Give Me a Break, John — Part 2

When Give Me a Break John aired his 10 libertarian grievances on his ABC 1-hour special back around the turn of the millennium, the most memorable moment for me came when he suggested that regulation of air and water pollutants serves no purpose, asserting that the air and water in the NYC vicinity are amazingly clean, and would be so with or without such regulations. To demonstrate his water point, he took a dip in the Hudson River.

Mr. Stossel’s got a few years on me, but not many, so his youth roughly spans the same era as mine, but evidently he either doesn’t remember certain details of that time, or perhaps he never knew them in the first place. George Carlin used to do a very funny bit about swimming in NYC waters during his childhood, and he certainly wasn’t talking about clean water. I also noticed that Mr. S. didn’t catch and eat a Hudson River fish, and most residents along the Hudson know that no matter how much cleaner the river is now than when George Carlin was growing up, the fish swimming in those waters still carry inside themselves deadly PCBs from that river water.

As clueless as John apparently was about the water pollution stories, which included the Cuyahoga River fire and similar tales, I still have to wonder how he missed the air pollution. Various school groups from my upstate area took visits to NYC, and I remember that looking downriver while crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, you couldn’t see any of the Manhattan skyscrapers on the horizon, but you could always clearly see the smog cloud.

Following my HS visits to the NYC smog cloud, I headed to the midwest for college, getting to know the Chicago smog cloud much better. As one of my colleagues said, “The air in this city starts 100 miles out.” For most of the 1970s I lived in that metropolitan area, and had occasion to return to it from every major point on the compass. Without planning to do so, I had the experience of seeing that smog cloud when approaching from N, S, W and E, plus a few other variants as well.

Early one morning I also got to experience how the sun rises, or actually doesn’t, when living inside the smog cloud. As a consolation for pulling an all-nighter in preparation for an exam at Northwestern, I thought, “Well, at least I’ll get to see a sunrise, for the first time in my life.” But actually, I didn’t. As I sat, book in hand, glancing out the east-facing window, twilight slowly gave way to full daylight, but the sun never appeared on the horizon. About an hour after the official sunrise time, the sun slowly appeared above the smoggy haze, and around 8, I walked over to the dining hall on a bright, sunny morning, prepared for my exam but disappointed by the hazy sunrise episode.

Fast forward a few decades, and in 1998 I set out from Brooklyn with a companion on my way to visit Wyoming. Along the approach to Chicago, I spoke to my companion about the smog cloud, and I kept a watchful eye. We got closer, and closer, and I never saw it. Then somehow we got by the city, and looking in the rearview mirror on that partly-sunny afternoon, I didn’t see any smog cloud. Slowly, as we cruised through western IL and into IA, I came to the realization that the Chicago smog cloud of the 1970s was gone. Later, after returning to Brooklyn, I made a similar observation on a return trip to NYC from upstate, noting that I no longer saw a smog cloud on the horizon when looking downriver from the Tappan Zee Bridge.

I would not give the all clear sign the way Mr. S. does, because combustion engines running on petrochemicals still spew poisonous toxins, especially those running on diesel fuel, but I would assert that the air quality in major U.S. cities improved remarkably between 1970 and 1998. John wants to tell us that whatever change occurred in this period happened naturally, and not because of the environmental regulations that began taking effect in the early 1970s. Strangely, at least for John, this natural air renewal hasn’t happened in foreign cities that, coincidentally, lack strong air quality regulations. Perusing the list of cities worldwide with the worst air quality, you have to get down the page quite a ways before you find a U.S. metropolis. We still have plenty to do, but we have made significant progress, and I feel quite certain that without those clean air regulations, that old smog cloud would still be visible looking downstream from the Tappan Zee Bridge.

John calls himself a libertarian. Coincidentally, so do David and Charles. And what business are those 2 Koch Bros. in? They’ve got fingers in different pies, but many of their revenue streams connect to fossil fuels in some way. As the Porter Ranch gas leak reminds us, a large proportion of pollution can be traced to fossil fuels, without even touching on the climate change discussion. David and Charles would like the freedom to pollute the air and water without any pesky government regulations interfering with them in any way. John wants to tell us that such air and water pollution won’t do us any harm. Could there possibly be a connection between the rich guys who want a certain message trumpeted in the media, and a guy coming along and playing the exact tune that the rich guys want? 

Oh, and about climate change, David and Charles, whatever they actually believe, still obviously want to confuse the issue and make everyone question it, if possible. Then John comes along recently with his media opinion piece suggesting that the climate scientists have a financial interest in exaggerating the threat. Personally, it sounds to me like a certain media mouthpiece might have a financial interest in dismissing the threat of climate change, and of air and water pollution. John, you say we don’t need regulations to keep our air and water safe? You say air and water magically clean up pollution and renew themselves without us doing anything? John, give me a break!

Give Me a Break, John — Part 1

Back during the Bill Clinton era, I sat through a number of 20/20 episodes, and along the way, became acquainted with a host named John and his “Give Me a Break” opinion segments. At the time I didn’t identify a particular pattern to those segments, but I would sometimes agree with the viewpoint expressed, and sometimes I wouldn’t agree.

Then, around the turn of the new millennium, ABC aired an hour-long special by Mr. S, during which he expounded on not 1 but 10 grievances. Somewhere along the way, between his suggestion that the 1970s DDT ban constituted self-disarmament in the war against malaria and his assertion that environmental regulations aren’t necessary because the air and water are just fine, and would be so even without such regulations, I concluded that going forward, i wouldn’t need to waste time giving serious consideration to anything he said. Though John obviously doesn’t know it, DDT, over 4 decades after the ban began, still causes harm to certain wildlife species, and may also negatively affect the health of humans who unknowingly come in contact with trace amounts. For an example of the fallacious reasoning behind the libertarian view of air and water pollution regulations, see Beijing, if you can.

So then, not so long ago, John reappears on the radar, in the form of a syndicated newspaper opinion column. This time around, Mr. S wants the climate scientists to give him a break. While John himself evidently hasn’t quite decided whether to believe in climate change (as if it’s some kind of article of faith), he’s quite sure there’s no cause for alarm, or even cause for lowering fossil fuel use.

While I’m no climate scientist either, I could tell John one thing — if, 50 years ago, when I was in HS, someone had told me that within my lifetime, there would come a point at which, during the northern hemisphere late summer, the Arctic Ocean would be completely devoid of ice, even if for only a short period of time, I wouldn’t have needed a climate scientist to tell me that such a change constitutes a really big deal. Yet, concurrent with Mr. S’s opinion piece, I also read such a prediction by a climatologist, who expects that this late summer iceless phenomenon could begin before the end of this decade.

During my HS years, one science teacher spoke about the concept of global warming as an ongoing topic of discussion and study for the scientific community, but one without definitive answers or conclusions back then. When I related this to a distant relative who I recently reconnected with on Facebook who also had attended the same school, he jokingly admitted that he hadn’t paid much attention in certain classes. Not long after, though, like a true climate-science denier, he asserted that carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere, to which I replied that from everything I knew, Tyndall’s work was still considered foundational in that regard, though if he had evidence to the contrary from some other valid source, I would certainly look it over. This reply of mine, unsurprisingly, got no reply from him.

In addition to learning about the possibility of global warming 50 years ago in HS, I also learned and understood the fundamental greenhouse-gas concept, which was settled science from a hundred years earlier, but my relative must not have paid much attention in class that day either. If you understand this piece of science, then it doesn’t take much to add in the possibility that oxidizing fossil fuel sources containing significant percentages of carbon could increase the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn would increase the greenhouse-gas effect — not all that different from adding 2 and 2 to get 4.

Before the late 1980s, the climate change discussion had no political element, but then some members of the Big Oil gang started blasting propaganda to confuse the issue, although, to the best of my knowledge, that only happened in this country, which explains why only in the U.S. does a sizable percentage of the population, mostly belonging to a certain political party, question the science of climate change. That propaganda continues, as evidenced by Mr. S’s opinion piece, although it also loses efficacy over time as the weight of the truth tips the scales. 

Perhaps John should give all of us a break, and go back to school for a bit so he can learn some genuine science, but then, maybe that might be too scary for him, because the teacher might also belong to a union, which is another thing that bothers John a lot. Who knows, possibly Mr. S has himself suffered from some trace exposures to DDT that have blunted his reasoning capacity, in which case it would be pointless to try to explain to him a simple concept I learned in HS biology, which is that all living creatures on this earth share some basic chemistry, meaning that what’s poison to an insect is also poison to a human being, if ingested in a large enough quantity. I suspect that, just like my distant relative, John might have had better things to do in HS than listen to his teachers, but his ignorance of elemental science is no excuse, so when he asks us to give him a break, we can — a break from any sort of media credibility, since he shouldn’t have any.

The Donald and The Dreaded F-word

We certainly don't need this guy running a reality TV show 

in the Oval Office, especially considering how 

he might f-up the country (and by f-word, 

I mean one with 7 letters, not 4).

Back in the early to mid-‘70s, my friends and I had no difficulty tossing the dreaded f-word around amongst ourselves, whenever we thought it fit — if we thought someone was an f, we wouldn’t hesitate to use the term, as had been the fashion among young hipsters like us for probably a decade. If someone acted like a control freak, then he (almost always he, rarely if ever she) was an f. Generally, back then, I might guess that those f types voted Republican, but not know for certain, or even bother to give it much thought, often enough. If someone came across as a control freak, then he needed to lighten up, and loosen up. I didn’t think much then about the possibility that a control freak I knew might harbor actual fascist sentiments in favor of rounding up particular ethnic or religious minorities en masse, confining them to concentration camps and/or inflicting harm on them.

The word slowly fell out of fashion, and when I would hear someone tag Reagan, Goldwater, or certain other right-wing Republicans with the term, it sounded to me like a bit of a stretch. As the Supreme Court handed the 2000 election to W, the partisanship of the Republican majority in that case didn’t surprise me, but the extreme behavior of his administration did — when I saw Rumsfeld do his “We know where they are” bit, I had difficulty adjusting to the fact that a sitting Secretary of Defense would lie so openly and blatantly with the TV cameras rolling. Still, in that summer of 2003, when I saw a t-shirt with W and Adolf side by side, I smiled, understanding the message (Same S**t, Different A***ole), but it didn’t bring that f-word to mind, and to give W credit, whatever his faults, at least he did not demonize Islam or Muslims during his time in office.

At some point in the warmer months of the following year, that a-word came back to mind. I had heard about the new Trump TV show, and at some point I actually sat through an entire episode, to see the reality behind the buzz. I even gave it a second chance a few weeks later, although ten minutes was about all I could stand that time around, and it confirmed my earlier conclusion — I’d known enough egotistical jerks in my life, and I didn’t need to watch one on a reality TV show.

Then in the late fall, that f-word came bubbling back up, in the wake of a second stolen election. All the malfeasance of the first term seemed to multiply, and map out dark roads ahead for our representative democracy. As the second term disasters unfolded and built on each other, I started thinking about the word a lot more, and what it might mean in the modern era. I also began to grasp the fact that the fight against fascism didn’t begin and end with the Second World War. I read a treatise that identified the basics of fascism, and I made mental check marks as I moved down the list, feeling very strongly that if people like myself didn’t get more involved in expressing our dissatisfaction with the direction the Bush/Cheney gang was taking the country, we might lose our representative democracy completely.

As the opposition grew and gained momentum, the Ds won back both houses of Congress in the fall of ’06, and I felt a sense of hope that citizen involvement could and would prevent a slide into total f-land. I breathed a sigh of relief in January of ’09 when Obama took the oath of office, feeling that we had gotten past the possibility of looming war with Iran. Fast forward to the spring of 2011, and as the next presidential election started to gather focus, I began to hear whispers about that reality TV barker trying to move to a much different stage, though some political pundits labelled those rumors as cynical self-promotion for his TV career, which his quick turn towards the exit door seemed to confirm.

With that history in mind, and not knowing of his other earlier political flirtations, such as his attempt at the Reform Party nomination in 2000, I initially dismissed the clown’s suggestions of a genuine political move as more of the same empty self-promotion. However, over the previous year or two, I had connected the dots between the simplistic empty-headed mindset of such vapid self-promoters and the fantasy world where so many modern D.C. Republicans seem to dwell, so when the Donald made his official announcement, I could believe that perhaps he meant it this time, and that he had meant it 4 years earlier as well, but had promptly packed it in the last time around because he could sense that he didn’t have the necessary momentum in that cycle.

When Trump began his 2016 run with a xenophobic rant directed at Mexicans, it didn’t surprise me. The Donald, same as the Republicans who applaud him, lives in the fact-free magical-thinking Fox News primitive-brain sphere where logic and reason do not intrude, and where the world doesn’t turn according to established scientific principles but spins around huge dark clouds of fear. Watching his reality TV show, one might have quickly pegged him as an authoritarian control-freak type, but when you understand what makes someone act that way, then you recognize how all the pieces fit together, from the annoying egocentric pronouncements to the joking suggestions of murdering reporters. What the Donald doesn’t realize when he hits full fascist mode is that when he says, “We need to round up all of them,” whoever they are (fascist flavor of the month — could be Mexicans, Muslims, Asians, etc.), what he’s really saying is, “All of those people look alike to me — I’m so dumb, I can’t tell the difference.” When someone uses phrases such as the blacks or the Muslims, what they’re actually admitting, without realizing it, is that they lack the mental faculties needed to distinguish one member of the group from another. 

And so, as you might expect, the fearful control freak feels the need to try to control not just what reporters might say about him, but likewise, to the extent he can, he wants to control how the people who inhabit his world look and act, so they’re the same as him, as much as possible, and therefore less of a threat.

Making one final connection, at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on 12/15/15, as a protester was being removed, a middle-aged man in the audience shouted, “Sig heil!” I would guess that in one form or another, Trump’s entire following shares that sentiment, even if they wouldn’t all express it in that way.

You Work for Steyer?

This odd and unexpected query came my way in the late summer of 2014 as a reply to a post on a Facebook exchange about the proposed Keystone XL northern leg. And how did I get there?

I had jumped into an existing, and already quite extensive, FB thread, adding some information that I had picked up largely from a podcast interview clip of Greg Palast. Greg asserted that the KXL would primarily benefit the infamous Koch Bros., conveying their tar-sands material from their Canada operations down to their Gulf Coast refinery, and the refined product would probably go mainly to markets overseas, as it evidently does now. According to Mr. Palast, the Kochs would save about $1 Billion a year by getting their raw material from their Canada operations rather than Venezuela, as they were currently doing.

A quick Google search had yielded informative articles from reliable sources confirming the multi-million-dollar Koch holdings in Canada tar sands operations, and their Gulf Coast refinery setup as well. Armed with some confirmable specifics, and basically trusting Greg Palast as a dependable source for the rest of it, I readily dove into the KXL thread with the evidence about the Kochs.

A day or two after I offered my input, I got back that strange question, accompanied by one or two others and the usual bogus BS about the purported benefits of the KXL project. Did I have some vendetta against the Kochs? Did I have a climate change axe to grind?

The woman’s Steyer question implicitly assumed that anyone spending that much time posting and discussing environmental issues on FB must be getting paid for doing so. It might be one thing to discuss your latest recipe or your cat’s recent antics, but who would put in that kind of time on an FB page just out of concern for breathable air and a livable environment? Not her, obviously. I thought her question quite likely revealed something about her own motivations, and while I could not prove that she gets an income from the Kochs, I do know that the petrochemical dynastic duo buys a lot of propaganda in various guises, so I suspected that she might very well number among that bought-and-paid-for crowd, or she may have a first cousin on the board at TransCanada.

Since I could really only guess at the woman’s reasons, I replied by telling her that if I had the honor of working for Tom, I would openly and freely admit it, which is something the Koch Bros. writers never do, to the best of my knowledge. I didn’t mention it, but I certainly understood that if you collect a paycheck to further the malevolent interests of a pair of filthy-rich sociopathic jerks to the detriment of everyone else, then you might have something to hide, whereas if you work for someone trying to do something positive, you have no need to hide that fact. 

Anyway, not too surprisingly, the FB exchange ended there, as the KXL defender apparently couldn’t craft a readable response. I meant what I said, though, and if I had the privilege of working for Mr. Steyer, then I would not make a secret of it. I would hope, however, that I could do something more substantive in the fight against fossil fuel pollution than simply countering pro-fossil-fuel Facebook posts, which I will happily continue to do for free.

The Real Connection Between Iraq and 9/11

When this idea came to mind not long ago, it gave me a chuckle, and so I thought I might share it. I won't claim, however, that it's totally original -- I may simply have heard it years ago from a progressive talk show host like Thom Hartmann or Sam Seder and I just don't remember that I did, so if you've heard this one already, feel free to criticize. Anyway, to put it in a form that Alex Trebek could appreciate: Can you name the Bush/Cheney administration's 2 biggest screw-ups?

So there you have the real connection between Iraq and 9/11. Given the huge numbers of people who suffered and died as a result of those screw-ups, the chuckle doesn't last long, and has a dark edge to it. The thought arose, though, as I mulled over the implications of a recent Mother Jones article I'd read that explains why Jeb Bush can't seem to answer any questions about Iraq.

The MoJo article centers around Paul Wolfowitz, who acted as one of the chief architects of the Bush/Cheney adventure in Iraq. Evidently, Mr. W. took his national security cues, at least in part, from a book by a Harvard professor centering around a grand theory that could be titled Saddam Did It All. And by all, this professor meant not just 9/11, but also the year 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Not having read the book, but only the MoJo article, I don't know if the professor also connected Saddam to D.B. Cooper or the Zodiac Killer, but I would guess all Mr. Hussein's crimes, according to this Harvard author, occurred after the Iran/Iraq war ended in 1988, since, as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark reminded us in his book The Fire This Time, Saddam only became an enemy of the U.S. after he stopped killing Iranians.

While such grand unifying connections might exist on rare occasions, this one greatly strains the bounds of believability to those of us who live in the reality-based community that the Bush administration spoke of with such disdain. The theory doesn't make much logical sense, and doesn't fit basic facts, but it does explain much of what the Bush/Cheney bunch did. It explains the excitement they clearly showed when announcing Saddam's capture, which always seemed strange to me. It also explains so many of the Bush/Cheney missteps, from the failure to capture bin Laden when they had him cornered to the failure to plan for an occupation of Iraq following the end of armed conflict, and even to the failure to heed pre-9/11 intelligence warnings of an impending attack. If Saddam did it all, then capturing him would stop all the really bad things from happening.

Those of us in the reality-based community know that the real world doesn't work like this, even for those who want to build an empire and create their own reality by doing so. Older right-wingers sometimes seem to miss the old Soviet Union because during the Cold War it functioned as a unifying enemy. The fall of the evil empire left behind a world that's much too complex to fit their simplistic evil vs. good formula. However, because they only see the world through that 2-toned lens, they connect the dots and tie together those who have become adversaries of the U.S., with no understanding of the forces that drive those adversaries. The bad guys must hate us for our freedoms, and not because we steal their oil and drop bombs on their heads, simply because they're bad guys, and not real people with real reasons for doing what they do. Timothy McVeigh had a much different motivation for detonating his truck bomb than the Ramzi Yousef bunch did when they detonated theirs, but right-wingers need to tie them all together and link them to Saddam because that view can fit into the right-wing mind, whereas the complex reality cannot.

So therein lies Jeb Bush's dilemma. He believes in this bogus Saddam connection to 9/11, as do, evidently, his brother, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and the core of Dubya's national security contingent, as well as others from the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) crowd and the like, but what can he say when the liberal (fact-based) media comes around with their gotcha questions about Iraq? If he tells them the truth, he knows they'll rip him to shreds because he can't back it up with facts, yet he doesn't want to deny the truth because he wants to give potential voters a sign that he knows the truth just as they do, and if they elect him for the big national security job, he'll keep them safe from the same phantoms that they all believe in, since he believes in those phantoms as well. The truth is that the real connection between Saddam and 9/11 exists only in the minds of a delusional Harvard professor, the Bush brothers, Cheney, Wolfowitz and other right-wingers, but unfortunately, the bad decisions that these types make based on such delusions can have catastrophic real-world consequences, and that's a fact.

Ayn Randed Part 6: Self-interest, Enlightened or Not

To conclude, or not to conclude: that became a question when, in writing the previous segment, I filled five paragraphs and got to my punch line without covering all the major ideas I had wanted to mention. What more do I need to say? Well, having relearned the value of honesty and self-respect from Ayn Rand's writing, I found many of her own pronouncements strangely at odds with the essence of one of her central philosophical conceits, as if she crafted an entire philosophy without understanding its wider implications.

After cutting myself free from the anchor of Christian fundamentalism that I had grown up with, I drifted for a while, and toyed with the idea that I didn't actually need a moral compass. Soon enough, and possibly as a consequence of that thought, a pair of low-level criminals who actually lived the reality of that idea would become part of my social circle. While I initially accepted them as new friends, it didn't take too long for me to decide that I didn't need or want to continue having any contact with either of them. At that junction, I discovered Ayn Rand's work, and reading her writings reminded me of the value of honesty and self-respect, as well as the connection between those two concepts.

Ms. Rand makes the point in her philosophy that a criminal lacks self-respect, and hungers for it, because his own mind tracks his actions and convicts him of his own wrong-doing, no matter how much he may try to cover that self-knowledge with rationalization and/or mind-altering substances. The thief knows somewhere inside his head that he is a worthless thief, and so he can never fully respect himself. I recognized this reality in the two criminals that had become acquaintances, and understanding this helped me to determine that I didn't really want these two jerks as friends. It also led me to ask myself about the worth of my own integrity, and to answer myself that I certainly valued it more than an extra handful of coins that a cashier might have given me by mistake. From then on, if the person at the register added in an extra nickel, I would give it back, and feel very good about doing so.

Cheaters never prosper, or so goes a saying that many children learn early in life. Expand that thought just a bit by considering long-term implications, and you have Ms. Rand's essential concept of enlightened self-interest. In this regard, it's truly not in a student's enlightened self-interest to cheat on an exam rather than to acquire the knowledge to answer test questions correctly.

However, in real life, cheaters not only prosper, but often outshine their more-principled colleagues. The cheater may score the undeserved high grade-point average, the unearned college diploma, and the unmerited highly-compensated cushy corner office. Then, those who suffer the fallout of the cheater's lack of requisite knowledge may very well be good, honest, well-meaning types who have the misfortune of finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who knows the degree to which professional incompetence played a role in, say, the recent oil spill near Santa Barbara? In the aftermath of such a catastrophe, incompetent management and the usual focus on maximum profitability seem neither enlightened nor self-interested, particularly when those factors often create the trigger for catastrophe. Yet, the cheaters of the petrochemical industry seem to prosper handsomely while the environment and those of us who have to live with the real-world repercussions of their short-sighted, unenlightened self-interest pick up the tab.

When I read about Ms. Rand's concept of enlightened self-interest, I pictured something quite far-reaching, so it surprised me when I read AR quotes that seemed to contradict the central principle of that written philosophy. In the real world, though, the kind of people attracted to such a catch phrase largely tend to relish the sound of the self-interest part but have little or no interest in the enlightened segment, and within that circle I would include the one who evidently originated the phrase. While I have actually heard the story of one Wall Street banker who walked away from a lucrative career out of concern for the long-term implications of the financial shenanigans that had become routine in his workplace, most of the members of the Wall Street gang focus their tunnel vision on quarterly profit margins, with no second thought for how their selfish greed may reap havoc and destruction on the financial system that serves them so well. They know plenty about self-interest but nothing about enlightenment. In most cases, the selfish ones, be they bankers, oil barons or some other species of greed-head, simply boil it down to "If it's self-interest, it's enlightened" with no further thoughts, and evidently, that's about as deep as the original objectivist got into it herself when she first put it down on paper. Not long after I tired of her simplistic philosophy, I came around to thinking that the more enlightened you are, the more you recognize that your self-interest aligns with the best interests of your entire community, or, as Jim Hightower and a few others have mentioned, "We all do better when we all do better.

Ayn Randed Part 5: Justifying Theft and Genocide

I originally believed that I could crystallize and share my thoughts about the limits of Ayn Rand's philosophy in four brief segments, each one focused on one particular aspect of its shortcomings, but in doing some elementary fact-checking for those pieces, I discovered a few additional truths about Ms. Rand that I hadn't previously known, and thus, I felt the need for one more round. What did I learn that I didn't know before? It came as news to me that AR openly voiced her approval for the savage genocide executed against the native people of the American continents by the European immigrants and settlers.

To put it mildly, reading Ms. Rand's quotes regarding native Americans made me angry. I have not yet read any historic accounts of the so-called savages attacking a white settlement and killing all inhabitants, including women, babies, and young children, by splitting their heads open with axes, as a group of white settlers did to a native American village in northern CA territory not long after the Gold Rush era. Whatever disagreements my grandfather and I might have had over the course of our lives, we had a life-long agreement about how badly our ancestors had wronged the native American people. On a visit to a reservation in Wisconsin during the summer before my final year of high school, I well remember him saying, "It's shameful the way this country treated the Indians." Around that time, he read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I eventually got around to reading as well.

A little over a year after the visit to the reservation, during my first few days at Northwestern U., I watched a comedian performing the Firesign Theater bit about how the West (and more) was stolen, and it made me laugh, but I also understood the more serious deeper meanings behind that bit. Then, a couple of years later, on a visit to the Adirondacks with my parents, I ventured out alone one day on foot, and soon found myself stopping at a nearby drum shop. The drum maker welcomed me at the door, and he proceeded to fill me in on a number of details that I hadn't known, including the fact that every treaty between whites and native Americans was broken by whites. He challenged me to find a single instance to the contrary, and I've yet to do so, over 4 decades later. He also showed me a copy of one particular treaty, and reading it, my gut reaction was that the white people who crafted it obviously never meant to keep it.

Ms. Rand happily accepted Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans, and didn't care to look any deeper into the actual historical context. She blithely justified theft and genocide by asserting that the natives had no right to their land because they believed in collective ownership rather than individual rights. I would love to have gotten her answer regarding the Georgia Cherokees who had adopted individual rights and the European-based lifestyle of their white counterparts, even to the point of taking their case to the Supreme Court, but despite winning that case, still ended up on the Trail of Tears. That forced march to Oklahoma in some ways reminds me of a similar story I read about Poland and eastern Germany during the final months of WW2, and somehow I would guess that a woman born with the name Alisa Rosenbaum would not have been so forgiving to the Nazi regime as she seemingly would have been to the Andrew Jackson administration.

As a capper, I had concluded that someone who would reduce life's complexities into such a simplistic two-toned philosophy would not exactly qualify as a genius, but Ms. Rand wrote well, and expressed herself capably when conveying her ideas and principles. I did not expect to find in her biography a quote about how much she believed the darkest Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans -- I honestly didn't know she was that gullible. It makes me wonder if she believed that Tide really could make whites whiter. Even as a wide-eyed young elementary school kid, I figured out that you couldn't believe everything you saw on TV or in the movies. To begin with, two competing products couldn't possibly both be the best one -- that didn't make logical sense, even to a 5th grader. However, apparently AR believed those early TV cigarette ads that touted the health benefits of smoking, even though that also didn't make sense to my 5th grade self. Was Ayn Rand smarter than a 5th grader? Evidently not.