GIVE UP THE TURKEYS

The problem of misplaced concreteness

(One of daily cartoons from nakedpastor.com)

This Thanksgiving, more than others, I’m hearing stories of distress, even panic and despair.  All the time the conventional news obsesses about dozens of people blown to pieces here or hundreds buried in mudslides there or thousands displaced by political genocide.  And all the time in the background there are what I call “pencil deaths,” those caused by the failure to allot budget resources needed for what are known effective and justified alleviations of misery.  Equally lethal miseries are created by the obsessive accrual of wealth, too much for anyone to spend so that in the end it amounts only to more pencil shenanigans in attempts to hide it.

It’s not just the ugliness in the US among the high and mighty.  It sweeps the nations of the world and challenges the very concept of nations at all.  “United” was supposed to help, but the UN is overwhelmed by the far more powerful international corporations, imitations of human systems that are clearer robotics than any industrial revolution style machines.

The Industrial Revolution threw a net of railroads over the planet, now being completed in the eastern parts of Eurasia but not quite in the African jungles.  The cyber-revolution has picked up the challenge on the Internet.  No one knows what will happen.  So far, it has been a great step forward for the isolated villages of Africa, allowing banking and commerce that had been prevented by inaccessibility.  No doubt new ideas and a sense of pushing-back horizons have begun.

Russia was probably the first to realize the great power of the Internet to interfere in other nations.  It’s hard to know whether the chaos now in countries used to the Rule of Law and institutional support of values have been destabilized by the Second Cold War or whether worn out arrangements made at the end of WWII has created the perfect storm that invites gaming the systems.

The Baby Boomers are dying of old age.  Most of them refused to learn to type — that was for women — so never could really keyboard and therefore have a pretty tough time getting their minds around this new landscape.  They’re busy trying to squeeze a bit more power and money out of their jobs — those that still have jobs — particularly our “elected” representatives who mostly got into their titles by seeming benign and having good connections.

It’s been good for me.  I never really grasped the publishing industry, though I had writing skills.  Long-form blogs are just the ticket for me, though I’m careful to keep paper copies.  But I’m no gamer.  I take games too seriously and I hate to lose.  The aspect of the internet I’m most thankful for is that it resolves the choice between the great adventure of thought possible at a fine university (and the glamour of fine things) — and the quiet prairie small-town connection that is the bone of me.  

I was raised in the closed family arrogance that has plagued so many people, that method of living based on the replication and defense of whatever has already happened, preventing all change.  The stubbornness and high-mindedness of my high school teachers (esp. the dramatics teacher, Mrs. Sparks) shoved me out into the “greater” (bigger) world of university and implanted the idea that no matter how elite and vital it was, there was always somewhere another group of people who were more, above, deeper, (and all the Lakoff-noted metaphors that convey challenge, never-endingness), the unfolding of awareness that humans can do across the generations.

That got me into seminary which took me where no one expected me to go: circuit-riding around Montana in a van; associating with an extraordinary set of UU male politically- incorrect-but-vital ministers just before they were broken up by an invasion of feminists who insisted on mommie values; an extremely cold sojourn in Saskatoon; and a slow path back to the Blackfeet rez, or just off it, where somehow all that has coalesced into meaning.  From here via keyboard I can stay connected to the indigenous people of the north, my former students on the rez (baby boomers — the millennials are their grandchildren and very different), and a diaspora of boys of many kinds everywhere.  I can sit here and explore the incredible advances in understanding of the human body, things that doctors don’t have time to read about, so that I go to appointments with printouts in hand.  

Unitarianism is one of the institutions that have shifted and dissolved over time.  The other is my birth family which had three roots because the Pinkerton sisters all married Hatfield brothers, so that was a double root; and then my mother, who wanted the city, married my father, a rural man who never quite committed to the city though he marvelled at the Industrial Revolution.  They were all three branches on the cusp of the shift from a nation that lived on farms to cities that have grown so much they are being spoken of as the natural replacement for nations.  

The Pinkerton-Hatfields never left the idea of the one-celled family that taught its children to get ahead, and some of them still raise sheep.  In the craving for prosperity, some made compromises and some suffered bad luck.  I’m not in touch with any of them.  They sheltered one of my damaged brothers for a while, but didn’t know how to confront and contain dementia — not even for their own Alpha males, so my brother died.  The other brother does not communicate.

On the Strachan side there are literate, keyboard-competent female cousins and we keep in touch.  But they are dedicated to family, safety, secrecy that they think of as discretion, and the prevention of change.  We’re the same age, all born in the same month, but quite different in terms of education.  We can relate — with effort.

The denomination I once felt was the answer to everything has disintegrated.  Opportunistic minorities looking for status accurately assessed it as a way to become genteel.  Women looking for power thought ministry would provide that but were mistaken.  These folks get cranky and pick fights.  They’re not my quarrels and their values still belong to the last century, though they are supposed to be permanent.  There’s nothing wrong with them — they’re just not enough.  Anyway, the don’t practice them any more than Christians practice Christianity.

Once in a while I feel as though I’m not trying hard enough, aging too quickly, too dominated by cats, not keeping my lawn cut.  It’s not that I’m not admired and loved enough, because that doesn’t really matter.  Because, oh, do I have the best objects of admiration and love and I love them as hard as I can — even when it bugs them.

SEROTONIN BASED MORALITY

Acknowledging that all animals are complex processes who move through the world by taking in sensations and processing them electrochemically, which tells us what to do, then it’s only logical to find out which part of the process works towards the good and the happy.  Serotonin is one of the important players.   A shortage makes you “depressed.”  Enough makes you pleased and amorous.  Too much?  Trouble.  Outside homeostasis.

I’m basing this post on the New York Academy of Sciences article at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3817523/

This "pop" website might be more suited to other readers.  It’ll keep you busy but be warned.  They misspell a lot of words, which means either that they don’t proof or they are not readers.  Still, who can object to eating sunflower seeds?  You’ll need your credit card — these folks are selling.

https://bodyecology.com/articles/boost_serotonin_happiness_heals_brain.php

I was first prompted to be curious about serotonin when I read “Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leather Sexuality.” by Geoff Mains, a shocking but beloved book and man.  Because he had a doctorate in biochemistry, he related serotonin to radical sexual behavior in the “leather” community, some of it prompted by PTSD.  This took medical mysteries into daily life.  His papers are archived at www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c83b60qk/  
The “finding aid” is at http://www.glbthistory.org/research/FA/glbths_1989_03_GeoffMains_FA.pdf  There are restrictions because society is still so squiffy and punishing about sex.  The links may be suppressed.

Serotonin is ancient and mammal-ominpresent.  (Our kind of sex is a mammal phenomenon.  Reptiles don’t fall in love.)  It keys into everything from sugar to weed to the tryptophan in the Thanksgiving turkey.  (ncbi.nim.nih says the turkey thing is a myth.)   A map of where it operates in the brain almost exactly matches what is called “the social brain,” particularly the parts involved in social cognition and decision making.  Even in monkeys, abundant molecules “co-vary” with prosocial behavior (grooming, cooperation and affiliation) and when low, matches with aggression and social isolation.  Deficient serotonin matches with depression.  (One can’t help speculating that our whole culture is serotonin deficient.)

“Moral codes dictate how people should treat one another, and most of these focus on two facets of social relationships. The first prescribes caring for others and prohibits harm; the second relates to the fair distribution of resources and reciprocity in social interactions.  Concerns for harm and fairness play a central role in moral codes across cultures, and there is some evidence that these building blocks of morality shape social behavior in primates.”

Chimps can be killers; bonobos are always lovers.  The diff may be partly in their serotonin.  There is evidence that serotonin and similar hormones are what create personalities and that the proportions and actions are inheritable.  People who are harm-averse (high serotonin) do not rape.  But there are two other valences: those who are disgusted by harm to people and therefore get out of there; and those who become aggressive in the face of harm.  High serotonin that triggers aversion may be useful for predicting problematic situations to avoid.

QUOTES:

Early studies in rats demonstrated that global brain serotonin depletion made them insensitive to punishment.

Cooperative behaviors in social dilemmas have been linked to serotonin function.

The association between serotonin and social reward processing dovetails with previous reports linking serotonin function to the processing of non-social rewards and recent studies showing that social and monetary rewards engage overlapping regions of the striatum. Collectively, these findings indicate that the role of serotonin in value computation goes beyond a simple enhancement or inhibition of reward processing in general; instead, serotonin's effects appear to depend on the social context. We suggest that serotonin amplifies neural representations of positive social preferences, whereas serotonin depletion shifts neural value computations toward selfish or even negative social preferences.

Assuming that people are predisposed to cooperate in social dilemmas (i.e., that their indifference curves are downward-sloping, absent concerns about inequality), serotonin augmentation should shift preferences further counterclockwise, making people more cooperative, whereas serotonin depletion should shift preferences clockwise, making people less cooperative.  Finally, previous studies have shown that serotonin manipulations influence aggressive behavior, particularly in people predisposed to aggression. Assuming that aggressive individuals have upward-sloping indifference curves (i.e., they are motivated to harm others) serotonin augmentation again should shift preferences counterclockwise, reducing aggression, whereas serotonin depletion should shift preferences further clockwise, increasing aggression.

This sort of inquiry is only suggestive, not definitive.  We don’t know enough to say that all politicians should be tested for their serotonin levels, but it does suggest that the general public is susceptible to persons with serotonin deficits who don’t want to cooperate, don’t want to avoid harm, don’t want fair shares for everyone.  We don’t vote for bonobos — we vote for chimps — as long as they seem to be on our side.

Unconscious efforts to make serotonin go up may include eating sweets, going for a walk at first light, eating foods high in tryptophan, like chickpeas.  In my experience chocolate, sex and praise make my serotonin go up — but it might involve some other interacting hormone as well.

“Breeding corn with a higher tryptophan content was shown in the 1980s to prevent pellagra; presumably, it also raised brain serotonin. In a recent issue of Nature Biotechnology, Morris and Sands argue that plant breeders should be focusing more on nutrition than on yield. They ask, “Could consumption of tryptophan-rich foods play a role in reducing the prevalence of depression and aggression in society?” Cross-national studies have reported a positive association between corn consumption and homicide rates and a negative association between dietary tryptophan and suicide rates.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2077351/

SOME MORAL REASONS FOR SHARING SOCIETY VIA THANKSGIVING DINNERS:

https://www.brainmdhealth.com/blog/4-ways-to-boost-your-serotonin/

As much as 95 percent of the serotonin in your body is produced in your gut, so strategies designed to optimize gut production of serotonin could certainly go a long way toward optimizing your mental health. Make sure you are taking a quality probiotic, properly hydrating, and eating a brain-healthy diet.

There are two ways that food can increase serotonin levels. Foods high in simple carbohydrates, such as pastas, potatoes, bread, pastries, pretzels, and popcorn, increase insulin levels and allow more tryptophan (the natural amino acid building block for serotonin) to enter the brain, where it is converted to serotonin.The calming effect of serotonin can often be felt in thirty minutes or less by eating these foods. This may be one of the reasons simple carbohydrates are so addictive. 

They can be used to make you feel happy, but also cause high blood sugar levels that over time are associated with brain atrophy and dementia. I particularly like complex carbohydrates, such as sweet potatoes, apples, blueberries, carrots, and garbanzo beans, as a healthier way to boost serotonin. Brain serotonin levels can also be raised by eating foods rich in L-tryptophan, such as chicken, turkey, salmon, beef, nut butter, eggs, and green peas. Many people unknowingly trigger cognitive inflexibility or mood problems by eating diets that are low in L-tryptophan.  

They don’t call it comfort food for nothing, and with enough serotonin and proper opportunity, people naturally love to comfort each other.  This is good for everyone.

TURKEYS

This is Ethel and John Pinkerton, my maternal grandparents, on their Roberts Creek farm near Roseburg, Oregon. Turkeys were all the rage at the time -- the idea was that a person could get rich raising turkeys. Of course, the turkey bubble -- like all bubbles -- burst, but they made enough to scrape by. It was a close thing in those days. World War II was a close thing. We just now dare to speculate about what would have happened if "we" had not won.

Turkeys are quite different these days. So are grandparents and so are we. Beyond that, it's our way of understanding the world that has changed most radically. For some of us, "we" is so radically inclusive that we are convinced that what each of us does matters in a deep way that changes everything.

For this, we are grateful.

HERITAGE TURKEYS

These are my maternal grandparents, John and Ethel Pinkerton, maybe in the early Forties.   I was a pre-schooler when they and a lot of other people in the country thought they would get rich raising turkeys. I remember these turkeys vividly, because when I went out to their yard at an age when I was hardly taller than they were, they suddenly turned and advanced on me, en masse. I was sure their intentions were dishonorable because even as individuals they looked nothing like chickens. I KNEW chickens. I even FED chickens. It never occurred to me that the turkeys might have rushed me because they thought I was going to feed them.

Mary Strachan (later Scriver) and chickens.

As it turns out, turkeys are kind of tricky to raise. They catch diseases. They don’t come in out of the rain. They die of disinterest or something. The other problem is that every time there’s a craze for raising something or other, EVERYONE does it and that means that when it’s time to sell, there are too many chinchillas, guinea pigs, ostriches or turkeys. The market is flooded: no profit.

These turkeys my grandparents raised were not the white front-loaded monstrosities that people eat now. They weren’t that many generations removed from wild turkeys, which are fairly wily and resourceful. In fact, YouTube has several vids showing turkeys on the attack. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhh68bITXM8 Clearly, I was right to be wary.

Today, sixty years later, in Roseburg on the ranches of my relatives, there are wild turkeys, or maybe feral turkeys, which they feed inside box traps until they want to eat one. Then they simply drop the trapdoor. That way, you don’t have to worry about losing a tooth by biting into a shot pellet on Thanksgiving.

When I told Bob Scriver about this, he got all excited and wanted a wild turkey to mount for the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now dispersed. My aunt sent a gobbler, frozen, in the mail. I had walked to get the mail and at first set off for home with the turkey in my arms but it was very big and very cold -- I ended up dragging the package down the road by the strings. Bob mounted it against the wall and put a spotlight on it, so it looked splendidly iridescent and indigenous with its wings spread out and its wattles authentically spray-lacquered. Ben Franklin would have approved. It was iconic.

When I found these photos at the top, I spent a long time looking at them -- not the turkeys, but my grandparents. I don’t remember them at this stage in their lives. My grandmother died of cancer, quite young. She was a sweet, gentle woman. Her funeral was the first I ever went to. At this stage my grandfather, whom we called “Pop,” because that’s what my mother called him, was still the fiery, contentious, and promising young gent he continued to think he was until he was a doddering old man. He died in the Roseburg, Oregon, truck explosion in 1959. A load of fertilizer -- not at all meant to be a bomb -- was parked downtown and spontaneously blew up, cratering twelve square blocks. Pop was sleeping on the sofa under a picture window that blew in, but that didn’t hurt him. He thought it was World War III, an atomic bomb, and had a heart attack, dying a few days later. I don’t think he wondered why Roseburg, a quiet timber town in those days, would be bombed. I think he believed that he himself was likely to be the target in a World War.

The marriage of my grandparents was one of those “opposites attract” or at least fit-together relationships. Ethel Cochran’s mother had died young and her step-mother was critical and overbearing. John Pinkerton was quite willing to be Ethel’s champion.  It was a love match.  My mother was the oldest daughter and quite a lot like her Pop, though she tried to be like her Mom. Father and daughter ran headlong into each other -- two fierce fighting birds. But yet in the Fifties when it was clear to my mother that she needed to finish college so she could take up the economic slack my father left, it was “Pop” who came through with the tuition money. At last. For he had started to put her through college in the Thirties. For the last year she attended, he presented her with a bag of seed corn, a big leased mule, and a piece of bottomland. The idea was that if she could get a good corn crop, it would pay the tuition. She did get a good crop. It was not enough money. What made her bitter was discovering later that there was a family scholarship for which she qualified, but he never told her about it out of pride. He considered it charity.

This is the mule. She had no fondness for it and the writing on the photo was NOT the name of the mule, which has gone unrecorded.

My parents’ marriage was a flipped-over version of my grandparents’ marriage -- that is, my mother was the ferocious proud one and my father was the quiet gentle one. If you were in danger, you needed my mother. If you wanted a splinter removed, you went to my father. My mother taught me to drive a nail straight. My father taught me to sweep a floor thoroughly without raising a lot of dust. In both marriages, the man traveled and the woman stayed put. In both marriages, the man never quite made enough money. My grandmother raised chickens and sold the eggs. After her aborted college years my mother worked in town, carrying the eggs in and bringing the money back. She generally threw in a little of her own money without letting anyone know. I think my grandmother suspected and was grateful.

My life has been nothing like the lives of these two women, or their husbands either, though superficially I inherited my father’s love of books and even some of the actual books. But in some way their lives have taught me how to take on the turkeys and the mules of life. (I could figure out the cats and chickens without help.) I’m thankful for that heritage.

THE STORY CONTINUES

Last Thanksgiving I was a guest for dinner across the alley at the Andersons. Eli brought a turkey, Rose cooked it, and Wayne and I were appreciative. Rose died of cancer last spring. Eli and Wayne were killed in a car crash this fall. Eli took a plate to Lee, who lived alone in an old warehouse. This year Lee has been taken to a nursing home. I’m thankful for last Thanksgiving, which was a happy day.

This year I acquired a grand-nephew, a baby so big he’s always in the ninetieth percentile on the growth charts. His papa is in the timber business, so I figure he’s a throwback to Paul Bunyan. Just week, I discovered that the house where I grew up is now owned by a bright and handsome professional couple with a two-year-old named “Finn.” I’m thankful for these two babies named for mythic characters.

I’m thankful for ten years in this house, and looking forward to the next ten. I came to write and that’s what I’m doing. My thanks are fervent for my co-writer, Tim Barrus, and the guys who are so important to him -- and me.

Yesterday I found the following url of a video that struck me so hard I was weeping. It’s made a big impression on other folks as well. Commissioned by Harvard in order to teach elementary cell biology it animates scientifically accurate events and entities in one human cell. It looks like cosmic ballet with humorous little bits and then amazing sequences like Hubble telescope photographs of galaxies, the birth of stars. The second url is comments by the studio that made the animation. They say it is as accurate as possible, except that they had to put in far more space than is between these molecules in your cells as you sit there. All this stuff is crammed together in one tiny skin.

http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/6850.html


This is quoted from the second url:

“The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students, won’t draw the kind of box office crowds that more ferocious ˜and furrier˜ digital creations did last Christmas. But it will share a place along side them in SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theatre show, which will run for three days during the 33rd annual exhibition and conference in Boston next month. Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

“Nuclei, proteins and lipids move with bug-like authority, slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space. “All of those things that you see in the animation are going on in every one of your cells in your body all the time,” says XVIVO lead animator John Liebler, who worked with company partners David Bolinsky, XVIVO’s medical director, and Mike Astrachan, the project’s production director, to blend the academic data and narrative from Harvard’s faculty into a fluid visual interpretation. “First, we couldn’t have known where to begin with all of this material without significant work done by Alain Viel, Ph.D. [associate director of undergraduate research at Harvard University], who wrote and guided the focus to include the essential processes that needed to be described to complement the curriculum and sustain an interesting narrative. I’ve been in the medical animation field for seven years now, so I’m a little jaded, but I still get surprised by things. For instance, in the animation there’s a motor protein that’s sort of walking along a line, carrying this round sphere of lipids. When I started working on that section I admit I was kind of surprised to see that it really does look like it’s out for a stroll, like a character in a science fiction film or animation. But based on all the data, it’s a completely accurate rendering.”

Anthropomorphizing white blood cells is familiar to the Cinematheque guys who struggle daily with HIV, which eliminates white blood cells, exposing the guys to mortality. To stay alive they must know more about their cells than most people do. This high awareness can be a burden but it is nothing compared to the burden of ostracism and blame that society throws at them.

I subscribe to academic “aggregators” about the environment and nature-writing, about Westerns, Western history, animals, arts and book reviews. A steady flow of ideas and information comes through this old computer. Recently H-Amerindian ran a short clip noting that in Manitoba the demographics of HIV-AIDS has shifted from gay single guys to families, because the origin of the infection has moved from blood exchange through sex to blood exchange through contaminated needles used for drugs. They said it is now typical to have one member of a family come in for treatment, to test the rest of the family, and discover that even the newborns are infected. This is a function of poverty. The drugs treat fear, starvation, and abuse.


At one point in the history of Cinematheque, a history as crammed together and complex as the workings of a cell, the guys began to take Sustiva. They were living in an old warehouse that had small spaces for each to have a studio/bedroom. On the first night of Sustiva, Tim asked the boys to sleep in pairs or trios so that no one would wake alone in the night, because the drug -- which can pass the brain barrier in pursuit of the HIV virus -- causes terrifying dreams.

I told Rose about all this and we shared a concern for these guys, esp. the youngest, so we cooked up a fantasy to make ourselves feel better. We pretended that we were able to go to that dormitory in the deepest part of night and trail around in our old lady nightgowns among the boys, putting our hands on their heads to reassure them. It was kind of goofy and we made it funny by saying Rose didn’t have her teeth in. But imagining such a thing did have some power, at least for us. Tim told the boys.

The epigraph on Cinematheque’s blog is by Picasso: “Everything you can imagine is real.” Let us imagine a better world, even as we are thankful for this one.