Man and Ultraman

Sometimes I hate Christopher Hitchens and his ever-brilliant, never less than electrically witty, drillbit-sharp take on culture and politics, and sometimes I love him. This article, from Slate magazine, is exactly why sometimes I love him. Thanks, Mr. Hitchens, for saying what has needed to be said for a long, long time.

Sarah Palin’s War on Science

The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher Hitchens

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man’s philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of “teaching the argument,” as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be “one of the refuge states in the Last Days.” For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the “End Times,” that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being “anointed” by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is “spiritual warfare,” in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at “spiritual warfare” events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of “prayer warriors” in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that “God’s perfect will be done on Nov. 4.”

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

I know, I know: I seem to have fallen off the map lately; my star has plunged from whatever very modest heights of the blogosphere it had previously achieved. For a week now, visitors to this space have been greeted with only a photo of a winking, leering Bible-thumping, bile-spewing, oil-drunk right-wing demagogue (for which I deeply apologize). But it’s been an especially busy week.

As some of you may know, I’ve recently returned to the ranks of the full-time gainfully employed. As of October 6, I am a Professor of Communications at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam. Better known here and in Australia as RMIT (not to be confused with plain old MIT), it’s sort of a training ground for the new breed of Vietnamese: an English-only campus of a Melbourne-based university offering degrees in business and accounting, multimedia and graphic design, IT, commerce, and – with the new term beginning Monday – in Professional Communication.

Enter yours truly, who has been tasked with teaching a course called “Visual Language” to fresh-faced hopeful future communicators. It’s a basic course in visual literacy, offering an overview of the way people use images and non-verbal visual narrative to convey meaning in art, film, graphic design, consumer messages, and marketing. Basically, it’s an entire class dedicated to the premise that a picture is worth a thousand words.

How the very smart head of the department got the idea I was qualified to teach this class is somewhat mystifying. Desperation comes to mind. I may also have had some part in it during our interviews. But teaching it I am, and I’ve been submerged up to my eyebrows for the past two weeks in terribly academic-sounding subjects like sight and visual processing, symbolism and semiotics, narrative and expression, spacial organization, aesthetics, propaganda theory, and phenomenology.

It’s also been a crash course in learning how to read and write in British English, in which organisation and utilise are spelled with an S, not a Z (that’s a “zed,” by the way), and colour, flavour, and centre are all words whose relation to modern life appears tenuous, as they all seem to have been lifted directly from The Canterbury Tales or Love’s Labors Lost.

Until last week, my days in Saigon were mainly occupied with drooling onto my new laptop (which has now been stolen, but more on that miserable tragedy later), drinking coffee, and tutoring English three hours each evening at a small private school.

A week and a half ago, however, I was chucked headfirst into the boot-camp-style orientation for new instructors here known as “induction,” a word that can only derive from the way it “induces” ulcers and paroxisms of anxiety about being unprepared to teach your course because of all the time you spend in it. From 9am until 4pm each day, I’m subjected to a barrage of workshops and seminars on HR policy and procedures, IT training, library database searching, work permits, health insurance (Oh, Joy), counseling services, lesson planning, building Powerpoint presentations, measuring student learning, and time management.

It’s a long way from journalism. Though I have found one common area of overlap: the preoccupation with plagiarism in the academic world is at least as obsessive as it is in the world of publishing. (Did you know they have software that can spot plagiarized material? I’m assuming for the moment that those students whose beer money comes from a busy schedule of report writing on commission, as mine did in college, remain safe.)

It’s also a different life from the one I’ve been leading for the past 15 months. I’m now working roughly 12 hours a day. I have an office, a salary, a boss, a passel of health benefits, a legion of wildly international colleagues, and a purpose.

Colour me satisfied.

Here’s one for all those Republican, evangelical Biblical literalists out there. Apparently, Sarah Palin’s wink is an affront not just to me and you, but to God, too:

From Proverbs 6:12-15

A naughty person, a wicked man [or woman], walketh with a froward mouth. He winketh with his eyes … he deviseth mischief continually; he soweth discord. Therefore shall his calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be broken without remedy.”

And from Proverbs 10:10

He [or she] that winketh with the eye causeth sorrow: but a prating fool shall fall.”

(Thanks to Dwindling In Unbelief)

This tidbit of local news is ever so interesting for several reasons. First and foremost, herein we learn that the Vietnamese prime minister’s name is Dung. That’s his first name. We can bitch and whine about either or both of the candidates running for president in the U.S., but at least we’re not going to have to deal with a chief executive who’s named for fecal matter.

Secondly, an urban rail system in Saigon is good news and all, but given the rate at which most construction happens in Vietnam, I think 12 years is optimistic. I’ve watched (and listened to) the new home construction taking place on both sides of my house for about a month now, and I’m not terribly impressed. The work ethic is there, to be sure, but the technical end is still a little out of date. The scaffolding, for example, is made of wood. I’m not talking about two-by-fours, either, but pieces of wood recently ripped from trees – limbs, branches and such. I do not kid. Also, if you think government contractors are slow in America, you should see them move in a Communist nation. It’s like watching crippled snails procrastinate.

Finally, whether this will actually solve the traffic woes in HCMC is debatable. There are 80 million people in Vietnam and 40 million motorcycles – in a nation the size of California. Assuming the rate of population growth is greater than the annual rate of death by motorbike (a family of four was killed on a motorbike near where I live last week, and twice in the last three days I watched crowds of spectators form as two-wheelers burned in the middle of the roadway), those numbers will be a lot higher in 12 years. Maybe our beloved leader knows something I don’t, but I plan to keep my expectations firmly in check. If Dung has any sense, he will, too. Otherwise he could find himself in deep doodoo.

Vietnam plans $15 billion for city railway systems

The Vietnamese government said today it plans to spend billions building two urban railway networks to help ease the ever-worsening traffic congestion in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung approved a US$14.8 billion plan to build commuter railway networks inside traffic-choked Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City over the next 12 years.

Hanoi will receive $7.3 billion to build seven railway lines, including sky trains and subways, according to a statement released on the government’s website on Sunday. Of the total cost, $5.5 billion will come from foreign investment.

Ho Chi Minh City will receive $7.5 billion, of which $6.3 billion will be foreign invested, to build six urban railways and metro lines.

Prime Minister Dung has asked officials to speed up preparations for the elevated and underground railway systems and focus on attracting overseas aid and loans for the projects, according to the statement.

“The project will help to ease congestion which happens everyday in the cities and has become chronic,” Nguyen Van Cong, chief administrator at the Ministry of Transportation said in a phone interview with Bloomberg Monday. “It will also help limit traffic accidents and improve cities’ environments.”

Fortunately, getting milk direct from the source (the udder) is still an option in my neighborhood.

More tainted milk turns up in Vietnam

Vietnam’s health ministry has discovered the industrial chemical melamine in 18 food products imported from China and three other countries and has ordered them recalled and destroyed, officials said Friday.

Russian news agencies reported that food inspectors found nearly 2 tons of Chinese dry milk believed to be contaminated with melamine. And Philippines health officials found melamine in two of 30 milk products from China, while Australian food regulators recalled China-made Kirin Milk Tea after tests in found the drink contained melamine. It is the fourth product withdrawn from the country’s stores in the wake of China’s tainted-milk scandal.

Chinese authorities believe suppliers trying to boost output diluted their milk, adding melamine because its nitrogen content can fool tests aimed at verifying protein content.

This one’s for the folks back home. The other day, I did a double-take as I was walking down the aisles of a local supermarket. Anyone notice anything familiar about the friendly brand logo on these cans? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Piggly Wiggly has probably not begun producing Vietnamese-style beans ‘n’ franks (suòn hâm dâu) in which the “franks” are gristly chunks of ham and bone. (Of course I tried it.) What we have here is a pirated pig.