politics

November 1, 2009

Ricketts or Rickets? “What’s in a Name?”

When I heard that the Ricketts family had purchased the Cubs, I immediately began to worry. Rickets (note that the name has only one “t,” unlike that of the Ricketts family) is, after all, a childhood vitamin deficiency disease, typically caused by a lack of vitamin D. The bones, as a result, are softened and malformed. Just what we need on the Cubs, I thought.

Names. The value of names. That is really what I’m talking about. (More about the Cubs later in this essay). Early in their life in school, kids find out that names can be a problem. Kids will rhyme and twist names to make you wish you didn’t have one or could crawl under a rock. I remember a girl called Leslie who was the only female in my high school physics class. The class wit called her “Lester” and the over-matched teacher didn’t rein him in. Doubtless, Leslie felt miserable.

Someone I know has a nephew with the initials “F.U.” What were the parents thinking? In fact, it was pointed out to them, very early, that the name they had in mind would, because of these initials, cause the child endless grief. Did they care? Apparently not. Some parents will argue that they do this to “toughen-up” their little guys. I doubt it.

Most of us are sensitive about our names. We want them said correctly and written correctly. They are us, in effect. I’ve been corrected properly when I called a woman “Judy” whose name was Judith. We want to be noted and respected. We don’t want our names besmirched, mutilated, or forgotten. When speakers thank others in public, they often take pains to list everyone who deserves some credit. They do this with good reason. We want to be thought of fondly and well.

Witness Shakespeare’s Henry V motivating his men on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, which was to occur on St. Crispin’s Day:

“…He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d…”

Of course, being “named,” isn’t always a good thing. Being named in an indictment, for example; or, during the infamous days of Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, having your name uttered by a witness as a possible Communist. The hearings in question concerned alleged Communist infiltration of the Federal Government and the entertainment industry. These could result in the subpoena of the named-individual to testify before the same congressional committee, not to mention the possibility of being fired from his job and being blackballed from making a living. Unless, of course, he too would be willing to go before the committee and “name names,” thus betraying people he knew and even, sometimes, people he was close to.

Back to the Cubs, we are told that there is little possibility that “naming rights” to Wrigley Field will be sold. If that were to happen, however, the fans of the Cubs would have their attachment to a name sorely tested. But, of course, one can only hope that the “Ricketts era” will bring the World Series that we have all been waiting for, and that many have died waiting for after leading long lives that began in late 1908 or later, and ended anytime since. And we’ve heard other, older names carrying the same promise: the infamous “College of Coaches” that was supposed to transform the Cubs in the early 1960s, the hiring of Leo Durocher to manage the 1966 team that finished in 10th place, the purchase of the Cubs by the Tribune Company and the installation of Dallas Green (named General Manager) to produce a retooling that would lead to the World Series; and, who can forget how Dusty Baker was touted as a savior a few years ago, only to be replaced by the naming of Lou Pinella, savior next-in-line, to replace Dusty in the dugout.

Will the Ricketts name be worth the paper it is written on? Will it be a better name than Chicago Tribune? Shakespeare gives us a hint, in the form of Juliet’s words to Romeo, who, after all, has a last name detested by her family, and visa versa:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

So, it would appear that the real question is whether the “Ricketts Era” Cubs will pass the smell test.

Shakespeare knew everything.

October 13, 2009

Misfortune and Prosperity

“No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity.”

So said Seneca, a Roman philosopher born in Spain one year before the birth of Christ. He believed that virtue alone was sufficient for a happy life. Regardless of whether you or I agree with him, it is an intriguing thought. He wrote much more, too, on how to live in a challenging world.

Enough said by me. For more, read Seneca.

October 11, 2009

An Important Book: “Tears in the Darkness”

I just finished reading a book so lovely in its lyrical prose, and so terrible in its content, that it is worth recommending to you. The authors seamlessly weave together 10 years of research, the story of a single solder who lived the events that are described, and the history of the Bataan Death March into a literary marvel. That single man is Ben Steele, now a 90-year-old retired art teacher, who was a young Montana cowboy before he enlisted in the armed forces in 1940. The book is Tears in the Darkness: the Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath by Michael and Elizabeth Norman.

A short history of the war in the Philippines: the United States was not yet in the World War that started in 1939, but was planning for it. The politics of the time did not permit an all-out preparation because of strong isolationist sentiment in this country. For many people, Europe and the Far East were very far away indeed and, even if they sympathized with the plight of the war’s victims, it did not seem to those US citizens that our country had any direct obligation or national interest in becoming involved. When war did come via the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941, the USA was ill-prepared, and with the damage done to the Air Force in Hawaii, incapable of much effective action in the Pacific. Thus, the American troops stationed in the Philippines, as well as the native soldiers there to defend their homeland, were on their own when Japanese planes began the assault a few hours after the Pearl harbor bombing.

The Japanese infantry had been trained in a merciless and humiliating fashion. Their attitude toward the 76,000 U.S. and Philippine soldiers who surrendered in early 1942 was fueled by racism (which was present on both sides of the conflict), “trickle down” of the way they had been treated by their own superiors, and their belief that their opponents had dishonored themselves by giving up, something that the Japanese soldier saw as an outcome worse than death. Their treatment of the enemy was criminal (and later subject to war crimes trials). When coupled with a starvation diet and lack of adequate medical supplies or attention, the death rate of the surrendering army was staggering, never more than during the 66 mile “death march” demanded of the already depleted army after their surrender.

The authors’ focus on one man in particular gives all this pain a very human and sympathetic face. As Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” The individual stories of Steele and others makes this book much more than a dry history lesson. Ben Steele’s drawings provide another way to get to know him and a further witness to the tragedy of  these ordinary men caught up in something beyond imagination.

The narrative is remarkably even handed in its treatment of the soldiers on both sides. No excuses are made for inexcusable behavior, but one cannot help but acknowledge that the post-war “war crimes” trials were tilted heavily against the enemy. The person of General Douglas MacArthur does not fair well. He is portrayed as a self-serving and mean-spirited man, more concerned with polishing his legend than providing encouragement to his troops. And his military decision making, especially his failure to safeguard the planes under his command despite being aware for approximately 10 hours that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, is called into serious question. Similarly, his failure to take tons of  provisions, including food and medical supplies, that could have been available to his forces when they staged their strategic retreat south down the Peninsula of Bataan, despite the urging of members of his staff. One can only recall MacArthur’s famous farewell speech ending with the words, “old soldiers never die…they just fade away.” The irony of those words is apparent when one thinks of the soldiers in the Philippines under his command, many of whom died before becoming “old soldiers,” and all of whom suffered.

In the end, this treasure of a book is terribly moving in its cumulative impact. You will have read about hundreds of men by name, as well as so many others unnamed but whose lives were no less valuable. They once had all lived as we do when in peace time, in the quiet security and beauty and commonplace of everyday life, with all the usual frustrations, routines, requirements, laughter, joy, and unremarkable disappointments and losses. Nothing could have prepared them for what the Philippines would bring in 1942 until the war’s end in 1945. Their names are important. We do them and ourselves an honor by reading them, knowing what they endured and in many cases failed to survive in the name of the United States of America and a government that saw them as expendable.

By the time you reach the book’s end, you will, at least temporarily, find it hard to view the normal events of the day in quite the same way because you will know what horrible things happened and, but for the grace of God, timing, or circumstance, could have happened to you or someone you love. And you might just kneel down and kiss the earth in gratitude for your relative good luck.

September 30, 2009

Obama, Racism, and the Implicit Association Test

Are you a closet racist? In 1948, your reaction to the above photo of a white man hugging a black man might have been a measure of that trait.*

Today, however, most people in the USA are better at disguising it, even from themselves. It’s not a charge that can be as easily dismissed as you would think. Your voting record, for example, might not tell you very much. That’s where the Implicit Association Test comes in, as a possible way to know more about your innate tendencies, perhaps even ones about which you are unaware.

Depending on your political orientation and attitude toward the man in the White House, you might have been accused of being either unpatriotic or a racist within this new century: unpatriotic if you opposed President George W. Bush and a racist if you opposed President Obama.  The voices of protest against the War in Iraq were often charged with giving aid and comfort to the enemy in the scary days after 9-11-2001, when all manner of evidence (later disproven) about the presence of WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) in the hands of Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator, were alleged by the folks in charge.

More recently, noisy opposition to President Obama’s initiatives have included accusations that he was not born in the USA, is a secret Muslim, is a closet Communist or at least a Socialist, and so forth. When the expression of these ideas is accompanied by posters telling the President to go back to Africa, and pictures of him in “white face,” it gets pretty hard to think well of the protesters.

Now, I don’t know if there is any psychological instrument that can effectively test your patriotism, but I do know one that might tell you something about whether you have any racist tendencies. Or, to be more precise, a tendency to prefer “white” over “black.” It’s called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measurement generated by the friendly social scientists at Harvard. It can be found at: Implicit Association Test. Click on the word “Demonstration.”

There are actually a great many measures on the site, but the one I’m talking about is the one labeled Race IAT: Race (‘Black-White’) IAT.

This and other similar tests are described in the following background quotation from the site:

The IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. This web site has been constructed for a different purpose — to offer the IAT to interested individuals as a tool to gain greater awareness about their own unconscious preferences and beliefs.

Many years ago, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: “Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

These lines from Dostoyevsky capture two concepts that the IAT helps us examine. First, we might not always be willing to share our private attitudes with others. Second, we may not be aware of some of our own attitudes. Your results on the IAT may include both components of control and awareness.

Now, you are likely to ask yourself whether there is a connection between preferring “white” over “black” and acts of discrimination or racism. You will find the answer to that in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section of the site. In general, the answer is a “not necessarily” and I’m sure that you will want to read more about the behavioral implications of your “preference.” The site and the various tests and explanations are really quite interesting, so I would encourage you to take a look.

The test just might be informative to you about who you “really” are. If you believe that your opposition, for example, to President Obama is entirely motivated by firmly rooted, color-blind principles, you might find the test results unsettling. No less, however, the left-leaning, Obama-supporting, test-takers who pat themselves on the back for their belief that they are “color blind,” might be surprised by their results. A member of either of these groups might be caught up short by what the “black-white” test suggests about them.

Of course, I don’t know how you, dear reader, will score. Are you, to quote Dostoyevsky once more, a hostage to “those things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself?”

Do you have the courage to find out?

Again, here is where you can: Implicit Association Test.

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*The image at the top is a 1948 newspaper photo of Steve Gromek embracing Larry Doby in celebration of a fourth game victory in the World Series. Gromek was the winning pitcher for the Cleveland Indians vs. the Boston Braves. Doby hit the game winning homerun, prompting Gromek’s spontaneous act.

The photo was astonishing for its time. Doby followed Jackie Robinson by less than three months in the 1947 integration of Major League Baseball. The idea of men of two different races cheek-to-cheek offended the most bigoted parts of the white population, some of whom never forgave Gromek. It should also be added that Doby endured the same racism and brutality as Jackie Robinson, but received less credit for it as the second man to integrate baseball while Robinson was the first. The fact that Robinson played for the Brooklyn (New York) Dodgers and therefore received much more media coverage probably also contributed to the reduced attention to Doby’s extraordinary courage and athletic accomplishments. Doby was elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

September 13, 2009

Therapy, Responsibility, and the Nuremberg Defense

http://mburgan.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/nuremberg_defendants.jpg

Therapy, like life, requires taking responsibility for what becomes of you. But, as the comedy team Cheech & Chong famously noted, “Taking responsibility is a lot of responsibility.” What does that have to do with “the Nuremberg Defense?” Read on.

If you are old enough (or a good student of history) the word Nuremberg has a certain resonance for you. It is a German town that was a center of the Holy Roman Empire and the Renaissance; later becoming the host of Nazi Party rallies between 1927 and 1938, the site of the passage of the Nuremberg Laws stripping German Jews of their citizenship, and equally well-known for the war crimes trials that were held after WWII, in an attempt to hold Nazi villains to account. Such Nazi higher-ups as Hans Frank, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher were brought to justice there (see above photo); Hermann Goering escaped hanging only by committing suicide.

A common refrain during the testimony of the accused was the statement “I was only following orders.” This line of explanation was used so often that it became known as “the Nuremberg Defense.” It was found insufficient by the judges, who reasoned that the accused had the moral responsibility to refuse orders to commit “crimes against humanity,” even assuming that it could be demonstrated that such orders were given.

Since I don’t treat war criminals, you might be asking yourself how the failure of some of these long-dead Nazis to take responsibility applies to treating people with less dramatic problems of depression or anxiety or relationship disappointment? In the course of talking with my patients, I often discover that they have suffered from some sort of misfortune; be it inadequate, negligent, or abusive parents; accident or injury; or unfair treatment at school, at work, or in love. Sometimes the stories are heartbreaking. It is perfectly proper for patients to blame at least part of their unhappiness on these events and these people. Moreover, it is often essential that they grieve those losses, give voice to their anger and sadness, and rail against the unfairness of life. And it is important for a therapist to help them as they process their grief.

But therapy cannot end there.

The patient, if he is to improve his life, cannot simply assign responsibility to some other person as a release from the need to take charge of what becomes of himself in the future, any more than a Nuremberg defendant might hope that assignment of responsibility to the commanding officer would take him off the hook for the unspeakable acts he committed.

Put more simply, neither the war crimes defendant nor the common therapy patient can point to someone else, say “He is the one who caused this,” and leave things at that. Just as the SS criminals were asked, “And then what did you do?” so must we all, regardless of what misfortune has happened to us, ask ourselves, “Now what? Do I simply accept the injustice, forever blame others, and stay defeated and aggrieved in-perpetuity, or do I grieve my loss, take responsibility for my life, and try to get beyond the injuries I’ve suffered?”

We all know people who, however small or large the disappointment that they have experienced, never get beyond criticizing, blaming, whining, and feeling sorry for themselves. While some of this is often necessary to get past the hurt, a lifetime of it is simply a waste, a personal failure to take control and to admit and accept that if life is to have meaning and value, we all have to do something positive with that life, regardless of bad breaks. Even if fairness demands that others compensate us for our losses, if such compensation cannot be obtained, life still calls us to repair ourselves. As a therapist colleague of mine, at the risk of sacrilege, used to tell those patients who seemed to forever bemoan their fate, “Get off the cross, we need the wood.”

Shakespeare commented on responsibility-taking in Julius Caesar when he gave Cassius the words:

“Men at some time are masters of their fates:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

This is not always literally true. But there is no better way to live than to try to make our circumstances the best we can, however unlucky our lot. A good therapist will help you get there.

September 10, 2009

“To Save One Life Is As If You Have Saved The World”

It was an easy story to miss: the 100th birthday of someone you’ve never heard of. Not even someone from the USA. But to some people, the most important man in their lives. Indeed, the man without whom they would have no life.

Sir Nicholas Winton was born on September 4, 1909, but his 100th birthday party was unexpected. In late 1938 he set out to create an organization designed to find a place for Jewish children in Czechoslovakia imperiled by the Nazis. Only a short time before, England passed a law allowing children to take refuge there within limits: they needed a sponsoring home in England and 50 pounds sterling as an advance toward a return trip back to Eastern Europe at such time as political events would permit.

In all, 669 children no older than 16 made the train trip, thanks to the efforts of Winton and others to find sponsors for these young people (in effect, adoptive parents), the money to support their travel, and the necessary 50 pounds for the hoped-for return that was not to come.

One can only imagine the feelings of the parents and the children as the latter boarded the transport; parents promising their children, as many did, that they would all be reunited. Of course, death in the Holocaust would dash such expectations. The project ended when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, World War II broke out, and safe passage across the continent became impossible.

Typical of many rescuers, Winton made little fanfare of his altruism. Indeed, until 1988, when he was nearly 80, not even his wife knew what he had done. Only her accidental discovery of a scrapbook documenting his activities led to the wider acknowledgment of Winton’s good works, including a Knighthood and a nomination for the Noble Peace Prize by the Czech government.

On September 1, 2009, several of the children Winton saved, now elderly themselves, took the original train used in the Kindertransport in a replication of the journey they had made 70 years before. And when they reached London, Sir Nicholas was there to greet them.

Many brought along their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In all, there are approximately 7000 descendants of the original group saved by this man. Children were among those most vulnerable to the Nazis. Thus, it is unlikely the 669, not to mention their descendants, would have lived but for the generosity and effort of Sir Nicholas.

The Jewish Talmud states that “to save one life is as if you have saved the world.”

Indeed.

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The 1939 photo is of Nicholas Winton with a child he saved, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.