While we're on the subject of cartoons, David M. Brown at LFB tells us about how various reviewers are seeing the Ayn Rand undercurrents in the animated flick,"The Incredibles." In his post,"The Incredibles' Ayn Rand," Brown writes:

When the animated feature"The Iron Giant" came out in 1999, some libertarians saw a theme of man or robot versus the state, because the movie depicts the government, in the person of a repressive bureaucrat, trying to destroy an innocent and good giant robot. The Pixar production"The Incredibles," directed by"Iron Giant" director Brad Bird, boasts not only more sophisticated animation than"Giant" but perhaps a more sophisticated theme as well. At any rate, more than one reviewer is finding the footprint of Ayn Rand.

I've not seen the film yet, but have heard similar things from other colleagues and friends. If true, of course, it would not be the first time that Rand made it into animation. In my newest essay in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I discuss"The Illustrated Rand," that is, the ways in which Rand and her work have permeated popular culture, giving us a plethora of both positive and negative references. It's a much extended, much more developed piece than its predecessor,"The Cultural Ascendency of Ayn Rand." As I write:

Rand’s presence on television is not restricted to live action dramas or sitcoms. It has also been felt in cartoons. In a “Futurama” episode entitled “Second That Emotion,” the character Bender holds up Atlas Shrugged while commenting that, in the sewer among the mutants, they find “nothing but crumpled porn and Ayn Rand.” In an infamous “South Park” episode called “Chickenlover,” Atlas Shrugged is presented to Officer Barbrady, who has recently learned how to read, and who, upon seeing the massive size of Rand’s novel, laments his achievements in literacy.

I also discuss the more"philosophically astute ... Rand references" that have shown up on “The Simpsons.” In a terrific book (co-edited by our esteemed colleague Aeon Skoble), The Simpsons and Philosophy, authors William Irwin and J. R. Lombardo tell us about that Rand episode:

[I]n “A Streetcar Named Marge,” Maggie is placed in the “Ayn Rand School for Tots” where the proprietor, Mr. Sinclair, reads The Fountainhead Diet. To understand why pacifiers are taken away from Maggie and the other children one has to catch the allusion to the radical libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand. Recognizing and understanding this allusion yields much more pleasure than would a straightforward explanation that Maggie has been placed in a daycare facility in which tots are trained to fend for themselves, not to depend on others, not even to depend on their pacifiers.

My JARS essay also surveys Rand references in scholarship, film, television shows, music, and comic books, especially the work of Steve Ditko and Frank Miller. Rand herself was no stranger to illustrated media; her Fountainhead was illustrated in a Kings Features serial back in 1945 and Anthem made it into Famous Fantastic Mysteries. With Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom having been illustrated in" cartoon" format in Look, and Ludwig von Mises having being mentioned in Batman comics, and libertarian themes showing up in the comic book character Anarky, I'd say that illustrated media and pop culture are both prime areas for affecting (and reflecting) wider ideological change. Libertarians and individualists need to think more seriously about how to affect that change in entertaining projects that are as widely viewed and praised as The Incredibles.

As a postscript to my essays on the"Saving Private Ryan" fiasco here and here, there comes this story about the protests of the Family Research Council concerning the ABC broadcast. With protests also over last night's episode of"Monday Night Football Meets Desperate Housewives," this war against"indecency" looks like it's just beginning.

I found two very interesting essays in the NY Times this weekend, the second almost a response to the first. In Robert Kagan's essay,"We Broke It, We Bought It," a review of Noah Feldman's book, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building, he writes:

Feldman's most important quality ... may have been his deep belief in the compatibility of Islam and democracy. He belongs to a small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims. In Feldman's first book, ''After Jihad,'' published just before he left for Iraq, he argued that the desire for democracy is widespread among Muslim believers, much more than the desire for violent jihad, and that Islamists should therefore be given a chance to rule. ...

[I]t's not only the Iraqis who have an interest in Iraqi democracy, Feldman says. The United States and Europe have for too long erred both morally and strategically in supporting authoritarian governments in the Arab world. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, Islamist terrorists ''have long been motivated by their grievances against the authoritarian states in which they live.'' Feldman points out that it was a ''cadre of Egyptian Islamist terrorists, defeated and thus displaced from their traditional battle against the Egyptian state in the 1990's,'' who ''joined forces with Osama bin Laden to create Al Qaeda.'' The answer to the threat of Islamic terrorism, he says, is to engage in nation-building ''aimed at creating democratically legitimate states that would treat their citizens with dignity and respect.''

While many argue that the Iraqis are not ready for democracy, Feldman insists it is the only system that can work. Without exaggerating what elections can accomplish, he makes a practical point often overlooked by skeptics. The diverse complexion of Iraqi society, he observes, means that no single group has the power to impose peace and stability. In order to succeed, an Iraqi government must be accepted as roughly legitimate by a broad cross section of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. But how can American officials or any outsiders, or even any Iraqi, know what the people will consider legitimate without asking them? Democracy, Feldman writes, is ''not merely the best political arrangement,'' it is ''the only option other than chaos.'' It helps that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani appears to be the kind of Muslim leader Feldman is counting on: a Shiite cleric who by word and deed has so far proven himself sincerely committed to democracy. One gets the sense that Feldman and Sistani were tacit allies in pushing for an Iraqi state that can be both Islamic and free.

Feldman admits that there have been many"American mistakes," but he's hopeful that democracy will come.

How can such political institutions emerge, however, when we are dealing with what Robert D. Kaplan calls,"Barren Ground for Democracy"? Kaplan proceeds on the premise that"while democracy can take root anywhere, ... it cannot be imposed overnight anywhere." He writes of the U.S. occupation of Iraq:

What we are witnessing is a legacy of history and geography—factors often denied by both liberal and conservative interventionists—catching up with America. Had our political leaders considered such factors, I suspect, they might have avoided some of the disasters of the occupation. These factors should also give President Bush pause as he plans to"spread freedom" in his second term. ... [T]he idea that Western-style democracy could be imposed further east and south, in the Balkans, has proved ... problematic. Beyond the Carpathian mountains one finds a different historical legacy: that of the poorer and more chaotic Ottoman Empire. Before World War II, this was a world of vast peasantries and feeble middle classes, which revealed itself in Communist governments that were for the most part more corrupt and despotic than those of Central Europe. Unsurprisingly, upon Communism's collapse, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled for years on the brink of anarchy, although they at least avoided ethnic bloodshed. Of course, Yugoslavia was not so lucky. Though democracy appears to have a reasonably bright future there thanks to repeated Western intervention, it is wise to recall that for 15 years it has been a touch-and-go proposition.

Undeterred, Wilsonian idealists in the United States next put Iraq on their list for gun-to-the-head democratization. But compared with Iraq, even the Balkans were historically blessed, by far the most culturally and politically advanced part of the old Turkish Empire. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, constituted the most anarchic and tribalistic region of the sultanate. ... Iraq is bordered by Iran and Syria, states with weakly policed borders and prone to radical politics, which themselves have suffered under absolutism for centuries. Western intellectuals on both the left and right underplayed such realities. In the 1990's, those supporting humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as"determinism" and"essentialism"—academic jargon for fatalism. In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq—and Liberia, for that matter. ...

By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives—the most fervent of Wilsonians—simply took that liberal idealist argument ... to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.

But rather than a replay of the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India—to make it more like England—were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule. Delhi, Lucknow and other cities were besieged and captured, before being retaken by colonial forces. The bloody debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded for another century. But it did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology. ...

I recommend both articles to your attention.

For some odd reason, the members of the committee, chaired by David Montgomery, appear to believe that an assigned week of study on Ronald Reagan's legacy by a high school in New Jersey poses a greater threat to academic freedom than the daily persecution of faculty (many non-conservatives and non-libertarians) under speech codes.

I commented on this yesterday in response to Ralph Luker's timely blog comment. You will be hearing more about this soon!

UPDATE

Jim Lindgren over at the Volokh Conspiracy has briefly commented on this controversy.

Pilger writes, There is nothing illicit about this cover-up; it happens in daylight. The most striking recent example followed the announcement, on 29 October, by the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. Eighty-four per cent of the deaths were caused by the actions of the Americans and the British, and 95 per cent of these were killed by air attacks and artillery fire, most of whom were women and children.

The editors of the excellent MediaLens observed the rush -- no, stampede -- to smother this shocking news with"scepticism" and silence. They reported that, by 2 November, the Lancet report had been ignored by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the report in terms of the government's"doubts" and Channel 4 News delivered a hatchet job, based on a Downing Street briefing. With one exception, none of the scientists who compiled this rigorously peer-reviewed report was asked to substantiate their work until ten days later when the pro-war Observer published an interview with the editor of the Lancet, slanted so that it appeared he was"answering his critics." David Edwards, a MediaLens editor, asked the researchers to respond to the media criticism; their meticulous demolition can be viewed on the alert for 2 November. None of this was published in the mainstream. Thus, the unthinkable that"we" had engaged in such a slaughter was suppressed -- normalised. It is reminiscent of the suppression of the death of more than a million Iraqis, including half a million infants under five, as a result of the Anglo-American-driven embargo.

In the same vein, I received the following email...[NOTE: I have not verified the accuracy of the analysis. Also I have edited out various comments that seemed politically over-the-top and may call the fellow's perspective into some question.]

Dear Ms McElroy, The following letter is being sent to global media and other organizations concerning horrendous civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Please inform your associates and readers. Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya.

Re: Reporting Iraq civilian deaths in post-invasion Iraq...Aside from the sustained lying, massive public deception, illegality, the horrendous" collateral" civilian casualties and immense US corporate benefit (nearly US$400 billion extra military expenditure by the US alone since 9/11), there is a further outrageous scandal associated with the post-9/11 US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, namely the NON-REPORTAGE of horrendous civilian casualties by mainstream global mass media. SOME mainstream global media have FINALLY permitted their readers to glimpse the horrendous reality of Iraq civilian deaths thanks to a scientific article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet - however the figure typically quoted of"100,000 over 18 months" is a MINIMUM ESTIMATE as outlined in estimates #1-4 below.

#1. The group of US scientists that just published an article in the top British medical journal The Lancet (online, 29 October 2004) found 0.1 to 0.2 million civilian"excess deaths" in post-invasion Iraq; that mortality increased post-invasion; and that violent death increased dramatically post-invasion. From primary survey data, The Lancet article calculated a post-invasion Iraq annual mortality rate of 12.3 deaths per 1000 (corresponding to 300,120 persons per year with The Lancet article's assumption of a population of 24.4 million ). However their pre-invasion estimate of an annual mortality rate of 5.0 deaths /1000 corresponds to 122,000 persons per year - yielding an upper estimate from The Lancet of"excess deaths" of 178,120 people per year - corresponding to 297,000"excess deaths" in 20 months of US war and occupation in Iraq. This upper estimate (based on data in The Lancet) of nearly 300,000"excess deaths" due to the US invasion and occupation in Iraq is equivalent to ONE HUNDRED (100) World Trade Centre atrocities. This US study is consonant with EXISTING UN and UNICEF data that has been COMPREHENSIVELY IGNORED by mainstream global media.

#2. According to UNICEF (2004), in 2002 the under-5 infant mortality was 1,000 in Australia, 108,000 in Iraq and 283,000 in conquered Afghanistan (up from 277,000 in 2001) - noting that these countries have populations of about 20, 24 and 22 million, respectively. From UNICEF data it can be CONSERVATIVELY estimated that the post-invasion under-5 infant mortality has been about 0.2 million in Iraq and 0.9 million in Afghanistan. These estimates largely IGNORE the effects of invasion and the evil reality that in Iraq (since 1991) and Afghanistan (since 2002) there has been an excess" collateral" mortality of about 2000 Muslim children for every US combat death...

#3. According to the UN, the current annual death rates in Iraq's poorest Arab neighbours Jordan and Syria are 4.3 and 3.9 persons per 1000, respectively - and the values range from 1.9 to 3.7 persons per 1000 for the prosperous and peaceful Arab Gulf States. If we assume a conservative estimate of an annual death rate in a peaceful, non-occupied Iraq of about 4 persons per 1000 then we would EXPECT 97,600 Iraqi deaths per year - as compared to the post-invasion estimate by the US scientists of 300,120. The difference - the"excess mortality" due to the US invasion and continued war and occupation - is 202,520 deaths per year or about 340,000 after 20 months of US-imposed war and occupation.

#4. Using UN and UNICEF data it has been CONSERVATIVELY calculated that total"excess mortality" (excess death, avoidable mortality) in war-ravaged Iraq since 1991 has been about 1.5 million (with under-5 infant mortality totalling 1.2 million) [see G. Polya, Australasian Science, June, 2004] and that the"excess mortality" has been about 1.2 million in post-invasion Afghanistan (with the under-5 infant deaths totalling 0.9 million)....

Silence kills. Silence is complicity. Please inform everyone. Save the children.

Dr Gideon Polya, e-mail: gpolya@optusnet.com.au. [Credentials: Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text"Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003), and is currently writing a book on global mortality (numerous articles on this matter can be found by a simple Google search for"Gideon Polya")].

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