MAGAZINE COLUMN
Need something to fret about? MALARIA!
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 23, 1997 ) -- If you're like me, you've got plenty to worry about already. Let's see, there's crime, global warming, overpopulation, the imminent stock market crash, dust mites, E. coli bacteria, antibiotic-resistant infectious agents, a rusting automobile in the driveway, terrorism, unrest abroad, high cholesterol, taxes, drive-by shootings, rotting floorboards in my porch, Bob Dylan's health, right-wing militias, killer bees, army ants, Lyme disease, the decline of family values, the idiocy of rural life, the death of small-town America, and on, and on, and on.
And now, malaria.
ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Malaria? Yes. Those cheery folks at the Atlantic Monthly have done it again, and found something else for us to start worrying about.According to Ellen Ruppel Shell's "Resurgence of a Deadly Disease" in the August issue, we all better start thinking a lot more about malaria than we have been, because while we've been ignoring it, it's been busy planning a deadly invasion.
In a nutshell, here's the bad news according to Shell: "Worldwide incidence of the disease has quadrupled in the past five years....[I]n the United States 1,000 to 1,200 cases annually have been reported in recent years....Malaria is transferable in blood, yet it is not screened for in the American blood supply....The 1995 Ebola outbreak in Zaire that inspired Hollywood and transfixed the world caused approximately 250 deaths over a period of six months. More than twenty times that many Africans die every day of malaria.....[M]alaria kills as many as 2.7 million people worldwide each year (roughly twice as many as AIDS), and...it sickens as many as half a billion.....[M]edical science has dismally failed to get a grip on the disease."
Shell is not hopeful that we will get a grip on malarial infection any time soon. Efforts to eradicate it are typically misguided, she says, resulting in improved strains better able to resist our sledgehammer-style attacks.
The only way to truly control malaria is to manage it, suggests Shell. But this is the sort unsexy solution that requires lots of time, money and hard work -- none of which is in great supply these days.
HARPER'S MAGAZINE
A few years ago, I served a short stint as a part-time instructor at a local college. I approached it with great enthusiasm, thrilled to be in the position where once stood teachers who so inspired me, grateful to be given the chance to make a similar personal and intellectual connection with a new generation of students.As it turned out, it was a thoroughly disheartening experience. Instead of facing a classroom full of eager minds ready to discuss and argue great issues, I was presented with dozens of blank stares that said, "So, entertain us." It was all downhill from there.
Ever since then, I have wondered if mine was a unique experience -- if, perhaps, I was just a really lousy teacher. (No, you're right. I haven't really been kept up many nights wondering about this.)
Now, after reading Mark Edmundson's incisive analysis of the intellectual climate on today's college campuses in the September issue of Harper's Magazine, I'm sure there is at least one other person who feels the same way I did.
Edmundson's piece, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students," makes the well-argued case that what ails our colleges -- students, faculty and administration -- is the wholesale triumph of the consumerist culture, whose credo is "buy in order to be."
Students come to college with minds totally brainwashed by years of inane TV programming, the subtext of which is an insidious ideology of consumerism. Colleges, finding themselves struggling in a buyer's market, remake themselves along the lines of resort communities, devoting resources to improved athletic facilities and activity spaces worthy of "northern outposts of Club Med." Teachers, finally, confronted with these anti-intellectual realities and the pressure to succeed as measured by student evaluations and course enrollment, dumb down their courses, taking care not to challenge or "offend" their students' sensibilities.
Edmundson is careful to stress that his argument is not an echo of the Allen Blooms of the world, to the effect that "a left-wing professorial coup has taken over the university." Rather, the problem is that "at American universities, left-liberal politics have collided with the ethos of consumerism." Guess who has won? And guess who has lost?
THE NEW REPUBLIC
While we're bashing higher education, here's another pet peeve. I did really well in high school mathematics until I reached senior-year calculus, when someone let the air out of the balloon of my grades. I'll never forget that course; it was like a year-long train ride that left me standing at the station from day one.I had another course like that in college, Psych 101. Instead of enhancing my understanding of schizophrenia, it induced schizophrenic- like symptoms, and it was the closest I ever came to failing a course in my life.
Had I only known then what we know now. In "Defining Disability Down" in the Aug. 25 issue of the New Republic, Ruth Shalit reports on how schools and campuses are plagued with students demanding accomodations for "neo-disabilities" such as dysphasia ("difficulty using spoken language to communicate"), dyssemia ("difficulty with signals [and] social cues") and dysrationalia ("a level of rationality...significantly below the level of the individual's intellectual capacity").
Students claiming these disabilities -- and their parents and their lawyers -- have successfully won the right to all sorts of considerations, such as extended time-limits on tests, separate and isolated exam rooms, copies of teachers' lecture notes and reserved seats in the front of the class.
All this time I thought I was just too lazy and stupid -- truthfully, too indifferent -- to get on the calculus train. Had I only known I was being discriminated against because of my disability, I could have demanded spoon-feeding. I wonder if it's too late to sue my school district?
BOSTON PHOENIX
In case you hadn't noticed, the campaign for the presidency in the year 2000 is well under way. In last week's Boston Phoenix (Aug. 15), political columnist Dan Kennedy engages in some imaginative wishful- thinking regarding Sen. John Kerry's chances of gaining the Democratic nomination.You can't fault members of the Boston media for salivating over the possibility of a Kerry-Weld rematch fought at the national level (assuming Weld emerges triumphant against Sen. Jesse Helms in his so- called battle for the soul of the Republican party and thereby cakewalks to the GOP nomination).
In Kennedy's scenario, a lot depends on the self-destruction of the acknowledged front-runner, Al Gore. Kennedy sees Rep. Richard Gephardt, running to the left of the vice president, giving Gore trouble early on in Iowa. He also sees an early advantage for Kerry as a stalking horse in nearby New Hampshire. A victory for Kerry there, combined with a sweep of the South by an insurgent Jesse Jackson (I told you, this is wild speculation), knocks out Gore. No one thinks Gephardt can win, leaving the Democratic establishment to come running to Kerry to save them from the guaranteed loss that a Jackson candidacy would represent.
Kennedy acknowledges that a Kerry nomination is the stuff of Republican wet dreams: another liberal from Massachusetts to run against, spelling certain victory for the GOP.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 23, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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