Will the Real Bambi please Stand up?

Mirko Hanák, 1967

by Madeleine Kando

The first time I saw Bambi, I was nine years old. Ten minutes into the movie, I had to leave the theatre, unable to handle Bambi’s mother being shot. It took another 5 years before I mustered the courage to watch the movie in its entirety.

You can say a lot of things about Disney, but he was a master puppeteer at manipulating his audience’s emotions, young and old. He was also an incredibly clever businessman who plagiarized most of his stories, including Bambi.

I found this out when I recently discovered the original Bambi story. It is written by Felix Salten, a Hungarian Jew, whose original name was Sigmund Salzmann. Like many Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, (including my own grandfather) he changed his name to be more accepted by the society around him.

He lived in Vienna, which was the center of European culture in those days and became quite famous as a writer and critic. His most famous work: ‘Bambi, A Life in the Woods’, is a masterpiece if you ever read one.

Contrary to Disney, Salten was a terrible businessman. He sold the movie rights to his story for a mere $1000 to MGM producer Sidney Franklin, who in turn, sold it to Disney. The rest is history.

After having read the original, part of me feels that, although Disney’s Bambi deserves a place in history for having captivated the hearts of millions of viewers, it has also overshadowed one of the most beautifully written stories I know. Read more...

Our Many Brains

by Madeleine Kando

It has long been known that our heart has a cluster of neurons that can influence the way we feel and think. Proof of this can be found in cases of heart transplants, whereby an inexplicable change occurs in the recipient’s personality.

After waking up with his new heart, Greg Swanson of Tulsa, Oklahoma, turned from being a fun-loving, hard drinking, skirt chasing Casanova into a shy, introverted bookworm, who suddenly needed prescription glasses and was afraid of everything except his 17-year old hamster, Jesibel. Medical staff found that the donor of the heart had been a reclusive, hamster-loving, semi-autistic genius who had blown himself up while working on an invention.

How do we explain this sudden transformation? Research has shown that the heart contains a cluster of neurons that not only functions autonomously to regulate its own rhythm, but that it also tells the brain what kind of person it wants to inhabit. Evicted against its will, a donor heart will tell its new landlord in no uncertain terms who is the boss. Read more...

Why I Marched

by Madeleine Kando

I marched with 150 thousand others yesterday, joining the Women’s March in Boston. Why did I sacrifice my precious Saturday to stand in an over-packed subway car to take me to the heart of Boston to join an ocean of women and men wearing pink pussy hats, brandishing signs of every imaginable shape and size with slogans ranging from ‘Dicktator’ or ‘Keep your tiny hands off my equal pay’, to ‘the pussy strikes back’?

I did this because I am angry, frustrated, disappointed, but mostly because I believe that doing nothing is not an option. By marching I showed the world, you, myself, that the time has come to say ‘this has gone too far’. It felt better than standing in my kitchen, listening to the news while cooking dinner and feeling helpless, hopeless and powerless.

I marched because marching binds people together without using words. When 150 thousand pairs of feet do the talking, people listen. I marched because it gave me strength, even if it was just for one afternoon and if there is anything that can be called ‘action at a distance’, yesterday’s 600 marches throughout the entire world deserve that description. Read more...

Petals

by Madeleine Kando

‘I don’t think I am drinking enough these days,’ said the rose petal to no one in particular. ‘I feel a bit dehydrated and it’s not good for my complexion.’ She looked at the petal over on her right with slight envy, noticing a marked difference in tone.

A ladybug, who was lazily crawling up the side of the rosebush overheard. ‘Don’t worry about it. Drinking is overrated, a fad if you ask me,’ he said.

‘It’s easy for you to say,’ the petal said, ‘you have legs but I am stuck here perched on a rosebush. Why they had to plant us in the sunniest spot in the garden is beyond me. Have they no compassion?’

The petal sighed which caused her to droop a little more. The brighter colored petal on her left looked at her with some disdain and said: ‘You haven’t used the treatment I recommended. Dew drops should be applied daily from left to right.’ She twisted a little to show off how rosy she still looked and started to hum with satisfaction. Read more...

Gender: Is it a Thing of the Past?

by Madeleine Kando

My grandson's name is Marshall. A big name for a little 4 year old. His long curly hair is the color of pure gold; the shiniest, softest curls cover his sweet little face. His eyes are blue, with a twinkle of mischief when he is happy, a dark stare that makes you shiver inside, when he is not.

He is my little man and I am head over heels. I never had a little man of my own, so this is a free-bee for me. He has entered my golden years and I feel like I won the lottery.

Because of his long blond hair, people in the street exclaim what a cute little girl he is. It's the privilege of young children to not be pinned down yet by their sex. We treat them with affection not yet tainted with judgment. They are not yet saddled with the burden of gender identity and we treat them the way we respond to pets, without any expectations or prejudice. He has long hair? So what if he is a boy? Read more...

Will there ever be Peace between Israel and Palestine?

by Tom Kando

My book club just discussed Susan Abulhawa’s book Mornings in Jenin (2006). I found it  gripping and convincing.

Jenin is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is also the site of a major refugee camp, and it suffered a brutal war in 2002.

It is important for people like me to read such a book: I have much sympathy for Israel and I am therefore not sufficiently attuned to the plight of the Palestinians. This book is a reminder of that people’s tragic circumstance over the past seventy years.

History:
The narrative begins in 1947, when the UN approved the partition of Palestine. This led immediately to conflict between Jews and Palestinians. The conflict escalated the following year, when Israel declared its independence, was attacked by, and waged war against the surrounding Arab states.
Read more...

The Benefits of Doubting

by Madeleine Kando

Doubt has gotten a bad rap over the course of human history. It has become the whipping boy in the arsenal of our emotions. I am not sure why, because doubt has a lot going for it. In a fair fight, it would win over certainty any time. After all, it has to fight on two fronts in an argument. Like an immigrant worker, it toils away; doing the dirty work that certainty feels too superior to take on.

Here comes certainty strolling down the street, briefcase in hand, stuffed with opinions whose ink is barely dry, immune to all the ugly stares from opposing views, so full of itself, so overconfident. That’s what I hate about it, it’s just too damn sure of itself.

In fact, certainty has caused so much suffering in the world, that anyone with an iota of common sense, should avoid it like the plague. It’s like the bully in the schoolyard, justifying all manner of abuse in its name. Religious fanaticism, Nationalism, Terrorism, they all hysterically wave their respective flag emblazoned with these dreadful words ‘We are certain of our cause’.

Some people will argue that the advise of philosophers like Descartes who tell us to ‘doubt everything’, negates itself, since we should also doubt that advise. Actually, the only thing you cannot doubt is doubting, since that would still make you a doubt. Read more...

Hooray for War Babies

by Madeleine Kando

For the past week, I have been a casualty of the influenza virus, and spent my time in bed, trying to catch my breath between bouts of coughing and wheezing.

I was transformed into a rusty, choking locomotive, and every night the sandman passed me by, realizing the futility of wasting his precious sand on me. So I spent my nights watching Word War 2 documentaries, to fit my somber mood.

I have almost recovered from my illness, but the obsession with the war has not stopped. After all, I am a war baby. I was born and spent the first 4 years of my life in that part of Europe, where the fighting was at its worst - the Eastern Front. Why cannot I remember? What happened to that part of my life? I was there, in the flesh, but now I am searching for myself in National Geographic documentaries and in big, heavy books that describe the insanity, cruelty and waste of it all.

As I write, I look out onto my lush suburban garden, full of chickadees and goldfinches, fluttering to and fro, enjoying the overflowing birdfeeders, the occasional wild turkey family strutting by and digging for seeds with their powerful claws. How did I get from there to here? Why did I survive and millions did not? In terms of risk factors, I was way up there. I am Jewish on my mother's side, which meant a clear stamp of annihilation approval from the Nazis and the Arrow Cross, until the Russians arrived. Read more...

Is Empathy a Bad Thing?

by Madeleine Kando

The title of Paul Bloom's new book 'Against Empathy:The Case for Rational Compassion' is misleading and if you are a cynic, you might think it is a PR ploy to get people to buy the author's book, which I did.

Bloom is making a case against 'emotional empathy', which he says, is not a good tool to make the world a better place, because of empathy‘s 'spotlight’ effect. It only illuminates what it is pointed at and is not good at addressing ‘large’ problems, like homelessness or inequality or public policy in general.

He also argues that it is easier to feel empathy for someone you know or someone who is more like you than a complete stranger (although as an animal activist, I sometimes feel more empathy for animals than people. They don't look like me but it doesn't prevent me from feeling their pain). In other words, Bloom says that emotional empathy is biased and is not very different from prejudice.

Feeling empathy for hundreds of people at a time is not easy. We are just not wired that way. That's where 'cognitive empathy' comes in: 'our more cold blooded ability to assess what other people are thinking, their motivations and their needs, without necessarily feeling what they are feeling'. This type of empathy is useful in negotiations and in dealing with 'groups'. But even here, isn't the empathy component still essential? It's not like a hungry child suddenly has morphed into a number, just because she is part of a group that needs food aid. You give to that charity because you 'feel' she is hungry, you don't just know it. Read more...

Fake news, Post-truth and Lies

by Madeleine Kando

 From very early on in life, we are told that lying is bad and telling the truth is good. These values are imprinted in our genes and they are one of the pillars on which any society is founded, since without truth, there can be no trust and without trust we would soon all be at each other’s throat.

But the past year has shown that the truth is no longer what motivates a large segment of Americans to make political, social or even personal decisions. What Donald Trump has shown is that the truth exists to be manipulated. He has taken the idea that the truth is relative and not absolute to a whole new level.

Plato and Aristotle already argued about this a long time ago. Plato pointed out that relative truth is logically unsound, since it refutes itself. If your truth is different from mine, then I can say that my truth is true and yours is false. Equally, you can say that my truth is false and yours is true, which means that neither one is real. (See: Plato's Critique of Cultural Moral Relativism). Sounds familiar? Does Fox News report the true news or is it the New York Times? No wonder we no longer trust the news.

Fact-checking
Who would have thought that the 'information age' would morph into a 'misinformation age', where we have to fact-check everything we read or view. An entire ‘truth detective’ industry has emerged comprised of fact checking sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com, as well as on-line open source investigation organizations such as Bellingcat. For instance, Bellingcat’s investigation showed that a Buk ‘brought in from the territory of the Russian Federation’ launched the missile that shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2004 in which 298 people died. Russia tried to cover up the facts of course. (See: Revelations and Confirmations from the MH17 JIT Press Conference).

Another development is the rise of Citizen Journalism or Guerilla Journalism, described by Wikipedia as "When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another.” In other words, because there is so much toxic information out there, we need these new efforts to make up for the loss of truth. Read more...