The usual suspects

The New Neo Posted on by

Light blogging today. It’s Sunday, beautiful weather, and–among other things–I need to do a bunch of work on my mother’s taxes.

But I just wanted to point out that, overnight, something seems to have eaten my tulip leaves (“Eats, Shoots and Leaves“–indeed!).

Take a look; it’s a sad and sorry sight, and I want some sympathy:

(The photo doesn’t really do justice to the jagged, amputated quality of the leaves, but it’s the best I could do).

Each year it happens, if I forget to spray the things with the noxious brew (eau de rotten eggs and hot peppers) known as “Deer Off” in time. This year I tried–I tried–but the friggin nozzle was clogged and could not get unclogged, and I just today managed to get a substitute spray thingee.

But alas, too late. The usual suspects–be they deer, squirrels, dogs with strange culinary tastes, neighbors with same, whoever and whatever their identity–have had their way with my tulip foliage, providing a graphic and all-too-poignant demonstration of the phrase “nipped in the bud.”

But at least I got a post out of it.

See you tomorrow.

Wafa Sultan, Jacksonian, vs. the Boston Phoenix: feeding that ravenous crocodile

The New Neo Posted on by

[CORRECTION: It’s been pointed out by several commenters that the linked article appears to be by one Amit Ghate, not Wafa Sultan, although it appeared on the latter’s blog. The link was originally sent to me and identified as being from Wafa Sultan’s blog. Under the influence of mental set and expectations, I assumed that it was by Dr. Sultan herself, without thinking to check the byline. I usually try to be extraordinarily careful about such things, but I’m only human, and certainly some things can slip by me, as this one did. So, I stand corrected: it was published on Dr. Sultan’s blog, but it is by Amit Ghate. And, although Dr. Sultan is still the same brave person, she didn’t write the “extraordinarily hard-hitting article,” although it certainly seems to be simpatico with her point of view.]

No, Wafa Sultan hasn’t directly challenged the alternative newspaper known as the Boston Phoenix. But she mentions the paper in passing in this extraordinarily hard-hitting article which appeared on her website “Annaqed.”

Dr. Sultan, whom I wrote about previously here, is Syrian-born. She is what Islam would consider an apostate from the faith, a psychiatrist who lives in America now. She recently achieved some notoriety through an outspoken interview she gave on Al Jazeera, praising Western Enlightenment thought and criticizing the oppression and ignorance she feels is rampant in many Moslem countries.

Her new piece is worth reading in its entirety (although I have some disagreements with her reading of ancient history–but that’s another topic, perhaps for another time). It’s the part of her article that deals with recent history that I find especially interesting and provocative, particularly her take on the passivity of the Western world since the Iranian kidnappings of 1979, which she feels was an act of war and should have been treated as such.

Dr. Sultan pulls no punches, to say the least; she sets up a Jacksonian challenge to Western countries to begin defending themselves and their culture with greater vigor, or to face continuing to be perceived by the Islamicist jihadis as weak and therefore relatively easy prey. Here’s some of the flavor of Dr. Sultan’s article:

…our government, under the pacifist Jimmy Carter, wrung its hands and negotiated with a regime which had just broken the most basic law of diplomacy. (Two half-hearted, under-manned and under-planned rescue attempts were made, but the fiascos only underscored how unwilling the government was to use its military force to remedy the problem).

This event signaled to all observers, that though the West still had abundant physical means to defend its citizens, it had lost its will to do so. In fact, not only would it not defend its citizens, it would even act against them, as did the US State Department when, after the eventual release of the hostages, it quashed their attempt to seek redress in international courts, simply to avoid “stirring up” trouble with foreign nations!

The absence of any military response and the complete abdication of the government’s responsibility to its citizens was the first sign to the Islamic world that it could act with impunity against any Western citizen — and act it did. A series of attacks throughout the Middle East followed.

What do I mean when I refer to Dr. Sultan’s position as “Jacksonian?” It’s part of Walter Russell Meade’s famous schema of strains in American foreign policy (and one of those many topics I’m saving for a longer post); see here for a summary, here for an article by Meade on Jacksonians, and here for his book Special Providence.

This is a summary of the Jacksonian position:

The driving belief of the Jacksonian school of thought is that the first priority of the U.S. Government in both foreign and domestic policy is the physical security and economic well-being of the American populace. Jacksonians believe that the US shouldn’t seek out foreign quarrels, but if a war starts, the basic belief is “there’s no substitute for victory” ”“ and Jacksonians will do pretty much whatever is required to make that victory happen. If you wanted a Jacksonian slogan, it’s “Don’t Tread On Me!” Jacksonians are generally viewed by the rest of the world as having a simplistic, uncomplicated view of the world, despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.

If you read Dr. Sultan’s piece with an eye to Meade’s categories, you’ll see how very Jacksonian it is. Dr. Sultan links together the last thirty-five years of terrorist acts with responses from the West that treat them, not as acts of war, but with various degrees of appeasement, capitulation, and/or ineffective responses. Towards the end of the piece, Dr. Sultan offers the following very Jacksonian declaration of intent:

…let us resurrect Dumas’ famous Musketeers’ rallying call: “One for All and All for One” emphasizing the latter phrase. For only by standing together to defend each individual can a peaceful society exist. Thus we must stand together and protect the lonely author who dares question a religion and who is sentenced to death because of it. We must stand together to defend his publishers who are firebombed for printing the book. We must stand together to defend the individual film-maker and political dissident who criticize Islam and are sentenced to death because of it. We must stand together to defend the benign cartoonist, who pens a simple cartoon, and is then forced into hiding by death threats and bounties.

To stand together means to assert our rights with our government as our agent. To those who threaten us with force, asserting our rights means responding with force, in fact, with overwhelming force. We must say to Iran (which on February 14 just reconfirmed the Rushdie fatwa) “oust and turn over the regime which sees fit to condemn a single citizen of ours to death, or face all out war.” And if they refuse, give them the war they started, but be sure to win it decisively, not protecting their mosques and infrastructure, but instead doing everything necessary to ensure they have no capacity to ever threaten us again.

The statement of an all-out no-holds-barred Jacksonian impulse is sobering, is it not? What Dr. Sultan is proposing is no less than the threat of a World War III, and a hot one at that.

I personally hope that this is not necessary, and that Dr. Sultan is wrong, although at times I fear that she is right. Because the distinguishing characteristic of this particularly enemy is its emphasis on the world to come, and its willingness to embrace the death of hordes of its own people in the cause of establishing a new Caliphate. Unfortunately, although vast numbers of “moderate Moslems” may be against this cause (and we have no way of knowing how many there are who fit that description), it may not matter, if leaders such as those in Iran are for it, and if they’ve shown their the willingness to sacrifice their own people to establish their version of heaven on earth, and to defeat the Great and Little Satans.

How does the Boston Phoenix enter into this? It’s a tabloid freebie paper, a relic of the 60s, and one I’ve read off and on for all these long years. It intersperses notices and reviews of cultural events–concerts, theater, poetry readings, all that good stuff–with actual news stories from a basic leftist/liberal perspective. You know the type of thing; probably every big city has its equivalent.

In Dr. Sultan’s article, she deals with the recent Mohammed cartoons issue at some length. That’s the context in which she mentions that the Boston Phoenix had refused to run the cartoons.

That fact alone didn’t surprise me, but their stated reason for not running them did. Here it is:

…fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists ”¦ This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question ”¦ we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix ”¦ in physical jeopardy ”¦ this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history.

I did not expect such a bold statement from the Phoenix, using phrases such as “bloodthirsty Islamists,” and freely admitting their fear of retaliation was the reason they desisted. Other publications (for example, the NY Times) had emphasized their sensitivity to Moslem feeling, instead.

Interestingly, the Phoenix actually pointed out the Times’s hypocrisy, here, in an article in which the Phoenix called out the Times for refusing to show similar cultural and religious sensitivity when it insisted on publishing the photo of an ultra-Orthodox Jew who had already protested the publication of said picture for religious reasons.

Columnist Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe, one of their few conservative writers, got into the act as well, here:

Journalists can be incredibly brave, but when it comes to covering the Arab and Muslim world, too many news organizations have knuckled under to threats. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, a veteran foreign correspondent, admitted long ago that ”physical intimidation” by the PLO led reporters to skew their coverage of important stories or to ignore them ”out of fear.” Similarly, CNN’s former news executive, Jordan Eason, acknowledged after the fall of Saddam Hussein that his network had long sanitized its news from Iraq, since reporting the unvarnished truth ”would have jeopardized the lives of . . . our Baghdad staff.”

Like the Nazis in the 1930s and the Soviet communists in the Cold War, the Islamofascists are emboldened by appeasement and submissiveness. Give the rampagers and book-burners a veto over artistic and editorial decisions, and you end up not with heightened sensitivity and cultural respect, but with more rampages and more books burned. You betray ideals that generations of Americans have died to defend.

Appeasement doesn’t seem to work–it merely feeds the crocodile, as Churchill famously said–but I can understand why it’s used so often. If I were a journalist working for the Phoenix or any other publication, would I want to lay my life on the line to publish those cartoons? I’m happy I don’t have to answer the question.

And I can well understand the West’s denial, for so many years during the last decades of the twentieth century, of the nature and seriousness of the enemy we face–after all, in my own small way, I was part of that denial. Some are still in denial, and this is also understandable: who among us can face the sort of destructive prospect Dr. Sultan is suggesting be unleashed? Can there not be a Wilsonian solution instead? Please? Oh, pretty please?

Because the alternative seems very grim, indeed.

I’ll close with more words from Winston Churchill on a similar matter:

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

[NOTE: You might want to take a look at this post by Vodkapundit Stephen Green, which discusses the same issue from another angle, that of a recent time-travel short story by Dan Simmons. Vodkapundit also discussed the issue yesterday, in this post about the meaning of the phrase “whatever it takes.” He writes:

“Whatever it takes” is what we’re trying to avoid. Whatever we’re doing might just be working.

I certainly hope so.]

The return of word verification

The New Neo Posted on by

Sorry to inconvenience everyone, but the spambots came back–rather, that is, one spambot came back. But one was enough for me; like mice or ants or other pests, where there’s one, more ordinarily follow. I’m actually surprised it took this long.

And so I’ve turned on the word verification feature again. Hope it’s not too much of a pain of you all. But it’s really helpful in making sure this blog doesn’t become a spam dump. Thanks!

More Kipling: history repeats itself (“the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger”)

The New Neo Posted on by

Part of an interesting piece by Dr. Horsefeathers on the subject of Kipling, posted some time ago (ignore the spambot dump that the comments section of that post has managed to become) , is the following observation on Kipling and pacifists, written by George Orwell:

In discussing the pacifist left Orwell wrote, “A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’.

That quote of Orwell’s, “A humanitarian is always a hypocrite,” brought me up short. Certainly, humanitarians are sometimes hypocrites, but always? Always? And Orwell was usually so careful with words! Which made me wonder what he was getting at here.

So I went back to the original source of the quote, this article Orwell wrote on Kipling. I found a few other interesting points about Kipling (about whom Orwell had mixed feelings, to say the least) before I struck pay dirt, such as this discussion of the ways in which Kipling is misquoted and misunderstood:

An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from “Recessional,” “Lesser breeds without the Law.” This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the “lesser breeds” are “natives,” and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase “lesser breeds” refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are “without the Law” in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German.

And here is the full Orwell quote about humanitarians and their hypocrisy:

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are “enlightened” all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our “enlightenment,” demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite…

So, in this context, he seems to be using the word “humanitarian” to mean “leftist” in the economic sense, not to refer to people who, for example, provide earthquake relief. The latter may be idealistic or simplistic, and they may at times be ineffective, but I don’t see how the vast majority of them could be described as hypocrites–unless one happens to be an utter Malthusian and Social Darwinist and believes that people who really have humanity’s best interests at heart should follow a strict non-interventionist policy in the struggle for existence, and that intervention only leads to a cascade of increasing problems.

But to get back to Kipling, in his essay Dr. Horsefeathers also reproduces a famous Kipling poem entitled “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” the last two stanzas of which I found especially thought-provoking. “Copybook Headings” is one of those archaic Britishisms that needs explanation for us benighted and ignorant moderns, especially of the American variety:

“Copybook” is the British for notebook; a “Copybook heading” was a proverb or other essential truth that a teacher assigned to his class to write an essay on.

Here are those last two stanzas:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.

I would assert that it’s hard to get any more pessimistic than that about humankind, history, and humanity’s inability to learn from history–or, perhaps, any more correct. Not to mention that–at least to this reader–one of the things he seems to be describing is the end result of Communism and Socialism.

I suspected that the poem was written after the profound disillusionment of World War I–and, sure enough, it was: 1919.

That incredible line, “…the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire,” is one that probably could be used by either side these days, to accuse the other. But to me it symbolizes in a profound, graphic, and bitter way the tendency of people to forget the lessons of history, even recent ones.

Rudyard Kipling, New Englander (Grieving parents in war, Part III)

The New Neo Posted on by

Rudyard Kipling’s name has come up in the comments section twice recently. The first time was in the context of this comment, in which Richard Aubrey mentions that:

Kipling, in his “Kim” has a retired officer of Indian cavalry talking to a Buddhist monk. I believe the officer’s comment to the monk’s reproach to his career of fighting went like, “War is an ill think, as I surely know. But ‘twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.”

Not a bad description of the way in which the military makes the world safe for pacifists.

And then, in my poetic thread of yesterday, commenter Ymarsakar mentions Kipling’s poem “If,” and offers up a sampling of his other work, including “The White Man’s Burden.”

That was enough to get me started on doing some research on Kipling–a man who was a giant in his own day, then faded in public estimation, but is undergoing a recent revival. The reasons for his rise, fall, and then slight rise again involve both literary fashion and the political.

Kipling was a very traditional poet; and in particular a rhyming, storytelling, and dialect-using poet; certainly not the type of thing that’s been in vogue for quite some time. But, as Ymarsakar points out, his is a type of poetry people can really understand; it’s very accessible.

Of course, the second (and perhaps even more relevant) reason for the ups and downs of Kipling’s career is his politics. He is seen–rightly or wrongly–as an apologist for colonialism and imperialism, and the “White Man’s Burden” poem (and the phrase itself), are considered un-PC to the max, the very essence of what’s wrong with imperialism.

I’m not a Kipling expert, and I’m not yet ready to write the definitive post on his work; this certainly isn’t it, if that’s what you’re looking for. But in doing my research I was reminded of the fact that Kipling, the quintessential author of the age of the British Empire at its zenith, was also a New Englander.

What, you ask? Yes, a New Englander. Kipling married a Vermont woman and they lived there for four years early in their marriage. I once knew that fact (although I’d certainly forgotten it) because about thirty years ago, while snowshoeing with some friends who lived in the town, I happened across the house where they’d lived in Brattleboro. They pointed it out; at the time, it wasn’t open to the public, but now it is:

They make an unlikely group of New Englanders: Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves and who talked with the animals; Shere Khan, the ruthless tiger; Bagheera, the fearsome panther. Indeed, though the jungle boy and the creatures who inhabit The Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling were conceived in India during the author’s childhood, they were given birth half a world away in the thoroughly unexotic setting of a small Vermont village. The first portion of The Jungle Books was published in the U.S. in 1894 (a second followed in 1895).

…Recently, the house where Mowgli was born has been restored by the Landmark Trust, a British nonprofit foundation devoted to preserving historic British homes. Landmark Trust properties are not restored to be museums, but for use as unconventional guest homes.

On a bluff outside Brattleboro, the library, gardens and spacious living quarters at “Naulakha” are active again, reincarnated as perhaps Vermont’s most unusual summer vacation home/winter ski chalet.

So, this is where some of the Jungle Books were written and Kipling’s first two children were born. He and his wife had retreated there after being repulsed by New York City:

If his American surroundings are any indication, the Kipling of Naulakha hardly resembled the imperial father figure he later became. Wandering the house, a visitor inevitably attempts to conjure the man with the assistance of an amusing contemporary newspaper report: “he wears shabby clothes, drives shaggy horses, is always saying, ‘Begad’ and plays with the baby.”

Rural Vermont or not, though, he never failed at Naulakha to dress for dinner. Remarkably, Kipling even played games at Naulakha — the USGA credits him with inventing snow golf there (a winter version played with distinctive red balls and tin cans for cups), and é  la Mark Twain, he installed a billiards table in the attic. On a visit from Britain, Arthur Conan Doyle brought Kipling a pair of skis and, it is said, introduced the sport to Vermont.

The thematic principle of the house’s design is decidedly playful, too. In a curious conceit, Kipling intended Naulakha to resemble a ship. At 90 feet by 24 feet, the house is unusually long and narrow with the author’s library and office at the “bow,” the kitchen at the “stern.” According to David Tansey, an architectural historian and the Landmark Trust’s US representative, the author was possibly inspired by elegant Kashmiri houseboats he had known in India.

I don’t know about you, but the idea that skiing came to Vermont via Kipling via Arthur Conan Doyle fills me with wonderment. And I love the fact that Kipling invented winter golf, a sport I didn’t even know existed.

Kipling’s American sojourn–though filled with joy at the beginning–had a sad, and then an even sadder ending:

When a family quarrel erupted between Kipling and an alcoholic brother-in-the law, the fallout obliterated whatever joy had formerly illuminated Naulakha. The author’s family left Vermont in 1896, and they returned to America only once with tragic consequences. Following a rough Atlantic crossing to New York in 1899, Kipling and six-year-old daughter Josephine fell seriously ill. He fought pneumonia and recovered; his “little American” and the “best beloved” child to whom he had recited the Just-So Stories in the Naulakha nursery did not. The Kiplings soon left America heartbroken and forever.

And then things got even worse; Josephine was not the only child Kipling lost. His son John was killed at the age of eighteen in World War I, leaving only one surviving child, a daughter.

The death of his son fighting in WWI engendered a lifelong grief in both Kipling and his wife. The body of John (“Jack”) Kipling was never found, although there were false claims in the 1990’s that it had been:

Triumphant official claims to have ended the 83-year search for the body of John Kipling, only son of the patriotic author Rudyard Kipling, are wrong, according to a six-year investigation due out this autumn.

The soldier, only 18 when he was killed in September 1915, remains one of Britain’s half million “lost boys” missing in the first world war. His headstone, placed on a grave in France by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1992, is false.

This is the verdict – reached “with much sadness” – of My Boy Jack?, a study by two long-established military authors. Their finding is endorsed by an expert panel, which includes a judge and the museum curator of Lieutenant John Kipling’s old regiment, the Irish Guards.

Last night, Michael Smith, secretary of the Kipling Society, said: “This is a shame. Most people had been led to believe by the commission that John had at last been laid to rest – and that Rudyard’s soul need no longer be in torment”.

The “My Boy Jack” reference is to a poem Kipling wrote on the subject after his son’s death:

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind””
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

[NOTE: See, also, my series “Grieving parents in war,” Part I and Part II.]

Those poets have a way with words

The New Neo Posted on by

After writing today’s post about toothbrushes and bacteria, I somehow thought of the poem “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop,” by William Butler Yeats, which says the same thing. Or, sort of the same thing. Or a related thing.

So, without further ado, I hereby reproduce it in its entirety:

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

The fact is that the body has its attendant messinesses. Probably best to accept that as some sort of yin-yang truth about life.

Next “change”post

The New Neo Posted on by

I find it’s about that time again: another “A mind is a difficult thing to change” post is in the works–at least in my head.

I’ve found in the past that it’s best if I make a public announcement of such. That seems to goad me into actually writing the thing within the next few weeks rather than to procrastinate further, which would otherwise be my wont.

So, stay tuned!

Your toothbrush is your friend

The New Neo Posted on by

I was watching TV the other night right before bed. I usually do a bunch of stretching exercises then, and I often turn on a cable news station to accompany the action (although, come to think of it, that may not be the most relaxing thing to have on in the background while trying to unwind).

While I was changing channels to try to find the best station, my attention was grabbed by an ad for this product, called “Violight,” a little gizmo that purports to sterilize your family’s toothbrushes through the wonders of UV light.

The commercial (actually, I think it must have been an infomercial–it was long!) featured the usual smiling hosts and satisfied customers, as well as “scientific” proof of how many germs ordinarily live on one’s toothbrush, lying in wait like muggers ready to pounce on the unsuspecting users of old, unsterilized, non-Violighted toothbrushes–that is, most of us. Quelle horreur!

We were told just how many bacteria dwell on our innocuous-seeming toothbrushes–nine million? sixteen billion? I forget; the mind boggles. The customers on the infomercial looked properly stunned at the news, and who wouldn’t be? They were grateful to have been told about the Violight, and will be sure to use one in the future to safeguard the health of their families.

I’d read about this toothbrush contamination business before. But it always seemed rather bogus to me. Not that I doubt there are plenty of bacteria–and viruses, let’s not forget the viruses–on our toothbrushes. But ordinarily, these things come from—our mouths!

Yes, I know it’s hard to accept, but our bodies are breeding grounds for bacteria, most of them innocuous, some even beneficial (that’s why taking antibiotics can sometimes cause people to come up with yeast infections, or intestinal troubles: the good beasties have been killed off by the drugs, as well as the bad).

There’s a book on the subject of bacteria and people that made the deepest of impressions on me back when I first read it in 1969, when it came out: Life on Man by Theodor Rosebury. Despite its so very un-PC title, I never forgot its message (caveat for the squeamish on the following passage):

The figures that [Rosebury] grapples with are quite mind-boggling. For example, he counted 80 distinguishable species living in the mouth alone and estimated that the total number of bacteria excreted each day by an adult to ranges from 100 billion to 100 trillion…From this figure it can be estimated that the microbial density on a square centimeter of human bowel is around 10 billion organisms (1010/cm2) [==> 1.5 x1013 or yielding a total of 15 trillion microbes, based on 2 m2 surface/person].

Microbes inhabit every surface of a healthy adult human that is exposed to the outside, such as the skin, or that is accessible from the outside — the alimentary canal, from mouth to anus, plus eyes, ears, and the airways.

Rosebury estimates that 50 million individual bacteria live on the average square centimeter (5×107/cm2) of human skin [5×107/cm2 x 20,000 cm2/person = 1011 bacteria], describing the skin surface of our bodies as akin to a “teeming population of people going Christmas shopping.”

I’m not sure why Christmas shopping would come to mind, but you get the point: Houston, we’ve got a lot of bacteria here. And then there are the parasites–but at this point, I’ll draw a veil over further discussion of this delicate issue. Sometimes it’s best not to look too closely, believe me (for example, I just did a Google search for images of the hair follicle mite that hitches a ride on us all, and concluded that I could not in all good conscience assault my readers with those pictures).

But one thing it is good to know is that most baceria do not harm us, and some actually help us. Not only that, but there’s even evidence that exposure to bacteria in early life toughens the system in various ways, such as the reduction in the incidence of asthma.

It seems that people–and even children–were not meant to be free of all bacteria. It’s true that advances in hygiene have saved lives, particularly from such contaminated-water-borne diseases as cholera and typhoid. But we have over-corrected when we are afraid of our own toothbrushes; the bacteria that live there, in general, originate within our mouths. As long as we don’t share toothbrushes with each other (and even the grungiest of us usually knows better than to do that), I think we’re quite safe.

After all, the Violight people have an interest in drumming up fear of contaminated toothbrushes: to make money for themselves. And they’re not the only ones; recent decades have seen the rise of two other similarly over-the-top anti-bacterial products: soap and sponges.

Ah, remember those days when a sponge was just a sponge and soap was just soap and a kiss was still a kiss? The fundamental things don’t seem to apply as time has gone by: it’s actually become somewhat difficult to find non-antibacterial soap or sponges.

There is no need to disinfect ourselves as though we were in an operating theater. But that seems to be the aim of companies who make these products and advertise them, who would dearly love to see us all turned into a bunch of obsessive-compulsives, the perfect consumers.

In pursuit of this goal, the Violight people have mastered the art of the out-of-context quote. Their website features the following, which sounds nicely convincing:

Even after being rinsed visibly clean, toothbrushes can remain contaminated with potentially pathogenic organisms.”
”” The Centers for Disease Control, January 2002 report

If one Googles the sentence and finds the original report, it’s true that Violight has quoted it correctly. However, let’s take a look at the rest of the story [emphasis mine]:

To date, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is unaware of any adverse health effects directly related to toothbrush use, although people with bleeding disorders and those severely immuno-depressed may suffer trauma from tooth brushing and may need to seek alternate means of oral hygiene. The mouth is home to millions of microorganisms (germs). In removing plaque and other soft debris from the teeth, toothbrushes become contaminated with bacteria, blood, saliva, oral debris, and toothpaste. Because of this contamination, a common recommendation is to rinse one’s toothbrush thoroughly with tap water following brushing. Limited research has suggested that even after being rinsed visibly clean, toothbrushes can remain contaminated with potentially pathogenic organisms. In response to this, various means of cleaning, disinfecting or sterilizing toothbrushes between uses have been developed. To date, however, no published research data documents that brushing with a contaminated toothbrush has led to recontamination of a user’s mouth, oral infections, or other adverse health effects.

So, as long as you keep your toothbrush to yourself, don’t worry, be happy: brush, rinse, and go forth into the world and meet the day, secure in the knowledge that your toothbrush is not out to get you.

Women and the perpetuation of female genital mutilation

The New Neo Posted on by

Dean Esmay has flung out a challenge to the female blogosphere, and I thought I’d take him up on it.

In this post, he points out that the practice of female genital mutilation (known also as “female circumcision”) is neither Islamic nor the sole province of men. In fact, it occurs in a cultural band in northern Africa and predates Islam there, and women themselves are generally the agents of its transmission: they perform the majority of these “surgeries.”

I am in agreement with Dean that the custom is not primarily an Islamic one, but rather, a cultural practice. However, it tends to follow a geographic distribution that intersects in many places with Islam, so the two are sometimes linked together in actuality, if not in origins. And some Moslems have used a passage in the Koran to justify the practice, although most think that’s an ex-post-facto stretch.

Dean has titled his post “Understanding things: a first step towards fixing them.” I agree with this notion as well: understanding something can help us in knowing how best to intervene to change it, and why it may be very difficult to do so.

Dean writes (and I believe this is the part of his post that he considers a challenge to the female blogosphere):

Historically, and even today, in most places where female circumcision is practiced, it is primarily done to women by other women…You aren’t going to change this horrific, barbaric practice until you get all those aunts, mothers, and grandmothers in places like Egypt to agree that it needs to be changed. And I doubt you’re going to get much mileage by blaming their brothers, fathers, and husbands for a tradition that goes back to long before any of them was born.

So, how can we best understand the practice, and is there any way to intervene to change it? There’s a vast amount of literature on the topic, both online and off, and this post of mine will hardly scratch the surface–the problem has great complexity.

When one looks at a cultural practice of any sort, especially an ancient one, there are a host of interrelated issues involved, and it can be very difficult to tease out what influences what.

For the ancient practice euphemistically known as “female circumcision” (see this), the milder forms may be roughly analogous to male circumcision, but the more extreme (and more common) forms are most certainly not. They represent a horror of major proportions.

Dean is quite correct in pointing out that women have traditionally perpetuated the practice. This, by the way (at least as far as I know) tends to be true of other similar cultural practices that subjugate women physically (such as, for example, foot-binding, now fortunately eradicated).

In cultures where such mutilating customs are practiced, one reason that women tend to be in charge of performing them on other women (on little girls, actually) is that, in such cultures, men have been traditionally discouraged from touching women’s bodies intimately–except sexually, that is, in the proper sanctioned relationships. But the more important reason that women are the agents of their own mutilation is that, of course, women are part of the culture, too. The custom is all of a piece, as is the culture, and women are not separate from it.

In the case of areas in which female circumcision is the custom, it is usually a cultural norm for men to only want to marry a circumcised woman. Of course, women want the girls in their own family to be marriageable; an uncircumcised girl would be a terrible liability. Still another goal of female circumcision is to enforce chastity by reducing female sexual desire, which is felt to be threatening and dangerous. Older woman, therefore, are also trying to control the tendency of younger women to run around and be sexually wild, and thus to reflect badly on the family (sleep around, get pregnant, etc.–all of which is absolutely forbidden in shame/honor cultures).

If you think of each girl who is born as a commodity that only gains worth when married, and if sexual activity prior to marriage (and intact genitalia) would make her unmarriageable, then the entire family–men and women both–will do everything in their power to stop that.

Who comes first, women or men, in perpetuating this endeavor? I don’t think there can possibly be an answer; the two are intertwined. But there is no question that it is the cultural demand (expressed as a male demand) for a chaste and sexually tractable wife that’s driving it, and the perception that female circumcision is an excellent way to accomplish this.

How could it be changed? Men or women–or both together–could take steps to do so–but, realistically speaking, to make this widespread would require a fairly massive cultural change in the entire way of looking at female sexuality, marriage, and the position of women in society. Although every journey begins with a single step, how do women or men get the courage to buck such a deeply ingrained system?

In the areas where female circumcision is common, it is a fact that women tend to have less political power than men, just as it is a fact that they are usually the actual agents by which the genital mutilation is performed. Most of their power is within the home, as Dean points out. And if female circumcision is the price they feel they must pay to be married and even to have a home and a family, then one can hardly expect them to cast off these chains all by themselves. It is a conundrum.

There are movements in that direction, however. And intervention can occur either through changing male or female attitudes, or both. This rather outdated article (from 1989)–which admittedly comes from a feminist and male-blaming perspective–details some suggestions for efforts in this direction, stressing the importance of education, including education of the women traditionally responsible for performing the procedure:

* Adoption of clear national policies for the abolishment of female circumcision;

* Establishment of national commissions to coordinate and follow up the activities of other bodies involved including, where appropriate, the enactment of legislation prohibiting female circumcision;

* Intensification of general education of the public, including health education at all levels, with special emphasis on the dangers and the undesirability of female circumcision;

* Intensification of education programs for traditional birth attendants, midwives, healers and other practitioners of traditional medicine, to demonstrate the harmful effects of female circumcision, with a view to enlisting their support along with general efforts to abolish this practice.

And here is a very recent article on the topic, which outlines some of the areas in which the UN is actually performing a positive service; general public education seems to be the way to go:

UNICEF is supporting programmes to end FGM/C in 18 countries and conducting initial activities in four. They use a variety of approaches:

In Senegal, largely thanks to the work of TOSTAN, a non-governmental organization that focuses on educating communities about human rights and human dignity, tens of thousands of people have declared their abandonment of the practice.

In Egypt, the FGM-Free Village Model project brings together government and UN partners to encourage villages in the southern region to make public declarations against FGM/C. UNICEF works with individuals who have renounced FGM/C and are willing to speak out and persuade others in the community to do the same.

In Sudan, religious leaders are using their authority to affirm that FGM/C is a violation of spiritual and theological principles. On Monday, government officials, the National Council for Child Welfare and UN agencies will hold a commemorative event that will include an exhibition, religious and secular songs on abandonment of FGM/C and children’s performances. The exhibition will include images of girls who died of FGM/C.

…The Maputo Protocol, a regional legal instrument which explicitly prohibits and condemns FGM/C, was ratified by 15 African countries and entered into force in November 2005. A month later, 100 African parliamentarians adopted the groundbreaking “Dakar Declaration,”
which underscores the importance of community involvement as well as legislative change in ending FGM/C…

As I’ve said before, a mind (or, in this case, minds) can be a difficult thing to change. But not an impossible one. The same goes for that aggregate of minds known as a culture, and the practices that make up that culture.

Kidnapping, coercion, and mind control: Jill Carroll, and the strange case of Patty Hearst (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I can be found here.]

About a month after being photographed with a gun at the Hibernia bank robbery and then coming out as the chic revolutionary “Tania,” Patty Hearst participated in still another crime. This time she covered for shoplifting SLA members Bill and Emily Harris at a sporting goods store, spraying gunfire from a car outside, allowing them to escape as Patty screamed obscenities. Witnesses said her cooperation was full and she did not seem to be coerced—and, in fact, there were indeed moments when the Harrises were in the store committing the robbery that Patty was alone in the car and had an opportunity to escape, an opportunity she did not take. It seemed that her conversion was for real.

The next day, the majority of the members of the SLA died in a shootout and fire in Los Angeles. It was thought at the time that Patty was among them. But forensic evidence proved otherwise; she had not been there, and was now on the lam.

Another tape—which I believe proved to be her last—was issued, in which she said:

I died in the fire on 54th Street, but out of the ashes I was reborn. I know what I have to do.

A little over a year later an emaciated Patty Hearst was taken into custody, and a few months after that she was put on trial and found guilty despite—or perhaps because of?—her defense by celebrity attorney F. Lee Bailey:

What really hurt her case, in Patty’s estimation, was Bailey’s closing argument. As he grabbed his notes, she could see that his hands were shaking and his face was flushed. She had the impression that he’d been drinking. His comments to the jury were rambling and irrelevant. Then he knocked a glass of water off the podium and the water hit his crotch. For the rest of his closing, it appeared that he’d wet his pants. Later Patty was to write about how jury members giggled: “It was, to say the least, distracting.” To make matters worse, he had flown each evening to Las Vegas to conduct a seminar, and had then flown back for the trial. It was the feeling of many that Bailey’s inability to make a forceful statement, whether he was exhausted or inebriated, decided Patty’s fate.

There were other irregularities in the trial, in which Patty was sentenced to twenty-five years (later shortened to seven). The brainwashing defense was poorly presented and poorly understood, and most of America didn’t buy it.

But brainwashing is by far the best explanation of Patty’s behavior, despite the verdict. Here are some of the many ways in which Patty’s treatment by the SLA greatly resembled brainwashing (from a Saturday Evening Post article around the time of the trial; the events in parentheses represent what actually happened to Patty):

1. Confinement under inhuman conditions to lower resistance (such as being kept blindfolded in a closet for 57 days).
2. The insistence on confession of past misdeeds (such as being raised in a privileged family).
3. Manipulating confessions into the context of the ideology (Patty had it all while many people are starving). The confession becomes self-criticism.
4. Telling the person that his former society had turned against him (Patty was told that her parents would not meet the ransom demands).
5. “Undeserved” liberties are granted commensurate with the person’s conversion, which makes the person grateful to his captors. (She denounced her family on tape.)
6. The person’s weakened physical state and feeling of shame and inferiority merge into a bond with the captor. (Patty joined the SLA in their criminal activities.)
7. Captors prove their sincerity by using the same tactics on their fellow prisoners. (Patty took part in a bank robbery and helped two members elude arrest.)
8. Even upon returning to society, the person will experience confusion and doubt. (She exhibited this behavior.)}

…In addition, Patty had some clear disadvantages. She had no training in these tactics, she was young and vulnerable, she’d been protected most of her life, and she lived among college students who articulated anti-establishment values. There’s no reason to doubt that she had been under duress sufficiently traumatic and manipulative to produce the shocking behavior for which she was on trial.

The list leaves out another important method of humiliation and manipulation used on Patty after her kidnapping: she was repeatedly sexually abused by her captors.

Patty’s sentence was commuted by President Carter after she had served twenty-one months (and President Clinton later pardoned her). Shortly after leaving prison, she married her bodyguard and went on to live a rather conservative—and security-conscious—life as wife and mother in Connecticut, as well performing as sometime actress in a few small movie roles.

Patty—now Patricia—also authored a book about her case. Those who believed her to be guilty thought it a self-serving apologia, but those more inclined to believe the brainwashing theory (such as me) found it mostly convincing and coherent. Among other interesting points I recall from her book was the fact that, early on, she knew she was guilty of bank robbery from the initial Hibernia heist, which was documented by camera. So had she tried to turn herself in at any later time, she was convinced that her innocence would not have been believed, but that she would have been convicted of the crime. Still later, when the fatal fireshoot and fire occurred, she realized that the police in fact had not been interested in protecting her, since they had assumed she had been in the house that had burned. She was not only fully brainwashed by then, but she felt that there was no turning back even if she had wanted to; if she did, she would most likely be found guilty and imprisoned. And later events certainly supported that perception.

There are some similarities and also huge differences between the Hearst case and that of Jill Carroll. Carroll is a young woman, but she’s a good deal older than Hearst was at the time. But, more importantly, Carroll’s situation seems to represent a case of simple coercion by political kidnappers who threatened her in order to make a political point, and to create a set of videos that could be successfully used as propaganda. Hearst’s kidnappers were far more ambitious in their aims: theirs was a purposeful, systematic, and remarkably successful program to brainwash Patty Hearst and to use her both as propaganda and as an actual accomplice in their cause.

These days Patricia Hearst Shaw seems both straightforward and insightful in interviews that describe both her particular state of mind long ago and the general attitudes and experiences of victims of brainwashing. As such, she still has important things to tell us.

Here is Patricia describing her mental and emotional changes during that first tumultuous year after the kidnapping (from a 2002 Larry King interview):

KING: A brain-washed person doesn’t know from time element when they’re being brainwashed, do they? They don’t wake up one day and say, I have been brainwashed?

HEARST: No. No, they don’t. They — I know for me, I thought that I was kind of fooling them for awhile, and the point when I knew that I was completely gone, I’m quite convinced, was at the Mel Sporting Goods Store when I reflectively did exactly what I had been trained to do that day instead of what any sensible person would have done or person still in control of their senses and their responses, which would be the minute the Harrises had left the van to have just run off and called the police.

At that point, you know, looking back, I can say that I was gone. I was so far gone I had no clue how bad it was.

Patty is well aware that many still think she’s guilty, and that her brainwashing claim is a transparent excuse. And she thinks she understands why they might feel that way:

CALLER: Hey, Ms. Hearst, I would like to know, have you ever felt guilty being a part of the SLA and how do you handle the fact that so many others think you are just as guilty?

HEARST: You know, when I first was arrested and first going through the therapy with the psychiatrist because I did feel really horrible. And I — it was the kind of guilt that was — a lot of it stemmed from feeling so horrible that my mind could be controlled by anybody, that I was so fragile that this could happen to me.

And because really we all think we’re pretty strong and that nobody can make us do something if we don’t want to do it. That’s true until somebody locks you up in a closet and tortures you and finally makes you so weak that you completely break and will do anything they say. And there was the feeling of guilt and self- loathing and despair and pain that was just overwhelming.

And in terms of people still thinking that I’m guilty, you know, the government spent an awful lot of time trying to convince people of that. So how can I blame them?…

Jill Carroll’s case is not the only recent one that has brought Patty Hearst to some people’s minds. In the same interview with Larry King, Patricia Hearst Shaw was asked to compare her case to that of the American Taliban, John Walker, who some saw as resembling her. She herself saw a different resemblance:

KING: Do you have some sympathy for John Walker?

HEARST: I had to think for a second. The…

KING: The American Taliban.

HEARST: OK, well, frankly, I mean, I think you have another case of someone who went looking for trouble, who politicized themselves, wasn’t finding enough trouble where they were and went looking for it. I have heard people say it reminds me of the Patty Hearst case and I think it reminds me of my kidnappers. That’s what it reminds me of.

And here is a portion of the interview that has some relevance to Jill Carroll’s (coerced) remarks about how she had been treated while a captive:

KING: Were any of these people [the SLA], to you, likable?

HEARST: You know, yes, sure. It gets to degrees of who’s likable when you’re with people who are causing mayhem and placing bombs and doing robberies. There are always some people that are more likable than others. It’s hard to say. You know how when people have been held hostage, one of the first questions they get asked is, how were you treated? And the answer is almost always I was treated, you know, pretty well. And by that, they usually mean they weren’t killed.

Patricia Hearst Shaw seems remarkably stable today, and exhibits rare insight and perspective into the state of mind of the brainwashed kidnap victim, although some reject that explanation of her acts even to this day. I think it’s quite clear, however, that she didn’t choose that unconventional and horrific period of her life; it was thrust upon her, and she appears to have ultimately adapted rather well to her re-entry to “normal” existence—although her life would never again be really normal.

My guess is that her husband (and former bodyguard) represents a figure of great stability and support to her, a person who bridges her former trauma and her present calm. It’s no accident she married her bodyguard, I would guess; he may have represented the one person able to protect her.

Because, when one actually thinks about it, no one else who should have protected her was able to do so: not her parents, not her boyfriend at the time, not the police, not the court system, not the expert witnesses, and not her lawyer (the best money could buy). In the end, she had to learn the hard lessons herself—and one of those lessons was that many will never forgive her for what she did. But I think she’s at peace even with that.

Kidnapping, coercion, and mind control: Jill Carroll, and the strange case of Patty Hearst (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part II can be found here.]

The Jill Carroll kidnapping was dreadful from the very beginning: watching videos of the young woman, pleading and crying; imagining the emotional state of her family and friends, and most especially her parents; trying to keep out of one’s mind the sad and horrific ending of so many hostages, including another journalist, Daniel Pearl.

No, it was almost unbearable to think about, and the only good thing seemed to be that, as time went on, there was at least a tiny bit of reason to believe that if her kidnappers hadn’t yet killed her, perhaps she might be released or even rescued.

And then came the good—no, the wonderful!—news: Carroll had been released. Along with that news was another video, this one of the Christian Science Monitor reporter criticizing US actions in Iraq and praising her captors. The video seemed to trigger a great deal of skepticism and anger: speculation that Carroll had staged her own kidnapping, that she’d actually been an Islamist sympathizer to begin with, or that she’d succumbed to Stockholm syndrome and gone over to the dark side.

Dr. Sanity writes with great clarity about Carroll and the criticism of her, here, as does Cori Dauber, here. According to Dr. Sanity:

I am of the opinion that people who are kidnapped and held prisoner have to survive. It should be understood that they are permitted by all rational people to say whatever they need to say in order to stay alive. We should assume that anything such captives say is said under duress and they should be confident that we will understand that. Jill Carroll was under duress. Thus, I think we must not judge Jill Carroll for anything she may have said to her captors in any videotape she made with them before her release.

The same is true, I might add, about her hedginess in a video made immediately after her release, for Iraqi TV, when she had not yet been debriefed and did not feel safe.

The harsh criticism that some have leveled towards Carroll reflects two things. The first is the fact that there have been a number of kidnappings in which the hostages (mostly NGO workers from other countries) seem to have been complicit in their own abductions, as well as the fact that some journalists are sympathetic to the terrorist (or “insurgent”) cause and bitterly opposed to the US actions in Iraq. So an attitude of skepticism, a sort of “co-conspirator until proven otherwise” attitude, has spring up on the part of many observers who have become cynical about these things.

The second is an older notion: people would often rather believe that they themselves would hold firm under any conditions–that they would never crack, nor would they make a video that would compromise their true beliefs.

For most people (unless they happen to be Navy Seals) this is balderdash, a form of grandiosity, and a denial of major proportions. But we all like to think we are (or would be, if given the opportunity) heroes, of the mind, spirit, and body.

The truth is that, short of undergoing special training or being an extraordinarily special person, we are all susceptible to coercion of the type Jill Carroll no doubt faced. And even if she had been treated well by her captors—as she stated in her video and the later Iraqi television interview (both of which Carroll now disavows)—the mere fact of having been kidnapped and held at the mercy of a shadowy bunch of unpredictable and violent people (after all, they had murdered her translator during the kidnapping, someone with whom she probably was fairly close) would be enough in and of itself to cause extreme psychological trauma in the average person.

This trauma can cause a host of reactions, which depend on details of the situation, the psyche of the hostage, and the techniques and goals of the kidnappers. Stockholm syndrome, for example, is a bonding with a kidnapper that at times happens naturally as a result of the hostage situation itself, and the almost childlike state of dependency it can engender in the hostage, who becomes grateful at not having been treated even worse. Then there is simple coercion: kidnappers who force the hostage to do or say certain things with the threat of physical punishment (or even death) for failure to cooperate.

By far the most comprehensive process is brainwashing, in which there is a systematic attempt by the kidnapper (or jailer, in a prisoner of war camp) to restructure the belief system of the captive and spark a political and social conversion towards the mindset of the enemy.

From the information we have so far, according to Carroll’s own statements, it seems that it was the second process, that of coercion, most likely to have been operating in her case:

The night before journalist Jill Carroll’s release, her captors said they had one final demand as the price of her freedom: She would have to make a video praising her captors and attacking the United States, according to Jim Carroll.

In a long phone conversation with his daughter on Friday, Mr. Carroll says that Jill was “under her captor’s control.”

Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life – what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak – were at her captors’ whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, “she had been taught to fear them,” he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.

That video appeared Thursday on a jihadist website that carries videos of beheadings and attacks on American forces. In it, Carroll told her father she felt compelled to make statements strongly critical of President Bush and his policy in Iraq.

Of course, we may never know Carroll’s true feelings in the matter, but I see no reason not to give her the benefit of the doubt and accept her words at face value, since they were recanted relatively quickly. And the truth is that, although we may not like to admit it, the vast majority of people would probably have done the same, knowing that once they were freed they could tell the truth.

A personal note: these issues have always been of great interest to me. Even as a child—through old World War II films, rumors of things that had happened during the Korean War, learning about concentration camps at a young age—I had a fascination with people’s ability to withstand psychological and physical duress and even torture.

In fact, as a very young child, perhaps ten years old or so, I actually purchased a book called The Rape of the Mind: the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing (yes indeed, I was a strange child; what can I say?). Aside from serving as fodder for many of my Cold War nightmares, it didn’t give me what I was searching for: a foolproof method for resistance if I happened to end up in a prisoner of war camp. But in its detailed descriptions of the sort of pressure that could be brought to bear to make even the strongest of men crack, it gave me a lifelong appreciation of the power of coercion.

That same appreciation was operating in my reaction to what was arguably the most famous political kidnapping/coercion case of the twentieth century. I refer, of course, to the saga of Patty Hearst.

To those of you were weren’t alive then, and who perhaps have only a glancing familiarity with the case, it’s hard to convey just how very famous Patty Hearst became, and what a deep effect her story had on the American psyche of the time. OJ was nothing compared to Patty; her story became a lightning rod for much of the anger, confusion, and cross-generational enmity that was roiling around in those years.

The basic facts are these: Patty Hearst was a 19-year-old Berkeley student and heiress to the Hearst fortune when gunmen broke into her apartment, beat her boyfriend severely, and kidnapped her in February of 1974. Sympathy was high for the fragile-looking and pretty young woman, and for her suffering parents, who distributed six million dollars of food to the poor at the request of her kidnappers in a vain attempt to gain her release.

There were no 24-hour cable news networks at the time, but coverage was heavy and the story saturated the airways and the press. A special feature that drew much attention was the release of many audiotapes featuring Patty repeating the terrorists’ demands; we all grew familiar with her eerily calm and relatively affectless voice.

But the nation was stunned, and sympathy for Patty quickly evaporated (although sympathy for her parents increased, if anything) when she was photographed during a bank robbery, holding a gun and looking tough:

The shocks kept coming. A further tape featured Patty saying:

…that she and her “comrades” had robbed the bank. “My gun was loaded,” she claimed, “and at no time did any of my comrades intentionally point their guns at me.” Their actions were justified to finance “the revolution.” She called her parents “pigs,” dismissed her fiancé, and then said, “As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous to the point of being beyond belief.” She ended by declaring that “I am a soldier of the people’s army.”

I wish I could offer a link to an actual recording of her voice, because I’m convinced that something about it—a certain snotty casualness, a cadence of disdain, an almost Valley Girl emptiness—caused people’s blood to boil on hearing it. And then, later, still another tape was released, in which Hearst declared:

I’ve been given the choice of one, being released in a safe area, or two, joining forces with the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people. I have chosen to stay and fight.

The rhetoric was perfect, and it was utterly convincing. Patty took the revolutionary name “Tania,” (after a female associate of Che Guevara’s—good old Che, he’s always in the picture) and posed wearing a fetching beret, looking very thin. It was one of the first examples of radical chic I ever saw:

The reaction to the robbery, the photos, and Patty’s declaration was electric. Hatred for her grew, even among those who’d been predisposed to sympathize before. As for me, I didn’t know what to believe about her sincerity. But—perhaps because of my background in reading about brainwashing and thought control—I thought the most likely explanation was that some sort of process of coercion had gone on. After all, she’d been an impressionable young girl, not even out of her teens, subjected to a horrific experience and under the total control of people who were both extraordinarily violent and politically inclined. Why would they not have made every effort to brainwash her, and what possible strength could she have drawn on that would have enabled her to successfully resist?

But when I tried to argue that these things were even a possibility I was shouted down. I seemed to be in an extreme minority. I vividly recall attending a dinner with my parents and about four other couples who were their friends—liberal Democrats all, people with children roughly around the age of Patty Hearst. I’d known all these people my entire life and had never had a political argument or even a disagreement with them, and they’d always seemed to be relatively mild-mannered. Several of them were in the field of social work, a profession that one might think would predispose them towards sympathy for Patty’s plight.

But no. In fact, the topic of Patty brought out a surprising rage in them. If Patty were ever to be captured, she should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There was absolutely no possibility, they screamed at me, that she hadn’t done all of this of her own free will, and there should be no excuses made. I was a gullible fool.

It seemed to me that all the frustrations of parents of the 60s and early 70s towards the excesses of their offspring—the long hair and the pot-smoking and the open sexuality and the music and the refusal to follow in those parents’ footsteps and become doctors and lawyers and upstanding community members; the turning on and the dropping out and the living on the hippie communes, as one of my cousins had done (although her parents didn’t even know it was actually a naked hippie commune)—everything these parents had been swallowing, all the rage and confusion and hurt they hadn’t fully expressed towards their ungrateful children, was coming out in one great big rush at Patty Hearst, who symbolized it all.

I decided to wait and reserve judgment. As it turned out, I had a long time to wait.

[To be continued in Part II, tomorrow….]