a long time ago, in a land far, far away....

There once was a time when terrorists had not yet flown any planes into major American cities in order to kill people and get free news coverage; when the biggest fear that people had in a junior high school was that somebody might bring a pocket knife to a fight; there was a time when you could walk through the most unimaginably simple device on your way to board a plane and your entire family could accompany you to wave goodbye at the gate; there was a time when not one single person had a cell phone - not one.  During this fabled age of Aurthurian chivalry and unicorns, a lot of people started to show the signs and symptoms of some, like, totally rare conditions - I mean, like, what the hell?  These people were generally poor and they were generally known to be intravenous drug abusers, heroine users for the most part.

The doctors were, like, "I dunno, these people are probably buying some really bad shit - and that's what's making them sick - let's get back to work."  The drug users didn't notice anything different from their usual level of care, so they just went back out and started dying and shooting up.  Then, a little bit further on, some guys started coming in to the emergency rooms and clinics of some major cities and they were all like, "I dunno man, I feel really awful!".  And they didn't even use drugs!

The doctors were all, like, "whoa, I just saw this same, really (I mean, totally) rare lung thing on some poor junkie downstairs yesterday."  And since these were just totally normal dudes with really expensive shoes, they actually got to see some specialists and people even wrote down their names, and everything!  So, like, after a while, all these totally normal dudes with expensive shoes started coming in with totally gnarly, but deadly, conditions; the conditions were so statistically unusual that the doctors were like, "uh oh, we better totally call that dude in Atlanta who keeps track of gnarly, statistically unlikely shit - we need to tell him something gnarly is happening."

Anyways, it turns out that the guy in Atlanta where all the whacky reports of statistically unlikely and gnarly disease thingys get reported, was like totally getting hammered on the phone from doctors all over the place (but mainly in big cities).  There was totally something weird going on - like maybe it's terrorists, right?  Nope.  Back in the day, terrorists only hijacked planes and, like, totally let everybody go - not terrorists.  Well the dude answering the phone in Atlanta told all of his scientist peeps in Atlanta - then they called Washington.  Ronnie Reagan was the boss and his lights were still totally lit up - he was pretty cool for that first term - a badass cowboy president who was a movie star!!  Ronnie totally thought it was a bummer.

All the doctors in the big cities were like, what do all these people have in common?  Like, some are totally poor and junkied out, and some are, like, rich (or at least not poor, judging by their shoes).  WAIT!  The shoes!  Those guys are, like, totally gay!  This is like a gay guy and junkie thing!  Whew!  We like totally dodged a bullet there - I know me and my wife won't get that gnarly cancer that makes your whole face, like, fall off.  Ronnie was totally relieved too, and he never even said the word AIDS until thousands of his countrymen were already dead.

So everybody was all, like, "you know what? Some gay Haitian dude who was also a druggie like totally brought this disease to America - close the borders!!"  Ronnie liked that - he could break out his horse!

And thus it was for about three years in the early days of the ninth decade (yes, ninth - count 'em up people) of the twentieth century.  Scientists with really amazing credentials that had names like Harvard, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins on them, credentials that were an alphabet-soup of legitimacy - MD, PhD, MS, ScD, MHS, DrPH - not a loser in the bunch - lots of these men and women of science did interviews on television and radio, in newspapers: "We have credible evidence that this disease is completely isolated within the IV drug-user and homosexual communities.  One flight attendant who had sex with a Haitian guy caused all of this by going to gay bath houses all over the place - all we have to do is contain and control these groups who are not us.  Everybody be cool."  Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite were totally relieved - they were safe.

All was not, however, cool.  Much like the debate we are about to observe in our class, there is a modicum of very credible evidence that supports any number of theories on apotemnophilia.  The theories offered up by the diametrically opposed writers we have read so far, have far-reaching possible consequences, if either (any) of them are 100% right.  As a teenager in Los Angeles, personally observing the HIV/AIDS outbreak, the first five years were rampant with theories and, all/any of the theories, if 100% correct, had massive potential consequences.  Knee-jerk reactions from the science establishment, governments of many nations, academe, and from the medical profession were alarming and incoherent; each of the groups had their own take on the problem, none had all of the answers (some had no answers at all, only panic to offer).  Yet we, as a culture, had learned that what these groups had to say must be legitimate and credible.  Indeed, we demanded answers from these groups - we took all that they had to say and made much of it.  By the time I joined the Army, in 1985, LIFE magazine had an entire issue dedicated to the AIDS virus and it was reasonably close to the truth we now know.

Similarly, apotemnophilia might well be a contagious disease - perhaps it spreads through ham sandwiches that have been exposed to dijon mustard.  If we close all of the borders to French mustard, we can stop the spread.  If a very credible scientist with eighteen degrees and a staff of 200 assistants (and grad students, of course) stood in front of cameras and told you to throw out every last jar of dijon mustard, wouldn't you do it to avoid getting excited by the idea of cutting off a limb or a digit?

Maybe, instead, apotemnophilia is caused solely by the level of development in the superior lobule of the right parietal.  We could selectively breed out the people with the genetic markers for this disorder, eradicating the disease within two generations - cool!  My galvanic skin responses are going off the charts just thinking about it.  Things are not so different today from the time described above, or at least not as different as many would like to believe.  We have endowed the science and medical establishments with the credibility formerly reserved for the ecclesiastical brotherhood, we are terrified of abnormalities as described by the priests of our new societal religion.

We can neither ignore these new phenomena, nor can we imbue our new priests of the empirical all the power they would like to have.  Reasonable people, in the early 1930s might have stopped a little political movement that claimed that Jews were the entire source of all problems within an entire nation - we, as the rational arbiters of the boundary between panic and stoicism, we the students of CSCL 3331 - we are the ones who have to know that, sometimes, not being able to completely wrap our arms around something strange by applying statistics to it, means only that we have a lot more to learn.