Ashkenazi Jews, genetic diseases, and intelligence

The New Neo Posted on by

As this article appearing in today’s NY Times itself mentions, the theory isn’t very PC.

I see some possible flaws in the reasoning–at least as it’s described in the article. Of course I’m no scientist (obligatory disclaimer), but I do have a bit more than the general reader’s knowledge of evolution. Judge for yourself, though, and read the article.

Once again, because of the Times’s requirement for registration, I will reproduce more of the original article than is my usual practice:

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability. The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say…

He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.

The explanation that the Ashkenazic disease genes must have some hidden value has long been accepted by other researchers, but no one could find a convincing infectious disease or other threat to which the Ashkenazic genetic ailments might confer protection.

A second suggestion, wrote Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a 1994 article, “is selection in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish population.”

The article then goes on to discuss whether the authors are correct in their interpretation of the existence of the genetic diseases and the possible link to intelligence, or whether the existence of the diseases have no connection to intelligence, but can be explained by something called “founder effect,” which involves the amplification of random mutations in small populations. I took an entire course in population genetics in college, and so I remember a few basics, but the finer points have long departed my brain. So I have no idea which camp is correct. But the part that interested me most was this:

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

The Utah researchers describe their proposal as a hypothesis. Unlike many speculations, it makes a testable prediction: that people who carry one of the sphingolipid or other Ashkenazic disease mutations should do better than average on I.Q. tests.

Whoa, that’s some statistic! What the researchers are saying about the distribution of intelligence in the Ashkenazi Jewish population is very interesting, and it happens to somewhat parallel the argument Larry Summers was making (remember that?) about men vs. women in science–that is, that the major and important difference occurred not near the middle of the scale, but at the far extreme, the “genius” level many standard deviations away from the mean.

But to me, this fact makes the Utah scientists’ arguments somewhat puzzling. Why would a selection process (if such a process actually did occur) for smarts that would confer an advantage in business and money-lending and surviving persection end up increasing the numbers of extreme intellectual outliers in a population, rather than just the average IQ of that population? Perhaps there’s an explanation in there somewhere, but I don’t see it. One would expect an increase in general intelligence, but not necessarily a greater increase in phenomenal intelligence; an increase in the ability to do arithmetic, perhaps, but not entry in such disproportionate numbers into the stratospheric regions of abstract math. I always thought arithmetic and higher math were not all that closely linked. And what about the ability to play chess? Chess is a game of strategy, to be sure, but it’s a game of a special kind of strategy–spatial strategy (again, linked to higher math)–and it’s hard to see how that ability would have been selected for by the processes these scientists describe, an aptitude for business, or the need to escape the Cossacks or whoever might be the persecutors du jour.

Fascinating, though. I’ll be interested to learn whether people who carry these mutations in their benign single-cell form actually are especially smart. Somehow, I doubt it–but I expect we’ll see when the results of the proposed research come out.

The International Criminal Court as theater

The New Neo Posted on by

There are certain bloggers with whom I seem to be in synch–we’re interested in the same issues, often at the same time. Sometimes I find myself writing a post only to discover that one of these simpatico bloggers has just covered the same topic. Or, I go to one of my favorites and find a post there that sparks a train of thought and leads me to write a response in a sort of time-delayed cyberdialogue.

Lately, Austin Bay’s posts have been resonating with me. Today is no exception. Here he writes on the topic, “Bad International Law,” citing John Keegan’s recent article in the Telegraph which defends the martial law system over criminal law (international or otherwise) in dealing with allegations of war crimes.

Keegan begins by quoting a Roman saying: When arms clash, the law is silent. That is no longer true, of course–the law has quite a few things to say about war. But, although the law is no longer silent, I would submit that it is often irrelevant and/or powerless–mere propaganda.

A while back I wrote a short post on the topic of the international law of war, entitled, “International law, and order?”. In it I said the following:

International law is a beautiful idea, but it can work only with the consent of the governed. Ideally, all nations would hold hands and sing “Kumbaya,” and then international law would function seamlessly. Short of that, the “law” has to have the “order” part as well–the teeth, as it were. And that requires force.

All law functions that way. If there were perfect consent (hardly possible), then force wouldn’t be needed; if enough force is present, consent isn’t needed–but law is most effective and humane when both are present, which they ordinarily are. The international law of war, however, runs up against a consistent failure to have either. I can’t imagine a realistic set of circumstances under which that lack will be remedied any time soon–or perhaps ever.

Why were we able to hold the Nuremberg trials, and to sentence Nazi war criminals and afterwards carry out the sentences? Quite simply, it is because we had won the war. That is what gave us jurisdiction, and that is what gave us the actual men to put in the actual docks. If we had attempted to put them on trial before that, it would have been merely a form of propagandist theater, a way to label them as war criminals but not to actually do anything about it. We would have lacked jurisdiction, one of the major elements of any case. Simply declaring that we had jurisdiction would not have made it so–except in our own minds, for propaganda purposes.

So, what of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, set up to try war criminals? It only has jurisdiction over those countries who consent to give it jurisdiction, because it has no natural territory (the Hague, after all, is rather small, as is the Netherlands) which it governs. Furthermore, it makes rulings only with the consent of the signitaries, since it has no method of enforcement in the face of defiance (the order part of law and order). Therefore, the Hague court is merely a propaganda machine, albeit one with a large worldwide audience. As such, it can (and most definitely will), be used for propaganda purposes–to further a certain agenda or agendas, such as focusing on the actions of the US allies in the Iraq War. It would go after the US too, of course, if we had signed onto the Court, but we have not done so.

The court martial system is quite different. The courts involved have the elements needed for trials: jurisdiction, consent, and teeth for enforcement. Each country has its own system, of course–I’m not aware of any international court martial system, even for international armed forces such as those of NATO (calling all experts on this subject for further information). Of course, a country’s ability to root out war criminals is only as good as its court martial system and its willingness to do so. Our system, I believe, has stood the test of time–although, like everything else, it’s hardly perfect. If it needs improvement, it should be improved on the national level. I would be highly reluctant to turn these issues over to the Hague, a venue I see no particular reason to trust.

The international justice system regarding war crimes is highly subject to abuse by special interest groups. In a sense, it is a polite fiction that such a system can exist and be meaningful, because it lacks the true characteristics of a functioning legal system. As such, we are correct to have opted out of the game.

Changing a mind: more on Radical Son

The New Neo Posted on by

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been reading David Horowitz’s autobiography of political/psychological change, Radical Son. Now, at two-hundred-plus pages into the work and only halfway through, I think Horowitz could have used a more ruthless editor. But the book remains absolutely fascinating as a study of one man’s change from radical to conservative.

I’ve finally reached the part I’d been waiting for, where Horowitz begins to “turn,” to question the leftist radical viewpoint in which he was raised and to which he had devoted the first thirty-five years of his life. I had looked at a brief synopsis of the book prior to reading it, and so I knew the bare bones of his story–that the trigger for Horowitz’s dark night of the soul was the murder by the Black Panthers of a woman acquaintance of his who’d been employed by them.

I wasn’t at all sure why this particular incident had acted as the spark that had caused him to question his entire set of political beliefs. On reading his account I find that, strangely enough, the roots of this change appear to have lain not in her murder, but almost twenty years earlier, when Horowitz had witnessed another event that had separated the true believers from those who ended up leaving the leftist fold.

Horowitz’s book is so rich with incident and food for thought that I imagine I’ll write a series of posts about it (oh no, not another series!!). But right now I want to concentrate on the tie-in between these two events in Horowitz’s life. The first event was one that rocked the American leftist world in a way I hadn’t quite realized till I read Horowitz’s book, while the second was an event that hardly made a ripple, except for sparking change in Horowitz himself.

The first event was the publication of what became known as the Khrushchev Report. Horowitz had been the quintessential “red diaper baby.” His parents were not just leftists, they were committed and devoted Communists, as were most, if not all, of their friends. They had pooh-poohed any criticism of the Soviets, and revered Stalin. For them, and for their generation of American Communists, this was a watershed event, the great dividing line which occurred in 1956, when Horowitz was in his freshman year at Columbia. He writes:

…the Times had published a report from the Kremlin describing a secret speech by the new Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. It had been smuggled out of the Kremlin by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service [quite a fascinating detail, that]. The speech made headlines all over the world because it was about crimes that Stalin had committed. Until then, Communists and progressives everywhere had denied such crimes ever took place, and had denounced the reports as “anti-Soviet” propaganda. Over the next months the story was confirmed, even by Communist sources, and in June the full text was published in the Times, and then in the Daily Worker itself…..

When my parents and their friends opened the morning Times and read its text, their world collapsed–and along with it their will to struggle. If the document was true, almost everything they had said and believed was false. Their secret mission had led them into waters so deep that its tide had overwhelmed them, taking with it the very meaning of their lives.

According to Horowitz, this was how Peggy Dennis, a woman who was a Party leader, recounted the event in her autobiography:

The last page crumpled in my fist. I lay in the half darkness and I wept…For the years of silence in which we buried doubts and questions. For a thirty-year life’s commitment that lay shattered. I lay sobbing low, hiccoughing whimpers.

Horowitz describes the split that followed:

In the American community of the faithful, the Khrushchev Report was a divisive force. Forty-year friendships disintegrated overnight, and even marriages dissolved as one partner would decide to quit the Party, the other to keep its faith…In the two years that followed, more than two-thirds of the Party membership dropped from its lists….My parents were among those who struggled to find solace in the thought that while “mistakes” had been made, remedies were being taken. But…they were stunned by a blow from which they could never recover…although they remained faithful in their hearts to the radical cause, they were never really active in politics again.

It remained to their son to finally complete the process of leaving the left, many years later. In the meantime, though, he did no such thing. He dealt with his own disillusionment by distancing himself from the mistakes of his parents’ generation. They had spent their lives in a cause that was tainted by murder and corruption on a monstrous scale, closing their eyes to the reality because they had wanted so much to cling to their idealistic beliefs. But Horowitz was young, and he had not yet spent a long life in that service–rather, he now dedicated himself to fashioning a New Left (his phrase) that would be free from the errors of the old ways. Just as each generation tends to look down on its parents, and to think it can do much better, so Horowitz thought he could fashion a left that would be free from the destructive impulses and actions that had led to the Stalin debacle. He spent the next eighteen years of his life working for that cause.

So the experience of betrayal and the resultant refashioning of a belief system wasn’t peripheral for Horowitz, and didn’t just happen once–it was central to his development, and it happened twice, although the first time he was more of an observer and the second time a participant. You might say, in post-modern terms, that the experience of betrayal and change was part of his “narrative” from a fairly early age. His identity as a moral leftist was based on the idea that he had figured out a way to rise above this terrible history, and to purge (to coin a phrase) violence from the movement, to learn from the mistakes of the past and enter a more perfect future in which power would not be used for evil.

It’s hard to believe that such a smart person–as Horowitz undoubtedly was–could be so naive, but, as Orwell said, there are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual can believe them. Another relevant factor is that Horowitz’s portrait of his emotional life at the time is that of a man whose thoughts outpaced his ability to understand his feelings or the feelings of others, a person strangely distanced from himself, lacking insight, and emotionally immature (naive, even), despite the fact that he had married and had children young.

By 1973 Horowitz was living in the Bay area, a successful author and publisher of the leftist periodical Ramparts, when he became involved with the Black Panther cause and Huey Newton. As a mark of his gullibility, he seems not to have recognized any of the very clear signs that he was dealing with a group that was mainly composed of violent and unpredictable thugs–particularly Newton himself. Horowitz was the person who recommended the idealistic Betty Van Patter to be the bookkeeper for a school run by the Panthers. She ended up annoying the Panther leadership and also learning too much about them, and so they coldbloodedly murdered her.

This was the real turning point for Horowitz. He learned in a very personal way that the evil and destructive impulse could not be expunged from the Movement after all. And, to his horror, he (just as his parents before him) had been complicit in the process by which this force had been allowed to operate on the innocent. It’s not surprising that this event precipitated a deep and harrowing depression for Horowitz, and sparked questions that led to a major re-alignment of his political world and his life, although that process was not completed overnight. But it seems to me that, had he not witnessed that first bitter disillusionment in his parents’ generation, his political beliefs might have weathered the second, and he might still be a radical today. It is no accident at all that his book is called Radical Son, because the intergenerational aspect is essential to his experience.

To be continued….

Amnesty fights back

The New Neo Posted on by

As many have noticed, Amnesty International recently went over the top in likening the prison at Guantanamo to the Soviet Gulag. Now Roger Simon asks a question:

So why did Amnesty make such an insane (word choice deliberate) accusation? That is what is perplexing me. Why are some people, in this case an important human rights organization, incapable of rational discourse? The answers are depressing, I think, and lie at the intersection of psychoanalysis and greed. What America has tried to do in Afghanistan and Iraq provokes rage in many people because they feel their own personas threatened. At the same time, organizations like Amnesty believe their fund-raising goals are best achieved through making outrageous statements – a dangerous combination.

I certainly agree with Roger’s conclusions that rage and fund-raising are part of what’s going on here. But I also think that this type of statement arises out of the idea of relativistic truth. Words have become stripped of their meaning, because “truth” is, in the eyes of so many, a word that is always in scare quotes (whether the quotes are actually put in there or not), because it is always seen as suspect and arbitrary. Therefore a word such as “gulag” is used for its emotional import, to mean, in some very general and amorphous way “a prison environment where people are sent by a government, for political reasons rather than for something like theft, and where bad things happen to them.” To know (and care) what the actual Gulag was, how many people it affected, who they were, and why it has no relevance whatsoever to Gitmo, would be to learn something about history and facts–and truth.

It is no accident, no accident at all, that the metaphors used by Bush’s critics in Old Europe or on the left are either Nazi or Communist comparisons. This has another function, which is to say: “see, you think you are better than we are, but really, you are the same or worse.” If parts of Old Europe might feel a bit guilty about the Nazis or the Holocaust, well then, what better revenge than to say Bush is like Hitler? And if leftists might feel a tad remorseful about the excesses of Communism such as the Gulag, what better way to expunge their feelings than to say Bush is running his own Gulag?

Response to Austin Bay: on courage, the military, and liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

In our continuing dialogue and speculation about attitudes of liberals towards the military, Austin Bay asks me to comment on the following story (scroll down to the bottom of his post to find it):

[Neo-neocon’s] comments about courage remind me of a conversation I had in 1996 at the Texas Book Festival. Actually, it was a conversation I overheard. A man who had just been on a Texas history panel was fuming in a hallway and complaining to a couple of friends standing with him. From what I gathered, a woman (either on the panel or in the audience) had started calling the Alamo’s defenders racists and sexists, etc., and made a comment about the “sexist focus” of history. (And when I say I gathered that, I’m paraphrasing what the man said.)

I do not know why I asked him this, I guess it was because he was suddenly looking at me. I asked him “Why do you think she said that?”

He replied: “Because what those men did took courage, physical courage. And she doesn’t have it, she’s petty and afraid. So she has to diminish them so she doesn’t have to confront her own cowardice.”

Then he asked me: “Do you know what kind of courage it takes to face bullets?”

I was taken aback a bit, but I replied: “I know soldiers have to do what they have to do.”

He gave me a curt nod, turned back to his friends, and continued to fume.

Austin later writes:

I think the angry man in the hallway hit on a fundamental factor in a lot of the elitist Left’s condescending treatment of soldiers and disdain for the military. I’d be interested in neo-neocon’s assessment.

So, is this indeed the motivation behind the liberal/leftist attitude towards those who serve in the military (discussed earlier in this post of mine)? Obviously, I can’t read the minds of liberals or leftists–so what follows is merely my speculation and personal observation, based on a rather small sample. It is also, by necessity, full of generalizations, so I’ll add the caveat that I certainly do not think this represents the view of all liberals, or even all leftists.

However, I disagree. Unlike the angry man at the Texas Book Festival, I do not think that a major factor in the attitude of most liberals/leftists’ towards the military is a consciousness of the military’s bravery in contrast to their own cowardice. It’s not my impression that liberals/leftists necessarily even focus on the courage of the military. It’s my impression, from talking to liberals/leftists and reading what they write, that many primarily see the military (as I wrote previously) as either bloodthirsty–or, much more commonly and condescendingly, as unintelligent lower- or working-class pawns of a cowardly and exploitative ruling class (thus, the “chickenhawk” accusation against that ruling class, especially towards those who didn’t serve, or whose service is deemed inadequate–see this for a rather lengthy example of the genre).

In my experience, liberals don’t necessarily even think very often in terms of concepts such as physical courage–it’s an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned value. They think in terms of the values of kindness and/or tolerance and/or intelligence, which they feel that they themselves demonstrate. Or, if they do think of courage and admire it, it is more often the courage to speak out, or to stand up for a cause (to “speak truth to power,” for example).

Remember the old slogan, “Better Red than dead?” The people who said it meant it. And they weren’t all Communists, not by any means. They were people who believed that almost nothing–no abstraction, anyway, including freedom–was worth fighting for in the physical sense, and especially not worth dying for. Therefore anyone who does believe in fighting for something so abstract must be deluded in some way, or oppressed in some way, or both.

Don’t forget, also, that these concerns about one’s own physical courage and how it might measure up to that of others are somewhat of a masculine obsession. Not that women don’t think in these terms sometimes–especially in recent years–but the trajectories of the lives of most women tend to lack those moments of truth–the fistfights, the interpersonal physical challenges–that constitute the tests of physical courage against another human being that are more commonplace in the lives of men. Of course, there are many exceptions to that rule–but I think the rule still generally holds. Women’s physical courage, which does exist, is more often of the intra-personal rather than the inter-personal variety–such as enduring the pain of childbirth, for example.

And of course, many liberals are women. For them, I just don’t think the whole question of their own personal courage in the physical sense of being ready to die for a cause is one they have had to contemplate very much. I say this, of course, as a woman. I have no idea whether I would have had the courage to serve in that way, if called upon–and, personally, I was very happy to have never been forced to face that question, since the Vietnam era draft did not apply to women. If that makes me a chickenhawk–well then, I guess that’s what I am (although I’m not so sure women can be chickenhawks, can they?)

I also think that the template for the liberal/leftist view of the military was set during Vietnam, when the draft was one of the main ways to enter the service. To the best of my knowledge and recollection, many (if not most) of those who served in the Army then were reluctant draftees–and some who enlisted in the other branches were somewhat reluctant also, having joined up only to escape the draft and thus gain a bit more autonomy. People whose attitudes towards military service were based on that era are sometimes unable to understand the changes that have been wrought by the all-volunteer military. They continue to see those in the service as victims, although now they are not seen as victims of the draft, but as victims of coercion and class via economic incentives for joining the military, and/or as victims of the self-serving lies of politicians. It stands to reason that the class interpretation would be especially common on the left, since it fits in quite nicely with a socialist or Marxist viewpoint. And, if the enlistee is viewed as a pawn of economic circumstances, and his/her motivation is seen as economic, then it’s easier to circumvent the whole topic of personal courage.

This idea of the dead soldier as victim, rather than courageous hero, is often cited by the left for propaganda purposes against the administration and those “ruling classes.” Here’s a recent and very typical example of this type of thinking (found here in comment #80–supposedly it’s taken from Michael Moore’s website, but I looked and couldn’t find it there, so I can’t swear it’s a proper attribution):

Bush and the Crime Cabal in power sent 26 more soldiers to their graves this week and 26 more families to lives of living hell. 26 more lives and families devastated and destroyed for absolutely nothing. We will see the hypocritical mobsters of the state at their events today and tomorrow spewing filth from their mouths, such as: “Freedom isn’t Free,” and “We must stay the course in Iraq to honor the sacrifices of the fallen…Then the morons who killed our children will happily go back to their homes and have a nice Memorial Day dinner secure in the fact that their children will never die in a war and their children will have nice, wealthy, long lives because of the incredible riches this misadventure in Iraq has brought their fathers and mothers.

Then there is the idea of those who serve in the military as the “other.” Here’s an interesting article from the LA Times that discusses the change of heart a father experienced when his son, a Marine, went to Iraq. The father had never served in the military himself, and seemed to have never even considered what might motivate someone to serve. He writes:

Before my son unexpectedly volunteered for the Marines, I was busy writing my novels and raising my family, and giving little thought to the men and women who guard us…

But later, when his son returns from combat, the father writes:

I found myself praying and crying for all the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands and wives of those who were not coming home. For the first time in my life, I was weeping for strangers…. Before my son went to war I never would have shed tears for them. My son humbled me. My son connected me to my country. He taught me that our men and women in uniform are not the “other.”

Prior to his son going to war, this man was almost dissociative in his ability to tune out the military. They simply did not exist for him as people–or, if they did, they were the “other.” What he means by that I’m not sure–were they the “other” in his eyes because of perceived class differences, personality differences, or merely a failure of imagination on his part? One might say he seems to lack the ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes–and yet it turns out he is an author, and a novelist! Very perplexing indeed.

I can only conclude that people like the author, Frank Schaeffer, are operating with blinders on. The motivations of people in the military are not understood by them, and they are not curious about those motivations. Schaeffer’s change of heart occurred for one simple reason: a military man finally became “real” to him, because that man was his son. He could no longer regard this particular Marine as the “other,” because he knew him and loved him, and that ended up humanizing all military personnel in his eyes.

Anonymous sources revisited: progress on several fronts

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not surprised that USA Today seems to be leading the pack in curbing its use of anonymous sources (see this earlier post of mine for a discussion of the history of the anonymous source). After all, its founder, Allen H. Neuharth, was the guy who called the anonymous source “evil.” USA Today has even created a new position, that of standards editor, for the sole purpose of tracking the use of anonymous sources in the paper, and has reduced the practice by 75% in the year since they tightened their rules.

Even Newsweek is starting to reign in its out-of-control use of the anonymous source–at least a tad.

And then there’s this revelation. If it’s true (large “if”), then what a coincidence of timing! The greatest anonymous source of them all–the source of the anonymous source, you might say–Deep Throat, now coming forward with this:

Felt was initially adamant about remaining silent on the subject, thinking disclosures about his past somehow dishonorable. “I don’t think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of,” Felt indicated to his son, Mark Jr., at one point, according to the article. “You (should) not leak information to anyone.”

Could it be that someone’s been reading neo-neocon :-)?

For Memorial Day: freedom isn’t free

The New Neo Posted on by

Austin Bay delivered this Memorial Day speech in Texas a few days ago, at the request of a group called “Tejanos in Action.” Reading the speech, and speculating on what many of my liberal or leftist friends would think of it (and, knowing it’s always dangerous to speak for others, I’m writing this with the caveat that I could be wrong about their reactions), I came to the conclusion that I don’t think they would understand his speech in the way it was meant. To them, it would sound like mere platitudes and cliches.

I am virtually certain that all of my friends feel sorrow at the death of young men and women in the military–they are not cold-hearted, far from it. But I think they see them as victims, not as people who freely chose to do this, knowing that the possible cost might be their very lives. And yes, I know that not all in the military, especially those in the Guard, thought all of this through when they signed up. But I believe that the majority of those in the military were well aware of the risks when they enlisted.

I don’t think most of my friends can conceive of a person making such a choice of his/her own free will. And of course it is difficult to comprehend; that kind of courage is not ordinary, and will never be ordinary. I think my friends look on military volunteers of today as being either bloodthirsty warmongers (the minority), or poverty-stricken and brainwashed cannon fodder who have no idea what they’re getting into (the majority). Someone such as Lance Corporal Perez, of whom Austin Bay speaks, a young man who served in the Marines and was killed in Iraq, would probably be seen as the quintessential victim of Bush, Rumsfeld, et. al., because of his Hispanic heritage.

I think my friends would certainly understand this part of Bay’s speech:

Military service is hard service. Everyone who’s ever worn the uniform knows that. It is a special burden, particularly in a free society.

The idea of hardship is one with which they would agree, and the idea of burden. But not the sad necessity of it, expressed in this part of the speech:

In some ways it is the hardest job as well as the most necessary job. It is the job of the soldier that makes our liberty possible, and it is our liberty that makes everything else possible.

Many, if not most, of my friends live in a dreamworld where such things can be avoided, if only we listened to and revered the UN, Europe, and Jimmy Carter. There is no problem that can’t be solved with love, understanding, and talk. Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but not by a whole lot, I’m afraid. Would that they were correct, and that human nature worked this way!

I was watching the news the other day–I think it was MSNBC, but I’m not certain. They had a feature on a young Hispanic man who had been killed in Iraq. I don’t think he was the same young man of whom Bay spoke, Lance Corporal Perez, but it’s possible that he might have been, because this man had also been nineteen years old when he died, as I recall. The news showed wonderful photos of a handsome and smiling young man who looked nearly like a kid (well, he wasn’t so far away from having been one, was he?), and an interview with his father.

The father’s courage and dignity were almost unbearably moving. It seems the young man was not a citizen, but he’d signed up anyway. The father showed some sort of memorial statuette of the twin towers that he owned, and he pointed to it and said that the son had been greatly affected by 9/11, and determined to join and serve. The father said he’d asked his son, if he had to join up, why couldn’t he be something like a cook? But the son had said no; he felt he needed to do more than that. Then the father went over to an American flag he had on his wall, and put his finger on one of the red stripes, and said something like this (only far more eloquently), “When I see this red stripe, it symbolizes the blood of my son and all the others who died so that we could be free–because freedom isn’t free.”

Heartbreaking and well said, on this Memorial Day.

For Memorial Day: on patriotism and nationalism

The New Neo Posted on by

I was driving down the highway yesterday, and I noticed that the car ahead of me had a small American flag decal on its trunk. It got me to thinking about how I’ve never displayed a flag on my car or my home, except for a small one on my porch on the very first Fourth of July after 9/11. I’ve never been one to wear T-shirts with slogans, or campaign buttons, or any of those sorts of public declarations of self and/or belief. I’m just a very private person (the apple in front of the face, for example).

But I clearly remember that huge proliferation of flags post 9/11. Flags on cars, on homes, pinned to lapels–everywhere one looked, so many more than ever before. There were, of course, those who carped about it (see this for a typical example). Too nationalistic. Too jingoistic. But I rather liked it–even though at the time I was still an unreconstructed liberal. It gave me a feeling of comfort and continuity. We might be down, but we weren’t out yet.

For many days after 9/11 I found myself going to the ocean and sitting on the rocks, watching the ubiquitous commercial fishing boats and ferries go by. Everyone remembers that blue blue sky of 9/11, but I don’t know how many recall that it stayed that way for some time afterwards. The weather was spectacular, almost eerie in its beauty, and very serene, although I felt anything but. At the ocean, I would ordinarily see airplanes on a regular basis–but those days, the almost supernaturally blue skies were very, very quiet.

I thought about many things as I sat there. I believed another large attack was imminent, maybe many attacks. I had no idea what could ever prevent this from happening. I thought about George Bush being President, and at the time the thought did not fill me with confidence, but rather with dread. Snatches of poems and songs would wander in and out of my head, in that repetitive way they often do. One was the “Star-Spangled Banner”–all those flags brought it to mind, I suppose.

I’d known the words to that song for close to fifty years, and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

Another school memory of long ago was the story “The Man Without a Country.” It used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book–as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers–that I ever was assigned to read in school. As such it was exciting, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad–and unfair, too–that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that probably would never be assigned nowadays to students.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades. I think part of this feeling began (at least in this country), like so many things, with the Vietnam era. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were seen to have wrought during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, but it seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…”

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country, who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response, one that helped lead to the formation of the EU. The nationalism of the US is seen by those who agree with him as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the pendulum is swinging back. The US is not Nazi Germany, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. And, in fact, that is one of the reasons they try so hard to make that particular analogy–because Nazi Germany is one of the very best examples of the dangers of unbridled and amoral nationalism.

But, on this Memorial Day, I want to say there’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores morality, but one that embraces it and strives for it, keeping in mind that–human nature being what it is–no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but it is a good country nevertheless, striving to be better.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Normblog poll: movie stars

The New Neo Posted on by

Norm Geras loves those polls! This one’s a request from Norm to list your ten favorite movie stars.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I’m not much of a moviegoer. Over the years I’ve gone to the movies less and less, and liked far fewer of them than I used to. That’s not to say I don’t have favorites. And the movies I do like, I tend to love inordinately.

Same for whatever passes for movie stars these days. To me, there aren’t any current ones, although there are certainly excellent actors and actresses (or, in the interests of gender equality, aren’t they all called “actors” these days? So hard to keep up with these trends). But to me, the real movie stars are all in the past.

So, this will be my very idiosyncratic, and exceedingly retro, list. What do these stars have in common? Well, as with movies—the ones I like, I tend to love. And so I have some feelings of love—not just admiration, or interest—for each of the following movie stars. Listed in no particular order:

1. Cary Grant

The most charming guy in the world, who always seemed to be mocking himself ever-so-slightly, and letting the audience in on the delightful joke.

2. Audrey Hepburn

If Cary Grant (see above) was the most charming guy in the world, she was definitely the most charming lady. Nobody ever looked remotely like her, and nobody ever will.

3. Gary Cooper

My idea of a hero—complex and somewhat tormented. Watch the amazing play of emotions on his deceptively immobile face in “High Noon.”

4. Henry Fonda

I fell in love with the achingly young Fonda (“Drums Along the Mohawk;” “Young Mr. Lincoln”) when I was about seven years old. The movies were in black and white, on our tiny TV, but it didn’t much matter. Fonda as Abe Lincoln? Forget about historical accuracy—just watch the movie.

5. Jack Lemmon

He could do pathos (“Days of Wine and Roses”). But no one has ever been funnier than he was in “Some Like it Hot.”

6. Sophia Loren

See her in anything she made with the wonderful Marcello Mastroianni. Then watch her as an Italian Mother Courage in “Two Women.”

7. Steve McQueen

I told you this was about love, not acting. My favorite bad boy. Brando didn’t hold any interest for me; McQueen did. Go figure. Especially in that exciting hymn to male pulchritude (not a woman in the entire cast) and courage, “The Great Escape.”

8. Natalie Wood

If you haven’t seen “Splendor in the Grass,” you may wonder why she’s in here. If you have seen it, then I bet you don’t wonder.

9. Liv Ullman

Transcendent and luminescent in “The Emigrants” and “The New Land,” two of the greatest movies of all time.

10. Paul Newman

Another childhood crush, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “The Hustler.” He had an edge. And boy, has he aged well!

Fair and balanced

The New Neo Posted on by

The following is a portion of a comment I wrote during this discussion over at Roger Simon’s. Roger had posed the question “what is ‘fair and balanced’?” The context of the query was that he and others are engaged in setting up a new blogger consortium called Pajamas Media, and are signing up hundreds of blogs as part of it, and are making decisions about whether it’s possible to achieve “fair and balanced” representation there.

The phrase “fair and balanced” (at least, as I interpret it) is something of an oxymoron.

Why? Because “fair” means, to me, logical, well-reasoned, factual. And “balanced” means “giving equal play to advocates of all sides of an issue” (a sort of “one from column A, one from column B, one from column C approach). Unless you subscribe to the morally relativistic position that all truths are equal, then striving for “balance” will probably dictate that some “unfair” views will, of necessity, be given a platform.

So, I think “fair and balanced” isn’t really the goal–not in that way, at least. If you take all comers, you’ll certainly have some blogs that aren’t “fair.” And, if you don’t accept all comers, then you won’t have good “balance” (or, at least, it would surprise me mightily if you did, since I’m not a moral relativist).

All you can do is to strive for blogs that use reason, logic, and facts, rather than sophistry, as their main tools. And if this means that you end up with a somewhat skewed distribution in terms of political orientation (and I won’t say to what side I think that might be–let that remain my secret :-))–well then, so be it!

Whether or not you agree with me on which side could be the one that is overrepresented in the “fair” column (and reasonable people may differ on that) it’s still an interesting question: how to choose? Should you give a forum to anyone and everyone who wants in? Does a sort of “pure capitalism” approach work best–let the market (i.e. the reader) sort it out? Or, if you want to have standards, how to apply them? Do you try to accept only those blogs you think are well-written and/or well-reasoned? How do you avoid letting your own political leanings color your decisions about this? Or, should you even try?

As I believe I’ve said before, all journalists–and certainly all bloggers–have a political point of view, and it’s best to be up-front about it. Here’s a section of another comment of mine on the subject (from this fascinating discussion at Jay Rosen’s blog about the politics of the press):

Yes, the press is a political animal–or rather, animals. Each newspaper and periodical, and each journalist, has a political point of view which informs what it publishes, and what he/she writes. To pretend otherwise is to deny the obvious. The public can best be served by knowing the politics up front, and having the press drop the fiction of objectivity. So, to answer your question about what politics the press “should” have: transparent ones.

(How lazy can I get, eh? Reduced to cannibalizing my own comments on other blogs! Go easy on me–it’s a holiday weekend, and the first day of sun we’ve had in about two centuries.)

Aging boomers (and I guess I’m one of them)

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve gotten to the point that going to the doctor, any doctor, is something I hate to do. I never liked it, but now I simply detest it. After all, the best that can happen is that things have stayed the same. But the reality is that, as time goes by, it becomes more and more likely that the news will be bad.

Those of you who are of a certain age know what I’m talking about. Slowly, more and more of your friends are taking pills–high blood pressure, cholesterol. A hearing aid blooms here and there, blushing pale pink in a (usually masculine) ear.

You want to postpone the test, the check-up, the mammogram, the prostate exam, the colonoscopy, and sometimes you do. But sooner or later the postponement goes on too long, and fear takes over, and so you go.

All this is a lead-in to say that yesterday I had an eye exam. I don’t even wear glasses, except for night driving and the theater, or reading glasses for those intimate low-light restaurants. Oh, yes, and computer glasses for blogging. But in normal life I don’t need them, and I can even read books without them.

So yesterday it was a surprise to me when the technician looked into my eyes, prior to the opthamologist’s grand entrance, and said, “I’m going to have the doctor come in now to take a look before we dilate you.” And then he went into some arcane discussion of the angle of my iris and the fluid and the shape of my eye and something something something. When I asked whatever was he talking about, he tried to find a diagram of the eye to show me. I didn’t want to see a diagram of the eye, I said, I wanted to know what it all meant–did I have some eye disease? Oh no, no, he said, just something that might make it dangerous to dilate my pupils. And then he left me alone to ponder that thought.

Next there was quite a bit more fussing with my eyes by several people, including the doctor. Measuring, putting numbing drops in, measuring again, being told to stare at little targets. Their conclusion was that yes, indeed, I have some relatively rare malformation of the eye that is congenital but gets worse with age (doesn’t everything?).

What does it all mean? Well, although it’s highly unlikely to happen soon, as the thing progresses, I would be at risk for sudden blindness if my eyes dilate quickly or forcefully, blocking off some sort of fluid canals and causing a clogged-drain effect in which the eye fluid pressure builds up alarmingly and speedily.

Huh? Not exactly what I expected to hear. That’s what he meant by “dangerous;” the eyedrops used to dilate eyes for the eye examination can cause an attack, requiring immediate emergency surgery to preserve the eyesight. Modern medicine being the relatively wonderful thing it is, however, there is a simple (they say; I hope!) laser surgery that puts a little hole in the iris and prevents any possible buildup.

The doctor then said he thought it would be okay now to dilate my eyes to examine them.

Now, one word I really don’t like to hear a doctor say is “I think” (actually, that’s two). So I inquired about this “think” thing, and he said if I was apprehensive (if?), I could just have the laser surgery soon, and postpone the drops for afterwards.

I made an appointment for laser surgery in three weeks. And then decided to write this little post to tell all of you that it’s not a bad idea to keep up with your regular eye exams. A cautionary tale.