Heirs of Plato

One of the reasons I enjoy Robert Heinlein is that he makes no bones about his belief that certain folks just aren't cut out to do certain things. As I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I am bombarded with spirituality and superstition with a huge dose of ignorance from poorly educated people and it annoyed me to no end. Naturally there are plenty of legitimate reasons for the Lacks' general state of education and I'm not claiming they have no right to privacy because of their mother's involuntary contribution to medical science, but transcribing that ignorance is incredibly embarrassing and only reinforces my latent belief that some folks don't have the right to hold an uninformed opinion.

Although I agree with author Rebecca Skloot's editor that the chapters devoted to the Lacks' personal history be pared down or cut altogether, she paints an intriguing human portrait of the racial undercurrents in the frontier of biotechnology. The fact that her husband was a rake and passed horrible diseases which directly contributed to her developing a virulent form of cancer diminishes the chance that a wealthy white woman would have been the progenitor; had this happened the story wouldn't have been as compelling. With the shadow of the Tuskegee Experiments in the near past, the history of slavery reparationism to fall back on, and a colorful cast of characters to give the story some flavor, a lot of humanity is injected into this atypical magical negro story.

Mysticism is inexorably connected to Henrietta from the opening pages onward. Fateful, often portentous, contradictory actions are referred to by family as acts of Henrietta in the same manner others speak of God and His work. Perhaps its my lapsed Catholicism which never stressed the sort of engaging worship and belief common for the souls of black folks and my general distaste for the spiritual that make me loath to read those passages. I don't mean to knock religion in general: I happen to think Protest-ants have it dead wrong, at least from a humanist perspective, when they claim that man is redeemed by faith alone no matter how loathsome you are as a human being.

I've never read Plato but I'm told he advocated, at least as mental exercise, a benevolent dictatorship which would consider the interests of the people as a whole. Henrietta's cells were taken when medical law was in its infancy and by the time the Lacks' learned of their actual use the infrastructure for the manufacture and use of them was too large and too complex to legitimately sue for damages decades later. Like slavery and slave owners these doctors and scientists (generally) operated in legal and ethical standards of the day. We look back at slavery and wonder how on Earth anyone could be a partied to it and think themselves righteous, just as doctors and researchers lied, mislead, or caused irreparable distress for the Lacks. Comedian Chris Rock claimed that slavery, while certainly wrong, let the descendants of thousands of Africans live in a generally better place than the one they came from; he likened it to an uncle who molested you as a kid but paid your way through college. Without slavery the Lacks' family wouldn't be here and without Henrietta the Magical Negro's cancer cells medical science would have slowed to a relative crawl and many millions more people would have died. Next to all this, the drama of a poor family from Baltimore seems insignificant.

The Act of Referring

The readings this week concerned users and how information professionals react or regard them in their professional practice. They were a tidy mixture of one short and humorous looking into personal information economy, a different article that was a narrative for a Museum controversy I've read about in past history classes, and two conventional articles that were tied to the reference desk.

After reading an article in 818 that misrepresented the Galileo Affair and even placed Copernicus, a Catholic priest, after Galileo, it was refreshing that the author avoided the erroneous claim that the Enola Gay bombed Nagasaki even though her crew did. Perhaps that plane, Bock's Car, was even less noteworthy and faced the scrap heap or was sold to de Gaulle before the 'Bomber Gap' began. The article rightfully pointed out administrative errors that exacerbated an almost inevitable problem but it rankles me when groups, whether they be veterans or museum administrators, refuse to let facts get in the way of their beliefs.

Perhaps because of my limited reference experience, or past readings on its effectiveness, but I have very little faith in the reference interview. The cognitive theory certainly has a place in reference and discussion can only enhance service but patrons will rarely sit for the whole spiel, especially the exit interview, when they are there with a specific purpose and won't see the advantage to themselves and others if they spend a few minutes telling the librarian what they did correctly. Furthermore, staff might be chained to their desk with patrons in person or remotely. Speaking of being chained...

 The Elmborg article struck an interesting chord about the similar aims of composition instruction and research but neglected the significance of instructional context. Composition instruction, and research instruction for that matter, either in a writing center or a coursework dedicated class, have students locked in their seats for a set period of time. Some compositional instruction is one-on-one but this often includes a finished product that needs touching up. For guidance in basic composition, or basic research, it may be quite wasteful for a qualified staff member to give instruction that universities give to competent bachelors and masters students.

Meta-muscle

My head aches from the near incessant discussion in all my classes about everything that is behind what librarians and archivists do to manage information. Perhaps because I've been reading Everything is Miscellaneous for several weeks now I'm ornerier than usual but frankly I'm sick of seeing "meta-" anything.

That being said I enjoyed feminist article. I've waited for something Sandy Berman-esque to pop up since I've always enjoyed breaking down social precepts. The analogy of the great Sex-Race-Class sort is really illustrative of not only how sorting can arrange containers of knowledge but what that says about base assumptions.

That, together with the remarks about bell hooks, reminded me of Weinberger's annoying use of the hypothetical person as "she" or "her" throughout. It's something of a starting gate equality issue but I don't think using "she" in every instance is going to somehow strike a blow for equality. He obviously made a conscious effort to be inclusive--and that's fine--but alternating would accomplish the same goals better especially if he used sex stereotypes against themselves. Have a "The woman is the doctor" scenario but without the twist ending.  "Anyone can post anything she wants" (pg. 189) irked me to no end since it struck a blow against gender neutrality. While perhaps not grammatical, the trend is to create a singular-hypothetical "they" to accomplish the linguistic hurdle required to prevent the transition from the ambiguous-neutral "anyone" to the specific-actor "he" or "she". Yes language can be intellectually oppressive but do you know what else is? Slavery. Women don't deserve reparations either and we should instead strive for a more equal society.

That issue with bell hooks essentially losing her name through authority headings gets little sympathy from me in part because it isn't her real name and this is more of a language issue, of which classification systems and subject headings must exist within, and people who go out of their way to defy basic precepts should accept a loss of message. If I decide to name my child after the linguistic character of a schwa, little more than an upside down lower-case "e", it is just as invalid. When Prince adopted the unpronounceable symbol in the 90s, promoters and record stores had to devise a way to place him and if their decision made him lose part of his identity he would have no right to complain.

The same goes for the movie "I [heart symbol] Huckabees" on Wikipedia. Although it is information by community editing and allegedly superior in many ways, Wikipedia's excuse for keeping the symbol out is that even though they are capable of expressing the symbol in a title is that not all browsers will recognize the symbol and thus the title will be distorted. bell hook's pen name is probably indicated as she prefers in the MARC record and I doubt catalogers are personally editing the author biography to unwitting patrons aren't confused by the difference.

New Information Frontiers

For several years I've remembered a side remark by a Canadian author who described the work of a historian who theorized that the discrepancies between US and Canadian settlement of the West was due in part because the US, even after the Civil War, were more still a league of self interested states whose emigrating population settled and established new states of order whilst Canada's commercial frontier and missionary work combined with exploratory policies of a distant imperial government established order before the people arrived. The city of Deadwood as captured in the eponymous TV show, a town that had no right to exist under Federal treaty law, simply would not exist in Canada since the Royal Northwestern Mounted Police would have established an outpost across the river and was ready to enforce the laws of parliament. US authorities have a track record of ignoring abuses, at worst, and improvising incomplete solutions, at best.

Here on the frontier of information, stored in genomes rather than books, and increasingly accessible online instead of a library or archive, the national government, in league with state and local governments in the tableau that is the US Federal government, is generally letting the states do as they choose when deciding what constitutes privacy. Under a libertarian interpretation 14th Amendment Congress could enact a privacy or consent laws while maintaining transparency and accountability in local and state records that do not move inter-state, but unless there is a great impetus its reluctance falls back to a strict (by virtue of neglect) interpretation of 10th Amendment and Article IV which inherently muddle the legal environment.

I am unsure how other countries have dealt with this problem but since the wealthier ones that can support vigorous stem cell research are likely in Europe where the parliamentary model prevails, the practical dictatorship of party that occurs after each election is an effective way to create sweeping legislation like a national privacy law or sane stem cell informed consent policies. The American republic is simply too cumbersome and individuated to fix this comprehensively.

This US model has its merits in some arenas, however. The Senate, formerly appointed by the states, encourages only sustained public pressure for changes and is potentially keeping the Democrats in control until 2012 when the cognitive dissonance of the Republican tax policies relative to the Keynesian Democrats is revealed as the greater evil. Unfortunately it might cost Russ Feingold, a far more deserving statesman than the lethargic Herb Kohl, his job simply because of bad timing. The federated approach is what lets 12 states have medical marijuana laws in an affront to national law. These eventually atrophied the Justice Department's in-state enforcement into 10th Amendment Land where it belongs. Too often the constitutional nuances are neglected when these problems are considered and I can guarantee states will chafe under any attempt for comprehensive privacy laws if for the only reason being an eradication of case law.

I am not appealing to the Constitution for the sake of legal nuance. I don't find legal squabbles as an aesthetically satisfying sign that our country is doing well but this systematic problem is a symptom of what makes America great. It will be solved as it always has--piecemeal until the various parties involved have assembled and had a chat about what's important to them and why. There's nothing unconstitutional about the states getting together to create a and agree upon an amendment to the Constitution should something be important. Until then defenders of privacy and public accountability or researchers should work within the arenas available and of which they have local control to make effective policy that satisfies them in part because they created it themselves.

It is also the responsibilities of the citizens to appraise themselves of laws before they act. Ignorance of the law, at least now that Miranda v. Arizona has been neutered, is seldom an excuse. Last year a man in his early 20s had sex with an emotionally fragile 17 year old girl in the High School where he worked because he looked up the age of consent laws but failed to consider that persons in authority are treated distinctly. This ignorance on the part of the genetic donors is inexcusable and the clinic, being the party that has an obviously greater interest in this narrow aspect of state and federal law in addition to professionally adopted practices, bears the greatest responsibility to provide information and receive consent. Just don't expect the national government to come up with something comprehensive.