Day 290: Video Revolutions

As tube, tape, and disc are replaced by file, pixel, and cloud, the present moment in media history offers a vantage point for regarding video as an adaptable and enduring term that bridges all of these technologies and the practices they afford. At different times video has been different things for different people, and its history is more than a progression of material formats: cameras, transmitters and receivers, tapes and discs, decks that record and play them, digital files, apps and interfaces. It is also a history of ideas about technology and culture, and relations and distinctions among various types of media and the social needs giving rise to their uses.

Champions and detractors have projected onto video a succession of fantasies, both positive and negative, at various moments of its history. Like television, video has been perpetually renewed, reborn as new media in relation to older iterations made obsolete by the relentless forward march of technology. It is something of a law of new media that emerging technologies are regularly invested with their users’ hopes and fears, with expressions of their societies’ tensions, contradictions, and crises. I aim to represent a history of video that accounts for these expressions in their specific contexts from the early period of television to the present day, identifying three broad historical phases. These phases are marked by technological innovations such as videotape and streaming web video, but also by the ways in which video has been placed in relation to other media, including radio, television, sound recording, and film, as well as networked computers, their hardware and software.

In the first phase, the era of broadcasting’s development and penetration into the mass market, video was another word for television. The two were not distinct from each other. In the second, TV was already established as a dominant mass medium. Videotape and related new technologies and practices marked video in distinction to television as an alternative and solution to some of TV’s widely recognized problems. It was also distinguished from film as a lesser medium visually and experientially, though at the same time it was positioned as a medium of privileged access to reality. In the third phase, video as digital moving image media has grown to encompass television and film and to function as the medium of the moving image. These phases are defined in terms of their dominant technologies (transmission, analog recording and playback, digital recording and playback) but more importantly by ideas about these technologies and their uses and users.

Video Revolutions is concerned with outlining the phases, but it also offers the example of video history as a way into reconsidering the idea of a medium as such. I propose adopting a particular understanding of this concept, a cultural view. From this perspective, a medium is understood relationally, according to how it is constituted through its complementarity or distinction to other media within a wider ecology of technologies, representations, and meanings. A medium is, furthermore, understood in terms not only of its materiality, affordances, and conventions of usage, but also of everyday, commonsense ideas about its cultural status in a given historical context. Cultural status refers to the ways in which a medium (or any cultural category or artifact) is valued or not valued, made authentic or inauthentic, legitimate or illegitimate. The medium of video exists not only as objects and practices, but also as a shifting constellation of ideas in popular imagination, including ideas about value, authenticity, and legitimacy. We can apprehend video’s materiality and its significance only through the mediation of discourses of video technology and the practices and social values associated with it.

I will be most concerned in my discussion of video’s three phases with describing and explaining each way in which video has been understood historically, particularly in terms of cultural status. When video was synonymous with television, its cultural status was television’s cultural status. When video was distinguished from television, its cultural status was opposed to television’s, unless it was associated with TV rather than with the movies that were the content of videotapes offered for rent at video stores. And as video has become a category bigger than either movies or TV, its cultural status has still been the product of enduring ideas about these media and their value and legitimacy. In my conclusion I will return to a more abstract discussion of the medium as a concept, elaborating on the examples offered from video history and extracting higher-level meanings from them.

In considering video’s history I have relied in particular on sources that speak to the ways in which people have understood popular media and culture. Reading the popular and trade press and the writings of prominent intellectuals and looking at advertisements and newspaper or magazine illustrations does not give us direct access to anyone’s thoughts, but it does establish a horizon of meanings available to individuals and communities in a particular place and time. It also shows us what some dominant meanings were, and how powerful interests tried to assert particular kinds of values and ideals. It is these dominant and typical available meanings that most interest me, as they speak most directly of video’s cultural status.

One key insight throughout will be the centrality of one medium in particular in relation to video. No matter whether video has been associated with television or distinguished from it, TV’s cultural status has often been the most important factor for understanding video. Television’s place as society’s dominant medium, and its shifting fortunes over time, will never be far from the surface in the events to come. Since television’s ascent to mass medium status, all media have been in some ways defined in relation to it. In the next chapter, the story begins with video and television sharing an identity in a period of optimism and hope for the future of communication, broadcasting, and the moving image.

~~Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium -by- Michael Z. Newman.

Day 289: Motion[less] Pictures

Larry Gottheim’s film Fog Line (1970) begins with a still shot of a landscape covered in dense fog. All that can be seen through the fog are the outlines of a few trees intersected by four high-tension wires. The setting is subtly beautiful, and the complete lack of sound creates a space for meditation. Minutes pass. Apart from some slight shaking, the camera does not move, nor do any elements within the mise-en-scène. The trees and telephone wires become easier to make out as the fog lifts, although the fog’s retreat is so gradual that its movement is not perceived by the viewer. After eleven minutes of the same motionless shot, the film abruptly ends. During my first viewing of Fog Line, I found the film simultaneously boring and absorbing. I was bored because, on a superficial level, nothing happened. Yet I was fascinated because I had never encountered a film like this before. It was so still, so uneventful, I felt like I was staring at a photograph or a painting for several minutes rather than watching a movie.

When I watched Fog Line a second time, I realized that there was actually more movement than I had initially registered. At one point, several minutes into the film, barely visible grainy shadows (in actuality, horses) slowly wander from one side of the landscape to the other. (Gottheim had intentionally selected this location for his film because of the horses that regularly moved through it.) At another point a small, almost indiscernible, bird quickly flies above the wires. Like most viewers, I had missed these developments in my first careful viewing; it was as if the prolonged inertia had tricked my mind into thinking I was looking at a still. I was unable to easily detect the minimal motion within the shot since, after the first few minutes of stasis, I was no longer expecting movement of any kind. Scott MacDonald describes the spectatorial experience engendered by Fog Line cogently: “For a few moments at the beginning of the film, viewers cannot be sure that the image they’re looking at is a motion picture. Indeed, it is only once the fog has thinned enough for an identification of the image to be possible that we can recognize that something other than the movie projector—the fog itself—is moving.”

While Fog Line is a remarkable and unique cinematic experience, it is not without predecessors, nor is it without successors. In fact, it places itself in a rich and variegated tradition that I will call the cinema of stasis. Static films offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion. In most films an impression of movement is provided either by the motion of the camera or the motion of elements within the mise-en-scène—usually both. In contrast, static films generally feature no camera movement and little or no movement within the frame. Instead, these films foreground stasis and consequently blur the lines between traditional visual art and motion pictures.

It should be noted that the term movement is polysemous and is sometimes used in a broader sense than what I have in mind here. Gilles Deleuze, for example, suggests that movement can be achieved in film not only through the motion of the camera or elements in the frame but also through montage, which he claims “allows the achievement of a pure mobility extracted from the movements of characters.” Along similar lines, Christian Metz claims that a filmic transition between one image and another—“even if each image is still”—constitutes an “ideal” movement. As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, movement can refer to “a change of place or position,” and by this definition any cinematic montage (even a montage of still shots) constitutes movement. But movement can also designate “the action or process of moving,” and it is this more specific definition that I have in mind. In other words a film that engages in montage can still be considered a static film for my purposes, so long as the elements within the frame are static (as in, say, Chris Marker’s La jetée [1962]). For while the spectator’s point of view is shifting “in place or position,” no “action or process of moving” is directly observed; in cases like these the movement itself takes place off-camera, and the dominant impression is one of stasis.

The tradition of static cinema arguably starts in 1930 with Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (Wochenende) (1930). The film features a rich, evocative sound track of voices, clocks, alarms, and other “found” sounds, but the screen remains blank and motionless for the work’s entire eleven-minute duration. At first, Weekend seemed like little more than a curio, an idiosyncratic experiment designed to test the limits of cinematic expression. But a similar kind of cinematic stasis began to appear again in 1950s France with Situationist films like Gil Wolman’s L’anticoncept (The Anticoncept) (1951) and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952), both of which traffic in immobile visual fields stripped of any imagery. By the 1960s the floodgates had opened. This was an era in which the boundaries separating various media were being challenged more than ever before, and this was reflected in a series of provocative and influential static films such as Marker’s La jetée, Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). These pioneering works would, in subsequent decades, inspire a number of filmmakers, including Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, and Derek Jarman, to continue exploring the aesthetics of stillness.

Although individual static films have been the subject of scholarly attention, the cinema of stasis as a modality has not yet been adequately theorized. I want to remedy this by analyzing several subsets of static cinema—the furniture film, the protracted film, the textual film, and the monochrome film—drawing attention to the diversity and multivalence of cinematic stasis. I also want to attempt to answer several questions that are intrinsically posed by static films: Why take a medium uniquely positioned to create the illusion of movement and use it to create a quasi-photographic stasis? What forms of spectatorship are appropriate in approaching these works? And finally, what are the implications of these experiments for the ontology of film?

~~Motion[less] Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis -by- Justin Remes

Day 288: Nagasaki

Every morning at five a.m., Wada wakes up after six hours of sleep and pauses to look out his window at the expanse of the Urakami Valley that stretches all the way to the bay. After washing his face, he heads to the kitchen, waits for the newspaper delivery, and has breakfast—misoshiru (miso soup), rice, and various dishes Hisako prepares. On days when he has speaking engagements, he dresses in coordinated slacks, a dress shirt, a tie, and a wool or tweed jacket. Since he no longer drives, Wada walks everywhere, laughing with appreciation that at his age, his legs still work.

“In 1945, there were no cars or gas or oil—so everyone walked,” he says. “You could see the mountains from everywhere.” Now, from certain vantage points, tall buildings block his view of the mountains. Some things haven’t changed, though: The Urakami and Nakashima rivers flow into Nagasaki Bay, centuries-old Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines still stand in the older sections of the city, and on early spring mornings, fog rolls in from the sea, blanketing the city. Nagasaki is still a Mitsubishi town, with factories rebuilt on two of the company’s former sites and massive shipyards that produce some of the world’s largest commercial ships and destroyers, the latter in defiance of Nagasaki’s declaration as a city of peace.

Little else remains of the city Wada knew in 1945. He walks down narrow streets through his neighborhood crowded with Japanese-style homes, apartments, and condominium buildings. Following a path along the Urakami River, he passes schools, parks, and grocery stores filled with fresh produce, meats, fish, canned goods, and sweets. He crosses Ohashi Bridge and strides past the former site of Do-oh’s Mitsubishi factory, near the streetcar stop where he would have died if another streetcar hadn’t derailed that morning, resulting in a change in his route. Today, cars and trucks speed by him on the Urakami Valley’s main thoroughfare, lined with storefronts, cafés, and offices. Wada passes a pachinko parlor just as someone exits, so he can hear the loud music and whirring of small metal pinballs racing through the machines inside. Color-coded streetcars still run along the same routes he drove before the bombing, their wires connected to cables overhead, though now an automated voice announces upcoming stops, and machines collect the fares. As the streetcars pass, Wada mentally calculates their speed.

Farther south, too, the city is barely recognizable from Wada’s childhood. The circular observatory atop Mount Inasa provides an expansive view of the East China Sea and the islands off the coast of Kyushu. Below, large vessels, smaller boats, and city cruise liners dock at Nagasaki’s port in view of waterfront shops and restaurants. The modern Nagasaki Station is surrounded by multistory office buildings, department stores, and hotels. Just north of the station on Nishizaka Hill is the Site of the Martyrdom of the Twenty-Six Saints of Japan, with a long wall of life-size bronze statues and a memorial hall with religious artifacts passed down through Nagasaki’s complex Catholic history of freedom and forbidden practice. Approximately sixty-seven thousand Catholics now reside in Nagasaki Prefecture, attending services at Urakami Cathedral and other churches scattered throughout the city, prefecture, and surrounding islands. Chinatown in the old city thrives. At night, the central district of Shianbashi is filled with packed clubs. Along the main north-south street through the city, a small Ferris wheel on the roof of a department store lights up the skyline.

In the southernmost region of the city, tourists frequent Glover Garden, perched on a hill overlooking the bay—the nineteenth-century home and gardens of Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant who established trade between Nagasaki and Britain. Dejima, the tiny fan-shaped residential and commercial island built in 1636 to segregate the Dutch East India Company traders from the rest of the city, has been restored to replicate its seventeenth-century design—a reminder that during Japan’s two hundred years of national isolation, Nagasaki was the only Japanese port open to the West. Now foreigners are so common in Nagasaki that they are barely noticed except by schoolchildren, who frequently stare at them at bus stops or from across the aisle inside streetcars.

Veiled from view from the main road through the Urakami Valley, the bombing and its aftereffects are meticulously and elegantly remembered at Hypocenter Park, Peace Park, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. In Hypocenter Park, enclosed by lush green trees that block the sounds of traffic, a tall, black granite cenotaph points upward to the spot a third of a mile overhead where the bomb detonated. In front of the memorial, a large stone box holds a microfilm list of victims’ names. Concrete concentric circles ring the monument. Scattered through the park are numerous smaller monuments, including one for the thousands of Korean slave laborers who died in the bombing. Against the banks of the small Shimonokawa River, which runs through the park, postbomb soil from the hypocenter area is encased in glass, revealing eerily preserved pieces of melted glass and fragments of tile, ceramic dishware, and bottles.

If you know where to look, lesser-known reminders of the atomic bomb are tucked away within the concentric circles of the bomb’s reach. Behind the rebuilt Shiroyama Elementary School, atop a hill west of the hypocenter, the cherry trees planted in memory of students who died in the bombing have now matured. Bomb shelters dug into the hillsides around the perimeter of the school are now filled in with dirt or covered by boards or chain-link fencing. At the corner of the school closest to the hypocenter, a five-thousand-square-foot section of the original building now serves as a small gallery of atomic bomb artifacts and Hayashi Shigeo’s 1945 photographs of the annihilated city.

Behind the enormous, U-shaped Yamazato Elementary School north of the hypocenter, three 1940s-era air raid shelters carved out of the hillside are preserved where countless teachers, children, and neighborhood residents fled and died. Down the hill is the tiny hut where Dr. Nagai lived during his final years; next door is a small gallery and library of the physician’s books, photographs, and personal possessions. Scorched statues of Catholic saints stand in the front garden of Urakami Cathedral, and one of its original fifty-ton domes still lies embedded in the hillside where it fell seconds after the blast.

At the base of Mount Kompira southeast of the hypocenter, Nagasaki University School of Medicine and its affiliated hospital host multiple organizations that serve hibakusha medical needs, document historical and current studies on radiation-related medical conditions, and provide the public with data on nuclear weapons stockpiles across the world. Nagasaki’s famous one-legged stone torii gateway still perches, blackened and erect, at the hillside entrance to Sanno Shrine. Up the hill, two scarred camphor trees—once considered dead after the bomb’s blast and heat had severed their trunks and branches and scorched them bare—are now more than twenty feet in circumference and rise fifty-five and sixty-nine feet high, their massive branches reaching out in all directions, creating a thick green canopy over the walkway leading to the shrine.
Except for those like Yoshida who cannot hide their disfigurement, most of the approximately fifty thousand aging hibakusha living in the Nagasaki area remain invisible to the public eye. Many avoid the hypocenter district altogether because of the terrifying feelings that still arise. Others agonize that their family members’ bones lie beneath today’s bustling roads, buildings, and memorial parks. Some bow their heads in silence as they pass by in their cars or by train.
The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) was introduced in Japan in the 1990s and came into public awareness as a psychological condition after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, but counseling remains culturally foreign and rarely available. Images of hideously burned people reaching out for help are permanently engraved in many survivors’ memories. One woman feels like she’s going insane because she can’t forget the voices of small children and their mother buried beneath their collapsed house screaming for help. Another has never eaten a pomegranate since watching—and smelling—one of her family members being cremated on top of wood from a pomegranate tree. For many, silence has remained the only way to survive.

Do-oh, Nagano, Taniguchi, Wada, and Yoshida remain among the select few who keep alive the public memory of the atomic bomb. Each year, the NFPP’s forty kataribe make nearly 1,300 presentations in 137 Nagasaki schools, plus many more for students visiting Nagasaki on field trips. In addition to Taniguchi’s U.S. travels, Wada, Nagano, and Yoshida have also traveled to American universities to tell their stories—Wada at Westmont College in California, Nagano at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Yoshida at DePaul University and Northwestern University in Chicago. Nagano was scheduled to depart Oberlin for a day of sightseeing in New York on the morning of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Unable to return home for nearly a week, she was terrorized by the images on television, not only because of their horrifying content but also because she initially misunderstood her interpreter and thought that Japan and United States were again at war.

This terrifying event notwithstanding, Nagano, Yoshida, and Wada are proud of the dialogues they were able to create with American students. They were frequently asked about Pearl Harbor and whether they, as atomic bomb survivors, hate Americans. In response, all three apologized for their country’s attack on Pearl Harbor and told their audiences that the war had been between countries, not people. At the same time, they challenged students to think about the morality of the atomic bombings. “I don’t blame the United States,” Wada told his audience, “but I want people to understand what the nuclear bombs do. We can’t have another atomic bomb experience.”

Since 1995, numerous books, exhibits, and documentaries about the bombings have been released in the United States. Many are from Nagasaki, including Yamaguchi Senji’s memoir Burnt Yet Undaunted; former ABCC physician James Yamazaki’s book Children of the Atomic Bomb; an exhibit of Yamahata Yosuke’s photo collection with an accompanying book and film in English; and U.S. Marine Corps photographer Joe O’Donnell’s Japan 1945—a collection with several photos of postbomb Nagasaki, including his gripping black-and-white image of Taniguchi’s back. While speaking in the United States, however, Wada was shocked to discover how many American college students knew only about the Hiroshima bombing; they hadn’t learned—or didn’t remember—that Nagasaki had been bombed as well. “The voice of Nagasaki,” he says, “has still not reached the world.”

~~Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War -by- Susan Southard

Day 287: What The Dog Saw

On the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas. He was wearing a navy blue suit and a tie. He was fifty-two years old, but looked older. Huddled around him were eight lawyers from his defense team. Outside, television-satellite trucks were parked up and down the block.

“We are here this afternoon,” Judge Simeon Lake began, “for sentencing in United States of America versus Jeffrey K. Skilling, Criminal Case Number H-04-25.” He addressed the defendant directly: “Mr. Skilling, you may now make a statement and present any information in mitigation.”

Skilling stood up. Enron, the company he had built into an energy-trading leviathan, had collapsed into bankruptcy almost exactly five years before. In May, he had been convicted by a jury of fraud. Under a settlement agreement, almost everything he owned had been turned over to a fund to compensate former shareholders.

He spoke haltingly, stopping in midsentence. “In terms of remorse, Your Honor, I can’t imagine more remorse,” he said. He had “friends who have died, good men.” He was innocent — “innocent of every one of these charges.” He spoke for two or three minutes and sat down.

Judge Lake called on Anne Beliveaux, who worked as the senior administrative assistant in Enron’s tax department for eighteen years. She was one of nine people who had asked to address the sentencing hearing.
“How would you like to be facing living off of sixteen hundred dollars a month, and that is what I’m facing,” she said to Skilling. Her retirement savings had been wiped out by the Enron bankruptcy. “And, Mr. Skilling, that only is because of greed, nothing but greed. And you should be ashamed of yourself.”

The next witness said that Skilling had destroyed a good company, the third witness that Enron had been undone by the misconduct of its management; another lashed out at Skilling directly. “Mr. Skilling has proven to be a liar, a thief, and a drunk,” a woman named Dawn Powers Martin, a twenty-two-year veteran of Enron, told the court. “Mr. Skilling has cheated me and my daughter of our retirement dreams. Now it’s his time to be robbed of his freedom to walk the earth as a free man.” She turned to Skilling and said, “While you dine on Chateaubriand and champagne, my daughter and I clip grocery coupons and eat leftovers.” And on and on it went.

The judge asked Skilling to rise.

“The evidence established that the defendant repeatedly lied to investors, including Enron’s own employees, about various aspects of Enron’s business,” the judge said. He had no choice but to be harsh: Skilling would serve 292 months in prison — twenty-four years. The man who headed a firm that Fortune ranked among the “most admired” in the world had received one of the heaviest sentences ever given to a white-collar criminal. He would leave prison an old man, if he left prison at all.

“I only have one request, Your Honor,” Daniel Petrocelli, Skilling’s lawyer, said. “If he received ten fewer months, which shouldn’t make a difference in terms of the goals of sentencing, if you do the math and you subtract fifteen percent for good time, he then qualifies under Bureau of Prisons policies to be able to serve his time at a lower facility. Just a ten-month reduction in sentence . . .”

It was a plea for leniency. Skilling wasn’t a murderer or a rapist. He was a pillar of the Houston community, and a small adjustment in his sentence would keep him from spending the rest of his life among hardened criminals.

“No,” Judge Lake said.
...
The national security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source, bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The CIA had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11 to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11 a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the CIA on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the FBI and the NSA and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

If you sat through the trial of Jeffrey Skilling, you’d think that the Enron scandal was a puzzle. The company, the prosecution said, conducted shady side deals that no one quite understood. Senior executives withheld critical information from investors. Skilling, the architect of the firm’s strategy, was a liar, a thief, and a drunk. We were not told enough — the classic puzzle premise — was the central assumption of the Enron prosecution.

“This is a simple case, ladies and gentlemen,” the lead prosecutor for the Department of Justice said in his closing arguments to the jury:

Because it’s so simple, I’m probably going to end before my allotted time. It’s black-and-white. Truth and lies. The shareholders, ladies and gentlemen… buy a share of stock, and for that they’re not entitled to much but they’re entitled to the truth. They’re entitled for the officers and employees of the company to put their interests ahead of their own. They’re entitled to be told what the financial condition of the company is. They are entitled to honesty, ladies and gentlemen.

But the prosecutor was wrong. Enron wasn’t really a puzzle. It was a mystery.

~~What The Dog Saw -by- Malcolm Gladwell

Day 286: Thinking Small

In 1949, a ship called the MS Westerdam departed from the coast of Europe, its hundreds of passengers headed toward U.S. shores. Nestled deep in the ship’s cargo compartment, a pair of headlights peeped out of a dark tarp; two wide, open circles leading to the soft curves of what would soon be known as the world’s most recognizable car. Protesters, rebels, dissidents, politicians, businessmen, the world’s corporate elite—all would eventually become entwined in its story. By the end of the 1960s, it would do what no other car had done before: transcend age, class, and country to become a symbol adopted by them all. Americans would call the car the Beetle. In other places it would become the Flea, the Turtle, the Vocho, the Foxi, the Buba, the Fusca, the Poncho, and the Mouse.

Over the years, the car developed a cult following as well as a more public persona. It had fan club after fan club created on its behalf; it showed up in the films of Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick; Disney endearingly dubbed it “The Love Bug”; it was even driven—briefly—by James Bond. For decades, the car filled college towns and campuses, the choice of students and faculty alike. It appeared on the cover of Abbey Road. John Lennon had a white one in his driveway. Packs of them dotted the beaches of California, surfboards strapped to their roofs. A children’s game even spontaneously developed around the car as kids scanned the roads in search of it: Punch Bug red! No punch back! The car became so ubiquitous that pop artist Andy Warhol included it in his iconic series of silk screens, placing it in the company of personalities such as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.

Today the original Volkswagen is still known as the longest-running and best-selling single car design in history, and it is the only car to have been brought back by popular demand … twice. Sometimes referred to as the world’s most huggable car, perhaps no other automobile has ever been lavished with such attention and affection. But onboard the MS Westerdam on that cold winter day in 1949, none of that had yet come to pass. In those days, very few thought the car had potential. Reaching U.S. shores for the first time, the car had much more in common with the millions of immigrants coming over on similar ships, men and women who had been through dark times and were now seeking refuge or hoping to reinvent themselves, eager to find out if what they’d heard about the American dream was real.

It had been a long road. In fact, after nearly two decades of work and planning, the Volkswagen had only barely made it into existence at all. During the Second World War, the car’s country and factory were all but destroyed. Caught in the ugliness of the Nazi machine, it became a symbol of the hated party. By 1949, one of the men responsible for it had committed suicide and another had been kidnapped and placed in prison, where he languished, imagining he’d failed to fulfill one of his lifelong dreams.

Needless to say, when the car was unloaded on the docks of New York City that first time, it was not greeted warmly. Not only because of the dark stain of war that washed over with it, but also because of the undeniable fact that the round little car just didn’t fit in. America had been through a long Depression and a long war, but now unprecedented prosperity was finally leaking into the land and the country was on the verge of an automotive boom. The United States of the 1950s would be marked by wide elegant cars—the bigger the better—with flamboyant tail fins, extra comforts, and plenty of chrome. In contrast, the Volkswagen was oddly shaped and excruciatingly austere. People found it comical, awkward, and strange.

And yet on those very same New York shores, in pockets throughout the city, there were men and women—people considered just as out of place as the car itself was in those days—who were feeling a new kind of energy, readying themselves to take the risk of dissenting, of going against the common way of doing things, of thinking strange. Likewise, back in Germany, a similar change was happening as the country struggled to come to terms with its dark history. On both shores, there was a desire to evolve from within, a need for individual freedom and economic responsibility, for less empty extravagance and for more meaning and truth. It would take a while to mature, but a revolution was rising, and the Beetle would be at the center of the wave. After so many years of obstacles and near misses, the car would finally be in just the right place at just the right time, merging with the larger flow of modernizing governments and evolving markets to revive a sense of joy and wonder in the world.

Beetle owners have a saying: They don’t find their cars, their cars find them. To some degree, that’s how this book came to be. My first real encounter with the original Beetle happened only after I’d graduated from college and moved to Germany. Riding back to Berlin after an artist residency in the countryside, lulled and drowsy in the backseat of an SUV, I was shaken from my daze when we came upon one particular town. That evening, the landscape had been empty and dark until suddenly there was the bright illumination of towering glass structures and fiery smokestacks: I was overwhelmed at the way this alien-like city suddenly sprang up out of the somber, empty terrain. One of the German friends I was with saw the effect it had on me: That’s Wolfsburg, she said, Isn’t it strange? She went on to explain that this town was originally built by the Nazis; Adolf Hitler had built it for his car. What car? I asked. You don’t know it? she wondered aloud. I thought everyone in America knows the Bug.

In German, “Volkswagen” means “People’s Car.” At first, it seemed impossible to me that the same car that was once a child of Nazi Germany could grow up to become a symbol of freedom, democracy, and love. But as I would soon discover in my research, the car had always been meant for the people, and it lived up to that dream in ways no one expected and no one could have planned.

~~Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle -by- Andrea Hiott

Day 285: Fixing The Sky

In 1996 Thomas Schelling wrote, “‘Geoengineering’ is a new term, still seeking a definition. It seems to imply something global, intentional, and unnatural.” More than a decade later, the word remains largely undefined and unpracticed. It is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it did find its way into the Urban Dictionary , where it is loosely defined as “the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment; planetary tinkering; a subset of terraforming or planetary engineering... the last gasp of a dying civilization.” Lovelock subscribes to this definition, at least the first part, and further claims that “we became geoengineers soon after our species started using fire for cooking,” or perhaps, as geoscientist William Ruddiman has proposed, millennia ago through the practices of extensive deforestation and agriculture.

In the OED, an “engineer” is one who contrives, designs, or invents, “a layer of snares”; a constructor of military engines; one whose profession is the designing and constructing of works of public utility. So engineering, by definition, has both military and civilian aspects, elements potentially both nefarious and altruistic (figure 8.1). By analogy, the neologism “geoengineer” refers to one who contrives, designs, or invents at the largest planetary scale possible for either military or civilian purposes—a layer of snares at the global level. Today geoengineering, as an unpracticed art, is still largely “geo-scientific speculation.”

“Ecohacking,” another term for geoengineering, made the short list for the Oxford Word of the Year 2008. It is loosely defined as “the use of science in very large-scale [planetary scale] projects to change the environment for the better/stop global warming (e.g., by using mirrors in space to deflect sunlight away from Earth).” A recent report issued by the Royal Society of London defines geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.” But there are significant problems with such definitions. First of all, an engineering practice defined by its scale (geo) need not be constrained by its stated purpose (environmental improvement), by one of its currently proposed techniques (space mirrors), or by one of perhaps many stated goals (to counteract anthropogenic climate change). Nuclear engineers, for example, are capable of building both power plants and bombs; mechanical engineers can design components for both ambulances and tanks; my father, a precision machinist during World War II, milled both aluminum ice cream scoops and one-of-a-kind components for top-secret military projects. So to constrain the essence of something that does not exist by its stated purpose, techniques, or goals is misleading at best.

“Ecohacking” sounds both too small and too electronic to cover the field of geoengineering. We are all ecohackers, as was the first person to cut down a tree with an axe. In traditional English, hackers are literally those who chop up the Earth, or figuratively those who mangle words or sense. In the computer age, “hacker” is slang for an enthusiast who considers programming an end in itself or, more subversively, who seeks to gain unauthorized access to computer files or networks. Hackers typically have “big projects” about which they obsess. One project of the computer climate engineers is to cut off the sunbeams in a simple climate model to “prove” that the Earth will cool and sea ice will grow. Much more sophisticated modelers have shown that the unknown consequences of doing this may be very, very serious. When people propose to cool the Earth by 2°C (3.6°F) using a technical fix, they are overlooking the fact that Earth has not yet warmed 2°C in the past century. So we are really dealing with dangerous speculation about speculation. A more apt term might be “geohacking,” which is hopefully harmless enough if the practice is restricted to tinkering with computer models and never “sees the light of day” in the form of potentially dangerous outdoor demonstration projects or planetary-scale tinkering.
Placing his faith firmly in progress, engineer and policy analyst David Keith is of the opinion that scientific understanding grants us increased Archimedean leverage and an “ever greater capability to deliberately engineer environmental processes on a planetary scale.” Echoing William Suddards Franklin and his grasshopper of long ago or Ross Hoffman and his misunderstanding of the butterfly effect, Keith maintains that “accurate knowledge of the atmospheric state and its stability could permit leverage of small, targeted perturbations to effect proportionately larger alterations of the atmospheric dynamics.” But no matter how great the scientific wizardry, the modern Archimedes still has no place to stand, no acceptable lever or fulcrum, and no way to predict where the Earth will roll if tipped. Failing ultimate control, geoengineering may indeed have the potential to enrage the chaotic “climate beast” of the influential geochemist and oceanographer Wallace Broecker.
...
Geoengineering is a subset of “terraforming ,” or the engineering of planetary environments. Martyn J. Fogg reviewed the history and some of the technical aspects of “orchestrated planetary change” in his book on this subject, published, curiously, by the Society of Automotive Engineers, a group that one might expect would be most familiar with automobile air-conditioning. He defined “planetary engineering” as “the application of technology for the purpose of influencing the global properties of a planet” and “terraforming” as the process of “enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that would be fully habitable for human beings.”

Fogg described how ecological-engineering techniques might be used someday to implant life on other planets and how geoengineering might be used to ameliorate (or perhaps exacerbate) the currently “corrosive process” of global change on the Earth. He presented order-of-magnitude calculations and the results of some simple computer modeling to assess the plausibility of various planetary-engineering scenarios. He deemed it “rash to proclaim” impossible any scheme that does not “obviously violate the laws of physics.” Yet Fogg focused only on possibilities, not on unintended consequences, and left unaddressed questions of whether the schemes are desirable, or even ethical. According to Fogg, geoengineering is not simply, or even primarily, a technical problem because people, their politics, and their infrastructures get in the way. That is, it involves the implications and dangers of attempting to tamper with an immensely complex biosphere on an inhabited planet.

The epigraph of Fogg’s book cites Hungarian-born engineer and physicist Theodore von Kármán to the effect that “scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.” This quote has an ominous ring, however, when it comes to terraforming, since some “worlds” perhaps should never be. Fogg traced inspiration for the field to Olaf Stapleton’s Last and First Men (1930), Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky (1950), and James Lovelock and Michael Allaby’s The Greening of Mars (1984). In his “concise history of terraforming,” Fogg mentioned the work of naturalists John Ray (English, seventeenth century) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French, eighteenth century), who looked on the Earth as unfinished, with man taking the role of a junior partner in creation, taming the wilderness as part of a historical progression toward “perfection.”19 From there, Fogg dropped the names of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), an American diplomat and naturalist who wrote about replanting forests, channeling rivers, and reclaiming deserts in Man and Nature (1864); Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945), the Russian mineralogist and geochemist who popularized the notion of the interconnectedness of the “biosphere”; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), the French cleric and philosopher who placed the “noosphere,” the realm of human thought, in evolutionary succession to the geosphere and the biosphere.

Such expansive antecedents belie recent attempts to restrict the definition of geoengineering to the purposeful and large-scale alteration of the shortwave side of the Earth’s energy budget with the intent of affecting climate. In the literature of planetary terraformation, geoengineering is much, much more than that. It comprises macro-scale projects to control not only the supposed relatively simple and straightforward interaction of albedo and temperature but also much more complex and potentially unknowable interactions of Earth system science—involving the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and, perhaps most important, society. After all, engineering deals with the technical side of human affairs, and the prefix “geo” potentially involves all aspects of the planet, perhaps also its most prominent companions, the Sun and the Moon. Fogg ventured into hyper-speculative territory when he discussed “astroengineering,” or modifying the properties of the Sun, by intervening in its opacity, nuclear reactions, mass loss, chemical mixing, and even “accretion into a central black hole.” Tellingly, Fogg admitted that “technical difficulties associated with astroengineering will be immense”.

~~Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control -by- James Rodger Fleming

Day 284: India in Mind

17 Dec '62
Long walk this morn to Manikarnika ghat—sat inside red stone porch with Saddhus & smoked ganja pipe & inquired about guru of good looking saddhu from Nimtallah—reminiscent red haired Naga saddhu knew him. Cow laid its head on my lap to be scratched. American tourists floating by in rowboats.
Dream: I meet Buddy Isenberg & Burroughs—turns out Isenberg is a nice girl—we sit at cafe table & talk, I apologize for writing so late. Nice dinky soft mannish looking girl. My demeanor is excessively self assured, is demeanor. Strange I should dream twice of girls in one day. “At my age” I said to Peter.
This morning while my back was turned from the table I heard a great thump—turned around to see a monkey jump on the table loaded with oranges & bananas, snatch one banana & leap out to the balcony, disappearing thru the lavatory window—next sitting on high branch of adjoining tree peeling the banana & staring at me thru the big leaves.
Incense in the room tonite, bought straw mats to cover half the slate-black tile floor.
What Vanity? What possible divine
blessing on all this Politics.
What invocation beyond Millions
of Votes for 1960 Hopes
What rat Curse or Dove vow slipt from my hands
to help this multitude
Smirking at the ballot box, deceived,
sensible, rich, full of onions,
voting for W. C. Williams with one
Foot in the grave and an eye
in a daisy out the window
18 Dec '62—
Sitting on rock at Harischandra Ghat—down below a sand slope at the water's edge blackened with ashes, a high pile of firewood ablaze and a man's head bent back blackened nose & mouth unburnt, black fuzzy hair, the rest of the chest belly outlined along down thighs at top of the pyre, feet sticking out the other end—now turned toes down—cry of geese & rabble of white longnecked good goose swan boids pecking in the water's edge a few feet from fire.
Nearby scows filled with sand from the other side of the river, laborers carrying baskets of grey sand up the brick stairway from the river—“Oh—the head's going to fall off—” The pile darkening, white ash floating up—a few watchers squatted on bricks facing the pyre—Pole man comes & tucks a foot into fire—then circles around & pushes length of pole against the black head (lain back with open black throat & adam's apple silhouetted against the small flames against the green river) til the body's balanced on the center of the collapsing charred logs. Donkeys led along the sand path, children running with kites, a black baby with no pants & pigtails, balancing a stick of bamboo—A saddhu in orange robes sitting up on a stone porch on the embankment under turrets of an old small castle—rather Venetian the scene—Rectangular-sailed boats going down stream—the air above the pyre curling in the heat, like a transparent water veil between my eyes & the greenfields & trees along the horizon on the other side of the Ganges—and the embankments, red temples spires, toy mosques, trees and squat white shrines walling in the bend of the river upstream to the long red train bridge at Raj Ghat an inch high.
18 Dec and a torn burlap bag to cover the squat pantsdropd lavatory window that opens on the staircase of the house, so ascending passersby can see the diarrheic mud bubble down from the asshole of P. Orlovsky & Company, Inc.
This morning down to the burning ghats & sat with same group of sadhus in their eyrie in the sandy basement porch of a pilgrim's rest house—fire with a pot of boiling lentils, embers from the burning ghat down below at 10 AM—a trident and bamboo lance & brass water-pot begging stoup scattered around, one friendly Sadhu named “Shambhu Bharti Baba” with whom I've sat and smoked before—today seeing my difficulty handling the red clay pipe he made & accompanied me smoking a cigarette mixed with ganja—I also partook of two pipes tho I coughed & the cold snot bubbled out my nostril from the strain-wheeze—brought some bananas & green seed fruits to distribute, gifts—and camera so made photos—the Naga Sadhu (S b b) wanted his very confusingly, as he don't talk but makes finger gestures—he got to his feet, stripped off his g-string & pulled down his cock under between his legs—one yogic ball bumping out—like cunt—for a photo—I took a dozen, all the group smoking round the pot & ashes—one standing of the Naga sadhu with his pots & brass tridents etc. then high put on my shoes & walked back along the ghats home, & slept in dark closed room a half an hour—read Mayakovsky
elegy to Lenin—“and
child-like,
wept the grey-bearded old”
and Brooklyn Bridge poem—I didn't remember it was so lovely —“in the grisly mirage of evening
… the naked soul
of a building
will show
in a window's translucent light”
Jodrell Bank's deposit of heavenly radio waves
Shot some M, last nite, up on mattress reading The Statesman (Calcutta), Time, Mayakovsky, writing postcards, washing socks handkerchiefs undershirt, Peters cock, necking with him,
While below the balcony under the streetlight one milk shop clattered pails
in the darkness, the Desasumedh Ghat beggars kept thin fingers moving under dried burlap, counting beads Jai Ram Jai Citaram, & the woman on the opposite corner with long wild hair crouched against a bidi shop steps rocking back & forth—I gave her 25 NP when I went out before dawn to buy milk & cigarettes—
now the square begins working—I feel like An American in Paris in 1920—The naiveté of neighborhoods awakening, radios turned on too loud to the Hindi news in the milk shop,
First lights turned on across the street, in the Cigarette and fried noodle peppers stall at the gate of the market,
three rickshaws circling to take off up street and look for cold dark business
Householders wrapped in shawls carrying brass waterpots trudging into the Ganges steps, passing & observing the beggar man in the mid-street shrouded in his own burlap shawl—he'd moved all night praying—
and carrying flowers to adorn the Lingams in the temples overlooking the starlit, planet-lit river—
arguments between Ram & Cita in Hindi voices tinnily rickochetting all the way up to my balcony from the radio—
Walkers coughing & trudging river street in Paterson too at this hour—
Him crouched under street lite on the corner counting a basketful of small potatos
Such a basket as I bought last night to contain my bananas & oranges, from white glued paperbags written in ledger sheets Hindi another day in a dark office—
Martial music to accompany the morning's broadcast, and the sound of a claxon with a throat inflammation in the background—
Peter lying dressed up in pants on mattress picking his red mustache, with long hollywood Christlike hair & Christ's small beard stubble—
I found out Octavio Paz is in Delhi the Ambassador of Mexico, arranging train rides for his tennis team—a headache—
Blake's photo on the wall, waiting waiting waiting—with his life mask eyes closed—thinking—or receiving radio messages from the cosmos source—
The rickshaw wallahs had slept all night crouched covered with their shawls on the red leather slope plastic of lowered rickshaws—
at night their bells rang in tune back & forth, speeding down the hill to Godolia from Chowk, up & down answering alarm clock tingalings in the dead streets—an iceman's tingaling, a knife sharpener's charged bellsound—
A huge black tree looming over my window obliterating half the square, all nite lights shining thru its leaves from milk shop where a vat of white cow buffalo lact bubbles over a charcoal trench.
Coughs answering back & forth across the square, and the splash of the streetcorner waterpipe faucet, clearing the throat near dawn—
a big white cow with horns had walked slowly up the street alone, looking for something to do—cows all last night in repulsive play, chasing each other in the traffic to lick the red asshole pads they drop streams of urine thru on the puddled street—black bulls horning the girls in front of Sardau's Hindu Hotel, separated by silver giant wire trees, knobby with ceramic eyes—
Wet charcoal & first white smoke impregnating the air to the tops of the trees—the monkeys asleep—the weasles aware— few rare ants—cigarette ashes cleaned from the trays in paper bag on the porch with banana & orange peels (the cows' lot) waiting the sweeper
Morning not yet come, Dec 19, 1962 must be 4 or 5 AM in Benares, writing & fingering my cock & remembering Shostakovitche's dead March as the radio bounces & crashes across India with brass violins—
The smell of frying meat cakes and potatos, Jai Citaram in a toneless voice, & gentle gossip near the rickshaws, the clanging of a temple bell at worship time early a few blocks away.
A lady already arrived with small baskets of parsley & radishes sits in the road where it turns down to the river steps, coughs & spits on the ground & bides in the gloom as the first blue light breaks open clouds in the East sky over the river, seen from balcony thru trees and a few balconied chickenwired houses leaning over the steps.

~~Allen Ginsberg's notes from India in Mind -ed- Pankaj Mishra

Day 283: Galileo’s Middle Finger

Although Darkness In El Dorado made Patrick Tierney look like an extremely adventurous but scholarly investigative reporter, in fact Tierney had no apparent training or employment history in anthropology or journalism. His first book, The Highest Altar, had purported to reveal ongoing human sacrifice in the Andes. No one in the scholarly world appeared to take that book all that seriously. But Darkness in El Dorado was a very different sort of book, absolutely crammed with impressive-looking footnotes—so many that the book looked like a masterwork of objective scholarship.

When she interviewed Tierney about Darkness in El Dorado in late 2000 for Chicago Public Radio, Victoria Lautman made specific mention of Tierney’s apparent documentation of his claims:

    There are 60 pages just of footnotes supporting Tierney’s incendiary main point[s], namely that the Brazilian Yanomamö Indians were hideously exploited, that a lethal 1968 measles epidemic was spread by a dangerous vaccine, that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission used the Yanomamö as a control group without their knowledge, and, most important, that all of these shocking abuses were perpetuated by two of the most famous and respected members of the anthropological community [sic].

As I looked back at all the positive media attention and praise the book got—it had even been named a finalist for a National Book Award—there could be no question this had resulted from readers assuming the footnotes were real. The truth was that plenty of them had simply not checked out. I knew this from reviewing the work of previous scholars who had looked, but I also was finding still more examples on my own.

For instance, as I went over the Darkness chapter on the 1968 epidemic, I came across this line: “The vaccinators were Napoleon Chagnon and a respected Venezuelan doctor named Marcel Roche.” Chagnon had told me repeatedly that he had not vaccinated anyone during the epidemic. This point mattered a lot to him, because Tierney’s New Yorker article included a story of a man whose child had allegedly died following a vaccination from Chagnon. Chagnon was understandably distraught at the implication that he had killed a Yanomamö child. So I looked at Tierney’s citation for the claim that Chagnon and Roche had been vaccinating and was rather stunned to see that Tierney seemed, by the citation, to be attributing this information to an article Chagnon had coauthored in 1970. How could Chagnon tell me he didn’t vaccinate anyone during the epidemic when his own coauthored article said that he did?

I wasn’t looking forward to having to confront the scarred and forceful Chagnon with that question, but I knew I had to. So I pulled the 1970 article and went to page 421, as Tierney’s citation indicated I should. Nowhere on the page did it name any vaccinator. Confused, I went through the rest of the article. Nowhere in the article was a single vaccinator named. Tierney’s citation was full of gas.

As I moved through what would become a year of research and about forty interviews for this project, a clear pattern of misrepresentation emerged. Even people who had been relatively aligned with Tierney were now admitting to me that he had played fast and loose with the truth. I called to interview Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers who had written Yanomami Warfare, a book highly critical of Chagnon. In the book, Ferguson argues that the introduction of large amounts of Western trade goods by researchers and missionaries contributed to Yanomamö conflict that Chagnon often blamed on sexual tensions. Ferguson told me that when the New Yorker fact checkers called him,

    everything was fine except one passage where Tierney has me saying something to the effect of “missions could be disruptive but according to Ferguson they are less so than Chagnon was,” downplaying the impact of the missions. I said, no I didn’t say that, and I don’t believe that to be true. I think [the missions] were very disruptive in the period I’m talking about. . . . I said that’s not what I said. And I got a call from Patrick Tierney and he got quite angry about it and said that I was backing down and that I was making a political move here and that he had me on tape saying what he said I said. And I said you’d better get that tape ready, because that’s not what I said.

Another strike against Tierney came from a woman with whom he’d apparently had a close friendship in South America, a woman named Lêda Martins, now an anthropologist at Pitzer College in California. Before going into anthropology, Martins had been a journalist and human rights worker, and she had long shared Tierney’s concern for the indigenous peoples in Venezuela and Brazil. In the acknowledgments to Darkness, Tierney said he was “especially indebted” to Martins, adding, “Leda’s dossier on Napoleon Chagnon was an important resource for my research.” I knew this dossier to be very important—Chagnon was practically obsessed with it—because it contained many of the misrepresentations of Darkness yet predated the book by years. Indeed, the copy of the dossier that Chagnon had obtained and given to me read almost like a draft book proposal for Darkness in El Dorado. The dossier had been used in various ways, but mostly to try to get Chagnon’s research permits denied. It was probably largely responsible for forcing an unwanted end to his fieldwork.

So, in his book’s acknowledgment, Tierney basically was saying that Martins had established many of the most damning charges against Chagnon. Martins’s charges against Chagnon would then constitute the basis for what Tierney would have followed up. I pressed Martins for a copy of the dossier as she had it; I wanted to know if it was the same as the one Chagnon had gotten his hands on. Eventually, when I went to meet her in person while I was in Southern California, she handed me a copy. It turned out to match Chagnon’s copy. But at that time, she also confessed something key, something she later, at my request, confirmed in an e-mail. She was not the author of the dossier. In fact, Martins told me:

    Patrick Tierney wrote the Chagnon dossier and I translated [it] to Portuguese. . . . I presented the dossier to Brazilian authorities (Funai employees) and human rights advocates who were looking for information on Chagnon who was seeking permission to go inside the Yanomami Territory in Brazil. I was the one who circulated the dossier in Brazil because people knew and trusted me. I trusted Patrick and did not check his references. (I can only hope whatever is left of my friendship with Patrick will survive the truth, but . . . he should not have said that.)

So the truth was that Tierney himself had written the charges he attributed to Martins, and Martins, presuming them to be true, had used them against Chagnon. This meant that Tierney had been working to spoil Chagnon’s reputation and his ability to do fieldwork in the Amazon many years before Darkness in El Dorado.

~~Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, And The Search For Justice In Science -by- Alice Dreger

Day 282:Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

To understand that English has developed not just via new words but also through the emergence of new grammar puts in a new light a notion about language you may have heard about.

One of the most popular ideas is that a language’s grammar and the way its words pattern reflect aspects of its speakers’ culture and the way they think. Countless times I have witnessed the hush in a classroom when introducing undergraduates to this hypothesis. If one doesn’t pick this up in college, one will catch it in newspaper and magazine articles about indigenous groups, or even in bits of folk wisdom floating around. One sometimes hears that Iran is home to a uniquely vigorous homosexual subculture because its third person pronoun is the same for men and women.

This idea that grammar is thought became influential from the writings of Edward Sapir. We met him in the previous chapter venturing that English speakers came to find nuance irritating. Even that point had hints of the language-is-thought persuasion—supposedly the erosion of various aspects of English grammar was due to some psychological leaning in its speakers. But Sapir ventured only passing speculations in this vein.
It was Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf who picked up the ball and ran with it, in the 1930s, publishing several pieces on the subject which served as its foundational texts. The hypothesis is known, therefore, as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The hypothesis has also failed. Repeatedly and conclusively.

Decade after decade, no one has turned up anything showing that grammar marches with culture and thought in the way that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed. At best, there are some shards of evidence that language affects thought patterns in subtle ways, which do not remotely approach the claims of Whorf.

Yet the Sapir-Whorf idea is cited enthusiastically in textbooks even today, and is a favorite approach to language by journalists. In 2004 a New York Times writer supposed that the language of the Kawesqar tribe in Chile has no future tense marking because, having been nomads traveling often in canoes in the past, they would usually have been so unclear on what was going to happen in the future that there was no need to ever talk about it (!). Never mind that Japanese has no future markers either, and yet the Japanese hardly seem unconcerned with the future. The point is that this Times writer would not have even floated such a notion if it weren’t for the seed planted by Whorf’s work seven decades previously. Whorf, even though he died in 1941, lent us a meme.

However, with an awareness of how languages actually come to be the way they are, we are in a position to truly understand how hopeless the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is. The idea that our take on the world is mediated by refraction through our grammar, such that the world’s six thousand languages generate six thousand correspondent world views, is deeply appealing. It is also mistaken.

After all, is the way I think shared with all of the other Anglophones of the world—or even just all Americans—and reflected in the language I am writing in right now? Was the change from Old English grammar to Modern English grammar—not vocabulary—determined or even partially affected by the transformation of England from feudalism to industrial capitalism?

The answers to both questions would have to be yes, from the way Whorf wrote. His pièce de résistance was an observation about the language of the Hopi: that it does not mark time in any way. He argued that this made Hopi speakers think in a way completely different from us Westerners, with our persnickety obsession with past, present, and future. The Hopis, he argued, think of time as cyclical, to the extent that they even have a concept of “time” as an ongoing process in the way that we do.

Grammars do differ in what concepts they choose to mark. Spanish marks gender on nouns. Japanese does not, but it has markers showing whether a noun is a subject or object. All grammars mark some things; no grammar marks everything. Whorf’s idea was that which things a grammar happens to mark determines what its speakers perceive most readily in their daily lives:

Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by the grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.

Whorf, like many of his followers, was not quite clear as to whether he thought that grammar, once accidentally morphing into certain patterns, channeled culture, or that culture determined how grammar morphed. Presumably, there was a “dynamic” two-way relationship. But his basic point was the correspondence between grammar and thought patterns, and hence culture.

Therefore, Western scientific advances presumably correspond to our languages’ rich tense marking: “Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are recepts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” This is why, therefore, it was not Native Americans who gave the world theoretical physics.
...
It isn’t hard to see why so many smart people from the thirties on have thrilled to this notion, especially couched in such eloquent phrasing. Whorf was also a mesmerizing speaker, and a looker to boot. Yet because the foundational presentation was founded on sand and no one has since found any further confirmation elsewhere, it is dismaying to see how deeply the idea has permeated educated thought nevertheless.

~~Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English -by- John McWhorter

Day 281: The Poorer Nations

The massive wave of anticolonial movements that opened with the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and came into its own by the last quarter of the nineteenth century broke the legitimacy of colonial domination. No longer could it be said that a European power had the manifest destiny to govern other peoples. When such colonial adventures were tried out, they were chastised for being immoral.

In 1928, the anticolonial leaders gathered in Brussels for a meeting of the League Against Imperialism. This was the first attempt to create a global platform to unite the visions of the anticolonial movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Considerations of expediency and the convulsions of World War II blocked any progress on such a platform. It would have to wait until 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia, when a smattering of newly independent or almost independent African and Asian countries sent their leaders to confer on a planetary agenda. The Bandung dynamic inaugurated the Third World Project, a seemingly incoherent set of demands that were actually very carefully worked out through the institutions of the United Nations and what would become, in 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

The central concept for the new nations was the Third World. The Third World was not a place; it was a project. Galvanized by the mass movements and by the failures of capitalist mal-development, the leaderships in the darker nations looked to each other for another agenda. Politically they wanted more planetary democracy. No more the serfs of their colonial masters, they wanted to have a voice and power on the world stage. What did that voice say? It spoke of three main themes:

a.  Peace. It had become apparent by the mid 1950s and early 1960s that the Cold War between the two superpower blocs was catastrophic for the planet. Not only might the nuclear-fueled confrontation result in Armageddon, but the sheer waste of social resources on the arms race would distort the possibility of human development. By the early 1950s, the United States was spending 10 percent of its gross domestic product on its defense sector, a development that raised the ire of President Eisenhower, who at the end of the decade bemoaned the growth of the “military-industrial complex.” This complex did not end at the borders of the United States. It had ambitions for the planet, wanting to sell arms to every country and to insinuate a security complex over the social agenda of the Third World Project. No wonder that the first concrete task after the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade was to send India’s Nehru and Ghana’s Nkrumah to Moscow, and Indonesia’s Sukarno and Mali’s Keita to Washington, carrying the NAM’s Appeal for Peace. Kennedy and Khrushchev offered the typical bromides, but did not reverse the tensions that intensified with the building of the Berlin Wall and the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie. The Third World Project kept faith with the Bandung communiqué, which called for “the regulation, limitation, control and reduction of all armed forces and armaments, including the prohibition of the production, experimentation and use of all weapons of mass destruction, and to establish effective international controls to this end.” The International Atomic Energy Agency of 1957 was a child of Bandung, and a cornerstone of the Third World Project.

b.  Bread. The new nations of Africa and Asia, and the renewed national agendas of Latin America, explicitly recognized that the countries they had seized were impoverished. Any direction forward would have to confront the legacy of colonial economy—with the advantages seized by the Atlantic powers and the trade rules drawn up to benefit those historical, not comparative, advantages. Economists like Raúl Prebisch of Argentina, who would become the first director-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), challenged the Atlantic institutions such as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the IMF, which Prebisch called “a conspiracy against the laws of the market.” When Prebisch took the helm at UNCTAD, the economic arm of the Third World Project, he announced the need for a “new order in the international economy … so that the market functions properly not only for the big countries but the developing countries in their relations with the developed.” It was out of this general framework that the Third World fought for a revision of the “free trade” agenda, for better commodity prices, for primary goods cartels (out of which came OPEC), and for a more generous policy for the transfer of investment and technology from North to South. Fought at each turn by the Atlantic powers, the Third World took refuge in the UN General Assembly with the 1973 New International Economic Order resolution. It was the highest point of the Third World Project.

c.  Justice. The NAM, created in 1961, was designed as a secretariat of the Third World Project, with the Group of 77 (1964) to act on its behalf in the United Nations. The founders of the NAM (Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Tito of Yugoslavia) recognized that little of their agenda would be able to move forward without a more democratic international structure. The UN had been hijacked by the five permanent members of the Security Council. The IMF and the World Bank had been captured by the Atlantic powers, and the GATT was designed to undermine any attempt by the new nations to revise the international economic order. It was hoped that the NAM, and the G77, would put pressure on both the West and the East to afford political space to the new nations. It was not to be. Nigeria’s foreign minister, Jaja Wachuku, came to the United Nations on September 30, 1963, and put the problem plainly: “Does this Organization want the African States to be just vocal members, with no right to express their views on any particular matter in important organs of the United Nations[?] Are we going to continue to be veranda boys?” The implication was that the NAM states would watch from the balcony while the five permanent members controlled the debate within the UN.

That was the Third World Project: for peace, for bread, and for justice. It came to the world stage on shaky terrain. The houses of the new nations were not in order. They were constrained by a lack of democracy in their own political worlds, combined with mismanagement of economic resources and a very shallow reconstruction of the social landscape. The old social classes hesitated before the anticolonial mass movements, but as these were demobilized the old elites called on the generals or on right-wing populist politicians to sweep up the mess. The Project was hampered by these failings, but it was not these limitations that did it in.

What did it in was the Atlantic project.

Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.
-Henry Kissinger, 1969

In 1975, the seven leaders of the major advanced industrial countries met in the Château de Rambouillet to decide the fate of the planet. They were the Group of 7: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada. The Rambouillet gathering was their first formal meeting. The G7 leaders were detained by four facts. Three of them were encumbrances that they wished to do away with:

1.  The social-democratic agenda that many of them emerged from had now become expensive (in terms not only of the social wages that had to be paid, but also the wage packets to the restive workers).

2.  The communist agenda, which had become more accommodating, but was still able to offer those restive workers an alternative.

3.  The Third World Project, whose most recent instantiations—the Oil Weapon of 1973, accompanied by the demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO)—had come as a genuine shock.

These three horizons needed to be abandoned. The fourth problem was a more general one, and it ended up being the solution to their other three irritants: the new geography of production.

Gerald Ford opened the conversation at Rambouillet with a plea that the main thrust had to be for the leaders “to ensure that the current world economic situation is not seen as a crisis in the democratic or capitalist system.” The G7 had to prevent the capitalist crisis from becoming a political one; it had to be handled as a technical economic problem. This was all very well as rhetoric, but it was not a salve from the point of view of the more realistic people in the room.

Helmut Schmidt, who was a socialist and chancellor of West Germany, took the floor:
 
Harold [Wilson] of the UK, you talked of viable industries, and indicated that this excluded lame ducks. You referred to textiles as an example. I am a close friend of the chairman of the textile workers union in Germany. It is a union of a shrinking industry. I would hope that this would not be repeated outside this room. Given the high level of wages in Europe, I cannot help but believe that in the long run textile industries here will have to vanish. We cannot ward off cheaper competition from outside. It is a pity because it is viable; capital invested in a job in the textile industry in Germany is as high as it is in the German steel mills. But wages in East Asia are very low compared with ours. The German textile industry is viable, but will vanish in ten or twelve years.

Foresight, collusion: it does not matter. What matters is the emergence of the new geography of production, viz. the disarticulation of Northern Fordism, the emergence of satellite and undersea cable technology, the containerization of ships, and other technological shifts that enabled firms to take advantage of differential wage rates. In Schmidt’s case, the wages of East Asia.

~~The Poorer Nations : A Possible History Of The Global South -by- Vijay Prashad.

Day 280: Anarchy Evolution

In high school, I was so eager to learn more about evolution that I applied for a volunteer job at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. I had no experience with museum work, and my grades certainly didn’t identify me as a promising junior scientist. But the museum’s department of paleontology always had more field material than the staff could handle. They accepted my application and put me to work in the fossil-preparation laboratory.

I had to ride the bus an hour and a half each way to get from my mom’s house in the Valley to the museum, but I didn’t mind the hassle. The staff at the museum collected large quantities of rocks from the field, which were full of fossilized material. The fossil preparation lab had two full-time technicians, each with an elaborate bench full of tools and alien-looking fossils; a couple of university students with smaller desks; and a modest preparation station for volunteers. My job was to carefully chip away at the rock and discard the sandstone surrounding a fossil, using dental tools, toothbrushes, and a pneumatic device called a zip-scribe. As soon as I finished, the bone would be whisked away for study in another part of the building.

Most of this work was extremely tedious. It might take two hours to reveal a square inch of a bone or extract a tooth from its grainy sandstone matrix. My technique rapidly improved, but I also found that I wanted to learn something more about the animals whose fossils I was preparing. I knew there had to be a larger context within which these fossils were significant. I wanted to know what the fossils meant, not just what they were.
The placement of organisms into categories is known as taxonomy. Many professions have this kind of expertise. An experienced brick mason knows more about the characteristics of bricks than any of us would imagine. He might be able to tell you what quarry the sand came from, how hot the fire was, and what kind of molding was used. His naming of all the different types of bricks is a little like the practice of taxonomy.

My work at the Natural History Museum was necessary for a beginner naturalist, because I needed to learn how to name and categorize organisms. I also took great pleasure in knowing the formal scientific names of plants and animals—it was a kind of secret knowledge that I had and most people didn’t. But naming, labeling, and categorizing assumes a rigid order to things, and the really important and interesting things in life are not static; they continually change. What I was interested in was systematics—the relationship between fossils and modern-day organisms.

Have you ever met anyone with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure rock bands? I knew a group of people in Los Angeles who spent their time browsing the used bins at record shops back in the days when music was recorded on vinyl (which is making a comeback these days, even though most kids have never heard anything other than compressed 128-kilobit-per-second digital recordings). Some of these people were so obsessed with obscure bands that they deserved the moniker “vinyl vermin.” They collected lists of band names and knew all the rarest albums available. There could be an obscure garage band from England that released just five hundred copies of a single album. None of the rest of us would ever have heard of the band, but the vinyl vermin could tell you more about it than you ever wanted to know.

The problem with most vinyl vermin, I’ve found, is that they let their knowledge of trivia overwhelm their judgment. Despite their encyclopedic learning, I can’t recall having a single discussion with them about whether any of the bands were actually any good. Maybe a band that released just five hundred copies of an album was an undiscovered gem, or maybe the music was so bad that no other record company would hire it to make another album. I never knew what most of the vinyl vermin thought about the qualities of musical groups or genres, because they never talked about anything other than trivial facts and statistics.

The lesson I learned from the vinyl vermin was that the most important thing about gathering information is what you do with it. The “secret language” of taxonomy might have made me feel special, but words applied to fossil species (or obscure records) didn’t satisfy me. Taxonomy is a beautiful art. But without theory behind it, taxonomy amounts to words on a museum label. Even today, new species are being discovered and described at a remarkable rate, and each newly discovered species receives a unique official name. But what does the naming and ordering of species say about their relationship to other species and to us? I wanted wisdom, not just knowledge.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my experiences at the Natural History Museum had interesting parallels with the history of fossil collecting in the years before Darwin. As early as the sixteenth century, naturalists in Europe and, to some extent, in other parts of the world began to collect fossils, exotic plants and animals, and other natural objects. They would organize these objects into collections, which they often displayed in “cabinets of curiosities” that the public could view for a fee. Like old-time record stores, these places were repositories of obscure artifacts. Some of the largest collections became the cores of today’s most famous natural history museums.

These early naturalists were dualists. They believed in an ordered, intelligently designed nature that was not constantly changing but rather was lying in wait for God’s inquisitive children to discover. All species were assumed to be specially created by God. The obvious similarities between organisms therefore must be part of God’s plan. But because these similarities were created by God rather than an intrinsic part of nature, early naturalists felt free to use their own schemes for arranging and naming the animals and plants in their collections. This caused utter confusion. It was as if all the vinyl vermin had created their own schemes for bands and musical genres without consulting one another or trying to adhere to a common classification. Without a proper taxonomy, God’s design in nature might never be understood.

The problem of naming and organizing organisms was solved by the seventeenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. He devised a system that used two names for every species, in the same way that people generally have two names. The first name assigns an organism to a genus of broadly similar organisms. This is analogous to your first name. You might know a lot of people who have the same name as you. But your first name doesn’t make you unique. In like fashion, Linnaeus’s goal was to have the first name of a group of related species—called the “genus”—identify a type of organisms. For example, the genus Canis includes dogs, coyotes, wolves, and jackals. The second name (sometimes called the “trivial” name) identifies a unique subset of organisms within the larger genus. This subset is called the species. So the coyotes that roam the woods near my house in upstate New York are Canis latrans. By Linnaeus’s system, humans are Homo sapiens. At the moment, we are the only species in our genus, Homo, though in the past, various other species in our genus existed, sometimes contemporaneously.

Linnaeus had an encyclopedic knowledge of the species that had been discovered, and he knew that they showed varying levels of anatomical similarity to one another. But he operated under the dualist assumption that nature was carefully planned by the Creator. His objective was to figure out God’s scheme, not to question the supernatural wisdom of Creation. For example, in different parts of the world, different species seemed to live in very similar ways and serve very similar biological functions. But this did not require an explanation in Linnaeus’s time. It was all part of God’s plan. The socially acceptable form of intellectual pursuit was to show how various plants and animals conformed to an intelligently designed world. In the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, there was very little opportunity to gain wisdom from the study of organisms.

~~Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God -by- Greg Graffin & Steve Olson

Day 279: Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals

Often, when human visitors walk up to the chimpanzees at the Yerkes Field Station, an adult female named Georgia hurries to the spigot to collect a mouthful of water before they arrive. She then casually mingles with the rest of the colony behind the mesh fence of their outdoor compound, and not even the best observer will notice anything unusual about her. If necessary, Georgia will wait minutes with closed lips until the visitors come near. Then there will be shrieks, laughs, jumps, and sometimes falls, when she suddenly sprays them.   

This is not a mere "anecdote" as Georgia does this sort of thing predictably, and I have known quite a few other apes good at surprising naive people. And not only them. Hediger (1955), the great Swiss zoo biologist, recounts how even when he was fully prepared to meet the challenge, paying attention to the ape's every move, he nevertheless got drenched by an old chimpanzee with a lifetime of experience with this game.   

Once, finding myself in a similar situation with Georgia (i.e., aware that she had gone to the spigot and was sneaking up on me), I looked her straight into the eyes and pointed my finger at her, warning, in Dutch, "I have seen you!" She immediately stepped away and let part of the water drop, swallowing the rest. I certainly do not wish to claim that she understands Dutch, but she must have sensed that I knew what she was up to, and that I was not going to be an easy target.   

The curious situation in which scientists who work with these fascinating creatures find themselves is that they cannot help but    interpret many of their actions in human terms, which then automatically provokes the wrath of philosophers and other scientists who work with domestic rats, or pigeons, or not with animals at all. Unable to speak from firsthand experience, these critics must feel confident indeed when they discard accounts by primatologists as anthropomorphic, and explain how anthropomorphism is to be avoided.   

Although no reports of spontaneous ambush tactics in rats have come to my attention, these animals could conceivably be trained with patient reinforcement to retain water in their mouth and stand amongst other rats. And if rats can learn to do so, what is the big deal? The message of the critics of anthropomorphism is something along the lines of "Georgia has no plan; Georgia does not know that she is tricking people; Georgia just learns things faster than a rat." Thus, instead of seeking the origin of Georgia's actions within her, and attributing intentions to her, they propose to seek the origin in the environment and the way it shapes behavior. Rather than being the designer of her own disagreeable greeting ceremony, this ape fell victim to the irresistible rewards of human surprise and annoyance. Georgia is innocent!   

But why let her off the hook that easily? Why would any human being who acts this way be scolded, arrested, or held accountable, whereas any animal, even a species that resembles us so closely, is considered a mere passive instrument of stimulus-response contingencies? Inasmuch as the absence of intentionality is as difficult to prove as its presence, and inasmuch as no one has yet demonstrated that animals differ fundamentally from people in this regard, it is hard to see the scientific basis for such contrasting assumptions. Surely, the origin of this dualism is to be found partly outside science.   

The dilemma faced by behavioral science today, and the grand theme underlying the present volume, can be summarized as a choice between cognitive and evolutionary parsimony (de Waal, 1991). Cognitive parsimony is the traditional canon of American behaviorism that tells us not to invoke higher mental capacities if we can explain a phenomenon with lower ones. This favors a simple explanation, such as conditioning of a response, over a more complex one, such as intentional deception. Evolutionary parsimony, on the other hand, considers shared phylogeny. It posits that if closely related species act the same, the underlying mental processes are probably the same, too. The alternative would be to assume the evolution of divergent processes for similar behavior; a wildly uneconomic assumption for organisms with only a few million years of separate evolution. If we normally do not propose different causes for the same behavior in, say, dogs and wolves, why should we do so for humans and chimpanzees, which are genetically as close, or closer?   

In short, the cherished principle of parsimony has taken on two faces. At the same time that we are supposed to favor low-level over high-level cognitive explanations, we also should not create a double standard according to which shared human and ape behavior is explained differently. If accounts of human behavior commonly invoke complex cognitive abilitiesand they most definitely do (Michel, 1991)we must carefully consider whether these abilities are perhaps also present in apes. We do not need to jump to conclusions, but the possibility should at least be allowed on the table.   

Even if the need for this intellectual breathing room is most urgently felt in relation to our primate relatives, it is limited neither to this taxonomic group nor to apparent instances of complex cognition. Students of animal behavior are faced with a choice between classifying animals as automatons or granting them volition and information-processing capacities. Whereas one school warns against assuming things we cannot prove, another school warns against leaving out what may be there: even insects and fish come across to the human observer as internally driven, seeking, wanting systems with an awareness of their surroundings. Inasmuch as descriptions from the latter perspective place animals closer to us than to machines, they adopt a language we customarily use for human action. Inevitably, these descriptions sound anthropomorphic.

~~Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals -ed-  Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, H. Lyn Miles