Incompetence in democracy

I was puzzled today too: a certain amount of incompetence goes with our electoral system. I asked myself the same question as yesterday about flaming incompetence. I have been following Secretary Geithner on C-Span while he goes from committee to subcommittees in congress. Of course, he has adversaries, of course some representatives or senators are intent on reading their questions and do not listen to his answers, but frankly, there is a significant number of them who visibly do not understand the answers at all. You can see that at the way they try to repeat their question as if Geithner or Bernanke were deaf.
You do not have to know much about government and specially finance to be elected to Washington: it is the idea. It is a very healthy system: I do not want to be governed by an elite of scientists, bankers and philosophers (specially not Aristotle). First, there are just as many racists within Nobel prizes than the rest of us; then there is no more morality: look at the arrest this month of a college professor who planned to rape a five years old girl (he is 62 years old). Third. a lot of the people we elect are extremely competent: they may look stupid in general assembly, but they certainly impress me in most committees.
Except for finance matters. The economy is confusing because it is largely a matter of ideology and because it has its own vocabulary (like normal for a statistician is not normal for a normal person). We all learned quickly what is a toxic asset and a subprime mortgage, but it is more difficult to get through a sentence like this: "The SEC should share the reports that it receives from the funds with the systemic risk regulator, which would then determine whether any hedge funds could pose a systemic threat and should be subjected to the prudential standards outlined above." We get the idea, sort of...who is which?
All I can think of is to tell Mr Geithner and Mr Bernanke: could you please try to have your reports translated in common English without looking paternalistic? It would help you.

Do not tell God what to do

I was puzzled today. I usually follow the very slow progress of teaching evolution in our school system, and I found this despaired comment: "Somehow, we have a system that gives flaming incompetents this kind of power — that we willingly hand over important decisions about the education of our children to people who aren't qualified ..."from PZ Myers on his blog. You do not have to be an educator to be on the board of education: it is the idea and it is a good idea. However, positions on any board of education are not well advertised and not very interesting, because there is so much pure administration: there is no wonder that many people who get there have an agenda of their own. And frankly, they are not well educated, so they do not know what is a good education. I must say, however, that contrary to my fellow scientists, I resent much more creationists for trying to tell God what to do and how to do it than for misunderstanding the science behind evolution.
It is worth maybe having a second look at that system of boards of education: maybe just making it more attractive would do the trick.

The other side of President Bush

I spent the years under President Bush more baffled than anything else: most of the time it was not clear to me how what he decided would help us, for instance despising European countries, delaying any decision about climate change, listening to conversations of American citizens, promoting "preventing wars": you name it, there was always something bizarre in what he did, something slightly "off", when it was not outright wrong..It left me with an impression of the man that was not satisfying. I thought he lacked judgement,sensitivity, good sense, and that most of his thinking was done by other people.
Well, I was wrong: since he left office, I have seen a very elegant side of the ex-president. He did his best to facilitate power transfer, refused to talk against president Obama, and there are moments when sweet petty revenge must be tempting. He said that he was moved by the emotion of people when President Obama was elected: it shows a heart that I had not seen before. And he refused to pardon Scooter Libby, which showed a personal backbone that I did not think he had.
Plus this: anybody who says he loves his country more than politics wins my heart.
So there is a good chance that the poorly rated president Bush will make a great ex-President. He would not be the first: Carter achieved that.
I am crossing my fingers.

Stolen art and forgotten art

I am still mourning the loss of art that happened in Iraq. When I was young the US was always praised in Europe for the care it took of protecting art and giving it back to European countries (see for instance here. It is in Mesopotamia that writing was first invented, so museums there are specially precious to me. But of course there are art thieves everywhere, and not enough money to find back all the stolen art.
There is also the fact that great art is sometimes ignored. Here is a short story about that.
The barefoot sergeant
For Dr Omoigui

The hero of my story was born in Benin City; in a country we now call Nigeria. It is way south, much more south than Miami, almost at the Equator and way, way across the Atlantic Ocean, in Africa. When he was born, the family elders held a meeting and discussed how he should be named, according to what was on their mind. Part of the family wanted him to be named "It has not rained this season" and another part wanted his name to be "Evil runs amongst men", because there was war and there was little crop, and everybody felt terrible. But his mother thought that these names were awful, and wanted something nicer. In the end, they decided to call him Edo, and that is what he was, a member of the Edo group, talking the Edo language and living in Edo country.
In Benin City though, one waits for the baby shower to announce the name of a child. Then, the mother teases her friends by inventing all kinds of ridiculous names for the child:
"We are going to call him Palm Tree in the Sky"
"This is not a good name", her friends would say, "Who ever heard of somebody called Palm Tree?"
"Well then, we are going to call him Eye of the Moon"
"O frankly what is it with you: it is not a name for a little boy"
And so it goes, and everybody is joking, and finally the father and mother whisper together, and the real name of the little boy comes out:” His name will be Edo Edo".
And then one opens a coconut, which represents the mystery of life, for who understands how milk goes into the wooden fruit of the coconut? And then there is a feast.
So, Edo Edo was born and named. He grew up like any other little boy, got married, and needed to make a living. Edo was too shy to be a good businessman, and not talented enough to be a great artist -artists were very praised in Benin. He decided that he would serve the British, who were in power at the time. He became a sergeant, I am not sure if it was in the army or in the police, but I do know that it was close to the highest rank any black person could achieve in the British system. He was only twenty-four years old.
It was Edo's day. We are not all destined to be famous, like the inventors of Aspirin, the last Oscar winners, the fastest runner of the year or the mathematician who just got the Fields medal. And how many of us remember their names anyway?
All of us, however, have our day in life: For some it is the day they fall in love, for some the day they buy a house, for some the day they finally retire. It is what we mean when we say that every dog has his day. Edo's day was the day he became a sergeant.


And this is what made of it an extraordinary story. You would never guess what Edo did. Edo went to an artist in Benin City and asked for his statue to be made. It is not something that any Sergeant would think of over here. Because in America, when it is your great day, you take pictures or you make a video. People with more money sometimes call a painter to get a painting of themselves. But even rich Americans rarely think of getting a sculpture of themselves to celebrate the big event of their life. It was different in Benin City. Sculpture had been a major art form for maybe eight centuries; the King was always represented in bronze and surrounded by bronze artifacts. Happily for Edo's dream, the king had allowed the artists in town to tackle more profane subjects than Himself, for the King was related to the Gods, and had the power to decide who was worthy of a statue.
So this is what Edo did: he ran to the house of one of the artists in town and commissioned his statue to be made in bronze. Financially, it was foolish: bronze was expensive, and he had to pay in advance 11 pounds of metal.
Edo insisted that his uniform would be perfectly reproduced and that of course his face would be easily recognized. The sculptor first made a body of clay, and then he applied wax on it and sculpted directly in the wax all the details of Edo's face and uniform. Wax allowed all details to be easily and precisely carved. Then the sculpture was covered with the finest clay; the mould was done. The sculptor heated the mould and let all the wax melt and go out by a little hole. Melted bronze filled the void left by the wax and when the bronze alloy finally cooled off, the mould was broken, and the bronze statue appeared.
Most of Edo's family was there and had a great meal while waiting, eating yams and goat meat with an okra sauce. When the statue appeared, everybody agreed it was magnificent.
I do not know when Edo died. Maybe later in life in Burma, where a lot of soldiers under British rule went from Africa, probably much earlier, because nobody lives long in Nigeria, and it is very unlikely that Edo ever saw the Queen of England visiting his regiment. His family was dispersed, and the British uniform became a sign of shame in a country all entranced by the idea of independence. My husband used to say this: “Some of us die along the path of history, some of us die across it.” When you die across the path, you are soon forgotten. Hence, Edo's statue was sold to an art dealer who was buying anything he could find to fill a whole container and hoped to make a fortune in Europe.
The statue came to London and was bought as part of a lot by an antique dealer. It is where I saw it, in 1972, for the first time. My mother and I had come from France on a shopping trip. We entered that dark place, which was huge and filled with furniture, stuff too big for us to transport, so we were disappointed and heading out when I noticed a bizarre object holding a door open. I picked it up; it was a heavy statuette, almost black in color, portraying a young African. I had never seen anything like that. I went to the dealer and asked what it was. He looked embarrassed.
"O this? This is nothing, really. It is a statue from Benin, but it has no value. They are only valuable if they were made before 1897."
I did not know it at the time, but this is when the British took several thousands art pieces from the King's palace and sold them at an auction in Germany to pay for the expenses related to pacifying the country. It is exactly what we wanted to do in Irak: the population always needs to pay for unrequited pacification.
I said that I liked the statue, although it was difficult to see the details of it. "It is not for sale, said the shy dealer, nobody would be interested in it, we sell them to a foundry for the price of bronze". You would think that the British have some respect for the people who fought for them, but they don't. Nor do the French who are more embarrassed by- than proud of- the Algerian Harkis who fought by their side. Foreigners are always foreigners.
My mother and I thought that it was very sad to have the statue destroyed and melted again. We asked if we could buy it. As I said before, bronze alloy is expensive, close to 10 dollars a pound nowadays. The dealer put the statue on a scale and told us the price, and my mother and I had to combine our British shillings and dimes to complete the sale. It was heavy. I carried our suitcases to the boat, and my mother carried the statue and complained all the way. Once at home, we washed the statue with soap and water until it looked golden again and I waxed it lightly. The statue had been left unfinished: all the little defects that come from the lost wax process had not been smoothed out, maybe by lack of time or money. Maybe Edo was so impatient that he took the statue with him immediately.
Here was our Edo, with real big eyes and the most beautiful smile you could see: the smile he had when he was made a sergeant. And one could see that the uniform was carefully done, and that Edo posed with his hands just as the army requested them to be. He had long limbs and a surprisingly large butt, the kind that is called callipyge (beautiful one) by the dreamers and steatopyge (fat one) by other people. Partly, it was a decision of the artist to create these details: large eyes, long torso, big smile. The artist wanted everything bigger than life. Most of the bronze must have been used for these features, because there was little bronze left for the feet, which appeared thin and porous.
The little sergeant had no shoes. Most of the black members of the British army (this must have been the West African Frontier Force) had no shoes until the Second World War. Some say that the local British officers stole the shoes' money, some say that the white officers wanted to humiliate the black soldiers, some say that the black soldiers did better without shoes, because they were not used to wear shoes or boots. And as you surely know, it was tough leather that was used at the time: the American army has had to soften the soldiers' shoes several times in the last fifty years, because modern little soldiers are used to soft shoes and blister easily.
Who is to know precisely how come Edo had no shoes, while according to army regulations, he should have had them? All I know is that this part of the British army went without shoes until the Second World War, when Emmanuel Cole, a civil rights hero similar in many ways to Rosa Parks, revolted. While he was a gunman in Sierra Leone, in 1939, he refused to serve until he had boots like the white soldiers.
It was timely: who would want to go barefoot to Burma?
Edo's statue came with me to live in America. For a chance encounter, it would have been melted and forgotten, but here is the barefoot sergeant of a disbanded army, fighting forgotten wars in a forgotten country where they do not even teach his language any more.
Some people still discuss how many treasures were taken from Benin in 1897, I do not know of anybody who cares how many 20th century Benin statues were discarded and melted. There is not much left of their century: millions of deaths, ethnic wars, AIDS, children sold as slaves, - no, there is not much left of them, not much art either. Behind this, there are many stories of cruelty and injustice.

But Edo was lucky: his image lives in America. He had his day in a dog's life, just like we all do, and now he smiles his beautiful smile and if you come to our house, we will show him to you.

Blinding views in the press

There are in the press a few things that I find really tiresome.

Bernard Madoff is ashamed. Really? At his age? After all these years?
It makes me think of "Nixon was just a political victim, everybody does that". People who say this are well intentioned, but they have never listened to the tapes.

A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses NOT AGAIN?

If we do not do anything, the economy will recover by itself. Well, yeah, it is like you pollute an estuary, you still have crabs: "mother nature takes care of herself". And five millions unemployed? It is "the price we pay" for progress?

Museums (ruined by the economy and some just by Madoff) have to sell works of art to survive. If that is all the imagination they have, it is time to fire their CEOs. The New York State Legislature had apparently the same feeling, because they just introduced a new bill to prevent that. See in the NYTimes here an excellent paper by ROBIN POGREBIN. It made me want to meet Richard L. Brodsky who drafted the bill, and it is not very often that I want to meet a politician! I wish legislation like this would appear in every State.

I see that our senators are all excited by "Financial literacy". I am all for it. Who do you think will teach us? The broker or the banker?

Journalist of the month: Gary Marx

Every month I praise a journalist who has been teaching me something that I will remember: journalists need some encouragement in today's crisis. Of course I usually try to pick somebody who just started. This month is different: the author, Gary Marx already had a brilliant career.
He wrote a piece in the Chicago Tribune that you can find here. The piece was recommended to me by my stumble friend Dan360 it is about the supermax prison of Tamms.The paper is superb and has stunning photographs.

I have a beef with the US jail system since I proposed to the local jail to give lessons in science and financial education and I was told that "only religious leaders were allowed to talk to convicts".
By contrast to jail, in a supermax prison, you find extremely bad people. I am under no illusion, because I was once victim of a psychopath; some people are evil and should be kept apart under lock and key. In the present state of science, they cannot be cured. Is it a reason to treat them like cattle? I do not see why, because I do not see what we gain from this: it is shameful.

To tell you the truth, I have worked all my life, and I resent people who do not work the best they can. So, not only they are bad people and we got to lock them up and feed them, but they do not contribute to society? We all work, not just to feed our family but to help each other. One person prepares bread, and one transports it, and one repairs the roads, and one builds houses: we all depend on each other, it is what makes this society successful. What kind of politics is it that makes the taxpayer pay through the nose to humiliate a bunch of evil guys for the next fifty years and then prevents prisoners to contribute to society the little they can? We have enough charities around that need help.
Prisons where I live, in GA, cost us a fortune,- we got half a million people in the system, and many people come out of it worse than they went in, despite the visits of religious leaders (but not scientists) of all kinds: it is time lost for them and for society. We should force them to learn: often they go to jail because they never learned anything. And if they are on the list of evil guys, by all means let us keep them locked and make them work.

There is in the bunch of prisoners a good proportion of people affected by mental diseases that could be cured. It makes sense to me that they are legally responsible, but it does not make sense that they are not treated when we can do it. Does it makes sense to you?

Bad people should learn and work like the rest of us and they should be shown as much humanity as security allows. Because humanity is what they do not have.