I was just watching some thing about Alzheimer’s Disease on PBS. It was sponsored by some insurance company or something, and had this weird feel to it. Lots of statistics and talk about projected costs and losses and stuff. Lots of footage of old people taking ridiculous tests with patterns and word games and stuff. Lots of concerned faces of family members who were describing the “torture” of having to care for somebody with the disease.

All in all, it was very depressing. Not because of the reasons they wanted it to be depressing though, but because of how they were trying to portray all this. The unspoken mental/emotional agenda they were pushing by the content and directorial choices they made. I can’t exactly articulate all that was wrong with it. The feeling was just all wrong. So mechanical and inhuman, their approach to the whole thing. In my eyes, their mindset about the whole thing is more dangerous than the disease, because it’s just another outcropping of how fucked up care for people with mental illnesses really is.

They were seriously talking about giving patients drugs that they didn’t know what effects they would have, just so they could see what would happen. Shit like that. I don’t understand how they could have been studying this disease for more than a hundred years, and still know next to nothing about it. Their problem-solving approach must be flawed. Also, they mentioned that 15 years ago, only 500,000 had Alzheimer’s, whereas now, something like 5,000,000 have it. Which is an explosive rate of increase.

One of the more interesting points to the whole thing was made by some guy who was talking about how the whole “point” of human identity is that we are these kind of walking storehouses of memories, which connect us to our lives and to the people, places and things we know. And then that this disease comes in and “rips up” all these carefully constructed and treasured memories and connections to things. That makes me think in a lot of different directions at once.

One of which is this notion that Alzheimer’s is a kind of analogy to a consumerist-culture nightmare. Memories as possessions. Wherein, all the possessions and property that you have spent your life working for and buying, can come and suddenly be ripped away from you. And there was a heavy feeling conveyed in that documentary about how once you lose your memories, you’re not the same person anymore, and almost a certain implication that you become somehow a little inhuman.

Isn’t there that part in Fight Club where Tyler says something like “You are not what you own.” I happen to agree with that, but I still like owning stuff. My question though, is that if we aren’t what we own, are we our memories? Do our memories define us in a similar or different way from how our possessions define us?

I wonder if there will be some kind of virtual reality drama that people pay to take part in some time in the future, like Fight Club, where some bold anarchist figment of someone’s imagination yells at us “You are not what you remember.” Maybe by that time, we’ll have so many manufactured memories (tv shows, movies, games, ads, music?) where this really will be an issue for us to think about. Maybe it’s already an issue. I’m not sure. I’m just getting a faint glimmer of the outlined shape of this idea.