(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

On December 26, 2009 I flew to Sri Lanka to attend a college reunion. It was the day after the ‘underwear bomber’ incident that took place on the transatlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. I was glad to go out of the country since I knew that the media here would be saturated with the usual hysterical “Oh my god, we’re all going to die unless we give up to the government all our rights and liberties and privacy so that they can protect us from all danger!” that always follows these attempts by suicidal persons to inflict harm on others.

Although such bomb attempts do not scare me from flying despite the absurd hysteria they arouse, I fully expected to deal with a lot of security. But there was nothing unusual and I breezed through security with just the routine checks.

But the second leg of my flight from Washington (Dulles) to London (Heathrow) was far from routine. About 45 minutes before we were due to land in London, I was trying to take a nap when suddenly I heard shouting and opened my eyes to see two men running up the two aisles from the back to the plane towards the center where there was the galley and bathrooms. I also heard the sounds of fighting in the narrow passage between the bathrooms with someone seemingly being beaten and their head pounded against the wall or floor. The two men whom I had seen running took positions in each aisle where they could see up and down, whipped out badges that were on chains around their necks, and shouted out that they were police and that everyone should immediately take their seats and remain seated thereafter. They stayed in this position while the sounds of fighting continued, accompanied by shouts of “Stop beating your head against the wall!” and “Stop beating me!” and I realized that two other air marshalls were the ones subduing someone in the passage between the bathrooms.

Eventually, after about fifteen minutes, the sounds of fighting subsided but the two air marshalls in the aisles stayed in their positions and kept surveying everyone in the plane all through the landing. We were told to remain in our seats until the British police could arrive and take charge of things. This took about 20 minutes and after that we were allowed to leave the plane, though those who had been eyewitnesses to what had happened near the bathrooms were asked to remain. No one told us the cause of fracas. I later checked the web for information and found nothing so I figure that the disturbance was caused by a drunk or psychotic or otherwise unruly passenger, not someone with any intent to destroy the plane.

Even though this occurred the day after the Christmas bombing attempt, I did not feel any panic or fear during the entire episode, nor did I detect such feelings in the other passengers that I could see. People seemed to be simply curious about what was going on, craning their necks to get a better view. In fact, one passenger allowed his little daughter to stand in her seat so that she could get a better look. I think that this sense of calm was due to the fact that the air marshalls seemed to quickly take control of things and also because the flight attendants, even while there were sounds of fighting, created an air of normalcy by going about doing routine pre-landing tasks such as collecting cups and so on.

On my return trip to the US on January 11, there did not seem to be any extra security either, even at London as I was boarding for the US. The security people at Heathrow airport did not require everyone to take off their shoes but looked at them first before making the request. My shoes were given the green light and could be kept on but people with boots were asked to remove them. The only extra measure was at the boarding gate. I was singled out of the line and asked to check in my carry-on bag because new size restrictions for carry-on baggage had apparently been imposed on January 1 because of the underwear bomber incident and my bag that had passed muster all these days was now suddenly deemed to be too large.

Although the request was made courteously and I complied without making any protest, I was a bit suspicious because other passengers with similar sized bags were allowed to keep them and I was wondering whether my skin color had caused me to be singled out as a potentially dangerous person. After arriving in the US at Washington and passing through customs and immigration, I was told that I could once again take my bag as a carry-on on my last leg to Cleveland, suggesting that this new size rule was being applied somewhat inconsistently.

On the flight from London to the Washington, they also announced that there was another new rule, that when the ‘fasten seat belt’ sign comes on, everyone must return to their seats immediately, with no exceptions even for those going to the bathroom or already in it. For this seven-hour flight, they put on the sign a full hour before landing, which is the time when a lot of people use the facilities. This caused some friction between a few passengers and the flight attendants, who knocked on the door of the bathroom and asked the people inside to return to their seats. The reason for this new rule seems to be that the underwear bomber tried to detonate his explosives during the last half-hour of this flight, but since that seemed to be an arbitrary decision on his part, the logic of this new rule escapes me, since another bomber could merely make his move earlier.

On my return to the US, I discovered that the usual hysteria over the underwear bomber had indeed occurred, with people demanding even more security measures such as full body scanners, profiling, and the like.

I wonder when people are going to say that they have had enough. I myself have long ago reconciled myself to the fact that there will always be people crazy enough to try and find ways to kill others and that there is no way to be 100% secure even if we give up all our rights and liberties and freedoms and privacy. Systems and people are fallible and there will always be some cracks in the security system that can be exploited. So I am willing to take the risk of loss of life in a terrorist attack in return for living a life that is free from highly intrusive government security. This is why I think I was so unperturbed by the fight on the earlier flight. After all, the risk from dying in a terrorist attack is surely less than the risk of dying from other causes that I face every day such as car crashes or common criminals or building collapses. I don’t obsess over those risks so why should I obsess over dying in a plane crash?

POST SCRIPT: Stephen Colbert on liberty vs. security

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On Wednesday evening, Marcia L. Fudge, Ohio’s congresswoman for District 11, held a town hall meeting for her constituents. These events, once staid and even boring exercises in democracy, have recently become notorious for the groups of vociferous opponents of health care reform who have stormed them, armed with a strategy formulated by the health care industry and its Republican Party allies to shut down meaningful discussion on this important issue, intimidate elected representatives, and give the impression that those who oppose reform are more numerous and care more deeply about their point of view than those who support reform efforts such as single-payer.
[Read more…]

Am I imagining it or does there seem to be a sudden upsurge in the number of people who seem to be disconnected with reality? To elaborate, is there an increasing number of vocal and visible people who are believe strongly in some crackpot idea despite the complete lack of plausible evidence in favor of their belief?

Into this category I put those who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution did not occur. Also included are the so-called ‘truthers’ (those who think that the events of 9/11 were planned and executed by the US government or that they had advance knowledge of it and yet allowed it to happen), and the ‘birthers‘, those who think that Obama is not a natural born citizen of the US and is thus ineligible to be president. And then we have the ‘gunners’, those who are convinced that Obama is going to take away their guns and enslave them. They have been forming militias and stocking up on weapons and ammunition ever since the election, presumably to prevent the military takeover of the country under the orders of Generalissimo Obama.

It is not surprising that this kind of paranoid climate would encourage individual nutcases like the Baptist preacher who is asking god to put a hit on Obama. Some have even gone on murderous rampages as a result of their beliefs

The health care reform debate has spawned yet another group of crackpots, called the ‘deathers’, who roam town hall meetings and yell about how the health care reform plans currently under consideration will result in government bureaucrats deciding who will live and who will die, and that they seek to kill off old people and anyone with any defects. This is quite an amazing level of delusion

The fact that there exist a sizable number of people who believe in each of these things is not surprising. I have long felt that there is no proposition, however crazy, that you cannot persuade up to about 20% of Americans to take seriously, simply by using spurious arguments that seem to have a veneer of plausibility, along with ‘evidence’ consisting exclusively of vague references to ‘they say’ or ‘I read somewhere’, with the source never specified. For example, a survey finds that 23% say ‘no’ or ‘not sure’ to the question of whether they believe Obama was born in the US. (Among Republicans, the figure is an incredible 58%!)

It is quite likely that there is strong overlap amongst all these groups, given their common basis in irrationality, so that the total number of believers may not be that much larger than the number that believes in just one of them. But given the rapid proliferation of such groups, it may be useful to adopt an umbrella label of some sort that covers everyone. How about the ‘nutters’? Tom Tomorrow describes the weirdness of these people in a recent cartoon.

These people are helped in their paranoia delusions by prominent politicians, who should know better, reinforcing their beliefs. A report says that Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) said “spoke of a “socialistic elite” – Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law.”

Then there is the ever-reliable serial exaggerator Sarah Palin. On her Facebook page she says the following about health care reform: “And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Her statement has no connection to reality. Can she really be so stupid and ignorant as to believe this? Can she really not know that the proposed health reform legislation does not say anything of the sort? Or is she cynically deceiving and exploiting her followers? In addition, she once again shamelessly uses her baby as a political prop when it suits her purposes, while whining that her family should be off limits.

(To make it worse, Palin uses for support Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachman, a person with an Alan Keyes level of craziness. Deciding which of Bachmann’s statements and actions is the loopiest is not easy, but my favorite was when she warned that Obama was thinking of abandoning the dollar as the US currency.)

Stephen Colbert gives his take on the death panels.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Death Panels

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As I said earlier, some greedy geezer seniors are prominent among the deathers who are trying to whip up anger against health care reform with their insanities, perhaps in order to preserve their own government-run Medicare health privileges. Christopher Beam writes: “To be sure, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for seniors to be concerned about reform. Seniors already have universal health care in the form of Medicare. There remains the possibility that a broader universal plan will drain resources from a program they like as it is, thank you very much.”

The Daily Show has some thoughts on the motivation that drives these people.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Healther Skelter

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So what is making these people so unhinged? Is it the thought that any Democratic president must necessarily be evil, and that a black one has to be the anti-Christ? Could they be that unhinged? It is strange because Obama is not even a liberal. He has kept and even increased the secrecy practices of the Bush regime, he is not planning a total pull out of Iraq any time soon (if ever, which I doubt), he is rapidly escalating the US war in Afghanistan, he has done little to advance gay rights, he has refused to close down the torture prisons that the US runs in other countries or to forbid the policy of extraordinary renditions, he is not prosecuting the lawbreaking torturers of the Bush regime, he has continued policies friendly to Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular, he has undermined support for a single-payer health care system, he continues the violation of human and constitutional rights such as habeas corpus, and so on.

We should not be that surprised. As cartoonist Tom Tomorrow points out, Obama has made vague promises into an art form that enabled his starry-eyed followers to read into his speeches what they wanted to hear and thus believe he was far more liberal than he really is. As a reality check, this website keeps a scorecard on Obama’s promises. Sam Smith also keeps tabs on Obama.

So why are these people so angry about his presidency when he is really not opposed to their interests in any fundamental way, just making changes in the margins? I do not believe that their anger is completely artificial, although powerful interest groups are definitely bankrolling and urging these groups on. Is it as simple as racism, that these people cannot stand the prospect of white people not having exclusive control of the power structure, even if the minorities who replace them pursue pretty much the same policies?

The Daily Show has some thoughts on the racial fears that seem to be driving at least some of these people batty.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Reform Madness – White Minority

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POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the level of current discourse

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By now everyone must have heard about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. flap, where the Harvard academic had a confrontation with a Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley, when he was seen by neighbors breaking into his own home when could not open his front door. What should have been a simple misunderstanding that was quickly settled ended up with Gates being arrested and even president Obama being dragged into it as well.

As might have been expected, people have focused on the race aspect of the incident (Gates is black, Crowley is white) and the class aspect of the town-gown divide (Gates being perceived as a member of the privileged Harvard faculty and Crowley as working class).

So were race and class factors? In America, any encounter between people of different races always carries with it a racial subtext. That is inevitable and unavoidable. Underlying this whole episode is the almost universal feeling among black people that police treat them far worse than they do white people. Black people are always conscious that actions that would be seen as innocent if done by white people are viewed with suspicion when done by blacks. This is because black people of whatever status in society have usually experienced an incident where they were personally treated negatively by the police and other security personnel, even though they were totally innocent. This feeling is so strong in the black community that it explains the rare verbal misstep that Obama made when, instead of keeping out of the fray because he did not have all the facts (and he should not feel obliged to comment on every incident anyway), he ventured the comment that the police acted ‘stupidly’ in this incident.

It is a rare white person who has had that kind of negative experience at the hands of the police. At the risk of over-generalizing, white people, especially those in the middle and upper classes, tend to look on the police as their friends and protectors, while black people tend to look on them as a necessary evil.

Class conflict is a trickier issue in the US, since it is less spoken of by the general public but, like race, is always present in any encounter between people of different classes. Police officers in general get infuriated when people try to intimidate them with the “Do you know who I am?” and the “I know important people and can make life hard for you” class-based rhetoric that some people try to use to intimidate officers who are merely doing their duty, in order to avoid being charged with some minor offense.

So while race and class had to be factors in the Gates-Crowley incident, the real question is whether race and class played a greater role than usual here. That is hard to say, without knowing more about the people involved and the details of the incident. And since much of the contentious elements of the exchange occurred when only Crowley and Gates were present, we might never know.

What I would guess is that over and above the race and class issues, what escalated the confrontation between Gates and Crowley is that for each person the encounter created a sense of lese majeste, which Merriam-Webster defines as originating as “an offense violating the dignity of a ruler as the representative of a sovereign power” but now is used more generally as “a detraction from or affront to dignity or importance.”

Gates is an academic superstar and people outside academia may not be aware of how deferentially such people are treated in the normal course of their work lives. Although in any administrative flow chart of a university, faculty members like Gates are at the bottom of the hierarchy, ranking below their department heads, deans, provosts, and university presidents, in reality they are more famous, more powerful, and more valued by their institutions than their nominal superiors. They carry a lot of clout and every one around them treads very gingerly for fear of giving offense because such people will be quickly snapped up by rival institutions if they are not accorded the proper respect. So Gates is used to being treated like royalty and it must have been galling for him to be treated and talked to like just an ordinary person, let alone an ordinary black person.

Police officers are also used to people being very deferential to them. First of all, they are armed and can easily injure or even kill you. They also have the power to arrest, harass, taser, or otherwise make life very difficult for you. So most people, even if they are innocent and think that they have been wrongly stopped or questioned by the police, will talk to them politely, even obsequiously, so that they do not give the police an excuse to book them. When people do challenge police, the charge of ‘disorderly conduct’ can and is routinely invoked against them, as was done against Gates, since this is a very elastic term that gives a police officer wide latitude with which to arrest someone, even if the challenge consists of merely expressing annoyance or anger. The phrase ‘disorderly conduct’ is sometimes referred as being a euphemism for the crime of ‘contempt of cop’.
See this Colbert Report clip of police tasering people, including a 72-year old great-grandmother, who did not show sufficient ‘respect’ to the police officer.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Current Events – Tasers

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Can anyone doubt that the feisty great-grandmother was being punished with a tasering purely because the police officer was offended by her act of lese majeste?

People who are routinely treated with excessive deference, such as Gates and Crowley, are the ones who are most likely to overreact to perceived affronts, unless they are highly self-controlled or have a well-developed self-deprecating sense of humor. It is very likely that what triggered Gates’ outburst against Crowley was the thought that he, a famous academic, used to being kowtowed to, was being asked to show his identification in his own home by a lowly policeman, an act that, while not unreasonable under the circumstances under which the officer was summoned, he would have perceived as an act of lese majeste. It is very likely that what triggered Crowley’s use of the disorderly conduct arrest charge was that Gates talked back at him and demanded his name and number, again an act that while not unreasonable, would have also been seen by him as an act of lese majeste.

What is surprising is that Gates, whose field of study is race, seems to have been taken by surprise by being treated the way other blacks are routinely treated. This may be because, as Ishmael Reed suggests, Gates has benefited professionally from being a leading proponent of the view that America is now a post-racial society, which is why he reacted so angrily to the way that most black men are used to being treated all the time. Reed says that Gates actually got off easy. “If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!”

All in all, it is an unfortunate incident, symptomatic of what happens when two self-important people prick each others’ ego balloons, resulting in an absurd situation in which the president ends up having to invite them both to the White House for a highly publicized beer, further feeding their already inflated sense of self-importance.

POST SCRIPT: Larry Wilmore on the Gates incident

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Henry Louis-Gate – Race Card

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