Articles from the Sunday Times...
Nov. 27th, 2005 01:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On the bedbug epidemic
Just Try to Sleep Tight. The Bedbugs Are Back.
By ANDREW JACOBS
They're the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they're a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night.
But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The suit was quietly settled last year.
And bedbugs, stealthy and fast-moving nocturnal creatures that were all but eradicated by DDT after World War II, have recently been found in hospital maternity wards, private schools and even a plastic surgeon's waiting room.
Bedbugs are back and spreading through New York City like a swarm of locusts on a lush field of wheat.
Infestations have been reported sporadically across the United States over the past few years. But in New York, bedbugs have gained a foothold all across the city.
"It's becoming an epidemic," said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, an Upper West Side business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. "People are being tortured, and so am I. I spend half my day talking to hysterical people about bedbugs."
Last year the city logged 377 bedbug violations, up from just 2 in 2002 and 16 in 2003. Since July, there have been 449. "It's definitely a fast-emerging problem," said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the city housing agency.
In the bedbug resurgence, entomologists and exterminators blame increased immigration from the developing world, the advent of cheap international travel and the recent banning of powerful pesticides. Other culprits include the recycled mattress industry and those thrifty New Yorkers who revel in the discovery of a free sofa on the sidewalk.
And that new mattress delivered from a reputable department store, which kindly hauled away your old one? It may have spent all day in a truck wedged against an old mattress collected from a customer with a bedbug problem.
Once introduced into a home, bedbugs can crawl into adjoining apartments or hitch a ride to another part of town in the cuff of a pant leg.
"Anyone who stays in a hotel, rich or poor, can bring them home in a suitcase," said Richard Kourbage, whose company, Kingsway Exterminating in Brooklyn, does about a dozen bedbug jobs a day. "Some of the best hotels in New York have them."
Unlike mice and roaches, which are abetted by filthy surroundings, bedbugs do just fine in a well-scrubbed home, although bedroom clutter gives them more places to hide and breed. When engorged with blood, they grow slightly plumper than the O on this page, although the nymphs, which appear almost translucent before their first meal, are not much bigger than the period at the end of this sentence.
And they don't dwell just in mattresses and box springs: any wall or floor crack the thickness of a playing card can accommodate a bedbug. Although some people try to treat the problem themselves, most hire exterminators, at $300 per room.
The modern bedbug is immune to hardware-store-variety insecticides, and setting off a cockroach bomb in the bedroom will only scatter them farther afield. And because they are active only at night, many people don't discover them until their population has grown into the hundreds, or even thousands.
Exterminators recommend bagging and washing every bit of clothing and fabric in the room and taking apart bureau drawers and bed frames in preparation for the application of four kinds of chemicals. The process often needs to be repeated.
Worst of all, bedbug sufferers say, is the stigma of living with an insect that feeds on blood - though it does not transmit disease - and leaves behind a trail of red bumps that many dermatologists mistakenly identify as hives or scabies.
"People come in here and cry on my shoulder," said Andy Linares, the owner of Bug Off Pest Control, in Washington Heights. "They feel ashamed, even traumatized, to have these invisible vampires living in their home. Rats, even V.D., is more socially acceptable than bedbugs."
In interviews with more than a dozen bedbug sufferers, only a handful would speak on the record, saying they feared the condemning glares of neighbors or the shunning of co-workers. A bedbug infestation, many say, puts a strain on relationships, all but ruling out staying the night.
Like many "bedbug victims," as some call themselves, Josie Torielli has become consumed with the biology of bedbugs since she found them in her home last year. She blamed mosquitoes for the blotches on her body until she turned on the lights one night and found a few of the fiends crawling across her sheets.
She thought she had them conquered, but last week, after nine months of peace, Ms. Torielli discovered the telltale red spots on her sheets, the result of blood-engorged bugs crushed during the night.
"I've become obsessed," said Ms. Torielli, 33, a student who lives in Hell's Kitchen, in Manhattan. "I switched to white sheets so I can see them better, and I've set up a bedbug jail in a Tupperware container that I put on the windowsill to torture them with daylight. It's all-out war."
Bedbugs prefer human hosts, but will feed on dogs or cats if necessary. They can live longer than a year, with the female laying up to 500 eggs in a lifetime. An adult bedbug can survive unfed for up to a year.
"They're kind of amazing," said Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, explaining how a bedbug, a k a Cimex lectularius, emits one pheromone to find another bedbug and another to warns others of danger. In heavy infestations, the pheromones give a room a sweet, musty odor.
To show off the insect's special sucking stylus, Mr. Sorkin removed a bedbug nymph from a container and placed it on his finger. Even under a bright light and being nudged by tweezers, it began to feed and turned rust-colored as it filled with blood.
"They're insatiable," he said five minutes into the bug's feeding.
All this science is not much comfort to those in the throes of battle. Kellianne Scanlan, 30, a hairstylist who lives in Washington Heights, has been living like a nomad since last month, when she spotted a bedbug on her pillow, and then whole families ensconced in the frame of her platform bed. Despite the visit of an exterminator, the problem has not been vanquished, and every last item of clothing is sealed in plastic bags and piled up on the living room floor.
"My life has become all about bedbugs," she said as an exterminator arrived last week.
She said that to calm her friends and to ensure that she does not spread the bugs, she takes an extra set of clothing and changes when she arrives at their homes for overnight visits. "The psychological damage is probably the worst thing about it. I mean, how long will it be before I can sleep soundly and not worry about some creature sucking my blood?"
Still, for Ms. Scanlan, there has been a silver lining. The night after she discovered the bugs, she went out drinking, intent on avoiding her own bed. That evening she met a man at a bar, and, contrary to her usual instincts, accompanied him to his apartment. An encounter partly born of desperation soon blossomed into something more, she said.
"We've been together ever since," Ms. Scanlan said with a smile. "Thanks to the bedbugs, I've fallen in love."
On child marriage in Africa
Forced to Marry Before Puberty, African Girls Pay Lasting Price
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
CHIKUTU, Malawi - Mapendo Simbeye's problems began early last year when the barren hills along Malawi's northern border with Tanzania rejected his attempts to grow even cassava, the hardiest crop of all. So to feed his wife and five children, he said, he went to his neighbor, Anderson Kalabo, and asked for a loan. Mr. Kalabo gave him 2,000 kwacha, about $16. The family was fed.
But that created another problem: how could Mr. Simbeye, a penniless farmer, repay Mr. Kalabo?
The answer would shock most outsiders, but in sub-Saharan Africa's rural patriarchies, it is deeply ingrained custom. Mr. Simbeye sent his 11-year-old daughter, Mwaka, a shy first grader, down one mangy hillside and up the next to Mr. Kalabo's hut. There she became a servant to his first wife, and, she said, Mr. Kalabo's new bed partner.
Now 12, Mwaka said her parents never told her she was meant to be the second wife of a man roughly three decades her senior. "They said I had to chase birds from the rice garden," she said, studying the ground outside her mud-brick house. "I didn't know anything about marriage."
Mwaka ran away, and her parents took her back after six months. But a week's journey through Malawi's dry and mountainous north suggests that her escape is the exception. In remote lands like this, where boys are valued far more than girls, older men prize young wives, fathers covet dowries and mothers are powerless to intervene, many African girls like Mwaka must leap straight from childhood to marriage at a word from their fathers.
Sometimes that word comes years before they reach puberty.
The consequences of these forced marriages are staggering: adolescence and schooling cut short; early pregnancies and hazardous births; adulthood often condemned to subservience. The list has grown to include exposure to H.I.V. at an age when girls do not grasp the risks of AIDS.
Increasingly educators, health officials and even legislators discourage or even forbid these marriages. In Ethiopia, for example, where studies show that in a third of the states girls marry under the age of 15, one state took action in April. Officials said they had annulled as underage the marriages of 56 girls ages 12 to 15, and filed charges against parents of half the girls for forcing them into the unions.
Yet child marriages remain entrenched in rural pockets throughout sub-Saharan Africa, from Ghana to Kenya to Zambia, according to Unicef. Studies show that the average age of marriage in this region remains among the world's lowest, and the percentage of adolescent mothers the world's highest.
Many rural African communities, steeped in centuries of belief that girls occupy society's lower rungs, are inured to disapproval by the outside world.
"There is a lot of talk, but the value of the girl child is still low," said Seodi White, Malawi's coordinator for the Women in Law in Southern Africa Research Trust. "Society still clings to the education of the boy, and sees the girl as a trading tool. In the north, girls as early as 10 are being traded off for the family to gain. After that, the women become owned and powerless in their husbands' villages."
In villages throughout northern Malawi, girls are often married at or before puberty to whomever their fathers choose, sometimes to husbands as much as half a century older. Many of those same girls later choose lifelong misery over divorce because custom decrees that children in patriarchal tribes belong to the father.
In interviews, fathers and daughters here unapologetically explained the rationales for forced, intergenerational unions.
Uness Nyambi, of the village of Wiliro, said she was betrothed as a child so her parents could finance her brother's choice of a bride. Now about 17, she has two children, the oldest nearly 5, and a husband who guesses he is 70. "Just because of these two children, I can not leave him," she said.
Beatrice Kitamula, 19, was forced to marry her wealthy neighbor, now 63, five years ago because her father owed another man a cow. "I was the sacrifice," Ms. Kitamula said, holding back tears. She likened her husband's comfortable compound of red brick houses in Ngana village to a penitentiary. "When you are in prison," she said, "you have no rights."
In tiny Sele, Lyson Morenga, a widower, financed his re-marriage two years ago by giving his daughter Rachel, then 12, to a 50-year-old acquaintance in exchange for a black bull, according to his new in-laws. Mr. Morenga delivered the bull to his new wife's family as a partial payment, said his wife's uncle, Stewart Simkonda. Mr. SImkonda said Mr. Morenga had promised to deliver a larger payment after the impending marriage of Rachel's younger sister.
Malawi government officials say they try hard to protect girls like Rachel. Legislation before Parliament would raise the minimum age for marriage to 18, the legal age in most countries. Currently, marriages of Malawian girls from 15 to 18 are legal with the parents' consent. Women's rights advocates say they welcome the proposal, even though its effect would be limited because many marriages here, like much of the sub-Saharan region, take place under traditional customs, not civil law.
The government trained about 230 volunteers last year in ways to protect children, especially girls. Volunteers for Malawi's Human Rights Commission, Roman Catholic Church workers and police victim-protection units also try to intervene. In Iponga village, for example, Mbohesha Mbisa averted a forced marriage to her uncle at age 13 last year by walking a half-mile to the local police station, where officers persuaded her father to drop his plans to use her to replace her deceased aunt as a wife and mother.
"I was really scared, but I wanted to protect myself," said Mbohesha, now in the sixth grade.
Still, Malawi officials say that this region's growing poverty, worsened by AIDS and recent crop-killing drought, has put even more young girls at risk of forced marriage.
"This practice has been there for a long time, but it is getting worse now because there is desperation," said Penston Kilembe, Malawi's director of social welfare services. "It is particularly prevalent in communities that have been hard hit by famine. Households that can no longer fend for themselves opt to sell off their children to wealthier households."
"The gains which were made in addressing early marriages are being lost," said Andrina Mchiela, principal secretary for the Ministry of Gender.
Women's rights advocates want to abolish marriage payments, or lobolo, saying they create a financial incentive for parents to marry off their daughters. But even the advocates describe the tradition as politically untouchable.
In its most benign form, lobolo is a token of appreciation from the groom's family to the bride's. At its most egregious, it turns girls into the human equivalent of cattle. In much of northern Malawi, lobolo negotiations are typically all-male discussions of down payments, installments, settlements and the occasional refund for a wife who runs off.
Jimmy Mwanyongo, a 45-year-old village headman in Karonga, explained the marriage of his daughter Edah much as he might any commercial transaction. Several years ago, he said, sitting on a straw mat in his six-room house, he promised to care for his neighbor's two cows.
Instead, he sold the cows to educate his adopted son. When the neighbor, Ridein Simfukwe, lost his wife a year later in 2002, Mr. Mwanyongo said he felt obliged to offer his daughter as a replacement. "Because I had sold the two cows, I had no choice," he said.
Edah was 17, doe-eyed and voluptuous. Even with an illegitimate son, her neighbors and relatives say, she had her pick of suitors. Mr. Simfukwe was 63, with nine grown children and a flock of grandchildren.
Mr. Simfukwe said he considered Edah a bit young for him. But "her father decided that although I am old, I am the right person."
"I think it was a tribute to my character," he said. "Edah was willing. I didn't tie ropes around her neck and drag her."
Edah said her father did everything but that. For nine months, she said, she held out until "I thought I would die of sorrow."
"My father refused to allow me to eat," she said. "He chased me from the house. He said, 'Go find somewhere where you can sleep!' He said, 'Go to your husband! If you don't want to go there, I will whip you to death!' "
Her mother, Tabu Harawa, sided with her daughter, to no avail. "I told him, 'It is like you are killing her,' " she said. "It was shameful."
She said, "If it happens again, I will divorce him."
Now 20, Edah has an 11-month-old girl and is racked by fears for her future. "My husband is old," she said, sitting on the porch of her tiny thatched hut. "He may die soon. Most likely he leave me with more children. So where will I go?"
Her life, she suggested, is about as free as that of the two prized oxen her father now hooks up to his wooden cart for springtime plowing. "I am like a slave," she said.
Some of Edah's neighbors pity her. Others joke that she has married her own grandfather. Their reaction is one hint that even the most traditional Africans are starting to frown on marriages of young women to old men, as Edah's mother said, "for the sake of cows."
Mwaka Simbeye has her fellow villagers in Chikutu to thank for her return to her parents' home after her sojourn in her neighbor's hut. Now back in the second grade, she is still young enough to be charmed by a simple game of toss. Her body remains that of a child's.
At Mr. Kalabo's, she said in a barely audible whisper, "I had to do all the household chores. Washing the plates, cleaning the house, fetching water, collecting firewood, cooking when the first wife wasn't around."
Her father, Mapendo Simbeye, who repaid his $16 debt with Mwaka, said he took her back after hearing that the police could arrest him. In a clearing that serves as the village social center, he said he underestimated her, adding, "My daughter is worth more than 2,000 kwacha."
"I did it out of ignorance," he said. "I had five kids, no money and no food. Then Mr. Kalabo wanted the money back so I thought of selling the daughter. I didn't know I was abusing her."
Mwaka's mother, Tighezge Simkonda, looks like an older version of her daughter and is no less shy. "I did object," she said softly, glancing nervously at her husband chatting nearby. "I said, 'My daughter is very young.' "
"But the control is with the man," she said. "The daughters belong to the man."
On the Christian schools having courses not accepted by that university...
Here's the Problem With Emily Dickinson
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
INTELLIGENT design isn't the only flashpoint in the battle over religion in the nation's classrooms. On Dec. 12, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles will hear a lawsuit filed by a consortium of Christian high schools against the University of California system for refusing to credit some of their courses when their students apply for admission.
Among those courses are "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and American Literature," both of which draw on textbooks published by Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which describes itself as having stood for "the absolute authority of the Bible since 1927."
The plaintiffs, the Association of Christian Schools International, which represents more than 800 schools in California, and the Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, Calif., contend that their students are being discriminated against because of their religious beliefs. The university system counters that it has the right to set its own standards. Here are excerpts from the disputed texts. THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
•
"United States History for Christian Schools," written by Timothy Keesee and Mark Sidwell (Bob Jones University, 2001), says this about Thomas Jefferson.
American believers can appreciate Jefferson's rich contribution to the development of their nation, but they must beware of his view of Christ as a good teacher but not the incarnate son of God. As the Apostle John said, "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son" (I John 2:22).
Slavery, which most historians look at politically or economically, is seen as "an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin."
The sin in this case was greed - greed on the part of African tribal leaders, on the part of slave traders and on the part of slave owners, all of whom allowed their love for profit to outweigh their love for their fellow man. The consequences of such greed and racism extended across society and far into the future. It resulted in untold suffering-most obviously for the black race but for the white race as well. ... The Lord has never exaggerated in warning us of sin's devastating consequences - for us and for our descendants (Exodus 34:7).
The book also criticizes the progressive movement championed by Theodore Roosevelt, and the Progressives themselves.
On the whole, they believed that man is basically good and that human nature might be improved. ... Such a belief, of course, ignored the biblical teaching that man is sinful by nature (Ephesians 2:1-3). Progressives therefore also ignored the fact that the fallible men who built the corrupt institutions that they attacked were the same in nature as those who filled the political offices and staffed the regulatory agencies that were supposed to control the corruption.
On the other hand, the "devout Methodist" H. J. Heinz is praised for his fine products and humane treatment of workers, which set him apart from the typical 19th-century robber baron.
Heinz illustrates the Christian's response to the challenge of business management: "And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance; for ye serve the Lord Christ" (Colossians 3:23-24).
•
"Elements of Literature for Christian Schools," by Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs (Bob Jones University, 2001), faults Mark Twain for calling God "an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master."
Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless. Denying that he was created in the image of God, Twain was able to rid himself of feeling any responsibility to his Creator. At the same time, however, he defiantly cut himself off from God's love. Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.
Emily Dickinson, too, is criticized for her lack of faith.
Dickinson's year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary further shaped her "religious" views. During her stay at the school, she learned of Christ but wrote of her inability to make a decision for Him. She could not settle "the one thing needful." A thorough study of Dickinson's works indicates that she never did make that needful decision. Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.
By contrast, the piety of Christina Rossetti, the 19th-century British poet, gets high marks.
The loneliness she faced is often reflected in her poems. But stronger than her loneliness was her total confidence in and submission to her Lord and Savior. Rossetti filled her mind and heart with Scripture. She gained from it a unique appreciation of the sustaining and sacrificial love of God. Her poetry and uplifting devotional literature are the natural overflow of her complete dependence on God.
•
"Physics for Christian Schools," by R. Terrance Egolf and Linda Shumate (Bob Jones University, 2004), addresses the question, "What is Christian about physics?"
Some people have developed the idea that higher mathematics and science have little to do with the Bible or Christian life. They think that because physics deals with scientific facts, or because it is not pervaded with evolutionary ideas, there is no need to study it from a Christian perspective. This kind of thinking ignores a number of important facts to the Christian: First, all secular science is pervaded by mechanistic, naturalistic and evolutionistic philosophy. Learning that the laws of mechanics as they pertain to a baseball in flight are just the natural consequences of the way matter came together denies the wisdom and power of our Creator God. ... Second, physics as taught in the schools of the world contradicts the processes that shaped the world we see today. Trying to believe both secular physics and the Bible leaves you in a state of confusion that will weaken your faith in God's Word.
Even the abstract laws of energy and matter, the authors write, reflect the hand of God.
You are about to embark on an adventure. The study of physics reveals the wonderful orderliness of God's creation - so orderly that it can be comprehended in terms of relatively simple principles (mathematical formulas). ... Physics is important because through it mankind learns how creation actually works. It satisfies our God-given curiosity about nature. Seeing that God does "great things and unsearchable; marvelous things without number" (Job 5:9), men have dedicated their lives to unraveling the rich mysteries of creation.
On selling the Brooklyn Bridge
For You, Half Price
By GABRIEL COHEN
THE year is 1899, and a saucy con artist named Peaches O'Day is trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. She succeeds, too, passing it off to a gullible fellow who pays her $200 and receives a bill of sale reading, "One bridge in good condition." As punishment, she is run out of town, but she returns in triumph, disguised in a black wig as the French entertainer Mademoiselle Fifi, and goes on to be elected mayor of the city.
So it went in the 1937 comedy "Every Day's a Holiday," a Mae West film that made merry with one of the most cherished notions about New York and the gullibility to be found there: that someone would be foolish enough to buy one of the city's iconic landmarks.
Since the bridge was completed in 1883, the idea of illegally selling it has become the ultimate example of the power of persuasion. A good salesman could sell it, a great swindler would sell it, and the perfect sucker would fall for the scam.
But this was not just a rhetorical or a fictional conceit. A turn-of-the-century confidence man named George C. Parker actually sold the Brooklyn Bridge more than once. According to Carl Sifakis, who tells his story in "Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles," Parker - who was also adept at selling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant's Tomb - produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the bridge's owner, then convinced his buyers that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. "Several times," Mr. Sifakis wrote, "Parker's victims had to be rousted from the bridge by police when they tried to erect toll barriers."
Another seller was William McCloundy, also known as "I.O.U. O'Brien," who sold the bridge in 1901, "for which he was convicted of grand larceny and served two and a half years in Sing Sing," The New York Times wrote some years later.
In writing his book "Hustlers and Con Men: An Anecdotal History of the Confidence Man and His Games," Jay Robert Nash interviewed an elderly swindler named Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil, who said he had known several criminal vendors of the bridge. Mr. Weil, whom Mr. Nash visited in a Chicago nursing home and described as "probably the greatest con man of the 20th century," recalled a swindler named Reed C. Waddell, who worked the bridge swindle in the 1880's and 1890's. Mr. Weil also claimed to know Waddell's successors in that trade, the notorious Charles and Fred Gondorf.
Perpetrators such as Mr. Waddell and the Gondorf brothers were savvy. They timed the path of beat cops working near the bridge, and when they knew the officers would be out of sight, they propped up signs reading "Bridge for Sale," showed the edifice to their targets, and separated them from their money as quickly as possible. "The Gondorfs sold the bridge many times," Mr. Nash said. "They would sell it for two, three hundred dollars, up to one thousand. Once they sold half the bridge for two-fifty because the mark didn't have enough cash."
And there were plenty of marks. "The oddity of the thing today," said Luc Sante, author of the book "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York," "is not that there might have been con artists ready to sell the bridge, but that there would have been suckers both gullible enough and sufficiently well-heeled to fall for it."
By all accounts, the bulk of the suckers were greenhorns, fresh off the boat. Swindlers used to approach the stewards of international vessels docked at Ellis Island and pay them for information about passengers who might have money and be interested in buying property. "They didn't understand the country," Mr. Nash said of this population. "They didn't understand the law. But they understood that this was supposed to be the land of opportunity."
The Brooklyn Bridge had several attributes that made it particularly well suited for this sort of endeavor. Its proximity to the port made it highly visible to newcomers who might be likely marks, and its size provided opportunities to show it off while avoiding the law. But perhaps most critical was its considerable fame. "In the 19th century," said Kathleen Hulser, the public historian at the New-York Historical Society, "the bridge was one of the two best-known symbols of America," the other being the Statue of Liberty.
Vendors of the bridge not only counted on the gullibility or greed of their targets; they also appealed to their vanity. Buyers could believe, as Mr. Sifakis put it, that "they had become real men of substance, great capitalists."
"All great monuments will have swindles built around them," he added. "The appeal is to own a piece of the rock."
Even as the nature of the immigrant population shifted, the scam endured. "Up to the 1920's people were still trying," Mr. Nash said. "But it was a hard sale. Immigrants had become much more sophisticated and knowledgeable, and by that time the processors at Ellis Island were handing out cards or booklets saying, 'You can't buy public buildings or streets.' " These shifts explain why the Brooklyn Bridge is the span associated with swindles; the city's other bridges were built after the high tide of gullibility had already begun slipping away.
Long after actual sales of the Brooklyn Bridge subsided, the concept still roused the public imagination and remained embedded in popular culture. In the 1947 movie "It Happened in Brooklyn," Frank Sinatra played a young private home from the war who sang plaintively to the woman he loves: "Don't let no one tell you/ I've been tryin' to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge." Even Bugs Bunny got in on the act; in the 1949 cartoon "Bowery Bugs," an old man is so charmed by the rabbit's tale of the famous bridge jumper Steve Brodie (Brodie's feat, alas, was a hoax) that he agrees to buy the bridge from him.
AND because of the Internet, which has provided seemingly endless new opportunities to propagate frauds, there's life in the old con yet. One particularly memorable attempt to sell the bridge is documented on Scamorama.com, a Web site that presents e-mail exchanges between would-be scammers and their not-so-gullible targets.
In one, a swindler using the name Genevieve e-mailed a target calling himself Vidocq (a pseudonym that should have warned off the scammer, it being the name of a famous French criminologist). In broken English, the scammer presented a convoluted story of riches tied up after a coup in Liberia and tried to entice Vidocq into sending money to help gain release of the funds. Vidocq did his best to gain the swindler's trust, then turned the tables by offering shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The notion piqued the swindler's interest, and an involved exchange of e-mail messages followed before the scammer finally realized just who was being conned.
When it comes to victims and victimizers, perhaps the humorist Will Rogers deserves the last word. "They may call me a 'rube' and a 'hick,' " he said. "But I'd a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it."
On the end of rudely indulgent parenting. Youse guys wanna read this
Kids Gone Wild
By JUDITH WARNER
CHILDREN should be seen and not heard" may be due for a comeback. After decades of indulgence, American society seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as far as tolerance for wild and woolly kid behavior is concerned.
Last month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans said they believed that people are ruder now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and that children are among the worst offenders. (As annoyances, they tied with obnoxious cellphone users.)
The conservative child psychologist John Rosemond recently denounced in his syndicated column the increasing presence of "disruptive urchins" who "obviously have yet to have been taught the basic rudiments of public behavior," as he related the wretched experience of dining in a four-star restaurant in the company of one child roller skating around his table and another watching a movie on a portable DVD player.
In 2002, only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were "respectful toward adults," according to surveys done then by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan and nonprofit public opinion research group. In 2004, more than one in three teachers told Public Agenda pollsters they had seriously considered leaving their profession or knew a colleague who had left because of "intolerable" student behavior.
Even Madonna - her "Papa Don't Preach" years long past - has joined the throng, proclaiming herself a proud "disciplinarian" in a recent issue of the British magazine Harpers & Queen and bragging that, as a mom, she takes a tough line on homework, tidiness and chores: "If you leave your clothes on the floor, they're gone when you come home."
Jo Frost, ABC's superstar "Supernanny," would be proud.
Whether children are actually any worse behaved now than they ever have been before is, of course, debatable. Children have always been considered, basically, savages. The question, from the late 17th century onwards, has been whether they come by it naturally or are shaped by the brutality of society.
But what seems to have changed recently, according to childrearing experts, is parental behavior - particularly among the most status-conscious and ambitious - along with the kinds of behavior parents expect from their kids. The pressure to do well is up. The demand to do good is down, way down, particularly if it's the kind of do-gooding that doesn't show up on a college application.
Once upon a time, parenting was largely about training children to take their proper place in their community, which, in large measure, meant learning to play by the rules and cooperate, said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist and co-author, with Nicole Wise, of "The OverScheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyperparenting Trap."
"There was a time when there was a certain code of conduct by which you viewed the character of a person," he said, "and you needed that code of conduct to have your place in the community."
Rude behavior, particularly toward adults, was something for which children had to be chastised, even punished. That has also now changed, said Dan Kindlon, a Harvard University child psychologist and author of "Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age."
Most parents, Dr. Kindlon said, would like their children to be polite, considerate and well behaved. But they're too tired, worn down by work and personally needy to take up the task of teaching them proper behavior at home.
"We use kids like Prozac," he said. "People don't necessarily feel great about their spouse or their job but the kids are the bright spot in their day. They don't want to muck up that one moment by getting yelled at. They don't want to hurt. They don't want to feel bad. They want to get satisfaction from their kids. They're so precious to us - maybe more than to any generation previously. What gets thrown out the window is limits. It's a lot easier to pick their towel up off the floor than to get them away from the PlayStation to do it."
Parenting today is also largely about training children to compete - in school and on the soccer field - and the kinds of attributes they need to be competitive are precisely those that help break down society's civility.
Parents who want their children to succeed more than anything, Dr. Kindlon said, teach them to value and prioritize achievement above all else - including other people.
"We're insane about achievement," he said. "Schoolwork is up 50 percent since 1981, and we're so obsessed with our kids getting into the right school, getting the right grades, we let a lot of things slide. Kids don't do chores at home anymore because there isn't time."
And other adults, even those who should have authority, are afraid to get involved. "Nobody feels entitled to discipline other people's kids anymore," Dr. Kindlon said. "They don't feel they have the right if they see a kid doing something wrong to step in."
Educators feel helpless, too: Nearly 8 in 10 teachers, according to the 2004 Public Agenda report, said their students were quick to remind them that they had rights or that their parents could sue if they were too harshly disciplined. More than half said they ended up being soft on discipline "because they can't count on parents or schools to support them."
And that, Dr. Rosenfeld said, strikes at the heart of the problem. "Parents are out of control," he said. "We always want to blame the kids, but if there's something wrong with their incivility, it's the way their parents model for them."
There's also the chance, said Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist whose 2001 book, "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," has earned her a cult following, that when children are rude, obnoxious and outrageously behaved, they're trying to tell parents something - something they've got to shout in order for them to hear.
"These kids are so extremely stressed from the academic load they're carrying and how cloistered they are and how they have to live under the watchful eye of their parents," Dr. Mogel said. "They have no kid space."
Paradoxically, she said, parental over-involvement in their children's lives today often hides a very basic kind of indifference to their children's real need, simply to be kids. "There are all these blurry boundaries," she said. "They need to do fifth-grade-level math in third grade and have every pleasure and indulgence of adulthood in childhood and they act like kids and we get mad."
If stress and strain, self-centeredness and competition are the pathogens underlying the rash of rudeness perceived to be endemic among children in America today, then the cure, some experts said, has to be systemic and not topical. Stop blaming the children, they said. Stop focusing on the surface level of behavior and start curing instead the social, educational and parental ills that feed it.
This may mean less "quality" time with children and more time getting them to do things they don't want to do, like sitting for meals, making polite conversation and - Madonna was right - picking their clothes up off the floor.
Replies to that article on genetic testing I posted
Disabilities in the Age of Genetics (5 Letters)
To the Editor:
"The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World" (Week in Review, Nov. 20) discusses the concern that advances in prenatal screening for Down syndrome and other conditions will lead to a decrease of services and care for people born with disabilities.
But testing for Down syndrome during pregnancy and the accompanying expansion of choice should lessen the isolation of people with disabilities. The world is a much more welcoming place for children who are wanted.
With testing, families will be expecting these children to arrive as they are, they will have been given a head start in working through their concerns, and other people will come to understand that the children were wanted - chosen in spite of test results, even if the choice is different from what theirs would be.
Remove the part of the disability that conjures up fear of the unknown and uncontrollable, and you've removed a large part of what makes up prejudice.
"That could happen to us" becomes "I wonder what we would do?" And respect for difference and different choices replaces fear.
Suzanne Hoffman Levin
New York, Nov. 20, 2005
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To the Editor:
As a socially conscious member of the medical community, I know that medical care is unequally distributed. As the sister of a disabled person, I know that the disabled must fight for equal treatment in society.
But these are problems we must fight at the level of social policy making, not by decrying genetic screening of the diseases themselves.
Diana Barnes-Brown
Honolulu, Nov. 22, 2005
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To the Editor:
It was with an increasingly heavy heart that I read about yet another refinement in genetic testing. Twenty-four years ago we began an unexpected journey for which we had no preparation: our daughter, Sarah, was born with Down syndrome.
Then, as now, a genetic test could have forewarned us. What the test could not have revealed, however, was the person that Sarah eventually became. Her delight in life and extraordinary capacity for love and forgiveness enrich the lives of those who know her.
Years ago a friend, sensing in Sarah an absence of the pretense that plagues so many "normal" people, described her as "a rose with the thorns removed."
Tragically, a genetic test may lead one to find thorns with no hope of experiencing the rose.
Dan Raessler
Lynchburg, Va., Nov. 20, 2005
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To the Editor:
Because Americans have the right to make their own choices, every mother has the right to decide if she can take on the responsibilities of having a disabled child.
We should put our energy into finding cures for the disabilities, instead of debating a personal choice of abortion. I know that if I became pregnant, I would want the best of both worlds, to be able to have a child and to not worry about his having a disability.
Heidi Dreyfuss
Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
Nov. 20, 2005
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To the Editor:
Genetic testing may mean there will be fewer people with certain disabilities in the future, which leads some with such problems to worry that people like them might have a more difficult time in the future.
Should I ever find myself with a disability, I certainly hope I won't wish the condition on others, just to make my own life a little easier.
William Vaughan Jr.
Chebeague Island, Me.
Nov. 20, 2005
On cloning (mostly concerning a book review, though)
What Would a Clone Say?
By GARY ROSEN
You know from the start that there's something creepy about Kathy H., the narrator of "Never Let Me Go," Kazuo Ishiguro's recent and widely acclaimed coming-of-age novel. Though Kathy's fond memories of adolescence are set at a tony English boarding school, with its cliques and pranks and furtive hookups, it's clear that she is no child of privilege. As we learn to our dismay, she and her peers are clones - members of a caste created and trained for no other purpose than to provide healthy organs for the sick and feeble.
Genetic duplicates are hardly new to literature and pop culture - think of Huxley's worker-drone Epsilons in "Brave New World" - but Ishiguro's protagonist is different. Despite the novel's fantastic premise and Kathy's gruesome lot, she is unmistakably a person - not a monster or a menace or a comic device but a young woman struggling to figure out who she is and what she wants. "Never Let Me Go" is something of a cultural landmark: a subtle, sympathetic portrait of the inner life of a clone.
The imaginative leap that Ishiguro takes is instructive. Today most people condemn the very thought of cloning for reproduction - that is, to make a child. But with the exception of the religious right, Americans increasingly embrace cloning for research, with its promise of miracle cures for our most debilitating ills. Ishiguro's tale flips this emerging consensus on its head. What's upsetting about Kathy isn't her existence as a clone but rather the fate that has been assigned to her: to die young, used up for the medical benefit of others. She is at once a literary protest against research cloning and, by virtue of her strength as a character, a quiet suggestion that reproductive cloning may not be so troubling after all.
A bill now before Congress would allow federally financed stem-cell research on embryos that would otherwise be thrown out by fertility clinics. Abortion foes hope to head off the legislation with their own proposals encouraging alternate sources of stem cells. But all of this is just a warm-up. The issue hovering in the background is cloning, what scientists call somatic cell nuclear transfer (S.C.N.T.). For researchers in the field, as well as for the various interests that lobby on their behalf - universities, patient groups, the biotech industry - the real prize is public support for work not just on "spare" embryos but also on cloned ones.
Embryonic stem cells can develop into almost any of the body's specialized cells, a capacity that gives them enormous therapeutic potential (as yet unrealized) for the treatment of diseases like Alzheimer's and diabetes. They might also make it possible to cultivate new tissue for failing organs. Researchers fear, however, that the immune systems of would-be patients will reject stem cells whose DNA is foreign to them. How to solve the problem? By drawing stem cells from embryonic clones of the patients themselves.
This is a far cry, of course, from the system of organ farming that furnishes the horrifying backdrop of "Never Let Me Go." The nascent being destroyed in research cloning is no larger than the dot atop this printed "i" - not a fetus and certainly not a baby. Indeed, advocates like the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research have energetically denounced any cloning that might result in reproduction. The one "clear, bright line" that shouldn't be crossed, said the group's president, is the "implantation" of a clone in a woman's uterus.
Still, you don't have to be a raving Bible-thumper to entertain moral doubts about so-called therapeutic cloning ("therapeutic," that is, for potential patients; not such a great deal for the embryos). All you need is a bit of Kant from Ethics 101, especially the part about treating other people, presumably even proto-people, not as a means to your own ends but as ends in themselves. It is an injunction hard to square with the literature on S.C.N.T., with its talk of "harvesting" and "programming" stem cells. The language of the scientists and their supporters is clinical, meliorative and humane, but it gives off an unmistakable whiff of cannibalism.
Some see the cloning debate as just another skirmish in the abortion war. After all, if it is permissible to abort an embryo, what could be wrong with putting it to some lifesaving use instead? But abortion is an ordeal unsought by the woman who faces it, a tragedy of circumstance. There is, by contrast, nothing accidental or contingent about creating nascent human life with the declared aim of destroying it. It is the deliberate use of one (developing) person as the instrument of another, a practice that should give pause even to those who ardently favor abortion rights.
As for Ishiguro's doomed Kathy H., is she a prototype of future clones? Certainly not in the harsh fate she suffers as a "donor." No one is going to deny the rights of a clone that escapes the petri dish, which helps to explain why the proponents of research cloning so noisily forswear any intention of producing babies. The first actual child born of S.C.N.T. will make it that much more difficult to treat other clones as raw material for experimentation.
What may most surprise us about that first child is its ordinariness. Critics worry that clones will be grotesque puppets, the manufactured playthings of their creators, lacking all individuality. But Ishiguro allows us to glimpse a different possibility. Though Kathy is a genetic duplicate, she is nobody's double or distorted reflection. She is her own person, indeed a young woman of growing self-awareness and independence. If she really existed, she might even be in Washington just now, raising her voice against the evils of therapeutic cloning.
Just Try to Sleep Tight. The Bedbugs Are Back.
By ANDREW JACOBS
They're the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they're a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night.
But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The suit was quietly settled last year.
And bedbugs, stealthy and fast-moving nocturnal creatures that were all but eradicated by DDT after World War II, have recently been found in hospital maternity wards, private schools and even a plastic surgeon's waiting room.
Bedbugs are back and spreading through New York City like a swarm of locusts on a lush field of wheat.
Infestations have been reported sporadically across the United States over the past few years. But in New York, bedbugs have gained a foothold all across the city.
"It's becoming an epidemic," said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, an Upper West Side business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. "People are being tortured, and so am I. I spend half my day talking to hysterical people about bedbugs."
Last year the city logged 377 bedbug violations, up from just 2 in 2002 and 16 in 2003. Since July, there have been 449. "It's definitely a fast-emerging problem," said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the city housing agency.
In the bedbug resurgence, entomologists and exterminators blame increased immigration from the developing world, the advent of cheap international travel and the recent banning of powerful pesticides. Other culprits include the recycled mattress industry and those thrifty New Yorkers who revel in the discovery of a free sofa on the sidewalk.
And that new mattress delivered from a reputable department store, which kindly hauled away your old one? It may have spent all day in a truck wedged against an old mattress collected from a customer with a bedbug problem.
Once introduced into a home, bedbugs can crawl into adjoining apartments or hitch a ride to another part of town in the cuff of a pant leg.
"Anyone who stays in a hotel, rich or poor, can bring them home in a suitcase," said Richard Kourbage, whose company, Kingsway Exterminating in Brooklyn, does about a dozen bedbug jobs a day. "Some of the best hotels in New York have them."
Unlike mice and roaches, which are abetted by filthy surroundings, bedbugs do just fine in a well-scrubbed home, although bedroom clutter gives them more places to hide and breed. When engorged with blood, they grow slightly plumper than the O on this page, although the nymphs, which appear almost translucent before their first meal, are not much bigger than the period at the end of this sentence.
And they don't dwell just in mattresses and box springs: any wall or floor crack the thickness of a playing card can accommodate a bedbug. Although some people try to treat the problem themselves, most hire exterminators, at $300 per room.
The modern bedbug is immune to hardware-store-variety insecticides, and setting off a cockroach bomb in the bedroom will only scatter them farther afield. And because they are active only at night, many people don't discover them until their population has grown into the hundreds, or even thousands.
Exterminators recommend bagging and washing every bit of clothing and fabric in the room and taking apart bureau drawers and bed frames in preparation for the application of four kinds of chemicals. The process often needs to be repeated.
Worst of all, bedbug sufferers say, is the stigma of living with an insect that feeds on blood - though it does not transmit disease - and leaves behind a trail of red bumps that many dermatologists mistakenly identify as hives or scabies.
"People come in here and cry on my shoulder," said Andy Linares, the owner of Bug Off Pest Control, in Washington Heights. "They feel ashamed, even traumatized, to have these invisible vampires living in their home. Rats, even V.D., is more socially acceptable than bedbugs."
In interviews with more than a dozen bedbug sufferers, only a handful would speak on the record, saying they feared the condemning glares of neighbors or the shunning of co-workers. A bedbug infestation, many say, puts a strain on relationships, all but ruling out staying the night.
Like many "bedbug victims," as some call themselves, Josie Torielli has become consumed with the biology of bedbugs since she found them in her home last year. She blamed mosquitoes for the blotches on her body until she turned on the lights one night and found a few of the fiends crawling across her sheets.
She thought she had them conquered, but last week, after nine months of peace, Ms. Torielli discovered the telltale red spots on her sheets, the result of blood-engorged bugs crushed during the night.
"I've become obsessed," said Ms. Torielli, 33, a student who lives in Hell's Kitchen, in Manhattan. "I switched to white sheets so I can see them better, and I've set up a bedbug jail in a Tupperware container that I put on the windowsill to torture them with daylight. It's all-out war."
Bedbugs prefer human hosts, but will feed on dogs or cats if necessary. They can live longer than a year, with the female laying up to 500 eggs in a lifetime. An adult bedbug can survive unfed for up to a year.
"They're kind of amazing," said Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, explaining how a bedbug, a k a Cimex lectularius, emits one pheromone to find another bedbug and another to warns others of danger. In heavy infestations, the pheromones give a room a sweet, musty odor.
To show off the insect's special sucking stylus, Mr. Sorkin removed a bedbug nymph from a container and placed it on his finger. Even under a bright light and being nudged by tweezers, it began to feed and turned rust-colored as it filled with blood.
"They're insatiable," he said five minutes into the bug's feeding.
All this science is not much comfort to those in the throes of battle. Kellianne Scanlan, 30, a hairstylist who lives in Washington Heights, has been living like a nomad since last month, when she spotted a bedbug on her pillow, and then whole families ensconced in the frame of her platform bed. Despite the visit of an exterminator, the problem has not been vanquished, and every last item of clothing is sealed in plastic bags and piled up on the living room floor.
"My life has become all about bedbugs," she said as an exterminator arrived last week.
She said that to calm her friends and to ensure that she does not spread the bugs, she takes an extra set of clothing and changes when she arrives at their homes for overnight visits. "The psychological damage is probably the worst thing about it. I mean, how long will it be before I can sleep soundly and not worry about some creature sucking my blood?"
Still, for Ms. Scanlan, there has been a silver lining. The night after she discovered the bugs, she went out drinking, intent on avoiding her own bed. That evening she met a man at a bar, and, contrary to her usual instincts, accompanied him to his apartment. An encounter partly born of desperation soon blossomed into something more, she said.
"We've been together ever since," Ms. Scanlan said with a smile. "Thanks to the bedbugs, I've fallen in love."
On child marriage in Africa
Forced to Marry Before Puberty, African Girls Pay Lasting Price
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
CHIKUTU, Malawi - Mapendo Simbeye's problems began early last year when the barren hills along Malawi's northern border with Tanzania rejected his attempts to grow even cassava, the hardiest crop of all. So to feed his wife and five children, he said, he went to his neighbor, Anderson Kalabo, and asked for a loan. Mr. Kalabo gave him 2,000 kwacha, about $16. The family was fed.
But that created another problem: how could Mr. Simbeye, a penniless farmer, repay Mr. Kalabo?
The answer would shock most outsiders, but in sub-Saharan Africa's rural patriarchies, it is deeply ingrained custom. Mr. Simbeye sent his 11-year-old daughter, Mwaka, a shy first grader, down one mangy hillside and up the next to Mr. Kalabo's hut. There she became a servant to his first wife, and, she said, Mr. Kalabo's new bed partner.
Now 12, Mwaka said her parents never told her she was meant to be the second wife of a man roughly three decades her senior. "They said I had to chase birds from the rice garden," she said, studying the ground outside her mud-brick house. "I didn't know anything about marriage."
Mwaka ran away, and her parents took her back after six months. But a week's journey through Malawi's dry and mountainous north suggests that her escape is the exception. In remote lands like this, where boys are valued far more than girls, older men prize young wives, fathers covet dowries and mothers are powerless to intervene, many African girls like Mwaka must leap straight from childhood to marriage at a word from their fathers.
Sometimes that word comes years before they reach puberty.
The consequences of these forced marriages are staggering: adolescence and schooling cut short; early pregnancies and hazardous births; adulthood often condemned to subservience. The list has grown to include exposure to H.I.V. at an age when girls do not grasp the risks of AIDS.
Increasingly educators, health officials and even legislators discourage or even forbid these marriages. In Ethiopia, for example, where studies show that in a third of the states girls marry under the age of 15, one state took action in April. Officials said they had annulled as underage the marriages of 56 girls ages 12 to 15, and filed charges against parents of half the girls for forcing them into the unions.
Yet child marriages remain entrenched in rural pockets throughout sub-Saharan Africa, from Ghana to Kenya to Zambia, according to Unicef. Studies show that the average age of marriage in this region remains among the world's lowest, and the percentage of adolescent mothers the world's highest.
Many rural African communities, steeped in centuries of belief that girls occupy society's lower rungs, are inured to disapproval by the outside world.
"There is a lot of talk, but the value of the girl child is still low," said Seodi White, Malawi's coordinator for the Women in Law in Southern Africa Research Trust. "Society still clings to the education of the boy, and sees the girl as a trading tool. In the north, girls as early as 10 are being traded off for the family to gain. After that, the women become owned and powerless in their husbands' villages."
In villages throughout northern Malawi, girls are often married at or before puberty to whomever their fathers choose, sometimes to husbands as much as half a century older. Many of those same girls later choose lifelong misery over divorce because custom decrees that children in patriarchal tribes belong to the father.
In interviews, fathers and daughters here unapologetically explained the rationales for forced, intergenerational unions.
Uness Nyambi, of the village of Wiliro, said she was betrothed as a child so her parents could finance her brother's choice of a bride. Now about 17, she has two children, the oldest nearly 5, and a husband who guesses he is 70. "Just because of these two children, I can not leave him," she said.
Beatrice Kitamula, 19, was forced to marry her wealthy neighbor, now 63, five years ago because her father owed another man a cow. "I was the sacrifice," Ms. Kitamula said, holding back tears. She likened her husband's comfortable compound of red brick houses in Ngana village to a penitentiary. "When you are in prison," she said, "you have no rights."
In tiny Sele, Lyson Morenga, a widower, financed his re-marriage two years ago by giving his daughter Rachel, then 12, to a 50-year-old acquaintance in exchange for a black bull, according to his new in-laws. Mr. Morenga delivered the bull to his new wife's family as a partial payment, said his wife's uncle, Stewart Simkonda. Mr. SImkonda said Mr. Morenga had promised to deliver a larger payment after the impending marriage of Rachel's younger sister.
Malawi government officials say they try hard to protect girls like Rachel. Legislation before Parliament would raise the minimum age for marriage to 18, the legal age in most countries. Currently, marriages of Malawian girls from 15 to 18 are legal with the parents' consent. Women's rights advocates say they welcome the proposal, even though its effect would be limited because many marriages here, like much of the sub-Saharan region, take place under traditional customs, not civil law.
The government trained about 230 volunteers last year in ways to protect children, especially girls. Volunteers for Malawi's Human Rights Commission, Roman Catholic Church workers and police victim-protection units also try to intervene. In Iponga village, for example, Mbohesha Mbisa averted a forced marriage to her uncle at age 13 last year by walking a half-mile to the local police station, where officers persuaded her father to drop his plans to use her to replace her deceased aunt as a wife and mother.
"I was really scared, but I wanted to protect myself," said Mbohesha, now in the sixth grade.
Still, Malawi officials say that this region's growing poverty, worsened by AIDS and recent crop-killing drought, has put even more young girls at risk of forced marriage.
"This practice has been there for a long time, but it is getting worse now because there is desperation," said Penston Kilembe, Malawi's director of social welfare services. "It is particularly prevalent in communities that have been hard hit by famine. Households that can no longer fend for themselves opt to sell off their children to wealthier households."
"The gains which were made in addressing early marriages are being lost," said Andrina Mchiela, principal secretary for the Ministry of Gender.
Women's rights advocates want to abolish marriage payments, or lobolo, saying they create a financial incentive for parents to marry off their daughters. But even the advocates describe the tradition as politically untouchable.
In its most benign form, lobolo is a token of appreciation from the groom's family to the bride's. At its most egregious, it turns girls into the human equivalent of cattle. In much of northern Malawi, lobolo negotiations are typically all-male discussions of down payments, installments, settlements and the occasional refund for a wife who runs off.
Jimmy Mwanyongo, a 45-year-old village headman in Karonga, explained the marriage of his daughter Edah much as he might any commercial transaction. Several years ago, he said, sitting on a straw mat in his six-room house, he promised to care for his neighbor's two cows.
Instead, he sold the cows to educate his adopted son. When the neighbor, Ridein Simfukwe, lost his wife a year later in 2002, Mr. Mwanyongo said he felt obliged to offer his daughter as a replacement. "Because I had sold the two cows, I had no choice," he said.
Edah was 17, doe-eyed and voluptuous. Even with an illegitimate son, her neighbors and relatives say, she had her pick of suitors. Mr. Simfukwe was 63, with nine grown children and a flock of grandchildren.
Mr. Simfukwe said he considered Edah a bit young for him. But "her father decided that although I am old, I am the right person."
"I think it was a tribute to my character," he said. "Edah was willing. I didn't tie ropes around her neck and drag her."
Edah said her father did everything but that. For nine months, she said, she held out until "I thought I would die of sorrow."
"My father refused to allow me to eat," she said. "He chased me from the house. He said, 'Go find somewhere where you can sleep!' He said, 'Go to your husband! If you don't want to go there, I will whip you to death!' "
Her mother, Tabu Harawa, sided with her daughter, to no avail. "I told him, 'It is like you are killing her,' " she said. "It was shameful."
She said, "If it happens again, I will divorce him."
Now 20, Edah has an 11-month-old girl and is racked by fears for her future. "My husband is old," she said, sitting on the porch of her tiny thatched hut. "He may die soon. Most likely he leave me with more children. So where will I go?"
Her life, she suggested, is about as free as that of the two prized oxen her father now hooks up to his wooden cart for springtime plowing. "I am like a slave," she said.
Some of Edah's neighbors pity her. Others joke that she has married her own grandfather. Their reaction is one hint that even the most traditional Africans are starting to frown on marriages of young women to old men, as Edah's mother said, "for the sake of cows."
Mwaka Simbeye has her fellow villagers in Chikutu to thank for her return to her parents' home after her sojourn in her neighbor's hut. Now back in the second grade, she is still young enough to be charmed by a simple game of toss. Her body remains that of a child's.
At Mr. Kalabo's, she said in a barely audible whisper, "I had to do all the household chores. Washing the plates, cleaning the house, fetching water, collecting firewood, cooking when the first wife wasn't around."
Her father, Mapendo Simbeye, who repaid his $16 debt with Mwaka, said he took her back after hearing that the police could arrest him. In a clearing that serves as the village social center, he said he underestimated her, adding, "My daughter is worth more than 2,000 kwacha."
"I did it out of ignorance," he said. "I had five kids, no money and no food. Then Mr. Kalabo wanted the money back so I thought of selling the daughter. I didn't know I was abusing her."
Mwaka's mother, Tighezge Simkonda, looks like an older version of her daughter and is no less shy. "I did object," she said softly, glancing nervously at her husband chatting nearby. "I said, 'My daughter is very young.' "
"But the control is with the man," she said. "The daughters belong to the man."
On the Christian schools having courses not accepted by that university...
Here's the Problem With Emily Dickinson
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
INTELLIGENT design isn't the only flashpoint in the battle over religion in the nation's classrooms. On Dec. 12, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles will hear a lawsuit filed by a consortium of Christian high schools against the University of California system for refusing to credit some of their courses when their students apply for admission.
Among those courses are "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and American Literature," both of which draw on textbooks published by Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which describes itself as having stood for "the absolute authority of the Bible since 1927."
The plaintiffs, the Association of Christian Schools International, which represents more than 800 schools in California, and the Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, Calif., contend that their students are being discriminated against because of their religious beliefs. The university system counters that it has the right to set its own standards. Here are excerpts from the disputed texts. THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
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"United States History for Christian Schools," written by Timothy Keesee and Mark Sidwell (Bob Jones University, 2001), says this about Thomas Jefferson.
American believers can appreciate Jefferson's rich contribution to the development of their nation, but they must beware of his view of Christ as a good teacher but not the incarnate son of God. As the Apostle John said, "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son" (I John 2:22).
Slavery, which most historians look at politically or economically, is seen as "an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin."
The sin in this case was greed - greed on the part of African tribal leaders, on the part of slave traders and on the part of slave owners, all of whom allowed their love for profit to outweigh their love for their fellow man. The consequences of such greed and racism extended across society and far into the future. It resulted in untold suffering-most obviously for the black race but for the white race as well. ... The Lord has never exaggerated in warning us of sin's devastating consequences - for us and for our descendants (Exodus 34:7).
The book also criticizes the progressive movement championed by Theodore Roosevelt, and the Progressives themselves.
On the whole, they believed that man is basically good and that human nature might be improved. ... Such a belief, of course, ignored the biblical teaching that man is sinful by nature (Ephesians 2:1-3). Progressives therefore also ignored the fact that the fallible men who built the corrupt institutions that they attacked were the same in nature as those who filled the political offices and staffed the regulatory agencies that were supposed to control the corruption.
On the other hand, the "devout Methodist" H. J. Heinz is praised for his fine products and humane treatment of workers, which set him apart from the typical 19th-century robber baron.
Heinz illustrates the Christian's response to the challenge of business management: "And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance; for ye serve the Lord Christ" (Colossians 3:23-24).
•
"Elements of Literature for Christian Schools," by Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs (Bob Jones University, 2001), faults Mark Twain for calling God "an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master."
Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless. Denying that he was created in the image of God, Twain was able to rid himself of feeling any responsibility to his Creator. At the same time, however, he defiantly cut himself off from God's love. Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.
Emily Dickinson, too, is criticized for her lack of faith.
Dickinson's year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary further shaped her "religious" views. During her stay at the school, she learned of Christ but wrote of her inability to make a decision for Him. She could not settle "the one thing needful." A thorough study of Dickinson's works indicates that she never did make that needful decision. Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.
By contrast, the piety of Christina Rossetti, the 19th-century British poet, gets high marks.
The loneliness she faced is often reflected in her poems. But stronger than her loneliness was her total confidence in and submission to her Lord and Savior. Rossetti filled her mind and heart with Scripture. She gained from it a unique appreciation of the sustaining and sacrificial love of God. Her poetry and uplifting devotional literature are the natural overflow of her complete dependence on God.
•
"Physics for Christian Schools," by R. Terrance Egolf and Linda Shumate (Bob Jones University, 2004), addresses the question, "What is Christian about physics?"
Some people have developed the idea that higher mathematics and science have little to do with the Bible or Christian life. They think that because physics deals with scientific facts, or because it is not pervaded with evolutionary ideas, there is no need to study it from a Christian perspective. This kind of thinking ignores a number of important facts to the Christian: First, all secular science is pervaded by mechanistic, naturalistic and evolutionistic philosophy. Learning that the laws of mechanics as they pertain to a baseball in flight are just the natural consequences of the way matter came together denies the wisdom and power of our Creator God. ... Second, physics as taught in the schools of the world contradicts the processes that shaped the world we see today. Trying to believe both secular physics and the Bible leaves you in a state of confusion that will weaken your faith in God's Word.
Even the abstract laws of energy and matter, the authors write, reflect the hand of God.
You are about to embark on an adventure. The study of physics reveals the wonderful orderliness of God's creation - so orderly that it can be comprehended in terms of relatively simple principles (mathematical formulas). ... Physics is important because through it mankind learns how creation actually works. It satisfies our God-given curiosity about nature. Seeing that God does "great things and unsearchable; marvelous things without number" (Job 5:9), men have dedicated their lives to unraveling the rich mysteries of creation.
On selling the Brooklyn Bridge
For You, Half Price
By GABRIEL COHEN
THE year is 1899, and a saucy con artist named Peaches O'Day is trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. She succeeds, too, passing it off to a gullible fellow who pays her $200 and receives a bill of sale reading, "One bridge in good condition." As punishment, she is run out of town, but she returns in triumph, disguised in a black wig as the French entertainer Mademoiselle Fifi, and goes on to be elected mayor of the city.
So it went in the 1937 comedy "Every Day's a Holiday," a Mae West film that made merry with one of the most cherished notions about New York and the gullibility to be found there: that someone would be foolish enough to buy one of the city's iconic landmarks.
Since the bridge was completed in 1883, the idea of illegally selling it has become the ultimate example of the power of persuasion. A good salesman could sell it, a great swindler would sell it, and the perfect sucker would fall for the scam.
But this was not just a rhetorical or a fictional conceit. A turn-of-the-century confidence man named George C. Parker actually sold the Brooklyn Bridge more than once. According to Carl Sifakis, who tells his story in "Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles," Parker - who was also adept at selling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant's Tomb - produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the bridge's owner, then convinced his buyers that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. "Several times," Mr. Sifakis wrote, "Parker's victims had to be rousted from the bridge by police when they tried to erect toll barriers."
Another seller was William McCloundy, also known as "I.O.U. O'Brien," who sold the bridge in 1901, "for which he was convicted of grand larceny and served two and a half years in Sing Sing," The New York Times wrote some years later.
In writing his book "Hustlers and Con Men: An Anecdotal History of the Confidence Man and His Games," Jay Robert Nash interviewed an elderly swindler named Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil, who said he had known several criminal vendors of the bridge. Mr. Weil, whom Mr. Nash visited in a Chicago nursing home and described as "probably the greatest con man of the 20th century," recalled a swindler named Reed C. Waddell, who worked the bridge swindle in the 1880's and 1890's. Mr. Weil also claimed to know Waddell's successors in that trade, the notorious Charles and Fred Gondorf.
Perpetrators such as Mr. Waddell and the Gondorf brothers were savvy. They timed the path of beat cops working near the bridge, and when they knew the officers would be out of sight, they propped up signs reading "Bridge for Sale," showed the edifice to their targets, and separated them from their money as quickly as possible. "The Gondorfs sold the bridge many times," Mr. Nash said. "They would sell it for two, three hundred dollars, up to one thousand. Once they sold half the bridge for two-fifty because the mark didn't have enough cash."
And there were plenty of marks. "The oddity of the thing today," said Luc Sante, author of the book "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York," "is not that there might have been con artists ready to sell the bridge, but that there would have been suckers both gullible enough and sufficiently well-heeled to fall for it."
By all accounts, the bulk of the suckers were greenhorns, fresh off the boat. Swindlers used to approach the stewards of international vessels docked at Ellis Island and pay them for information about passengers who might have money and be interested in buying property. "They didn't understand the country," Mr. Nash said of this population. "They didn't understand the law. But they understood that this was supposed to be the land of opportunity."
The Brooklyn Bridge had several attributes that made it particularly well suited for this sort of endeavor. Its proximity to the port made it highly visible to newcomers who might be likely marks, and its size provided opportunities to show it off while avoiding the law. But perhaps most critical was its considerable fame. "In the 19th century," said Kathleen Hulser, the public historian at the New-York Historical Society, "the bridge was one of the two best-known symbols of America," the other being the Statue of Liberty.
Vendors of the bridge not only counted on the gullibility or greed of their targets; they also appealed to their vanity. Buyers could believe, as Mr. Sifakis put it, that "they had become real men of substance, great capitalists."
"All great monuments will have swindles built around them," he added. "The appeal is to own a piece of the rock."
Even as the nature of the immigrant population shifted, the scam endured. "Up to the 1920's people were still trying," Mr. Nash said. "But it was a hard sale. Immigrants had become much more sophisticated and knowledgeable, and by that time the processors at Ellis Island were handing out cards or booklets saying, 'You can't buy public buildings or streets.' " These shifts explain why the Brooklyn Bridge is the span associated with swindles; the city's other bridges were built after the high tide of gullibility had already begun slipping away.
Long after actual sales of the Brooklyn Bridge subsided, the concept still roused the public imagination and remained embedded in popular culture. In the 1947 movie "It Happened in Brooklyn," Frank Sinatra played a young private home from the war who sang plaintively to the woman he loves: "Don't let no one tell you/ I've been tryin' to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge." Even Bugs Bunny got in on the act; in the 1949 cartoon "Bowery Bugs," an old man is so charmed by the rabbit's tale of the famous bridge jumper Steve Brodie (Brodie's feat, alas, was a hoax) that he agrees to buy the bridge from him.
AND because of the Internet, which has provided seemingly endless new opportunities to propagate frauds, there's life in the old con yet. One particularly memorable attempt to sell the bridge is documented on Scamorama.com, a Web site that presents e-mail exchanges between would-be scammers and their not-so-gullible targets.
In one, a swindler using the name Genevieve e-mailed a target calling himself Vidocq (a pseudonym that should have warned off the scammer, it being the name of a famous French criminologist). In broken English, the scammer presented a convoluted story of riches tied up after a coup in Liberia and tried to entice Vidocq into sending money to help gain release of the funds. Vidocq did his best to gain the swindler's trust, then turned the tables by offering shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The notion piqued the swindler's interest, and an involved exchange of e-mail messages followed before the scammer finally realized just who was being conned.
When it comes to victims and victimizers, perhaps the humorist Will Rogers deserves the last word. "They may call me a 'rube' and a 'hick,' " he said. "But I'd a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it."
On the end of rudely indulgent parenting. Youse guys wanna read this
Kids Gone Wild
By JUDITH WARNER
CHILDREN should be seen and not heard" may be due for a comeback. After decades of indulgence, American society seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as far as tolerance for wild and woolly kid behavior is concerned.
Last month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans said they believed that people are ruder now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and that children are among the worst offenders. (As annoyances, they tied with obnoxious cellphone users.)
The conservative child psychologist John Rosemond recently denounced in his syndicated column the increasing presence of "disruptive urchins" who "obviously have yet to have been taught the basic rudiments of public behavior," as he related the wretched experience of dining in a four-star restaurant in the company of one child roller skating around his table and another watching a movie on a portable DVD player.
In 2002, only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were "respectful toward adults," according to surveys done then by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan and nonprofit public opinion research group. In 2004, more than one in three teachers told Public Agenda pollsters they had seriously considered leaving their profession or knew a colleague who had left because of "intolerable" student behavior.
Even Madonna - her "Papa Don't Preach" years long past - has joined the throng, proclaiming herself a proud "disciplinarian" in a recent issue of the British magazine Harpers & Queen and bragging that, as a mom, she takes a tough line on homework, tidiness and chores: "If you leave your clothes on the floor, they're gone when you come home."
Jo Frost, ABC's superstar "Supernanny," would be proud.
Whether children are actually any worse behaved now than they ever have been before is, of course, debatable. Children have always been considered, basically, savages. The question, from the late 17th century onwards, has been whether they come by it naturally or are shaped by the brutality of society.
But what seems to have changed recently, according to childrearing experts, is parental behavior - particularly among the most status-conscious and ambitious - along with the kinds of behavior parents expect from their kids. The pressure to do well is up. The demand to do good is down, way down, particularly if it's the kind of do-gooding that doesn't show up on a college application.
Once upon a time, parenting was largely about training children to take their proper place in their community, which, in large measure, meant learning to play by the rules and cooperate, said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist and co-author, with Nicole Wise, of "The OverScheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyperparenting Trap."
"There was a time when there was a certain code of conduct by which you viewed the character of a person," he said, "and you needed that code of conduct to have your place in the community."
Rude behavior, particularly toward adults, was something for which children had to be chastised, even punished. That has also now changed, said Dan Kindlon, a Harvard University child psychologist and author of "Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age."
Most parents, Dr. Kindlon said, would like their children to be polite, considerate and well behaved. But they're too tired, worn down by work and personally needy to take up the task of teaching them proper behavior at home.
"We use kids like Prozac," he said. "People don't necessarily feel great about their spouse or their job but the kids are the bright spot in their day. They don't want to muck up that one moment by getting yelled at. They don't want to hurt. They don't want to feel bad. They want to get satisfaction from their kids. They're so precious to us - maybe more than to any generation previously. What gets thrown out the window is limits. It's a lot easier to pick their towel up off the floor than to get them away from the PlayStation to do it."
Parenting today is also largely about training children to compete - in school and on the soccer field - and the kinds of attributes they need to be competitive are precisely those that help break down society's civility.
Parents who want their children to succeed more than anything, Dr. Kindlon said, teach them to value and prioritize achievement above all else - including other people.
"We're insane about achievement," he said. "Schoolwork is up 50 percent since 1981, and we're so obsessed with our kids getting into the right school, getting the right grades, we let a lot of things slide. Kids don't do chores at home anymore because there isn't time."
And other adults, even those who should have authority, are afraid to get involved. "Nobody feels entitled to discipline other people's kids anymore," Dr. Kindlon said. "They don't feel they have the right if they see a kid doing something wrong to step in."
Educators feel helpless, too: Nearly 8 in 10 teachers, according to the 2004 Public Agenda report, said their students were quick to remind them that they had rights or that their parents could sue if they were too harshly disciplined. More than half said they ended up being soft on discipline "because they can't count on parents or schools to support them."
And that, Dr. Rosenfeld said, strikes at the heart of the problem. "Parents are out of control," he said. "We always want to blame the kids, but if there's something wrong with their incivility, it's the way their parents model for them."
There's also the chance, said Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist whose 2001 book, "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," has earned her a cult following, that when children are rude, obnoxious and outrageously behaved, they're trying to tell parents something - something they've got to shout in order for them to hear.
"These kids are so extremely stressed from the academic load they're carrying and how cloistered they are and how they have to live under the watchful eye of their parents," Dr. Mogel said. "They have no kid space."
Paradoxically, she said, parental over-involvement in their children's lives today often hides a very basic kind of indifference to their children's real need, simply to be kids. "There are all these blurry boundaries," she said. "They need to do fifth-grade-level math in third grade and have every pleasure and indulgence of adulthood in childhood and they act like kids and we get mad."
If stress and strain, self-centeredness and competition are the pathogens underlying the rash of rudeness perceived to be endemic among children in America today, then the cure, some experts said, has to be systemic and not topical. Stop blaming the children, they said. Stop focusing on the surface level of behavior and start curing instead the social, educational and parental ills that feed it.
This may mean less "quality" time with children and more time getting them to do things they don't want to do, like sitting for meals, making polite conversation and - Madonna was right - picking their clothes up off the floor.
Replies to that article on genetic testing I posted
Disabilities in the Age of Genetics (5 Letters)
To the Editor:
"The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World" (Week in Review, Nov. 20) discusses the concern that advances in prenatal screening for Down syndrome and other conditions will lead to a decrease of services and care for people born with disabilities.
But testing for Down syndrome during pregnancy and the accompanying expansion of choice should lessen the isolation of people with disabilities. The world is a much more welcoming place for children who are wanted.
With testing, families will be expecting these children to arrive as they are, they will have been given a head start in working through their concerns, and other people will come to understand that the children were wanted - chosen in spite of test results, even if the choice is different from what theirs would be.
Remove the part of the disability that conjures up fear of the unknown and uncontrollable, and you've removed a large part of what makes up prejudice.
"That could happen to us" becomes "I wonder what we would do?" And respect for difference and different choices replaces fear.
Suzanne Hoffman Levin
New York, Nov. 20, 2005
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To the Editor:
As a socially conscious member of the medical community, I know that medical care is unequally distributed. As the sister of a disabled person, I know that the disabled must fight for equal treatment in society.
But these are problems we must fight at the level of social policy making, not by decrying genetic screening of the diseases themselves.
Diana Barnes-Brown
Honolulu, Nov. 22, 2005
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To the Editor:
It was with an increasingly heavy heart that I read about yet another refinement in genetic testing. Twenty-four years ago we began an unexpected journey for which we had no preparation: our daughter, Sarah, was born with Down syndrome.
Then, as now, a genetic test could have forewarned us. What the test could not have revealed, however, was the person that Sarah eventually became. Her delight in life and extraordinary capacity for love and forgiveness enrich the lives of those who know her.
Years ago a friend, sensing in Sarah an absence of the pretense that plagues so many "normal" people, described her as "a rose with the thorns removed."
Tragically, a genetic test may lead one to find thorns with no hope of experiencing the rose.
Dan Raessler
Lynchburg, Va., Nov. 20, 2005
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To the Editor:
Because Americans have the right to make their own choices, every mother has the right to decide if she can take on the responsibilities of having a disabled child.
We should put our energy into finding cures for the disabilities, instead of debating a personal choice of abortion. I know that if I became pregnant, I would want the best of both worlds, to be able to have a child and to not worry about his having a disability.
Heidi Dreyfuss
Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
Nov. 20, 2005
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To the Editor:
Genetic testing may mean there will be fewer people with certain disabilities in the future, which leads some with such problems to worry that people like them might have a more difficult time in the future.
Should I ever find myself with a disability, I certainly hope I won't wish the condition on others, just to make my own life a little easier.
William Vaughan Jr.
Chebeague Island, Me.
Nov. 20, 2005
On cloning (mostly concerning a book review, though)
What Would a Clone Say?
By GARY ROSEN
You know from the start that there's something creepy about Kathy H., the narrator of "Never Let Me Go," Kazuo Ishiguro's recent and widely acclaimed coming-of-age novel. Though Kathy's fond memories of adolescence are set at a tony English boarding school, with its cliques and pranks and furtive hookups, it's clear that she is no child of privilege. As we learn to our dismay, she and her peers are clones - members of a caste created and trained for no other purpose than to provide healthy organs for the sick and feeble.
Genetic duplicates are hardly new to literature and pop culture - think of Huxley's worker-drone Epsilons in "Brave New World" - but Ishiguro's protagonist is different. Despite the novel's fantastic premise and Kathy's gruesome lot, she is unmistakably a person - not a monster or a menace or a comic device but a young woman struggling to figure out who she is and what she wants. "Never Let Me Go" is something of a cultural landmark: a subtle, sympathetic portrait of the inner life of a clone.
The imaginative leap that Ishiguro takes is instructive. Today most people condemn the very thought of cloning for reproduction - that is, to make a child. But with the exception of the religious right, Americans increasingly embrace cloning for research, with its promise of miracle cures for our most debilitating ills. Ishiguro's tale flips this emerging consensus on its head. What's upsetting about Kathy isn't her existence as a clone but rather the fate that has been assigned to her: to die young, used up for the medical benefit of others. She is at once a literary protest against research cloning and, by virtue of her strength as a character, a quiet suggestion that reproductive cloning may not be so troubling after all.
A bill now before Congress would allow federally financed stem-cell research on embryos that would otherwise be thrown out by fertility clinics. Abortion foes hope to head off the legislation with their own proposals encouraging alternate sources of stem cells. But all of this is just a warm-up. The issue hovering in the background is cloning, what scientists call somatic cell nuclear transfer (S.C.N.T.). For researchers in the field, as well as for the various interests that lobby on their behalf - universities, patient groups, the biotech industry - the real prize is public support for work not just on "spare" embryos but also on cloned ones.
Embryonic stem cells can develop into almost any of the body's specialized cells, a capacity that gives them enormous therapeutic potential (as yet unrealized) for the treatment of diseases like Alzheimer's and diabetes. They might also make it possible to cultivate new tissue for failing organs. Researchers fear, however, that the immune systems of would-be patients will reject stem cells whose DNA is foreign to them. How to solve the problem? By drawing stem cells from embryonic clones of the patients themselves.
This is a far cry, of course, from the system of organ farming that furnishes the horrifying backdrop of "Never Let Me Go." The nascent being destroyed in research cloning is no larger than the dot atop this printed "i" - not a fetus and certainly not a baby. Indeed, advocates like the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research have energetically denounced any cloning that might result in reproduction. The one "clear, bright line" that shouldn't be crossed, said the group's president, is the "implantation" of a clone in a woman's uterus.
Still, you don't have to be a raving Bible-thumper to entertain moral doubts about so-called therapeutic cloning ("therapeutic," that is, for potential patients; not such a great deal for the embryos). All you need is a bit of Kant from Ethics 101, especially the part about treating other people, presumably even proto-people, not as a means to your own ends but as ends in themselves. It is an injunction hard to square with the literature on S.C.N.T., with its talk of "harvesting" and "programming" stem cells. The language of the scientists and their supporters is clinical, meliorative and humane, but it gives off an unmistakable whiff of cannibalism.
Some see the cloning debate as just another skirmish in the abortion war. After all, if it is permissible to abort an embryo, what could be wrong with putting it to some lifesaving use instead? But abortion is an ordeal unsought by the woman who faces it, a tragedy of circumstance. There is, by contrast, nothing accidental or contingent about creating nascent human life with the declared aim of destroying it. It is the deliberate use of one (developing) person as the instrument of another, a practice that should give pause even to those who ardently favor abortion rights.
As for Ishiguro's doomed Kathy H., is she a prototype of future clones? Certainly not in the harsh fate she suffers as a "donor." No one is going to deny the rights of a clone that escapes the petri dish, which helps to explain why the proponents of research cloning so noisily forswear any intention of producing babies. The first actual child born of S.C.N.T. will make it that much more difficult to treat other clones as raw material for experimentation.
What may most surprise us about that first child is its ordinariness. Critics worry that clones will be grotesque puppets, the manufactured playthings of their creators, lacking all individuality. But Ishiguro allows us to glimpse a different possibility. Though Kathy is a genetic duplicate, she is nobody's double or distorted reflection. She is her own person, indeed a young woman of growing self-awareness and independence. If she really existed, she might even be in Washington just now, raising her voice against the evils of therapeutic cloning.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 07:28 am (UTC)I see a wprld of difference between using an embryo or cluster of cells medically, be they natural or cloned, and using a fully formed, living human being. That is the difference, not that it was created through cloning.
And I don't see the big deal about clones - identical twins have been around for ages.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 07:57 am (UTC)Aarrgh, wrong...wrong...wrong! From experience -- it's completely the opposite, being the rare 'disabled' person in a sea of normies is a lot less welcoming, and a parent not wanting the kid to have disabilities isn't the same as them not wanting the child at all! *headdesk*
About clones -- the controversy eludes me for two reasons. First is that it shouldn't freak people out so much, considering it's just artificial twinning, and we have genetic multiples born all the fricking time. So I don't consider that a logical reason *not* to do it. Second, and in the polar-opposite direction, is that the *real* controversy should be the number of fetuses with (my) birth defects that would result for every one normal live birth. I don't mind being here as myself, but I doubt most parents/researchers *wouldn't* abort my kind, and if we did increase drastically in number, we'd probably do really painful things to the healthcare system.
It's NOT my Imagination...
Date: 2005-11-27 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 02:58 pm (UTC)Physics from a Christian perspective? What the hell is that!?!
Whether by chance or by the will of an all powerful being, the physics governing the world and the universe around it are fine and intricate to the extent that science may never know them in their entirety. To argue that any part of physics that can be broken down into ever more intricate and complicated parts (I.E. Most likely all of the laws of physics that have been discovered thus far) are instead "Simply god's will" denies the majesty and forethought of god and refuses to give credit where it is due. Such an argument takes the gift that god has given us in the form of the majesty of the cosmos and blows raspberries in its face.
Is probably what I'd say if I were a better Christian.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 07:28 am (UTC)I see a wprld of difference between using an embryo or cluster of cells medically, be they natural or cloned, and using a fully formed, living human being. That is the difference, not that it was created through cloning.
And I don't see the big deal about clones - identical twins have been around for ages.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 07:57 am (UTC)Aarrgh, wrong...wrong...wrong! From experience -- it's completely the opposite, being the rare 'disabled' person in a sea of normies is a lot less welcoming, and a parent not wanting the kid to have disabilities isn't the same as them not wanting the child at all! *headdesk*
About clones -- the controversy eludes me for two reasons. First is that it shouldn't freak people out so much, considering it's just artificial twinning, and we have genetic multiples born all the fricking time. So I don't consider that a logical reason *not* to do it. Second, and in the polar-opposite direction, is that the *real* controversy should be the number of fetuses with (my) birth defects that would result for every one normal live birth. I don't mind being here as myself, but I doubt most parents/researchers *wouldn't* abort my kind, and if we did increase drastically in number, we'd probably do really painful things to the healthcare system.
It's NOT my Imagination...
Date: 2005-11-27 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 02:58 pm (UTC)Physics from a Christian perspective? What the hell is that!?!
Whether by chance or by the will of an all powerful being, the physics governing the world and the universe around it are fine and intricate to the extent that science may never know them in their entirety. To argue that any part of physics that can be broken down into ever more intricate and complicated parts (I.E. Most likely all of the laws of physics that have been discovered thus far) are instead "Simply god's will" denies the majesty and forethought of god and refuses to give credit where it is due. Such an argument takes the gift that god has given us in the form of the majesty of the cosmos and blows raspberries in its face.
Is probably what I'd say if I were a better Christian.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-27 10:19 pm (UTC)