A friend e-mailed me the following, under the subject line CANDIDATE FOR THE MOST PC FAMILY IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. It is from the wedding columns in the New York Times Style Section, September 10:
Catherine Chandler, Jonah Deutsch
Catherine O’Connor Chandler and Jonah Schatzow Deutsch were married Wednesday at Chicago City Hall. Walter Williams, a judge in the circuit court of Cook County, officiated. On Saturday, Richard Rosengarten, a professor and the former dean at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, led a ceremony incorporating Jewish and Catholic cultural wedding traditions at the home of Diana Young and William Brown, friends of the bride, in Buchanan, Mich.
Mr. and Mrs. Deutsch, both 28, met at Wesleyan in Middletown, Conn., from which they graduated. She received a master’s in public policy studies from the University of Chicago, where Mr. Deutsch is studying for a Ph.D. in the same discipline.
The bride works for the Chicago public schools as a manager of a violence-prevention project. She is the daughter of Elizabeth O’Connor Chandler and James K. Chandler of Chicago. The bride’s parents work at the University of Chicago. Her father is an English professor and the director of the university’s Franke Institute for the Humanities. Her mother is the director of the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
The bridegroom is the son of Emily Schatzow of Cambridge, Mass., and Charles Deutsch of Boston. The bridegroom’s mother is a research associate in psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and a senior consultant with Visions Inc., a company in Roxbury, Mass., that advises private and public organizations on workplace diversity. The bridegroom’s father is a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Now, far be it from me — moi? — to cast any pall of cynicism over this couple’s happy day. May they live long and prosper together, and may their first child be a masculine child. And lacking further information, I am willing to give the bridegroom’s father the benefit of the doubt — the doubt, that is, that anyone mentioned in this notice is making any non-negative contribution to the life of the nation.
I will, though, pass on the rhetorical question my friend appended to the e-mail: How many parasites can the host bear?