In  Stephen Kinzer’s recent book “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future,” the author, writing as a regional expert in Middle East  history and politics, has attempted to formulate a new pathway for reconciliation in the Middle East, one that advocates a lasting peace and insures prosperity for the region, by reducing the tensions through recruiting two new players in the peace process that heretofore have not been inserted as major partners for a settlement. This new vision for peace, includes the participation of  Turkey and Iran as major players, two countries that would probably not be on the top of the list drawn up by most Americans. We are still locked in a mode in which we think negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel can lead to a magical formula for peace, but only if thousands of clauses and sub-agreements get adopted as conditions for talks or preconditions for peace. But Kinzer argues that until all the major players in the region are included, such negotiations are all destined to fail. He argues that a negotiation strategy between two partners only is completely naive and that the United States needs to more maturely step up to the plate and insist on a peaceful solution involving all those in the region, because the stakes are too high for the economies of the world to continue taking oil in exchange for arming every country to the teeth, in order to protect the national interests of each new nation that comes to the area looking for black gold. Furthermore, Kinzer argues that bringing in Iran and Turkey will make the peace process easier, though the United States will have to deal with Iran more effectively than what we have done to date, and a big step forward for that objective could be achieved if the U.S. stopped behaving like an emotional child towards Iran and finally recognized the fact that Iran is a major player, not a minor leaguer, and that our invasion of Iraq helped to make it that way. Are you listening Dick Cheney?

Continued conflict in the Middle East increasingly risks the danger of evoking a wider conflict between any number of countries that are increasingly competitive with one another in hopes of establishing oil contracts in the new cutthroat game of searching for scarce new oil and gas leases, as China, India, Japan, South Korea and many other countries have become and will continue to insist on being players in the region. The history of the United States in viewing Persian Gulf oil as something that it owns, sparked in part by the “Carter policy,” and preceded by FDR’s secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945, to provide their protection in exchange for rights to the Saudi oil fields–all that history seems to be the policy mantra that we are moving forward with, which cannot help but evoke serious conflicts in the future: not that the region needs any new ones. It wasn’t just 9/11 that changed things for us, it was the emergence of a new world-wide panic that we are headed for “global peak oil.”

Kinzer has written several books about the Middle East. One of my favorites is “All the Shah’s Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” published in 2003 that explains how the CIA, at the request of the British Government, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 because he had nationalized what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (today’s BP); the United States replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza, the son of Reza Pahlavi), who in turn, was overthrown in the 1979 coup that led to the Islamic cleric Khomeini as Iran’s new leader.   The success the CIA had in overthrowing Mossadegh, served as the U.S. template for eliminating other democratic governments in favor of installing autocratic despots, especially in South American countries, beginning with Guatemala in 1954. The point of all this CIA intrigue was supposedly based on an assault against communism, but every American should know by now that it was really all about securing a favorable climate for American corporate interests. The Truman administration refused to act on the British outrage (Truman apparently admired Mossadegh), of the nationalized oil company, as they demanded return and control of Iranian oil. In fact, they had an embargo against Iran.   But, a few years later, during the Eisenhower years, when the CIA and the Secretary of State positions were occupied by  Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (each of whom favored American corporate interests over the sanctity of internal nationalist movements), they agreed to help the British re-establish their control of Iranian oil. According to Kinzer, we are still paying the price for what we did in overthrowing Moassadegh in 1953. When the Iranians revolted against the Shah, the Mossadegh story was the first one they mentioned to their American captives. Americans didn’t find out about the CIA overthrow until 2000, when the New York Times got hold of a secret CIA document and published the details of the story.

In his book “Reset,” Kinzer takes us through the early 20th century history of Turkey, the first democratic Muslim state and Iran, a more troubled country, but one with deep democratic instincts, as we all witnessed by the turmoil that took place following last year’s presidential election. In the 1920s, both Turkey and Iran generated leadership who were committed to advancing their countries through a pathway of secular modernity. In the case of Turkey, it was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, made famous by his military success at Galipoli,  who led Turkey from its planned destruction and occupation by the victors of WW I, through a decisive military victory over the Greek army,  followed by the consolidation of modern Turkey into a secular state. For Iran, the new leader to emerge was Reza Pahlavi who wanted to help modernize Iran through the formation of a secular state, using the Turkish model he admired. However, Reza had to settle for a new monarchy in which he was crowned king, as the 132 year old Qajar dynasty was abolished. The difference between the two countries was that Mustafa Kemal was successful in unseating the power of the clerics in Turkey, whereas Reza had to accommodate the religious leaders, which remains today as one of the fundamental differences between the two countries. But, as Kinzer points out, we need to form relationships with large countries that are committed to peace and democratic reforms. Turkey is already there and could be the first Muslim c0untry admitted to the European Union. They also have good relationships with Israel and they have gained experience in their diplomatic dealings with neighboring countries. Iran right now is a conflicted state, but one that cannot be ignored as a major player in any peace settlement for the region. Kinzer suggests that it may not be possible to deal with Iran right now, but our hardline attitude towards the country only insures that hardliners within Iran will have the advantage of leadership, much like how our attitude towards the Soviets during the Cold War extended the lifespan of their dictatorship; we surely prolonged the life of the Soviet Communist state through our obsessive confrontational policies.

Now is the time to recognize that the primary result of our invasion of Iraq was to strengthen the hand of Iran, who has become a far more important player in the region in the post-Iraq invasion world; our actions served to push Shiites in Iraq into leadership positions, and they have established friendly relationships with Iran. That’s as it should be and there’s no getting around it.  That train left the station the moment we entered Iraq and declared war on the Bathists. Today, we continually tell ourselves that our main fear is that Iran may be enriching Uranium on its way to building nuclear weapons. But there is very little evidence supporting that view and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which,  neither Israel nor India has signed.  In reality, what we are worried about with Iran is having a hostile country that is too close to our prized partner in oil production–Saudi Arabia. We had relied on the Shah of Iran, whom we armed to the teeth with American weapons, to serve as our surrogate army in the Middle East. But with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, something that dumbfounded our State Department,  together with the humiliation we endured when our embassy workers were kept hostage for more than a year, Iran quickly converted from friend to foe and ever since we have reacted like an emotional child to Iran, insuring that they in turn react emotionally towards us. Bush calling Iran a member of the “axis of evil” was hardly realistic or knowledgeable about our mutual history. But any realist can see that no peace settlement in the Middle East is possible without the inclusion of Iran as a major player and we have to recognize that our best partner for approaching the peace process is  Turkey. So we should be doing everything we can to facilitate Iran’s conversion to a more cooperative partner, and engaging Turkey as a full partner, not a messenger boy.

Few Americans are aware that Iran has been very cooperative with America in the post-9/11 era. Iran is a bitter enemy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the months following 9/11,  Iran and American officials met constantly. At the request of the U.S., Iran expelled hundreds of foreigners within its borders that the U.S. believed were connected to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  Iran connected the U.S. to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,  which we engaged to fight a proxy war in that country. In early 2003, after Bush’s silly “axis of evil” speech,  Iran tried to approach the United States in a cooperative mode. They proposed comprehensive talks and laid out an agenda in which the United States would end its “hostile behavior” towards Iran, lift the economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology and recognize its legitimate security interests. In exchange, Iran offered to do the two things demanded of them by the U.S.: full transparency in its nuclear program and the elimination of any material support for militant groups in the Middle East, specifically referring to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was the most forward-looking proposal that the U.S. had received from Iran in a quarter century and quite astonishingly (maybe not so surprising when you think about the American actors on the stage at the time), Bush turned the offer down because he and his cohorts wanted to destroy Iran not compromise with it. It is is simply mind-boggling to think that GWB would  turn down the Iranian offer for negotiations on the very issues we claimed were important to us, and all of this took place after he had given his axis of evil speech. It is sometimes hard to know whether the destructive hard line attitudes that prevent reproach between the two countries belong to the U.S. or Iran. Perhaps a little of both. But if our objective is that of establishing peace rather than dominance, we must recognize that Iran cannot be left out of the equation. I haven’t done justice to Kinzer’s book “Reset,” but it’s a fascinating read and brings a whole new perspective to the  equation table that we will need before we have a legitimate and just fix for the Middle East. One of the problems we face in confronting issues of the Middle East is that of basic competency and judgment on the part of our State Department. Kinzer talks about the acute need for sage officials among our diplomatic corps, and stresses a time when we did have a better, more informed State, which had a more longitudinal view of the world. As he talks about the need for more cultural knowledge of Iran, he quotes Nassir Ghaemi who is knowledgeable about both countries. Ghaemi points out that i) Americans are willing to compromise principle for results; Iranians are willing to sacrifice results to principle; ii) Americans worship the future, Iranians the past; iii) Americans value forthrightness and simplicity while Iranians prefer complexity and iv) Americans have imbibed science while Iranians have done the same with literature. Yet, despite these cultural differences, Americans and Iranians have far more in common and it is this larger, common set of values that should bring Iran and America into a much closer alignment, particularly when thinking about the gravity of the issues that must be solved if more serious conflict is to be avoided.

RFM

Twain was an avowed anti-militarist and abhorred the empire wars he watched America engage in, including the Spanish American war, in which he describes, in the new biography, American soldiers fighting in Cuba as “our uniformed assassins.” You can see why the author of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” might pause before allowing remarks such as that to come into print during his lifetime. But Mark Twain had a tragic life. He almost committed suicide once in San Francisco before he became a famous writer, after which he experienced serious debt problems and witnessed the loss of many of his family members to sudden illness. Twain was a great humorist, but his sharp sense of humor was the frosting that covered a layer cake of tragedy and worry. Nearly everyone has read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, as it remains required reading in public schools (I hope). Twain once said that he is not an American, he is the American and who can disagree.

As we all await the first of the three new volumes on Mark Twain’s autobiography to arrive, you might find it interesting to review the life of Mark Twain as told in the excellent documentary by Ken Burns, available on Netflix as a DVD or streaming video.

When thinking about human evolution, I can’t help but remind myself of  one of the remarks that Twain made, which  surfaces in the Ken Burns documentary. He said “I think God invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.” As one of Twain’s biographers said, what made Twain unique was space and slavery. The America Twain grew up in was a gigantic space, unrivaled as such in the known world and slavery was a part of that new space, which any humanitarian had to address. Twain did address slavery, after the Civil War in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“, published in 1885; in so doing, he changed forever the American understanding of slavery, race and prejudice. It has been argued that without “Huck Finn” the civil rights legislation of the 1960s could never have been passed, or at least it would have been considerably more delayed. The cultural penetration of a great novel, when read by most Americans,  is hard to deny but not easy to fathom.

At the time of his death, Mark Twain, who had struggled all his life against the Samuel Clemens within him, was the most famous writer in the world and, when seen walking the streets of any city in the world, would be surrounded by people hoping to hear a remark from him about any subject that pleased him. He adored and sought out visible public adulation and was comfortable speaking on virtually anything that pleased him. In general, when he spoke, it also pleased those that gathered to hear his remarks.

RFM

The American press, which normally gives a green light for our national  misadventures abroad, but particularly the New York Times, found itself trying to defend against Chomsky’s analysis about bias of coverage over a brutal war that would have made us look bad, except for the fact that the invasion of East Timor in the 1970s received virtually no attention from the press, with a few rare but notable exceptions. Chomsky knew this, because he counted up the number of newspaper citations and compared it directly with the coverage for the better known atrocities in Cambodia (a right-wing (East Timor)  vs left-wing (Cambodia) government–that distinction also played a major role).  He claims to have learned more about East Timor by reading British and Canadian articles as virtually nothing appeared in the American newsprint or in television coverage. The conflict Chomsky referred to as one left out of media attention, was that of the East Timor invasion by Indonesia in 1975, which we supported, as we looked the other way when mass genocide against the indigenous people of the region was carried out by the invading army, using American made military hardware. Chomsky compares press coverage of East Timor with that of Cambodia under Pol Pot, who came to power after we invaded the country and deposed Prince Sihanouk. When Pol Pot took over, his objective was to install  a harsh, left wing government, which he implemented through policies of dislocation and genocide in what became known as the “killing fields” of Cambodia. Why asks Chomsky, did East Timor get nearly zero coverage from the NYT, while Cambodia got a lot, when both events were associated with mass genocide and were equally indefensible? Chomsky’s critics have always been waiting for him to make some sort of blunder and then pounce on what appears to be a self-inflicted mortal wound, only to discover that Chomsky’s mistake was usually one of misinterpretation on their part,  rather than his lack of consistency or a failure of his encyclopedic knowledge of events and reporting. I don’t think anyone is better at that than Chomsky.

A good example of one interesting case in the documentary took place when a French professor, Faurisson, claimed the holocaust was a hoax; he was put on trial by the French government and found guilty of distorting history. You may remebmer this case. Chomsky, as well as many other academics throughout the world, signed a petition in support of Faurisson’s right to make his statement, without passing judgment on the statement per se. Chomsky’s many detractors seized on this as an opportunity to caste him as an anti-Semite, though he himself is Jewish and was brought up within a strong, liberal Jewish tradition in New York. The documentary showed the numerous engagements he went through to establish the academically defensible point that a person should be free to advocate their position and leave it to the evidence presented to determine whether a rational case was established by the assertion. On other occasions, Chomsky went on to thoroughly destroy the argument that the holocaust did not take place and eventually seemed to win the day over those who thought they had finally caught him in an indefensible position. But as he said, “I defended his right to say it, not what he said.” He then accused the French Government of putting themselves into a Stalinist-like state by making a legal decision about which history was correct and which was not (holocaust or no holocaust) . So he touched on just about everyone. The presence and actions of Vichy France during WW II have made the French very sensitive to this issue, since they participated in the persecution of Jews and helped ship 70,000 French Jews to the “East” as part of the final solution; only about 3% of them ever returned.

Quite predictably, I found myself deeply resonating with Chomsky as he was portrayed, while I was at the same time a bit astonished to see how many of his ideas don’t or didn’t penetrate with sufficient clarity to most people, at least those with whom he interacted on the video clips. Because of Chomsky’s dogged persistence and his unfailing attention to detail (with some lapses), I think we have a much better appreciation of him during the last decade or so and then too, the militaristic nature of our country, thanks to GW Bush, has been much more thoroughly exposed and perhaps revealed as a nation-state, more loathsome to at least some sensible Americans, than one might ever have imagined. At least we better understand Chomsky’s views and his critique on social issues and war. His positions on issues are hardly radical: he believes that a just society should take care of everyone and stay out of conflicts that unnecessarily kill people. He argues that WW II was justified, but nothing since has risen to the threshold requiring military action. Throughout his career as an activist, Chomsky has always harbored a special dislike for governments as well as a particularly strong dislike for our government and our support of vicious,  right-wing governments, who will do the bidding of Corporate America, such as those we helped  establish and prop up throughout South America after WW II, right up to the present day.

Chomsky  is a prodigious writer who gave up a successful academic career as a linguist to pursue the social and political ideology for which he is better known. Yet, eighteen years after the documentary was made, one can see what was missing from Chomsky’s arguments, something for which we have a much better appreciation today, as a result of accumulated studies of the brain, which impact on our views of human brain function and how political bias gets established therein. This new level of understanding, though hardly complete, has come about through contemporary studies in neuroscience as well as the encroachments from molecular biology and brain imaging studies using the methods of fMRI, PET (positron emission tomography) and MEG (magneto encephalography). These insights have established a more solid foundation for further speculation about brain function, bias and the failures of our frontal lobes to be given rational access to our experiences. As humans, we have an enormous capacity for learning and creativity. Chomsky’s “manufacturing consent” needs a redux. Here’s what one might add for a new version of the documentary.

Chomsky was a leader in pointing out that language is not the act of creating utterances on a blank sheet of auditory neurons, but is in fact, a reflection of genetic programming within the brain, which makes a human baby very different from that of an infant chimpanzee for example, or for that matter, any other primate.  At two months of age, a human infant begins to babble language sounds and perfects them through listening to humans around him/her, a process that reflects a voracious appetite for expressing and receiving language, fed by the energy of their pre-programmed neural circuits, highly tuned for language acquisition. Even children who are born deaf, utter language sounds, though their babbling eventually subsides due to the lack of auditory feedback. Different languages have enough similarities such that phonetic rules are learned and the native language is spoken well before our children go to school. Some languages are phonetically easier to master than others and Italian children for example can speak their language two years before children raised in English-speaking families. Eventually humans have a storage capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 words!

“Manufacturing consent” as Chomsky and co-author  Herman point out, paints a picture, not of a conspiracy theory in which some committee in the New York Times editorial office or a government agency meets to shield us from the reality of our atrocities abroad. Rather, the process of bias reflects an entrainment which loads our mental dice, so that when called upon to roll a winner, we mostly get snake eyes!  We tend to look the other way when information flows into our brains that runs counter to the grain of our private national image, as we focus and emphasize instead the affairs that enhance the internal image we  project about ourselves and the views we have adopted that are supposed to guide our international behavior. It runs against our many mental programs to imagine we are out there in the real world somewhere murdering innocent people, or at least facilitating such behavior. We are capable of a search mode that runs beneath the conscious, declarative mode of verbalized behavior. It also helps, that, in the case of newspapers like the New York Times, the paper does better in terms of advertising and their subscription rate when they rock the boat only intermittently or not at all. But, in attempting to describe this reality bias, Chomsky moves from the genetic code of language, where he is obviously very much at home, to a behavioral interpretation, as if we suddenly switched from Chomsky as the genetic linguist to Skinner as the behaviorist, using a slate of blank neurons for encoding. But brain studies have suggested another kind of genetic code for brain wiring and function, maybe several, though each of these additional coding modes is far more difficult to trace when compared to the development of our linguistic apparatus. There may well be many different  language mechanisms for which humans are “primed” for intense learning as part of our adaptive pre-programmed brain structure. Our motor control, sensory integration and emotional make-up may all reflect programmatic coding to start us out on the road to success as an evolutionary wonder!

Humans are born early and mature late. A chimpanzee reaches young adult stage at about 7 years after birth, whereas humans stretch that out to at least 12 years and our brains are still growing and maturing even during our late teen years. There is evidence that brain mechanisms involving the amygdala for example, which helps us avoid dangerous circumstances, may not fully kick-in until the mid-twenties, leading to the irrational behavior, for example, of Olympic competitors achieving sub-orbital heights on a snow board! What adult would do such things?

With the growth of our brain, we stretch the developmental period out, the purpose of which is to enhance our capacity as great, natural learners, full of curiosity and eager to figure out how things work, before full cultural responsibility comes to rest on our shoulders. Anthropologists like to express the problem of prolonged maturity to the limits imposed by our big brains, which  need to go through the birth canal early, because the imposing physical constraints, thus rendering us more dependent at birth and slower on the uptake, when compared to other primates. Our prolonged developmental period was almost surely related to our survival, particularly as the African continent of our origins became less of a tree-filled jungle and more like the Africa of today, during which time, we came out of the trees and, as bipeds, began to compete with other carnivores for food and sometimes as well, we became the target of their predatory behavior. There is fossil evidence to suggest that humans were confronted with new environmental challenges which served as the stimulus for brain growth and enhanced our brain resources for improved adaptability. One issues seems well established: when our ancestor first stood up and walked as humanoids, their brain size was initially small; it was only later that hominid brain size showed rapid growth and development. Whatever advantages we gained by walking upright, it was not the stimulus of bipedalism that began the development of our larger brain size–that came later.

Phineas Gage Head Wound

The main feature of the human brain that we can appreciate today, compared with those of apes and our distant ancestors of several million years ago,  is the growth of the brain in general, but more especially the growth of our frontal lobes. It is this region of our brain that seems to house much of our social skills, personalities and the capacity for long-term planning. These complex functions of our frontal lobes first came to our attention through Phineas Gage, who, in 1848, had a tamping rod explode through his orbit and destroy much of his frontal lobes, reducing his capacity to deal with abstract issues and suffering from a dramatic change in personality. When you read the description of Phineas Gage and his post-accident behavioral changes, you have the feeling that you are reading about contemporary Republicans/teabaggers. Naturally, the Republican brain is quite different from that of normal humans with respect to our frontal lobes. But, we briefly digressed.

As one example of our brain/behavioral repertoire, just thinking about moving our finger let’s say, instead of actually moving them,  switches the prominent activity center of our brain, as determine by fMRI studies, from the precentral gyrus (where motor commands originate) to a more frontal lobe location (supplementary motor area (SMA)), which is one site where planning our motor actions take place, just as the better known Broca’s area of the left frontal lobe serves as the motor planning region for vocalizing language.

Our capacity to rapidly develop language is likely to be only one of many genetic programs that we have embedded within the millions of neural circuits residing in our cerebral cortex, all derived from the process of natural selection, whose original function was that of optimizing our chances for survival. And, it isn’t all just cerebral cortex: lying within the cerebral hemispheres underneath the cortex, the basal ganglia get massive input from the cortex and feed back through cortical projections; the cerebellum receives at least two loops of impulses, one of which precedes our movements, while the second loop modifies our movements once they are being executed. New imaging data suggests that even the cerebellum, once considered to be a strictly motor organ (where much of our motor-based non-declarative memories are formed) may be involved in cognitive functions as well. This story is far from over, as it represents an increasingly expanded view of human cognitive brain functions.

Most of the coding mechanisms in our brains, those outside of language, such as our social interactions, either depend on or are facilitated by language acquisition. So it is natural to ask how long spoken language has been within the hominid ancestral clans? Well, the brain doesn’t leave a fossil record, so one has to rely on other kinds of evidence, like skull size and depressions in the skill to derive the composition of the brain and guesstimate the presence or absence of language. All of this leaves great uncertainty and doubt. Some have speculated that language mechanisms have been with us for perhaps several million years, although, as we know from our social history, the written forms of language have been with us for only 4,000 years or so. If true, it implies that language is an innate, pre-programmed component of our brain structure, while the capacity to recognize written words is a very recent acquisition, too recent to have found an evolutionary niche in our brain structures and programed genetics. Nevertheless, the fact that our visual memory system seems to have created a visual “letterbox” where knowledge of written words is housed, implies that we had to crowd out some other cortical function in order to have knowledge of the written word. As many as 17% of us cannot read normally and fall into the diagnostic category of dyslexia.

In the last few years, enthusiasm has developed over a single gene that some feel might represent a unique gene  for expressive language. The FOXP2 gene was discovered in a group of individuals with an inherited incapacity to develop language and was eventually discovered in the Neanderthal genome to have the exact same form as the normal human. This gene appears to differ in several important ways from the equivalent in other primates. Many took this to mean that Neanderthals used language. Part of the FOXP2 gene appears to generate a transcription factor that controls other genes, but it is still unclear from the studies carried out so far if the FOXP2 gene can serve as the gene for language. Many of the large group that suffered language deficiency with a point mutation in the FOXP2 gene also had low intelligence, which itself can cause language deficiencies. So, at the moment, the scientific community is properly divided on the subject of this gene and how much it has to do with language. Is FOXP2 the the master or merely another slave of speech and language acquisition? We will be hearing a lot more about this gene in the future.

The brain of course is a highly plastic organ and, once we are born, our brains go to work constructing themselves according to the experiences to which we are exposed. This goes on throughout the day and probably takes place during our sleep, as recent studies are beginning to show that sleep is a form of re-practicing what was learned the previous day. Though our retina appears to be a hard-wired structure, the visual cortex behind it is not. The plasticity of the cortex can change connections according to the visual experiences of the individual. As I sometimes have said to my students, we spend the first thirty years of our lives constructing a brain we can live with and the next thirty years trying to figure out the brain we constructed. Some never get it right. During the early growth period of our lives, the acquisition of culture has the same kinds of driving mechanisms we see for language. We intensely absorb the cultural and social elements around us and the behavior and ideas of those with whom we come in contact, as we try to sort out and stamp out our cultural phenotype. Just as surely as a French child growing up in a French family learns to speak French, a child growing up in a teabaggers environment, with both parents speaking cultural teabaggereeze, will become a teabagger child.

But the frontal lobes of our brains are always exercising another one of the programmatic options, that of longitudinal evaluation and it is during this period, long after we started school, that the opportunity exists, by sharing information with and through others, that the teabagger children have an opportunity to unteabag themselves. Sometimes this happens through a “Eureka” moment from a memorable teacher and sometimes it occurs when taking a college course. For many of my friends growing up in Salt Lake City Utah and coming from a Mormon background, it was the early interactions with others who had question marks about the validity of Mormon doctrine and the recognition that a demarcation line existed–a line in the sand so to speak. The heart of Mormonism demanded that everyone had to accept things that the church said were true. And, mostly this worked. But, for a few, myself included, we opted, perhaps unconsciously,  for the alternative brain mechanism I refer to as “the frontal lobe longitudinal program option,” which planted little seeds of doubt about the story that was too fantastic to neatly fit into an acceptable belief program–it couldn’t fit into the frontal lobe compartments when such knowledge would then be nominated for long-term memory and reflexive cortical behavior. Compounding this early nugget of uncomfortable disbelief, was the attitude that we didn’t want to believe something that wasn’t true. Suppose for example, you were told that the grizzly bears that have been attacking farmers and killing sheep, sleep in nearby caves and are incapacitated during sleep, such that they can easily be approached and killed. If you were asked to join the party that was going to eliminate the grizzlies one night, you would want to know whether the story was absolutely true and you would certainly want to talk to someone who had been on such a killing trip and even then you might and should be wary, as your very survival would be at stake. If you declined to join the grizzly party and later discovered many were killed by an angry awakened grizzly during the night, it would make survival sense for you to avoid seeking additional knowledge from the group. So too with the Mormons.

Once the seeds of doubt get planted, the analytical programs of our minds begin to reshape our neural circuits, replacing older connections with new ones as the older cultural values get pushed out of the way in favor of the new intellect. It is highly stimulating to our brains to feel we have arrived at this new conclusion all by ourselves, even though it never happens on solo flights alone. But once a transition in brain thinking begins to take place, our physical brain is transformed: new synapses are added and older connections are pruned away. Thus, to some extent, we get to rebuild our brains! The seemingly subtle commitment that we make, when we decide we don’t want to believe something unless it’s true, unless there is some evidence we can verify, that is the first fatal step of demanding that religion convert itself into a science, where it cannot survive and voila! The link is broken. The requirement of “truth” and “proof” brings on a burden of evidence that no religion can meet, not the least of which is the Mormon church, because it is relatively new and a lot of information is available on its origins and deeds. Verifiability with Mormonism is a far easier task than it would be for Catholicism. All religions fall apart once the demand for evidence becomes an essential element for continued subscription to the belief system. I was always impressed that those of us who escaped Mormonism in Salt Lake City, all went on to graduate training or advanced professional degrees and had successful careers in a variety of academic and non-academic pursuits. Yet the Mormons we left behind, those that didn’t exercise their “frontal lobe filibuster toolbox”, remained as those who would accept without failure the teachings of the church, including the absurd ones that the book of Mormon was anything other than a nineteenth century fairy tale. Thus, rather early in my life, I resisted a form of brain development that was best served by the absence of a frontal lobe engagement, which committed the lives of non-doubting Mormons to a kind of self-imposed celibacy against the use of the frontal lobes, at least that’s the metaphorical explanation. Most Mormons are Republicans and the state of Utah overwhelmingly votes Republican, with the few Democrats that get elected also voting along the same conservative party line, at least at the national level.

Our developmental period of brain growth and maturation readily follows from another genetic code we see in the human brain–the need to be creative, social animals, coupled to our thirst for understanding how things work. This is also a gift of our greatly expanded frontal lobes, that have new connections now being described by fMRI, MEG and PET scanning images of the human brain during different kinds of cognitive processing. Whether these techniques can ever decipher the nature and substrate of our consciousness and higher mental capacities remains as a future aspiration. But, we know a little more today than we did ten years ago.

So, what Chomsky should say in the redux  version of his documentary is that the New York Times didn’t publish much on East Timor, while publishing a lot on Pol Pot and the Cambodian atrocities, because, though they were smart and well educated, the editors  didn’t understand that they were the prisoners of their many languages of the brain and had yet to go through a full frontal lobe review of their inconsistent behavior. The non-declarative memory, that parks itself somewhere within the brain, perhaps the cortex and in some cases, for some skills, in the cerebellum, represents a force that encourages decisions like the elimination of East Timor news from the pages of the New York Times. It’s the braining, not the training that eliminated East Timor!

But, while we’re at it, let’s not forget the biggest distortion in U.S. history ever perpetrated by an American President. That happened right after 9/11, when Bush said, referring to the attack,  “the terrorists hate our freedoms.” And that immediately established a political constituency of millions of Americans, including the swift boaters and the teabaggers,  who still believe that Bush identified with clarity the motivating factor of the 9/11 terrorists. To reaffirm this position, Cheney later spoke at the American Enterprise Institute where he said the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences” (what was he smoking?). As we all know, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, khalid sheikh mohammed, the person who probably also beheaded reporter Daniel Pearl, emphasized throughout his incarceration, that he planned 9/11 and other attempts to murder and harm Americans and Israelis, solely because of the way that the U.S. and Israel have treated the Palestinians and occupied their lands.  Bush’s statement makes no sense unless you appreciate the intelligence from which the statement came, whereas khalid sheikh mohammed’s statement will not earn him any relief from trial or outcome, so he has nothing to personally gain by making such a statement, which is  also widely corroborated by what the other plotters and planners have said all along. To swallow Bush and Cheney’s  assertion, you must suffer from severe frontal lobe atrophy and be denied the possibility of ever exercising your “frontal lobe longitudinal program option.”

[Note added: while there are many deficiencies in each of the main brain imaging methods in use today, none of which leads to an unambiguous determination of brain activity or provides us with a simple interpretation of brain function, the confluence of these methods has led to an entirely new culture of science on human brain function in which the efforts of psychologists (cognitive neuroscientists), neuroscientists, physiologists and imaging physicists are collaborating with the belief that their measurements are providing us with new revelations about brain function. Whether this new effort is taking us down the path to greater clarity about human brain function remains to be seen, but one can no longer ignore the fact that this group of scientists, using these methods, are making a significant contribution to clearing up the excessive number of houses on the market. It's a growth industry. One of the best books on this subject, though it is very focused on language and reading is "Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. In this book Dehaene discusses the current state of knowledge available to us from these imaging methods, at least as it applies to the subject at hand. I strongly recommend the book if you are looking for something on the modern view of language and brain function revealed by imaging methods.]

RFM

The day after the NPR airing appeared,  FAIR posted an alert that expressed outrage at the segment and emphasized how, when William Buckley died in 2008, NPR aired no less than six segments, all of which featured glowing tributes to him, despite the fact that he accomplished little of intellectual significance. So, the argument goes, if NPR arranged things so that Buckley received only positive eulogies from his friends and admirers, why should Zinn be given the bipolar treatment? The FAIR article evoked many responses that were quickly posted and led to a general expression of outrage by his friends, colleagues, liberals and progressives: in other words, most of the good people left in the country were pissed.
Now perhaps it was the light weight intellectual timbre of Buckley that didn’t prompt NPR to “balance” the eulogies with at least one mud-slinger who could offer some balance to Buckley’s glossy veneer finish, as Horowitz attempted for  Zinn (apparently encouraged by Keyes).  In Buckley’s case, one could easily mount a juggernaut of offensive slurs about his sordid, right-wing history (I have commented previously on some of Buckley’s background, especially as it relates to turning the right-wing from its anti-war conservativism/libertarianism at the close of  WW II,  to the party of bombs-away, dominated by the neocons of today. That would have made for a much richer and more accurate account of Buckley’s life, even without the slurs.  Buckley also worked for the FBI as a student spy at Yale and later for the CIA, at which time his boss was the mysterious Howard Hunt). While Buckley is forgettable, Zinn is not: he will live on as a cultural icon, elevating for all time, our awareness of the history of those who suffered the genocidal actions of the discoverers and developers of the new world. The list of those who perished because they were obstacles in the creation of the American empire reaches into the many millions.

There are many conservative historians who, unlike Horowitz,  have legitimate academic pedigrees, and do not regard Howard Zinn as a serious historian. Arthur Schlesinger Jr commented that Zinn was a “polemicist, not a historian,”  and the British historian Paul Johnson recently described Zinn as a poor historian during his 3 hour C-Span series which aired on 2/7/2010. The fault line between these two views of history, the pro and anti-Zinn views, happens to be whether you are concerned with the history of the winners or that of those who perished and, in some cases, ceased to exist along the way. One is a purely pragmatic, presumably objective form of history (which it is not)  and the other tries to inject a moral and behavioral tone or the lack thereof into the motives of those we still celebrate, such as  Christopher Columbus. As a historian, Johnson is concerned with the behavior of America as a great empire, the world’s only superpower. He is an American Enterprise fellow who would identify with Henry Kissinger’s remarks, when he responded to a question about why we invaded Iraq, by saying “Afghanistan wasn’t big enough.” In other words, the empire demands a high price for those that transgress against it and the empire needs to be properly fed in such a way that the world will see the heavy toll that must be extracted whenever a violation of our global  hegemony takes place.  Iraq committed no act of aggression against America, but she paid a heavy price, one we extracted from the country and its citizens for the “transgressions” against us that were never committed (historian Johnson remains in favor of our invasion of Iraq–it’s what great empires do). But, as a result of that war, the “empire” was badly depleted of resources, sent spinning into deep debt and has yet to learn the true cost of the war, which may ultimately be in the several  $ trillion level.

Of equal importance is whether the “empire” gained anything by our invasion of Iraq. While we plotted different strategies on the military side during our long occupation,  we kept one eye on Iraqi oil, with perhaps the second largest oil reserves in the world. Yet, while bogged down with the military side of our invasion, the Chinese quietly came in and now look as though they might get a good share of the oil contracts, together with mining arrangements that make the neocon strategy seem completely senseless if not downright stupid. The deplorable cost in lives and our destruction of a functional, literate society cannot be viewed as a good outcome, even by the measure of a hegemonic empire,  so we deny the true numbers of Iraqi deaths and place doubts on those that attempt to do accurate assessment of the damage and death toll of our wars (Bush called the Lancet data “flawed”).  Some on the right have said that there are no innocents in Iraq!  If our invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are the sensible things that world powers do, what constitutes a failed state and is it possible that we are already there or asymptotically approaching that point? It is high time we ask the question that William Pfaff recently posed:  “Has it been a terrible, and by now all but irreversible, error for the United States to have built a system of a thousand or more military bases and stations girdling the world? Does it provoke war, rather than providing security?” What’s your best guess?

To my knowledge, the criticisms that are leveled against Howard Zinn’s interpretation of history, by emphasizing what happened to the other side, those whom our ancestors trampled on, and the policies which keep those same attitudes in play today, don’t challenge Zinn’s facts or his basic scholarship. He certainly qualifies as a polemicist because he does oppose the traditional history of the American empire, but through his book, with sales of more than a million, has he established a view that one can take without the charge of polemicy? But anyone who reminds us of those we eliminated on the way to the creation of our “empire” are, by some accounts, studying the wrong side of history.

Those who scorn Howard Zinn’s  “A People’s History of the United States” are Social Darwinists who are content with the view that societies succeed or fail through the same mechanisms that govern individual species, in which the strong survive and the weak fade from view. But that view is firmly ignorant of the more recent concept of Sociobiology advanced by E.O. Wilson in which the success and survival future of the individual is acquired through their supportive role which helps to guarantee the survival of the larger social unit, the clan or in the clan of today, modern civilization. Which society will be ultimately better equipped to face the threats that are increasingly apparent in the form of global climate change? Successful reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide will require the cooperation of virtually all countries. If America exported its high carbon footprint to the rest of the world, the planet would face almost certain doom from carbon dioxide intoxication that could reach irreversible atmospheric concentrations and permanently change the globe to a planet that could not support the 9 billion human inhabitants expected as our steady state population. Perhaps our military is already preparing for this possibility. Will the United States face the global threats of decreased oil as a member of a cooperative global effort or will we use our vast military resources to insure our energy future? Isn’t that what we have been trying to do in the Middle East, without much to show for it? Howard Zinn would have suggested that an expression of concern and support for those with whom we must share planetary space is the better, moral strategy and would generate a new history for America that Americans won’t have to dodge, as they do for our history of the last two hundred fifty years. Howard Zinn’s history of the American People is now being taught in many public and private schools throughout the country. Perhaps the straight line pathway to a demilitarized America, one better prepared to deal with our planetary future, goes through the Howard Zinns and not through the Henry Kissingers of our future.

RFM

Howard Zinn believed in a permanent state of revolutionary zeal, always challenging the established authority, with movements that begin at the bottom. He did not see the election process as a major solution to our problems, but viewed elections as a cushion used by the ruling elites to soften and absorb the misery of our war-making elitism, carried out within an inequitable society. He gauged success of movements by what they achieved for the disenfranchised, those on the bottom rungs of the ladders of racism and economic disparity. His writing and his personal history emphasized the power of movements that begin at the bottom of society and from there blossom into a populist surge, which inevitably becomes corrupted, absorbed and dampened by the ruling elites. But slowly, these movements have an impact, although the never-ending process must be continuously refreshed from below. Zinn didn’t look at the failure of a social movement to make change as failure per se, but saw such terminal events as indicating the need for new refreshed fomenting from below. The erosion of the middle class in America and the shocking growth of poverty and homelessness are the forces created by the ruling elites to suppress grand social movements from taking root at their historical source, where  social transitions in the past have ignited and changed America for the better. Zinn was only modestly approving of Obama and since his election was highly critical of him for his escalation of the war in Afghanistan. There is at least some discussion about creating a social forum and structure in the name of the two giants that have represented the voices of the people in the latter have of the 20th century–Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Who will follow such influential scholars?

RFM

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn passed away yesterday at age 87. He was a progressive historian who wrote many books but is best known for “A People’s History of the United States,” which tells the story of how the indigenous people were treated by the early European explorers and the Americans, including the exploitations and wars right up to the modern era. If you read that book, you cannot help but think we are doing a great injustice to our own humanity by celebrating “Columbus Day.” Columbus was a murderous slave trader with no redeeming characteristics, whose drive for gold obscured any capacity to see the beauty of the people and the newly discovered land he found himself in (but he never saw North America). For most progressives, this book serves as a kind of rite of passage and, for those of you yearning for more progressive literature, there is no better starting place than Howard Zinn’s book. But he also wrote many other books.

Howard  directly experienced war as a bombardier in a WW II bomber in the European theater. His conscience was ignited when his group was asked to bomb a French city that was rumored to still have Germans in it after most had already retreated from France. This experience forced him to confront a moral dilemma of whether one could justify indiscriminate bombing of a civilian area, particularly when the enemy in that region was probably ready to surrender. What was the purpose of that bombing? Eventually, through the GI bill,  Zinn obtained his Ph.D. in history and began his life as a college professor. His teaching of this alternative view of history, namely the history of what happened to the indigenous people as a result of European expansionism into the new world, has you wondering what kind of people were these early explorers? And what were the moral principles used by the Americans who committed genocide against the American Indians? But, he also explores the moral ground of Vietnam and the panoply of militarism we find ourselves in today.  Zinn’s book was recently adapted for a History Channel TV presentation “The People Speak,” with readings taken from his book that testify to the power of individuals when they are confronted with an oppressive government. His message is strong: Americans need to take back their government, stop the wars and killing and address the world as a friend, without searching under the rocks for enemies. Hopefully more young Americans will be exposed to Howard Zinn’s work and begin to question the false, politically motivated version of history that all of us received in our public school education. Actor Matt Damon grew up next to Howard Zinn in Boston and read his book on “The Peoples History”  as he was writing it. Damon was one of the producers who adapted parts of Zinn’s book for the History television program.

Howard Zinn was an activists activist. In 1967 he published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. When Daniel Ellsberg was fleeing with the Pentagon Papers and needed a place to hide out, he went to Howard Zinn who took him in and shielded him until the papers could get published and put into the congressional record. Both men should have been awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for that one.

Zinn’s entire life as a professor was dedicated to speaking out against war and supporting civil rights and doing so by applying a moral metric to the dilemma. He always framed the issues that way. When Bush decided to invade Iraq, Zinn was opposed and said,

• “If Bush starts a war, he will be responsible for the lives lost, the children crippled, the terrorizing of millions of ordinary people, the American GIs not returning to their families. And all of us will be responsible for bringing that to a halt.

• Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.”

Howard Zinn wrote extensively for The Progressive. Several eulogies of Howard Zinn are posted  there by Elizabeth DiNovella and Matthew Rothschild. But, perhaps the best tribute is Amy Goodman’s interviews on Democracy Now with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Alice Walker and Anthony Arnove.

If you are frustrated by the lack of progress on liberal issues, Howard Zinn had a special message for you:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Howard Zinn is one of the great irreplaceable giants in our progressive movement. But thankfully, his words will live on and hopefully his book will become the alternative Bible for addressing the moral dilemma of how we as a nation treat people. With his help, Americans might finally begin to learn their own history.  Howard Zinn’s website is here, where additional information on his life and books can be obtained. There are two Netflix documentaries on/by Howard Zinn in 2006 and 2004.

RFM

When McCarthyism ended in the 1950s, America did not pull back to some previous, blissful iteration of itself, but remained at a new level of anti-intellectualism that destroyed New Deal liberalism, neutered the United Nations and allowed the Korean and Vietnam Wars to develop without cautionary input from a more liberal and scholarly point of view. Had a more balanced viewpoint been available, both wars could have been avoided: each was a war of ignorance.  In many ways, those who had their lives shattered or died during those two conflicts can place direct blame for them at the doorstep of McCarthyism. A new version of McCarthyism was ushered in by the events of 9/11, resulting in  our present state of exaggerated paranoia and fear about the threat of terrorism, associated with reductions in civil liberties and suppression of those with more progressive ideas about conducting a rational foreign policy instead of one derived purely from emotional reactions: those alternative voices have been silenced once again by charges of treason against our national cause or being soft on protecting American lives. One person thoroughly familiar with the methods of Joseph McCarthy is Karl Rove.

President Harry Truman paved the way for McCarthy’s purges by signing Executive Order 9835 in 1947, making it possible to dismiss Federal employees who were found to be disloyal Americans. Truman was undoubtedly reacting to the Republican sweep of the 1946 election and was trying to firm up his own image as an anticommunist, in anticipation of his own election campaign coming up the following year. But the executive order had far reaching national implications: eventually “loyalty review” boards and offices sprang up in state, city and community neighborhoods to weed out the New Deal liberals from the grass roots of America. McCarthy began his style of attack in 1950, claiming that there were many subversives in the State Department, as he waived a list of names that varied in number from 57 to 81, depending the day of his pronouncement. His initial claim was met with widespread public attention and apprehension, with his base of operations carried out within the Tydings Senate Committee, who would call public officials and private citizens accused of subversive activities, to testify, while  denying the accused access to the information that would be used against them by special “witnesses” or other documentation, much of which was fabricated or exaggerated by the FBI.

The proceedings of the Tydings Committee  became something of a three-ring circus, in which an accusation from McCarthy was enough to damage lives, terminate careers and render accused Americans out of work and unemployable. It was a witch hunt in which the agreed objective was to validate the charges brought against the individual even if you had to distort or fabricate the evidence to convict. McCarthy’s targets were typically prominent figures and the easy ones were those in Hollywood or academia that had been members of the Communist Party, even though the party was a legally registered political party within the United States. One objective McCarthy had for initially restricting his charges to the State Department, was to purge the department of liberals who might suggest foreign policy alternatives other than the ideology of anticommunism. This was a particularly important issue for the Right, as they wanted to support the Nationalist Chinese through Chiang kai shek.  Anyone suggesting a more enlightened approach to the conduct of our foreign affairs could be charged and purged from the State department. McCarthy’s objectives were to suppress the State Department, shatter the New Deal liberalism and neuter the promises embodied in the United Nations towards a cooperative drive for World peace. The lasting influence of McCarthyism allowed the Korean and Vietnam wars to unfold with predictable disaster, because the knowledgeable people that tried to steer us clear of a one-sided liaison with the anticommunists in China for example, were discredited by McCarthy and charged with losing China to the communists as part of their subversive actions; the emotional state of blindly identifying communism as our mortal enemy, especially in Asia, left no room for any enlightened policy to develop that could have avoided the conflicts in Asia into which we fell, blindly trapped by a false ideology: as a nation, we were unable to see that Ho Chi Min and Mao Zedong were both nationalists, trying to unite their countries and remove the influence of foreign imperialism. Indeed, Ho Chi Min was inspired by our own Declaration of Independence and wrote a letter to Truman asking him not to allow the French back into his country (Truman never responded).  Thanks to McCarthyism, few within our government would challenge the new orthodoxy of blind obedience to anticommunism,  because the appearance of being soft on communism could cost you your job and destroy your future.

McCarthy’s influence might have been more pervasive had he not leveled charges of espionage against one man who fought back defiantly and brilliantly: Owen Lattimore, director of the Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins, was accused of being the top Russian espionage agent in America and, McCarthy claimed to have supporting evidence and testimony from sources that would corroborate his accusations. In those days, a charge such as that carried with it a sentence of guilty and anyone accused with such a morally reprehensible act as treason, would have an uphill battle to save his/her reputation, job, financial security and personal dignity. The accused often destroyed themselves by their testimony during congressional hearings.

Owen Lattimore was our most knowledgeable and experienced scholar on Central Asia at the time McCarthyism began to take root.  Born in the United States in 1900, he spent the first 12 years of his life growing up in China, as his father took a teaching position there shortly after he was born. During the 1920s, he lived in China and worked as a journalist and businessman as he traveled into remote regions of the country, absorbing the culture, learning the language and immersing himself in the history of the region. As early as 1927, he predicted that China and Russia would find it difficult to merge their cultures into a unified brand of “communism,” and that both countries would have difficulties with peoples along their border regions, including Mongols, Uigers, Kashaks and the “high tartary” (the Uigers of course have been in the news lately with violence in Urumqi and East Turkestan). Lattimore wrote numerous books on Asia, which led to his identity as America’s best Sinologist. He received fellowship support from Harvard that allowed him to continue his extensive travels in Asia. In 1933 Owen was given a paid position as the editor of Public Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Public Relations (IPR), an organization consisting of a group of international scholars and business leaders and largely funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. He continued to travel extensively in China during the tumultuous war years and was able to interview Chou En-lai and Mao Zedong. He deplored Japanese aggression and the prospect of a civil war in China, as he urged the U.S. to stop their aid to Japan. In fact, he predicted a war between the U.S. and Japan, with Russia gleefully on the sidelines. His warnings were validated in 1941 when the Soviet Union and Japan signed a Neutrality Pact. But within our government, Lattimore’s warnings were ignored and because of that, we were caught completely off guard by Pearl Harbor in December 1941. When the Japanese invasion of China began to compromise Lattimore’s ability to move through that country, he returned to the United States and accepted a position as the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, a position he retained from 1938-1950. It was there that his capacity as an outstanding teacher, lecturer and mentor surfaced, as the School attracted some of the most brilliant students who were interested in global geography, history and international relations. For a time, Hopkins became the leading University in America for Chinese and Mongolian studies. Lattimore was a rigorous scholar who insisted on documentation for every detail and claimed that “getting history right is a political act.” Although everyone was shocked when Lattimore was charged with espionage by McCarthy, in many ways, he was an unavoidable target. In his writings, he had always emphasized the value of an open discussion about foreign policy issues and he advocated that the United States should seek a balance in its relationship with China, favoring a position that benefited the people of that country. In that way he argued, the development of China would proceed along a course that benefited both the Chinese and our own interests in the region. In essence then, Lattimore was an pro-American internationalist, who felt that foreign policy should follow from an open discussion of the issues and the inclusion of scholarship and deep knowledge of the region. He was never a member of the communist party and was fairly apolitical, though, perhaps through his business experience, favored a more conservative philosophy; he never went through the liberalizing experience of getting an advanced degree at a time when the topic of governance was a major focus of university discussions and action.

Although McCarthy was able to shatter many lives and fractionate the New Deal, he took a wrong turn when he accused Owen Lattimore of being a top espionage agent. At the time of McCarthy’s charges,  Lattimore was in Afghanistan, leading a United Nations mission to evaluate the technical and economic aid needed by the country for its development. McCarthy announced on the Senate floor that he was willing to stand or fall on his accusations against Lattimore as the Soviet’s top espionage agent in America.  When Lattimore received an Associated Press cable in Afghanistan telling him about McCarthy’s charges, he replied with his own return wire  “McCARTHY’S OFF-RECORD RANTINGS PURE MOONSHINE.” But, however dismissive he was about McCarthy’s charges, he was well aware of the fact that he would be in a serious battle for his reputation, his position and even his financial security and future. For that reason Lattimore headed back to the United States, hired a good lawyer (Abe Fortes) and moved to Washington DC with his wife to settle down and fight the charges leveled against him by McCarthy. Lattimore directly challenged McCarthy and provided thorough documentation for his arguments, including many letters from prominent leaders who were shocked at the allegations made against him.  Lattimore wrote a book about his experiences during his first public trial in the Senate. His “Ordeal by Slander” is a blow by blow account of his appearance, testimony  and preparation for dealing with the charges McCarthy had leveled against him. The book was first published in July 1950 and has been characterized as the “First Great Book of the McCarthy Era” (part of the subtitle); it was published again in 2004 by the Lattimore Estate, in response to the rising tide of emotionalism that began to dominate our foreign policy decisions, as the American reaction to the events of 9/11 and our invasion of Iraq unfolded (the new edition has an excellent introduction by one of Lattimore’s former students, historian Blanche Wiesen Cook).  It seems that, buried within the DNA of Americans, lies a fear gene that, when aroused, leads to complete abandonment of rational thinking and  longitudinal analysis. In the presence of these active gene products, governing springs from the gut.

Following Lattimore’s remarkably strong testimony before the Senate, the Tydings Senate Committee dismissed all charges against Lattimore that had been brought into play by Joseph McCarthy. But that was not the end of his ordeal. After his first exhaustive testimony and trial,  he was charged with perjury, then acquitted on that charge. This was followed by another hearing and another trial in a seemingly endless effort to wear Lattimore down and finally come up with at least one “gotcha.” Lattimore’s entire career and all of his writings were scrutinized, distorted and mocked for five long years. To give you some indication of the kind of absurdity that was presented as evidence against Lattimore, was a charge that he must be a communist, because when he denied being a communist, he smiled. To this day, the right wing still dominates our foreign policy decisions and the left lies in fear that they are perceived as being too soft when it comes to national security issues. This state of affairs reflects the long-lasting residue of McCarthyism and the purges of scholarship and the elimination of serious academic input into the development of our foreign policy. If you have any doubt that the State Department, the presumed instrument of our foreign policy, was made ineffectual by McCarthyism, you have only to look at the Department’s poor showing during the American invasion of Iraq. Under Colin Powell, the State Department was an observer, not a participant or advisor.  More often than not, our foreign policy decisions are influenced if not controlled by the military, highly befitting a military empire.

RFM

A second topic of some interest relates to the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted of the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing. As you know he was released from prison recently as a humanitarian gesture, since he is suffering from terminal cancer. If you listened to the press, you would think that the heinous crime that was committed should not allow anyone to avoid permanent incarceration, no matter what the circumstances. However, it seems very likely that al-Megrahi was innocent and that it was politics that got him sent to prison. According to William Blum, our own government knew he was innocent, and knew that the act was committed by a terrorist group centered in Iran as a payback for our downing of an Iranian passenger plane that we claimed was an “accident.” Apparently it was an accident for which all of the American perpetrators were congratulated! According to Blum, al-Megrahi was convicted without substantive evidence of his guilt.

Finally, the third item on my list is a story about the Harvard Law School and the McCarthy era, an era in which almost everyone, including virtually all politicians, looked awful and did awful things to people. In that era of hysteria, Harvard Law School proved it was not immune from conforming to the red-bating mania that typified the period. Alexander Cockburn, of CounterPunch tells the story of how Harvard Law School behaved in the McCarthy era witch hunts. As he describes it, they behaved with sickening cowardice. Famed attorney Jonathan Lubell describes how the school tried to force him to testify and how the Harvard Law Review slammed the door in his face. His radical views had managed to get him on the list to testify about his “activities.” When he approached the dean of Harvard Law and told him that he would not cooperate with the House committee, that they were pursuing issues that were unconstitutional, the dean was furious and threatened to expel him and his brother who was also at Harvard Law school. The Lubells stuck by their guns and eventually appeared before the committee and told them they would not cooperate, that their activities violated the fifth amendment of the Constitution. The committee concluded the hearing after the Lubell testimony. The brothers graduated from law school, but were denied membership in the Harvard Law Review, something normally accorded to all students of their caliber (they graduated magna cum laude).  So few people had the courage of the Lubell brothers at a time when we needed a few more like them. It was a period where we seemed to lower the IQ requirements for admission to Congress. The blacklisting, lives ruined, red scares, television shows depicting your neighbor as a possible communist, it was truly government and society at its worst! You might have thought we had ended that kind of repressive hysteria, but then voila–9/11 hit and dejavu–we got the Patriot Act and started cutting short again on our constitutional promises. But, just imagine what Faux News would have looked like in the McCarthy era when all enemies were not Democrats, but unidentified persons? They would have identified a new TV camera-based type of phrenology by deciding the good guys based on facial expressions.

RFM

I was unprepared for the sheer magnitude of the national mourning that we saw on television;  streets were lined by onlookers in tears, many with signs of well-wishing and thousands were waiting in line to view him lying in state. It seemed to be agreeably and almost automatically accepted by television news and the space filling demands of our newspapers that, with Kennedy gone, it was the passing of an era, embodied in the death of a special political figure, the likes of which we will never see again, in part because the country hasn’t earned quality leadership. The fact that GW Bush got elected proves the character flaw in our national politics.

We typically think of Senators as politicians with an agenda for the state from which they were  elected. Generally speaking, Senators do not project nationally unless they run for the Presidency and Kennedy’s attempt at the Presidency stopped well short of that status, since he didn’t get the nomination of his party in 1980 and never tried for the office again. But, in Ted Kennedy’s case, somehow, perhaps through the forgotten mystique of Camelot, he was viewed very differently–as the Senator from Massachusetts, who just happened to  work  for the  entire nation. It was unique and special  that Ted Kennedy  could speak as a Senator from Massachusetts in such a way that we viewed his speeches and his political agenda as one that would benefit the entire country. Kennedy created Massachusetts as the Gold Standard for the home of national causes, not just those restricted to the interests of his home state.

Despite having a national Senator, who always looked at issues well beyond the borders of a single state, the citizens of Massachusetts elected him eight consecutive times to an office that he relished and a position that he managed to convert into a national forum, with him at the epicenter–a lion who could always roar. He promoted his state’s problems in such a way, that we could all see them as national issues. It was as if each state in our union had three Senators, with Kennedy serving in the third spot for every state, whether they wanted it or not: his specialty was dealing with hard problems, particularly those that had been too long neglected; he raised issues that would improve us as a nation and at the top of his national agenda, was a healthcare plan for all Americans.

Kennedy was a party loyalist until he saw how Jimmy Carter was destroying the Democratic Party. Coming from the South, Carter did not appreciate the importance of labor and labor unions to the party that was galvanized and stitched together by FDR and served as one of the power sources for the New Deal. Kennedy’s move to unseat Carter for the 1980 election failed and with that failure, Reaganism came onto the American stage and began destroying the power of labor unions and proved indifferent to manufacturing interests, unless they freed their work force of union representation. That is why GW Bush showed complete insensitivity to Detroit automobile manufacturers during the meltdown because they had strong unions. In general,  Republicans prefer car makers who don’t have unions because they know that strengthening union representation will strengthen the Democratic party, which might then threaten to become a national party again. Clinton played a similar role to that of Carter  in the destruction of the party of FDR, by not recognizing the importance of labor union membership for party cohesion and strength. FDR would never have passed NAFTA. Obama faces an uncertain party base because of low union membership, something he needs to fix. If he overcame that problem, my guess is those minions that he brought into the election of 2008, would be far more energetic about supporting his causes today. Right now, Obama looks more like a transitional figure to the person we need rather than the person looking for cures.

How did Kennedy become such a national Senator? At least in part, it was because Kennedy worked and talked about issues that related to the humanity of a nation, whether it was war, civil rights, women’s issues, labor laws, healthcare or basic human dignity. He served as our national conscience and had credentials that gave him credibility. And, somewhere in our brains, where the site of decency gets articulated through neuronal circuits and becomes translated into a recognizable neural code that broadly resonates with all humans,  Kennedy aroused those synaptic mechanisms in ways that reflected the makeup of his DNA, and made them resonate within each of us. A true liberal to the core, and unashamed to admit it at a time when other Senators tried to hide it,  he had to lie in waiting until Obama stepped forward to accept the mantra of liberalism, though he has yet to properly endorse all of its causes and resonate with its central core.

We shouldn’t think of Ted Kennedy as a Senator, for he transformed that constrained political definition into something new–he was a Presidential Senator. In response to his death, it was as if the nation finally recognized the debt that was owed to the Kennedy public service record, with Ted as the longest serving example of a dedicated clan, albeit the last in line to carry the torch. Through Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the family, who served in the FDR administration as the first head of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission,  the long arm of the New Deal permeated into the Kennedy clan. The public debt of gratitude that was owed to the Kennedy brothers, but never fully recognized as such, was a debt to a group of three brothers who tried to raise the expectations of a country, but who never quite succeeded in getting there. Now that the country recognizes the Kennedy value system and is beginning to share Teddy’s vision, we can only wonder whether it isn’t too late to arrive on the doorstep of what he was talking about.  In the middle of an intense debate about our national healthcare future, the very icon of healthcare for all, easily translated to Medicare for all, fell into silence in such a way that we hope his absence will translate into something he could endorse as a healthcare plan, as we have no doubt what he would like to call it or how he would prefer to have it shaped as a policy. Have we as a country returned to a greater state of progressive liberalism to accept Ted Kennedy’s wisdom and passion about healthcare and follow his long-held clarion call to action? Are the Republican goons that have plagued the town hall meetings in August impacted on the future of healthcare reform? The shock of Teddy’s death is that we see the vacuum that he left behind with no one else to push the right buttons. There is  only one person able to fill the void that Kennedy left behind and lift our aspirations once again to perform a worthy service to our country. But, can he do it? Does he have a good manual? What Obama needs to recognize is that the forces that want to keep things the way they are in our healthcare system need to feel and taste bitter defeat, not be encouraged to continue the battle or live long enough to fight another day. That’s the best pathway for Obama’s re-election pathway, not the piecemeal, peek and peck method he has tried without much success.

RFM

The alternative to religious indoctrination when I was growing up was my father, who was transfixed on ideas about social equality and justice, especially racial equality, which in Utah was easy to think about without taking much action, because there were virtually no blacks in the state at the time. I was probably 10 or 12 before I ever saw a black person in Utah and my very first encounter was with two blacks, a husband and wife who had joined the Mormon church and who worked as servants in the home of a rather well to do neighbor.

After WW II, we moved into a newly built house in a Mormon dominated suburb of Salt Lake, but during the war we lived with my grandparents within the city, about 12 blocks away from the center of town, in a brick home my grandparents had built many years earlier. My grandfather was an entrepreneur who had started up a transportation company, giving tours to college professors who took their students through the fascinating geological formations of Southern Utah into places like Bryce and Zion canyons and many other fascinating formations (if you have never been to Southern Utah, you should put that one on your list of trips before you move on). He and his partner eventually sold their thriving "touring" company to Lewis Brothers Stages, which I think is or was still operational as of a few years ago. He used to build his special touring cars, fitted with giant luggage trunks from bus frames he bought from General Motors. The finished product was very handsome and functional, as he expanded his operations to include ski trips to various canyons.

The beginning of the war had brought us back from Oregon where I was born. In Oregon, my father had headed a small savings and loan operation in Eugene, but when we moved back to SLC, he went to work for the Federal Government in one of Roosevelt’s programs known as the OPA or the Office of Price Administration. That was one of the programs that Roosevelt had initiated to make sure that no retailer profited unfairly because of shortages created by the war. OPA controlled rent prices as well. So my father’s responsibility was to monitor prices and rent costs in a region of the state and make sure that no one raised them outside of strict federal guidelines. At one point OPA controlled about 90% of the economy, with farm commodities as about the only price not regulated. My father was a great admirer of FDR and seemed very gratified to get the position he had, for which he worked diligently and thoughtfully, though until a very specific event in my life, I was never really sure what he did. But the OPA was, for him, a position of high calling and I remember how he often expressed his deep admiration for FDR and his policies. That point was made often and with conviction, something I could never get out of my reading of the Book of Mormon.

In the fall of 1944, I entered Kindergarten at the Wasatch School, a public school on South Temple that still exists, about five long blocks away from my grandparents home. Each day, on the way home from school, my older sister and I and many of our friends would stop by a small grocery store and, if we had a few pennies, we would buy some candy or gum, or on really good days, we could get an RC Cola, my very favorite drink. In those days even the mill (0.1 of a penny) could get you something. But one day at the store, we were all shocked to see that the store owner had raised the prices of his candy very substantially, which priced most of us out of the market for sweets. That night my father heard my sister and I talking about the new price structure at the store and he took a keen probative interest in our experience. We didn’t go back to the candy store for several days, thinking that we couldn’t afford it. But a few days later, encouraged by our father, we went back to the little grocery store after school to find that the price of candy was once again back to the same value as that of a few days earlier. Suddenly our favorite sweets were within our price range again. We later learned that my father had gone to the store, spoke with the owner and apparently put the fear of God into him about his price hikes, to which he promptly responded by restoring the original prices, those to which we had hooked our entire, if limited, candy economy. We were fascinated to learn more about how our father had achieved such a miraculous outcome, that was so favorably in our direction. Naturally, we thought he did it just for us. But, as he explained what he was trying to do, what his job was all about, he described the war and many other things that went completely over our heads. Yet, I came away from that experience, intuiting that my father was doing something more than just making sure I could afford candy. Then too, whenever I went into the candy store after school, I was a little afraid that the store owner might identify me as the tattle tale and deny me access to the more favorable price structure that I had something to do with. Fortunately, he was a good old fashioned capitalist and I was never denied candy at the market prices firmly monitored by my father, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was under a special glare fixation from the store owner. Then too, he seemed eager to please and eager to let my father know, through our collective experiences, that he was loyal to the core for the OPA.

Many years later I was in college, working intensely to keep my grades up, so that I could get into medical school. That was the era of the early civil rights movement when idealistic young men and women undertook very risky trips into the South to register black voters. Periodically, one of these young civil rights workers would come to the university and talk about his experiences. It was listening to these young men, who risked their lives and jeopardized their futures, that made me realize, that above all other candidates, these young men were my real heroes: they were only a few years older than I was, but had I not been seriously committed to medical school, their descriptions of what and why they were taking such risks made me feel that I should join them in what I perceived to be the greatest contribution we could make for our country at that time. During this period of the beginning of great social unrest about segregation, which seamlessly evolved into a fulminating protest against the Vietnam War, the Mormon Church was insisting that its policy of not admitting black males as full members of the Church, was ordained by God and their primary campaign in the state of Utah at that time was to mount a huge public relations effort to prevent liquor from being sold in bars. They won that campaign to keep Utah as a dry state, but it was many years earlier for a variety of different reasons, that they lost me and most of my friends. Oddly, it was many years after that I realized the victor in my youthful turmoil about religion was achieved through my father’s influence. His words seemed to have made my choices quite easy and to this day I wonder if my intense loathing for the Book of Mormon was not in fact some psychological, subconscious effort on my part to begin my separation process from the Mormon Church. That book made the process easier than it otherwise might have been. I don’t remember when I finally read the Mark Twain book, but it was several years after my resolve about the church.

So, with the sub-prime fiasco serving as kind of a Whirling Dervish into a new state of uncertainty about our economy and its impact on our future standard of living, I have been thinking a lot about FDR recently and couldn’t help but share my small story about how his influence helped me maintain my candy economy all through the war and less obviously how my father, and perhaps more indirectly FDR, silently shaped some of my current attitudes.

RFM