The Language of Abortion

            I have been reluctant to touch the issue of abortion in my blog, not because I lack for a  stance about it, but mostly because I don’t want my thoughts dismissed as “radical right-wing garbage.” In our current climate, it is very dangerous to oppose abortion. The moment you do, you become fair game for those who are ready to label you a misogynist (or woman hater) or for those who are ready to paint you as dictatorial, narrow-minded, intolerant, in short, to describe you with the language many use to describe Christians. Now, I should point out that not all people who are “pro-life” are Christian, and it is also true, sadly, that not all Christians are “pro-life.” Still, the last reason I haven’t touched the issue is lack of a specific current event. My blog entries that touch on issues like unions, outsourcing and the like stem from particular items in the news, and now, abortion has come up for discussion thanks to the recent controversy surrounding the Susan G. Komen Foundation. But since the subject’s come up, I want to engage in calm, reasonable, rational, caring and truthful discussions here, emphasis on ‘caring’ and ‘truthful.’ So, to quote God from Isaiah 1:18, “Come, let us reason together.”

            I was fifteen when I learned just how abortions are performed. Two of my friends were going back and forth on the subject, and I was listening with only half an ear. I’d heard it all before, it seemed, and the debate simply didn’t interest me. Finally I chimed in with, “you know, how are abortions even done anyway?” My two friends fell silent, and one turned to me and offered to let the others sitting around us leave the room. No one did. She then explained in graphic and accurate detail how the most common procedures were done. She told me about suction abortions, saline abortions and partial birth abortions. I sat there in horror. I had a vivid imagination, you see, and once I had the how-to information in hand, imagining the actual process didn’t take much. A question came out of my mouth without my planning it.

“Amy,” I asked, “Why would anyone even think about doing that?”

Well, almost as many years have passed since that conversation. I’m twenty-nine now. Since that conversation, I’ve sat in philosophy classes beyond count, contemporary issues classes, biomedical ethics classes; I’ve been to three universities as a student and I’ve read feminist writers, post-modern writers, women’s rights advocates, sociology texts, and on and on and on. I’ve met a number of women who’ve had abortions. And still, I want to ask that question. Today, I am a linguist. I live by words and I thrive on knowing what people mean when they use words. So, my own contribution to the abortion debate (probably one of today’s most controversial issues) is to look at the words people use and figure out what’s going on. Let’s look at some language.

Rights and Choice

My first question:  which rights and what choice are we talking about? Reading the literature of NOW and Planned Parenthood and the like, certain answers keep coming up. These organizations talk about a woman’s choices in terms of her “reproductive rights.” The basic idea boils down to something like, “my body, my rights.” But again, rights to do what? A choice to do what?

The first problem with the, “it’s my body and I’ll decide what to do with it,” line of reasoning is that its inherently false. My arm is part of my body because it shares my DNA. The cells of my arm, my liver and my femur share my own unique genetic pattern. Yet, a baby, whether he or she is a zygote (the first cell formed after fertilization) or a fetus or a newborn on the verge of delivery, doesn’t fit this basic criterion for being called part of, “my body.” Their DNA is not identical to the woman’s, because that DNA includes the father’s contributions too. To take a more extreme example, even a cancer cell has more in common with the woman’s DNA than this baby does, because a cancer cell is a mutated cell of her own genetic code. A baby, by definition, has a genetic code that is unique to him or herself, and not entirely part of either her mother’s or her father’s genes. So, “my body?” That is incorrect. It’s not part of her body. It is a resident of her body, true. The baby is fully dependent on her mother’s body for life, true. But that doesn’t make the baby part and parcel of her body the way the mother’s arm or leg is. So, to this line of reasoning I would reply, “if most people wouldn’t kill a baby while it’s suckling at the breast, by what logic do we justify doing so a few months before it gets to come out and do that?” Let’s move on.

Let’s talk about the words ‘right’ and ‘privacy.’ They seem to be very important in this discussion. Many women’s rights advocates see abortion as being a matter of a woman’s right to privacy and personal choice. Many will argue vehemently that that right to privacy and that right to choice are sacrosanct, and that anti-abortion people are impinging upon those rights. This is a powerful argument to some, but I find its reasoning flawed.

First, our rights are already limited. I do not have the right to walk across the hall and shoot my neighbor. According to my lease, I do not have the right to play my music as loud as I want to even in the ‘privacy’ of my own home. If I’m arrested, I lose my right to privacy. I cannot abuse my children even in the ‘privacy’ of my own home, because I don’t have the right. In every one of the examples I just used, the notion of ‘privacy,’ held sacred by pro-abortion advocates, is superseded by other rights or circumstances or laws. So, apparently, we as a society do indeed hold some things as being able to transcend my right to privacy. Why, I ask in puzzlement, is killing a baby before it is born considered a matter of ‘privacy,’ but killing one the day after he or she is born isn’t a matter of ‘privacy?’

Now, let’s talk about the other word, ‘choice.’ In all the examples above, two things came into play, right and choice. I don’t necessarily have the right to do any of the things listed in that paragraph. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t choose to do them. I could walk over and shoot my neighbor. It’s a matter of choice, right? I could smack my kids around to my heart’s content. It’s a matter of choice, right? Well, ok, yes, I can choose to do those things. I have free will and a body that mostly obeys my commands. But you might reasonably point out that choices have consequences including legal ones, and because of these consequences,  I might refrain from shooting my neighbor or beating up my kids. Fair enough.

So, does abortion have consequences? Whose consequences? Well, since every biology textbook I’ve ever picked up defines the beginning of life as being at conception, the first answer is the baby’s consequences. A good number of abortions happen somewhere in the first trimester. By the end of that time, the baby displays facial expressions, has a heartbeat, generates a brain wave pattern unique to himself, kicks and makes fists, and the nerves are developing. Consider this from Dr. Robert Shearan, a surgeon who, we presume, knows his stuff:

As early as eight to ten weeks after conception, and definitely by thirteen-and-a-half weeks, the unborn experiences organic pain.... First, the unborn child's mouth, at eight weeks, then her hands at ten weeks, then her face, arms, and legs at eleven weeks become sensitive to touch. By thirteen-and-a-half weeks, she responds to pain at all levels of her nervous system in an integrated response which cannot be termed a mere reflex. She can now experience pain.

That last point is important, because abortion hurts like hell for the babies themselves. Yes, they feel pain, lots of it.

Other consequences to this ‘choice?’ I’ve met women who’ve had abortions, and I’ve read of countless more, and almost to a woman, they’ve talked about the emotional scarring, the regret and pain, that followed their abortion. Maybe not immediately, but at some point it came. Try this one:

Doctors shouldn't say it is easy for people to have an abortion. Because it's not an easy thing. People like my friends get pregnant, get an abortion, get pregnant, get an abortion, get pregnant, get an abortion. You know what I mean? All my friends that I've called say, Oh, it's a piece of cake.' For me, it wasn't a piece of cake.

The woman who said that was quoted in the Journal of the American Medical Association, folks. So, apparently, there are consequences to the women involved.

Are there any consequences to the fathers? Well, consider this:

She did it for me. I feel like I murdered somebody. I wish I could do it over again, if I could just go back in time and relive those years. If she'd had the child, even if we'd got married and everything, it wouldn't have been that bad. I've seen other people do it. Reality's such a bitch sometimes, you know?

That was spoken by a father who didn’t become a father, not that time anyway. One more, and this may surprise you. Abortion, that ‘choice,’ often has lasting consequences for many of the clinic workers who do them. Imagine being a nurse or tech whose job, eight hours a day, is to take babies in the womb and end their existences. Think I’m exaggerating? Let me spend a little time on this point, because it’s often overlooked. I have two longer quotations here which should shed some light on the issue. Consider this first,  most of the time, possibly all the time, the patient i.e. the mother, does not get to view the fetal remains. Who would want to, you ask? She is protected from seeing the end results. Not so for the technicians performing the abortion. They see the consequences up close and personally, and they see them right away in full color and HD. This first quote comes from a report presented to the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians by a veteran abortionist of twenty-three years’ experience and his assistant some years ago. They interviewed twenty-three current and former staffers at their clinic about their responses to viewing some of the procedures, and this, from the report, is a summary of what they found:

Many subjects reported serious emotional reactions which produced physiological symptoms, sleep disturbances, effects on personal relationships, and moral anguish.... Reactions to viewing the fetus ranged from "I haven't looked" to shock, dismay, amazement, disgust, fear and sadness.... Two felt that it must eventually damage [the doctor] psychologically… Two respondents described dreams which they had had related to the procedure. Both described dreams of vomiting fetuses along with a sense of horror. Other dreams revolved around a need to protect others from viewing fetal parts, dreaming that she herself was pregnant and needed an abortion or was having a baby.... The more direct the physical and visual involvement [i.e. nurses, doctors], the more stress experienced.

That’s pretty straight forward, isn’t it? Have you ever seen a suction machine? I haven’t. Well, ok, that’s not a blindness pun. I really never have been to an abortion clinic or handled the machinery responsible. I can’t say I want to, though I’d probably go if I had the chance and a reason. Here’s a description written by a woman researcher who was pro-choice at the time. This is graphic, I warn you:

I am drawn to the unit, irresistibly, by my reactions of disbelief, sorrow, horror, compassion, guilt. The place depresses me, yet I hang around after working hours. When I leave, I behave outside with the expansiveness of one who has just escaped a disaster. I have bad dreams. My sense of complicity in something nameless grows and festers. I consider giving up the research....

I remove with one hand the lid of a bucket.... I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person there floating in a bloody liquid--plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But then perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tautness of one forced to die too soon. Death overtakes me in a rush of madness. [the same woman goes on to talk about her experiences from the surgeon's end of the table.] During an abortion] The doctor pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. "There," he says. "A leg."... I turn to Mr. Smith. "What did he say?" "He pulled a leg off," Mr. Smith says. "Right here." He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. It consists of a ripped thigh, a knee, a lower leg, a foot, and five toes. I start to shake very badly, but otherwise, I feel nothing. Total shock is passionless....

"There, I've got the head out now"... There lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person. My vision and my hearing though disengaged, continue, I note, to function with exceptional clarity. The rest of me is mercifully gone.

            Ok, under our laws it is a choice. Even when it was illegal, it was still a choice. No one disputes a woman’s ability to choose and that this is one possible choice. But is it a choice she should make? The consequences are far-reaching. They go beyond one woman and one baby. They impact lives in a widening circle that draws in fathers, family members, even the people paid to perform the abortion. I didn’t make these quotes up and they’re not the only ones I’ve found. The tone and content are remarkably similar. So again I ask, even if it is a choice, is it a right one?

Abortion vs. Murder

            I’m not trying to be flip here. When Christians call abortion ‘murder,’ they’re dismissed. When the laws of the land call it the same, most nod approvingly. What am I talking about? In an increasing number of U.S. states, a man who murders a pregnant woman is charged with two counts of murder, two. The woman’s and the unborn baby’s. The murder charge involving the unborn baby is pursued with all the seriousness as the charge concerning the woman. What does this tell me? It tells me (and remember I’m not even speaking morally) that there is a disconnect in the language and intent of our laws. Answer me this:  how is it murder if someone kills the woman and baby, yet if the woman pays to have the baby killed, it’s a medical procedure? Some might answer me, pointing out that in the first example, the woman dies too. Point taken, but the murder charge brought against the killer for the baby is the same murder charge that he would face if he’d killed, say, a mother and her newborn. No difference under the law that I’m aware of. So, my question remains a good one. And there is no answer. Well, there is one. Our laws concerning the unborn are inconsistent.

            In medicine, we call it ‘termination of a pregnancy.’ Yet if a doctor performed the same saline procedure or something similar once the baby was outside the womb, we would call it ‘murder’ and hang the doctor from the highest tree. The arguable exception to this was the partial-birth abortion. For those not in the know, the partial-birth abortion, put briefly, involves delivering the baby alive, just as you would normally, and then making an incision at the base of the baby’s skull and sucking her brains out with a vacuum pump. After that, the baby’s body is delivered the rest of the way. Fortunately, and isn’t it about time we had some good news, this type of abortion, which was made legal by President Clinton in 1997, was made illegal by legislation signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003. A 2007 Supreme Court decision, Gonzales v. Carhart, upheld the Partial-birth Abortion Ban Act. I add that many clinics have found ways to circumvent the wording of the law. Not surprising.

            I have not been trying to sensationalize the issue. I’ve just been talking about words we all use, ‘rights,’ ‘choice,’ ‘abortion’ and so on, trying to figure out just what we mean, regardless of what we think is meant, when we use this language in the abortion debate. This is not a comprehensive discussion of the issue. I have not, for example, mentioned the fact that the earliest women’s rights advocates, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were ardent supporters of women’s rights at a time when they had next to none, both vehemently opposed abortion, calling it a crime and labeling it murder. Hmmm, interesting. On that same subject, I have also not discussed the fact that many feminist groups oppose abortion, though you never hear about them. One is the Feminists For Life (FFL) which is passionately pro-women’s rights and is ardently anti-abortion. One member called the attempt to make abortion a women’s rights issue “terrorist feminism,” because women are deceived into believing they have to be willing to kill (babies, of course) to support the platform of women’s rights. I could go on and on. But this is a blog, not a book. I suppose, in closing, I’d have to say that what amazes me is not that some people oppose abortion, but that so many approve of it unreservedly. Feel free to respond reasonably.

Anybody Want a Job?

            This morning I had a technical question about my voice recognition software. After reading the “help” files and not having resolved my trouble, I placed a call to the company’s tech support line. Now, the company we’re talking about, Nuance Communications Inc. is headquartered right here in the good old U.S.A. They’re in Burlington Massachusetts to be exact. This is an important detail. Believe me. Well, tech support meant that I had to call Florida, the 407 area code. So, I did. And when I did I got this:  “Good Morning, thank you for calling Nuance Technical Support. My name is Louise. Have you called about this issue before?”

            My first impulse was to respond in Spanish. Louise is a name that occurs commonly in a variety of Hispanic communities, and as we all know, Florida has a massive Hispanic population. He had an accent, but it wasn’t distinctive enough to place it. So, I talked to good old Louise. Alarm bells began going off when we got to my first question, whether, given the advances made in the software in question, I, a totally blind user, still needed to employ a certain intermediary program to maximize my access to the voice recognition technology. A simple question, actually. When I talked to Nuance about six years ago, this interface I’m talking about was still widely used by blind users of Dragon Naturally Speaking, and Nuance was still recommending it. So, I know that the company knows what it is. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the rep’s first questions revealed to me that he had no idea what in Heaven’s name I was talking about. Well, ok, I thought, not every tech rep is knowledgeable about everything. Let’s move on.

            Finally, the representative is helping me register my product so that I can get faster tech support next time I need it, and during our chat he asks me about the weather here. I tell him the weather’s fine, which for Illinois in late January, it really is, and I ask him in turn how Florida’s weather is. And he says, “Oh, this is the Philippines.”” He told me that my call to Florida had been routed to him at his desk there in Manila, as were most tech support calls about my product, it seems.

            Now, isn’t this a familiar story? How often do we have troubles with something from credit cards to computers and make a phone call, and get this (in extremely heavily-accented, barely comprehensible English), “Thank you for calling [company name]. My name is Robert. May I have your name please?” This happens to just about everyone these days. Comedians make fun of it. YouTube has who knows how many skits that poke fun at it. I’ve encountered it times without number with credit card accounts, technical support issues, even telemarketing. Today, people, I’m not laughing. If you haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about offshore outsourcing. It’s also known as ‘offshoring.’ Just so we’re straight on our terms here, I’m talking about situations where a company outsources overseas, not to another domestic company in country.

            My first encounter with outsourcing came at the age of fifteen in the late 90’s. I was walking through the commercial district of my home town (in so far as an army brat has a home town), which is Clarksville Tennessee. We passed the Acme Boots plant. Now, let me say a word about this company. It was founded in Chicago by two shoe makers, Jessel and Sidney Kohn. They moved their children’s and infants’ shoe factory to Clarksville Tennessee and set up shop on Crossland Avenue. Around 1940, they became known as Acme Boots, a name that many Clarksvillians would still remember today. The company history goes on from there, but the thing you ought to know is that this was an American company, founded by Americans, built by Americans and selling to Americans. In 1989, its Clarksville plant closed up shop. I’m told that the jobs out of that plant that weren’t liquidated were relocated to various manufacturing spots around Mexico.

            Back then, I didn’t have any understanding of business at all. I still have a limited understanding of large scale company finance. Then again, so do a lot of people. But I felt, standing there outside that closed up plant, that there was something wrong with closing up a local manufacturing facility, a place where men and women reported for work every day, did their work and took their duly earned pay, only to move that plant down to a country where those same jobs will be done by people who will be paid a pittance by our standards. Well, over a decade later, with two degrees under my belt and a third one on the way, now that I’m approaching 30 (only one more year until that happens), guess what, I still find something wrong with it.

            The usual reason you see companies sending their work overseas has to do with cost-cutting. Oh, they’ll tell you things like, “we do it so we can offer our products to you at a lower price.” Whether or not that’s true, it saves the company overhead when they can pay a call center full of people a buck or two an hour to do work that they’d have to pay us seven bucks an hour to do an upwards. Does that make Americans greedy? I’ve actually heard diehard business people of one party or another call the American worker ‘greedy’ because he won’t take wages like what Chinese or Mexican workers will take. Well, I don’t want to make this a Democrats versus Republicans issue. I am so disinterested in both parties that I can’t even tell you which party is on which side of this issue. It’s an American issue, people. Whether you voted for Obama or McCain, or Bush or Carry, it affects you and me. I say all that so we can talk about it without politicizing it more than we have to.

            So, why did I get some guy in the Philippines, way the hell and gone on the other side of the planet, when I, an American living in America, called an American company, using an American phone number, to get help? It happens all the time. But I submit to you this:  just because our larger and medium-sized businesses see a profit margin in it for them, that doesn’t make it right. I know I’m not alone in this point-of-view either. In August 2004, Zogby International conducted a poll  and found that 71% of American voters who participated said that they felt that this type of outsourcing hurt our economy, and another 62% felt that the government should impose some form of tax-based penalty on companies who outsourced. Well, that solution may or may not be workable or the best one. It sounds good, but I don’t know. Here’s something I do know, however.

            As for us on this level, we average consumers, I have news for us too. Cheaper isn’t always better. Remember that thing in the news a few months ago about the Chinese drywall manufacturer having to settle a lawsuit with all those people on the Gulf Coast because their houses were falling apart? Here’s a link to an ABC news story about that:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/chinese-drywall-settlement-reach-billion/story?id=15163447

The first question that popped into my head was, what the hell are homebuilders along the Gulf Coast doing getting their building materials from the Chinese? Sears used to build houses. Now the home builder of America is … let me get the right Anglicized spelling … Tianjin Co. I don’t care how much money we owe them. Do we have to let them build our houses? I’ve always thought Chinese-made stuff was junk to begin with, and so far, I haven’t been proven wrong. In fact, I’d say I’m right regardless of what the pro-Asian lobby thinks. A non-profit home building organization, Operation Helping Hands, actually went broke helping so many home owners across so many states to replace this stuff, which was corroding people’s pipes, their silverware and their jewelry and causing health problems.

Come on, folks! These are the same people who make most of the kids’ toys these days. You know, the ones you buy from Wal-Mart that fall apart as soon as you take them out of the box? Yeah, those guys. Drywall? Are you serious!

It’s time we stopped letting corporations opportunistically send jobs overseas. G.E., for instance, wants to send its x-ray division from Wisconsin to China. And the CEO claims that he expects that the move won’t cause any job losses. I doubt it. But even if he’s right about that based solely on the numbers, shouldn’t we be creating jobs here, not there? China keeps coming up, because it’s one of the most popular venues for our outsourcing. I guess the Chinese need our jobs more than we do, eh? India’s another one. Though most of the jobs that wind up in India have to do with customer support services, call centers and the like. If you have a question about your Master Card charge or your computer’s warrantee, it’s probably an Indian who will take the call. Again, I suppose New Deli residents need our entry level jobs much more than we Americans.

I know big business would reply and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do, actually. Just because something is legal, does that mean you ought to do it? As for us, the buyers, who sold us on the idea that cheaper is always better? I would be glad to pay a few dollars more for an American product that was actually made here in the USA. Assuming you have the money, shouldn’t you? I know. American stuff is more expensive. It also lasts, people. You get what you pay for. I’ll just have to be on the lookout next time I want a laptop and not by Li-Chou LTD’s computers. No, that’s a made up company name, but give it time, people. The way this country’s going. Just give it time. It’s hard to know where to end a post like this. So, I’ll stop here. Think about what I’ve said, would you? Till next time.

Internet Censorship, Rethinking the Issue

I keep seeing these “Stop Piracy” links on my Facebook page here, and I note a couple of interesting things. It's interesting how easy it is, when protesting, to fail to give an accurate and balanced view of the situation. I've had a hard time discovering for myself what's in these bills. All I've seen are a bunch of internet sites like Wikipedia ranting about it. Maybe their rants are perfectly justified. But maybe, just maybe, I'd like to see the legislation for myself and make a decision that is more informed than the average American's decision is going to be. This, for example, comes from the widely-circulating link from Google, "End Piracy, not liberty:"  Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Now, that single sentence is highly provocative and is apt to cause readers to swell with indignation. It's a carefully calculated piece of jingoistic propaganda which is designed to motivate you to fight to the death for your rights. It smacks of “give me liberty [read internet] or give me death.” Hang on, though. Hold it a sec. Think with me about that one sentence for a moment before moving on, "would censor the web?" Every time a cite is banned for bootlegging uncopyrighted movies, that's a form of censorship. Yet, we don't seem to complain. When parents impose controls that filter what their kids can and can’t view on the net, that's censorship of a sort. Do we complain? Companies, colleges and universities (especially private ones) have regulations and guidelines out the old ying-yang telling their customers, employees, students and other staff what they may, may not, or must view. Is that censorship? Yet, we don't complain. “Impose harmful regulations on American business.” Ok, what regulations? Who would be affected? Wikipedia certainly wouldn’t be in my opinion. It’s free. The advertisers who support Wikipedia and Google? Well, before you say anything, remember, Google already limits what you can advertise on there. The limits aren’t anything most of us would protest against and consist of things we would find sensible. Go read their policy on this subject, but it is a form of, dare I say it, “censorship.” And I’m not even saying they’re wrong. I’m saying that no one, not even the BBC article I read courtesy of someone on my Facebook page this afternoon, is bothering to find out what, exactly what, is contained in these bills. So, I tried to. Where are the bills? By the way, if anyone does discover the full text of the bills, send me a link. Maybe I’ll revise my opinions in light of what I read, maybe not. In any case, googling the bill titles or legislation numbers does little good. You can find ten thousand articles about the protests or articles that claim to explain what the bills are about, to be sure. There’s even a Wikipedia article on each one. But how much can I trust Wikipedia to provide me with a fair and balanced view of what the bills contain? I don’t have anything against Wikipedia, mind you, but this cite is adamantly opposed to the legislation, and so its point-of-view is already suspect. Similarly, most media has a left-leaning bias and will always present the anti-censorship position. I don’t want pro or anti-bill arguments. I want to read the actual text and nothing but the text of the very legislation itself. That’s what all of us need to be doing. Yes, it may require using a dictionary and it won’t be as easy to read as a fluff novel, but reading the legislation itself, for yourself, is the only way you have of insuring that you make a decision that is truly your own. Otherwise, good luck..

            Now then, based on what I was able to find, even using Wikipedia’s own information against it, as it were, here’s some food for thought. This reminds me of the Nabster crisis. The music industry is still struggling with lost revenues from artists whose works are transferred through file sharing again and again. Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to buy music digitally and legally. I have no problem paying $0.99 for a song. I have no problem paying Netflicks for movies or TV viewing if I want to. I believe that an artist or author should be compensated for their work. I’ve written stories. None of them are published, but I’ve done it. If I ever did publish something I’ve written, I’d want to choose whether or not to make money from it. If I publish it on Hubpages, for example, then it’s free and open to everyone. That’s probably what I’d do But suppose, just suppose, that you, the reader here, publish something like a novella in an anthology or in some other royalty-generating way. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. If you want to make your livelihood with the written word, I wish you well. Then, supposing someone took your novella or poetry collection that you’d legally copyrighted and put into bookstores, hand scanned it with a doc scanner and posted it to the web, how would you feel about it. They could even do so without mentioning your name. What would you think of that? If you find yourself not liking that idea very much, well, now you’re starting to get it. Foreign web sites, those beyond the reach of our laws, can do just that and have done it.

            Let’s consider something else beyond the issue of censorship. Opponents of these two bills moan about first amendment rights. Big surprise there. Now, I’m a fan of the first amendment, no matter what the radical left thinks. Consider this:  it is illegal to threaten to bomb a plane or a building. It is generally illegal to crash a commercial site with spam messages. It is illegal to talk to the Taliban about plans to poison America’s water supply. You can’t even shout, “fire,” in a movie theater. These are all exercises of speech, and there are those who’d claim that every one of them should be allowed in theory because of freedom of speech. What I am saying is just this:  there have been times and places where we have seen fit to restrict or censor the freedom of speech or press. Now, given that, the question is not or should not be, “are these bills violating our first amendment rights.” The question we should be asking is, “what do first amendment advocates want to be able to do that these bills would limit them from doing?” Online publishing of their own work? I don’t think so. Sharing free content? I don’t think so either. Does it ban people from doing business with or supporting certain web sites? What kinds of sites? Well, if it bans them from opportunistically supporting sites that specialize in distributing copyrighted materials to people who haven’t paid for them, well, shouldn’t they be banned from doing so?

            There’s another provision, so it seems, that would penalize users, possibly criminally, for continued streaming or downloading of copyrighted internet content that they haven't paid for or gotten permission to use. Now, I’m sure we’ve all done this at some point at one time or another. I’m sure I have, possibly without even knowing it. Sometimes, though, I did know it. These issues of streaming and file sharing are new ones relatively speaking. Our copyright laws have only begun to address this issue, because up to about a decade ago, this form of digital media simply wasn’t available and it wasn’t the way people chose to publish. But now with ITunes, Amazon’s Kindle reader, Audible and Google Books, electronic media is becoming the means of publication for everything from songs to poetry to doctoral dissertations to the latest novels. Now, I remember when file sharing was only just starting to be cracked down on by the R.I.A.A. I knew, and still know, people with not hundreds, or thousands, but tens of thousands of songs sitting on their hard drives, all illegally file shared. Now, my friend Nick can give you a better idea of when a song that you get is legally gotten and when it’s not. Suffice it to say that not all songs you get for free are illegally had, but that the big file sharing sites like LimeWire, Kazaa or whatever people are using today are not legal means of exchanging tunes. So, take an acquaintance of mine who has something like twenty thousand songs on his hard drive. If fifteen thousand of them are illegal downloads or file shares, then, at a cost of, let us say, one dime per song, that represents $1500 worth of music that he didn’t pay for. If we were talking about jewelry or food or any tangible goods, the phrase we’d use is “stolen property.” In fact, at that value’s worth of goods, we’d be talking about felony prosecution for grand larceny.

            So, should it make a difference whether the goods stolen are shoes or songs? Some think it should make a difference indeed. Many people feel like you shouldn’t prosecute someone for piracy like the type I’ve been describing. Yet, I ask, what is the real difference between steeling $100 worth of shirts from Coal’s or steeling $100 worth of movies or songs from their makers. The difference is only in technique. When I steel a shirt, I walk into a store, take a shirt off the rack and walk out with it. Alternatively, I do the same from my friend’s dresser. I’ve still absconded with property that I do not own. I didn’t pay the store for it, nor did I pay sales tax on it. I have stolen it. If I steel it from my buddy’s dresser, I’ve freely taken something to which his money entitled him, not me. But there’s a perception out there that if I download your movie from a web site that offers it, what have I really done? It’s harmless, right? Well, no. Because actors, directors, camera people, makeup artists, sound effects people, and musicians and writers made that movie to sell to you in the hopes that you’d enjoy it and that they’d make a little money from it. What’s wrong with that? In my view, nothing.

            Finally, some critics warn that if the American government is prepared to ban foreign web sites for whatever reasons, then foreign countries may ban American web sites for their own social and political reasons, thereby harming us. Well, that’s their right. That’s why it’s called a “foreign” country. I don’t really care whether China bans Facebook or whether or not the Saudis ban Amazon. Of course, Facebook and Amazon may care a great deal; I don’t know. But foreign governments can do whatever they want with the internet in their country. I think we’re big enough to take it if France bans a web site or two or if the Brits don’t like one of our news outlets because it infringes on their personal privacy acts by reporting confidential news. Guess what. We don’t own the net and it’s not up to us to tell other countries what to do with it. It is our job to protect ourselves. That may mean that we ban some foreign sites from doing business with us in order to protect our own copyrights. And it may have the consequence that foreign governments do it to us. Tough. If we can do it, why can’t they? In fact, some do. Check out China.

            Fundamentally, I disagree with Professor Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law prof who specializes in the Constitution. He claims that SOPA and PIPA would undermine freedom of speech and the free exchange of information on the internet. I don’t see any inconsistencies in trying to balance an open forum like the net with safeguarding the property rights of people who have something worth protecting. And it is property, people. Even if it’s not a house or a car or a shirt, it’s still theirs, and if you didn’t pay for it and they didn’t give it away, you have no damned right to it. End of discussion. Replies should be … interesting.

Old-Time Radio

            This all started, depending on your perspective, when I was eight years old in Barns and Noble or just a few weeks ago courtesy of a conversation with Nicole about advertising techniques. What am I talking about? A rediscovered hobby of mine which we’ll get to. Oh yeah, where have I been, you ask? Let’s see. It’s been a while since my last blog post, I know. That isn’t due to a lack of things to talk about, but rather to a plethora of things to do and the accompanying exhaustion that follows doing them. For starters, I’m going to be here an extra year. Despite intensive recruiting efforts and $30 per head paid out of my own pocket, I still don’t have enough subjects for my study. This, I suppose, is the big downside to human subjects-based studies. So, that prolongs my studies an extra year. Meanwhile, I continue writing those parts of the dissertation that can be written in the absence of data. Did I mention that I hate lit reviews? My one solace is that my advisor hates them too. Misery loves company.

            Christmas was wonderful if you were wondering. Nicole popped up here at the end of November, spent Thanksgiving with me and then we traveled back to North Carolina for Christmas. After a New Year’s spent in Tennessee, where I reaffirmed my pension for singing Lynnard Skynnard tunes under the influence, we’re back. Having taken on a winter pre-semester German course and finished it, both because I wanted to and because of the extra few hundred it’d bring in, I now sit here contemplating the start of a new semester. That’s it for catching up. You know me. I’m not one for writing blog posts solely for that purpose. So, let’s get on with it.

            I’ve recently rediscovered my latent interest in the Golden Age of radio, a hobby which seems to interest more people than I’d have thought. This all got started when Nicole and I were sitting around talking about commercials and I began looking up old 50’s ads. This led to my remembering my youth. One day about twenty years ago, my mother and I were in a bookstore in the mall. She was and is an avid bookworm. There are worse vices that a person can have, so I don’t blame anyone for having too many books. Anyway, it was her custom that on such book runs, I could have one or two audio books. Audio books back in the early 90’s were both a bit scarce and rather expensive. There just weren’t that many, and most people hadn’t caught on to listening to books. Now, thankfully, blind people in this country have benefited enormously from the public’s interest in audio-recorded books. Thanks everybody. Well, on this one particular day I couldn’t decide what I wanted, so, she picked.

            What she got was a set of four cassettes and on each cassette were two recordings from either the old Suspense Theater or one of the old detective episodic serials. Well, time has passed and now much of this material is available online either for streaming or for download courtesy of the Old-Time Radio Research Group.

            The Suspense Theater is particularly interesting, because it featured a new half-hour-long story each week, never with the same characters and rarely the same actors. The show’s trademark was the announcer’s intro. Every title was followed by the tag, “a tale well calculated to keep you in … suspense!” That’s how I came to know some of those old names you just never see on screen anymore:  Danny Kaye, Douglas Fairbanks, Joseph Cotton, Bob Hope, Olivia de Havilland, Bette Davis and Lucille Ball. A lot of those names are still known today. What’s interesting is that their appearance on radio was usually secondary to their screen work and in many cases was simply the side work they did to make money while struggling to promote themselves on screen. Lucille Ball’s best radio work, in my humble opinion, took place ten years before “I love Lucie,” and it’s not something she’s particularly well known for anymore. Danny Kaye is probably totally unknown today, but he sounded good on the radio to be sure.

            The first suspense program I ever listened to was one of Lucille Ball’s roles. It was a 1948 production called, “A Little Piece of Rope.” She played Isabel Towns, a professional blackmailer who winds up snagging The Strangler, a local serial killer, as one of her victims. On the reverse side of that cassette was Danny Kaye in the 1949 show, “The Too Perfect Alibi,” about a man who tries to ease his romantic rival out of the way so that he can get the girl and winds up watching her go to the chair for the crime, kind of an unintended twist. My first exposure to Bob Hope was his 1949 role in the show, “Death Has a Shadow,” where he plays a shady lawyer (is there any other kind) who’s knocked off his wife and now has to face being knocked off by the killer he hired to do the deed. I first came across Olivia de Havilland in her 1944 role as Judith Webster in “Voyage Through Darkness.” It goes on and on.

            As good as Suspense Theater was, to me, the detectives were even better. I have to say I don’t care much for Sam Spade. My all-time favorite was and is still Richard Diamond, most famously played by Dick Powel on radio from 1949-53. I saw an episode of the TV show they made out of it in the mid-50’s, and it just wasn’t such of a much. Diamond is a former New York City cop turned private I who’s always near broke and starving for clients while dating, of course, a multi-millionaire who he just can’t seem to settle down with. I’d have to say Diamond and I get along because of his sense of humor. Nicole seems to think it resembles mine to a certain degree. Maybe it does. And then there’s the whistling jingle that always starts the show that gets stuck in your head, not to mention the incessant cigarette ad and accompanying jingle that ran for better than a year around 1950 that gets featured in each program. I have over a hundred of the episodes, and despite its repeating themes, Diamond’s corny slogans when he answers his office phone, the ever-present girl who comes on to Diamond and winds up pulling a gun, the beating Diamond usually takes at some point in the show, and the cops who frequently save Diamond’s bacon, the stories are still funny and interesting. Nicole’s favorite part is the song he sings to his girlfriend at the end. This is a nod to Dick Powel’s Hollywood singing days. And so, a piano solo is featured at the conclusion of each case.

            The other detective I got into in a big way is one who is still extremely well-known today, Phillip Marlowe. I admit I can take or leave Raymond Chandler’s writing. Still, there’s no better actor for Marlow than Gerald Mohr, who acted in several thousand radio plays and played Marlowe from 1948-51. A frequently used intro tag line, “Now get this and get it straight. Crime is a sucker’s road and those who travel it end up in the gutter, the prison or the grave.” These were simpler times, cynics could argue, before people realized how easy it was to get away with crime, some kinds of it anyway, thus giving the lie to Marlowe’s tag line. I, however, am not a cynic. The overall message of the early hardboiled detectives was that crime doesn’t pay. One wonders what Marlowe or Diamond or even Sam Spade would think of America today. They’d probably say it hasn’t changed much.

            So there you have it. It’s a harmless hobby. It’s completely free. But it does make me wish that television and radio were as good today. Nicole tells me there’s still some good suspense theater (not the specific Suspense Theater I’ve been talking about) on today. I’ll have to see it for myself. It does seem, however, that the age of the hardboiled detective on the radio has passed. In fact, radio itself isn’t such of a much. Aside from music, you usually are just left with ranting ultraconservative talk radio, more of an entertainment venue than a source of real information, and I don’t find it entertaining. One of the chief exceptions to this is the Left Behind series of radio plays and the Chronicles of Narnia, two separate versions. So, if anyone has their own favorites from the Golden Age of radio, let me know.

Americans, Informing Ourselves

So, here I am on this cool and windy first of October. It’s been exactly two months since my last posting, and what an eventful two months. The academic job search is winding up. I’ve got seven positions picked out, I’m getting my C.V. in order and I’m drafting my first cover letters. My dissertation’s data collection continues. I say again, the scarcity of subjects on the one hand, and the economics of paying them (namely out of my own pocket) on the other, continue to plague me. But all in all it’s been a good start to this, my fourth and final year in Illinois. “One day at a time” is my mantra. For the moment, I’m collecting subject data, teaching, preparing job applications, getting ready to do a couple of invited presentations and looking forward to Nicole coming up for Thanksgiving or thereabouts. Today, things are alright all in all. And now on to the topic of the moment.

            I try to talk about politics only in moderation, and there are several good reasons for this. First, I’m not a political theorist, so my opinions on this subject are on the level of the laity. That wouldn’t stop me from commenting, except that it’s also not a subject that passionately drives me. That’s not to say that I don’t have a developed political philosophy or set of beliefs at the very least, but it’s one of only many important and interesting issues. Still, the time has come to take it up again.

            One thing that has disturbed me of late is the almost willful ignorance of people on the right and the left concerning government issues and government power. Now, I have good and dear friends on both right and left, and that’s ok with me. What’s interesting is how both sides view the president. The president, being the visible head of the country, comes in for all the praise, and more often all the flack, that the citizenry has to shell out. This is generally unfair. People often forget what they learned in civics class about the system of checks and balances, how the legislative branch and the executive branch of government balance each other or, more often, antagonize one another. In short, if Congress develops a truly amazing bill which the president supports and signs into law, then the president should rightly be praised for his support and his signature, and Congress would, in its turn, deserve the praise for developing such a fine law. When they’re at odds, the same applies. It wasn’t Congress who didn’t want to see draw downs in troops overseas over the last three years of the Bush administration. It was Bush himself who vetoed a number of spending measures that included troop reductions. See how it works? Now, let’s get to a few things of today.

            One thing that I hear people slamming Obama over these days is the numerous near-shutdowns of the federal government. The closest call probably came in early August, when a number of people came within a hair’s breadth of not receiving their social security payments due to a government shutdown. Now, the causes of the government’s spending crunches are numerous, increasingly complex, and wide open to debate. I’m not interested in the causes. I’m interested in the back-and-forth between Obama and congressional leaders. It seems to me that the problem with Congress is that there is just enough of an imbalance between parties so that either party can block, stall and obfuscate until Hel freezes over when the other party sponsors a bill that the first party doesn’t like. It’s like a board meeting where you’re one or two votes shy of a majority, and the opposition digs in its heels just because it doesn’t want to see your item pass. When you strip away the political language, the high government positions, and the scope of the bills and measures we’re talking about, the general tendency of the behavior on both sides is petty,, counterproductive, and self-serving. Big surprise? So, why blame the president? In this model of behavior, the president is less the commander and chief and more the mediator. He has no dictatorial power here. He cannot order John Bainer, Harry Reed or any of the rest to do this or that. It is Congress who must pass or fail to pass a spending bill. In that situation, Obama is nearly as helpless as you or me. This is not me praising Obama. This, ladies and gentlemen, is me stating facts about the dynamics of the powers involved. It’s not Obama who pisses me off when the government is about to shut down. Rather, it’s the Congress at large and the wrangling congressional leaders in particular.

            Let’s move on to the ongoing recession and the unemployed. Here again, Americans love spouting off at the mouth about what caused it all or who’s to blame for today’s unemployment rates. People, Democrats and Republicans, moderates and independents, do me a favor and listen for a moment. The causes of the recession are numerous. People on both left and write have written book after book trying to figure out what caused it. Those books go all the way back to 2007 and are still rolling off the presses. Some are thoughtful and thorough examinations of the causes of the recession, while many others are little more than book-length rants against one side or another. One thing that is clear is that the recession’s causes are not going to be summed up in a few words over a cup of coffee. The same holds true of the solutions.

            Solving our economic woes remains a nasty and protracted business. Whatever solutions, plural, we ultimately find to be successful, they will be solutions that encompass everyone. It may be that the upper 1% should pay more taxes. Warren Buffett seems to think so in any case. It may be that unemployment laws are rewritten. It may be that tax credits, deferments and so on are extended. I don’t know. And I have no idea what the best thing to do would be. Once again, I’m not writing this blog to provide solutions. That is beyond both my knowledge and my interest. However, let me point out a couple things about how we talk of such things.

            I know a lot of people who are out of work. I may soon be one of them. That being said, why are the unemployed blaming Obama? Well, he’s visible. But is it right to do so? Let’s not forget that Obama inherited the current economic crisis. The market collapses happened under Bush’s administration; though, blaming him for the collapse of the markets is just as questionable as blaming Obama for their continuing struggles. Now, what’s important to me is not whether Obama has a magic solution. Unlike most Americans, I don’t expect him to, because I know my history. The Great Depression was not solved overnight. It was not ended with one or two sweeping initiatives. Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t succeed in every one of its programs. In fact, a good chunk of them were dry wells, and if anyone will please study your history, you will see that only the massive industrial boom brought on by America’s involvement in the second world war finally closed the doors on the Great Depression. No, I don’t think we should start a world war, folks. But my point should be obvious. Obama is correct when he observes that the causes of this current recession did not arise overnight. Nor, too, will the solutions take effect immediately.

            Because I have some perspective on the economic crisis, I am watching Obama for different reasons. I am not waiting for his all-inclusive solutions. Rather, I am watching his initiatives. His efforts are what concern me. Right now, the American Jobs Act is up for debate, and once again, most people have no idea what they’re talking about when they begin slamming it. The Whitehouse has published a fact sheet on the proposed law, breaking down the effects of its proposed measures. I’ve read it, and I won’t summarize it here, because I want you to read it too and form your own opinions about it. Just Google the phrase ‘American Jobs Act.’ It’s the first entry that comes up.

            Now what I do want to invite you to do is this. Compare the American Jobs Act and the rest of Obama’s proposals with the New Deal. Look up the New Deal, the measures and programs that Roosevelt initiated, the ones that failed and the ones that worked. Finally, if you have been criticizing Obama lately, ask yourself after getting informed whether your criticisms are fare and constructive, or whether you’re doing what a lot of people I’ve run into are doing, and making yourself look foolish. And yes, democrats have been as foolish about Obama as republicans. And you cannot infer from this blog what I think of these issues. My point has not been to advocate a plan or a bill or to support Obama. My goals have been two:  to remind us all of some of the basic realities of how the government works, and to invite all of us to consider our opinions and what we say about the president, especially before we say it. I don’t care what conclusions you come to, for or against the president’s initiatives. I care about whether or not your opinions are as well-informed as they should be and whether you actually do understand, to the extent that we can without being economists, the nature of the mess we’re in. If I’ve accomplished even one of those goals of mine, I’m happy. If I have actually managed both, I’m quite satisfied with this blog.

2011 Convention Memories

            The first star trek convention I attended, back in 2004, was about memorabilia. I’d never seen most of that stuff before, and admittedly, there were some very special items being sold there. It was the Vegas convention, after all, and Vegas is always bigger than anything else because it’s the main show for Creation Entertainment. Meeting the actors was just as important, but I was very focused on bringing home mementoes, things I could touch and hold, as it were. 2011 was far different, and it its way, far better. This year marks forty-five years of star trek history, and for me at least, it was all about experience, memories.

            I was able to attend the Nashville convention because it took place in my home state, and I could attend without having to pay airfare or hotel booking or dining prices. Hundreds and hundreds in savings. I didn’t attend on the first day of the three-day convention, because there wasn’t much I wanted to see. Day two as a different story. I got there only to discover that I’d had the cab drop me on the opposite side of the building from the convention center. That was a long walk I tell you. I got there and the process of standing in line began. That’s just part of the experience; you stand in line after line after line for everything. Nashville wasn’t too bad as far as that went, nothing like Vegas. That’s the advantage of having fewer attendees.

            The first presenter, Max Grodenchik, was typical of the actors who spoke. He talked about his acting experiences both in trek and outside of it, told us how he landed the job as Rom, and took questions from the audience. Things got interesting during the following presentation though. I had known that John Paladin was going to do a special on Klingon makeup, and as part of his presentation, he was going to have a volunteer put on stage and transfigured into a Klingon in front of God and everybody. Not to be too blunt, but I wanted that person to be me. Didn’t we all hope to be up there? I was curious to see for myself what the Klingon face looked like, and as visual as makeup is, I dreamed of being able to wear that face for myself. Well as it happened, the makeup artist got wind of what I’d said to fellow fans in line about it and approached me in the memorabilia room before the first show and introduced himself. To make a long story short, he was just as happy to find a volunteer as early as possible in the day, and he was fine with it being me.

            I sat on the stage under the spot lights and he applied makeup while taking questions from the audience. The makeup consists of a face piece and a wig and some coloring to blend my natural skin tone with the prostheses. When it was done, I wore the long hair and the forehead ridges. Touching the ridges for the first time was interesting. And it was the real thing, exactly the sort of stuff he, John, had put on .G. Hertzler or Bob O’Reilly when they went on set.

I didn’t realize just how much it’d transformed me until I left the stage and was swamped with photo requests. For the next two days, people would stop me randomly or come up to me as I stood around and ask for either pictures of me in makeup or to have their picture made with me. It was flattering and I admit I enjoyed it as much as anyone would have. But for what it’s worth, I didn’t just enjoy it because so much attention was coming my way, I enjoyed it because it allowed me to contribute something meaningful to my fellow fans at the convention. I mean, if they couldn’t get photographs with the actors who portrayed the Klingons, getting a photo with someone who, at the very least, had been turned into a real Klingon was maybe the next best thing. I’ll never forget the Kiskinus family. It’s a Greek last name and I doubtless misspelled it. But Autumn and her mother pretty much hung out with me this weekend. They were always spotting me in the memorabilia room, and if memory serves, Autumn was the one who wanted to snap the pic of me eating my chicken sandwich. After all, when did you ever see a Klingon eating a chicken sandwich? I definitely saw the humor in it. The thing with the makeup stretched over both days I attended, because I slept in the makeup. I really wanted Hertzler and O’Reilly to see me in it. The following morning, in fact, Paladin said the makeup looked as fresh as it had when he first applied it. I’m glad I was careful with it, and the Klingons’ reactions to it were worth losing sleep the night before, but I digress.

I’d say the most memorable presentation of Saturday was Kasey Biggs, Deep Space Nine’s Damar. There was something he said about the acting classes he teaches, and I’ve endeavored to recall it word for word:  “even though not everybody I teach is going to go out there and become an actor, I can teach them one thing, how to live in the moment. Too often we’re focusing on the future or the past, what I did yesterday or the things I have to do next week, but if you’re going to act, you’ve got to live in the moment, in the now. And I try to give them the tools so they can learn to grasp at right now. I don’t think you can have a full and satisfying life until you learn how to appreciate right now.” It was well put and meaningful. Not that the rest of the guys were chopped liver, by no means, but it was thought-provoking.

The photo ops on Saturday and, indeed, throughout the convention were fun and the pictures of me in Klingon makeup are probably hilarious, but I have to say I truly treasure the autographs. The autographs, with one exception, were complimentary parts of my ticket package. But until about 3:00 Saturday morning, I couldn’t find any way to make a signature meaningful. I’d probably manage to lose whatever I had signed, even. It was frustrating. People love autographs, but for blind folks, your normal autograph just isn’t such of a much. Finally, a solution came to me, a novel idea. First, I went through the episodes and movies and found one character quotation for each actor whose autograph I was receiving. I made a list of these quotes with space underneath each quote for the actor to sign, each to his own character’s dialogue as it were. I kept my list in hand, and for each actor, instead of having them do something meaningless like writing, “to my good friend Brad,” I asked each man if he would read his character’s dialogue as he signed his name, and whether I may record them doing so. I expected flat refusals. What I got was interest and excitement. Every single one read his line, and only William Shatner couldn’t get recorded, only because there wasn’t enough time with the hundreds in line behind me waiting for his autograph. Max Grodenchik was the first I tried this on. When he understood what it was I wanted, he got into it! He wanted to record his line three times to get it right, and he even gave me some vocal coaching on my own Rom impersonation. The rest of the actors were delighted, frequently asking if they themselves could hold my digital recorder and often taking extra time, by their own choice, to read over the lines before recording them. To a man, they seemed to think this was a novel way to get an autograph and in many cases, the reading was followed by their comments on the line I’d chosen. Kasey Biggs described the experience as wholly unique, and we talked for a minute about how important and transformative the particular line I chose had been for his character. It seemed that they all appreciated the fact that I chose meaningful lines. In many cases, the lines I chose came from episodes they spent a while talking about or citing as meaningful for their characters’ development during their on-stage presentations. Well I sure wasn’t going to use throwaways. The most special instance of this came when I saw J.G Hertzler on Sunday. At one point in his presentation, he’d hinted at his favorite moment as Martok, and I felt a thrill shoot through me, because the line I’d chosen for him was from the very scene he was describing. It was Martok’s speech to Worf on the worthiness of marriage. It was especially meaningful that so important a line, important to me and too, to my fiancé, was equally meaningful to him. He read it well, even if he was a tad too close to the recorder’s microphone.

Sunday was as jam packed as Saturday. By Sunday morning I was tired, because I didn’t want to sleep too heavily and risk ruining the makeup. The first event Sunday morning was a continental breakfast with O’Reilly and Hertzler. This took place well before their stage presentation, and it was the first time fans saw them at the convention. Only 30 tickets were sold for this event, and I was glad I took the trouble to buy one of them. They were hilarious and personable. They remembered your name when you told it to them, and they were obviously happy to be there. While they didn’t comment to me directly about the makeup, I got word that they’d spoken with John Paladin about it and were very impressed with his makeup job on me. Well I was glad. It was positive attention for me, but also for the makeup artist. John really did do excellent work on me, and if I wore it well, most of the credit goes to him. That made sleeping in the makeup worth it. Their on-stage presentation was hilarious and noisy as hell. They gave you good natured ribbing when you asked questions and the audience loved them. Me, no less than anyone else. They were also the two best readers of their dialogue, coming very close to their on-screen performances of the text, which says something considering that those performances are both more than a decade in the past. On the other hand, I treasure those that weren’t close to their set performances, because they read them live, and the vocal divergences simply represented other possible interpretations of those character moments.

Sunday closed with William Shatner. The afternoon saw the hotel packed. Hundreds of people showed up who hadn’t been there all weekend long. And of course, they were there for Bill. I went to the photo line an hour beforehand, because I had had experience with Vegas and knew that in his case, I’d better get there early. By the time he appeared for the photo op, the line stretched for more than five hundred people, and I was about fifteenth in line. His on-stage talk was lively and drew on four and a half decades of star trek memories as well as talking about his future projects. It was here that I finally got to do something I’d meant to do when I saw him in Vegas. When my turn came in the Q and A, I took the opportunity to thank him for narrating so many of his own books, explaining that I’d likely have never read them if he hadn’t narrated them. He seemed touched by this, because almost nobody asks him about his books. His movies, music and plays, yes. But almost never the books. I wanted him to know that all those hours in the recording studio had mattered to someone.

These experiences are unforgettable, and though I spent a respectable amount of money at the convention, I spent it on things like photo ops and the breakfast, things that would leave me with experiences and memories, which you can’t lose the way you can lose a t-shirt. I plan to save those recordings, backing them up as I would my dissertation, to which this last year of study is devoted. I intend to have the quotations paper they all signed framed. Something to hang on the wall. I’ve made a few Facebook connections with fellow fans, and there are people I definitely intend to keep in touch with. Again, experience. It was enjoyable to be around hundreds of people who were as geeky as me, who knew all the obscure details of the characters and who could appreciate quoting the dialogue These are normal people, people with jobs and families and drudgery and troubles, but for one weekend, you get to forget being who you are, whether plumber or housewife or doctoral student or soldier, and you become a star trek fan, nothing more, nothing less and nothing else. If I could attend any other convention, just one more in all of my lifetime, I’d attend the Vegas convention of 2016. Vegas is the main attraction, and 2016 will mark star trek’s 50^th anniversary. That convention had better be a blowout, and I intend to be there, God willing.

Some Reflections on Suicide

            This somber blog entry actually started life almost a year ago as a Facebook note, when a professor of mine, a man I respected and admired, took his own life. I’m revising and reposting it for two reasons. First, more people read blogspot.com than the forum where this first appeared, and why blog if you don’t want people to read? Second, recent events have given me more to think about when it comes to suicide, and I find myself still wanting to write. No, another friend of mine is not dead; I’ll explain in due time if you’ll read on. But as you read, consider these questions:  is suicide worse for those left behind when they are left wondering why, or is it worse when those left behind know exactly why.

Until the last year or so of my life, I’d known only one person before this who took his own life. It happened about five years ago, and as for the young man in question, he was a vengeful, hateful person whose passing didn’t disturb me in the slightest. In case any of my readers (always assuming anyone reads this) knew him and actually cared for him, I’ll refrain from mentioning his name. But his suicide was a vindictive act, intended to inflict pain and guilt upon a select few against whom he held a grudge; that was his own assertion at the time, not hindsight. The fellow even called up those whom he hated as he was dying and told them that they were responsible and that he did not forgive them their offenses. No I was not one of those whom he hated, this young man; having said that, I did not mourn his passage. I found him somewhat pitiable, but grieve, that I did not do.

In September 2010, a senior professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois took his own life. This was a man I’d worked with, taken classes with, done research with and who sat on my doctoral examination committee. It seems egocentric to say that this suicide matters more because he matters more to me, but let’s leave aside accusations of egocentrism for the present. He did matter to me, a lot more, more than the first person I talked about. More relevant to the discussion of suicide is the unanswerable question, at least, unanswerable in his case. Why did he do it? It’s a question I attempted to persuade myself not to investigate, not because I feared the answer, but because I had, and still to this day have, no means at my disposal for finding an answer. Even those closest to him may not have anything approaching an answer. And that lack of answer is something we will simply have to deal with. And yet, because this is suicide, that lack of answer proves more vexing than it otherwise would. Why do I say this?

In the weeks following my professor’s death, I read and reread the doctoral dissertation of someone who has been like a sister to me for a lot of years, because it is most germane to the point. Consider this from the concluding chapter, “Despite its unfortunate prevalence, suicide-related bereavement is a non-normative, sometimes traumatic experience that stands in sharp contrast to the normative nature of non-traumatic loss” (Anderson p. 115). Too true. A common sense conclusion, if most diligently researched. My complements. What that conclusion means today is just this: if this man, respected scholar, popular professor, devoted family man and sincere in his Christian beliefs, had died of a heart attack, in a car accident, had even, let’s say, been murdered, the nature of what it is I felt would be different. The “why” would still have been asked, but the question of agency, or at least, his lack of agency in the matter, would make wrestling with it a bit easier. Who can control the car accident, who can control the death by natural causes that overtakes you, who indeed can foresee and forestall a senseless violent crime? In the three preceding questions, we would do well to ask, fore who can know the mind of God? Our recourse in those former cases to the will of God is more than just a pat answer, though it can come across as such depending on who’s delivering it. Yet in those cases, we must perforce accede to the will of God, because as his ways are indeed, not our ways, nor his thoughts, ours. Yet suicide. Such divinely oriented reasoning seems to fail with suicide in so far as the death of the person is concerned precisely because it does not appear to be the will of God that you do such a thing. … An inherently interesting choice about your existence, to decide not to exist anymore. And then to do it, to perform the final instantiation of agency that, in and of itself, deprives you of all further agency, forever. To, in a manner of speaking, short-circuit God’s plan.

What is the bible’s answer on suicide? In truth, the bible itself is little help here. The word, “suicide,” doesn’t appear in the King James Version or the New American Standard Version at all. And there are, so far as I can see, only four genuine suicides in all of scripture, with three more popularly being offered up as examples of suicide. The others are arguable, because it’s debatable whether Jonah wanted to take his own life (Jonah 1:11-15), that is, did Jonah throw himself into the sea expressly to end his own life, and a similar question shows up when we look at Sampson’s death in Judges 16:21-31. . Similarly, some suggest the case of Abimelech as a suicide in the scriptures, but when you read Judges 9:54, you see clearly that his servant actually kills him. Abimilech requests the favor, granted, but Abimelech’s death still comes about through murder at another person’s hand. Of the other four, the suicides of Ahythophel, 2 Samuel 17:23 who hanged himself when his advice went unheeded, and the case of Zimri, 2 Kings 16:18, who burned his palace down around him to avoid capture, are relatively obscure incidents. The two most well-known are probably the suicide of Judas as recorded in Matthew 27:35 and the death of King Saul and his armor bearer as recorded in 1 Samuel 31:1-7. In none of these cases does scripture say anything explicitly about taking one’s own life or about God’s view of one who has done so. There is the commandment that forbids willful murder, but whether, “thou shalt not commit murder,” extends to the self is open to some interpretation. Most theologians think that it does and that Judeo-Christian scriptures forbid suicide by implecation.

So know, resort to the divine does not provide comfort or answers to the “why question or to any other questions where suicide is concerned. I have concluded, tentatively, that it’s not an answerable question for me in my professor’s case, as I’ve said, but it is difficult to stop asking it, and perhaps that too is as it should be. Normative grief, not maladaptive grief, to borrow once more from that excellent dissertation. Quite normative, quite unpleasantly normative. And I was just a student. Not a parent or, god forbid, a child, of which he left behind three, ages 12, 9 and 7, one of whom had a birthday right around the day he died. And for the record, I wasn’t his wife either.

All of this leads me away from 'why' and towards something a bit less abstract, anger, and, forgiveness. Wow, isn’t that just a can of worms. Yes, I am well aware that anger is considered one of the five stages of grief, both on the part of survivors and on the part of those suffering, say, a terminal illness. Yes, anger is normal. I know. And yet, I did not wish to be angry with this man. I had never been angry with him until that time. As a student and junior colleague—we were collaborating on research after all—I never had cause to feel anger towards him. And yet it was not entirely non-altruistic anger. Like many others, I was angry that he knowingly and willfully did this and left his children behind. 12 isn’t old enough to know and understand everything, but it’s old enough for death. And you can’t tell me that poor boy won’t, or hasn’t since, attempted to draw a connection between his father’s death and his recent birthday. I’m sure no such connection exists, but try telling him that. And what of the other two? "Daddy’s not coming home anymore?" To what extent do children of that age cognitively understand death, let alone suicide? I don’t know. I was 7 when my grandfather died, and I certainly understood it. I still remember the day I was told about it, January 5, 1990. I remember where I was, when in the day it was, and exactly what words my father chose to tell me. And if that memory is so clear to me, I must assume that they, his children, could not be unaware of his death. They must know, and it must be terrible, and just what the hell was so bad that he did it? That he caused the situation wherein they struggle with it and ask, ‘why?’ I have, sadly, no answers for them. No one does. Even were God to attempt an answer, his best reply would be, “I am.” And, being God, that will be sufficient. Temporally, they have it bad. That’s the long and the short of it, they have it bad even now and likely will for a long time. I’m so sorry, Children.

As for my own anger, it revolved around the question in the last paragraph. What could have been so wrong with his life that permanently checking out seemed like the solution? Nothing is that bad. No shame, no disgrace, no stress, nothing, is that bad. Admittedly, I’ve never been suicidal, never wanted to commit suicide, never planned it. I have friends who have thought about it, even planned and attempted it, so I realize my opinion here is not the only one available. But to those friends I would ask, in all sincerity, what stopped you? If you planned, or attempted suicide, you’re still here. And the fact that a person plans but does not attempt, or attempts, and does not succeed, in committing suicide is significant. It’s fairly easy to do, after all; the human body is remarkably destructible. And he did it. It has the hallmarks of something that was deliberated, meticulously planned, and put into action. And what, I return to the point, could have been that bad? Money? Sex? Departmental politics? Somehow I doubt it. Not that I’m in any condition to doubt, because had you asked me to list faculty members in my department who would be likely to commit suicide, none would have appeared likely, but he would have appeared less so. But I was wrong, it seems. That leads me to his mental state. Did he suffer debilitating depression? Did he suffer a nervous breakdown? Those are the kindest explanations, because they present an act committed by a man not in full possession of his faculties at the time. And for my part, I’d like to believe that such a thing was the motivator, and those explanations, if true, are likely forever hidden from my knowledge. Still, it appears to have been deliberated. The disappearance was deliberate, the location of the car and the body were equally well-chosen so as not to be spotted by aerial surveillance. This was not an impulse suicide, which makes it all the worse on those left behind for that. It also, at least to my thinking, makes it harder to attribute his actions as being the product of a mind that was faltering at the time. He didn’t get drunk and then attempt something stupid, as someone did in my home. He didn’t get some piece of particularly bad news, go into his office, lock his door and blow his brains out. This was calculated, thought about. Concluded. I suspect he went away for a while, gave his life some serious thought, and decided that it was no longer bearable, or would be a case of diminishing returns, for him to continue to live it. As I say, that makes those kind explanations questionable, and questioning is what I was, and still am, reduced to. More to the point, the absence, or the improbability of those kind explanations left me unable to mitigate my anger and puzzlement in that way. Only time has been able to partially do that.

I started out by offering two questions. Who has it worse, the ones who are left to wonder why, or the ones who know why. This brings me to my second example, and I warn you, you may feel like laughing at it. But if you stuck with me this long, keep on going. The second suicide, the one that raises that second question of mine, concerns a person who, in most senses of the word, never existed. I’m something of a role-play game (RPG) player. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this is where you create an avatar and role-play through it, constructing a life for your character and making them live it. It’s a form of acting, I suppose, except that it’s acting without a pre-written script. Yet, it is acting in the sense that you must be faithful to your character in his or her portrayal, making them react as their personality would cause them to react, not as you yourself might feel like doing. So you immerse yourself in your character when you act or when you role-play or when you write a novel, and you observe their world and their emotions closely. This is what novelists and actors and gamers have in common.

Without boring you with detail, I’ll say this much about my character. He is thirty years old and a moderately successful movie maker and theater director. Now, I actually had to do my homework in film making and stage directing to make this convincing, mind you. This character of mine had a lover, played by a friend of mine. She was a deeply troubled woman, this female character. Whatever troubles my friend may have, they’re nothing like the ones her character had. I digress. As you no doubt have figured out, my character’s lover took her own life. She blew her brains out in a public place, having already written a suicide note explaining the reasons. The note was written to my character and for him alone, and it explained very clearly why she was taking her own life. While it would probably not be accurate to say that he caused her to pull the trigger, it would be accurate to say that he had an indirect hand in her motivation to kill herself; at least that’s how he sees it.

Now back to the real world. I watched these characters’ situation with interest, and I, like my friend, was saddened when his lover shot herself. For my friend it was worse because the character belonged to her, but let’s not get bogged down in detail. The point of this story is this:  in this case, there was an explanation. As my character observed to a friend of his, “I can’t even ask why.” The note was clear and left no doubt. Yet, I found even through vicarious experience, that having an explanation made it no easier to deal with. In fact, the explanation may have made it worse. That is to say, if what a person says in a suicide note can be taken as representing their true motivations, you may be left feeling like you should’ve foreseen it, like you should’ve known that was the problem and like you should’ve been more intuitive, more on the ball, more competent in dealing with that person. You may feel as if, had you but been a little more attentive, a little more in tune with that person, you’d have seen the problem and have been able to act. This is classic survivor’s guilt. And it is as bad, in its own way, if not worse than not knowing why at all. I know that now. I even wrote to my friend asking her this, “you tried to show me what was wrong with her. Did she die because I didn’t pick up on the clues and have my character act appropriately?” Yes, I was experiencing second-hand survivor’s guilt, wondering whether I, Brad Blair, should’ve seen what she, my friend, was trying to tell me. It was a miniature version of the type of survivor’s guilt I would doubtless feel if a friend of mine, or Heaven forefend a lover, took their own lives, suicide note and all. When I realized what answers this role-play experience had given me, I knew it was time to revise this essay. I hope I don’t have to revise it again.

Anger plays its part in both cases. In my professor’s case, certainly. And my character is angry at his lover for doing this to him. I was even upset with my friend, if on a much lower key, for doing this to her character and, by extension, to me and to those few who had extensive interactions with her character. Yet I mentioned forgiveness. That’s part of it too, and it applies in both situations, where a reason is known and where it is not. If we do not forgive, we will not be forgiven. True, but more importantly, and more to the point of those scriptures that echo that sentiment, is the notion that forgiveness is psychologically necessary in order to close the grieving process. Ok, I can accept that. So, even though I was only a student, only a colleague, and this isn’t as near to me as it is to his children and widow, I too must forgive. And I shall, even without understanding, I shall, because I must. I have no alternative. Or rather, the alternatives, what my dear friend Amy called complicated or maladaptive grief, these are things I must needs avoid. And so I shall forgive. My character will also forgive, and his case, he has the added burden of forgiving himself. It’s easy to beat yourself up and hard to stop. And yet, for his own sanity, he will have to forgive. He has no particular grasp of the bible, so that sort of reasoning wouldn’t reach him, but he must accept that in the end, it was his lover who pulled the trigger, and he will need to let it go if his life is to ever be normal again.

It’s interesting to me how a lack of knowledge on the one hand, or how complete knowledge on the other hand, affects the emotional responses to suicide. I’m left asking myself this:  in the real world, which would I rather have, the bafflement and puzzlement of not knowing, or the risk of the associated survivor’s guilt that may come with knowing full well why the person is gone? My answer doesn’t stem from any religious background, but from my own philosophical perspective. I do not agree with Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four when he writes his party slogan, “ignorance is strength.” Rather, in knowledge lies power and wisdom and resolution, depending on how the knowledge is used. So, I’d rather know. That being said, that’s all for today.