Mia voĉo (My voice)

When Crazies Are In Charge

I've been hearing for a long time now that North Korea differs from us by having a crazy man (Kim Jong-il) in charge. This, of course, is why that country can't be trusted with nuclear weapons.

On Saturday, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of McClatchy newspapers reported the following:

...North Korea is in a far stronger negotiating position than it was in 2002 when Bush halted heavy fuel oil shipments. That prompted Pyongyang to expel IAEA inspectors; withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the cornerstone of the international arms control system; and end a freeze on operating the Yongbyon reactor, which the Clinton administration had negotiated in 1994.

So ... in 1994 the Clinton administration negotiated a quid pro quo agreement with North Korea under which they did not process plutonium nor build nuclear weapons and we provided them with heavy fuel oil and other considerations to make up for their withdrawal from the nuclear materials race. Then, in 2002, George Bush decided to unilaterally abrogate our side of the agreement, expecting ... what? That the North Koreans would sit there, docilely, waiting for us to finish our process of régime change in Iraq and get around to purging them, the second ball bearing on the Axis of Evil?

I don't think that it's Kim Jong-il who is crazy; despite a tendency for his puppet avatar in Team America to behave that way, the man did exactly what I would have done in his place — taken steps to protect himself and his country — and I don't think that I'm crazy. No, based on that 2002 decision that killed a successful attempt to keep nuclear weapons out of yet another country's hands, I would say that if there's any national leader involved in this who's a certifiable nutcase, it's not Kim Jong-il this time. We should look closer to home.

Terrorist State

Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas today writes, among other things:

Do any of them [liberals] seriously believe that if the United States were to prematurely withdraw from Iraq, al-Qaida and Iran would not take advantage of the resulting power vacuum and establish a terrorist state from which even more horrible attacks could be launched against the United States and American interests worldwide?

One wonders where Thomas has been hiding his head since 9/11. He apparently still does not understand that the differences between Shi'ite and Sunni Moslem in the Middle East are at least as great as those between Catholic and Protestant Christian in Northern Ireland. al-Qaida and Iran? There is no "and". Were we to turn over peacekeeping in Iraq to the Iranian army today, the immediate result would be a severe increase in suffering among innocent Sunnis in Iraq, probably followed by Saudi intervention to protect them; but there would be no cooperation between al-Qaida and Iran to establish a "terrorist state" — or towards any other common goal, either, Iran and al-Qaida having no common goals.

More likely, the result would be the equivalent of having a couple of scorpions in a bottle. Which, in my humble opinion, would be no better than the current situation, but would certainly not be the united anti-American front that Thomas posits.

Tax Deduction

I do not yet know much about President Bush's plan for health care, but when I see the words "tax deduction" I also tend to see red. I haven't had occasion to take a tax deduction in almost a quarter of a century — the standard deduction covers everything, and considerably more, than any other deductions I might take would. I wonder how many of the people in this country who have no health care can say the same. A tax deduction is not going to help such people in the least.

"Tax credit," now, there are words to live by. But they don't seem to be in the President's vocabulary.

Islam and Booze

Columnist Leonard Pitts today expounds on an unfortunate tendency of Moslem taxi drivers at the Minnesota-St. Paul airport to refuse to pick up fares who happen to be carrying suspicious-looking bottles. Islam, after all, frowns on alcohol. So do I, for that matter, though I pretty much frown on it only for myself and not, like the taxi drivers, for everybody else.

Regular readers of my blog, if any, have probably noticed that I tend to defend Islam against its unthinking and fearful detractors here in the United States. Nonetheless, I was a little put off by the following passage that Pitts quoted from Khalid Elmasry, spokesman for the Muslim American Society of Minnesota:

In an environment of fear and misunderstanding of everything Muslim, tolerance has become too much to ask.

Khalid, tolerance is a two-way street. As long as the fares in question do not, upon entering a taxi driven by a Moslem, in some misguided spirit of good fellowship crack their bottles and attempt to force a swig of their contents upon the drivers, the drivers also have a duty to practice tolerance and not leave these undoubted sinners standing helpless on the sidewalk. Perhaps their dedication to a bottle of Champagne from France will indeed condemn them to Gehenna, but that is their problem, and it is not the duty of a taxi driver to punish them for their misguided preferences. The duty of a taxi driver is to pick up fares and drive them to their destinations.

Learning Languages in Russia

Several days ago I posted some thoughts here on the use of Esperanto as a propaedeutic language, and mentioned two or three of the "experiments" that had been done in this regard. Today I received the December issue of the magazine Esperanto, and found an interesting article on the same subject, detailing an experiment I hadn't known about, by Svetlana Miroŝniĉenko of St. Petersburg, Russia. I thought I'd translate the article for today's blog, so here goes (it won't be that easy; Miroŝniĉenko's Esperanto is quite good, but since she's not an English-speaker it doesn't reflect the characteristics of English that make for an easy translation). The article appeared on page 246.

In 1993 an experiment on the introduction of Esperanto for propaedeutic purposes, to facilitate the study of foreign languages, under the sponsorship of the International Academy of Sciences in San Marino and the Cybernetic Institute of Paderborn (Germany), was disseminated throughout the entire former Soviet Union.

In several middle schools in St. Petersburg (Russia) there was participation as well. In Gymnasium [high school -DH] No. 271 Esperanto was taught as of 1991. The result was so good that the management kindly allowed Esperanto to be introduced as a mandatory object of study in the first year. Unfortunately, the experiment did not end successfully in all schools, firstly because of administrative obstacles, secondly because of a lack of experienced teachers [the dangers of success, again? -DH].

Results that raised quite a bit of enthusiasm were attained in Gymnasium 271, with deepening study of French, where Esperanto was taught as a mandatory subject through 2002, even when the experiment had ended. The language entered the school program quite naturally. It helped the students learn French, later, more easily and with pleasure. Many years of work brough an approved task which received the title: "Author's program of Esperanto. For classes 1-10. Basic course — first-degree step, 2 hours per week. Elective course for classes 2-10, 1 hour per week."

After serious expertise the program (340 hours) was acknowledged by the St. Petersburg state university of pedagogical operations in February, 2001.

The basic course (mandatory) contains 63 hours and every subsequent elective year contains 34 hours.

The program was worked out for "musical" classes, for pupils who, in addition to the ordinary school program, are occupied with music and song. Esperanto is a very musical, creative language which is very similar to the Romance languages. The Esperanto teaching staff, too, liked the language and propagandized it, consequently it awoke interest among the parents and also among the children. Thanks to that many Esperanto trips and Esperanto concerts were realized by the pupils and the city's Esperanto speakers, there was vigorous correspondence, the gymnasium took part in the projects Interkulturo and Euroscola (2002).

The teachers successfully taught Esperanto for many years in the gymnasium. The program was set up to show the pupils the similarities and differences between French and Esperanto. Meanwhile the pupils had the chance to get to know Esperanto literature and history, etc. After first learning the grammar and vocabulary of Esperanto, the pupils passed through to learning French. I don't believe that it was by chance that several of the pupils after leaving the gymnasium chose to study foreign languages, French, Spanish and others, for their professional lives.

Despite the success of the experiment, it seems to me that relatively few people know about it. Esperanto speakers should be better informed about the results of the experiment, to be able to convince the incredulous about the positive, valuable sides of Esperanto in the study of foreign languages while on the "school benches".

Listen to Your Constituents

Another fun letter was published in the West County Times today. Jacqueline Cloidt, who lives in our neighboring high-rent district of Orinda, starts by stating that other groups besides the Democratic Party were happy with the November elections — she names al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah, based on unattributed "recent reports", but forgets to mention the American people. But then she lights into Michigan congressman John Conyers, who is to take control of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers, by her account, "... represents the largest Muslim population in the country ..." and, to make matters worse, " ... apparently does their bidding."

There is something wrong with this? We've just gotten over twelve years of House members who either obsessed about gaining and holding onto power (Tom DeLay) or spent their time feathering their own nests at our expense (Randy "Duke" Cunningham). And we are supposed to panic about a congressman whose major sin is that he listens to his constituents and does what they want him to? My own take on the matter is that if Conyers is doing what Cloidt accuses him of, he's got to be one of our best Congressmen, and we should cherish him, not fear him.

Of course, I can suppose that it's not Congressman Conyers who bothers Cloidt as much as it is that set of constituents; chances are good that she would like to drum them out of the body politic, based on their religion, which is alien to our way of life. And yet ... didn't we go through this same exercise around two-thirds of a century ago? In a time of equal (and much more justifiable) fear, didn't we collect a whole group of innocents and excise them from the body politic, based solely on their ancestry? Seems to me that you can still visit the concentration camps at Manzanar and other places where we relegated Americans of Japanese ancestry, based on nothing more terrifying than the fact that they were of Japanese ancestry. Do we really want to do that, today, to Americans who just happen to be believers in the religion of Islam?

Send In the Clones

Today's "Perspectives" section of the West County Times, our local newspaper, contains both an op-ed and a pair of letters on the cloning of animals for food. The op-ed, of course, supports the process; the letter-writers fear it.

I wouldn't hesitate to eat a steak from a cloned animal; I doubt that the taste would be any different, and I suspect that the contents wouldn't be, either. After all, a clone is, for all intents and purposes, nothing but an identical twin of its progenitor, and we've been dealing with identical twins in both the human and the animal worlds for a long time, now. I might have some pretty severe doubts about the way a farm of cloned animals would be treated, but I doubt whether they'd be any worse off than the uncloned animals now relegated to factory farms.

My problem with the whole process is a bit longer range. Consider Beefsteak the Steer, whose prime rib turns out to be better than that produced by any other animal. Can you see a time in the future when all our fields are covered by simple, and genetically identical, copies of Beefsteak? Seems to me that this would only be Good Business. And then there's that outbreak of cattle dengue, the disease to which most cows were more or less immune but to which something in Beefsteak's makeup made him just that little bit more susceptible — boom! our cattle industry is decimated!

What worries me about the whole cloning process in the food industry is not the possibility that there will be something bad for us in the product, but the potential loss of genetic diversity. Is this something we want to take a chance on, simply for the good of the Bottom Line?

Incidentally, this is not a problem we can expect to have with human cloning, where the motivations (short of the potential reestablishment of the slave trade) are considerably different. I have no problem with human cloning whatsoever, given the proper circumstances, and I have no understanding of those people who would ban human cloning "for ethical reasons" but are quite ready to adopt the cloning of animals "for business reasons."

The Major Menace: Success

One of the most horrible nightmares I have, relating to the language Esperanto, is that I'll wake up some morning and find that the whole world is knocking at our door — and who will be there to answer? Is the Esperanto movement ready for success? I've always assumed that it isn't. I think of a friend of mine who taught Esperanto for some years at a university in Shanghai; when large classes appeared, she had to turn many students away because "there just weren't enough chairs". This happens from time to time; at a provincial university in Liaoning, China, last year a new Esperanto course attracted some 500 students, but teaching resources were available for only around 100, and the rest had to be rejected. Good examples of a movement that is not ready for success.

There are hopeful signs. This morning a new Esperanto course, presumably around three months in length, began at the Foreign Language University of the Hanoi State University in Vietnam. Some 150 students were expected; 400 turned out. Not to worry; the people who run the course (including the University director) managed to summon up necessary teaching resources, and everybody will be able to take the course. Rewards? Aside from learning the language, the top ten students will get free registration in this year's International Youth Esperanto Congress, also to be held in Hanoi, and many of the rest will gain free entrée by working as volunteers-aides (an arrangement that I saw work fairly well in Beijing in 1986).

In any case, it was nice to see an example of readiness for success, for once. My hat is off to the Esperanto movement in Vietnam.

Guilty Until ... Proven Innocent?

Several hundred detainees are being held in stir at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. These men are not terrorists, or even enemy combatants; they are suspected terrorists and/or enemy combatants. Some probably are terrorists; some probably are enemy combatants (whatever that means); many were probably the victims of the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now it's been suggested by one Cully Stimson, "deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs" it says here, that law firms providing pro bono representation to these men should be the subject of boycott and reprisals by their regular customers, since they are apparently in the business of representing terrorists.

Suspected terrorists, I point out again. Not one of these men has ever been proven to be a terrorist.

It is astonishing to believe that someone like Stimson could have grown up in the same country I imagined I grew up in, where the accused were considered innocent until they were proven guilty, and where everyone had the right to be represented before a court of law.

Or has something terrible happened to America?

One hopeful sign — even the Pentagon is backing off from Stimson's diatribe.

Language Learning

I had an interesting discussion at lunch today with a couple of other Esperanto speakers, on the topic of teaching the language in schools. Esperanto is, of course, one of the great untold educational stories of the century (so far). We discussed two questions: is Esperanto easier than other languages to learn? And: can it contribute to the learning of other languages? Learning languages in the United States is something to which we all give lip-service, but which in fact is heavily ignored in our schools, and it seems to me that anything that can help should be at least looked at.

On the first question, I remember a little folder I picked up back in 1988, on the teaching of foreign languages in California public schools. One section gave milestones that students were expected to reach at the end of each year of study, through four years — I vaguely remember a recommendation to double the times for "Slavic, Semitic and other non-European languages" (sic!). More seriously, I remember that the annual milestones given were the milestones that anyone who has taught — or learned — Esperanto would expect to reach in an equivalent number of months — yes, "M" for "Mother" months. There is no question in my mind, or from my experience, that Esperanto is easier to learn than any other foreign language, and that we're talking at least one order of magnitude here (double that for "Slavic, Semitic and other non-European languages").

Does this help American language learning? Probably not a whole lot. The argument will be made (incorrectly!) that Esperanto is not a very useful language to learn; in fact, it is a lot more useful than it is usually given credit for, but on a national scale we'd rather have our kids learning Chinese or Arabic, I think (though most of our kids end up with Spanish — relatively useful — or French or German, far less useful languages even, I think, than Esperanto). So can Esperanto help with learning these other languages? There have been experiments that invariably suggest that yes, it can. This is known as the propaedeutic effect — the learning of a first foreign language always helps with the learning of later languages.

This is hardly unique to Esperanto; the student who learns Spanish first will learn French — or Arabic, or Chinese — much more quickly later. My take on the matter is that (a) in learning his first foreign language, the student learns the mental tools he needs to learn a foreign language in general, and (b) when he successfully learns his first foreign language, the student overcomes a psychological barrier that says "a foreign language is an academic subject, not to be treated in the same way that I treat my mother tongue, the topic of exams, not of conversation". The advantage of Esperanto is not that it can do these things, but that it can do them so much more quickly than other first foreign languages — based on the figures I quote above, you can see that a year of Esperanto is the equivalent of a number of years of study of some other language.

As I said, there've been experiments that show this assumption to be at least anecdotally valid — all the experiments done have shown this. My favorite was the one that went on for a number of years at a high school in Manchester, England. The headmaster, who was a speaker of Esperanto, regular split the incoming class into those who started out with French and those who started out with a year of Esperanto and then switched to French. The results: at the end of three years, the French-only students were generally about one lesson (only one lesson!) ahead of the Esperanto starters; and, more importantly (though less easily quantifiable) the Esperanto starters were generally more active in class, in terms of conversation in the language. During my period of following the literature, similar experiments in Somero, Finland (Finnish to German via Esperanto) and Paderborn, Germany (German to English via Esperanto) gave similar results.

Again, this is one of the great undiscovered stories about language teaching of our time. Why it remains undiscovered is, perhaps, an even better story, and has to do, to some degree, with politics, both high-level and low-level school politics. But maybe I'll tell that some other time.

Enemies Forever

It may be that we need occasionally to be reminded that Osama bin Laden started his career in terrorism as a client and ally of the United States, whom we used to stir up trouble in an Afghanistan occupied by the Soviet army. In the days of Presidents Reagan and Bush I, Osama, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, apparently could do no wrong. In those halcyon days no one referred to his supporters as "Islamofascists," despite the fact that they were as rigidly ideological then as they are now. Apparently the fact that they were our ideologues made all the difference.

I am sort of reminded of the age of my growing up and Southeast Asia. There we were faced by an implacably bitter enemy, the Viet Cong (South Vietnamese nationalists whom we referred to as Communists) and their allies the army of North Vietnam. After years of fighting, and ultimately the near-destruction of the Viet Cong, the Vietnamese {nationalist, communist} forces won the war. We were bitter about this for a long period — as bitter as we were almost thirty years earlier when the entrenched Washington bureaucracy in Harry Truman's State Department lost China (as though China were somehow ours to lose).

Cut to a few decades later, in each case. Our relationship with both China and Vietnam today can be described, I think, as carefully cordial; we have gotten over the horrible disappointments of the late forties and the mid seventies (and, in the case of Vietnam, they too seem to have gotten over the war, despite the fact that they had so much more than we did to get over). Today I got a copy of the magazine TEJO Tutmonde, the organ of the World Esperanto Youth Organization (TEJO). Pages 15-18 are devoted to this year's world Esperanto youth conference, which will be held from July 27 through August 3 in — guess where! — OK, you guessed it: Hanoi, Vietnam. And I suspect that there will be Americans present in the crowd during the conference.

All this makes me suspect that, if Osama bin Laden continues to survive for the next few years or decades, the tides of history will flow and ebb and change, and by 2030, 9/11 notwithstanding, he may once again be considered a good and faithful friend of the United States, unlikely as that may seem today. It all depends, of course, on who else we find to hate and fear in the interim.

Snowstorms

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently reported that Exxon contributed some 16 million dollars over a period of several years to a number of what we may call "front groups" over on the ideological right whose main goal was not to disprove global warming and human influence on it — that would have been impossible! — but simply to cast enough doubt on the question of scientific proof of global warming in the public mind to delay any effective action (of the sort that would hurt the oil companies' bottom line) to slow down the rate of global warming. Given the Bush administration's attitude toward the question over the past six years, the money seems to have been well spent.

Meanwhile, what seems to be the same group of people are quoting the occurrence of two anomalous snowstorms in Colorado as "proof" that there really is no such thing as global warming. (We may, of course, ignore anomalous phenomena to the contrary, such as the massive heatwave a couple of years ago that killed several tens of thousands of people in Europe, or the one that swept over much of the United States last July.)

Meanwhile, again, I gather from the news that over on the East Coast people are scratching their heads and wondering whatever happened to winter. Temperatures seem to be running on the order of 15 degrees (Fahrenheit) above normal for this time of year. Global warming, anyone?

I would suggest that those people may simply be patient for a few years. Many of them are familiar with a phenomenon known as the "lake effect": when a mass of cold, dry air swoops down from Canada over the Great Lakes, it picks up lots and lots of moisture from the lakes and dumps it out as snow over upper New York State. One may wonder whether there will be a similar effect, on a continental scale, when cold air masses forming over the Arctic Ocean are no longer barred from the ocean's moisture by the layer of ice (now melting very, very quickly) covering that vast layer of water, and plunge southward as cold wet air masses rather than cold dry air masses.