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Analog SFF, January-February 2007
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2007 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT
Vol. CXXVII No. 1 & 2, January-February 2007
Cover design by Victoria Green
Cover Art by Bob Eggleton
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Serial
ROLLBACK, Conclusion, Robert J. Sawyer
Novellas
EMERALD RIVER, PEARL SKY, Rajnar Vajra
NUMEROUS CITATIONS, E. Mark Mitchell
Novelettes
SUPER GYRO, Grey Rollins
DOUBLE HELIX, DOWNWARD GYRE, Carl Frederick
Short Stories
THE FACE OF HATE, Stephen L. Burns
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE, David W. Goldman
EXPOSURE THERAPY, R. Emrys Gordon
THE TASTE OF MIRACLES, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
THE UNRUNG BELLS OF THE MARIE CELESTE, Richard A. Lovett
IF ONLY WE KNEW, Jerry Oltion
Science Fact
SHIELDING A POLAR LUNAR BASE, Franklin Cocks
AFTER GAS: ARE WE READY FOR THE END OF OIL?, Richard A. Lovett
Special Feature
HOW TO WRITE SOMETHING
YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT, Richard A. Lovett
Reader's Departments
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, Jeffery D. Kooistra
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
THE 2006 INDEX AND ANALYTICAL LABORATORY BALLOT
IN TIMES TO COME
UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Associate Editor
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Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: THE CHEESESTEAK NAZI, THE COLONEL, AND THE FOOD POLICE by Stanley Schmidt
Emerald River, Pearl Sky by Rajnar Vajra
SCIENCE FACT: Shielding a Polar Lunar Base by Franklin Cocks
THE FACE OF HATE by STEPHEN L. BURNS
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE by David W. Goldman
IN TIMES TO COME
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: IMAGINATION Jeffery D. Kooistra
Super Gyro by Grey Rollins
Exposure Therapy by R. Emrys Gordon
Special Feature: How To Write Something You Don't Know Anything About by Richard A. Lovett
The Taste of Miracles by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Unrung Bells of the Marie Celeste by Richard A. Lovett
If Only We Knew by Jerry Oltion
Science Fact: After Gas: Are We Ready for the End of Oil? by Richard A. Lovett
Double Helix, Downward Gyre by Carl Frederick
NUMEROUS CITATIONS by E. Mark Mitchell
ROLLBACK (Conclusion) by Robert J. Sawyer
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
IT'S ANLAB TIME AGAIN
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EDITORIAL: THE CHEESESTEAK NAZI, THE COLONEL, AND THE FOOD POLICE
by Stanley Schmidt
Most cultures, I suspect, have proverbs like “The way to a man's heart is through his stomach” or “An army travels on its stomach.” As with any other animal, food is one of our most fundamental needs, and our relationships with it drive and/or reflect virtually all aspects of our lives. As Jared Diamond discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the whole course of development of “western civilization” in some areas and not others depends crucially on the accidental occurrence of certain plants and animals that lent themselves to domestication in just a few spots. People still fight over cropland and water rights, use “wine and dine” almost as a synonym for wooing the opposite sex (or potential clients), and use particular foods as excuses to flaunt one's own status or sneer at somebody else's. Lobster was considered fit only for livestock and indentured servants when it was plentiful and easy to get; now that it's scarce, the poor can seldom afford it and the rich use it to show off.
Our own current culture has its own odd attitudes toward food and the use thereof. Several of these have been in the news of late, leading me to comment on them collectively as symptoms of some of our more general societal quirks.
Consider, for example, the Philadelphia cheesesteak shop operator who has been accused of discrimination because he posted signs in his window saying “This Is America: When Ordering ‘Speak English.'” His motivation was annoyance with the growing number of local residents who can't speak English, which is part of the much larger controversy over the extent to which immigrants should be expected or required to speak English—which is, so far (but to a visibly dwindling extent), the conspicuously predominant language of this country.
Personally, as I've said on numerous occasions, I agree with the cheesesteak guy on the general principle that people who take up residence in a new country—any people and any country—should consider it both a duty and common sense to learn the prevailing local language as quickly and well as they can. If I moved to Lithuania, I would feel both obliged and eager to learn Lithuanian. I would consider it foolish to deprive myself of the opportunity to communicate fully with my new neighbors, and arrogant to expect them—or their government—to provide services to me in English.
Does this mean that I agree with the cheesesteak vendor's actions? Not particularly; it strikes me as a rather petty and unkind thing for an individual merchant to do. If he really can't understand a customer's orders, there's no problem; he doesn't know what they want so he can't sell it to them. If they can make themselves understood, he can and (in my purely personal opinion) should. (I wonder how he'd feel if somebody plopped him down in Lithuania for a month and made sure that nobody would deal with him except in Lithuanian?) If he's really determined not to sell to them, he can always pretend he doesn't understand.
To his partial credit, he claims he's doing this for their own good (a claim that should usually provoke wariness). One newspaper article says he's never turned a customer away because of the policy, and I seem to recall another that said if customers have trouble ordering in English, he tries to teach them. This is admirable if they want him to teach them, but I suspect at least some of them find the process more humiliating than helpful.
Should he be required to do otherwise, as Philadelphia's Commission on Human Relations maintains? I'm not enthusiastic about that, either. There are plenty of cheesesteak salesmen in Philadelphia[1], and customers who want cheesesteak and are unwilling to learn to ask for it in English can find somewhere else to buy it. I'm leery of Big Brother telling people how to run their businesses in any more detail than necessary, and it seems to me that ordinary market forces ought to be able to handle this one. Customers who are sufficiently determined to get these particular cheesesteaks can surely make the minimal effort to learn to order them in English; and if this vendor's practices alienate enough customers, he may have to rethink them.
[Footnote 1: And no, for the record, I am not saying that this one is r
eally a Nazi. The title is an allusion to a well-known Seinfeld episode, and it's come to a pretty pass when I need to explain that.]
What's often overlooked in the heated debates over linguistic accommodation of immigrants, but clearly pointed out by Charles Krauthammer in an essay in Time (June 12, 2006), is that there's a fundamental difference between the current wave of immigration and earlier ones. Past waves included a mixture of people speaking many languages, who (mostly) learned English because they knew they needed it and nobody was going to cater to them in their own languages; they didn't demand that, or if they did, nobody paid much attention to them. The current one has a large preponderance of speakers of one language, and there's a sizable and vocal part of our culture so afraid of being accused of “discrimination” that they do seriously advocate providing official services to them in that language.
It's clearly impractical to do that for every language spoken by immigrants, and I see no reason to do it for even one. As a taxpayer, I think the government already has its hands way too deep in my pockets, and I don't want to pay for it to provide a huge amount of a service it shouldn't have to provide. And as Krauthammer (raised in Québec) points out, there's a real danger in reducing the incentive for a large wave of speakers of a single language to learn the currently prevailing one: it could be the first step toward dividing us into two cultures, creating a potentially unstable situation like that in Canada (which has occasionally come close to splitting over its bilingualism).
So: I do think all immigrants should learn the prevailing language of their adopted country, if it's lucky enough to have one, and I don't think public money should be spent to reduce their motivation to do so. I don't think a single merchant's withholding food from newcomers (who may be in the early process of learning), or embarrassing them, is a good way to do that. It seems to me quixotic at best and nasty at worst—but I don't think either of those warrants government interference.
Okay, let's look at another example: the group suing a well-known fried chicken chain for using transfats in cooking and trying to force them to stop it. This, and a slightly related debate I'll mention shortly, touches on at least two of our cultural problems: a pathological aversion to accepting personal responsibility or expecting others to do the same, and how to deal with things like the much-publicized obesity epidemic on both medical and economic levels.
At first glance, this seems another simple case of people expecting government intervention to make unwise choices impossible so that no one has to take responsibility for making wise ones. Plenty of information on nutrition is readily available—both effects of particular ingredients and the content of nearly all foods offered for sale—so people should be able to decide for themselves what they want to eat and how much importance they want to place on particular facts. If Transfats Are Bad (as current fashion holds), and a particular restaurant uses a lot of them, you're certainly free to take your business elsewhere (and if enough people do, said restaurant will have to change its ways to compete). Many people try to eat carefully most of the time, but still enjoy an occasional splurge at the “forbidden” place as a special treat. Trying to deprive them of all opportunities for that once-in-a-while indulgence seems like unnecessary overkill, and uncomfortably reminiscent of Prohibition (which didn't work).
But even if somebody wants to live entirely on things that current medical opinion considers unhealthful, that's their choice because it's their body, right?
My first inclination is to agree, but as often happens, our society has created a tangle of complications. In principle, if you actually believe in the value of individual freedom and responsibility (which not many people do, though many claim to), you pretty much have to agree that people have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their own bodies—if they also accept responsibility for the consequences. And that is something that our current culture has aggressively discouraged, to the point of making it practically impossible.
One of the more cogent arguments advanced against making people solely responsible for their own choices about eating (or smoking, or drinking, or ... ) is that excessive or unbalanced eating often leads to a multitude of medical problems. The aforementioned abundance of overweight Americans is only the visible tip of the iceberg; dietary problems also contribute to problems with all parts of the body, notably the cardiovascular system and the digestive system itself. And those cost everybody, because treatment for those ailments is financed mostly by medical insurance. We all pay premiums, and the more the insurance companies have to pay out, the more they have to take in, so the higher the premiums we all pay—whether we ever have to collect much or not. So everybody does have at least an indirect stake in the problem of large numbers of people developing ailments that they could prevent.
But what can we do about it? Many of us are still uncomfortable with the idea of literal “food police” monitoring everything we eat and either telling us what that can be or penalizing us if our choices don't meet their approval. The alternative would be for more people to voluntarily take better care of themselves—but what incentive do they have to do that in our present culture?
Very little, actually, because our society does so many ludicrously counterproductive things. Most people don't actually feel, deep down, any connection between their own health and insurance costs (even their own). They view insurance as a sort of bottomless communal pocket from which they draw whatever they need, so they feel little motivation to keep their needs down. Furthermore, the epidemic of “political correctness” has spawned an automatic tendency to pussyfoot around practically all issues, including this one, by referring to them with gentle euphemisms instead of their real names. My local newspaper recently carried an article headlined, “Should children be called obese?” At present, they aren't, at least by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no matter how obese they are. Seriously obese kids are called merely “overweight,” while the merely overweight are called “at risk for overweight."
Some pediatricians are trying to change that and adopt the same usage for children as for adults, to get patients and their parents to face squarely a medical problem that they need to try to do something about. But they're afraid of offending somebody. As one doctor quoted in the article says, identifying children as obese might risk “making them [and their families] angry.” The article also quotes a young woman who would be affected by the redefinitions as saying the word obese “doesn't sound good."
Well, of course it doesn't—and shouldn't. Obesity isn't good, not in the sense of being a character flaw, but of being a medical problem that warrants some effort at remedying. Which is more likely to motivate people to make that effort: a word that sounds all warm and fuzzy and neutral, or one that calls a problem a problem? And so what if using such a word makes some patients and their families angry? Maybe, once they get past the initial flare-up, they'll be inspired to see if they can do something about it (and I realize that not everyone can).
Probably, though, such an effect would be minimal unless something is also done to make people feel personally responsible, and I don't see that happening under our present medical financing system. What might do the trick? I'll offer one suggestion that might be a starting point for consideration, though I warn you it is, by contemporary standards, outrageously radical and a long way from politically correct.
The problem is that people want to have freedom while expecting others to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. What if we removed that link?
What if people had to pay for their own medical care?
Oh, not all of it; I wouldn't be that outrageous even in an Analog editorial. But not too long ago, insurance was just for the biggies: catastrophic expenses like major surgery. Routine things like check-ups and minor illnesses and injuries were paid for out of the patient's pocket—and that didn't seem nearly as unreasonable then as it does now. What changed? Mainly, as near as I can tell, the combination of the expectati
on that insurance would cover everything, with the frequent granting of big malpractice awards that drove doctors’ malpractice insurance sky-high. That required them to raise rates—and why not, since medical insurance would cover everything?—and that required insurance companies to raise premiums....
It's a classic example of a vicious spiral.
I don't say that this is a finished solution, but I do submit it as a prototype whose consideration might lead to something better: let's limit those malpractice awards and drive all those costs back down to where most people can afford to pay for their routine medical needs and it's harder to get help with things that seem excessive but less than catastrophic. When it sinks in that that has happened, maybe more of them will see more reason to do what they can to keep those costs down—because maybe they won't be bailed out if they don't.
I realize this will sound harsh to some, but bear in mind that evolution got us where we are today. Our present culture gives it almost no freedom to continue operating, and our present practices encourage the proliferation of both flabby bodies and sloppy minds. Neither of those is good for our future, either collectively or as individuals.
Maybe we should try for something better—and giving evolution at least a little chance just may be part of it.
Copyright © 2006 Stanley Schmidt
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Peter Kanter: Publisher
Christine Begley: Associate Publisher
Susan Kendrioski: Executive Director, Art and Production
Stanley Schmidt: Editor
Trevor Quachri: Associate Editor
Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant
Victoria Green: Senior Art Director
Shirley Chan Levi: Art Production Associate
Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager
Analog SFF, January-February 2007 Page 1
