Friday, October 21, 2011
The Waterboys
And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats and they’ll get high
On a blue ocean, against tomorrow’s sky
And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And I will never grow so old again
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing
And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry
Hey, it’s me! I’m dynamite and I don’t know why
And you shall take me warm in your arms again
And I will not remember that I ever felt the pain
And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain
And never ever ever ever ever get so old again
more:
The Road to Melville
Even though I hadn’t read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study, relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.
Sometimes he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school, when my English teacher made it clear that I had no choice in the matter, that I finally read Moby-Dick . I soon found myself in the worst position an adolescent male can ever know: having to admit that maybe, just maybe, his father had been right all along.
The voice of Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, caught me completely by surprise. I had expected to be bored to death, but Ishmael sounded like the best friend I had not yet managed to find. Thirty-seven years later, after reading Moby-Dick cover to cover at least a dozen times, I still count Ishmael as a beloved soulmate and spiritual adviser. Not only is he funny, wise, and bighearted, he is the consummate survivor, for it is he and he alone who lives to tell about Ahab’s encounter with the White Whale. For me, Moby-Dick is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual—the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century. (...)
Melville’s intense imaginative engagement with these forces of turmoil and change meant that the novel he wrote and re-wrote over the course of a year beginning in September 1850 would be about much more than a whaling voyage to the Pacific. Indeed, contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that had contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 and were about to precipitate a civil war in 1861, and that have continued to drive this country’s ever contentious march across 160 years, up through the current “war on terror.” This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations of readers have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or, closer to our own day, as a profit-mad, deep-drilling oil company in 2010, or as one of several power-crazed Middle Eastern dictators in 2011.
The irony is that when Moby-Dick was first published, in the fall of 1851, virtually no one, except for the author to whom the novel was dedicated, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his wife, Sophia, seems to have taken much notice. By the time of Melville’s death, in 1891, Moby-Dick had sold a grand total of 3,715 copies—a third of the total that his first novel, Typee, had sold. It wasn’t until after World War I that what had begun as a few belated plaudits became a virtual tidal wave of praise. There were still some naysayers (Joseph Conrad ridiculed Moby-Dick for its romantic, overblown prose), but the vast majority of writers who first encountered the book were stunned and deeply influenced by how Melville conveyed the specifics of a past world even as he communicated an unmatched sense of what it is like, in any age, to be alive. What Moby-Dick had needed, it turned out, was space—the distance required for its themes and images to resonate, unfettered by the passions that had inspired them. Once free of its own time, the novel was on its way to becoming the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today.
By Nathaniel Philbrick, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Illustration: Moby-Dick and Ahab, Claus Hoie, 1911- Norwegian/American
Not So Fast
by Spencer Ackerman, Wired
President Obama announced on Friday that all 41,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq will return home by December 31. “That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end,” he said. Don’t believe him.
Now: it’s a big deal that all U.S. troops are coming home. For much of the year, the military, fearful of Iranian influence, has sought a residual presence in Iraq of several thousand troops. But arduous negotiations with the Iraqi government about keeping a residual force stalled over the Iraqis’ reluctance to provide them with legal immunity.
But the fact is America’s military efforts in Iraq aren’t coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas. (...)
That means no one outside the State Department knows how its contractors will behave as they ferry over 10,000 U.S. State Department employees throughout Iraq — which, in case anyone has forgotten, is still a war zone. Since Iraq wouldn’t grant legal immunity to U.S. troops, it is unlikely to grant it to U.S. contractors, particularly in the heat and anger of an accident resulting in the loss of Iraqi life.
It’s a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it’s being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective.
Read more:
Now: it’s a big deal that all U.S. troops are coming home. For much of the year, the military, fearful of Iranian influence, has sought a residual presence in Iraq of several thousand troops. But arduous negotiations with the Iraqi government about keeping a residual force stalled over the Iraqis’ reluctance to provide them with legal immunity.
But the fact is America’s military efforts in Iraq aren’t coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas. (...)
That means no one outside the State Department knows how its contractors will behave as they ferry over 10,000 U.S. State Department employees throughout Iraq — which, in case anyone has forgotten, is still a war zone. Since Iraq wouldn’t grant legal immunity to U.S. troops, it is unlikely to grant it to U.S. contractors, particularly in the heat and anger of an accident resulting in the loss of Iraqi life.
It’s a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it’s being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective.
Read more:
Friday Book Club - I Want My Hat Back
[ed. I haven't read this yet and am just waiting for the right person to give it to. I quite enjoy Jon Klassen's illustrations.]
...speaking of great children’s books, everything you have read or heard about Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back is true.
The book is funny, gorgeous, and perfect — an instant classic if ever there was one. Beautiful minimalist art and smart, funny writing.
via:
...speaking of great children’s books, everything you have read or heard about Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back is true.
The book is funny, gorgeous, and perfect — an instant classic if ever there was one. Beautiful minimalist art and smart, funny writing.
via:
How New Science Is Revealing the Power of Meditation and Prayer
by Steve Volk
(...) Robert’s goal was to reach a bliss that humans have been chasing, and finding, for thousands of years: the transcendent experience. In this condition, the human mind, normally so noisy with the worries of the day, quiets to a hush. Time and space drop away. The meditator feels one with the universe—every atom of every body, all part of his body. For centuries, mystics have described this root experience in varying terms, and in metaphorical language. The “ecstasy of unity,” as Edgar Mitchell put it in the previous chapter, is both real and ineffable—an experience beyond words.
Newberg waited for an hour, unsure if the plan would work, and then—he felt it: a small tug on the length of twine running between him and Robert. This was the signal Robert was to give just before he reached the state Newberg wanted to study. Newberg waited a few beats, allowing Robert to achieve whatever nirvana he’d won for himself, then jumped into action. He opened the door between him and Robert and injected the intravenous line with a radioactive tracer. If the injection was precisely timed, the tracer would document the blood flow patterns in Robert’s brain at the moment his meditation reached its peak.
Rousing Robert from his meditation, Newberg then hustled him to a room in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He laid him down on a long metal table and slid him under a huge, high-tech SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Temography) camera, designed to detect radioactive emissions.
Newberg didn’t know whether this part of the experiment would work. No one had ever tried this before. But the results were all he could reasonably have wanted. Looking over the SPECT scan, Newberg could see that the areas of Robert’s brain associated with judging distances, angles, and depths—in short, his position in space—had gone whisper-quiet. During normal consciousness, this area—the posterior superior parietal lobe—lights up on a SPECT scan with the furious red of active blood flow. This part of our brain has a lot of work to do. It keeps us from running into walls and missing the chairs we intend to sit in. Even when we’re still, in fact, this area of the brain remains active: always aware of which parts of our body are in contact with the chair, and which are floating in space; how far away the water glass sits on the table, and how high. But in Robert, during the peak of his meditation, the blazing red turned cool green and blue. The suggestion was obvious: Robert felt himself become one with the universe because the part of his brain that tells him where his body begins and the objects around him end pretty much shut down.
Newberg studied eight Tibetan meditators and took similar pictures. Then he moved on to Franciscan nuns, who practice a form of meditation called “Christian centering prayer.” A new field of science was born. And as Newberg accumulated data, he made an important finding: “The altered states of mind [our subjects] described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking,” writes Newberg in Why God Won’t Go Away, “but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”
In short, the world’s mystics have not been kidding themselves—or crazy. But what did this say, if anything, about God or spirituality?
Read more:
(...) Robert’s goal was to reach a bliss that humans have been chasing, and finding, for thousands of years: the transcendent experience. In this condition, the human mind, normally so noisy with the worries of the day, quiets to a hush. Time and space drop away. The meditator feels one with the universe—every atom of every body, all part of his body. For centuries, mystics have described this root experience in varying terms, and in metaphorical language. The “ecstasy of unity,” as Edgar Mitchell put it in the previous chapter, is both real and ineffable—an experience beyond words.
Newberg waited for an hour, unsure if the plan would work, and then—he felt it: a small tug on the length of twine running between him and Robert. This was the signal Robert was to give just before he reached the state Newberg wanted to study. Newberg waited a few beats, allowing Robert to achieve whatever nirvana he’d won for himself, then jumped into action. He opened the door between him and Robert and injected the intravenous line with a radioactive tracer. If the injection was precisely timed, the tracer would document the blood flow patterns in Robert’s brain at the moment his meditation reached its peak.
Rousing Robert from his meditation, Newberg then hustled him to a room in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He laid him down on a long metal table and slid him under a huge, high-tech SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Temography) camera, designed to detect radioactive emissions.
Newberg didn’t know whether this part of the experiment would work. No one had ever tried this before. But the results were all he could reasonably have wanted. Looking over the SPECT scan, Newberg could see that the areas of Robert’s brain associated with judging distances, angles, and depths—in short, his position in space—had gone whisper-quiet. During normal consciousness, this area—the posterior superior parietal lobe—lights up on a SPECT scan with the furious red of active blood flow. This part of our brain has a lot of work to do. It keeps us from running into walls and missing the chairs we intend to sit in. Even when we’re still, in fact, this area of the brain remains active: always aware of which parts of our body are in contact with the chair, and which are floating in space; how far away the water glass sits on the table, and how high. But in Robert, during the peak of his meditation, the blazing red turned cool green and blue. The suggestion was obvious: Robert felt himself become one with the universe because the part of his brain that tells him where his body begins and the objects around him end pretty much shut down.
Newberg studied eight Tibetan meditators and took similar pictures. Then he moved on to Franciscan nuns, who practice a form of meditation called “Christian centering prayer.” A new field of science was born. And as Newberg accumulated data, he made an important finding: “The altered states of mind [our subjects] described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking,” writes Newberg in Why God Won’t Go Away, “but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”
In short, the world’s mystics have not been kidding themselves—or crazy. But what did this say, if anything, about God or spirituality?
Read more:
The Re-Birth of Cool
[ed. Definitely click on the Reid Miles link to get an eye-opening perspective on this amazing artist's career.]
Hi-Fi from bante on Vimeo.
Hi-Fi from bante on Vimeo.
Back in 2009, Blue Note Records, the influential jazz label, was celebrating its 70th anniversary. And The Bella Vista Social Pub, looking to promote its own summer jazz concerts in Siena, Tuscany, came up with a smart idea. Why not pay tribute to Blue Note (and promote the Italian concert series) by animating the cool cover designs that graced Blue Note albums during its heyday. These cover designs were the work of Reid Miles, a graphic designer who moved from Esquire magazine to Blue Note around 1955, then designed hundreds of aura-creating covers until he left the label in 1967. The animated video above, called Hi-Fi, brings Miles’ work back to life. Graphicology has more on the nostalgia-inducing clip here.
via:
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Bitter Brew
by Michael Idov, Slate
You know that charming little cafe on New York's Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.
I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. Friends' eyes misted over when my wife and I would excitedly recite our concept ("Vienna roast from Vienna! It's lighter and sweeter than bitter Italian espresso—no need to drown it in milk!"). It seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.
You know that charming little cafe on New York's Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.
I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. Friends' eyes misted over when my wife and I would excitedly recite our concept ("Vienna roast from Vienna! It's lighter and sweeter than bitter Italian espresso—no need to drown it in milk!"). It seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one's own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it.
Read more:
Billions and Billions
What is the limit to population growth?
by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
Sometime on October 31st, the world’s population will hit seven billion. The baby who does the trick will most likely appear in India, where the number of births per minute—fifty-one—is higher than in any other nation. But he or she could also be born in China—the world’s most populous country—or in a fast-growing nation like Nigeria or Guatemala or, really, anywhere. The idea that a particular child will on a particular day bring the global population to a particular number is, of course, a fiction; nobody can say, within tens of millions, how many people there are on earth at any given time. The United Nations Population Fund has picked October 31st as its best estimate. That this date is Halloween is presumably just a coincidence.
Depending on how you look at things, it has taken humanity a long time to reach this landmark, or practically no time at all. Around ten thousand years ago, there were maybe five million people on earth. By the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt, the number was up to about fifteen million, and by the time of the birth of Christ it had climbed to somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million. Global population finally reached a billion around 1800, just a couple of years after Thomas Malthus published his famous essay warning that human numbers would always be held in check by war, pestilence, or “inevitable famine.”
In a distinctly un-Malthusian fashion, population then took off. It hit two billion in the nineteen-twenties, and was three billion by 1960. In 1968, when Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” predicting the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of people from starvation, it stood at around three and a half billion; since then, it has been growing at the rate of a billion people every twelve or thirteen years. According to the United Nations, it reached six billion on October 12, 1999. (A baby boy born in Sarajevo, Adnan Mević, was, for symbolic purposes, designated the world’s six-billionth person and greeted at the hospital by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.) For large and slow-to-reproduce mammals like humans, such a growth curve is, to put it mildly, unusual. Edward O. Wilson has called “the pattern of human population growth” in the twentieth century “more bacterial than primate.”
Tombstone Generator
[ed. Perhaps you're the kind of person that doesn't like to leave anything to chance - like letting your loved ones come up with a suitable inscription for your headstone (they'll be too busy fighting over your will). So, just in time for Halloween - your own personal Tombstone Generator.]
via:
Thanks GS
Best Abstract Ever
Twitterings call it the “best abstract ever“. The lead author, Michael Berry, was awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in physics (together with Andre Geim) for using magnets to levitate a frog. This new paper is a response to the recent reported measurements of neutrinos that apparently traveled faster than the speed of light.
via:
Current Events: Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
by Glenn Greenwald, Salon
Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote: “Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.” The boy’s grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives. There are two points worth making about this:
(1) It is unknown whether the U.S. targeted the teenager or whether he was merely “collateral damage.” The reason that’s unknown is because the Obama administration refuses to tell us. Said the Post: “The officials would not discuss the attack in any detail, including who the target was.” So here we have yet again one of the most consequential acts a government can take — killing one of its own citizens, in this case a teenage boy — and the government refuses even to talk about what it did, why it did it, what its justification is, what evidence it possesses, or what principles it has embraced in general for such actions. Indeed, it refuses even to admit it did this, since it refuses even to admit that it has a drone program at all and that it is engaged in military action in Yemen. It’s just all shrouded in total secrecy. (...)
(2) Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.
Read more:
Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote: “Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.” The boy’s grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives. There are two points worth making about this:
(1) It is unknown whether the U.S. targeted the teenager or whether he was merely “collateral damage.” The reason that’s unknown is because the Obama administration refuses to tell us. Said the Post: “The officials would not discuss the attack in any detail, including who the target was.” So here we have yet again one of the most consequential acts a government can take — killing one of its own citizens, in this case a teenage boy — and the government refuses even to talk about what it did, why it did it, what its justification is, what evidence it possesses, or what principles it has embraced in general for such actions. Indeed, it refuses even to admit it did this, since it refuses even to admit that it has a drone program at all and that it is engaged in military action in Yemen. It’s just all shrouded in total secrecy. (...)
(2) Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.
Read more:
Planet of the Retired Apes
by Charles Seibert, NY Times
This past spring, in a secluded patch of forest in northwest Louisiana's Caddo Parish, a singularly bizarre bit of evolution unfolded. There, amid the sun-dappled pines and flitting birds, a pair of 40-something chimpanzees named Rita and Teresa -- lifetime research subjects who were originally taken from Africa for use in NASA's space program -- became American pioneers of a whole other sort: the first beneficiaries of an inspired piece of retirement legislation passed by the United States government. Under the watchful eyes of animal behaviorists, veterinarians, enrichment specialists and daily caretakers, Rita and Teresa checked in on the afternoon of April 4 at the recently opened Chimp Haven, the first federally financed, taxpayer-supported retirement home for chimpanzees.
They arrived in a specially equipped trailer after an eight-hour drive from the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Tex. After receiving full physicals from Chimp Haven's in-house veterinarian, including dental checkups for possible extractions or root canals, the two chimps were shown to their spacious new sleeping quarters, complete with fresh running water and cross-ventilation, multiple windows and skylights, hammocks made of neatly crosshatched sections of used fire hose, bedding of warm blankets and hay, vanity mirrors, as well as a TV, a VCR and DVD and CD players.
Following a long nap, Rita and Teresa awoke to a couple of banana smoothies and were shown the door to their courtyard. As it was recalled to me by a staff member, they paused a moment to regard the somewhat otherworldly prospect of a wide-open, odor-free patio, a playground jungle gym and, just beyond the play yard's far walls, their own private five-acre expanse of grapevine-laced pines and sweetgums. And then, as if in some unwitting primate pantomime of the very Apollo 11 moonwalk they'd helped to make a reality, they stepped out into the sunlight and tentatively down onto an equally unfamiliar earth. (...)
Chimp Haven is a happy consequence of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (or Chimp) Act, passed in the final days of the Clinton administration. The bill allotted up to $30 million, pending matching funds from private donations, for the construction of the facility, which, with future expansions, could house as many as 900 chimps and serve as a template for the nationwide ''system of sanctuaries'' mandated by Congress to accommodate the country's growing number of surplus chimpanzees. Whether or not Chimp Haven is, as its publicity brochure proclaims, ''what chimpanzees dream of,'' a fellow primate -- a human being, let's say, also living in this country in the year 2005, when the future of Social Security and old-age pensions is very much in doubt -- could be forgiven for trying to pinch himself awake upon encountering the splendors of this monkey Delray Beach.
Still, for all of its feel-good aspects and carefully considered creature comforts, Chimp Haven is also a reflection of a darker set of realities, a particularly topsy-turvy time in the already tumultuous history of our so-called compact with the wild; a moment when the number of chimpanzees in the wilderness is rapidly decreasing and the number of those in captivity continues to rise. In fact, while chimpanzees in the wilderness are now officially designated endangered, those in captivity are not. There are an estimated 2,500 captive chimps in the United States, a number that's difficult to pinpoint because of the many private breeders still turning out baby chimps, mostly for private ownership or use in entertainment. Of the 1,500 or so laboratory chimps, nearly half are no longer being used for experimentation. Lab chimps today are largely confined to behavioral studies and hepatitis and malaria research, and an even greater number may soon be rendered unnecessary for research by advances in DNA analysis and computer modeling. As for the remaining refugees of entertainment and private ownership, their ranks continue to swell even though chimps are unmanageable much past the age of 6 and despite the fact that advances in computer animation may soon obviate altogether the need for actual animal performers.
Read more:
Photo: Zachary Scott for The New York Times
This past spring, in a secluded patch of forest in northwest Louisiana's Caddo Parish, a singularly bizarre bit of evolution unfolded. There, amid the sun-dappled pines and flitting birds, a pair of 40-something chimpanzees named Rita and Teresa -- lifetime research subjects who were originally taken from Africa for use in NASA's space program -- became American pioneers of a whole other sort: the first beneficiaries of an inspired piece of retirement legislation passed by the United States government. Under the watchful eyes of animal behaviorists, veterinarians, enrichment specialists and daily caretakers, Rita and Teresa checked in on the afternoon of April 4 at the recently opened Chimp Haven, the first federally financed, taxpayer-supported retirement home for chimpanzees.
They arrived in a specially equipped trailer after an eight-hour drive from the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Tex. After receiving full physicals from Chimp Haven's in-house veterinarian, including dental checkups for possible extractions or root canals, the two chimps were shown to their spacious new sleeping quarters, complete with fresh running water and cross-ventilation, multiple windows and skylights, hammocks made of neatly crosshatched sections of used fire hose, bedding of warm blankets and hay, vanity mirrors, as well as a TV, a VCR and DVD and CD players. Following a long nap, Rita and Teresa awoke to a couple of banana smoothies and were shown the door to their courtyard. As it was recalled to me by a staff member, they paused a moment to regard the somewhat otherworldly prospect of a wide-open, odor-free patio, a playground jungle gym and, just beyond the play yard's far walls, their own private five-acre expanse of grapevine-laced pines and sweetgums. And then, as if in some unwitting primate pantomime of the very Apollo 11 moonwalk they'd helped to make a reality, they stepped out into the sunlight and tentatively down onto an equally unfamiliar earth. (...)
Chimp Haven is a happy consequence of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (or Chimp) Act, passed in the final days of the Clinton administration. The bill allotted up to $30 million, pending matching funds from private donations, for the construction of the facility, which, with future expansions, could house as many as 900 chimps and serve as a template for the nationwide ''system of sanctuaries'' mandated by Congress to accommodate the country's growing number of surplus chimpanzees. Whether or not Chimp Haven is, as its publicity brochure proclaims, ''what chimpanzees dream of,'' a fellow primate -- a human being, let's say, also living in this country in the year 2005, when the future of Social Security and old-age pensions is very much in doubt -- could be forgiven for trying to pinch himself awake upon encountering the splendors of this monkey Delray Beach.
Still, for all of its feel-good aspects and carefully considered creature comforts, Chimp Haven is also a reflection of a darker set of realities, a particularly topsy-turvy time in the already tumultuous history of our so-called compact with the wild; a moment when the number of chimpanzees in the wilderness is rapidly decreasing and the number of those in captivity continues to rise. In fact, while chimpanzees in the wilderness are now officially designated endangered, those in captivity are not. There are an estimated 2,500 captive chimps in the United States, a number that's difficult to pinpoint because of the many private breeders still turning out baby chimps, mostly for private ownership or use in entertainment. Of the 1,500 or so laboratory chimps, nearly half are no longer being used for experimentation. Lab chimps today are largely confined to behavioral studies and hepatitis and malaria research, and an even greater number may soon be rendered unnecessary for research by advances in DNA analysis and computer modeling. As for the remaining refugees of entertainment and private ownership, their ranks continue to swell even though chimps are unmanageable much past the age of 6 and despite the fact that advances in computer animation may soon obviate altogether the need for actual animal performers.
Read more:
Photo: Zachary Scott for The New York Times
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