Hey everyone. I saw this article about vampire bats killing 38 people because of rabies, and had to post it after all of the discussions on bats dying. It’s all very creepy, particularly how they usually get you while you’re sleeping…and they’ll know when based on their sensitive hearing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4509833.ece
Not sure if anyone still reads this, but I came across an article today that ties a lot of stuff together.
Apparently Kent State (home to the infamous shootings in 1970) is studying the language of telecommunication (text messages, IMs, blogs, Facebook, etc.) as a form separate from English. Reminds me of when they started teaching ebonics in Oakland. Anyway, whereas ebonics is primarily a spoken language, I think apart from those Cingular commercials (TISNF), the language of IMs is exclusively a written language. Relatedly, the article refers to modern technologies like the cell phone and internet applications like Facebook or Myspace as writing technologies. It almost makes sense, given the exponentially shrinking time between writing technologies (codex to printing press to typewriter to computer and on) that we could be approaching a new episteme.
On the other hand, I don’t agree that text-speak is a different entity from English, and studying it as such separates it from the oral/imaginary, in a time where it seems we are actually trying to return to the imaginary. And those writing technologies are actually just new uses of old ones (the phone and the computer–although interestingly, Steve Jobs (Apple) is the man behind popular versions of both). But regardless, it’s quite an interesting development in print study.
Lastly, I never really had a reason to post about this, but the other day I was reminded that “please” is often called “the magic word.” I’m not sure what that means, but someone else may have something to say about it
–Brandon
As Brandon noted a while back in a post on the topic, Bats are dying in large quantities. First the Bees, now the Bats. What’s a Vampire to do? Now the subject has hit the big time, earning the following article in today’s New York Times.
March 25, 2008
Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why
By TINA KELLEY
Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondacks, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State.
It was broad daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas, using the thumbs at the top joint of their wings to gain their balance.
All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.”
They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.
Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.
Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.
“This is probably one of the strangest and most puzzling problems we have had with bats,” said Paul Cryan, a bat ecologist with the United States Geological Survey. “It’s really startling that we’ve not come up with a smoking gun yet.”
Merlin Tuttle, the president of Bat Conservation International, an education and research group in Austin, Tex., said: “So far as we can tell at this point, this may be the most serious threat to North American bats we’ve experienced in recorded history. “It definitely warrants immediate and careful attention.”
This month, Mr. Hicks took a team from the Environmental Conservation Department into the hibernaculum that has sheltered 200,000 bats in past years, mostly little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) and federally endangered Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis), with the world’s second largest concentration of small-footed bats (Myotis leibii).
He asked that the mine location not be published, for fear that visitors could spread the syndrome or harm the bats or themselves.
Other visitors do not need directions. The day before, Mr. Hicks saw eight hawks circling the parking lot of another mine, waiting to kill and eat the bats that flew out.
In a dank galley of the mine, Mr. Hicks asked everyone to count how many out of 100 bats had white noses. About half the bats in one galley did. They would be dead by April, he said.
Mr. Hicks, who was the first person to begin studying the deaths, said more than 10 laboratories were trying to solve the mystery.
In January 2007, a cave explorer reported an unusual number of bats flying near the entrance of a cavern near Albany. In March and April, thousands of dead bats were found in three other mines and caves. In one case, half the dead or living bats had the fungus.
One cave had 15,584 bats in 2005, 6,735 in 2007 and an estimated 1,500 this winter. Another went from 1,329 bats in 2006 to 38 this winter. Some biologists fear that 250,000 bats could die this year.
Since September, when hibernation began, dead or dying bats have been found at 15 sites in New York. Most of them had been visited by people who had been at the original four sites last winter, leading researchers to suspect that humans could transmit the problem.
Details on the problem in neighboring states are sketchier. “In the Berkshires in Massachusetts, we are getting reports of dying/dead bats in areas where we do not have known bat hibernacula, so we may have more sites than we will ever be able to identify,” said Susi von Oettingen, an endangered species biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
In Vermont, Scott Darling, a wildlife biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Department, said: “The last tally that I have is approximately 20 sites in New York, 4 in Vermont and 2 in Massachusetts. We only have estimates of the numbers of bats in the affected sites — more or less 500,000. It is impossible for us to count the dead bats, as many have flown away from the caves and died — we have over 90 reports from citizens across Vermont — as well as many are still dying.”
People are not believed to be susceptible to the affliction. But New Jersey, New York and Vermont have advised everyone to stay out of all caverns that might have bats. Visitors to affected caves and mines are asked to decontaminate all clothing, boots, ropes and other gear, as well as the car trunks that transport them.
One affected mine is the winter home to a third of the Indiana bats between Virginia and Maine. These pink-nosed bats, two inches long and weighing a quarter-ounce, are particularly social and cluster together as tightly as 300 a square foot.
“It’s ironic, until last year most of my time was spent trying to delist it,” or take it off the endangered species list, Mr. Hicks said, after the state’s Indiana bat population grew, to 52,000 from 1,500 in the 1960s.
“It’s very scary and a little overwhelming from a biologist’s perspective,” Ms. von Oettingen said. “If we can’t contain it, we’re going to see extinctions of listed species, and some of species that are not even listed.”
Neighbors of mines and caves in the region have notified state wildlife officials of many affected sites when they have noticed bats dead in the snow, latched onto houses or even flying in a recent snowstorm.
Biologists are concerned that if the bats are being killed by something contagious either in the caves or elsewhere, it could spread rapidly, because bats can migrate hundreds of miles in any direction to their summer homes, known as maternity roosts. At those sites, females usually give birth to one pup a year, an added challenge for dropping populations.
Nursing females can eat up to half their weight in insects a day, Mr. Hicks said.
Researchers from institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, Boston University, the New York State Health Department and even Disney’s Animal World are addressing the problem. Some are considering trying to feed underweight wild bats to help them survive the remaining weeks before spring. Some are putting temperature sensors on bats to monitor how often they wake up, and others are making thermal images of hibernating bats.
Other researchers want to know whether recently introduced pesticides, including those released to stop West Nile virus, may be contributing to the problem, either through a toxin or by greatly reducing the bat’s food source.
Dr. Thomas H. Kunz, a biology professor at Boston University, said the body composition of the bats would also be studied, partly to determine the ratio of white to brown fat. Of particular interest is the brown fat between the shoulder blades, known to assist the bats in warming up when they begin to leave deep hibernation in April.
“It appears the white nose bats do not have enough fat, either brown or white, to arouse,” Dr. Kunz said. “They’re dying in situ and do not have the ability to arouse from their deep torpor.”
His researchers’ cameras have shown that bats in the caves that do wake up when disturbed take hours longer to do so, as was the case in the Adirondack mine. He also notes that if females become too emaciated, they will not have the hormonal reactions necessary to ovulate and reproduce.
In searching for a cause of the syndrome, researchers are hampered by the lack of baseline knowledge about habits like how much bats should weigh in the fall, where they hibernate and even how many bats live in the region.
“We’re going to learn an awful lot about bats in a comprehensive way that very few animal species have been looked at,” said Dr. Elizabeth Buckles, an assistant professor at Cornell who coordinates bat research efforts. “That’s good. But it’s unfortunate it has to be under these circumstances.”
The die-offs are big enough that they may have economic effects. A study of Brazilian free-tailed bats in southwestern Texas found that their presence saved cotton farmers a sixth to an eighth of the cash value of their crops by consuming insect pests.
“Logic dictates when you are potentially losing as many as a half a million bats in this region, there are going to be ramifications for insect abundance in the coming summer,” Mr. Darling, the Vermont wildlife biologist, said.
As Mr. Hicks traveled deeper in the cave, the concentrations of bats hanging from the ceiling increased. They hung like fruit, generally so still that they appeared dead. In some tightly packed groups, just individual noses or elbows peeked through. A few bats had a wing around their nearest cavemates. Their white bellies mostly faced downhill. When they awoke, they made high squeaks, like someone sucking a tooth.
The mine floors were not covered with carcasses, Mr. Hicks said, because raccoons come in and feed on them. Raccoon scat dotted the rocks along the trail left by their footprints.
In the six hours in the cave taking samples, nose counts and photographs, Mr. Hicks said that for him trying for the perfect picture was a form of therapy. “It’s just that I know I’m never going to see these guys again,” he said. “We’re the last to see this concentration of bats in our lifetime.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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I’ve admitted on this site that I was wrong about HRC. I read the cultural unconscious correctly, picking up the symptoms of an emergent psychosis desperately in need of a little down time with the Maternal/Imaginary; I read the candidates themselves incorrectly by falling into the oldest form of lazy-think possible. I assumed that biology is destiny, that the male candidate was “stintin’” for the symbolic, and that the female candidate was advocating on behalf of the Imaginary. But, as I have begun to suggest in recent postings, the Barackster is the woman running for president this year, and Hillarious is the Man. (McCain is playing the role of Skeletor.) How pleased I was therefore to read Maureen Dowd’s op-ed column today because she — a magical thinker who has frequently sounded out some of the oedipal, patriarchal unconscious structures that are shaping current events — clearly sees who is trying to wear the pants in the democratic primary. As Dowd makes clear in the article below, Mrs. Dad is doing increasingly un-maternal things to try to get herself elected, even if it includes scaring the PJs off of little kids. In short, Mrs. Dad is quickly becoming the anti-imaginary/maternal candidate, or as Dowd puts it, touching upon another point i made in a previous post about the emergence of the monstrous mother figure, “an Andrea Yates-looking mother who’s creeping up on the sleeping babes in the dark.” But what would we expect from a candidate whose chief political strategists is named “Mark Penn,” i.e., “to mark something” and “a technology used for writing.”
Thinking magically with my ears here in this context, might it be possible that Barack is doing so well in the primaries not because his last name sounds so much like “Osama,” as many have pointed out, but rather because it sounds so much like “Momma” ?
Viva la differance!!!
March 2, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Wake-Up Call for Hillary
By MAUREEN DOWD
SAN ANTONIO
Channeling her inner Cheney, Hillary Clinton dropped a fear bomb, as Michelle Obama might call it, implying in a new ad that if her opponent is elected, your angelic, innocent, sleeping children could die in a terrorist attack.
Only she has the wise head to go nuclear, should that Strangelovian phone call from a power-mad Putin come into the White House at 3 a.m. Her ad shows how composed she would be at the dread moment when she picks up the phone. Her nuke look is feminine, in a tailored camel-colored jacket and gold necklace, yet serious, in Tina Fey black reading glasses.
It’s hard to discern the message of the ad. The scariest thing is not the persistently ringing phone but an Andrea Yates-looking mother who’s creeping up on the sleeping babes in the dark. The point can’t be that Hillary is superior to Obama in international crisis management, because she’s done no more of it than he has. She’s only done domestic crisis management, cleaning up after Frisky Bill.
Is the message that Hillary is Ready on Night One? That she won’t have to waste any time if she’s rousted out of bed in the wee hours, because she’s wearing a pantsuit under her pantsuit? (Or is it just, as Wesley Clark said during an appearance with her in Waco on Friday, that Hillary’s “been in the White House when the tough decisions were made. I guess you’ve been at the bedside when that phone rang at 3 a.m.”)
It’s rather Mommie Dearest for the first serious female contender to try to give the kiddies nightmares. How maternal is that? But since her nightmare is losing, she doesn’t mind scaring the pj’s off of little Jimmy and Johnny.
Obambi-No-More briskly dismissed Hillary’s attempt to cast him as a global ingénue. “Senator Clinton may not be aware, but we already had a red phone moment,” he said at an outdoor rally here, with the crowd of 8,000 booing at the mention of Hillary’s ad. “It was the decision to invade Iraq. Senator Clinton picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And John McCain picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And George Bush picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer.”
(In fact, there is no red phone in the Oval Office, but maybe Obama will redecorate. He wants to put in a hoops court.)
On “Nightline” last week, Hillary once more wallowed in gender inequities, asserting that it’s harder for her to run than her opponent — a black man with an exotic name that most Americans hadn’t even heard a year ago.
“Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field,” she said, “but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there.”
Is that how she would deal with dictators, by playing the refs and going before the U.N. to demand: “How come you’re not asking Ahmadinejad these questions first?”
Tangled in her own victimhood, she snipped to Cynthia McFadden that Obama had written in his book that “he’s a blank screen and people of widely different views project what they want to believe onto him.” She said voters were projecting their hopes onto that blank screen even though “he just hasn’t been around long enough.”
In the next breath, asked about the women who feel sorry for her, she said: “I think a lot of women project their own feelings and their lives on to me, and they see how hard this is. It’s hard. It’s hard being a woman out there.”
So projection is bad with Obama but good with her?
On a conference call Friday with Hillary’s ever-more-hysterical male strategists, Slate’s John Dickerson asked exactly when she had been tested in a foreign policy crisis. After a silence long enough to knit a sweater in, as the Web site The Hotline put it, Mark Penn cited “her work on the Armed Services Committee.”
Hillary’s boys pout that the press should find some dirt on Obama before time runs out. Their once fearsome campaign is now reduced to whining that Obama did not hold any substantive hearings of his Subcommittee on European Affairs. What’s next? Bitterly complaining that he missed a quorum call?
Hillary keeps trying to dismiss Obama’s appeal as emotional, something that can be overcome with enough mental discipline. But behind that ethereal presence he’s a wonky lawyer, just like Hillary. He reads The Times and Philip Roth and talks about the fine points of Medicare Part B in a way W. never could have when he first ran for president. (Or now.)
Hillary’s visceral attacks will not work. And the Republicans’ visceral attacks on the Obamas’ patriotism, and their usual attempt to make the Democrat seem foreign (Hussein, Hussein, Hussein!), may not have the same traction.
The president took the country to war on his gut, exploited our fears and played the patriotism card to advance his political agenda.
This time, Americans may prefer cerebral arguments to visceral ones. What a refreshing change reality would be.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: the paternal, symbolic narrative of his-tory is told for the eye; the maternal, imaginary narrative of her-story is told for the ear. As such, it should come as no surprise that potentially the first woman president in the history of this nation, Barack Obama, has a more pleasing voice than Hillary. You’ll notice that the first word to describe the Barackster’s voice is “Magic.”
Does Obama’s baritone give him an edge?
A powerful voice is a “god-given sound,” says opera’s Lotfi Mansouri. Obama’s baritone seems to have that magic. Clinton’s higher-pitched voice, not so much.
By Frank Browning
Feb. 28, 2008 | What is it about Barack Obama’s baritone?
Aside from the symbolism of finding a new hero who might displace the shame and fear that has poisoned American public life since Martin Luther King’s murder in 1968, there is something in the very essence of Obama’s voice — its tone, its timbre, its resonance — that has struck deep chords among Americans and foreigners in this year’s campaign season. Not since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 has a black American moved so many other Americans, white or black. And once the matter of voice was raised for Obama, a not always flattering parallel immediately arose concerning the voice of the first real female candidate in U.S. history: Hillary Clinton.
Eager to probe deeper into the chords of the candidates, I called two of the world’s specialists on what moves us as listeners to others’ voices, Lotfi Mansouri and Rick Harrell, who have coached singers at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Conservatory opera program.
Says Lotfi, “The fact is that the basic timbre is a god-given sound. Through technique and vocal study and all that, you can learn to control it and develop it, but you cannot manufacture timbre artificially.” Adds Rick Harrell, “The old saying is the eye is the window of the soul. Well I would say the voice is the window into the heart. People, whether they be actors or politicians, can be slick and manipulative and pretend to be genuine or heartfelt. However, the sound of the voice or the sound of a baby’s cry or the sound of someone saying, ‘Please! I can do what’s best for our country.’ It comes across at a very gut level more so than at an intellectual level.”
When it happens that something within us shivers or tingles at the words of a great and moving voice — Martin Luther King Jr. for my generation, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt for my parents, or even perhaps for some others Benito Mussolini — it is because there is something that leaps forth from the very anatomy of the speaker, revealing the innate grain that vibrates with a receptive grain of our own. It is not about goodness or morality or truth-telling and is little affected by coaching or practice.
The late French semiotician Roland Barthes touched on this vocal magic in a famous essay called “The Grain of the Voice.” He cites the power of a Russian church cantor’s chant: “something … is directly in the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages … as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings.” Barthes goes on: “The ‘grain’ is … the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.” Like the variable grain of an oak or a walnut, it reveals, if we let ourselves hear it, the integral character of the person before us.
Mansouri and Harrell also wanted to talk about another iconic American voice — that of Frank Sinatra. By no account did Sinatra possess a great singing voice. To the contrary, it was by most musical assessments decidedly mediocre. And yet, when Sinatra sang, it was as though he filled all the inner and outer dimensions of our experience. “Take ‘One for My Baby,’” Lotfi said to illustrate. “He didn’t just sing the words; you got the whole atmosphere inside and around the words and you were enveloped by it.” Like the great Ella Fitzgerald, whom he studied, Sinatra employed all the technique he could muster: tone, phrasing, inflection, the single note prolonged beyond endurance. Yet all of that would have been as nothing had the story he was telling in his songs not also been the elemental, physical story of his own life. The mediocrity of his lightweight baritone disappeared and we became travelers on the pulsars generated by the anatomy of his voice box in a separate universe of his making.
Can we say that Barack Obama achieves something similar when he speaks his chant for change? That is apparently what is happening for tens of millions of Americans, not to mention the cheering galleries across Europe and around the world who want it to be so.
But set against that resonant Obama grain there is what appears to be a counter-grain of what is all too often labeled Hillary the Shrill, including all the gendered codes buried beneath the word “shrill.”
Natasha Williams, a longtime friend from Ukraine, who directs the Balagula Theatre in Lexington, Ky., says simply that it is jarring to hear a lineup of self-important, deeper-voiced males followed by a higher-pitched female. We are conditioned, she says, to look for authority in the male voice — even though she finds the Republican heir-apparent John McCain squeaky and the now withdrawn John Edwards tweaky. Hillary’s problem arises, Natasha says, “when she gets excited and it comes across as angry and that upsets voters more than if she were an angry man. It’s connected to the fact that when the mother is upset in a house, kids feel insecure. It’s not like that with the father because the mother stands in between the kids and the father. But when mother loses it, then it’s really scary because the whole sense of security goes tumbling down.”
That’s one interpretation. Lynn Meyer, who’s done everything from political consulting to selling Florida real estate to writing a detective novel, has a different take on how men hear women’s voices. “There are two voices that don’t seem very threatening [to men]. One is the little girl voice — either Valley girl or Jackie Kennedy’s little tiny whisper. The other is Lauren Bacall’s [she lowers her own deep and gravelly] very sexy voice. Anything between these two, women have to be very careful they don’t sound like what I call ‘the voice of civilization.’ That’s the voice who told you to eat your spinach, take your elbows off the table, asked you where’s your homework. It’s a voice that sounds like a bit of mother, then schoolteacher, and finally nagging wife.”
Sound like that and you’re dead in the water. That is too often Hillary’s problem when she gets excited, Lynn says. “Every time she changes her register, people use that awful, sexist word ’shrill’ and that’s really code for the voice of the scold.”
I put that proposition to Rick Harrell, the San Francisco Opera coach, who agreed that shrill is death to any public performer: “We wouldn’t want our hectoring mother speaking to us from the White House for the next four years.” Harrell’s Opera colleague Lotfi Mansouri broke in, “It’s a preconception. A cultural preconception.”
One of those apparent cultural preconceptions afoot in the current political fray is a rather odd preoccupation with the baritone quality of Barack Obama’s voice, an insight pointed out by my radio colleague Brenda Wilson, a woman raised in Virginia who often speaks in grave stentorian stanzas. “Type in the phrase ‘Obama’s voice’ on Google and see what you get,” she advised one day.
I did so as I was listening on the transatlantic phone line. “OK,” I said, still clueless. “There are a lot of listings.”
“More than just a lot, Frankie-boy,” she answered. “How many do you see?”
“Yeah, there are a lot. A whole lot. Sixty-some thousand. But what’s that prove?” I persisted. “Everybody knows he’s a great speaker.”
“Yes,” she said, the schoolmarm slipping into her instructions. “Now, type in ‘Obama’s baritone.’ What do you see?”
“Whoa!” I answered. “Two hundred and sixty-nine thousand results!”
“Um-hm,” she murmured.
I waited.
“That’s all,” she said. “Isn’t it curious that the hot candidate gets to be described as a baritone? I mean, really, what’s so good about baritones?” I took the question back to Rick Harrell.
“When you hear commercials, whether on the radio or voice-overs on television, when they’re saying, ‘Trust me, buy this,’ or ‘Trust me, go here, go there,’ as often as not it is a baritone voice. If they want to get you excited and stimulated, then they’ll go for a higher-pitched sound.”
Probing further into the hidden presumptions and preconceptions of the baritone, I came back to an old reference from Freud’s student Theodor Reik, who proposed that the true baritone is an evocation of the ancient shofar, the ram’s horn that came from Abraham’s sacrificial sheep but was also the instrument Moses used to call the wandering tribes together at Sinai to hear the thundering words of God. Retreaded into 20th century neo-Freudianism the shofar/baritone becomes the vocal embodiment of phallic authority.
Hear my horn, hear my authority. It’s not a great leap to hear the multiple meanings of the horn.
Freudians, we know, can find something phallic in just about anything that speaks, breathes or moves. But such interpretations of the power of the baritone long antedate Freud or even the children of Abraham. Last summer Harvard anthropologist Coren Apicella took herself and some tape recorders to visit the Hazda people of Tanzania, who live pretty much as their ancestors did several millennia ago. Apicella wanted to know what voice had to do with seduction, fertility and reproduction. To get at the question she invited a clutch of Hazda men into her Land Rover and asked each one to say, “Ujambo,” or “Hello,” in Swahili. Then she played her recordings for a group of Hazda women and asked them to rate the voices.
Hands down, the women chose the baritone “Ujambos” over the higher-pitched ones. “Why there’s this relationship we’re not entirely sure yet. It could be that these men have greater access to mates. And so maybe these men that have deeper voices have higher levels of testosterone, maybe they’re better hunters and they’re able to bring more food home to their wives,” Apicella told NPR reporter Sean Bowditch. As it happens, when Apicella reversed the gender recording, the Hazda men seemed to prefer women with higher voices.
When it comes to the public arena, however, baritone is still the winning vocal register — as Obama’s string of primary victories, even among blue-collar white men, would suggest. It all comes back to how the baritone “is the voice one tends to associate with authority,” as opera coach Rick Harrell says, to get people to buy stuff or take certain medicines or, where candidates are concerned, to “trust … [that they] know what’s good for the country.”
– By Frank Browning
You know for a long time I felt that the cultural unconscious was working itself to put the maternal at the locus of authority in this country, given the obsolescence of the paternal narratives brought on by the verifiability of paternity through paternity tests. Given that the for the first time in history fathers no longer have to abstract the paternal role in procreation in terms of the culture’s dominant writing technology, it just seemed the right time for the maternal imaginary to make a comeback. That led me to believe that Hillary would get the nomination and the election. Perhaps I was right, but had chosen the wrong mother.
The First Woman President?
Obama’s campaign bends gender conventions
SPECIAL GUEST COLUMNIST
Updated: 11:49 AM ET Feb 26, 2008
It has been a rarity in modern political life: a wide-open race for the nomination of both parties. But whatever happens from here on out, this campaign will always be remembered for the emergence of the first serious woman candidate for president: Barack Obama.
Obama is a female candidate for president in the same way that Bill Clinton was the first black president.
It was Toni Morrison who first had the insight. In a 1998 essay in the New Yorker, the Nobel Prize-winning author described Bill Clinton as “the first black president,” commenting on his saxophone playing and his displaying “almost every trope of blackness.”
Obama doesn’t play the sax. But he is pushing against conventional—and political party nominating convention—wisdom in five important ways, with approaches that are usually thought of as qualities and values that women bring to organizational life: a commitment to inclusiveness in problem solving, deep optimism, modesty about knowing all the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on all the work alone, and a willingness to air dirty linen. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is taking a more traditional (and male?) authoritarian approach.
Obama is advocating conversation and collaboration—talking with everybody, including those with whom he has significant disagreements. Several of the so-called “gaffes” targeted by Clinton and GOP front runner John McCain have been about Obama’s willingness to talk with people we aren’t supposed to like, such as various factions in the Middle East.
Clinton’s campaign, on the other hand, is centered on the idea that she is the experienced realist. She understands the rules in this man’s game of politics and governing, knows how to play by them and win, and can take the heat that inevitably comes with entering the fray. Obama’s argument is that he understands the rules and knows how to play by them—but that he wants to change those rules, because they embody values with which he does not agree. He manages to hold his realism and his optimism in constructive tension together, even though it opens him up to the charge that he is naive.
Clinton proposes policy solutions to every problem. She has the answers, fulfilling our expectations of an aspiring authority figure and the brightest person in the class. Obama often proposes process plans, without specific policy solutions, such as bringing together all the interested parties on global warming and having them hash out their differences in a transparent forum, taking the risk that what they come up with will not be his preferred outcome.
Obama is willing to acknowledge his indiscretions and not apologize for them. His drug use was part of his journey. He returned the campaign contributions of a former friend with an unsavory past. Clinton seems to think that admitting mistakes or acknowledging indiscretions—having second thoughts—is a sign of weakness.
Clinton’s message is that she will drive her solutions to enactment and implementation despite the forces of evil lurking everywhere. As a woman, Clinton feels constrained to portray herself as tough, competitive, willing to take on the bad guys. She has to be more male than men, in the same way that women are reluctant to leave the office early to pick up their children at day care because they fear they will not be thought of as serious about their careers, while men are applauded for doing so.
Obama can raise possibilities that are off the table for Clinton. She needs to tell us that she can solve our problems. Obama seems comfortable in what we think of as a female role: not overpromising what he can accomplish, and telling us that the work of change is ours as much as it is his. As recently as his speech in Wisconsin right after the Potomac primaries, Obama told his listeners that any real change was going to require difficult work on their part.
Elections aren’t about leadership. They are about winning, and winning requires pandering: telling people what they want to hear. Leadership is often about giving people news they don’t want to hear. My favorite definition of leadership is disappointing your own people at the rate that they can absorb.
While Obama has tried to combine optimism and realism, John McCain is the only candidate in the race who has consistently delivered messages that his constituents did not want to hear. He is the only one who has regularly gone in front of hostile crowds and been willing to stand and defend positions—on immigration, the Iraqi war, ethanol, restoring jobs in Michigan, and campaign finance—that were certain to offend people whose votes he was trying to secure. Despite the gender-bending styles displayed by Obama and Clinton, McCain’s manner of exercising leadership is an androgynous and rare activity.
Martin Linsky is co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and a longtime faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
One need only look briefly at any number of cultural traditions to know that when there’s a major technological transition in a given historical moment, then the monstrous mother comes out of hiding. I’m thinking here of Medea (greek alphabet) or Lady Macbeth (printing press) to name only two of many. Thus we should not be surprised at the recent spate of mothers killing their children as we move inexorably toward the total dissolution of analog culture, at the same point in the cultural unconscious when another mother grows more monstrous as her bid for the White House falters. Oh and notice that both writers of the following NYT article are Mac people vs PC, as in “M(a)cFadden” and “Macropoulous,” the latter name clearly of ancient Greek Origins, but also sonically identical to the name of a computer company
and the title of a graphic novel about a sadistic serial killer created by, errr…. “Dreamweave Productions.”
http://www.hillcity-comics.com/graphic_novels/new_graphic_novel1549.htm
The ear knows all.
February 25, 2008
Mother Is Held in L.I. Slaying of 3 Children
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and ANGELA MACROPOULOS
A Long Island woman described as emotionally disturbed and afraid of losing custody of her children called the police on Sunday and led officers into a blood-spattered bedroom where her young daughter and two small sons lay slain on a bed, investigators said.
The woman, Leatrice Brewer, 27, who lived with the children in an apartment in the Nassau County hamlet of New Cassel, was taken to a hospital for physical and mental examinations, the police said. Late Sunday evening, she was charged with the murder of all three children.
Neither the police nor the county medical examiner said what caused the death of the children, who were identified as Jewell Ward, 6; Michael Demesyeux, 5; and Innocent Demesyeux, 18 months old. But investigators said one appeared to have been drowned, while the others had been slashed to death.
“It was a very disturbing scene, not only because they were children,” Detective Lt. Kevin Smith of the Nassau police said of the bedroom where the victims were found, at 891 Prospect Avenue in New Cassel. He declined to give details, pending inquiries by homicide detectives and the medical examiner.
The killings on Sunday appeared to add another grim chapter to a growing casebook of children slain by mothers: five drowned in a bathtub near Houston; two battered with rocks in Tyler, Tex.; three drowned in San Francisco Bay. The cases — some ending in verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity — have ignited a national debate over mental illness and the legal definition of insanity.
Nassau authorities declined to discuss any motives behind Sunday’s killings. But relatives and acquaintances described Ms. Brewer as emotionally unstable.
The two fathers of the children said they had tried through the courts to gain custody. Ricky Ward, Jewell’s father, said he had been trying in Family Court for a year. “Whenever I tried to get my daughter, Family Court wouldn’t let me,” he said. “The courts wouldn’t hear me out. I blame this on Leatrice Brewer and Family Court.”
In the 12 years that he had known her, Mr. Ward said Ms. Brewer had tried to kill herself a number of times. The Nassau police said they were investigating a report that she had jumped out a window of her apartment on Sunday. “He problem was her mind state,” Mr. Ward said. “She wasn’t stable and wasn’t able to communicate. She didn’t want anyone to have her kids. It’s a tragedy that my daughter’s gone.”
Innocent Demesyeux, the father of Ms. Brewer’s two sons, said that he and Ms. Brewer had been battling in court for 18 months over visitation rights and custody of the boys, and that she feared she might soon lose custody.
“I’ve been fighting to see them,” he said. Interviewed while sitting in a car parked outside the scene of the killings, Mr. Demesyeux, 28, of Hollis, Queens, said he had last seen his sons a month ago. He said that he and Ms. Brewer had a date in Nassau County Family Court on Monday, and that he had hoped to win the case. He said Ms. Brewer had missed court dates recently and had refused to take drug tests, which he said he had passed.
He said that he had recently been in contact with a county child protective services agency and that a representative was to have visited Ms. Brewer’s apartment on Friday. It was unclear if that visit took place.
Some neighbors said Ms. Brewer had behaved bizarrely. “I used to see her walking down the street during the day in her pajamas,” said Lisa Jones, who said she was a distant relative of Ms. Brewer. Asked if Ms. Brewer had seemed mentally unstable, Ms. Jones said, “Absolutely.”
Tatiana Wideman, 13, who said she had been a baby sitter for Innocent, said of Ms. Brewer: “She was stressed out. Everybody knew it. She would go around asking people for money.”
The Rev. Elijah Crawford, pastor of the Healing Power Church, spoke on behalf of the family at the Westbury home of a relative of Ms. Brewer’s, where family members had gathered. He said he had been told that Ms. Brewer had snapped because money she had expected from a social services agency — money she needed for the children — had failed to arrive.
“She didn’t get it, and snapped out,” the pastor said. He later said of family members: “They don’t know what happened. All they know is that she snapped. They said she had great love for her children. It’s just something that happened all of a sudden.”
Lieutenant Smith said the police responded to a 911 call at 8:55 a.m., summoning them to the Prospect Avenue address. It is a white-brick, two-story apartment building on the northwest corner of Swalm Street.The avenue, lined with commercial and residential buildings, is the main thoroughfare of New Cassel, a hamlet in the town of North Hempstead with 13,000 residents.
The 911 caller was apparently Ms. Brewer, but the police declined to specify what was said. Officers arriving at the scene found a building with four apartments, two on the ground floor and two upstairs, and were met on the second-floor landing by Ms. Brewer, who took them into her apartment, No. 3, and then into the bedroom, where the three children lay on a bed.
The children, the lieutenant said, were “obviously dead.”
Homicide detectives and dozens of police officers arrived shortly afterward, along with a crime scene investigation truck, which pulled into a driveway behind the building. The avenue was cordoned off to vehicular traffic, and yellow tape was set up to contain the large crowd — people from New Cassel and adjacent Westbury, as well as members of the news media — who gathered to watch the police activity.
Many people emerging from nearby church services joined the throng, and the talk for much of the day was of the deaths of the children, whose bodies were in the building all day and into the evening. They were to be taken to the medical examiner’s office in Mineola, and an autopsy was planned for Monday.
While the debate over degrees of mental illness and the legal definition of insanity continues, mental health experts and defense lawyers in recent years have been encouraged by the outcome of several high-profile cases in which mothers who killed their children have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to mental institutions instead of prisons.
Last year, Lashuan Harris, 24, who threw her three young sons to their deaths in San Francisco Bay in 2005, was declared insane by a judge one day after a California jury found her guilty of second-degree murder. The defense argued that she was schizophrenic, borderline mentally retarded and convinced that she was acting on orders from God when she threw the boys — ages 6, 2 and 16 months — into the water.
In 2006, Andrea P. Yates, who drowned her five small children in a bathtub at their home in the Houston area in 2001, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in her second trial. In 2002, another jury had convicted her of murder, rejecting defense claims that she was so psychotic that she thought she was saving the souls of her children by killing them. An appeals court overturned that conviction because of erroneous testimony by a prosecution witness.
And in 2004, Deanna L. Laney, who bashed in the heads of her sons, 6 and 8 years old, in Tyler, Tex., in 2003, saying that God had ordered her to do it, was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity.
Her lawyers argued that insanity was the only way to explain why Ms. Laney, a deeply religious woman who had home-schooled her children, would kill her sons without shedding a tear. Psychiatrists testified that Ms. Laney believed that she was chosen by God to kill her children as a test of faith.
So why will Barack get elected at this complex moment in the cultural unconscious? One reason could well be that the font he uses on all of his campaign signs is Gotham. Isn’t that the name of the city where our Vampiric hero, Batman, lives? Oh yes, I think it is.
A Font We Can Believe In
Barack Obama and his favorite font, Gotham
Unless you’ve been avoiding television, newspapers, and all other forms of mass media for the past few months, you’ve probably seen Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” and “Stand for Change” banners. The typophiles among you have realized that the “change” font Obama’s campaign uses is Gotham, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, originally as a commission for GQ Magazine.
Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones spoke about the creation of Gotham during our interview for Helvetica, and looking back at their description of what GQ wanted from the font, it sounds surprisingly Obama-esque. “GQ had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it,” says Hoefler. It also needed to look very masculine and “of-the-moment.” Mission accomplished.
The conversation about the origins of Gotham didn’t make it into the film, but was included among the 41 bonus features on the Helvetica DVD. I’ve posted part of the interview above. Watching this clip, I think it’s interesting that the design of Gotham was influenced by early Modernism, another movement that was about change and social idealism. And I like that the design aesthetic that may help move Obama into the White House was inspired by the humble NY Port Authority Bus Terminal sign.
And here’s a video from the guy who made the film, Helvetica, talking about the Obama font.
You know for years I’ve been wondering why Dragons play such a big role in all of these myths of parthenogenesis, paternity, and literacy. Well, I think I just figured it out, thanks to an article that appeared today in the NYT. It’s all there in the first line of the article: “DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion.” Having put together these seemingly incompatible mythic figures, the article then proceeds to provide scientific evidence of what they have in common. Both can give birth apparently without any role played by fathers. No wonder it’s a dragon that Cadmus slays, then plants its teeth in the ground, giving birth to both the founding Greek Paternal line and the alphabet.
February 24, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.
By NEIL SHUBIN
Chicago
DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.
Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion — there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.
But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.
Komodos — like many fish, amphibians and reptiles — have lots of reproductive tricks. For example, females can store sperm for a long time, tiding them over when conditions may be poor for reproduction. It’s possible that the Wichita dragon eggs could have been fertilized by the sperm from a male that was on site a long time ago. But DNA analysis of the “miracle embryos” from Britain showed that every bit of their DNA came from the females, and nobody should be surprised if this is also true of the Kansas dragons.
Virgin birth, known to biologists as parthenogenesis (from the Greek, “parthen” meaning virgin or maiden and “genesis,” beginning), has been seen in other species over the years. Some lizards occasionally produce offspring in this way. So do several species of fish, including a female hammerhead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha that produced offspring without a male last year.
The shark example is particularly striking because sharks are very primitive living fish, having shared a common ancestor with us over 400 million years ago. Biological cloning is not a recent invention of scientists; it is an ancient ability. And sharks, fish and lizards are probably only the tip of the iceberg. We know of virgin birth only in those rare instances when we’ve been lucky enough to see it. Nobody knows how common it is because there has been no systematic search for the phenomenon.
The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.
Cloning is one of many mechanisms species use to survive in a dangerous world. Indeed, the diversity of reproductive strategies seen in animals staggers the imagination. Some reptiles do not determine sexes genetically, but rely on different incubation temperatures to determine the development of males and females. Other creatures can actually switch sexes during their lifetimes, being born male and developing as females. Still others can switch sexes based on behavioral cues in the social group. There is no one way that creatures start development, grow and form sexes — there are many varied ways.
Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.
And that is the point. Biology is about variation. Without variation, the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges like changing climates and environments. So as we continue our very necessary debates over ethical issues, let’s bear in mind that morality is a concept limited to our species. The natural world is a fuzzy place that doesn’t always accommodate our decidedly human need to find cut-and-dried categories.
Neil Shubin, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, is the author of “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.”
Ok, so there’s this movie called the American Astronaut, and it’s a science fiction musical that is basically parenting and printing…in space. If I had known about this film sooner, I would have definitely done my final project on it. This is probably the best film I’ve ever seen in my life. This scene takes place on Jupiter where boys grow up with no first-hand knowledge of women. (Women on Venus found a way to reproduce without men.) To keep up morale they keep a boy on the planet who can actually remember his glimpse of the maternal as a symbolic substitution for the real thing…I guess it makes perfect sense that he sings to them about VOWELS before getting to the juicy part, which turns out to be nothing more than an afterthought:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EEyZffBQKu0&feature=related
If you haven’t seen the American Astronaut, you’re really missing out! It’s a truly incredible film.
Judy