Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The little c

I worked for the American Cancer Society in Spokane for a couple of years in the late ‘70s. It was a good job, and for a layperson I learned a lot about cancer. I left to go back to graduate school in English, but I could have seen myself staying there for a career.

Back then, not that long ago, cancer was still mostly a taboo subject. People tended to keep it secret. In obituaries, people died of “a lingering illness.” Even patients themselves were kept in the dark if their doctor or family didn’t think they could handle the news. It’s amazing to think that people could go through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy and the doctor would never tell them they had cancer, but it happened rather often. Didn’t they suspect?

That began to change slowly in 1969 when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross published On Death and Dying, still a book worth reading today, even if you’re not. Journalist Betty Rollin opened the door further to the general public in 1976 with First, You Cry, her personal account of breast cancer.

Today, in contrast, it seems like the first thing anybody does after a cancer diagnosis is call their agent: I Am Lance Armstrong’s Malignant Testicle! I have a book by comedian Robert Schimmel called Cancer On Five Dollars a Day, his account of his fight against lymphoma. Amazingly, it's funny.

All of these personal narratives seem to have the same theme, which is that you have to be positive and have a good attitude about your cancer. You have to “survive.” Failure (that would be death) is not an option. Wear an ugly pink plastic thing on your wrist. Walk/run for the cure.

It’s enough to make your hair fall out, but who am I not to join the parade? Last week I got my biopsy results back and I have early stage prostate cancer. This is way better than most cancers but worse, say, than getting a tooth pulled or the hernia surgery I had a year and a half ago. Although actually, the hernia was uncomfortable and then painful, and I had to wait five weeks to get surgery because of the surgeon’s busy schedule. Prostate cancer is asymptomatic, (it doesn’t hurt), and I’m waiting until winter to schedule a few days in the hospital because why ruin a good motorcycle riding season, plus I have some concert tickets and I don’t want to miss any concerts: Taj Mahal. Joe Cocker. Wynton Marsallis, even. I saw Return to Forever last week, and what a band! I was never big on jazz fusion, but these are four of the great jazz musicians of our generation, and it was an electrifying concert. (Pun way too obvious.)

Anyway, despite my professional past and also my father died of prostate cancer, I’m finding I know very little about this disease, and some of what I know is wrong.

That’s enough for now, but I’ll post more from time to time because what else is new? I can only post so much about the utter moral corruption of the Bush administration. Every day in the paper is a new outrage, but it has become so commonplace it usually only makes page two or three. Dennis Kucinich has introduced articles of impeachment, which will never go anywhere, but Marie Cocco wrote a column about it and said it was a stunning indictment of “the current occupant,” as Garrison Keillor calls him. I don’t think it’s at all hysterical to talk about a war crimes trial, but don’t wait around for that, either.

My prostate I can do something about, and suddenly I have lots to learn and think about. It’s like a new hobby. You can get a t-shirt. For my guy friends, I hope you’re getting an annual PSA test. One in six men will get prostate cancer, and it’s completely curable if it’s caught early.

(This isn’t actually true, but get a PSA test anyway.)

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Mr. Obamma

If I'm going to endorse this guy for president, I should probably spell his name correctly. It's Barack, with a C.

Carry on.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Barak

The media have at least mentioned what a historic occasion is the nomination of Barak Obama, but only just. Despite my vow to quit watching the nightly news on any of the networks, I tuned in last Wednesday when Obama had locked up the Democratic nomination. It seemed the commentators couldn’t move on quickly enough to the story of Hillary and whether or not she would go after the vice-presidential nomination.

This was Obama’s day and a day of historic proportions, and the television media reduced it to what will become a footnote of the political campaign. Not to take away anything from Hillary Clinton’s own historic campaign, but still. . . .

It all made me reflect back on some of my own experiences involving race in America, only a few of which I will relate here.

In 1967, though I barely understood the significance at the time, “The case is Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 ruling in which a unanimous Supreme Court found that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision has been on my mind recently because of the death this month of Mildred Loving, the African American woman who dared to marry a white man and try to live with him in Virginia.” (I quote from an online essay and apologize that I’ve lost the link.)

“. . . My car radio crackled with the tinny voice of Virginia's lawyer urging the court not to usurp the state's "legitimate legislative objective of preventing the sociological and psychological evils which attend interracial marriages."

This was part of the backdrop against which I was being drafted into the army and only months away from landing in Vietnam. I made a quick rush down to the Coast Guard office to see if they were looking for any help but ended up enlisting as a GI in hopes of staying out of the infantry.

In January of 1968, I was at Fort Gordon, Georgia in Signal Corps school. Weekends, we would go into Augusta, where in the bus stations I first encountered drinking fountains and bathrooms labeled “white” and “colored.” I felt like I had landed in a different country.

In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and my company went through a quick day of riot control training in case we had to go into Augusta to put down riots. We were issued rifles and bayonets and confined to the company compound on ready alert for the week. A lot of good we would have done. Fort Gordon was also home to an MP school and an Airborne school, and presumably they would have gone in first. The Signal Corps motto, we said among ourselves, was “Last to Fight!”

Augusta didn’t riot, although plenty of other cities did. In May I was in Vietnam, and racial tensions in my unit were high. They didn’t get any better in the two years I had left in the army.

The struggle for civil rights, and even voting rights, has been a background to my whole like, starting with my earliest memories of the Freedom Riders when I was very young. Some of those early activists were murdered and their murderers are only now being brought to justice, some fifty years later, racist old men with hate still in their eyes. I celebrate their belated convictions.

I watched, as we all did, news reports of demonstrations in Southern cities in which peaceful protesters were beaten, had fire hoses and police dogs turned on them. We watched as National Guard troops, ordered in by President Johnson, escorted black children into newly integrated schools while white parents screamed hateful, shameful slurs at them.

So it says everything to me that we Democrats have now nominated an African-American to be our next president. It seems to me still utterly impossible that I am seeing this in my lifetime. Obama is a remarkable man, but right now he looks to me like a very fragile human being. I see him and I see my own experience of a fifty-year struggle for civil rights in America, an observer’s experience, but still one that has deeply shaped my consciousness. I hope he’s up to it. I hope we all, finally, are.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

How to be a famous cartoonist

In the short list of reasons to go on living, I include the cartoons in the New Yorker. In recent years, there has been a contest on the last page in which readers are invited to submit their own captions for cartoon drawings. I don't know what the prize is other than being able to say you wrote for the New Yorker, but for most New Yorker readers, that would be enough.

So if you're interested in reading how one man did it, go to http://www.slate.com/ today to read "How To Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest: A champion reveals the recipe for victory," by Patrick House. An excerpt here:

"Today I can finally update my résumé to include "Writer, The New Yorker." Yes, I won The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, and I'm going to tell you how I did it. These observations have been culled from months of research and are guaranteed to help you win, too. (Note from Slate's lawyers: Observations not guaranteed to help you win.)

"Most people who look at the winners of the caption contest say, "I could've done better than that." You're right. You could have. But that doesn't mean you could've won the caption contest—it just means you could've done better. And if your goal is not to win the caption contest, why bother entering? There is one mantra to take from this article, worth its own line break:

"You are not trying to submit the funniest caption; you are trying to win The New Yorker's caption contest."

Well, I thought House's caption was pretty damn funny.