Why are all these moms fighting Santa?

Best Buy or some similar store is running a bunch of commercials where a smug, aggro-mom is all about outperforming Santa. She smiles and eats the cookies and drinks the milk reserved for Santa, while a hapless Santa sputters and stammers on about how it looks like there’s not enough room for his gifts.

 

Is this really what mom-dom is about nowadays? Competing against everything, including Santa? It’s kind of abhorrent and probably a confusing message for kids.

 

It led me to think about this recent debate we had in my urban sprawl class, which I enjoyed greatly. The class was divvied up into three teams: one representing the traditional liberal viewpoint, the other representing the traditional conservative viewpoint, and the third group representing the family viewpoint. Just what that is should be evident in a few sentences. The topic, I think, was the definition of progress – each side had to present and argue for a particular viewpoint of what constitutes progress and what the future looks like in light of that definition.

 

So, you can easily imagine the conservative argument: progress is brought about by markets. It is efficiency that can only come from a decentralized economic system, and it allows individuals, according to their own hardwork or merits, to achieve wealth and preserve it for future generations, unmolested by the government. In this society, all can achieve wealth and purchase the things they’d like to own. The liberal viewpoint is that progress occurs when the government intervenes sufficiently in free markets to ensure that the rising tide lifts all boats: it’s vaccines, it’s public health initiatives, it’s appropriate regulatory interventions. With this, the liberals envision a future where the standard of living gradually improves, so that, in the future, all can achieve happiness, some degree of economic security, and purchase most of the things they’d like to own.

 

The family group went in and argued that progress is measured by familial relations. It’s a function of emotional growth, of knowing when you have enough to be happy, and of pulling back from the aggressive search for wealth in order to nurture those familial relationships, to give successive generations a moral center, to create good human beings. In terms of the world’s finite resources, it’s easy to see where the traditional liberal and conservative viewpoints put us in the same place, on a similar timeframe: all the resources get used up, and whether that happens in, say, 500 years or 700 years, it still gets us to the same final destination. The family viewpoint stands out, then, as a kind of antidote to using more resources and amassing more material wealth – in a way that’s entirely appealing, even for a careerist such as myself. (The conservatives did repudiate the anti-careerist tone of the family’s position, by the way.)

 

So, for me, the point of the Best Buy ads may be that they give us the dark side of the family viewpoint: the family as an a single economic unit, a tribe out to vanquish all enemies in the interest of its own self-preservation. A tribe that knows no idols, where traditions are just antiquated notions that deserve to be outperformed.

 

Also, the more I type the word “family,” the more I think about Mr. Bungle’s ‘Stubb (ADub).’

Obligatory 9/11-esque post

Driving to Virginia Beach for Sunday’s half-marathon, we passed a stretch of highway near the Pentagon that’s been renamed the “9/11 Fallen Heroes Memorial Highway,” or something like that. I can’t stress how stupid I find this to be. My friend Dave, who’s much smarter than I am, spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the way in which our memory of past events changes as the cultural landscape changes. He’s spent a lot of time at the Shanksville memorial site, doing research for what I’m sure will be a brilliant book, and he’s watched how the dialogue surrounding those events has shifted. I don’t want to scoop, so I won’t say anything else, but here’s what I think:

 

Some people did heroic things on that day. Fire fighters in lower Manhattan. The people on flight 93 who fought back rather than allow themselves to be turned into a missile. But most of the 3000 or so dead people aren’t heroes –they were victims of a terrible crime. They didn’t do anything heroic that day: they woke up and went to work. If they had done something heroic or extraordinary, their deaths would be, paradoxically, a lot more ordinary. Their deaths are extraordinary and terrifying because they were doing something utterly ordinary on that Tuesday morning.

 

 

So, google+ is gonna shame me into blogging again.

Yup. Let’s try to do this right for the 9^th time or whatever…

Having half the summer off made things fly by in a hurry. I read a couple of great books – in especial Felix Gilman’s “The Half-Made World,” for which no linked reviews will be provided. It’s a fantasy/sci-fi book, and I don’t read a lot of those, so I can’t really judge it from the standpoint of whether it’s successful within its genre. But as storytelling, it’s dazzling. It’s sort of an alternate history of America, with a touch of magical realism lending a lot of weight to the use of archetypes. The mythic West, about which much ink has been spilled, is actually literally unmade: land is “made,” or formed, I suppose, by the sustained presence of humans. Humans name things, and keep the landscape from being quite so inconstant (to pilfer a phrase from Auden.) Far out West, at the furthest point you can travel, land, sea, and sky are inseparable. We become familiar with three distinct factions, more or less: you have The Line, which razes the natural world in its thirst for oil and what it defines as “progress.” You have the terrifying and bloodthirsty Gun, which recruits characters that have Waitsian names like Dandy Fanshawe, to do its bidding – which is mostly to kill and terrorize the men of The Line. And way back when, there was a honest to goodness republic buried somewhere, a society which believed in order, laws, and peace.

Anyway, the book is great fun – the writing is terrific, the characters are all compelling, the archetypal subjects are familiar – native Americans, early Christians, abolitionists - and there’s a pleasant haziness there that keeps some of the images just beyond the edges of what you can imagine. For example, we never quite get a clear sense of what the Engines that drive the Line look like, nor do we understand how the spirits that constitute Gun exist, or where they exist. Anyhoo, I understand a sequel is in the works, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.  

Stephen Malkmus came out with a new album, and you should listen to it.

I also developed a bit of a musical crush on Jessica Lea Mayfield.

Also, everyone had babies.

And that about catches you up on 2011 so far. More on thesis, school, and other things to follow.

I had gin and tonics at lunch.

So, when a coworker asked me if Ms. Abstract and I were thinking of kids, I responded that, to date, our copulatory activities are still largely recreational, and not necessarily goal-oriented.

 

On being immersed in genetics

Grad school has been a huge time-drain, which is why I rarely get a chance to post anything anymore. Every now and then, a half-hearted attempt, but nothing really comes of it.

Still! Quite a story from the other night. I've been taking a class on genetics and related ethical issues – a strange class, with two policy students, some staff from the university's genetic counseling center, and about 10 med students. It's been a terrific experience, largely because the class delivers on the ethical side, and also because I'm learning a lot about genetics.

Put simply, genetic testing can raise a number of issues, none of them with easy solutions. The first thing that makes genetic information unique is that it typically gives you information about more than just yourself: it gives you information that might have clinical utility for your relatives. In some cases, you relatives may not want to know the information that is conveyed. If your maternal grandmother died of breast cancer at an early age, and if one of your uncles had prostate cancer, you might think it's reasonable to find out if your mom's side of the family carries the BRCA mutation. But say your mom refuses to get tested for it – for whatever reasons (good or lousy – she remembers her own mom's battle with cancer and would prefer not to know, or she's generally afraid of the process, or whatever) – but you want to find out. Well, if you test positive for the mutation, and if there's no cancer on your dad's side, you know that your mom has the mutation. She still doesn't want to know? Fine, you don't have to tell her. But what do you tell her if you opt for a radical bilateral mastectomy as a preventive measure? In a sense, it's impossible for you to make an autonomous decision about your own genetic health without somehow infringing her sovereignty too.

That being said, BRCA testing is fairly simple and fairly straightforward. The mutation is known; once a family is known to be at risk for the mutation, it's easy to do relatively cheap tests on the family to figure out who has the mutation and who doesn't. Once you know your BRCA status, you can decide whether you want to, say, get on with having kids so that you can have your ovaries removed before turning 35 (despite being named for BReast CAncer, BRCA confers a much higher risk of ovarian cancer.) You may opt to go the Christina Applegate route. You may do both, just one, or neither.

Other kinds of testing that are equally deterministic are similarly straightforward. Huntington's…that's the one everyone goes back to. If you have the mutation, by your mid-40s, you will begin to show symptoms of the disease, which is devastating and inexorable, and arguably one of the best arguments for the availability of physician-assisted suicide. Wanting to know if you have the mutation can be empowering or terrifying. Unlike breast cancer, where genetic mutations account for only about 10% of new cases, Huntington's pentrance (the link between the mutation and the disease) is basically 100%.

Finally, there's information that's not deterministic at all. For example, genetic mutations for Alzheimer's disease would tell you that you have a 55% chance of developing Alzheimer's – not much better than a coin toss. (Oddly, there are studies showing that people with some of these mutations are more likely to buy life insurance and long term care insurance, neither of which are protected by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.)

Anyway, clearly the stuff is interesting, and as a spectator, I was excited to attend a patient panel (cruelly scheduled at the same time the university would be handing out tickets to the president's kinda-meh speech about energy policy yesterday morning.) Except, after hearing a couple of touching stories from cancer survivors and pre-vivors (eg, someone with a BRCA mutation who has never had cancer but has still opted for the bilateral mastectomy), we were treated to the sound of this dramatic, conceited, self-righteous doc with a family history of diffuse gastric cancer prattle on about how the only right decision to make, in the face of a genetic mutation, is to cut whatever it is out. She actually told another panelist struggling with Lynch syndrome, who had already undergone a partial colectomy, to "use it or lose it." In reference to her uterus. The panelist who wanted not to use or lose her uterus was a sweet woman, in her early 30s, who desperately wants a child before undergoing the procedure. She is single, and painfully aware of the menacing ticking clock in her life, but she has chosen to manage her heightened risk by increasing the frequency of her colonoscopies and uterine biopsies. Another panelist, who had delayed her oopherectomy and mastectomy for as long as possible, acknowledged the doc's strident position by quipping, "Well, apparently I'm screwed."

Probably unintentional, but the panel illustrated, vividly, what several studies have shown: that doctors are much more directive (ie, much more likely to approach genetic results with a perception that there is a right and a wrong course of action to be taken as a result of the test) than genetic counselors are. If this were an academic blog, I'd provide you with references, but it's not, so you just have to believe me when I tell you that, when it comes to genetics, doctors get a lot of basic information wrong (eg, whether men in a BRCA family are at increased risk for anything – they can be, if they have the mutation, as can their offspring, etc) and are more likely to try to get you to do something, with little regard for your own ability to make autonomous decisions about risks and trade-offs.

The phrase “rags to riches”

I was, to my chagrin, watching an episode of "Storage Wars" the other night – a show whose mere existence still confounds me – when the resident dickhead on the show said that he wanted to name his business "Rags to Riches," after his own life-story, you see. They then flashed a picture of his childhood home, which was…pretty nice, all things considered. Rather than rags to riches, his journey seems to have been more of a "lower middle class to perhaps upper middle class-ish."

More recently, perhaps, I've been chagrined by Speaker Boehner's characterization of his own childhood (the one that so often causes him to weep.) He was one of a gajillion kids, and he worked in his dad's bar. Now, from my vantage point, being the son of a small business-owner in a tiny Ohio town seems like a pretty good family to be born into. Just because you had to share a bathroom with the gajillion kids your parents kept having (because they were either (a) too ignorant to use contraception, or because (b) they want the kids for either free labor or a preferential tax treatment) doesn't mean you were raised in abject poverty.

I would posit that being in a single-parent family, and then managing to attend a prestigious university followed by an Ivy league law school on your way to becoming president of the country is a tad bit more impressive (Clinton, Obama.) But my point here isn't to compare Boehner's biography to that of two former presidents – it's to point out that more and more, the type of self-mythologizing that allows an individual to believe that everything they have acquired in life has been acquired solely through their own hard work and dedication, and that none of it is the result of existing power structures, institutional biases, etc, is one of the most dangerous ideas in political discourse today.

Bill Gates is a popular example of true "rags to riches," but I'm not sure the rags were so raggy in his case (although the riches certainly are richy.) I think that, in all probability, the closest true occurrence of a rags to riches story comes from the world of sports. Terrell Owens, Michael Vick? Terrible humans, in all probability, but they come out of a type of poverty – a setting – that most of us cannot imagine. The rags are there, and so are the riches. (This is doubly true for, say, a Brazilian athlete who makes the national team, or who gets to play in Europe. The amount of work and adversity they face to make it as professionals makes the hardships of being a collegiate athlete seem…well, like first world problems, frankly.)

It might be the case that people are using this phrase as lazy shorthand for "my life-story is improbable." Which is dumb, because every life-story is improbable. But for Boehner not to realize that not going hungry, having dinner on the table every night, being raised in a loving family, and being assured work that would contribute to the family's wealth as a young teenager gave him and his siblings a tremendous institutional advantage over others is either disingenuous or delusional. And the fact that he hasn't been asked to clarify what about his journey is so remarkable seems negligent on the part of the media.