The pink, the pink, the pink

In the mid-90s, when I was working at George Brown College, I was also a volunteer at the AIDS Committee of Toronto, writing and copy-editing their volunteer newsletter. When the AIDS Walk for Life came around, I organized a walk team for George Brown. It was (and remains) a very important cause for me; I lost many friends and acquaintances to the disease. While I was running around the campus putting up posters and soliciting pledges, one of my coworkers, a woman who was probably 10 or more years my senior, said to me wistfully -- and possibly with a bit of resentment in her tone, in fact -- "You know, many more people die of breast cancer every year than die of AIDS, yet the AIDS cause has all this media coverage and and all these fundraisers. I wish people would pay as much attention to the fight against breast cancer."

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I probably wondered if her comment was a bit homophobic. I knew she had survived breast cancer, but at the time, that disease was very distant from my radar screen. Almost nobody in my fairly large family had ever had cancer of any kind; I was in my mid-30s and planning, as people in their mid-30s do, to live forever, and, moreover, to be healthy forever. Breast cancer was something that happened to a handful of other women, not to me.

Fast-forward a little over a decade. I am now a two-year breast cancer survivor (and I'm happy to say my former colleague is still with us, as well). And you cannot walk a block in my city, or watch TV for more than an hour, or surf the Internet, without running into the ubiquitous pink ribbon. Breast cancer is the cause du jour, and it seems to know no bounds. The other day I saw a billboard for a brand of chewing gum that featured the familiar ribbon loop carved into a piece of pink gum. Professional sports players wore pink jerseys during games to raise breast cancer awareness. Not long ago the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation sent me a survey that involved evaluating different stylized pink-ribbon logos, and asked me to be part of a focus group. Breast cancer has to be one of the most successful brands ever invented.

Of course, I'm grateful. But leaving aside the argument that too much effort and money is spent by the breast cancer charity machine on a cure and not enough on prevention, I'm also a little embarrassed by the saturation of the marketplace by the ailment that, I admit, may kill me yet. I know there are people who, like my former colleague, must look wistfully and resentfully at the pink juggernaut and wonder why their disease -- whether it be colitis or ALS or prostate cancer -- doesn't get the same attention. I think of Cheryl Hawkes, the widow of journalist Bill Cameron, who died of esophageal cancer. She is trying to leverage Bill's fame to bring a little attention to that disease, which she says is on the rise (and which claimed my dad's youngest brother this year), but has found there's very little infrastructure in place for fundraising and awareness.

Women's ailments were ignored for years, it's true. I admire the women and men who mobilized so much clout for the breast cancer cause -- the squeaky wheel, and all that. If you want help, you have to go out and find a way to get it -- you can't wait for the government to find the money to cure everything. And it's typical of marketing that some causes get more time in the sun than others. The public has only so much attention span, and we can't focus on everything at once. But the situation is hardly equitable. The breast cancer bandwagon, like the AIDS bandwagon, smacks more than a little of political correctness and fashion now. Thus does the pendulum swing.

UPDATE: A former student of mine sends a link to www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org, a little cartoon from the anti-establishment Breast Cancer Action group that criticizes companies' use of the breast cancer cause to sell more stuff.

Guilt & Pleasure

I've been working on an interesting project recently, as temporary copy editor of Guilt & Pleasure Quarterly, whose tag line is "Making Jews Talk More." The magazine sprang from the salon on Jewish culture that Mireille Silcoff (whom I met when we were working at Saturday Night magazine) set up when she moved from Montreal to Toronto. Her goal was to bring together young Jews, not necessarily affiliated with religious organizations, to talk about what it means to be Jewish today. She hooked up with a group called Reboot to launch salons all over North America and is editor in chief of G&P (I think their backing comes from the Bronfman family philanthropical funds). The quarterly is great fun; it's a literary magazine of ideas, with lots of historical and archival stuff on Jewish traditions of the past, but the tone is often edgy, comical, and hip/serious, never politically correct, much like Mireille herself. She's the epitome of cool while being painfully bright, and what I thought was simply cleverness has turned out, as seen in this magazine, to be a keen intelligence and concern about community.

G&P is also highly visual (designed in Toronto by illustrator Marco Cibola of Nove Studio). Beautiful layouts of old "Hebrew Comedy" sheet music, striking photos of young casualties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and excerpts from graphic novels make it great to look at. Articles are by prominent Jewish writers from around the globe, many of them academics, playwrights, comics. The upcoming third issue, whose theme is magic, contains everything from an examination of the figure of the golem by Nathaniel Deutsch, to a memoir about the near-conversion of the writer Lisa Crystal Carver (formerly sexually outrageous punk rocker Lisa Suckdog), to a hilarious excerpt from a play in progress by David Auburn (Proof, The Lake House) about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, to a piece on Hitler's Jewish psychic.

I'm just filling in as copy editor because of a maternity leave, so I won't be doing it after this issue, but it's been a pleasure to work on a magazine of ideas again. (Interestingly, G&P is published out of New York, but Mireille lives mainly in Montreal, and the editors and art director are in Toronto -- and mainly, like me, aren't Jewish.) You can read G&P online, too, at www.guiltandpleasure.com, and here's a link to an article in New York's The Jewish Week about its founding.

Little things...

The weather this week has been so astoundingly wonderful, I am trying to savour every moment to remember when the swamp returns. For a week, it's been sunny, cool and dry. My house is on the chilly side, in fact. I've been bicycling to the Beach as often as possible. I feel wonderful.

Yesterday I walked across a local elementary schoolyard while the kids were out playing at recess. Three little boys, about six or seven, were playing hopscotch on the pavement. I hear so much today about the fact that kids don't play the schoolyard games we played when we were kids -- Ordinary Solitary, marbles, etc. Teachers who've been trying to revive those games blame their disappearance on the diverse ethnic backgrounds found in your average Toronto school -- but I don't get that. We learned those games from the kids who were just a little older than us, and we taught them to those who were younger. The only time games stopped being transmitted to the next group of kids was when the school outlawed them for some reason (I recall marbles disappeared that way when I was in Grade 4 or so, I can't recall why -- too much unscrupulous marble-trading, I think). I would have thought that no amount of ethnic diversity could stop that knowledge transmittal on the schoolyard.

In any case, when I was young, no self-respecting boy would ever have been caught playing hopscotch, which was decidedly a girls' game. It was refreshing to see the little boys at my local school playing the game. Perhaps it's just as well the traditions of my childhood didn't all get passed along...

This afternoon on the radio a Trinidadian man was interviewed at a bar about the soccer World Cup -- he exuberantly touted the Trinidad and Tobago soccer team, ending his little speech by saying, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it!" The announcers seemed to get a huge kick out of this exhortation, presumably thinking it a feature of Caribbean speech. I laughed out loud -- my mother used to say that all the time when I was a little girl, and she's a Canadian of German descent. I wonder where it comes from.

Woman, thy name is...confusing

On CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition this morning, Michael Enright talked about a female friend's dismay that her niece is taking her husband's family name when she gets married.

I’ve never married, so I’ve never had to face the decision of whether or not to take a man’s family name – but I was intrigued by Enright's characterization of the dilemma women face as a choice between cutting oneself off from either one’s history or one’s future. I don't think that's an easy choice. I sent The Sunday Edition an e-mail saying:

Though I'm pretty sure I'd keep my father's name, no system seems to satisfy -- how about men and women keeping their surnames, but giving male children the father's surname and female children the mother's? It can't be any stupider than what we do at present.

At least we don’t often see the old practice of calling a woman by her husband’s first AND last names, save when we’re trying to be a tad sarcastic. I got a glimpse of the way this custom not only erased women’s identities but led to some confusion when I happened to read a booklet that outlined the history of the Lutheran church congregation to which my grandparents and their relatives belonged many years ago, in the tiny town of Alice, Ontario, which is outside of Pembroke. In a chapter called “The Role of Women in the Church Life of St. Peter’s 1866-1940” we read that “It can be conjectured that most of the church organists were women. The first factual evidence of this can be found however only in the minute book of January 3, 1934, when Miss Grace Born was asked to fill this position. Mrs. Wilbert Stencill followed her in 1936 and received for her labours not a salary but a gift of $10.” No need to worry that Miss Grace Born might have envied the generous stipend given to her successor, Mrs. Wilbert Stencill, since Miss Born and Mrs. Stencill were one and the same person. But how could the writer of this history have known from reading the old minute books that the organist had remained unchanged between 1934 and 1936 -- except that my Great-Aunt Grace had, in fact, married my Great-Uncle Wilbert?

Meanwhile, I discovered when I was teaching business writing to college students that the younger generation (God, it feels weird to use that phrase) hasn't a clue what the honorific title "Ms." means. Of course, Ms. was intended as a substitute for both Miss and Mrs., conflating the two, in keeping with the sensible notion that there is no reason a woman's title should reveal her marital status if a man's title doesn't. The idea was to have two parallel titles: Ms. and Mr. But when I asked class after class of students what Ms. meant, I always got the same answer: "It means a divorced woman, doesn't it?" I can only assume this misconception comes from the fact that because Ms. never completely caught on, since it became current in the 1970s, the designers of forms have attempted to please everyone and offend no one by giving us four boxes to check off: Mr., Mrs., Miss and Ms. Why would it occur to young people that one of those titles is meant to subsume two of the others? Logic tells them that Ms. must stand for something that is mutually exclusive of the other two female titles -- and if it isn't "married" or "single," it must mean "divorced"! Makes perfect sense, sadly.

Perhaps we should have adopted the system used in French and German, whereby a young woman is called "Miss" until she is "mature," at which time she becomes "Mrs." (i.e., Madame, Frau) regardless of whether she's married or single. That is, provided we used a similar system for men...

You call it an ad; we call it a lie

Friends have responded to the previous post about An Inconvenient Truth pointing to the ad campaign launched by the oil industry-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute to counter the movie's claim that we ignore global warming at our peril. One of the slogans: "Carbon dioxide -- They call it pollution. We call it life."

You can read a New Republic story here (free; registration required) that describes and debunks the anti-Gore campaign.

I have a link to the ads. Unlike many liberals, I support strongly the right of any idiot to buy advertising making whatever claims they like (on the theory that suspicious-sounding ads should make us suspicious of ALL ads -- the notion that we can divide ads into those that are true and those that aren't is preposterous).

However, I also have no intention of linking to the ads here -- it's my personal choice not to reproduce and disseminate the CEI's ads for them. (That's why blogging is not journalism, I suppose.)

An Inconvenient Truth

When I was a teenager, I was invited to go to a double bill at the Espanola movie theatre by some friends in Espanola. Coming from an even smaller town, I had rarely gone to a movie theatre and it was an exciting invitation. One of the movies was a horror flick whose name and plot I had entirely forgotten within 24 hours, and during it the girls screamed satisfyingly while the boys took advantage of their fear. I thought it was boring. The other movie was called No Blade of Grass, an apocalyptic tale whose tag line, imdb.com tells me, was "A virus of doom envelops Earth! No room to run! No place to hide!" I think it was a horrible movie, but its violent portrayal of people confronting hordes that coveted their food and shelter was far more terrifying to me than the slasher flick.

Last night I went to see the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, and came away feeling much the way I felt when I saw that awful movie in the mid-70s, but worse. It's hard to find words for how scary this documentary is. It's essentially a film of "the former next president of the United States" Al Gore giving a slide presentation on the climate crisis, as he insists on calling it, using a lot of charts and graphs. You wouldn't think such a film could keep you awake, let alone be riveting, but it does and it is. I never thought I'd hear a movie audience gasp at the sight of a line on a graph, but I did.

I also don't know where Gore's reputation for being wooden, geeky and pedantic comes from, because he comes across as engaging, funny and articulate. Quite apart from the despair one feels at the thought of losing our planet, one comes away from the movie thinking that but for those U.S. Supreme Court judges in 2000, this smart, thoughtful guy could have been the leader of the free world for the past six years instead of Bozo Bush. It's demoralizing to speculate, "what if."

And yet, one review criticizes Gore's record as Bill Clinton's vice-president, and claims he wasn't nearly as vigilant as he could have been on the environmental front during his tenure. Which may simply prove that ex-politicians are the only people who get to speak the truth.

Is this film the truth? Even the negative reviews I've read don't suggest his science isn't solid; RealClimate.org takes him to task on a few points, but agrees with most of what he says. And though the presentation is slick, the film is not nearly as manipulative as anything from the Michael Moore oeuvre. Of course, it can be seen as an attempt to get people to vote for Gore should he decide to run for president again (a Time.com reviewer said the film should be titled, "Elect me, or we'll all die"). (Oh, and then there's the fact that Gore's Apple Powerbook is on display in every other shot -- apparently he's on Apple's board.)

But the data is organized and displayed so that anybody can understand it, the photos of glaciers today and 20 years ago are starkly telling, and the story they tell is nothing short of devastating. Interspersed with the data are some clips designed to make us trust Gore and fear for the planet, like the computer-animated polar bear who can't find an ice floe to crawl onto in a warm sea.

Margaret Wente recently wrote in her Globe and Mail column, in her usual contrarian way, that the "polar bears are drowning" theory is a myth. She quoted a single biologist who said so, and nobody else. (This not long after she took Wendy Mesley to task, fairly enough, for calling on too few scientists and using too much anecdotal journalism in her "the environment is causing cancer" documentary on CBC TV.)

Is Gore trustworthy? David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, A.O. Scott in The New York Times, and David Edelstein in New York magazine seem to think so. After the graphs that show carbon dioxide levels going literally off the charts, and temperatures climbing with them (not, as many skeptics claim, simply moving up and down as they have done since the earth was born), and the increasing number of violent storms, etc. etc., the most arresting figure Gore presents is that out of almost 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles that were surveyed in a meta-study, not a single one denied the existence of a global warming crisis. But a similar study of articles in the popular press revealed more than half suggested it might be just a theory, not a real crisis. Of course, I don't know how the 1,000 academic articles were chosen.

But if he's right, we're in seriously big trouble. As he did in his Vanity Fair article, Gore tries hard to point out that if we move from disbelief straight to despair, and are too paralyzed to act, we're toast -- he says it is within our power to do something, in his opinion. His faith in democracy is touching, given his career in politics. But his conclusion is stark: if we don't do something right now, within a very few years (perhaps 10) there will be catastrophic storms and flooding and drought that will change life on the planet in terrible ways and cause the deaths of millions.

Liam Lacey writes in The Globe and Mail:

Here is a man who was almost the American president, who declares that global warming is here and, unless checked, will lead to catastrophic results. If Al Gore is wrong, the argument demands a responsible and thorough refutation; if, on the whole, he is right, then we need to make changes, fast.

The problem is, how much longer can we go on saying "If he's right"? At what point do we say, we can't wait any longer? Who leads us to make the decision? We can only make it for ourselves, as individuals.

You can see a trailer of An Inconvenient Truth -- and learn more about what we can do (including a quiz to determine what your carbon-emissions impact is) -- here.