Reframing Our Relationship to Life

Ismael (Richard Basehart) and Queequeg (Friedrich von Ledebur) in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick. “Heathen” Queequeg represented the goodness that Christianity preaches, but seldom obeys in practice.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (1851), is arguably one of the greatest works in literature, and the subject of many critical studies.
One of the clearest interpretations* I’ve found is that Captain Ahab represents the will to dominate the world (above all other considerations), while the white whale represents unpredictable Life.

Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) dies plunging his harpoon into the white whale. Ahab didn’t care about his ship staying sound or the lives of his crew; he only desires revenge. (Does this remind you of a presidential candidate whose name begins with a T?)

Stories in which the creatures of the ocean fight back against humanity are also found among the first science-fiction tales.
In 1870, French author Jules Verne (1828-1905) wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, in which giant squid capsize ships.

1912 book cover of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote the short story “The Sea-Raiders” (1896), about large predatory squid that creep ashore to devour human beings.
In 1936, Karel Čapek (1890-1938) wrote War with the Newts, a novel about intelligent salamanders who win primacy over the earth.
The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham (1953), is the story of entities from beneath the oceans attacking coastal towns, eliminating the glaciers, and sinking vessels.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm (2015), a team of marine biologists are able to communicate with an amoeba-like intelligence that is attacking humankind, and has lived in the oceans for millions of years.
This memorandum compares the last three novels in the above list.

Book cover of Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts.

War with the Newts begins with a Czech seaman Van Toch “discovering” intelligent newts off the coast of Sumatra.
Captain Van Toch finds that the nearly human-sized black salamanders are “teachable” and willing to bring him precious pearls in exchange for human-made tools.
He travels back to Czechia to persuade a businessman (Mr. Bondy) to fund money-making schemes that use the newts.
For the first few years, their company just uses the newts to gather pearls.
(However, that industry merely reaps a 30% profit.)
Unsatisfied with those numbers, the company begins to use the newts for elaborate hydro-engineering projects.
During the next few years, humans become ever more dependent on the newts: as a free labor source, and as consumers for human goods.

Book cover of The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham.

Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes is told from the viewpoint of a married couple (Phyllis and Mike Watson) who are science writers for a British competitor to the BBC.
Another main character is a scientist named Alastair Bocker.
At first, Dr. Bocker believes that humankind can coexist with the beings from the deep, but he later realizes that war is necessary.
The mysterious entities begin to sink ships, and the observation chambers sent to investigate them.
Then, they send gigantic jellyfish-like beings to carry off humans, injuring those that they don’t absorb.
Eventually, the creatures melt the icecaps causing the sea level to rise, so that the earth population is reduced by at least four-fifths.

Original German book cover of Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm.

In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, marine biologists gradually begin to understand that attacks by sea creatures, worms that destabilize the continental shelf, lobsters that spread poison, and swarms of white eyeless crabs are all a connected strategy.
They’re able to communicate with the amoeba-like creatures (controlled by a collective intelligence, the Yrr) that attacked humanity.
The novel concludes with a seeming truce between humankind and the newly-discovered marine life-form.

Čapek’s War with the Newts deals with humanity becoming dependent on sentient beings that it considers “inferior.”
However, the “subservient” amphibians become the primary power on the planet, as they remake the globe to match their own needs.
In The Kraken Wakes, an intelligence comes from the stars, and proceeds to remolding the earth as its’ new watery habitat.
(In both novels, the battle isn’t so much a war against humankind, as gentrification.)
In The Swarm, the goal of the “hive mind” may be to increase ocean area, but its’ other goal is likely to stop humanity from harming the ocean ecosystems. 

Book cover of Out of the Deeps, the American (heavily-edited and shortened by one chapter) version of The Kraken Wakes.

Motivations aside, the actions of the creatures are similar.
The newts create earthquakes which result in tidal waves, causing great loss of human life, and many more livable shorelines for the salamanders.
The alien creatures, in The Kraken Wakes, melt the polar ice caps raising the sea level by 120 feet, thereby killing and displacing millions of humans.
In Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm, worms (created by the amoeba-like Yrr) destabilize the continental shelf, causing a massive tsunami, again killing millions.

One quality that the three novels share with Moby Dick is a dark view of human behavior.
In one segment of Čapek’s The War with the Newts, a German newspaper proposes that “because of its German environment that this [the German] newt had developed into a different and superior sub-species, indisputably above the level of any other salamander.”
The Kraken Wakes also points out human defects: the ridiculous infighting as human governments drop nuclear bombs willy-nilly, blame each other, and fail to cooperate against the deep-sea menace.
The Swarm finds comic qualities in the grotesque, nativist belief systems of U.S. government officials.

All three of the science-fiction novels deal to some extent with religion.
In War with the Newts, humankind’s cruelty to sentient creatures is on constant display.
(American Black ministers are among the few that show any compassion toward the enslaved newts.)
In The Kraken Wakes, Mike Watson (speaking of humanity and the creatures in the Deep) tells his wife: “We can’t both inherit the earth.”
In The Swarm, religious groups are thrown into chaos by the concept that humans aren’t the primary life-form on the planet.
(In the epilogue, a Catholic bishop sprinkles “the waves with holy water and ordering the devils to depart.”)

The Swarm is more driven by ideas on ecology than either War with the Newts or The Kraken Wakes.
In the earlier novels, the salamanders and the alien entities (that arrive on earth via fireballs) wish to remake the earth, to make it a better home for their species.
However, the hive mind in The Swarm—by sinking and disabling ships, disrupting deep sea cables, and starting epidemics—seems set on saving the marine ecosystem from humanity.
Only when the Yrr realizes that it may have some commonality with humankind, does it stop its’ onslaught. 

Although many passages in the Bible preach that humanity should live peacefully with nature, people seem most impressed by the line in Genesis 1:26 about humankind having “dominion.”
Most ignore Genesis 9:1-19 in which Noah promises God that he, and his progeny, will become good stewards for “every beast of the earth.”
U.S. history shows that although the first stewards of the North American continent—the 600 Native American tribes—wanted to live in harmony with nature, the conquering (European Christian) worldview was to use the earth as a wealth source: killing beavers and bison to extinction, searching for gold and other minerals, creating havoc in ecosystems.

According to an article in Hakai (hakaimagazine.com), and reprinted in Smithsonian Magazine, humans “kill, collect or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species, mostly for nonfood reasons.”
According to Dr. Andrea Reid (a scientist quoted in *”Humans Take Out More Wild Species Than Any Other Predator on Earth”) “if we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.”

*War in Melville’s Imagination, by Joyce Sparer Adler, The Gotham Library, 1981, pages 55-78.

Pink Flamingos and White Eyeless Crabs

Babs Johnson (Divine) outside her trailer with pink flamingo lawn ornaments in Pink Flamingos.

The above title isn’t a reference to the 1972 John Waters film Pink Flamingos.
Instead, the title comes from a long-ago discussion, when I was fifteen.
I was walking (in a Michigan neighborhood) with a German foreign exchange student.
We passed by a front yard bedecked with pink flamingo* lawn ornaments, when my new friend commented that this was the way she expected all American homes to look.
I got it.
She expected all Americans to be vulgar, ignorant and low-class.
It’s just the way Europeans thought of the U.S.A.
(I tried not to take it personally.)

This memorandum compares the 2006 English translation of the German eco-thriller The Swarm, to the 8-part mini-series (based on the novel), which aired on European TV in March of 2023, and in the U.S. on CW (sadly, the lowest-rated American network).
A future memorandum will deal with science-fiction novels that deal with humankind’s relationship with nature, and the oceans.

The Swarm deals with humanity destroying the oceans—dumping radioactive and industrial waste; laying down deep sea cables with magnetic fields (that interfere with the homing instincts of salmon and eels); and laying waste to ecosystems and coral reefs.
As the result of this activity, entities in the oceans begin to fight back.
Although the novel is science-fiction, and not a scientific book, most critics say The Swarm presents marine biology and geology very accurately.

Board game for The Swarm.

The Swarm novel sold over 4.5 million copies and has been translated into 18 languages.
The mini-series has an international cast, and the mini-series was the most expensive German TV show ever made.
There’s also a popular strategy board game, based on the novel, in which each player sends scientists to confront the ecological catastrophes.

Frank Schätzing, creator of the novel, is of the same generation as the German exchange student I knew in the late 1960s.
In his novel, the U.S. President talks about the “ridiculous little countries” of the U.N., and says that “God’s still holding His protective hand over the West.”
CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt wears “a bright yellow T-shirt bearing the words ‘Kiss me, I’m a Prince,’ stretched over his expansive belly,” when he greets a team of scientists.
The U.S. Defense Secretary arrogantly says to the President: “We are the free world. Europe is part of the American free world.”
(Most of the American government officials featured in the novel are hyper-nationalistic jerks.)

While the basic plots are the same, scientists versus a higher intelligence—that’s existed in the oceans for millions of years—a lot of material couldn’t be used from the 881-page novel.
Some characters (Norwegian biologist Sigur Johanson, American astrophysicist Samantha Crowe, and Canadian biologist Leon Anawak) carry over from the novel, but they’re altered, both in appearance (age and ethnicity) and in personality.
New characters were created, and the novel’s main American villains—General Judith Li, and CIA Deputy Director Jack Vanderbilt—are completely erased from the mini-series plot (probably, because of misguided hopes for reaching the “American market.”)

Scientist Sigur Johanson (Alexander Karim) in the mini-series The Swarm.

At the beginnings of both versions of The Swarm, we’re introduced to several scientists as they begin to realize that a superior intelligence exists deep in the oceans, and is moving against humanity.
Whales overturn ships, and millions of white eyeless crabs invade the shorelines.
A species of marine worm (with teeth) destabilizes the continental shelf, causing a tsunami that kills millions in Northern Europe.
Eventually, some of the scientists are united on a big ship, and attempt to communicate with the intelligence (named the Yrr by Dr. Johanson).
In the novel, the scientists unite on a gigantic U.S. Navy ship.
In the mini-series, a Japanese industrialist finances the mission.

Despite calling out many countries (including Germany) for their non-ecological methods, the novelist does focus, in a few instances, on American actions.
According to one section on the Vietnam War dolphin experiments, the U.S. Navy created a:

Swimmer Nullification Program. . .Those animals were trained to tug at divers’ masks and flippers and disconnect their air-supply. . . The navy strapped hypodermic needles to their beaks and the dolphins were ordered to ram the divers. . . Our animals killed over forty Vietcong and two of our own guys by mistake.

While I’ve read that the U.S. Navy did use dolphins to blow up ships during the Vietnam War, the idea of dolphins being turned into “killing machines” is a bit hard to accept.

A beached orca in the mini-series The Swarm. Its’ brain has been tampered with by the Yrr.

Another sequence deals with the U.S. Navy Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS), and how its’ brain-damaging sonar makes whales beach themselves.
(“Evidently the Americans couldn’t pass up on the opportunity of putting 80% of the world’s oceans under surveillance,” says a Canadian character in the novel.)
However, the U.S. already has plenty to feel guilty about in terms of polluting the oceans with DDT, nuclear waste, and chemicals (in case you’ve never read Rachel Carson’s 1962 science book Silent Spring).

In the novel, the first “physical” interaction with the Yrr occurs when dolphins return to the ship hanger with Yrr and murderous orcas.
Alicia Delaware, and other crew members, die gruesomely, and she’s taken over zombie-style.

Mini-series episode 7 is far less violent than the novel.
In it, after oceanographer Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch) and a robotics expert return to the ship in a submersible, they unknowingly bring the Yrr along.
Later, Alicia Delaware (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers) is alone in the hanger, when she spots a strange glowing form in the water.
The Yrr hijack her nervous system (just as it took over sperm whales, orcas, lobsters, and crabs).
Delaware is the Yrr’s first human experiment, and rather than becoming a zombie, she goes into a coma.

The final chapters of the novel involve the heroes fighting (action-movie style) with part of the U.S. Government.
Aware that destruction of the Yrr might end in earth’s extinction, the scientists hope for co-existence.
However, the American officials just want to eradicate the Yrr. . . no matter the consequences!
(In an attempt to implement their plan, Li and Vanderbilt kill many of the hero-scientists.)

The cover of a new American edition of The Swarm.

The novel ends with the big ship going down, and journalist Karen Weaver traveling down 3,466 meters in a submersible and dropping off a corpse (full of pheromones), for the Yrr to examine.
Only a few scientists and crew members survive the sinking.
Canadian biologist Leon Anawak rescues Karen Weaver from the water in a helicopter.
A year-later, an epilogue reveals that the nations of the earth are slowly recovering from the tsunamis and the Yrr-created pathogens.
We don’t learn much about the Yrr, but they do give surface creatures a reprieve.
However, at the point that the novel ends, humankind has gone into in a deep funk over its’ “loss of primacy,” and armed conflicts are spreading across the globe.

The mini-series ending is not quite as dark as the end of the novel.
Episode 8 concludes with oceanographer Charlie Wagner traveling deep in the submersible (to show “good faith” to the Yrr?), communing with them/it, and (strangely) washing up alive on shore.
Even a comatose Alicia Delaware seems to survive!
Since the last episode was listed as a season finale, and not a series finale, there’s the possibility of a second season.

In Frogs,  millionaire Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) represents those who want to “use up” the earth’s resources, and nature photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) represents those who respect the environment.

Putting The Swarm into context, it’s in the tradition of eco-thrillers. The 1968 Japanese film Genocide, also released as War of the Insects, tells of insects attacking humanity because of humanity's nuclear threat.
(Brave scientists battle the unreasoning American military in that film, as well.)
In 1972’s Frogs, reptiles, insects and amphibians stalk rich patriarch Jason Crockett after he uses poisons against creatures on his estate.
In Phase IV, ants (taken over by a superior intelligence from outer space) wage war against humankind in the American desert. 

Phase IV was released in 1974 with a truncated ending. The “real” ending (“discovered” in 2012) shows people merging with the ants, and a new species being formed. (Paramount found that ending too disturbing to use in the initial release.)

*According to the Wikipedia article on pink flamingos, some U.S. homeowner associations forbid the placement of these lawn ornaments because they lower real estate values.

You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

2009’s District 9 in which members of an extraterrestrial race line up for food in a militarized refugee camp.

The book Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930, by Mark Wyman, explains how millions of immigrants weren’t “immigrants” at all.
They were migrants.
Although there were 20 million migrations between 1890-1924, the return rate for that period averaged 35%, and many “immigrants” crossed the ocean back and forth several times.
Regions with the highest return rates were Southern Italy (60%), Romania (66%), and Slovakia (57%).
Between 1908-1923, 60% of Southern Italians returned to Italy (969,754 Italians out of 1,624,353).
Migrants labored in U.S. mines and stockyards, sweated in factories, and built U.S. transportation systems, but then traveled back home.
Many never considered living in the U.S. long-term, or becoming citizens. 

One reason for returning home was that although American wages were higher, the working conditions were worse.
In 1895, Chicago stockyard workers—mostly migrants—labored alongside children in rooms “flooded with water, foul smells, smoke, and steam” for 10 hours a day and 16 cents an hour (the equivalent of $5.86 per hour today).
Children made half that amount.
25% of the immigrant workers at the Carnegie Steel South Works (in Pittsburg) died or were injured between 1907-1910.
According to Round Trip to America, “travelers on returning ships were repeatedly struck by the large numbers of injured, broken, or ill immigrants on board and the multiplicity of widows.” 

Another reason for people returning home was nativist resentment.
One line from the poem by Emma Lazarus describes immigrants as “the wretched refuse of your teaming shore,” and that’s how migrants—especially those from southern Europe—were perceived.
An immigration inspector claimed in 1887 that the U.S. was “now receiving installments of the ignorant and degraded, a class that is little superior to the Digger Indians of the West.”
(“Digger Indians” is a derogatory term that was created to facilitate Manifest Destiny.)
More than 125 years later, former president Trump proclaimed (in 2023) that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

As soon as many immigrants recognized what they were getting into, a good share (especially those who wanted to stay) stopped working for others, and became entrepreneurs.
The first millionaire American (from 1810 until his death in 1831) was Stephen Girard—a banker and shipowner who was born in France.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, many immigrants started their own grocery stores, bakeries and butcher shops.
Other immigrants founded small toy and food-stuff factories—idea-based businesses.
In 2023, immigrants are still the principal force behind new American businesses.

“Forgotten man” and former socialite Godfrey Park (William Powell) wasn’t an immigrant, but he was “down on his luck” in 1936’s My Man Godfrey.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830’s: “in no country in the world are private fortunes more precarious than in the U.S.
It is not uncommon for the same man in the course of his life to rise and sink again through all the grades that lead from opulence to poverty.”
Fortunes are still precarious, in this modern country.

Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) in 1492: Conquest of Paradise—a film that concealed (rather than revealed) many disturbing facts about his treatment of Native Americans.

The Columbus Day holiday had an interesting origin.
It began in 1891, when eleven dark-skinned Sicilian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans.
(There were false rumors that the Sicilians had been “let off,” after killing a white man.)
Italian consulates throughout the U.S. were incensed.
A year later, President Harrison helped create a holiday that would kill two birds with one stone.
It would honor the 400th anniversary of the “discovery of America,” and help Italians enter the mainstream of American society. 

A lobby card for 1944’s Fighting Sullivans, a film about five Irish-American brothers who died fighting for their country in WWII. It’s a myth that after the Sullivan brothers died, siblings were prevented from serving together.

During the Civil War, 25% of the men in the Union Army were immigrants, and another 25% were first-generation Americans.
During WWI, 18% of the U.S. soldiers were immigrants.
Detailed counts (on origins) weren’t kept for WWII.
However, Italian-American soldiers comprised at least 10% of the volunteers, and Polish-American soldiers at least 8% (far above their percentages in the U.S. population).
Scores of first generation Irish and German Americans volunteered to fight on the Allied side in WWII, seeking to prove their patriotism.

The current immigration policy is supposed to be based on three main factors—family reunification, labor market needs, and diversity.
The system is being overwhelmed, however, by asylum seekers (many bringing children).

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. has a labor shortage.
More workers—skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled—are needed in many fields: medicine, agriculture, hospitality, teaching, construction and manufacturing.
On the other hand, American business seems determined to widen the salary gap between upper management and blue-collar jobs, so many of the available jobs don’t pay very well.

Immigration is a very difficult issue.
An article by the Cato Institute in 2021 called the present system “archaic and barely coherent.”
An article on the Brookings Institute website, in 2023,* tells us that 80% of new technical jobs will go unfilled.
Are we allowing for asylum-seekers who may just want to work here, and find safety for their families?
Is it possible to recreate the immigration system so it isn’t tainted by nativism and prejudice?

* “Industrial Policy Will Require Immigration Reform,” Greg Wright and Emma Berman, September 29, 2023.

Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie—A Story of Entitlement

Alexander Hamilton (Derryl Yeager) and James Madison (Craig Wasson) in a scene from 1989’s A More Perfect Union: America becomes a Nation.

Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution, stated which people would be counted to determine the number of Representatives (for each state) in the House, and for taxation purposes.
This was an important number because it gave states power within the Federal Government.
Southern states, with large slave populations, wanted extra power.
However, they didn’t want slaves to be thought of as more than chattel.
As a result, the “Three-Fifths Compromise” was devised in 1787.

The counted people were free (white) men, women, and children, including “those bound to service for a term of years.”
Thus, indentured (white) servants were considered “free.”
(Indentured servitude ended for the most part in 1864, but it wasn’t abolished until 1917.)

The people to be excluded were “Indians not taxed” (Native Americans living in tribal territories) and “three-fifths of all other persons.”
“All other persons” meant slaves.
Thus, a few free Black people were counted as people; but enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of one person, for House Representation and tax purposes.

The 14th Amendment repealed the Three-Fifths Compromise in 1868, but Native Americans living in tribal territories were still excluded from representation.
Twenty years later, the Dawes Act allowed citizenship to those Native Americans who owned land.
However, all Native Americans weren’t declared citizens until 1924.
According to Jefferson and the Indians, by Anthony F. C. Wallace, the Cherokees asked for citizenship as early as 1808.

Newton Knight (Matthew McConnaughey) shows his common-law wife Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) how to shoot in Free State of Jones.

Stephen Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, quotes an address by the Provisional Governor Benjamin F. Perry to the South Carolina constitutional convention in 1865—the early days of Reconstruction.
Perry proclaimed that “to be no longer a slave in no way made the Negro a citizen,” and “this is a white man’s government, intended for white men only. . . To speak of extending political equality to the Negro was nothing but folly and madness.”

Although Perry was mandated by President Johnson to end slavery in his state, he was making sure that the convention of “gentlemen” knew that only they were entitled to full political equality.
South Carolina remained a “white man’s government” for decades after 1865, because Southern men thought it “madness” to elevate Blacks “to the dignity of the white man.”

Panel from a comic book, approved by George Wallace, used to promote segregation in Alabama during his 1960 campaign for Governor.

In George Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address (as governor of Alabama), Wallace declared that “in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth” he would protect “separate racial stations” with “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
(The libraries and schools for Black Alabama children would NOT be as well provided for as those for white children.
However, there would be libraries and schools of some mean sort.)
All over this country, there are still big differences between schools and libraries in exclusively Black neighborhoods versus those in White neighborhoods.

Ernest Burkhart and Mollie Kyle (Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone) in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

The film Killers of the Flower Moon (based on the David Grann book) is scheduled to be released on October 20th.
It’s about members of the Osage tribe being murdered for oil money.
I’ve read that David Grann outlines the back story.
The Osage tribes, and the U.S., made a treaty in 1808 in which they were to be protected on a portion of their own land.
A few years later, the Government broke its’ word and moved them to Kansas.
After Kansas became popular with white settlers, the Osage were moved (once more) to Oklahoma, where oil was found, making them wealthy.
The local white power structure, of the 1920s, felt that only they were entitled to the wealth of the land. Therefore, many people were murdered.

Although immigrants were categorized as “exotic novelties” down to “wretched refuse (of your teaming shore),” being an immigrant didn’t stand in the way of gaining wealth.
Between 1815-1860, the three richest men in the U.S.—Frenchman Stephen Girard, German-born John Jacob Astor, and Irishman Alexander Turney Stewart—were all immigrants.
Immigrants are still among the wealthiest people: Chinese-born Eric Yuan, South African-born Elon Musk, and Nigerian-born Tope Awotona, among others.
According to recent study,* immigrants are 80% more likely to found companies, than those born in the U.S.
(Perhaps, the main reason immigrants start new companies is because it’s impossible to get ahead working for others.)

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) proclaiming “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” in 1987’s Wall Street.

For generations, there was more economic disparity between rich and poor in Europe, than in the U.S.
However, the balance shifted dramatically around 1980.
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, by Kevin Phillips, analyzes how the superrich have harvested privileges—at the expense of the lower and middle classes—despite the U.S. being a democratic society.
Wealth and Democracy was written twenty years ago.
In 2002, CEOs made 145 times as much as a typical worker.
By 2022, CEOs made 344 times as much as a typical worker.
Now, the average Fortune 500 CEO salary is $15.9 million a year, while the average worker salary is $61,900 a year.

When people speak up for unions, parity, and a safety net, they’re dismissed as communists.
However, cut-throat Darwinian capitalism was never a good fit with democracy.
It dismisses the worker as just a cog, and raises up the “job-creators” above all others.
(Consumers are the true job-creators.)
This isn’t a battle between capitalism and communism; it’s a battle of entitlement. 

Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, 1933-1945. 

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt died in November of 1962.
In one of her last essays “The Social Revolution,” published in Tomorrow is Now, she discusses issues that are still crucial today: 

It is this minority of strident and prejudiced people, with their unwillingness to accept race equality—at whatever cost—who provide the Communists with most of their ammunition against the democratic system, who are loudest in their expression of hatred for Communism. . .this recurring matter of labeling “Communist” anyone who does not agree with you is essentially an act of dishonesty and it should be nailed every time for what it is.

*”Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States,” Azoulay, Jones, Kim, and Miranda, Vol. 4, No.1, March 2022, American Economic Review: Insights.

A Mad Raging Womb

I didn’t cover whether being a woman made you more likely to be considered “mad” in last week’s memorandum—“Fit to be Tied (in a Straitjacket).”
For centuries this was so, but the situation is slightly better today.

From left to right, Judy Bernly (Jane Fonda); Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin); Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman); and Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) in a scene from the 1980 comedy (about women being demeaned in a white-collar workplace), Nine to Five.

There are more women than men in the U.S., and more women than men are college-educated.
Yet, women run only 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies; and make up only 28% of the current (118th) Congress.
(These are considered “wins” because the Fortune 500 number hovered at 8% for several years, and 28% of Congress is the highest percentage ever.)

For twenty years, 2002-2022, American women (on average) have earned about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men.
(Women sometimes begin their careers at close to wage parity, but lose ground as they age.)
When the average is broken out by race and ethnicity, Black women earned 70 cents for every dollar, and Hispanic women earned 65 cents for every dollar earned by white men.
Companies don’t want employees to discuss salaries in the workplace mainly so women won’t find out how much more men are making than women.

Essentially, there are certain viewpoints about men and women that have been accepted since Greek and Roman times.
Women are viewed as less capable of rational thought and weaker emotionally than men.
To be a real “man” is to be considered strong, logical, and capable.
To be a “woman” is the opposite.
No matter how our own experiences make these ideas ridiculous, this set of beliefs still permeates our religions and Western philosophy.

Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) in the center of a group of patients in 1948’s The Snake Pit.
According to the IMDb trivia on this film, at least 13 states changed their mental health laws after this film was released.

When films have dealt with lobotomy, they’ve usually portrayed men: poet Samson Shilitoe in 1966’s A Fine Madness; angry veteran Randle McMurphy in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and traumatized US Marshall, Teddy Daniels in 2010’s Shutter Island.
However, in most countries, between 60%-75% of lobotomy patients were women.
(In the U.S., the percentage was 75%.)
Lobotomy (the process of severing the cerebral nerve tracts) was praised for making women more compliant and “feminine.”

Penelope Hildern (Lorna Heilbron) in The Creeping Flesh. The story involves a paleontological skeleton, and an insane mother and daughter. This 1973 horror film is set in the Victorian era, and stars Peter Cushing (as her father) and Christopher Lee (as the madhouse administrator).

Men have long equated female sexuality and madness,
In the 5th century BC, Hippocrates originated the term “hysteria”
(The Greek word “hystera” means “uterus.”), and “hysterical fits” have been discussed ever since.
Flemish doctor Jean Baptist van Helmont asserted, in the 1600’s, that “women are more inclined to madness, depression, and bewitching or enchantment than men because of the influence of the ‘mad raging womb.’”
In the 1860’s, British Dr. Isaac Baker Brown thought he could “correct women’s functional disorders” by removing their sexual organs (for example, the clitoris or their ovaries).
The very influential British psychiatrist Dr. Henry Maudsley claimed, in 1911, that “uterine changes lead to an unstable brain.” 

In the past, asylums were used as a method to control women—especially wealthy women—enabling their male relatives to control that wealth.
(The image of the “mad” beautiful woman has long been romanticized.)
In 1799, famed English actress, author and royal mistress Mary Robinson wrote The Natural Daughter with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family, in which the lead character (Mrs. Morley) is falsely imprisoned in a madhouse.
Mrs. Morley is eventually able to free herself, and her own mother, from the asylum.

Still from 1948 film The Woman in White with Laura Fairlie (Eleanor Parker) and Count Fosco (Sydney Greenstreet).

Wilkie Collins wrote The Woman in White, in which hero Walter Hartright rescues a beautiful woman who has been drugged and carted off to an asylum, in order that her estate be inherited by Count Fosco’s friend.
The 1859 novel has been adapted multiple times.
The earliest play version was performed in 1860, and Andrew Lloyd Webber staged a musical version in 2004.
The earliest film version was a 1912 silent, and the most recent adaptation was a BBC five-part TV series in 2018.

Jessica Lange was nominated (in 1983) for a Best Actress Oscar for playing Frances Farmer in the movie Frances.
This film tells the story of Frances Farmer—a 1930’s film actress who was ostracized, institutionalized and lobotomized because she wanted to play by her own rules.
(There’s some confusion as to whether Farmer was actually lobotomized, but she was definitely held in a mental institution.) 

Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) in 2012’s Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln gave birth to four sons, but only one child outlived her.
She was holding her husband’s hand when he was assassinated.

That middle class, and wealthy, women were committed to asylums in the 1800’s (mainly by close relatives)—is well documented.*
In 1876, the former First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, spent time in a private asylum.
Her last remaining son (Robert) had her committed because he believed she was having delusions, and because she spent money on unnecessary household goods—especially draperies and gloves.
(Mary Lincoln smuggled letters out to good lawyers, and notified the press.
After three months, she was released to the custody of her sister.)

Slowly, as the courts gave women more rights—and men had less financial control over their wives and mothers—the “tool,” of incarceration in madhouses, was used less often.
The 1974 Fair Credit Opportunity Act gave women the right to a credit card.
The Supreme Court ruling, Kirchberg vs Feenstra (1981), gave women some control of marital property, when the Louisiana “Head and Master Law” was disallowed.
(Recently, another Supreme Court ruling deprived women of their rights. In June of 2022, the Court overturned Roe vs Wade—the 1973 law which gave women the right to an abortion.)

Currently, the numbers have improved—with 50.8% of the people in mental hospitals being women—almost 50/50.
Yet, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, 27.2% of women experience mental health problems, while only 18.1% of men do.
(Perhaps, the reason is because women are more interested in changing their behavior, as well as more willing to seek help from doctors and psychiatrists.)

White, heterosexual men—especially of Northern European descent—are at the top of the caste system in American society.
Women, along with other groups and colors of people, are on lower rungs of the class structure.
As long as white men play their roles (or pretend to), they’ll keep their freedom, earn more, and retain their privileges.
Stepping outside those “norms,” however, may lead to varying degrees of social censure (including incarceration).

*Lunacy in the 19th Century: Women’s Admission to Asylums in United States of America, by Katharine Pouba and Ashley Tiamen, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/6687