The Best and the Brightest (According to the Sunday New York Times Styles Section)

Synchronicity! On the very day I sat down to start writing about all the beautiful people announcing their marriages in the Sunday New York Times Styles Section I happened to read the Opinion Section where the Public Editor addressed a question from a reader that was the very same question I wanted to ask: “How do editors select which announcements to publish, and why don’t editors make a sustained effort to include different types of couples?”

OK, I only wanted to ask the first part of this question about how editors select which announcements to publish because I know better than to ask why they don’t make an effort to include other kinds of couples besides lawyers who graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and now work for Wall Street investment firms or doctors who are doing their residency at the University of Pennsylvania in gastroenterology. In the intense competition among all these power couples who want their announcements to appear in the NYT Styles Section I figured it’s the beauties over the uglies, the Harvards and Yales over the Oberlins, and the Greenwich parents over Newark who get the nod.

But lo and behold, according to the Public Editor, the criterion is none of these: it’s achievement. “The only truly fair way to select one submission over another is on the basis of achievement.” Nietzsche lives! (You have to excuse me, I’m still reading his Philosophical Biography). The elite are defined by their will to power, especially those who manage to make their way out of the herd and end up at the “top of their medical school class at Yale or Stanford,” as the Public Editor explained it.

So I decided to submit a marriage for publication that might give the Weddings /Celebrations editors pause, at least in terms of their definition of achievement, and might give the rest of us out here in the herd someone we can identify with.

“On March 20, at the lovely farm of the groom’s family in upstate New York (I guess one of the criteria for publication is that the couple has some connection to New York, but I’m really talking about anywhere in rural America) so and so and so and so married themselves with their extended family members, their intimate comrades in arms, their three dogs, two cats, and tank of tropical fish in attendance (the cattle, horse, and chickens were confined to the field). They both will retain their own names even though they are their father’s names but it’s too late to do anything about that and anyway, everybody has always known them by those names.

So and so’s parents own the local grocery store where they have kept accounts for as long as twenty years for the down and out folks in the community who live month to month on their social security or disability checks. The other so and so’s parents drove in from New Mexico where they work as farriers and create magnificent iron sculptures on the side.

The happy couple has a long employment history that includes waitressing at a swank restaurant in the neighboring town, working for the Forest Service as seasonal patrols telling people to put out their campfires during times of drought, substitute teaching in the local high school while reporting on sports for the local newspaper, writing articles for various other local newspapers about whatever they can come up with on a day’s notice, canvassing for the Service Worker’s Union, growing great garlic that they sell to the local food stores, working construction on all their neighbors’ houses so their neighbors will work construction on their house, and most recently, and thanklessly, as members of the school board even though they don’t have any kids yet and might not because as anyone with a brain can see things are getting worse, not better.

They love to tell the story of how they met. One day so and so went over to a friend’s house down the road for a visit with her/his dogs and the other so and so was also there visiting and had to run into the house when the first so and so’s dogs started barking at him/her, which kinda pissed him/her off, but he/she also kinda liked the first so and so and thought she/he had an especially nice butt. He/she started dropping by the first so and so’s house around breakfast time but she/he rarely invited him/her to eat, so they didn’t make much progress. Then he/she got up his/her gumption, however, and invited the first so and so on a real date: they went to the State Fair. But then when they got back to the first so and so’s house, where the second so and so had high hopes for a kiss, they got into an argument on the nature of inspiration and the first so and so kicked the second so and so out of her/his house. But the second so and so was tenacious, and when the first so and so started working in the fire lookout for the summer he/she went up to visit and those Desolation Peak fantasies were too much for both of them and they kissed. The rest is history.

Productivity

“Without productivity, life is worthless and unbearable.” This is Friedrich Nietzsche, who, remember, went completely mad (I’m reading A Philosophical Biography of Friedrich Nietzsche by Julian Young). He did get to live in posterity, both worshipped and maligned, but I wonder how things might have turned out for him if he’d spent a little less time trying to figure out the meaning of life (to be fair, he was also trying to figure out how to have a peaceful and pleasant life).

My partner Mark used to tell me that my “productivity” intimidated him. I’m not sure he meant productivity in the sense of “producing” things, like novels and magazine articles or gourmet dinners and cherry pies, but my “busyness.” Because here’s the thing. Even though I’ve almost always worked at home, setting my own schedule and creating my own agenda, I’ve also had a rule that during the day I do not sit down and read a book. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t read things during the day like information related to whatever article I’m writing, Environmental Impact Statements for whatever issue I’m dissecting, other people’s books that I’m editing, etc. But reading a novel, biography, or philosophical treatise is reserved for in the mornings with my coffee and after dinner until bed. I manage to get a lot of books read in those hours, but what in the world makes me think that there is something wrong with sometimes sitting down during the day and reading a book?

I don’t have weekends for reading books, either. Because of my self-employment I don’t really have Saturday and Sunday off. I take days off here and there, to go for a hike or ski or go to town for a movie or lunch, but there’s no designated day for lying around the house reading or watching TV, heaven forbid. Does it mean that I think life is worthless without productivity? Sort of. If productivity means using your individual talents to the best of your ability to create something that is uniquely yours or contributes to the common good or taxes your brain and body, then I’m definitely a fan of productivity. Again, according to Nietzsche: the well being of society is better promoted by everyone pursuing her own “highest good,” or becoming an “enlightened egoist.” If productivity means feeling that you have to constantly be doing something to prove your worth, then I think you’ve got a problem. Or I’ve got a problem.

This has become more obvious to me as I’ve gotten older. It’s a byproduct of having to look back instead of forward and make certain assessments about the outcome of your productivity. If an assessment of the outcome makes you say, “I never really did the things I wanted to do” or “I was never able to effect the changes I wanted” or “what I produced is a pile of shit,” then you better adopt the postmodern position immediately that all things are relative and there is no ultimate achievement or progress. That way your life can’t have been meaningless because there’s no such thing. You need to watch Casablanca again and listen to Rick when he tells Captain Renault, “Our lives don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

It was easier to live with that kind of attitude when I was younger. I have a kind of plodding personality that once I decide upon a course of action, say that of my organizing work that led to La Jicarita News, the radical rag I’ve written and edited with Mark for 15 years, I stay the course no matter how many battles we lose, no matter how many allies fall by the wayside, no matter how many nasty letters and e-mails and phones calls we get from the opposition. And there’s been plenty of that. But somehow I always manage to see as what I do is in my “self-interest” to further the “common good”

But now, as I face the fact that I’m going to retire La Jicarita News because of health issues and the fact that my energy has flagged with age, I can’t keep those nagging assessments out of my head. While I doubt that I would have ever made the choice to be a “professional” so that right about now I’d be looking at a well deserved retirement along with the rest of my baby boom cohort, I could have made other choices: committing much more time to creative writing and publishing, learning how to play the piano really well, traveling much more often to Latin America and speaking fluent Spanish (a more peaceful and pleasant life),

But I do appreciate the small changes I did effect, even if they only amount to changing someone’s life by knowing me or sharing in the work we did. And I don’t think I produced a pile of shit. I could have spent more time perfecting what I produced and been more confident about it, but I guess I had no burning desire to “prove” my self worth and leave something to posterity. So I guess I’ll muddle through this new phase in my life with the same mulish behavior that got me here, for better or worse. And maybe, just maybe, I can finish the Nietzsche biography and start that John Berger book in the middle of the day lying on the couch. Oh, what possibilities.

Baby Boom Regret

What follows is based on anecdotal, not empirical, evidence, at least the part about my baby boom cohort. But by the time I’m done you may want to eschew empiricism with the same abandonment we eschewed feudalism, monarchy, republicanism, and social democracy (at least those of us who think The Nation is wimpy).

My partner Mark is 62 and has pancreatic cancer. Our friend Richard is in his early sixties and had surgery for prostate cancer. Our friend Alan, who is in his fifties, lost a kidney to cancer. Gilbert, our neighbor, who in his sixties and a former Los Alamos National Laboratory subcontractor, also had kidney cancer. My friend Emma’s sister, who is fifty, has colon cancer. I am 60 and have an autoimmune condition called CREST syndrome. My brother-in-law has suffered from psoriatic rheumatism, another autoimmune disease, since his fifties. My sister was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in her late forties. The local postmistress, in her fifties, has lupus.

The list goes on and on, but what stands out about it are the predominant ages: fifties and sixties. Cancer and autoimmune diseases have been around for a long time, of course. But the frequency of their occurrence in my generation, the baby boomers, seems to me to indicate a causal relationship. Our post-World War II generation was largely bottle-fed, as the formula industry, in concert with the gynecological industry, convinced mothers (and fathers) that breast feeding was unnecessary. So our first line of defense—mother’s milk—was compromised right out of the womb (and now we know cancer causing chemicals leach from the plastic used in bottles). The formula industry, of course, was just part of the food industry in general, which proceeded to package our food for mass consumption by adding artificial colors, preservatives, and flavors made with cancer causing chemicals. The farms that produced the food also became highly industrialized as well, and the cancer causing pesticides and herbicides necessary to support that industrialization entered the food chain in massive doses.

This has all been documented in books like Silent Spring, Fast Food Nation, and Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I won’t belabor the point. Combined with an exponential increase in air pollutants, as urban areas became clogged with cars and the entire country was contaminated by energy and manufacturing development, baby boomers were clobbered from all sides. I’m afraid the environmental safeguards that were promulgated in the 1970s with the passage of government regulatory laws (the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.) were too little, too late.

So what we’ve been exposed to by scientific (chemical), medical (gynecologists), and industrial (power plants) development, all in the name of progress, seems to be killing us. Whereas previously we died in massive numbers because of the lack of scientific discoveries like penicillin and medical inventions like angioplasties, now we’re dying in massive numbers (when you count the number of people who are dying not just from cancer and autoimmune diseases but industrial pollution and accidents, the number is massive) because of technological poisons. I can’t take the long view on this, that every generation has suffered its particular burdens, because this is my generation Most of our parents lived into their seventies and eighties (never exercising, drinking martinis). Many of us will not. That may not be such a bad thing, when I see the individual suffering of those kept alive by medical intervention and the burden that places on society as a whole. But we’re suffering, too, both physically and emotionally. We’ll probably be the butt of many jokes regarding our slogan—“Don’t trust anyone over 30” — and our delusions of immortality, but despite our excesses and self-indulgence, we developed a conscience and decided as adults to breast feed our babies, grow organic food, and riot for revolution. We were too preoccupied being active, political, and creative to see this coming.

My Summer Job

I was listening to NPR the other day and there were these people describing what their summer jobs, oh so many years ago, meant to them in terms of life lessons. It seems that NPR is running a series on summer jobs and soliciting stories from all of us nobodies out in radioland. But rather than go through that process—I already know what it takes to get on NPR’s Click and Clack show, which my son did with his story about the time we were driving down from Mount Lassen and he decided to toot his horn at the slowpoke ahead of us . . . but that’s another story—I’m going to post my story here, where I don’t have to audition.

I learned to swim at the local YMCA and by the time I was 16 had my Red Cross Life Saving and Water Safety Instructor credentials under my belt. So now that I could also be legally employed, there was no question that I would try for life guarding at a pool; no bussing, waitressing, or housecleaning for me. I don’t remember how I got the job, but it was a lifeguard’s dream: a motel swimming pool in Manitou, the resort community “nestled at the foot of Pikes Peak,” where hardly anyone ever swam. The motel was owned by an older couple, who I’ll call Harvey and Helen Oakley, probably the only motel owners in town who provided a lifeguard for their guests. The motel had been in the family for a couple of generations, and apparently Harvey’s mother had run it in grand style, with evening barbecues and weekend square dances for the Midwest clientele that came back every year to enjoy the Rocky Mountains. After Harvey and Helen inherited the place, though, tourists seemed to prefer the newer motels with hot tub jacuzzies, and their old fashioned lodge, with no attendant restaurant or fancy features, was losing business.

But this meant nothing to me, at least at first, because all I had to do was show up in my bathing suit and sit out in the sun waiting for the occasional guest to take a dip. Helen never emerged from inside the motel where she smoked Camels and kept the books, but Harvey would come out periodically to check on me, apologize that there wasn’t much for me to do, I must be bored, and bring me sandwiches from the restaurant across the street.

Then Edward showed up. Edward was Harvey and Helen’s 14-year old son and was truly weird. He had pale, peaches and cream skin and jet-black hair that fell across his forehead and over his ears. He dressed only in black: black pants, black turtleneck, black fedora. I learned later that several of his bedroom walls were also painted black, while the remaining ones were covered with posters of Bela Logosi and Lon Chaney. At first Edward wouldn’t talk to me, he’d just come out and walk around the pool and look at me and act really annoyed if one of my friends was there hanging around with me. That was another perk that Harvey provided; permission to have my friends come swimming while I was on duty. I was just getting involved with one of the jet setters, what we called the older boys in high school who were the first to smoke dope and drop acid, and I was beside myself with nervousness when he began to show up at the pool to smoke cigarettes with me and laze around in the water. One day while he was there Edward showed up and jumped into the pool with all his clothes on; Harvey had to come out and apologize for his behavior, finally convincing him to get out of the water with the promise of a new guitar.

I was a kind person, even back then at the mixed-up age of 16, and I quickly befriended Edward, as I knew he desperately needed one. He used to show up at noon, after staying up late playing guitar or watching old horror movies, and Harvey would come out, lock up the pool, and send us across the street for lunch, which he paid for. Then Edward and I would play gin rummy all afternoon around the pool, waiting for guests. I finally persuaded Edward to swim without his clothes on (with trunks and a T-shirt) and I helped him practice his strokes. He’d still get pissed off when my boyfriend showed up on his way to work—he watered one of the local golf courses in the evening after everyone had left and would often take me for rides on the golf carts racing through the sprinklers—but resigned himself to going inside and bothering his parents until the boyfriend left. Then, unless I had to be home early or was going on a date, Edward and I would head back across the street to dinner.

This scenario played itself out over the course of two summers. For the second summer I got Harvey to hire all my girlfriends as maids. But also during that second summer Helen became ill and died of lung cancer. Everything quickly fell to pieces. After the funeral, Harvey took the night shift so he could drink without anyone knowing. Edward spent more and more time locked in his room with his stereo blaring, adrift at a tender age when he especially needed loving, involved parents. At the end of the summer Harvey sold the motel to a couple from Texas, who promptly fired me, having no intention of providing a lifeguard. They kept me on only long enough to teach them how to backwash the filter system, which I did every morning before opening the pool. Then, in a moment of contrition, they hired me as a maid. That lasted about a week, until one day I apparently put a bedspread on sideways, and between the time I left for the afternoon and drove home they called my mother and told her I was fired. When she told me, I immediately got back in the car, drove back to the motel, and told the Texans that if they were going to fire me they better do it to my face, which they did.
So did I learn a life lesson from this? As I said in my blog post called “Self Image,” maybe this experience helped me learn to “do what I want, say what I want, and expect results.” While I didn’t get the result of getting my job back (who wanted to be a maid anyway), I did get the satisfaction of telling someone what’s what, and knowing how to do that, my friends, is indeed worth learning.

Funky Soul

If you don’t start dancing or break down in tears when you hear Jimmy Ruffin sing “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” or Ben E. King doing “Stand By Me” (there’s also a heartbreaking video on YouTube of street musicians all over the world singing it) then you ain’t got any funky soul.

I know, this is ageism speaking. Who under 50 (or 60 maybe) knows who Jimmy Ruffin is (remember, this is a white girl speaking, who can never speak for the black community, who I’m sure know Jimmy Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick like they know their abc’s)? Their loss, I would say. They would say, in the person of my 29-year old son, what about Rage Against the Machine or Orishas? I happen to love Orishas—a great hip hop band from Cuba—but the rhythm and blues we grew up with came from a different place and time and evokes a different response.

When I was in fifth and sixth grade I watched American Bandstand on TV every day after school. My mother was at work, and this was my time to see the whole weird mix of acts Dick Clark brought to the stage: Stevie Wonder, Lovin’ Spoonful, Rascals, Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Beach Boys, and Marvin Gaye. When the show was broadcast from Philadelphia, the teenagers who came to dance were all Italian kids with names like Carman, Dominick, Michael, and Loretta. I could tell by who was dancing with whom whether they were still going steady, whether they had just broken up, and whether there was any hope that they would get back together.

When I was a teenager, the music I listened to, locked in my room doing homework or lying on my bed daydreaming, came from the KOMA airwaves all the way from Oklahoma City (I was in Colorado Springs, remember). For some reason K-O-M-A had this powerful frequency that broadcast Motown, Philly soul, Memphis soul, the British invasion, and bubblegum pop all over the Rocky Mountain West to the bedrooms of fourteen- and fifteen-year olds like me, dependent on the radio to know what was going on musically. I was just starting to buy 45s, but albums were still too expensive for my measly weekly allowance. When I got my first job at sixteen—lifeguard at a motel swimming pool in Manitou Springs at $1.10 an hour— I still couldn’t afford many LPs.

But I did get to see a lot of groups at the Colorado Springs City Auditorium, like the Rascals (called the Young Rascals back then), the Beau Brummels (remember “Laugh Laugh”?), Spanky and Our Gang, and even Eric Burden and the Animals. I never wondered at the time how come these groups came to little old Colorado Springs, Colorado, for some unheard of cheap ticket price, but in retrospect I assume they played the big venues in Denver and drove the sixty miles down to the Springs for a little extra cash before flying out to Phoenix or Salt Lake City.

I was fourteen when the Beatles came to New York and played on the Ed Sullivan Show. The radio had been playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” but I was unprepared for the thrill I felt when I saw them bouncing their heads and tapping their feet to the screams of the fourteen-year olds who were actually in the TV audience. Their musical debt to rhythm and blues was evident in this visceral response. My father always ate dinner on Sunday night on a TV tray in front of Ed Sullivan, but this time we were all there: my mother, my two sisters, and me. And when he said, “They’ll never last,” I knew he was utterly, and irrevocably, wrong because anyone who could touch my soul the way they did, the way Marvin Gaye did singing “Sexual Healing,” the way the Shirelles did singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions singing “You Must Believe Me,” Aretha Franklin singing “Prove It,” and Jimmy Ruffin singing “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” would last forever in the heart and mind of a fourteen-year old going on 60.

Obfuscation

I sat down to read the local paper today and it hit me hard in the head how every story—from the health care bill to Afghanistan to the Mexican drug cartels—was only that, a story made up to obfuscate the issues that lie not so deeply buried beneath the rhetoric and lies. These issues cannot be talked about in public (language is institutionalized) because the house of cards that has been carefully crafted to keep the powers that be in power would crumble like salted crackers into the deep wounds they have inflicted upon our society. Maybe then things would change.
Let’s take a look at today’s stories, one by one: 1) health care “reform”; 2) Hilary Clinton’s meting with Felipe Calderon on stemming the flow of drugs from Mexico to the U.S.; 3) sex abuse in the Catholic church; and 4) the war in Afghanistan.

Health Care Reform
There can be no equitable health care reform until it is taken out of the hands of for profit insurance companies. During the long and excruciating “debate” on fixing the health care mess in this country a few people talked about health care as a “right,” not a privilege, like education, police and fire protection, and social security. Well duh, who pays for those rights. Society does, that’s who, through taxation for teachers, cops, firemen, and so the elderly don’t starve—just barely. In Canada, where they have nationalized health care, the cost is 10 percent of the gross domestic product. In the United States, where insurance companies cover only those who they think are healthy enough to not rack up too many hospital bills—by denying coverage for preexisting conditions—we pay 16 to 18 percent of GDP towards health care. That’s for all those folks who don’t have insurance and end up in public financed emergency rooms and hospitals, all the enormous bureaucracy that goes along with all the complicated billing, denials, referrals, and appeals that should be covered by a single payer, We the people. That’s what a society is and does: it levels the playing field by helping those who need it and by regulating those who don’t.

War on Drugs
The war on drugs was lost before it ever began. As long as drugs are illegal there will be an underground market that will stop at nothing to keep the flow of money across la frontera de los Estados Unidos y Mexico. Yes, while the drugs flow north, the dinero flows both ways: to Mexican drug lords and their hordes of couriers and into the country’s economy (the second largest money maker next to oil); and to the U.S. border guards, DEA agents, prisons, and Homeland Security. The illegal drug industry is big business over here, too. When NAFTA was implemented during Bill Clinton’s reign, making the price of tortillas sky rocket as Mexico had to import subsidized corn the U.S. was selling, destroying the local agricultural economy, how was anyone in Mexico supposed to make a living other than selling drugs or leaving for the U.S.? Hillary recently admitted that the U.S. does bear some of the responsibility for the violent deaths of thousands of Mexicans caught in the drug war crossfire because of U.S. drug consumption. When she puts up a sign in her office that says, “It’s the Mexican economy, stupid,” we may actually get somewhere.

Pedophile Priests
I can’t really talk about this one without devolving into a diatribe about the evils of organized religion (which I’ve already posted on this blog), but in an attempt to be more specific and to the point I will state the obvious: the Catholic church could go a long way towards reducing priestly pedophilia by allowing them to marry, by recognizing women priests, and forcing priests to be prosecuted for child molestation in civil courts. Let the priests marry and at least have a chance at gratifying their libidos, even if marriage itself isn’t going to entirely solve the problem of sex and/or relationships (see Marriage). And, of course, marrying a woman isn’t going to do much for the priests who prefer men (can you imagine the day the Church ever let men marry men??!!), but maybe the latent pedophiles who currently fill the priestly ranks wouldn’t be so attracted to the profession. Maybe they would be less inclined to preach their homophobia from the pulpit as a distraction from their deceit. It’s hard for me to understand why so many women want to become priests, and why they think they can deconstruct church hierarchy without abandoning the church altogether. If it’s faith and observance they’re after, why can’t they do it outside the confines of a church that has abused and ignored them since it’s inception? But you have to admire their persistence and their desire to bring down the priests who have done so much harm to so many.

The War in Afghanistan
I thought we’d already won the war in Afghanistan. Isn’t that what the neo-cons told us when they said it was time to invade Iraq? The Taliban were on the run, the Afghanis had elected a great guy who would do the U.S. bidding, and the women there could walk around town without covering their heads.Of course, a few of us on the left were not in favor of that first war in Afghanistan, either, including Susan Sontag who caught all kinds of shit in the pages of the New Yorker, and Professor Ward Churchill, who lost his job, for daring to point out that maybe we should first look at the political and economic reasons for jihad against the U.S. before we started bombing Afghanistan back into the stone age. Of course, western society thinks Afghanistan never left the stone age. So now, after more than seven years of occupation in Iraq Obama decides its time to send “our good men and women” back into Afghanistan, in greater number, because surprise, the Taliban is back (seemingly the only ones capable of providing goods and services to the poor villages in the hinterland), President Karzai is more corrupt than ever and an anathema to his people, and women are still be abused and repressed and kept out of mainstream society. I guess because we’re a postmodern society we can’t factor Afghanistan’s long and unfortunate history into any decision making process where it’s recognized that imperialist countries are never going to “save” or “liberate” it. But that’s not really the goal, is it. This poor, volatile, and oppressed country is necessary to our geopolitical goals in the Middle East (see Globalism) and that trumps everything.
So the obfuscation keeps getting written and the wars on drugs and people keep being waged.

Solution? Just what I quoted Rick Lowry saying in my “Global Dominance” post: “ . . . the embrace of the U.N., the ridiculous talk of global disarmament, the distance from Israel, the slaps at American hegemony.” Thanks, Rick, for putting it so nicely.

Marginalization

I’ve acknowledged before that living in El Valle involves both privilege and deprivation. The privilege is the fact that we’re not dependent on wage labor, i.e., a nine to five job in a designated location, and can therefore live where we want, in a relatively isolated community that is beautiful, friendly, and restorative. The deprivation comes from living on a very limited income, where we don’t enjoy the luxuries most middle class folks take for granted—that is, until the economy tanked again and lots of middle class folks have lost their jobs, their new cars (I’ve never owned a new car), and even their houses. So while I wouldn’t wish any of this on anyone, except the bankers, Wall Street traders, and complicit politicians who brought us to this point (that comes to a lot of exceptions), the trade off has definitely paid off.

But as the years go by, the privileged part of getting to live someplace out of the way is being assaulted by a world that, in its march toward collective consumerism (cities) and globalization (see Global Domination), apparently would like nothing better than to marginalize us out of existence. As the “home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time—space compression (David Harvey)”, it seems we spend way too much time on the phone trying to tell a computer that there really is a little village in northern New Mexico where you can send a package to our mailbox or door. We have this rural mailing address that says Box 6 El Valle Route, Chamisal (where the post office is located), New Mexico. This address gets rejected by computers that recognize only addresses that have numbers and streets or P.O. Box numbers. So we tell the computer — or very rarely, a person — that it’s OK, just let the computer change our address to P.O. Box 6, because as long as the name of the town, Chamisal, is in the address, the postmistress, who knows who everybody is, will make sure it gets delivered by the highway contract mailman to that green mailbox number 6 sitting at the head of our driveway.

Even she can’t compensate for some confusion, however. We were once given a subscription to the Sunday New York Times by a friend. After finally verifying that we did indeed exist, we got our first issue on the Monday after the Sunday it came out. We were ecstatic. The next Monday, there it was again in the mailbox. The next Monday there was no paper, and it didn’t come Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, either. But there it was on Monday morning, along with the new issue that actually came the day it was supposed to. From then on, on Mondays we either had no paper, or two papers, but I guess the Book Review and Arts and Entertainment section are never really dated for us, as we have to wait for new books to get to the library anyway (and take our turn on the request list, usually about thirty spots down) and we don’t often get to New York to go to the jazz clubs (I think the last time was around 1995).

United Parcel Service is another story. The main artery for northern New Mexico deliveries is in Santa Fe. There used to be a branch center in Española, the town of any size closest to us, and the man who made the deliveries to all of our little villages picked up his truck there. He, like the postmistress, knew everyone on his route. It didn’t matter how mangled the address was, even as UPS tightened up its requirements on rural addressing, if the name was on the package, Wilfredo got it to the right house. Alas, Wilfredo eventually retired. I think it took us a year to figure out what the current UPS regulations required for shipping, but once we got it right it didn’t mean we got our packages on the stipulated delivery day. The package may get sent out from Santa Fe, but if there’s no other delivery in El Valle that day, the driver doesn’t want to drop by. If it’s been raining or snowing, which is usually the case nine months out of the year, and our well maintained dirt road is wet, the driver may decide not to stop by. If we finally get the phone number of UPS in Santa Fe (they only list a central 800 number in the phone book, where you end up talking to someone in India) and tell them to just keep the package there until we come in to get it, they send it out anyway and the driver doesn’t deliver it because we’re not home, we’re in Santa Fe getting the package that isn’t there.

But I have no right to complain, really, because if I have these expectations that means I should move to town where the rest of the folks in the industrialized world conduct business, buy things, and communicate with people around the world without worry or complaint. Except for when the U.S. Postal Service deconstructs, which it did a couple of years ago, and everyone in Santa Fe started getting everyone else's mail, getting mail two months after it was sent, or not getting any mail at all, and went ballistic. The New Mexico congressional delegation had to intervene to demand better service for its constituents. While all this wasn’t as bad as the current meltdown of the entire financial system, it’s another reason I think I’ll just stay here.

White Men in Suits

I sat in a room all day yesterday with white men in suits, and I’ll tell you, I can’t take it anymore. On my way home in the car I rolled down the windows, turned Aretha on full blast, and stopped for an Oreo ice cream bar to cleanse my soul and restore my sanity, or what’s left of it.

My poor compañera, the director of the anti-nuclear community group whose board I sit on, had to be in the same room with these white men in suits for two weeks straight while they bickered over the hazardous waste permit the state will be issuing to Los Alamos National Laboratory. How has it come to this, that these white men in suits can tell us it’s OK to burn chemical waste in the open air to rain down into our soil and water? How can they deny their fiduciary responsibility to clean up the mess they’ve made making bombs? How can they insist that their monitoring wells that have numerous structural problems can adequately tell if our aquifers are being contaminated?
Of course, I’ve also sat in many rooms with white guys in green uniforms telling me it’s OK to use herbicides on noxious weeds in the forest, that acequias need to get special permission from them—our friend the Forest Service—to work on our headgates or diversion dams even though the acequias predate them, and that ski area expansion are good because they provide jobs.

These white guys in suits and green uniforms are the professionals. Just because they’ve built enough bombs over the past 55 years to blow up the world a thousand times over and clearcut enough forests and suppressed so many forest fires that we now live in a tinder box waiting for catastrophic fire to burn us to smithereens doesn’t mean we have the right to question their authority or judgment. I can see it in the paternalistic roll of their eyes when we (brown people, women, white men in jeans) sit across the table from them, meaning, oh Christ, here we go again, what a waste of time this is when we know we’re going to go ahead as planned. They’re thinking, these people just don’t get it, they don’t live in the real world, while we’re thinking, these guys have created a world no one in their right mind would want to live in.
It’s a perpetual impasse, of course. It’s nothing new. It’s just the consequences are now so enormous and we all know they’re so enormous that apparently it renders us helpless. That’s not really a fair analysis, but that’s how it seems sometimes. Is our postmodern world so fragmented, so transient, ambiguous, and fetishized that we can’t figure out how to take unified action because we can’t figure out who the enemy is? Capitalism? Consumerism? Neo-conservatives? Religious right? (Unrepentant Marxist that I am I think it’s all about capitalism.) Arundhati Roy talks about this dilemma often in her activism—“To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible”—but hopes that we can all take on our individual, localized battles that remain connected to each other despite the power elite’s attempt to identify our common ground as the market place.

Occasionally there are signs of hope. Everyone is down in Bolivia right now at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, where President Evo Morales, who never wears a suit, said to the crowd, “Death to Capitalism!” Of course, some of his own people are concurrently demonstrating in the streets of San Cristóbal against the continued mining of silver by a Japanese corporation, the capitalist signifier of Bolivia’s colonial history, He has a tough row to hoe, figuring out how to nationalize foreign industries to benefit Bolivians while at the same time function in a global economy where capital accumulation continues to define how business is done. But apparently Bolivians have figured out who the enemy is and aren’t afraid to remind their fearless leader when they think he has forgotten. So keep wearing those brightly colored woven shirts and wool sweaters, Señor Morales, to keep our hopes close to your heart.

Self Image

I am completely schizophrenic when it comes to my self-image. I hate having my picture taken because I hate the way I look: long nose, thin mouth, chicken neck and all. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I were just a little better looking I wouldn’t have to worry so much about it and could focus on being a better person (just like Madonna and Angelina Jolie—not!).

Yet at the same time I find myself outraged that anyone would dare judge me on my looks and I plow ahead through the forcefulness of my personality to do what I want, say what I want, and expect results. I rarely let anyone get away with anything against what I think I can effect. If, as society has conditioned us to think, our physical appearance matters as much or more than our character, where does this chutzpa come from? I recently came across this passage in a Joanna Trollope book: “I do not long for beauty, she told herself resolutely in the glass in the hall coat stand, but I do require some significance. I am not in any way ready or prepared to be rubbed out. I do not agree—or submit—to being invisible merely because my outward self, lacking the required drama for contemporary life, gives no indication of what is going on inside.”

My mother always thought I was wonderful and could do no wrong, but my father, who was emotionally crippled, belittled me (and my mother and my two sisters) about my appearance and behavior but bragged about my supposed IQ. He insisted that somehow he’d gotten the results of the IQ tests they’d administered to my sisters and me at school and that they were grand. I knew I wasn’t particularly brainy, just that I had to do well in school to get my ticket out of Colorado Springs into some less provincial world where I’d be a “professional,” whatever that meant. In the meantime, I had to deal with a plain face sometimes broken out with acne that would never land me a spot on the cheerleading squad or a position in school government. Of course, I was always disdainful of these social networks and longed to be one of the jet setters, which is what we called the kids who were just beginning to become the potheads and day trippers of the late sixties and early seventies whom I would join in college.

Was this disdain sour grapes or was I somehow able, from a very young age, to see through the crap and know what to value? My parents helped me along this path by joining the Unitarian Church (she’d been raised an assimilated Jew, he a Methodist, and neither were believers) where LRY (liberal religious youth) turned me on to sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. And I didn’t have to wait too long after high school to see what happened to the cheerleaders and student council members who got married young, divorced young, and stayed, as the Dixie Chicks sing, “in the same zip codes where their parents live” (in other words, banal suburbia).

Of course, not many better things happened to many of the pot smoking, LSD dropping jet setters I emulated. Some over dosed, some ended up in dead end jobs, and some eventually found God. I ended up dropping out of college, never even getting a bachelor’s degree, and never becoming a “professional.”

So what did I become and how did I become so full of it? I became not so much something but an amalgam of some things: a house builder, a gardener, a writer, a partner, a mother, a community activist, a publisher, an acequia commissioner, and a buen vecino in a tiny little village in northern New Mexico. In other words, I learned how to get along with lots of kinds of people, how to sustain relationships, and how to fend for myself. It was an attempt to be whole in the postmodern world increasingly fragmented by specialized work and paying someone else to take care of your necessities. Becoming whole builds assurance, and so I acquired mine. Or at least enough to weather being relatively poor and anonymous except within a small circle of those folks I care about. I’m never going to publish a best selling novel and I’m never going to get a humanitarian award for devoting my life to a cause. But I figured out a way to live with the choices I made, which in and of themselves define my character: kind of schizophrenic, but defiantly so.

Global Domination

The day after I posted my Electoral Politics blog the local newspaper ran a column by conservative pundit Rich Lowry, in which he tells Barack Obama he should be “insulted” by getting the Nobel Peace Prize because it means he agrees with the Nobel Committee that America needs to be put in its place as a member of the world team, not its dominating leader: “The apologies for his country, the embrace of the U.N., the ridiculous talk of global disarmament, the distance from Israel and kid gloves for Iran, the slaps at American hegemony—are all the stuff of shame-faced American weakness and retrenchment, uttered by the most powerful American on the planet.” Another conservative, this time the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that his nomination was proof that “the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control.”

Obama wants this? Never. The “international” and domestic leftists? Yes, yes and yes! It’s hard not to read these guys with a certain amount of incredulity — do they actually believe this stuff they write — until you remember that they rule the world. George II liked to talk about invading Iraq to spread Democracy, with a capital D, to the rest of the impoverished world. Even if pundits actually use words like “hegemony,” they still cop to Bush’s excuse for this global domination: that because we’re a so-called democracy and our standard of living is the highest in the world, it’s our moral obligation to spread this largess and allow capitalism to bring everyone into the twenty-first century.

Hannah Arendt, in Imperialism, explains perfectly the real reason for our push for global domination:

"Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from outside; otherwise it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. , , , [The] ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states."

Globalization is changing the face of imperialism but not its basic function, the spread of capitalist accumulation. In his book, The New Imperialism, David Harvey talks about how imperialism has changed from nationalistic control over foreign territory (Britain in India, France in Algeria, etc.) to an economic imperialism based on production and finance (oil and Wall Street). The success of the U.S. in this new age of imperialism is what Lowry and his ilk are defending, of course. As Harvey explains it, “From the late nineteenth century onwards, the US gradually learned to mask the explicitness of territorial gains and occupations under the mask of a spaceless universalization of its own values, buried within a rhetoric that was ultimately to culminate . . . in what came to be known as ‘globalization.” Therefore, Wall Street/Treasury/IMF, all one thing, can do no wrong in opening up capital globalization, by whatever means necessary, because it is simply spreading our democratic values and standard of living to all those poor countries who resources would just be sitting there without benefit to anyone without our intervention.

What the U.S. failed to anticipate is that if financialization is the key to accumulating more power, as Arendt talks about, and if our internal and external deficits, largely held in Asia, continue to skyrocket, then we may just find our hegemony “slapped upside the head” by China. To come back to Lowry’s complaint, it makes perfect sense for us to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, to threaten to invade Iran, to refuse to reduce our nuclear arsenal, and to arm Israel to the teeth when that may be all we’ve got left: our military prowess, our “exploitative domination,” as Harvey calls it. So in our fight to the finish with China to maintain global domination we’ll just keep sending those soldiers to protect the world from “terrorism” and bring those infidels into the twenty-first century. It’s reminiscent of Marie Antoinette: let our schools continue to fail our students, let our transportation systems crumble, let the global corporations drill for oil on all those offshore shelves, and let the insurance companies make a profit from our ill health. In other words, let civil society be damned as long as those in power can continue to acquire more power.

Solution: Off with their heads!

Dental Insurance, Or the Lack Thereof

Seems like the medical industry would be quite happy for us to revert back to the days when George Washington had wooden teeth and Michael Bakunin didn’t have any. He probably ended up having some kind of teeth — I don’t know what kind — after he lost them from scurvy in the infamous Peter and Paul fortress in St. Petersburg, as he went on to marry a young woman when exiled to Siberia and enjoy a long career as an anarchist after his return to Europe. Hardly anyone’s health insurance policy covers dental, so when you go into the dentist’s office for a simple filling: $300. Need a root canal, which probably won’t work anyway and you’ll end up losing the tooth: $1,500. A tooth implant or bridge? I don’t even know because you lost me back at the $1,500 for the root canal. I just have them pulled and leave a space. So far, those spaces have been at the back of my mouth, but I’m sure the day will come when it’s one of my front teeth and I will be consigned to being either a toothless old hag or bankrupt.

When Mark had an appointment with his urologist, who, by the way, is a very nice man and a very competent doctor, I started wondering why anyone would want to be a urologist. Or a proctologist. Or even a gynecologist who gets to deliver babies as a bonus. But I know why someone wants to be a dentist: money! I recently had fillings put across the top of my three bottom teeth, worn down by wear and tear. No Novocain was administered, I was in the dental chair for half an hour tops, and bingo, I owned $575. A few customers like that every day, even with the office overhead, and you’re taking home a big bundle.

I suppose some of this dentist vitriol also comes from the fact that they hurt you — almost all the time. During one of those great root canal experiences where I ended up losing the tooth anyway, the dentist injected Novocain into a nerve that went all the way up into my cheek and had the entire side of my face tingling for months. Or they’re drilling away and suddenly hit a nerve that wasn’t deadened by the Novocain and you’re Dustin Hoffman being tortured by Lawrence Olivier. And every time they put those rubber blockers into my mouth to isolate teeth for x-rays my gag reflex makes me spit the thing out of my mouth and then they make me do it all over again.

Why isn’t dental care covered by insurance? Do they figure the rich people are just going to pay for it no matter how much it costs out of vanity, and the poor people will, after enormous pain and suffering, go to Juarez for a set of false teeth they can afford? In a time when the advertising industry has everyone convinced that the path to success requires a set of big teeth — remember those big white smiles of Hilary Clinton and Barach Obama plastered across our TV screens for months — we’ve come up with an entire category of haves and have-nots: the ones who can afford to buy the veneers and the rest of us with the crooked, slightly yellow teeth of character. Before advertising I never particularly noticed teeth. Now I see that all my friends are in the same character category as me, and it’s comforting, really. Except that none of us want to be hags.

The Olympics

It’s Olympics time again, the Winter Games in Vancouver, where we’re already experiencing the “heartbreak” of Lindsay Vonn, whose entire life has been building towards this moment when she was expected to win as many gold medals as Michael Phelps did in the Summer Games. The heartbreak being, of course, that she was injured just before the games began, that she failed to win multiple golds, and wiped out completely in several races. The list of injuries that led to this disappointment, however, is just as heartbreaking: uprooting a family, a divorce, and not speaking to her father for the last four years. But hey, if that’s what it takes to produce a
world class athlete, who am I to quibble. As these games come to an end, this post is about the previous Olympics, where there was just as much hype and heartbreak.

I was turned off to competitive sports a long time ago when I was on the YMCA swim team as a pre-adolescent. So when the Olympics roll around every four years I usually don’t bother to watch much, even — or especially — the swimming competition.
During the last summer Olympics, however, it was hard to avoid the hype about Michael Phelps and his quest for eight gold medals, more than anyone has ever won in a single Olympics game. I ended up watching him easily win several freestyle events, then swim the heart-stopping butterfly event where he was behind and won only by one-hundredth of a second, and finally swim for his eighth gold medal in the medley relay event, where he had to depend upon his three other teammates to also swim their best race. Now, at 23, he can sit back and watch the endorsements come rolling in. But what does he do with the rest of his life?

I also watched some of the gymnastic events, mostly the girls’ team competition and a few of the individual events. It’s much more difficult to watch a sport like gymnastics as opposed to swimming: the subjectivity of the judges and the opportunity for costly mistakes make it excruciating for me as a spectator and, I imagine, excruciating for a competitor to have to experience. Several times during the course of the competitions the T.V. cameraman stuck his lens in the face of some poor young woman who had just made some momentary, but irreparable, mistake that cost her a medal in her event. Her tears and anguish were on display for millions of people around the world to witness. It’s just another example of the lack of privacy any public figure must relinquish, but you feel sorry for her, nonetheless. And per usual, there were complaints that the judges unfairly awarded a medal to the host country’s Chinese competitor, despite the major error she committed in one of her individual events.
Of course these athletes, with their flag waving and anthem signing gestures of patriotism, complicity agree to participate in these games that are political games as well. They interviewed Serena and Venus Williams about coming to the Olympics despite having to rush back to the States for the U.S Open, and they delivered the expected paean to patriotism: we’re so happy to be representing our country and participating in one of the most exciting and important events in the world. What else could they say? We’d get accused by the media of being unpatriotic and selfish if we didn’t come to play so we have to do this for our careers? We have to show the Chinese that despite their dominance of gold medals, America is still the most powerful imperialistic country in the world and intends to remain as such no matter what it takes? Neither Serena nor Venus won an individual gold medal (they won in the doubles) but neither did the Chinese. Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers was also there to do his patriotic duty to himself by telling the interviewer that his team was a special team that appreciated the significance of representing your country, doing damage control for previous basketball teams of NBA superstars who were accused of not taking the games seriously enough, and damage control for his own reputation as an accused rapist and renegade.

Then there was Dara Torres, the 41-year old wonder who was participating in her fourth or fifth Olympics (not in consecutive order) who was out to prove that with millions of dollars in endorsements to pay for the state of the art training and attention it took to get her body into shape to beat 20-somethings in the 50 meter freestyle, anyone could be in the Olympics at 41. They showed pictures of trainers walking on her muscles for massage, while others hovered over her weight-lifting routines, and still others directed her Pilates, yoga, and meditation sessions. All for her eleven seconds of fame, where she came in second. She was very gracious and smiled her toothy grin, but you can bet she was devastated.

So back to what you do with your life after the gold or silver. Mark Spitz became a dentist, of all things (see the blog spot Dental Insurance, Or the Lack Thereof). Michael Phelps gets caught smoking a hookah on camera. Some of the ice skaters join the Ice Capades, a few become sports commentators, but most of them join the rest of us in obscurity, where we have to generate our own sense of self worth without the aid of the TV camera. I finally threw out all my swimming medals from when I was a kid when my own children were still kids. Max was appalled, and made me give him several golds to put in his pile of accumulated junk. Now his chess trophies line the top of the dresser in his former room, and when he comes home for xmas/hannukah this year we’re going to make him put them away somewhere so we have more room for our accumulated junk.

A postscript about the Winter Olympics. Because NBC overbid for the rights to broadcast the games and had to make as much money as possible, the frequency of commercials ruined my already lackluster attempts at watching even the interesting sports, like figure skating. After two hours of commercial bombardment during prime time at night, like most baby boomers I was already nodding out by nine, when they showed the skaters in contention for the medals, and asleep by ten (only for a couple of hours, though, as that’s all I get at one stretch these days; if they aired the show at midnight, I might have seen a few triple axels or double salchows, whatever they are). Ah well, it’s finally over, the Canadian hockey team beating the Americans. Amen.

Marriage

I wrote this piece on marriage before Mark was diagnosed with cancer. While it questions the institution, it pays homage to Mark’s tenacity and love, which is what it's all about.


I recently reread Shulamith Firestone’s book, The Dialectic of Sex, and while I reject the cyber solutions she posits, her description of marriage is right on the money:
“A second cultural prop to the outmoded institution is the privatization of the marriage experience: each partner enters marriage convinced that what happened to his parents, what happened to his friends can never happen to him. Though Wrecked Marriage has become a national hobby, a universal obsession—as witnessed by the booming business of guidebooks to marriage and divorce, the women’s magazine industry, an affluent class of marriage counselors and shrinks . . . still one encounters everywhere a defiant ‘We’re different’ brand of optimism in which the one good marriage in the community is habitually cited to prove that it is possible.”

I’m guilty as charged. While I’m not married, per se, I’ve lived with a partner for 33 years and have two children with that partner—Mark. I didn’t exactly rationalize our relationship with the thought that we could do it “better,” at least at the beginning. It was fraught with difficulty from day one, as I had no idea how to live with a man and he’d already spent nine years living with his first wife. Ours was more of a partnership by default (a common theme in my life). We were both living in Placitas at the time, a little village at the north end of the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, when our mutual friends Anne and Charlie decided to move to Arkansas where Charlie could go to Physician’s Assistant school. Mark and I both claimed that they’d told each of us we could move into their cheap little house. He was living in a leaky dome up in Dome Valley and my landlady was moving back into her house and kicking me out. We were having an affair, but it was new and I certainly was not ready for a commitment beyond that. I suggested we move into Anne and Charlie’s house as roommates. Mark would have none of that, so we moved in as lovers and I did a lot of crying those first couple of months, as I learned what it meant to live intimately with a man.

We started out keeping our finances separate. There was never any doubt that I wouldn’t marry him. But we became a couple, partying with all the other couples and families in Placitas, some of whom had previously been members of communes but had eventually drifted into more traditional relationships. The months somehow turned into years. We were both so poor we eventually pooled our resources. And we started building a house together on the land I had bought outside the village before we were together. (I’d borrowed the down payment from my mother and made monthly payments; in those days, land was cheap.) Five years later, we had our first child. Seven years later we had our second one.

Before we had the first one there was talk of extending our family to include a female friend of ours who I had known since college. She was single, she and Mark got along well, she loved New Mexico, and we didn’t want to be a nuclear family. We talked about having two mothers, but I don’t think we talked about our being two wives—at least with her. I always thought it would be a good idea. But we had lots of good ideas in those days and few of them came to fruition. So I ended up in a nuclear family situation, rationalizing like all the rest, that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes our parents made, that our generation was more enlightened and better able to avoid the pitfalls of marriage, particularly with regard to a woman’s position in society. I don’t know why we made those assumptions, as on a daily basis we had to deal with all the cultural issues that had never been resolved, particularly the woman’s issue. I fought like hell to maintain a position of equality and independence, both circumstantially and psychologically. It made for a very combative relationship that ultimately elicited resentment and regret.

But for some reason we stayed together. Inertia? Money (we never made any)? The kids (our older son once told us he’d kill us if we ever broke up)? Fear of being alone (it is a travesty in this world that our two choices are living in nuclear families or living alone)? I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and even discussed it once with a therapist who I went to see when the built-up resentment over the battles I’d had to fight to maintain equality was making me hateful. And I finally figured out what it comes down to is loyalty. I know that Mark, as a white male who grew up in a culture of dominance against which we all have to struggle, has made that his struggle as well, and I know that he has tried, to his best ability, to shed those shackles. I also know that despite his foibles and insecurities he has been incredibly loyal to me and continues to try to make me happy.

So here I am, more than 30 years later, rereading Shulamith Firestone (I’ve searched for information about what ever happened to her after the publication of The Dialectic of Sex and have come up with nothing). My older son has been in a series of monogamous relationships since he was in high school, and is now marrying a lovely and independent woman. My younger son is still in college and to my knowledge has never had a serious relationship with anyone. Both of them at least had a less traditional upbringing than Mark and I did, were less pressured in high school to pair off and become part of a couple, and have been exposed to an array of peers and friends who function quite well outside mainstream society. But they also have the weight of the marketplace on their backs and have less opportunity to slip through the cracks that Mark and I managed to navigate because the cracks aren’t there anymore. I don’t know if either will ever have children, and although Mark and I would be doting grandparents, that may not be such a bad thing. But I fervently hope that they both find some way to live with other men and women who will care about them, be intimate with them, and create a family for them, not necessarily based on marriage between a man and a woman with two kids.

Solution: To recognize and encourage—socially, legally, economically—everyone’s personal choices about how they want to live with other people.

Drug Company Advertising

Even though we have satellite TV, which we got for our younger son and so Mark could follow the NBA, I don’t watch it much, and when I do I am continually astounded by the commercials. Instead of seeing the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet and getting your wash sparkling clean with Tide and Cheer, we can now ingest drugs for erectile dysfunction, arthritis, constipation, osteoporosis, high cholesterol, fibromyalgia, dry eyes, and depression. The commercials all end with a list of potential side effects for each drug —dizziness, weight gain, blindness and heart attack—along with the caveat, “Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you,” but what do we need doctors for? The drug companies have identified the diseases, designed the drugs, and have apparently bought off the doctors who now prescribe the medicine. The patient just needs to tell the doctor, “I saw Viagra advertised on TV and I want some,” and voila, he’s got an erection.

I’m old enough to remember when doctors not only diagnosed and prescribed the drugs, they actually came to your house to do so. When I was in grade school, our doctor in Colorado Springs came to the house when we were too sick to go to his office. Which usually meant we had the chicken pox, measles, mumps, or the flu. Now, of course, they have vaccines for all of these diseases, but in those days all the kids got them and were down for at least a week or two. I remember when I had one of them, and the doctor wanted to give me a shot, I ran out of the bedroom and into the closet in the kitchen that went under the stairs. This was a very deep closet, full of all kinds of things besides clothes, and required a major extraction by my parents, with a lot of kicking and screaming on my part. But the good-natured doctor waited until I quit screaming and still gave me the shot.

Even with the new vaccines there are plenty of diseases out there that need a drug — mainly all our new “lifestyle” diseases — ergo all the drug advertising on TV to all the couch potatoes watching it. Everyone over 60 seems to be on medicine to reduce their high blood pressure and cholesterol. Type II diabetes is epidemic, but weight loss medication will allow you to drop the pounds without ever passing up that piece of strawberry cheesecake or walking farther than the car to the house. Environmentally caused auto immune diseases like fibromyalgia are bringing once active people to their knees with chronic pain and loss of energy. Lyrica, however, will help you do all those things you used to love to do, like watering your plants and going on vacation to Bermuda. Baby boomers are dropping like flies with hip, knee, and even shoulder replacements, after years of pounding their joints by running on pavement or climbing across all those scree fields on their mountain ascents. But Boniva once a month will keep those bones strong and sturdy, and Ativa once a year will keep that “on the go woman” going.

After being bombarded nightly by these unfulfilled promises no wonder everyone is depressed and can’t sleep. But there are plenty of drugs for that, too. No more of those hard core barbiturates, you can take Ambien and Lunesta, which will lull you into a gentle sleep and make you fresh and alert the next day, assuming you don’t have any of the potential side effects like walking in your sleep and falling down the stairs or falling asleep while you’re driving, which a former Santa Fe county commissioner did, claiming Ambien made him crash into that parked car on the side of the street. If you’re depressed you can take Zoloft or Prozac and get rid of all that anxiety and worry about whether you’re going to have to spend the last of your paycheck on a tank of gas or enough groceries to get you through the week. You may even have to cancel your high-speed Internet connection, or god forbid, your satellite TV service that allowed you to find out all about Prozac in the first place.
So we’re all going to live to be 90 as long as we take our daily regimen of 20 or so different medications every morning and night that are probably working against each other to counteract each one’s desired effect, leaving us all demented. But hey, we’re not dead, and apparently that’s all that matters.