Looking for the Truth in a Pack of Lies

You know, I’m a big fan of the truth. Not the brutal, unvarnished truth like what AJ Jacobs did with his experiment in Radical Honesty, which he wrote about for Esquire back in 2007, and I definitely believe in lying in order to pull off a successful surprise for someone. I’m a big fan of the practical truth, the reasonable truth, the truth that’s not used in a hurtful manner.

Along with this goes the fact that I’m not a big fan of lying…except as I mentioned before, for the sake of pulling off a surprise party, or sparing someone’s feelings…or their life. And I have no problem with being “economical with the truth” from time to time. With this in mind, I really don’t need to tell the Nazis that I’ve got Anne Frank hiding in my attic (although I know of some people who believe that their obligation to always tell the truth would take them to just such extremes).

But what I hate most of all is lying in support of the truth…lying in support of something we think is good. I can’t buy this. I firmly believe that our noble goal should be able to stand on the truth, and not on outright lies or even a little bending of the truth. This is for both practical and philosophical reasons. One of the practical reasons is that if the people you’re trying to convince of your truth discover a lie, not a mistake, but an outright lie, in your argument, then they’re likely to dismiss everything else you’ve said.

And this is why I have a problem with so much of what we’ve said as we’ve tried to prevent people from smoking.

Yes, I know that smoking is a nasty habit. I know that it can kill you. But I also believe that hyperbole isn’t the way to get people to stop.

Let me start by taking a look at one of the best-known lies used in trying to fight smoking. This was the argument RJ Reynolds must be marketing cigarettes to children because more children recognized the “cartoon character” Joe Camel than Mickey Mouse. Even if this were true, it wouldn’t mean anything. Why? Because it’s quite possible that more children recognized Mr Clean than Mickey Mouse. Did that mean that Procter and Gamble is hawking cleaning products to children? I doubt it. And I don't recall seeing kids flocking to help their parents scrub that floor because Mr Clean made it look cool. But here’s the kicker…the actual situation was that more children recognized Joe Camel than the stylized Mickey Mouse outline logo for the Disney Channel. That’s something completely different, and when you ask yourself how many children got the Disney Channel at home, you can see where the problem…and the lie is.

And once you know about that lie, you start to wonder what other lies are being told in an effort stop smoking.

Then there’s the big lie…the lie that we non-smokers don’t realize is a lie, but that many smokers do. But wait, maybe this isn’t really a lie, perhaps while it’s an inaccuracy that’s simply not true. However, because many smokers know that this simply isn’t true, they don’t listen to us.

What is this lie? The “fact” that smoking causes lung cancer.

“Now wait a minute!” I hear you saying. “It’s an established fact that smoking causes lung cancer. So how can that be a lie?”

Very simple…it’s as much a lie as saying that crossing the street causes people to be hit by cars. Yes, had Johnny not been trying to cross the street, he wouldn’t have been hit by that Buick, but there isn’t a direct one-to-one correspondence between crossing the street and getting run over. Most people who cross the street don’t get hit. The same applies to smoking, and the smokers know it.

I was curious about this, so I checked it out on Wikipedia, and while roughly 80% of lung cancer deaths can be attributed to smoking, it’s not true that 80% of smokers get lung cancer. Instead, its occurrence in smokers is “only” about 14%. This means that 86% of smokers don’t get lung cancer.

So smokers aren’t deluding themselves when they say that their great-aunt Sally smoked all her life until she died in her sleep at age 92. In fact, my grandfather was a smoker, and died at age 86. Similarly, my father was a smoker, and died at age 80. As a result, when they hear us say that “smoking causes lung cancer,” as if there were a direct one-to-one correspondence, they tend to roll their eyes and ignore us, because they know it’s not true.

Then what is truth? The truth is that smoking increases your likelihood of getting lung cancer tenfold, from 1.4% to 14%. The truth is that smoking is a major factor in a number of other diseases, such as heart disease, emphysema, and stroke. Oh…and for you guys out there, it’s a key factor in erectile dysfunction. But again, while it greatly increases the likelihood of developing one of those problems, it is not a direct one-to-one correspondence. Many people…most people…do indeed cross the street every day…even in Midtown Manhattan…without getting hit by a car.

But…and here’s the important difference…you have to cross the street to get places. It’s a necessary risk. On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason why anyone needs to smoke.

Besides, as I learned when I was 19, kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.

And that’s the truth.

Isn't It Romantic?

Last Valentines Day Cheryl took me to dinner at my favorite restaurant; the Spaghetti Warehouse.

Just me. No kids, even though they both love the place too. No, this was just the two of us, celebrating Valentine's Day a day early because she had the night off and the 14th was a school night anyway. So we each grabbed our magazines and stuff, got into the van, and headed out to eat.

When we got there, we asked to be seated in the "trolley car." We like sitting in the trolley, and it also has much better light to work by. So we sat there reading our separate magazines and circling coupons while we waited for our dinner to arrive.

When our waitress came by with the mozzarella sticks, I turned to her and said, "This may not look romantic, but after 25 years, we get to just sit and read together."

The woman at the table behind us agreed.

No, it's not that we're so bored with each other that we bury ourselves into our reading when we go out. Quite the contrary, we enjoy sitting and reading together. After 25 years we don't have to stare into each other's eyes all the time anymore; and just to be somewhere anywhere, without the kids once in a while is a wonderful thing.

Many years ago, around 1980, Suzanne Britt Jordan wrote a piece for Newsweek that I wish I could find again, about how the ideal of marriage is not necessarily to always be like new young lovers, but instead, to eventually end up like old friends. She complained that those who divorced after many years because "the thrill was gone" had simply missed the point. A bonfire is great and exciting, but it doesn't keep you warm for as long as the slowly burning fire.

Hey, we might not have looked all that romantic that night, sitting there at the Spaghetti Warehouse, reading our separate magazines, and circling coupons while we waited for our dinner. But after 25 years we don't have to stare into each other's eyes all the time anymore, and just to be able to be somewhere, ANYWHERE, without the kids once and a while is a wonderful thing.

Happy Valentine's Day to all!

Eyes Up!

Perhaps I had been living under a rock, since I don’t watch much TV, but I had never heard of Nigella Lawson until I saw a humorous post on Facebook comparing the results of her eating and cooking habits to those of Scottish nutritionist Gillian McKeith.

Intrigued, I decided to do a little more research on this woman who looked like she obviously enjoyed what she cooked, and had a body to die for. Indeed, I was especially intrigued…and heartened…by the many women who applauded her for showing that you can have a body larger than a toothpick and still be considered hot. (Well, duh…all of us guys knew that, it seems to be the women who are stuck on this thin kick.).

And then, as I was doing my reading, I found a post from one particularly bitter woman who complained that “the Queen of Gastroporn” can’t cook worth a darn, and that the only reason people watch her show is “because she has a nice rack.”

Well…OK now…I think that someone here has some issues.

But as I thought about it some more, a question kept nagging at me (and probably nags at a lot of other guys too). Why is it OK to admire a woman’s beautiful eyes or beautiful face, but not to admire her beautiful chest? I mean, after all, they’re all body parts, aren’t they? They’re all part of the whole package, right? So why is it OK for a guy to sit there transfixed by a woman’s incredibly deep blue eyes, but if he lowers his gaze 13 inches, she’s likely to think he’s a pig?

I needed to find out, so checked online, and then I asked someone who I thought would be an expert on this…my wife…after all, last I checked, she was a woman. She might be able to fill me in here on what I was missing.

The answers I got were all pretty much along the same line: staring at the eyes or face shows that you’re interested in her as a person, while staring at her chest shows that you only have one thing in mind. It’s invasive, and makes her feel uncomfortable and unsafe, as if you’re molesting her visually.

And yet, while I understood the words I was hearing, Mr Dense here, still didn’t quite grasp it. It still didn’t quite make sense to me. After all, if I’m staring at the face of a beautiful woman, I’m likely thinking the same thing that she’s worried about me thinking if I’m looking lower. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that if I’m talking to a woman with an incredibly engaging personality, I’m likely thinking the same thing. Hello…I’m a guy…we’re wired that way. If we’re attracted to you in any way…eyes, face, personality…chest, our minds are gonna go there. Actually, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s an issue for another post.

So why isn’t that invasive? Or did that just change now that you found out how our minds actually work?

I brought up my question to a bunch of people I work with, and one of the guys said that the problem is that there’s such a huge “no fly zone” with women’s bodies, that it makes it almost impossible to look anywhere but their eyes without being offensive. When he talks to me, he doesn’t have to always have his eyes locked my face; in fact, that would be rather awkward for both of us. Because we’re both guys, his eyes can drift to just about any other part of my body, and not mean a thing.

This got me wondering…would we actually be a bit more relaxed about things if huge portions of the female anatomy weren’t considered “no fly zones?” Would guys feel as compelled to try to “sneak a peek” if looking at a woman’s chest was considered no different than looking at her arm, or anything else that just happened to be there?

OK ladies, what do you think?

A Browner Shade of Pale

It’s funny…inside the space of one week Cheryl and I watched two movies that got me thinking about the same subject, but in different ways. The first was The Green Card Tour, the latest video from Indo-Canadian comedian Russell Peters. This performance was filmed in England, and as he looked around at the multicultural crowd, he said, “England, what happened? You used to be the factory that made white people.”

The second was William Shatner’s documentary The Captains, which had interviews with everyone to play the role of a leading captain in all the shows and movies of the Star Trek franchise. In the interview with Avery Brooks, who played Commander Benjamin Sisko, he said that he decided to do this show because it “showed a future where there were still brown people.”

The two didn’t come together in my head until about a week later. As I thought about what Brooks said, I was reminded of what demographers have said for the past few years, and what Russell Peters noted about England: by the year 2050, the United States will be a “minority majority” country. That is to say that no one group will be in the majority; there will be a number of pluralities, but the one very certain thing is that white people will no longer be the dominant group.

Avery Brooks need not have worried.

Then I thought about the map…or rather…the globe; and as I thought about the globe, I found it remarkable that there was a 500-year span of time when white people were thought to be in the majority in the first place. I mean think about it…look at the globe yourself. In Africa the indigenous people are various shades of brown. In North and South America you have the same thing, with a little red thrown in. In Asia you have brown with a touch of yellow. And then…in this one little corner of the world called Europe, you have some people who aren’t brown at all. In fact some are so pale that they’re translucent.

The simple fact of the matter is that the world has always been majority minority, it’s just that that’s not where the power was for the past 500 years. All things considered, but for a bloody nose in Asia or an alert baker in Vienna…not to mention a few smallpox infections in Central America…things could’ve looked very different. But somehow the tiny countries in one tiny continent of the world ended up populating and taking power in places where they had never been before…far out of proportion to their populations in the places they originally came from. And for centuries, they thought this was not only normal, but the way it should be.

But a funny thing happened in the 20th century: increased travel and the emancipation of the indigenous peoples who had in one way or another been under the power of the European minority. And with the increased ability to travel, instead of the whites going to the lands of the browns, the browns were going to the lands of the whites.

And with this new migration another thing started happening: increased intermarriage between groups, which led to many white families having brown grandchildren. It seems that the white population isn’t going to decrease just because of the greater fecundity of the brown populations, but also because they’re helping to add to that brown population themselves.

Now, we’re pretty used to this concept as Americans. The gradual browning of America, or even Canada, is really no surprise to us; and I’ve already talked about the browning of England. But imagine…and it will happen eventually…the browning of France, of Spain, or…of Germany (can’t you just see Hitler spinning in his grave like a turbine?).

Knowing this, I suppose it was William Shatner who should’ve wondered, when he took on the part of Captain Kirk 44 years ago, about a future where there would still be white people.

Nostalgia Just Ain't What It Used To Be

A few weeks ago I saw a complaint by someone on the Internet about Nick@Nite and TV Land. It seems that according to this person, they’ve stopped showing “classic” shows like The Dick VanDyke Show or All in the Family and are now showing “90s crap” like Married with Children.

I chuckled to myself when I read that. You see, growing up in North Jersey, I was in the land of abundant TV. We had seven stations: the three networks, three independent channels, and the PBS station. And in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, those three independent stations were the home of endless reruns and countless old movies. Nick@Nite and TV Land were just WNEW, WOR, and WPIX on a national scale. It was on these stations that my sister and I watched reruns of The Odd Couple, Make Room for Daddy, and of course I Love Lucy every afternoon.

But it was also on these stations that we watched reruns of shows that most of you under the age of 40 have never heard of. Shows like December Bride, My Little Margie, and I Married Joan.

This is why I chuckled; you see the guy who complained on the Internet doesn’t seem to get the fact that nostalgia is always a moving target. The definition of a “classic old TV show” changes as the years go by and the viewers get older…and the target audience is a younger generation. Sure, to him, shows from the 60s like Dick VanDyke and Bewitched were classics, and the stuff that came afterwards was crap. But people just a few years older would find themselves ranking Father Knows Best among the classics.

And when you think about how soon we saw shows hit the rerun stations after they’d been cancelled back in the old days, it makes perfect sense to me that Married with Children would eventually show up a good 15 years after its last original episode was broadcast.

But still, I do understand the poor guy who wants to see Dick VanDyke again. I’d like to watch Oscar and Felix together again; or Archie and the Meathead; and even Jim, Margaret, Princess, Bud, and Kitten. But I know that if I want to do that, all I have to do is buy the DVD collection.

Then I can watch them whenever I want.

Academic Computing

I used to work for an organization at Syracuse University called Academic Computing Services, and that colors my view of computers in all levels of education. We weren’t the School of Engineering, we weren’t the School of Computer Science, we weren’t even the School of Information Studies. Even though we were in charge of most of the computers on the campus, we didn’t teach any programming courses…at least not for credit. So what did we do?

We taught you how to use our computers in support of your education. What few programming workshops we taught were toward that end. We got you started with enough FORTRAN to get you through some really intense Math, Engineering, or Science projects. We taught you enough SPSS or SAS to be able to run the statistics you needed for that Political Science or Public Policy course. We might even teach you the APL you needed in order to get started as a “real” Computer Science student. But for the most part, our job was to support you in using our computers as a tool in whatever discipline you might be studying, be that Linguistics or Physics, Religion or Engineering.

And a lot of what we did involved teaching you to use our computers, our mainframe computers back then, for writing and formatting your papers. We helped a lot of doctoral students with their dissertations on what would now look like a very rudimentary word processing system, but a system that still beat making corrections on a typewriter. As time went on and we went through the PC revolution, we started teaching how to do your word processing, spreadsheets, and databases on those machines, as well as how to connect to our mainframes from them.

But the point remains that our focus was on the academic use of computing, and not programming for its own sake. And even calling it academic computing misses the point, because these were skills that could carry you through the rest of your life.

This is a focus that I believe a lot of us have lost in the world of elementary and secondary education. We seem to want every kid to be able to write the next Angry Birds, and don’t care about teaching them to use Java or C++ or whatever the new “language du jour” is to create the 1000 virtual marbles we need in order to take a better look at the question of whether or not it’s fair to worry about most of the black kids sitting together at lunch when most of the white kids do too. We want them all to be able to create great podcasts and videos to post online, and don’t care about teaching them the word processing skills that will get them through their four years of writing papers as a Nutrition major.

We are so concerned with being number one in Computer Technology that we have forgotten about Academic Computing. Indeed, in many places we have denigrated Academic Computing, considering it to be something lower than “Technology Education,” because it’s not as exciting or sexy. In some places we have even gone so far as to say that we don’t need to teach this, because it’s something they can pick up for themselves on YouTube.

We need to remember that not everyone is going to be a programmer or an engineer. We need to remember that we are also educating people who will become nurses, accountants, lawyers, actuaries, ministers, rabbis, writers, librarians, and who knows what all else. In fact, this will be the vast majority of the people we educate.

And we owe it to them to remember the concept of academic computing.

            
You may also want to read my previous posts We Still Need to Teach Computer Literacy and The Four Stupid Smart Girls and US.

Alfie and the Fairy

I was first introduced to Alfie as a kid in Braddock, PA, and I was terrified by him. We were visiting there at the end of October, and my cousin Alan was going to be part of the annual Halloween parade. And as I recall, even though he was participating as a pumpkin, he was running around the house wearing a mask of Alfred E Neuman.

Yes…that Alfred E Neumann. The face that has graced countless covers of Mad magazine since the late 50s, and had quite a life on calendars and postcards before he became their official mascot. This lopsided, goofy-looking, face was the face that struck terror into the heart of a little five-year-old kid.

I was never really comfortable with that face; it caused many nightmares, but one day, at a friend’s house, I actually took a look inside of an issue, and was instantly hooked. That face still bothered me, but I formed an uneasy truce with it as I devoured every issue of Mad for the next ten or so years. It was an image that I could deal with during the light of day, but knew better than to look at when I was alone at night, because it could still cause nightmares.

And then one night, as an adult, I had a dream that changed everything. This wasn’t the usual nightmare where his goal was to frighten and tickle me. This dream was different. He seemed sad, and didn’t seem to want to taunt me at all. I cautiously approached him, and asked what was wrong.

He told me that his name, the name he preferred to go by, was “Alfie,” and that he was a really nice guy who just happened to have a goofy-looking face that everyone made fun of, and he didn’t mean to scare me. He asked if we could be friends.

How could you possibly turn down an appeal like that? I agreed, and when I woke up, I had a whole new relationship with that face…or the guy behind it. Alfie’s a friend of mine now.

Which brings me to the fairy. For the past 18 months I seem to have been visited by what a friend of mine calls the Shit Fairy much more often than I’d like to be, or that my friends would like to see. Those of you who know me well know all the gory details. This friend went so far as to say, “Looks like the Shit Fairy backed up her truck and delivered you a huge load.”

And so 2011 drew to a close, I posted a cartoon on my Facebook page that said I was looking forward to kicking the Shit Fairy out of my life during the coming year, and I got a lot of “likes” on it. And then a little later I thought about her…and Alfie.

Perhaps I misunderstood her, as I had misunderstood Alfie. Maybe she wasn’t being spiteful, and intentionally trying to screw up my life, so maybe I shouldn’t take such joy in trying to forcibly kick her out. Perhaps, rather than fighting her, I should take the time to befriend her…and then introduce her to a nice farmer or gardener…someone who normally has to pay for what she’s giving away for free. Maybe we can both win here.

Yes, I think I’ll do that. And maybe then, in 2012 I’ll be able to join Alfie in saying, “What, me worry?”