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by Seth Rogovoy
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 24, 1996 -- "Walk down a European street these days and you will see that American faces stand out for their youthful and naive look. Some who are 50 look 30. Part of this phenomenon is good nutrition and exercise, but part of it is that we are losing our ability to mature."
So writes poet and author Robert Bly in "A World of Half-Adults," the cover story of the May-June issue of Utne Reader that professes to diagnose the central ailment of our civilization.
Bly's complaint is that with the demise of the patriarchal society, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Or rather, we haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The baby is all we have left. The baby, says Bly, is us.
In our new "sibling society," Bly writes, "parents regress to become more like children, and the children, through abandonment, are forced to become adults too soon, and never quite make it."
Bly variously blames TV, the lack of a literary canon, materialism, and that catch-all bugbear of conservatives, rap music, for the infantilization of our civilization.
Unfortunately, Bly's article -- excerpted from his new book, "The Sibling Society" -- is laden with fuzzy-headed parables that do little to elaborate just what he means when he says things like, "...the world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while." He calls such thinking mythopoetics. I can think of a few other names for it.
In "Oh, How How Happy We Will Be" in the June 1996 issue of Harper's, Greg Critser argues that, in a sort of last-gasp capitalist power-grab, our psyches have become a mere market to be mined and manipulated by drug companies.
It would be nice to think that pharmaceutical manufacturers like Pfizer Inc., Eli Lilly and SmithKline Beecham hire scientists to come up with better drugs, notify doctors of their availability and let doctors decide when, how and if these new drugs should be used.
While technically this is how things work, what this picture ignores is the $10 billion per year the drug industry spends on promoting its products. That money pays for a lot more than just informational ads and mailings. The drug companies employ battalions of marketing teams -- "the proverbial aluminum-siding salesmen of the antidepressant industry," Critser calls them -- to devise new and clever ways to expand the market for their products. They are not above convincing thousands of unsuspecting consumers who never suspected they were depressed that in fact they are, and that they have the snake oil to cure what ails them. Nor are they above what to any rational person sounds like out-and-out bribery: "...thousands of company sales reps fan out to recruit doctors they know prescribe certain drugs, and then pay them for each patient they enroll in a `study' to try a new drug."
Writing in the May 17th issue of the weekly Boston Phoenix, Al Giordano takes a look at the "gender gap" between the two politicians running for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.
Despite his putting himself on the front line as a pro-choice Republican -- Giordano calls him the "GOP's pro-choice poster boy" -- Gov. Bill Weld's polls show him badly trailing Kerry among women voters, whose votes he will need if he is to overcome Kerry's lead among all voters.
While Weld may hold the "politically correct" positions on most so- called women's issues -- abortion rights, domestic violence, family planning -- he fails miserably on meat-and-potato economic issues that are as much of a concern to women -- who are also workers and mothers -- as those more traditionally identified with women, says Giordano.
Weld's tough-guy posturing on the death penalty and other crime issues doesn't help his cause, either, especially when, as he did in his first debate with Sen. John Kerry, he uses it to attack his opponent.
In a rejoinder reminiscent of Lloyd Bentsen's quip about John Kennedy in the vice-presidential debate against Dan Quayle, the decorated Vietnam combat veteran responded to Weld's personalizing of the death penalty thusly: "I know killing. I don't like killing."
Take that, carrot-top!
"My Old and New Lives" is a fascinating memoir by Robert McCrum, who at age 42 had a stroke last year. In the latest New Yorker, McCrum recounts in gripping detail the events of the day when he woke up alone in his house and could not move. It took him most of the day to drag himself into another room to call for help, while the phone kept ringing and he tried to recite the poem "Jabberwocky" from memory.
Later, in the hospital, writes McCrum, "...every few hours a team of three nurses would turn me over in bed, as if I were a slow-cooking roast." Of the actual stroke itself, the author and Faber & Faber editor shares with the reader his non-technical understanding of just what occured: "...the bleed in my head [w]as a kind of bruise; over time, the scavenging macrophage cells would literally eat up the damage to the cerebral tissue, leaving that part of my brain permanently scarred."
It is a story full of wit and tenderness, and oh so veddy British: "...when...someone used the phrase `an insult to the brain' -- a commonplace of stroke care -- I couldn't help imagining a gang of rogue neurons viciously hissing `Your mother is a water buffalo' to my sensitive cortex."
It is a also a story full of pathos, but McCrum never succumbs to self-pity: "Every day I am acutely reminded that there is a world out there, a world I cannot be part of in quite the same way. One tangible effect of my illness, however, has been a more Zen-like response to the pressures and anxieties of the world, and in my new mood of self- examination I am inclined to say, `So what?'" A brilliant piece of writing, reminiscent of the old New Yorker. If only it was three times as long.
(This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 25, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.)
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