Palpatine the Merciful, Sauron the Just, and Ripken the Self-Aggrandizing Egomaniac
I have contrarian tendencies. When I watch movies, for example, I often find myself secretly rooting for the bad guy; operating under the theory that the winners write the history books, I try to imagine how the story might be different had the bad guy won. Might the Emperor have been more sympathetic if he’d had a chance to tell us his side of the story, instead of being thrown down a reactor shaft by his trusted protégé and having his Death Star blown up, not once, but twice, by a handful of self-righteous rebels? Had not a bunch of lily-white men and elves defeated his dark-skinned, multiracial, multi-species armies, might Sauron be seen as a wise and compassionate champion of the downtrodden of Middle Earth? There’s little doubt that’s how he would tell it, if he hadn’t been so rudely dispatched by some meddling riverfolk.
My contrarian habits extend to nonfiction characters as well. (I can tear down pretty much any historical figure, no matter how revered; I’d be happy to take requests.) Recently, I found myself ripping a new one on a contemporary hero—that paragon of the American work ethic, the great Cal Ripken Jr., recently inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame.
Despite an outstanding career in the field and in the batter’s box, Ripken is known in popular culture almost exclusively for The Streak, the incredible 2,632 games in a row he played between 1982 and 1998. It’s an article of faith that Cal Ripken Jr. represents the hard-working ideal, a self-sacrificing team-player who just wanted to win baseball games—so much so that he’d play through injuries, the flu, hemorrhoids, anything. But let’s look at Ripken through a contrarian lens. Setting aside the tremendous luck required for such a streak—both his genetic luck-of-the-draw durability and freakish avoidance of serious illness and injury—should we join the crowd and laud Ripken’s achievement?
Perhaps not. Consider that a baseball season consists of 162 games—that’s a lot of games even for a relatively undemanding sport. Consider also that even durable players can benefit from the occasional game off. If you want to maximize the probability of winning, it makes sense to have your best players take some time to recuperate, resting against weak opponents so that they can be fresh against stronger ones. What this means is that there were almost certainly times when it would have been in the best interest of the team for Cal Ripken Jr. to rest—but this would have meant breaking The Streak. In other words, Ripken may very well have sacrificed his team’s success for his own personal glorification. (That this was done with the complicity of his managers and probably teammates as well indicates that he wasn’t the only one willing to sacrifice the team’s performance for personal goals—in this case, the reflected glory of being a manager or teammate of the great Cal Ripken Jr.)
One can plausibly argue that winning isn’t the only goal of baseball, and defend The Streak on the grounds that it increased the value of Ripken’s team more than the extra wins would have. This is quite possibly true, but that’s not the argument people make; The Streak is always couched in terms of hard work, dedication, and doing whatever it takes to help your team win.
Despite being mainly ironic fun, there is a serious undercurrent to these sorts of thought experiments. Trying to imagine how the Emperor or Sauron might have been wronged by the official accounts—or how Cal Ripken Jr. might not be the humble, selfless team-player of media legend—is like push-ups for your critical thinking muscles. It’s only too easy to believe what everyone else believes, simply following conventional wisdom wherever it leads. I find that habitually going the other way is a useful mental exercise, even—or perhaps especially—when it leads to Palpatine the Merciful, Sauron the Just, and Ripken the Self-Aggrandizing Egomaniac.
And don’t even get me started on Scrooge the Misunderstood.
What I've been up to 2
I’m terribly sorry to have abandoned this blog for so long. The problem, of course, is that once you stop blogging for n >> 1 days, the marginal cost of not blogging on day n + 1 is small. I’ve been very busy, and it has been hard to justify taking the time to blog. I had to return some time, though; while I am still quite busy, I am going to make a point of blogging regularly, starting with making a post around once a week and (I hope) ramping up a little from there (but no guarantees!).
So, what have I been up to? The two posts made immediately before my long hiatus give a clue. I spent most of the last year working on a book that is now out, available at an Amazon near you: RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Site with Ruby on Rails is a book about, well, building a social networking website with Ruby on Rails. The other event that put the kibosh on my blogging for awhile requires and deserves more explanation. It’s a longer and much more personal story (based on an email I sent out last year), so I’ve put it below the fold.
In May 2006, I was distressed to learn that my stepmother, Jerene Johnson, had begun experiencing an unexplained loss of cognitive function, which at the time was minor but seemed to be progressing. Extensive testing revealed several significant health problems, but none that could account adequately for her symptoms. The doctors kept saying “come back in a month and we’ll see how you are then”, but Jerene’s symptoms continue to worsen rapidly. Finally, a friend at the UCLA Medical Center pulled some strings, and Jerene was admitted to the hospital in late July, where she soon came under the care of the neurology team.
The UCLA neurologists quickly ruled out all of the most common causes for Jerene’s symptoms, and began to suspect an uncommon one. On July 28, we received the devastating diagnosis: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a degenerative and invariably fatal neurological disorder caused by protein pathogens called prions, the same infectious agent found in mad-cow disease. Jerene’s form of the disease was the so-called “sporadic” variant, which basically means that no one knows exactly how it happens; it’s probably caused by a random genetic mutation. Though sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is the most common variant, it is still exceedingly rare, with only about 300 cases per year in the United States—literally one in a million.
Since there is no treatment and no cure for CJD, there was no point in keeping Jerene in the hospital once the diagnosis was confirmed, so she was discharged to home care on July 31. During the subsequent month, her descent was extraordinarily rapid, even by the standards of CJD, which typically results in death between four and eight months after the onset of symptoms. Since I was involved in many aspects of her care, I could see how her cognitive function and motor skills declined on virtually a daily basis, resulting in an effectively comatose state within a couple of weeks. This meant that she was unaware of her condition and thus experienced no pain—one of the few mercies afforded by this terrible disease. She died on Sunday, August 27, 2006.
Since most readers of this post did not know Jerene, I would like to tell you a little bit about her, and especially about her influence on me. She was born on August 22, 1949, in Inglewood, California, and grew up in the city of Garden Grove in Orange County. As a child, Jerene was a precocious musician, and showed great talent for the piano in particular. By the time she was 13, she already served as an instructor for the younger students, in addition to pursuing her own more advanced piano studies. She was also an accomplished choral singer. Over the years, her piano skills were often on display, especially during the holiday season, when she would accompany our traditional family Christmas caroling (always in parts, of course). Jerene did much to foster my own love of music, especially classical music and musicals, and provided much encouragement as my interest in singing grew over the years. She was a particularly enthusiastic audience member at many Caltech Glee Club concerts.
Jerene and I shared another close affiliation. Starting when she was around 20, Jerene worked for several years as a secretary for Professor Harrison Brown in Caltech’s Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences. She loved Caltech, and even went so far as to marry two Caltech graduates (though not at the same time). Those marriages didn’t last, but her affection for Caltech and its denizens did. One story she particularly liked to tell concerned the Ricketts House annual Apache party and its infamous garter contest. Though Apache (as always) featured plenty of scantily clad women, in the late ’60s most girls would still stop their dates from pushing a garter all the way up. Jerene, never one to be prudish about such things, won the contest easily. She was especially pleased that part of her prize for winning was the honor of sitting on the lap of a certain well-known professor who frequented the party. (The Caltech people out there will no doubt already have guessed that the professor in question was every Techer’s favorite physicist, Richard Feynman.)
When my father married Jerene, now more than twenty years ago, he married into a large and loving family, one that embraced not only him but also me and my sister as well. Obviously, this has been an incredibly difficult time for us all, but, as hard as it has been, it would have been so much worse without the incredible support of the family and friends surrounding Jerene and my dad. It has certainly driven home for me the importance of my own network of colleagues, mentors, and friends. If you are part of that group, I’d like to thank you.
Back in action
Good Lord, I’ve been on hiatus too long. I’m going to start blogging again soon, I promise. (My three readers just winced in anticipation.) Expect a poignant start; then, let the heresy flow.
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