(news)letter "Say the thing with which you labor." Thoreau from the porter micro.press Volume 1, Number 22 July 30, 1994 _________________________________________________________________ Please send suggestions and submissions. To get on the mailing list, send your name and address to: Please note the change of address, those who care: CTPorter 317 S. Tate St. Apt. 3 Greensboro, NC 27403 or e-mail ctporter@mercury.interpath.net Your input is appreciated. I received a review copy of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone (scheduled for publication in October from Random House) and it was a fascinating book; it made me think of diseases and viruses and even what life is all about. In December, 1989 there was an outbreak of a very deadly and highly-contagious disease in a monkey-handling facility in Reston, VA. There were three known strains of this disease, called Ebola, the least deadly of which still made AIDS look like a vacation: it's "kill" rate (the ratio of those who die from the disease over those who get it) was "only" forty per cent. As the author points out, not only was this Ebola virus deadly and contagious, but it was right on the doorstep of Washington, DC -- the whole Eastern seaboard would be in immediate danger if this disease got out of the "hot zone" (i.e. the area in which the disease lives, hopefully a contained area). But the affects are horrible, too, and a major panic situation is looming if people find out about its existence, proximity and see on the evening news the usual end of a victim. In the final stage, the victim literally explodes -- what is inside wants to be outside and all of the orifices serve as conduits. I don't remember when I've been as uncomfortable as when I read about one of the first known victims of this disease -- that first chapter is enough to give even the most stalwart the willies. As fascinating as the story is, Preston tells it well, too. He can get very "hokie" at times, melodramatic and coy, but those instances are few and far enough between to avoid triteness. The greatest strength of this book is what the reader learns about the nature of a virus. There, in a cave in a rain forest in Africa, lurks a rival form of DNA. This DNA, as it is in that cave, is absolutely harmless and even lifeless; introduce it to a primate though, and it becomes the worst kind of parasite. First it sticks to a cell in the body: the cell tries to surround and destroy the foreign organism, but once inside the cell this Ebola virus uses the cell's energy to multiply. It takes over the first cell so completely that it will eventually burst, unleashing more particles into the body, with each of those particles attacking new cells. It only takes a couple of weeks from the initial introduction to turn a victim from a human being into a shell full of the Ebola virus, so rapid and complete is the takeover. It also makes me think of what goes on in this world that most of us will never know about. At one point the experts are transporting the carcasses of some diseased monkeys in the trunk of a passenger car on a busy highway. Later, an Army team comes to decontaminate the facility (kill all the monkeys and fumigate all life from the building), and there is a child care center nearby. Children play on swings while the soldiers don their "space suits." I remember once, living in Colorado, when a truck failed to make a curve on Interstate 70 in Denver; nobody was hurt but it turned out that this truck was carrying a bomb or a missile. Earlier this week I read of an expensive missile that had to be destroyed because it was damaged -- it was transported in pieces in unmarked boxes and one of the pieces was hit by "stray" gun fire. There are a lot of people in positions of authority in this book who make some questionable decisions -- had an epidemic broken out we would have had their heads. There's so much that goes on about which we have nary a clue, but maybe it's better that way. Diseased Land Alan Weisman's "Journey Through a Doomed Land" (August Harper's, 145-53), is the story of what the Russians -- with American help -- are trying to do to save the land that was rendered all but useless by the various nuclear accidents at Chernobyl. In contrast to The Hot Zone, this epidemic is one created by man, yet like Preston's book it has the capacity to destroy a population. John Baldwin and David Hulse are part of an American team attempting to find the best ways to reclaim a land that keeps their Geiger counters dancing. The site of Chernobyl, as well as that land downwind of the nuclear reactors, happens to be very fertile and though ideally Russia would condemn it and prevent its cultivation, truth be told they need the produce that could come from that area. And despite the extreme danger, people come back to the land. At one point the author questions a family that has relocated from a safer place and he learns that the "safety" is relative -- the land that the family had been relocated to was radioactive as well. The American team suggests ways to bring the radioactive deposits out of the land, though not necessarily into the food that would be eaten: in grains, for example, the radioactivity is concentrated in the stalks, not in the oats; in lettuce the danger is in the leaf, the edible part. Developing a plan whereby the farmers can minimize their danger and the health of those who eat their produce is very valuable but there seems little hope. The price to be paid for the Chernobyl disaster awaits future generations, and it is doubtful whether humans have the power to keep away from fertile areas and the discipline to learn a lesson over a period of generations. Hard Fax Again in the current Harper's, John Sundin's "Kigali's Wounds, Through a Doctor's Eyes" (13-17), is a collection of dispatches that the doctor sent back to America (they were posted in a coffee shop in New Haven, CT, for all the patrons to read) while serving on a tour with the Red Cross in Rwanda. It reminded me of what doctors went through in our Civil War it was so barbaric and elemental. War is that way for medical teams, I guess, a test of what a doctor can do with the limited resources he or she has at hand. But the frustration! Here the doctor is, using a fax machine to send his correspondence to New Haven, and he doesn't even have the proper supplies. He comes from Yale, probably one of the top medical environments in the world, and he goes to a hell where the situation deteriorates to the extent that one whole morning is spent at the head of a dis-assembly line amputating limbs. And always there's that fax machine to remind him how close he is to that Ivory Tower, that place where he doesn't have to face bandits who want to obliterate not only the doctor and his staff, but the patients as well. It's sad what those people are going through and it irks me to no end that our government waited until cholera broke out in a refugee camp before they would help. It's as if we set a price on our involvement -- a thousand people a day must die of germs, not of machetes, then we'll deign to toss some aid that way. Compromised Land The cover article of the August Sierra magazine asks about Bruce Babbit, "What Does He Stand For? (And When Will He Prove It?)." I was ready to read about how Babbitt has sold out the Environmental movement now that he is in the best position to help it, as the Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton cabinet. As Governor of Arizona, Babbitt was known as the most powerful friend of the Environmental movement, yet the Clinton administration has compromised on or backed off of key environmental issues such as Grazing Fees and Timber Rights, and as a result the Democrats in power have not compiled a stellar environmental record. The question this article addresses is just who's fault it is -- Babbitt's or Clinton's, or even the Environmentalists'. I came away convinced that Bruce Babbitt should be president instead of Bill Clinton because of Babbitt's modus operandi: he is "the negotiator who locks the doors, takes away the doughnuts, and wears the obstinate down with sweet reason" (73), and he settles issues others thought would never be settled. One of the prime themes of Bob Woodward's The Agenda is Clinton's style of governing by crisis -- he doesn't seem able to do anything until he is in crisis mode and when there is no crisis one is created. That's how I work but I'm not the President. Babbitt, on the other hand, takes control of the problems and sits people down and gets things done. The sad, final conclusion of this article seems to be that Babbitt feels betrayed by the Environmental movement: when there was talk about Babbitt being named as a member of the Supreme Court, the environmentalists balked, not wanting to lose their hero. And again, when Babbitt did push for some issues, the Environmentalists could not deliver from their end. One person said of him, Bruce Babbitt is an environmental hero who found himself as Interior Secretary and who has fought until his knuckles are bloody and his eyes are black. He has gotten all the reform that the political system will yield. It will take a stronger environmental movement to get stronger reform. (76) I find it very depressing to think that the Clinton administration might have given away the Environmental issue, that they have bartered away what seemed to most separate the Democrats from the Republicans, despite Bush's 1988 claim to be the "Environmental President." (* Comments *) I apparently struck a chord with John McCarthy, a reader from Stanford. He had some things to say about Norman Mailer, which I have edited slightly: I remember Mailer's account very well from the time. Life magazine, at the time with the second largest circulation in America, chose Mailer to add "color" to the moon landing. Mailer's specialty is denigrating achievement. His The Naked and the Dead denigrated the achievements of World War II. I particularly remember Mailer's finding and picking on a rather stiff German official at Marshall Space Flight Center, I recall George Mueller as the name. Mailer called himself Aquarius and made himself out in contrast as a really hip character. That Mailer would behave as he did was unsurprising. The shocking thing was that the editors of Life chose him as their main writer about the human aspects of Apollo. It was a major indication of the literary culture's move against every kind of achievement, in science, in business, military, engineering and adventure. I think this attitude was what almost destroyed the space program and I am very bitter about it. Mailer was and is a real shithead. I didn't remember Mailer writing about the assembled journalists being reduced to using vending machines just like the masses. However, it is in the long literary and journalistic tradition of seeing an inconvenience to themselves as a sign of the imminent collapse of civilization. Of course, it was a lapse on the part of the space program people, which should have known that what is written about you is more important than what you accomplish. It is a well known in the PR industry that how well you feed the bodies and the egos of the journalists determines what they will write about your enterprise far more than what you have accomplished or what you say about it. I noticed that last Sunday's New York Times had only a short paragraph on the observations of the collision of the comet with Jupiter. I'd bet that the science editor was not treated with the consideration due the SCIENCE EDITOR OF THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES at one of the press conferences. As for Mailer, about 10 years ago his ego led to another tragedy. He extravagantly praised a murderer in prison for his literary talent and was instrumental in getting him out. The murderer promptly killed someone else. My impression of the comet colliding with Jupiter was the same: the newspaper accounts concentrated on the champagne that the comet's discoverer's drank. Here's a fantastic planetary happening and I'm reading of corks popping, not science. "Just the Facts, Ma'am" I felt bad about what I wrote last week about Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels, implying that that type of work is beneath my appreciation. So I decided to read a detective story, and picked up Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Chandler writes of 1920s Los Angeles, a world of grifters and molls, folks ever ready to take advantage of you, and beautiful ladies in the full "flirt" mode. Chandler's narrator, Private Investigator Philip Marlowe, is one of those characters who always says the right thing, always has a witty comeback. I like Chandler's style, too: his writing is strong and he often provides the wonderful detail in short, crisp sentences. At one point Marlowe is in the crook's hideout and he's trapped -- his arms are pinned and the murderer has a roll of nickels in his fist: The fist with the weighted tube inside it went through my spread hands like a stone through a cloud of dust. I had the stunned moment of shock when the lights danced and the visible world went out of focus but was still there. He hit me again. There was no sensation in my head. The bright glare got brighter. There was nothing but hard aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope. Then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees. (127) What I like about Marlowe most is his very direct ways -- when he knocked on the door to the crook's hideout, for example, they told him to go away. Instead of leaving, he starts kicking the door, forcing them to deal with him. Brazen! This is the kind of mystery that the reader is not on top of -- Marlowe knows things he doesn't tell, unlike many mysteries in which the reader can deduce the next move that the detective will make. But I like it that way, it makes Marlowe seem that much more capable. Quote of the Week From Balthasar Graci n's The Art of Worldly Wisdom, translated by Joseph Jacobs: One half of the world laughs at the other, and fools are they all. Everything is good or everything is bad according to who you ask. What one pursues, another persecutes. He is an insufferable ass who would regulate everything according to his ideas. (84-85) Graci n was a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit and his book is one of the most sensible that I have ever read. He teaches the reader how real people are, not how they should be or how they want to be.