THE LAST WORD
Getlein, Frank
THE LAST WORD Crisis intervention Frank Getlein A friend of mine has two old ladies in his life, his mother and his mother-in-law, both of whom require a certain amount of attention as they edge...
...Instead of a population explosion, we, thanks to perfected birth control of apparently endless variety, are on the edge of a population implosion, with the number of producers inevitably destined to shrink while the number of consumers grows...
...Old lady number two, my friend's mother, is, on the contrary, in the pink, a fine physical specimen for one of her years or indeed for one of considerably fewer years...
...What is happening is a little like what has been happening since World War II in the developing world, again thanks to the miracles of modern medicine...
...Oh, moderation in all things, of course, but don't fall in with those food nuts, just eat what is put before you by agribiz and packagebiz and when you have a crisis, we'll intervene...
...The Frank Getlein is a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...The most obvious consequence is the continuing population explosion within economies least able to provide for increasing numbers...
...The people in those countries had a complex, comprehensive, and comprehensible way of life...
...She keeps away from doctors as much as possible, relying on either the folk remedies of yesteryear or, when she can find them, the patent medicines available over the counter...
...Doctors get angry at the idea that a woman — any patient, really, but especially a woman — should be told in understandable detail just what it is the doc is doing down there in her private parts, what the risks, what the alleged benefits, what the procedure...
...The crisis intervenor can identify on sight with any medical hero who turns up on the tube...
...Living in town, she has also enjoyed the benefits of modern food manufacture — that is, the extraction and discarding of all natural taste and nutrition from the food she eats...
...Brought up in the country, she has always eaten country food when she could get it...
...Nor of the growing governmental and corporate bureaucracies that manage our affairs...
...Crisis intervention and the wiping out of assorted plagues and ills prolonged lives to an astonishing extent, and the cultures have gone berserk as a result...
...Subtract death from that equation and you get population explosion, a politics of crisis — crisis intervention of a different kind — founded on poverty, hunger, and an entirely rational despair...
...That kind of medical practice is more spectacularly lucrative than any other and more grati-fyingly dramatic...
...But doctors get absolutely livid, raging, furious, at the idea that food, diet, nutrition, have anything at all to do with health...
...We are going, going, going — and not with a bang, but a belch...
...Old lady number one is a physical wreck, subject to attacks of anything that comes along, constantly in and out of hospitals, maintaining a small pharmacy in the bathroom, and repeatedly preserved by the miracles of modern medicine...
...That is the Third World as we watch it daily and as we have, to a great extent, made it...
...All this does not even take account of the spiritually debilitating effects of massive exposure to commercial television, the exact intellectual equivalent of the plastic food so appropriately merchandized on the medium...
...doctor concerned with diet identifies not only with kooks and cranks, but with kooks and cranks widely perceived by his profession as the enemy...
...They get especially angry, no doubt, as they gird up their lobbying treasury for the supreme effort, the Armageddon of legislative medicine, the national health plan almost certain to come up in the present Congress...
...Nor of the Defense Department's ensured growth principle, established this year by President Carter and, if not defeated in Congress, built irrevocably into our future...
...Having many children ensured that some would survive, maintaining the family among the living to minister to the dead and maintaining productive youth and middle age to minister to the old...
...THE LAST WORD Crisis intervention Frank Getlein A friend of mine has two old ladies in his life, his mother and his mother-in-law, both of whom require a certain amount of attention as they edge their way through the eighties...
...Translate that into the ever more clearly emerging domestic future and you get a comparable new, chaotic society...
...Medicine changed all that...
...In this new world, a steadily growing class of the aged ill, maintained by crisis intervention medicine but ruined by a lifetime of eating plastic food loaded with poisonous preservatives and mere cosmetics, is supported by a steadily dwindling class of middle-aged and youthful productive workers, likewise poisoning themselves with every mouthful of plastic food they take in...
...it was merely a sensible precaution against the received truth that children tended to die in childhood...
...Until modern medicine came along, having many children did not produce a population explosion...
...Again...
...Doctors get angry at any suggestion that health insurance, which they have fought every step of the way, has made them rich...
...Reflecting on his experience with comparative geriatrics, my friend inveighs against medical practice based on — or climaxing in — "crisis intervention" as the supreme achievement of the healing arts...
Vol. 43 • June 1979 • No. 6
