Those who do not understand history are doomed to misquote it

In Oliver Stone's W, the 43rd President responds to his wife's comments on John Adams and John Quincy Adams by interjecting, "But wasn't that about 300 years ago?" (For an interesting round table on whether Stone's film got Bush right, see this article in Slate. I for one have never wondered whether it was important to Stone to get things right to begin with, but in any case, the discussion is enlightening.) Now, presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminds us that LBJ, who started life as a schoolteacher, can be heard on tape telling an associate that Lincoln returned to Springfield, Missouri—after he was President(!) I think my daughter's grasp of history was on firmer ground when, after I took her and her little brother to see the 1871 Woodruff-Fontaine house when they were small, summed up the experience by saying "Daddy, the people who lived in that house lived in the old-fashioned times, but today we use the right potties and we know everything."

As to the 16th President, someone else who apparently falls short in his grasp of the essential Lincoln is the director of the Lincoln Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, who was caught shoplifting DVD collections of House and Seinfeld from a local Target. A year earlier, he had been convicted of shoplifting ties from Macy's. Since the man made $200,000 a year, he would not have qualified for the President-elect's proposed tax cuts, so one can only hope that he learns the value of a little belt-tightening. I, too, would be tempted to shoplift if Target or anyone would stock a DVD copy of John Huston's 1970 Cold War thriller, The Kremlin Letter, with Richard Boone, Orson Welles, Patrick O'Neal, George Sanders, and Max Von Sydow. It was derided by critics, but I have certainly appreciated it on the 3 occasions since 1971 when I have been able to catch it on TV at 2 in the morning.

AdSense is still having trouble figuring out what ads to place here; it is displaying the same offer to post for $10,000 a week, or something to that effect, and I have no idea how that relates to anything I've said so far. Perhaps if I had quoted the Epistle of Jude—"Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints"—it might be understandable. Apparently picking up on my references to church, AdSense posted this message of comfort last night—"Are Gays Going to Hell?"—and about an hour ago, an ad for Dianetics® invited the reader to ponder the origins of irrational behavior, strangely fitting after two guards at the Church of Scientology were forced to shoot a man to death in self-defense after he appeared on the property brandishing two samurai swords. Otherwise, AdSense is reduced to advertising itself, inviting bloggers to "monetize" their ads by using this service. I wish I could say that making a noun a verb by attaching -ize to it was peculiar to our day, but I learn from William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur that the general's father, himself a famous soldier of the 19th century, was fond of using "mediatize," a word he had invented.

Speaking of Presidents and their place in history, the BBC reports that former President Carter—the same man who assured the world in 1994 that the nuclear threat from North Korea was at an end—is shocked that things are as bad as they are in Zimbabwe. The former President is distinguished for his personal decency; he taught the men's Bible class at the Washington, D.C. Baptist church he attended as President and has volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, but his career as a statesman inclines one to believe the claims of some cosmologists that there are parallel universes and forces one to wonder if the gentleman from Plains inhabits one of them.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

What is Tagalog for "toggle"?

Typing the title of this post, I saw the words turned into apparently meaningless character combinations: &#2352,&#2381, etc. That had me scratching my head, until I remembered that I had turned on a setting that enables transliteration into Hindi. I'm all for promoting international understanding and am aware that Hindi is the world's fourth-most spoken language, but I still felt that I ought to click the new transliteration toggle on my toolbar (itself a Hindi character looking something like 3-T) and turn the thing off for now. English has been the language of trade and technology, but now, we have the launch of India's Chandrayaan-1 unmanned lunar orbiter, as well as China's Chang'e-1 space craft, which doesn't mean "change," but considering China's growing economic clout, might as well. I think Chandrayaan is Sanskrit for "We're catching up with you, USA."

Chinese scientists, rather like the beings from the future obligingly reconstructing Frances O'Connor from a single strand of hair in Spielberg's film AI, worked from a single moon rock given as a goodwill gesture by the United States; according to Time: "China's true fascination has long been the moon--at least since 1978, when the U.S. presented Beijing with a 1-g (.035 oz.) sample of lunar rock brought back by the Apollo 17 mission. Chinese officials razored off half of that moon crumb and gave it to scientists to study. 'From that half a gram, we produced 40 papers,' space scientist Ouyang Ziyuan told the People's Daily."

Meanwhile, NASA left all its data analyses of moon dust on tape drives that could only be played on equipment last manufactured in the 1960s, and on my single visit to the Kennedy Space Center, in 1979, the tour guide could not say the word "spacecraft," which he continually pronounced spacecran. All I can say is that if I had to travel to the moon, which takes about 4 days, I would want to listen to this on the way, certainly one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

The AdSense ads finally appeared, though nowadays, any interval in which ads do not appear is more remarkable; I suppose I can understand the frequent ads for suicide prevention, since I mentioned the Jonestown suicide, though the frequent ads for removing belly fat, while certainly reflecting a private goal, don't seem related to anything I've discussed here. As I checked the single piece of spam in my G-mail inbox this morning, Google helpfully offered an ad for "Tasty Spam Crescents." It wouldn't hurt for the ad writers to avail themselves of a spell check utility; so far, I've seen "jewerly," "recieve," and "entrepeneur."

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Render unto Batman

In 1935, the mayor of Rome, Texas, cabled the League of Nations to offer assurances that his town, at least, was not complicit in Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Now the mayor of Batman, Turkey, seeks damages from the producers of The Dark Knight.

That the undercurrents of history can sometimes be glimpsed in small moments is evident from Nancy Gibbs's comments in Time on Presidential transitions:

Outgoing President James Buchanan advised Abe Lincoln that water from the right-hand well was better than from the left, and he shared the secrets of the pantry. During John F. Kennedy's visit the day before his Inauguration, Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated the panic button, instantly summoning an evacuation helicopter to the White House lawn. Fatefully, Lyndon Johnson gave Richard Nixon a tour of the hidden tape recorders.

Another hidden agent is AdSense, a program that invites bloggers to add its HTML code to their templates, activating a script that is supposed to place ads here that are keyed to what the blogger writes about. I've pasted in their code and can't see any difference. I wondered what kind of ads these comments might evoke; whether, upon coming on a reference to Caesar, AdSense might place an ad for Little Caesar's Pizza. The ads were supposed to appear within a few minutes, and it's been several hours now; perhaps they're meant to be like faith, "the evidence of things not seen."

Speaking of belief in spite of the facts, I was startled to hear an otherwise very intelligent friend of mine assert, a couple of years ago, that autism can be caused by childhood vaccinations. Autism is not caused by the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, any more than cancer is caused by power lines or AIDS by spirits of the dead. Frightened parents of children with autistic spectrum disorder are being misled by poorly done science, and other parents may risk exposing their children to diseases that had nearly been eradicated in the United States.

The incidence of autism is increasing--it is diagnosed in as many as 166 children per 10,000, up from 4 in 10,000 just 45 years ago. No precise cause has been identified, though it probably results from some combination of genetic and environmental factors. What it does not come from is the MMR vaccine. As noted by the Centers for Disease Control:

Groups of experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that MMR vaccine is not responsible for recent increases in the number of children with autism. In 2004, a report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that there is no association between autism and MMR vaccine, or vaccines that contain thimerosal as a preservative.

The absence of measles and other contagious diseases from our daily lives has made many forget the severity of the threat. What could happen if a sufficiently large number of parents decided to skip MMR vaccination? The CDC notes:

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases in the world and is frequently imported into the U.S. In the period 1997-2000, most cases were associated with international visitors or U.S. residents who were exposed to the measles virus while traveling abroad. More than 90 percent of people who are not immune will get measles if they are exposed to the virus.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 900,000 measles-related deaths occurred among persons in developing countries in 1999. In populations that are not immune to measles, measles spreads rapidly. If vaccinations were stopped, each year about 2.7 million measles deaths worldwide could be expected.

In the U.S., widespread use of measles vaccine has led to a greater than 99 percent reduction in measles compared with the pre-vaccine era. If we stopped immunization, measles would increase to pre-vaccine levels.

Listen to this interview on autism, genetics, and vaccination with Dr. Larry Reiter of the Department of Neurology at the University of Tennessee Center for the Health Sciences, Memphis, conducted by Nicole Erwin of WKNO FM.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.