Red Knot Shorebird

Perhaps we need another century or two to understand the species of the world and their inter-dependencies before we make judgments about who should go and who should stay: say goodbye to one and you may have to do the same for a seemingly diverse group of animals for reasons that are highly counter-intuitive. It’s foolish of course to even suggest that we are in a position to make decisions about species survival, because we aren’t knowingly making those judgments, even though events, such as species extinction, are very likely occurring on a regular basis as a result of human interventionism. But, species extinctions are taking place without our knowledge of the cause or even, in most cases, an understanding of the species involved. We keep track of big animals, like lions, tigers, elephants and other large mammals and, though  the future for them is not looking particularly bright, we are completely ignorant about animals a step or two below on the evolutionary ladder–like the now extinct, Gastric-Brooding Frog. Who said goodbye to that species? But, here’s one to ponder for the short-term: are you kidding me?–shorebirds and horseshoe crabs? This survival dynamic may play itself out over the next few years.

The interconnectedness of nature almost dictates that you don’t lose single species, that in in losing one, some other species or fauna will also be put into harm’s way:  the loss of one species may precipitate the loss of one or more others, largely because we are unaware of the biological forces that unite them. I don’t know who else we lost or which other species might have been changed when the Gastric-Brooding Frog disappeared, but it didn’t disappear without impacting other species. Of that we can be certain. But, what connection for example does the continued vitality of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, an ancient marine arthropod, have with survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shore bird that makes an annual stopover in the region in which the horseshoe crab breeds? The Limulus is virtually unchanged since it first appeared in the Paleozoic, 570-248 million years ago. Though most people have barely heard of the Limulus, anyone who studies vision is well versed with this species, as its compound eye was first used by H.K. Hartline to reveal fundamental mechanisms of visual physiology, for which he went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1967 for his pioneering work. Horseshoe crabs are abundant on the shoreline of Woods Hole Massachusetts, where Hartline did much of his early work. One of Hartline’s students, Robert Barlow, went on to show that the male Limulus uses its eyes to search aggressively for females and looks for the outlines of the carapace as a visual cue for finding a suitable female, at a time when the animals come into the shoreline for laying and fertilizing their eggs, an activity that usually takes place at night. But, who would ever have thought that the seasonal breeding of this ancient marine species, which takes place big time in Delaware Bay on the East coast, would have a dramatic impact on the survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shorebird that flies 20,000 miles each year, from South America to the Arctic, where it breeds, and then flies back again. Surely the biologists got this one wrong!

The Red Knot arrives in Delaware Bay just at the time the Limulus has come near the shore for breeding and egg laying. Eggs are laid by the female in the sand and then fertilized externally by the male or males that surround her. It is the nourishment derived from feeding on the newly released Limulus eggs that provides a critically needed source of food for the Red Knot to regain its stamina and prepare for resuming its long journey North.  Once the Red Knots arrive at the Delaware shore, they only have about two weeks to get sufficient nourishment, rebuild their wing muscles and store fat for the flight ahead to their Arctic breeding grounds, where they lay their own eggs and raise their young over the short summer of the region. If  insufficient Limulus eggs are available, the Red Knot does not seem to have a plan B and may be ill-equipped to finish the long journey to the Arctic. In some regions where Red Knots used to breed in the Arctic, they have not been seen in recent years and insufficient Limulus egg nourishment has been regarded as the main deficiency in their failed migratory outcome. In preparation for the long flight from South America (Tierra del Fuego, in Chile/Argentina) the bird’s digestive system shuts down, such that the intermediate stop, to feed on Limulus eggs, provides the bird with a very digestible meal, rich in proteins–apparently the ideal food for building up muscle and fat for an animal with a reduced capacity digestive system. Despite the aggressive feeding of the Red Knot on Limulus eggs, the horseshoe crab population in the region was stable into the 1990s, when fishing with Limulus bait became popular.

The shortage of Limulus eggs seems to reflect an overly aggressive harvesting of animals, particularly gravid females used by fisherman as bait for catching eels and conch (marine snails): this has led to a significant decline in the number of Limulus eggs laid on the shoreline, down to perhaps 2/3 of previous estimates and the magnitude of this decline has been implicated in the reduced numbers of Red Knot birds making it to their Arctic breeding grounds. Indeed, it was the alarmingly fast reduction in the Red Knot population, by about 70%, that led to the discovery of their dependence on Limulus eggs in Delaware Bay.  The decline in Limulus breeding and egg-laying seems to be the tipping point that could wipe out the Red Knot and could do so very quickly if a better balance isn’t restored.   There is now a two-year moratorium on using Limulus for fishing bait in the region and researchers are busy trying to find artificial bait substitutes that could be used in place of the real thing. An excellent video about this species interdependency was shown recently on PBS and can be seen here.

How long this interconnectedness between a marine animal that is roughly 350 million years old and a bird, whose evolutionary record goes back 150 million years, is not a matter that can be resolved through the fossil record. At some point, the Red Knot’s migratory flight to Delaware Bay was initiated to be well-timed to the breeding season of the Limulus.  This synchrony could be seriously interrupted further by global climate change which might affect one or the other of these tightly timed mechanisms. Some biologists believe the Red Knot could be extinct within five years. At some point, you reach a bird density wherein birds can’t find one another to mate.

Limulus polyphemus

The fishing industry is not the only survival challenge that Limulus faces. The blood of  Limulus has been used for many years because of its unusual properties. Limulus blood is blue because it uses a copper protein as an oxygen carrier. But, of more importance is the fact that Limulus blood clots whenever it comes into contact with endotoxins. Extracts of Limulus blood have been used for decades to test for bacterial contamination. One quart of Limulus blood is valued at about $15,000. Currently, the FDA insists that all intravenously administered drugs should be exposed to a Limulus blood amebocyte lysate as a test for endotoxins. This is a significant improvement over the prior process of injecting a rabbit with the substance and then waiting to see if the animal gets sick and develops a fever!  The discovery of Limulus amebocyte lysate also took place at Woods Hole, through the observations of scientist Fred Bang. This insight and its technological development has reduced the endotoxin analysis test from days to about 45 minutes. Instead of killing the horseshoe crabs and then bleeding them, the pharmaceutical industry harvests blood from live animals, who are then returned to their native habitat. Thus, some former fisherman, who used them for bait, now collect them for blood letting in a laboratory environment and then release them to the same location. Last year, 300,000 horseshoe crabs were bled and then released; about 13% do not survive this blood-letting procedure, which extracts about 2/3 of their blood.

The counter-intuitive interconnectedness of the Red Knot and the horseshoe crab could only be revealed by extensive field studies that involved capturing, tagging and measuring birds along the pathway of their extensive, almost incomprehensible, migratory flight pattern. These are dedicated scientists who share a passion for this bird and its preservation. Why a bird would exist under the harsh conditions of the Tierra del Fuego, near the Strait of Magellan, then fly to the even harsher climate of the Arctic for breeding and the early rearing of their young, before flying off again on another 10,000 mile trip, is well beyond our capacity to comprehend. Perhaps it got started before tectonic plates rearranged the land masses. The migratory pattern of North America by non-indigenous Homo sapiens was primarily East to West, which is a little easier to understand. In contrast to the rational, the Red Knot flight plan is not one that any of us would recommend to serve as the basis for a committed, routine lifestyle, unless it was one we recommended to our Republican friends. I can imagine Rush Limbaugh feeding on Limulus eggs in search of a new high. Let us hope that the Red Knot survives and the current iteration of the Republican Party goes the way of the Dodo bird as its major flight plan glides it  into extinction. There are many signs that such a glide pattern is already underway. We will undoubtedly hear more about each species in the coming years.

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

Hominin is meant to describe all humans and human ancestors exclusive of those related to modern apes. You can learn about the various distinctions among humans and other primates here. The single requirement legitimizing membership in the hominin club is that of walking erect, as we do. Many clues point to an erect posture for Ardi, including skull changes, hand differences and pelvis structure. Ardi’s pelvis was not well preserved, so some doubt about this not so subtle feature, makes the story incomplete, or at least less certain. You can watch a video discussion among the scientists who described the original findings here. One distinctive feature of Ardi is the structure of the foot, which had an opposable toe, suggesting that she was at home swinging from tree branches grasped with her feet or hands. Thus Ardi, only slightly larger than a chimpanzee, was in transition between a pure tree dweller and a non-tree dwelling, erect-walking hominid. Ardi had a brain only slightly larger than that of  a chimpanzee, a fact that researchers take to mean our ancestors learned to walk upright before our brains acquired their large, modern size. Extensive analysis of the fossil record from the dig site suggests that Ardi hung out in an ancient floodplain, covered in woodlands, as she climbed among hackberry, fig and palm trees and lived among monkeys, kudu antelopes and peafowl. Do you see any similarity between Ardi and the features of known, living hominids of today? I think I have a direct descendant as one of my neighbors.

Gastric-Brooding Frog

It was a PBS program that alerted me to the extinction of a frog called the gastric-brooding frog. These animals reproduce by the female swallowing the fertilized eggs and keeping them in her stomach until the young emerge as fully formed frogs. The young fertilized eggs/tadpoles secrete an unidentified substance that stops acid production in the female’s stomach and shuts down her entire digestive system, converting it from a means of sustenance into a brood pouch. After the appropriate developmental period, lasting from 36-43 days, the little frogs, about 21 to 26 of them, come out of their mother’s mouth as fully formed and ready for action (see image). The delivery process apparently takes place in the water. Two different species of these frogs were known as the Southern and Northern gastric-brooding frogs, indigenous to Queensland Australia.  Now it appears that both species are extinct. They have not been seen in the wild since the 1980s and attempts to maintain them in captivity were not successful. Like most disappearing amphibians, the cause of this extinction is unknown, but the three leading hypotheses include global climate change, fungus infections and habitat destruction, all three of which can be related to human activity, including an increasingly understood global threat to amphibians from a fungus infection.
Species extinctions of course are part of evolution. But biologists have argued that we are in the early or intermediate phase of the sixth mass species extinction, with the last one taking place some 70 million years ago when the dinosaurs became extinct, quite likely from an asteroid which struck the earth in the Yucatan Peninsula. But the new extinction phase we are in now is entirely man-made and, if it should reach the dimensions of the dinosaur extinction, we need to act with an emergency plan: I would suggest, as one of our first actions, we put all of the Republicans on the last ice flow out of Antarctica. I will personally escort George Will to catch one of the earlier break-aways. It’s probably too late to organize and catch the last one out of the Arctic.

I have previously written on the disappearance of the Golden Toad in Costa Rica and commented more extensively on the problems facing amphibians globally. Having used amphibians for research during most of my career, I have watched in horror, as I see these animals depleted on a massive scale, for a variety of reasons, each of which can be traced to our incursions into their habitat or the changes we have helped to generate in the quality of their environment. Some of these changes, like those that might be attributed to global climate change, are not easily identified and require skilled and knowledgeable field biologists working with climatologists to figure out the problem, the stimulus for which is often species extinction or severe species decline. Even then our right wing detractors can and do claim that “it’s only a theory.” Unfortunately that criticism can be applied to every scientific dictum that we have, yet the predictability of these “theories” has generated some of the most astounding successes in our technological and scientific history.
One case in which I was personally involved, led to funding for one of our animal suppliers to move his aquatic amphibians (tiger salamanders in the aquatic phase) from a toxic site to a safer environment, at a cost of about $20,000. This emergency move was necessitated by the introduction of a nearby giant pig farm/factory,  which created a toxic waste dump that putrefied the surrounding water. These kinds of problems are happening all over the world and amphibians, because they are sensitive to both aquatic and land pollution, with delicate skin that can’t usually tolerate dry climate changes, are now serving front-line duty as our canaries in the mines of global climate change. What will the world do for entertainment if our little frogs and toads are eliminated? Will we only know Kermit the frog as a puppet and not the animal types from which he was dervied? Paris Hilton can’t last forever and neither can her front page replacement, Tiger Woods. Yet, what are we actually doing about it? If Copenhagen is any example of our state of readiness for action, we are not doing nearly enough and we are not doing it fast enough to save amphibians from large-scale extinction. But then, do we really care? If Rush Limbaugh can dismiss poor Americans as undeserving of healthcare, what would he say about the current and future state of our amphibians? Thanks to politicization of our policies related to global climate change and its impact on species extinction, our policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” has gone way beyond gender preference in the military to include the animals whose abundance we once took for granted. How about a three minute inclusion in our evening news on “the species that we lost today.” A little video clip of a gastric-brooding frog giving birth to her little frogs coming up from her stomach and out her mouth should be competition for Paris Hilton, especially if it spills over onto Sesame Street–Kermit needs competition. If we had learned about the “substances” that the little tadpoles release to shut down the mother’s gastric secretions, we might have a new form of medication for the dreaded heartburn and its subsequent development into Barrett’s esophagus and/or esophageal cancer.
RFM

Darwin ages well with time, as increased exposure to his arguments and illustrations serves to emphasize how much he shared his lifetime  commitment for his work and his insatiable curiosity about nature. Through his work, the genie of species connectedness came out of the bottle and never went back in. Some of his stories are just as stunning today as they were when Darwin first revealed them to his naive audience. At the time his famous book was published, English society believed that the function of flowers was to beautify the countryside and they were not prepared when Darwin told them that flowers were for sex. The Origin was written under duress. Darwin discovered that Alfred Russel Wallace had hit upon the same idea, so he hurried his book and published it in a condensed form, rather than the much larger book he had originally contemplated. Yet, by modern standards, it is not a small book, as it contains 150,000 words. But partially because of his truncated book, the Origin made it easier for him to explain his theory more clearly, which is probably why it had an impact with the public, in addition to the new guiding principles it established for science. When Origin was published, Darwin was already a well-known, popular scientific writer, as he had previously published his well received account of his voyage on the HMS Beagle that was the stimulus for his career as our first evolutionary biologist.

When you realize the general naivete of British Society in the early part of the 19th Century, it makes you wonder how anyone could grow up in that culture with a fascination for the range and depth of biological organisms. We should all be grateful that Darwin did not become the doctor that his father wanted him to be. Darwin extended his innate curiosity into a form of innovative genius based on observation and intuition and he was amazingly correct on some things he could only intuit rather than prove, particularly without the detail of the modern fossil record that now exists today for virtually all species, interconnected through our knowledge of genetics.  When so clearly present, as in Darwin’s case,  genius gives us that rare quality of a sharp demarcation line between the before and after and that’s what the Origin provided–a demarcation line that was so distinct and permanent that a new trajectory of discussion was instantly embedded into the scientific and social conversation of our own origins and the nature of biological diversity. Unlike many other scientists, such as Gregor Mendel, Darwin lived to see a wide appreciation of his theory in his own time, as he was one of the great notables of 19th Century English science.

Of course, after 150 years of Darwin’s revolutionary ideas, the controversy surrounding the origin of man remains as much a part of our cultural landscape as it did shortly after Darwin’s  publication. However, today, the arguments against evolution are no longer about the facts of evolution, but instead we see how the efforts of creationists and the like have been reduced to that of trying to capture Darwin’s insights and co-opt them through distortion into their own abortive descriptions and conclusions, so creationism tries to mask itself as science, such as what we see in the form of “Intelligent Design.” Geneticist Steve Jones has a beautiful summary of Darwin’s Origin published in the NewScientist, with contemporary examples and expansion of how Darwin’s  arguments have stood the test of time.  The section on dog domestication found in chapter one (variation under domestication) is particularly relevant as an example of how man-made selection used the principles of an accelerated form of natural selection and survival of the desired traits, accomplished by killing the animals with undesirable traits and breeding the desired ones into existence and stark prominence. Today for example, we have developed about 400 breeds of dogs, most of which are less than 400 years old. Most dogs can interbreed with other dogs and with their ancestors, the wolf. Interbreeding is often used as the demarcation line between species. Yet, the large number of dogs with different popular names, all share the same genus and species names as the wolves from which they were generated–Canis lupus!

RFM

As humans, there is much that we can celebrate about ourselves. While we don’t have the greatest body plans and we are not the fastest or the most agile or the strongest species, we do have a brain worth bragging about, a modern marvel, and perhaps the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Although big brains per se may be worth noting, it is far more important to understand what part of our brains have evolved in such a way that we manage to dwarf the achievements of all other species with our rich linguistic skills, a powerful sense of logic, a prolonged period of social learning  and the creation of a vast culture that has led to a sea change in the earth around us.  Our  language facility  keeps our social evolution on a continuous staircase of change and adaptation, one in which each new generation adds its own cultural layer on top of those of its predecessors.The central question is whether we can continue on the staircase we are currently on or whether we need to backup and start over on a new trajectory. As far as I know, there is no evidence in the fossil record that suggests Homo sapiens was ever confronted with something as threatening as what we might face with global climate change and its potential impact on our culture. Are we smart enough to make the kind of adaptation that may be required to meet this new uncertain future?

Cortical surface of human, cat and rat brain (NEUROSCIENCE: EXPLORING THE BRAIN, Bear et al, Fig 7-27; not to scale)

The figure above illustrates the cortical surface of thee different mammalian brains, including human, cat and rat. These are not drawn to scale, but magnified as required to illustrate how different regions of each brain are functionally divided into visual, auditory, motor and somatic sensory partitions (the olfactory bulb in humans is  tucked under the frontal lobes of brain and can’t be seen using this view). Most of us understand that the cerebral cortex (neocortex), the outer, undulated surface  of our brains, is the real envy of the neighborhood. It’s what has our competitors swooning. This convoluted outer surface of our brain is so vast that it has to be folded into peaks  (gyri) and valleys (sulci) to squeeze  its huge surface area into  our skull; within the skull, the brain is suspended in a fluid-filled shock absorber system, surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and suspended by strands and layers of concentric, fibrous collagen, through which blood vessels penetrate to nourish and oxygenate the brain: an impressive engineering marvel with natural selection at the control center. You can appreciate that the cortex of the rat has very few folds, whereas the number and complexity of them increase as one moves from cat to human.

The three pound universe that resides in our skulls, constitutes  a small percentage of our body weight, but requires 25% of the oxygen we consume. Our brains do not store energy, so blood supplied glucose provides the main nutrient and must be continuously available.  Every region of the brain is within 90 µm of a capillary, reflecting this supreme dependency on continuous access to oxygen and nutritional support. Our brains have created a miraculous way of regulating their own blood supply: the blood flow within the brain is not uniform, but varies according to the tissue demands. Brain regions where neuronal activity is high receive more blood flow compared to brain areas which have lower levels of activity. So, blood traffic in the brain is under neighborhood regulation. It’s like the street gets wider if the traffic gets heavier.  It is the change in blood flow, based on neuronal activity (maybe glial cells too (see below)), that serves as the signal detection basis  for the technique of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI. The cellular  mechanisms which regulate this regional blood flow  are still poorly understood, but appear to involve glial cells, the non-neuronal cells that were once thought to merely be the “glue” that keeps the neurons together.

Our brains contain more than 6 billion nerve cells and perhaps a hundred times that number of glial cells. It is now clear that glial cells play many important roles in modulating neuronal excitability through a generalized set of tools we refer to as “glial-neuronal control.” Other than acknowledging that it exists, we still have a very poor grasp of the significance of this relatively new controlling pathway. We are far more familiar and conditioned to the idea that the neuron to neuron form of transmission is the sole basis of brain cell communication, primarily because we know that neurons communicate with one another through elegant, chemically mediated structures known as “synapses.” But we now know that glial cells can also communicate with one another: they do it through much slower mechanisms of “calcium waves” and connect with each other through electrical rather than chemical synapses based on structures called gap junctions. So, in all future considerations of brain function, we have to recognize the possibility that glial cells may be doing far more for our brain functions than we ever imagined.

There are two broad systems of nerve cell connections that contribute to the normal day to day operations of the brain. One of these systems consists of global extensions of nerve cells from regions within lower brain centers that innervate extensive areas of the cortex and other brain structures; these broad, diffuse connections provide for the global features of sleep, wakefullness and overall regulation of excitability or the “tone” of the nervous system. These systems are transmitter-specific and consist of overlapping connections of fine axons containing dopamine, serotonin acetylcholine and nor-epinephrine. The second brain system at the other end of the brain connectivity organization, consists of localized regions of nerve cells that work within a small region of the brain and constitute “local circuits.” These local circuits carry out the computational requirements needed to derive a small component of our sensory or motor functions and our behavior. In the visual system, local circuit neurons in different subdivisions of the occipital cortex (posterior in the brain) are used to derive information about the location of a stimulus, its color, its shape or its  movement pattern and direction of movement and, of supreme importance, whether the object we see is something we recognize: if so additional activity within the inferior temporal lobe of the brain is used to detect pattern and image recognition and that’s where visual identities are stored.  Each local circuit has an output, a means by which the computations carried out in one local circuit get transmitted to other regions of the brain; both nearby and more distant brain regions are served by these kinds of connections. In the case of the cerebral cortex, these connections are vast; one obvious set of connections is found in the corpus callosum, the giant collection  of nerve fibers (axons) that wire the two halves of the brain together and serve as the connectivity basis of many global brain functions. For most individuals language is stored in one half of the brain, usually on the left side and in the temporal lobe.  Here is one surprising fact about our brains: though our cortical functions are divided into different regions for vision, auditory, touch and motor functions, the microscopic structure of each cortical region does not reveal special cell types. The so-called pyramidal cells for vision look like the pyramidal cells for auditory signaling. So, it is the region of the brain and not the cell type that determines its function. Deaf people that learn to use sign language for communicating, use their temporal auditory cortex for processing this information, not their visual cortex.

There are many other kinds of fiber pathways that connect local circuits with both regional  and more distant areas of the cortex. We are still trying to understand how all of this novel pattern of connectivity results in a normal functioning brain, and, of equal importance, what happens to brain function if these connections are lost or not wired properly in the first place. In addition, not yet fully understood, is the functional basis for our state of consciousness or awareness of ourselves and our brain processes. Consciousness appears to represent a way of reading out the activity of the cortex and being aware of ourselves, our surrounds and our memories. But, how finely-tuned our state of consciousness is to local circuit operations, vs. more global “summaries” of activity remains one of the great problems for modern day neuroscience. Though we don’t yet understand its cellular origins, consciousness serves as the basis of our human character: it is the sum of all the parts.

Not everything we learn is available to our conscious awareness, which includes the fusion of long and short-term memory. Psychologists like to divide our memory into two forms–declarative–that which we can verbally articulate (where we were yesterday) and nondeclarative–the non-conscious commands we use to control our movements for example. When we walk, we are not aware of the alternate signals we send to our arms and legs that make our movements automatic–we simply give the command “walk” and the brain takes care of the rest with the details unknown to us. This too is adaptive genius, because it frees our brains to focus on the capacity to execute new global commands without worrying about the details of each command that is executed.  While the origin of these two forms of memory relate to what we can verbalize through our conscious recall,  the mechanisms that determine the demarcation line between declarative and nondeclarative memory remain one of the many mysteries of the human brain and its functional organization.

The cortex varies systematically in thickness from about 0.4 to 1.8 inches, depending on the region and the extent to which large input and output functions are part of its repertoire: it has a massive surface area of 233-465 square inches. If you removed the cortex and spread it out flat, it would cover about two newspaper pages.  It is the cerebral cortex, within which lies our capacity for language, rich vision, the planning and execution of movements, our ability to appreciate other senses like sound and touch and the capacity to integrate all of the sensory and motor information through special integration areas that also reside within the cortex, that sets us apart from all other animals. Integration of this vast amount of information is continuously updated through a millisecond to millisecond flow of information. It is this real time knowledge and our conscious awareness that provides us with the means to make rapid adjustments to changes in our environment and undoubtedly served our distant ancestors with a powerful set of survival tools when humanoids were prey rather than predator. Moreover, animals lacking a significant cortical structure typically have a far more redundant and limited capacity to vary their response to new challenges that appear in their environment–their escape reflexes are often more stereotyped and less flexible in their capacity to adjust to a new l challenge or threat to their survival.

Because our early mammalian ancestors survived by living under the feet of the dinosaurs, one can presume that natural selection participated in the development of the beginnings of a primitive form of a cerebral cortex that provided these early mammals with a new flexibility in the range of their escape possibilities and survival options through “escape diversity.” A cerebral cortex provided clear survival advantages at a time when speed and agility may not have been enough–when we might be confronted by a stronger, faster, more agile adversary (though no one knows for sure). The evolutinary pressures  of living with the dinosaurs produced in our distant mammalian ancestors the natural selection pressures that favored the development of a neocortex, becuause only mammalian species have them.

Another advantage available to smaller animals is that achieved from the skill of living in trees and using trees as an escape pathway. But moving quickly through tree branches with agility, reliability and confidence, places demands on the brains of those who achieve that selective niche and you can appreciate from your own experiences that no animal excels in moving through trees better than primates–the masters of agility in the tree environment: that agility was achieved by having a cortex that can process and react to the new environment as it appears in the personalized movie of the external world that  plays continuously in their brains, revealing the rapidly changing images sequencing in front of the escaping animal.  Excellent vision was one key, while exceptional motor skills were the other and the emerging cortex was the control center that made it all possible. The tree escape option places strict demands on one’s ability to move, since the mover will be continuously challenged by obstacles and branches and an ever changing visual scene that requires continuous shifting in the motor strategies needed for skillful movement and avoiding objects. But the integration of the information needed to make that adjustment could only be achieved by the cortex, for that is the center where sensory information and motor  planning come together so that strategic decisions can be made quickly and, with practice, seeming ease. And, there was no room for error. Falling from the tree was likely to prove fatal, either from the fall itself, the hobbling injury, or the new vulnerability to predators on the ground. The advantages of tree dwelling and the tree escape route was probably essential to our early ancestors, as most of our homini predecessors lived in trees. When Homo species came out of the trees, they were proficient hunters, meat eaters, tool makers and more fully prepared to deal with those who would predate on them, as they transformed their operations from prey to predator, using tools and strategies that would eventually lead them to dominate the world.

As we execute our daily lives, our complex visual mechanisms, through their cortical processing power, give us a continuous 3D movie in color, running in our brains at about 20 or so frames per second, which gives us our visual representation of the events that transpire before us, rich in color, speed and connected in such a way to evoke strong memories and stimulate our analytical powers. Perhaps half of the cells in our brains can be activated by visual information, making us a truly visual animal. During periods when we are awake, our cortex is alive with nerve activity. If our conscious state is related to cortical activity how is it possible to concentrate on a subset of the activity to meaningfully achieve something? All of us are aware of our capacity to quickly change our attention based on our motivations at the moment (reading a book, while shutting out all other potential distractions, like nearby conversations) or the sudden interruption of our visual environment by something demanding our attention. The ability to change our attention to one subset of our cortex over another is a powerful feature of cortical processing, without which we would be hopelessly engaged in a massive flow of information, perhaps paralyzed by neuronal activity overload.

I remember taking peyote once and lying on a couch listening to music and examining artistic paintings on the wall, getting pleasure out of all the sensory stimulation that was surging in my brain. While under the influence I thought to myself that the state I found myself in must be something similar to what it’s like to lose your ability to attend to only one region of your cortex, while excluding the ongoing activity of all other regions.  I was experiencing sensory overload because I couldn’t shut out one stimulus–sound–while concentrating on the other– the paintings on the wall. It seemed like the colors and sounds were too intense and inter-related for me to select one or the other to focus on. So, though we know little about the process, the gift of shifting our attention rapidly and selectively is a component of our consciousness and another gift of our genius cortex.

You can appreciate our dependence on vision by witnessing the severe challenges that blind people  go through to achieve the many things we take for granted or do almost automatically because we have our own vivid, personalized, lifetime movie that plays continously in our brain. Fortunately, our society has many compensatory assistance options for those suffering from visual loss, but it is self evident that a blind person living among our early hominoid ancestors, trying to survive on the African Savanna, would have been severely disadvantaged and challenged on a regular basis just to survive the array of predators that were around at that time. In that era, there were far more predators than one sees today.

Vision is the supreme sensory system we have and for good reason: by capturing light signals, we can detect objects in our environment at distances much further than those provided by any other sensory system, including sound. It’s the difference between signal detection from a source traveling at 186,000 miles/sec vs sound traveling at 1200 ft./sec. We are so advantaged by vision, that we actually process visual signals much more slowly than we process sound signals. Despite the slow nature of vision, it’s hard to deny the power of the  stunning movie we see in front of us our entire lives. Perhaps standing on two feet and becoming bipeds,  gave us an advantage for taking in a more panoramic view of the environment, or perhaps, as Darwin suggested, standing on two feet freed our hands to explore objects tactily and make tools more effectively. In any case, the great distance advantages provided by vision is one of the prominent reasons we have devoted so much of our brain to analyzing and responding to visual stimuli. Visual stimuli not only provide us with our conscious sense of vision, but they also regulate unconscious actions responsible for our eye movements and changes in pupil diameter that are used to fixate on new objects of interest and continuously compensate for the ambient light levels in the visual environment.  We enjoy going to the movies where we use our splendid parallel processing of visual information that instantaneously connects our visual signals with our emotions that in turn can evoked feelings of fear, anxiety, disgust, contempt and sorrow as well as all the other elements of our human psychological makeup. The giant screen in front of us provides large visual images with little contrast and strong interconnections to our visual memory, triggering the immensely gratifying experience we often get by going to the theater. We are compellingly attracted to movies in powerful ways still not fully understood.

It is the tapestry of cortical-derived options that have greatly increased our chances of survival and eventually secured our current state of planetary dominance. The evolution of the human brain probably had a lot to do with our early mammalian ancestors, who were running under the feet of the dinosaurs. In those very early mammals, survival skills were enhanced by the development of the early primitive cerebral cortex. Although the cortex is typically only a few mm in thickness, it was that outer shell within our brain that produced a new miracle–the miracle of knowing where you are and then deciding whether to leap, run or execute some other plan of escape: through the evolution of their primitive cortex, our distance mammalian ancestors could think before they made an escape decision. Through the cerebral cortex, the survival instincts of our early ancestors, or their escape behaviors, could be based, not on a simple reflex, like the predator-prey decision processes of the frog, but a reaction based on where they were when the decision had to be made. If they were on a cliff, in a tree or perched on a rock, successful escape behavior might have to be different for each environmental circumstance and could be not be mediated by a simple stereotypical set of reflexes. You had to think before you jumped!

The need to execute a different response for different circumstances served as one of the supreme survival tools of the animals with a primitive cortex: the cortex became the pinnacle of redundancy avoidance. And, once an escape plan was initiated, the power of the cortex provided the animal with the ability to modify the behavior based on the moment to moment updating of how it was going during its execution. This rapid modification was possible because the cortex provided these early mammals with a means by which knowledge of their circumstances could be rapidly and broadly integrated with all their sense organs, enabling a more “informed decision” to be made about the adaptive change required for the most efficient means of survival behavior. If, when moving through trees rapidly, by grabbing alternate branches with the right and left hands, and you suddenly detect that the branches are wet and slippery, you may decide to change your escape strategy by moving to lower branches that may be drier or get closer to the tree trunk and scale up to safety where the grip is more secure. These changes in direction and speed would not be possible without close linkage between the visual, motor,  memory,  and the sensory information needed to detect of wet branches. All of these signals come together in the cortex, where the command center for future movements is located. The ability to continuously update executed movements,  through on-going  cortical processing, like a massively parallel computer, with moment to moment revision of our state and place within the environment, provided the ultimate in adaptive behavioral variability that must have been part of our ancestors survival skill set. Thanks to our cortex, simple reflexes were replaced by strategies and plans based on knowledge and current circumstances. The modern mechanisms of learning and memory, with long-term memory residing in our cortex, meant that each new success we experienced could be adapted and incorporated into the evolving sophistication of our memory, as part of our iteratively adjusted engram. It was like switching from obligatory reflexes to a plan of execution based on knowledge of the threat and the circumstances we found ourselves in when we had to make the appropriate decision: early mammals started it and primates brought it into perfection.

When we consider the motor system that we use to execute and carry out our plans, it is not the cerebral cortex alone that is important for this aspect of our behavior. Our cerebellum, particularly the lateral hemispheres of the cerebellar cortex play an important role in the planning, early execution and modification of movements as well. This part of the brain is particularly clever at helping us make smooth movements and correcting those movements as new sensory information feeds into the cerebellar system. What is remarkable about the cerebellar cortex is that its output through specialized Purkinje cells is entirely inhibitory, so it’s importance is in reducing signals and refining planned movements rather than adding to them.  In addition, motor learning is a feature of the cerebellum that allows us to modify primary motor functions as our environment changes. We are not specifically aware of the actions of our cerebellum unless it is damaged or diseased, at which time we struggle to make smooth movements, as if the afflicted person is drunk, when in fact they are sober. Then too, the basal ganglia, which lie underneath the cortex are also important for smooth execution of movements, as well as their initiation. Anyone who has seen the motor limits of a person with Parkinson’s disease, a deficiency of dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia system, can appreciate that this region of the brain plays a role in regulating the normal smooth movements, particularly the initiation of these movements, associated with our voluntary motor behavior. Yet, it remains the singular task of the cerebral cortex to initiate the movements and make the decisions to alter them once they have begun.

Those of our ancestors that didn’t survive, might have lost the race, or the test of strength, but those that emerged from that era, did so with the beginnings of the greatest brains of evolutionary history. Our brains further evolved to give us the capacity for language, another cortical gift, which gave us a deeper culture and served as the birthplace of a common history and purpose. We don’t know when language first emerged in our evolutionary history because language acquisition does not leave a trace in the fossil record. But everyone appreciates that language-based culture helped generate ever more improved methods for survival, as the knowledge and history of our ancestors before us was transmitted in ways that served to our advantage: man could at last write a good survival manual.

A popular theory of man’s evolutionary history is that the rapid growth in his brain size, something he shares with other primates, reflects a disproportionate growth in the frontal lobes of his cerebral cortex, the specialized  region of the brain where man’s most longitudinal level of thinking and his projections for the future reside. I have commented on this topic previously in discussing hyenas and the Republican brain, which seems devoid of frontal lobe activity. Much of the neuronal machinery responsible for our personality and our capacity to think logically and strategically is embedded within the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex. So, the sociological view of human brain evolution suggests that frontal lobe development facilitated man’s ability to form social networks, distribute the workload to create a social structure that not only initiated his cultural development, but also formed the basis of his hunting prowess with protection from hostile clans and the predators that plagued his distant cousins, such as Australophithecus afarensis. While the acquisition of language does not leave a trace in the fossil record, it seems likely that man’s capacity to form a culture must have been based on the development of language, with the progressive evolution of symbolism into concrete language forms that define many of the cultural differences seen today among the Homo sapiens subcultures. Language acquisition is a complex  evolutionary development that resides primarily in the temporal lobes of our brain, but also has important representation within our frontal lobes. The act of understanding language and expressing it through complex vocal commands requires integrative functions and collaborations with specific regions of the frontal cortex and the temporal lobes of our brains.

Although modern humans have been around for some 200,000 years, the acquisition of fire and tool-making had appeared in earlier iterations of our ancestors, though it has been argued that efficient hunting methods are a relatively recent development (~60,000 years ago). These cultural achievements, particularly group hunting, were probably essential for man’s development into an efficient predator against large scale animals. The higher levels of protein found in animal food sources meant that, with successful hunting and cooking methods, man could devote more time to cultural development, diversification of skills for survival and the implementation of social customs.  But, in the process of cultural development, man fused  his survival paranoia with the personality of his clan, such that the very earliest forms of complex societies included the art of making love and war. It seems to me however, that a high degree of variance exists within each culture about the importance of war and the degree to which war policies became more central to one culture over another. War as a reflex to new objects is not uniformly distributed among the population within a culture, particularly in modern cultures in which religion and cultural dominance are a strong component to the war-making mentality. The development of a paranoid state in early hominins is understandable. It was a successful defensive reaction, a sort of better be safe than sorry response. But, this long period of war-making and plundering other groups proved to be culturally threatening in the 20th century, when the tribal instincts of warfare got wedded to the modern mechanization of military hardware. I look at Hitler as a pagan warrior who probably wouldn’t be in history when conflicts were resolved with bow, arrow and sword. But with the ultimate weapons such as nuclear bombs and missils, anyone can be a catastrophe-maker. While we haven’t had a global conflict in nearly 65 years, we continue to kill Homo sapiens as if our older reflexive behavior dominated our thinking. The war option reflects an emotional component of our behavioral makeup that requires input from the amygdala and hypothalamus, the regions where survival insticts of rage can be called upon for assistance. How our analytical instincts, generated through frontal lobe analysis, get outvoted by the war-making rage instincts that probably require inputs from the amygdala and hypothalamus remains as one of the secrets to our survival success  in the distant past, but one of the obstacles for dealing rationally with our future.

All of the early means of survival, as hunters, gatherers, farmers or fisherman, relied on adaptations to the world that was not changed by our own adaptive behavior, at a time when the world seemed like an infinite collection of resources waiting for human exploitation. It was not until much later, after the industrial revolution, that our methods of mass hunting and fishing and general resource depletion of the earth, including the depletion of our forests, began to produce deficiencies in a vast number of natural resources, with the promise of future resources being vastly compromised if Homo sapiens continues on his present course. Just a hundred and fifty years into the industrial revolution we began to generate planetary deficiencies that man could not even begin to count, because he didn’t know enough about the planet he was destroying. That cultural deficiency seems to be getting worse as time goes on, rather than improving, stimulated by the irrational character of many updated and downgraded religions. Indeed, biologists argue that we are in a not-so-early phase of the sixth mass species extinction. The difference between this one and all of the others, is that this is the first man-made mass extinction.

In the latter half of the 20th century, we  slowly began to realize that the world was not a constant in the universe, a place of infinite resources, but was in fact a small planet, with finite resources, such  that we could easily appreciate the limits and the down-side to man’s adaptive superiority. All other species on the planet had to adapt to the planetary forces for their survival and these forces were immutable to the species struggling for their own personal continuity. But man’s adaptive genius began to change the planet over the past few hundred years, such that he now faces the ultimate challenge to his survival: how to survive on a planet in which human forces have changed it  in ways that he is only beginning to understand? Just meeting the fundamentals of life, those things that we once regarded as unchangeable, like clean water, clean air and a livable environment, will be the supreme challenge to man’s adaptability in this new 21st century.

Our early ancestors found value in forming clans, with work tasks distributed by sex, age and skill. Now the challenge is to determine if we have the capacity to form a clan of 9 billion people, or roughly the population of the earth projected as the steady-state population in the near future. Our modern culture has new demands for its survival, including energy costs to run our complex societies and support large economies, each with its own social order and environmental dependencies. Although our ancestors may have been responsible for creating some species extinctions, such as the woolly mammoth, who apparently had no innate fear of man and fell an easy victim to his hunting prowess, they largely adapted to the world they found and lacked the numbers and knowledge to change their environment significantly: earth was master and man had to find his own key for survival and reproductive competency. It was that way for several million years and for all Homo species, it was that way for the last 200,000 years.

As our culture evolved into and through the industrial revolution, with dramatic improvements in social wealth, communication, public health and industrial skills, we began a process that was entirely new for Homo sapiens, and eventually for the Earth. We began putting a new surface on the earth, one of cities and farms and expanded our collective civilization into one that increasingly changed the earth, and in many cases, the new makeover was made of materials with which Mother Earth was unfamiliar. We changed the chemistry of the Earth in ways that began to encroach on the essentials critical to our own survival, but we started these actions long before we understood their implications or their future impact. We cut down most of the trees (98% of the Pre-Columbian forests in North America have been cut down) long before we began to understand the importance of trees for our air and water resources.

In the relatively short geological life span of Homo sapiens, the very processes through which we had obtained our initial success, our planetary superiority, and the things we had taken for granted, like clean water, reliable food and safe, breathable air, began to erode as the new skin we put on the Earth’s surface got larger and larger, such that the products we produced and the very energy we used to sustain our culture, began to change our own atmosphere long before we were aware of it.  By the time the implications of all these changes became manifest in one way or another (the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire in 1969–that was for me personally a very early alarm–it represented something that was against nature, since burning rivers do not seem to be part of nature’s plan), it was too late to think of these issues as the subject of a rational analysis confronting humans, not unlike things our ancestors might have faced before, though surely on a smaller scale. But, these new findings are things we need to view as threatening to our own survival.

In America, the issue of global climate change and toxins in the environment and the man-made changes in the atmosphere became politicized. Politicization of these issues, meant the complete suspension of man’s sense of independent thinking, of his commitment to  a rational method of problem solving. The suspension of those biological facilities, the very basis of his evolutionary success, was a requirement for successful political party formation. The political system in America produced something brand new in the evolution of the human brain–a frontal lobotomy–created by the two party system of politics. What will win out? Will man restore his frontal lobe functions after years of denial, inactivity and the atrophy of disuse, or will he continue to descend into a resource depleted Earth that cannot support the life forms contained within it? This is the greatest and most serious choice that is now available to Homo sapiens. What will he do? Should we open up a new derivatives market and stock exchange to trade in man’s new vision and his new adaptive challenge? How would you invest in this market based on human and animal survival? What will be the meaning of private wealth during the 21st century?

So if man’s capacity to change the Earth now threatens the basic requirements for his own future, has the culture he produced become so runaway, so much on automatic pilot, that he has no chance of controlling the factors that are increasingly understood to be the result of his own environmental purges and exploitation? Did man reach the limits of his cortical apparatus to formulate a new escape plan, at the very time that he needs one now more than ever? Has he abandoned the use of his own frontal lobes at the very time when that is the only structure he has that is capable of seeing him successfully negotiate a new and better future for his species? Now more than ever, the threat to man is not so much the threat at hand, but it is based on the one around the corner–the one he can only imagine and can’t quite predict, though it is probably less than a hundred years away?

RFM

Folly Compounding (FC) happens when you don’t recognize your error or Folly and allow Folly Interest (FI) to accumulate until you have one big, giant looming Folly that is hard to deal with. By that I mean how a country or a person makes a mistake, perhaps one of great colossal dimensions, though it may not seem so at the time, and then spends a long duration, perhaps a lifetime, or many lifetimes for a country, reaping the misery or the incalculable results of that mistake because the problem wasn’t fixed early on, when it was eminently more fixable. But, by not identifying the problem early in its development, FC is just that: the problem gets bigger and more unmanageable because compound interest on your Folly balloons by margins more than you ever thought possible. It’s like a retirement system in reverse, putting your future into debt rather than building up a nest egg. Instead of getting a check when you retire, you get a bill, maybe a very big one. That, unfortunately is where we seem to be today, this year, right now. Some say it took us less than thirty years to get here, but the reality is far far different. The place we stand today got started after WW II, when we sat at the very top of the heap and committed our most important and first Folly–that of dividing the World in two.

Have we seen this movie before? Today, we are witnessing a replay of the old movie that we saw twenty years ago, called the “Savings and Loan Scandal” which played in American theaters in the 1980s. It was the result of advancement in our free market economy, a result of deregulation of the Savings and Loan Banks. The difference between the new and the old release of the movie is that this time, it’s our entire financial system that we are bailing out and the bill will be proportionately larger. Indeed we are witnessing an almost daily enhancement to the bailout costs as Citi Bank has needed and received financial help and many other banks are known to be teetering. When you couple the bailouts for the financial institutions, with other funds that may be funneled into the American automobile manufacturers, with complete uncertainty as to whether any of these funds will be recovered or repaid, the number reaches into the $ trillions and a seemingly unlimited sea of national debt. And then folks, get ready for the really big one in 20-30 years or so because the bigger they get, the more likely they will have the Federal government as their ultimate guarantor. You saw the problem with Lehman Brothers–they were too small for Federal Bailout. AIG was larger however and seemed to have its sticky fingers in too many different financial pies. The message is clear, get bigger and then you can keep on truckin’. With an FDIC guarantee of $250,000 per deposit, as part of the new bailout agreement, our banks will grow and grow and if someone doesn’t monitor what they do with the largess of all this new money, then the really big one may be still ahead of us. Let’s hope we can fix it now and fix it for good. But, the fix we did earlier started at the wrong end of the problem and in all likelihood, its magnitude may prevent us from fixing the gigantic social problems that need our attention, the most serious of which is our badly broken health care system. But, there is a way out and it is spelled MILITARISM, the solution for which is to shrink the completely insensible budget of the military and eliminate our corrupt and incompetent intelligence system. It doesn’t protect us anyway! But let’s get back to the nature of Follies before we tackle the really big one.

The Unforeseen Folly: There are of course Follies that cannot be seen as such when they begin: who would have thought that the beginning of the industrial revolution was going to give us global climate change in ways we have yet to fully understand. But, based on what we know now, our planetary future doesn’t look so good. At the very least, things will be different climate wise and maybe our lovely little frogs, salamanders and toads will disappear during our lifetime. In some areas they have been wiped out already. The FC through environmental change, with perhaps a new mass species extinction underway, is the Mother of All Follies. Yet, that Folly is going to play itself out in some way that we can’t do anything about, at least not in the short run. It was like lighting a very long fuse a hundred and fifty years ago, connected to a bomb that is about to go off without us ever understanding how powerful the explosion is going to be. Whether we can fix that Folly in the long run is the mother of all challenges, but far removed from the kinds of Follies I am talking about here. In this space, we are considering political and social Follies, the ones that are fixable through political and social change, those that will have a short-term and perhaps long-term benefit if we recognize them as such and do some repair work on them. Indeed, fixing these kinds of Political Follies could serve as a model for fixing the long-term Mother of all Follies–the environmental one.

We will go through a period in which the environmental changes will seem permanent, because of the long half life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (50-200 years). But our models of global climate change are too primitive yet to fully understand the scope of what lies ahead of us. Yet the predictions of global climate change have thus far been too conservative, particularly in projecting the rate of loss of the polar ice caps, since it is now clear that the slowly melting ice cap model, the ice cube in a glass of water model, does not account for what really takes place during polar ice cap melting. But again, fixing the Mother of all Follies, will require that we have to fix the FC of political origins, those that can be solved through the political and social changes demanded by our current state of a very un-American America.

The Economic Crisis of Today: Our current economic crisis, and the poor solutions we have used to fix it, will mean borrowing ourselves further into a hole without fixing some of the most critical elements the country faces, such as our broken health care system. Our solution to the meltdown is likely to mean that we will no longer control our own financial destiny, at least not on the sea of international currencies. We face the very real prospects that other countries will use our current state of financial collapse as a tool to reduce our influence in the World, even though at the moment it seems like we have dragged the rest of the countries down with us. But the countries that are buying our debt, like China, have a grip on our economy that we have never allowed before. Inflation of the dollar is very likely to be the only way out for America to reduce its debt and, with a further declining value of the dollar, there could well be pressure to push for another currency, like the Euro, as the basis for a new, more stable international exchange system, even though, right now, the dollar looks pretty stable. But the amount of money committed by our government to fix this economy is so far hovering around $7 trillion (loans, promises, purchases, stocks), a sum unimaginably large and unimaginably impossible to contemplate as an entry in the credit and debit columns. However, much of the borrowing that we are doing could be eliminated and we could stabilize our own economy if we dramatically reduced our military spending and began investing in the areas that help bring us an innovative economy, not the one we have today. Converting our military-industrial complex into the innovative technologies needed to address greenhouse gas reduction, as a new component of our economic engine, is one way to think about getting us out of a permanent war footing that stagnates our economy and the way we look at the world. Remember that we spend more than $1 trillion dollars each year on military and military-related costs, so that in principal, we could fund our own bailout without heavy borrowing. But these huge debts we face, are only going to multiply if we continue to go down the road of treating the military budget as untouchable. Massive public and private debt through military spending, wars, excessive speculation and credit card frenzies are the result of the accumulated Follies that are now arriving at our doorstep, all derived from the concept of Folly Compounding Interest (FCI), addressed below.

Fixing Follies Early: There is great danger in delaying the corrections needed to avoid serious FC. The greatest of these is that by putting off the fix for your Folly for a very long time, you may have forgotten what the folly was that started to get you into trouble in the first place, and, instead of fixing the original Folly , you fix the wrong thing, perhaps you actually introduce another Folly, which itself begins to accumulate as FCI. Worse, you might unravel some of the good stuff, keep the doodo, add some doodo of your own and then let somebody else worry about it later. Does that in any way feel like what we are faced with as a result of the presidency of GW Bush and his partner in crime Dick Cheney? It feels that way to me: nothing but a sea of doodo in front of us. Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about the free market hoax as a serious economic strategy, since we recently socialized a good part of our financial system. But of course, we only fixed things at the top, further depriving us of resources to fix things that truly need fixing.

Huge Problems for a New Administration: Ordinarily, a new administration coming into the American Presidency has to face a difficult issue or two. But in this case, what Bush leaves behind is so extensive and pervasive, almost across the board, that it seems like a vast sea of problems, way beyond counting with just the fingers of your hand and way beyond simple solutions. No incoming President in our history has ever had to face two different ongoing wars (a third one is the “war on terror”). And to face them with a military that is shattered in its morale and strained to the breaking point from the stress of excessive, unfair, over-taxing service. There is a recent report out that claims the suicide rate of soldiers who have been in Iraq, after coming home, is such that the death toll from that source is higher than the death toll of soldiers in combat.

Domestic Issues: Our medical care system is an embarrassment and badly broken as an effective and fair health care delivery system: it is too expensive and serves too few people. It doesn’t look anything like a solution by the so called “can do” Americans. Wages have declined over the past eight years for the middle class and were stagnant for a good part of the last 25 years; good jobs have been replaced by bad ones. People are losing their homes through money-gouging schemes that banks themselves have created in another far more extensive version of the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s. On Wall street, we have privatized profit and socialized risk. We have a magnitude of public expenditures on the military that is a noose around our neck with a budget of about $1.1 trillion, when all military items are added up, including the DOE costs for maintaining our nuclear arsenal, which itself remains more of a threat to all Americans than a source of security. It would seem that these many problems, none of which can be solved with a single band-aid, must have multiple causes. At first it might seem impossible that all of our current Follies, each of which is gathering FCI, can be traced to a single source. Yet, it is intriguing to at least explore the possibility that we can in fact, trace all of our current problems to a single Folly which we germinated and hatched in one of the past iterations of America–this would be the Mother of all Political Follies. Is it even remotely possible that one errant move of national dimensions in our past behavior has led to our current state of multifarious misery? That is the subject of this little note. But before exploring the issue in any significant detail, we must explore the nature and origin of Follies in our history and better understand FC, before switching to the Mother of All Political Follies.

Folly Compounding is Endemic to Institutions. All institutions make mistakes and countries tend to make very big ones. When a Folly befalls a company, which has a profit motive and a bottom line, it usually needs to be corrected quickly, or else the company could go out of business. British motorcycle manufacturers for example, were at one time king of the hill, with Norton, Triumph and others at the head of the class. Yet, by resting on their laurels, they fell victim to the energetic post-war Japanese, who provided, among other things, electric start motors, which helped propel them into the front ranks of motorcycle manufacturing. Today it looks like something similar may be happening to the American automobile manufacturers as a result of a kind of ossification in corporate leadership that maybe more related to the class dividing line of workers and management.

Follies are hard to fix for a Country: For a country, where there is no profit motive per se (it primarily serves a security function for those engaged in undertaking high profit activities), the motivation for correcting mistakes is always in the context of political survival rather than the health of the country. It’s good if they’re congruent, but GW has demonstrated to us how completely incongruent their alignment can be. It is far more likely for a country to get ossified from its Follies than a person or a business. And, the primary reason for this relates to the concept of constituency, because national political Follies are created by, and need to serve, a political alignment that brings you to power in the first place. And quite often, in modern America, that political alignment means telling the American people that one or more of the greatest Follies committed in their name, was in fact, a great American initiative. In America, political influence has created a false history of the country, such that a gifted politician, fed by a party with deep pockets, has no trouble convincing a large segment of our population, that pursuing Follies can be a noble cause. Nations suffer when they cannot properly identify their Follies and fix them before FCI comes due as a massive payment of unapproachable dimensions. It is not possible to change course unless you want to sacrifice your own career, which few people do. Under those circumstances, a politician survives by helping his constituency find better words for their Folly, words that allow the Folly to continue by another name: the invasion of Iraq had to be sold as a search for “weapons of mass destruction”  (WMD), not for oil and that myth still exists for many Americans today, particularly those with a deep need to believe their country can do no wrong. Unfortunately, these people are often the families and friends of soldiers that get called up to fight these wars and propagate the folly.  As another example. the Southerners didn’t fight intensely over slavery, but over States RIghts–the political version, which goes down more smoothly than the more barbaric term “slavery.” When corrected early on, a Folly does not accumulate FCI but, unfortunately, some Follies are seemingly impossible to avoid and invoke FCI not out of choice but out of circumstances.

The Civil War as FC. Some FC may be unavoidable and you may even realize at the time, that one preferred choice may necessitate adopting a Folly, perhaps a major one. When the founding fathers of America couldn’t resolve the issue of slavery at the time the union was first formed, seventy years later we had the bloodiest conflict in our history in the form of a civil war and, still alive today, we face the aftermath of that war and the slavery mentality in the form of racism and prejudice that has become a major political tool, stimulating the great realignment politics of the 20th Century, in which the Republican party converted Southern Democrats into Republicans, feeding the political horror shows of Reagan, Bush I and Bush II.

The Benefits of Slavery: One must keep in mind that the Folly of slavery, of allowing slavery to become rooted as an economic system, without which the slave states could not exist as they did, was not restricted to the South. During the peak of slavery, a very large fraction of wealthy British had acquired their wealth through the slave trade. Northern Americans profited from slavery through ship building and financing and many of the most successful slave traders were in fact Northerners by residential criteria. It’s been estimated that until the 19th Century, about 1/3 of wealthy British owed their wealth to the slave trade. The South was the recipient of the slave trade, but not necessarily the profiteer of the slave procurement system. The bill for perhaps the unavoidable FC of slavery came due during the civil war, which involved 3 million armed fighting men and 600,000 lives lost, many of whom died of poor medical care after being wounded (it was that event that stimulated the beginning evolution of medical care to move away from the primitive colonial medical methods, to adopt more modern techniques and ideas and eventually this process led to the fusion of science into medicine towards the end of the 19th century).

Still Paying for the Civil War: If the heavy price of the Civil War in lives lost and mass carnage wasn’t enough, in many ways it proved to be something of a down payment for future atrocities and future wars. Indeed, we continue to pay on that bill in ways that seem challenging at each new turn. Like global climate change, the impact of the Civil War will likely be with us forever. The historic institution of slavery created huge wealth for many and an unsustainable economy for a significant population of Americans. Yet, the very nature of slavery was such an anathema to the founding of our nation, such a completely farcical notion in the face of the wording found in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal” that continuity with the past had to be sharply altered. Otherwise it was hard to sleep. You can only wonder if addressing global climate change will prove to match the titanic struggle we went through over slavery. It seems to be shaping up that way. There is after all, a giant economy and huge profits derived from fossil fuels and the suppression of science that tries to tell us about the Folly Compounding nature of pursuing cheap carbon-based energy sources.

The Civil War did not end FC from Black enslavement. As devastating as the civil war was, it didn’t really solve the problem of slavery. It was only the beginning of a solution as we faced a long interim period of converting from slavery to enslavement. If you believe that the civil war ended slavery in the South, think again. In Douglas Blackmon ‘s book “Slavery by Another Name ” (a summary of which can be read/watched on Bill Moyers Journal) the author discusses how post-slavery enforced labor camps created a new form of slavery in the South that re-enslaved thousands of blacks who became indentured laborers. Blackmon has compiled strong documentation that Southern states, which had Slave Codes that regulated the behavior of slaves before the civil war, formulated new codes after reconstruction that allowed them to bring back slavery in a new form–forced labor camps. Immediately after the civil war, Southern States tried to replace “Slave Codes” with “Black Codes” to achieve something similar in creating cheap black labor in the South. But these laws were struck down and the South responded by creating new laws that would fall on blacks to effectively recapture their free labor. These new laws were more subtle and included the concept of “vagrancy” which itself became a code word for rounding up blacks and getting them into forced labor camps from which they might have escaped previously or be recruited anew. These new laws helped to create labor camps that effectively replaced slavery, and, in essence, accomplished very nearly the same thing. From Blackmon’s interview with Bill Moyers: “Well, and but what the picture also demonstrates [referring to a photograph in his book] was the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There were work camps where people reported that they would arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It was it’s just astonishing, the level of brutality.” Blackmon continues–”And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the creation of modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men.”

The Black Law of Vagrancy: During the forced labor camp era in the South, you could be arrested on the streets and charged with vagrancy, appear before a judge who ordered you moved to a labor camp from which it was testified you escaped. Apparently the North looked the other way after reconstruction as if to say “we will not tolerate slavery in the North, but if you are a Black man and decide to stay in a former slave state, you’re on your own.” These labor groups existed throughout the South until the beginning of the Second World War. So when you walk the streets of Atlanta think about the fact that the city probably could never have been built without modern slave labor. It just wasn’t called slavery.

A Modern carryover of Slavery. In modern times, post-Barry Goldwater, manipulation of this “Southern block” of former slave states created the new political coalition that polluted the Republican Party and gave us Reaganism. Modern Republicanism was built on the unethical manipulation of Southern Whites who were pissed off with the Democratic Party, because of Civil Rights Legislation, passed when Lyndon Johnson was President. It was Barry Goldwater himself who suggested, after his stunning defeat to Johnson in 1964, that the Republican Party should recruit the Southern States who were ready to jump ship from the Democrats after the Civil rights legislation passed under Johnson; that was the beginning of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” It proved to be the most significant political realignment of the post civil war era and it still dominates our political landscape. Hopefully the 2008 political victory of Obama has helped to destroy this block of voters that eliminated any liberl, progressive legistation from ever passing. You may notice that until the recent healthcare bill was passed this year (2010), no progressive legislation had been passed by our national congress since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The power of the South can only permanently be eliminated by eliminating or changing the senate to a proportional system and eliminating the electoral college system all together.  Otherwise, unified Southern power can be reborn again, many times over.

Could we have done without Slavery? Would we have been better off today by insisting on a slave-free union written into our constitution when we first formed our country? That is what some, like John Adams wanted to do. But it proved to be a bridge too far. One of the most prominent states, Virginia, was a slave state and its most prominent political figure of that era and author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves and sired children by at least one of them (although he wanted to rid Virginia of slavery earlier in his career and concluded, by the opposition that he ran into, that the time was not ripe for such a sea change in the culture, that it would have to wait until some future date when the country was more mature. Of course, that maturity never came). Even if one could have formed a slave-free union and defeated the British, a new smaller union, one formed of slave-free states might not have survived the war of 1812, if the Southern block served as allies with the British, permanently changing the landscape of America and perhaps restoring British rule, at least in some regions of the country. It was not until the war of 1812 was concluded that the British decided against ever seeking dominion in North America again. As an aside, perhaps the American Indian culture would have been better off, for it was their alliance with the British during the war of 1812, that resulted in the Indian purges by Andrew Jackson, as he drove some southern Indians into Florida, and forced the Cherokee Indians of Georgia to march the “Trail of Tears” to relocate into what is now Oklahoma, ostensibly as punishment for their alliance with the British, but in reality it served as continuity for American expansionism. Thus, Indian genocide was greatly accelerated by the War of 1812 (Northern Indian alignment with the British during the Revolutionary war also figured in the hardened attitudes that the new American government had towards Native Americans).

One last try for the British: Until the battle of New Orleans, which the Americans were supposed to lose, Britain had a strategy for retaining American holdings. Even though the 1812 peace agreement was signed in London before the Battle of New Orleans, Britain insisted that it had to be carried over to the US for its signature there, hoping that in the intervening travel time, the battle of New Orleans would be a decisive victory for them and the treaty would be renegotiated or canceled, giving Britain a new opportunity for continued presence in the New World. But that all ended when Andrew Jackson pulled off a stunning victory in the Battle of New Orleans. As a result, the British never again challenged American hegemony in North America, by trying to establish a foothold in America. Of course, the American aim, of driving out the British in Canada did not succeed, as our invasion into Canada was a bit like our invasion of Iraq.

More on Follies: Part of FC is institutionally endemic, because when large organizations make decisions of great momentum, often when they first get started, or get a fresh start for some reason, they very rarely change or adapt to new circumstances. Indeed institutions or countries are designed to propagate FC: that’s why they can accumulate such huge levels of FCI as it is hard or perhaps impossible to avoid. This is not because they feel they made the right decision in the first place, but rather their decisions create constituencies and an internal momentum, such that going back on the foundations of their decision-making might risk the entire enterprise and certainly put those in charge at greater peril, politically or otherwise. Once you make a big folly, it is hard to undo it. Indeed preservation of the folly means preservation of the folliers. I have heard in recent months elected members of the House of Representatives take the floor to remind Americans that there is no greater duty to country than that of continuing to fight communism. Presumably, they are referring to Cuba or North Korea as the remaining giants of communism, as China is now evolving into a new relationship with the United States, in this case, an economic one (mind you, our current and developing relationship with China was initiated by Nixon when he realized that he could not solve the war in Vietnam without going through China. So forgetting that China was a communist country was more like a forced choice on Nixon, rather than a contemplative option). For the Chinese, the American loss in Vietnam was an overwhelming, but expected victory.

Folly Compounding by undoing the wrong Follies: Folly compounding is different for an individual when compared to a nation, largely because a person has only one or at most a small group of people to worry about, not a large constituency. The individual is always better prepared to correct follies, especially those that have significant financial implications. The ultimate financial crisis can lead to bankruptcy which at least gives you something like a fresh start. But for countries, such as the United States, once an initial decision is made, succeeding presidents tend to enforce those decisions rather than unravel them: if you try to unravel prior decisions you always run the risk of unraveling the unraveler. After the Bay of Pigs disaster for example, President John F. Kennedy might have wanted to expunge the CIA, and apparently intimated that in one of his comments. But, he never really had any intention of doing so (despite numerous rumors that he did), because had he seriously tried it, he would have unraveled all the narratives of the post-war era and too many American heroes would have bit the dust. Any attempt on JFK’s part to do that might well have put the Democratic party into the dust bin of history. Even by the 1960s, the false narrative of our country was not a pretty story. But if the Follies of a predecessor might get recognized early on as a Folly, it is far easier to let the Folly continue to perpetuate itself, continue to grow at compound interest rates, so that the new guy can make Follies of his own and look forward, rather than spend his time unraveling the Follies of his predecessor(s) and always be looking through the rear view mirror. Every incoming president wants to do something new, and only in our recent history have we had presidents (like Reagan and G.W. Bush) who were seriously committed to undoing what others had done before them (OK Jefferson did it to Adams’ presidency during his first term, but that was pre-industrial). For Reagan it was more subtle, like hiring incompetents to head organizations like the EPA, whereas for GW it was not subtle at all, as he tore up prior laws and international treaties and went out on his own (Under GW Bush, the Clean Air Act is gone, as is the Endangered Species Act). Unfortunately, these new undoers, Ronald Reagan and G. W. Bush, undid the wrong stuff and further added to FC and the FCI that goes with it. We have only begun to contemplate the payback in store for us from the changes in the environment and our climate. The only thing we know for sure is that the worst is yet to come.

The Bill for Folly Compounding:has it arrived? The responsibility of a new administration is to plan a new set of programs, many of which are likely to initiate new follies and, at the same time, it’s important to put a band-aid on the follies of your predecessor so that the bill for the old ones won’t come due during your presidency, otherwise you will get the blame. The Republican Party of today does not object to Obama or McCain becoming President this time around, because there are so many Follies coming due that the new President will get blamed for his inability to solve them. It seems to be turning out however, that G. W. Bush and his neocon buddies weren’t smart enough to band-aid the old follies with ones that stick and we may be witnessing the bill for all the old Follies coming due during the last months of his presidency. Although, with nearly two months to go, the bill could still get higher (note added later–it did!).

America’s last gasp Folly? The last log to put on the fire for the American economy was the housing bubble, created by low interest rates by the Fed and sub-prime mortgages conjured up largely by investment banks as securitized stocks. These instruments were so complex that few understood them. Now that it is burning out, it seems like it might turn into a nuclear star, the predecessor to a black hole. Wall Street got hooked on bubbles. The dotcom bubble was created out of hype, when internet companies could issue stocks one day and see their worth soar to hundreds of times the opening share price without ever showing a profit. Any fool could tell you that this bubble couldn’t last and when it burst, the feds quickly moved in to help create a new bubble–the housing bubble–seemingly the last log to put on the fire. There is no economic factor or bubble on the horizon that is waiting in line to replace the speculative housing bubble: with a consumer-based economy and so much public and private debt, at such high interest rates when credit cards are used to finance the debt, the cupboard is now bare. The bursting of this bubble has now led to $ trillions in debt and loan guarantees. This is nearing a 10 on the Richter Scale. It may not seem believable that the huge financial meltdown we are going through had its origins in the era immediately following the end of WW II, when we stepped into a leadership vacuum, without clarity of mission or technique. Instead of learning from the FDR era about going softly on issues such as how we would deal with Russia, the right-wing was able to veer Truman into the same anti-communist  frenzy that had been  unleashed during World War I when the Russians quit the war as a result of their revolution. We sent American troops into Russia in that period to help the White Russians overcome the Bolshevicks. That intervention in another country’s internal struggle was against the very principles we were founded on as a nation. And, many Russians still remember the U.S. treachery in those years, fed by the rabid anticommunist frothing churned up by the right wing Republican fanatics. And, part of the solution to these problems lies in the 900 lb gorilla in the room that no one wants to talk about yet–the excessive military expenditures that drain our resources. But this too is a double-edged sword, as our “bomb economy” puts a lot of people to work in the defense industry. Bush may be too mired in ideology to generate the vision necessary to find at least a temporary solution (in case you haven’t noticed how many untoward disasters that are all around us and seemingly have us properly on the edge) to the most pressing problems that are currently falling into his watch. One needs to face the housing disaster as a national disaster, like Katrina, but do it this time so that it works. Get people back into their homes and stop the financing that has allowed wealthy people to make more wealth off of the poor. Reduce the interest rates on credit card debt and make it easier for people to get out of that form of debt. Yes banks will fail, they are failing now, but we have faced that problem many times before: remember the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s? Yes, it may no longer be possible for a financial wizard to make hundreds of millions of dollars each year for doing very little, except contributing to the national level of FCI. Folly Compounding gets harder and harder to fix the longer you wait. If you wait too long, no one can remember what the folly was in the first place that got you into your current dilemma.

There is always great opposition to fixing Follies. The Republicans don’t want anyone to go back and examine how we really got into our present fix, with a bloated military, runaway military expenditures, the need to create new demons and dragons to slay, calling ourselves a superpower, all the while internally evolving into a third-world country. No leader, no party, no single person on the political horizon with the exception of Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson, wants to connect the dots between our huge military expenditures and our inability to provide health care for our citizens or our concern for the internal economic stability of our country. That is the FCI bill that is coming due today. We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. We are in a country where any wealth we could apply to fix our current fiscal problem goes to the military to fight of our enemies, most of which are imaginary. As a result, all of our financial bailout is created by money borrowed through the printing press.

When did we begin Folly Compounding? No one seems willing to go back far enough to recognize that our biggest source of FC began at the close of WW II, when we launched the Mother of all Political and Social Follies, by making Russia, China and communism into a giant monolithic threat that seemingly wanted to enslave us all, all of us wee little capitalists. This threat was created by the rabid right-wing elements who wanted to preserve capitalism at all cost and sucked the inexperienced Truman into being the guy with the banner. In retrospect it was all too easy. But Truman was aided by one big ace in the hole that made his creation of the Cold War too tempting: Leslie Groves, the air force general who guided the development of the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb, promoted the idea that, by dropping the bomb on Japan, we would be serving notice to the Russians, letting them know that this new ultimate death weapon could be used against them and this single act (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) would give Americans hegemony over the Russians and the threat of advancing communism for at least forty years. In the words of Groves, “the Russians couldn’t even build a decent jeep.” It was in fact Truman’s adoption of this attitude, however naive that it was (many have argued for example that the Russian T34 tank was a good match for the German Panzer tanks, much better than our own Sherman tanks, which were poorly matched against them when head to head confrontations began after D-Day and in Africa and Italy). It was the seemingly seductive gift of the atomic bomb that made Truman jump onto the slippery slope of using militarism as the chief weapon against the contrived threat that the Russians would be advancing communism throughout the World, now that they were a true superpower, created by their dominant role in defeating Germany in WW II. The Russians did not want the Cold War. Stalin had lost 20-24 million people and badly needed time to heal as a nation. He did not support the communist party’s in Europe in the aftermath of the war, because he didn’t want another conflict to absorb his energy. He had too many things to do at home. At the end of WW II, the great Russian army that defeated Germany was largely demobilized–they had to rebuild their country.

When the Cold War Began: It has been argued that only days after FDR died (1945), Truman met with Russian Ambassador Molotov and chewed him out for the Russian demands in controlling Poland. This was a little odd, since Russia had experienced Polish soldiers who participated with the German army during the invasion of their homeland and the Battle of Stalingrad: why wouldn’t the Russians insist on control of Poland after WW II? The old axium that to the victors go the spoils is still true in case of war. Of course there were Russian atrocities against the Poles when Hitler and Stalin signed a pact and carved up Poland before the Germans opened up their fatal second front against Russia. The abrupt hostile attitude and contempt that Truman showed for Molotov has been used by historians to mark the beginning of the Cold War and, for America, it was the beginning of their greatest Folly. Folly by fiction is the greatest of all Folly sins, because to fix those, you have to recognize the fiction before you can get to the Folly. The cold war was conceived and executed by a small group of Americans in the Truman administration who would never have had the authority on policy had it not been for WW II, which gave them the access they should never have been allowed to have. The Cold War was nothing more than a policy to propagate world-wide American hegemony.

Follies are propagated: As another example (hardly trivial for those on the receiving end) of this kind of propagating Folly, you can see it in how we support our military, more specifically, how we support the soldiers on the ground. We have all been disgusted by the lack of good armor for our troops in Iraq, where roadside bombs have been the single biggest cause of death and injury, a situation in which simple armor plating of the vehicles could save lives and reduce injury and ultimately, long-term care costs to those who get injured. Although conditions have improved, most of us reel in irritation and feel that soldiers are underpaid and certainly under protected. The revelations about the poor health care conditions at Walter Reed Hospital confirmed and expanded our disgust with our own government. Can’t the world’s only superpower protect its soldiers and care for them any better than this? But that attitude is endemic to the way we have always looked at our foot soldiers, the grunts in the trenches. George Washington almost quit as the commander of the Continental Army because Congress would not adequately fund his troops, many of whom went without shoes and adequate clothing. The winter at Valley Forge was nothing short of a nightmare for Washington. His army was replete with desertions, infighting, quarrelsome interactions and bad morale. The only thing that kept the Valley Forge army together that winter was Washington’s constant visits to the camp and his engulfing presence. But once this policy was formulated, that we would be stingy with the troops, it became our cultural standard and has been carried forward as part of our modern view of the military at the level of the grunt: don’t spend any more than you have to on the soldier who does the actual fighting. If any succeeding president wanted to undo what congress established during the revolutionary war, it would be challenging and most presidents want to promote continuity of presidential lineage, not a series of disjunctive changes of the guard, where you spend most of your time unraveling the old stuff and much less time threading some new. With the exception of GW Bush, no president wants to be part of a historical yo-yo. In the case of the foot soldier, any advantages that our modern troops have over Washington’s, were carved out of the need to give incentives for recruiting an army of adequate size and skill, particularly as the population from which they were derived became more educated and sophisticated. It would be far better if we completely outsourced our military at the foot soldier level. But, will the Chinese be willing to serve their army and ours?

How is our treatment of soldiers relevant for Folly Compounding? Nixon eliminated the military draft in 1969 and the last drafted soldier to serve was called up in 1973. Since then we have an all  volunteer army. At the present time, the unpopular war in Iraq has seriously compromised our ability to recruit qualified soldiers. This inability to recruit quality personnel for the military has forced the military to reduce the standards for army recruits, such that high school dropouts and people with marginal ability or those with criminal records can qualify today, where they were banned previously. These soldiers are much more likely to engage in torture and abuse, simply because of their background. More importantly, professionalizing the army, as we have done, puts the nation at greater risk for a military junta or takeover. You have only to look at the composition of our police and military to know which political philosophy would prevail in a military takeover. So it might be the case that this source of Folly Compounding is yet to extract its ultimate price. The other component to this issue is that by calling up the National Guard to serve in Iraq, we have robbed the governors of access to a military force when confronted with an emergency. All these elements lie smoldering under the surface and, by the time pressure for more army personnel comes up, the escalation to a permanent war footing may be necessary, at which time reconstituting the draft may be required. Currently the army is stretched to the breaking point and the National Guard is completely dispirited.

One feature of Folly Compounding that consistently rings true, is that looking back, it seems utterly irrational when you try to visualize how we moved from enemies to friends or the other way around. Continuity is not among the landmarks of our retrospective trail. Take for example how we react to Cuba vs China. Both are communist states, the presumed mortal enemy of our capitalist society. Yet, we simply disregarded the communist state of China to engage them in an act of symbiotic economic interdependency, but oh yes, Cuba is different—it’s a communist state and we have no economic or political will to change our attitude about that country right in our own backyard. For Cuba, it’s the ideology stupid! But it’s not the ideology of the political system that counts, it’s the ideology of corporate America. We will have an embargo against Cuba until we get to use Havana again as a vacation/gambling resort and Castro is no longer around.  It’s that simple. Hypocrisy doesn’t even matter anymore. We no longer have a free press that is willing to draw attention to our corporatist state and the false history that is needed to sustain it. We have reached a state in our society where outright plain lies spoken by our president are never challenged in the press. You have to go to the blogs to find reality.

The Roman Empire was a classic example of Folly Compounding: the only problem is that no one knows with certainty which of her many follies was the most important one accounting for her decline and fall.  Did she jump into the dust bin of history by the sheer weight of too many accumulated Follies, or was there one in particular that outweighed all the others? Corruption? Too many wars? To many armies to feed and support? Bloated aristocracy? Blowbacks from all the indigenous people she had trampled and slaughtered? For the last sixty years, America has been Folly Compounding and, at the moment, it does not look to anyone that we will last anything comparable to the duration of the Roman Empire, which lasted about a thousand years.

Our one-time attempt to erase our Folly: a decade of restoration: There is one sliver of hope that we can draw on from a long forgotten page in our post war history which gives us encouragement that something like a cure can still be found. Perhaps our economic collapse has given us an opportunity to address these problems as we did previously. Lately, we hear a lot more people asking “what would FDR do?” The Google list for “FDR” has exploded with new options for information. But we should also think about Googling sputnik, the Seaborg Report or Vannevar Bush. In fact, we did go through a brief ten-year period (1958-1968) where it looked like America might recover, as she attempted to set a new course for herself and tried to right her tilted ship of state. This happened as a result of Sputnik, the Russian satellite launched in 1957. Sputnik I, followed a month later by Sputnik II shocked the world and terrified the hard right-wingers. Physicist Edward Teller, the patron saint of the hydrogen bomb, said the United States had lost “a battle more important than Pearl Harbor.” Senator Henry Jackson, a war hawk Democrat, proclaimed that Sputnik was a “devastating blow to the prestige of the United States as a leader in the scientific and technical world.”  The hardliners throughout the country were flummoxed. They couldn’t respond with more military buildup and a new round of nuclear warheads (although they did that too), because the lesson of Sputnik was a lesson of being bested in the game of science and technology. For the Russians, Sputnik was a major propaganda victory and yet it was a scientific disaster. Before Sputnik was sent into space, Russian technicians were having a hard time getting the Geiger counter on the satellite to send signals to a receive for making measurements of radiation in space. Kruschev was so worred about getting the Russian satellite up there first (it was a geophysical year and others, including the U.S. were trying to launch a satellite as well), that he sent it up without the ability to make measurements. Ironcially, several months after Sputnik, the Americans sent up their first satellite–Explorer I–which did have measurement tools and was able to measure the first of the two Van Allen Radiation Belts. With the launch of Explorer I America grabbed the lead in the science of space exploration, while ceding to the Russians the propaganda victory in the struggle between two political systems. Scientists in America had argued since the close of WW II that new government expenditures for research had gone mostly to the military and that basic science research was not developed as promised after the war. Sputnik forced America to re-examine her research investment priorities. Clearly something in America was wrong if the Russians, germinating from a supposedly inferior system, could best the United States in an area that they had claimed for themselves. America was first with the bomb, how could they not be first into space?

Eisenhower assigned a committee to make recommendations about how to respond to Sputnik. The Seaborg report of 1960 concluded that the Russians were ahead of America because their students were better trained in math and science. America had too few research universities for proper science exposure to its student population. More would have to be built. A doubling of research universities had to be initiated. The Seaborg report further emphasized that the kind of investment they were proposing represented a sound investment in America and her future. In addition to the construction of more research universities, the Seaborg report emphasized that support for students and the infrastructure for training future Ph.D.s would be a necessary system of support. Prior support of universities had been too narrowly focused.  A national consensus developed that America should increase the number of research universities  (there were about 16 in that era, about the same number as those that existed in the 1930s) and embellish those that were already designated as such (based on the % of nation’s Ph.D. students). So began the Golden Era of the American Research University, in which new  universities began and  students were encouraged to go to college and received support through student loans and scholarships. Low interest student loans were made available and funding for graduate students was  expanded together with a gigantic expansion of the research facilities throughout the country. Collectively this  formed a new industry, one  never before seen in this country–an industry to educate and grow, with a new emphasis on science, engineering and technology all viewed as a new investment strategy for America.

More on Sputnik. The new national mood created by the response to Sputnik reflected one of the great transforming moments in American history. Although Americans were encouraged to study Russian, as they seemed to be the dominant scientific community of the post-Sputnik world, there was palpable relief from the old McCarthy era days when students had to get under desks to practice drills for an atomic bomb attack, as one of the means for indoctrinating the country against an enemy that did not exist. Instead of beating America’s chest for developing American hegemony on the basis of military achievements and deployments, we began to emphasize the fundamentals of education and began to appreciate more intellectual developments and individual cognitive growth: America needed to get a lot smarter. The projected growth for  the American research university system was pegged at 15% per year and in 1968, the research university program reached its highest percent spending of the economy at .025%. The country was aroused and responded dramatically to these new education and research opportunities. This new effort became the center piece of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” that brought him into office, as he promised continuity with the program and expansion of teacher education throughout the country. This ten year period, the Golden Era, proved that America can do remarkable things when a national focus is made that improves the lives and outlook for all Americans. No child left behind did not need to be included in the dialog, because the great civil rights awareness was just appearing on the horizon as a national dilemma. The scientists and engineers brought into universities in that era changed the face of science and brought the new disciplines of molecular biology and neuroscience into the American sphere of influence, while keeping other disciplines such as physics, as premier disciplines in American universities. Indeed the term “neuroscience” is an American term brought into existence in the 1960s, when the Society for Neuroscience was formed in the United States. But, tragically, this new emphasis on education and research, though it restored American prestige by putting a man on the moon ahead of the Russians in 1969, did not continue in the same way, as the Vietnam War began to capture the resources that had been flowing into our higher education system. In addition to that, the civil rights movement clearly established that America had a long way to go before justice for all its citizens could be established. But, by investing in education and expanding our research universities in the 1950s and 1960s, we are better prepared today to soften the blow that currently rests on our doorstep. Indeed, without that investment in the 1950s and 1960s, we would not be as prepared as we are today to rebuild our economy along the lines that can take advantage of the investments we made in that long forgotten Golden Era. So, there is a way out–we did it once before. While we look back to FDR for hints about dealing with our fiscal crisis, we should look back at Sputnik as an example in our history where, for a decade, we started to get things right. But, after this brief flurry of relief, when America had an opportunity to right the ship and set a new course, whamo, we got back on the Folly Compounding train through Vietnam, the rise of Southern politics and the corporatist reaction to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” which put the brakes on our development of higher education and turned on the spigot once again as we turned our back on that enriching decade to reassert our pursuit of compound interest on our Follies. Vietnam is part of the bill that seems to be coming due right before our eyes. But that too is only part of the story.

Do we finally recognize our Follies? GW Bush, our current president, has been able to achieve something no other president in the history of the United States has managed to do: he has shown us how you can Folly Compound on a scale so unimaginable that almost everyone today either understands or feels what Folly Compounding is or does to the country as well as the individual citizen. The financial cost and the social implications of what he has done to our treasury and the cultural threads that bind us together are both visible, palpable and planted somewhere in our gut. We can see in the course of a single presidency what has taken nearly 6 decades to otherwise achieve. Bush has the unique distinction of not only spawning a whole new slew of Follies, but he has done what presidents seldom do–he did go back and undo his predecessors decisions and convert good decisions into a new brand of Folly. Bush didn’t undo any of  his predecessors Follies, but instead undid their positive contributions. Things like the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. He undid those good deeds that worked well and kept his predecessors bad ones, tilting the windmill ever further towards the point of no return. Many have argued that we are just one or two terrorist attacks away from a military dictatorship. GW had already cleared the way for this action, since he struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for our military to patrol the U.S. The military establishment of NorthCom should frighten every American, because it is a new military field of operation, targeted at the United States with the possibility of using our own military for a takeover of the country, if the situation warrants it. But who decides whether any situation requires military action and martial law? Yep, GWB. Bush has “legally” established that in the “War on Terror,” the U.S. is a potential battlefield and the “decider” will choose whether the conditions warrant military action. It will be a stain on all of us that GWB and Cheney were not impeached during their tenure as president and vice-president. Will that failure become America’s greatest Folly?

The National symptoms of Folly Compounding: Even in the face of such a devastatingly high level of Folly Compounding , for some, recognition of this phenomenon still travels below the radar screen of verbalization. Perhaps this is still true for the majority of our citizens: for them, the awareness of Folly Compounding comes in the form of a gnawing, uncomfortable rumbling in the gut, accompanied by a low grade nausea, possibly with gas or the disquieting sensation of convulsive-like, peristaltic waves gurgling in our abdomen and rippling within our gut. At times this discomfort makes one feel as though the lunar tides have settled in the abdomen as a full-blown nighttime repetition of what one goes through less subtly during the day. Antacid sales go up and Insomnia, depression, poor performance on the job, being easily distracted, more irritable mixed with confusion and anger are all part of the Folly Compounding syndrome when it reaches the subconscious level of our citizenry, those who don’t know quite know enough to verbalize the problem. You don’t know what it is, but your gut is telling you that something is very wrong. For these types, things just aren’t right–there is a feeling of doom lurching around the corner. They will know a better country when they see one or feel it in their gut. Religion might be their antidote and perhaps it already is. There is a mood shaped by these tormented intestinal rumblings, a thread throughout the nation, a feeling that something bad has happened, but something worse is on its way. Perhaps we are ripe for an alien invasion, as the Martians have been waiting for signs of weakness and now they feel the time is ripe for a launch. But, for others, they know exactly what is going on and why. Their insight has reached the stage of verbalization and perhaps well beyond. Yet, for this group too, our present circumstances leaves them somewhat paralytic, facing a sense of despair about the future, because political realities are such that change in a big way, something that might put limits on Folly Compounding, and begin to reign them in, those seismic events usually require a major disaster, a sea change that leaves no doubt that mistakes were made and choosing to go down the road we have been on was a disaster: we need a brand new direction. We need to re-lurch the ship. Do something that will register on the Richter scale. The listing ship is there, but the will to right it has yet to emerge.

America has lacked palpable disaster: In a way, America has never had a major disaster visited upon it from another shore. Our major Follies have come when we have attempted to influence other countries through our growing militarism. But, we have yet to recognize these missteps for what they really represented. So, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq should have been viewed in that way and, had that kind of viewpoint prevailed, then Folly Compounding might have had a much more restricted visitation in setting the course of our current and future history. One might argue that 9/11 was America’s first disaster of foreign origin, but that is stretching the meaning of the concept and the significance of the event. 9/11 was visually horrific, but nothing less or more than a “blowback,” the stage for which we created for ourselves and upon which we became the principal actors. It did not signify an act of war, but rather an act of terrorism combined with pure luck and extremely poor awareness on our part about the dangers we create for ourselves, the alarm for which should have been the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, an event that should have set off an alarm and triggered a more rational way of dealing with our own domestic security. The same person who financed the World Trade Center bombing, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed also helped plan 9/11. Preceding 9/11, the same group had planned a terrorist attack in the Philippines that involved boarding numerous planes and using them to crash into selected targets. But the story behind the 9/11 attack, a story of Folly Compounding, began in the 1970s during the Carter administration, when we were feeling so clever and invincible about ourselves. We rope-a-doped the Soviets into invading Afghanistan and as a reward, got 9/11, Iraq, the Taliban, Pakistan and a new narrative for the false history of America. Charlie Wilson’s War was a Folly and another example of the short-term thinking that dominates our government strategy. 9/11 was another notch in our Folly Compounding belt, but much of the country has yet to recognize it as such, for the Republicans have been successful in telling and warning the country “don’t go there.” If you go there you will suffer “paralysis by analysis.” It is the Republican tendency for developing irrelevant jingoism that seems to work for them as it distracts the public. Only in the last few weeks of our post-war history is this Republican form of  sloganism beginning to ring very hollow. It seemed to ring hollow in the 2008 election.

The origins of modern Folly Compounding: Since the close of WW II, the United States has embarked on Folly Compounding by generating great, disjunctive moments in our history where abrupt, hard political turns were made that lurched America inexplicably in new directions: two of these seismic shifts were destructive and one was restorative. All three bear examining. Yet these giant political lurches, a Folly Compounding spree if you will, begged most fundamentally at the question of why. Why does a country seemingly on the verge of a breathtaking pinnacle of opportunity for peace, social tranquility and economic prosperity, choose instead the most paranoid and destructive option of all available choices? How did a country that had come through a challenging but uniting war, under strong, popular Democratic leadership, a leadership that advocated a vision for a peaceful future, with reduced imperialism as a global objective, how did that country make such a hard right turn after WW II? How did America make such counter-intuitive choices? No single American ever voted for the option of the Cold War and it was never really a matter of public debate. How did the promises and vision of FDR suddenly get trashed by Truman, with the country veering sharply right, setting us on an new unchartered course which so abruptly changed our anticipations, that we had to begin the process of inventing a national mythology just to live with it all: the lurches were too unnatural, our enemies too unreal and too invisible. The Red Scare of the 1950s was an essential component to the plan for lurching the nation. We remain in a lurched posture today.

Let the Follies begin! No on knew it at the time, or could possibly foresee, but the childlike paranoia that was forced onto the American consciousness, beginning with the death of FDR near the end of WW II, would initiate the process of Folly Compounding , the bill for which has been accumulating interest and is coming due in our current generation, perhaps beginning in the last few years. It certainly accounts for a great deal of our current financial crisis. Tragically, the generation who will have to pay this bill was not even born when our greatest Folly Compounding adventures began. The seeds were sown, the plants emerged and the harvest has begun. Why did we set sail on a ship of militarism when other options were so readily available and so seemingly more attractive? In the space of a single war and two decades of an uneasy peace, a country that didn’t want anything to do with foreign affairs after WW I became the country that wanted to dominate the World–big time–after WW II. Perhaps it is inevitable that complex cultures choose Folly Compounding almost unavoidably.  But if so, that too only serves to emphasize and repeat the question– Why? You can have a citizenry that is educated and thoughtful, but as one ascends the ladder of their political leadership, the brain mechanisms that subserve national behavior become more and more dominated by the amygdala of the brain, rather than the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex. We initiated and sustained sea changes in our culture through giant ideological transitions, each of which demanded a new narrative for the country in order to be seemingly coherent about the need for change and the justification for such a dramatic transition. In each case these new narratives so stretched our conceptual boundaries, that for some, a religious epiphany was required to gleam any sense of clarity about the motivation for such dramatic changes or derive any meaning to the transition. Continuity was always absent. Indeed, continuity was the mortal enemy of where we were going. To decipher these transitions, we needed a royal version of a Rosetta stone, since the facts before us seemed so disjunctive. We needed more than one Rosetta stone as we embarked on our adventure of Folly Compounding and all of them would come from Washington. The beltway was the eager, willing mint for the new coin of the realm, the Rosetta stones to guide our future and soothe those who had any doubts. We needed reliable new narratives and the ability to interpret them. But, eventually, we ran out of good narratives and the Rosetta Stones became useless and costly. Our current president, GW Bush never learned the art of minting high quality Washingtonian Rosetta stones. Now he waits for the cold harsh judgement of history. Yet, by not minting any new Rosetta stones, Bush was seemingly an ally to those who thought it was high time to take the rose-colored glasses off. With GWB, almost everyone agreed that the emperor’s clothes had come off.

The hard right wasn’t so hard: It turned out that the hard right in our history wasn’t so difficult to make after all. Red-baiting was the ready tool available to apply to any politician or citizen who disagreed with our new direction. The wicked new right suddenly found themselves with allies and power they never counted on before, most notably in the form of Harry Truman and key people in the administration, such as Leslie Groves (who ran the Manhattan project that created the atomic bomb) and James Forestall, Secretary of the Navy and eventually Secretary of Defense under Truman. The list goes on, but it isn’t all that deep. Aided by the hardliners in the administration, some of whom rose through the wartime footing to gain positions of influence that otherwise would never have been available to them, a small group got hold of the steering wheel of the nation and forced a hard right turn, lurching us into the era of Folly Compounding.

Justifying the turn: The social methods used to justify this sea change in our political course, selected one of the most effective methods from the new shelf of social indoctrination: take the single, best known members of our culture, those who work in Hollywood and the entertainment industry and persecute a few of them as communists, getting them blacklisted from their livelihood and use their popularity against them, to infect Americans with the new virus– the virus that our enemies are right here in America–the communists and “pinkos” among us. But, unlike today, the enemies of that era were not terrorists, even though we thought that somehow they wanted to fuck things up. We weren’t sure what they were doing, but they could be our neighbor, you never knew. We also knew that they all had good jobs, so they must be smart, because they spent most of the day trying to fuck up the country. The Communist scare had nothing to do with reality and in burying reality for all time in America, we launched our ship on the sea of Folly Compounding that would reshape the world according to our own view of it. We would eventually discover, that viewing the world from space, showed us we were a blue planet, but Washington was busy trying to paint the world bright red, or at least pink.

We turned against our own history: The greatest irony for Americans was that when we launched our ship of Follies at the end of WW II, we did so against the countries that were trying to copy our own historic agenda. The close of WW II had very little to do with advancing international communism and everything to do with countries that, seeing an opportunity, a break in the imperialist grip on the world, they wanted to take advantage of the change in world order to throw off the shackles of imperialism and focus on their own national development and unification. It was not a new world trying to enslave us, but a new world trying to emulate our own history. What we didn’t see at the end of WW II was that the rest of the World, especially those countries that had been enslaved by imperialism, wanted to use the American model to create Independent, nationally oriented states free from the imperialism that had enslaved much of the undeveloped world. But we took the low road. Instead of Truman responding to Ho Chi Minh’s letter asking for help to prevent the French from coming back to Indochina, Truman opposed FDR’s intentions and sided with the French, who joined in our new narrative and borrowed our Rosetta Stone as they declared that they would re-enter Vietnam and prevent the Communists from taking over. The French and eventually all other nations learned how to play the American fiddle–just say communism and America would come to your rescue no matter how absurd the circumstances. So, to make this all work, we took all aspiring nationalist leaders and turned them into communists. Just like the message at home: if you leaned left you were a communist or a communist sympathizer–a “pinko.” In any case, you were on the wrong side of our line in the sand, the imaginary line that separated those we would support and those we would oppose. It was a black and white world or a blue and red one. Now the real trouble with this line was that it was more properly termed “antidemocratic” and “pro dictatorship” for there is not a single instance in which our foreign policy supported the overthrow of a repressive dictatorship in support of democracy. There are many instances, beginning in Guatemala and Iran in the early 1950s, where we participated in the overthrow of Democratically elected leaders to favor repressive regimes that allowed our continued growth of American Corporatism, which was in fact, the real line in the sand. Truman tilted, but he wasn’t the real leader of the tilt machine.

Ronald Reagan as an anticommunist: A new star was born in that post-war era. Ronald Reagan, whose own reach for stardom as an actor was diminishing, as he lacked the innate skills to get there, found a new occupation, one that would carry him to the pinnacles of power in America. He willingly cast aside his FDR liberalism (I think he voted for FDR during each of his Presidential campaigns), to become the national shill for promoting the idea that America was rotting from within. We had disloyal Americans, not only in Hollywood, but throughout the country, that were secretly working to sell the free America we had been working for, to some kind of takeover by the Soviets, enslaving America to the antithesis of its national objectives. You had to forget the fact that moments ago, the country that we now proclaimed to be our mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, was our badly needed ally. You had to dash those memories, they were fallacies of the real world and once you expunged your brain of those misunderstandings, you could appreciate that WW II was merely an interruption of a few years from the titanic struggle between two systems, a good one and a really bad one. It’s freedom or enslavement. Anyone who disagrees is suspect and must be working for the other side. If you weren’t a communist, you must be a Commie Sympathizer. It didn’t matter that the Communist Party was a legal, recognized political party in America, nor did it matter if you really belonged. What really mattered is that by making a fool out of you, our government could scare the country. If you have ever watched any of the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), you can see that the willing door to door salesmen for this charade were the race-baiters, red-baiters, red-neck members of Congress, many of whom were from the South, with a new opportunity to launch their own national careers by finding communists underneath the carpet. If it couldn’t be proven or if you didn’t admit that you were a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, then your liberal views or your left-leaning philosophy meant you had to be a “Commie Sympathizer” or “Pinko” which was every bit as bad as being the card carrier. Nor did it matter that some people joined the Communist Party in the 1930s expressly to support the anti-Franco democrats in Spain. Franco had lavish support from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but FDR refused to support the government of Spain engaged in fighting Franco. Many of the young who joined the CP in the 1930s were young academics and they would pay by losing their academic appointments. This happened throughout the country, but was too far below the radar screen of the more celebrated events, like  by McCarthyism and finding communists in the State Department and Hollywood. J. Robert Oppenheimer paid a similar price, but he did not ever belong to the CP: He was merely in the way of America’s launching of Folly Compounding , which he tried, single-handedly, to prevent and for which he paid a heavy price. But that was bomb science, what did that matter?

Committed for good: When the vote was finally taken, America’s passive stand on the unfolding events of Folly Compounding contributed effectively to the new lurch in our history. The right-wing learned to coin labels before we had good label makers. So successful was this national hysteria, that the word “socialism” would be cast aside as just another form of communism and eventually “liberalism” would become an equally unacceptable word for you to apply to your politics or your beliefs. Red-baiting was out to label communists, socialists and liberals as part of the same ugly block of un-Americans. Atheists and agonistics are all in the atheist camp–the evil anti-deists who don’t deserve to live in America and who must be left-leaning and dangerous. So successful was this campaign of national hysteria, that even today, you have democratic politicians that avoid the word “liberal” as if it was roughly equivalent to “tertiary syphilis.”

The new historians: As we embarked on the first round of Folly Compounding , it was clear only to a few that our history would no longer be history by historians, but history by politicians, who wrote history by decree and not by acts of scholarship. Scholarship too was the enemy of the new narrative. Indeed, Washington would eventually insist that their Rosetta stones, minted fresh for each transition, each new narrative, were the only legitimate means of interpreting the new world, the one they created for us. Secrecy was essential: if you only knew what we knew about our enemies, you would think of nothing else, you would be paralyzed. So, let us worry for you. Turn on your TV, watch the soaps and take some Valium. For each Rosetta stone, and there were many, a national constituency was formed among the stone believers, who claimed a tiny slice of truth imparted by their special reading of the stone, the interpretation of a temporary narrative; these were like roadside bombs or casualties we had to leave along the roadside as the need for new narratives was always in our future. To hell with the rear view mirror. Americans were naive about the world and they wanted to keep it that way. So, the Rosetta stones from Washington were welcomed into our homes because their arrival meant we didn’t have to learn anything about the world around us: we could focus on movie stars (those not blacklisted), video games, cars and our teenage children. The new Michael Jordan shoes of that era got more attention that did our own history or any grasp of whether we lived in a nation of Folly Compounding.

Swift boaters remind us of past Follies: The Swift boat Vietnamers who targeted John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, never got beyond what is by now an ancient Rosetta stone. For most people, the Rosetta Stone that interpreted our narrative for Vietnam has been discarded. But, not everyone threw theirs away. Those who got hit by this special roadside bomb we call Vietnam, might have been forgotten, but, they could be called upon for special duty through political support in a tight election, since their Rosetta stone had told them that Vietnam was a noble cause, a near victory denied to us by the traitors at home, the cowardly liberals, our internal enemy. Wasn’t after all the Tet Offensive really a military victory for our noble anti-communist crusade? Then too wasn’t it painful to watch John Kerry, a very legitimate Vietnam Hero, be afraid to stand up and claim his proper title as a legitimate war hero, in the face of the Swift Boat Vietnamers who claimed he was something other than what he really was. How silly, but how American.

Sixty years of narratives: For the last sixty years, we have been piling up stacks and stacks of narratives, that can only be interpreted through the Rosetta Stones minted by Washington and, in the process, we have been adding to our Folly Compounding, until we were visited upon by the presidency of G.W. Bush, who is currently going through an implosion type of presidency. GWB assumed an office for which he has no skills; he was unable to provide any new Rosetta stones. He didn’t have the talent. He had to retread the old ones, and in doing so, one could see the country unraveling. One could finally begin to see that the old Rosetta Stones had lost their luster and completely lost their power: Folly Compounding hit in a dramatic way on 9/11, to which Bush responded by attempting to reinforce the old narratives only to find they really didn’t work anymore and it was even a source of national embarrassment to hear them once again. Fewer and fewer believed them. Simplistic platitudes like “freedom” didn’t fit. We were free but getting poorer. Who profited by ridding the world of communism? Perhaps the Russians and the Chinese? No new narrative could be generated by the talentless group that remained in charge of the Rosetta stone mint. As much as anything, it was the sheer lack of talent that prevented Bush and his crew from formulating a new believable narrative. Iraq started to do for America what Vietnam could not achieve: the complete unraveling or our post-war narrative. Bush and Cheney have been reduced to a single hope: to prevent America on their watch from waking up from the national nightmare of their leadership and their view of the world and realize the magnitude of Folly Compounding. But in the past few weeks, we have witnessed a glimpse of all this that is coming due from our Follies. The compound interest over sixty years had produced a national treasure of Follies, we just didn’t know when the real bill would arrive, or in what form it would really take. All Bush needed was to get to 51% of the vote and then he didn’t need any narratives, or so he thought. He could do what he wanted. The process was simple, the way had been paved so well by his predecessors. But every new misadventure requires a new narrative and Bush proved too lazy or too unskilled to formulate his badly needed new narrative for Iraq and the “war on terror.” And, it was too late to repaint the world again. We had done that once before and found the color we applied lacked the color and hue of the one we saw on our television screens from outer space: we live on a blue planet and Bush wanted us to believe it was red. He was a very poor salesman. His attempt at a new narrative, the “War on Terror” seemed oddly phrased, as if we were going to war against an emotion, not a country. But this attempt at a new narrative for America, expanding the military budget to new heights to confront an enemy of a few dozen to a few hundred to a few thousand? This war was hard to swallow, even for those committed to expansion of our military hardware. In the meantime, we were storing too many cluster bombs.

Bush is the reward for our Follies: GW Bush was the inevitable president. Inevitably incompetent, but just competent enough to reveal the complete incongruity of all other narratives that preceded him and the stupidity of those that proposed and propagated them. Reagan and Reaganism have not toppled yet, but Reagan’s likeness will never be on Mt. Rushmore. Yet these forces were just stupid enough to ruin the country, a country that was always a fragile enterprise from its very beginning–an experiment from the get-go. Our Declaration of Independence is like a manifesto for Ayn Rand and our Constitution reinforced the federalist role for our fledgling country: take your pick. And they lasted long enough to generate new constituencies for their policies and watch the Folly Compounding gather interest. There is always a constituency for new narratives or even the attempt the create one. So, like it or not, the country now has a new constituency that likes torture, especially the type that was so successful during the Spanish Inquisition, that of waterboarding. How many voters will now believe that torture should be part of our policies for making war or responding to a threat? A thousand? A million? Many million? Who knows? Is waterboarding Folly Compounding? Will we pay a future debt for our use of torture? Is there another blowback in our future.

Bush as the decider and aggressor: Bush succeeded in only one way: he made his followers feel that America could lead in one international dimension only–that of aggression. We could still be the world’s leader in that important arena. We had a huge military and enough military bases throughout the world to launch a global threat at any moment and we would get better and better in time, because we were going to arm space itself to push for the final victory of permanent American hegemony over all our rivals. To permanently maintain this military largess, it would be necessary to permanently impoverish the country, a country that is only beginning to understand that there is a bill out there that will need to be paid, a Folly Compounding bill against our future. We are already paying that bill, but far more will be required of us, especially as we lose our national wealth, largely created by manufacturing. As one example, we have the highest per capita health care costs in the World, yet have 47 million Americans are uninsured for health care. Every year workers get less and less health care coverage, as our declining national wealth drives us into a state of numbed paralysis and unidentifiable aches and pains.

Bush gave us reality: Under Bush, the emperor’s clothes fell off and the entire bottom fell out of the large bushel of narratives: there were too many and one could not distinguish between them, it became mix and match, take your pick, relax and smoke a new narrative. A Chinese feast of narratives was available. Narratives are always best, especially if you are going to recycle one, if they begin or are attached to a sound byte jingo. So, “better a smoking gun than a mushroom cloud ” uttered by C. Rice in response to questions about the motivation for invading Iraq and whamo, the recycled narrative will have a bit more life to it. Could the Republican reliance on jingoism have more life? Not according to the polls, where Bush’s popularity continued to erode no matter what got recycled or what jingo could be brought to bear on the subject at hand. Jingoism was dying. It couldn’t pay the bills. Folly Compounding was now a dark cloud on the horizon, a looming ugly mass of growing magnitude. People were tired of hearing Bush say that he stood for “freedom” when he appeared that he didn’t really know anything at all about the concept. And, since terrorism is really a technique, applied by all insurgents against those in power, including the American revolutionaries against the British, Bush was asking us to go to war faithfully with him against a technique that was central to our own national aspirations: a jingo or two and perhaps you can get a way with it. But, that lethal combination of poor jingoism and terminology requires a quick entry and exit strategy and Bush was unable to engineer and fulfill that requirement through sheer incompetence.

Short-lived narratives: The multitude of narratives made it possible for G.W. Bush to incite the introduction of al-Qaeda into Iraq which was followed by the instantaneous new narrative as the reason for our invading that country, followed by using that as the main reason for staying there. A cyclical merry-go-round. But, on this one, you can’t get off. Indeed, we are now in “the long war” a never ending engagement against those that want to do us harm and send a bomb our way. According to Bush, we are not really fighting Iraqis, but terrorists, among whom al-Qaeda is the dominant force. Likewise, the Democracy and secular government we were bringing to Iraq was oddly juxtaposed to our engagement in a civil war to eliminate the secular Sunnis and support a conservative Muslim government, more closely allied with Iran. Indeed, it is more accurate to say that we are fighting a proxy war for Iran, without their direct approval, even though Iran thinks it is a good idea for Americans to stay there for a while–to lighten their ultimate load. The list goes on and on and on. Surely no one is dumb enough to swallow all this. Then again, we have the Swift Boaters and the Evangelicals. A house of cards and all the cards were stacks of narratives, none of which could fit. What then really happened to generate our spaghetti of narratives, our Chinese feast of options? A continuous thread of continuity exists in our post-WW II history with our problems of today.  The anti-communist strategy we developed under Truman began to dictate who our leaders would be. Ronald Reagan would never have made it to the White House had the anti-communist strategy not been successful. His rise in visibility was generated by his role in serving the interests of the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. His indoctrination from FDR supporter to flaming right-winger was done when he worked for GE as host of the General Electric Theater and worked under the tutelage of GE Vice President Lemuel Boulware. It was Boulware’s influence that tipped the scales, as Reagan supported Goldwater for the Presidency in 1964 (before that he had supported and voted for FDR, Truman and Eisenhower as a member of “Democrats for Eisenhower”).  Reagan supported Helen Gahagan Douglas in her U. S. Senate contest against Republican Richard Nixon. His conversion began with his tilt by the anti-communist lurch of the country and was then reshaped into staunch conservatism by his experiences with GE. He was a gifted politician, proving that grade B acting can lead to a galvanizing politician, but he was a dupe, a shill for the right-wing and the single most disastrous President we have ever had, simply because he started to unravel the country from its most successful economic period in history that began with FDR and the New Deal.  GW Bush is the culmination of linear history in which he and his family are tied to Nazism and Hitler before and during World War II and the reshaping of the right-wing as the army against communism, armed with the supposed advantage of “the bomb.”

Next: Part II, where we really begin to connect the dots.

RFM

All of us are hoping for an election of historic realignment. It is really a choice about two different kinds of governments and two different strategies for our future. One choice reinforces our Constitution, restores the Bill of Rights and our civil liberties and looks at the world as a group of similar states within an international neighborhood–it’s a “Howdy Neighbor” kind of world view. But, we have no illusion that it will require major restoration work to get there. The other view is one that preserves the paranoid destruction of our freedoms in order to preserve a security state–a homeland security state, in which every other country is viewed as a potential threat to our own through acts of terrorism: that country exists today, it’s the one in which we live. The paranoid country we have today is one that cannot even hold a political convention without viewing it as a security threat and respond by beating up its own citizens who are attempting to act out their constitutional rights of protest that somehow disappeared after 9/11. We once looked at the police as a force created to protect citizens, but it has devolved into a force that protects the state against its citizens–the new security state.

One view expresses hope for restoring a country we once had, while the other wants to reinforce the greatest dissemblance of American values in our history. Today, through the ballot box, we hope to say goodbye to that country, one badly out of tune with our own values, the very values that emerged by living in a country that gave up on them in the name of securitized paranoia. Today, we masquerade as that country, but hopefully by tomorrow we can share a new vision for restoring that badly listing ship of state to one under full sail, ready to leave the harbor under a new banner. The Cold War didn’t go away as it should have, because it was morphed into the War on Terror. The military budget that was supposed to protect us from hundreds of millions of communists who wanted to enslave us, was increased to fight the new threat from a few thousand terrorists who are sailing under the banner of “blowback.” But today, through the ballot box, we can begin to end those wars of fiction and begin to stand for a strategy designed more for a world at peace than a world on the interminable edge of war.  But we must change the definition of peace to mean peace with our neighbors, of near and far proximities and peace with the world and its environment, including the non-humans within it. The depth of that peace will require an intensely educational mission, one that would have been expected of us a few decades ago, but one in which the world of today doubts whether America can ever lead again on these important issues that include the not so simple acts needed to insure our planetary survival.
While we can hardly expect a transformation of America through a single election, we can at least change the question mark now hovering over the country and its intentions with an exclamation mark acknowledging that America is going to go back to work again. The country that forgot how to think longitudinally will have to commit itself to the greatest act of longitudinal thinking in planetary history. Without that kind of commitment and all that is required of it, planetary nature may have to turn the lights out on a very bad experiment that only lasted a couple of million years. Have we made too much of this election? Is it really about planetary survival or extinction? If we vote the wrong way our children may experience the answer to that question. So, today, for the country and the planet, pull the correct lever in the voting booth. Then party like Hell!
RFM

Creationism or Intelligent Design (ID) in the classroom is especially troublesome since it implies that we entertain the possibility of supporting a literal interpretation of the Bible. As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, anyone who takes the Bible literally hasn’t read it. Perhaps the most effective means of combating creationism is to give instruction (not in science classes) on how replete the Bible is with errors of dates and silly extensions of ideas that do not withstand scrutiny or make sense (i.e., the Bible as history). If this is the word of God, he must be on a very long vacation. But those errors and inconsistencies are something you expect from a propaganda tool that was not put together until hundreds of years after the events it describes. And what about all the other narratives and testimonies that were available, but omitted by a committee which decided what was right and what was wrong (was this the committee on religious indoctrination?). While the teaching of creationism in science classes has been banned in most science curriculums, and the banning has successfully survived numerous challenges in court, until recently no one understood the extent to which creationism was still taught in the science curriculum of our public schools. After all, it is the teacher who is the final arbiter of what gets taught and she or he is effectively the one person for whom the rubber meets the road for this issue of creationism in the classroom. For most school districts, the guiding philosophy for developing a science curriculum is based on the 1996 National Research Council report establishing evolution as one of the five top unifying concepts for implementing a foundation for the biological sciences and thus a firm requirement for committing to a National Science Education Standards teaching program. It is not possible to understand biology without understanding the connectivity threads of evolution. As Richard Dawkins points out in his marvelous book "The God Delusion" up until 1859 it was possible to infer a seemingly rational model of "Intelligent Design" to account for the great complexity found in biology (the eye has always been a favorite target of those who want to believe in ID). But after Darwin’s publication and his introduction of Natural Selection , one of the greatest unifying theories ever advanced in human history, no other explanation has been necessary to account for the great diversity we find in the world of biology, including of course the world of humans, who are so closely and obviously related genetically to non-human primates that we pretty much have an open and shut case. Now, the relationship between fruit flies and humans requires a little more depth of understanding, despite the rather amazing similarity in genetic composition for a great multitude of functions.

There is no national policy which establishes a science teaching curriculum (I wish it were otherwise), but each state has their own. And because of that, science teaching in the classroom varies substantially throughout the country. Yet, until a new survey appeared we didn’t know the extent to which evolution vs creationism was taught as part of the science curriculum because individual science teachers have substantial latitude as any teacher does. But a recent national survey of high school science teachers shows that 25% of science teachers devote 1 to 2 hours of science classroom time to creationism or "intelligent design." This poll went on to try and determine how much time was devoted to teaching evolution. Perhaps the good side of this story is that an average of 13.7 hours of classroom time was devoted to evolutionary processes including human evolution (the easiest case, a lot harder than the fruitfly connection). Only 2% of polled teachers excluded evolution entirely from the classroom (did you get evolution instruction in your high school biology classes?). Yet, this poll also revealed alarming attitudes on the part of teachers themselves, which parallels the viewpoint of our society on this issue.

When the following statement was put to science teachers (and the public in a separate national poll): "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so," 48% of of the general population agreed and 16% of the science teacher respondents agreed (52% of Americans believe that creationism should be taught in the science classroom). Yes, 48-16 difference is significant, but for a country that thinks of itself as the intellectual leader of the World, both numbers are appalling.

If you want to read the full tablet of how the Republican Party has abused science, destroyed science policy, and purged our country of scientific influence, read Chris Mooney’s excellent book "The Republican War on Science." If you read that book cover to cover you may then understand why physicist Robert L. Park (author of "Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud" , an excellent book in its own right ) said "Not until I saw the whole story laid out in Chris Mooney’s thoroughly researched and documented book did I realize the enormity of what is happening. Reading this important book won’t make you feel good, but it will make you wiser." Creationism in the science classroom is the result of a political ploy which Ronald Reagan began when he was governor of California. After he mentioned his belief that creationism should be taught in the science curriculum, polls showed that this idea resonated with Americans, especially those whom the Republican Party was trying to coerce into membership (the "Southern Strategy" of Goldwater and Nixon). We need to get beyond the wisdom of the causes of this dilemma, this appalling diregard for science literacy and help the country get wise to the solutions. A country that is dripping with religion is dripping with inequality and lacking in social justice: it can’t be any other way. Let’s stop the dripping, at least in our classrooms.

So let’s take our newly emergent knowledge of Social Darwinism 101 and apply it to the evolutionary origin of modern Democrats and Republicans in America. Surely this kind of analysis is crying to be done. If we stretch our imaginations far back into an earlier, evolutionary stage of our ancestral development, at a time when we were a group of tree dwelling primates, we can appreciate some of the pressures that might exist for natural selection to favor one type of clan organization over another. Let’s imagine our distant ancestors in an environment where food was plentiful, with a vast carpet of fruit trees amidst a plush jungle of vegetation, rich enough to support a lavish lifestyle of eating at will and living continuously above the ground, safely removed from most predators. This environmental nirvana of abundance put little pressure on social unit formation and allowed for wide variance of individualistic behavior, even though early social units were also evolving into place, through a process known as genetic drift. Through this mechanism, multiple behavioral motifs were evolving simultaneously in the same species and developing in parallel and within the same general geographical area. It was as if nature was experimenting and probing in a variety of ways to optimize and specialize in the anticipation of future changes that could not be foreseen. But at this moment in time, these differences seemed to offer no obvious benefit and no identifiable clues for any survival value.

But then imagine, through a dramatic climate change, a regional drought was created and the decline in water availability led to a reduction in the number of fruit trees, creating an unexpected stress on the food supply. The continuous carpet of massive fruit trees gave way to more isolated clusters. More time was spent by each animal searching for food. Members of the same species became more aggressive towards one another as the once abundant food supply was continuously shrinking. This new food-sparse era was the trigger that now brought natures genetic drift experiments more sharply into focus. Some experiments would prove advantageous for one gene pool, while dooming others. One advantage was evident in the social structure of the Fruit Clan, who had developed a gene pool which facilitated a complex, interdependent clan behavior that offered collective benefits of territorial defense, food distribution and protection and rearing of the young. But alongside the emerging strength and growing numbers of the Fruit Clan unit, other less socialized groups existed in parallel and ultimately came in conflict as the food supply was increasingly stressed. It is at this point in the cultural evolution of the Fruit Clan that we meet George. George became a somewhat peripheral member of the Fruit Clan during its earliest period of matriculation into a social unit, just at the time when food scarcity was on the horizon. George was different. The good thing about George was that he was very agile and could retrieve fruit from high in the canopy, where few other members of the clan would dare to go. For one thing, movement within the tree canopy exposed individuals to predator eagles who could snatch smaller clan members from their perches in the tree tops. But George’s size, agility and alert behavior made him less of a target for predators, so he was somewhat immune from this type of risk. George was greatly admired, especially by the young clan members and was regarded by many of them as a clan superstar. He always emphasized the advantages of individual behavior and skill. He was the Ayn Rand of the Fruit Clan.

But, there was one serious problem with George: he was a hoarder. His gene pool had poorly prepared him to fully integrate as a full-fledged clan member and, as food became increasingly scarce, the other clan members viewed him with suspicion and hostility. Whenever other clan members approached George to discuss his lack of good citizenship and the complete absence of sharing, he was hostile and dismissive towards them and insisted that he was entitled to exclusive control of his fruit, because he retrieved it from the highest places where no other clan members dared to go, and for that reason, he wasn’t really taking food away from other clan members: they couldn’t get to it anyway. George felt that he was creating new fruit wealth where non existed before and that he therefore had every right to hoard it because it wasn’t coming from the fruit supply that all the other clan members depended on. He rebelled against any communal tax on his capital gains. He even went so far as to promote the introduction of a kind of “free fruit economy” by advocating that, if everyone were more like him, they could each be responsible for their own lives and their own future and much of the clan organizational structure could be done eliminated. His strategy would reward the agile and eliminate the weak. George encouraged all other members of the clan to adopt his behavioral lead by putting aside their social institutions and joining him at the tree canopy where food was plentiful and life was easy. George had no idea that he was missing the full array of the socialized gene pool and that its absence would ultimately lead to his extinction. But that day was far far away.

For a time, the other clan members didn’t know how to respond to George. Some said that it was true that George’s fruit was retrieved from places where no other clan members felt safe. But then other, more thoughtful members pointed out that, while George didn’t compete with the other clan members for communal fruit, he took advantage of all the other benefits of clan membership, including group protection from hostile clans and he clearly enjoyed the admiration he received from the young clan members who wanted to emulate his behavior. Someone also pointed out that having the young clan members admire George so much was proving to be a liability. Some of these young members had tried to emulate George’s fruit gathering behavior and had been grabbed by the predatory eagles from their perches in the tree canopy. One thoughtful member also suggested that the function of the canopy fruit was different, because it was a source of food for migratory birds, whose flight disseminated the tree seeds to other regions, potentially expanding the geographical source of food for the Fruit Clan. They pointed out how the very migratory pathway of these birds was dotted with new growing fruit trees. George’s hoarding was increasingly viewed as antisocial and potentially destructive to the larger social unit. After much deliberation, all agreed that something had to be done. One way or the other, George had to go.

Eventually, the clan decided that they would be better off without George as a member: he took, but never gave and his behavior served as a risky role model for young clan members who needed to learn more integrated ways of food gathering and sharing. So, a committee of clan members approached George and gave him a final ultimatum: either he had to be come a full-fledged member of the clan, with fruit sharing behavior, or he had to leave. George responded in his typical hostile manner, repeating again all of his prior claims. But this time the clan committee was insistent. George was too unclan-like to fit in.

George eventually agreed to leave and, in the search of a new tree haven, he discovered there were others like him who had also decided to go-it-alone rather than subject themselves to the clan rules and the social requirements for membership, which they all agreed was too constraining for their taste. It turned out that the George clan, or the ‘Georges’ as they eventually were known, had much smaller frontal lobe development than did members of the fruit clan and hence proved less socially adaptable. So the Georges of the species created a subspecies that developed in parallel with the more socialized Fruit Clan. Because the food supply for each group was somewhat different, with the Georges eating fruit from the tree canopy and the Fruit Clan gathering fruit from lower branches, the two groups lived in a kind of uneasy peaceful parallelism for a while. This genetic distinction between the Fruit Clan members and the Georges carried on for many generations. Eventually the George clan gave rise to the more humanoid group we refer to as Republicans because of their admiration for individual greed and hoarding, while the more socialized Fruit Clan evolved into Democrats, known for their commitment to social institutions as the best means of survival and solving problems.

One day a new food stress for the Fruit Clan suddenly appeared in the form of large migratory giraffes who could reach the lower branches of the fruit trees and competed with them for this layer of food. The giraffes were too large for the Fruit Clan to drive away, so the end result was that the food source of the Fruit Clan was layered, sandwiched between the giraffes who dominated the lower branches and the Georges who controlled the tree canopy at the top. But another development had been taking place within the clan. Some of the new clan members began to show the same kind of daring behavior that the Georges displayed and could successfully get fruit from the tree canopy. The George gene pool had been added to the Fruit Clan gene pool, with the best of both worlds: the new emerging members were daring fruit gatherers, but integrated to the social needs of the Fruit Clan. This extension of the food gathering range of the Fruit Clan into the canopy put them in direct conflict with the Georges and hostilities began to break out between them. An all-out war eventually ensued. But, in this new conflict, the Georges were no match for the Fruit Clan, who showed a high degree of organizational skill, with trained armies and brilliant offensive strategies. In time the Fruit Clan drove the Georges out of the area, which stabilized their own chances for long-term survival by reducing the conflicts for food and ideology. The growth of DNA had worked. The gene pool had been expanded to provide the social and more entrepreneurial elements for a healthy, emerging society.

The genetic drift which created the clan had proven successful, as if trouble ahead had been predicted and the social gene pool emerged to eventually dominate the species. But lying ahead for the more humanoid progeny of the Fruit Clan that would follow, would be the challenges of forming an even more complex society and eventually a whole civilization, one whose regional spread would be large enough to include the once eliminated Georges, the Republicans who would constantly push for more individual freedoms and encourage hoarding and greed among all members of the new group. But finally, the members with genetic ties to the Fruit Clan, whose natural instincts were to enhance social institutions to meet the new complexities of a larger society, figured out, as did their ancestors before them, that the Georges among them, those Republicans whose gene pool had not adapted to conform with the Fruit Clan strategy, were the enemies of the large clan survival prospects. A final cleansing war broke out and once again the Georges were no match for those with the Fruit Clan gene pool. The Georges were forced onto giant ice flows, that formed during a period of global warming, as the polar ice caps broke up and drifted throughout the expanding oceans. They were not heard from again.

The Fruit Clan gene pool had finally proven its merit as the dominant mode of survival behavior for the clan members who now looked upon themselves as a civilized society with obligations to and expectation from each individual. As the civilization evolved further, new stresses would arise, but these would always be met with a new or modified socialized group strategy.

Ultimately the origin of the Fruit Clan and the Georges came into a more scientific focus. Fossil records of the Georges’ skulls, using CT scan tomography to estimate relative size of different brain regions, revealed that the Georges were a distinct subspecies, with smaller frontal lobes and a reduced neocortex when compared to the same kind of analysis done on fossilized Fruit Clan skulls from the same geological strata. Thus, the critical gene pool for clan success had been working on the nervous system for its adaptive advantage and the new socially adapted brain had evolved through natural selection to expand the frontal lobes, which became known as the social center of the nervous system and was also the region of the brain devoted to long-term planning, something entirely missing from the Georges’ brains. It became apparent then, that genetic drift, which seemed neutral in its earliest stages, had been working on frontal lobe size as its target of preparing the Fruit Clan for future contingencies, through improved neuronal mass and connectivity to facilitate more contemplative solutions to new challenges when they appeared. This rich cooperative gene pool survived in the form of modern Democrats, whose approach to the complexities of civilization was to create open social structures as the means of meeting the diversity and challenges of these new challenges. The ice flows melted and the Georges were gone.