The whale has swallowed me…

Yona, Yunos, Lonas… Jonah, and of course our friend the Whale. Then again according to the Hebrew text of the Tanakh, the Quran and the Bible he is of course merely a ‘big fish.’ When did he become a Whale? This question arose the other day when a co-worker was recounting a Halloween were her husband turned his pick up truck into a giant paper mache Whale. It followed me home to where I had been listening to Hugh Laurie's new album ‘Let them Talk.’ Hugh covers an old J.B. Lenoir track titled, of course, ‘The Whale has Swallowed Me.’ The Lyrics are simple, and are what under lie all good blues songs, acting as the perfect source of meditation. Lenoir has given us an interesting metaphor; he sometimes ‘…feels that old whale has swallowed [him to].’

What does it mean to feel like a whale has swallowed you? Its’ not found in the obsession of the Captain Ahab. It cannot be categorized under the uniquely Christian disease, of desiring a death made impossible by the resurrection and redemption of Christ (That Kierkegaard describes as the ‘Sickness Unto Death’). It is not even the simple pain of mortality. Our friend the ‘big fish’ is more a kin to fate itself, bearing down on the helpless seafarers of old, and as it bears down on us today. It is short of the pain of mortality it self. It is instead the simple feeling we all have in the deeps of our stomachs that there is something going on that we cannot quite put our fingers on. It is that same emotion C.K. Chesterton indicated to as the motivating factor of all great poets and artists. The truth that no man, woman or child can quite describe or grasp in language alone.

Lenoir most likely would not have known of the translational error that came from the pulpit. He would have perhaps realized that the story came from the Old Testament making it both important to Christians and Jews. It is less likely that he knew of it’s recounting in chapter 37 of the Koran. Here it is a story much a kin to that found in the Old Testament. Jonah flees from the calling of Lord aboard a ship only to be cast into the sea when the ship becomes overtaken by a storm. His lot in life came as lots where drawn by his fellow shipmates seeking to appease their respective gods. In the end he repents and is rescued from the belly of the whale.

Why did he end up trapped in the belly of the great fish? According to the Quran he committed acts worthy of blame. But what did Lenoir do to be worthy of blame? Maybe God knows? But what we can be sure of is that he grew up in the Deep South during a time of racial discrimination. These motivations came to the forefront in later albums he produced in the mid-60’s titled Alabama Blues and Down In Mississippi. And in a performance captured in a Martin Scorsese Blues Documentary these later themes become intertwined with his original classic. You can check the video out on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34evyrWA0xc). It captures that something, the feeling we cannot describe in words, and it dose it with the images of the fight for civil rights and the bending strings of Lenoir’s guitar.

So when did the ‘big fish’ become a whale? I feel it must have happened sometime shortly after people stopped reading the bible and began to depend once more upon their respective religious elders for divine inspiration. But the whale is a strangely fitting symbol, for those who look past the literal meaning and try to grasp at that deeper kernel of truth. The rest, well they make giant paper mache whales out of trucks.

Cheers 

Sociological Perspective on the MSM Blood Ban

In the past four years of my life I have run over a dozen blood drives as a representative of the American Red Cross. While running these drives I found myself often in a position of having to explain to individuals why they would not be allowed to donate blood. Socially the issue at large was the federal ban on blood donations made by men who have had sexual relations with other men (MSM). A social issue is any issue pertaining to the sociological study of behavior within a larger society. Sociology studies the larger social structure and how individuals’ social interactions change over time. A personal trouble is the effect of a larger social issue on an individual or individuals. My personal trouble was helping two close friends affected by the MSM blood ban and countless other males confused by its implication understand its purpose.

Applying the sociological imagination we can better understand the effect they MSM blood ban had on my personal trouble. The sociological imagination is the ability to imagine the possible relationship between a given individual experience, or personal trouble, and the wider social forces or social issues in a given society (Curry, 2008). Homosexuals recognize the MSM blood ban as a personal trouble because from their prospective it appears as an unwarranted form of discrimination. It is clear today that the spread of HIV is not caused by ones sexual preferences but by the failure to in act appropriate preventive measure such as the use of condoms. It is also possible that the MSM blood ban could become a personal trouble for males who do no participate in MSM. Heterosexual males may misunderstand the ban and fail to understand the real cause of HIV, therefore failing to in act appropriate preventive measures themselves.

A study conducted by Rodney G. Triplet at Northern State University titled Discriminatory Biases in the Perception of Illness found that there is already a perceived association between homosexual behavior and HIV. The MSM blood ban supports this incorrect association between HIV and MSM activities (Triplet, 1992). According to the CDC, 67 percent of HIV diagnoses among males do accrue due to MSM (CDC, 2007). Although 26 percent of HIV cases happen among women, 80 percent of these involve transmission from high-risk heterosexual contact. Left unaccounted from all this is MSMW cases, or men who have sexual relations with men and women. The MSMW group, according to Mutchler, constitutes a vacuum HIV research. One of the key reasons this group is so important is that Homosexuality is an identity and therefore can not be a cause of HIV. Only specific behaviors can account for the transmission of HIV (Mutchler, 2005).

The sociological imagination allows us to see how my friends may have been emotionally harmed by the policy. It also allows us to imagine how an individuals behavior, let’s say choosing to use a condom, may change based of the stereotype put forward by the policy. A male who believes that only homosexuals can spread HIV may not feel the need to use a condom if he doesn’t identify himself as a homosexual.