the-wordsmiths-blog

Feeding the Monster

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:33:46 +0100

The United States shares over nineteen hundred miles of border with Mexico, and Mexico is fighting for its life. Drug cartels are attacking the government and each other for control of border crossings into the US, and thousands of people have died in the fighting. Some are "soldiers" in the drug gangs, but many of the dead are law enforcement officers, civil servants, and innocent bystanders. While the US-Mexico border has always been a troubled region – it's been observed that the income disparity between the US and Mexico is greater than that of any other two contiguous countries on earth – the strife and suffering occurring there now has reached a point that cripples Mexico's civic life and damages our own.

Americans are not bystanders in this fight. If only we were. Our role has been far more malign: tens of millions of Americans use illegal drugs, and together they form the vast market that has made these cartels so rich and powerful. The drug lords in Mexico have become strong enough to corrupt officials and command death squads, and they couldn't have done it without us.

I don't use drugs, and I have little understanding of what addiction is like. If you're addicted to illegal drugs, all I can offer is what I have observed in myself: that I need many reasons, and not only one, to make any change in my life. So in addition to all the other reasons you may have for seeking treatment, think about the good people you're hurting, and the evil people you're helping, by buying drugs.

And if you're a recreational drug user whose participation remains a matter of choice, I'd ask you to consider this: doing drugs is no longer an act of rebellion. Using illegal drugs is a vote FOR authority figures that are far more unfair, far more repressive, and far more brutal than the worst cop or teacher you ever met in high school.

I am a victim of bacon's deliciousness

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:33:54 +0100

It is not reasonable how much I like bacon. Sure, we all have plenty of foods we enjoy, but then there's that category of things we feel we were born to love. Coke goes in that category for me, served in a tall glass over plenty of ice. So did Chips Ahoy, until they monkeyed with the manufacturing process several years ago. And so does bacon, served with scrambled eggs and toast, or put in a BLT next to pickles and a glass of sweet tea.

Why is there a place in my brain specially made to love a vein-clogging carcinogen? A walk down the meat aisle in any supermarket is enough to tell you I'm not the only one. There must be a hundred kinds of bacon. The top brands are over five bucks a pound, and they keep selling it! The answer to why we all love it so much lies in our primitive past. For most of human history, hunger stalked our lives, and eating a pig was a pretty good idea. It had lots of protein, and plenty of calories (already in the form of fat) to pack on against the next famine. And if it clogged your arteries? Please. What were you going to do? Live a long life? There's a bear behind you that has other ideas. So, the benefits of loving pork far outweighed the costs.

But now, a love of bacon is like a piece of bad code, left over from an earlier release of humanity, causing fatal errors. I think of it almost like an allergy. An allergy is an emergency response to a non-emergency situation. Your body tells you that ragweed pollen is a big problem, and makes your tissues swell up and your nose run. It's a case of your body telling you something that just isn't true. That's how it is with bacon. And yet I always believe the lie. The pan gets hot, the bacon starts sizzling, and I say, "Oh, yeah. That is exactly, exactly what I want."

If you've ever seen A Streetcar Named Desire, you may remember the climactic scene in which Marlon Brando scoops up Vivien Leigh in his arms and says, in his brutish way, "We've had this date with each other from the beginning!" Well, that describes me and bacon.

And sadly, the bacon is Brando.

Bonuses for the well-off, courtesy of us

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:51:36 +0100

On CNBC (the cable business news channel) a few weeks ago, the CEO of American International Group made his case for using taxpayer bailout money to pay bonuses to AIG's executives. The situation is this: AIG, one of the world's largest insurance and financial services companies, got about $150 billion of the money that the federal government made available to help unfreeze credit markets. AIG plans to pay back some of that money by selling some of its operations. The CEO, Edward Liddy, argued on December 22 that, without "retention bonuses," executives in the spun-off operations will fly the coop, thereby reducing the value of those assets and lessening the amount that taxpayers will get back.

To his credit, Mr. Liddy has announced that he will take compensation of $1 for 2008 and 2009. Opinions differ about whether his strategy will be successful in keeping the most talented executives on board at AIG.

In forming our own opinions, let's consider a deeper issue. Is it in our society's interest to have the most talented people in the financial sector at all? It was described to me that the financial sector creates value by doing two things: allocating capital and managing risk. Those things are important - but are they really THAT important? More important than actually manufacturing stuff? So important that the people who excel in them should be some of the wealthiest people on earth? While they do provide a service, is that service really worth the eighteen or twenty percent return on investment that they tend to make?

Look at the skyline of an American city in this first decade of the new century. Most of the tall buildings have the names of banks on them, with some insurance companies thrown in for variety. These endeavors throw off enough cash to build skyscrapers, while companies that actually make things are hardly represented. So, when the best and brightest choose their careers, they find that the world of finance offers the shortest route to wealth. People who, had they been born a century earlier, might have made their fortunes as inventors and factory owners, have instead devoted themselves to crafting, and trading in, increasingly complex financial instruments. Is that really a good use of human resources?

Under normal circumstances, you could argue that these questions are moot. People may choose to work wherever they want, and there's nothing wrong with the profit motive. But these aren't normal circumstances. We (the taxpayers) are being asked to play a role in providing incentive for people at the highest levels of achievement. So let's point the incentive in a better direction!

The Symbology of Transportation

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:44:19 +0100

Note the associations that different ethnicities have with different forms of transportation.
    I'm half Irish, and in the collective memory of the Irish-Americans, travel by ship is mainly positive. For all its difficulty, it was a journey by ship that liberated my Irish ancestors from famine and oppression in their homeland, and brought them to America.
    Ships are a dark presence in the collective memory of most African-Americans, because ships were what made possible the oceanic slave trade, which killed and enslaved millions of people. For many blacks, trains, not ships, are the symbols of hope. The movement to help blacks escape from slavery was called the Underground Railroad. In modern times, the creation of a TV show called "Soul Train" reflected that associations with the idea of trains are mainly positive.
    I wouldn't expect trains to have positive associations in the Jewish community. Trains were what mediated the Holocaust, bringing millions of innocent people to their deaths in concentration camps. But if trains meant the beginning of the nightmare, tanks meant its end. Elie Wiesel's Night ends with his memory of an American tank standing at the gate of the camp, bringing liberation. A tank is one of the last images in the movie Life is Beautiful, the visible image of a promise kept to a small boy in an Italian concentration camp. That's why it didn't surprise me when I saw a large van in New York City, used by a Jewish outreach group, proudly labeled "Mitzvah Tank."
    There is no way that you'd find such positive connections with tanks as symbols among Palestinians. Tanks are the weapon of those that they fight. A tank lumbering into a Palestinian neighborhood is bad news.
    So, for Irish-Americans, ships good.
    For African-Americans, ships bad, trains good.
    For Jewish people, trains bad, tanks good.
    For Palestinians, tanks bad. I wonder what form of transportation is good in their symbology?

In Defense of Self-Medicating

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:44:31 +0100

Some directions on medicines and home health care products are intended to protect the health of the manufacturer, not the health of the consumer. For example: the caution on the side of the Q-Tips box that says, "Do not insert into ear." Come on. Are you telling me they created that long probe-like implement so I can clean my earlobes? Sure, they don't want people poking out their eardrums, but if consumers actually started following those instructions, Q-Tips' market would collapse. It's cynical; they depend upon people inserting Q-Tips into their ears, but they don't want to bear responsibility for the occasional jackass who works it in there with a pair of pliers.

I have a prescription for allergy medicine, a nose spray called Flonase. When the allergist "trained" me on how to use it, he told me to schpritz it in there, then lean forward so it drips into the front of my nasal passages, then lay back in a chair so it drips into the back nasal passages. The next time I visited him, he told me that "they've learned better now," and the "lean forward" step had been eliminated. When I followed these new directions, I could feel that it wasn't working as well - the front of my head felt stuffier. Then I said to myself, "I'll bet these new directions have nothing to do with efficacy. I'll bet they've found that some people are so feeble that, when you ask them to lean forward, they black out, fall down, crack their skulls and sue you. So they changed the instructions to protect themselves." I have absolutely no proof of this, just the evidence of my own experience. So I've disregarded the doctor and done it the old way.