Age of Innocence
Walking past a construction site today, I saw a bunch of workmen straddling a newly poured concrete sidewalk. They were busy pressing boards into the sidewalk at right angles, and with a little metal blade, making shallow indentations in the concrete to create the illusion that it was made out of separate blocks. In chronological order, I was:
Surprised
Bothered
Bothered that I was surprised
posted July 22, 2010 | Comments (0)
All Bull
Supposedly, people don’t like to know what goes into hot dogs. And whether it’s the slag from a meaty blast furnace, or as Steve Purcell has it “insect lips and eyelids” I couldn’t say for sure. What I can say though, is that it’s definitely not pork.
At the grocery store in my neighborhood — at the grocery store that isn’t Kosher, even — it is impossible to find a hot dog that will admit to containing pork. They’re either “all beef” or “beef and poultry and this and that” or simply “no pork”. Now, I understand that even if they’re not so religious that they demand Kosher-certified hot dogs, the number of people in New York City who abjure pork is greater than the number of people who require it. But there’s already a very popular brand of hot dog (Kosher certified even! They answer to a higher authority) for people who want to avoid pork. Is there any reason for every other hot dog company, even those without a brand to disgrace, to follow suit?
Hot dogs, like most sausages, like bratwurst and liverwurst and kielbasa, are traditionally made out of pork. And the local grocery stores sell other kinds of sausage. And while our bratwursts remain pork, our hot dogs have turned to beef. This isn’t just a New York thing either. Google returns 61,500 results for “all beef hot dog” and only 3,800 for “all pork hot dog”.
I know for a fact that pork is cheaper than beef. (although I couldn’t say for sure whether Grade F pork is cheaper than Grade F beef it seems likely.) And while hot dog makers may be evil, they are not insane. It must be that consumers prefer beef hot dogs. Why?
The only explanation I can imagine is that people think pork is icky (I don’t know why, but they do, right?) and that people think hot dogs are icky. Each of these factors alone is not enough to keep people from buying pork or hot dogs, but when they’re combined, the product is simply too loathsome for the buyer to contemplate. Does that sound right?
posted July 21, 2010 | Comments (2)
Cultured Milk
It’s always surprising, the way dairy products can ferment.
I bought a gallon of milk today from the bad grocery store, and when I went to try it, I found flecks of very dry cheese-like material on the cap. Inside, the milk is as sweet and thin as ever, but it has a real flavor of parmesan cheese, which I assume is butyric acid or diacetyl, and I suppose that something has happened to the butterfat. It certainly doesn’t taste spoiled in any ordinary way, like the casein has broken down — just very very savory.
I sometimes eat butter that’s been sitting out for days and days, and I like that Continental tang, but I have to admit that a gallon of liquid parmesan might be too delicious even for me. But I also feel bad pouring so much of this rare and potentially valuable liquid down the drain. If anybody wants some cultured milk, let me know. We can do a deal.
posted July 19, 2010 | Comments (0)
Triple Word Score
In the big news of the day Thursday, an FDA panel rejected the first new diet pill developed in over a decade, a combination of the old standby phentermine with the anticonvulsant topiramate. Flimsy excuses like “heart attacks” and “psychiatric problems” were offered, but I think we all know what the issue was:
Vivus Inc., whose stock prices, reputation and business were riding on this new drug, named it Qnexa, a name that doesn’t even approach hailing distance of a word, yet manages to suggest both “anorexia” and a winning move in Scrabble. Naturally, Vivus doesn’t offer any documentation on how to pronounce this non-word, and now that it’s set to join Fen-phen in the dustbin of pharmaceuticals, I don’t suppose they’ll ever bother.
But this suggests a real failure in marketing. Everyone knows that naming a drug is important for marketing to consumers. It’s well known in the food industry that people eat with their eyes — but they dope with their ears. Nobody would smoke crack if it were called “fart”, while “Viagra” is a poem unto itself. Vivus may have thought they could iron out their horrible nomenclature after it got approved, but perhaps they forgot that FDA regulators are people too; FDA regulators consider marketing as much as the rest of us. Indeed, more so. If you’re paid to think and write about medication all day, day in and day out, surely the lousy aesthetic standards in the drug industry will come to gall you. How else can you strike back?
In other words, if you wouldn’t take a pill called Qnexa, why would you approve a pill called Qnexa?
posted July 16, 2010 | Comments (2)
Wikipedia Sentence of the Day
“Mild habaneros were expected to be widely available in the future as of 2004.”
posted June 24, 2010 | Comments (0)
I Called It
Right here.
A “software malfunction” — that’s what they said it was. I called it.
posted June 07, 2010 | Comments (1)
Do You Feel Lucky?
In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Pac Man, Google is changing the header on its website. Again. This time is different though, because the Google header will double as a miniature version of that classic video game. Mere tributes aren’t enough — we have to live the moment all over again.
Pac Man is fun, although Google Pac Man leaves a little to be desired, but what I really want to celebrate here is the demise of “I’m Feeling Lucky”. In order to make room for the button that allows you to begin a round of Pac Man, Google replaced the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with an “Insert Coin” button.
I’m sure it will be back soon enough — at least until Google Ms. Pac Man comes out — but let’s all appreciate the respite. Google has a spartan interface: Logo, toolbar, and search button. I don’t know why they thought it was necessary to include a special search option for people who want the first result available, without the necessity of *looking*. Scrolling through a half a page of results isn’t very taxing, and it’s always better to get some context for your search. The best explanation I can find is that it “saves time and clicking.” Does anybody ever feel that lucky?
posted May 23, 2010 | Comments (0)
Personal Growth
Chuck Pahlaniuk, the author of the only novels men read, had his breakout success in 1996 with the publication of Fight Club, a story of people who parlay a society for beating one another up into a cultish terrorist organization called “Project Mayhem”.
On Google Ads today, they’re pushing Pygmy — 14 years later, Mr. Pahlaniuk’s latest book. Once again, it’s the story of people behaving ghoulishly — but this time, they belong to Operation Havoc.
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ALEXANDER KOBULNICKYAN AMERICAN HERO
I suppose I always assumed Floyd Landis was innocent. I never thought about it too hard, but he maintained his innocence so steadfastly in the face of everything, that I was ultimately won over. Nobody in professional cycling seemed to believe him, and in the wider non-cycling world, he’s just another disgraced non-Armstrong, so protesting that he never doped would have just been pointless and embarrassing if he weren’t genuinely innocent. Right?
I’m not sure what caused him to change his story — it’s not like new evidence could have come to light that would be more damning than several positive blood tests — but it does put the header to his incredibly smarmy website in an interesting light. People are suggesting that he change the “hero” part to something more modest, but I don’t see it. He maintained the lie for years in the real world; but you never need to admit anything on the internet. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Inc. may want us to present the same face to the whole world through every window, irrespective of context, but Floyd Landis and I are more traditional netizens. Depending on the audience, the time and the place, I choose my words carefully — and so does Mr. Landis. On the internet, nobody knows you’re not an American Hero.
posted May 22, 2010 | Comments (0)
Possible Name for an Objectivist-themed Punk Rock Band
“Moochers and Looters”
posted May 14, 2010 | Comments (0)
Moby-Dick in the 21st Century?
I’m sure my economic ignorance is showing, but considering that the Deepwater Horizon collapse represents such a disaster to fishing interests in the Gulf: Is there any way for them to recoup their losses by fishing for oil? Oil is $74 per barrel; can shrimp be much more? As the oil slick covering much of the ocean approaches land, how hard would it be to send a few boats out, skim the surface with a couple of pails, and head home with a hold full of light, sweet crude?
The explosion on Deepwater Horizon surely represents a disaster for BP, mankind and God , but all that oil is free for the taking — whoever is bold enough to claim it.
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True Stories
The other day, Claire ran into Bill Nye on the street, and of course asked him for his autograph on a piece of scrap paper. He was very gracious about it. He wrote “science rules!” as the valediction, and as she turned to leave, he shouted “science rules!” after her. That is a man who does not regret his choices in life.
posted May 11, 2010 | Comments (2)
your ugly little friend archie
Everything that happens happens in Riverdale, and when our culture eventually digests a new trend, it’s a sure bet that, beet-like, it will show up in the urine of Archie Comics. The latest buzz is that the world of Archie and Reggie and Betty and Veronica is going to introduce a gay character, going by the not-at-all-20’s-sounding name of Kevin.
Now, what the point of having only one gay character is, I’m not sure. Maybe he’ll moon in soliloquy over Archie and Jughead and the gang, but it’s clear that no actual gay relationships are in the cards. I am a little bit confused that Archie Enterprises describes Kevin as the first openly gay character. Are we supposed to think that somebody else at Riverdale is in the closet? Can we really give that much credit to their inner lives? Is it possible that somebody is gay and the writers don’t even know it? That doesn’t seem likely. Like a puppy, Archie Comics exists in the eternal present, without secrets, memories, dreams or thoughts. Really, a shadow of our own world: Shocking new things happen all the time, splashed all over the cover, but when the next Double Digest comes out, nobody remembers a thing.
posted April 23, 2010 | Comments (1)
Or Should I Say, “I’m Sure we WILL?”
There was a Nor’easter today, and although the gusty wind didn’t generate the sustained force necessary to blow out the kitchen windows, it did ruin umbrellas in Midtown by the thousands. So many people opened their umbrellas into the wind and the rain that their little metal struts bent and snapped off almost immediately. Outside of every subway station was a heap of shattered, twisted metal and wooden handles with the fabric ripped totally off, and mortally wounded umbrellas, still caught in the wind, skittered around the streets.
As disastrous and surreal as it was, Oscar Wilde was right to say that whenever people talk about the weather, they mean something else. In this case, I just want to point out that in response to Daylight Savings Time, the New York Times’ AP feed — as of 3:45 AM EDT — is running backwards and prophesying future news. Right now, for instance, they’re saying that -54 minutes ago, a rainstorm will cut the electricity to 500,000 houses.
It might just be a Y2K-style glitch, but with this mounting, umbrella-proof chaos, it might also be the apocalypse. If the prophesies are true and we get another Nor’easter like this, time could stop altogether.
posted March 14, 2010 | Comments (3)
Curse God and Die
Granny D, the elderly campaign finance reform agitator, has died at the age of 100. She walked across the country and ran for the Senate on a campaign finance platform, and the when the Supreme Court voted 5-4 last month to strike down the laws she fought for, it was a sad and ironic end to a very long life.
When the ruling was handed down, she issued a statement, reading in part:
“The Supreme Court, representing a radical fringe that does not share the despair of the grand majority of Americans, has today made things considerably worse by undoing the modest reforms I walked for and went to jail for and that tens of thousand of other Americans fought very hard to see enacted.
I realize she must have been absolutely crushed by the ruling, but really, “the depair of the grand majority of Americans?” That’s such a jarring, depressing thing to say, as though we were all characters in a Chekhov play, that I’m half sure it was a misquote. Even sadder is the implication, by its juxtaposition with the previous phrase, that to be hopeful is to be part of a “radical fringe.” Just a year ago, Obama won a majority campaigning on hope, but now? He’s the Lyndon LaRouche of the emotional world.
posted March 12, 2010 | Comments (0)
Your Tax Dollars at Play
I’m not sure this is a worthy subject for a blog entry, since it’s something literally everyone in America does or soon will know about. But I just got a Census document in the mail saying nothing important, but reminding me that in a week I will be receiving another census document. Government documents receive free postage, so this probably didn’t cost them very much, but I do wonder at their choice of priorities. There are a lot of things the government wants us to do — join the army, don’t murder, pick up litter — but direct mail is seldom a preferred medium for propaganda.
If you adopt the libertarian line, it isn’t surprising that the Census is going all-out. Large bureaucracies, in this view, make sustaining themselves and increasing their responsibilities their primary goal. Few agencies deal more intimately with paperwork than the Census bureau, the people tasked with collecting basic information on every American, filing it, and tabulating the hell out of it. The paper-pushers for the Census clearly have the most to gain in a professional sense by sending out these mailers, trolling for as much paper to play with as possible during those lean years not ending in zero.
The difference between me and libertarians is that they find this paper agglomeration wasteful and sinister. I kind of think it’s adorable.
posted March 09, 2010 | Comments (0)
Balms for the Poor
Google Ads once again separates the chaff from the wheat and brings us beggarbags.com, an online business selling non-perishable food parcels to give to the homeless. At first this seems like an embarrassingly roundabout way to give homeless people mail-ordered gum and Slim Jims, while skimming a little bit off for the middleman. We’re warned not to cut out that middleman and give money directly to the beggar, “because you’re not so sure he’ll buy food with the money you give him.”
But because the homeless have such dirty hands, each bag also contains a package of Purell wipes, containing 62% ethanol by volume, enough to make a normally mild-mannered prisoner ‘red-eyed,’ ‘loony’ and ‘combative’ and ‘lecturing everyone about life,’ according to the New England Journal of Medicine. Undoubtedly aware of the practice of drinking hand sanitizer and hoping to mitigate its harm, beggarbags.com decided to include Purell, one of the only non-toxic brands on the market. A thoughtful — or at the same time perhaps very thoughtless — gesture.
posted March 07, 2010 | Comments (0)
You Have Won First Prize in a Beauty Contest
In a stunning upset yesterday, the Scottie dog took first place in this year’s Westminster Dog Show, narrowly beating out the battleship, thimble and top hat.
posted February 17, 2010 | Comments (0)
@nothing woof woof #woof
The New York Times’ website, in addition to all the news that’s fit to print, features an Associated Press feed. Today, this article scrolled by, listing toys to be debuted at a trade show this weekend. Most interesting is the “Puppy Tweets” accessory, which clips on to your dog’s collar and monitors his vital signs, sending messages to Twitter about what he “might be up to.”
According to insiders, the collar attachment will monitor the dog’s “level of activity and barking” and will accordingly compose tweets that are “humorous or poignant.” No examples of a poignant tweet are offered, nor is it clear what level of activity or barking could reliably distinguish a pathetic moment from a comic one. I suppose, if Puppy Tweets comes with the basic ability to monitor vital signs like temperature and pulse, that it would be able to send out a tweet when your dog dies — and several more as its body cools — but if there are more mundane tragedies in a dog’s life, they might be beyond its ken.
At first, it’s hard to imagine that anybody could be stupid enough to buy Puppy Tweets. On the other hand, it vaguely resembles the microchips that people get implanted under their dogs’ skin, making it possible to track them if they get lost. It’s only a matter of time before someone combines the concepts, implanting Puppy Tweets under the skin, where it can offer real-time commentary on your dog’s physiology. A humorous or poignant series of tweets might track the progress of a crunched-up chicken bone through your dog’s intestines, while a more flirtatious message might signal that she’s in heat.
Part of the promise of the modern age is the hope of an audience — somewhere — for everyone. Right now it seems unbelievable that anyone could be interested in a dog’s inner life, but nothing can bring reader and writer together across continents like Twitter. Before now, the only way for curious souls to see things from a dog’s point of was to get a dog, with all the expense and trouble that entails. But soon, cyber-dogs will be communicating their feelings to interested parties around the globe. Whenever a dog gets skunked, humps somebody’s leg, or pukes up the shards of a tennis ball, they’ll know about it.
posted February 13, 2010 | Comments (3)
Tornado Alley
With my prodigious MS Paint skills, I made this map of my apartment building. I have an unusual address, on a one-way street that descends a steep hill, makes a 90 degree turn left, and descends another steep hill, surrounded on all sides by six-story buildings. On the outside corner of the street is my apartment building, with a big courtyard in front. I live on the first floor, in the back corner where the X is.
Consequently when the wind blows, as it has been lately, it roars down one street, turns a corner and roars down the other. Wind being poor at making sharp turns, it invariably collects in the courtyard, where it whirls ceaselessly in an eddy current. The upshot is that the plastic bags, newspapers and candy bar wrappers blowing in the wind all fetch up outside my window in great heaps. When the wind picks up, they form into a dust devil, which can reach two stories tall, and sometimes develops enough force to blow the windows out of their tracks.
I only mention this because it seems like a pretty unusual problem.
posted February 05, 2010 | Comments (3)
Raid
Like most apartments in New York City, this one has roaches. Cockroaches are a pest, but as infestations go, they’re pretty mild. Even Wikipedia has a hard time coming up with reasons that cockroaches are uniquely horrible. (The most hard-hitting charge they can present is that they sometimes carry pathogenic microbes “particularly in environments such as hospitals,” a small worry to those of us who don’t reside in hospitals.) With their waggly antennae and fuzzy legs, they’re self-evidently disgusting but still, better roaches than bedbugs or mice or termites. I’m not afraid to say it: I can live with cockroaches.
Still, even my patience has limits, and when the bugs get too bold, and no longer scatter when the light comes on, it’s time to kill some pour encourager les autres. Cockroaches are slow and easy to smash if you surprise them in the open, but their chitinous exteriors conceal a surprisingly gooey center, and if you catch them a glancing blow, their front parts try pathetically to drag a shattered abdomen to safety. I’ve tried cutting them in half with a paring knife, but it doesn’t really slow them down — like an engine severed from the rest of the train, their front legs scurry away all the faster. You can scald them, sic the cat on them, or shoot them with Windex, but Rasputin-like, they remain alive.
The best alternative is poision, pyrethroids that comes in a spray can and are so loaded with artificial lemon scent that the actual pyrethroid odor is only a dimly palpable funk. Like most insecticides, it’s a neurotoxin, and the instructions are to spray it around the baseboard and behind appliances. . . and wait. A few minutes later, cockroaches come rushing out in obvious agony. As their brain functions shut down, their gait becomes unsteady, they start walking in circles, limp and gyrate, and then lie down and twitch until they expire. They come out in a steady stream for the next several hours, looking for safety and dying disgustingly all over the floor. And this is the best way to kill cockroaches.
With options like these, the fight against cockroaches, practically unwinnable, starts to feel like a real war. It’s no mistake that the top-selling brand of insecticide is called “Raid”. There is no insecticide called “Sustained Campaign,” “Conquest,” or “Clear and Hold.” Raids are the only kind of military action that is possible against cockroaches. You can attack behind the sink, kill the women and children, poison their turf, and retreat victorious, but the cockroaches still control the baseboards and you haven’t seriously damaged their ability to regroup. Even crueler, killing these basically harmless animals in droves starts to feel like a war crime after a while. Watching a column of poisoned roaches stagger out of the darkness, waving the roachy equivalent of a white flag, and then finishing them off with a final squirt of pyrethroids is no less an atrocity than murdering the prisoners of Agincourt or the Alamo. You may think that extermination is all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.
posted February 04, 2010 | Comments (1)
A Sucker Born Every Minute
A study was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggesting that people who feel like victims are more selfish. The conclusion sounds reasonable enough, but I take issue with the method. “In Experiment 3,” we are told, “participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason.
This is the year 2010. Studies like this are conducted every month, and the results endlessly reported, and there are still test subjects who believe scientists when they say, “oops, a computer glitch happened. How unexpected.” Likewise, there are research subjects who think they’re actually administering electric shocks to helpless victims, still unaware that researchers employ confederates to play the part of victims, screaming in mock-agony from the fake jolts.
It’s touching that there are still people this naive wandering among us, but I’m afraid what will happen if casino bosses catch wind of them. “Yes sir, the slot machines are certainly supposed to pay out when three gold bars come up. It must be a computer glitch.”
posted January 23, 2010 | Comments (1)
Up With People
My friend Justin asked me yesterday why web ads aren’t as profitable as print ads. It’s a good question, but we can thank our lucky stars that they aren’t. Rather than the opulent McDonalds and Verizon ads featured on TV, nytimes.com brings us this bargain-basement gem: You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, a new offering from Random House. To drum up interest, they’re giving us one free chapter, and — man, oh man.
In the intellectual tradition of Karl Marx and Valerie Solanas, Lanier describes his book as a “manifesto” in opposition to “cybernetic totalism.” What is cybernetic totalism, you might ask? He seems to describe it as
“people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious, or people simply being annihilated in an imperceptible instant before a new superconsciousness takes over the Earth,”
a fate coincident with “the Singularity,” a moment that is described in little more detail than “…superintelligent robots will suddenly rule the Earth” or “the whole universe becomes a brain, or something along those lines.”
Lanier considers that “there may be some truth” to the idea of the Singularity, but he wants none of it. He is worried that the apostles of the Singularity are “antihuman,” trying to make mankind obsolete and to exalt computing for computing’s sake. As a human (I assume), Lanier is opposed. Watch as he delivers their infamy:
- Web applications like Facebook and Twitter aggregate people’s information. This depersonalizes them.
- Microsoft Word suggests indentations sometimes when you don’t want them.
- Comments on blogs and video clips may have been left by people who are now dead.
In between what I can fairly call petty gripes (although those margins on Word can be tricky, can’t they?) Lanier finds space to willfully misconstrue the adage “information wants to be free, ” taking it as an insult to dedicated pro-humans like himself, rather than the illustrative metaphor it obviously is. In an adversarial stance he says that information “doesn’t deserve to be free.”
Lanier closes his disjointed discursus by telling us that information and computers (and, presumably, superintelligent robots) aren’t really really real: Berkeley-like, they need humans to perceive them, although I’m not sure his ontology will be any comfort to future Luddites as superintelligent robot armies root out their cells of resistance.
I’m dying to read the other chapters, to see if they tie these gripes and whines together into a larger theme, but until then I’ll have to wonder why Random House decided to publish online a chapter of Lanier’s book, mere undeserving information, for free. Maybe Random House is in league with the robot armies and the universal brain, or maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t that seem a little. . . antihuman?
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. . .
Conservatives might not like it, and prescriptivists can squeal, but the English language changes. We perceive it best in words, words being the most obvious part of language, and when the Oxford English Dictionary added “unfriend” to their lexicography, everyone took notice.
Less prominently, punctuation evolves too. Apostrophes mushroom and semicolons fade. Commas are substituted for periods and hyphens, and all of them move around sentences, serenely independent of the laws of grammar. But over the last few years, no punctuation has erupted like the ellipsis, a modest character formerly used to omit portions of quotes and carry out infinite sums.
If “unfriend” is a word for the internet age, then surely the ellipsis is its punctuation mark. On message boards, YouTube comments and Facebook threads, the ellipsis can be substituted at will. To break up sentences, to separate thoughts, to link phrases — it’s all we need.
I think the secret to the ellipsis’s success is its expressiveness. A comma doesn’t mean anything. We miss them when they’re gone, but in a semantic sense, they were never there in the first place. Periods signal that a sentence is over, but they don’t say anything about the speaker’s attitude. An ellipse conveys a sort of glib negligence, a sense that the writer is so tired of his own thoughts that he can’t bear to link them together in a more coherent way. If the exclamation point signals that the writer is excited about what he wrote, then the ellipsis signals that he is barely paying attention at all. And who is, on the internet?
Even better is the two-dot ellipsis (written as ..), which has so many deep layers of meaninglessness that it’s practically a short story in itself. It combines the boredom of the ellipsis with the carelessness of a typo. Did the writer mean to type a period? Did he mean to type an ellipsis? Anybody who would use an ellipsis as punctuation is probably blind to typos, but suppose he actually intended to type two dots? What might he mean by that? Anything?
It’s easy to say that Strunk & White are good enough for the ’10s, but with the popularity of the internet making more writers than ever, it’s just not possible to express new attitudes with old tools. You can say that the ellipsis is slipshod, apathetic, and ignorant — but that’s just who we are.
posted January 19, 2010 | Comments (3)
Ghostbusters
Last week, the New York Times Magazine ran an article by Ethan Waters about the export of American classifications of mental illness to the rest of the world, and the displacement of native classifications. Although he wants us to agree that indigenous concepts of mental illness are worth preserving, the article is handicapped by the author’s refusal to describe most of these diseases; he says
…illnesses found only in other cultures are often treated like carnival sideshows. Koro, amok and the like can be found far back in the American diagnostic manual (DSM-IV, Pages 845-849) under the heading “culture-bound syndromes.” Given the attention they get, they might as well be labeled “Psychiatric Exotica: Two Bits a Gander.”
And so we are unable to learn that koro is also known as “genital retraction syndrome,” a form of panic attack in which victims believe that their penises are retracting into their bodies, usually by means of witchcraft. Injuries are often seen in victims attempting to keep their penises extended by main force, or by mob action against the accused witches.
Waters’ implicit assumption is that it would be a shame if koro and similar diseases were to fade away, replaced perhaps by American-style panic attacks. It’s hard to say what the people of Ghana, who beat 12 sorcerers to death for penis theft a decade ago, would lose by the switch, or whether Malaysians who suffer from amok, a disease characterized by the sufferer attempting to “kill or seriously injure anyone he encounters,” wouldn’t do better to adopt American ideas of sociopathy. He does mention that culture influences the way humans experience otherwise universal mental illnesses, but never really follows through on that: If American insanity is edging out Tanzanian insanity, that must be because American culture is edging out Tanzanian culture to some degree. And that’s okay! American culture is okay, and even if our civilization’s understanding of mental illness is different from an indigenous understanding, it’s hard to argue that it’s worse.
Later in the article, to bolster his view that the DSM-IV is bad for our health, he describes the different experiences of schizophrenics in America and Tanzania. In short, Tanzanian schizophrenics have a better prognosis because Tanzanians view schizophrenia as mere possession by spirits, while Americans view it as a dreadful, incurable brain disease, treatable only with medication and intensive therapy.
Left unsaid is that the Western view is right. Schizophrenia isn’t possession by spirits. There are no spirits. Schizophrenia is a dreadful and incurable brain disease, and even if viewing it in that light is bad for our collective prognosis as a society, then there’s not much we can do: If the shoe fits, wear it. To encourage Tanzanians to maintain wrong beliefs about the causes of mental illness for their own good is condescending and ultimately hopeless.
In conclusion, he says
“No one would suggest that we withhold our medical advances from other countries, but it’s perhaps past time to admit that even our most remarkable scientific leaps in understanding the brain haven’t yet created the sorts of cultural stories from which humans take comfort and meaning. When these scientific advances are translated into popular belief and cultural stories, they are often stripped of the complexity of the science and become comically insubstantial narratives. Take for instance this Web site text advertising the antidepressant Paxil: ‘Just as a cake recipe requires you to use flour, sugar and baking powder in the right amounts, your brain needs a fine chemical balance in order to perform at its best.’ The Western mind, endlessly analyzed by generations of theorists and researchers, has now been reduced to a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowl of our skulls.”
I can’t deny that “a batter of chemicals” lacks the whodunit appeal of “spirits did it!”, but speaking as (I hope) a typical American, I draw a lot of comfort from the mixing bowl analogy. If a cake has too little baking powder, just add more. Fixing a cake recipe might not be a satisfying narrative, but it’s easy and it usually works. If your schizophrenia is caused by a chemical imbalance, you can always take Clozapine. But if you’re possessed by spirits, who are you gonna call?