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By jamie, April 15, 2012 6:49 pm

This weekend our daughter had an Alice in Wonderland themed birthday “tea” party with a few of her friends (the tea was really lemonade). One of the girls finished her tea early and wanted to go play outside, but her mother told her she had to “keep [her] bottom in a chair” until the other girls had finished up. Kids are so smart – she waited until her mother wasn’t looking, then quickly moved into Little Mama’s “little red chair, ” a light-weight, child-sized chair that is easy to carry around. Careful to keep the chair firmly attached to her rear end, she then walked herself outside to play. No rules were broken (unless you count the second or two it took her to switch seat).

This section of the book is all about loopholes (I read through Chapter 14). There were plenty of exceptions to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, and people used these as loopholes to have alcohol if they wanted it.

Loophole One: each person was allowed a certain amount of homemade fermented fruit juice (it wasn’t technically assumed to be alcoholic, and was supposed to allow people who grew fruits to make use of some of their harvests). Grape growers got exceptionally rich by shipping mashed up grapes all over the country. Okrent says that, for a time, grape prices got so high that former wine makers were earning nearly exponentially more by just shipping grapes than they did making and selling wines (of course, some of them lamented that the quality of home-fermented wine was sub-standard, but they kept ion shipping the grapes. I vaguely remember making my high school science class making wine – as I recall, it wasn’t that hard to do (of course, no one was allowed to taste it, and it might not have been potable at all).

Loophole Two: Alcohol remained legal for religious purposes. In short, their motives were noble ones and, in the end, some priests and rabbis also managed to become very wealthy because of Prohibition. Also, a surprising number of people became Catholic or Jewish during this time. Here is a quote:

American Jews had opposed the Eighteenth Amendment with the near unanimity and absolute vehemence that seized American Catholics. For both groups, it wasn’t simply a matter of protecting the free practice of their respective religions. Like the Catholics, the Jews peered behind the Prohibition banner and saw the white-hooded hatred of the Ku Klux Klan and the foaming xenophobia of the nativist pastors who dominated the Methodist and Baptist churches. It was a view summarized by a speaker at the annual meeting of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1914: the effort to place Prohibition in the Constitution, the rabbi declared, could be attributed to “the ambition of ecclesiastic tyrants.”

Loophole Three: Alcohol remained legal for medicinal purposes. Evidently a lot of doctors and pharmacists prescribed straight whiskey or other spirits for various ailments, or used it in their various tonics. Some of them fancied up their prescriptions by calling it “Spiritus Frumenti” which means “spirit of the grain.” This reminds me of the current situation with marijuana – it is legal for medicinal purposes in California and other places, and I often hear people joking about how easy it is to get a prescription for it: Headache? Medical marijuana. Hangnail? Medical marijuana. Seems like the same thing was going on with whiskey back in those dark days of Prohibition.

They still put alcohol in some medicines, don’t they? When we were kids, they used to give us “Baby Percy Medicine” whenever we had stomach problems. That stuff contained quite a lot of alcohol, and it worked every time – as I recall, it made us fall contentedly to sleep, but you’ll have to check with my mom or grandma as to whether this was really the case. I Googled it and found an assortment of websites listing the alcohol content at 5% (don’t quote me on this – I made no attempt to verify this). Hm – doesn’t Nyquil have a fairly high amount of alcohol too?

Evidently, you can still buy it (you'll never guess where). The URL (and where this image was taken from) is printed as a footnote.

Here is my favorite quote from this section:

Charles Walgreen…had built his Chicago-based chain from nine locations in 1916 to twenty just four years later. In 1922 Walgreens introduced the malted milk shake, which family historians have credited with the chain’s next growth spurt. But it’s doubtful that milk shakes alone were responsible for Walgreens’ rocketing expansion from 20 stores to an astonishing 525 during the 1920s. The author sites, as evidence, a quote from one of the heirs, about having to call the fire department to the stores and hoping that they would leave quickly “because whenever they came in we’d always lose a case of liquor from the back.”

Not another loophole, but the book mentions that soft drinks did well during Prohibition, and not just because they gave the compliant something besides water to drink. Soft drinks were also used to mask the awful taste of home made spirits.

Footnote: The URL for the Percy Medicine is (wait for it): www.walgreens.com

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By jamie, April 10, 2012 3:49 am

When I attended community college, they used to give us a “welcome pack” every semester, containing a really cool planner, and several product samples like breath mints and deodorant. One time the sample pack contained “NoDoz.” I am not a coffee drinker, and, while I have had my share of chocolate, I have not been one to consume caffeine in doses high enough to brink about what I have heard people refer to as “caffeine headaches” whenever they are away from the stuff for too long. Anyway, I put the caffeine tablets in my purse and pretty much forgot about them until one day, after I had pulled an all-nighter and was feeling like I could barely hang on. I was trying to will my eyes to stay opened when I remembered – impulsively, I swallowed them down without any water, and hoped that I would be able to stay awake in my next class. I was awake alright – awake and jittery. At one point, I tried to speak, and my words came out all jumbled because my brain was running faster than my mouth could. It was horrible. Admittedly, I have attempted it since this – in tea form, but after about three cups my fingers don’t type properly and my whole body feels shaky and uncomfortable (I’m awake, but I’m not sure how efficiently I work in this condition). [I read through chapter 14.]

I guess my caffeine sensitivity is probably a blessing in disguise because it keeps me from being tempted by other things – admittedly, like so many others, I sometimes wish that there was some magic substance I could take that would enable me to skip the need for sleep [that was the most compelling part of The Twilight series for me - can you imagine how much you could accomplish if you didn't ever have to sleep, and you didn't ever feel sleepy?]. This part of the book talks about teenagers using much more than coffee to stay awake, including prescription drugs. Here is a quote – see how tempting it sounds (if you aren’t afraid of strange potential side effects, like I am)?

The pills are considered universal enhancers, meaning that even students without ADD could gain a longer and more focused attention span from the pills. “It won’t make you smarter, but if the material is hard, you’ll be able to stick with it longer, plow through it. You’re able to concentrate better,” said California pediatrician Lawrence Diller. “People with ADHD who are performing below average on mental aspects that require continued concentration and attention to detail, when you give them Adderall or Ritalin, their performance improves to normal levels. If you give [non-ADHD] people who are performing normally in these tasks low doses, their performance improves to supranormal levels.”

Some kids get a false ADD diagnosis in order to get the pills (by convincing a psychiatrist that they have it). Others make a fortune selling the pills to overachieving students who want an edge. None of my students admit to this, but they sometimes mention knowing someone who has, typically in high school. I am so afraid of taking unnecessary medication that it seems shocking that anyone would do this – then I remember the feeling of sleeping only a few hours a night for weeks on end. And I guess the drugs would be pretty easy to get in high school – I remember reading about ADHD drugs being over-prescribed to kids (are they the same drugs as for ADD?) and now I wonder what percentage of diagnoses for older kids are for those who really just want a “magic pill” to help them get more schoolwork done. Someone Robbins interviewed for the book actually refers to these drugs as “academic steroids.”

The other most interesting part of this section is about the SAT. I hadn’t realized that so many colleges no longer require this test (for many it is optional). The most disturbing quote: “Until 1994, “SAT” stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” But generally, students’ “aptitude” increased by thirty points for every $10,000 their parents earned in yearly income. A California study found that the level of parents’ education alone explained more than 50 percent of the difference in students’ SAT scores. The SAT has historically been accused of racial bias, with minorities regularly scoring below the national average for white students.” I knew about the racial bias, but combined with those other two statistics, it sounds as though the SAT is a form of “affirmative action” for upper middle class white people. Go figure. I am curious to see the actual results of these studies.

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By jamie, January 5, 2011 1:55 pm

We have all heard stories of dilapidated neighborhoods being further damaged by the drug trade. Why would someone get involved in such an industry, knowing full well that not only are they are contributing to the destruction of so many lives, they are also putting themselves at risk for death or worse? This is the kind of question I sometimes hear from moneyed people who are clueless about what life might be like for those with few if any opportunities for legitimate success. They will probably not read this book, though – too bad, because in Part 2 (I read through page 127) Jay-Z gives a detailed account of his experience and those of his peers.

Here is a sample:

The kid on the streets is getting a shot at a dream. The dream is that he will be the one to make this hustling thing pay off in a big way….He ignores the other stories going around, about dudes who get shot or beaten to death….

But they’re working that corner for more than whatever small cut they get of the crack they sell–they’re working because they think they’re due for a miracle. The kid in McDonald’s gets a check and that’s it. There’s no dream in fast food. Manager? That’s a promotion, not a dream. It took me a long time to realize how much courage it took to work at McDonald’s, to walk through the streets past rows of hustlers wearing that orange uniform. But at that time, it seemed like an act of surrender to a world that hated us. I never even considered it a possibility.

This section covers the murders of Tupak Shakur and Biggie Smalls, and Jay-Z makes parallels between “hustling” (dealing drugs) and the music industry, pointing out that these two rappers would probably still be alive today had they not started to become successful rappers. He talks about famous rappers having to wear bullet proof vests to the studio. This goes beyond simple competition – it should not be dangerous to cut a record.

The rap industry is a legitimate business, unlike the drug trade. And it’s a fantastic money maker – Jay-Z talks about how he has done countless unpaid endorsements of clothing, alcohol, and other things which have clearly helped boost the profits of various different companies. One example was when he got arrested on an assault charge (he later settled to avoid being a “circus act”), sales of the jacket he was wearing during the televised arrest jumped in the following weeks. Another example was the champagne, Cristal, which he mentioned in some of his lyrics and used to publicly endorse on a regular basis. During an interview, the president of the Cristal company publicly voiced his displeasure that his product was being associated with the “bling bling” rap lifestyle. Jay-Z responded by publicly vowing to avoid the product from now on and to no longer sell it in his clubs, but the idea that a luxury company would be disgusted with any association to the rap industry It reminded me of the quote from Obama’s book about being doomed to be what the dominant population demands, or being branded a “militant” or worse. In the case of rap/hip hop, this means being thought of as “street,” as somehow illegitimate, regardless of your success.

This is one of the things that makes me–and all serious rappers–renegades. When we report the news, it doesn’t sound the same as when you hear in from CNN. Most of us come from communities where people were just supposed to stay in their corners quietly, live and die without disturbing the master narrative of American society. Simply speaking our truths, which flew in the face of the American myth, made us rebels.

Here’s to the rebels!

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By jamie, January 4, 2011 7:04 pm

Meeting the parents – such an excitingly awkward experience. One particularly horrifying one for me included a home cooked meal and a major dose of Ignorant Parent. His mother served tacos I think, or it might have been burritos, and she apologized for not having proper “Mexican salsa” (they were served with ketchup instead). She expressed her disappointment that her son had taken French in high school instead of Spanish, “If he had only known that you were in his future, I’m sure he would have chosen to learn Spanish.” She wanted to know everything about my culture, and I think she would have been thrilled if I had responded by grabbing her son’s arm and breaking into an Authentic Latin Dance right next to the table. Instead, I had to endure her crestfallen face when I delivered the bad news that five years of classes had failed to make a Spanish speaker out of me, that not one of my family members lives or has ever lived in what is now Mexico, and that (oh the horror) we don’t even own a sombrero. (I know I have written about this already, but I couldn’t find it in a search of my blog – sorry for any redundancy).

Here is what Obama has to say about his experience with Ignorant White People (by the way, I finished section 1, through page 129):

Still, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right stayed with me, a warning that sounded whenever a white girl mentioned in the middle of conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder; or when a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball; or when the school principal told me I was cool. I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge? There was a trick there somewhere, although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.

I know I can’t presume to understand what it feels like to be a young black man being raised in a white world by white grandparents during a particularly volatile time in U.S. racial history. When he explains about trying to move back and forth between two worlds while secretly knowing that the one he lives in is not the one he belongs in, at least according to those who see him from the outside, obviously I cannot identify. But I do understand about sitting on the fence and not being allowed to fully join either side. Most of the Spanish-speaking kids in school did not see me as one of them (or they would tease me by speaking to me in Spanish anyway, assuming that I was trying to “be white” by pretending not to understand them. The Anglo kids included me, but I always felt different from them anyway – I was constantly surprised by things they would do or say; sometimes felt like I was “passing,” and I was ashamed by this. Now I am in Florida and people think I am Caucasian, and this bugs me to no end; it is a welcome relief going back home and being spoken to in Spanish by people in the grocery store – so my face hasn’t changed after all, the people here just don’t know how to recognize the more subtle features of my ethnicity.

Then I study racial inequality and social stratification, and I want so badly NOT to be part of the dominant culture. I am thankful for the value my mother has always placed on education, and that my husband has also valued education enough to encourage me to pursue advanced degrees instead of immediately entering the Florida job market upon my arrival here. I know that I am extremely blessed and incredibly lucky, and I don’t ever want to lose sight of the position other Latinos have in this country, because their blood is my blood, regardless of what language I speak.

More from Obama:

In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self–the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass–had been freely chosen by us. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. N*****.

Some people still refer to the United States as a melting pot, and I don’t think they really understand what this implies: Immigrants are valued more if they assimilate, if they get “melted” into the dominant culture. Obama discusses the inner turmoil he endures while learning this. He talks about how minorities get swallowed up into “white culture” rather than the other way around. If a person of color attempts to fit in amidst the dominant “culture”, this usually means avoiding people who look like her/him, and pretending to be a colorless “individual” instead.

I have written a bit about my views on independence and extended family and have a few more things to say here. One hallmark of “white culture” (a very silly term, actually) is the value of independence. The more I think about it, the more I think the rest of us are manipulated into believing that our successes and failures are all our own (because we are independent, right?). In truth, we all stand on the shoulders of others, and, to me, it’s immoral to say otherwise. Our ancestors, living family members, mentors, educators, friends – when we look at a homeless person and say that “he did this to himself” is just as ridiculous as saying that someone like Bill Gates is extremely wealthy entirely because of his own merit. It’s easier, of course, to preach the gospel of “individuality” – then we don’t have to worry about our involvement in the misfortunes of others, but it’s also dishonest.

One more thing about this section: Remember when Bill Clinton said he “didn’t inhale?” Evidently Barack (Barry at the time) Obama was a little more successful at “inhaling” before he finally decided to get serious about his future and stop trying to escape his concerns about being a mixed-race individual. Reading this and knowing that is was written by the sitting U.S. President (long before he started running for major political office, of course), was kind of surreal. We have fallen into a pattern of elementary school-style “gotcha” when it comes to our politicians. We try to “dig up dirt” and see what we can “throw at them.” It’s ridiculous. Does this encourage would-be and current politicians to become sinless? Of course not – it DOES encourage them to hide any embarrassing fact about themselves, sometimes by any means necessary. We don’t value honesty and high moral standards in our politicians, only the appearance thereof. And if you do mess up young boy or girl, might as well just hang up any future political aspirations because forgiveness and fresh beginnings are NOT part of the “American way.”

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By jamie, May 29, 2010 10:01 am

After Hubby and I got married, it used to really bother me when people would ask us, “when are you going to have a baby?” This is probably the second worst question to ask a woman right after “how much to you weigh?” If she does not plan to have children, you are essentially criticizing a decision that is really none of your business. Worse, if the couple is trying very hard to get pregnant, then the answer would be “your guess is as good as mine,” and you are placing unkind and unnecessary pressure on the woman because, let’s face it, it’s always her fault even if biology says otherwise.

Section 3 begins with a discussion of how women used to be blamed for infertility and prescribed psychotherapy as a potential cure. They did all sorts of other crazy things to women to help their fertility too. Even today, women are told to avoid stress if they are trying to conceive. I have spoken with a few families who have adopted a child and then, almost like clockwork – they get pregnant, so there may be something to helping women avoid stress when they are trying to conceive (so don’t ask them about it – if they want to talk about it they will initiate the conversation).

After conception, the real pressure begins anyway – keeping the pregnancy. We have to watch what we do, what we eat, and where we go (some say that the beauty shop is fine – to others it’s akin to child abuse). In the 1950s, this often included taking a hormone drug called DES, which was purported to help avoid miscarriage. Their doctors told them to take it, and so they did. “Many women were getting a lifetime’s worth of estrogen packed into nine months, essentially consuming the equivalent of a nine-month stock of birth control pills every day. One DES mother figured out that she swallowed more than 10,000 milligrams of the stuff, ‘roughly the equivalent of 500,000 of the current low-dose birth control pills.’”

There was a great deal of controversy over DES, and rightly so. It was later learned that, not only did it not help prevent miscarriage (double blind studies found that the miscarriage rate was actually slightly, not not statistically significantly higher), it also increased the likelihood that the daughters of women who took it during pregnancy would get cancer. The really upsetting thing is that doctors were so sure of themselves that some of them included DES with prenatal vitamins, and the women did not even know they were taking it.

Our doctors are not infallible. We should trust them to a certain extent, but not blindly. Women have a better chance of challenging their doctors than they did in the 1950s, and we should exercise this option when something does not feel right. Sometimes a second opinion is a very good idea. It might not be a bad idea to reject new drugs or procedures (like new forms of birth control) – you might sigh with relief five years later when it turns out that people are getting sick (or worse!) with the new drugs.

Other posts about Get Me Out:

Post 1: Get Me Out, by Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D.
Post 2: Sleeping Through Childbirth
Post 3: Trust Me, I’m a Doctor
Post 4: Do-It-Yourself Childbirth
Post 5: On Fertility