Rolling in Special Dirt

Now if this were a medical show on T.V., the narrative might run something like this. The doctor realizes that the patient was bitten by a squirrel and has fallen victim to ardillian paralysis, a life threatening state involving delusions and hallucinations, not to mention drastic fluctuations in blood pressure and brain wave activity. Fortunately, it is completely treatable with the right cocktail of prescription medicines, the patient would show signs of improvement within a couple of days, a duration that would be shrunk by television to a couple of minutes. Then, right before the patient’s release, the doctor would wink at him and say something cute like, “Now don’t be picking up any more strange squirrels.” There would probably also be a positive change in the patient’s attitude. Having gone through a life threatening episode, he would be a kinder, gentler soul from that point on. The problem with all this is the problem with modern medicine. The analysis of cause and effect is superficial. The doctor had understood that Eggplant Charlie had been bitten by a squirrel and had, consequently, developed symptoms that seemed to fit within the parameters of ardillian paralysis syndrome. Her mistake was that her analysis of both the cause and the effect was inadequate. She would have done better had she taken her analysis out of the passive voice and instead of having started with the premise that Eggplant Charlie was bitten by a squirrel , had started with the premise that a squirrel bit Eggplant Charlie. If she had thought about the cause in the active voice, she may have bothered to ask herself “Why?” Now, she had asked how it was possible for the squirrel to bite Eggplant Charlie’s face multiple times, and Eggplant Charlie had told her that he picked it up to look at it more closely. Instead of asking why, she passed judgment on Eggplant Charlie, proclaiming his action “stupid.” Bones had attempted to correct this behavior, but she couldn’t see him, and she wasn’t listening. Bones was beside himself in anger, literally. Righteous Bones had temporarily split from ungodly Bones, and they were both fuming. After a couple of seconds, however, they were reunited into one entity again. Bones, in his anger, didn’t even notice that he had just split like an amoeba. “Goddamn doctors today are all a bunch of idiots,” he said. His own track record as a physician while he was drawing breath was actually much worse than that of Eggplant Charlie’s doctor. He never spent much time on analysis because there wasn’t much to analyze. A patient had been shot, so the arm or hand or foot or whatever would have to come off. After Bones had ceased drawing breath and during his probationary period as a righteous ghost, and even later during his post-probationary period as an inept demon, he hung around hospitals a lot, and to his credit, he learned a lot about modern medicine from what he saw. Of course, Bones was also informed by his post three-dimensional experiences. He could have written a critique of modern medicine a million pages long about what doctors didn’t know about the human condition and the causes of their patients’ torments and distress. “Ask him why, lady!” he said in disgust. She wasn’t listening. Eggplant Charlie had written Bones off as unreal, but he was equally frustrated with the doctor. Immediately after Eggplant Charlie was finally able to communicate that a squirrel had bitten him, the doctor had an “aha” moment. “Aha! Ardillian paralysis syndrome!” She then hurried out of the room in order to go about the business of fixing Eggplant Charlie. The doctor could not see the metaphorical elephant in the room. The doctor was oblivious to Cauliflower. The problem was Cauliflower. The doctor had seemed to understand that a squirrel had mauled eggplant Charlie, but she didn’t seem to care much about what that entailed. The squirrel mauled Eggplant Charlie. Therefore, Cauliflower did not maul Eggplant Charlie. Eggplant Charlie desperately wanted the doctor to find out what had happened to Cauliflower, but the doctor, afflicted with modern medical tunnel vision, thought her patient’s wife was of no particular interest, now that she could be excluded as the cause of her patient’s condition. After all, she wasn’t a social worker. WHY? Sam the squirrel bit Eggplant Charlie because he was afraid. Sam was afraid because he had been injured moments before. To put that last sentence in the active voice, Sam was afraid because Eggplant Charlie had seriously injured him moments before. Eggplant Charlie threw a rock at Sam because he heard Sam chattering. Eggplant Charlie was infuriated at the chattering because…well, at this point, the cause and effect becomes less definite and more mysterious, but the real cause of, and the real solution to Eggplant Charlie’s current state of distress could only be determined if this information were to be made available, but by whom? The passive voice is good for dodging blame---“Mistakes were made”, or for focusing on the effect—“ The patient was bitten by a squirrel”, but the passive voice is, by design, really inadequate for identifying a cause or an agent. The doctor didn’t care about the agent. Her patient had been bitten by a squirrel and had been diagnosed as having ardillian paralysis syndrome. She had the solution, so she arranged to have Eggplant Charlie’s bloodstream infused with a cocktail to knock it out. It knocked Eggplant Charlie out right away. In fact, you could say that it killed him, in that his heart stopped beating and he stopped drawing breath.