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mugwump jissom: December 2008

Monday, December 29, 2008

I want a new drug


We have been living in the age of serotonin. Bad moods, say the experts, result from a deficiency of serotonin, and are corrected by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—Prozac is the celebrity. But the discovery came from outside the pharmaceuticals, from guerilla drug warriors, in the form of MDMA—ecstasy—the substance that lets us swim in the sea of serotonin that our brains hide from us.

Finally science is surpassing this paradigm. From The New Scientist, the hormone that is now capturing the attention of researchers: oxytocin.

Emotions have structural relationships to drugs in the brain. Our brains, of course, produce drugs—people who run marathons are essentially junkies, who have found a less constipating way of encouraging their brains to produce opiods. When we fall in love, experience orgasm, or feel affection for our families, oxytocin is at work. When we take ecstasy, not all the credit can go to serotonin; the magic also comes from oxytocin.

Never mind the medical uses. What does the research surrounding this internal drug mean for the psychonaut, the explorer of inner space? The problem with oxytocin is that, like serotonin, simply taking the hormone has no real effect. What a drug would have to do is change the way the brain produces and absorbs the hormone, as outlined in The New Scientist:
Pharmaceutical companies are eager to find a small molecule that would enter the brain more easily and switch on oxytocin receptors long-term. An "oxytocin agonist" is the ultimate prize, says [Paul] Zak [director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California]. So far, no one has announced such a discovery.

Ideally, such a substance would be beneficial but not prone to misuse. Yet given oxytocin's association with comfort, love and sex, such a molecule could turn out to be hugely pleasurable, or even make users fall in love. MDMA is often credited with unleashing the "second summer of love". Just imagine what the third could be like.
Hopefully some backyard chemist will get there first.

P.S. For the necessary background information, please take a listen to this excellent lecture by Andrew Weil, the face of "integrative health" who started out as a very serious analyst of drugs and the human mind.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Fey is the new Palin

Everyone was happy to see Tina Fey take the wheel at the sinking ship Saturday Night Live with her impersonation of America's Top Politician Sarah Palin. But no one has posed the essential question: who profits? Who profits from this comedy and the unavoidable talent behind it?

What we know of Tina Fey from the profiles written of her in The New Yorker and more recently Vanity Fair is that she is a relatively shrewd and sharp square who is impatient with people who aren’t squares. She hates strippers but loves to make fun of them. She fears terrorists with anthrax as much as or more than she hates George W. Bush. She recoils at the word “cunt” but gave a new life to the words “whore” and “bitch” during her tutelage as SNL head writer.

Both her humor and morality come from the interior world of a white woman. Not, to paraphrase Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that, but there is certainly no political humor left in this world of highly personalized affectations and prejudices. The clever Tina Fey may engage in gender humor, but there’s no political content—just language games that grow out of personal identity and the social anxiety that comes from being surrounded by a multiplicity of other identities. A major source of humor on Fey's primetime TV show 30 Rock is the bewilderment of Fey’s and our alter ego Liz Lemon in a multicultural world—someone is always around to ruin our day by getting offended at an innocent remark, which we didn’t mean that way (like mixing up the names of the two black people who work on your set), or not matching a stereotype that we were perfectly rational in believing (like that quiet Arab men are generally planning terrorist attacks).

So does Tina Fey show us the real stupidity of Sarah Palin? Or does Sarah Palin reveal the hidden conservatism of Tina Fey? When Fey defended Hilary Clinton on SNL, declaring that “bitch is the new black,” she summed up the roots of today’s cynical comedy and politics. Mainstream has been out for a long time, and an endless rotation of marginalities is in. “Black” isn’t an identity so much as a signifier of “outsideness,” of difference, and that’s what sells—so, for a successful white person, your personal quirks and particularities may be your ticket to politically incorrect privilege. Everyone can be The New Black, whether they are teddy-bear Republicans like Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock, or edgy, career-driven post-feminists like Tina Fey.

Fortunately, there are oppositional tendencies within the contemporary comedy world. I am always dismayed when I watch 30 Rock by what seems to be Tina Fey’s hatred of Indians—the only Indians in her world are annoying convenience-store owners, hot dog salesmen, or Jonathan, the sniveling, overachieving personal assistant to Jack Donoghy—but I am filled with renewed optimism when I remember the glorious Kevin G., from Tina Fey's most progressive (and funniest) project, Mean Girls. Here what could have been a nasty joke became a liberatory force in the hands of a talented young actor.



On 30 Rock itself, the virtuosic performances of Tracy Morgan manifest the sheer force of cultural icons that come from the outside. His character is utterly incomprehensible to the rationality of the show—he embodies every imaginable stereotype so completely that we are no longer able to pin him down to an acceptable multicultural category. When Morgan appeared on SNL to defend Obama in response to Tina Fey’s political declarations, he represented the appropriate response to the anxieties of mainstream America. The cultural forces coming from the margins of American society are not just threats to mainstream identities, they have already destroyed them; Obama just drove the point home.



The Sarah Palins of television had better move over, because it’s time to celebrate a new mainstream. Black is the new America.