Post 27, Loyal listener

Spokesdog Ladybug debunks the hygiene argument.

Good news.  I tracked down a copy of Ed Wallerstein's book, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy.  It's not easy to find.  It's been out of print for years.  In my next post, I'll get into how that book started changing American attitudes about circumcision when it first came out in 1980.

I guess it's just as well I didn't find it right away.  I got a lot of positive feedback about my digression into the events surrounding Disco Demolition Night.  And Steve Dahl figures into the What I'm Missing story in a pretty significant way, so it's only right that I should make some effort to explain his cultural significance.

Like I said Steve is the first public figure I can ever remember questioning routine infant circumcision.  It happened back around 1982 or so.  I don't remember what radio station Steve was working for at the time.

Steve moved around a few times while I was living in Chicago.  I remember not long after Disco Demolition Night, the station he was working for fired him for violating "community standards."

Steve had a way of pushing the boundaries of good taste.

So Steve moved around, but I always listened to his show.  If Steve switched stations, I switched stations.  If Steve switched to the afternoon slot, I listened to the afternoon slot.  Even if Steve was working for a station where I didn't care for the playlist, I'd listen to his show.  If I had to sit through a Billy Joel song, it was a small price to pay.

I actually learned to like the Glass Houses album.

Now Steve used to take a lot of calls from listeners.  He never did a full on call-in format like Rush Limbaugh or anything like that, but he'd start talking on the air about something, could be anything—local politics, dieting, nudist colonies, professional sports, Ann Landers' column—and listeners would call in, and he'd put them on the air.  

Now, normally call-in segments on the radio drive me insane the same way that listening to someone talk on a cell phone on the bus will drive you insane.  It just sounds like a lot of pointless chatter that doesn’t seem to progress anywhere, but Steve had a way of keeping the conversation lively and entertaining.  Kind of like Merv Griffin, I guess.  He just had a gift for that sort of thing.

So one day I turned on the radio, and Steve was in the middle of a phone call with a listener who'd recently given birth to a baby boy.  Steve and the lady were both talking about how they felt that infant circumcision was a pointless, outdated custom.  If I remember correctly, the woman said that her obstetrician hadn't circumcised the baby, and her pediatrician was opposed to circumcision on ethical grounds.

Steve said something to her like "Well, that settles it, right?  No circumcision for your kid then?"

And the woman said "No, my husband wanted to have it done, so he took him to a surgeon."

Then Steve did something you're never supposed to do on the radio.  He let the air go dead. Silent, in other words.  And that silence gave me a moment to reflect on how sad that was, how absurd that was, that American parents-- people my age—still felt a cultural pressure to have their boys' genitals altered at birth.

We knew it was pointless.  We knew it didn't prevent disease or facilitate hygiene, but we still did it.  We just did it because we did it.

And maybe because nobody wanted to admit that it was a mistake.

Part 26, Steve Dahl

Yes, I said livestock pavilion.

The high school I went to in Houston was pretty big.  There were about 600 or so of us in the graduating class, and the campus was spread out over maybe five buildings, not counting the football stadium and the livestock pavilion.

Yes, the livestock pavilion.  There are those among my fellow Spring Branch High alumni who will claim that the livestock pavilion was a multi-purpose building, but that's a lot of revisionist history if you ask me.  I think some people just aren't comfortable with the idea of graduating from a high school that had its own livestock pavilion.

Well, Spring Branch High School had a livestock pavilion, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.  Every year the Future Farmers of America would host a... I'm not sure what you would call it, sort of an open house in the livestock pavilion, and there would be sheep and cows and chickens and what not right there on campus in this big building with high ceilings and no permanent interior walls, the sort of place where you would go to see a boat show.

Anyway, the point is high school was big, but college was huge.  Physically, I mean.  It was gigantic.  I spent my first few months in college feeling lost and bewildered a little lonely and homesick living there on the third floor of a big concrete dorm on the edge of campus.

I had a roommate, but he was never around.  He was a sophomore or a junior, I forget, and he had a girlfriend he would shack up with for weeks at a time.  I think he kept up a pretense of living in our dorm room for his parents' benefit.  They must have been Catholic or something.

So I was kind of a lonely guy my first few months in college, and I used to turn on the radio in the morning just to hear another human voice, actually a whole lot of human voices.  I used to listen to this radio show in the morning called "The Steve Dahl Rude Awakening" on WDAI.  It was Steve talking to all these outlandish characters.  I remember a grandma character and grandpa character who performed a duet called "Whenever I Cough up Phlegm," sung to the tune of the Kenny Loggins hit "Whenever I Call You Friend."

There was a flamboyant gay character called Rex Reational, and there was a dumb guy character whose name was Bruno or Bluto something like that.  I remember one time Steve came out of a commercial or a song or something and Bluto was saying "Gee, Steve I don't know about this."

Then Steve tells him "It's OK, Bluto.  It's for comedy."

And then you hear a toilet flushing five or six times and Steve starts blubbering and gasping for air, and you realize that Bluto (or Bruno) is giving Steve what we used to call in college a "swirlie."

I don't know what happened after that because I was laughing too hard.  All that day I kept replaying that gag in my mind, and I'd start laughing. I still laugh when I think about it.  I was laughing when I typed that sentence.

Anyway, when I came back from winter break in January, 1979, Steve Dahl was gone, and all the characters were gone too.  I don't think I realized it until after Steve lost his job, but all those characters were Steve.  I'd always pictured a whole studio of people doing voice characterizations, but it was all just Steve.  The man was a comic genius.

But WDAI didn't need a genius.  In December 1978, they switched to an all-Disco format and pink slipped Steve.

A few months later, Steve moved to another radio station in Chicago, WLUP, where he railed against the whole Disco phenomenon and smashed Disco records on the air.  His anti-Disco efforts gained such a wide following in Chicago that the White Sox asked him to host Disco Demolition Night, the event where my friends Joe and Mohammed narrowly averted a pot bust.

I guess you could say Disco Demolition Night got a little out of control.  I turned on the local news the next morning, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  Smoke billowing into the stands, smashed up records all over the outfield, police dragging half naked teenagers by the hair and tossing them into paddy wagons.  Steve Dahl's destruction (by means of dynamite) of thousands of Disco records in center field after the first game of a double header had inspired an anti-Disco riot of such intensity the White Sox had had to forfeit the evening's second game to the visiting Detroit Tigers.

Now I know you're probably thinking what in the heck does all that have to do with Ed Wallerstein's book Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy?

Well, I'm getting there.

Before Ed Wallerstein's book came out in 1980, America had never really had much of a dialog about circumcision.  Circumcision rates went into a gradual decline beginning in the 1960s, and I think that decline happened for all sorts of reasons: immigration, the sexual revolution, the hippies.  (I mean actual hippies who lived on communes and ate granola and got back to nature, not these young people you see these days who buy their tie-dye at the Old Navy.)

But even when the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with those wishy-washy policy statements in 1971 and 1975 about circumcision (Essentially, they adopted a policy of "There's no medical need for routine infant circumcision, but, hey, who needs a medical reason?"), even then there was no real public dialog about circumcision in the media, not that I remember.

As I remember, the dialog began with after Wallerstein's book came out in 1980, and the first public figure who I ever heard questioning America's tradition of circumcision in a really frank, open way was Steve Dahl.

Part 25, Disco Demolition

I've always been more of a glam rocker.

This was going to be an in-depth analysis of Ed Wallerstein's book Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, but it appears that the only copy of it at my library has been misshelved.  Therefore this will be a post about the death of Disco.

But it relates to Wallerstein's book, I promise.  It might take me until Post 26, but I assure you it will relate.

I started college at the absolute zenith of American Disco mania.  All the college dances they used to play Disco, and nothing but Disco.  "Boogie Fever," "Disco Inferno," the 20-minute Donna Summer disco cover of "MacArthur Park."  You could not escape Disco.  There were Disco movies, Disco TV Shows, Disco clothing and accessories.  Roller rinks started converting into roller discos.  Seemed like every celebrity whose career ever hit a slow patch would take a shot at Disco-- Cher, Kiss, ABBA, Frankie Valli, Rod Stewart, Leif Garret, Kristy and Jimmy McNichol, Ethel Merman.  The list goes on and on.

I remember I was in the car with my Mom during Winter break my freshman year in college.  She said to me, "Mark my words, one day you'll wake up, and it'll be like this Disco stuff never happened.  That stuff will just die.  You'll get up in the morning and turn on the radio and go to work, and that stuff will be gone.  People will forget all about it.  They'll pretend like they never went in for all that crazy Disco stuff."

(I cleaned up that quotation for family audiences.  My mother rarely used the word "stuff.")

Now fast forward to the evening of July 12, 1979.  It was the summer before my sophomore year in college.  B. and I were sitting up in his dorm room chatting and drinking BEER.  He was working on the campus clean up crew that summer.  That's how he happened to be living in the dorms during the summer break.

Well, we hear a knock on the door, and we go open the door, and there's our buddies Joe and Mohammed, who'd also been working on the clean up crew, so they were living in the same dorm there with B.

Joe and Mohammed come in and help themselves to a couple of BEERs and tell us this crazy story about how they'd just left a riot in Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox.

"It was awesome!"  Joe said.  "Steve Dahl blew up like a million Disco records in center field, and everybody went crazy!  Then the cops just started busting people for no reason at all.  We didn't want to get caught with weed, so we cut out."

"The cops bust people for weed at Comiskey?" I said.  "Since when?  People smoke weed in the stands at Comiskey all the time."

"Well, we weren't in the stands," Joe said, "we were down on the field."

"You were what?!"

"Well, the records blew up, and there was fire and stuff, and we stormed the field.  Everybody did.  It was awesome!"

I guess I can see how it might have seemed like good idea at the time.

Part 24, The Jews

A fortuitous library book sale find.

I guess you could say it was a night of firsts.  It was the first time I ever told anybody that I had a problem with being circumcised, and it was the first time I found out that I wasn't the only guy in the world who felt that way, and it was the first time anybody had ever offered me an explanation for why circumcision had become a cultural norm in the United States.

Until that night, sitting there drinking BEER on the couch in B.'s dorm, the closest thing to an explanation I'd heard for the 90 percent circumcision rate among my American-born peers was a vague insinuation that my mother had made years before that foreskins were something found far from urban centers among the lowly and uneducated.  She seemed to think that circumcision was a mark of sophistication, kind of like table manners or knowing how to say "chaise longue."

"You know why we're all circumcised, right?"

I let B.'s question hang in the BEER-fragranced air for a moment.

How do you answer a question like that?  Of course I didn’t know why we were all circumcised.  You grew up in America too, B.  You know how it works.  Nobody tells you why you're circumcised and you don't ask.  You're supposed to pretend like you don’t notice.  At least that was the cultural expectation that I had internalized by age 19.

Looking back though, it made sense that B. would have formulated a theory about America's curious history of male genital alteration.  For one thing, B. was a hypochondriac.  I mean a big time hypochondriac.  He was one of these people who would go to a party and bring up one anecdote after another about visits to specialists and painful treatments for conditions that defied any kind of straightforward diagnosis.  A delicate surgery in which bone harvested from his hip had been grafted onto his left wrist had appeared in a medical journal.  He seemed to take a special pride in that.

No, B. was not the kind of person to bear any aberrant bodily condition quietly, and for B., as for me, having a dark scar on your penis where your foreskin was supposed to be was an aberrant condition.  I never really thought about it at the time, but I think one of the reasons B. and I shared that perspective was that we'd both grown up in the midst of immigrant cultures that didn't practice circumcision.  B. had spent almost his whole life before college in Miami.  Many of his boyhood friends and classmates came from Cuba, their families having emigrated after Castro's revolution.

I waited until B. answered his own question.  "It was the Jewish doctors," he said.

"The Jewish doctors?" I said.  "How do you figure?"

"In Europe, if they wanted to know if you were a Jew, they'd pull your pants down.  If you were circumcised, you were a Jew.  When the Jews got to America, the Jewish doctors started circumcising everybody.  That way, nobody could tell who the Jews were."

I thought of a book I'd read in my senior year of high school, Mila 18, by Leon Uris.  It was about the Warsaw ghetto.  I learned from that book that during the German occupation, the Jews in Warsaw used women as couriers, never men or boys.  It was too dangerous for Jewish males to step outside the ghetto walls, because you never knew when a German soldier might tell you to pull down your pants.

The Jews, I thought.  Maybe B.'s on to something.  They are the people who invented circumcision, aren't they?

Then I thought of some of the other crazy ideas B. had.  He thought that you could contract a fatal illness if you rinsed off chicken parts and then baked them without patting them dry first.  I mean pat them all the way dry, leaving not so much as a droplet glistening on the bony end of a drumstick.

In fact, he seemed to regard eating in general as a life-or-death struggle against malevolent natural forces, kind of the way you might think about backpacking in the Amazon rain forest.  He believed so strongly in the potential lethality of seafood, undercooked meat, mayonnaise and most fruits and vegetables that he lived almost entirely on prepackaged food.  If it came in a box, he trusted it.  I guess that's why we ate so much Rice A Roni.

You would think I would have treated B.'s Jew theory of circumcision a little more critically, but I didn't.  I think part of me wanted to believe it.  Not out of any feelings of anti-Semitism on my part.  No.  Just the opposite.  I had a deep sentimental attachment to Jewish culture, particularly American Jewish culture.  I'd seen every Marx Brothers movie, every Woody Allen movie, every Mel Brooks movie and "Fiddler on the Roof."  I'd read Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye Columbus and Oscar Levant's memoirs.  I used to play Sophie Tucker 78s on my grandmother's record player.

I loved Sophie Tucker.  She was like an older, more family-friendly version of my mom.

And then there was Mad Magazine.  Mad was full of Jewish humor.  I think that's where I learned most my Yiddish.

No, I think this crazy idea that circumcision had begun in America as some kind of vast Jewish conspiracy brightened my outlook a little bit.  It was another one of those ideas that I could bargain with.  My disfigurement had a purpose.  A heroic purpose.  It was camouflage for the Jews. It made America pogrom-and-Holocaust proof.

It was a comforting misconception, and one I might have held on to a little longer had a secular American Jew named Ed Wallerstein not published a book called Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy.

Part 23, Saying it

Life as I know it now: groggy at 7:45pm.

I consider it my great good fortune to have started college right around the time American retailers began experimenting with generic products.  Remember generic products?  The A&P near my college campus in Chicago had a whole generic aisle.  You'd walk down the aisle and everything was white cartons or white cans or just clear plastic wrap with big black letters on it, all caps:

"PEAS"

"APPLE SAUCE"

"OLIVES"

"MAYONNAISE"

"HOT DOG BUNS"

"ALUMINUM FOIL"

"NAPKINS"

"PAPER TOWELS"

Oh boy, generic products were a cash-strapped college student's best friend.  You could save a fortune buying that stuff.  You don't realize how much of your grocery bill goes to pay for all that fancy packaging and commercials on the TV with the animated bumblebees and young people eating graham crackers on a spotless beach.  You're paying for all that psychological manipulation you know.

So anyway, one day around the beginning of my sophomore year, I'm in the beer section with my buddy B., and he says "I don't believe it.  Is that what I think it is?  Right on!"

And he pulls out a six pack of white aluminum cans, and on each can is printed in big black letters "BEER."

All that year, me and B. drank generic beer from the A&P.  We didn't call it generic beer.  We called it "BEER," just like the label said.  "BEER," not "beer."  You had to say it in a way that indicated that it was all caps.  "We need 37 more cents, so we can buy BEER.  Did you check under the sofa cushions?"

I can't tell you how many times we threw together a Saturday dinner of hot dogs and Rice-A-Roni and BEER.  I'd probably die if I treated my body like that now, but at 19, I was pretty indestructible.  I could eat hot dogs and Rice-A-Roni every weekend, and sit up until 3am drinking BEER and shooting the breeze with B.

One such weekend, probably pretty close to 3am, B. and I were sitting on the couch talking about what we thought our lives would look like in the distant future, after we grew up and graduated, when college and Chicago would be nothing but a lot of hazy, BEER-scented memories.  What kind of jobs would we have?  Where would we live?  What about marriage?  What about children?

I remember thinking to myself, "Should I say it?  Do I really want to say it?  Will I sound like a lunatic?  Or will B. understand?  Oh hell, now your heart rate's going up.  Hurry up and get it out before you hyperventilate.  Say it.  Say it!"

I took a deep breath and I said, "You know something, if I ever had a son, I would never have him circumcised."

B. got this look on his face that I don't know how to describe it, but I'm sure you've seen this look before.  Or you've made it before.  You know the look you make when your friend tells you "I'm getting a divorce."  And you make that look that says "Please stand by.  My cognitive functioning will return shortly."  That's the look I'm talking about.  I'm pretty sure it's a hard-wired human behavior.

So B. made that look, and then he smiled, clunked his BEER can against my BEER can and, with an exclamation that included both the noun and present participle forms of the English language's most socially unacceptable word, indicated his unqualified concurrence with my opinion.

Then B. said to me "You know the reason we're all circumcised, right?"

"Reason?" I thought.  "There's a reason?!"

Now that I think of it, I probably gave him that funny look too.

Part 22, Shame

kurt_t with muscle car, 1977

Did I mention that the nerd table was all male?  I should have.

Girls would visit the nerd table from time to time, but the core group was all guys.  It was like "The View" but in reverse.

So naturally, the nerd table was a place where we all felt comfortable discussing matters of sexuality, such as they were for socially awkward teenagers who collected stamps and took Latin.

If there was anyplace I could have had a conversation about circumcision, it would have been the nerd table, especially after that episode in "Roots" with the circumcision ceremony and the Mandinka elder saying "You no doubt have noticed the porthos of a man does not resemble the porthos of a boy," as his sidekick held up something that looked like pruning shears stuck in the open position.

It was the sort of image that was made for in-depth review at nerd table.  That was one of our favorite pastimes, deliberating over dramatic moments from our favorite movies and TV shows, particularly scenes involving violent death or disfigurement.

"See, that's why Robert Mitchum used a grenade launcher instead of the M-16.  Did you see when he lit his cigar on the smoldering Panzer?  That seemed kind of fake.  Could you really do that without setting your hair on fire?"

So that was the way I tried to open up a discussion about circumcision.  I did it by talking about that scene in "Roots."  I forget what exactly I said, but I remember that I approached the subject very indirectly.  I never used the words "foreskin" or "circumcision" or even "penis" or "genitals."  I think the conversation went like this:

"Did you see the scene with the big knife?  And the big Mandinka guy?   And LeVar Burton and his buddies are all lined up?  That looked painful.  Do you suppose that's really what they did in those days?"

One or two nerds looked up from their cafeteria trays and shrugged, and that was it.  Nobody wanted to talk about it.  Somebody changed the subject right away, started talking about Dr. Demento or something.

Looking back on that time in my life, I wonder why I didn't try harder to talk to one of my peers about my feelings about being circumcised.  I can understand why I didn't talk to an adult about it.  Like all teenagers, I understood instinctively the futility of confronting adults with questions about cultural norms.

"Why can't women be topless at the beach?"

"Why are drugs that kill you legal and drugs that don't kill you are illegal?"

"Why can't we have pizza for Thanksgiving?"

"Why do people drink milk?  Isn't that stuff for baby cows?"

You couldn't expect an adult to give you an honest answer to those kinds of questions.  Adults expected you to accept your culture as a package deal.  They didn't want you picking at the absurd parts like they were cocktail onions in a chicken pot pie.

But your peers, that was a whole different story.  Everything was open for discussion.  The legal drinking age, the speed limit, the composition of NATO and the American League West, whether algebra had any basis in reality or was simply an elaborate educational hoax.

So why not circumcision?  Why didn't I make more of an effort to talk to my friends about that?  It wasn't like I only had the nerds to talk to.  Every summer, I'd go back to California to stay with my dad's side of the family, and I'd always spend a lot of time with John and Michael.  They were the guys who first noticed something different about my penis that afternoon when we were changing into our swimsuits.  Now we were older, and we knew why we looked different, and we still had no inhibitions about being naked around one another.  John and I used to skinny dip in the backyard when the grown ups weren't around, and once we even streaked the neighborhood.

It was the '70s.  Everybody was doing it.

So why did I feel like I couldn't talk to anybody about this issue, not even my partner in streaking?

I don't think there's any one answer to that question.  Or if there's one answer, it's an answer that has many parts.  Part of the answer is shame.  My youthful experimentation with streaking notwithstanding, I felt ashamed of what my penis looked like.  I was ashamed of what had happened to my body.

Now, I suppose that's not a logical reason to feel ashamed, is it?  I wasn’t the one responsible for what my penis looked like, right?

But how much of your shame when you're a teenager is based on logic?  How much that shame is based on things you have no control over?  Isn't that part of what you're ashamed of?  Not being in control?

Isn't that part of what you're ashamed of if you're a teenager with an alcoholic parent?  Or an abusive parent?  Isn't that part of what you're ashamed of if you've been sexually assaulted?  Not having control.  Not having any power to stop the problem from happening.  Not having any power to fix the problem.

And if you can't fix the problem, and you feel ashamed for having the problem in the first place, about all you can do is stay quiet and pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Part 21, Nerds

kurt_t, not always this cool.

I graduated from Spring Branch Senior High School in 1978, and the school closed in 1983.  As far as I know, our alumni association still sponsors football games. 

Let me tell you something about that.  If you go to a football game where one team consists of guys who graduated high school no later than 1983, that game is going to move kind of slow.  You're going to have plenty of opportunity to move around and mingle and catch up with your friends.

It was a muggy Texas evening in August 2003.  Down on the field at Tully Stadium, the Spring Branch Alumni Bears faced our much sprier arch rival, the Memorial Alumni Mustangs.  I was heading to the snack bar during what felt like the eighteenth timeout of the first quarter, when a blonde in a drill team outfit waved at me so hard her cowboy hat fell off.

"Kurt!" she said.  "Is that you?  Is that really you?!  Git over here!  I got somebody I want you to meet!"

It was my old pal Cindy.  I hadn't seen her since graduation, 25 years before.  The somebody she wanted to meet was her teenager daughter.

"How did you know my mom?" the girl asked me.  "Did you play football?"

Logical assumption.  I'm a big guy, and Cindy knew all the football players because she was on the drill team.  That's why she was there in the stands with the rest of the Bruin Brigade, wearing a blue and white miniskirt and tasseled boots.

"No," I said.  "I didn't play football.  I was a nerd."

Honestly, it was like telling somebody you'd been to Woodstock. 

When did the young people develop this fascination with nerds?  Was the Internet responsible for that?  Or Emo music?  Or Jerry Seinfeld's show?  What turned the corner for nerds?  I never figured it out.

Anyway, when I was in school there was no nerd mystique.  There was no glory in it.  Being a nerd just meant that every day at lunch time you sat at the nerd table in the cafeteria with your nerd peers, who spent a lot of time reading science fiction and discussing political theory.

We were an intellectually curious group.  I suppose that's what set us apart more than anything, our enthusiasm for the free exchange of ideas, all sorts of ideas.  No idea was too outlandish or far fetched for frank and thoughtful consideration.  The nerd clique welcomed Ayn Rand libertarians and crypto-monarchists.  It embraced advocates for space colonization and believers in ancient astronauts and pyramid power.  I think by senior year, the nerd table had given rise to at least five mutually conflicting theories about the ultimate disposition of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

You would think that in such an atmosphere I might have felt comfortable talking to one or more of my nerd friends about my frustration and bewilderment over America's weird cultural attachment to circumcision.  I often wondered if anybody else felt the same way I did.  Why not just ask around?

Well, I kind of did.  Once.  Almost.

Remember Alex Haley wrote a book called Roots that traced his ancestry back to a West African slave named Kunta Kinte?  And remember they turned the book into a miniseries on TV?  That miniseries came out in 1977, during my senior year in high school.

Well, "Roots" was probably the most popular thing that had ever been on TV since Ed Sullivan booked the Beatles.  I mean "Roots" was huge.  Everybody watched it.  White, people, black people.  Everybody watched "Roots."  And that included everybody at Spring Branch High.  Didn't matter if you were a cheerleader or a football player or a nerd.  Didn't matter if you were in the mime troupe or the science club or the Future Farmers of America, you watched "Roots."  It was definitely a cross-clique phenomenon.

It must have been episode one or two where a teenage Kunta Kinte and his friends went through a circumcision ceremony in Africa.  Nothing graphic.  You just see a big dude holding a cutting implement with two blades sticking out of it, and then LeVar Burton grimaces, and half a minute later he's saying something to his buddy like "Didn't hurt nearly as bad as I thought it would."

Well, that scene flooded my mind with new information.  For one thing, I had no idea that any culture practiced circumcision aside from Jews and Americans.  For that matter, it had never occurred to me that non-white people had foreskins.

I know.  Pretty naive, wasn't I?  But remember the first explanation my friends had offered for my missing foreskin?  I wasn't German.  Or I wasn't German enough at any rate.

I think without really thinking about it very deeply, I made a vague connection in my mind between foreskins and European people, just as I made a connection between circumcision and Jewish people and circumcision and white American people.

Who was going to teach me that those connections were oversimplified and imprecise?  My Health teacher?  No.  Health class was mandatory in those days, unless your parents objected on moral or religious grounds, but nobody ever said a thing in Health class about foreskins.  Even when we learned about condoms, nobody told us "If you have a foreskin, be sure to retract it before you put this thing on."

No, I guess if you had a foreskin, you were expected to figure that out on your own.  Health class proceeded as if foreskins didn't exist, as did Biology class, as did History class, as did the entire culture I lived in.

But then right there on national TV in front of millions, "Roots" broke America's conspiracy of silence about foreskins and circumcision.

Well, I decided if Roots could break the conspiracy of silence, I could break the conspiracy of silence.

And what better place to break it than at that most enlightened and cosmopolitan of forums, the nerd table?