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Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

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from: Andrew Solomon

Blond, Straight and Normal: The Good Life?

Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2001, at 2:31 PM ET

Dear Peter,

Oh yes, exotics. I spend much of my life being an exotic and occasionally get slapped around for being one. I was recently told by a club for which I had been proposed that they had admitted a few Jews and they had admitted a few gays, but they really didn't see that it was necessary to admit people who were both. Homosexuality was for a long time viewed as a disease, of course, and the very recent conversion of its status will, I think, be under serious threat when genetic engineering or an equivalent (stem cells, perhaps?) allows us to "cure" or prevent it. We will move toward a standardized world. Certainly we will get rid of obesity pretty darned quick. Now I happen to think that being gay is better than being obese. As for being deaf, I thought the idea of deaf culture was slightly ridiculous until I began hanging out in the deaf world, and then I fell in love with the language and with the culture around that language, and with the way that people whose language uses the same bodies that they use in love seemed to relate to one another. What about prodigious genius? Is that aberrant gene that makes some kids brilliant at chess, for example, a sort of deformity insofar as it deviates so much from the norm? Or is it something desirable enough so that we'd add it into everyone's makeup the way we put vitamin D into milk? These are obviously huge questions, and what one says about them in 500 words or less can't help being somewhat banal.

Here's the real truth of the matter: Some exotics have made a career out of being exotic, and they love it. Some exotics hate it. Did you by any chance see the brilliant documentary Dwarfs: Not a Fairy Tale (I think that was the title) that was screened a few months ago? There was one woman who was less than 2 feet tall and who was just a powerhouse, and I was in awe of her. She had just decided she was going to live an amazing life, and she was a school teacher in the inner city in Baltimore, I think, and she had all these tough kids totally respecting and deferring to her, and there was something about her aura of regal authority that was much more remarkable and exhilarating because she was so incredibly teeny. And her parents said she had always been incorrigible. And she had married a man who was nearly normal-heighted (4 foot something) and who clearly loved her for who she was with her shortness. Also in the film was a girl who as a child had apparently been introduced to adult dwarfs and screamed and carried on about how she hated them and thought they were disgusting and wouldn't ever want to be like them. And she eventually had a gruesome-looking long-term surgery that allowed her to add 13 inches to her height. She just didn't want to be a dwarf. I know gay people who hate being gay, and I know gay people who love it. I know people who've been through depression who wouldn't give that experience up for anything, and I know people who would erase that part of their past if they possibly could.

So yes--for my own putative children, I'd probably make them blond and straight and normal because I have this idée fixe that those people have the easiest time. But with my luck, they'd turn out to be people who wanted, who needed the Lucretian challenge of exoticism in order to become amazing. Not just amazing at parties, but amazing in life and, perhaps most of all, amazing to themselves.

Your exotic friend,
Andrew

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Andrew Solomon

Blond, Straight and Normal: The Good Life?

Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2001, at 2:31 PM ET
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Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
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Reader Comments From The Fray

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[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

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