Better Condom Prize: Bill Gates

The big news is Bill Gates is offering a $100,000 prize for the invention of a superior condom.

As the wags on Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me noted this morning,  Two words which one would not want associated with a condom are "Micro"  and "Soft."

There were also remarks about a device coming from the Microsoft giant which ought to be effective against viruses.

Developing low cost, effective, simple and human power driven water pumps for clean water in African villages is something folks of all political and religious persuasion can rally around;  but for condoms, we've still got Catholics who believe if we do not talk about or plan for sex, it will not happen.  Or that when it does, it's God's will, especially if pregnancy results, even if it's pregnancy accompanied by HIV infection, which is all too common. 

Got to give Mr. Gates points for trying.

Planned Parenthood has the better idea.  Planned Parenthood understands it's not the construction or the experience of the condom which is the problem; it's the availability.  The bashful, painfully shy adolescent boy who does not plan in advance much would likely use condoms if he did not have to walk into a store and purchase them from  some matronly clerk, who looks like his mother. If there were a condom machine in every middle and high school bathroom, it would be regularly vandalized, need constant upkeep, but it would do far more to prevent teen aged pregnancy and venereal disease than a better condom. If every bar had a condom dispenser, then the male patron, or the female patron, who has just met his or her sexually attractive opposite number could pay a quick trip to the bathroom and emerge equipped to prevent a one night stand from becoming an incubating fetus.

Mr. Gates, as far as the Phantom can discern, is a pretty benign billionaire. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates maybe one or two others have done well by their fellow man, have their hearts in the right place. 

But let us not forget the much beleaguered Planned Parenthood, which has been doing God's work for decades, and is in the cross hairs of every wacko right wing moron for the same amount of time.

Mr. Gates has made his fortune as an engineer, solving all sorts of technical problems. He was also adept at divining what sorts of engineered products would appeal to the minds of buyers.  What Planned Parenthood does is to solve problems which have a scientific basis, but the science is pretty straightforward; what is not so straightforward is solving the sociological, the anthropological (values) and the psychological forces which prevents condom use.  

Even college educated men will say "Using a condom is like taking a shower in a raincoat."  That this is not in fact even remotely accurate, has not prevented this catchy slogan, a sort of machismo chant, from providing cover for stupidity. Nobody ever says, "Having sex without a condom is like sky diving without a parachute: it can be fun for about 12 minutes but it gets messy in the end."

 Mr. Gates might be well advised to fund Planned Parenthood directly, of if he finds that too fraught with political problems, create his own organization which does the same thing. 

Dysfunctional/ Functional Organizations: Success and Failure

There are three important works which might form the nidus of a good course to offer college seniors as they find themselves on the launching pad into the real world, out of the academy and into the fire, as it were.

It might help some of us, who are already here to understand we are not alone and the difficulties of dealing with bosses and coworkers has always been with us and likely always will be. 

Of course, all of this is from the American perspective.  The Phantom suspects other societies, in particular the Germans, and maybe now, the Chinese, have been better at 
organizing people into highly efficient and functional groups.  The German Wehrmacht, the army of the Third Reich, was able to roll over the Russians, the British, the French, and all the lesser military powers with superior efficiency, planning, technology and imagination.  Ultimately, the industrial capacity of the United States and the sheer weight of the Soviet leviathan and Russia's withering winter was too much to overcome.

As longtime readers of this blog will know, the Phantom considers the best portrait of a dystopia, a dysfunction society and dysfunctional organizations is The Wire. Virtually everything you see in your own job, company, organization that can go wrong, does go wrong in The Wire. The image of the police detective sergeant who nails a plywood siding back on the door of a townhouse which contains murder victims because he does not want to find those bodies listed on his white board at the office--they would wreck his statistics of unsolved murders--is so classic for the mindset of the organization man.  

The Band of Brothers provides a detailed picture of an organization which actually does function successfully--the American Army actually does push forward and defeat the German Army--but it does this despite the stupidity of its leadership. It is the non coms and the enlisted men who suffer the consequences of asinine decisions by officers and top leadership, but somehow, the Allied advance overwhelms the German Army, which is smarter and better at just about everything, but simply cannot deal with the overwhelming numbers the Americans are throwing at it. In the process, you can see the great sense of purpose and resolve individuals derive from the magnificent victory they've achieved, a victory which no individual could ever have achieved, a victory which occurred because of group effort.

And then there is Enough Glory for All , an obscure CBC docudrama about the efforts of Sir Frederick Banting and Sir Charles Best in 1921, at the University of Toronto, to discover the cause of juvenile diabetes, to identify the missing agent, insulin, and to develop that agent into a usable treatment, saving the lives of millions through the year. This, too, took the talents, the specialized knowledge of many people, working together, but the efforts were not connected into good teamwork and they almost crashed into defeat because of a lack of vision and good management. 

Looking at these three worlds side by side reveals much about where each of us finds himself in today's America--on the cusp of changes which could change the world, or mired in a culture which is composed of groups of people who  care nothing for anyone but themselves (e.g., the Barksdale drug gang) but who strive only to maximize gain for themselves.  For those of us who are employed by a company or organization which is designed to accomplish something but we see people we work with or who are above us in the pecking order thwarting the accomplishment of the goal, we can look at these three works and realize we are not alone, thus has it ever been and likely always will be.

Priorities: Income Wealth Distribution et al

What would the Phantom change in this country to achieve his utopia?
1/ The first thing would be income redistribution:
When the CEO of a company makes in one hour what the average worker in his country takes 1 month to earn, that requires corrective action. We are talking about "publicly held" companies here, for the most part, so we should, theoretically all have an interest as stake holders. Actually, only 50% or less of Americans own any stock in any company, so the "public" which owns companies is actually already a rarefied part of our population. And a good share of this 50% may be poor, owning stock only because they have inherited it or it's part of a pension and they cannot touch it. But, in any case, the right to reduce what the CEO makes, what the 1% owns is clearly a right which belongs to the 99%
Below is a link which graphically illustrates the income maldistribution in the USA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&feature=player_embedded

How would this be achieved?  The old fashioned way: Taxing the rich, taxing their incomes, taxing their yachts and their holdings, forbidding them from hiding wealth and aggressively pursuing those Swiss bank accounts, the Cayman Island hideaways. Is this class warfare?  You bet. That upper 1% has been winning that war. It's time for the meek masses to take back this country. 


2/ Return control of the Supreme Court to the people:  Right now, the court is owned by the rich,  as a legacy from George W. Bush who appointed 4 justices who are the most reactionary we have had for a century. They have the power to block any progress designed by even the most progressive Congress and/or President. It would not take a Constitutional amendment to shove these 4 aside, to make sure the court changes regularly, no matter who is President and who controls Congress, but would change in line with the winner of the White House and Congress, albeit at a slower pace. Allow the President one appointment every other year of his tenure, only the 9 most recently appointed allowed to vote.

3/ Start reversing injustices which the Court and Congress have perpetrated, starting with strip searching unconvicted citizens who police have arrested rightly or wrongly, and continuing with outlawing arbitrary "Stop and Frisk" practices in New York and elsewhere as a violation of unreasonable search and seizure. 

4/ Legalize marijuana, heroin, cocaine and empty the prisons of any prisoner sent there for mere position of for sales of small amounts, so the hoppers and corner boys of The Wire ilk would all be set free. Of course, inner city criminal enterprises would have to shift to some other line of work, and the Phantom is sure they will adapt, but at least dope fiends can be regarded and treated much as alcoholics--primarily a medical problem not a felon. Sell all these drugs in "package" stores, regulate the sale, tax it, require HIV testing, Hep C testing, provide clean needles and syringes, do outreach for detoxification.

5/ Legalize, unionize prostitution. Gain control of the health and practices of sex workers. Do mandatory HIV testing, encourage condom use. 

6/ Legalize gay marriage. Make marriage a civil contract, available to any two consenting adults with defined privileges and responsibilities in a progressive licensing system much like progressive drivers' licenses--with more obligations as you go from living together to owning a house to having kids.

7/ Establish a Medicare for all option for all Americans from cradle to grave. Pay physicians salaries and remove from them all responsibility for billing patients.

8/ Tax gas to build railroads, subways, public transportation.

9/ Employ a workforce to repair bridges, highways, tunnels.

10/ Eliminate arbitrary "qualifications" in hiring and employment, e.g. requiring a college degree for jobs for which such degrees do not provide necessary background. There is no reason a welder in an airplane plant who has demonstrated his prowess on the job for 15 years should be denied a management position because he has no college diploma, while somebody with a degree in drinking or an online degree gets the job instead. 

David Kenyon Webster: Man vs Organization Man

Parachute Infantry , the wonderful memoir which provided the substrate for the TV series, Band of Brothers, is remarkable for what it says about the experience of a man who is  just, honest and moral (and these three are not the same) and in what it does not tell you about that man.

It's author David Kenyon Webster is a web of contradictions:  He is the child of privilege, who could have entered the Army as an officer--his parents could have assured that--but who chose to leave Harvard after his sophomore year to join the Army as an enlisted man.  

He was a child of privilege who went to an Ivy League school, but he reacted to the men he met there with contempt and some disgust--they were cold, conniving men who had no sympathy for the suffering of the great mass of men, but cared only for themselves.  He obviously was ready to leave Harvard early. And yet, when he got to the Army, he apparently talked about Harvard so much he looked like a snob to many of his fellow paratroopers.  A young man who acted rashly and then thinks better of what he left behind? He was treated to indignities in the Army which must have made Harvard look pretty tame.

He wanted to see the war as a "grunt" but he was clearly frustrated he never rose above the rank of PFC.  At the end of the war the only officer he seeks out is Captain Spears, who was one of the most relentless, merciless and respected officers in the 506th regiment. Webster makes a point of saying good-bye, saying Spears was the only officer who promoted Webster, if only as an acting sergeant, to a rank above PFC.  "He was the only officer to ever give me a break."  And yet, Webster says, more than once, he never volunteered for anything, hoped every day for the clean, million dollar wound which would get him out of the war, and when he got wounded, he took his time "gold bricking" and convalescing, so he missed the Battle of the Bulge, when his comrades were surrounded at Bastogne. 

Webster describes moments of intense terror and almost paralyzing fear during his time in battle, but he always functions and never fails to act. During a raid depicted inaccurately in the TV show, showing Webster as part of the assault team, in fact  Webster  remained behind, across the river, but he was, in fact, just as much in danger,  in an exposed position manning a machine gun to cover the escape of his brethren paratroopers. He does not brag about this--he simply says he couldn't have lived with himself if he had not remained at his station, firing tracer bullets which could be traced back to his position and could have got him killed.

He says he hated the Army but  never realized how he had been a part of an enormous  force for good in the world,  until Easy Company stumbled upon the concentration camps they liberated. 

He describes dispassionately how his fellow soldiers detested the French, thought the German (civilians) were the best people in Europe, even as the American soldiers threw them out of their homes to billet their companies. The German homes were spotless, comfortable and felt like home. 

Webster could not warm up to the Germans, no matter what virtues they might have, knowing they were part of a group which sent people, women and children off to concentration camps.

He could not bring himself to evict children from their homes in Germany, even when an officer upbraids him saying, "They didn't take any pity on Jewish children or Polish children when they threw those kids out of their homes!" But Webster knows there is a problem with the "they" in that sentence. The German kids he was evicting, and possibly their parents,  did not send Jewish kids off to concentration camps.

While his brothers in arms liked the Germans, Webster loved the Dutch, who, he said, were Germans without the viciousness. 

Why would a man who could have avoided war, or got a cushy safe position have hated the war and sought to escape it at every opportunity? Presumably, he was quickly disillusioned, once he found himself in the ranks. 

But if he became disillusioned why join the most gung ho outfit?  Maybe he got disillusioned only after joining the paratroopers.

One thing he reiterates is how much as he hated theArmy, especially the officers. He describes being rousted out of his bed of hay in a barn, which he considered luxury accommodations  by an officer who took him to a lovely house requisitioned for the officers, and Webster was ordered to swept out the floors and clean the place up for the officers, as if he were a chamber maid. He was not a maid, just a private, and he was treated like dirt. 

And yet, when he leaves the Army, and even before he is discharged,  when he is away, convalescing, he misses his friends and he respects the effectiveness of the regiment. He would fight with no other outfit and is happy to be part of the 506th. He transferred within companies of the regiment, because he disliked his assignment in his company, carrying ammunition and his company was always bringing up the rear, so he did not feel as if he were really in the fight but  Easy company was always on the tip of the spear. So here is a man who talks about getting out of the war with a clean wound and wanting nothing more than getting out of the fight, but he pushes to be a rifleman in a position which will put him more in the fight. He also, in a letter to his mother, upbraids her for fearing for her younger son, David Kenyon's brother for wanting to join the paratroopers because it strikes her as being more risky. He tells her two things:  1. It's immoral to want other mothers to put their son at risk.  2. If you're going to fight, it's probably safer to fight with the best soldiers in the Army.

So, in the midst of his resentment of the Army, he still thinks his outfit is the best place to be, even if paratroopers are always surrounded. And despite his doubts about American propaganda and his awareness of the Gott Mit Uns mentality, which tells soldiers on both sides they are doing God's work, he does believe, as he says in his letters the Americans are right, the Germans wrong and detestable for enslaving other Europeans and America is the best country in the world and worth dying for. Coming from him, this is no empty phrase. 

In the TV series, Webster's comrade, Cobb, is depicted as a malcontent, embittered and destructive to the sense of camaraderie necessary to the functioning of a primary group.  Webster provides documentation that Cobb was not too different than many other members of Easy Company; Cobb was just drunk more often and he was a nasty drunk.

Band of Brothers is the flip side of the coin with The Wire.  The Wire depicts a dystopia where no institutions function properly, where everyone is corrupt; although individuals may have their own merits, they always are stained by the scum in which they swim. In BOB, individuals may have their failings, but the overall efficiency of the organization is manifest, and individuals manage to save the failures of management through individual merit.  In the end, the soldiers are fighting on faith, faith that their cause is right--the same faith the German soldiers who wore belts inscribed Gott Mitt Uns.  But in the case of the American soldiers, their cause turned out to be even more right than they had imagined. Webster says they had heard about German concentration camps but they assumed this was all Allied propaganda. Only when they discovered the concentration camps did they appreciate the evil. Of course, Mr. Spielberg attempts to confer on the efforts of Easy Company a moral purpose which they did not have at the time they made those efforts, but Webster will have none of that sentimentalism. He is just glad he turned out to be on the right team. he makes no claims to have been any more moral, after the fact.

Webster loathes the viciousness of the Germans but he still hates the American Army.
It's a thorough going love/ hate relationship.

And for all its contradictions, it is somehow totally understandable. Anyone who has ever gone through college, anyone who has every had a relationship with an organization of human construction knows what Webster is talking about. There is so much to loathe, and yet, there is something about some organizations which makes you part of something bigger than yourself, something capable of more good, more potency to change the world than you could have ever achieved on your own, sitting by a pond thinking and writing. 

It is the possibility of a functional institution, a community and the possibility the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.  It is that possibility which can bring the hermit out from the woods and into the crowd.

Way Beyond Ignorance

In the Medical Sunday section of the Portsmouth Herald, was an article about Joseph Carringer who runs an enterprise called "Ancient Voices Harmonic Therapy" in Portsmouth, NH. 

Seems Mr. Carringer, a refugee from "the eco-fashions industry" and a former manager of a bar, has found a new calling. Having geared up his street cred by attending a "holistic workshop in Denver" and now he administers "sound therapy" using a didgeridoo, which, he says produces ultrasonic frequencies "similar to the frequencies used by medical practitioners for a wide range of muscular skeletal therapies."  He adds, "A second level is clearing of emotional and energetic stagnation...For instance if someone has a deficiency in their third chakra, I will do specific work in the key of E." The reporter, Suzanne Laurent, tells us, rather breathlessly, "There are seven charkas, or energy centers, in the body." 

And furthermore:  "The unique sound of the didgeridoo lets the person achieve deep meditative brainwave states."  Mr. Carringer treats arthritis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, stress and insomnia, "to name a few conditions." 

Mr. Carringer is in good company on the seacoast: Right across the Piscataqua River, in Kittery, Maine is a chiropractor who does thyroid hormone tests no endocrinologist can even understand. His patients pay him $700 for salivary cortisol tests and other exotic laboratory investigations, which somehow always seem to indicate an imbalance in the adrenal glands, or, alternative, the thyroid gland. Seven thousand dollars later, the patients almost always feel lighter, if not better.

What is it about Americans who seek out these shamans?  What is the psychology? The Phantom asks not about the chiropractor or about Mr. Carringer--their motivations are pretty obvious. But what of those "patients" who are displayed in color photographs on the pages of the Herald, lying on their backs on the floor, while Mr. Carringer blows his didgeridoo at them?

This is not Merin County, California, after all. This is New Hampshire and Maine!

Cyra McFadden wrote a wonder novel called The Serial in the 1970's, when alternative medicine and whacked out Californians with more money than brains were doing scream therapy and exploring their unreleased cosmic energy, usually with the help of Mary Jane and other reliable helpers.

Right here in Portsmouth, we have "naturopaths" and Holistic medicine practices. 

These people are right out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn, the snake oil salesmen, the hucksters and charlatans of those pre scientific times, when American doctors were men who had bought diplomas from diploma mills, before the advent of the university medical school, before Johns Hopkins medical school, when "doctors" spurned the idea of germ theory and probed wounds with fingers used at autopsies.

But what draws modern, 21st century Americans, who have access to the internet, to the man with the long horn or the naturopath? It's not that they are inexpensive. Quite the contrary. Do these customers not understand they are being taken? Or do they understand, but something is driving them to be taken?

What drives the editors of an otherwise respectable newspaper to provide the didgeridoo man with a free stage to hawk his goods is another question.

This is not about simple ignorance, which is an empty vessel awaiting filling with sound thinking and information. This is about a vessel possessed by an owner who empties out whatever water or broth was there and fills it instead with fetid milk gone very bad.

Why would you want to take a deep drink of that?

College, Class, Race, Success, America, New Hampshire Instructs

Vanderbilt University

MIT

NYU Washington Square Greenwich Village

Just Send Money

When the Phantom was 9 years old, his father was invited to speak at The University of New Hampshire, which meant the whole family got a trip for a week's vacation at Lake Winnipesaukee  and that's when the Phantom fell in love with New England, New Hampshire and the idea of college.

During the day, it was 80 degrees on the lake and at night it dropped to nearly 50, and you needed a jacket. Back home in Washington, D.C. the temperatures and the humidity ran over 90 and it was not much more comfortable at night. New Hampshire had wonderful birch tress with white bark and the water on the lake was so clear you could see to the bottom a hundred feet off shore.  In those days, the mid 1950's, no motorized boats were allowed on the lake, except for the Mount Washington cruise ship. 

Walking around the campus of the University of New Hampshire, the Phantom informed his parents he would someday come to Durham to go to college. His mother smiled indulgently, and told him he would never last the winter. 

But 9 years later, the Phantom learned the real reason he would not go to UNH: It didn't have enough social cachet.  The Phantom learned from his friends in his Maryland high school the glittering prizes lay in the Ivy League.

The Phantom's father had suffered through the Great Depression. He was the first member of his family to graduate college--he worked his way through City College of New York, along with Jonas Salk and a generation of first generation sons of new immigrants. And he was fortunate to land a job in a job placement firm where he saw how the system in this nation worked: If he sent an applicant with a stellar record from Brooklyn College and another with a mediocre record from Yale down to Chase bank, the Yalie got the job. 

That was then.

Since then, the idea took hold widely that getting into an Ivy League or some other elite college (Stanford, Swarthmore, MIT, you-fill-in-the-blank) was "getting your ticket punched," the first step toward an inevitable ascension into the upper class.

But this is a big country, and there are lots of colleges which claim to be elite and considerable confusion about how much attaching the name of one of these to your application will launch your career and prospects.  The sheer numbers likely explains the fascination with that insipid gossip rag, U.S. News and World Report, a sort of social register for which colleges are entitled to snob appeal.

Once the idea became accepted that an acceptance to Harvard was essentially equivalent to winning the lottery, the fight to claim a place took on legal and social dimensions:  Affirmative action battles began. If you could exclude Blacks and Hispanics from Harvard and MIT, then you were excluding them from any chance at entering the upper classes and if you could assure them a place, then you would move the underclass into the upper class.

This thinking reverberated all down the line, so a student applying to the University of Colorado from Dover, New Hampshire, would absorb the marketing that going into debt to go to Colorado would change her life, and was a reasonable investment in her future, even though it meant acquiring debt UNH would not load on her. 

Parents were in no position to analyze the marketing claims from colleges which promised a better life for their kids--the investment was worth it. Don't short change your kids' future. 

But here in New Hampshire, that psychology does not play much. Yes, people know the names Harvard and Dartmouth, but beyond that, none of the hype resonates much with them. Too many people in New Hampshire have either never gone to college and done just fine--when doing just fine means having a job, a house--a camp, they call it--on a lake and time to hunt and fish. They judge the success of their children by how secure they are economically, how well they've married, how nice a house they've built themselves and how much vacation time they have. 

Here in New Hampshire, most folks I meet do not think there is much difference between Hesser College and Bowdoin, between Franklin Pierce and Haverford, between Keene State and Vanderbilt, between Southern New Hampshire and Johns Hopkins, between the University of Phoenix and the University of Pennsylvania, between Plymouth State and Wellseley or between the University of New Hampshire and the University of Chicago.

All the same to folks here. And maybe they're on to something.

In New York City, there are lines a block long outside the latest hot restaurant  where everyone just has to be, to eat, to be seen.  Once you get in,  is the food that different from the food at Jumping Jay's?

In the big "glamour cities" around the country, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, your kid is not known personally by more than a few score of friends and neighbors. He needs another name attached to his to be a success.

The Phantom was "lucky" enough to slip into three different Ivy League schools for college, medical school and post graduate study. Maybe he was just not smart enough to be able to understand how brilliant everyone was at these places, but as far as he could see, there was far more hype than reality to these places.  There were plenty of smart people, for sure, but there were a fairly large number of pretty mediocre intellects ensconced in these places. And at universities with less cachet, i.e. less effective marketing, there were plenty of very smart people. 

In small town New Hampshire, everyone knows your kid, has since he was little, watched him grow up through middle school to high school and if he does go off to Harvard, it won't change their opinion of him much, because the basis for their opinion of him is based on way more than Harvard's.

So maybe the solution to the student loan burden is for America to become more like New Hampshire. Stop lining up for that table in the restaurant everyone is so eager for, and savor the food which is on your own table.

Eternal War

One thing George Orwell got right in 1984 was the future would include eternal war. Of course, in his imaginings, the war was between three great powers, but that's a detail. Now we have only one power with bases in countries beyond its shores, and that country, the United States of America, is committed to eternal war.

Because there are no other countries who will fight the capture the flag type war any more, we have had to create whatever war we can find, so we attack countries, invade them and then we have to engage in a guerrilla war, an asymmetric war, and nation building, two things we have discovered we cannot do successfully. 

No mater, we still got war, and that's what we need.

What we did not realize about Vietnam is that it was the first chapter of this new epoch of ongoing wars between the United States and all its firepower and technology and an occupied people, often living in another century (Afghanistan) or simply another frame of reference (Iraq, Libya, Syria) but whomever we decide to invade, we always say we are laying some freedom and the American way on them, which is supposed to be a good thing, as George Carlin said.

If you want to hear the opening of an epoch, listen to Lyndon Johnson speaking with his good buddy, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, as the President stumbles through the portal to this new American epoch of overseas adventures.

http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/clips/1964_0707_russell/

(Hightlight  above http address and chose go to http: etc)

You can be an eyewitness, or an ear-witness to history. 
It's really fascinating stuff.
I am trying to work my way through the Lyndon Johnson tapes.
It has given me a fuller picture of a man I loathed as a twenty-something. He was trying to get me killed in a rice paddy.
But he also got through the Voting Rights Act which lost the South for the Democratic Party--and he, the consummate politician wheeler dealer who supposedly cared for nothing but power and election results was willing to sacrifice Democratic Party hegemony for this cause. 
Johnson comes across as a sort of Mayor Carcetti--driven by ambition, but mindful of the little guy. He is, as David Webster would say, a conniving bastard, but he cared about the little guy--as long as the little guy wasn't a GI.

Arkansas Limits Abortion to First Trimester

Orville Faubus, Gov of Arkansas Resists Integration

Arkansas State Capital 

There are certain issues which seem to brook no compromise. Slavery was one of these. You were either for slavery or against it; it was either evil for one man to "own" another or it was not. If it was not, then a human being could be property and treated as property. Unless you were Abraham Lincoln, who sought a third way, by saying slavery had to end, but it ought to be phased out by 1900 or maybe 1940. Lincoln sought a compromise less drastic than a civil war, but even he could not hold back the tide of history.

Abortion is another one of those issues.  It involves the unknowable: When does life begin? What is in the mind of God? Who can speak for God? 

The Phantom wrote his senior thesis on abortion in college, and although the Phantom was a science major, he realized he needed to find a faculty adviser who knew how to look at the issues involved and he found one, in the Department of Religious Studies, an episcopal priest, Donald Colenback. Sitting in the professor's office the Phantom tried to answer the questions hurled at him from the professor:  When does the termination of existence become the termination of human life?  If you can insert a blade up the birth canal and cut out the conceptus at 36 weeks, a few weeks prior to delivery, is that abortion or infanticide?  All the organs are formed. The conceptus, were it delivered by C section could likely survive with intensive care in a neonatal ICU. What about using that blade 15 seconds before that conceptus emerges into the air, as it is sliding down the birth canal? Is that abortion or infanticide?  Suppose you insert that blade or a suction catheter at six weeks of gestation? Is that infanticide?

One thing the Phantom knew, from his four years as a biology major is life is not defined by science. "Life" is defined by theologians, or by citizens, but science cannot answer questions about when life begins.  If the theologian says life begins when the fetus emerges into the air and takes his first breath, the doctor waits for that to happen and says, "It's alive."  If life begins at quickening, when the mother first feels the fetus move in the womb, then the scientist detects quickening by placing a hand on the womb, or an ultrasound, and then he says, "It's alive."  If life begins once the fertilized egg, one egg cell, one sperm cell united, implant into the womb,  then the scientist can look for evidence of implantation and say, "It's a life."

If life begins at conception, when a one cell sperm enters a one cell egg, then the scientist detects that event and says, "It's a life."

When the Phantom first saw an abortion by dilatation and curretage in medical school, he watched the doctor who performed the procedure inspect the smear of blood from his metal instrument on a gauze pad, looking for fetal material and what looked like nothing more significant than a chunk of skin from a skinned knee was all there was visible of that "life," and the Phantom found it hard to think of that blob as a human being. There was potential there, like the potential in any seed, but there was nothing the Phantom could, emotionally, think of as a human life.

On the other hand, when the Phantom saw a "salting out" of a perfectly formed 28 week old fetus, and that doll like thing was carried on a metal tray into a utility room and disposed of--that looked like infanticide to the phantom, and he was appalled.

At a certain point the thing passes from a small bit of tissue which is mostly potential but little realization, into a larger, formed thing which is enough realization and beyond just potential. 

So, for the Phantom, the line drawing between abortion and infanticide was all about line drawing, where you draw the line.

Reading Roe vs Wade, the Phantom marveled at how the Justices of the Supreme Court of the  United States got it just about right. They drew the line at was in the early 1970's the point of "viability"  that is, the point at which the fetus was capable of survival outside the womb, even if that survival was possible only in a neonatal ICU.

The problem with that line drawn is everyone realized, it would be a movable line--as technology improved, the point of viability would move earlier and earlier in pregnancy as neonatal intensive care got more sophisticated.  Now a 24 week old fetus stands a good chance in an NICU. So that's when life "begins" in the 21st century, if life means the point of viability.

The Arkansas legislature has now seen fit to draw the line at 12 weeks.  The Republican majority reasons that if all the organs are fully formed, even if they are barely visible with the naked eye, and if you can convict a man of murder who beats a woman who is 12 weeks pregnant and she loses that fetus and aborts, then you have defined a life as being present at 12 weeks. After all, you cannot murder what is not alive.

There is certainly reason in this. Defining abortion and infanticide is about line drawing. Arkansas draws the line early. Who are we, in New Hampshire to tell Arkansas where to draw that line? 

The Phantom might well draw that line later. The percentage of "fetal wastage" is thought to be high early on in pregnancy. A woman is a little late for her period, has a heavy flow and that was a lost pregnancy. She never even knows she was pregnant. Treating that 2 week or even 4 week tissue as a human life, which requires last rites strikes the Phantom as a bit bizarre. 

In the days when Purgatory was a place all those unbaptized souls went, it must have been a crowded place, if those fragments of tissues all had souls.

If a two cell organism if a human life, before it even implants into the womb, then Plan B might be considered an abortifacient--although now there is evidence Plan B simply prevents conception. And IUD might be an abortion machine, unless it works by preventing the sperm from meeting the egg.  Only condoms and birth control pills would be true contraceptives, the first preventing sperm from meeting egg and the second preventing ovulation and the production of an egg. 

The big question remains:  In the absence of knowledge, what can we do? One approach would be to say, well, if we can't be sure when it's alive, let us err on the side of life and not allow interference with the progress of the pregnancy at the earliest stage it is even remotely possible we are dealing with an ensouled bit of tissue. But that might be at the two cell stage and then we are back to some very early bits of tissue and more potential than realization.

The Phantom does not know where to draw the line. He does know the mother must have some right to exert her own judgment since, beyond the conceptus, she is the one most intimately affected by the decision.  She is the one who will have to carry, deliver and ultimately either care for the child or give it up and live with the knowledge her child is making its way through life without her. 

If you read that De Maupassant story about the mother who gives up her child to be raised in luxury by a rich family which provides a wonderful, fulfilling life for the child rather than being raised in the  abject poverty in her home, and you think: the mother who was wiling to give up her child had the best interests of the child at heart, rather than the mother who clung to her child and raised it in squalor, then you might say, sometimes the emotionally conventional thing is not the right thing. Sometimes giving up that child may be the best thing. 

Children who are raised in unwelcoming circumstances may have a happy life, but it is possible and the Phantom thinks even likely, their lives will be lives of misery, and there is some evidence, lives of crime and a burden to society. 

Of course, then you are arguing some lives are so miserable, so bereft of love and so entrenched in suffering, they were never worth living.  There were slave women, maybe some of them were in Arkansas, who slit the throats of their own babies as they were being returned to a slave state, having briefly escaped. These mothers killed their own babies rather than allow them to live as slaves.  Thus was a clear eyed, bleak but informed judgment from women in dire circumstances. Could you say they acted from selfishness?  The Phantom thinks not. He respects their judgment. 

How different is the judgment of the woman who chooses abortion for a child she knows she will not be able to provide a decent life?

There are no easy answers here. There may not even be uniform answers. What is right for Arkansas may not be right for New Hampshire.