To End a Presidency by Laurence Tribe & Joshua Matz

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub May 15th 2018 by Basic Books, ISBN13: 9781541644885

America is an advanced democracy. It is imperative we the citizenry recognize our responsibilities and make use of our rights. “Impeachment is neither a magic wand nor a doomsday device.” It won’t fix the problems that brought a failed real estate magnate and showman to power. Moreover, calling for impeachment may have deleterious consequences which serve to rally the tyrant’s support.

The best thing about this book for me is that it lowered my blood pressure. I am not going to deny I have been distressed for…more than a year now, and severely low in the past couple months. This book reminded me that there are smart, educated people thinking about how best to deal with a liar whose proclivities border on fascism. Impeachment, these authors argue, may not be the best way to address this threat.

“When our democracy is threatened from within, we must save it ourselves…We must draw together in defense of a constitutional system that binds our destinies and protects our freedoms.”

Calls for impeachment have been increasing over the past decades, but this pair of authors thinks that is a sign of the divisiveness of our politics rather than realistic means of addressing things we don’t like about the other party’s president. We reached a new low when, even before the last presidential election in 2016, promises were made by each side to impeach the winner.


The authors stress that loose talk of impeachment may become as desensitizing as crying wolf when even the public begins to mistrust the options for curbing bad behaviors in a sitting president. Our elected officials must think strategically about what they are planning to achieve especially when they do not control enough seats to initiate impeachment hearings. Hot air is not helpful in educating the public in a time of crisis because it inflames the citizenry’s baser instincts.

We must work together if we are going to govern. The authors quote Lincoln at a time our country was more divided than now:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”

Yes, exactly. We clearly have not seen the existential threats coming down the road or we would be a lot more circumspect about calling hatred down on fellow citizens. Good grief. If we can’t work together despite living in the most resource-rich and abundant country on earth, we’re gonna lose it. But the people that made us this angry will all be dead and we and our children will have to deal with the problems that come. If everybody’s happy with that, let’s prepare well.

“In our experience, one of the main obstacles to an even-keeled analysis of impeachment under Trump is the fear and fury that he inspires in many of his political opponents.”

Don’t be a part of the problem. Educate yourself. It turns out that the most reliable way to deal with a pedant ideologue is to sideline them…in our case, by voting him and his supporters out. Not easy. But neither are any of the alternatives. This state of affairs was a long time developing into toxicity. It may take some time to rid ourselves of it.

This book is worthwhile. Time to take a deep breath and think before you speak.




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What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience by Gregory Berns

Hardcover, 320 pgs, Pub Sept 5th 2017 by Basic Books, ISBN13: 9780465096244

Berns uses what he’s learned about human cognition and emotion in the title of this book, which promises insights into the understanding of the dog brain. To be fair, the book does discuss experiments and findings involving what happens in a dog’s brain while commands are given and associations are made. But the book goes far beyond the dog to discuss cognition and sentience in animals of many kinds, principally by using evidence from MRI and fMRI brain scans. It is a fascinating look at the study of neuroscience on animals.

Despite the density of terms required to study neuroscience, Berns guides us easily through the basics, allowing us to understand the principal goal of their studies on dogs: to determine how dogs process information. I will admit to a degree of awe to think they could manage to get a dog to voluntarily crouch within a noisy MRI machine and stay immoveable long enough to be scanned while the scientists perform tests. Georgia dog trainer Mark Spivak was given a shout-out at the end of this book for his insights and indefatigable efforts to this end.

The decades-long work of Peter Cook of the pinniped labs in Santa Cruz, CA is highlighted for several chapters beginning with “Seizing Sea Lions.” Berns and Cook worked together to determine the effects of domoic acid toxicity on normal patterns of connectivity in the brains of dead sea lions. Domoic toxicity caused by agricultural runoff was determined to be the cause of a wave of malnourished sea lion strandings during El Niño years.

After the sea lions come dolphins, a discussion of how echolocation manifests in the brain, and some indication how dolphin brains resemble and differ from other mammals. Then back to dogs, where studies have shown a real possibility that rats and dogs may experience regret: regret for choices that do not turn out as desirable as anticipated. Berns acknowledges it is difficult to imagine regret in a rat, but he suggests that our word for it does not limit the experience of the emotion to those who understand the word. From here he moves from “what do words mean to animals”?

The detail in his discussion of dog training with words and visual cues may lead other scientists to suggest tweaks that may lead to even greater understanding of the emotional responses of animals. Enough work has been done now on a variety of mammals (and even crows!) to show emotions are a part of their brain activity and daily life. But what appeared to be almost a failure of dogs to recognize words led to a new insight:

“It may be that in a dog’s semantic space, actions and things are very close, which would explain why it was so difficult to teach the dogs the names of things. The semantic representation for ‘squirrel’ might be to ‘chase and kill,’ while ‘ball’ becomes ‘chase and retrieve.’…Human represent the world with nouns…it might require a shift in perspective—in this case, from a noun-based worldview to one based in action…In an action-based worldview, everything would be transactional.”

In one of the final chapters, called “A Death in Tasmania,” Berns tries something completely different. He writes of his experience traveling to Australia to view the habitat and scan the brain of an Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial mammal species thought to be extinct. As an experience and as a piece of research, it is as different from his earlier work as studying the brains of placental mammals and marsupial mammals, two animals who evolved differently over millennia. Berns uses narrative nonfiction techniques to situate us visually, historically, physically in “one of the last great wildernesses on Earth…utterly unique and worthy of protection.”

The chapter on Tasmania really highlighted Berns’ special skills as a scientist—his ability to look beyond the lab to the wider meanings of neuroscience “for the rest of us,” as he emphasized in his final chapter on the “Dog Lab.” Working for so long on understanding the extent of animal cognition, consciousness, sentience, or self-awareness has led him to animal advocacy, if only for our own selfish reasons. “We, Homo sapiens, might soon be an animal in the eyes of our successors…” given our tinkering and experimentation with the human genome. One day unmodified humans may be considered undesirable, inferior.

Berns has skill in involving us, allowing us to follow his work. He would like to map the brains of the Earth’s megafauna with the best science and equipment available today.

“The WWF estimates that two-thirds of many species’ populations maybe gone by 2020. Apart from the ecological catastrophe, scientific opportunities may be lost forever. It is imperative that we begin the archival process for all species, and especially for megafauna…”

Is 2020 a misprint? I surely hope so.



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Coyote America by Dan Flores

Dan Flores has done something fascinating in this book, rehabilitating the image of a persecuted carnivore lowest on our opinion roster of animals, including cockroaches and rats. He makes the case that coyotes should be America’s national avatar, displacing the bison or buffalo. Extremely clever, adaptable, and pioneering, the coyote was designated a principal deity by American Indians--North America’s oldest deity, responsible for creating all of North America.

Flores tells us that coyotes live within a couple miles of us at all times now…even those of us in major metropolitan areas. Coyotes are cosmopolitan, and have been living in urban areas since the time of Columbus at least. They are perceptive, wily fellow-travelers with us.

”Suffice it to say here that as we humans head off into an uncertain and probably dangerous future of our own making, it might be wise to keep an eye on [coyotes]. I, for one, am going to be very interested in how coyotes cope with the twenty-first century and what insights we might draw about our own circumstances from a coyote history that so often seems to mirror ours.”

Coyotes are predators, feeding mainly on small mammals, birds, or fruits. They are sociable, hunting in packs. Contrary to the notion that coyotes were responsible for cattle kills, they were nearly always scavengers of large animals as befit their position in the ranking of predators in the larger ecosystem. Very nearly killed off as pests since the end of the nineteenth century, they have none-the-less persevered.

Flores suggests we look to the Indian coyote stories, of which there is a rich seam, to understand human nature: “who better to illustrate that than self-centered, gluttonous, carnal Coyote?”As we began to understand our own animal natures, the study of other social animals leaves “little doubt that…canines also understand equality and inequity…and experience both a rudimentary form of empathy and some basic theory of mind…an essential sense of what in human terms we would call 'right and wrong.'”

Employees of the Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Center, whose greatest advocate is the American sheep industry, is responsible for killing by aerial shooting roughly 35,000 coyotes from the air annually. Even they readily admit that coyotes have personality: “They’re individuals. Like people, some get into trouble.” Sheep farmers claim to lose some percentage of lambs to coyote packs every year. The federal government spends an equal amount of money (the cost of the lambs) to kill or sterilize coyote. Hmmm...a good use of federal tax dollars?

This book is a wildlife biologist’s dream. Readable, eloquent, well-argued, it looks at coyote history from many angles and leads even those of us with reason to dislike the disruptive canines to a grudging admiration and wonder. Of course, sport hunters probably don’t read peer-reviewed ecological articles, but Flores points out that ecosystems tend to develop some balances in response to threats and flourishing in their environment. Trying to kill coyotes takes natural balances out of the equation.

Flores ends with examples of coyote in art, and reminds us again how the animal is portrayed as a caricature of human nature, for example Wile E’s comic overconfidence (remind you of anyone?), unswerving obsession with a goal, and unfailing faith in technology. (Even that swath of red-gold hair has something of the coyote about it.) But I don’t want to carry the metaphor too far. After all, coyote in modern day parlance means a person who sneaks illegal aliens into the U.S. from Mexico.

NPR's David Greene interviewed Dan Flores about this book on coyotes.

Dan Flores is a historian, A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus at University of Montana-Missoula, who has written several books about the American West and the animals who reside there. This year he also published a book called American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, perhaps in conjunction with the movement by Sean Gerrity, president of American Prairie Reserve, committed to wildlife conservation and hoping to create the largest wildlife complex ever assembled in the continental United States. "When complete, the reserve will comprise some 3.5 million contiguous acres (more than 5,000 square miles) of native grassland in northeastern Montana, with a goal of restoring the wildlife abundance the landscape once contained." [National Geographic bio].

Here is Dan Flores addressing the 32nd National Cowboy Poetry gathering about the history of America's Serengeti, and here is Sean Gerrity at an Aspen Institute gathering to elicit donations for his project.


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Second Chance (2007) and Strategic Vision (2012) by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Hardcover, 240 pages Published March 6th 2007 by Basic Books (first published 2007);
Hardcover, 224 pages Published January 24th 2012 by Basic Books (first published January 2012)

First published in 2007, the title ‘Second Chance’ refers to the possibility that the United States would be able to recognize and seize its historical moment as the world’s only superpower to do the moral and necessary thing: to lead the world towards greater amity, less divisional politics and severe wealth disparities, and to prepare for the changes climate change will unleash.

Brzezinski was National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter 1977-81 and went to academia (Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins) since. This book looks at three U.S. presidencies after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Brzezinski was a Sovietologist by education and is never so articulate and convincing as when he is discussing the intentions and pressures of Russian society.

Brzezinski begins with the intellectual disarray that accompanied the end of the Cold War, something America had been waging for some forty years. He notes the rise of the “mixture of opinions, beliefs, slogans, and pet formulas…that expressed a pre-disposition…for relatively flexible formulations based on a broadly shared, loosely defined set of convictions”: the globalization of Clinton I and the neoconservatism of Bush II. Brzezinski discusses and debunks the neocon attempts to articulate foreign policy: “without 9/11, the [neocon] doctrine probably would have remained a fringe phenomenon, but that catastrophic event gave it the appearance of relevance.”

Bush I enlisted the help of Arab states to oppose Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait, and began to set in motion a process to address the Israeli-Palestinian issue which, along with American troops on religious ground in Muslim lands, fed resentments in the Middle East .

“A second term might have given Bush I the time to become a truly innovative president, the shaper of a new historical era. Certainly, his record in handling the agony of the Soviet empire deserves the highest plaudits, and it is doubtful that his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, would have performed as skillfully. But on the Middle East, a stunning military victory was diminished into a mere tactical success whose strategic legacy gradually became negative…In brief, George H.W. Bush’s greatest shortcoming was not in what he did but in what he did not do.”

Clinton I is characterized by Brzezinski as a cheerful, idealistic president embracing globalization but primarily concerned with domestic concerns, unwilling to involve the country in adventures outside the borders. Clinton I had a casual style of leadership on the kaffesklatsch model featuring prolonged meetings with spontaneous participation by a wide variety of White House officials whose personal influence was “fluid.”. Only when forced to acknowledge widespread large scale violence in Yugoslavia did he belatedly put together a NATO coalition to oppose it. Clinton I had the smarts, the smooze, and the talent to put the United States into its role as “leader of the free world,” but he did not have the temperament nor discipline for it.

The presidency of Bush II had a “catastrophic” effect on America’s standing in the world. The simplicity with which Bush I elucidated his Manichean worldview, “If you are not with us, you are against us,” shows his complete unawareness of the complexity of world alliances and nations’ decision-making realities. He squandered his opportunity to lead the world by risking the goodwill of every nation by operating on gut instinct rather than through reasoned consideration, turning his adventurism in Iraq into a global disaster that plagues us still.

“…the war on terrorism took on the menacing overtones of a collision with the world of Islam as a whole…the blend of neocon Manichaeanism and President bush’s newfound propensity for catastrophic decisiveness caused the post-9/11 global solidarity to plunge from its historical zenith to its nadir.”

Thus, we turn to strategists like Brzezinksi when things go very badly wrong and we need to know how to extricate ourselves from the holes which we have dug for ourselves. We can see his point, that world leadership is desirable and needed to smooth the differences in opinions among diverse countries. It might as well be the United States, since we are [still] the world’s only superpower. Our internal divisions, however, preclude our ability to solve even the smallest issues we face domestically, negating any privilege wealth and might may accord us.

Brzezinki’s point in writing this book in 2006-7 was that America could still manage to lead if it could manage some restraint and regulation in domestic affairs, and put our values to good use. The book he wrote in 2011-12, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power , is far more strident and apocalyptic, with far less optimism that the world would look anything like it had for the past several hundred years. It is a new century, and America is in decline.
-------------------

Is American leadership necessary? This was the question I set out to answer when I began looking the analyses of foreign policy experts. One of these experts is Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981). Brzezinski was instrumental in the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin.

Brzezinski has written many books suggesting initiatives and directions for American foreign policy since he left office, most notably his book Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower in which he describes the successes and failures of three administrations (Bush I, Clinton I, and Bush II) to pull Russia into the European community after the failure of the Soviet state, to address the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to begin to address widening disparities in wealth & influence among the world’s partners. He has long felt that the world’s remaining superpower could help steer increasingly contentious countries to solutions we will need on problems which will soon arise for all of us in a world changed by climate. Without leadership, the world might not be able to orient our direction to solutions that lessen the burdens of inequality.

In Strategic Vision, written before the reelection of President Obama for a second term in 2012, Brzezinski sounds far more apocalyptic than he ever has, suggesting that unless we take control of our internal political mayhem, the corruption of our financial and political systems, and the widening gap between the wealthy and the rest, we may find the world has moved on, without leadership, to a bunch of special interest nationalities, all seeking to preserve their own interests in an interdependent world.

Naturally, I didn’t like this book as well because it posits there are no roads back once we have missed our opportunities. New opportunities come when old ones are exhausted, but the central question is whether or not we are ready to create opportunities to steady and lessen the rancor developing throughout the world to pressures all of us will be subject to very shortly (debilitating changes wrought by climate change). The American populace seems more awake now than at any other time in recent memory, with outside candidates for president railing at the corruption in the system. We have enormous pressures for change within our own society as a result of political gridlock for precious years. Perhaps the political will is finally solidifying to make the changes necessary. Now we just need to choose a president who can be effective with so many internal and external challenges to their leadership.

Brzezinski is a Sovietologist by education and is extraordinarily fluent, fascinating, and lucid on the subject of changes Russia has undergone and that are ongoing in Russia. It is worth reading the book for that portion alone. He makes a special attempt to incorporate Obama’s pivot to Asia in this book, examining how the strengths and weakness of the Asian and south Asian economies and political systems affect the global balance of power, pointing to India and China as the most populous and potentially influential power centers. He makes a point about China that is worth reiterating: as a country with a homogeneous population and long history of central control, it has been extraordinarily effective in creating an extremely strong national identity. That nationalism is something quite new in the experience of other national entities, riven as they are by populations with different religions and races. China’s sense of itself in the world is just developing: its leaders are patient, but its people are ambitious. They face enormous resource and population pressures and difficulties in modifying their one-party system. We don’t know how this will play out in years to come, but currently China has a stake in the U.S. managing to get the corruption of our financial system under control. It doesn’t want to see us fail in this, not right now. We shouldn’t want it to fail, either.

Brzezinski talks about Obama as president, praising Obama’s speeches as candidate and as president, but noting that Obama never spoke to the American people directly about the challenges we face. Part of the job of a leader is to educate its populace, and to ask it to sacrifice for the common good. Obama failed dismally in not raising for public discussion the corruption of special interest money in election financing, the pressures of climate change on our aging infrastructure, the need for restraint in corporate governance. I feel painfully that missed opportunity, but there is some indication in the early presidential election results that some people have gotten the message anyway, no thanks to a hot-air media which is never so happy than when repeating its own predictions and inaccuracies.

Brzezinski writes of the central position of Turkey and its ambitions, and supports the notion that it would eventually be welcomed into the EU. He still holds out hope that Russia would rein in its divisive tendencies, leading to a conception of the West that looks like the entire North of the globe, including all of North America, through the Mediterranean, and encompassing Russia. This is a large leap, especially in light of events of recent years, but I like seeing how Brzezinski got there.



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America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, Narrated and Moderated by David Ignatius

Hardcover, 304 pages Published September 9th 2008 by Basic Books (first published September 8th 2008)

In the spring leading up to the 2008 election, this conversation between two former National Security Advisors, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinksi moderated by veteran foreign policy journalist David Ignatius, touched on the state of the world and how America should interact. Both men believe in American exceptionalism, not merely because of our enormous luck in geography and resources, but because our diverse population has given us strength. The development of our democracy followed a path that is not replicable in the rest of the world, but it has given us the resilience we needed to develop a strong sense of the value of personal initiative. Both men conclude that what matters most, what guides our hand in foreign policy, are values. In 2008, both men agreed that Obama and Hillary Clinton embodied those values.

These two highly respected foreign policy analysts are known as “realists” on different sides of the political spectrum but they both recognize the need to balance realism and idealism in a national leader. We are again at the crossroads to choose a national leader, and the candidate who most effectively balances realism with idealism will win.

In eight years much has changed, but much has stayed the same. At that time the two men discussed the withdrawal from Iraq: Brzezinski was more precipitous in his recommendation for an immediate draw down, Scowcroft believed we “broke it, we own it,” though neither man thought it was wise to invade Iraq in the first place. But both men placed as the most important foreign policy issue needing addressing is resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Imagine. Still. “And you know, the moment Israel and Palestine are reconciled, they have a chance together of becoming the Singapore of the Middle East.” (Brzezinski). “Lebanon is one of the most fragile states in the world. But for a long time, Beirut was the entrepột and Paris of the region. Lebanon was a fragile, carefully balanced multipolar state….I think it is possible for people who don’t agree on all the same things to live together and prosper.” (Scowcroft)

Brzezinski often refers in his dialogue to disparities in wealth in America and in the context of nations and how dangerous this is becoming. He sees in that disparity larger issues rooted in the need for restraint and recognition of the dignity of all individuals, no matter their race, religion, or social group. Both men recognize that fostering a "culture of fear" in our rhetoric will sideline more critical issues that need to be addressed, like climate change. "…America can only respond to [critical issues] if it manages to shape a whole series of differentiated coalitions that are dedicated to a collective response." [May I point out here that young Americans are doing this despite the stodgy intransigence of their parents—to address opportunity and wealth inequality and climate change. Occupy was not a one-off fringe movement, we belatedly realize at our peril.]

Both men talk about the speed of communication and the spread of ideas as something that is accelerating access to information and change, making it more difficult for nations to defend widely unpopular polices.

"Americans tend to a kind of universal activism. Europeans are more preoccupied with what they are and would like to nurture and preserve it. Maybe by combining the two, we can achieve a close transatlantic communication that would be healthy for both of us…In the more developed parts of Europe there is a real absence of the kind of social iniquities and disparities that exist in the United States. These disparities are not healthy. I don’t think they are in keeping with our values…I think we have a lot to learn from Europeans, who in that respect have moved towards a more just and genuinely democratic society than ours." (Brzezinski)

"One of the fundamental differences between Europe and the United States is that Europe has developed in such a way that they’ve had to get along with each other. As a result of geographical limitations, they’ve increasingly lived in larger urban units and therefore had had to have rules for behavior, rules for managing people’s interaction with each other. People who couldn’t stand that kind of confining regulation tended to come over to the United States.
As communities on the U.S. east coast started to develop the same need to manage people’s interactions, those who chafed under regulation moved to our open and empty west. As a result, the U.S. has developed a much stronger tendency to resent government. Hence the motto that government is best that governs least." (Scowcroft)

Scowcroft raises something I have never explicitly thought about before in terms of global politics: that population and resource pressure in China is something that may eventually cause them to cast a hungry eye on Russia.

"When you look at the border between China and Russia, the demographics and the demands on natural resources are such that there’s something almost unnatural about the map in that part of the world. On one side of the border is a huge space, as large as the rest of Asia, inhabited by thirty-five million people. On the other side, the rest of Asia, inhabited by three and a half billion people, one and a half billion of whom are expanding dramatically, getting wealthier, richer, more powerful, more modern. Is that an enduring situation?"(Scowcroft)

There is much, much more: they talk of Putin and the pressures within Russia, some of which have broken out into action in the years since this book was written. It was a bit sketchy on our relationship with China and Asia generally, partly because these men were in office before China was really a major force in our economy and politics. They talk of the need for talks with Iran, which also happened in the years since this book was written. All in all, it was ravishingly interesting, and not so distant that it feels like history.


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