Research on Einstein's brain has suggested to some neuroscientists that he was late in talking because of the unusual development of his brain, as revealed by an autopsy. Those portions of his brain where analytical thinking was concentrated had spread out far beyond their usual area and spilled over into adjoining areas, including the region from which speech is usually controlled. This has led some neuroscientists to suggest that his genius and his late talking could have been related.
At this point, no one knows whether this is the reason why Einstein took so long to develop the ability to speak, much less whether this is true of the other people of outstanding intellect who were also late in beginning to speak. What is known, however, is that there are a number of disabilities that are more common among people of high intellect than in the general population.
Members of the high-IQ Mensa society, for example, have a far higher than normal incidence of allergies. A sample of youngsters enrolled in the Johns Hopkins program for mathematically precocious youths—kids who can score 700 on the math SAT when they are just 12 years old—showed that more than four-fifths of them were allergic and/or myopic and/or left-handed.
This is all consistent with one region of the brain having above normal development and taking resources that leave some other region or regions with less than the usual resources for performing other functions. It is also consistent with the fact that some bright children who talk late remain impervious to all attempts of parents or professionals to get them to talk at the normal time. Yet these same kids later begin to speak on their own, sometimes after parents have finally just given up hope and stopped trying.
Noted language authority and neuroscientist Steven Pinker of MIT says, “language seems to develop about as quickly as the growing brain can handle it.” While this was a statement about the general development of language, it may be especially relevant to bright children who talk late. As the whole brain grows in early childhood, increasing the total resources available, the regions whose resources have been preempted elsewhere can now catch up and develop normally.
My research and that of Professor Camarata have turned up a number of patterns in children with the Einstein Syndrome that were similar to what biographies of Einstein himself reveal. Most children who talk late are not like those in our studies. But a remarkable number are.
Unfortunately, many of these children get misdiagnosed as retarded, autistic or as having an attention deficit disorder.
LOOSE LIPS
Some of the intelligentsia are yelling louder than ever that they are being silenced. Professors, journalists and others who have made grossly offensive remarks in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attack are shocked that other Americans are criticizing them for it. To them, apparently, free speech means being free of criticism by others who want to exercise their own free speech rights.
As the Chronicle of Higher Education—the trade publication of academia—put it, “professors across the country have found their freedom to speak hemmed in by incensed students, alumni, and university officials.” Apparently none of these people has a right to be incensed or to express their reactions to the profs.
The self-righteousness of those who want to be exempt from criticism is incredible. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, events “have left emotions so raw that people are struggling to think critically about what happened—and some administrators would prefer that professors not even try.”
Thinking critically? When a professor at the University of New Mexico makes a joke approving the attack on the Pentagon, is that thinking critically—or thinking at all? At one of the California State University campuses, a professor who said that American actions had helped bring on the terrorist attacks was “shocked by the anger his remarks prompted.”
Even the Chronicle of Higher Education, while characterizing these responses as “part of the American impulse toward antiintellectualism,” has to admit that “no one has been fired or locked up for joking about bombs or criticizing President Bush.” All that has happened is that others have asserted their own rights of free speech. But even that is said to have a “chilling effect.” As one professor at the University of Texas put it, the message from the academic administration was “if you stick your neck out, we will disown you.”
Apparently other people don't even have a right to disassociate themselves from your remarks. Apparently anything short of uncritical acceptance of whatever asinine statements the profs make seems to them like a violation of the First Amendment.
This seeking of privileges in the name of rights extends far beyond the campuses. Journalists have been wrapping themselves in the First Amendment for years—even as they assume the role of citizens of the world, who soar above the parochial concerns of the United States of America. One of the cable networks doesn't want its employees to use the word “terrorists” to describe those who launched an attack that killed thousands of American civilians.
Various media outlets apparently feel a need to give equal time, if not moral equivalence, to Osama bin Laden and others in the terrorist organizations.
Would anyone have thought of giving Hitler free time to broadcast his propaganda on networks during World War II?
The most unconscionable media act of all may well have been the banner headline on the front of the New York Times of October 10, 2001: “U.S. Said to Plan Copter Raids in Afghanistan.” The Times' motto is “All the News That's Fit to Print.” But, while reporting what has happened is news, reporting what is about to happen with American troops in a military operation is more like espionage.
Nor is this the first time that the media have been reckless with the lives of fellow Americans in combat. During the Gulf War a decade ago, one of the reporters on the scene broadcast to the world that the Iraqi missiles being fired at American troops were missing and landing “five miles north of here.” That is the kind of information that an enemy needs to adjust his range. It is the kind of information which spies and spotters are supposed to provide. But here it was being supplied free of charge.
Perhaps that is what to expect from journalists who claim all the privileges of Americans, while acting as citizens of the world, neutral as between “both sides.” Since they are so totally incapable of self-criticism, the rest of us should at least understand the implications of their self-indulgence.
There are American troops who can die needlessly in combat, and American children who can grow up as orphans, because somebody forgot the old wartime maxim, “Loose lips sink ships.” There is great consternation in the press and in Congress that President Bush has ordered stricter limits on who gets military briefings. But it is reassuring that irresponsible people will now have adult supervision.
“THE DUTY TO DIE”
Our betters have been telling us how to live our lives for so long that it is only the next logical step for them to tell us when to die. We have grown so used to meekly accepting their edicts, even on what words we can and cannot use—“swamp” has virtually disappeared from the English language, replaced by “wetlands,” as “bums” has been replaced by “the homeless, “sex” by “gender”—that it seems only fitting that they should now tell us when to die.
The new phrase is “the duty to die.” The anointed have proclaimed this duty, so who are we ordinary people to question it? Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm has said that the elderly should “consider making room in the world for the young by simply doing with less medical care and letting themselves die.”
Colorado didn't seem that desperately over-crowded to me, but Lamm is one of the voices of the anointed, so their arbitrary dogmas become well-known facts by sheer repetition.
In the Hastings Center Report, described as a journal of medical ethics, a medical ethicist says that “health care should be withheld even for those who want to live” if they have already lived beyond the politically correct number of years—which he suggests might be 75. He says that, after such a “full rich life” then �
�one is duty-bound to die.”
There's more. Another medical ethicist would consider extending the limit to 80 years but, after that, medical care should be denied to all who have “lived out a natural life span.”
You may wonder who these people are and who gave them the right to play God. But the answer is simple. They are legion and it is we who have supinely accepted their pronouncements on so many things for so long that they see no reason to limit how far they can go.
There was a time when Americans told people like this where they could go. But one of the many phrases to fade from our vocabulary is “None of your business!” Today, everything is everybody's business. The next step is for it to become the government's business.
This collectivist mentality has led to big noises being made in the media and in academia about whether corporate executives or professional athletes are being paid “too much.” I don't know how many millions of dollars Derek Jeter gets paid for playing shortstop for the Yankees, but I do know that not one of those millions comes from me. That's between him and George Steinbrenner. It's none of my business.
How did we get sucked into collectivizing decisions that were once up to individuals? Purple prose is one factor. One of those who wants to see old-timers removed from the scene declares that the costs of keeping them alive are “a demographic, economic and medical avalanche.” Melodramatic phrase-making has become the royal road to power.
What is far more of a threat than the little dictators who are puffed up with their own importance is the willingness of so many others to surrender their freedom and their money in exchange for phrases like “crisis” and “compassion.” Will America go down in history as the country which defeated collectivism in the 20th century and then became collectivist itself in the 21st century?
Collectivism takes on many guises and seldom uses its own real name. Words like “community” and “social” soothe us into thinking that collectivist decision-making is somehow higher and nobler than individual or “selfish” decision-making. But the cold fact is that communities do not make decisions. Individuals who claim to speak for the community impose their decisions on us all.
Collectivist dictation can occur from the local level to the international level, and the anointed push it at all levels. They want a bigger role for the UN, for the International Court of Justice at the Hague and for the European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. Anything except individual freedom.
You cannot even build or remodel your own home without finding yourself under the thumb of local bureaucrats and tangled in red tape. A couple who are trying to have a home built in coastal California are discovering that it takes far less time to build the house than it does to deal with the arbitrary edicts of local bureaucrats and the reams of local regulations. The husband has taken to singing in the shower: “We shall overcome some day…”
Maybe they will and maybe they won't. Maybe we are all destined to give up our freedom to those ruthless enough to take it from us—or glib enough to soothe us into handing it over to them.
SHOCKED BY THE OBVIOUS
The obvious makes headlines in California. Maybe this shows that a sense of reality or common sense is not something that can be taken for granted among Californians.
A recent headline stretching across the top of the front page announced that “Population dwarfs housing” in San Mateo County, on the San Francisco peninsula. The same headline would have applied throughout most of the state—and it should not have surprised anybody anywhere. But apparently a recent release of Census data brought much news that should not have been news.
Census statistics showed that the housing supply in San Mateo county grew only half as fast as the population. Should this have surprised anyone, given that more than two-thirds of the land in that country is off-limits for building anything? But, in California, there seems to be no connection in most people's minds between “open space” laws and housing so scarce that it is outrageously expensive. Often the very same people are passionately in favor of both “open space” and “affordable housing”—and see no conflict between these goals.
Nor do they see any conflict between arbitrary height restrictions on buildings and the clogged freeways that plague all of California. They would undoubtedly be shocked if told that open space and limits on building heights increase traffic deaths by forcing more people to drive greater distances from their dispersed housing to the places where they work. Such obvious common sense would undoubtedly produce headlines in California if someone would just go collect the statistics.
Whether the fear of looking like Manhattan would overcome the fear of death, if people stopped and thought about it, is not clear—because very few have stopped to think about the costs of most of California's sacred cows. Only recently have blackouts caused some to reconsider their automatic opposition to building power plants in general or nuclear power plants in particular.
For years, California's movie stars and environmental activists so demonized nuclear power plants that nobody bothered to find out what scientists thought or what the experience has been with nuclear power plants in Western Europe over the past decades. Facts play a very minor role in many decisions.
For example, to many Californians, the words “public power” still have a magic ring, despite the fact that people around the world have discovered the hard way that having politicians run economic activities produces disasters. That is why even left-wing governments in various countries have started selling government-owned enterprises to private industry. But few Californians either seek or welcome such facts. Nor are they likely to consider that Chernobyl was “public power.”
Another headline on the same front page which announced that housing was lagging behind population growth also announced that the median age in the San Francisco Bay area was rising. Of course. As housing becomes ever more expensive, those who can afford it are increasingly restricted to those with higher incomes.
Contrary to political rhetoric, these are not some separate class of “the rich,” but are simply people who have reached an age where their earnings have peaked, even though many of those very same people were counted among “the poor” in earlier years. Once you get past political rhetoric, it is easy to see why the most expensive places in the bay area tend to have the oldest ages and the poorest places the youngest ages.
In upscale Marin County, for example, the median age is 41. In San Mateo County, posh Portola Valley has a median age of 47.5, while run-down East Palo Alto, with a predominantly minority population, has a median age of just under 26.
Another headline, inside the same newspaper, declares: “Housing grows more nationwide than in state.” Lots of things grow more nationwide than in California. That is because California politicians so heavily restrict, tax and micro-manage so many economic activities that people are left freer to grow elsewhere.
The missing link in many Californians' thinking is the link between what they do and the consequences that follow. In California, you show what a good person you are by being in favor of all sorts of politically correct goals—and blithely disregarding the costs these goals will impose on others or the consequences for the whole society. That is why these obvious consequences produce such shocking headlines.
FAMILIES AND DICTATORS
In one sense, the Elian Gonzalez story is over. In another sense, it may be years before it is over, in the sense that the truth finally comes out.
Given how young Elian Gonzalez is and how old Fidel Castro is, it may be only a matter of time before Elian will be free to tell the truth, though that time may be measured in decades. How long the Castro regime will last after Castro himself is gone is problematical. But Cuba has no tradition of freedom to assure that it will become a democracy any time soon.
The one thing that is clear already is that this case was not about parental rights, which do not exist in Cuba, nor about “the rule of law,” which did not exist in the Clinton administration. Judging by the polls, the A
merican people do not understand that.
Part of the problem is that most Americans have no conception of a totalitarian dictatorship or the ruthlessness with which they use family members as hostages. This is nothing new, but our schools and colleges teach so little history that the public can hardly be expected to understand what an old and widespread pattern this is, among dictatorships of the left or right.
Back in the 1930s, for example, Nazi agents were infiltrating the many German organizations in Brazil. Those Germans in Brazil—many of them born in Brazil—who opposed Nazi takeovers of their organizations were reported to the Hitler government and their relatives back in Germany were subject to visits from the Gestapo.
Castro has retaliated against the brother of baseball pitcher Orlando Hernandez of the Yankees, who defected from Cuba. The family of a woman who defected from China a few years ago has likewise faced retaliation. Against this background, there is much overlooked significance in the fact that Castro has never let the entire Gonzalez family come to the United States at the same time. First the grandmothers came over while father Juan Miguel Gonzalez stayed behind. Then Juan Miguel came over with his wife and one son, while the grandmothers and another son stayed behind. But Castro always had his hostages in Cuba.
Those who do not understand this will have a hard time explaining some very strange things that went on during this long struggle over the fate of Elian Gonzalez.
Let's go back to the beginning, when this little boy was rescued from the sea, after the boat he was on sank, drowning his mother and others on board. Those who believe that his father was saying and doing what he freely wanted to say and do must face the fact that, with his son hospitalized after this traumatic experience, in a city that could be reached within the hour from Havana, the father waited for months before coming to the United States.
Controversial Essays Page 21
