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Op-Ed Columnist A Failed Experiment By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: November 21, In upper-middle-class suburbs on the East Coast, the newest must-have isn’t a $7,500 Sub-Zero refrigerator. It’s a standby generator that automatically flips on backup power to an entire house when the electrical grid goes out.
In part, that’s a legacy of Hurricane Sandy. Such a system can cost well over $10,000, but many families are fed up with losing power again and again.
(A month ago, I would have written more snarkily about residential generators. But then we lost power for 12 days after Sandy — and that was our third extended power outage in four years. Now I’m feeling less snarky than jealous!)
More broadly, the lust for generators is a reflection of our antiquated electrical grid and failure to address climate change. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our grid, prone to bottlenecks and blackouts, a grade of D+ in 2009.
So Generac, a Wisconsin company that dominates the generator market, says it is running three shifts to meet surging demand. About 3 percent of stand-alone homes worth more than $100,000 in the country now have standby generators installed.
“Demand for generators has been overwhelming, and we are increasing our production levels,” Art Aiello, a spokesman for Generac, told me.
That’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.
It’s manifestly silly (and highly polluting) for every fine home to have a generator. It would make more sense to invest those resources in the electrical grid so that it wouldn’t fail in the first place.
But our political system is dysfunctional: in addressing income inequality, in confronting climate change and in maintaining national infrastructure.
The National Climatic Data Center has just reported that October was the 332nd month in a row of above-average global temperatures. As the environmental Web site Grist reported, that means that nobody younger than 27 has lived for a single month with colder-than-average global temperatures, yet climate change wasn’t even much of an issue in the 2012 campaign. Likewise, the World Economic Forum ranks American infrastructure 25th in the world, down from 8th in 2003-4, yet infrastructure is barely mentioned by politicians.
So time and again, we see the decline of public services accompanied by the rise of private workarounds for the wealthy.
Is crime a problem? Well, rather than pay for better policing, move to a gated community with private security guards!
Are public schools failing? Well, superb private schools have spaces for a mere $40,000 per child per year.
Public libraries closing branches and cutting hours? Well, buy your own books and magazines!
Are public parks — even our awesome national parks, dubbed “America’s best idea” and the quintessential “public good” — suffering from budget cuts? Don’t whine. Just buy a weekend home in the country!
Public playgrounds and tennis courts decrepit? Never mind — just join a private tennis club!
I’m used to seeing this mind-set in developing countries like Chad or Pakistan, where the feudal rich make do behind high walls topped with shards of glass; increasingly, I see it in our country. The disregard for public goods was epitomized by Mitt Romney’s call to end financing of public broadcasting.
A wealthy friend of mine notes that we all pay for poverty in the end. The upfront way is to finance early childhood education for at-risk kids. The back-end way is to pay for prisons and private security guards. In cities with high economic inequality, such as New York and Los Angeles, more than 1 percent of all employees work as private security guards, according to census data.
This question of public goods hovers in the backdrop as we confront the “fiscal cliff” and seek to reach a deal based on a mix of higher revenues and reduced benefits. It’s true that we have a problem with rising entitlement spending, especially in health care. But I also wonder if we’ve reached the end of a failed half-century experiment in ever-lower tax rates for the wealthy.
Since the 1950s, the top federal income tax rate has fallen from 90 percent or more to 35 percent. Capital gains tax rates have been cut by more than half since the late 1970s. Financial tycoons now often pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
All this has coincided with the decline of some public services and the emergence of staggering levels of inequality (granted, other factors are also at work) such that the top 1 percent of Americans now have greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
Not even the hum of the most powerful private generator can disguise the failure of that long experiment.
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Op-Ed Contributor The People’s BeachBy ANDREW W. KAHRL Milwaukee
(December 4, 2012) . .“IN recent years, fences and barricades have blocked the public right to have access to our seas. We are becoming a landlocked people, fenced away from our own beautiful shores, unable to exercise the ancient right to enjoy our precious beaches.” This is how Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas characterized the relationship between the American public and its coasts in 1969. Nearly a half-century later, those same words could have described much of the New Jersey and Long Island shorelines on the eve of Hurricane Sandy.
In the years between, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, beachfront property owners, wealthy municipalities and private homeowners’ associations threw up a variety of physical and legal barriers designed to ensure the exclusivity — and marketability — of the beach. These measures were not only antisocial but also environmentally destructive.
By increasing the value of shoreline property and encouraging rampant development, the trend toward privatizing formerly public space has contributed in no small measure to the damage storms like Hurricane Sandy inflict. Tidal lands that soaked up floodwaters were drained and developed. Jetties, bulkheads and sea walls were erected, hastening erosion. And sand dunes — which block rising waters but also profitable ocean views — were bulldozed.
It didn’t have to be this way. In 1967, Bob Eckhardt, a first-term congressman from Texas, came to Washington determined to do for the nation what he had done for the Texas coastline. As a state legislator, Mr. Eckhardt had passed the nation’s first open beaches law, the Texas Open Beaches Act of 1959, which defined all land below the vegetation line as belonging to the state for use by the people.
Rather than a departure, this bill was a restoration of the ancient right of the public to the foreshore — a right dating from Roman civil law that was incorporated into English common law, transported to the American colonies and finally preserved in the new nation in what came to be known as the Public Trust Doctrine. Sadly, each state interpreted that doctrine differently. While on the West Coast, a strong tradition of public beach access prevailed, along much of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, and especially along the crowded Northeast corridor, states tended to adopt a very narrow interpretation. Some states maintained that the Public Trust Doctrine covered only the public’s right to fishing and navigation, and still others largely ignored it.
While Mr. Eckhardt’s bill was, in the truest sense, conservative, its effects on the Texas coastline were nothing short of radical. The fences and jetties that beachfront property owners had constructed to restrict public access were dismantled. In some instances, buildings were torn down. Slowly, the beach returned to a more natural state.
The National Open Beaches Act, first proposed in 1969 by Mr. Eckhardt with Senator Yarborough, intended to do the same, by outlawing “any obstruction, barrier, or restraint of any nature which interferes with the free and unrestricted right of the public ... to enter, leave, cross, or use as a common the public beaches.” But opponents assembled a host of arguments against its passage. Open beaches would attract more people to the shore, tying up traffic, ruining fragile sand dunes and leaving a trail of litter. It was the classic “tragedy of the commons” thesis. Given how overrun with bathers public beaches had become, this argument seemed to make sense.
But time has shown that the biggest threat to America’s coasts is not an overabundance of public space but its absence. As the bill stalled in Congress, private development along the Eastern Seaboard accelerated. By 1974, one coastal scientist bemoaned that the “waterfront lot” had “replaced the public beach as the modern symbol of coastal America.” Beaches were no longer a public resource but a private asset, and ensuring the value of beachfront real estate came to play an increasingly influential role in shaping environmental policy.
Reaffirming the public’s right to the beach could be the first step in a more just and sustainable coastal environmental policy. The argument used to defeat the Open Beaches bill — that it would depress real estate values — is precisely the reason we need to reintroduce an updated version of this legislation now. Without the ability of property owners to wall off and claim the beach as their own, coastal real estate values would slowly decline, and the pressure to develop would dissipate (or at least become more ecologically sensitive).
I’m not calling for a full-scale retreat from the coast. Long before the modern age of coastal development, people lived by the sea. Their homes were routinely battered by storms, and they didn’t try to defy nature by constructing fortifications to preserve each attractive stretch of shore, since they knew that what was there today would most likely be gone tomorrow. We need to return to those sustainable practices, and an open beaches act could help us get there.
By dedicating beaches to the states for use by the public, Congress would be declaring an end to the destructive — and futile — attempts by private property owners to hold back the sea. It would ensure a better future for America’s coasts and restore one of our founding legal principles. We would not be confiscating private property, but merely recognizing who owned it all along: us.
Andrew W. Kahrl, an assistant professor of history at Marquette, is the author of “The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches From Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South.”
also;
Resisted for Blocking the View, Dunes Prove They Blunt StormsBy MIREYA NAVARRO and RACHEL NUWER LONG BEACH, N.Y. — Surfers railed against the project because they said it would interfere with the curl of the waves. Local businesses reliant on beach tourism hated it, too. Who would flock to the historic Boardwalk, they asked, if sand dunes were engineered to rise up and obscure the ocean view?
And many residents did not care for the aesthetics of the $98 million plan — declaring that they preferred the beach wide and flat, with the soft, light-colored native sand that they had grown up with.
So, six years ago, after the Army Corps of Engineers proposed to erect dunes and elevate beaches along more than six miles of coast to protect this barrier island, the Long Beach City Council voted 5 to 0 against paying its $7 million initial share and taking part.
Many of Long Beach’s 33,000 residents would come to regret it.
The smaller neighboring communities on the barrier island — Point Lookout, Lido Beach and Atlantic Beach — approved construction of 15-foot-high dunes as storm insurance. Those dunes did their job, sparing them catastrophic damage while Long Beach suffered at least $200 million in property and infrastructure losses, according to preliminary estimates.
Joe Vietri, director of coastal and storm risk management for the corps, toured the damaged coastlines after the 12-to-14-foot storm surge of Hurricane Sandy and came to an inescapable conclusion. “The difference was dramatic for areas with vital and healthy dune systems, which did better than those that did not,” he said in a telephone interview. “You can see the evidence on Point Lookout and Lido Beach, which did much better than Long Beach.”
Mr. Vietri, who is overseeing a comprehensive coastal damage assessment, says it is too early to provide hard figures on how towns with barriers fared in comparison with those, like Long Beach, without them.
But up and down the coast, for the most part, dune barriers acted like soft sea walls made of sand and vegetation that even when flattened or breached still managed to protect places like Westhampton Beach on Long Island, Plumb Beach in Brooklyn, and Bradley Beach in Monmouth County, N.J., by blunting the attack of surging waves and tides.
Richard T. Bianchi Jr., public works supervisor in New Jersey’s Bradley Beach, said the town began building its 15-foot-high dune barrier along the mile-long waterfront in the 1990s by laying 25,000 feet of snow fencing in a saw-tooth pattern down the beach and later adding 20,000 recycled Christmas trees as traps for drifting sand. After wind pushed sand over the structure, shoots of dune grass were planted to further stabilize the barrier.
When Hurricane Sandy came, the force of the waves flattened the dunes but left the town’s Boardwalk and the houses just 75 feet from it intact. Plans to restore the Bradley Beach dunes are already under way. The town’s dune-barrier project cost about $10,000 in 1996, Mr. Bianchi said. The town suffered $2 million to $3 million in damage, officials said, while many of its unprotected coastal neighbors were devastated.
“People complained about how high they were, but now they’re not complaining,” Mr. Bianchi said. “They’re praising.”
The Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency charged with maintaining the nation’s coastline, said some of the 100 miles of barrier dunes in the region were built by the corps, others by local governments themselves. Many of the projects were built to withstand storms less powerful than Hurricane Sandy, the corps said, and even in places where the surge cut through the sand, the dunes helped to soften the blow.
Cliff Jones, a program manager with the corps’s North Atlantic division in Brooklyn, was the project manager for the 2006 barrier-island dune project that Long Beach rejected. He said the dune would have limited the damage to the town.
“It’s not to say it would have stopped everything, but it would have stopped some,” Mr. Jones said.
Now Long Beach officials say they are reconsidering. “It’s no longer a hypothetical,” Jack Schnirman, the city manager, said. “It’s a reality, and we have to rebuild in a way that takes into account catastrophic storms in the future.”
Long Beach and other vulnerable communities will have to await an act of Congress before restoration and beach-protection projects can move forward. New York’s senators, Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, have asked for a $1 billion emergency appropriation to pay for seven corps sea-barrier construction projects that have been approved by Congress but have never been financed. Included are construction on the south shore of Staten Island, Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, Long Beach and the shoreline from Fire Island to Montauk Point.
“These are projects that should get built, providing the local communities go along,” Mr. Schumer said. In Long Beach, he added, “now everybody supports it.”
The projects can include sea wall or dune building and nourishing beaches to a higher elevation with millions of cubic yards of sand. But some shoreline experts warn that anything short of relocating the buildings and development closest to the ocean only buys time as sea levels rise.
“If you put up a sea wall, the beach will disappear because you stop its ability to move landward,” said Robert S. Young, director of the program for the study of developed shorelines at Western Carolina University in North Carolina. And restoration projects, he said, need to be maintained, at great financial cost.
The Surfrider Foundation, an advocacy group that opposed artificial dunes at Long Beach, has softened its stance against armoring coastlines. Chad Nelsen, environmental director for the national group, said rising sea levels and the threat of more intense storms required a thoughtful consideration of all strategies, including relocation.
“We’re more likely to have a less black-and-white view of the issue,” he said.
Homeowners along the coast are undergoing a similar rethinking. But some experts say dunes can lend a false sense of security.
“People think that if we have a nice big dune, they don’t have to worry and can build a high rise,” said Orrin H. Pilkey, professor emeritus of earth and ocean sciences at Duke University. “I think that’s a very serious shortcoming of dunes.”
He supports dune restoration but also proposes limiting and mitigating development, including not rebuilding destroyed homes next to the beach and elevating others onto stilts to avoid flooding in the event that dunes are overtopped.
“Our preference is to put those dunes back as quickly as possible,” said Julie Schreck, the mayor of Bradley Beach. “I hope other communities will consider trying to emulate nature as much as they can, but I guess every town has to take stock of its own preferences.”
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A crown cap, reading "500 Years of Reinheitsgebot in Munich (since 1487)" on a bottle of German beerThe Reinheitsgebot (German pronunciation: [ˈʁaɪnhaɪtsɡəboːt] ( listen), literally "purity order"), sometimes called the "German Beer Purity Law" or the "Bavarian Purity Law" in English, was a regulation concerning the production of beer in Germany. In the original text, the only ingredients that could be used in the production of beer were water, barley and hops.
The law originated in the city of Ingolstadt in the duchy of Bavaria on 23 April 1516, although first put forward in 1487,[1] concerning standards for the sale and composition of beer.
[edit] The textIn the original text, the only ingredients that could be used in the production of beer were water, barley and hops. The law also set the price of beer at 1-2 Pfennig per Maß. The Reinheitsgebot is no longer part of German law: it has been replaced by the Provisional German Beer Law, [2] which allows constituent components prohibited in the Reinheitsgebot, such as yeast, wheat malt and cane sugar, but which no longer allows unmalted barley.
Note that no yeast was mentioned in the original text. It was not until the 1800s that Louis Pasteur discovered the role of microorganisms in the process of fermentation; therefore, yeast was not known to be an ingredient of beer. Brewers generally took some sediment from the previous fermentation and added it to the next, the sediment generally containing the necessary organisms to perform fermentation. If none were available, they would set up a number of vats, relying on natural airborne yeast to inoculate the brew.
Hops are added to beer to impart flavors but also act as a preservative, and their mention in the Reinheitsgebot meant to prevent alternative methods of preserving beer that had been used before the introduction of hops. Medieval brewers had used many problematic ingredients to preserve beers, including, for example soot and fly agaric mushrooms. More commonly, other "gruit" herbs had been used, such as stinging nettle and henbane. Indeed, the German name of the latter, Bilsenkraut, may originally mean "Plzeň herb"; that this region was a major centre of beer brewing long before the invention of (Reinheitsgebot-compliant) Pilsener.
The penalty for making impure beer was also set in the Reinheitsgebot: a brewer using other ingredients for his beer could have questionable barrels confiscated with no compensation.
German breweries are very proud of the Reinheitsgebot, and many (even brewers of wheat beer[3]) claim to still abide by it.
[edit] HistoryReinheitsgebot was introduced in part to prevent price competition with bakers for wheat and rye. The restriction of grains to barley was meant to ensure the availability of sufficient amounts of affordable bread, as the more valuable wheat and rye were reserved for use by bakers. Today many Bavarian beers are again brewed using wheat and are thus no longer compliant with the Reinheitsgebot.
The Reinheitsgebot formed the basis of legislation that spread slowly throughout Bavaria and Germany. Bavaria insisted on its application throughout Germany as a precondition of German unification in 1871, to prevent competition from beers brewed elsewhere with a wider range of ingredients. The move encountered strong resistance from brewers outside Bavaria. By restricting the allowable ingredients, it led to the extinction of many brewing traditions and local beer specialties, such as North German spiced beer and cherry beer, and led to the domination of the German beer market by pilsener style beers. Only a few regional beer varieties, such as Kölner Kölsch or Düsseldorfer Altbier, survived its implementation.
Regulations similar to those of the Reinheitsgebot were incorporated into various guild regulations and local laws all over Germany, and in 1952, they were incorporated into the West German Biersteuergesetz (Beer Taxation Law). Many brewers objected to the law at the time, disagreeing more with the amount of the tax than the ingredient requirements. The law initially applied only to bottom-fermented ("lager") beers, but brewers of other types of beer soon accepted the law as well.
In May 1988, a European Court of Justice ruling led to the Reinheitsgebot being lifted, allowing ingredients beyond what was listed in the Biersteuergesetz; this meant that anything allowed in other foods was thus also allowed in beer. The lifting of the Biergesetz, however, only concerns imported beer. Beer brewed in Germany still has to abide to it.
After German reunification in 1990 the Neuzeller Kloster Brewery, a former monastery brewery in the East German town of Neuzelle, Brandenburg, was warned to stop selling its black beer as it contained sugar. In the end, it was allowed to sell it under the name Schwarzer Abt ("Black Abbot") but not "beer". This decision was repealed by the Federal Administrative Court of Germany through a special permit, after legal disputes lasting ten years, known as the "Brandenburg Beer War", so the "Schwarzer Abt" can be called "beer" again.
The revised Vorläufiges Biergesetz of 1993 is a slightly expanded version of the Reinheitsgebot, allowing, besides water, malted barley, and hops, for yeast to be used for bottom-fermented beer, and for different kinds of malt, and sugar to be used for top-fermented beer. All ingredients and the process itself are subject to additional regulations.
Thus, German breweries continue to comply with the Biergesetz, often claiming compliance with the Reinheitsgebot even when it is patently incorrect (for example, for wheat beers, which were prohibited by the Reinheitsgebot), using this compliance as a valuable marketing tool.
Until superseded by a change in EU law, the Reinheitsgebot was also enforced in Greece from the early 19th century due to a law by the first Greek king, Otto (originally a Bavarian prince) that had remained in effect for over a hundred years.
When it was in effect, the law drew criticism from foreign brewers as a form of protectionism that allowed West Germany to prohibit beers from Belgium and England which contained sugars, adjunct grains such as corn (maize) and rice, and clarification and fining agents. Many German and American beers, for marketing purposes, continue to claim to abide by the rule.
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In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.
Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.
“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.
“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”
“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”
“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”
I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.
A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.
That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.
We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.
At the start of seventh grade, Michael was accepted to an accelerated program for highly gifted math and science students. His IQ is off the charts. When he’s in a good mood, he will gladly bend your ear on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to the differences between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics to Doctor Who. He’s in a good mood most of the time. But when he’s not, watch out. And it’s impossible to predict what will set him off.
Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We decided to transfer him to the district’s most restrictive behavioral program, a contained school environment where children who can’t function in normal classrooms can access their right to free public babysitting from 7:30-1:50 Monday through Friday until they turn 18.
The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful. Right before we turned into his school parking lot, he said, “Look, Mom, I’m really sorry. Can I have video games back today?”
“No way,” I told him. “You cannot act the way you acted this morning and think you can get your electronic privileges back that quickly.”
His face turned cold, and his eyes were full of calculated rage. “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said. “I’m going to jump out of this car right now and kill myself.”
That was it. After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs, ands, or buts. I did not respond, except to pull the car into the opposite lane, turning left instead of right.
“Where are you taking me?” he said, suddenly worried. “Where are we going?”
“You know where we are going,” I replied.
“No! You can’t do that to me! You’re sending me to hell! You’re sending me straight to hell!”
I pulled up in front of the hospital, frantically waiving for one of the clinicians who happened to be standing outside. “Call the police,” I said. “Hurry.”
Michael was in a full-blown fit by then, screaming and hitting. I hugged him close so he couldn’t escape from the car. He bit me several times and repeatedly jabbed his elbows into my rib cage. I’m still stronger than he is, but I won’t be for much longer.
The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—“Were there any difficulties with....at what age did your child....were there any problems with...has your child ever experienced...does your child have....”
At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.
For days, my son insisted that I was lying—that I made the whole thing up so that I could get rid of him. The first day, when I called to check up on him, he said, “I hate you. And I’m going to get my revenge as soon as I get out of here.”
By day three, he was my calm, sweet boy again, all apologies and promises to get better. I’ve heard those promises for years. I don’t believe them anymore.
On the intake form, under the question, “What are your expectations for treatment?” I wrote, “I need help.”
And I do. This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.
I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.
According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...-shootings-map). Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.
When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”
I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise—in fact, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarcerated population. (http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/09/05/u...ons-quadrupled)
With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill—Rikers Island, the LA County Jail, and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation’s largest treatment centers in 2011 (http://www.npr.org/2011/09/04/140167...-ill-prisoners)
No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”
I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.
God help me. God help Michael. God help us all. Anarchist Soccer Mom at 10:07 PM
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Put on your thinking caps and open your minds as I try to explain to you how the corruptive forces of America’s illicit drug war and mass incarceration can be seen in ESPN’s morning debate festival First Take.
The show has been in the news the past week because its part-time clown, Rob Parker, gleefully swallowed Skip Bayless’ bait and discussed Robert Griffin III’s “blackness” in the most racist way possible. Among other things, Parker insinuated RG3 was a “cornball” brother not “down for the cause” because he’s engaged to a white woman and there are rumors Griffin is a Republican. To the delight and entertainment of his puppeteer (Bayless), Parker did this on national TV.
ESPN was originally so pleased with the segment that it re-ran it during its daily 30-minute best-of show. The Worldwide Leader did not recognize the inappropriateness and unfairness of Parker’s commentary until the blogosphere and social media exploded with an angry backlash. Within 24 hours, Parker was suspended indefinitely. Six days later, Parker apologized for his stupidity and racism. And on the seventh day, ESPN announced Parker’s indefinite suspension would last 30 days and First Take would receive additional editorial oversight.
What took so long? And why the wrist slaps for something this grossly unfair?
Previously, I’ve explained that First Take is a black barbershop conversation. “Black enough” conversations are a frequent topic in black barbershops. President Obama’s “blackness” is dissected on a daily basis, as is President Clinton’s (I’m not joking). Unless you’re covered in tatts, have more than three baby mamas or are currently working regular shifts selling bean pies and Final Calls for the Fruit of Islam, your blackness can and likely will be questioned at some point inside a black barbershop.
For decades — even centuries — intelligent human life forms were able to distinguish the difference between conversations appropriate for the barbershop and not appropriate for mass broadcast distribution. There’s a lot of sex talk inside the barbershops I frequent. Brothers lose it when Josina Anderson appears on ESPN. Should this be a segment on First Take?
Our public conversations are being dumbed down. Why?
Because there’s a growing mass of American humanity demanding a dumbed-down conversation they can access. In the week since Parker unleashed his stupidity, I’ve heard from countless black men via Twitter and email who believe Parker did nothing wrong and was only bringing up an issue that the black community is discussing. Gregory Lee, the president of National Association of Black Journalists, told the blog TheBigLead.com that he understood what Parker was trying to say but Parker’s “execution was poor.”
Yeah. There’s a right way to publicly question the blackness of a 22-year-old kid quarterback? OK. This kid excelled academically and athletically in college. He carries himself in a spectacularly classy manner. But these aren’t “black enough” qualities? OK. Griffin has the characteristics that would’ve made him beloved by black folks in the 1960s and 1970s, but now he’s a target of Black McCarthyism.
Why?
. The mass incarceration created by our immoral war on drugs. Mass incarceration corrupts the values of a free society. We wrongly think our world-leading incarceration rate makes our society more civil and safe. It is rotting our core, polluting our values, unleashing corruptive forces that powered the Wall Street mortgage crisis, the urban warfare we read about every day and all the other forms of greed-induced fraudulence plaguing America.
It’s not just the prisoner who is corrupted by the degradation of incarceration. It’s the jailer, too. It’s the community that houses the prison. It’s the loved ones of the prisoner and the prison employees. It’s society as a whole. Our love of guns and paranoid preparation for a race war are fueled by the paranoia and race tension found within prison walls. The unfairness of the drug war and mass incarceration breed a bitterness and cynicism throughout society that undermines our ability to see the characteristics that bind us, to see the good and necessity of working together.
Despite the myths spawned by Grover Norquist and other Ronald Reagan groupies, the Soviet Union collapsed from the internal wounds of mass incarceration not because of Reagan’s military might and foreign policy. The Soviet Union couldn’t withstand the pervasive corruption. We can’t either.
Let me take this back to First Take, the show that features barbershop conversation. A common trade learned in prison is barber. I’d estimate that a good 10 to 15 percent of black barbers have been incarcerated. Who sits around at a barbershop talking all day? Who frequents barbershops selling colognes and hot clothes? Ex-cons. The unemployed.
Who is at home with the free time to watch First Take at 10 a.m. every weekday? Nightshift workers and the unemployed. The unemployment rate for black men is around 13 to 14 percent. I’d think that number is significantly higher for black male ex-cons.
First Take is catering to a growing demographic. Rob Parker at one time owned a barbershop in Detroit — “Sporty Cutz,” I believe, was the name. He knows the demographic well. He knows what they talk about and what they want to see talked about on TV.
He and ESPN are not trying to elevate the conversation and uplift the victims of America’s mass incarceration crime. Parker and ESPN simply want to make a buck, no different from the corporations building prisons all across America.
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The NRA and the 'Positive Good' of Maximum Guns By Ta-Nehisi Coates
In light of the NRA's call for even more guns, in even more places, friend of the room and historian Tony Horwitz (Confederates In The Attic, Midnight Rising) sends along this beautiful missive noting the haunting similarities between the aggressive expansionist tactics of The Slave Power and aggressive, expansionist tactics of "The Gun Power." I am tremendously excited, and privileged to offer this to you guys. Tony's is a beautiful mind. Watch him work.
In the 1840s and 50s, abolitionists often spoke of a menace they called "The Slave Power." This pejorative wasn't aimed at Southern slavery, per se. It referred to the vast reach of proslavery money and influence in Washington and beyond. If unchecked, abolitionists warned, the Slave Power would poison every corner of American life and territory. I'm wary of historical analogies. But in the wake of the Newtown massacre, I'm struck by parallels between the Slave Power and a force haunting us today: call it The Gun Power.
For decades we've appeased and abetted this monster, as Americans once did slavery. Now, like then, we may have finally reached a breaking point. I don't mean to equate owning slaves with owning guns. But I do mean to equate the tactics and rhetoric of the NRA with those of proslavery "Fire-Eaters." The NRA casts itself as a champion of the Constitution. So did slaveholders, citing the safeguards accorded owners of human "property." Few Americans questioned slavery's legality, though they debated the Founders' intent, just as we do with the Second Amendment.
But as the nation spread, slaveowners turned the defense of a right into an expansionist crusade. Slavery wasn't just a right that nonslaveholders had to recognize and uphold. It must extend wherever slaveholders traveled and settled. So, too, has the N.R.A. demanded the right to carry guns into every conceivable place, including schools, churches and hospitals. The N.R.A. does so in the name not only of rights but of "safety" and "self-defense." Guns, you see, aren't a danger to be regulated; they're a source of peace and security that everyone should enjoy.
Proslavery zealots had their own version of this. While 18th century slaveowners like Jefferson had treated the institution as a necessary evil, John C. Calhoun lauded slavery as a "positive good," a source of freedom even, because it liberated whites from drudgery and class conflict and blacks from African "savagery." It followed that all should enjoy its benefits. "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth,' declared Mississippi Senator Albert Brown.
This wasn't just bluster. Even after the U.S. had enlarged itself by a third at Mexico's expense in the 1840s, Brown and others urged the nation to conquer Central America to provide Southerners with more land to plant and enslave. In the 1850s, Americans invaded Cuba, Baja, and Nicaragua, where a proslavery partisan, William Walker, installed himself as leader and reinstated slavery. His dictatorship won recognition from the administration of President Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire. Northerners like Pierce were derided as "doughfaces"--half-baked and malleable in the hands of Southern leaders.
The N.R.A. has its own such minions, many of them Democrats the organization has bought or bullied with its lobbying and war chest. A famous political cartoon from the 1850s, titled "Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler," shows a miniature Pierce and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois holding a bound man's hair while two Southern Congressman hoist a black man down the captive's throat. A similar cartoon could be drawn today, featuring the NRA's Wayne LaPierre and legislators with A ratings from the gun lobby, ramming concealed weapons and Stand Your Ground laws through state bodies too cowed to oppose them.
These kinds of tactics can work for a time, a very long time, as they did in the case of slavery. Most mid-19th century Americans, after all, were white supremacists who had little or no care for the plight of blacks. What most Northerners hated and feared wasn't slavery in the South, but the prospect of competing with slave labor and slaveholders' wealth in new territories, putting white freedom and opportunity at risk.
I suspect most Americans today who don't own guns have somewhat the same stance towards gun ownership. So long as guns stay on shooting ranges, or in the hands of hunters, or those who can make a good case that they need protection, few of us will make a stink, however much we disapprove. But forces like the Slave Power and Gun Power know no limits.
Emboldened by success, and imbued with a fanatical and paranoid world-view, they see enemies everywhere and regard any hint of compromise as betrayal. As New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wrote in 1854, slavery "loves aggression, for when it ceases to be aggressive it stagnates and decays. It is the leper of modern civilization, but a leper whom no cry of 'unclean' will keep from intrusion into uninfected company." Much the same applies to the NRA and its insatiable appetite for new territory to allow arms in, and new ways to allow those guns to be used--such as putting armed guards in our elementary schools, as the NRA today suggested.
In the 1850s, slaveholders got their way in Congress (including a hardened Fugitive Slave Act), in the Supreme Court (the Dred Scott decision), and in the White House (occupied by a succession of doughfaces). But proslavery hardliners weren't satisfied. They sought the resumption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which the Constitution had banned as of 1808. They branded moderates like Abraham Lincoln--who pledged to leave slavery alone in the South--as members of a "Black Republican" conspiracy to overthrow slavery. And they banished former allies such as Stephen Douglas, who lost his A-Rating for straying from the ultra-orthodox line that there must not be any restriction on slavery.
Rather than accede to Douglas's nomination as Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential election, which he might well have won, Southerners split the party and nominated one of their own, dividing the Democratic vote and paving Lincoln's path to the White House. At which point, the Fire-Eaters led Southern states out of the Union rather than accept a democratically-elected president they opposed.
The NRA shows signs of similar derangement and over-reach. During the election, it demonized a president who had done nothing on gun control, claiming a "massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term." It has alienated staunch allies like Democrat John Dingell who resisted the NRA's mad-dog campaign to hold Eric Holder in contempt over "Fast and Furious." Other supporters who have deviated an inch from the NRA line have been targeted for electoral defeat.
And now, as the NRA's crusade bears fruit in Aurora, in Newtown, in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the nation shows signs of finally rousing from its slumber and acquiescence to whatever the Gun Power demands. The freedom of gun-owners--as interpreted and enforced by the NRA--threatens the freedom and security of every American. This was, in essence, the argument of Northerners who conjured the Slave Power: unstopped, it will enslave us all.
Here's one last link between the Slave Power and Gun Power, albeit ironic. The NRA was founded after the Civil War by Union veterans who felt Yankees had shown a lack of marksmanship in battling Rebels.
The NRA's first president was General Ambrose Burnside, who led Union troops at Antietam, a battle that in turn led Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This early NRA appears to have regarded guns and marksmanship as necessary to the maintenance of a well-regulated militia. Today's NRA, of course, resists the "regulated" part of that equation. And militia, in its mind, means massively armed individuals ready to resist the "jack-booted government thugs" of the ATF and other agencies (including the United Nations).
In short, the NRA has become a neo-Confederate movement that sees Federals as foes, and that stokes the paranoia of its followers by claiming, as LaPierre did this year, that Obama's re-election marks "the end of our freedom forever." That's more or less what Fire-Eaters said about Lincoln in 1860. This article available online at:
THIS week millions of “Chreasters” — Americans who attend church only on Christmas and Easter — will crowd into pews to sing carols and renew their vague relationship with the Christian God. This year, there may be fewer Chreasters than ever. A growing number of “nones” live in our midst: those who say they have no religious affiliation at all. An October Pew Research Center poll revealed that they now account for 20 percent of the population, up from 16 percent in 2008.
Enlarge This Image Valero Doval Avoiding church does not excuse Americans from marking the birth of Jesus, however. Most of us have no choice but to stay home from work or school — and if you complain about this glaring exception to the separation between church and state, you must be a scrooge with no heart for tradition. Christmas has been a federal holiday for 142 years.
Yet Christianity’s preferential place in our culture and civil law came under fire this year, and not simply because more Americans reject institutional religion. The Obama administration subtly worked to expand the scope of protected civil rights to include access to legal marriage and birth control. Catholic bishops and evangelical activists declared that Washington was running roughshod over religious liberty and abandoning the country’s founding values, while their opponents accused them of imposing one set of religious prejudices on an increasingly pluralistic population. The Christian consensus that long governed our public square is disintegrating. American secularism is at a crossroads.
The narrative on the right is this: Once upon a time, Americans honored the Lord, and he commissioned their nation to welcome all faiths while commanding them to uphold Christian values. But in recent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against prayer in public schools, and legalized abortion, while politicians declared “war on Christmas” and kowtowed to the “homosexual lobby.” Conservative activists insist that they protest these developments not to defend special privileges for Christianity, but to respect the founders’ desire for universal religious liberty — rooted, they say, in the Christian tradition.
The controversial activist David Barton has devoted his career to popularizing this “forgotten history” through lectures, books and home-school curriculums. Mr. Barton insists that “biblical Christianity in America produced many of the cherished traditions still enjoyed today,” including “protection for religious toleration and the rights of conscience.”
Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the American Family Association, told me that he saw the “nones” as proof that “the foundations of our culture are crumbling.” The Pew poll, he said, “is one of the signs.” A couple of weeks after we spoke, he told a radio audience that God did not protect the children killed in the Newtown, Conn., massacre because of the Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and Bible reading in public schools. “God is not going to go where he is not wanted,” Mr. Fischer said.
How accurate is this story of decline into godlessness? Is America, supposedly God’s last bastion in the Western world, rejecting faith and endangering religious liberty?
The truth is that “nones” are nothing new. Religion has been a feature of human society since Neanderthal times, but so has religious indifference. Our illusions of the past as a golden age of faith tend to cloud our assessment of today’s religious landscape. We think of atheism and religious apathy as uniquely modern spiritual options, ideas that Voltaire and Hume devised in a coffee house one rainy afternoon sometime in the 18th century. Before the Enlightenment, legend has it, peasants hurried to church every week and princes bowed and scraped before priests.
Historians have yet to unearth Pew studies from the 13th century, but it is safe to say that we frequently overestimate medieval piety. Ordinary people often skipped church and had a feeble grasp of basic Christian dogma. Many priests barely understood the Latin they chanted — and many parishes lacked any priest at all. Bishops complained about towns that used their cathedrals mainly as indoor markets or granaries. Lest Protestants blame this irreverence on Catholic corruption, the evidence suggests that it continued after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door. In 1584, census takers in Antwerp discovered that the city had a larger proportion of “nones” than 21st-century America: a full third of residents claimed no religious affiliation.
When conservative activists claim that America stands apart from godless Europe, they are not entirely wrong. The colonies were relatively unchurched, but European visitors to the early republic marveled at Americans’ fervent piety. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840 that the absence of an established state church nurtured a society in which “Christian sects are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified; but Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.”
De Tocqueville visited during a wave of religious revival, but he underestimated the degree to which some Americans held Christianity at arm’s length: the “infidel” Abraham Lincoln declined to join a church, and his wife invited spiritualists to hold séances in the White House.
Nevertheless, America’s rates of church affiliation have long been higher than those of Europe — perhaps because of the First Amendment, which permitted a religious “free market” that encouraged innovation and competition between spiritual entrepreneurs. Yet membership, as every exasperated parson knows, is not the same as showing up on Sunday morning. Rates of church attendance have never been as sterling as the Christian Right’s fable of national decline suggests. Before the Civil War, regular attendance probably never exceeded 30 percent, rising to a high of 40 percent around 1965 and declining to under 30 percent in recent years — even as 77 percent still identify as Christians and 69 percent say they are “very” or “moderately” religious, according to a 2012 Gallup survey.
We know, then, that the good old days were not so good after all, even in God’s New Israel. Today’s spiritual independents are not unprecedented. What is new is their increasing visibility. “I like the fact that we’re getting more ‘nones’ because it helps Christians realize that they’re different,” Stanley Hauerwas, a Protestant theologian at Duke Divinity School, said when I asked for his thoughts on the Pew poll. “That’s a crucial development. America produces people that say, ‘I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.’ ”
The temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern America. Three decades ago, one “none” named Sheila Larson told the sociologist Robert Bellah and his collaborators that she called her faith “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Americans are drifting out of the grip of institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional authority in general.
THIS trend, made famous by books like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” has encouraged both the theological mushiness of those who say they are “spiritual, not religious” as well as the unfiltered fury that has come to characterize both ends of the political spectrum. “It seems like we live in a Manichaean universe, with vitriolic extremes,” said Kathryn Lofton, associate professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale. “That’s not unrelated to the lack of tempering authority. ‘Religious authority’ is no longer clergy in the pulpit saying ‘Vote for Eisenhower,’ but forwarded URL links or gossip exchanges in chat rooms. There is no referee.”
For a very long time, Protestant leaders were those referees. If individual impiety flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to traditional Christian morality. They question the Protestant civil religion that has undergirded our common life for so long.
The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.
Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained, officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.
The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance” premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private assent to a set of propositional beliefs,” she told me. Other traditions, such as Judaism and Islam and to some degree Catholicism, do not frame faith in such rationalist terms, or accept the same distinction between internal conviction and public argument. The very idea that it is possible to cordon off personal religious beliefs from a secular town square depends on Protestant assumptions about what counts as “religion,” even if we now mask these sectarian foundations with labels like “Judeo-Christian.”
Conservative Christian activists hold those sectarian foundations more dearly than they admit, and they are challenging the Obama administration’s efforts to frame access to contraception and same-sex marriage as civil rights immune to the veto of “private” conscience. Alan Sears, president of the legal advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom, sees an unprecedented threat to religious liberty in the harsh fines facing employers who refuse to cover contraception in their insurance programs. “It is a death penalty. It is a radical change,” he told me. “It’s one thing when you’re debating about public space, but it’s another when you say, if you don’t surrender your conscience, you’re out of business.”
Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (an organization that until 1972 was named, tellingly, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State), sees things differently. He worries about what might happen if an unpredictable Supreme Court agrees to hear conservative Christians’ challenges to the contraception mandate, or their pleas for exemptions for charities that accept federal grants but discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring. “The court could create something vastly more dangerous than corporate free speech: a ‘corporate conscience’ claim,” Mr. Lynn, a lawyer and an ordained minister, told me. “These cases could become as significant for the redefinition of religious liberty as Roe v. Wade was a rearticulation of the right to privacy.”
These legal efforts are less an attempt to redefine religious liberty than a campaign to preserve Christians’ historic right to police the boundary between secular principles and religious beliefs. Only now that conservative Christians have less control over organs of public power, they cannot rely on the political process. Now that the “nones” are declaring themselves, and more Americans — including many Christians — see birth control as a medical necessity rather than a sin, Mr. Sears sees a stark course of action for the Catholic and evangelical business owners he represents: “Litigation is all that our clients have.” Their problem, however, is more fundamental than legal precedent. Their problem is that America’s Christian consensus is fragmenting. We are left groping for something far messier: an evolving, this-worldly, compromise.
Molly Worthen is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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IT is the religious time of the year. Step into any city in America or Britain and you will see the night sky lit by religious symbols, Christmas decorations certainly and probably also a giant menorah. Religion in the West seems alive and well.
But is it really? Or have these symbols been emptied of content, no more than a glittering backdrop to the West’s newest faith, consumerism, and its secular cathedrals, shopping malls?
At first glance, religion is in decline. In Britain, the results of the 2011 national census have just been published. They show that a quarter of the population claims to have no religion, almost double the figure 10 years ago. And though the United States remains the most religious country in the West, 20 percent declare themselves without religious affiliation — double the number a generation ago.
Looked at another way, though, the figures tell a different story. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion’s imminent demise. Yet after a series of withering attacks, most recently by the new atheists, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, still in Britain three in four people, and in America four in five, declare allegiance to a religious faith. That, in an age of science, is what is truly surprising.
The irony is that many of the new atheists are followers of Charles Darwin. We are what we are, they say, because it has allowed us to survive and pass on our genes to the next generation. Our biological and cultural makeup constitutes our “adaptive fitness.” Yet religion is the greatest survivor of them all. Superpowers tend to last a century; the great faiths last millenniums. The question is why.
Darwin himself suggested what is almost certainly the correct answer. He was puzzled by a phenomenon that seemed to contradict his most basic thesis, that natural selection should favor the ruthless. Altruists, who risk their lives for others, should therefore usually die before passing on their genes to the next generation. Yet all societies value altruism, and something similar can be found among social animals, from chimpanzees to dolphins to leafcutter ants.
Neuroscientists have shown how this works. We have mirror neurons that lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering. We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals.
The precise implications of Darwin’s answer are still being debated by his disciples — Harvard’s E. O. Wilson in one corner, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins in the other. To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form.
A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.
The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.
If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters.
No one has shown this more elegantly than the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. In the 1990s he became famous for the phrase “bowling alone”: more people were going bowling, but fewer were joining bowling teams. Individualism was slowly destroying our capacity to form groups. A decade later, in his book “American Grace,” he showed that there was one place where social capital could still be found: religious communities.
Mr. Putnam’s research showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers were more likely to give money to charity, do volunteer work, help the homeless, donate blood, help a neighbor with housework, spend time with someone who was feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger or help someone find a job. Religiosity as measured by church or synagogue attendance is, he found, a better predictor of altruism than education, age, income, gender or race.
Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology. This may go to show that God has a sense of humor. It certainly shows that the free societies of the West must never lose their sense of God.
Jonathan Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and a member of the House of Lords.
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Back in the 1950s three social psychologists joined a cult that was predicting the imminent end of the world. Their purpose was to observe the cultists’ response when the world did not, in fact, end on schedule. What they discovered, and described in their classic book, “When Prophecy Fails,” is that the irrefutable failure of a prophecy does not cause true believers — people who have committed themselves to a belief both emotionally and by their life choices — to reconsider. On the contrary, they become even more fervent, and proselytize even harder.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Paul Krugman Go to Columnist Page » .Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal .Related How Party of Budget Restraint Shifted to ‘No New Taxes,’ Ever (December 23, 2012) Related in Opinion Times Topic: Economy Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT. .Readers’ Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (847) » This insight seems highly relevant as 2012 draws to a close. After all, a lot of people came to believe that we were on the brink of catastrophe — and these views were given extraordinary reach by the mass media. As it turned out, of course, the predicted catastrophe failed to materialize. But we can be sure that the cultists won’t admit to having been wrong. No, the people who told us that a fiscal crisis was imminent will just keep at it, more convinced than ever.
Oh, wait a second — did you think I was talking about the Mayan calendar thing?
Seriously, at every stage of our ongoing economic crisis — and in particular, every time anyone has suggested actually trying to do something about mass unemployment — a chorus of voices has warned that unless we bring down budget deficits now now now, financial markets will turn on America, driving interest rates sky-high. And these prophecies of doom have had a powerful effect on our economic discourse.
Thus, back in May 2009 the Wall Street Journal editorial page seized on an uptick in long-term interest rates to declare that the “bond vigilantes,” the “disciplinarians of U.S. policy makers,” had arrived, and would push rates inexorably higher if big budget deficits continued. As it happened, rates soon went back down. But that didn’t stop The Journal’s news section from rolling out the same story the next time rates rose: “Debt fears send rates up,” blared a headline in March 2010; the debt continued to grow, but the rates went down again.
At this point the yield on the benchmark 10-year bond is less than half what it was when that 2009 editorial was published. But don’t expect any rethinking on The Journal’s part.
Now, you could say that The Journal’s editors didn’t give a specific date for the fiscal apocalypse, although I doubt that any of their readers imagined that they were talking about an event at least three years and seven months in the future.
In any case, some of the most prominent deficit scolds have indeed been willing to talk about dates, or at least time horizons. In early 2011 Erskine Bowles confidently declared that we would face a fiscal crisis within around two years unless something like the Bowles-Simpson deficit plan was enacted, and Alan Simpson chimed in to say that it would be less than two years. I guess he has about 10 weeks left. But again, don’t expect either Mr. Simpson or Mr. Bowles to admit that there might have been something fundamentally wrong with their analysis.
No, very few of the prophets of fiscal doom have acknowledged the failure of their prophecies to come true so far. And those who have admitted surprise seem more annoyed than chastened. For example, back in 2010 Alan Greenspan — who is, for some reason, still treated as an authority figure — conceded that despite large budget deficits, “inflation and long-term interest rates, the typical symptoms of fiscal excess, have remained remarkably subdued.” But he went on to declare, “This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency.” How dare reality not validate my fears!
Regular readers know that I and other economists argued from the beginning that these dire warnings of fiscal catastrophe were all wrong, that budget deficits won’t cause soaring interest rates as long as the economy is depressed — and that the biggest risk to the economy is that we might try to slash the deficit too soon. And surely that point of view has been strongly validated by events.
The key thing we need to understand, however, is that the prophets of fiscal disaster, no matter how respectable they may seem, are at this point effectively members of a doomsday cult. They are emotionally and professionally committed to the belief that fiscal crisis lurks just around the corner, and they will hold to their belief no matter how many corners we turn without encountering that crisis.
So we cannot and will not persuade these people to reconsider their views in the light of the evidence. All we can do is stop paying attention. It’s going to be difficult, because many members of the deficit cult seem highly respectable. But they’ve been hugely, absurdly wrong for years on end, and it’s time to stop taking them seriously
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The Chemist's War The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences. By Deborah Blum|Posted Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, at 10:00 AM ET
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Detroit police inspecting a clandestine underground brewery during Prohibition. It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Advertisement Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.
I did, however, remember the U.S. government's controversial decision in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they'd brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn't really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.
During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee.
The saga began with ratification of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States. * High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.
But people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.
Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.
Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.
To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.
Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff."
And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes," proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.
Officially, the special denaturing program ended only once the 18th Amendment was repealed in December 1933. But the chemist's war itself faded away before then. Slowly, government officials quit talking about it. And when Prohibition ended and good grain whiskey reappeared, it was almost as if the craziness of Prohibition—and the poisonous measures taken to enforce it—had never quite happened.
-------------------- We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..
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Don’t believe proclamations that the password is dead. Even with increasingly sophisticated software programs able to rapidly burn through an endless array of possible character combinations, the password is not only alive, but as important as ever.
“Passwords are the bane of our existence, but they’re here to stay,” says Hilary Schneider, president of LifeLock, an identity-theft protection company.
Think of the password as a mouse trap. As simplistic as it seems, there’s nothing out there more effective and straightforward for accessing sites likes your bank and favorite retailer. “A better system can be developed but it needs to be easy to use before it can have the widespread adoption to abolish the use of the password,” says Cameron Camp, a security researcher for ESET, an antivirus and Internet security provider. “If it’s not convenient, you won’t transact with the bank as much and the bank loses revenue.”
We’ve been told time and again how important it is to have tricky, unique passwords that are known to no one but ourselves. We should make them long and add numbers and symbols to fool the fraudsters combing the Internet for access to our records.
And we should always, always have different passwords for each site.
But apparently, we’re not listening very well. The annual compilations of “worst passwords ever” are numerous but remarkably similar in their results. Moreover, the top 25 or so passwords are held by an alarmingly large number of people.
If you have any one of these as your supersecret word, consider yourself a hacker’s target: password, qwerty, 123456, abc123, admin, 111111, shadow, letmein, trustno1, iloveyou, love, football, baseball, monkey, master, batman and common names like michael, jordan, even jennifer.
Why do we do it? It’s just too hard to remember so many different passwords. Our memory function doesn’t grow as our list of password-protected sites does. We want a system that will make sense to us and that we can use again and again without putting much thought into it.
“People don’t do this because they’re dumb and want to be hacked,” says Markus Jakobsson, a security-research expert and an adviser to the newly formed Council for Identity Protection. “It’s a matter of mental overload. Nobody can remember 150 passwords.”
So what we do instead is take a word, say “happy,” and add a number to it, giving us a password of “happy1.” If a password-strength checker says that’s weak, we then capitalize the first letter and add a symbol, ending up with “Happy1!”
“It’s fairly easy for the attackers to guess this,” Jakobsson says. And changing the 1 to a 2 when phishing on another bank or social site requires little extra effort.
In big breaches where passwords are stolen from major companies, hackers typically write a short computer program to sort all the passwords out. They find a number of common passwords and start applying them to random bank accounts with your name. For example, if the password on your LinkedIn account is “letmein1,” the hacker will run that password and your user name against accounts at Bank of America, Chase Bank, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, for starters — just to see if maybe you have an account there.
If that doesn’t work, they may change the password to “letmein2” and then “letmein3” and so forth.
“If a fraudster knows that one out of 10,000 people has one of these very common passwords and he does this to 10,000 people, he will get access to an account,” Jakobsson says. Remember that the bad guys aren’t physically typing your name and your lame password onto the banks sites; a software program is doing it.
Jakobsson, who has analyzed and written about the passwords of consumers whose accounts were compromised at large companies, thinks the best way to remember large numbers of passwords is to develop a system to compartmentalize them. Think of a story — say, a situation or an experience that is unforgettable — and come up with three or more words to describe it. Let’s say you were at an outdoor concert and it poured rain, creating mud puddles as big as ponds throughout the area. You slipped in the mud, face first and lost your cell phone in the process. Your password can then be “Mudcellconcert.”
Now use that password on all of your social-media sites, but mix it up with a code. For Facebook, the code could be “Red,” so your password becomes “MudcellconcertRed.” And the Twitter account code could be “Periwinkle,” so that password then is “MudcellconertPeriwinkle.”
Use different stories for different groups of accounts. Your financial accounts, for example, could be tied to a time when you mistakenly double-paid on a bill and thought you had a windfall on the account. Your password could be “TwoX$$justdumb” with the code to your bank account as “Maple” for “TwoX$$justdumbMaple,” and as “Birch” for your 401(k) account for “TwoX$$justdumbBirch.”
Jakobsson scoffs at the contention that the longer the password, the better it is, or that all passwords need numbers and symbols. It depends instead on what the contents are. A “Mudcellconcert” password is only 14 characters, compared with the 18-character “Mississippiburning.” But it is far more secure because it has more components — three vs. two — and with parts that aren’t easily associated with one another.
“Length by itself is not a surefire way to measure the strength,” he says. “A password is secure if it’s hard to guess and not common.”
There, of course, are companies like Kaspersky Password Manager, KeePass Password Safe and myLock Password Managers springing up to help you manage the myriad of passwords. They work by encrypting the data through software that’s installed on your computer or smartphone. But that will cost you.
Eventually, we’ll all have layers of password security, Camp predicts. It could be a one-time password that comes to a keychain or fob plus your own password or biometric for authentication. “It will be something you know and something you have,” he says.
Until then, come up with a story — and stick to it.
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But things were different in the '80s—assault weapons weren't cool, and hardly anybody actually wanted to own one.
Ducking behind a concrete wall, I brushed the hot barrel of the M16 against my ear and yelped in pain. The barrel glowed orange against the black sky. They said you could melt the barrel if you fired on full-auto for too long. One of my buddies saw what I had done and shook his head in disdain. We were a rag-tag squad, in hand-me-down fatigues of every style, festooned with canteens and ammo pouches that smelled like mothballs and surplus store mold. Most of us had barely started shaving, and few of us were old enough to drive.
When I was a freshman in high school, I didn't know anyone who owned an assault weapon. No one I knew had parents who owned military-style rifles; or, if they did, the kids didn't talk about it. There were no pop songs that called out brand names of guns, and, if there was such a thing as a first-person shooter videogame back in 1982, they didn't have it at the bowling alley near my suburban townhouse—the only place my friends and I ever played games more sophisticated than Pong.
Guys I went to high school with got drunk, smoked pot, got in fistfights, crashed cars, got bored, stole things, got girls pregnant, and did all the other stupid stuff boys do today. But they didn't really play with guns, or even talk about guns much. Of course, living in the suburbs of D.C., which at the time was essentially still the Virginia countryside, some of my classmates were hunters; but that was considered too rural to be cool. Far more boys would have known that Edelbrock made carburetors than would have recognized Glock as the brand name of a pistol. If you wanted to mess around with military weapons, or simply geek out about them with like-minded peers, you needed to go out of your way.
Today, kids (especially boys) grow up interacting with gun violence in ways that makes it seem sexy and exciting, and they grow up knowing that it will be easy to acquire real guns like the ones they see in movies and games, legally as soon as they're old enough, or illegally whenever they want. Since the 1980s, firearms manufacturers have reacted to declines in demand for hunting rifles by increasingly focusing their production and marketing on pistols and "assault weapons" (a term gun advocates hate, but which I will use here for lack of a better one). And increasingly hyper-realistic videogames have featured recognizable incarnations of those weapons, sometimes even providing links to the manufacturers' website in a macabre product placement scheme. Along with more gun porn in music, movies, and TV, the combination of weapons marketing and violent videogames has helped to make gun fetishism mainstream within the last few decades. However, it was not that long ago when the idea that a civilian would have a desire to own an assault weapon seemed suspicious, or at the very least, odd.
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The Gender Divide on Gun Control Being an old guy, I can only speak to current attitudes about guns among young people based on my stint teaching high school, and on what I have read about the topic. But I can attest first-hand to the fact that enthusiasm about tactical weapons was not considered normal when I was a 15-year old.
My road to joining a paramilitary scouting group was tortuous. The short version is that I had been a debauched 13-year-old punk rocker, who had become a 14-year-old "straight-edge" (anti-drugs and drinking) punk, and finally an angry 15-year-old with nationalistic views and an aching desire to blow poop up. This is a simplified version of the 15-year-old me: My parents would tell you that I was a friendly, funny, helpful kid who loved playing with his dog and chopping firewood, and that would be true, too.
But I was dealing with a dangerous combination of testosterone, suburban isolation, and an attitude that made it difficult for me to channel the aggression that a lot of teen boys sublimate in socially acceptable ways. I wasn't great at team sports, and so I decided that sports were stupid. I played guitar and bass, but everybody else at my school that I might have played in a band with liked popular (i.e. stupid) music. I had a weight bench in the basement that I used faithfully, and that helped. If I was lucky enough to catch a ride with an older friend to a punk show in D.C., flailing in the pit went a long way toward bleeding off the unfocused anger. When idle, though, I stewed in hatred toward the TV programming that I endlessly stared at out of boredom, the jocks and rednecks who beat me up for being a punk, the stoners who listened to irrelevant classic rock, the girls who wouldn't have anything to do with me, the grownups who oppressed me, and the posers who tried to be friends with me.
So when one of my classmates, a nerdy reject I tolerated because he liked punk rock and, like me, hated everyone in our school, told me about this group he was in where they got to shoot real assault rifles and machine guns, my interest was piqued.
Despite being an avowed non-joiner, I signed up for the chapter of Explorer scouts that was attached to the National Guard unit in Manassas, Virginia. Most Explorer troops back then were associated with law enforcement and firefighting (these days they also work with Border Patrol and FBI), with the aim of getting kids interested in careers in those fields. Our troop existed as a recruiting tool for the military.
My friend's mom and my mom took turns driving us (an hour each way) out to the National Guard Armory for our weekly meetings. The meetings took about two hours and consisted of a short lesson on military procedures by either a guest speaker or our sponsor, a young lieutenant with a wispy mustache. The adults would then disappear, leaving us to drill under the command of the older scouts, one of whom often broke into a broad German accent and made us goose-step and Sieg Heil. We would practice marching and standing in various positions until the higher-ranking kids got bored, at which point we would talk about the most violent war movies available at Erol's Video and pass around copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine so we could take turns ogling pictures of pistols, assault rifles, and machine guns, and reading longingly about mercenaries in far-flung military conflicts. Some guys brought in Guns & Ammo as well, but it was too tame in those days, featuring endless photos of shotguns and dead bucks. Whoever's mom had driven that week waited in the car, happy that my friend and I were participating in a legitimate extra-curricular activity for once.
The main reason we went to the meetings, aside from our common infatuation with firearms, was that attendance was mandatory for scouts who wanted to go on weekend maneuvers with the Guard once a month. Those weekends were when we got to fire live rounds from M16s, M60 machine guns, and M203 grenade launchers. Maneuvers would take place at one of several different military bases. The best location was Marine Corps Base Quantico, where we would have urban firefights (shooting blanks, of course) in Combat Town, a warren of concrete buildings designed for just that purpose. The exercise always devolved into a free-for-all, with all of us weekend warriors emptying clip after clip of blanks until we couldn't see past the end of our rifles for all the smoke in the air. After the battle, we would snuggle up with the rifles we had checked out from the armory, and camp out under our rain ponchos. But I could never get to sleep with all the adrenaline buzzing around in my head.
Between drill weekends, my friend and I watched movies about the Vietnam War, studied Army field manuals with pictures and specifications of different weapons, and used my dad's tools to build wooden versions of our favorite assault rifles for playing war. We even recruited other kids from school to go on "missions" with us in the middle of the night, sneaking out of our houses, creeping around in the woods, and inflicting minor damage on our largely inanimate "targets."
My gun obsession was not considered cool back at school, though. Classmates found my interest in firearms even weirder than my love of bands that didn't sound anything like Journey. And on the day that the four or five of us from my school who had joined the Explorers showed up for first period in fatigues and camo face-paint in an effort to recruit more students, even the administrators were worried. I don't think anyone thought we were armed or meant harm to our classmates, because that kind of thing was unheard of. They just thought it was disturbing and disruptive. They made us wash our faces and sent us off to class.
In 2013, if a handful of students showed up to school in camouflage face-paint, the campus would go on lockdown, and rightly so. In the context of 1982, though, the decision the administrators at my school made was sensible. School shootings, or at least the indiscriminately lethal sieges that have happened with such regularity in the past 15 years or so, were virtually unheard of. Other factors contributed to the relative scarcity of these tragedies, of course. But before firearms manufacturers started pushing to normalize ownership of military weapons by civilians, the idea that a kid might have access to a gun specifically designed to kill people wouldn't have seemed like a serious possibility.
As much as I was infatuated by military guns and the idea of someday using them in my future career as a mercenary (a dream that lost its luster once I got a driver's license and learned how to be less repulsive to girls), I would have had no idea where to begin trying to get my hands on one. The only assault rifles I had ever seen in real life were locked up in the armory whenever they were not in use. Thankfully, the gun industry had not yet enticed ordinary citizens into thinking they needed M16s—a version of the AR-15, which is not just a favorite weapon of mass-shooters, but also the best-selling rifle in the country today—in their homes.
-------------------- We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..
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The year began with a line that was as much a lamentation as it was an astute observation. "The scale and brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life," Adam Gopnik wrote in a trenchant essay in the January 30th issue of the New Yorker. "How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disemboweling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane condition?"
The year ends with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki touring the country -- visiting prisons, prosecutors' conferences, schools -- showing off his heartbreaking documentary, The House I Live In, an acclaimed collection of interlocking stories about the mournful human impact of America's failed war on drugs. Did you know there is a man serving a life sentence in Oklahoma for "trafficking" three ounces of methamphetamine? Did you know that the rise of privately-owned prisons means that there is now a direct financial incentive to incarcerate people?
The 11 months in between these two statements were extraordinarily fruitful ones in this area of law and justice. And almost all of the change seemed to reflect a growing sense of unease, or even disgust, on the part of America's criminal justice community -- lawyers, judges, politicians, prison officials, etc. -- a sense that the status quo is unsustainable, that America can no longer afford, on either financial or moral terms, to keep millions of its citizens locked up. It's too early to label 2012 a turning point in our war against the war on drugs. But it's not to early to see a definitive trend in that direction.
In June, for example, in a case styled Dorsey v. United States, the United States Supreme Court endorsed new federal sentencing rules that finally reduced the disparity in minimum sentences between crack and powder cocaine offenders. In a 5-4 ruling, over the objections of the conservative justices, the court declared that the new, more lenient rules applied to defendants who had committed their crimes before the 2010 law came into effect but who were sentenced afterward. The ratio is still too high -- 18-to-1, by Congressional decree -- but the 2010 law and the 2012 ruling were significant advances toward a just cause.
That same week in June, an important new federal civil rights lawsuit was filed in Denver, alleging the mistreatment and abuse of mentally ill prisoners at the nation's most famous prison, the ADX-Florence "Supermax" facility in Colorado. The litigation is still in its nascent stage, but the complaint highlights some of what Gopnik and Jarecki each chronicled. If the courts permit the case to proceed to discovery, and thus force the Bureau of Prisons to answer under oath for the conduct of its prison officials, Congress will have little choice but to intercede, the same way the Obama Administration ultimately was pressured into doing something this year about juvenile rape in prison.
Then, in November, voters in California decided finally to minimize the effects of its "three strikes" law -- which is only partially responsible for the fact that the state's prisons are so dangerously overcrowded that the federal courts have ordered the release of thousands of prisoners. Voters there also came close to gutting the state's costly, ineffective and unfair death penalty regime -- nearly 6 million California residents voted to end capital punishment, an extraordinary outpouring of support for an idea which is growing in popularity all over the country.
That same month, voters in Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use, a dramatic break from both federal law and policy. Why didn't the Obama Administration immediately crack down? Why do conservatives like Pat Robertson want to reduce the nation's prison population by decriminalizing marijuana? As Robertson said in March, "California is spending more money on prisons than it spends on schools." Last month, a federal judge in Iowa, Mark W. Bennett, who appeared in Jarecki's film, wrote a poignant piece in The Nation. "If we don't speak up, who will?" he asked.
To his immense credit, Jarecki is speaking up. He says his film is no advocacy piece but rather a movie "driven by real people's stories." But the advocacy is there, in virtually every scene. The "real people" Jarecki shows us are complex individuals, generators of sympathy and empathy, outrage and sorrow, sometimes all at the same time. And in that sense, if no other, they are powerful tribunes for the message he seeks to send: Drug crime is caused by drug addiction, drug addiction is a public health matter, and all of us pay in one manner or another for short-sighted policies that treat drug abuse as a matter for the criminal courts.
Jarecki contends that the "war on drugs" is more warlike than any of us are willing to believe and that it has been waged disproportionately for decades on America's poor. If every lawyer, judge, cop, prison guard, politician, policy maker, and economist in America saw this film, fewer families might be devastated by the "lock-em-up" approach to the problem. And fewer taxpayers would have to foot the bill. Here is my interview with him, conducted by telephone on December 23.
COHEN: Your work touched upon many different components of the failed war on drugs. If you had to choose two sentences to describe the film -- two thesis sentences -- what would they be?
JARECKI: Well, you described it as a failed war on drugs and I'm delighted to hear you refer to it that way. If there are two sentences that my film wants to communicate, it's that the war on drugs has failed and must be thrown on the ash heap of history as a kind of accident from which we must move on. The second sentence is that what was wrong with it from the start must be corrected -- namely, that it took a public health concern, drug abuse, and treated it instead as a criminal matter, and by doing so has made an explosion in our prison population of incarcerating the non-violent as through they were violent.
COHEN: The Holocaust. You went there. Can you share a little bit of your thinking into why you made that analogy toward the end of the film? I can imagine some folks, including people who generally are sympathetic to the movie's message, won't quite get the comparisons. Have you received any blowback?
JARECKI: Almost none, and I think it's because the framing of the message by David Simon, who created The Wire, and by Richard Lawrence Miller, the historian who drew his analogy from Raoul Hillberg's analysis of what went on in the Third Reich. All of them work with great surgery to ensure that they are not making some kind of clumsy, ham-fisted analogy that blurs the differences between discrete elements of history.
Anyone with a scalpel involved in that enterprise will find that there are discomforting patterns that mankind has engaged in, where we have seen groups persecuted by the larger society, often predicated on some habit of the theirs, or practice of theirs, or custom special to a group. As someone who comes out of the Holocaust experience, as the child of survivors, I take any analogy of the Holocaust with great seriousness. But if one is surgical and is learning from that horror that so impacted my family, then history is finally being the educator that it's supposed to be.
COHEN: One of the most powerful components of your film was the use of old footage to show just how bipartisan has been the zeal to wage this war on drugs. Did you go back to some of the politicians whose speeches you cited -- like Vice President Joe Biden or Bill Clinton -- and ask them whether and to what extent their views have changed on the failed war on drugs?
JARECKI: No, we didn't in the case of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. We did in the case of current policy makers because the film was not really designing itself to give a platform for mea culpas or for expressions of regret by former policy makers. My film is dominated, the screen time is dominated, by these individual stories of people whose lives are like directly touched by the war on drugs. It's more a revenge of the voiceless truth than it is a perpetuation of the top-down structure.
COHEN: You talked to a federal judge and police officers and journalists and investigators, and they all were very poignant, each in their own way. But there wasn't a current prosecutor of victims' rights voice, at least none that I can remember. Were these people simply unwilling to involve themselves in the project?
JARECKI: When we approached people who were active prosecutors, they were a little bit more uncomfortable in appearing. And I think the reason is that the war on drugs is very hard to defend these days. Its track record of failure is so vast, and so manifest, that you find greater defensiveness, greater anxiety, about communicating.
But also, interestingly enough, I don't see the prosecutor as the villain in the equation. I think prosecutions in America are villainous but I think it's the laws as written by Congress, namely the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, that have so warped the administration of justice in our courts. That overly empower the prosecutor and disempower judges.
Americans always like a good villain, and one of the reasons they like it is that it makes the world safe for them to be apolitical. So I didn't want to put prosecutors on screen who might have come across as provocative, tough-as-nails, tough on crime. Because if there is a good villain in the movie, then they can just blame that guy.
COHEN: Along the same lines, I like the idea of traveling to prisons to share the film with inmates and prison officials. But what about the idea of taking the film, and your message, to places of political power, like police and prosecutors' conferences? Have you received any invitations to take your show into this hostile territory?
JARECKI: We've done that. We have been at several conferences with law enforcement people, we've been at conferences with DAs, conferences of sheriffs, conferences of judges, conferences of defense lawyers. It's a very fundamental part of our plan, alongside what we do in prisons, churches, schools, and community centers, to people who are on the receiving end of the war on drugs power rather than the enforcement end. We show it to the powerful and the powerless.
COHEN: And what has the reaction been when you've gone to a prosecutors' conference?
JARECKI: We get a very good reaction. It's about what they think about the most, so it's about their world, and they certainly have a great interest in that. I think they believe that the people are treated with great fairness in the movie. All the characters are very textured people. You don't have caricatures walking around; you don't have a cop as a simplistic person made out to look like he's a heartless, tough monster. And you don't have drug dealers made out to be savage monsters who have only the worst interests of society at heart.
In general, and from both ends of the spectrum, what I always find when I go out with a camera is how rich and textured and majestic people are. And I capture that on screen and that's really what I do, my best contribution.
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Slavery's Global Comeback By J.J. Gould 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means.
Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Some have children with them as they wade into water poisoned by mercury used in the extraction process. (Lisa Kristine)
RANGOON, Burma -- Earlier this year, Ko Lin, 21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles northeast of Rangoon, with a friend to look for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two found jobs there as day laborers loading and offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles, being illicitly transported by truck in and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at a local pagoda with, he and his friend met a super-amiable young woman who ended up pitching an opportunity to work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange great jobs for them there.
Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker who sold the two into forced labor in Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok. They were taken there by an irregular route that involved walking through the jungle for eight days. Several weeks after arriving in Chonburi, Ko Lin was told he'd now be working at sea. When he resisted, he was knocked unconscious and woke up separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Thailand. From this point on, for months, he rarely if ever had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough fish to earn it; and when he was fed at all, it was always dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the market. His arms regularly became infected from the extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew would beat him. He was injured multiple times by heavy blocks or booms, once having to tend to a head wound with a handful of wet rice. Three months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.
There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Ma Moe, 34, and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour outside Rangoon, poor enough that on some days they had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a domestic worker in China where, she was told, she could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near the border, her friend told her the trip would soon get rough and she should take some pills so as not to get carsick. The pills knocked her out almost immediately. When she came to, she was in a small village in China; she still doesn't know where. Kept with a few other women in a small house, Ma Moe was then taken around to different villages where she was offered up for sale as a "wife." After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten by local police, a man from northern China bought her. By now, having spent a month-and-a-half as a Burmese commodity on a Chinese black market, she could hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated. Her owner was concerned -- he wanted a child -- so he had Ma Moe's blood tested; the results showed that she's HIV-positive; and he ended up abandoning her at the bus station. With no hope of being able to get back to Burma, she prayed to die. But a young newspaper seller, fending off an attempt by another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with him, called a police hotline for trafficking victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they ultimately took her home.
There's a plain-language word for the horror stories that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as anachronistic as it might sound: slavery. Contemporary slavery is real, and it's terribly common -- here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and around the world.
The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, and the former satellite states of the Soviet Union. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Descent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. Most of the world's slaves are in sedentary forms of servitude, such as hereditary collateral-debt bondage, but about 20 percent have been unwittingly trafficked by predators through deception and coercion. Human trafficking is often highly mobile and dynamic, leveraging modern communications and logistics in the same basic ways contemporary business does generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into forced domestic work or brothels.
As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it hasn't come clearly into focus as a global issue until relatively recently. There are a couple of big reasons why -- one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the idea of slavery itself.
The Scale
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the number of slaves in the world today at around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves -- the U.S. affiliate of the world's oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based Anti-Slavery International -- (and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth Kara of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more than 29 million.
That range represents a tightening consensus. In the 1990s, some accounts had the world's slave population as high as 100 million; others had it as low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I traced all these numbers back. The 100-million number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a guess.' So nobody had the number."
Bales's 27 million -- which as a statistician he considers a "conservative estimate" -- is derived from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level. We're doing that now, though, building much sounder numbers, and they're still coming out in the same range. ... So we're getting closer."
In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many enslaved right now as there had been in that whole 350-year span.
The Idea
Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then, has been a matter of quantitative analysis; but some has been conceptual: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.
One consequence of this is that when people apply the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use the word to dramatize conditions that may be exploitive -- e.g., terrible wages or toxic working environments -- but that we'd never on their own call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I was in the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."
But there's an inverse consequence to seeing slavery as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa Kristine)
Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities -- in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York -- started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. I took no one long to understand that these were prostitutes -- or much longer to understand that they weren't operating freely; criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.
The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution feminists who took the lead on this issue used at the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a movement started against sweatshop labor that developed its focus not broadly on the issue of forced labor but narrowly on the conditions of the sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety issues within them.
Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally or not, ways to feel too comfortable about addressing the issues in question. "If we say the problem with domestic servants is that they're not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so let's just go out and make sure they get covered by labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for example, the fact that domestic servants are being locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we devolve back to the old debates about whether prostitution should be legal and regulated, should it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '... hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern slavery."
Pattern Recognition
CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about slavery in our recent history scarcely less euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting current preferences for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you know slavery is a highly emotive term."
But if the president of the United States has nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack Obama now has with his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in September, you know it's also an emotive term whose time has come -- or come again. The State Department, meanwhile, answers the question "What is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to the point of stating, that it now considers "slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of "trafficking":
Over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service.
The United States government considers trafficking in persons to include all of the criminal conduct involved in forced labor and sex trafficking, essentially the conduct involved in reducing or holding someone in compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), individuals may be trafficking victims regardless of whether they once consented, participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked, were transported into the exploitative situation, or were simply born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon of trafficking in persons are the many forms of enslavement, not the activities involved in international transportation.
(Emph. added)
CdeBaca understands the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for the change in social conceptions about human trafficking and forced labor that have followed. Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca says: A social movement grows and, if it's successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes legislation or the UN (or some other international body) passes a resolution. With contemporary slavery, more than a decade of governmental and trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the social conversation, which has in turn articulated an emerging consensus around the language of slavery.
CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely consequential, not just domestically in the U.S. -- where Obama has now both embraced the term "slavery" and issued an executive order to remove human trafficking and forced labor from federal contracting -- but globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified message is wonderful," he says, "because the government here isn't going to have to unlearn those differences. When we talked to the government [on Friday], they were talking about forced labor and forced prostitution as though they're the same concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why you need to care about forced labor as much as you care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I think it's because they come into this at this moment, now."
The New Abolitionism
It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization that the awareness of slavery has always given rise to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be more complex than what went before it only because it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization" -- or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group Walk Free, has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."
In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT), want to harness the good, or at least potentially good, aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum sense for global big businesses to integrate their risk-management strategies with their corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains of any involvement with forced labor once and for all. Forrest believes in the constructive power of potential shame, too, being focused currently on a campaign to recruit major corporations around the world to sign Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."
Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself. Projects like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their success will necessarily be a tough question. There are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the world today, because it got hammered for its labor practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign against it as a brand -- brand equity being a very important, very bottom-line issue for a company like Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining company that needs to procure concrete for railway tracks to get its materials out, and the best-deal concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity of the challenge in leveraging global business's better angels against its worst instincts.
There will meanwhile be new opportunities for political will against slavery, particularly now that Obama has used the word -- new legislative efforts, new instruments of international cooperation -- and there will be new opportunities to build important anti-trafficking capacities, with law enforcement, with victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.
And then there will be social-awareness campaigns -- which may represent the one strand of the contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical observers are more inclined to be cynical about than they are about the leadership of global business. If you're tempted to think that way, consider before anything else that here in Rangoon, it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick you into slavery, and this is what you do about it ...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into slavery by a friend, what was the most important thing she wanted people to understand about her experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how crucial it is that people in Burma -- especially young people -- get the coaching they need to insulate themselves and their families against the risk of being trafficked, particularly given how sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims and preying on trust.
Neither is any of this the hard part compared with the complex task of changing or putting an end outright to kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts governed by the caste system or other forms of entrenched social hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.
Precedents
On the global level, there are historical reasons why a heightened social awareness of slavery could prove more effective than we might first be inclined to think.
"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788" (Thomas Clarkson)
As Bales likes to remember, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery International -- or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade -- in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This movement worked entirely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The Society inundated parliament with huge petitions against slavery, 517 altogether. It passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable women wore in bracelets and pins. And it disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, illustrating the horrible reality that slaves were forced to cross the Atlantic packed together like sardines, lying in their own excrement and vomit, for months. This picture was extremely shocking -- and effective.
The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some of the most pivotal moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually total social division between the North and the South, and it culminated an enormous war that resulted in upward of three-quarters of a million deaths and new troubles for the United States' former slaves that have cast long shadows since.
Hierarchical societies still create empathy barriers as powerful as what enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries. The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was a global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. But the breakthrough for this movement was also thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows in big theaters across Europe and America -- a kind of documentary film before documentary films -- graphically demonstrating the routine physical mutilation of Congolese slaves who failed to meet their "rubber quotas," which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign was able to show the photos it had captured, social indignation turned to outrage, and Leopold, who'd completely denied everything until then -- he could, because there was no proof of what he was doing -- gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government.
Let's see what the fourth one does. The most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it -- and here's the paradox -- the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable.
A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful variation on this theme -- well clear of the most pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism -- is that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be forced to defend itself against. The same interests responsible for human trafficking and forced labor are, after all, also responsible for fostering other types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption that slave-labor operations need for survival. If developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it will threaten to corrode the bilateral and multilateral agreements, and the international rule of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If developing countries don't check it, it may or may not mean slower short-term growth, but it will definitely complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the less inclined I'd be to forget some of the most consequential uses that mobile technology and social media been put to around the world in the last two years -- or to ignore the analogies between these uses and the tactics of the first and third modern anti-slavery movements.
The relationship between a country's tacit willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk of being left behind by the currents of global civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I asked Brigadier General Khin Maung Si, chief of police and head of the human-trafficking office in the ministry of home affairs, about his government's emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic stagnation. But it's a relationship that his government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.
It's also a relationship that the leading exponents of the second modern anti-slavery movement were emphatic about and staked their political reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860:
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organization.
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A federal appeals court is reinstating a civil rights lawsuit brought by a New York man arrested for disorderly conduct after flipping off a police officer in traffic.
There’s no law against directing to police what might be the world’s oldest insulting gesture. Flipping the bird, or sticking out the middle finger, dates to ancient Greece and was adopted by the Romans as digitus impudicus – the impudent finger.
But it’s not advised, as it may lead to a confrontation. And that’s exactly what happened in upstate New York.
After the police stop in 2006, words were exchanged between the local police officer and middle-finger-saluter John Swartz, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran. He flipped the bird at officer Richard Insogna who was employing a radar device to ticket speeders — and Insogna stopped the vehicle.
In reinstating the lawsuit, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t buy Insogna’s explanation for the traffic stop. Insogna testified in a deposition that he stopped the vehicle Swartz was traveling in because the raised middle finger suggested Swartz “was trying to get my attention for some reason” and that he “was concerned for the female driver.”
A federal judge sided with police and tossed the lawsuit. But the New York-based appeals court on Thursday reinstated the case, which was also brought by the driver, Swartz’s wife, Judy Mayton-Swartz.
According to the three-judge panel: (.pdf)
Perhaps there is a police officer somewhere who would interpret an automobile passenger’s giving him the finger as a signal of distress, creating a suspicion that something occurring in the automobile warranted investigation. And perhaps that interpretation is what prompted Insogna to act, as he claims. But the nearly universal recognition that this gesture is an insult deprives such an interpretation of reasonableness. This ancient gesture of insult is not the basis for a reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation or impending criminal activity. Surely no passenger planning some wrongful conduct toward another occupant of an automobile would call attention to himself by giving the finger to a police officer.
No trial date has been set in the unlawful-arrest case. The disorderly conduct charges were later dropped after Swartz’s arrest.
In its Thursday opinion, the appeals court cited American University legal scholar Ira Robbins, who has written a definitive paper on flipping the bird: “Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger and the Law.” (.pdf)
In the paper, he writes: “The pursuit of criminal sanctions for use of the middle finger infringes on First Amendment rights, violates fundamental principles of criminal justice, wastes valuable judicial resources, and defies good sense.”
This isn’t the first lawsuit on the topic, and it likely won’t be the last.
In 2009, a Pittsburgh man was awarded $50,000 after he was wrongly cited for disorderly conduct after flipping off an officer. A year later, suburban Oregon police department paid a local man $4,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit in which he claimed he was pulled over for flipping off the cops in traffic.
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A Platinum Coin as Big as the Ritz Posted by Amy Davidson
“It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived—and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well as in jewels.” That predicament, of Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” centered on a single, flawless diamond, which was a cubic mile in size. Perhaps more fantastic still is the idea, gaining momentum in non-fictional circles, that a predicament engulfing Washington, D.C., can be resolved with a single platinum coin—and not even a very big one.
The story goes like this: Sometime around the end of February, the Treasury will have spent all the money it has, and it will hit the statutory limit on the amount that the federal government can borrow—the debt ceiling. The fiscal-cliff negotiations, which were the product of the recent debt-ceiling fight, just made it worse by deferring another constructed crisis involving automatic cuts—sequestration—to about the same juncture. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, the government won’t be able to pay its bills, including things like Social Security, soldiers’ pay, and interest on bonds, meaning that the United States of America would go into default and all manner of financial disasters would ensue. The Congressional Republicans, knowing this, plan to use the debt ceiling to force President Obama and the Democrats to agree to things like big cuts in Medicare. Since Obama doesn’t want his Presidency to coincide with a Depression, they think they have all the chips, apart from the one about the public hating them.
And maybe another: the platinum coin. The Federal Reserve is in charge of what we might call normal money, but there is an exception in the statute dealing with coins:
The Secretary [of the Treasury] may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.
The plan with this law was that the Treasury could make “real” commemorative coins, like the kind you see sold on television, that are legal tender. But since the denominations and other details are up to the Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner (or, soon, Jack Lew), can take a lump of platinum, set to it with an embossing seal and a hammer, and mint a trillion-dollar coin. Or a gazillion-dollar one—but the suggestion on the table is that he stick to a trillion, then deposit it in the Treasury’s account at the Fed, where it would be booked as an asset. With that reckoned against liabilities, we’d be well below the debt ceiling. The Treasury could pay everyone—no default, no Medicare cuts.
Unless someone digs up another obscure law, this is, on its face, legal. (And it would take a while, and someone with standing to sue, for the Supreme Court to say that it wasn’t.) Stranger still, reputable economists have been arguing that it wouldn’t hurt the economy at all. They say that a trillion-dollar coin would not mean we’d need wheelbarrows full of cash in checkout lines, even if it kind of sounds that way. Without getting into the technical depths, their reasons involve the assumption that the government wouldn’t be reckless enough to just turn the coin into a trillion dollars in paper money—or not exactly—and would instead use its existence borrow what it needed to pay its bills. Also, the Fed could issue bonds to, in effect, draw cash out of circulation. A key phrase is quantitative easing. In correspondence with Ezra Klein, a former head of the mint offered a series of steps that the Fed could take to make sure nothing bad happened; several ended with the coin being melted down once Congress came to its senses, which seems like a long time frame. The Economist has some charts showing how it could all be controlled (and an alternate suggestion for marketing fifty-million-dollar coins). Paul Krugman says not to worry; he claims that anyone who tells you otherwise is just an inflation obsessive, and that current interest rates prove he’s right.
Krugman and others also say that, as crazy as this sounds, it’s less crazy than Congress forcing the country into a default by not raising the debt ceiling. Krugman does acknowledge that it may be “undignified”: “Here’s how to think about that: we have a situation in which a terrorist may be about to walk into a crowded room and threaten to blow up a bomb he’s holding. It turns out, however, that the Secret Service has figured out a way to disarm this maniac—a way that for some reason will require that the Secretary of the Treasury briefly wear a clown suit,” he writes. “And the response of the nervous Nellies is, ‘My god, we can’t dress the secretary up as a clown!’ ”
In other words, don’t worry about putting in motion a plot that sounds like a cross between “Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Goldfinger,” without the romance of the former or the fun of the latter. (“Diamond” is already the most Bond-ish of Fitzgerald’s stories, with an underground glass prison and a girl whose name sounds like “kiss me,” as well as anti-aircraft guns and a villain wearing riding boots, a fur coat, and “rose-colored pajamas,” flanked by three naked hit-men. Plus, painful racial stereotypes.) And never mind if the image that comes to mind is Geithner, not in a clown suit but sprawled out in a seaside suite, his body covered entirely in platinum paint. John Boehner will still be more absurd.
There is also an argument to be made for simply arguing for a platinum coin. This is akin to Richard Nixon’s madman theory: if the Republicans believe that Barack Obama would really go through with it, they’ll take what they can get and go home. The fantasy here is that, in the middle of the State of the Union, Obama will take a trillion-dollar coin out of his pocket and toss it onto the floor, a flat platinum apple of discord. In the ensuing frenzy, Paul Ryan jumps over several desks, stiff arming cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court Justices, and Marco Rubio, and then falls on the coin and swallows it—only to look up and see Obama twirling a second coin in his hand. Or something like that. The drop-the-mike mastery the platinum coin promises is why, for example, Talking Points Memo has been putting together a list of people whose portrait could be on it. (Ronald Reagan is one, Dr. Evil is another.)
And yet, too much of this depends on the government and the Fed being responsible with the coin. That is not a casual bet. Neither is the idea that the international financial markets will understand and trust what we’re doing and not distance themselves from us or impose costs on the American economy. (Examining the options, one begins to wonder if they should.) Also, how will the spectre of the coin make Republicans more sane when conspiracy theories involving monetary machinations drive a whole faction of the Party? If the trillion-dollar coin actually was minted, it might buy nothing more than a Rand Paul Presidency—with the country nearly ungovernable in the interim.
The coin is clever and intellectually interesting. That does not make it a good idea. The debt ceiling is a bad idea without being clever at all. A saner approach might be to ask how Congress expects to pass laws that mandate spending while keeping taxes low, and still have a debt-ceiling statute that makes doing so impossible. This is where the constitutional version of the platinum coin comes in: the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned.” The case that the President should just faithfully execute the laws that ran up these bills—which is, after all, his job—seems stronger than that for the coin. In the past, Obama has been reluctant to think of simply invoking the Fourteenth and ignoring the debt ceiling. Maybe, with visions of a platinum Geithner, he’ll change his mind. As Fitzgerald wrote, who knows what a government might do to avert a financial panic—or, in the case of the congressional Republicans, to manufacture one?
There's More to Life Than Being Happy By Emily Esfahani Smith "It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."
Kacper Pempel/Reuters In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"
As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
Viktor Frankl [Herwig Prammer/Reuters]In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man's Search for Meaning as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book's ethos -- its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"
According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."
***
This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."
"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.
How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.
Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.
"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write.
What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with doing activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.
"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.
Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.
Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."
***
Which brings us back to Frankl's life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.
Peter Andrews/ReutersIn his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl's talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. "I hope you don't object," Freud wrote the teenager.
While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did he establish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers -- a precursor to his work in the camps -- but he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.
That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field.
As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, "Should I leave my parents behind?... Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?" Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a "hint from heaven."
When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments -- the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.
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No Flowers On the Psych Ward The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: "Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."
Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.
the telegraph in Lincoln was reminiscent of the fishing reel in Jaws
Lincoln's, George Washington story was priceless
Transcript: With the possibility of a Mitt Romney presidency tying my stomach in knots, I was looking forward to some big-screen escapism the night before the election in the form of the new James Bond movie, Skyfall. But in one of those "Only in LA!" moments, when the lights went down in the packed theater, I realized that I'd somehow entered the wrong theater, and instead of an action-packed spy movie to get my mind off politics, I was in an early screening of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, a movie so political, Dreamworks wouldn't release it until after the election. And while I was sometimes envious of the muffled explosions coming from the theater I should've been in, Lincoln is, in many ways, the movie America needs after such a long, often ugly election.
Based partially on Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 best-seller Team of Rivals, Lincoln follows a graying, weary Abraham Lincoln (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) who has just been re-elected but is worn down by the brother-on-brother brutality of the Civil War. But with the Union gaining the upper hand and the South considering a face-saving deal, Lincoln has enough energy and conviction to make a push to end slavery in the United States once and for all. But the risks are enormous, possibly prolonging the war, shattering the fragile coalition within his own party, and empowering his democratic opposition.
So most of Lincoln is about the dirty work of actual politics, as Lincoln, his Secretary of State (played by David Straithairn), and a trio of congressional horsetraders (played by James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson and John Hawkes) and a vocal abolition champion (played by Tommy Lee Jones) attempt to convince, cajole, shame, trick, and outright bribe vulnerable congressmen and lame ducks to support what would eventually become the 13th Amendment.
At the same time, we see a portrait of Lincoln as a solitary, humble, disarmingly intelligent, often melancholy man with a flair for folksy storytelling in order to get his points across. But Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd (played by Sally Field), who is unstable and still grieving the death of one of her sons, often pulls Lincoln back into darkness, reminding him of the dangers of his gamble.
What makes Lincoln a great movie for post-election America is its reminder that American politics, even when it has the most noble of goals, is an inherently messy affair involving an awful lot of backroom deals, arm-twisting, and trickery. Younger viewers will probably be surprised to learn that it was a republican president who fought to end slavery, since today's republican party has been comfortable and even proud to be the party for white racists. That is, it was until November 7, as the GOP grapples with the fact that winning the white vote no longer means winning elections in an increasingly diverse America.
And for Americans, and especially Barack Obama, Lincoln reminds us that what we now see as self-evident political truths took a lot of hard fighting to achieve, and in many cases, came very close to never happening at all. While we can now laugh or be shocked at those in the film who can't imagine black people as anything more than subhuman property, we currently have one of our two political parties committed to the notions that gay people don't deserve full human rights, that poor people have too much money and the wealthy don't have enough, that women shouldn't have control of their own bodies, and that the richest country in the world should allow its citizens to die in the streets of preventable illness. Is there any doubt that future generations will see them as being any less backwards?
Obama certainly faces significant challenges, but are they any bigger than those faced by Honest Abe? While Lincoln shows that there's rarely a perfect time to do the right thing, but if you know in your heart that your cause is just, it's always the right time. And I hope Lincoln, and Obama, inspire us to do the right things for this country right now.
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tomorrow is the funeral for Aaron Swartz, the programmer and sometime activist who killed himself last Friday, while facing federal trial. No one knows, or will ever really know, what caused Swartz to take his own life. But his suicide, in the face of possible bankruptcy and serious prison time, has created a moment of clarity. We can rightly judge a society by how it treats its eccentrics and deviant geniuses—and by that measure, we have utterly failed.
I knew Swartz, although not well. And while he was special on account of his programming abilities, in another way he was not special at all: he was just another young man compelled to act rashly when he felt strongly, regardless of the rules. In another time, a man with Swartz’s dark drive would have headed to the frontier. Perhaps he would have ventured out into the wilderness, like T. E. Lawrence or John Muir, or to the top of something death-defying, like Reinhold Messner or Philippe Petit. Swartz possessed a self-destructive drive toward actions that felt right to him, but that were also defiant and, potentially, law-breaking. Like Henry David Thoreau, he chased his own dreams, and he was willing to disobey laws he considered unjust.
Swartz’s frontier was not geographic like Thoreau’s, but defined by other barriers unique to our times. His form of civil disobedience consisted of heading into an M.I.T. closet with a laptop, hooking it up to the Internet, and downloading millions of articles from JSTOR, an academic database. Swartz thought information should be free. It wasn’t a major coup, but it counts as a defiant act—and one that made its point, for it was, and remains, absurdly hard for the public to gain access to what academics supposedly write for it.
The act was harmless—not in the sense of hypothetical damages or the circular logic of deterrence theory (that’s lawyerly logic), but in John Stuart Mill’s sense, meaning that there was no actual physical harm, nor actual economic harm. The leak was found and plugged; JSTOR suffered no actual economic loss. It did not press charges. Like a pie in the face, Swartz’s act was annoying to its victim, but of no lasting consequence.
In this sense, Swartz must be compared to two other eccentric geniuses, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who, in the nineteen-seventies, committed crimes similar to, but more economically damaging than, Swartz’s. Those two men hacked A.T. & T.’s telephone system to make free long-distance calls, and actually sold the illegal devices (blue boxes) to make cash. Their mentor, John Draper, did go to jail for a few months (where he wrote one of the world’s first word processors), but Jobs and Wozniak were never prosecuted. Instead, they got bored of phreaking and built a computer. The great ones almost always operate at the edge.
That was then. In our age, armed with laws passed in the nineteen-eighties and meant for serious criminals, the federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz approved a felony indictment that originally demanded up to thirty-five years in prison. Worse still, her legal authority to take down Swartz was shaky. Just last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar prosecution. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a prominent conservative, refused to read the law in a way that would make a criminal of “everyone who uses a computer in violation of computer use restrictions—which may well include everyone who uses a computer.” Ortiz and her lawyers relied on that reading to target one of our best and brightest.
It’s one thing to stretch the law to stop a criminal syndicate or terrorist organization. It’s quite another when prosecuting a reckless young man. The prosecutors forgot that, as public officials, their job isn’t to try and win at all costs but to use the awesome power of criminal law to protect the public from actual harm. Ortiz has not commented on the case. But, had she been in charge when Jobs and Wozniak were breaking the laws, we might never have had Apple computers. It was at this moment that our legal system and our society utterly failed.
Defenders of the prosecution seem to think that anyone charged with a felony must somehow deserve punishment. That idea can only be sustained without actual exposure to the legal system. Yes, most of the time prosecutors do chase actual wrongdoers, but today our criminal laws are so expansive that most people of any vigor and spirit can be found to violate them in some way. Basically, under American law, anyone interesting is a felon. The prosecutors, not the law, decide who deserves punishment.
Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. Swartz was a passionate eccentric who could have been one of the great innovators and creators of our future. Now we will never know.
Published: January 17, 2013 3:00 a.m. Singing and sketching, bar patron left his mark Frank Gray In the last 20 years or so, if a bar in Fort Wayne held a karaoke night, there’s a good chance that a guy named Willie Fields showed up at one time or another.
Fields loved karaoke. He liked the old Motown songs, songs by Otis Redding and such, and he was a pretty good singer, too, people say. Some karaoke disc jockeys even kept a collection of songs in their inventory just for him.
Barbie Brown, who is a local karaoke disc jockey, first encountered Fields about nine years ago. She recalls there was a two-year period, though, when he disappeared.
Then, as quickly as he disappeared, he reappeared on the karaoke scene. At first people didn’t notice, but during his absence, Fields had had one of his legs amputated, apparently the result of diabetes, but he never bothered to mention it to anyone.
“He’d dance and sing like nothing had happened,” Brown said.
But it wasn’t karaoke that Fields was best known for. Wherever he went, he carried a sketch pad and charcoal pencils. He’d sit in bars, never drinking but sometimes wandering from table to table, sketching the people he saw. When he was done, he’d give his subject the sketch.
Some nights his sketches were good, and sometimes he’d have off nights when his sketches weren’t that good, people said, but when he was on his game, he could create some impressive drawings.
Sometimes people would pay him for the sketches, and sometimes they’d just take them. If you gave him money for a sketch and he thought it was too much, he’d give you some of the money back, Brown said.
Oddly, Fields often didn’t keep the money people gave him for his sketches.
“He didn’t have much,” said his son, Michael Thieme, “but if you needed two or three dollars, he’d give it to you, even if it was his last $3.”
Art is what Fields loved, Thieme said. He had studied art at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
Thieme recalls one day when his father grabbed a chunk of clay and quickly transformed it into a bust of John F. Kennedy.
Fields also painted murals and signs and other works around town, Thieme said. He’d done work for City Glass, Karen’s Antique Mall on Fairfield and the Oriental Grocery on Calhoun Street.
There’s no telling how many of his sketches are stashed away in drawers or boxes around Fort Wayne, sketches produced in places like O’Sullivan’s Italian Irish Pub, the Steel Mill tavern, the Latchstring, Foster’s sports bar, Pike’s, The Office tavern, the Warsaw Street market, McDonald’s and other places.
For all the people who knew him, though, Fields was somewhat of a mystery. He reportedly worked for the highway department or BF Goodrich, but even his son doesn’t know about that. Maybe he worked there before he was born, Thieme said.
“Everybody knew him and no one knew him,” said Brown, “but he was awesome all the time.”
Then, on Jan. 2, Fields, 68, died suddenly and unexpectedly. An obituary appeared in the paper, but it was only 40 words long. Word spread, though, and at his funeral, held last week, the church wasn’t big enough to hold everyone who showed up.
Still, some people are just learning about his death.
At O’Sullivan’s on West Main Street, a place where Fields was a regular on Tuesdays, some of his sketches are still stapled to the walls.
So on Sunday, from 2 to 8 p.m., O’Sullivan’s is going to have a sort of memorial karaoke night/fundraiser for Fields. The goal is to raise enough money to buy a headstone for Fields’ grave in Lindenwood Cemetery.
Fields had a passion for what he did, his son said, but as O’Sullivan’s manager Dave Seel noted, he never had a lot of money
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Each December for the past fifteen years, the literary agent John Brockman has pulled out his Rolodex and asked a legion of top scientists and writers to ponder a single question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive tool kit? (Or: What have you changed your mind about?) This year, Brockman’s panelists (myself included) agreed to take on the subject of what we should fear. There’s the fiscal cliff, the continued European economic crisis, the perpetual tensions in the Middle East. But what about the things that may happen in twenty, fifty, or a hundred years? The premise, as the science historian George Dyson put it, is that “people tend to worry too much about things that it doesn’t do any good to worry about, and not to worry enough about things we should be worrying about.” A hundred fifty contributors wrote essays for the project. The result is a recently published collection, “What *Should* We Be Worried About?” available without charge at John Brockman’s edge.org.
A few of the essays are too glib; it may sound comforting to say that ”the only thing we need to worry about is worry itself” (as several contributors suggested), but anybody who has lived through Chernobyl or Fukushima knows otherwise. Surviving disasters requires contingency plans, and so does avoiding them in first places. But many of the essays are insightful, and bring attention to a wide range of challenges for which society is not yet adequately prepared.
*** One set of essays focusses on disasters that could happen now, or in the not-too-distant future. Consider, for example, our ever-growing dependence on the Internet. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it:
We really don’t have to worry much about an impoverished teenager making a nuclear weapon in his slum; it would cost millions of dollars and be hard to do inconspicuously, given the exotic materials required. But such a teenager with a laptop and an Internet connection can explore the world’s electronic weak spots for hours every day, almost undetectably at almost no cost and very slight risk of being caught and punished.
As most Internet experts realize, the Internet is pretty safe from natural disasters because of its redundant infrastructure (meaning that there are many pathways by which any given packet of data can reach its destination) but deeply vulnerable to a wide range of deliberate attacks, either by censoring governments or by rogue hackers. (Writing on the same point, George Dyson makes the excellent suggestion of calling for a kind of emergency backup Internet, “assembled from existing cell phones and laptop computers,” which would allow the transmission of text messages in the event that the Internet itself was brought down.)
We might also worry about demographic shifts. Some are manifest, like the graying of the population (mentioned in Rodney Brooks’s essay) and the decline in the global birth rate (highlighted by Matt Ridley, Laurence Smith, and Kevin Kelly). Others are less obvious. The evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, for example, argues that the rising gender imbalance in China (due to the combination of early-in-pregnancy sex-determination, abortion, the one-child policy, and a preference for boys) is a growing problem that we should all be concerned about. As Kurzban puts it, by some estimates, by 2020 “there will be 30 million more men than women on the mating market in China, leaving perhaps up to 15% of young men without mates.” He also notes that “cross-national research shows a consistent relationship between imbalanced sex ratios and rates of violent crime. The higher the fraction of unmarried men in a population, the greater the frequency of theft, fraud, rape, and murder.” This in turn tends to lead to a lower G.D.P., and, potentially, considerable social unrest that could ripple around the world. (The same of course could happen in any country in which prospective parents systematically impose a preference for boys.)
*** Another theme throughout the collection is what Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson called “metaworry”: the question of whether we are psychologically and politically constituted to worry about what we most need to worry about.
In my own essay, I suggested that there is good reason to think that we are not inclined that way, both because of an inherent cognitive bias that makes us focus on immediate concerns (like getting our dishwasher fixed) to the diminishment of our attention to long-term issues (like getting enough exercise to maintain our cardiovascular fitness) and because of a chronic bias toward optimism known as a “just-world fallacy” (the comforting but unrealistic idea that moral actions will invariably lead to just rewards). In a similar vein, the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson argues that “knowledgeable people expected an eventual collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran, but did nothing because there was no pending date. In contrast, many prepared for Y2K because the time frame was so specific.” Furthermore, as the historian of ideas Noga Arikha puts it, “our world is geared at keeping up with a furiously paced present with no time for the complex past,” leading to a cognitive bias that she calls “presentism.”
As a result, we often move toward the future with our eyes too tightly focussed on the immediate to care much about what might happen in the coming century or two—despite potentially huge consequences for our descendants. As Knutson says, his metaworry
is that actual threats [to our species] are changing much more rapidly than they have in the ancestral past. Humans have created much of this environment with our mechanisms, computers, and algorithms that induce rapid, “disruptive,” and even global change. Both financial and environmental examples easily spring to mind.… Our worry engines [may] not retune their direction to focus on these rapidly changing threats fast enough to take preventative action. The cosmologist Max Tegmark wondered what will happen “if computers eventually beat us at all tasks, developing superhuman intelligence?” As Tegmark notes, there is “little doubt that that this can happen: our brains are a bunch of particles obeying the laws of physics, and there’s no physical law precluding particles from being arranged in ways that can perform even more advanced computations.” That so-called singularity—machines becoming smarter than people—could be, as he puts it, “the best or worst thing ever to happen to life as we know it, so if there’s even a 1% chance that there’ll be a singularity in our lifetime, I think a reasonable precaution would be to spend at least 1% of our GDP studying the issue and deciding what to do about it.” Yet, “we largely ignore it, and are curiously complacent about life as we know it getting transformed."
The sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling tells us not to be not afraid, because
Modern wireless devices in a modern Cloud are an entirely different cyber-paradigm than imaginary 1990s “minds on nonbiological substrates” that might allegedly have the “computational power of a human brain.” A Singularity has no business model, no major power group in our society is interested in provoking one, nobody who matters sees any reason to create one, there’s no there there.
But Sterling’s optimism has little to do with reality. One leading artificial intelligence researcher recently told me that there was roughly a trillion dollars “to be made as we move from keyword search to genuine [A.I.] question answering based on the web.” Google just hired Ray Kurzweil to ramp up their investment in artificial intelligence, and although nobody has yet built a machine with the computational power of the human brain, at least three separate groups are actively trying, with many parties expecting success sometime in the next century.
*** Edison certainly didn’t envision electric guitars, and even after the basic structure of the Internet had been in place for decades, few people foresaw Facebook or Twitter. It would be mistake for any of us to claim that we know exactly what a world full of robots, 3-D printers, biotech, and nanotechnology will bring. But, at the very least, we can take a long, hard look at our own cognitive limitations (in part through increased training in metacognition and rational decision-making), and significantly increase the currently modest amount of money we invest in research in how to keep our future generations safe from the risks of future technologies.
Opinion Successful and Schizophrenic By ELYN R. SAKS
THIRTY years ago, I was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My prognosis was “grave”: I would never live independently, hold a job, find a loving partner, get married. My home would be a board-and-care facility, my days spent watching TV in a day room with other people debilitated by mental illness. I would work at menial jobs when my symptoms were quiet. Following my last psychiatric hospitalization at the age of 28, I was encouraged by a doctor to work as a cashier making change. If I could handle that, I was told, we would reassess my ability to hold a more demanding position, perhaps even something full-time.
Then I made a decision. I would write the narrative of my life. Today I am a chaired professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. I have an adjunct appointment in the department of psychiatry at the medical school of the University of California, San Diego, and am on the faculty of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. The MacArthur Foundation gave me a genius grant.
Although I fought my diagnosis for many years, I came to accept that I have schizophrenia and will be in treatment the rest of my life. Indeed, excellent psychoanalytic treatment and medication have been critical to my success. What I refused to accept was my prognosis.
Conventional psychiatric thinking and its diagnostic categories say that people like me don’t exist. Either I don’t have schizophrenia (please tell that to the delusions crowding my mind), or I couldn’t have accomplished what I have (please tell that to U.S.C.’s committee on faculty affairs). But I do, and I have. And I have undertaken research with colleagues at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. to show that I am not alone. There are others with schizophrenia and such active symptoms as delusions and hallucinations who have significant academic and professional achievements.
Over the last few years, my colleagues, including Stephen Marder, Alison Hamilton and Amy Cohen, and I have gathered 20 research subjects with high-functioning schizophrenia in Los Angeles. They suffered from symptoms like mild delusions or hallucinatory behavior. Their average age was 40. Half were male, half female, and more than half were minorities. All had high school diplomas, and a majority either had or were working toward college or graduate degrees. They were graduate students, managers, technicians and professionals, including a doctor, lawyer, psychologist and chief executive of a nonprofit group.
At the same time, most were unmarried and childless, which is consistent with their diagnoses. (My colleagues and I intend to do another study on people with schizophrenia who are high-functioning in terms of their relationships. Marrying in my mid-40s — the best thing that ever happened to me — was against all odds, following almost 18 years of not dating.) More than three-quarters had been hospitalized between two and five times because of their illness, while three had never been admitted.
How had these people with schizophrenia managed to succeed in their studies and at such high-level jobs? We learned that, in addition to medication and therapy, all the participants had developed techniques to keep their schizophrenia at bay. For some, these techniques were cognitive. An educator with a master’s degree said he had learned to face his hallucinations and ask, “What’s the evidence for that? Or is it just a perception problem?” Another participant said, “I hear derogatory voices all the time. ... You just gotta blow them off.”
Part of vigilance about symptoms was “identifying triggers” to “prevent a fuller blown experience of symptoms,” said a participant who works as a coordinator at a nonprofit group. For instance, if being with people in close quarters for too long can set off symptoms, build in some alone time when you travel with friends.
Other techniques that our participants cited included controlling sensory inputs. For some, this meant keeping their living space simple (bare walls, no TV, only quiet music), while for others, it meant distracting music. “I’ll listen to loud music if I don’t want to hear things,” said a participant who is a certified nurse’s assistant. Still others mentioned exercise, a healthy diet, avoiding alcohol and getting enough sleep. A belief in God and prayer also played a role for some.
One of the most frequently mentioned techniques that helped our research participants manage their symptoms was work. “Work has been an important part of who I am,” said an educator in our group. “When you become useful to an organization and feel respected in that organization, there’s a certain value in belonging there.” This person works on the weekends too because of “the distraction factor.” In other words, by engaging in work, the crazy stuff often recedes to the sidelines.
Personally, I reach out to my doctors, friends and family whenever I start slipping, and I get great support from them. I eat comfort food (for me, cereal) and listen to quiet music. I minimize all stimulation. Usually these techniques, combined with more medication and therapy, will make the symptoms pass. But the work piece — using my mind — is my best defense. It keeps me focused, it keeps the demons at bay. My mind, I have come to say, is both my worst enemy and my best friend.
THAT is why it is so distressing when doctors tell their patients not to expect or pursue fulfilling careers. Far too often, the conventional psychiatric approach to mental illness is to see clusters of symptoms that characterize people. Accordingly, many psychiatrists hold the view that treating symptoms with medication is treating mental illness. But this fails to take into account individuals’ strengths and capabilities, leading mental health professionals to underestimate what their patients can hope to achieve in the world.
It’s not just schizophrenia: earlier this month, The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry posted a study showing that a small group of people who were given diagnoses of autism, a developmental disorder, later stopped exhibiting symptoms. They seemed to have recovered — though after years of behavioral therapy and treatment. A recent New York Times Magazine article described a new company that hires high-functioning adults with autism, taking advantage of their unusual memory skills and attention to detail.
I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna about schizophrenia; mental illness imposes real limitations, and it’s important not to romanticize it. We can’t all be Nobel laureates like John Nash of the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” But the seeds of creative thinking may sometimes be found in mental illness, and people underestimate the power of the human brain to adapt and to create.
An approach that looks for individual strengths, in addition to considering symptoms, could help dispel the pessimism surrounding mental illness. Finding “the wellness within the illness,” as one person with schizophrenia said, should be a therapeutic goal. Doctors should urge their patients to develop relationships and engage in meaningful work. They should encourage patients to find their own repertory of techniques to manage their symptoms and aim for a quality of life as they define it. And they should provide patients with the resources — therapy, medication and support — to make these things happen.
“Every person has a unique gift or unique self to bring to the world,” said one of our study’s participants. She expressed the reality that those of us who have schizophrenia and other mental illnesses want what everyone wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, to work and to love.
A law professor at the University of Southern California and the author of the memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”
-------------------- We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..
Op-Ed Contributor The People’s BeachBy ANDREW W. KAHRL Milwaukee
(December 4, 2012) . .“IN recent years, fences and barricades have blocked the public right to have access to our seas. We are becoming a landlocked people, fenced away from our own beautiful shores, unable to exercise the ancient right to enjoy our precious beaches.” This is how Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas characterized the relationship between the American public and its coasts in 1969. Nearly a half-century later, those same words could have described much of the New Jersey and Long Island shorelines on the eve of Hurricane Sandy.
In the years between, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, beachfront property owners, wealthy municipalities and private homeowners’ associations threw up a variety of physical and legal barriers designed to ensure the exclusivity — and marketability — of the beach. These measures were not only antisocial but also environmentally destructive.
By increasing the value of shoreline property and encouraging rampant development, the trend toward privatizing formerly public space has contributed in no small measure to the damage storms like Hurricane Sandy inflict. Tidal lands that soaked up floodwaters were drained and developed. Jetties, bulkheads and sea walls were erected, hastening erosion. And sand dunes — which block rising waters but also profitable ocean views — were bulldozed.
It didn’t have to be this way. In 1967, Bob Eckhardt, a first-term congressman from Texas, came to Washington determined to do for the nation what he had done for the Texas coastline. As a state legislator, Mr. Eckhardt had passed the nation’s first open beaches law, the Texas Open Beaches Act of 1959, which defined all land below the vegetation line as belonging to the state for use by the people.
Rather than a departure, this bill was a restoration of the ancient right of the public to the foreshore — a right dating from Roman civil law that was incorporated into English common law, transported to the American colonies and finally preserved in the new nation in what came to be known as the Public Trust Doctrine. Sadly, each state interpreted that doctrine differently. While on the West Coast, a strong tradition of public beach access prevailed, along much of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, and especially along the crowded Northeast corridor, states tended to adopt a very narrow interpretation. Some states maintained that the Public Trust Doctrine covered only the public’s right to fishing and navigation, and still others largely ignored it.
While Mr. Eckhardt’s bill was, in the truest sense, conservative, its effects on the Texas coastline were nothing short of radical. The fences and jetties that beachfront property owners had constructed to restrict public access were dismantled. In some instances, buildings were torn down. Slowly, the beach returned to a more natural state.
The National Open Beaches Act, first proposed in 1969 by Mr. Eckhardt with Senator Yarborough, intended to do the same, by outlawing “any obstruction, barrier, or restraint of any nature which interferes with the free and unrestricted right of the public ... to enter, leave, cross, or use as a common the public beaches.” But opponents assembled a host of arguments against its passage. Open beaches would attract more people to the shore, tying up traffic, ruining fragile sand dunes and leaving a trail of litter. It was the classic “tragedy of the commons” thesis. Given how overrun with bathers public beaches had become, this argument seemed to make sense.
But time has shown that the biggest threat to America’s coasts is not an overabundance of public space but its absence. As the bill stalled in Congress, private development along the Eastern Seaboard accelerated. By 1974, one coastal scientist bemoaned that the “waterfront lot” had “replaced the public beach as the modern symbol of coastal America.” Beaches were no longer a public resource but a private asset, and ensuring the value of beachfront real estate came to play an increasingly influential role in shaping environmental policy.
Reaffirming the public’s right to the beach could be the first step in a more just and sustainable coastal environmental policy. The argument used to defeat the Open Beaches bill — that it would depress real estate values — is precisely the reason we need to reintroduce an updated version of this legislation now. Without the ability of property owners to wall off and claim the beach as their own, coastal real estate values would slowly decline, and the pressure to develop would dissipate (or at least become more ecologically sensitive).
I’m not calling for a full-scale retreat from the coast. Long before the modern age of coastal development, people lived by the sea. Their homes were routinely battered by storms, and they didn’t try to defy nature by constructing fortifications to preserve each attractive stretch of shore, since they knew that what was there today would most likely be gone tomorrow. We need to return to those sustainable practices, and an open beaches act could help us get there.
By dedicating beaches to the states for use by the public, Congress would be declaring an end to the destructive — and futile — attempts by private property owners to hold back the sea. It would ensure a better future for America’s coasts and restore one of our founding legal principles. We would not be confiscating private property, but merely recognizing who owned it all along: us.
Andrew W. Kahrl, an assistant professor of history at Marquette, is the author of “The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches From Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South.”
also;
Resisted for Blocking the View, Dunes Prove They Blunt StormsBy MIREYA NAVARRO and RACHEL NUWER LONG BEACH, N.Y. — Surfers railed against the project because they said it would interfere with the curl of the waves. Local businesses reliant on beach tourism hated it, too. Who would flock to the historic Boardwalk, they asked, if sand dunes were engineered to rise up and obscure the ocean view?
And many residents did not care for the aesthetics of the $98 million plan — declaring that they preferred the beach wide and flat, with the soft, light-colored native sand that they had grown up with.
So, six years ago, after the Army Corps of Engineers proposed to erect dunes and elevate beaches along more than six miles of coast to protect this barrier island, the Long Beach City Council voted 5 to 0 against paying its $7 million initial share and taking part.
Many of Long Beach’s 33,000 residents would come to regret it.
The smaller neighboring communities on the barrier island — Point Lookout, Lido Beach and Atlantic Beach — approved construction of 15-foot-high dunes as storm insurance. Those dunes did their job, sparing them catastrophic damage while Long Beach suffered at least $200 million in property and infrastructure losses, according to preliminary estimates.
Joe Vietri, director of coastal and storm risk management for the corps, toured the damaged coastlines after the 12-to-14-foot storm surge of Hurricane Sandy and came to an inescapable conclusion. “The difference was dramatic for areas with vital and healthy dune systems, which did better than those that did not,” he said in a telephone interview. “You can see the evidence on Point Lookout and Lido Beach, which did much better than Long Beach.”
Mr. Vietri, who is overseeing a comprehensive coastal damage assessment, says it is too early to provide hard figures on how towns with barriers fared in comparison with those, like Long Beach, without them.
But up and down the coast, for the most part, dune barriers acted like soft sea walls made of sand and vegetation that even when flattened or breached still managed to protect places like Westhampton Beach on Long Island, Plumb Beach in Brooklyn, and Bradley Beach in Monmouth County, N.J., by blunting the attack of surging waves and tides.
Richard T. Bianchi Jr., public works supervisor in New Jersey’s Bradley Beach, said the town began building its 15-foot-high dune barrier along the mile-long waterfront in the 1990s by laying 25,000 feet of snow fencing in a saw-tooth pattern down the beach and later adding 20,000 recycled Christmas trees as traps for drifting sand. After wind pushed sand over the structure, shoots of dune grass were planted to further stabilize the barrier.
When Hurricane Sandy came, the force of the waves flattened the dunes but left the town’s Boardwalk and the houses just 75 feet from it intact. Plans to restore the Bradley Beach dunes are already under way. The town’s dune-barrier project cost about $10,000 in 1996, Mr. Bianchi said. The town suffered $2 million to $3 million in damage, officials said, while many of its unprotected coastal neighbors were devastated.
“People complained about how high they were, but now they’re not complaining,” Mr. Bianchi said. “They’re praising.”
The Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency charged with maintaining the nation’s coastline, said some of the 100 miles of barrier dunes in the region were built by the corps, others by local governments themselves. Many of the projects were built to withstand storms less powerful than Hurricane Sandy, the corps said, and even in places where the surge cut through the sand, the dunes helped to soften the blow.
Cliff Jones, a program manager with the corps’s North Atlantic division in Brooklyn, was the project manager for the 2006 barrier-island dune project that Long Beach rejected. He said the dune would have limited the damage to the town.
“It’s not to say it would have stopped everything, but it would have stopped some,” Mr. Jones said.
Now Long Beach officials say they are reconsidering. “It’s no longer a hypothetical,” Jack Schnirman, the city manager, said. “It’s a reality, and we have to rebuild in a way that takes into account catastrophic storms in the future.”
Long Beach and other vulnerable communities will have to await an act of Congress before restoration and beach-protection projects can move forward. New York’s senators, Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, have asked for a $1 billion emergency appropriation to pay for seven corps sea-barrier construction projects that have been approved by Congress but have never been financed. Included are construction on the south shore of Staten Island, Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, Long Beach and the shoreline from Fire Island to Montauk Point.
“These are projects that should get built, providing the local communities go along,” Mr. Schumer said. In Long Beach, he added, “now everybody supports it.”
The projects can include sea wall or dune building and nourishing beaches to a higher elevation with millions of cubic yards of sand. But some shoreline experts warn that anything short of relocating the buildings and development closest to the ocean only buys time as sea levels rise.
“If you put up a sea wall, the beach will disappear because you stop its ability to move landward,” said Robert S. Young, director of the program for the study of developed shorelines at Western Carolina University in North Carolina. And restoration projects, he said, need to be maintained, at great financial cost.
The Surfrider Foundation, an advocacy group that opposed artificial dunes at Long Beach, has softened its stance against armoring coastlines. Chad Nelsen, environmental director for the national group, said rising sea levels and the threat of more intense storms required a thoughtful consideration of all strategies, including relocation.
“We’re more likely to have a less black-and-white view of the issue,” he said.
Homeowners along the coast are undergoing a similar rethinking. But some experts say dunes can lend a false sense of security.
“People think that if we have a nice big dune, they don’t have to worry and can build a high rise,” said Orrin H. Pilkey, professor emeritus of earth and ocean sciences at Duke University. “I think that’s a very serious shortcoming of dunes.”
He supports dune restoration but also proposes limiting and mitigating development, including not rebuilding destroyed homes next to the beach and elevating others onto stilts to avoid flooding in the event that dunes are overtopped.
“Our preference is to put those dunes back as quickly as possible,” said Julie Schreck, the mayor of Bradley Beach. “I hope other communities will consider trying to emulate nature as much as they can, but I guess every town has to take stock of its own preferences.”
Unfortunately, Texas Open Beaches Act does not establish a public easement. It was cleverly worded so that its provisions apply only where a public easement was already established. Apparently, for much of the State's Gulf coast, it will be difficult to impossible to show that a public easement has ever existed. See Texas Supreme Court case Severance v. Jerry Patterson (Texas General Land Office Commissioner).
To compound the potential for further damage to Texas' Gulf coastline, Texas' Constitution prohibits the State from spending public money to sustain eroding private beach. Likewise, public money should not be spent to restore beachfront damaged by Sandy if communities continue to prohibit beach access to the public.
-------------------- Put your good where it will do the most.
~Hugh Romney(?)
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The Author Himself Was a Cat in the Hat By LESLIE KAUFMAN Published: February 3, 2013 The Cat wore a hat. Everyone knows that.But so did Sam-I am, the mooing Mr. Brown and the fat fish from “One Fish, Two Fish” — a tiny yellow hat.
The Grinch disguised himself in a crinkled Santa hat.
All over Dr. Seuss’s beloved children’s books, his characters sport distinctive, colorful headwear — unless they are the kinds of creatures that have it sprouting naturally from their heads in tufted, multitiered and majestically flowing formations.
So it’s no surprise that the real Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, was a hat lover himself. He collected hundreds of them, plumed, beribboned and spiked, and kept them in a closet hidden behind a bookcase in his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He incorporated them into his personal paintings, his advertising work and his books. He even insisted that guests to his home don the most elaborate ones he could find.
“Believe me, when you get a dozen people seated at a fairly formal dinner party,” his widow, Audrey, said in an interview for an 1999 educational video, “and they’ve all got on perfectly ridiculous chapeaus, the evening takes care of itself.”
Now, as part of their efforts to keep the Seuss brand fresh in the eyes of young readers, Random House Children’s Books, his longtime publisher, and Dr. Seuss Enterprises have collaborated on an exhibit that for the first time will display some of his hats to the public.
The show, timed to the 75th anniversary of his book “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,” will open Monday at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and then travel to 15 other locations over the course of the year. About a dozen hats will be displayed.
Paintings done by Geisel for his own enjoyment that include the hats are also part of the exhibit, but because of space constraints in New York those paintings will be shown separately at the Animazing Gallery in SoHo.
Theodor Geisel was born in 1904 in Spingfield, Mass., at a time when hats were a much more common part of a man’s wardrobe. Still, Geisel, who was something of an iconoclast and prankster, enjoyed them more than most, largely because of their costumelike quality.
During a brief time studying at Oxford University, he wore a cap. As he traveled to 30 or so countries in his 20s, he wore a Panama hat. It was then that he started his collection.
After his sister Marnie returned from visiting him in the autumn of 1937, The Springfield Union-News quoted her as reporting: “Ted has another peculiar hobby — that of collecting hats of every description. Why, he must have several hundred, and he is using them as the foundation of his next book.” She added, “I have seen him put on an impromptu show for guests, using the hats as costumes,” and “he has kept a whole party in stitches just by making up a play with kitchen knives and spoons for the actors.”
Robert Chase, co-founder and president of Chase Art Companies, which represents modern and contemporary artists, is the curator of the hat exhibit. He said the hats showed up early in the advertising work and editorial cartoons of Geisel, who died in 1991. “By putting a hat on a character” Geisel “realized he could give that character a lot of personality,” Mr. Chase said. “In some cases the hat became a punch line.”
In one of the humorous ads he did for the insecticide Flit, for example, Geisel showed a mosquito busting a hole through a surprised woman’s tiny flower-decorated hat. The ad helped jump start his career as a commercial artist and copywriter and became part of one of the longest-running campaigns in advertising history, built around the line “Quick, Henry, the Flit!”
While hats in Mr. Geisel’s personal collection clearly make appearances in his paintings, it is harder to draw a straight line from his hat collections to his children’s books, Mr. Chase said, although there are examples of where the connection is clear.
The collection does feature a red Robin Hood-like cap with feather that is exactly like the one that kept reappearing on Bartholomew Cubbins’s head. A tall blue military cap with red yarn balls that is also in the show under the name Triple Sling Jigger, seems to have been the inspiration for a hat in “The Butter Battle Book,” Mr. Chase said.
Then there is the striped, red-and-white stovepipe hat that is clearly the twin of the one worn by the most famous, mischievous cat of them all. Mr. Chase said he has no documentation as to which came first — the hat on display or the illustrated one in “The Cat in the Hat.”
But even when the hats in the collection did not directly inspire the drawings in the books, they certainly seemed to inspire the man. The exhibit quotes from a book called “Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel” to illustrate how this sometimes worked:
As editor in chief of Beginner Books at Random House in the late 1960s, Michael Frith worked closely with Geisel, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. When they were stumped by a word choice, Mr. Frith said, Geisel would often bound to the closet and grab a hat for each of them — a sombrero, or perhaps a fez. There they would be, sitting on the floor, Mr. Frith remembered, “two grown men in stupid hats trying to come up with the right word for a book that had only 50 words in it at most.”
-------------------- We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..
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Torturer’s Apprentice The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.
By Cullen Murphy
Umberto Eco, in his best-selling 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, summons to life a dark and compelling character: Bernard Gui, a bishop and papal inquisitor. In the movie, he is played with serpentine menace by F. Murray Abraham. The year is 1327, and Gui has come to an abbey where a series of murders has been committed. It falls to him to convene a tribunal and examine the suspects. Eco describes the inquisitor’s bearing as the tribunal gets under way:
He did not speak: while all were now expecting him to begin the interrogation, he kept his hands on the papers he had before him, pretending to arrange them, but absently. His gaze was really fixed on the accused, and it was a gaze in which hypocritical indulgence (as if to say: Never fear, you are in the hands of a fraternal assembly that can only want your good) mixed with icy irony (as if to say: You do not yet know what your good is, and I will shortly tell you) and merciless severity (as if to say: But in any case I am your judge here, and you are in my power). Bernard Gui is a historical figure. He was a Dominican priest, and in 1307 he was indeed made an inquisitor by Pope Clement V, with responsibility for a broad swath of southern France. Over a period of 15 years, Gui pronounced some 633 men and women guilty of heresy. We know the disposition of these cases because Gui wrote everything down—the record survives in his Liber sententiarum, his “Book of Sentences.” It is a folio-size volume, bound in red leather. File a request at the British Library, in London, and before long the document will be delivered to the Manuscripts Reading Room, where you can prop it up on a wedge of black velvet. The writing, in Latin, is tiny and heavily abbreviated.
Inquisition records can be highly detailed and shockingly mundane. An itemized accounting of expenses for the burning of four heretics in 1323 survives from Carcassonne:
For large wood 55 sols, 6 deniers. For vine-branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 sols, 3 deniers. For straw 2 sols, 6 deniers. For four stakes 10 sols, 9 deniers. For ropes to tie the convicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 sols, 7 deniers. For the executioner, each 20 sols . . . . . . . . 80 sols. In all 8 livres, 14 sols, 7 deniers. An event like this would typically have occurred on a Sunday, in the course of a ceremony known as a sermo generalis. A throng would gather, and the various sentences would be read aloud by the inquisitor. The recitation of capital crimes came last, and the prisoners were then turned over—relaxed was the euphemistic term—by the spiritual authorities to the secular ones: churchmen did not wish to sully themselves with killing. To emphasize that his hands were clean, the inquisitor would read a pro forma prayer, expressing hope that the condemned might somehow be spared the pyre—though there was no hope of that. Bernard Gui’s most productive day was April 5, 1310, when he condemned 17 people to death.
Late in 2010, Google Labs introduced something called the NGram Viewer, which allows users to search a database of millions of published works and discover how often particular words have been used from year to year. If you search for the word inquisition, you’ll get a graph showing a sharp upward climb beginning about a decade ago. The word comes up more and more because people have been invoking it as a casual metaphor when writing about our own times—for instance, when referring to modern methods of interrogation, surveillance, torture, and censorship. The original Inquisition was initiated by the Church in the 13th century to deal with heretics and other undesirables, and continued off and on for 600 years. But it’s a mistake to think of the Inquisition as just a metaphor, or as relegated to the past. For one thing, within the Church, it has never quite ended; the office charged today with safeguarding doctrine and meting out discipline occupies the Inquisition’s old palazzo at the Vatican. More to the point, the Inquisition had all the hallmarks of a modern institution—with a bureaucracy, a memory, a procedure, a set of tools, a staff of technocrats, and an all-encompassing ideology that brooked no dissent. It was not a relic but a harbinger.
You can see this in the work of someone like Bernard Gui. Few personal details are known about the man himself, but Eco’s fictional characterization gets at something authentic. He was methodical, learned, clever, patient, and relentless—all of this can be inferred from the paper trail. Gui was a prodigious writer. Among other things, he compiled a lengthy manual for inquisitors called Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, or “Conduct of the Inquisition Into Heretical Depravity.” The manual covers the nature and types of heresy an inquisitor might encounter and also provides advice on everything from conducting an interrogation to pronouncing a death sentence.
Gui would never have put it this way, but his aim in the Practica was to create something like a science of interrogation. He was well aware that interrogation is a transaction between two people—a high-stakes game—and that the person being interrogated, like the person asking the questions, brings an attitude and a method to the process. The accused may be wily and disputatious. Or he may seem humble and accommodating. He may feign insanity. He may resort to “sophistries, deceit, and verbal trickery.” The inquisitor, Gui advised, needed a variety of “distinct and appropriate techniques.”
Gui’s was not the Inquisition’s first interrogation manual, but it was one of the most influential. A generation after Gui, another Dominican, Nicholas Eymerich, produced the Directorium inquisitorum, which built on the work of his predecessor and achieved even greater renown. In our own times, the techniques of interrogation have been refined by psychologists and criminologists, by soldiers and spies. Place the medieval techniques alongside those laid out in modern handbooks, such as Human Intelligence Collector Operations, the U.S. Army interrogation manual, and the inquisitors’ practices seem very up-to-date.
The inquisitors were shrewd students of human nature. Like Gui, Eymerich was well aware that those being questioned would employ a range of stratagems to deflect the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out 10 ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” They include “equivocation,” “redirecting the question,” “feigning astonishment,” “twisting the meaning of words,” “changing the subject,” “feigning illness,” and “feigning stupidity.” For its part, the Army interrogation manual provides a “Source and Information Reliability Matrix” to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of “reporting information that is self-serving,” who give “repeated answers with exact wording and details,” and who demonstrate a “failure to answer the question asked.”
But the well-prepared inquisitor, Eymerich writes, has ruses of his own. To confront an unforthcoming prisoner, he might sit with a large stack of documents in front of him, which he would appear to consult as he asked questions or listened to answers, periodically looking up from the pages as if they contradicted the testimony and saying, “It is clear to me that you are hiding the truth.” The Army manual suggests a technique called the “file and dossier approach,” a variant on what it terms the “we know all” approach:
The HUMINT [human intelligence] collector prepares a dossier containing all available information concerning the source or his organization. The information is carefully arranged within a file to give the illusion that it contains more data than is actually there … It is also effective if the HUMINT collector is reviewing the dossier when the source enters the room. Another technique suggested by Eymerich is to suddenly shift gears, approaching the person being interrogated in a seeming spirit of mercy and compassion, speaking “sweetly” and solicitously, perhaps making arrangements to provide something to eat and drink. The Army manual puts it this way:
At the point when the interrogator senses the source is vulnerable, the second HUMINT collector appears. [He] scolds the first HUMINT collector for his uncaring behavior and orders him from the room. The second HUMINT collector then apologizes to soothe the source, perhaps offering him a beverage and a cigarette. Eymerich and the Army describe many other techniques. You can try to convince the prisoner that resistance is pointless because others have already spilled the beans. You can take the line that you know the prisoner is but a small fish, and if only you had the names of bigger fish, the small one might swim free. You can play on the prisoner’s feelings of utter despair, reminding him that only cooperation with the interrogator offers a path to something better. The Army manual refers to this as the “emotional futility” approach:
In the emotional-futility approach, the HUMINT collector convinces the source that resistance to questioning is futile. This engenders a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness on the part of the source. Again as with the other emotional approaches, the HUMINT collector gives the source a “way out” of the helpless situation. And then there is the matter of torture. Pope Innocent IV authorized its use by the Inquisition in 1252 in the papal bull Ad extirpanda. Few words summon the Dark Ages as quickly as torture, but the uncomfortable reality is that the emergence of torture as an instrument of justice marks the advent of a modern way of thinking: the truth can be ascertained without God’s help.
Torture as a tool of jurisprudence was little known in the darkest part of the Dark Ages. The ability of human beings to discover the truth was thought to be limited. Thus the reliance not on judges or juries but on iudicium Dei—the judgment of an all-knowing God—to determine guilt or innocence. This often took the form of trial by ordeal. The accused would be submerged in water, or made to walk on red-hot coals, or forced to plunge an arm into boiling water. If he or she suffered no harm, or if the wounds healed sufficiently within a certain period of time, then it was the judgment of God that the accused was innocent. This regime was common in Europe for many centuries. It was unquestionably primitive and certainly barbaric. In its favor, it was devoid of hubris about what mere mortals can ever really know.
The late-medieval revolution in legal thinking—manifest everywhere, from Church courts to secular ones—took the pursuit of justice out of God’s hands and put it into the hands of human beings. In his book Torture, the historian Edward Peters explains that the medieval legal revolution was based on one big idea: when it came to discovering guilt or innocence—or, more broadly, discovering the truth about something—there was no need to send the decision all the way up the chain of command, to God. These matters were well within human capacity.
But that didn’t quite settle the issue, Peters goes on. When God is the judge, no other standard of proof is needed. When human beings are the judges, the question of proof comes to the fore. What constitutes acceptable evidence? How do you decide between conflicting accounts? In the absence of a confession—the most unassailable form of evidence, the “queen of proofs”—what form of questioning can properly be applied to induce one? Are there ways in which the interrogation might be … enhanced? And in the end, how do you know that the full truth has been exposed—that a bit more isn’t waiting to be discovered some little way beyond, perhaps with some additional effort? So it’s not hard to understand, Peters concludes, how torture comes into the picture.
From time to time, exhibits of torture instruments go on tour. The effect is oddly Disneyfied—a theme-park view of interrogation. The very names of the instruments reinforce a sense of distant fantasy: Brazen Bull, Iron Maiden, Judas Cradle, Saint Elmo’s Belt, Cat’s Paw, Brodequins, Thummekings, Pilliwinks, Heretic’s Fork, Spanish Tickler, Spanish Donkey, Scold’s Bridle, Drunkard’s Cloak. They could just as easily be the names of pubs, or brands of condoms, or points of ascent on a climbing map.
The Inquisition rarely resorted to these specific instruments. It relied on three different techniques, all of them used today. Before a session began, the person to be interrogated would be brought into the torture chamber and told what was about to be done. The experience of being in conspectus tormentorum was often enough to compel testimony. If not, the session commenced. A physician was generally in attendance. Meticulous records were kept; the usual practice was for a notary to be present, preparing a minutely detailed account. These documents survive in large numbers; they are dry, bureaucratic expositions whose default tone of clinical neutrality is punctuated matter-of-factly—“Oh! Oh!”—by quoted screams. The first technique used by the Inquisition was known in Spanish as the garrucha (“pulley”) and in Italian as the strappado (“pull” or “tug”). It was a form of torture by suspension, and worked through simple gravity. Typically, the hands of the person to be interrogated were tied behind his back. Then, by means of a rope threaded through a pulley or thrown over a rafter, his body would be hoisted off the ground by the hands, and then be allowed to drop with a jerk. The strain on the shoulders was immense. The weight of the body hanging from the arms contorted the pleural cavity, making breathing difficult (asphyxiation was the typical cause of death in crucifixion, for the same reason).
Under various names, the garrucha appears frequently in more-recent history. Senator John McCain was subjected to a version of it, called “the ropes,” by the North Vietnamese, after his airplane was shot down during the Vietnam War. It has been employed in the interrogation of prisoners in U.S. custody. One well-known case is that of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died during interrogation at Abu Ghraib in 2003. His hands had been tied behind his back, and he had then been suspended by the wrists from the bars of a window five feet off the ground. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police at the time, explained the consequences to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker:
“If his hands were pulled up five feet—that’s to his neck. That’s pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It’s not only painful—it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired.” The second technique employed by the Inquisition was the rack. In Spanish the word is potro, meaning “colt,” the reference being to a small platform with four legs. Typically the victim was placed on his back, with legs and arms fastened tautly to winches at each end. Every turn of the winches would stretch him by some additional increment. Ligaments might snap. Bones could be pulled from their sockets. The sounds alone were sometimes enough to encourage cooperation in those brought within hearing distance. Here is an account of a suspected heretic who had been placed on the potro and was being questioned by inquisitors in the Canary Islands in 1597. The winches had just been given three turns. The suspect would confess after six more. The recording secretary preserved the moment:
On being given these he said first, “Oh God!” and then, “There’s no mercy”: after the turns he was admonished, and he said, “I don’t know what to say, oh dear God!” Then three more turns of the cord were ordered to be given, and after two of them he said, “Oh God, oh God, there’s no mercy, oh God help me, help me!” The third technique involved water. Toca, meaning “cloth,” was the Spanish name, referring to the fabric that plugged a victim’s upturned mouth, and upon which water was poured. The effect was to induce the sensation of asphyxiation by drowning. Waterboarding is the English term commonly used today. The modern term in Spanish is submarino. One historian writes:
Even a small amount of water in the glottis causes violent coughing, initiating a fight-or-flight response, raising the heart rate and respiratory rate and triggering desperate efforts to break free. The supply of oxygen available for basic metabolic functions is exhausted within seconds. While this is sometimes called “an illusion of drowning,” the reality is that death will follow if the procedure is not stopped in time. The CIA has acknowledged that one of its detainees, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. Defenders of the practice contend that this figure is misleading—that 183 refers to the number of individual “pours,” and that they occurred in the context of no more than five “sessions.”
As it happens, the Inquisition invented that defense. In theory, torture by the Church was strictly controlled. It was not supposed to put life in jeopardy or cause irreparable harm. And torture could be applied only once. But inquisitors pushed the boundaries. For instance, what did once mean? Maybe it could be interpreted to mean once for each charge. Or, better, maybe additional sessions could be considered not as separate acts but as “continuances” of the first session. Torture would prove difficult to contain. The potential fruits always seemed so tantalizing, the rules so easy to bend.
The public profile of torture is higher than it has been for many decades. Arguments have been mounted in its defense with more energy than at any other time since the Middle Ages. The documentary record pried from intelligence agencies could easily be mistaken for Inquisition transcripts. The lawyer Philippe Sands, investigating the interrogation (which used a variety of techniques) by the United States of a detainee named Mohammed al-Qahtani, pulled together key moments from the official classified account:
Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah. Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. The Inquisition, with its stipulation that torture and interrogation not jeopardize life or cause irreparable harm, actually set a more rigorous standard than some proponents of torture insist on now. The 21st century’s Ad extirpanda is the so-called Bybee memo, issued by the Justice Department in 2002 (and later revised). In it, the Bush administration put forth a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” To place this in perspective: the administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop. The regulation of torture never really works—it just points the practitioners in new directions. Darius Rejali, one of the most prominent scholars of torture, puts the matter simply: “When we watch interrogators, interrogators get sneaky.” The phenomenon is sometimes called “torture creep.” Inquisitors were well aware of the dynamic. We see it today when interrogators, queasy about extracting information by means of torture, send prisoners to be interrogated in countries without such scruples. The process is known as “extraordinary rendition”—a way of keeping your own hands clean, the equivalent of the Church’s “relaxing” the condemned to the secular authority. (During the past decade, the United States has handled an estimated 150 suspected terrorists this way.) In medieval times, torture was at first limited to crimina excepta—crimes of the utmost gravity—but that category was eventually broadened, and the threshold of permissibility lowered. In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, in May 2011, a number of commentators claimed that the al-Qaeda leader’s hideout had been discovered owing to information gleaned from torture—demonstrating how worthwhile torture can be. The claim was false, but the fact that it was made illustrates a falling threshold: where once torture had been justified only by some urgent “ticking time bomb” scenario, now it is seen as an acceptable way to obtain intelligence of a more ordinary kind.
Amoral brutes certainly commit torture, but in their hands it doesn’t become part of a legally sanctioned system. Torture becomes legitimized in the hands of a different sort of person—one who is determined to use the powers of reason, and believes in the rightness of his cause. This is what the writer Michael Ignatieff means when he calls torture chambers “intensely moral places.” Those who wish to justify torture don’t do so by avoiding moral thinking; rather, they override the obvious immorality of a specific act by the presumptive morality of the larger endeavor. The Bybee memo maintained that interrogators could not be prosecuted if they were acting in good faith: “The absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture.” It is the same logic advanced by the inquisitors. Citing Thomas Aquinas, they argued that purity of motive forgave the crossing of any line.
Which, in the end, is the most dangerous inquisitorial impulse of all—that sense of moral certainty. In America today, religion asserts itself repeatedly and increasingly. Oklahoma and a dozen other states have introduced legislation to ban the use of Islamic sharia law in any way within their jurisdictions, despite the fact that it has become a problem exactly nowhere. Schoolbooks in Texas have been revised by government fiat to downplay the idea of separation of church and state. During the past decade, public libraries have faced challenges on moral grounds to more than 4,000 books in their collections. The notion of America as a “Christian nation” has emerged as a theme—explicitly or by innuendo—in the current presidential campaign. When President Obama, in 2009, maintained in a speech that what united Americans was not a specific religious tradition but “ideals and a set of values,” he was attacked by a wide range of public figures.
But religion is not the only culprit. The Enlightenment, which was supposed to be the antidote to this sort of thinking, gave rise to uncompromising outlooks of its own. For some, the higher power is not God but the forces of history, or democracy, or reason, or technology, or genetics. Fundamentally, the inquisitorial impulse arises from some vision of the ultimate good, some conviction about ultimate truth, some confidence in the quest for perfectibility, and some certainty about the path to the desired place—and about whom to blame for obstacles in the way. These are powerful inducements. Isaiah Berlin foresaw where they would lead:
To make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever—what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken—that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know, of Pol Pot … You declare that a given policy will make you happier, or freer, or give you room to breathe; but I know that you are mistaken, I know what you need, what all men need; and if there is resistance based on ignorance or malevolence, then it must be broken and hundreds of thousands may have to perish to make millions happy for all time. Pasted into the front of Gui’s Liber sententiarum is a sheaf of 17th-century correspondence that describes how the book came to the British Library in the first place. It was discovered by the philosopher John Locke in the late 1670s, in the archives of Montpellier. Locke understood the importance of what he had found, and arranged for the manuscript to be sent to the historian Philipp van Limborch, in the Netherlands, who was compiling a history of the Inquisition. “When you see what it contains,” Locke wrote his friend, “I think you will agree with us that it ought to see the light.” Limborch published Gui’s document as an appendix. Years later, a buyer was found for the manuscript on behalf of the British Library. Locke wrote his famous Letter Concerning Toleration in 1685. He made the case for freedom of thought and expression—and a certain humility regarding one’s own cherished beliefs—on the grounds that, no matter how much certainty is in our hearts, human beings cannot know for sure which truths are true, and that believing we can leads us down a terrible path.
The correspondence tucked into Gui’s manuscript offers a reminder of what Locke understood. The Inquisition is not a closed chapter. It is an open book.
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Last week, I took a glancing look at some of the most dubious gun measures creeping up from state legislatures all over the country since the beginning of the year. The statutory text may differ from state to state, but the theme of those post-Newtown proposals are essentially the same: Under the banner of federalism, expressing alarm at federal power, earnest lawmakers are seeking to use new state laws to prevent law enforcement officials from enforcing existing (and future) federal gun regulations.
At the same time, also in the last five weeks, lawmakers in at least 18 states -- more than one-third of the nation -- have proposed dozens of new marijuana laws that would dramatically alter the way millions of people interact with pot. Again, the details differ from bill to bill. But, again, the underlying theme is familiar: Under the banner of federalism, expressing disdain with federal power, earnest lawmakers are seeking through these measures to erode the scope of federal law, which still classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug that is illegal to sell or possess.
The new generation of gun laws, which run directly counter to national public opinion, is rooted in the fealty of state lawmakers to the 10th Amendment, to the 2nd Amendment, to gun industry lobbyists and to its tribune, the National Rifle Association. And these measures, if passed, would be patently unconstitutional. You can amend or repeal a federal statute, in other words, including of course a federal gun regulation, but as a state lawmaker you cannot seek to punish federal officials who are trying to enforce it.
On the other hand, the new generation of marijuana laws, which represent growing national support for reasonable reform, is a direct result of the stunning election success last November of two legalization measures in Colorado and in Washington. These measures, too, on their face, violate federal marijuana law. And, ultimately, either the federal law will have to change, or these state laws will have to change. That change isn't likely to come first from the courts. It's going to have to come from lawmakers, from Congress, and the White House.
***
Legalize, regulate, and tax. Since the beginning of the year, lawmakers in Rhode Island, Hawaii and New Hampshire (twice) have introduced legislation that would legalize marijuana for adult use -- along the lines of what voters endorsed in the two Western states. New Hampshire's effort is explicitly infused with that blend of finance and federalism that always seems to inspire conservatives:
In the interest of the efficient use of law enforcement resources, enhancing revenue for public purposes, and individual freedom, the people of the state of New Hampshire find and declare that the use of marijuana should be legal for persons 21 years of age or older and taxed in a manner similar to alcohol.
Rhode Island's Marijuana Regulation, Control and Taxation Act goes even further. Apart from its operating provisions, it is remarkable for its pointed preamble. Here are just three of the 12 paragraphs which form the factual bases for the pending measure:
More than seven (7) decades of arresting marijuana users has failed to prevent marijuana use; a study published in the American Journal of Public Health compared marijuana usage rates in the United States with rates in the Netherlands, where adults' marijuana use and sales are de facto legal, found "no evidence to support claims that criminalization reduces [marijuana] use."
In June 2005, five hundred thirty (530) economists, including three (3) Nobel Laureates, endorsed a study on the costs of marijuana prohibition by Harvard professor Dr. Jeffrey Miron which estimated that taxing and regulating marijuana would yield ten billion dollars to fourteen billion dollars ($10,000,000,000 - $14,000,000,000) in increased revenues and savings, and which called for "an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition," adding, "We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods."
There is an alarming racial disparity in marijuana arrests in Rhode Island, with African Americans arrested at nearly three and one half (3½) times the rate of whites in 2009, although their marijuana usage rates were very similar.
And so on. These aren't merely political pronouncements. They are based on nonpartisan facts which federal policy makers (of both parties) have been slow to recognize. They are based also on a sort of logic that has been gnawing at more Americans, and which likely accounts for the growing popular support of legalization: Along the drug spectrum, marijuana is much closer to whiskey and wine than it is to heroin. Colorado's Amendment 64 passed in November in large part because it made explicit the obvious analogy to alcohol use.
Decriminalization. Since the beginning of the year, lawmakers in no fewer than 11 states have introduced legislation either to decriminalize marijuana possession outright or to reduce the penalty for it. Here we see a red state/blue state divide. In four red states -- Texas (where they spell it "marihuana"), Oklahoma (ditto), South Dakota and Missouri -- legislators are moving to reduce penalties. In the other states, all blue, lawmakers have moved to make the possession of marijuana punishable by a fine or even simply a civil fine.
Legalization of medical marijuana use. Twenty years ago, no states permitted the use of marijuana for medical use. Today, 17 states and the District of Columbia have such laws. In just the past few weeks alone, lawmakers in 13 other states have introduced legislation that would either legalize medical marijuana or recognize its use as an affirmative defense in a court of law. Those 13 states, blue and red, are Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas. Together, they represent 161 electoral votes.
The folks at the Marijuana Policy Project, who track these laws, predict that "comprehensive medical marijuana bills are anticipated in Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin." That's 20 states altogether, this year alone, that will address this issue. If even half those measures pass, it would mean that, for the first time, more states permit medical marijuana than don't. This would be true even though the feds, as both a technical and practical matter, still don't concede that marijuana has valid medicinal value.
***
Yes sir, it's a whole new world, at least for now, at least so long as Obama Administration officials, and especially Attorney General Eric Holder, continue their hands-off response to these new state initiatives. So far, officials in Denver and Olympia have been talking with federal officials about the new marijuana regulations being established out West -- keeping the feds in the loop, you could say -- while seeking to reassure the White House that the world will not end if states are permitted to experiment with different approaches to marijuana use.
Nor will the world end now that Congress finally is stirring to address the growing disconnect between federal policy, state law, and popular sentiment. This week, two marijuana bills were introduced on Capitol Hill. The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act, introduced by Representative Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, recognizes limited legalization by creating a federal permit that allows a holder to grow marijuana only in states where it is legal. The Marijuana Tax Equity Act, introduced by Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat, would tax pot sales and use the proceeds to help law enforcement and drug abuse programs.
Will this nascent Congressional interest in the topic back the Justice Department off any aggressive enforcement of federal drug laws? Does the White House really want to stamp out these state experiments on marijuana regulation before they begin, really want to deprive these states of an important revenue stream? And is there meaningful Congressional support for a new federal tax or a new policy that would legalize conduct that has been a federal crime for most of the time our federal legislators have been alive?
I keep coming back to the federalism angle. The marijuana story this year turns on its head all the tired, old political postures. "Tough on crime" or not, conservatives can't honestly oppose the new measures on their face, because they represent core Tenth Amendment activities -- criminal laws, traditionally, are state laws. And progressives who traditionally have been fearful of broadening states' rights suddenly are up against the barricades asking the feds to leave local jurisdictions alone. Something's gotta give.
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In a move that's baffled and enraged his staunchly libertarian fans, three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has asked the World Intellectual Property Organization to confiscate two domain names currently held by his supporters: RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org. In a Friday blog post, the sites' proprietors fired back at their hero by claiming that they'd already offered to let Paul buy RonPaul.com (and its 170,000-follower mailing list) for a measly $250,000. (RonPaul.org was apparently thrown in as "a free gift.") After all, that's the proper market economy way to handle this situation … right? Instead, their beloved leader has chosen to expropriate private property with the help of a major bastion of liberal tyranny: the United Nations, which controls the WIPA.
The betrayed loyalists at RonPaul.com went on to blast Paul for his hypocrisy in this heartbroken passage:
Back in 2007 we put our lives on hold for you, Ron, and we invested close to 10,000 hours of tears, sweat and hard work into this site at great personal sacrifice. We helped raise millions of dollars for you, we spread your message of liberty as far and wide as we possibly could, and we went out of our way to defend you against the unjustified attacks by your opponents. Now that your campaigns are over and you no longer need us, you want to take it all away – and send us off to a UN tribunal?
In closing, they had just one thing to say: "We want our old pre-retirement Ron Paul back!" It's sad, but Paul knows that all's fair in love and domain names.
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In my twitter (and maybe in yours) and around the web, I keep hearing what I can only call an attempt to redeem Christopher Dorner's murderous rampage. These redemption narratives, from what I can tell, are a mish-mash of cynicism, anger and left-wing populism. Heaped on top of that is LAPD's incredibly ugly history of corruption, racism and mayhem. If you've forgotten what a mess that was, go here. Finally, there's the fact that Dorner himself claimed that he was motivated by racism within the department, and that he'd been fired after blowing the whistle on an instance of police brutality. It would not surprise me if both charges were true.
The urge to make myth, to try and redeem humans who commit immoral acts under the flag of moral causes, is understandable. It's understandable in those who look at Jesse James and see not the straight white supremacist, but the scourge of greedy bankers and acquisitive industrialists against whom, it seemed, none could stand. And it's more understandable among a people disproportionately brutalized by the police who look at Christopher Dorner, and see not a murderer but a plague on a police force that is, itself, above the law.
But those who would form hard arguments based on myth need to confront something -- Christopher Dorner was a murderer:
Four days before her death, Monica Quan had news for her team. Quan, an assistant coach at Cal State Fullerton, held up her hand to show off an engagement ring. The players screamed and huddled around her for a closer look, head coach Marcia Foster recalled. Quan was as happy as her basketball players, and later said she wished she had recorded the moment. She loved to have pictures taken with her friends. She wanted a big wedding, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, a public safety officer at USC, was trying to work extra hours to make it possible.... The couple was talking about who would be in the wedding party. They had yet to pick a date and a location when they were found Feb. 3, shortly after the Super Bowl, shot to death in their car in the parking structure of their Irvine condominium complex. They had multiple gunshot wounds. There were no signs of a robbery, and investigators ruled out a murder-suicide. The next day, Quan's father got a call from a close friend of the family. Randal Quan, a former captain with the Los Angeles Police Department, and Wayne Caffey, a detective with the Southeast Division, had known one another for almost 25 years. Caffey recalled their conversation.
"We lost her," Quan said. "She's gone." The two men were overwhelmed by the senselessness of the slayings. We don't know anything, Quan said; we don't know what happened. He would later learn that his daughter and her fiance were probably killed by a former LAPD officer who had been fired in 2009; Randal Quan had represented Christopher Jordan Dorner at his termination hearing.
What was once incomprehensible -- the deaths of these two young people -- was now considered a revenge killing. The reasons were spelled out in an 11,000-word post police found on a Facebook page that they believe belonged to Dorner, 33, who is now a fugitive.
"I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own," Dorner supposedly wrote. "I'm terminating yours." I don't really know how anyone, with any sort of coherence, adopts Christopher Dorner as a symbol in the fight against police brutality, given how he brutalized those two human beings. I cannot understand, except to say that sometimes our own anger, our pain, becomes so blinding that we fail to see the pain of others. This is the seed of inhumanity, and inhumanity is the seed of the very police brutality which we all deplore.
In my time here I have blogged relentlessly about police brutality. It's an important and legit issue. When cops brutalize innocent black people, they erode the contract between citizen and country. But the case against police brutality enjoys more eloquent, and more moral, voices than a coward who ambushes innocent people in a parking garage. We don't need a Jesse James. No one needs a Jesse James.
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Nader Hasan’s cousin Nidal is accused of shooting and killing Kerry Cahill’s father, Michael, after Michael Cahill charged the shooter, clutching only a folding chair over his head, trying desperately, valiantly to stop the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood.
One wouldn’t expect Kerry Cahill and Nader Hasan to be friends, but they are. Sometimes, humanity throws you a curve that way
Living through the pain of the Fort Hood tragedy from different places, Cahill and Nader Hasan are finding common bonds forged through a common purpose. In 2011, Hasan founded the Nawal Foundation to denounce extremism and violence committed in the name of Islam. Cahill joined the board of directors a year later after striking up a friendship.
“We don’t want violence to get the last word,” Hasan, a 43-year-old trial lawyer in Fairfax, Va., said of the foundation.
He knew that by being related to Nidal Hasan, he had a platform to state the position he felt was missing from the public discussion: “That this is in no way who we are as a community and what we have as values. It’s completely to the contrary.”
Cahill and Hasan will share their unlikely story Tuesday in Austin at a Friends in Faith luncheon fundraiser sponsored by Interfaith Action of Central Texas, a nonprofit that seeks to build relationships among faith communities. In separate phone interviews with the American-Statesman, they spoke emotionally, pensively and hopefully about their evolving friendship, their work with Nawal and the message they hope to impart in Austin.
Maj. Nidal Hasan is charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 others at Fort Hood, where he was an Army psychiatrist. In emails to a known terrorist, Nidal Hasan, who is Muslim, had expressed his support for suicide bombings and killing civilians, a report on the Fort Hood rampage later found.
Nader and Nidal Hasan grew up together, but Nader declined to comment on what his cousin was like then, worried that anything he said would be misinterpreted as a plea for sympathy.
“I’m disgusted by the acts of my cousin every day,” Nader Hasan said. So are his fellow Muslim Americans, he added.
But in the two years since the mass shooting, Nader Hasan grew dismayed by what he called the “perceived silence or an acceptance” among Muslim Americans, though there were plenty of them, he said, who denounced the mass shootings.
“You never heard anything in response, speaking out to say that the majority of Muslims don’t believe this,” Hasan said.
Nader Hasan figured that extremists get media attention. They have had an impact by inflicting casualties, thereby garnering the media spotlight. They have succeeded in a very small number of cases, he said, by making Muslim Americans choose between God or country.
“They say, ‘Do you believe in God more, or do you believe in America more, because if your country is at war with your religion, shouldn’t you take on that aggressor?’” Nader Hasan said. “This is a false choice.”
Subhed here
At a 2011 evidentiary hearing, witnesses testified that Nidal Hasan had exclusively targeted soldiers, training his gun on those lying on the ground or crawling away, until the barrel-chested Michael Cahill, a 62-year-old civilian, rushed him.
That was just like her dad every day, Kerry Cahill said.
“If he saw somebody being treated wrong, something not going right, he got out there, and he was loud, and he was bossy, and he stood up” for what was right, Cahill said. She had spoken in a thoughtful, measured tone during the interview, but her voice brimmed with pride when the conversation turned to her father.
“It’s not what you do in the moment of crisis, it’s what you do every day,” Kerry Cahill said. “If you have to do the best possible thing you do every day, then you get to be like my dad.”
A Cameron resident who worked as a physician’s assistant at Fort Hood, Michael Cahill was the only civilian killed. He was posthumously awarded the Secretary of the Army Award for Valor.
A 30-year-old actress, writer and artist-educator who lives in the New Orleans area, Kerry Cahill met Nader Hasan for the first time in 2011, reaching out to him after watching a TV interviewer ask him if he would meet with the victims’ families.
Hasan paused ever so slightly and told the interviewer, yes, if they so desired.
Kerry Cahill didn’t like at all what she sensed was a stain “on families of people who do things like this,” she said, as if the blame somehow was transferred onto them as well.
“I know (Nidal Hasan’s family members) went through just as much hell” as the victims’ families, Cahill said.
Subhed here
Near the second anniversary of the mass shooting, Cahill, her mother, Joleen, sister Keely Vanacker, brother James Cahill, and Leila Hunt-Willingham, whose brother J.D. Hunt was killed in the Fort Hood mass shooting, met with Nader Hasan, his wife and 1-year-old son, and his mother, Nawal, who lives down the street.
The foundation is named for Nader Hasan’s mother, whose name means gift in Arabic. It is Nader Hasan’s tribute to his single mom who raised five children, which he considers a gift.
“It was emotional. It was surreal,” Nader Hasan said of that meeting between families. “I think we probably both surprised each other as to how comfortable it became after the first few sentences.”
“It was a wonderful day,” Cahill said. “Healing gets easier with days like that.”
The Cahills brought with them something special, “Mouse Soup,” a book their father had read to them when they were children. Nader Hasan now reads the book to his son, now 2. The gift, Nader Hasan said, captured “what great human beings the Cahills are.”
By coming into his home and his mother’s home, seeing where they live and the American flag hanging out front, the Cahills were able to see that what happened at Fort Hood “was completely from left field for us, too,” Nader Hasan said. “Nobody deserves this. Nobody.”
Cahill and Nader Hasan kept in touch via email. When she asked how the foundation was doing, he invited her to sit in on board meetings via teleconference. Cahill had ideas about what the foundation could do. Nader Hasan invited her to join the board.
Cahill’s coming on board has opened doors for the Nawal Foundation.
“Here you have somebody whose father was killed by my cousin, and she’s able to show a respect and understanding and awareness to listen before any judgment is passed on anyone else beside my cousin,” Nader Hasan said.
When they learn that she is working with the cousin of the accused Fort Hood shooter, Cahill says, some people seem taken aback. She’s surprised because the collaboration has been only positive, and she reasons that, in the face of tragedy, it is best to look for what one can do, rather than do nothing. Her father lived his life like that, she said.
“I tell them what we’re doing and that extremism is a problem, and we can speak out in a way that’s very personal to people,” Cahill said.
She hopes their Austin audience will leave feeling empowered to do something about preventing violence.
“I don’t expect everybody to hold hands,” Cahill said, but “we’ve got to amplify the voice of (Muslim Americans speaking out against violence), because the voice of the violent is getting way too loud.”
To those who think she and Nader Hasan are an unlikely pair, she says they have more in common than people think.
“We both have the same enemy, and that is extremism,” Cahill said.
“Good can trump evil if we give it a chance,” Nader Hasan said.
-------------------- We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..
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Reged: 04/26/08
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GREAT design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. You want it, too: brain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement. Instinctively, we reach out for attractive things; beauty literally moves us.
Yet, while we are drawn to good design, as Mr. Hamel points out, we’re not quite sure why.
This is starting to change. A revolution in the science of design is already under way, and most people, including designers, aren’t even aware of it.
Take color. Last year, German researchers found that just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and motivation. It’s not hard to guess why: we associate verdant colors with food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment.
This could partly explain why window views of landscapes, research shows, can speed patient recovery in hospitals, aid learning in classrooms and spur productivity in the workplace. In studies of call centers, for example, workers who could see the outdoors completed tasks 6 to 7 percent more efficiently than those who couldn’t, generating an annual savings of nearly $3,000 per employee.
In some cases the same effect can happen with a photographic or even painted mural, whether or not it looks like an actual view of the outdoors. Corporations invest heavily to understand what incentivizes employees, and it turns out that a little color and a mural could do the trick.
Simple geometry is leading to similar revelations. For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions (about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the “Mona Lisa,” the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.
Experiments going back to the 19th century repeatedly show that people invariably prefer images in these proportions, but no one has known why.
Then, in 2009, a Duke University professor demonstrated that our eyes can scan an image fastest when its shape is a golden rectangle. For instance, it’s the ideal layout of a paragraph of text, the one most conducive to reading and retention. This simple shape speeds up our ability to perceive the world, and without realizing it, we employ it wherever we can.
Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals — irregular, self-similar geometry — occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals — not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder — home is where the genome is.
LIFE magazine named Jackson Pollock “the greatest living painter in the United States” in 1949, when he was creating canvases now known to conform to the optimal fractal density (about 1.3 on a scale of 1 to 2 from void to solid). Could Pollock’s late paintings result from his lifelong effort to excavate an image buried in all of our brains?
We respond so dramatically to this pattern that it can reduce stress levels by as much as 60 percent — just by being in our field of vision. One researcher has calculated that since Americans spend $300 billion a year dealing with stress-related illness, the economic benefits of these shapes, widely applied, could be in the billions.
It should come as no surprise that good design, often in very subtle ways, can have such dramatic effects. After all, bad design works the other way: poorly designed computers can injure your wrists, awkward chairs can strain your back and over-bright lighting and computer screens can fatigue your eyes.
We think of great design as art, not science, a mysterious gift from the gods, not something that results just from diligent and informed study. But if every designer understood more about the mathematics of attraction, the mechanics of affection, all design — from houses to cellphones to offices and cars — could both look good and be good for you.
-------------------- We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..
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