by John Barnes
“Well … let’s see. There was a big fad around 1922 for ‘acme,’ a previously obscure term, for example. The early 80’s saw big waves for ‘excellent’ and ‘fresh’; just recently, ‘extreme’ was that way. The fad words pop up as brand names for dozens or hundreds of products and services. There’s usually a spirit that gets associated with it, too—you might have noticed that ‘acme’ didn’t really denote things that were the absolute best and the utter peak of perfection, that ‘excellent’ only rarely meant ‘standing out above the rest’—remember how berserk that drove some of our older colleagues when the local school board declared that its goal was ‘universal excellence’?”
“‘And all of the children are above average,’” I said. “It annoyed the shit out of me, too, and I’m not that old.”
“But anyway, a fad word usually means something specifically—though vaguely—different from plain old good. Good in a particular way. Twenties ‘acme’ does not translate into forties ‘atomic’ does not translate into nineties ‘extreme.’ They’re all different kinds of goodness—which sounds like a slogan for a breakfast cereal company—see, there’s an example of how things have very precise overtones, goodness is something a breakfast cereal can have but it’s different from tasting good or being good for you (though it implies both) and it works for food but not for an ISP or a washing machine, which, instead, would have, um—”
“Gooditude?” I suggested.
“Goodiosity, maybe. Anyway, whatever it is, each fad word names a particular flavor or type of gooditudiositousness.”
“You can say that again,” Kara said.
“Not on a bet. Now, the odd thing is”—Melody adjusted her glasses again and rested a pointing finger on the table beside her coffee cup—this next point was going to be on the test for sure—“whenever one of those words becomes a fad, there’s a placebo effect associated with it, which persists and continues to work for things named during the fad period, but can’t be successfully deployed on anything named afterwards. Don’t groan, John, it’s not nice, and you know I’m serious.”
“I’m groaning because I know you’re serious,” I said.
Very few of us at Western State had any reputation at all as scholars, and the few of us who did didn’t get much reward for it; Western is proudly, even obsessively, a teaching institution, and research is if anything devalued there. That was another way that Melody didn’t fit in and was probably headed elsewhere soon. She’d made quite a stir with her paper on the semiotics of placebo, which I’d read and given her notes on before she submitted it; she hadn’t liked my notes much so she’d made little use of what I’d said.
I thought about seventy percent of it was brilliant, ten percent the sort of grease needed to slip a paper past some of our colleagues, and twenty percent utter crap, and said so; the notes and comments columns in the semiotics journals were alive with people arguing about it, some having the good sense to agree with me and others trying to push Melody into endorsing positions that would be about eighty percent utter crap, that being the preferred ratio in communications and performance theory.
“Catch me up here,” Travis asked.
“I’m going to go take a very long time in the bathroom,” Kara said, “I’ve seen enough reruns of this show.” She went back toward the kitchen, where the W’s bathrooms were, stopping at a couple of tables to talk to people on the way.
“It’s probably my uncanny powers of deduction but I believe your wife has heard some of this before,” Travis observed. “Let me direct here; I’m used to asking people nosy questions. I know what a placebo effect is. So using a word that’s currently going through a word fad does what?” He looked at Melody and held a hand up at me.
“Well, anything with that name will tend to work slightly better than it otherwise would,” she said. “So giving your project a trendy name is a pretty good way to give yourself some extra luck with getting it to work. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not just duplicating the work of some top-secret researcher many decades ago—after all, ‘Manhattan’ was a big word just before World War Two, and ‘atomic’ and ‘rocket’ were big just after, and look how well all that stuff worked.”
“Okay,” Travis said. “And John, you are turning purple with desire to say that—”
“Oh, I think Melody’s two-thirds right. She gives three reasons for that. Two of them make great sense. One, it’s the semiotic process of framing or de-framing. Like, cut out a piece of canvas that’s been used for brush wiping when we’re painting scenery, so that it has lots of big smears and blobs of different colors, plus students work paint out of a brush by practicing lettering (mainly insults at each other), and smiley faces and cartoons, and sometimes someone will do a quick pencil diagram or sketch to make clear what the designer wants, all on that old piece of shot canvas. Put it in a frame and you can sell it as art. Or the way that some Christies will pull ordinary Romantic adolescent rebellion—‘I am Satan’ and pentangle jewelry and all that—out of the frame of bored teenagers in some suburban gulag-for-the-would-be-hip, and put ‘I Long to Be the Bride of Satan’ into the frame of a secret underground, thereby creating that whole fantasy that there’s a vast Satanic underground out there eating babies and having sex and whatever else it is that a vast Satanic underground does (generally whatever parents moved to the suburbs to avoid).”
“I know my folks moved to the suburbs to avoid having me eating babies. So ‘frame’ is the fad word for ‘context.’”
“Hey, don’t blow our gig,” Melody said.
Too much time as a prof, and you learn to ride right over heckling; it’s an occupational hazard, at least as severe as drinking is for writers. I rolled on. “So Melody points out that one reason placebos work so well in medicine is that they create a frame of ‘I am being cared for and I am getting better.’ The patient starts looking for signs of getting better—which, of course, occur randomly and naturally in most illness and injury—and finds them, and responds to them, and, bawunga, they get better. So, sure, if something was ‘atomic’ in 1948, it probably got extra attention paid to its experimental results, and if it worked at all, people poured effort and money into making it work better. That argument, I got no problem with.”
“Now, argument two,” Melody said. “People getting a placebo want to be good patients. And ‘the patient is getting better’ is the signifier that signifies ‘the patient is a good patient.’ So many of them tell the doctor they’re feeling better, whether they are or not. Reinforced, of course, by the framing effect, which makes them believe it themselves. So it’s not that people get better as much as it’s that they report getting better.
“Now, the place where John and I get into a fight would be argument number three, which is this. Logically, a placebo is a contradiction in terms—it’s a beneficial medication or procedure that has no effect. ‘The pill isn’t doing anything but it is making me feel better.’ So if a pill or a touch or a beam of light doesn’t work, it’s not a placebo because it’s not beneficial, but if it does work, it’s not a placebo because it has an effect. Since, from the patient standpoint and the doctor standpoint, the thing either works or it doesn’t, there can’t be any such thing as a placebo.
“Well, I said that what resolves the question is that there’s always a who-decides about whether it works or not. If you experience a sugar pill making your headache go away, hey, you’re the only person who can say your head aches in the first place, or that it stops. ‘I took the pill and the headache went away’—if you get the same report for a sugar pill and an aspirin, then the only difference is that a guy in a white coat says that the aspirin is blocking those pain thingies in your brain, whereas the effect of the sugar pill is all in your head. Well, duh. Then the difference isn’t in the brain cells, it’s in the guy in the white coat.”
“I can see where this would set old John off,” Travis said, diplomatically.
“Well, because logically, it means there’s no falsifiable effect,”
I said. “Waving crystals over a broken leg—or over a broken radio—is just as appropriate as a splint or checking the connections. Look, Trav—Melody and I go around about this one a lot, you don’t need to be caught in the middle. Suffice it to say that Melody thinks—”
“That she’s still present, and she ought to say what she thinks for herself,” she said.
“Uh, right. I was just about to say that.”
“Did you ever tell him he’s all right for a narrow-minded pompous old fossil?” Melody asked Travis, who glanced at me with an expression that said “Don’t say a word about my age” just about as clearly as a kick in the shins could have. More than one signifier can signify any given signified, and the choice of signifier signifies in and of itself, I mentally quoted. “Anyway, I think there’s an undismissable, unassimilable third factor: name something after a fad word and it just works better. And no matter how many individual cases you are able to reduce to physical or psychological causes, or to contamination of the reporting, you always end up with an irreducible remnant that work for no known physical cause—which are the only cases that everyone will agree are placebos. So by logical definition, when you study placebos, you’re looking for something that works without having any reason to work, and the fact that there’s anything to study means such things exist. There’s a little bit of magic that’s always just over the frontier, you see? That’s what really drives John crazy.”
“But is the effect real?” Travis dropped a hand on my forearm while I was taking a deep breath. “I know you don’t think so and I can see why, John, so let Melody answer, you sexist pig.”
She winked at me, bless her. “You mean, really real, whatever really means? Well, I say it’s really real and John says it only looks real to every real observer, and we disagree about whether or not that’s really the same ‘real’ or two different ‘reals’ or a ‘real’ and a ‘not real.’”
“That’s three sides and there’s only two of you,” Travis pointed out.
“We trade off. Like playing round-up baseball when you were a kid and didn’t have enough players,” I explained. “Anyway, that’s the argument, and as usual Melody has put it better than I would have.”
“And ‘gaudeamus’ is a fad word? Right now?”
Melody nodded so hard that the pile of brown hair on top of her head wobbled and threatened to spill down over her face. “‘Gaudeamus’ is exploding as a fad word right now. I don’t know why a mildly obscure one-word Latin sentence, meaning approximately ‘Party on, dude,’ has suddenly become the it-word, but web-search it, and you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of references on the web, and thousands on Usenet, almost none of them older than six months. Everything and its brother—anything or its brother?—is being named ‘gaudeamus.’”
“Except for me,” I said. “I am being called a sexist pig by a redneck Texan.”
“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio …” Travis said. “Now prove you’re really a theatre professor, and finish the quote.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I guess if the timing had anything to do with it, it was my fault. I kept finding ways to delay departing; since Kara had always liked Travis, and hated cooking, it wasn’t too difficult to get her to come along for a late lunch-early dinner at Mario’s, which is Gunnison’s version of that good college pizza joint that every college town is legally required to have at least one of, before we finally departed. As we headed east, toward the massive swell of Tomichi Dome beyond the golden arches of the McDonald’s, Travis said, “You really don’t like science fiction conventions.”
I shrugged. “Most sf writers complain about them. I’m just one of the few who actually avoid them. It’s not easy because so many writers, and especially editors, used to be fans and they don’t want to hear that you don’t like fan stuff—the same way your favorite aunt or cousin doesn’t want to know that you aren’t coming to the family reunion because you hate most of your family, but you try not to mention it around your favorites.” We were beyond the Gunnison town speed trap but we had to get through some miles of the favorite hunting grounds of Colorado state troopers, so I pushed it into fifth gear and sat back, letting gas mileage be merely crappy instead of execrable, hanging within a mile or two, give or take, of the speed limit. Besides, this valley was lousy with deer and elk—that’s why we got a Texan infestation every fall—and early evening was their favorite time to be out.
“Aren’t fans the ones who buy your books?”
“Not if you’re doing well. Almost everyone who reads sci fi just reads it—heck, most of the readers don’t even know that there are people in the world who get snotty about anybody calling it sci fi. I love those folks that just read it—or maybe occasionally drop me a note telling me that I’m a genius, I changed their life, and they’d like to have my babies. But those are the ones that call it sci fi and leave the paperback lying on the airplane seat when they’re done, or dump all their city bus books at the Goodwill a couple times a year, and let it go at that. Fans means something different. Fans are the maybe one or two percent of sci fi readership that ever goes to a con or reads some online fannish thing. And fans are weird.”
“No!” Travis started laughing, and I joined him.
“All right,” I said. “I don’t mean that. They aren’t weird enough, in that sense—most of them have completely reactionary tastes in everything, haven’t caught up with the painting of 1910 or the poetry of 1930, and many of them lead very circumscribed lives, like any suburbanite that belongs to a strange little church or anyone in a dead-end job who puts most of their attention into some allconsuming hobby. It would be good for most fans to get weirder, in that sense, and heck, a lot of them do. I like many of the ones that are genuinely weird. But I meant weird in that they’re a weird demographic; their tastes are different from general readers. Not totally different, but different enough that they can skew your market sense. Fans read the stuff for different reasons than most readers, and if you start to write for fans … well, it’s like what would happen if McDonald’s started doing all their customer surveys along a hundred miles of the Rio Grande.”
“They’d serve food with flavor?”
“They’d lose sales.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive, bud.” He leaned back and said, “Damn pretty up here. Half a mile higher than Denver, you said? And two hundred miles away—”
“And fifty years into the past. Yeah. Drives me crazy every second that I don’t love it, and I love it every second it doesn’t drive me crazy.”
“I think I’ll add this place to my list of places to go out of my way to pass through,” Travis said.
Dead ahead of us, Jupiter was coming up over the distant mountains; in the rearview I saw the very last glint of red sunlight flashing out across the West Elk, pursued down the sky by an unusually gold Venus. I remember thinking that it would have been nice to have more of a moon for this drive, but at least the pavement was dry and there wouldn’t be fog to cope with. In the dim light, the cattle and horses in the fields might as well have been lawn ornaments on the biggest lawn you ever saw.
“How come that creek’s so twisty?” Travis pointed to our right, to the winding tangles of curves that the ribbon of dark silver made on the mountain meadow.
“Tomichi Creek,” I said. “A geologist friend drew me up a diagram of that once, when I asked him that question. I guess the short answer is that it’s old and the ground doesn’t slope much through here. You’ll be all wrinkled too when you’re old. Something like that.”
“For a guy who puts that much science into books, you don’t remember it very well.”
“Actually the problem is I always remember more than I ever knew.”
We roared past the little crossroads towns, Parlin and Doyleville, and it was full dark by the time we passed the Dome, which I knew was there only by the dark absence in the stars in my left peripheral vision. “Lot of stars out here,” Travis said.
“
We keep the extras that they don’t want in the cities anymore.”
The valley narrowed to a steep-walled canyon. Rock walls bounced in and out of my headlights between black voids. We came to the last broad part before the pass, the patch of soggy flat ground, mostly horse pasture, around Sargents. “This light coming up is your last chance for a pee or a candy bar till we’re over Monarch,” I said. “Twenty-three miles to the next anything.”
“I’m good.”
The truck started the long climb, roaring as if it were trying to intimidate the pass in front of us. Monarch is awesome in the sense that kids never mean anymore—a place that induces pure awe—with high peaks, steep dropoffs, bare rock faces, deep snow far into the summer, the kind of place that Christmas card painters and poster makers mean when they say “Colorado.” It’s also a frightening series of hairpin curves with very steep and far dropoffs, and one of several contributing factors to one of the less-pleasant aspects of life in Gunnison—everyone knows some people who died young. Monarch is dotted with numerous makeshift monuments, usually wooden or metal crosses surrounded by plastic flowers, bits of outdoor gear, teddy bears, that kind of thing, on both sides of the narrow two lanes of US 50, either along the steep stone wall, or just the other side of the guardrail, by the edge that drops off anywhere from fifty to two hundred feet. I had known three of the people that the crosses represented. There were many more than three crosses.
Tonight, though, we had the road almost to ourselves, till I saw a gray-brown mass ahead, for just an instant, in my bouncing hibeams, and downshifted and braked, well short of a young bull elk, who was just wandering along the road, in my lane, with the usual expression of ruminant stupidity. He stopped to look back at us for an instant, as if to say, “Well, are you coming?”
“Can you imagine,” I said as we followed at about five miles an hour, “that there are hunters who can’t tell one of these guys from a deer? Grown men who can’t distinguish between something this big, with a completely different head, and an ordinary deer? And that said grown men are allowed to run loose in the woods with liquor and guns?”
