Michael Prescott's Blog

Living dubiously

(I had second thoughts about this post, which I express in an endnote.)

At the moment, I'm reading a new biography of the pioneering filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, best remembered as producer and co-director of the original King Kong.

In many ways, I respect and admire Cooper. He was, after all, the mastermind behind my favorite movie. Ever since childhood I've been enthralled with the misty jungles of Skull Island, crowded with lumbering, leathery dinosaurs and ruled over by a lovelorn prehistoric ape. Kong made an indelible impression on me and was one of the main reasons why, from about the age of ten until the age of twenty-five, I harbored the very serious ambition to be a filmmaker.

Still, I must admit that while reading the early chapters of Living Dangerously, Mark Cotta Vaz's new bio, I've found myself thinking that there is an exceedingly fine line between heroism and sheer craziness. It's hard to say which side of the line Cooper occupied.

Even a capsule summary of Cooper's young manhood gives you some idea of what I'm talking about. Here's a guy who desperately wanted to be an aviator so he could fly combat missions in World War I -- this despite the fact that the poorly designed aircraft of the time were known by their own pilots as "Flying Coffins," prone to bursting into flames almost instantly when set upon by the superior German Fokkers. Cooper turned down an opportunity for a commission that might hit kept him out of the fiercest fighting and instead applied for the most dangerous missions. Inevitably he was shot down, miraculously surviving a crash landing with his hands horribly burned. A German surgeon saved his hands, and he spent the rest of the war in a series of hospitals.

Most people would have breathed a sigh of relief at this lucky escape and contented themselves with a simpler life. Not Cooper. He immediately plunged into the new war between Russia and Poland, taking the side of the Poles against the invading Bolsheviks. He led daring aerial raids against the enemy and was, of course, shot down again. Somehow he survived the second crash and ended up in a succession of Russian prison camps, where he received no medical attention and precious little food. Convinced he was about to be executed, Cooper escaped and made his way to the border, surviving a series of close shaves before reaching freedom.

And still Cooper had not satisfied his thirst for "adventure." He promptly set off on an expedition financed by the National Geographic Society, which led him into the wilds of Ethiopia, where he met the young prince Ras Tafari, who would later be crowned Haile Selassie. Next, embarking on a filmmaking odyssey with cameraman Ernest B. Schoedsack and intrepid journalist Marguerite Harrison, Cooper joined the grueling seasonal migration of Kurdish nomads as they made their way across furious rapids and a dizzying mountain range. The trek was caught on film and became Cooper and Schoedsack's first motion picture, the silent classic Grass. The movie was a critical and commercial hit, and the two men headed off to Thailand (then known as Siam) to film Chang, a story of Siamese villagers threatened by man-eating tigers and rampaging elephants. Schoedsack contracted malaria in the jungle and filmed most of Chang while running a triple-digit temperature and tottering on the verge of collapse. Cooper himself nearly died when he slapped a tribal chieftain in a fit of rage and then made the mistake of dining at the chieftain's hut; the man's wife laced Cooper's stew with invisible slivers of bamboo which cut his digestive tract to pieces. Of course, these risks were trivial compared to the daily chances Cooper and Schoedsack took filming close-ups of savage tigers in the jungle and shooting an elephant stampede from a hole in the ground directly underneath the beasts' pounding feet.

That's as far as I've gotten in the book -- but it's enough to give you the flavor of Cooper's early years. The man was clearly a dynamo, fearless, packing every day of his life with thrills, and if we don't linger on the story too much, it will probably seem like a fine series of adventures. Upon reflection, however, perhaps a darker side emerges.

What was it that drove Cooper to risk his life again and again in combat and in exploration? Cotta Vaz gives little information about Cooper's childhood, presumably because he has few sources for that period, but one thing does emerge: Cooper's family filled his head with stories of military valor and strongly suggested that until he succeeded on the battlefield he would never be a real man. The young Merian obviously took these ideas to heart. He was desperate to prove himself in what he later called the "test of steel and blood."

Unfortunately he failed his first such test when he was expelled from the U.S. Naval Academy for some unspecified misconduct. Crushed and humiliated, Cooper wandered the country, penniless, refusing all aid from his family, as if by subjecting himself to the most severe physical punishment he could make up for his unforgivable lapse. A few years later he discovered the novel The Four Feathers, which tells the story of a man who displays cowardice in battle, is humiliated before his friends and his fiancee, and spends the next few years undergoing heroic trials and tribulations in order to redeem himself. It's clear that Cooper identified strongly with the hero of the book (which, years later, he sought to produce as a Hollywood film). What drove him into battle -- and into the most dangerous possible circumstances of warfare, with complete disregard for his own safety -- was clearly the need to atone for his profound personal disgrace. Even his World War I heroics were not enough to erase, for him, the stigma of his Annapolis expulsion. He had to fight and nearly die for the Poles as well.

All of this "adventure" did not leave him unmarked. Although Cooper comes across as the least introspective of men, Cotta Vaz did find a revealing essay he wrote after the close of his military service, in which he identifies with Don Quixote, the mad would-be knight from whom the adjective quixotic was coined.

I must strike through unspeakable opposition, and fight battles every one of which costs me my heart's blood. Day and night I am in straits, for those enemies are so artful that many I struck to death still give themselves the appearance of being alive, changing themselves into all forms, and spoiling day and night for me... Everywhere, and when I should least suspect it, I discovered on the ground the traces of their silvery slime... they poured hell into my heart, so that I wept poison and sighed fire; they crouched near me even in my dreams; and I see horrible specters, noble lackey faces with gnashing faces [sic] and threatening noses, and deadly eyes glaring from cowls, and white ruffled hands with gleaming knives.

And even the old woman who lives near me in the next room considers me to be mad, and says that I talk the maddest nonsense in my sleep; and the other night she plainly heard me calling out ...

The faces that must have haunted Cooper were the faces, real or imagined, of the many people he killed in his bombing raids and in hand-to-hand combat. In modern terms, Cooper was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder -- though doubtless he would have laughed off the suggestion that there was anything wrong with him.

Another unintentionally revealing statement is found in Cooper's diary from the time when he was traveling with the Kurds:

Buy horses, a few flocks of sheep, ally with one of the powerful tribes, get a couple good Persian doctors -- oh, there would be no limit to what might be done. Health and freedom and what a chance for power if a man was willing to play the game and run the risks. These people had over-run Persian before. They could put five to fifteen thousand fairly good light cavalry in the field....

How serious Cooper may have been when he penned these words, it is impossible to say. But there was more to his global wandering than simply a desire to see the far corners of the earth. There was a restless, incoherent ambition in the man, which at times took the form of adolescent power fantasies.

Is it too much to suggest that there was a death wish, as well? In one respect, no one ever lived life more fully or with more gusto than Merian C. Cooper, who lived out the fantasies of meeker men on the battlefield, in the desert and jungle, and in his numerous romantic liaisons. But again, there is a darker side. During his Polish bombing raids, Cooper carried a vial of poison which he intended to swallow if he were at risk of being captured; his plan went awry when he lost the bottle during his plane crash. Earlier, when his plane caught fire over the trenches of World War I, he nearly leaped to his death before deciding it would be cowardly to leave his observer (the man whose job was to scan the sky for enemy aircraft) alone in the cockpit. He was, at the very least careless, of his own life and of the lives of the people who fought and traveled with him.

When he and Schoedsack and Marguerite Harrison sojourned among the Kurds, it was only Cooper who idealized and romanticized their tribal lifestyle, even fantasizing that he might chuck civilization altogether and become one of the nomads himself. Schoedsack and Harrison were more realistic; impressed as they were by the Kurds' stamina and ferocity, they recognized that their impoverished life of constant struggle was hardly Edenic. Cooper relished physical punishment and deprivation to a degree that was arguably masochistic. And I have to wonder if he was not still (and always, to the end of his days) proving to himself and his family that he was tough, that he was a man, that he had lived up to the heroic traditions of his ancestors.

No one can or should pity Merian C. Cooper, a man whose life was crowded with excitement and romance and lasting achievements. Still, I can't help thinking of Socrates' famous observation that the unexamined life is not worth living. Cooper would have violently disagreed. For him, living was about plunging into the thick of things without thought or hesitation. Yet in the end, Socrates was probably right. Cooper lived dangerously and cheated death a hundred times, but it's unclear if he ever knew himself or wanted to.

And I wonder if the faces of the dead ever left his dreams.

Note, Oct. 23: I must have been in a churlish mood when I wrote this post. I seem to have gone out of my way to find a dark side to Cooper's charmed and crowded life. The truth is, "Coop" served his country with distinction, made marvelous movies, and pursued adventures of all kinds with courage and enthusiasm. Recently I saw Cooper & Shoedsack's silent film Chang, which is on DVD, and it really is a wonderful piece of work, exciting and unpredictable (albeit burdened with too many jokey title cards). Chang evokes the magic of faraway lands that enticed Cooper all his life, and I hope he is still exploring them now. As the kids say, "my bad" for trying to psychoanalyze and criticize such a distinctive American hero.

Touching heaven

Right now I'm reading one of the most interesting books I've encountered in quite some time -- Induced After Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma, by Allan L. Botkin and R. Craig Hogan.

Botkin is a clinical psychologist who specializes in EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming. The EMDR technique involves simulating the rapid eye movement characteristic of deep sleep in order to place the patient in a trancelike state. In this state of altered consciousness, the patient seems to be able to process the memory of traumatic events with extreme speed and efficiency. Frequently patients who have been haunted by the symptoms of post-traumatic stress for years have been cured, or at least significantly helped, by a single application of EMDR.

What Botkin found, quite by accident, was that when the EMDR procedure was modified in a rather minor way, patients would experience a strong sense of connection with a deceased friend or loved one, and that this experience was remarkably effective at healing grief. Although Botkin remains wary of asserting that these experiences are metaphysically real, clearly he believes there's more going on than a mere hallucination. He terms the procedure Induced After Death Communication, or IADC.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the IADC phenomenon is its similarity to near death experiences (NDEs). An example from Botkin's book makes this clear:

After [Pam] finished telling me about her mother, I used core-focused EMD are to go to her sadness and help her start to bring it down. Then I performed the IADC procedure.

After a minute, she opened her eyes and explained what had happened. She said she felt like she was going through a tunnel toward a bright light, but found herself becoming frustrated because she couldn't get to the end of the tunnel. I assured her that the IADC would unfold naturally; she just needed to relax and let it happen.

After some EMDR to relax her and help her move into a receptive stage, she was ready for the IADC experience. This time her mother was there. Pam kept her eyes closed for five minutes, a relatively long IADC. Tears rolled down her face as she sat quietly with her eyes closed. Finally, she opened her eyes and said, excitedly, "I saw my mother very clearly. She looked younger and thinner even though she had put on weight the last ten years of her life. She looked healthy, happy, peaceful, and she had a spark in her eyes that seemed to emanate a glow around her."

Pam laughed and said, "My mother was sitting on a large rock by the beach in one of those old-style bathing suits, but the surroundings were more beautiful than any beach I've ever seen. She communicated to me in a very clear way that she was very proud of what I had accomplished in my life. She said there was no reason for me to feel guilty about anything. I felt a warm connectedness like we used to have. When Mom was alive, there was always a touch of sadness in her smile, but that was gone and she looked genuinely happy."

When she was finished describing the IADC, she said, "I can't believe how peaceful I feel, like there's been a tremendous burden lifted off of me. And I have the sense that she is not gone and will always be with me."

As she was preparing to leave, she said she felt like all her issues related to the death of her mother had completely resolved. She emphasized more than once how unexpected her experience was.

Two months later she reported that she continued to feel much better, and that she could still experience the warm connectedness with her mother.

I should mention that the typical IADC does not involve the sense of moving through a tunnel toward a bright light. Then again, according to some researchers, the majority of NDEs do not feature a tunnel, either.

Botkin, who claims to have had extraordinary success with this technique and to have trained many colleagues in its use with equally good results, provides fascinating case histories that clearly indicate there's something more to the IADC than merely a trick of the mind. In some cases, the patient receives information during his IADC which was unknown to him but which is later verified. In other cases, an observer -- or even the therapist himself -- may simultaneously experience the same IADC that the patient is undergoing. Botkin dubs these instances "shared IADCs." (There may be a parallel here with shared deathbed visions; some people who have been present when a person dies have recounted experiencing the dying person's perceptions of leaving the body and moving into a bright light. This experience is relatively common among hospice and hospital workers who work with the terminally ill.)

The great majority of Botkin's patients, regardless of their views about life after death before the session, have come away from their IADCs with the conviction that they were in actual contact with the deceased. A few diehard skeptics view the experience as hallucinatory, but even they seem to derive considerable emotional relief from the procedure.

Botkin maintains a Web site which provides more information on the procedure as a clinical tool. A related Web site considers IADC from the standpoint of what it may tell us about persistence of consciousness after death.

Years ago, a wealthy inventor named George Meek (now deceased) tried to develop a machine he dubbed Spiricom, which would allow people to get in touch with the deceased at the press of a button. The story is told in detail in John G. Fuller's The Ghost of 29 Megacycles. Although there were some successes with Spiricom, the machine never proved to be reliable enough for general use. But maybe we don't need a machine. Maybe we have the capacity inside ourselves to touch heaven whenever we want.

Botkin's groundbreaking work suggests that in the future the line between life and afterlife maybe crossed almost at will. Somewhere, George Meek must be smiling.

Technical question

For anyone who knows about broadband, a question ...

I have a DSL connection that normally delivers data at about 2.6 - 3 Mbps. Yesterday, however, the speed (as tested by several online services) slowed to a crawl - only about 50 Kbps. That's dialup range, far below what a DSL line should offer.

I tried various home remedies like searching for spyware and viruses, power-cycling the modem and PC, hooking up a different phone cord, and testing the physical connections. No improvement. Then I called my service provider (Verizon) and spoke with a tech support guy, who eventually concluded that my modem was defective. He authorized shipment of a new modem.

Bu here's the thing. Today (still using the old modem, with no changes in my setup) my speed is back to normal!

What the huh?

If anyone out there has an explanation for this anomaly, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

I am leaning toward malicious spirits, myself. Or evil dogs that live in the woods. Or maybe it's all part of corporate America's master plan to drive me insane ...

Blogging is for losers

And who should know better than me, right?

But it's true. Or at least it's sometimes true. Blogging is for losers.

Let's face it. There's something about an electronic soapbox that is just not healthy. It promotes narcissism and egocentricism and general idiocy. At least, it certainly has done so in my case.

Before I started blogging, I never thought that anyone cared a fig about my off-the-cuff observations and opinions. And, of course, nobody does. Nor should they. My opinions are no more valuable than anyone else's. Often they are of no value whatsoever. And I knew this.

Then, about nine or ten months ago, I got my very own blogging platform. And slowly but inexorably I began to change. I started to think that my opinions matter. That I am important.

"People," I would say to myself, "NEED to hear MY TAKE on _________ [fill in the blank with any issue] ... and they need to hear it RIGHT NOW!"

Which is just nutty. Who cares what I think about, say, Hurricane Katrina? It's not as if there aren't fifty thousand other people out there with opinions on the matter, and most of them are better informed about the subject than I am.

To be honest, even I don't care what I think about Katrina. The stuff I wrote about Katrina when the flooding was in progress seems overheated and feverish to me now, all of three weeks later.

The thing is, it's addictive, having an oratorical platform from which to spout opinions to cyberspace. Admittedly, only a few people are actually reading my opinions - but it still feels like I'm "making a difference." With every new post I publish, I'm puffing myself up just a little bit more, inflating my ego, and pretending that my shoot-from-the-lip pontifications are of lasting significance. What would the world do without me? Heck, I'm not just important; I'm indispensable!

You know the story about the fellow driving past the graveyard, who points to the rows of headstones and quips, "There they are - all the indispensable men."

It's good to have a forum to toss out ideas and opinions, as long as I don't abuse the privilege by posting every stray notion that comes into my head. Well-considered, thoughtful commentary is good. Daily preening before the mirror of my laptop's monitor is bad.

An example of how to do it right is Iowahawk. He has a satirical blog site, and he posts his elaborate and trenchant satirical pieces only when he's got something good to offer. As a result, he doesn't post daily. He may not even post weekly. He posts when he's written something that's actually worth posting. What a concept!

I'd like to try this approach. So I am going to exercise a virtue rarely practiced on the Internet - restraint. When I come up with some idea or observation that seems genuinely worth sharing, I'll put it here. But the vast majority of the harebrained, half-assed opinions tumbleweeding through the arid corners of my mind don't fall into that category. They will be relegated to the unpublished obscurity they deserve.

In other words, the format of this blog is changing. Following the lead of the old communist who excused the Soviet show trials and purges by saying they would result in "fewer, but better Russians," my new motto for this site is: fewer, but better posts.

Quality over quantity. Less is more. That's the idea, anyway.

Who knows? Maybe I can start a trend.

Killing babies (and why we shouldn't)

Some time ago I wrote a post called "The Irrational Rationalist," complaining that some of the more ardent advocates of rationalism and scientism have gone overboard and become fanatics. In the ensuing discussion I mentioned the example of Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer. Recently, while reading Bernard Goldberg's new book (discussed in my previous post), I came across a chapter on Singer. It reminded me that there was another point I'd wanted to make about Singer's ethical arguments, which, for lack of space and time, I didn't bring up before.

Singer is known for his defense of infanticide. He has written, "Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."

A reader named Marcus, who has his own blog, Non Plus Ultra, argued that Singer's ethical position is well reasoned and worthy of serious consideration. Saying that my characterization of Singer as a fanatic was a misrepresentation, Marcus wrote:

Singer's actual position, as outlined in his collection "Writings on an Ethical Life", is less easily dismissed.

He then proceeded to synopsize Singer's argument, which includes this key example:

For instance, imagine a poor couple somewhere in the third world, whose second child is born with a severe, painful, and non-correctable disability (e.g. a severe case a spina bifida). The child itself faces a life of constant and intractable pain. If their parents try to raise the child, they face the real possibility that their first child might die, because of the resources they would have to expend on the second. In such a case, the parents might be justified in killing their second child immediately upon birth.

Summing up Singer's position, Marcus writes: "In some cases, infanticide is justified."

Now in order to look at this, let's do what is called a thought experiment. Ordinarily, thought experiments make use of far-fetched hypotheticals. In this case, however, we can use three convenient real-life examples.

Example No. 1. A jetliner crashes in the Andes. To ward off starvation, the survivors cannibalize the dead. No one blames them for it. Conclusion: society should adopt the principle that, in some cases, cannibalism is morally okay.

Example No. 2. A major U.S. city is flooded. To ward off starvation and thirst, the survivors break into an abandoned grocery store and steal food and potable water. No one blames them for it. Conclusion: society should adopt the principle that, in some cases, stealing is morally okay.

Example No. 3. A coastal strip of towns is flattened by a hurricane. To prevent widespread looting, the governor of the state empowers law-enforcement agencies to shoot suspected looters on sight. No one blames him for it. Conclusion: society should adopt the principle that, in some cases, shooting suspected criminals on sight is morally okay.

Does something seemed amiss? It should. The conclusions do not follow. The reason is simple. A course of action that may be perfectly understandable and justifiable in an emergency is not necessarily a course of action that can be encouraged or even permitted under normal circumstances. In a life-and-death crisis, people may have to take extraordinary actions, break the rules, and use violence or other desperate measures just to survive. But there's a difference between a temporary life-and-death crisis and everyday life. It is the difference, in fact, between anarchy and civilization.

If our daily lives were defined by the anything-goes, survival-of-the-fittest approach suitable in an emergency, then there would be no civilization to speak of. We would all be cannibalizing corpses, stealing necessities, and shooting anyone who looked at us cross-eyed, while incurring no penalty for any of it.

We don't want to live that way. That's why we agree to abide by social rules and customs in the first place. We recognize that in extraordinary circumstances these rules and customs must be temporarily put aside, but that doesn't mean we are willing to throw them overboard on a permanent basis. To do so would be to throw our whole civilization overboard and revert to the law of the jungle.

With this in mind, take another look at Singer's example, as synopsized by Marcus. Here we have a heart-wrenching situation involving a family on the edge of starvation-level poverty, faced with the prospect of sacrificing their first child in order to care for their second child. There are apparently no government relief agencies to care for the disabled child, nor any private charities offering help, nor any extended family members who might take in the child, nor any other options all. The choice is literally one of life and death, and the family makes the choice to kill the disabled infant. Most likely, no one would blame them for it. But to generalize from this emergency situation to a general social policy would be the same kind of category error that we saw in the above three examples.

Singer, remember, is not prescribing ethics for starvation-ravaged Third World countries. He is prescribing ethics for the industrialized Western world, where he lives and teaches. It is only the Western world that reads his books and pays any attention to what he has to say. And on this issue, what he has to say is entirely irrelevant in the context of the normal, ordinary, everyday lives of our citizens. Even if an impoverished family in the U.S. were to bring a severely disabled infant into the world, their situation would not resemble Singer's example. They would have access to medical care, charity, and a variety of supportive institutions to ease their burden. This is not to say that raising a disabled child would be easy -- but it would not entail the dire Hobson's choice implicit in Singer's example.

The difference between Singer's example and the world we live in is the same difference between trying to survive on a snowcapped mountain peak ... and earning a living in New York City. Or between trying to find food and drinkable water in flooded New Orleans ... and stopping at the 7-11 on the way home from work. Or between shooting looters to prevent a total breakdown of law and order in a disaster area ... and calling the police when you hear a prowler on your porch.

If we want to live in a civilized society, we have to recognize that certain rules are fundamental and can be abrogated only under the most desperate circumstances. One of those rules is that killing babies is bad.

Let me repeat this with emphasis: killing babies is bad.

It shouldn't take an ethicist to tell us this. It only takes common sense -- a quality Peter Singer evidently lacks. Which is why he is indeed a dangerous fanatic and an irrational rationalist. And not someone I would recommend as a babysitter, either.

Not even in a pinch.

What a country!

So I'm in Barnes & Noble, and on impulse I pick up a copy of Bernard Goldberg's new book 100 People Who Are Screwing up America (and Al Franken is # 37). And I have to say, I'm enjoying it a lot. It's sort of like eating potato chips. You say, I'll just read one more entry... and then one more... then one more... And before you know it, it's two o'clock in the morning.

The book counts down from # 100 on the list -- a tie between Rick and Kathy Hilton, the odious pair who spawned the equally odious Paris -- to # 1. I haven't actually gotten to # 1 yet, but I skipped ahead and saw who it was. Not to spoil the surprise, let me just say that it's a grossly overweight pseudodocumentary filmmaker with a penchant for self-promotion and lying. Hopefully I didn't give anything away.

Even before we get anywhere near # 1, Goldberg treats us to a gold mine of absurd quotes and the absurd people who have uttered them. He includes the memorable episode in which Barbra Streisand quoted "William Shakespeare" in a speech, the problem being that the "Shakespeare" quote in question was an obvious piece of hackwork that La Streisand or one of her associates found floating around on the Internet:

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind... The citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

No one even glancingly familiar with the real Shakespeare's immortal works could have been fooled by this tin-eared imitation. And by the way, I'm pretty sure the word patriotism didn't even exist in Shakespeare's era.

Goldberg has a knack for zeroing in on the dumbest and most offensive things any celebrity (or would-be celeb) has said. Here's cartoonist Aaron McGruder -- creator of a comic strip called The Boondocks, which, thankfully, I had never heard of -- giving us the lowdown on former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

Let's just say, he's directly killed, not by hand, but he's been a guy he says, "Those people over there, that whole ethnic group, they got to go -- kill them." And they just disappear...

Yeah, I remember Powell saying something just like that. Then there was Alec Baldwin's unforgettable outburst on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, during the Clinton impeachment proceedings:

If we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families.

Or Sean Penn:

I am not disturbed by Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's. You know, there's not a lot of cleaner pictures of karma in the world.... I go right from him mocking the farm workers and eating grapes on television during the boycott to him dribbling today. And I feel a sense of justice.

Or Janeane Garofolo:

Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, "Oh my God, you're insulting me."

Curiously enough, whenever I see Janeane Garofolo on my TV set, I go, "Oh my God, you're insulting me." But that's just me.

Goldberg also has a keen ability to detect and expose hypocrisy. Take comedian Larry David's wife -- please. Laurie David enjoys pulling alongside people driving SUVs on the freeway and yelling at them for using too much gasoline. She will also confront people on the street.

I say, how many miles per gallon does your car get? And wouldn't you rather be driving a car that had a higher fuel efficiency?

We should all admire such outspoken public spiritedness! At the same time, however, Laurie David likes to fly around the country in private jets like the Gulfstream G200, which burns more than 1200 gallons of fuel in a cross-country trip. This is roughly the same amount of fuel consumed by a Hummer in one year of operation. Goldberg quotes Gregg Easterbrook, who performed this analysis, as concluding, "But then, conservation is what other people should do."

Hypocrisy doesn't bother me as much as outright mean-spiritedness. In this vein, let us not forget -- or rather, please let's do forget -- one Kathy Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, who tried to stop her young daughter from hanging an American flag in the days immediately after 9-11.

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.

Author Barbara Kingsolver found herself chilled to the marrow by a similar incident:

My daughter came home from kindergarten and announced, "Tomorrow we all have to wear red, white and blue."

This was right after 9-11. The red, white and blue outfits were intended to show solidarity with the victims in the attacks. Kingsolver, however, didn't see it that way. Coolly she analyzes the situation:

I fear the sound of saber-rattling, dread that not just my taxes but even my children are being dragged to the cause of death in the wake of death.

Today it's kindergartners in red, white and blue; tomorrow it's thugs in brown shirts. Aren't you glad we have intellectuals like Barbara Kingsolver to make these connections for us?

Kingsolver's position seems to come from the heart, but other intellectuals' arguments are often backed up by an impressive array of statistical data. For instance, uber-feminist Katherine Hanson once clinched her thesis that men are savage brutes by relating the shocking statistical fact that nearly 4 million women are beaten to death in United States every single year. Someone once suggested that over the doorway of every church should be ascribed the words "Important if True." I don't know about churches, but maybe those words ought to serve as the epigraph to Hanson's writings. Because, as Goldberg informs us, "the total number of female deaths annually in the United States from all causes is approximately 1 million -- and the total number murdered is around 4,000. Just for the record, the real leading cause of death for women is heart disease (370,000 deaths per year), followed by cancer (250,000)."

Nothing like getting your facts straight. Hey, so she was off by a factor of 10... I mean 100... I mean 1,000. Who needs facts, anyway, as long as we have strong emotions? Here's Vanity Fair columnist James Walcott on the 2004 election:

I am preparing myself for either outcome today. Should Kerry win, I will post an important statement called "A Time for Healing," or something equally noble-sounding. Should Bush win, I shall post a statement of philosophical resignation tentatively titled "Good, Go Ahead, America, Choke on Your Own Vomit, You Deserve to Die."

Most of these comments are kind of funny, in a sad sort of way, but sometimes Goldberg points out statements and behavior that are truly disturbing. Case in point, one Amy Richards, a freelance journalist in Manhattan. Richards got pregnant by accident and was horrified to learn she was carrying triplets.

My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets. I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year....[I] asked the doctor: "Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?" The obstetrician wasn't an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more.

Richards decides to eliminate two. Luckily, the choice is made easy for her.

When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone [sic]. I doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one.

Sure. I feel psychologically comforted, don't you? So she "got rid of" the inconvenient twins, thus saving her from a life she dreaded. Consider the nightmare stream of consciousness racing to her mind as she considered the prospect of actually giving birth to all three babies:

I'm going to have to move to Staten Island. I'll never leave my house because all have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.

A fate worse than death, obviously. Fortunately, with just "a shot of potassium chloride to the heart of the fetus" her problems were over. No big jars of mayonnaise for her! She can go on buying the regular size.

It's hard to top Amy Richards, but Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), certainly gives her a run for her money. Goldberg informs us that Newkirk has included a clause in her will stating that she wants

the "meat" of my body, or a portion thereof, [to] be used for a human barbecue.

This is in protest of the consumption of animal meat, of course. Word of advice: if you happen to be invited to Ingrid Newkirk's wake, steer clear of the buffet table. Newkirk also wants the skin of her corpse to be made into shoes and purses. She wants her liver mailed to France to protest liver pate. Perhaps you're thinking that Newkirk is a woman who lacks a certain, shall we say, perspective. Perhaps you're right. She is, after all, the person who famously said:

Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.

And:

There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.

You know, she's right -- they are all mammals. Funny no one has ever noticed that before. As far out as Newkirk's position seems to be, famed Princeton University "ethicist" Peter Singer would probably agree with much of it. Singer is best known as the founder of the "animal rights" movement in the 1970s, but more recently he has extended his ethical insights to the area of human euthanasia. He has written:

Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.

How much is the annual tuition to Princeton these days, anyway? Because if it's more than about fifty bucks, I think the students may be getting ripped off.

Well, those are some of the highlights of 100 People Who Are Screwing up America (and Al Franken is # 37). And I haven't even finished the book yet! Keep in mind, all the people Goldberg cites are influential in our culture. They are, to varying degrees, our intellectual movers and shakers, providing us with guideposts and milestones on our road to a brighter tomorrow. And don't you know, many of them are raking in heaping piles of money in the process.

As Yaakov Smirnov might say, "What a country!"

Fear itself

Here's a nice column by Tony Snow on fear and why it's "a waste of time." Though he never mentions the bird flu, it's still a curiously apposite counterpoint to my previous post.

Also, Dr. Gilbert Ross has reassuring words about avian influenza and doomsaying.

Don't worry. Be happy.

If you want to get depressed ...

... all over again (after the trauma of Katrina), just check out this ABC News story.

More here.

Let's hope these fears are exaggerated. I searched for a reassuring contrarian view, but couldn't find any from a source that seemed reputable.

UPDATE: More searching led me to some contrarian views, after all.

Slate weighs in here. 

A blogger takes on the issue here.

And here.

The main contrarian seems to be Wendy Orent, who has written a book on plague outbreaks. I have no way to judge who's right and wrong in this complex scientific dispute, but I will say that people (including "experts") have a tendency to overstate dangers and give in to exaggerated fears. Let's hope the fears are overblown in this case.

Oops

During the worst of the Katrina crisis, I wrote that a Louisiana parish president, Aaron Broussard, had bitterly criticized FEMA for incompetence. Broussard said that FEMA had cut emergency communication lines, which then had to be guarded by sheriff's deputies, and that FEMA had prohibited the Coast Guard from delivering fuel to rescue vehicles. I took Broussard's comments at face value - one more reason to lambaste the hapless feds.

But now it turns out that Broussard is not a reliable source. At least part of what he said in the same interview has been proved to be untrue, casting doubt on the rest. There may never have been any cut communication lines or undelivered fuel at all. Details are here.

For playing a small part in circulating what appears to be a "Katrina myth," I apologize.

The feds may not end up looking good in all this, but the Louisiana local officials are looking increasingly bad.

No matter? Never mind ...

One of the more obvious things about Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is that it is essentially a materialistic system. Most critics of Objectivism take this for granted. Yet Rand herself denied this fact, claiming that her approach transcended the artificial dichotomy of materialism and spiritualism. She derided materialists as "mystics of muscle," epitomized by Attila the Hun. To this day, her followers indignantly reject the label of materialists.

The trouble is, Rand was able to make this case only by using a highly tendentious definition of the word materialism. Creative redefinition of familiar words was a standard Randian tactic; her definition of altruism, for instance, bears no resemblance to the ordinary usage of that term. The same could be said of such basic terms as sacrifice and selfishness. It's not really a surprise that materialism came in for the same kind of treatment.

According to Rand, materialism is a philosophic system that denies the existence of consciousness. Now, there have been a few materialists to whom this definition would apply. The behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner comes to mind. But because this position entails such obvious logical contradictions -- an intellectual theory that denies the reality of the intellect itself -- very few thinkers have embraced it.

The great majority of materialists have taken a more subtle and sophisticated position, namely, that consciousness exists but that it is ultimately reducible to physical processes. The mind, in other words, is ultimately only an expression of the brain. Consciousness is a product of the nervous system and nothing more.

This brand of materialism is extremely common today, so common that it could be described as the conventional wisdom, at least in the academic world. And it is a view that Ayn Rand unquestionably shared. She did not believe in any supernatural soul or in personal immortality. ("No supernatural dimension exists," she wrote bluntly in her introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead.) Physical death, she believed, meant the end of consciousness. Thus, in her system, consciousness is an offshoot -- an epiphenomenon -- of material antecedents. She was a materialist, according to the the correct definition of the term, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

And so are most people today, or at least most Western intellectuals. The idea that the mind, the self, the personality, or the soul -- call it what you like -- could be independent of the nervous system strikes contemporary intellectuals as counterintuitive. After all, there is a great deal of evidence showing that certain mental states correspond to certain brain states. Damage to the brain, whether caused by illness or injury, is correlated with impaired thinking. Chemicals that affect the brain can directly affect mental and emotional states -- inducing or preventing depression, anxiety, hallucinations, etc.

With all of this evidence at our disposal, it seems natural to assume that the mind is directly dependent upon the brain and constitutes only an expression of the chemical and electrical processes of the brain and nervous system. But before we wholeheartedly embrace the materialist paradigm, we might want to consider some contrary data. There is, in fact, a great deal of evidence suggesting that the mind is not inextricably linked to the physical brain.

For instance,  there are so-called out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, in which a person is able to perceive the world around him while he is physically unconscious or even clinically dead. There are well-documented studies of mental telepathy, in which a test subject is able to pick up the thoughts of a person in another room. There are cases of small children who spontaneously recall what they take to be a past life, complete with accurate and verifiable details unknown to them by any normal means. There is surprisingly good evidence for the survival of consciousness after death -- so much of it that even David Fontana's recent 500 page book on the subject is barely able to cover the main lines of research, let alone all the details.

None of this is explicable according to the materialist paradigm, which is why it is generally ignored or ridiculed. It doesn't fit what we already "know" to be true, so it can't be real. Or can it? Is there a way of reconciling the obviously close correlation between mind and brain on the one hand and the evidence for supernatural or paranormal phenomena on the other? I think there is, and it is as simple as the nearest television set.

If someone who knew nothing about the technology of TV were to sit down in front of a television set, he would probably assume that the pictures and sound originate inside the magic box before him. And he would have a good deal of evidence to back up this assumption. If he turns off the TV, the pictures and sound go away. If he drops the TV and damages it, the pictures and sound will be impaired -- the picture may be fuzzy, the sound distorted. If he smashes the TV to pieces, then there will be no picture and sound coming from it ever again.

In all these respects, the TV is quite similar to the human brain. But in fact the pictures and sound on the TV set do not originate inside the TV at all. They originate as a signal that is received by the television and translated into pictures and sound by the circuitry inside the TV set. The signal is quite independent of the TV itself. Turn off the TV, damage the TV, destroy the TV -- and the signal will continue, unimpaired and uninterrupted.

The TV, in other words, is only a receiver, which, when tuned to the correct frequency, will pick up the signal and translate it into the pictures and sound that we perceive. If the receiver is rendered inoperative, then it will not, of course, pick up the signal or decode it into pictures and sound anymore. But nothing that happens to the TV will have the slightest effect on the signal itself.

Although, like any analogy, this comparison is oversimplified, it may be essentially correct to say that our brain is a receiver and our consciousness is the signal. When the receiver is operating, then the signal is picked up and translated into the appropriate physical terms. We think about moving our hand, and our nervous system picks up this thought and translates it into physical action. If the receiver (our brain) is not operating because we are in a deep trance, in a coma, or dead, then our consciousness continues, but it is no longer filtered through the nervous system and exists, in effect, outside our body -- just as out-of-body experiences would suggest.

Is this analogy a valid explanation of the relationship between mind and brain? Well, it has the advantage of reconciling what we know about the nervous system with what we know about parapsychological phenomena. It incorporates both sets of data -- unlike the materialist paradigm which has room for some of the data but not for the rest.

By the way, this analogy is not original with me. The pioneering psychological theorist, philosopher, and psychical researcher William James suggested this idea way back in the 19th century. He called it the "transmission theory" of consciousness. Nothing that has been learned in the intervening decades has disproved his hypothesis. If anything, the evidence is stronger now than it has ever been.

As I said at the outset, Ayn Rand liked to think she had resolved the dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism. Really, however, all she did was define her terms in such away as to make the dichotomy artificially disappear. William James' transmission theory, by contrast, actually does hold out the promise of resolving this dichotomy, by allowing us to see mind and brain as intimately interconnected and yet distinct.

I guess that makes William James a better philosopher than Ayn Rand. But you already knew that.