Wednesday, December 8, 2010

How to Fabricate the Truth Without Even Trying

Ten minutes ago I ended a 14 hour death match with a $4100.00 insurance claim check.  The check had come in yesterday afternoon.  I immediately opened the envelope, made a copy of the check, took the check back to my bedroom and put it in my billfold in my purse.  Then I returned to the study to check off what items Blue Cross had paid of the items I had sent in.  A couple of hours later two delivery men brought a television I was expecting.  Anticipating their arrival, I had gone back to get some cash out of my billfold for a tip.

After the delivery men left and I had set up the TV, I prepared to go to the bank to deposit the check.  I looked in my billfold for the check to make out the deposit slip.  The check was not there.  My anxiety ran up the scale like a thermometer headed toward appendicitis.  Within seconds I had pictured several scenarios in which the check had been misplaced, lost forever, or stolen.  As my homemaking is not altogether, um...efficient, I have spent the better part of the last 14 hours going through piles and stacks, looking in certain places, going again through piles and stacks, looking again through the same places (perhaps not efficient because obsessive), and gradually adding piles, stacks, and places to my frantic search, for a while in this room, then again in that room.  What I put off and put off was digging through the two huge bags of trash I had put out just before preparing to leave for the bank.

In most endeavors I use an open (if scattered) approach to the task.  If a new detail or idea occurs to me, I tend to follow it.  While digging through something in the study I spied the workbook in which I had checked off claim items against the BCBS Explanation of Benefits that came with the check.  I knew it was illogical to look there, so vivid in my mind was the memory of having put the check in my billfold before I started that task.  Perhaps it was my ironclad resistance to sorting through garbage that allowed me to plunge ahead through the cognitive dissonance of having an impulse to look in a place that totally contradicted such a clear memory.  But plunge I did...straight to the location of the check.

If cognitive dissonance had been uncomfortable, think total ambivalence.  My first reaction was actually spoken (to an audience of two kitties?  More likely God) and is unsuitable for reproduction here.  My next reaction was the kind of relief in which one feels the body melting. 

If in this case there was thesis, then antithesis, there has yet to be synthesis.  I do not anticipate that melding any time soon.  Giving in to the idea that a memory (which I still experience) was actually something else entirely, say, a wish (Dr. Freud certainly would have) requires a certain grace to which my narcissism will be loath to hand over the reins any time soon.

But why go into such detail about a relatively minor life event?  As it happens, very recently I carried on a very exciting and intense communication, by email, text message, and telephone, for over five months with a high school friend.  We exchanged over 200 emails; over time we began to talk on the phone, up to two hours per night.  We became very close and got to know a great deal about each other.  We looked forward with great anticipation to his trip to Dallas, very close to my home.  Based on our conversations I had very high hopes for our face-to-face meeting. 

And meet we did.  I needed something less than two seconds to read him (facial expression, body language) and know that somewhere between the speaking and the hearing of the words by telephone, the great Universal Truth in Advertising Law had been smashed into a thousand broken fantasies, never [think Humpty Dumpty] to be put back together again.  Even as I write, some three weeks after these culminating events, the memories of what I read in text messages and heard on the phone are as real as the kitty on my lap.

But the last 14 hours bring a new experience which must be integrated into my understanding of Dear Things Lost.  Essentially this is a situation of my existentially experiencing what Mr. Einstein told us about the the Law of General Relativity: when I am in fifth gear, blowin' and goin' with my hair on fire, I can never be sure exactly where I am or how fast I'm moving.  So how in this universe could I ever pretend to think I know where I've been?

The inability to rely on memory I describe is not the phenomenon brought on by age.  It is the universal human phenomenon directly proportional to desire: in my case with the check, a desire to have done the safe thing; in my case with lost love...to have not.  Put another way, to have had the fantasies running in my head alongside the telephone repartee be as real as an iPhone.  When desire is that great, one is apt not to know, or much care, at what speed the train is traveling.  The speed feels slightly manic when desire is undifferentiatable from reality, and manic is always more fun...until, as can only happen in the human mind (so far as we know at present) the train gets headed back into itself and reality crashes into the cherished desire.  This is the moment of truth: those of us who are blessed with mere neuroses begin to understand what's what, undergo the agonizing grief of giving up what we thought was real, and begin to pick up the shattered pieces of our lives.  All of which I am going to do right now...beginning with a good long cry, I think.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

A Word on Behalf of Neli

The first anniversary of my father's death will arrive in 2 days. It has been a hard year, absolutely filled to the brim with active grieving. Giving up the most loveable, loving controlling-alcoholic-narcissistic father on the planet has been complicated for his immediate family, and expecially for his extremely middle-aged baby daughter.

But even the closing of melancholic doors opens windows to fresh air: in this case empathy with a family who has difficulties worse than any ours ever faced. This family has come into opposition with the police state at constant but so often dead silent work in this the land of the free. Their misfortune came about by the accident of a child's genetic miscoding that resulted in autism, that resulted in eccentric behavior, that met with a reaction of UNACCEPTABLE to a police officer on duty. And now a man-child with a misunderstood, terrible neurological disorder languishes in jail.

Eighteen year-old Neli Latson's story was printed as a headline story in today's Washington Post online news, due to the monumental work his mother, Lisa Alexandra has done to get his story out via the social media. You can find it at http://avoiceforneli.com.

I have visited Neli's site, signed her petition, made a contribution, and contacted Lisa. I hope someone will read and do the same.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

On Discourse and Opinion

I sat at dinner with my friend the other night. We wet our toes in the discomforting waters of politics and accomplished, at most, the amazing feat of concluding the paragraph of conversation without a single curse word.


What haunts me is that we, two relatively more intelligent than average bears, accepted the exchanges we made as if they were substantive. The subject was the legalization of marijuana. I, being the tree-hanging, heroin gulping, female substitute-little-pink-flags-for-bullets, left of your right cortex liberal that I am, would like to see the national discourse (if not quite yet the ballot ) swing intelligently in that direction, was for the proposition. My friend was against it.

Here is where things went wrong: the reason my friend was against is that he had had two friends in college (some 40 years ago) who had tried what we then so lovingly referred to as "dope" who had both gone on to meet tragic ends, one of whom, he vaguely remembered, had experimented with "harder drugs" and then at some point had died in an automobile accident (drugs or possibly no drugs involved, or possibly alcohol involved). But you see the great arc of his reasoning: experimenting with marijuana => tragic end. Therefore, marijuana.

Here, of course, is the heart of my ghost of the conversation: that reasoning, based on a single observation [let us momentarily pretend it was a substantiated single event] informs the entirety of my friend's approach to the question, "Should marijuana be legalized in America?"

The word I used in the paragraph above was "reasoning". That word is incorrect. My friend believes he is reasoning, but he is not. He is opining.

One simply cannot take a single instance of anything and extrapolate to an entire population.

However, I would wager next month's income on the probability that in certain populations of people, I could tell my friend's story and 90% of those populations would agree with my friend, based on his opinion, that marijuana should not be legalized in America. Moreover, they would have no idea that they were agreeing with an opinion based on anecdote.

Anyone who is still with me either:

1. already clearly understands the definitions of the words "opine", "extrapolate", "anecdote" v. "antidote"; or

2. has a neurotic relationship with his dictionary.

...which leads me to my thesis: my friend is quite intelligent but he is not educated in the science of reasoning (which requires more than a college course in philosophy). Reasoning requires a thorough understanding of The Scientific Method, an acquaintance with basic statistical methods, a working knowledge of algebra and geometry (if for no other reason than to force a three-dimensional model of existence into the inside of one's brain).

These are tools that can be acquired in American high schools...that could be acquired in American high schools if enough Americans understood they are necessary tools for us to be able to reason our way through discussions rather than believe that our opinions on any given matter are of any significance whatsoever. They are not!

And yet, our national news wastes precious time getting the opinions of your man on the street regarding the most pressing issues of the day: opinions likely gained from anecdotal experience rather than from dispassionate discourse or even the reading or viewing of dispassionate discourse based on carefully gleaned and analyzed data from studies of large populations plus the insights that arise from thoughtful consideration and analysis of the issues.

The apex of this disturbing phenomenon is the fashionable reprise, "Data can be interpreted any way they want." Data can only be so interpreted if they are manipulated, the operable word being "manipulated". When "your man on the street" has no idea what "p is significant at the 0.01 level" means, he is a sucker for manipulated data. Asking "your man on the street" to know that much about statistics and why they are useful to the gathering of data is not asking too much of a knowledgeable citizen, although I suspect many a citizen will believe that acquiring such knowledge is beyond his duty to his country...another reason to make the acquisition of this information mandatory in American high schools. Then your average citizen can discern for himself, if he chooses, whether, say, the OMB or a political party is playing fast and loose with the facts. He can look into any given study by any given Administrative agency to see if their methods are in the Scientific Ball Park (the FDA alone would be stopped in its tracks if more people actually read its research, or more specifically, the withholding of its research, which is, in many cases, highly competent).

The most obvious (and, when viewed from the world stage, embarrassing) example of American opinion having conquered American reasonable thinking is the determination of the Religious Right to blindly throw away scientific work reaching back to the Renaissance, in order to hold fast to their opinion of Biblical inerrancy. I have spoken personally with some of these “believers” whose capacity to discount en masse the sciences of geology, archeology, anthropology, and genetics is chilling. They throw away the theory of evolution knowing essentially nothing about it. When they deride it as theory, they are saying, in effect, that they know nothing about the scientific definition of the word, “theory”, as in the “theory” of gravity. These people are incapable of reasonable discourse; as such, they are as great a threat to the forward progress of America as any external threat.

If ever there were a time when we as a nation must be nimble on our feet, it is in this time in the history of the world, when history is flying out from under us at an exponentially increasing rate. We can only be nimble on our feet when we are nimble in our minds, and that facility requires, absolutely, the ability on the part of every one of us to be able to turn each issue about and view it from all its aspects: a facility which in turn requires the capacity to think about the issue, tear it apart and rebuild it, consider it from every vantage point. If, after all that, we each come to an opinion on the issue, I say, “Well done!”

Or, as is my life’s motto: “Anyone who has an opinion on the matter hasn’t considered all the facts.”