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Fear and Loathing in America the Beautiful

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My father, a Texan born in 1909, used to say he was a bigot and proud of it. He used the N-word freely, and he had a pejorative for every race, ethnicity, and nationality on the planet.

He had a bizarre cosmology of race, a hierarchy in which Asians ranked highest as most evolved among the human family, followed by whites (in his time, Latinos were regarded as white, more or less: highly sexualized whites who liked bright colors, so my mother said), American Indians, Blacks, and, at the bottom of the ladder, hybrids of all sorts. The Arabs among whom we lived were scarcely better than monkeys, he believed, because they were the product of intermarriage between African slaves and light-skinned Semitic slave-owners, and so inherited the worst of both breeds.

Even as a child, I used to marvel at the strangeness of this construct, its basic metaphysical weirdness. It wasn’t until we came back to the United States and I was halfway through junior high school that the vicious wrongness of his thinking revealed itself to me.

In San Francisco, I attended an urban school that was about a third white and Asian, a third black, and a third Latino. At the start of the seventh or eighth grade, I don’t recall which, the school assigned an African American girl to share a P.E. locker with me. I was put out not because of who she was but because I had zero desire to share anything with anyone. But when my parents found out that the sharee was black, they charged down to the school and demanded that I be assigned a white lockermate. The principal, to his lasting credit, said “thank you very much” and ignored them.

Before long, the young girl stopped coming to school, so in effect I had our locker to myself. Two or three months later, she resurfaced, with a horrifying story. Her clothing had caught fire in a kitchen accident. In her terror, she ran through a glass sliding door before anyone could catch her. She had been in the hospital for weeks.

So it was brought home to me, forcefully, that this was not some sort of subhuman creature but another early-teen girl, just like me. A living, breathing, feeling, fragile human being.

Not until I was in my twenties did it cross my mind that my father’s fierce bigotry toward everyone not like him—a broad, inclusive bigotry that took in women and homosexuals as well as people of different races and nationalities—was rooted in fear. He feared the Other, and that fear, being unmanly in a time when men were men or else, manifested itself as hatred. He feared the Other more than he hated the Other. What I couldn’t figure out, didn’t understand for many, many years, was why? What was he so afraid of? What about a 13-year-old black girl is frightening?

A great deal of time passed.

Toward the end of his life, he admitted to something profoundly ironic: his grandmother was a Plains Indian. His mother, whom I never met, was half-Indian. His brother had made noises to this effect over the years, but my father vehemently denied it, said Ed was full of beans. This interesting revelation took on more poignancy when one day a young man rang his doorbell and said he’d noticed my father’s name on the front door. The visitor was working on the roof at the retirement home where my father and his current wife were living and, since the name was a little unusual, he worked up the nerve to introduce himself, because his last name was the same. He came from a whole tribe by that name. And he was a full-blooded Choctaw.

Well, helle’s belles. My father was outed. I have no idea what his father was or what he looked like (though my father was distinctly Indian in appearance, with high cheekbones and black hair that stayed dark until after he was 80). My grandfather ran off when my father was born and before long was found dead by the side of a road, an apparent suicide. But whatever the details, ultimately the truth was that he—my father—himself was the Other. What I do know is that the family was passing as white and that my father clung to that identity. He clung to it with some desperation.

But still I didn’t know why was he so afraid? Why was he possessed of such fear that it invaded his soul, curdled into hatred, and took up permanent residence in his heart and mind?

One’s children are slow on the uptake, no? It takes a long time to grasp a parent’s humanity. Sometimes it takes the odd intervention.

Yesterday I was editing a forthcoming book by novelist Donis Casey, Crying Blood, due out in February 2011 from Poisoned Pen Press, and very much enjoying it. The characters live in Texas during the 1910s, the time when my father was a boy. They arrived there from the same part of the Deep South that my father’s family came from, and they behave and sound much like my father’s family—though a bit more enlightened, given their author’s immersion in the culture of the twenty-first century. Casey has a real gift for character and voice: her people sound exactly like my father and uncle did.

Along about the end of the book, we learn that the protagonist, rancher Shaw Tucker, has a great deal of Indian in him, having come from a family “woven through with Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry from as early as anyone could remember.” His mother was the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee woman.

But he was raised to be White. In fact, even though he was an enrolled tribal member, he was White enough in blood and looks and way of life that the U.S. Government never bothered him. No one had ever come to take his children away and put them in boarding school. No one had ever proscribed his movements or told him where he had to live, or how. Shaw Tucker was White and he viewed the world in the way of a White man.

Well, now. There’s something to be afraid of! Your children kidnapped and hauled off to boarding school, there to be assimilated into an alien culture. Your way of life extinguished and your people forcibly removed from their homelands. That would have been the experience of my father’s parents and grandparents.

Why did I never see this? It seems so obvious. He wasn’t afraid of all the people he’d taught himself to hate. He was afraid of what he wanted to be.

He wanted to be white, whiter than the whites who were his forefathers’ mortal enemies and exploiters. More precisely, he needed to be white, so that he could have a shot at decent jobs and the same kind of freedom the majority of Americans took as their born right. The contradiction must have twisted around and around inside him and finally come out as hate. Bizarrely metamorphosed hate.

§

The present discourse on immigration rings of my father’s language. I can hear his voice in every pejorative: “illegals,” “Mexicants,” “beaners,” and in every random news story that commenters turn into a racist tirade. The new N-word is “illegals,” and the new “greaser” is “Mexican.” It’s as dreary as it is disturbing.

So what are we, as Americans, afraid of? What terror inside the American soul writhes around and comes out as hatred? My Muslim students tell me of experiences when they personally have been the targets of hate and threats. Latinos and Indians, citizens of the United States of America, say they dread being stopped by the police, hassled, and made to show papers.

Whatever it is, we need to get over it. The current fear and loathing of the Other, to the point where citizens express distaste for small brown-skinned children, is dragging our polity and our people back to the 1950s, when it was OK to utter the N-word in polite company and grown men and women thought it made sense to raise hell when a white kid and a black kid were assigned to share a locker for 40 minutes a day.

We have met the Other, and he is us.

Image: Choctaw woman. Public domain.


The (Not So) Good Old Days

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Just finished the chest freezer’s first defrosting job. The thing doesn’t collect very much frost, but after enough months pass, it does need to be chipped free. This summer’s humidity caused enough frost to grow that it was threatening to interfere with closing the lid, so, reluctantly, I finally moved myself to action.

To my surprised delight, it didn’t take anything like as much effort or time as expected. Only about a half-hour with a hair dryer defrosting the glaciers, plus another half-hour of winnowing out the hopelessly aged items and organizing the survivors.

The reason I dreaded this chore and put it off as long as I could is that I can remember what it was like to defrost a Frigidaire. O God!

Defrosting the icebox’s freezer was a half-day job. In the first place, the freezer compartment started to build layers of frost from the instant you plugged in the refrigerator. Frost built up on everything: every surface of the machine and every surface of anything you put into the freezer.

First, you’d wait until your family had gone through most of the food in the freezer and the refrigerator. Turning off the freezer in older models entailed turning off both compartments. Later, you could shut off just the freezer, but even then, since the job would take a long time, you didn’t want to leave much frozen food sitting in the refrigerator or sink.

In those days, women didn’t have hand-held hair dryers. A hair dryer was a lash-up with a plastic bonnet on the end of a hose connected to a contraption that looked a little like…I don’t know…a drag-around vacuum cleaner. It never occurred to anyone to try to use one of those things to speed defrosting, if that were even possible.

On the day you decided to defrost and clean the freezer, you’d turn on the soaps to keep you company. The soap operas would start around 10:00 or 10:30 in the morning. So if you started with the first soap, which I recall was Days of Our Lives, you would clean through As the World Turns, The Guiding Light, The Edge of Night, and finish about the time The Dumb and the Feckless came on. If you worked steadily, you’d finish around 12:30 or 1:00 p.m.

It was a messy, foot-aching, back-aching, endless job that entailed boiling water, pouring it into flat pans, setting them into the freezer compartment to melt the two- and three-inch thick ice, wiping up the mess, and repeating. Over and over and over. Then you had to clean up the mess you’d made on the floor and kitchen counters. So, as you can imagine, I wasn’t looking forward to doing that with a chest freezer that would add bending over to the list.

Moderns suffer way too much nostalgia for the good old days. One thing that concerns me about both this bottomless recession and the sometimes silly sentimentality inherent to the environmental movement is that both of these forces are tending to push back our standard of living.

To my mind, not having to stand in front of a freezer for two or three hours pouring, chipping, scrubbing, sponging, and mopping comes under the heading of “standard of living.” So does having a freezer at all. So does running an air conditioner and electric lights and an indoor stove. So does walking into a supermarket and having a choice of all the fruits and vegetables that grow in any season of the year, somewhere on this earth or in some agribusiness’s greenhouses.

One of the problems with the locavore movement is that, taken to its logical end, it means that you eat whatever is in season in your local area. Whatever does not grow in your immediate vicinity and is not in season, you don’t eat.

While that sounds very romantic and green, its reality is far plainer and far simpler than most locavores would relish: malnutrition.

Enthusiasts tell us that “most Americans should not expect to have tomatoes in January” and that “to eat truly locally means learning to live without those foods that won’t naturally grow in your own backyard, or in your local farmer’s fields.” Be careful what you wish for.

My mother grew up in upstate New York during the 1910s and 20s. She lived with her grandparents on a small subsistence farm. During the summer and fall, they ate what they could grow or gather in the forest. During the winter, they ate what they could store.

My mother grew up with rickets. Thanks to poor childhood nutrition, all of her teeth had been removed from her head by the time she was 45.

She told me that an orange was a rare treat. Citrus was expensive, too expensive for people who lived off their own land, and even if you could afford them, oranges were rarely available. During the winter, she said, oftentimes all they had to eat was beans and potatoes her grandmother had put up, served in bowls of hot milk taken from their cow.

That’s locavore eating. Do we really want to take ourselves back to 1918?

Consider, too, the bright ideas intended to save water and energy. Front-loading washers, for example: there’s a throwback to the “good” old days, if ever there was one. They work very much like the old Bendix my mother and I used in the early 1950s. Put a tablespoon too much detergent in the thing, and it would bubble up and flood the service porch. This is why washer hookups in 1950s houses are often outside, on the back porch or in the garage. It’s a lot easier to clean up the concrete garage floor or the back porch slab than to have to scrub an interior floor every third time you do the laundry.

I remember that damn thing overflowing, and I remember my mother racing to wipe up the mess with a mop and on hands and knees with rags. As if she didn’t have enough physical labor to do!

And I remember both of us bending over with aching backs to haul the heavy wet laundry out the front side the thing—even a little girl can get a back-ache, believe it or not. The Bendix induced back pain in users of all ages and sizes.

Why on earth do we think reverting to the 1950s is a good thing?

Then we have the repercussions of the present economic depression. How many of us are putting off buying appliances and other tools that make our lives more tolerable? I, for one, can’t afford to replace my dangerously overheating clothes dryer. It will run on “air fluff,” but that cycle doesn’t dry clothes. Most of my laundry can be hung out. But what happens when I need to wash the down comforter? That has to go through a dryer, and it can’t go into an ultrahot commercial dryer.

If I didn’t have a dryer, I wouldn’t own a feather comforter. I’d be doing the same thing my mother did: hauling heavy woolen blankets and bedspreads to the dry cleaner once a year. When we unwrapped them and put them on the beds, we’d sleep in toxic fumes for two weeks, until the stink dissipated.

How “green” was this? Well, take a look at a map of the Superfund sites in your area, and note how many pieces of land contaminated with dangerous chemicals once housed neighborhood dry cleaners.

While I can stand to hang out my clothes on a line, the truth is that having no working dryer puts one foot back in the 1950s, when most people didn’t own dryers. Or dishwashers. Or electric stoves and ovens. Or televisions. And no one ever heard of a microwave.

We no longer have the Russians to bomb us back into the Dark Ages. The Chinese are too busy turning themselves into the world’s economic superpower to bomb us into the Dark Ages, and the Iraqis are in no position to return the favor just now. But we seem not to need any help: we appear to be taking ourselves there on our own.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d like to see the developed world and everyone else consume less fossil fuel; spew less gunk into the atmosphere; quit polluting air, land, and water with toxic chemicals; quit bulldozing farmlands and blading the desert to make way for square mile on square mile of sprawl; stop torturing animals in grotesque factory “farms”; live well but not so large; and all such good things.  I just don’t think we should do it at the expense of our health. Or at the expense of the positive factors that make us a “developed” country.

Working Smarter: Applying a few insights

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Okay, so one train of thought that’s been going on here at Funny about Money has to do with the dawning realization that I’m spending too many hours on work that doesn’t pay a living wage and too few hours on actual…well, living.

In a good month, FaM returns about two hundred bucks, and that’s fine, because it’s exactly the amount I need to get out of one section of freshman comp a year. Or, more to the point, to make up for an assigned section that doesn’t gel.

And I normally make $200 or $250 a month reading detective novels (!) for my favorite client, Poisoned Pen Press. This amount covers a second freshman comp section each year, and of course it’s pay for play.

So, between them these two piddling sources of income either give me the option of teaching two and two (i.e., two courses a semester)  instead of three and three or provide a safety net should one of three assigned sections not gather enough students to fly.

For both these income streams, pay per hour is beneath laughable. FaM earns about $6.67 a day, on average; spending two hours on a post and another hour on blog-related web-surfing yields a pay rate of $2.19 an hour. Earnings for editing the novels are somewhat better: $12 an hour.

Usually, those novels serve as bed-time reading, so the work I do on them doesn’t occupy productive daytime hours.

After a little experimentation, I’ve found that if I get up off my rear end in the morning and do some yardwork, housework, dog walking, or socializing before settling in to paying work, I can put off writing blog posts until the evening. It’s something that can be done, as it was in the beginning, from an overstuffed chair in front of the television. That strategy defuses the blogging work by moving it out of daytime hours that should be better paid or at least should provide some fun, exercise, or relaxation time.

Now. What about the teaching?

What, really, does it pay by the hour? And is there a way to manage time used in teaching to ensure a decent hourly wage?

Well, I did a little English-major math and made some interesting discoveries. First, I posited that a “decent” rate would be about $30 an hour, approximately what I was earning at GDU before the layoff. Second, I established that I should work no more than five days a week—I should get weekends off to sing in the choir, schmooze with my son, and do whatever I feel like doing. A community college course here in Maricopa County, Arizona, pays $2,400. With those as givens, let us ask…

How  many hours can you put into a community college course and still earn a decent wage?

Okay, so what we see here is that no matter how many weeks the course spans, the maximum number of hours you can work on the course to keep the pay rate at $30/hour or better is 80. Next area of inquiry: is that realistic?

To keep your rate at $30/hour, what is the maximum number of hours you could spend on a course working outside of class meeting time?

Well, if you add up the number of hours per period and multiply by the number of class meetings, you find that an eight-week course meets about 42 hours; a sixteen-week course meets 40 hours. Since the excessively long meeting time for the short-form course requires several breaks, you could (sort of) argue that class meeting time for the eight-week course is actually about 40 hours, too.

A fully online course, by definition, has no class meetings, but it requires a great deal more course preparation time.

To keep your pay rate at $30 an hour for an eight-week course, you could spend no more than five hours a week outside of class, giving you one hour a day of grading and interaction time.

With no face-to-face (F2F) time, an online course provides a full ten hours a week for grading and online interaction with students.

For a 16-week F2F course, you could spend no more than two and a half hours a week outside of class. That’s only a half an hour a day, five days a week.

On the face of it, this doesn’t look very practical; realistically, one spends many hours a week reading student papers and answering e-mails. However, it’s not as dire as the figures above suggest, because you can manipulate due dates so that some weeks pass with no incoming. So, let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective:

How many hours does it really take to grade student papers?

The community college district requires four papers for English 101 and three papers for English 102. A typical set of freshman comp papers takes four to six hours to grade.

Okay, an hour an a half is still not long enough to grade a set of papers. However, assuming one doesn’t have to grade a set of papers every single week, then what? In fact, with 40 hours of in-class time, you have another 40 hours, at $30/hour, available to read student papers. That provides plenty of leeway to perform 24 hours’ worth of grading!

This optimistic conclusion, alas, leaves out the untold numbers of hours one spends in course preparation.

How much time could you spend on course prep and still gross $30 an hour?

In reality, it takes about four or five full-time, eight-hour days to prep a composition course, especially in the semesters when a new edition of the overpriced textbook comes out.

Thus, to make this work, prep time would have to be cut to no more than sixteen to twenty-two hours. All scutwork—that is, all checking and scoring of in-class exercises, drafts, and homework—would have to be foisted on a teaching assistant, so that all the instructor had to read would be the required, final full-length papers. Assuming about 15 or 16 hours of scutwork, I could afford to pay a T.A. $10 an hour and still be left with enough to buy groceries.

If all one read were the required papers and a T.A. scored the other student activities, how many hours would you spend on a course and what would you earn per hour?

It works out. Of course, about fifteen of those hours would actually earn only $20/hour, but the $10/hour wage for one’s T.A. would be tax-deductible.

In its strange way, this perspective starts to make things look a little better. First, what we see is that teaching, even adjunct, is my best and steadiest source of income. And on inspection, we see that I’m actually grossing approximately what I earned, per hour, at GDU. It explains why I seem to have plenty of cash during the nine months of the school year, and it suggests that even one course over the summer would chase away the summertime budgetary doldrums.

What can be done to bring course preparation time under control?

There, too, I have a plan.

The base content (such as it is) of freshman composition has not changed since I started teaching the subject about 40 years ago. There are only so many ways you can explain what an essay is, what a research paper is, and how to write them. This means that every newly adopted textbook and every new edition of an existing textbook is just another rehash of the same material.

So, prep time could be cut by creating fungible modules that can be plugged in to each new semester’s sections to fit time available. We might call such modules “learning module templates.” These would key reading assignments to subject matter, and writing assignments to specific patterns of development, not to chapters in the current textbook. Thus if in a given week you want to teach students a specific mode of discourse, you simply take whatever textbook you’re handed and look for the chapters or passages that discuss that.

To avoid having to create new assignments for each new textbook edition, you would have to be sure never to key a writing assignment to a reading selection (i.e., a sample essay) printed in the text, since these tend to change as new editions are churned out. You could require students to use the book’s selections as source material for their essay citations; this wouldn’t stop plagiarism, but at least students would feel they were using the textbooks more fully.

Each module could contain the following

• The module’s learning goals
• Subject matter that should be addressed in reading
• Homework, related to this subject matter but independent of specific reading matter
• In-class lectures, discussions, and activities
• Writing assignment, if any (depending on the number of weeks/course)

If you made the modules generic enough, it would be very easy to pick and choose to fit your timeframe, and quick to plug in new reading material and resources to make the broad choices specific.

It would take some time to create these things, but once they were in place, each semester’s prep time would drop to a few hours.

So what does it all mean for Working Smarter?

In the first place, sideline enterprises that earn less than a living wage should be relegated to the status of hobbies. They should not be permitted to consume time that could be spent more profitably, nor should they be allowed to morph into work.

Blogging, for example, should be as entertaining as reading detective novels. It should never be treated as a job. In other words, I should not be trudging in to my office every morning, there dutifully to crank out another post. I should not be checking e-mail every few hours to screen out spam and accept comments from real humans—instead, do this at the end of the day. Adsense? Alexis? Google Analytics? Awstats? Is there some point in tracking data whose significance is negligible, except as gratification for a hobby? Obviously not. These should be ignored; certainly never checked more than once a week.

In the second place, the number of hours put into decently paying work should be tightly controlled so that the per-hour wage never drops below a minimum threshold.

With teaching, it appears this is eminently possible. Medicare keeps overhead down so that, given enough sections, $30 an hour amounts to a middle-class wage. The only drawback to focusing solely on teaching as the “real” source of income is that it doesn’t pay enough to add to savings. However, next year I should be able to get some summer courses, and in that case, any editing and blogging income can be rolled into savings. That would fund my Roth each year, as long as I can dodder into a classroom or sit in front of computer to teach an online course.

And there really is no third place. It’s pretty simple.

• Move the hobby income out of the center of one’s field of vision.
• Focus on the endeavor that earns the most money.
• Control time spent on that endeavor to maximize per-hour income.

And…get a life! 😀

Motivating People around Us: Six Ways to Better Customer Service

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A week or so ago, Financial Samurai posted a thoughtful article on the importance of recognition in motivating workers, especially as they move upward through the organizational hierarchy to take on greater and greater responsibility.

He touches on an issue that was presented to me some years ago. While I was an editor at Arizona Highways, I was sent off to take a seminar in motivating creative workers. To boil a daylong talkfest down to a sentence or three, the gist was that creative people are motivated less by money than by recognition of their skill and talents. It was claimed that graphic artists, writers, and editors feel a great deal less validation from promotions, nice offices, and raises than from awards (whether from inside the organization or from trade and creative groups) and verbal commendations from management.

Well. I recall thinking that sounded like a good excuse to pay creative workers less than accountants, circulation managers, and ad salespeople—as though those folks never engaged any kind of creativity in their jobs. What I took away from the seminar was that all workers thrive on generous recognition of excellence: that positive feedback on good work is more effective than negative feedback on efforts that leave something to be desired.

Weirdly, that idea was recently reinforced by, of all people, a dog trainer.

Motivated creative worker

Cassie the Corgi and I were attending an agility training class. The trainer was trying persuade everyone that the key to convincing a dog to do what you ask is effusive praise. In the middle of his harangue, he stopped and said, “How do you feel when the boss says to you, ‘Great job, Joe! You really did exactly what was needed!'” He mimed a handshake and a pat on the back.

“That makes you feel like doing the same thing again, right? Maybe even better the next time.

“But what if he just grunts ‘Nice work there’?” He made like a guy walking past the cube, waving a coffee cup in the air. “How does that make you feel? Not so enthusiastic about the job.”

You don’t have to be a boss (or a dog trainer) to profit from this advice. One obvious application is to customer service reps and sales clerks. Ever think about how you behave affects the way they feel about their jobs? Imagine having to put up with some chucklehead who can’t even make eye contact while she yammers on the cell phone as you’re toting up her grocery bill. What must it feel like to be on the receiving end of a call from a customer who has just spent ten, fifteen, or more minutes listening to infuriating Muzak, advertising, and “we value your patronage” pseudomessages while trying to get a simple answer to a simple question?

We can “motivate” all sorts of employees around us. Even though they’re not strictly “our” employees, they’re our employees in that they’re trying (in theory) to please us with various products and services. It’s in our interest to motivate them, because happy employees provide better services and may even go above and beyond the call for us, in one way or another.

Here are some ways to build better morale and promote better service among the employees we run into every day:

• Refrain from yakking on your cell phone while the checkout clerk is charging up your purchases (that is so rude!).

• To keep the edge out of your voice after navigating an endless phone tree, turn on your speaker phone so that annoying ads and muzak aren’t pumped straight into your ear. Try not to take out your frustration at having to fight to reach a human on the human being who finally does answer the phone.

• Thank people for their efforts, even if they’re just doing their job.

• When people do something you like, compliment them on their professionalism, helpfulness, or special effort.

• Even if the person is doing just an adequate job, compliment him or her on something or make some empathetic remark. Recently a tired-looking bank teller perked right up when I observed that her manicure looked lovely.

• When a talking machine asks you to comment on a telephone representative, say “yes” and leave a positive comment—most people only comment when they’re complaining, so these devices serve mainly to add stress to an already stressful job.

What strategies do you use for getting the best out of the people around you?

Image: Pembroke Welsh Corgi on an agility teeter-totter. Elf. GNU Free Documentation License.

Health care, Woo-Woo, and the Spread of Superstition

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Did you read where whooping cough has been declared epidemic in California? It’s an entirely preventable disease that kills little children. There’s an easy way to keep your kids from getting miserably sick or even dying from this disease: vaccinate them.

Sadly, Americans have for some years been resisting calls to immunize their kids against diseases that were once common scourges. Somehow folks have absorbed the idea that immunization is dangerous to kids, and that magically nothing bad will happen to children if they are not vaccinated. Despite solid scientific evidence to the contrary, some parents persist in imagining that childhood vaccines cause autism. Despite the indisputable fact that because of vaccination we no longer need to fear smallpox and polio, or typhus, tetanus, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria—horrible diseases that devastated populations—people have allowed unfounded theories to frighten them to the point of putting their children at serious risk.

Vaccines do not kill children. Whooping cough kills children. While it is true that the older version of whooping cough vaccine had some side effects, occasionally severe ones, the “acellular” type now in use does not bear much risk; in either event, the disease itself has always posed a greater threat to children than has vaccination.

Vaccines do not cause autism. No one knows for certain what causes autism, but it pretty clearly has something to do with genetics; removing thimerosal, the vaccine preservative alleged to have caused a purported rise in cases, has done nothing to reduce the rate of autism diagnoses. One thing you can be sure of, though: viral and bacterial diseases do cause death, long-term physical harm, and mental disability.

Why have Americans become so superstitious? Where do people get ideas so misguided that they are led to put their children at risk, in a country where universal education is required? Shouldn’t an educated populace be wiser and more aware of the facts?

Snake-oil-poster

One reason is that we are being blitzed with propaganda for so-called “alternative medicine,” an approach that, more often than not, amounts to snake oil. A friend of mine, hearing of the continuing pain from my three-month-old shoulder injury, gave me a large bottle of pills that, while legally required to be called a “nutritional supplement,” were sold to her as an anti-inflammatory. She remarked, in handing the stuff over to me, that although her friends had assured her it’s highly effective, it hadn’t done anything for her.

This product costs around $100 for a bottle of 800 pills. One is supposed to take six tablets a day—that’s considered a “maintenance” dose.

When I looked up the product on the Web, not one skeptical word about it appeared in page after page of Google results. High on the lists of results were blissful songs of praise to the stuff. We learn, to our mounting joy, that the product is a cure-all. Not only does it ease your aches and pains, it reduces the occurrence of injury among athletes; lowers blood pressure; lowers cholesterol; prevents strokes and heart attacks; treats pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, and hepatitis; eases the pain of rheumatoid arthritis; supports your joints (whatever that means); and aids digestion.

A miracle.

The research supporting these claims? Minimal to none. The buzz about the stuff is emanating from purveyors of vitamins and dietary supplements, the product’s manufacturer and distributors, naturopaths, and various other “holistic” practitioners.
Try to find solid clinical studies of this product, and you come up blank. Some “research” is quoted here and there, but when you examine the sources, you quickly see it’s bogus. The NIH and FDA have done nothing, as far as I can tell, to look into the product, whose sales in Germany are second only to aspirin. Adding tags like .edu to a Google search does nothing to bring up anything resembling actual science.

Adding “scam” and “snake oil” to the product’s brand name will bring up a few reports showing that the stuff does nothing for MS—but even with that search string, the results are full of sales pitches and ecstatic testimonials.

That notwithstanding, when the pain flared up a few days ago, I tried the pills. True to standard snake-oil claims, the product was said to cause few or no side effects, although its manufacturer notes it can cause an upset stomach and diarrhea.

Well, yes. It made me good and sick to my stomach but did nothing for the pain.

Lordie. We need to get out of Woo-Woo Land, both politically and intellectually. Part of the reason so many people subscribe to Woo-Woo is that our healthcare system is so poor. In quality of healthcare, the U.S. ranks at the bottom among developed nations. If you can’t get access to a doctor, you can’t get enough of her time to get diagnosed and treated effectively, or you can’t afford the treatment, you naturally seek alternatives. Unfortunately, many or most of these alternatives are unproven, ineffective, and sometimes downright unsafe.

Equally unfortunate, the products are aggressively marketed by profit-seeking entities (imagine the worth of a product that can sell like aspirin!) and touted by practitioners who may  sincerely, if naively, buy into the hype. They’re making a great deal of money from alternative products and treatments. And when you try to look into the facts, you’re run around in circles—probably because there are no facts, only unsubstantiated claims and anecdotal stories, all of them coming from folks who have already bought into the propaganda.

The fact that people don’t recognize when they’re looking at “research” whose sources have an ax to grind speaks to another cause of the widespread taste for credulity: the lack of real, solid science education in our school systems. People don’t understand what the scientific method is and why it is a more valid way of seeking verifiable facts than are anecdote and unsubstantiated theory because they don’t learn science in the public schools. To the contrary, the forces of superstition work against the teaching of real science—textbook publishing is dominated by parties who think science is a faith-based system of beliefs, no different in that respect from their own religion, which they believe should take precedence in educating everyone’s children.

The predictable result of weak science education is…well, exactly what we have. Ignorance leading to epidemics of preventable diseases that kill children, and a population of gullible consumers prone to wasting their money on highly profitable, untested nostrums.

Want Car. Want Car!!

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Trying to get a grip here. But lookit this:

All together now: oooooohhhhhhh!  ahhhhhhhhhh!

Isn’t that a sweet little car? A Honda Fit (turn off the sound before clicking on that link!). And isn’t 28 mpg ever so much sweeter than the 18 mpg the Dog Chariot makes when it’s in a good mood?

Want car.

At $15,0000 or $16,000, the price is pretty good. I could keep the Dog Chariot (or give it to my son, except he thinks it’s “gay”) and pay in cash from my car savings. But if the D.C. is really worth around five grand, as Kelly Blue Book says it is, then what I’d have to pay in cash would not deplete my car savings. Not by a long shot. If I paid myself back a couple hundred a month, or even just $100 a month, over the vehicle’s proposed ten-year lifetime, that would recharge the car savings and then some.

The fly in the ointment is the outrageous cost of car registration in Arizona. They really gouge you for new cars. The tax drops each year—the older your car is, the less you pay for registration—until by the time the junker gets to be as antiquated as the Dog Chariot, registration costs so little even someone like me can pay it out of pocket, without having to borrow or self-escrow for a year.

This flies in the face of reason. Why does Arizona have to do everything bass-ackwards? It would make sense to charge drivers more for each year the car ages. This would tend to get gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles off the road, and it would gently stimulate sales of newer models. The truth is, the high annual cost of automobile registration is a significant motivator, for me at least, to keep the old junk running.

And of course, insurance would go up, too. Right now my car insurance is almost more than I can afford to pay. I’d have to drop the million-dollar umbrella, which (between you and me and the rest of the galaxy) insures this site against libel suits. Since companies have taken to suing bloggers for saying unkind things about their products and services (is there one among us who has not complained about the likes of Comcast, Qwest, or Chico’s?), it behooves one to have such a policy. Even without the extra coverage, insurance premiums on a new car would end up being around the same as I’m paying now, I expect.

So the savings on gasoline would be mooted, many times over.

But oh! Wouldn’t it be loverly to have such a pretty little, maneuverable little, gas-efficient little car?