Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

  Colonel John J. Smith, United States Military Academy at West Point, a twenty-five-year army veteran who commanded an artillery battery during the 1991 Gulf War:

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of decades. Some psychologists would say that humans—and especially men—are inherently violent; this comes from our evolution. Some sociologists would say that war and organized conflicts are necessary to building cohesion and a sense of identity within a culture. And we could debate those points, but I think it really comes down to four big reasons.

  “The first one would be economics. Groups of people either have real, imagined or perceived differences or inequalities—somebody has more than I do. Maybe there really is a need, maybe a country has famines or drought and they are lacking basic resources, and a neighboring country has those resources, and if they can’t obtain these peacefully, sometimes they are forced—or think they are forced—to go and get them.

  “That would bring us to our second big reason for war: fear. We fear that people will come and take the things we have, we fear people will come and harm us or harm our families, and this can lead to preemptive wars: we would rather fight them on their home territory than let them fight here. Sometimes this fear leads us into coalitions or allegiances—and because we have an agreement with someone else, we are forced into a war.

  “And that leads us to our third reason: our sense of honor. Honor means different things to different cultures over the centuries. Sometimes a sense of honor becomes a little bit overblown or escalated, and we get into wars of vengeance or retaliation. There may have been a good reason to go to war, maybe it began as a perceived just war or a justifiable war, but then it becomes a matter of retaliation over the years—we can point to the situations in the Middle East or Northern Ireland as examples of this.

  “And that brings us to our fourth big reason for war: we have different ideologies, ways of thinking about religion or thinking about government. Some of these belief systems require expansion of this ideology. Some people thought Fascism or Communism was the way to go, and wanted to force the whole world under that umbrella. We think one way of living is better than another, and we want to force others to our way of thinking. You can mix and match various degrees of all of those four reasons, really.”

  “What if a mom really wants a baby but can’t have one?”

  —FREYA ERIKSEN, age five, San Jose, California

  Dr. Jerald S. Goldstein, reproductive endocrinologist, Dallas:

  “I sit down with a couple and go through basically everything, all their options, all the stats associated with each treatment. And then it’s up to them. It is done like a typical algorithm: the younger you are, the less invasive treatment you start off with, unless it is a clearly identifiable problem. You want to find out how far a couple wants to go in terms of treatment, how much time and how aggressive they want to be.

  “The least invasive would be Clomid, which induces ovulation, with timed intercourse or intrauterine insemination. Typically, you try that for two or three months. After that, I might talk to women about injectable medications. This would be injectable medications with intrauterine insemination or in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization often represents the best option in terms of pregnancy rates, approximately sixty-five percent in women thirty-four and under; however, they decline with age. For older women, using an egg donor may need to be considered, which has a pregnancy rate of about eighty-five percent. That is the medical part; there is also the physical and emotional part of treatment which needs to be addressed. The cost of in vitro is typically around ten thousand dollars; however, with the use of an egg donor it increases to about eighteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars. Adoption is always an option, and we always try to help couples have an understanding of their options.”

  “Why did people have slaves?”

  —REBECCA GUDZY, age six, Montclair, New Jersey

  Gerald A. Foster, Ph.D., scholar-in-residence, United States National Slavery Museum, Fredericksburg, Virginia, a descendant of slaves who owns an 1846 slave coin that once belonged to his great-grandfather:

  “Before the Civil War, approximately twenty-five percent to thirty percent of Americans owned slaves. They purchased and maintained them for the free labor they provided both in the North and South for more than two hundred years. Furthermore, after the American Revolution and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, slaveholding became a very substantial element of political power and influence in the areas of taxation as well as proportional representation in the Congress (Three-Fifths Compromise).

  “So why did people have slaves? Answer: primarily to amass wealth and to gain political power. Socially, slaves were rendered less than human and were objectified as property. Slave owners were therefore able to justify scientifically and religiously the inhumane and heinous treatment of their slaves. It was the beginning of the class-oriented structure of early America, which eventually evolved into late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century prejudice, discrimination and racism directed almost exclusively at African Americans.”

  “Why are there no lady presidents?”

  —JACK LANCASTER, age seven, Los Angeles, California

  Pat Schroeder, former twelve-term congresswoman from Colorado, who was the first woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee and who considered a run for the presidency in 1988:

  “It’s almost a catch-22: we haven’t had any presidents who looked like women, so we can’t envision one. Visuals are important. Countries in Europe and elsewhere have had queens and empresses and all kinds of women who ran them. We say ‘Commander in Chief,’ ‘Leader of the Free World,’ so we see a military/macho type of president, and it is very hard for women to fit that image. We have never had a woman secretary of defense, we haven’t had a woman on the Joint Chiefs. Luckily, two women have been secretary of state, and that helps, but this military thing—‘Commander in Chief,’ ‘Leader of the Free World’—has always made me nuts, because we have had all sorts of male presidents who have never served in the military and somehow it doesn’t matter. I always say America is the ultimate tree house with a ‘No Girls Allowed’ sign on it. Look, we have a female helicopter pilot from Iraq running for Congress. We are beginning to see women work their way through the military, and while people aren’t totally comfortable with it, they are much more comfortable with it than they were even ten years ago. We have had women who are the head of their class at West Point. Gradually it is seeping into the culture that women can manage security issues, but there has always been this view that women are too softhearted. I always remind people that in nature it is the lioness you don’t want to run into, while the male lion is asleep somewhere.”

  “Is George Bush evil? Mommy said so.”

  —NATE CONRAD, age five, Rockaway, New Jersey

  Malcolm David Eckel, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University, which recently sponsored a multiyear investigation of the concept of evil in philosophy and religion:

  “I can understand where your mother is coming from. The world seems to be getting more and more violent all the time, and anyone who seems to contribute to the violence, as we have been doing in Iraq, can seem to be evil. But ‘evil’ is a strong word.

  “Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers who has written about evil, said that it is evil anytime someone decides to do something for selfish reasons without considering the interests of others. By this definition, just about everybody is evil at one time or another, including me, you, your mother, President Bush and anybody else you would care to name. Other people think that the word ‘evil’ should be reserved for only the most horrible crimes, like the indiscriminate killing of thousands of people.

  “When you call somebody ‘evil,’ you also have to ask what kind of effect it has on you and the person you are talking about. Sometimes we call something ‘evil’ because we are afraid of it or do not understand it. The w
ord can be used to dehumanize other people and justify all sorts of ugly or violent actions against them. When President Bush referred to other countries as an ‘Axis of Evil,’ it was like a threat, and it encouraged them to respond in ways that seemed threatening in return. Sometimes using the word ‘evil’ about someone can encourage exactly the kind of evil you are trying to avoid.

  “I do not want to get in a fight with your mother, and I certainly do not want to call her evil, but her use of the word may not be very different from all the things that make her uncomfortable about President Bush.”

  One of the dangers of watching a documentary about the Revolutionary War with your five-year-old son is that the Redcoats might hang somebody, and questions will inevitably follow. This happened to my friend Danny. But he didn’t take the easy way out—“Oh, he goes to sleep. And his soul leaves his body.” He tried to answer, honestly, tactfully, with mixed success:

  Gabriel: “Dad, why are they doing that to him?”

  Danny: “To punish him.”

  Gabriel: “How does that punish him?”

  Danny: “Well, when the horse rides away, the man will fall and hang from the rope.”

  Gabriel: (after a long pause) “What happens to the man when he hangs from the rope?”

  Danny: (after an equally long pause) “He dies.”

  Gabriel: (more pausing) “How does he die?”

  Danny: (beginning to sweat) “Well, I suppose he can’t breathe because the rope is very tight around his neck.”

  Gabriel: “Then he dies?”

  Danny: “Yeah.”

  Gabriel: “From not breathing?”

  Danny: (desperate) “Yeah. Basically.”

  Let’s bring in an expert.

  “What happens to the man when he hangs from the rope?”

  —GABRIEL SCHLACHET, age five, Brooklyn, New York

  Frank Brown, coroner for Walla Walla County in Washington, one of two states that allow death-row inmates the option of being hanged (the other is New Hampshire):

  “The first thing that happens is when the rope is placed around the neck, it is positioned to one side of the head, which is usually to the left side. What we are actually doing when someone is hung is rupturing the nerves and breaking the vertebral body—the cervical disks, the little bones in your neck. We are separating those. The knot is placed on that side of the neck because it gives a good directional pull. To the best of our knowledge, hanging is relatively pain-free because it is so quick that the body doesn’t have a reaction time to the pain. It is not like they hang there and suffer. That isn’t what happens. There is very little bleeding in the area. That is what we’ve seen with the autopsies that we’ve done.

  “Now, if someone commits suicide in the shower or somewhere else at home by stepping off a chair, then you don’t get that quick action. That is a different hanging episode. You get more of an inclusion, or stoppage of the arteries in the neck, that basically shuts off oxygen supply to the brain, and death occurs. There is a little more time needed for that to happen: instead of hundredths of a second, it’s going to be seconds.”

  “Do you think he knows he’s in there?”

  —HALEY CALDWELL, age five, of Chardon, Ohio, as she patted the belly of her older cousin, who was pregnant

  Dr. Kathleen Gustafson, associate director of the Fetal Biomagnetometry Laboratory, Hoglund Brain Imaging Center, University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City:

  “Thankfully, no—if you knew you were in there, I think it would be kind of scary for nine months. The fetus is developing, of course, but the frontal lobe of our brain—the one that gives us emotion and self-recognition—develops very slowly. In fact, even up until adulthood, the frontal lobe isn’t fully developed; that’s partly why we sometimes see bad judgment in teenagers. I joke that parents are walking frontal lobes for their children.

  “Now, infants do all sorts of wonderful exploring behavior in the womb. They run their hands along the inside of the womb, they feel their own feet, they feel their face, they start putting their hands in their mouth. Studies have also shown that a newborn infant will recognize its mother’s voice versus a stranger’s voice, and also recognize its native language versus a foreign language.”

  ME: “But they don’t think, Hey, I’m in my mother’s stomach. Get me out of here!”

  “No. They don’t even know who ‘I’ is.”

  “Why do people ‘fall’ in love? Do you always have to fall first?”

  —MINA PAZ-LE DRAOULEC, age three, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

  Joyce Brothers, Ph.D., psychologist, advice columnist, television and radio host:

  “We don’t really fall in love; we jump in love—we are at the mercy of our chemical being. Chemicals are released in our brain when we are drawn to someone. The first, phenylethylamine, makes us feel very excited; everything is wonderful. It’s almost like the flu: your face is flushed, your palms are sweaty, you are breathing heavy, you even feel a slight tingle in the hands and feet. We are attracted to opposites of ourselves—the organized person to the disorganized person, the bookworm to the social butterfly. We envy what we haven’t got, and what we do is we jump into love to escape the possible loss of this person. We feel very jealous of somebody who has the characteristics we don’t have, and we try to mold that person to us and become a couple.

  “In the next stage, oxytocin is released. This is a hormone that plays an important role throughout our lives: it is sort of a cuddle hormone. Childbirth, a baby crying, makes it flow; nuzzling your baby makes it flow. Before that it acts as a kind of an infatuation chemical. Not only do we fall in love in this oxytocin time, but we can stay in love for a long time. The idea of romantic love is not something we have had forever, it is something that comes from the Middle Ages when knights started rescuing fair maidens in distress. It was men who cultivated this. Men fall in love pretty much by looks alone. They choose that way. Men fall in love after four dates; the average woman waits more than twenty dates. Women take much longer.”

  “What does ‘sexy’ mean?”

  —AVA EISNER, age five, Merrick, New York

  Eyvette Manigault, fitter and assistant manager, The Town Shop, Manhattan, who in thirty-six years on the job has fitted thousands of women for bras:

  “It’s the way a woman appears in front of someone, as far as the proper type of clothes she wears, and not having the clothes look sloppy on her. Very clean, stylish, not too tight, not too loose—say, as far as lingerie goes, sexy would mean a matching bra and panty set that is appropriate for a woman’s shape. The right size bra: she can’t be hanging over it, and it can’t be so big on her. But it is not overdone or gaudy-looking—it is sexy-looking because it fits nice, it gives nice cleavage and uplift.”

  My dad has tried to help me with my quest for questions by asking colleagues and friends if their children had asked any good ones. “Here’s one,” he said one day. “Why are only the plastic plates and cups still wet when you take them out of the dishwasher?”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Whose kid asked that?”

  “No one’s—I just want to know.”

  “Dad, it has to be a real question from a real kid.”

  “Oh, who’ll know?”

  “Dad!”

  So he returned to the hunt. One friend told him that she had overheard the five-year-old son of a woman at the gym ask, “What is porn?” The mother’s answer, alas, was not audible.

  I asked my dad if he could get me the boy’s full name. A few days later he called me back with it and suggested that with my journalistic skills, I should be able to find the family’s phone number on my own.

  I thanked him and began the process. I found the number easily enough by using an old reporting trick: I called 411. But as I started to dial, I imagined how the conversation could unfold:

  “Hi. My name is Wendell Jamieson. I’m calling about [name of child].”

  Child’s mother: “Yes. What can I do for you?”

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nbsp; “Well, um, I’m writing a book in which I am finding expert answers to the questions of children.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I heard your son had a good one, and I’d like to include it, along with his full name.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The question was, ‘What is porn?’”

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “No, it’s not a joke.”

  “My son is five.”

  “I know, I know. That’s what makes it funny. I just thought—”

  “Funny? Does your publisher know you are harassing mothers with porn questions? Are you suggesting my husband and I watch porn? Do you know who my husband is?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, my husband is [name of husband].”

  Thanks, Dad, but I think this is one case where I just won’t use the kid’s name.

  “What is porn?”

  —Unidentified boy, five or six, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan

  Tricia Austin, vice president of marketing, Penthouse magazine:

  “‘Porn’ is an informal use of the word ‘pornography,’ which applies to stories about and pictures of people who display their bodies and sometimes perform intimate acts publicly, to gain a strong reaction from an audience. It is as old as history itself, and has existed in many cultures: the Romans created pornographic images, and some Japanese woodblock prints from the nineteenth century could also be described as pornography. Pornography was even criminalized in Victorian England with the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, but today it is considered an accepted form of free speech in most societies. While porn may be considered an art form by some, just being naked is not porn. For example, there are classical paintings and statues of naked men and women displayed in museums around the world that show the human body simply for what it is…beautiful. Therefore, porn should be defined more by a viewer’s reaction than solely the image of a nude body, or bodies. Either way, everyone agrees that pornography is something that is for adults only.”