Month: September 2010

by Zoe Pollock

Stefany Anne Golberg has written a deeply arresting essay on the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and what a country's secret files can do to the psychology of a people:

It’s no easy task to kill a dictator. Partly this is because they have a special kind of life. A double life. In 1957, Ernst Kantorowicz published a classic study on the medieval theory of the rights of kings, which he called “The King’s Two Bodies.” Every king has two bodies, he explained: the body politic and the body natural. The body natural is a physical body — a screaming, pissing, farting, and, most importantly, dying body, just like yours and mine. Knowing that this natural body will eventually die, the king also has another body, the body politic that is the symbol of his divine right to rule. Being divine, the body politic transcends the physical body, allowing for a continuity of the kingdom even when the king had died. In other words, the king’s rule is still wielded over his subjects, even after death. As such, a king never really dies. The king is dead, long live the king.

It is really, then, the king’s subjects who keep the kingdom (and the king) alive. They are the believers with the immortality of the regime woven into their souls.

by Zoe Pollock

Diane Silver draws a parallel between self-defense karate style and the constant self-defense of "an out lesbian and a non-Christian living in nation where more than 75 percent of the people are Christian:"

Intellectually, I know every Christian isn't anti-gay or disrespectful of other people's religious beliefs, but my little girl self doesn't live in the land of logic. My little girl self wants to hurt them as much as they've hurt me. I can be the closest of friends with Christians if I know they don't seek my destruction. I can accept their theology, and support their worship. However, I also feel powerless to withstand what feels like a continuous assault from a portion of Christianity. My smallest, most frightened self is too scared to wait to determine if an individual Christian is friend or foe; I just want to verbally attack the instant I meet one.

But here's a fact about powerlessness that's surprising. I learned two lessons that day in karate. I learned that my anger is fueled by feelings of helplessness, but I also learned that my feelings distort my perception. My hapless practice partner was much smaller than I could see at first. What am I missing in my great tussle with Christians? What am I unable to see about them?

by Zoe Pollock

Olivia Solon profiles a new trend in the vinyl craze. You can now have your ashes pressed into a record of your choosing.

(Image from directions on how to duplicate records)

by Zoe Pollock

Robert Wright returns from a meditation retreat, clicks on a Paris Hilton video, and ponders our plugged in lives:

In the space of only a few minutes, the grid had sent a succession of emotions coursing through my body, none that I’m especially proud of. And I feel especially not proud of them right after a meditation retreat, which grants enough critical distance from your feelings to highlight their frequent pointlessness, if not absurdity…

So there you go: covetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on. It’s the frequent fruitlessness of such feelings that the Buddha is said to have pondered after he unplugged from the social grid of his day — that is, the people he lived around — and wandered off to reckon with the human predicament. Maybe his time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from these emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them. In any event, it’s because the underlying emotions haven’t changed, and because the grid conveys and elicits them with such power, that his formula holds appeal for many people even, and perhaps especially, today.

by Zoe Pollock

Iris Monica Vargas reviews the new book Final Exam by surgeon Pauline Chen:

Chen says, “we learn not only to avoid but also to define death as the result of errors, imperfect technique, and poor judgment. Death is no longer a natural event but a ritual gone awry.” For Chen, it is a physician’s rituals that allow him or her to evade death, literally and figuratively. “Concentrating on the ritual becomes [the] professional method of coping, an action that allows him or her to spend as little time as possible with the dying patients, concentrating instead on the treatment algorithm.”

But this obsession with doing, the susceptibility to “the intoxicating power of treatment,” isn’t only a physician’s error. As Chen asserts in  Reappraisal, the third and final part of the book, family members and patients are equally at fault. “We battle away until the last precious hours of life, believing that cure is the only goal.” During life’s final, tortured moments, says Chen, we often inflict misguided treatments not just on others but on ourselves. Ironically, the promise of the nineteenth century—that the body was not just an irrational repository of disease but a potentially reparable biological machine — has become the curse of the twenty-first.

by Zoe Pollock

Clare Stein gives reincarnation the literary treatment:

In Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom mispronounces metempsychosis as “met him pike hoses.” In some cases, this is what the eagerness to believe in reincarnation strikes me as: a mispronunciation of the Collective Unconscious, or something like it. The wealth of history inhabiting the places we like to claim as exclusively ours– mistaken for immortality.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

There are an immense number of things people don't understand about the work I and my team do, but if I had to pick one that causes the most problems, it's the belief, fed and nurtured by medical television, that minor symptoms can exploded into a life-threatening disease process at any moment.

In reality, people who are critically ill almost always look critically ill. It's not subtle. If you are in a lot of pain, or vomiting uncontrollably, or suddenly unable to move half of your body – by all means, come in. We don't expect or want people to diagnose themselves or their families. If it feels like an emergency, let us take a look at you.

But if your sick child is feeling well enough to grab every toy in the toy bin and hurl it across the room, the chance they have anything that won't wait until their PCP can see them on Monday is between small and nonexistent. And if your symptoms would have led your mother to send you to bed and made you soup when you were six, it's probably safe to send yourself to bed when you're forty. And if you show up at the ED instead, I'm not going to run a battery of tests to figure out why you have a sore throat and a fever. I'm going to send you out on your mother's plan, the only difference being the terrifying bill that will follow after.

New Orleans, Louisiana, 12.15 pm

by Zoe Pollock

A Commonweal reader points Paul Moses to a July 28, 1879 article in The New York Times, “An Unprofitable Church: Roman Catholic Troubles in New-Haven:”

As The Times put it, “When the residents of this aristocratic avenue discovered that they were in danger of seeing a Roman Catholic church spring up among them, with all that the establishment of such a church implied, they bestirred themselves to oppose the project. The wisest of the Roman Catholics here did not favor it, and St. Mary’s was induced to exchange the lot for a good one in some other locality.” But that site was also deemed “too good” for Catholics, so a lesser lot was found. The pastor refused this, according to The Times, and built the church as originally planned on wealthy Hillhouse Avenue….

Pressure to “compromise” on a site … bias against the religion of an immigrant community …  hostile media coverage. There is nothing new under the sun.