The birthmark: an identity is a difficult thing to change

The New Neo Posted on by

Just recently I received an e-mail from a thoughtful reader who asked:

For most of my friends, being progressive is part of their identity. Changing their minds requires reevaluating who they are…Why do you think identity is so tied up with political beliefs?

In the post entitled “Beginnings” (part of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series), I tried to describe the process of formation of a political identity. A great influence is the political affiliation of a person’s family. Although some people certainly break away and forge a different political identity than that of parents and relatives, there is definitely a tendency to stick with whatever is the ideology in which we are raised.

Here is a picture of the identity-forming process as a whole:

Memberships in organizations or collectives that serve as reference groups are typically emphasized as integral to the process of identity formation. These socially based identities provide potential sources of identity for the individual… Most findings suggest that identity is seldom restricted to one group…individuals may have a variety of identities or subidentities, each supported by group memberships.

So, the groups to which we belong–social, ethnic, religious, racial, class, professional, recreational, familial, political–all are pieces in the puzzle that creates our sense of identity. The majority of people are probably most comfortable when they perceive the elements within them as cohesive, and are uncomfortable when they see them as clashing with each other. But all sides–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, “progressives” and anarchists and libertarians–take on an affiliation which becomes a basic part of personal identity and is consequently often very difficult to give up.

An excellent illustration of this phenomenon is Democrat Zell Miller, who gave a speech nominating G.W. Bush at last year’s Republican convention. This earned him the enmity of most of his fellow Democrats, who considered him a traitor to the party.

Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.

Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate.

Miller’s not the only one who feels that way in his neck of the woods:

“We’re a little bit different than the Washington Democrats,” said state Rep. Charles F. Jenkins (D-Blairsville), who represents Miller’s home county of Towns as well as Rabun, Union and White counties.

Jenkins said he understands why Miller refuses to join the Republican Party.

“You’ve got people up here who just will not switch from the Democratic Party because they’ve been Democrats since they were born,” Jenkins said. “They’re hard-headed mountain people. And hard-headed mountain people don’t switch for anybody.”

Well, most people are pretty hard-headed in that respect. But it’s my impression that liberals may even be more hard-headed than most about changing their political identities.

That’s because a liberal political identity tends to be so much more than a political identity–it’s also a moral and personal identity. Liberals tend to equate their own position with such abstract (and non-political) qualities as goodness, kindness, lack of bigotry, intelligence–oh, a host of wonderful virtues. Any identity that is so identified is going to be particularly difficult to shed. Do some conservatives feel this way about their identity? Of course. But my impression is that it is a feeling even more basic to the political identities of liberals–at least the ones I know, and I know quite a few.

My sense is that this is one of the main reasons that my attempts to talk to my friends have so often been met with rage: to many of them, my espousing of any conservative causes means 1) I must be a bad (i.e.: selfish, racist, classist) person; and 2) if I ever were to convince them of the rightness of my arguments, they would be faced with leaving the fold, also, and becoming a bad person, too. Much better to let the whole edifice remain in place than to remove one little brick and risk the whole thing toppling down.

Japan votes for a reformer

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not particularly conversant with Japanese politics, but this seems like an important story. Japanese voters answered the call of Prime Minister Koizumi with a strong vote to return him to power on a platform of reforming and streamlining the Japanese government to deal with the next few decades of change there.

By returning Koizumi to power (which looks on the surface like “no change”), the Japanese people are voting for enormous change, at least potentially. Koizumi has plans to scale down government by privatizing the post office and insurance industry, as well as changing the pension system.

Looks like the Japanese are encountering something similar to what Europe is facing as the population ages over the next few decades. Many Europeans seem to be more or less in denial, not wanting to abandon their free lunches, but Japan seems to be trying to tackle the problem head on.

It’s also a vote for a Bush supporter in foreign policy:

The win would keep a staunch ally of President Bush in power. Koizumi is expected to stand by his dispatch of troops to support the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq over opposition objections, and he strongly supports the continued presence of 50,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan. Tokyo also is a U.S. negotiating partner in efforts to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons.

Koizumi has his work cut out for him, especially in the economic sphere. I wish him the best of luck; he’ll need it.

A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 6A (9/11: the watershed)

The New Neo Posted on by

[On this fourth anniversary of 9/11, I am offering the following post. It represents part A of a projected two-part segment about 9/11. Parts A and B together will be the sixth entry in my ongoing series about intrapersonal political change. For links to earlier posts in this series, please see the right sidebar under the heading, “A mind is a difficult thing to change.”]

INTRODUCTION

Although I’ve written in my “About Me” section that I was “mugged by reality on 9/11,” that’s really just a convenient and probably misleading shorthand description of a much more complex reaction, one that began that instant but emerged only slowly, over a period of several years. It’s probably still in the process of evolving and changing.

But the beginning wasn’t slow. Not at all.

It began in an instant, the instant I heard about the 9/11 attacks. Like most of you, I remember exactly where I was at the time and how I learned the news. My story isn’t a particularly dramatic one. I don’t tell it for that reason. I tell it to learn more about the process by which a mind is changed–sometimes, as in this case, through a sudden and dramatic event that sparks intense feelings and begins a cognitive process by which a person tries to make some sort of sense of that overwhelming event and those chaotic feelings.

9/11

I was having trouble sleeping that night. I don’t know why–I wasn’t in pain, I didn’t have a stomach ache, nor was I anxious about anything in particular. But I lay awake in bed for hours in a sort of unfocused but nevertheless unpleasant and restless agitation, until I finally fell into a fitful sleep from about 5 AM to 8 AM, and then woke up again.

I was visiting with friends, so I wasn’t in my regular bed. I didn’t have to get up early, so I tried to relax and sleep a bit more. But the strange wakefulness continued, and at about 10:15 I finally gave up and went downstairs.

My friend was at her job, but her husband John worked at home in a basement office. Since he was nowhere to be seen, I figured he was down there at his computer. I grabbed a yogurt for breakfast, and was engaged in eating it a few minutes later when John appeared in the kitchen.

John is one of the calmest people I know, almost preternaturally so. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, and never even seen him look agitated, despite the vagaries of raising two teenagers and assorted pets. Nor did he appear particularly distressed that day. He seemed to be looking through some piles on the countertops for something–a pen? some notepaper?–when I caught his attention and started to ask some casual question.

John stopped shuffling through the stacks, and gave me a look I can only characterize as quizzical. He seemed to be studying me. And what he said next are words that are burned into my brain, a phrase I never want to hear again, not ever: “You don’t know what happened, do you?”

I write it as a question, but it didn’t really have a rising inflection at the end. It was more of a statement, an expression of intense wonderment that anyone could be so ignorant of something so obvious. It was as though he’d said “You don’t know the sky is blue, do you?”

No, I guess I didn’t know what had happened, I said, and waited for him to tell me.

What did I suppose it might be? I had already sensed, somehow, that it was nothing good. But in the split second of innocence I had left to think about it, I might have thought John was about to say that there had been an auto accident, a bus collision, or a fire, an upsetting but ordinary and generic tragedy of some sort or another.

But instead, John’s calm words came out in one long run-on sentence, although their content was anything but calm, or calming.

“Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center, and the towers have fallen, and then another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth one is missing, and a few others are missing, too” (the final destination of Flight 93 was unknown as yet, and a mistaken report had been issued that there were further planes still unaccounted for).

If John had told me that Martians had landed in Central Park, or that an asteroid was on a doomsday course towards earth and we had only a few hours to live, I could not have been more surprised. My body reacted instantly, before my mind did–my legs felt shaky, my mouth went dry, and something inside my gut was shaking, also.

I knew immediately and intuitively that a watershed event had occurred. I didn’t know the exact parameters of it, nor any details of the direction in which we were headed, but I knew that this moment felt like a break with everything that had gone before. Assumptions I hadn’t even known I’d held were dead in a single instant, as though their life supports had been cut. I didn’t know what would replace them.

What were the main assumptions that had died in that instant for me? They had to do with a sense of basic long-term safety. Some utterly fearful thing that had seemed contained before, although vaguely threatening, had now burst from its constraints. It was like being plunged into something dark and ancient that had also suddenly been grafted onto modern technology and jet planes–Huns or Mongols or Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler or Hector being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot–a thousand swirling vague but horrific impressions from an ancient history I’d never paid all that much attention to before.

I remembered having read articles within the last couple of years that had told of terrorist plans and threats, but managing to successfully surpress my rising fear and reassuring myself that no, it wouldn’t actually happen; it was just talk and boasting bravado. The nuclear nightmares of my youth now came to mind: the fallout shelters, the bomb drills, the suspicion that I wouldn’t live to grow up. I had suppressed those, too, especially in recent years when the fall of the Soviet Union had removed what had once been the likeliest source of the conflagration. It now felt like one of those horror movies where the heroine is chased by someone out to do her harm and then she gets home, feels safe, closes the door and breathes a sigh of relief–and then the murderer leaps out of the closet, where he’d been hiding all the time.

But all these thoughts and images weren’t fully formed, they were a jumbled set of apprehensions that hit me almost simultaneously with John’s news. In the next instant, I had a sudden vision of the two WTC towers toppling over and falling into the other buildings in downtown New York, crushing them as in some ghastly game of giant dominos. So the first question I asked John when I could get my suddenly dry mouth to function was, “How did the towers fall? Did they fall over and smash other buildings?

John didn’t know the answer. The reason he didn’t know was that the family television set had recently been unplugged and stored away, deemed too distracting for the kids, who’d been having some trouble in school lately. This meant that John had no visuals, and so he couldn’t answer my question.

And then John left to get his daughter, and I was left alone with my thoughts.

I had always been glad I’d been born after World War II because I had a sense that the stress of those horrific war years would have taken a terrible toll on me. I had often wondered whether I could have handled such a lengthy time of deep uncertainty about whether the forces of good or evil (not that I really thought in those terms ordinarily, but WWII did seem to present a stark choice of that type) would triumph. I wondered about the sense of impending doom and personal danger that a worldwide war with so many casualties would have entailed, especially in those early years when it wasn’t going very well for the Allies.

I’d known war, of course–most particularly, Vietnam. But as much as that war had affected me personally by affecting those I loved, and as much as I’d been upset by all the killing and struggle, the actual fighting had been far away “over there,” and in a relatively small area of the globe.

From the very first moment that John had told me the news of 9/11, there had been no real doubt in my mind that the attacks had been the work of terrorists. There had also been no doubt that this was something very different from what had gone before.

But why was that difference so clear? After all, there had been terrorist attacks before that had killed hundreds of people at a time. There had even been a previous attack on the World Trade Center, and I had known that the intent of the terrorists back then had been to bring the building down. So, why this feeling of something utterly new?

Each prior terrorist attack had contained elements that had allowed me to soothe and distance myself from it, and to minimize the terrorists’ intent. Most of the attacks had been overseas, or on military personnel, or both. Or, if the attack had been in this country and on civilians (both were certainly true of the previous WTC bombing), the terrorists had seemed almost comically inept and bumbling. Each attack had been horrible, but the presence of one or more of these elements had kept knowledge of what was really going on at bay.

Those planes that had crashed into the towers and toppled them on 9/11 also had smashed the nearly impenetrable wall of my previous denial. These attacks had been audacious. I could not ignore the fact that the intent of the terrorists was to be as lethal and malicious as humanly possible. The change in the scope and scale of the project made it seem as though they did indeed want to kill us all, indiscriminately, and it gave their motives even less grounding in any sort of rational thought that I could fathom, or any real strategic end. The creativity of the attacks (and I do not use that word admiringly, but the attacks were indeed an instance of thinking outside the box) made it seem that anything was possible, and that the form of future attacks could not be anticipated or even guessed at. The attacks had imitated an action/adventure movie far too well, the type of thing that had always seemed way too improbable to be true. But now it had actually happened, and the terrorists seemed to have become almost slickly competent in the split-second timing and execution of the attacks.

After John had left the house, I did a few practical things. I called my family in New York, who were all safe, though very shaken (my sister-in-law had witnessed the second crash from her balcony, and their small yard was covered with ash and papers). I managed to get to a television set and watch the videotapes, and it was then that I learned that the towers had fallen neatly, collapsing onto themselves like a planned demolition.

And then I did something impractical. I went to the ocean and sat on the rocks. It was the loveliest day imaginable. I had been alive for over fifty years at the time, and I cannot recall weather and a sky quite like that before. It added to the utter unreality of the day and my feelings. The sky was so blue as to be almost piercing, with a clarity and sharpness that seemed other-worldly. It made it feel as though the heavens themselves were speaking to us; but what were they saying?

All this clarity and purity was enhanced by the fact that there wasn’t an airplane in the sky. There were boats of all types on the bluest of oceans, the sun beamed down and made the waves sparkle, and it all seemed to have a preciousness and a beauty that came with something that might soon be irretrievably lost.

I thought there might be more attacks, bigger attacks, and soon. So I might as well enjoy the sky. I wondered whether I should go ahead with a house purchase I was about to make. I wondered whether it mattered. But most of all, I wondered why the attacks had happened.

I’d studied human behavior for a good many years, but I can honestly say there was a tremendous and unfathomable mystery here. I had always been a curious person, but the amount of time and effort I had spent studying world history or political movements had been relatively minor. I’d been more interested in literature and art, psychology and science.

Now, and quite suddenly, I wanted to learn what had happened, why, and what we might need to do about it. In fact, I felt driven to study these things, in the way that a person suddenly faced with the diagnosis of a terminal illness might want to learn everything possible about that disease, even if they’d had no interest whatsoever in it before. Samuel Johnson has written that the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully. A terrorist attack on this scale had focused the mind wonderfully, too. That was, perhaps, its only benefit.

Even on that very first day, as I sat on the rocks overlooking the beautiful ocean that I loved so much, I thought we had entered a new era, one which would probably go on for most of my lifetime however much longer I might live. The fight would be long and hard, and there would be many many deaths before it was over. Perhaps it would result in the end of civilization as we knew it–yes, my thoughts went that far on that day. This war would encompass most of the globe. I had no idea how it would work out, but I knew that we were in for the fight of our lives.

The legal actions of the past–the puny trial after the first World Trade Center attack, for example–no longer seemed like an effective response. It seemed, in retrospect, to have been almost laughably naive. The situation didn’t even seem amenable to a conventional war. Something new would have to be invented, and fast. And it would have to be global. It would have to have great depth and breadth, and it would probably last for decades or even longer.

So for me the day began with an emotional intensity–a stunning shock that very quickly was matched by a cognitive intensity as well. It now seemed to be no less than a matter of life and death to learn, as best I could, what was going on. I knew it wasn’t up to me to solve this; I had no power and no influence in the world. But still something drove me, with a force that was almost relentless, to pursue knowledge and understanding about this event. The pursuit of this knowledge no longer seemed discretionary or abstract, it seemed both necessary and deeply, newly personal.

[Trackback to this Mudville Gazette post featuring photos of the World Trade Center on 9/11.]

[ADDENDUM: for Part VIB, go here.]

The doctor is in, indeed

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many excellent blogs and bloggers that I can’t even begin to keep up with all the ones I want to read, and still continue to do any writing myself. But every now and then I find a new blog (new to me, anyway) and see something there so resonant and stirring that I can honestly say that I feel a thrill of excitement at the discovery.

That’s what happened to me when, through some circuitous route or other, I encountered Dr. Bob and his essay entitled “The Call”, which appears at his blog The Doctor is In. It is a remarkable piece of writing; please do yourself a favor and read it.

But writing is only the half of it. Dr. Bob can surely write, but he can also think and feel, and he can write eloquently about what he thinks and feels. He can also act, in his capacity as a doctor. My guess is, from the evidence of his essay, that he is every bit as good a doctor as he is a writer and thinker and feeler, and that’s saying a great deal.

For those of you who are not Christians, don’t let Dr. Bob’s Christian perspective throw you off, because he writes for everyone, and he writes of universal matters.

I plan to do more reading at the Doctor Is In. But even if Dr. Bob had never written another word besides “The Call,” it would have been enough.

Statistical surprise?

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back, in the course of doing some research on World War II and the Holocaust, I came across a statistic that absolutely stunned me: the percentage of Jews in the population of Germany immediately prior to World War II.

Since then, every so often I will ask people if they can guess what it might have been, and no one’s ever gotten it right, or even come close.

So, what percentage of the population of pre-WWII Germany do you suppose was Jewish? Take a moment and think about it. Then guess.

Here’s another one that no one ever seems to get right: the percentage of Jews in the population of Baghdad around the time of World War I. Take a moment and think about it. Then take a guess.

Now look here for the answer to the first question (hint: it’s in the first sentence of the third paragraph).

Now look here for the answer to the second question (hint: it’s in the second sentence of the second paragraph).

Okay, let’s review. Answer to the first question: just prior to World War II, Jews constituted about 0.75% of the population of Germany. In case you’re bad with figures or think that was a typo, I’ll say it in words: less than one percent of the population of Germany was Jewish around the time Hitler rose to power.

Answer to the second question: around WWI, Jews constituted about one-third of the population of the city of Baghdad.

Most people will guess between 5 and 20 percent for the first question, and a couple of percentage points or even less for the second. You get closer to the truth if you reverse Germany and Baghdad.

What does it all mean? I’m not sure, except that it’s another case of facts sometimes being quite different than what we suppose them to be.

The few vs. the many: the Martin Higby Phenomenon

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was in grade school, our entire class of thirty-odd marched more or less in lockstep from grades one through six. The community in which I was raised wasn’t very transient; people stayed put, and so we got to know those same kids awfully well by the time we went to junior high and dispersed somewhat into the larger crowd.

There was Glenna (all names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty), everybody’s favorite nice girl, a motherly and protective soul who was the only one who was nice to Jerry, a nervous pacer and pretty much of a nervous wreck. There was Melinda, gossiper and partygiver; Brian, the ruthless achiever whom it seemed even then would have climbed over his own mother to succeed; Elizabeth, wild child who later ended up a heroin addict.

And then there was Martin Higby. Today I suppose his diagnosis would be ADHD, but then he was just labeled “bad.” He couldn’t sit still; he was loud, angry, disruptive, and aggressive .

The things that scared the rest of us didn’t intimidate Martin in the least. He didn’t much care if he spent his life in the assistant principal’s office or in detention—or even in jail, as some darkly predicted. I seem to remember a bit of corporal punishment, too—in those days not illegal—and one memorably nasty teacher who made him stand for an hour or so in a large metal garbage can, because he was “dirt.”

Whatever was tried, it didn’t work. Martin continued to disrupt things. It was bad enough when the teacher was in the classroom, but it got really bad on the occasions when she (and it was always a “she”) had to leave the room for a few minutes, which happened every now and then.

With stern warnings, and leaving the reliable Glenna in charge, the teacher would let us know that our behavior was being monitored even though she would be out of the room. She’d be able to hear us, and the neighboring classes would be able to hear us. If she got a report that we’d caused too much of a ruckus and been too loud, we’d all be punished by getting a detention.

That was music to the ears of Martin. The chance to get everyone else in trouble, as opposed to just himself, was an opportunity not to be missed. So he set out to do just that. Our ever-escalating efforts to stop him only added to the confusion and the noise level. I still remember my feelings of impotent rage at Martin (and the teacher) as I sat at my desk after school in detention with the entire class—my restless hands folded neatly, as required, watching the beautiful day go on outside the large school windows while we sat cooped up inside for an extra hour.

I thought that the teacher showed little knowledge of the nature of people like Martin, who for whatever reason wanted to ruin things for others. But lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it was a valuable lesson after all.

In fact, even though it’s a pseudonym, I’d like to nominate Martin for notoriety by coining the phrase “the Martin Higby phenomenon.” That stands for the idea that it doesn’t take many people to wreck things (or come very close to wrecking things) for everyone else—just a few will do. That’s what the police (and teachers) are for, of course—to try to keep those few in check. But in any situation in which the authorities are weak or absent (when the teacher leaves the room, metaphorically speaking) the Martin Higbys of the world see their chance, and they pounce. Whether it be looting after a natural disaster like Katrina, or the so-called “insurgents” in Iraq, the nature of the Martin Higbys of the world is to love a vacuum.

A police state, of course, is not a desirable response, although in some ways it “works” (Soviet Russia had a lot less crime than post-Soviet Russia, for example). The aim is to balance control with freedom, a tricky undertaking. It’s the one we’re trying to get at in areas as simple as theater fire regulations. It’s what’s at stake in arguments over the Patriot Act.

It also relates to my previous post on sheep becoming sheepdogs. I’ve begun to wonder what would have happened in that long-ago classroom if more of us had figured out a way to become sheepdogs rather than sheep. What could we have done, short of violence to Martin? What would have happened had we gotten together, for example—some of the strongest among us—and held him down and put a gag on him?

Well, in that setting, we probably would have gotten a lot more punishment than just a detention. But there must have been some sort of group sheepdog action possible. Back in the 1950s I don’t think we children were even capable of conceiving of the idea, much less carrying it out successfully.

In the end, though, countering the Martin Higby phenomenon requires an interaction of public and private responsibility, both group and individual. With the growth of the technology of destruction, and the possible availability of nuclear weaponry to ever smaller fringe groups, it has become vital to counteract the tyranny of the few.

More about those sheepdogs: what do they think of the sheep?

The New Neo Posted on by

In my recent “sheep to sheepdog” post, the following question was posed here in the comments section:

Richard, I hope NNC really thinks about your question: what do the sheepdogs think about the sheep? Because they prolly have some superior / contempt feelings. Sometimes quite a bit like the wolves, actually, though the wolves are more open and honest. (And many sheepdogs are NOT contemptuous at all, more supportive).

If you’ve read my post (or Bill Whittle’s essay to which it refers), you’ll know that “sheep,” “sheepdogs,” and “wolves” were meant to be metaphorical. The word “sheep” refers to those regular folk who don’t have much capacity or aptitude for violence, and the word “sheepdogs” refers to those people who have a capacity for violence but choose to use it to protect “sheep” against the “wolves,” those who prey on the otherwise innocent and defenseless. “Sheepdogs,” then, are typically members of the military or the police, for example.

I don’t really know the answer to the question “what do the sheepdogs think of the sheep?”, but I can certainly speculate. My guess is that the attitude of such “sheepdogs” to “sheep” is a combination of responsibility, love, and a frustration which sometimes borders on anger–depending on the particular sheep and the particular sheepdog in question.

Strangely enough, I happen to know a bit about sheepdogs. Actual sheepdogs. Not from personal experience, but from some research I once had to do for an editing project. And although I think the Whittle-Grossman metaphor of sheep/sheepdog/wolf is an excellent way to express some thoughts about the distinctions between these three types of people, it turns out that “sheepdog” is really too general a term to apply. Whittle and Grossman aren’t really talking about sheepdogs as we commonly think of them; they are talking about guard dogs for sheep.

This may all seem quite irrelevant, but please bear with me. There are actually two types of sheepdogs: herding dogs and livestock guard dogs. The former are the ones we think of when we ordinarily speak of sheepdogs–the Border Collies and the Corgis and Old English Sheepdogs and the like. They don’t actually fight off predators, they guide the sheep to where the owner wants the sheep to go. The livestock guard dogs are something else entirely. They are mostly larger dogs such as the Great Pyrenees and Komondor, for example, and they are the ones that will protect the flock against predators.

The interesting thing is that these two groups of dogs are raised very differently from each other, and they exhibit different attitudes towards the sheep they guide or guard. Here is an excellent article that explains the difference, which is that herding dogs make use of prey behaviors towards the sheep, whereas guard dogs make use of protective behaviors towards the sheep and prey behaviors towards animals that threaten the herd.

So this is the key to what’s going on with herding dogs–they see the sheep as prey and begin to stalk them, but stop short of killing them:

[B]asic canine predatory behaviors [consist of] seven steps: orient, eye, stalk, chase, grab-bite, kill-bite, dissect…Orientation on the prey animal starts the sequence. The dog focuses on the prey with an intent stare honed to perfection in the Border Collie, then stalks the prey with a slinking motion to get into position for the chase or pounce…Herding dogs orient, focus, stalk, and chase livestock, but with few exceptions, the behavior chain is broken before the grab-bite.

In similar fashion, hunting dogs go part of the way in this behavior sequence and then stop. With hunting dogs, we are aware that they consider their quarry prey; with herding sheepdogs, that attitude is more veiled. But it is still present; it’s an interrupted predator behavior.

Livestock guard dogs do not exhibit any of these behaviors–towards the sheep, that is. They direct them only towards animals that threaten the herd. How is this done? The trick to raising a guard dog is to convince him that he is a sheep (or rather, perhaps, that sheep are dogs). This is done by raising the guard dog from early puppyhood to live with sheep, until he is completely bonded with them and considers them part of a pack of which he is the alpha dog:

Flock guardians exhibit none of these behaviors towards sheep because farmers place their puppies with the sheep before stalk and chase behavior are triggered, so the dog becomes accustomed to the sheep and never learns that they might be fun to chase and even kill.

And, from another article on the subject:

…[the guard dog has a] unique ability to bond to the livestock, accepting the flock as its “pack.” Because of this bond, the guard dog spends the day moving with the sheep as they graze, ever vigilant for hungry predators. At night the guard dog is found with the flock in the “bed” ground ”“ usually a small, protected natural pasture central to the area the flock will graze for the next 7 to 10 days…
It is important to realize that “posturing” ”“ confrontation and warning off the intruder ”“ rather than outright attack is an important part of a flockguardian’s behavior. The ultimate goal is to protect the flock, not necessarily kill predators.

How does this all relate to people? Perhaps not at all. Perhaps it’s just a metaphor that I’m trying to extend way too far.

But perhaps not. Perhaps somewhere in all of this lies an answer to the question that sparked this post. And that answer would be: it depends. It depends on whether the sheepdog is a true guard dog–that is, how much love the protector has towards the people he/she protects, and how closely bonded to them he/she is.

If dogs can bond so closely with sheep, a very different species, it stands to reason that most people who are protectors are very bonded with their human protectees–their “sheep,” as it were. And this can carry them through a lot of the inevitable frustration that comes with the task of protecting those who might not be all that cooperative or appreciative, or who even might be getting in the way of the protectors and making their task more difficult.

That would be true of protectors who are the guard dog type. But are some protectors more like the herding dogs, in which there is still some predator instinct towards the sheep, and the bonding with them is less? Do these “herder” types turn out to be those members of the police and military who would be more inclined to crack under the strain of serving, to commit abuses of power, or to become bitter at those who don’t appreciate them?

I don’t know. As I’ve said, perhaps I’ve already stretched the metaphor to the breaking point. But I suspect that it is love and bonding that drives the true protector, and that the true “sheepdog” actually operates more like the livestock guarding dog than the herding dog.

I welcome any comments, especially from sheepdogs themselves.

Winning hearts and minds in Sadr City

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know which is more amazing: the fact that this is happening, or the fact that the article about it appeared in the LA Times.

I noticed the story via this link from Big Pharaoh, my favorite Egyptian blogger (he’s also the only one I know, but I’m sure he’d be my favorite even if I knew of more).

So, things are going very well lately in Sadr City, that poor section of Baghdad that was thought to house an incorrigibly anti-American population, unreachable and potentially violent. Although the LA Times and Yahoo News have seen fit to spotlight the story, it certainly hasn’t gotten the wide coverage one would expect from such an astounding turnaround. After all, just remember how much we heard about Sadr City when things were going badly there.

So, I’ll do my small bit to publicize the good news. Here are some excerpts:

Crammed into armored Humvees heaving with weapons, Lt. Col. S. Jamie Gayton and his soldiers were greeted by a surprising sight as they rolled into one of Baghdad’s poorest neighborhoods.

Men stood and waved. Women smiled. Children flashed thumbs-up signs as the convoy rumbled across the potholed streets of Sadr City…

We’re making a huge impact,” Gayton said as his men pulled up to a sewer station newly repaired with U.S. funds. “It has been incredibly safe, incredibly quiet and incredibly secure.”

Sadr City has become one of the rare success stories of the U.S. reconstruction effort, say local residents, Iraqi and U.S. officials. Although vast swaths remain blighted, the neighborhood of 2 million mostly impoverished Shiites is one of the calmest in Baghdad. One U.S. soldier has been killed and one car bomb detonated in the last year, the military says.

The improvements are the result of an intense effort in the wake of the street battles last August with fighters loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr. Within a month, U.S. officials decided to make Sadr City a showcase for rebuilding, and increased spending to $805 million in a neighborhood long neglected under
Saddam Hussein..

The author, T. Christian Miller, than goes into the obligatory disclaimer about all the other projects around Iraq that haven’t gone as well. But even he cannot restrain his excitement at the remarkable success of this one, when he returns to re-interview people who were complaining a short year ago, and finds them quite pleased with how things have been going lately:

At the newly repaired sewer station, a local family guarding it greeted Gayton like an old friend; he had visited several times before.

Haita Zamel showed Gayton how the local sewer authority was fixing a problem that had developed in one pump. She proudly showed off the small home that had been built on the site to replace a dilapidated trailer where her family of six once lived. She even asked Gayton for computer software to teach English to her children.

“When you tell me something, I know you’ll do it,” she said, clutching tightly at the white scarf covering her head. “To the last day of our life, we are with you. Us and all of our neighbors.”

But I think this is my very favorite part:

Kadhem said that for the first time, he could imagine a future for his children better than his own.

“Things are different. Before, we felt afraid. Now, there is freedom and we feel there will be a solution and it will be better,” he said. “At this stage, we have to endure.

“The change from a dictatorship to a democracy is not easy.”

Kadhem, resident of Sadr City, seems to be exhibiting far more patience and understanding–and just plain common sense–about the transition and reconstruction process than a great many people in the US and Europe are showing.

It makes a neocon proud.

Nidra Poller’s J’Accuse

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Although it certainly comes as no surprise, it seems that the technique of the Big Lie is not dead. Here’s still another–and very convincing–debunking of the al-Dura blood libel, the story of the death of a young boy that was instrumental in galvanizing world opinion against the Israelis at the start of the second intifada.

Please read Nidra Poller’s J’Accuse and you’ll see why mainstream journalism has come close to losing all credibility with many people–and how, in so doing, it has caused untold damage. The evidence points to the probability that the al-Dura case was an outrageous fake, or at the very least, that his death was at the hands of the Palestinians rather than the Israelis. Furthermore, the facts have most likely been known for quite some time to the journalists and the cameraman responsible for the story, which was promulgated originally by the French media.

Follow the “J’Accuse” link to a discussion of the original “J’Accuse” of Emile Zola, who championed the cause of the falsely accused Dreyfus–in France, naturalmente. In his famous article, Zola was using the mighty medium of the press to accuse the French military tribunal, and the military itself, of an outrageous miscarriage of justice against Dreyfus, a Jew. In the al Dura case, the culprit is the worldwide press itself, particularly France-2, a channel of the state-owned French television network.

Here is British journalist and blogger Melanie Phillips on Poller’s piece:

…the evidence assembled in this article strongly suggests that France 2 is guilty of one of the most monstrous pieces of deception of modern times whose effects in terms of fomenting hatred, violence and mass murder have been incalculable.

It seems the pen is mightier than the sword, both for ill and for good. Most of what Poller writes is not news, but perhaps her article will make it more widely known.

Then again, perhaps not.

In Zola’s case, he was already a huge celebrity, and this helped his “J’Accuse” reach a wide and influential audience. He used his “mighty pen” for good, and he was effective. The following refers to his article:

Written in sparkling and mellifluous prose, imbued with a tone of outrage, the article contains many beautiful sentences and phrases. The most memorable: “la verite est en marche et rien ne l’arretera” (truth is on the march and nothing can stop it).

In my more optimistic moments, I believe that this may be true today: truth is on the march and nothing can stop it.

In my more pessimistic moments, I’m with Churchill: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

So, as always, we have lies and truth in a worldwide race. Which will win? Our lives may depend upon the answer.

[ADDENDUM: Michelle Malkin is on the case.]

Fire in a crowded theater: from wet blanket to sprinkler system

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Yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.

It’s become a cliche for inciting panic–although, actually, it seems that the original phrase in the Oliver Wendell Holmes decision is “shouting” rather than “yelling.” It is forbidden to do so because of the possibility of inciting a deadly stampede.

But even more deadly and dangerous is the panic that sets in when there is a real fire inside an actual theater. The metaphor originates in the knowledge of the reality. In such a situation, the panic is compounded with the fire itself to cause a lethal mix in which people are killed by a combination of burns, smoke inhalation, and trampling. And, tragically, that is exactly what seems to have happened on September 5 in a theater near Cairo, Egypt. Twenty-nine people died.

Just a few days ago I wrote a post about the phenomenon of stampedes. It was occasioned by the terrible stampede deaths on an Iraqi bridge during a Shi’ite religious festival. In my research for that post, I discovered that

there are three main categories of venues that would appear to favor stampedes: the soccer stadium (or other large sporting event); the crowded nightclub in which a fire breaks out; and the religious pilgrimage.

Tragically, just a few days later, the Egyptian theater fire has occurred, almost identical to situation number two–fire in a crowded nightclub. It’s unclear as yet how many deaths were due in this case to the fire and how many to the stampede, but what is clear is how incredibly criminally negligent the theater company was.

Here’s a description of the stage and how it was set up:

The play was set in a zoo, and the stage was done up like a cave inside one of the animal cages: The ceiling, floor and walls were covered with paper bags painted to resemble stone, and in the middle of the stage was a “mountain” also made of paper. There were candles set up all over the set, survivors said.

In the final scene, one of the actors was shaking another character to wake him up, and the movement knocked over one of the candles….

Yassin said there were only two exit doors from the theater, but one of them was covered in the same paper as the set and was in flames. So the crowd rushed for the other. As they streamed out, a piece of wood fell, partially blocking it. He and some others managed to climb around it, but it slowed the escape, he said.

So we have a stage wreathed in paper, live candle flames being used “all over,” and inadequate exits. A recipe for disaster, and disaster is exactly what happened.

Over time, we in this country and others have managed to compile a host of tedious regulations concerning, for example, the number of working exits required in a theater or nightclub, prohibitions on open flames in theaters, and the need for flame-retardant sets (see here for a typical list of theater rules, particularly numbers 8 and 9). I wonder whether Egypt has similar rules. Perhaps they do, but if so, there certainly was no enforcement in this case.

Even in this country, regulations do not necessarily prevent such tragedies from happening, especially if the regulations are not followed. After all, there were a bunch of regulations in place in West Warwick, Rhode Island, but it didn’t stop the Station Nightclub from burning down when the rules were apparently violated, killing ninety-seven people (see here for details of this and another nightclub stampede, this time in Chicago. In the latter case the panic was sparked by pepper spray and rumors of a terrorist attack, and therefore somewhat resembled the Iraqi bridge stampede).

Laws about what is allowed and not allowed at public assemblies and theaters may seem picayune and needlessly restrictive at times. But they are the result of bitter experience with what can happen in such venues, and are necessary to protect the public. In Rhode Island, there was no requirement for a sprinkler system. But the following (from the same article) is a case of how important such a system can be, especially when working in combination with well-trained staff and adequate exits:

In yet another incident on February 17th, The Fine Line Music Cafe in the downtown Minneapolis warehouse district sustained an estimated $1.5 million in damage when Seattle band The Jet City Fix set off pyrotechnics during their encore and ignited the club’s ceiling. Admirably avoiding a tragedy, the staff quickly evacuated the 120 patrons without incident or injury, and the fire was extinguished within 15 minutes. The Fine Line had a sprinkler system, which activated during the fire – something the Rhode Island club was not required to have.

We’ve come a long way from the days when theaters were lit by candles or gas jet, and being burned alive was part of the risk a performer took. As an ex-dancer and theater reviewer, I’ve long been aware of the tragic story of Emma Livry, up-and-coming young ballet star of the Paris Opera in mid-19th century, who died in 1863 at the age of twenty-one (I’ve corrected some spelling errors in the following that occurred in the original):

Livry refused to have her costume flame-retarded because it caused the material to turn yellow and stiff. She was required to sign a release stating she was willing to take the chance. As she danced her tulle skirt came into contact with the gas jet and caught fire. Two male dancers tried to extinguish the flames, but unsuccessfully. She suffered severe burns and died eight months later from complications. From that time until the advent of electric stage lighting, blankets soaked in water were kept ready on both sides of the stage. Hence, “wet blanket.”

So even then there were attempts to protect the performers: flame-retardant costumes and wet blankets. And sometimes, as still happens today, performers intent on creating a spectacular effect tried to circumvent the rules. It would be one thing if the performers were knowingly risking only their own lives, but the rules are in place so that they don’t take their audiences with them–even if the rules can sometimes throw a metaphorical wet blanket over the proceedings.

From sheep to sheepdog

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There are all types of bloggers. I’m a practitioner of the long essay form, for example.

And Bill Whittle is a practitioner of the LONG esssay form.

When you write LONG, as Bill does, you have to be very very good to get anyone to stick with you and follow your essay to its conclusion. Bill is very very good. He not only has intelligent and original things to say, but he says them in a uniquely conversational voice that manages to carry the reader along almost effortlessly through his LONG pieces (did I mention that they were long?).

So when Bill puts a new essay up, it’s time to take notice. His latest is no exception. It’s an infinitesimal bit rougher around the edges than his usual polished product, but that’s because he wrote this one quickly, with a sense of pressing urgency. It’s well worth reading, as always.

The part that caught my interest most, though, was not written by Whittle himself (sorry, Bill!); it’s a passage from something called The Bulletproof Mind, written by a Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman (a digression: from looking at Grossman’s biographical webpage, I learned that he’s written some things I should take a look at–a psychologist by training as well as a military man, he has been doing some exceptionally interesting work on the psychology of killing). In Whittle’s excerpt, Grossman uses a metaphor of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs, and divides humanity into three groups based on this idea:

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath–a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path….

Let me expand on this old soldier’s excellent model of the sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial; that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids’ schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid’s school. Our children are dozens of times more likely to be killed, and thousands of times more likely to be seriously injured, by school violence than by school fires, but the sheep’s only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their children is just too hard, so they choose the path of denial.

The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog that intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours.

Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land…

This is a vivid way of describing something I’ve wrestled with quite often on this blog, most recently in this post, and in this one.

Reading Whittle’s essay and his description of what he imagines he himself might have done had he been a passenger on one of the 9/11 flights, I was reminded of a thought I had on 9/12. It had already become clear just what had happened on all the flights, and that only the passengers on Flight 93 had known about the others, and that this had emboldened them to take heroic action against the terrorists. The thought that struck me at that time was quite simple: well, that’s the last hijacking we’ll ever see. Hijackings are finished as of now.

This wasn’t because I thought that security would be so wonderfully different after 9/11, or that terrorists would just give up. No. It was just that knowledge of what had transpired on 9/11 meant that no one would consider a hijacking to be a survivable event any more.

Never again could a hijacker say, “Just do what we say, and no one will get hurt,” and have anyone believe them. Never again could a hijacker count on anyone, even a wimpish sort like me, to cooperate when the hijacker issued an order, assuming that complying would allow that person to survive. No, that innocence (that sheepish innocence, you might say) was lost for all time. Whether or not a flight also carried official sheepdogs (armed pilots or air marshalls) to protect the passengers, from now on, there are no sheep on an airplane.

When I was a child I loved the movie “High Noon” (and if there is anyone within the sound of my voice who hasn’t seen it yet, please do me a favor and do so immediately). I loved “High Noon” for a lot of reasons. Gary Cooper’s expressively stoic (no, that’s not an oxymoron) face was one of them. The compressed time frame was another. The music—oh, how I loved that music! Katy Jurado was fascinating; she looked a lot like me, or like someone who could be my older sister, which was very odd because I was not a Mexican actress and I don’t have a sister. Grace Kelly was impossibly lovely and way too young for Cooper, but she was wonderful, too.

But it was the plot that made me love the picture the most. I didn’t really understand it in a way that I could explain at the time—but, intuitively, I sensed that it was telling some sort of essential truth. I was a pacifist, like Grace Kelly’s character Amy—or, rather, I wanted to be. I wanted everyone to love one another and hold hands and never use guns and never fight.

But even my rather short life so far had told me otherwise. I’d already encountered violence and meanness and, if not evil, then cruelty. And I already knew, from my own life, that you couldn’t appease it or wish it away.

(Warning to those who haven’t seen the movie yet: spoiler coming!)

So at the end of the movie when Grace Kelly, the Quaker pacifist, shot the gunman who was stalking and about to kill her husband, I knew something important and dramatic had happened. Until now I didn’t have a phrase to describe what it was. But now I do: the sheep had turned into a sheepdog.

Placing blame: thoughts on the first anniversary of Beslan

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Next weekend is the fourth anniversary of 9/11. No doubt many will commemorate that solemn day; whether in ceremonies, private meditation and thought, donations and other acts of remembrance, or by writing about it.

But this past weekend was the first anniversary of a different day of infamy and the deliberate slaughter of the most innocent of innocents, the Beslan school massacre.

It was fairly quiet here on the Beslan anniversary, although Russia itself had an official remembrance. A number of newspapers covered it; here, for example, is a heartrending article from the LA Times about the searing, almost unimaginable grief the families felt–and still feel, a full year later.

As I previously noted, the great graphic artist Kathe Kollwitz, who lost a son and grandson in war (see this article of mine on grieving parents of children), wrote: There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it. The same is true, I’m afraid, for the families of the Beslan dead.

The following photo of grieving grandparents at the grave of their grandson killed at Beslan appeared in this Boston Globe article on the Beslan anniversary, reminding me of those Kollwitz statues of grieving parents (see this post for a photo of the Kollwitz statues).

But if you read the Globe AP article carefully, you’ll note something very strange. If ever people had earned the right to be called “terrorists” (and much worse), the Beslan perpetrators had fully earned that right. And yet the AP seems, once again, to bend over backwards to avoid the word. Sure, the word “terrorists” appears five times in the article, but most of these are quotes from Putin’s speech. He, at least, doesn’t pull his punches; he uses the word four times in two sentences.

Mike Eckel, author of the AP article that appeared in the Globe, only uses the word “terrorist” once himself to describe the Beslan attackers. And even then the word is only used in a very general way to say that this is “the anniversary of one of Russia’s deadliest terrorist attacks” (by the way, was it not the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia, not just the less dramatic “one of” them?). When action verbs are used, then Eckel and the AP back off and call them “militants” (twice) and “rebels” (once), as in “militants attacked.”

The focus of media coverage in general was focused on two elements: the grieving families, and the incompetence and negligence of the Russian authorities. Both, of course, are suitable subject matter; it’s the lack of balancing attention paid to the perpetrators, and the inability to call them what they most undoubtedly were, that struck me as odd.

The stories about the grieving families of the dead children could rip your heart out, and rightly so. Here are some excerpts from the previously mentioned LA Times article:

“She never leaves my mind. She’s constantly there,” Kargiyeva said of Zarina, who had sat beside her for three days as a hostage in the school gym, then died in the explosion while Kargiyeva and her 9-year-old son Alan survived. “The last time I saw her, when I looked at her, she looked so tired, as if she had lost all hope. And her eyes were so, so big. Day and night, that’s what I see.”…

Women shrieking with despair and raising their hands to the sky had to be helped along by friends and family. “My dear little girl, why did you abandon me?” screamed Marina Pukhayeva, whose 13-year-old died in the siege. “Who killed you? Who tore you to pieces?”…

In a sort of empathic re-enactment, an attempt to endure some approximation of the suffering their dead children had undergone in the long hard days before the shootout, some of the mothers tried to recreate for themselves certain elements of the hostages’ fate:

Several mothers had kept vigil for three days and nights in the gymnasium, sitting without food or water, as the hostages had been forced to endure, from the hour when a reported 32 militants calling for Russian withdrawal from Chechnya first captured the school at 9 a.m. on Sept. 1. More than 300 hostages and police died two days later in an explosion and firefight.

As the crowd diminished and the school grew silent in the midnight hours, “We tried to imagine what our children were doing on a night like this,” said Zalina Guburova, 42, who lost her 67-year-old mother and her 8-year-old son.

“Of course, we will never feel the pain our relatives and our children felt here, no matter how much time we spent here,” she said. “But we decided to try.”

I read a selection of articles about the Beslan anniversary from around the globe in preparation for this post. Most of them were in line with the AP article in using euphemisms for the attackers and in focusing very little on the original event (this somewhat murkily-written Pravda article is the one exception I encountered).

I’m not asking that we dwell endlessly on acts such as this. But surely the Beslan massacre was one of the most vicious and coldblooded killings in recent memory, and one in which children were purposely targeted for suffering and death rather than their deaths being caused unintentionally, as collateral damage. Surely it’s important to mention those facts.

The truth is that the Beslan killings were murders perpetrated by Chechen terrorists hoping, by committing the vilest of atrocities, to strike fear into the heart of Russians everywhere, and to cause political concessions to be made. But you could read a host of articles on the anniversary without hardly learning a thing about what was behind the Beslan attack, except perhaps that it was perpetrated by Chechen separatists. And even in those rare articles that did go into more detail, there was hardly even a whisper of the fact that Chechnya is a Moslem area, and that the faction of the separatists and militants who become terrorists (as opposed to true militants and separatists only) tend to be Islamicists as well.

There’s even more that’s interesting about the Beslan articles. It seems as though Russia and the US are not so different after all, these days, in people’s tendency to focus on the actions (or inactions) of their own governments. A close reading of this article is fascinating for the parallels it demonstrates: the emphasis on the blaming of the authorities for their failure to protect rather than of the terrorists for the murders themselves, the vociferous demands of the victims’ families for a confrontation with Putin, and the callous and opportunistic use the terrorists make of the controversy to score their own propaganda points through the clever manipulation of public opinion to deflect all accusations even further in the direction of the government.

It’s mystifying to me why this particular act, so unequivocally evil (yes, I’ll use the word), seems sometimes to have been transmuted into just another opportunity to blame the government. As with many things–9/11, the Katrina disaster–there is no doubt plenty of blame to go around, and many errors that were made by the authorities. But these errors are more in the nature of contributory negligence at worst, and inevitable and unavoidable human failings at best.

The true perpetrators here must not be forgotten: cold-blooded and manipulative terrorists who were out to murder the largest possible number of children in the most painful way possible, making them suffer first for several unspeakable days. It’s almost as though the truth of Beslan is so horrific that people feel they must close their eyes to it or go mad. It’s an example of that tried and true defense mechanism, displacement. How much safer to rage against the imperfect and seemingly impotent governments than at the perfectly malignant and all-too-active terrorists.