Hillary Clinton, Macha, Pneumonia, and Great-Grandmother Ferguson

[NOTE: Almost all of this is a slightly updated version of some paragraphs I wrote for my blog on OpenSalon, before the Salon.com book-burners closed down the site. Since it's from one of a collection of essays submitted to Wildside Press in Winter of 2014 — and which they will publish apparently when they damn well get around to it — it was definitely written without Hillary Clinton in mind.]

One day back in the late 20^th century, back when I was teaching writing courses, a student staggered into my office, sneezed, coughed, wheezed, and dropped off a paper on my desk, only somewhat spotted by her bodily fluids. She rasped, "Here it is," and waited for my thanks and appreciation. She didn't get any; I said something like, "Okay, now go home and get some sleep; I would've given you an extension." I wasn't going to thank her. I wasn't going to be impressed. What was going through my mind was (1) that she'd exposed me to Whatever Is Going Around — although I'd probably been exposed already (students are disease vectors) — and (2) that far from being impressed that she'd trekked over with the paper, I thought her socially unskilled that she couldn't get a friend to drop it off and/or unsophisticated about modern technology that it didn't occur to her to just send me the essay as an e-mail attachment.

I discussed this matter with some women colleagues, and they told me the problem was Great Grandmother Ferguson.

They'd all been brought up on some version of Great Grandmother Ferguson, "who dropped the twins while plowing the south forty; bit through the umbilical cords; put one twin to each breast to suckle; finished the plowing; then went home to nurse a log-cabin-ful of cholera victims; and you, you little weakling, you're complaining about some minor appendicitis. Woman up! You're whining like a boy!" The rule was, "Real women don't get sick," or they don't allow a little pneumonia to get in the way of getting housework done: that's for boys and men, who "never have to go through a three-day labor like I had to for you — and then you ripped me apart!"

My colleagues explained to me, "Girls are brainwashed, Rich; it's the Macha Creed, and you just have to tell them that times have changed, and we're winning the Revolution, and now women and girls can take a day off to be sick the way men always could. Or at least rich men."

I thought that story and line were great, and I repeated them back to the class, to which several young women responded, "Right! Boys are wimps! If they get sick they go to bed!" And I repeated the point to rather militant stares and repetition of "Boys are wimps!" and finally just said, "All right — all of you! If you're sick, don't come to class. I gave you a roster with contact information; you're divided into groups; get someone to cover for you." And we moved on.

==============================================

            So: There may be some convoluted Machiavellian reason(s) why Hillary Clinton in September 2016 hid the fact that she had pneumonia; or it may be just Great Grandmother Ferguson, lying moldering in the grave, but hoo boy! her spirit marches on.

What If You Did Everything Expected …? (7 Dec. 2012)

            If you're reading this, you're a modern person, free from the anxiety of primitive life and its taboos, probably free even from the complexities of following the 613 mitzvot ("commandments" — sort of) of the Mosaic law or the straight, strait, and narrow path for Christian salvation. Okay fellow free, modern folk, I have a question for you: What would happened if your tried to do everything expected of you — if you'd try even in our state of liberation to get everything right?

            Let me get into this question with a couple of stories. (I'm an old fart; I get to tell stories.)

            First one is from about the mid-1970s, when I found myself on Miami University's Student Affairs Council looking at proposed rules and came upon the locution, "Students are expected to …." I asked, "By whom, and so what?" Who expects them to do what this rule says, and why should they care: "what happens if they don't?"

            I was told, "Oh, then we can throw them out of school."

            I pulled what rank I had as an English teacher and former parliamentarian and — let's say liaison (and not "lobbyist") — and as someone who had dealt with student-targeted laws in the Illinois General Assembly.

            "'Shall'," I said; "You need to say, 'Students shall.'"

            Part of my sensitivity to this usage came from near the end of my first academic year at Miami when I received a very nice letter — fancy letterhead, really good paper — from the President of the University telling me that full-time, tenure-track faculty members "are expected to attend commencement."

            I asked myself, "By whom and so what" and concluded that I could skip those questions and read the sentence, «Untenured assistant professors had better get their asses to commencement», which turns out to have been much of what it meant.

            Behind that was my experience as a sophomore undergraduate moving out of a biochemistry program and into the Microbiology Department with a growing knowledge that what I really liked was English and history. I got a note telling me to report to the office of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and declare a major; "You must declare a major." That was back when one talked to humans about such things, and I asked the woman at the desk, "Uh, what if I don't? Don't declare a major." And I was told, "You must" and asked again "But what if I don't" — and was answered, "I don't know; no one hasn't before." After a moment of secretarial consultation, they told me to just be sure to declare a major before too long into the semester I graduated — "But don't come in during the first week or so; we've got too much work then."

            So my last semester I declared an English major, and a sweet little old Credentials Analyst told me I could have a split minor of Microbiology/History, which she recommended because, "We've never had one of those before." Which is what I did, and I graduated as an English major with a split minor in Microbiology and History; and the whole process was very good for me. And it was good for rule-writing by Student Affairs Council (for a while, and uniquely in the school's governance) because they adopted a policy of trying to be clear when we were making suggestions or requests and when we were bloody well giving an order backed up with, say, expulsion.

            The experience was good for me because I had grown up doing what I was told, asked, and/or (often just) expected to do.

            In my family, I was The Good One.

            It was fair. My sister was clearly my father's favorite child, and I was my mother's — talk about living a cliché! — and she was The Smart One, and I was The Good One.

            My father took this judgment with him to the grave in spite of occasional evidence to the contrary.

            After my father had a stroke and my mother came down with Alzheimer's disease, my sister was more loyal and helpful than I was; but I was still The Good One. With my father's encouragement, I ran a charity at age 18, and I pretty much ran a fraternity chapter at 21; I made Phi Beta Kappa and got Wilson and Danforth Fellowships for graduate school, took an MA at Cornell and a PhD at Illinois; helped manage the student strike at the U of I at Urbana during the Troubles in May of 1970, and managed to get work in my field and eventually get promotion and tenure at a pretty good university.

            My sister was still The Smart One, and I was not. (Indeed, when my sister called our father to tell him her son had made Phi Beta Kappa, our father congratulated her, paused, and then said, "But Phi Beta Kappa can't be that big a deal; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa.")

            Returning to topic — responsible students stay "on task" — returning to the topic, we can allow that I had some experience questioning authority and resisting social pressure. "And yet the old schooling sticks," and I still get anxious whenever I stray from the Good-One role and try to ignore (or reject) social demands.

            And this means a lot of low-grade anxiety for me, and probably for you. One of the easily-resolved paradoxes of the 1960s was that most of the radicals and counter-cultural people in The Movement were the good kids from high school, so even at a time of a lot of apparent rebellion most of us, most of the time, conformed and complied; and nowadays it's possible that more of us, more of the time, conform and comply.

            Or we try to.

            Think about your life if you did all you were supposed to do — just socially "supposed to do," ignoring serious stuff like moral dilemmas when social pressures conflict with internal ideals; ignoring big issues and major life-choices. What would life be like if we complied in all things in just the small stuff of daily life?

            What if you kept all your receipts, performed routine maintenance on your car and appliances, ran your virus scans, read the labels when you shopped, read the manuals with your cell phone and computer and the GPS on your car; if you spent all the time with your spouse and kids that you're supposed to nowadays; if you "gave 110%" on the job or to a sports team or volunteer work?

            If you got your holiday shopping done early — don't forget Halloween! — and studied up before you made big purchases; if you carefully reviewed the releases and contracts and terms of use that you sign; if you seriously skimmed a significant portion of your electronic and hard-copy mail and carefully considered all the requests for your support of worthy causes.

            If you followed the campaigns of all the candidates you're entitled to vote for, and read the full texts of the propositions and initiatives.

            If you replaced those batteries, checked the wiring, checked the furnace and the vents and the ducts and got the right amount of the correct exercises and kept up with the latest research on proper nutrition and got checkups and early treatment when you were supposed to (which can get tricky: check the health websites for current views on checkups, and learn the symptoms you should just keep an eye on for a few days before seeing a physician).

            What if you kept careful track of your spending and the packages you send and put in the necessary time to get the best deals on insurance and shopping: if you were a totally responsible investor, consumer and producer, worker and parent?

            Etc., etc., etc.

            What would life be like if, in all your roles, you gave that "110%" — or up to 20% in each role — to respond just to all of the legitimate demands on your time and effort?

            And remember that anyone who asks for "a 110% commitment" is demanding a blank check, and that someone who seriously wants more than, say, a quarter of you is making an illegitimate demand.

            As Curtis Armstrong's character Miles says to Tom Cruise's significantly named Joel Goodsen — "good son" Get it? — in RISKY BUSINESS: "[…] you wanna know something? Every now and then say, 'What the f*ck.' 'What the f*ck' gives you freedom."

            Maybe more exactly "What the f*ck" or its equivalent is necessary for survival.

            "Students are expected to …"; "Good citizens will always …" "Warrantee is voided if …" — Yeah, most of this stuff we should do, and in some cases it's a real risk if we don't. But part of the low-key horror of modern life is that we just can't do it all or even most of it. Fairly often we must say, "What the f*ck," which guarantees that now and then we will fuck up.

            Every bit as much as "primitives," surrounded by innumerable taboos, every bit as much as more recent folk with 613-and-counting divine demands or the infinite obedience a devout Christian owes a God who became human and died for your sins — as much as most people, most of the time, we will fail to live up.

            Freedom and responsibility means trying to do what is right as much and as often as we can, but now and then saying "What the f*ck" to things in general — and to some people making demands on us and placing their expectations, to everyone who wants more than their legitimate 25% or less —just saying (now and then, with an asterisk), "F*ck off."

Nitrous Oxide: A Blast from Past Getting Blasted (23 March 2013)

          In an Associate Press story from March 22, 2013, Tami Abdollah reports that "Los Angeles County sheriff's officials have zeroed in on the recreational use of nitrous oxide […], cracking down on more than 350 illegal parties […]."

            This is an important story for several reasons, including one that few interviewed experts will stress.

            To quote the Wikipedia entry, "The use of nitrous oxide as a recreational drug at 'laughing gas parties,' primarily arranged for the British upper class, became an immediate success beginning in 1799." I.e., a little over a quarter century after it was first synthesized, nitrous oxide was at the cutting edge of using scientific chemistry to produce new drugs to supplement such ancient drugs as ethyl alcohol.

            So in some places, "laughing gas" is back is fashion, and that is my point: like much else, fashion applies to drugs, and fashions often cycle. There is the possibility that the LA County Sheriff and other forces of law and order can have only marginally more effect on recreational drug use — unless the drugs are as blatantly dangerous as tobacco — than they can over clothing styles, tatooing, piercing, skin tanning, or fashions in sex.

            In the Epic of Gilgamesh from about 2000 BCE, it's a given that getting drunk is something civilized humans do, and getting zonked one way or another is at least as old as human civilization and possibly "as old as cooking."

            Humans will continue to get high one way or another, with fashions in intoxication probably more important than the laws of the land.


            The practical and humane thing to do with recreational drugs is hard-headed harm reduction, starting with cold calculation of the most cost-effective ways to let people do what they're going to do anyway — seeking pleasure where they can — with minimal harm.

Porn in the Public Interest (3 May 2013)

{Bloggers Note: For whatever reasons, this post on OpenSalon got more hits — a whole lot more — than other individual item I've ever posted to the web.}

Headlines in the News:

"Gates Foundation Funds Development of High Tech Condoms"; 

"California’s landmark condoms in porn bill (AB 332) 

clears first Assembly committee, 5 to 1" (References: Gates, AB 332) 

       
            If fashion can get people, especially young people, to tattoo and pierce their bodies, shave their genitals, wear stiletto heals and low-rider pants, and — in the developed world — buy water in small bottles; then fashion can also be a force for good, encouraging condom use.

            So there should be strong support for California Assembly Bill 332 and similar legislation in other states requiring condoms on male actors in pornographic movies. The argument for condom use for sex-workplace safety is legitimate, but there's a more pressing argument for such legislation as a truly public, public health issue. In their way, porn stars are role models, and if their example can be a major influence getting young people to shave like semi-pro swimmers or body builders, porn-actor behavior can be important in making condom-use fashionable, normal, and normative: perhaps even, in the old expression, cool. Condom use as normal behavior for young people has obvious benefits limiting sexually-transmitted diseases, reducing unwanted pregnancies and, hence, the numbers of abortions, and more generally encouraging responsibility among older boys and young men, who should take responsibility for their reproduction and health.

            As part of a larger public information program — i.e., "Wrap That Willy!" propaganda — porn stars can inculcate the doctrines that "Real Men Control Their Reproduction" and "Real Men Can Hold an Erection Well Enough to Be Cool in Condoms." Well, and that Real Women limit their heterosex lives to such Real Men, and have the sexiness and know-how to help their men, let's say, achieve and maintain their "reality."

            Parents and other older adults could also get involved.

            "Late adolescence" was invented during my lifetime, and it isn't a good idea. "The pill" was an excellent idea, except insofar as its existence got people to think contraception an issue for just women and girls. At 18-years old, I was expected to be a young adult, and a good while before I turned 18 my father gave me an optimistically large box of condoms and told me, "Until you know what to do with it; keep it in your pants." I suspect that bit of SexEd was more useful than most of what gets taught in US schools.

            Parents, however, are radically limited in their influence over fashion; stardom, including porn-star stardom, is powerful.

California Dreamin' — Censoring What You Say About It (24 May 2013)

          It was several small masscres ago — about the time when I started thinking seriously about moving to California — and the General Assembly of the Golden State reacted to the demand to DO SOMETHING!!! about gun violence by adding another requirement for shrinks to report to police authorities on their, the shrinks', conversations with their clients.

          "Well," I thought, "if I ever have to talk to a professional in California about mental issues, I'll stick to a lawyer or priest."

         Professional conversations with lawyers and priests are still privileged, even in California, and I sincerely hope Church authorities have kept up, or will soon return to, the old custom of burning at the stake priests who violate the seal of confession. And you can add to the pyre lawyers who tattle on their clients.

         Or, if that seems extreme, perhaps just defrocking priests and disbarring lawyers and banishing them from respectable society.

         You see, I probably should never talk to a California shrink, possibly to no one in the mental health biz, because I say things like my hoping for burning at the stake priests — or lawyers or shrinks — who finque on their clients.

         I sometimes write with violent imagery and sometimes "image" (briefly) baroquely unpleasant outcomes for people who annoy me.

         Although I may not do this as often as most people.

         I declined to see Zero Dark Thirty (2013) because of its torture scene(s), and I've never seen a a Texas Chainsaw remake. (For professional reasons, I had to watch the original Chainsaw and the original Saw and that will do me for that series.) Indeed, I felt compelled to caution one younger colleague when we compared notes on having courses micromanaged by a council of busybodies at our university: he talked about fantasizing walking into one of their meetings with a flamethrower, and I chided him for lacking in his imaginings the personal touch. "A Sarah-Connor-style pump-action shotgun," I said. "You get satisfying imagined splatter while respecting individuality."

         Long before that, a colleague my own age asked me how I could sit through Student Affairs Council meetings smiling beatifically amidst the droning bullshit. I said the secret was using one's imagination. "I play 'Damn the Dean' and picture something out of Dante, just updated."

         She was a respectable woman, the product of a good Catholic upbringing, but one light on the Dante-esque.

         So I bought her a Fantasy Aid: a miniature sound-effects device that you could point at someone and listen to the quiet sounds of machine-gun fire, rockets, and a couple other appropriately nasty noises (crossbow-bolt thuds?). She accepted the present and the advice and went on to finish her term of office — or sentence, perhaps — on Council.

         John of Patmos — John, anyway, of The Book of Revelations — was not the first guy to picture horrible ends for his enemies, and Dante was very far from the last. (And these guys were Christians!) Indeed, women, from time to time, have not been totally immune: one wife in a long-term marriage was asked if she had ever contemplated divorce. "Divorce?" she said. "Never! Now murder (pause) — frequently."

         Would the long-married and probably totally-harmless lady be wise to say that line to a shrink in California? Would the shrink be obligated to follow-up with questions to be sure she had not become a threat?

         Perhaps more interestingly, if Dante Aligheri were to discuss his visions with a clinical psychologist in California would he be reported to police authorities for threats to, say, a Pope or two?

         For sure he could get into trouble talking to a counsellor in some school districts.

         The drugs psychiatrists can offer can be effective, perhaps especially effective when combined with some talk. If the talk is potentially dangerous to a client, however — if it could get "shared" with police authorities or others — then there is an interesting balancing of risks and benefits here.

         Perhaps one would do best to come up with a story for a shrink that might get one healing drugs, but wouldn't get one into trouble. For serious talk, though, at least in California, one might do best to see a priest or lawyer; they're allowed to keep secrets.

"Words Mean": Precision, Clarity, and Royal Pudding (13 July 3013)

Royal...Pudding...

Rich, rich, rich in flavor!

Smooth, smooth, smooth as silk,

More food energy than fresh, whole milk!

            I'm sure there were exceptions, but my memory is that every term I taught a writing course — which pretty much meant every semester for forty years — I'd write on the board at least once, "Words means." Often words mean complexly and sometimes ambiguously, but it's only rarely and perversely that we get the Humpty-Dumpty rule that a word "means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." If you're a legislative body words can mean what you command them to mean, and you can define "weapons of mass destruction" to include a hand grenade, which is destructive, but not massively, or nerve gas, which is somewhat figuratively "destructive to life" — though less effectively than well-placed hand grenades — but leaves objects very clearly undestroyed.

            Few of us, though, have such power, and most of us, most of the time, use words to communicate and have to stick to generally accepted definitions.

            Still, many were the times my students (and older folk who should know better) said, "Oh, you know what I meant!", and sometimes I did know. "Pedagogical confusion" is an old trick, where the teacher pretends not to understand what the student is saying and prods the little sod … uh, encourages the pupil into clarifying the point. Sometimes, though, no, I didn't understand; sometimes I'd been grading essays into the small hours of the morning and had trouble even seeing the words on the page. Sometimes, yeah, I understood — but I understood because I knew the material, knew the context, knew the student's dialect, and was a professional with a lot of experience and someone paid to read and figure out what authors mean; it's really arrogant for most writers to place such expectations on normal people, working for free.

            Sometimes, though, people expect you to just know what they mean and not challenge them because they're passing on received wisdom and speaking in clichés. A few such folk have an agenda, as your boss or coach very well may when urging from you a "110% commitment"; that 110% is a figure of speech and a cliché, but it's also a veiled demand for a blank check for your time and effort.

            Most clichés, though, are less pernicious than bosses of various sorts setting themselves up to demand way more of your time and effort than you should reasonably give. (If you give more than, say, 33.3% commitment to your job or 22.7% to a sports team, you're probably short-changing your family, community, and yourself.)

            I was generally spared motivational and inspirational balderdash, and most often just got innocent lemming-thought like a fair number of my more sentimental students' seeing Romeo and Juliet's being together "forever."

            I would quote Hamlet at them and suggest that "The rest is silence" is probably the best way to think about deaths at the end of tragedies. Romeo and Juliet, as tragedies go, is highly romantic and upbeat, and ends like an Italian comedy gone horribly wrong: a new and better world coalesces around a young married couple — Verona will finally know some peace — but the newly-weds are dead. So I would repeat back to my students, "they will be together forever" and ask, where?

            Romeo and Juliet are Catholics, you know, and so were most of my students; the earliest reference to Montagues and Capulets is in Dante's Purgatorio (canto 6, lines 106-08). If Catholics get the doctrine right, and Dante correctly supplied the gory details, Romeo and Juliet are together forever in the middle ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, as trees or bushes eaten by Harpies.

            If the Protestants are right, R&J are less graphically burning in the lake of fire.

             Taking a more materialist or spiritualist view, the question is still, if "You can never kill love / When love is true" — as The Kingston Trio affirmeth unto this day on my old tapes — where does love live eternally. Unless you're a Buddhist, the fashionable cosmologies open to you insist on a doomed universe. "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice," but there's wide agreement that the world will end. Mythically, there's the Christian Apocalypse — possibly that "fire next time" — or Nordic Ragnarok for the ice alternative. Or the universe peters out through entropy or comes to a fiery pop out of existence with The Big Crunch. Take your pick: if you want to see love lasting forever, it has to be outside our universe.

            Even a saved pair of lovers up in heaven will have their love subsumed in an infinite divine love, or they will be in a variety of hell. Think seriously for a moment on heaven as an eternal family reunion. Then wait for a Rod Serling voice-over reminding you that an eternity of anything not infinitely interesting will become torture. However much Juliet et al. think their loves infinite, eternity had better be an "eternal Now," 'cause a century or so of human time with Romeo, and she's going to try to strangle him (if he doesn't snap first).

            Romeo and Juliet's love is a bright flash, tragically beautiful, tragically brief; it's of infinite value, if you like that idea and believe, but also "sudden; / Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say, 'It lightens'" (2.2.119-20): its an awesome fireworks of "fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume" (2.6.10-11).

            Let it go at that, kids, I'd say; it's plenty.

            All of us some of the time and some of us much of the time just don't think much about what we're saying. And that's OK, so long as we note that when we get serious about, say, love and marriage, the legal formula is precisely, clearly, and with hope but minimal bullshit, "until death do us part."

            In less exalted matters, and more generally, precision and clarity can still be difficult.

            I recently contributed to a tribute to my colleague Brit Harwood upon his retirement from the Miami University (Oxford, OH) English Department. My comments included the point that he improved our vocabularies.

            Brit was into precision, and his suggested wording for rules and policies and reports and such were very, very precise — and sent us to the dictionary. On at least one occasion, the trip, so to speak, was worth it. Brit taught us the word "cognizable," which is a very useful word for white-collar peasants and the professorial proletariat: in an extended meaning. it's a claim that actions by one's superiors can be reviewed and potentially blocked.

            I didn't know "cognizable" but do now. Similarly with a number of words Brit used, including in communicating with the Department's Promotion and Tenure Committee. Some of Brit's totally precise terms were totally unclear to your average full professor in English at a respectable university, though not a first-rate one.

            Which brings us to another question of precision and clarity.

            The closest thing I ever had to an argument with the Chair of my Department came when I was making claims for more appreciation of my scholarship or some such thing, and my Chair said to me, "Oh, come on Rich! You've got a second-rate mind." To which I replied, "Yeah, but I'm at a third-rate university," an assertion with which he didn't argue.

            My boss and I were both PhDs from the University of Illinois at Urbana, which is a second-rate school: usually in the top twenty-five world-wide, but not in the top ten or even up there with my other alma mater, Cornell: ranking thirteenth in the Shanghai Rankings of 2012. If Miami University has ever appeared in the top 500 in the Shanghai Ranking, then I missed it.

            Talking about Miami U as "third-rate" was precise (arguably even generous) but maybe misleading. Something like "third-rank" might be better, ranking just behind, say, the academically major Big Ten schools. Miami University is a good school and nearly a perfect "fit" for many of our students; it's a place where an undergraduate and even many graduates can get a good education, usually more than adequate for their needs and abilities.

            That the whole ranking system might be legitimately characterized as having "all the intellectual respectability of a pecker contest": that's a different issue. Still, if you can't make the top 500 on an international list, calling yourself a "top-rank" institution is either really parochial — "Best School in the Miami Valley!" — or it's hyper, or lying.

            My favorite example in this area combines precision with obfuscation disguised as clarity, and with gleeful dishonesty.

            I refer to a Royal Pudding jingle from my childhood, the one I quote as my headnote and can sing from memory, and the associated Royal Pudding ads.

            The ad copy touts that Royal Pudding has "74% more food energy than fresh whole milk" in large red type and informs you that that extra energy is "in every delicious serving!" That last part is undoubtedly true, given that it'd be 74% more food energy in any size serving. The ad continues in smaller, black type, "Milk is Nature's best food — as every mother knows. It's needed for strong, sturdy bodies, for growth, for vitality. But a serving of ROYAL PUDDING gives you all the benefits of the milk you make it with plus 74% more Food Energy," and then goes on with useful and straight-forward reminders that you can buy Regular  ROYAL or Instant ROYAL.

            The Royal Pudding people got into trouble for misleading advertising.

            Regular or Instant, Royal or Jell-O or homemade, you make pudding by adding to milk a thickening ingredient, stuff for the specific taste (color preservation), a touch of salt, and sugar or sugars, lots of sugar.

            Sugar is the point with most desserts — well, and fat, which the whole milk supplies — and Royal Pudding delivered sugar, and with it a whole bunch of food energy.

            Food energy in the US and UK is measured in "food calories" or "dietary calories" or kilocalories.

            Now consider a modified form of the jingle (and ad): " Rich, rich, rich in flavor! / Smooth, smooth, smooth as silk, / More food cal-o-ries than (even) fresh, whole milk!" Since the extra calories are (a) plentiful and (b) pretty much uncontaminated by vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, or nutrients you might want in addition to high-power carbs and fat, tight-ass nutritionists and various health agencies would deride them as "empty calories" and assert that rich, sugary, smooth Royal Pudding and its successor products are pretty much just fattening.

            Still, the jingle and ad might be misleading, but they are eminently defensible as precise.

            Verily, even (sort of) as it is more exact to talk of "the environment" rather than "the ecology" and "rock formations" rather than "the geology," so it is more exact to talk of The Thing Itself, food energy, than the units in which food energy is measured, i.e., for most of us, calories.

            Changing "energy" to "calories" would make the ad less precise.

            My memory is that the ad was eventually pulled but not before it had run its course and drummed that dumb-ass jingle into at least hundreds of thousands of little minds. And frankly, I kind of admire the hucksters who developed the Roy-al Pud-ding! ad campaign. It's a rare and brilliant example of how to be precise and apparently clear while being memorable, effective, and really, really, dishonest.

            "Words mean," but if you're wily enough they can mean in nastily misleading ways and get the gullible public buying a lot of product. 

Glasses Half Full and Half Empty, and "There must be a pony somewhere" (9 Dec. 2013)

Inter urinas et faeces nascimur.

"We are born between urine and feces" —

misattributed to St. Augustine of Hippo

           The "sig" line of one of my e-mail signatures ends with the quotation, correctly attributed to Rich Erlich, "Some people look at a glass and see it half full; others see it half empty. Me? I hold it up to the light, swirl around the contents, and check for contamination ...."

            Alternate start, for a longer essay: I grew up on the old story of the little boy who was a total optimist, way beyond the standard-issue American Pollyanna. His constant, insistent sunniness begins to wear on his little friends, who throw him into a gloomy abandoned stable, with the kid up to his thighs in manure. And they leave him there all day and all night. Returning in the morning they find him smiling and energetically shoveling the manure. When they pronounce to him the age- and era-appropriate version of "What the fuck?!" he answers them gleefully with, "With all this horseshit, there must be a pony somewhere!"

            That became a catch-phrase for my generation, and a book and movie title: "There must be a pony (somewhere)."

            Now I'm sure there's a large genetic and congenital and early-experience basis for optimism and pessimist — "He's a congenital optimist" may have some literal truth to it — and I'm sure many parents could tell which of the twins would be the cautious, pessimistic one and which the speed-crawling optimist by the time the kids were a year old. And I know that Americans expect people to get grumpier with age and that it's no surprise that by the time I hit 65 I had achieved thorough-going curmudgeon hood.

            But my negative attitude started in my late teens and solidified when I was in my mid-thirties, when I wasn't all that old and reasonably healthy and vigorous.

            The initial push toward pessimism came senior year in high school when I took over a teen-run charity group in Chicago and was told that we weren't going to get the proceeds from a dance that one of our member fraternities had thrown because the officers had embezzled the money and used it for a winter trip to Florida. These gonifs had stolen money from crippled kids for a road trip.

            What was I going to do about that?

            Well, I got elected to president of the organization after having served a year at what we'd now call "media relations," and I knew goddamn well we couldn't afford the bad publicity and plummeting of confidence if we went to the cops and the story got out, which it would. So I did nothing, this time, but spread the word that any more theft and people were going to find themselves arrested at home in the middle of the night and find themselves rape-bait in Cook County jail.

            But that was just a bit of evidence for "People are no damn good": only a subset of a pessimistic attitude, and a sentiment my classmate Nick Kundra stamped on various surfaces around the area (he had had a rubber stamp made for the purpose and used his spare change to buy a lot of ink). And even at age seventeen I knew an overgeneralization when I read one stamped on my American History textbook: even in the "good news is no news" world of history, some people are okay.

            I graduated in 1961 and reached as much social and political consciousness as I was going to get during the period of assassination and blood of the 1960s, although the key issues for my psychology were — as for a lot of people — personal and, hence, relatively trivial.

            Summer of my freshman year, I finally became a counselor at a summer camp I had long attended and had worked at as a "JC," junior counselor. I was given a lift to camp by one of my superiors in the counselor hierarchy and got mildly nervous that I could get nothing from him about my new job assignment until we were far, far out of Chicago and into the wilds of Wisconsin, and then he broke it to me that I'd be in charge of Cabin 1, the seven-year olds (more or less): "You're good with little kids," he said, incorrectly.

            I did my job and at the end of summer went to pick up my check for the princely sum of $200, which wasn't too bad, if you allow for inflation and a summer of decent lodging, good food, and the Great North Woods.

            I still expected a tip. I was not good with little kids, but I was bloody-well good enough at a job no one else wanted, or at least no one else you'd want around little kids. I did not get a tip. What I got was an offer to receive my pay in cash, and my tip would be my not having taxes withheld.

            Making $200 for the summer wasn't going to put me in any tax bracket for paying taxes; I'd get my "withholding" back. I still had to submit a tax form or some sort and affirm ("under penalty of perjury") that I'd declared all my income.

            Uh huh! I declined the offer and told the camp secretary to cut the check and bit back, "And cut the crap." She did so and gave it to me saying, "You fool! You utter fool!"

            I thought about that line for years, wondering in what sort of value system, what sort of view of the world, was simple honesty, and prudence, folly.

            I ended up writing my dissertation on "Wise Men and Fools" in some plays by Shakespeare and a couple or three of his contemporaries. My Master's essay stemmed from the malice I encountered in the larger world and more personally during "the Troubles" of 1963-74.

            Now malice is nastiness toward others, without profit to oneself, and it's scary — Iago in Shakespeare's Othello is a pretty pure example — and encountering it can really get a guy down on human nature. But (again) we humans are only part of the world, and a vicious human species within an otherwise benevolent universe would give us a figurative glass way more than half full.

            I knew that and my somewhat sour attitude came not so much from bad stuff but as a reaction.


            For thirty-five years, I taught at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with a large percentage of undergrads not only convinced that there were ponies somewhere, but who were pretty sure they knew where those ponies were: back home in their stables, being fed and groomed and pampered by mom and dad.

            Most Miami students impressed me as not so much optimistic about human nature as optimistic about the nature of Nature and their place in it. It wasn't so much a sense of entitlement as what I've called a sense of "comfort in the universe."

            I usually used the phrase in the sentence, "I envy their sense of comfort in the universe."

            And envy it I did. The may've been young and healthy, but I was healthy, and even when young I never, ever felt that comfortable.

            I once said something I thought pretty banal to my friend Marion Musgrave, one of my few Black colleagues, that got me a quizzical look from her and the question/statement, "You don't assume you'll survive here, do you?" And I said/queried, "Excuse me?" And she said, "You, as a Jew; you don't think you'll necessarily survive in the United States. …" And continued after the brief pause, "I assume we'll survive — Black people; at least they'll want our labor." And I thought about it for a moment and said, "That's right; I don't assume I'll survive" — and she said quietly, "Hmmm … we should learn that from Jews."

            I'd studied the Hitlerian Holocaust; I was going to go on to teach a course titled "Massacres"; I'd read P. K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and had thought through possible scenarios if Stalingrad had fallen to the Nazis and England had been neutralized and the possible deals the US government might cut to appease a triumphant Hitler — and hell yes, I didn't assume survival. I assumed, if things got bad enough, that the US government and society might well hand over American Jews to Hitler, and throw in a fair number of Blacks as well.

            Probably not. I hoped not — but I never, ever assumed "It can't happen here": a wide variety of very nasty Its could indeed happen in the USA.

            That was part of it: the Big Picture part. Much more small scale, I didn't grow up somewhere between well-to-do and 97^th-percentile rich (many Miami students had); I grew up loved, but not absolutely, unconditionally loved, and not with love spiced with uncritical admiration and occasional adoration.

            Not that Miami U, Oxford, OH, was inhabited wall-to-wall by kids from rich, beautiful, happy families. We had commuter students and scholarship students and students working their way through. We had one kid who baseballbatted his family to death (well, he missed one sister, but it was a pretty big family), and I had a student who was a serial rapist. Both, it's safe to say, had issues, and certainly the wielder of the baseball bat wielder had family issues.

            The "modal phenotype," though, the usual MUO undergrad, was from a conservative Catholic family of Celtic origins (not, say, Italian or Polish), and well off. In an early survey of college campuses, Playboy Magazine had typified MUO undergrads as "Male models and cheerleaders with straight teeth." Most had never run into problems they couldn't handle, certainly few problems that couldn't be handled by Mom or Dad.

            Let's put it this way: If Mitt Romney had been a High-Church Episcopalian instead of a Mormon, he would've fit right in; and 2012 Republican VP candidate and MUO alum Paul Ryan — though he had more suffering in his youth than most — did fit in.

            For student comfort and confidence, consider this anecdote; it it's no proof but an illustration.
            One of our best students in the English Department brought in his honors thesis on the day it was due. It was fine but needed some minor corrections, and I told the student, "You've got your text on a floppy disk, right" — younger readers can look up "floppy disk" — and he did; "Okay, I'll just make the corrections on my computer, and you can take it home or to a computer center and run off final copy and turn it in with time to spare."

            I put the floppy in the drive, found the file, and either clicked on it or otherwise ordered it to open — this was back in the days of the steam-driven computer, kids; I forget whether or not my computer had a mouse — and nothing happened. The file wouldn't open.

            I tried again.

            And again.

            "Ooookay," I finally said; "you'll have to bring me your backup disk, and we'll run it off on the Department's printer, or you can run home and do it yourself."

            "Backup disk?"

            "Yeah, your backup disk. One of your backup copies."

            "Backup copies? … This is my only copy." He had one copy of his thesis, on one 3.5" floppy disk, a disk that he carried around in his shirt pocket.

            One of my colleagues was a computer geek and had in his office a super-smasher-sledgehammer-file opener program, and we were able to open the file, make the minor corrections, run it off, and have him run it (literally run it) over to the proper academic bureaucrat to make the deadline.

            It was 1970, during the Troubles, that I wrote my dissertation, with my office a few doors down from the Office of the Chancellor of the U of I, Urbana-Champaign, with its bulletproof glass windows. But I composed my dissertation on a typewriter — a technology that doesn't allow file copying — but still made three to five carbon copies of each chapter, which I dispersed in various safe places around campus. And much later, when campus peace had broken out, my co-editor and I made enough computer file copies of the anthologies we were working on that our texts would survive anything short of high EMP (ElectroMagnetic Pulse) from atomic attack on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton — in which case, we figured, we probably wouldn't be too concerned about our manuscript or academic careers.

            I was never, ever sufficiently comfortable in the universe that I'd rely on one copy of a crucial document.

            So I envied such comfort in the universe but thought it borderline delusional. Ditto for many of my students' confidence in their ability to find work upon graduation, and succeed.

            Now to a great extent, that confidence was justified: all were pretty bright, as humans go, and most had the social skills, and social connections, to do just fine. And that apparent confidence was sometimes mostly bravura.

            Still, the degree of confidence, of comfort, was disturbing.

            "Shit happens," and it doesn't always happen to other people, or just to bad or lazy people.
         
            Many of the MUO students I met — our other campuses were different — weren't much into the goodness of human nature, but were convinced of the goodness of the world toward them, and the justice of that goodness. "With god all things are possible," as Matthew 19.26 and the motto of the State of Ohio has it; so if you say, "Hey, it's impossible for me to find a decent job," well, maybe you ain't got God; maybe you deserve your lot. As for whether or not they felt entitled to their privilege — I don't think they felt privileged; I think they didn't "felt" much in that sense at all, except comfort.
  
             Inter urinas et faeces nascimur, all of us; and all of us, at one time or another in our lives, can fall into a world of shit. That much pessimism, as Paul Ryan and others need to learn or remember, is helpful for ethical behavior. Otherwise, young optimists, as they come into some minimal political consciousness, can come to disdain people unlike their comfortable selves and take the position politely called "YoYO" (You're on Your Own), which we used to call, less politely, "I got mine; fuck you."


            The glass may be half full or half empty, but for some of us humans, for sure, its contents are contaminated. We need to keep that in mind — and be willing to do some figurative fluids cleanup and replacement, to help heal the world; we need a fair degree of pessimistic discomfort in the world to behave with common decency.

Opiates and Other Drugs, Endemic and Cyclical (18 February 2014)

Rate: 2 Flag

            Page one of my local newspaper for 16 Feb. 2014, above the fold: "Opiates plague east county," a variation on headlines you've probably seen in your newspaper since the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and that I've seen since the 1950s.

            So here's a repetition of an exercise for you. ("Reps" are crucial for social attitudes, as well as building muscles.)

            Start with the observation that "alcohol and drugs" is improper English because alcohol is a drug, and "alcohol and drugs" makes as much sense as "editors and humans." The phrase "alcohol and drugs" may be acceptable as common usage, but it's unethical because it sneaks in a lie.

            Nicotine is also a drug, and caffeine; and if sugar isn't exactly a drug it acts like one, and in terms of the drug/crime connection, the history of sugar is atrocious for its key role in the Atlantic slave trade, where deaths and stolen lives were in the tens of millions. (Tobacco, molasses, and rum were also crucial for the sordid history of American slavery, so that crime/drug connection is very old, very wide, and deep in the cultures of the Americas.)

            So if you drink an Irish Coffee now and then, you're using drugs. Don't feel guilty, not unless you're a drunk, or you're stereotyping the Irish; drug use is normal human behavior and boozing as older than civilization.

            Drug use is normal but a problem since some portion of any population will misuse any drug for pleasure, and if the drug kills pain, significant numbers will become addicted.

            Drugs and drug problems are going to be both endemic — always around — and cyclical: following the laws of economics and trends in politics and even fashion.

            The solution?

            Social problems aren't math problems to be solved; social problem can only be ameliorated, managed. "First, do no harm," and after that, do what harm-reduction you can.

            The local newspaper headline was under the label, "Crime/Courts": That's part of the problem. Drug problems as such, with no immediate harm to others involved, should be handled under "Public Health," not criminal law. Handling drug problems, as such, as crime, does do harm, and more harm than it prevents.