Life as an Extreme Sport

Author: Kelly

quick thoughts on health care reform from an admitted baby eater*

Politics

It’s not too surprising that I occasionally (okay, frequently) am asked my opinion about the health care push, what I think, and so forth. So, in an effort to cover all bases at once, and cut down a bit on repeating myself til I’m blue in the face:

Is this an ideal health care reform bill? No, of course not. Anyone who thought we were going to wake up and be Just Like Canada or England after a single bill was, and I say this with all kindness, delusional. There were and are intense hurdles being faced by lawmakers – and not just other lawmakers. Opposing interest groups ran out the door, and not even people most eager for health reform, like the American Medical Association, were behind the latest bill until very late in the week.

One of the good and bad things about America is the competing interests and lobbying groups and financial interests and even organized voters who can threaten their representatives with a lack of re-election for not representing their interests. With all due respect to my friends on the West Coast, this issue becomes a lot more crystal clear on the East Coast; while there are still large blocks of red and blue on this coast, there are also even larger blocks of purple, where a representative has to face the fact that they are elected into office to represent disparate and widely varied views.

But anyhow, political rant for another day. Does the fact that the health care reform bill is not ideal mean it shouldn’t happen, or that Obama/the Democrats/whomever you want to place here failed? No, it’s a step forward. These steps are important, because they are very, very hard to undue. As my friend Russ pointed out, the 1994 Clinton initiative was considered a failure by people on both sides of the isle – and yet, 16 years later, no one talks of removing SCHIP or HIPAA, because constituents have become fond of them, and familiar with them.

This is how health care reform must work, as well.

And there are other things – other bills, policies, and efforts – that a lot of people seem to be ignoring in favour of moaning over how this current bill isn’t perfect, for whatever reason you support. We’re not going to get anything close to perfect until the FDA takes back control of drug policy from Pharma – something that is being worked on. We’re not going to get close to perfect until we give our infectious disease folks over at the CDC and USDA and even FDA more power to regulate food, to track infections, to be able to order rather than suggest recalls. We need malpractice premium reforms, something that is being fought for by people on both sides of the political divide, against Very Large insurance interests.

Is it perfect? No. Does this mean Obama failed you, individually? No. Does it mean there is still more work to do, work that includes educating those who, for a variety of reasons, are terrified by the results? Yes.

Does this make me an apologist? No, it makes me a realist. Medicine is full of compromise – I learned this up close and personal in the first ethics case I sat in on, in determining the course of my own treatments, and watching my mother navigate hers. There’s a reason most of us who are involved in the medical sciences, to any degree, are pragmatists. We have to be. Idealism is nice enough, but in the end, it doesn’t get forms signed or allow for care to happen.

*No, I don’t eat babies. In case that needs to be clarified. I am, however, actively pro-choice, and have been dipping my toe in bioethics for a while now. That has led to me being labeled some really interesting things in the past. I figure, I might as well embrace the funnier ones.

a sponge must have substance to absorb

Academics

I’m reading Barrington Moore’s Moral Purity and Persecution in History, having started it as a bit of “light” nighttime reading a few evening’s back. (Yes, I know, I need to work on my ideas of what constitutes good before bed reading, especially since I find myself getting up to grab copies of various Bibles to check references far too often for this to succeed in being relaxing reading.) It’s been an interesting read, in part because Moore appears to rely relatively heavily on Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. My exposure to Douglas’s work is second-hand, through Elizabeth Grosz, but even then, I feel like I understand enough of Douglas’s theory to be able to answer a question posed by Moore early on in his work. In Chapter One (page eight, so yes, very early), he discusses rules about nakedness in Leviticus. He says

Mixed in with the rules about nakedness are two prohibitions on perversions. One prohibits homosexuality in the strict sense of the word: sexual relations between males. This is an abomination (Lev. 18:22). There is no mention of lesbianism. Two possible explanations for this odd omission come to mind. Conceivably the male religious authorities who created this legislation didn’t even know about its existence. OR else they were so terrified at the prospects of female joys without the male contribution that they did not even call attention to lesbianism by passing ordinance against it. Some variant of the first explanation seems more likely.

Does it really seem likely to anyone that men in the Biblical era had no notion of lesbianism? That while male homosexuality was known of enough to call an abomination, absolutely no male religious authority ever saw or heard of lesbians? Perhaps there was a rampant lack of mental creativity?

I propose a third option: that it wasn’t mentioned because the pollutions of a woman’s body are dealt with in other Jewish rituals, and because a woman cannot be further polluted by a woman; that is, the “dirt” that she absorbs is from a male (semen) rather than any contagion from another woman. As Grosz notes in Volatile Bodies, the female body is coded as “a body which leaks, which bleeds” (203); these environment-polluting contagions that are expressed from the woman’s body are already controlled by Jewish rituals and laws – specifically the mikveh. There are a whole host of regulations surrounding the mikveh, and not being a religious scholar to any degree, I won’t go into them. Suffice that they exist as a way to ritually purify after contagion, and that most feminine fluids, such as menstruation, are covered under this. But, as Grosz goes on to explain, “Women are the guardians of the sexual fluids of both men and women; …she is in fact regarded as a kind of sponge or conduit of other men’s ‘dirt’” (197). (This is where the notion of a woman being impure or defiled for sex outside of marriage comes from; as a sponge or conduit of other men’s impurities, she can collect and cross-transmit the contagions.)

But if a woman is not absorbing the “dirt” of men, but instead merely contaminated by that which she already has and is, which is already addressed by the mikveh, then why set up additional legislation? Women and their purity and how to maintain it has already been covered by existing purity laws, therefore there was no need to specifically address lesbianism. This was no oversight on the scholars and writers of Leviticus; it is, instead, an oversight on our part. We modern folks see the rules in Leviticus as being about controlling behaviour or social mores; we’re not looking at them in the “right” light, where that light is about symbolic boundary maintenance and maintaining Jewish cultural identity in hostile lands. That laws governing sex and clothing and food are all discussed together is not some weird coincidence, if you look at them as being laws governing purity and boundaries.

who are you?

...and everything else

I received my Census form today, after receiving a note last week telling me I would be receiving a Census form this week. I’ll spare you my rant about government redundancy and costs, but you can make up your own and insert it here.

I have to say that, after filling out my census form – the first one I think I’ve ever filled out, since I have absolutely no memory of the 2000 census – that I am somewhat disappointed in the lack of information being collected these days. In the last few years, as I’ve done more and more research into genealogy and my family history, released census forms have been an incredible wealth of information. They’ve listed birth country, residency, occupations, educational levels, disabilities, languages spoken in the home; this is all data that helps build a rich tapestry of knowledge, and often offers valuable insight and information about people with whom we have little to no tangible connections.

In 72 years, all anyone searching for my data will learn is where I lived. While that might prove useful for someone who is trying to trace the nomadic tendencies that appear to run in my family, it’s hardly going to offer the sort of rich background that the 1930s census offers about my great-grandparents.

pushpins

Academics, CHID, Pop Culture, University of Washington

There are moments in memory where, when looking back, you see these little pushpins of moments that changed life. Sometimes they’re good moments, and sometimes they’re bad. One of the first of these pushpins in my academic life was a class I took my first quarter at the University of Washington, called Buffy as Archtype: Rethinking Human Nature in the Buffyverse.

I hadn’t wanted to take the class, truth be told. Buffy? Oh, please. (Yes, hold your laughter.) I had no interest in Buffy. Friends who were huge fans had tried to make me watch the show for years at that point, and I humoured them, and would be shown this or that favourite episode, and I would roll my eyes and continue to pass on the whole thing. Because of course, the problem with showing someone your favourite episode is their utter lack of context for why it’s your favourite; to me, it was people I didn’t know behaving senselessly. I had no background, and I really didn’t care.

But the academic adviser for CHID would not be deterred. I needed another class, and she needed a body – especially a body that did know her mythology and her Joseph Campbell. Besides, it was a CHID class, and would let me meet my fellow department-mates, and get to know people. It was sound argument, and I acquiesced. This was probably one of the two best decisions I ever made at UW.

The Buffy class did several things for me. First and most obviously, it introduced me to Buffy and the wider Whedonverse. I used Netflix to rent the series from the beginning, because if there’s one thing I hate, it’s not knowing – and watching just an episode here and there for class wasn’t doing it for me. I had to know the characters, I had to know the back story, I had to know the why’s. And what I discovered was a story of a female hero, friendship, strength, and even the value of weakness and the virtue of relying on your friends – all things I needed just then, as I was going through my divorce. Buffy kept me company at night, after work and schoolwork, and it helped me reshape my world to one where I could be that strong, too.

But the class had another major influence on me: it showed me that critical academic theory in a pop culture framework was possible. I don’t mean those light philosophy books and whatever popular TV show at the moment sort of things, but actual critical theory, Zizek-style (if you will). Perhaps even more importantly, it showed me the power of pop culture in teaching complex theories, something that has gone on to inform the basis of my own pedagogical style. It’s not coincidence or even passing brilliance on my part, that I illustrate my own lectures and courses with clips from The Daily Show, relevant movies, newscasts, and whatever else catches my eye and is appropriate. It is a direct callback to this class, which showed me the power of pop culture to form a concrete basis to then connect more tenuous academic concepts to.

In typical CHID tradition, one of the co-facilitators of the course was another CHID student, Jennifer K. Stuller. Jen was really amazing (and kind of intimidating) from the get-go. She herself was a great model of the sort of funny, warm, brilliant, strong female academic I wanted to be, an embodiment of the strong female hero that she was so fascinated with, and that formed the basis of her CHID thesis. (I would feel tongue-tied and shy around her, although if she ever noticed this, she was kind enough to not say.) It’s also formed the basis of her first book, Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, which is available now, and something I really think everyone should buy. Moreso if you have daughters, because women need strong role models – the fictional ones Jen talks about in her book, and the ones like Jen herself.

these things go through your head

a-musing, blog as therapy, life and living

When I was little, my mother would buy the peanut butter that had separated in the jar. When we got home from the store, there was always the ritual of dumping the peanut butter into a bowl, stirring everything up, and then placing it back into the jar.

I never had to do this; Mom always did. It was sticky and messy and lunch for all of us, so leaving it in the hands of an impatient child probably would have been a bad idea.

Even though I never had to do this, I always hated it. It was so pointless, I though. Why spend the time and the mess and the energy when you could just spend a little more for the stuff that was already mixed? That was faster! It was cleaner! Therefore, it must be better.

Mom would just shrug and say that this was the way her mother did it, and this was the way she did it, and maybe some day I would understand. I was a child, so of course I knew that I would never understand, and fastercleaner would always be better.

It’s nearly 4am, and these are the things that go through your head when you’re standing in a bathrobe in the kitchen, mixing a new jar of peanut butter.