

### Claude Lambert

## Creative Senior Moments

**I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.  
** George Bernard Shaw

Creative Senior moments  
by Claude Lambert

Copyright © 2012 Claude Lambert  
All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 978-0-9836791-9-6

This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

### Table of Contents

Introduction

Idiots

Languages

Truth

Loneliness

Friends

Equality

Narcissism

Denial

Brain

Survival Skills

Social Behavior

Human Rights

Torture

Looting

Dallas

Politicians

Democracy

Stability

Corruption

History

Laziness

Attila Returns

Bad People

Humiliation

Jails

Punishment

Money

Cultural Literacy

Obesity

Sex

Inventions

Plumbing

Nixon

Business

Lent

Terrorism

Health Care

Marriage

Economy

Laugh
Introduction

I am very fond of the biography of great achievers in any field, but my life is not remarkable, and although I am proud of it, I don't think that the story of my life is interesting to anybody else. What I learned, however, what any old woman learns through life, is food for thought, delightful or stodgy. These are some of the things I did not know when I was twenty. I didn't think that I knew everything, but was convinced I had good principles. Then, I fell flat on my face.

Aging thoughts of course are like aging cheese. You got to know when to start eating.

Keywords (cross-referenced topics in alphabetic order)

Attila Returns, Bad People, Brain, Business, Corruption, Cultural Literacy, Dallas, Democracy, Denial, Economy, Equality, Friends, Health Care, History, Human Rights, Humiliation, Idiots, Inventions, Jails, Laugh, Languages, Laziness, Lent, Loneliness, Looting, Marriage, Money, Narcissism, Nixon, Obesity, Plumbing, Politicians, Punishment, Sex, Social Behavior, Stability, Survival Skills, Terrorism, Torture, Truth.
Idiots

### The World Is Full Of Idiots

I wish somebody had told me this when I was twenty years old: the world is full of idiots. It would have changed my life, I would have been happier, more efficient, and it would have spared me considerable pain. I would have given up being stressed out and trying in vain to treat this case by case, as if decency obliged me to correct such accidents of nature. Once you know this for a fact, you can choose to ignore that it is a problem or you can try to solve it. The worst thing you can do is what I did all my life: treat each case you meet as an accident.

Languages

I am born in Belgium, a very small country surrounded by four strong cultures: Dutch, German, English and French. The difficulty for us is not to learn languages, it is to find our own identity. My father insisted that I learned to read books in any European language. He thought it was "basic." Later, I learned enough Hebrew to read the Bible. Once I learned Latin and Greek, and as Dutch was mandatory in school, it was rather easy for me to access reading in many European languages, though Hungarian is a real pain, because it is entirely different and has no link to the others. My father gave me a Hungarian dictionary together with a translation of _Cyrano de Bergerac_ , my favorite play as a teenager. It is a good thing I knew the French original by heart.

My mother had an interest in the many vernacular languages of France. Her father spoke French and Corsican, her mother French and Walloon. Her parents were born in the 1880s, when most Europeans still spoke two languages: their own dialect and the official language of their country. Half of the world still is raised in two languages, probably for the same political reasons.

I have a very bad connection between hearing a sound and reproducing it, so I do not sing, and I do not speak any language at all.

Why was it important for my parents? I think it stemmed from them being anti-fascists. Let me explain this. They opposed the ideology of European Nazism to the birth of Democracy in Greece. Learning Greek and Latin was getting access to dreams of beauty, democracy, free speech, hope for humanity. I never heard them speak of the sad realities of life in ancient Greece, such as slavery and the poor condition of women. It was all idealized, because it was the reverse of the obscurantism they suffered from, fascism. As a result, they prevented me to go into the mathematics section I yearned for, because math studies did not allow a sufficient formation in antique languages. My parents often spoke in Latin to each other or exchanged quotes.

What did I learn from this?

1. Learning languages is no big deal in a family who thinks it is natural and ethical.

In most countries, there is a political will to unite under one language. Where that will is strong, the vernacular dialects disappear. Although dialects may disappear quickly, resentment may last centuries.

2. As technological progress is limited to a few countries, a lot of languages cannot keep up. Scientific Irish, to give one example, is very irritating to read, because the creation of new words comes from a few scholars. It does not come from the heart. French, despite a few successes like _ordinateur_ for _computer_ is even worse, because new words come from a committee.

3. The death of languages follows the same rules as species extinction: no space, no food, no respect, no future.

4. Reading is natural in a family that reads.

5. Thinking in different languages makes you somewhat schizophrenic, because it is impossible to think exactly the same way in a different language: each language is the expression of a culture, and you cannot get rid of the cultural context. I thought it came from some defect of my brain, but it is the common rule rather than the exception. It explains the Italian proverb _Traduttore, traditore_ (translator, traitor). It is the nature of the beast.

6. A magnificent example of the cultural differences manifested in languages came from a friend of mine who confessed, "I make love in French, I pray in Brazilian and I swear in Yiddish."

It beats the European king Charles V (1500-1558) who used to say, "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." Like most people from Belgium, I remain convinced that he said all this in Flemish (he was born in the Belgian town of Ghent.)

7. Also very well felt is this judgment by Paul Drexler, "I find it is sadder to be sad in German, more cuddly to be cuddly, and I know of no better language in which to get drunk." ( _The German Puzzle: My Search for the Missing Pieces_ )

8. Of course the last word always belongs to Mark Twain. Here he is learning German:

"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

Gretchen. 'Wilhelm, where is the turnip?'

Wilhelm. 'She has gone to the kitchen. '

Gretchen. 'Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?'

Wilhelm. 'It has gone to the opera.'"

9. If you know 20 words of the language of any country on any continent, people will be 20 times nicer to you.

10. One of the ways we should fight racism in any country is to always impose two languages in school. It is not foolproof, but it helps opening the mind.

11. I always thought that some of Bertrand Russel's mathematical work in the field of the theory of logical relations is wrong because it mainly made sense using the English language and it did not work as well for foreigners, outsiders or other outliers like me. However, I never gave this enough time to demonstrate it, as life is so short. I went back to Mark Twain and what he aptly calls the _perplexity of the foreigner_.

Truth

The truth is, nobody cares about the truth. Where it is most needed, in religion or in politics, there is no truth, there is just conviction.

However, we all need access to the truth. It is the difference between democracy and other regimes: in democracies, it may take a lot of work, but you have access to the truth. In non-democratic countries, you are just denied access. I discovered that early in the U.S.S.R. The official newspaper, the _Pravda_ , was so afraid of any kind of truth, that they would deny bad weather and natural catastrophes. There has been a lot of the same attitude in China for decades. In a society of lies, the lies are pervasive and invade everybody's life.

***

This being said, there are lies that I am perfectly comfortable with. I don't want anybody to tell me that Robin Hood did not wear tights; it spoils the fun. I don't want to know that George Washington was a mediocre general; just leave it alone. I am more comfortable with the real life of Jefferson, probably because his catastrophic humanity is so close to ours.

Conversely, I don't want to learn anything good about bad people, be it Hitler, Stalin or Ted Bundy. I was filled with horror when Eichmann, responsible for the death of millions of Jews, said " _My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood."_ It made even more deeply horrible the man who also said _"I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals."_

Loneliness

What became of my friends?

Love is dead.

They were friends that the wind sweeps away

And it blew in front of my door,

Took them away.

Rutebeuf, French poet, 1230-1285

I lived alone for over 40 years. Do I ever feel lonely? Sure. When I do, I go out and I volunteer for something, make friends or not, just be nice to somebody who needs it, talk a little. Never feel lonely for more than 2 minutes, it is unhealthy. Take action.

What makes difficult to live alone is that you cannot tell anybody the inconsequential things of your life: that you are going to the dentist, that you have bills to pay, that you just cooked something wonderful. Lots of people say it on Facebook or on Twitter. What baffles me is not the person who tells, it is the reader. Who reads that stuff? What are these readers doing with their time? What kind of job do they have? How do they use their time? It is a deep mystery.

What one used to confide to a husband while he was taking off his socks, we now announce to the world. What does the world do with all this useless information? Take off its socks?

***

It is great to have new ways of expressing ourselves. It is inconvenient that we now face a narcissistic generation.

***

Of course there is a deeper loneliness, when you cannot really share your thoughts because frankly, there is nobody to share with. Take Bertrand Russell. He was so lonely when he was young that he held imaginary conversation with the poet Shelley. "... _knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy._ " It would have made an interesting relationship and it shows how unhappy Russell was. It always makes me smile, imagining Lord Byron, Shelley and Bertrand Russell together. I don't think it would have worked.

Personally, if I had to find a friend in British Victorian times, I would prefer to spend an evening with Alexander Graham Bell (we would not dare disturbing Darwin, would we?) Romanticism is not my taste at all, I can't recall liking any romantic author, except of course Victor Hugo, because he was a social author.

Friends

Just like Russell liked Shelley, we all have friends in the past. I have a translated collection of women's letters that are four thousand years old, and there is a girl I am still aching to speak to, because of the way that she describes her desolation at a dancer's death.

There are actors or performers that we never met, but it hurts us to see them on screen knowing that they are dead. Sometimes we are haunted by the irony of a tragedy, like playing Superman and becoming paraplegic.

Sometimes we just know how people think. I know how Kierkegaard thought, because I felt like him when I was fifteen: I could have written his _Journal_. Happily for me, I snapped out of it, he didn't: he died too young.

My heart bleeds for the British actor Michael Caine. I do know that he is lucky, he has a wonderful wife and grand children and he has enough money. I also know what goes on in his mind on a bad day.

I never quite recovered from the early death of the Swiss philosopher Pierre Thevenaz, who introduced me to phenomenology well after his death. His death has pained me for over 50 years.

You may know that President Roosevelt was cheerful and always surrounded by friends and family, but if you visit the Little White House in Warm Springs, you'll get an overwhelming feeling of loneliness. It made me cry. My father was like that.

Such are the friends we never met, a source of sudden joys and permanent desolation. Real-life friends are more like comfort food, a source of unabated joy.

Equality

### Kids are born Smart, but not Equal

The magnificent idea that we are all created equal required a genius to see it, because it is not true. We should be, try to be, fight to be, equal in rights. But we certainly are not born equal. The chances of success still largely depend on economic status, though less in the US than in most European countries. Look at this USA government table: it is dated, but the numbers do not change that fast.

Percentage of children ages 5 to 17 who have difficulty performing everyday activities by family socioeconomic status, 1994

a) Total percentage of children with difficulty performing everyday activities does not add to the sum of different categories (difficulty with learning, etc.) because some children fall into more than one category.

b) Parental education is defined as the highest education of an adult in the family.

NOTE: While this table presents four measures of children's ability, it does not include every area where a child may experience difficulty. For example, it does not include all visual or hearing impairments. The measures included here are defined as follows: Difficulty with mobility includes difficulty getting around the home and use of special equipment for a period of 12 months or more or having a physical delay. Difficulty with self-care is defined as having difficulty for 12 months or more with bathing, dressing, eating, or toileting. Difficulty with communication represents children who have had difficulty for 12 months or more communicating with persons, family or non-family, difficulty understanding others, or who have a problem or delay in speech development. Difficulty in learning includes having significant problems at school understanding materials, paying attention in class, controlling behavior, or having a problem or delay in mental development, a problem or delay in emotional development, or a reported learning disability. This measure reflects a re-conceptualization of children's limitations and difficulties, by capturing more detailed dimensions.

**Source:** Table from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Health Interview Survey on Disability.

What does this table show? It shows that children who are born below the poverty level and children who live with only one parent are almost twice as likely to have learning difficulties. It does not say that it is unavoidable or that children cannot conquer their difficulties.

It seems to me that parents and teachers should remain aware of children's circumstances and work _twice as much_ when circumstances require it.

A member of Yo-Yo Ma's family said that it takes three generations of wealth to make a musician. Some great musicians, like Quincy Jones, are born in the utmost misery, but it is not the rule. Musicians, like doctors and lawyers and writers, more often than not come out of the middle class.

This being said, having difficulties with something still leaves you with an opportunity to win plus you are probably bright at something else.

We live in a society that often equates "fast" with intelligence. For instance: performing fast on a math test can give your child access to the next level. Then, everybody thinks that your kid is smart. We do not apply the same judgment to a lot of other great accomplishments, such as reading music or distinguishing differences in colors' intensities. Why not? It is just a cultural bias. A student slow in writing, because for instance, she is dyslexic, often is underestimated, even if she is not any less creative than the others.

Our culture has a narrow view of intelligence that is not based on any scientific facts or on good sense. There are thousands of ways of being intelligent and smart, and everybody inherits a lot of these ways. Nobody has them all. Learning difficulties should not blind us to the multiple intelligences of children. Many children in my neighborhood are under the impression that they are dumb, because school is difficult for them. They become the prey of choice for gangs. No child left behind should mean: we should focus on each child's unique talents.

_What we hear_ : some of us have a perfect pitch, other don't. Some of us discriminate sounds (they can hear that the second violin made a mistake), other don't (they hear a magma of sounds).

_What we see_ : some of us have such a good visual memory that they see if a pen has been moved on their desk, some of us would not see that their car was stolen unless they need it. Some of us only see what is on the right side of the street: you ask kids what is in front of the school or on the other side of the mall, many have no idea.

Some of us have a perfect _memory of color_ : if shown a fabric sample under different lights, they can go to the store and find a sample of the exact same hue.

_What we perceive_ : some of us are sensitive to the least variation of mood of people they talk to; some never know what other people think.

We vary on the most basic characteristics such as _proprioception_ or the speed of inborn reflexes.

These are only examples: the brain has thousands of little niches, so the probability that everybody is bright at something is extremely high. Kids should know this. Not that they can do anything they want, because it is not true, but that each person has a beautiful mind.

Everybody has a beautiful mind and we are definitely not born equal.

Narcissism

I should have seen it coming. The first time I saw a mobile phone, about twenty-five years ago, I was very impressed: mobile phones were not cellular back then, they came with a heavy suitcase and looked like the army field phones. A person with a phone like this must have an important job and be able to answer in an emergency. That is what I thought.

A middle aged man sitting next to me in the airport took a heavy phone out of his case, deployed a five foot antenna and said:

"I am in the airport. The plane is on time."

I guess I had expected 007, I felt deflated.

Similarly, when my friend Mr. Dulac, who had a small TV and electronic shop in the French town of Angouleme, installed a car phone for the first time, it was for a man who wanted to call his wife to tell her to open the garage door when he came home.

Nowadays when I go to the grocery store, two people out of three are on their cell phone. I roll my cart next to them, and what do they say?

"I am at Wal-Mart", or "I am at Kroger's" or they say: "I think that I'll buy an Iceberg salad."

Then they go home and they Twitter the same message.

What kills me is that I do not understand whom they are talking to. Does two thirds of the country talk to the 10% unemployed people we have? It does not make statistical sense. Who has the time to listen to this incessant chatter and to read all these Twitter and Facebook messages? What do these people DO?

What kind of friends does this new generation have? All my friends work. They remodel houses, they teach, they are ex-military going back to school, they pave roads, they invest, they write books. Even if they do not have a job, they all work. Of course all of them, including my ex-students, are over forty years old.

I think that if I called any of them to say that I am at the grocery store and considering, God forbid, buying an Iceberg salad, they would have me committed.

Denial

Alcohol and other drug use typically do not begin when a student enters a university setting. This was revealed in the First-Year Student Orientation Surveys at the University of Georgia. The surveys were distributed during the 2002 and 2004 summer orientation sessions at UGA. These examined parent perceptions of student use and actual student use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. The table below compares these parental perceptions and the actual student response.

Incoming students reported using the following substances at least once in the year prior to attending UGA

The Core Alcohol and Other Drug Survey was conducted in 2005. It revealed that 74.4% of UGA students under 21 years of age consumed alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs within the last 30 days and 44.3% of UGA students experienced peer pressure to drink or use drugs (University of Georgia Health Center, uhs.uga.edu).

Bill Cosby said it well in one of his shows: "The only time a child tells the truth is when he is in pain."

Brain

### Our Subservient Brain

Some people have the gift of guilt: they feel guilty about what they do, what they say, what they did not do, and even about what other people do. But mostly, and for most people, their brain is a dangerous pleaser. The brain is a pleaser because it looks for its own satisfaction, not the wellbeing of the person you are.

Case in point.

Many divorced people have a hard time paying for child support, not because they do not love their kid, but because they hate their spouse. Their brain says: "Why would I give anything to the bitch who did (whatever) to me?" It does not say naturally: "I am responsible for my own kids." How frequently does this happen? Often. We have in Georgia a caseload of over 480, 000 child support cases for a population of children (under 18 years of age) of about 2.5 million. It shows that about 20 percent of kids have parents who listen to the pleasing brain instead of the voice of good sense.

I knew a father who refused to have a regular job because he would have to pay child support: he had a miserable life. A lot of these reluctant parents want to be paid cash for odd jobs, so that do not pay taxes and child support. It does hurt their social security, it does hurt their child, and of course some of them end up in jail. It happened to another guy I knew. He was working next door as a maintenance worker. I knew he was a good dad, that is to say with the kids he had with his second wife, he had totally forgotten about the kids of the first one. He went to jail, he deserved it, but of course that did not help the children of either marriage.

A father in Savannah was so distraught by the necessity to pay child support that he would say in public: "I would do anything for my daughter" whose picture had a prominent place in his office. He said that in front of the son he had from a first marriage: he could not resist resenting that child. The kid and I exchanged a knowing look, I did not know what else to do.

Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

Case in point.

The brain loves grandstanding. Why do we call _pro-life_ people who do not care what happens to a child, providing he lives, and _pro-choice_ people who generally think that they have no choice? Both sides have a similar pleasing brain: question of faith, says one; freedom of choice, says the other. It pleases the brain to have a moral standing, provided it does not cost the brain's owner anything.

You can listen for hours and hours to what our senators say on the subject, they never make a link with children's welfare, on either side. As if having one million abused and neglected children every year had nothing to do with the issue. The social pressure on pregnant girls to have the child instead of an abortion does not yield good results in this country. " _Once you have the child, you will love it_ " yields horrible consequences. What happens to unloved children? Does either side care about it? What do we do about this? Nothing much. It is easier for both sides to discuss principles than to join forces to solve the real problem. Both sides disgust me.

Case in point.

We all know that what a dog likes best is to go out with us. Do you walk your dog, or is it that you do not have the time?

Case in point.

It is well known that rapists often tell themselves that they break into a home because they want to steal. And how many rapists say later, " _She was asking for it?_ "

What about stealing, cheating, and taking drugs? The most common excuse is that _everybody does it_. It is an argument that works well with teenagers, always eager to be accepted, to be like the others.

Case in point.

Stealing has multiple excuses provided by our fecund brain: from " _the store can afford it_ ," to " _my boss owes me_ ," or " _I am only stealing from the rich_ ", or " _It is a bank: it does not hurt anybody_ ". All that is invented by the pleasing brain.

In Georgia, in terms of crime rate, burglary, larceny and auto theft make about 4 per cent of the population. Most of the people I visited in jail, or people I just talk to who have been in jail (when I lived on 37th street, most of my neighbors were in and out of jail), most of them had a very good reason and an even better story. They seldom said: I made a mistake. Note, by the way, that in Savannah, people do not say that they are just out of jail; they say that they have been staying in the country.

Case in point.

I have a 90-plus years old neighbor whose pettiness is astounding. And she never missed a Sunday in church, not that it did her any good. She describes herself as charming, generous, intelligent and wise. However, she always talks about her friends in a derogatory way and in the last ten years, she never found anything good to tell me about any of her own "friends." Her narcissism has deprived my neighbor of common decency, and her subservient brain is complacent and complicit.

Case in point.

If you are very sad, your subservient brain will suggest that suicide is the solution. The brain does not protect itself: it is there to serve your whims.

Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

Survival Skills

This country was built by people who had good survival skills. These skills were transmitted by parents to children at a time when there was no school.

Nowadays the basic skills we need are not so different, though they apply to the city jungle: we still need to learn how to handle a budget, especially if we are poor, and how to find a job, especially if we do not have a job.

A number of jobless people around here, in Savannah GA, have very good working skills, mainly in housing jobs (electricians, plumbers, carpenters who have suffered from the economic downturn), and I am surprised to see how many of them have no survival skills at all. They do not know how to manage a smaller budget, what is the best time to show up for a job, how to dress for a job interview, when to ask for a letter of recommendation, or even how to manage food stamps.

How come?

Social Behavior

Basic morality, if it is anywhere in the brain, sits in the frontal part, where we make decisions and control impulses and instincts such as violence. How do we know that? We know that social and ethical mental complex processes are controlled by the frontal part of the brain because if this part is injured or removed, the corresponding capacity disappears. It has indeed been observed that people who have frontal brain injuries often develop abnormal social behavior.

There is some evidence arising from neuropsychological features and powerful methods of medical investigation, such as CT or MRI scans and Functional Resonance Magnetic Imaging. It seems that researchers observe smaller volumes of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of asocial criminals compared to non-criminal or "normal people." Similar results are observed for borderline personalities and with specific disorders resulting from alcoholism. There are also extraordinary differences between people who commit one murder and people who commit several murders: "Individuals who committed a single murder were characterized by executive dysfunction, lower intelligence, slower speed of information processing, and a higher frequency of developmental disorders (58%), relative to those charged and/or convicted of killing two or more people, who were characterized by a significantly higher rate of personality disorders (79%) and a lower rate of developmental disorders (34%). "

The problem with this kind of finding is that we do not know what is the effect and what is the cause: does frontal neuronal activity lack in some people who are therefore asocial, or does frontal neuronal activity go dormant because asocial people do not use it?

A claim has been made that pathological liars suffer brain deficiencies as well. I am less sure about this, because we would need a good scientific way to define a pathological liar and I am not sure we have one. All these are observations of volumes or quantities. It is interesting, but a bit crude. What we want is information about functions, but up to now, I have not seen many papers on neurotransmitters of morality!

Here is my reasoning about all this: If you learn to run, you get better at it; if you learn to read, you get better at it. What about this: if you learn to care, you get better at it. My bet is that a large fraction of the criminals observed never got exercised at being better persons. I meet children every day who do just what they want to do, their otherwise good parents never tell them to care. Will their brain show deficiencies twenty years from now? I think yes, probably. Their capacity to control themselves and to care for others will be atrophied: it is due to lack of exercise. The idea that their lawyer will argue that it is the way they are born and they could not help it makes my blood boil. We should not allow children to stay selfish.

Are there any known cases of people who are "born bad"? It is entirely possible, it is even probable but nobody knows that for sure; in the meantime, we should give all children a chance to exercise at being good people.

Criminals rarely do volunteering work. Selfishness and low IQ rule our jails.

I think that the American churches have become very complacent with children and do not accomplish the hard work they used to. Proof of it? Compare the number of young criminals in the Bible belt and in the rest of the country. Whose fault is that?

Tolerance and compassion should be daily exercises. When they are not, greed takes over. There were over 24,500 active gangs in the United States in 2000. "The overall estimate of gang members across the United States has exceeded 750,000 in all survey years. "

You will notice that the number of gang members is about equal to the number of abused children. Surely some abused children have a productive life, and some gang members are beloved preppies. But there is probably a good overlap of the two categories.

_Sources_ **:** M C Brower, B H Price, Neuropsychiatry of frontal lobe dysfunction in violent and criminal behaviour: a critical review J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2001;71:720-726 ( Dec.) Bassarath L., Neuroimaging studies of antisocial behaviour. Can J Psychiatry. 2001 Oct;46(8):728-32.

Robert E. Hanlona, Leah H. Rubinc, Marie Jensend and Sarah Daousta, Neuropsychological Features of Indigent Murder Defendants and Death Row Inmates in Relation to Homicidal Aspects of Their Crimes, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 2010 25(1):1-13.

U.S. Department of Justice, National Youth Gangs Survey Trends from 1996 to 2000.by Arlen Egley Jr, 2002.

We may not be far of finding more about this. Papers emerge about neurological pathways playing a role in sociability, trustworthiness, infidelity and homosexuality. In October 2005, the _Journal of Comparative Neurology_ published a special issue entitled " _The anatomy of the soul._ " The issue did not live up to the title, but it was interesting.

Human Rights

### Volatility of Human Rights

In 1960, when I was twenty years old, I assumed that, mainly thanks to the Americans, human rights were here to stay: the Second World War had been tattered with so many horrific crimes that we would never see anything like it again. I thought racism was dead with the dragon.

Little did I know that they were at the time two lynching a week in Georgia and in Alabama. American racism was a well-kept secret in Europe until Martin Luther King reached the world's ears. Every country has well-kept secrets: I bet you don't know that it always rains in Paris or that Belgium hosts the most dangerous conmen in the world.

The same year, 1960, came my first shock: I was in the local grocery store, and an old lady in front of me was palming and bruising tomatoes one by one to pick the most juicy ones. It was not pleasant, but she was old, nobody said anything. When she left, the grocer told me with bitterness: "See, they did not burn all the Jews yet!"

A part of me has suffered from traumatic stress disorder ever since, because it never stops. Everywhere I went I observed the same nonsense. One Protestant leader in Northern Ireland even told me: " _Catholics do not make love like us_." If you thought it was only a racial prejudice, wake up: prejudice attacks all the people that belong to another group, and the attacks are always the same.

Another fascinating example of racism without race is what happened to the French people born in Northern Africa.

A large number of French people, about one million, had to leave Algeria in 1962 when Algeria became independent from France. These French expatriates came back to France after over a century of presence in Algeria. They were French coming to France from French departments abroad, but they had developed their own culture: a local accent, local tastes in furniture, clothes and cooking, local customs like keeping a closer look on girls. With them came back Jewish settlers who had been in Algeria since they were expelled from Spain in the 15th century, and genuine Algerians called Harkis who had defended the French cause and were likely to be killed if they stayed in Algeria. Of course the Harkis and the Jews had a terrible deal. What about the French people from Algeria? Were they welcome back in their own country? Of course not. First, the political left treated them like colonialists –even though the majority was born in Algeria and still dirt-poor. The right wing treated them like intruders.

Two generations later, my boss, a well known intelligent scientist, told me that as long he was in power no "Blackfoot" as French Algerian-born people were called, would ever work in our laboratory. He kept his word: my best students found good jobs only in the South of France. This is pure French people who hate pure French people.

What about race? I lived 60 years in Belgium and in France, and it is only when I came to Savannah that I learned for the first time that I was "white." Yes Georgia made a lot of progress, but race is still on the mind of everybody. I was even asked, in the middle of a somewhat philosophical conversation with two neighbors (one white, one black), what I was thinking " _as a white person_." They were both curious. The question is so incongruous that I laughed: I only think as a person. The white guy was a racist of the real old school; over 85 years old and talking like a Klan member of the twenties. The black guy was a fast conman always in and out of jail. They were both good friends. The South passes my understanding.

***

After decades of disappointment and intellectual misery, I came to make sense of all of this.

Human beings are the product of evolution and they were meant to live in small communities: they form groups of a few hundreds to a few thousand people, even in Paris or in New York.

In Paris, I met an old woman rue Dauphine who complained to me that her life was miserable since she had been moved to a new neighborhood. I thought she moved from the other bank of the Seine, the "rive droite," where the atmosphere is different, but no, she had moved from further south on the same street, two blocks away.

In Savannah, I lived four years on 40th street, and four murders were committed on my small block; during the same period, no crime was committed on the same block of 41st street.

In New York, I met Portuguese people who had lived there for thirty years and did not speak one word of English.

This shows that our communities are small no matter where we live.

If the community is closed, fear and resentment of another group are just around the corner. It is the reason why racism and prejudice are always with us: there is always another group just around the corner. In France like in the US, fear (like after 9/11) or rapid changes in the population structure (like when one million French Algerians came back to France or when there is a large change in Mexican immigration in the US) induce an immediate reaction: racism seems suddenly justified.

The existence of small communities and the persistence of local habits and local accents attest that we are meant to understand ourselves in small groups. This explains how an actual fascist candidate was the main opponent to the democratic right in the French presidential election of 2002.

Each American town comes with its own dialect or group of accents, from Pittsburghese to Texan to Southern, we all sound different. My own town of Savannah was created in 1733 by 113 settlers (before them we had a Creek population and some Spanish people). They had mainly, I suppose, English and Scottish and German accents. How did that become one Southern accent? The population went from 113 to 200,000 in less than 300 years. Most of the people who live in Savannah today are not the great-children of the first settlers. But a local distinct accent was created (several accents, in fact, because I still hear an upper-class Southern accent in some shops) and remains alive to this day. I find it extraordinary that each region keeps its own accent despite the fact that 800 million people fly around the US every year and only 60 percent of Americans reside in the state where they are born and we are all unified by TV and YouTube. It certainly says something about our will to belong to a small group.

It is a similar story with the French people from Algeria. In 130 years, the French population in Algeria had created its own distinctive accent and its own culture. It only takes five generations, probably less. Languages are at the center of each culture.

The south of France has a distinct way of talking that originates from the languages of Oc and Oïl (the two main ways to say _oui_ , yes). The accents are still there, despite the persistent efforts of the French government to suppress them (until I left France in 1998, I never heard anybody with a southern accent on the French national television). Similarly, do you hear strong local accents on national TV in the US? Why not?

Spanish accents in Spain are so different that when you learn the language, you can understand one way to talk and not the other. The same is true in Italy. On their national TVs, however...

What does it mean? Anywhere in the world, humans create their own small community with its own dialect and its own culture. We do it because we want to be unified, to form a small group and identify ourselves as a community. Then, anybody else is _foreign_ and a potential adversary. I think that it is the origin of any bigotry, and therefore bigotry is here to stay.

So, how can we fight racism?

***

What we should not do is close our eyes when it is convenient for us, create a new class of unprotected people and complain that they are here illegally when the economy is going down the drain. Every country does that and it is a shame. I remember that Great Britain foolishly offered the British nationality to all Indians from Kenya, and when riots occurred in Kenya and all that community wanted to flee to Britain, Britain said that you did not need just a passport, you needed to have grandparents born in Britain to be able to find refuge in Britain. So they corrected a stupid mistake with a perfidy. There is an echo of that period in the Tom Hanks movie _The Terminal_ : I have seen thousands of cases like that, cases of life and death, and it was not funny at all.

Foreign-born residents in GA are over half a million (I am one of them) and constitute 7 percent of the population. Muslims are about 6 percent of the population in France. Foreign-born immigrants are over 8 percent in the UK. In such countries, too many immigrants at any one time in a community cause an adverse reaction that we cannot control efficiently. It is the difference between keeping racists under 5 percent and letting them grow up to 15-20 percent where they start to be political bombshells. There is no country, to my knowledge, that had over 5 percent immigrants and dealt efficiently with the problems it created. The truth is that we are a bunch of hypocrites. We like immigrants who work on the cheap and go back to their own country when we want them to.

***

What can we do to avoid bigotry? We should keep our small communities open. Let children meet with people who are different in appearance, in faith, in origin, in languages, in crafts, in artistic expressions and let them sometimes eat food from somewhere else. Make this mandatory for schools. Let children know that people who are handicapped or different are also part of our community, make children meet the kids of another district once a year. Make this mandatory for schools. Organize small neighborhoods festivals.

I wish our churches would find mandatory to respect and serve all the members of the community. It is not the case yet: not many churches are pro-active, especially down here in Georgia.

Torture

### Torture up close

People like me, born with WWII, have a different view of torture: it was in conversations so much when we were kids that torture was one of the first words you learned, together with _hunger_. I remember hearing of a man tortured by the Germans who was forced to count the whippings. It frightened me: I did not know very well how to count then, I must have been four years old. I was an adult when I realized that you do not learn by being beaten.

Then came Nuremberg: the American legal team said that torture was forbidden and that you were responsible for your own acts, even if your boss told you to torture somebody. The most awesome was that they did teach that to their own soldiers. Such was the American doctrine. This is why they hanged the main Nazis and it is why I wanted to become an American.

In the following decades, most European countries did use torture, usually far away or just far enough from the mainland, in the colonies fighting for their independence.

When I worked with new colleagues or a new boss, the first question that came to my mind was would they betray me, if there was a war? Would they betray you if you were a Jew? Most of them would, you learn to live with that. It is even worse with boyfriends. For anybody else, if a guy betrays you, he is just sleeping around; for me, he might send you to a gas chamber.

It is what happens to the mind of little girls in wartimes. I kept thinking: I want to die in America, where they do not torture anyone.

And finally my dream came true.

### Torture again

So, one of the saddest things I witnessed was the return of the legitimacy of torture here in America, the country who had rooted it out in 1948. It would have desolated my father who used to teach that the US was the most remarkable country in the world because not only it condemned torture but it believed that its own soldiers had a duty to disobey if they were ordered to commit acts against humanity. Nuremberg meant so much for Europeans.

But Human Rights are volatile. Every generation is likely to forget. I should have believed Aldous Huxley, when he said: _That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach_.

The first time I heard about physical torture and knew what it meant, I was less than five years old. The last time was yesterday.

The first time I shook hands with a man who had no nails, I was just a kid. My father said: "Remember this all your life." I do remember. The man was a friend of my father, an Austrian anti-fascist, and a very old man. He had been tortured during the war and his nails never grew back.

But later, I was involved with European Civil Rights, and I lost count of all the hands without nails that I held in mine: Spanish, Greek, Russian, South African, Algerian...

This is the beginning of the 21st century. These hands come back, and I hold them in the night. Often when I sleep, if I sleep, I still dream that I sleep in a pool of blood. _But it means nothing to me._

One day, I mentioned the concentration camps to a French colleague, and he asked: "What is it to you? You are not Jewish." Millions of Jews were killed in my lifetime. _What is it to me?_ Indeed, I am not a Jew. Three million Gypsies were killed and forgotten in my lifetime. _What is it to me?_ I am not a Gypsy. This would mean, today, more than wiping out every human being in Ireland. _What is it to me?_ I am not even Irish. And one could add to this a few millions corpses in Biafra, in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, in Darfur, but it never made history, so _what is it to all of us?_

Have you ever met IRA people? I have. I met two of them, a long time ago, and promised I would never make bad use of what they said, never describe them and never say where we met: that was the deal. I can describe them to you accurately without breaking that promise. According to the most common definition, they were both "good people": they did not work, or take risks, or get wounded, or die for their own sakes. They both bore obvious marks of their courage. Nevertheless, we did not make friends. I did not meet them so that they could convince me that the cause of Ireland was a good one: I sympathized with the ideal of Irish unity long before that. I just wanted to ask them how they felt about murder.

***

One of them was a learned man, an intellectual, and I recognized him immediately. If you have read the _Germinal_ of Zola, it would be easy for you too: he is the anarchist that has no friends except a rabbit, and when the rabbit dies, he is alone. He is the one that places a bomb in the mine to punish the miners who go back to work. Then his own friends decide that the strike cannot go on any longer, they go back to work and he says nothing, knowing that they will be killed. The earth moves under his feet from the explosion, and he carries elsewhere his ideal and his destruction. That Irishman was like that.

I am certain that you have met the other terrorist as well, you have seen him a thousand times at the movies: he played the handsome second role, war hero, kid-for-ever, the one who tells all the jokes, and shouts with joy when he "gets one", he is the guy who dies at the end, while saving a friend's life; and the film loses all momentum after his death.

***

We could not communicate: they were so convinced that I did not "understand." It is another Irish characteristic that goes together with playing in the same play again and forever: nobody _understands_ them.

I tried in despair to appeal to their Christian side. For once it seemed, as I recall, that the Church of Ireland had said that it was not nice to shoot people in the back. It was not as bad as fornication, but it was not quite permitted either.

"Don't you feel afraid for yourself when you kill innocent people, I asked. Aren't you afraid of God?"

"It cannot be avoided," said the first one.

"One can always find a priest," the other replied.

We never shook hands.

***

The Prime Minister of the "New Yugoslavia" was once interrogated about Kosovo, in London, and answered: " _All history books should be kept away from children_." This gave me a bitter pleasure.

There are still countries where any mention of the massacre of Armenians is banned. I was once censured on the Belgian radio for mentioning it in a pastoral address. My protestant colleagues did not support me: they thought nobody should talk about it.

How does torture come to mind? When each generation comes to war, there is a temptation to save lives by forcing some people to talk under torture. It is easy to find young men who believe that by torturing, they achieve a greater good, save lives of their countrymen, protect their own. And then, they are not sissies; they have to do what has to be done. The discourse is successful in any country. It was in France in the 60's, a country that has many faults but is generally considered civilized.

The problem is that we never really know who knows what, so we torture innocent people. The problem is that most of our enemies don't know squat, and they tell us what we want to hear. The problem is that with each wrongdoing, each atrocity, we create a century of hate.

I know exactly what the Germans did to my family in 1914. Armenians know exactly what the Turks did. Black people remember their history. You will have a hard time finding Japanese Americans who do not know that their grandparents were in camps during the war. None of us wants to forget 9/11.

It is a pity that each generation has to be explained this again and again and again, and that so many governments hide bad deeds, poor administration and stupid revenge under the guise of a need for information.

Legal wartime behavior is not easy to achieve: there is the pressure of war, the rage of seeing your friends killed, the fear, the sense of urgency. So I do not condemn soldiers who go too far. What I criticize is the Executive for its lack of vision and for the lack of training in appropriate techniques of war when it will boil down to man-to-man contact.

What do we want after the war ends? All wars end. It used to be that Americans, specially the army, were admired worldwide for their restraint as opposed to the Nazis' immorality and for the way they carefully protected works of art in all of Europe during wartime. We didn't do that in Iraq, I guess some generals did not know that Iraq has cultural treasures of the greatest importance for all of us: it is where writing was invented and where many Bible stories come from.

Respect of the rules of war is the way I like it and at the end of the day, it is the only efficient way.

Looting

Let me start with my own recollection of Nazi looting. People my age know that the Germans during WWII looted a lot of museums and private collections. Little as I was, I remember that the bells of all the churches from my native Belgium were to be melted in Germany and used for weaponry. When I was a child, many people were too poor to have a watch: they usually got one for their retirement. When people worked in the field, it was the sound of the bell that gave them the time. The loss of the bells was resented by all, but mostly by small children, because we believed that the bells travel to Rome and come back each Easter with eggs and gifts.

Some of our bells of course never came back from Germany. Belgium lost forever 3,358 bells to be precise. But some were found in Hamburg and came back for Easter 1947. These are the bells I remember. The whole country celebrated the return of our bells, and it did not matter what religion you had. Belgium is a country of belfries. The city of Mechelen has a belfry dating back to the 13th century that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage. The city hosts an international school of _carilloneurs_ , bell ringers.

During WWII, the Nazis stole art from all of occupied Europe and from their own Jewish countrymen in Germany. The saving of some paintings by the French resistance is illustrated by a still superb movie with Burt Lancaster: _The Train_.

So, when a German citizen named Harry Fuld Jr. flew Germany in 1937, the Germans confiscated his belongings. He had a Matisse representing the hospital of Ajaccio in Corsica named _The pink wall_. The painting was discovered by the French in 1948 in Germany, hidden by the man responsible for delivering the poison to the gas chambers of Auschwitz death camp. Nobody knew who the real owner of the painting was, so it ended up in a museum in Paris.

Years passed, Harry Fuld died. But there were, all over the world people interested in the history of looting, and families wanting their paintings back. Where do you find what belongs to you and how do you prove it belongs to you? It is almost impossible to win. But little by little the various French governments, with varying amounts of enthusiasm and perseverance, found the owners of about 60,000 works of art; 2,000 remained without an owner, about 10 percent belonging to Jewish families that have never been found. The rest is thought to have been sold on the German black market. A catalogue of these lost paintings was published and an exhibit of about 50 paintings was shown in Israel and then in Paris in 2008.

The Paris exhibit was at the _Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme_. The name of the exhibit was appropriate: _Looking for owners_. It is not small stuff: there is Ingres, Degas, Monet, Delacroix, Vlaminck. One painting by the Flemish painter Pieter de Hooch (The Drinker) did belong to Edouard de Rothschild. It had been stolen and it was found back in the collection of Goring. Later, it was given back to Edouard's daughter and she offered it to the Louvre.

The owner of the lost Matisse was found after many years of research by German art historian Marina Blumberg. It so happens that the actual owner, through a series of wills, is a British charity involved with emergency medical needs in Israel. So, they intended to sell the painting and fund more work with the proceeds. The French Minister of cultural affairs, Christine Albanel, gave back the painting to the rightful owners on Nov 27th 2008 and said that this would bear testimony to a major work of remembrance and justice.

Dallas

### The Dallas Effect

I was listening to an actress called Angelina Jolie, and she explained that she had a boyfriend at age 14, living with her in her mother's house. She said that she used to cut herself with razor's blades in order to feel alive and true. Her mother, who had been an actress as well, apparently had been teaching her to _connect with her feelings_ , in the imperative style and method that Lee Strasberg made famous.

The story made me smile: nobody ever asked me how I felt about anything. As far as I remember, my feelings have been no major concern for anybody in the last seventy years, except when I was in physical pain. My mother used to wake me up every morning with a cup of tea and a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville. The quote goes like this: " _Life is neither a pleasure nor a sorrow. It is a serious task that it is our duty to carry out with dignity and propriety._ "

Every morning for 16 years, it was the first thing I heard. I was touched later to find the same quote in the private papers of Juliette Gordon Law, who founded the Girl Scouts. It is very typical of a Victorian education.

I bet that if anybody had bothered to ask me how I felt, and if anybody had told Angelina that _feeling_ is not what life is about, both Angelina and me would have become better persons.

But it is not just a question of what kind of parents you have, it is mainly a question of culture. Victorian times were wary of expressing feelings except in the most conventional romanticism. European culture stayed like that a long time, American culture evolved faster due to several factors such as a very strong belief in psychology.

I used to think that the US had a larger proportion of psychologists than any other country, but it is just not true: France and the US both have about one psychologist for 1500 people. France just does not have as many people telling you that confession is good for the soul, that you feel better when you talk or that you should let it all hang out. Maybe it is the result of just another _Dallas_ effect.

Sitcoms and soap operas have something in common: actors got to talk on the same sofa for several years, which threatens to be boring, so the least they can do is to "express their feelings." Any restraint, and the show goes down the drain. So, since the 1950s, generations of Americans got used to these intimate spectacles of hate, love and pain where everybody suffers at the top of their lungs.

In the 1980s, these shows came to Europe where they had two different effects. One, everybody thinks that expressing your feelings is the ultimate way of life. Nowadays, if you do not burst in violent tears, you are going to be suspect of a crime anywhere you go.

Case in point. " _The husband did it: he did not show any emotion_."

Two: everybody, especially in Eastern countries, started thinking that every American lived like in _Dallas_ , with a great mansion, expensive furniture and not much work to do. _Dallas_ was such a success abroad that I remember being in a hospital in France where they changed the meal's hour so that everybody could watch the show. It probably was the only major change that they had made in 200 years.

I remember Polish miners saying that they thought they were OK until they saw _Dallas_ and realized how well people lived in the US.

They convinced me that _Dallas_ , more than President Reagan's efforts or the CIA plots ... it is _Dallas_ that broke down the Wall.

Politicians

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many to appointment by the corrupt few. G.B. Shaw

If you are not interested in politics, it is too bad, because everything is decided without you. If you are into politics, you should not vent your frustrations by saying that "President Bush is stupid" or "President Bush should go to jail" or that "Mrs. Clinton got away with murder" or that "President Obama is not an American." Such comments create young little fascists around you, and it is the last thing we all need. At the 2008 election, there were at least ten books on each side accusing the other of lying. I see the same books with a new cover in 2012. Who reads that stuff? Older fascists?

If you need to vent your party's frustration, do it in the shower.

Yes, democracy comes with frustrating moments. But we cannot expect our children to respect our values if one half of the population is always demonizing the other.

While Republicans and Democrats play tough games with each other, another society emerges, with hundreds of thousands of gang members, reminding me of the decadence of Rome: "About 20,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs with approximately 1 million members are criminally active in the U.S. today. Many are sophisticated and well organized; all use violence to control neighborhoods and boost their illegal money-making activities, which include drug trafficking, robbery, theft, fraud, extortion, prostitution rings, and gun trafficking." (Annual Conference of Mayors in Chicago, June 10, 2006.)

We have to keep in mind who the real enemy is.

Democracy

### Genetics of Democracy

Have you noticed that in any democratic country, votes pro and against are always so close to 50%? It is true most of the time, except when there is war or exceptional (good or bad) economic growth. Take the presidential elections in the USA after WWII. We will look at the popular vote, not at the results of the Electoral College. Only in five out of sixteen elections, the difference between popular votes was greater than 10%. The French, Belgians and Germans always had pretty close elections too, in terms of popular votes. However, these countries have seen big constitutional changes during the last 50 years, so we cannot compare the whole series. We can still look at Great Britain. The two major parties are always close: only three cases exceed 10% difference. Note that the election of the Prime Minister vs. the election of the US President are very different processes.

In fact, the chances for the conservatives or the progressives to win are basically identical everywhere: most of the time, each party starts with 40% and fights for 10% more in any democratic country. Why is that? If, as some people think, the left wing (democrats or labor) represent the interests of the lower classes (i.e. blue collars compared to white collars, or poor and middle classes compared to the rich) and the right wing (republicans or conservatives) represent the opposite, then the left would always win, because we always got more poor people than rich people. But the votes never coincide with the social structure. This is important, because if we did not have two large groups attached to very different ideas, there would be no democracy: there would be no possibility to change.

***

My guess is that the way we think in political matters is basically genetic. I guess that the chances of surviving if you are a conservative (for instance you are not going to try a new kind of mushroom even if you are starving, so you won't be poisoned, but you might not survive) are equal to your chances of surviving if you are prone to change (for instance you are going to try these new mushrooms no matter what, so you will not starve, but you might get poisoned). After a long period of evolution, we end up with two major groups; one with set values, one who is ready for new adventures. The way politicians go about winning might therefore be childish and inefficient.

Landslide votes are complex and cannot be explained by just one variable, be it war time of some mix of economic factors. The notes in the following tables are therefore not "explanations," just a brief reminder of what was going on. Although a model "bread and peace" can explain a few elections, the voters' mind remains too complex to predict: we are still better at explaining the past than the future (see for instance Hibbs, Public choice society, 2012).
Table 1 **US Presidency, popular votes**

Table 2 **United Kingdom general elections**

Of course I am not alone playing with this idea, see for instance in Behav. Genet. 2007, _The genetics of voting: An Australian twin study_ by P.K. Hatemi et al.

Stability

### Progress and Stability work hand in hand

This really is such a platitude that we forget it all the time: there is no progress without stability. Politicians hate the idea because it involves longer terms than their reelection. So, after giving it lip service, they promptly turn their back to the truism. It is one of the greatest weaknesses of democracies: their vision never exceeds the next election. On the other hand, there is no other system allowing you to get rid of corruption, which is the weakness of non-democratic regimes.

Corruption does not only affect how the government money is used and distributed, it paralyzes the lives of everybody. I remember a time when corruption was so high in Turkey (in the 1960s) that people who wanted to obtain their own passport had to pay bribes equivalent to several months of salary to get it. Corruption is high enough in Belgium that it affects the number of car accidents. It is the thesis of the author of _Traffic_ : if people know that there is corruption and do not trust the system, they do not obey the law: corruption is then "indicative of a larger lack of faith in the law." From _Traffic: why we drive the way we do_ , by Tom Vanderbilt, 2008, p. 235

When the Berlin Wall fell, everybody rushed in to do business with the new "free" Eastern countries, and our democratic countries did not pay attention to the rampant corruption left by the communist regimes. One generation later, everybody is still paying the consequences.

***

The last time I changed my mind about politics was when we started having all these difficulties in Iraq. I heard on TV and on PBS radio the declarations of many important people who came back from Iraq and said: "We did not know whom we could trust." Well, if you do not know whom to trust, you just occupy the country, but it is not what we came to do.

I thought a lot about this. I had always resented General McArthur for allowing Japan's Emperor Hirohito to stay in power and for keeping most of the old superior administration – all these guys were criminals and should have been punished.

I now realize that if there is a void of political and administrative power, there is also chaos. I do admit that I was wrong about McArthur - reluctantly, very very reluctantly, but I admit it.

Corruption

I love Walmart. Sure enough, for its prices, but also because of the jobs it produces. You should have seen the opening week of the last Walmart here in Savannah: every employee was smiling. Many of the new employees had been looking for a job for a long time. I liked these smiles: I knew what they meant. I also liked the fact that Walmart carried the products of a nearby Alabama delicatessen. Their products were not sold here in summer because that small producer could not afford to buy refrigerated trucks. Now they got the strength of Walmart behind them. Good for them.

What I am less fond of is Walmart CEO Mike Duke. He kept the mentality of his mentors.

During the Cold War, bribery was a way of life, the cost of doing business abroad. I still remember how Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was led to abdicate after her husband accepted a million-dollar-bribe from the Lockheed Corporation. The minds were starting to change, not only in the US, but in many countries, realizing that paying bribes abroad was counter-productive. For Pete's sake, even the Russians signed the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention! Lobbying to water down our anti-bribery legislation is a sign of old age, and I'm polite about this (see details in the Washington Post).

The same Mike Duke, I heard, refused to follow the politics of McDonald who fights the terrible conditions met by pregnant pigs. There is no need to torture pigs, and the fight serves McDonald image. Burger King has similar pledges. See, the end of the Cold War: no bribery, cage free: signs of progress. Wake up, Walmart! Don't linger in past ideologies!

Nowadays, you need not only to sell cheap, you need an image. The image of Duke-Walmart is terrible.

Time for fresh air.

History

### Greed, Intolerance, Fear and Laziness

I have been lied to. Because I was born in 1940, all I learned about history was divided into two philosophies. On the right, teachers concentrated on battles, heroes and kings. On the left, teachers tried to show some economic great design, where "the Establishment was oppressing the Masses." The end result of any conflict depended on the particular little philosophical church of each professor; it had nothing to do with facts. It was a time, in the 1950s in Europe, where "historical materialism" was used as often as we use "political correctness" nowadays, and with the same hypocrisy. It polarized politicians, so our poor professors tried to give us the best of both visions.

I was easily irritated as a child: I decided that I would not study history at all.

If there was a control, I always wrote the same answer, saying that _the efforts for peace of the people surrounding the kings or the tyrant were bound to fail. The population was heavily taxed and the economy was at an all time low. Misery was so great that there was unrest, especially at the border and in the rich plains_ (doesn't every country enjoy at least one rich plain? If they don't, these countries are not mentioned in textbooks.) The question could be about the Second Empire in Egypt, France under Louis XIV, or the birth of the United States. It did not matter to me, I always gave the same answer, and I always passed with honors. I think that my Professors appreciated that I looked as if I had thought this by myself: nobody ever remembered that I always gave the same answer no matter what. Ha! Fifty years later in Savannah, GA, I still find the same nonsense in textbooks, like _the war of 1914-1918 is a consequence of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian Empire._ Ha! We create a new generation of Americans that will be powerless at understanding the world.

In the meantime, I researched what every little girl wants to know: things like what was the shape of Cleopatra's nose, why Agnes Sorel, the mistress of a king of France, was always represented with one nude breast. And I had a fascination for false money, so I tried to check it in every period. If the professors were unwilling to amuse me, the least I could do was to make time to amuse myself.

***

Consequently, when I was 20 years old, I was full of hopes for the world and full of illusions and I did not understand what makes kingdoms rise and fall. For example, I dutifully marched against colonialism, for the independence of African countries and their conquest of democracy. In the 1960s, believe me, that was quite a lot of marching. And what happened? Millions and millions of deaths happened, famine, rapes and the economy spiraling down everywhere in Africa. The future African rulers were educated in a panic in Paris, Brussels and London, so I came to know a number of them. Fifteen years later, practically all of them had met a violent death, the first generation of African intellectuals was wiped out. Am I saying that colonies were great? Of course not, it was time for these countries to forge their independence. But all these democratic marchings left me with the impression that what happened later was all my fault, the fault of people with good intentions who were never told how the world really ticks, never told that what dominates history is greed, intolerance, fear and laziness.

You are allowed to laugh at the credulity of my generation, if I can remind you that your generation did exactly the same stupid mistake in 1989. Remember the Berlin Wall? How we were all going to be friends and there would be no more wars? We were going to teach the Russians the benefits of a free economy; I listened to excited talks for a whole week, nobody said a word about stability, about the legal system, about how to protect the rights of investors. It was like: "Let us do business together, let us teach free market economy to the ex-USSR," as if free markets were not essentially depending on stability, as if corruption, the main evil of dictatorships, did not count any more. Result: most of that new economy is driven by the mafia and the world is more dangerous than ever. It is the Russian mafia that has been, in the meantime, teaching us a thing or two. And as anybody could have cared to predict, at the end of the day, all the deaths in Yugoslavia came from our illusions.

I do remember the fall of the Berlin Wall with bitterness, because in the midst of all that joy, my mother was on her deathbed. One of the last things she said was: "It is a mistake, the Germans will come back." All her life had been forged by two world wars and German invasions. You could not expect her to rejoice at the fall of the Wall, which had been in her mind not a symbol of communism - like it was for most Americans - but a handy protection against the next Prussian invasion.

Case in point.

You may think that greed, intolerance and fear explain all wars; it is a truism. Find me a textbook that says it outright. In the history of civilization, we make war because the gods are with us: _Gott mit uns_ and _God bless America_ are the descendants of the wars of Mesopotamia, justified when you won because the gods were with you: "In accordance with the ideological conception of war that existed in the ancient Near East, the unachieved or incomplete success of a military enterprise demonstrated that divine support for it was lacking." (in: Hittites studies in honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr, 2003; in a chapter by Stefano di Martino and Fiorella Imparati: " _More on the so-called Puhanu chronicle_.")

***

Later on, the warmongers got smarter and learned to call for a victory even when they lost: at the time of the battle of Qadesh between Ramses II and the Hittites, both sides claimed victory. Napoleon did that in Egypt; his army met defeat after defeat, but he went home claiming victory with such confidence that when I was a kid, and probably still nowadays, French textbooks claimed that the campaign was victorious.

Two thousand years ago, Romans claimed that they were bringing around the Pax Romana. It is a trick we used since then: pretend that you come to bring peace! Indeed, when I was in school in the 1950s, all battles in Africa were about bringing civilization and Christianity to poor retarded populations. Nowadays, it is all about defending American interests. We impose on our children visions of the world that have nothing to do with the coarse realities of life, and we do it generation after generation after generation, ever since writing has existed. How cool is that?

Laziness

Laziness is an interesting point because it works as a double edge sword. On one hand, laziness brings about creativity and creativity makes better weapons. If we were not lazy, the wheel would never have been invented. On the other hand, it is tempting to believe that many civilizations disappear when they get lazy and use slavery and cheap foreign hands to do the hard jobs, what nowadays we call "outsourcing." Of course, there is no way to demonstrate this, as empires usually crumble under an accumulation of factors, but maybe outsourcing is an early sign of decline as it has been throughout history.

Attila Returns

This was in France. We had an exchange student from Hungary and I noticed she was squirming when a black student sat next to her. So after the lecture, I went to her and made small talk, and asked her if she was afraid of black people.

"Not at all, she said, it just that it is the first black man I ever saw. I will get used to it." Then she looked at me and added: "What I am afraid of is the Mongols." Well, well, I had to smile, but it made sense. In Europe, we are all afraid of somebody to our east, who invaded us in the past, and it cascades more and more east to the Chinese who fear Japan.

Of course Hungary was once a small part of the Hun territory (and the Huns invaded the future Belgium and France, as I am sure you all know). The name of the little town where I come from, Hannut, means denuded, sacked by the Huns (Hun nudum). With time, however, the people who lived in the Belgian and Northern France territories came to nickname "Huns" a more recent eastern invader, the Germans.

So Belgians are not afraid any more of Huns and other Mongols, though Attila's rapists left deep traces in our population. Many children in Belgium and Northern France, probably between 1 and 5 per cent, but it varies from town to town, are born with a blue mark on their lower back called the mongoloid spot, attesting a long lost Asian origin. The spot disappears in the first years of life, as it does for most Asian and American Indian children. One more reminder that being "white" is not a race, it is an inherited characteristic of people who once lived where there is little sun, as compared to people who lived closer to the equator and have a darker skin.

Bad People

I met on a French train this handsome, impressive, charming American and he was so interesting to talk with. He asked me what I thought of president Carter, who had just been elected. I answered that it was not going to work: president Carter was too naïve and honest. The man in front of me, who was a Republican, nevertheless raised his hands in frustration and said: "But why not? Why not? All Europeans tell me the same thing, it is so cynical!" I did not know what to say, but I have been thinking about it for a few decades more, and I think I found out why Carterism does not work.

Some people are bad people, and you cannot expect them to play the game. Take Hitler: I think that Chamberlain really believed that Hitler could and would keep his word. Chamberlain, like most Englishmen of his time, expected diplomacy to be in the hands of gentlemen. Learning the truth is probably what killed him.

I once read the memoirs of the British ambassador in Germany before WWII, the poor man was all lost in protocol details and the proper rules of cricket: it was a very sad reading.

I am convinced that Roosevelt made similar mistakes, first with Japan, then with Stalin. He thought that they would follow the rules of war and respect treaties, and it is not what happened. It is pretty hard to have an inbred sense of honor but to expect some other leaders to have no honor at all.

It does not mean that we should answer in kind: are you going to refuse to help any man with his arm in a cast because a criminal named Ted Bundy trapped young women with a false cast?

At one point, however, we have to face the truth: some people are bad people, It is a mystery why we never seem able to see them for what they are, no more in public life than in private life. Think of all these tyrants: Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam. Ceausescu, Pinochet: the list is endless of people who would have better fit a mental hospital than an official position.

It is hard to manage such people for any country, because a country is usually one person with a bunch of advisors who disagree with each other. There always were in the United States war people and peace people, Hawks and Doves, so we always have both sides represented, which is the way it should be. We mainly sorely lack people who understand other countries.

President Kennedy had such a man in Tommy Thompson who, because he understood the mind of Krushev, avoided for all of us a third world war. Kissinger also was very good at understanding people: this explains why he was successful with women in his youth: small-time predators understand women. Kissinger's descriptions of characters in his memoirs are on the spot, with very few exceptions.

President Reagan was surprised to learn that the Russians were convinced that America envisioned a first-strike nuclear war against them. Most Americans and Europeans took president Reagan's rhetoric against the Soviets as political statements or acts of faith, not as declarations of war. The Soviets had their doubts about what the discourse entailed; at one time, they thought they might be invaded. They did not understand the American mind any more than American politics.

Another example of poor understanding of people, but there are hundreds, is the CIA supporting the extreme rightwing in France before President Mitterand's election. It was a mistake, first because it made honest democrats turn against America, second because in France, there is no border, no real difference between the extreme right and the communists or the extreme left. The French have a high percentage of permanently discontent population, 15 to 20 %. They always vote for extremists, it does not matter to them which side these extremists claim to be, and you never know what the leaders will do to get their votes. So giving any of them money is destabilizing for the country. The set up is likely to end up in the wrong hands.

Bad people are bad people: they are never "on our side". It has been a long-standing mistake of the United States in general and the CIA in particular, to think that we can win bad people or win with bad people.

The United States is of course not the only country who made the mistake of believing that the wolf can be tamed with money, weapons, and a good word, we just have more money, more weapons and more good words to throw around.

Humiliation

I am sure that Saddam had a lot of fun playing the nuclear inspectors for fools, it gave him a sense of control and power and it probably also pleased his population. Saddam just had no idea how Western minds are working: we were all convinced that he had something to hide; then he suffered the consequences. On the other end, I think that we went in Iraq without a good plan and without any understanding of the Muslim world.

It is said that the CIA has a psychological analysis of all heads of state, which I expect is terrifying to read. I am wondering if their description of Saddam was accurate and how many cultural traits were described. Saddam came with his cultural characteristics just as Savannah plumbers have a mind of their own. These traits, we should learn to know. I also hope that the psychologists of the CIA never describe anybody without giving some advice on how to handle the person: let them take a risk. I am wondering about that because, if they do, why is it that we have only one policy: the policy of humiliation?

I remember some official specialist, saying this on ABC News the day Saddam was arrested: they were going to humiliate him. As if Saddam was going to talk if he was humiliated! I would have thought he was more likely to talk if he were given some illusion of a negotiation; what you get from humiliating people is only temporary basic compliance. Humiliation is the general policy we have in our jails, and how does that work?

Well, I am not a politician, nor am I a specialist in all this, but I live in Savannah where I have seen plenty of young soldiers every day, and I heard the planes leave for Iraq and Afghanistan. I feel as if these young people were my own kids.

I would like to make sure that the guys who do not go to war but stay here in the administration are at the top of their competence.

Jails

### The Cost

In Georgia, 7.2 million adults support half a million people under correctional supervision, people in prison, in jail, on probation and on parole. Is this reasonable? The system does cost of over a billion dollars a year. It means that if nobody committed crimes, we would be one billion more rich! I know you will not believe this, so here is the cost page.

GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS  
FY2010 ALLOCATION OF COST TO INMATES, PROBATIONERS, ETC.

**Note 1 - Total Costs:** Includes proration of Central Office costs, i.e., Commissioner's Office, Accounting, Payroll, Personnel, Inmate and Probationer record keeping, etc. Total costs were used in calculations except in the "(STATE ONLY)" columns.

**Note 2 - County and Jail Subsidies:** We paid $20.00 per day per inmate assigned to a County Correctional Institution and $22.00 per day per sentenced inmate awaiting pick-up in county jails.

**Note 3 - Bainbridge PSATC:** This facility is a specialized, one of a kind Probation Substance Abuse Treatment Center (PSATC).

Non-State Funds that are included in the above total (except for the columns labeled "(STATE ONLY)".)

\- Federal Funds (SFSF, SCAAP, workplace & community training, Child Nutrition, etc.): 103,121,661 - Sick Call, Escape/Search, and Inmate Fees: 1,424,931

\- Inmate Store: 4,751,659 and Central Project Telephone Funds: 7,393,063

\- Construction Projects: 32,245,290 and Insurance Recoveries: 686,631

\- Details (DOT, county, city): 12,223,794

\- Employee Payments (utility, rent collections, etc.): 397,307

\- Miscellaneous (family violence, payroll admin fees, CD data sales, special education, recycling, miscellaneous, etc.): 1,662,965

Non-State Funds NOT included in totals above (remitted directly to State Treasury, or Criminal Justice Coordinating Council): 17,247,533

\- Probation Office Fees ( Probation Fees - 8,845,528; Victim's Fee - 3,811,634): 12,657,162. - Transitional Centers (room and board): 4,572,914.

\- Miscellaneous : 17,457.

***

By comparison, we only spend 300 million on technical college education. Does it make sense to you? It does not make much sense to me.

Punishment

Is punishment a useful concept? Look at this.

I have a simple mind. For me, the figure means that we do not have a good system.

From my visits to jail, I have observed that many prisoners develop new bad skills instead of acquiring good skills. For instance they get new "prison language" and general behavior traits that makes them unlikely to find a job, if they look for one. We have programs of "rehab," we do not have programs that correct what is wrong with small offenders.

Things small offenders have in common, according to my own observations are:

1. A lack of capacity for self-discipline (on parole, they would go to a movie with a friend rather than keep an appointment with a parole officer).

2. The inability to consider delayed gratification or to envision what is going to happen next week.

3. A low self-esteem.

4. As a consequence of these problems, they do not like to work or they cannot keep a job.

***

I don't know what to do with violent offenders and predators. I tend to think like everybody else: too many of them are set free. But they remain a minority in the prison plague.

What do we do with the rest?

I am not a great believer in punishment, in rehab for the rehab's sake, in boot camps, or even in literacy programs (literacy is only useful when you want to read). I believe that education in _life matters_ is lacking and many small things as the ones I just listed can be corrected at a low price. I do know, however, that it is difficult to convince the system that it is the right thing to do: I once proposed to answer some science questions to inmates in Savannah, and was told by the County authority that the only volunteers they accept are religious personalities. Good luck with that! We have here a church per two hundred inhabitants, over a thousand Christian churches in our small town. If they cannot prevent young people to go to jail, how can they be doing such a good job inside the jail?

Money

### The Art of Poverty

There is a saying about getting rich: "It is not about what you earn, it is all about what you spend." The richest people from the gold rush were not the gold diggers; it was the guys who sold the shovels. The reason is that the gold diggers spent all their money as soon as they made it. Over the years, I have seen that it was true: money that comes fast goes fast. It is why you see drug dealers spending money, but you never see them getting rich (only the big lords get rich, and they are too smart to work the street). It explains how too many lottery winners who win tens of millions of dollars (much more than most of us in a lifetime) can lose it all in two or three years despite the counseling provided by the lottery organizers. It is how so many investors have gone down in 2008-2009.

I am old enough to have been poor several times. Here is what I think. When you talk about money, a lot of it is in your attitude. Use your imagination to find work when there is no job: what is it that your neighbors need? Somebody to mow the lawn, to wash the windows, to clean the driveway, to wax the car, to walk the dog, to go to the store for them, to watch the kids when they go shopping, to read a book to their aging grandma, to clean the kitchen? Once you find an angle, think about how people will know that they can trust you with the job. How hard do you work? Do you still wake up early? Do you look the part? Do you show up on time? Do you keep notes of what you have to do? Do you remember your promises? Are you honest? How does your asking price compare to the competition? Tough times call for tough decisions.

1. Take your time to get rich and spend less than you earn.

2. When you work, work hard.

3. When you have some money, be careful with it. Two or three times in a good life, you will find yourself earning less: you are very lucky if you escape this. I happens to many people: they lose a job for a while, they get sick, they divorce, they move to a town with less possibilities, they got to take care of more family members.

4. Not many young people make good money, always for the same reason: they come around when they need the money, not when people need them.

Young Brandon asked if he could mow my backyard, which he did. As I paid him he asked: "Can I come every two weeks to do it?" Brandon was making customers, not just money. I was impressed. By contrast, one of my neighbors has had a gardener for over ten years. He comes when she calls. The guy is over 60 years old and does not know how to run his business. Count with me: she gives him 30 dollars every three weeks or so, when she notices that the grass grows up. If he were smart enough to have an agreement with her and come automatically every two weeks, she would be pleased and he would make 30 dollars times 22 weeks equal: 660 dollars instead of 30 dollars times 17 weeks equal: 510 dollars. In other words, he loses about 20% of the money he could make. With his 30 customers, he could make 4,500 dollars more every year. And the difference is more than that, because sometimes he does not answer the phone and my neighbor uses somebody else.

### Michael's Jackson's money

Nobody has said yet what I think about Michael's untimely death. I just think: "another famous black guy who dies without a cent."

It is hard enough for each of us to spend wisely the little money we have, it is extremely hard to handle tens of millions and hundreds of millions when you have no financial education. Agatha Christie had that problem, I remember her saying that there was a moment when the money ceases to be pleasant enough to get and becomes a real hassle.

British actor Michael Caine recently said that when he told his mother that he was earning one million pounds per film, she asked "How much is that?"

Sportsmen are supposed to have some financial education, though sometimes you wonder: I remember baseball player Ricky Henderson who framed a check of one million dollars and let it hang on his wall instead of endorsing it.

Usually it is less funny: very friendly sharks will steal the money from under your feet.

You get talented kids? Send them first to a business school.

### Old Money

The press reported that a pastel by Degas was stolen from a Museum in France. It was worth over a million dollars. It reminded me of a small Degas I saw hanging on the wall of the powder room, in the house of a notable French couple. I was surprised that it was not displayed more prominently. I bluntly asked to the lady of the house if it was genuine. "I would think so," replied the lady dryly. Then I asked why on earth she did exhibit it in the John.

"I just don't like it," she said.

That is the difference between old money and new money.

Old money, you can't fake it.

Cultural Literacy

The children of poor people do not do as well as the children of rich people, except of course if they are exceptional. The way out is to increase your culture, do better in school to get a great job. You may like school or not, but it is the way out.

Cultural literacy is a more important factor than poverty. The correlation poverty/lack of achievement of the children is not about the lack of money in the house, it is about the lack of culture in the house. Social, political, religious, musical, mathematical, artistic knots are creating the fabric of success for children. The more involved you are, the more curious you are, the better you and your children will be.

Obesity

Everybody knows that the Midwest culture is different from the California culture and that Texas has a mind of its own. But do you know that obesity is local? Obesity affected 18.5 per cent of the adult population in Colorado in 2008, but 31.4 per cent of the adults in Alabama (cdc.gov obesity maps).

Sex

### A History of Sex

The ways we are having sex do not change with time, but the ways we interpret it vary with time and place. For instance, the President of France, Francois Mitterand, wanted to be buried in presence of both his wife and his mistress, and it is how the two women presided the official ceremony in 1996. I heard of Presidents of the USA who had a double life, but I doubt very much that a scene like this would be appreciated by the American voters: different places, different point of views.

Similar differences can be observed in the past. A history of sex should be mandatory for US historians, because they fail to understand the simplest cultural factors of the past. I was listening to professor Brands re-telling to a fascinated audience that Eleanor Roosevelt warned her daughter, on the eve of her marriage, that sex was an ordeal to be borne.

What does it mean? That Mrs. Roosevelt did not like sex? That she was a lesbian? That her husband was unkind? I am not sure. The one thing I know for certain is that four or five great aunts and old cousins of mine, all born in the 1880s like Mrs. Roosevelt, told me the exact same thing when I got married. Women born in the 1880s in the bourgeoisie all had the same Victorian education (Queen Victoria died in 1901.)

Good women were not supposed to like sex, only bad women enjoyed it; good women only suffered through it. So, men got married to a _bourgeoise_ who had children and they had mistresses for the fun of it. This not only explains La Belle Époque and the can-can dancers with open drawers (drawers unlike the abundant lace panties that you see in the movies), but a lot of the early 20th century architecture. Paris is full of bachelors' pads of the period, with just one large front room, a small bath and a kitchen relegated at the end of a long hallway, so the servants could respect your privacy. Those were the apartments where you kept your girlfriends.

I do not mean that married women of the early 1900s did not enjoy sex, just that they were not supposed or expected to: the culture was so pervasive all over the Western world that several of the old women I knew were convinced that female cats were always raped (only the male cat enjoyed sex!)

So what is the meaning of what Mrs. Roosevelt told her daughter? It means that she was born in the 1880s.

Similarly, all the discussions about lesbians in the 19th-early 20th century have to be taken with caution. A woman who writes to another woman nowadays that she wants to sleep in her arms is probably a lesbian. One century ago, the same letter does not mean a thing: maybe yes (I am longing for you), maybe no (like: sister, I wish we were peacefully together). What people write reflects their culture and their personality, you cannot infer who they are from what they write out of both contexts.

I seriously doubt that Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was an active pedophile for the same reasons. When I was a kid, there were photos of nude infants, generally playing on a sheepskin rug, in every house I went to. It was still the style of the day. The days before puberty were a symbol of innocence and purity.

Above all: why would you care about other people's sex life?

Inventions

### Inventions that changed my life since the 1940s

What changed our life? The answer is probably different for every person, because we have different needs. Cell phones, for instance are not on my list. I think that they are a nuisance in the US but helpful in underdeveloped countries. Here is my list.

Because they saved my life:

1. Antibiotics

2. Fiber-optic technology. Among many applications, I am especially grateful for the medical ones.

Because they ameliorate social conditions

3. The pill or not the pill: freedom to organize one's life. More than that. knowledge that you can organize your own life.

4. New vegetables. New species of flowers. I still got the gardening guide of my grandmother: it is incredibly poor, compared to what is available today. I am less convinced by "modified" meat generally made to satisfy greed, rather than the customer.

Because I lived alone most of my life:

5. Good quality paint, especially latex paint.

6. The invention of home improvement stores which gave women access to DIY.

7. Television (like many Europeans, we got our first TV to see the moon landing).

Because I used to be an oceanographer:

8. Weather and positioning satellites: it changed everybody's lives not only life at sea.

9. Numerical weather predictions: climate models save countless lives every day.

Because I am curious:

10. Computers, the Internet, blogging.

11. Finding black holes at the center of galaxies. That gives more sense to the universe.

12. Access to time. Dating the age of the earth, of artifacts, of climate changes: it is all possible through our understanding of nuclear reactions. Come to think of it, my grandparents did not understand the sun.

13. The structure of DNA: a first access to the great secrets of life.

14. A better knowledge of the brain. I have much hope that some day it will become useful.

Plumbing

... and Plumbers

I read the announcement that the "Space station's new urine recycler has glitches" with glee.

I am not surprised. In close to three quarters of a century, I have never seen decent plumbing anywhere. I am left to admire what the Romans did over 2000 years ago. It is frustrating that we made such progress in quantum physics, in the understanding of the universe, with the new world communication, and I still can't find a competent plumber.

Well, it is not quite true. Years ago, I was waiting for a colleague at Orly airport and the plane was late, so I got to talk with a guy who was waiting for the same plane. I was expecting to meet another chemist, he was expecting to meet another plumber.

"We just finished a new bathroom for a sheik," the man said. I was horrified.

"Are you telling me that we export French plumbing?" I asked somewhat bluntly.

"We are the best in the world," the man said, "nobody equals us in solid gold plumbing."

One learns something new every day.

***

Here is Savannah, the visit of a plumber is a bizarre ritual.

Suppose you live here in Savannah, GA and need a plumber, which is likely, as this certainly is the city with the worst plumbing in the whole universe, except for the Space station.

For individual workers in Savannah, there is a tradition of a 2-times operation. The plumber will first show on your doorstep for a visit, see what kind of person you are, what has to be done, indulge in a bit of conversation. Then he will leave and come back a few days later to do the work, if he shows up at all. There is no way you can speed up the process, because it corresponds to their need for politeness, and politeness starts with the art of conversation. Courtesy is in high esteem in Savannah. Who cares about the leak? Rude people like me.

If a plumber shows up and starts tackling your problem immediately, he probably is from Chicago.

Nixon

During Watergate, I misjudged what happened because I candidly believed what the White House was saying. It did not come to my mind that the President of the United States would tell blatant lies. Since I retired, I had the time to read over 15 books on Watergate, and then I bought the tapes. You got to listen to the original tapes, though they are very difficult to understand, because listening to a "reading" by an actor gives you a very different take of what was said.

For what it is worth, here is what I think about Watergate:

1. Republicans who say that Nixon was a victim because "everybody else does it" never listened to the tapes. It is as ridiculous as if you were saying nowadays that everybody is a Blagojevich: only fascists would say that. Not that I would ever think of comparing the two men: President Nixon was highly intelligent and won the respect of all the people working for him.

2. President Nixon often sounds very uncertain, seeking advice: he lowers his voice, leaves his sentences unfinished and sounds rather pitiful. His "advisers" never have the guts to give him any advice at all. It is painful to listen to. The president was often in anguish and nobody helped. I do know that Nixon did not like to be contradicted, so this may be a catastrophe of his own making, but at times President Nixon sounds unbearably lonely and surrounded by cowards. There is a lot of Richard III in Nixon, from the paranoia to _Despair and die!_

3. The tapes are extremely difficult to listen to, and instead of attacking Stanley Kutler for errors and omissions in his transcription of the tapes, one should just publish corrections and be thankful to the man. But of course it is less conductive to publicity than to attack him.

4. Howard Dean comes out as the worst lawyer in the history of mankind. And not a very decent person to boot.

5. The one I feel pity for in the whole saga is Haldeman. I understand what it is to do wrong with the best of intentions. I have done that. What I have never done, I think, is ignore the facts. There are remarkable parallels between Haldeman and McNamara. It was in Haldeman's make-up to "submerge himself totally to the cause," and both President Nixon and him paid the price for it.

Business

" _The alpha and omega of business life has become keeping up the share price. Innovation and investment can go hang_ ," said Will Hutton in the UK Guardian. Yes business has changed a lot in the last decades. Paternalism has disappeared. Instead as fighting to keep competence around, every business tries to get rid of you when you reach fifty because you are too expensive. Computers have allowed the quasi disappearance of inventories, to the great dam of drivers who wait too long for auto parts. A lot of consumers have become incidental. For instance, if you need to move, the contract goes to the closest truck company, so the movers have no incentive to treat you well. When I was still working as an oceanographer, our complaints about movers rose by a factor of five before I understood the reason.

Globalization has become more than a word. It bothers me, what are we going to do in the next war? Everything we need is made up in three or five different countries. It makes us so vulnerable, it is unhealthy.

And some of the morality of companies has disappeared somewhere between 1980 and today. In 1980, big companies did not call you and immediately lie to you. Most banks do that nowadays; it starts with a person calling from India and giving you some American surname. I never received in 1980 letters pretending to come from the government and coming instead from a private insurance company.

The need to please shareholders has become the law of the field, resulting into some damning decisions of CEOs, such as covering for child labor abroad. Nike pledged to have better standards in 1998, when it realized his reputation suffered. The sweatshops abroad are still not up to snuff for many other industrialists.

Businesses are the image of America abroad, but they do not care about our national image, they care about the price of the shares. It used to be, during the cold war, that businesses would easily give a hand to the US government, now they lost the incentive.

This has been the era of "greed is good," but it is already changing.

Lent

Right here, in the Great South, two ladies came to my door to invite me to celebrate Jesus' death. I was shocked and I told them it was not for me. I would celebrate a resurrection, but there is no way I'll celebrate anybody's death.

One lady looked at me sternly and said: "The Bible says Jesus died for our sins."

I answered: "You want to celebrate **that**?"

YES THEY DO.

You would think that they are a little bit ashamed that somebody died for them, or worried that they may not be worth it, or try to be better persons to avoid Christ some suffering. But no, mainstream theology, specially in the South, says that the sacrifice of Christ is sufficient, you do not need to do anything, just accept it, rejoice in it and that is what they do. "Thank you Lord, I repent and I am washed of all sins."

Early theologians did not talk to the sophisticated narcissistic crowds we deal with today.

As a result, we got in Georgia a staggering number of people "in the system, " meaning in jail or in prison, or on parole. It is hard to find neighbors who never got to jail around here.

And in the USA, the best country in the world, there is close to one million kids abused or neglected every year.

A.D. of course. Now thank Jesus for dying.

Terrorism

### Terrorism and Tacit Consent

Some years ago, I was convinced that my neighbor was a drug dealer, because I saw dealers going in and out of her apartment all day long. I was wrong: she would never deal because she was a very Christian person, but she sheltered the dealers. It was a totally new concept to me. Why did she do it? Because, she said, they were kids with no hope of getting a job. These dealers were hard to eradicate: they had been on our street for decades, but when that neighbor moved away, the dealers on the corner of my street moved too. It convinced me that dealing is the kind of crime that most often comes with a support group.

It reminded me of another Christian I had met in Ireland. He would never commit an act of terrorism, but he would always hide a terrorist. The idea of calling the police seemed to him equivalent to a betrayal.

Similarly, I knew of a very pacifist Palestinian who would never commit an act of terrorism himself, but he understood and would have protected terrorists. Why? He understood what they were fighting for, agreed with the ends if not with the means. And of course he was constantly subjected to propaganda. For instance he told me that the proof that "the Jews own America" is that the star of David is on the US dollar; I guess he meant the 13 stars from the 13 first states.

I do not understand tacit consent: to me, it is like shooting yourself in the foot; but it is a force that we ignore too often.

Health Care

### Two Cents of it

As soon as people hear my foreign accent, they ask me about health care in Europe. Is it true that you can wait a whole year for an operation? Is it true that public health care is horrible?

No, it is not true.

All these rumors were created by people paid by insurance companies or by extreme right people who have so much political passion that they have become anti-Americans (look at the way they applauded when we did not get the Olympic games!)

I lived 30 years in France and one year in various British Isles and many years in Belgium. The most I ever waited for an operation was about 6 weeks. And then I was treated competently. The most I paid for an operation was about 300 dollars.

Is medicine in Europe perfect? Of course not. For instance, if you are a fifty years old woman, it is hard to find a doctor who would not answer your complaints with: "it is just menopause, do not worry about it."

When I was fifty and in trouble is the only time I really wished I had an interesting prostate. But I am sure it does not happen here, in the paradise of private medicine.

### Health Care in Jails

The only thing that makes sense to me in the prison system is that we pay, in the US, 3 billion dollars a year for the healthcare of incarcerated people. Yes, we do not want them to suffer cruel and unusual punishment, but mainly, we do not want them to contaminate us. Same thing with illegal immigrants: tuberculosis, hepatitis and AIDS do not ask people if they behave well or if they are here legally: diseases spread around, it does not matter what kind of person you are, so we got to treat whoever is around us. No real choice.

You know, it is pretty much like pollution: there is no pollution that stops at any border, be it river-borne or airborne.

Marriage

Many a wife is left wondering how come she never saw that her husband was a fake. Of course, more that one man wakes up next to a trophy wife instead of the partner he wanted. How often do we meet, in bed or in politics, the imitation of life?

Economy

### A simple economic view

On one hand, we get called names for using too much credit, and that killed our economy. On the other hand, we are supposed to spend more to support the economy because we do not spend enough and that kills the economy.

It does not make sense. Ah, wait a minute! The US Gross Domestic Product is about 14 trillion dollars a year, about the same as the European Union and twice as much as China. But most of it is made of services (79% compared to 19.8 for industry and 1.2 for agriculture). What is "services"? Everything not included in the two other categories: transport, health care, finance, retailers, etc). It means that over three quarters of the economy is built on our capacity to spend: buy or rent houses, buy clothes and books and go to the movies and end up in a restaurant. It has been decades now that businesses look for more stuff to put in our hands, from hula hoops to cell phones. They calculate a shorter and shorter lifetime for everything we buy to force us to buy the same thing again, be it a house, a computer, a car or a refrigerator, then of course we need credit to buy the stuff. And businesses outsource and import to make more profit. So our industrial capacity disappears.

Unhappily, the more there is unemployed people and poor retirees like me, the less we spend and the economy shrinks. This US economy, the one that is more built on spending than on building.

So the real solution is not for the government to throw trillions dollars around, it should be to get more industry in the US. Let us get back to a 30% industry and agriculture: that is the real wealth of a country. Creating before spending.

Laugh

### Don't laugh and drive

Imagine that your zeugmatic muscles hurt, your lung volume diminishes suddenly, your airways are compressed, your diaphragm becomes rigid and your toes curl up of pleasure, instead of quietly apply pressure on the brake pedal. Is it dangerous to laugh and drive? Certainly.

Yet, I cant find statistics of accidents caused by laughing, which indicates that more people take drugs, drink and use their cell phone while driving than actually have a good laugh.

Lucky them, I am risking my laugh, sorry my life, daily. Yesterday I almost bumped into a bus: it had an ad for a local lawyer: "a real lawyer" said the ad.

The world is full of idiots.

***

### Novels

### On Pets and Men

This is a series of ultra short stories about ... mainly pets and a few men. It is a tender book about all the creatures I love, including spiders who like music, orphan birds, miniature rabbits, wise crows and a very stupid dog.

Available from Amazon.com (print or Kindle), Barnesandnoble.com (print), and Smashwords.com (digital formats).

### Vague Souvenir

This is a historical fiction book. I wanted to describe the smells, the conversations, the dresses, the cooking of my parents' time during World War 2. Some characters are intense at surviving and some are hoping to change the world. Many people I have known figure in the book. As an oceanographer, I have traveled extensively. My heroes travel to places where I have been and often worked, from France to Spain, to Portugal, to London, to the United States. A whole year of research went into finding what was there during the period I describe: the restaurants in Lille, the food in London, the music played in Lisbon, etc. A whole year of research went into this.

Available from Amazon.com (print or Kindle), Barnesandnoble.com (print or Nook), and Smashwords.com (digital formats).

### Biography

I had three lives, one in Belgium where I was born and became a Pastor and Civil Rights activist (1940-1971), one in France as a scientist (1971-1998) and one in the United States as a happy mom re-united with her children and sweetly retired. I published in French a novel, 50 short stories for children and a political book beautifully illustrated by Virginia Leirens (a companion of Chagall and the mother of his talented son David McNeill).

Everything I write now is about empathy, a quality sometimes lacking in a generation for which fame often overrides service. On Pets and Men is about empathy with living creatures. Vague Souvenir is about empathy with people torn by war. Crimes of the Balance Sheet (in press) is about friendship.

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