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

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

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

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

RFM

In case you haven’t heard, bottled water is not regulated and, in many cases, it is merely tap water or worse (one example pointed out in the documentary was one in which a small company drilled a hole for water next to a Superfund site for hazardous waste removal). Bottled water in this country is already a $10 billion business and worldwide the sales are more than $ 100 billion. The United Nations has estimated that for $30 billion, the entire population of the world could be provided with sufficient water for their daily  human needs. In the credit section of the documentary, they urge viewers join in signing a petition and contribute to a movement within the U.N. to provide safe, fresh water for all human inhabitants of the world, as an innate right of global  citizenship (that should extend to animals as well, but that’s getting a little ahead of the game). Doesn’t that sound simple and right?

The full wording of UN Article 31 is  “Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.” You can sign the petition by going here. This pursuit of privatized water is a growing multinational corporate menace created by the sinister for-profit drive by the amoral free market economy, the force that is increasingly impoverishing the globe, with no major obstacles yet standing in its way. The economic crash we are still enjoying, given to us by corporate greed, is being used to accelerate the move towards complete privatization of our water supply. Our public water supply is under a threat that extends to all corners of the globe.

I previously commented on how Bolivia managed to drive out Bechtel, a corporate giant, who had privatized the local water supply of Cochabamba (as one condition for receiving a World Bank loan), but had to leave one step ahead of the hangman when their enterprise went sour because of rapid increases in local water charges. Then too, I raised the issue a while ago about why bottled water is an unnecessary ripoff and serves to remove pressure to keep our drinking water supply safe and continuously evaluated.
This documentary on water is an easy, but disturbing introduction to the vast scope of our water supply future.  The impact of trapping water by damning rivers goes far deeper than we might think. By creating huge numbers of ever larger damns, we massively reduce the normal flow of nutrients that eventually find their way to the ocean and help sustain both river and ocean sea life.  Creating damns not only reduces the capacity of our oceans to support life, but the nutrients that are trapped by the damn sink and rot and contribute methane gas to our environment, one of the greenhouse gases that we have to worry about. The High Aswan damn built on the Nile in the 1960s, has reduced the flow of nutrients to farmers, such that some of the electricity generated by the damn has gone into the production of fertilizer to replace what was lost when the damn became operational. But the replacement fertilizer is very rich in phosphates, which in turn generate large algae blooms. While the high Aswan damn provides a large fraction of electricity to the region, many who have studied the impact of the damn over its 40 plus year history,  have concluded that its net effect for the population has been negative.

Global climate change, combined with poor distribution and conservation of our water supply (more golf courses in Arizona?) are creating a crisis of water distribution, that, like global climate change, many of us will increasingly experience as one component of our future life on this shrinking planet during the advancing decades of this century. It seems that nature picked this century to test our wisdom in managing natural resources and, in response to this dilemma, we selected GW Bush as the first leader of this potentially dangerous new century. Good choice America! You probably thought I would not be able to squeeze in a reference to GWB in this short article, but there you have it! You may recall that GWB has purchased a huge piece of property in Paraguay, near one of the largest aquifers (the Guarani aquifer) in South America. What do you think a free marketeer like GWB is planning for his property development? It has the added feature that it is protected by a nearby secret U.S. military base.

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

While we are still in the middle of a suspenseful financial meltdown, who doesn’t need a little escapism from the daily barrage of threats to our economic security? So, against more sensible advice from many quarters, here are three movies that may not qualify as escapist opportunities, but certainly qualify as educational documentaries of some interest, though none are comedies.

The first is “The Rape of Europa” a documentary recommended to me by Derek, directed by Richard Berge and narrated by Joan Allen. This documentary traces the Nazi theft of European art during their years of military occupation of much of Europe and Russia. I have watched many films related to the Nazis and WW II before, but most of the footage for this documentary was new to me. Hitler was of course an artist, but he was denied entrance into an Austrian art school (which he later pillaged when he marched “invited” into Austria); instead of becoming an artist, he became a maniacal, out of millenia, pagan war lord. But his fascination with art permeated the entire officer corps of the Third Reich, particularly Herman Goering. So the Nazi war machine would pillage art in every country that they invaded and issues related to the proper return of this stolen art are still playing out today. In this documentary, you get to see “art soldiers” who were organized by the United States and became embedded with frontline U.S. troops, with the approval of Eisenhower, to look out for the protection of art treasures as the Allies advanced towards Germany. This documentary will give you tears, because it reflects a time when we all thought that we were the good guys: in this documentary, in this period of our history, we were!

The second film is “Taxi to the Darkside,” an HBO documentary, directed by Alex Gibney, which deals with the development of torture as a military technique, created by the Bush administration as a tool to confront terrorism after 9/11. You may not hear anything you haven’t heard before in this documentary, but when you put it all together in the stunning visuals and comments from the people involved, you realize what a complete disaster we have created with torture as a major mantra of how we conduct our war on “terror.” The last victory of sorts on this issue was achieved by none other than GW Bush, who was able to have Congress pass legislation that not only exhonerated him and his cronies for past violations of the Geneva Convention on torture, but gave Bush the license to decide how the Geneva Convention agreements should be interpreted–so he decides whether water boarding is torture according to the Geneva accord. When it comes to torture, Bush is the “decider.” This documentary leaves no doubt in your mind that torture doesn’t work, but GW and Cheney have now created a legacy of torture such that it will be hard for us to eliminate this as policy. Can you imagine the next terrorist attack during a Democratic administration, where the Republicans can charge that the Democratic leader failed to use waterboarding which otherwise would have spared us from attack? Cheney still insists that torture works, but there is no evidence produced in this documentary that truthful information was extracted from any high-level detainee. They talk, but they tell their interrogators things they think will sell and relieve them from the horrors of that form of torture. It was torture that gave Powell the information that Hussein was providing al-Qaeda with training and equipment, which he revealed at his famous appearance at the U.N., only later to say it was the most embarrassing moment of his life. That torture-extracted information was never checked through another source for accuracy, primarily because Bush and Cheney were looking for any excuse to go to war.

The third film is “Meeting Resistance” a documentary by reporters Molly Bingham and Steve Connors, who created this film from their own experience as reporters and photographers, while embedded among Iraqi citizens before the war broke out and continued in that fashion during the development of the insurgency. so they spoke directly to those that started and sustained the insurgency. More than anything else, this documentary paints a picture of an insurgency that was truly home grown. The documentary is based on interviews before and after the war began, and the photographer made sure to blur the facial images to protect those interviewed, who would otherwise be targeted. In some ways, this is the most remarkable of the three films because it came from direct contact with Iraqis during the critical period in which the motivation for the insurrection morphed into widespread violence. Watching this film, you realize that none of the stories you were told about the war could be supported by the Iraqis interviewed for this documentary. The war did not start with pissed off Bathists or Republican guards, or, as Rumsfeld said, “deadenders.” Instead you realize that the insurgency began as a local effort to rid the country of foreign invaders. The resistors first formed into small groups of mostly Sunnis, beginning with a handful of people. They had little money, but bought their own weapons through taxation of their paychecks–1/3 for the cause, 1/3 for the family and 1/3 for the individual. Their initial targets were U.S. soldiers and vehicles as they paraded through Baghdad. As they gained in confidence and skill with weapons of increasing sophistication, they began to target tanks. But they discovered that their attacks on tanks could lead to civilian deaths because not all civilians seemed to get the message that they should not follow close to American military vehicles. For that reason, they switched to attacking military bases, but also learned that the U.S. military would open fire indiscriminately on civilians, when their bases were attacked, so they abandoned that approach in favor or IEDs (roadside bombs) which they detonated by remote control, thus reducing the risk of civilian casualties. The documentary also shows interviews with an Iraqi professor who studied the sociology of the resistance and his studies confirm that the resistance was created first in local neighborhoods and from those nests, the numbers grew and grew until the groups attracted the attention of outside supporters. But, their movement is guided by a religious zeal and love of country for an independent Iraq–they are driven by nationalism. This documentary also makes it clear that even though many of the insurgents despised Saddam Hussein, they were appalled that a national leader would be treated in such a humiliating manner through his capture, trial and execution. Those events helped in their recruiting efforts.

You cannot watch this movie without realizing that if the entire resistance movement in Iraq is made up of these small cells, sort of like the conditions that the French found themselves while occupying Algeria, then the period we are in right now, the surge that seems to be of a comparative lull, will be followed by renewed civil war against the government of al-Maliki, if he is still around, once we depart. His government is viewed as a puppet government and an illegitimate representative of Iraqi citizens. The documentary reveals one poignant moment when a young revolutionary left to join the insurrection in its early history. As he departed his family, his mother hugged him and told him she didn’t want him to come back alive, but wanted him instead to become a martyr for the cause, thus exalting the honor of the family. Do you think for a moment we are going to defeat those who express that kind of commitment? Does that remind you of anything you heard about Vietnam? When are we going to awake to the fact, that when it comes to wars of nationalism, the kind we have become experts in producing, the very kind we cannot win!

All of these movies are available on Netflix and I am sure many of you have seen some or all of them already. I am always a little late catching up to good relevant movies. If any are new to you, then enjoy!

RFM

Four major themes of this meeting united most of those in attendance and the proposed solutions largely center around implementing regulatory reform, and reducing corporate control, including i) changing the broadcasting regulations so that the corporate news media are held accountable for the content of their programs; ii) keep the internet free from corporate intrusions; iii) restrict corporate ownership of mass media so that more independent news organizations can be revived and iv) through activist demands, force the major news media to cover issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and global warming. The meeting was also attended by the two current members of the FCC who are in the Democratic column, Johnathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, who will be the new FCC chairman if Obama is elected President. He talked about immediate reforms he plans to put into place, including a return to a three year review of broadcast licensing (it is now 8 years and virtually automatic) with a more strict enforcement of the old standard that broadcast licenses are given to serve a public function and need to uphold those values. He talked about probationary status if these changes are not adhered to and the prospect of losing a broadcasting license if things don’t change. It would be a very enjoyable outcome to see Fox lose their broadcasting license. Is that why Rupert Murdoch says he supports Obama?

The quality of this meeting was extremely high and most of the speakers were excellent and inspiring to those in attendance. In going to the meeting, I expected to see the attendance biased towards those with gray hair like me. But, in fact, as I surveyed the crowd, there were many young people in attendance and many middle aged adults. You came to appreciate it, if it wasn’t immediately obvious, that quality journalists are being terminated from major papers and news media in favor of softer journalism of the type that supports the current administration and blurs the line between pop culture and journalistic standards. Let’s face it, we have national news system that serves as apologists for the Republican Party and its policies. Until that changes, there is little chance that news can ever be educational. Where have you heard that Iraq is now so unsafe that journalists do not go outside of the Green Zone?

Bill Moyers gave an excellent speech on the freedom of the press and the current reform movement. He is truly the guru of the free press movement. You also came to appreciate that if we didn’t have PBS, we would not have any access to accurate reporting, except for what we get through the internet and C-Span. But, as Moyers pointed out, PBS, due to political pressure, has decided time and again not to produce or air things that are too controversial and they frequently program apology news for events such as 9/11. Dan Rather gave a good talk and admitted the complicity of the major news media in hyping the buildup to the war. He has his own program and has repented from his past sins.

Phil Donahue showed his riveting film "A Body of War" a story of a young US solider (Thomas Young) wounded and paralyzed in Iraq, who joined the Winter Soldier movement as a fierce critic of the war and our sitting president. The last scene in the movie, when the young soldier meets with Senator Robert Byrd, who led the fight against the declaration of war for invading Iraq (bet you never saw his speeches on TV–they were fabulous), and Byrd takes down a large plaque from his office wall, as his own greatest political challenge to the government and reading from the plaque, Byrd and Young read the names of the senators who voted against the war, after which they get up and walk side by side down the senate office building hall as they discuss their daily problems, having clearly formed a common bond. Try viewing that scene without tearing. Donahue was unable to sell his movie to any distribution system, but finally Landmark films stepped in and will show it in their theaters. So if you want to see a riveting film about the lives of our soldiers that we send to an illegal war, go see that one. It probably won’t stay long in any theater, but it was masterfully filmed and covers nearly three years of a soldier’s post-injury life and his activities as an antiwar Winter Soldier. I noticed and commented on the fact that when the credits to this movie were given, Donahue cited the figure of Iraqi citizen deaths at more than 1 million which reflects the best estimate available from the cluster survey and analysis reported in The Lancet a few years ago. That is the first time I have seen these more accurate figures be cited in any theater experience.

There was an opportunity to hear from Phil Donahue about his firing from MSNBC just as the Iraq invasion build-up was underway. He had the top-rated program on MSNBC, but he was fired because he was too liberal and a threat to the morale of the invasionary hype. But, before he was he fired, he had to have two conservatives on his show for every liberal, and, as prescribed by MSNBC, he had to count himself as already having two liberals on the show if no one else showed up. So, I guess by the math done at MSNBC, adding one liberal to his program meant a total of three, so having two conservatives to one liberal as guests, still meant that the liberals outnumbered the conservatives or neoconservatives. Does that give you some indication about the corruption and distortion of our television programming?

All of us can participate in helping the free press movement. If you go to the Free Press website, you can sign up for news alerts and other information. I would urge you to watch the video of Senator Dorgan’s speech and also that of Bill Moyers. When the news alerts come out, respond by signing the letters/emails that will be sent to your congressional leaders. It was that influx of demands (1.5 million) that forced the Senate to rescind the recent FCC ruling to give more expansionary communication acquisitions to newspapers, further enhancing giant corporate control over our news. Write-ins work! We just need more of them and they need to get bigger and bigger in volume. If I was disappointed about anything with the meeting, it was the complete lack of any attention given to the other dimension of this information suppression, which is the administration’s suppression of science information and their purge of scientists through the elimination of their funding. That is not just destructive, it is destroying our future.

This was all taking place during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Alito Jr., whose confirmation was hailed as another step towards total victory for God’s army. Strict social and learning customs are enforced and most contemporary issues are considered evil. For example, Harry Potter is a taboo, as he would have been stoned to death in the days of the old testament for promoting belief in warlords. Creationism is emphasized while science is downgraded. These camps look for and promote those young kids who may have special talents for becoming evangelical preachers and one such young boy is identified. Several young kids get to speak and act out inspirational preaching. When you realize that most of these kids also get home schooling to further promote their religious zealotry, and the fact that evangelicals claim to have 30 million members, you can appreciate how polling data consistently shows that the majority of Americans believe that God created the universe and that creationism or intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in science classes. International polls have revealed that Americans finished second to last among Western nations for identifying evolution as an established principal. I couldn’t help but get a kick out of the special prayers that were offered to God by Pastor Fischer, just before the camp began, imploring him to keep the lights on for the entire camp, only to see the lights go out during an electrical storm, which brought out the mischievous little kids with their flashlights.

At the end of the documentary, we get to see the now infamous Ted Haggard, who was then the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals. The documentary takes place before Haggard was defrocked for homosexuality and drugs, which took place after the release of the film (2006). In the documentary, we see Haggard preaching in Colorado Springs (a city that has the largest number of evagelical mega churches in the country) and it was emphasized that he was conversing on a weekly basis with GW and Cheney (once suspects that those conversations have ceased). Haggard appears in the movie as taunting and hostile towards the filmmakers, so it was more than a little gratifying to see him go through his self-inflicted humiliation. Haggard is now in “recovery” at the same Phoenix center that helped Jim Bakker get over his dilemma. But Haggard reminds us of something that will be with us for a long time to come when he said that if the evangelicals come out to vote, they will swing any election. So, right away, we have to imagine that Huckabee has 30 million votes waiting for him should he get the nomination. What is it that we are witnessing in these camps and through the eyes of evangelicals? Are these the yellow canaries in the mine hole of America’s future? Is it economical? Most of these evangelicals are in the heartland and many have southern lifestyles. Mid-Missouri was the site of the non-camp experiences, in regions where signs dot the roadsides promoting faith and Jesus. Have these people always been there and we see them now because they have learned how to organize into an effective political voting block? The fact that international polls show Americans declining in their appreciation of science over the past 20 plus years speaks to something other than just organizing a group of people that were always there, but muted. Their views are becoming more mainstream and they have a president to prove it.