I am so foggy from prescription cough medicine, because I’m getting over the flu.
It’s unfortunate this fog arrives near the end of the year, because I find myself contemplating how the entire year has been a bit of a fog. I have been finding myself stunned at the cold weather, because surely it’s still July or something? It can’t be December already. Yet the first sticky snow came today. Everything looked so pretty when I walked my son to the school bus stop, especially the wintery sky, and my front garden, but I was lost in the thought that it must actually be spring, not summer, since there was snow. So it couldn’t be summer.
Yesterday morning (or was it two days ago? or three?), I was lying in my bed sleeping off the virus while vaguely hearing my contractors banging away at the bathroom renovation a few feet away. I was stuck in a dream wherein I had suddenly realized we had a whole nother bathroom in our home that I had forgotten about. It was hideous, but it was another bathroom, and so in the dream I was trying to decide whether I was happy (another bathroom) or sad (another ugly room to fix). When I woke up, I realized this was the dream of a really privileged woman.
As if to drive home the point, I had awakened to the sound of my phone: it was my doctor calling to ask how I was. I had called his office first thing in the morning, and the nurse told me this: Yes, you have all the symptoms of the flu. But don’t come in. We don’t want you to infect anyone. (I agreed.) But if you want any prescription drugs, like a really strong cough medicine so you can finally sleep, you have to come in.
So I said thank you to her, and resigned myself to muddling through without any prescription cough medicine, at least for a few more days. I didn’t like the thought of going to my doctor’s office and infecting some pregnant woman with H1N1, if that’s what I have; she could die from it. Besides, I didn’t know how I’d get to the doctor’s office. I was too sick to drive myself, and I couldn’t ask a neighbor and expose them. My husband is so busy, being a doctor and a med school dean, I didn’t see how he could find a time to drive me.
My doctor must have seen the nurse’s note about my call. So he called me. He immediately realized how awful I sounded. And when I started telling him about how I could not sleep because of the cough, I just started crying. He figured out a way to get me some prescription cough medicine. That has really helped.
Like I said: privileged.
That, in turn, got me thinking, in my fog, back to the AAA session last week. There was an anthropologist there, who had once stood in direct prosecution of Napoleon Chagnon, who wanted to claim that “facts are all constructed” and that texts can be read this way or that. He’s making this argument in part because he doesn’t like what I found in the course of my research.
And I thought to myself, what a position of privilege such a postmodern stance is. What a sign of a working democracy and a stable middle class, that one can make such an argument–that evidence is just cute and naive. This was obviously not a man who had been accused of murder, as Chagnon has been. Obviously not a person, like me, who has had loved ones hauled off by the police on frightening charges. What a lucky man, to get to argue that facts are what we make them. He has no fear of being trapped in a prison of falsehoods.
At my AAA session, Terence Turner (opponent-in-chief of Chagnon) had called me a “partisan” of Chagnon. Over and over he used this term on me, “partisan, partisan, partisan.” I wonder to myself if anyone in the audience saw the smile that started to break out on my face as he called me this.
I was already starting to feel crummy before the session; I was already on Tylenol for what felt like a real fever coming on. And so I was already starting to get a little foggy. And as I sat listening to Turner chant the word “partisan,” my foggy brain went to where it goes when I hear “partisan.” It went to Poland.
Both my maternal and paternal lineages go straight to Poland, and stay there as far back as we know. What many people don’t know about Poland in World War II is that it found itself in what was essentially a civil war. Some people cooperated with the Nazis. And others formed a resistance force, often hiding in the woods to regroup and plan attacks and desperate protective maneuvers. And those people, the resisters, were known as “the partisans.”
These were the people who did not give into the flexible morality of the Nazis, who held firm in a moral belief, and in a belief that goodness and truth would prevail again in Poland, a land that had become truly democratic long before many European nations.
I am not calling Turner a Nazi; he’s most assuredly not one. But he could not have realized that by calling me a “partisan,” he was failing to insult me. The claim was inaccurate–I am not a Chagnon partisan. I am a scholar, and that’s why I come to judgement after weighing the evidence. That’s why I judged Turner wrong. But I also don’t feel the bad connotation with the word “partisan” that Americans apparently are supposed to.
I was thinking about this, in my feather-bedded fog, about how far I’ve come since the desperation of my parents’ parents. How I live in privilege. And yet why, I wonder, do I live with the fear of the way that postmodernism can erode justice, where so many scholars of privilege do not?
For me, scholarship and truth are how we stay free and just. I wonder what kind of scare it would take to make these other people realize the connection between a belief in some discernible reality and democracy.
They seem to fear no knock.
The sound of the contractor banging in the midst of a feverish fog only ever brings hazy dreams of a forgotten bathroom, not disorienting nightmares of high-up imprisonment.
And I find myself noticing that the Pottery Barn catalogue uses “CME” as the standard monogram for sheets and towels, and I wonder if it is meant to invoke “Continuing Medical Education.” Can I get educational credits for buying new towels for the new bathroom?
A postscript: I found out later that I didn’t have the flu; I had whooping cough. My doctor had goofed and forgotten to give me a pertussis booster when I had my tetanus booster. It’s a nasty disease, pertussis.