Pham Thai, Michael Sprinker, and John Holstun: Chemical Herbicide and the Indirect Costs of Production

James Holstun Pham Thai, Michael Sprinker, and John Holstun: Chemical Herbicide and the Indirect Costs of Production I know Michael from his herculean but good-humored efforts to help me chop down my bloated book manuscript and convince Verso to publish it. During the year or so I was finishing the manuscript, I gave him a series of firm dates about when it would be ready. He was bemused and tolerant with most of my excuses. My favorite was a photocopy of a letter Marx sent to his publisher in the early 1860s, promising the manuscript for Capital I in a week, and those for Capital U and /// at one month intervals after that. His favorite was when I told him that my friend Paul Zarembka and I at SUNY Buffalo were organizing efforts to urge members of our union (UUP, affiliated with NYSUT and AFT) to rejed a treacherous new contrad that allowed our work to be "contracted out" to private contradors and "contraded in" to quasi-private corporations within the university system. With unions like that, who needs management? After the state turned up the heatby illegally denying benefits, our union leadership pushed hard for the contract and refused to allow a free debate in the union newsletter and web site. We lost, big time, with only seven percent of the membership voting to rejed the contract. But Michael was one of us. In our discussions of the contract, he mentioned a recent conversation with his oncologist: "Both the dean of the medical school here and the university president are agreed that the oncology unit should be sold to a pharmaceutical company and that its services will be contraded in to the university hospital. Very scary" (4 Nov. 1997). I didn't know he had been sick, so I wrote him back. With the sort of narcissism that such intimades tend to create, I told him about the deaths of my parents from cancer. My father died in 1977 at age fifty-one from a heart attack, the result of the protein -thickened blood produced by the chemotherapy he had undergone for his multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. Michael wrote me back and, in the second paragraph, after getting through editing business, said, Strange coincidences. My cancer is the same as killed your father, though I've been lucky, both in having some very talented medical help and in having a sister who is pretty much a perfect genetic match and who could as a result serve as an excellent bone marrow donor. Even so, I've been on the verge of checking out at least twice, perhaps three times. Ifs not clear what the etiology of my condition was, though I have these strong memories of DDT spraying in my youth—ifs a kind of Proustian thing; I still have the smell in my sensorium. But no one knows much about these things; they can only guess. (Apr. 1998) You can only guess, but you can't really refrain from guessing either. Michael was born in 1950 in Elgin, Illinois—in the beginning of the era of 174 the minnesota review herbicides, and in the herbicide-laced middle swath of the country. He grew up around Bloomington and Normal, in small towns near agricultural areas , one generation removed from German-American farmers. Modhumita Roy tells me that, after his diagnosis in 1991, he thought aboutdoing a study to see how many of his Illinois contemporaries had also come down with cancer, but time ran out, and he died in August 1999. 1 would like to be able to do that study, but I don't know how. Instead, I've tried to write a sort of dry, speculative elegy for Michael (the kind I think he might have liked best) and for my father, connecting the hard, simple fact of two premature deaths to larger, collective levels of analysis, and using the crucial Marxist concept of the mode of production, which guided so much of the work that Michael wrote and helped to shape as an editor. I grew up downstream from Michael, in Leland, Mississippi—right in the middle of the Delta and...