Gin & Calamity · 2005-08-09 23:01

Having resurrected the quaint phrase ginned up from the bowels of the English lexicon, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. brandishes it again in a new entry about thimerosal and autism in today’s Huffington Post. There Mr. Kennedy writes:

The Institute of Medicine as well as the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration base their defense of Thimerosal on four flimsy studies ginned up by the pharmaceutical industry and federal regulators who green-lighted the use of Thimerosal in the first place. Those fraudulent studies deliberately targeted European populations which were exposed to a fraction of the Thimerosal given to American children.

Here’s what I had to say to our aspiring hero:

Mr. Kennedy may believe that the epidemiological studies which he disparages are inferior to the studies provided by his informants, but he offers no support for his claim that they are “fraudulent”—a claim that borders on libel against their authors. I am one parent who regards the allegedly “fraudulent” and “flimsy” studies he so roundly rejects as far more credible than the studies produced with funding from SafeMinds, the founders of which have been publicizing their pre-existing conclusions about autism causation and culpability for years.

The “recent survey by United Press” to which Kennedy refers is in fact a series of newspaper articles written for the Washington Times by one Dan Olmsted, a journalist with no discernible background in genetics, and no discernible prior journalistic interest in the subject of autism until he began to communicate with anti-thimerosal activists over the past year or so. To his credit, Mr. Olmsted has acknowledged the position of parents of autistic spectrum children who do not attribute their children’s autism to iatrogenic injury, and has published letters by adults on the spectrum who take umbrage at his and his informants’ suggestions that either they don’t exist, or that they are not really autistic, or that their autism bears little resemblance to the “heretofore unknown mercury-induced regressive autism” experienced by their own children. However, these communications don’t seem to have inspired Mr. Olmsted to modify his tendency to refer to proponents of the autism=poisoning hypothesis as “the parents.”

Mr. Kennedy makes the same mistake in his statement, “Despite the repeated urgings of independent scientists and the families of autistic children…” It would be more correct to refer to “some families,” and more honest to disclose that many of those “independent scientists” are making a bundle selling “some families” legal support for product liability claims, and products and services not FDA-approved for treatment of autism, nonetheless marketed as “cures for autism.”

The autism-cure-and-litigation-economy is booming, but not all parents of children with autistic spectrum diagnoses are inclined to buy into it—especially those whose experience offers living evidence of the genetic transmission of autistic traits. Neither do all parents appreciate Mr. Kennedy’s eagerness to broadcast bloodcurdling images of the awfulness of autistic lives as part of his knight-in-shining-armor game. I refer here to his previous post, where he bewails the presence in special education classes of “autistic children lying on the floor screaming, many of them in dire agony from autistic enterocolitis,” and suggests witness of their distress as suitable punishment for those he deems culpable for reshaping their brains. Any child suffering from Crohn’s Disease or similar GI dysfunction, whether autistic or neurologically typical, could play a starring role in Mr. Kennedy’s melodrama. Why should he pick on the ones who happen to be autistic? Don’t they have enough to deal with in this world where the volume is perpetually set to 11, without Mr. Kennedy screaming about the hideousness of their responses to stress? Of course, children with GI problems need proper medical care, but for those who are autistic, an autistic cognitive profile is likely to persist even after their medical problems are resolved.

No doubt, Mr. Kennedy will be out of autism-land once there’s no notoriety in it for him anymore. In the meantime, all those who live on the autistic spectrum will get to live with the legacy that he is helping to pass on to the world—that is, the idea that they can be presumed to be contaminated simply because they think and behave like autistic people; that their life experience is overwhelmingly negative; that their coping mechanisms should strike fear into the hearts of those deemed “normal”; and that the very best society is one that contains no autistic people at all. Raising a child on the spectrum isn’t easy, and parents need appropriate support. Nonetheless, it is absolutely incredible to this mother than someone who bills himself as “progressive” should be so oblivious to the potential impact of his autism-is-poisoning-horror-show upon autistic citizens themselves.

The origin of the phrase gin up is itself the subject of some controversy. On questions like these, this librarian tends to gravitate towards Eric Partridge’s fine works on English slang and colloquialisms. Here’s what I found in Partridge’s Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English from the Work of Eric Partridge, edited by Paul Beale (Macmillan, 1990), when I first tried to figure out exactly what Mr. Kennedy meant by ginned up:

ginned-up. Tipsy: from ca. 1920 (occurs in Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 1933). cf: Gin up

gin up. ‘To consume hard liquor’—esp. spirits—‘before a party” (occurs in Jackson, Airman’s Songbook, 1945): Service officers’: since ca. 1930. Cf. ginned-up: gin up, however means—not to get drunk but merely to induce the party-spirit.

The Eggcorn Database offers the following etymology, with a little Oriental spice:

The now-opaque expression gin up ‘stir up, get something going’ (??Dictionary of American Regional English??) or ‘enliven’ or ‘create, develop’ contains, according to OED2, the gin of cotton gin (from engine). A modest number of people seem to have reinterpreted this expression as involving djinn, presumably on the grounds that a djinn(i) can create or fetch things.

Official or unofficial definitions notwithstanding, Mr. Kennedy seems to be using the term ginned up as a synonym for “bogus.”

The escalating media-induced popular anxiety over vaccines and over the increase in incidence of autistic spectrum diagnoses brings to mind another quaint phrase that’s ripe for resurrection: calamity howler (first introduced to me by the most excellent Autism Diva). This epithet for a noisy doomsayer had its heyday in the mid-to-late-1800’s, particularly in the context of the Populist movement. The Daily Calamity Howler, a short-lived populist newspaper, was published in Kansas in 1891; the flamboyant orator Mary Elizabeth Lease (a.k.a., “Mary Yellin”) was known as “queen of the calamity howlers.”

Sherwood Anderson was known to use the phrase, and in Sinclair Lewis’ classic novel Main Street, one character endearingly introduces himself as:

“Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as ‘that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain’t satisfied with the way we run things.’”

H.L. Mencken offered calamity howler as one example of the American “instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque.” FDR used it in his May 26, 1940 fireside chat, encouraging the American people:

let us not be calamity-howlers and discount our strength. Let us have done with both fears and illusions.

By sheer serendipity, in my search for uses of the term calamity howler, I stumbled upon a text that offers some real insight into historical precedents for the contemporary alarum over the alleged autism epidemic. The following testimony of Meyer Jacobstein of New York in hearings held before the House Committee on Immigration in the spring of 1924, is cited in Chapter 7 of Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement, a resource book for the curriculum Facing History and Ourselves:

In those early days, however, the anti-foreign movement, strangely enough, was directed against the very people whom we now seek to prefer—the English, the Irish, and the Germans. The calamity howlers of a century ago prophesied that these foreigners would drag our Nation to destruction.

The trouble is that the committee is suffering from a delusion. It is carried away with the belief that there is such a thing as a Nordic race which possesses all the virtues, and in like manner creates the fiction of an inferior group of peoples, for which no name has been invented.

Think about this the next time the autism calamity howlers begin to howl, believing that there is such a thing as a normal class of humanity possessed of the virtue of indistinguishability, and a corresponding toxic group, to which the name autistic is applied.

Comments


  1. Thank you again, Kathleen.

    Autism Diva is still struck by the fact that our ginned-up calamity howler, Mr. Kennedy, doesn’t recognize the autism like traits that were in his aunt Rosemary.

    What is it with this guy? What is it with that Huffington woman? Don’t they they have bigger political fish to fry?

    When does Kirby go back to Puerto Vallarta and how much do you suppose it would take in the way of a cash to make him stay there? Not that you or Autism Diva have that kind of money, but still, it’s an interesting question.

    How much was he paid by SAFE MINDS to go speak about autism this time on Meet the Press? How much did they pay him to speak at the “power of truth” rally?

    The man has to make a living, you know, that book deal wasn’t that fat, by his own admission.

    One assumes that the NYT won’t be buying any more of his free-lance articles, ...

    There IS a rock band called “David Kirby”... probably “heavy metal” (hah!) maybe our David Kirby could be a roady for them when he’s done being a “hero”. — Autism Diva    2005-08-10 03:17    #

  2. Let’s not forget: Ole Joe (as my dear departed grandmother referred to him) made a large part the Kennedy family fortune on the making and distributing of GIN during prohibition. So, the use of the word Gin (in any form) may be common (whether spoken or unspoken) in Bobby’s family-at-large.

    Further, Bobby may realize that Aunt Rosemary had many ASD characteristics and is either trying to vindicate Joe (for the secret lobotomy) or is sublimating his anger at Joe by venting about thimerosal. Take your pick.

    Either way, Bobby is no scientific or medical authority and no one should be giving him a pass due to his last name – however famous or infamous it may be. — hollywoodjaded    2005-08-10 17:12    #

  3. Thanks for the interesting word-origin info. I always assumed that the phrase was “gen up,” and that it was short for “generate,” as in generating output from a computer. Just goes to show how much the computer age is changing the way we perceive language.

    “Calamity howler” is a great one! — Bonnie Ventura    2005-08-11 11:12    #

  4. Kathleen, you have outdone yourself. The opportunity to enjoy your writing and analysis is one of the nice side benefits of having spent a lot of time learning about this whole mercury-autism hoax. — Lisa Randall    2005-08-12 22:26    #