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.

Remora

From the WP a story ostensibly detailing another instance of environmental degradation:

"The first nationwide study of pharmaceutical pollution of rivers and streams offers an unsettling picture of waterways contaminated with antibiotics, steroids, synthetic hormones and other commonly used drugs.Of the 139 streams analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey in 30 states -- including Maryland and Virginia -- about 80 percent contained trace amounts of contaminants that are routinely discharged into the water in human and livestock waste and chemical plant refuse."

But only the naysayers, the nattering nabobs, will jump on this story from the pollution side. Because this is a classic good news/bad news story. See how the liberal press typically showcases the bad side -- when the good news side of it is right in front of their collective noses: here's the solution to the pesky problem of universal health care! The compassionate conservatives can now make the case that health is just a glass of tapwater away from even our poorest citizens! Is this a great country or what? In other countries, to get your steroids, you have to know a doctor. You have to go through the state socialism of a bureaucracy. It is all the Soviet Union out there in the world where the parts aren't American (except for Britain, of course. They love us in Britain. They kiss our butts in Britain. They're crazy to go along with us when we do the darndest things -- oh, like attacking the axis of evil --in Britain. They have Tony Blair in Britain, and he understands our sorta sometimes hostile needs like perfectly!), and people have to queue up at the steroid store to get those necessary muscle builders. Imagine!

There was a story back in October (a month devoted to recoil from 9.11, and thus essentially a blank, as far as news goes, in Limited Inc's mind) in Salon http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/10/25/drugs_water/print.html that has a lot more fun facts to know and tell. For instance, the author, Mark D. Uehling, quotes some water honcho as saying: the presence of "endocrine-disrupting chemicals in potable and nonpotable water has not been established."

But Uehling
notes:

Scientists in Minneapolis presented abundant evidence to the contrary. For one thing, most farmers liberally dose pigs, cows and chickens with hormones. Those male and female hormones are definitely reaching the environment in both liquid and solid animal wastes. Birth control drugs, even steroids used by body builders and pro athletes, are making similar deposits. The question is what effects the chemicals are having, and whether the water (or something else) might be the source. One new clue came from the Mississippi River, where James Levitt of the University of Minnesota studied a variety of fish coping with endocrine mimic-molecules. Levitt compared walleyed pike upstream from a lock, where there were no endocrine mimic-molecules, with fish caught downstream from the lock, where there was plenty of sewage effluent and no shortage of estrogen disrupters.

The male fish swimming in the dirty water had no sperm, and malformed testes. The female fish in the same water had similarly degenerated ovaries
."

The old joke, from W.C. Fields, was that he didn't drink water, because fish fuck in it. The new joke is something like, I don't drink water, because fish can't fuck in it. As they say in the Reader's Digest, humor is the best medecine.

Note:

The usual process of putting out my posts involves proofreading them once they are up on the web page. For some unknown reason, the Blogger won't go into editing mode. So in the post below, there are several mistakes. For instance, "were does this woman, this woman flying around the Middle East alienating Egyptian journalists,. come from..." would have been edited to "where does this woman, jetting around the Middle East and alienating Egyptian journalists on US government time, come from..." Anyway, I apologize in advance for certain inelegancies.
Limited Inc.

Remora

Limited Inc, predictably, is a fan of Naomi Klein -- or at least is a fan of the idea of Naomi Klein. Sometimes, though, we feel that Ms. Klein allows the writerly ocassion, as Henry James might have put it, to pass her by. This is what we felt about her column, for the LA Times, on Charlotte Beers, America's official Image-meister:

"As undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Charlotte Beers' assignment was not to improve relations with other countries but rather to perform an overhaul of the U.S. image abroad. Beers had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she's built brands for everything from dog food to power drills."

Unsurprisingly, Charlotte Beers task, orientation, and administration are not to Klein's liking.

"So why, only five months in, does the campaign for a new and improved Brand USA seem in disarray? Several of its public service announcements have been exposed for playing fast and loose with the facts. And when Beers went on a mission to Egypt in January to improve the image of the U.S. among Arab "opinion-makers," it didn't go well. Muhammad Abdel Hadi, an editor at the newspaper Al Ahram, left his meeting with Beers frustrated that she seemed more interested in talking about vague American values than about specific U.S. policies. "No matter how hard you try to make them understand," he said, "they don't."

"The misunderstanding likely stemmed from the fact that Beers views the United States' tattered international image as little more than a communications problem. Somehow, despite all the global culture pouring out of New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, despite the fact that you can watch CNN in Cairo and Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu, America still hasn't managed, in Beers' words, to "get out there and tell our story." In fact, the problem is just the opposite: America's marketing of itself has been too effective."

And the drums go drum drum drum. The discrepancy between the American reality, which is a pretty consistently pursued imperialism, and American rhetoric, is hauled out, and we fade Charlotte Beers to black. All honorable stuff. Yet Limited Inc feels a distinct sense of the cobbled together, the held back, in Klein's piece. When Charlotte Beers went before the senate during her nomination, Time magazine's Richard Stengel wrote:

"It would be easy � too easy � to make light of Charlotte Beers, the former big-time advertising exec recently named undersecretary of state for public affairs. The so-called "queen of branding" who helped promote Head & Shoulders shampoo and Uncle Ben's Rice has now been assigned the job of helping to boost the U.S. image in the Muslim world."

Because a thing is easy does not mean it is not worth doing. Surely we should ask ourselves, were does this woman, this woman flying around the Middle East alienating Egyptian journalists,. come from, and why is she working for us, and why can't we make fun of her? According to an Economist piece, she once impressed a dog food client by eating dog food; she once impressed Sears execs by taking apart and putting together a power drill (she is apparently a woman of endless resources). She puts sweaters on her toy poodles and lounges around, apparently, with Martha Stewart, when Stewart is prepared to lounge.
This is the standard media identikit re Charlotte Beers.

Alan Rosenshine, in Advertising age, has risen to Stengel's call to seriousness, and delivers several solemnities about Beers' onerous task. He makes the point that we aren't selling our brand to terrorists. No, we aren't. We just aren't a-going to do that:

"Audience segmentation is a primary principle of branding. Terrorists and those who have turned hatred into violent fanaticism are not our audience. Their psyches are warped beyond any possibility of communication. Terrorists are criminals and enemies of civilization who deserve destruction in the name of justice and self-defense. The message of America must instead reach the many millions still in the process of being taught to hate us."


I'm glad that Rosenshine got that off his chest, but the interested by-stander has to disagree. Surely it would be cheaper to send Beers deep into the mountains of Afghanistan with an Uzi and letting her demonstrate to puzzled Al Quaeda execs stripping it and putting it back together again. She could also sample their simple fare, and get them rolling with her imitation of Martha confronting a badly done coq au vin. Instead, we waste her talents on Egyptian journalists. Even Beers seems to know that there's something hopelessly porkbarrel about her Nile tete-a-tetes. According to the NY Metro,

"Beers, for her part, seems to be busy managing expectations. Testifying before Congress, she recently characterized the propaganda war's goal as reaching young people. "It's the battle for the 11-year-old mind," she said, sounding ominously like someone who has decided that the 12-and-over demographic may already be a lost cause."

Actually, it isn't that the over 12 demographic is enfolded in the process of cult hatred. No, as any Piagetian psychologist can tell you, between the age of 11 and 12 the world begins to take on a cause and effect density. Bushiepoo, whose very ascension to the throne was in defiance of cause and effect, loses his aura of plausibility to the well tempered sixth grade mind. Best appeal to em while they are still in nappies.

Dope

Limited Inc was raised in the suburbs, but escaped those wastelands at the end of our larval stage. Still, sometimes there is a thing that calls us, a beckon in the sweet air, and we must go back to haunt those teen tedious reaches, those bloated wood and brick tents each on its own independent half to one acre� Well, really there isn�t, but for anthropological reasons we took off with a friend to explore Round Rock, Austin�s bedroom community, yesterday. The friend had romantic visions of Penny Lane, or at least the Cal-friendly colors of the Truman show, but we knew better. We knew that this is the South, after all, and that suburbs are where Yankees have traditionally coped with the South � by voting Republican, adopting Northern racism � a primness about language combined with a ferocity about money and who (and what color of who) it goes to � to Southern norms, and exuding around them, like the shell of some strange crustacean, that outlying reef of oddly monotonous shopping centers, among which old Southern remnants � the visibly unhygienic barbecue place, the commercially dubious shacks, usually sprinkled over with some disgusting grayish sludge of oil and rubber, somehow connected with the auto trade, the bakery outlets (white bread discounted) � exist in an uneasy symbiosis.

My friend, a product of Europe, had never taken a close and loving look at suburbia. Well, to the unaccustomed sensibility, it does come somewhat as a shock. She kept looking for waterfalls and greenery � Limited Inc never did find out where these inviting, though wavering, images came from. Alas, the only waterfalls to be found in the Round Rock area are artificially constructed, and usually involve railroad ties and some sprayer on an automatic timer. As for greenery, it has been a brown winter.

Paradise is getting everything you want � hell is the necessity of living with having gotten everything you want. Any teenager can tell you that. What makes America perpetually different is the p-to-h ratio � it is just at a different multiple from everywhere else. For three hundred years there�s been a bull market in paradise; but also, inexplicably, hell never disappears -- just take the next exit off the interstate if you want a taste of it. We Americans have produced the first real blackmail empire in world history � we have the weapons to end it all, and that armament has penetrated the pores of our very dreams. Assyrian lust for power, and the British conviction of our essential righteousness, this is a heady mixture. We like to think we are giants. But oh my friends, why, why, does all that power seems to leak away in the bungalows, at the end of the day? Why can one drive down the streets of Round Rock and feel something deadly, a tedium that seems to visibly weigh on the Dell Baseball Stadium, the HEB Grocery store, the Gatti�s Pizza Delivery place?

Remora

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.


That was, indeed, a curious incident, for those who have ears to hear (that there is nothing to hear) and eyes to see (that there is nothing to see). Well, campers, consider the curious incidents that await us in today's newspaper. One headline says, The surprise recovery is here. America is in great shape, happy days are here again, and Bushiepoo has avoided the curse of the house of Bush, which, before, has always gloomily exuded recession around its slimy walls. But what is this, Watson? Chap says Japan in deep recession, make that depression, with an incredible 4.5 percent drop in GDP. Curious. The stats the Financial Times packs into its first graf are heart stoppers:


"Japan's economy shrank in the fourth quarter of last year on falling exports and a plunge in capital spending, nudging the country into its longest recession since 1993, official data showed on Friday. Gross domestic product contracted 1.2 per cent in real terms between October and December compared with the previous quarter, and 4.5 per cent on an annualised basis. A 12 per cent drop in business investment undermined the benefits of an increase in consumer spending. "

On to today's mystery theater: why don't Japan's numbers bug us?

Perhaps, and here I am flying blind, it has to do with our decades long failure to pierce the Japanese market. This long deplored situation, in which the Japanese craftily avoid our meaty, beaty American products, stimulates periodic choler among our politicos, and the news story about some fantastically expensive thing in Japan that is cheap as water in Omaha and that we could be providing them with if only they didn't protect their farmers, retailers, industry, whatever. And this is a continuing scandal and a stumbling block to free traders. What free traders don't say, however, is that when the global economy is inter-connected, economic contagion is necessarily provided with routes to spread faster than if the global economy is, well, less inter-connected. Clearly, if the US economy depended on exporting to Japan, we would be in deep trouble. And we might well be in trouble with this recovery anyway. And -- to continue backpedalling - if we simulate an economy in which trade barriers with Japan had fallen, and the US was happily trading away with the Japanese, perhaps this kind of activity would re-compose our economy in such a way that its present state would be so different from its current state as to be unpredictible. All clever hypotheses, Watson. But the fact remains, Japan's troubles, so far, have left the U.S. relatively untouched. Given the extent of Japanese investment in this country, and given the size of the Japanese economy, the fact that Japan is doing a Titanic without sucking us into its wake is a mystery. I don't see any of the free traders out there, or the globalists, explaining it.

Remora

The Enlightenment was a great age for sympathy. The whole Scottish school, from Hume to Adam Smith, had spotted sympathy floating about in the culture and gone -- aha! Because the cultural sea, according to the best authorities, consisted of self interest -- wave after wave of the stuff -- so the question was, why was there morality at all? Sympathy was a respectable escape from self interest, without wholly being an escape. Besides, there is, in this idea, an agreeable dependence on some kind of narration. In fact, this moral elevation of sympathy surely fed into the later nineteenth century fascination with stories. First comes the moralist, then the novelist.

Hume, for instance, in his treatise on Human Nature, has this to say:

"We may begin with considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature. When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is convey�d to the effects, and is actuated with a like emotion. Were I present at any of the more terrible operations of surgery, �tis certain, that even before it begun, the preparation of the instruments, the laying of the bandages in order, the heating of the irons, with all the signs of anxiety and concern in the patient and assistants, wou�d have a great effect upon my mind, and excite the strongest sentiments of pity and terror. No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes or effects. From these we infer the passions: And consequently these give rise to our sympathy."


Well, the NYT reports today on the terrible operations of modeling, and it is a nice little parable of the arousal of passion followed by its diminishment -- the limits of sympathy are the limits of my bank account, might be the moral. This week, as my trendy readers will surely know, is a great week for fashion in Milan -- one of the supreme rites, one of the ceremonies that holds together the universe. Guy Trebay, the NYT reporter, filed this account of an incident they should teach in intro to ethics:

"Midway through the Gucci show on Saturday, a young British model, Michelle DeSwarte, made her first exit, as entrances at fashion shows are called. She got about two-thirds of the way down the runway and staggered dramatically on a pair of four-inch heels before her ankles gave way."

The stumble created Humean gasps in the audience. We presume that a lot of mass infering was going on. It was the infering of an inference, if embarrassment be considered not a first level pain, but a second level pain -- a sort of sympathy with oneself. So it was already an intellectual effort, rather like reading a postmodern novel.

Hume was a man of abridged expectations. He did not expect the best from the human beast, and he was rarely disappointed. The effort of sympathy, its prolongation, is rather like reading to the end of a tedious story -- something we might do with some effort, once we have begun, but that very few will do if the tedium mounts too high (excepting us poor reviewers, who then attack -- our sympathy beyond eroded, actually transformed into malignancy). Well, our stumbling model stumbled again:

"Bret Easton Ellis pointed out in his novel "Glamorama" that, in objective terms, a model's job is not all that complicated. You have to look good and have the capacity to walk. Slick floors, fur rugs and weird and ill-fitting shoes are standard occupational hazards. All the same, people understand that things can go wrong. The reaction when Ms. DeSwarte fell the first time was mainly sympathetic. When she made a second exit and again crumpled to the runway, there was a widespread assumption among the spectators that they were watching a professional suicide."

Don't let it happen to you twice. The general sentiment from an audience a good third of whom have surely been treated, somewhere along the way, for addiction to one or another of our favorite candies. Isn't this, isn't this ... beautiful? The state of play of class relations emblematized in the stumble of a model in four inch heels. That is a lot of heel. Limited Inc is moved.