Quote/Unquote 2006 May

The winner of the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee will be crowned tonight, and all the pomp will be broadcast live on ABC. But it's worth wondering whether the Scripps bee still merits such publicity while the estimable National Geographic Bee (held last week, and hosted by Alex Trebek) goes relatively unnoticed. The National Geographic Society recently released a survey showing that 60 percent of college-age Americans can't find Iraq on a map, and half can't find New York state. But rather than educate our students by emphasizing words with geographic and real historical value--Peloponnesus, say, or Djibouti--the spelling bee chooses shamelessly to tout its own passé-ness. Thus, words such as pelisse (use in a sentence: ''Your great grandmother called; she wants her pelisse back.'') and retinue (welcome to the 21st century, Scripps--try ''entourage'') are the norm. So while Chinese and Indian engineers and cartographers come to dominate the global markets, Americans of Chinese and Indian descent will be left behind, spelling their way into irrelevance. A peccadillo? More like sesquipedalian treason.

Revisionism in history knows no boundaries. Just in the past few years, we have been told that that comet may have glanced right off the dinosaurs, prodding a few toward flight and feathers; that the German blitzkrieg barely meandered across Europe; and that Genghis Khan was actually a sharing and caring and ecumenical leader, Bill Moyers with a mustache and colorful folk costume. So it was inevitable that we would get a revisionist history of the French Reign of Terror—the period from September, 1793, to July, 1794, when the Committee of Public Safety, in Paris, invented the modern thought crime, cut off the heads of its enemies, and created the apparatus of the totalitarian state.

WEEK of May 22, 2006

The Haditha incident, in which US Marines are alleged to have killed between 14 and 24 civilians in cold blood, is becoming the My Lai of the Iraq War. Officers have been relieved of command, and murder charges may be brought. Somehow, though, this time the American public doesn't seem very interested in the story. My guess, is that many still have payback for 9/11 in their minds. The Vietnamese had never done anything to us. Of course, the Iraqis hadn't done much to us, either, aside from fighting back when the United Nations pushed them (quite rightly) out of Kuwait. But Dick Cheney has by innuendo and half-lies managed to convince the American public that in fighting the Iraqis, we are fighting the people behind 9/11, or at least people very like that.

It's funny. I remember when Bush insisted that he wanted to bring the parties together to pass a patients' bill of rights, even as he arm-twisted Republicans who favored such a bill into renouncing it. I remember when he insisted that lower-income workers reaped the biggest share of his tax cuts. I remember when he presented his stem cell position as a way to dramatically expand research opportunities. One could say that misleading rhetoric was the hallmark of Bush's political style. But if you said that two years ago, you were a rabid Bush-hater. Now the immigration debate, which has turned the right against itself, has provoked a kind of right-wing glasnost.

No professional and highly competent terrorist organization would ever send a man like Moussaoui to do anything important. So it comes as no surprise that Bin Laden now says that he was not part of 9/11. Bin Laden quite plausibly, for a mass murderer and terrorist mastermind, explains that he would have pulled the hijackers out of the United States if he had heard that one of the team had been captured. Moussaoui was arrested two weeks before 9/11.

On the other hand, the old monster is blowing smoke up our posteriors when he says that there are no al-Qaeda in Guantanamo. The Pakistanis captured over 600 fleeing Arab members, and turned most of them over to the US. This part of what Bin Laden says is just manipulative. He is trying to convince Muslims that the US only has innocents in custody, and that it was unsuccessful in capturing the real al-Qaeda operatives. It did have a handful of innocents in custody. But most of these guys (who should be charged and put on proper trial) were on the battleground trying to kill our guys. The late comedian Richa rd Pryor once made fun of those silly liberals who thought only innocent people are in prison. He said he had visited a penitentiary, and there were Mofos and father molesters in it, or words to that effect.

Day by day, the ability to analyze genomes — sequences of DNA — grows more and more sophisticated. Scientists are able to examine the biological past in finer detail and with greater accuracy. The results will almost certainly transform what we know about how species are interrelated, and that, of course, includes us.

Consider, for instance, a new analysis of the genetic links between early humans and chimpanzees by a group of scientists at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Their hypothesis, using new analytical techniques, is that the two species diverged more recently than previous estimates, which were based solely on fossil evidence. Their results suggest further that the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees might have diverged but then hybridized to produce the early lineage from which modern humans eventually developed.

This really lets the genie out of the bottle. Even after Darwin, the popular vision of how humans became humans has always had something platonic about it. The details of our descent have been vague enough to implicitly reinforce what one geneticist, commenting on this new finding, called"a more Victorian view of our genome."

The thought that we might be descended from the mating of ancestors of separate species — that in our origins we are hybrids — is a bold one, and a reminder, once again, of what we always forget: that humans are animals too, closely related to all of life on earth. It's also a reminder how hard it is to do away with Victorian views.

If these results hold up, we will have some reimagining to do, not only of our own history but of the processes of speciation as well.

The claim that President Bush's top political strategist had been indicted in the CIA leak investigation was written by a journalist who has battled drug addiction and mental illness and been convicted of grand larceny. That didn't stop more than 35 reporters -- from all the major newspapers, networks and newsmagazines -- from calling Luskin or Rove's spokesman, Mark Corallo, to check it out.

WEEK of May 15, 2006

Fair.org:

Friedman's do-or-die dates never seem to get any closer

* New York Times columnist Tom Friedman in 2003:"The next six months in Iraq -- which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there -- are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time."

* Friedman in 2004:"Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months."

* Friedman in 2005:"I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it's going to come together."

* Friedman in 2006:"I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding."

Books matter. Stories matter. People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves. Though we learned from postmodernism that a story is only a construct, so is a house, and a story can be more important as shelter: the story that you have certain inalienable rights and immeasurable value, the story that there is an alternative to violence and competition, the story that women are human beings. Sometimes people find the stories that save their lives in books.

The stories we live by are themselves like characters in books: Some we will outlive us; some will betray us; some will bring us joy; some will lead us to places we could never have imagined. George Orwell's 1984 wasn't a story to shelter in, but a story meant to throw open the door and thrust us into the strong winds of history; it was a warning in the form of a story. Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang was an invitation in the form of a story, but even its author didn't imagine how we might take up that invitation or that Glen Canyon Dam might have taken on a doomed look by 2006."The universe," said the radical American poet Muriel Rukeyser,"is made of stories, not atoms." I believe that being able to recognize stories, to read them, and to tell them is what it takes to have a life, rather than just make a living. This is the equipment you should have received.

Ronald Reagan vindicated? The proliferation of trees, argues a University of Alaska researcher, led to the extinction of pre-historic mammoths in North America.

WEEK of May 8, 2006

Light sweet crude is almost $70 a barrel. Analysts are saying that about 10 percent of that is jitters ove r the articifical Iran crisis. That is, Americans should know that everytime Bush and Rice make threats against Iran, you pay $3.00 a gallon instead of $2.70 a gallon for your gasoline. Think about that when you're filling up.

Bush channels Neville Chamberlain: When history judges the Bush administration's policy on Darfur, it will summarize it in one word: appeasement.

WEEK of May 1, 2006

The more beleaguered Bush becomes, the more he is flattered by his advisors with comparisons to great men of history whose foresight and courage were not always appreciated in their own times. Abraham Lincoln is one favourite. Another is Harry Truman, who established the framework of cold-war policy but left office during the Korean war deeply unpopular with poll ratings sunk in the 20%-30%-range. Lately, Bush sees himself in the reflected light of Winston Churchill, bravely standing against appeasers."Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in", Churchill said in 1941 as Britain stood alone against the Nazis."Bush tells his out-of-town visitors to think of how history will judge his administration twenty years hence and not to worry about setbacks in Iraq", conservative columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave writes.

As a rule, Europe has not been well-served by its public intellectuals. German philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi apologist; French writer Jean-Paul Sartre was famously soft on Stalin; German novelist Günter Grass opposed German reunification; Portuguese novelist José Saramago supported an aborted Communist coup d'etat, and . . . well, it's a long list. But an exception was Jean-Francois Revel, the French political theorist and commentator who died last week at the age of 82.

After 34 years of college teaching, I thought I had heard just about every imaginable student complaint. Last week, however, a freshman in my 300-seat US History Since 1865 course came in to discuss her exam with one of the graders and proceeded to work herself into a semi-hissy over the fact that we had spent four class periods(one of them consisting of a visit from Taylor Branch) discussing the civil rights movement.

"I don't know where he's getting all of this," she complained,"we never discussed any of this in high school." One might have let the matter rest here as simply an example of a high school history teacher's sins of omission being visited on the hapless old history prof. had the student not informed the TA in an indignant postcript," I'm not a Democrat! I don't think I should have to listen to this stuff!"