REMEMBERING KENNETH ANDERSON (1928-2015)

REMEMBERING KENNETH ANDERSON (1928-2015)

I learned with sorrow that my friend, Kenneth Anderson, died on June 9, 2015.  He was born December 3, 1928 and lived somewhat more than 87 years. I first met Ken Anderson at Stony Brook University when I was teaching my second year there.  He asked if he could audit my course.  I learned from him that he was one of the first African Americans to work as a nurse anesthesiologist in Suffolk County and to serve on the University’s outreach programs to recruit black faculty and staff. Ken had served in the US Army in Germany after the end of WWII and sang for the troops and on good will missions because of his beautiful baritone voice.  I also learned from him that it was a struggle for him and other minorities to find housing in Suffolk County.  To facilitate change, Ken joined civic organizations like the Boy Scouts and met many of the leading officials in the County.  He was friendly and persistent, two qualities that made him successful in bringing about change.  He also was a frequent target to vandalism or threats of violence during those turbulent years of the late 1960s to the 1980s.  A cross was burned on his lawn in Port Jefferson.  Over the years I attended many concerts given by Ken to the Unitarian-Universalist churches in Nassau and Suffolk County where he was frequently invited.  He had begun a serious study of Negro spirituals and worked out Paul Robeson’s schedule of performances and the playbills with the songs he sang in his distinguished careers.  He would sometimes take on the persona of Robeson to give an account of his life and he used to borrow my Phi Beta Kappa key because Robeson proudly wore it.  When I was on the Stony Brook Phi Beta Kappa chapter’s board, I proposed Ken for the Phi Beta Kappa award because of his scholarship on Robeson’s musical career and his efforts to enlighten the public about Robeson’s many talents as an all-star collegiate athlete, a musician, an actor, and an activist for human rights.  I was pleased when he was unanimously elected to the Stony Brook chapter.

  Many times Ken would invite me to meet civic leaders he knew so I could discuss issues of higher education with them.  When Ken retired and moved upstate, he would stay at our home on Mud Road in Setauket while visiting friends or giving performances.  It was to the delight of my mother-in-law who was living with us, that Ken would always sing her a song at supper.  Once Ken took me to the veteran’s cemetery in Suffolk County where his wife was buried and it was very moving as I saw him sending his thoughts and prayers for her. When Nedra and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana in 2009, I corresponded with Ken as he moved around upstate New York and later in Delaware.  He was always eager to learn about black history and I shared items I found for him when he asked me about contemporaries of Robeson or leaders of the abolitionist and civil rights movements of the nineteenth century.  We also spoke on the phone about once a month to get updates on our lives.  Ken became friends with Pete Seeger and the two of them sometimes sang together.  For the last 20 years of Ken’s life he was in pain from arthritic degeneration of his bones and from congestive heart failure. Ken inspired me.  He tried to bring out the best in people he met. It was that love for humanity that poured out in his songs and it was a privilege to know him.    

THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE PRODUCES WINNERS AND LOSERS

THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE PRODUCES WINNERS AND LOSERS

I met my friend Foley at the Starbucks near Bloomington High School South.  It was a warm day so I ordered a vanilla bean frappachino.  Foley stayed with a mocha latte.

“Did you watch the debate last night?”  I asked.

“All of it.  Both the failed four and the main event,” replied Foley

“Were there any clear winners, Foley?”

“Trump by far.”

“Why so”, I asked.  “He seemed poorly informed on issues.”

“The others ganged up on him so he got to reply more than any of the others. Jindal sounded like a jilted lover.  Fiorina was like a harpie.  Bush was too busy defending his brother.  Walker was too busy busting unions and bragging about it.  Only Trump talked about making America great again.”

“I thought he was thin on specifics for foreign policy.”

“That’s because policy wonks are useless for foreign affairs, Elof”

“So who should make those policies?”

“Deal makers.  Trump has a play book, Art of the Deal. That and the Bible are the only books you need to make America Great Again.”

“Why the Bible?”

  “Simple”, Elof, “to let heathens know that the Book is on our side.”  

“I thought Fiorina was more informed than Trump, didn’t you, Foley?

“I was too busy trying to listen to her between her whistles to know what she was saying”.

“What about Huckabee?”

“Saying the Bible is important, like Trump does, is like saluting the flag, it’s an OK thing.  But quoting from the Bible makes you a minister.  You don’t do that as President, you do that as a pastor in church. “

“What about Cruz?”

“He’s like that Hungarian in My Fair Lady.  He oils himself across the floor.”

PATRIOTISM IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

PATRIOTISM IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

I was walking in the Mall and greeted my friend Foley and we decided to have lunch at Applebee’s. They had about a half dozen TV sets on.  Foley and I watched a military honor guard lead a singer to sing the National Anthem.

“Why do sports events start with the national anthem?” I asked

“It’s patriotic,” said Foley.

“Should that apply to all large gatherings?”

“You better believe it” Foley asserted.

“How about a movie theater before each film is shown?”

“That doesn’t count.”

“How about a beach on a hot day?”

“Nope, wrong occasion.”

“A funeral?”

“No, again”.

“So being patriotic is something to celebrate?”

“You got it.”

“Can you criticize the government and still be patriotic?”

“Not in my book,” said Foley.  

“So if Republicans criticize President Obama, they’re unpatriotic?”

“No, because they’re telling the truth.  It’s Obama who is unpatriotic”.

“Why is that?”

“He doesn’t stand up to our enemies.  He is destroying free enterprise.  He is inviting 10  million illegals to a path to citizenship.”

“ Would it be patriotic if I criticized Republicans for buying elections, depriving citizens of their right to vote, allowing the rich to escape paying taxes, and rushing into wars based on deceptive claims? “

“No, Elof, that’s just sour grapes liberals spew”. 

“So where does that leave the patriotic motto ‘My country right or wrong’?”

“That applies to me, not you.  Get your priorities straight, Elof.”

THE SCARY PARALLELS BETWEEN DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN AND DICTATORIAL PERSONALITIES

When I taught at UCLA I got to know a psychiatrist, Maurice N. Walsh, MD (1905-1991) who was in the Neuropsychiatric   Institute.  He developed an interest in psychiatry and war when he was a medical resident at the Mayo Clinic and was asked to see a patient.  It was Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator who had syphilis but who also was psychotic.  Soon WWII broke out and Walsh found himself in the Pacific helping pilots to carry out missions to bomb Japan with a high probability of crashing at sea before they could return to their base.  At the war’s end he was asked to examine Rudolph Hess for the Nuremberg trials.  He found Hess to be psychotic and his report was stamped secret and not allowed to be used in the trials.  Walsh wondered why it was that highly narcissistic persons who might be classified as megalomaniacs had such an appeal to the public and why they rose to power as dictators.  He became an advocate for the scientific (rather than political or economic) study of war.  He edited a book (1971) War and the Human Race gathering dozens of articles on medical, psychiatric, anthropological, biological, and other approaches to the study of war.   

              Every time I listen to one of Donald Trump’s interviews or speeches, I think of Maurice Walsh.  He said of Trujillo or Hess, why is it that if we heard this person on a soapbox we walk away and consider this person a nutcase but if he ran for office we would treat him as a serious candidate?  But Walsh also asked another question: Why are so many people charmed or attracted by these narcissistic personalities?  He argued that they appeal to people who are tired of nuance, complexity, inconsistency, compromise, and failure in the political world in which they live.  The narcissistic leader is decisive, admits no wrong, is good at fault-finding in others, and is willing to take the risks to set things right that is part of our own wish fulfillment. 

              I wish some of our political commentators on TV news shows would call attention to the striking similarity of Trump’s rhetoric and those of past bullying dictators like Hitler and Mussolini and Trujillo.  Those with a dictatorial personality like to preach macho values of war or the threat of war instead of diplomacy.  They disregard legalities in favor of executive authority as their first choice for governing. They have overblown confidence in their intelligence or knowledge of how the world works.  The dictatorial personality likes to give orders, likes to be surrounded by “yes men,” looks at criticism as a form of treason or lack of patriotism, and likes to have others fight their wars which are rarely responses to massive attacks or declarations of war.  

              I regret the disappearance of psychological and psychiatric research on war, aggression, and the narcissistic personality.  In mid 20^th century there were books like Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Carlo Levi’s Fear of Freedom.  In the last half of the 20^th century, I believe, the wrong approach was used, stressing evolutionary models of innate aggression or human nature making war seem inevitable because it is fixed in our genes.  I doubt that.  War is a disease of society. Diseases can be prevented but we need to do research that is not stuck in the traditional economic, political, and human nature arguments for its causes.  Those have not worked in the past and a fresh look is much needed.     

TRUMP APPEALS TO A FAN WHO LIKES A STRAIGHT SHOOTER (TAKE COVER)

I hadn’t seen my alter ego, Foley, in several weeks and was glad to see him at the Post Office. ”Who do you like among the Republican candidates?” I asked.   

“Trump, by far.”

“What’s attractive about him?

“He tells it like it is.  I like his building a wall across the southern border of the US and Mexico.”

‘Would it be like the Berlin Wall or like the Great Wall of China?”

“It would be better than both.  It would be impregnable.”

“You mean like the Maginot line?”

“No, no. It will be about 30 feet tall and five feet thick with detectors for anyone trying to dig a tunnel under it. And every fifty feet there will be huge letters on it saying TRUMP.”  That will scare them off."

“Wouldn’t that money be put to better use for our infrastructure repairs and expansion?” 

“No way. Trump is a businessman and he knows how to make deals. Besides he’ll make America admired again.”

“Isn’t that what the Republican Presidents, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover said when they ran a campaign of ‘Back to Normalcy’ and ‘The business of America is business?’ And didn’t their policies of unregulated laissez faire lead to the excesses that caused the Wall Street crash of 1929?”

 “Not at all,” said Foley.  “These are just natural adjustments to the market, like weather cycles. It’s like Adam Smith’s invisible hand.  Usually it guides us to everyone’s benefit but sometimes it gives us the fickle finger. Humans can’t prevent these cycles from occurring but we know to respond to them.”

“And how do we do that?” I asked.

“Let the market remain unregulated and when a bust occurs have the government bail out the biggest banks and corporations.”

“Why bail out them and not the smaller investors and corporations?”

“Because billionaires are too big to allow to fail.  Ask any billionaire.”

READING HISTORICAL FICTION – NOAH GORDON’S THE PHYSICIAN

  

         I read The Physician by Noah Gordon.  It is a huge book, 750 pages in paperback, but well worth reading.  It follows the life of Rob Cole, an eleventh century orphan in London who becomes a barber surgeon and travels with his mentor throughout England selling potions and entertaining crowds by juggling. He has the gift and calling of a healer and hopes to learn real medicine.  At that time King Canute ruled England and life for most of the British Isles was harsh with high mortalities for all age groups.  Cole learns from a Jewish patient that the only decent medical school is in Persia. They don’t take Christians but they do take Jews, so he pretends to be a Jew and begins the long trek to Persia where he manages to get accepted so he can study with Avicenna.  Gordon studied medieval history, history of medicine, and the cultural and political histories of Persia and Great Britain to provide the background and feeling of authenticity for his novel.  It is a wonderful novel because it has so many subplots and events, like reading a Russian novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

   

        Most of my knowledge of medieval history came from courses as an undergraduate with Wallace K. Ferguson at NYU who focused on the renaissance or, as he preferred to call it, the transition from medieval to modern society.  I’ve read several books on medical history so I could check the novel against what I knew.  I know some scholars who never read historical fiction because they feel they would be deluded into believing that the history of that time is accurate when it is more likely that an author will project the present dressed up in the past and that past would be a mixture of guesswork and reality.  There is that risk, of course. But I would not shun reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace just because the author did not fight in the Napoleonic Wars. The satisfaction I get from historical fiction outweighs the errors that might creep into my understanding of past societies. A good novelist spends time in the library or doing web searches for authentic detail and broad overviews of the places and times that are described in the novel. The reader benefits by getting a general overview of a piece of history of biographical knowledge, or cultural awareness that would otherwise be absent. In some cases a good historical novel stimulates interest in reading more about that period.  I know I shall check out the life of Avicenna, the great Persian physician and scholar whose works gradually found their way into later medieval learning and the first medical schools in Europe. 

THREE NATION STUDY SHOWS LEUKEMIAS ARE INDUCED BY EXTREMELY LOW DOSES OF RADIATION EXPOSURE

                An important study was reported in the July 2, 2015 issue of Nature, a publication read by scientists.  It was written by Alison Abbott.  She discussed a report carried out in the US, France, and the UK involving 300,000 nuclear industry employees over a 60 year period whose radiometer badges were used to study the radiation received and this was then matched against their health records.  It showed that as claimed by H. J. Muller for low doses of ionizing radiation (mostly x-rays) to produce mutations and by Ed Lewis for Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors of atomic bombs, the linearity of dose to mutation or dose to incidence of leukemia is maintained with no threshold at lower doses.  Those in the nuclear industry, governments engaged in making nuclear weapons, and some health professionals using radiation for diagnosis and treatment of a variety of diseases have sometimes claimed that below a certain low dose there are no mutations induced or no cancers induced by exposure to low doses regardless of many times a person is exposed.  For most of the nuclear industry workers they have an annual exposure of about 1.1 mSV (or in the older terminology O.11 roentgen) above the natural background rate asll humans experience which is 2 to 3 mSv (or 0.2 to 0.3 roentgens).  In this study, the total accumulated dose of each worker was calculated and the medical history for cancers was studied.  The report also supports what Muller and his colleagues found in the 1930s and 1940s – that whether the total dose was received acutely or spread out daily or interrupted by intervals of working with radiation and years of not being exposed, it was the total dose that counted.  The risks, of course are low, compared to high dose exposures of 1000 mSv (100 roentgens) that accidents and nuclear bombs inflicted on relatively few humans over the past 75 years. 

              The study appeared in Lancet Haematology http://doi.org/5s4;2015    The lead author is K. Leuraud.  I have never appreciated the logic of deniers of low dose effects of radiation. The linearity holds for experiments with fruit flies (and many other organisms from bacteria to mice) from doses of 50 to 12,000 roentgens (500 mSv to 120 Sv).  Deniers may fear a public rejection of using radiation for diagnosis and cancer treatment.  During the Cold War, it was the military that tried to convince the public that small doses of radiation (such as worldwide fall out) were harmless or that contaminated soils from nuclear testing grounds were safe to live in if the doses were low.  Physicians quickly recognized the need for safety of both patients and practitioners and they found more effective ways to take x-ray pictures at even lower doses than in the 20^th century. I have welcomed x-rays at such low doses for my own family and myself.  It is a question of weighing risks.  I’d rather have x-rays to rule out an ulcer or cancer in my intestinal tract than keep my fingers crossed that maybe I’ll be lucky and there is no serious problem that gives me symptoms.  At the same time, I celebrate those in the health professions who seek to use the least amount of radiation needed for diagnosis. When tens of millions of people are exposed at low dose there will be a few losers with induced mutations or leukemias.  But if no one had diagnostic x-rays there would be hundreds of thousands of people who would die prematurely because their diseases would not be diagnosed until they are terminally ill.