| Number 139 | January 4, 2001 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, This week I attempt to stray, at least in part, from the barrage of war articles that have dominated the Notes for the past three-plus months. I offer instead an article on the subject of suicide. No, really. The subject of suicide is an important and fascinating one for Americans to consider, as I hope you'll see as you read this week's Notes. Those of you who have recently sent in financial support to Nygaard Notes will have received your long-overdue receipts and thank-yous just this week. My sincere apologies to you all. There is really no excuse for failing to promptly thank one's supporters, but here comes one anyway: The "business" end of the Notes has been in a bit of disarray for the past several months as I dealt with several personal crises, and among the things that suffered as a result were the clerical duties associated with the Notes. In an attempt to address the problem, I have managed to find a volunteer who is going to help me with some of this stuff in the coming months. 2002 should be better. Thanks for your patience as I work my way out of this difficult period. Welcome to all the new readers this week! I always like to "warn" new readers that it may take a few weeks for you to start getting the humor and to begin to be able to answer the eternally-vexing question, "What the heck is Nygaard Notes all about?" Luckily for you, you are coming on board just shortly before the periodic "pledge drive" for the Notes, and in that process I will attempt to explain what it is that I am trying to do here. So stick with us a while; then you can recommend it to your friends. And thank you to all of you who wrote to the Nation Magazine to recommend the Notes to the larger world. You did it! Nygaard Notes did indeed receive a recommendation in the January 7th issue of that august magazine, from whence several of the new readers this week have come. I hope I continue to be worthy of your support. As a small example of the arbitrary and capricious nature of Nygaard Notes, last week's editor's note was only about 1/2 as long as this week's monster. Go figure. In solidarity, Nygaard |
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In Nygaard Notes #132 I reported on an important international survey conducted by the Gallup organization on attitudes toward the U.S. War on Terror ("Act of War? Or Crime Against Humanity? The World Weighs In"). In that poll the citizens of 37 countries around the world rejected by large majorities the idea of a military response to the September 11th attacks on the United States. The poll was conducted by Gallup International at the end of September, two weeks before any military action was undertaken. What seventy to ninety percent of the people of the world would have preferred was that the perpetrators of the bombings be identified, extradited, and brought to trial. The complete lack of reporting by the U.S. media on the Gallup International poll—occurring as it did at a time when it might have had an impact on U.S. opinion and thus on the decision to go to war—was a major failure of the Free Press. It was therefore interesting to see and hear reports on a very different type of poll taken between November 12 and December 13th by the Pew Global Attitudes Project (a project of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press) in conjunction with the International Herald Tribune. The results of this poll were released to the press on December 18th, and received a bit more coverage in this country than did the earlier poll. I myself heard about it on National Public Radio, then went and looked it up. The Pew poll was revealing for a number of reasons. First of all, it was not a poll of the general public around the world, as the Gallup poll was. Rather, this was a poll of "opinion leaders" in 24 countries. It looks like these people were selected because of their power, as the list is weighted toward "current or former senior members of government," CEOs or "other senior business people," religious leaders who are "influential," and various other high-powered types. Supposedly some "political activists" and "labor leaders" were also included, but Pew doesn't report on exactly who they may have been. Pew calls them opinion leaders; I think this is misleading. "Leaders" implies that one leads something and, logically, that being led must already be in existence. These types of people, in contrast, I consider to be "opinion shapers," situated as they are at or near the top of very hierarchical and largely non-democratic organizations. I will call them elites. The Global Attitudes Project is an interesting entity, chaired as it is by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who is rather notorious in human rights circles, and including on its inaugural advisory board a man who is considered by many to be one of the major war criminals of the past fifty years, Henry Kissinger. These are the people deciding which questions Pew will ask of the world's elites. The press release from Pew states that "Two-thirds of opinion leaders outside the U.S. say ordinary people in their countries have a favorable view of the U.S." Why not just ask those "ordinary people," one wonders; I suspect it is partly because of the reasonable fear that those types of people might give some difficult-to-hear (and likely unwanted) answers. This "favorable view" comment put me in mind of the September Gallup poll, which asked a more pertinent question upon which I chose not to remark at the time: "Do you think American foreign policy has a positive effect on your country?" No more than 40 percent of the citizens of any western European country answered in the affirmative, and the only country in the world where a majority agreed with this statement was Israel (61%). Not coincidentally, Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign and military aid in the world. Included among the respondents were some American elites, and the survey went ahead and asked them if they think U.S. foreign policy has had a positive effect on the U.S. and, remarkably, only 33% of them would say that it did! The Reality Gap It's worth noting that the Pew poll, like every other poll I have seen, shows almost universal sympathy for the innocent victims in New York and Washington, and general support for a strong response to terror. The gap comes into view when we consider how different people understand the nature of the problem that gives rise to such terror, and when we consider the best ways to go about addressing the problem. Since the Pew poll was a poll only of elites, they were forced to preface many questions with introductory phrases like "We're interested in what ordinary people think about..."). Still, even a poll of global elites does shed a little light on the subject of the "reality gap" between people in the United States and the rest of the world. Asked if "U.S. policies and actions in the world were a major cause of the [Sept 11] attack," only 18 percent of American elites agreed, while almost 60 percent of the rest of the world saw things that way. Only one-third of American elites were in accord with the idea that "a slowing down in the pace of globalization a good thing or a bad thing for ordinary people," while over half of the rest of the world thought it was. Pew asked if the U.S. military machine should go ahead and attack other countries ("such as Somalia and Iraq") while they are on the warpath; on this one, fully one-half of U.S. elites were found to be hawks, but only 3 in 10 outside of this country favored expanding the war. (Among the general population the gap is likely higher, as the September Gallup poll showed in response to a similar question.) The Pew Survey didn't bother to ask about the possibility that the United States might be violating international law in carrying out its war—who cares, anyway?!—but they did ask the elites the following: "Do you think the US is taking into account the interests of its partners in the fight against terrorism or do you think the US is acting mainly on its own interests even asked about what I like to call United States." This question is worth thinking about a little bit. First of all, note the bias in the question. Pew assumes that the superpower U.S. really has "partners" in this war, a questionable proposition at best. A further premise is that the most that a superpower like us could possibly do is "take into account" their interests, as opposed to working with them as an equal using established international forums and organizations. Despite the bias built into the question, the reality gap nonetheless rears its head once again: 70 percent of U.S. elites think we are being what I would call benevolent dictators, while only 33 percent of world elites agree. That's pretty remarkable. What's even more remarkable about it is that these U.S. "opinion leaders" continue to believe this despite the fact that our political leaders take every opportunity to state their contempt for international cooperation. The standard phrase goes something like this, usually heard issuing from the lips of someone like Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld: "The United States prefers to act as part of a coalition but we must, of course, reserve the right to act unilaterally when we determine it is necessary." Sounds like a Rogue State talking, if you ask me, and much of the world apparently agrees. Even elites. Andrew Kohut, Director of the Pew Center, found the results of the survey "striking." If you listen to National Public Radio, he evolved into being "shocked" by the gap between U.S. interpretations and those of the larger world. The shocking thing to me is that someone whose job it is to measure opinion is shocked when one of his polls finds exactly what Nygaard Notes readers have known for months. There are lots more fascinating tidbits in the Pew survey. To see it, you can go to the Pew website at http://www.people-press.org/121901que.htm. For the International Herald Tribune's take on it, go to http://www.iht.com/articles/42410.htm. |
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For those who claim to be concerned about human suffering and death, it should be worth your while to consider the fact that more Americans—by far—die from suicide than from homicide. I've been conducting an informal survey for the past few months, and have yet to find anyone who is not surprised when I state this fact. And I'm not surprised at their surprise. Suicide is a lot harder to understand for the average American than is homicide, for reasons that I will explore in this short series, of which this article is Part I. First, some facts on the subject. Suicide is the 11th-leading cause of death in the United States and, if you factor out death by disease, suicide is the 2nd-leading cause of death, with only accidents accounting for more. Murder comes in 14th (3rd among non-disease-related deaths). Almost twice as many Americans kill themselves as are killed by others (There were 15,533 homicides during 1999—the most recent statistics—compared with 29,199 suicides.) More teenagers and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia and influenza, and chronic lung disease, combined, according to national collaboration called the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention. While suicide is a nationwide problem that cuts across all barriers of age, race, gender, health status, region, and anything else, there are some surprising variations to be found for those who care to look closely. One thing that is immediately apparent is that suicide rates appear to be inversely related to one's situation in the social hierarchy. That is, the more power held by people in a given social group, the more likely they are to kill themselves. The most likely Americans to take their own lives are white males. The least likely are African-American women. In all groups, men are more likely than women to kill themselves. Why do people kill themselves? We have no way of actually knowing, of course, since all of the people who have done so are now dead. But there are no shortage of theories as to the causes of suicide. Anyone who looks into the subject will find it difficult to avoid coming across a guy named Emile Durkheim. Mr. Durkheim (1858-1917) was a French sociologist and philosopher who published a remarkable book in 1897 entitled "Suicide: A Study in Sociology." Durkheim took a look at suicide and concluded that the causes of suicide were largely social and collective, rather than personal and individual as was (and is) believed by many. Next week I will take a look at the sociology of American suicide, with special attention to the sociological analysis of Mr. Durkheim and how his ideas might help us understand the strange silence that surrounds it in our media and, I suspect, in our living rooms. Along the way I'll suggest some ways to think about how we might reduce the rate of suicide and the suffering that is its inescapable companion. |