PBA

I was playing some music the other day. I don’t usually do this in the middle of the day because music for me is not a suitable background for reading or, especially, writing, but rather something I have to fully attend to. But this day I had decided that I wanted to hear a piece that I had first delved deeply into in college—the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven. It’s his third symphony and a pathbreaker, one I learned intimately in a freshman music-appreciation course, and hence came to love. So I searched it out on youtube and found what seemed to be a decent rendering by Daniel Barenboim leading a BBC orchestra. Though he took the first movement a bit too slow for my taste, the rest was splendid. And then came the surprise. When I heard the third movement, it brought me to tears. I don’t mean that in a figurative sense. I mean real tears; I was bawling. And when I got over that, some parts of the fourth movement did the same thing: tears, real crying. In the course of listening, I noticed another Beethoven piece I thought I’d also like to hear: the Sonata Pathetique (#8 in C minor). This is one that I also knew well, having practiced and learned to play it moderately well. It was first played for me by a cousin, and my brother also played it, especially the lovely, slow second movement. So I found a rendering by Valentina Lisitsa, a pianist I’d never before heard of, and it was equally gorgeous. She is a wondrous artist, with flawless technique and expressiveness. But that isn’t the real point. Once again, I cried like a baby. Especially during that luscious, slow second movement. My emotions were simply out of control. And I could perhaps see why that movement might affect me, since it brought back memories of my older brother who died some years ago. 

            Now, I have been moved to tears by music before. I used to sing with the Berkeley Community Chorus, and near the end of my stint with them, we sang the Bach B-Minor Mass, one of the most transcendent pieces of music ever written. I loved doing it, but sometimes, even in rehearsal, I found myself focusing not on my bass part exclusively but on the other parts, all of them, sopranos soaring at the top, with tenors and altos beautifully complementing them—the whole of the profound, intricate interweaving of voices. And at such times, I found that the sound of all those voices soaring in counterpoint together was so stirring that I couldn’t sing my part. The emotional involvement in what I was hearing was so great that I choked up and tears came to my eyes. So I know what emotional involvement in music feels like. But this was different. This was not just being choked up and unable to sing. This was deep racking and grimacing sobs—and I knew not whether it was joy or pain or regret.   

            Actually, I have experienced this sudden upwelling before—recently. When I was in the hospital not long ago, I found that when I tried to explain to visitors that some nurse or therapist had been particularly comforting or solicitous for my care, I would get so choked up that I could not speak. Several times I was racked with that same kind of sobbing that went on for long minutes, and I would have to stop relating whatever event it was. Sometimes I would try to explain what was happening, but would usually have to stop that too, and then apologize for the strange outburst. And when I had to say goodbye to my therapists at CPMC, I was again struck dumb with tearful emotion. At other times I had outbursts of laughter that seemed out of proportion to the stimulus, embarrassingly strange laughter that I’d never had before. Those who have worked with stroke patients—I had had a stroke in August—reassured me that these outbursts were a kind of side effect stemming from what they called the ‘emotional lability’ following a stroke. I accepted that explanation at the time, but after my music-listening episode, I searched online for more specific information about the phenomenon. 

It’s called PBA, which stands for Pseudobulbar Affect. The word ‘bulbar’ itself means what it sounds like: a bulb-shaped organ, specifically the medulla oblongata portion of the brain. And the bulbar area of the brain is said to be “composed of the cerebellum, medulla and pons.” Further explanation on Wikipedia notes that “the bulbar region is made up of the brain stem minus the midbrain and plus the cerebellum…and is responsible for many involuntary functions that keep us alive.” That means that the pseudobulbar affect (PBA) has something to do with brain injury, often from stroke, but also affecting patients with other brain debilities such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. PBA is said to be characterized by “episodes of sudden uncontrollable and inappropriate laughing or crying.” Of course, that’s not exactly what I have—responding emotionally to music is not always inappropriate—but it pretty much describes my situation in general. Especially the involuntary part. 

So now, I had the explanation I sought. My stroke(s) were located in the left pons area of my brain, right above the medulla, as it happens. It affected mostly my motor functions, mainly my left arm and left leg, both of which were, and still are partly disabled. The function of both is coming back with lots of rehabilitation therapy, but I’ve still got a long way to go. I’m prepared for that. What I was not prepared for was the emotional stuff. My emotions have usually been held mostly in check, consistent with our emotionally-constrained culture. Big boys don’t cry. Or laugh inappropriately. And certainly not in response to the kindness of strangers, or to music. But since my stroke, I have been doing all of that. And it’s not clear to me if this is a good thing or a bad thing. 

            Perhaps I don’t need to know whether it’s good or bad. Perhaps I don’t even need to know when I’m going to get over this affect, or whether I’ll get over it at all. This makes me think of Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neuroscientist who, at age 37, had a massive stroke and lost most of her cerebral and muscular functions. So severe was her disability that it took her a full eight years of intense rehab to fully recover. But recover she did, and then wrote a best-selling book, My Stroke of Insight, in which she recounted the details of her stroke and recovery, and her gratitude for what the stroke revealed and did for her. As she put it in a recent interview,

It took away all my stress circuitry. Who doesn’t want that? My left-brain emotional system went offline, and with that went all my negative judgment. It took away all my emotional baggage from the first 30 years of my life. And it set me on a new path of possibilities. (cited from www.thecut.com, 9/25/19 interview by Erica Schwiegershausen.)

In her book, Bolte Taylor is even more specific about how her stroke changed her:

I shifted from the doing-consciousness of my left brain to the being-consciousness of my right brain. I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive…All I could perceive was right here, right now, and it was beautiful (68).

I also think of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad and how Homer repeatedly sings of the Greek heroes like Odysseus as yielding to the relief of shedding hot tears. It is clear that for the ancient Greeks, there was nothing unmanly about this. Rather than indicating weakness, tears are treated as natural to men, even men at war, as a natural part of the male domain of passionate emotion. 

            So perhaps this side effect of stroke is not so shameful or embarrassing after all. Perhaps it is serving to clear away the stroke victim’s “stress circuitry” and opening up some more ancient circuits in the brain that have been covered over by cultural inhibition. Perhaps music and the kindness and love of strangers is meant to be met with emotion. Whether it is or not may not be the issue in any case. For that is what is happening to this stroke survivor, and so far, he seems none the worse for it. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Can We Save Ourselves?

Not much gives me cause for hope these days. What with the paralysis in our political systems exacerbated now by impeachment hearings, the growing authoritarianism/fascism in governments around the globe, the environmental threats including most prominently global warming and species extinction, and the still-present threat of nuclear annihilation, we humans seem to be on a path to catastrophe, chaos, and general collapse. But recently, I have been made aware of some thinkers and movements that do give me hope that perhaps humanity can, in fact, deal with these problems and move to a more sustainable level. These thinkers—most prominently for me, Daniel Schmactenberger—are actually probing deeply into what humans need to do economically, politically, psychologically and spiritually, to save ourselves and our institutions from annihilation. To put it in the way that Schmactenberger does, we need to move out of our current ways of thinking and organization—in short, our civilization—to a wholly new phase that does not lead to self-termination. We need a fundamental and complete phase shift. Partial solutions, half measures like voting new people into office in Washington, for example, or short-term coups, simply won’t do. Because the same systems, the same dynamics that are causing humans to move swiftly towards self-termination, will remain in place.

            That phrase that I used—self-termination—is one that I find particularly vibrant, and it is one Schmactenberger uses a lot. By it he means that the peculiarly human gifts that have allowed us to exponentially increase our killing power, say, from simple clubs to arrows to guns to now nuclear weapons, have allowed us to not just out-gun our enemies and predatory animals, but to so decimate our natural prey both on land and in the air and in the oceans that we are well on the way to destroying the fauna and flora that we utterly depend on to survive. We have become capable of clearing away the trees and forests that supply a good portion of the oxygen we need to breathe. We have already destroyed the fish many of us need to nourish ourselves. We have tried to replace these with fish farms, as we have replaced natural game animals with domesticated herds, but the nutritional value of both is inferior, not to mention the waste problems they generate. The same is true of our agriculture, with its use of monocrops and artificial fertilizers that strip and decimate the soil and poison our water supply and us. The side-effects, or externalities that derive from these industrial practices add another unsolved problem: driven mainly by petroleum power, they add to the CO2 that is now generally agreed to be driving the most intractable problem of all—human-caused climate change. 

            What Schmactenberger and others analyze are the deep substrates upon which all these insults to the natural world depend. It is not just that industrialized farming or fishing or resource extraction are wasteful and short-sighted. It is that they, like the move to systems of destruction such as nuclear weapons, are the natural, inevitable outcome of ways of thinking and acting that have been with us for millennia. These ways are summarized by the words Schmactenberger repeatedly uses: rivalrous dynamics; open- rather than closed-loop systems; reliance on complicated rather than complex systems; capitalism and the madness of constant growth that it demands on a finite planet; and the regarding of the individual self as totally independent rather than an integral part of a planetary and universal whole. All these and more need to be changed or phase-shifted to a new level if we are to survive.

            Take the arms race. As Schmactenberger points out, a lion does not, via evolution, improve its killing capacity in isolation. As it gets bigger and faster, the gazelle that is its prey also gets faster, so that the system stays in rough balance. The lion does not kill so many gazelles that its species starves. It is not self-terminating. But humans, with our big brains, accelerate change faster than evolution allows. And so we have wiped out whole species like the bison or the carrier pigeon or cod because of our ability to invent technologies with which bison or pigeon or cod could not respond via evolution. The same is true in countless areas. With our capitalist value system, we are faced with the situation where a live whale is worth nothing to most humans, whereas a dead whale is worth millions. So are tons of dead tuna, or cod, or salmon. And so the incentive is to hunt and catch as many as possible (and with factory ships, this is a lot) because if we don’t, some other nation with equally lethal ships, will. Ditto with forests. Ditto with anything you can name. Rivalrous dynamics dictate that our side must be bigger and faster and more ruthless, because if we aren’t, we’ll be wiped out by our rivalrous neighbors. And so we have the insane situation of mutually-assured destruction, where we have far more nuclear weapons at the ready than we need to wipe out all Russian or Chinese cities, while at the same time, they feel the need to have equivalent arsenals because if they don’t, they risk being overwhelmed by ours. All on hair trigger alert and susceptible to the whims or mistakes of some zealot in charge. And it is almost guaranteed that it will be a defective in charge because the system favors the rise of sociopaths as leaders—not just in government but in corporations as well. They, sociopaths, are the only ones with enough disregard for their fellow humans and the planet to be able to make the “tough” decisions. To be willing to tolerate deadly “externalities” like mutually-assured destruction, like global warming. 

            So what Schmactenberger and others are trying to figure out is whether, or how we can get to a planet where the opposite of these things can prevail. Must prevail—before we self terminate. Humans must somehow come up with societies, that is, and economies and political systems that foster selves that are not incentivized to be narcissistic and sociopathic, but rather to be aware of our connection to the whole—including all the bacteria that we depend on, without which we are literally nothing. Humans who are not driven by rivalrous dynamics to always beat the other guy and win, but who act in concert with others and do what makes sense on its own; what helps the community of all others, or at least no longer ignores them. This would involve creating systems that are not complicated so much as complex—like the systems that nature evolves.  Consider this one difference that Schmactenberger highlights—the difference between complicated and complex. A forest in its natural state is complex. Trees have immense root systems that keep them in contact not only with the soil nutrients and bacteria and fungi that keep them healthy, but often with each other to ward off invading insects. The forest system is amazingly complex. By contrast, a house built by humans is complicated—containing a foundation, siding, windows, roofing, a complicated support system of rafters and electrical wiring and plumbing and so on. But if a fire destroys much of the forest, it eventually grows back. It reconstitutes itself. Its complexity contains within it the seeds for its renewal. A house, by contrast, if burned down by the same fire, does notgrow back. It is only complicated. Once destroyed, its stays destroyed and another must be totally rebuilt by an outside entity, a human. What those anticipating the phase shift look to is making more of our systems complex. Making them more like natural systems. Following nature. Making our world more self-sustaining like the natural world.

            This is where closed loops come in. Most of our human-created systems now are open-loop systems. We just forge ahead with no concern for the externalities like the waste and pollution they produce. If hog farms produce tons and tons of manure that eventually flows into nearby rivers and pollutes them, so be it. That polluting waste is simply an externality that doesn’t have to be accounted for. If my manufacturing process produces tons of plastic packaging waste that eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean vortex, so be it; it’s an externality that someone else has to pay for or solve. And if the transportation system that the whole world is induced to use ends up not only producing tons of tires and metal and plastic that cannot be disposed of, and along the way billions of tons of CO2 as air pollution that leads to global warming, so be it. It’s not my problem as an oil company or car manufacturer and in fact I will try every trick I can think of to prevent people from becoming aware of it. This is open loop—the open loop that allows capitalist systems to thrive. 

            What Schmactenberger is calling for is a phase shift, and soon, to closed-loop systems. Systems that pattern themselves after nature, where nothing is wasted; where that which is destroyed or discarded is useful, usually as food, for something else. Nature seems not to produce undigestible or unusable waste. Everything is constantly recycled to be used by some other creature or organism. Nothing is wasted in complex systems. And natural systems are amazingly complex; that is what keeps them in balance. Dead matter is useful—as fertilizer or as food for the countless beings that form part of the great system that is life. That is what humans must strive for in designing systems for the next great phase shift that Schmactenberger sees coming. Or must come if we humans are not to self terminate. 

            Is such a phase shift possible? Elements of it have already started to emerge. And that word, emerge or emergence, again is a constant in Schmactenberger’s arguments. It is a deep biological/philosophical principle that states thatemergence occurs when an entity has or develops properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole, that is, when the parts act together for the good of the whole. It is like the cells in a human body: alone, they each act to preserve and advance their own survival. But when they come together as a body, they act their part as organs or T-cells to sustain the larger body of which they are a part, even at the risk of their own demise. And importantly, Schmactenberger notes, with no conflict between their individual function to survive and their overall bodily function to preserve the whole. In addition, there would be no way to predict that overall bodily function from observing the individual cells functioning on their own. Just as one could not predict the emergence of a butterfly from observation of the caterpillar from which it eventually emerges. And presumably, just as one could not predict the phase shift that Schmactenberger sees emerging right now from the perilous situation that we humans now find ourselves in. And yet, if the human endeavor is to survive, it or something like it has to emerge. Whether enough humans and cultures can be induced to join such a movement that goes against so many allegedly ingrained human instincts is arguable. But the incentive to do so is as great as anything has ever been: to emerge and survive, or to proceed to self-termination. Is there any real choice?

Lawrence DiStasi

Ukraine Extortion

To hear Drumpf and his Repugnant allies tell it, the holdup of military aid to Ukraine was just a normal part of the diplomatic effort to get rid of any chance of corruption in that country. The holdup, they insist, had nothing to do with trying to get leverage on possible 2020 rival Joe Biden and/or to invalidate the Mueller investigation by blaming the 2016 election interference on a Ukraine plot. But if we look at the timeline of the aid and its eventual release on September 11, 2019, the story becomes more damning. This is very important, but most news outlets simply stay with the events closely surrounding the July 25 phone call from Trump to Ukraine President Zelensky. That misses the deep issue. 

            What’s really key is to go back and focus on when exactly, the U.S Congress authorized desperately-needed military aid of about $400 million for Ukraine. This aid was for military equipment to stave off the Russian-backed forces trying to bite off another chunk of Ukraine in its eastern province. If we look at the record, as outlined by an important article in Lawfare (10/16/19), we see this:

On Feb. 15, Congress appropriated $445.7 million to the State Department to assist Ukraine (see here, § 7046(a)(2)), which included the $141 million at issue here. In a joint explanatory statement (page 65 of Division F, for interested readers), Congress broke down the $445.7 million in funding, which included (among other initiatives) $115 million in foreign military financing; $2.9 million in military training; and $45 million in international narcotics control, law enforcement and anti-terrorism funding.

Look at that date again. Congress authorized $445.7 million on Feb. 15, 2019. Yet that aid was not released to Ukraine until September 11. This in spite of the fact that the Trump administration twice notified Congress—on February 28, 2019 and again on May 23, 2019—that it was going to release the aid. It thereafter has struggled mightily to explain why the authorized aid was withheld for so long. That’s because top officials in both the Defense Dept. and the State Dept. sent letters to Congress authorizing the release of the aid—in the first case in May certifying that Ukraine was making good progress in the fight against corruption, and in the second in June with the Pentagon announcing that a large grant was being released to Ukraine for training, equipment and advisory efforts. These notices were undergirded by a May 23 letter from John Rood, defense undersecretary for policy who wrote:

“On behalf of the secretary of defense, and in coordination with the secretary of state, I have certified that the government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purpose of decreasing corruption.” (www.militarytimes.com.)  

            So Congress had authorized the $450 million, and both the State Dept and the Pentagon had approved dispersal of the funds; but still they were not released. Now the law says that the OMB in the White House has to approve these funds and can take up to 45 days to review them.  But it is only supposed to ensure that the funding lasts for the required time and is spent appropriately. It is not supposed to alter or amend the purposes for which the money is to be spent without formally notifying the Congress in accord with procedures, and must adhere to the 45-day limit. The Trump White House most decidedly did not. In this case, in fact, the White House OMB held up the funds, not just for a few weeks, or 45 days, but for several months (until Sept 11), and then only released them under the duress of the impeachment hearings.   

            The White House, of course has several explanations (aside from the extortion of President Zelensky) for the withholding of the funds. One of them came from Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff and director of the OMB. He told leaders at State and Defense in mid-July that the president wanted the aid withheld because he was concerned about the ‘necessity’ for the aid (even though Ukraine is fighting for its very life and depends on the U.S aid to do it). Note the timing here: the order to withhold the aid came before that notorious July 25 phone call, and the president himself ordered the delay. This means that the plan to extort the president of Ukraine was already in place well before the president made his recorded demands by phone. Other evidence makes this even more telling. Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony, for one, makes clear that the aid money to Ukraine (and the promise of a meeting) had long been conditioned on their complying with President Trump’s wishes to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter:

 “That was my clear understanding, security assistance money would not come until the President  [of Ukraine] committed to pursue the investigation.”

Taylor then affirmed that this demand, plus the demand to investigate the 2016 election interference by Ukraine (not Russia) met the definition of a “quid pro quo.” He also affirmed that it was Rudy Giuliani’s idea to get the Ukrainians to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on whose board Hunter Biden served. He said the idea was to get President Zelensky to publicly announce these investigations so as to put him into a “box” that would force him to comply. Taylor’s testimony contradicted EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s earlier testimony that there was no “quid pro quo,” after which the ambassador then revised his testimony to agree that, in fact, there was a “quid pro quo.” He agreed that the pressure on Ukraine was “improper” and “insidious” and that it probably violated the law. 

            There is much more to this nefarious case, including the politically-calculated firing of veteran ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Jovanovich, but it is all coming out in public hearings. The bottom line remains: the President of the United States held up for months desperately-needed aid to a U.S. ally in order to 1) damage the election prospects of his presumptive rival, Joe Biden; and 2) to impel a bogus investigation into a supposed Ukrainian plot to affect the 2016 election, thus invalidating the hated Mueller investigation. Both of these bogus Ukraine investigations were meant to serve not the nation he is sworn to serve, but his own political (and criminal) purposes. This is a textbook definition of extortion and of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitutional remedy of impeachment was written for. QED.

Lawrence DiStasi