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I hung laundry on the line to dry and went in to Providence for work.  Not only did a series of downpours soak my clothing, but they were hailed on.  Twice.  My clothes look very, very wet and discouraged.  Maybe they will dry tomorrow.

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In defense of placebos

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[updated]

I'm pretty much a non-interventionist when it comes to health and healing.  Whether that's a luxury I enjoy because I'm usually in good health -- or whether I'm usually in good health because I stay away from the meddling of healers -- I can't say.  I hit up my doctor for doxycycline when I get the tell-tales for Lyme disease, I had surgery when a salivary gland went bad, but otherwise I mostly rely on my body to heal itself.  I listen to my body when it has something to say to me, and eat plenty of multi-grain bread with butter and Monica's fantastic cooking.

As an anthropologist and sometimes pagan, I'm sympathetic to the theatrics of "alternative healing" even if I'm fairly skeptical of the mechanics.  But when Brian Kaller, of Restoring Mayberry, of one of my favorite blogs, laid out a more consistently skeptical takedown of alternative medicine it struck a chord.  An excerpt:

Most people I know, in one way or another, yearn for a simpler and more natural way of life, a way to get around big government and big corporations and deal with authentic people, to buy products whose ingredients they can pronounce. And so markets and movements have arisen to meet that demand, and give people the illusion of doing that . . .

Some of the ways people try to live a more natural life, however, just do harm. Refusing vaccinations does not restore the collapsing plankton levels in the ocean, it just makes your children more vulnerable to disease. Buying “herbal” medicines sends money to corporations – just corporations that can work outside of mainstream medicine’s public rules, and so get to sell things that don’t work. 

I'm neither a doctor nor a politician, but I can think of a number of ways people can improve their and their neighbours' health. They could persuade many people to garden, getting excercise and fresh vegetables. They could persuade lawmakers to force herbal companies to abide by the same standards as pharmaceutical companies . . . Americans could also persuade lawmakers to change health-care laws, imitating what seems to work best in other parts of the world.

If more people feel sick, stressed and helpless in years to come, however, the danger is that, instead of doing any of these real things, they will be a prime target for hucksters selling placebos – things that only make them think they are fighting the good fight. 

With slightly tipsy ambivalence, I tried to think through the redeeming features of quackery:

(more below the fold)

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Garden Blogging:

In the cold frames --

(like miniature greenhouses)

I've got lettuce and sunflowers coming up.

Beets, too.

And another summer experiment:

"hugelkultur"

-- a mound built of logs and sticks

overlaid with mulch

(from 5 years worth of firewood) --

And then overlaid again

with undercooked compost from the heap

and a couple of inches of dirt.

I'm a gonna plant some beans 

and nasturtiums on it.

Maybe a squash too.

Can you spot the asparagus spears

poking out below?

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OK, for those who are interested, 

here is a link to a slideshow of our 

Galapagos Islands photos.

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We watched as a sea turtle swam among the mangroves along the Galapagos' Isabella island.

the hawksbill turtle in flight

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Writing is a way to bring unruly thoughts (for better or worse) into an order.  Sometimes - though not often enough - I achieve a kind of thinking that is like one of the oaks that grow over the back wall.  Not the perfect iconic tree-shape, but a recognizable tree-shape and built out of a fractalization of honest branchings.  Other times - like now - my thinking is like the raspberry patch behind the beehive.  The berries give the patch their nominal identity, but they struggle for sunshine with the common milkweed and burdock and goldenrod and maybe some rarer milkweeds I've planted.  And it's being invaded by crown vetch and by the peppermint I introduced, and the burning bush that the boys hacked out with hatchets has never really given up.  Now, if I can disentangle myself from that metaphor - which isn't easy given the thorns - I'm not sure how to write myself back out into the garden.

Would it help to write down a list of some of the shoots and vines and weeds in my metaphorical mental thicket?  Let's see, there is still the desire to engage with the Galapagos Islands and the car wreck that led up to it . . . there's the ongoing decline of our political culture and our communities and the desire to do something more than just serve as a witness . . . there's the vacillating springtime with lettuce and sunflower coming up in the cold frames and birds breaking out into song, beanpoles and beehives . . . there's eight-hour days as research director with their own complex braids of thinking and writing and planning - oil depletion, social security reform, unionization, jobs quality . . . there's the crisis of sustainability all around our unsustainable lifestyles . . . there are Porter, Nico, Monica, three cats and this anthropologist getting older and acting out our dramas and non-dramas within the walls of our little peeling yellow cottage.

It's going to take a while, so bear with me.  For now, here's a little bit of clarity from the Galapagos.  A hawk has killed and will eat a young iguana.  The adult iguanas, too big to trouble about hawks, too reptilian to trouble about young iguanas, bask.

Galapagos hawk and marine iguana, photo A. Brown

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The boys had two weeks off from school in March, and my father and mother had invited them to go on a trip together with their aunt Chris to Quito and the Galapagos.  Monica and I are saving our travel budget to go to Colombia in June, so we weren't intending to go.  We'd do a little trip to New Orleans instead.

But February 14, three weeks before the trip, someone ran a red light as my dad was making a left turn and they slammed into him.  The collision left him with a broken leg, a broken collar bone and a couple of cracked vertebrae.  A couple of surgeries at the Hershey Medical Center and he graduated to the rehabilitation hospital, where he was making quick progress.

But obviously the trip was out of the question.  It was far too late to cancel, but they were willing to slot in Monica and I in place of my parents, and that's how on March 8 we found our way on a flight to Quito, with 30 other tour-members on the North Museum (of Lancaster, Pennsylvania)'s "Ramble to the Galapagos."

Dad's now back home from re-hab, we're back home from the ramble.  I'll post some pictures.

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Remorseless nuthatches and kinglets and titmice and woodpeckers probe every crevice of bark and mulch and fallen leaf, looking for those invertebrates that have been unlucky enough or careless enough to leave themselves in range of beak and tongue.

When I get to the bottom of the woodpile I toss aside the muddy logs that have lain on the ground - to be rinsed off by the next rain.  Under them are multitudes of pill bugs and nightcrawlers and beetles and ruddy centipedes.  And I am like a pagan god of Destruction and Undoing as I tear away the massive rooves of their winter refuges and expose them to cold winter sunlight and feathered predation.  

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The mark of our woodpecker, the sapsucker.

I kissed the stolid maple where it wept, with ruffled bark shiny and wet and sweet.  The sapsucker has pierced it even as the sap rises.

I sipped that watery draught, which is like the promise of spring.  And a mist cooled my skin as a droplet shattered above me.

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I've never been a soldier, nor in a war -- neither was my father, my grandfathers, nor any of their fathers and grandfathers.  According to family tradition my grandmother's great grandmother was seduced by a French officer in 1848, but otherwise you have to go back to the War of 1812 and the Revolution to find any of my ancestors actually taking up a weapon for battle.  What's remarkable is that, except for some Scots-Irish latecomers who didn't get here until 1871, all the others were here for the Civil War, yet managed not to serve.

There is a family tradition that one of my ancestors had volunteered to join the Union Army, but he and his friend had to clear trees before they left.  My several-times great grandfather managed to drop one of the trees on himself -- breaking both his legs, and so he never made it into the army.  His friend, on the other hand, went to the war and he never returned.

I was thinking of that story as I worked to fell the big maple tree by the shed.  In the end, I didn't drop the thing on myself, nor on the shed -- though the treefall may have murdered some of Nico's cedars.  But now the mulberry tree will get sunlight.

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Each year, we plant rosemary, and sooner or later a hard frost always kills it off.  So this year I've experimented with leaving a cold frame over part of the herb garden  (essentially, a cold frame is an angled window pane on bottom-less box).

This mild winter wouldn't have killed off the rosemary yet in any case.  It's only fallen into single digits a few times and never for very long.  Still, the rosemary does look happy in its little greenhouse - as do the oregano and parsley.  Only the thyme seems indifferent.

And Haru would like a greenhouse of his own.

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I was out filming "man in the street" interviews with people on union issues.  In this case I needed to talk to people who felt negative toward unions.  The trouble is that in sub-freezing temperatures the only people loitering outside are those unfortunates banished from the warmth to smoke their cigarettes.  And apparently smokers in Rhode Island are mostly pretty union-loving.

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Following up on a previous post . . . 


I used to be perplexed about why so many working and middle class conservatives could support the Republican Party.  The party was too obviously dishonest about its economic policies, which it claimed were good for regular Americans, but which were all designed to shift wealth away from them and up the socio-economic pyramid.  

I realize now that rank and file Republicans never believed that the Democratic Party was an alternate, legitimate vehicle for their economic interests, so they settled for the "cultural politics" of conservatism (rooted mainly in religious enthusiasms harnessed to anxieties about gender and white privilege), and  in lieu of true political representation, they gravitated toward cynicism and anti-government rhetoric.

I come to this insight because, as a middle class progressive, I find myself in a strikingly similar position.  Ever since Clinton's technocrats betrayed working Americans with NAFTA and other race-to-the-bottom free-trade policies, the Democratic Party has again and again preferred practices that move wealth toward the wealthy and erode socio-economic mobility.  

Despite the cronyism and the hard-to-ignore "corporatist" turn of the party, we are supposed to choose the liberal politicians over Republicanism out of a preference for the cultural politics of progressivism (rooted mainly in civil rights, diversity and common good).  So, like working class conservatives, we are supposed to delude ourselves about (or be cynical and resigned about) the party's worsening economic policies, but still give it our vote, because they offer more support to gays, minorities, women - and, when convenient, the environment and the common good.

I can't view the Republican Party as an alternate, legitimate vehicle for my politics - since they are clearly much worse than Democrats - so I have little choice but to vote against my economic interests - or as the sociologist might say, "to my least disadvantage," by supporting Obama and the Democratic Congress.


I am curious to see whether this collapsed and corrupted politics is going to continue unchallenged, however.  The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement were both about many things, but they each put forward a similar critique of politics, media, and corruption.  But that is a post for another day.

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Chipping sparrow surveys the scene.

The snow began falling before dawn in a cold, sleety curtain.  The browns and grays of our view into the forest changed to white and steel.  Now the gray sky is whirling toward us as a storm of feather down.


The outdoorsy son, Porter, is wandering in it, testing the too-cold crystals for sledding and snowballability.  The indoorsy son, Nico, is on his computer.  "I'll go out after lunch," he declares.

Black-capped chickadee.

At the dangling bird feeders the squirrels have vanished into the pines, made nervous by Porter's occasional appearances.  Woodpeckers, juncos, titmice, jays, chickadees, and a lone fox sparrow take their place quickly.  The doves are waiting somewhere all puffed up -- waiting like Nico for the snow to stop falling.

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photo: Providence Journal

Up in Cranston a 16-year old atheist objected to her school posting a school prayer in a position of prominence.  After a protracted tussle, the school was forced to take it down.  She's since been continually threatened by fellow students and community members.  Talk Radio hosts have lambasted her.  Her cretinous state representative, Peter Palumbo, (a Democrat) has called her an "evil little thing" being "coerced by evil people."  Even the local florists refused to deliver flowers of support to her.

Jessica Ahlquist is giving (or at least offering) her community a much-needed lesson in civics, the Constitution and history - especially ironic in a state that was founded explicitly and emphatically as a refuge from religious intolerance.

The Christians who would shun or cast out this young woman accuse her of being intolerant.  They ask why she cannot just - not be offended - by this prayer - this plaintive request to God to "grant us" our better impulses and to "help us" be better.  After all, they insist, it's not like they are using public school grounds to insist that she or anyone else adopt particular religious beliefs.

That lie is utterly exposed in the breach.  Ahlquist pointed out that this banner shows the school expects her to believe in God, though she does not believe in God, and it's illegal and unconstitutional for public institutions to elevate one religious belief over another.  The Christians of the community could have responded in a way that showed they supported this student's right to atheism as diligently as they support the right of other students to believe in God.  Instead they made it perfectly clear that her atheism was beyond the pale, that she was evil, that a true member of the school community must necessarily be a believer, and that she was exactly right and justified in her insistence that she was being made a marginalized religious dissident.

If you want to give Jessica a virtual pat on the back for standing up to religious bigotry there's a facebook page dedicated to just that, of course.  


UPDATE: or buy the T-shirt!

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13 degrees and dropping fast.  The temperature will slip into the single digits tonight -- with a good breeze to insinuate chill tendrils into the house's every crack and crevasse.  The boys are in short sleeves down in the basement where the fire is running hot - playing Minecraft on their computers.

  The down comforters are piled on the beds upstairs.  Potatoes are baking in the oven and Monica is fixing a gravy out of mushrooms and onions.

We've had our vintage 1954 furnace on once this winter -- when we came home from Christmas in Pennsylvania and the house was 50 degrees.  


The ancient furnace fumes and roars and would probably kill us all if we didn't open up the basement door and windows when we let it run.  But it will still send hot water through the cast iron baseboards.

Still, the wood stove does it's job, though tonight I really should get up in the night to load it an extra time.

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The wind has stolen my energies and is using them to sing and re-arrange all the leaves.

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Arthur Brisbane, the public editor at the New York Times put his foot in it.  In a post titled, Should the NYT be a Truth Vigilante? he asked "whether and when news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about."


The deluge of universally exasperated comments lasted only briefly before the comments were closed, but it also stimulated a fair amount of chatter in the blogosphere, from Joe Romm to Glenn Greenwald and James Fallows. 


I was happy to see that my own two cents, in the form of an irritated comment, rose to the #5 slot among the "readers picks" at the Times.  I noted:

If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, then by all means continue to do nothing more than paraphrase those press releases. (Though I'll spend less and less of my time reading it.) If you have ambitions to be a newspaper that practices journalism, then practice journalism - even if that's harder. You might find there's an audience for an actual functional news organization.

Brisbane and his editors have been backpedalling frantically and trying to explain what he really meant, but I hope that they take to heart the overall tenor of the responses they got, and take seriously the intense frustration that their audience is expressing about the current state of this flagship of US journalism.

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As I pushed a wheelbarrow of mulch under the ugliest of our ugly spruce trees, a golden-crowned kinglet combed through the quills looking for insects.  Its bright yellow head-streak and it's utter disregard for me made me smile.  I think it only flitted away when it thought I might collide with it.

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David Roberts, who blogs at Grist about sustainability issues is tired of being such a critically-minded downer:

What we need now, more than ever, are not critiques of the extant but models of the new -- new institutions, new social practices, new identities, new purposes, new ways of measuring and valuing what matters. If we're ever going to get off the sinking USS Fossil Growth and into lifeboats, we need to know where we're heading. A new North Star.

We need people who can make a prosperous, enjoyable, sustainable world vivid and real. That will be the work of creators and dreamers . . . It will mean acts of social and economic entrepreneurship, art and storytelling, irrational hope and optimism. It will involve lots of experiments undertaken by people unwilling to be constrained by the limits of the "realistic," people who are willing to try, to risk failure or absurdity.

Much as I don't like risking failure or absurdity, he makes a good point.  Working to get people to notice that something's gone amiss with our society is one thing.  But to actually do something about your own participations is the hard part.


Personally, I put in my 30-odd hours per week on the project of getting the public to notice some dysfunction or another - and ideally helping them understand some potential solutions, but on my own time I ought to be able to pick up D.R.'s gauntlet and flirt with irrational optimism and constructive trying.


So what do I want?  I want to live in a society that is sustainable in every sense.  One that enriches our earth and our ecosystems rather than despoiling them.  I want to live as part of a community that is progressing into greater wisdom and deeper living rather than what we have today - islands of faltering struggle in great, oceanine turmoil of delusion, denial and destruction.  I want to live not in rejection of something, but in affirmation of something.  And I don't want to have to invent it all myself.


So what do I do?  Something absurd?  That is what I have to figure out.

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