Cancer Candy

At the end of October I was in a huge home improvement store with my daughter, and we noticed that Christmas decorations, ornaments and displays were already out in full force and had taken over half the garden department. We walked past three-foot-tall lighted garden decorations featuring frogs and chickens holding sparkly candy canes and wearing tinseled Santa hats. We marveled at the unseasonable earliness of the display and the nontraditional symbolism of it all. Then we were stopped dead in our tracks by sparkly bright pink forest creatures. As we drew closer to the Barbie-pink-colored nearly life-sized buck and doe covered in pink fairy lights we noted the store's signs that proclaimed them to be KOMEN BUCK and KOMEN DOE. Sure enough, the big pink breast cancer awareness ribbon and the logo of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation were emblazoned on their boxes for all to see, assuring would-be pink deer owners that their holiday lawn decorations, like nearly everything else available for sale in the United States nowadays, could now be constant reminders of cancer.

Throughout the month of October each year, I am used to seeing special pink editions of everything under the sun marketed to encourage breast cancer awareness, from perishables like M&Ms to $300 kitchen mixers that will last for thirty years or more. Once there were pink T-shirts, hats and stickers available to those who have endured breast cancer or been touched by it when those they loved were afflicted and were fighting, or had lost the fight. Then already-pink items produced for the female market such as lipsticks and perfumes were sold in special editions during October, which was officially designated Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now there are cell phone charms, socks, jewelry of all sorts, newborn baby onesies, special edition designer purses, teas, dishes, staplers, towels (even Terrible Towels), helmets, yoga mats, pushpins, even specialty fabrics like flannel and fleece, so you can sew up your own breast-cancer-reminder jammies, blankets, pillows and scarves in case you can't find every single thing you might want to eat, apply, wear or use pre-stamped with a pink ribbon logo or wrapped in Komen-emblazoned shrinkwrap all year long, everywhere you go.

I understand the original mission of the Komen Foundation, and the desire to promote awareness of a cancer that used to be hidden and whispered about by women who were embarrassed to draw attention to their breasts. I applaud the desire to raise money to get millions of women to watch for signs of illness, to be aware of risk factors and to avoid behaviors that could lead to increased risk of cancer. I am delighted that they have raised millions of dollars for research into the causes and possible cures for this horrible disease. The diagnosis can be wrenching, the treatment terrifying, the waiting excruciating, the physical and emotional pain intolerable. I have lost loved ones to cancer, including breast cancer, and I agree wholeheartedly that helping people to avoid it or make it go away is a wonderful idea.

What I do not like is the assumption that blanketing the world with reminders of cancer is an appropriate or effective way of dealing with our fear of a disease which, despite our throwing more money at it than just about any other disease, is not affecting fewer women despite all our efforts but is increasing at an alarming rate. I understand why a woman who has been fighting breast cancer or whose life has been touched by it would want to let people know so that they could give her encouragement and be reminded to be vigilant so that they would not end up in her shoes. I can see wanting to show solidarity for those who have fought or lost the fight. But to want constant reminders of a devastating disease all over one's house, one's body, one's garden, one's canned goods, one's ears, one's cupcakes, one's Christmas tree or one's menorah is, to me, disturbing.

Some call this constant swathing of the world in baby-girl pink a desire to celebrate life; I believe it is an effort to totemize these pink items as if they were charms so that they might ward off cancer. See, you bad cancer! We're not afraid of saying your name and drawing attention to you! We'll hang cancer streamers (from the party store), float mylar cancer balloons (from Safeway), put out the breast cancer Kleenex, use the special cancer edition disposable Swiffer cloths, eat the Campbell's chicken noodle soup from the pink can, and serve breast cancer ribbon-bedecked Hershey's Kisses and drink cancer-awareness-labeled wine (both of which increase our cancer risk: increased body fat and moderate alcohol consumption significantly increase the likelihood that a woman will be diagnosed with breast cancer). That will show you, cancer! We'll use hair colorants and shampoos with ingredients proven to be carcinogenic, but we'll feel good about it because the Komen logo is on the box, even when there's nothing on the packaging saying that any portion of the proceeds from the product will benefit the Komen Foundation. We'll buy fatty snacks with pink ribbons on them and feel good that we just did something important to end cancer, when actually the company will make a huge profit by using pink packaging that tricks shoppers into feeling like eating their chips will save the world, then may pay only a tiny portion of the proceeds (sometimes less than a penny per unit sold) to an organization which actually does something to help women or men with breast cancer, or which helps people not to get it in the first place.

Cancer candy, shoes, spaghetti sauce and mouth guards constantly remind everyone with and without the disease of the existence of cancer in the cutest, pinkest, girliest fashion, until we become completely inured to it. Many women fetishize the color pink; some coyly post Facebook status updates with the colors of their bras because they somehow believe that making sexual innuendoes and encouraging people to imagine our breasts in lingerie will certainly lower the incidence of a vile disease that maims and damages and hurts and kills those we love. How?

Getting more women to pay attention to changes in their breasts and believe in the importance of regular mammograms results in more cancer diagnoses, but the increase in breast cancer cases over the past three decades is clearly correlated to other factors as well, including diet, alcohol use and environment. This is the information we need to spread. Is this information getting out there as much as it should, or does it get washed away in the tide of pink-packaged Pepperidge Farm partially hydrogenated cookies and rosy-hued Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets?

Part of the huge increase in breast cancer diagnoses over the past two decades is because of increased awareness and treatment, it's true; partly it's because diseases of affluence, like obesity, have seen a shocking increase over the past few decades, and they also increase the risk of breast cancer. And partly, well, we just don't know; we don't understand why breast cancer is rising, and why the Pacific Northwest, where I live, has an especially high number of incidents of breast cancer. It may be because vitamin D deficiency is extremely common here because of the frequently overcast skies, and such a deficiency is correlated with increased risk. But there seems to be more than that. Should we do more research? Sure! But should we think we're doing our part because we buy pink Komen deer lawn ornaments from the Lowe's garden department?

Don't all of these product tie-ins raise huge amounts of money for research or awareness? Some have, and that's great. But did you ever notice that may products sport pink labels but give no specific information about how much of your purchase price will go to charity? That can mean a particular purchase can net $5 for a good cause, or 5¢, or nothing at all. Sometimes a company will pledge a set amount from the sale of every package, say 50¢ from each sale, up to a total amount, like $10,000. So, after they've sold 20,000 packages, they keep all the proceeds from every package sold thereafter. If they print a half-million pink bags that make people feel better about the company and encourage consumers to pay full price for their wares because of the feel-good factor, they can make a huge profit from their supposed largess.

Is this bad? It does raise some money for a good cause, but the public is often misled regarding how much. If consumers feel they've already done their part in the fight against cancer because they bought three pink-labeled snacks, some dish soap and a bottle of nail polish, all of which actually provided a grand total of 30¢ to charity, one can argue that being misled into thinking that one has done enough is not good for society.

The Komen Foundation is extremely marketing driven, but according to Charity Navigator, a research organization which publishes statistics about thousands of charities and their incomes, expenditures and effectiveness, the Komen Foundation is well run. It is not, however, the only organization which benefits breast cancer research or encourages awareness. Other top-rated breast cancer charities with lower overhead than the Komen Foundation include the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (which also puts its logos on and benefits from sales of many products), Living Beyond Breast Cancer, the National Breast Cancer Foundation and the Breast Cancer Network of Strength.

You can also donate directly to research institutions like the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which does groundbreaking cancer research and works with the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance to provide treatment to thousands of people each year. If you have difficulty with the idea of giving to an organization which does some of its testing on animals, you can direct your gifts toward divisions of the organization which do not do research but provide treatment, or choose an organization that focuses on awareness instead of research, or you can donate to any of the wonderful hospice organizations around the country. They do remarkable work alleviating pain and providing comfort for those with terminal diseases. They give great aid to their families, friends and caregivers as well.

Should you give up on buying things with pretty pink ribbon emblems? Not if you already like those products and you like the color pink. But purchasing them won't confer immunity to cancer or buy you good karma points; your pink items aren't totems that will save you or those you love, nor do they provide as much funding to anti-cancer charities as most people think they do. What does help? Healthy living, regular screening and donating directly to or volunteering at good organizations. Also important is helping those you know with cancer (or any serious illness) by telling them you'd like to bring a meal (or meals), babysit, clean house or do other chores for them, and mean it. Rather than asking "Can I do anything?" try to offer something specific. See if they really want it (maybe they don't need what you're offering) and then ask when it would be most helpful instead of doing it on your schedule, which may not work with theirs. Provide reading material, movies or company (if they want it) to distract them during treatment. If you have time, let them know you'd be happy to to take them to radiation or chemo appointments. Offer encouragement often so they don't feel forgotten or alone; people with long-term illnesses or extended treatments suffer when people get compassion fatigue and stop checking in. These small but meaningful actions will go a lot further than buying a new pair of pink breast cancer awareness sweatpants.

The Robin Hood of the Art World

Is graffiti art? And if it is, is the defacement of others' property ever justifiable in the service of art? When is graffiti (or "guerilla art," or "street art") okay? When it says something meaningful? When it's well done? When it's pretty? When famous people say it's art?

Let's suggest for a moment that it's always wrong to deface others' property. After a graffiti attack, once a property has already been defaced, is there ever a justification in leaving the defacement/art in place? What if it's really great-looking, astonishingly intricate, brilliant in its message: would those circumstances justify the illegal (and some would say unethical) action that created it?

These are important questions to consider when discussing or viewing graffiti art or "street art," and a documentary that addresses them would be fascinating. However, Exit Through the Gift Shop, the excellent new documentary on street art, doesn't address any of them. And it doesn't need to. Subtitled "The world's first Street Art disaster movie," it's a fascinating film on its own merits, even though it leaves the ethics of all the principal characters in the film essentially unexplored. The film itself may be at least in part an elaborate hoax. If it is, it's still worth seeing.

The most famous graffiti artist in the world, and certainly one of the most talented, is a Briton who goes by the pseudonym Banksy. Banksy is a wily and elusive character who has been creating graffiti art, first in England and then internationally, since the early 1990s. He began as a common tagger but after too many run-ins with the law, he decided he needed to develop a new style that would allow him to prep a public outdoor space, create his art as quickly as possible, then disappear before cops could show up and arrest him. He developed a system in which he created a series of stencils, then smuggled them to various spots around Britain and used one or more of them to build up intricate and often sophisticated images, sometimes adding freehand strokes to the stenciled areas. His pieces often feature wry comments spray-painted next to or within the images. Subjects have ranged from small single-color rats (a frequent motif) to huge murals of policemen in riot gear dancing with daisies to pop culture parodies. He's often created life-sized people or animals, including policemen kissing each other and children in surprising situations. His messages are usually usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment.

Over time, Banksy's wit, talent and cleverness at hiding his identity made him a cult figure, and his art became so desired and in such great demand that people began removing his works from walls, cutting chunks out of tagged buildings and selling them at auction, even on eBay. He has created a number of pieces on canvas as well, and they now sell for grand sums at no less august an institution than Sotheby's.

Banksy often paints works that mimic the style and subject matter of old masters but which show clever twists, such as a 17th century village scene in which the buildings are covered in modern graffiti. He has repeatedly smuggled his paintings into major art galleries such as the Tate in London and New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum, then hung each piece, complete with fancy frame and descriptive placard, among famous masterpieces. Sometimes museums have taken weeks to discover the subterfuge before removing his works. In 2005 his version of a primitive Lascaux-style cave painting depicting a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping cart was hung in the British Museum. When it was discovered, the British Museum, home to such important pieces as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon's Elgin Marbles, wisely added Banksy's painting to the permanent collection.

Despite his remarkably varied artistic talent, Banksy fits well into the graffiti artist or "street artist" genre because of his guerilla-style illegal forays into public places, which he then vandalizes, albeit wittily and with great skill, leaving evidence of his cunning alongside artistic talent. Many street artists have more swagger than technical skill, and the "Screw you, society!" anarchic message their graffiti announces to the world is usually more compelling than the actual art they produce. Banksy is not unusual among graffitists in his desire to remain anonymous and avoid arrest for his illegal activities, but he does show particular skill, subtlety and cleverness.

Some of his ruses, such as cutting a red British telephone box in half, reassembling it and welding it so looks as if it's been hacked in two and bent, and then burying a hatchet in it, take not just daring and skill but some major resources to create, transport and maneuver into place. For fun several years ago, he counterfeited a million pounds worth of British currency with the face of Princess Diana taking the place of Queen Elizabeth II, but the results were so believable that attempts to spend the faux currency were all too successful, and he ended up with boxes of funny-money that he didn't dare distribute for fear of being prosecuted for a federal crime.

Banksy's story is perhaps the most compelling one in the world of graffiti art, but it takes an unexpected back seat to the story of his videographer in the Banksy-made film Exit Through the Gift Shop. The documentary made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is packing arthouse cinemas around the world just a few months after its debut. The gist of the story is this: In the 1990s, Thierry Guetta, a French-born entrepreneur, ran a successful LA clothing boutique which sold vintage rock-and-roller and punky clothes which he bought for almost nothing in scrap bundles and sold for obscenely high prices. On the side, he began obsessively videotaping everything, including the illegal activities of his cousin, a French graffiti artist who made small mosaics based on bit-mapped Space Invaders videogame characters. His cousin, who called himself Space Invader, allowed Guetta to film him gluing his guerilla-art mosaics around Europe and America, and Guetta's videotaping obsession finally had a focus. He started documenting almost all the top players in the street art movement to the exclusion of doing almost anything else throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s.

One artist who allowed Guetta constant access was Shepard Fairey, first famous for spreading over a million images of Andre the Giant's face on stickers and posters around the world, all atop the word OBEY, as if he were the ubiquitous Big Brother of Orwell's distopian classic 1984. Later Fairey became famous for the red and blue poster of Barack Obama above the word HOPE that becames an official image of Obama's campaign and has since been endlessly parodied. Fairey is now being sued by the Associated Press because he didn't have permission to use the AP photo he based the poster on. A likeable guy who gets around, Fairey had become friendly with Banksy. Fairey was impressed after seeing Guetta's obsessive compulsion to document graffitists and Guetta's willingness to put himself in harm's way and spend his own money and time helping Fairey and other street artists create and hang their work. According to the documentary, he felt Guetta could be trusted to meet and even videotape Banksy when Banksy came to Los Angeles. Guetta proved himself an extremely willing, friendly and helpful assistant, driving Banksy around, showing him the best public walls on which to ply his craft, and making his life and his art easier. Banksy soon allowed Guetta to film him at work, trusting that Guetta would keep his identity safe, which he did.

Here's where the questions of who is an artist and what is art get confused. If you want to keep the upshot of the documentary a mystery, you might want to skip the next three paragraphs.

Eventually, Banksy felt it was time for Thierry Guetta to edit his huge collection of Banksy videos into a documentary, something Guetta had said he would eventually do but for which he had no training or experience. According to Banksy, after six months Guetta had cobbled together a headache-inducing, chopped-and-diced fiasco of a film without any narrative at all, a barrage of undifferentiated random images from his thousands of uncataloged videotapes of Banksy and other graffiti artists. Upon seeing this mess, Banksy suggested that Thierry give over access to all the videos and Banksy himself would create a movie out of them. To distract Guetta, Banksy suggested that Guetta should go off for six months and create art of his own and then have a little show. This made some sort of sense; the videographer had started doing some stencils of himself around LA and signing them MBW, which he said stood for Mr. Brainwash. Banksy thought Guetta would have a small vanity show someplace and the distraction would get him out of Banksy's hair while Banksy put together a reasonable documentary out of Guetta's frightening mishmash of videotape.

However, Guetta, now consumed with the idea that he was an artiste who could make a fortune and have a giant, splashy, expensive solo show that would wow the world, mortaged his house, hired a cadre of actual artists, prop designers and contractors, and rented a huge, expensive space in downtown LA. He told other artists to make largely unattractive knock-offs of Andy Warhol-style pop art pieces and spray painted silkscreen images of pop culture icons, claimed and signed them all as his own work, and relentlessly hyped himself around LA as the next big thing. Seven thousand people lined up to see Mr. Brainwash's opening and his hundreds of derivative paintings, many of them created by others with almost no or no input from Guetta at all.

LA loved him. He sold a million dollars worth of "art" in two weeks. So many people flooded the gallery that what had been expected to be a two-week show stayed up for two months. Madonna asked him to create a Warholesque image of her for her latest greatest hits album. Mr. Brainwash has his first New York show this spring. And the joke was on Banksy. Or was it? While it illustrates the phoniness of the art world that he's always reviled and parodied, a significant contingent of art world critics and followers believe they recognize the clever guiding hand of Banksy himself behind this cynical, clever and amusing film; they believe he put up the money for Guetta's show and is using Guetta as a frontman for his ruse.

Whether this is a clever con or simply a wild situation that spun out of control while Banksy was distracted by the editing down of Guetta's archive of tapes, it is a perfect illustration of the sort of art world nonsense Banksy has always opposed. Banksy has staged it as the story of an authentic (if anarchistic) hermitic artist who hides out among us and goes by a pseudonym vs. the faux-artist con-man entrepreneur with little if any talent for art and no insight into what makes it good, important or inspiring. Even when Banksy has created art meant to be sold to the throngs angling to pay real money to own a genuine Banksy, he has happily bitten the hands that feed him.

In 2007, Sotheby's auction house auctioned off three of his pieces for a total of over £170,000; to coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit." In his quest to meet and videotape all the bright lights of the street art movement, Guetta, on the other hand, became so hungry to be seen as a creator and star rather than part of the supporting cast of the art world that he created a huge show out of nothing but borrowed money and chutzpah, and, horribly, pulled it off.

The question of whether what guerilla street artists do (trespassing and defacing property that is not theirs) is ethical or justifiable is never addressed in this film. That's understandable; Banksy is an outlaw hero who probably sees himself as akin to Butch Cassidy or Robin Hood, someone who points out the flaws in the system in an outrageously public way while remaining essentially invisible, only popping out often enough to build his legend and prove his existence. There's no reason why such a person would want to draw attention to the dark side of what he does, especially when he doesn't appear to recognize any darkness in it.

A film this cleverly and entertainingly made adds to his allure and stature while presenting his actions in the best possible light. Without ever explaining or justifying himself, he wangles his way into the audience's affections and makes the story unfold in a way that builds sympathy for the characters, all of whom are literal outlaws. We find ourselves rooting for them to get away with their trespasses without ever feeling like we're being manipulated or spoonfed with obvious and unnecessary explanations or justifications. Banksy really knows how to tell and sell a story, and, like a sleight-of-hand master, how to distract us from many of the important issues without our stopping to think, hey, what about the elephant in the room?

Speaking of which, there's a great scene in which Banksy places an actual live elephant in the middle of a gallery show in order to prove a point. Of course, the point is lost on the media; they report that PETA (and LA Animal Services) didn't like him painting an elephant with children's facepaints and putting it on display, which is indeed newsworthy, but they seemed to have no concern with what the point of his painting the elephant was. This example of his disdain for people who don't think about the meaning or point of art is astute, but it also shows his arrogance in thinking that, because others don't share his sophisticated ideas and opinions on art, their own tastes, questions and concerns about what he does and how he does it are not just debatable but abominable proof of their philistinism. While I share his disappointment that people are so happy to accept pop culture simplifications of art rather than develop opinions of their own, I find his open contempt for people who don't share his worldview distressingly self-absorbed and arrogant.

Banksy shows himself to be a witty and articulate man, both via his art and in the speeches he makes to the camera in this documentary. He speaks and gesticulates while wearing a dark hoody that obscures his face and and has his voice altered digitally. He could have been interviewed off camera and had the documentary's narrator Rhys Ifans, the dryly entertaining Welsh actor, repeat his words to ensure that nobody could recognize his speech patterns or accent, but Banksy clearly enjoys scooting out of the shadows just a bit, providing blurry-faced proof of his escapades to the world via Guetta's videos, letting people hear his accent, albeit in altered form. He is playing with his anonymity here, heightening the drama yet again, just as he does in his art, working the darkness and spray cans and stencils until he's constructed a shadowy version of himself that he can carefully control access to.

Banksy appears to have a strong system of values (often fine ones, like looking out for the little guy and avoiding governmental tyranny), but seems to have little respect for the rights of others whose values differ (such as those who own property which he would like to cover in examples of his self-expression). This places him squarely alongside other heroes of the anarchistic British punk movement who have determined that destruction and defacement of things that they don't value is justification enough for ignoring laws which seek to respect property and and which respect the needs of a society based on the rule of law.

In an attempt to focus attention on exploitative flaws in the capitalist system, socialists or, even further to the left on the political spectrum, anarchists like Banksy sometimes feel justified in ignoring property rights entirely, saying they are an artificial and damaging construct which enslaves the poor and empowers the rich, thus denying basic human rights and dignity. If you believe that an entire system is wrong, it can be tempting to determine that you will no longer acknowledge its rules or its power over you and decide to do things your own way. But just as unfettered capitalism can lead to great selfishness and a lack of awareness or concern for the needs of others, unfettered socialism can lead to societies which refuse to give incentives or rewards for exceptional efforts or remarkable talents, and which can be perverted into unhealthy organisms which stamp out originality or innovation. Fortunately, hybrid societies with capitalistic bases and strong (though imperfect) social safety nets exist in several nations around the world. They show that a respect for the innate worth of every individual and the responsibility of society to look after its weakest members can be balanced with respect and recompense for exceptional talent and effort. They also show that respecting a person's property rights is an important component in respecting the person herself. No nation balances these opposing needs perfectly, but it is encouraging that millions around the world still strive to perfect their systems.

A healthy and safe hybrid society runs on respect for all the people in it, as well as for their legally-obtained possessions. And while Banksy has often shown himself to have a certain integrity, pointing out flaws in the art world and questioning the values of modern society, he has also shown a willingness to profit (sometimes enormously) by engaging in the same art world he mocks. To have true integrity, one could argue that he would have to turn down chances to make money off his art, but by selling works directly through Sotheby's, even as he mocks the process, he has become a part of the system he claims to disdain. On the one hand, I want to see someone so talented and original, someone of his wit and insight and great skill, benefit from his ability and be able to make a good living as an artist. On the other hand, it saddens me to see him revel in becoming rich off the sale of his own private possessions while feeling no compunction about messing with the possessions of others and mocking the owners in the process. He then makes those whose property he has vandalized look bad when they seek to remove his art, even though, if they leave it in place, they give a message to all graffiti artists and other vandals that if you're famous and clever or do a good enough job at it, the rules of respecting other's space and property no longer apply.

A society which makes exceptions for disrespect of property and laws of trespass invites evisceration of the social compact. Sad as I am to see some of Banksy's work disappear, I cannot blame the owners of the defaced spaces for showing their resolve not to let themselves become victims of vandalism, even clever or attractive vandalism, without a fight. Furthermore, Banksy knows that much of his work will be defaced or destroyed; he has chosen his medium and locations for precisely this reason. The impermanence makes seeing it as quickly as possible imperative, and that makes him an extra hot commodity and burnishes his oppressed outlaw image. It makes him a romantic figure of brash mystery.

Banksy can act as cynical about the superficialities of the art world as he wants, but he's making huge sums of money off that very world nowadays, so he's benefiting from the system he finds so corrupt. His hands aren't clean, either.

The Little Guy

You'd be shocked if a coworker said she could gauge the intelligence of a member of your company by the color of her skin, wouldn't you? If your child's teacher said Muslim kids aren't trustworthy, you'd notify the principal at once. If your favorite cafe's owner said he disliked gay people, his blatant bigotry would ensure that you'd never eat his risotto again. You're careful not to stereotype people in wheelchairs or wheatgrass juice drinkers, lesbians or limo drivers, Estonians or the elderly. You see how ridiculous it is to ascribe personality traits to whole groups, or make generalizations about ability or behavior based on so little information. You expect your friends, family and coworkers to show the same respect to others that you do.

So, why are so many otherwise sensitive, multiculturally aware folks so willing to put down the little guy? Why does society hold such contempt for short men? Why are smaller-than-average fellows passed over for jobs, relationships and pay raises at higher rates than other men? And why are jokes and snide asides about short men being less confident, virile or capable so pervasive?

Easy laughs at the expense of men who are mere inches shorter than average are commonly accepted in daily conversation, in ads, in TV shows and films, at work. Even the rare man who shares my own height of just five feet two inches is only 10% smaller than a man of average stature in the U.S., and most men who are publicly berated for being short come within 5% of average height. Why do we ascribe so much social importance and status to such a small variance in size?

My own height is below the 25th percentile for American women, so I've always been aware of society's preference for taller people. But as a petite female, I sometimes benefit from stereotypes about small women. Short women are often assumed to be cuter, nicer or more approachable before people even get to know us. Our stature is less threatening, so strangers often assume our personalities will follow suit. Because people expect us to be friendlier, meeker and weaker than average, they might let down their guard more easily with us and be more willing to help us. However, they also condescend more, sometimes assume we're less capable or even less intelligent, and not infrequently they offer assistance we haven't asked for and don't want, sometimes insistently, as if being smaller than they are means we can't be trusted to gauge our own strength and ability appropriately.

In study after study, the majority of men say they much prefer dating women who are smaller than they are. Shorter-than-average women make men feel bigger and stronger in comparison with taller women. Tall women definitely find it harder to find men who are comfortable dating them, and they say overwhelmingly that they prefer to date men even taller than they. They then hear fewer comments about their height and get less attention for sticking out in a crowd. But tall women also have a lot of positive characteristics ascribed to them. They're assumed to be more capable and powerful in social, academic and business settings, so they earn more money as a group than their smaller sisters. There are various advantages to being taller than average, of medium height or even shorter than average height for women, and men of taller-than-average height gain noticeable benefits in social, financial, academic, business and governmental realms. But short men? They're at a social disadvantage across the board.

Surveys of attitudes reveal that people both perceive and treat people of shorter stature as inferior. This is particularly notable in the business sphere. International university studies have shown that short people, male and female, are paid less than taller people, with disparities similar in magnitude to those ascribed to race and gender gaps. Tall people have significant advantages when it comes to hiring, pay, promotions and prominence within their companies. A 2005 survey of the heights of Fortune 500 companies' CEOs revealed that they were on average six feet tall, approximately three inches taller than the average U.S. man. Fully 30% of these CEOs were six feet two inches tall or more. Ninety percent of CEOs are of above average height.

In the U.S., taller candidates have the advantage in electoral politics, though heightism isn't a problem in Russia, where President Dmitry Medvedev is just over five feet five inches tall and former President Vladimir Putin is just over five feet seven. France's President Nicolas Sarkozy is just over five feet six. He is married to the former model Carla Bruni, who is five feet nine inches tall, and this fact is constantly remarked upon throughout the world. Endless jokes have been made about his power being enough of an aphrodesiac to make up for his lack of height, which many assume would otherwise make him appear weak and sexually less desirable. As if a man's attractiveness, sexual skill or ability to be a good husband had anything to do with his height!

Shockingly, heightism has been cited as one of the underlying causes of the Rwandan genocide, in which approximately one million people were killed. One of the reasons that political power was conferred on minority Tutsis by the exiting Belgians was reportedly because Tutsis were taller and were therefore seen by the Belgians as superior and more suited to governance than Hutus. That's a horrifying price to pay for baseless prejudice, isn't it?

Why do a few inches of height matter so much that over 90% of women say they wouldn't want to date someone shorter than they are? Why do men and women find being of short stature so risible? Film and TV directors often elicit laughs by having a short man make an entrance in a scene when a man of power, action or attractiveness is expected, playing off the audience's expectation that a charismatic individual must be tall. Think for a moment about how often people laugh at the mere idea that a short man could be considered worthy of their admiration, just as people used to laugh at the idea of showing respect to women, black people or gays and lesbians.

The excellent actor Peter Dinklage, who was so moving in the film The Station Agent, has made a career of playing bright, serious men with dwarfism in a world in which people make constant assumptions about their ability, their personalities or their manhood based on nothing more than height. The brilliant economist Robert Reich met Bill Clinton while they were Rhodes Scholars; he went on to be Clinton's labor secretary and is now a professor at UC Berkeley. He is a particularly witty and pleasant fellow, and is quite willing to make jokes about his four-foot-ten-inch stature. He has to be a good sport about this; it is cited as a relevant fact about him far too frequently. Reich is wise to let this roll off his back; when short men show fatigue or frustration at the frequent comments and stares, the public that so enjoys razzing them about this inane fact is all too quick to turn nasty and attribute a panoply of bad characteristics to them based on, yes, their lack of height.

We've all heard that short men are supposed to be prone to the Napoleon Complex, or Little Man Syndrome, an alleged type of inferiority complex said to affect men of short stature who attempt to overcompensate for their height in other aspects of their lives. Yet this supposed syndrome or complex does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Ironically, Napoleon Bonaparte was, at five feet six, taller than the average European man of his time. Yet how many images have you seen of Napoleon depicted as unnaturally short, and how many times has that trope been used for comic effect? He and countless men of less-than-average height have been depicted as angry, pompous and much shorter than they are, and the negative characteristics ascribed to them are often assumed to be related to a burning desire to overcome supposed embarrassment and self-hatred brought on by their height.

Think of how often this cliché appears in television, film and especially advertising. When people need visual shorthand to express negative characteristics, isn't it remarkable how often they resort to using height as a signifier for social, sexual or business failure? The primary villain in the popular animated movie Shrek is Lord Farquaad, whose most notable physical characteristic is his extreme shortness. He is repeatedly made the butt of jokes about his stature, even in his presence, despite his power and authority. His every entrance is made more ridiculous by his attempts to conceal his lack of height. The idea that his dastardly and grandiose gestures are all efforts to compensate for shortness (or his supposed lack of virility) is not only alluded to tacitly but is explicitly mentioned numerous times. His small stature is, if you will, visual shorthand meant to allow the audience to detest and dehumanize him so that he can be made more hateful and ridiculous in our eyes.

Michael J. Fox has been an extremely popular actor and public figure for over 25 years. He is talented, likeable, attractive and witty, and his articulate and impassioned advocacy for stem cell research brings a huge amount of attention and funding to his cause. He suffers from Parkinson's Disease, which often causes embarrassing physical tremors and even difficulty speaking, but he has been willing to brave the snide remarks and derision of people like Rush Limbaugh in order to help his others, no matter how difficult or exhausting public speaking are for him, and no matter how much travel and public scrutiny and exhaustion aggravate his symptoms. Yet, despite his remarkable efforts, which have allowed his foundation to fund over $171 million worth of research to help people with Parkinson's to live better lives, public figures and private ones continue to make jokes about his height and caustically remark on his shortness, as if his size should in any way impact our ability to take him seriously.

Tom Cruise's having had several wives taller than he is has gotten nearly as much press as his dismaying affiliation with Scientology, and has garnered much more press than stories of his actual acting talent or business acumen. His over-the-top demeanor and outspoken behavior certainly merit attention and even, at times, derision, but why is his height alluded to alongside descriptions of his behavior, as if the two were related? He is one of the most popular, lauded, influential, powerful and wealthy men of all time, yet there is usually a derisive smirk on the faces of commentators and poison in their prose when they refer to him. How many times have you heard journalists laugh because a shorty like Tom Cruise thinks himself worthy of the amazonian goddesses at his side? And how minuscule, how lilliputian, is this allegedly tiny and unworthy human being who thinks he's man enough to stand next to Katie Holmes (who is five feet eight) or Nicole Kidman (who is five feet ten)? At five feet seven, he's two inches shorter than the average U.S. male. Two inches. The width of a lemon. But because he dares to fall in love with women who are taller than he, he is castigated and verbally emasculated by media outlets on a nearly daily basis. How ridiculous is that?

For the fun of it, consider the following list of shorter-than-average famous men. Consider their accomplishments, personalities, their talents, their influences on culture. Think about whether they fit general stereotypes of short men. Then consider whether you have unwittingly bought in to these stereotypes, or carelessly perpetuated any of them. It's so common, and so easy to do. But it's not fair. It's time to stand up for the little guy.

Five feet tall: David Ben-Gurion • Andrew Carnegie • Danny DeVito • Fiorello LaGuardia

Five feet two: Buckminster Fuller • Paul Simon

Five feet three: • Mohandas Gandhi • Sammy Davis Jr. • Martin Scorcese

Five feet four: Ludwig van Beethoven • Mel Brooks • Elton John • Pablo Picasso • Rod Serling • Auguste Rodin

Five feet five: Harry Houdini • J.R.R. Tolkien • Lou Reed • Armand Hammer • Gus Grissom

Five feet six: T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) • Alfred Hitchcock • Spud Webb • Bob Dylan • Peter Falk • William Faulkner • Elijah Wood • Dustin Hoffman

Five feet seven: Martin Luther King, Jr. • Stephen Spielberg • Mario Andretti • Doug Flutie • Bono • F. Scott Fitzgerald • David Eckstein • James Cagney • Robert Downey Jr. • Salvador Dali

Finding Beauty in Each Day

Tonight I watched the end of the PBS six-hour series "This Emotional Life" to see the segment featuring my friend Betty Schneider. Betty, who is 87 and has always loved learning and finding beauty in the world, said that her life continues to be filled with pleasurable, meaningful activities and good times with people who are dear to her. I found it moving to hear her speak about how good old age can be.

Betty misses Jack, her husband of 61 years, and wishes she could share her ongoing adventures with him, but in the six years since his death she has found ways past her sadness over his loss and again enjoys and appreciates her life. Her days are rich with activity, and there are still new things to learn and people to enjoy. She takes classes, lunches with friends, plays the piano and goes to cultural events. Life has never stood still for her.

Betty is inspiring not only in the way she lives her life now, but in the way she has always sought beauty and understanding and wished to be a force for good in the world. She loves to share the things she's learned, seen or created in the most positive and energetic ways. When I first met her and her husband Jack over 20 years ago, they spent part of each year in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University, where Jack had long taught statistics, and they spent another part of the year in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Jack taught and did research and Betty got her PhD in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (known to South Africans as Wits). Already in their late sixties and early seventies, they traveled back and forth and around the world, going to lectures and concerts and plays, taking cruises, doing research, writing and filling their lives with interesting people and stories.

Jack and Betty were active in liberal politics and loved sharing political ideas and keeping up with international news. Betty took photos so beautiful that some were published in National Geographic magazine. She painted, she wrote and published, she had friends to dinner often and brought tales of her adventures to others' parties. At Wits she made a friend of Johnny Clegg, the sensational South African pop star whose music helped spread the anti-apartheid message around the world in the 1980s; she and Johnny were both members of Wits' anthropology department.

Part of what has always made Betty such a delight is her positivism and energy. There's nothing frantic or edgy or forced in this. She's down to earth and easy to talk to, but she's also a worldly intellectual who can speak engagingly on many subjects. She is always curious to learn more and takes a genuine interest in those around her.

Betty's life is rich and full because she makes those around her feel that they and their interests matter, and that good things can and will be done if we make an effort. She is patient and gives her full attention to those she is with. As full as her life and her mind are, she still has the time and interest to open herself to new experiences. In this way, she draws toward her people of energy, positivity, passion and excitement. Because she gives so much, I believe people bring forward their best selves when they see Betty because they feel valued, respected and inspired.

I believe Betty knows the keys to a rich life at any age. Never stop learning. Never stop exploring. Keep your ears open. Find things to be passionate about. Work for things you care about. Give people respect and full attention when in their presence. Make compromises and consider the needs of your partner and those you care about. Understand that personal growth and the support of those you love take effort and sacrifice. Look for the good in people. Each of these things is true at any age, and none of them requires superhuman strength or extreme intelligence. When each day is lived with a spirit of openheartedness and positivity, when age doesn't stop a person from trying new things, taking risks and starting whole new ventures, each day can be full, meaningful and worthwhile at any age.

The PBS series focused largely on the importance of human relationships in making people happy, and on the things people do to either limit or damage their relationships with others or to encourage and enhance interpersonal closeness. I believe Betty shows by her example a number of behaviors that draw positivity and happiness into her life. This radiates from her life into the lives of others. She knows the value of being grateful for what she has. She shows the beauty of appreciating the moment and paying attention to what is happening now, and to what those around us have to say. She shows the power of continually expanding the mind and seeking out new skills, new understandings and new friendships while nurturing the old relationships. Betty laughs well and often, and her sense of humor sets those around her at ease and encourages them to relax.

Betty is an exceptional woman, but the example she sets isn't beyond the reach of those of us who may have less energy, drive or mental agility. The attitude of positivity, possibility and appreciation she carries with her each day brings her joy and spreads that joy to others. If we can learn anything from remarkable people like Betty, let us learn to appreciate and bring that sense of wonder and a desire to share the best of our discoveries with others each day.

Sleepy Time Gal

Sleep and I have a love/hate relationship.

On the one hand, it's always felt like an enormous waste of time to me, and I resent having to cut short my days by going to bed when I could be doing any of a million other things that would be more fun or interesting. I've had trouble falling asleep since I was a little girl, and I'm a light sleeper and wake easily in the night. Then I have trouble getting back to sleep. I can rarely sleep on planes or in other conveyances, and conditions have to be just right for me to fall asleep in the first place. Morning light and noises creep into my consciousness and even pillows over my head can only help me so much when I try to sleep in past dawn to make up for the insomnia of the previous night. Sleeping is fraught with a lot of frustration and irritation for me.

On the other hand, without good, regular, deep sleep, I feel awful. Giving birth, while the hardest thing I've ever done, was less physically overwhelming and difficult than the three years of chronic sleep deprivation I suffered after my daughter (also a poor sleeper) was born. Normally an energetic person, when I'm sleep-deprived I feel lackluster and without drive, and the headaches I'm already prone to settle on me more often and for longer periods. They wake me and won't let me sleep, but, cruelly, they require sleep to go away. Once one of my frequent headaches turns into a full-blown migraine, no medicine can dull the pain or make it stop. The only thing that will cure a migraine for me is sleep, but the misery of the migraines pushes sleep out of reach. Then, for the hours until I am exhausted and depleted enough to doze off, all I can do is writhe and whimper and, occasionally, vomit, until I can coax Morpheus close enough to whisper in my ear and let me doze. Only then can I make the nausea-inducing jackhammer in my head desist, or at least decrease the decibel level for a while.

I've been frustrated not to have kept up my blog for so many weeks, but trying to work around loved ones' conflicting sleep schedules in order to have time to talk with them or help them out late at night or early in the morning, when they're free, and feeling always sleep deprived for months on end has meant I've felt less sharp, less productive, frustratingly behind in many projects. My various ideas for essays all felt uninspiring and not worth the hours they take to write because my fatigue makes everything feel like a bigger effort with less reward at the end of it. I feel like I've been grasping at sleep and just missing it, catching only a few feathers in my hand when I try to hold onto it. When I have time to get a big gulp of sleep and can finally catch up, I feel wonderful and run around happily, making the most of it, but my schedule hasn't let me carry that feeling for more than a day or two before I again fall into a series of sleep-deprived days and nights that make me anxious and angry at my body's inability to relax. And lying in bed, exhausted and headachey and mad at myself for not being asleep, does not make me feel sleepier.

I've made pacts with myself to get to bed earlier and get into sleep-friendly habits, and when this school holiday ends, I'm determined to again give this my best effort. But the rush and bustle of holiday preparations has upended my plans and the sleep-deprived slog through the fog continues. I've been going to bed very late, waking in the middle of the night and again early in the morning, fighting headaches and fatigue day after day. I've been feeling ever more frustrated during what was supposed to have been a week in which I could catch up on some lost sleep and reset my broken body clock while having fun relaxing with people dear to me. Hard as I've worked to be ready for this holiday season, I still haven't sent out holiday cards or responded to letters or e-mails. Fatigue makes communication take twice the effort it usually does.

Much as I love Christmas, when I think of how I've actually spent past Christmases, I realize how many of them have found me feeling exhausted, sick with colds, headachey, ill with chronic stomach problems, or completely sidelined with migraines. Somehow every year I overplan and undersleep and again realize, oh yeah, the holidays make me sick! Of course, the problem is not with a Christmas virus or New Year's infection; I just push myself too hard and hold my expectations too high, and I forget how lack of sleep, perfectionism and frequent socializing compress my introverted self into a tightly-wound knot, much as I wish they didn't. I have tried repeatedly to push myself to be what I wish I were, and I've worked valiantly to package myself as more extroverted than I really am in an effort to show more people my best self and make them feel my appreciation for them. Sadly, eventually all that crumbles and the sleepy, headachey little mouse within asks plaintively if it can please just get a little peace and quiet for a while.

Holiday socializing, even with those who are very dear and important, requires a lot of energy from introverts like me. We need quiet time to prepare for and recover from interactions with others. Extroverts don't understand this about introverts; even when we're having fun interacting with others, we're burning through reserves of energy that need regular fill-ups, and those fill-ups come from time on our own, not from spending more time in the company of others. Extroverts gain energy and comfort from doing things together; we introverts love our friends and family dearly, too, but we need time alone each day to gather our wits and prepare ourselves to be up and on and ready for action. If we don't get some time between engagements, we feel overwhelmed and anxious.

We don't want to appear unfriendly, and you're not unimportant to us just because we need to back away for a little while. We just don't gather energy from our interactions the way extroverts do. And since the U.S. population is supposedly made up of about 75% extroverts and only 25% introverts, the general cultural bias around here is toward people who draw energy from parties and who like making small talk with strangers, and who think fun equals being around other people as much as possible. These people just can't understand those of us who never went to a prom and didn't want to, and can't imagine wanting to go to a movie alone instead of going to a bar or a party. Though I love spending time in the company of dear ones, if I'm not well rested beforehand, such visits can wear me out, and then I get frustrated with myself for not being able to last longer without needing to retreat for a bit.

Among my resolutions for 2010 is to quit beating myself up for not being someone I can't be. That means not expecting myself to be a party person just because the season dictates that We Shall All Enjoy Parties Now. It means listening to my body when it tells me You Need To Go To Bed Earlier On A Regular Basis. It means worrying less about letting others down by not being as social as they want me to be and explaining that I need more time between social engagements or that I need to leave earlier than some folks do. I worry too much that people will find me a stick-in-the-mud since some in my past took umbrage at my having to spend regular time on my own. But I want to learn to look after the quiet little mouse inside better next year, rather than trying to dress her in a party dress and high heels when she really just needs some fuzzy slippers and a nice cup of chamomile tea.

So Bad They're Good

With film, there are good movies, and then there are movies that are so bad, they're a special kind of good. In the second case, their very badness makes them so ridiculous that gawping at them in disbelief and outrage, followed by a satisfying session in which one rips them to shreds with a critical eye, brings the greatest delight.

When it comes to science fiction films and television shows, the ridiculously bad category is actually usually more fun than the good movie category. Sure, there are classic science fiction films done so well that their cleverness, artfulness, innovation and insight stand out and inspire admiration: Alien, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the excellent new film Moon with Sam Rockwell, Minority Report, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are exciting, innovative, even moving films that transcend the limitations of their genre to appeal even to people who don't usually enjoy consuming science fiction stories.

The wide and lovable middle ground features classics that are enjoyable, tell good stories, make people think and have staying power but still have a pleasing element of campiness to them. This large batch of movies includes one of my favorite television series of all time, the original Twilight Zone series of the early 1960s (how I do love Rod Serling), as well as fun-to-watch films like the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still ("Klaatu barada nikto!"), Logan's Run, the original Godzilla, and the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston's character is such a complete jerk in Planet of the Apes that one rather enjoys his comeuppance, but you have to love his delivery when he shouts "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" And yes, it does have one of the greatest final scenes in film history. If you want some fun surprises with your science fiction, check out the assortment of television and movie stars who gave memorable performances in episodes of the Twilight Zone, some toward the ends of their careers, others (including Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Burt Reynolds and William Shatner) in their younger years before they became household names.

The Godzilla film empire is one of the largest and longest running in movie history. The first Godzilla movie was actually titled something closer to Gojira in Japanese. Godzilla is the name given to the Westernized version of the film to which unnecessary narration and scenes with Raymond Burr were added to try to appeal to non-Japanese audiences. Apparently rendering the Japanese name into Roman alphabet characters as "Gojira," as is usually done, isn't exactly correct either; the proper pronunciation, as demonstrated here, sounds more like "Gozira."

There is a serious political undercurrent to the first Godzilla film. Created in 1954 at the height of the Cold War and just nine years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla is an allegory about the destruction caused by nuclear war and the frightening and, it was feared, unstoppable menace caused by nuclear radiation. Though supposedly a prehistoric creature, Godzilla's monstrous size and power were said to have come from modern exposure to nuclear radiation.

Below this middle section of cheesy but relatively well-made science fiction and fantasy films is the wonderfully deep and wide basement where one finds such delights as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Brain that Wouldn't Die, and the assorted Hercules and later Godzilla sequels with their rubber swords, rubber suits and laughable dubbing jobs. Much as I appreciate Ridley Scott's fine direction and Harrison Ford's intensity, the classic movie Blade Runner doesn't make me laugh myself weak the way watching oiled musclemen in teeny-tiny togas wrestling with people in foam suits who are supposed to be volcanic-rock-clad moon-men does. Godzilla being challenged for dominance by a giant moth around whom two tiny fairies fly and speak in unison? Priceless. A nearly-dead Bela Lugosi embarrassing himself in Ed Wood's horrendous Plan Nine from Outer Space? Jaw-droppingly laughable. Like a car wreck, it's hard to turn away when something that awful plays out before one's unbelieving eyes.

Of course, these baaad movies are awful on their own, but are rendered even more outrageously funny when snarky commentary is added, hence the success of the delightful Mystery Science Theater 3000 television series, which ran from 1988 to 1999. This cult classic show featured a man marooned in space and forced to watch terrible movies with no company except his robot buddies while his brain is monitored by mad scientists. Over a hundred awful movies and short subjects were skewered by the hosts and robots of MST3K, who make fun of the films with voice-over commentary in real time as we watch along with them. There were two hosts over the course of the series, and while Mike Nelson did a good job, nothing can match the deadpan wit of the original host and series creator, Joel Hodgson. Each episode intermingled skits (some lame, some wildly funny) interspersed with the movie footage, including a number of special songs and outrageous inventions. This is the sort of low-budget hilarity that cable access TV was invented for.

I grew up in an era of laughably low-budget science fiction television shows. Watching and enjoying them anew with my teenage daughter evokes a special, twisted nostalgia. Ah, yes, I remember the days when television production companies could get away with reusing the same bad papier-mache rock outcropping in every single episode of a series, as they did in Lost in Space (a series which features my favorite fictional robot of all time). It wasn't that long ago when female spaceship officers of the future were revealed to be wearing scary polyester panties in fabrics that matched their tiny tunics, so short were their sexy little uniforms (and yes, I'm talking to you, Lieutenant Uhura). Thanks to the SyFy channel, DVDs of MST3K and the easy access to endless classic (and classless) science fiction films provided by Netflix, we can introduce the joys of badly acted, badly cast, badly dubbed, badly directed, underfunded and horribly scribed stories of foam-rubber monsters and space travel gone awry to a whole new generation. Look into it: it's full of stars.

For What It's Worth

Journalists wondering how the recession has affected average people have been writing a lot of articles about the booming resale market lately. Nearly weekly I read about how consignment clothing shops, flea markets and thrift stores can hardly keep items in stock, they've become so popular. It's clear from ubiquitous Craigslist and eBay references on TV shows, in movies and in daily conversation that society has fully embraced resale culture.

We're more eager than ever to get what we perceive to be good deals in exchange for our hard-earned (or painfully borrowed) dollars. The old distaste for the outmoded, dated or used has been replaced with a new appreciation for vintage style. But how can we determine the true value of whatever we buy, new or used, in an economy where the cost and accepted value of everything—a job, a car, a house, a suit, a vacation—keeps shifting wildly? How do we know what our possessions, our talents, even our own selves, are really worth?

This summer at a garage sale I got an exquisite pair of sterling silver, pearl and pink tourmaline earrings for $1 from the same woman to whom I gave $10 for a plastic Darth Vader full-head mask and helmet. The chic earrings were quite a deal, but the Darth Vader head, made of plastic, a few screws and a battery-operated voice box that still worked, was, to my mind, the real deal. The earrings were made of materials with more intrinsic value: silver, pearl and gemstone earrings are a luxury item. However, one can find nice jewelry in many places, but a vintage Darth Vader head that plays James Earl Jones' voice with the flick of a button? THAT'S special. Why? Because it's hard to find, and well, it's a life-sized Darth Vader head. (Duh!) And since value has a lot to do with scarcity, that plastic toy is worth more to me (and probably on eBay, though I could never sell my precious Lord Vader's head) than the earrings, even though the original sales price for the earrings was probably higher.

The rarer and more collectible an item, the more desirable it is, and the greater the value people ascribe to it. So a plastic bobblehead figurine of a popular athlete still in its cardboard box might be considered more valuable than a complete set of cookware, a jade bracelet, a pound of Godiva chocolate or a portable dog kennel. This is so even though the bobblehead's components are worth a few cents at most, and it does nothing but wiggle disturbingly when poked, while the other items can be used, displayed, worn or devoured.

The bobblehead's value doesn't come from its usefulness or attractiveness or the innate value of its components. It's worth what the market says it's worth, based on what the marketplace thinks people will pay for it. Its value, like the value of any item or set of talents, is based on its necessity and desirability as determined by a mixture of largely emotional factors, as well as on its scarcity. I know people who "invested" in Beanie Babies at the height of their popularity, thinking that their value would rise and they could be sold to finance vacations or retirement funds in the future. Now, I'm seeing those same special, limited edition Beanie Babies, still with their tags on, in specially made display boxes, marked at $2 apiece at garage sales. And they're not selling at any price. There are just too many of them and their novelty has worn off. The Beanie Baby market crashed because they're not novel, necessary or scarce.

Last week I bought two antique teacups and saucers in remarkable shape for $3 a set and paid the same amount for an old Big Boggle game. I happen to know that at an antique store, those particular cups would probably have been priced at $25 for each cup and saucer set, and on eBay classic Big Boggle games fetch an astounding $25 to $40. But even though I got to the sale six hours after it began, nobody had snatched up these treasures, because their appeal isn't universal. Their value is based on what they are likely to sell for at a particular time under particular conditions. These items weren't being sold at a high-end antique show or a vintage game convention, but out of an overfilled garage with people looking for deals on cribs and golf clubs and folding chairs. Value is in the eye of the beholder and changes constantly depending on necessity and desirability.

You might think $4 is too much for a pair of shoelaces on Thursday, but when your lace breaks in the airport on Friday, you'll pay $8 for a less sturdy pair in order to get out of the airport and to your important meeting on time. An item's value is what you and the seller agree it is at that moment.

Today I went to a garage sale and found a pair of show-stopping black shoes with chic hardware that had been worn maybe twice and probably cost $75 new. They fit me perfectly and cost a mere $2. A lovely and unusual Japanese fabric wall-hanging was only $3. The set of small, cheap wooden chess pieces with no board tossed into a Ziploc bag? The seller wanted $5 for them. I asked politely if she'd consider $3 for them (I wanted to use them in an art project), but on that she stood firm: $5, please. I politely declined. Considering that much finer chess pieces with full, inlaid wooden boards are sitting unsold on eBay despite rock-bottom prices, I have a feeling she'll be regretting not selling the pieces tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. when they're still sitting next to the unsold Hulk puzzle and the Yahtzee! game. However, she determined that those used, inexpensive pieces with no board or box were worth two-and-a-half times the elegant black shoes or the new Trivial Pursuit game in its embossed tin collectible box that I got for another $2.

And she may be right. For the value is in either what the market will bear, or it's in what something means to us emotionally. Maybe tomorrow a bidding war for the chess pieces will break out between a man whose late parents bought him a chess set at Toys R Us with similar pieces ten years ago and a woman who thinks the bishops look like her great-grandpa and the knights like her childhood horse Spunky. It could turn out that those pieces are actually worth $25 to someone. And maybe nobody else would have bought the chic shoes I got today. If I hadn't dropped by, those shoes might have sat there unsold, and then they would have been worth nothing to anyone. There's no way of knowing.

It's all a crap-shoot, and the decision to value a bag of game pieces at $3 or $5 or even $150 is based on many emotional factors as well as logical ones. That's why economics is an art and not a science. You can draw all the graphs you want, compare Hayek's economic vision with Keynes's or Reich's, review consumer spending habits over the past century till you're blue in the face, but economics still comes down to the thousands of choices people make each year about how to allocate limited resources. Which is why all the clever economists and statisticians in the world couldn't make enough useful predictions to keep banks, real estate markets and car manufacturers' businesses from imploding over the past year. They can track trends, but they can't always smell fear before mass hysteria hits.

For years, during booms and market expansions and times of lack of accountability and deregulation run amok, we've had unrealistic expectations that the value of our homes or our skill-sets were ever-increasing. We believed we would always find reasonably paying jobs or make profits when selling our real estate. When people were buying houses with no money of their own and not even being asked to prove that they could make the initial payments, trying to determine the real value of a piece of property was the furthest thing from their minds. There is no true, actual, real value to anything, be it gold bullion or Q-tips. It's all about what people say it is at any particular time. Get out a compass and you'll find a true north; buy a dress or a car or a house today and its value to someone else tomorrow is only a guess. Once you've bought it, its value to others is largely out of your hands.

Our current worldwide economic crisis frightens us not only because we have to buy cheaper food, go to fewer movies or concerts, take the bus to work or to move out of our comfortable houses. It also frightens us because it reminds us how malleable the value of everything around us is, and how tenuous our own value is in an ever-fluctuating job market. We don't know whether we might lose our jobs tomorrow, or have to work for fewer hours to stay employed, or whether someone else will hire us if we get laid off. We can no longer be confident that a good education, good references and good experience is enough to allow us to keep our position in the world, let alone improve it.

It's scary enough to wonder whether we'll be able to retire when we expected to or whether our particular pile of belongings has retained enough of its value for us to be financially secure. It's much worse to have to face the fact that our value to society is determined by so many random factors, and that it can change enormously, and quickly, based on things that have nothing to do with what we believe are the real determiners of our own worth.

Shocking and upsetting as this is, one positive element comes from this disturbance in our worldview: we are no longer as likely to determine someone's value or meaning based on what he or she does for a living. We're now less likely to assess someone's worth based on what vehicle he or she drives or on the type of home he or she lives in. For the first time in a long time, we are not what we do so much as what we are. When labels are so labile, it is easier to slip out of old classifications that constrained us, and it is easier for others to see us as being more than just whatever it is that we do for a living.

People from other cultures find the United States' fixation with career as a determiner of value and meaning curious. Go to a pub or a bistro or a taverna abroad and you probably won't be asked what you do for a living within the first minute of meeting someone, as you would be in the United States.

Here so much of a person's value is determined by how much money that person makes. If we do something wonderful but aren't paid for it (or aren't paid much), we're considered by some to be mere pretenders as people. Just because one's work isn't lucrative doesn't mean it's not real, valuable, worthwhile or important.

In other parts of the world, the questions of how one thinks and feels about politics, literature, music or cinema are at least as important as careers when choosing topics for discussion, both with old friends and total strangers. By the end of a spirited evening abroad, you might still not know what Saeed, Michiko, Pablo or Marianne do for a living. That can happen here, too, but it's rare; here we are what we do, we are our capacity to earn. Certainly one's career can say a great deal about one's values, one's dreams or one's talents, but it's only one facet of a life, one arbiter among many in determining a person's worth, both financial and social.

When we are shaken to the core until we reexamine our basic values, when we are humbled and forced to do things we don't love in order to save the things we do love, perhaps we can learn both humility and an appreciation for the people around us who do the jobs we don't want to do. Perhaps when we are shaken, we will also be stirred to look more deeply and listen more intently when we meet people so that we can see beyond the old labels which we formerly used to determine whether they were worthy of our time.

Update: Here is an interesting piece on the topic of labeling people based on what they do for a living. It appeared in an October 8, 2009, posting to Salon.com writer Cary Tennis's "Since You Asked" column.

Is It Worth It to Get Burned?

When I was about five, I got a working miniature iron for Christmas. I was thrilled. It was painted turquoise on top, had a shiny silver plate on the bottom, and its plastic handle was just the right size for my tiny palm. When plugged in, my dainty-looking electric iron heated up enough that it would have given me a third-degree burn if I'd been careless. As it was, I singed my little fingers every time I used it, but I loved it nonetheless, and I learned to be cautious when it was time to use the real thing.

Of course, what made that toy so exciting was that it was an actual working model of a grown-up's object, not some namby-pamby knock-off without enough power to do anything but look cute. It was lightweight and adorable, which made it cute and seemingly child-friendly in a time when kids were expected to get injured occasionally, and burns, broken bones and various childhood diseases (German measles, chicken pox) were par for the course.

Around that time, a popular gift for young girls was Hasbro's Easy-Bake Oven. Oh, how I wanted one! With the power of a single ordinary lightbulb, one could bake tiny, flat cakes made from miniature boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix and ice them with Betty Crocker frosting mix. Every time I saw one on TV, my heart ached with longing. With the magical Easy-Bake Oven, I could be the perfect miniature hostess, baking my own cakes in my own room and arranging magnificent tea parties for the friends who would all want to come to my place after school to share in the joys of flat, goopy, unevenly baked chemical-infused cakes. As I lay in bed at night, I imagined the imaginary row of tiny Betty Crocker boxes in the corner of my room above my imaginary oven, and thought how happy I would be if only I had a lightbulb-based appliance to call my own.

I asked my mother for one for my birthday. She wasn't concerned with how easy it was to burn oneself on the tiny pans. After all, she'd not only bought me the tiny iron but had also given me a Creepy Crawlers set with die-cast molds that cooked Plastigoop into little rubbery flowers and bugs over a hot plate on which I burnt my fingers time and time again. I started the fires in our fireplace and lit candles on my own as far back as I can remember. I did heavy yardwork and housework and cleaned with smelly chemicals from an early age. It's not like I was kept from physical risk. No, the obvious hazards of the toy were no issue; the problem was with the high cost of the tiny cake mixes. My mother wisely pointed out that for the price of two tiny cakes we could buy a full-sized cake mix to bake in the kitchen, or make a better one from scratch for less money, and we could frost it with homemade frosting that was much cheaper AND tastier than the stuff that came in the box. And since Mom and I baked together often, and my grandmother and aunt let me bake in their kitchens as well, it wasn't as if I couldn't bake a whole cake pretty much any time I wanted anyway. Damn. My mother's frugality made perfect sense, but I still longed for another dangerous appliance of my very own with which I could make real cakes that I could serve to real kids without any adult interference.

Happily, it wasn't long before I was having friends over for after-school omelettes, frying up sombrero sandwiches for them or baking things on my own in an empty house with some regularity. My mother usually got home an hour or two after I did, but sometimes stayed later in the afternoons for meetings or had musical rehearsals to attend, so I often had the house to myself before dinnertime from the age of six-and-a-half onwards. This was unusual as most of my friends' mothers didn't work outside the house, but kids were so often on their own at that time that nobody batted an eye. Kids were frequently off by themselves for hours at a time outside, the only stipulation being that they come home for dinner. Four-year-olds were told not to cross the street but to stay on the block when they left the house, but they were routinely out of visual range of their parents or grandparents as they rode tricycles up and down the block or ran to play in each others' houses and apartments with parents often left unaware that kids other than their own were even on the premises.

At age six my friend Diane and I would walk to the railroad tracks nearby and look for old bottles. We'd gather them in grocery bags, then carry them a few blocks away to the liquor store to trade them in for the five-cents-a-bottle deposit money. Little girls walking alone along railroad tracks attracted no attention at all. When my mother wanted a new carton of cigarettes on a Saturday afternoon while entertaining guests, she'd write a note to that effect, give me three dollars and send me down to that same liquor store; I'd trade the money and the note for a new carton of cigs, no questions asked. When I was just a little older and I wanted to ride my bike down to the center of town after school, I'd just leave a note on the kitchen counter and hop on my bike; nobody wore bike helmets and almost no-one had lights or reflectors on their bikes. My friend Toni's parents told her she couldn't ride downtown with me because she'd have to cross railroad tracks and they feared she'd get her tires caught in the tracks, panic, sit there and be hit by a train. We rolled our eyes at this absurd scenario, but never doubted the wisdom of two little girls on bikes driving around town by themselves until dusk.

Nowadays parents are cautioned not to give stuffed animals with any parts that could possibly come loose to any child under the age of three. Even a ribbon around a stuffed dog's neck is verboten. In my day, babies got teddy bears with hard plastic eyes that could easily come loose, or cheap stuffed monkeys or clowns with glued-on felt noses and mouths that came off within a week. Dolls with tiny bows, shoes and buttons that slipped off in baby's hands and fit easily into tiny mouths were given to toddlers with regularity. Tin dollhouses with sharp edges and corners were popular children's toys for girls; boys frequently got chemistry sets with chemicals dangerous enough to cause corrosion or explosions. Skaters didn't wear helmets, knee pads or elbow pads. Toy trains and cars were painted with lead paint. BB guns were common and tiny BB-sized holes in house, school and car windows were, too.

Sharp-ended lawn darts were thrown haphazardly around back yards during countless children's birthday parties and undersupervised Fourth of July parties to such bad effect that they were banned in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1980s. Wet plastic Slip 'n Slides ran down lawns and driveways across the nation as children hurled along the wet surfaces like bats out of hell, then spun out of control when they reached the ends of the long plastic sheets, scraping their way across thousands of sidewalks and into streets. Children hurled onto aggregate driveways, tearing up their knees and thighs along the way, and adults, expecting to slide like children, stopped suddenly in mid-slip after flinging themselves forward, fracturing necks and spines, sometimes resulting in paraplegia or worse.

My uncle tied thick, long rope swings around branches of tall trees that swung out over jutting hillsides so that my cousins and I could stand at the edges of cliffs, wrap our bare legs around the rope, rest our bottoms on giant knots and fly forward with ten to fifteen feet of nothing but air below our feet and above the steeply sloping hillside. The scratchy jute ropes chafed our thighs till they were raw, but a fall meant a long drop and a tumble down a rough and jagged hillside, so we clung to the rope and shouted for more pushes so we could fly far, far, until we swung directly over the gravel road fifteen, even twenty feet below.

Was the extra freedom to risk injury fun? Sure it was! I loved being on my own and getting up to whatever I wanted as a child. It did teach me a measure of independence and self-reliance, but I was built to be independent and self-reliant anyway. Do I prefer the world today, in which parents monitor their children so carefully and fear letting them out of the house so much? Well, that depends. Kids spend too much time in front of computers and TV sets while their expensive bikes sit idling in the garage. Is that really better for them than being left to their own devices in a neighborhood full of risks was a few decades ago? Probably. But I cherish my memories of riding or rollerskating around the neighborhood on my own when I was a kid, of wandering into other people's garages, apartments or houses five minutes after meeting them, of chatting them up without adults telling me what to do. There was pleasure in that, too.

I do fear we've gone too far in providing so much safe, passive, home-based entertainment for kids that they have little incentive to be creative and fight boredom by making their own fun and going beyond their front doors to see what the world has to offer. But I think a world in which parents take a more active interest in their children's lives and know what their kids are doing and where they are is not only a safer world but a friendlier world. Parents were so out of touch during my childhood that they let kids get away with a lot of bad behavior before intervening. Bullying was common and something kids were discouraged from telling adults about; if they complained they were labeled babies, whiners, snitches. Random adults, even strangers, felt free to intervene and even physically discipline other peoples' kids in public. Teachers and coaches teased and bullied students themselves. It happened all the time.

Even during my childhood, not all THAT long ago, some teachers still used corporal punishment on children because kids weren't treated with the respect that they regularly receive today. Parents and teachers often assumed that reason wouldn't work on kids, so they needed to be spanked or smacked to be kept in line. While we kids were taught that we must never talk back to adults, bullies were given free rein to mess with other kids, and teachers rarely did anything to prevent bullying beyond stopping fights that took place during school hours. Playground fist-fights were not uncommon when I was a child; there was even a certain expectation of bad behavior. Among boys, especially, there was an understanding that you'd probably get beaten up occasionally, and you just had to take your lumps and learn to fight back. Nowadays, anti-bullying policies at school make such displays of aggression rare and they're severely punished when they do take place.

Today's greater evidence of parental interest and the emphasis on care and awareness of risks does mean that there are many fewer injuries and preventable deaths. Kids may be coddled in some ways, but they're also aware that there are risks in the world to consider. Nowadays they don't have to look out as carefully, though, because authorities and laws have eliminated or ameliorated so many of the risks before they have a chance to experience them. Forty years ago, we learned by failing a lot more often. Such lessons stick better, but they can come at the cost of sometimes permanent physical or psychological injury. I still bear psychic scars from being regularly bullied for so many years as a child. Now children learn more by warning and avoidance instead of via trial by fire (or by toy iron). I think the drastic reduction in injuries is worth it, over all, but it does come at a societal cost: people expect to be protected and not to have to look out for themselves as much as they used to. I think the benefits to society are enormous, but we do lose some measure of beneficial self-reliance and wariness.

Increasingly, we're also used to being entertained and fed by others rather than entertaining ourselves and cooking at home. We have others provide food in precooked portions at restaurants or take it with us in disposable packaging so we don't even have to learn how to clean up after ourselves. We so fear the discomfort of being a little hungry that we overeat on a regular basis. We don't learn how to measure and regulate our food intake: we eat what's on our plate even when there's much too much, since restaurants routinely feed several servings of food at once in an effort to make us feel we're getting great value so that we'll pay more. Because we've relinquished so much of the responsibility for making and serving our own food, we've lost the knack of measuring out how much food we really need, so obesity is rampant. A third of the U.S. population is overweight, and another third is obese. Think of that: one out of three of us is obese. As a people we no longer expect discomfort to be a part of our lives, as our grandparents did. We seek medicines or junk food to allay aches, pains or boredom much more readily. We believe we deserve as much comfort and happiness as we can get. And I do mean "we": I hate pain and discomfort as much as the next person.

Please, don't misunderstand: I think our increased standard of living is wonderful. I love going out to eat. I love my Mac, my iPhone, movies on demand from Netflix. I'm thrilled that my daughter's schools have believed in respecting children and had extensive anti-bullying curricula. I think society has improved immeasurably both technologically and in our expectations that people all deserve to be treated fairly and kindly. But the expectation that life should generally be pleasant and pain-free used to be the worldview of none but a small segment of the extremely rich and powerful. Now we all feel like we are entitled to live as only the elite lived in the past. And that impacts us in some negative as well as positive ways.

I worry about a growing expectation that pain and effort will be exceptions rather than the rule in life, and that people shouldn't have to sacrifice to get ahead or help their families. Most of us have to do some unpleasant things every day and work harder than we might want to to accomplish most of the important things in life. While I love the increased ease and enjoyment that technological advances bring to my life, I also get satisfaction from doing things for myself, from making things from scratch, from putting effort into life. Increasingly, I grow frustrated with people's willingness to just get by with "good enough." Making an effort to do things well, to go a little further, shows respect, both or oneself and for others.

Life is so much easier in so many ways than it used to be, and we're insulated from so much effort. That's great if we channel the energy we save into being more helpful, productive, happy or engaged with others. But if it just means that we stop recognizing the beauty and benefits that come with effort, with challenge, with risk, then we've lost something valuable. I don't want us to get burned, but I'd like us to remember how to use the iron, how to cook a meal, how to write a real letter, if for no other reason than to recognize that there is an art to each of these, so that we can respect and appreciate those who do such things for us.

How do we learn to be aware and careful and to avoid unnecessary risks while still moving outside our homes and exploring the world? How do we enjoy our wonderful technological advances without being so completely seduced by them that we stop interacting with other people or the world directly? How do we restore our pleasure in making our own toys, food or entertainment sometimes so we can balance out the passive pleasures of life with the active ones? That's our challenge: to balance risks and freedoms with responsibility and caution so that we engage with the world and the people in it. We don't want to lose the lessons of the past or miss out on the life-enhancing innovations of the present. How do we synthesize the knowledge that comes from experience with the knowledge that comes from superior technology? How to we embrace our blessings without taking them for granted?