Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 862
February 16, 2016
Thomas Piketty says Bernie Sanders can “change the face of the country”
In a new op-ed published in the Guardian on Tuesday, famed French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty credits Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders with waking the larger American political establishment up to the problem of rising income inequality and channelling the Democratic electorate's righteous outrage. Piketty says that Sanders' campaign proves that a leader like Sanders—if not Sanders himself—“could one day soon win the U.S. presidential elections and change the face of the country.” "Because he is facing the Clinton machine, as well as the conservatism of mainstream media, Sanders might not win the race," Piketty observes, but, "in many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections." Both former president Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama have failed to even attempt real tax reform, allowing for inequality to run rampant, according to Piketty. "Sanders’ success today" however, Piketty argues, "shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality and these so-called political changes, and intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism":
Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a higher minimum wage ($15 an hour). To this he adds free healthcare and higher education in a country where inequality in access to education has reached unprecedented heights, highlighting a gulf standing between the lives of most Americans, and the soothing meritocratic speeches pronounced by the winners of the system."Meanwhile," Piketty notes, "the Republican party sinks into a hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam discourse (even though Islam isn’t a great religious force in the country), and a limitless glorification of the fortune amassed by rich white people." And Sanders' rival, Hillary Clinton, is now "just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama political regime." Despite observing that "the judges appointed under Reagan and Bush have lifted any legal limitation on the influence of private money in politics," Picketty is not resigned to doom, instead crediting the Sanders campaign with offering a real counter to fight unlimited campaign contributions rather than succumbing to its power. "New forms of political mobilization and crowdfunding can prevail and push America into a new political cycle," Picketty wrote. "We are far from gloomy prophecies about the end of history."
Ben Carson admits the truth about GOP’s Scalia hypocrisy: Republicans would not wait to pick their own SCOTUS replacement
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing this weekend may come to be remembered as the day Republicans officially gave up any veneer of respectability and threw out even the slightest modicum of decorum in their blisteringly fast rush to politicize the conservative jurists' replacement process. Hours after Scalia's death was announced, Ben Carson
February 15, 2016
Kanye is right about the Grammys: The music industry needs to fix its whiteness problem, too
If you’re a gambling person, don’t bet against Taylor Swift at this year’s Grammys. Although many critics favor Kendrick Lamar to win album of the year for his critically beloved “To Pimp a Butterfly”—2015 winner of the prestigious Pazz and Jop poll—the 26-year-old pop star is widely expected by Grammy insiders to take home the evening’s top prize for “1989” instead. Pundits on Gold Derby are currently backing Swift by 50 percentage points. That would be Swift’s second win in the category after her 2009 win for “Fearless.” History is certainly on Swift’s side. Recent best album winners like Daft Punk, Mumford and Sons, Arcade Fire and Adele all have something key in common—they’re all white. An artist of color hasn’t won album of the year since Herbie Hancock's 2008 win, a problem that Kanye West called out last year when he nearly stormed the stage to interrupt Beck as he accepted a surprise win over Beyoncé. (To widen the frame of reference further, in the last 40 years, 12 of the album of the year awards have gone to artists of color.) Beyoncé's self-titled visual album redefined the music industry when she released it without prior press in December 2013, but she settled for wins in the R&B song categories. If Kanye once suggested that George Bush didn’t care about black people, the same can be said of the Grammy Awards, at least in recent years: The ceremony will continue to dismiss the musical contributions of people of color because the Grammys simply do not value black artists on the same level as their white peers. In a year that brought us #OscarsSoWhite and the continued conversation about racial inclusion at the Academy Awards, the public has yet to recognize that the Grammys have the same problem: They’re extremely white—and only getting whiter. Each year, the Grammys present a stage that exhibits a post-racial ideal of diverse artists of varying backgrounds coming together for artistic collaboration. The show brought together U2 and Mary J. Blige in 2006 for a transcendent rendition of the Irish band’s classic “One,” as well as Ed Sheeran, Questlove, John Mayer and Herbie Hancock for a performance of Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” last year. But even that utopian ethos is deceptive: Notice that Blige also offered backing vocals to Sam Smith in 2015 for “Stay With Me,” but the Grammys have yet to enlist Adele and Lady Gaga to jam out in the background of “Family Affair.” That’s because the Grammys like their diversity when it has a white face at the center. In the history of the Grammys, only two hip-hop acts have ever earned album of the year—Outkast for “Speakerboxx/The Love Below” in 2004 and Lauryn Hill for “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” back in ‘99. A hip-hop album wasn’t even nominated until 1990, when M.C. Hammer’s “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” broke that glass ceiling for rap artists at Grammys. Since then, album of the year has passed over far more deserving records—2Pac’s “All Eyez on Me” and Jay-Z’s “Reasonable Doubt” in 1997—for fare like Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You.” If you have to ask whether Jay-Z or 2Pac even made the album of the year shortlist, clearly you’ve never seen the Grammys. In fact, the Grammys didn’t even recognize hip-hop albums as their own separate competitive category until 1996 — to use a reference a Grammy voter might recognize, that's a full decade after the Beastie Boys released "License to Ill." Naughty by Nature’s “Poverty’s Paradise” became the first-ever rap album winner; before then, the group had only previously given awards to rap singles, not entire LPs. Since Eminem won his first rap album Grammy in 2000 for “The Slim Shady LP,” white artists have dominated the category. Although white artists account for just 11 percent of rap nominees in the past 16 years, acts like Eminem and Macklemore make up 35 percent of the category’s winners. As the CBC’s Jesse Kinos-Goodin points out, it’s not just that the Grammys favor white artists overall, but that they almost always win any time they are nominated for a rap album award, too. “Kanye is the only rapper to ever win the award against a white artist (he beat the Beastie Boys in 2005 and Eminem in 2006),” Kinos Goodin writes. Perhaps that’s the reason why Eminem currently holds the record for most rap album awards—with six victories (over winless artists like Nelly, Mos Def, Common, the Roots, and Childish Gambino). The past two winners—Marshall Mathers (2015) and Macklemore (2014)—have both been white. A couple of years ago, Macklemore stoked the flames of controversy by apologizing to Kendrick Lamar of “robbing” him for the best rap album award via a text message after he left the stage, rather than calling attention to the Grammys' double standard in his speech. (The rapper—née Ben Haggerty—then reposted the exchange to his Instagram.) The apology, I’m sure, was well-intentioned, but Haggerty missed the point: Because the Grammys seem to believe that white artists sell (and black ones don’t), the awards are designed to rob everyone who doesn’t look like Macklemore. As Salon’s Brittney Cooper told the Los Angeles Times, “Black stars are not seen as crossover stars and are often relegated to traditionally black categories.” This means that Kanye West—one of the most dominant and acclaimed musicians of the past decade—has never won an award outside the Rap and R&B genres. This would be less of an issue if those wins were on the same playing field as prizes like album or record of the year, but genre is treated as a lesser phenomenon, so much so that the Grammys don’t even air the presentation for rap album during the ceremony. They’re pushed to an awards banquet held earlier in the day. The group’s disrespect for genres specific to non-white musicians was particularly clear in 2012, when the Grammys decided they didn’t need to be giving so many awards to people of color. “They decided to siphon off 31 jazz, world music and Latin-centric categories from the Grammys,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Raquel Cepeda. Latin jazz artist Bobby Sanabria called it “subtle form of racism,” protesting the decision along with musicians Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, and Carlos Santana. The Grammys would save face by bringing back its Latin jazz award—at the expense of all the other musicians who got shown the door. What’s unusual about the Grammy’s tortured relationship with genre is that historically, this wasn’t always the case. In the 1970s, revered R&B and soul singer Stevie Wonder won three album of the year awards, while Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston all took home the same prize in the next two decades. Their groundbreaking wins were reflective of a music industry where artists of color were gaining increasing amounts of radio play. Research from Vocativ shows that in the late '90s and early 2000s, when rap ruled the airwaves, the Billboard Hot 100 was evenly split between musicians of color and white artists. As research from Vocativ shows, that diversity peaked around 2003—rapidly declining in the years since. Today, mainstream radio is the whitest that it’s been in 40 years, as over 80 percent of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 are Caucasian. If it seems Grammys have followed suit, that disguises an important fact: The success of artists like Stevie Wonder and Natalie Cole were always outliers. At the apex of diversity, non-white musicians accounted for less than 10 percent of Grammy nominees—despite the fact that in 2000, people of color made up around 30 percent of the population. As the industry has become whiter, so have the Grammy Awards. These days, the Grammys like R&B, hip-hop, jazz and Latin-inspired music best when they have a white person to vote for. In 2000, Santana won his first album of the year award after his Rob Thomas-sung “Smooth” went No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 weeks. After being nominated twice, Ray Charles nabbed a posthumous award for "Genius Loves Company," a duets album that features a roster of the whitest people ever: Michael McDonald, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt and Diana Krall. Herbie Hancock won his 2008 album of the year trophy for singing Joni Mitchell covers. When it comes to the nominations, at least, this year represents a modicum of progress: 2016 is the first time since 2005 that people of color boast the majority of album of the year nominees—the Weeknd, Alabama Shakes and Kendrick Lamar all earned bids. But not a single non-white artist is favored to win in the lead categories: In addition to Swift’s presumptive album win, she’s also expected to earn song of the year over Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again”—which was the bigger hit. Record honors will likely go to the Bruno Mars-sung “Uptown Funk,” which feels like something. However, it’s Mark Ronson’s song—Mars is just the vocals. Seven years ago, Kanye famously started this debate about who wins music awards and why when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech during the 2009 VMAs, arguing that Beyoncé deserved the honor. The public backlash made West a pariah in the music industry, writing “Runaway” in response to his regret and self-loathing over the incident (it’s the closest you’ll get to Kanye apologizing). But close to a decade later, history is repeating itself, as Swift is poised to win yet another award over more deserving black artists. If Kanye snatches Taylor Swift’s microphone on Sunday, it’s time to listen to what he has to say. You might hate Kanye West, but you have to admit that he’s been right all along.If you’re a gambling person, don’t bet against Taylor Swift at this year’s Grammys. Although many critics favor Kendrick Lamar to win album of the year for his critically beloved “To Pimp a Butterfly”—2015 winner of the prestigious Pazz and Jop poll—the 26-year-old pop star is widely expected by Grammy insiders to take home the evening’s top prize for “1989” instead. Pundits on Gold Derby are currently backing Swift by 50 percentage points. That would be Swift’s second win in the category after her 2009 win for “Fearless.” History is certainly on Swift’s side. Recent best album winners like Daft Punk, Mumford and Sons, Arcade Fire and Adele all have something key in common—they’re all white. An artist of color hasn’t won album of the year since Herbie Hancock's 2008 win, a problem that Kanye West called out last year when he nearly stormed the stage to interrupt Beck as he accepted a surprise win over Beyoncé. (To widen the frame of reference further, in the last 40 years, 12 of the album of the year awards have gone to artists of color.) Beyoncé's self-titled visual album redefined the music industry when she released it without prior press in December 2013, but she settled for wins in the R&B song categories. If Kanye once suggested that George Bush didn’t care about black people, the same can be said of the Grammy Awards, at least in recent years: The ceremony will continue to dismiss the musical contributions of people of color because the Grammys simply do not value black artists on the same level as their white peers. In a year that brought us #OscarsSoWhite and the continued conversation about racial inclusion at the Academy Awards, the public has yet to recognize that the Grammys have the same problem: They’re extremely white—and only getting whiter. Each year, the Grammys present a stage that exhibits a post-racial ideal of diverse artists of varying backgrounds coming together for artistic collaboration. The show brought together U2 and Mary J. Blige in 2006 for a transcendent rendition of the Irish band’s classic “One,” as well as Ed Sheeran, Questlove, John Mayer and Herbie Hancock for a performance of Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” last year. But even that utopian ethos is deceptive: Notice that Blige also offered backing vocals to Sam Smith in 2015 for “Stay With Me,” but the Grammys have yet to enlist Adele and Lady Gaga to jam out in the background of “Family Affair.” That’s because the Grammys like their diversity when it has a white face at the center. In the history of the Grammys, only two hip-hop acts have ever earned album of the year—Outkast for “Speakerboxx/The Love Below” in 2004 and Lauryn Hill for “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” back in ‘99. A hip-hop album wasn’t even nominated until 1990, when M.C. Hammer’s “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” broke that glass ceiling for rap artists at Grammys. Since then, album of the year has passed over far more deserving records—2Pac’s “All Eyez on Me” and Jay-Z’s “Reasonable Doubt” in 1997—for fare like Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You.” If you have to ask whether Jay-Z or 2Pac even made the album of the year shortlist, clearly you’ve never seen the Grammys. In fact, the Grammys didn’t even recognize hip-hop albums as their own separate competitive category until 1996 — to use a reference a Grammy voter might recognize, that's a full decade after the Beastie Boys released "License to Ill." Naughty by Nature’s “Poverty’s Paradise” became the first-ever rap album winner; before then, the group had only previously given awards to rap singles, not entire LPs. Since Eminem won his first rap album Grammy in 2000 for “The Slim Shady LP,” white artists have dominated the category. Although white artists account for just 11 percent of rap nominees in the past 16 years, acts like Eminem and Macklemore make up 35 percent of the category’s winners. As the CBC’s Jesse Kinos-Goodin points out, it’s not just that the Grammys favor white artists overall, but that they almost always win any time they are nominated for a rap album award, too. “Kanye is the only rapper to ever win the award against a white artist (he beat the Beastie Boys in 2005 and Eminem in 2006),” Kinos Goodin writes. Perhaps that’s the reason why Eminem currently holds the record for most rap album awards—with six victories (over winless artists like Nelly, Mos Def, Common, the Roots, and Childish Gambino). The past two winners—Marshall Mathers (2015) and Macklemore (2014)—have both been white. A couple of years ago, Macklemore stoked the flames of controversy by apologizing to Kendrick Lamar of “robbing” him for the best rap album award via a text message after he left the stage, rather than calling attention to the Grammys' double standard in his speech. (The rapper—née Ben Haggerty—then reposted the exchange to his Instagram.) The apology, I’m sure, was well-intentioned, but Haggerty missed the point: Because the Grammys seem to believe that white artists sell (and black ones don’t), the awards are designed to rob everyone who doesn’t look like Macklemore. As Salon’s Brittney Cooper told the Los Angeles Times, “Black stars are not seen as crossover stars and are often relegated to traditionally black categories.” This means that Kanye West—one of the most dominant and acclaimed musicians of the past decade—has never won an award outside the Rap and R&B genres. This would be less of an issue if those wins were on the same playing field as prizes like album or record of the year, but genre is treated as a lesser phenomenon, so much so that the Grammys don’t even air the presentation for rap album during the ceremony. They’re pushed to an awards banquet held earlier in the day. The group’s disrespect for genres specific to non-white musicians was particularly clear in 2012, when the Grammys decided they didn’t need to be giving so many awards to people of color. “They decided to siphon off 31 jazz, world music and Latin-centric categories from the Grammys,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Raquel Cepeda. Latin jazz artist Bobby Sanabria called it “subtle form of racism,” protesting the decision along with musicians Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, and Carlos Santana. The Grammys would save face by bringing back its Latin jazz award—at the expense of all the other musicians who got shown the door. What’s unusual about the Grammy’s tortured relationship with genre is that historically, this wasn’t always the case. In the 1970s, revered R&B and soul singer Stevie Wonder won three album of the year awards, while Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston all took home the same prize in the next two decades. Their groundbreaking wins were reflective of a music industry where artists of color were gaining increasing amounts of radio play. Research from Vocativ shows that in the late '90s and early 2000s, when rap ruled the airwaves, the Billboard Hot 100 was evenly split between musicians of color and white artists. As research from Vocativ shows, that diversity peaked around 2003—rapidly declining in the years since. Today, mainstream radio is the whitest that it’s been in 40 years, as over 80 percent of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 are Caucasian. If it seems Grammys have followed suit, that disguises an important fact: The success of artists like Stevie Wonder and Natalie Cole were always outliers. At the apex of diversity, non-white musicians accounted for less than 10 percent of Grammy nominees—despite the fact that in 2000, people of color made up around 30 percent of the population. As the industry has become whiter, so have the Grammy Awards. These days, the Grammys like R&B, hip-hop, jazz and Latin-inspired music best when they have a white person to vote for. In 2000, Santana won his first album of the year award after his Rob Thomas-sung “Smooth” went No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 weeks. After being nominated twice, Ray Charles nabbed a posthumous award for "Genius Loves Company," a duets album that features a roster of the whitest people ever: Michael McDonald, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt and Diana Krall. Herbie Hancock won his 2008 album of the year trophy for singing Joni Mitchell covers. When it comes to the nominations, at least, this year represents a modicum of progress: 2016 is the first time since 2005 that people of color boast the majority of album of the year nominees—the Weeknd, Alabama Shakes and Kendrick Lamar all earned bids. But not a single non-white artist is favored to win in the lead categories: In addition to Swift’s presumptive album win, she’s also expected to earn song of the year over Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again”—which was the bigger hit. Record honors will likely go to the Bruno Mars-sung “Uptown Funk,” which feels like something. However, it’s Mark Ronson’s song—Mars is just the vocals. Seven years ago, Kanye famously started this debate about who wins music awards and why when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech during the 2009 VMAs, arguing that Beyoncé deserved the honor. The public backlash made West a pariah in the music industry, writing “Runaway” in response to his regret and self-loathing over the incident (it’s the closest you’ll get to Kanye apologizing). But close to a decade later, history is repeating itself, as Swift is poised to win yet another award over more deserving black artists. If Kanye snatches Taylor Swift’s microphone on Sunday, it’s time to listen to what he has to say. You might hate Kanye West, but you have to admit that he’s been right all along.
My accidental, alcohol-drinking pregnancy adventure
“What a day…” I said to my new husband, Josh, uncorking a bottle of cab before bed.
On my commute home earlier that evening, my best friend Madeleine had called from Portland, with News, out of nowhere. “I’m pregnant!” she cheered. I was happy for her, if overwhelmed by what it implied for me. The fact that Madeleine was having a baby meant that someday sooner than later, I might have to have one, too.
I hung up and dashed into a Thai restaurant, where my friend Kimmie was waiting—with more News of her own. Meanwhile, my little sister back East was well into her second trimester.
“I can’t believe this is happening already!” I cried to my husband, an aspiring father himself, as I curled into the fetal position on the couch with my goblet of red. “Why is every human I know pregnant?”
A few nights later, he and I went out for Mexican food with Kimmie and her boyfriend to celebrate. The three of us non-pregnant people toasted with tequila shots, followed by ginormous margaritas, while Kimmie clinked her sparkling water with lime and tried not to glower at us.
A month, maybe more, passed. My sister emailed me photos of her bulging belly. Madeleine and Kimmie’s pants grew tighter. I continued to pop my birth control pill every morning.
And my urban professional, semi-hedonistic, happy child-free life in San Francisco carried on. Josh and I went out for our weekly sushi fix, complete with sake and Sapporos and more nigiri than you’d expect a normal hungry couple to consume. I drank a double-shot latte every morning and a glass or two of wine, sometimes three, more nights than not. I ate soft cheese. I ate raw cheese. I ordered a processed turkey sandwich from the deli counter pretty much daily. I skied at 11,000 feet. I lolled in a hot tub or two. Once, home solo on a Friday night, I discovered a leftover joint in the coffee table, lit it, and looped reruns of Sex & the City.
Then a good friend who likes good food was visiting from Manhattan and we went out for what I now jokingly refer to as my Last Supper: a four-hour Michelin-starred meal, which kicked off with Prosecco and ended with port and had at least seven courses and as many wine pairings in between.
The next day my head hurt. But, oddly, my breasts hurt more.
I recalled Kimmie complaining about a similar symptom and rang her immediately.
“Maybe you should take a pregnancy test,” she advised. “Why would I do that? “I said. “I am on the pill!” But, then I remembered: I am also irregular. So, just to rule out the possibility, I swung by Walgreens and grabbed one of those purples E.P.T boxes I’d always assumed were for other people. And then, home alone in my bathroom, I watched as a fuzzy blue + appeared. Like Juno, I remained unconvinced, and frantically took another test. There it was again: +. WTF. As soon as Josh walked in the door, I showed him this strange cotton strip of an intrusion. Stunned, and late to meet friends, we tabled it and adjourned to dinner, where I didn’t touch my glass of wine. As if it matters at this point, I thought. My mind did a rapid rewind of the past few months. I had no idea how pregnant I was, if I really was pregnant. But either way, wasn’t the damage already done? The next day, I demanded an appointment with my doctor. She was on vacation and I was redirected to a white-haired old man I’d never met. A younger woman in a white coat sat by his side with a notepad, apparently a resident, there to learn the ropes. Trying to sound like the intelligent, responsible person that, up until then, I’d thought I was, I spilled my story, in between sobs. The pill… The tequila… The wine… Kind of a lot of wine, sometimes… I tried to make light of my predicament and put it in perspective. “I mean, aren’t there babies born to crack addicts every day who turn out fine?!” I said smiling weakly, waiting for him to tell me, Yes, yes, of course it’s fine. But instead he just gave me a strange look and said, deadpan, “No, those babies are generally not fine.” But I didn’t smoke crack! I reminded him, realizing he wasn’t getting my bad joke—or me. “Do you think this baby will be okay? I mean, should I not keep it??” I asked, searching for some sort of affirmation. He said nothing. I looked to the female resident; she remained silent. I sobered up from my hysteria. “Wait, are you telling me that because I drank alcohol, I should have an abortion?” I asked. “It’s your decision,” he said flatly. I walked out of the office and into the crowded elevator, wailing. I felt like one of those hapless 16-year-olds on that TLC show, “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant,” except I was 33 and newly married and fully employed and primed—by societal standards, at least— for motherhood. Later, at my first ultrasound, I was told I was 13 weeks, six days pregnant. Further along than both Kimmie and Madeleine, much to their amusement when I later broke my news. Somehow, a baby had invaded my body and I managed to sail through my entire first trimester—typically a trying, anxious time— without even realizing it. I have to admit, ignorance was indeed bliss. Had I known, I would’ve been like every other pregnant person out there: overly preoccupied, paranoid, and occasionally, insufferable. ** Women today are subject to a whole laundry list of worries regarding what not to ingest and not to imbibe and not to involve themselves in when pregnant. After the first article on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was published in the Lancet in 1973, alcohol eventually made its way to the top of the list, dropping into “occasionally okay” territory, whenever a report was released that said “light drinking” during pregnancy contributes to better behaved boys or some-such. More recently, it seems, the restrictions have intensified. I mean, bury yourself in Babycenter.com’s “Pregnancy Safety” section, and you may spiral into a virtual state of paralysis: Is it safe to take a bath? Is it safe to ride the bumper cars? Is it safe to use a smartphone? Is it safe to sleep in a waterbed? (Wait, does anyone even still sleep in a waterbed??) And now, last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took it a step further—by declaring what women ages 15 to 44 who are not pregnant should not do: Namely, drink alcohol. The backlash was, of course, rampant. Tweets and op-eds and rants posted all over the place calling the (albeit well-intentioned) suggestion condescending and unrealistic. (A favorite was from Kalyie Hanson who called herself the “pre-pregnant” national communications director for NARAL. “Okay, CDC. It’s not my glass of rose that’s the problem. It’s a culture that doesn’t respect women or trust us to make our own decisions.”) A friend of mine told me how someone on her Facebook feed linked to a news report saying the CDC recommends all women not on birth control abstain from alcohol, and she added the comment, “Oh yeah? Well I recommend you go suck a bag of dicks you sexist douche bags.” I prefer the way Rebecca Solnit put it. But hear, hear to the Internet's collective outcry. Plus, instilling fear in an entire population of people who may or may not—or may never even want to— become pregnant at some point is kind of absurd. I agree that the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current position makes good logical sense: the standard for pregnant women should be no drinking at all, since alcohol-related birth defects and developmental issues are “completely preventable when pregnant women abstain from alcohol use,” as a report released in October stated. But I do think, like many others, that the level of panic surrounding pregnancy has become overblown. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is real and tragic— and yes, completely preventable. For alcoholics, of course, it’s a serious problem. For frequent pregnant drinkers, it probably is too. But, I don’t know… if, once in a while, a pregnant woman waddles into a bar for a beer, is it really such a big deal? There’s this strange idea that from the moment a woman is impregnated she’s supposed to, somehow, avoid all risk. But a pregnant person is still a person—and, as people roaming the planet, we are constantly taking risks. When we cross the street (could get hit); when we go to the movies (could get shot); when we eat at Chipotle (if we ever eat at Chipotle again...). I commuted two-and-a-half hours a day in California traffic while I was pregnant. I wonder, really, which posed a greater threat: the wine I drank or Highway 101? Being a responsible pregnant woman, or parent, doesn’t mean eliminating risk —but managing it. Is it responsible for someone who is actively "trying" to drink four shots of bourbon or shoot-up heroin? Obviously not. But it does seem like a reasonable level of risk for a 30-year-old woman who is having sex and not on the pill to split a bottle of wine with her boyfriend at dinner. Who invited the CDC to the table? A lot of OBs will quietly tell you what mine —one of the most respected in San Francisco— did (once I finally got an appointment to see her). That this “no drinking while pregnant rule” is really in place because, well… if it wasn’t, some women would probably go nuts. I get it. I realize with the advent of the 44-ounce Super Big Gulp and the $9.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, Americans have lost a little credibility in the self-policing department. Still, whatever happened to the Socratic motto, “everything in moderation, nothing in excess”? When I got pregnant with my second kid, I knew it from the get-go. And, yes, I curbed it like a normal person. Still, during a weeklong vacation to Paris, while seven months pregnant with my son, I drank one glass of wine a night. (Despite the fact that, for the record, according to my server, French women actually don’t drink wine when they’re pregnant.) I’m not advocating women booze their way through their first trimester. Not even through their third. My story is just one data point in an amniotic sea of overwrought 21st century anxiety. Maybe it will move one newly pregnant woman to live a little and put lox on her bagel. Back in the Mad Men era, of course, pregnancy was considered a nine-month inconvenience at most, barely a reason to alter one’s lifestyle. Expectant mothers swilled martinis and smoked cigarettes, even swallowed diet pills if they’d gained too much baby weight (doctor's orders!). A vodka-and-OJ was essentially a welcome cocktail at some hospitals, believed to prevent premature labor. In the 19th century, physicians apparently suggested champagne to ease morning sickness. We’ve all guffawed over these outdated anecdotes. I clung to them constantly during the second half of my pregnancy, as friends consoled me with tales of their mothers’ gin-and-tonic habits that put my glass of wine or two to shame. My mom never drank, she still doesn’t, but she did smoke a pack a day while she was pregnant with me. (“The doctor said I could!” she reminds me, adding that they’d share a Parliament at every appointment.) I was four pounds and a month premature, but otherwise apart from seasonal allergies and non-pregnant neurotic tendencies, I’m alive and well. And so is my daughter. Friends told me I was lucky. To have so easily gotten pregnant. To have avoided worrying about every little thing, like they did. And though I felt anything but lucky at the time, looking back now, I realize of course I was, for so many reasons. Number one being now seven-year-old Hazel— a witty, sweet, little girl with wild curls and a wide smile— who dodged every obstacle I’d inadvertently thrown at her in utero, including a pill intended to prevent her very existence. And yet she emerged on that clear October day, a healthy, blue-eyed, tiny triumph.“What a day…” I said to my new husband, Josh, uncorking a bottle of cab before bed.
On my commute home earlier that evening, my best friend Madeleine had called from Portland, with News, out of nowhere. “I’m pregnant!” she cheered. I was happy for her, if overwhelmed by what it implied for me. The fact that Madeleine was having a baby meant that someday sooner than later, I might have to have one, too.
I hung up and dashed into a Thai restaurant, where my friend Kimmie was waiting—with more News of her own. Meanwhile, my little sister back East was well into her second trimester.
“I can’t believe this is happening already!” I cried to my husband, an aspiring father himself, as I curled into the fetal position on the couch with my goblet of red. “Why is every human I know pregnant?”
A few nights later, he and I went out for Mexican food with Kimmie and her boyfriend to celebrate. The three of us non-pregnant people toasted with tequila shots, followed by ginormous margaritas, while Kimmie clinked her sparkling water with lime and tried not to glower at us.
A month, maybe more, passed. My sister emailed me photos of her bulging belly. Madeleine and Kimmie’s pants grew tighter. I continued to pop my birth control pill every morning.
And my urban professional, semi-hedonistic, happy child-free life in San Francisco carried on. Josh and I went out for our weekly sushi fix, complete with sake and Sapporos and more nigiri than you’d expect a normal hungry couple to consume. I drank a double-shot latte every morning and a glass or two of wine, sometimes three, more nights than not. I ate soft cheese. I ate raw cheese. I ordered a processed turkey sandwich from the deli counter pretty much daily. I skied at 11,000 feet. I lolled in a hot tub or two. Once, home solo on a Friday night, I discovered a leftover joint in the coffee table, lit it, and looped reruns of Sex & the City.
Then a good friend who likes good food was visiting from Manhattan and we went out for what I now jokingly refer to as my Last Supper: a four-hour Michelin-starred meal, which kicked off with Prosecco and ended with port and had at least seven courses and as many wine pairings in between.
The next day my head hurt. But, oddly, my breasts hurt more.
I recalled Kimmie complaining about a similar symptom and rang her immediately.
“Maybe you should take a pregnancy test,” she advised. “Why would I do that? “I said. “I am on the pill!” But, then I remembered: I am also irregular. So, just to rule out the possibility, I swung by Walgreens and grabbed one of those purples E.P.T boxes I’d always assumed were for other people. And then, home alone in my bathroom, I watched as a fuzzy blue + appeared. Like Juno, I remained unconvinced, and frantically took another test. There it was again: +. WTF. As soon as Josh walked in the door, I showed him this strange cotton strip of an intrusion. Stunned, and late to meet friends, we tabled it and adjourned to dinner, where I didn’t touch my glass of wine. As if it matters at this point, I thought. My mind did a rapid rewind of the past few months. I had no idea how pregnant I was, if I really was pregnant. But either way, wasn’t the damage already done? The next day, I demanded an appointment with my doctor. She was on vacation and I was redirected to a white-haired old man I’d never met. A younger woman in a white coat sat by his side with a notepad, apparently a resident, there to learn the ropes. Trying to sound like the intelligent, responsible person that, up until then, I’d thought I was, I spilled my story, in between sobs. The pill… The tequila… The wine… Kind of a lot of wine, sometimes… I tried to make light of my predicament and put it in perspective. “I mean, aren’t there babies born to crack addicts every day who turn out fine?!” I said smiling weakly, waiting for him to tell me, Yes, yes, of course it’s fine. But instead he just gave me a strange look and said, deadpan, “No, those babies are generally not fine.” But I didn’t smoke crack! I reminded him, realizing he wasn’t getting my bad joke—or me. “Do you think this baby will be okay? I mean, should I not keep it??” I asked, searching for some sort of affirmation. He said nothing. I looked to the female resident; she remained silent. I sobered up from my hysteria. “Wait, are you telling me that because I drank alcohol, I should have an abortion?” I asked. “It’s your decision,” he said flatly. I walked out of the office and into the crowded elevator, wailing. I felt like one of those hapless 16-year-olds on that TLC show, “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant,” except I was 33 and newly married and fully employed and primed—by societal standards, at least— for motherhood. Later, at my first ultrasound, I was told I was 13 weeks, six days pregnant. Further along than both Kimmie and Madeleine, much to their amusement when I later broke my news. Somehow, a baby had invaded my body and I managed to sail through my entire first trimester—typically a trying, anxious time— without even realizing it. I have to admit, ignorance was indeed bliss. Had I known, I would’ve been like every other pregnant person out there: overly preoccupied, paranoid, and occasionally, insufferable. ** Women today are subject to a whole laundry list of worries regarding what not to ingest and not to imbibe and not to involve themselves in when pregnant. After the first article on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was published in the Lancet in 1973, alcohol eventually made its way to the top of the list, dropping into “occasionally okay” territory, whenever a report was released that said “light drinking” during pregnancy contributes to better behaved boys or some-such. More recently, it seems, the restrictions have intensified. I mean, bury yourself in Babycenter.com’s “Pregnancy Safety” section, and you may spiral into a virtual state of paralysis: Is it safe to take a bath? Is it safe to ride the bumper cars? Is it safe to use a smartphone? Is it safe to sleep in a waterbed? (Wait, does anyone even still sleep in a waterbed??) And now, last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took it a step further—by declaring what women ages 15 to 44 who are not pregnant should not do: Namely, drink alcohol. The backlash was, of course, rampant. Tweets and op-eds and rants posted all over the place calling the (albeit well-intentioned) suggestion condescending and unrealistic. (A favorite was from Kalyie Hanson who called herself the “pre-pregnant” national communications director for NARAL. “Okay, CDC. It’s not my glass of rose that’s the problem. It’s a culture that doesn’t respect women or trust us to make our own decisions.”) A friend of mine told me how someone on her Facebook feed linked to a news report saying the CDC recommends all women not on birth control abstain from alcohol, and she added the comment, “Oh yeah? Well I recommend you go suck a bag of dicks you sexist douche bags.” I prefer the way Rebecca Solnit put it. But hear, hear to the Internet's collective outcry. Plus, instilling fear in an entire population of people who may or may not—or may never even want to— become pregnant at some point is kind of absurd. I agree that the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current position makes good logical sense: the standard for pregnant women should be no drinking at all, since alcohol-related birth defects and developmental issues are “completely preventable when pregnant women abstain from alcohol use,” as a report released in October stated. But I do think, like many others, that the level of panic surrounding pregnancy has become overblown. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is real and tragic— and yes, completely preventable. For alcoholics, of course, it’s a serious problem. For frequent pregnant drinkers, it probably is too. But, I don’t know… if, once in a while, a pregnant woman waddles into a bar for a beer, is it really such a big deal? There’s this strange idea that from the moment a woman is impregnated she’s supposed to, somehow, avoid all risk. But a pregnant person is still a person—and, as people roaming the planet, we are constantly taking risks. When we cross the street (could get hit); when we go to the movies (could get shot); when we eat at Chipotle (if we ever eat at Chipotle again...). I commuted two-and-a-half hours a day in California traffic while I was pregnant. I wonder, really, which posed a greater threat: the wine I drank or Highway 101? Being a responsible pregnant woman, or parent, doesn’t mean eliminating risk —but managing it. Is it responsible for someone who is actively "trying" to drink four shots of bourbon or shoot-up heroin? Obviously not. But it does seem like a reasonable level of risk for a 30-year-old woman who is having sex and not on the pill to split a bottle of wine with her boyfriend at dinner. Who invited the CDC to the table? A lot of OBs will quietly tell you what mine —one of the most respected in San Francisco— did (once I finally got an appointment to see her). That this “no drinking while pregnant rule” is really in place because, well… if it wasn’t, some women would probably go nuts. I get it. I realize with the advent of the 44-ounce Super Big Gulp and the $9.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, Americans have lost a little credibility in the self-policing department. Still, whatever happened to the Socratic motto, “everything in moderation, nothing in excess”? When I got pregnant with my second kid, I knew it from the get-go. And, yes, I curbed it like a normal person. Still, during a weeklong vacation to Paris, while seven months pregnant with my son, I drank one glass of wine a night. (Despite the fact that, for the record, according to my server, French women actually don’t drink wine when they’re pregnant.) I’m not advocating women booze their way through their first trimester. Not even through their third. My story is just one data point in an amniotic sea of overwrought 21st century anxiety. Maybe it will move one newly pregnant woman to live a little and put lox on her bagel. Back in the Mad Men era, of course, pregnancy was considered a nine-month inconvenience at most, barely a reason to alter one’s lifestyle. Expectant mothers swilled martinis and smoked cigarettes, even swallowed diet pills if they’d gained too much baby weight (doctor's orders!). A vodka-and-OJ was essentially a welcome cocktail at some hospitals, believed to prevent premature labor. In the 19th century, physicians apparently suggested champagne to ease morning sickness. We’ve all guffawed over these outdated anecdotes. I clung to them constantly during the second half of my pregnancy, as friends consoled me with tales of their mothers’ gin-and-tonic habits that put my glass of wine or two to shame. My mom never drank, she still doesn’t, but she did smoke a pack a day while she was pregnant with me. (“The doctor said I could!” she reminds me, adding that they’d share a Parliament at every appointment.) I was four pounds and a month premature, but otherwise apart from seasonal allergies and non-pregnant neurotic tendencies, I’m alive and well. And so is my daughter. Friends told me I was lucky. To have so easily gotten pregnant. To have avoided worrying about every little thing, like they did. And though I felt anything but lucky at the time, looking back now, I realize of course I was, for so many reasons. Number one being now seven-year-old Hazel— a witty, sweet, little girl with wild curls and a wide smile— who dodged every obstacle I’d inadvertently thrown at her in utero, including a pill intended to prevent her very existence. And yet she emerged on that clear October day, a healthy, blue-eyed, tiny triumph.“What a day…” I said to my new husband, Josh, uncorking a bottle of cab before bed.
On my commute home earlier that evening, my best friend Madeleine had called from Portland, with News, out of nowhere. “I’m pregnant!” she cheered. I was happy for her, if overwhelmed by what it implied for me. The fact that Madeleine was having a baby meant that someday sooner than later, I might have to have one, too.
I hung up and dashed into a Thai restaurant, where my friend Kimmie was waiting—with more News of her own. Meanwhile, my little sister back East was well into her second trimester.
“I can’t believe this is happening already!” I cried to my husband, an aspiring father himself, as I curled into the fetal position on the couch with my goblet of red. “Why is every human I know pregnant?”
A few nights later, he and I went out for Mexican food with Kimmie and her boyfriend to celebrate. The three of us non-pregnant people toasted with tequila shots, followed by ginormous margaritas, while Kimmie clinked her sparkling water with lime and tried not to glower at us.
A month, maybe more, passed. My sister emailed me photos of her bulging belly. Madeleine and Kimmie’s pants grew tighter. I continued to pop my birth control pill every morning.
And my urban professional, semi-hedonistic, happy child-free life in San Francisco carried on. Josh and I went out for our weekly sushi fix, complete with sake and Sapporos and more nigiri than you’d expect a normal hungry couple to consume. I drank a double-shot latte every morning and a glass or two of wine, sometimes three, more nights than not. I ate soft cheese. I ate raw cheese. I ordered a processed turkey sandwich from the deli counter pretty much daily. I skied at 11,000 feet. I lolled in a hot tub or two. Once, home solo on a Friday night, I discovered a leftover joint in the coffee table, lit it, and looped reruns of Sex & the City.
Then a good friend who likes good food was visiting from Manhattan and we went out for what I now jokingly refer to as my Last Supper: a four-hour Michelin-starred meal, which kicked off with Prosecco and ended with port and had at least seven courses and as many wine pairings in between.
The next day my head hurt. But, oddly, my breasts hurt more.
I recalled Kimmie complaining about a similar symptom and rang her immediately.
“Maybe you should take a pregnancy test,” she advised. “Why would I do that? “I said. “I am on the pill!” But, then I remembered: I am also irregular. So, just to rule out the possibility, I swung by Walgreens and grabbed one of those purples E.P.T boxes I’d always assumed were for other people. And then, home alone in my bathroom, I watched as a fuzzy blue + appeared. Like Juno, I remained unconvinced, and frantically took another test. There it was again: +. WTF. As soon as Josh walked in the door, I showed him this strange cotton strip of an intrusion. Stunned, and late to meet friends, we tabled it and adjourned to dinner, where I didn’t touch my glass of wine. As if it matters at this point, I thought. My mind did a rapid rewind of the past few months. I had no idea how pregnant I was, if I really was pregnant. But either way, wasn’t the damage already done? The next day, I demanded an appointment with my doctor. She was on vacation and I was redirected to a white-haired old man I’d never met. A younger woman in a white coat sat by his side with a notepad, apparently a resident, there to learn the ropes. Trying to sound like the intelligent, responsible person that, up until then, I’d thought I was, I spilled my story, in between sobs. The pill… The tequila… The wine… Kind of a lot of wine, sometimes… I tried to make light of my predicament and put it in perspective. “I mean, aren’t there babies born to crack addicts every day who turn out fine?!” I said smiling weakly, waiting for him to tell me, Yes, yes, of course it’s fine. But instead he just gave me a strange look and said, deadpan, “No, those babies are generally not fine.” But I didn’t smoke crack! I reminded him, realizing he wasn’t getting my bad joke—or me. “Do you think this baby will be okay? I mean, should I not keep it??” I asked, searching for some sort of affirmation. He said nothing. I looked to the female resident; she remained silent. I sobered up from my hysteria. “Wait, are you telling me that because I drank alcohol, I should have an abortion?” I asked. “It’s your decision,” he said flatly. I walked out of the office and into the crowded elevator, wailing. I felt like one of those hapless 16-year-olds on that TLC show, “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant,” except I was 33 and newly married and fully employed and primed—by societal standards, at least— for motherhood. Later, at my first ultrasound, I was told I was 13 weeks, six days pregnant. Further along than both Kimmie and Madeleine, much to their amusement when I later broke my news. Somehow, a baby had invaded my body and I managed to sail through my entire first trimester—typically a trying, anxious time— without even realizing it. I have to admit, ignorance was indeed bliss. Had I known, I would’ve been like every other pregnant person out there: overly preoccupied, paranoid, and occasionally, insufferable. ** Women today are subject to a whole laundry list of worries regarding what not to ingest and not to imbibe and not to involve themselves in when pregnant. After the first article on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was published in the Lancet in 1973, alcohol eventually made its way to the top of the list, dropping into “occasionally okay” territory, whenever a report was released that said “light drinking” during pregnancy contributes to better behaved boys or some-such. More recently, it seems, the restrictions have intensified. I mean, bury yourself in Babycenter.com’s “Pregnancy Safety” section, and you may spiral into a virtual state of paralysis: Is it safe to take a bath? Is it safe to ride the bumper cars? Is it safe to use a smartphone? Is it safe to sleep in a waterbed? (Wait, does anyone even still sleep in a waterbed??) And now, last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took it a step further—by declaring what women ages 15 to 44 who are not pregnant should not do: Namely, drink alcohol. The backlash was, of course, rampant. Tweets and op-eds and rants posted all over the place calling the (albeit well-intentioned) suggestion condescending and unrealistic. (A favorite was from Kalyie Hanson who called herself the “pre-pregnant” national communications director for NARAL. “Okay, CDC. It’s not my glass of rose that’s the problem. It’s a culture that doesn’t respect women or trust us to make our own decisions.”) A friend of mine told me how someone on her Facebook feed linked to a news report saying the CDC recommends all women not on birth control abstain from alcohol, and she added the comment, “Oh yeah? Well I recommend you go suck a bag of dicks you sexist douche bags.” I prefer the way Rebecca Solnit put it. But hear, hear to the Internet's collective outcry. Plus, instilling fear in an entire population of people who may or may not—or may never even want to— become pregnant at some point is kind of absurd. I agree that the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current position makes good logical sense: the standard for pregnant women should be no drinking at all, since alcohol-related birth defects and developmental issues are “completely preventable when pregnant women abstain from alcohol use,” as a report released in October stated. But I do think, like many others, that the level of panic surrounding pregnancy has become overblown. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is real and tragic— and yes, completely preventable. For alcoholics, of course, it’s a serious problem. For frequent pregnant drinkers, it probably is too. But, I don’t know… if, once in a while, a pregnant woman waddles into a bar for a beer, is it really such a big deal? There’s this strange idea that from the moment a woman is impregnated she’s supposed to, somehow, avoid all risk. But a pregnant person is still a person—and, as people roaming the planet, we are constantly taking risks. When we cross the street (could get hit); when we go to the movies (could get shot); when we eat at Chipotle (if we ever eat at Chipotle again...). I commuted two-and-a-half hours a day in California traffic while I was pregnant. I wonder, really, which posed a greater threat: the wine I drank or Highway 101? Being a responsible pregnant woman, or parent, doesn’t mean eliminating risk —but managing it. Is it responsible for someone who is actively "trying" to drink four shots of bourbon or shoot-up heroin? Obviously not. But it does seem like a reasonable level of risk for a 30-year-old woman who is having sex and not on the pill to split a bottle of wine with her boyfriend at dinner. Who invited the CDC to the table? A lot of OBs will quietly tell you what mine —one of the most respected in San Francisco— did (once I finally got an appointment to see her). That this “no drinking while pregnant rule” is really in place because, well… if it wasn’t, some women would probably go nuts. I get it. I realize with the advent of the 44-ounce Super Big Gulp and the $9.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, Americans have lost a little credibility in the self-policing department. Still, whatever happened to the Socratic motto, “everything in moderation, nothing in excess”? When I got pregnant with my second kid, I knew it from the get-go. And, yes, I curbed it like a normal person. Still, during a weeklong vacation to Paris, while seven months pregnant with my son, I drank one glass of wine a night. (Despite the fact that, for the record, according to my server, French women actually don’t drink wine when they’re pregnant.) I’m not advocating women booze their way through their first trimester. Not even through their third. My story is just one data point in an amniotic sea of overwrought 21st century anxiety. Maybe it will move one newly pregnant woman to live a little and put lox on her bagel. Back in the Mad Men era, of course, pregnancy was considered a nine-month inconvenience at most, barely a reason to alter one’s lifestyle. Expectant mothers swilled martinis and smoked cigarettes, even swallowed diet pills if they’d gained too much baby weight (doctor's orders!). A vodka-and-OJ was essentially a welcome cocktail at some hospitals, believed to prevent premature labor. In the 19th century, physicians apparently suggested champagne to ease morning sickness. We’ve all guffawed over these outdated anecdotes. I clung to them constantly during the second half of my pregnancy, as friends consoled me with tales of their mothers’ gin-and-tonic habits that put my glass of wine or two to shame. My mom never drank, she still doesn’t, but she did smoke a pack a day while she was pregnant with me. (“The doctor said I could!” she reminds me, adding that they’d share a Parliament at every appointment.) I was four pounds and a month premature, but otherwise apart from seasonal allergies and non-pregnant neurotic tendencies, I’m alive and well. And so is my daughter. Friends told me I was lucky. To have so easily gotten pregnant. To have avoided worrying about every little thing, like they did. And though I felt anything but lucky at the time, looking back now, I realize of course I was, for so many reasons. Number one being now seven-year-old Hazel— a witty, sweet, little girl with wild curls and a wide smile— who dodged every obstacle I’d inadvertently thrown at her in utero, including a pill intended to prevent her very existence. And yet she emerged on that clear October day, a healthy, blue-eyed, tiny triumph.“What a day…” I said to my new husband, Josh, uncorking a bottle of cab before bed.
On my commute home earlier that evening, my best friend Madeleine had called from Portland, with News, out of nowhere. “I’m pregnant!” she cheered. I was happy for her, if overwhelmed by what it implied for me. The fact that Madeleine was having a baby meant that someday sooner than later, I might have to have one, too.
I hung up and dashed into a Thai restaurant, where my friend Kimmie was waiting—with more News of her own. Meanwhile, my little sister back East was well into her second trimester.
“I can’t believe this is happening already!” I cried to my husband, an aspiring father himself, as I curled into the fetal position on the couch with my goblet of red. “Why is every human I know pregnant?”
A few nights later, he and I went out for Mexican food with Kimmie and her boyfriend to celebrate. The three of us non-pregnant people toasted with tequila shots, followed by ginormous margaritas, while Kimmie clinked her sparkling water with lime and tried not to glower at us.
A month, maybe more, passed. My sister emailed me photos of her bulging belly. Madeleine and Kimmie’s pants grew tighter. I continued to pop my birth control pill every morning.
And my urban professional, semi-hedonistic, happy child-free life in San Francisco carried on. Josh and I went out for our weekly sushi fix, complete with sake and Sapporos and more nigiri than you’d expect a normal hungry couple to consume. I drank a double-shot latte every morning and a glass or two of wine, sometimes three, more nights than not. I ate soft cheese. I ate raw cheese. I ordered a processed turkey sandwich from the deli counter pretty much daily. I skied at 11,000 feet. I lolled in a hot tub or two. Once, home solo on a Friday night, I discovered a leftover joint in the coffee table, lit it, and looped reruns of Sex & the City.
Then a good friend who likes good food was visiting from Manhattan and we went out for what I now jokingly refer to as my Last Supper: a four-hour Michelin-starred meal, which kicked off with Prosecco and ended with port and had at least seven courses and as many wine pairings in between.
The next day my head hurt. But, oddly, my breasts hurt more.
I recalled Kimmie complaining about a similar symptom and rang her immediately.
“Maybe you should take a pregnancy test,” she advised. “Why would I do that? “I said. “I am on the pill!” But, then I remembered: I am also irregular. So, just to rule out the possibility, I swung by Walgreens and grabbed one of those purples E.P.T boxes I’d always assumed were for other people. And then, home alone in my bathroom, I watched as a fuzzy blue + appeared. Like Juno, I remained unconvinced, and frantically took another test. There it was again: +. WTF. As soon as Josh walked in the door, I showed him this strange cotton strip of an intrusion. Stunned, and late to meet friends, we tabled it and adjourned to dinner, where I didn’t touch my glass of wine. As if it matters at this point, I thought. My mind did a rapid rewind of the past few months. I had no idea how pregnant I was, if I really was pregnant. But either way, wasn’t the damage already done? The next day, I demanded an appointment with my doctor. She was on vacation and I was redirected to a white-haired old man I’d never met. A younger woman in a white coat sat by his side with a notepad, apparently a resident, there to learn the ropes. Trying to sound like the intelligent, responsible person that, up until then, I’d thought I was, I spilled my story, in between sobs. The pill… The tequila… The wine… Kind of a lot of wine, sometimes… I tried to make light of my predicament and put it in perspective. “I mean, aren’t there babies born to crack addicts every day who turn out fine?!” I said smiling weakly, waiting for him to tell me, Yes, yes, of course it’s fine. But instead he just gave me a strange look and said, deadpan, “No, those babies are generally not fine.” But I didn’t smoke crack! I reminded him, realizing he wasn’t getting my bad joke—or me. “Do you think this baby will be okay? I mean, should I not keep it??” I asked, searching for some sort of affirmation. He said nothing. I looked to the female resident; she remained silent. I sobered up from my hysteria. “Wait, are you telling me that because I drank alcohol, I should have an abortion?” I asked. “It’s your decision,” he said flatly. I walked out of the office and into the crowded elevator, wailing. I felt like one of those hapless 16-year-olds on that TLC show, “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant,” except I was 33 and newly married and fully employed and primed—by societal standards, at least— for motherhood. Later, at my first ultrasound, I was told I was 13 weeks, six days pregnant. Further along than both Kimmie and Madeleine, much to their amusement when I later broke my news. Somehow, a baby had invaded my body and I managed to sail through my entire first trimester—typically a trying, anxious time— without even realizing it. I have to admit, ignorance was indeed bliss. Had I known, I would’ve been like every other pregnant person out there: overly preoccupied, paranoid, and occasionally, insufferable. ** Women today are subject to a whole laundry list of worries regarding what not to ingest and not to imbibe and not to involve themselves in when pregnant. After the first article on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was published in the Lancet in 1973, alcohol eventually made its way to the top of the list, dropping into “occasionally okay” territory, whenever a report was released that said “light drinking” during pregnancy contributes to better behaved boys or some-such. More recently, it seems, the restrictions have intensified. I mean, bury yourself in Babycenter.com’s “Pregnancy Safety” section, and you may spiral into a virtual state of paralysis: Is it safe to take a bath? Is it safe to ride the bumper cars? Is it safe to use a smartphone? Is it safe to sleep in a waterbed? (Wait, does anyone even still sleep in a waterbed??) And now, last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took it a step further—by declaring what women ages 15 to 44 who are not pregnant should not do: Namely, drink alcohol. The backlash was, of course, rampant. Tweets and op-eds and rants posted all over the place calling the (albeit well-intentioned) suggestion condescending and unrealistic. (A favorite was from Kalyie Hanson who called herself the “pre-pregnant” national communications director for NARAL. “Okay, CDC. It’s not my glass of rose that’s the problem. It’s a culture that doesn’t respect women or trust us to make our own decisions.”) A friend of mine told me how someone on her Facebook feed linked to a news report saying the CDC recommends all women not on birth control abstain from alcohol, and she added the comment, “Oh yeah? Well I recommend you go suck a bag of dicks you sexist douche bags.” I prefer the way Rebecca Solnit put it. But hear, hear to the Internet's collective outcry. Plus, instilling fear in an entire population of people who may or may not—or may never even want to— become pregnant at some point is kind of absurd. I agree that the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current position makes good logical sense: the standard for pregnant women should be no drinking at all, since alcohol-related birth defects and developmental issues are “completely preventable when pregnant women abstain from alcohol use,” as a report released in October stated. But I do think, like many others, that the level of panic surrounding pregnancy has become overblown. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is real and tragic— and yes, completely preventable. For alcoholics, of course, it’s a serious problem. For frequent pregnant drinkers, it probably is too. But, I don’t know… if, once in a while, a pregnant woman waddles into a bar for a beer, is it really such a big deal? There’s this strange idea that from the moment a woman is impregnated she’s supposed to, somehow, avoid all risk. But a pregnant person is still a person—and, as people roaming the planet, we are constantly taking risks. When we cross the street (could get hit); when we go to the movies (could get shot); when we eat at Chipotle (if we ever eat at Chipotle again...). I commuted two-and-a-half hours a day in California traffic while I was pregnant. I wonder, really, which posed a greater threat: the wine I drank or Highway 101? Being a responsible pregnant woman, or parent, doesn’t mean eliminating risk —but managing it. Is it responsible for someone who is actively "trying" to drink four shots of bourbon or shoot-up heroin? Obviously not. But it does seem like a reasonable level of risk for a 30-year-old woman who is having sex and not on the pill to split a bottle of wine with her boyfriend at dinner. Who invited the CDC to the table? A lot of OBs will quietly tell you what mine —one of the most respected in San Francisco— did (once I finally got an appointment to see her). That this “no drinking while pregnant rule” is really in place because, well… if it wasn’t, some women would probably go nuts. I get it. I realize with the advent of the 44-ounce Super Big Gulp and the $9.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, Americans have lost a little credibility in the self-policing department. Still, whatever happened to the Socratic motto, “everything in moderation, nothing in excess”? When I got pregnant with my second kid, I knew it from the get-go. And, yes, I curbed it like a normal person. Still, during a weeklong vacation to Paris, while seven months pregnant with my son, I drank one glass of wine a night. (Despite the fact that, for the record, according to my server, French women actually don’t drink wine when they’re pregnant.) I’m not advocating women booze their way through their first trimester. Not even through their third. My story is just one data point in an amniotic sea of overwrought 21st century anxiety. Maybe it will move one newly pregnant woman to live a little and put lox on her bagel. Back in the Mad Men era, of course, pregnancy was considered a nine-month inconvenience at most, barely a reason to alter one’s lifestyle. Expectant mothers swilled martinis and smoked cigarettes, even swallowed diet pills if they’d gained too much baby weight (doctor's orders!). A vodka-and-OJ was essentially a welcome cocktail at some hospitals, believed to prevent premature labor. In the 19th century, physicians apparently suggested champagne to ease morning sickness. We’ve all guffawed over these outdated anecdotes. I clung to them constantly during the second half of my pregnancy, as friends consoled me with tales of their mothers’ gin-and-tonic habits that put my glass of wine or two to shame. My mom never drank, she still doesn’t, but she did smoke a pack a day while she was pregnant with me. (“The doctor said I could!” she reminds me, adding that they’d share a Parliament at every appointment.) I was four pounds and a month premature, but otherwise apart from seasonal allergies and non-pregnant neurotic tendencies, I’m alive and well. And so is my daughter. Friends told me I was lucky. To have so easily gotten pregnant. To have avoided worrying about every little thing, like they did. And though I felt anything but lucky at the time, looking back now, I realize of course I was, for so many reasons. Number one being now seven-year-old Hazel— a witty, sweet, little girl with wild curls and a wide smile— who dodged every obstacle I’d inadvertently thrown at her in utero, including a pill intended to prevent her very existence. And yet she emerged on that clear October day, a healthy, blue-eyed, tiny triumph.
Peter Straub’s childhood horror: “I knew more about fear and its first cousin terror, and pain, than children are normally expected to know”
Horror writer Peter Straub is far more genial than anyone who writes such frightening and grotesque fiction should be. The Milwaukee native has a friendly Midwestern delivery even as he talks about acts of violence and the pain of his early years. Straub, of course, is best known for novels including “A Dark Matter,” “In the Night Room,” “Lost Boy, Lost Girl” and “Ghost Story,” which became a 1981 movie. He's also written books of poetry and two novels with Stephen King. Next week, Doubleday releases “Interior Darkness,” a selection of 16 of Straub’s short stories, including three that have never been collected. Neil Gaiman has described the short fiction as "like tiny novels you drown in." Straub is also a student and scholar of horror-story history: He has edited volumes on “The American Fantastic Tale” and the work of H.P. Lovecraft for Library of America. Salon spoke to Straub from his home in New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It must be daunting to try to wrap an entire career’s worth of stories into one book. How did you decide which ones made it in? At first I thought that I could have a one-volume collection of stories, and when I suggested that to my agent, David Gernert, he said something that I didn’t quite understand about two volumes. I thought he must be wrong, so I added things up and I realized if I tried to do everything it would be way over a thousand pages, almost 2,000. So that meant I really had to be careful about what I chose. So of course I chose the ones I especially like. Within that category, then I had to do a lot of further trimming, because a lot of my shorter fiction is still really pretty long. There are a lot of novella-size pieces that I like and am proud of that I could not fit into the book. At which point, my criteria had to do with themes. That is, what stories echoed other stories, what sorts of themes were repeated, and which ones did I choose to repeat? If I specify these themes, it’s going to sound like a bloodbath, or like some kind of Grand Guignol or extremely perverse set of stories. So if you don’t mind, I’m not going to do that. But I do have stories that echo the content of other stories and I had to decide which ones I wanted to admit into the book. Is bullying an important theme to you? It appears in “Blue Rose.” How often does it show up in your work? That’s a good way to put it. I’m sure it does. It probably did more so in earlier work of mine when I dealt more with young people. Because it comes up on a daily basis, really, if you’re talking about children or high school students. It’s morally offensive, it’s interesting, it speaks to a lot of people, it evokes genuine and painful feeling, so it’s something there to be used for sure. A perfect subject for horror, I guess. [Laughs] Yeah. What I like about it is you can call it “horror,” and it is horrific, yet it isn't anything like conventional horror as it is understood by most reviewers. Let’s stick with childhood for a minute. You had a car accident when you were young. What kind of effect did that have on you and your writing? It took me a long time to see this, but of course it kind of darkened my view of life in general. It meant that I was way more open to fear than any child ought to be, and that I knew more about fear and its first cousin terror, and pain, than children are normally expected to know. And it meant that I was kind of pushed forward into an emotional understanding that I wasn’t quite prepared for. It was very, very complex. I had nightmares; my behavior suffered. I darkened in character; I was less amenable, less friendly. I was way less a child than I had been beforehand. It took me a long time to understand the consequences of that single event. Once I did understand the consequences then I was far more able to deal with them. It meant also that I had that material available for conscious thematic use. So did it help make you a writer? It helped make me a different kind of writer. The sort of thing that I had written before this that was all available for conscious use was “Ghost Story” and “Floating Dragon.” Afterwards, the kind of thing I wrote was “Koko” and “Lost Boy, Lost Girl,” in which the supernatural is not a part of experienced life at all. What influence has poetry had on your writing? I did love poetry with a full, overflowing heart for most of my young manhood and, in fact, still do. I buy a lot of poetry; I read a lot of poetry; I have shelves full of poetry books. I can’t write it anymore. I’m not quite sure that I wrote poetry at all well. But anyhow, though, I certainly did it with great dedication for years. What it did for me was to allow me to pay great attention to individual phrases, individual words, to the cadences of sentences as they moved across the page. It made me far more linguistically aware than I would have been otherwise. Also, it made me more aware of the way the writing sounded in one’s ear. There are writers who I read sometimes that you can tell have no idea how their work sounds. They can be very, very good writers, although their work is actually very ugly. To choose a case that’s not going to hurt anyone’s feelings or insult anybody, Theodore Dreiser was a great example of this. He wrote ugly sentences, and you can tell the sound of the language meant nothing to him at all. It’s a little punishing to read, but nonetheless he is a marvelous and great American writer. But someone whose work you can’t really hear? Or you can hear all too well. Clunky and ugly and it just doesn’t sound good. How often do you kill off or punish your most vile characters? Does that happen much in classic horror? No, it probably doesn’t happen much in classic horror. That is -- I’m thinking of Dracula or Frankenstein or supernatural creatures in general -- part of the problem is you can’t kill them. I guess you can kill a werewolf, but I don’t have much interest in writing about a werewolf anyhow. I like the worst characters, I like the villain. You can almost always tell there’s a lot of imaginative sympathy for them on my part. Once I start thinking about how they got that way I feel empathy and compassion. I don’t want to kill them off. I do sometimes kill off the worst. In the long novel called “The Throat,” there’s a very, very bad character who’s had a long, long career of being a killing machine, an absolutely soulless character. And one of my heroes, with great satisfaction, literally pulls the trigger on him. So I’m not in love with evil people at all. It’s just that I think that very bad people aren’t born that way and that we increase our intelligence if we begin to understand how they might have been formed. You’ve been an advocate of H.P. Lovecraft for a long time. What did he do better than anybody else? Lovecraft was an extremely imaginative man. He invented a scheme that people still thrill to. Out of his sense of his own frailty, he evolved a way of seeing the world that was dramatic, frightening, involving. It had within it all sorts of great readerly qualities. He was an interesting stylist, but not at all a beautiful one. But he wasn’t anything like as bad as he’s sometimes described. He did have a tendency toward, let us say, stylistic enthusiasm. He could be purple. He could be purple. He liked exclamation points too much and italics too much. [Laughs.] But Stephen King likes italics and I like italics. Lovecraft probably used those devices a little more than most people would. He was very, very good at a slow burn. Lovecraft was never the scaremonger that people like to think he was. He worked his way in, down many a little trail, through layer after layer, before you got to what he was really talking about. I really like that a lot. That did influence me hugely. The idea that you could work by indirection, you could work in a collage-like manner. For whatever reason I found that very exciting and it did influence me. I was very pleased to be able to do some work with Lovecraft for the Library of America. What else did you pick up from him? Did you discover him at an early enough age that he could make a real impact on you? [Laughs.] I did, yeah. When I was maybe 11, I discovered this great Modern Library book, one of the great horror anthologies of all time, called “Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.” It had just an amazing amount of great stuff. The stuff I really liked was the stuff I didn’t immediately understand, because of the way that it was written. And Lovecraft was chief amongst those writers. That I had to work a little bit to get inside “The Dunwich Horror” meant that I valued “The Dunwich Horror” more than most of those other stories. It’s half written in the typical Lovecraft English that was influenced by 18th century English, and it’s also half written in dialect, so you have to try to figure out what these people literally are saying. These little challenges kind of awakened the story for me. It meant that I remembered his name, and a little later in life I found other collections by Lovecraft and read them. I moved elsewhere in my reading and returned to Lovecraft when I was in my late 20s or early 30s and I had a Lovecraft orgy. I read all kinds of things with tremendous pleasure, and I saw echoes of Lovecraft in the universe all around me. It was an amazing amount of fun. Is any topic off limits for a horror writer? Anything so gross or disturbing that you would shy away? [Laughs.] I wonder. I don’t really think that I’ve backed away from anything. At one point I would have said something like child abuse, but when it occurred to me that it was open to me in a particular way. What I wanted to do was show it as transparently as possible. I wanted it to really be seen. I think that’s because it is so awful. What happens is so destructive and demeaning to its victims that I thought it was worth doing. There’s a lot of stuff that I think people in general prefer to back away from that I simply cannot back away from, temperamentally, because I don’t think we have the whole world in mind or in view unless we also include these things. Those kinds of things are of immense importance in allowing us to see what’s going on around us in the proper way.Horror writer Peter Straub is far more genial than anyone who writes such frightening and grotesque fiction should be. The Milwaukee native has a friendly Midwestern delivery even as he talks about acts of violence and the pain of his early years. Straub, of course, is best known for novels including “A Dark Matter,” “In the Night Room,” “Lost Boy, Lost Girl” and “Ghost Story,” which became a 1981 movie. He's also written books of poetry and two novels with Stephen King. Next week, Doubleday releases “Interior Darkness,” a selection of 16 of Straub’s short stories, including three that have never been collected. Neil Gaiman has described the short fiction as "like tiny novels you drown in." Straub is also a student and scholar of horror-story history: He has edited volumes on “The American Fantastic Tale” and the work of H.P. Lovecraft for Library of America. Salon spoke to Straub from his home in New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It must be daunting to try to wrap an entire career’s worth of stories into one book. How did you decide which ones made it in? At first I thought that I could have a one-volume collection of stories, and when I suggested that to my agent, David Gernert, he said something that I didn’t quite understand about two volumes. I thought he must be wrong, so I added things up and I realized if I tried to do everything it would be way over a thousand pages, almost 2,000. So that meant I really had to be careful about what I chose. So of course I chose the ones I especially like. Within that category, then I had to do a lot of further trimming, because a lot of my shorter fiction is still really pretty long. There are a lot of novella-size pieces that I like and am proud of that I could not fit into the book. At which point, my criteria had to do with themes. That is, what stories echoed other stories, what sorts of themes were repeated, and which ones did I choose to repeat? If I specify these themes, it’s going to sound like a bloodbath, or like some kind of Grand Guignol or extremely perverse set of stories. So if you don’t mind, I’m not going to do that. But I do have stories that echo the content of other stories and I had to decide which ones I wanted to admit into the book. Is bullying an important theme to you? It appears in “Blue Rose.” How often does it show up in your work? That’s a good way to put it. I’m sure it does. It probably did more so in earlier work of mine when I dealt more with young people. Because it comes up on a daily basis, really, if you’re talking about children or high school students. It’s morally offensive, it’s interesting, it speaks to a lot of people, it evokes genuine and painful feeling, so it’s something there to be used for sure. A perfect subject for horror, I guess. [Laughs] Yeah. What I like about it is you can call it “horror,” and it is horrific, yet it isn't anything like conventional horror as it is understood by most reviewers. Let’s stick with childhood for a minute. You had a car accident when you were young. What kind of effect did that have on you and your writing? It took me a long time to see this, but of course it kind of darkened my view of life in general. It meant that I was way more open to fear than any child ought to be, and that I knew more about fear and its first cousin terror, and pain, than children are normally expected to know. And it meant that I was kind of pushed forward into an emotional understanding that I wasn’t quite prepared for. It was very, very complex. I had nightmares; my behavior suffered. I darkened in character; I was less amenable, less friendly. I was way less a child than I had been beforehand. It took me a long time to understand the consequences of that single event. Once I did understand the consequences then I was far more able to deal with them. It meant also that I had that material available for conscious thematic use. So did it help make you a writer? It helped make me a different kind of writer. The sort of thing that I had written before this that was all available for conscious use was “Ghost Story” and “Floating Dragon.” Afterwards, the kind of thing I wrote was “Koko” and “Lost Boy, Lost Girl,” in which the supernatural is not a part of experienced life at all. What influence has poetry had on your writing? I did love poetry with a full, overflowing heart for most of my young manhood and, in fact, still do. I buy a lot of poetry; I read a lot of poetry; I have shelves full of poetry books. I can’t write it anymore. I’m not quite sure that I wrote poetry at all well. But anyhow, though, I certainly did it with great dedication for years. What it did for me was to allow me to pay great attention to individual phrases, individual words, to the cadences of sentences as they moved across the page. It made me far more linguistically aware than I would have been otherwise. Also, it made me more aware of the way the writing sounded in one’s ear. There are writers who I read sometimes that you can tell have no idea how their work sounds. They can be very, very good writers, although their work is actually very ugly. To choose a case that’s not going to hurt anyone’s feelings or insult anybody, Theodore Dreiser was a great example of this. He wrote ugly sentences, and you can tell the sound of the language meant nothing to him at all. It’s a little punishing to read, but nonetheless he is a marvelous and great American writer. But someone whose work you can’t really hear? Or you can hear all too well. Clunky and ugly and it just doesn’t sound good. How often do you kill off or punish your most vile characters? Does that happen much in classic horror? No, it probably doesn’t happen much in classic horror. That is -- I’m thinking of Dracula or Frankenstein or supernatural creatures in general -- part of the problem is you can’t kill them. I guess you can kill a werewolf, but I don’t have much interest in writing about a werewolf anyhow. I like the worst characters, I like the villain. You can almost always tell there’s a lot of imaginative sympathy for them on my part. Once I start thinking about how they got that way I feel empathy and compassion. I don’t want to kill them off. I do sometimes kill off the worst. In the long novel called “The Throat,” there’s a very, very bad character who’s had a long, long career of being a killing machine, an absolutely soulless character. And one of my heroes, with great satisfaction, literally pulls the trigger on him. So I’m not in love with evil people at all. It’s just that I think that very bad people aren’t born that way and that we increase our intelligence if we begin to understand how they might have been formed. You’ve been an advocate of H.P. Lovecraft for a long time. What did he do better than anybody else? Lovecraft was an extremely imaginative man. He invented a scheme that people still thrill to. Out of his sense of his own frailty, he evolved a way of seeing the world that was dramatic, frightening, involving. It had within it all sorts of great readerly qualities. He was an interesting stylist, but not at all a beautiful one. But he wasn’t anything like as bad as he’s sometimes described. He did have a tendency toward, let us say, stylistic enthusiasm. He could be purple. He could be purple. He liked exclamation points too much and italics too much. [Laughs.] But Stephen King likes italics and I like italics. Lovecraft probably used those devices a little more than most people would. He was very, very good at a slow burn. Lovecraft was never the scaremonger that people like to think he was. He worked his way in, down many a little trail, through layer after layer, before you got to what he was really talking about. I really like that a lot. That did influence me hugely. The idea that you could work by indirection, you could work in a collage-like manner. For whatever reason I found that very exciting and it did influence me. I was very pleased to be able to do some work with Lovecraft for the Library of America. What else did you pick up from him? Did you discover him at an early enough age that he could make a real impact on you? [Laughs.] I did, yeah. When I was maybe 11, I discovered this great Modern Library book, one of the great horror anthologies of all time, called “Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.” It had just an amazing amount of great stuff. The stuff I really liked was the stuff I didn’t immediately understand, because of the way that it was written. And Lovecraft was chief amongst those writers. That I had to work a little bit to get inside “The Dunwich Horror” meant that I valued “The Dunwich Horror” more than most of those other stories. It’s half written in the typical Lovecraft English that was influenced by 18th century English, and it’s also half written in dialect, so you have to try to figure out what these people literally are saying. These little challenges kind of awakened the story for me. It meant that I remembered his name, and a little later in life I found other collections by Lovecraft and read them. I moved elsewhere in my reading and returned to Lovecraft when I was in my late 20s or early 30s and I had a Lovecraft orgy. I read all kinds of things with tremendous pleasure, and I saw echoes of Lovecraft in the universe all around me. It was an amazing amount of fun. Is any topic off limits for a horror writer? Anything so gross or disturbing that you would shy away? [Laughs.] I wonder. I don’t really think that I’ve backed away from anything. At one point I would have said something like child abuse, but when it occurred to me that it was open to me in a particular way. What I wanted to do was show it as transparently as possible. I wanted it to really be seen. I think that’s because it is so awful. What happens is so destructive and demeaning to its victims that I thought it was worth doing. There’s a lot of stuff that I think people in general prefer to back away from that I simply cannot back away from, temperamentally, because I don’t think we have the whole world in mind or in view unless we also include these things. Those kinds of things are of immense importance in allowing us to see what’s going on around us in the proper way.Horror writer Peter Straub is far more genial than anyone who writes such frightening and grotesque fiction should be. The Milwaukee native has a friendly Midwestern delivery even as he talks about acts of violence and the pain of his early years. Straub, of course, is best known for novels including “A Dark Matter,” “In the Night Room,” “Lost Boy, Lost Girl” and “Ghost Story,” which became a 1981 movie. He's also written books of poetry and two novels with Stephen King. Next week, Doubleday releases “Interior Darkness,” a selection of 16 of Straub’s short stories, including three that have never been collected. Neil Gaiman has described the short fiction as "like tiny novels you drown in." Straub is also a student and scholar of horror-story history: He has edited volumes on “The American Fantastic Tale” and the work of H.P. Lovecraft for Library of America. Salon spoke to Straub from his home in New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It must be daunting to try to wrap an entire career’s worth of stories into one book. How did you decide which ones made it in? At first I thought that I could have a one-volume collection of stories, and when I suggested that to my agent, David Gernert, he said something that I didn’t quite understand about two volumes. I thought he must be wrong, so I added things up and I realized if I tried to do everything it would be way over a thousand pages, almost 2,000. So that meant I really had to be careful about what I chose. So of course I chose the ones I especially like. Within that category, then I had to do a lot of further trimming, because a lot of my shorter fiction is still really pretty long. There are a lot of novella-size pieces that I like and am proud of that I could not fit into the book. At which point, my criteria had to do with themes. That is, what stories echoed other stories, what sorts of themes were repeated, and which ones did I choose to repeat? If I specify these themes, it’s going to sound like a bloodbath, or like some kind of Grand Guignol or extremely perverse set of stories. So if you don’t mind, I’m not going to do that. But I do have stories that echo the content of other stories and I had to decide which ones I wanted to admit into the book. Is bullying an important theme to you? It appears in “Blue Rose.” How often does it show up in your work? That’s a good way to put it. I’m sure it does. It probably did more so in earlier work of mine when I dealt more with young people. Because it comes up on a daily basis, really, if you’re talking about children or high school students. It’s morally offensive, it’s interesting, it speaks to a lot of people, it evokes genuine and painful feeling, so it’s something there to be used for sure. A perfect subject for horror, I guess. [Laughs] Yeah. What I like about it is you can call it “horror,” and it is horrific, yet it isn't anything like conventional horror as it is understood by most reviewers. Let’s stick with childhood for a minute. You had a car accident when you were young. What kind of effect did that have on you and your writing? It took me a long time to see this, but of course it kind of darkened my view of life in general. It meant that I was way more open to fear than any child ought to be, and that I knew more about fear and its first cousin terror, and pain, than children are normally expected to know. And it meant that I was kind of pushed forward into an emotional understanding that I wasn’t quite prepared for. It was very, very complex. I had nightmares; my behavior suffered. I darkened in character; I was less amenable, less friendly. I was way less a child than I had been beforehand. It took me a long time to understand the consequences of that single event. Once I did understand the consequences then I was far more able to deal with them. It meant also that I had that material available for conscious thematic use. So did it help make you a writer? It helped make me a different kind of writer. The sort of thing that I had written before this that was all available for conscious use was “Ghost Story” and “Floating Dragon.” Afterwards, the kind of thing I wrote was “Koko” and “Lost Boy, Lost Girl,” in which the supernatural is not a part of experienced life at all. What influence has poetry had on your writing? I did love poetry with a full, overflowing heart for most of my young manhood and, in fact, still do. I buy a lot of poetry; I read a lot of poetry; I have shelves full of poetry books. I can’t write it anymore. I’m not quite sure that I wrote poetry at all well. But anyhow, though, I certainly did it with great dedication for years. What it did for me was to allow me to pay great attention to individual phrases, individual words, to the cadences of sentences as they moved across the page. It made me far more linguistically aware than I would have been otherwise. Also, it made me more aware of the way the writing sounded in one’s ear. There are writers who I read sometimes that you can tell have no idea how their work sounds. They can be very, very good writers, although their work is actually very ugly. To choose a case that’s not going to hurt anyone’s feelings or insult anybody, Theodore Dreiser was a great example of this. He wrote ugly sentences, and you can tell the sound of the language meant nothing to him at all. It’s a little punishing to read, but nonetheless he is a marvelous and great American writer. But someone whose work you can’t really hear? Or you can hear all too well. Clunky and ugly and it just doesn’t sound good. How often do you kill off or punish your most vile characters? Does that happen much in classic horror? No, it probably doesn’t happen much in classic horror. That is -- I’m thinking of Dracula or Frankenstein or supernatural creatures in general -- part of the problem is you can’t kill them. I guess you can kill a werewolf, but I don’t have much interest in writing about a werewolf anyhow. I like the worst characters, I like the villain. You can almost always tell there’s a lot of imaginative sympathy for them on my part. Once I start thinking about how they got that way I feel empathy and compassion. I don’t want to kill them off. I do sometimes kill off the worst. In the long novel called “The Throat,” there’s a very, very bad character who’s had a long, long career of being a killing machine, an absolutely soulless character. And one of my heroes, with great satisfaction, literally pulls the trigger on him. So I’m not in love with evil people at all. It’s just that I think that very bad people aren’t born that way and that we increase our intelligence if we begin to understand how they might have been formed. You’ve been an advocate of H.P. Lovecraft for a long time. What did he do better than anybody else? Lovecraft was an extremely imaginative man. He invented a scheme that people still thrill to. Out of his sense of his own frailty, he evolved a way of seeing the world that was dramatic, frightening, involving. It had within it all sorts of great readerly qualities. He was an interesting stylist, but not at all a beautiful one. But he wasn’t anything like as bad as he’s sometimes described. He did have a tendency toward, let us say, stylistic enthusiasm. He could be purple. He could be purple. He liked exclamation points too much and italics too much. [Laughs.] But Stephen King likes italics and I like italics. Lovecraft probably used those devices a little more than most people would. He was very, very good at a slow burn. Lovecraft was never the scaremonger that people like to think he was. He worked his way in, down many a little trail, through layer after layer, before you got to what he was really talking about. I really like that a lot. That did influence me hugely. The idea that you could work by indirection, you could work in a collage-like manner. For whatever reason I found that very exciting and it did influence me. I was very pleased to be able to do some work with Lovecraft for the Library of America. What else did you pick up from him? Did you discover him at an early enough age that he could make a real impact on you? [Laughs.] I did, yeah. When I was maybe 11, I discovered this great Modern Library book, one of the great horror anthologies of all time, called “Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.” It had just an amazing amount of great stuff. The stuff I really liked was the stuff I didn’t immediately understand, because of the way that it was written. And Lovecraft was chief amongst those writers. That I had to work a little bit to get inside “The Dunwich Horror” meant that I valued “The Dunwich Horror” more than most of those other stories. It’s half written in the typical Lovecraft English that was influenced by 18th century English, and it’s also half written in dialect, so you have to try to figure out what these people literally are saying. These little challenges kind of awakened the story for me. It meant that I remembered his name, and a little later in life I found other collections by Lovecraft and read them. I moved elsewhere in my reading and returned to Lovecraft when I was in my late 20s or early 30s and I had a Lovecraft orgy. I read all kinds of things with tremendous pleasure, and I saw echoes of Lovecraft in the universe all around me. It was an amazing amount of fun. Is any topic off limits for a horror writer? Anything so gross or disturbing that you would shy away? [Laughs.] I wonder. I don’t really think that I’ve backed away from anything. At one point I would have said something like child abuse, but when it occurred to me that it was open to me in a particular way. What I wanted to do was show it as transparently as possible. I wanted it to really be seen. I think that’s because it is so awful. What happens is so destructive and demeaning to its victims that I thought it was worth doing. There’s a lot of stuff that I think people in general prefer to back away from that I simply cannot back away from, temperamentally, because I don’t think we have the whole world in mind or in view unless we also include these things. Those kinds of things are of immense importance in allowing us to see what’s going on around us in the proper way.Horror writer Peter Straub is far more genial than anyone who writes such frightening and grotesque fiction should be. The Milwaukee native has a friendly Midwestern delivery even as he talks about acts of violence and the pain of his early years. Straub, of course, is best known for novels including “A Dark Matter,” “In the Night Room,” “Lost Boy, Lost Girl” and “Ghost Story,” which became a 1981 movie. He's also written books of poetry and two novels with Stephen King. Next week, Doubleday releases “Interior Darkness,” a selection of 16 of Straub’s short stories, including three that have never been collected. Neil Gaiman has described the short fiction as "like tiny novels you drown in." Straub is also a student and scholar of horror-story history: He has edited volumes on “The American Fantastic Tale” and the work of H.P. Lovecraft for Library of America. Salon spoke to Straub from his home in New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It must be daunting to try to wrap an entire career’s worth of stories into one book. How did you decide which ones made it in? At first I thought that I could have a one-volume collection of stories, and when I suggested that to my agent, David Gernert, he said something that I didn’t quite understand about two volumes. I thought he must be wrong, so I added things up and I realized if I tried to do everything it would be way over a thousand pages, almost 2,000. So that meant I really had to be careful about what I chose. So of course I chose the ones I especially like. Within that category, then I had to do a lot of further trimming, because a lot of my shorter fiction is still really pretty long. There are a lot of novella-size pieces that I like and am proud of that I could not fit into the book. At which point, my criteria had to do with themes. That is, what stories echoed other stories, what sorts of themes were repeated, and which ones did I choose to repeat? If I specify these themes, it’s going to sound like a bloodbath, or like some kind of Grand Guignol or extremely perverse set of stories. So if you don’t mind, I’m not going to do that. But I do have stories that echo the content of other stories and I had to decide which ones I wanted to admit into the book. Is bullying an important theme to you? It appears in “Blue Rose.” How often does it show up in your work? That’s a good way to put it. I’m sure it does. It probably did more so in earlier work of mine when I dealt more with young people. Because it comes up on a daily basis, really, if you’re talking about children or high school students. It’s morally offensive, it’s interesting, it speaks to a lot of people, it evokes genuine and painful feeling, so it’s something there to be used for sure. A perfect subject for horror, I guess. [Laughs] Yeah. What I like about it is you can call it “horror,” and it is horrific, yet it isn't anything like conventional horror as it is understood by most reviewers. Let’s stick with childhood for a minute. You had a car accident when you were young. What kind of effect did that have on you and your writing? It took me a long time to see this, but of course it kind of darkened my view of life in general. It meant that I was way more open to fear than any child ought to be, and that I knew more about fear and its first cousin terror, and pain, than children are normally expected to know. And it meant that I was kind of pushed forward into an emotional understanding that I wasn’t quite prepared for. It was very, very complex. I had nightmares; my behavior suffered. I darkened in character; I was less amenable, less friendly. I was way less a child than I had been beforehand. It took me a long time to understand the consequences of that single event. Once I did understand the consequences then I was far more able to deal with them. It meant also that I had that material available for conscious thematic use. So did it help make you a writer? It helped make me a different kind of writer. The sort of thing that I had written before this that was all available for conscious use was “Ghost Story” and “Floating Dragon.” Afterwards, the kind of thing I wrote was “Koko” and “Lost Boy, Lost Girl,” in which the supernatural is not a part of experienced life at all. What influence has poetry had on your writing? I did love poetry with a full, overflowing heart for most of my young manhood and, in fact, still do. I buy a lot of poetry; I read a lot of poetry; I have shelves full of poetry books. I can’t write it anymore. I’m not quite sure that I wrote poetry at all well. But anyhow, though, I certainly did it with great dedication for years. What it did for me was to allow me to pay great attention to individual phrases, individual words, to the cadences of sentences as they moved across the page. It made me far more linguistically aware than I would have been otherwise. Also, it made me more aware of the way the writing sounded in one’s ear. There are writers who I read sometimes that you can tell have no idea how their work sounds. They can be very, very good writers, although their work is actually very ugly. To choose a case that’s not going to hurt anyone’s feelings or insult anybody, Theodore Dreiser was a great example of this. He wrote ugly sentences, and you can tell the sound of the language meant nothing to him at all. It’s a little punishing to read, but nonetheless he is a marvelous and great American writer. But someone whose work you can’t really hear? Or you can hear all too well. Clunky and ugly and it just doesn’t sound good. How often do you kill off or punish your most vile characters? Does that happen much in classic horror? No, it probably doesn’t happen much in classic horror. That is -- I’m thinking of Dracula or Frankenstein or supernatural creatures in general -- part of the problem is you can’t kill them. I guess you can kill a werewolf, but I don’t have much interest in writing about a werewolf anyhow. I like the worst characters, I like the villain. You can almost always tell there’s a lot of imaginative sympathy for them on my part. Once I start thinking about how they got that way I feel empathy and compassion. I don’t want to kill them off. I do sometimes kill off the worst. In the long novel called “The Throat,” there’s a very, very bad character who’s had a long, long career of being a killing machine, an absolutely soulless character. And one of my heroes, with great satisfaction, literally pulls the trigger on him. So I’m not in love with evil people at all. It’s just that I think that very bad people aren’t born that way and that we increase our intelligence if we begin to understand how they might have been formed. You’ve been an advocate of H.P. Lovecraft for a long time. What did he do better than anybody else? Lovecraft was an extremely imaginative man. He invented a scheme that people still thrill to. Out of his sense of his own frailty, he evolved a way of seeing the world that was dramatic, frightening, involving. It had within it all sorts of great readerly qualities. He was an interesting stylist, but not at all a beautiful one. But he wasn’t anything like as bad as he’s sometimes described. He did have a tendency toward, let us say, stylistic enthusiasm. He could be purple. He could be purple. He liked exclamation points too much and italics too much. [Laughs.] But Stephen King likes italics and I like italics. Lovecraft probably used those devices a little more than most people would. He was very, very good at a slow burn. Lovecraft was never the scaremonger that people like to think he was. He worked his way in, down many a little trail, through layer after layer, before you got to what he was really talking about. I really like that a lot. That did influence me hugely. The idea that you could work by indirection, you could work in a collage-like manner. For whatever reason I found that very exciting and it did influence me. I was very pleased to be able to do some work with Lovecraft for the Library of America. What else did you pick up from him? Did you discover him at an early enough age that he could make a real impact on you? [Laughs.] I did, yeah. When I was maybe 11, I discovered this great Modern Library book, one of the great horror anthologies of all time, called “Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.” It had just an amazing amount of great stuff. The stuff I really liked was the stuff I didn’t immediately understand, because of the way that it was written. And Lovecraft was chief amongst those writers. That I had to work a little bit to get inside “The Dunwich Horror” meant that I valued “The Dunwich Horror” more than most of those other stories. It’s half written in the typical Lovecraft English that was influenced by 18th century English, and it’s also half written in dialect, so you have to try to figure out what these people literally are saying. These little challenges kind of awakened the story for me. It meant that I remembered his name, and a little later in life I found other collections by Lovecraft and read them. I moved elsewhere in my reading and returned to Lovecraft when I was in my late 20s or early 30s and I had a Lovecraft orgy. I read all kinds of things with tremendous pleasure, and I saw echoes of Lovecraft in the universe all around me. It was an amazing amount of fun. Is any topic off limits for a horror writer? Anything so gross or disturbing that you would shy away? [Laughs.] I wonder. I don’t really think that I’ve backed away from anything. At one point I would have said something like child abuse, but when it occurred to me that it was open to me in a particular way. What I wanted to do was show it as transparently as possible. I wanted it to really be seen. I think that’s because it is so awful. What happens is so destructive and demeaning to its victims that I thought it was worth doing. There’s a lot of stuff that I think people in general prefer to back away from that I simply cannot back away from, temperamentally, because I don’t think we have the whole world in mind or in view unless we also include these things. Those kinds of things are of immense importance in allowing us to see what’s going on around us in the proper way.
Concussions can prove deadly: A single brain injury dramatically increases risk of suicide
As the Panthers and Broncos faced off in the third quarter of the Super Bowl, wide receiver Philly Brown suffered a possible concussion—and to the disappointment of Panthers fans, he never returned to the game. But for good reason: concussions are now known to be much more serious injuries than once thought. And the danger may not be limited to the immediate repercussions. Researchers have already linked more severe traumatic brain injury to later suicide—particularly in military veterans and professional athletes—and have more recently explored the connection between concussion and depression. Now, new research published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows that even mild concussions sustained in ordinary community settings might be more detrimental than anyone anticipated; the long-term risk of suicide increases threefold in adults if they have experienced even one concussion. That risk increases by a third if the concussion is sustained on a weekend instead of a weekday—suggesting recreational concussions are riskier long-term than those sustained on the job. “The typical patient I see is a middle-aged adult, not an elite athlete,” says Donald Redelmeier, a senior scientist at the University of Toronto and one of the study’s lead authors. “And the usual circumstances for acquiring a concussion are not while playing football; it is when driving in traffic and getting into a crash, when missing a step and falling down a staircase, when getting overly ambitious about home repairs—the everyday activities of life.” Redelmeier and his team wanted to examine the risks of the concussions acquired under those circumstances. They identified nearly a quarter of a million adults in Ontario who were diagnosed with a mild concussion over a timespan of 20 years—severe cases that resulted in hospital admission were excluded from the study—and tracked them for subsequent mortality due to suicide. It turned out that more than 660 suicides occurred among these patients, equivalent to 31 deaths per 100,000 patients annually—three times the population norm. On average, suicide occurred almost six years after the concussion. This risk was found to be independent of demographics or previous psychiatric conditions, and it increased with additional concussions. For weekend concussions, the later suicide risk increased to four times the norm. Redelmeier and his fellow researchers had wondered whether the risk would differ between occupational and recreational concussions. They did not have information about how the concussions happened, so they used day of the week as a proxy. Although they do not know why weekend risk is indeed higher, they suspect it may be because on weekends medical staff may not be as available or accessible or people may not seek immediate care. Although the underlying causes of the connection between concussion and suicide are not yet known, Redelmeier says that there were at least three potential explanations. A concussion may be a marker but not necessarily a mechanism of subsequent troubles—or, in other words, people who sustain concussions may already have baseline life imbalances that increase their risks for depression and suicide. “But we also looked at the subgroup of patients who had no past psychiatric history, no past problems, and we still found a significant increase in risk. So I don’t think that’s the entire story,” he notes. One of the more likely explanations, he says, is that concussion causes brain injury such as inflammation (as has been found in some studies) from which the patient may never fully recover. Indeed, a study conducted in 2014 found that sustaining a head injury leads to a greater risk of mental illness later in life. The other possibility is that some patients may not give themselves enough time to get better before returning to an ordinary schedule, leading to strain, frustration and disappointment—which, in turn, may result in depression and ultimately even suicide. Lea Alhilali, a physician and researcher at the Barrow Neurological Institute who did not participate in this study, uses diffusion tensor imaging (an MRI technique) to measure the integrity of white matter in the brain. Her team has found similarities between white matter degeneration patterns in patients with concussion-related depression and noninjured patients with major depressive disorder—particularly in the nucleus accumbens, or the “reward center” of the brain. “It can be difficult to tease out what’s related to an injury and what’s related to the circumstances surrounding the trauma,” Alhilali says. “There could be PTSD, loss of job, orthopedic injuries that can all influence depression. But I do believe there’s probably an organic brain injury.” Alhilali points to recent studies on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative brain disease associated with repeated head traumas. Often linked to dementia, depression, loss of impulse control and suicide, CTE was recently diagnosed in 87 of 91 deceased NFL players. Why, then, she says, should we not suspect that concussion causes other brain damage as well? This new study may only represent the tip of the iceberg. “We’re only looking at the most extreme outcomes, at taking your own life,” Redelmeier says. “But for every person who dies from suicide, there are many others who attempt suicide, and hundreds more who think about it and thousands more who suffer from depression.” More research needs to be done; this study was unable to take into account the exact circumstances under which the concussions were sustained. Redelmeier’s research examined only the records of adults who sought medical attention, it did not include more severe head injuries that required hospitalization or extensive emergency care. To that extent, his findings may have underestimated the magnitude of the absolute risks at hand. Yet many people are not aware of these risks. Redelmeier is adamant that people should take concussions seriously. “We need to do more research about prevention and recovery,” he says. “But let me at least articulate three things to do: One, give yourself permission to get some rest. Two, when you start to feel better, don’t try to come back with a vengeance. And three, even after you’re feeling better, after you’ve rested properly, don’t forget about it entirely. If you had an allergic reaction to penicillin 15 years ago, you’d want to mention that to your doctor and have it as a permanent part of your medical record. So, too, if you’ve had a concussion 15 years ago.”
Good news, online daters: You’re no longer considered sad and pathetic
There's good news for people who use online dating as a primary way to meet people: you’re no longer considered sad and pathetic. That's just one of the revelations for Pew Research Center's study on attitudes towards online dating, released today. A mere 16 percent of people surveyed who have dated online agree with the statement "people who use online dating sites are desperate." Similarly, only 24 percent of people who have not used a dating site or dating app agree. And it is no coincidence that attitudes towards online dating have shifted: Online dating among young adults, the data shows, has tripled since 2013. More from The Daily Dot: "The last days of Hitchbot" This revealing new data comes from a survey of 2,000 American adults from different age groups. Online dating has increased among all age groups, with 15 percent of American adults reporting they have used online dating (an increase from 11 percent in 2013). Researchers said one of the most surprising findings was that young adults and people in their late 50s/early 60s showed the greatest growth, as both groups have historically not been active online daters. Another contributing factor to how one views online dating is education level: 58 percent of college graduates know someone who uses online dating and 46 percent know someone who met their longtime sweetie via app or dating site. More from The Daily Dot: "As elections approach, Iran cracks down on Internet activism with 'advanced' censorship tactics" The most overwhelming figure is that 80 percent of Americans who have used online dating think it's a good way to meet someone—even if nearly a third think the process keeps people from settling down because of what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls "the paradox of choice" or having way too many options. Despite this vote of confidence by most people surveyed, a sizeable amount shared their belief online dating is a more dangerous way to meet people than other avenues. Nearly half of users believe this to be true, along with 60 percent of non-users. These views are, maybe not surprisingly, gendered: 53 percent of female online daters feel there are safety issues, while only 38 percent of men agree. More from The Daily Dot: "We dare you to try a recipe from this urine cocktail guide" Right now it seems like there is a dating app for every age, interest, shape and size. There's sites like WooPlus, which caters to plus-size women and their admirers; there's Bro, for the straight man looking to experiment with fellow straight men; OpenMinded is designed for polyamorous people; and there's even the controversial SwirlMingle, which caters to biracial couples. Whatever your preference, you could be just a swipe away from romantic bliss. And hey, if it's good enough for Khloe Kardashian, it should be good enough for you.
The diplomat and the killer: Death squads, dirty war and the untold story of H. Carl Gettinger
On December 1, 1980, two American Catholic churchwomen — an Ursuline nun and a lay missionary — sat down to dinner with Robert White, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. They worked in rural areas ministering to El Salvador’s desperately impoverished peasants, and White admired their commitment and courage. The talk turned to the government’s brutal tactics for fighting the country’s left-wing guerrillas, in a dirty war waged by death squads that dumped bodies in the streets and an army that massacred civilians. The women were alarmed by the incoming Reagan administration’s plans for a closer relationship with the military-led government. Because of a curfew, the women spent the night at the ambassador’s residence. The next day, after breakfast with the ambassador’s wife, they drove to San Salvador’s international airport to pick up two colleagues who were flying back from a conference in Nicaragua. Within hours, all four women would be dead. Two days later, White and a crowd of reporters gathered as the bodies of the four Americans were pulled by ropes from a shallow grave near the airport. The black-and-white photos snapped that day document a grisly crime. The women were dressed in ordinary clothes — slacks and blouses. Investigators would conclude that all had been sexually assaulted before they were dispatched with execution-style gunshots to the head. White, grim-faced and tieless in the heat, knew immediately who was behind the crime. This time, he vowed, the Salvadoran government would not get away with murder, even if it cost him his career. In the years since, much has come to light about this pivotal event in the history of U.S. interventions in Central America. But the full story of how one of the most junior officers in the U.S. embassy in San Salvador tracked down the killers has never been told. It is the tale of an improbable bond between a Salvadoran soldier with a guilty conscience and a young American diplomat with a moral conscience. Different as they were, both men shared a willingness to risk their lives in the name of justice. In November of 1980, just weeks before the churchwomen were abducted, H. Carl Gettinger was sitting at his desk in the U.S. embassy when the phone rang. On the line was Colonel Eldon Cummings, the commander of the U.S. military group in El Salvador, who said there was a lieutenant from the Salvadoran National Guard in his office who could tell Gettinger about the harsh tactics of the guerrillas. The soldier was well-placed; El Salvador’s National Guard was an essential part of the country’s internal security apparatus. It operated as “a kind of landlords’ militia in the countryside,” as White wrote in a prescient, 1980 cable that analyzed the forces that would fuel the country’s civil war. Gettinger, then 26 years old, was considered something of a liberal, in part because, like White, he supported the pro-human rights approach of President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan’s predecessor. Adding to his reputation as a “proto-communist,” as Gettinger mockingly described himself, was that he had a beard and was often incorrectly assumed to be Jewish (he was called “Getzinger” when he first arrived). “I looked like a lefty rabbi,” Gettinger told me. Gettinger informed Cummings that he did not need to hear more about the cruelty of the guerrilla forces. “I already know that,” he said. But Gettinger viewed his job as talking to everyone, and he had a knack for putting people at ease. His mother, who was Mexican, had taught him, Hablando se entiende la gente (“By talking, people understand each other”). He was born in Calexico, California, and spent many youthful days with his cousins, aunts, and uncles across the border in Mexicali, where his mother was born. Growing up in San Diego, Carl lost himself in National Geographic magazines and would dream about going to exotic lands. One day, when he was about 14, Carl asked his father what he should do with his life. “Try the Foreign Service,” his father said, without looking up from his newspaper. Gettinger’s first posting had been in Chile, where he was assigned to the consular section. He quickly grew bored handling visa requests, and used his fluency in Spanish to moonlight for the embassy’s political section. When the State Department asked for volunteers to work in El Salvador, he didn’t hesitate. It was the place for a young diplomat to make his mark. In neighboring Nicaragua, the Marxist Sandinistas had come to power, and Washington was worried that El Salvador would be the next domino to fall. Gettinger arrived in the first months of a decade-long civil war that would be marked by peasant massacres and the loss of some 75,000 civilian lives, most killed by government forces. Cummings walked the Salvadoran lieutenant, who was dressed in civilian clothes, over to Gettinger’s office, introduced him, and left. The lieutenant, whom Gettinger described as “mean and low-brow with the flattened face of a boxer,” began by saying that the guerrillas had killed both his father and a brother, and that he was playing a role in the dirty war. On one occasion, he said, soldiers under his command had picked up three “kids” who were suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers. After briefly interrogating them, the lieutenant thought they should be released, but a sergeant told him they were “unreformed.” The lieutenant ordered them executed. He had also killed several men who he thought might pose a threat to his own life. “He seemed to have a lot that he wanted to get off his chest,” Gettinger recalled. But the diplomat was not prepared for what was to come. “It was the single most ironic twist in my 31 and something-year career,” Gettinger told me. (He retired from the Foreign Service in 2009 after several years in Japan and tours in Pakistan and Iraq — a decision he described as “wrenching” since the service “had been my whole life.”) After expressing his distaste for the left, the lieutenant lashed out with equal contempt for El Salvador’s right. The lieutenant, who was born into a lower-class family, said the country’s oligarchs were using the military to do their dirty work. Soldiers should fight to defeat communism, not to enrich powerful landlords, he said. Gettinger banged out a cable recounting his hour-long conversation with the lieutenant, who was unofficially dubbed “Killer” around the embassy. The message was stamped NODIS [no distribution], a higher classification level than SECRET, and only a limited number of copies were made. Gettinger described the lieutenant as “badly educated,” and “a savage individual who feels victimized both by the left and by the GN [National Guard] hierarchy.” In cables to Washington about the information it was learning, the embassy tended to refer to Gettinger as “the officer” and the lieutenant as “the source.” (In 1993 and 1994, shortly after the end of El Salvador’s civil war, the Clinton administration released thousands of previously classified documents pertaining to human-rights abuses during the conflict.) In subsequent cables, the embassy told Washington that the “source” had been “deep inside extreme right wing fringe group activities” and “closely associated with rightists such as Major Roberto D’Aubuisson,” the notorious and charismatic right-wing leader. The lieutenant said that he had bombed a Catholic radio station and the Jesuit-run Central American University on orders from D’Aubuisson’s aides. (In the 1970s and 80s, as many priests and nuns in Latin America embraced the doctrine of “liberation theology,” which focused on the poor and oppressed, the rich and powerful came to view the Church as an enemy.) But he said that he had grown disenchanted as D’Aubuisson and his followers morphed into gunrunners and smugglers, motivated as much by money as political ideology. The lieutenant told Gettinger that D’Aubuisson had been an architect of the assassination of the revered Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who was murdered inside a church while saying Mass in March 1980. A couple days before the shooting, the lieutenant said, he had attended a meeting chaired by D’Aubuisson at which soldiers drew lots for the chance to kill the archbishop. There had long been rumors of D’Aubuisson’s involvement in the assassination, but this was the first concrete evidence the Americans had. (No one has ever been prosecuted for the murder. In 2015, Pope Francis declared that Romero had died a martyr and would be beatified, the final step before sainthood. D’Aubuisson died in 1992, at the age of 48, of throat cancer.) Two weeks after Gettinger first met the lieutenant, on December 2, 1980, the Maryknoll nuns Maura Clarke, 49, and Ita Ford, 40, were returning from a Maryknoll conference in Nicaragua, where left-wing guerrillas had recently toppled President Anastasio Somoza and his American-backed dictatorship. They were met at the airport shortly after 6 o’clock in the evening by the two women who had joined White over dinner the previous evening: Dorothy Kazel, 41, and Jean Donovan, 27, a lay missionary who was engaged to be married. The next day, the burned-out shell of their white Toyota minivan was found about five miles from the airport. On December 4, the vicar of San Vicente called the U.S. embassy to report that the bodies of the four women had been discovered near the airport. When White heard this, he rushed to the scene. “I watched as the bodies were being pulled out of the grave,” he recalled many years later. He asked the town clerk what had happened. “He was surprisingly candid,” White said. The clerk told the American ambassador that death squads used the area as a dumping ground, that the villagers had heard screams the night before, and that “it was the military who had done it.” The Reagan administration did not want to hear that the Salvadoran army had killed the churchwomen. Soon after the incident, one of Reagan’s top foreign-policy advisors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, told a reporter for The Tampa Tribune, “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” She didn’t stop there: “They were political activists on behalf of the Frente” — the leftist political coalition formed by five guerrilla groups. Asked if she thought the government had been involved, Kirkpatrick said, “The answer is unequivocal. No, I don’t think the government was responsible.” Kirkpatrick, who became Reagan’s United Nations ambassador, was a principal architect of the administration’s policy in El Salvador and Central America. She argued that the United States should support “authoritarian” regimes as long as they were pro-American. (Kirkpatrick died in 2006.) Gettinger did not share Kirkpatrick’s foreign-policy views and was sickened by the murders. He had met two of the women, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan, at the ambassador’s residence a week or two before they were killed. “Even to this day, the touch of their hands is something that I remember, value, memorialize,” he told me recently. Or, as he put it years after the episode in an unpublished article, which he provided me: “Roman torturers of the early Church martyrs could hardly have come up with a crueler or more humiliating end for these four disciples of Christ.” When Gettinger returned from his Christmas leave, he realized that there was no serious investigation into the killings — and that there was never likely to be one. He would do his own. He turned to “Killer,” the National Guard lieutenant. “He was the most valuable of contacts, a bad man with a conscience and the means to get information,” Gettinger said. Within the embassy, Gettinger’s relationship with the lieutenant was carefully guarded. But those colleagues who did know about it, even if vaguely, were astonished at what Gettinger was able to get from him and would ask jokingly if Gettinger had pictures of the officer in compromising situations. The CIA typically uses bribes and blackmail to recruit sources. Gettinger did neither, and he was never quite certain why the lieutenant came to confess so much. “I think we hit it off because I treated him with dignity and respect,” Gettinger told me. Carol Doerflein, the public-affairs officer in the embassy at the time, had a broader and deeper explanation. “It was his demeanor and his looks,” she said of Gettinger. He wasn’t some six-foot-tall, swaggering blond American. He was short — 5’4” — and half-Mexican. “He’s quiet, unassuming, non-threatening, and spoke perfect Spanish,” she added. Gettinger assiduously courted the lieutenant, on one occasion taking him for drinks at La Bonanza, a popular steak house in an upscale neighborhood of the capital. “Don’t ever take me there again,” the lieutenant said angrily as they were leaving. It was a hangout for the wealthy, and the lieutenant identified with the poor. It also wasn’t a good idea for him to be seen in public with an American diplomat. After that, Gettinger invited the lieutenant to his home, which was on the edge of San Salvador’s volcano. The lieutenant liked his scotch — “drank it by the glassfuls,” Gettinger said — and Gettinger always kept pouring. One evening, Gettinger asked the lieutenant if he would find the names of the soldiers who had killed the churchwomen. The lieutenant told Gettinger to go to hell. It was one thing to inform on D’Aubuisson, but he was now being asked to betray his fellow soldiers. “I don’t rat on my own people,” he said. Eventually, Gettinger persuaded him. The lieutenant said, in effect: “You’re helping us beat back these guerrillas who killed my father and brother. And what do we do? We kill your women.” When Ambassador White went to Washington for Reagan’s inaugural, he was summoned to the State Department by the new secretary of state, Alexander Haig, a retired four-star general. Haig told White that he wanted him to send a cable when he got back to El Salvador saying that the Salvadoran government was making progress in its investigation of the murders. “Well, Mr. Secretary,” White replied, “that would not be possible because the Salvadoran military killed those women, and the idea that they’re going to investigate in a serious way their own crimes is simply an illusion.” White recalled that confrontation when I interviewed him in April of 2014 for Retro Report. He still looked every inch the distinguished diplomat, dressed in a sport coat and tie, and his gravelly baritone voice still had a trace of his New England roots; his mind was as sharp as three decades earlier. He had not yet been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him in January of 2015. “Later, I got a call from one of Haig’s aides, saying that the secretary is anxiously awaiting my telegram that would affirm that the Salvadorans were conducting a serious investigation into who was responsible for the death of the nuns,” White told me. He said he couldn’t and wouldn’t. The aide replied, “All you’re doing, Bob, is creating problems for all of us.” A State Department cable released years later confirms White’s story. “I will have no part of any cover-up,” White wrote to Washington in January of 1981. “All the evidence we have, and it has been reported fully, is that the Salvadoran government has made no serious effort to investigate the killings of the murdered American churchwomen.” Haig was furious. He removed White as ambassador and forced him out of the Foreign Service — a rare action against a career diplomat. Several weeks later, in mid-March, Haig sought to absolve the Salvadoran military. “Perhaps the vehicle that the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock … and there’d been an exchange of fire,” he said during testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Haig died in 2010.) White’s dismissal did not slow down Gettinger’s personal quest to identify the killers. On April 10, the lieutenant called him to say he had the information Gettinger wanted. The lieutenant said he couldn’t tell him over the phone — that Gettinger would have to come to him. He was stationed at the time in San Vicente, which is only some 25 miles from San Salvador. But travel on the roads was dangerous for anyone, more so for American diplomats; the hills were crawling with guerrillas, the roads owned by the government’s death squads. J. Mark Dion, the number two in the embassy and another diplomat willing to think and act outside the traditionally cautious diplomatic box, signed off on the trip. If it had gone badly, Dion and Gettinger might both have paid with their careers, and Gettinger with his life. Dion gave Gettinger his bulletproof car, along with a driver and security guard. On Palm Sunday, Gettinger set off. The lieutenant sent his own security team to meet them partway and guide them to the base. Gettinger was uneasy when “Killer’s” security turned up — men in civilian clothes with bandanas and bandoliers, riding in a pickup truck. A classic death squad. At the base, the lieutenant took Gettinger to his cubbyhole and whispered for fear of being overheard by soldiers in the barracks. He scrawled a name on a piece of newspaper — “Colindres Aléman” — and handed it to Gettinger. “That’s the guy you want.” Sub-Sergeant Luis Antonio Colindres Aléman, he said, was the leader of the operation involving the churchwomen. It was an extraordinary piece of intelligence, and there would be more. Gettinger rushed back to San Salvador. The next morning, he and Dion went to see the charge d’affaires, Frederic Chapin, at his residence. Chapin had been sent to fill in as ambassador after White’s dismissal. As Chapin dug into his bacon and eggs, Gettinger, who hadn’t eaten much in the last 24 hours, wished his boss would offer him something to eat; he didn’t. Though tired and excited, Gettinger dispassionately related what he had learned. The embassy sent a highly classified cable to Washington that named Colindres Aléman. The lieutenant’s disclosure rocketed to the senior levels of the Reagan administration, at a time when human-rights groups and their allies in Congress were demanding that El Salvador prosecute the murderers as a condition for further U.S. military aid. The American embassy notified El Salvador’s president, José Napoleón Duarte, “that it might be necessary to request a meeting with him on short notice later in Holy Week.” Gettinger had hoped to get additional names of those involved before that meeting, but he heard nothing more from the lieutenant. And so on April 21, 
