truth is stranger than fiction

On the fiction end, I saw a good movie over the weekend.  The Weatherman, starring Nicholas Cage, covers similar ground to Elizabethtown:  an angst-ridden alienated main character;  a father dying; weighing the relative importance of personal relationships, career and money.  But it does so in a very affecting, perceptive way that leaves you thinking about the characters long after the movie is over.  The weatherman of the title works for a Chicago TV station and often has fast food thrown at him.  When I lived in Chicago, I often felt like throwing a half-eaten burrito at the weatherman, who kept adding to a mountainous pile of fake snow as he gleefully predicted the next blizzard.  During the movie, though, I actually felt bad for the poor slob as he cleaned the greasy mess off his suit.  Cage’s character is perhaps ten years older than the character portrayed by Orlando Bloom in Elizabethtown, and is dealing with a messy divorce and two troubled teenage children. This lends his character more gravity and interest but I think the main difference between the two movies is that The Weatherman is written with empathy and intelligence, and, while sometimes funny, doesn’t compromise its integrity to play for cheap laughs.

On the other hand, I read an article in Harper’s yesterday that I wish was just a movie.  In fact it was a movie, The Constant Gardener. The Constant Gardener is based on a novel by John Le Carre, and it certainly is a believable story.  What I didn’t realize is that it is essentially a true story.. minus Rachel Weisz’s murder.  Apparently the National Institutes of Health, in conjunction with a German based pharmaceutical company conducted studies of a drug, nevrapirine, that supposedly reduces the chances of HIV transmission from mother to child.  These studies, conducted mainly on economically disadvantaged pregnant women, were conducted mainly in Africa but also in the US.  They were conducted remarkably sloppily–without blind testing or placebo controls.  The results of the studies were ambiguous and unreliable, and nevrapirine proved extremely toxic to both mothers and children.  Quite a few participants died (this was reported as a :”serious adverse event”).  

But surprise, surprise.  All these negative results were covered up, whistleblowers were silenced, and the nevrapirine was approved for use Another shocking bit of information revealed in this article is that there is no conclusive link between HIV and AIDS. There are other, equally credible, theories for AIDS transmission that have been passed over in the rush to develop profitable drugs based on the HIV hypothesis.

If you want to check it out, read this month’s edition of Harper’s. 

Is Monsanto on God’s side?

It’s almost spring.  The forsythia is blooming in the garden and the seed catalogs are arriving in the mail.  It’s time to think about this year’s garden and perhaps also contemplate the peculiar mindset of the religious Right.

I have no doubt that many of these people care deeply about their family and communities, (though not necessarily any more than those of us with different religious and cultural persuasions).  It’s when they translate their values to the larger world that their theology becomes remarkably inconsistent.They’re awfully concerned with life before birth, but lose interest afterwards, judging by their support of elective wars and the death penalty.  And judging by the way thay buy into the Bush Administration’s agenda, they must believe  God is sitting on the board of major multinational corporations.  .

For instance, take recombinant DNA.When did it become the right of human beings to shuffle around the basic building blocks of life?  If God intended a fish gene to be in a tomato, wouldn’t he have put it there?  Shouldn’t vegetables be allowed to ripen in their natural time, to be served in their season, to be grown with respect for the rest of God’s creation?  And what about the “terminator” gene, the seeds that Monsanto developed that are incapable of reproducing themselves (so they have to be ordered anew each year from Monsanto, who would own the patent on these plants)?  Isn’t that plant abortion to the extreme?

The Religious Right should be at the forefront of the organic and sustainable farming movement, but too often you find them shopping at WalMart and WinCo, buying foods that were never created naturally, and certainly aren’t the result of intelligent design.  Instead of falling all over themselves sucking up to the Religious Right while letting them narrowly define “family values” us latte drinking liberals should show them a little more intellectual respect and open their minds to a broader perspective. Both groups might find they have more in common than they thought.

 

new blog link

I’ll be back later…I just wanted to add in a link to a friend’s blog:  http://blueparrot.blogspot.com    He is a member of my writing critique group and a perceptive and interesting guy!

united american emirates?

Just when you think the news can’t get any more surreal, along comes a story like this.  As I’m sure you know by now, the Bush Administration has sold the shipping operations at six of our major ports to a foreign country.  And not just any foreign country, but to the United Arab Emirates, the home of several of the 9/11 hijackers and a major source of funding for Al Quaeda.  I’m sure glad the department of Homeland Security is busy tapping our phones and searching our sandals for shoe bombs at the airport while they leave our ports completely open to terrorist attack.

Even conservative Republicans like Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert are up in arms about this.  The fact is, folks like them are only circling the top rings of Republican hell.  No matter how misguided and morally bankrupt their policies, I believe that at some level Frist and Hastert, et al, have the interests of the American citizenry at heart.  Sure, they’re trampling on civil liberties at home and killing people abroad so that the US can force its idea of “democracy” on the world and control the world’s oil supply, but at least their aim is to advance American power.  (I realize this lofty goal puts them in the company of honorable historical figures as Caesar, Napoleon, and Mussolini, but, hey, my standards have sunk pretty low).

Not as low as the Bush Administration, however. Their loyalties do not lie with the US.  Prior to this news story, I would have said that their loyalties lie solely with multinational corporations.  Why else would they support foreign imports at the expense of American farmers or the profits of major drug companies over the lives of millions of people devastated by methamphetamine (just to mention a couple egregious examples).

But now this.  They have sold our ports, not to the stateless mercenaries of a multinational corporation, but to another country.  To the United Arab Emirates.  Who is the Bush Administration working for?  Hint:  it isn’t you or I.  

attention deficit disorder part two

Ok, now I’m going to turn my attention back to garden variety ADD.  That is, the type of ADD ten percent of children are apparently diagnosed with.

We are fascinated with diagnosing mental disorders, whether they be ADD or  OCD or some other acronym .  The truth is, all of us humans are born with unique ways of perceiving and relating to the world.  At the extremes, these personality structures can render people incapable of functioning in the world.  Then it is time for intervention.  Between the extremes there’s room for intervention too–but it should be aimed at maximizing an individual’s unique potential rather than pathologizing it.  Otherwise, who draws the line at where creativity becomes delusion or perfectionism compulsion?

Half the children diagnosed with ADD may not even have true “ADD” personalities.  They might be suffering from an undiagnosed learning disability, such as dsylexia or poor hearing, that is impeding their ability to focus in the classroom. Or they might be unusually bright, and bored by the material presented.  They might be experiencing problems at home or social problems at school.  They might eat too much junk food or spend too much time watching TV or playing video games.  Or maybe a poor teacher is simply failing to capture their attention.  One article I read on ADD listed one of the symptoms as “not being able to pay attention to boring material”!  Please.  An adult might possibly be able to feign interest in something boring in the hope of future rewards (a degree, a paycheck) but a child will not.

But we all know true ADD types.  They are the manic and enthusiastic ones, the ones with unbounded energy.  They found businesses and win snowboarding competitions.  They’re emergency room physicians and test pilots.  They react quickly, they react on impulse, they live for that adrenalin rush.  They may need help focusing their energy and turning their dreams into reality.  What they don’t need is someone drugging and dulling them down.  They don’t need someone denying who they are.  We need these manic people.  They contribute much value to the world.

In health class children learn to say no to drugs.  Then they march down to the nurse’s office to take their daily dose of mind altering drugs, drugs that have now been linked with such serious side effects that they need to be labeled with a “black box”.  The irony of this is pretty ludicrous.

In some ways society is well suited for those with ADD (see my previous post).  In some ways conventional education is too, most notably in the way learning segments, from elementary school on up, are broken into 30-45 minute increments.  But in many other ways they are not.  Children sit at desks for hours at a time, working on material that has been shrunked into a two dimensional abstraction.  Phys ed and recess time have been eliminated in many schools.  After school, many children have little freedom to run around, make noise, or create their own mildly dangerous adventures. At the same time they are barraged with sensation:  TV, video and computer games, endless rounds of programmed activities, hours of homework.  I read a blog last week by someone who called himself “Houston conservative” who went on about how boys like to fight and how the wimpy liberal left wants to shut them down.  Well, maybe he’d like a news flash from the liberal left.  Some of us think boys lhave a right to wrestle and throw sticks and play superhero too. So do girls. They have a right to work with their hands, and to learn from direct experience. 

If a child doesn’t fit neatly into a one size fits all box, if they aren’t passive and pliable, and “good”, then in rush to experts to diagnose the problem.  Oftentimes parents are eager for these diagnoses, because we live in a society that loves to pigeonhole, and because more funding is available for students with diagnosed pathologies. 

So, teachers and parents:  instead of obsessing about how a child is failing to meet some artificially designed standard, focus on what they do well.  What are their unique gifts to the world?  Let them amaze you.  

if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention

When I drop my five year old son off at his Montessori school I am jealous of him.  Not of the specific activities he engages in there, but of his freedom to focus on whatever he chooses for as long as he wants to.  Whether it be subtraction or drawing orlooking at dinosaur cards, no one will interrupt him.  This respect for focused concentration is the most countercultural aspect of Montessori education.

Ten percent of all ten year old boys in this country are now on medication for “attention deficit disorder”, and ADD diagnoses for adults are increasing rapidly.  The ludicrousness of this is extreme but I’ll address that in another post. Today I’d like to point out that our entire society suffers from ADD.  ADD helps make our society what it is today.  ADD is an essential component of maintaining the status quo.

How many times in the past week have you heard the term “multitasking”?  Or references to our “frenzied contemporary lives”?  (why lives should be so much more frenzied today that when we had to grow our own food or launder clothes on a washboard is another issue–watch for future blog posts).  You get the impression that if you aren’t driving along the freeway simultaneously talking on your cell phone, checking email on your blackberry, and gulping down an egg mcmuffin, you’re slacking off.  When I lived in New York the favorite verb people used to sum up their days was “running”.  Running where?  Up and down the length of Long Island?  Around a track?  Around a wheel like a caged hamster?

Multitasking is a useful skill for some occupations–being an air traffic controller, say, or a stock trader.  And every life provides its inevitable moments of frenzy  Mothers of small children by definition multitask (like my trying to write this while my son is in the next room) But  the reality is that people’s attention capacity is finite.  The more things you are doing at one time, the less attention you can devote to any one thing. At the worst case this results in obvious mistakes:  car accidents, burnt meals, forgotten appointments.  Human beings are pretty adaptable creatures, though, and most of us have adapted to a frenzied ADD society.  We get through the day without incident, plowing through that endless to do list. But not much registers.  Not much sticks. Have you ever noticed what a razor sharp memory little children have?  Part of that is due to their brand-new brain, but the rest is due to the fact they’re paying rapt attention to their life.

Societal ADD benefits corporate America in many ways.  You need to buy more labor saving gadgets so you can fit more activities into your frenzied life.  You need to buy more services (fast food meals, event planners, personal shoppers and professional errand-doers) for all those functions you no longer have the time and/or mental energy to perform yourself     You need to buy more services (massage therapists, cruise vacations) to relax from your frenzied days. You treat yourself to even more consumer products to fill up that empty feeling that comes from processing your life instead of experiencing it.

Most insidiously, societal ADD affects our perception of the news.  Have you noticed that in the past few years, newspapers provide sidebars with high concept synopses of the news so you don’t need to spare the precious time to read the full article?  And that’s assuming you get news from a newspaper (a growingly archaic habit) instead of in sound bite snippets on the TV or Yahoo.  The trouble with these one minute summaries is that the reader is totally dependent on the summary maker to decide what is important.  A newslet like this leaves out all background, all nuance, all kinds of potentially significant detail Current events inhaled in this manner rarely register.  They do not resonate.  They get lost in the white noise of people’s frenzied days.

This is handy for an Administration that has lots of things it wants US citizens to forget.  Like the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or why Bush played guitar on his ranch while New Orleans flooded, or the UN and Amnesty International reports accusing America of torture.  They are counting on the assumption that the American people will half listen to a fragment of the next bit of appalling news before turning their attention to the next distraction.  (“the polar ice caps are melting?  Oh, how awful.  Time to pick up the kids from soccer and order that pizza because I have a meeting tonight.)

So far, unfortunately, the Bush Administration has been dead-on right in their cynical calculations. America has ADD, and I’m talking about liberals as well as conservatives, nd I’m definitely talking about the great alienated middle who are too apathetic to define themselves in any way at all.  Maybe its time to slow down a little bit.  Maybe its time to look beyond the headlines.  Maybe its time to pay consistent, focused attention.  Maybe its time to get outraged. 

if you’re going to be sappy, be honestly sappy

I’ve got nothing against sappy movies.  Every time I’ve seen Pride of the Yankees (about eight) I choke up when Lou Gehrig gives his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium.  I actually liked the Titanic movie and choked up at the end there, too, as Kate Winslet clings to life in the frigid ocean.

I’ve got nothing against cliched plots, either.  Oftentimes thermes become cliches because they represent universal truths.  There’s always a creative way to tell an old story.

I’ve got nothng against irony or a sardonic tone either, when the material warrants.

What I don’t like is when they’re all mixed up together.  That’s what Cameron Crowe does in Elizabethtown.  I believe this is a fairly recent movie, but my husband and I just saw it on DVD,  Elizabethtown is not without its virutes.  It’s artistically filmed, has one genuinely engaging character (Kirsten Dunst), a few chuckles, and a great soundtrack.  The problem is the tone.  Crowe tells a sappy story with an uplifting but cliched ending at such a level of self-aware remove that the fillm loses any emotional resonance and becomes completely banal.

In the movie, a shoe designer (Orlando Bloom, whose major dramatic contribution consists of soulful handsome stares ) is fired after the shoe design he’s slaved over for eight years proves to be a commercial fiasco.  He goes home intending to kill himself but receives a call from his sister informing him that his father has just died of a heart attack while visiting relatives in Kentucky. Bloom flies to Kentucky to reclaim his father’s body and in the process reconnects with his homespun roots, finds love with a bubbly flight attendant (Dunst) and (wow! what a deep insight!) learns that there is more to life than money.

During this week of self-discovery we are treated to some truly bizarre scenes.  Time and time again, Crowe digresses from the plot to indulge in lengthy musical interludes.  Try Bloom and Dunst skipping about merrily as they choose a cremation urn for Bloom’s father, looking for all the world like a Mastercard ad (creation urn:  $300  loved one’s ashes inside:  priceless).  Or Susan Sarandon (Bloom’s mother) performing a standup comedy routine and tap dance at the memorial service.  I can believe–barely–that Bloom’s Kentucky cousin performs with his rock band at the service.  But would they do so with a sound system fit for an arena concert?  Would they play White Bird?  (or are we supposed to be laughing knowlingly at this choice of White Bird–ha, ha, what a corny song)

Being fired from a job you’ve put your heart and soul into, lsing a father you loved deeply:  these are events that strip you of ironic reserve.  They leave you raw and exposed.  A movie dealing with these themes needn’t be devoid of humor, but they can’t be afraid to penetrate beneath the surface and expose genuine emotion.  The characters in Elizabethtown are all facade. They are always playing for an audience.

Elizabethtown shares a lot with the movie Garden State. For one thing, they have virtually identical plots. An alienated young man on the West coast is summoned home after a parent dies, rediscovers his roots, finds love with a whimsical girl, and gives up his vacuous West Coast life.  Both have radio friendly sountracks, and both are scripted and filmed from the same ironic distance.

So I’ve been surprised to hear some people say that Garden State truly speaks for them and reflects their life.  Will (or doe they already) say the same about Elizabethtown?  Am I missing something?  Maybe these films are articulating the perceptions of people so distanced from unfiltered emotion that they can’t experience even the most profound of emotions without the awareness of being watched.

welcome to wendy’s opinion on just about everything

Welcome to my blog!  Here you will find all those random epiphanies that occur to me in the shower or on the way to picking my son up from school.  All those philosophical meditations that my mind drifts to when I probably should be doggedly plowing my way through my to do list.  All those op-eds that the Oregonian doesn’t see fit to print.

 

Why am I blogging?  Well, I have a lot to say.  I am a freelance writer, so my word gets out a bit, but not as much as I would like it do  I live here in this beautiful rainy corner of the Northwest, and have four children ranging in age from 25 to 5..  I feel like lots is at stake these days.  On a macro societal level the world is going to hell in a handbasket.  But on the micro grass roots level incredible, creative, life-affirming things are happening.  I want to add my own small voice in a positive direction and not be a passive observer, as “democracy dies to thunderous applause” (as George Lucas put it so aptly in the surprisingly good Revenge of the Sith).

 

If this sounds overly earnest, it is.  I’m so sick of people using layers of irony to emotionally distance themselves from the world.  I’m tired of how truth and fiction, news and parody, have become so inextricably intertwined that few people can tell the difference, or even care whether they do or not.  If you want jokes, watch the Daily Show.  I know laughter is healthy and all, but some things just aren’t funny.

 

I’m tired of how mainstream media claps onto buzzwords and doesn’t let them go.  I’m tired of how they restrict debate by creating false dichotomies like the economy or the environment, or civil liberties vs security, or latte drinking liberals vs salt of the earth mainstream Americans.  I am so tired of the Bush Administration’s ignorance.  I am so tired of how our president speaks in sentences at the level of a first grade reader….and gets away with it.

 

I could rant on forever, but I’ll break it up into edible daily chunks.  Not just politics either.  Expect comments on social trends, parenting, food , travel, literature, movies—remember this is my opinion on almost everything!

 

I hope to inspire intelligent debate, so comments are welcome.