Pat’s Polemics

This book, The Village Effect, is getting interestinger and interestinger. My environment as a new born and infant was good, I would say. Yet I developed three speech impediments and lots of food allergies and later hayfever allergies and others. All of the allergies were fairly severe, although I outgrew them around my 30s. My egg allergy was so severe that if I simply fried an egg for someone else, my face would swell up. So what might have accounted for these, genes? No one else had such allergies. But reading this book gives me a clue.
My mother said that she would sit and hold me, terrified of German paratroopers. This was in 1942 (I was born in August of ‘41) and we had declared war on Germany. The newsreels at the movie theaters were full of footage of German paratroopers dropping in on Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, etc. Of course, we were on the shore of Lake Eire in northern Ohio, but my mom was not educated and so did not understand that we were effectively out of reach of Germans (the Canadians might have been a problem, though). So I wonder if the intense anxiety she recounted in later years might have had an effect on me and Pinker’s book discusses this a great deal. In utero experiences and even pre-conception experiences have been shown to have an effect on the development of the fetus and infant, pursuing the individual on into adulthood and even overcoming genetic effects in identical twins.
Worth pondering.
My next book is Akata witch by Okorafor-Mbachu, Nnedi, a science fantasy tale of a Nigerian-American girl who returns to Nigeria to discover she has magical powers. It is the sort of book awarded Sci-Fi literary prizes by organizations like The Hugo awards that has raised the ire of more traditional fans who make it clear they want White male combat with aliens and lots of hardware and none of this nulti-culti girly stuff. They call authors like Okorafor SWJs, social justice warriors. One sci-fi blogger with deep roots in the genre reminded these guys that Star Trek had tons of social justice themes, including the first interracial kiss, between Uhuru and Cpt. Kirk.
This crap infects everything, not just the Trump campaign.