Working Class Hero; Studs Terkel RIP

If E.P. Thompson gave voice to a new form of labour history; social history of the peoples struggles, history of the forgotten, with his Making of the English Working Class, American popular social hisorian Studs Terkel gave it voice through his interviews which were broadcast on radio and later published as books. Studs was as much a Marxist as Thompson, and both gave birth to the new labour history.

After being investigated by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, his contract was cancelled. Terkel refused to give evidence against other left-wing activists and was therefore blacklisted and prevented from appearing on television. He later recalled: "I was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted... I signed many petitions that were for unfashionable causes and never retracted."


Studs passed away on Halloween. His passing was noted in the press but they quickly moved on to history in the making; the U.S. Presidential election. An election that used terms not heard for over sixty years; working class, socialism, communism, marxism, depression. Studs wrote on American working class culture with his book Working and on the stories of the Great Depression. The irony of the current crash of the market which he warned about back during the Reagan revolution would not be lost on him.

When Terkel's 1970 oral history of the 1930s Depression, "Hard Times,'' was reissued in 1986 in the heart of the Reagan administration, Terkel's new introduction worked strenuously to show how the two eras were comparably nightmarish - though the 1980s never had anything like the 25 percent unemployment of the earlier era. Terkel writes: "In the '30s, an administration recognized a need and lent a hand. Today an administration recognizes an image and lends a smile.'' Part of Terkel's wide appeal was that he seemed to be a scrappy liberal in his choice of causes and concerns, but look more closely and it becomes less clear where his liberalism slips into radicalism. Though Terkel was not a theorist, nearly every one of the positions approvingly intimated by him seem to fit models shaped by Marxist theory; he even wore something red every day to affirm his attachment to the working class.

The most admired are those who, because of personal gifts, transcend the monotony of working life; the most respected are those who come to recognize those horrors most clearly and speak of them. The interviews fit the intellectual framework set up by the “Working” introduction: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body.” That means it includes, in Mr. Terkel’s list, ulcers, accidents, shouting matches, fistfights, nervous breakdowns, daily humiliations and “scars, psychic as well as physical.” There are some, he says, who may enjoy their work, but these cases may “tell us more about the person than about his task.” He seems to cheer the questioning of the “work ethic,” though he himself clearly relished it and relied upon it.
This vision of work, though, is an obvious translation of a traditional Marxist view of the alienation of labor — the sense of disassociation that comes from the capitalist workplace. The most transformative accomplishment would be to recognize the causes of that alienation, because that would help usher in a new world; this is what Mr. Terkel seems to cherish in his most admired laborers and what he hopes to accomplish in the book itself

Being a Chicagoan he would have appreciated that home boy Obama won the election using the strategies and tactics of his old pal Saul Alinsky another Chicago radical.

Brian Viner: A shame that Studs Terkel didn't live to see Obama win

And he documented that great racial divide that Obama overcame this week.

Terkel, who was often praised as the consummate listener, didn't just arrive at someone's front door and say, "Tell me about yourself." He carried on a conversation. Terkel didn't let people off the hook. In Division Street, a 19-year-old man who had left the hills of Kentucky for Chicago talks about his fear of living too close to blacks. "It doesn't bother me," he says, "as long as they stay on their side of the street." To which Terkel asks, "Suppose they're on the same side of the street?" You can almost hear the young man consider this for a moment before laughing at himself. "I imagine we might be able to be pious and get along pretty good," he replies. That was Terkel. His effervescence brought out the best in virtually everyone he encountered. His books brought out the best in America

In fact Obama's appeal to the broad base of America to recognize itself in his story was very much based on Studs giving voice to America. In fact Obama's campaign theme of hope was influenced by Studs 'radical optimism', even if it never credited him.

"I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence—providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."
"With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven."

And Studs was not one to shy away from controversy in fact he defended fellow Chicgoa activist William Ayers of the Weather Underground. His support for fellow radicals was longstanding.

Mr. Terkel also provided a blurb for the memoirs of William Ayers, the Weatherman bomber whose connection with Barack Obama has been a point of controversy. “A deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world,” Mr. Terkel wrote. “Ayers provides a tribute to those better angels of ourselves.”

My last encounter with Studs might give Sarah Palin chills, or at least campaign fodder. It was a couple of years ago at the Studs Terkel Community Media Awards dinner, sponsored by Community Media Workshop. Bill Ayers wasn't there, but his wife and Weather Underground comrade Bernadine Dohrn was. Little did I realize I was "palling around with domestic terrorists" that night.

Mr. Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn,another Weather Underground figure. Both were indicted in 1970 for inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings, but charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

And with his usual humourous aplomb and indeaftable optimism and cutting wit he wrote his own epitaph.

He was in that living room last year when he said with zest that when he "checked out"--as a "hotel kid" he rarely used the word "dying," preferring the euphemism "checking out" and its variants--he wanted to be cremated. He wanted his ashes mixed with those of his wife, which sat in an urn in the living room of his house, near the bed in which he slept and dreamed."My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat,'." he said.He then said that he wanted his and Ida's ashes to be scattered in Bughouse Square, that patch of green park that so informed his first years in his adopted city."Scatter us there," he said, a gleeful grin on his face. "It's against the law. Let 'em sue us."

SEE:

Gay Old Communists

American Proletarian Republicanism

Hobsbawm Historical Revisionist

Tick, Tock, We Live By The Clock

Tyrant Time-Tempus Fug'it

Tags; workers,, proletariat,, socialism,, labour, history,, labor, history,, Barack Obama, Barack, Obama, Studs Terkel, America, oral history, Social History, Chicago, Illinois, USA,

On Magick and Technology

In my obit yesterday I had overlooked my favorite quote from Arthur C. Clarke, his definition of magick.

It ranks up there with any given by Aleister Crowley or Robert Anton Wilson.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Which of course was the logic behind the Technomages on Babylon 5, who quoted Clarke to explain their magick; "using technology to create the appearance of magic". Ah yes Babylon 5 one of the best SF TV programs ever.

And befitting his humanism Clarke leaves this vale of tears as he came.

Clarke's brother was traveling to Sri Lanka for his burial, due in Colombo's general cemetery later this week. Clarke left written instructions that his funeral be private and secular.

"Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral," he wrote.

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Childhoods End

Arthur C. Clarke the great SF writer who put the 'science' into science fiction has passed on. He was a humanist who believed in the spirit of man. I got emails from Clarke because he supported the SETI project.

In 1945, a UK periodical magazine “Wireless World” published his landmark technical paper "Extra-terrestrial Relays" in which he first set out the principles of satellite communication with satellites in geostationary orbits - a speculation realised 25 years later. During the evolution of his discovery, he worked with scientists and engineers in the USA in the development of spacecraft and launch systems, and addressed the United Nations during their deliberations on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Today, the geostationary orbit at 36,000 kilometres above the Equator is named The Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union.

Space expert Robin Scagell told Sky News: "He was very much a scientist and science was at the heart of his work.

"As well as predicting satellites, he saw that rockets would go into space."

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore paid tribute to his friend.

"He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster," he said.

"He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel - he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 - and he was right."

Childhood's End is a science fiction novel by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. It was originally published in 1953, and a version with a new first chapter was released in 1990 due to the anachronistic nature of the opening chapter (the first attempts to launch rockets into orbit by both the Americans and Russians are in progress but aborted suddenly when aliens arrive, with a sense of the death of a dream). This story was originally a short story dubbed Guardian Angel which Clarke first published in 1950 for the Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine. It is basically the novel's section after the prologue, Earth and the Overlords but with some different text in certain places.

Clarke struck notes that were poignant and challenging, as with this final, anguished question which ends "The Star":

"There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?"

May he join the stars in his passing unto the duat.

"Term of all that liveth, whose name is Death and inscrutable, be thou favorable unto us in thine hour. And unto him, from whose mortal eyes the veil of physical life hath fallen, grant that there may be the accomplishment of his True Will. Should he will absorption in the Infinite, or to be united with his chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to be at peace, or to achieve the labour and heroism of incarnation on this planet or another or in any star, or aught else, unto him may there be granted the accomplishment of his true will."

My libertarian science fiction opera loving uncle Phil Smith, a bread truck driver, turned me on to sci-fi as a kid. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Andre Norton, the books he read he passed on to me. And we both shared our love of sci-fi with lots of political debate as well as I became a radical teen ager. He was right wing libertarian and I was a left wing anarchist, yet we agreed more often than disagreed. My favorite memory of my uncle was the two of us seeing 2001 together.I got to help him pass into the duat when he died of cancer.

Unfortunately as I cruise the sci-fi section of bookstores I find that it is stuffed full of fantasy novels, sci-fi has been eclipsed by the money making fantasy genre. Hopefully with Clarke's passing more folks will decide to read his works, as dated as they me be, and to begin to read more sci-fi because science fiction has always been a radical critique of existing society unlike fantasy. Which may be why the publishers like it, safe money making literature, not unlike that other fantasy genre; romance novels.



SEE

Vonnegut, Dresden and Canada

RAW RIP

Octavia Butler RIP

Van Allen Belt

LEM RIP

Andre Norton 1912-2005

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Bobby and Howard

There is a passing similarity between the decent into madness of social isolation that Bobby Fischer suffered and the decent into madness of social isolation that affected Howard Hughes. Given time perhaps Martin Scorsese will make a movie about this Brooklyn kid. He remained Bobby through out his life, never Robert. Perhaps his madness was that of never really growing up after having grown up too soon.

Or perhaps his paranoia was justified,given how he went from Red Diaper Baby to American Chess ChampionWho Defeats The Reds.

For it turns out from now declassified FBI files that Bobby’s biological parents, Paul Lemenyi and Regina Fischer (née Wender), were for many years spied on by the federal government, which feared they had pro-Soviet sympathies. Her husband, Gerhardt Fischer, whom she divorced in 1945 when Bobby was 2 years old, had in 1939 been permanently barred from entering the United States on account of his suspected Commie sympathies, and according to the FBI never did so. Short of also being possessed of magical powers of impregnation by a process of thought or telepathy, he could therefore not have fathered young Bobby.

His paranoia was the same as that of the culture of Cold War America in which he grew up. A paranoid culture of the American Military Industrial Complex which also impacted on Howard Hughes. And it is a culture that continues today Post 9/11.That Bobby Fischer like Hughes saw conspiracies running the Chess World and then America even if he mistook the source, is understandable.

Unfortunately his criticism of the Israel US domination of the Middle East was tainted by his own self loathing of being Jewish and by holocaust denial in effect the denial of his own parentage and heritage.

Such social schizophrenia resulted in a very personal madness of social isolation. He went from Cold War Prodigy to Social Pariah in a few short years resulting in his further break down. As a result he is another victim of the emotional plague.

Influenced as he was by the Cold War propaganda of American Culture such social schizophrenia is understandable, it still exists today on the right. A right which sees Bolshevism and Communism as a Jewish conspiracy and even attributes that same conspiracy to the development of the anti-communist/anti-Stalinist neo-con movement of the Sixties being that it was made up of former leftists from the New York Jewish intellectual circles.

BOBBY FISCHER: 1943-2008

By the end of his life his eccentricity and paranoia had come to overshadow his achievement.

Even in his strange exile from the chess scene, however, Fischer continued to haunt it. He became the Howard Hughes of chess, with fans eager for his return reporting sightings at tournaments and continuing to analyze his games years after other champions had taken his place.


On the day after Bobby Fischer’s death it was clear that Icelanders felt they had lost a friend. Many had grown accustomed to seeing this bearded man in central Reykjavík. Even though he was a very private man who kept to himself it is clear that he had a small group of very good friends. Those remembered him yesterday with fondness even though they made it clear that he had been very difficult at times.

Remembering Bobby Fischer, chess's Cold War warrior

An Appreciation From an Heir

Q: What was Mr. Fischer’s place in chess history?

Mr. Kasparov: Definitely, Fischer’s contribution was the most revolutionary. He made chess more professional in terms of overall chess strategy and proper education in chess, in bringing everything he had into the game.

Q: What do you mean?

A: He exhausted himself, his opponent and all the resources at the chess board. He was a real fighter, at a time when short draws were often agreed. Fischer was unstoppable. They [other top players] had nothing to offer to conquer his dedication to the game. He also added an element of psychological warfare.

Q: Did he influence your career?

A: I was seven, eight, nine in the early 1970s. We didn’t know much about the Cold War, of Fischer being the symbol of individualism and freedom fighting the great Soviet machine. Only later when I worked on [writing the book] “My Great Predecessors” did I realize the full impact of the Fischer revolution. He was a unique combination of a great researcher and fierce fighter and great chess player — a man with tremendous chess capacity.

Excerpts from Associated Press coverage of the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky Match of the Century in 1972

Fischer-Spassky, 1972, Game 6
Click on the diagram to replay a crucial game from the tournament.
After losing the first game and forfeiting the second, Bobby Fischer had stormed back to tie the match after five games. In Game 6, he played an opening he had never played before, and in which Boris Spassky had never lost. In a masterful display, Mr. Fischer pushed Mr. Spassky off the board, took the lead in the match and never looked back.

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Body Shop Loses Founder

Somehow the passing of Anita Roddick, the founder of Body Shop went without much notice in the progressive blogosphere. She was 64 and suffered from a brain hemorrhage a week ago, after discovering she had Hep C. She and her Body Shop were a modern version of Robert Owen in the age of globalization. She took campaigning for fair trade policies empowering farmers in the third world, to end animal testing, to support the Angola 3 in the U.S.

In fact she shared much in common with Owen.

Robert Owen (1771-1858), social and educational reformer, remains a controversial and enigmatic figure. Having profited enormously from enterprise in the early Industrial Revolution he set about trying to remedy its excesses through environmental, educational, factory and poor law reform. Synthesizing reformist ideas from the Age of Enlightenment and drawing on his own experience as an industrialist he constructed A New View of Society (1816), a rallying call for widespread social change, with education at its core. New Lanark, the test-bed for his ideas, became internationally famous.

She will be sadly missed. As they say success breeds success and her making Body Shop not just a business but a global effort to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism for this she will be remembered and her organization will continue to contribute to the betterment of humanity.

Those on the right who dis fair trade continue to miss the point that Anita and other Owenite capitalists have always made, capitalism is supposed to make life better for people. The right wing of course espouses this theory, a hand up instead of a hand out, but of course that is just a platitude to justify rapacious speculative casino capitalism.

Anita is one of many capitalists who used their business acumen to do just that to use their wealth to aid in social development and not just to make more money for its own sake. That was what made her wealthy, the good works she did, not the money in her bank account.

Dame Anita Roddick dies aged 64

Dame Anita brought ethically-sourced products to the High Street

Founder of ethical cosmetics firm Body Shop, Dame Anita Roddick, has died at the age of 64.

Her family said in a statement she suffered "a major brain haemorrhage" at 1830 BST at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex.

Her husband, Gordon, and daughters Sam and Justine were all with her.

Dame Anita set up the first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. She pioneered cruelty-free beauty products and turned them into a highly profitable business.

In February she announced she had contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in 1971.

She had been taken to hospital on Sunday evening after she collapsed complaining of a headache.

The founder of the Body Shop, famous for her determination to combine social campaigning with business success, has a new mission. Facing her own battle against liver disease, she's determined to win this fight, too

Anita Roddick embarked on a new campaign last week - in an intensely personal fashion. Rather than watching the creator of the Body Shop talking aloe vera with Guatamalan tribes, we are now witnessing her as the campaign chief for hepatitis C. She was diagnosed with the disease three years ago, but decided to go public as her health worsened; she has cirrhosis of the liver and will need a transplant.

her new mission to rid the UK of its 'air of indifference' towards hepatitis has all the hallmarks of a classic Roddick campaign. For starters, she wants to know why the government spends £40m a year promoting the switch from analogue to digital television and just £2m on her disease. It's another example of Roddick turning personal questions into political activism.

The Body Shop was famously born out of pure necessity of supporting two children during Gordon's equine adventure. In 1975, Roddick began cooking up moisturisers from Bedouin recipes in her Brighton kitchen, opening her first shop in the Lanes in 1976.

She once said: 'How can you ennoble the spirit when you are selling something as inconsequential as a face cream?' But there was a certain inevitability that the young woman who blagged a £2,000 bank loan pitching up in a Bob Dylan T-shirt would end up retailing soap from her soapbox.

In 1985, Roddick used the shop windows of her by-now burgeoning Body Shop business to promote Greenpeace's Save the Whales campaign. It was the first explicit tie-in between products and causes. Mango butter, jojoba cleanser and brazil nut conditioner were to become inextricably entwined over the next decade with staving off destruction of the rainforest, preserving the Human Rights Act, resisting nuclear power, sticking two fingers up at corporate greed and promoting pacifism.

Roddick is routinely considered to be the originator of almost all the different facets of ethical consumption and business, but she was certainly an important pioneer of fair trade in the UK. Instead of buying ingredients such as brazil nuts for shampoo from commodity markets, she went straight to the source and set up development projects all over South America and Africa. The overriding message was that a business could be good and consumers could be a force for change. 'If Anita can whip up an empire, you can too,' ran a Body Shop slogan of the time.

More than three decades later, the company has around 2,000 stores in 50 countries; it was bought by France’s L’Oreal Group in March 2006. Roddick claims on the company’s Web site, “I haven’t a clue how we got here.”

The Body Shop’s success has stemmed from the growing numbers of middle-class, ethically conscious people who pine for organic food and Fair Trade products, along with a combination of first-mover advantage and consistency in branding and reputation.

There was some anger from Roddick’s admirers last year when the Body Shop was acquired by L’Oreal. Many feared the company’s standards would be compromised, and that the $204 million return for her and her husband’s 18% stake suggested Roddick was abandoning her by-then iconic business.

But she defended the decision, saying that “the campaigning, being a maverick, changing the rules of business. It's all there, protected. It's not going to change – that's part of our DNA." (See: “ Roddick Promises No 'Selling Out' In L'Oreal Sale”)

Earlier this year, she wrote in Newsweek that she had sold the Body Shop so that she could dedicate her time to radical causes; she also said that she regretted taking the company public in 1984 because it had led to a loss of some control.

After selling the business but staying on as an arms-length consultant, Roddick turned her back on the world of commerce and focused on giving away her more than $100 million fortune to charity – saying she didn’t want to die rich – and campaigning.

Up until Sept. 7, she regularly updated her blog, anitaroddick.com, focusing on developments in human rights and globalization, an area where she said the developing world had been grossly shortchanged.

Roddick viewed her illness with characteristic aplomb: “Many people have spoken of my ‘bravery’ in going public with my illness – pish. It shouldn’t take bravery to live life openly despite illness, although our developed world, with its deep fear and denial of mortality, often demands it.”

Aside from the frank expression of her beliefs, Roddick will be remembered for having helped reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: commerce and social activism. Though the latter seemed to clearly be where her heart was, she still managed to cultivate a phenomenally successful business and become a millionaire, while reminding everyone that, “businesses have the power to do good.”

Comments on Anita and her impact are posted on her website.

Dame Anita Roddick, our founder, has died at the age of 64. She died at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex, where her husband, Gordon, and daughters Sam and Justine were all with her. "All of us in The Body Shop family are deeply shocked and saddened to hear the news about Anita's passing away. Anita was not only our Founder but she was also the heart and passion of The Body Shop and with her we achieved so much, whether on animal rights, human rights, Community Trade, or through the founding of organisations like Children on the Edge. It is no exaggeration to say that she changed the world of business with her campaigns for social and environmental responsibility. But for everyone who knew Anita, it was about much more than that: you couldn't help but be inspired by her love of life, her vision of the world and her passion for changing it. Anita leaves us with an enduring legacy which will long guide the affairs of The Body Shop. Our heartfelt condolences are with the Roddick family at this sad time." Adrian Bellamy Chairman, The Body Shop, Canada

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Mime Silenced

There is an eternal silence in the world of Theatre today.

Good night gentle clown.

Marcel Marceau, Famed French Mime, Dies

Marcel Mangel (March 22, 1923 – September 22, 2007), better known by his stage name Marcel Marceau, was a well-known mime, among the most popular representatives of this art form world-wide. He was said to be "single-handedly responsible for reviving the art of mime after World War II."

Mime originated out of the old folk pagan traditions of clowning and mummery, which are still alive in Newfoundland and once were practiced by the Ukrainian diaspora community in Western Canada.

The performance of pantomime originates at its earliest in ancient Greece; the name is taken from a single masked dancer called Pantomimus evolved. It was , although performances were not necessarily silent. In Medieval Europe, early forms of mime such as mummer plays and later dumbshowsJean-Gaspard Deburau in early nineteenth century Paris who solidified the many attributes that we have come to know in modern times -- the silent figure in whiteface

Clowning around is joyful anarchy.


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Alex RIP

You may have seen Alex on TV. That is where I first came across him.

He provided evidence that animals are not dumb.

And he gave new meaning to bird brained.

The African Grey Parrot is a medium-sized parrot of the genus Psittacus native to Africa, and is considered one of the most intelligent birds. Pet owners often liken the experience of keeping an African Grey to that of raising a young child, not only because of the birds' intelligence, but also arising from the substantial time commitment which they require.

Sad! Alex the Grey Parrot, Dead at 31

Alex | Dr. Pepperberg purchased Alex from a Chicago pet store in June, 1977. He can label seven colors, is learning the alphabet and can count up to six objects. Alex is also working on identifying objects from photographs. Alex likes cardboard boxes, keychains, and corks.

Teaching an Avian Scholar

Here at the lab, we are often asked exactly how it is that
Alex is trained. Just as you would assume, Alex has
been taught using a strong language-based format. We
are careful to always use words in context when
speaking to Alex, Griffin, and Wart, and we constantly
label all actions and objects associated with their daily
lives. Objects we’re likely to speak about include
everything from food items to toys to favorite perches.
Common actions that are labeled include such activities
as making breakfast, taking a shower, giving a tickle, or
going back (which is the delightful way Alex asks to be
returned to his cage top).

We simply talk to the birds in a way that most people speak to human babies
and small children during their quest to acquire language. However, that is by
no means suggesting that meaningless baby talk is ever used with the lab parrots.
Rather, we use sentence frames as a way of inserting and stressing the label for
a single object in several different sentences.

For example, let’s say the target word might be ‘corn’. While offering corn to Alex,
we might say “Alex, would you like some corn?” and “Did you notice the corn is
yellow?” and “Corn tastes yummy.”

The practice of using such sentence frames combined with consistently labeling
everyday objects and actions has greatly aided in Alex’s vocabulary development.
However, we use actual training sessions to teach Alex the necessary things he
needs to know for the research work.

Alex (1976 - 2007)

Category: Animal Behavior
Posted on: September 8, 2007 3:54 PM, by Coturnix

It is not unusal to write an obituary when a great scientist passes away. It is much more unusual to do so when a lab animal does so. But when that animal is not just an experimental subject, but also a friend, colleague, teacher and collaborator, than the species boundaries lose importance. And Alex, the famous African Grey Parrot, was just that, and more, to Irene Pepperberg and to the entire field of cognitive ethology. He died yesterday, unexpectedly, at the age of 31 (about half the normal life expectancy for the species) and he will be sorely missed. You can send donations, that will assure the research goes on with Alex's younger buddies Griffin and Wart, to the Alex Foundation.

Repost: The Story of Alex

Category: Friday Grey Matters
Posted on: September 8, 2007 4:52 PM, by Shelley Batts

This is a repost from July of 2006. I thought it was appropriate, given Alex's passing. Please check out Friday Grey Matters in my archives for many more reports on Dr. Pepperberg's work with Alex.

Alex is a 28-year-old African Grey parrot who lives in the lab of Irene Pepperberg, in Brandeis University, and is the eqivalent of a superstar in the bird world. Long ago, Dr. Pepperberg chose Alex at a pet store as neither an exceptional nor sub-par bird. Through the years, Dr. Pepperberg has engaged Alex in a complex form of communication, where, much like a parent teaching a child, Alex is taught the proper "name" for an object. Now, he can label more than 100 items, including seven colors, five shapes, counting up to six, and three categories (color, shape, material of an object). This is amazing when you consider that this bird is working with a brain the size of a walnut! In addition, Alex has learned to ask for an item he wants. When the incorrect item is brought, he will either ignore it, or throw it at the person! :) He has learned to say "no" if an item is incorrect, and to tell his handlers when he wants to go back to his cage, or come out.

Here's an example of a test that Dr. Pepperberg might present to Alex: seven items on a tray, of differing colors and shapes. She asks "What shape is green and wood?" (This is the way to ask what is the shape of the object which is green and made of wood?) Amazingly, Alex answers correctly over 80% of the time. This is obviously far more than chance, and operant conditioning also cannot account for it as he answers the same, even to novel researchers. The content of the question, and answer, is understood by this bird. She also might ask, "How many wood?" (How many objects on the tray are made of wood?) He looks at the tray for a few seconds, and then answers with a number, again correct 80% of the time! He can replicate this up to six items.

Alex has also "coined" words, or made up new words to use for unfamilar objects. An example of this is when he first encountered an apple. He already knew the word for "banana" and "strawberry, " and the first time he saw an apple he called it a "bananaberry." This was hypothesized to be because an apple was red like a strawberry by white inside like a banana, so Alex put the two words together to make a new word! He has done this several times, like calling an almond a "cork nut" because of the nut's texture like a cork. He can be inventive and creative.

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A Tale Of Two Heiresses

Compare and contrast. These two well known American Hotel Heiresses died within week of each other.

One made the news for a day, being a well known Philanthropist and clothes horse.

The other, well even dead she is still the Queen of Mean. And she gets more posthumous press than her more liberal counterpart.

One suffered at the hands of her son while her grandson exposed how badly his father had treated her. The other is making her grandchildren suffer.

Brooke Astor, 105, aristocrat of the people, dies

Astor's image as a benevolent society matron was overshadowed last year by that of a victimized dowager at the center of a very public family battle over her care and fortune. Yet for decades she had been known as the city's unofficial first lady, one who moved effortlessly from the sumptuous apartments of Fifth Avenue to the ragged barrios of East Harlem, deploying her inherited millions to help the poor help themselves.

Among the rich of New York, she was perhaps the last bridge to the Gilded Age, when "society" was a closed world of old-money families, the so-called Four Hundred, who were ruled over by a grandmother of Astor's by marriage, Mrs. William Backhouse Astor.

Helmsley's dog gets $12 million, but leaves 2 grandchildren zilch

Leona Helmsley's dog will continue to live an opulent life, and then be buried alongside her in a mausoleum. But two of Helmsley's grandchildren got nothing from the late luxury hotelier and real estate billionaire's estate.

Helmsley left her beloved white Maltese, named Trouble, a $12 million trust fund, according to her will, which was made public Tuesday in surrogate court.

She also left millions for her brother, Alvin Rosenthal, who was named to care for Trouble in her absence, as well as two of four grandchildren from her late son Jay Panzirer - so long as they visit their father's grave site once each calendar year.

Otherwise, she wrote, neither will get a penny of the $5 million she left for each.

Helmsley left nothing to two of Jay Panzirer's other children - Craig and Meegan Panzirer - for "reasons that are known to them," she wrote.

But regardless of their personal peccadilloes they both represent inherited wealth. One from the Robber Barons of 19th Century American Capitalism the other from the modern day Robber Barons of Property Speculation.

THE concept of richesse oblige has various dimensions. The bottom line is that those who have come into oodles of money should give some of it back; the second-to-bottom line is that they should cut a certain style while doing so. Both Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, who died within a few days of each other, gave millions of dollars away. And their similarities ended there.

The Astor money, more than $120m by the time it was Brooke's to disburse, was old, from New York land and the fur trade. The Helmsley money, $5 billion by the time Leona got her hands on it, was pretty new, from property speculation. Both fortunes came from late third marriages to cunning husbands. But whereas Mrs Astor, aside from writing features for House & Garden, merely let the markets increase her pile and relished spending the capital (something, she admitted, that John Jacob Astor would have thought as outrageous as dancing naked in the street), Mrs Helmsley worked like a dragon to build up and expand her husband Harry's hotel empire. As a Manhattan hatter's daughter with several competitive siblings, she was used to graft and struggle. Mrs Astor, a solitary and dreamy child who had come by money almost magically, treated it like fairy dust to the end of her days.

The arrogance of big money, Mrs Astor wrote once, “is one of the most unappealing of characteristics”. Mrs Helmsley, though fun to her friends, was arrogance personified: “Rhymes with rich”, was Newsweek's caption for her portrait on its cover. “We don't pay taxes,” she was said to have told a housekeeper once; “only the little people pay taxes.” Mrs Astor, a gentle soul, was upset when her first father-in-law, a colonel, yelled at his secretaries. Mrs Helmsley believed staff existed to be barked at, slapped and called fags if appropriate; two of them sued her for firing them because they were gay. On visits to underprivileged areas Mrs Astor, gloved and immaculate because this was what the ordinary person expected of the rich, would happily sip from a paper cup and praise the hot-dog mustard on her paper plate. At the sight of a paper-cup-carrier in any of her reception areas, Mrs Helmsley would get her doormen to throw the offender out.

SEE:

Rich Getting Richer

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Vonnegut, Dresden and Canada

Kurt Vonnegut, author of `Slaughterhouse-Five,’ dies


The defining moment of Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids.

The firebombing of Dresden, he wrote, was "a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany."

His experience in Dresden was the basis of "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote critic Jerome Klinkowitz, "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age."

Slaughter House Five became the anti war novel of the Viet Nam era in America. Today the fire bombing of Dresden is still controversial in Canada as military chicken hawks attempt to white wash Britain's Bomber Harris because he used Canadian pilots to do the dirty work of bombing civilian targets in WWII.

A war of words over Canada's role in the bombing of German cities during the Second World War will move to Parliament Hill after a Senate committee on veterans' issues agreed to calls from the Royal Canadian Legion to host hearings on a contentious exhibit at the Canadian War Museum.

The display, which notes critics have questioned the "value and morality" of the Allied bombing campaign in Nazi Germany, has sparked outrage among some veterans and prompted the legion to urge a public boycott of the Ottawa museum until the disputed wording is changed or removed.

A single panel at the heart of the conflict describes the "enduring controversy" over the role of Canadian bombing squadrons in attacking Germany's industrial infrastructure and major cities as part of an Allied strategy to destroy the enemy's morale and cripple the Nazi war machine.

"Mass bomber raids against Germany resulted in vast destruction and heavy loss of life," the panel reads.

"The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber Command's aim was to crush civilian morale and force Germany to surrender by destroying its cities and industrial installations.

"Although Bomber Command and American attacks left 600,000 Germans dead, and more than five million homeless, the raids resulted in only small reductions in German war production until late in the war."

The museum has defended its exhibit, arguing the actions of Bomber Command have been debated for decades and that raising questions about the conduct of the 1939-1945 war is part of what historians should do.

Fire bombing tests were conducted on model cities built in the Nevada desert as Mike Davis writes in his book Dead Cities. The tests showed what we know today; fire bombing was not a military success but it certainly was successful as terrorism against a civilian population.

Davis begins our apocalyptically inflected tour with a trip to New York’s Ground Zero. He then takes us to “German Village,” a Utah wasteland that was once a test site for Allied science advisors to rehearse the perfect plan for destroying Berlin,

As Niels Gutshow has shown, some hardcore Nazi ideologues actually welcomed the thousand-bomber raids and firestorms as a ritual cleansing of the "Jewish influence" of big city life and the beginning of a mystical regeneration of Aryan unity with nature. Thus, in the aftermath of the Hamburg, Cologne, and Kassel holocausts in 1943, the "eco-fascist" Max Karl Schwarz, who shared Ruskin's and Jefferies's aversion to the "toxicity" of big cities, proposed to "revitalize the landscape" by leveling the debris and planting trees. The old, dense cities would not be rebuilt; indeed, "only after the destroyed areas are animated through forest will they become a true urban landscape, that is, with houses and gardens." Authentically German garden cities would replace the decadent "Jewish" metropolis. After all, had not Zarathustra commanded his followers to "spit on this city of shopkeepers"?

The British Air Command also planned a final solution for Germany had D-Day not been successful, they were going to drop anthrax on Germany.


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RIP

Obituary


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