Halfway Down the Other

Intermarriage, Yugoslav versus American style

How did this discussion start? Doug was down because some people he cares about are still drinking Walker Bush's yellow Kool-Aid. I tried cheering him up by e-mail. Not my forte, as Poppy might say...

The wingnut lifestyle is not a complete counterculture, not even the evangelical portions thereof. And as long as they're interacting with the larger culture -- the extremely latitudinarian sensibilities of a large majority of Americans -- they will internalize some of that sensibility. I've seen it happen close up.

In this sort of tolerant wider cultural environment, only the people who can continually redefine an external enemy according to their own internal mental needs, who must needs [sic] define themselves in terms of combativeness -- the psychologically damaged, in other words -- are able to carry this sort of attitude to the grave.

It's a novelty, me being on the ebullient side, and Doug being morose. Doug replied, in part:

I think that's too optimistic. 1970s Yugoslavia was a tolerant cultural environment, no?

I answered,

Cultural tolerance in the U.S. for most of the wingnut types does not represent a psychological reality. To them, it really does seem like a bad government policy which many bien-pensant whites have gone along with because of their ingrained leftism and dhimmitude, and which the coloreds naturally support because they get bread and circuses (affirmative action, the Cosby show, et cetera). Should the legitimacy of the goverment fall, all this will quickly unravel. Just like Yugoslavia!

As is sometimes said elsewhere, fap fap fap. The psychological reality on the ground, outside of the wingnut enclaves -- which are strongly regionally and generationally defined, among demographically shrinking subgroups -- is very different.

Doug replied,

Um. Go back and look at the [Yugoslav] intermarriage rate.

(So I did. But that's a bit later.)

Hello Mütter!

Yesterday I went with Peanut and Bad Mama to Philadelphia's Mütter Museum. It's a respectful museum devoted to medical anomalies, utterly fascinating if you like that sort of thing, which all three of us do.

I was deeply struck by a unique method of tissue preparation devised by Werner Spalteholz, not a name I was previously familiar with. One of the great German anatomists -- his Hand Atlas is still regarded as a classic -- he devised a method to render tissue transparent, which is still used to this day. The trick is to permeate the tissue with chemicals of the right index of refraction, such as oil of wintergreen, which 'clears' the tissue, like a grease spot on a paper placemat. You stain or dye the things you want to highlight, and they appear like a floating three-dimensional hologram in the preparation.

Spalteholz's method was used extensively in Dresden's German Hygiene Museum, the original home of the Transparent Man which freaked so many members of my generation out as children. Between Hitler trashing the Otto Dix murals, the Billy Pilgrim incident, and the Soviet aftermath, eighty percent of the museum was destroyed. Interestingly, the Soviets thought highly enough of the museum to rebuild it.

Spalteholz patented his method in the U.S. (#1021952), after being given an honorary doctorate at the University of Wisconsin a few years before.

Not a whole lot of information on the history of this sort of innovation out there.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Thoughts so far:

1. Cheese curds freeze really well.

2. The Negroni is a very classy way to drink a lot of gin.

3. I have to get an accordion.

New Year's Resolution:

This is the other half -- to export my content over to Typepad.