Late Night Laugh: No Matter How You Look At It

Intolerable Tolerance

From The Armed Forces Journal:

The problem with diversity training in the military

BY LT. COL. JIM PARCO, DAVE LEVY AND RANDY BLASS

At a military training base in the southern U.S., tensions ran high. A minority enlisted service member returned to his work area only to find that a noose had been left on a chair. When it was discovered who left it, the situation went from bad to worse. It had been the unit commander.

After an investigation by the immediate chain of command, it was determined that the situation was an unfortunate misunderstanding — the noose had apparently been left on the chair by accident. Over the next several months, senior leaders continued to emphasize the importance of “tolerance” through training programs while the officer remained in command.

A lot has changed over the last 50 years, but not as much as we’d like to think. This event occurred in October 2007.

Since World War II, the U.S. military has emerged as an iconic example of diversity and tolerance. In nearly every unit across the branches of service today, you will find men and women from every race, religion and creed serving side by side as one fighting force in the defense of our nation. But the diversity evident in today’s military isn’t the result of a deliberate strategy to create an inclusive organizational culture as much as the result of an emergent strategy where the integration of minority groups has been resisted at every turn. The Defense Department has embraced diversity within its ranks primarily because it has been forced to do so by its civilian masters.

In 1948, President Truman decisively ended racial segregation in the military by executive order. Although racial equality was achieved with the stroke of a pen, the integration of women across the roles of military service proved to be more complicated and continued to lag for several more decades. Despite it being one of the most hotly contested social issues in U.S. military history, Congress eventually took the lead in the mid-1970s by giving women appointments to the military academies. But it would be another 20 years before women received equal opportunity in select combat roles. The lessons born out of the history of integration of the military are becoming clear: Determining the “right” social policy governing military service in the U.S. was one of the most contentious and politically heated topics from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, and it promises to dominate the political stage for the foreseeable future. One needs to look no further than the ongoing debates as to the role of religion in the military or the merits of allowing openly gay people to serve as America continues the war on terrorism. The challenges that military leaders face as to how best to deal with the internal effects of these contentious social issues are not trivial. As a result, the military has become a bastion for tolerance — out of necessity.

How to prevent discrimination, and worse, harassment, inside the ranks presents a perpetual concern for senior leadership. Over the past 50 years, the persistent need to overcome internal cultural barriers to the integration of minority groups into the services has led military organizations to put great effort into creating an environment of tolerance. Through many years of dedicated effort, the armed forces successfully integrated across the declared racial and gender barriers and emerged as an exemplar for other organizations.

The secret to its success was really no secret at all:

n Establish clear policy guidance as to the expectations for all service members.

n Provide sufficient training on the policy to ensure the expectations are communicated and understood by everyone.

n Punish those who don’t comply.

As past and present military members can attest, countless hours have been spent in various training sessions devoted to making each individual in uniform more tolerant of those who are different from them in some way. The solution seemed obvious: When faced with the prospect of increasing diversity within the workforce, it is necessary to create an environment for tolerance to minimize the occurrence of discrimination and/or harassment.

Thus, when military organizations recently found themselves amid a resurgence of social crises involving discrimination and harassment in the realm of gender, race and religion, particularly at the service academies, the natural response was to create more briefings and conduct more tolerance training. The prevailing belief held that increased tolerance training would directly translate to decreases in observed discriminatory behavior. However, it is quite possible that what the military needs now is not more tolerance and less discrimination but, rather, just the opposite. It seems that despite its best intentions, the military may have become too tolerant of tolerance.

We advance a holistic view of how military organizations approach the development of desired values, attitudes and beliefs toward diversity, discrimination and tolerance of others. We argue that despite the best efforts and intentions, the secondary effects of current approaches to promoting diversity awareness are at best ineffective and possibly even harmful. In the end, fostering appropriate attitudes of inclusion and respect can be achieved only by re-establishing the purity of how military organizations socialize their newest members in how they view one another. When these socialization mechanisms become tainted by key members in the organization (such as instructors and commanders), junior members are unknowingly led to think in terms of in-groups and out-groups, resulting in increased potential for divisiveness and harassment. It is time for leadership across the branches of service to critically evaluate how they take a heterogeneous sample of Americans and develop the correct attitudes, values and beliefs toward one another in the pursuit of the shared goal of defending our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

ON TOLERANCE

The word “tolerate,” despite its generally accepted endorsement as a method of dealing with others who are different, does not connote a positive message. “Tolerate,” defined as “to put up with” or “to endure,” has become the standard by which military members are to relate with others who are different. A critical analysis of tolerance reveals two necessary conditions for it to exist in an interpersonal setting. First, there must be a noted difference between two or more individuals, such as race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. Second, there must be an internal choice not to allow the noted difference to affect the relationship with others within the organization.

The problem that emerges by promoting tolerance as an accepted method of human relations is that there is no way to ascertain what the individual attitude might be toward the noted difference observed in others. Indeed, all that separates intolerant behavior from tolerant behavior is a conscious effort to suppress an attitude that otherwise might yield an unwillingness to put up with others who differ in some way. And yet, tolerance training remains at the center of our diversity initiatives and social crisis response efforts. Implicitly, the mere use of the word tolerance leads individuals to believe that they don’t have to like the difference observed in another, but they must put up with it.

This observation is not an indictment of diversity training. In fact, it is quite the contrary — diversity training exists out of necessity. Organizations must establish a baseline for people of different backgrounds to come together and work with one another in the pursuit of institutional goals. Without such training, individual attitudes and beliefs toward others might otherwise go unchecked, leading to bigotry and harassment. Properly structured diversity training must pursue the primary objective of identifying and eliminating harmful stereotypes. To demonstrate a need for a change in perspective, it is necessary to start by highlighting a relevant difference. But where most diversity training programs fall short is in their failure to consider the secondary effects that the highlighting of differences might catalyze.

The desired outcome of any diversity training session should be to foster a sense of awareness on the part of the trainee and an expectation that the training will result in an individual’s willingness to accept and embrace the noted differences. But those who design the training also must consider to what extent the training might create a sense of in-groups and out-groups by directing attention to the particular highlighted attribute. Psychological research has repeatedly demonstrated that in-groups tend to develop a sense of superiority toward out-groups, even under the most artificially created laboratory experimental conditions. Out-groups can be tolerated, but they are often tolerated as an inferior group, and the very act of tolerating reinforces the sense of superiority the in-group holds. Such a secondary effect could be quite harmful and counterproductive to the original intent of programs designed to teach tolerance. Leaders simply cannot ignore the proximate effects that tolerance training initiatives can impose on organizational members to “put up with” or “endure” others who are observed to be different is some fashion.

The emphasis of any diversity training must focus on the individual level because only at that level can a true recognition emerge that no two individuals are the same. Few people would question the assertion that all individuals are different. But when judgments are made comparing others with oneself, absent a deep knowledge of the other person, a critical analysis of the noted differences often is stopped short at the highest and most observable level (gender, skin color, accent, etc.). And yet, a focus on these incomplete comparisons is precisely what traditional diversity training desires to eliminate. People are taught not to discriminate on such irrelevant attributes because there is no correlation with job performance. The generic message that discrimination is bad leads most people to believe that it always results in stereotypical judgments that are not merit-based. But perhaps this is where the wrong message is being communicated. The act of discrimination is not only good, it also is absolutely necessary.

In its purest form, discrimination is an essential element in the daily functioning of both organizations and individuals. Organizations routinely discriminate among individuals to identify the best candidates for a particular job. Society wouldn’t tolerate blind pilots, asthmatic firefighters or autistic neurosurgeons. Under U.S. law, it is entirely permissible for organizations to discriminate among competing candidates to select those whom they believe to be the best qualified, provided there exist legitimate criteria by which the discriminatory actions are based. At the individual level, everyone demonstrates discriminating behavior on a daily basis. Without active and healthy discrimination, we would have a hard time getting through the day. We are constantly bombarded with stimuli and information — so much so that we cannot possibly comprehend it all. The same is true in our dealings with others. Given the impossibility of knowing everything there is to know about someone, we initially take many unconscious shortcuts to arrive at initial judgments about them using the attributes and characteristics we can readily observe and define. Yet when such cognitive shortcuts are used, the discriminatory value is often minimal to nonexistent.

This is where discrimination yields negative results — when it is stopped short and incomplete. But if the discrimination process is taken to a point where all salient attributes are evaluated, the result identifies the person as a unique individual — different from any other person. Thus, the only way that a discrimination analysis can produce any meaningful results is to consciously determine what attributes matter to the judgment at hand and invoke sufficient cognitive effort to judge the individual on the merits of the attribute.

Clearly, it is nonsense to suggest that we should not discriminate. What is needed is a concerted effort to refine our discrimination skills to the point where gender, ethnicity and race become far too general and superficial to be of any discriminatory value. At the point where individuals are inclined to make discriminatory judgments about irrelevant attributes, they should be encouraged instead to take the discriminating analysis as far as it can be taken. In doing so, trainees will discover that by taking discriminating judgments to the extreme, everyone differs from one another on just about every attribute imaginable and thus, discriminating judgments are useful only when they are tied to some level of performance. Once this level of discrimination is achieved, highlighting in-group/out-group events such as “Diversity Month” become immediately obsolete.

A deep understanding of the power of discrimination reveals the most critical aspect of fostering a positive organizational climate: Celebrating individual differences (not in-group differences) is at the root of organizational effectiveness. Regardless of skin color, religious affiliation, gender or sexual orientation, each individual within the organization brings a portfolio of perspectives, ideas, experiences and capabilities to contribute to the institutional goals. Creating a sense of acceptance of individual differences among organization members is merely a first step along a continuum in creating an inclusive and cohesive environment. If the ultimate goal is to develop a sense of perceived equity between individuals in an organization that transcends individual differences, perhaps if we taught members to be more discriminating, we would have less of a need for tolerance training.

The possibility for the military to advance along the continuum beyond tolerance and on to a desired end-state of inclusion hinges on its ability to create an environment in which the appropriate discrimination skills can be taught and learned. It is unlikely that such skills could be achieved under the current methods involving the standard training, such as tasking a trainer to develop and deliver a boilerplate block of training each year. Briefing the importance of going beyond distinctions among race, gender and ethnicity to find relevant levels of discrimination that support organizational effectiveness is likely insufficient and counterproductive. Although training is certainly important, it is never enough to transform an organization’s culture. Given the “culture of tolerance” that has developed over the past 60 years of social integration of the U.S. armed forces, what is needed now is not more training but, rather, the implementation of a robust socialization process. Fortunately, the socialization of new organizational members is an area in which the modern military has earned a well-deserved reputation for superior results. However, as with any socialization process, such a tool should not be taken for granted, as its misuse or abuse could have far-reaching consequences well beyond those which are intended.

ON SOCIALIZATION

In every society, risks sometimes must be endured to achieve some greater good and, thus, societies may give license to certain professions to wield powerful and potentially dangerous tools. Surgeons are allowed to cut into the human body with razor-sharp scalpels. Police officers are permitted to use deadly force against citizens who place others at peril. Pharmacists are permitted to mix and dispense powerful concoctions to prevent illness and pain. But when it comes to the military, society yields a tool that can be more dangerous than any scalpel, weapon or drug. It is the tool of socialization.

Socialization is the way our military takes immensely diverse and heterogeneous people from our population and recasts them as a single and homogeneous type. Socialization of citizens into uniformed members of the armed services is essential to the discipline and subservience that society requires of a capable military force. It is a deliberate set of indoctrination tactics that results in changing how individuals view themselves and their role in society. Individuals are transformed from citizens to combatants. They become the obedient servants of the nation and are prepared to do its bidding wherever, however and whenever it is asked of them.

Socialization can be an immensely effective tool, having the dual capacity to do both great good and great harm. Thus, it is essential that it be entrusted to those who use it with extensive knowledge and discipline. Just as surgeons are expected to be impeccable in the sterility of the operating room, it is no less important for society to insist that military leadership exercise the highest levels of prudence when entrusted to use socialization tools. Purity of use is the minimum standard.

Socialization is the process by which people, beginning in infancy, learn to become effective participants in social relationships. Psychologists have long studied the processes of socialization and its outcomes. One of the earliest essays on the subject, written in 1919 by Edward A. Ross, defined socialization as the “development of the ‘we’ feeling in associates and their growth in capacity and will to act together.” This observation that individuals sharing a master experience were likely to bond with one another foretold of the prevailing mind-set that would dominate the U.S. military’s approach to the socialization of new recruits into the 21st century.

As early as 1955, researchers studying socialization processes at the Coast Guard Academy discovered that from the moment individuals enter an organization, they are both formally and informally socialized into the organization’s culture. It also revealed that a person’s earliest experiences in an organization are the most formative in their development within the organization. Prospective members going through a socialization process are more receptive to organizational cues during this period than they ever will be again, and what is learned during the initial stage becomes the core of the individual’s organizational identity.

Once an individual decides join an organization such as the military, a considerably strong desire develops to become an integral part of it. Because of this desire, there exists a considerable motivation to conform. With such a high need for conformance and a desire to become an integral part of the organization, new members are exceptionally vulnerable to role-modeling. Thus, it is incumbent on the organization to take great effort to select those ideal organizational citizens that will become the exemplars in terms of organizationally sanctioned attitudes, behaviors and values that will profoundly influence new recruits. In the military, these exemplars who wield the most influence early on in the socialization process are the training instructors and commanders.

Newcomers to the military are particularly vulnerable because of their near-absolute dependence on the organization for almost everything. Having been virtually stripped of their former identity early in the socialization process, they are placed in a situation in which they must establish a new identity to survive, one that is in the desired mold of the military caste. In this state, they are particularly dependent on role models as sources of information. They also are dependent on the system to show them what new behaviors are desired. At this stage, their dependence is nearly complete. They are dependent on the organization for their basic needs for sustenance, they are dependent on the system for their social needs, and they are dependent on the organization for their personal growth and development needs. This high level of dependency presents an omnipotent source of power for the organization and those who represent the organization. It is hard to overstate the potential influence role models have on individuals during these highly dependent and vulnerable states. But this is precisely what makes socialization so effective in transforming individuals into the desired organizational citizens.

During a socialization process, recruits can easily be taught to discriminate between attitudes and behaviors that are consistent with the institutional values and those that are not. For instance, there is a reason why military units don’t conduct tolerance training for eye color, music preference and one’s favorite reading genre. The reason is obvious — these are irrelevant attributes. During basic training, recruits are instead socialized into believing that the only permissible form of discrimination in the military is the ability to do a job. To the extent that the socialization process is not contaminated, this approach would be complete in preventing undesired discrimination. It would be unlikely that a future need would occur for any form of tolerance training because the only differences recruits would be socialized to see would be those that limit others’ abilities to do their job.

Unfortunately, a string of reports documenting senior officers injecting their personal beliefs into the developmental programs at military academies and training units over the past few years indicates that the socialization processes of the U.S. military aren’t as pure as they need to be. The danger from a socialization perspective emerges when an organizational exemplar (be it a drill sergeant, instructor, commander or general officer) elects to infuse his or her idiosyncratic perspective into the process. As a result of the power these exemplars have in terms of their organizational status, their perspective easily can infect the organizationally sanctioned message while remaining indistinguishable to the lower-level members. Such covert modifications to the process result in an in-group mentality based on the socialization contaminants.

A significant part of the problem emerges from the structure that permits exemplars to infuse their own attitudes, values and beliefs into the socialization process as proxies for those that are organizationally sanctioned. Senior officers often are given free license to inject their own perspective into training processes, in the belief that they know best. But then the senior officer changes assignments two years later and turns over everything to someone else, who will change the training program to fit his own worldview. This structural instability fosters variations in the expectations of the desired behaviors, which inevitably derails the socialization processes on a path to nowhere good. The short-term result: more tolerance training at some future date. The long-term result: explaining to the public why a scandal emerged.

The most prominent and recent examples of military leadership injecting personal perspectives into socialization processes (as noted in these pages in “A Question of Faith,” January) dealing with religious preference are profound. As newcomers pursuing entry into the military become immersed in the institutional socialization processes, they are often unable to disassociate the contaminated aspects from the pure aspects. The result is that they are socialized to recognize the merit that some religious beliefs have over others in the course of military service. Thus, it should come as no surprise that religious harassment emerges from the system, and also that the institutional response will be to conduct tolerance training to “fix” the problem. The lesson that cannot be forgotten is that every system is perfectly designed to yield the behaviors observed. To the extent that impermissible discrimination emerges, it is quite likely because it was designed into the socialization process.

ON INCLUSION

Although the domains of race and gender seem to be settled when it comes to the roles they play in military service, it seems equally clear that the domains of religion and sexual orientation will dominate social policy discussions for the foreseeable future. If history is our guide, we can gauge that the diversity within the U.S. military is destined to become more diverse, not less. And thus, the military has an opportunity to unilaterally reflect and critically re-evaluate how it can best mitigate the effects of impermissible discrimination in the future. The military social structure has progressed beyond the point where tolerance training can provide any future value. To achieve a level of inclusion and respect among all military members, basic training (socialization) programs should refine their focus on teaching all recruits the necessity of becoming highly discriminatory in the identification and evaluation of attributes that will profoundly affect the military’s ability to wage and win wars in the future. Service members must be socialized to refrain from incomplete discriminatory comparisons that deal with irrelevant attributes and instead learn to fully discriminate across the domains of values (such as loyalty and integrity) and required behaviors for successful soldiers (such as conformity and creativity). As a first step, the word “tolerate” should be stricken from the military lexicon. Men and women in uniform should not be encouraged “to put up” with each other. Instead, they should be socialized to look beyond classifications such as race, religion, sexual orientation and gender and instead focus on attributes that directly relate to a person’s ability to do the job assigned.

Unfortunately, despite the military’s unparalleled success as an organizational leader in developing and implementing socialization mechanisms, it is likely that these mechanisms will continue to be ineffective toward the socially contested views of the roles that religion and sexual orientation have on military service. Socialization can work only if the process is pure — free from contaminants. Until leaders are held accountable for sanctioning inappropriate behaviors (such as proselytizing and overt homophobia), the socialization processes relied upon by the military will continue to reinforce an in-group mentality and a mantra that everyone should be tolerant of everyone else.

Given this landscape, it should come as no surprise that the next social crisis is likely just around the corner. After all, every system is perfectly designed to yield the behaviors observed. For socialization to be maximally effective, it is imperative that congruence exists among the various messages that are sent to everyone in uniform. But until the actions and behaviors of military leaders match the intellectual and emotional understanding of fostering an inclusive environment based on mutual respect, we must continue tolerating tolerance. Words aren’t enough.

Cleaning Out The Car, Cell Troubles, CSI Disneyland, Lost Guns And Learning From The Democrats

“Officer, I can explain”

Police arrested a man who was found driving in the woods with knives, a machete and what he said were 18 human teeth in his van on Sunday night…

After more searching, police found a film canister with 18 teeth, which Placko said were human, a blonde wig, a voice recorder, a pair of leather gloves, laser pointer, white rope and two spent 9 mm shell casings, according to the report. Read it all.

Another reason for dropped cell calls

Service is not expected to be fully restored for another two weeks after a cell phone tower in Tracy City was pulled down in an apparent attempt by thieves to get copper.

Guy wires were cut this past weekend to get a 360-foot DTC Wireless tower to fall. A DTC official says no one has been arrested.

…a weak dollar overseas has increased scrap metal demand because foreign markets can buy more U.S. products more cheaply than ever. He said the process has driven prices up worldwide.

“Now THAT’S a crime scene”

It was a bizarre scene, rivalled only by the cast of characters who will be called to give evidence about her unsolved death.

Opening an inquest into the 59-year-old’s death in Sydney on Monday, counsel assisting the coroner, Rebbecca Becroft, said the circumstances could only be described as “strange and bizarre”.

Ms Germain’s large frame was buried beneath various household items, including bedding, towels and a blue foot spa.

An electric iron cord was wrapped about her neck and a knife and razor were found near her body, but there were no discernible wounds, Sgt Becroft said.

Her dress was lifted above her head and a clothes peg had been attached to her genitals, with lipstick smeared over the vanity basin, walls and the body.

A toaster hung from the shower railing, and atop the pile obscuring her body sat a construction hat.

Two autopsies could not determine a cause of death, and the forensic pathologist deemed it to be either suicide or natural causes. Read it all.

“Where did I put my keys?”

A group of mothers and children at a Southwest Austin park found the loaded gun of an Austin police officer who did not know for hours that his weapon was missing, officials said Tuesday.

Austin police Lt. Donald Baker said supervisors are reviewing how officer Daniel Eveleth’s Glock handgun might have fallen from his holster while he was training a police dog about 5 a.m. Monday at the Circle C Ranch Metropolitan Park on Slaughter Creek…

Officers responding to the park after one of the mothers called 911…

‘He had no idea he was missing the weapon from his holster…” Read it all.

Learning from the Chicago Democrats

Medicare has paid as much as $92 million since 2000 to medical suppliers who billed the government for wheelchairs and other home equipment purportedly prescribed by physicians who, according to records, were dead at the time, congressional investigators said yesterday.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) honored about 500,000 such claims despite pledging six years ago to correct the problem, which was identified by the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general in 2001.

In more than half the cases studied, the doctor listed as having ordered the equipment had died more than five years earlier, said a report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s permanent subcommittee on investigations. Read it all.

Hollywood’s Hero Deficit: Lost In Time, Lost In Space

From The American:

The movie industry no longer aspires to portray genuine heroism—even though that’s precisely what audiences want to see.

A spate of movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror came out last year, all of them hostile to U.S. involvement and all of them box-office flops. At the time there was a certain amount of soul-searching in the media as to why, when most Americans told pollsters they thought the Iraq war, at least, had been a mistake, they didn’t seem to want to go and see movies that sought to show them just how great a mistake it had been. The New York Times critic A.O. Scott cited what he called “the economically convenient idea that people go to the movies to escape the problems of the world rather than to confront them,” but acknowledged the possibility that America’s opposition to the war “finds its truest expression in the wish that the whole thing would just go away, rather than in an appetite for critical films.”

Without denying that insight, I would like to propose another explanation: American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia. What kind of box office might have been done by a movie that offered up a real hero? [emp-SC&A]

There’s no way of telling, because there haven’t been any real movie heroes for a generation. This fact has been disguised from us partly because of the popularity of the superhero but also because Hollywood has continued to make war movies and Westerns, the biggest generators of movie heroism, that are superficially similar to those of the past but different in ways that are undetectable to their mostly young audiences, who have no memory of anything else. In an otherwise excellent article in Vanity Fair about “chick-flicks,” James Wolcott recently wrote that, like the chick-flick, “the Western is also a genre that’s often pronounced dead and buried only to be dug up again and propped against the barn door—witness 2007’s ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,’ and ‘No Country for Old Men.’”

Wolcott is far from being the first to express such an opinion, but neither he nor anyone else appears to have noticed the principal way in which the movies he mentions differ from those of 50 years ago. None of them has anything like a real hero, though all three have charismatic villains, played by Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt, and Javier Bardem, respectively. The title tells us what to think of the would-be hero of “The Assassination of Jesse James,” played by Casey Affleck. He’s a creep, a stalker, and a traitor, as well as a coward. “No Country” has one really sympathetic character, the aging sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is as helpless against the bad guy as everyone else is. Next to the sexy and invincible serial killer, a kind of inverted superhero played by Bardem, he is reduced to being just another victim hero, maundering on about what a nasty old world it is.

But it is “3:10 to Yuma” that offers the most interesting contrast between the old-fashioned sort of Western and the new breed. It was a remake of a movie first made in 1957, directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. Like so many other Westerns of the period, it was a parable of the heroism of the ordinary people who brought civilization, peace, and prosperity to the Wild West. Heflin’s character, Dan Evans, is a simple farmer in danger of losing his farm to drought who, for the $200 it would take to pay the mortgage, accepts the task of escorting Ford’s Ben Wade, a dangerous killer, to catch the eponymous train to trial. At a moment when it looks as if he is sure to die in the attempt, Evans explains to his wife that he is no longer escorting the prisoner for the money but as a civic duty. “The town drunk gave his life because he thought people should be able to live in peace and decency together,” he said. “Can I do less?”

Needless to say, there is no comparable line in the remake. The Dan Evans of 2007, played by Christian Bale, is an almost helpless victim, a Civil War veteran who lost his leg in a friendly-fire incident and whose motivation would remain merely mercenary but for the fact that, like us, he is meant to become rather fond of Crowe’s fascinating Wade—and vice versa. James Mangold, the director of the remake, has turned it into a meet-cute buddy picture. In the original, Evans stands four-square for due process and saves Wade from a vigilante. Ford’s Wade, having the rough sense of frontier honor of old-fashioned Western villains, repays the favor, even at the cost of having to make the train. He doesn’t like owing anything to anyone, he says. The remake ends with a general shootout in which it is unclear why anyone, especially Wade, does what he does. Poor Evans remains only a victim.

Both films are typical of their times. The 1957 version shows moral earnestness, an optimistic belief in civilized standards, and an unabashed portrayal of heroism. These things are lacking in its 2007 counterpart. In this it is like the other two new Westerns, or the HBO series “Deadwood.” Its moral landscape is the war of each against all that we see on the lawless and violent streets of “American Gangster” or other films with a contemporary setting. The Wild West has been resurrected not as a story of taming the wilderness, both external and internal, on behalf of decency and civilization, but as a convenient synecdoche for that dark, amoral, and timelessly violent world that all art worthy of the name today must presuppose. Where there is no hope of a better world, there can be little to distinguish heroes from villains.

That’s why the American movie hero—who once so impressed the world that he personified heroism for people far beyond our borders—has been missing in action for decades. From the days of Tom Mix and other silent-screen cowboys up until the 1970s, America’s heroes were the world’s heroes. During and after World War II, real-life heroes themselves often looked to the likes of John Wayne or Gary Cooper to see what a hero was supposed to look and act like. Such men hardly exist anymore, except in old movies [emp-SC&A]. In the early 1970s, there were many paranoiac films influenced by the popular take on Vietnam and Watergate. In Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View” (1974), Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), or Peter Hyams’s “Capricorn One” (1978), not to mention Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” (1976), government, corporate, and civic leaders are bad guys, while heroism, now the province of lawyers or journalists rather than soldiers or cowboys, can only hope to unmask them.

Here was the origin of the whistle-blower hero who, however noble in other ways, can’t help being a rat, a betrayers of friends and colleagues, and self-righteous in proportion, which would seem to limit his appeal. Yet down the years from “Norma Rae” (1979) through “The Insider” (1999), “Erin Brockovich” (2000), the “Bourne” trilogy, and last year’s “Michael Clayton,” behind every whistle-blower hero has been the assumption that the public realm is inescapably corrupt. Once populated by heroes whose job it was to tangle with and triumph over the villains, the institutions that support the community have now been abandoned to the villains. The hero stands alone against corruption so massive that he cannot hope to do anything more than expose it, not end it. This makes him, also, a victim hero. He may also, like Jason Bourne, morph into a superhero and so hit the post-heroic heroism trifecta.

The vogue of the superhero dates to the late ’70s and early ’80s when, in the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies—the latest of which, starring a geriatric Harrison Ford, came out this spring—the movie hero paid the price of his continued existence in Hollywood by living out his cinematic existence in a galaxy far, far away. Like Superman, whose first feature-film incarnation was in 1978, these heroes were unashamed of their cartoon origins and, therefore, their detachment from reality. Often muscle-men, like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, they even looked unreal. Wayne and Cooper had, of course, been imposing physical presences on and off screen, but no one would have mistaken either of them for bulgy, oiled-up Mr. Americas. Nowadays, even so traditional a heroic story as that of Thermopylae finds its translation (in “300”) into contemporary terms as beefcake.

The doomed Spartans were also examples of the victim hero who was the staple of the Vietnam War films, beginning with “Coming Home” and “The Deer Hunter” and continuing through “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Hamburger Hill,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” and others. Like the superhero, the victim hero did not invite emulation—though hints of some nameless hidden trauma, sometimes self-inflicted like drug or alcohol addiction, were among the hallmarks of “cool” masculinity. Thus he might also overlap with the whistle-blower hero who, like Warren Beatty’s character in “The Parallax View,” was caught and destroyed by the forces of evil, or with the cartoon hero who suffered childhood trauma, as in “Batman Begins,” or undergoes torture, as in “Braveheart.”

The point of all three of the kinds of hero in which Hollywood has specialized over the last 35 years has been to make sure that heroism can continue to exist only on a plane far removed from the daily lives of the audience. It is hard not to speculate that this is because of a quasi-political aversion on the part of filmmakers to suggesting to the audience that real-life heroism was something to which it, too, could aspire. The subtext of films featuring the whistle-blower hero, the cartoon hero, and the victim hero is that heroism—heroism of the, say, Gary Cooper type—belongs to the public and communal sphere, now universally supposed to be cruel and corrupt, and therefore is really no longer possible or even, perhaps, desirable.

That seems to have been the point of the great John Ford film of 1962 called “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” In it, John Wayne plays rancher Tom Doniphon in the Wild West town of Shinbone, which is still part of a territory not admitted to statehood and has only a comically feckless Andy Devine resembling anything like a duly constituted authority. Shinbone is terrorized by an outlaw named Liberty Valance, played by the great Lee Marvin. An idealistic lawyer named Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) comes to town to practice his profession only to find that there is no law there. In fact, he himself is robbed by Liberty on his way into town, yet he can find no one there who thinks that this is any of his business, or that it is even possible for this outlaw to be brought to justice. The law is helpless where there is no law enforcement. As Doniphon advises the newcomer, “Out here men take care of their own problems.”

Doniphon is the only man in town capable of standing up to Liberty, but as he himself hasn’t been robbed he doesn’t quite see why anyone else being robbed, let alone this geeky stranger, should be any business of his. Eventually, the idea of a larger civic responsibility begins to sink in—and, with it, a sense that it has become incumbent on him to do what no one else can do. Yet it can only be done outside the law, which remains powerless. This puts Doniphon and Liberty (the name is of course significant) on the same side. Both are outlaws whose would-be heroic struggle has no place in a civilized community. When Wayne triumphs, a way must be found for the townspeople to pretend that it is the law which has rid them of the depredations of Liberty and his gang, and a way duly is found. Stoddard is hailed as a hero and Doniphon, the real hero, is forgotten.

Ford’s film was a parable less of the coming of civilization to the West than of the  cultural transformation that was taking place in the postwar period in America and elsewhere—a transformation which resulted in an early but unmistakable foreshadowing of the death of the hero in the 1970s. The heroes who had won the Second World War commonly didn’t want to be heroes. They wanted to believe that they had been fighting for “a better world” (as it was so often formulated), by which they meant, among other things, a world that would have no need of heroes. The idea went back to Woodrow  Wilson’s characterization of World War I as “a war to end all wars,” and this became the enduring dream behind the League of Nations and, after the setback of World War II, its successor body, the United Nations. War had become a shameful thing simply as such and irrespective of the justice of the cause in which it was waged or the net humanitarian good it might accomplish.

As a result of this increasingly influential cultural attitude, the movie hero was already beginning to become a more and more ambiguous figure in the immediate postwar period. The kind of clean-living, pious hero portrayed by Cooper in the pre-war “Sergeant York” (1941)—which celebrated an American hero of the First World War—gave way to the isolated and magnificent but dubious postwar figure of Cooper’s Marshal Will Kane in “High Noon.” The heroics of Sergeant York were seen as having been performed on behalf of a community and a nation—two-thirds of the film is spent introducing us to his hometown of Pall Mall, Tennessee—which are as properly grateful to him as he is devoted to them. Kane’s deeds are performed in spite of and in opposition to the will of the community he serves and more to satisfy a personal standard of honor than a sense of duty to such a pack of ingrates. The film ends with his dropping his badge in the dust and leaving town for good.

Similarly, John Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Ford’s “Stagecoach” of 1939 may be a convict, but he wins our hearts not only by being handy with a gun but also by his willingness to form an ad hoc community with his fellow passengers when they are attacked by Indians and by his broad-mindedness and chivalry toward a “fallen” woman. But in such postwar roles as Tom Dunson in “Red River” (1948), Sergeant John Stryker in “The Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), or Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers” (1956), Wayne was portrayed as a lonely and isolated figure, living by a personal code, like Kane, but also like him in being more or less mistrusted and excluded from the community of those on whose behalf his heroic deeds are performed. In “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” Wayne’s attachment to a pre-war idea of what it meant to be a U.S. Marine even suggested that, in spite of the film’s admiration for his heroism and leadership, it finally saw him as a throwback who could have no place in the postwar world.

The greatest of the postwar contributions to the eventual decline and fall of the American movie hero came from what the French called the films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s.  The noir hero was a prototype for all three of the heroes who have dominated American movies since the 1970s. Alone and without roots in any community, he lived in an urban twilight where few if any people could be trusted. Often a criminal himself, his real job was to expose a larger corruption and criminality than his own, and to suffer from it. In his most perfect incarnation, a private eye such as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe—both played by Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) and “The Big Sleep” (1946)—he even had something like super-heroic powers. The noir film didn’t survive its period, however, and to my eye the many attempts to revive it since “Chinatown” (1974) have all failed.

The reason, I think, was that in the noir pictures there was always a sense—enforced to some extent by the Hays Code that aimed to uphold high moral standards and was still in force at the time—that however hated and resented the moral order enforced by the social and political powers-that-be, it was still a genuine moral order and not just the greed, viciousness, and violence of those who happened to hold power. Though the antihero whose flowering we have seen in our own time was there in embryo, it still left open the possibility of goodness and decency, not just on the part of individuals but of a community. That’s what it took for Dan Evans in the 1957 version of “3:10 to Yuma” to be a hero: the idea that his courage was for the sake of a belief that “people should be able to live in peace and decency together.” Without this belief in a community where power is not antithetical to the good and the decent but the means of its advancement, neither the war films nor the Westerns of our own time will ever be able to give us any but a debased sort of heroism.

‘Why facts won’t demolish the conspiracy theories’: The Troofer Lemmings March On

From Spiked:

A report on the collapse of Tower 7 will not shut up 9/11 Truthers: their theories spring from a culture of mistrust, suspicion and ‘agency panic’.

Frank Furedi

The rise and rise of conspiratorial thinking is one of the most disturbing developments in twenty-first century public life.

Sometimes it appears as if Western societies have regressed, adopting a medieval attitude towards calamitous acts. Back in the Dark Ages, people regarded accidents, disasters and other acts of misfortune as the work of hidden forces. Accidents did not happen, apparently – they were intentionally caused, either by divine or malevolent forces. Misdeeds were often said to have been caused by people who had been manipulated by ‘evil forces’.

This primitive outlook is making a comeback; it informs the way many people make sense of high-profile catastrophes today. Conspiracy theories are pushed forward to explain what happened on 9/11, or why there was such devastation in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
And since conspiracy thinking believes that what you can’t see is more important than what you can see, it is highly unlikely that the report on the destruction of Tower Seven on 9/11 – due to be published by the Washington-based National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) this month – will help to clarify matters.

The 47-storey Tower Seven was the third tower to collapse at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Unlike the twin towers, Tower Seven was not hit by a plane. According to the conspiratorial imagination, Tower Seven was destroyed by the American government in a controlled explosion. Why? Because, it is claimed, American security agencies such as the FBI and CIA had offices in Tower Seven, and that is where they plotted to execute the ‘9/11 operation’. In short, they demolished Tower Seven to cover their tracks. How else, the conspiracy theorists ask, can we explain the collapse of a massive building?

9/11 ‘Truthers’ and other conspiracy thinkers are unlikely to be moved by NIST’s report, which is likely to argue that a raging fire caused Tower Seven to fall. As far as the so-called Truth Movement is concerned, this report is simply further evidence of a massive government-inspired cover-up.

A crisis of causality

The conspiratorial imagination views people, not as the authors of their destinies, but as objects of manipulative, secretive forces. Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil figures pull all the strings. The flourishing of this imagination in recent years has been driven by society’s own difficulty in putting forward an authoritative account of events.

These days, virtually every aspect of public life is contested, challenged, doubted: there is little agreement on what are the causes of our current predicament. We might refer to this as a ‘crisis of causality’, and it is a crisis which continually calls into question any official version of events. Of course, officialdom’s account of event often needs to be questioned, but not by putting forward a simplistic, conspiratorial worldview that blames small cliques of evil people for everything that goes wrong in the world.

The crisis of causality means many people believe that major events are shaped and determined by a hidden agenda. We seem to be living in a shadowy world similar to that depicted in the movie franchise The Matrix Trilogy, where the big questions are: how do we know what is real, and who is being manipulated by whom?

In previous times, such conspiracism mainly informed the thinking of right-wing populist movements, which always saw the hand of Jewish, Masonic or Communist conspiracies behind major world events. Today, conspiracy theory has gone mainstream, and many of the most vociferous proponents of the conspiracy theory are radical protesters and thinkers on the cultural left. When, a few years ago, Hillary Clinton warned of a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ to undermine her husband – then US president Bill Clinton – it became clear that the politics of the hidden agenda had well and truly become a feature of public life. Today, the anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movement is as wedded to the politics of conspiracy as is its opponents on the far right.

Contemporary conspiracy thinking helps to fuel suspicion and mistrust of politics. It replaces critical engagement with public life with a destructive search for the hidden agenda; it distracts from the clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a theatre where what matters are the private lives and personal interests of mistrusted politicians. The media, in turn, fuels this attitude by continually suggesting that what really matters today is not what public figures actually say, but rather what their ‘real’ agenda is. This incites the public to look for hidden motives. No one, apparently, is what he seems to be. The normalisation of suspicion has absolutely no positive element to it.

The crisis of causality does not only mean we find it difficult to understand the chain of events that led to a particular outcome; it has also diminished our capacity to find meaning in what sometimes appears to us as a series of patternless events. Today, making sense of events is proving particularly troublesome – and in such circumstances, ‘facts’ about what happened do not really help very much. That is why significant sections of the public are sceptical toward official accounts of the death of Princess Diana, the reason for the US invasion of Iraq or the events of 9/11; even when we have the facts, society’s inability to make sense of events in a meaningful way pushes some people to seek meaning elsewhere.

Many seek explanations in the realm of conspiracies. People’s embrace of conspiracy theories is often driven by a sense of incomprehension towards the workings of the world. According to author Peter Knight, in his exploration of the relationship between our heightened sense of risk and the rise of conspiracy theories: ‘A conspiracy theory typically claims that there is a hidden agenda and a hidden hand behind current events… In effect, conspiracy theories have tended to restore a sense of agency, causality and responsibility to what would otherwise seem the inexplicable play of forces over which we have no control.’ (1)
The loss of a sense of causality has led to a situation where bad things – whether it’s accidents or disasters – are increasingly associated with intentional malevolent behaviour. Such episodes are frequently blamed on the self-serving, purposeful acts of politicians, business figures, doctors, scientists – indeed all professionals. Today, one of the clearest expressions of the sense of diminished subjectivity is the feeling that the individual is manipulated and influenced by hidden powerful forces – not just by spindoctors, subliminal advertising and the media, but also by immense powers that have no name.

For example, people often attribute unexplained physical and psychological symptoms to the food we eat, the water we drink, an extending variety of pollutants and other substances transmitted by new technologies and other invisible processes. The American academic, Timothy Melley, has characterised this response as ‘agency panic’. He writes: ‘Agency panic is intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy, the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else or that one has been “constructed” by powerful, external agents.’ (2) The perception that our behaviour and action is controlled by external agents is symptomatic of a heightened sense of fatalism, which arises from today’ s sense of diminished subjectivity. The feeling of being subject to manipulation and external control – the very stuff of conspiracy theory – springs from the contemporary perception of powerlessness.

History shows us that nothing is more frightening than when a community lacks a system of meaning through which it can understand the problems it confronts. In such circumstances, people feel powerless and confused, and are sometimes drawn towards a simplistic version of events where everything appears black or white or good and evil. That is why, for many people, the collapse of Tower Seven symbolises the workings of evil – and why NIST’s forthcoming report is unlikely to shake them out of their thinking patterns. Once you see and hear evil, and believe it exists, it is difficult to regard competing views as anything other than the work of Very Bad People.

Left hand, Right Hand: US Exports To Iran Multiply 10 Times

The good news is that he top export is tobacco.

From AOL News:

Nuclear weapons? No way. But there are plenty of items on Iran’s shopping list the United States is more than happy to supply: cigarettes, brassieres, bull semen and more.

U.S. exports to Iran grew more than tenfold during President Bush’s years in office even as he accused it of nuclear ambitions and sponsoring terrorists. America sent more cigarettes to Iran — at least $158 million worth under Bush — than any other product.

Other surprising shipments during the Bush administration: fur clothing, sculptures, perfume, musical instruments and military apparel. Top states shipping goods to Iran include California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of seven years of U.S. government trade data.

Despite increasingly tough rhetoric toward Iran, which Bush has called part of an “axis of evil,” U.S. trade in a range of goods survives on-again, off-again sanctions originally imposed nearly three decades ago. The rules allow sales of agricultural commodities, medicine and a few other categories of goods. The exemptions are designed to help Iranian families even as the United States pressures Iran’s leaders.

“I understand that these exports have increased. However, we believe that they are increasing to a segment of the population that we want to reach out to, we want to know and understand that the U.S. government, the U.S. people want to be friends with them, want to work with them to integrate them into the world economy and become partners in the future,” Gonzalo Gallegos, a State Department spokesman, said Tuesday when asked by reporters about AP’s findings.

The government tracks exports to Iran using details from shipping records, but in some cases it’s unclear whether anyone pays attention.

Sanctions are intended in part to frustrate Iran’s efforts to build its military, but the U.S. government’s own figures showed at least $148,000 worth of unspecified weapons and other military gear were exported from the United States to Iran during Bush’s time in office. That included $106,635 in military rifles and $8,760 in rifle parts and accessories shipped in 2004.

The Bush administration looked into those shipments after AP questioned whether the U.S. really approved the export of military rifles to Iran. A review found the rifles and parts actually went to Iraq; the wrong country was entered on the shipping record, Treasury Department spokesman John Rankin said. The government will correct the data, he said.

The remaining military gear is likely $33,000 in military apparel shipped to Iran under the humanitarian exemption to the trade sanctions, Rankin said.

The government was also looking into U.S. records showing the export of at least $13,000 in “aircraft launching gear and/or deck arrestors,” equipment needed to launch jets from aircraft carriers. Iran’s navy is not believed to have carriers. It’s likely the wrong commodity code was entered in the shipping record or the parts are for civilian aircraft and legal to export, Rankin said.

U.S. law enforcement believes Iran is actively trying to acquire U.S. military technology, including aircraft parts that can sell for pennies on the dollar compared with what the Pentagon paid. Last year, federal agents seized four F-14 fighter jets sold to domestic buyers by an officer at Point Mugu Naval Air Station, Calif., for $2,000 to $4,000 each, with proceeds benefiting a squadron recreation fund. When F-14s were new, they cost roughly $38 million each.

Bush this year signed legislation prohibiting the Pentagon from selling leftover F-14 parts. The law was prompted by AP reporting that buyers for Iran, China and other countries exploited Pentagon surplus sales to obtain sensitive military equipment that included parts for F-14 “Tomcats” and other aircraft and missile components. Two men were indicted in Florida last week on charges they shipped U.S. military aircraft parts to Iran, including Tomcat and attack-helicopter parts.

Iran received at least $620,000 in aircraft parts and $19,600 worth of aircraft during Bush’s terms. Iran relies on spare parts from other countries to keep its commercial and military aircraft flying. In some cases, U.S. sanctions allow shipments of aircraft parts for safety upgrades for Iran’s commercial passenger jets.

Iran is a hot issue in Washington. The House plans a hearing Wednesday on U.S. policy toward Iran, and the Bush administration announced Tuesday it was freezing the U.S. assets of several people and entities accused of helping Iran develop nuclear weapons.

But the U.S. government seems uncoordinated on efforts to limit trade with Iran.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sought to shine a light on companies active in Iran but stopped after business groups complained. The Treasury Department allowed some companies and individuals suspected of illegal trading with Iran to escape punishment. Yet the Bush administration also has collected millions of dollars in fines from trade-rule violators and pressed Congress without success to pass laws to strengthen enforcement.

The fact that the United States sells anything to Iran is news to some.

“Until you just told me that about Iran, I’m not sure I knew we did any business with Iran,” said Fred Wetherington, a tobacco grower in Hahira, Ga., and chairman of Georgia’s tobacco commission. “I thought because of the situation between our two governments, I didn’t think we traded with them at all, so I certainly didn’t know they were getting any cigarettes.”

The United States sent Iran $546 million in goods from 2001 through last year, government figures show. It exported roughly $146 million worth last year, compared with $8.3 million in 2001, Bush’s first year in office. Even adjusted for inflation, that is more than a tenfold increase.

Exports to Iran are a politically loaded but tiny part of U.S. trade. The United States counted more than $1 trillion in world exports last year. The value of U.S. shipments last year to Canada — America’s top trading partner — was more than 1,000 times the value of shipments to Iran.

Top U.S. exports to Iran over Bush’s years in office include corn, $68 million; chemical wood pulp, soda or sulphate, $64 million; soybeans, $43 million; medical equipment, $27 million; vitamins, $18 million; bull semen, $12.6 million; and vegetable seeds, $12 million, according to the AP’s analysis of government trade data compiled by the World Institute for Strategic Economic Research in Holyoke, Mass. The value of cigarettes sold to Iran was more than twice that of the No. 2 category on the export list, vaccines, serums and blood products, $73 million.

Iran is a top customer of Alta Genetics Inc., a Canadian company with an office in Watertown, Wis., that sells bull semen, used to produce healthier, more profitable cattle. “The animals we’re working with are genetically superior to those in many parts of the world,” said Kevin Muxlow, Alta’s global marketing manager.

Also getting Bush administration approval for export to Iran were at least $101,000 worth of bras; $175,000 in sculptures; nearly $96,000 worth of cosmetics; $8,900 in perfume; $30,000 in musical instruments and parts; $21,000 in golf carts and/or snowmobiles; $4,000 worth of movie film; and $3,300 in fur clothing.

Few people or companies asking U.S. permission to trade with Iran are turned down by the Treasury Department, the lead agency for licensing exports to sanctioned countries. During Bush’s terms, the office has received at least 4,523 license applications for Iran exports, issued at least 2,821 licenses and 213 license amendments and denied at least 178, Treasury Department data shows.

Neither the Treasury data nor trade data compiled by the Census Bureau identifies exporters or specifies what they shipped. The AP requested those details under the Freedom of Information Act in 2005 and still is waiting for the Treasury Department to provide them.

Though some trade with Iran is legal, some businesses prefer that people not know about it.

Citing corporate financial reports, the SEC published a list online last year of companies that said they had done business in Iran or four other countries the State Department considers state sponsors of terrorism. The SEC withdrew the list after business groups complained, but it is considering releasing one again.

“There’s no question that people are looking for that kind of information,” SEC spokesman John Nester said. “But under the current disclosure regime, it’s beyond most people’s abilities and time to slog through every corporate report and find companies that make reference to one of those nations.”

Business groups oppose publishing such lists. It “could inappropriately label companies with legitimate activities as supporters of terrorism,” the European Association of Listed Companies told the commission earlier this year.

An AP photographer strolling through shops in Tehran had no problem finding American brands on the shelves. An AP review of corporate SEC filings found dozens of companies that have done business in Iran in recent years or said their products or services may have made it there through other channels. Some are household names: PepsiCo, Tyson Foods, Canon, BP Amoco, Exxon Mobil, GE Healthcare, the Wells Fargo financial services company, Visa, Mastercard and the Cadbury Schweppes candy and beverage maker.

Georgia led states in exports to Iran over the past seven years, with cigarettes representing $154 million of the $201 million in goods it exported there. Cigarette shipments to Iran peaked in 2006, apparently from a Brown & Williamson cigarette factory in Macon, Ga.

When the plant closed, tobacco shipments to Iran fell dramatically. No U.S. tobacco shipments to Iran were reported for 2007 or the first quarter of this year, the most recent figures available.

British American Tobacco began operating in Iran in 2002, producing most of its cigarettes under a contract with the Iranian tobacco monopoly, company spokesman David Betteridge said. B.A.T. shipped Kent cigarettes from the United States to Iran until 2006, he said.

The factory in Macon closed after B.A.T.’s Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings merged their U.S. tobacco and cigarette businesses. B.A.T. said it now makes cigarettes for export to Iran in Turkey. It declined to say how much tobacco the company previously shipped from the U.S. to Iran, but said the U.S. government approved the shipments.

The Bush administration’s record enforcing export laws is mixed. The Office of Foreign Assets Control let the statute of limitations expire in at least 25 cases involving trade with Iran from 2002 to 2005, according to one internal department audit. The companies involved, disclosed to the AP under the Freedom of Information Act, include Acterna Corp., American Export Lines, Parvizian Masterpieces, Protrade International Corp., Rex of New York, Shinhan Bank, Phoenix Biomedical Corp., World Cargo Alliance and World Fuel Services.

Abdi Parvizian of the Parvizian Masterpieces rug gallery in Chevy Chase, Md., said his case was dropped because his business proved everything was imported from Iran legally. He bristled over current congressional proposals to ban imports from Iran, including carpets.

“The problem with the rugs is it has nothing to do with the government of Iran,” Parvizian said. “This is something that is made by the very unfortunate people in the country, and those people are going to get hurt more than anybody else.”

World Fuel Services said an employee fueled a ship out of Singapore that turned out to be Iranian-owned, and the U.S. government spotted it from a wire transfer. The company explained the mistake to Treasury with no repercussions, said Kevin Welber, general counsel of the company’s marine business. It has since put in place techniques to identify Iranian-owned ships, which Welber said can be difficult because some Iranian ships sail under Cyprus flags.

Phoenix Biomedical acknowledged it shipped surgical shunts to Iran without a license. It previously was allowed during the Clinton administration to send them to Iran and sent replacement shunts without a new license, which was required, said Charles Hokanson, who sold Phoenix Biomedical to French-based Vygon and is now chief executive of Vygon USA. He said that was the last business it did with Iran.

The other companies did not respond to requests by the AP for explanations.

Failure to obtain export licenses has caused trouble for some companies whose products can legally be sold to Iran.

Months after Zimmer Dental of Carlsbad, Calif., acquired Centerpulse Dental in late 2003, it learned Centerpulse had sold dental implants and related items to Iran without necessary export licenses, Zimmer spokesman Brad Bishop said. It voluntarily reported the violations to the Treasury Department, which announced in January that Zimmer Dental had paid an $82,850 penalty.

Bishop said the company has since trained employees and also took the easiest solution to avoid such problems:

It stopped doing any business with Iran.

The New, Merry England: Toddlers who dislike spicy food ‘racist’

From The Telegraph:

Toddlers who turn their noses up at spicy food from overseas could be branded racists by a Government-sponsored agency.

The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.

It alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can “recognise different people in their lives”.

The 366-page guide for staff in charge of pre-school children, called Young Children and Racial Justice, warns: “Racist incidents among children in early years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships.”

It advises nursery teachers to be on the alert for childish abuse such as: “blackie”, “Pakis”, “those people” or “they smell”.

The guide goes on to warn that children might also “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘yuk’”.

Staff are told: “No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action.”

Warning that failing to pick children up on their racist attitudes could instil prejudice, the NCB adds that if children “reveal negative attitudes, the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes”.

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: “Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.”