Good News

This past week, the New York Times carried two stories I was happy to read. In "Study Documents the Stress of Waiting for Biopsy Results," a Harvard study reported that women who had to wait more than five days for results of a breast biopsy had stress hormone levels in their blood just as high as if they'd been told they had cancer. Why is this good news? It's good news because, finally, someone is paying attention to the dangers of waiting ridiculously long periods for test results.

The high stress levels could actually impact on a woman's ability to fight off the disease. So being forced to wait is more than just mental torture, it's actually harmful and can affect the outcome. Maybe now that this study has been published, medical labs will be pressured to produce results considerably faster.

Each time I had another test, I had to wait, usually at least a week. Those weeks are spent in a hellish way station. Without the answer, it is impossible to visualize the future. Will life go on as before? Or will it be permanently, perhaps fatally altered? There are times when we can take our minds off the test, but it comes back, again and again. Then comes the moment of the fateful phone call, with the receiver slippery in the sweating palm.

Speeding up the process and getting an answer is much better than prolonged waiting. I hope that this study will provide the incentive that's needed to respect our psyches and our health by getting the results out quickly.

The other good news was in an article about schoolroom furniture. Schoolroom furniture? That's right. The story, "Students Stand When Called Upon, and When Not" describes an experiment in Minnesota classrooms. Children who are wiggly and find it difficult to sit still throughout the school day now have the option of standing up during class. Special desks and stools that adjust to allow for sitting or standing have been placed in classrooms. There are also footrests so the students can stand and swing their feet while they do their lessons.

If only this furniture had been developed 13 years earlier and implemented in New York City classrooms, Jason's first grade might have been a bit easier. His first grade teacher might as well have flown to class on a broomstick. Rumor had it that she'd taught in Catholic school and was used to imposing harsh discipline on little children. Once, a little girl came to school without her bottle of Elmer's glue, because her mother had forgotten to buy it. Jason's teacher made this child stand up for the entire day as punishment.

No one was allowed to sharpen a pencil in her class. So what did you do if it broke? One day another little girl was discovered with pencil shavings on the floor under her desk. Horrors! She was accused, and when she pleaded not guilty, the teacher branded her a liar in front of the class.

She tore up Jason's coloring because he colored outside the lines (and she knew he was receiving physical therapy). After that, Jason lost interest in any arts and crafts. Our friend Richard, on hearing this, said she ought to be horsewhipped. I would have watched that with pleasure.

One of her complaints about Jason, when we met with her for open school night, was that he stood up while working. Such a terrible sin had to be squelched. I can only imagine how she must have badgered him.

I should have gone to the principal but I was afraid if I did she would take it out on Jason. I suppose I should have waited until he was done with first grade and then complained. But I was afraid, also, that she might be assigned to teach a higher grade, and he could end up in her class again. So I never said anything, except directly to her.

Anyway, now, too late for Jason but not too late for the next generation, there's finally some recognition that kids don't have to be sitting down with their little hands neatly folded in order to learn. Some of them learn by moving. Jason wasn't even aware that he was getting out of his seat. Tomorrow's children can just adjust the desk, and sit or stand at their pleasure.

I bet they will learn just fine, and I bet they will be happier and more eager to go to school than the past generations of kids who were forced into a cookie cutter.

That's the good news that was fit to print.

A Demagogue's Task

Today as I walked uptown to the Mid-Manhattan Library I passed the CUNY Graduate Center. A sign in the doorway read, in huge white-on-red lettering, "A demagogue's task is to become as stupid as her audience, so that they will believe they are as clever as she is."

I don't know the origin of this quote but it was reproduced in such size that it struck me as well worth repeating here.

Shame on the NY Post

The New York Post has a long history of tasteless and offensive reporting. I remember the headline, "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar." Ugh! This time, though, they have gone over the line.

A few days ago, a chimpanzee that was kept as a house pet and "acted human" went berserk and mauled a woman who was a guest at the home. The chimp's owner tried to stop it by stabbing it but had to call in the police, and the animal was shot.

As an aside, I don't think it's morally right or smart to keep chimpanzees or other wild animals as pets. This one dressed and bathed himself, drank from a glass and watched TV, but no matter how much he appeared to be "tamed," wild animals are dangerous, and it's cruel to try to fit them into our lives and then have to destroy them when they act like the wild creatures they are.

In any case, the Post published a cartoon showing two policemen with guns drawn standing over a dead chimp, and they're saying, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill!"

Now although they tried to deny it, it is obvious that the dead chimp is supposed to be President Obama, who had just signed the stimulus bill. There's no excuse for something like this. It is racist, disgusting, and completely over the line.

I'm in favor of freedom of speech, but President Obama was elected by a popular majority and an electoral landslide, and he deserves some respect. Besides, this was practically an incitement to violence. Heads should roll over this. There was a protest at the Post headquarters today. I thought of going to it but didn't quite get myself moving fast enough, and at the time when I should have been getting on the subway I was still at the bank taking care of an errand.

I hope the Post receives millions of protest letters. What they did was an abomination.

Thoughts on "1984"

Recently I rediscovered a longstanding fascination with Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, “1984.” I must have been fairly young when I first read it, maybe not more than ten or eleven years old. Some of it must have sailed straight over my head, just as the other adult novels I read at the time did. Still, I understood enough to compare certain aspects of Orwell’s nightmare vision with the world I saw around me.

At that time I was in junior high school. Although it was a public school and no physical punishment was allowed, our lives were closely regimented. The Assistant Principal, Miss Cahill, was a tyrant worthy of the Thought Police.

She was a blue-haired old lady, in the days when rinses intended to spruce up gray hair turned a woman’s tresses to an unmistakable and unpalatable shade of blue. Rumor had it that she ran her English class like a prison camp. Everyone in the class had to click his pen at exactly the same moment. I guess she’d never recovered from the gradual demise of the fountain pen. If a pen or pencil dared to roll off a desk during Miss Cahill’s lesson, the resulting sound as it clattered to the floor would earn its owner a trip to detention.

I had the good fortune never to end up in her classroom, but Miss Cahill presided over the cafeteria in the same arbitrary and capricious manner that befits all petty tyrants. When she wanted silence, she put two fingers in the air, and everyone else had to put their fingers in the air also. Had I been slightly older, I would have raised only one finger, the one most fraught with emotional significance. As it was, I frequently substituted the Nazi salute. No one ever noticed.

Miss Cahill punished students for their “attitudes,” driven by some inchoate gut feeling that they were not sufficiently submissive to her orders. Time and again I heard her assign students detention for having the wrong look on their faces or because she didn’t like their “attitude.” Orwell had a Newspeak word for this: Facecrime.

I wrote a revolutionary tract urging the students to rise up and fight back, to reclaim our rights to have our faces look any way we wanted, and to talk throughout the lunch period instead of a meager 15-20 minutes until we got the flying fickle finger salute of silence. But I never distributed it. Copying wasn’t so easy back then: you had to use a mimeograph machine or layers of carbon paper in your typewriter. It wasn’t worth it to me. However I rejoiced when once, Miss Cahill pushed us too far and the students fought back, shouting and jumping up on the tables in defiance. We were squelched, but like Winston Smith, I felt for a moment that perhaps the great rebellion was going to succeed. Miss Cahill did flee the cafeteria crying, her hair-trigger nerves shot by our loud defiance. But, as in “1984” our revolt failed.

In any case, I had to recognize that no matter how much Miss Cahill resembled an agent of the Thought Police, the stakes were not nearly as high.

For years, I misinterpreted the ending of the book, believing that Winston was shot to death right there in the Chestnut Tree Café. It took a long time to realize that although physical death was not far away now that he’d fully capitulated, the bullet spoken of was a metaphorical one. His soul and his capacity for independent thought had been blown out as surely as if by a bullet.

So why, then, is such a depressing novel so fascinating to me? I enjoy the beginning, Winston’s rebellion and his affair with Julia. Our modern world has turned out partially like “1984” with a large helping of “Brave New World” added to the mix.

Today, we can be observed through the Internet. There are cameras galore in public places, watching our every move. We’re given the impression that they are used to protect us from terrorism and criminality. To an extent I am sure that’s true but the potential for misuse is huge.

Cookies and spyware watch our activities online. The government in recent years has tapped phone lines with no warrants, and has demanded that bookstores reveal the buying habits of their patrons. A new technology observes you as you watch advertising and adjusts the ad to your gender and age. We’re told that the technology can’t yet recognize the individual watching but is that really true?

Winston would surely find a great deal of modern technology to be frighteningly familiar and even more advanced in some of its spying capabilities.

Falsification is of course possible as evidenced by the epidemic of identity theft. Could the government misuse our personal information? Sure it could.

Can we protect our privacy? At this point, probably not.

As for the affair between Winston and Julia, I don’t see evidence in our modern world that any governmental entity desires to break down the emotional ties and loyalties between friends and family. In the private sector, though, our family lives have often come into conflict with the demands of our jobs. Doesn’t it break down family ties when employees are expected to work overtime, travel anywhere and everywhere, and miss family events in order to give all of their energies to the company? They can’t arrest us or torture us, but they certainly can deprive us of a means to make living, and that’s a serious enough consequence, especially now.

In “1984” sexuality was to be denied and the ultimate goal was to destroy it, abolishing the orgasm and breaking the family unit up so that children would be artificially conceived and then raised by the State. The artificial production of children was achieved in Brave New World but instead of abolishing the sex urge the power elite chose to allow it but to trivialize it. Loyalty to any one person would be “bad for production” and so people were strongly encouraged to be promiscuous, having as many partners as possible and viewing them all as simply recreational companions to whom they owed no exceptional loyalty. In a sense our own society has taken that route, without it being necessarily planned as a way to keep workers “stable” and untroubled by any family stress.

However, romance, love and joyful sex certainly do exist in our world of 2009, and Winston and Julia would be delighted to learn that this is not a crime, at least not in America. There are other places where people are not free to choose their own partners, and where sexual love with a “wrong” partner can be punished by death, such as in the case of “honor killings” of women and girls who are even suspected of illicit or forbidden involvement with men.

So, they would have their work cut out for them, bringing the importance of individual freedom and self-determination to the front and center.

I may have seen the “1984” movie before but I barely remembered it, and it seems a false memory now because I seem to recall watching it in the apartment where I grew up. It isn’t possible that I saw the 1984 version there because we moved out in 1971. I may have seen the 1954 version with Peter Cushing. I watched that one on YouTube the other day and found it dreadful. It was dated and so old-fashioned. The lovers never removed an article of clothing (except for the checkered sash Julia wore- which was supposed to be red, according to the book). The acting was substandard and the whole thing had the feel of a primitive science fiction movie. In fact, that’s what it was.

By contrast, I loved the 1984 version with John Hurt and I have already watched it several times on YouTube. This one was filmed during the exact time period of the book’s setting, from April to June 1984. Clever indeed! Moreover it is extremely true to the book. Everything was dingy, gray and half broken down, just as Orwell described. Winston’s flat in “Victory Mansions” was one step above a slum. No one decorated their homes with anything the least bit personal, so their living quarters were completely soulless.

John Hurt did an excellent acting job. He was completely believable as Winston. His face had a sad and vulnerable look to it even when he was happy with Julia. While not handsome he had a peculiar brand of beauty (as Winston said of the immense prole woman hanging out her wash beneath the secret room, that was his style of beauty).

It’s a fascination I don’t fully understand but I have returned to it from time to time. Could anyone have stood up to the horrors of Room 101? And once the words were spoken, were they really so indelible? Could love be squashed so easily? It’s true that young people in cults have often been brainwashed to believe that their parents are evil, just trying to lure them away from some obscure “truth” with their protestations of love. So maybe it is possible. However, deprogramming suggests that the process is reversible. Could Winston and Julia have been deprogrammed to rediscover their love for each other? It’s possible, but in their world, no one had any interest in doing so.

Just as much as the day it was published, and maybe more so in our modern world where the internet sees all, “1984” stands as a warning and a call to resist the forces that would find it convenient and rewarding to crush the human spirit while making us believe we are living a “new, happy life.” May we always recognize encroachments on our freedom to love, freedom to think and feel, and freedom to remember the past as it was. May we always remember, that 2+2=4.

"I Screwed Up"

That's what President Obama said, regarding his supporting Daschle's nomination. Well, maybe he did screw up, maybe Daschle and a couple of others weren't vetted as closely as they could have been.

But I'm proud of the President even if he did "screw up." That's because he's a big enough man and a strong enough man to admit he made a mistake. Oh, sure, President Bush admitted to a few mistaken decisions as he was leaving office. That doesn't exactly help all the people who were harmed by those wrong decisions during his eight years in the presidency.

In President Obama's case, this mistake happened only two weeks after he took office. So he's out there admitting he erred, saying baldly, "I screwed up," without dodging behind excuses. What a refreshing change from the past eight years! In fact, I don't think I've ever heard a POTUS say right out that he screwed up, right in the middle of the problem.

By trying to take accountability to a higher level, our new President puts himself in a more vulnerable position than any past president has ever taken. Will he screw up again in some other way? Probably he will. There's no real preparation for this position. It is unique in the world, and the on-the-job training is as rigorous as it gets. From day one, he's expected to hit the ground running, and never more than today with all the problems he's inherited.

A leader who can say, "I screwed up," deserves respect. We can only learn from our mistakes if we are willing to own up to them. Here's a leader who isn't pretending to be a demigod. He's showing character instead of bluster. Good for him!

Hire America

I've just read that the banks receiving the biggest bailout money have been applying for the most visas to bring in foreign workers to their employ. This has been going on for at least six years and probably longer. The foreign workers are filling top spots and earning more than $90,000 a year on average. That's more than twice the earnings of an average American household. And those are the very people who got those outrageously large bonuses, that President Obama spoke out against.

This is just wrong in so many ways. At a time when so many Americans are out of work, why are we allowing this to go on? If outsourcing to other countries is something the President wants to see discouraged, then surely "insourcing" of foreigners into the country for the express purpose of snapping up American jobs should be firmly discouraged as well.

The ironic part of this is that the reason these foreigners are being hired is not that they are more competent than American workers, but that these companies find ways to pay them less than what they would have to pay their U.S. born and bred counterparts. Now, I personally can't find myself weeping for the unfairness of earning "only" $90K, but there it is: we're spending our taxpayer money bailing out these banks that have mishandled the trust we put in them, and they are returning the favor by putting Americans out of work, every which way they can.

I want to see a law, plain and simple. No more outsourcing. No more favoring foreign workers over Americans. If two people apply for a job and have equal qualifications, the American citizen gets the job. Period, end of story. Why should people who have worked here and paid taxes their whole lives be put out of work and maybe out on the street, so that companies can pay foreigners less?

Oh, and those equal qualifications must NOT have anything to do with bilingualism. That should no longer be permitted to be a job qualification. Yes, I'm in favor of our next generation, the little ones, learning a second language. But which language are they going to learn? Here where I live, you can't get a job unless you speak Russian, or Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese...maybe both), or Korean, or....you get the picture. And once they learn a second language thoroughly, meaning from pre-kindergarten onward, then it might be fair and equitable to allow bilingualism to be a job qualification.

But not now. No young adult of working age today who was born to English-speaking, American parents and educated in our public schools can possibly compete with a native born speaker or a child of native speakers. We have to level the playing field here, and the only way to do it is to abolish bilingualism for at least the next 18 years, and then institute foreign language as a subject taught from pre-kindergarten forward.

Otherwise, the foreigners will pour in, destroy our standard of living by accepting lower wages, and take away all our jobs because they are "bilingual" (some of them marginally able to speak English still get jobs requiring them to speak on the telephone) and we, victimized by our school systems, are not.

In England, workers are striking and demanding that jobs be given to native Englishmen and Englishwomen before foreigners. Good for them! We need a similar outcry here.

So here's my battle cry: buy American, as much as possible, hire Americans first, and take bilingualism out of the job descriptions!