Books reviews, current events, and other musings

 
The New York Times raises an important point about the 9/11 attacks: the absence of a public investigation (registration required, from Talking Point Memo):

One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths in Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic, which sank in the middle of an ocean in the dead of night.

That hardly seems possible, considering that 9/11 iconography has been absorbed into everything from football pageants to pitches by speakers peddling lessons in leadership at stiff fees. And yet, says John Timoney, formerly a senior police commander in New York and the police commissioner in Philadelphia, the events of Sept. 11 are among the most rare in American public life: true catastrophes that have gone fundamentally unscrutinized.

The lack of such an investigation is astonishing. Most Americans, regardless of their political views, would like to learn exactly what happened, both as general knowledge and to better forestall a future attack. However, the Bush administration managed to block such an inquiry.
posted by Julian at 10:24 PM

 
I just got back from the Giants-Dodgers baseball game, which of course started with a 9/11 commemoration. The ceremonies were reasonable, avoiding the overdose of patriotism and sentimentality that I had feared.

Each person attending the game received a small American flag and a T-shirt with the emblem "September 11, 2002; we shall not forget". There didn't appear to be any extra security. Some people wore patriotic clothing, but many did not.

The ceremonies started with a small marching band consisting, strangely enough, of bagpipe players. Then many uniformed people arrived, carrying an enormous rolled-up American flag. Both baseball teams entered, and stood in two separate lines. Around 15 civilians, including a few children, stood near the center the baseball diamond. I assume that they had lost loved ones in the attacks, and the saddest part of the ceremony was watching them standing there and thinking about what they had endured.

One Bay Area resident, whose father died in the WTC, placed a baseball on the diamond. Then America the Beautiful started playing on the loudspeakers. During the song, the American flag was unfurled, occupying most of the outfield. Toward the end of the song, numerous doves were released; the flock of doves flew in a few large circles and then departed, a pretty sight.

After that, a woman from the San Francisco opera sang the Star Spangled Banner. The refrain "bombs bursting in air" unfortunately conjured up the standard image of an airliner striking the WTC. A San Francisco Fire Department boat glided through the Bay next to the stadium, squirting out several streams of water.

Then came the actual baseball game. Various 9/11 messages appeared on the stadium monitor during the game. An inane letter from President Bush referred to baseball as part of the healing process. My internal response was "Great; does that mean we can call off the war against Iraq?"
posted by Julian at 7:18 PM

 
This week's Nation has a fascinating exploration of the variety of opinions among the Left about how to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Here are some choice excerpts:

I spoke to a range of left intellectuals, from social democrats who were convinced that Afghanistan was a necessary and just war, to anti-imperialists who believed that it was a nasty war of retribution. More important, I spoke with people, arguably the left majority, who fell somewhere in between, in that sea of uncertainty that is the post-9/11 condition.
...
Unlike most Americans, leftists didn't have to ask the question "Why do they hate us?"--and not because of any glee that the chickens had come home to roost. The left press had spent the better part of the past two decades critiquing American policies that have fanned anger and resentment in the Arab and Muslim world.
...
"This war is a real crisis for the left," says Katha Pollitt, "in that finally there is an enemy who has attacked us, as opposed to any enemy that's in our heads, and one that's completely unsympathetic to the goals of the left."
...
When it comes to military action, moreover, the left has been similarly hard pressed to develop an informed critique that transcends pacifist platitudes. "What we should be learning from the last couple of decades," Barbara Ehrenreich reflects, "is that there's a variety of forms of [military] intervention."
...
The bellicosity of Christopher Hitchens is more surprising. It's true that Hitchens also supported American military interventions in the Balkans and in Haiti. Even so, it's hard not to be taken aback by his zealous embrace of the war on terrorism, his conditional support for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq and by the ferocious invective he has poured on antiwar critics.
...
"I don't believe that we're ideologically committed to do evil," says playwright Tony Kushner. "On the other hand, what Chomsky says about the globalization of the war is absolutely true. It's the beginning of an unapologetic imperium, and that's quite frightening."
...
Chomsky's jaundiced perspective on American power makes it virtually impossible to contemplate the possibility of just American military interventions, either for self-defense or to prevent genocide. Hitchens's intoxicated embrace of American power has left him less and less capable of drawing the line between humanitarian intervention and rogue-state adventurism. What the left needs to cultivate is an intelligent synthesis, one that recognizes that the United States has a role to play in the world while also warning of the dangers of an imperial foreign policy.

As one of the uncertain left majority, I found the article to be quite thought-provoking.
posted by Julian at 9:15 PM

 
In Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explores maternal behavior from the perspective of evolutionary biology. Hrdy, a primatologist, describes parenting in primates and other animals. She compares the behavior of human mothers with the way other primates act. Hrdy's central premise is that the traditional portrayal of mothers, instinctively caring for and loving their children, is an oversimplification.

Hrdy analyzes how maternal behaviors, in people and animals, maximize the number of children who reach adulthood and pass on their genes to later generations. Infanticide is one fascinating, though disturbing, example. Many societies have killed a large fraction of their infants, even in 19th century Europe. In light of the enormous cost of raising a child to adulthood, it makes evolutionary sense to abandon the babies that the parents can't afford. Hrdy examines when parents choose to raise their children. For example, in colonial India the higher castes raised more sons while the lower castes raised more daughters, in each case supporting the gender with greater reproductive potential.

Hrdy spends most of her time on the early stages of motherhood: mate selection, infanticide, breastfeeding, and attachment between mother and infant. While those are all important topics, a balanced treatment of post-weaning motherhood would have been more interesting. Maybe later childhood is less relevant to a primatologist.

Still, she does reveal many aspects of motherhood that I hadn't seen before. She argues that sociobiology is compatible with feminism, once you counter the 'women as passive breeders' thread of Darwinian thought. Also, infant abandonment and preferential treatment of some children indicate that unconditional caring is not a universal maternal instinct. She describes how, in Europe of past centuries, many parents left their children at foundling homes with appallingly high mortality rates. Even now, many cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) are actually infanticides. She emphasizes the importance of allomothers - caregivers besides the actual mother - in raising a child. She suggests that infants have evolved to be adorable and to compel their mother's attention, in order to increase their likelihood of survival.

The book lists many tidbits about mothering among various animal species. After a ewe gives birth, it licks the amniotic fluid off of its lamb so it can recognize the smell in the future; sheep evidently look alike to other sheep. Dogs, prairie dogs, and hamsters prune their litters, feeding the stronger ones with higher survival chances while nudging away the runts. Male langur monkeys often kill unrelated infants and then mate with the now childless females.

Mother Nature could definitely use some editing. The book's length could have been cut in half without omitting anything important. Much of the time, Hrdy reiterates points that she made previously. Her arguments were convincing, though heavy-handed at times. The descriptions of animal behavior were more entertaining than the theoretical discussions. And the photographs of baby monkeys were cute.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about Mother Nature. The book included a great deal of significant material with many explicit examples. However, the writing style and organization left room for improvement.
posted by Julian at 11:47 AM