Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  A major disadvantage to living which the study called attention to is, of course, death. In fact, so obvious are its drawbacks that no one before had thought to examine or measure them empirically. Death’s effects on life, the scientists pointed out, are two: First, death intrudes constantly and unpleasantly by putting life at risk at every stage, from infancy through advanced adulthood, degrading its quality and compromising happiness. For individuals of every species, death represents a chronic, worrisome threat that they can never completely ignore.

  Secondly, and far worse, death also constitutes an overwhelmingly no-win experience in itself. Many of life’s well-known stress producers—divorce, loss of employment, moving, even fighting traffic—still hold out hope of a better outcome in the future. After all, one may end up with a better spouse, exciting new job, beautiful home, or fresh bottle from the drive-through liquor store. Death, by contrast, involves as much trouble as any conventional stress, if not more. Yet, at the end of the medical humiliations, physical suffering, money concerns, fear, and tedium of dying, one has no outcome to look forward to except being dead. This alone, the study found, is enough to give the entire life process a negative tinge.

  Besides dying, life is burdened with countless occurrences that are almost equally unacceptable to active and vital individuals. In many cases which the scientists observed, humans no longer functioned properly after the age of seventy or seventy-five. A large majority of subjects in that age range exhibited significant loss of foot speed, upper-body strength, reflexes, hair, and altitude of vertical leap. Accompanying these impairments were other health glitches, sometimes in baffling number and variety. Such acquired traits carried the additional downside of making their possessors either “undesirable” or “very undesirable” to members of the opposite sex in the key eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic. Researchers were able to offer no credible hope for the development of treatments to deal with these creeping inadequacies.

  Somewhat simplifying the study’s collection of data was the natural law first discovered by Newton that things are rough all over. Thus, what happens to you will always be just as bad (relatively speaking) as what happens to anybody else. Or, to frame it another way, no problem is effectively “minor” if you yourself have it. One example is the mattress cover, or quilted pad, that goes over the mattress before you put on the fitted sheet, and that pops loose from one corner of the mattress in the middle of the night nearly 60 percent of the time, experts say. After it does, it will often work its way diagonally down the bed, taking the fitted sheet with it, until it becomes a bunched-together ridge of cloth poking up at about kidney level. The problem it represents to the individual experiencing it at that moment is absolute, in the sense that it cannot usefully be compared with difficulties in the lives of people in China or anywhere. The poke in the kidneys and the press of bare mattress against the face are simply the accumulating misery of life making itself known.

  Nine out of ten of the respondents, identified by just their first initials for the purpose of the survey, stated that they would give up completely if they knew how. The remainder also didn’t see the point of going on any longer but still clung to a slight hope for something in the mail. Quitting the struggle and lying face down on the floor was a coping strategy favored by most or all. Situations like having to wait an entire day for a deliveryman to deliver a breakfront and the guy didn’t say exactly when he would be there and in the end didn’t come and didn’t even bother to call were so pointless and awful that the hell with the whole deal, many respondents said.

  Interestingly, the numbers bear them out. The point, or points, of going on with existence, when charted and quantified, paint a very grim picture indeed. Merely trying to get a shoe off a child has been shown to release a certain chemical into the system which causes a reaction exactly opposite to what the task requires. Despite vigorous effort and shouting, the thing won’t come off, for Christ’s sake, as can be seen in the formula written out in full in Figure 7. Furthermore, that level of suffering doesn’t include the additional fact that a person’s spouse may not consider what the person does every day to be “work,” because he or she happens occasionally to enjoy it; so what is he or she supposed to do, get a job he or she hates, instead? From a mathematical standpoint, this particular problem is an infinite regression.

  Flammia Brothers Pharmaceuticals, which paid somebody to say it paid for the study, frankly admits that it does not as yet have the answers. In the interim, it offers a wide array of experience-blocking drugs, which consist of copyrighted names without pills to go with them, and which certainly might work, depending on one’s susceptibility, financial history, and similar factors. Hundreds of thousands of notepads with the Flammia Brothers’ logo and colorful drug names at the top of every page are already in circulation in doctors’ offices and examining rooms, and a soothing poultice may be made of these pages soaked in water and driveway salt from Ace Hardware. (Most health-insurance plans may or may not cover the cost of the salt, excluding delivery.)

  Other large drug manufacturers, while not willing to go quite as far, still substantially follow the Flammia Brothers’ program. The fact that life is beyond us has been firmly established by now. All the information is in, and no real dispute remains. But with the temporary absence of lasting remedies, and looking to a future when they won’t be necessary, the manufacturers’ consortium suggests that consumers send them money in cash or check, no questions asked. Major health organizations have unanimously endorsed this goal. Originally, the consortium explained that the companies might need the money to develop a new generation of drugs narrowly focused on curing many previously un-cured problems. More recently, however, they have backed off of that.

  Why we were brought into the world in the first place only to suffer and die is an area of research in which much remains to be done. Like other problems thought impossible in the past, this one, too, will someday be solved. Then anybody afflicted with questions like “Why me?” “What did I do to deserve this?” “How did I get in this lousy mess?” and so on could be given a prescription, maybe even through diagnostic services provided online. The possibilities are exciting. At the same time, we must not underestimate our adversary, life itself. Uncomfortable even at good moments, difficult and unfair usually, and a complete nightmare much too often, life will stubbornly resist betterment, always finding new ways of being more than we can stand.

  2002

  DON STEINBERG

  BRAINTEASERS: THE AFTERMATH

  Problem: In a terrible car accident, a man is killed and his son is rushed to the hospital for surgery. As the boy is wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon looks at the patient and says, “I cannot operate on this child. He is my son.” How is this possible?

  Answer: The surgeon is the boy’s mother.

  Subsequently: Interns plead with the female surgeon, saying that her stubbornness about operating on the boy is jeopardizing his health, yet she steadfastly refuses. It is decided that the boy’s broken foot must wait until another surgeon is summoned. Suddenly, the door bursts open—it is the boy’s father, alive. “Just do the surgery, Elaine!” he shouts.

  “Hey,” she replies, “do I come to your job and tell you how to drive?”

  . . .

  Problem: A king wants to hire a royal adviser, so he invites his kingdom’s three wisest men to engage in a contest of wits. He sits them down facing one another and walks behind them, putting a cap on each man’s head. He tells them that he has given each of them a red cap or a white cap; in fact, he has placed red caps on all three heads. No one can see what he himself is wearing; there are no mirrors or other ways to cheat. The king says, “Raise your hand if you see someone wearing a red hat.” All three men raise their hands. Then the king says, “All right, now, if you know what color your cap is, stand up.”

  For several minutes, no one moves. Then wise man No. 3 stands up. “I am wearing a red cap!” he proclaims. How did he know?


  Answer: Wise man No. 3 first imagined himself wearing a white cap. “If I have a white cap,” he reasoned, “then when wise man No. 2 raised his hand he must have been looking at wise man No. 1’s red cap. Wise man No. 1, being smart, would have realized immediately that the red cap seen by No. 2 had to be his, and he would have stood up. Wise man No. 2 would have reached the same conclusion and he would have stood up quickly as well. Since neither of the others stood up, I must not be wearing a white cap. I must be wearing a red one.”

  Subsequently: Wise man No. 3 is made the king’s royal adviser. Two days later, the king consults with him. “The people of my kingdom are unhappy,” he says. “There is much misery and disease, farmland lies fallow, and war may be imminent. What shall I do?”

  The wise man thinks for a moment. Then he says, “Sire, do any of those people happen to be wearing a red hat?”

  . . .

  Problem: I was born in Boston, and my parents were born in Boston. Yet I was not born a United States citizen. How is this possible?

  Answer: I was born before 1776, before the United States was created. Subsequently: Like many others, I became a proud U.S. citizen in 1776. The ensuing years have been arduous for me, and I bear no small shame for the unholy means by which I have sustained myself for more than two centuries. You see, I am not only a U.S. citizen … I am also a vampire.

  . . .

  Problem: A traveler visits an island inhabited by two types of people, knights and knaves. Knights always tell the truth; knaves always lie. The visitor falls in love with a local girl and wants to marry her. But before marrying he wants to be sure she is not a knave. An island tradition prohibits men from speaking to women until they are married. So the traveler must ask the girl’s brother, who may be a knight or a knave and is not necessarily the same type as his sister. The traveler is allowed to ask the brother one question to find out if his potential bride-to-be is a knave. What is the question?

  Answer: Are you and your sister of the same type? If the brother answers yes, then, no matter whether he is a knight or a knave, his sister must be a knight. If the brother answers no, the sister must be a knave.

  Subsequently: The bride’s brutal honesty soon sours the marriage, and the visitor leaves the strange island heartbroken, vowing never again to book travel through the Internet. Knights and knaves gradually intermarry, and within three generations everybody on the island lies occasionally, at unpredictable times.

  2003

  GEORGE SAUNDERS

  A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

  THE Patriotic Studies discipline may properly be said to have begun with the work of Jennison et al., which first established the existence of the so-called “fluid-nations,” entities functionally identical to the more traditional geographically based nations (“geo-nations”), save for their lack of what the authors termed “spatial/geographic contiguity.” Citizenship in a fluid-nation was seen to be contingent not upon residence in some shared physical space (i.e., within “borders”) but, rather, upon commonly held “values, loyalties, and/or habitual patterns of behavior” seen to exist across geo-national borders.

  For approximately the first five years of its existence, the Patriotic Studies discipline proceeded under the assumption that these fluid-nations were benign entities, whose existence threatened neither the stability nor the integrity of the traditional geo-nation. A classic study of this period was conducted by Emmons, Denny, and Smith, concerning the fluid-nation Men Who Fish. Using statistical methods of retro-attribution, the authors were able to show that, in a time of national crisis (the Battle of the Bulge, Europe, 1944), American citizens who were also citizens of Men Who Fish performed their duties every bit as efficiently (+/-5 Assessment Units) as did members of the control group, even when that duty involved inflicting “harm” to “serious harm” on fellow-citizens of Men Who Fish who were allied at that time with the opposing geo-nation (i.e., Germany). During this battle, as many as seventy-five hundred (and no fewer than five thousand) German soldiers who were also citizens of Men Who Fish were killed or wounded by American soldiers who were citizens of Men Who Fish, leading the authors to conclude that citizens of Men Who Fish were not “expected, in a time of national crisis, to respond significantly less patriotically than a control group of men of similar age, class, etc., who are not citizens of Men Who Fish.”

  Significant and populous fluid-nations examined during this so-called “Exoneration Studies” period included Men with Especially Large Penises; People Who Say They Hate Television but Admit to Watching It Now and Then, Just to Relax; Women Who When Drunk Berate the Sport of Boxing; and Elderly Persons Whose First Thought Upon Hearing of a Death Is Relief That They Are Still Alive, Followed by Guilt for Having Had That First Feeling.

  A watershed moment in the history of the discipline occurred with the groundbreaking work of Randall, Clearly, et al., which demonstrated for the first time that individuals were capable of holding multiple fluid-nation citizenships. Using the newly developed Anders-Reese Distance-Observation Method, the authors were able to provide specific examples of this phenomenon. A Nebraska man was seen to hold citizenship in Men Who Sit Up Late at Night Staring with Love at Their Sleeping Children and also in Farmers Who Mumble Soundless Prayers While Working in Their Fields. In Cincinnati, Ohio, twin sisters were found to belong to Five-Times-a-Week Churchgoers as well as to Clandestine Examiners of One’s Own Hardened Nasal Secretions. An entire family in Abilene, Texas, was seen to belong to Secretly Always Believe They Are the Ugliest in the Room, with individual members of this family also holding secondary citizenships in fluid-nations as diverse as Listens to Headphones in Bed; Stands Examining Her Breasts in Her Closet; Brags Endlessly While Actually Full of Doubt; Makes Excellent Strudel; and Believes Fervently in the Risen Christ.

  At the time, awareness of this work among the general public was still low. This would change dramatically, however, with the publication, by Beatts, Daniels, and Ahkerbaj, of their comprehensive study of the fluid-nation Individuals Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction.

  In this study, 155 citizens of the target fluid-nation were assessed per the Hanley-Briscombe National-Allegiance Criterion, a statistical model developed to embody the Dooley-Sminks-Ang Patriot Descriptor Statement, which defined a patriot as “an individual who, once the leadership of his country has declared that action is necessary, responds quickly, efficiently, and without wasteful unnecessary questioning of the declared national goal.”

  Results indicated that citizens of Individuals Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction scored, on average, thirty-nine points lower on the National-Allegiance Criterion than did members of the control group and exhibited nonpatriotic attitudes or tendencies 29 percent more often. Shown photographs of citizens of an opposing geo-nation and asked, “What sort of person do you believe this person to be?,” citizens of Individuals Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction were 64 percent more likely to choose the response “Don’t know, would have to meet them first.” Given the opportunity to poke with a rubber baton a citizen of a geo-nation traditionally opposed to their geo-nation (an individual who was at that time taunting them with a slogan from a list of Provocative Slogans), citizens of Individuals Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction were found to be 71 percent less likely to poke than members of the control group.

  The authors’ conclusion (“Within this particular fluid-nation, loyalty to the fluid-nation may at times surpass loyalty to the parent geo-nation”), along with the respondents’ professed willingness to subjugate important geo-national priorities, and even accept increased national-security risks, in order to avoid violating the Cohering Principle of their fluid-nation (i.e., not killing for an abstraction), led to the creation of a new category of fluid-nation, the “Malignant” fluid-nation.

  At this time—coincidentally but fortuitously—there appeared the work of Elliott, Danker, et al., who made the important (and at the time startling) discovery that multiple fluid-nation citizenship did not occur in rando
m distributions. That is, given a known fluid-nation citizenship, it was theoretically possible to predict an individual’s future citizenship in other fluid-nations, using complex computer-modeling schemes. The authors found, for example, that citizens of Overinvolved Mothers tended to become, later in life, citizens of either Overinvolved Grandmothers or (perhaps paradoxically) Completely Uninterested Grandmothers, with high rates of occurrence observed also in Women Who Collect Bird Statuary and Elderly Women Who Purposely Affect a “Quaint Old Lady” Voice.

  The implications of these data vis-à-vis the so-called Malignant fluid-nations were clear. Work immediately began within the discipline to identify and develop new technologies for the purpose of identifying those fluid-nations most likely to produce future citizens of Malignant fluid-nations. The most sophisticated and user-friendly of these tools proved to be the Rowley Query Grid, which successfully predicted the probability that citizens of Tends to Hold Him/Herself Aloof from the Group (previously thought to be innocuous) would, in time, evolve into citizens of Individuals Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction. Subsequently, dozens of these “Nascent-Malignant” fluid-nations were identified, including Bilingual Environmentalists, Crusty Ranchers, Angry Widowers, and Recent Immigrants with an Excessive Interest in the Arts.

  Needless to say, these findings resulted in dramatic improvements in both the National Security Index and the Unforeseen-Violence Probability Statistic.