“Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards,” columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote. When research subjects are encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of their brains light up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex. Kristof concluded: “So at a time of vast needs, from Haiti to our own cities, here’s a nice opportunity for symbiosis: so many afflicted people, and so much benefit to us if we try to help them.”
Despite all the bad news this year and over the past decade, 78 percent of Americans said they were very happy or somewhat happy, according to a new AP-GfK poll. “If happiness is the point,” Kevin Huffman wrote in the Washington Post, “four in five Americans already are on the right track, and that should make all of us more optimistic about the decade to come.”
Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, who now teaches law in Lynchburg, Va., saw “Avatar” and went away more than unimpressed, calling its visuals stunning but its story “borrowed” and its message “shallow and false.” Writing on the Web site Renew America, Kline said: “The only way to reconcile a godless Darwinistic worldview with a deeply spiritual American culture is to convert environmentalism into religion.” He saw the planet Eywa’s warriors as “Freudian expressions of the left’s desire for that all-powerful environmental protecting global police force,” concluding, “Call me unenlightened, but when I see a Marine battle an anvil-headed beast called forth by a planet-god — I root for the U.S. Marine.”
On this 218th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, Americans continue to cherish — and debate — the rights to speak, worship, assemble peacefully, petition the government; to own guns and private property; to avoid self-incrimination and unreasonable search and seizure; and to have a fair, speedy trial by an impartial jury of their peers and with the benefit of counsel. Virginia planter George Mason surely would be proud to know that the declaration of rights he championed not only endures today but gets a workout daily in our courts, legislative chambers and public square.
Time magazine has declared the ’00s the “decade from hell” and welcomed its passing: “Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post-World War II era.” As the century approaches its teens, Time concluded, “It’s likely that China will continue to grow faster than the U.S., and we may continue to see our global dominance erode. But very significantly, we still hold many of the world’s trump cards. We still have the world’s strongest military, which means we can and must lead in maintaining order and crafting peace. We are the leaders in technological innovation. And we are still the nation that most others emulate.”
Columnist David Brooks recently listened to a rebroadcast of the “Command Performance” radio program that aired the day World War II ended. He was struck by the humility shown on the day of that great victory — and how that contrasted with society today, citing Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” shout, Kanye West’s MTV awards interruption and Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech as recent examples of “self-indulgent expression.” Brooks wrote: “A display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day ‘Command Performance,’ comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.”
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Here’s a short YouTube video that mixes Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst with Kanye West’s interruption during the MTV Video Music Awards. President Obama reportedly called West a “jackass” in an off-the-record comment this week.
National Geographic’s July issue has an article on state fairs by Garrison Keillor. It includes photos from state fairs in six states, including Kansas, by former Eagle photographer Joel Sartore. Among Keillor’s “Ten Chief Joys of the State Fair” are:
— “To eat food with your two hands.”
— “To see the art of salesmanship, of barking, hustling, touting, and see how effectively it works on others and not on cool you.”
— “To watch the judging of livestock.”
— “To sit down and rest amid the turmoil and reconsider the meaning of life.”
“According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006,” columnist Charles Blow wrote. “. . . According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates. And, a study titled ‘Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?’. . . found that subscriptions to online pornography sites were ‘more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality’ and in states where more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’”
Declaring that “The Star-Spangled Banner” has “got to go” as the national anthem because of its two-octave range, melodic leaps, bloody lyrics and lack of places to breathe, columnist Michael Kinsley suggests some replacements, including “America,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” (despite its communist roots). Or, Kinsley writes: “How about Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’? A bit dark for a national anthem, I suppose. The Shaker hymn ‘Simple Gifts’ (turned by Aaron Copland into a theme in ‘Appalachian Spring’)? . . . Anything would be better than those ‘bombs bursting in air.’”
David Brooks had an interesting column about a longitudinal study of 268 young men, including John F. Kennedy, who entered Harvard College in the late 1930s. What’s fascinating is how unpredictable their lives and behaviors were. “It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don’t even hear,” Brooks wrote. “They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can’t even fathom. The man who is careful and meticulous in one stage of life is unrecognizable in another context.”
“Some sort of record in White House puffery was achieved when Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, joined first lady Michelle Obama to ‘help’ her plant vegetables in the new White House garden,” wrote St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Kevin Horrigan. He noted how Vilsack wore a suit and tie, and Obama wore “some sort of L.L. Bean-ish, Lands’ End-ish pink jacket.” Horrigan contends that real gardening attire is “boots, jeans and a T-shirt, all of which you don’t care if they get torn and muddy in your fruitless (also vegetable-less) struggle to persuade the soil in your yard to yield something edible.”
First there was the gay marriage question at the Miss USA pageant. Now Miss California Carrie Prejean is in hot water for posing for racy modeling pictures several years ago. What’s more, she assured the Miss California USA pageant, after one of the photos was released, that only one photo existed. But then a second was released, and there reportedly are two more. Prejean had signed a contract with Miss California USA stating she has never been photographed nude or partially nude. As a result, she could lose her Miss California crown. Oh, the horror. Also, it was reported earlier that the Miss California USA pageant paid for Prejean to get breast implants.
Who knew there was so much scandal potential in a beauty pageant? Will Prejean continue to be a heroine of the religious right?
Nothing is more American than Hollywood, right? But even that industry has been so globalized that Sunday’s Oscars might have been handed out in Sydney, London or Mumbai. The only acting winner born in the USA was best actor Sean Penn. Best picture “Slumdog Millionaire” was produced by a British company, co-financed by a French distributor, released by a company owned by Aussie Rupert Murdoch, and filmed with a largely Indian cast and crew. Supporting actor winners were Penelope Cruz (Spain) and the late Heath Ledger (Australia). Even the show’s engaging host was foreign-born, Aussie Hugh Jackman, apparently a first (if you count Bob Hope as American). Michael Medved blogged: “While the movie industry relies on the international market for more and more of its revenues, the televised Oscar broadcast won’t get healthy again until it reconnects with the American mainstream.”
On this Presidents Day, C-SPAN’s second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership puts George W. Bush in 36th place and ranks the top 10, in descending order, as Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, JFK, Jefferson, Eisenhower, Wilson and Reagan. Bill Clinton moved up six spots since the 2000 survey, now coming in 15th. Jimmy Carter moved in the other direction, from 22nd to 25th, just two spots ahead of Richard Nixon. Now, as in 2000, James Buchanan brought up the rear for his failure to avert the Civil War, his prediction that “history will vindicate my memory” still unrealized.
Taking a break from politics. . . . A 10-year-old Sussex spaniel called Stump became the oldest best-in-show winner at the Westminster Kennel Club Tuesday night. Meanwhile, The Eagle has a cute video of a local pit bull who talks — though an Eagle article about the dog notes that her speaking sounds a bit like Peter Boyle, the Monster in “Young Frankenstein.”
“My particular derangement, somewhere between train-wreck fascination and unbridled outrage, was fueled by questions as to how such an unwise pregnancy occurred and why so many members of our baby-crazed society insist on glorifying even the most dangerous, irresponsible and (despite a fondness for seeing them as divinely determined) technologically assisted reproductive events,” columnist Meghan Daum wrote about the California woman who gave birth last week to eight babies. So far, the woman isn’t getting sponsorships from baby-products companies, as businesses don’t want to be associated with the unwed mother who already had six young children.
The issue of slave reparations is “political dynamite,” acknowledges writer Paul Devlin of TheRoot.com, but now may be the best and only time to make the case for them. Not because the nation’s first African-American president has been sworn in, but because of the bailout bonanza. As Devlin explains: “Call it a belated bailout of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, chartered by Congress in 1865 as a financial haven for freed slaves and failed in 1874 because its white board lost all the money after a spree of wild speculation. . . . That combination of real assets lost and hundreds of thousands of people involved (to whom most African-Americans today could claim an ancestor) provides a legitimate cover for, or different way of looking at, reparations. It’s not a giveaway; it’s a bailout, you know, just like the kind white people get today.”
The percentage of Americans who see racism as a “big problem” has dropped in half in the past dozen years, from 54 percent in 1996 to 26 percent in the latest Washington Post/ABC News survey. But there hasn’t been much change in the amount of racism people perceive in their local communities. “There are two levels of identity with racism,” Wichita native Ron Walters (in photo), a University of Maryland political scientist, told the Post. “One is the national level, which is more symbolic. And the other is how they parse it in terms of their lives.” Not surprisingly, the latest poll also show disparity in how people of different races view the issue, with 44 percent of blacks and 22 percent of whites seeing racism as a large problem.
Our editorial Sunday noted how Tuesday’s historic inauguration is made bigger by the serendipitous timing of the today’s federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. To King’s credit, when the nation first sees an African-American sworn in as president, many of its citizens will see no big deal in that moment. They’ve grown up in a post-King world in which races mingle and marry without a lot of drama, where race is identifying but not disqualifying. To Obama’s credit, such “postracial” voters weren’t the only ones willing to place their trust in the junior senator from Illinois. Obama reached across ethnicity, income, culture and geography to find common cause with 53 percent of voters. Much of King’s dream is still unrealized. But surely if too slowly, change has taken its place – in the classroom and courtroom, on the bus, at the lunch counter, in the voting booth, in the boardroom.
“O.J. actually got convicted of something. Gasoline hit $4 a gallon – and those were the good times. On several occasions, ‘Saturday Night Live’ was funny. There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury secretary would be Joe the Plumber. Finally, and most weirdly, for the first time in history, the voters elected a president who – despite the skeptics who said such a thing would never happen in the United States – was neither a Bush NOR a Clinton.” That’s where the Miami Herald’s Dave Barry begins in his lengthy review of 2008.
This gem comes from July: “John McCain, at a strategy session at a golf resort, tells his top aides to prepare a list of potential running mates, stressing that he wants somebody ‘who is completely, brutally honest.’ Unfortunately, because of noise from a lawn mower, the aides think McCain said he wants somebody ‘who has competed in a beauty contest.’ This will lead to trouble down the road.”
November is remembered thusly: “Barack Obama, in a historic triumph, becomes the nation’s first black president since the second season of ‘24,’ setting off an ecstatically joyful and boisterous all-night celebration that at times threatens to spill out of the New York Times newsroom. Obama, following through on his promise to bring change to Washington, quickly begins assembling an administration consisting of a diverse group of renegade outsiders, ranging all the way from lawyers who attended Ivy League schools and then worked in the Clinton administration to lawyers who attended entirely different Ivy league schools and then worked in the Clinton administration.”
Even as it was drafted and ratified, the Constitution was deemed incomplete by many because “it has no declaration of rights,” as Virginia planter George Mason bitterly put it. His dissent, and the Virginia Declaration of Rights he had authored, eventually led to the Bill of Rights, which had been ratified by three-quarters of the states as of 217 years ago today. The 10 amendments spelled out for all time the rights of individuals and the limits of government power. Americans can thank founders such as Mason for insisting on a written guarantee of their rights to speak and worship freely, keep and bear arms, and much, much more. And readers can thank the dutiful local members of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America for ensuring that Bill of Rights Day always gets its due on The Eagle’s Opinion pages.
The 25 finalists for Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2008 include John McCain, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Michael Phelps, T. Boone Pickens, Henry Paulson, Gordon Brown, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hu Jintao and Tina Fey (in photo). But does anybody really think the editors can choose anybody but President-elect Barack Obama? In the setup to its online poll, the only “cons” the magazine lists for Obama are: “He neither cured cancer nor won the World Series. Also, could be funnier.”
“Old arguments about the 1960s never die. They just provide skeletons to pull out of the closet and rattle at opponents during presidential campaigns.” That was the conclusion of columnist Clarence Page after interviewing William Ayers and listening to him speak during his book tour. Ayers refuses to give a blanket apology for the extremist side of anti-war protests, but he would be willing to participate in a truth and reconciliation process alongside government leaders who started the Vietnam War and kept it going. But Page said that “there’s not much chance that our Vietnam generation will reach closure through a truth commission or anything else.”
Were any of you bloggers among the nearly 100 million people who watched “The Day After” 25 years ago today? The TV movie was mostly filmed in Lawrence and was about a nuclear attack. Though we don’t worry as much anymore about the possibility of such an attack, that danger hasn’t receded, said the film’s director. “If anything,” he said, “it has grown worse, with atomic weapons no longer under control of stable governments.”
