Second Acts In American Lives: Past is Prologue Dept.

There are no second acts in American lives.

                 --F. Scott Fitzgerald


F. Scott said a lot of silly things, but some of them have had more traction than others, if only because they seem so outlandish;  they provoke discussion--people start citing examples from Mark Sanford to Teddy Roosevelt to Muhammad Ali. 

Part of the allure of this idea, apart from its apparent obvious fallacy, is the idea Fitzgerald may have, in some psychological way, been on to something.  The last line of his most famous book is about the inescapable hold the past has over the self--the image of boats born back ceaselessly against the current, into the past, the gravitation pull of the past which sucks even Gatsby, who has been so wildly successful in American terms of money and fame and power, but who cannot escape his own sense of inferiority and defeat,  because he once was poor and because he was poor he was unworthy and not able to win the love of his life.

Of course, this problem was one which afflicted Fitzgerald, the arrested development thing. He could not get past his own past, and it tied him to Zelda and doomed him to defeat and disappointment. He was not one who could escape the surly bonds of Freudian gravity and soar above, to new and better places.

The Phantom considers the trajectories of two men he knew when they were children. Their stories are still unfolding, but they appear to offer examples of individuals who got past their childhood deprivations and on to better places.

Jamel Mims, who grew up in the dangerous Anacostia section of Washington, DC, who was selected for a place in the private Sidwell Friends School, graduated and went on to another school which one would think would make him a brother from another planet, Boston College, and from there to New York City.  He came to public attention when he was arrested protesting Stop and Frisk, the practice of New York City police to harass, stop and search anyone they damn well please. In New York, police can just throw people up against a wall for walking while Black or walking while Hispanic and claim this blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment and of all that America should hold sacred is the vehicle which has accounted for the decline of crime in New York City.

Of course, crime has declined in other cities where police have not created a police state of random and arbitrary terror--well, not really random since there is a pattern of racial profiling. Steve Levitt, author of Freakonomics, has suggested the real reason for the decline in ghetto violence since the 1990's is there are fewer young men who were born to teen aged mothers on welfare, unwanted babies, because of the Supreme Court ruling, Roe v Wade in 1973.  The argument, not entirely convincing, is  young men are responsible for most the the rape and robbery and murder,  and eliminating the most uncontrolled young men, the motherless sons, has had an unanticipated social benefit. Who knows? Hard to prove. But at least it raises the possibility lower crime rates may be multi-factorial and not attributable to one practice, as the police have claimed.

While at Sidwell, Mims was on the wrestling team. Another Sidwell wrestler was Zac Bookman, whose homelife was something of a cross between Dickens Oliver Twist, and The Children of Sylvia Plath. Had Zac grown up to be a shooter who mowed down children on a playground, the adults in his village of  Cabin John, Maryland, would have shaken their heads and said, "Well, you could see that coming."  

But Bookman went in exactly the opposite direction, graduated first in his class from the University of Maryland (where there were thousands behind him) went on to Yale Law and Harvard Kennedy school of government and then on to a law practice in Silicon Valley, where he is not only rich, but respected, and may be one of those forces in a culture which cares nothing for the general welfare,who pushes that culture away from self absorption,  a man who pushes the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to think about the welfare of the country which spawned them.

Psychological biography is fraught with speculation and little data, but it is intriguing both of these men were attracted to, and successful in a sport which throws boys into the most intensive confrontation, where there are no team mates to save them, and where conflict is face to face, intimate, unavoidable and ruthless.  Anger is as pervasive in wrestling as it is in the Iliad, and it is important for boys to learn to channel that anger into meaningful and efficient action, or they are lost.

Whatever it was which saved these two boys and sent them on the path to manhood-- and it was likely multi-factorial-- they both managed to arrive at a place which would surely astonish the adults who knew them when.

As far as the Phantom can tell, there is no systematic review by institutions like Sidwel Friends School, not to mention Yale Law or Boston College, to look back into the past, to follow those boats.  

Too bad:  we might all learn something. 

Eternal War and the American Right

Carver:  You can't even call this "war" on drugs a war.
Kima: Why not?
Carver: Wars end.
                     --The Wire

Tonight, on the News Hour some twit from the American Enterprise Institute made the case for continuing drone attacks and continuing Gitmo by saying that we (the United States) did not seek this war; it was thrust upon us, and we cannot evade or end it simply by wishing an end to come or by saying it's over. We have to respond to all those enemies who continue to plan for attacks on us and to wage war on us, like the Boston bombers and that freaky Nigerian Muslim convert with the bloody hands in London.

A very patient, but weary liberal, who had read President Obama's speech at the Arm Forces University, rejoined that while it was true we once had a war thrust upon us on 9/11/01, we had an enemy who was at least semi visible--Al Qaeda and its ally the Taliban. Once we had routed the Taliban in Afghanistan and killed the leadership of Al Qaeda, we had reduced our enemies from an identifiable organization to a scattering of terrorists, thugs and lunatics, who tell themselves they are important, and who make plans more or less like bank robbers and drug dealers--for personal satisfaction--not as a war strategy. President Obama is saying now  we cannot and should not try to engage these criminals with armies but with police, FBI, possibly CIA. 

We ought not send in the Army or Marines to deal with some white supremacist group living off the grid in Idaho or Wyoming or North Dakota which holds meetings in which they denounce the mongrelization of America and vow to keep America white, Christian and pure. These whackos are better left to the police.

We do not need Gitmo and in fact, we ought to try to close it down as fast as the Republicans in Congress will allow, and that may not be very fast.  For some reason, the Republicans like Gitmo. Maybe Republicans just like punishing people without the bother of a trial. Maybe they like Gitmo because they know Mr. Obama hates it. Maybe they like it because it is the ultimate in authoritarianism--no trials, just lock 'em up and throw away the key. A sort of eternal Ox Box Incident, where prisoners are not even called prisoners and nobody is hanged; everyone just winds up on Devil's Island without so much as an arraignment. 

And, later in the broadcast,  there was Kelly Ayotte up their with her mentors, Lindsey Graham and John McCain, squawking about sending IRS employees to jail, while smiling approvingly about keeping men who have never even heard the charges against them kept in jail for ten years without so much as a habeas hearing.

Oh, the glory of the Right Wing.

Meaning from the Dead

To join the great majority:  That is an ambition no healthy person should have.

We will all get there soon enough. And realizing what a relatively select society we belong to simply by being alive on earth--even with over population--there are so few of us living, as compared with all  who have preceded us; it is enough to make one feel very privileged indeed.

The Phantom never misses a graveyard.  You walk among the stones and try to glean some hint of what those lying beneath your feet were like, what they believed in, what they feared, what they loved, what they loathed, how they lived and how they died.  The stones, no matter how much information is carved into them, do not tell enough. 

In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the graveyard itself is so jarringly wrong, it seems perfect. The entire cemetery, hard by a tiny church, wedged between two of the ugliest, noisiest suburban roadways, Rockville Pike and some other forgettable asphalt jungle, is an eyesore. 

In the case of Grace Metalious, the author of Peyton Place, a soul no less tortured, a life no less profligate than Fitzgerald's, her grave is in one of the most beautiful cemeteries the Phantom has ever had the fortune to stroll through. Her cemetery is the sort of thing you might have expected for Fitzgerald, a green clearing in a gorgeous wood. One would expect Fitzgerald to be buried in St. Paul or Minneapolis or Paris, or New York or Long Island or Princeton even, but he is not. He is interred in Rockville, Maryland,  (Although he was born in St. Paul, and raised in upstate New York, his family had roots in Maryland and in fact, he is named after Francis Scott Key, a distant cousin, and a Maryland icon). Maureen Dowd says his grave was actually transplanted to this spot some years after he died in 1940, from a non Catholic graveyard, only after the Catholic church forgave him for being profligate and decided fame had made him worthy enough to be buried among the faithful.

Metalious is buried outside a small New Hampshire town, midpoint between the three towns which formed the basis for Peyton Place--Laconia, Alton and Gilmanton  There is no hint of her tempestuous personality and her stormy life to be found standing in front of the minimalist stone bearing only "Metalious/Grace/1924-1964." The stone is so understated you just know there is much more to that story. 

Fitzgerald's stone, of course, is supplemented by a flat stone with the final words of the Great Gatsby, so you know there is a story there. No mystery. 

Of course, neither Fitzgerald nor Metalious likely had much say in the design or even the placement of their graves. 

Down the road from the Phantom's home in Hampton, there are three town graveyards:  One,  from the 17th century, next to the high school, one from the 18th century between that and the newest cemetery, which has bodies from those who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The names in all these cemetery's date back to the town's founding: They come from the founding families: Lamprey, Marston, Fogg, Brown, Batchelder, Chase, Leavitt, Cole, Dearborn, Gilman, Prescott, Hobbs, and you can see the family names start to mingle on the gravestones as they inter married. Who were these people? What lives did they lead?

Up near Lake Winnipesaukee, in the town of Holderness, is a graveyard filled with young men in their twenties who died between 1861 and 1865. You  see the impact of that great national conflagration on a small New Hampshire town, a town so distant from the sound and fury of what was happening below the 40 th parallel of latitude.

You walk among these silent stones and you make up stories in your own head to give meaning to these inert objects. For some, the dates themselves suggest a story: A man's name, Abner Philbrick,  1825-1900 on a stone with the names of two women, one, Abigail, 1830-1852, the other Prudence, 1840-1920. First wife dies in childbirth, the second lives into her 80's and outlives the husband. The story is plain enough, but that's all you know--the bare outline. The rest you need to fill in.  

And you wonder why human beings need to invest things with meaning. 

Driving by the cemetery in Frederick, Maryland, the Phantom asked his firstborn son, age four, if he knew what that cemetery was. "It's where the dead people live," his son said sagely. And the Phantom looked over at his wife, who said, "The kid is a genius. I told you."

Angelina Jolie and BRCA mutations

Angelina Jolie recently announced she has undergone bilateral prophylactic mastectomies because she has the BRCA mutation which increases her risks for breast cancer by over 80% and almost the same for ovarian carcinoma, from which her mother died in her 50's.

As a rule, the Phantom has disparaged the star marketing of disease, but Ms. Jolie actually cannot be accused of a publicity stunt--on the contrary, this announcement will, if anything, reduce her marketability. 

One may be cynical about Ms. Jolie's forays into the third world, her adoption of underprivileged children, but it is hard to see anything other than a genuine attempt to save lives in her most recent announcement.

For anyone who has ever seen their mother die of either breast or ovarian carcinoma, the experience is something you would never wish on anyone else. If you could do anything to reduce those numbers, the right thing to do is to do it.

The Phantom cautions that discussion of topics like breast carcinoma and BRCA mutations is almost always never well done when it occurs in the pages of the National Enquirer, People or even The Washington Post. 

But in this, as in other arenas, Ms. Jolie has proven to be the exception.

The Heritage Foundation Instructs

Jason Richwine

Jim De Mint

Don't you just love studies?
The Phantom certainly does.
Why just the other day he was driving to work listening on the radio as Jim DeMint told a very earnest story about all the misconceptions he had about the role immigrants play in American Society, which had been corrected by a recent study.

You remember Jim DeMint: he resigned his job as a United States Senator from South Carolina,  so he could serve his country by taking a job as the  head of the Heritage Foundation where he would no longer be  unobstructed by all those annoying Democrats in the Senate who kept getting in the way whenever Mr. DeMint tried to block the door to some immigrant or when he tried to deny health care to some undeserving poor person.

So, Mr. DeMint was talking about a study done by his own Heritage Foundation which revealed that immigrants are a burden to the United States of America, not an invigorating tonic.

Being from South Carolina, Mr. DeMint slid easily into his humbler-than-thou mode, and he allowed as he had many misconceptions about immigrants his own self, before he read this study: Mr. DeMint thought maybe immigrants were good, took jobs Americans did not want to do, built house, took care of kids, tended lawns, washed dishes and did all the menial tasks the darkies used to do before the Yankee government crushed that cherished South Carolina institution--you know, slavery.

But, no, now that a scientific, unassailable study had been completed, it was clear immigrants are a net burden to the U.S. economy--all those immigrants washing up in emergency rooms demanding medical care, going on welfare, gobbling up food stamps, becoming a burden to the American taxpayer. It's all right there in the study.

Who woulda thunk?

Mr. DeMint emphasized that all those free spending Democrats who wanted to pass legislation throwing open the doors to immigrants, "Don't have single study to back their claims. Not like we do. We got a study."

One of the study's co-authors, Jason Richwine is a bone fide smart boy from Harvard, so there's no disputing the study. Mr. Richwine's doctoral thesis was about immigrants, so he knows of what he speaks.  In his thesis Mr. Richwine noted, "Immigrants living in the U.S. today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives."  He further observed, "No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against."

Yes, the Phantom well remembers in his own family, it took several generations before anyone figured out exactly how to mark between those lines with a number 2 pencil and how to erase completely. So, it wasn't until the third generation that his family members scored much higher than the family yellow Lab on any of those computer graded IQ tests. It was only by sheer determination the Phantom's family did not become a burden on the Irish, Italian and German immigrants who had preceded them. Of course, each of those groups were pretty dumb when they first arrived, until they learned to master the number 2 pencil.

The Heritage rushed it's study's findings out to be available in time for Congress's deliberations on the immigration bills before it. 

There is an amendment proposed by New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte that Marco Rubio has to take an IQ test before he is allowed to vote on any legislation having to do with immigration.

Mr. DeMint has refused to take the IQ test, but he is no longer a Senator, and really, with a name that is so close to "demented" can anyone blame him if he refuses, on principle?

As for Mr. Richwine--Really, could you make up such a name for a comic book character and get away with it?--he does not have to take the IQ test because, after all, he went to Harvard.

As for Lindsey Graham, he will only take an IQ test if it is scored under South Carolina rules:  1. You get  80 points for being white.  2. You get an extra 15 points for being male. 3. You get 30 points if your great grandfather fought for the Confederacy  4. You get 20 points if you have any relative who went to the Citadel or ever considered applying 5. You get 10 points if you part your hair down the middle. So Mr. Graham starts with an IQ of 155, which ought to insure his right to vote on the immigration bills, but it will likely get him into all kinds of trouble with his constituents because, don't youall know, it's hard being humble when you're so damn smart.

Maureen Dowd On F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing in today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd provides some actual insight into all the hoopla surrounding the latest iteration of the movie version of The Great Gatsby.

The Phantom has to acknowledge, by way of full disclosure:  1. He has never developed an affinity for F. Scott or  his magnus opus. The Phantom's impression of F. Scott has been from various biographies and from Hemingway's descriptions of the foppish F. Scott on a motorcar tour of France. F. Scott simply struck the Phantom of a pretty silly man, sentimental and embraced more for his fair haired boy qualities than for any real literary talent.    2.  The Phantom has never been much of a fan of Ms. Dowd.

Having said all this, it must be admitted, The Great Gatsby has meant something to a lot of different people over the years. There was that wonderful scene in The Wire where DeAngelo, in prison, explains the meaning of Gatsby as a man who could not escape his past, which, of course, has resonance for all those in jail who are there because of past acts.  And there is that famous scene with the shirts, which is likely Fitzgerald's  apogee as a writer, throwing those shirts around at Daisy, a scene filled with pathos and restraint, and it must be agreed that even a silly man can render art, occasionally.

What the Phantom liked about Dowd's piece today was her description of Fitzgerald's grave site, in Rockville, Maryland.  The Phantom has visited this grave--he grew up not far from it. But the thing about this grave is it is in a vest pocket cemetery, just outside a tiny church, on an eyesore of a road, Rockville Pike, near a noisy, busy, bleak intersection, with the noise of automobiles, trucks and the suburban blight all around it. You have to pick your way across unfriendly roads just to get there, and then you see the graves--Zelda, Scott and their daughter. 

But what Dowd told us today is this was not Fitzgerald's first grave site--the Catholic Church did not allow him to be buried in a Catholic graveyard because F. Scott did not meet the high standards for a Catholic to be buried in a Catholic churchyardm whatever those may be. Ultimately, the powers that were forgave him enough to allow him to be buried in this Godforsaken graveyard. Well, maybe not Godforsaken, but forsaken, nevertheless.

And Dowd tells us one more thing, about herself. She had grown up in Washington, and was covering the "cossetted" beat of Montgomery County, an affluent, striving, place of staggering inauthenticity and ordinariness, not unlike similar suburbs outside other competitive American cities--Gross Point, Shaker Heights, Great Neck, Scarsdale, Winnetka, the Main Line, Brookline--you name it. The places the gifted and talented children of the winners settle down to reap the glittering prizes which are more glitter than prize.

In telling us about herself and her connection by gravestone of F. Scott Key Fitzgerald, Dowd gives us something so lacking in the great state of  suburbia--a sense of longing, a sense of reality amid the great imaginings of the striving classes.

Plan B: Memo to the President (You Won the Last Election)

As readers of this blog will know, the Phantom is fond of the President. 
The Phantom voted for the President.
The Phantom smiles whenever he sees the President on T.V., because, after 8 years of cringing whenever the President of the United States opened his mouth, it has been such a pleasure to hear the official who was elected to our highest office say intelligent things with regularity.
But why, oh why, is this President pandering to the most reactionary, fundamentalist, whacko elements of our populace when it comes the morning after pill?

The Phantom can understand why its opponents so loathe the whole idea of a morning after pill:
1. Here is a product made for a woman who has had unprotected sexual intercourse. We can imagine she might be a respectable, married woman, but we suspect more often she will be an unmarried woman who has had sex, and that offends at least 1/2 of 1% of our population.
2. Levonorgestrel, a progesterone and a component of many birth control pills when given as a big dose may make the endometrium inhospitable to a fertilized egg. So, if you believe a fertilized ovum is a human life looking for a receptive home to put down roots and it finds nothing but a barren wasteland, so it withers and dies, then you have an abortion. 
On the other hand, the prevailing opinion is the pill does not  work  by preventing implantation but works  by preventing ovulation, (at least most of the time) -- in which case no argument can be made Plan B causes abortion, that is wastage of a fertilized egg. It works by preventing the egg from ovulating, and so there is no egg to be found by foraging sperm.
(On the other hand, if it works only by preventing ovulation one would ask how it would prevent pregnancy in a woman who has an ovulated egg in the Fallopian tube or the endometrium, when she has intercourse. It may, like birth control pills also make the cervical mucous thicker and sticky so sperm cannot get past the cervix.)
  The point is, the likelihood is this pill is not likely, most often,  a pill which works after the egg has been found by the sperm, but before. That would make it a contraceptive not an abortifacient. 

Now, enter the FDA, the agency which is comprised of doctors, pharmacists, scientists and is supposed to render decisions about drugs which are concerned with verifying the scientific evidence says the drug in question is A/ Safe and B/ Effective.  The FDA is not supposed to enter into theological or political argument. 
So the FDA says, originally, this drug would be safe and effective for a 13 year old girl to take,  and it should therefore be available on the shelves of pharmacies, to any person who wants to buy it. It should not be held behind the pharmacist counter available only when the pharmacy is open, but should be on the shelf of any grocery store with a pharmacy or of any Walmart or Target, and no ID need be presented to verify age. (Of course a 13 year old girl would not have a driver's licence, so with the ID requirement currently in place, she'd need a birth certificate or a passport.)

Of course, the FDA has not always been able to dodge the politics. The FDA was about to approve over the counter status for birth control pills, but Planned Parenthood, among other organizations resisted it because it argued handing out birth control pills in clinics was the one way to assure women would actually be seen by some health care practitioner, get a Pap smear and a blood pressure check. So the simple issue of safe or not safe got waylaid by social concerns in the case of birth control pills.

Now, it's happening again, this time to the morning after pill.

We can only imagine the arguments:  1/ I don't want my 14 year old daughter having unprotected sex, getting pregnant, getting an sexually transmitted disease, all of this behind my back and thinking, oh, well, I can always go buy Plan B . And she'll be doing this 10 times a month.   2/ I don't want my daughter (or your daughter or any woman) having unprotected sex, or having any sex,  and then buying a cheap abortion without so much as a fare thee well.  3/ I don't care about preventing unwanted pregnancies. I just do not want women having sex period,  and if they get pregnant, well that'll learn 'em. Sex is dirty and foul and it ought to cause suffering.

Mr. President: The people who are going to get steamed about Plan B would never vote for you, will never vote Democratic--you have lost them forever so forget about them. Think of all those people who will be happy about this medical breakthrough. Think about those desperate 14 year old girls.

And think of this: The difference between contraception and abortion is time and development, just as the difference between veal and mutton is puberty.  A drug taken 24 hours after intercourse is destroying the development of a two cell --or maybe a four cell--conceptus, and at that point only the most extreme fundamentalists would call that thing a human life. 

Let us make abortions unnecessary by making effective contraception available, inexpensive and such an easy option even the most clueless 14 year old girl will have the opportunity to save her life from ruin.

What the Pig in the Swamp Has to Say to America

One of the most fascinating parts of the Phantom's recent trip to New Orleans was a boat tour of the bayou/swamp/wetlands, during which our most excellent guide steered us into a stream where we saw a group of wild pigs, trotting after us, along the banks of the bayou. The mother pig was in a great hurry to get to our boat.  She plunged into the water, swam out and hooked one great hoofed leg over the side of our boat, leaving her two piglets to fend for themselves , one struggling behind her in the water, the other timidly, frantically, trying to follow but mired near the shore. She ignored her offspring. She was riveted on what she knew the guide would have in the boat--a supply of marshmallows.

Our guide popped one white sugary treat after another into mother's mouth, which she held open like a hippo in the zoo, getting pelted with peanuts--occasionally, the guide would send one toward the piglet, treading water frantically behind mother, and mother pig would grunt indignantly and demand another marshmallow.

What all this meant to the Phantom is that something in that pig brain was highly rewarded by the sugar fix.

Chemists for American food companies have discovered the same thing and created foods which appeal to that phenomenon in human brains. You cannot blame the chemists--they are just doing their jobs. They are increasing demand for their companies' products; they are increasing profits.

But this becomes the perfect example of the conflict between free enterprise, the profit motive, a capitalist economy and the public health. You are giving people, giving consumers what they want, even when it's bad for them. Cigarettes, even more so. Some would argue alcohol, marijuana, recliner chairs, big screen TV's and nachos all fit this description.

When Mayor Bloomberg tried to take away the 20 oz soda pop from New Yorkers there  were cries of government oppression, the nanny state, black helicopters and Brave New World dystopia.

As Michael Pollen and Food, Inc. have said, the modern American cathedral, the supermarket is in great measure, an illusion. You see what appears to be a wide variety of colorful choices in all those middle aisles of the store, but they are all just high fructose corn syrup, in the end, in a great variety of colors, shapes and sizes.

And the food industry advertises Fruit Loops as a healthful food to feed your child--because it has "fiber."  Well, Fruit loops probably have some water and some grain, but saying they are a "good source of fiber" is like saying a pint of whiskey is a good source of hydrating fluid and will calm your baby down at the same time.

That pig was an eye opener for the Phantom. Next time, the Phantom will bring his camera.