More Selfish Than I

 Today, in the midst of the nation's ongoing controversy about childlessness (prompted by some downright hate speech on the subject that resurfaced in an old J.D. Vance interview), the New York Times decided to run an article profiling the reasons why some adults are choosing not to have children. The rationales they cite, in the article's telling, mostly relate to their fears of the negative impact kids might have on their personal freedom and lifestyle. Many, the article says, expressed that they were "worried about how a child would affect their identity and their choices." 

The article was not necessarily unsympathetic, but I nonetheless tensed up when I read it. I could almost see the neuronal connections lighting up in J.D. Vance's brain, if he ever saw it. He would be too chastened this week to utter the thought that would almost certainly come to mind—after spending the last several days trying to walk back his earlier comments about "childless cat ladies"—but he would surely think it. The word would march through his consciousness in big neon letters: "Selfish!" he would think. "That's the reason they're not having kids. They're selfish!"

Indeed, one of the people discussed in the article even anticipates this critique. She is a filmmaker whose documentary is reportedly called (and I dig the allusive title) "My So-Called Selfish Life." I felt inclined to commiserate with her. I know the J.D. Vances of the world see people like me as selfish. And indeed, when they ask me why I don't get into a relationship and have kids, most of the reasons I can cite are self-directed: I don't want to; it would make me miserable; I would have no time to myself anymore; I wouldn't be able to read or write or finish a thought; it just wouldn't work for me.

As I do so often when this topic arises, I thought back to Philip Larkin's "Self's the Man." The poem—which is admittedly no more politically correct than Vance's own mean-spirited remarks that prompted this week's controversy—concerns the poet's fear that his friend Arnold, who is married with children, is "less selfish than I." He confesses that he prefers his bachelor existence over that of his friend—and would not willingly trade lots with him—for fundamentally self-centered reasons. And they are basically the same ones I would cite: "He has no time at all," e.g.

But the poem does not ultimately cede the moral victory to the Arnolds of the world; for it is also an excavation of hypocrisy—and no one in politics today more fully represents the latter than J.D. Vance. In the poem, after Larkin first appears to concede his friend's superior altruism, he eventually retracts it: "But wait," he writes, "not so fast./ Is there such a contrast? He was out for his own ends/ Not just pleasing his friends[.]" Such surely could be said of J.D. Vance too! For all he accuses Democrats of not valuing family, has he not dragged his own mother's reputation through the mud for the sake of private gain? 

Indeed, if there is anyone who has chosen the selfish path at every turn, it is Vance. If there is anyone in American politics who besmirched his own family in order to cast himself as a Horatio Alger hero and rise to power on the backs of others' tragedy and degradation, it is Vance. He claims that childless adults do not care about the country's future; but I—at least—however childless and selfish—am not actively working to subvert that country's future democracy. I at least am not trying to deprive my niece and nephew of inheriting the representative institutions and personal freedoms they deserve. 

No, it cannot be denied; Vance is more selfish than I. If there is anyone who is "out for his own ends," as Larkin puts it, it is the memoirist-turned-Peter-Thiel-minion-turned-Trump-bootlicker Vance. He wouldn't know an other-directed end if it bit him in his own. He has proved time and again that he is willing to mortgage the entire country's democratic future for the sake of his measly private ambition and paltry lust for power. So, let us hear no more from him. And let us fear no longer the word "Selfish" from his brain or lips. For, I say it again: Oh, no one can deny. Vance is more selfish than I!