IF WE COULD JUST GET ORGANIZED . . .

At one point in the Seventies -- high on new-found knowledge discovered at a UU Leadership School -- I thought organizational design would save the world.  If we could just get properly organized so that everyone had found their niche and had proper communication channels, institutions could rock along doing their jobs and we’d all whistle as we worked.  Wrong.  The usual devious greedheads went right on making all the marbles roll into their corner and the usual brainless blunderers couldn’t remember what they were supposed to do, esp. if it were new.

But now things have gotten bad enough around the world that TED talks are urging us to re-think democracy, health has become a worldwide exercise in relativity with viruses scarier than a-bombs, while Indian tribes and college grads are so far in debt that there seems to be no way forward.  Casinos and advanced degrees were supposed to guarantee success and prosperity.  It’s a bait-and-switch world.  The idea of the greatest good for the greatest number has somehow morphed into “winner take all” and some kind of repetition compulsion.

I’ve been on a jag of WWII movies, right now watching “Winds of War” (Herman Wouk’s series) by streaming, alongside “Enemy at the Door” (BBC) on discs.  Netflix recognizes what I’m doing and feeds me more suggestions, everything from “Foyle’s War” to “Restropo.”  The best of them use war to comment on the larger civilization of the times. (If you can call it civilized to be at war).  Marriage does not come off well.  Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen demonstrate an heroic, high-status man who has enough income to support an ambitious but asinine woman whose most admirable quality is her manicure.  The women in Wouk’s world have no skills, are obsessively attached to men by something mysterious called “love,” and balk, disagree, and go off on a tangent at every difficult moment.  Of course, it’s great dramatic fodder.

“Enemy at the Door”, about the German occupation of the English Channel Islands (Jersey and Guernsey) shows little flashes of this sort of drama, but it really is about rigid organizational design versus human resourcefulness.  The central hero is Dr. Martel, excitable but dependable and his quite unsexy but resourceful wife.  A recent episode was about the pain-in-the-butt SS officer trying to curry favor by organizing a chess tournament he is sure his superior will win.  Instead, in spite of intimidation, that worthy is defeated -- by a woman!  Luckily, the German is a wise man who plays by the rules of a higher game.  This series is about an informal but coherent society on the islands, based on different assumptions than the regulated society introduced by the occupiers who find their own system difficult to manage.

The problem in many places now is the dynamics of interwoven but not-the-same cultures, often too inventively human to be captured by any bureaucratic assumptions.  I see the TED talk today is about immigrants who send money back to their families on the other side of the planet: their allegiances are double.  But isn’t the welfare of families a universal?  

Valier is a village (300-400 people, depending on who’s counting) that is mostly coherent because of history, since on a few generations ago they came as a group from Belgium.  The same people who were leaders in high school are still prominent business owners and leaders of traditional organizations.  It’s not that they’re against innovation so much as they can’t grasp what that might be, so they do more of what they did last time.  

The rez next door is a sprawl of 8,000 enrolled people plus a lot of other people who refuse to be counted.  Some don’t even want their real names known.  In fact, they will claim the right to change their names as an ancient tribal custom and they would be right.  They also claim sovereignty while sending the bills on to the USA.  Every new scheme, whether generated internally or handed down from on high, is quickly scoured for loopholes and choke points that might yield profit.  They’re like corporate lawyers reading tax codes.  Bone game.  Stick game.

It’s surprising to have two such contrasting systems next to each other.  Managing the interactions between them is problematic.  Drawing on all this WWII stuff, I started thinking about sentry and sentinels.  A definition search yielded the following:

A Sentinel Event is defined as any unanticipated event in a healthcare setting resulting in death or serious physical or psychological injury to a patient or patients, not related to the natural course of the patient's illness. . . Sentinel events are identified to help aid in root cause analysis and to assist in development of preventative measures. 

Medical Definition of SENTINEL. : Being an individual or part of a population potentially susceptible to an infection or infestation that is being monitored for the appearance or recurrence of the causative pathogen or parasite.

Sentry definitions are military, a guard who is armed, but also can be computer programs, for instance,  a program called “Sentry,” whose motto is “Shit happens.  Be on top of it.  Sentry gives you insight into the errors that affect your customers.” 

In a week or so I’ll have to chose a new Medicare plan.  I plan to change.  I let myself be passively assigned to Silverscript, which was then bought by the CVS drugstore chain.  The result was a steady stream of automated phone calls and letters nagging me to take my meds, buy my meds NOW, account for why I wasn’t on the schedule they thought I should be on.  This strategy has backfired.  I will never go in a CVS drugstore again.  But I dread the job of wading through all this junk and fine print, which they reserve the right to change on the spur of the moment anyway. Humana has leapt into the breach, offering personalized guidance by “trained” professionals.  Is this reassuring?  Not at all.  Trained to guide me into Humana, right?

I looked up “bureaucracy” which put a lot of emphasis on the fact that the administration of systems is not elected.  Increasingly, I see that as not being the key problem.  Instead I suggest that the people making decisions -- elected or not -- simply don’t know what they’re administering.  They never go there, never listen to the people whose lives they are controlling, never get rain or sun on their heads, barely get out of their town cars long enough to enter their office buildings.  They look at statistics, design algorithms, and make graphics according to some GPS.  No one has ever convinced them that the map is not the territory.  They have no sentinels.  

So I’m claiming that military sort of role: the sentinel.  I’m watching at town meetings, I’m watching a giant digging machine tear up the next street over, I’m watching old people struggle in and out of their cars at the post office.   I'm watching kids and a few grownups on bikes.   I’m not a canary -- my watching is not based on vulnerability.  

I see that the institutions we used to count on -- churches, libraries, schools, hospitals, newspapers, movie houses, orchestras -- are starving for money and failing to serve the purposes they were originally intended to serve.  Most of them are culture-based, expressions of the humanities.  The big discussion websites, even the high-minded enviros, get hung up on pets, favorite songs and cooking.  If one tries to talk about religion or even spirituality, they're willing, but cliché ridden.  There is no vocabulary for it except what institutions supply, which no longer fit because they are so culture-bound.  So the subject is discarded.  But aren’t these witherings of humanities institutions “sentinel events”?

"THE VIRAL STORM": Reflections

In the Seventies after working as an animal control officer in the streets of Portland and then as the research and education coordinator, I was advised never to donate my blood, because I had probably acquired a soup of microbes and other infectious agents and the blood would be used by vulnerable people.  Not much research was available and no internet so one had to go cruise library stacks or make appointments with experts.  One of the other officers, the second woman hired, was Renee, who had interrupted her trajectory towards being a veterinarian because her husband had developed a rickettsia, an infection that severely compromised his health.  Until then, none of us knew there was such a thing. 

A tick's butt on the left, head on the right.

A rickettsia is a kind of bacteria, a class of microbes that includes Rocky Mountain Fever and other typhus sorts of afflictions.  Bugs carry them: fleas, lice, skeeters, etc.  “They are one of closest living relatives to bacteria that were the origin of the mitochondria organelle that exists inside most eukaryotic cells.”  By now many of us are aware that our cells have many little bubbles of inclusions with cell walls and DNA of their own.  Evolution at its most amazing and powerful took place when the planetary soup was just giving rise to one-celled “animals” -- animated and self-determining as they cruised where they could to find what would help them survive, taking in bits of everything else and throwing off what was no longer needed.  

This is the heart of “fitness”, that the endeavor matches the result.  Bits of DNA, technically viruses, never really formed into anything more than that.  Bits of DNA absconded from established cells and took up life on different terms, if you could call it life.  Some won’t.  They want their cell walls!  No cell wall, no life!  As if a virus cared.  To say nothing of virions, which are bits of virus floating around on their own.  The bits keep getting bittier.

When I first moved back to the East Slope about fifteen years ago, I thought I was evading the crowded cities and their diseases.  But one of the worst cases of flu I ever had came from helping to turn bales in a field that had been shared by free-ranging pigs and migrating waterfowl.  We’re on one of the major flight paths.  I read about it later.  Cases of contagious disease that go back and forth between species have always interested me, partly because my mother survived the Spanish Flu and partly because of myself not being affected by a national wave of flu in 1957, just as I started college.  We both derived a sense of imperviousness.  Quite unwarranted.  My immunity to measles, chicken pox and scarlet fever was acquired the old-fashioned way:  I had ‘em and survived.

But when I was an animal control officer and going in and out of houses full of sick people, muck, feces, rodents and bugs of all kinds, I didn’t worry about it very much, even though our shelter veterinarian (trained in public health) reminded us that Portland is a port city, which means the rats carry to shore every kind of scuttling life on the planet.   Even so, the rabies case that turned up was brought in by a wealthy man with his son and a “found” dog from the street in Mexico.  They evaded the border because the man piloted his own plane.  The animal control staff had rabies vaccinations.  No one knew whether they would really work.

  

In the Eighties when I was a circuit-riding minister, one of our most beloved parishioners in Bozeman, developed some kind of brain affliction.  No one understood it, though Bozeman is a college town on the cutting edge of this stuff.  Over the years it became clearer as a prion disease, called Alzheimer’s, but then I couldn’t find any literature on the Internet (by now I was googling like mad) about what a prion was.  Beef ranchers obsess about brucellosis, which is bacterial and causes bovine abortions.  If people catch it, it will lodge in their joints and plague them for life.  Maybe they should worry more about elk chronic wasting disease, which is a prion (misfolded protein -- now we know) contagion that isn’t even alive -- just infectious.  But now some think prions are produced by spiroplasma bacteria, strange wall-less cells.  Not quite virus.

I’m saying that the new paradigm of world-wide existence no longer has cell-walls itself.  In fact, truly addressing the ebola epidemic, which could easily get far more out of hand, means removing the walls of disciplines, the walls of nations, the walls of stigma that we have depended upon to keep boundaries and limits, our basic principle of existence.  Now we must go to DNA, and that means code: everything is code.  Our bodies, societies, lines of inquiry about the world, moralities, economies -- all code at the core.

Nathan Wolfe’s book, “The Viral Storm, the Dawn of a New Pandemic Age,” was published in 2011, before the current crisis.  Therefore it is calm but prescient and persuasive.  David Quammen is writing a new book about Ebola, building on his previous work in “Spillover,” which covers some of the same thought.  

Wolfe spends a lot of time thinking about hunting in Africa where it was bushmeat that let HIV and ebola (the most notorious examples) jump to humans.  In that part of the world, these things are personal so he was a participant, eating everything, catching malaria just like everyone.  He sees patterns.  He speaks of “background chatter” of code in the same sense as diplomatic capture and sifting of information in the hopes of predicting danger.  He compares the constant code webbing of viruses among themselves to the constant code webbing among kids on smart phones.  Hidden, often unsuspected, powerful in subtle ways. 

In 1990 Judy Comes at Night was teaching coding to her fifth grade classes in Heart Butte when the rest of us hardly knew what software was and there was no access to the internet.  (She died of cancer, a cellular code failure.) Once satellite service developed and the computers left the desktops to inhabit pockets, they became a poor person’s necessity and a young person’s access to the world.  Code swarms.  Poor tribal kids living on the fringe, “speaking World”.  So far the East Slope has not been investigated in the way that Wolfe’s jungle hunters have been indexing viruses in animal blood.  Most of us no longer hunt for meat the way we used to.  Maybe with luck it will turn out that the high level of ultraviolet light, temp extremes, and the dry grasslands will not host so many little invaders of humans.  I doubt it.  I think they will just be tougher.

The unique method of Wolfe’s hunters is to collect blood samples as they go, very simply on little cards of filter paper.  They needn’t be refrigerated and can be turned in for a small reward.  What has been revealed is more of the same massive paradigm shift of understanding that is deeply changing thought about human behavior.  We talk about the Anthropocene, but these recent insights are at the same level as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment and just as powerful -- maybe more. Everything is interactions in patterns.  Even the line between life and not-life has been erased.  Kids know.  Zombies!

Instead of attacking the bush meat hunters, as conservationists are wont to do in defense of valued species, Wolfe sees that that bush meat hunters are innocently surviving, but also -- more crucially -- redefines them as “sentinels” watching what turns out to be a great squirming complex of interactions, some definable as viruses mutating and interacting.  It turns out that HIV is a long-ago weaving of at least two simian IV’s, slightly mutated, conveyed to chimps (who also hunt bush meat) who were the jump donors to the world pandemic.   And that the blood of these hunters is saturated with many versions of SIV, HIV, and their antibodies -- among other microbes, some entirely unknown until now.

Now I’m going to make a leap.  It’s no secret that for almost a decade I’ve been following along with a group that tries to get young male sexworkers off the city streets.  Families in economic distress take it out on their children and find excuses to get rid of them: drugs, gay, defiance, HIV, truancy, whatever.  The male path is a little different from that of the female, which is somehow romanticized.  It's easier to throw a boy out.  Or make them leave.

Street Boy Sentinel

These boys in their “jungle survival” engage in extreme behavior -- violence, drugs, infection, cons, scams and hustles (which they mostly learn by barely surviving them) -- as arduous as hunting monkeys in the jungle (which also requires endurance and strategy).  What if they, too, were made virus sentinels, recording blood, spit and spunk on filter paper?  What if in major cities the cruising streets (which are easily found by watching smartphone activity in the transmission towers) each had a machine like an ATM that provided clean filter paper cards, then later accepted them back with samples and spit out a five dollar bill.  Cameras would have to be absent and police, public health workers, and obsessed customers must be somehow blocked.  The machines would have to be secret, because our righteous public order-keepers are predatory.  Our systems of control are cell-based, literally.  Incarceration.  Confinement.  Quarantine. Walls.  Stigma, which is a wall. 

Guinea worm mature and emerging.

We are told that guinea worms have been eliminated from human infection -- a great triumph!  But then it turns out that the pariah dogs that clean the streets by eating garbage and carrion, including human corpses, are loaded with guinea worms, which they get from eating contaminated fish guts discarded by humans.  How hunters survive, what they are hoping to capture in the web of life, is always changing.  All walls are temporary.