the menace of mercury

I was doing some research yesterday on the dangers of mercury and I stumbled upon a few resources I want to pass along.

The first is an amazing video from the University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine. Using actual brain neurons from snails, they show exactly how mercury damages brain neurons. It's extraordinary:



The U.S. coal industry emits 96,000 pounds of mercury into the air each year. Watching the video it's easy to understand why those emissions are so catastrophic for human health. What is more, the fact that drug companies continue to use mercury as a preservative in vaccines (including the flu vaccine) is absolutely fucking insane.

Next, I stumbled upon a fascinating article in the Times Online (UK): 'Green' lightbulbs poison workers: Hundreds of factory staff are being made ill by mercury used in bulbs destined for the West. Money quote:

Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs. A surge in foreign demand, set off by a European Union directive making these bulbs compulsory within three years, has also led to the reopening of mercury mines that have ruined the environment.

Over a year ago I wrote a post arguing that the environmental movement was being played when it came to compact fluorescent light bulbs and increasingly it appears that I was correct. It is not a complicated argument to say that using nuclear power or mercury in lightbulbs in order to reduce CO2 emissions is a bad trade off. I'm hoping that within a year a two that organic light-emitting diode lightbulbs (OLED) will come down sufficiently in price so as to make CFL's obsolete. Related to the issue of CFLs, check out this brilliant article by Derrick Jensen on the limits of consumer choice as a tool for environmental protection.

Finally, I just ordered the book, Diagnosis Mercury: Money, Politics & Poison by Dr. Jane Hightower and hope to have a review of it soon.

Tea parties show that Lyndon LaRouche has taken over GOP

For me the most fascinating aspect of the tea party phenomenon that we have witnessed in 2009 is the degree to which it shows that Lyndon LaRouche has taken over the modern Republican Party.

The Republican party is an extremely hierarchical organization -- a pyramid with one leader at the top who cannot be questioned or challenged. And after eight years of being led by a shell of a man, the GOP was simply a shell of a party. No leadership had been developed within the party in over eight years so they were forced to nominate a septuagenarian and a glorified cocktail waitress for president. Furthermore not since Reagan has the party had any idea of how to mobilize people -- contracting that out to the NRA, talk radio, and the Christian Coalition.

By 2009, with the complete absence of any leadership at the head of the party, Lyndon LaRouche was able to walk right in and take over the Republican party without firing a shot. Because, as crazy as he is, LaRouche still knows how to mobilize a few (whacked out, paranoid) people. Make no mistake about it, the tea parties that we witnessed this year are pure Lyndon LaRouche and his gang of crazies. The photos of bodies piled at Dachau, the chaotic rallies with an infinite number of conflicting complaints all presented at the same time, the complete lack of any cohesive rational narrative, the obsessive focus on demonstrating just pure crazy paranoid anger -- that's all signature Lyndon LaRouche mobilization.

So when Michele Bachmann invites the LaRouche crowd to descend on DC -- and the rest of the Republican political establishment gets pulled into doing their bidding, it's really a remarkable statement about the complete collapse of a once proud American political party. The fact that traditional beltway media (and the RNC itself) doesn't realize it's been played by LaRouche shows what a disaster our political pundit class has become as well.

Photo of LaRouche supporters from back in 2007 -- before they took over the Republican Party. The telltale sign of a LaRouche protest is that they always make sure to coat everything they say or do with just a little extra dose of crazy.

Did Marya Hornbacher kill the "pain-and-suffering-memoir" genre and if so, is that a bad thing?

The pain-and-suffering-memoir genre has been hot in publishing for much of the last 15 years.

Susanna Kaysen seemed to jump start the modern pain-and-suffering-memoir craze in 1993 with her brilliant account of her experience in a mental institution, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, in Girl, Interrupted. (BTW if you have the chance, read the book, but don't watch the movie -- they are very very different.)

In 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel came out Prozac Nation, an astonishingly beautiful memoir of living with depression which became a national bestseller.

Then in 1998, Marya Hornbacher came out with Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. Wasted is a masterpiece, a work of literature so poignant and searing that I imagine people will be reading it 50 or 100 years from now in the same way that we now read Sylvia Plath.

So last year (2008) I was surprised to see that Marya Hornbacher had a new memoir out called Madness: a Bipolar Life. My head tilted like Scooby Doo realizing, ruh roh, something was not right here. There were no loose ends at the conclusion of Wasted -- Hornbacher had triumphed over the most severe case of anorexia imaginable and fallen in love and married a wonderful guy. There was no need for a sequel. In fact, putting out a second pain-and-suffering memoir seemed to violate the #1 rule of the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre which is: You only get to write one! And yet here, in my hand, at the local bookstore was Marya Hornbacher's new pain-and-suffering-memoir, Madness, exactly 10 years after Wasted had been published.

Naturally I bought it took it home and read it in one sitting. Now Hornbacher writes that she had likely been suffering from bipolar disorder all along and anorexia was merely a symptom of this larger disorder (which makes sense of course). In the course of Madness she bounces from one disaster to another -- severe cutting, alcoholism, sabotaging relationships with friends and family, multiple trips in and out of mental institutions -- with such frequency that she starts to appear self indulgent. The writing in Madness lacks the insight and power of Wasted -- perhaps the result of memory loss from multiple electro-convulsive ("shock") therapy treatments (which she recounts in Madness). In Wasted, Hornbacher, for all of her setbacks, was still always the subject of her own destiny. In Madness, Hornbacher has become pure object buffeted by the relentless waves of misery.

Wasted was perhaps the singular achievement in the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre. And Madness feels like the work of an aging championship boxer coming back into the ring long after he should have retired. After 15 years of one-upsmanship in the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre, with one extremely talented author after another showing that she (usually it's a she) could survive (and even thrive! amidst) the most severe hardships imaginable, it is as if Marya Hornbacher turned in the ultimate piece of performance art, going all in against all comers in the game of misery poker to show that no matter what, she will always have the winning hand. Madness feels like the end of an era in publishing, the curtain coming down on an era of self disclosure as a form of self help.

But I wonder if, in the process, Marya Hornbacher also gave us a great gift and opened up space for new forms of storytelling to emerge. Because there was always something disingenuous about the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre. The stories were always told as a "Hero's Journey" and seemed to follow the same script -- an earnest well-intentioned young woman (or man) is beset by some evil affliction (disease, abuse, injury, or accident) that is not understood by western medicine and perhaps is caused by our modern era itself. Through trials and tribulations the author figures out how to smote the evil affliction and lives happily ever after and then sends us all a note about how she did it so that we might be aided in our own journeys. (Of course that is putting too fine a point on it, one could also make a compelling case that these authors were merely trying to narrate their own experience and illuminate the human condition and had no intention of telling a Hero's Journey sort of tale.)

The only problem with the hero's journey structure is that, particularly with mental health challenges, it rarely works out as neat and tidy as all that in real life (and memoirs after all are supposed to be an account of real life). For example, Elizabeth Wurtzel went on from the success of Prozac Nation to write a self help advice book for women, The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman. But in order to complete that advice book she started taking speed and in the process became a meth addict -- which then led to her next memoir More Now Again: a Memoir of Addiction. [Kaysen, to her credit, ends Girl, Interrupted decidedly unsure -- unsure whether she was ever sick, unsure of whether she will ever be considered what society calls "well." The movie of Girl, Interrupted on the other hand presents a Hero's Journey that runs counter to the ambivalence portrayed so effectively in the book.]

In some ways then, Madness: a Bipolar Life functions like Richard Wright's masterpiece Native Son (although obviously the pathologies in Madness are much much less severe than those depicted in Native Son). Do you remember reading Native Son in high school? In the book, Wright creates a sort of anti-hero in his character Bigger Thomas. An Amazon.com review states:

Other books had focused on the experience of growing up black in America -- including Wright's own highly successful Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of five stories that focused on the victimization of blacks who transgressed the code of racial segregation. But they suffered from what he saw as a kind of lyrical idealism, setting up sympathetic black characters in oppressive situations and evoking the reader's pity. In Native Son, Wright was aiming at something more. In Bigger, he created a character so damaged by racism and poverty, with dreams so perverted, and with human sensibilities so eroded, that he has no claim on the reader's compassion. ... Wright's genius was that, in preventing us from feeling pity for Bigger, he forced us to confront the hopelessness, misery, and injustice of the society that gave birth to him. --Andrew Himes

I think finally that's what Hornbacher does with Madness. She smashes the pain-and-suffering-memoir genre and in the process smashes the Hero's Journey form of story telling. She creates in herself a character whose extremes of self destructive behavior are so far beyond the norm that she no longer makes a claim on the reader's sympathies. She seems to be saying 'here I am, fucked up, beyond repair, beyond happily ever after, that is my experience of life, can you bear to look at it? can you stand it if life does not come wrapped in a bow?' In the process, I think she opens up space for us to once again see the world as it is with all of its light and darkness. Madness thus opens up space for stories that go beyond the Hero's Journey, into the depth of the human experience.

Update #1: this post is slightly modified from an earlier version.

I suppose it was only a matter of time...

I was at the local wine shop the other night and the guy behind me in line was buying a beverage called Neuro Sleep -- it's literally a soft drink to help you sleep -- an anti-energy drink. I went home and googled it and it turns out that the Neuro Drink company makes beverages to tweek performance and mood in ALL areas of your life -- Neuro Gasm to improve sexual performance, Neuro Sonic for work, Neuro Trim to lose weight, Neuro Sport for exercise, and Neuro Bliss to manage depression I guess.

In fact, we've been using beverages to tweak mood for a long time -- various forms of alcohol to (poorly) manage depression, increase desire, or facilitate sleep; various forms of sugary beverages to manage mood and provide fuel during exercise; and coffee or strong tea to boost alertness at work. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that they could add the latest over-the-counter herbal supplements to beverages and then market them as tonics to manage specific neurological functions. But at the same time it all feels so "Brave New World" meets "Children of Men." Oh yeah, the guy behind me in line said Neuro Sleep works great and I should try it -- and the clerk and everyone else in line agreed.

Things that seem normal but aren't, part 4

Continuing my occasional series on things that seem normal but aren't...

8. How totally fucking unhappy most of us are at work. We spend 8, 10, 12 hours a day at work. Most of us are there for a reason -- a common purpose shared with others or just a common goal of wanting to earn a living to provide for the essentials of life -- shelter, food, and medical care for ourselves and those we love. And most of us are totally fucking miserable in our jobs. Employees hate their bosses and see them as selfish, willfully ignorant,and intentionally counterproductive to the mutual aims of all involved. Bosses see their employees as lazy, unproductive, unenlightened impediments to traversing the obvious path laid out in front of them. In spite of seemingly mutual aims between all involved, most workplaces are a total fucking mess.

In a four year undergraduate college degree, most students will take zero classes in management (and no, an undergraduate class in psychology is not very helpful preparation for human relations in the workplace). In an MBA program there are lots of classes on economics, risk management, and decision making but most students will take one class in the art of management at most. In teacher education programs there are lots of classes on pedagogy and curriculum, but very few classes on how we get along with others and successfully negotiate the academic politics around us. In seminaries, where our religious leaders receive their professional training, there are lots of classes in theology but few classes in management. It's really quite extraordinary that the one thing essential to our mutual happiness -- the art of people relating to people -- is almost entirely unstudied in most all of our professional training. There is a sense that most people, in their heart-of-hearts must regard the art of how we are to get along with one another as simply unknowable. But the fact is, there are techniques for how we can and should get along with each other. Some methods are better than others and all of these propositions are knowable, testable, and replicable. The fact that all managers and most employees don't spend lots and lots of time learning, developing, and perfecting these skills is really dumbfounding.

If you are looking for a place to start, I highly recommend, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone (and three other co-authors at the Program on Negotiations at Harvard). Hands down this is the most informative self help book I've ever read.

I also highly recommend Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande Even though the book is focused on how to improve workplace practices in a medical setting, I think his insights about checklists and processes could help improve both performance and satisfaction in lots of different workplace settings.

If you have other ideas for tools, techniques, and processes that you find helpful, I'd be eager to learn about them in the comments.

intimacy defined

In the midst of an otherwise thoroughly depressing article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about the limits of marriage counseling, is this gem of a sentence that I will now carry with me (slightly modified so that it will make sense out of context):

Intimacy begins when one person expresses revealing feelings;
intimacy builds when the listener responds with support and empathy; and
intimacy is achieved when the (initial) discloser hears this support and empathy and feels understood, validated and cared for.

I think that is very well stated.

Things that seem normal but aren't, part 3

Continuing my occasional series, Things That Seem Normal But Aren't, I've got two more for you today.

6. The sheer volume of vampire stories in film, TV, and books. Look, I could understand if a new vampire movie came out every 15 to 20 years. But it seems that a new vampire-themed media product comes out every other week these days. Conservatives love vampires (ahem, Ayn Rand), progressives love vampires, men love vampires, women TOTALLY love vampires, old people like vampires, young people like vampires, Americans like vampires, people around the world like vampires. As a media brand, vampire rule. Which is all very odd when you think about it. What makes a sickly pale white guy who sucks people's blood compelling let alone sexy?

I gotta figure that the enduring power of vampires in our collective consciousness stems from the fact that vampires are really serving as a sort of metaphor for something else. My hunch is that vampires serve as a metaphor for the ways that men mess up women's lives and the ways in which women sacrifice their own lives for desire. As Carol Gilligan points out, for much of human history (really up until about the late 1960s) desire (eros) and death (thanatos) often went hand in hand (desire led to sexual union which led to childbirth where a high percentage of women lost their lives). Even since the advent of the pill and even with improved maternal and infant mortality in childbirth, men still seem to find ways to make women's lives messy (as Rene Russo's character Catherine said so well in The Thomas Crown Affair).

7. Car chases in movies. Even though we've mercifully escaped the era of the Cannonball Run series there are still an awful lot of car chases in movies. Which is surprising given that there really aren't that many car chases in real life. Of course there is the occasional O.J. Slow Speed Chase or various police pursuits on the freeway covered by local news traffic helicopters. But those are usually covered on the local evening news. It's unclear why someone would also pay money to see such things in a theater. But I think the role of the car chase in modern movies is not to simulate reality. Rather, the movie car chase recreates the primitive animal sensation of pursuit -- both predator and prey -- that is hardwired into our limbic system through millions of years of evolution. I think the movie car chase, even though unrealistic and foreign to our daily lives, gives us the dopamine rush and subsequent sense of relief when the danger passes that makes us feel satisfied -- like we went on an intense journey -- as we leave the theater (or as is usually the case these days -- as we hit the "open" button on the DVD remote and walk to the fridge).

Immortality projects

A friend recently introduced me to George Monbiot's blog and it's excellent. Monbiot writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper in the UK and has written extensively on global climate change, corporate power, and environmental protection. He also has one of the finest posts you'll ever read on career advice for aspiring journalists.

In a recent post, Monbiot gave a great short summary of Ernest Becker's writing and I want to quote from it briefly and then riff on the ideas that came up in connection with this idea:

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with "vital lies" or "the armour of character"(10). We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. Over 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker's thesis(11). When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it and increasing their striving for self-esteem(12).

I think Ernest Becker is correct -- immortality projects drive so much of what we do on this planet. Capitalism and the pursuit of wealth are immortality projects, religion is an immortality project, family can be an immortality project, writing, careers, even really intense hobbies can become immortality projects. So much of what we do is an attempt to build a name or thing or idea that lives on long after we do.

It makes sense then that our fights over jobs or politics or religion are so fierce -- the other person who disagrees with me or who is blocking me from accomplishing what I want to accomplish -- is getting in the way of my immortality project and that cannot stand!

And then one day you realize that it is all so silly. In all likelihood there is no immortality to be gained anyway, so what exactly are we fighting for? Time swallows everything and appears to be merciless. One of my all time favorite passages in any book is this from Milan Kundera in the Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Tereza's dream reveals the true function of kitsch: Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.

With even just a little honest examination, all of these immortality projects all become just kitsch. Capitalism is just a folding screen set up to curtain off death. Religion is just a folding screen set up to curtain off death. World's records, tall buildings, that cherished book project, is just a folding screen set up to curtain off death.

The path of the Buddhist monk then makes sense. To their credit, Buddhists are willing to take a long gaze at things as they truly are. Looking into the abyss, they come to realize there is really nothing to push back against and they slow down, stop, and sit still in silence for the rest of their lives. But then of course Buddhism can easily devolve into its own immortality project too so it shows just how difficult it is to escape from the clutches of kitsch.

Lincoln was really on to something when he said, "The world will little note nor longer remember what we say here..." In fact I wonder if the reason the Gettysburg address has become so famous is because of Lincoln's existential rambling at the beginning of the speech that really captured the frailty of the human condition.

But here's the thing, I think we need immortality projects in order to keep our sanity. Even if we know they are silly, even if we know they are untrue, I think we should do them anyway. I think immortality projects are the motorboat that keeps us one step ahead of the sharks of depression. When I'm actively, passionately pursuing my own personal immortality project, I'm really quite happy. Immortality projects are often the thing that gives life meaning and brings us into connection with others. And even if, as the Landmark Forum folks point out, life is actually empty and meaningless, so what? We should still pursue that thing that we think is important just because we think it is important. I think recognizing that our immortality projects are silly enables us to hold them more loosely, to back off when they start making us miserable. But at the same time, I think they should be pursued because they make us happy. And if we can do it lightly, then perhaps it can bring us into greater communion with our fellow travelers on this rock.

----

Footnotes from the first blockquote above:

10. Ernest Becker, 1973. The Denial of Death, pp47-66. Republished 1997. Free Press Paperbacks, New York.

11. Tom Pyszczynski et al, 2006. On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations. Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4, 328–356.

12. Jeff Greenberg et al, 1992. Terror Management and Tolerance: does mortality salience always intensify negative reactions to others who threaten one’s worldview? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 63, No 2 212-220.

Capitalism is a wave form not a straight line

Continuing a theme today...

Interesting article a few months back in The New Yorker (subscription required) called, "The Secret Cycle: Is the financier Martin Armstrong a con man, a crank, or a genius?" by Nick Paumgarten (October 12, 2009). The paragraph that really stayed with me (and prompted me to write a blog post about it almost 3 months later) is this one:

"In the nineteen-twenties, Nikolai Kondratiev, a Soviet economist, concluded that capitalism was inclined to half-century cycles of boom and bust and boom again, rather than, as Marx believe, a single, inexorable march toward collapse. Wrong answer. Stalin had him imprisoned and executed. It was the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, he of "creative destruction," who called these cycles Kondratiev waves and popularized them in the West. "

I think that is it exactly. Capitalism is a wave form -- innovation followed by greed followed by collapse over and over again in 5 to 50 year cycles of boom and bust. [I could add: Capitalism is a wave form of innovation followed by greed followed by collapse -- followed by rebirth IF progressives are elected to clean up the problem, i.e. Franklin Roosevelt; OR fascism if conservatives are elected/seize power in response to the problem, i.e. Augusto Pinochet.]

I think the Wall Street guys know this too. They study the financial data more than anyone, they know that markets move up and down in waves. But the Wall Street guys never tell the general public that information. Rather, when they are selling stocks, 401(k) plans, and IRAs to the rest of us they always portray the market as a straight line of 8% returns year in and year out. ("Don't think about it," they say, "just give us your retirement savings and everything will work out fine. Trust us." Hard to imagine that not working out.) And it is precisely in the difference between the wave forms that Wall Street is riding and the straight line that they are selling to the rest of us that Wall Street makes all of its billions -- betting against the down times and riding the wave of succeeding bubbles.

Furthermore, the capitalist enablers in politics, Republicans, also sell capitalism to the public as an inexorable march of steady progress (profit), a rocket ship streaking ever onwards and upwards. And it is precisely this public lie of the straight line of capitalism by Republican politicians (and way too many Democratic politicians) that gives the Wall Street guys the cover they need to make money off of the actual peaks and valleys of capitalism.

How much wiser then it would to have a public policy that understood capitalism as a wave form subject to inevitable booms and busts, than as a straight line around which we try to build rational incremental linear policies. Indeed the challenge of progressive politics is to take the wave form of capitalism and straighten it out through massive regulation, enforcement of white collar criminal statutes, and a social safety net that protects the most vulnerable in society from the vicissitudes of the market.

I think it is wonderfully liberating to see that the both the straight line down of Marx and the straight line up of capitalist apologists are incorrect. It liberates us to focus on the challenge of how to design public policy based on curves -- calculus rather than arithmetic.

Update #1: I probably should have spaced out my earlier post, "Men's desire is a straight line, women's desire is a wave form" with this one because even though they both talk about straight lines and wave forms, I don't think the two topics (the booms and busts of capitalism and the peaks and valleys of women's desire) have anything to do with each other.

Men's desire is a straight line, women's desire is a wave form

Sally Law in the latest issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating interview with Cindy Meston and David Buss, psychology professors at the University of Texas at Austin, about their book, "Why Women Have Sex." Here's the paragraph that jumped out at me:

[W]hereas men’s sexual orgasm tends to be fairly predictable and reliable in the sense of its occurrence, women’s sexual orgasm is highly variable. It's variable from woman to woman, and variable within the same woman from partner to partner, circumstance to circumstance, etc. Sexual attraction provides another example. Men’s sexual attraction tends to be based heavily on visual cues. Women’s sexual attraction tends to be far more nuanced. It’s affected by olfactory cues (how a man smells), personality of the partner (such as sense of humor and confidence), social status (how he is regarded in the eyes of his peers), other women's judgments of how attractive he is, and many other factors, in addition to the visual cues. The qualities women find to be sexually attractive in a man also vary across the ovulatory cycle, such as a shift toward finding more masculine features (faces, bodies, and voices) attractive at ovulation.

To put this simply, men's desire appears to be a straight line -- fixed, constant, predictable, cliched even (and often involves light blue eye shadow). But women's desire seems more like a wave form -- nuanced, varied, shifting over time. So why are men and women so rarely on the same page? Because the straight line of men's desire and the wave form of women's desire only intersect occasionally.

Now that may be putting too fine a point on it. But I think it is helpful to understand that men and women are not mirror images of each other, but rather seem to think about and experience desire in very different ways.













And of course Dr.'s Meston and Buss focused their research on heterosexual desire. It would be fascinating to replicate their research but focus it instead on homosexual relationships and those in which gender is more variable.

[Note: it's tough to write about this topic without slipping into using sex and gender synonymously. But as I pointed out in a previous post, sex is not the same thing as gender.

Also because I occasionally write on sex and gender (and use explicit language), it's interesting to see the keywords in the google searches that sometimes bring people to my site. Many many people who end up at my post, bleeding heart liberal, were not exactly looking for an exegesis on subconscious framing in political speech. But for the few dudes out there who were looking to get off, ended up here by accident, and maybe learned a little something new in the process, I guess that's to the good too.]