The flu pandemic: were we ready?

Nature aks ze question, here.

Oh, and check out more bird flu goodies on the Guardian.

Bird Flu. It's the New Black Death.

[ADVERTORIAL]

Salon: still pimping products

Well, the second installment of Salon's pimp-a-thon is out, and, just like the first, it's a swan-song to a conveniently purchaseable product, complete with product links. Again, I would like to register my discomfort with Salon's new role as product pimp.

Yes Virginia, pregnancy may very well make you listless and lonely

Some poor pre-motherhood chick on Alternet bitches about Padme's pregnancy. I haven't seen the so-called anti-Bush propaganda movie (and I certainly won't go see it in the theater, so I really can't comment, but the author of the article says:

Despite the futuristic age in which she lives, things aren't much brighter for Padme, whose pregnancy renders her oddly helpless. Though supposedly a member of the Galactic Senate, she does little more than sit listlessly in an oversized living room watching the passing hovercraft and the multiple sunsets, waiting for her belly to grow and for Anakin to come home. The only thing that changes are her outfits.

According to the story, Padme was a talented and educated girl from the planet of Naboo. She became an apprentice legislator by age 11 and by 14 was the planet's queen. A principled ruler, she fought illegal occupations and cleverly restored freedom to her planet. When her term as Queen ended, she remained active in public service and became an outspoken senator, championing peaceful solutions to the galactic wars.

So what happened? Why does Padme spend this movie sentenced to an idle life at home in tearful silence? Is this what pregnancy does to women?

I'm wondering because for the past year or two I've been thinking about having a kid myself. Now, added to my usual litany of questions--do I have the money, will I still have time to write, can my body handle it--I'm wondering if pregnancy itself will make me lonely and dull. Will I become like Padme, stuck on the sofa, isolated, brushing my hair for hours, waiting for my partner to come home from work?

In my effort to answer the "Should I have a baby?" question, I spend a lot of time looking for role models. I look for mothers who still make it to book club, stay up on current events and show up for the dinner party. I look for pregnant women who read more than just mothering magazines, who dance and go running and converse about things other than diapers and babysitters. In short, I look for mothers and mothers-to-be who are active, smart women who still make it to Galactic Senate meetings.

Ugh. I am so sick of non-mothers mouthing off about what kind of role model I, a mother, should be to them. Some women have fabulous pregnancies, cheerfully running off to the Galactic Senate. Fine. I'm happy for them. Not that I think George Lucas has any particular insight into the experience of pregnancy, but my pregnancy was a lot more like how the above description of Padme's pregnancy than it was like this chick's idealized Babystyle book-groups-and-jogging-pregnancy.

The truth is, people, pregnancy is fucking hard. It's an enormous effort by your body. Sure, it's not sickness, exactly. But it certainly does not feel like health. Pregnancy is exhausting, bewildering, and often icky. It can make you tired and lonely, and prone to sitting on the couch brushing your hair, waiting for your spouse to come home and feed you crackers. There's a lot of waiting involved in pregnancy, and it's pretty much impossible to just go on with your regular life as though nothing is going to change. Because everything is going to change.

I should be more gracious, though. I too was once as self-centered as the author, looking at all moms through the lens of what I wanted them to be and do, my own image of how I didn't want my life to change when I had kids. I too had the gall to look at moms I knew, real and fictional, and judge them: not smart enough, not active enough, too involved with the kids, pathetic. Me, I won't be a mom like that, I said.

It's a funny thing about moms, though. We'll snipe at one another endlessly, but defend to the death the honor of all mothers against the non-moms who snipe at us. You non-mom women: you have no idea what kind of mom you'll be. You have no idea what kind of pregnancy you'll have. You have no idea of the challenges to your energy and intelligence that motherhood will lay on you, and how those challenges will be, basically, invisible to non-moms who will look at you.

But go ahead and get pregnant. And when you are sitting there on the couch, letting your book group book fall and gazing dully out at the passing spaceships, give a mom a call. "Yeah," she'll say. "Pregnancy sucks ass, doesn't it." "How come no one told me?" you'll ask.

Mark Danner, Joan Didion.

Our dear friend RJ at the Daily Blague suggests two New York Review articles; our NYRB not yet having arrived, I had to print them off the computer to read them.

Mark Danner discusses the Downing Street Memo, and reprints it in full. "Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear."

Two weeks after he wrote the article, the full text of the Downing Street Memo, which, as I pointed out previously, is nowhere near as long as the Starr Report, has still not been reprinted by the Times, or, as far as I can tell, by any other major U.S. paper. Newsweek, however, is dutifully taking dictation from Larry Di Rita. Mission Accomplished!

The other article suggested was Joan Didion on Terri Schiavo. That article annoyed me, but I'm not doing well at explaining exactly why, so I won't discuss yet. Maybe it's just because it's the end of May and I've had to put the heat on, and my tomato seedlings are huddled underneath a Reemay blanket, soddenly awaiting spring so that they can be planted.

Best Friends

Some books about friend breakups have just been published, reaping a review in the Times, and an article in Salon. The Salon article, as is so often the case with Salon's 'life' features, tries to make grand historical statements about why female friendships are more important these days than they were in the past -- a ridiculous argument that any first year women's studies major would snort at. Hasn't the author heard of Lillian Faderman? Surpassing the Love of Men ? Anyone, anyone? Salon's editors should have just cut the entire last three paragraphs of the article:

Perhaps severing our female bonds and then getting over them is so difficult because it's still hard for us to articulate how important we are to each other in the first place. But it's high time we figured out how to get over our self-consciousness about the intensity of our female alliances. Because while friendship may have always existed as a shaping force in women's lives, it has never been so integral to so many.

As our biological and professional horizons change, we are freer to make our associations with women the center of our lives for longer periods of time -- not simply refuges from our dealings with men, though certainly those kinds of camaraderies still exist and are as valuable as ever.

Our friendships -- their beginnings, their durations and their ends -- have become as crucial to the timelines of our lives and to the shape of our selves as the traditional family structures we have long revered and respected. A couple of new books that take the pains of female love seriously are exactly what we need to begin to develop a vocabulary of female loss.

Historically inaccurate filler. Breaking up with a best friend is painful enough, we do not need to justify our interest in the phenomenon by insisting that it is a newly important societal trend.

But really, I'm snarking at the Salon article because I'm coming up on the anniversary of my divorce from my own best friend, and it hurts, hurts, hurts. We broke up after fifteen years of passionate love, on the basis of a brief comment I made while standing in line at a Victoria's Secret waiting for her to buy a strapless bra to wear under her wedding dress. I made the comment ("I've recently discovered that shopping gives me migraines," I said), and she gave me a look. Just a look. And then we went back to my house for lunch, and I asked her about the look she'd given me. And then, at my dining room table, our friendship simply unravelled. All the loose threads of it, years of loose threads, got pulled all at once, and we sat there in a pile of bitterness and yarn. Three emails and two brief telephone calls later, we said goodbye to one another. "Let's do it cleanly," I said to her. "We don't want to drag this out for years and years more, and torment one another, do we?" "No," she said, "you're right." And so it ended. She went and got married without me. She had been my maid of honor. She had made my wedding dress. She had been present at the birth of my son. And she went and got married without me, in a dress I'd helped her choose, and a menu I'd organized for her with a caterer I'd found, and wearing, I suppose, the strapless bra whose purchase was our tipping point.

I can't breathe, thinking of it. This is a rare kind of entry for me to put on Biscuit, as it's not about politics at all. I don't know why I'm posting it at all, in fact. Perhaps I simply feel the need for some public mourning. There's no grave to stand at, no wake to attend, no papers to sign. What else can I do with the wide and silent lake of my grief?