ANOTHER SLANT ON CONSCIOUNESS: Vulnerability, Presence, and Power

A while back I did a post on Hillary (Hillary and the Woman Thing) in which I talked about her appeal to me when she allowed herself to feel and show vulnerability. She became a much more three-dimensional figure, and I felt her presence as never before. It was a wonderful complement as well as an antidote to her poised and tough persona, which strikes me as too image-bound. This, among other things, got me thinking about how female power might differ from male power and even more generally about the connection between vulnerability, presence, and power. I will flirt with the first question here but end up focusing on the second.

I knew I had to write about this, yet it is a challenging topic. On the face of it, vulnerability isn't power, its weakness. It's a bit like claiming that up is down. I had only a sketchy, nonverbal sense about why I felt so strongly that this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Then I attended a seminar at the Women's Studies Research Center, where I work, by my colleague Hilde Hein, a philosopher who studies museums. During her talk she presented a double analogy she had used years ago in a talk on aesthetics. She showed on one side of the screen a picture of a proud aggressive looking nail and on the other a more humble sewing needle just entering some fabric. Below is her eloquent description of these different implements, taken from her early paper. She writes that both are employed, “…to bind together diverse substances, both [are] progenitors of socially significant structures." You will have no difficulty knowing him from her.”

He is strong, rigid, and straight, with a point at one end, the better to penetrate resistance substances, and a strong head at the other. A few sharp and well directed strokes fix him firmly in place....He remains there, stalwart and unyielding until the material that he punctures softens and rots away and he himself becomes brittle and rusted. She, by contrast, is pliant, sleek and tapered, her purpose integrated continuously throughout her form, which is, however distinctively marked by a hole at one end. A thread, introduced through that orifice, is carried distributed and left behind to hold together and shape a unity out of separate fabrics, which, once joined,live out their collective identity long after she has passed to be of service elsewhere.

This fable of gender difference intrigued me---the commanding authoritarian male who actively maintains structures with iron force as opposed to the more generative female whose nurturing guidance leaves only an inter-psyche thread. I found myself thinking about it when I woke up the next morning and sensed that this was a way into what I wanted to say. Among other things, its truth/ non-truth quality---its aptness along with its limitations as a caricature---captures the ambivalence I feel about framing this issue through a gender lens.

In her paper Hilde focuses initially on the different kinds of artifacts and then art each produces. I will focus only (and only briefly) on the different kinds of sheltering each provides for us. The strong proud nail is essential to the outer boundary layer that separate us from the environment--- our building and houses. The more humble and well traveled needle is essential to creating a boundary layer closer in--- our clothing.

Yet we humans, both male and female, are made of the softer penetrable stuff on the outside at least. The boundary of our body with the external world, our skin and flesh, is soft and permeable like cloth. Because of this we can experience the kiss of a young spring breeze on our face and the joyful effervescence of bubble bath. Of course it also means we wound and tear. To keep out infection and to heal, we have to be sown together, with needles---and nowadays disappearing thread.

We are no crustaceans separated from the world by a hardened shell. Instead the tougher stuff, the more rigid part of our body, our bones, are hidden inside. When they break or fracture, nails---or even mental plates---may be required to keep them in place and maintain the integrity of our skeletal structure.

We are made to be permeable to the external world and to each other. (In fact what are called mirror neurons in our brain make us mirror the feelings of others even when we are unaware of doing so.) To the extent that we experience and reveal our inherent vulnerability, we paradoxically reveal the stronger stuff inside. When Hillary's face revealed her vulnerability when her opponent came over to her podium in a debate during her first Senate campaign demanding she sign a statement, she seemed not only more likable, but stronger and more resilient. We saw the bones of her Being. This moment of being seems to have been the turning point in the race.

When we defend against external forces we don't like and the feelings they bring up---something alas we all do---we pretend we can maintain ourselves inviolate. Like George Bush we hold the line and become the decider of what we will let in and what we will keep out. Instead of feeling our vulnerability to the vicissitudes of life and fate, we turn it around and preemptively---and/or indiscriminately---kick ass. (The more openly vulnerable the target, the better to deflect our own banished feelings.) Instead of strength, we show meanness or bravado. Instead of letting life reveal the bones of being human, we try to stage manage it so it becomes an endless photo op.

The truth is we can't keep out difficult feelings, and perhaps especially painful vulnerability. It is inherent in the curse and gift of consciousness. Even if we try to deflect them by projecting them outward and making sure others feel them instead, they still leave their mark on us---in our muscles and maybe even our bones. In some real sense we store the unpleasant feelings we wish to keep out inside our bodies. (Remember the old saying that you become what you resist.)

My chiropractor tells me that like muscles, bones can hold tension. I'm not completely sure how this works; it could be that bones can store blocked Ch'i, or life force. In any case, the muscles that hold the bones in place have to maintain tension to do their job. I suppose as a result they can hold a certain amount of unnecessary tension as well. Difficult feelings we refuse to feel also can be stored in the patterns of reaction of muscles, including presumably the muscles that hold the bones. Whatever the mechanism, unfelt feelings tend to make our bodies function in a rigid and stiff or otherwise maladaptive way---the very opposite of the resilience and flexibility we all desire.

Experiencing vulnerability is not the same as feeling victimized. Nor does it mean taking to heart what another is saying or doing. Being vulnerable in the sense I am using it means fully feeling whatever is happening and letting it reverberate through the bones of one’s being. What I found so magnificent about Hillary in the debate in her first Senate race I described above was that she was completely present to that difficult moment.

This is a more difficult task with a backlog of stored trauma, as many of us have, or just stuff. But it is not impossible, just more of a challenge. The trick, it would seem, is to be completely permeable. This means feeling whatever is happening, remaining present as it reverberates through both our bodies and our being as long as it needs to, and then letting it pass out through the other side.

This ability to be fully present in the moment---and the next moment and the next moment--- feeling one's vulnerability to the external world and whatever it brings and brings up, links vulnerability not only to presence, but to real power. In difficult situations, correct action---actions which will serve others as well as the self---can only come from being present to what is happening as it echoes through our being before it goes out the other side. This is true whether it calls for the forceful structuring of the nail, the more gentle guidance of the needle, or something in between. No doubt we will often get it wrong, but with the effort to stay conscious, perhaps we can get it right much more of the time.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE and...(an illuminating conjunction)!

One of a series of 36 posters by Pamela Davis Kivelson for the PDK Poster Project on Women in Science.

The title of the article on women in science was a little bit odd, "Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?" and there were some other clues as well. But my misgivings were allayed by the following sentence that appeared close to the beginning. "The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, sensible answer." I experienced a pleasurable crisp feeling as I read that.

I have been somewhat less condemning of the Lawrence Summers escapade (transcripts of his comments) than most of my colleagues at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis. (See also) As a scientist I feel that even controversial, "politically incorrect" data should get an airing, especially if it speaks to critical cultural controversies. However, I have to acknowledge that I cannot say how I would have reacted had I been at his presentation.

The facts seem clearly stated in the third paragraph of the article. “ Women comprise just 19% of tenure-track professors in math, 11% in physics, 10% in computer science, and 10% in engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 25% of the Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences---way up from the 4% of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields." This apparently clear statement of the facts along with the crisp sentence cited above helped set me up (primed me) to be more accepting of the author's argument than I otherwise might have been.

She argues that the low percentage of women in these fields reflects the female tendency to prefer careers connected to nurturing. She cites, for example, a survey in which 1500 professors (gender breakdown not given) were asked what accounts for the low percentage of women and 74% chalked it up to differences in interests. She also cites work by Baron-Cohen suggesting that autism is the far end of the male spectrum. He feels that the male brain on average is wired to be better at systematizing and the female brain better at empathizing.

In a skillfully presented case, the author suggests that the campaign to get more women in these as well as other aspects of science is not just a con, but a juggernaut completely out of control. Those on the gender equality in the sciences bandwagon have hoodwinked university presidents, the NSF, and now even Congress into making a nonexistent problem a cause célèbre. A Title IX program for the physical sciences analogous to the Title IX program for sports is in effect (although its requirements have apparently been unevenly enforced). They have been able to do this, she claims, because of:

… a body of feminist research that purports to prove (emphasis added) that women suffer from “hidden bias.” This research, artfully (emphasis added) presented with no critics or skeptics present, can be persuasive. A brief look at it helps explain the mind-set of the critics and their supporters. But it is a highly ironic story. For the three recognized canons of literature are, in key respects, travesties of the scientific method, and they have been publicized and promoted in ways that ignore elementary standards of transparency in objectivity.

Since I only had the information the author gave me, at first reading I found her arguments plausible against two of the three sources used to bolster the feminists perspective (see below however). Introducing the third source, she wrote “How in the face of women's clear tendencies to choose other careers and more balanced lifestyles, can one reasonably attribute the scarcity of women in science and engineering to unconscious bias and sexist discrimination? Valian showed the way.” Quoting Valian, she continues:

In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action...[and being] assertive, instrumental, and task oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different: it includes being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.

Continuing to describe Valian's work, she says:

Valian does not deny that schemas have a foundation in biology, but she insists that culture can intensify or diminish their power and their effect. Our society, she says, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop "a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement." All this inevitably result in a permanently unfair advantage for men.

I recognized some deep resonance with Valian’s claims. However just as I was starting to reconsider the easy pass I was giving the argument of the author of the article I was reading, I learned about mandatory gender bias workshops in which interactive theater about exaggerated situations is used to try to raise the consciousness of physicists and engineers who get government grants. This did seem over-the-top. I was also kept in line by a report of a Title IX review requiring a female physics professor to make a list of all the equipment in the lab and indicate whether women were allowed to use each item.

I finished the article and then noticed that what I had been reading was published in the American Enterprise Institute bimonthly newsletter. I also recognized that the author Christina Hoff Sommers had written an intensely antifeminist book (while claiming herself as a true feminist). Uh-huh, I thought to myself.

In retrospect, the last paragraph of the article made perfect sense.Sommer's wrote, "Americans scientific excellence is a precious natural resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation's health and safety" She then points out that people from MIT have started more than 5000 companies in the past 50 years. She asks, "Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?"

Cooperative science works, and more of it sounds great to me. Moreover, as current events strongly argue, the well-being of our economy and our health and safety as citizens depends considerably more on having leaders capable of objectivity and willing to assure adequate government regulation and than it does on resisting any hypothetical decline in scientific and technological innovation that having more women in these fields might bring. Besides having more women might increase innovation!

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Without thinking more about the article, I went on to my real task for the evening. It was once again rereading a paper by John Bargh and Melissa Fergerson on the automaticity of higher mental processes. They reviewed studies showing that researchers can prime all kinds of higher level behavior most of us generally assume depends primarily on conscious processes. For example just by giving subjects scrambled sentences containing several words relating to a stereotype they can prime subjects to identify with a stereotype and thereby influence their behavior. In one study subjects were primed with the stereotype of university professor or hooligan. In a second apparently unrelated task, those primed with the professor stereotype answered more Trivial Pursuit questions than those primed with hooligan.

Even as I have appreciated the growing body of work in Social Psychology on automatic behavior, I have been a bit resistant to it. For one thing, it seems that random priming influences would more or less cancel out in real life. Also this work is often used to make the point that introspection is useless since our behavior is governed by extraneous influences of which we are unaware. Certainly introspection, like anything else, has its limits, but it is often invaluable.

That night the words of the article almost danced on the page. I really got it, or the version of it that makes sense to me. Even very subtle consistent environmental influences can over time have a powerful and long-lasting effect on the psyche. Once again, the message about the power of conditioning hit home. Wow!



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The next morning as I lay in bed, I was quite astonished when I recognized the relevance of the work on automaticity to the women in science problem. No wonder the words danced on the page! The women in science article had in a sense primed me to get the social psychology material on environmental priming (and vice versa as well--- why not reverse priming since things stick around in our head?).

As I lay there, my thoughts kept coming back to the female junior physics professor who Sommers claimed had been required to list for Title IX reviewers whether women were allowed to use each piece of equipment. I wondered whether she had instead been asked to report, on the basis of equipment logs, the percentage of time women got to use important pieces of equipment versus men? Such a question could provide data on one aspect of potential implicit gender bias in laboratories. (The other question, if it makes sense that all, would look at explicit bias.) So I decided to check out Sommers sources. Yes, I found that the female junior physics professor, not shy about her hostility to Title IX review,really did tell a reporter for Science Magazine that she was required to list all her equipment and say if female lab members could use each piece. (I still suspect this is not the whole story.)

I will not consider the second gender-bias-in-science source Sommers critiques, as the story is too convoluted. However Sommers was less than judicious in her comments about the summary of the in-house MIT report made available to the public---which was what got the "gender equality in science" movement going in the first place. For example, she quotes from an ungenerous source, conservative anti-feminist Judith Kleinfeld who calls it “junk science” for not obtaining confidential informationin some cases and not revealing it in others.

In contrast I was struck by the judicious and sincere tone of the report. For example, on page 8, it says, “Data reviews revealed that in some departments, men and women faculty appear to share equally in material resources and rewards, in others they did not.”

Sommers in addition claims that the summary, which was publicized as showing objectively that there was a woman in science problem, failed to do so. I disagree since it documented the most important piece of information. It shows that from 1985-1994 the proportion of women in senior faculty positions in MIT’s School of Science remained constant at roughly 8%.

She also suggests the authors of the report might be misconstruing the broader problem in a critical way. Quoting from the report, she writes: [The summary concedes]“Junior women felt included and supported by their departments." Sommers continues: "Instead of acknowledging that the problem might be generational and confined to a small group of senior women from three departments, Hopkins and the other authors of the report claimed that the Junior women were naïve and simply did not know what was in store for them: [Again quoting the report] "Each generation of young women began... by believing that gender discrimination was solved in the previous generation and would not touch them.”

Quite to the contrary, the scientists place this paradox close to the core of their understanding of the problem. It is what we call the glass ceiling.

An important finding to emerge from the interviews was that the difference in the perception of junior and senior women faculty about the impact of gender on their careers is a difference that repeats itself over generations. Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was "solved" in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result. (p. 9: from section called: What the Committee Learned)

Implicit gender bias increases as women climb the academic latter . [From the summary of the report by the chair of the MIT faculty, p. 3:] "It was only when they came together, and with persistence and integrity, that they saw that as their careers advanced something else besides competence came into play, which for them meant an accumulation of slight disadvantages, with just the opposite for their male colleagues.

Two other paragraphs struck me as I read the report, especially after having "got" the work on priming.

...While the reasons for discrimination are complex, a critical part of the explanation lies in our collective ignorance. We must accept that what happened to the tenured women faculty in the School of Science is what discrimination is. It defines discrimination in the period from the 1970s up till today. But we, including for a long time the women faculty themselves, were slow to recognize and understand this for several reasons. First, it did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. Most of us thought that the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action had solved gender "discrimination". But gender discrimination turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize. Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its "special circumstances." Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.

They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful, but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty in the light of obvious goodwill. Like many discoveries, at first it is startling and unexpected. Once you "get it," it seems almost obvious. Of (p.10-11: from section called: How Did Inequality Come about? “Gender Discrimination” in 1999).

By 1999 when the summary of the 1995 report was released as a result of its recommendations the percentage of female tenured faculty at MIT in the sciences had increased to 13%, representing a 40% increase. However as far as I can ascertain, the percentage seems to have remained relatively steady since. Certainly there are fewer women than men who want to go into these fields, no doubt in part because of innate preferences. But implicit bias against women in science, which women as well as men harbor, exacerbates the situation. (By the way, you might might want to test and see if you have unconscious bias that associates science more with men than women.)

Finally this brings us back to those over-the-top workshops on gender bias mandated by Title IX. Implicit gender bias, like other implicit bias, is nearly impossible for us to become aware of on our own. Workshops on gender bias using interactive theater and exaggerated situations, rather than indicating a feminist agenda out of control, may make sense as a way to shake up implicit as well as explicit bias. However I feel it might be even more important to have workshops in junior high, high school, and college that help counteract the bias against becoming a scientist in the young women themselves harbor.

Hillary and the Woman Thing

Written after the Iowa Caucuses and before the New Hampshire Primary

Like many others, I have trouble imagining the United States electing a woman president. I certainly like the idea,--but. Hillary might make an excellent president, but she is too relentlessly perky, too full of high notes, and exudes too little feeling for me. I prefer subtlety and a sense of depth. After eight agonizing years of putting up with George Bush and his pseudo-Texan act, I want our president to be someone highly unlikely to ever, ever, grate on me.

I understand Hillary developed the public personality she has in part in response to her need to excel and to excel in a man's world. However it is not the only possible response. I began writing this in part to do whatever little I could to encourage her to reveal other sides of herself.

What I find so interesting about the Hillary situation is that it is very likely that a moment of public vulnerability got her elected to the Senate in the first place and thus started her own career in public office. In her first Senate race, her opponent Rick Lazio was giving her a good fight; they were even in the polls. A lightweight Republican, who seemed he would do anything to win, he came over to her podium in one of the debates and aggressively demanded that she sign a no soft-money pledge. (He meanwhile was benefiting from a lot of anti-Clinton advertising from Republicans.) She responded to this invasion of her space by looking very vulnerable, human, and un-slick. I found myself really liking and respecting her in that moment. I am convinced that instant of emotional honesty turned the tide, and for what it is worth a number of commentators agreed.

I've heard on network news, which I sometimes catch snippets of at the gym, that Hillary has been trying to show her softer side. I haven't seen the actual clips of her appearances I have to admit. However I suspect that this means being folksy, down-home, and open hearted. I think all these things are fine and I don't think she should stop, but this is not what I really want from her.

Nor am I suggesting that she go out of her way to express vulnerability. However along with the vulnerability in that pivotal encounter in her first Senate race came a moment of Presence. I felt I glimpsed her strength of character as well as humanness as never before. Yes experiencing---never mind showing---that vulnerability is probably something that only a woman would do. But the sense of Presence and essential humanness that came with it got her an elected position her own.

Besides being smart and politically savvy, isn't this sense of Presence, of beingness, what we want from our leaders, men or women. With it, good leaders become statesmen and stateswomen; they inspire us. If I got to see more of this and less shiny persona from Hillary, I would not hesitate to vote for her. I would even work enthusiastically to help elect her as the first woman President of the United States.

Written after the New Hampshire Primary and just before the Nevada Caucuses

I don't get to vote for a couple of weeks, but Hillary probably now has my backing. It was not her moment in the diner in New Hampshire, which didn't really impress me that much---probably too down home and folksy for me. Instead in part it was the picture of her that appears at the very end of the following ad, which I happened to see on television the day before the diner event. None of the pictures of her here are particularly glamorous or slick, but you will know the one I am talking about when you see it. She exudes a kind of depth that is really striking.(Click hard on the arrow in the center or the You Tube icon at the bottom right; it sometimes takes some patience).

Some might say it's only PR. But you can't fake an expression like this or this kind of depth. It is part of her repertoire and I am delighted to see it.

(By the way, I do respond to Obama's rhetoric. He often exudes the kind of Presence I hope for in a political leader, but not when talking policy. My intuition while watching the last New Hampshire debate was that his oratorical skills are somewhat ahead of his governing skills and he is not ready yet.)

There is another factor working in synergy with my newly confirmed sense of Hillary's potential soulfulness that seems to be nudging me into her camp. The Democratic primary, at one level, hinges on the politics of disadvantage. Even though I was leaning towards Edwards, when I heard polls saying Obama was 12 points ahead of Hillary in New Hampshire, I didn't like it one bit. I suspect a lot of women felt this way. I actually felt a bit depressed.

Perhaps it really is time for a woman---and a woman who has that wonderful deep and un-slick expression in her repertoire, even if it is very different from her ususal self-presentation---to shepherd this country. Don't forget Golda, who had 'the look' (see last post, where she makes a cameo appearance), and was among Israel's most significant leaders. My advice to Hillary is: Play the gender card, but in the process transform it into something profound!

You might find this amusing. I was tempted to use it at the top, but thought better of it. You have to scroll down to fully appreciate it.

Thank You Michael Chertoff: Intuition, Gut Feelings, and the Bush Administration

Thank you Michael Chertoff. I’ve been waiting for the chance to write about this administration and intuition. So you had a gut feeling that the Islamic terrorists are going to attack us soon. Don't we all. (Picture of Mr Chertoff and his gut from http://tildology.com/category/michael-chertoff/)

Yes you have access to more information than the rest of us. You could be integrating this below awareness and coming up with something more significant than the vague feeling we all have---even though you say there was nothing specific besides increased activity in Al Qaeda training camps. But balancing this is the proclivity of this administration to play the fear card when they want to change the subject. More and more Republicans are falling off the Iraq war bandwagon. Seems to me if this gut feeling were anything other than a political ploy you would have raised the terror level to the next color---silly as that might be. Instead you just tried to raise the fear level.

Whether or not you actually had a gut feeling about this---you are only a bit player. But your boss Bush is known for going with his gut and he has consequently helped give intuition somewhat of a bad name. I feel a need to defend my topic of study against his now infamous incompetence and the incompetence of most everyone on whom he depends.

Intuition has a very complex relationship to gut feelings. (For another take on this relationship from a different perspective---see Reason vs. Intuition.) The intuition of Bush and his administration seems effective only when geared to winning power. I would even say it is magnificent on that score. They are incredibly inventive, even uncanny in their judgment here. Also they appear to leave no stone unturned in their desire to seek their own political advantage. But their intuition doesn’t seem to work very well for them when the task is instead to look after the best interests of the country. Their gut feelings and whatever else they integrate into their decisions have been for the most part wrong and very often spectacularly so---with disastrous results.

I suspect part of the problem is lack of motivation at the deepest level. They seem not to care about the well-being of the country--- and certainly not about governing as an art. Instead it is all about their raw power. How could their gut feelings work so well for them some of the time and not at all at other times?

Gut feelings are grounded in emotions. Although emotions get a bad rap, they are essential to us. They are evolution's way of assuring that our survival needs are taken care of so that we will survive and even thrive. As Spinoza pointed out---way before Darwin--- thriving is our basic task as biological organisms, and emotions play an important role in this task---up to a point.

Emotions are closely coupled to biological drives at least to begin with---such as the need to satisfy hunger, avoid danger, to reproduce, and to gather information about the world. But with time, the positive or negative arousal---or constellation of bodily feelings---associated with different emotions get connected to many other things. Largely without our awareness, these bodily feelings have an important role in guiding behavior and decision-making ----just as is true with other animals. A recent NYT article titled Who's Minding the Mind? summarizes some recent work showing that experimenters can manipulate our unconscious feelings without our awareness and thereby affect our subsequent behavior---at least to a certain degree.

What these positive and negative feelings get connected to over time depends on the interaction of individual biology, training and education, and of course the vagaries of chance. Emotions eventually come to determine our most basic values--- what motivates us, or is important to us---what we care about. But these do not necessarily correspond to what we hold as values at a conscious level, although they might. Rather these unconscious values are reflected in some underlying consistency that characterizes our behavior over time--- and they can be very different.

Gut feelings are thus a generic term for largely unconscious bodily feelings that direct behavior according to our values. (The work of Antonio Damasio has been very important in establishing the importance of somatic feelings to decision-making.) The bottom line is that for the most part we only have trustworthy gut feelings about things that are important to us at this unconscious level---which I will stress again may or may not correspond to what at a conscious level we hold to be our values.

Bush and his lackeys care about power, not about governing or even about Democracy. (Who with a deep interest in democracy would label themselves “The Decider?”) When Bush goes with his gut about anything other than what bears on accumulating power, as far as I can ascertain, he is not interested in the subject. He seems to have instead simply incorporated into his visceral guidance system the need to further the aims of others who are likely to advance his power.

Our strange and dangerous President is unusually lacking in that aspect of emotion that motivates us to be interested in the world and its workings in what seems to be at first glance a more or less non-partisan way. Yet in the long run this capacity to be interested for interests’ sake has had an essential role in our survival both as individuals and as a species. It has certainly been responsible for our collective scientific endeavor and our technological prowess, which (at least up to this point) have been important to our ability to thrive.

Power, of course, like gut feeling and its relationship to intuition is a many sided issue. Technological power (independent of the uses which some put it to) is a less raw kind of power than the kind that tends to motivate the bullies of this world---such as George Bush. Alas his favorite nickname in some circles “the Chimp,” is surprisingly apt (with apologies of course to many Chimpanzees). Like many others, my gut feelings tell me that any President whose need for power may know no bounds is just as dangerous to America as an external attack.

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I was recently in Prague where I visited the Museum of Communism. The exhibit about the secret police stressed that wiretapping under communism, in contrast to what happens in Democratic Countries, required no court order!

Voters Beware---A True Fable

Because of a repetitive strain injury, I use a voice activated word processing program. Sometimes it misunderstands me, especially when I don't speak clearly or have a cold. At other times the program actually inserts words unbidden on the screen while I am sitting at the computer with the microphone on, silently thinking. Its preferred words to sneak in are “he,” “she,” and “and.”

The word “and” seems to be a wildcard; maybe it's the sound of ringing in my computers ears. I suspect that “he,” comes from heavier than usual breathing on my part, while “she” comes from inadvertent sniffling or sighing. Yet this cannot be the whole story, since sometimes five “he”-s or “she”-s in a row mysteriously appear on the screen. On occasion I have even found a whole line of “he he he he” or “she she she.” Perhaps it is my word processor trying to parse the sound of the wind ---heeeee or sheeee.

A couple of weeks ago out of the blue my friend and word processor, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, inserted the word “Bush” extraneously in mid-sentence. Unfortunately I didn't catch it until after I sent the file to a group of people. Intriguingly Dragon inserted “Bush” just before it wrote---at my request---“radical re-contextualization.”

When I finally did catch the mistake, I kept looking at it---because it seemed somehow to fit. Certainly Bush has radically re-contextualized the political landscape. To my thinking this has not for the better.

The truth is that even though I study intuition, I'm not ready to have my voice activated word processor read my (unconscious) mind---especially when the addition is off-topic. Of course, I do have to admit I am obsessed about this midterm election. In any case I am greatly relieved to report that the word “Bush” did not make sense in the larger context of the sentence or the paragraph, at least as far as I can tell.

Just a few minutes ago--- Dragon did it again! But this time instead of the word “Bush” it inserted the word “Reagan”-- it was in fact the possessive form, “Reagan's.” But Reagan's what?

I don't know because I erased it in horror. I wish I hadn’t, because it too might have had contained some little nugget of suggestive voice-activated word processor, self-activated wisdom. But horrified I was because Reagan started this radical re-contextualization of the political landscape, and because this is beginning to look like a trend.

Being a sensible person, I looked for another reason. I had no success; intead it got worse. I can conceive that the wind sometimes sounds may sound like “Bush”--- “wussh.” Yet by no stretch of the imagination does the wind ever sound like “Reagan’s.”

Maybe Diebold slipped a short bit of code into my Dragon software that biases it towards hearing ambiguous words, or even silence, as the name of conservative icons? Perhaps the Diebold people are working with the Dragon people? Perhaps the Diebold people even surreptitiously inserted it into a recent Dragon automatic update in time for the election?

My rational mind says forget it. But something in me says don't be so quick---only forget it provisionally. In fact, at some level, I can't help myself. I am waiting to see if in the next year or so my Dragon proves its lack of bias by spewing forth unbidden “Obama,” “Hillary,” “Gore,” “Kerry,” or “Edwards.” To give it lots of leeway and help restore the world to its right order, I will also accept “Clinton,” “Roosevelt,” “Kennedy,” “Truman,” “Carter,” or even “LBJ.”