"
I took Ambien a few times to help me sleep. It was lovely! Then I heard it might cause me to become an obnoxious racist, so I stopped.
"
"...While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication,” Ashleigh Koss, Head of Media Relations, North America, Sanofi US tells @Cnn
Cowardly of the manufacturer, Scott Adams opined on his podcast, of which I wish he'd posted a transcript.
I'll comment on his summary of what he said, because it does relate to something I've been noticing, and mentioned on this site twice during the past month:
First, let's get it clear: "Ape" is not a racial insult. It's one of the large group of personal insults that compare a human to some other species of animal. Here are some data points that I'm reasonably sure form part of Roseanne Barr's mental map of things "ape" can mean:
* Planet of the Apes was a novel, which I vaguely remember having read, which was made into a movie and an unsuccessful TV series. It was sort of a remake of the end of Gulliver's Travels: a man visits an alien world where the dominant species who speak and invent machines are hairy (and were played by men in gorilla suits in the movie), and the species that look like humans seem incapable of learning language. All the major characters were male, which, along with a simplistic and outdated view of "animal" intelligence, put me off the book--the only "woman" in the story was the human-looking "dumb animal," with whom the human character didn't want to mate--but people who watched the movie claim it had a female character, played by a woman with a little baby face similar to Valerie Jarrett's. (RB's "racist" tweet did not call Jarrett a jungle gorilla or anything similar; it referred to Planet of the Apes, so that's probably what she had in mind. I don't claim to know this; I didn't watch the movie and the only other celebrity face that comes to my mind as resembling Jarrett's would be Tammy Faye Bakker's.)
* "To ape" means to imitate someone in a superficial, literal-minded way. British author Percy Wyndham Lewis, for example, once referred to his fellow arts patrons, the Sitwell siblings, as The Apes of God, meaning he thought they took too much authority upon themselves.
* "Ape" has also often been used to describe a person, usually male, as being big, tall, long-armed, hirsute, and/or aggressive. Contemporaries who didn't care to call former President Abraham Lincoln "Father Abraham" or "Honest Abe" often called him "the Illinois Ape." In this context I once heard an old (White) man describe two (White) bad cops, during the "color wars" of the mid-twentieth century, as "two big apes beating an old cullud man."
* "Go ape" means to act greedy or overenthusiastic, grabbing and uttering exclamations of excitement, as your political opponents might be said to do about bad policies.
* And of course there's always the basic implication of any comparison of a human to any other species, in English, that the person is stupid or at least inarticulate, a "dumb animal." One set of jokes Roseanne Barr is particularly likely to remember, because it's part of the canon of comic writing by twentieth century women, stereotyped P.T.A. (Parents and Teachers Association) members as "Partially Trained Apes."
* All of those uses of "ape" predate the infamous Darwinian image of African Man as an evolutionary stage in between Gorilla and British Man. Interestingly, although one medieval English ballad unmistakably describes a woman being considered extremely ugly because she had physical features we might summarize as "Black," the "Black ape" association seems to have started with Darwin...and it never was the most common way "ape" was used as an insult to a human.
So RB could claim that she wasn't thinking of "Black ape" when she mentioned VJ in connection with Planet of the Apes, about as plausibly as she could claim that her inexcusable reference to Muslim terrorists was based entirely on Jarrett's public political statements (twisted and exaggerated). "Valerie Jarrett" is not an Arab or Persian name. VJ is another of those multiethnic types, like Doug Wilder, Eric Holder, or Toi Derricotte, who go around telling people they identify as Black because merely looking at their faces leaves people wondering what ethnic identity they claim, if any. I was aware that VJ considers herself Black but, before yesterday, I hadn't heard that her particular ethnic mix also includes Iranian. Maybe RB wasn't aware of that either. Maybe she was thinking "pro-Arab statement plus resemblance to obscure actress," rather than "Iranian and Black American ancestry," when she typed that insult to VJ.
Let's say for the sake of argument that she was. Let's interpret RB's infamous tweet as merely personal, not noticeably justified (do they know each other in real life?), ugly, unfunny, and mean. Let's say it's only the sort of tweet that, when I find in a Twitter "conversation," prompts me to imagine it's coming from a nine-year-old. When adults pay adults to provide adult-level entertainment, are the ones paying fully justified in firing a professional comedian whose idea of a joke has regressed all the way back to the middle school "Computer + rattlesnake = you" formula?
Should ABC and Viacom at least contain their wrath, recast the New Roseanne Show as the Ann Coulter Comedy Show, and let all those other people be funny about the transition from RB to AC? Yes, that'd be a nice move...Laura Ingraham and Michelle Malkin are witty, and also nice, but so far as I know neither of them can clown the way RB does when sober. Ann Coulter can't clown like RB, either, but she definitely does clown...I'm not sure to what extent she knows she's clowning. RB has a very special talent and I hated that it seemed to have been ruined, when she was writing her second book, by drugs.
Now...this Ambien moment. Does Ambien cause racism? Of course not. Does it cause impaired thinking? Lapses in taste and judgment? A mind that normally works on a grown-up professional level lapsing back to a middle school level? I'm not familiar with specific effects of Ambien, but don't a lot of similar pills have that type of effect? Yes. They do.
Actually, anything that causes people to feel tired, sleepy, or sluggish does. This was something that got a lot of testing at Berea College when I was there. All Berea freshmen have very high I.Q. scores; that's a given. All Berea freshmen are very good test takers. Nevertheless, the point spread obtained by giving them different tests on different days can be amazing.
For purposes of comparison...In the early twentieth century, much was made of the fact that Black Americans from poverty-stricken areas consistently lagged behind White Americans, on various tests, by five or ten I.Q. points or the equivalent. (No use sugar-coating it: lower-income Americans still lag behind, and it's still caused, not by physical features, but by nutrition and general health.) If, however, you can offer good enough bribes to obtain rigorously defined groups of Berea freshmen who are and are not dehydrated, or are either coming down with or recovering from flu, you find the dehydrated and/or flu-fighting group trailing by ten or twenty I.Q. points. At the extreme of the curve, I once caught and tested a public school student and obtained a 32-point gap on different I.Q. tests for the same freshman when she was coming down with flu (low score 119) and recovering from flu (high score 151).
Most of us retain enough use of our brains to be considered competent, intelligent, responsible adults when we're feeling low. We do our jobs. But haven't you noticed how the quality of blog posts deteriorates when bloggers mention minor health problems or physical stress? (At some blogs it doesn't--that's an indicator of either (a) a group blog or (b) a blogger who's written some "good" posts in advance, and doesn't actually write while fighting the flu.)
I mention seeing a worker make minor mistakes when other people are showing symptoms of physical illness because it's obvious to me that these lapses, which she doesn't normally make, are her characteristic way of showing symptoms. My nose runs. I don't work in food service. If you work in food service, you can't be seen with your nose running. So either her nose doesn't run, or she's able to use pills or an inhaler to stop it running. And then she blurts out things she normally knows better than to say in public, or starts pouring a drink into an in-cafe cup for someone who's ordering take-out lunches.
Flomax, a drug prescribed for men with urological problems, is one of the worst. I've seen patients using Flomax lapse all the way into momentary insanity or incompetence. They suddenly lose the ability to steer their own car into their own driveway, or forget having put something into the oven to get it out of the way when they light the oven. I once watched a teacher panic because he hadn't written a test, when in fact the test he was scheduled to give his students was in their textbook.
Motrin notoriously affects neuromuscular reflexes and muscle control, such that patients using it are ordered not to drive cars. Anesthetics and pain blockers generally have side effects that range from making patients slur their words and drive out of the road, to making them black out altogether.
There's no way I'm buying the excuse that Ambien caused Roseanne Barr to type a "joke" that not only sounded like a racist slur about Valerie Jarrett's parents, to those who knew their ethnic identity, but also sounded like a lame, petty, personal middle-school sneer rather than a joke, to the rest of humankind. But I do believe that it's probably true, and should be more generally known, that any medication may cause the kind of performance on any job that causes people to notice, "You can do so much better than this."
Roseanne Barr of all people ought to have known...I remember her original show, and her first book, being funny. Raunchy, edgy, yes--but funny. Then she tried Prozac and wrote a second book that wasn't funny, that was full of what sounded like classic Prozac pseudomemories--no fun to read at all--and her comedy act deteriorated. Poor Thing faded out of the world of comedy with a physical display she tried to pass off as a comic parody of male clowns, only male clowns didn't do it in that situation, it wasn't funny, and it was a classic reaction to a classic pattern of pain produced by SSRI reactions. I've given massages to people having that type of cramp, and I think RB was doing well, in her last performance for several years, not to scream out loud. It was sad, not funny; it was time for her temporary retirement from clowning.
Raunchy clown comedy is not my favorite genre in any case but I think Roseanne Barr mixes in enough intelligence to do it well--when she's sober. But if that dig at Valerie Jarrett, even if it was strictly a dig at "public political statements + individual facial features" rather than "yo' Mama + yo' Daddy," is what comes out of her brain after using sleeping pills...RB should take a vow of abstinence even from aspirin during the week before she says anything in public.
And the rest of us should know that this is our brain, too, on otc drugs, or while fighting the flu, or having an allergy reaction. We too do things that...most of us have a self-protective brain function that seems to protect us from remembering most of our lapses. We all make mistakes. Most of the time we forget them. Only when our errors in judgment are written down, or otherwise recorded, is attention likely to be called to the fact that a comedy star's sense of comedy suffered the same way an ordinary person's memory for shopping lists, or sense of what not to say at work, or ability to add up numbers, suffers when the person is tired or ill or overmedicated.
No comments:
Post a Comment