WHAT IS A CHILD?

The Pope thinks that a cell with two newly united genomes in a double helix, whether it’s in a glass dish of agar-agar on a lab bench or in a human uterus, is a child.  He dodges the problem of where to draw the line by making it as inclusive as possible.  The problem is that he has so little regard for the physical body once it has left the uterus and needs more than prayers for its soul.

In earlier and more practical times the line was simply whether a baby, in or out of the mother, looked like a baby.  If it still had gills and webbed hands, it was not a baby.  For the mother the line came at what was called “quickening” -- when the baby was big enough and moved enough for her to feel it.  There are many other angles to consider but I consider ALL of them to be more important than obsessing about guns.

This boy shooter, judging from his photo, had some kind of genetic challenge.  From the outside it looks as though this family defined one boy as the father’s and one boy as the mother’s.  The mother took the deficient child, probably feeling that he needed her and that sufficient nurture might somehow heal him, but instead the broken boundary between the two of them meant that when he decided to kill himself, he took her along.  He used a separate gun, a .22, that he didn’t use on the children, little kids who may have stood for the last happy times he could remember.  He was like a king taking all his attendants and lovers with him.  Or maybe he thought he was saving them from a painful future -- more than one teenager has told me that growing up was a terrible curse.  The adults appear to be collateral damage -- they just got in the way.  It’s the reverse of ghetto children accidentally shot in the course of gang wars -- “shrooms” they’re called.  Mushrooms sprouted fungally out of the dark, unhuman.

As a friend of mine -- a mother devoted to her sons -- remarked, this woman evidently just couldn’t bear to put her boy in an institution because of her fantasy that she could at least control him, which was futile, a product of her own childishness.  A child is, first of all, an extension of ourselves so the way we treat them reflects who we think we are.  Secretly we all think “our” children are different from everyone else’s: more precious, more important, more dearly cherished.  So Obama (and I AM an Obama supporter) wipes away a tear over Connecticut kids, but (not in public anyway) not Afghani kids killed by Predator strikes.  ‘Shrooms.

Every time there’s one of these incidents I do some reading.  Someplace I read that the period of American history in which there were the most child massacres was the Dust Bowl Thirties in mid-western rural America, the very place considered the heart of honor and decent families.  Isolated families with year-after-year of crop failures began to starve to death.  The fathers of some could not find a solution.  No transportation out, too far to walk to town, no telephones, no outreach from other places, and not even weeds and gophers to eat.  So they took their families into the storm cellars, killed the children while the mothers held them, then killed the mothers and themselves.  No one noticed for a long time.

In essence children are economic units.  At one time farm success depended on having enough children to do the work and there was plenty to eat regardless of money because it was all produced right there.  This is still the case in much of the world.  But as the shift to technology meant that education was key to economic success, fewer children was a better strategy.  Luckily, the technology provided contraception and morning-after pills.  But this meant that the culture began to infantilize sex and disconnect it from parenthood.

So children become sexual objects.  Something that could be sold, either as slave labor or for sexual use.  The formal psych categories of children as sex objects divide into infants and toddlers, the primary school years (6 to 9), and adolescents.  In actuality the categories are more like Third World kids who are kidnapped or sold; exceptionally attractive children; victims of family abuse; damaged and therefore vulnerable children; and abandoned children who have learned to survive by using sex.  There are probably other categories like emotionally needy children or children of parents who think they are possessions advertising status and wealth.

If you are a teacher or health care worker who has learned to recognize any of these kids, you are required by law to call in law enforcement.  The mantra of all law enforcement is to get rid of the immediate problem -- clear the books.  (Deportation might work.)  Principals and hospital managers do the same -- by firing the person who turned in the problem.  Thus, we know a lot more than we admit.   The media colludes. 

People are confused (and the Pope offers no guidance, though individual priests have their own ideas) about the “old” end of the child spectrum.  If kids make trouble, we shove them towards adult, making them vulnerable to incarceration and even capital punishment.  By adolescence the children have formed identities and are looking for affiliation, either with groups or with individual friends and lovers.  By now the kids are various and the groups they join make them more various, as they find resources that might be quite different, varying from universities to gangs.  Gangs and military service are rigorously structured and provide weapons.  Universities these days tend to be pretty loose, even in the sexual sense.  Few families feel someone should be home for teenagers.  Few talk to them.  Except on the Internet.

So, a child is an accident, a child is a precious possession, a child is a burden, a child is the future, a child carries on the family, someone else’s child is less deserving than our own children, a child is just a little adult, a child is never really adult, a child is the business only of parents, a child should be protected by the government, and so on.

As to the question of whether traumatized survivors of massacres can cope, ask the Blackfeet.  Many have great-grandmothers who as children witnessed the shooting deaths of their families and playmates.  They’ve gone on and succeeded, but not unscathed.  And since all children belong to all of us, we all pay for it in terms of callousness, selfishness, abandonment, sexual abuse, violence, and continuing trauma in communities.  Surely we could do better. 

ADOLESCENCE, PUBERTY, ADRENARCHE

Adolescence never ends.  There’s no physical marker for the end.   The beginning is quite clear, because it is a mammal phenomenon, driven by the maturation of the creature.  Right now across Montana there are adolescent grizzlies coming out onto the prairie, often in sib-pairs, following the streams as highways, using the brush the streams support as bedrooms and hideouts in the day time between raIds on farms and ranches.  Bears, like many predators, are diurnal -- up and traveling in the morning and evening.  Napping in the afternoons and wee small dark hours.  Unless there’s a bright moon.  Are humans so different?  

The cougars have been moving out of the back country for decades, sometimes mistaking the highways for rivers.  They are not likely to be in pairs.  Bears like birdseed and apple trees.  Cougars prefer small dogs.  Growing animals need lots of food and sleep.  At the point when sexuality is coming online in mammals, the results are disconcerting to the creature and others.  It’s not a steady climb, but a jerky business of stinks and starts, wants and hates, strange dreams in unknown territories.  

Humans are not different.  Adolescence is one time that our mammal natures are obvious and sometimes controlling everything else.  We used to keep baby animals for pets -- very politically incorrect and ecologically unsound, but it was a long time ago and sleeping with baby foxes and bobcats is even more seductive than cuddling kittens and puppies.  Their preparation for adulthood ended in the fall and since we didn’t confine them, it was a matter of distancing from us to find their own territory.  First missing for part of the day, then overnight, then rarely coming back -- a little gaunt and tattered in order to eat and sleep for a day or two (and leave tracks in whatever newly poured cement there was) -- then gone.   

A too-high percentage would never been seen again because they were killed, often by males of their own kind.  Probably higher than normal death rates for our pets because they didn’t learn what animal parents would have taught them.  Do you remember how Elsa the lion struggled to learn from her human surrogates how to be a lion?

Death is one way to end adolescence, even for humans.  More and more of human adolescents are dying now because no one taught them how to be in the world.  Even adults who were conscientious and taught what they know cannot provide advice on some of today’s impossible situations.  No wonder the bitter struggle to keep the world the way it was when the parents were learning their own way.   

But all of the above is wrong because I’m confusing adolescence with puberty.  Adolescence is a culturally constructed state.  Puberty is physical.

In fact, there IS no end of adolescence in a biological sense.  That’s because when we talk about animals, we’re really talking about puberty.  Adolescence is a human cultural and psychological complexification of puberty, which is the result of a development in the adrenals that produces a molecule sequence resulting in sexual maturity.  What follows is biological info from Wikipedia.  (Scientific matters are generally reliable there.  Generally.)  Skip it if you want to, but I find it fascinating, maybe because I personally had a tougher time with “adrenarche” than with puberty.  Primary school was for me a time full of aching, bad dreams, temper tantrums, tears and raw terror.  For a while I’ve been searching for more info on this stage, but there’s not much about it.  Children’s books are often focused on this age, which is when many people learn to read and alternate realities spring to life.  (“Winnie the Pooh,”  “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Little Prince”)

Adrenarche is an early sexual maturation stage in some higher primates that in humans typically occurs at around 6 to 8 years of age. During adrenarche the adrenal cortex secretes increased levels of androgens such as DHEA and DHEAS, but without increased cortisol levels. Adrenarche is the result of the development of a new zone of the adrenal cortex, the zona reticularis.  Adrenarche is a process related to puberty, but distinct from hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal maturation and function.  Adrenarche occurs in only a small number of primates, and only chimpanzees and gorillas show a pattern of adrenarche development similar to humans.

The zona reticularis is the innermost layer of the adrenal cortex, lying deep to the zona fasciculata and superficial to the adrenal medulla. The cells are arranged cords that project in different directions giving a net-like appearance (L. reticulum - net).  Cells in the zona reticularis produce precursor androgens including dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and androstenedione from cholesterol.

DHEA is the most major steroid in the body and seems to have something to do with fertility, glucose metabolism and the operation of neurons.  It’s a precursor and intermediary for a LOT of processes, possibly contributing to longevity.  In Canada one needs a prescription but in the US it’s a “health food supplement.”   If athletes take it, it is considered “doping”.  If housewives take it, it is considered a “pick me up.”  It’s very popular but there’s little testing done.  The decline of DHEA begins at thirty, after maturation in humans is complete.  Perhaps that is the biochemical end of puberty.  Once it was about as long as people lived, barely long enough to raise a child who could survive without a parent.

Doctor Hal Bieler, author of “Food is Your Best Medicine,” was often around here in the Sixties.  He had a great fondness for John Clarke, the Blackfeet woodcarver,  and he liked to make little bear figurines that he sold.  He was also generous with his opinions and intrusions.  He used to say that Bob Scriver was an “adrenal” type.  (His tripartite sorting system was based on the dominance of one of three organs: the adrenals, the pituitary, or the thyroid.  He only applied it to men.  He wasn’t very interested in women.)  It would be interesting to know whether that traced back to DHEA from the Zona Reticularis:  high energy, aggression, strong sexuality, and hairiness.  Bob was always teased about being a “bear.”  We associate puberty with sexual maturity but the marker is the secondary sex characteristic of axillary hair, which today some spend a lot of time, money and pain removing.

Puberty is actually the result of the adrenarche, the precursor for the better known male and female hormones of sexual function.  Are the years of six to eight or nine far more crucial than we’ve thought?  My family used to drive long distances and my father liked it best at night when we kids slept in the back instead of quarreling.  Except that I tried not to sleep because the adult conversation was pretty interesting.  I was in late adrenarche when they had a discussion about puberty.  My father thought it was a dirty word because he confused it with pubis, an anatomical feature cushioning the genitals in front.  I think our whole culture has gotten human sexuality confused because of embarrassment and lack of accurate definitions.  Taking DHEA will probably not help this.  Why is it that bears don’t have an adrenarche or even a zona reticularis?  There is no end to questions.

TAKE YOUR NAP!

In my mother’s bedroom was a “picture” on the wall of a baby sleeping.  It was “mixed media,” consisting of a paper head tucked under a scrap of real blanket and embellished with the real curls from my little brother’s first haircut.  When I was little this fascinated me because of the mixture of reality and fantasy.  Was that paper head really my brother’s picture?  Where was the rest of the blanket?  Why was only my youngest brother depicted?  My hair was just as red and curly.  That didn’t reach down into my struggle with reality versus fantasy, which seems to have been lifelong.  Maybe it’s the reading and writing.  I would not have been surprised if the baby had opened his eyes. (I presume he was male -- he only had a head and I knew his hair was male.)  When I asked, I was told my aunt made this collage.

I don’t recall anyone’s potty training being much of a deal at our house, but naps were different, a battleground for me.  I was the oldest and when I was the only, my mother and I lay down for our naps together.  Very cozy.  Then came a brother.  And another brother.  At that point my mother maxed out.  She had the idea that I was “withholding” sleep in order to make trouble.  

The worst example was one day when she had promised the family would go see “Fantasia,” newly released, so we needed to have our naps because it would be late before we went to bed.  But I tried to do down our steep driveway on roller skates and scraped my knees into hamburger -- again.  I couldn’t go to sleep.  I just bawled.  She threatened that if I didn’t nap, there would be no “Fantasia.”  I didn’t.  There wasn’t.  When my father got home after work and discovered the “Fantasia” attendance was cancelled, he was more devastated than I was. I didn’t really know what it was anyway.

My birthday was in late October so I was technically too young for kindergarten, but as soon as I had that birthday, my mother went to work to get me accepted into afternoon kindergarten so she and “the boys” could nap.  It was not a bad solution to our screaming matches.  Except that she got a little dramatic: she put me on the knee of the principal’s three-piece suit and claimed I was killing she and my brothers with my wakefulness.  (I was impressed by the idea that I had the power to murder.)  I joined the class after the social circles had formed.  Since there were no other kids our age in the neighborhood, I had zero social skills.  The few I had pertained to boys since I had brothers.  My feet were on the outlier path and have been ever since.  It wasn’t about sex.  It was about “getting along.”

So I was interested to see an article by Perri Klass MD, who often takes on quirky subjects.  She says,  “Most parents cherish toddlers’ naps as moments of respite and recharging, for parent and child alike; . . . napping problems have often been treated by pediatricians as parents’ “limit-setting” problems.”. . . “napping in children actually is a complex behavior, a mix of individual biology, including neurologic and hormonal development, cultural expectations and family dynamics.”  “Possibly because of the intense synaptic activity that goes on in their highly active, highly connected brains, young children are less able to tolerate long periods of time awake.”  

Why can’t kids be like puppies and just pile up to sleep for a while?  Maybe we interfere and schedule too much.  Current thinking is that the “circadian process,” . . . “works a little like a clock, tying our sleep to schedules and to cycles of light and dark, regardless of how much we have or have not slept. This interacts with the “homeostatic process” which works differently, pushing us harder toward sleep the longer we stay awake and building up sleep pressure.” 

If you get off schedule because of something unusual happening -- a trip, company, catching up work late at night -- then habituation comes all undone.  None of the cues that normally tip you towards sleep are there.   And then if there are hard tasks, much commotion, a lot of things to think about or problems to solve, the “homeostatic process” wants you to sleep.  

“Generally, new infants sleep between feedings in short periods both days and nights.”  I’ve never raised a human baby, but mammal babies of various kinds seem to go “four and four,” four hours asleep and four hours awake.  A feeding on awakening and a feeding on dozing off. 

Dr. Klass assures us that “Sometime after the first birthday, the . . . naps are consolidated into one, usually in the late morning or early afternoon.”  That when the mammals usually lay-up to sleep for a bit in mid-day, especially if they are diurnal animals who like the half-light of early morning and evening.  But for humans, “The rationale for having your afternoon nap over by 3 p.m. is to build up enough sleep drive so you can fall asleep at night.” 

“Go to sleep,” my mother would call, as though it were something I could control.  Now Dr. Klass says, “there is a great deal of individual variation, and many parents struggle with a child who seems too eager to do without a nap.”  And as the tempers of both parties rise, the likelihood of real sleep dims and withdraws.

“By age 5, about 80 percent of kids have given up a nap — that means one in five still napping.”  What’s a kindergarten teacher to do?  

Those insatiably curious people in their white coats run around recording everything. “They also found that individual children’s sleep needs and sleep patterns tended to be consistent through age 10. In other words, children who slept less than their peers as infants grew into older children who seemed to need less sleep.”  No surprise.

But this factoid raises questions:  “A 2005 study of American children ages 3 to 8 showed distinct differences between black and white children, too. While total sleep duration for the two groups was similar, black children napped more and tended to be older when they gave up their naps.”  Is that good or bad?

Now we get into the chemical stuff that we want to know so we can simply give the kids a pill.  (Be careful about that.  Death due to antihistamines used as sleeping pills for children is not unknown.)  “Dr. Monique LeBourgeois, a sleep scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her colleagues recently conducted the first study on how napping affects the cortisol awakening response, a burst of hormone secretion known to take place shortly after morning awakening. They showed that children produce this response after short naps in the morning and afternoon, though not in the evening, and it may be adaptive in helping children respond to the stresses of the day.”

“I think there’s a dire need for adults in general to be in tune with individual children’s physiology,” Dr. LeBourgeois said. “What are the capabilities, and what are the limits?”

There seems to be a long continuum of parent involvement in their children from zilch to helicoptering, and a parallel continuum of from those who live in chaos to those who live by elaborate charts and clocks.  As much variation in household style as in kid physiology.   Parents need a calibration adjustment system that works, especially when they kids are different kinds and ages. Of course, it’s partly cultural.  One of the nice things about computers is that they seem to have broken up the suburbs who lived by the television fifteen-minute intervals with hourly bathroom breaks that show up as water demand spikes.  

“If the child is stopping the napping, that represents a process of neurological maturation,” Dr. Jenni said. “The ability to tolerate wakefulness is an indication that the brain is maturing.”

The rest of the story is that moms need naps, too.  My own collapsed on the sofa late in the afternoon and I know from monitoring my glucose that I go into a decline about then as well.  Why fight it?  Why doesn’t this country have siestas?  Surely it’s not because we all have mature brains!

CHILDREN & WEALTH

With very little effort but consciously and voluntarily, I’ve managed to avoid acquiring either wealth or children. However, I’ve paid attention to those factors in other lives.

This morning when I sat down to the read the paper, I noticed that more than half of the stories were about either wealth or children or some relationship between the two. Most of the stories were bad news: autism rates and premature birth numbers rising, wealth acquired the short-cut way, either at the point of a gun or through some kind of swindle. Newspapers don’t usually dally long over good news.

I don’t quite know how to classify the story about Roman Polanski: is it about children or wealth? The child in question was not his. It’s kind of a mystery where her parents were. Wealth has on the one hand allowed him to escape immediate punishment but on the other hand has not been able to keep him from being banished but on the other hand (I love three handed arguments, which tend to break up polarization, I hope.) have not prevented him from making lots of money which probably gave him access to a lot more of other people’s children (a little older, I hope). There is such a gap between the event and the court date that in the meantime standards for sexual ethics have shifted drastically, or more accurately they have shattered, idealisms of various sorts being pitted against overwhelming realities. Outrage gathers in defense of Polanski’s victim while the world simply looks away from widespread human trafficking of children. Of course, most of the children you can buy are not blonde.

Much of our morality when it comes to sex is the goal of our children inheriting our wealth. Much of our practice when it comes to children is to use wealth to secure them an advantage. This was true when the first white traders came to the high prairie and gave their half-white children the resources to get ahead of the indigenous people whose world was diminishing and it is true today in the “highest” circles where Prince Charles looked for a healthy commoner to give him vigorous sons. But the terms of the relationship have changed.

In law, if a woman cannot give a man a male inheritor, she throws the basis of peaceful transfer of wealth and power into chaos, leading to competition and overthrow. On those grounds she can be divorced or annulled, or as England knows, simply beheaded. If a husband will not perform the act that will give a woman a male breadwinner to support her in old age, he can be legally divorced. These laws have encouraged a certain amount of legerdemain to provide an heir, who sometimes looks rather like the milkman. Or prompt representations of obligation to support a child conceived outside of wedlock. (LOCK!)

So the first monkeywrench in the old arrangement is that nowadays the inseminator and the ovum producer can be identified scientifically through DNA. The locus of the transaction may not be a bed but a petri dish. The motivation for a man to keep a woman locked up in order to guarantee he is the only one with access to her reproductive machinery is in question.

The second monkeywrench is the nature of the more recent sexually transmitted diseases (like AIDS) which are not obvious until it is too late. This has put an unnatural premium on sex with children, too young to reproduce but presumably too inexperienced to have caught an inconvenient virus for which there is no cure. On the other hand, HIV is a powerful consumer of wealth and if the government or NGO’s cannot provide the prevention, the cure research, or the palliative treatment, the motivation for creating wealth through criminal sexual transactions (including trafficking) is much higher.

And the third monkeywrench is the globalization of the planet, the loss of boundaries which once kept people local, and awareness of the huge wealth disparities on the planet, which so increase rage and frustration as to fuel wars in which sexual assault is used as a weapon. Resulting in unwanted children.

In spite of my total rejection of censorship, which interferes with rational inquiry into these social problems, I cannot help deploring the constant use of sex and wealth to hype media popularity. It is the very complexity and intensity of the problem that both triggers the tendency to hide, cover up, deny, at the same time as to tease with half-knowledge and scandal. We have all noticed the connection between the supposedly virtuous with their secret transgressions.

The question is how to address both children who are destitute and children who are neglected investments in tomorrow. Neither is getting the kind of nurturing, attention and focus that will build a better world for us all. Yesterday’s advice no longer applies. One of the chief characteristics of both kinds of children is their loathing of hypocrisy and their ability to spot it in adults. Sadly, most of our beliefs about families and institutions like schools are simply hypocrisy. I hardly dare mention the relevance of drugs, whether those meant to keep child-whores at work or those meant to keep disruptive kids under control.

Too many families are meant to be signals for acquiring wealth: “Trust me!” Too many schools are wealth-accruing strategies for teachers and administrators. Too many religious institutions have crossed over into politics that guide wealth and supposed virtue into dubious hands. Too many governments are confused about their obligations and assets.

Many of the stories in today’s newspaper are about damage to children caused by prematurity, autism, baby-selling, and other universal social ills. Eight soldiers killed in Afghanistan, no one knows how many killed by tsunamis: the sorrow and political consequences, like funds needed for recovery, are beyond anyone’s capacity to estimate.

Yet millions of children die early, carry irreparable damage through life, or never get enough support to thrive and learn. We note that, but don’t do much about it. We’re too busy obsessing about the proper punishment for Roman Polanski, just as earlier we were split between punishment and apologies for Michael Jackson. And more recently obsessed with the captor of Elizabeth Bright. It’s so much easier to understand, or at least think we understand, a story about someone that it is to digest numbers that in fact might be telling us more about both wealth and children.

COLD BLOOD

Jake Alsop http://oldscroteshome.blogspot.com/ is one of my favorite bloggers, a man full of drolleries, word play, love of tractors driven by well-endowed females, and sometimes surprising thoughts. Once in a while he gets indignant, as in the following post, which is the more surprising since he is in a quiet part of England, the better to bird watch.

Jake asks, “What is the matter with this photo?” The photo in question is a conventional group portrait of fourth or fifth graders with a distinguished-looking man standing behind them, hands innocently on the shoulders of two children.

Here’s the critique.
“1. It shows the children's faces, thus making them identifiable. Such photos should only be taken showing the children from the back, or at least with their faces not visible.
2. The adult is touching two of the children. No adult should touch children under any circumstances.
3. The adult is alone with the children. There must always be at least two adults when children are being accompanied.

“These are not my rules; these are published rules for the guidance of Local Education Authorities and similar.

“My friend Ruth is the head of a primary school. She cannot take a child in her car unless a second adult is present.

“My friend Amy Bell is a primary school teacher, who loves to organise outdoor wildlife events for her classes. But transport is now a problem because parents are not allowed to give lifts to other than their own children.

“Have we gone crazy, or what? We have created a society where mistrust and suspicion are the key virtues, where we all now have an unhealthy mindset, where normal relationships have been poisoned by those in authority who see sin in everything. A recent TV programme tested this by putting a child on its own in a shopping mall and then filmed the reactions of adult passers-by. The child was clearly distressed, but NOBODY offered to help it. Until finally some old scrote - and it would have been me if I had been there - went up to the child, took its hand and led it into a nearby store, from where they could make a phonecall for help.

“I love children. If I think a child is hurt or in distress, I will go to its aid. I am telling you this so you can start planning your prison visits to me when I end up in the chokey for being a Dirty Old Man. Damn them all.

“Envoi: I am very strict with myself these days: I only allow myself to be a Grumpy Old Man once a week."


I was telling a teacher and a school nurse about this post and they relayed an incident just days ago when a child needed a ride home. This is serious business on the rez at night with the temps below zero and icy roads. NO ADULT PRESENT WAS WILLING TO DRIVE THE CHILD HOME. The student luckily remembered she had a grannie in Browning who was willing to come get her.

How did we get so afraid of each other, so resistant to happenstance, so afraid of accidental injury -- possibly uninsured? Is it the steady media stream of ghastly incidents in which children meet terrible fates? I don’t have television and my radio station is NPR, so I’m spared quite a bit, but every time I go to visit Petunia the television is following in minute detail some unthinkable atrocity committed by some person no one suspected. (Mind you, there’s rarely or never anything about American bombs falling on children in some foreign country, though we occasionally see their bodies in the arms of despairing parents.)

Today the paper had a local story about two small children found on the street in our below-zero weather with no shoes or coats. A neighbor intervened. The police found the home through a name-sticker on one little girl. The parents were asleep with an infant howling on the floor by the bed -- both bed and floor covered with child and dog feces -- and another toddler screaming in a crib. The father works in a day care center. A normal response is to, well, over-respond. Forcible sterilization comes to mind: first the parents and then the premises. The same newspaper has a story about European proposed laws imposing castration on sex criminals. Of course, such irreversible penalties assume infallible detection of guilt.

When I reflect on the sources of Taliban/Puritan/draconian impulses in our society, I come upon two main causes: the first is money. We emphasize over and over how much money it is costing society for an irresponsible young couple to produce all these neglected children. We institute lawsuits that then make insurance rules more powerful than felony law. In history the times when Puritans have been in control have been the times when virtue was linked to parsimony, control, severity and hoarding. We have never given up the belief that wealth and status are markers of deservingness or that people get pushed to the edges of existence because they are no good. The current argument against the death penalty is that it’s too expensive because of all the appeals. It may only a matter of time before we give up the idea of sparing the occasional innocent by insisting on costly justice. Do like China: shoot ‘em, part ‘em out, and bill the family for the bullet.

The other force is community. Our emphasis on individualism and the right to do as we please has given us the idea that wanting something and working for it enough will get us ANYTHING. A comic strip is currently mocking this by showing a little boy, over-impressed by urgings to “be whatever he wants to be,” saying he wants to grow up to be a komodo dragon.

In the meantime, while our fear of taxes means that one out of fifty children in Montana is currently homeless for lack of government safety nets, we’ve all become komodo dragons by default. We don’t touch each other, we eat each other’s assets, we fear the warmth and human softness of fur and milk, those mammalian nurturing characteristics. We’ve forgotten that even dinosaurs -- at least maiasaurus whose bones are around here -- fed their babies in nests they kept clean.

PROUST & THE SQUID: A Review

“Proust and the Squid” has gotta be a high-end book -- you can tell from the title. If there was ever a high-end author, it’s gotta be Proust. And what do ordinary people know from “squid” unless they eat calamari? This is one of those trendy Something-and-Something titles that are supposed to make you curious. But it is a justified title. Ironically, the copy I bought is cheap paper, rough cover, physically about fit to wrap a squid.

The content is revolutionary, just as promised in the several reviews and radio interviews that attracted me to the book in the first place. It’s in three parts: a history of how humans learned to read; what happens in the brain when an individual reads; and what these ideas mean for people who can’t or don’t read. This is not about literacy and Harold Bloom’s list of must-read prestige books. This is not about cultural collapse and how we’re all doomed if schools don’t do a better job. This is about the phenomenon of reading itself.

The first “book” was a little clay pocket like pita bread that contained some dime-sized tokens like game markers. Each shape meant a unit of a commodity (sheep, wheat, oil, wine) and the pocket was supposed to hold the equivalent of a shipment: it was an invoice. The idea was very simple: this token means this real thing ought to be there. Then someone figured out it was easier to just “write” the tokens onto wet clay. Gradually that elaborated out into systems and conventions of business.

One day SHAZAM !! someone realized that it would be possible to symbolize spoken words. This happened in several places and in two main ways. One was to draw a little token for each word: this is the system Chinese follows. They call the tokens ideograms.

The other system was to symbolize the sounds of the words with “letters” that each stood for a sound. All the rest is alphabet. The “trick” of doing it depended on three things: the ability to hear the individual sounds of the consonants and vowels that made up words; the ability to associate each sound with a letter of the alphabet; then to juggle the recognition of the ensuing words into their meanings and what the sequence of words actually means in terms of ideas and reality.

Socrates was adamantly opposed to this. He felt that written language would be such a “prop,” such a “cheater,” such a Google, that real understanding would be totally undermined. The hard-won skills of discussion and thinking on one’s feet would be lost. He was probably right. But on the other hand, there was a gain that Maryanne Wolf, the author of this book, feels was world-shaking, because it enabled much slower, more thorough, broader and more in-depth ideas. (I felt this was the shakiest part of the book, asserted more than demonstrated.)

This jugglers’ trick with words, “writing,” was not easy to learn and only the elite or even the “set-aside” members of the elite (like the religious) ever got really good at it in those days. When the fMRI crowd got to investigating the brain functions necessary, they discovered why. Reading and writing are not done in a certain “part” of the brain but rather requires the participation of several parts and is dependent on the connections among them. Not only that, but culture and individual experience “build” brains (and constantly rebuild them) according to what they need to do in their unique worlds. A yak herder in Mongolia has a brain that is thick and thin in different places than a Jewish kid in Brooklyn. People who read ideogramic writing have different brains from people who read alphabet writing. All people have different brains, though most have the same parts. They just learn to use them differently and store different information in them, acquiring slightly different skills.

Some people are are “a-lexic.” They cannot learn to read and write. Something is missing. A higher proportion are “dys-lexic,” either learning with difficulty or learning in their own way. Some will be very gifted in other ways than reading, because they just happen to be thickly connected in other ways. Not all dyslexics are gifted. Some of this seems to be related to the left-brain/right-brain allocation of functions.

But reading is not just dependent on brain structures. You can’t learn to read if there’s nothing to read. If the culture is limited in the subject matter they talk about, it will be hard to read about things that are never seen or discussed. In a family that never sits with the children, reading out loud to them, maybe following the words with a pointing finger, gives the child few clues about what’s going on.

So to successfully read, a human being needs the proper brain parts, needs to learn to make them interact properly to decode spoken sounds, needs examples of people translating the marks on the page or screen into spoken language, needs a family that values reading and keeps written material at hand, and needs motivation to read: to be hooked.

I’ve tried to read Proust. I wasn’t hooked. I’m aware that it’s a marker of education and so on. I’m still not sure I understand the concept of “modernity” of which Proust is a part. I think it’s about investigating the nature of memory and reconstituting it in a kind of dream or spell of story in written language. So that means it’s about being able to share one’s internal life with other people. Once that was a matter of writing letters to friends. Now it seems to be about texting and twittering.

Just mastering reading and writing in terms of vocabulary and culture is not enough. That’s just about at the level of choosing brushes and mixing paint -- the Big Picture is an art form and always will be. Not everyone will appreciate every “school of art” and it might take as much skill to write Mickey Spillane as Proust. That’s not what this book is about. This book is a prescription for the future.

We must do a better job of understanding children as they come to school, esp. since we are now mixing ideograph-reading people with alphabet-reading people; we must have a better collection of strategies and materials to teach those children appropriately; we need ways to diagnose what’s not functioning properly in the dyslexic child (which structure, which connection, which developmental thickness or thinness); and we need courage as we enter the next stage of communication based on electronics and the Internet. Already the children read video better than the teachers can.

THINGS COME TOGETHER

Across the street from me in the “good gray” city of Portland, Oregon, lived an atypical household with a daughter a little older than me. Glamorous, graceful, and carefully guided, this dark-haired, dark-skinned beauty was a role model for me. If I were lucky, I sometimes acquired her hand-me-down clothes in colors no one in my white bread, rurally-raised family would buy. In the last few months she has found me via the Internet and reads my blogs as well as sending emails about a life quite different from mine and yet very similar. That is, she has two daughters, a limited income, and an education much like mine, but she enjoys a night of Texas Hold’em Poker, fortified with Scotch in milk, though she lives back in Portland, not far from the high school we attended. These days it’s black. On the whole, she’d rather be in San Francisco visiting the very fine zoo.

Recently she sent me a rave review of “Hobart Shakespeareans,” a documentary about a school in Los Angeles that follows through the year a class of fifth graders who are studying Hamlet in order to perform it. Aside from their youth, the most salient aspect of these kids is that they are from a neighborhood of immigrants: Asian, Hispanic (If I’m using this term improperly, I apologize), maybe American Indian, “India-Indian,” South Pacifican (?), Phillipino. The faces are all brown and framed with straight black hair. Most speak a language other than English at home, but not the same “other.” These are the people I’m calling “tomorrow’s children.” Not because they are privileged. Their parents struggle economically and in the course of the movie someone was killed in front of the school so that it had to go into “lock-down.”

These kids didn’t choose to study Shakespeare: it is their teacher’s preoccupation. But also I think it would not be a stretch to identify these kids with Obama and Jindal, both brown and both with strong Pacific connections, both eloquent speakers in English. (Did I say that one of my Blackfeet friends voted for Obama because “he looks like me”?) Nor do I think “Slumdog Millionaire” is an accidental Oscar winner. The Pacific Era, long predicted, has arrived.

The first thing that means might surprise some people: a high value on education, including European-based education. Rafe Esquith has been teaching the fifth grade class at Hobart Elementary for 17 years. Each year, as an add-on, the class enacts a Shakespeare play with indelible performances by these small (some of the girls are truly tiny) people who clearly understand what they are doing. Part of the secret is children that age -- just after their nerves are fully myelinated (I’m reading about this in “Proust and the Squid.”) and just before the pubertal hormones and culture kick in -- hunger and thirst for learning. They are smart, and they are deeply impressionable if given a consistent and full-contact teacher. Rafe certainly is that. He is a believer and he is completely in sync with historical education traditions in the US.

Ironically, this puts him out of step with contemporary public schools and many of his fellow teachers who practice highly structured, prescribed, force-based but theoretically “fun,” grade-skewed methods. His principal, a Latina who gets the big picture, protects him from bad evaluations but cannot prevent his ostracism by jealous fellow teachers. Rafe himself says that his students sort into three groups: those who will learn no matter what the circumstances, those who are group-guided and will follow those leaders, and those who don’t care to learn or just can’t, but who will not be discipline problems if they see the group would scorn them.

The content of what he teaches is entirely traditional with one exception: guitars everywhere all the time, including rock n’ roll “sound tracks” for Shakespeare. It is striking to me that this is also true of the Blackfeet Immersion School in Browning and Barrus’ Cinematheque in Amsterdam. It means something about brain development. Since music is related to math, it seems a good omen. Also, rock n’ roll appears to be a global given: most young people and many older people respond to it viscerally.

Rafe Esquith knows his Shakespeare down to his very core, and because he is in LA, he can bring in acting luminaries like Ian McKellan and Michael York to give the class a sense of significance and belonging. The youngsters deliver their memorized speeches with eloquence and precision a Hollywood actor can only admire. They understand deeply what they are saying. In fact, when Rafe -- looking them in the eye in a way only trust-based teaching will bear -- explains Hamlet’s choices, several of the children weep, welling up with emotional intensity. They recognize the dilemmas.

So now I’ll double back. On one level Obama and Jindal were sort of set up to be equivalent race cards: brown golliwog wonks that the beefy red-faced politicians and CEO’s behind the scenes hope will become a puppet show that entertains American voters while the power-brokers continue their raids and hoarding. They would treat Rafe’s class as a one-off phenomenon, a curiosity, the way they’d like to treat Obama/Jindal. They have not paid attention to Shakespeare or they would understand the plate tectonic shift of the conversation. They had better start reading Confucius.

One of the ways East and West have separated in the past centuries is that the East values the community and the West has lionized the individual. Surely the best reality is a balance between the two. China went far to the community, treating nonconformers with a bullet to the back of the head and billing the bullet to the family on grounds that they should have controlled that person. America went far to the individual, romanticizing murderers. In the West that lies so far west it’s East, we see suicide bombers, a betrayal of both self and community.

Rafe Esquith’s fifth graders are learning a citizenship created around great ideas, yet by calling out their own human-ness. They go to Washington, D.C., they go to South Dakota, they see the monuments. They do NOT go to Disneyland, which is in their backyard anyway. I have said before that these are “tomorrow’s people,” a mixture of Asian, Hispanic, Native American on both coasts and in the southern part of the US. They feel their affinity for each other, based on appearance underlaid by a genome that has long been the foundation of human settlement on these American continents, which makes them different from any subsequent Euro-immigration. They can break the black/white deadlock that holds us hostage and, hopefully, also the deadlocked two-party political system. Radical means going to the roots. It can be done with thought rather than violence.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, The Movie. A MEDITATION

The movie called “A.I.” or “Artificial Intelligence” -- a necessary translation around here where AI means Artificial Insemination -- is not for children. In fact, there are probably some adults who should not see it. The most obviously upsetting parts are in the war between Organos (humans made the old-fashioned way) and Mecchos (near-humans constructed as machines). In a “Flesh Fair” (meant only for organic persons) Mecchos are destroyed in a kind of gladiator spectacle, except that the victims are bound, restrained and destroyed in ways that cause our “mirror cell” empathies to writhe and suffer. The organic people are repulsive, depraved, drunken and clearly enjoying the suffering. Is this what it means to be really human? It’s a Stanley Kubrick question.

This movie began in a sci-fi short story about a future couple who have a robot child which they casually discard when they become able to have a genetic child. This short fable morphed into a version of Pinocchio, not a child’s story except in the ambiguous hands of Walt Disney who wasn’t always aware of his own subconscious. He also muddied the waters with Bambi, which originally raised a lot of adult subjects we still have not resolved a hundred years later. Both 19th century stories ask unsettling questions about what humans are: what makes us human? Are we more than animals? More than puppets in the hands of an angry god? Who among us is entitled to moral protection from suffering and death and on what grounds? VERY relevant right now, maybe more than when this movie was made or, indeed, throughout the several decades while it was in development.

The slippery aspect of “Artificial Intelligence” is that it slides back and forth between asking about the line between human and robot even as it slips back and forth over the line between child and adolescent. As soon as the “adult” meccho was changed to being a gigolo, sex was in the story. Neither an inflatable doll nor one of Dr. Masters’ mechanical penile cameras nor a robot like the charming “Angel Lips” of Lopez’ radio fantasy called “Ruby, the Galactic Gumshoe,” this robot is a supposedly pre-calculated unemotional being who is pressed into being protective of a child. The little bear, who has no power, is mostly confined to Jiminy-Cricket-type comment, though thankfully he speaks in a gruff male voice instead of a piping superego rebuke.

I think our culture somehow combines the question of moral maturity (I’m told fourteen in some European countries) with the nature of sexual maturity, with the legitimacy of killing, and with just plain “otherness.” We are shocked by child soldiers in Africa but willing to treat young black boys in this country as adults in murder cases. The movie artificial boy is white, necessarily purchased by a prosperous family, also white. Does this make a difference? What if the puppet had been a little Chinese girl? Or would the story have been different if the gigolo had been black? (I suspect it wouldn’t to Kubrick but maybe it would to Spielberg, who draws on a white suburban childhood.) I was a little worried by the denim-indigo, androgenous, racially inclusive IBM clones at the beginning of the movie. I’ve come to associate the actor William Hurt with characters who are morally unreliable and unconsciously cruel.

I’ve been thinking about starting an illustrated memoir of my child years -- mostly because of a trove of photos my father took. Still, I was startled to Google “pre-adolescent child” and see that most of the early list are photo sources. First entries on Google lists are there because of high frequency, popularity. Why are photos of that age group so much in demand? Can child photos be considered pornographic even when the child is not nude? Would my photographic memoir be put to perverse uses? The other striking thing about the lists is that so many of the pre-adolescent scholarly papers are not about “child” at all, but rather all in terms of preparation for “adolescent” with a lot of emphasis on sex. Surely it is only since WWII that figures like Christopher Robin or Alice in Wonderland have been seen as sexual objects. Did “Lolita” do that? (That was a Stanley Kubrick film. I’ve never seen it. Maybe it’s time.) Or were we all in denial?

In the articles “childhood” is variously described as years 3 to 12, or 8 to 14, or sometimes divided into early and late childhood, along the lines of primary and elementary school. There are also quite a lot of articles about suicidal or depressed children, but they are hard to access. One needs subscriptions to medical libraries.

“David,” the little robot child, is a CHILD -- not a pre-teen -- and his love is clearly meant by Spielberg (the final developer) to be innocent child-to-parent love. In the final scene he is under the covers with his sleeping mother, but not in a clinch. The nuance of the endings (they are additive) is debated but Spielberg seems to come to conclusion that the meaning of life is happiness and that it is an entitlement. I’m not so sure, regardless of the Constitution of the United States. Anyway, a robot child cannot commit suicide or become depressed.

For quite a while I’ve thought about why it is that “outsiders” are always so interested in Native American children until they hit adolescence. Everyone thinks the little kids are “darling” and “adorable,” but they pretend the teens don’t exist. The obvious answer is that at that point they begin to be trouble: they can get sexual, they can get drunk, they can get violent. They can begin to worry about what it means to be an Indian and whether they smell bad or are dirty in some other way. Teaching junior high school is totally unlike teaching primary and elementary grades, and yet one can’t impose high school standards on children. I found that one seventh grade class can be way out there working on the issues of sixteen-year-olds, while the next set of seventh graders can be preoccupied with crayons and stuffed animals.

The confusion and seeking of childhood is not over when one gets to adolescence, but once there at least the budding person can rely on a body of experience. We probably haven’t given enough importance and attention to the early school years, the primary years when one’s identity is forming. For instance, it is appalling to contemplate the number of high schoolers who still can’t read or figure and who have no study skills or ability to manage their own consciousness. Too many children have parents who are immature, under so much economic pressure (some of it self-imposed) that they are out of the home most of the time. It is fantasy to think that most parents are monitoring television and computers, much less friends or even neighbors.

We have not yet evolved effective social compensations for the break-up of old family patterns. It is past time than we did.