Tale of Two Cities

NY Times, October 21, 2001

When Times Get Tough, Some Go for Plastic Surgery
By RUTH LA FERLA

A FEW weeks ago Jody Seiff, a Manhattan nightclub manager, was seized 
by an indefinable melancholy. "You know how when you feel bad, 
nothing makes you happy?" she said. "You try shopping, and when that 
doesn't work, you go to the makeup counter to buy some new colors."

But last week, when her usual strategies failed, Ms. Seiff, 36, 
sought balm for her spirits in a plastic surgeon's consulting room. 
"I had a little bit of collagen done in my lips and in those places 
where tiny wrinkles were starting to show," she confided. "These 
things distract you for a time. You feel a little perkier."

Americans' consumption of luxury indulgences may have fallen off a 
cliff since Sept. 11 -- rabbit-fur hats, $100 face creams, platinum 
charm bracelets. But one unexpected growth area has been outpatient 
cosmetic surgery, as patients like Ms. Seiff try to salve their 
unease with a host of skin-deep, but inwardly comforting, remedies.

It is too early for statistics, but a dozen cosmetic surgeons around 
the country said that they and their colleagues had found that while 
major hospital procedures like face-lifts have fallen since 
mid-September, office procedures like eyelifts and Botox and collagen 
injections have surged markedly -- by 20 to 30 percent compared with 
the same weeks a year ago. Some of those procedures can be performed 
in about an hour and require minimal recovery time.

"Based on what we are hearing, people are beginning to come back 
around to those procedures that they had planned to do," said Leida 
Snow, a spokeswoman for the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic 
Surgery. "We're also seeing new people coming in. Patients are 
saying, `If not now, when?' "

The decision may be an outgrowth of a shift in priorities as a result 
of the terrorist attacks and the declining economy, one that has many 
Americans buying fewer big-ticket items and postponing vacations, 
while indulging instead in mini-luxuries they hope will provide a 
quick fix for the body and the spirit.

====

NY Times, October 21, 2001

Why Peshawar's Youth are Tinder for Islamic Extremism
By PETER MAASS
 
Emroz Khan destroys for a living. He dismantles car engines, slicing 
them open with a sledgehammer and a crooked chisel, prying apart the 
cylinders, tearing out pistons, dislodging screws and bolts and 
throwing the metal entrails into a pile that will be sold for scrap. 
He is 21 and has been doing this sort of work for 10 years, 12 hours 
a day, six days a week, earning $1.25 a day. 

His hands and arms are gnarled works of body art, stained a rich 
black like fresh asphalt and ribboned with scars. As dusk falls on 
Cinema Road, where Emroz works in a shop that is so poor it has no 
name or sign, he rolls up his sleeve and asks me to put my finger 
along a bulge on his forearm; it feels as hard as iron. It is iron, a 
stretch of pipe he drove into his body by mistake. He cannot afford 
to pay a doctor to take it out. 

''I've had it for three years,'' he says. 

He opens his left palm and places two fingers alongside what looks 
like a crease, then pulls apart the crease to reveal a two-inch gash 
that runs an inch deep. I hadn't noticed it because the raw flesh was 
covered with grease, like the rest of his palm and arm. The wound is 
two years old. 

''We work like donkeys,'' Emroz says. ''That's what our life is like. 
It is the life of animals.'' 

full article: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/magazine/21PESHAWAR.html

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 10/21/2001

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org