Diabetic Diets

Susan Sontag is the one who alerted us we should pay attention to the way people talk about illness and, by extension, their bodies. It’s no doubt to her I owe my mind’s wanderings after talking to two friends on medical diets who each delighted in telling me what they were allowed. When my mother was diagnosed with diabetes, our household lived in fear of what was forbidden.

In some ways, the different responses are similar to how people notice if a glass is half full or half empty. They indicate states of mind that outsiders roughly translate into optimism or pessimism, happiness or sadness, tranquility or depression. Beyond that, they indicate how people react to limitations and how those reactions affect their long term health.

The first woman has been overweight as long as I’ve known her and seeing specialists who tried to help her deal with a diabetic condition with diet. To no avail. She remained overweight but constantly talked about what she was told to do.

When I noticed it looked like she had lost weight, she said she had recently had her gallbladder and uterus removed. She was now fully diabetic, and again she told me about what she was allowed to eat. In addition to her three meals, she believed she could snack all day on nuts. It was in this context that she said she was allowed so many nuts a day and had them stashed in different places in her office. She sounded like a happy gerbil who didn’t pay attention to the warning that she could only eat so many calories a day, composed of foods from the list. She took the list to be a list of what was permissible within her traditional dietary patterns and was always confused that nothing ever changed.

The second woman has also been overweight as long as I’ve known her, and suffering from stress or emotion triggered symptoms like severe rashes. At one time she was told she was pre-diabetic, and I remember then she shopped the internet until she found some kind of bran muffin that tasted good and met her dietary restrictions. She allowed herself one in mid-morning.

Her conditions never really change. When I saw her this time, she mentioned all the medicines she was taking and noted she was back on Prozac. This time she has a gluten allergy which limits what she can eat, but it was when she was discussing her dietary list and mentioned what kind of chocolate she was allowed, that I asked was she still pre-diabetic. She looked at me as if she didn’t understand the question.

I was about five when my mother was diagnosed with diabetes. At the time, the early 1950's, diabetics were put on strict diets. She ate a poached egg and whole wheat toast every noon. Our dinners usually were some meat leached of all fat (and nutrients) and boiled, canned vegetables, usually peas, corn or string beans. When I later talked to other diabetics and learned even corn and peas were too starchy, I realize my mother’s condition was serious enough to warrant giving herself a daily shot of insulin, but not severe.

Like many diabetics, she was obsessed with the forbidden, and would indulge in fudge or other chocolate when she thought she could. She looked on the times my father was away on business as periods of freedom when we could go to the local drive in. Still, she had some kind of internal monitor because I only remember a few times when her biochemistry was off and she needed a quick dose of orange juice.

The difference between focusing on what’s permitted or what’s forbidden, however, may be more than a difference of individual psychology. Since I was a child, organizations representing diabetics and individuals like Mary Tyler Moore have been arguing that diabetes is a disease that can be treated, not some contagious or debilitating condition that requires special handling by society.

I was reminded of the reasons for such campaigns when I got my driver’s license renewed a few weeks ago. The form asked if I was a diabetic, alcoholic, drug user or had heart problems. No one is going to voluntarily admit to being a member of that quasi-illegal group. When I asked the clerk about the reason, he said diabetics might pass out. I didn’t say, so might I if I had a fever and was driving to the drug store to fill a prescription.

There is a profound difference between saying someone with a disease should be treated equally by the Department of Motor Vehicles, and saying they, in fact, are like others. The attempt to convince society to treat diabetics as normal has morphed into a belief by some diabetics that they are normal, and that their dietary lists are simply menu choices not clarions to change behavior.

My working friends will probably outlive my reclusive mother simply because they are more active, but I doubt they’ll live so many years with diabetes. The first women I mentioned is probably around 50, and I’ve heard her complaints about ill-health for about 10 years. The other women is a little older, and she’s been on a physical roller coaster the 15 years I’ve known her.

My mother, although a deeply unhappy woman who died just before she would have turned 60, managed to live 25 years with diabetes with no concerns about her weight and, until her heart attack in her mid-50's, no dramas of physical malaise.

Living with the forbidden may actually have been healthier than exploiting the permitted.

South Carolina - John Colleton

Some of South Carolina’s roots lie in the English Civil War.

Our school books simplify that war by saying it was fought between the Puritan Roundheads and the Anglican and Catholic Cavaliers, the men of Massachusetts versus the planters of Virginia and Maryland. As with most wars, the conflicts were more complex. The west of England, centered on the port and merchants of Bristol, was competing with the upcoming merchants of London on the eastern shore. Parliament was jockeying to maintain its privileges against a monarch who believed he had absolute power. The House of Lords, representing inherited landed money, was under siege by the House of Commons which represented the merchants and new wealth. The Scots, Irish and Welch were still protesting union.

Many credit John Colleton with suggesting the settlement of Carolina to Anthony Ashley-Cooper, a Londoner with investments in Barbados. However, his background did not automatically qualify him for such reward from the Stuarts. His family had risen to the status of gentlemen in Exeter, the center of the Devon woolen industry in southwestern England. His father, Peter, was high sheriff in 1618; his sister Elizabeth married Hugh Crocker who became mayor.

When war came in 1642, mercantile and industrial Exeter supported Parliament against the king. Royalist forces laid siege to the town in August, and forced men like Colleton and Croker to retire. Colleton apparently lost his rights to income from his estates in Cornwall in the ensuing months.

When John Berkeley asked him to raise and arm a private army to support the dominant royalist force in the region, he agreed. They apparently fought at the Battle of Stratton in May of 1643 which Berkeley won for Charles I. Parliament won the war in 1645, although Exeter remained royalist country until Thomas Fairfax defeated Berkeley in 1646.

Colleton next appears in the public record in 1648 asking to have the income from his estates reinstated. Meanwhile, Charles was still fomenting rebellion and new fighting broke out soon after Colleton received his dispensation in March. In August he must not have been considered a rebel because he was granted permission to go to Calais.

After Charles was executed in 1649, supporters of his son regrouped in exile and had the younger Charles issue demands for recognition of his succession from the colonies. Massachusetts refused, but Virginia, where Berkeley’s brother William was governor, agreed. Barbados chose to stay as neutral as possible to protect its trade with both London and Amsterdam.

Disgruntled and impoverished soldiers from the royalist army fled to the colonies, including Barbados where Humphrey Walrond refused to accept neutrality and forced the governor to pledge to Charles in 1850. It was in this year John Berkeley says he ran into Colleton in Holland.

Oliver Cromwell sent a fleet to blockade Barbados in 1651. In 1652, a compromise was signed with now Colonel Colleton supporting Cromwell’s admiral, George Ayscue, who then appointed Daniel Searle governor. Soon after, Charles sent Francis Willougby as his governor of the island.

Colleton, in fact, was an ally of Thomas Modyford, who had arrived in Barbados in 1647. Modyford had been a mayor of Exeter and George Monck refers to both Modyford and Colleton as cousins in a 1663 letter to Willoughby. Both joined the subsequent plots to overthrow Searle.

The royalist cause was not a simple one, when men like Walrond squabbled with men like Modyford. After the restoration of the Stuarts many had to rearrange their biographies to emphasize when they had supported the ultimate winners. John Berkeley did the rehabilitation for Colleton in 1660 when he wrote a letter that became the model for all the heroic biographies that followed our civil war some 200 years later.

Berkeley said Colleton had sacrificed his fortune to support the royalist cause in the English civil war, left the country for the Caribbean after Charles I was executed in 1649 to avoid taking an oath, and continued to scheme for his son’s return from exile. He even introduces the now contemporary euphemism used to denigrate civil war in Ireland as mere "troubles."

However, while Berkely would like to have used Colleton to remind Charles of his own service, he hedged his language with "to the best of my knowledge" in case reports surfaced that suggest Colleton was not quite as steadfast as proclaimed.

Berkeley knew the myth of loyalty was more important than the reality, and that personal self-interest was best wrapped in that myth. When he lobbied for the Carolina grant, he gave us both a colony and a narrative legitimizing disobedience.

Notes:
Berkeley’s letter to Charles II as reproduced by William Betham in The Baronetage of England, 1802.

These are humbly to certify to your sacred Majesty, THAT John Colleton, some time of Exeter, Esq. engaged for your majesty’s royal father, in the beginning of his troubles, raised and commanded a regiment under me, consisting of 1100 men, well armed, without any charge to his then majesty, or compulsion of his people, which was very costly to him, he never receiving any pay or free quarter, to my knowledge, and the soldiers very little either; that he furnished moneys and arms, to a good value, when he was driven from his habitations and estate, in Cornewal, before the Battle of Stratton, for which I am confident he hath not had satisfaction; that he being chosen a commissioner by the county of Exon, for the carrying on of the service of your Majesty’s royal father, in the associated counties of the west, did therin good service.

That he did, at several other times, procure and lend moneys, and procure and furnish good store of armes and ammunition, when his majesty’s affairs were in great straits, and gave credit, and staid long for considerable sums yet unpaid, of many of them, whereby a good sum must de due to him. That he suffered much by your majesty’s enemies, by being of your part, I believe to the value of above sixty thousand pounds, and he was well contented to stay for his disbursements, and bore his sufferings cheerfully, proposing to himself no other satisfaction, that I could perceive, than your majesty’s restoration. That after your majesty’s exile, he was ever active and helpful to your majesty’s agents, in England, in his person, and with his purse, which I my self know to be true, and have been informed thereof by divers others.

That he forsook England, for many years, to avoid the oaths, subscriptions, &tc, imposed upon your subjects, by your enemies, destructive of your majesty’s interest, as I found him, in Holland, in the year 1650, and returned not until your majesty’s restoration.

That he hath kept his loyalty unspotted, to the last, as far as I can be informed, or understand.

I am sure he hath done your majesty, faithful and good service many ways, and all this, in order to his duty and allegiance, without any respect to reward or gain, that I can perceive by him.

19th of Xth, 1660
Jo. Berkeley

"Letter from George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, to Francis Lord Willoughby," 31 August 1663, reproduced on University of North Carolina docsouth website, mentions the cousinship.

Realism and Romanticism

Recently I started reading a novel by Marge Piercy, Braided Lives, that I abandoned after 160 pages because I really didn’t care about the sex life of the heroine and her oafish boyfriend as they got through a joyless freshmen year at the University of Michigan and a summer in Detroit.

I lived that life. If I read someone else’s experience, I want it leavened by perspective and I want it in a style better than my own.

In frustration, I took down a book from the shelf as different as I could find. I ended up with a movie promotion edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Camille written more than 130 years before. It was one strange object, a thick paged Grosset and Dunlap from 1927 with photographs from the Norma Talmage production set in the 1920's interspersed with Dumas’ 1840's text.

The first problem was language. I was never sure how much simplification had been done beyond translation from the French. However, since the plot concerned a "kept woman" with a friend who provided the narrator with information on the economics of such a life, I figured it couldn’t be too bowdlerized.

The second reading problem was the conventions of the genre. While Piercy wrote about her experiences in the first person, Dumas used a third person to narrate his personal story. The anonymous narrator retells the story of a man he met when he bought a book at Marguerite Gautier’s estate sale that the stranger had given her. The lady of the camellias’ final days are described through the journal she left with a friend.

By the end of 150 pages I was bored by Dumas and went to bed. The next evening I tried again, and resumed at the point where the narrative crosses the threshold of engagement to takes on its own compelling life. This engagement existed despite the fact that the story concerned a prostitute dying from tuberculosis who gave up her pampered life to life with a jealous young man who truly loved her only to be punished by his family for her earlier ways.

At the time it was published the stereotype was fresh, but its very success - by Wikipedia’s count at least 20 movies starring women like Theda Bara and Greta Garbo, as well theatrical adaptions with Eleanore Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, and Tallulah Bankhead and the opera La Traviata - has rendered it too familiar.

So why does the one autobiographical novel work better than another? I can only think the distancing required by the romantic conventions makes it easier for the author to transform private experience into the public domain without destroying the reality of the personal for the author. The imaginative leap necessary to produce art is simply easier when one can deny it’s my true life.

Malaria and Men

It all began with a grammar error.

On August 3rd of this year, Nathan Wolfe told readers of the Huffington Post "today, me and my colleagues from Cameroon, Germany and the United States announced our discovery of the origin of malaria."

If he had said "my colleagues and I," I wouldn’t have noticed the many violations of scientific etiquette embedded in his posting. But instead, he baldly declared "me discovery."

Now anyone who’s read the history of science or novels by C. P. Snow knows scientific etiquette is, at best, a veneer disguising ambition, jealousy and all the other human emotions that characterize the interactions of competitive individuals. Wolfe’s comment is only noteworthy for revealing the contemporary narcissistic form, "it’s all about me."

The National Academy of Science did indeed publish an on-line article that day, "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," with Stephen Rich as the lead author. After whatever jockeying for credit occurred, Wolfe came out last in the list of 14.

He wasn’t the only co-author to promote an independent narrative. Number 13, Francisco Ayala, used the University of California at Irvine as his more discrete, third-party platform. Unlike Wolfe, he at least did admit Rich was the lead author, but not without emphasizing Rich had been one of his students.

Reuters apparently used the Irvine news release for its story the next day, while the Associated Press relied on Wolfe. The New York Times picked up the latter, thereby giving Wolfe the edge in kudos for the team’s research.

Ayala, now in his 70's, is of an age when men secretly hope to win a Nobel Prize to recognize their lifetime achievements, and he has been one of the pioneers investigating the evolution of the malaria parasite. Irvine’s story emphasized that his work probes one of the great questions of contemporary medicine, how diseases like AIDS and influenza migrate between animals and humans.

But, as is the way with science, he is not alone in his presumed quest for recognition from that notoriously factious, political group in Sweden. In May of this year another team, this one centered in France and Gabon, published their findings that documented genetic similarities between the human and primate forms of malaria. Either team could make the final breakthrough that might receive the award.

Wolfe is younger and no doubt knows only one prize is awarded each year in any field and every year there are more scientists in more countries doing innovative work. He probably also knows that historians have found most scientists make their most important contribution before they are 30, and if they haven’t achieved some fame by then, they probably won’t. He’s nearing 40.

California has developed an alternative paradigm for the young that promises them celebrity at an early age if they can patent something that can be sold. Wolfe has already been tempted by that siren. Last year, Frank Rijsberman, of Google’s philanthropic group, gave money to support Wolfe’s work with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and declared "Nathan is going to be a rock star in this field." Wolfe’s Huffington Post release emphasized the possibilities of a sellable product, a vaccine.

Ayala represents pure science grappling with the workings of nature, while Wolfe is promoting practical applications for that knowledge. A malaria vaccine would certainly be useful, but will face the same cultural and financial impediments the Bill Gates’ foundation confronts now in fighting malaria in Africa. The individual or group who finds the best way to convince humans to change their behavior without coercion may be the one who should win the prize.

Notes:
Associated Press. "First Origin of Malaria May Have Been Found," 3 August 2009.

Fitzenberger, Jennifer. "Scientists Report Original Source of Malaria," University of California at
Irvine news release, 3 August 2009, has best discussion of research in the field.

Ollomo, Benjamin and 7 others. "A New Malaria Agent in African Hominids," PLoS Pathog, 29 May 2009.

Reuters. "Malaria May Have Come from Chimps," 4 August 2009, edited by Xavier Briand.

Rich Stephen and 13 others. "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," National Academy of Sciences, online Proceedings for 3 August 2009.

Svoboda, Elizabeth. "Nathan Wolfe: Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic," The New York Times, 20 October 2008.

Vasich, Tom. "Biologist Francisco J. Ayala Wins National Medal of Science," University of California at Irvine news release, 9 May 2002.

Wolfe, Nathan. "The Origin of Malaria: Discovered," Huffington Post, 3 August 2009.

Anger

After World War II, psychologists tried to use the work of Freud to explain that of Hitler. They began with the simple model, drawn from physics and the steam engine, that human energy must be channeled. If it is not, it is diverted into aggression. Without a safety valve, that aggression becomes bigotry and mass hatred.

Since last summer, when people began admitting the economy had problems, there has been an increasing number of examples of undiffused aggression when people showed up at John McCain or Barak Obama rallies primed to vent their anger. More recently, political groups have been trying to manipulate that rage to destroy Obama’s presidency.

Many in the media are trying to identify what they call the astroturfers, the lobbyists and political spokesmen who hope to gain from public demonstrations of anarchy. Others are saying the anger is legitimate and we must listen to what demonstrators are saying. Still others are suggesting it isn’t what they say that matters, but that they are so easily enraged.

With all our sophisticated knowledge of non-verbal communication and the deconstruction of language, we sometimes lose our ability to know when to listen to what people are trying to say and when to probe deeper.

When Timonthy McVeigh said he blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 because the federal government had overstepped its powers when it attacked Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, he believed what he said. Many of the people who use their web sites as journals of self-loathing are trying to understand themselves. We would we wise to overcome our Morsberger responses and listen when people are trying to say something we have a hard time understanding.

When what we hear is pure rage it’s harder to listen. If you confronted some people at public rallies who are attacking Obama with accusations of racism they would deny they were bigots because they don’t see genocide as a solution. Their rage is simply looking for an outlet, and they take up whatever slogans are available. As Marshall McLuhan would have said, their medium is their message.

The important social question is why are so many people so angry? Even if you discount those who have been maladjusted since childhood, there is still a great deal of raw emotion floating in the ether. Everyone has a pet theory he or she can trot out - it’s the lack of jobs, it’s the role models of the media, it’s the loss of social mobility and status, it’s jealousy, sexual inadequacy, the abandonment of a religion that confronts human weakness.

My particular hobbyhorse is that we’re back at the corner Twelfth and Clairmount.in Detroit on July 23, 1967, before everyone agreed the cause of urban unrest that summer was racism rather than something structural in our economy.

We’ve now gone through forty years, while the economy has been contracting for uneducated workers, using race to argue about allocating the remaining jobs, and elected a president who made clear he wouldn’t continue the tactics of men like Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson who navigated those treacherous waters.

In a way people are right when they say we are post-racial. It doesn’t mean people are any more tolerant or that Blacks have any more opportunity, but that the rage that fed the urban riots in 1967 has now spread to the general population and cannot be dismissed as bigotry. We are challenged to confront the problems we evaded back then, but like every time a cultural problem is ignored, when we face it again, our tools have devolved, this time when decisions were made to export our manufacturing and devalue our belief in a community supported by taxes.

Merce Cunningham

When Merce Cunningham died a week ago Sunday I kept looking back at a photograph of his foot from the 1958 production of "Antic Meet." He was dressed in black, against a black background, so all that showed was his face, hands, and left foot pointed straight down in a leap with a chair strapped to his back.

That foot captured the essence of dance. The straightness of the line resulted from the raw talent and anatomy of the dancer, the pointing that looked so natural was the product of years of practice, the lighting came from a production designed to showcase dance, and the lens captured what the audience saw.

The obituaries and eulogies carried the usual biographical information and praised his choreography for blendeding modern dance with traditional ballet to capture the randomness of life. The New York Times quoted a fellow teacher, Richard Glasstone, who believed that he, along with Fred Astaire and Margot Fonteyn, had been the greatest dancers of the twentieth century.

Among the personal reminiscences was one that revealed how, even in the most ephemeral of art forms, the materialism of the Reagan years has seeped into people's evaluations of greatness. Alma Guillermoprieto remembers visiting him a few years before and noticing the shabby furniture. I'm sure Cunningham didn't care about furniture after his best friend, John Cage, died in 1992.

She also noted that the man she believed was the "greatest living creator of dance beauty and contemporary fusions of art forms...did not even own his own home." The lack of real estate didn't signify to Cunningham. Diminishment came from arthritis that robbed him of his ability to move. He was like Monet with his cataracts and Beethoven without his hearing, an artist bereft of his medium.

He himself said dance left nothing - no copyrights like those of Cage for companies to haggle over, no paintings like those of his collaborator, Robert Rauschenberg, for auction galleries to hype - "nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

Every dancer knows the song from Chorus Line, "What I did for Love," has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a single foot eternally suspended in the air, defying arthritis and death.

Notes:
Guillermoprieto, Alma. "Merce Cunningham," New Yorker website, 28 July 2009.

Macaulay, Alastair. "Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies," The New York Times website, 27 July 2009, includes quote by Cunningham and the photograph from "Antic Meet."

Michael Jackson and Creativity

It was bad luck for Gale Storm and Billy Mays to die the weekend everyone’s attention was focused on Michael Jackson. Buried in the June 27 edition of the New York Times was a notice that an important diamond cutter had passed on the 15th.

Margalit Fox’s notice was that rare obituary that not only told you the usual information about Antonio Bianco’s survivors, but also described what made him special in his trade. She first needed to explain how diamond molecules react to being violated, before it was clear why it took several months to cut particularly large stones without permanently marring their internal structure.

I sent the notice to a friend of mine who’s drawn to the mystery of what’s inside externally drab rocks she finds in her neighborhood. Her return comment was "He must have made a lot of money."

She was a great Michael Jackson fan and we had spent part of Saturday talking about him and what his death meant. No one would just say, "he made a lot of money," although there are those who wonder who will inherit and what will be left after the debts are settled.

I used to wonder what people meant by materialism, because I was raised to respect work well done and to acknowledge the greatness of artists and artisans. I’m still shocked when, regardless of what people feel, they can only express their reaction in monetary terms.

It’s that simple equation that truncates artistic creativity. Someone is always afraid of the cost - the dependent family, the record companies, the concert promoters. As soon as large sums appear on bank statements, representatives of capitalism fear the kind of risks that create wealth in the first place.

No one minds if famous performers spend their money on useless possessions or self-destructive substances. After all, each purchase creates wealth for someone, as do any medical consequences. In their uselessness such transactions are materialism at its purest.

However, none of those petty traders of human frailty can step back at the end of a day and take pleasure in a well-cut stone or a new combination. Obituaries don’t yet record what people made, but what they did. Tombstones still have dates, not dollar signs.