Godzilla 2014...big, beefy, and an environmental reminder

Well, Godzilla has returned and overall has garnered some good reviews. 

"Godzilla: why the Japanese original is no joke"

How could Japan take a man in a suit so seriously? As Gareth Edwards's Godzilla is released, Tim Martin looks at the nuclear nightmares that created the 1954 original

by

Tim Martin

May 15th, 2014

The Telegraph

 Western audiences have spent more than half a century thinking of Godzilla as a joke dinosaur in a rubber suit, a Japanese trash-culture ‘King of the Monsters’ locked in endless battle with giant moths, dragons, armadillos and skyscraper-sized robots. Against this camp backdrop, then, it may seem surprising to hear Gareth Edwards, the director of this summer’s Godzilla film, declare his intention to portray the monster as “a force of nature, like the wrath of God or vengeance for the way we’ve behaved”.

But the idea of presenting Godzilla as the harbinger of man-made apocalypse isn't simply another gritty reboot for an age in which children’s franchises have become big-budget adult entertainment. It harks back 60 years to an almost forgotten chapter in the franchise’s history: the tragic story of nuclear paranoia told by the original Gojira in 1954.

Released in the same year as Seven Samurai, directed by a colleague of Kurosawa’s and starring one of Japan’s most famous actors, the film Gojira was a far cry from its B-movie successors. It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience.

Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy.

 To its first viewers in 1954, Gojira also evoked a disturbingly recent catastrophe. In March that year, the crew of a boat called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) had been fishing off the Marshall Islands, the string of atolls in the Northern Pacific that had been captured from Japan by the US during the Second World War.

Just before dawn, they saw a blinding flash in the sky and heard what sounded like a thunderclap. Before long a white ash began to settle on the decks of their vessel, which the bewildered sailors shovelled into heaps and dumped over the side. By evening, several of them were vomiting and covered in strange burns. When the Lucky Dragon limped back to its home port of Yaizu a fortnight later, it was clear that the men were suffering from radiation sickness.

It was less than two years since Japan’s American occupiers had made their exit from the country, and memories of the A-bomb attacks that had ended the war were still painfully fresh. When the US acknowledged that the crew of the Lucky Dragon had been caught in the fallout from its secret hydrogen bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the Japanese reaction was immediate and furious. Other fishing boats were soon found to have been similarly exposed, and the bottom dropped out of the lucrative tuna market. When the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator died that autumn, 400,000 people went to his funeral.

In this tense atmosphere, the opening scenes of Gojira could scarcely have been more provocative. Thudding drumbeats and unearthly howls accompany the stark opening titles, before the scene changes to the deck of a fishing boat in the Pacific, where the crew are relaxing, chatting and playing guitar. The ocean begins to boil. The men are blinded and burnt as they flee in terror. Tapping out his desperate SOS below decks, the ship’s radio operator is the first to die. Once again, Gojira suggested, the Japanese people was being attacked in its homeland by history’s greatest superweapon.

 But why cast such an incendiary political statement as a monster movie? The answer lies with Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer at Toho Studios in Tokyo, who in early 1954 found himself faced with a professional catastrophe. The film he was preparing, a co-production between the cinema industries in Japan and Indonesia, had just collapsed after the Indonesian government cancelled visas for the main actors.

Tanaka was confronted with a gaping hole in his autumn release schedule, but he had been an admirer of American monster movies since King Kong in 1933 and had recently read about the latest example, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released the year before. Could he, he wondered, use a similar conceit to explore Japanese fears about the use of nuclear weapons in the postwar age?

Tanaka hired the science-fiction writer Shigeru Kayama to produce a script. Initially, this document made no bones about its influences: its Japanese working title translates as Big Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea. More importantly still, Tanaka began to discuss the project with two other Toho regulars: the special effects supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya and the director Ishiro Honda.

Each came from an unusual background. Tsubaraya was a mechanical genius who claimed to have built his first film camera as a child. During the war he had also specialised in modelmaking for Japanese propaganda films. So realistic was his re-creation of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, according to legend, that the American occupying forces assumed it was real and sent it home to be used in newsreel footage. Tsubaraya was as fond as Tanaka of the nascent genre of monster cinema in America. In fact, he clung on for some time to the early suggestion that the antagonist in Gojira should be a giant octopus.

Tsubaraya agreed to undertake the vast task of recreating and destroying a model Tokyo in return for equal billing with the film’s director. This was Ishiro Honda, a former colleague of Akira Kurosawa’s who had assisted him on films such as Stray Dog (1949) and directed several features of his own.

Honda was an ex-soldier who had survived the firebombing of Tokyo, had been captured and imprisoned in China and, on his return to Japan, had passed through the devastation that the A-bomb had wrought in Hiroshima. “There was,” he later said of the experience, “a feeling that the world was already coming to an end. Ever since I felt that this atomic fear would hang around our necks for ever.”

Honda recruited another screenwriter, Takeo Murata, to develop these ideas in the script. At some point, too, the men changed the title to one less baldly revealing of its American origins. The word Gojira is a portmanteau of two Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira) but it is not clear who decided to apply it to a radioactive dinosaur the size of a mountain. One legend runs that it was the nickname for a burly member of the film’s technical crew, but no one has ever explained exactly who; and, as Honda’s wife later observed, the filmmaking team “loved to joke around with tall stories”.

Planning the destruction of the capital was not without its problems. Two members of the team were detained by security guards as they stood on the roof of a department store, discussing the trail of devastation that Gojira would cut across the city. Back in the studio, Tsubaraya was working on the problem of his lifelike monster.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had already demonstrated the stop-motion animation that would make Ray Harryhausen a legend among 20th-century animators, but Tsubaraya chose to employ a different approach. He built a latex dinosaur suit, fortified with bamboo spars, with jaws that could be snapped at will by the technician inside. He would, he decided, shoot the monster scenes at double speed, then slow them down to give an impression of stomping inertia.

 This technique came to be known as "suitmation", and became an integral part of the camp allure of subsequent Godzilla films. The actors playing Godzilla based their lumbering performance on the bears at Tokyo Zoo, but the thick rubber monster suit, combined with the fierce set lighting required to shoot at double speed, placed drastic limits on their performance. Neither could spend more than two minutes inside it, and both fainted frequently from the stress. One of them lost 20lb on the shoot, and found himself pouring a cupful of sweat out of the suit at the end of each take.

With the film well under way, the producers turned their attention to the music. Akira Ifukube, a university professor and one of Japan’s top composers of classical music, was recruited to develop a score that complemented the doom-laden, apocalyptic tone of the film, as well as to provide the noise of the monster’s footfalls and the sound of its roar. He did so by covering a leather glove in rosin and rubbing it across the strings of a double bass, producing an unearthly dissonant howl. Applying an electronic echo to the instrument’s deep sounds created a noise like thundering footsteps.

For Honda and Tanaka, the allegorical aspect of Gojira was paramount: “Mankind had created the Bomb,” as Tanaka later commented, “and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind”. Contemporary references abounded (“First contaminated tuna,” complains one woman to her neighbour on the train, “and now Godzilla”) and the film’s protagonists carried on a running debate about the validity of using violence against violence.

The final lines abandoned indirectness for a cliffhanger warning: “If we keep conducting nuclear tests,” intoned a wise old palaeontologist over the monster’s remains, “another Godzilla may appear somewhere in the world.”

The sternness of this message made the film a divisive proposition in Japan. Audiences turned out in droves, attracted by a sinister radio drama that was broadcast on national radio for weeks before the film’s release, but many critics felt that its grim scene-setting and overt references to the Lucky Dragon catastrophe were simply too close to the bone.

Its thematic preoccupation with nuclear energy proved even less acceptable to the American distributors who, after buying the film, began an extensive reshoot and recut for Western markets. Scenes were inserted featuring the actor Raymond Burr (later famous for his roles in Perry Mason and Ironside) as an American reporter covering the destruction of Tokyo, while references to American testing and the dangers of radioactivity were assiduously hacked out.

But this radical intervention would prove strangely influential on the franchise's development. Released as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in 1956, it was panned by critics (one of whom complained of “a dinosaur made of gumshoes and about $20 worth of toy trains”) but a hit with the public, who flocked to see what the posters called its “psychotic cavalcade of electrifying horror”. Bizarrely, this recut version was even exported again to Japan, where audiences turned out once more to watch it with subtitles.

What the public wanted, it seemed, was not grim nuclear allegory but more monster movies, and Toho Studios was there to oblige. In the years that followed, Tanaka found himself presiding over the development of the most famous creature in a new genre of so-called kaiju (monster) movies, battling a cast of bizarre foes in films that soon became a cultish pleasure for children of all ages. In the adventures of Mechagodzilla, Mothra, Son of Godzilla and a host of city-stomping animal freaks, the political philosophising and existential terror of the first film soon became little more than a black-and-white footnote.

William M. Tsutsui, an American historian and Japan expert who has written extensively on Godzilla, explains that the series was at its wackiest and most humorous “in the decades when Japan’s economy was booming. In the Sixties and Seventies, when Japan was growing at 10 per cent a year, the monster became a sort of happy monster, a protective monster, a goofy monster, not a threatening one.”

Despite the giant lizard’s growing international fame, the Godzilla films in the intervening years have appealed more to dedicated fans of monster combat than to mainstream cinemagoers. Toho has insisted on using physical effects rather than CGI, and while Godzilla aficionados may treasure the way in which this limits the films to puppetry and so-called ‘suitmation’, they look fascinatingly low-tech in an age of CGI.

 The human cast, meanwhile, seem wearily conscious that their cheesy lines and daft situations are only there as placeholders before the biff-pow gigantomachy resumes, and low receipts have twice forced Toho to call a halt to its flagship series. Godzilla took a nine-year holiday from 1975-1984, and after the disappointing 50th-anniversary special Final Wars in 2004 Toho demolished its main water stage and refused to license or make any more films for a decade.

Recent events, however, suggest that the moment may be right for Godzilla to return. “In the days immediately after the Fukushima disaster in 2011,” Tsutsui observes, “Google hits on Godzilla spiked. People went back to look at the movies, and look at the lessons filmmakers had been bringing forward about the fears of untrammelled nuclear energy and weapons testing.”

Gulliermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, released the next year and dedicated to Ishiro Honda and to Ray Harryhausen, suggested a renewal of the fitful interest in the giant-monster movie that had been stirring in America since the millennium with films such as Peter Jackson’s King Kong and JJ Abrams’s Cloverfield. (Even Godzilla fans prefer to forget Roland Emmerich’s disastrous attempt to reboot the franchise in 1998 with a giant iguana.)

Ultimately, though, Pacific Rim was more of a eulogy to the tradition than an exercise in political comment. “I want the joy I used to get seeing Godzilla toss a tank without having to think there are guys in the tank,” del Toro commented. “There’s global anxiety about how fragile the world is, and the safety of citizens, but the film is in another realm.”

This year’s effort, set in the aftermath of a Fukushima-like nuclear meltdown and evoking the panic and disaster of a decade of natural disasters, looks a more serious proposition. As Tsutsui points out, though, the franchise “allows filmmakers to reflect on the tensions and problems with society, and how those can be brought to the surface through a gigantic irradiated lizard walking through a city,” and has, even in its darkest moments, trod a certain line between absurdity and acuity.

It remains to be seen where on this scale Gareth Edwards’s contribution to Godzillan history will fall. But if there’s one thing the franchise has delighted in proving over the past 60 years, it’s that Japan’s most famous monster is always capable of rising again. 

"Godzilla is the latest blockbuster to punish the sins of mankind"

Gareth Edwards' take on the classic joins Noah and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes as another of summer's anti-humanist fables

by

Tom Shone  

 
May 15th, 2014

theguardian.com

My favorite quote from the trades last week was, "Warner Bros has avoided making Godzilla out to be a monster movie." What else are they going to make it out to be? A coming-of-age picture about the Summer that Changed Everything? A Merchant Ivory flick? Actually, the new film arrives in cinemas boasting the highest pedigree of any creature feature hitherto, with an Alexandre Desplat score, and roles for David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche, thus making it the first and surely only time “Juliette Binoche” and “300-foot lizard” will ever be uttered in the same sentence. It’s a good movie – maybe too good, with its visual sophistication leaving its B-movie roots poking through. Was Godzilla ever meant to have $200m spent on him? Wasn’t the original a warning against American technological know-how?

We are a long way from the man-in-a-rubber-suit who wobbled through a model Tokyo in the 1954 original. Newly scaled up to keep pace with the latest skyscrapers, Godzilla is glimpsed teasingly, through Cloverfield POV shots for the first hour, before finally taking centre stage to defend mankind from MUTOs – giant nuclear mutants that look like the queen alien in Aliens and snack on nuclear missiles like Twinkie bars. The scenes of cataclysm, most of them at night, have a sulphurous power, as if director Gareth Edwards had prepared by boning up on Gustave Doré's engravings for Paradise Lost. At one point we see a mountain – or a silhouette our eye had taken to be a mountain – move, in one of the best such sleights of hand since Spielberg’s headlights-in-the-rearview-mirror gag in Close Encounters. If only Edwards had held it longer.

Needless to say, all human scale is obliterated. Cranston, as the nuclear engineer reduced to conspiratorial babbling, may be the smartest casting choice of the summer: when even Walter White throws a hissy fit, you know things are bad. He and Binoche hold the screen for as long as they are allowed, but soon have to make way for the demographically-approved chosen ones, Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Taylor-Johnson is a physical actor who likes to storm into a room and pace its four corners like a lion, but when faced with the sight of two giant nuclear mutants treating masonry like meringue, he wears an expression of mild consternation, as if remembering he’d left the oven on. He spends most of the movie trying to catch a train to get back to Olsen, but we couldn’t care less. Unlike King Kong, this was never a story scaled with a human adversary in mind. “What are we supposed to do?” asks Navy Commander David Straithairn. “Sit back and watch?”

Well, actually yes. What makes Godzilla such a curious summer blockbuster is it rootedness in failure – specifically the feeling of stunned national impotence that gripped Japan in the aftermath of the second world war. Cultural studies professors like to peel back the keloid-scarred skin of the series to reveal the lurking atomic bomb subtext lurking underneath, but there’s no “subtext” about it. That’s what Godzilla was about. It’s the text.

“The theme of the film from the beginning was the terror of the bomb,” said producer and Godzilla creator Tanaka Tomoyuki. Passing through the ruins of Hiroshima upon his repatriation to Japan, the 1954 film’s director Honda Ishuro noted “a fear the earth was already coming to an end”. He filled his movie with visions that directly summoned the spectres of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: families pulling cart-loads of possessions, children being relocated in army trucks, hordes of injured refugees, churches of widows and orphans, hospitals overflown with the dead and the dying, the camera lingering on a little girl her eyes glazed in shock whose irradiated body sends the geiger counter off the scale.

“Godzilla functioned not simply as a figure of war incarnate or a metaphorical admonition of nuclear annihilation, but also became a reproachful symbol embodying the spirit of Japan’s war dead,” writes William Tsutsui in his book Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of the Monsters. Very little of this, needless to say, made it through into the bowdlerized, American edit, which smoothed over the moral crisis of radiation with the calming tones of Raymond Burr recasting Godzilla as just another monster on the loose, recalled to the screen again and again for what amounted to prolonged bouts of monster-on-monster pro-wrestling. Mankind was relegated to the status of stupefied observer, like those cavemen that cowered in the corner of Ray Harryhausen epics while the dinosaurs duked it out above.

Edwards has more than honored the spirit of the original. Those hospitals are now filled with Americans and tended to by Elizabeth Olsen, while refugees collect in giant sports stadiums that recall the aftermath of Katrina. The American psyche wold appear to be in roughly the same state of disrepair as that of Japan in 1954. We’re ready for Godzilla in a way we weren’t in 1998, when Roland Emmerich rolled out his remake. If the cycle of disaster movies that gripped audiences in the 1990s were notable for their jocular oops-apocalypse tone – “Ha ha! It's the wonder of nature, baby!” boomed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as tornadoes ripped up the south in Jan De Bont’s Twister – our contemporary variants are joke-free zones in which mankind isn’t just threatened with extinction. We're told we deserve it.

Not only do we bring our own nuclear doom upon our heads in Godzilla, but in a few weeks' time, we stand in the dock once again, indicted for crimes against the primate in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And this just a few Sundays after God annihilated the Earth on account of our wickedness in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. “The wickedness is not just in them, it’s in all of us,” insisted Russell Crowe’s prophet. “It had to be what He wanted – a world without men. You see that, don’t you?”

The right went into its usual tizzy over Aronofsky’s film, with Glenn Beck saying, “it’s just so pro-animal and anti-human, and I mean strongly anti-human,” but for once, the nut fringe was basically right. The blockbuster has finally gone post-human. The Godzilla movies always tilted audience sympathy towards the monster, of course, but as Edwards' lizard takes a bow and slips into the ocean once more at the end of the film, I felt something else: a nip of the old Avatar blues. The first true hero of summer and he doesn’t even say goodbye.

Daigo Fukuryu- Maru [Wikipedia]
 
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Charm of the Nazi body politic

Heinrich Himmler with His Daughter Gudrun

"‘Heini’ Himmler: When Nazis Play Cute"

A new trove of letters from an architect of the Holocaust and a new scientific study shed light on the roots of hate

by

Jeffrey Kluger

January 27th, 2014

Time

Let’s be honest, there’s something about Nazis that makes them impossible to ignore. Those boots, those salutes, that deeply creepy goosestep. And then of course there’s the small matter of their unspeakable evil. Murdering 11 million people—six million of them for their religion alone—makes you unique among history’s monster states. But what about the individual monsters themselves?

The architects of the Holocaust long go achieved a sort of undifferentiated, single-name infamy—Eichmann, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels—all of them evil, all accursed, all deservedly so. But there’s also the fact that most of them were family men, strivers climbing the career ladder and bringing home paychecks to a wife and children whom they told themselves they loved—and they probably did.

It’s that duality—the man who can dote on a cherished handful, then go to the work murdering millions of others—that has always mystified us the most. The just-released cache of correspondence between Heinrich Himmler—the Reichsführer responsible for building the concentration camps—and his wife and daughter, has raised the mystery of this aspect of human behavior anew. Coincidentally, on the same day the news of the Himmler letters went wide, investigators at SISSA-International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, have released the results of an experiment that may help explain it.

The sound-bites from the Himmler letters are jaw-dropping. There are the 150 tulips he sent his wife Margarete and their daughter from Holland, which his Nazis had only two years earlier terrorized and conquered. “Striped, jagged, two-color, one-color. The kind you cannot find [in Germany],” he wrote attentively. There are his regular updates on his important work, expressed with a chilling pride and nonchalance: “From Saturday until Tuesday I’ll be in a killing field to test new and interesting methods of shooting.” And there’s his affectionate farewell as he embarks on a business trip to a place that has become synonymous with the very essence of evil: “I’m off to Auschwitz. Kisses, Yours, Heini.”

Ethicists, morality researchers, historians and more have done as good a job as possible explaining how people who manifestly care for their own families can so easily slaughter members of other people’s. It begins by dehumanizing the group to be eradicated so that the act feels more like pest control than genocide. And so the Nazis depicted the Jews as rats in their propaganda films and the Hutus labeled the Tutsis “cockroaches” during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Even history’s good guys—the Allied nations in the Second World War, for example—are capable of that. Hitler and Mussolini were caricatured as cartoonishly evil in American propaganda posters. The Japanese, however, were drawn as yellow-faced, fang-toothed and claw-handed—when they weren’t simply depicted as monkeys.

But the Allies weren’t looking to exterminate all of the Japanese, Italians or Germans, while the Nazis had just that fate in mind for the Jews and other undesirables. In this, Himmler and his wife were aided by another tool of the actively evil: mutual validation. Humans do appear to have an innate sense of right and wrong—what researchers call “moral grammar”—and it’s with us from birth. Hatred and bigotry require that that impulse be beaten back, and cultural reinforcement helps. There’s a reason American racism is more common in the South which, even now, has more pockets that serve as echo chambers for bigotry than the North does. The more social opprobrium the racist feels, the faster hatred can be choked off. The Himmlers pumped plenty of fresh oxygen to their mutual antisemitism.

As early as 1928, Heinrich wrote to Margarete, who was trying to sell her share of a health clinic to a Jewish co-owner of the same building: “You have to fight with these wretched Jews because of the money. Don’t get frustrated over the Jews good lady—if only I could help you.”

A decade later, after Kristallnacht—the Nazi-sponsored looting and destruction of Jewish homes, shops and synagogues—Margarete wrote to Himmler, “This thing with the Jews. When will this scum leave us so that we can lead a happy life?”

The Himmlers even seemed to revel in a shared sense of what they saw as their impetuous wickedness. “I am so lucky to have a bad husband who loves his bad wife,” she wrote. Himmler responded, “There’s nothing other than ‘revenge.’ Forever.” Margarete then upped the evil ante. “My black soul is thinking about the most impossible things.” In a measure of the slipperiness of language, the German word Margarete used in describing them both as “bad” was “böse,” which can also mean naughty, misbehaved or, less commonly, evil. The U.K.’s Daily Mail, in its reports on the letters, used the “bad” translation. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot went for the full “evil.” Either way, the Himmlers hardly come out looking good.

The new Italian study explains—at least a little—the roots of their awfulness by looking at how the brain processes individuals versus groups. As long ago as 1984, neuroscientists began documenting the fact that people suffering from brain damage or dementia may have trouble categorizing nouns that belong in the category of either animate or inanimate things. Often, they did much better with one category—reliably identifying plants, animals and humans as animate, say—while struggling with the inanimate. Since damage can be particular to certain parts of the brain, this suggested that the two concepts are also processed in certain regions.

In the new study, the Italian researchers recruited a group of 21 subjects with varying stages of either fronto-temporal dementia or Alzheimer’s type dementia—which are specific to different areas of the brain—as well as a group of healthy control studies. The subjects were asked to make distinctions among three categories: the nonliving (including beds, forks, windows and hats), the living (including monkeys, onions, butterflies and horses) and groups (including gypsies, Jews, criminals and the disabled—all Nazi targets).

Across the board, the subjects with some form of dementia performed less well than the healthy, but there was no uniformity in the particular categories on which they did well or poorly. Without brain scans, it’s impossible to know which portions of the brain were responsible for the deficits, but one patient who had trouble with social categories was already known to have frontal temporal dementia, with the damage localized to the left hemisphere, so perhaps that is the spot that plays the biggest role.

None of this is remotely to suggest that the Himmlers—nor any of the other authors or enablers of the Holocaust—either suffered from brain damage or could blame their hate on physiological functions beyond their control. Instead, it seems the brain is, for better or worse, what one morality researcher calls a “meaning-making machine” and that it’s hardwired to make all manner of value judgments, including judgments concerning whole groups of people. Through circumstances, surroundings and our own disreputable choices, we may sometimes make hateful judgments. The Himmlers and their ilk were history’s grotesqueries. But all of us, like it or not, have the same brains—and the same capabilities.

Japanese comfort women and a statue representing same

Does this involve political correctness or finger pointing for an admitted practice that the Japanese would rather forget? An assuagement of male combatants' horrors of war is morally unacceptable--but it did happen and probably still happens.

"Japanese politicians want Glendale's 'comfort women' statue removed"

by

Brittany Levine

December 19th, 2013

latimes.com

Three members of Japan's House of Representatives called on Glendale to remove an 1,100-pound statue honoring an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 "comfort women" from Korea, China and other countries who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during World War II.

The trio, Mio Sugita of the Hyogo Prefecture, Yuzuru Nishida of Chiba, and Hiromu Nakamaru of Hiroshima, are members of the Japan Restoration Party, a 1-year-old conservative political party that prefers a smaller central government, tax cuts and a hard-line approach to national security.

The group was on a two-day study mission in the Los Angeles area regarding the controversial memorial in Glendale's Central Park, the Glendale News-Press reported.

The group shared their perspectives on Tuesday through a translator, Koichi Mera, the president of the Study Group for Japan's Rebirth, an organization based in Los Angeles, at a downtown Los Angeles hotel.

"The news that the statue was installed made a big noise in Japan," Nishida said, as it describes the women as sex slaves. "That hurts Japan's honor."

Glendale erected the roughly $30,000 statue, which was paid for by Korean groups, in July, and a wave of controversy followed. City officials received thousands of letters from Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans opposing the statue.

Many former comfort women have publicly shared disturbing stories of their servitude and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs says on its website that some women based in war-area brothels were "deprived of their freedom and had to endure misery."

But statue opponents, including the three Japanese politicians, say the women acted willingly and claim the estimated number of comfort women is greatly inflated.

In addition to calling for the Glendale statue's removal, the Japanese politicians also said they wanted the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to revise its account of the comfort women system and for their colleagues in Parliament to retract an apology to comfort women made by Japanese officials in the 1990s.

The politicians' party holds a handful of seats in Japan's upper and lower houses of the National Diet and it's unclear how much traction their requests would actually receive. Their ideas have yet to be debated in open session, the representatives said.

As the politicians aim to change Japanese policy regarding comfort women, Korean American lobbyists are working on installing more statues in the U.S. to increase awareness about the history of the women as well as encourage the Japanese government to pen an official resolution of apology.

The politicians visited the statue in Glendale, which features a young woman in Korean dress sitting next to an empty chair, and met with Japanese Americans to discuss the "comfort women" issue during their trip.

They met with a Japanese veteran who opposed a similar statue proposed in Buena Park—which failed to gain support from the City Council there—as well as two Japanese American groups that supported the statue, Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress and the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Citizens League.

"They wanted to say this is an issue for Japan, that it's not an international issue, but that's not the way the rest of the world is looking at it," Kathy Masaoka, co-chair of Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, said during a phone interview after their meeting. "It's too late for that."
Masaoka said she was concerned that the controversy will not be resolved if Japanese politicians continue to oppose increasing awareness of "comfort women."

Although Glendale Mayor Dave Weaver has said he regretted that the city installed the statue, four other members of the City Council said they continue to support it and don't plan to remove it.

Politics, ethics, state rights, demographics...Satanism at Oklahoma State House?

Satan Cast Down from Heaven 

 

Gustave Dore

"Satanists plan statue to stand alongside Ten Commandments in Oklahoma"

A decision to erect a Christian monument outside the statehouse could backfire as satanists demand religious parity

December 8th, 2013

theguardian.com

In their zeal to tout their faith in the public square, conservatives in Oklahoma may have unwittingly opened the door to a wide range of religious groups, including Satanists who are seeking to put their own statue next to a Ten Commandments monument outside the statehouse.

The Republican-controlled legislature in the state known as the buckle of the Bible Belt authorised the privately funded Ten Commandments monument in 2009. It was placed on the Capitol grounds last year despite criticism from legal experts, who questioned its constitutionality. The Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking its removal.

But the New York-based Satanic Temple saw an opportunity. It notified the state's Capitol Preservation Commission that it wants to donate a monument and plans to submit one of several possible designs this month, said Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the temple.

"We believe that all monuments should be in good taste and consistent with community standards," Greaves wrote in letter to state officials. "Our proposed monument, as an homage to the historic/literary Satan, will certainly abide by these guidelines."

Greaves said one potential design involves a pentagram, a satanic symbol, while another is meant to be an interactive display for children. He said he expects the monument, if approved by Oklahoma officials, would cost about $20,000.

The Republican state representative Mike Ritze, who spearheaded the push for the Ten Commandments monument and whose family helped pay the $10,000 for its construction, declined to comment on the Satanic Temple's effort, but Greaves credited Ritze for opening the door to his group's proposal.

"He's helping a satanic agenda grow more than any of us possibly could," Greaves said. "You don't walk around and see too many satanic temples around, but when you open the door to public spaces for us, that's when you're going to see us."

The Oklahoma legislature has taken other steps that many believe blur the line that divides church and state. The House speaker said he wants to build a chapel inside the Capitol to celebrate Oklahoma's "Judeo-Christian heritage". Several lawmakers have said they want to allow nativity scenes and other religious-themed symbols in public schools.

The Republican representative Bobby Cleveland, who plans to introduce one such bill next year, said many Christians feel they are under attack as a result of political correctness. He dismissed the notion of Satanists erecting a monument at the Capitol.

"I think these Satanists are a different group," Cleveland said. "You put them under the nut category."

Brady Henderson, the legal director for ACLU Oklahoma, said if state officials allow one type of religious expression, they must allow alternative forms of expression, although he said a better solution might be to allow none at all on state property.

"We would prefer to see Oklahoma's government officials work to faithfully serve our communities and improve the lives of Oklahomans instead of erecting granite monuments to show us all how righteous they are," Henderson said. "But if the Ten Commandments, with its overtly Christian message, is allowed to stay at the Capitol, the Satanic Temple's proposed monument cannot be rejected because of its different religious viewpoint."

Ayn Rand talks with Mike Wallace in a 1959 interview

Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand

1959

Part 1

 

Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand

1959

Part 2

 

 

Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand

1959

Part 3

She's in, she's out, she's in...Johnny Carson interview and an essay--Ayn Rand

Use the blog's search engine for more on Ayn Rand.

She's in, she's out, she's in...Johnny Carson interview and an essay--Ayn Rand

Johnny Carson interview

Part 1

1967

Johnny Carson interview

Part 2

1967

"Ayn Rand's Long Journey to the Heart of American Politics"

by

Jennifer Burns

August 14th, 2012

The New Republic

In the heyday of her celebrity, it often seemed that the only appropriate public response to Ayn Rand was dismissal. In 1961, Newsweek magazine sent a reporter to investigate the growing circle of devotees clustered around the right wing novelist. Visiting the New York City headquarters of Rand’s Objectivist movement, the reporter declared the Russian-born Rand an “apparition” with a “glare that would wilt a cactus.” After a similar pilgrimage, a writer for Life magazine forthrightly concluded that Rand was the leader of a cult. A review of Rand’s essay collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in The New Republic simply referred to Rand as “Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book.”

And yet, some fifty years later, Rand is the avowed intellectual inspiration of presumptive GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Ryan offers no apologies for interest in Rand’s philosophy and makes little effort to hide his allegiances. Just how did Rand travel from the fringes of a 1960s subculture to the heart of American politics?

It clearly wasn’t via the traditional institutions of mainstream conservatism. The original mandarins of the conservative movement, from William F. Buckley, Jr. to Whittaker Chambers, all roundly rejected her atheistic philosophy of selfishness and her assertion that capitalism was a moral system.

Rather, Rand made her fortunes among the young foot soldiers of the right in the 1960s, who thrilled to her iconoclastic rejection of mainstream values. Rand’s Objectivism, as she called her comprehensive philosophical system, attacked all American pieties but one: The national creed of getting rich. This put her in perfect step with the anti-authoritarian mood of the times—while offering the additional benefit, unlike your average hippy guru, of not threatening her followers’ material fortunes.

But Rand’s philosophy would have gone nowhere if it were confined to its original adherents. The early Objectivists were decidedly insular, and hardly the most effective evangelists of their cause. Objectivism was first promoted in New York City and across the nation by the Nathaniel Branden Institute, named after Rand’s best student and designated “intellectual heir.” When Rand and Branden had an explosive falling out in 1968, fueled by the end of their long-running, secretive extramarital affair, the movement splintered. (The affair shocked Rand’s followers, though it shouldn’t have: Rand dedicated her 1957 opus Atlas Shrugged to both her husband and Branden, which was clue enough that he was more than the apple of his teacher’s eye.) In the wake of the break-up, Objectivism’s infrastructure collapsed.

But this actually turned out to be the saving grace of Rand’s legacy. Her ideas were subsequently seized by a broader audience of libertarians who would inject her free market ideology into the political mainstream. The Randian founders of the Libertarian Party were little more effective than Objectivists at winning the ear of a broader public, but they did attract Ed Crane and Charles Koch to the cause. Together, Crane and Koch would found the Cato Institute in 1974. Cato joined a growing phalanx of pro-business, right-wing think tanks that, over the course of the 1970s, would refashion the intellectual consensus around the desirability of free markets and unregulated capitalism. As the political climate shifted away from Great Society liberalism, with even Democrats embracing a more market friendly “neoliberalism,” the ideas of Rand came to seem ever more plausible.

When Rand passed away in 1982, she was no longer capable of serving as the gatekeeper to her ideas. (The prurient details of Rand’s personal life, which may have served as a deterrent to some, also no longer seemed relevant.)  Rand had always  insisted that her ideas were a package deal. Libertarians who borrowed her political ideas but didn’t buy her epistemology were “a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people,” “plagiarizers,” and “scum.” Conservatives were far, far worse. “Futile, impotent and culturally dead,” conservatives could only “accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.” Despite their agreement on capitalism, unlike most conservatives Rand was a forthright atheist who supported abortion rights and opposed the Vietnam War. After her death, her philosophy was liberated from its origins; it was now possible to mix and match bits and pieces of Rand’s ideology to better fit the emerging conservative worldview.

Indeed, it was during the 1980s, when Rand was no longer around to raise a ruckus, that conservative intellectuals and politicians from Jack Kemp to George Gilder to Ronald Reagan began expressing admiration for her work, combining her economic ideas with their social conservatism. While Rand’s aging original followers feuded among themselves over her philosophical legacy, conservatives who had encountered her in college quietly folded her into their canon as they grew into power. (Alan Greenspan was among the few original adherents who managed to cross over into mainstream political success; his meteoric rise helped further to dispel the odor of fanaticism that once marked the Randian right.)

But the true public blossoming of Rand’s philosophy came with the arrival of the Tea Party in 2008 which transformed this subterranean undercurrent of conservative interest in Rand into a blaring declaration of love. Before the Tea Party, Paul Ryan had been one of the few conservatives willing to openly embrace Rand as a formative influence. Most conservative politicians preferred to cite thinkers like F.A. Hayek or Milton Friedman, who were both more high-brow than Rand and neutral on the topic of religion. But the very aspects of Rand that made journalists shudder in the 1960s—her angry division of the world into “producers” and “looters,” her cheesy novels—made her into a Tea Party favorite. Protestors at Tea Party rallies waved signs asking “Who is John Galt?” (a reference to the hero of Atlas Shrugged) and used Randian logic to argue that health care reform was immoral.

It may seem incredible that fictional plotlines are being used to critique policy, but it’s important to recognize that Rand has remained popular precisely because she was a bestselling novelist rather than a dry theorist. Rand waved off specific questions about how her policy proposals—like the abolition of taxation—would work, emphasizing her role was to inspire her readers to high moral purpose. With Galt’s Gulch, the capitalist Shangri-la of Atlas Shrugged, she brought to life the dream world of the successful striver surrounded by equals and unencumbered by the poor, the weak, or the unlucky. Only in this fictional world could her heroes duck the hard questions of fate and chance, for in Rand’s novels, everyone gets what they deserve.

By selecting Ryan, Mitt Romney is gambling that the radical free market capitalism of Ayn Rand has moved definitely from the fringes to the mainstream of American life. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that another Republican once embraced Rand: 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Like Ryan, Goldwater tried to shave off Rand’s atheism, emphasizing his Episcopal roots and disagreeing with her atheism. Yet  his campaign speeches rang with the romantic capitalism of Rand’s novels; one of his speechwriters was a full-fledged Objectivist.

And it turned out that, thrilling as Rand’s ideas might have sounded to a reader wrapped up in her fictional world, few voters were interested in translating her capitalist utopia into reality. Of course, the culture of Washington has clearly changed in the fifty years since then; Romney is clearly hoping that the culture of the American public has changed as well. Before long, we’ll know whether his assumption is fact or fiction.

[Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Goddess of Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.]

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

by

Jennifer Burns

ISBN-10: 0195324870
ISBN-13: 978-0195324877

"House Passes Heavy Tax on Bonuses at Rescued Firms"--NY Times

Normally, I would not pursue this topic but it is curious to note what is happening here. It just isn't the amount of money involved. Sure it is high but small considering what the U. S. Government has invested in A. I. G and other companies. What is significant here is a demonstration of the populace finally beginning to express their sentiment of all of this spending--now that it demonstrates a bad sense of ethics and conduct. And it is also dynamic politics. 328 voted for the tax whereas 93 didn't. The 328 will go unquestioned as they are playing the political game by siding with the anger of the populace whereas the 93 will be questioned. Why didn't they jump on the popular bandwagon? It is the 93 that may express a more balanced and thoughtful analysis of the bonus debacle. And then again, they may be playing politics too. What were their thoughts? Just remember that these repercussions were a result of hasty actions taken by the Bush administration and Obama and crew have been dealt a crippling hand of cards...it will be hard to win. But at least the populace has spoken.

"House Passes Heavy Tax on Bonuses at Rescued Firms"

by

David Stout

March 20th, 2009

The New York Times

WASHINGTON - Spurred on by a tidal wave of public anger over bonuses paid to executives of the foundering American International Group, the House voted 328 to 93 on Thursday to get back most of the money by levying a 90 percent tax on it.

The measure easily surpassed a procedural hurdle requiring a two-thirds majority vote, thanks to considerable Republican support. The Senate will consider a roughly similar measure, perhaps next week. If something is approved in that chamber the House and Senate versions would have to be reconciled, so prospects for final passage of a bill are unclear.

But there was no doubt after the House vote that the lawmakers were keenly aware of their constituents' anger, which was focused on A.I.G., although the House measure would apply to executives of any company getting more than $5 billion in federal bailout money.

Hours after the vote, the office of Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general, said A.I.G. had turned over the names of employees who received bonuses, in response to a subpoena.

Before releasing the list, the attorney general's office plans to review it and assess whether individuals on it might have reason to fear for their safety.

"We are aware of the security concerns of A.I.G. employees, and we will be sensitive to those issues by doing a risk assessment before releasing any individual’s name," Mr. Cuomo’s office said in a statement.

Bank of America is expected to turn over the names of the highest-paid workers from Merrill Lynch later on Thursday.

In one sign of the bonus issue's political potency, 85 Republicans joined 243 Democrats in the House in voting for the measure, rather than for a rival proposal put forth by the Republican leadership. Only 6 Democrats voted against the bill, along with 87 Republicans.

"The people have said 'no,'" Representative Earl Pomeroy, Democrat of North Dakota, shouted on the House floor. "In fact, they said 'hell no, and give us our money back.'"

"Have the recipients of these checks no shame at all?" Mr. Pomeroy continued. Summing up his personal view of the so-far anonymous A.I.G. executives, he said: "You are disgraced professional losers. And by the way, give us our money back."

Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee and has been among A.I.G.'s fiercest critics, spoke contemptuously of the bonus recipients as people "who had to be bribed not to abandon the company" they had nearly ruined.

Republicans were not to be outdone in expressing disgust, and they had a collective "I told you so" message for Democrats. Representative Ed Royce of California, for instance, said he would vote for the bill on the floor, but he proudly recalled that last fall he had voted against the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the bailout plan that is the source of mounting public fury.

Before the vote, other Republicans signaled that they would vote "no" and would line up instead behind a countermeasure that Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the minority leader, said would recover the taxpayers' money much faster.

Representative Judy Biggert, Republican of Illinois, said that while virtually everyone agreed that the A.I.G. executives should not be getting bonuses for failing, it would be a mistake for the House to rush through a piece of legislation. If that happened, she said, there could be regrets later, as there are now over the TARP bill, "made public in the dead of night, just hours before the vote."

The bill that the House approved on Thursday was offered by Representative Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat who heads the House Ways and Means Committee. It would take 90 percent of the A.I.G. bonuses back in federal taxes. It would apply to bonuses paid since Jan. 1 by A.I.G. or any other company accepting more than $5 billion in bailout money.

"This is not going to happen again," Mr. Rangel said. "The light is flashing and letting them know that America won't take it."

Mr. Boehner was disdainful of Mr. Rangel’s proposal, calling it "a sham" and urging adoption of a bill to get back the bonus money at once. The $165 million in bonuses has spawned rage in part because it was paid to executives in the very unit of A.I.G. that arguably turned a stable, prosperous insurance company into a dice-rolling financial firm in search of quick profits.

The Republicans said their measure would get back all of the bonus money, not just most of it.

And they said it would do so within two weeks, as opposed to the year or so that the Democrats' bill would take - assuming, that is, that the A.I.G. executives filed honest tax returns.

What's more, Republicans asserted, the Democrats are mostly responsible for the A.I.G. bonus debacle, since Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, inserted language in President Obama's economic stimulus package - not to be confused with the TARP legislation, passed in the waning days of the Bush administration, by the old Congress - to exempt bonuses granted by contract before Feb. 11 from general restrictions on bonus payments.

Mr. Dodd has said the Treasury Department insisted on the exemption in final negotiations on the stimulus legislation. Republicans have been calling the provision a "dark of night" or "dead of night" deed, as Ms. Biggert did. Some Republicans have also been offering reminders that not one of them in the House voted for President Obama’s stimulus program.

Of course, it is not uncommon for complicated legislation to go through Congress with sections that escape detailed initial scrutiny. And when the lawmakers considered President Obama's economic stimulus package, they no doubt recalled that, on the day last fall when the TARP legislation initially stalled in the House, the stock market plunged so alarmingly that the House members were prompted to pass the legislation in a follow-up vote.

No lawmaker had anything good to say on Thursday about the A.I.G. bonus recipients, notwithstanding the disclosure that the new A.I.G. leadership has asked them to give back some or all of the money, and that some have actually volunteered to give it all back.

A couple of themes have emerged in the continuing financial crisis. Democrats and Republicans have accused one another of forgetting history, or trying to rewrite it. Republicans have seized on possible shortcomings in bills passed to combat the crisis, noting that the Democrats control Congress. And Democrats have said the legislation is necessary because of the excesses of the presidency of George W. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress.

The inspector general for the TARP program said on Thursday that Bush administration officials knew at the time of the November agreement between the Treasury Department and A.I.G. on bailout funds that A.I.G. intended to pay bonuses. The contract between the company and Treasury "specifically contemplated the payment of bonuses and retention payments to A.I.G. employees, including A.I.G.'s senior partners," Inspector General Neil Barofsky told a House Ways and Means subcommittee, Bloomberg News reported.

Although the bonuses paid to the A.I.G. executives have aroused public fury for several days, they were in a sense hiding in plain sight. Three months ago, for instance, Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, said Congress should investigate reports that A.I.G. was secretly giving bonuses to some employees.

Apparently the bonuses were not so much secret as under the radar. The White House has said, for example, that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner first learned of the bonuses on March 10. On Wednesday, A.I.G.'s chief executive, Edward M. Liddy, was met by a wave of anger at a House hearing, although some lawmakers were kind enough to point out that he was recruited to lead A.I.G. after it slipped into crisis.

While the House was debating, Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was testifying before Senator Dodd's banking panel. She told the senators that the idea of bailing out institutions considered “too big to fail” was unsatisfactory.

Mr. Dodd agreed. One lesson to glean from the current crisis, he said, is that "no institution should ever be 'too big to fail.'"

In another development likely to fan the flames, a House leader said on Thursday that at least 13 firms receiving billions in bailout money owe a total of more than $220 million in unpaid federal taxes.

"This is shameful, it is a disgrace," said Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat who heads a Ways and Means oversight committee, according to The Associated Press. "We are going to get to the bottom of what is going on here."


"Administration, Lawmakers Turn Up Heat on AIG Over Bonuses"

Scientists in Congress--a difference?

The token scientists will make no difference in congress save perhaps on a very small scale. The task of convincing other congressmen to follow dictates of science when it would drastically conflict with constituents's expectations based not on sound science but economics is nearly impossible. I cannot envision any ground swell changes based on science or the congressional scientists.

Two articles:

"Physicists in Congress Calculate Their Influence"

by

Cornelia Dean

June 10th, 2008

The New York Times

Washington:

According to the Congressional Research Service, there are only about 30 scientists among the 535 senators and representatives in the 110th Congress, and that is counting the psychologist, the psychiatrist, a dozen other M.D.’s, three nurses, an engineer, two veterinarians, a pharmacist and an optometrist.

But physics is on a roll.

"Go back 15 years, and there weren’t any physicists," said Vernon J. Ehlers, a Republican who taught the subject at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., until he was elected to Congress in 1993.

His was a lone voice until 1998, when Rush Holt, assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory, won election from New Jersey as a Democrat. And today there are three, adding Bill Foster, a physicist at Fermilab and another Democrat, who won a special election in March in Illinois.

"If we continue to reproduce in this manner," Mr. Foster began, and Mr. Ehlers finished the thought, "the entire Congress would consist of physicists!"

They were joking — probably. But a Congress full of physicists might solve some worrisome problems, the three-member physics caucus argued one afternoon when they met for a joint interview in the Capitol.

There are 435 people in the House, Mr. Holt said, and "420 don't know much about science and choose not to." He recalled his exasperation when anthrax spores were discovered in the Capitol in 2001 and colleagues came to him and said, "You are a scientist, you must know about anthrax," a subject ordinarily missing from the physics curriculum.

"The difference," he said, "is we would be perfectly happy to pick up a copy of The New England Journal of Medicine and read about the etiology of anthrax."

"In fact, we basically did that," Mr. Ehlers said.

"We know more than our colleagues," Mr. Holt said, "but not more than they could know."

Unfortunately, Mr. Foster said, "unless things play to their advantage in the next election, they are not interested."

Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Sherwood L. Boehlert, the upstate New York Republican who until last year was chairman of the House Science Committee, said that what citizens should expect from their elected representatives is not knowledge of science per se, but rather "an ability to reach out to experts in any given field and then do what is oftentimes hard for elected officials to do, listen instead of talk."

(For his part, Mr. Boehlert said, his last exposure to science was in a high school physics class, "and I got a C.")

Problems arise not just in obviously science-related issues, but also, as Mr. Holt put it, in "those countless issues, and it really is countless, that have scientific and technological components but the issues are not seen as science issues."

He cited the debates over electronic voting machines that caused problems "that would be obvious to any computer scientist but went right past some people here in Congress."

Mr. Foster mentioned the debates over electronic border fences, which he said lacked "fundamental concepts of what radar can or cannot do."

What is needed is not more advanced degrees, the physicists said (they all have Ph.D.'s), but a capacity to take the long view, what Mr. Ehlers called the scientists’ ability to see from the pre-Cambrian era to the space age.

But sometimes, he said, the problem is just old-fashioned ignorance. Several times he has found himself “rushing to the floor” to head off colleagues ready to eliminate financing for endeavors whose importance they did not understand.

Once it was game theory. The person seeking the cut did not seem to realize that game theory had to do with interactions in economics, behavior and other social sciences, not sports, Mr. Ehlers recounted.

Then there was the time he rose to defend A.T.M. research against a colleague who thought it should be left to the banking industry. In this case the initials stood for asynchronous transfer mode, a protocol for fiber-optic data transfer.

"'The Two Cultures' is not a myth," Mr. Holt said, referring to a 1959 lecture by the British chemist and novelist C. P. Snow, who bemoaned a growing gulf between the sciences and the humanities.

Mr. Ehlers agreed, saying he had as much right to expect that his colleagues would understand basic physics concepts as they had to expect that he would be familiar with Shakespeare. "It’' utterly stupid that we have to fight that," he said.

But there are barriers to drawing more scientists into politics. For one, Mr. Holt said, many researchers have the idea that "politics is somehow dirty."

That was never an issue for him or Mr. Foster — both came from political families. Mr. Holt’s father represented West Virginia in the Senate from 1935 to 1941, and Mr. Foster’s parents met when they worked on Capitol Hill. And Mr. Ehlers came up through the Republican ranks, finally winning the seat once held by President Gerald R. Ford.

When Ford was in Congress, Mr. Ehlers gathered a committee of scientists to meet with him from time to time on difficult scientific questions. These days, though, there is less "comity" in Congress, he said, and fellow scientists tell him they wonder why he stays involved. "They say, 'I am glad you are there, but I think you are crazy.'"

All three physicists had the same advice for whoever wins the White House this fall. Move quickly to appoint a science adviser and keep that person in the presidential inner circle.

"I would say that's No. 1," Mr. Ehlers said.

Mr. Holt said: "Proximity counts. You want face time."

Among other things, they said, a science adviser should be someone who will remind the next administration what science can and cannot do.

For example, Mr. Ehlers said, it is irksome to encounter people who ignore the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to global warming yet count on science to produce new sources of energy magically. "They sort of reject our reasoning," he said. "But they will come back and say, 'Science will find a way.'"

All three say they have thought about returning one day to full-time physics. When life in Congress becomes unusually frustrating, Mr. Ehlers said, "I think, well, it would be great to be in the lab today."

Still, they say, they manage to overcome any intellectual disconnect between the more or less orderly laws of physics and the sausage-making aspects of legislation. "Physicists are versatile," Mr. Ehlers said. "We live in the real world."

After all, their caucus is growing.

"We’ve done the calculation," Mr. Holt said. "By midcentury, I think, we’ll have a functioning majority."

Lesley Stone

"A physicist’s place is on the ballot"

by

Lesley Stone

March/April 2008

Volume 5, Issue 2

Symmetry

Few elected officials, from the President to members of the local school board, have strong backgrounds in science or engineering. Yet, many of the complex problems we face—in areas such as innovation and competitiveness, health care, energy, climate change, education, and even our physical infrastructure—have policy solutions that depend on an understanding of the sciences.

It's time more scientists got involved in politics. Scientists have a contribution to make to public life. They have a way of thinking that is transferable to the policy realm; problem-solving, evidence-based thinking and testing hypotheses are all likely to generate good policy.

Just as important, scientists have specific knowledge that policymakers from other disciplines lack. Training in law (the background of many of our legislators) is useful for thinking rationally and weighing evidence, but it does not enhance understanding of the importance of nanotechnology, public health strategies, or the processes at work in climate change. These are all areas of knowledge critical to finding solutions to the obstacles we face. Further, the more diverse the expertise and experience a legislature has to draw on, the more likely it is to come up with innovative solutions that will keep us on the right track.

Eight members of the US House of Representatives hold doctoral degrees in science, including the newest addition, Bill Foster of Illinois, who is the third physicist. These scientists have contributed to law and policy in important ways, as have many who serve in state and local government. They are proof that it is possible to serve one’s community not only in the lab, but also in civic life.

It’s easier than you think to get involved. The local school board is a great place to start. There are about 15,000 school boards in the United States, the vast majority of them elected. Most campaigns cost less than $1000—though in bigger cities the cost is closer to $10,000—and serving may mean a commitment of about five hours a week. Yet this commitment is minor considering the important contributions a scientist can make.

Who better than a scientist to evaluate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics curricula? In some parts of the country, people are searching for innovative ways to insert creationism into science classes. A scientist can keep this from happening by explaining the difference between a scientific theory and an untestable hypothesis. Even in localities where intelligent design is not an issue, we are struggling to find effective ways to help our students learn cutting-edge material so they are prepared for an increasingly competitive world. Study after study shows children in the United States are falling behind in critical areas of math and science; publicizing this issue has not made it go away. But, serving on a school board where you can help evaluate your community’s educational programs and options could be a step in the right direction.

For those interested in learning more about running for office, Scientists and Engineers for America, along with a group of scientific societies, scheduled a May 10th workshop in Washington, DC, to teach scientists and engineers the nuts and bolts of running a campaign.

Even if running for office is not on your horizon, it is important to take action. Most scientists believe science should have a place at the table when important policy decisions are made; scientific advisory boards should include the best scientists available; scientists working for the government should be free to discuss their research, regardless of the political implications; and when science is misrepresented by the government, people who speak out should not fear retribution. Yet, well-documented breaches of these principles have become all too common. To ensure that our government values science, we must demonstrate that we value it, both by asking candidates for office hard questions and through the ballot box.

If scientists invest time and energy in politics, whether by running for office or by making sure that potential representatives know what their constituents value, policy will change for the better. Not getting involved means accepting the status quo.

Lesley Stone is executive director of Scientists and Engineers for America.