Dope

D. called up this morning. He told Limited Inc a funny tale.

Seems D. and his wife went to a cowboy dancehall a couple of days ago.

Now, D., like Limited Inc, is an unhibited dancer. He dances like he has fishes in his britches, he flails galvanically, he pogoes to the sweet strains of trucker nostalgia coming over the loudspeakers, and he isn't afraid to dance alone.
He also, it should be said, drinks like a fish. Of course. He's a friend of mine.

Anyway, a good time was being had by all when D.'s wife was approached by a woman who identified herself as a school teacher. As you know, you can go through the education department at many of our illustrious institutions and come out without a clue as to how to do, say, long division. But one thing you can't skip is the class on how to drug the a- and anti-socials. Dumb em down, drug em up -- is this a win-win situation for your local school board or what? So, being a good diagnostician, this teacher had immediately spotted D. for what he was -- a sufferer from ADD. D.'s wife is doing the slow burn when the teacher, sly as a cat, made off with D.'s drink. Apparently, she didn't want this ADD guy running around drunk, who knows what he'd do.

D. told Limited Inc this story partly because he wanted to make us laugh. ADD is Limited Inc's current favorite designer disease. It is more than a state of mind, it is the state of the union, baby! If America pays attention to anything for more than two days, we all agree that it is world history, there's never been anything like it before, and, in short, "everything (as they say) will be different."

A designer disease is such a money maker that I feel it a public duty to reveal to my select audience, entrepeneurs all, how a designer disease work. Take any assortment of bad habits and aches and pains, package it, and baptize it with a nifty acronym. SDD, XDD, whatever. You need to link it to some neural jargon, and thence to a neuro-toxin, which can be had for x bucks a pill. Or as a wonderous site on ADHD puts it, licking its lips and rubbing its hands: ADHD in adults is very responsive to pharmacotherapy. Very, very big boy. Can't you just hear the pharma guys purring that line into the local doc's ear? Throw in eye of newt, whiskers of cat, and bingo:
"Research and clinical experience have shown that the antidepressants Norpramin (desipramine) and Tofranil(imipramine) effectively increase attentiveness.' In Limited Inc.'s case, attentiveness is also increased by the promise of large sums of money or ready sex, but alas, the pharmacist doesn't purvey such things.

Still, once you have your SXXD, you need a market. To get it across, most trained medical personel feel that you need to tell some tales of the tribe. Brochures, books, stories about people just like you and me, people who are sufferin' terribly from life dysfunction. A guy I know who is convinced he has adult ADD once proved it to me by telling me of a story he'd come across in a book on the subject. The guy in the book had a presentation to make, but kept putting it off, putting it off, couldn't concentrate until the last moment, did it, then, exhausted, fell asleep and slept through the time scheduled for the presentation. And, here's the killer, the reader told me, he'd done exactly the same thing . Is this Q.E.D. or what?

Tales like this are glommed onto by the great mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation. Now they suddenly understand that their desperation is a medical condition, and so they become much less quiet -- become positively noisy. This is the second phase of the designer disease profile -- the viral stage. It spreads from mouth to mouth, as people compare anecdotes and recall their own multiple failures and unhappinesses. It turns out it was this scoprion lurking in the shadows! ADD is just sitting there, in the biography, waiting to strike.

The importance of the anecdote can't be underestimated in this process. In this, it reminds me of fortune-telling. Fortune telling is a communicative emblem, really, because all of the cues plug in to a good fortune telling session. First, the fortune teller casts back into the past. Relationship problems? perhaps with a man who didn't appreciate you? perhaps this man, though, he had some good qualities? Of course. Play the averages, here. If you are dealing with a lesbian audience, the bad boyfriend thing isn't going to work, but you simple have to shift the gender stuff around, plug into a different regime of sentimentality. Ditto if you are dealing with a guy. Then some unusual circumstance that is statistically distributed: she told me all about that time X (the relationship reject in question) threw a fit about the car. about the dishes. About the insurance. About the vacation. Fortune telling relies on the odd relationship between our self consciousness and our unconsciousness of our fit into regular social patterns. The broad shapes of our fates within a population in which like social constraints apply are really not so different. Plug in the variables, take a ride on the wild side. But fortune telling also depends on vanity. The fortune teller who predicts, I see you marrying a man who will go bald and pudgy in ten years, pick at his food, and watch way too much television is not going to get a big tip, even though she gets points for truthtelling. You can only play the odds so much. L'amour propre is still the goddess.