The fault lies with us
A doctor's confession, tsunami warnings, and dancing type. Plus: snippets of the week on eugenics, the delusions of smart people, and Lenin's centennial.
EXHIBITS
BLUE SKY, Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, has accepted ten of my photographs for its 2024 Pacific Northwest Drawers exhibit in Portland. Juror Aline Smithson, an LA-based artist and educator, selected among submissions from photographers in five northwestern states and British Columbia. The unique program enables visitors to view and handle matted prints in a series of drawers in the gallery. My photograph Redhead Down will be shown with nine others in the exhibit, which debuts April 4. Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Avenue, Portland, OR.
LINDA OKAZAKI’S retrospective, Into the Light, runs through February 25th and the accompanying book is now available online and in the museum bookstore. Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, 550 Winslow Way East, Bainbridge Island, WA.
BURST OF COLOR, the fiber arts exhibit at the Northwind Art gallery continues through the end of February. Two of Barbara’s quilts are featured. Jeanette Best Gallery, 701 Water Street, Port Townsend WA. Photographers from Northwind Art classes are also showing work at Reveille Cafe in Fort Worden State Park.
ROBERT TOGNOLI, a founding member of our LEO photographers group, which supports local environmental organizations, will be the featured artist at Grover Gallery in February. Grover Gallery, 236 Taylor Street, Port Townsend, WA.
THE 17TH ANNUAL CVG Juried Show of Washington State artists continues through February 23rd. My picture, Red-tailed Tropicbird, won the second place award in photography and digital art. Collective Visions Gallery, 331 Pacific Avenue, Bremerton WA.
TALES FROM THE CLINIC
The doctor learns a lesson
By Barbara Ramsey
I WAS A THIRTY-SOMETHING white woman practicing family medicine in a small clinic in East Oakland. Bill was a middle-aged black man who came to the clinic for medical care on a regularly irregular basis. He was a guy who liked his liquor and his ladies in equal measure, and many of his medical problems stemmed from one or the other or both. He found it inconvenient to keep appointments to address his high blood pressure and malfunctioning liver. But he was good about dropping in from time to time if he felt poorly, especially if he had symptoms of a sexually transmitted infection.
Bill and I were both skilled at diagnosing these kinds of problems and I appreciated his matter-of-fact attitude. Some guys who came to the clinic with penis-related complaints were mortified to see a female physician. Bill respected my straightforward approach and I his. He always allowed me the requisite time to give my HIV-prevention spiel and I spared him anything resembling a “Bill, I’m disappointed in you for not wearing a condom” lecture.
What troubled me was his blood pressure. While gonorrhea was a bother, uncontrolled hypertension was far more likely to kill him. He’d periodically accepted a prescription for meds, but basic math convinced me that a 90-day supply of pills shouldn’t last him for a year, despite his reassurance that “Nope, don’t need a refill yet—I’ve got plenty still at home.”
While Bill sometimes told me what he thought I wanted to hear, he wasn’t usually masking. He seemed willing to present his real self and that wasn’t common with other patients. I, on the other hand, often felt it necessary to conceal myself, especially when it came to certain emotions, especially anger. Anger was one hundred percent unacceptable to me while in a room with a patient. But one day with Bill, I let it out.
The problem was that I really liked the guy. He combined self-confidence with a knowing self-deprecation. He had a kind of pride that didn’t preclude genuine humility. He was charming, he was funny, and he was smart. So I was mad at the person who was risking Bill’s life by not taking his meds: Bill.
I just blurted it out. I told him I was mad that he wasn’t taking his blood pressure meds regularly, mad that he failed to show up for half his appointments, mad that I seemed more worried about his health than he was. Then I asked him a question: What if he were the doctor and I were the patient? What would he do with a patient like him?
Bill looked right back at me. “Well, I sure wouldn’t give up on a fella like me,” he said.
He was right. He’d give me an accurate job description—all my training summed up in a sentence. Bill continued to come to the clinic on a regularly irregular basis for another ten years, until his death. I miss him. —Barbara Ramsey
NATURAL DISASTER
The real danger from the deep
WHEN WE MOVED to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in 2015, I was aware of the Cascadia Subduction Zone—the fault that runs from Cape Mendocino to Vancouver Island. I had interviewed oceanographers at the University of Washington who study the fault. I had researched and written about earthquake-induced tsunamis. That same year, The New Yorker published an article by Kathryn Schultz about a future Cascadia earthquake and tsunami entitled “The Really Big One” with this memorable quote from a FEMA official: “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” We made sure to buy a house on a hill.
The deadliest tsunami in world history struck less than twenty years ago, on the day after Christmas in 2004, Boxing Day. At 7:59 a.m. local time, an eight hundred and ten-mile border between two tectonic plates ruptured off the coast of Indonesia, generating an estimated 9.1 magnitude earthquake. The Andaman earthquake unleashed the energy equivalent of fifteen hundred Hiroshima bombs and sent waves traveling up to five hundred miles per hour across the Indian Ocean. The nations and people in its path were unprepared. Here in the eastern Pacific, thirty-nine DART buoys—Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami stations—are strategically placed in the ocean to warn us before disaster strikes. At the time, there were none in the Indian Ocean. And during the hours that the tsunami swept towards India, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, no communication systems were in place to alert residents along the coast or to direct them to safe ground. Between 225,000 and 300,000 people lost their lives.
In March 2011, I interviewed an American scientist who had survived the Andaman tsunami. Nine days before the interview, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, known for destroying the Fukishima Nuclear Power Plant, had overwhelmed Japan, killing more than eighteen thousand people. The Tohoku tsunami subsequently crossed the Pacific, drowning one person in Crescent City, California, and destroying structures along the American west coast. In Santa Cruz, where it wiped out the back harbor, I watched federal workers gingerly raising the sunken boats to avoid releasing oil or onboard toxics into the water.
A Cascadia earthquake would likely reach a 9.0 magnitude or more—nothing like the earthquakes I’d experienced in California, including the Loma Prieta in 1989, which caused sections of the Nimitz Freeway and Bay Bridge to collapse. California’s famous San Andreas Fault consists of two parallel plates that slip against each other. Subduction quakes, generated where one plate lies underneath the other—like those in the Cascadia and Andaman zones—are far more dangerous. I explain why in an article entitled “The Survivor” that begins:
Dwayne Meadows thought he still had time to escape. He planned to throw his backpack through the louvered windows of his vacation bungalow, leap out the back, and run up the nearby hill. Using the few surviving videos, he later calculated that he’d had thirty seconds from the time he heard screams on the beach until the wave smashed through his sliding glass door. He turned to see the harbor emptying, a thick white line of foam on the horizon roaring towards him, and boats bobbing wildly in Khao Lak Bay…
FOR THE LOVE OF TYPE
KAREL TEIGE was a modernist Czech artist and writer who introduced Paul Klee, André Breton, and Man Ray and other artists to Prague audiences. He also lectured at the Bauhaus. In 1926, he collaborated with the poet Vítězslav Nezval and choreographer and dancer Milča Mayerová to produce Abeceda—the alphabet book. Nezval’s poems accompanied each letterform montage designed by Teige, with obvious Constructivist influences (also see Zlom). The pair founded a movement they called Poetism that highlighted the sensual and playful in contrast to Czech modernists whose principal ambition was to join the class struggle and produce socially useful art. “I decided to reject any theme whatsoever, and chose the most abstract poetic object—the letter—as the pretext for the gymnastics of the mind,” Nezval said. But both remained committed Marxists and Teige welcomed the Red Army in 1945. Nonetheless, he was silenced and then denounced by the communist government, which destroyed his papers and suppressed his books. Thankfully, Abeceda survived.
READINGS
Snippets of the week
There’s an echo in here. “A century ago, eugenics provided the unquestioned and unquestionable foundation for academic writing and public policy. Eugenics preached a world of predestination, where an individual’s worth was irrevocably determined at birth by race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, economic status, and family history. No one could escape his or her essentialist destiny by dint of action, accomplishment, or character. Eugenics began as parlor conversation among well-born, well-educated, often well-meaning British academics.” —Robert F. Graboyes
IQ clubbing. “The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust… While unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true.” —Gurwinder
My response to seeing Facebook posts celebrating Lenin’s centennial: “Lenin was the one who initiated the policies that caused about ninety percent of the repression and death in the Soviet Union… Mao Zedong managed to exceed the Soviet Union in sheer numbers of victims (he had a much larger population to work with). Cambodia's Pol Pot killed a higher percentage of his population in a shorter period of time, and arguably managed to exceed both the Soviets and Chinese in sheer torture and cruelty. But these mass murderers were, on major issues, still largely following the model first established by Lenin.” —Ilya Somin
Thank you for reading. Please consider subscribing (it’s free) and sharing. And your comments are most welcome. -Kerry
Terrific writing, Kerry.
‘The fault lies with us’ is another great edition of Wild Things. I was glued to my chair reading the full version of the Tsunami piece. The stories from eye witnesses and victims added weight to the physics and metrics provided. I’m going to take more notice of the blue tsunami warning signs in future.