In this week's media face-off between the medical group in France who performed the first face transplant and those of us who can't really meet the idea face-on, we've revealed some interesting assumptions about how we think about identity.
A lot of people found their nosesout of joint over the arrogance of the French team, or making funny faces as the "too much information" image of having your face torn off by a dog and someone else's pasted on hits your stomach.
It's a delicate and interesting phenom. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, we certainly don't worry about cornea transplants, which certainly aren't any more lifesaving than this recent surgery.
Yet somehow this story seemed more in your face than most medical news. People didn't bother to mask their feelings, and a few folks I knew who asked what the deal was did an about face as some creeping social consensus -- partly built by the face time the French group cultivated with the media -- seemed to sink in.
And that's one of the things I think we all need to face up to. This is a manufactured consent -- but it was manufactured in a medical office in France. The group is doing very little to unmask the mystique of what they are doing. They are not interested in some scientific saving face. They are trying to draw as much fire -- but without really dispelling any of the questionable energy growing around the story.
It makes me wonder about their motives.
But aside from that, I really want to see more discussion of the "squikiness" of this story -- how we seem to equate face and identity. My dearest love is blind -- it makes me very aware of how much beauty is not skin deep.
Is it because we fear that these people are going to go into the most tailored of plastic surgeries?
Does this surgery deserve the contemplation of, say, test tube babies, surrogate mothers, or genetic screening in utero?
Let's face it, it's not that big a deal.
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