Dropshots

Comments on the semester's blogs

2004-12-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

Certainly I've come a long way. From the first, hesitant, self-conscious blog to today's about Sergeant Hanh. With the Free Blogs my writing has evolved. I guess it started with my musings on our cat, Sassy. I used to write a weekly op-ed column when I lived in New York City, and I thought about resurrecting some of those topics, but the Sassy blog got me to thinking about things I just want to talk about. So in that sense, it's a lot like what the op-ed column turned into. (I just ended two sentences in a row with prepositions, or should I say I just used prepositions to end two sentences with.)
I actually woke up today with the notion that I should write about Hanh, even though I had no idea if I had enough material. And this on top of having spent a couple of days wondering what the hell I was going to write about this week. I put on a pair of running shorts, sat down at the keyboard, and rapped it out. I didn't want to leave. At the same time I was thinking about how to rewrite my Popular Revision of the Research Paper.
I think this one -- about Hanh -- and the one about racism are my favorites. I had what I thought was something interesting to say, and I said it fairly well. They're also the most personal by far. It's tough to write something that means so much, but once it starts, it's, well, magic.
I plan to keep writing, free writing, maybe blogging. Trouble is I only want to write for this class. I hope they keep reading. I'll check in once or twice a week to see if anybody else is doing the same.
Oddly, my wife Googled her own peace group, MothersUniting, and came upon my blog, since I mentioned her group in one of my earlier pieces, and apparently there aren't that many mentions of her group out there in cyberspace. Yet. It scared the hell out of me because I wasn't sure she should see it, and I certainly wasn't writing it with the idea that she'd read it. She didn't see all of it, but she liked what she saw.
I really like some of my stuff. I think the desultory tone to some of the earlier, required-not-free blogs made them my worst, like the interview with Mark Long about the exciting state of English Literature.

Free Blog #13 -- Sergeant Hanh

2004-12-07T08:47:00.000-05:00

Hanh and I were in my jeep, driving up QL1 from the Phu Bai combat base to Hue City, when he quietly told me he had some interesting information and was wondering what to do with it. I glanced over and saw he was looking straight out the windshield. I asked him what it, the information, was, and he remained silent for perhaps a minute. I was on the verge of asking him again, when he said, "I know a man who happens to be VC, and he wants to defect in place." I almost drove off the road.
Information, indeed. "What level?" I asked.
"Province level." Wow.
For the first time he looked at me. I guess I wasn’t watching the road, because I had been staring at Hanh since he said "defect in place." Hanh looked excited. "What do we do?"
"I don’t know, Hanh; I’ll find out."
"Today?"
"Yeah. Today."

Hanh was a sergeant in the ARVN – Army of the Republic of Vietnam. I was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Counterintelligence. He was my I/T – Interpreter/Translator. A good man. Married with one child. I used to buy my full ration of cigarettes on my MACV card and give them to him for what I had paid. I didn’t smoke. Hanh did, but I don’t think he smoked the full ration. Selling the American cigarettes on the black market probably helped a lot with his family budget, since ARVN sergeants didn’t make much.
Like most of the Vietnamese I met, he was smart, playful, and had a great sense of humor, although sometimes humor didn’t come through translation very well. That, more than most things, was the earmark of our cultural differences. When we’d be riding together, he asked me a lot of questions about life in the U.S. I was a little more circumspect in my questions about his culture, not wishing to offend with any sense of superiority. I cared a lot for Hanh.
He floored me one day with an impression of Leonid Brehznev smoking a cigarette. At first I didn’t get it, and then I saw Brehznev. He had caught every detail. I don’t know how he had ever seen the Soviet premier smoking, or how I had seen it enough to recognize it, but there it was. I didn’t offer him my Brando impression, but I hadn’t really perfected it back then, so I just laughed and made a note to do my Nixon for him sometime.

I talked to my Captain and we planned to have Hanh set up a meeting between him and the VC guy. The Captain was even more excited than I was, but he was a lifer and the possibility of commendations probably stoked his fire. Defecting in place meant that the guy wanted to come over but would stay "in place" for a while and feed us information. Then he’d rally when it got hot.
The Captain thought if Hanh could get him to meet in a public place and I could surreptitiously take pictures of them together, we’d have him hooked. Then, if he got cold feet about defecting in place, he’d have no choice. He asked me what I’d need. I asked for a Nikon with a lens I had used in the Intelligence Photography Course, a 600-mm lens that was only four inches long. It was literally done with mirrors, and while it looked short enough not to attract attention, as would a lens that was 600mm l-o-n-g, it could shoot from a long distance. Something way off in the background would suddenly be the primary object. The lens weighed a ton. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one.
The Captain said he’d see what he could do. In the meantime, Hanh and I made plans to go to the village where he was going to meet the VC, so we could case the scene, and I could take normal pictures to bring back to the Captain, the Major, and everybody else involved in planning the meet locally.
I dressed in PX-bought civvies, wore dark glasses, and brought a Canon with a standard lens. And I had a snub-nosed .38 jammed under my beltline at the small of my back. Hanh and I mingled with the Vietnamese in the marketplace area of the village, chatted, examined the produce, acted like tourists. Well, I acted like a tourist; Hanh acted like my interpreter. I took pictures of him, showing the whole village, the little place where he would sit down with the VC and drink tea and formally recruit him, and the spot from which I figured I could discreetly take the pictures of them together. Hanh told me that the villagers thought I was Korean.
We sat together in the open-air eating place where he was going to meet the VC. We had Coca-Colas together, knock-off stuff from the People’s Republic of China, he said. It was great. Since the train that ran from DaNang to Quang Tri had been blown up, I hadn’t seen a real Coke in weeks. Nothing but Fresca. We never ran out of Fresca. This Coke was as good as anything from Georgia, even though it was warm. You didn’t get anything with ice over in Vietnam, since the water was always suspect, or at least unkind to those not used to it.
We were making small talk when a burst of automatic weapons fire ripped into the trees about three feet behind me, on the other side of the back wall of the eating place. Just a short burst. I almost crushed the glass in my hand, and I got that feeling deep in my stomach that I always got when I was suddenly terrified, or I had seen something really horrible. It was like the feeling you get when you crest a hill, driving fast.
We were so in our casual, two-guys-hanging-out-in-the-vill mode that we didn’t show any reaction at all. That, if anything, should have tipped off anybody watching us that we weren’t normal. Not at all normal. To this day, I have no idea what that burst of gunfire was about, but nothing further happened and after a moment’s hesitation in their routines, the villagers went on as if nothing had happened. I suppose if I had dived for cover, they’d have wondered why.
We developed the pictures and I put an illustrated lecture together for the brass, showing the whole layout of the village and where everything would take place. Colonel Bennett was there, too, having flown up from DaNang in the battalion helicopter. They loved it. The lens was coming in from Fort Holabird. I was scared and excited.
Then the Colonel took me aside and asked me if I really wanted to do it. At first I didn't understand him. He said he’d understand if I bailed out. They’d probably be able to find somebody else to do it, maybe another ARVN I/T. I could show him how to work the camera. I started to wonder what I was getting into. Was there more here than I had figured? I got more scared and more excited. I told the Colonel I wanted to see it through. Hanh and I were a team, and since he sourced this guy, I wanted to work with him on it. And, truth be told, I wanted to get my hands on that lens one more time. The Colonel loved that team talk, that mission stuff. He smiled like a kid, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, "Good luck, Sergeant." Didn’t even shake my hand
I sweated it out for the better part of two weeks, while Hanh gently pushed for the meeting with the VC. The longer I waited the more I feared I had volunteered for something that was probably going to get me killed. And with the monsoon season just starting, it was looking like the picture taking would not be as simple as it would have been in bright, sunny, warm weather. And then word came that the VC had backed out. Got cold feet before we could get him on the hook. It was off. The lens never came up from Saigon.

I think about Hanh, not as much as before, but I think about him, and I wonder how he made out. When the North Vietnamese took over, he wouldn’t have had a good time, if he was still there. Did he get out? Did he get killed? Did he get "re-educated" in some camp? He was smart and resourceful. I like to think he somehow survived. I’d love to see him, but I don’t even remember his family name. Still, I’d love to see him and know he’s okay. And I love to show him my Brando.

Free Blog #12 -- Recruiters and Such

2004-12-02T10:09:00.000-05:00

Another New Hampshire kid was killed in Iraq on Sunday, as reported in Tuesday’s Sentinel. Manchester kid, 20 years old, joined the Marines right after graduation in 2003. His mother said, "He wanted to further his education that way. He had all kinds of plans."

I guess he believed the recruiter, as have a lot of high school kids. The No Child Left Behind Act has a requirement of all schools that receive aid under that act. The schools must provide the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all secondary students to the military recruiters. If a family wants to opt out, it has to go through several steps to do so. Most people don’t know about this.

I’ve recently gotten involved with a counter-recruitment effort at Keene High School, where we set up tables and advise the students about the military, dispel myths, answer questions. We’re not there to tell anybody not to go it; we just want them to go in with their eyes open, make an informed decision. Because when they’re only hearing it from the recruiters, they’re only getting half the story. At best. At worse, they’re getting flat-out lied to. After all, what’s the mission of a recruiter? Do they have quotas? If they don’t meet those quotas for a few months, will they go back to a line unit?

Go to a recruiter and collect all the brochures and written material you can. Read them all. See if the words "kill" or "die" are in any of them. They aren’t. That’s the half truth part of their pitch. They forget to tell people that they might have to kill and/or die for a cause they might not necessarily support. Because when you put on the uniform, you’re signing a blank check. If the current occupier of the Oval Office decides to go after an old buddy (like Saddam), you’re part of the team.

Even if you’re inclined to go into the military, I’d think about waiting until Bush gets out and all of his wars have started to simmer down. He’s on a mission, and it’s looking like War Without End right now.

Back to the recruiters. The flat-out lying part of it is when the recruiter says you’ll get your education. That’s what Lance Corporal Brooks was planning on. He isn’t gonna get much of an education now. And about two-thirds of those getting out of the military never gets theirs either, even if they’re still sitting up. That U.S. Government stats, not something I made up.

Another lie? How about you’ll get trained in skills that will carry over nicely to civilian life. 88% of men and 92% of women getting out had nothing they could use out here. That’s from the Wall Street Journal.

Another one? It’ll grow you up. Yeah, somebody telling you exactly what to do every moment, including what you’re going to wear today and how your sock drawer should look, that’ll really mature you. I learned more about myself running my first marathon than I did in five years in the Army, including twelve months in war. That’s the truth.

I’ve seen these guys on campus here, and they have a problem with me. See, I’m an anti-war war veteran. And most pro-war types who have never been there can’t figure that out. I don’t know how anybody could get a full experience of war and come back thinking it’s a great way to handle problems. I think most saber-rattlers have never been in one. Certainly the White House is filled with what we ca;;hicken Hawks. The only one who had ever heard a shot fired in anger was Colin Powell, and he was the only moderate on the war, even when he was mouthing the party line. Doesn’t anybody ever wonder why?

Ther are better ways to get an education, better ways to grow up, better ways to serve your country, ones where you don’t have to kill people, even if you’re at some risk. I once heard a quote, and I never got its source, so maybe I’ll claim it. It was that a hero is somebody who will die for a cause but not kill for it. My wife describes war as a failure of imagination.

Recently I started wearing the little lapel pin that goes with the Bronze Star that I got a long time ago. Whenever I happen to wear a suit or sports jacket, I put it on. Just in case anybody mistakes my anti-war sentiments for a lack of patriotism.

Free Blog #11 - Fans

2004-11-29T22:49:00.000-05:00

For most of my life I thought of myself as a Yankee hater. I started out as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, so I had to hate the Yankees. Red Sox fans think they hate the Yankees. They ain’t got nothin’ on Brooklyn Dodger fans. Red Smith said that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel. That was back when U.S. Steel meant something. And back when Red Smith was not only alive but doing some of the best writing in journalism.

The Dodgers left town. My first broken heart. It’s bad enough when your team trades away your favorite player. With the Brooklyn Dodgers, the owners basically traded away the whole team. In a heartbeat, the Brooklyn Dodgers became the Los Angeles Dodgers. It didn’t even sound right. It wasn’t right.

A number of years later the Mets were born. The anti-Yankees. They were fun to watch because nobody expected them to win. They still hold the record for most losses in a single season. But seven years later they won the World Series.

Three years ago, the year the Series was postponed because of terrorism, I was in New Jersey the last weekend of the Series. We were visiting my in-laws, and my mother-in-law, a die-hard, unthinking Yankees fan, was crowing about her Yankees, and then the Yankees lost to Arizona. I was glad to be there for that. But, more important, that was the weekend when I realized I was wrong about my relationship with the Yankees. I haven’t really hated them all these years. In fact, when I look at the team, as it’s pretty much been for the past six or seven years, you know, Jeter, Williams, Posada, even back to O’Neill and Tino Martinez, I like the teams. They execute well, they’re fun to watch. Who couldn’t love the skipper, Joe Torre? And seeing those three faces next to each other in the dugout, Torre, Sottlemeyer, and Zimmer, looking like some baseball version of Mount Rushmore. Good stuff. And back when I lived in New York City and actually rooted for them, Munson, Guidry, Catfish, Reggie, I didn’t hate them then.

No, I haven’t really hated the Yankees all these years. I’ve hated their fans. Their fans are the most arrogant in sports. They can’t simply accept winning so much as their due; they have to make sure everybody knows they’re Yankees fans. They are so committed to winning that they don’t even appreciate the beauty of the game. If somebody beats them on a great play, they can’t see it. All they know is that the Yankees lost. Probably got robbed, if ya wanna know the truth. Because the Yankees really should go 162-0 for the regular season, every season.

What an epiphany! I could let myself enjoy Jeter’s play and not somehow violate any principles. Then I got to thinking. It’s not just Yankees fans. Most fans, when you really look at it, are flaming assholes. There’s a really fine line between the good fun of somebody dressing up funny to go to a professional sports venue and the bozos who take their shirts off – when most of them really ought to leave them on, preferably in several layers – and paint themselves in their team colors. The word "fan" is derived from "fanatic," after all.

The Fenway fans get the "Yankees suck" chant going, and the Sox are playing Kansas City, for crying out loud. I saw my only World Series game in Philadelphia a while back – more than a while, since the Phillies haven’t seen a World Series from the dugout in about 20 years – and when Mike Schmidt, their third baseman, whose bat had suddenly gone quiet for that particular series, came to the plate for the first time in the game, they booed him. The bastards actually booed him, one of the few guys playing at that time who was a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. The Phillies wouldn’t have even been in the Series if they hadn’t had Schmidt that year. And they booed him. Fans. If I had been him, I’d have flipped them all out, walked off the field, and refused to wear their goddamned uniform again. And when I went into the Hall, I’d wear the uniform of the other team, whoever it was, even if I had only played for one season with them. But Schmidt, pro that he was, dug in and took his cuts.

So I guess I just don’t get the rabid, crazy fan thing. The guys who wear the authentic gear from their team. Not just a shirt or a jacket. A lot of the gear, all at the same time. I saw a guy a few years ago, here in Keene, short, pear-shaped, and he was wearing a Dallas Cowboys cap, a satin Dallas Cowboys jacket, Dallas Cowboys sweat pants. He didn't look like anybody who had ever seen the inside of a locker room, and there he was, all decked out. I looked to see if he was wearing cleats. You can’t go a day without seeing somebody who looks like he – or she – is in the pit crew of some NASCAR driver, somebody named Ricky or Jeff or Dale, probably, since they all seem to have one of those three names. They wear so much of the gear that you wonder how they can afford it. Do they go to work like that?

I like watching a game where I don’t have a strong leaning for one team or the other. Then I can really appreciate the game. I tried that this year with the Yankees and Red Sox. But by the time they played in the League Championship Series, I was hooked on the Sox. They were so grubby and so damned good. Most important, they were having fun. They were laughing, during the game, like any of us would hope to be if we were there. In truth, any of us there would be so nervous we’d forget to have fun. But they were like kids. They were having fun. And when they were down three games to none, down 4-3 in the ninth, facing the best closing pitcher in the history of the game, they took the whole thing by the throat, and they didn’t let go until they had won that game and the next seven in a row, shutting down some of the best bats in the game. It made me feel more like a fan than I’ve felt for a long, long time.

A couple of days after the Sox beat the Yankees, I caught a clip of Joe Torre’s press conference after that series, and he said something like, "Yeah, I’m disappointed. I’m more disappointed for some of the guys on the team who’ve never been in a World Series. But then, on the other side, there’s a guy named Wakefield, and his season ended badly last year. And he’s going to the World Series. So it’s not all bad." Class act, that Torre.

The same day there was a letter in the Sentinel from some woman saying something like, "Oh yeah? Well, now you’ve finally won one. Let’s see, how many have the Yankees won?" And on and on. And I started hating Yankees fans all over again. She should be made to sit in a small room with George Steinbrenner and watch the clip of Torre's remarks over and over again until, say, Spring Training.

Research Blog #7-- Lay Summary of Research Findings

2004-11-18T09:09:00.000-05:00

For some time now I have been interested in the odd juxtaposition of a plethora of diet books on the best-selling lists and the dramatic increase in obesity. The rate of this increase is more geometric every day. And it seems the more wonder diets on the bookshelves, the fatter we get. Obesity, according to most experts, is the most pressing health issue of our time, being associated with heart disease, hypertension, stroke, liver disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and various cancers, most notably, colon cancer. It is now an epidemic. What has changed? Why is obesity not only increasing but also increasing in its rate of increase?
Certainly, the availability of cheap, convenient, calorie-laden, fatty, good-tasting food in huge portions and aggressively marketed is a factor in the supply side of the calorie equation. And on the expenditure side of the equation, there is an increasingly sedentary lifestyle with labor-saving devices both at work and at home, less leisure time in order to do the physical exercise most jobs no longer require, and a physical environment that discourages walking and bicycling.
If we couple this combination of increasing the calories we put into our bodies – not to mention the inferior, highly-processed quality of those calories – and the decreasing of opportunities to burn those calories with a genetic history where a body that could hang onto its energy and expend it stingily had the best chance for survival, there could be no other result than an alarming rate of increase in obesity.
The research explores these causes, along with a look at possible solutions on both sides of the calories-in/calories-out equation and resistance to those solutions that helps to keep the causes alive. We also investigate the quality of the food we eat, the benefits of exercise – obvious and not-so-obvious ones – and an examination of the genetic pressures that contribute to the ability of human beings to hang onto to our energy, which usually winds up hanging over our belts. This research includes professional journals and popular magazines, three books, personal interviews, and a film.

Free Blog #10 -- Born on Halloween

2004-11-16T08:52:00.000-05:00

What a great day to have a birthday! It's the best day of the year for any kid anyway, but to have it come on a day when everybody's dressing funny, and you can go around and get candy at strangers' houses, well, that's just the icing on the cake, so to speak.
It's great to see everybody, I mean everybody, having a great time on your birthday. People you don't even know. Everybody's got a smile on his or her face, even when it's hidden behind a mask.
It wasn't until I was in the second grade that I found out that the parade they held every year on my birthday was not for me. Let's face it, nobody draws a sharp line between what's happening for you on your birthday and everything else. So my birthday had cards, a party, presents, cake, trick-or-treating, a parade. And it was great that so many other people took part in it, too. People I didn't even know. So some kid in the second grade set me straight on the parade. Kids can be so cruel. Hey, kid, we were having this parade before you moved here, okay? Haven't you ever heard of Halloween? Well, yeah, but . . . .Oh.
When I lived in New York City, Halloween was a great study in contrasts, as is so much in that town anyway. There were some people fully participating in the holiday, and others were going about their days as if it didn't exist. Probably even people who were going to go to masquerade parties that very night. I went into a corner grocery on Columbus Avenue one Halloween, and everybody working their was dressed in gorilla outfits. Need something? Just ask the silver-back fellow in aisle 3.
I saw a guy dressed normally with a werewolf head. He was holding his kid's hand, and the kid was dressed the same. He flagged down a cab. And the cab stopped and picked him up. African Americans can't get a cab to stop for them, but werewolves can.
The annual Halloween parade in Greenwich Village is one of the great spectacles of the year in that town. Some of the cleverest, wittiest ideas for group costumes are seen there every year. There are politically topical themes, especially in election years, and cultural icons are regularly skewered there. Equal opportunity stuff. I was dating a woman who lived in the West Village, and for my birthday that year she took me to dinner at an Afghanistani restaurant in the East Village. We were walking back to her apartment after the parade had broken up, and I remarked on how many cops there were around. She said, "They aren't cops, you jerk." It was just the village guys taking the opportunity to dress like cops. I couldn't stop laughing.
For the past few years my birthday has centered around my son's trick-or-treating and his school Halloween gig. No more dinners at Nicola's for me. At least on that day. But living in Keene has a way of extending the holiday, owing to the Pumpkin Festival. This year my son was Johnny Damon. We face-painted a beard on him, he already has a mullet of sorts, he wore a Damon #18 jersey, baseball pants and socks and cleats, a Red Sox cap, and carried a bat. In the costume parade at the Pumpkin Festival, he was getting a lot of recognition from the spectators. "Hey, there's Johnny!" "Johnneeeeee!" as only people with New England accents can say it.
Even though I don't forward to birthdays the way I used to -- probably something to do with the size of the number -- Halloween is still a day I look forward to, because it's so damned funny. And seeing it through my son's eyes makes it even better. Maybe if he gains a lot of weight he can be David Ortiz next year.

2004-11-09T09:24:00.000-05:00

They ran the New York City Marathon this past Sunday and I still don’t know the results. There used to be a time when I watched it live on television, knew who a lot of the contenders were. I relate to that race, but I don’t follow it anymore. Life has changed since that days when I used to run the marathon.

Emil Zatopek, the great Czech distance runner, once said, "If you want to run a race, run the mile; if you want an experience, run the marathon." I ran five of them. I still cannot believe. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I once heard that Neil Armstrong, after he came back from the moon, was walking his dog late one night in Houston, and he looked up at the full moon. And then it hit him that he had walked on it. But he was looking at the moon as he had always looked at it. And it just didn’t make sense to him that he had been there. It’s like that with a marathon. Even after you’ve done a few of them, it just doesn’t seem that you did. I guess that's why so many people keep running them from time to time.

I always thought it would be an impossible thing to train for. Who’s got time to run 20 miles a day? Then I read an article in a running magazine that showed a reasonable training schedule, based on a plan of alternating hard and easy days, or longer and shorter days, if you will. And I immediately decided I was going to have a go at it. That was in February, and I ran my first New York City in October.

It’s a race that’s impossible for the average human being. You carry about 2000 total calories of available energy in your body, 800 in glucose, a single sugar, in your bloodstream, and 1200 in your liver, stored as glycogen, a double sugar. When you use up glucose, the liver breaks down enough glycogen to replace it. You burn about 100 calories per mile, regardless of pace. That’s 20 miles. Your liver has to get very creative to get you through the last 6 miles 385 yards. Mostly you go it on will.

My first marathon I got a slow start and then pushed to make up the time for the next 10 or 12 miles. Big mistake. You’ve got to listen to your body. If today isn’t the day to run a seven-minutes-per-mile pace, no amount of pushing will get you there over a 26 mile course. It all unraveled going up First Avenue in Manhattan. By the time I got to the Bronx, I was as stiff in the legs as I expected to be the next day – "flash freeze," it’s called. My liver cramped as it started working on things to break down that aren’t all that easy to break down, like amino acids. I’d stop. My liver would catch up on the backlog. I’d start running again, though by that time it didn’t look like the running I was doing in Brooklyn.

Oh, boy, only six or seven more miles of THIS. My goal of a 3-hour marathon began slipping away. Only in Harlem did I get a pickup, with the most enthusiastic crowds in the whole race. Steel drum bands playing the Rocky theme; kids running to open hydrants to bring water. Unbelievable effort. I figured those kids did more work on the sidelines than we did running.

I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever do another one. I always wanted to run Boston, and there’s one in the Humboldt Woods in northern California that goes through the redwoods, called "Avenue of the Giants." Quite a contrast to the crowds in NYC, silent giants. Maybe. For now, I guess I’ll go find a paper and see the results from this past Sunday. And keep carbohydrate loading. That's the fun part. I can always do that.

2004-11-04T09:19:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION

Obesity is epidemic in the industrialized world, most especially in the United States. Most alarming is its almost geometric rate of increase. The sight of morbidly obese people in public, a rarity 30 years ago, is commonplace today. What has changed?

There is no lack of either theories about obesity’s causes or advice on what to do about it. Indeed, the best-selling book lists are riddled with diet books, and magazines and newspapers rarely go to press without at least some ink devoted to obesity. Each author has the "answer". But the population is getting fatter almost before our very eyes. The direct correlation between the increase in the number of diet books on the best-seller lists and the rate of obesity could tempt a researcher into looking for a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. Do diet books cause obesity? They certainly do not seem to be working. Or are they? Perhaps obesity would be increasing at an even faster rate without them.

All researchers agree that obesity is a major, if not the major, health issue of our time, directly or indirectly contributing to heart and liver disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, colon cancer, and osteoarthritis. 310 million people are affected worldwide. But with all the attention being paid to obesity, the problem only seems to be getting worse.

What are the causes for obesity, and why is it on a head-spinning increase? How have these causes been addressed, and why don’t they seem to be effective? What are we missing?

CONCLUSION

As stated above, obesity’s fundamental cause is a surplus of calories at the end of the day. The solution is to turn the surplus into a deficit until ideal weight is achieved. And one can do that by either taking in fewer calories than he or she burns, or by burning up more calories than he or she takes in. The pressure against dealing on the supply-side is enormous: cheap, easily-obtained, calorie- and fat-laden, tasty, and aggressively-marketed food in huge portions, produced by an entrenched industry that puts huge amounts of money into resisting any societal changes on that side. So the solution, as repugnant as it might sound to the average American, is the deal on the debit side of the calorie ledger: In a word, activity.

If we can learn about the body’s regulatory system for storing and burning calories, our metabolism, not to outsmart or disrupt it, but to work with it, we might be able to find out how to turn up the furnace. The set-point theory answers most of our questions, and science has spent a lot of its time and resources trying to refute it instead of applying it. Because the pressure on the supply side is enormours -- cheap, tasty food, plenty of it, and no work involved in getting it -- our success depends on our resisting that pressure and burning up more of what we have stored.

Intros & Conclusions in the periodical reading room

2004-11-02T11:15:00.000-05:00

In the Nov/Dec 2004 issue of Solar Today magazine, Avi Bar & Candace Lampkin profile the Solaire Building in Battery Park City in lower Manhattan ("Solaire Dawns on Lower Manhattan"). They open with some background, not leaving out the hitherto uninformed and not boring those who already know, mentioning that building has been written up in periodicals as diverse as Architectural Record and National Geographic. The article continues with a description of this "green" building, a high-rise apartment building that is run on renewable energy and then introduces the obstacles and uncertainty the project faced in the aftermath of 9/11, since Battery Park City is literally in the shadow (at least in the morning) of the World Trade Center.

The conclusion looks to the future, specifically in what lessons building professionals in NYC can learn from the Solaire project.

In the Summer/Autumn issue of American Forests, Will Clattenburg profiles a tree planter in Mexico ("A Mission for Monarchs"). The article opens in anecdotal style, more a magazine style than a journal. The tree planter grows and transplants trees, for reforestation and commercial planting, to help poor landowners and to offset the effects of deforestation -- mostly from illegal logging and the spread of agriculture -- notably the destruction of the habitat of the monarch butterfly. The anecdote leads into the work this man is doing and, coincidentally, the life of the monarch, which the Aztecs believed to represent the spirits of slain warriors.

The article concludes with both an opportunity to contribute to this man's work and an invitation to learn more about the project.

The October 2004 issue of Audubon magazine features "The Greatest Show on Earth" by Alex Shoumatoff, about the Narcisse Snake Dens in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which draws about 50,000 people each spring to watch tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes emerge from the ground for mating and the beginning of their season in the sun. The article starts with the story of the author's 8-year-old son and his fascination with Steve Irwin, Animal Planet's Crocodile Hunter, and, by extension, the boy's love of reptiles and amphibians. The article is a chronicle of their trip to Manitoba for the event.

He concludes his article with a brief anecdote of his son's exchange with a woman who hates the snakes because they "torture" the frogs, and how the boy picks up one last garter snake and tells it he loves it.

I blew this assignment by not noticing AND between "magazines" and "journals," so there is no report on a journal. Having read enough journals for my research paper to make my head spin, I am confident that the openings and conclusions are less folksy and more geared to readers who already have a deep, abiding interest in the subject.

Election Day

2004-11-02T08:35:00.000-05:00

On Saturday the Square was filled with people holding signs, some of them chanting "Four more years," and more of them chanting "Four more days." I thought of the Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It's Worth": "Mostly young, and they're carryin' signs./ Mostly say, 'hooray for our side.'" Then I flashed back to an earlier line in the same song, "There's a man with a gun over there/ tellin' me I've got to beware."

Voting is a highly emotional act for me. Whenever I step into a voting booth, I'm very much aware of what it means, the price paid, what's at stake. This year it's apparent that most people see something big at stake. The registration of new voters is going through the roof. People are active, visible, vocal. On both sides.

The first time I voted was by absentee ballot. From Germany. I was in the Army, and I voted that way every year, starting with the primary and general election of one Presidential election through the primary of the next Presidential election. A tad more than four years' worth of absentee ballots. In the general election that year I stepped into a voting booth for the first time in my life as a voter, not going in with my Dad back in Pennsylvania, not even in my hometown, but in New York City, where I was going to school. My eyes welled up so that I had trouble reading the names. When I was finished I came out and saw people in line seeming to take it all in stride. Worse yet, I went out onto the street and saw people who weren't acting any differently from usual, and it occurred to me that most of them probably hadn't voted and weren't going to vote. But every year, for me it's a very emotional experience.

For the rest of the day I feel like I do a few hours after I've gone on a good, hard run. The day is the same as it would have been had I not done it -- run or voted -- but it's not the same at all. Because I'm different. Different from what I would have been. Maybe not better, but somehow enriched.

When I was a kid, my sister and I were at my grandparents' house one afternoon. The phone rang, and my grandfather answered it. After what I thought was an odd exchange, at least from our end of the conversation, Grampie rung off, and I asked him who had called. A man on the other end had immediately said, "The is the government." Grampie, who had a better sense of what being a citizen means than most, responded with, "Funny, I thought I was the government."

Well, we are. Act like it.

Free Blog #7

2004-10-19T08:41:00.000-04:00

I spent a few hours with an old friend of mine the weekend before last. We go way back. Fourth grade. His family moved up the street after they got wiped out in a flood. They had moved from the next town, the twin town, the arch rival in the annual Thanksgiving Day football game. They were also black. Still are.

My mother tried to prepare me for their arrival. One day, just before school resumed after the Christmas break, she said, out of nowhere, "You know, Billy, colored people are just like we are." I knew, of course, that they weren't "just like" we were -- they were darker, for one thing -- but I said, "Uh huh" anyway. She went on: "And you know, Billy, we should treat them just like we'd treat white people." "Uh huh." I didn't know exactly where she was going, and I wasn't sure she knew, either. I waited. "Well, a colored family is moving in up the street." Immediately I asked, "Do they have any kids my age?" "Well, yes, I think they have a boy about your age." "Great."

The next Monday at school there was this dark kid sitting in our classroom when I went in, looking alone. I immediately concluded he was my new neighbor, and I was excited. He was not only about my age, he was in my class. Later in the morning another classmate and I argued before the teacher to see who actually lived closer to Les so that we could walk him home at lunchtime. We both walked him home. But Les became my best friend, not Richie's.

We became inseparable. In high school I spent more of my waking hours in his house than in my own. He had two older brothers and an older sister. His Dad was a professional jazz musician, so the dining room in their house was actually a music room. Couch, chair, piano, and a lot of wind instruments lying around. A trumpet (my instrument), various saxophones, clarinet, French horn. We played chess, listened to Brubeck and R&B and Mingus, and talked about everything, especially girls.

After the novelty of Les's color wore off, I had a few delicious years of being as close to color-blind as a white person in this country could probably be. Les was simply Les. Then the civil rights movement got cranked up, and I had to look at Les differently. I was unaware of the daily prejudice he encountered, because it never happened when I was with him. At least I didn't notice it. Thinking back, I'm sure Les was getting the Hate Stare, and I probably was, too, but I just didn't notice it. I wasn't looking for it.

A few years ago I happened to be back in my hometown and was going to leave just after breakfast, which I was going to have at another friend's restaurant. At the cash register, he told me he had just heard that Les's stepfather had died that morning at home. (Les's Dad had died when we were in high school, and his Mom had remarried and had moved outside of town.) I went over to see his Mom on my way out of town and spent some time with her. I came back a few days later for the funeral.

At the reception in the basement of Hank's church, I was sitting with Les's family, catching up with his brothers and sister and some other friends of theirs I hadn't seen for years. An old black woman sat down with Les's Mom, looked me over with a jeweler's eye, and said to Les's Mom, "Now who's this?" "He's family!" "I figured that, I just wanted to know who he is." It turned out she and the grandmother I never knew had known each other long before I was born.

We went back to the house to continue the informal part of the reception. The world was in the midst of the O.J. Simpson trial at that time, and at one point Les told about a project he's working on with two white women and how they had been on a break and had inevitably begun discussing the progress of the trial. And Les said, "Can you imagine? They actually think he's guilty." It hit me like a cold blast of air in the face. I didn't know what to say, because I thought he was guilty, too. I don't think I said anything, because I don't remember a discussion about OJ's guilt or innocence. I was just struck with how little I knew about Les. Had we grown that far apart in those years? But I realized it came from his black experience, and that was what I did not know. His comment came from a place I didn't know. He couldn't see OJ's guilt, because all he saw was the cop on whom much of the prosecution's case was based. (And apparently the jury later saw that, too.) And Les must have some experience along those lines with which I am totally unfamiliar.

All I could think was that I have no idea what it's like to be black in this country. Les and I were, sociologically, about as similar as two people could be. Identical socio-economic background, education, living conditions, however one could cut it. But my experience and his were leagues apart. I've never been pulled over in my car because of my skin color, a DWB. I've never had cab drivers ignore me when I've tried to hail a cab. I've never been followed around a store.

And it got me to thinking about my own racism, the racism I've denied since becoming Les's friend. I truly thought that because of the privilege I had to have been living on a street that Les's family moved to, that I had no racism in me. I had thanked him for that, on more than one occasion. And I was proud of it. Once, in Vietnam, I was with Brother Javo when we ran into a bunch of tough-looking, well-armed Brothers. When they started eyeing me, Javo said, "He's okay." Proud, proud proud. But a few years I ago I met Cornell West, a professor of religion at Harvard or Princeton (he's been at both schools, and I don't remember which one he's at now). And Brother Cornell disabused me of my fantasy. He recalled a conversation he had had with a white friend, who said, "You know, Cornell, I don't think I have one prejudiced bone in my body." And Cornell had said, "I have a hunch that if it's in me, it's in you."

You see, we lived in a racist society, so it's in all of us. We prefer the white look in women, not the Serena Williams look, or better yet, the Venus Williams look. Light skin, light hair, small nose, blue eyes. Have you ever seen contact lens manufacturers marketing brown contacts for blue-eyed people? No way. It's the other way around. An advertising campaign that automatically demeans African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians. In no other advertising campaign could you find more people left out of the ideal, and at the same time try to sell them something to make them more like the ideal.

What a relief it was to hear Cornell West say this! I was off the hook, the big lie that I'm not racist. I heard Jesse Jackson one time say that he's afraid of a group of black kids on the street in a way that he's not with a group of white kids. It doesn't matter that racism is in me; given where I'm living, it couldn't be any other way. What matters is what I do with it. Do I give into it and discriminate against people of color? Do I not look for, and see, the beauty in a woman from the Middle East or Jamaica? Or do I fight it?

It has really let me off the hook. Being okay with the racism in me has made me a better human being with people of color. I'm no longer trying to prove anything, to let them know I'm okay. This white boy is okay. I can really be with them. What a relief indeed! As John Brown said, "I know it's in me, but I'm fighting it anyway." We have a lot of work to do. It still ain't okay, not by a long shot. But it gives us something to do for the next 50 years or so, doesn't it.

Research Blog #5 - Counter-Argument

2004-10-14T08:54:00.000-04:00

Chetna Mehrotra, et al., in "Arthritis, Body Mass Index, and Professional Advice To Lose Weight: Implications For Clinical Medicine and Public Health," study the relationship between arthritis and obesity. They state up front that "obesity is a risk factor for arthritis," and their findings show a strong relationship between the two. While not actually stating it, they imply a cause-and-effect relationship, where their evidence only supports a strong correlation between obesity and arthritis.

It is entirely possible that both obesity and arthritis are the result of an unhealthy lifestyle and are actually independent of each other. An unhealthy lifestyle shows up in different people differently; their genetic predisposition to "diseases" manifests the result of their lifestyle. If one is not genetically predisposed for arthritis, no amount of bad living will create arthritis in that person.

Perhaps Mehrotra, et al., have only discovered that the more unhealthy the lifestyle, or the longer individuals have been leading that lifestyle, the more likely they are to manifest severe symptoms of any sort. And those who are predisposed to arthritis and obesity manifest them both along a continuum.

This counter-argument feels like nit-picking, but what might help this study most would be a description of exactly why the researchers believe one condition causes the other.

There is the possibility that since great weight puts more stress on joints, especially in the lower extremities, obesity actually enhances a tendency for arthritis. On the other hand, it is equally possible that the progression of arthritis in an individual restricts that person’s engaging in physical activity and contributes to greater weight gain. A study controlling for these alternatives might be possible. Certainly, it would be difficult to screen out one condition from the other in the study, but if one could find a way to do it, a more valid conclusion about the possible cause-and-effect relationship could be drawn.

Collage - Obesity and Health

2004-10-12T11:15:00.000-04:00

(Since virtually all of my blogs are on different topics, I went with the three on Diet, Obesity, and Health. They don't coalesce very well, but it was interesting to see how ruthless I got when it came to cutting. I wouldn't submit this if I didn't have to do so. It's a fine exercise.)

What interests me is the notion of Diet For Health as opposed to Diet For Weight Loss. This would be a Diet, capital "D," as a way of life, a primary way of eating, and not a diet, small "d," a short-term regime for the purpose of dropping pounds.The fundamental question is: Why are there more and more diets that have the "answer" to the obesity epidemic in this country, and yet people seem to be gaining weight before our very eyes? It used to be that the trend in obesity could only be seen in 30 or 40-year spans; now the percentages of obese and morbidly obese people in the population changes significantly in less than a decade. If all of these diets -- or any one of them -- had the answer, why are we getting fatter? Maybe none of them knows anything at all. What other factors are contributing to the obesity, such as the convenience of fast food and prepared dishes, the sedentary lifestyle, a decrease in people's relationship to the natural world?

I've summed up my fundamental question to: "What's changed?" Given that there are probably a lot of ways of eating that will prevent obesity, and a lot of ways of eating that promote it, we have to assume that those ways of eating have been around for a century or so, at the very least. I'm more inclined now to look at recent phenomena, TV, fast food joints, processing of food beyond belief, remote control, one car per family member.

Newsweek, a basic, weekly news magazine, starts off with a focus on leptin, a hormone lacking in a strain of morbidly obese mice. When injected with leptin, these mice ate more like "normal" mice and lost their excess weight. Researchers thought they had found a "magic bullet." Give fat people leptin and they’ll lose weight. It turned out that such a prescription only worked for the few people who don’t have the gene which produces leptin.

The tone of the article is about researchers trying to find the elusive magic bullet, science outsmarting the body, reflecting conventional western medicine’s and science’s standard approach to any malady: Address the symptom with medication and/or surgery, and don’t try to find the root cause.

There is some good information, explaining some of the actual mechanisms of why fat is unhealthy, e.g., that fat is fed blood by capillaries which puts more stress on the cardiovascular system than muscle, which is fed by larger blood vessels; or that sleep apnea is caused by fat surrounding the windpipe and interrupting breathing when one relaxes in sleep. Newsweek’s article focuses on research being done into the structure and function of the fat cell itself and the mechanics of its relationship to inflammation, which might be more of a causative agent in heart disease than clogged arteries; the secretion of estrogen, which has been associated with cancer; and diabetes. Sprinkled throughout the article are three sidebar profiles of people who took fairly serious measures to combat their morbid obesity: Gastric-bypass surgery, weight-loss drugs, and gastric pacemaker. The article concludes with the observation that many drugs and scientific approaches have shown great promise to cure obesity, but one only has to look at our population to see how they’ve worked out so far. Nevertheless, one senses that the quest for the easy answer will continue, and those efforts will be duly reported on and celebrated in the pages of Newsweek.

National Geographic's article, "Why Are We So Fat?" has an illuminating subtitle: "Americans enjoy one of the most luxurious lifestyles on Earth: Our food is plentiful. Our work is automated. Our leisure is effortless. And it’s killing us.") Inlcuded is a section about diet guru Dr. Adkins, followed by a rebuttal from one of Dr. Adkins's most vocal critic, Dean Ornish. It then ticks off a list of possible reasons for the obesity epidemic: huge portions, mindless eating, lack of exercise, and aggressive advertising, along with a description of some bodily functions related to weight gain and loss. Leptin makes its appearance in National Geographic, and a brief discussion of drug research follows.

Nutrition Today, a professional journal, puts forth a convincing analysis of the "problem," that the human race is genetically set up to hold onto calories, to store and use energy efficiently, and now lives in a world of not only plenty, but rich, available, convenient, tasty, large-portioned, and heavily marketed plenty, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle. The American Dream has been given to us through the miracle of technology, which makes our life so easy we don’t have to move much, either for work or for entertainment, and which brings highly-processed food, savory and in huge portions, right to our plate. No surprise that we’re obese. The article mostly focuses on changing our behavior and approach to life, since it looks as if fast food and remote controls are not going away soon. There are no charts, few pictures, no sidebars, no fascinating human interest stories, and there are 21 references at the end. Of the three, the Nutrition Today piece is probably the most realistic. We’re stuck with things as they are, nobody is going to ride up on a white steed to save us from this, and if we’re going to slim down, it’s up to us. Nasty news, but probably spot on. And, hey, somebody had to say it, even if it’s in a journal that 99% of the population doesn’t know exists.

In all three articles, the advice to eat less and exercise more is mentioned, but in Nutrition Today, it’s what the article is all about.

Political Thought(s)

2004-10-12T09:11:00.000-04:00

I’m a political "progressive." Sometimes I’m probably a radical, but "progressive" seems to cover most of what I believe. It’s about the only label with which I’m comfortable. The Bush administration has turned me into an activist. It’s happened with a lot of people I know. People who were only somewhat discontent and were inactive politically have become very active, mostly because of the Bushies.
Now, what usually happens when progressives win back the White House is that they go back to sleep, and the Republicans come back again. What it’s looking like now, though, is that most of us ain’t going back to sleep. We’ve upped the gradient. We’re much more active, and we’re liking it. We, most of us, acknowledge that Kerry isn’t the best we could have done, but he’s better than Bush. I said back during the Primary Campaign that if the Democrats put up Bozo the Clown for their candidate, I would be voting for Bozo the Clown come November.
What has changed is that people realize there’s so much at stake. And they’ve seen how much damage can be done in less than four years by a group of rabid ideological zealots. What I’m hearing pretty consistently now is how we all plan to hold Kerry’s feet to the fire starting January 21st.
My heart-of-hearts scenario is that Kerry gets in and stays in for eight years. He’s decent, his wife is a committed environmentalist, and he’s trainable. At least he’ll stop the bleeding. We then have eight years to build a solid progressive wing to the Democratic Party, and we have time to build a solid Third Party if the Democrats really don’t want a progressive slant.
But, oddly, I began to think of the Republican Party the other day, and how I’m astounded that reasonable conservative Republicans don’t seem embarrassed by having Bush be their man. But I got to talking to a retired man I know, a Republican all his life, who’s getting a huge yard sign for Kerry. He’s the guy I’m talking about. And I got to feeling bad for him. His party has been taken away from him in a manner much worse than the Democratic Party being in the hands of moderates. I really felt bad for him.
So Republicans have their work cut out for them, too. And what they have to do first is get the Bushies out; if they stay, they’re certainly going to retain control of the GOP. So moderate, intelligent people of both parties have to vote them out. And then they’ll have time to work on their respective parties. It makes me hopeful, because all we need are enough intelligent conservatives to figure out . . . .
And then I think of the story of Adlai Stevenson, who, when he was running for President against Eisenhower in 1952, was approached by a woman who gushed, "Oh, Governor, you know all intelligent people are going to vote for you." "I know," Stevenson said, "but I need a majority to win."
And it makes me wonder.

Claims and Evidence -- Dr. Peters

2004-10-07T08:40:00.000-04:00

In "Social Change and Obesity Prevention," Nutrition Today, Volume 39, No. 3, May/June 2004, John C. Peters, PhD, analyzes the mostly social reasons for obesity and puts forth suggestions for what changes could be made in order to stop and to reverse the alarming trend in obesity.

Most of what he observes does not need evidence. It is obvious to anybody who's paying the least bit of attention that easily-accessible, cheap, aggressively-marketed, tasty food, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle are the combination of causes for the obesity epidemic. And Dr. Peters lists these causes along with a more inherent genetic one, that the survival mechanisms which our human ancestors developed were those that encouraged eating whatever was available and conserving energy when it was not absolutely necessary to expend it. Curiously, that is about the only assertion Dr. Peters makes that is not footnoted.

The rest of his claims are very well backed up with evidence -- 21 references for a six-page article -- and he covers this subject in minutest detail. For instance, he cites two studies to support the claim that few people will change behavior that has a short-term reward -- such as eating fast food -- for a long-term benefit -- such as "health."

Unlike many of the articles in the popular press, Dr. Peters does not bemoan the fact that there seems to be no solution, given that there appear to be many "solutions" available and nothing seems to be working. He recommends an incremental approach, namely to burn an extra 100 calories per day, or consuming 100 calories less per day. He prefers the former as something that would be easier for the average person to track.

Dr. Peters acknowledges that it will take several generations to turn the obesity epidemic around, and what is left unsaid is that it took several generations to establish.

My Uneasy Relationship With Technology - Free Blog #5 (late)

2004-10-06T09:11:00.000-04:00

There are times when I wonder if it's all worthwhile. All this time I'm supposed to be saving with, say, computers, seems to be undone when one of these wonderful pieces of technology malfunctions. It can take days, even weeks, to get it all straightened out, and this is time I could be spending on other pursuits. I've come close to throwing the whole damn thing out the window, taking sash and all with it, and if I weren't certain I'd probably throw out my back while throwing out the computer (sounds like an old adage in the making), I'd have done it several episodes ago.

Any serious problem with a computer involves a number of phone calls, for starters. If it seems to be related to not being able to get email, one calls the server, who immediately blames the phone company, the manufacturer of the computer, and the software. All these companies pass me around until I finally get some answers. I'd prefer having a conference call with them, so that they could discuss the problem and pass around the blame, and give me an answer more quickly. At least I'd know who is the one who should be helping me and let the others hang up.

I can tell when I've spent too much time on a problem like this, because I walk around with an inane tune in my head, an "ear worm", and it's always some non-music background noise I've listened to while on "hold", over and over and over. Only Gateway has good rock for its Hold Music, and my problems are usually not Gateway's responsibility, sad to say.

The night before last, as I sat down to compose this blog for the next day's assignment, I found that my monitor would not go on. It's a peculiar monitor anyway, a replacement for the original that died early in the summer. When I turn on the computer, the monitor shows a screen as the computer goes through its checkout procedure, a sort of pre-flight check, and then it (the monitor) turns itself off. The little yellowish-green light turns to orange. I push the on/off button once, and the light goes off; I push the button a second time, and the monitor makes its wooshing turning-on-the-monitor sound, the light turns to its happy yellowish-green, and everything is fine.

The night before last, every time I restarted the monitor, it would make a funny noise, the light would turn to orange, and nothing else would happen. It's so hard to use a computer when you cannot see where the cursor is. You can't even shut the computer down. It's odd enough that in order to turn off a computer you have to click on "start", but not knowing where your cursor is makes it odder yet. In earlier versions, you didn't even have a mouse, you did everything with a keyboard. If you were really really good, you could do a lot without a monitor. Not now.

And my computer is odd, too. If it freezes up and I have to turn it off at the CPU, it goes to sleep for 20 minutes and then turns itself back on. It did this yesterday, when, bright and early in the morning, I made several more attempts to get the monitor working and finally shut off the computer. I came home last night to find the computer on, making its computer noises, and then I forgot about it. This morning I absently touched the on/off button on the monitor, almost as if I had nothing else to do, and suddenly it was working. It seemed so normal that it took me a few minutes to notice it, as I stood there wondering if I should just try to shut off the computer at the CPU. I must have been mulling over how I was going to get the monitor either fixed or replaced, and how long it would take to be tapped into cyberspace again. And there it was, bright and shiny, smiling at me, ready to go.

I moved the cursor to "start" and shut the whole thing down for the day. Now I wonder what I'll find when I get back home and turn the sucker on again. I'm cutting some deadlines mighty close, and I don't need any more ironic delays caused by my time-saving devices. To say I don't trust that everything is back to normal, such as that is, would be overstating things. I don't trust it. Not a bit. And I just hope this school computer doesn't somehow let my equipment back home know how much I don't trust it. Because, well, you know how these things are. They talk. At least mine do.

Sassy

2004-09-28T08:58:00.000-04:00

Reading Scribble's blog about her fat cat got me to thinking about Sassy. Until a couple of weeks ago, she was one of three cats we've had for the last 11 years. My wife Susan's cat, Face, had died about three weeks before she decided we should go to the pound and see about getting another cat. There were a lot of cats there, not to mention dogs, but we weren't set up for a dog at the time. In one cage was a mother and her last kitten. The kitten was a calico and she had one yellow eye and one blue one, a David Bowie kinda cat. After looking over all the others, we found we kept coming back to her. When Susan said, "Let's take her," I looked at the mother and said, "Her mother will never be taken. People don't tend to take adults." So we took her mother, too.

The mistake we -- or I -- made was when I glanced into another cage with three kitten, litter mates, a tiger, a red one, who somehow reminded me of David Caruso, who, at that time, was on NYPD Blue, and a black one with white chest and paws, who looked like all he needed was a Rat Pack bowtie, and he'd look like he was wearing a tux. He was sitting on an upside down cat food tin, screaming at me. His fur was spiky, as if he had gelled it, or perhaps stuck his paw into a light socket. I thought he was communicating with me, so we took him, too. Went into the pound for a cats, came out with three.

We always had a 24/7 commercial free jazz station on in the car, and when we got in the music came on and Susan started thinking aloud about names. She said, "Who's that singing?" I said, "Joe Williams." She said, "Let's call the boy 'Joe'." That was easy. The little girl? Since we were near Newark, NJ, and Sarah Vaughan came from there originally, I suggested "Sassy," Sarah Vaughan's nickname. And of course, the mother had to be Ella.

We've had them ever since. Three years later we brought them to New Hampshire, and they've adjusted well. Joe's a royal pain in the ass, a certified bully, but he's also an outstanding hunter. (Even though they're indoor cats, our house is 234 years old, so the line between the inside and outside is a dotted one at best. Critters tend to get in from time to time, and they usually pay a high price at Joe's paws.) I saw him take a confused bat out of the air one time.

Sassy was clearly number three on the totem pole, the Gamma Cat, I suppose. She always ate last, and Joe would bully her most, though she usually got the better of their scraps, curiously enough. She became the unofficial greeter whenever strangers would come into the house, the first to meet them. Joe would hide in the basement for a few hours. Like most bullies, he a resolute coward. He would call it discretion, if he could think. Sassy was also the most vocal, always responding when one would talk to her.

While Joe was a hunter of refugee critters, Sassy was a hunter of socks. She loved the smell of feet, would roll around a shoe on the floor, sticking her nose deeply into it, savoring the aroma. And we'd hear her feral cry as she would stalk along a room with a dirty sock in her mouth, much as Joe does with a dead of dying mouse. Odd cat.

Somewhere along the line Sassy developed a "trick," not something a dog owner would think is particularly impressive, but a damn fine one for a cat. When asked a number of times if she'd like to roll over, she would flop over onto her side and let you rub her belly. She knew we loved her for it, and would never fail to do it.

She started to fail a while back, and we couldn't entice her to eat better food, like canned fish, even out of our hands. Probably thought it wasn't her turn, that Joe and Ella should eat first. Medicating her was impossible. As she went downhill, she stopped eating at all, and got weak enough not to resist when we would feed her baby food meats with a supplement off our fingers. Never being one for being held, she even submitted to that, and even got to liking it. We were taking her into the vet every few days, and then every day, for fluids. But her reluctance to eat or drink indicated to us where this was all going. A thin cat to begin with, she didn't have a lot in reserve.

The decision to put her down was very difficult. I've done it before, and it was more clear cut back then. Not this time. She didn't seem to be suffering, and I didn't want to jump the gun. I fantasized -- perhaps -- that she was simply not eating in order to throw off whatever was ailing her, and that she'd come back thinner but recovered. I was probably whistling in the dark. The difficulty is in not waiting until she actually is suffering, but not cutting her life too short, especially if it's at our convenience. We were scheduled to go away for the weekend, and taking her back for admitting into the animal hospital seemed cruel. I offered to stay, if it meant she'd go through the weekend reasonably well, but the indications were increasingly bad. Even so, one of the last time she was at the vet for fluids, she did her "trick" for one of the doctors, on the cold steel examining table. Things like that argued for keeping her around longer, but, finally, we decided it was time.

Two weeks ago tomorrow, we took her into the vet for the last time. She cuddled again in Susan's arms, in a soft towel, probably thinking, "If I had known how good this 'being held' thing was, I wouldn't have waited to be dying to try it out."

We buried her in the towel, out back, with one of Reilly's dirty socks between her front paws, near her nose. She's out there in the rain right now.

Journal articles vs. magazine articles

2004-09-23T11:33:00.000-04:00

First, the journal articles are much more focused, delving into arcane matters that probably are only referred to, at most, in a magazine article on the same subject. The Integrated Roles of Environment and Genetics comes up when I search for obesity, genetics, and activity. The titles of the journal articles, as well as a skimming of them, reveals study into smaller and smaller facets of the overall subject. Some of the titles which I rejected I didn't even understand, so deeply into cellular structure and chemistry as they were. I emailed about a dozen of them to my computer, and I plan to winnow them down after I've plowed through the minute details they hold.

2004-09-23T09:17:00.000-04:00

I read three magazine articles about the obesity epidemic, or pandemic, depending on whom one reads: Newsweek’s 23 Aug 2004 issue ran "What You Don’t Know About Fat," by Anne Underwood and Jerry Adler; National Geographic’s August 2004 issue ran, as its cover article, "Why Are We So Fat?" by Cathy Newman; and Nutrition Today ran Social Change and Obesity Prevention, by John C. Peters, Ph.D., in Volume39, May/June 2004.

Newsweek, a basic, weekly news magazine, starts off with a focus on leptin, a hormone lacking in a strain of morbidly obese mice. When injected with leptin, these mice ate more like "normal" mice and lost their excess weight. Researchers thought they had found a "magic bullet." Give fat people leptin and they’ll lose weight. It turned out that such a prescription only worked for the few people who don’t have the gene which produces leptin.

The tone of the article is about researchers trying to find the elusive magic bullet, science outsmarting the body, reflecting convention western medicine’s and science’s standard approach to any malady: Address the symptom with medication and/or surgery, and don’t try to find the root cause.

The article contains statements that don’t make sense without further explanation, which is not there. For instance, Newsweek quotes Dr. Michael Schwartz of the Univ. of Wash.: "We like to think that eating is a voluntary act. But the amount you eat is controlled in part by how much fat you have." This implies that the fatter you are, the more you’ll tend to eat. This flies in a the face of human genetics, as stated two paragraphs later by Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School: "For most of evolution, getting enough to eat was a driving force for survival."

The article also provided a statement which I read and reread again and again, trying to see why I wasn’t getting it: " . . . some people are likely to stay fat to minimize the negative effects on their health." Knowlingly? Let’s see, being fat is unhealthy, therefore I’ll stay fat to "minimize" the unhealthy effects. (!)

There is some good information, explaining some of the actual mechanisms of why fat is unhealthy, e.g., that fat is fed blood by capillaries which puts more stress on the cardiovascular system than muscle, which is fed by larger blood vessels; or that sleep apnea is caused by fat surrounding the windpipe and interrupting breathing when one relaxes in sleep.

Newsweek’s article focuses on research being done into the structure and function of the fat cell itself and the mechanics of its relationship to inflammation, which might be more of a causative agent in heart disease than clogged arteries; the secretion of estrogen, which has been associated with cancer; and diabetes.

Sprinkled throughout the article are three sidebar profiles of people who took fairly serious measures to combat their morbid obesity: Gastric-bypass surgery, weight-loss drugs, and gastric pacemaker.

The article concludes with the observation that many drugs and scientific approaches have shown great promise to cure obesity, but one only has to look at our population to see how they’ve worked out so far. Nevertheless, one senses that the quest for the easy answer will continue, and those efforts will be duly reported on and celebrated in the pages of Newsweek.

I had not expected to see a photograph of the folds of a woman’s obese body on the cover of National Geographic, with the words "Why are Americans so FAT?," so I bought it at a newsstand in Bradley Airport while awaiting a flight last month. (One could almost stop with the subtitle inside: "Americans enjoy one of the most luxurious lifestyles on Earth: Our food is plentiful. Our work is automated. Our leisure is effortless. And it’s killing us.")

The article starts off with the story of Linda Hay (no relation, as far as I know) who’s just made the decision to take the drastic, I-give-up step of bariatric surgery (gastric-bypass). Then, being National Georgraphic, it depicts the globe – three of them – color-coded to show obesity rates of a whole lot of countries.
It followed that with an analysis by Dr. Atkins, a rebuttal by Dean Ornish, Atkins’s most visible and vocal critic, and then ticks off a list of possible reasons for the obesity epidemic: huge portions, mindless eating, lack of exercise, and aggressive advertising, along with a description of some bodily functions related to weight gain and loss.

Leptin makes its appearance in National Geographic, and a brief discussion of drug research follows.
It’s a well-written article with plenty of sidebars and charts, probably a bit deeper than Newsweek’s piece, but, then, Newsweek has probably done similar articles in the not-too-distance past, and I would guess that this one is a first for National Geographic, unless it once did something on the Pima Indians.

Nutrition Today, a professional journal, puts forth a convincing analysis of the "problem," that the human race is genetically set up to hold onto calories, to store and use energy efficiently, and now lives in a world of not only plenty, but rich, available, convenient, tasty, large-portioned, and heavily marketed plenty, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle. The American Dream has been given to us through the miracle of technology, which makes our life so easy we don’t have to move much, either for work or for entertainment, and which brings highly-processed food, savory and in huge portions, right to our plate. No surprise that we’re obese.

The article mostly focuses on changing our behavior and approach to life, since it looks as if fast food and remote controls are not going away soon. There are no charts, few pictures, no sidebars, no fascinating human interest stories, and there are 21 references at the end.

Of the three, the Nutrition Today piece is probably the most realistic. We’re stuck with things as they are, nobody is going to ride up on a white steed to save us from this, and if we’re going to slim down, it’s up to us. Nasty news, but probably spot on. And, hey, somebody had to say it, even if it’s in a journal that 99% of the population doesn’t know exists. In all three articles, the advice to eat less and exercise more is mentioned, but in Nutrition Today, it’s what the article is all about.

I should point out that Nutrition Today often has articles relating to obesity, as it probably should, and it even had "Pandemic Obesity" in the Nov/Dec 2003 number, under "Nutrition and Business" and then "Pandemic Obesity" in the Jan/Feb 2004 number, under "Business and Nutrition," both by the same author.

Update on Reseach (second attempt)

2004-09-21T11:14:00.000-04:00

Owing to a couple of freewriting exercises about the topice I have right now, I've summed up my fundamental question to: "What's changed?" Given that there are probably a lot of ways of eating that will prevent obesity, and a lot of ways of eating that promotes it, we have to assume that those ways of eating have been around for a century or so, at the very least. Those things are the reason why obesity is an epidemic in this country. So, what's changed? It's been pretty recent, that's for sure. I'm more inclined now to look at recent phenomena, TV, fast food joints, processing of food beyond belief, remote control, one car per family member. It'll be interesting to see what the "experts" are thinking about this.

Update on research

2004-09-21T11:12:00.000-04:00

Free Blog

2004-09-21T08:46:00.000-04:00

Went to Pennsylvania this past weekend for my wife Susan's college reunion weekend. A number of her college friends have stayed in the town where the college is, so there's always the nucleus of a reunion of sorts anytime she's out there. The rest of them show up for organized (if that could possibly describe anything these people do) gatherings. Two of the women who stayed in the town are married to men they went to the school with and were going out with then. Another of them married a professor. There are lots of kids around, now older, and they have a relationship with each other like cousins in big families.

A number of gatherings ago I came into the picture and became a part of the extended family, except for the fact that I don't share the history they share and often feel out of most of their conversations. Saturday night I bounced from one small group to another, looking for something in the conversation that would hook me, but it never really worked. I wound up mostly talking to one or two of the other extended family, though there were very few of them.

At the school there are organized activities surrounding Alumni Weekend, but this group doesn't really participate in any of them, save the football game, which they wander into late in the second quarter, as a rule. They're never in time for the class picture. One year they prevailed on the photographer and classmates to reshoot it; this year it didn't work. With amazingly ferocious weather the day and night before, Saturday turned warm and clear as a bell, so except for a few of the locals having no power, it was perfect. One of the Amoeba (that's what they called themselves in college, since they traveled in a loose pack of women, oozing their way around the campus and town, presumably) lives a biscuit toss from the campus, so there was a pregame gathering, extending well into the first half, a halftime gathering, and a postgame gathering. For some, it was all one gathering, never making it over to the campus.

I was even less interested in the football game than I was in the old stories and mentions of names I'd never heard of. I'm not keen on football anymore anyway, and a game between two teams I don't follow was even less captivating. There is the spectacle of a full stadium of partisan (both sides) supporters on a crisp autumn afternoon that is appealing, though. But beyond that, the game no longer holds anything for me. As George Will once said -- and it's one of the few things he's ever said I agree with -- "football combines two of America's worst traits: It's violence interrupted by committee meetings." And it's much too specialized, even at a Division III college level, evidence of which was in the enormous number of players on the sideline. I counted 93 players there, fully suited up and ready to go in. That, I realized later, didn't include the 11 already on the field. What are all these guys doing? Do they all expect to play? Does the coach know them all by name? About 5% of the college population is on the football team.

In baseball each and every player is expected to be able to run, catch, throw, and hit. In football there are short-yardage linemen; there might not even be a situation that calls for their specialty, perhaps for a couple of games or so. The placekicker doesn't do the punting, for crying out loud, and vice versa.

But I will say that when we went over three minutes before the end, when it was 7-0, we saw three touchdowns, trading back and forth, and the home town team won it, though I thought the other team had every chance in the world of taking it and just kept letting it slip. So everybody in town was happy with the result, and they didn't care how it happened. We certainly saw the only interesting part of the game.

All in all, a fine weekend, especially for Susan. We were talking, on the ride back to pick up our son, about the nature of friendship, and how the connections one makes at those times are intense and long-lasting, probably because they all got to know each other during times when they were vulnerable, they saw it all. These are the people around whom you know you can let your guard down. You're safe with them. There's damn little judging, if any. We all know those relationships. And it seems as one gets older, that quality of relationship, while not unavailable, is very rare. So you have to hang onto the ones you've got.

Peace.

Interest, Questions, KSC Dep'ts

2004-09-16T11:18:00.000-04:00

What interests me is the notion of Diet For Health as opposed to Diet For Weight Loss. This would be a Diet, capital "D," as a way of life, a primary way of eating, and not a diet, small "d," a short-term regime for the purpose of dropping pounds.

The fundamental question is: Why are there more and more diets that have the "answer" to the obesity epidemic in this country, and yet people seem to be gaining weight before our very eyes? It used to be that the trend in obesity could only be seen in 30 or 40-year spans; now the percentages of obese and morbidly obese people in the population changes significantly in less than a decade. If all of these diets -- or any one of them -- had the answer, why are we getting fatter? Maybe none of them knows anything at all. What other factors are contributing to the obesity, such as the convenience of fast food and prepared dishes, the sedentary lifestyle, a decrease in people's relationship to the natural world?

The two KSC departments that jump out are Dietetics and Nutrition.

Research Topics in the Exciting World English Lit

2004-09-16T09:04:00.000-04:00

I interviewed Prof. Mark Long, Chair of the English Department at KSC. Prof. Long said at the start that “research” in the field of English Literature is less data-driven than in the sciences and is “built on other scholarly projects.” He talked about two arenas as examples of research he’s involved in or aware of.

His colleague, Ken Hodges, a medieval literature scholar, is writing a book about Chivalry and its effects on cultural subjects. The book comes out of a question he asked as a freshman taking a seminar on Sir Thomas Malory, "why does King Arthur receive Excalibur twice, once from the Lady of the Lake and once by drawing it from the stone?" As Excalibur is a symbol for Arthurian Chivalry, he questioned why it was not a unified concept, especially as the knights seemed to play by each one's own rules.

Hodges came to see that "Malory's perception of chivalry as a dynamic, multi-formed institution fit into larger historical patterns." His book explores this, as well as "tracing what communities form and how they shape and are shaped by styles of chivalry."

Prof. Long himself is presently finishing up the editing of a book, Teaching North American Environmental Literature, a collection of 30 essays in a new field about how people are teaching literature about environmental matters, from representations of nature to Native American Literature, Mexican and Canadian environmental writing, African American work, Asian influences on the literature, and the way these issues clash with issues of race, gender, and ethnicity.

The impetus for this book came from Prof. Long's attending various academic conferences and starting to ask around, how are people teaching this stuff? The inevitable conversations and networking grew into a book, since nobody else had really addressed it.

Always keeping the context of “research” in the forefront, I asked how one goes about collecting and then deciding what goes into the book and what does not. He said one puts out a Call For Papers, which I suppose is analogous to a Request For Proposal that is the first step in applying for a grant. The Call is put out through places such as the Modern Language Association. Approximately 60 people submitted essays and they were reviewed and about half of them were selected for the collection.

Writing -- What Works and What Doesn't Work

2004-09-14T11:27:00.000-04:00

Without a doubt, the most “dangerous” method of writing for me is when I wait until the last minute. Then there’s no way I can do it justice. Elbow’s suggestion to divide the time you have in half and use the first half to create the block of marble and the second half to chisel away what shouldn’t remain is good in theory. BUT I know, with a short deadline, my part of my mind – a good part, probably – would be going, “I don’t have enough time to create the block of marble,” and then, “I don’t have enough time to revise.” The point is, I should always go back later. There was some French poet who said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. And it’s true; you can always go back and make it better. But for me, what works best is to get on it soon enough to play with it, then revise, the let it marinate for a while, and finally go back to it somewhat cold. And finally, to abandon it. That probably takes more courage than cutting.
For today’s Free Blog (#2), I actually wrote a ramble on religious points of view in political matters and the ongoing, rampant contradictions there, but I decided it wasn’t appropriate. I didn’t delete it, mind you, and it might well reappear, perhaps even as a Letter to the Editor.
For my second go at today’s Free Blog, I came up with a thought, which is actually the title of my Blog, “Rooting For The Hurricane.” I asked the initial sentence (question, actually) to my wife last night, hoping to get a dialogue going that would generate some ideas (“Do you ever find yourself rooting for the hurricane?”), but she didn’t bite (“No,” she said), so I was on my own.
I wrote some random thoughts down, in a reasonably logical order, a new line for each, then I went back to the start, used the first line to start the piece, said what I wanted to say, went to the second thought and fleshed that out, and so on. Each thought becomes the start of its own paragraph. It’s the way I used to write a lot of my Op-Ed pieces. When you get done with a thought, there's a prompt there to get you into the next one.
When I got done, I reread it, and then revised. It’s in the “dangerous” realm of which Elbow speaks in that it is fairly finished on first draft.
My worst writer’s block was when I was at Columbia. I’d have a goddamned Columbia degree if I had just written the papers! It got so I didn’t even try to start any of them. And I’ve always had a lot to say. I’ll talk about stuff until the cows come home. The block probably lasted until the NYU Summer Writers Conference a decade later, and it pretty much disappeared when I was writing the column. It was basically taking all that I have to say about something and putting it down on paper. Then revising. (It would be good to be able to revise before you actually speak, huh?)
For ideas for the column, I followed Russell Baker’s explanation of how he wrote such engaging and witty columns. He said he read the papers every day until he read something he didn’t understand, and then he would explain it to everybody. It worked for me.
I’ve never done a formal research paper, at least I don’t think I have. The more I read in The Craft of Research, the more I don’t think I have any idea what it’s about. The notion of researching something and writing about it makes sense. But what they’re saying in the book, in the strongly academic context they’re talking about, mystifies me. I hope this clears up before we get into our research papers.

Rooting For The Hurricane - Free Blog #2

2004-09-14T07:26:00.000-04:00

Ever find yourself rooting for the hurricane? As Ivan built up speed and approached the Islands and Florida and the Caribbean, I found myself hoping for a Category 5. It’s not that I enjoy hearing about the destruction of people’s homes and businesses, though the image of a high wind furiously tearing apart some tacky shopping center is satisfying on some level, perhaps the first step in an improved look. Maybe they’ll replace it with something tastier. Right. But there is something exciting about the prospect of a huge storm wreaking havoc on human structures.
Certainly, it’s Mother Nature showing us humans where we stand when She really has a mind to do some work. It’s a sort of truing mechanism, pointing up our insignificance in the grand scheme, the triviality of our work here.
I have a cousin who retired from 20-plus years in the military a while back, and he was in the habit of calling my sister, Kathy, in Pennsylvania, or me – and probably others in our family up north – when we were getting hit with a winter storm. And he would "lord it over on us," as Kathy would say. He was never more glad to be living in the Sunshine State than when we were up to our arses in snow. He visited his brother and others in my home town a few winters ago, and he was never more miserable in his life. After that I told everybody at a Family Reunion that if they wanted Jon to be at their funerals, they should plan on dying during warm weather. After a few of these "lording over" calls, Kathy finally said to him, "Jon, if I wanted to live in Florida, I would. But I wouldn’t live there if you put a gun to my head. It’s not like there’s a bunch of us up here wishing we could live in Florida, but there’s a quota or something. Okay?" He cut back on the calls, at the least the calls to her.
But there is a snootiness (snottiness?) that people who live in those places seem to display, often. They’ve finally wound up in their version of Paradise, and they just have to let you know about that. Thye think that because they want it, everybody else must want it, too. But when a big storm hits them, we see the occasional news shot of somebody living on the beach expressing surprise, or resentment. How could this happen? Very rarely do we see one of them showing that he or she has some perspective on this. A woman from Key West was talking on a snippet of tape on the Weather Channel one or two hurricanes ago, and she said, "Hey, it’s part of the price you pay for living here. Once in a while something like this happens." You go, Girl. She was actually smiling. Maybe she secretly roots for the hurricane, too.
A few years ago, the Andrew storm, I believe, there was an area where every single house lost its roof, except for those built by Habitat For Humanity. It turned out that the Habitat people had used the proper number of nails to hold the roof onto the house, and the "developers" had cut corners, so to speak, and getting by with fewer nails. Of course the people who live in trailers – and I know there’s a Politically Correct term for trailer, but I just can’t come up with it right now – always get it the worst. It’s bad enough that they live there anyway, but those homes just don’t handle high winds very well.
I saw that there’s a town, whose name I had never heard and cannot remember at the moment, which is at the point where Charlie’s and Frances’s paths crossed. It had to be someplace, I guess, but you have to wonder what’s left of that place. Ivan seems to be going for the Panhandle, so the three paths will look like somebody's got a Grand Design For Florida going right now.
Without loss of life, there is still the tragic loss of personal belongings, irreplaceable family treasures, pictures, fragile possessions, but what a great opportunity to let go of "stuff." A whole Zen housecleaning. Do we own our possessions, or so they own us? I imagine most of the people surveying what’s left of their homes, don’t look at it that way, but a Zen school could probably make some important inroads into people’s thinking down there. A hurricane is God’s way of showing us what’s really essential.
Ultimately, I guess what I’m really hoping for is an asskicker of a storm, with no loss of life, and nothing important destroyed. That’s probably not going to happen, but there is one great hope I have for this Hurricane Season: That all the touch-screen voting machines in Florida are rendered useless in the next month and half. There’s still time.

Addendum to Mothers and Peace

2004-09-09T11:26:00.000-04:00

What I left out, in my hurry, was that these websites are a fraction of similar organizations all over the world, the beginning of a groundswell of opposition to war and injustice. What they have in common is a context that no mother raises her child to go off and kill another mother's child. That as long as one child is unsafe or hungry or cold, no mother's child is safe, well-fed, and warm. It echoes the words of Julia Ward Howe's address at the first Mother's Day in 1870. It is valid because it's always been this way. There's a bumper sticker with a quote, attributed to Maggie Kuhn, that says, "Speak you mind, even if your voice shakes." As mothers around the globe become more confident that what they're saying should be heard, as they find each other and realize they aren't the only ones thinking that way, a movement will occur. And it just ain't mothers, folks.
I probably should also have mentioned that I'm a war veteran who's anti-war. I've seen it, and I don't know how anybody who has seen it could think it's a great way to handle differences.
Carina's comments are spot-on. Thank you.

Three Great Sites (and More): Mothers and Peace

2004-09-09T09:09:00.000-04:00

Some background: Since my wife – and her organization, Mothersuniting – is in the midst of planning "A Day of Waging Peace," an all-day conference at the Student Center, October 5th, with a dozen or so workshops, Holly Near delivering the keynote address and a concert that evening, and even Granny D herself, it’s natural for me to be thinking of mothers and peace.
The first good one I found is Mothers For Peace (http://www.mothersforpeace.org). Founded in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1969, out of a single letter to the editor about the senseless loss of life in the Vietnam War, its commitment is to "peace, social justice, and a safe environment." Locally, the organization’s current focus is on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.
Code Pink (http://www.codepink.org) is a site with a big purpose and a sense of humor. Its stated purpose is "a woman initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement (see a pattern here?) that seeks positive social change through proactive, creative protest and non-violent direct action. There are chapters all over the world, with their own web sites. A Google search for "Code Pink" brings up a lot of them. Yes, they wear pink, and they’re visible.
Mothers Acting Up (http://www.mothersactingup.org) is "dedicated to mobilizing the gigantic political strength of mothers to ensure the health, education and safety of every child, not just a privileged few. We realize that we live in a world that does not prioritize or protect our children’s well-being and that this will not change without each of us finding the courage and commitment to speak out of their behalf." On the home page, there are five photos, including one of Granny D and one of my wife and son, which I didn’t know about until I started exploring. These are the bad girls of mothers and peace activities, as the name of the organization spells out.
"Let us whisper this to each other, sing it out in the streets, yell it from our rooftops, declare it in our houses of government: we will protect our children with our personal and political strength, wherever they live on earth!"

MothersUniting, the local peace group presenting the conference mentioned above, has a brand new website, and I would be greatly remiss were I not to cite it here, a bonus site, as it were. www.mothersuniting.org

Warmongers, be warned.

Sharing What I've Written

2004-09-06T17:45:00.000-04:00

The notion of sharing what I've written by posting it on a blog connotes living in a gated community, cocooning, hiding out. There's something antiseptic about it, too detached.
I've been in writing classes and part of writing groups (a long time ago) where participants would take turns reading what they had written since the last time the group had met and get feedback. There was something warm and personal about it, not like this, putting it out into the ether and getting responses without seeing faces attached. On the other hand, one can "listen" to another's writing at one's leisure, say, at 2:00 a.m., or while getting ready for the day the next morning. One can "fit it in." Sharing my writing is really what I want to do with it, after all.
Reading Peter Elbow's chapter about sharing made me realize that it doesn't really matter how I share it, just that it gets shared. Feedback is good, of course; we all like to see our writing well-received, and gentle, constructive criticism is useful at all points in the life of a written piece. Walter Miller, who led a writer's group in NYC, was always so validating, no matter what the piece sounded like. He acknowledged the effort, if nothing else, and a good start. I never had the experience of a vicious writer's group, where you'd work on something, bring it in and read it, get torn to shreads (both you and the piece), smile weakly, and go back home to try again, wondering if you really got anything out of it. Elbow doesn't even seem to recommend any feedback at all, no matter how gentle, though I wonder how that's possible, a response without comment. I'll be interested to see how that works, if it does.
One wants to see the effect of his or her writing, how it lands, and without any feedback at all, I wonder how that can happen.

Welcome

2004-09-02T10:45:00.000-04:00

Whether or not this will continue beyond the semester is still up in the air. But I imagine fairly frequent use of this format for three months could well become a habit. Time will tell. I usually have a lot to say about things, so if I find there are readers out there, it'll probably continue. At least my spelling and grammar are reasonably good enough that sloppiness and poor spelling will not drive people away. Peace, Doctor Bop