The Interview” -- Why not a Parody Like “The Great Dictator?”

I must be the only person outside of North Korea who objects to Sony’s film about a plan to assassinate Kim Jun Un.  I can understand how a comedian might come up with the idea, but I am amazed that the Sony front office bought into it.  Mark Shields, my favorite newsman, defended the Seth Rogen film on PBS, and mentioned Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” as a case in point.  This may be the only time I disagree with Shields and, apparently, with everyone else.  There is a key difference between the two films.  Chaplain renamed the dictator Adenoid Hynkel and changed the country name to Tomania.  This made the film a parody.  Hitler screened it twice but seems never to have mentioned it in public.  If he had mentioned it, it would have been an admission that it was more than a parody.  All Sony had to do was change the name of the head of state and the country – the comic possibilities here are legion -- and it would have become a parody like ”The Great Dictator.”  Everyone, including Kim Jong Un, would have known that it was about him.  North Korea might still have attacked Sony’s computers, but they would not have been able to say anything publicly.  When I first started thinking about this, I was wondering what reactions would have been if the subject of the film had been Obama or Putin or Ayatollah Khameini or Netanyahu.  Fox News would have had a field day supporting free speech for films about the first three.  I don’t know where they would stand on Netyanhu.  While I was rooting around on the internet looking for Nazi reaction to Chaplin’s film, I found that during production the British Government had said they would not allow it to be shown in the United Kingdom.  By the time the film was finished, they were at war with Germany and were glad to have it shown.  Over in Germany Albert Speer said it was the most accurate representation of Hitler ever put on the screen.

The Shutdown, Cancer and Children’s Health -- Bashing Journalistic Integrity

I did my first post on this subject after seeing a clip on CNN.  The questioner was in profile, and I didn’t recognize her as CNN’s own Dana Bash.  Afterwards I googled “shutdown cancer Children” and found she had launched a real shutstorm.   Now I understand why Harry Reid wondered why a person of her intelligence would ask such a question.  Why does a nationally known reporter like Dana Bash use a Republican talking point as a question?  Answer:  To get her name in lights.  She did.  Are we now to consider “journalistic integrity” as an oxymoron on a par with “legal ethics” and “military intelligence?”

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The essence of the question was:  “If we could save one child’s life by passing a limited authorization for NIH to go ahead with its research study, shouldn’t we do it?”

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The answer is:  “We are deeply concerned about the children who had hoped to be treated at NIH and equally concerned about the millions of children who have no access to health care now but will have it under Obamacare, if we resist Republican efforts to kill it.”

The Shutdown, Cancer and Children’s Health -- Hostage Taking?

For those who have just returned from outer space, let me bring you up to date.  In late September the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would fund the U.S. Government for the coming fiscal year, except for the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.”   They sent this bill to the U.S. Senate.   Having failed 42 times to get the Senate to consider House bills that would repeal Obamacare, the Tea Party Republicans persuaded the Republican leadership to try this defunding strategy.   The Senate promptly passed its own bill that would fund the government, including Obamacare, and sent it to the House.   The House leadership refused to bring it to a vote.  On October 1 the government shut down except for essential services like the military and air traffic control.   Many Republicans went on TV to say the public might not even notice the shutdown of our “oversized and wasteful government,” except maybe the 800,000 federal employees who were furloughed.  Unfortunately many people did notice, including a busload of WW II vets who had come to see the WW II memorial and the 200 cancer victims who were supposed to be enrolled in an NIH experimental cancer research study, which was their last hope for a cure – and for survival.

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Sensing a public relations disaster, the Republicans got right to work writing bills to fund a few specific programs like NIH cancer research and staffing for the National Park Service, which oversees the WW II Memorial and such vacation spots as Yellowstone.  They hoped to remove the embarrassment of the obvious and immediate effects of the shutdown, while holding out for some “compromise” that would effectively end the Affordable Care Act, a law of the land which had been passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the President and approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Republicans put on a full court press public relations campaign. 
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Poor Harry Reid.  The Senate Majority Leader was questioned by a CNN reported who wanted to know why he couldn’t sympathize with the cancer plagued children who had hoped to enroll in the NIH study.  Why had he refused to bring the House bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote to give these children a chance at life?  Reid did O.K.  He said he had to look at the larger picture, including the 1100 people in his state at an Air Force base who didn’t know when they might see a paycheck again.  And he said he was surprised that a person of her obvious intelligence would even ask such a question.  Then he moved on.  There were better answers.  He might have said that he was deeply concerned about the children who had hoped to be treated at NIH and equally concerned about the millions of children who have no access to health care now but will have it under Obamacare, if he and the other Democrats refuse to capitulate.

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Or he might have compared the Republican tactics to hostage taking.  “Open the city gates or your daughter dies!”  There have been similar charges from the Republican   --  with a straight face

Are We All Still Racists?

Last Week in our discussion group of about ten retired guys with nothing better to do, one member raised the question of racism.  It happened to be just six days before the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington.  He said that he sometimes had trouble accepting blacks in his heart, although he never let his reservations affect his actions.  I said I felt the same way, but another member said he was not bothered by the fact that his ”internal dialog” might contain thoughts that he would not want to express.  In effect, he said his internal dialog was his own business and that as long as his he did the right thing, he had no concerns about being a racist.  He went on to recount how when he finished at Berkeley in 1965, he and his wife took a trip through the south and were dumbstruck when they saw the “Whites Only” signs everywhere they went.   I had the same experience on my first trips to Norfolk, VA in the 1950s when I had to report there for midshipman cruises.

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One of our members asked us what our reaction would be if we saw a group of black youth congregated on the sidewalk in the direction we were walking.  I guess we all agreed that we would probably cross the street, but some of us noted that we would do the same thing if it were a group of white kids.  No one thought to mention that blacks would do the same thing we would in both cases.  I guess it’s correct that your are O.K. as long as you do the right thing and treat everyone equally, but I started wondering if we would ever get to a point where we were truly non-biased in our thoughts as well as our actions.  This made me think of three books I read this summer, Malcolm Gladwell’s  Blink, Edmund O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Gladwell talks about how we make many of our decisions subconsciously on the basis of experience, Wilson talks about cooperative social organization, and Pinker’s basic theme is that we are evolving toward more rational and unprejudiced beings as a result of the Enlightenment, literacy and scientific development.

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I could take the themes of those three books and construct a hopeful scenario for a future without racial prejudice in a society based on reason and ever higher levels of abstract thinking.  But maybe not.  I have told my kids this story too often:   When my father was in his 50s he mentioned to me that he was concerned about his father, because Ben, who had spent much of his adult life fighting for the rights of others – the miners at Ludlow and Hispanics in southern Colorado --  in his old age was prone to making anti-Semitic statements.  Twenty years later my father, then in his 70s, who had championed racial equality as a journalist and labor leader, suddenly had nothing good to say about anyone who wasn’t of Anglo Saxon extraction, especially Jews, blacks and Hispanics.  I think he only held back on Asians because my wife is Japanese.  I swore that I would never let this happen to me.  The good news is that I’m sure the internal dialogs of my children are very different from mine and there is a glimmer of hope that someday this will be a world without prejudice.  It will take some effort and persuading.

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Just this morning, I was reading two different things, a passage in Ken Follett’s Winter in the World which describes how so many in Germany in the 1930s accepted fascism and the loss of individual rights that went with it and a review by Alan Ryan in the August 15, 2013 issue of the NYRB of Lawrence Friedman’s The Lives of Erich Fromm, Love’s Prophet.  Fromm explored the different ways in which we “evade the anxieties of freedom.”  He was interested in the contrast between  premodern Western society, which he thought provided psychic security but left little room for individuality, and the modern society that came into existence after the Reformation and the rise of the capitalist economy.  The latter, he said, provided a “negative freedom,” a loss of security and the promotion of an individualism that throws us on our own resources in a competitive and frightening environment.  I think this applies to what happened in Germany.  People chose what they thought was security over individual freedom. They were not alone.  In general it seems that the middle class tends to choose security over freedom.  I probably did it myself by choosing a lifetime career in government.

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Egad, how do I tie all this together?  I think the heart of our prejudices goes all the way back to when society was organized in bands.  Like chimps, we were loyal to the hierarchy in our own bands and aggressive toward all others.  We’re a lot more organized socially and far more developed intellectually than we were in prehistoric times, but we are still carrying vestiges of those prehistoric drives.  I think that explains where prejudices come from.   The Germans of the 1930s bought into the holocaust because it didn’t conflict with basic drives left over from pre-Enlightenment times.   The hope for the future is that we can reach a society wide level of intellectual development that will enable us all to live as free individuals who respect the rights of all others.

I.Q. and the Immigration Question

If you Google “I.Q. Immigration” you get 4,580,000 hits.  I don’t know how much of that is the responsibility of the Heritage Foundation, but everything on the first two screens has Heritage in the title line.  I started wondering about I.Q. testing, so I took three different tests on the internet.  The results were nothing to brag about, but nothing to be ashamed of either.  The last time I took an I.Q. test was in the spring of 1948 as part of the entrance exam for Regis High School in Denver.  I remember that day well.  I had the flu and I can still see the numbers and diagrams sort of swimming around the page.  My score was so bad that even 30 years later I couldn’t get my mother to tell me just how bad.  I must have gotten into Regis solely on the basis of my record in grammar school; they did put me in the “B” class – there were three sections, A,B and C.  I assume that was sort of a compromise between my terrible exam results and my academic record, which was “all A’s.”  I did well in the three years that I was there before we moved to New York and never had to take a final exam in anything.  Nothing went that well after that.

Recently I wrote a short review in this blog of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.  The book is about declining levels of violence in modern Western society, but he has a lot to say about I.Q  The bell curve of measured intelligence comes up in his discussion of the “Flynn Effect.”  It seems the keepers of I.Q. tests have to add about 3.5 points every decade to keep the average at 100.  An I.Q. of 100 in 1910 would measure about 70 today and an I.Q. of 100 today would be equivalent to 130 in 1910.  Are we actually smarter than our grandparents and great grandparents?  Maybe so, but I.Q. is supposedly stable over a lifetime.  Despite my lousy performance in 1948, I’m quite sure I was actually well above average, i.e., above 100, at that time, or I couldn’t have had the academic record that I had.  If I add 3.5 points for each of the six decades since 1948, that’s 21 points which would put me up there close to the genius category.  So I have my doubts about the Flynn Effect.  I’ve always suspected that even the most primitive people are as intelligent as we are, but that they just know different things.  After reading Pinker, I will have to rethink that.

According to Pinker and the myriad of studies he consulted the change in handling of answers on I.Q. tests from decade to decade doesn’t happen in questions that test math and language.  It’s all in the questions that test abstract reasoning.  Our apparent gains in intelligence have not raised scores on tests like the SATs.  I didn’t notice whether Pinker described results for tests of abstract reasoning other than those within standard I.Q. tests, but I Googled results for the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) and compared verbal, quantitative and analytical reasoning scores.  I remember it well.  The third section tested reasoning and problem solving and would seem to be testing the kind of development that has caused the Flynn Effect.  Unfortunately the series only runs from 1982 through 2002, when it seems to have been replaced by an analytical writing section.  Verbal scores dropped steadily from 530 in 1965 to 462 in 2007; quantitative scores dropped from 533 in 1965 to a low of 510 in 1976 and then rose to 584 in 2007; analytical reasoning scores started at 498 in 1982 and rose to 571 in 2002, hooking up sharply the last couple of years. I don’t see anything conclusive in these numbers.

Pinker distinguishes between 1910 and the present by suggesting it is the difference between pre-scientific and post scientific reasoning and points out a major difference between then and now.  We routinely use terms like percentage, rates of change, correlation, causation, post hoc, representative sample, statistical control group, placebo, empirical, median, circular argument, cost benefit analysis, false positive, trade off and so on.  If you tried these in 1910 your listener might think you were speaking a foreign language.  If you have enough Spanish, try cost benefit analysis on the guy who mows your lawn.

This brings us to all of the guys who mow our lawns.  If you Google “bell Curve,” you will find charts that show people on the Asian rim including all of China are smarter than the rest of us, and there are a plethora of charts showing I.Q. by race, region, income level, years of education and perhaps other characteristics.  Perhaps we should only allow immigration from Asia.  To me it seems only natural that there would be differences among cultures, and I don’t see how it would be possible to develop I.Q. tests that would predict success rates for people with different cultural experiences. 

If Hispanics and African Americans measure lower as groups than white Americans and do so over several generations, it seems to me that our educational system is failing to bring these groups into the intellectual climate that has been developing in Europe and the United States since the Enlightenment, i.e., into the era of post scientific reasoning.  We are smarter than our forebears about the things that are important in modern society, but very likely so are the potential immigrants because even in third world societies, most people have had more exposure to the modern world than our forebears.  This takes me back to Pinker again.  His book wasn’t about I.Q. but rather about how the development of a reasoning society has led to the decrease of violence in all aspects of our lives, but along the way he makes a strong case for doing what is necessary to bring everyone into our post scientific society that is based on reason.

How would the Knights of the Roundtable or any other pre-Enlightenment European group do on a modern intelligence test?  They had the same genes as us white folks, but they would be unlikely to survive in our modern society unless we imparted to them the knowledge required to be successful in a post scientific society  --  exactly the same thing we should be doing with minority groups.

Sharpening Obama’s Campaign Message

Am I missing something?  I cannot understand why each and every campaign statement by Obama and every one of his surrogates doesn’t include a plea to give him a Democratic House and 60 Democratic senators next November.  While we all recognize that this is basically a middle of the road country, something has happened to the Republican Party.  The moderate Republicans who were able to work with Democrats have disappeared.  Bilateral solutions are no longer possible, because there is no one for Democrats to negotiate with.  Voters’ only choice, if they want to restore effective government, is to reelect Obama and elect a Democratic Congress to work with him.  If that happens and the Democrats are able to restore growth and move on to long term management of the debt, there is certainly the possibility that moderate Republicans will be able to revive their party and restore the two party system that worked so well in the past to keep the country on a middle path and balance the interests of capital and labor.  The alternatives are gridlock with either a President Romney or one house of Congress able to block all progressive legislation or, worse yet, a right wing Republican sweep which could turn back the clock to the 1920s or even earlier.  I took to heart what one street demonstrator had to say in the wake of the Wisconsin disaster:  “The Republicans won’t be satisfied until all working people are making the minimum wage.”