WUSS NATION
What to make of the latest trend--hyphenating surnames when a couple marries?
In the latest departure from traditional marriage (search) procedure, some American men are beginning to take their wives’ last names, either using the woman's name in addition to their own or nixing their given names completely.“I’ve definitely heard more about both the husband and wife hyphenating," said New Jersey-based wedding expert Sharon Naylor (search). "It’s really picked up in the past few years, although it's still a very small number."
How does one get to be a "marriage expert," anyway? Is there a masters course from the University of Phoenix or something? Or do you just have to marry lots of people?
Imagine a few years from now, when Kelly and Jon Shubert-Coleman's son marries Jennifer and Jerry Price-Johnson's daughter (or son, I guess, given the way things are going). What in world does the couple call themselves--Steve and Mary Shubert-Coleman-Price-Johnson?
We're not only becoming a nation of wusses where men essentially have become "metrosexuals" (ick) and are just abandoning their traditional roles as much as possible, but of idiots as well. Doesn't anyone spend more than two seconds thinking about the effect the seemingly innocuous changes that we introduce will have on following generations? If anyone keeps them, these little hyphenated surnames are likely to wreak havoc in a generation or two.
MORE: And how could I rant against the Wuss Nation without mentioning what's been going on in the Educational Quagmire lately? I'm sure you've heard the stories, neatly summarized by John Hawkins in a tastefully violent work of art: Kids are getting into trouble for drawings depicting Marines offing Taliban scum, etc. Our "educators" seem bent on beating the last dying ember of creativity from our kids.
(Old man voice) Back in my day (end old man voice), we kiddos didn't shoot up schools. But we did draw and create violent things. On the cover of my Music Class folder (yes, Music Class), I once drew a scene of a US pilot downing a Japanese Zero over the Pacific. It was a lousy drawing; I was a terrible artist. At the time, it was so unremarkable that it never even got so much as a look askance from the teacher. Today, I'd be in counselling, my parents subject to visits from social workers, and probably amped down on Ritalin before it was overwith.
Fast forward to high school. One of my best friends was an aspiring film director. He bought a little Super 8 film camera, and we proceeded to make a series of films. He made one claymation flick on his own that was quite good, actually, though it did end in the horrible death of one of his main characters. But together, he and I worked on a couple of films that we just referred to as our "RV stuff," "RV" standing for Random Violence. They were claymation, two-character slugfests, in which we animated toothpick spears flying about and, well, spearing the characters. We did another one that was a chalk drawing animation that depicted pretty much the same thing--random, senseless violence.
Were we bad kids? No. Honors students, actually, known mostly for our good citizenship and top grades (ok, dorks--but clever dorks). Given the time all this happened (a while ago) and the location (Texas, where boys are still for the most part allowed to be boys), none of what we did was remarkable. To the extent that our parents knew what we were doing, they were appropriately untroubled by it. My friend's dad actually helped out at bit--a mild-mannered insurance salesman participating in the decapitation of clay characters. He seemed to get a kick out of it.
Today, I have little doubt that if I did such thing in Maryland, I'd be death-penalty eligible. It would take Johnny Cochran and F. Lee Bailey to get me off. And I'd definitely end up in a foster home somewhere.
I've more deep, dark secrets like this--like the other friend I had who had the habit of milling black powder to turn into rocket engines. Do you know what happens when you make the nozzle on a rocket engine just a wee bit too small? Pressure builds in the body, eventually forcing its way out in a catastrophic structural failure--the engine becomes a bomb, in other words. The R&D phase of rocket engine building is a noisy process, as my friend's neighbors can attest. I'm sure there's still aluminum schrapnel lodged in the trees in his parents' yard. Today, he's contributing to the war effort by having designed and is now piloting one of those cool drone aircraft used to such great effect in Afghanistan and Iraq. If he was a rocket-designing kid today, he wouldn't have gotten past the first explosion before someone yanked him from his home, doped him up on behavior-modifying chemicals and squirreled him away in a cell somewhere.
We are a wuss nation. We're beating the creativity right out of our kids in the name of snaring the tiny percentage who are actually true menaces, while we fail to raise our kids with the basic discipline they need to become functioning adults.