Quote of the Day (Adam Ratner, on the Origin of the Recent Anti-Vaccination Movement)

“Early vaccine hesitancy mostly centered on pockets of resistance to the DTP vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The shift in focus to the MMR vaccine, which bundles measles, mumps, and rubella, got a big push in 1998, when a doctor named Andrew Wakefield published an article in the British medical journal The Lancet that hypothesized that children who received the MMR vaccine were more likely to develop autism. Its convoluted reasoning had to do with the way the viruses from the vaccine replicated in the intestine. The article was fraudulent, unethical, and wrong, and The Lancet later retracted it. Wakefield lost his medical license, but his baseless claims have had enormous staying power. With autism rates on the rise, worried parents were desperate for explanations, and Wakefield supplied an easy one.”—Pediatrician-author Adam Ratner, interviewed by Lorraine Glennon, “Dangerous Consequences,” Columbia Magazine, Winter 2024-25

The other day, scanning the profile of a friend of a friend on Facebook, I noticed that this proponent of homeopathic medicine also believed in something considerably more pernicious.

Memes she had posted supporting the anti-vaccination (or, in an undoubtedly poll-tested phrase, “medical freedom”) movement were even more numerous than those of herself and her family. I could only shake my head over this kind of fanaticism spreading through the digital world.

I wish someone could have sent her a link to Dr. Ratner’s interview with Columbia Magazine, though I’m afraid that, without the slightest bit of evidence, she would dismiss him as a champion of “Big Pharma” simply because he takes a position in direct opposition to hers.

I read the above quote from Dr. Ratner with great interest and dismay but little surprise. At one time, Andrew Wakefield’s faulty research would not only have been refuted, but also so decisively sidelined that few people would read it and even fewer spread it.

Now, of course, it’s all different. Even 15 years ago, anti-vax resistance was forming in the nascent Tea Party movement. COVID-19 turned these diehards into protesters.

Articles in yesterday’s New York Times by Apoorva Mandavilli and Francesca Paris, with accompanying graphs, add details to Dr. Ratner’s contentions. This time, anti-vax skepticism has moved beyond COVID to polio, measles, and other once-common childhood diseases that, too optimistically, were believed to be eradicated not long ago.

“Herd immunity”—the indirect protection for a population, achieved by vaccination rates of at least 95%--is being breached in geographic areas ranging from large urban districts to small rural ones.

Opposition to vaccination is being fueled by legislative efforts that soften vaccination mandates, as well as by podcasters, cable “news” propagandists, opportunistic politicians, and social media “experts” who claim to be “just asking questions” when they are utterly uninterested in any from vaccination advocates who would contest flimsy evidence.

Amid the multiple and massive horrors of the 20^th century, improved public health stands out as an unqualified triumph.  In contrast, vaccination doubters are responsible for spreading too many diseases that cause unnecessary discomfort and deaths. In this case, ignorance is anything but bliss.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Mad Men,’ on Inferior Ad Submissions)

[Two ad firm partners are discussing the portfolio of a spouse’s cousin.]

Don Draper [played by Jon Hamm]: “His book.” [Chuckles] “It was filled with old ads.”

Roger Sterling [played by John Slattery]: [Chuckles] “Plagiarism. That's resourceful.”

Don: “He had five originals. There were all the same thing.”

Roger: “I told him to be himself. That was pretty mean, I guess.”—Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 6, “Waldorf Stories,” original air date Aug 29, 2010, teleplay by Brett Johnson and Matthew Weiner, directed by Scott Hornbacher

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the Hypocrisy of the Very Rich)

“He stood in the doorway, studying the petty maneuvers of the women and the resigned amenities of their partners. Was it possible that these were his friends?... Who were they, that they should sit in judgment on him?

“The bald man with the globular stomach, who stood at Mrs. Gildermere's elbow surveying the dancers, was old Boylston, who had made his pile in wrecking railroads; the smooth chap with glazed eyes, at whom a pretty girl smiled up so confidingly, was Collerton, the political lawyer, who had been mixed up to his own advantage in an ugly lobbying transaction; near him stood Brice Lyndham, whose recent failure had ruined his friends and associates, but had not visibly affected the welfare of his large and expensive family. The slim fellow dancing with Miss Gildermere was Alec Vance, who lived on a salary of five thousand a year, but whose wife was such a good manager that they kept a brougham and victoria and always put in their season at Newport and their spring trip to Europe. The little ferret-faced youth in the corner was Regie Colby, who wrote the Entre-Nous paragraphs in the Social Searchlight: the women were charming to him and he got all the financial tips he wanted from their husbands and fathers.”—American novelist and short-story writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), “A Cup of Cold Water,” first published in The Greater Inclination (1899), republished in The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, Vol 1. 1891-1910, edited by Maureen Howard (2001)

Quote of the Day (Kay Boyle, on a Child Viewing New York on a Cold January Night)

“There is a time of apprehension which begins with the beginning of darkness, and to which only the speech of love can lend security…. It may begin around five o'clock on a winter afternoon when the light outside is dying in the windows. At that hour the New York apartment in which Felicia lived was filled with shadows, and the little girl would wait alone in the living room, looking out at the winter-stripped trees that stood black in the park against the isolated ovals of unclean snow. Now it was January, and the day had been a cold one; the water of the artificial lake was frozen fast, but because of the cold and the coming darkness, the skaters had ceased to move across its surface. The street that lay between the park and the apartment house was wide, and the two- way streams of cars and busses, some with their headlamps already shining, advanced and halted, halted and poured swiftly on to the tempo of the traffic signals' altering lights. The time of apprehension had set in.”—American novelist, short-story writer, poet, educator, and political activist Kay Boyle (1902-1992), “Winter Night,” originally printed in The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1946, reprinted in Thirty Stories (1957)

I chose this quote for today not only because it relates to this point in the year but also because it combines vivid description of a time and place with compassion for the dilemma facing “little girl”: another night without her divorced mother, who is working constantly to make ends meet.

Within 10 pages, “Winter Night” opens up, as good stories do, to something much larger: a world far beyond that of Manhattanites readjusting to life after WWII.

Kay Boyle had seen much of the worst of the war before America’s entry, as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. In this story, she introduced readers—many of whom still knew little about those caught up in the European maelstrom—to the refugees who found themselves on America’s shores.

It’s an imaginative leap into the life of a migrant—a fictional instruction that Americans can use as readily in our time as in Boyle’s.

Chances are, if you’re like me, you may have heard, glancingly, about Boyle without having read any of her nearly fifty books (novels, collections of short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction). 

That enormous output resembles more that of European authors (like Georgy Girl author Margaret Forster, whom I profiled earlier this month in this post) than American ones who labored on only a few books spread out over years or who flamed out after a short but exciting creative spurt.

The “time of apprehension” in the opening paragraph refers to the hour that seven-year-old Felicia waits for her mother in their apartment, fearful of being left alone.

But the “sitting woman” who comes to mind her, it becomes clear, has experienced her own “time of apprehension.” In telling Felicia about another little girl who loved the ballet, the sitter exposes the horror of the Final Solution: fathers gone off to “another place,” remaining family members separated in weekly deportation roundups, constant hunger and lack of necessities, and mothers’ desperate covert messages passed along on trains begging surviving women to look after their children.

Nowhere are the phrases “concentration camp” or “death camp” used, but Boyle’s postwar readers could have easily inferred that was being discussed in the babysitter’s quiet narration.

At the end of the story, Felicia’s mother finds her daughter and the babysitter asleep in each other’s arms. Boyle hints that this is only a temporary remedy for lonely Felicia, who’s enduring a parade of sitters who are “no more than lonely aunts of an evening or two who sometimes returned and sometimes did not,” and for this one, forever traumatized by the horrors she’s witnessed in the war.

Surprisingly, considering Boyle’s considerable body of work, it’s not easy to find any of her books in many libraries. (My local system, covering 77 libraries, contains single copies of only three of her books.) I was only able to find this title in a 1977 Reader’s Digest anthology, Great American Short Stories.

As more writers compete for slots on college curricula, it’s likely to be even harder to locate examples of Boyle’s work—unless feminist scholars succeed in placing her in more American literature courses.  Judging by the skill she displayed in this story, she deserves to be far better known.

Quote of the Day (Ina Garten, With Advice for Those Who Can’t Find Their Direction in Life)

“Think about what you used to do when you were 10 and figure out how to make a living doing it.”—American professional cook and author Ina Garten, quoted in “The One Sheet: Ina Garten,” WSJ Magazine (the monthly magazine of The Wall Street Journal), October 2024

The image accompanying this post, showing Ina Garten at a book signing in Chapel Hill, NC, was taken in 2006 by Therealbs2002.

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ on a Difficult Problem for Archie)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “I’ve got a very serious problem here’s gonna take all of my thinking and all of my consecration.”—All in the Family, Season 2, Episode 10, “The Insurance Is Cancelled,” original air date Nov. 27, 1971, teleplay by Norman Lear, Lee Kalcheim, and directed by John Rich

Song Lyric of the Day (Maggie Rose, on ‘Something Broken’)

“Life's full of broken things
Like hearts, homes, and dreams
We all come from something broken.”— “Broken,” composed by Patrick Russell Davis, Margaret Rose Durante (AKA Maggie Rose), and Corey Crowder, from Ms. Rose’s EP The Variety Show, Vol. 1 (2016)
 
On Sundays, I normally include a “Spiritual Quote of the Day” on this blog. But last night, while listening to several country music artists on a PBS station, I heard this song from Maggie Rose, a singer-songwriter I hadn't heard of before. 

It struck me that it is precisely “something broken”—call it original sin or just the human condition—that has sparked the need for so much religious consolation.
 
And so, I offer it here, and hope that anyone reading this finds what will mend anything broken in their own lives.