To the Editor:

The research question offered by author Ross F. Ralston in his ISU thesis proposal addresses complex concepts such as social construction of reality, hegemony and reification. It is both commendable and blissfully mature. After reading this gifted traveler/scholar’s proposal for his Doctoral thesis in sociology, these images came to mind:

First, imagine the human race as “fresh unbroken skin.” Then, visualize an accident which causes a relatively deep wound to that skin. The chain of physiological events which follows such an injury eventually results in the formation of scar (keloid) tissue unless some other condition interferes with the healing process. Keloid tissue is morphologically different from the outer epidermis in two ways: 1) it stems from a deeper layer (subcutaneous) of cells and, 2) it is more vascular (and therefore, more prone to bleeding upon repeated injury). The repaired site, though somewhat more fibrous and tough, is actually more susceptible to injury by sunburn, abrasion, etc., than the original skin layer. We, the human race, are thus prone:

If an ulterior-motive-based mass media “machine” (as Mr. Ralston refers to it) is likened to the “keloidal aftermath” of “deep wounds” incurred by society as the result of years of reality construction by our mass media, then concepts such as freedom have been a farce since the country’s inception!

Upon further diagnosis, the able medic in this case must concede that something more injurious than a skin wound is afflicting America.

Ralston states that the social condition could be slowed somewhat by a last-ditch effort by our government to fess up to its numerous cover-ups and blatant dishonesties. Any and all withheld information concerning the public butchering of people like John F. Kennedy should be fully released (additional atrocities could be dealt with after that). Inoperable as our collective condition may be, the complete exhumed truth in cases like J.F.K. would allow the crippled ghost of freedom to have its just “Boo!” in the face of power. If the truth could set us free to become more self-diagnostic in the future, then how come we haven’t been told exactly what kind of sickness we have?

After reading Mr. Ralston’s craftily rendered doctoral proposal, I must say that:

In light of the human debacle described here (with somewhat impossible imagery), it becomes apparent that some kind of spiritual-political “transfixus” is blindly leading the grand human debate. If the public human condition is inextricably bound to taste of its own toxin (at the price of sacrificing truth and harmony with nature), then we are all trapped alongside the whirring machineries of hegemony, wherein the fumes suffocate our ability to think and act critically as a society.

This crash course we’re on – could it actually be a natural collective progression back to the metaphysical? Where our destiny is to return once more to some kind of “necessary falling” from a Creator’s grace only to repeat the self-effacing rituals of gaunt Puritanism, the very “thing” that got us into this mess in the first place?

Look for Ralston’s thesis in 1996. It promises to make you think.

Jack M. Gallup

zoology and genetics