Edward B. Rackley

Africa has produced many musical giants. Some, like Fela Kuti and Cesaria Evora, achieve international renown; others influence a wide swathe of musicians but remain relatively unknown to a wider public. François Luambo Makiadi (6 July 1938 – 12 Oct. 1989), the Congolese bandleader and guitarist, is definitely in the latter category. Considered the father of the modern Congolese sound, he is a towering figure even in death, and certainly the greatest the DR Congo (formerly Zaire) has ever produced.

Nicknamed “the Sorcerer ” for his fluid, seemingly effortless guitar playing, François or ‘Franco’ founded the seminal group Orchestre Kinshasa Jazz, shortened to ‘O.K. Jazz’, in 1955. Franco led O.K. Jazz—later dubbed ‘T.P.’ or ‘Tout Puissant (almighty) O.K. Jazz’ by his fans—until his death, a total of 33 years.

In 1989 after his premature passing to AIDS at 51, the Zairian government declared four days of national mourning. The national radio service, Voix du Zaire, played only Franco songs, twenty-four hours a day. In the countryside where I was living at the time, daily life stopped entirely, out of solidarity and respect for a man many felt they knew personally. Neighbors sat under palm trees listening to radios, farmers and schoolchildren stayed home, the palm wine flowed. Although I didn’t know Franco’s music well at the time, I recall noticing an absence of repetition in the DJ’s playlist. No wonder—with over 100 albums in thirty years, the O.K. Jazz discography far exceeds that of Elvis and the Beatles combined.

Franco achieved iconic status not for his guitar wizardry, his talents as a composer or vocalist. His greatness lay with his abilities as a bandleader, organizer and recruiter of new talent. In O.K. Jazz Franco offered a launching pad for many artists, including Sam Mangwana, Verckys Kiamuangana, Mose Fan Fan, Youlou Mabiala, Papa Noel, Dizzy Mandjeku, Josky Kiambukuta and Madilu ‘Système’ Bialu. All of these and more floated in and out of O.K. Jazz, many with important international careers of their own. Ultimately, though, Franco had the vision to push the music forward, to form line-ups that could master develop the rumba style with it various offshoots, including the speedy Soukous, which blossomed in the late 1960s.

Here’s an early 1960s rendition of ‘Toyeba Yo’ (‘We know you’), with a young but already large Franco in the back:

Roots of African Rumba and Soukous

Franco’s family moved to Congo’s capital as a Belgian colony, Leopoldville, when he was a child. By the age of ten he had mastered his homemade guitar, listening to European music via colonials and missionaries, and to Cuban ballads playing on local radio. After his recording debut as a studio musician, he formed a band at 15, which debuted at the OK Bar in 1955. He took this name a year later for the new band, calling it ‘O.K. Jazz’. Within a year they were challenging the established stars, Dr. Nico’s ‘African Jazz’, as Congo’s top group.

Like African Jazz, O.K. Jazz started out playing their versions of Cuban music, whose rhythms had bounced from West Africa across the Atlantic and back. But while African Jazz continued to look to outside influences, Franco and O.K. Jazz turned to Congolese traditions. He shaped the Cuban rumba into the ‘rumba odemba’, named after an aphrodisiac tree bark still popular in bars and nightclubs today. As guitarist, singer, songwriter and showman, the Franco stage persona seemed to draw as much from rock ‘n’ roll as from rumba, while remaining firmly grounded in local tradition.

Congolese independence in 1960 was followed by instability and violence. Franco and O.K. Jazz, with its constantly changing personnel, headed off to Belgium to record. By 1965, with President Mobutu Sese Seko firmly in power, the band returned and began its climb to the heights of national popularity, headlining the Festival of African Arts in Kinshasa the following year.

Here, Franco and Sam Mangwana collaborate again on Cooperation. No video, alas.

From the sixties forward, Franco began to replace Cuban-style melodies with longer, curvier vocal lines closer to the speech-melodies of Lingala. Drumming patterns progressed into greater complexity while achieving a hypnotic, background effect. Guitar lines multiplied, evolving into the “limpid, gleaming tone” (Jon Pareles) that went on to cover West Africa and the French-speaking Caribbean. By the mid-1960’s, a new name has arise for Zairian pop—Soukous, a hybrid of the French ‘secouer’ and Lingala ‘sukisa’, both meaning ‘to shake’.

As African Jazz fell apart and other bands emerged, O.K. Jazz expanded to a dozen members or more. Its audience grew exponentially, transcending national and regional borders. In that period when African countries were all gaining independence, new relations were forged with neighboring countries. Records, radios and tours were spreading Congolese music throughout the continent, O.K. Jazz quickly came to embody the modern African band, and Franco one of the first pan-African stars.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Franco and the band toured and recorded constantly. O.K. Jazz played three-chord dance music that gently carried listeners into motion—a glistening web of guitar lines, horn-section riffs, vocal harmonies and drumming, complex but transparent and irresistibly lilting. Initiated with ten members in the mid-1950s, its size had tripled by the time Franco first played in the United States in 1983.

By the late 1970s the line-up on stage and in the studio included at least two drummers, a bass player, four guitarists, four trumpeters, four saxophonists, and as many as six singers switching between the chorus and the lead. Franco stood in the center or towards the rear of the stage, guitar slung across his wide girth, holding the sprawling ensemble together. He sang solos and duets in a husky baritone, but more often would feature other singers, sometimes confining his vocals to commentary or narrative spoken in the margins of the music. Above all he played his guitar, starting most numbers with a rumba flourish or odemba riff and leading the band from one section to the next and finally into an instrumental climax, weaving his signature fretwork among other guitar parts while the drums pounded and the horns wailed away, tout puissant like no other band of its day.

Here’s ‘Bimasha’: very tight, powerful horn section, from the late 70s/early 80s. Worth a look for the period costumes and stage personas alone…

Authenticity’s lapdog?

The rise of O.K. Jazz coincided with the restructuring of an independent Congo by Mobutu Sese Seko. In the early 1970s, besides the disastrous decision to ‘Zairianize’ (nationalize) private businesses held by colonial families, Mobutu also launched a coercive cultural-political reform initiative known as ‘authenticité’. The influences of Senghor, Fanon and Sartre on this program are direct and constitute a fascinating tale in their own right, one too lengthy to recount here. The ostensible aim of authenticité was to reclaim African traditions and to ‘decolonize the mind’ by breaking clean from colonial influences. While Franco’s music was played on Western instruments, by the late 1960s it was already unmistakably African.

In practice, authenticité meant that Congo became Zaire; Leopoldville became Kinshasa. All across the country, the names of towns, rivers, lakes and districts lost their European names for traditional or invented African names. Western suits and ties were banned in favor of the ‘Abacos’, short for ‘A bas les costumes’ (‘no more suits’). Zairians were required to abandon their christened, European names in favor of African ones. In professional settings, the formal address ‘Citoyen/ne’ (‘citizen’) replaced Monsieur/Madame. To comply with the new authenticity laws, Franco became L’Okanga La Ndju Pene Luambo Makiadi. Like the dictator who would become his political patron, President Mobutu, exuberance and immodesty were never in short supply with Franco.

In 1980, the Zairian government bestowed on Franco the title of ‘Grand Maitre’. It was a huge honor, but came with the indelible stain of the country’s ruling kleptocracy. His lyrics changed significantly under the weight of official recognition, switching to patriotic songs of praise and tributes to rich fans—an about-face from the independent profile he had cut as a younger man.

Yet even as Mobutu recognized Franco’s power, he also feared it, trying to control it and use it to his advantage. But Franco was not always the darling of the political establishment, and spent short periods in jail on accusations of ‘immorality’. Like all Congolese, he relished the apt pun and used parables to address controversial subjects. Was the song ‘Liberté’ only about escaping a domineering wife, or about a more fundamental form of liberty? Was ‘Tailleur’ really about a tailor who loses his needle, or was it Mobutu’s bootlicking Prime Minister? Under a repressive single-party regime, Congolese warmed to Franco’s subtle satire.

Faced with the biggest crisis of his life, however, Franco dropped the parodies and puns. The only solo composition he released in 1987 was “Attention na SIDA” (“Beware of AIDS”), whose lyrics presented a somber, plainspoken warning. It was his last big hit. He died two years later, never acknowledging that he may have had the disease. While his life’s work had certain international influence, the fact that so few Westerners know Franco’s music suggests the world is not so small after all.

Given that Franco recorded over 1000 songs with O.K. Jazz, getting an initial grip on the discography can be daunting. Far from mastering the entire Franco repertoire, I tend to cherish albums I’ve stumbled upon over the years, or that Congolese have referred to me. For first-timers, the three albums I always recommend are:

• ‘20e Anniversaire: 6 juin 1956 – 6 juin 1976’: The plaintive, rolling ‘Liberté’, mentioned above, opens the album. It also contains my two all-time favorite ballads, ‘Voyage na Bandundu’ and ‘Kamikaze’.
• ‘Missile’: From the authenticité era, it features the incredibly tight, tempo hopping ‘Adieu je m’en vais’.
• ‘Omona Wapi’, the legendary duet between Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau, another great ‘sorcerer’ in Congolese music. ‘Lisanga ya Banganga’, the opener, is still heard on Kinshasa streets today.

Acquire these three disks and you’re ready to raise your glass and drink to the memory of these musical legends. The cultural era they created and almost singlehandedly sustained for forty years was destroyed in toto with the eruption of Congo’s tragic civil war in 1996. Congolese music has survived the war but lacks the authority and vision that Franco carried so well, for so long.

Here’s ‘Ngungi’ (‘mosquito’), from ‘Omona Wapi’, a stab at Kinshasa’s idle, gossiping class… some things about Kinshasa haven’t changed!

by
Ram Manikkalingam

I sat in on a class that Obama also attended at Harvard Law School.  I believe it was the Spring or Fall of 1991.  The class was called “Re-inventing Democracy”.  It was taught by Roberto Unger, who dresses like an undertaker, lectures like a prophet, and thinks like a philosopher in a hurry.  At the time, I was doing my doctorate in political science at MIT. Students at MIT and Harvard were permitted to take classes at each other’s institution.

Unger is now the “minister of strategic affairs” in Lula’s government in Brazil.  His colleagues call him “the minister of ideas”. Unger belonged to what is known as the critical legal studies movement in law. They are leftish, foucauldian, postmodernish, multiculturalist critics of how law has traditionally been approached in the academic (primarily), professional and political worlds.  Critical legal scholars have had more success with changing academia than the “real world”.  Still, their views are important to understand the role of power (racial, class, gender, heterosexual, among others) in law.  In fact Unger’s first (and I believe his best) book is called Politics and Knowledge.

Roberto Unger’s own work goes beyond critical legal studies.  He has been describing a new world full of political possibilities and economic opportunities for quite some time.  He described this world then as an alternative to liberalism and Marxism.  While the world he describes remains the same, the alternatives he critiques have changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe. He goes after neo-liberalism on the right, and on the left he attacks what he calls – “the populist authoritative nationalist version of Latin America” associated with Chavez, and the “well behaved version of Western Europe” associated with social democratic parties of the north Atlantic. He criticises both lefts for stifling individual and institutional creativity.

He argues instead for a world of economic and political experimentation, where the state’s function is to first provide the social and political tools (including insurance for individual and collective failures) to encourage innovation, and then to get out of the way. Innovate and experiment, till things get stuck, either because the strategy has failed, or you have come to a fork in the political road. Then let the people decide how to get unstuck through a plebiscite.  The heroic class of his theory are the petty bourgeoisie, dismissed by marxists, and disregarded by liberals.  He believes they are the wellspring of innovation as the classic boundary crossing group – finding new ways of surviving in an institutional and ideological environment that is inhospitable to them.  But their innovations are disregarded, dismissed or suppressed by a combination of ignorance (among those who seek emancipation through Marxism) and enmity (among those who seek wealth through capitalism). The result is a failure to harness and increase innovations that can help society progress.  Instead, Unger argues those dissatisfied with the world moving towards a divide between rich, fat and comfortable white people, and poor, hungry and uncomfortable black ones – are left with authoritarian Third Worldism and phlegmatic North Atlantic social democracy as the only available alternatives.

While it is easy to be sceptical about Unger’s capacity to translate his ideas into practical policies, there is no doubt that his work captures the disaffection many of us feel with the failures of the dominant neo-liberal model, and the uninspiring alternatives that have been presented to us. It says something appealing about Obama, that he attended this class, instead of one on say corporate tax law that many other Harvard law students planning to pursue another career route probably did.  Dissatisfied with the world we inhabited, he too was struggling with ideas for a better future one.

One day in the midst of all this high minded theorising, students in this class staged a (mini) “revolt” against Unger. I do not recall exactly what sparked it off, but a student (planned or unplanned) took on Unger’s own commitment to democracy.  Since this was a class about re-inventing democracy in radically new ways – Unger did not discourage challenges to his ideas and queries about his approach.  This attack, however, went beyond the realm of Unger’s ideas, but to his personal commitment to implementing them in the very sphere he had control over – the class room.  The attack was that while Unger talked about re-inventing democracy in the world, the class was taught in a hierarchical manner, like any other. In short, his class was run like a Latin American fiefdom, while he posed as a radical democrat.

He behaved like he knew more than we did, so the critique went.  He taught by lecturing, and we – the students – learned by trying to digest what he said. The point – at least to the extent I can recall one – was that Unger was not engaging the class in a manner that enabled them to participate more fully. He set the agenda, the content and the tenor of the discussion. And the students had to fall in line. More over, those revolting charged that some students seemed to speak more than others, implying that Unger was permitting a select few to domineer class discussion. And so one student after another piled on repeating variations of the same critical theme and accusing Unger of hypocrisy.  The class ended in the middle of the uproar.

I was bemused by the whole incident walking back. And by the time I got to my flat the supercilious attitude I had assumed towards my fellow students – rich and privileged members of the corporate elite-in-waiting who were posing at radicalism – had turned into disdain. What do they expect – they teach and the professor listens? How could these students be so naïve about what a classroom is? Or who a professor is?  How else is he to teach other than lecture in a class with seventy odd students? And they are the ultimate hypocrites – taking a class on re-inventing democracy, while interviewing for jobs with corporate law firms.

I had never felt that Unger or for that matter any other professor – however authoritarian and hierarchical in the class room – was necessarily smarter than me – just by being my professor. Certainly, I acknowledged that some were. But the reason they were the professor and I the student, was more pragmatic. They had already struggled with questions I was struggling with. And they (probably) had read far more books than I had, in doing so. So their experience and possibly wisdom might help me navigate a little quicker my own struggle with ideas.  Did this mean that they were smarter? I was loathe to admit it of those who were, and happy to deny it of those who weren’t. 

The following week, I returned to class expectantly for the second act in the drama.  I was not the only one. There were many new faces in class, along side the regulars. Word had spread there was going to be a showdown in Unger’s classroom. So the cheap stalls were full.  And Unger began – as he always uncannily did – from the very word where he left off the previous week.  He acknowledged the mini revolt and then proceeded to express his disagreement with its rationale. 

He said that for him the “form” of the class was dictated by practical aspects.  He disagreed that just because a professor lectured and students listened, they ought to feel less smart or agree with his views. In fact, he claimed that he always did think he was smarter than his lecturers even though he had to listen to them.  And as a student who never spoke in class, he certainly felt that those who did usually made fools of themselves, rather than actually dominate discussion. He also argued there was nothing about the nature of the classroom that precluded students from disagreeing with his ideas, forming their own, or simply dismissing his altogether.  And finally he came up with the most brilliant summary of teaching approaches (in a large lecture classroom) I had heard.  Here is what he said:

“There are three forms of pedagogical discourse. The first is the no-holds-barred philosophical discourse. The chief requirements of which are infinite amounts of time and a willingness to waste it.  The second is the pseudo socratic method, with the illusion of freedom and the reality of structure.  Here the professor asks a question. Joe responds – wrongly in the view of the professor. The professor says that was a very interesting answer Joe – now can we please get on with the discussion. The third is what I do.  I present my own ideas. You then develop and sharpen your own, by arguing against and critiquing mine.  I do not expect that the outcome of this process will be that you come over to mine.”

Unger then opened up the class for more comments and suggestions about what to do.  He had a little trick up his sleeve, but he wanted to first give everyone hankering for a showdown an opportunity to have a say.  One supporter piped in from the gallery saying that Unger should not be discouraged (as if he were when he was quite enjoying himself), but that “he should know, in the words of Nixon, that a silent majority was with him”.  After the tumult had settled down a bit, Obama took the stage.  He captured the mood of the outspoken minority in the class – idealistic (even if naïve) outrage about hierarchy in the university. Without losing the realistic view of why we go there in the first place – there are people who know more than we do about books at a University and spend more time thinking abut them than most others.  He was good, really good. Though not succinct, he was eloquent. Students quietened down and listened.  So did I. For a moment I even suspended my cynicism about Harvard law students in the class, as corporate elite-in-waiting posing as radical democrats. He finally ended his speech. There were few other comments afterwards.  But they seemed superfluous after Obama’s.

Finally Unger came in with his denouement.  He invited the students to take over the class. He asked any interested group of students to develop a syllabus, an agenda and a reading list, and visit his office and discuss it with him. He assured them that he would not just consider this input but actually work with it.  It may have been this that put students off. But in any case, anyone who has had to teach knows that developing an agenda and content for a class in a coherent, interesting and pedagogically useful way takes time and/or experience. The students had neither. None showed up in his office and we returned the next week to business as usual, much to my relief.

This minor episode (or at least my reaction to it) prefigures my response to Obama as a Presidential candidate sixteen years later.  I recall verbatim Unger’s brilliantly succinct summary of pedagogical approaches. While I remember the tenor of, I struggle to recall, a single word in Obama’s eloquent intervention. He is inspiring as a speaker on change. But, however much I would like to, I cannot quite shake off my doubts about him as a maker of it.

It sounds like it might be a baritone sax. One note repeated over and over underneath the song. Low and nasty. The beat is driving and has a funky edge, set off by the little guitar riff looped over the top. The whole sound is there from the first note. No build. No games. Within the first second you’re hearing the lyrics, which come hard and relentless…

Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube
From the gang called Niggaz With Attitudes
When I’m called off, I got a sawed off
Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off

It is hard to explain the way that song makes you feel when you first hear it: Los Angeles, 1988, coming out of the giant speakers of a low-slung Oldsmobile rolling down Pico Boulevard just after sunset. Bad Ass. Rock and Roll died that day. Whatever its other virtues, Rock and Roll was driven and sustained by one thing… badassness. But that summer in LA in the late 80s was the final straw. Bad Ass moved to Compton.

The first two songs from the album Straight Outta Compton hit the NWA formula perfectly. The sound and the mix were put together by Dr. Dre. It was mean and gritty but it always managed to stay light. Hip-hop wasn’t plodding anymore, it was leaping around like Bizet, plus a growl. Then you get the lyrical triumvirate: Ice Cube, Ren, Eazy-E. Ice Cube always had the strongest voice and the solid rhymes. You start with Ice Cube. Then Ren comes in and picks up where Ice Cube left off with a slight twist, different emphasis, stranger thoughts. And then, just when it seems that you know what to expect, comes Eazy-E. Eazy-E has a crazy high-pitched voice. It comes out of nowhere. It’s evil and funny at the same time. Plus nobody in NWA was a Bad Ass quite like Eazy-E. His first lines from Straight Outta Compton are legendary…

…straight outta Compton
is a brotha that’ll smother yo’ mother
and make ya sister think I love her
Dangerous motherfucker raises hell

He’s like a maniac from some ghetto nightmare. Unbelievable. Brilliant. He is going to kill your mother and he’s going to treat your sister badly. Bad Ass. Same thing on Fuck Tha Police, the second song off the album. You get excited by Ice Cube and Ren but you’re secretly waiting for Eazy-E. And then, after a slight pause, the Eazy-E madness kicks in.

I’m tired of the muthafuckin jackin
Sweatin my gang while I’m chillin in the shackin
Shining tha light in my face, and for what
Maybe it’s because I kick so much butt

I kick ass, or maybe cuz I blast
On a stupid assed nigga when I’m playin with the trigga
Of an Uzi or an AK
Cuz the police always got somethin stupid to say

He is in extra Eazy-E whine mode for these lines and really works himself into a stunning sing-songy rhythm for the lines “cuz I blast / on a stupid assed nigga when I’m playin with the trigga.” Nobody ever had more fun than Eazy-E being an inexcusably awful person. That’s the nature of a Bad Ass. Done right, there are no excuses. There can’t be. It isn’t a moral position. It isn’t something that can be argued about, for, and against. That was what was so silly about all the debates around gangster rap. The defenses missed the point every bit as much as the denouncements did.

NWA was not great because the music “directed our attention to the real conditions in the inner city” or any such twaddle. And every attempt to attack NWA for glorifying crime and violence simply added another six figures in the “albums sold” category. You can’t beat Bad Ass with logic or politics or ethics. Bad Ass is an aesthetic category. It’s inimical to discourse. Bad Asses don’t explain themselves because there is nothing to explain.

That begs the question, I guess, as to why we ever cared about Bad Asses in the first place. Why are we thrilled and excited by them, if even despite ourselves. The answer is not a definitive one, I suspect, and the matter can’t be looked at dispassionately. Maybe you’re sitting on a stoop somewhere, any half-assed bungalow in the southland on a dry night with the Santa Ana winds blowing just so. You’re young and the world seems new enough still that something different might just happen. But probably it won’t. There’s the dull ache of empty desire and the vague scent of a wild fire burning itself out in one of the canyons. And then you hear the sound again, from a boom box or a car radio. The bounce of that sound, the drive in it, the thump and the relentless lyrics. Bad Ass.

NWA is satisfying in the same way as a James M. Cain novel or maybe Byron’s Don Juan. It isn’t pretty and isn’t meant to be. It’s something else. But anybody who isn’t drawn to the Bad Ass in some way is missing an essential human bone. You can’t listen to those NWA songs without feeling a moment of thrill, when the beat comes, when the lyrics blast out, whenever. It is Bad Ass pure and simple, stamped and sealed and impossible to ignore. We want the Bad Ass to blast the world apart, if only for a moment, or to deny it just for the sake of denying it. We don’t want to take up the task of being the Bad Ass ourselves, but we want somebody to be it, we want some Bad Ass out there to say fuck it all, every single bit of it.

Looking for Evidence
Jim Culleny

Poor Darwin.
Forever dissed by people-of-the-book,
he rummaged through bins of bones
flinging one after another
over his shoulder
looking for a missing link.

Femurs and fibulas went flying.
Knuckles and kneecaps rained.
Disks —the pride of vertebrates—
hit walls and ricocheted like pucks
slap-shot by blood-thirsty Bruins.
The thud of ulnas and clavicles
drummed rhythms on wallboard as they hit.
They landed here and there in the dusty landscape
only to be buried again in the sands of time,
found by future anthropologists,
and dismissed once more (no matter what)
by latter-day people-of-the-book.

It’s gotta be here somewhere, murmured
Charles. Everything else so elegantly fits.

Meanwhile, at a bin to Darwin’s right
marked “Creation, Myths, and Miracles”
Reverend Pat dug in too.

He tossed a leather-bound edition
of the Epic of Gilgamesh
onto a heap in the corner which
nudged a volume of the Enuma Elish
that slid to the floor and settled
beside a story of how a flower
grew from Vishnu’s navel.

Junk, grumbled Pat . Absurd junk
that can’t hold a candle to a talking snake.

He’d been hoping for a scrap
of Genesis notarized by God
but found only a sheepskin note
inscribed “Adam and Eve
are the apples of the old man’s eye.”
Good enough for me, said Pat
and ducked as the skull of a chimp
sailed by.

by Frans B. M. de Waal

Something curious is underfoot in the science of human vs. ape comparisons.

For a long time, we’ve been used to scientists who believe we’re totally unique. They simply don’t see humans as part of the animal kingdom, are uninterested in evolution, and indeed uninterested in any meaningful cross-species comparison. They just react with horror to any hairy creature that looks like them, the way Queen Victoria declared the apes displayed, in 1835, at the London Zoo “frightful, and painfully and disagreeably human.”

It is different now. We’re dealing with scientists who believe in evolution, claim an interest in it, and sometimes even have great expertise, yet balk at accepting mental continuity between humans and their closest relatives. Admittedly, most of them have a background in the social sciences, such as anthropology or psychology, not biology, which may explain why they argue that Charles Darwin was actually mistaken on this issue and that the cognitive gap between a human and an ape is in fact so wide that it may exceed that between an ape and a beetle.

A beetle? Have they ever seen a beetle brain next to a chimp’s?

Darwin could not have been clearer, saying in The Descent of Man: “… the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” The evolutionary framework simply has no room for saltationist arguments. Like Darwin, I am not claiming that humans possess absolutely no unique mental capacities – I am sure they do – but these capacities are merely the tip of the iceberg, and I prefer to look at the whole “berg.”

Except for a few differences at the microscopic level, the human brain is barely distinguishable from the ape brain. Its structure, neurotransmitters, and functional connections are all the same. Even our much-heralded frontal cortex turns out to be about the same size as an ape’s relative to the rest of the brain. Since we don’t assume that the human heart or liver work any differently than those of other animals, why shouldn’t this apply to the stuff between our ears? Yes, the human brain is three times larger, but this only means that it can do more, or do certain things better.

We now seem to have two schools of primate researchers. The “gradualists,” who follow Darwin on both counts (evolution and continuity), and the “exceptionalists,” who follow only half the theory. They propose major mental and behavioral differences, often focusing on just one that they feel explains everything that makes our species unique. Even the major scientific journals are taking sides, with Nature publishing more gradualist papers and Science more exceptionalist ones. Entire research institutes are split, such as two directors at the Leipzig Max-Planck for Evolutionary Anthropology, with one director publicly criticizing another on this issue.

Claims and counter-claims arrive at a pace that must be hard to follow for the outside world. For example, a recent exceptionalist paper on how altruism is sadly absent in the apes, hence must be uniquely human, was soon followed by a gradualist correction about how altruism is alive and well in chimpanzees (see my commentary on both). Or a recent prominent paper about highly developed social learning in chimpanzees was forgotten, and in fact unmentioned, when Science published a report about the limits of chimpanzee social cognition. This prompted our recent commentary in Science – which the journal published four months later – about the best way to compare human and ape cognition.

Our main critique was that if both children and apes are tested by human experimenters, this is unfair to the apes. On the surface, the procedures look identical, but the apes are the only ones facing a species barrier. They obviously don’t relate as well to adult humans as children do. Another difference is that children often sit on or next to their parent during testing, meaning that the parent can give all sort of unintentional clues that assist performance, whereas the apes lack this advantage. In fact, apes have been tested for decades in ways that almost guarantee underperformance.

We do have solutions to this problem. A recent study on dog cognition was conducted in the pet owner’s presence, but with the owner blindfolded. This way, they excluded unwanted influences known as “Clever Hans” effects. Shouldn’t children, too, be tested in a way that cancels parental influence?

I do think there is room for careful human/ape comparisons, and that most of the time (but not always) these will come out in favor of the primate with the larger brain. Humans are different, but not as drastically as claimed. The bigger task that we face is not to assign the gold, silver, and bronze medals of smartness in the animal kingdom, but to see what kind of processes underlie all cognition, both human and animal. Evolutionarily speaking, the more parsimonious assumption is that related species will handle similar problems in similar ways, using the same brain areas, (mirror) neurons, and connectivity.

This is something to keep in mind when the next paper comes along postulating a huge human vs. ape difference. My bet is always on the similarities, and indeed over my lifetime I have seen tons of claimed differences fall by the wayside, but rarely a claimed similarity.

A nice illustration is the work on imitation by Vicky Horner and others. Even though everyone uses the word “aping” for imitation, it was until recently held that apes are actually not good at it. Apes were said to lack “true” imitation based on the fact that, most of the time, they refuse to follow the human example. When we removed the human experimenter from the picture, however, and looked at imitation from ape to ape, all of a sudden they turned out to be excellent, faithful copiers of behavior. So, apes actually do ape!

This won’t deter the exceptionalists, however. They have already begun to turn their attention to the next major difference.

The most amusing one I have ever seen occurred in a Dutch newspaper by a serious philosopher writing about man’s place in nature. He proposed that humans differ from all other animals in that only we go on vacation. A sea lion may lie on the beach, he wrote, but not with the purpose of relaxation. Only we set aside time for this.

Perhaps we should just grant him his little distinction, and not fight it, so that we can finally close this line of argument and move on to more important matters.

Trained as an ethologist and biologist, the Dutch-born Frans B. M. de Waal is C. H. Candler Professor in Psychology and Director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

..
Heaven conforms to the Way (Tao). The Tao conforms to its own nature.
—Lao Tzu, Poet; 6th century BC
Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.
–Sir Arthur Eddington, Astrophysicist; 26 centuries later

Tao Meets (E = mc²)
Jim Culleny

I’m as left as I am right
as up as I am down
as in as I am out
as far as I am near

I’m loud as pianissimo
I’m bright as I am blind
as cool as caliente
as body as I am mind

I’m dark as I am light
as here as I am there
as seen as out of sight
depending upon your where

Long story short
I’m nuanced and mirrored
as (E = mc²)

..

My most valuable contribution to literature is probably this: a couple years back, I used the NYU English Department copier to run off some manuscripts for an impoverished friend.  I had read her book in email attachment (subject line: “the nov-hell”) and thought it was great.  At the time, Porochista Khakpour was freelancing for various magazines and websites and appearing at parties in cool t-shirts.  Flash forward to the present: Sons and Other Flammable Objects has been well received almost everywhere (here’s the New York Times’ review), and I’m proud to have been one of the little people who helped along the way.  I urge you to read it!  Or to attend her reading this Thursday, February 21st, 7:30pm, at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

This past week, Porochista and I conducted the following email interview, in which she is characteristically astute, honest, funny and indefatigable:

Asad Raza: One of the most remarkable traits of Sons and Other Flammable Objects is its tonal assurance, especially for a first novel.  From the first pages, it’s just so evident that your writerly voice is confident, stylistically developed, and unique.  It hooked me immediately; I remember that first night, thinking, “wow, here’s a real writer.”   But it also made me wonder: how long did it take to evolve your narrative style, and how self-conscious a project was that?  Or do you believe it was somehow, mysteriously, there all along?

Porochista Khakpour: I think I have been inconsistent with my answer to this question, so I feel a little nervous.  It’s a very good question but the answer could be black or navy–depends on distance, light, eyes, etc, you know?  So I have two answers that are close, but just off: on the one hand, anyone who has spoken to me for a while can attest to the fact  that the  “voice” is actually my voice, really.  I am breathless, excursive, complicated, full of twists and turns.  I am not just a literary maximalist but a conversational one, and probably one just in general.  On the other hand, when I wrote the novel I was very frustrated with “immigrant fiction” and “multicultural lit” and even specifically the prose of Iranians of the diaspora.  I felt very alienated from the literature that I was supposed to be close to.  I had no patience for all the lazy stereotypical stories and these stock characters and these very familiar and generic themes… with little attention, whether in the composing or editing, to the actual art of fiction.  It was almost as if publishers were thinking, well, this is literature for people with accents, who must not speak good English… therefore it will be written by people who don’t write good English!  Do you know what I mean?  So when I began writing Sons and Other Flammable Objects, I made “style” a priority.  Some of the book is quite stylized, in fact, and  occasionally experimental.  This is the type of writing I like and the sound of the voices in my head as well–I don’t think in conventional linear narrative, so how could I create it authentically?  So I wanted to write a book I would want to read, I guess–written by someone who was from my part of the world, but yet pushed the prose beyond the limits of what “my people” had done in this country yet.  The truth is, they could have done it and could be doing it, who knows, but the publishers may have dumbed them down or picked the easier outs–the more clean, simple, pedestrian road–and all we have is this chick lit for the ethnic set, essentially. I wanted someone who was not even interested in Iran or 9/11 or Middle Eastern men to be able to read the novel and just enjoy the actual writing.  And I guess I was lucky to not have to actually invent some new style to embark on for that mission–I kept it true to the same voice I used in writing crazy stories about chaos theory (in grad school, I was a writer of painfully pretentious metafictional sci-fi-math lit), the same voice I speak in, email in, text in… I am a one-trick pony, in some ways, but luckily my trick is kinda unique!

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I HAVE WRESTLED WITH AN ALLIGATOR, I HAVE TUSSLED WITH A WHALE

If I could meet one person in the world, it would without question be Muhammad Ali, and I would probably collapse in a pool of blubbering tears at his feet, such is my worshipful admiration of the man. The first time I remember hearing about Ali is when I was ten. The “Rumble in the Jungle” fight against the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, George Foreman, was coming up, and the whole third world rallied behind Ali. He was our champion, our symbol of hope. A few years ago I wrote about that fight at 3QD, and this is what I had to say:

Mohammad Ali’s most famous fight of all, the Rumble-in-the-Jungle against George Foreman in 1974 in Zaire, is the athletic world’s most powerful instantiation of the David versus Goliath story. It speaks to our dream of the triumph of cunning and skill over brute strength. And this is what Ali’s life has been about, inside and outside of the ring. He is not a big boxer, as heavyweights go, but he more than makes up in speed and nimbleness what he lacks in size. Ali’s hold on our psyches is such that I can remember my mother, who knew and cared nothing about sports, not only getting up in the middle of the night to watch the Rumble-in-the-Jungle live via-satellite, but very earnestly saying a prayer for Muhammad Ali to win. If you have not seen the documentary When We Were Kings, please do yourself a favor: buy the DVD and watch it every Sunday as I used to do until I practically had it memorized. [I just bought it again, here in the Sudtirol, and have been showing it to people on Sundays!] Norman Mailer and George Plimpton were at the fight covering it as journalists, and comment on the fight looking back. There is music by James Brown and B.B. King, and there is the fight itself, along with delightful footage of Ali from before and after the fight, including his reciting some of his poetry, such as this bit to describe what he has been doing to train for the fight:

I have wrestled with an alligator,
I have tussled with a whale,
I have handcuffed lighting,
Thrown thunder in jail.
Yesterday, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick.
I’m so mean I make medicine sick!

The movie, and Ali’s story, is so moving that several of the people I have shown the film to have wept at the end, out of sheer joy and admiration for the man. At the time, Ali was a bit of a has-been fighter in his 30s while George Foreman was the new, young, invincible, 22-year-old heavyweight champion of the world. Foreman was built like a bull with the personality of a pitbull. He was taller, heavier, and had much greater reach than Ali. He was nothing like the amiable teddy bear of a guy-next-door we know so well now from commercials for his electric grill and Midas mufflers. And the sheer force of his punches had already become mythic. The bookmakers gave him 7-to-1 odds againts Ali. Ali didn’t care. Muhammad Ali crushed him in an 8th round knockout in a blindingly fast flurry of punches (see picture), having tired him out earlier in the fight by inventing what we now know as the rope-a-dope trick (leaning back against the ropes in a defensive stance and letting your opponent pound you until he or she gets exhausted). Ali became world champ for the third time that day.

But Ali is such a colossus that his herculean boxing accomplishments can only explain a small part of his appeal. I cannot think of another human being as physically beautiful, as talented, as intelligent, as charming, as articulate, as funny, vivacious, and brave, and as morally principled, as Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali has been the greatest international symbol of standing up to overwhelming might that the sports world has ever produced. He is the modern-day David that took on the Goliaths of racism, the U.S. government, even the Nation of Islam–after he broke with it. He gave hope and strength to those who opposed the Vietnam war and American imperialism, not only within America, but everywhere. He refused to run away to Canada to avoid the draft and faced the prospect of jail instead. He was stripped of his title and was not allowed to box for years. He suffered and sacrificed for his beliefs, and he never gave in. Ali is the only sports figure ever with Nelson Mandela-like dignity. As George Plimpton puts it toward the end of When We Were Kings: “What a fighter. And what a man.”

I AM THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME. I SAID THAT EVEN BEFORE I KNEW I WAS.

Do yourself a favor: watch ’em all!

I SHOOK UP THE WORLD.

FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY, STING LIKE A BEE. MUHAMMAD, MUHAMMAD ALI.

“What a fighter. And what a man.” Indeed.

This post is dedicated to my sister Azra, one of the most passionate defenders of African-American rights that I know; my brother Tasnim, whose stubborn integrity, among other things, reminds me of Ali; and also to my friend Husain Naqvi, a fellow Ali admirer.

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

By Jesse Last

Sunday afternoon, I found myself inspired by Hillary Clinton. It was not what she said in her speech – as usual, her mastery of policy impressed me – but rather how she connected with me. She explained that making change in this country is a task that no single person, even the President, can accomplish alone. Instead, she argued, it will demand the hard work of individual citizens. She stated that while she would promote clean energy, she would also ask us to conserve. While she would work to improve our schools, we as parents would need to read to our children and support their study. And while she would push for Universal Healthcare, she would want us to take more responsibility for keeping healthy. I felt respected, challenged and above all involved.

In short, Hillary took Obama’s message of change and emphasized the small, but hugely important, individual contributions we must make in transforming America. This co-opting of his rhetoric is serious business, at least for me as an Obama supporter. When I consider what initially drew me to Obama, it was his proposed *process* of change as well as the change itself. He seemed ready to set aside partisanship in serving the greater good, and he asked that I and all other Americans regardless of race, gender, and political affiliation join one another in doing the same.

Recently, he seems to have turned up the “change” volume but neglected the “individual contribution” sound, and now his message feels slightly out of tune. When I watch him speak on television, I see the crowd cheer with an incredible fervor. And there is nothing inherently wrong with such passion – friends who have heard him speak attest to the enthusiasm he generates. I just wish I did not feel as though I were watching a rally bordering on a revival. We need soaring rhetoric in a world of depressed resignation, but such rhetoric should be filled with content. I want to hear more about his proposals (I know he has them, I’ve checked!) Even more than policy, I want to hear more of his original humility, more of his reaching out to me, asking me to not only support him but to support the incredible work that is confronting global warming, restoring the country’s security and standing in the world, and improving our economy.

I’m pretty young – sadly, I never got to see John F. Kennedy speak. But I have read his quotes and even watched recordings of several of his speeches. And no matter how many times I hear it repeated, Kennedy’s appeal to my better self still gives me shivers:  “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

I think our country is ready for this message of strength and sacrifice again. During the last eight years, very little has been asked of many of us, while too much has been asked of a few. While our soldiers have died or returned scarred by war, the President has encouraged those at home to continue in self-indulgent spending. And I think we have; I think I have. We have consumed more than we can afford and now find ourselves in debt. We have let the terrorists terrify us and our government take away fundamental freedoms and civil liberties. Above all, we have allowed ourselves to believe that we are helpless – that it is the role of the President to make our most important decisions for us.

Obama has challenged the idea that we as a nation are somehow too weak or too unwilling to think for ourselves and to sacrifice for the larger good. He has showed us the respect borne of high expectations. He has inspired us with his hope and his faith in a better America, and asked that we as citizens work to make it a reality. We have responded. Record numbers have turned out to cast their votes, including many groups traditionally skeptical of the political process. As of the most recent primaries, we continue to do so, and Obama continues to win States.

Now, I am concerned that he is losing the core of his message – the one that Hillary appropriated so well on Sunday. My hope for Obama is that he will return to expressing the principles that gave him his initial momentum. I want to be invited back into our project of renewing America – only not through giving money or cheering madly at rallies. I want to be invited back by his telling me, honestly, what he sees as the central problems in our country today, and what, precisely, he plans to do about them. And I want him to let me know that his vision includes a role for me, one of service as well as privilege, in making it a reality.

Jesse Last grew up in Massachusetts, attended Pomona College in California, and lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a Truman Scholar, he is passionate about public service and interested in energy, sustainability and finance.

..
“Faith is a window or a mirror, you never know which. But every once in a while they both could use a little Windex” –Clara Lichtner

Dim Bulb on Watch —North Atlantic
Jim Culleny
 
At sea in a cork
on the back of a frothing bull
grey to infinite horizon
smack in the middle of it
stupid in adventure
bullspit flying everywhere
lurching twenty, thirty feet per leap
pitching, yawing, rolling, falling
it never occurred to me
that I might drown

And so, the dim bulb
of the boy I was
lit my way. And what
dim bulb still does?

..

Michael Blim

As I was entering my Massachusetts polling place on February 5, I encountered a Clinton supporter yelling out to prospective voters about how Senator Clinton was “the real liberal,” and how Mr. Clinton had brought the country eight years of economic growt and well being. I couldn’t hold my tongue. I responded that it was after all Alan Greenspan and Silicon Valley that accounted for the good times; that they were only really enjoyed by some; and that it was Bill Clinton’s good fortune to be in the White House at the time. Senator Clinton’s poll watcher responded chanting over and over again as I walked into the polling place: “You’re wrong. Clinton did it, Clinton did it, Clinton did it…” So much for dialogue, but here in Jamaica Plain, people spit up their politics like they spit up like curdled milk. Even at 6:30 in the morning.

Chalk it up to misguided enthusiasm, wishful thinking, or just ignorance. Take your pick. Senator Clinton cannot be held to account for one over-zealous poll watcher.

But in a way, Senator Clinton and Ex-President Clinton “did do it,” or are doing it.

And to Senator Clinton and her consort, I say: Beware the ABCs — “Anybody But Clinton.” I have never sat out an election in my life, and never voted for anyone but a Democrat for president. Even if my own politics stand considerably to the left of the party, I come from a yellow dog family, and have never strayed in the voting booth. In American politics, there is no other option, and I accept this as an “inconvenient truth.”

Well, God help me, as my Irish grandmother used to say.

“Anybody but Clinton” has crept into my thoughts. It was a shock – a kind of Pauline horse fall – that I experienced last Tuesday at the polling place. In my family, sitting out an election was a sin of omission. Despite all of the doozies that the Democratic Party has passed off on voters from time in memoriam, they still have to thank Franklin Roosevelt, my grandmother and her undying love for “that man” as the local reactionaries used to call him for my life as a, ahem, “block voter.”

It used to be so automatic. “Just pull the big red lever,” the committeeperson would say. Doing poll work and getting voters out for about forty years of election days, I would say the same thing too, and I even served some time as a committeeperson in the black and liberal remnants of the Philadelphia Democratic organization. Palm cards, election courts, running the voter lists around five in the afternoon were as natural to me as watching water run downhill. Not going out to work an election seemed a sin, let alone sitting one out. For all of the insurgents I worked for – and yes for the party hacks who at least voted the right way — there was always a reason. Spring or fall, fellow workers and I were like the postal carriers of politics. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the machine. Da Mayor and his crowd in Chicago taught me a lot.

So I say to Senator Clinton and her supporters: Beware the ABCs. There have been many elections about passion since World War II. People were passionate – I was passionate – about John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson until the latter really dug us into the Vietnam War. I was for Gene McCarthy in the worst way, but I felt bad about Hubert’s Humphrey’s 1968 loss. Though a red-baiter historically and a little too friendly with his patron Dwayne Andreas, the Archer Daniels agro-business boss (Wonder why we have ethanol now so conveniently at our disposal? Your tax dollars at work for almost half a century), Humphrey fought for causes in the Senate nobody else would touch. Lyndon Johnson’s by then deadly embrace effectively ended the career of a now-forgotten man. Then when George McGovern’s running mate reported that he truly had lost his head in bouts of depression, George lost his. And as they used to say in my house, for McGovern that was all she wrote.

Reagan and a roll-over Democratic Congress pretty much finished the passionate politics of the Democratic Party, save Teddy Kennedy’s run in 1980 and the good works of fringe candidates like Fred Harris and maybe Mo Udall. Mike Dukakis is a very intelligent and decent human being, but didn’t inspire passion. There were other worthies, but I hope you get the picture. The passion that make movements and effective political majorities has passed from the Democrats to the Republicans.

Senator Clinton and her consort had better watch out. Barack Obama inspires a passion I have not seen abroad in the land since the Teddy Kennedy 1980 run, and that was nothing in size and scope to the feelings that Obama is inspiring. Perhaps Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign came close, but many like me chose McCarthy, or mind over matter. With the assassination, the passion dissipated.

Kennedy’s capacity to inspire passion was palpable. In 1966, Bobby Kennedy stumped for Senator Paul Douglas, perhaps the last truly gifted intellectual Illinois sent to the Senate until it elected Obama. He and Senator Douglas spoke to about 50 people on the lawn of a shopping mall about a mile from my house. Bobby radiated heat. Trying with all my might to resist him, to channel thoughts for instance of his despicable performance as an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy in the fifties, it was impossible. He inspired passion.

So it goes with Obama. Pick your side, but he radiates that heat.

Obama is the “Hail Mary” pass of American politics.

Passion and desperation run together today: everyone except the rich has the sinking feeling or experiences the brutal truth that the United States itself is sinking into a cesspool, using the hiking boots of empire to drag itself out of a 25-year morass of a politics as destructive of American life as any since the age of the Roosevelt rescue.

By the way, talk about heat. Listen to any of FDR’s fireside chats and try not to feel the warmth of voice and feeling that when all else failed, actually talked my grandmother’s generation through the Depression. He was “that man” for a reason.

Obama is the “Hail Mary” pass of American politics because our political system has no game plan, no plays to move the country toward mending its ways and sorting out how to become a decent society of equal opportunity and a good neighbor abroad. Its elite of which the Clinton are proud members has little intention of pulling American ambitions and power back from their world struggle for resources and military dominance. Americans, one senses, are finally tired of fighting for Standard Oil (we call it Exxon now) and fighting daily struggles for affordable medical care and education for their kids. They want a Social Security retirement they can count on, and would I think be interested in stopping the spending of its blood and treasure for imperialism and repression abroad.

Obama brings no guarantee: when did you ever see a “Hail Mary” pass that did? He has joined America’s political elite, no doubt about it. The risks of betrayal are always there. But have you ever been to the South and “East” Sides of Chicago where Obama worked as a community organizer? I have. I worked there too, almost a generation before Obama. That counts for me as at least a forward pass.

Beware, Senator Clinton, of the passions Senator Obama is stirring up. Heart is winning over head – not yours, Senator Clinton, but the hearts winning over the heads of tens of millions placing whatever hopes they can conjure or hold on into Obama’s candidacy. Don’t expect those voters to come home to you if your campaign goes the way of your Massachusetts poll watche — and worse with each triumph. Democrats don’t always reunite for Election Day. Remember Hubert Humphrey. He lost because people stayed home, their passions spent and their hearts unwilling.

I was appalled by the 2000 “Vote for Nader where you can, and Gore where you must.” The narcissism was breathtaking. I recall so many West Side liberal New Yorkers I knew believing they could vote for Nader and leave the rest of the city, black, brown, working class, or whoever was not them, to get Gore New York’s electoral votes. Don’t you wonder where those Florida Nader voters got some of their gumption? From just the arrogance that the politically safe expressed Election Day 2000? And those assurances that Nader would be there for “us” afterwards: that was some whopper.

But as I write, I wonder: Perhaps Gore was the Nader voters’ bridge too far. By my reading, Gore despite efforts on behalf of Big Pharma and his deadly participation in the protection of the patents of multinationals, was surely decent enough to deserve election. His subsequent record speaks for itself. Did he deserve to lose because of Nader Know-nothingism?

Voting or not voting for Gore rested with the head, not with passion. It was a duty. It was pulling the big red lever. You did it out of habit, or out of rational belief. Save billionaire Bloomberg, he who proves what all that money can do to you and do for you, no third party prospects are stalking the horizon. So Democrats may have a decent chance this time.

Millions are leading with their hearts. Passion can be unreason, but it can also trigger the stuff of which major social changes are made. Step on that, Senator Clinton, and bring on the ABCs.

When people are passionate, and feeling that their candidate was ill-used or cheated by a well-oiled, client-driven political machine (The Clintons have been running for the presidency for a quarter century, and with those eight years of patronage from the White House, likely can call up favors in every election precinct in America), reason can take a holiday.

Beware the ABCs. Anybody but Clinton? If you are the candidate in November, Senator Clinton, it could happen to you.

Regrettably, given a desire for a rational world, I could happen sense a case of the ABCs coming on. Even possessing what Max Weber called the ethics of responsibility is not helping this time.

When the air leaves the balloon, it falls. Obama is part of the air in our political balloon. Puncture it, and the energy for reform dissipates, as does the majority to do it.

Ask Hubert Humphrey, who loved not wisely but too well. He was the happy warrior of his time and was defeated by disillusion and withdrawal. His combination of reason and passion didn’t prevail. The passions were too strong, and the disillusion too great.

Mark Twain said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Against all hope, I have begun to hear the world in couplets.

Elatia Harris

Valentine’s Day approaches. Are we a romantic bunch?  Or, what?

Last month, the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge was issued. Learning about the Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin (it really does exist…), I asked readers to write in with an artifact that deserved to go on view there. It need not be a concrete artifact, but could be a memory, an idea, a painting, or a puppy, and anonymized entries were welcome. To say one word more than that would be to seriously take the fun out of what follows.

Our First Anonymized Tale

During my life I have been blessed to experience several unforgettable relationships, At least five were romantic, two of which were nothing but pure lust. Others were intimate in the Platonic sense. You are wise to allow anonymous stories. Otherwise this little fling could be dangerously combustible. It’s a variation on the “Post Secret” notion.

The only artifact I can recall suitable for your exhibit would be a wire screen on a summer cabin in the North Georgia woods. I had a summer job on staff at the camp less than a year after the most unforgettable crush of my adult life. A tour of duty in the Army had left me emotionally drained and desperately in need of love. Like a hanging ripe fruit I fell totally and wonderfully full force into an unforgettable relationship lasting almost a year. To this day, some four decades later, the memories remain fresh and promising, and I do understand how people in their declining years can rekindle long-lost loves after a lifetime of separation.

But the screen…

I knew the romance was done. Irretrievably and permanently relegated to the shelves of memory. And I could say with truth that it really is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But the pain of separation remained a little raw. There was healing yet to be done.

One still, hot afternoon I was alone, getting a cabin ready for the next camp.  I sat down alone to take a break in the common area and noticed one of the screens. The angle of light in the afternoon sun caught the image of some writing scrawled on that screen years before.

Young campers discovered that toothpaste could be used to put graffiti on the screens. Since toothpaste would wash off with a water hose, it was harmless enough, so the powers that might otherwise forbid such mischief let it pass. Besides, the place was already covered with other graffiti done in felt-tip markers so more scribbling here and there didn’t matter.

There on that screen I could discern the name of my lost love, left there probably some ten or more years before when she was a little girl off at summer camp. Tears came to my eyes as I remembered our times together and I cried briefly for that lost experience. That shimmering image of a little girl’s name scrawled on a screen was God’s way of letting me know that although no one else would ever know, He understood and would help me recover and get on with the rest of my life.

I submit that screen for your collection.

Poetry Counts Here

Last month, Jim Culleny became the poetry editor of 3QD, and we’ve seen lots more poetry since then. Here’s a poem he wrote for us on today’s theme.

In My Museum of Busted Love
Jim Culleny

1. Ring

In my museum of busted love
would first be the engagement
ring of inertia

the sign urged upon greenhorns
when the young pulse of biology
meets the  traditional need to rein it in
and set it to the pace of Eros
in civilized society:

the circus maximus of fidelity,
the merry-go-round of oughts
of lust and love
–the diamond ring I one day reclaimed
with an ardent,
whew!

Display that once dazzling rock
beside the big one called Hope
in the museum’s Hall of Almost,
and watch it diminish
in the glare of possibility
to the luminescence
of dull inevitability.

2. Car

And of course there would be my tiny TR3,
a courtship vehicle of desperate love:

its bucket seat of impossible sex,
its inconvenient gear shift,
its shock absorbers announcing
the illicit choreography within,
bouncing its comical, dead serious,
life-altering profundity.

Put it and all its dents upon a dais
at an car show under hot spots
next to a Porsche.

Adorn it with a fender babe
in plenty of flesh and lurid pout
and let it tell its fun-filled
soon sad but torrid tale.

3. Insight

And last
(but way more than least)
at the gallery’s back door
near the broom closet
in a glass case unlit and forlorn,
passed by countless tenderfeet
hip and horny, tattooed, pierced,
bristling with ipods, iphones,
and lost in Myspace ,
seething with tech knowledge
but clueless as  lovers
suffering the old implacable
urge of hormones in love
that doomed unwired Romeo
and foolishly unconscious Juliet
to live and die their misconceptions
in the pages of a play-write

… there upon a simple bronze base,
ignored but brilliant in its banality
sits the sweet fruit of my own

I-It
turf fight:

the Bubered wink of battered,
bruised, and tardy

I-Thou
insight

Men with Special Boxes — They Have Them, Too

Quondam 3QD contributor Josh Smith:

I am a sentimental man. By sentimental I don’t mean in the coarse way, like weeping along with fluff films, or incessantly scribbling little notes and drawings in my Moleskine. Rather, I appreciate memories for what they are. So I keep, well, keepsakes. Little tidbits of life. Real, visceral pieces of my material existence. “Proof,” as Duane Michals would call it. And where better the need for proof than my story of love.

This “Museum of Broken Relationships” is quite an interesting project, especially considering that I feel I’ve done it first (albeit only for myself). My own museum rests in the tiny front closet of my tiny studio apartment, itself a tiny little box that sits a little precariously above other boxes. (Recently, old keepsakes were moved to this new box from an older box, which had scrawled on it, in terrible, large-print, felt marker: “MEMORY TYPE STUFF.”) Here rest the remains of my broken relationships, from notes passed in school to movie stubs from first dates.

I struggled hard to imagine which artifact I would relinquish, which one would do the most justice to my story. But then I began to think about the museum itself. I thought about the museum, the one in Berlin and the one in my box. I thought about how all the pieces in the Berlin museum would weave a sort of story about their people, and the place they held and hold in their lives. Here are all these stories, somehow connected, telling us things about ourselves, from the admittedly crazy to the bittersweet.

And I realized that my own museum must remain intact. Whether it sits on a pedestal in Berlin or a shelf in suburban Maryland, it must remain part of a story. Its doors should always remain a little open. It should always sit a little precariously. And should always be open to its own kind of revisionism.

Now I realize that all this sentimentalizing, this whole, heavy chest of lost love, can become some sad weight on a person. Ever since I gave the film Citizen Kane its first true watching, I’ve always worried that my intense desire for love has and would echo that of poor Mr. Kane. Remember what they said about him? “That’s all he ever wanted out of life… was love.” And what did Kane do, when he couldn’t fill his world with love? He tried to fill it with keepsakes. From around the world, he bought and brought to his estate the world’s finest animals and artwork, making it a museum of a lovely world that always just eluded him.

Kane’s museum was a sad one. It was a museum that immortalized a struggle. But sentimental does not mean sad. The kind of museum I aspire to, whether it be in my box of “MEMORY TYPE STUFF,” or the more biological museum between my ears, is one of sentimental wisdom. The memories kept in such places will always be simultaneously glowing and fading away. They must be understood as a story, where one can reorder them and give them new meaning. Then, the “proof” that someone loved you, or that you were simply “naïve back then,” won’t just be some silly cop-out. Instead, you grow. You become reordered. And you always remain just a little precariously placed.

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News stories sometimes provide strange anecdotes. One that has often been useful for me came from the flurry of coverage after the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in 1996. As everyone now knows, this odd duck was for a brief time a math professor at the University of California at Berkeley. One of the many articles recounting this fact (I forget which one, alas) included a sentence that went something like this. “After receiving his Ph.D from Harvard in 1967, Kaczynski took a position in the Math Department at the University of California at Berkeley, one of sixteen assistant professors hired in the department that fall.” The story then went on to describe his loneliness amidst the carnival of freaks on Telegraph Avenue, his descent into misanthropy and despair, and so on. But I could hardly make it that past that sentence, tripped up as I was over the sixteen assistant professors hired by the Math department in one year.

For those of you who don’t know much about these things (and why should you?), nowadays an academic department in a university the size of Berkeley hires on average three assistant professors over a five year period, give or take depending on the vicissitudes of budgets, retirements, and so on. Kaczynski’s hire came at the high water mark of the post-war expansion of the American university system, when the baby boomers were all going to college, the economy was doing well, and cold-war dollars poured into higher education. Things would soon change, irrevocably.

Enter the 1970s. Expansion gave way to constriction, the good times to recession. In English Departments (my little corner of the world), the jobs that had been abundant throughout the 1960s disappeared virtually over night. 1971 was a year like any other. 1972 saw effectively no jobs. If you were in graduate school at the time, your fate was decided by the dumb luck of when you defended your dissertation. Had you applied for jobs a year earlier, you might be an assistant professor at Brandeis. Now that the bottom had fallen out, you were lucky to get by as an adjunct. From what I gather, the same was true of other fields as well. Suddenly those dissertations written in a space of six months took six years to finish. Four-year stints in graduate school stretched to a decade. The culture of graduate school, with its attendant malaise and cynicism, was born into the world.

Here’s a little known fact about recessions and graduate school. When job offers plummet, applications for admission swell. Those same factors that constrict hiring at universities ripple across the entire economy. And what is a bright college graduate to do when faced with few prospects? Why go to graduate school of course! The result is somewhat curious. In the midst of job crisis and despair, the number and quality of those wanting to go to graduate school rises. So here’s how things stacked up in English in the 1970s: fewer PhDs were getting jobs, brighter and more interesting BAs were entering graduate programs. No longer a brief period of apprenticeship, graduate school became a place of intellectual ferment. From this ground sprang post-structuralism, literary theory, and the sense that literary study was really beginning to change.

My point in revisiting this history is not to have anything to say about the intellectual content or value of seventies-era literary theory. Nothing could be more boring at this point in time. Rather, I want to point to the interesting convergence of economic recession and intellectual change, especially since we seem to be heading to a recession just now. My argument is simple: more applicants to graduate school + fewer jobs for PhDs = intellectual change. The advantage of this argument is that it is impersonal and structural and thus does not rely on the charismatic influence of great minds. Were Derrida or DeMan not around, in other words, someone else would have fit the bill. The disadvantage is that the equals sign does a lot of heavy lifting. Oh well.

The second great job crisis hit the academy during the recession of the early nineties. I was around for this one. I entered graduate school in 1989. The NY Times ran a story that same year about how a slew of academic retirements were about to produce a boom in jobs. That never happened. By the early nineties, job-crisis talk was all over the place and had produced a small industry of whining and hand-wringing (often by those folks who lucked out in the 60s). To this recession, we may credit the arrival of cultural-studies and historicism. The former was almost dead on arrival but the latter is still the dominant paradigm of literary study.

We are too close to the culture of nineties-era literary study to have much to say about it in comparison to what’s going on now. Without waxing nostalgic, however, I think we can credit something at least provisionally to the combination of more applications from BAs and fewer jobs for PhDs. What I can say for sure is that the job market in English has on balance gotten better over the past decade while applications to grad school have gone down. What this moment will look like to the eyes of the future is of course anyone’s guess. If my argument is true, however, it would be of equal interest to ask what a coming recession might bring.

Dear Friends and Family –

I am writing to share my thoughts on the Democratic Primary (the Republican Primary seems pretty sealed up!) I hope that you find something of value in my thoughts, and in the thoughts of others who have written to me and who I quote below.

In Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the Democratic Party offers two intelligent and capable candidates. I have looked closely at their policies, and with several exceptions, they offer remarkably similar proposals. With similar positions, much has been made of experience, and of Hillary’s supposed advantage. However, as a friend observed: “Any president will be surrounded by old hands and experienced politicos. If lack of credentials is coupled with poor judgment, inability to work with others, lack of intuitive intelligence, etc. then it’s a problem. But I don’t see any evidence that Obama lacks these things; in fact, he appears to excel in this area.”

To these words I would only add that Obama has unique and valuable experience of his own.Professionally, he served as Editor of the Harvard Law Review, organized communities in Chicago, practiced as a civil rights attorney, served as an Illinois legislator and finally, as a US Senator. These are all great resume pieces. Still, I believe that the seemingly less-relevant life experiences are valuable as well. Many of our fundamental outlooks and frames of references develop during the years that Obama lived in Indonesia, that he struggled to find a place as a half-black Kenyan and half-white Kansan first at Harvard’s Law School, and then again in Chicago’s South Side. He has lived with the uncertainty of identity, and is attuned to these issues without being constrained by them.

It is perhaps this experience that allows him to connect to individuals from so many walks of life. As a friend who volunteered for him recounts: “In Nevada and South Carolina I saw people come together from every age, walk of life, race, religion, and party affiliation – all thrilled and united by this candidate. In a stadium at the University of South Carolina , I cheered with hundreds of people from all backgrounds and thought – what other event in history has united this type of group for a common cause? I drove with Democrats, Independents, and even Republicans from Texas , California , Pennsylvania , and South Carolina , to knock on doors and talk about the new leadership inspired by Obama.”

It is this same experience, as well as physical appearance, that may allow him to connect with individuals beyond our borders too. As Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic Monthly writes: “Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America . In one simple image, America ‘s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii , who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”

Thus, in this primary, neither issue positions nor experience confer a material advantage in my mind. Rather, it is rival conceptions of the role of President, of politics and of possibility that swings my vote. As a friend shares: “Obama offers a centering voice around which disenchanted Americans can rally to overcome nearly three decades of vicious partisanship, to reenergize the nobler aspirations of American democracy, and to restore faith in government and civic life….Clinton’s diagnosis, consistent with her conception of the kind of Presidency she wants to offer to the American people, is that what most needs to be corrected are the errors, distortions, manipulations, and inadequacies of a failed Presidency.  Obama’s diagnosis is more fundamental.  The current Bush administration is the painfully unpleasant fruition of an era of American politics that has discarded civic virtue and responsibility, and has mastered the art of manipulating our fears and differences to divide us, to control us, and, most damagingly, to enfeeble us.  Obama inspires us to see beyond what is most immediately obvious in order to understand the greater task we face and to trust our capacity to meet the challenges of that hard work.”

I support Obama because truthfully, no one person can “fix” our country. No politician, no President alone can realize all the policies we need enacted. Rather, fundamental change will happen when we elect a President who inspires *us* to make these changes. We as individuals, as families, as religious, ethnic, professional and larger communities decide how we treat our veterans coming home, what we ask of our schools and demand of our elected officials, and how much we are willing to contribute to the greater good.

Barack Obama believes in our ability to contribute to the greater good. As he remarked after his loss in New Hampshire: “For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.” (For those inspired by music, check out his message here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY)

I am tired of being told by the media, by friends, by myself, of how flawed we are as a country and as Americans. True as it may be, a focus on our shortcomings is worth only so much. I want a new focus. For the next four years, I want my television to broadcast not fear, but the vision of a President who trusts that I am a part of a country and a world that is profoundly flawed but fundamentally good. That it is ok to believe in my fellow human beings and our potential to make things better – never perfect, but better. That I may carry myself with both pride and humility as an American traveling abroad. That I can reject the labels of “Republican” or “Democrat” and the associated demonization of the other side.

And during this nomination, I do not want to play to labels of “first black man” or “first woman.” This is not to say that such identify is irrelevant. Both the Democratic candidates have undoubtedly experienced the cruelty of low expectations, of misguided assumptions, of undue skepticism, of outright bigotry. As a white woman and biracial man, both have been told what is and is not possible, for themselves and by extension for others. However, more important than choosing either candidate based on identity is choosing the candidate who has demonstrated the most integrity and courage in responding to its challenges.

They have responded differently. Hillary chooses to confront her tormentors by pushing back with a tenacity bordering on vengeance – as she has argues lately, she has been attacked by the Republican Machine for years and knows how to fight back. So now, her world view is that of opposition, of a need to hold on, to not give up all that she has worked so hard to accomplish. It is a view that lends itself to suspicion, aggression and conflict – partisan conflict and conflict more generally. It is not the mindset that I want my next President to hold.

Obama seems to have chosen another path. He does not talk about fighting his critics nor obsess about those who oppose him. He does not seem to harbor grudges and distrust as Hillary does. Rather, he evokes a confidence borne of overcoming personal challenge.

He is not naïve to hope, he is courageous to do so. It is easier to hate your enemies than to love them. It is easier to hold grudges than to let them go. It is easier to believe the worst of others than to see their failings time and time again and maintain a deep faith in their fundamental goodness. Obama chooses the harder path.

His campaign of unity and hope and faith in a better America works because he believes that his message will resonate. He has placed his faith in us, and in return asks that we hold faith not only in him but also in our individual abilities to rise above partisanship and above voting for a person because of race or gender. He is asking a lot of us, because choosing a new, bold way is frightening.

Obama is giving us a gift – the chance to hope and to begin to make change. Let’s seize this opportunity.

All my best,

Jesse Last

Jesse Last grew up in Massachusetts, attended Pomona College in California, and lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a Truman Scholar, he is passionate about public service and interested in energy, sustainability and finance.

Justin E. H. Smith

In what spokespeople for both parties are calling an act of “unprecedented interference,” a strongly pro-government newspaper in the authoritarian republic of Belarus has offered its own endorsements in the US presidential primaries.  Analysts contend that this operation was likely directed by president Aleksandr Lukashenko himself, and was meant to serve as a critical response to the international community’s past efforts to monitor elections in Belarus.  The US government and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe strongly denounced as illegitimate the 2006 Belarus elections, in which Lukashenko received more than 80% of the vote and opposition parties were not permitted to campaign.  As of press time, the Belarus embassy in Washington has refused to offer any comment on the endorsements. 

*

From Belaruskija Naviny (translated by the Belarus Information Agency):

Minsk (BIA) 1 February, 2008– In America, there are not strong leaders like Aleksandr Grigorevich Lukashenko, who come into power, and stay in the power.  The only president in American history to have held on his power more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt.  And he was cripple!  He stayed long because of war-time situation, not strength.

But every four years, the parties make their best effort.  This year, because of failed war in Iraq and weak leadership of George W. Bush, the American people are going in for politics like never before in their history.  Participation in the political life of the country is up 32% from its historic low in 2004. This upswing is most notable among the young-people of America, many of whom have at long last removed their walkman headphones to “tune in” to their nation’s future. 

What choices are the Republican and Democratic parties offering them?

At this present, the Republican (“Grand Old”) Party has three candidates in competition: the Christian retail-store magnate and “healthy life-style” advocate Mike Huckabee, whose business practices were subjected to critique already in American independent cinema production “I Heart Huckabee” (2005); Mitt Romney, governor of State Utah and elder of Mormon church, which until Lukashenko’s bold measure against foreign missionary-activity was responsible for the common sight on the streets of Grodno and Brest and Vitebsk of clean and polite young Americans, speaking Belarusian like mother tongue, and promoting their heretical sect to our villagers like we were pagan Indians; and finally, John McCain, senator of City Phoenix and number-one opponent of current president George W. Bush within Republican party.

The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular solidarity-building women’s breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton. 

Let us have a look at the Democratic candidates first.

Even in Soviet times we had saying: “The Woman: it is also Person!”  In Belarus, we have many women in political offices.  For example, Nadezhda Kholstyak is undersecretary of Dairy and Eggs, and Academician Elena Ostrovskaya is ad hoc advisor for the problems relating to Chernobyl Incident.  In Belarus, we are not afraid of a woman in place of power.  Now Hillary Clinton had eight years already in White House.  During that time, she set herself one goal: the creation of new polyclinics throughout America, for the promotion of health and hygiene, from Poultry Processing Plant “John Tyson” in State Missouri to High Technology Cybernetics Park “Bill Gates” in State Washington, to public high school “Martin Luther King” in City Oakland.  But how many polyclinics emerged from her time in the White House? There are no more polyclinics in America now than during Great Depression. Instead Clinton left America with the “health’s management organizations,” with queues of length we have not seen in Belarus since Great War for Fatherland, and costs that are sure to make any patient “sick.” Americans should be asking to Candidate Clinton: where are the polyclinics?  Where can I go for antibiotics or a mustard plaster when I fall ill?  Where can I go to pasteurize my children?   

It is known that Barack Obama hoped to “jump-start” his campaign through “community services” in Chicago.  But what sort of services did he provide?  Did he promote physical culture to Chicagoans?  Did sport, leisure, and tourism receive a boost from his bold efforts?  Do more Chicagoans go in for patriotic games now than before?  The answer is a three-times “no.”  Yet it cannot be denied that Americans have enthusiastically embraced Barack Obama’s color.  As a result of Candidate Obama’s bold hue, white Americans are now going in for black Americans at unprecedented levels.  Racial good-will is up 56% since its historic low in 1813, and if Obama is elected president we can count on seeing many Centres for the Friendship of the Peoples “Barack Obama” in future.  These are something we would surely like to see, and for this reason we endorse Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.

What about the Republican candidates?  What bold initiatives do they go in for? 

As business tycoon, Mike Huckabee has actively promoted physical culture in State Arkansas.  He has personally created 17 Centres of Physical Culture “Mike Huckabee”, and has motivated the youth of State Arkansas to go in for sport with unprecedented vigor.  It is now estimated that as a result of his effort, 68% of Arkansans are engaged in physical culture in some way.  He is also author of dietetic book with title, Stop to Dig Your Grave with the Knife and the Fork!.  (By the by, Huckabee himself is said to have lost over 50 kilos on his own diet plan.) Now we Belarusians go in for physical culture with great vigor, as our world-class performance in Olympic Games and in European football competition shows.  The members of the national sport teams are the pride of the country.  But we have saying: “Who makes sport, he has ‘Olympic-sized’ appetite.”  What about Huckabee?  Would he not eat a pig’s foot in aspic after making daily sport routine?  Would he not spread goose fat on his craquelins, not even “on a lark”?  How would his healthy regime go over, we wonder, at a state dinner with President Lukashenko? 

In the spite of the fact that he is Mormon, Mitt Romney has taken firm stance against polygamy and dianetical therapy.  To Romney’s credits, he is Mormon of the future: in his State, teaching of Belarusian tongue is up 34% since its historic low in 1960, and monogamy has also risen to historic levels. Under Mitt Romney’s presidency, America would witness bold initiative for creation of Palaces of Marriage Between One Man and One Woman “Mitt Romney”. Now in Belarus, we are in vanguard of religious pluralism, with many Christian sects, some Muslim descendants of the Lipka Tatars, and even some Jews!  But we would not elect president who believes preposterous things, like that angels dictated book of Mormon to Joseph Smith in motel in State New York and that God has personally blessed University “Brigham Young” with top-ranking scientists and academicians.

John McCain is gray eminence of this campaign and is also highly decorative war hero.  As POW he was kept in box by cruel torturers for five years.  Some say he is “Manchurian Candidate,” but little do they know he was soldier in Viet-Nam.  We are sure that he learned important lessons while prisoner of Viet Cong, and that he is now ready to boldly take the initiatives required to be great president of America.  We thus strongly endorse John McCain for the Republican nomination. 

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For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

By Edward B. Rackley

The novelty of the New Year is only now dawning on me. Last year was exceptional; amazing and sad in equal measure, like the dynamics of any satisfying novel or credible cosmology. This year started with an unexpected blast in the face: a week of wilderness survival training in southern Florida.

I had expected to be tossed naked into a Florida swamp and told to ‘survive’ (I admit the idea still excites me), but the course proved long on lecture and short on real-time scenarios. This mix has its merits. Not of the ‘me alone against nature’ school, the Tracker School approach emphasizes the acquisition of primitive/ancestral skills over grin-and-bear-it privation and raw endurance. Its aims are far-reaching and total, merging the physical and spiritual. Provided one is ripe for conversion, the experience can be genuinely transformative. On the pragmatic level, its lessons will enable you to enter Nature’s green veil without a knife, food, water or clothing and still ‘live lavishly’, or so the instructors like to repeat.

There is no obvious reason to embark on a primitive survival course, unless you’re an apocalyptarian, a rabid Luddite or a very gung-ho Navy Seal. But there we were, a room full of seemingly normal people, eager with curiosity and our love of dirt. Both elements proved essential as the week wore on. Highlights of the course included fire by friction, emergency shelter, track identification, camouflage and stalking, trapping, skinning and tanning, edible plants, flint knapping, cordage, and safe water. We learned all of this and more, but the skills themselves mean nothing until you get out in the wilderness and practice–‘dirt time’, they call it.

Uncomfortably numb

Our instructors were often blunt but never repetitive. I heard this sentence only once, and it stuck: ‘By the end of this course, you will know how to make or do anything you see in a museum.’ I looked up from carving a friction fire tool, the bow-drill. Other students also laid down their handiwork. We stared for a moment of mental digestion, then resumed our cutting and scraping. Were these skills so lost as to require preservation in natural history museums? Those dusty diaramas of Stone Age domesticity are all that’s left of the knowledge that kept our species alive for hundreds of thousands of years?

Humanity has been around a while, even our Creationist friends would agree. Whether this makes us ancients or moderns–closer or further from history’s point of departure—we’ll let the philosophers decide. Besides this continuity in time, and a prehensile thumb, we share almost nothing with our distant ancestors. We would definitely not know how to survive in their world, nor they in the world we have built for ourselves. In fact, so much has been learned and lost in the passage from Cro-Magnon to Joe Sixpack that we need museums to house it all. The fact that our minds are now crammed with information needed to navigate our world—none of it serving the simple purpose of survival in the wild, the primary human activity for countless millennia—hit me in the head like a locomotive. If nature is a womb, we are test tube babies: functional and yet entirely oblivious of our true origins.

It took a full week of rumination over this breach of knowledge for the various pieces to come together. The school’s founder, Tom Brown Jr., spelled it out in his own way on the final morning of the course. ‘How can you expect someone confined to a hospital bed, for a full year, pumped with three meals a day, to walk out the door and be able to run, jump or do anything physical?’ Given the extreme state of our separation from nature today, who could possibly know where to start the process of reanimating the personal, immediate relation to nature enjoyed by humans of all previous eras.

Far greater than the sum of the survival skills we’d learned during the course, Tom continued, the quintessence of ‘living lavishly’ in the wild could not be taught. Wild animals fashion no tools and most lack prehensile thumbs, yet they manage to survive, and flourish using only this one skill. Tom refers to it simply, and deceptively, as ‘awareness’.  Sound flaky? Diss not, gentle reader.

When most of us enter the wilderness today, we do so for leisure, rarely survival. Such is our prerogative, our luxury, and our choice: we are after all Lords of the Food Chain. We bring in our own food, water, and gadgets to make our nature experience as much like home as possible. We treat the excursion as if we were scuba divers or astronauts. Inserted into an alien, potentially hostile medium, our comfort and security depend on the conveniences we import. Shelter, food, water, heat: without these we are naked, vulnerable, shit out of luck. As a result, our forays beyond domesticity are typically brief and highly choreographed: we stick to prescribed trails; we don’t touch the animals. The would-be naturalists and conservationists among us like the concept of ‘leave no trace’ because it reflects how we were raised, in pristine domesticity.

The story is well known. From our origins as lowly, abundantly hairy yet edible items on nature’s menu, we have come to dominate the planet’s only inherent hierarchy, the Food Chain. Among the spoils of this conquest, we are granted liberation from the immediate risks and rewards of survival. In its stead, we bask in the Holy Trinity of Comfort, Safety and Security. Doubtless much is gained in this progression; what is lost is less clear. To illustrate my point, indulge me this simple exercise.

Pull out your wallet or purse and look at the cards and bills inside. Like yours, the contents of my wallet allow me many privileges. Among them, I am allowed entry to supermarkets where I wander the aisles, sway to the Muzak, ask the assistant for directions to gluten-free bread and unpitted olives, collect various comfort foods and items of irrevocable necessity (like non-frizzy dog shampoo). Occasionally option paralysis overwhelms me, I abort mission and curse the supermarket experience.

But usually my basic needs are immediately, magically satisfied, with a minimum of conscious effort. There is no stealth, no guile, no creativity involved (although if we drove our shopping carts like bumper cars things might get more interesting). Those parts of my brain get their exercise while I’m perched here on my hindquarters, gazing at this screen and poking intermittently at the keyboard. This sequence of perching, staring and poking ultimately results in the plastic cards and paper money that I find in my wallet. These baubles and trinkets in turn allow me a trip to the supermarket. On off days, when I use my body at all, it is to stand up, walk a few steps, open the fridge and ingest whatever consumables I find there.

All these actions I can perform on autopilot, a blissful state of full-blown mind/body dualism. So long Homo Faber. Meet Zombie Man, connoisseur of post-industrial carrion, the Twilight Consumer.

As long as I fill my wallet at regular intervals, I can perform the minimal necessary actions to secure shelter, fire, water, and food. Nature’s immediacy recedes further and further from my life until it becomes pure idea. For the rest of nature’s creatures, of course, reality is nothing like a vending machine. There is no currency to exchange, no symbolic transactions, no passive remove. Awareness is their sole survival mechanism.

Farewell, Homo Faber

In a 2003 Sports Illustrated article on the Tracker School, Tom reflected on the place of his teachings in today’s society: ‘People are aliens to their own planet. I’m just trying to reintroduce people to their own natural landscape.’ This is certainly true of me, a creature of convenience, but it is not universally true. We co-exist on the planet with traditional peoples whose circumstances are not unlike the Stone Age diaramas in our museums. Their relationship to nature remains immediate, the awareness informing their survival skills is still vital. Clothing, matches and metal tools are now available to many of these peoples, but how these objects are made or where they originate not widely known. Many of the traditional peoples I work with in rural Africa use matches but do not, for instance, know what to make of a mirror or a lighter, nor do they recognize themselves in a photo. They’ll turn it over in their hands like an alien artifact, which it is. 

In Luzubi, a rural Congolese village where I spent two years, I once placed an ice cube in an elderly neighbor’s palm. Nzolene retracted her hand immediately, exclaiming tiya! (fire). The ice fell in the dirt as she turned to search my eyes and read my intent. I realized she thought I had tried to burn her. Suddenly she laughed, clearly delighted to have encountered something utterly alien.

In my two years in Luzubi, I learned a lot from Nzolene. Our friendship began rather mysteriously. The day I arrived in the village, she approached my the door of my mud hut, bowing low and avoiding eye contact. Silently she placed a cola nut at the threshold, turned and left. Locals later told me her husband, also named Edouard, had fallen from a palm tree while tapping wine and died. Nzolene believed I was his reincarnation, and the cola nut was a traditional gift to welcome me home.

When the time came to slaughter my first chicken, Nzolene’s son Masaba was climbing the coconut tree in front of my hut. He climbed down to watch me chase the chicken around the yard in vain, squawking and flapping for its life. When I stopped to catch my breath and reconsider my strategy, he nimbly snatched it up. I had planned on decapitation, but before I could reach for my machete, Masaba had wrung its neck, killing it instantly. I stared as he handed me the limp bird, then stepped back to watch me work.

Standing there holding a lifeless chicken, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I gut it then de-feather it, or the other way round? I put down the machete and, cradling the bird with my left arm, grabbed some feathers with my free hand. I pulled hard—nothing. I tightened my grip and yanked harder, still nothing. A pot of steaming water appeared, brought by other boys who’d gathered to watch. Masaba laughed, taking the bird from me and plunging it into the pot. The feathers came out like pins from a cushion.

When I wasn’t working, Masaba and I would head into the forest and catch things—mostly birds, fish, and insects. Striding along a forest trail, Masaba could swat a grasshopper in the weeds, set it on his fishhook and have a line in the water in a single seamless motion that announced the joys of boyhood. After a heavy rain, we’d pick through underbrush to find a forest clearing where flying termites were taking to the air in droves. Masaba would catch a few in his cupped hands, eat some and affix others to the poles I’d cut and pasted with sticky tree sap. We’d step back into cover and watch small birds and bats swoop down to nip as the insects twitched, stuck to our poles. If the sticky sap did its job, birds and bats would get stuck alongside the live bait. Then we’d make a fire and roast our catch, munching as we sat on the forest floor.

Cro-Magnon Love 

In whatever country I happen to be, children always reveal themselves as a ‘traditional people’ in their own right. Mostly because they are curious and unashamed of their ignorance—like Nzolene’s unabashed delight at the sensation of heat left by an ice cube. We all start out that way, ignorance setting the stage for the wonder to come. I like to quiz my friends’ children when we’re eating together. Anybody know where this mayonnaise comes from? ‘The mayonnaise plant’–my favorite answer. How about my hamburger? ‘Uh, the refrigerator?’ If it’s meat we’re eating, they often don’t know the animal or understand that death was involved. But they want to know, and there is always joy in their curiosity.

Tom often referred to his teachings as having originated from nature itself, gleaned through direct observation and years of solitary ‘dirt time’. By the end of the week, a full circle had been drawn around the human and animal worlds. ‘Living lavishly’—the mark of success in any survival situation—was not the re-conquering of the Food Chain using arrowheads, deadfall traps or high-speed invisibility techniques. These were the glitter and sheen of Tom’s teachings. Successful survival required something far more elemental, a basic disposition of mind and spirit. By foregoing our modern trappings of convenience and comparative advantage (rifles, sleeping bags, MREs, etc.), we meet the animal world on equal footing, where survival is a matter of wits and senses. In short, awareness.

If you’ve read this far, you may be wondering what you can do to ‘increase your awareness’. Many techniques were shared with us, but the following can be practiced almost anytime, anywhere. On a summer night, stand at the edge of a garden, forest or field and listen to the cacophony of insects. Try to isolate one insect song, and approach it. Or listen to trees blowing in the wind, and try to identify one in the chorus. Next time you get up in the middle of the night, don’t turn on the lights. Let your vision adjust to the flat dark world, compensating for reduced vision with your other senses, including memory.

Curiosity is the condition for wonder, and wonder—I like to think—the condition for gratitude. For Tom Brown and his School, awareness is the synthesis of gratitude, childlike curiosity and wonder. Without awareness, the survival skills themselves are empty acts performed in a barren, non-responsive landscape.

Another word for the type of awareness being described here is love. Whether this has any bearing on our broken link with our distant ancestors, who knows. I’ve no idea, for instance, if love Cro-Magnon style was anything more than a monosyllabic, grunty affair. But after a week of survival school I came away certain that the Cro-Magnon definitely had their own version of the boob tube. No doubt about it, fire was Cro-Magnon TV. To watch a fire as it transforms solids into air is mesmerizing, its flames in constant motion and yet without mass. Starting a fire, feeding a fire, and watching it burn: a truly timeless showcase event. Ugh!

He walked into the bar just after sundown. Steven Levine. His friends call him The Adorable Rabbi. Some prefer The Divine Levine. Cold outside. The kind of night you pull your coat up around your head and make like a turtle. The bartender took an immediate dislike to the Divine One. She stared at him like he’d slapped her sister. It was making me nervous. But that’s the sort of night it was. Lonely no matter the number of people around. Edgy.

The Rabbi settled onto his stool and I looked up.

“I finally saw it.”

He got excited, in his way.

“you saw it?”

“I did.”

“what’d you think?”

“it’s good. real good”

Time passed. He was waiting for me to want to know but he already knew I wanted to know and I knew he knew it. More time passed.

“alright Stevie, what’s your theory?”

The Rabbi always has a theory but I can’t fault him for it. So do I. Trouble is, the Rabbi’s a Hegelian. If you know any, you know what I mean. No doubt it’s the side effect from all those dialectics. Metaphysicians the lot of them but they try to queer it. Made the whole system organic, fused it with history. The works. Hegelians.

“spill it, Rabbi.”

“the thing is,” he was warming up, “the thing is that after a few disastrous movies the Coens went back to their bread and butter.”

“keep talking.”

“they went back to The Big Lebowski.”

“you’re crazy.”

“no, listen.”

I ordered him another whisky to settle his upper lip. I hate it when Hegelians take to quivering. They never know how to start a point ‘cause it’s all one big fucking idea. Like Parmenides and his “well rounded truth.” No way to get in. A whole tribe of hedgehogs. Hegelians.

“take a sip, kid, and start from the start.”

“it’s like this, see. The Dude is the person for whom, in the end, nothing matters because everything is OK.”

“always loved The Dude.”

“but in No Country we get The Dude for whom everything matters and nothing is going to be OK.”

I kept quiet for a minute. Damn Rabbi was on to something.

“the Dude is the Coen Brothers’ theory of goodness, which is basically that the good is banal… The Banality of Goodness. and that’s a good thing. goodness is really about absolute flexibility, just flowing around.”

“spin it out, Rabbi.”

“well, they decided to take the goodness out of The Dude and remove all the limpness. what happens if you make The Dude hard? what happens if you make The Dude a man who actually turns his maxims into imperatives? you remove all the fluid goodness and you get badness, evil. Anton Chigurh.”

They always throw a dig at Kant in there. They can’t help it, it’s in the blood. The Rabbi was no different. Still, he had me up against the ropes. Nobody ever called that stinkin’ Hebrew stupid. I was stalling for time. Never let a Hegelian close the circle.

“sure, I see the angle. but what…” (I was grasping here) “what about the fate stuff? what about the Greek shit?”

I was swinging wilder than a blind kid at a pinata party but I figured I might square his circle a little with the flip. Plus you can always slow a philosopher down with the classics. Only thing that intimidates them. Throw out a few lines of ancient Greek and they’ll let you date a family member. I saw The Rabbi hesitate and I made my move.

“Chigurh is a Fury, man. plain and simple. we’re talking Oresteia territory here. never get messed up in affairs of the Gods. never get tangled up with Fate and never get in the way of the Olympian order… because the Furies do not stop.”

He downed his whisky in one gulp. I had snagged a line and I was yanking it until somebody yelled Uncle.

“you’re good Rabbi, but you’ve got the wrong movie.”

Then it came to me.

“the real remake here is Raising Arizona.”

He turned away, thinking. I could see the vein bulging on his neck from all the blood his brain was begging for. Time to give the screw one more turn and then let Wilhelm Friedrich the Second dangle.

“fate is the subject, my friend. always has been, always will be. moira is big and human beings are little and when the two get together you have got yourself a story. Aeschylus or the Coen Brothers. don’t matter. everybody gets their portion.”

“yeah, I can see that.”

“funny thing about the Coens in the 80s and 90s is they thought they could do the Fates in the register of comedy. human beings transgress. the Furies are sent to do Fate’s bidding. hilarity ensues. Raising Arizona.”

“OK.”

“now the cheeky bastards think they can do tragedy as tragedy. they’ve always liked to swing it far in whichever direction. either everybody’s talking all the time or no one ever says a damn thing. either everybody has something smart to say (Miller’s Crossing) or you can barely get a frickin peep out of nobody (Fargo). you get the picture. they picked up the Cormac McCarthy book and read their own damn script. ‘shit’, they said ‘we couldda wrote that’. Raising Arizona done minimalism and done mean. tragedy.”

Mostly I think he bought it. Started getting that faraway look in his eyes like he’s trying to peer into the night in which all cows are black. But the fact is I was just jumping on his argument and giving it a ride. That’s why we’re good together, me and the Rabbi. Cracked a few open in our day. Aim to crack a few more before the big boat comes. It was a cold night. Lonely. Me and the Adorable Rabbi and some harmless speculatin’ like it ought to be. That’s my story.

..

–yesterday at a local wired coffee house: the place is full,
but no one’s talking —McSorley’s Bar it’s not.

Internet Cafe
Jim Culleny

where virtual folk
with cappuccinos
gather at tables
like islands of stone
in zen gardens,
faces lit by laptops—
and no one’s apt to step
into the cool raked space between,
to be laughingly hugged or nudged
at key points in a repartee
that flies back and forth
on waves of beer-scented
breath

Rather, they sit
keyboarding thoughts into capacitors
that are Bluetoothed into broadband
and bound for distant counterparts
in other states and hemispheres
instead of being uploaded to
that other E-cocooned human
less than three feet away, breathing
to the left of the stacked biscottis,
keyboarding too, but longing for a
real spontaneous embrace

Painting of McSorley’s Bar, artist unknown

..

My January was anything but uneventful, though I rarely left my apartment.  This month will be remembered by the Kleenex, always to my nose, and all the apologies, after each unguarded sneeze.  My body seemed trapped in a sauna and after spending the night lying awake from a hacking cough, I found another wretched soul. Natalie Angier wrote about a New Year’s Eve visitor who “for the next 18 hours would treat the mucosal lining of our stomachs like so much pulp in a pumpkin”. Her family’s violent weight-loss program helped them lose 10 pounds, to maybe meet one of their resolutions.

Their crash-diet came thanks to a virus, a norovirus (named after a bunch of sick kids in Norwalk, Ohio in 1968).  It’s more commonly called the “stomach flu” and targets the digestive system. I also had the flu, the influenza virus, which targets the lungs, not the guts. Along with the rhino and the common cold (corona viruses), January felt like a train wreck for most of us, or more aptly put, a hit-and-run.

The culprits are tiny guys, so small that thousands can sit on the period at the end of this sentence. Viruses very likely appeared about four billion years ago, though they’re are not given ‘living’ status, since they are not much more than DNA or RNA wrapped in a protective shell, without the tools for reproducing themselves or turning their genetic information into useful proteins.  Viruses are fragile, entirely dependent on a host organism for survival.  So they need us. And use us… whether we like it or not.

So, how do they do it?  When a virus infects a host cell, the cell becomes its factory. It hijacks the cell’s machinery, turning the cell away from its usual tasks to now solely replicate the virus’s genetic material and protein coat.  So effectively does the virus take over the cell, with so many viral copies produced, that the cell eventually bursts under the pressure of the viral young, setting them free to infect other cells and continue the cycle. 

Viruses have a kind of docking device, used to infiltrate a particular cell. Rhinoviruses dock onto receptors projecting from the cells of our nasal passages. Coxsackie virus B attaches to a surface protein called CAR, using it to invade cells in the pancreas. Hepatitis viruses are set up to infiltrate receptors on liver cells. Their specificity is from competition for a niche in a virus-packed world. As Phillip A. Sharp of the Center for Cancer Research at M.I.T. put it, “every virus has to have a scheme.”

By the way, we’re also out-numbered. Recent estimates indicate that the total number of viruses exceeds the total number of cells in every other life form – including bacteria – by a factor of ten.

Bounty Hunters

Before we plan on avoiding contact with other people, and showering with chemical disinfectants there are a number of ways to fight viruses. A vaccine can prime the immune system to attack them as soon as they invade the body. If a virus manages to establish itself, a doctor may be able to prescribe a drug to slow down its spread.  If all else fails, a patient may be quarantined in order to head off an epidemic. 

We even have disease detectives to solve the case. They are NOT microbe detectives as I’m told by my good friend Tracy, who was a disease detective.  In the early 1950s the Centers for Disease Control formed a special unit, called the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. These detectives are dispatched on two-year active assignment, paid by the CDC, in various local and state health departments, in order to combat the causes of major epidemics.  Tracy tracked tuberculosis outbreaks in many regions, the last place New York City.

Some scientists are now exploring other ways to wipe out disease. Carl Zimmer wrote (NYT, 3/27/07) that they are using decoys to lure them to their death.  Viruses invade a cell by latching onto certain proteins on its surface. But unlike most other cells, red blood cells can’t be infected. Since red blood cells develop in bone marrow they lose their DNA. If a virus ends up inside a red blood cell, there are no genes it can hijack to replicate itself, a dead end. 

Dr. Robert W. Finberg, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and his colleagues, decided to do just that.  They would bait their virus traps (red blood cells) with a surface protein, engineering mice to produce this protein on their red blood cells.  The normal mice all died within a week of the viral infection. The engineered mice tended to live longer.

It showed some promise, but didn’t reveal exactly why they failed to eradicate the virus. Dr Paul E. Turner, an evolutionary biologist, tested what threshold was needed for these traps to force the viruses into extinction. His team mixed normal bacteria with different levels of mutant traps and then infected them with viruses. After letting the viruses replicate, they discovered there was indeed a trap threshold above which the virus population could not survive.

Scientists are using what was learned with bacteria to study HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. While now purely speculative, they hope that someday it might be possible to give HIV patients transfusions of engineered blood cells. Ultimate success would depend on the details of HIV infection. At some points in an HIV infection, a single milliliter of blood can contain as many as 10 million viruses, which would require allot of traps.  It is also possible that viruses will mutate in such a way that they avoid the viral traps. The results are exciting, but still in the early stages.

Less along the lines of a ‘Viral Terminator”, but with possibly equally effective results, Dr. Paul Ewald also believes that the rules of evolutionary biology can change the course of infectious disease. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99feb/germs.htm

In his interview with Judith Hooper of the Atlantic Monthly, he argues that the notion of “commensalism”, which dominated medical thought for decades, is wrong.  This idea was that the pathogen-host relationship inevitably evolved toward peaceful benign coexistence, because it is in the germ’s interest to keep its host alive. But Dr. Ewald counters that the Darwinian struggle of people and germs is not necessarily so benign. It can go either way, toward mildness or toward virulence.

Imagine that you’re a disease organism, such as the common cold.  You’d want to multiply inside your host as fast as you can. However, if you produce too many copies of yourself, you’ll risk killing or immobilizing your host before you can spread. The average airborne respiratory virus would ideally want its host well enough to go to work and sneeze on people (like I did)… This is BAD.

But what if the germ doesn’t need host mobility to spread. If it can use a vector, another organism, such as a mosquito, for it to travel from person to person, it can then afford to become very harmful. That is why insect-borne diseases such as yellow fever and malaria are so horrid. Cholera uses another vector to transmit. It goes by way of fecal matter shed into the water supply… This is UGLY.

His team showed that cholera strains are virulent in Guatemala, where the water is bad, and mild in Chile, where water quality is good.  Moreover, strains of the cholera agent found in Texas produced such small amounts of toxin that rarely anyone who gets infected will come down with cholera. On this, he said, “If you can make an organism very mild, it works like a natural vaccine against the virulent strains. That’s the most preventive of preventive medicine: when you can change the organism so it doesn’t make you sick.”

Dr. Ewald has also taken the laws of evolutionary theory, and applying them to a new theory: that diseases believed to be caused by genetic or environmental factors, such as certain forms of heart disease, cancer, and mental illness, are in many cases actually caused by infections.  The ordinary stomach ulcer is the best recent example of a common ailment for which an infectious agent turns out to be responsible.

The medical establishment had earlier thought that peptic ulcers were caused by: environmental factors, smoking, diet, certain drugs such as aspirin, or stress. Not infection. So for years, ulcer patients ate bland food and swore off stress. But in 1984, Marshal and Warren indicated that maybe an infection explained the ulcers.  It was ignored, until Marshall reportedly “personally ingested a batch of the spiral bacteria and came down with painful gastritis”.  There is now little doubt that Helicobacter pylori causes inflammation of the stomach lining. 20% of those infected produce an ulcer. Many can be cured in less than a month with antibiotics.

Ewald takes Darwin’s laws to mean the evolutionary success of an organism relative to competing organisms. Genetic traits that may be unfavorable to an organism’s survival or reproduction do not persist in the gene pool for very long. Natural selection, by its very definition, weeds them out in short order. By this logic, the genes that spell out that disease or trait will be passed on to fewer and fewer individuals in future generations. Therefore, in considering common illnesses are unlikely to have a genetic cause. He says “When diseases have been present in human populations for many generations and still have a substantial negative impact on people’s fitness, “they are likely to have infectious causes.”  This may offer a new way to think about the causes of our most baffling illnesses, that we have previously considered tied to genetic or environmental factors.

The Good

With news about AIDS, Ebola, the Avian Flu and SARs, it’s hard to imagine anything good could come out of the viral world.  But while viruses are the pirates of the cellular sea, there may be a few Peter Pans also around.  Scientists are starting discover the extent of viral diversity, which may one day radically shift how we think of our uninvited guests.

Hamish Clarke wrote that viruses, which are cheap, quick to produce, and easy to modify, “filled out the toolboxes of many a biologist” for years. Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey used viruses in 1952 to help establish that DNA, rather than protein, forms the basis of heredity.  Their success launched its new career. Their ability to entwine themselves with the host’s genome has made viruses an important factor in the field of gene therapy. The notion of going into a person’s cells and correcting genetic ‘typos’ earlier seemed unlikely. But now researchers are planning to swap the virus’ harmful genes for a corrected version of the patient’s defective genes and use the virus’ unique abilities to insert the gene into patient’s genome. Like a Hollywood movie, the scientists are essentially hijacking the hijackers. 

Patients may feel uncomfortable with the thought of being injected with a virus to cure a disease. But, according to Paul Osten, from Northwestern University in Chicago, the risks are low and decreasing. He wrote that “The viral vectors … are in most cases stripped down to the most basic elements that are required for gene delivery, and thus in no possible way pose any risk with respect to the original disease.”

We always hear about their assault on humans, but viruses don’t just attack animal cells. A large number of viruses actually target bacteria, including the bacteria, called bacteriophages (phages for short), that infect humans. Targeted bacterial killing may be an alternative to antibiotics.  Sounds like another Hollywood thriller, but it’s very real.  In August of 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a bacteriophage food spray designed to reduce the amount of illness-causing bacteria on ready-to-eat meals.

Viruses were known to do allot to control other parasites.  But they are now recognized to be an integral part of every ecosystem and can’t be ignored.  Microbiologist Nick Colman said “We usually only hear about viruses in the context of human disease. But most viruses are actually not harmful, and in fact have played an important part in evolution and in maintaining healthy ecosystems.”  Andrew Holmes, a microbiologist from the University of Sydney, thinks that people should know that viruses “have the potential to cause very rapid biological change through epidemic disease, but that is exceedingly rare”. He pointed out that this same process is an important part of correcting imbalances that occur in nature, such as explosions of algae that choke sea life and disrupt food chains. He notes that, “such viruses are the means by which the ecosystem corrects itself.”

It’s now February, and my nose still runs and my head feels like a football.  Still my role as reluctant host has become little more clear, and my thoughts for these uninvited guests a little more understanding (though I still dont want them around.

by Shiban Ganju

Dedicated to Jenny Mah, a 3QD reader, who blogged the following comment in my earlier post: “Would you consider doing one on other forms of “detox” such as “cleansing” diets and, the latest to hit my city – ionic footbaths!”

—————————————–

I travel for my work; I fly forward across continents and backward across centuries. In twenty-four hours, I journey away from the worried–well, who scurry to ‘detox’ their bodies, to the scared sick, who fall prey to needless death; from twenty-first century neurosis to nineteenth century ignorance.

Currently, my work lands me in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in north India with 186 million people, which would make it the sixth largest country in the world, were it an independent nation. From Lucknow airport we drive – in a rented Toyota Qualis – deep into the state, where 783 persons stuff every square kilometer, all of who seem to crowd into the bazaars on the two-lane highway. The driver assiduously – and miraculously – avoids every sauntering pedestrian without a scratch, but he can’t avoid potholes, which outnumber people. Our Toyota drops and hops, rattling my vertebrae and shaking my innards.

After trundling for four hours we reach our destination – a small village of 150 houses. My jolted body slides out of the car and hobbles into a dusty patch in the center of the village, where I see a circle of women in bight colored saris, who greet me with restrained smiles and curiosity. I learn they have walked miles, from twenty surrounding villages, to become social health activists. My travel aches vanish. I sit among them on the tarp-covered ground.

My job: to strengthen health delivery systems. My aim: to eradicate ignorance. My method: to persuade and educate. And my success: not guaranteed.

Failure to persuade is not new to me; I remember having failed before, when I ‘imparted education’ in my faraway home country, where ‘body detox’ is big business. And where it sells in different packages.

Detox customers throng to ‘colonics’ where they learn that the colon holds body waste in its crevices for a lifetime and a medicated colon wash is curative. The caregiver inserts a tube into the rectum and flushes the client’s colon with a gallon or two of the washing fluid. They may also offer a strong purgative called the ‘oral colonic.’ I have tried – with limited success – to convince ‘colonic addicts’ that a normal colon does not hold any grouse and does not need catharsis. They listen, they ignore me and they go back for the colon scrub.

Then there are the ionic footbath parlors for stressed urbanites. Here, I am quoting a sales pitch I found on the net about ‘Ion footbath detoxification’:

“This is the most relaxing way to get rid of the toxins present in the body. You just have to sit on the chair, with your feet dipped into the water container. A flow of warm water will flow under your feet and the positive and negative ions in the water will attach themselves to the toxins present in the body. Toxins that are insoluble will also dissolve in this water.”

Look at the clever craft of words – toxins, positive and negative ions – to add credence. It helps to sell, if the pitch throws in a couple of mysterious words without context to create a scientific aura. Flowing water under the sole may be soothing but that probably is the only truth in the statement. Even a perfunctory knowledge about the working of the body is enough to arouse suspicion against this ludicrous claim preying on the gullible.

Ions are components of a salt in solution. Common salt, also called sodium chloride, floats as sodium and chloride ions in water. These ions – the commonest ions in the body – can cross through porous barriers by passive osmosis or active transport. Thick sole of a foot is not permeable and the ions in the container cannot penetrate into the feet, which hoard no special toxins to extrude.

Feet also become touch pads for ‘reflexologists’ who carry an unsubstantiated belief that feet possess a mirror ‘reflex’ representation of the whole body. These practitioners promise relief for migraine, hormonal imbalance, digestive, sinus, respiratory and many other ailments by rubbing areas – representing the sick organ – on the feet. Unfortunately for the sufferers of these ailments this relief is merely an expensive promise.

Similar to such practitioners are ‘energy field’ or ‘biofield’ healers, who claim to heal by transmitting energy from the healer to the patient in some mysterious way. They claim to ‘restore balance’ and release ‘congested energy.’ Spurious claims abound in this field and we have to be as much skeptical as we have to be receptive to healthy holistic tips.

Then there are cleansing diets, which may be harmless to the body but not to your wallet. These diets offer no extra benefit. If we just eat the calories and the nutrients we need, we cannot go wrong. Food has an either-or effect; we become what we eat: fat-slim, happy-sad, intoxicated-sober, energetic-mellow, sick-healthy – the choice is ours to make. Each nutrient – carbohydrate, fat, protein, vitamin, mineral or water – has a specific utility for normal functioning of the body and in special circumstances, we may have to increase or decrease the quantity of one or the other nutrient. Cleansing diets provide extra amounts of one or the other nutrient and claim an exaggerated benefit.

Some alternative medicine practitioners recommend a liver and gall bladder cleanser. The recipe contains Epson salt (magnesium sulfate), olive oil and ornithine. They offer no rationale about what it cleanses in the liver and how it works.

For people with a temperament of ‘faith’ in much abused clichés of ‘organic’, ‘natural’ and ‘holistic’, probably I sound foolish. It is nothing new to me. I am aware of my limitation to persuade people of seemingly simple things. My inability haunts me now, as I face these eager women in this remote Indian village, which still lives in the nineteenth century.

My mission is to devise ways to reduce maternal mortality, which is one of the highest in this part of the world. Over 500 women die out of 100,000 live deliveries. Compare that with the USA, where maternal mortality rate is under 9 per 100,000 live births. The solutions are so simple that we in the west are incredulous. If we treat anemia with extra iron, prevent excessive hemorrhage during birth, give one prophylactic antibiotic before delivery and encourage institutional delivery, we can decrease the mortality by almost 75 percent. It has been done before.

The women, sitting in a circle, introduce themselves; they tell me their name and the village they come from. I enquire about the deaths in their villages.

Shakila, a girlish woman, wearing black, recounts – in a flat voice – the story of her neighbor, who died in childbirth last month.

“How old was the mother?”

“Twenty one.”

Her emotions do not match the tragedy; death is not an occasional visitor – it is their next-door neighbor.

But it doesn’t have to be this way; ‘this death was preventable!’ My challenge is to penetrate this simple message into their brains – the most obstinate organ of the body.

Changing behavior is an uphill task – anywhere in the world. I have ranted against scams in health care; pleaded against colon cleansers, protested against refeloxolgy and energy healing without success. If I have failed in persuading educated twenty first century people against ionic footbaths, how will I convince these illiterate women about the benefits of iron in pregnancy?

I realize, it is all about ‘detoxing’ the mind and not the body.