Woodstock and Dire Donald Trump

August, 1969 was a pivotal time.

For me, it was the culmination of a 4 year struggle, a long running gauntlet which led to medical school acceptance at a time when every 21 year old male who could, applied to medical school to avoid Vietnam. Tickets of admission to med school were harder to cop than tickets to "Hamilton" today. But despite being told I'd never make it, I got in and I was on my way to New York City to matriculate.

I hadn't heard about what was going on a hundred miles up the New York Thruway near Woodstock. I wouldn't have cared, if I had. I would have been like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel and the Doors and a variety of others, dismissive of the whole hippie thing. 

It was a summer of culmination in many ways: The Tet Offensive had happened the year before and it was pretty clear America would not defeat Vietnam. My brother was on the launching pad to Vietnam. The lottery had not yet been devised, so almost every male born between 1940 and 1951 was in line for the draft, unless they had a deferral. Med School was one of the only sure deferrals. 

Watching the film, "Woodstock," brought back memories, despite the fact I never attended.

The whole counter culture revolution, the blather about Peace and Love and words like "groovy" and "far out" and "tripping" and "where it's at" brought back conversations, snippets of those times.

I had heard all this at peace demonstrations. I had been to enough of those. The hippies and tie dyed folks, the love beads and long hair and reefers and the smell of pot were well established by 1969.

In some ways, it makes me feel a little like Rhett Butler in that scene where he hops down off the carriage carrying Scarlet O'Hara and Melanie Wilkes and hands Scarlet the reins and says, "You can get home on your own."
"Where are you going, Rhett Butler?" Scarlet demands indignantly.
And Butler explains he's joining the old men and boys marching out to meet Sherman's invading army. 
"It's stupid, I know," he says. "I'll never understand it myself. Or forgive myself."
But off he goes to join a hopeless, silly, stupid cause. He cannot resist being part of the resistance. 

And that's sort of the way I felt about the hippies and all those middle and upper class, privileged kids who were playing at hippie, pretending to rebel, all the while knowing it was just a summer fling, knowing they'd go back to their upper class lives when it was all over. And yet, absurd as they were, they were at least resisting.

And there was something liberating about it, too. 
Johnson had lied. Nixon had definitely lied. "Never trust anyone over 30," was a sound piece of advice. America seemed to be built on lies. Vietnam was a bright and shining lie. Johnson and Nixon both talked about "honor" and "commitments" and fighting for "freedom" and fighting for "our country."  And every night on Walter Cronkite you could see the lie. And guys my age were mucking about in rice paddies, getting their legs blown off because of that lie. 

In the era of a pathological liar who tweets daily, who leads every news story, who has made himself the central figure in the nation, some of that hippie rejection of lies and power and Senators and Congressmen-please-heed-the call seems in order.

Maybe what we need is a three day weekend of Peace and Love and songs about justice and truth. 

Maybe Dylan will come this time. 

Transgender News: The Kobudai Fish

Blue Planet 2 has done the impossible. It has bested the original. Almost every sequence is more astonishing than anything which preceded it in Blue Planet 1.


In one sequence it introduces a fish found north of Japan, which, if it grows big enough, undergoes a transformation from female to male gender.


Not all the Kobudai fish undergo this transformation, but some of the larger fish do. They mention some of the "enzymes" in the fish allow for conversion of female hormones to male hormones, and I think I know just which enzymes these are.

In humans, of course, the most famous example is 5 alpha reductase deficiency, in which an enzyme responsible for converting testosterone into dihydrotestosterone fails to allow for adequate amounts of DHT to form and it is the DHT which, in fetal life, stimulates the developing fetal penis and scrotum. Not enough DHT and your penis comes out looking like a clitoris and your scrotum like labia.


But when the testes begin pumping out industrial doses of testosterone at puberty, it all washes past the bottle neck at the 5 alpha reductase step and you make enough DHT to "masculinize," and you go the route of the male Kobudai fish. Presto, new male. (Well, mostly.)


Blue Planet mentions there are other fish in the wrasses group which do something similar, starting off as females and transforming into males.


They do not comment about whether the fish develop psychological problems with their identity, whether they feel like male fish trapped in a female body, or how these fish feel about this transformation. The individual fish they show seemed quite comfortable in his new role and in fact, vanquished the older former "bull" fish and assumed command of the harem.

Of course, anyone reading about all this will wonder what it would be like to live life first as one sex then the other. This is not something I've spent much time thinking about. In fact, call me staid, call me uptight, but it is not something I much want to think about.


Being born male is such a blessing, not just because it confers social, hierarchical advantages in most human societies, but because, from a sheerly sensual point of view, it's way better. For starters, you get to have sex with women.


I know, male homosexuals may not see this as much of an advantage, but some of us do.


But just knowing about these strange fish is sort of mind expanding.
The idea of women entering the professions, the workplace, transforming into dominant organisms is something we've had to think about and now we know other species seem to allow for such a life course.

Reading about Queen Victoria, one sees another oblique version of this, as she transforms from a libidinous adolescent into a devastatingly effective alpha dog.


She retains her gender identity through all this, but she does follow the Kobudai model of dominance.


Just saying.