If you have to explain a joke, the old saw has it, then it’s not funny.
It could even be dangerous to do so. For instance, take this gem of English-language humor: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, buddy, why the long face?” It’s just the sort of jape that a time-traveler would employ in conversation with, say, Genghis Khan, who would probably boil said voyager alive as just punishment for the groans that would ensue after an interpreter (never mind the differences between modern English and the Mongolian of centuries past) explained the idiom “to have a long face.” (On that note, this philosophical statement: Genghis Khan, but Immanuel Kant.)
Now try this one: A bee is flying alongside another bee. He notices that his fellow apian is wearing a yarmulke. “What’s with the headgear?” he asks. “You want I should be taken for a WASP?” comes the reply.
Certainly it can be socially and politically daring to explore the workings of a joke, as Albert Brooks discovers in the course of his not-so-funny movie Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. (On that note, this unobligatory aside for the benefit of the Iranian site that regularly hijacks this blog: Q: How many members of the Council of Guardians does it take to change a light bulb? A: None, because there are no light bulbs in the Middle Ages.) And as for the joke-dissecting that goes on in the exquisitely foul film The Aristocrats—well, you’ll just have to see it for yourself.
Jokes cannot kill, with all respect to the brilliant lads of Monty Python, one of whose sketches concerns a joke developed by British intelligence against the Nazis, a notoriously humorless bunch who nonetheless expire in spasms of laughter. Nazi scientists attempt to retaliate, as Hitler roars before an adoring crowd, “My dog has no nose!” The crowd shouts back, “How does he smell?” “Awful!”
All the same, according to research conducted a few years back at the University of Hertfordshire, the funniest joke in the world, the one that most easily travels across cultures, is about death. It goes something like this:
Two hunters are out hunting. One of them falls over and seems not to be breathing. His friend calls 911* and cries, “What do I do?” “Well, first, let’s make sure he’s dead,” says the operator. There is silence, and then a shot rings out. The hunter returns to the phone and says, “Okay, now what?”
It’s a good joke, to be sure. But curiously, the jokes that seemed to work the best on the cross-cultural charts were just over 100 words long, with the optimum number being 103. The full version of the hunters joke tips in at 102 words, lending credence to the notion that a strange numerology is at play. Couple that with linguistic studies that suggest that velar consonants are funnier than alveodentals and sibilants and such (thus “kayak” is a funny word, “yellow” and “sassy” not so much), and we have the beginnings of a formula. Back to the drawing board, then….
Oh, and breaking news, to return to the Python front: The Norwegian blue parrot, it appears, really did exist. Where’s that time traveler now that we need him?
* Or whatever emergency number is appropriate to the locale where the joke is being told.
Written by Gregory McNamee on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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We eat too much, and we know it. Worse, we can’t seem to stop ourselves from overeating. The obesity epidemic sweeping the United States, the United Kingdom, and other developed countries is, literally, a growing problem, waist lines included. We’ve so far been most successful not at burning off excess fat but instead at explaining away our weight problems, generally placing the blame on supersized fries, sedentary lifestyles, and stress. These factors have without a doubt influenced our eating behavior. But scientists have been digging deeper into our pantries and into our fat cells, and not surprisingly, the basic factors that drive our eating behavior are strikingly complex.
Chronic stress is known to be a major cause of overeating, although even the connection between stress and the strangely increased stickability of fat when we’re under a lot of stress isn’t clear. Scientists know that there exists of an odd disconnect between our brains and our bodies; they know too that our brains can dominate our appetites. The amount of food we eat is in general guided by two physiological control systems. The first is based in our gastrointestinal tracts and controls digestion and absorption of nutrients, and the second is housed in our brains and responds to signals received and transmitted by neurons. These two systems communicate with one another, forming a gut-brain axis that controls how much, how frequently, and what kinds of food we eat.
The various cell signaling pathways of the gut-brain axis, which communicate by way of hormones, peptides, neurotransmitters, and other molecules, are all integrated in the hypothalamus in the brain. Using signals relayed from tissues about the amount of energy we have stored as fat, the hypothalamus is able to determine how much food we need to eat and how the energy extracted from the food needs to be used.
However, the brain part of the gut-brain axis is vulnerable to other forms of psychological input, including psychological stress, which could be clogging the highways of our gut-brain axes with an overwhelming amount of traffic. We also seem to innately pay attention to some signals and to ignore others. One signal over which many of us have little control is stress; we often tolerate this signal, but it can easily escalate and evolve into chronic stress, which results in the release of cortisol and has the ability to induce long-lasting physical changes.
In the 1990s before scientists could really begin to investigate the link between cortisol and overeating, they first had to figure out how the hypothalamus received status reports about energy stores in the body. They discovered a gene, dubbed ob for obesity, that when inactivated in mice caused the mice to overeat no matter how fat they became. Their brains appeared to completely ignore their bodies.
The protein produced by the ob gene was later identified and named leptin. Scientists found that healthy mice had detectable levels of leptin circulating in their blood but mice with dysfunctional ob genes had no detectable leptin. When these obese mice were given injections of leptin, their food intake decreased, as did their weight, amount of body fat, and circulating glucose and insulin levels.
Simple enough then; treat obese people with leptin, and they will lose weight, and their overall health will improve—a pharmacological pot of gold. However, leptin injections are effective only in individuals who have an actual mutation in the human equivalent of the ob mouse gene. These people are very few and very far between. For the majority of us, our brains have found other, mysterious ways to ignore our stomachs.
Maybe if we could find a way to recognize that our brains have become disconnected from our bodies we could save ourselves from becoming obesity statistics. People used to go for hikes in the woods to get fresh air and to get in touch with themselves and the environment around them. Since a combined regimen of exercise and a healthy diet is the only way to reduce the amount of fat we harbor, maybe we should all just take a hike.
Written by Kara Rogers on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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Immediately after Eight Belles crossed the finish line in the Kentucky Derby on May 3, her two front ankles snapped and she collapsed. The young filly was euthanized in the dirt where she lay, the latest victim of the thoroughbred racing industry.
The tragedy prompted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to call on the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority to institute sweeping reforms to help prevent similar injuries and reduce animal suffering. Hollow expressions of sadness and regret are not enough. If the racing industry genuinely wants to do something to avert incidents like this in the future, PETA proposes the following changes:
1. Delay training and racing until after a horse’s third birthday: Before reaching this age, the animals’ legs are not fully developed, which increases the chances for injury. Their skeletal systems are still growing and are unprepared to handle the pressures of running on a hard track at high speeds. One study showed that one horse in every 22 races suffered an injury that prevented him or her from finishing a race, while another estimates that 800 thoroughbreds die each year in North America because of injuries.
Strained tendons or hairline fractures can be tough for veterinarians to diagnose, and the damage may go from minor to irreversible at the next race or workout. Horses do not handle surgery well, as they tend to be disoriented when coming out of anesthesia, and they may fight casts or slings, possibly causing further injury.
In an effort to keep injured and ailing racehorses on the track for as long as possible, veterinarians give them drugs such as Lasix (which controls bleeding in the lungs), phenylbutazone (an anti-inflammatory), and cortiscosteroids (for pain and inflammation). While legal, these drugs can also mask pain or make a horse run faster.
An executive director of the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium said there “could be thousands” of illegal drugs used in the horse racing industry. Morphine, which can keep a horse from feeling pain, was suspected in the case of Be My Royal, who won a race while limping. One trainer was suspended for using an Ecstasy-type drug in five horses, and another was kicked off racetracks for using clenbuterol and, in one case, for having the leg of a euthanized horse cut off “for research.”
According to the Association of Racing Commissioners International, Rick Dutrow Jr., the trainer of Big Brown, the winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby, has been fined every year since 2000 for a horse doping situation. In 2003, one of his horses tested positive for Mepivacaine, an illegal analgesic. Dutrow has served various suspension times, ranging from 14 to 60 days, for these violations, yet he is still allowed to compete despite his repeated violations.
Many injured horses are euthanized in order to save the owners further veterinary fees and other expenses on horses who can’t race again. Care for a single racehorse can cost as much as $50,000 per year.
Barbaro (pictured right), the 2006 Kentucky Derby champion, was euthanized after shattering his leg in the Preakness. At first, his owners spared no expense for his medical needs, but as the New York Times reported, “[M]any in the business have noted that had Barbaro not been the winner of the Kentucky Derby, he might have been destroyed after being injured.”
Another horse, Magic Man, stepped into an uneven section of a track and broke both front legs during a race at Saratoga Race Course. His owner had bought him for $900,000, yet the horse hadn’t earned any money yet and wasn’t worth much as a stud, so he was euthanized.
Such “expenditures” are considered par for the course in the horse racing industry. Joseph Dirico, the owner of a filly who suffered a heart attack and died mid-race at Pimlico, said of her death, “I guess that’s part of the game.” That sentiment was echoed by the general manager of Virginia’s Colonial Downs, where five horses died within eight days in 2007. “We’re upset when it happens,” he said, “but it’s just part of the racing game.”
2. Ban whipping: Injured horses who are whipped by jockeys will keep going until their legs shatter completely. Eight Belles’ jockey whipped her mercilessly as she came down the final stretch. PETA has asked racing officials to suspend both the trainer and the jockey who, through excessive force and neglect, allowed this tragic death to happen.
A “whipping ban” has already been proposed in the U.K., where the cruel practice has been regulated for years. Monty Roberts, known as the “horse whisperer” and author of the book The Man Who Listens to Horses, said of racing: “A whip has no place in horsemanship at all. It’s medieval for horses.” Renowned Kentucky horse veterinarian Dr. Alex Harthill said simply, “Sure, it hurts a horse.”
Last year, while racing at California’s Bay Meadows track, 4-year-old gelding Imperial Eyes took a wrong step and broke down in the deep stretch. Jockey Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in thoroughbred racing history, whipped the stricken horse to a second-place finish. Imperial Eyes had suffered a broken leg and was euthanized. Baze was only assessed a small fine and suspended from racing for two weeks.
3. Eliminate racing on dirt surfaces: Synthetic track surfaces—such as the surfaces used at Keeneland and all California race courses—are safer for horses and have led to dramatic decreases in breakdowns.
4. Limit the number of races per season: Even Triple Crown racers who have light schedules leading up the Derby break down under the strain. Horses who race on smaller tracks are often run so frequently that strains and breaks are inevitable.
PETA’s appeal to the horse racing industry—and the national outrage about Eight Belles’ death—have already begun to have a noticeable effect. In the words of The Wall Street Journal, one prominent horse auction company has “instructed agents and breeders to discourage jockeys from whipping horses during a coming sales show,” citing the negative media attention generated by animal rights organizations as its reason for implementing the policy.
In the same Wall Street Journal article, Alex Waldrop, the president of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA), said, “It is clear that the status quo is not an option. We have to stop identifying problems and start implementing solutions.”
5. Stop the “Sport of Kings,” period: If implemented—and enforced—the changes PETA proposes would stop a great deal of suffering. They will not, however, stop all the cruelty of horse racing—the only way to do that is to stop supporting the so-called “sport of kings.” There is nothing “sporting” about forcing animals to participate in these strenuous events, and there is nothing regal about animal abuse and exploitation. It’s time for the horse racing industry to cross the finish line.
In a commentary on the industry, a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News remarked, “It is not something they talk about much in their advertising, but horses die in this sport all the time—every day, every single day.”
But unlike Eight Belles and Barbaro, these horses seldom make headlines. Their broken legs and battered bodies are simply hidden from public view. Most end up broken down or are sent to Europe for slaughter. Horse Illustrated magazine reported that 90 percent of all horses end up slaughtered and turned into food overseas.
Ferdinand, a Derby winner and Horse of the Year in 1987, was retired and changed hands at least twice before being “disposed of” in Japan. A reporter covering the story concluded, “No one can say for sure when and where Ferdinand met his end, but it would seem clear he met it in a slaughterhouse.” Even Exceller, a million-dollar racehorse who was inducted into the National Racing Museum’s Hall of Fame, was killed at a Swedish slaughterhouse.
People can also help phase out horse racing—and horse slaughter—by refusing to patronize horse races, working to ensure that racing regulations are reformed and enforced, lobbying against the construction of new tracks, and educating others about the tragic lives that the horses lead.
To learn more, read PETA’s complete factsheet on horse racing at http://www.peta.org/mc/factsheet_display.asp?ID=65. To send a letter asking your congressional representative to call for hearings on the problems in the thoroughbred racing industry, see http://getactive.peta.org/campaign/eight_belles_congress. To urge the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority to institute the reforms requested by PETA, go to http://getactive.peta.org/campaign/eight_belles.
(Special thanks to PETA writer Jen O’Connor for her assistance with this article.)
Written by RaeLeann Smith on May 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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When I look out one of my back windows I can see an electric-power generating station, which is situated just a few hundred yards inland from the ocean. It’s a peak-use station, and so it does not run all the time. It burns natural gas to turn its five steam turbines, and it uses seawater as a coolant, drawing the water from a lagoon. The company that operates the station owns a good deal of unimproved land around it.
Some years ago another company proposed building a desalination plant on a portion of the station’s property. The desal plant would take in a portion of the heated seawater that the power station discharges, run it through some complex machinery to remove salt and other minerals, and produce pure water, something of which Southern California is in increasing need.
Have you ever noticed how often in the newspaper or in a television news broadcast the headline, whatever it may be, is followed immediately by a subhead or second line that begins with something like “Critics claim…”? Have you ever wondered where all the critics come from, and why they so often claim unlikely things? Not that developments and proposals in the public sphere ought not to be criticized; far from it. Most benefit from the critical eye, and some, of course, ought to be tossed out as bad ideas. But might there be some limit?
The desal proposal looks like a good deal all around. We need the water (we’ve been “borrowing” water from Arizona for a long time and have now been told to stop) as demands continue to grow even as we sit out a multiyear drought. It’s a private undertaking requiring no public money. It even has an environmental benefit: the water returned to the sea after passing through the desal plant will be cooler than that now discharged directly from the power station.
So what’s the problem? I’m not sure I see any. But at every step of the approval process – and brother, are there a lot of those – “critics” appear to complain about this or that possible outcome. Some fish might die, as though otherwise they’ll live forever. There might be an endangered species on the property, although there is no evidence of any, which “critics” take as evidence that they haven’t been look for diligently enough. There might be a better use for the land. It might rain.
So the Friends of the Sea and the Friends of the Land and the Friends of the Littoral, the Surfers Junta, the Beach Strollers Coalition, the Patriots United Against the Desalination Conspiracy (believing, perhaps, that it is a sneaky way of introducing fluoridation), and a dozen other groups nobody had heard of before yesterday and that may or may not have more than two members apiece, these all have their say and mount their lawsuits and get their names in the paper.
Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion; but that does not imply that the rest of us are obliged to indulge it.
Eight years now this has been going on. A cynic might tentatively conclude that delay is the whole point. That same cynic might wonder just how good the show will be when, the prices of oil and natural gas having hit some trigger level, someone gets around to proposing to build a new nuclear power station somewhere. Two words: “China Syndrome.”
Written by Robert McHenry on May 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET AJAX
.NET
-
Ukadc.Diagnostics: Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc).
Visual Studio
Silverlight
WPF
Hope this helps,
Scott
Written by ScottGu on May 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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“Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.” But it does suggest that God has not been entirely forthcoming with us. This ought not to surprise anyone – why on Earth should he, after all? Here we are on a rather small planet located toward the outer reaches of one among billions of galaxies in an immeasurable universe.But the facts run counter to the attitude of those whose single-minded focus on what is written in the terrestrial Jewish/Christian scripture leaves them no capacity for curiosity about what may not be written there.
The comment, at least as reported here, is gratifying, especially when amplified thus: “Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like ‘putting limits’ on God’s creative freedom.” It is remarkable how many of our leading – which seems to mean something like “having forced themselves to the front row” – religious spokespersons seem quite willing to dictate such limits: God can only have meant thus, or, alternatively, thus (they often disagree, these intimates of God’s intentions). This or that action or policy is “contrary to God’s wishes,” they are quick to inform us – particularly, it seems, when they have not been consulted beforehand.
Like those people who interpret chance markings on a wall, or on a toasted cheese sandwich, not merely as resembling a human face but as representing specifically the face of the Virgin Mary, we have among us many who, hearing a voice in their heads, conclude it must of course be that of the Deity. Over the centuries this has served at least some of them well by protecting them from the tender mercies of the medical profession – trepanning, lobotomy, electroshock, sundry drugs – and so they can be perhaps forgiven, even complimented on their quick footwork on defense. This does not imply, however, that they have any special call on anyone’s credulity.
By contrast with the Vatican scientist, I heard on the television news this evening a local pastor of a conservative Christian church denounce a ruling of the California Supreme Court on same-sex marriage. He conceded, though, that from his point of view there is an upside to the matter, in that he counts on news of the ruling to rile up the evangelicals among voters to pass an initiative to amend the California constitution to ban such unions. This action of the court, he opined, would get these voters to be “visceral.”
Without question, what this country needs is more voters following the promptings of their livers or their gall bladders or, for the more forward among them, their spleens. Anything but their brains is what the pastor is counting on, one is obliged to infer.
Now here (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) is a more mundane but nonetheless delightful display of sublime certitude coupled with abysmal ignorance. Let us count the qualifications that radio host Kevin James brings to his job of discussing public policy on the public airwaves:
1. He’s loud.
2. He’s rude.
3. Did we already count that he’s loud?
Bluster and a limited but tendentious vocabulary will take you far in today’s media world. I leave it to readers to suggest how, in a juster world, such a fellow might more appropriately be employed.
Back here in the real world – or one of them, anyway – I can only offer him one of my own mottoes:
What I Know:
That about which
I have not yet been shown
to be wrong.
Written by Robert McHenry on May 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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Imagine Etta James, Quincy Jones, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, and Gnarls Barkley on the same stage. The venue may seem as improbable as the offplanet discotheque of Luc Besson’s grand film The Fifth Element, with its wonderful aria from Lucia di Lammermoor mingled with thumping hip-hop beats, but it is business as usual for the Montreux Jazz Festival, whose musically catholic doors will swing open in about six weeks’ time. The festival, now in its 41st year, has emerged as one of the world’s most important celebrations of jazz, geographically and culturally very far from that music’s roots in West Africa by way of the Mississippi River. By all reports, tickets are going fast; with luck, no stupid with a flare gun will burn the stage to the ground in the interim.
Jazz, it has been remarked, is music for grown-ups; it finds few listeners in the coveted 18–25 demographic. As David Remnick remarks in his New Yorker profile of jazz encyclopedist Phil Schaap, the genre “is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable,” since light-pop mediocrities such as Kenny G and Michael Bublé are counted alongside the magisterial likes of Thelonious Monk, Bix Beiderbecke, and Miles Davis. Remnick’s article is perhaps less about jazz than about Schaap’s obsessive knowledge of it, which has both edified and puzzled listeners of Columbia University’s WCKR-FM, which may be the greatest broadcaster of true jazz in the United States. For all that, Remnick’s article is excellent, and a pleasure for jazz buffs. Grab it fast, since New Yorker links tend to expire quickly; get Remnick’s list of 100 essential jazz albums, too, which is entertaining to follow and argue with, inasmuch as any knowing listener will have his or her ideas of what should be in the canon.
As Montreux suggests, jazz has proven itself a portable and translatable form of music, beloved in many parts of the world. Some of the most interesting experiments in various jazz forms came out of Eastern Europe and Russia during the years of the Cold War. Shanghai is emerging as a center of jazz in China today, just as it was in the last days of the European concessions there. (Mao Zedong is reputed to have liked jazz; on the other hand, he may be rolling in his grave. Certainly his wife, gangsterette-de-quatre Jiang Qing, was an aficionada.) Jazz is a music of resistance in Iran, and there is a price to pay for it: Iranian musician Habib Moftah Bushehri was sentenced to two years in prison for having offended Islam with the music, which seems unfortunate, particularly given the Muslim component in African American music. Even Norway, at the antipodes of jazz’s birthplace, figures into the world jazz scene, with saxophonist Jan Garbarek perhaps the country’s most prominent player today. Born of far-flung influences, jazz continues to travel the world, finding enthusiastic listeners—and enemies, too—wherever it goes.
Written by Gregory McNamee on May 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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Last week, in a post entitled West “By God Race Mattered” Virginia, I presented some tidbits from the exit polls that showed, among other things, that 22% of West Virginia Democratic primary voters said that race was an important factor in their vote and that Hillary Clinton captured 81% support among this group.
Though I never called these voters (almost all of whom were white, given the demographic composition of West Virginia) racist, a couple of commenters associated my presentation of these facts as labeling these whites racist and turned the argument around, suggesting that blacks were as “guilty” as whites when casting their votes en masse this primary season for Barack Obama. (As a note to readers: I cast a ballot for neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama in the February 5 primary in Illinois, my home state.)
Is it fair to group together both African Americans and whites who say that race was a factor in their vote and who voted for the candidate of their same race? Or, are there qualitative motivational differences?
In my estimation, a claim that blacks and whites are motivated by the same factors when race enters their political judgment is specious. Women who consider gender a factor in choosing Hillary and African Americans who identify race as a factor do so because of the aspirational and historic qualities of both the Clinton and Obama candidacies.
Throughout the history of presidential primary/caucus voting, voters of both parties have been presented with only white males as credible candidates with a chance to win the nomination (my apologies to Shirley Chisholm, Elizabeth Dole, and Jesse Jackson). Both women and African Americans–as well as white males–thus have only had the choice of voting for white males for the presidency. Thus, with no viable woman or African American candidates, women and African Americans consistently have cast ballots for white males. Conversely, white males have not been presented with an opportunity to confront race (or gender) and the presidency until Campaign 2008.
African Americans who vote for Obama and cite race as a factor do so for a variety of reasons, but among the largest has been the symbolic nature of his candidacy for their children and for future generations of African Americans. Whether you like Obama or not, his candidacy represents what the American dream is all about: that no matter your race or your socioeconomic background, you can be anything in this country–even president of the United States. Forty years after the first presidential election under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Obama stands on the precipice of being the first African American nominated by a major political party. Many African Americans–though not all–who vote for Obama because of racial considerations thus do so out of the best of intentions, voting their dreams and their aspirations for their children.
Whereas African Americans have always been asked to vote for white candidates in presidential elections, only in 1984 and 1988 have whites had to consider an African American for the nation’s highest office. And, even then, Jesse Jackson was not considered a viable candidate for the nomination, despite his impressive string of victories in 1988.
Now, in 2008, with Obama’s candidacy and since John Edwards dropped from the race, there has been no traditional candidate for white voters to choose among. In this historic campaign, there have been two choices for Democrats–Hillary Clinton, carrying the hopes and dreams of many women, particularly older women, who view in her candidacy the opportunity to break the ultimate glass ceiling, and Barack Obama, whose election as the first African American president would be a powerful symbol to both the country and the world as to how far the United States has progressed since the eras of slavery and segregation.
When white voters, particularly white male voters, have gone into the privacy of the ballot box, they’ve faced a choice of historic proportions as well, one that has forced them to confront their own notions of race, gender, and politics.
There are good reasons for any voter to select Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama (or John McCain or Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee). What should concern us, however, are the results of exit polls such as those in West Virginia (though one should not single out West Virginia, since similar findings could have been made in earlier primaries). It has long been known to pollsters that respondents sometimes “lie” when giving answers to questions, giving socially desirable answers often to mask their own prejudices.
Polls have often tended to exaggerate support for black candidates (the so-called “Bradley effect,” named for Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, an African American who led in all polls heading into election day but who lost to his white opponent). Thus, though about one in five white voters in West Virginia identified race as an important factor in their vote (and one in twelve said it was the most important factor), the true figure is probably higher (though how high, nobody knows). That is notwithstanding the findings in an article from February 2007 by Scott Keeter and Nilanthi Samaranayake of the Pew Research Center, who published research into whether Americans were ready for an African American president. Their findings showed that only 6% of Americans said that they would not vote for an African American candidate. But, such questions are, by their nature, hypothetical, until a voter is faced with an actual choice on election day. And, with the experience of Campaign 2008, we can surmise that the figure is probably somewhat higher (maybe 8% to 20%?).
Whites citing race as a factor in their vote do not fall into a single category: some whites voted in favor of Obama because he was African American; some whites who voted for Hillary may have done so out of fear that Obama could not win the general election because of the racism of other voters rather than their own; and some voters simply have cast ballots because they could not, in the privacy of the ballot box, pull a lever for an African American candidate.
What the 2008 primaries have shown is that there is probably a higher percentage of Americans than we’d like to admit who will not vote for an African American based on racial considerations. But, this is not to say that all voters who vote against Obama because of race are inherently racist, though some may indeed be racist. His candidacy was seen by some pundits at one point as post-racial, but in fact his candidacy awakened many attitudes that lie just beneath the surface in America and has forced us to confront our own prejudices, be we white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Catholic, etc. None of us are immune to prejudice, but how we think about our own prejudices and how we act on them says a lot about us as people and as a country.
Obama’s candidacy has given us a rare opportunity to talk about race at a more elevated level than we have in recent memory. And, an Obama presidency, should that occur, would do a lot to move the debate forward where voters could consider a candidate not solely based on demographics but on the policies that the person advocates. For all the ink wasted during the 2008 campaign on whether Mitt Romney could win because he was a Mormon or Obama because he was African American or Hillary because she’s a woman, 2008 will be remembered as an election where we American voters had to look into the mirror and decide what kind of person and what kind of country we are.
There is a hard slog and a rough road to come this campaign (we can all imagine what kind of under-the-radar smears are going to occur). And, though it is clear that there’s a long way to go in this country before we have true equality, with three of America’s final candidates for the presidency being potential historic firsts, forcing Americans to think in terms that we are not accustomed, we have found at the end of the day that the American social fabric remains resilient. That’s something we can all be proud of.
Written by Michael Levy on May 19th, 2008 with no comments.
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When the popular historian Simon Winchester, in the New York Times on May 15, calls it “a cruel and poignant certainty that the children who died in the wreckage of their school during the earthquake last week in Dujiangyan, China, knew all too well that their country once led the world in the knowledge of the planet’s seismicity,” it’s hard to know what he means to say.
He’s referring to Chang Heng, an astronomer who lived in China two thousand years ago, and who invented the world’s first instrument for detecting and measuring seismic activity. Winchester evocatively describes the machine, a brass bowl ringed with little dragons whose mouths would drop metal balls to indicate the source of seismic tremors.
Is Winchester actually saying that tens of thousands died because China eschews the use of ancient dragon bowls?
Certainly not.
And Winchester, a geologist and brilliant explainer of tectonic phenomena, knows better than I that despite seismic measuring systems far more accurate and sensitive than Chang Heng’s, we still can’t predict tremors, nor can we entirely prevent the damage done by massive earthquakes. But Winchester doesn’t let this widely known fact stand in the way of concluding that a ruined Dujiangyan “stands as a tragic monument to a culture that turned its back on its remarkable and glittering history.”
By thus invoking China’s illustrious past, Winchester makes use of the same kind of rhetoric that justified the opium trade and a host of other colonial-era Western depredations in China. Moral superiority mingles with sentiment and paranoia to produce a thick haze of incense-tinged nonsense.
It’s time for us in the West to take a close look at how we think about China. There are a host of reasonable concerns about Tibet, human rights, the environment, and China’s use of its burgeoning power. But much reporting about China is colored by a mixture of fear, confusion, and bemusement. While we rightly condemn Chinese news media for their propagandizing and lack of independence, we fail to see the groupthink and flat-out racism that too often governs our own perspective on Asia.
There are other voices in the West worth listening to. In a recent post on his Boston Globe blog Brainiac, Joshua Glenn profiles Westerners who manage to see through layers of paranoia and sentiment to a clearer view of China. Lindsay Waters, a Harvard University Press editor who works extensively with Chinese scholars, points out there that it’s possible to develop a nuanced view of the problems of population, human rights, and environmental destruction while keeping in sight the diversity and vitality of this complex and rapidly-growing country. We can do this, Waters argues, primarily by veining our extensive Asian market entanglements with cultural and scholarly connections, by encouraging young Americans to learn Mandarin and Cantonese and to study in China. They’ll find a vast and vital civilization that over thousands of years has enjoyed great victories and suffered humiliating setbacks–through which the lines between the invention of gunpowder and the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the Analects of Confucius and Mao’s Little Red Book, are not so simple or easily traced.
As we learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, disasters very efficiently expose the shortcomings of government. There are important questions to ask about building standards and the corruption of local government in Szechuan province. And while we in the West will argue that global influence requires transparency and accountability, it’s clear that China’s elite take a different view. But it’s reprehensible to conclude that those suffering in the aftermath of the Chengdu earthquake are the victims of a backwards and decadent culture. The children of Dujiangyan did not die because their leaders turned their backs on the splendors of the Han Dynasty.
Written by Matthew Battles on May 19th, 2008 with no comments.
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