I'm an animal

I subscribe to Salon.com -- an on-line magazine that features a combination of political coverage and "lifestyle" pieces. The political stuff is mostly fairly obvious liberal-democratic anti-Bush vitriol. Neither the writing nor the analysis is spectacular, but it's one of the few left-ish outposts that occasionally achieves some mainstream penetration. Plus, every one of its columns is in a blog format, and something I'm pretty fascinated with lately. As a hardnosed, cynical, dispassionate realist, who lacks a single atom of touchy feely senstivity, I try to convince myself that that's the reason I maintain a paid subscription.

Who am I kidding? Half the time I go straight for the fluff. Nearly every day, there's something about the "mommy wars"; or a singularly loopy letter and response [with dozens or hundreds of reader comments] in this guy's column; or some other "culture war" item that only the narrowest of demographics can follow. In order to get past the jump on all of this, and have the opportnity to pull out my what's left of my hair and mumble "what the fuck are these guys talking about", I have to pay to get past the jump. I'm hooked, so that's what I do.

A while back, there was an article that was really no more than a solicitation for commentary on the question of "why have kids?" [I don't have a link right now, but if I can dig it up, I'll post it.]. Every writer offered a treacly cliche on one of four basic themes:

1. I never knew unconditional love until my little sunshine was born
2. he makes me laugh
3. he completes me
4. after [mother, dad, the cat] died, there was a hole in my heart that stayed empty until she was born

A chorus of dyspeptic malthusians attacked each blurb the same way: Your "reason" is no more than selfishness and vanity. You want kids because of what they they can do for you, meanwhile you're filling the planet with more hungry fuel eating, greenhouse gas spewing ADHD Republicans in training. If you can't give a better reason than that, the planet is doomed. Neuter thyself. This preceding is paraphrase, not parody.

As a non-parent at the time it was a classic no-horse-in-this-race WTF are they talking about hair puller for me. I expected to move on, freeing the synapses for the next internal rant. For some reason, that didn't happen, though, and the question "can procreation be altruistic?" kept creeping towards the frontal lobes. Subsequent to the appearance of that article, I joined the ranks of the unconditional-loving-laughing-completed-heart-hole-filled, and the question has become a bit less hypothetical.

I'm almost embarrassed to acknowledge the truth about the warm and fuzzy benefits of childhood. My son does make me laugh, he does fill a void left by the the mental and physical deterioration (though not death) of a parent, he does give me a sense of completeness, and the unconditional love thing is really not half bad.

So what's in it for him? I guess the main thing is existence, which if he didn't exist wouldn't be much of a problem, so I guess that doesn't really count. And how about the rest of you? Well, for now, he has provided his share of stimulus to the baby industrial complex (thanks Grandma). He has also done a pretty good job of contributing to the college funds of the offspring of quite a few medical professionals, but I can't take credit for thinking of any of that before letting loose my little homunculi

So I guess there probably isn't any selflessness in the act. But it occurs to me, so what? No one asks you to justify breathing, eating, or mitosis beyond the benefits to self. It's what you do. So what if I happened throw in a little meiosis. I'm an animal, eukaryotic no less. What do you want from me? I got urges, drives, selfish genes, and all that. Besides, have you seen my kid? I swear he's the best looking, smartest, funniest kid on the planet. Plus, he's gonna take care of the whole global warming, inequality, poverty and disease thing. When he gets a little older. Right now, he's busy filling in holes.