I just finished reading Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, a book I liked but didn’t love, appreciating it more with my writerly head than my readerly heart. I say writerly head because the book is largely about the idea of narrative and story. In it Philip Roth’s counter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman goes through a series of linked stories which each somehow call attention to the artificiality of the previous chapter. Like Roth’s later novel, Operation Shylock, it s a novel about writerly selves (Israel also figures big in both novels) and can best be described with the phrase “Super Meta.”

Some bulleted thoughts after the jump

•  Right before reading this book, I watched this story told by Jonathan Franzen for the Moth. It’s an excellent story in its own right, but particularly interesting in the context of The Counterlife. Both pieces (spoiler alert) are about the moral consequences of a writer’s telling a story. In the Franzen story, which you really should watch before I continue to spoil it further, the author finds that in telling a story from his own life, he painfully robs another participant in the story of her own experience. That is, he takes the story of her son (who co-stars with Franzen) and makes it his own. By telling it with his own emphasis and in his own voice, Franzen grants the experience a meaning, his own, and this robs the mother of her own interpretation of the story. Just like my writing “spoiler alert” doesn’t absolve me of responsibility for spoiling the story (you did, after all, keep reading, didn’t you?) Franzen’s factual accuracy and essential decency does not exhaust his writer’s culpability to his classmate’s mother.
• In the Counterlife (some spoilers here also), Roth shows that a writer plunders his own memories like a thief (to use his phrasing, couldn’t find the quote). Accurate memoir in Franzen is bad enough, but fiction for Roth is worse, because it takes the essential nature of someone in the author’s life, a brother, a wife, an in-law, and twists it into something fictional. The resulting characters or situations are unreal and grotesque to the real life on which they’re based. Each character or story is a chimera drawn with features essentially recognizable from whatever sources the author could lay his hands on. This unreality renders the theft of experiences all the more painful: the fiction is in some respects recognizably real (Zuckerman so clearly similar to Roth, Zuckerman’s English wife perhaps something of a funhouse mirror portrayal of Roth’s own, English, wife), so the unreal facts stapled onto the source’s real-life experience themselves take ownership and supersede the life of the human being. Roth, I mean, Zuckerman, makes the character of Zuckerman’s brother far more vivid than the impression we would receive upon meeting the real man himself. What’s more, Zuckerman affixes onto his brother the writer’s own dramas, problems and neuroses, infecting the character with pitiable frailties that the real analogue would find repugnant.
• The Counterlife is also a novel about escapes and alternate lives that a person could choose. In the opening chapter, Zuckerman’s staid dentist brother is beset by heart disease, the pharmaceutical cure to which renders him sexually impotent. Having been invigorated by his affair with his dental assistant, he decides to undergo a dangerous bypass operation to restore his flagging vitality (one of the emotions I felt most strongly in reading this novel was gratitude for the existence of Viagra). This decision, to set off into the unknown, informs the rest of the book. Characters continually leave their own life (by divorce, by pilgrimages to Israel or England), to venture out into a counterlife of their choosing. Are these escapes  courageous or childish? Roth is unsure, but whatever advantages the counterlife may have, they leave the character fundamentally the same person as before. Zuckerman says of one of the characters in the book: “I tried repeatedly while I was with him to invest this escape he’d made from his life’s narrow boundaries with some heightened meaning, but in the end he had seemed to me, despite his determination to be something new, just as naive and uninteresting as he’d always been.” “If [he] was ever going to turn out to be interesting, I was going to have to do it.” These words are repeated later in the novel to cruelly devastating effect.
• Roth also, as usual, wrestles with the question of Jewish identity, a story and experience imposed on him by others. He desires to be Jewish by being himself, fettered by neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism. He does not get his wish. Other characters wish to reinvent themselves through use of different Jewish stories — by becoming West Bank settlers or terrorist highjackers, but the desire to embed oneself in one narrative rather than another is an act of individual will (Alasdair Macintyre fans, take note). The Israeli settler might be no more Jewish than the New Jersey dentist, but is the dentist himself any more honest a face than the settler? Roth ultimately does not seem to think so.
• You may notice that the interlocking themes of the novel are quite intricately crafted, and Roth explicates his ideas eloquently. There is truly much to admire in the Counterlife and when I describe the book by its ideas, I regret not enjoying it more. In fact, for all of Roth’s prodigious eloquence, his latter work in particular has generally left me rather cool.  The books I’m thinking of now are Operation Shylock, the Counterlife, and American Pastoral. Interestingly, from skimming the wikipedia summary of Roth’s second wife’s memoir (he treated her quite badly before they divorced), it seems that he regarded Operation Shylock as his masterpiece when it was written, a fact I find surprising. I haven’t read the book in a while, but Shylock, even more than the Counterlife, is full of metafictional flourishes and critiques of Israel and Jewish identity. It has more animal momentum than the Counterlife (which is a book that can move rather slowly), but like that book, I imagine it has few if any moments that could bring a tear to a reader’s eye. American Pastoral may seem the opposite, but I feel like I am reacting (comparatively) negatively to it for the same reason as I failed to fall in love with Shylock or Counterlife: it’s a book about themes and ideas (in American Pastoral, the impact of the 60s on the American culture) rather than emotions and characters. Now, Roth is a brilliant writer; his characters are fascinating and true-to-life, but I think that, those three books, for me, can be a bit too intellectual for me to give them the appreciation they deserve.
• Even for a self-indulgent post, such as this, I’m really pushing the limits of space and attention, but one final detail I’ll mention. As I said above, I read this book after watching this Franzen oral story. I also read this book after reading (and loving) Franzen’s Freedom. My feelings towards Franzen at the moment are less man-crush than psychopathic obsession (I count the Corrections as well one of my favorite books and will next read Franzen’s brief memoir – The Discomfort Zone). I recently watched this longish speech Franzen gave, one part of which is about how to talk about a writer’s influences, a question he finds overemphasized by the Harold Bloomian school of thought. One (fairly trite) thought that struck me in writing this entry was that Franzen doesn’t just influence me as a writer but also as a reader as well. It’s impossible for me to read the Counterlife after Freedom and not be influenced by Franzen’s book, which is titanically different from Roth, being less precise and more exhausting, less intellectually intricate and more emotionally overwhelming.  Just like being in one relationship primes you for how to treat the next, one book can leave a deep impression on the gaze with which you view the next.

As a good capitalist, I believe that corporations don’t change their practices (good or bad) without economic incentive to do so. Thus, I sent Apple a comment indicating that as a customer, I was disturbed by this behavior and would not be purchasing a new iPhone if the conditions were not ameliorated. The form this comment took was an entry under the iPhone feedback form, which I doubt Tim Cook reads personally and might very well be simply discarded by whatever customer service representative happens upon it: As social protest goes, it’s not exactly chaining myself to a tree. On the other hand, it might not be thrown out, it might live on as an entry in a spreadsheet ticking off how many Apple users have complained about factory conditions. Maybe if that number’s high enough it will provide an incentive to change. Maybe it won’t. Either way, I figured it was better than my usual judgmental silence.

If you also own Apple products and are interested in registering your disapproval in an unobtrusive, low-energy, and low-effort way, here’re the feedback forms for the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook (depending on which products you own). Below is what I wrote in case you’re interested in using the basic structure and changing the details as appropriate (or in just chuckling at my self-righteous delusionality):

Prologue:

Once again, and for the last time before the 2012 election gives me a heart attack, I return to offer my thoughts on President Obama’s State of the Union address.

These days, I spend most of my spare time reading about the ragtag gang of misfits in the GOP nominating contest. I also nervously refresh Nate Silver’s 538 Election Models, and watch the ferris wheel of idiocy that is the RCP polling index.

Because I am a self-hating glasses-wearer who avoids MSNBC, I don’t even know the latest Democratic talking points.  Of course, the bar has been set so low by GOP election rhetoric that just hearing the word “regulation” without the prefix “job-killing” will be bliss.  I also look forward to an audience that won’t boo the very existence of minorities or Mexico.  I even have my sunglasses ready to protect my eyes from John Boehner’s day-glo skin.

Christ, it’s been so long that I barely remember our country’s actual issues.  Education? Infrastructure? Unemployment? Environment?  Either way, time to see if President Obama can remind the 54% of Americans who disapprove of his performance why we elected him in the first place.

* * * *

The Speech:

Can you tell it’s election year?  In a sweeping, occasionally feisty speech that (unofficially) kicks off the 2012 campaign, President Obama dove headfirst into the populist waters of job creation and tax reform.  Overall, I thought the speech was effective, if a bit long.  But let’s dive into the substance.

Foreign Policy:  Obama kicked off with what is (in my opinion) his single greatest accomplishment: ending the war in Iraq.  Yes, the war was unpopular from nearly the beginning.  But people scream bloody murder when any sort of defense cuts are on the table, and you know opposition must have been tough when candidates like (oops… I forgot his name) even advocated going back in.  President Obama also touted the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in his opening, to raucous applause.  Obama is clearly trying to remind the  extra 5% of people who approved of him for a month following the assassination and then resumed hating his guts that he shares their thirst for terrorist blood.  Still, it is one feat the GOP can’t possibly diminish, so it makes for good stumping.

Later in the speech, Obama turned to the issue of Iran just long enough to say that he was keeping “all options on the table” but that a peaceful resolution was still possible.  And whereas I’m sure this did not satisfy the hardcore republicans tripping over themselves to bomb Iran into the Atone Age, I have to think that at least some Americans recognize that we can’t possibly afford another war.  Obama even took the time to laud our iron clad — iron clad  – relationship with Israel.  I am sure repeating the adjective twice will earn him points tomorrow at his daily meeting with Netanyahu.

Manufacturing: The President waxed poetic on his hopes for the rebirth of American manufacturing.  I have my doubts that the United States will return to being a manufacturing powerhouse with our relatively high labor and environmental costs.  However, this is election season and nothing sells better than the idea that, with a few tweaks, companies will gladly pay a thousand times more for fat Ohioans who get weekends and holidays. Don’t get me wrong, I am very much in favor of restructuring our tax code to encourage job creation — it’s just a process that will prove far more arduous than either party cares to admit.

Obama’s tax proposals, most involving cuts for manufacturers who hire domestically (and penalties for those who hire abroad) are ripped right from the GOP playbook.  Indeed, much of the address played out as a paean to the American worker, and, for long stretches, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from a Romney stump speech.  That is, until he showed his hand by hinting that the government might help play a part in recovery by ”turning our unemployment system into a reemployment system.”

Education: The President’s education remarks were pretty uninspired, but it did make me reflect on how little I’ve heard of the issue lately.  Lost in the GOP war drums of tearing down the government, we have a systemic crisis of education ranging from achievement gaps in distressed communities to higher education that is bankrupting the middle class.  Obama addressed both in sweeping fashion, making the usual points about teacher accountability and school funding.  He also threatened to withhold federal funding to universities that didn’t slow tuition growth.  Perhaps most importantly, he urged Congress to keep money in federal aid programs.  It will be important moving forward to remind the American people that, in many cases, government spending can do a lot of good — and students about to see rate increases because of Tea Party intransigence will learn that lesson the hard way.

Energy: Obama walked carefully here, pledging explicitly to open up oil reserves before calling for an “all of the above” energy strategy that, I suppose, implicitly contains all of the energy resources we should be focusing on.  I am mildly annoyed that solar and wind were mentioned once each, while natural gas and oil were discussed extensively.  Such is the nature of election year pandering.  Of course, the first words from this idiot‘s mouth following the speech (yes, I watched it on Fox News) criticized the lack of Keystone Pipeline in the speech.  Does anyone else remember a time when we cared about the noble caribou instead of maximizing our domestic drilling?  At least Obama had the courtesy to drop the understatement of the century so far: “The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change.”

Deficit:  ”Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.”  Amen. If I had to sum up my policy prescription for America in one sentence, this would be it.

Milk Spill Joke: Not Bad

Congress: Remember these?

• “Send me a bill that bans insider trading by Members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow.”
• “Send me these tax reforms, and I’ll sign them right away.”
• “Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.”
• “Send me a bill that creates these jobs.”
• “So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.”

On one level, these requests smack of naivete; after all, we know that the Republican House would never contemplate useful legislation.  Even if they agreed with it, they couldn’t risk letting Obama reap any benefit. However, I think the strategy is more subtle; it reminds the American people that the biggest obstacle to significant political progress are the clowns in Congress. Not that they need much reminding, as Congress is less popular than Communism.

Moreover, it’s important for LIBERALS to remember that Obama’s supposed ineffectiveness comes largely from the recalcitrance of Congress rather than his philosophical shortcomings.  There are few things Obama has exclusive control over, and reminding Americans of that will only help him.  Of course, all of this may be wishful thinking; perhaps people in the White House are just too lazy to draft up bills.

Shameless Lincoln Plug: I’ll take it over another goddamn Reagan reference.

The Big Finish: To close out, Obama again returned to the Osama story, using it as a metaphor for the importance of sticking together as a country.  As Obama opined,  ”Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes.”  Although lines like that will always make a liberal elitist cringe, it is a vastly better campaign strategy than telling it like it is.  If the 2012 election must be won by winning over the generally-apathetic flag-waving masses, then so be it.

* * * *

The State of the Union is always an exercise in platitude. Indeed, you can simply cobble together old ones and make a serviceable speech.  But now is not the time to overly scrutinize its contents.  It is election year.  Any liberal with a pulse should be trying to figure out how to prevent Republicans from dismantling the moderate progress President Obama has made in health care, banking regulation, foreign policy, and the rest.  My own frustrations with President Obama have ebbed and flowed, but I am frightened daily by the alternative.

Some day, the progressive movement will again gain political traction in America.  Until that day, however, it is far better to stand against the irrational rightwing than to submit to apathy.  The speech tonight was a worthy opening salvo in our upcoming electoral struggle, and that is all that matters.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have poll numbers to cringe at.

The Basics. SOPA and PIPA, which have received broad bipartisan support, represent the latest Congressional efforts to address the perennial problem of foreign piracy Web sites—problematic because they harm American copyright holders, benefit from American-based search engines, advertising, and payment systems, yet tend to escape liability under U.S. law—by granting sweeping new enforcement powers to rights-holders and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Both work by choking off funding and American user access to foreign piracy sites; specifically, SOPA/PIPA would allow the DOJ to require (1) search engines to de-index and remove all links to an infringing site (and, it appears, to continually police against such links); (2) payment processors (like PayPal) and advertisers to stop doing business with the site; and, perhaps most controversially, (3) Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block customer access to the foreign site entirely. These obligations represent a potentially radical change from the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) regime, under which intermediary sites merely hosting or linking to infringing material are exempted from liability as long as they make good-faith efforts to take down infringing material when asked to.

The Criticisms. Though sponsors of SOPA/PIPA insist they target only “foreign Web sites that are primarily dedicated to illegal and infringing activity,” the two bills are drafted in broad language, leaving unclear the scope of key terms such as “foreign” or “search engine.” These ambiguities potentially allow the legislation to be interpreted to encompass even domestic sites, including social networking sites, sites such as Reddit made up primarily of user-shared links, and blogs, among others. Critics argue that this uncertain yet potentially significant liability for intermediaries will hurt startups and smaller firms and that permitting entire sites to be blocked via their domain name raises the specter of censorship. Critics also argue that the bills’ reliance on Domain Name Servers (DNS)-blocking as an enforcement tool could alter the very architecture of the Internet, an argument which has recently succeeded in persuading legislators to drop those provisions.

The Politics. The SOPA/PIPA debate pits the historically politically well-connected entertainment industry (which has spent $91M thus far lobbying for SOPA/PIPA) and the similarly formidable U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO (persuaded of online piracy’s harm to American jobs) against the far less politically-established tech and internet industries (among other allies), which are nevertheless in an interestingly unique position to influence citizens directly. Until recently, approval of SOPA by the House Judiciary Committee (which would send the bill to the full House for a vote) seemed all but guaranteed. However, with this most recent January 18 protest and with the White House’s strong hint disapproval of the two bills on January 14, passage of the bills is now far from certain. A Senate debate on PIPA is scheduled for January 24, while SOPA will be debated in the House in early February. However, even if defeated this time, aspects of SOPA/PIPA are likely to return in other forms. Meanwhile, a counter-proposal is now also pending in the form of the OPEN Act.

*This post primarily written without the assistance of Wikipedia.

The most popular referrers were: facebook.com, reddit.com, tumblr.com, afternoonsnoozebutton.com, and twitter.com. Some readers found us through search terms. The most popular searches were: “antibiotic[s]” (1,074), “christopher hitchens [smoking]” (584), “vietnam war medals” (65), “leaders” (64), and “importance of export” (48). A few of the more amusing search terms include: “did andy dufresne kill his wife” (9), “farm subsidies are good” (3), and “where does america rank?” (2).

Attractions of 2011:

Here are the posts that got the most views in 2011.

1. How The Other Side Thinks - 6,785 views

2. The Antibiotics Shortage and How to Solve It. - 1,842 views

3. Guest Post: A Deserved Toast To Christopher Hitchens - 935 views

4. Federal Funding Received by State per Dollar Sent. - 773 views

5. Recipe: The Best Braised Short Ribs, with Coffee and Chili - 628 views

A few of our favorite posts by author: 

Alex Taubes - Summer Vacation and Teachers

Thomas Miller – A Regruntled Democrat on the State of the Union

David Yin - How The Other Side Thinks

Josh Morrison – the kidney donation series, thus far:

1. My Kidney Donation

2. Pre-Op Testing — Blood Work

3. Vegetarianism and Kidney Donation

4. Hurry Up and Wait

5. False Starts

6. A New Normal

7. Day (after the Day) of Days

8. Not So Easy 

Thanks for reading Stone Soup in 2011!

I recently asked my Facebook network which Supreme Court justice, modern or historical, would they elect to partner with on a Constitutional Law final exam, assuming the justice had taken the class with them that semester. John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Robert Jackson, and William Brennan were predictable choices as powerful writers and influential molders of constitutional thought. Scalia, well-known for his bombastic style yet clear exposition of facts and law, was popular. Clarence Thomas received no votes. Perhaps it is to be expected that among the constellation of judicial stars, Thomas would pale in popularity–his legacy, after all, has yet to be defined. No doubt for others his judicial philosophy, hewing tightly to original intent and historical understanding, leaves progressive-minded comrades ill at ease. Yet if a motivating factor for unpopularity is Thomas’ silence at oral argument, I would ask my friends to reconsider.

Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in October 1991. On February 22, 2006, Thomas posed a question during oral argument, and has stayed silent ever since. His silence has been the subject of much commentary and speculation, and perhaps inevitably, ridicule and accusations of un-intellectualism. This disparaging category of charges is unfair, and deserves some scrutiny.

In a piece on the fifth anniversary of Thomas’ silence, Adam Liptak of the New York Times quoted a law review article which opined: “If Justice Thomas holds a strong view of the law in a case, he should offer it . . . It is not enough that Justice Thomas merely attend oral argument if he does not participate in argument meaningfully.” One Huffington Post author, writing on important questions Thomas had asked, noted, “. . . Thomas’ silence has also left many casual observers — that is, ordinary American citizens — with the impression that the man either does not care about the cases or cannot intellectually compete with his colleagues.”

Dahlia Lithwick from Slate has defended Thomas’ right to remain silent: “if, like Thomas, you don’t think argument changes anything, or that you’re unlikely to change your views of the case as a result of it, years of radio silence is perfectly defensible. No justice owes the public a show of public agonizing . . . No justice owes the lawyers before her any hints about her thinking, either. And while some justices may use the argument time to hone and refine their own arguments to appeal to their colleagues, that is not an obligation, so much as a choice.” Even this interpretation is somewhat unfair. Thomas does not believe that oral argument is worthless, merely that oral argument is a time for advocates to make their case, and not justices to lobby their colleagues. In a 2009 C-SPAN interview, Thomas revealed:

I view oral argument a little differently. I think it’s an opportunity for the advocates, the lawyers, to fill in the blanks. To make their case, to point out things that were not covered in the briefs . . . in other words to flesh out the case a little better . . . I think we’re here, the nine of us, and we can talk to each other anytime we want to, so I wouldn’t use that thirty minutes, the advocate’s time, to talk to each other. But again as I said earlier, we all learn differently . . . When I first came to the court, the court was much quieter than it is now. And perhaps it was too quiet, I don’t know. I liked it that way. It left big gaps so you could actually have a conversation. I think it’s hard to have a conversation when nobody’s listening, when you can’t complete sentences or answers . . . I think you should allow people to complete their answers and their thought . . . and I find that coherence that you get from a conversation more helpful than rapid-fire questioning.

If you listen to an oral argument today, it is indeed dominated by the pointed questioning from justices. Yet as Thomas pointed out, it was not always this way. Orin Kerr wrote: “Before Justice Scalia’s arrival on the court in 1986, oral arguments were very boring. The justices rarely spoke. Lawyers could go on for several minutes before anyone would pose a question. In the last 25 years, that style has fallen out of favor. Almost all of the members of the court today are active questioners in the Scalia mold. As a result, lawyers arguing before the court now are pelted with questions from the moment they begin.”

Reasonable people can disagree about whether asking questions during oral argument is useful. But the important question Thomas’ critics must answer is whether asking questions are necessary to developing a coherent understanding of a case, or writing a cogent opinion. History suggests it is not.

In the early days of the Court, oral argument could stretch as long as ten days. Supreme Court litigator Stephen Shapiro wrote that advocates like Daniel Webster and William Wirt could develop long arguments with reason and rhetoric, and were unobstructed by questions from the justices. A contemporary observer noted: “Counsel are heard in silence for hours, without being stopped or interrupted… The Judges of the Court say nothing.” While the introduction of longer briefs means oral argument serves a different purpose today, it might still be asked why John Marshall or Joseph Story declined to pose hard questions when they were even less encumbered by time-restraints. And I suspect few would accuse Marshall or Story of intellectual weakness, or lack of insight when they wrote their seminal decisions.

Even important cases of more recent vintage may stand for the proposition that a refrain from questioning is no hindrance to crafting momentous law. Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952), the Steel Seizure Case, defined the framework by which we still measure presidential authority. The New York Times and Associated Press coverage reported a “throng that queued up hours before Noon” to attend that oral argument, and how seats had to be “strictly rationed . . . Hundreds more stood outside the chamber.” John W. Davis, the lawyer for the steel industry, “spoke for about eighty-five minutes [with few questions from the Justices during his presentation]” (original brackets). Though the Solicitor General received more questions, Justice Jackson remarked at the end of the SG’s time, “This is not something that may be decided in the light of one day’s discussion. The arguments may just begin when argument stops.” The Youngstown case, holding against the President’s seizure, produced a majority opinion, five separate concurrences, and a three-justice dissent–Jackson’s concurrence would be remembered as the most influential concurring opinion in history. No one would accuse any justice of inattention or lack of interest for the absence of questioning during Davis’ argument.

United States v. Nixon (1974), which would lead to Nixon’s eventual resignation, is another case where the justices were unquestionably interested in both the subject matter and in contributing to an occasion of historic importance. Though an unanimous opinion, every justice recognized the stakes of the case, and contributed to the decision ultimately delivered by Chief Justice Burger. It was also an oral argument that is notable for a lack of continuous questioning. While not given the same temporal freedom as Webster or Davis, Leon Jaworski was allowed to make his case against the president for over six minutes before the first one was levied, and his argument contained long stretches in which he was allowed to speak unmolested.

As a fan of oral argument, I enjoy the verbal sparring and the extemporaneous thinking questioning creates. But to indicate that Thomas’ non-participation is somehow indicative of a lack of intelligence or lack of regard is to ignore the history of the Supreme Court in oral argument. If Justice Marshall could write McCulloch without asking questions, if thoughtful justices could write passionately in Youngstown without lodging inquiries, then non-participation creates zero injury toward the resolution of a case. And if Thomas decides to remain silent in every argument, as is his right and discretion, then the aggregation of those decisions is still zero hindrance to his ability to fully consider the cases before the Court.

On a final note, it is worth observing that none of the publicity surrounding Thomas’ silence is corrective in any way. If we know anything about what motivates Clarence Thomas, it is not the editorializing of the liberal media establishment–the media that contributed to, in his words, a “high-tech lynching” during his confirmation process. Indeed, it is probable that by continuing to write about it anniversary after anniversary, Thomas will merely become more stubborn in his refusal to speak during oral arguments. The question becomes, in a sense, what is the purpose of this journalism–is it merely to point out something interesting, albeit repetitively? Or is it to affect change, and persuade a jurist to rejoin his peers in oral argument? Here, perhaps the best way for the media to change Thomas’ behavior would be to remain silent.

The difference a few hours made was extraordinary. At 3 PM, yesterday, I walked down from my hospital room to wait outside for my mom to bring her car around. Standing around for five minutes, the only discomfort I felt was a regular twinge of pain on my left side if I tried to stand straight. My mom dropped me off in front of my building; I took the elevator four floors up to my apartment, but if I had wanted to really push myself, I could have taken the stairs. I had taken one percocet an hour before; the last painkillers I’d taken previously had been at 6:30 AM (there were two hours at the hospital when I wasn’t even on painkillers. At 2, I’d just decided, why not?).
Fast forward to last night at 8:00 PM, when each trip to the bathroom had become an odyssey. Thirty minutes later, I gave up the effort of shuttling between the bathroom and the couch altogether and retired to bed. That was an adventure.

The difference between the surgery I had at 15 wiring up my jaw and the surgery I had at 26 removing my kidney from my abdomen is that you don’t use your jaw to move around. The jaw hurt, but it was a passive hurt. On the other hand, any sort of movement last nigh made me remember vividly that my stomach had just recently been cut open. Unfortunately, a fact I never knew as a healthy person was that traveling from the couch to the bed involves a plethora of fun little movements. First, there’s sitting up. To accomplish the transition from reclining to sitting , I relied as much as possible on levering my chest by the strength of my upper arms and spinning my torso limply around them. The squashed position into which this twists my left abdomen sends a nice overture of pain to my brain to introduce me to the concerto to follow. Despite my best limb-using effots, there’s some special moment where it becomes clear that sitting will require me to actually compress and bend the muscles of my abdomen of my own volition. This can resemble only the feelings of a fox caught in a trap when she realizes that if she wants to leave, she’s going to have to gnaw off her own leg. The muscles of my abdomen are cut up, inflamed, and generally angry with me for forcing them to undergo surgery for no reason; they loudly resist each effort of my body to lift itself.

Once I make it up to a seated position, I pause for a slight moment to savor the “Oww, that really hurt” forced through my nervous system by my abdomen on behalf of my missing kidney. Then I stand up, which is really a crapshoot. Sometimes it’s suprisingly easy – press down with my hands, knees pull straight, my center following meekly along. Other times the abdomen feels the need to exert itself on the way up, stabbing at the left side of my brain with painful static for a moment as I recollect myself. After this, walking is relatively easy. I accomplish it sort of limping. Imagine if your bad knee started at your left shoulder and you’ll get the idea.

Then there’s getting into bed (I won’t describe the whole bathroom situation because that’s painful in just an anticlimactic way).  You never realize how many muscles and movement are awkwardly choreographed into the descent into bed until they are all hurting you. There are a few different elements of the bed-move with which the post-surgical ought to concern themselves: first, there’s getting onto the bed itself. You don’t step downwards onto a bed, you have to bring your leg up and onto it, throw yourself down on it like a hefty pillow and then wriggle your body up, or fall backwards like a vaulter over the high jump. All of these approaches have their selling points under the circumstances, and I tried variants on each. In any event once you do get yourself onto the bed, there usually involves some sort of turning process, which would have been less painful for me had I been rotating on a spit instead of of on my own accord. Once these two basic procedures (stepping and turning) have been executed, the real fun begins: the gymnastics competition of hunting for a resting position painless enough to make the attempt to fall asleep any more than agonizing farce.

At first, I tried laying neutrally on the middle of my back, using pillows to incline me to a thirty degree angle. This setup (and the morphine drip) had worked for me the night before. Unfortunately, last night my left side had decided that it wanted to be shorter than my right. Putting my weight flat on my back conflicted with that desire: my left side showed me that by trying to rip its way out of my body along the site of my incision (which was now starting to send to my brain a fiery incision-shaped line of pain whenever I moved or thought about the lower left half of my body). Eventually, I, or rather my amazing caretaker (and love interest), Erin, settled on a complicated ramp of pillows that angled my body in a mild-spiral staircase-like twist, laying my right side down with my head thrown back, thus placating my left torso’s whim to be shorter than my right while taking the weight off of the incision area.  That said, for all of my harsh description of last night (which really did suck), I was able to fall (and stay) asleep very well after that point (which came around midnight), entering a fairly deep sleep for a couple of hours, waking up for about ten minutes, and then falling asleep for another few hours, repeating until I finally got out of bed at 12:30 PM today. Today’s been tougher than yesterday, but a definite improvement over last night.

I have a lot of thoughts I wanted to share about what I think caused the pain to be worse last night (combination of bloating/constipation and having tried to do a bit much yesterday) and about how it fits in with the approach to recovery that I wrote about in yesterday’s post. This post is already incredibly long, so I will hopefully get to some of these thoughts in the days ahead.

The one moral of the story I wanted to draw out and felt couldn’t wait is this: Part of the reason I’m writing these series of posts are that I hope that someday, someone considering donating their kidney will stumble across this blog and find out a bit what someone else’s experience was like. I believe very strongly that more people should donate, so I’d expect to feel conflicted in telling the parts of my story that make donation out to be more curse than blessing. Strangely, I didn’t really feel that way at all as I wrote this post. I wanted to present my experience as accurately and vividly as I had the skill to do. This comes perhaps in part from simple honesty, but I think it more stems from the fact that the pain I underwent last night didn’t really make me think any less of the decision to donate, and if I could get that across truthfully it wouldn’t pose any conflict.

I knew that pain would be a part of my surgery when I decided to donate my kidney. Part of what made me want to give my kidney was because I wanted to present a challenge for myself. Could I make into fact the idea I accepted as good in theory? Could I have the strength to go through the whole process of a rare and life-changing choice? I gave my kidney because I wanted to answer those questions myself, because I wanted to do something I found audacious and amazing. The pain hurt; it was more pain than I remember ever being in. It made me get some brief glimpse of how bad my dad’s failing knee (corrected, finally, by serious surgery) must have been for him, of how awful chronic pain must be. But there was something comforting to me about it as well, because though I wish I could have gotten off with having the miraculous recovery, I knew the pain I had last night was (a bad) part of the choice I made. When I made the choice, months ago, I was happy with it. Luckily, I still am.

A few of my gambling-minded friends had the urge to drag me to Foxwoods this past weekend as a karmic good luck charm. Given that I’m writing this blog post twenty-eight hours after I went under general anesthesia, reclined on my couch, with Archer episodes playing in the background, I think they might have been on to something: my luck has been extraordinarily good. Last night at 6 PM was when I was first lucid enough to ask nurse in the post-op recover room what time it was. (My surgery, delayed again, till 2:30 PM, lasted a bit longer than expected but was otherwise unremarkable). I remember one of my first thoughts upon waking was that I hurt way less than I had expected it would. Lying back to rest didn’t hurt at all. Shifting my weight or leaning up in the bed, produced pain but not agony. It was isolated in my left abdomen, the morphine drip dampened it to a manageable “Ouch!” rather than an  ”Oh My God, This is Horrible.” Perhaps even more surprising, I was completely lucid while on the morphine drip: when my friend Andrew called to see how I was doing, our conversation turned to the law school exam he had taken yesterday. We discussed how he organizing his exam answers differed from mine when I was in law school (his approach: analyze each issue and argument; mine: keep saying somewhat intelligent things that each plausibly connect to the thought in the previous sentence until I reach the word limit).

This morning at 6:30 AM (didn’t sleep well because turning onto my side hurt), they removed my catheter, unplugged me from the IV (no more morphine), and gave me two Percocet. By that point, I had started doing laps around the 9th floor of the hospital. On one of these, I spoke to one of my surgeons (who had been searching for me in my room). She said that I was doing well and that it was likely that I’d be able to go home today if  wanted to. A nap, another Percocet, a visit from my old work office-mate, some painful climbing in and out of bed later, and I was on my way back home, feeling far healthier than anyone who just had surgery has any right to feel. Maybe tomorrow I should head to Foxwoods.

*This post brought you by five miligrams of oxycodone

(Previous posts in this series can be found (in order) here, here, here, here,here, and here)

All of this is in the way of asking how should I discuss my kidney donation without sounding like simply a self-righteous jerk? I ask this as someone who’s probably more than a bit self-righteous (though hopefully not more than a bit of a jerk). Perhaps a better question is, should I talk about it at all? Better, perhaps, to give quietly and unassumingly, to make it about the gift rather than the giver.

Few have accused me of being quiet and unassuming: Where’s the fun in that? I’d like to think, however, that my telling people about my donation isn’t driven by some desire for recognition (not typically my thing) or to hear the sound of my own voice (definitely my thing). In part, my desire to tell people reflects the drive to be honest about what’s going on in my life. I could horde  my privacy from those who ask me about why I’m taking my time off of work, but why not just tell them the truth?

Perhaps to be so detailed is immodest, but if so, it’s immodesty in pursuit of a good cause. As I’ve gone through with my donation,  several friends I’ve talked to about it have begun exploring whether that decision would be a good one for themselves. When I see the gleam of curiosity in the eyes of coworkers to whom I tell my story, I can’t help but thinking that if one of them were asked by a loved one in need, the fact that they knew someone who donated might lead to them being generous and feeling better about the choice.

I feel like the biggest obstacle to people giving a kidney, more even than whatever sacrifice donation involves, is that it doesn’t seem like a regular, everyday, choice: potential donors (that’s you, dear reader) don’t approach it as a feasible option, to be selected or rejected depending on one’s preferences. Spreading awareness that someone you may know, someone like you, has donated their kidney and (fingers crossed) been perfectly OK may bring donation a bit closer to being a significant but standard choice in your mind.

It may seem that the reason altruistic kidney donation feels like such an unusual gift is just that it imposes a greater harm than other choices that are more typical. This misunderstands the costs of kidney donation (it’s a laparoscopic surgery, has no impact on the donor’s long term health, and does not increase the donor’s chance of kidney disease), but more importantly, regarding giving a kidney as an extraordinary sacrifice undersells the difficulty of decisions that are considered normal and are made every day. Thousands of college graduates devote two years of their lives to working 80-hour weeks teaching underprivileged students at Teach for America; thousands more go to developing countries in the Peace Corps. Even more commonly, soldiers volunteer to leave the comforts and safety of the modern U.S. to serve their country in places where every day could ruin their lives with gunfire or an IED. All of these people take up far greater burdens than those assumed by donors, but people picture them as sane, reasonable options for how to do good in the world: noble, yes, but more importantly, normal. I want to tell my own story so that people can see that a donor can be a normal person with a normal story. Someone who’s non-heroic and flawed, someone who can be stubborn and slothful, someone who has a higher opinion of himself than he probably should, someone who isn’t above using his donation to impress women. By talking about my donation and showing readers that, yes, real people, normal people, actually do make this choice, I hope to make it seem like one that’s worth considering. Sure, I want readers to think donating a kidney is a good decision, but really, I’d settle for it just seeming like a sane one.

(Previous posts in this series can be found (in order) here, here, here, here, and here)

When I first made my decision to donate, back in April, I thought I would need to use up vacation time at work to donate my kidney. Accordingly, I planned on doing the operation in mid-December, allowing me to use Christmas and New Years to minimize the amount of vacation days I’d have to spend (My Judaism renders Christmas insignificant to me except as a chance to tell people about Hanukkah Harry).  Once my work informed me that the surgery would be covered as paid medical leave, I modified my desired time slightly to be shortly after Thanksgiving, with a hoped-for donation date of either November 29 or 30 (Beth Israel does surgery on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). My parents, who moved  to Florida last September, would be up for Thanksgiving, and I couldn’t think of anything that would make my mom more thankful than surgery for her oldest son. She’s not the strongest advocate of donating a kidney to a stranger, but she wanted to be here to take care of me while  I was in the hospital and convalescing at home.

My goal for the Thanksgiving donation, was to create a chain of “paired donations.”  Paired donation is a fairly new but very valuable trend in the transplantation. Here’s how it works: say that I would like to donate to my brother, Bob, and you’d like to donate yours to your sister, Sue. If I don’t match Bob, and you don’t match Sue, but I do match Sue  and you do match Bob, we’d pair off and swap kidneys, you to Bob and me to Sue so that each of our intended beneficiaries ends up with a transplant that we couldn’t give ourselves. If an unpaired donor puts in a kidney, it creates a chance to make longer chains of donation, and allows multiple exchanges.

I had hoped to be that unpaired donor, and my name was submitted in a drawing to match up pairs on October 18th. The next day I discovered that I’d be starting a a  chain of, I believe, five people and that we’d likely be able to do the surgery on my desired date. I was obviously excited, both to get the day I wanted and to be able to contribute to multiple transplants. I quickly gave a blood sample with which to run a cross-match that would ensure that  the intended recipient had not built up  immunity against markers on my kidney. This test came back positive, and that’s bad: it means that their body would reject my kidney. Because their personal information is understandably confidential, I have no idea what happened to whoever I had been paired with, nor to the other recipients with whom the chain had been made, though of course I still speculate.

Rather than wait another month  for another drawing of paired matches, I instead decided  to try my luck with an individual recipient on Beth Israel’s internal waiting list, still hoping to make the post-Thanksgiving date. I submitted samples  to be matched against five potential recipients: each test came back negative (that’s good), and I was set to give my kidney. By then, however, the operating dates I had wanted had been booked up, so my surgery was pushed to December 6th. A fairly small inconvenience. The main effects were: (1) to extend the dead period at work where I’d be sitting on my hands because I couldn’t take on new deals and (2)   to  require my mom to stay at our family friend’s house for another week rather than head back to Florida with my dad . This made the delay last week (which I wrote about on Thursday) more than a bit irksome to her.

Minor issues all, but they point to medical care’s unpredictability that I as, luckily, a novice, have only recently and mildly discovered. I’m undergoing an elective surgery, have as much support in as idyllic a set of circumstacnes as a patient is likely ever to have, and have experienced only minor deviations to my plan for how my surgery would work out. For me, it’s been less emotional roller coaster and more emotional Ferris Wheel. The potential recipients of my kidney, however, have a bit of a different story. To them, the best case scenario for such delays, reversals, and surprises is brutal,vertiginous, worry; the worst consequences are deadly. My mom’s heart jumps to her throat at even the mild bumps in the road I’ve experienced; how much worse are  the feelings for the families of those for whom this surgery is not a choice?

In order to end on a slightly more happy note (I hope), my transplant looks like a go for tomorrow. Wish me luck.

(Previous posts in this series can be found (in order) here, here, here, and here)