Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what exactly was America buying into with such enthusiasm last week? The Internet, of course, that boomtown of the wired world. "The Internet has gone to Main Street," said analyst Kathleen Smith of Renaissance Capital, a Connecticut firm that evaluates initial public offerings for institutional investors. Netscape was "the hottest deal we've ever seen. Friends we never thought we had were calling us, asking us how they could buy shares...
...creepy details are peculiar to Smith's case, but the message to girls is similarly demeaning: Love (of men) is the supreme adventure! The peak experience! The only possible redemption for a worthless little creature like you! And, needless to say, the love celebrated in songs and soap operas and romance novels is not the love for sticky-faced toddlers...
...have, in the Susan Smith case, the female dilemma at its starkest: Not the pallid "family-vs.-career" predicament, but a zero-sum choice between romantic love and mother love, with guaranteed misery no matter which you chose. Novels like Anna Karenina taught us the "bad" woman's fate, which is ideally suicide. The Bridges of Madison County gives us the "good" woman's answer, which is to renounce romantic love for the sake of husband and kids. But the more disquieting message of that story is that four days and three nights with a sexy stranger can outweigh anything...
...socially redeeming lesson we can derive from the Susan Smith case, then, is that girls need the possibility of some great adventures other than romantic love. Yes, love is a joy and a shining moment of transcendence in our life. But it is not the only one. If I controlled the nation's playlists, there'd be a lot fewer songs about "giving all for love," and plenty of danceable tunes about running for Congress or getting through community college as a single mother...
None of this is to excuse Susan Smith's crime. But if we're going to dwell on her case for anything other than voyeuristic thrills, we have to forsake the easy, self-distancing explanations like "evil" and acknowledge that the unthinkable is always lurking within the familiar. That the "love" we endlessly celebrate can be a source, sometimes, of endless sorrow...