Levi's Real Plan Is To Marry Palin Inc.
LatestYesterday we opined that Bristol and Levi’s (Brevi’s?) engagement was all a big ploy by Sarah Palin. Whether or not that’s true, the question remains — what’s in it for Levi?
Slate‘s Jessica Grose disagrees with our theory — she says Levi himself has plenty of good reasons to want to get hitched. Grose writes,
Like many working-class men, Levi lost his macho job during the recession. Instead of stepping up into his new role as a father or finding a new career, he watched TV all day and then posed for Playgirl. At the same time, Bristol was going to college and holding down a job as an assistant at a dermatologist’s office-a stereotypically female profession. Levi seems to have realized that without Bristol, he truly is adrift. From what he says to Us, it sounds like he feels the limelight was a cold and empty place, and now he vows that he’s going to get his GED and become an electrician. This isn’t a dastardly scheme from Sarah P. to make herself look sympathetic. It just sounds like Levi is struggling to find his place in a world where his skills-good looks, physical strength (he ain’t the brightest sweater in the drawer)-aren’t of much use to anyone anymore.
Salon’s Amy Benfer, too, looks at Brevi through a class lens. She reminds us that young working-class parents have long been encouraged to marry — she mentions Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative, “which started from the premise that two-parent families tended, statistically speaking, to make more money and provide more stable homes for children, and thus decreed that the best way to make poor, unstable single parents into stable, affluent families was to marry them off to one another.” This approach doesn’t always work — concludes Benfer, “I’m still of the mind that a college diploma and decent job skills are a much better guarantee of young family’s healthy future than a marriage license.” But is Levi a typical working-class man, sideswiped by the new economy, looking for stability in the place conservatives have traditionally located it: marriage and family?