*
CIVILIZATION
the director of a natural history museum
told me how, at the end of the war,
Russian soldiers entered, saw
snakes, salamanders, lizards
shelved in tall jars,
preserved in alcohol.
The Russians were interested
in the alcohol.
The director warned,
“These snakes are poisonous!”
He was left with barbarian laughter
and little corpses on the floor.
*
Germans didn’t behave like that.
In Pomerania, where I was born,
they had cut down the forests,
replanted them in straight rows.
Record keeping in the concentration camps
was exemplary: numbers and names
in ordered files; eyeglasses, hair, shoes,
suitcases in separate piles.
*
This was my heritage:
the burned ground,
a century divided between
such extremes of civilization.
~ Oriana
FICTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE
The metaverse is hot right now. Not only for Marvel (or Everything, Everywhere, All at Once), but in books, video games, even Facebook’s parent company, the metaverse is unironically omnipresent. I myself wrote a novel about the disappearance of a parallel-universe self, a premise I have felt as true to life since I was two and was adopted from Korea. The feeling that our reality has diverged from actual reality has become common.
It is a kind of melancholy, wherein the loss that we cannot move on from is our sense of what is normal. It is often prompted by an event like Donald Trump’s election as president, or, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic. At the height of the pandemic, that feeling was exacerbated by film and television, which depicted a world in which COVID never happened, so that we constantly encountered a version of our world that made it impossible to grieve it.
As pandemic restrictions faded, the loudest call, in America, was for a return to normal. As if the old normal was not already gone, a ghost haunting our present—just as climate change reflects carbon emissions from fifty years earlier, so that our current mess is the mess we made of the world in 1973. These things are not dissimilar, in that it is fundamentally too late to ever go back to normal.
Lately, I have been thinking about our choices regarding global warming.
Cli-fi is defined as “novels setting out to warn readers of possible environmental nightmares to come,” which reminds me of a sentence from Donna Orange’s Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics: “When we cannot panic appropriately, we cannot take fittingly radical action.” But if warning readers to panic appropriately was a legitimate strategy in 2013, it didn’t work.
Part of our failure to panic may have to do with what scholar Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” or objects so huge and massively distributed across time and space that they are impossible to point at directly. Elisa Gabbert explains further: “[The massiveness of climate change] paradoxically makes it harder to see, compared to something with defined edges. This is part of the reason we have failed to stop it or even slow it down. How do you fight something you can’t comprehend?”
Cli-fi’s orientation toward the future would make sense if we thought that climate change, unlike racism, were still avoidable. The trouble is that it is not. The too-lateness, in fact, is why I started this essay. If cli-fi acts as warning, and it is too late for warnings, what is the point? There must be another way.
Some would argue this is a bad premise. Maybe the point of future-oriented climate fiction is not to warn us of the dangers of global warming, but to make us ask, as Min Hyoung Song does in Climate Lyricism: “What is possible now?”
There is no future point of no return, beyond which unchecked climate change will become catastrophic. That point has already passed. Conditions are already catastrophic. And the present is more and more dominated by the contours of this worsening catastrophe. What is possible now?
Sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany (who famously said sci-fi is not about the future) argued that what sci-fi does is present us with just such a range of possibilities. Delany claims that by showing us as many alternatives (“good and bad”) of what the world could be, sci-fi gives us control over our present choices—by which, I take it, he means the choice of what kind of future world we want to make.
Here is the whole Samuel Delany quote:
Science fiction is not “about the future.” Science fiction is in dialogue with the present. We SF [sic] writers often say that science fiction prepares people to think about the real future—but that’s because it relates to the real present in the particular way it does; and that relation is neither one of prediction nor one of prophecy. It is one of dialogic, contestatory, agonistic creativity. In science fiction the future is only a writerly convention that allows the SF writer to indulge in a significant distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader’s here and now.
https://lithub.com/matthew-salesses-on-the-possibilities-of-climate-fiction/
Oriana:
This reminds me of a pre-amble to Werner Herzog's movie Kaspar Hauser: "Every man for himself and God against all." There is also Kurt Vonnegut's version: "God the utterly indifferent." That, of course, has always been the deist position .
*
ORSON WELLES ON A HAPPY ENDING
“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” ~ Orson Welles
*
YOUR LIFE IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK
The undeniable popularity of self-help books, wellness podcasts, and happiness workshops reflects the constant human desire to make life better. But could it be that many of our lives are already better than we recognize?
While we may have a loving family, a good place to live, and a decent job, we often fail to notice those things. It’s not because we are ungrateful or stupid. It’s because of a basic feature of our brain, known as HABITUATION.
Habituation is the tendency of neurons to fire less and less in response to things that are constant. You enter a room filled with roses and after a short while, you cannot detect their scent any longer. And just as you get used to the smell of fresh flowers, you also get used to a loving relationship, to a promotion, to a nice home, to a dazzling work of art.
Like the front page of a daily newspaper, your brain cares about what recently changed, not about what remained the same. And so, what once took your breath away becomes part of life’s furniture. You habituate to it—you fail to notice and respond to elements of your life which you previously found enchanting.
The good news is that you can dishabituate. That is, you can suddenly start perceiving and responding to things to which you have become desensitized.
The key is taking small breaks from your daily life. For example, when people return home from a long business trip, they often find their ordinary life has “resparkled.” Mundane things suddenly seem amazing. The actress Jodie Foster recently described this feeling when sharing her experience of returning home after filming on location for six months. “I came back from somewhere that is amazing and beautiful,” she explained. “But you know, you long for really dumb things that you're just used to… Right now, I'm like ‘my God avocados are amazing!’ or ‘I'm so glad I get to go to the gym again!’ Things that six months ago were sort of what I was trying to escape from.”
Of course, Foster’s life is far from ordinary, but we think that in this case her experience reflects a fundamental point. If something is constant, we often assume (perhaps unconsciously) that it is there to stay. As a result, we focus our attention and effort on the next thing on our list. But if we can make the constant less so, our attention will naturally drift back to it. If it is good at its core, it may just resparkle. This is why time away, however short, will enable you to perceive your life with fresh eyes—and to break up reality.
The renowned couple’s therapist Esther Perel draws similar conclusions. When Perel asked people to describe an incident when they were most drawn to their partner, they mentioned two general situations. First, they were especially drawn to their spouse when they felt unfamiliar and unknown—for example, when they saw their partner from a distance or when they observed them deep in conversation with strangers. Second, they were especially drawn to their spouse when they were away and then when they reunited. Perel’s conclusion is supported by science. A 2007 study of 237 individuals showed that when people spend more time apart from their partner, they report greater sexual interest in them.
But what if you are unable to get away from your daily routine, even for a short while? Well, perhaps you can change your environment using your imagination. Close your eyes and imagine your life, but without your home, without your job, without your family; create vivid images with color and detail. This small act might make you feel lucky about what you have.
It’s a bit like having a nightmare in which you lose a loved one—when you wake up and realize it was all a dream and the person is right there beside you, you feel especially thankful. Before the nightmare you may well have known that you had a good thing, but after you awake from it, you feel it too.
Why, though, does the emotional response habituate so fast? Why have we evolved a brain that derives less and less pleasure from good things that are constant or frequent? And perhaps most importantly, wouldn’t it be great if you marveled at your job, house, or spouse just as you did at the very beginning?
Maybe, or maybe not. Habituation to the good drives you to move forward and progress. If you did not experience habituation, you would be satisfied with less. For example, you might end up being happy with a low-paying, entry-level position many years after getting the job. Now, being satisfied with less may seem desirable, but it also means that you would have reduced motivation to learn, to develop, and to change. Without emotional habituation, our species may not have ended up with the technological innovation and great works of art we do, because people might not have had the motivation to create them.
A delicate balance must be struck here. On the one hand, without habituation (and dare we say some boredom, restlessness, and greed), we might have remained mere cave dwellers. But on the other hand, habituation can lead us to be unsatisfied, bored, restless, and greedy. Perhaps then, rather than focusing completely on how to better our life we need to also learn how to see our life better — to notice the great things we have habituated to a little bit more. ~
Edvard Munch: Cupid and Psyche, 1907
https://time.com/6722038/life-destabilizing-habits-essay/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
Call me hopelessly domestic — to me, ever since I can remember, the best part of travel was returning home. I’d just walk around the house, dazzled by all the space, the amazing bathrooms, the stairway, the house plants, the art on the walls. The house seemed palatial. And the luxury of sleeping in one’s bed! Is there a place that anyone loves more than one's own bed?
Predictably, that delight does wear off, replaced by habituation. But, in a minor way, returning home after even a few hours of running errands still works to make me happy as soon as I step inside and see it again: the spaciousness, the patio, the lush philodendron facing the window — my own little Eden with my own Trees of Life.
*
As we get older, part of what allows us to deeply appreciate our lives and savor our time is our past despair. In fact, it has great value as a springboard for growth. There is an ancient and almost universal cycle that involves trauma, despair, struggle, adaptation, and resolution. This is a deepening cycle that prepares us for whatever comes next. It opens our hearts to others and helps us feel grateful for every small pleasure.
https://lithub.com/want-to-be-happy-live-like-an-woman-over-50/
*
NETANYAHU’S VISION FOR A POST-WAR GAZA
~ Under his plan Israel would control security indefinitely, and Palestinians with no links to groups hostile to Israel would run the territory.
The US, Israel's major ally, wants the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern Gaza after the war.
But the short document — which Mr Netanyahu presented to ministers last night — makes no mention of the PA.
He has previously ruled out a post-war role for the internationally backed body.
He envisages a "demilitarized" Gaza; Israel would be responsible for removing all military capability beyond that necessary for public order.
There would be a "Southern Closure" on the territory's border with Egypt to prevent smuggling both under- and overground.
And "de-radicalization" programs would be promoted in all religious, educational and welfare institutions. The document suggests that Arab countries with experience of such programs would be involved, though Mr Netanyahu has not specified which.
Under the plan Israel would also maintain security control over the entire area west of Jordan from land, sea and air.
Mr Netanyahu has been under pressure — at home and internationally — to publish proposals for Gaza since he began his military operation. He is keen to restore a crumbling reputation as a leader who can keep Israel safe and will want to appeal to right wing hardliners in his coalition government.
A spokesman for Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the PA, said Mr Netanyahu's plan was doomed to fail.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh said: "If the world is genuinely interested in having security and stability in the region, it must end Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and recognize an independent Palestinian state.”
Mr Netanyahu repeated his rejection of any unilateral recognition by Western countries of a Palestinian state.
On Friday US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US was opposed to any reoccupation of Gaza by Israel as well as any reduction in the size of the territory.
"Gaza... cannot be a platform for terrorism. There should be no Israeli reoccupation of Gaza. The size of Gaza territory should not be reduced," he said at a G20 ministers meeting in Argentina.
Meanwhile negotiators trying to broker a temporary ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages are expected to meet in Paris.
The US wants a deal in place before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins in just over a fortnight.
And, as the humanitarian situation worsens in Gaza, there is international pressure too for the war to end. The Hamas-run Ministry of Health reports that more than 29,500 people, mostly women and children, have been killed since the war began in October.
Israel's military offensive was triggered by Hamas's unprecedented attack on 7 October in which gunmen killed about 1,200 people — mainly civilians — and took 253 back to Gaza as hostages.
Overnight the head of the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) warned that Gaza faces a "monumental disaster with grave implications for regional peace, security and human rights”.
In a letter to the president of the UN general assembly, Philippe Lazzarini said the agency "has reached breaking point, with Israel's repeated calls to dismantle Unrwa and the freezing of funding by donors at a time of unprecedented humanitarian needs in Gaza”.
Some of Unrwa's biggest donors suspended funding for the agency last month after Unrwa sacked several of its staff amid allegations by Israel that they had participated in the October attacks.
Mr Netanyahu aims to close the agency as part of his post-war plan and replace it with — as yet unspecified — international aid organizations.
And he has insisted that he will continue his war until Israel has dismantled Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the second largest armed group in Gaza — and all Israeli hostages are returned.
At the end of 2023, Mr Netanyahu warned the war could go on for "many more months".
Meanwhile the US has described Israel's expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank as inconsistent with international law.
"Our administration maintains a firm opposition to settlement expansion, and in our judgment this only weakens, doesn't strengthen Israel's security," Mr Blinken said.
It overturns a move made in 2019 by the Trump administration, which was welcomed by Israel, when then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Washington no longer viewed settlements as breaching international law.
West Bank settlements
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68379646
*
RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES ARE TERRORIZING AND BLACKMAILING NAVALNY'S MOTHER, REFUSING TO RELEASE HIS BODY UNLESS SHE AGREES TO A SECRET BURIAL. Even in death, he is a threat to them, and even in death he reveals them for who and what they are: the wretched lowlifes, endlessly amoral subhuman miscreants. ~ Misha Iossel
Update: the body has finally been released, without (to my knowledge) concessions from Navalny's mother.
*
A HORSE-DRAWN AMBULANCE IN TULA (Misha Firer)
I have been radicalized against American leaders by the experience of seeing a horse-drawn ambulance in Tula and I couldn’t wait to tell my subscribers in Russia.
Tula region known for its weapons manufacturing factories lies only 120 miles south of Moscow, a shiny city on seven hills. but what they have got is what undeveloped, barbaric America doesn’t?
A horse and a cart ambulance! Eat it, you Tucker-loving Americans.
The story goes like this. A retiree babushka in the village became ill. Her son called an ambulance. Paramedics’ car got stuck in the snow bank.
The old woman’s son arrived on a horse and cart. He loaded the paramedics and brought them to his mother.
I know what you gonna say, “But we have Amish people. They ride in horse carriages.”
They choose to live that way as part of their religious faith.
These Russian folks didn’t choose this way of life. Tula region governor is Putin’s former bodyguard, he didn’t build roads and didn’t provide jobs for the villagers to afford cars. They don’t even have horse carriages like the Amish!
They literally ride like peasants in Europe in the Middle Ages. 120 miles from the capital city and the seat of Putin’s power, from which he’s brainwashing the developing world that he’s fighting their war against the Hegemon as if they had asked him to do it!
*
71-year old Vladimir Putin, a tireless advocate of conservative family values swapped his gymnast mistress with whom he had three illegitimate children and whom he had never married, for a 39-year old head of The League for Safe Internet.
Yekaterina “Miss Censorship” Mezulina advocates for abortion ban and encourages women to have more children and yet she doesn’t have any kids of her own!
Perhaps Mezulina has hooked up with Putin for that particular reason — to have children out of wedlock?
Nobody wants to marry this Cruella. She hates everyone — university students, rappers, women who haven’t had kids, women who have had kids, liberals, and principally she hates 87% of the populace for being internet users, whose activities she has to monitor and censor.
I think Russians should see concrete example of conservative family values in action demonstrated by their supreme leader and Miss Censorship!
Mezulina’s boyfriend spoke at the forum “Strong Ideas for New Times.”
“Today we are going through a special time, we are reaching a completely different level of the tasks facing us.”
By the special time, Putin means pariah status for Russia, fratricidal war with Ukraine, and state terror.
“Russian is qualitatively changing from within, becoming more self-sufficient, sovereign, more self-confident.”
It’s like putin-g lipstick on a dead pig. What a beautiful face. Don’t pay attention to flies buzzing around.
Putin said that his message to the Federal Assembly will set goals for the next six years. Yay, Soviet era five-year centralized economic plan. With an extra year to make more plans plus de-industrialization of the whole country.
“Russia has more and more supporters all over the world, especially in the field of traditional values.”
Putin leads by example. A divorced grandpa, three mistresses and six or seven illegitimate children, Putin doesn’t even have a family. He doesn’t speak the names of his daughters aloud and has never been seen in their company. He’s always by himself. Never with a family. With one of the highest divorce rates in the world and record breaking low fertility rate, Russia too sets a wonderful example of conservative values to the world.
Putin also said that he has supporters in “unfriendly” countries and many countries are interested in Russia’s ideas, including in the economic sphere.
In the absence of anything to sell apart from natural resources, Putin is now peddling “ideas.”
Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that matters. And Putin’s regime is very short on the latter. Blah-blah-blah. Or as we say in Russia, blyat-blyat-blyat. Yawn. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Peter Pang:
Whoever accepts someone like Putin as the leader of the country, has de facto chosen the horse-drawn cart.
Paul Vincent:
And the outhouse.
Paul Browley:
Pooptin should work on bringing back the traditional toothbrush style mustache as worn by Charlie Chaplin.
Chuck Weisenberg:
“Russia has more and more supporters all over the world, especially in the field of traditional values.” Says Putin. Ah yes, so many ex-KGB operatives waiting for a new era of funding.
*
THE BRUTALIZATION OF RUSSIAN SOCIETY
~ What is important for foreigners to realize is that the Russians who are living in 2024 Russia are not the people they were 2 years ago — or even 1 year ago.
The brutalization of the society brings about a complete transgression of moral norms and civil laws. People are becoming more cynical and hardened, they lose compassion and empathy. It’s “dog eats dog” world.
Andrey Morozov
44-year-old sergeant of the Russian army Andrey Morozov, nicknamed "Murz", abruptly decided to leave this world after being branded “traitor” by propagandist Vladimir Solovyov on the state TV.
Morozov was a military correspondent. It was him who reported 2 days ago in his Telegram channel that the Russian army is suffering enormous losses — in just 4 months of fights for Avdiivka, Russia lost more people than the USSR lost in the entire 10 years of the war in Afghanistan.
Murz was a friend of Igor Girkin, a convicted war criminal, sentenced to life imprisonment by Hague Court — and then arrested by Vladimir Putin and thrown into a Russian prison on a 4-year sentence for extremism, for making fun of Putin’s girlfriend.
Once again, an “Uber-patriot” from the Z-community decided to tell the truth, and they immediately put him in a coffin. (Murz could have been helped to depart — or was too devastated by the consequences awaiting him for “treason”, who knows. No pity here — he was a dangerous enemy of Ukraine.)
Truth-tellers don't live long in Russia.
Can you imagine what will happen when someone publishes data on all losses of the Russian army over 2 years of war?
This number, apparently, is in hundreds of thousands of dead Russian citizens. And everyone around, except their family members, does not care about these losses.
Meanwhile, people in Russia are massively submitting applications to the registry office for a wedding on February 24, 2024.
In the Rostov region, about 300 couples will get married on the “mirror date” of February 24, 2024 (24.02.2024).
In Voronezh, 190 couples chose this date for their wedding.
In St. Petersburg, 258 applications were submitted to have a wedding on the day.
February 24 is a tragic date for Ukrainians — and many conscious Russians. It is the date when Russia began its full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022.
And here we have thousands of young Russian people choosing this date as the date to begin their life together as husband and wife.
Are they all such supporters of the war in Ukraine? Not at all.
It's much worse.
Yes, exactly — worse.
Russians are going to get married en masse on the anniversary of the start of the shameful war, not because they support this war.
But because they don't care.
There are many people in Russia who are avid supporters of the war and (still) enough of those who are against it. And arguing whether there are more avid supporters or quiet dissenters is pretty pointless.
Because there are many more of those who simply don’t care.
Those who genuinely don’t notice the war.
Well, yes, there is some kind of war going on somewhere. But this is “out there somewhere” and does not concern them.
“We are about to get married, and what a beautiful date it is!”
They are actually getting married on 24/02/2024, simply because it’s a “special” mirror date.
The mirror dates are rare and many believe that such dates are “magic.”
However, if they are that superstitious, how come it doesn’t occur to them that the terrible tragic date can bring them a completely disastrous kind of “magic”?
And that’s what Russian people have become. Find your own epithets to describe it — I’m lost for words. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
JJM:
Agree. This is Europe in the late 1930s all over again. The only difference is that in this case, Crimea is the Sudentenland … and when it came to invading Czechoslovakia, Ukraine decided to fight back.
Let´s see how many EU and US politicians actually wake up and see history repeating itself…hopefully not with the same outcome.
Joe Moorman:
Czechoslovakia versus Nazi Germany is very comparable to Ukraine versus Russia. The Czechs had some heavy industry and good natural defenses and could have survived if they were supplied well with weapons and logistics, although of course it would have been tremendously costly for them.
Most observers from the outset of this war thought Ukraine did not stand a chance, but they are stronger than we thought. At least there wasn't a Munich agreement in advance this time.
We cannot blow it this time. It seems costly now, but it's absolutely tiny compared to what it could become.
Matias D:
I have read several times about this apathy or indifference of many Russian citizens towards the war in which their country is involved.
My question is whether this indifference can actually be a way of hiding resignation for an unpleasant reality that they cannot change. Or perhaps, this indifference is a way of hiding the rejection of the war, so as not to be persecuted if they give an open opinion.
Steven:
It's terrible but common everywhere. Life goes on despite the horrors in Ukraine, Yemen, Israel , Gaza. The human brain protects itself from dwelling on such pain constantly.
*
“When you hate, you generate a reciprocal hate. When individuals hate each other, the harm is finite; but when great groups of nations hate each other, the harm may be infinite and absolute. Do not fall back upon the thought that those whom you hate deserve to be hated. I do not know whether anybody deserves to be hated, but I do know that hatred of those whom we believe to be evil is not what will redeem mankind.”~ Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)
*
NAVALNY’S DEATH IS A LOSS TO THE WORLD
"That's the difference between you and me: you are afraid, and I am not afraid. I realize there is danger, but why should I be afraid?”
These words from Alexei Navalny, spoken to a reporter in 2011, show the extent of the Russian opposition leader's fortitude.
Russia—and the world—are worse off without him.
There have been few people who have demonstrated such fortitude against Vladimir Putin. For more than 10 years, Navalny openly opposed the Russian dictator, calling out the "crooks and thieves" in the Kremlin who enabled his corrupt reign. Navalny knew exactly what the consequences for his dissent might be, especially after Boris Nemtsov, his friend and fellow opposition leader, was assassinated in 2015. Still, he continued to press for change in Russia, because he loved his country more than his own life.
Navalny rose to global prominence in 2017, when he ran for president against Putin––and Kremlin agents responded by throwing chemicals into his eyes.
In 2020, Putin tried to poison Navalny again, which international news agencies recorded in painstaking detail. What followed, however, was even more remarkable: Navalny decided to reenter Russia the following year.
When asked why he was traveling to what seemed like certain death, Navalny said he didn't want to “give Putin the gift of not returning.”
This courage didn't go to waste.
I met with Russian opposition figures in 2022, and even though the Kremlin had just arrested both Navalny and anti-authoritarian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, I could tell that the Russian people's aspirations for freedom were alive and well.
Would that have been the case if Navalny had fled? Maybe, but I bet Navalny's self-sacrificial example was a powerful motivator.
Navalny never gave up hope or lost his spirit. For the last years of his life, he was imprisoned in the "Polar Wolf," a Siberian gulag whose conditions recall all the inhumanity of Soviet tyranny. But he still managed to crack jokes with his judge and send love letters to his wife—up until virtually the day of his death at the hands of Putin's bloodthirsty regime.
I'm sure the Kremlin feels more secure with their chief domestic opponents gone and Kara-Murza behind bars. But that just shows the weakness of authoritarian governments.
Navalny, for one, saw politics more clearly than Putin. His prediction that the dictator's closed, fear-based system would reap degradation for Russia proved devastatingly accurate, as the war in Ukraine continues to take thousands of lives and waste trillions of rubles.
What would the world look like if Putin had listened to his opponents rather than his yes-men? What would it look like if other authoritarians did the same: if Nicolás Maduro allowed María Corina Machado to run against him in an open election, or if Xi Jinping promoted his officials based on merit instead of personal loyalty?
Such a world would be safer for West-aligned democracies. There would be no war in Ukraine, no troops massed on the border of Guyana, and probably no COVID-19. But it would also be a better world for the people of Russia, Venezuela, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Iran, and so many other countries.
That dictators like Putin prefer this world to that one reveals their great tragedy—that their ultimate goal is not their nations' well-being but their own self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.
Alexei Navalny, like Nemtsov and Kara-Murza, was different. He put his nation first, up until the bitter end. I hope Navalny's example inspires many others, because we could use more people like him. ~ Marco Rubio, https://www.newsweek.com/alexei-navalnys-death-loss-russia-world-opinion-1872089
*
THE LEFT SHOULD NOT SUPPORT AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES
In late 1936 George Orwell, like so many young idealists from Europe and the USA, went off to fight fascism in Spain. By the spring of 1937 he realized he was in a war with not two but three sides. The USSR was holding back a full Spanish revolution while attacking the socialists and anarchists outside its control.
Facing prison and possible execution himself, not from the fascists, but the Soviet-allied forces, Orwell fled Spain. His immediate commander, Georges Kopp, was imprisoned, and the leader of his militia unit, Andres Nin, was tortured and assassinated by an agent of Stalin’s secret police. Orwell would spend the rest of his life trying to clarify that in his time the left meant both idealists committed to human rights, equality, and justice and supporters of a Stalinism that was the antithesis of all those things.
He wrote after he got back to England:
"When I left Barcelona in June the jails were bulging… But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are… the communists."
Some of the pro-Stalin left believed the sunny propaganda about the USSR and some of them knew better but went with the Stalinist notion that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, that the gulags and lies and mass executions were the price of the ticket to some form of utopia that would soon arrive after everything else had been quashed.
There are similar rifts in the left of our time, which are both obvious and seldom addressed outright.
What is the left? I wish I knew. When the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the fact that some sector of what is supposed to be the left excused, justified, or even rooted for the Putin regime was, among other things, a reminder that “left” has long meant a grab bag full of contradictions. Later came the “peace marches” that argued the US should withdraw support and Ukraine should surrender.
Recent stories about these sectors of the left stumping for the Chinese government and downplaying its human rights abuses are reminders that this is an ongoing problem that takes many forms. I’ve seen genocide denial among this left: excusing the Chinese in the case of the Uyghur people, justifying the invasion and subjugation of Tibet, denying the Holodomor—the Soviet genocide through induced famine in 1930s Ukraine—even whitewashing the Pol Pot era in Cambodia, and siding with Assad as he wages a brutal war against the Syrian people.
It should be a modest request to ask that “left” not mean supporters of authoritarian regimes soaked in their own people’s blood. But the people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies. Some of the loudest pro-Putin people are now clearly part of the right; some continue to claim the mantle of the left, begging the question of what the left is.
Perhaps the left/right terminology that originated with the French Revolution has, more than two centuries later, outlived its appositeness. (In the French National Assembly of 1789, the royalists members sat to the right, the radicals to the left, and thus the terms were born.) The left I love is passionately committed to universal human rights and absolute equality and often is grounded in rights movements, including the Black civil rights movement. I sometimes think of the current US version as a latter-day version of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
This rainbow left pitches a big tent and as such is often more welcoming to, say, things like religion—after all, the Black church played a huge role in that movement, Cesar Chavez and Dorothy Day were among the devout Catholic radicals in American history, and Indigenous spirituality is central to many land rights and climate campaigns—while many traditional leftists often scorn organized religion.
I’d argue that because of its intersectional understanding of both problems and solutions, this left is more radical—radically inclusive, radically egalitarian—than those who treat race and gender as irrelevancies or distractions (including the men, from Ralph Nader in 2000 on, who’ve been dismissive of reproductive rights as an essential economic justice as well as rights issue). Perhaps it’s seen as less radical because bellicosity is often viewed as the measure of one’s radicalness.
Likewise, this rainbow left often has radical aims but is pragmatic about how to realize them. This might be because it includes a lot of people for whom social services and basic rights are crucial to survival, people who are used to compromise, as in not getting what they want or getting it in increments over time. All or nothing purity often means choosing the nothing that is hell for the vulnerable and I-told-you-so for the comfortable.
That’s the Rainbow Coalition-ish left; the other left has some overlap in its opposition to corporate capitalism and US militarism, but very different operating principles. It often feels retrograde in its goals and its views, including what I think of as economic fundamentalism, the idea that class trumps all else (and often the nostalgic vision of the working class as manly industrial labor rather than immigrants everywhere from nail salons to app-driven delivery jobs to agricultural fields).
This other left is often so focused on the considerable sins of the United States it overlooks or denies those of other nations, particularly those in conflict with the USA, decrying imperialism at home but excusing it abroad (and apparently seeing US aid to Ukraine through the lens of American invasions of Iraq and Vietnam rather than the more relevant US role in the European alliance against Germany and Italy in the Second World War).
It often embraces whatever regime or leader opposes the US, even when that means siding with serious human rights abuses and inequalities, as if the sins of the one erased or undid the sins of the other. It tends to rage against Democrats more than Republicans.
The Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine brought to the surface some of the old conflicts in what the left is and should be. Not a few people claiming the mantle of the left have been cheerleaders of Putin and Russia for some time. Putin is, of course, an authoritarian, a petroleum-fueled oligarch who might be the world’s richest man, an obstacle to climate action, the leader of an international white Christian nationalist revival, a vicious human rights abuser whose domestic enemies have a habit of dying suddenly, a homophobe, misogynist, and antisemite, and he’s involved in an imperialist war to annex the sovereign nation of Ukraine. You can’t get much further to the right.
But many in this version of the left insist that somehow the US forced Russia’s hand, or it was all NATO’s fault and NATO was just a US puppet, and Russia was somehow a victim acting in self-defense. Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz were among the many Eastern European critics who called this “westsplaining,” writing that though these arguments are supposed to be anti-imperialist, they in fact perpetuate imperial wrongs when they continue to deny non-Western countries and their citizens agency in geopolitics.
Paradoxically, the problem with American exceptionalism is that even those who challenge its foundational tenets and heap scorn on American militarism often end up recreating American exceptionalism by centering the United States in their analyses of international relations.
Of course all this muddle about Russia is not new. Western leftists fell in love with Russia during the revolution from which the Soviet Union arose. Some—the anarchist Emma Goldman among them—became disillusioned early on, but for others, nothing could shake the devotion.
All through the history of the USSR, it had its defenders in the west, when that meant denying the gulags, the show trials and executions, the attempt to control everything everyone did and said, the ethnic cleansing and cultural and sometimes literal genocide of many non-Russian populations from Crimean Tatars to Siberian reindeer herders to Muslim Kazakhs.
When it was an ally during the Second World War, the mainstream West supported Stalin and the USSR (which of course then included Ukraine). This is cited to their credit, often while overlooking the fact that Stalin had earlier signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazi government, dividing up Eastern Europe between the two.
While some of his peers who became disillusioned with communism and the Stalinists shifted right, Orwell was loyal to the left and pushed back at conservatives who tried to claim him and his books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. But he was disturbed all his life by the conflicts and contradictions of what left means.
I wonder now if the vicious persecution of leftists, communists, socialists, and progressives by the postwar American right, made people avoid analysis and statements that could weaken or divide their own side. That is, had there been no McCarthyism, might the left itself have cleaned house and clarified its positions? Might it have taken on the widespread mistake of supporting Stalin and other authoritarians?
There’s no answer to that, because there was McCarthyism and it was brutal. It left us with direct legacies, including what McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, taught his protégé Donald Trump about ruthlessness, manipulation, lying, and winning at all costs. (One of the ironies of what I call the left-wing men of the right was their constant claim that talk about Russian intervention on behalf of Trump was McCarthyism, as if somehow anticommunism had anything to do with the facts in the case or assessments of the current government of Russia.)
But this lack of clarity about what the left is and what principles are essential to it continue to create confusion and spread credit and blame between two different camps. It’s an old conundrum but maybe the solution is as simple as truth in labeling and clarity in categories. ~
https://lithub.com/what-is-left-rebecca-solnit-on-the-perennial-divisions-of-the-american-left/
Mary:
I have been confused by the "left's" response to the war in Gaza, but the analysis in this article helped clarify it for me. There is no one "left" in the US, but many opposing and contradictory sects (if I may call them that) each trying to maintain their own position as the "true," "pure," correct one. When I was involved in the 70's there was the old US Communist party with adherents like Angela Davis, (a fiery speaker) but also different amalgams leaning toward Maoism, or civil rights groups that took from both the USSR and China positions that were aligned with their own goals but talking about revolution using those as models...even when it didn't make a lot of sense. I remember Stalin referred to as "Uncle Joe," and Mao quoted like a kind of gnomic revolutionary evangelist.
We were all very young and foolish, buying into a narrative far too simple for real world complexities. Anti imperialist, anti West, critical of writers like Solzhenitsyn, and talking endlessly about "struggle" and "revolution" without knowledge or experience of either. I think these young "leftists" protesting against Israel are framing their objections in terms of anti colonialism and anti imperialism, which don't quite fit the picture, and protesting a genocide of Palestinians without acknowledging the Palestinian intention to commit genocide against all Israelis and all Jews. I can't escape the thought that behind all these protests is a real and undeniable antisemitism.
Oriana:
I had an odd experience once when I was a student at UCLA. One male student seemed to dislike me, and I couldn’t figure out why. Then someone explained to me that in his eyes I was a traitor, having left a “revolutionary” country for America. “But it’s America that’s a revolutionary country!” I exclaimed. My interlocutor, an older woman, replied, “Yes, but he doesn’t know that.” It would take years to go into all the ramifications of terms like “revolutionary” and so on.
For my part, I was confused by white students who grew their hair long and then had a special tight permanent (I imagine that was what did the trick) to create an “Afro” — so profoundly did they yearn to be black, even if only as some pathetic semblance. I was more thrilled to see the straightforward hippies, with hair down almost to the waist, and the “head shops” in very expensive locations near the campus — there must have been some very shrewd capitalists involved, the kind who knew a few quotes from Marx.
I also remember a little party during which all the students complained about America. Finally even I joined and said something critical about the country (I forget what — nothing explosive) — and got instantly attacked from all sides. That was a lesson I never forgot.
It was a good preparation for the statement that when the subject is large — continental, so to speak — anything you say is true, but the opposite is also true. Solzhenitsyn hated America and the West in general, and left for Russia as soon as he could after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As so often, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Meanwhile some of my classmates used phrases like “up against the wall.” I took French as my spiritual escape, the teachers correctly diagnosing my “accent slavique” (interesting how it travels from language to language).
You are probably right about the hidden anti-Semitism — it just never ends. Of course the Palestinians want Israel without Jews, just as the Jewish Israelis dream of Israel without Arabs. Not that I can offer any solution — “population transfer”? to where? Suffering flows through any attempted answer like an unstoppable mountain river.
I experienced a bit of Angela Davis in person (well, not really up close) and all I can say is that she was struck me as not especially charismatic (it took me a while to choose the most fitting term) — definitely not fiery, at least not when lecturing on existentialism (I can imagine her being fiery when attacking America). Soon she became a fugitive from justice. She is now 80 years old. It all seems a surreal past lifetime.
I’m not sure if clarity is possible in such a tangled situation. In any case, we have enough current problems and new threats (e.g. climate) to be spending much time trying to figure out the past.
You are so right about “young and foolish.” No one can escape that. Being old and foolish also happens. Maybe that’s one reason why so many people lavish outrageous love on pets rather than fellow humans.
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WHAT AMERICAN DIVORCES TELL US ABOUT AMERICAN MARRIAGES
~ The history of marriage is also the history of divorce. Divorce found its legal pathways because King Henry VIII couldn’t sire a male heir. In 1522, the king fought with the Vatican to obtain a divorce to marry Anne Boleyn. Famously, this didn’t work out for her. Spoiler: She was beheaded.
And Henry VIII would divorce one more wife after that. But his divorces didn’t open the floodgates to divorce in England. In fact, his bad example made England far more restrictive, and getting a divorce required an act of Parliament until 1857. In that year there were 324 divorces granted, and only three of them were instigated by women.
Americans may not have invented divorce, but we did make it great. Glenda Riley’s book Divorce: An American Tradition posits that Americans have always led the world in divorce rates. In 1620, the Pilgrims made marriage a civil, rather than a religious, agreement. Records show that the Pilgrims granted at least nine divorces, and the first was granted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1639, the wife of James Luxford was granted a divorce because her husband already had a wife. In the 1830s, the Frenchman Michel Chevalier toured America and noted that divorce was easier to attain in the new country than it was in Europe.
Divorce fit well with American mythos of freedom, democracy, and individualism. If men escaping the law could come to America and find a new life, why not women? In 1771 or 1772, Thomas Jefferson, never one for being good at dating his notes, began writing a brief in defense of divorce on behalf of John Blair, who wanted to end his tumultuous nineteen-month marriage. The brief was never filed because John Blair died. But Jefferson’s writing connects the freedom of divorce to the ideals of the Revolution.
Under the title “Arguments pro,” Jefferson wrote the following: “Cruel to continue by violence an union made at first by mutual love, but now dissolved by hatred. Liberty of divorce prevents and cures domestic quarrels.” It sounds liberating, but Jefferson was advocating for freedom for men and men only. The other notes in his documents show he believed that a wife was obligated to have sex with her husband and produce children. Freedom, for Jefferson, when it came to marriage and the founding of America, was freedom for white men.
Jamestown, founded as a puritanical theocracy, allowed a kind of marital separation, where the couple could live apart, the husband would support the wife, and neither could remarry. After the colonies declared independence, the southern states (except South Carolina) began to allow legislative divorces, where the couple could apply for the absolute dissolution of their marriage from the state’s lawmakers.
Overwhelmed by the number of divorce petitions, lawmakers eventually turned the process over to the courts. It’s important to note that this freedom was for white people only. Black people were still largely enslaved. But they were often mentioned in divorce petitions, where husbands blamed their wives for bearing “mulatto” children, or wives accused their husbands of cruelty for bringing enslaved women into the marriage bed.
The reasons for many of these early divorces are no different from the reasons people today have for splitting up—abuse, intoxication, and adultery. Riley’s analysis of the data concludes something that also parallels modern marriage: Most of the divorce petitions in the state of Virginia were sought by women. A lot of these women so desperately wanted to be free that they shared their private humiliations with an entire legislative body. I wonder about all the women without the means or stamina or support to seek divorces. What were their lives like? How much greater their humiliations?
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On November 9, 1805, Robert Cartwright placed an ad in The Tennessee Gazette and Mero-District Advertiser for his runaway wife. “I do hereby forewarn all persons from crediting my wife Polly Cartwright, on my account, or harboring her, as she has left my bed and board without any just cause. I am therefore determined to pay no debts of her contracting, and will prosecute any person harboring her, with the utmost rigor of the Law.” Ads for runaway wives that mostly absolved the husbands of their debts rather than calling for the wives’ return filled the pages of early newspapers.
In the 1800s, the Midwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa gained reputations for quickie divorces. Ohio and Indiana eventually put restrictions on residency requirements, pushing people into Iowa and Illinois, and eventually the Dakota Territory. In 1889, the U.S. Bureau of Labor tallied 328,716 divorces between 1867 and 1886. And most of the divorce seekers, two out of three, were women.
In her book The Divorce Colony, historian April White tells the story of women who escaped to the Dakota Territory to get a divorce. One woman, Blanche Molineux, took the four-day train ride to Sioux Falls to establish residency in order to divorce her husband Roland, who had been tried for the murder of one of Blanche’s friends. Although Roland was ultimately acquitted, the trial rocked the nation, with Blanche named as the center of a love triangle and blamed for the murder. Sioux Falls at the time had become a divorce colony, where women with the means could go to establish their residencies and seek their divorces. They formed a motley band of outlaws, an Ex-Wives Club on the frontier.
Blanche got her divorce. But her notoriety brought scrutiny to the divorce colony, and lawmakers extended the time required to establish residency. Then, Nevada took up the mantle as the quickie divorce capital of America. It’s important to note that none of these quickie divorces were actually that quick; they took months, and they were reserved for those who had the means to make them happen.
Freedom was what so many American women wanted, and they would do anything to get it. After all, America had been founded on the promise of freedom. In April 1848, forty-four married women in western New York wrote to the New York state legislature citing America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, noting, “Your Declaration of Independence declares, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. And as women have never consented to, been represented in, or recognized by this government, it is evident that in justice no allegiance can be claimed from them. Our numerous and yearly petitions for this most desirable object having been disregarded, we now ask your august body, to abolish all laws which hold married women more accountable for their acts than infants, idiots, and lunatics.”
That same year, American suffragists held the Seneca Falls Convention, where women argued not just that they should have the right to vote and hold property, but that marriage itself should be changed. Women, created equally, should be treated equally. And change began to happen. In 1848, New York passed a married women’s property act. It wasn’t the first—that had been passed in Mississippi, nearly a decade before. But after New York, other states followed—passing laws that allowed women to own property, keep income, and have a right to property acquired through marriage.
As women became more financially free, marriage became more about love and sex rather than commerce (or so we told ourselves). But it was a slow change. Women couldn’t get a mortgage or own credit cards without the approval of a father or husband until 1974. For centuries, rape was defined as between a man and a woman “not his wife,” establishing the fact that no matter the reality, legally, a husband could do what he wanted with his wife, and he did. Those laws began to change in the ’70s but even now, some states like South Carolina treat marital and nonmarital rape differently.
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The story of marriage is just as much about who is included in the narrative as it is about who is excluded. The book Far More Terrible for Women is a collection of the stories of women who were enslaved in America before the Civil War. These women recount love unions ripped apart because it was more advantageous for their owners to have them married to someone else, and partnerships made for breeding purposes, only to be ended when husbands were sold away or killed.
One woman, Louisa Everett, who was ninety when she was interviewed, recalled that on the plantation where she lived, enslaved people were forced to have sex with one another. If the owner thought a certain couple would have good children, he’d force them to have sex even if they were married to other people. Everett was married to her first husband when the plantation owner, a man she called Mister Jim, called her and an enslaved man named Sam over to him and ordered Sam to take off his shirt. Then Mister Jim asked Everett if she could stand such a strong man. Mister Jim was carrying a bullwhip, so Everett said yes.
“Well,” she recalled, “he told us we must get busy and do it in his presence, and we had to do it. After that, we were considered man and wife.” Another woman, Julia Brown, recalled her aunt and uncle being married but living on two separate plantations; they were allowed to visit only on Wednesdays and Sundays. One Sunday her uncle went to visit his wife and she’d been sold. He never found her again. Slavery in America was used to prop up white families with free labor, while tearing Black families apart.
Later, government support for families, such as free childcare for working women during World War II and veterans housing, would be denied to Black families. Every cultural force in America was working to tear Black families apart, while shaming them for not being married. In Veil and Vow, her cultural history of Black marriages, sociologist Aneeka Ayanna Henderson writes, “Black women’s unfreedom is made plain through the fictional depiction of domestic or intimate partner violence, rape, and sexual assault, and the state’s violent interventions in their private lives.
These interventions, from both political and cultural institutions, often rehearse neoliberal discourse, bolstering familiar order and privatized solutions as they reduce female subjectivity to marital status. They surreptitiously encourage African American women, imagined as the least desirable, to suffer through abuse and assault in order to sustain the facade of bourgeois nuclear family, made politically important for African American people.”
It’s hard to get married when the culture views you as less desirable. Henderson calls this “marriageocracy,” a portmanteau of “marriage” and “meritocracy.” The word suggests “that a free, unregulated, and equitable romance market animates marriage and the idea that it can be obtained with the cogent but misleading trinity of individual hard work, resilience, and moxie,” Henderson explains. But this idea isn’t borne out by reality.
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, Black women are more likely to be single than any other demographic. A 2014 OkCupid survey of dating behavior from 2009 to 2014 found that Black women were viewed as the least desirable dating cohort. And if you should get married, it’s hard to stay married when the state is more likely to incarcerate Black women and Black men, and social services are more likely to get involved in their children’s lives.
Additionally, interracial marriage was illegal in many states until the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision of 1967. Author Michael Warner sums it up perfectly in his book The Trouble with Normal, when he calls marriage “nothing if not a program for the privileged.”
Today, nearly half of all Black women have never been married. That’s compared with 32 percent of all American women. Marriage, simply put, can’t be a solution to societal ills, because it isn’t accessible to all people in our society. For centuries, traditional marriage was illegal for gay people. It wasn’t until 2015 that the Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.
In the Queer Manifesto, a defining document of the social and political movement ACT UP written in 1990, the author points out that for centuries, because of stigma, many queer people were consigned to expressing their feelings of love through art, therefore defining cultural conceptions of love while being denied the ability to access the legal institutions of love. The documentary Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music highlights this point perfectly, telling the stories of lesbian country songwriters who cloaked their sexuality to remain in the industry, writing songs that defined and expressed and reinforced notions of heterosexual love.
Excluded from the institutions of heteronormative marriage, Black and queer people have found fuller ways of living. In the essay “Single Black Women and the Lies About Our Love Lives,” the author Minda Honey notes,
The pandemic has only deepened my ambivalence about the supposed connection between matrimony and happiness. The surge in divorces these past few years made me question what these married women I’d often envied learned during the months they were shut-in with a spouse? Yes, the pandemic has been lonely for singles. But unlike many partnered women, I had not needed to drop out of the workforce to be the primary caregiver for children, nor had I found myself grumbling over being laden with an unfair portion of the household management. Often, when discussing singleness, there is a focus on what is lacking from a life unpartnered. Rarely do we consider what must be exchanged for a life lived with someone else.
Honey then goes on to describe the different ways Black women are redefining their relationships and their lives. Being forced out of the heterosexual marriage market has become a place of freedom rather than exclusion.
Whenever we tell the history of marriage, it’s important to know who is excluded: the poor with no property to transfer, queer people, people who are too fat or too thin, the women used for sex then discarded because they weren’t considered high class enough to be wives, the enslaved, the sluts, the single moms, women of color. These are the Liliths in the myth of marriage.
The story of Lilith is derived from the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the creation. Genesis recounts two versions of the creation, one where God makes man and women in his own image. The other is where he creates women from the rib of man. Mandaean and Jewish mythology tells the story with two women.
Lilith, the first woman, who is Adam’s equal and who rejects the Eden created by the Lord, is banished and becomes a demon. And Eve, made from man, the good woman—who still isn’t good enough—who gets both Adam and herself tossed out of paradise. Other interpretations of the Bible reject the existence of Lilith altogether. But if Western ideas of heterosexual marriage are rooted in the Christian and Jewish tradition of the union of Adam and Eve, then the woman lingering on the shadows of that story, even if she is a ghost of mythology, becomes relevant.
I imagine her hovering just outside of Eden, smoking, waiting for the others to be cast out, too. And they always are. Because it doesn’t matter how pretty you are or how good you are at roasting chicken or cleaning the house, you will fail. Your body will not produce an heir. You will commit that unforgivable female sin of getting old. You will become boring. You will nag about socks. You will eat of the forbidden fruit. Even now, the Liliths know that marriage remains a vehicle for the strict regulation of money, property, inheritance, sexuality, and female desirability. And anyone who falls afoul is tossed out of Eden.
Lilith, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Historian Randal Olson created a chart tracking American divorce rates over the course of 144 years. Beginning in 1867, the chart shows the number slowly rising with a dip in the 1930s due to the Great Depression and a leap in the number after WWII. The chart seems to show that when economic hardship hits America, the divorce rate drops or holds steady; after all, it’s hard to spend money on lawyers when there isn’t much money to go around and the economy is uncertain.
Historians attribute the leap in divorces at the end of WWII to the ending of the hastily cobbled together war marriages. Both divorce and marriage rates would drop in the 1950s, as women who were free to work while the men fought the war were forced back into the home. This restriction of women, and their unhappiness over it, brought about the second wave of feminism of the 1960s and ’70s, in which women fought for equal pay, the right to work, financial freedom, and no-fault divorce. These freedoms caused a wave of divorces, with divorce rates in America hitting 50 percent.
Since then, the rate of divorces has leveled out, and as I write this book the divorce rate sits at 2.3 per 1,000 people for the year 2022. Divorce is not immune to the cultural and political forces of history, because marriage and divorce are an essential pillar of society. ~
https://lithub.com/what-american-divorces-tell-us-about-american-marriages/
WHO BUYS ELECTRIC VEHICLES
Electric vehicle sales hit a new milestone last year, with more than a million sold across the US — and buyers might not be following partisan patterns, new data suggests.
The research by the Environmental Defense Fund Action, which acquired the voter and vehicle data from L2, a political firm that analyzes and sells voter registration and consumer records, suggests that despite common perceptions, not all electric vehicle owners are Democrats.
In nine of the 31 states and DC that register voters by party, for example, more Republicans voters are linked to records of electric vehicles – including insurance and repair records – than Democrats. Republicans, independents and third-party voters associated with electric vehicles also exceed Democrats in 24 of those states.
This data contradicts the idea that electric vehicles are “only popular with coastal elites and liberals,” said David Kieve, president of the Environmental Defense Fund Action. Recent polling has supported that idea as well.
The group’s findings, which still paint an incomplete picture of the market, show that former President Donald Trump won six states where registered Republicans were associated with more than half of the electric vehicles on the roads.
L2 linked voter registration to commercial records of electric vehicles, including insurance, credit and repair records, which vary in each state and could include multiple voters in the same household — or exclude some voters with electric vehicles due to privacy laws or missing data.
The data doesn’t include each voter with an electric vehicle, but it does offer some insight into political attitudes among consumers.
Many of the drivers of electric vehicles adoption are unrelated to politics, according to market experts. Before the vehicles become more mainstream, for example, their availability and the proximity to charging infrastructure affects whether consumers buy them.
Currently, the most widely available electric vehicles options are luxury brands, while mainstream consumers have more limited options. As long as batteries remain costly, automakers are unlikely to sell cheaper models. Additionally, challenges remain with charging infrastructure, and being able to charge the car at home is a big selling point that tends to limit the market more to consumers in single-family homes.
A 2023 Gallup poll found that while 43% of respondents might consider buying an EV, 41% of respondents would not.
Among new vehicle shoppers who are not considering an electric vehicle, JD Power’s research has found, “Consistently, the number one reason that [these shoppers] cite is lack of charging station availability,” said Stewart Stropp, executive director of the agency’s EV intelligence. In states like California, the average road miles between public chargers is only nine, while in North Dakota, there can be more than 800 miles between chargers, he said.
In addition to infrastructure, consumer awareness of electric vehicles also plays a role in adoption, according to Brett Williams, a senior principal advisor for EV programs at the Center for Sustainable Energy.
“We’re not finding universally that charging centers sell cars unless EVs are already on the mind of the consumer,” Williams said.
Essentially, there is a mix of market factors, such as consumer awareness, infrastructure, incentives and availability, that drive sales. States that have more of those things, such as California, have more consumer interest.
But evidence suggests other states are catching up.
“Some of the markets that had the richest soup of those ingredients got an early start,” Williams said. “We’re also seeing that things are really changing over time… That speaks to the fact that the economic and pollution benefits of electric vehicles don’t obey political boundaries.”
Still, public opinion research suggests interest in electric vehicles has some partisan roots, even if the landscape may be changing.
A 2023 Gallup poll found that 71% of Republicans would not consider buying an electric vehicle, compared with 17% of Democrats. Similarly, a 2023 Pew Research survey found that 70% of Republican or Republican-leaning Americans were unlikely to consider one.
The Environmental Defense Fund Action’s findings also show that, in states where more than 50% of voters linked to electric vehicles were Democrats, just one — Kentucky — went for Trump in 2020. The remainder supported President Joe Biden.
Voters associated with electric vehicles aren't all Democrats.
In some red states, more than half of registered voters linked to electric vehicles are Republicans.
And while the new state-level evidence in the adoption of electric vehicles might show less of a partisan divide, one left-leaning state still has the most in the country. More than one-third of electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were registered in California, according to data from the US Department of Energy in 2022.
Electric vehicles are still concentrated in very few states
More than one-third of electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle registrations were in California in 2022. Florida had the next highest number, with just over 6% of all EV and PHEVs.
Still, buyers are driven not just by politics but by things like charging station availability, awareness of EVs and incentives like rebates, experts such as Williams and Stropp say.
“The more people get behind the wheel of an electric vehicle the happier they are,” Kieve, the EDF Action president said, adding that, while 2023 was the first year that a million units were sold, “It won’t be the last.”
Understanding the political leanings of electric vehicle consumers may affect how those policies develop on the national level, especially in an election year when Trump and Biden discuss their plans on the issue.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/21/us/electric-vehicles-republican-voters-dg/index.html
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WHAT MARX GOT RIGHT
~ “Marx was like a brilliant doctor in the early days of medicine. He could recognize the nature of the disease, although he had no idea how to go about curing it. At this point in history, we should all be Marxists in the sense of agreeing with his diagnosis of our troubles. But we need to go out and find the cures that will really work.
ONE: I want to see myself in what I have made
Our work should — if things go right — be a little better than we manage to be day to day, because it allows us to concentrate and distill the best parts of us.
TWO: Money isn't enough
Marx was aware of a lot of jobs where a person generates money, but can't see their energies 'collected' anywhere. Their intelligence and skills are dissipated. They can't point to something and say: 'I did that, that is me'. It can afflict people doing apparently glamorous jobs — a news reader or a catwalk model. Day to day, it is exciting. But over the years it does not add up to anything. Their efforts do not accumulate. There isn't a long-term objective their work is directed towards. After a number of years they simply stop.
It's the reverse of an architect who might labor for five years on a large project — but all the millions of details, which might be annoying or frustrating in themselves, eventually add up to an overall, complete achievement. And everyone who is part of this, participates in the sense of direction and purpose. Their labors are necessary to bring something wonderful into existence. And they know it.
THREE: Work should be meaningful
How does work get to feel 'meaningful'? A lot of what we look for in employment seems to hang on this word. Work becomes meaningful, Marx says, in one of two ways. Either it helps the worker directly to reduce suffering in someone else or else it helps them in a tangible way to increase delight in others. A very few kinds of work, like being a doctor or an opera star seem to fit this bill perfectly.
But often people leave their jobs and say: I couldn't see the point in working in sales or designing an ad campaign for garden furniture or teaching French to kids who don't want to learn. When work feels meaningless, we suffer — even if the salary is a decent one. Marx thought this painful experience was so important he gave it a special name: alienation.
Marx is making a first sketch of an answer to how we should reform the economy; we need an economic system that allows more of us to reduce suffering or increase pleasure. Deep down we want to feel that we are helping people. We have to feel we are addressing genuine needs — not merely servicing random desires.
FOUR: Specialization deadens the soul
In Marx's eyes, all of us are generalists inside. We were not born to do one thing only. It's merely the economy that — for its own greedy ends — pushes us to sacrifice ourselves to one discipline alone.
But in our hearts, we are far more multiple, and promiscuous than that: beneath the calm outward façade of the accountant might lie someone pining to have a go at landscape gardening. Many a poet would want to have a go at working in industry for a few years.
So in the Communist Utopia, Marx proposed that it would be 'possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner...but without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.' It's a vision of a rounded development, which work frustrates.
Marx recognizes our multiple potentials. And so do we; sometimes on a Saturday morning, we'll sketch a building or put up something in Lego and wonder, 'I could be an architect'. It can feel pathetic, but Marx dignifies this feeling. There are all kinds of other selves slumbering within us. Specialization might be an economic imperative but it can be a human betrayal.
FIVE: Progress should make life easier
Why are we all so anxious all the time? Marx had a diagnosis. Because capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; just one factor among others in the forces of production and one that can ruthlessly be let go the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology. There simply is no job security in capitalism.
And yet, as Marx knew, deep inside of us, we long for security with an intensity similar to that which we feel in relationships. We don't want to be arbitrarily let go, we are terrified of being abandoned. Marx knows we are expendable; it all depends on cost and need. But he has sympathy for the emotional longings of the worker. Communism — emotionally understood — is a promise that we always have a place in the world's heart, that we will not be cast out. This is deeply poignant.
If this were not bad enough, Marx insists that our sufferings are in fact unnecessary. He draws our attention to something very important: we actually now have the resources to make our lives far easier than they are. We have crises in capitalism not because of shortages, but because of abundance; we have too much stuff. And yet rather than this being a cause of celebration, it becomes grounds for agony. Our factories and systems are so efficient, we could give everyone on this planet a car, a house, access to a decent school and hospital. Few of us would need to work.
But we don't liberate ourselves. Marx thinks this is absurd, the outcome of some form of pathological masochism. In 1700, it took the labor of almost all adults to feed a nation. Today a developed nation needs hardly anyone to be employed in farming. Making cars needs practically no employees. Unemployment is currently dreadful and seen as a terrible ill. But, in Marx's eyes, it is a sign of success: it is the result of our unbelievable productive powers. The job of a hundred people can now be done by one machine. And yet rather than draw the positive conclusion from this, we continue to see unemployment as a curse and a failure. Yet, logically, the goal of economics should be to make more and more of us unemployed and to celebrate this fact as progress rather than as failure.
http://thephilosophersmail.com/110314-capitalism-marxism.php
Oriana:
It’s interesting how all of this was withheld from us in school. The Marx we were taught in Warsaw was strictly about capitalism as a ruthless exploitation of the workers. I had to discover Marx’s more interesting observations on my own, both through reading and personal experience.
Specialization kills the soul? It turned out to hold also for poetry . . . if you read and write a lot of poetry, your skill increases, but your mentality shrinks. The hunger for intelligent prose finally drove me precisely to intelligent prose. The hunger to try out a variety of other activities eventually drove me to try out other activities. Now, the muse of poetry is a very devouring goddess, and it took a lot of internal pressure (including growing boredom with poetry as such) for me to be able to live more fully after the very restricted life of specializing in poetry.
And then, not surprisingly, once I had variety rather than specialization, I felt a renewed delight in poetry.
What Marx is saying about fulfilling work is especially relevant now, when guaranteed basic income is again being discussed as a viable solution that would permit people to pursue more creative and satisfying activities. I am struck by the statement: “I want to see myself in what I have made.” To see the best of myself, in fact.
Or perhaps the emphasis should be on socially useful activities — instead of lamenting the “crumbling infrastructure,” imagine finally modernizing, getting the job done!
But what a different world that would be — for one thing, a world in which we don’t continue to bomb the Middle East for decades without end . . .
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“Be careful what you name your kids, if you don't want them delusional. Donald is a masculine given name derived from the Gaelic name Dòmhnall. This comes from the Proto-Celtic Dumno-ualos ("world-ruler" or "world-wielder"). [Sometimes it is construed to mean “PSYCHOPATH”.]" ~ Edward Margerum
Oriana:
"Vladimir" also means World Ruler. Maybe it's better to be less aware of what names mean.
Perhaps we are too careless with words in general. Take “psychopath.” After all, we wouldn’t call someone a schizophrenic unless the symptoms (e.g. hearing voices) warranted it.
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HOW CONTACT WITH THE NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES CHANGED THE WORLD
~ “In their pursuit of silver and gold, newcomers discovered many other riches, including new foods like corn, beans of all kinds, and squash. Aboriginal people introduced Europeans and the rest of the world to whole new families of foods: potatoes, tomatoes, green, yellow, and red peppers, zucchini, peanuts, pecans, pumpkins, artichokes, chocolate, avocados, vanilla, mint, curry, chilies, paprika, cranberries, maple syrup, wild rice, chewing gum, sunflower seeds, papaya, and more. This bounty of food crops were taken to Europe from the Americas and they changed world cuisine forever.
With the introduction of the potato and other American crops, the European population exploded. Before Contact all empires in Europe, from Greece and Rome to Persia and Egypt, had based success on their control of grain production. Situated in the warmer southern countries where it was easier to grow grain crops, these empires provided colder northern countries with food. Following the introduction of Aboriginal food crops such as the potato, northern countries such as Germany and Russia rose as world powers because they had gained a food supply independent from these warmer southern countries.
Other plant-based contributions from the Americas had equally significant economic consequence. Two– cotton and rubber – were essential to the Industrial Revolution. I would even go so far as to say that without the meeting of the two worlds there would have been no Industrial Revolution.
Thousands of years before Charles Goodyear patented the vulcanization process that made commercial rubber viable, Meso-American peoples used a similar process to transform latex from the native Castilla elastica tree into rubber goods for a variety of uses. Written records of the Spanish conquistadors indicate that these Aboriginal people wore rubber footwear. Archaeologists have found rubber balls, rubber bindings to tie a stone axe head to its wooden handle, molded rubber figurines, and evidence of rubber adhesives.
When rubber was first encountered by the newcomers, the Europeans viewed the material as a curiosity but quickly forgot it in their search for gold, silver, tobacco, and other profitable products. With the Industrial Revolution two centuries later, rubber became important for everything from hoses, belts, matting, flooring, footwear, all the way to pencil erasers. Think of all that would not exist if we did not have rubber.
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Eventually newcomers started rubber plantations in other parts of the world and its use spread, especially with the twentieth-century invention of the automobile and bicycle and their use of rubber tires. Even though the rubber tree is native to South America and experimentation with latex from its sap was developed by Aboriginals before Contact, the reason Charles Goodyear gets credit for the invention of rubber is that in 1844 he registered with the U.S. Patent Office the vulcanization process that makes rubber more durable.
Cotton from the Americas also brought important economic change during the Industrial Revolution. The large supply of raw cotton available from the Americas transformed European society. Manufacture of machines for spinning threads and weaving cotton into fabric began an industrialization process in Europe that over time developed factories for other goods that attracted rural workers into urban centers, increased mobility, liberated them from class structures, and improved health and well being. Cotton for clothing improved health around the world because they now had a regular change of clothing.
In addition, the “dirty Indians” of the Americas showed Europeans the benefits of sweats or bathhouses. The Spanish were horrified when they first arrived to see the Aboriginal people bathing on a regular basis. The Spanish believed that disturbing body oils by washing would allow sickness in, and so they bathed on a very limited basis and wore perfume to cover up the smell of their unwashed bodies.
Plants with medicinal effects are other important Aboriginal contributions. When Jacques Cartier and his men reached the shores of the Americas in 1535, they were very sick with scurvy, a sickness developed because of lack of vitamin C. It is well documented that the Aboriginal people knew of this disease and showed Cartier how to cure himself and his men with ascorbic acid (vitamin C) decocted by boiling winter leaves and the bark from the white spruce tree.
Without the initial help and the sharing nature of the Aboriginal people, the newcomers would never have survived. Most Europeans had never hunted. English citizens in particular could not go out and kill the King or Queen’s venison. Everything in the kingdom belonged to the Royals, who hunted for sport and not survival. A commoner in Europe caught hunting faced severe punishment. When the newcomers got to the Americas, the Aboriginal skill and accuracy in hunting must have astounded them. Newcomers relied heavily on Aboriginal hunting skills.
The men at Fort Simpson, a fur trading post established in 1831 by the Hudson’s Bay Company in Tsimshian territory near the mouth of the Nass River in British Columbia, totally depended on food provisions from Aboriginal people in that area. A notation in one of the Fort Simpson journals read: “If the Indians don’t stop celebrating soon we will starve to death.” I am assuming it was potlatch season and the Aboriginal people were otherwise occupied taking care of their own affairs in the business and government matters dealt with through the potlatch ceremony.
History books refer or name only a few Aboriginal guides, even though we know we played a major role in helping newcomers safely find their way. One Aboriginal guide is well-known, however: sixteen-year-old Sacagawea, who accompanied Lewis and Clark east to west from May 1804 to September 1806. Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark find their way, I assume, by communicating with Aboriginals along the way using hand gestures and sign language; she could not have known all the diverse languages she met along the way. Aboriginal peoples speak many different languages and so used a universal sign language to ease trade and communication between nations. In my territory, sign language was a necessary part of our culture and was used extensively during trade with other nations.
The newcomers had no names for the new sights they saw in the Americas so used traditional names of the Aboriginal people. Some of these names are moose, caribou, raccoon, opossum, chipmunk, barracuda, cougar, puma, jaguar, skunk, shark, wigwam, parka, poncho, toboggan, canoe, and tomahawk. Even weather descriptions such as hurricane, chinook, and blizzard come from Aboriginal languages.
It is estimated that the English language now contains about 2,200 words taken directly from the Aboriginal languages of America. The word caucus is an Aboriginal word and, again, did not come into the English language until the newcomers came to the Americas. The word may derive from the Algonquian cawaassough, meaning an advisor, talker, or orator, and was first used in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early part of the eighteenth century. Words such as utopia (1551), anarchism (1640s), socialism (1837), communism (1843), and other social forms entered the English language only after Europeans came to the Americas. The talking stick and the notion that only one person be allowed to talk at once with everyone respectfully listening knowing they too will get a chance to talk comes from the Aboriginal peoples.
When the Europeans came to the Americas and witnessed the talking stick and the individual freedom it represents, the newcomers began to envision new forms of political life and a more egalitarian way of living. Equal democracy and liberty as we know it today did not originate in European societies. Individual freedom in Europe was unknown because ordinary people were considered subjects of kings, queens, and tsars.
In contrast to the European rulers, American Aboriginal people did not “belong” to their leaders. The leaders, in most nations, were many and did not have special privileges despite their responsibilities. Aboriginal chiefs and leaders had to earn their positions by proving their merit and accomplishments to their people. Hereditary chiefs were trained almost from birth to assume their role as leaders of their people. Chiefs were selected for a certain skill such as hunting, warring, dancing, or other skills. The Aboriginal laws made sure everyone had equal opportunity and also had consequences for the ones who did not work as hard or were quarrelsome.
Aboriginal governments in the Americas were well established long before the newcomers arrived. The United States of America developed its Constitution based on the Iroquois Confederacy traditions. When the newcomer thirteen colonies were trying to put together a government they did not know how. These people were not royalty from their countries and forming a new government was a challenge. It was Benjamin Franklin and others who studied the Aboriginal governments of the Americas suggested a government like the Iroquois Confederacy.
The end result was that the newcomers took from the Iroquois and came up with their own constitution. Obviously it has been changed over the years but if you look at the U.S. Constitution and the Iroquois Confederacy, it is very similar in many ways. Bill Clinton and George Bush, when they were presidents, thanked the Iroquois for contributing to the formation of the United States Constitution. One has to wonder how many other countries took forms of government from the United States and were indirectly influenced by the Iroquois or other Aboriginal governments. Other political traditions adopted from Aboriginal people are used worldwide today.” ~
https://lithub.com/there-would-be-no-fourth-of-july-without-the-iroquois-nation/?fbclid=IwAR02kgwXymbpokexp96x1-DGsopj03sVL_pWohjTIWm6bSxNgIMYUbNQjm8
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CONSUMING TOO MUCH PROTEIN BAD FOR CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers discovered a molecular mechanism by which excessive dietary protein could increase atherosclerosis risk. The findings were published in Nature Metabolism.
The study, which combined small human trials with experiments in mice and cells in a Petri dish, showed that consuming over 22% of dietary calories from protein can lead to increased activation of immune cells that play a role in atherosclerotic plaque formation, driving the disease risk. Furthermore, the scientists showed that one amino acid – leucine – seems to have a disproportionate role in driving the pathological pathways linked to atherosclerosis, or stiff, hardened arteries.
“Our study shows that dialing up your protein intake in pursuit of better metabolic health is not a panacea. You could be doing real damage to your arteries,” said senior and co-corresponding author Babak Razani, M.D., Ph.D., professor of cardiology at Pitt. “Our hope is that this research starts a conversation about ways of modifying diets in a precise manner that can influence body function at a molecular level and dampen disease risks.”
According to a survey of an average American diet over the last decade, Americans generally consume a lot of protein, mostly from animal sources. Further, nearly a quarter of the population receives over 22% of all daily calories from protein alone.
That trend is likely driven by the popular idea that dietary protein is essential to healthy living, says Razani. But his and other groups have shown that overreliance on protein may not be such a good thing for long-term health.
Following their 2020 research, in which Razani’s laboratory first showed that excess dietary protein increases atherosclerosis risk in mice, his next study in collaboration with Bettina Mittendorfer, Ph.D., a metabolism expert at the University of Missouri, Columbia, delved deeper into the potential mechanism and its relevance to the human body.
To arrive at the answer, Razani’s laboratory, led by first-authors Xiangyu Zhang, Ph.D., and Divya Kapoor, M.D., teamed up with Mittendorfer’s group to combine their expertise in cellular biology and metabolism and perform a series of experiments across various models – from cells to mice to humans.
“We have shown in our mechanistic studies that amino acids, which are really the building blocks of the protein, can trigger disease through specific signaling mechanisms and then also alter the metabolism of these cells,” Mittendorfer said. “For instance, small immune cells in the vasculature called macrophages can trigger the development of atherosclerosis.”
Based on initial experiments in healthy human subjects to determine the timeline of immune cell activation following ingestion of protein-enriched meals, the researchers simulated similar conditions in mice and in human macrophages, immune cells that are shown to be particularly sensitive to amino acids derived from protein.
Their work showed that consuming more than 22% of daily dietary calories through protein can negatively affect macrophages that are responsible for clearing out cellular debris, leading to the accumulation of a “graveyard” of those cells inside the vessel walls and worsening of atherosclerotic plaques overtime. Interestingly, the analysis of circulating amino acids showed that leucine – an amino acid enriched in animal-derived foods like beef, eggs and milk – is primarily responsible for abnormal macrophage activation and atherosclerosis risk, suggesting a potential avenue for further research on personalized diet modification, or “precision nutrition.”
Razani is careful to note that many questions remain to be answered, mainly: What happens when a person consumes between 15% of daily calories from protein as recommended by the USDA and 22% of daily calories from protein, and if there is a ‘sweet spot’ for maximizing the benefits of protein – such as muscle gain – while avoiding kick-starting a molecular cascade of damaging events leading to cardiovascular disease.
“Perhaps blindly increasing protein load is wrong,” Razani said. “Instead, it’s important to look at the diet as a whole and suggest balanced meals that won’t inadvertently exacerbate cardiovascular conditions, especially in people at risk of heart disease and vessel disorders.”
Razani also notes that these findings suggest differences in leucine levels between diets enriched in plant and animal protein might explain the differences in their effect on cardiovascular and metabolic health. “The potential for this type of mechanistic research to inform future dietary guidelines is quite exciting,” he said. ~
https://www.upmc.com/media/news/021924-too-much-protein
"High leucine foods include chicken, beef, pork, fish (tuna), tofu, canned beans, lentils, milk, cheese, squash seeds, and eggs." Please note: leucine is not harmful except in excess. It's best not to take leucine supplements.
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WHITE HOUSE POST-MORTEM: WHAT REALLY KILLED 5 PRESIDENTS?
George Washington: Was He Bled to Death?
The father of the nation was supposed to live forever, or at least die a noble death in his sleep at a ripe old age. Instead, George Washington died at his Mount Vernon home within 24 hours of falling ill, apparently of suffocation. He was just 67 years old, only 3 years out of office, and his demise deeply shocked the nation.
Washington's symptoms included shortness of breath, a sore throat, and fever. The treatments, typical for the time, were excruciating. Aiming to restore the balance of "humors" in his body, physicians repeatedly drained his blood, applied a blistering substance to his throat and other body parts, and gave him an enema. But Washington wasn't optimistic.
"Doctor, I die hard; but I am not afraid to go," he said. "I believed from my first attack that I should not survive it; my breath cannot last long." It didn’t.
According to a 2014 PBS article by Howard Markel, MD, PhD, of the University of Michigan, retrospective diagnoses include croup (swelling in the airways), quinsy (an abscess between a tonsil and the throat), Ludwig's angina and Vincent's angina (infections in the throat not chest pain), diphtheria, and pneumonia. Washington's doctors have also been blamed for reportedly bleeding him of some 40% of his blood volume.
That certainly didn't help, Markel writes. But he believes Washington's cause of death on Dec. 14, 1799 was something else -- acute bacterial epiglottitis, the swelling of a flap of tissue that keeps food from going into the windpipe.
That certainly didn't help, Markel writes. But he believes Washington's cause of death on Dec. 14, 1799 was something else -- acute bacterial epiglottitis, the swelling of a flap of tissue that keeps food from going into the windpipe.
Medical historian Philip A. Mackowiak, MD, MBA, of the University of Maryland, told MedPage Today that this diagnosis makes sense, although a staphylococcal retropharyngeal abscess – an infection deep in the neck — is another possibility. Today, as then, the proper treatment would be to lance the swollen tissue, Mackowiak said. However, "his physicians apparently never examined his throat to see if there was swelling there.”
Mackowiak, who wrote a 2021 report about Washington's death, doubts that blood loss killed him. It's unlikely that 40% of Washington's blood was drained since he didn't show lightheadedness when he was helped to a chair, he said.
According to Mackowiak, Washington's death reveals the age-old importance of the clinical examination. "Even 2,500 years ago, an astute physician with a patient with an illness similar to George Washington's would have had the wisdom to look in the back of his throat to make sure that there wasn't something back there obstructing his upper airway.”
George Washington on his deathbed
William Henry Harrison: Out in the Cold
Inauguration Day in Washington D.C. on March 4, 1841, was windy and a bit chilly with temperatures in the 40s, but the new president didn't bother to wear an overcoat or even a hat or gloves. Within a month, war hero William Henry Harrison was dead at the age of 68, and generations of history buffs have known exactly whom to blame: Harrison himself. If only he'd bundled up and not gotten pneumonia!
Mackowiak suspects that Harrison actually died of typhoid fever – an intestinal infection caused by contaminated food or water — making him a victim of pestilence instead of carelessness.
As Mackowiak wrote in a 2014 report about Harrison's death, the president became ill 3 weeks after his inauguration with fatigue, anxiety, a severe chill, constipation, and cough. The initial treatment included multiple laxatives and the emetic antimony potassium tartrate, which is still used today to cause vomiting.
Then came enemas, more laxatives, mustard plasters, even more laxatives, a blistering agent, calomel, and laudanum (opium) ... and even more laxatives. Some of Harrison's treatments, such as camphor and senna, are still used today.
At last, the president died on April 3, 1841, after days of agony.
Mackowiak believes that Harrison's symptoms, including his respiratory illness, fit enteric fever and death from septic shock. The president, he thinks, was likely at risk because the White House's water supply was 7 blocks below a repository for "night soil" – sewage hauled from local homes and businesses.
Harrison's doctors followed the standards of the time, Mackowiak said, although the mixture of drugs – including opium, which can be constipating — didn't make sense.
Today, Mackowiak said, it's possible that Harrison could have been cured, although it's not clear how robust his health was. As for lessons, the case points to the dangers of prescribing too many drugs. "We don't use many of these drugs anymore, but we use equally toxic drugs. They should always be used with discretion.”
Mackowiak quoted 19th-century American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, MD: "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica [medications] as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind -- and all the worse for the fishes.”
Zachary Taylor: No Jubilee From These Cherries
It was Independence Day in 1850, and Washington D.C. was its usual miserable summer self. President Zachary Taylor ate fresh cherries and iced milk, and then he felt sick with cramps and diarrhea. Physicians turned to the usual suspects — laxatives, bloodletting, blistering – but Taylor died 5 days later at the age of 65. He saw it coming: "I should not be surprised if this were to terminate in my death."
Almost exactly 141 years later, in 1991, Taylor's body was exhumed from a Louisville cemetery to test a theory that he'd been poisoned by arsenic. Testing revealed no sign of unusual levels of arsenic in Taylor's body, which was recognizable by his protruding eyebrows.
The generally accepted theory is that Taylor died of gastroenteritis instead of a plot by Southerners to knock him off to preserve slavery.
San Francisco cardiologist John G. Sotos, MD, who manages a presidential medical history website, told MedPage Today that Taylor's cause of death is especially difficult to retrospectively diagnose because there's little information about his illness. Still, it's likely that he would have been successfully treated today with antibiotics, and any intestinal perforation could be repaired, Sotos said.
James Garfield: A Doctor Named Doctor Gets the Blame
President James Garfield endured the most agonizing, drawn-out, horrific death of any president: He lived for more than 2 months in the summer of 1881 after being shot in Washington D.C. in the arm and abdomen by a deranged office-seeker on July 2. His assassin is the ultimate culprit – never mind that the killer blamed Garfield's doctors — but historians have long blamed medical misadventure for his demise.
Garfield's physicians dug around his wound with unwashed fingers. A stubborn surgeon named Doctor Willard Bliss missed the true location of the bullet in the abdomen. An attempt to use a new-fangled x-ray machine only turned up static, possibly because metal bed springs were causing interference. Garfield, fed rectally, fell from 210 to 130 pounds and died on Sept. 18, 1881, at the age of just 49.
In an interview, Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, senior historian with the National Library of Medicine, said "at the time, American doctors did not believe in germs because they did not accept the theory of germs embraced by the British surgeon Joseph Lister beginning in the early 1860s. American doctors of the period subscribed to the miasma theory, the belief that bad air caused disease and illness.”
Even so, Reznick said, the "the arrogance and ambition of Dr. Bliss did not allow any second opinions. The autopsy confirmed what Bliss publicly and adamantly denied, that the bullet was on the left side of the president's body.”
So did the doctors screw up? In a 2013 report, surgeons Theodore N. Pappas, MD, of Duke University, and Shahrzad Joharifard, MD, MPH, of BC Children's Hospital in Canada, mainly let the physicians off the hook. While the apparent cause of death was "a late rupture of a traumatic splenic artery pseudoaneurysm" (an injured blood vessel), they think a gallbladder abscess "was the most logical source of the President's sepsis, which was, in turn, the cause of Garfield's unrelenting downhill course.”
Warren Harding: The Heart of the Matter
The New York Times blared the news in a front-page headline on August 3, 1923: "President Harding Dies Suddenly/Stroke of Apoplexy at 7:30 P.M./Calvin Coolidge Is President."
Harding succumbed to something – a stroke, perhaps, or heart failure, or poisoning – the night before at a hotel in San Francisco while touring the West Coast.
The president certainly had enough energy to enjoy during his term in the White House. (You don't want to know what he called his penis in erotic love letters.) But, as medical historian Markel noted in a 2015 PBS report, the president "was never a well man.”
He suffered from "neurasthenia," a vague term for general nervousness, and symptoms of congestive heart disease, Markel wrote.
In an interview, Duke University surgeon Pappas, who wrote a 2020 report about Harding's death, said uncontrolled hypertension and atherosclerosis likely contributed to his heart disease.
His symptoms worsened in 1923, Pappas said, as Harding developed angina and suffered from the stress of a gallbladder attack. "He clearly had some heart damage because he could not sleep flat in bed without getting short of breath. He slept on several pillows.”
As to the cause of death, "the only question was whether he had a stroke as he died," Pappas said. "A stroke was not likely. It is much more likely that his terminal event was a heart arrhythmia, which is very common when individuals have damage to their heart due to blocked arteries to the heart.”
Pappas added that there was no sign of poisoning, although no autopsy was performed.
"This was a time when we did not have antibiotics to treat the gallbladder attack and no heart surgery, strong heart medications, or blood pressure control," he said. "Today he would have been on antihypertensive meds. He would have gotten a cardiac catheterization at the first sign of chest pain and would have had stents put in his coronary arteries if necessary. If stents were not possible, he might have had heart surgery to do a bypass of the blocked blood vessels. He would have received antibiotics for his gallbladder and likely have his gallbladder removed if his heart improved.”
Instead, Harding died at the age of 57. Only 2 presidents who weren't assassinated failed to live as long -- James Polk, who died at 53, apparently of cholera, and Chester Arthur, who died at 57 of Bright's disease, a kidney ailment. In contrast, the president who's lived the longest – Jimmy Carter – turned 99 last October.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/108756?
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CAN ORGAN TRANSPLANTS CHANGE PERSONALITY?
I have received some unusual phone calls in my nearly 40-year career as a psychiatrist, but Mary's* call was unique.
"Dr. Liester," she began, "I don't need to see you as a patient. I just want you to tell me if I'm crazy. You see, I'm having memories of things that have never happened to me.”
That piqued my interest, so we agreed to meet for an appointment.
Mary was a pleasant, intelligent woman in her mid-40s who exhibited no signs of psychosis. In fact, she seemed quite rational and easy to engage in conversation. She began explaining why she had called: for the last year, Mary had been experiencing recurrent, intrusive memories of being hit by a car. In these "memories," she was a pedestrian and she not only saw herself being struck by the car, but she felt the impact as the car struck her torso, sending her airborne.
The problem was, Mary had never been hit by a car. When asked about any trauma, Mary recounted she had undergone heart transplant surgery just prior to the onset of these new memories. Her transplant surgery had gone well, but she was left wondering, "Could my new heart have anything to do with these new memories?”
Mary then divulged that she had recently learned the identity of her donor's family. They lived in Seattle, and she was planning to visit them in the next week. We ended the appointment with me reassuring Mary that she was not crazy and asking her if she would meet once more after she returned from her trip. She agreed.
When Mary returned, she described what she had learned on her trip. Her donor was a pre-adolescent boy who was playing tag with friends when he ran between two houses, then into an alley where he did not see an approaching car. He was struck by the car in the torso in the same location where Mary had been experiencing the sensation of having been hit. The boy was declared brain dead, but his heart was not damaged, so his parents donated his heart. Mary's reaction to learning this information was a sense of relief and closure. She now knew she was not "crazy." But I was left wondering, do organ transplants cause personality changes?
Relevant Research
One of the earliest patient accounts describing personality changes following organ transplantation is found in Claire Sylvia's book, A Change of Heart, published in 1997, and it wasn't until the 1990s that researchers began investigating this phenomenon.
In one early study in this area, neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, PhD, investigated changes in the personality of 10 heart transplant recipients to see if they paralleled the personality of their donors. In each case he interviewed the heart transplant recipient, a member of their donor's family, and a member of the recipient's family. He found two to five similarities in each case between changes in the recipient's personality post-transplant and the donor's personality. These included changes in preference for food, music, art, sex, recreation, and career.
He also found specific instances in which the recipients were able to identify the names of their donors or had sensory experiences related to their donors. In another study, described in his 1998 book, The Heart's Code, Pearsall reported that recipients of kidney, liver, and other organs also described changes post-transplant including their sense of smell, food preferences, and emotions, but these changes were usually transitory and not as robust as the changes found in heart transplant recipients.
More recently, we conducted a study on this topic at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and found 89% of organ recipients (of any organ) reported changes in their personality following their transplant surgery.
These findings raise the question, what causes these personality changes? Numerous hypotheses have been proposed, including the effects of immunosuppressive drugs, the trauma of undergoing transplant surgery, and surreptitious acquisition of information about the donor from outside sources. Pearsall suggested another possibility: he hypothesized cellular memory might be responsible.
Where Are Memories Stored?
In 1894, Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal suggested memories are stored in the brain. He believed this storage occurs by restructuring synapses, the connections between neurons. More than half a century later neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, MD, found evidence to confirm this. The theory that memories are stored in the synapses of the brain persists to this day.
But memories stored in the brain would not likely account for the personality changes observed following organ transplants. Could a different type of memory explain these changes?
Several types of non-neurologic cellular memory exist. For example, the immune system remembers exposure to infectious pathogens and responds quicker if re-exposure occurs. This is known as immunological memory.
Another form of cellular memory involves DNA. The DNA in our cells is capable of storing enormous amounts of information.
Almost all cells of the body are known to secrete DNA-containing packages known as exosomes that circulate throughout the body and deliver their contents to other cells where they are then incorporated into the recipient cell's DNA. Is it possible that donor organs secrete exosomes that deliver DNA to the organ recipient's cells, thus transferring DNA-encoded memory about the donor?
Epigenetic memory is another type of cellular memory. Epigenetics is the study of factors that turn genes on or off without altering the DNA sequence. Numerous types of epigenetic changes occur in human cells, and these changes create an epigenetic code that is stored and retrieved over time.
The totality of an individual's epigenetic changes at any point in time is referred to as the epigenome. The epigenome, which can be viewed as a record of the interactions between an individual and the environment, persists as a form of cellular memory known as epigenetic memory. Just as DNA memory can be transferred between cells via exosomes, epigenetic changes associated with DNA can also be exchanged between cells, suggesting a possible means of transferring information between organ donor and recipient cells.
RNA memory could also be at play. Researchers at UCLA used the sea slug Aplysia to demonstrate the transfer of memory between individuals. These animals were exposed to repeated electrical shocks to their tails, which established a memory of the shock. RNA was then removed from the trained animals and injected into naïve animals, who responded as if they had been trained to respond to the electrical shock. This demonstrated that memory can be transferred via RNA, raising the possibility that organ donors' memories might be transferred to recipients via RNA-containing exosomes.
Another potential method for transferring memory involves proteins. Over two decades ago, Sandra Peña de Ortiz and Yuri Arshavsky hypothesized that novel proteins could encode long-term memories. Exosomes are known to transfer proteins between cells, suggesting memories stored in such proteins could be exchanged between a donated organ and a recipient.
Ramifications
For now, the jury is out on these theories, and much more research is needed. But if memories and personality traits can be exchanged via organ transplantation, this suggests multiple potential consequences of organ transplant surgery. Not only could the transfer of an organ affect the recipient's identity and personality, but relationships and surgical outcomes might be influenced as well. For example, my patient Mary wanted to stop taking her immunosuppressive medications because she believed she had "integrated" her new heart and therefore would not reject it if she stopped taking her medicines. Such a decision could have dire consequences, including rejection of the donated organ and death.
Further studies exploring personality changes following organ transplants may teach us not only about the types of personality changes that can occur, but also increase our understanding of different aspects of personality and various processes involved in the storage and retrieval of memories. Although anecdotes do not prove personality changes occur as a result of organ transplantation, they do suggest the possibility of such changes, and provide a starting point for further explorations into this fascinating area of medical science. ~
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/
Mary:
I have read stories about memories and personality changes in organ transplant recipients...it's been around as long as transplants themselves. I think the explanation is probably a physical one: that cells, proteins, DNA or RNA can be repositories of memory. All need not be isolated in the brain alone, in the same way we are learning about the importance of the gut biome, or what we call muscle memory, when an action is so well known and so integrated it almost becomes automatic, without thought. Memories, especially physical memories, might be held elsewhere, or everywhere in the cells of the body, not just in the activities of neurons and their synapses. This is an exciting area for research.
Sometimes I wish we lived in less interesting times.
Oriana:
All I can do is nod my head.
As for interesting times, who knows, maybe already the Paleolithic hunters-gatherers thought they were living in interesting times. As inventions go, can anything really compete with the wheel?
Personality supposedly changes, sometimes in a dramatic and beneficial way, also when one survives being struck by lightning. But then personality changes regardless . . .
*
ending on beauty:
DUST OF SNOW
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
~ Robert Frost
