for 10 April 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Intention Deficit Disorder Ambrose, "And the cocktails of uppers, downers, and SSRIs aren't the only realities of contemporary childhood that suggest the possibility that large numbers of grade-schoolers may someday sign with Colonel Tom, do a bunch of shitty movies, and die on the toilet." Heh. Just as I finished reading this line my alarm sounded to remind me to take my Ritalin, which made me chuckle (which subsequently made me nearly choke on the damn little pill). I was diagnosed with ADD at age 23, and I've been taking Ritalin off and on ever since. I quit taking it about a year and a half ago because I was convinced that it hindered my creativity, which I saw as a con that far outweighed the pros of drugging myself into conformity every day. Turned out that I couldn't do my shitty job without it. I also couldn't balance my checkbook, pay my bills on time, match my socks, find my keys or remember to eat (maybe there's your link to why the little pharmaceutically treated buggers are getting so fat), so I started taking it again. I dream of the day when I can do something for a living that actually has something to do with my inherent talents and abilities, at which point my addled brain and my admittedly twisted way of looking at things will be an asset rather than a liability, and I hope that once I get there I'll be able to afford to hire people to take care of the necessities of life for me; but in the mean time, I continue to take it so that I can function at my shitty job and take care of myself, and try not to dwell on the fact that my brain on drugs loses touch with those talents and abilities that I hope will someday earn me a decent living. It's quite a trade-off. I have to wonder if, had I been diagnosed and medicated from an early age, I'd have done better in school, lived up to all of that potential that everybody kept telling me I wasn't living up to, learned some social skills, graduated college, and been able to get a job that's not quite so shitty, that wouldn't require me to voluntarily drug myself into a socially acceptable norm just to be able to get through the day without screwing up or alienating all of my coworkers. Then again, maybe if I had been given medication all through my childhood, I'd have missed out on all of the schoolyard beatings and faculty neglect, not to mention the wrath of my parents who knew I was smart but mistook my inability to get ahead for unwillingness to try and punished me accordingly, all of which led to my considerable teen angst, which put me in touch with my ability to write, which led me to become a writer. So on the one hand I'd likely have turned out to be a corporate cog with good pay, good benefits, good manners, good memories, and social grace, and I'd be leading a perfectly normal life, and I'd probably be the sort of person who gets a little wigged out by people like me. When I consider this, I'm glad that my parents didn't medicate me. Yes, my childhood was incredibly painful as a result, and I may be broke, bitter and introverted, but I'd rather be this way and aware of who I am and what I came from and where I'm headed as both a writer and a person, than blissfully ordinary and uncreative. Seriously. Jean Marie Cousins <cousinjean@cybergeek.com> Jean, I have torn through many, many, many shitty jobs, and the thing I can promise you is: There are always more of them out there. Not worth drugging yourself to keep a job you hate when unemployment is at, like, point-zero-zer- zero-four percent. Save that for the next major economic depression. As for me, I spent about a month on Ritalin as a five year-old. My parents, however, immediately noticed that it turned me into a houseplant, and - bless their hearts - told the mediocre school district that wanted me drugged to... well, you get the point. And now, to repeat a favorite theme, I write for Suck! And, anyway, what the hell's wrong with a shitty childhood, schoolyard beatings, no social skills, a poor education, and being broke and bitter? You make it sound bad or something. Please. Ambrose  Todays article kicked ass. I particularly like the part where you refer to the American consumers as Aphids of the new economy. We are indeed being reduced to spineless consumers which excrete food for our masters. As someone who tries to avoid participation consumerism, I must say that the good feelings generated by standing against the man more than compensates for the derision I recieve for my unstylish dress, my wholesome diet, and my anti-imperialist hygiene. Ciao Ben <bschwabe@mit.edu> Your warm praise is humbly accepted. Well, okay, not humbly. Just one thing: Tragically, you have singled out, for special praise, a piece of the essay - that "aphids" thing - that came from the mind of a highly trained Suck editor. They're good, yes? But the rest was mine. Or at least a lot of it was. For sure all the other good parts. So. Yeah. Ambrose Ambrose: Read your piece in Suck today and enjoyed it immensely. This trend of medicating our kids seems only to serve to raise the stock values of pharmaceutical companies and continues a grotesque trend of America's elders not raising the young but devouring them. If we can't bother to raise them, we can at least make a little money off them as we grind them to dust. I was surprised you didn't mention Brave New World anywhere in your piece, with the Soma holidays being a natural extension of what these medicated kids will become as adults. Your pieces habitually hack me off, make me laugh and oblige me to nod my head. Strong work. Cheers, Randal Doering <rdoering@best.com> "Your pieces hack me off" just doesn't sound like a compliment, no matter how many times I re-read it. Sounds like I've given you a throat disease of some kind. But still and all, thanks. off to the feelies, Ambrose Thank you for your piece on the appalling overuse of drugs to keep kids from being, well, kids. Back in my day (I'm a hoary oldster of 29) I played soccer, went swimming, and watched a lot of football, and except for being kind of cranky at times, did just fine. "Just Say No" was just starting; little did we know that our generation would switch to "Say Yes To Ritalin" in only twenty years. It will come full circle, though. Just you wait for the class-action lawsuits by grown-up Ritalin kids. Only a few years left until this happens - the maker had better hope that it's off patent by that time, so the risk can be spread across the whole industry. Andrew Sullivan <ajsullivan@att.com> Lawsuits? Naaaaah. Baseball bats. Much more elegant and streamlined. Ambrose The Hinckle File You wrote, quoting Warren Hinckle: "For a guy to be saying the new Examiner is going to be yellowing on your doorstep is just Torah, Torah Torah. It's hysterical and crazy. So I put out a column where I quoted a bunch of his defenders saying he hasn't got a racist bone in his body. I say that's like the old "some of my best friends are Jews" line they used to say about anti-Semites." Unless Hinckle deliberately mixed his metaphors, I'd say the spelling of "Torah, Torah, Torah," should have been "Tora, Tora, Tora." Without the "h" it's a reference to the bad WWII war movie of the same name. Among other things, the movie depicted various epic air/sea battles between Japanese attack fighter aircraft and U.S. naval craft. How the Chinese Fang family is related to the Japanese military of WWII isn't quite clear. Hinckle's casual inaccuracy is an example of ethnic trash talk that has an offensive edge. Chinese don't like being mistaken for Japanese. Jewish people don't like being mistaken for Chinese. Afro-Americans don't like being mistaken for East Indians, ad infinitum, in every combination you can dream up. A person generally prefers being defined by his own culture, mores, and folkways (even if some definitions are insulting!), rather than being mistakenly lumped in with someone who looks vaguely like him due to similarities in skin color or some other vacuous reference point. Allusions to the vagaries of prejudiced attitudes goes hand-in-hand with the responsibility to comment accurately and narrowly. Hinckle's use of the eponymous "they" in reference to what used to be said about Jews is laughable. In fact, "they" still use the quoted line. Hinckle's stream of consciousness description of what the paper will/may become is typical of S.F. attitudes. A lot of money will be spent. Very little of value will result. The opportunity exists for Hinckle to do something really worthwhile and sustainable, but the lack of maturity evident in a man so experienced is shocking. Howard Carson <HowardC@mgisoft.com> Since the article was a transcription of a spoken interview with Hinckle, I am solely to blame for the misspelling, an error made all the more embarassing by the fact that I have seen the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! five or six times and have on countless occasions tried to milk some yuks out of the old joke "Tora! Tora! Tora!? Who wants to see a movie about a bunch of rabbis?" Unforgivable as the error is, since it seems to be the only one in a 6,000-word transcription, I'll just have to invoke another piece of rabbinical wisdom and say "Call me pischer." As for the rest of your complaint, it reminds me of why I have long sought to come up with a two-syllable or two-word phrase to describe the phenomenon of fake, puffed-up and vain displays of umbrage. I would be truly amazed if you've ever lost a minute of sleep over casual confusion of ethnicities. In any event, I don't see how it's beyond the pale for Hinckle to make this reference in a discussion of the legendary "yellow peril" scares propounded by the Hearst papers and the California establishment - the most infamous expression of which was the incarceration of Japanese Americans following the events depicted in the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! (Slight correction: This movie does not depict various epic air/sea battles, but only the prelude to and execution of the attack on Pearl Harbor; you may be thinking of Midway in Sensurround). Hinckle was not referring to either Japanese or Chinese, but to people who slight both groups based at least in part on the color of their skin. Or to put it another way: A Jewish guy walks into a bar, sees a Chinese guy having a drink, and proceeds to punch him in the face. "That's for bombing Pearl Harbor!" he says. "I didn't bomb Pearl Harbor," the Chinese guy says. "The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor." "Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, you're all the same." A few drinks later, the Chinese guy gets up and punches the Jewish guy in the face. "That's for sinking the Titanic." "I didn't sink the Titanic. An iceberg sank the Titanic." <insert punchline here> yr pal, BarTel Dear Tim: Thank you for telling me more than I needed to know about SF journalism. I knew there was a reason I always bought the national edition of the New York Times when I was visiting. Awesome interview. In your copious spare time, be sure to check out the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal last Thursday. In the second paragraph of an otherwise completely MEGO editorial about why the French should be more like us, we find the phrase "putting their fingers into dykes." What this says about the WSJ's spellcheck routines, editorial policies, or general attitude toward life I cannot say, but I can speculate. No correction was visible Friday, and one wonders how you COULD publish a correction. Oh well. Alan Kornheiser <askornheiser@prodigy.net> Once again, the Journal appears to have been channeling the Howard Stern Show. On Wednesday, Stern broadcast an Oscars interview in which Stuttering John asked Morton Downey Jr., "Do you think Hillary Swank did a good job playing a dyke?" Mort's reply: "I don't know what a dyke is. The last dike I saw was in Holland." No doubt the editorial writer still had Mort's sly double entendre in mind as he or she typed away. In any event, since we went live with a claim that Rabbis bombed Pearl Harbor, the stupid typo of the week award still goes to Suck.com. On the topic of slipping in derogatory terms for women, I'd like to congratulate the Slutgers women's basketball team on a great season and a hard-fought tournament. Better luck next year, Lady Knights! yr pal, BarTel Sweet Hinckle article. I think it cuts up well into separate pages. I definitely find it easier to read a lot of stuff when I don't have to scroll around as much. Plus, Hinckle rules! When's he gonna run for mayor? heavyC <cameron@slip.net> It's an intriguing prospect. The eyepatch alone should be enough to get him on the ballot. But my sense is that Hinckle would rather be a boilermaker than a king. yr pal, BarTel |
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