September 2013 – Page 8

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn introduces Denise Levertov:

The poet Denise Levertov was born in 1923 to a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish father who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican minister. She grew up in a suburb of London and had no formal schooling, but she read and wrote poetry from an early age, sending poems to T. S. Eliot when she was twelve. (He responded with a two-page letter.) She served as a civilian nurse during World War II and emigrated to American in 1948. Her social conscience led her to join forces with Muriel Rukeyser and many other prominent writers in vigorously protesting the war in Vietnam. She is most closely associated with poets of the Black Mountain School, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan.

Today and in the days ahead, we will feature poems by this extraordinary woman, “a voice,” as Amy Gerstler has written, “committed to acute observation and engagement with the earthly, in all its attendant beauty, mystery, and pain.”

Here is “The Ache of Marriage”:

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

(POEMS 1960-1967, copyright ©1966 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Levertov’s work is available in ebook format. Image of Denise Levertov via Wikimedia Commons)

Before Kermit

Luke Epplin explores the multi-faceted projects of Jim Henson before he struck gold with the Muppets. The polymath “tried his hand at documentaries, experimental films, animation, acting, music, corporate promotional videos, and even nightclub ownership”:

In the latter half of the ’60s, Henson became more and more influenced by that decade’s countercultural movements. His experimental documentary, Youth ’68: Everything’s Changing…Or Maybe It Isn’t, spliced together interviews, rock music, and trippy dance sequences to create a sort of filmic collage of youth culture. But Henson’s most beguiling project involved a dome-shaped nightclub called Cyclia that would immerse its patrons into a perfectly synchronized environment of music, images, and dance. In the sales brochures, Henson asserted that Cyclia would be “a sensational glimpse into the inner contents of our time—a vital, living, expanding experience that consumes its audience. It is total involvement, total communication … Cyclia is the entertainment experience of the future—theater of the year 2000.”

Colin Marshall digs up the above video, one of Henson’s many surrealist short films:

Ripples Henson and Scott put together for Montreal’s Expo 1967. It takes place, like Memories and Limbo, inside human consciousness: an architect (Sesame Street writer-producer Jon Stone) drops a sugar cube in his coffee, and its ripples trigger a memory of throwing pebbles into a pond, which itself sends ripples through a host of his other potential thoughts. You’ve got to watch to understand how Henson and Scott pulled this off; conveniently, they only take one minute to do it.

The Geography Of Inequality

Dylan Matthews parses the Palma ratio, a method of measuring income inequality:

[T]he most shocking number from that [Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS) report] is the global Palma: the ratio of the top 10 percent’s share of world income to the bottom 40 percent’s share, taking every country into account. The ratio, DIIS estimates, is about 32. Those of us in the richest 10 percent globally make 32 times more than the bottom 40 percent.

Fisher mapped the Palma ratios of various countries:

I’ve illustrated the latest data on income inequality around the world, as measured by the Palma. The results are pretty revealing. Bluer countries have greater income equality, according to the metric, meaning that there’s less of a gap between the rich and the poor. Redder countries have more income inequality, meaning that there’s a wider gap. Purple countries are about in the middle — that includes the United States, which is the most unequal of any developed country measured.

The Brutal Weapons That Don’t Cross The Red Line, Ctd

Betcy Jose questions why the international community is standing up to chemical weapons in Syria but not the targeting of civilians:

Today, civilian immunity arguably ranks among the most important norms that the global community wants to protect. And that is what makes discussions about Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons so puzzling. Much of the debate about U.S. military strikes stressed the importance of preserving the taboo on chemical weapons, which were banned in part because of their indiscriminate nature: They are difficult to control and can harm civilians who are not the intended targets.

But in Syria’s case, it appears that the Syrian regime aimed to kill civilians with its alleged chemical attack on the suburbs of Damascus last month. Hardly anyone concludes that the civilian deaths were simply collateral damage in an operation meant to take out the rebels. Therefore, examining the civilian deaths through the lens of the norm against the use of chemical weapons is wrongheaded. Civilians died because Syria violated the taboo against deliberate attacks on civilians.

Charli Carpenter offers her theory:

I wonder if the answer is that the taboo is so strong not primarily due to the specter of dead civilians, but rather the way that weapons of this particular type threaten international order and state sovereignty. If that were true, it would be less puzzling that it would provoke such a disproportionate reaction – although no less morally problematic. … [The ban is] perhaps stronger because it satisfies what Ward Thomas calls a “power-maintenance function” in international society:

Norms are not only socially constructed but also geo-politically constructed. Weapons or practices that have the potential to close the gap between the strong and weak states in international society are more likely to be restricted than those that reinforce the relative advantage of strong states; and the more directly a norm reflects the interests of strong states, the stronger the norm will be.”

By contrast, the civilian immunity norm – while admittedly foundational to the contemporary laws of war -is perhaps weaker in political practice because it is built primarily on moral principles – the responsibility of the strong to [make] sacrifices on behalf of the weak.

How Americans And Iranians See Each Other

In our final two videos from NIAC founder Trita Parsi, he contends that the influx of Iranian-American culture is starting to help Americans better understand their alleged enemies (a recent Gallup poll found that 83% of Americans view Iran unfavorably – basically unchanged since the 1980s):

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But he feels that Iranians understand Americans much better than the other way around:

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Parsi’s previous videos are here. Our full interview archive is here. Speaking of American-Iranian relations, Parsi and NIAC just put out a press release responding to today’s diplomatic breakthrough:

We applaud the Presidents of the United States and Iran for the historic phone conversation, which reflects the strong mutual investment they are making into the diplomatic process. It is precisely this commitment to diplomacy that is needed to resolve the nuclear stand-off and open up the opportunity for greater reconciliation between the two countries. The institutionalized enmity that has estranged the two governments – but never the two peoples – for more than 34 years will not be undone overnight. … The Iranian-American community looks forward to this as the beginning of a brighter future that can be shared by both the American and the Iranian people.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

With most of our coverage this week centered on the Republican Party’s, you know, declaration of total war on our democratic system of government, we could use some good news:

1. HIV/AIDS infections are going down:

A new report from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has … reviewed the progress made against HIV infections since the start of this century and found a lot of encouraging data. Annual infections among children, perhaps the most tragic demographic to be affected by the spread of the AIDS virus, have fallen to 260,000 in 2012, 52 percent lower than 2001′s 550,000. When adults are included as well, the reduction is smaller in relative terms, but greater in absolute numbers: there were 3.4 million new HIV infections in 2001 compared to 2.3 million in 2012.

2. Support for legal cannabis in California is going up:

Six out of ten likely California voters support making cannabis legal, according to survey data released yesterday by the Public Policy Institute of California. Sixty-eight percent of likely voters also believe that the US government should not enforce federal anti-marijuana laws in states that have approved the plant’s use. The percentages are the highest ever reported by the polling firm in favor of allowing adults to possess and consume cannabis socially.

3. A near-centenarian just graduated from high school:

A 99-year-old Iowa woman who dropped out of high school over 80 years ago despite needing only a single credit to graduate has just received her diploma. … Audrey Crabtree — grandmother of five [and] recipient of the Callie Beusman Award for Most Outstanding Grandma Name — was given her diploma in a special ceremony at Waterloo East High School. “And I feel so much smarter,” said Crabtree wryly as she grasped the slip of paper.

4. Eating just got easier for those with Parkinson’s:

A new spoon from Lift Labs may help others who suffer from hand tremors that make eating difficult. The spoon (which down the road will also have knife and fork attachments) counteracts the movements of a wavering grip, reducing the shaking by 70%

5. And George H.W. Bush served as a witness for a same-sex wedding:

While the first President Bush never expressed much animosity towards the gay community, my first response was a bit of surprise. And then I thought that the Bushes are people, and we often say that we welcome the evolution of thought of people on the issue of equality. So I definitely welcome this.

Face Of The Day

A child eats at US pastor Jimmy Hughes’ refuge in Zambrano, Honduras on September 27, 2013. Hughes gives refuge to 50 Honduran children and teenagers hit by violence, drugs and poverty. By Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images.

A Language Of Ones And Zeroes

Brendan Koerner advocates teaching kids to program:

No one seems to have researched precisely how programming languages are learned, but there is every reason to believe that they’re best absorbed by students primed to form procedural memories.

“I would speculate that the same general-purpose memory systems that underlie language learning in children and adults likely underlie the learning of computer languages,” says Michael Ullman, director of the Brain and Language Lab at Georgetown University Medical Center. A key data point in favor of this view is the evidence regarding music: great violinists don’t start learning the instrument when they’re 20 years old but rather when they’re 3 or 4, a time when procedural memory is most sensitive.

And what is music if not a form of code—a series of abstract signals that must be sequenced properly in order to please the human ear?

Ever More Polarized

A few weeks ago, Vote View calculated that the current Congress is the most polarized on record:

Chris Cillizza notes that Republicans are responsible for this year’s uptick:

Republicans in Congress continued to grow more ideological over the first eight months of 2013 while Democrats’ partisanship stayed relatively steady. That’s in keeping with a long-term polarization trend in the House that began in the early 1980s. Since that time, both parties have grown increasingly more polarized in their votes, but Republicans’ polarization numbers have moved up further — and faster — than Democrats.

Poking For Organs, Ctd

Surgeon Andrew Cameron wants to develop an app that “will offer a ‘template’ for those in need of organs to tell their story, and will allow potential donors to link directly to the transplant center for further information, or to share the story with their Facebook circle”:

Cameron started thinking about the link between Facebook and organ transplantation in 2011, when his former Harvard classmate Sheryl Sandberg … approached him about whether Facebook could help to reduce the organ-donor shortage. On May 1, 2012, Facebook added an option that allowed users to “share” organ-donor status on their timelines, with a link to their state online donor registry. In a study published this June in the American Journal of Transplantation, Cameron and his colleagues reported that on that day, online organ-donor rates soared to twenty-one times the usual level. Registration declined in the following days, but, even two weeks later, remained double what they were before.

For Cameron, this was a powerful lesson, suggesting that social networking might be the tool needed to address what he describes as the “refractory” public-health problem of inadequate organ-donor numbers. “We have the tools. It’s on us to effectively mobilize them,” he said.

Dish coverage of Facebook’s donor initiative here.