waaaaaay ahead of everybody else here. Some people in such a situation become trend-setters, like the Plastics in “Mean Girls,” but my brothers and I were socially retarded to begin with. Whatever the odds of getting a head injury in a bike accident, we know they were lower than the 100% chance of being ostracized for our Bell Bikers. This helmet was a double-bummer: not only would I have to wear the thing, but it was my main Christmas present that year. Sweet.

The helmet was big and white and gaudy. I don’t have a photo handy but click here and scroll halfway down the page and you’ll see it. The print ad for this helmet showed a cut-away cross-section of the helmet with a ruler showing the thickness; the caption read, “The difference between our helmets and the others is about an inch.” Like that over-thick Styrofoam was a benefit. Since my three brothers and I all got helmets and my dad didn’t want us getting them mixed up, he bought 3M Scotchlite in four colors—one per kid—and added it to our helmets. I got red. For some reason, you got more in the roll of red Scotchlite than other colors, so I got extra stripes.

Eventually the helmet pads started to wear out. They were about a centimeter thick and made of soft spongy stuff, just like those off-brand sink sponges that your cheap college roommate bought instead of Scotch-Brite. The pads wore out fast, especially the front one that got most of the sweat, and after rotating his own pads for awhile, each of us would raid his brother’s helmet and swap out his own grody front pad for his brother’s less grody back pad. I got sick of my pads getting snaked, so I took a magic marker and made a dot on each of my pads—kind of like a rancher branding his cattle. My brothers thought this was a great idea and went one better: they inked their first initial and last name on each pad (e.g., “BALBERT,” “GALBERT”). What they didn’t realize was that their sweat would react with the ink, and they’d have all this backward writing on their forehead after a ride. I secretly enjoyed this. Since the labeling had been my idea, this was the closest I’d ever come to writing on my brothers’ faces with a felt tip as they slept.

The social outcast effect

As predicted, the helmets made my brothers and me pariahs. It was tempting to think this was my dad’s actual reason for making us wear them, just to build character. (After all, he never got us sunglasses, which might have looked cool, or sunscreen, which might have at least made us smell like the lifeguards that got all the chicks.) But more likely, our dad was just ahead of his time. (Decades later, he cautioned me about trans fats, long before I—or anybody else—had heard of them.) When our dad suggested that we wear our helmets roller-skating, I finally put my foot down. Does this mean I stood up to my old man? Of course not—I just stopped going to the roller rink.

It was my second helmet, though, that made things really bad. I got a Bell Tourlite when my first helmet got run over by our car in 1983. I have always suspected my brother Max was involved in the destruction of that first helmet. First of all, it was crushed right after Max and I had been in a big fight; moreover, moments after the helmet was smashed Max came running into the house with it, gleefully holding it above his head like a trophy. Of course I couldn’t pin anything on him and I got in big trouble. My mom took me to a bike shop for a replacement, and they were out of the Bell Biker. I hated the Tourlite on sight: it had tiny vents, fancier stripes, and a dorky tinted visor. The front pad wasn’t velcroed on but just sort of sat there, framed by soft foam. It was a fake chamois pad and looked just like a club cracker. I knew this pad would get lost (or stolen by an envious brother) in no time, and I wasn’t wrong. But I couldn’t very well protest the Tourlite purchase, since I was in trouble anyway. I tried to make the helmet less awful by snapping off the visor, and I guess it helped a bit. Here’s a photo of it:

My best friend at the time didn’t like the Tourlite at all. We were in the process of drifting apart anyway, and this escalated the process. “Why’d you get that?” he complained. “I thought we agreed it was ugly!” It seems silly to claim that a friendship could be compromised by a helmet, but it really could, and was. In fact, my brothers Geoff and Bryan were also snubbed by one of their best friends over their helmets. He’d ride to junior high with them, but a few blocks from the school would make them go on ahead. “It’s not that I don’t like you guys,” he said, “it’s just that I can’t be seen with you.” (Rest assured, he got his: not long after this, his own parents started making him wear a helmet too, along with his little brother, who suffered the added indignity of being made to ride only on the sidewalk.)

That same summer, when I was fourteen, I went on kind of a blind date. There had been two girls my age hanging around the neighborhood one day, and I fell into a weeks-long phone-based quasi-romance with one of them. (I never figured out which one it was.) Finally we agreed to meet up, and chose a video arcade downtown as our rendezvous point. This presented a problem: the place was about five miles from my house, so I had to ride my bike there, and I knew if I showed up wearing a helmet I’d be spurned for sure. At the same time, I was convinced if I rode all the way across town without the helmet, I was bound to run into my dad and get busted. (This may seem paranoid to you, but my brothers and I would frequently bump into our dad at any hour of the day and in any part of town. It was weird.) So after much deliberation I decided I’d better wear the helmet. I got a half a mile or so out when I changed my mind again, rode home, and ditched it. All the way to the arcade I sweated it, worrying about seeing my dad. To say I felt naked without my helmet isn’t enough; I felt like I was naked in church. When I got to the arcade I realized that after all my indecision and dallying, I was like half an hour late, and the girl had bailed. She never talked to me again.

Anti-helmet arguments

Of course my brothers and I wouldn’t have dared argue with our dad about the necessity of the bike helmet, but Max did argue with the other three of us. He alone dared ride without a helmet, and occasionally did get busted. His rationale was, “If I crash hard enough to need a helmet, I’m going to mess up my bike, and if I mess up my bike, I’ll want to be dead.”

As helmets became more common, many others developed anti-helmet arguments. One use of such arguments was to justify the use of a leather “hairnet” helmet in bike races instead of a hard-shell; as late as the early ‘80s a hairnet was all that was required for U.S. races. Some argued that a big hard-shell helmet increased your chances of falling, as if the weight of it would drag you to the ground—kind of a reverse-Weeble-wobble theory. Others argued that having a helmet on would encourage you to take unnecessary risks. When hard-shell helmets became mandatory in U.S. amateur races, some racers complained that the weight caused neck strain. (They must have been airheads for the helmet weight to even matter.)

But there was one day when my friend Peter and I did stumble on a solid argument against helmets. We were out on a training ride and were bored out of our skulls. Pete decided, on a whim, to grab one of my helmet straps and drag me around by it. I retaliated by grabbing his helmet strap, and right away we were weaving all over the road. Suddenly our handlebars got all tangled up, and for a brief moment we stared at each other in shock. Then we were both sailing over the bars, and we stacked pretty hard. We went back to his place to treat our road rash and fix our bikes, and his mom said, “At least you were wearing your helmets.” Pete replied, “If we hadn’t been wearing our helmets, the crash never would have happened.” And he was right!

About the silliest excuse I heard was a couple years later when Peter was on the 7-Eleven junior team. As we headed out for a ride (I in a helmet, he not), his mom hassled him. “I can’t wear one,” he explained, “because we haven’t ironed out our helmet sponsor for this year and I can’t risk being seen in the wrong helmet.”

Fun with helmets

By the mid-‘80s, when hard-shell helmets became mandatory for racing, I could wear a helmet without shame. By that time the Bell V1-Pro had come out, and being a bit smaller than earlier hard-shells and styled after a hairnet, it was not so bad looking. Moreover, the pinstripes and logos were easier to remove, so you could give your helmet a stripped-down road-warrior look. Here’s a photo:

When the foam-only no-shell helmets came out, you could personalize your helmet: you could put on your own fabric cover, or not wear a cover at all. When I rode for the UC Santa Barbara team, we all got fabric covers to match our team uniforms. These covers had colored side panels and a white mesh center section that went over the vents. Screwing around while warming up for the UCLA hill climb, I turned my helmet cover sideways. The effect was that from a distance, it appeared my head was turned. My teammate Trevor laughed and turned his helmet cover sideways, too. This ended up giving us an unexpected psychological advantage in the race: as we both hammered at the front of the pack, a couple of riders toward the back thought we were just chatting while they got dropped. They were so miffed they complained to us afterward for showing off.

Here’s a photo (from a 1989 collegiate team time trial in Colorado) showing three different helmet choices. Trevor has removed the cover and used an ink stamp to make a barbed wire pattern all over his helmet. I’ve turned my cover sideways (well, askew). Mark has eschewed his free team-issue Bell helmet for the more fashionable Giro.

What I don’t have a photo of, but I wish I did, is our teammate Dan’s customer helmet cover that he made out of a pair of underwear (briefs, not boxers). He’d written “JOCKEY FOR POSITION” on the back in felt tip. He actually raced in that thing, and he was fast!

Helmets today

When helmets were something only safety-minded scientist-types wore, ugliness was okay—in fact, it was a badge of honor. In those days, manufacturers could get away with a pretty mediocre product: a helmet that was hot, heavy, and hard to get to fit right. But the helmets got better, and became more popular, and the two trends reinforced each other: a bigger market meant more R&D money.

When helmets became common (and eventually required) in the pro peloton, the state of the art got a nice boost. Pros demanded a decent helmet. (A nice side effect has been more money for the pro teams, as helmet companies pay for the privilege of outfitting them.) Modern helmets are pretty sweet: they’re light, have great vents, look pretty cool, and have these nifty adjustable ratchet systems to snug them up.

(Fit really is important. I once replaced the free Aria Sonics helmet I got from my bike team because I couldn’t keep it from sliding back on my head. On my first ride out with my perfect-fitting Giro helmet, I crashed really badly and was knocked out cold. The helmet performed perfectly; no question I’d be dead or severely brain-damaged had I been wearing no helmet, or an ill-fitting one.)

Even the modern kids’ helmets are really nifty—who wouldn’t want to wear one?

Who wouldn’t want to wear one? The Dutch, that’s who. None of the bike commuters wear helmets over there. (Perhaps it’s the same all over Europe; I don’t really know.) Granted, in the Netherlands the bike paths are great, the motorists seem alert, and the big black 3-speed “opafiets” bikes aren’t exactly built for speed. But still, you’d be hard pressed to find anybody (other than a bike racer) who even owns a bike helmet over there. Here’s a pretty typical photo:

I got that picture from a web photo album that a guy put together showing 82 bike photos he took in a 73-minute period on a fall day in Amsterdam. I counted 112 bikers and zero helmets on this website, and have seen much the same thing during my visits over there.

Ah, the astute reader has surmised, Dana is about to break his promises and start preaching! And he’s going to wax patriotic while he’s at it! Actually, no. I don’t wear a helmet when I ride in the Netherlands either, except on training rides. Neither does my brother, nor do my nieces and nephew over there. It just seems unnecessary, over there. I did a small bit of research and discovered a fascinating analysis concluding that you’re more likely to be murdered in the United States than killed while bicycling (helmetless, by definition) in Amsterdam.

But over here, I’m happy to wear my helmet. After all, I’ve paid my dues … the social outcast years are way behind me.

dana albert blog

Bond Gunned Down

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for descriptions of violence, mature themes, and mild strong language.

Introduction

I had a dream the other night that I was James Bond. When I told the dream at the breakfast table, my daughter Lindsay said it sounded like a nightmare. I did find it disturbing, but not really a nightmare—not like the three nightmares I had the night I watched “Let the Right One In,” an incredibly, brilliantly creepy Swedish vampire movie. (I don’t remember those nightmares; only that I woke up screaming from each one, and that the bleak flavor of the movie was with me each time.)

In this post I examine the James Bond character: specifically, why all men want to be him, and what his greatest vulnerability is. I also describe my dream and how it gave me a whole new angle from which to look at … things.

What we like about Bond

In describing my dream, I said, “It started out really well. I was the Daniel Craig Bond—” and here my wife interrupted to ask why I’d dream of being that Bond. It’s a fair question—everybody seems to have a strong opinion of which actor was (or is) the best Bond. (When Siskel and Ebert did a special on Bond movies, one of them said he thought Connery was the best, and threatened to throw the other one over the edge of the balcony if he didn’t agree.) I asked Erin, “Why wouldn’t I want to be the Daniel Craig James Bond?” She replied, “He’s not even good looking!”

Of course that’s a matter of taste; obviously Craig wouldn’t have been selected for the role had MGM not felt he would help draw women to the theaters. But he’s not for every taste. (As Erin’s mom famously said during a conversation with her daughter and me, “Erin never went in for hunks.” I replied, “Well that’s for sure,” and the exchange instantly became family lore.) I’m sure my wife isn’t alone in finding Sean Connery the most attractive of the Bonds. But all this is beside the point. Bond’s looks don’t matter whatsoever to men.

I’ll go out on a limb and speak for all men here: we don’t want to look like Bond; want to be Bond, because he’s so capable, decisive, and unflappable. There’s nothing he can’t fly, drive, ride, shoot, or otherwise instantly achieve complete mastery of. He never gets lost; far from it, in a chase situation he always knows the side roads and ad hoc escape routes. He doesn’t forget things. He doesn’t futz with the seat adjustment in a rental car. He doesn’t get routed all over the place by Customer Service. He doesn’t fight with the ice cube tray. He never whines or complains. And not only does he always get the girl, but you’ll never find him embroiled in some deep discussion about a relationship. He may brood, but usually only after somebody has been killed. (And hey, brooding is kind of cool.)

Bond’s vulnerability

It would be absurd to think that Bond has a vulnerable side, that he ever needs a shoulder to cry on or admits (least of all to a woman) that he’s scared of something, or is uncomfortable, or anything like that. His character puts me in mind of a quote from Shakespeare: “O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause/ To be suspected of more tenderness/ Than doth become a man.” Bond has the traits men admire in one another, which are often different than the traits a woman might admire in a man. Women might like a man who is sensitive, vulnerable, and helpful around the house. Bond is none of these things, but gets the girl anyway. That’s what we men wish we could have.

And yet, Bond does have an Achilles’ heel: bad scripts. Let’s face it, no matter how suave and capable this character is, he’s powerless to prevent himself being stuck in a bad movie, and there have been a lot of them. It’s tempting to blame the actor playing him; I tend to hold Roger Moore accountable for the wisecracking, dippy, often constipated-looking Bond of the ‘70s and early-to-mid ‘80s. (Of his performance in the awful “Moonraker,” Pauline Kael wrote, “Roger Moore is dutiful and passive as Bond … like an office manager who is turning into dead wood but hanging on to collect his pension.”) But if I remember right, Moore started out okay in “Live and Let Die” before the movies got progressively stupider. Was he ruining the character with his own spin, or just following the script and taking direction?

The movie creators surely deserve most of the blame; consider that Pierce Brosnan was a fine Bond, but after his first Bond movie, the rather cool “Goldeneye,” the movies just got worse and worse. That seems to be the way with each new Bond actor: a promising start, then a decline in the quality of the movies until MGM freaks out and finds a new Bond.

To test this theory I looked at the average ratings for each film from Internet Movie Database users. The average rating of the first three Connery films was 7.6; the average for the next four was only 6.7. The trend repeats with every actor (though there’s some fluctuation due to the overrated “Spy Who Loved Me”—I mean, a villain with steel teeth named Jaws? Bond on a Jet-Ski? Ahem!). Check it out (click to enlarge image):

After the invisible car in “Die Another Day,” I actually decided to stop watching Bond movies altogether; fortunately, “Casino Royale” came along and rescued the series. Maybe the creators chose Daniel Craig—the biggest brute of all the Bonds—to make sure they’d completely flushed Roger Moore out of the franchise’s system. Or maybe Craig had laid out some contractual conditions for accepting the role:

o Absolute minimum of bow ties

o No bright yellow ski suit (in fact, no more ski chases)

o No seven-foot villains with steel teeth who move in slow-motion like they’re physically impaired

o No Jet-Skis or similarly frivolous vehicles (e.g., ATVs, rider mowers)

o No spaceships

o No pointlessly complicated kills, like scooping up a villain’s wheelchair with a helicopter and dropping him down a smokestack

o No supposedly clever but actually quite stupid quips (e.g., “Oh, you want to get off!” before dropping villain from helicopter)

o No remote-control or invisible cars, or similarly far-fetched gadgets

o No dumb floozies as Bond women

There’s so much going for this character, it’s a shame to see things spoiled by bad choices from the moviemakers. Take the motorcycle chase scene in “Never Say Never Again.” It’s pretty cool overall, but seriously marred by a non-cool motorcycle and, more egregiously, having Bond wear a helmet. A helmet? I mean, come on, guys! He looks like a dork! Of course in real life I support the use of helmets by motorcyclists, but Bond isn’t real life! What’s next: a scene of Bond as a toddler being strapped into his car seat? (Fortunately, MGM wised up, and Bond and his girl are helmetless in the motorcycle chase in “Tomorrow Never Dies.”

My dream

Speaking of bad scripts, it’s time I got to my dream. In the dream I wasn’t myself, I was Bond, the Daniel Craig incarnation, and the dream opened in medias res, spang in the middle of a ski chase. I wasn’t on some far-flung Alpine peak, either: I was at a ski resort, with recreational skiers going by every so often. Worse, I’d fallen, and was struggling to get my boot back into the ski binding. There was all this snow packed in there and for the longest time I just kept futzing with it. I was highly annoyed. What was I even doing at a ski resort? And why did everything seem tacky, like the eighties: teal-colored snowsuits and mirrored sunglasses? This was the lamest situation ever. What, did I have a gun hidden in my ski pole again to shoot the baddies with?

And then, suddenly, a villain came skiing by with a machine gun and strafed me. Only, he didn’t miss. In fact, in the fusillade I took like eight hits to the chest. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I never thought I was invulnerable; I’d been wounded before, even tortured, and once almost got sawed in half by a laser … but to just be hit, multiple times, by simple gunfire, at point-blank? Unbelievable. I turned to Felix. “I’ve got like eight holes in my chest!” I whispered. “I’m gonna die!”

Felix dropped to one knee to check out my wounds. He looked me over, intently, puzzled, like he was troubleshooting something under the hood of a car. I realized, probably at the same moment he did, that I wasn’t spouting blood like I should have been. Bulletproof vest? No, I hadn’t worn one. I probably should have. Where had I seen that? Ah, right, it was an episode of “Starsky & Hutch” I saw as a kid. You see Hutch get shot and he crumples to the ground and you think your hero is dead, and then suddenly he's okay because—aha!—he had a bulletproof vest! Why were they showing that on TV? Is that anything our children ought to be seeing?

Finally Felix spoke: “You were shot at such close range, the bullets have cauterized the holes. You’re not going to bleed to death.” I must have looked hopeful because he quickly added, “But you’re still gonna die!”

Unlike the standard plot, where I get myself out of one terrifying scrape after another, now I found myself in a long, slow, depressing dénouement. Q fitted me with a (very basic) heart rate monitor, and over the next few days I watched with bitter resignation as my pulse rate dropped progressively lower. I received no actual medical attention, as it was universally acknowledged I was a goner, but more and more medical researchers began following me around, documenting my amazingly slow death. Now and then one would take my vital signs, and once or twice somebody held a stethoscope to my back and had me cough. Nobody wore surgical masks; after all, my bullet wounds weren’t contagious. The researchers’ overall response was that of fascination. I never actually died; I suppose the dream ended when I (or rather, Dana) woke up.

Interpretation

I’m not of the belief that dreams are actually that useful in gaining an understanding of the self. I truly believe that many, if not most, dreams are completely nonsensical, and ultimately mean nothing. Sure, our subconscious is involved, but so is pure chance. Did my subconscious start meowing outside the bedroom door at 3 a.m. and make me dream about my cat? No, the cat did. Did my subconscious tell me to eat all that spicy Thai food right before bed? Did it tell me to watch “Let the Right One In?”

That said, this dream offers a fairly obvious interpretation. Bond—though intelligent, unflappable, and constitutionally solid—does not know how to die gracefully. Watching himself slowly expire, he is, for the first time, completely powerless. He could insist on having his dignity respected, but what would be the point?

If my subconscious is trying to tell me anything, perhaps it’s that in denying the inevitably of my own death—which I certainly do—I am engaging in pure fantasy, no less so than when I daydream about being James Bond. To which I say, so what? By the time the next Bond movie comes out, the franchise will be fifty years old, but Daniel Craig will be only be forty-four, and I’ll only be forty-three. I’ve still got time.

dana albert blog

New Year’s Resolutions

Introduction

While much of America is taking part in the age-old tradition of new year’s resolutions right now, I’m following my own tradition of pondering the matter without actually coming to any conclusions or committing to anything. This post documents that struggle.

Getting started

Part of my issue is that the most obvious resolutions aren’t available to me. Googling top-ten lists of resolutions, I see the same things every time: lose weight, quit smoking, exercise more, drink less alcohol, get out of debt, spend time with family. This low-lying fruit is beyond my reach. My body-mass index is spang in the middle of normal; I exercise like crazy; I’ve never smoked; medical studies suggest I should perhaps drink more alcohol than I do; and so forth.

You might assume that I therefore think I’m just fine as-is. Actually, I don't; rather, my shortcomings simply aren’t the garden-variety ones. While other people are clear and resolute in their desire for self-improvement, I’m just stagnating here, for lack of imagination. Surely there are ways for everybody to improve. So on New Year’s Day I asked my brother Max—an accomplished practitioner of nonstandard thinking—if he had any new year’s resolutions. To my delight, he’d written out a hundred of them the night before, which he read to me over the phone. Here are some highlights:

1. eat right

2. weekly haircut

3. lose 36 pounds by March

10. love 6 things I hate

12. talk to people by creek

24. no more classic rock people

37. Boston kreme doughnut

38. work on golf swing

77. lower temperature for larger roast, and increase cooking time

92. if I get a bloody nose, put a cold towel on the back of my neck and tilt my head back

Several of these, particularly #38, tripped my irony detector. Max has never played golf in his life, and isn’t about to start. I had to ask about #25, “cut off arm.” I said, “Wait … cut off arm?” Max replied, in a tone of pure resignation, “Yeah….” My favorite item on his list was #93, “We don’t want any replays of what happened last year.” He delivered this in the same scolding-woman tone as he used for his follow-up comment: “As long as we’re changing the calendar we might as well make some other changes.” (I know what you’re thinking: he should be the blogger of the family. I agree! Here’s a picture, by the way, of the two of us.)

Good intentions

New year’s resolutions remind me of perennial magazine articles like “Ten easy steps to improving your fitness!” and “Five anti-ageing secrets!” If these easy techniques really worked, they’d have long ago become mainstream and the articles wouldn’t have to be recycled continually. Unsurprisingly, when I looked at online lists of the top ten new year’s resolutions over the last few years, they were all the same.

I got a fortune cookie fortune once that said, “Hell is paved with good intentions.” Not the road to hell, as the saying goes, but Hell itself. I love the image of a flaming underground chamber with the standard rivers of fire and everything, but dotted here and there with exercise bikes, Soloflex machines, and crock pots. Every so often amidst the fire pits you’d see an abandoned home-improvement project. Everyone down there would be a grad student still working on his thesis.

My inner conflict

I can’t help but reflect that the people who have the easiest time coming up with new year’s resolutions are the ones who have allowed their obvious failings to persist and accumulate unmitigated all year long, like dust bunnies under the bed. I mean, if you’re doing something you know you shouldn’t, or are failing to do something you know you should, why ignore it until this arbitrary January timeframe? Why wait to correct your behavior? Why shouldn’t the self-improvement process run all year?

At the same time, I think the earnest, all-together-now spirit of these resolutions is kind of sweet. I went to BoozeMo recently, and couldn’t believe how empty the parking lot once. Normally it’s packed. It was like a ghost town in there, and every single thing I bought was on sale. The cashier said it’s the same every year: slammed on New Year’s Eve and dead after. Similarly, my brother commented on how crowded the gym gets during January. It’s a special time of year when most of the nation unites in a group self-improvement project.

My goodwill toward new year’s resolutionists heightens my own anxiety about not knowing what, in myself, to address. It would be dangerous to decide I’m satisfied. Whatever little satisfactions we have in life would probably end up being sources of actual guilt if we just stepped back and saw the bigger picture. The happy consumer, thrilled with that new iPad, would probably be shocked to know how truly insufferable he or she really is, seen from the eyes of the person on the receiving end of an unsolicited demo. The person who gets great satisfaction from recycling a huge passel of plastic bottles is missing the point—that he or she should be drinking tap water to begin with. Doubtless there are a great many ways in which I could be improving; I just lack the vision to come up with them. Why is it so much easier to come with ways for other people to improve?

My resolution candidates

Having scoured my brain, I’ve come up with some candidates for new year’s resolutions:

1. Be more insightful into my own shortcomings

2. Save money

3. Take a class

4. Eat more pizza and taqueria fare

5. Read more to Lindsay

6. Help others

7. Be less messy

8. Reduce stress / Enjoy life more

9. I will not lose … ever

10. Keep journal about kids

The first item suggests itself to me right away, just as a New Year’s Day hangover suggests “drink less” as a resolution for so many. But I’m not sure “be more insightful” would go the distance as a resolution; it might actually make things worse by leading me into self-absorption or the kind of self-flagellation that would interfere with resolution #8. I’m going to let those two kind of cancel each other out. That’s okay, I still have eight left.

Saving money isn’t a resolution I feel I can truly commit to. First off, I’m not exactly a rabid consumer to begin with. (I almost made a resolution to buy some new socks—I’ve been wearing the same eight pairs of brown socks for the last five or six years—but I felt it too trivial.) Meanwhile, servicing my Bay Area mortgage makes a money-hoarding goal kind of laughable. And then there’s the matter of another resolution I considered, which was to do my part to save our nation’s economy. Finally, saving money conflicts with item #4, eating out (which, meanwhile, clashes with another near-candidate, “spend more time with family,” because my wife hates pizza and my daughter Lindsay dislikes restaurants). I’m going to scratch this one.

Take a class … this could cause stress, but might help me enjoy life more. I’m going to keep it.

Reading more to Lindsay is actually problematic. I enjoy it, and she enjoys it, but I might actually be interfering with her education. She’s just learning how to read, and can handle the simpler Dr. Seuss books and the like. But intellectually she’s much more interested in books like Black Beauty and Clarice Bean Spells Trouble and it’s hard to see how my reading these to her will encourage her to go read basic picture books on her own. This resolution may fail the sustainability test as well—after all, once Lindsay is able to read on her own, my read-aloud tradition will vanish and I’ll have to read to the cat.

Helping others … this I have some experience with. In my high school health class the teacher tasked each student with assigning himself a Health Behavior Change (HBC), and each of us had to report weekly to the teacher on our progress. After I nailed my first HBC, flossing my teeth (a regimen I faithfully continue to this day), I was at loose ends as to my second HBC. I asked the teacher, “Can our HBC be to help a friend with his HBC?” The teacher said, “That’s a great idea. What, do you know someone who’s trying to quit smoking?” I gestured to my friend at the next desk and said, “No, I want to help Sean floss.”

Kidding aside, helping others is really tricky. It takes either money (a conflict with #2) or work (a conflict with #8) and moreover requires, and/or fosters, a certain amount of ego-bloat. Who am I to decide I have what it takes to be somebody’s savior? I once gave a homeless guy some change but he turned out to be a (shabbily-dressed) construction worker on break. He correctly fingered me as a do-gooder college kid and said, “Man, you guys are conditioned.” That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t give change to (suspected) panhandlers; I just have to be more careful. So I’ll do the basic stuff, like giving to charities or guiding a blind Bart passenger to his seat, but I can’t commit to a new better Dana who makes helping others a major life goal. I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is.

Being less messy pertains to how much food I get on my face and clothes when I eat, and to how much I splatter when I pee standing up. There’s much room for improvement here, and I expect that I can actually make some progress. After all, I never used to have to wipe my mouth with a napkin so much, or clean up the toilet seat every time. Either my skills are waning over the years, or I have always been messy and just didn’t realize it until now. So I’ll try to eat more slowly and aim better, but this isn’t destined to be a perfectly satisfying new year’s resolution. I’m still more interested in other bad behaviors I’m ignorant of now but will identify and target in the future.

Item #9, I will not lose … ever, does not refer to an actual goal (after all, I graciously lose all the time), but to my beer-swishing mantra. To properly pour a Belgian-style beer, you gently pour two-thirds into a glass, swish the rest around while reciting your personal mantra, then pour the rest. (A brewery provides these instructions, minus the mantra part. I’m not sure where I got that.) I’ve found through trial and error that “I will not lose … ever” is just the right length for a mantra. So this resolution is about enjoying beer more. I think it holds great promise.

The last resolution, keeping a journal about my kids, fails the new year’s resolution applicability requirements simply because it’s nothing new—I already do this. I just need to be better. You know those baby books, listing height, weight, first words, and so forth? They’re like a poster child for unfulfilled intentions. The harried parents (which would be a good name for a rock band, by the way) usually begin neglecting this project almost instantly, and when the kid comes across the book decades later he’s bound to be disappointed at how little is revealed about his earliest years. So I’m fully on the hook for this resolution.

Conclusion

It looks like in 2011 I’ll be focused on taking a class, aiming better, enjoying my beer more, and writing more in that journal. If I find, three months in, that I’ve mastered each of these projects and am feeling dangerously satisfied about it, I suppose I’ll have to take up smoking, week-long benders, and Boston kreme doughnuts. After all, I have next year to think about.

dana albert blog