Author: Andrew Sullivan

Quote For Independence Day

“These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man.

In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of New York Public Library Displays Copy Of The Declaration Of Independenceprosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence.

You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity, the Declaration of American Independence,” – Abraham Lincoln, speech at Lewistown, Illinois, August 17, 1858.

(Photo: People look at a copy of The Declaration Of Independence, on display at the New York Public Library on July 1, 2014. The copy, which was written by Thomas Jefferson, will be on display through July 3. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Taking The Pledge

Mark Oppenheimer finds “national pledges of any kind … idolatrous,” but admits that as a kid, he “was kind of thrilled I had the Pledge of Allegiance in school, if only to rebel against”:

In sixth grade, when I was last in public school, I had to recite the Pledge every morning. And I decided for a time—a couple weeks maybe? a month?—that I would stand for the Pledge, but when we got to “with liberty and justice for all,” I would say, “with liberty and justice for some.” … There was another reason, besides the opportunity to test my Constitutional liberties and defy a teacher, that I liked saying the Pledge: It was something I did with my classmates. It was a ritual that all of us—the class was about a third white, a third black, and a third Puerto Rican, and overwhelmingly poor—performed every day. It was a common text, the one poem, if you will, that we all had memorized. It did not function as ideology. I now think that it rarely does.

In fact, I think of the Pledge of Allegiance mainly as part of two of the great pageants of American life: free, public schooling and spectator sports. Two institutions that tend to bring people together, across lines that otherwise divide them. Two institutions that make our country a bit more of a community. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is like that too, and the fact that millions of us are a bit sketchy on the words yet it never seems to matter proves the point that the words should not, indeed cannot, be taken literally. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be stirred to stand and sing that song—or recite that pledge—together.

Defining The American Dream

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Chasing the American Dream author Mark Rank lists its three main elements, based on his extensive interviews and social surveys:

The first is that the American Dream is about having the freedom to pursue one’s interests and passions in life. By doing so, we are able to strive toward our potential. Although the specific passions and interests that people pursue are varied and wide ranging, the freedom to engage in those pursuits is viewed as paramount. The ability to do so enables individuals to develop their talents and to truly live out their biographies. America, at its best, is a country that not only allows but encourages this to happen. As one of our interviewees put it when asked about the American Dream, “What I’ve always known it to be is being able to live in freedom, being able to pursue your dreams no matter what your dreams were, and having the opportunity to pursue them.”

A second core feature of the American Dream is the importance of economic security and well-being.

This consists of having the resources and tools to live a comfortable and rewarding life. It includes working at a decent paying job, being able to provide for your children, owning a home, having some savings in the bank, and being able to retire in comfort. These are seen as just rewards for working hard and playing by the rules. Individuals frequently bring up the fact that hard work should lead to economic security in one’s life and in the life of one’s family. This is viewed as an absolutely fundamental part of the bargain of what the American Dream is all about.

Finally, a third key component of the American Dream is the importance of having hope and optimism with respect to seeing progress in one’s life. It is about moving forward with confidence toward the challenges that lie ahead, with the belief that they will ultimately be navigated successfully. Americans in general are an optimistic group, and the American Dream reflects that optimism. There is an enduring belief that our best days are ahead of us. This abiding faith in progress applies not only to one’s own life, but to the lives of one’s children and the next generation, as well as to the future of the country as a whole.

(Stereoscopic image of right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty, 1876 Centennial Exposition, via Wikimedia Commons)

Don’t Call Them Superpowers

The American goalie who made a record 16 saves in Tuesday’s World Cup match against Belgium also happens to live with Tourette’s syndrome. As Melissa Dahl notes, the neurological disorder may actually help Howard’s goalkeeping abilities:

Kids with Tourette’s have better timing than kids without it. In one study, researchers asked two groups of children — one with Tourette’s and one without — to judge whether two circles were on a computer screen for the same length of time. The kids with Tourette’s were better at the task overall, which could be because their brains have to work harder to suppress their tics, and tic suppression is thought to involve an area of the brain that’s also associated with timing.

People with Tourette’s have more self-control.

In an earlier study, researchers tested cognitive control on people with Tourette’s versus people without, via an eye-movement-tracking experiment. Participants were sometimes told to make speedy eye movements toward a target; other times, the directive would suddenly switch, and they were told to quickly send their gaze away. People with Tourette’s were better at switching back and forth than the people without Tourette’s, and, as with the other experiment, researchers think it may come down to tic suppression.

That doesn’t detract from the accomplishments of a phenom so beloved by America that fans are petitioning to name an airport after him. Indeed, it makes them all the more incredible. But Howard isn’t the first Tourette’s sufferer with incredible sports skills; years ago, Oliver Sacks wrote about a patient who was practically unbeatable at ping-pong:

Sacks cited a study where a control group of “neuro-typicals” and a person with Tourette’s were asked to react as quickly as possible to a situation. The control group proved able to respond two to two and a half times faster than usual and with poor aim. The person with Tourette’s responded five to six times faster than usual and without compromising accuracy. “This is very real, this mixture of speed and accuracy,” Sacks said. “I think it often is part of Tourette’s.”

But another expert is more cautious about making that link:

“The research is not in yet if they can perform at a higher level than can be normally expected,” said Dr. Michael Okun, professor of neurology at the University of Florida at Gainesville and chairman of the Tourette Syndrome Association Medical Advisory Board. Okun has found that other aspects of Tourette’s can prove highly beneficial in a wide range of endeavors. He noted that people with the condition often have obsessive-compulsive tendencies. They repeat tasks over and over with a ritualistic and often perfectionist bent. “Obsessive-compulsive tendencies really help to enhance abilities,” Okun said. “In chess, piano, or when they’re playing goalie for the World Cup team.”

OK, let’s get back to the meme of the week:

An Online Right To Be Forgotten? Ctd

May’s ruling in the EU Court of Justice upholding the “right to be forgotten” online is beginning to have predictably strange effects, such as causing Google to scrub from its European search results a seven-year-old blog post from the BBC:

The post was removed because someone who was discussed in it asked Google to “forget” them. In the original article, [BBC economics editor Robert] Peston only named one particular individual, Stan O’Neal, a former executive at Merrill Lynch. That narrows down who put in the request to Google with great ease.

Peston describes his post as a discussion of “how O’Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.” The post did not outwardly attack O’Neal, nor was it “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant,” which are the requirements set for being “forgotten.” This plays directly into fears that Google would allow illegitimate requests to slip through the cracks, “forgetting” search results that remain relevant, and undermining the freedom of journalism.

But Mario Aguilar thinks it was brilliant of Google to notify the BBC of this removal, effectively ensuring that it became news:

Oopsies Stan!

Looks like your dirty laundry is flapping in the wind all over again. And all because you tried to cover it up. Google’s response is a wonderful reaction to censorship and a triumph for transparency. It’d be better if nothing was getting de-indexed at all, but this is at least a delicious reminder that you can’t run away from your past on the internet. Nothing really goes away, and if you’re an idiot, you’ll pay the price forever.

Sooner or late, Drum figures, someone will come up with a way to effectively nullify the ruling:

I wonder if there’s a way to make this backfire? How hard would it be to create an automated process that figures out which articles Google is being forced to stuff down the memory hole? Probably not too hard, I imagine. And how hard would it then be to repost those articles in enough different places that they all zoomed back toward the top of Google’s search algorithm? Again, probably not too hard for a group of people motivated to do some mischief.

Update from a reader:

Update to the story here. Turns out the request came from a commenter to the article, not O’Neal himself.

Adopt American? Ctd

A reader protests:

I hope you like the taste of worms, because you’ve opened a big ol’ can of them with excerpt of Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza’s piece on the adoption of African-American children overseas. There are several things in that article that I can see Dish readers vociferously debating – like the citation to an unnamed legal scholar who thinks Western Europe is a less racist place to raise a black child – but I want to focus on her implication that domestic adoptions in the United States ought to be colorblind.

While there is no doubt that the overwhelming number of African-American children in the foster care system is an urgent matter that needs to be addressed, I disagree with Buckwalter-Poza’s suggestion that we can help solve this problem by dismissing cultural competency concerns in transracial adoption applications.

Firstly, as a historical note, she doesn’t mention that a major reason for the mid-20th century backlash against transracial adoptions was because of programs like the Indian Adoption Project, where Native American children were taken from their communities and deliberately placed with white adoptive parents in order to mainstream them (and give them ostensibly “better” lives). This was widely perceived by Native American tribes as an effort to stamp out their language and culture, and when transracial adoption proponents turned to African American children in need of families, there was wariness that this was going to happen to the black community next.

Secondly, whether we like it or not, raising a minority child in a white-centered, prejudiced society today is still a complicated task – one that is made even more fraught if parents are ignorant of or unwilling to address the effects that a child’s race will have on how he or she is treated by society. Parenting a minority child is always going to be different in some regards from parenting a white child, so why shouldn’t the ability of prospective families (regardless of their race) to navigate those issues be considered as part of the adoption vetting process? Whether it’s having the skills to properly care for black hair, knowing where to find resources for your Chinese child who asks about his/her heritage, or knowing when and how to engage in “The Talk” with your African-American kid (something that I as an Asian person was completely ignorant about until Trayvon Martin), having cultural awareness is hugely important.

To be clear, I definitely do not think that any parents should be out of the running for adopting a child simply because they are of a different race, nor do I assume that cultural competency is automatically present so long as a prospective parent is the same race as the child. I am saying, however, that getting rid of that consideration entirely (as opposed to, say, beefing up cultural competency training and support for transracial adoptive parents) is a mistake.

Happy Second Fourth!

Today’s our national birthday, but, P.J. O’Rourke grumbles, we really should have been celebrating two days ago:

The Continental Congress declared independence from Britain on July 2nd. The 4th was simply when the Continental Congress approved the final wording of its independence declaration. If the 4th of July were the 2nd of July, it would have been on Wednesday this year. We could have taken a couple of days of family leave (which Washington prevents U.S. corporations from being required to provide) on either side of Wednesday and had a whole damn week go to parades, play backyard softball games, fire guns, ring bells, light bonfires, grill cheeseburgers, drink beer, and blow our fingers off with M-80s.

Update from a reader:

O’Rourke is right that our holiday should be a week – and there’s a historical reason. Only 12 of the 13 original colonies voted for independence on July 2. The final colony, New York, did not ratify the Declaration until July 9, a full week later. (We write about this in our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, and on our blog today.)

Why not celebrate from July 2 to July 9? Now that would be a party.