Hey, What Happened to All Those Posts? (Plus Invective)

What happened to all my posts?

Since May? Huh? Oh, right, now I remember; they never did make it out of my head. But they were boiling away in there and I e-mailed myself many reminders and enticing ideas. I’ll try to revisit them and see if any had value that survived the moment.

(New job recently and other schedule-altering things. Transitions eat up time. (What’ll be my excuse in another five months?))

But one thing continually plaguing my mind and bringing on fits of sputtering invective these days is how we are poisoning our world. Not in a dramatic Exxon Valdez kind of way; in an incremental, dull, nonphotogenic kind of way.

Dry cleaning. Paint for toys. Plastic water bottles. Antibiotics (and antibacterials, don’t get me started) and hormones in strange places. Cellular phones and towers. Agriculture. New and improved products of every stripe.

It’s not stuff you can get high-minded about avoiding. Everybody should now know that smoking is very bad for your health. If you persist in doing it, you’re a dum-dum. Likewise, eating a Supersize Me diet or working in asbestos remediation without a respirator are bad ideas. Most people have a choice in these things.

And, sure, they have a choice about dry cleaning, buying toys, walking down the street, or drinking water. But it’s an uninformed choice since they don’t know these things are potentially hazardous in the long term. And have no logical reason to suspect them. Products and services are offered up without concern and consumed without question. Despite complaints to the contrary from free market champions, there’s too little regulation about what we put on or in our bodies, let alone in the water or earth or air. How can we be so stupid?

More to the point, why does the government, which historically loves to invoke the defense of the citizenry to back up all kinds of bold and improbable acts (overseas particularly), not step up defend us once shadowy killers have been identified near at hand? (This is an analogy that bears exploring and would bring a new twist to a war on “terror.”) How do we ourselves contribute to the flood of poison? When will the connection be obvious enough to force action?

Maybe it’s not fair to ask how we can be so stupid. Maybe we are intrinsically hopeful and optimistic and trusting people and until presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, we prefer to go blithely about like Candide, all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds (wasn’t that it?). But whether we (and I’m applying that collective pronoun back a generation or so) were trusting or wilfully ignorant, I think better living through chemistry has come around to bite us in the butt.

The reason I’m particularly pissed off about all this is that my close circle of friends (to say nothing of acquaintances or people at one degree of separation) now includes too many widow[er]s who are not yet at or past middle age. Bone, ovarian, pancreatic, and breast cancer killed their spouses. We do not live in Love Canal. We do not live in Hannaford, Washington, or Chernobyl, Ukraine. These friends who died took care of themselves, lived healthy, active, and athletic lives. Did not work in factories, mines, or incinerators. Did all they could to fight the disease. But where did it come from?

I know, thankfully, just as many survivors of cancer as people who have died from it. They too are young: in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Breast, brain, testicular, uterine…. And their survival would lead a lot of people to cheer: Hooray for treatment and advances in medicine. Send more money for cancer research! I’m glad they are still alive and grateful for what made that happen. So yes, keep the treatments coming. But what I still want to know is, where did the cancer come from?

Pharmaceutical companies enthusiastically pursue research into treatments, because they can sell these expensive life-saving tortures to people and doctors desperate to save lives. Where’s the profit in finding out the cause of these illnesses? Especially if the cause turns out to be within some other arm of your diversified business. (Check out The New Cigarette, reviewed in Slate.com.) Where’s the money to find and fight the genesis of this scourge instead of just swatting it back? (Yes, I know, in the same place as the money for finding and fighting the genesis for terrorism, but I digress.) Cynically, the return on the investment just isn’t as good.

I have a friend who takes this thinking a step further, with a so-far only privately expressed, completely heretical notion: Down with the Jimmy Fund!

That campaign platform would be a hard sell, even for me in my riled-up snit. But behind the memorably shocking slogan, his idea is serious. Spend at least as much on stopping the disease from occurring in the first place as on developing new ways to fight it once it strikes.

Somewhere there must be organizations or people researching exactly what we are putting in our environment that is killing us. (Let alone the fishes and frogs.) Anyone out there know? That way when next I’m asked to sponsor riders in the Pan Mass Challenge, a very fine event (money goes to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute), I can split my contribution between those riders and someone investigating further upstream.

Where does it come from? What unknown dangers wait in my cupboards? Where is the Upton Sinclair of our times?

Not Even the Silly Season

Oh my, this (below) made me laugh. It’s from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, a website worth visiting and a newsletter worth subscribing to. It’s weekly, so sometimes hard to keep up with, but almost always full of gems. He looks at new words coming into use in English (both British and American (and other variations too)), the odd history of words, and funny misuses of words.

The following is from his most recent newsletter from the section called “Recently Noted,” about words coming to prominence.

E FOR EVERYTHING So many words in the public prints now come with the “e-” (for “electronic”) prefix that I’ve long since given up mentioning them here, or in most cases even reporting them to the Oxford English Dictionary. But a big row in the UK last week led to the terms “e-petition” and “e-petitioner” becoming widely known. It all started with some bright young person in the Prime Minister’s office—some papers have fingered the in-house Web guru, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, surely an escapee from a Wodehouse novel. He had the idea that the Number 10 Web site should allow electronic petitions to be submitted. Some spectacularly silly ones have been organised, one of them demanding that mice be allowed to travel free on public transport and another one—which has gained a surprising level of informal support—arguing that Spandau Ballet’s “Gold” should become the new national anthem. The row, however, was over very tentative proposals to introduce road-pricing—charging road users by the distance they travel. At the last count, 1.8 million signatures had been added to an e-petition demanding the scheme be scrapped, even though trials are several years away and full run-out could not happen for a decade. Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary, was understandably displeased with the whole idea of electronic petitions. “Whoever came up with this idea must be a prat,” he said. (Prat: an incompetent or stupid person, from an old term for a person’s buttocks that also appears in “pratfall”.)

Don’t miss Gold on YouTube—priceless.

Another Great Voice Quiet

This was a voice not so much to listen to for its beauty, but to read or hear for its mordant wit and exposure of hypocrisy and idiocy. Molly Ivins died yesterday, and I’m sad.

She was 62. It was breast cancer, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, that other great voice recently quieted. I don’t personally know too many people who’ve died of breast cancer but I do personally know way too many who have had it. I have no idea if these kinds of things actually do anything, but there is a site that claims to support free mammograms if you just click…

Of course that, or even searching for the cure, doesn’t address the real issue of why there is so much of this kind of disease among otherwise healthy people….the poisoning of our world, basically. But I digress. More on this in another post, if I remember.

I have had many an excellent laugh from Molly Ivins, though quite a lot of that laughter rueful. Her invective was not toothless. In fact, with that Texas accent even coming through in her writing, one might not even recognize it as invective. There was a certain generosity in her bitingly funny critique. A generosity that might leave wiggle room for some toadying, power-hungry, narrow-minded greedyguts to excuse their behavior on the grounds of being a complete moron.

Here’s a great paragraph from The Nation’s article about her:

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins’s columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

The New York Times remembrance ends with these paragraphs:

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

Forgotten Cultural Icon

Remember Euell Gibbons? You’ve got to be of a certain age to recall him hawking Grape Nuts on TV. The author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962) hearkens back to the days when public television called itself “The 21-inch Classroom.” Euell may just have had a show, I don’t know. One of the first “health food nuts” of our times, his Stalking the Wild Asparagus is just the book I need when I think of the uneventful apocalypse ahead, where we have to find our own edible tree bark and make soap from beetles’ wings because the distribution of goods shall have decayed so. He’s got a whole chapter on burdock!

The title has been much riffed on, but I’d completely forgotten it until now, poking through the shelves of my friend’s house in central New Hampshire, where I’m blissfully spending the afternoon doing nothing but drinking tea and reading (and now writing). Toasty on this brisk October day with the sun slanting in the windows, and even the four dogs quiet after our three-hour hike this morning. (Child and husband went on their own camping trip, no dogs allowed.)

While on the topic of reading, I just finished Pere Goriot, the 1834 novel by Honore de Balzac. I do seem to be on the old book kick this year. I read it because a) it has been sitting in my house for 60 years (it came with the house when I moved in) and b) just previously I read an endearing little novel called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. It was a sweet book on a serious topic and I enjoyed it. But it made me realize I had never read any Balzac. I had always admired him though for his reputation, productivity, intriguing name, robust deshabile statue by Rodin, and not least, the fact/story/myth that I’d heard that he drank 60 cups of coffee a day. That is prodigious.

Before the Little Chinese Seamstress, to go yet further back in the conversation monologue, I had read another oldie: Melville Goodwin USA, a 1952 novel by John P. Marquand. I love J.P., and this was the fourth or fifth novel of his I’ve read. Least favorite too, but it wasn’t bad. I’d recommend B.F.’s Daughter over it, or Wickford Point, or his most famous The Late George Appley. (Melville Goodwin, I just discovered, was made into a movie in 1957 called Top Secret Affair.) Before Melville, I finished the previously mentioned Ten Circles Upon the Pond.

Have I wandered enough? Back to my fading afternoon of reading I go. I am loving the come and go of the furnace’s rumble, and the gentle snores of the sacked-out dogs.

Saw a Cool Thing Today

Someone had taken a whole lotta those ubiquitous yellow-ribbon “support the troops” stickers, and with minimal snipping had turned them into stylized letters which they had affixed to the tailgate of their pickup truck to read:

n o  w a r

Wish I’d had a camera on me.

Disgruntled Chemist Writes Letters

I do not know the Disgruntled Chemist, but I like his blog and the pep and righteousness of his disgruntlement. Plus dry humor. And who doesn’t love chemistry?

He posted a letter he wrote to his senator regarding U.S. policy in the Middle East and he invites all and sundry to steal and add to it and send it to their own elected officials. I will send something like it to my two Senators K. and I pass on his invitation to anyone who stumbles upon this page.

I like the notion of passing this on. It’s a rootier grass roots than old MoveOn.org, which I found inspiring during the ‘04 election, and still admire, but which now seems a bit diffuse and unfocused.(Sadly, I hardly ever open mail from Eli Pariser anymore.)

I was once a teaching assistant for a professor who tried to preach to his torpid-looking students in the windowless classroom that they ought to DO something. That activism wasn’t that hard, nor did it demand much. Five minutes a week, he said, could make a big difference. I try to remember that, and even act on it, though usually end up expending half a year’s five minuteses in one big clump, toothless and all.