Why nobody wrote the colonel

I saw something on TV that made me sheepishly realize I've been expecting far too much in expecting others to answer my e-mails.

You know, I've heard stories about people routinely abandoning people like me who've been laid off and can't land new work. People like me make people like them uncomfortable. On the other hand, I'm old-fashioned enough to find not answering e-mails despicably discourteous; as rude as blowing off a friendly hello in the hall.

But what do I know?

Not much, evidently, according to what I saw on ABC's What Would You Do? last week. The show's producers conducted a hidden-camera test in broad daylight in New Jersey. They had an actor disguised as a homeless man collapse and lie motionless on a busy city sidewalk, to see how long he'd have to lie there before someone at least whipped out a cell phone.

Sure, the empty beer can in the actor's hand might explain why 88 people walked right by as though a fallen man wasn't there. But how about this: The 89th person, a limping African-American woman who later told What Would You Do? she'd been homeless herself on occasion, not only stopped to check on the apparently unconscious man, but stood there begging passersby to please call 9-1-1. She even removed the built-in beer-can turn-off. A total of 26 people ignored her pleas before another compassionate woman deigned to make the call.

What the heck.

But there's more. As a preamble to the foregoing, the show aired surveillance-camera footage of a real-life incident in which a woman fell to the floor and lay motionless for 45 minutes in the waiting room of a New York hospital, ignored not only by everyone else in that waiting room but even by several members of the hospital staff who looked at her and kept going. She died where she lay, mis amigos. Dead right there.

I'm not trying to blow my own horn when I say I know for certain I would have helped both those people lying motionless on the ground; it would not have occurred to me not to.

And on that basis I reckon the fault lies with me for believing others should answer my e-mails.

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Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

I'm not an atheist. I used to be a Catholic, but couldn't hang with it once I started thinking for myself; Catholicism did not compute, and I've always been of the "in for a penny, in for a pound" mentality, so cafeteria Catholicism was never an option.

Once I rejected Catholicism, I drifted around but couldn't stick to much of anything but Eastern philosophy. Eventually, Tom Paine talked me into deism. If anything, I'm a deist—someone who, as my dictionary puts it, believes that "God created the world and its natural laws, but takes no further part in its functioning [as evidenced by the flies crawling on starving babies' eyes in Ethiopia]." I added the latter bit in case you were wondering.

That said, I invite you to consider this. ...

So there was this program on one of the God channels recently, about the Rood and Christ's crucifixion thereon, and one of the talking heads with a turned-around collar was saying how God harbored so much love and compassion for mankind that he allowed his only son to become a man in order that his only son could then be offered up to him as the blood sacrifice necessary to appease his otherwise eternally and fatally implacable anger toward mankind.

He didn't say that exactly, but that's exactly what he was saying; and the thing that curdled my blood (besides the Manson-like arrangement of his facial features) was that he obviously saw nothing illogical or unconscionable or reprehensible or grotesquely pagan—or even mildly disappointing—in the "rationale" he was spouting.

I mean, it's so perfectly reasonable. ...

GOD: I am mad at all of mankind for something just two of them did. I will therefore allow malicious, sadistic men to beat the bejesus out of my only begotten son, and then cruelly and slowly murder him in order to make me feel better. See? See how much I love mankind after all?

I'm sorry, but if that makes sense, so do thousand-dollar Hannah Montana tickets.

Seriously. Are you seriously going to tell me that the only way God could feel mollified, could stop feeling so goddamned hateful toward human beings, was through the grisly slaughter of his own son? That's insupportable. Couldn't God, being God, have just simmered down? More to the point, couldn't God, being God, have just not hated the imperfect beings he himself created in the first place?

Forgive me, please, but I like to give God credit for having more, um, humanity than that. Speaking of which ...

Sometimes I think there's just no hope for humankind; that this is still the Planet of the Apes. Bonobo chimps seem more rational to me than we. Ditto for whales, elephants, dolphins, dogs, and assorted farm animals.

And sometimes the malevolence that seems to underlie the general insanity of human existence makes me literally shudder.

Don't throw any Bibles at me for this one. I've already read both Testaments. I've also read Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, and wish more people would do the same.

For further reading:
Inquisitive minds want to know ...
Phew! So grateful I didn't make altar boy after all ...
And for your penance, ten years in the laundry, missy ...
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Why I believe in a sweet hereafter

First, there's the near-death experience (NDE) described in encouragingly consistent forms by throngs of returners from the brink of doom. The NDE, more than anything, including that song by Blue Oyster Cult, persuades me not to fear the Reaper.

Thanks to the NDE, I fully expect to ...

• Hover overhead after drawing my final breath, personally witnessing and profoundly moved by the heroic measures being applied in vain to retain me in the here-and-now, as well as the inconsolable grieving of those inconsolably aggrieved by my demise
  

• Float through a long tunnel toward a brilliant light
  

• Encounter, on emerging, not only every loved one who's gone before me but a spirit-being from whose side I shall never wish to stray

• Make really good use of the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball® *

And don't go trying to rain on my parade with your battery of physiological explanations for the NDE. I will shut my eyes, plug my ears, and loudly chant gibberish until you go away.

Second, there are these reassuring and compelling passages from Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason:

The most beautiful parts of the creation to our eye are the winged insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and creeping caterpillar-worm of today passes in a few days to a torpid figure and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly. No resemblance of the former creature remains; everything is changed; all his powers are new, and life is to him another thing. [If] we cannot conceive that the consciousness of existence is not the same in this state of the animal as before, why then must I believe that the resurrection of the same body is necessary to continue to me the consciousness of existence hereafter?

... [T]he belief of a future state is a rational belief, founded upon facts visible in the creation; for it is not more difficult to believe that we shall exist hereafter in a better state and form than at present, than that a worm should become a butterfly, and quit the dunghill for the atmosphere, if we did not know it as a fact.

Just imagine: Maybe all those dreams we've had of soaring high above the world below are, in truth, visions of what's to come once we have "quit the dunghill." Visions benevolently bestowed by a kind and caring God.

For further reading:
Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody Jr.
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine

* See February post entitled My idea of heaven
Magic 8 Ball is a registered trademark of Mattel Inc.

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Maybe they should call it the Hypocritic Oath

Remember Hippocrates of Kos?

No, not him. The other one. No, not that one either.

Oh, come on! The one they call "the father of medicine"? The one who founded the Hippocratic School? The one who died in around 370 B.C.?

Oh, forget it. I'm talking about the one they named the Hippocratic Oath after. No, not that oath. The Hippocratic Oath doctors are supposed to follow even if they don't actually swear to it with one hand resting on a Bible.

God!

Well, the Hippocratic Oath, contrary to what some may have come to believe, does not actually contain the words "First, do no harm." It contains similar wording, though, about abstaining from causing any.

And that's where this post comes in. Because I think doctors violate their avowed prohibition against doing harm on a daily, if not hourly, basis. They violate it because, as I like to say, they are too often clever without being wise. They do the things they do because they can, in many cases, regardless of whether they should. And they are, of course, out to make a buck just like the rest of us.

So they do harm by helping a hapless single mother up her kid-count from six to 14. Because they can, and can sure use the do-re-mi.

They do harm by helping to pave the way for MRSA and other killer superbugs by over-prescribing antibiotics—when they, of all people, should readily appreciate how doing so accelerates Darwinian evolution to the benefit of microbes and detriment of humankind. Their rationale? Their patients will simply go to other doctors for the antibiotics they, the patients, believe they need. A buck's a buck, after all.

Thanks in large part to the reckless over-prescribing of antibiotics, there are microbes out there today—most of them infesting your favorite hospital, as a matter of fact—that no antibiotic, not even intravenous, can touch.

In other words, all those times your doctor coughed up a scrip for ampicillin or erythromycin or some other antibiotic when you presented yourself or your child with a viral infection and expected not to leave empty-handed, he or she was doing harm.

But being too often clever without being wise is where I think they do the most harm of all. Bear with me, please. ...

Let's set the Wayback Machine to 1962 and accompany little R. J. as he takes in a first-run screening of The Brain That Wouldn't Die, starring Herb Evers and Virginia Leith. The publicity poster in the theater lobby bears this tantalizing teaser (which contains, for the present-day R. J., a scathingly prescient commentary on modern medicine):

ALIVE ... WITHOUT A BODY ... FED BY AN UNSPEAKABLE HORROR FROM HELL!

A romance of sorts, The Brain That Wouldn't Die tells the story of Dr. Bill Cortner's devoted efforts to keep his fiancée's head alive after she literally loses it in an automobile accident. The cinematic special effects of that era were good enough for me, and I carry to this day the mental image of dear Jan Compton's living albeit detached noddle resting in a tray of liquid, secured by elaborate mechanisms, nourished and stimulated by various tubes and wires.

So. Here's this head of Jan Compton bossing Dr. Cortner around from a liquid-filled tray; and that look-ma-no-body noggin was not only the stuff of science fiction back in '62, but the stuff of ghastly science fiction whose solitary raison d'être was to shock and horrify and repel the likes of adolescent moi.

A head fed by an unspeakable horror from Hell, remember ... much as the head of poor Christopher Reeve, the late actor who starred in numerous Superman films, was kept alive atop the liquid-filled tray of a lifeless body, by the not infrequently unspeakable horror from Hell we call medical science.

Only, now we regard what once repulsed and terrified us as a miracle.

Sorry. I'm not buying it. I submit that no material difference, horrifying-wise, exists between a Jan Compton and a Christopher Reeve.

I submit that, notwithstanding his bravery and unflagging upbeat demeanor (for the cameras at least), the quadriplegic, unable-to-breathe-unaided Christopher Reeve would sooner have died that awful day he broke his neck in an equestrian event.

I submit that in cases such as his, plus countless others, the physicians' Hippocratic Oath may as well be called the Hypocritic Oath.

Watch The Brain That Wouldn't Die at the Internet Archive.

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Scream Tennis

Chris didn't howl. Martina didn't growl. So what's with all these present-day tennis ladies making so much—here it comes—racket? Are they simply paying collective homage to proto-grunter Monica Seles by dint of over-the-top emulation?

It's astronomically asinine. Ridiculously risible. Outrageously outré.

On the other hand, it can also be lotsa fun—when you settle in for a side-splitting match of SCREAM TENNIS!

Don't need no rackets. Don't need no net. Don't need no tennis court or togs. Don't need no yellow balls. All you need for a fast set of Scream Tennis is sturdy lungs, supple vocal chords, and an enthusiastic willingness—or better yet, a perverse eagerness—to disturb the peace big-time.

My daughter Kelly and I spontaneously invented this consummately cathartic divertissement while watching the French Open. There was a whatever-round match featuring Serena Williams versus some Russian lady, and we just could not get past the Russian's shrieks and Serena's grunts.

Next thing we knew, Kelly was mimicking the shrieking, and I was returning her "serves" and "ground strokes" with grunts, and she was mopping the court with me at 40-love. (Her hilarious whooping-and-looping screams kept making me laugh too hard to go on volleying.)

Seriously. You need to play you some Scream Tennis. Preferably really early in the morning or really late at night. Or in the lunchroom at the office. Or—an inspired suggestion from my son—across adjacent stalls in a public restroom.

Read what Martina said about screaming.

And "Happy Birthday!" Kelly.

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Two true tales about principles

1. Well, good for you ...

A nighttime U-16 girls' soccer game in Royal Oak, Mich., circa 1996. Thea's team is playing two players short and without any subs; the other team's coach, however, has elected to field a full 10-player team—versus eight—and send in four or five substitutes at a time. We are getting shellacked, of course, and with every goal scored by the opposing side, the opposing side's parents and supporters scream like maniacs and stomp their feet and applaud wildly, just loving the way their girls are kicking our girls' fatigued and outnumbered asses up and down the field. It gets to where I can't take the psychotic demonstrating any longer, and make some audible critical comment about the lack of sportsmanship I'm witnessing, on and off the field. This raises the ire of a woman sitting near me, who turns and snarls, "You'd play it the same way if you were coach!" And I snap back something to the effect that I sure as hell would not, to which she mockingly replies, "Well, good for you—you have principles."

2. That wouldn't be fair ...

Mid 1980s. I'm looking to buy a used car. I find a clean subcompact at a Ford dealership about six miles from home. I take the car for a test drive and detect an intermittent clunking noise that sounds like it's coming from the rear axle. I stop by the house and fish through the glovebox, where I find the previous owner's name and telephone number on one of the documents there. I call the previous owner and tell him I'm thinking of buying this car but am concerned about a noise I'm hearing in the rear end. Could he tell me anything about that? Had he had any problems with the car? He refuses to answer any of my questions, saying it wouldn't be fair to the used car dealer. I guess that man had principles.

# # #

Profile in courage

There seemed to be several hundred kids on the sprawling soccer fields of Oakland University that muggy July evening, but I picked out Thea from about five hundred yards away. There was no mistaking her trademark all-legs lankiness, swirling copper hair, or reckless abandon.

Her team, "Scotland," was winning its Mini-World Cup final. Thea waved to us from her sweeper position then redirected her attention to the pitch.

Her coach, Billy Gilmore, a ruddy, paunchy, balding, thin-legged Englishman in his latter forties or early fifties, strolled up and down the sidelines in a white T-shirt and blue shorts, whistle in hand, checking his clock and pronouncing his judgments with cordial calls of Play on! ... Free kick! ... Well done!

He shouted "Well done, Thea!" after Thea got knocked down hard while tackling the ball away from an opposing player; kept asking her if she was all right after she was back on her feet chasing the action.

Thea assured Coach Gilmore repeatedly that she was fine. But the ferocious collision with her male opponent had hurt her a lot. The boy had basically run right over her. I knew Thea would not cry no matter how much she wanted to: I’d seen her take a vicious ball in the face at age 9 and keep right on going, suppressing the tears-impulse for all she was worth. (That, in an age group where most kids screamed for their mommies and writhed on the ground after stubbing a toe.) Years later I would unknowingly watch Thea play an entire soccer game with a fractured forearm.

So I knew Thea would "play on," which she did.

My feelings at that moment were actually a mixture of pride and shame—pride in Thea's bravery, shame for her parents' oversight in forgetting to include a bottle of sunscreen when helping her pack for a five-day camp. What weren't we thinking? Yup. Poor fair-skinned Thea had been "playing on" most of the week with a painfully sunburned neck, arms, and thighs; paying the price for her parents' pitiable lack of foresight.

Then the match was suddenly over and we were hugging Thea and apologizing all over ourselves for her salmon-colored skin.

There was a short farewell ceremony at a distant set of bleachers, where awards and certificates got handed out.

Thea, unfazed by physical insults ranging from stomped-on to sunburnt, began crying at that point—dismayed and deflated by the average grades she'd received from Coach Gilmore in the skills section of her final evaluation form.

Walking back to the van, I tried as best I could to help her see the light: Coach Gilmore's "average" ratings had all been levied in things like passing and dribbling—things she could readily improve through dedication and practice.

In truth, Thea had succeeded well past admirably in all the categories that mattered more—in life as well as in soccer. Had received uniformly glowing praise from Coach Billy Gilmore for demonstrating, for example, the courage and determination to get back up and play on whenever a boy ran over her head.

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