Truth & Jest

Occupation Troops: Thoughts on Viewing the American Cemetery at Normandy

2010-11-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

Beneath clean white markers on manicured lawns, American troops forever occupy lands wrested from tyrants’ brutal grip. Across its broadest seas, the world’s great ships sail in freedom purchased with the priceless lives of brave Americans who forever occupy their depths.

American troops occupy their own strife-torn nation by the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands: Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam. As American troops occupy our great mausoleums and humble churchyards, they confer upon each a proud equality that transcends a grave’s opulence, or its lack.

Around the world in nature’s tender, remote embrace, unmarked patches of forest, desert and field are occupied by American troops whose ultimate moments remain unrecorded and unattended by their countrymen’s gentle care.

Yes, Americans are global occupation troops. In quiet repose they occupy places whose soil would be bloody still had it not been redeemed with American blood. They occupy the memories of grateful peoples and nations that would not exist, whose hopes would be hollow, had they never greeted hopeful young Americans come to vouchsafe freedom’s promise.

They landed here armed with a pledge of liberty, and occupied a territory even more vast than all the world’s battlefields and graveyards – the boundless realm of humanity’s highest aspirations and its children’s optimism.

They occupied a savior’s place in the tearful prayers of the oppressed.

By the thousands, hundreds, dozens and alone, American troops will always occupy large tracts of the world and small specks of eternity. For their devotion, the world and eternity are both brighter places.

For all its momentary troubles, the American dream enduringly occupies the collective mind of a hopeful world – a testament to beloved sons and daughters who will remain as occupiers of nations and seas from which they shall not depart until land and water cease to be.

Belligerent by Nature

2010-10-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

I don’t have to step too far out my back door to know that some of my neighbors are – I’ll say this gently – disturbed. It’s evident in the way they bluster and flap and shriek the most outrageous things. Only recently have I learned that such behavior has a proper scientific name: ornithologists call it “countersinging.” The label is spot-on, as my rowdy neighbors are songbirds.

Dr. Jeremy Hyman of Duke University, avian biologist and animal behaviorist, has heard what I’m hearing. What’s more, he’s listened carefully enough to write an interesting – to me, at least – 2003 paper on countersinging: “Countersinging interactions…include singing matched song types and singing so as to overlap individual songs…. Several studies have documented that matched countersinging and overlapping are correlated with aggressiveness and readiness to escalate confrontations, suggesting that matching and overlapping are honest signals of aggressive intent.”

My backyard neighbors are essentially yelling at one another, trying to shout the competition down, to jam their rival’s signal. Eerily, much of what they’re saying sounds like human words or syllables, and often has been rendered as such by authors of birding guides.

The Tufted Titmouse takes up a cry that sounds for all the world like “Cheater, cheater, cheater.” I find that accusation offensive, as I am innocent. Besides, he has no proof.

My Carolina Wrens are prone to unwarranted panic: “Jeopardy, jeopardy, jeopardy!” Of course, it’s a false alarm.

There’s an anonymous libel being spread – anonymous, as I cannot identify the voice’s owner – that goes, “she HURTS you, HURTS you, HURTS you.” Not just slanderous, it smacks of misogyny. That call has even the experts stumped.

By an inquiry to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, perhaps America’s foremost repository of songbird savoir-faire, I am reliably informed that this time of year the woods are filled with immature birds that have not yet learned to vocalize in a refined manner. To my mind, the birds’ scholarship is faulty and I’ve just about abandoned hope that they’ll ever enjoy mature discourse.

The Towhee is the most annoying of all, prone to protracted spells of belligerent paranoia. Daily, he hurls himself against his own reflection in our kitchen’s bay window. Lunging repeatedly at the self he can’t recognize, he beats his wings against an imaginary peril only a bird brain could concoct. It sounds like someone’s lobbing tennis balls against the glass. Occasionally he’ll pause long enough to wrap his battered beak around the trademark refrain, “DRINK your TEEEEEEE…DRINK your TEEEEEEE.” Not a useful proposition, as I’m certain tea won’t help. I’m amused that he, of all birds, would recommend a beverage I associate with gentility.

In his 1928 book, The Outermost House, naturalist Henry Beston described the birds with whom his cottage shared the Cape Cod dunes as “…not brethren…not underlings [but] other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time [and] the splendor and travail of the earth.” For the most part, my little wooded Bestonia has splendor to spare, its colorful citizens flitting through a verdant lattice, threading among tendrils of light and shadow woven by low-angle sun through crisp autumn air. Great choruses of beguiling warbles and cheery, lyrical trills rise and fall as optimistic little neighbors transact their nation’s business.

It also has its share of “travail,” courtesy of a few pessimistic agitators with voices completely out of proportion to their message’s merit. They are ridiculous little hotheads whose songs and behaviors remain predictably rote – accusations, defamation, paranoia; confused flapping at invented threats while demanding that I drink my tea.

I can’t blame them – they’re just silly birds with a sort of hard-wired biological imperative to be cantankerous. They may actually be flattering me, says Jennifer Scales in a 2009 dissertation submitted at the College of Charleston. Scales correlates elevated levels of songbird aggression with the superior quality of their habitat. Measured by civic clamor alone, my Betstonia is a great nation indeed.

But I will say that occasionally, for their own good – because like Jeremy Hyman I’ve been carefully listening instead of just hearing – I have to step off the patio and wave my arms to shut them up. It’s when they’ve gotten a little too self-absorbed; inebriated, as Disraeli would say, with the exuberance of their own verbosity. It’s when, beyond the echo of their own quarrelsome voices, they have missed the distant cry of the approaching hawk.

E Pluribus Unum

2010-09-04T06:59:00.000-07:00

Across the Potomac from Georgetown, between Rosslyn and Arlington and awash in the bright, lingering notes of the Netherlands Carillon, stands one of America’s great icons. The Marine Corps War Memorial took sculptor Felix de Weldon three years to fix in meticulously and faithfully detailed bronze what Joe Rosenthal froze on film in a fraction of a second. Observers with no knowledge or memory of the events of February, 1945, might presume that all six of the Iwo Jima flag raisers were Marines. They’d be wrong.

Pharmacist’s Mate 2nd Class John Bradley was a Navy Corpsman, a combat medic, who had climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi with a 40-man patrol from E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines. As Suribachi was being softened-up by aerial bombs and naval artillery, Bradley had been on the beach tending to a badly wounded Marine. He gave the man the last of his water before beginning the long, thirsty, 560 foot climb up the mountain and another 24 hours of tropical combat with no water of his own. Bradley is easy to spot among the other giant figures of the memorial. He’s the one with the empty canteen pouch.

In the agonizing hours after the towers fell on 9/11, 235-year-old St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway in Manhattan became the hub of a massive rescue and relief effort. The chapel, just across the street from Ground Zero, had been shielded from the massive shock wave and debris of the collapse by the nine-story bulk of 5 World Trade Center. In the dolorous moonscape that had been Manhattan, the Episcopal chapel stood, unscratched, as a magnet for both helper and helpless alike.

The staff of St. Paul’s has poignant stories from that time: George Washington’s historic personal pew being used for medical triage, crowds of exhausted rescue workers for whom the sanctuary was an impromptu dormitory, 15,000 volunteers serving 500,000 meals, and a visit by one frail old lady.

She was African-American, and they guess she was in her 80s. She had taken the subway from the South Bronx all the way to Lower Manhattan, blustered through police barricades and slowly made her way across the toxic crime scene. At the chapel door she lingered only long enough to hand the staff her cane – her contribution, she explained, to be used by anyone among the injured. Then she turned and hobbled anonymously back toward the Bronx.

Years ago I spent a couple of summers counseling at a camp where it was always one of my great delights to recite an allegory we counselors used to call, “The Fable of Heaven and Hell.” It’s the story of a man who, upon arrival at the Pearly Gates, discovers St. Peter’s computer is on the blink and it’s impossible to confirm his reservation. While we’re waiting for a repair, suggests the old apostle, why not let me show you what you’ve avoided? In a flash, the two are standing on a vast plain, spanned by an impossibly long picnic table. The table is heaped with delicacies of every description and set with the finest china. This, says Peter, is Satan’s realm. Our hero, of course, is not buying it. Where’s the suffering, the flames, Bosch’s deranged hellscape of grotesque demons and decaying sinners? Just wait, says Peter, just wait.

And soon they see the legions of the damned approach the enormous table. They are sickly, jaundiced and lethargic, and our hero soon sees why. In place of a right hand, each has a three foot long fork; in place of the left, a three foot long spoon. The denizens of Hell heap their plates and sit, but it’s joyless. Their devilish utensils make it impossible to bring the food to their mouths. Well, the wizened saint gently asks, seen enough?

Happily, the Pearly Gates are up and running when they return and, after a few taps on his keyboard, St. Peter bids welcome to the celestial kingdom. But our hero lurches to a drop-jawed halt just inside the boundary: Heaven, it seems, is a vast plain, spanned by an impossibly long picnic table. The table is heaped with delicacies of every description and set with the finest china. How can it be!? Just wait, counsels Peter, just wait.

They see the angelic multitudes approach the enormous table, laughing, vigorous and beautiful, but our hero cannot understand why. Because in place of a right hand, each has a three-foot fork; in place of the left, a three-foot spoon. The chosen say a quiet blessing, then heap their plates and sit. They load their ungainly utensils and…each leans forward to feed the person across the table.

And that, we would announce to our campers, was the way to make our own lives a lot less hellish: be selfless – feed the person across the table. Invariably, dinner that night would be a messy affair.

The upcoming 9/11 anniversary is what got me thinking about Iwo Jima and St. Paul’s and days in piney woods. I’m just sappy that way, but I’m a guy who likes some occasional reassurance that there still might be some selflessness left in the world. I’m the kind of naïf who believes it only takes simple acts of serial kindness to make humanity truly humane. If only we could take a moment and sit, metaphorically, at the same table.

Today, America seems mired in demagoguery unparalleled since the days of McCarthyism. Uncritical masses are prey to master propagandists of every persuasion who have replaced informed commentary with performance art. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, doctrines known to be untrue are being preached to people known to be idiots. The result is factious, belligerent discord. We remain a country, but we seem too ouchy to be truly a nation.

On this anniversary of September 11^th, who will join me in resurrecting the spirit of September 12^th? I’m talking not about fear, grief or anger, but about that day when a shell-shocked nation awoke to find that the polarity of right/left, native/immigrant, white/black, gay/straight, choice/life, rap/country, young/old and rich/poor had been switched off. I’m talking about the feeling of national unity, the open expressions of concern for strangers’ welfare, the knowing nods that said we’re all in this together. I’d like to think that next week, for at least one day, we can get that feeling back again. Each of us must have some morsel to offer the person across the table. Or a canteen. Or a cane.

Cabin Pressure

2010-08-12T13:49:00.000-07:00

There is nothing heroic about Steven Slater.

Slater is the JetBlue flight attendant whose dramatic Monday meltdown has become a curious cause célèbre among the take-this-job-and-shove-it crowd. As his assigned flight from Pittsburgh to New York’s JFK Airport was taxiing to the arrival gate, a woman reportedly stood up and began removing luggage from an overhead compartment. As he was instructing her to sit down, things got a bit physical. In a written statement to a New York court, Slater said, "I lost patience after a female passenger had an argument with another passenger and then opened the bin door hitting me on the head without apologizing.” In fact, she offered an expletive instead. Faced with a situation requiring tact and maturity, Slater chose not to step up but to step out.

In a meltdown reminiscent of Peter Finch’s deranged on-air “mad as hell” speech in the film Network, Slater grabbed the plane’s intercom to announce, “I’ve had it” – though not that succinctly – in a tirade that included volleying the passenger’s unladylike expletive back at her as a compound word. He then grabbed a can of beer from the beverage cart, popped the cabin door, inflated the emergency evacuation chute and slid into American folklore.

Slater’s mother, a retired flight attendant, told television reporters that her son actually exercised more restraint than she would have in the same situation. As I write this, a Facebook fan page dedicated to his antics has 178,381 followers, and the newly-unemployed and potentially unemployable Slater is being hailed as a working-class hero. Apparently, lessons learned at home have carried him far.

I find in Steven Slater more to be pitied than admired, more evidence of a deeply disturbed and conflicted personality than of an emblematic crusader. According to police, Slater’s dramatic exit was not immediate; he was reportedly sent to the front of the plane to cool down, and was observed drinking alcohol freely. In his MySpace profile, Slater describes himself as “Beating alcoholism and substance abuse ‘one day at a time.’” Monday wasn’t one of those days. Besotted thinking may be evident in his PA announcement, “I’ve been in this business 28 years,” an impressive achievement for a 39-year-old.

Slater’s conflicted view of his job is found in some of his regular posts, as “skyliner747,” to the online industry forum Airliners.net, in which he discusses the very issues that came to a head this week. On January 18, 2008, he vigorously deplored the actions of an agitated flight attendant who apparently exchanged angry words with a passenger:

“If the flight attendant did indeed speak the words alleged afterwords [sic] and rant and rave…then she obviously lost the very composure she was hired to have…. I have found that a little tact and diplomacy on my part goes a long, long way to making my own job much easier. ‘Busy’ or not, unprofessionalism is unacceptable, and you don't speak to people that way. Period…. I am always amazed by the (fortunately few) FA's on power trips. We know who they are, and as unpleasant as they are for the passenger, imagine the nightmare of working three days with these people in that close proximity!”

By contrast, his comment on March 17^th of this year, rendered here exactly as posted, makes him seem to have hardened: “I hate to be bag nazi when i work a flight, but I feel if I am not, then I am letting down all those who cooperate and thry to help out as well.”

In every account I’ve seen, other flight attendants are appalled by his behavior – “unprofessional” is the common description – and the great injury it has done to their good names. They seem to be in general agreement that no amount of provocation can establish an excuse for Slater’s actions. So how has the industry’s bête noir become America’s man of the hour?

I submit that the popular appeal of Steven Slater’s psychotic episode proves that the new model of public discourse in America is the tantrum. Our cable channels have devolved into little more than protracted, program-length tantrums about politics and culture and people we just don’t like, and such institutionalized outrage has become a standard that suborns individually outrageous behavior. When we make angry people our heroes, personal restraint equates to weakness.

Maybe Slater is such an online darling because bad manners suffuse so much of the online community. Emboldened by username anonymity in increasingly rude web interactions, civil discourse has been replaced by the instant gratification of in-your-face exchanges calculated to give offense. Immune to the idea that maturity is measured by one’s ability to delay gratification, too many ouchy, self-absorbed people are just one indignity away from behaving disgracefully in person. But only the immature throw tantrums, or admire those who do.

Steven Slater’s actions cost JetBlue plenty: $25,000 to replace the emergency slide, plus lost use of the aircraft while the work is underway. The airline has also distributed $10,000 worth of flight vouchers as an apology to the passengers aboard his flight. It’s reasonable to assume that the carrier will act to recover its losses from the “hero” who caused them.

Add the potential civil judgment to the other costs incurred by Slater himself: loss of a career and a possible felony record for malicious mischief, reckless endangerment and trespassing. His defenders say the charges are too severe, considering – no doubt – that he was provoked. And, that they find it entertaining. But this was no wacky prank. Beyond the loss to JetBlue, there is the manifestly unsafe act of deploying the emergency slide while the plane was at the gate, an explosive, 3,000-p.s.i. event that took six seconds or less and placed ground crews at risk of injury or death. Thankfully, no one was injured and, fortunately, Slater’s emotional shortcomings were revealed in an episode other than a genuine emergency in which the emotional demand would have been exponentially greater.

I think it’s only fair and probably unnecessary to say that Steven Slater is an aberration in a profession otherwise worthy of our esteem. When his 15 minutes of fame is over, we can get back to remembering flight attendants Donna Dent, Doreen Welsh, and Sheila Dail, who earned the world’s admiration and gratitude by guiding 150 passengers to safety as US Airways Flight 1549 floated helplessly in the frigid Hudson River. Or we can appreciate the everyday heroics of the Lufthansa flight attendant in this video, who used a pillow fight to raise coach passengers’ spirits.

There are heroes great and small in every walk of life. But in his or any other, Steven Slater is not one of them.

Unknown Alternatives

2010-08-06T09:35:00.000-07:00

War: a violent conflict between nation-states employing systematic destruction organized on an industrial scale with an outcome decided by force of arms.

By that definition, America’s last war formally ended in September of 1945. For the preceding 14 years – since the September, 1931, invasion of Manchuria – the Empire of Japan had been inflicting industrial-scale inhumanity across East Asia and the Pacific.

America’s systematic response also spawned an entirely new industry for which today is an important anniversary. It was at 8:15 a.m. on this date in 1945 that war was elevated to a new level about 580 meters above the Shima Surgical Clinic in Hiroshima.

Eleven days earlier the Allies had issued an ultimatum – the Potsdam Declaration – demanding a Japanese surrender and threatening “utter devastation of the Japanese homeland” as the alternative. The demonstration of that alternative over Hiroshima, and three days later at Nagasaki, has been the subject of debate ever since: Was it necessary?

On August 6, 1945, Japan was an aggressor whose martial and economic fortunes had failed. It was largely powerless to resist industrial-scale warfare. Five months earlier, 16 square miles of Tokyo – nearly four times the destruction at Hiroshima – was obliterated in one night of American bombing. The 100,000 Japanese deaths in that one Tokyo raid exceed the immediate death toll of either subsequent atomic attack. In addition, an estimated one million were injured and another million left homeless. It is clear that the Japanese homeland was suffering greatly prior to August 1945 on the strength of conventional munitions alone. What, ask historians on both sides of the question, could nuclear bombs do to change Japan’s mind that ordinary high explosives weren’t already doing?

We all breathe the air of our times. An insightful sample of the air from 65 years ago is contained in eight paragraphs (text in gray, below) of a United States government document prepared by a blue-ribbon panel, the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey: The Effects of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, June 19, 1946:

Even in the target cities, it must be emphasized, the atomic bomb did not uniformly destroy the Japanese fighting spirit. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when compared with other Japanese cities, were not more defeatist than average. The bombs were tremendous personal catastrophes to the survivors, but neither time nor understanding of the revolutionary threat of the atomic bomb permitted them to see in these personal catastrophes a final blow to Japan’s prospects for victory or negotiated peace.

The further question of the effects of the bombs on the morale of the Japanese leaders and their decision to abandon the war is tied up with other factors. The atomic bomb had more effect on the thinking of government leaders than on the morale of the rank and file of civilians outside of the target areas. It cannot be said, however, that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor.

This decision did not, of course, represent the unanimous feeling of those influential in government circles. As early as the spring of 1944 a group of former prime ministers and others close to the Emperor had been making efforts toward bringing the war to an end. This group, including such men as Admiral Okada, Admiral Yonai, Prince Konoye, and Marquis Kido, had been influential in effecting Tojo’s resignation and in making Admiral Suzuki Prime Minister after Kioso's fall. Even in the Suzuki cabinet, however, agreement was far from unanimous. The Navy Minister, Admiral Yonai, was sympathetic, but the War Minister, General Anami, usually represented the fight-to-the-end policy of the Army. In the Supreme War Guidance Council, a sort of inner cabinet, his adherence to that line was further assured by the participation of the Army nod Navy Chiefs of Staff, so that on the peace issue this organization was evenly divided, with these three opposing the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Navy Minister. At any time military (especially Army) dissatisfaction with the Cabinet might have eventuated at least in its fall and possibly in the "liquidation" of the anti-war members.

Thus the problem facing the peace leaders in the government was to bring about a surrender despite the hesitation of the War Minister and the opposition of the Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff. This had to be done, moreover, without precipitating counter measures by the Army which would eliminate the entire peace group. This was done ultimately by bringing the Emperor actively into the decision to accept the Potsdam terms. So long as the Emperor openly supported such a policy and could be presented to the country as doing so, the military, which had fostered and lived on the idea of complete obedience to the Emperor, could not effectively rebel.

A preliminary step in this direction had been taken at the Imperial Conference on 26 June. At this meeting, the Emperor, taking an active part despite his custom to the contrary, stated that he desired the development of a plan to end the war as well as one to defend the home islands [italics mine]. This was followed by a renewal of earlier efforts to get the Soviet Union to intercede with the United States, which were effectively answered by the Potsdam Declaration on 25 July and the Russian declaration of war on 9 August.

The atomic bombings considerably speeded up these political maneuverings within the government. This in itself was partly a morale effect, since there is ample evidence that members of the Cabinet were worried by the prospect of further atomic bombings, especially on the remains of Tokyo. The bombs did not convince the military that defense of the home Islands was impossible, if their behavior in government councils is adequate testimony. It did permit the Government to say, however, that no army without the weapon could possibly resist an enemy who had it, thus saving "face" for the Army leaders and not reflecting on the competence of Japanese industrialists or the valor of the Japanese soldier. In the Supreme War Guidance Council voting remained divided, with the War Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff unwilling to accept unconditional surrender. There seem [sic] little doubt, however, that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weakened their inclination to oppose the peace group.

The peace effort culminated in an Imperial conference held on the night of 9 August and continued into the early hours of 10 August, for which the stage was set by the atomic bomb and the Russian war declaration. At this meeting the Emperor, again breaking his customary silence, stated specifically that he wanted acceptance of the Potsdam terms.

A quip was current in high [Japanese] government circles at this time that the atomic bomb was the real Kamikaze [“divine wind”], since it saved Japan from further useless slaughter and destruction. It is apparent that in the atomic bomb the Japanese found the opportunity which they had been seeking, to break the existing deadlock within the government over acceptance of the Potsdam terms.

Critics of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings note that the Japanese were discussing surrender months before the nuclear attacks. But the June 26th decision of the Supreme War Guidance Council was ambiguous: in the section of the bombing survey I’ve italicized, the emperor is portrayed as presenting not one option – surrender – but two, thereby preserving the council’s even division on the question.

America’s systematic analysis of the nuclear attacks was just one of three official postwar strategic bombing surveys. Panels also evaluated the theater-wide impacts of aerial strikes in Europe and the Pacific. Paul Nitze, who subsequently spent four decades as an architect of American cold war policy, eventually as a special advisor to President Ronald Reagan, was a member of both the A-bomb survey and the broader survey of bombing in the Pacific theater. Writing the report on the latter, Nitze makes a much stronger statement than any contained in the former, casting the nuclear attacks in a less favorable light:

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Emperor Hirohito declared the Japanese surrender on August 15th. Considering both surveys’ reports, it seems reasonable to conclude that the effect of the atomic attacks was to shorten the war by three or four months. For an America that had suffered more than 350,000 casualties in the Pacific – a figure growing by the hour – and facing the prospect of an additional million-plus in an invasion of Japan's home islands, Hirohito’s announcement couldn’t have come soon enough.

It’s arguable that operational use of the bomb shortened the war by providing Japan's anti-war faction with leverage to break the deadlock in the Supreme War Guidance Council. For that purpose, would one bomb have been sufficient? It is unclear just how well America was reading Japan's mood at the moment. But it does seem that the decision was ultimately Hirohito’s, and it is unknowable when he might have reached it based on the toll – albeit horrific – of conventional bombing alone.

History does not disclose its alternatives. On the rightness of President Harry Truman’s decision to send atoms into combat, historians may be destined to debate forever. What's important is that the war ended without an invasion and Japan, aided by humane victors, built itself back to prosperity and became our ally.

The end of the war meant the Allies were free to make what they would of Europe and Japan. It was also at Potsdam that Russia's Stalin provided the first clues of his intended domination of Eastern Europe to commence at war's end. So, in retrospect, today's Hiroshima anniversary is shared with another: it seems certain that the Cold War, with its own special thermonuclear chill, also began on this day 65 years ago.

Maybe it’s thanks to the harsh object lesson of Hiroshima that the Cold War stayed as cold as it did, and industrial-scale warfare itself was exposed as the one alternative that should remain forevermore unknown.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

2010-07-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

President Barak Obama stood alone on a Gulf Coast beach, hearing only the waves and his own inner voice. The solitary scene just reinforced his isolation as the expanding oil slick threatens to overwhelm his connection with coastal residents and recovery managers….

If an old aphorism is true, I am owed 957 more words to complete the phony analysis I began in the preceding paragraph - phony, because the picture I’m describing is itself a fraud.

Reproduced above is the cover of June 19th issue of The Economist, based on a May 28th photo by Reuters journalist Larry Downing. I say "based," because what The Economist printed is not the image Downing recorded.

The Economist is a blue-blooded British weekly aimed at a Brahman caste of international executives and policy makers, with unsigned articles of a rather pedantic tone. On the whole, The Economist might be considered somewhat witty. But on the 19th of last month they were too clever for their own good, and ours.

In Downing’s original shot, Obama is not only not alone, he is actively engaged in a conversation with coastal resident Charlotte Randolph as U.S.C.G. Admiral Thad Allen listens. But Randolph and Allen, not instantly recognizable and in postures nowhere near as dramatic as Obama’s, had to go.

The photographic trickery was exposed Monday by Jeremy Peters of The New York Times. According to Peters, Economist Deputy Editor Emma Duncan offered this rationale:

“I was editing the paper* the week we ran the image of President Obama with the oil rig in the background. Yes, Charlotte Randolph was edited out of the image (Admiral Allen was removed by the crop). We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers.

“We often edit the photos we use on our covers, for one of two reasons. Sometimes — as with a cover we ran on March 27 on U.S. health care, with Mr. Obama with a bandage round his head — it’s an obvious joke. Sometimes — as with an image of President Chavez on May 15 on which we darkened the background, or with our ‘It’s time’ cover endorsing Mr. Obama, from which the background was removed altogether — it is to bring out the central character. We don’t edit photos in order to mislead.

“I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated. That wasn’t the point of the story. ‘The damage beyond the spill’ referred to on the cover, and examined in the cover leader, was the damage not to Mr. Obama, but to business in America.”

[*Though The Economist is a glossy magazine, its publishers refer to it as a newspaper.]

Just to be perfectly clear, the news service photographer had no part in the photograph’s alteration; in fact, it would be against Reuters policy to make such a change without management approval and the consent of the subjects. The Economist's Emma Duncan is the one who made the call.

Her call was fundamentally dishonest, intellectually and journalistically, and her explanation seems, well…thin. Her editorial standards are apparently humor (“…an obvious joke.”) and emphasis (“…bring out the central character.”), but during a long career in journalism I have had it emphasized to me, as I’ve emphasized to others, that there’s nothing funny about misrepresenting reality. That applies especially to visual media, where only half of the graphic’s intended message is under editorial control; it is the viewer, a creature with sometimes quirky predispositions, whose personal context completes the interpretive experience. No two people would write the same thousand words.

There is no denying that we live in a Photoshop age. A moderately astute adolescent with a couple hundred bucks can manipulate images in ways unavailable to the CIA less than a generation ago. There’s no dishonesty in doing so in the name of art or entertainment. Just don’t do it and call the image news.

I remember an interview with film director James Cameron several years ago in which he was commenting on advances in digital graphic technology. He was, he told the interviewer, sincerely worried about the future of our democracy. The power to completely rearrange elements within the frame long after the image is recorded left him wondering whether voters could ever trust their eyes again.

In 2004 there was no doubt in many minds that presidential candidate John Kerry and certified veteran-annoyer Jane Fonda once shared the same antiwar podium. The incontrovertible evidence, a grainy newspaper photo from the early ‘70s, was in fact a modern digital paste-up job using file photos snapped a year apart. A lot of smart people, and an exponentially larger number of the not-so-smart, were completely taken in. It was clear case of technological dishonesty in the service of political slime-mongers. It was James Cameron's nightmare.

In a larger scheme of things, the only apparent harm arising from The Economist cover is to the publication itself. Politically, not enough of the American electorate reads it for the misimpression to have meaningful effect. And while there needs to be a sustained cry for more editorial integrity among the world’s visual media, it’s a sad fact that committed visual propagandists will always have their ways of making the unreal look real, and us look like fools for believing it.

The next time an image – especially one purporting to depict newsworthy or politically sensitive events – amazes, appalls or inspires you, ask yourself: is there any particular person, entity or point of view that stands to gain by your reaction (or a similar reaction from others) and, if so, to what degree? That’s the first step in answering the question, Is it real?

Looking Back Like Lincoln

2010-07-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

Independence Day is the occasion for a traditional patriotic exercise, and I’m not talking about the hike from the parking lot to the fireworks venue. I refer to an intellectual exercise, as this is the day we meditate on our founding documents and the way they express our bond as a nation. While I yield to no one in my admiration of the majesty and genius of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, another uniquely American document just might be my favorite. While not part of our charter, it’s a big part of our national character. My choice is a speech.

Abraham Lincoln was a great admirer of the nation’s founders with a firsthand appreciation of their moral fiber. That’s why in the fall of 1863 it took him just slightly more than two minutes, standing among the graves of America’s newest national cemetery, on America’s saddest battlefield, to summarize the nation’s founding dreams and current duties: liberty and equality for all, and “the unfinished work…the great task” of bringing freedom to fruition and establishing an enduring government of, by and for us.

Lincoln was three years old when we again fought the British for American freedom in the War of 1812. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson lived until Lincoln was 17, and for him their historic work was as much current affairs as it was history. He knew just how far the young nation had come in a short period of time. If you doubt how keenly one might appraise the trajectories of events 87 years removed, give it a try from our current point on the timeline:

Four score and seven years ago…

• American Robert Millikan won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work to determine the elementary charge of an atom and the photoelectric effect, work that helped establish the basis for modern particle physics;
• Working in Pittsburgh, immigrant Vladimir Zworykin perfected a design he would patent as “Television Systems”;
• Col. Jacob Schick patented the first electric shaver;
• Roy and Walt Disney founded the Disney Company and established Disney Studios;
• Born were actress Jean Stapleton, pilot Chuck Yeager, Project Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Wally Schirra, Senator Bob Dole, game show host Bob Barker, gossip columnist Liz Smith, television producer Aaron Spelling, novelist Joseph Heller, Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian, former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Price winner Henry Kissinger, and actor Don Adams;
• Yankee Stadium hosted its first baseball game.

To a grateful beneficiary of events three generations past – both momentous and mundane – those events convey a heightened contextual awareness. Lincoln was looking back four score and seven years to find parallels between one war and another, a moral continuity from era to era, and his context was insightful.

Our own equivalent look back finds an equally informative parallel, for 87 years ago all America was scandalized by another vast pool of oil. It was during an affair called Teapot Dome in which, without competitive bids and influenced by bribes, the secretary of the interior leased vast U.S. Navy underground oil reserves to a pair of petroleum tycoons. The oil fields were eventually restored to the government and, more significantly, in the scandal's wake the Supreme Court established Congress’ power to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas and compel testimony under pain of fine and imprisonment.

There’s a scant 60 year gap – that’s three score – separating the date of Lincoln’s address from the earliest date of our modern four score and seven year retrospective. Though slightly more mature and blessed by progress, despite our considerable global reach we are still an adolescent nation. Of the 12 founding members of NATO, we are the fifth youngest.

But we are old enough to remember our dreams and duties as well as Lincoln did at Gettysburg. And to remember that he, like the founding fathers whose memory he invoked, got it right.

Of Science and Society

2010-07-01T11:58:00.001-07:00

In mid-June, the president nominated a blue ribbon panel for his BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission. Its members are all accomplished professionals: a longtime environmental activist with an M.F.S. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; a Ph.D. marine scientist from the University of Maryland; a National Geographic Society executive vice president with a J.D.; a Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean with a Ph.D. in physics; and a Chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage, a J.D. diplomate. The commission’s co-chairs are former Florida Senator Bob Graham and former EPA administrator William Reilly – both Harvard-trained lawyers.

Shortly after their appointment, Yahoo! News headlined an analytical piece, “Obama spill panel big on policy, not engineering.” The article pointedly implied that the environmentally-aware commissioners had an axe to grind. Only in the final sentence of the 811-word article was there a hint of moderation, and that from former George W. Bush science advisor John Marburger: "It's not really a technical commission. It's a commission that's more oriented to understanding the regulatory and organizational framework, which clearly has a major bearing on the incident."

That article, posted for comment on Facebook, drew this remark from noted astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson: “The value of politicians and policy makers to society is over-valued compared with that of scientists and engineers.”

Would that statement include the geophysicists and engineers at BP? I will stipulate that they are world-class in their fields and in no way ill-intentioned. But their talents – and, as is now clear, their better instincts – were co-opted by private sector bosses (including their top boss, noted geologist Dr. Tony Hayward) whose allegiance lay with stock values, not social values. I would suggest that good politics, which includes good oversight, goes a long way toward enabling good science in the global interest.

I don’t imagine Dr. Tyson really meant to denigrate the many mutual successes of science and public policy which have created genuine national value. As in 1933, when New York politicians established The American Museum of Natural History Planetarium Authority and thereby the Hayden Planetarium, the Central Park West address where Tyson reports for work each day. In 2001 and 2004, respectively, it took political will to create national commissions on the aerospace industry and space exploration on which a certain astrophysicist, apparently recognizing the value of thoughtful public policy, enjoyed a high-profile role.

It takes national will – political will – to create the financial and policy framework in which science gets to accomplish the “hard” things JFK spoke of, with often spectacular results. But sometimes the opposite is true, with significant societal consequences. Edward Teller was chief among a legion of scientists of high pedigree who urged the continued pumping of extravagant public funds down the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) rathole. Craig Venter’s synthetic biology is exciting, but I’m relying on public policymakers to establish safeguards against any potential health and security consequences.

The Gulf mess is actually proof that commercial technologies putatively applied in the national interest, and the public policies under which they are deployed, must both be robust in order for the effort to retain its societal merit. A multinational corporation and a Minerals Management Service, each awash in scientists and engineers, left us awash in oil. Both inside and outside of government, science has to do better.

Dr. Tyson, as an avid follower of your work, I admire the truly valuable public-sector science you practice and preach; I know my neighbors and I will never look at trans-Neptunian objects the same way again. But, with respect, I submit that technology and society advance best when science and politics coexist in a spirit of mutuality, reciprocity and consent.

Atomic Numbers

2010-04-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

If a pair of recently-approved nuclear reactors is built in Georgia, they would be the first new additions to America’s fleet of atomic power stations in nearly thirty years. A look at some numbers reveals that we need to be building more such installations, faster – at least on the order of a couple per year – if we expect to meet our burgeoning electricity demand. Those same numbers reveal that such a nuclear building boom is necessary even as we bring other power generation technologies to full capacity.

The total U.S. electrical generating capacity is 1,075,677 megawatts (MW). The U.S. Department of Energy tells us we’ll need 30 percent more power by 2035, for a total of 1,398,380 MW. We need to find another 322,703 MW somewhere.

Any honest discussion of large-scale electricity generation should include an evaluation of each technology’s “capacity factor,” which takes into account its actual vs. potential output. Capacity factor is not just a simple measure of how long a power station stays “on line,” but of how much power it supplies when it is. This is important in evaluating its suitability as a baseload power provider.

Capacity factor is the ratio, expressed as a percentage, of a power station’s actual output over a period of time – usually a year – and its output if it had operated constantly at its full installed capacity. A station with an installed, or “nameplate,” capacity of 100 megawatts would produce 876,000 megawatt-hours of electricity in a year if it ran at full capacity 24 hours a day. But if it produces only 700,000 megawatt-hours in that year, it would have an annual capacity factor of 80 percent. Capacity factor is affected most directly by maintenance requirements and fuel availability (remember – water, wind and sunlight are also fuel).

Here are the capacity factors for today’s current technologies:

Solar, photovoltaic panels: 20%-30%
Wind turbines: 20%-40%
Solar, heliostats and molten sodium: ~65%
Hydroelectric dams, run-of-river: 65%
Coal: 74%
Hydroelectric dams with reservoirs: 90%
Geothermal: 90%-98%
Nuclear: 95%-98%

By the numbers, both types of hydroelectric installations plus geothermal and nuclear are our best bets for reliably meeting the energy challenge, with nuclear development being crucial. Of the others listed above, photovoltaic solar installations and wind farms are just not generating a lot of investor interest given their low capacity factors, and it will be about 10-15 years before solar molten sodium technology (using stored heat to drive steam turbines) is producing power from just a handful of plants. And it’s fair to say that fossil fuels – coal in particular – are high on no one’s list.

America’s total geothermal potential, according to United States Geological Survey, is 95,000 to 150,000 megawatts. Geothermal generating stations already have 3,153 MW on line, so 146,847 MW is waiting in the wings.

Today 2,400 dams provide about 10 percent of America’s electricity, with an installed capacity totaling around 80,000 megawatts. The DOE estimates that between new construction and upgrades of current installations, there is another 30,000 megawatts of domestic hydroelectric capacity available. But that would require developing a whopping 5,677 separate sites.

With just 104 reactors, nuclear generating stations currently provide nearly double the electricity from hydro. There are another 28 reactors currently proposed, with a combined capacity of more than 31,000 megawatts. Unlike wringing the last remaining capacity out of geothermal or hydroelectricity, that increase would be just the beginning.

If we add geothermal’s remaining potential capacity to that of a totally optimized hydroelectric industry, we are still 145,856 megawatts short of our projected need.

Our only choices for reliable power generation would be to increase our burning of fossil fuels by 26 percent (from the current 559,352 MW to 705,208 MW), or build another 80 or 90 nuclear generating stations – or more, because unlike hydro and geothermal, this is one power source that can’t be “built out.”

Of course, more reactors – even little modular ones – mean more waste. Right now the United States is seeking suitable permanent storage for the 50,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel that’s accumulated to date. While that sounds like a lot, it is not so much bulky as it is dense. Stacked uniformly on a football field, the pile would be just one meter high. But with technology now on the horizon that pile could be made to disappear. Areva, the world’s largest nuclear energy company, says it is developing a special waste-burning reactor that could reduce the stockpile by up to 99 percent.

Bill Gates has also taken a high-stakes hand. As a principal investor in TerraPower, Gates is betting on a new type of unit called a traveling wave reactor. A TWR operates differently from other types in that the entire core does not undergo fission at the same time. Instead, only a localized area reacts as fuel is shuffled to it slowly. The core itself is all low-grade fuel – it will work just fine using the unprocessed waste from conventional reactors and can even use natural, un-enriched uranium.

The TerraPower design is expected to be so efficient that its TWR could operate for up to 100 years on a single load of fuel. The company expects to have a prototype in the 300 megawatt range producing commercial power in ten years, and has a design for a 1000 megawatt model as well.

But the truth is, nobody ever attacks nuclear power generation for being inefficient. It’s simply that radiation scares people. Among the ways nuclear technology can deliver a dose are routine releases during plant operation, plant accidents, accidents in transporting nuclear materials and the escape of nuclear waste from confinement. Dr. Bernard Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, offers the probabilistic assessment that all of those events combined carry a risk of having one’s lifespan shortened by less than an hour. He goes on to state that electricity generation by fossil fuels shortens our lives by up to 40 days.

It is important to note that nuclear generating stations are nowhere close to being our worst radiation threat. The 3.5 million tons of coal burned to produce one gigawatt of power contains more than five tons of uranium, an alarming amount of which is released into the environment in fly ash. U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu (Nobel Prize, Physics, 1997) says a typical coal plant emits 100 times more radiation than a nuclear facility. Considering that just one ounce of uranium fuel contains the energy of four tons of coal, just 27 tons of uranium would produce that same gigawatt with an orders-of-magnitude reduction in released radiation.

If you’re still with me by this point, you’ve read a lot of numbers. Those numbers constitute an empirical call to action on several energy fronts, with one in particular. By the numbers, accelerated expansion of America’s nuclear power generating capacity can no longer be regarded as just optional. It is a necessity.