Free Frank Warner

Lack of imagination? AP missed the point of J.K. Rowling’s Harvard speech

J.K. Rowling’s Harvard address on the imagination seems to have moved those who heard or read the whole thing. So I wonder why the Associated Press missed the point in its news coverage of the speech.

Rowling’s major point is that, as citizens of a democracy, Americans have to use our imaginations to understand the horrors of living under totalitarian regimes. And then we have to decide what we might do about those abuses.

Rowling recalled her days working for Amnesty International in London:

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes. …

“Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places. …

“And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.”

‘Your privilege, your burden.’ Rowling told the Harvard Class of 2008:

“The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.”

It’s interesting she chose the word “burden.” Was she only coincidentally referring to the unfortunately titled “The White Man’s Burden,” in which Rudyard Kipling a century ago summoned the United States to the thankless, but noble burden of guiding the Philippines into enlightenment and freedom?

Equally interesting is that, in the Associated Press’s coverage of Rowling’s speech, there is a reference to using the imagination, but no mention of what Rowling suggests using the imagination for.

Imagination for what? The AP doesn’t tell readers that she asked Harvard’s graduates to hear the screams and to peer inside the cages of the world’s police states, and then to raise their American voices for the voiceless.

The AP quotes her as saying “we have to power to imagine better,” but never reveals what she specifically wants made better or how imagination is so important to that task.

Maybe there’s a longer version of AP reporter Jay Lindsay’s story, but he seems to have blown it. Shouldn’t Rowling’s point have been in the lead paragraph?

Frank Warner

J.K. Rowling: Imagine what goes on in totalitarian states

J.K. Rowling gave a thoughtful address this week on the indispensable power of the imagination.

She told the Harvard Class of 2008 that when they consider what they might do about their fellow human beings suffering in the world’s various police states, they have a responsibility to use their imagination, and to act wisely on it.

Two days ago, Rowling said:

“Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read. …

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. …

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

Politics of empathy. Rowling’s political statement sounded remarkably apolitical. She advised the Harvard graduates not to forget their fellow humans, to weigh the plight of the oppressed and act on empathetic judgment, to use their imagination well.

Let me make this a little more political by repeating something I said here last October:

If you never experience a terrible pain, wisdom demands that you imagine it. Otherwise, you’ll let it hit you when it could have been avoided. The same is true of nations.

Give a nation twenty years of prosperity, and a third of its people will believe prosperity takes neither work nor competition. Another third will be unsure.

Give a nation twenty years of peace, and a third of its people will believe peace comes not from actively opposing enemies, but from ignoring them. Another third will be unsure.

Give a nation twenty years of freedom, and a third of its people will lose the ability to imagine the misery of a life in chains. Another third will struggle with the thought.

It is a sad irony that the success of one generation can make fools of the next. We in the Free World have been given so much that many of us have lost the feel for real pain or suffering. Somehow we’re able to play pretend, and yet too many of us have lost our imaginations.

When a third of a population lives an illusion that appeals directly to selfish cynicism, and another third is passively confused, it doesn't take much effort for the senseless to block the sensible from doing, for freedom, peace and progress, the necessary things that also happen to be hard.

Short on imagination and long on self-deception, we invite disasters easily avoided.

Unheard screams. In half the world today, there is unseen suffering, there are unheard screams, there is the desperate knowledge by billions of people that they can never say or write or act on what they believe.

Imagine that.

Frank Warner

* * *

See: Hegemony or Survival: Noam Chomsky is alive, but he is one sick man.

See: The Single Backpack Theory: Proof archaeologists owe the U.S. an apology for their accusations over the Iraq National Museum looting.

See: Safe cash: $5 reward for proof Saddam ended his repression.

See: In the ‘South Pacific’ musical, why doesn’t the Navy know they’re fighting for freedom?

‘The Charge of the Heavy Brigade’

I was doing some historical research last night when I discovered that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” also wrote “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade.”

No kidding.

Apparently, there were several phases to the October 1854 Battle of Balaclava, in which the British and French fought the Russians in the Ukraine, near the Crimean Sea. The first phase involved the British Heavy Brigade attacking the Russian cavalry.

The Heavy Brigade was commanded by Major General James Scarlett.

Redcoats like drops of blood. Tennyson’s poem on the Heavy Brigade is not so melodic as the “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Its weakness explains why the verses are little remembered. But here is one of the more interesting stanzas from “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava”:

Fell like a cannon-shot,
Burst like a thunderbolt,
Crash’d like a hurricane,
Broke thro’ the mass from below,
Drove thro’ the midst of the foe,
Plunged up and down, to and fro,
Rode flashing blow upon blow,
Brave Inniskillens and Greys
Whirling their sabres in circles of light!
And some of us, all in amaze,
Who were held for a while from the fight,
And were only standing at gaze,
When the dark-muffled Russian crowd
Folded its wings from the left and the right,
And roll’d them around like a cloud,–
O, mad for the charge and the battle were we,
When our own good redcoats sank from sight,
Like drops of blood in a dark-gray sea,
And we turn’d to each other, whispering, all dismay’d,
‘Lost are the gallant three hundred of Scarlett’s Brigade!’

In the second phase of the battle, the 93rd Highlanders regiment under Sir Colin Campbell slowed the Russians’ advance by forming a “thin red line” below the Causeway Heights.

Theirs not to reason why. The final phase was the ill-fated, but much celebrated Charge of the Light Brigade. Here’s part of Tennyson’s memorable account:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Some one had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Much of 18th and 19th century history appears to be recorded in poetry. Much more than I suspected.

Frank Warner

Rudyard Kipling guarded against the weeds of ignorance

Take a look at Roger Kimball’s essay on Rudyard Kipling. It puts into perspective Kipling’s call on the West to accept “the white man’s burden” and guide the uncivilized masses out of oppression and ignorance.

Remember that it was Kipling’s poem of that name that called on the United States to steer the Philippines to freedom and enlightenment after the Spanish-American War. Recall, too, that in accepting that burden, America found itself with its first Iraq war. Subduing that anti-democratic insurgency produced the first elected parliament in all of Asia, and kept the Philippines out of the hands of the land-hungry Japanese.

The Philippines project also produced anti-American resentment over what seemed to some as meddling, rather than liberating. But Kipling predicted that sentiment. Before the U.S. embraced the Philippines, he wrote:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—.

It sure sounds like Iraq.

Dedication to civilization. Kipling was called an imperialist and racist for his dedication to progress, but as Kimball points out convincingly, Kipling was not talking about the “white man” as an empire or a race, but as civilized mankind of all colors. If Kipling felt hostility toward any ethnic group, it was the “huns.”

Says Kimball:

The key word is “civilization.” Kipling was above all the laureate not of Empire, but of civilization, especially civilization under siege. Henry James once sniffed that there was only one strain absent in Kipling: that of “the civilized man.” It’s a frequent refrain. But in a deeper sense, Kipling was about almost nothing else—not the civilization of elegant drawing rooms, but something more primeval and without which those drawing rooms would soon be smashed and occupied by weeds.

Guarded and bettered. Where people have governments without dictators, town halls without intimidators and libraries without censors, they have Kipling to thank. Where no one takes up the burden of freedom, the schools grow weeds.

Frank Warner

Martin Luther King would have backed Iraq invasion?

Martin Luther King probably would have supported the forced liberation of Iraq, King’s long-time friend Clarence Jones says in a soon-to-be-published book, “What Would Martin Say?”

“A complicated King emerges from Jones’s portrait—not the familiar pacifist but a likely supporter of the Iraq War who in Jones’s words might believe that military action is an unavoidable option that even those who are otherwise committed to non-violence must be prepared to consider now in order to save many more lives later.”

I’m not sure how Jones will prove his case, but it’s an interesting thesis. How will Jones be able to explain King’s opposition to the bloody and prolonged U.S. battle against the Communist take-over of South Vietnam?

War and color. Would King, who was assassinated in 1968, say his opposition to U.S. military action in Vietnam was based solely on drafting too many black Americans to fight then? Look at the U.S. casualties. The proportion of the U.S. Vietnam war dead who were black (13 percent) was only a little higher than the proportion of U.S. Iraq war dead who were black (10 percent).

(The black population is about 11 or 12 percent of the U.S. population.)

In 1963, King said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed,” and “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Though he did promote nonviolent resistance to repeal unjust laws, he never seemed strictly turn-the-other-cheek. But who knows whether he thought oppressed people ever are entitled to military assistance from the outside?

What did Jones hear that we didn’t? In his book, he had better show some convincing evidence.

Frank Warner

The Evil Empire Speech signaled a liberal revolution

A few years ago, curiosity took over. I was intrigued by the reports that some of President Reagan’s closest advisers tried to stop him in 1983 from calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire.”

I did a little research into the Evil Empire Speech, and wrote about it.

More recently, Paul Kengor found more about that speech and put it in his amazingly complete book, “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.”

‘Close it down.’ On the Evil Empire Speech, Kengor reports:

Bill Clark [Reagan’s national security adviser] called it “probably his greatest speech.” Fred Ikle, Reagan’s undersecretary of defense for policy, appreciated the underlying logic and strategy in such bombastic statements. Ikle admired Reagan for having the “courage” to articulate what was then an “incendiary idea” but is now a “hackneyed truth”; namely, “that we had a Cold War because of the evil empire, and could not end the Cold War without ending that empire.”

For every Ikle or Clark, however, there was a David Gergen or State Department official who got quite nervous about such Reagan remarks. To them such comments were more incendiary than helpful, destined to produce international anger instead of progress.

Two people who shared this view were Nancy Reagan and her friend Stuart Spencer, a Reagan campaign adviser: About a week after the speech, Spencer was having one of his private dinners for three with the Reagans. Nancy and Spencer both expressed reservations over the president’s speech a week earlier. Reagan waved them off: “It is an Evil Empire,” he responded. “It’s time to close it down.”

Freeze vs. freedom. Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, the Evil Empire Speech was delivered in Orlando, Florida. The immediate reaction from those pretending to know better was to call the speech a dangerous provocation.

The trouble with the protesters, however, was that long years of angry arguing had cut them off from reality. People calling themselves liberals no longer had a good word for freedom or a bad word for totalitarianism. Their overstretched logic was now so illogical that they were unable to challenge the imprisonment of hundreds of millions of minds. As Kengor notes, some Democrats even secretly aided the tyrants in the Kremlin.

Reagan’s foreign policy critics were locked unwittingly in a post-Vietnam War ultra-conservatism that could not entertain even the thought of political liberation of oppressed peoples. To claim oneself an intellectual, one now had to be solidly and stubbornly for the status quo, however bad it was. Even on the numbers of nuclear-tipped missiles, the buzz word was “freeze.”

‘Aggressive impulses.’ The nuclear freeze movement is exactly what Reagan was targeting when he shamed the Soviet Union as evil. He had proposed deploying NATO nuclear missiles in Western Europe to counter the nuclear missiles the Soviets had installed in Eastern Europe. He saw the growing opposition to his plan. The protesters wanted the number of nuclear weapons frozen, allowing the new Soviet missiles to stay, but with no NATO counter-move.

Reflecting on the nature of Soviet repression, Reagan in the Evil Empire Speech urged a moral and practical clarity:

“So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals I urge you to beware the temptation of pride -- the temptation to blithely declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

Ultimately, the NATO missiles were deployed in Western Europe, and Reagan used them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Better than a ‘freeze.’ On Dec. 8, 1987, Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Washington to sign a treaty eliminating all intermediate- and shorter-range nuclear missiles in Europe. It was the first treaty ever to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenals.

Instead of a nuclear arms freeze, Reagan won a nuclear arms reduction.

At the same time, the “evil empire” brand was burning the soul of the Soviet dictatorship. In 1991, Gorbachev allowed the first-ever free elections in Russia and declared the Soviet Union abolished. Eastern Europe was free, and the world significantly safer.

Frank Warner

See also: Full text of the Evil Empire Speech.

Benazir Bhutto’s son: The real Harry Potter?

Is it just me, or does Bilawal Zardari, the 19-year-old son of the late Benazir Bhutto, look much too much like Harry Potter? He goes to Oxford?

OK, it’s a pointless thought. But might he do battle with He Who Must Not Be Named?

Frank Warner

Today is St. Crispin’s Day, when England’s ‘band of brothers’ defeated France

Today is St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, the day in 1415 when King Henry V called his fellow warriors a “band of brothers” as they prepared to fight the Battle of Agincourt in northern France.

In Shakespeare’s “King Henry V,” the English king says:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Battle with France. This was late in the Hundred Years War (1337 to 1453), which started when English King Edward III got fed up with French interference in Scotland and declared he had the right to rule France. After capturing a large part of France, Edward III died in 1377 and was succeeded by Richard II, who was succeed in 1399 by Henry IV. King Henry V assumed the throne two years before the Battle of Agincourt.

Weakened by sickness, fatigue and hunger and outnumbered by French forces, Henry V’s army in 1415 nevertheless won a spectacular victory. In their surrender, the French officially named Henry V heir to the French throne. However, Joan of Arc soon emerged to inspire French resistance to the English presence in France.

Eventually, the English were left only with Henry V’s words, as imagined by Shakespeare in 1599, to remember the Battle of Agincourt and England’s last claim to French soil.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day.

Bond between soldiers. Perhaps the speech glorifies war and gives too little thought to what might establish a lasting peace. But man, could Shakespeare write. He expressed for all time the unique and permanent bond among men who have risked their lives together for a cause greater than themselves.

Frank Warner

No wonder David Petraeus thinks of Rudyard Kipling

It’s as good as “Petraeus … Betray Us.” The Philadelphia Inquirer today gives us another uninspired attempt at using rhyme against the liberation of Iraq.

Carlin Romano, The Inquirer’s book critic (is there even one non-Democrat, one real liberal at The Inquirer?), writes verse today to dispute Gen. David Petraeus’ reference to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.”

Writes Romano:

But here’s the rub -- Kipling the imperialist knew his own flaws,
And he thought “If” -- if you just look it up -- might not cover all wars.
Ricketts, like Boswell, thinks it’s still English’s most famous poem,
Though not an all-purpose reason to take war critics and stow ’em.…

Still, we liked the brilliant general, with Ph.D. from Princeton,
Showing that classic words bolster this patient, fight-right-on Winston.
Now all we need is a haiku, fixed on bars of a mountain bike,
That says, “Dear 43, These Iraqi brass need to take a hike.”

Kipling’s ‘If.’ Kipling wrote “If” in 1895. Even if you think you don’t know it, you’ve probably heard part of the poem:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;…

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And -- which is more -- you’ll be a Man, my son!

Right to be wrong. Petraeus told the National Press Club three days ago that Kipling’s words give him comfort in the face of the lies, distortion and defeatism of organizations like MoveOn.org. Petraeus also said:

“Needless to say, to state the obvious, I disagree with the message of those [at MoveOn] who are exercising their First Amendment rights that generations of soldiers have sought to preserve.”

Kipling also is well known for another poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” which he wrote in 1899 to encourage a long-term commitment by the United States to prepare the Philippines for democracy. The U.S. project to educate the Filipinos for freedom clashed with fierce insurgencies with many similarities to those in Iraq today.

Freedom rescued. America’s control of the Philippines, which lasted until 1946, produced Asia’s first freely elected parliament and probably saved the Philippines from being swallowed up by the powerful and land-hungry Japan decades before World War II.

In “The White Man’s Burden,” the title of which I’d edit to “The Free Man’s Burden,” Kipling said liberating the Philippines was right, but he warned that Americans could not expect anyone to grateful for their freedom.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Echoes from Manila. Guiding the Philippines to democracy was in many ways a thankless task. America’s own Mark Twain called the policy “imperialism” and the fight “a quagmire,” words that sound eerily like today’s writers at MoveOn.org and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

But in the Philippines, the messy U.S.-led transition to democracy almost certainly was better than the two likely alternatives: a nation mired permanently in slavery and ignorance, or a nation conquered by Japan for permanent service to totalitarian and imperial goals.

General Petraeus knows what happened in the Philippines. When he hears the words “imperialism” and “quagmire” applied to Iraq, when he sees others losing their heads and blaming him, it’s only natural that he think of Kipling.

Frank Warner

Any advantage to James Bond’s martinis, ‘shaken not stirred’?

Science proves shaken martinis are healthier, even if stirred martinis taste better. It appears James Bond went for the more protective mix.

The trivia question: In Ian Fleming’s book series, what was 007’s favorite drink?

Answer: Whiskey. He had 101 shots of the stuff. He had only 19 of his famous vodka martinis.

Frank Warner