The Moral Myopia of J.D. Vance’s Thesis on “Cat Ladies”
“Cat Ladies,” and other childless people, are often more virtuous than married people with kids as single people have more time to fight the good fight.
By
David Gottfried
J.D. Vance, the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party, and Donald Trump’s dedicated stooge and poodle, seems to be an urbane, erudite version of Archie Bunker. His scholarly credentials are sterling, his syntax and intellectual savvy surpass those of a savant, but his judgments are those of a cretin lumbering through the primordial swamps of pre-history.
When he excoriated “cat ladies” and single people, he was as prejudiced and as primitive as Granny on the “Beverly Hillbillies” hectoring Jethro and Ellie May on the virtues of good ‘ole possum stew. Vance seems to think that single people are, of necessity, bitter, bitchy bastards whose all-consuming desire is to transmit their bleak view of life to everyone around them. In large measure, we have heard this story before from the Religious Right: Being single is conducive to immorality while connubial relations ensure virtue.
Of course, many Americans believe what J.D. Vance is saying and kowtow before his ancient conventional wisdom the way Granny genuflects before the malodorous contents of her Appalachian pantry. However, single people are often more morally upright than married people with children.
Married People with Children Have Neither the Time Nor the Inclination to Care about anything outside of their Family
Married People with Children have no Time, and usually no inclination, to fight for the suffering of the downtrodden; they are owned, lock, stock and barrel, by their familial obligations.
I think married people are probably happier than single people. They know they are wanted and needed. However married people with children make the world a more unhappy place. When one is married, and has children, almost every waking hour is devoted towards one’s spouse and one’s children. This is good for spouses and, to an extent, children. However, it is not good for the world around and outside of the familial cocoon.
Married people with children have no time to do the heavy lifting necessary to fight the good fight to make the world a better place. They have no time to do anything about, and generally never think about, world hunger, disease, genocidal war, climate change, nuclear weapons, etc. Those battles are fought, for the most part, by single people.
Of course, married people with children could, I suppose, subtract some time from their children and donate it toward “the world.” However, in such cases, the kids often feel neglected and their emotional development seems impaired. Eleanor Roosevelt’s philanthropy was nothing short of saintly, but her kids were, for the most part, rather mediocre. Robert Kennedy cared, intensely, about the world, but quite a few of his children seem to have been mortally wounded (Of course, much of their wounds might be attributable to their Father’s untimely death by assassination and their entire family’s constant brushes with disaster and death). Also, I knew a close associate of Liz Abzug, a daughter of the pioneering and aggressive feminist Bella Abzug, and that close associate told me that Liz Abzug was emotionally compromised and maladjusted, and had been brutally neglected by her politically courageous mother, and was taking 4 different psychotropic medications during her unsuccessful campaign for the New York City Council.
It seems to me that while marriage and children and a constricted life concerned with the quotidian and common, with carpools and Christmas vacations, would be just fine for most people, to ensure the progress of society a sizable minority of people should be single and childless.
The Myriad Moral Contributions of Single, Childless People
What the Military and the Catholic Church knew for centuries:
The Military and the Catholic Church have always known that Married People, with Children, will never save the world.
The military has known for time immemorial that single men are the best fighters. They are less afraid of death than married people who want to save themselves for their spouses and their progeny. The Catholic Church’s insistence on celibacy rests, at least in part, on the same realization. Ordinary working people go home at 5 PM and retreat into their families, but a worshipper, confronting crises of conscience, needs help during the menacing midnight hours.
The Holocaust
In World War Two, in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, who helped the Jewish orphans? Married Rabbis ? Fat and smug businessman? Of course not. The man who led efforts to help the youngest victims of Hitler’s satanism was a gay, Jewish man, a man whom the synagogue would have been happy to lambast and emotionally lacerate eight days a week.
In America, plenty of American Jews were aware of the Holocaust while it was transpiring. Of course, young Jewish men served in the American military in enormous numbers. But to me that never seemed to be close to enough. I always thought that my Jewish ancestors in America should have leaped across the Ocean to do everything they could to lessen the magnitude of the slaughter. But most of American Jewry was AWOL. While some Jewish political organizations talked about the war ad nauseum, their talk was usually a lot of meandering, impotent babble. I got a glimpse of what the problem might have been caused by when I read Philip Roth’s novel “My Life as a Man.” In the beginning of the novel, we are treated to a Jewish family’s Jewish hotel in the Catskill Mountains, about a three-hour drive from New York City. The time is World War Two. While the residents of the hotel are “troubled” by the destruction of their European brethren, they are too deeply ensconced in their families, and the balm to the soul that familial love may offer, to ever get up off their asses and do a damn thing to battle the Nazis.
The American Civil Rights Movement
In the American Civil Rights movement, the most dedicated workers were also single people. For example, the organizing engine of the famous 1963 March on Washington was a black, gay man. (And how many of the church ladies at that famous demonstration got their jollies by ridiculing “faggots” and “dykes”) Similarly I remember that the comic and civil rights activist Dick Gregory noted, in his book “Nigger,” which lamented the scorn and shame he suffered growing up black and poor, that although black women, who were largely unattractive and single, marched and protested against the failure to hire any black female models at an Auto show, only svelte black women were hired after the auto show changed its ways.
Resistance Against the War in Vietnam
American protests against the Vietnam War were in large measure buoyed and boosted by single people and gay people. For example, Allard Lowenstein, whose sexual identity was debatable, was perhaps responsible, more than anyone else in the Democratic Party, for succeeding in dumping President Lyndon Johnson, in 1968, because of Johnson’s continued advocacy of the Vietnam War. 1
And what of the Cat Ladies who Vance so vociferously reviles
The cat ladies are responsible for the first and the finest social welfare institutions to aid the urban poor as Hull House in Chicago and the Henry Street Settlement in New York fed, educated and nursed the millions extolled in Emma Lazarus’s magnificent exemplification of the American liberal Spirit:
“Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shores
Send those, the homeless, tempest tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door”
These words of Emma Lazarus, one of America’s finest Jewish female poets, adorns the base of the Statue of Liberty.
The Tawdry, Tacky Tasks and Obsessions of Married People with Children
While single people may fight Nazis, racists and unjust and criminal military conflagrations. Married people have their own vital battles to fight. For example, married women are adamantine about the necessity of looking exquisite in gorgeous gowns at shimmering, glimmering receptions and balls.
Indeed, David Halberstam, the brilliant journalist and author of, among other things, “The Best and Brightest,” said journalists, with wives, often submitted less audacious and frankly mediocre articles on Vietnam because their tacky wives wanted to be invited to the balls given by the American ambassador to Vietnam and the General in charge of MACV, the Military Assistance Commend of Vietnam. According to Halberstam, these journalists sometimes refrained from telling the truth – that the gang of thugs we supported in Vietnam were fascists, thieves and Torquemadas who wanted to criminalize Buddhism – because they didn’t want to antagonize the Washington brass and endure the rage of their shrieking wives who found themselves disinvited from a reception where they hoped to dazzle everyone with their diamonds. Well, we all know how Vietnam turned out.
Straight married people with children are so damn busy catering to their kids – who’d like to make them sniff airplane glue so they’d just chill and get lost – that they will sabotage their son’s opposing softball team. But this should be expected.
Indeed, the economist Thorstein Veblen said that although competition will sometimes boost output in capitalistic countries, competition often undermines output because very often businessmen will succeed by sabotaging their competitors’ plans, factories and inventions, thereby reducing a nation’s output and overall economic efficiency.
In supposedly tranquil suburbia, each split level is an armed camp, as each familial nationalist is as ardent in his fight for his family as Spartans in Greece or Jewish Zealots in ancient Israel.
Although we often think of the 60’s as a politically combustible era, until 1968, no one and no force in America seemed ready or brave enough to combat President Johnson’s endless prosecution and escalation of the Vietnam War. Except for Allard Lowenstein. He founded the Dump Johnson movement. And he and his idealist students pled with Robert Kennedy to run against Johnson, but Kennedy declined. Then he went to George McGovern, Wayne Morse and a few men I can’t recall. Finally, Eugene Mc Carthy, an intellectual and a bit of a political streetfighter (And a fantastic poet), decided to fight. The political elitists and lying pollsters said Mc Carthy would get, at most, 15 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. On March 12, 1968, Gene Mc Carthy got 42 percent in New Hampshire, and the more mature, and stunningly violent, segment of the 60’s began.