The Red Orchestra by Anne Nelson

To Harro Schulze-Boyson (whose extraordinary facility with many languages led him to a position in the intelligence division of Goring's Air Ministry), Arvid Harnack ( well-placed in the Economics Ministry of Adolf Hitler's regime) and Adam Kuckoff (playwright, novelist, journalist, screenwriter), the fact that the Soviets utterly failed to heed their warning about the impending invasion of Russia in 1941 was incomprehensible. But there was more to the story than they would ever know.

Stalin had received additional warnings from across the globe as an uncertain and hesitating world began to coalesce against the Nazis. Harro Schulze- Boysen's intelligence had been the most detailed, but his information was reinforced by a remarkable array of sources across a broad political spectrum. These included the State Department in Washington, the Tory Government in London, a German-Russian Communist agent in Tokyo and a German Lutheran exile in Lucerne. All of them believed it was in their interest to warn the Soviets of the German invasion.


Washington's alert resulted from the efforts of Erwin Respondek, a German economist also well-connected in Nazis circles but secretly offended by their anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic policies. Respondek shared his secrets with a U.S. embassy official in Berlin named Sam Woods though the U.S. mission in Berlin was openly hostile to the idea of gathering intelligence. As the Nazis advanced their scenario leading to world war, the U.S. chief of mission stated that it was improper for American diplomats to "run around Berlin digging up secrets." Woods managed to forward the information to Washington nonetheless.

Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was among the few who took Wood's report seriously. On March 1st he passed along Respondek's warning to the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Konstantin Oumansky, an agile Stalinist who had come through the recent purges unscathed. The Soviet's reaction to Welles' assistance was to place a call to the charge' at the German embassy, and tell him that the American's were spreading ugly rumors designed to damage German-Soviet friendship.

On April 3rd, Winston Churchill instructed his ambassador to Moscow to deliver his personal note to Stalin. The message described the massive build-up on the Soviet border, which the British had learned about by intercepting coded German messages.

Soviet agent Richard Sorge, the Russian-German working for the Soviets in Tokyo, sent Moscow an even more precise alert, pinning down the date of the invasion as June 22.


Sorge's June date was confirmed by Rudolf Roessler, who has been called the most effective anti-Nazi agent of the entire war. Roessler, a nondescript journalist from Bavaria, had student ties to a group of young men who became career officers in the German military. Roessler moved to Berlin in the 1920s and was appointed public arts administrator in the field of the theater. His publications quoted Adam Kuckoff, and he worked under the ministry of Adam's friend Adolf Grimme. Roessler's department was purged by the Nazis in April 1933, and he fled to Switzerland the following year. There he established contact with Swiss intelligence and began to pass information from his military friends in Germany to the Swiss, who shared it with the French. As war approached and the Swiss remained neutral, Roessler turned his attention to the Soviet Union.

Roessler's information was delivered to Soviet army intelligence, while Arvid Harnack's and Harro Schulzed-Boysen's reports were routed through the NKVD. But all of them pointed in the same direction, and all were ignored. Over a hundred warnings from various sources reached Moscow before the German invasion took place. The final alarm was sounded on the eve of the attack, when a German soldier deserted and crossed the lines. He informed his Russian interrogators that the invasion would be launched at three o'clock the next morning. Stalin received the report three hours later- and responded by ordering the German deserter to be shot.

Once the invasion was launched, Soviet intelligence was frantic to get more news from Berlin. But now the Soviet embassy route was closed. Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen continued to diligently gather information and divide the necessary tasks among their circle, who encoded the messages and delivered them to the designated radio operators. What none of them realized was that, due to defective radio transmitters and novice operators, their efforts were in vain.


The arrival of the Soviet agent Anatoli Gourevitch at his door on October 29, 1941, came to Harro Schuzle as a complete surprise but he did not focus on the breach of security. He was pleased by the Soviet's appearance. He had been trying to undermine the Nazis for months with his transmissions of intelligence, with no evidence that it was getting through. The German army was closing in on Moscow, and it appeared that the next few months would determine the outcome of the war. The two men sat down in the living room and Harro offered his visitor a long menu of military intelligence, which Kent carefully recorded in his notebook.

Harro handed the Soviet a motherload of invaluable intelligence which, from his station in Brussels, Gourevitch transmitted in marathon sessions, breaking every possible security precaution by staying on the air for long sessions every night, for seven days straight. This gave German counterintelligence an easy means of honing in on the signal. They tracked the transmissions and carefully recorded the coded content.

By the fall of 1942 the Gestapo had decoded the messages and completed their investigation. Over 120 people were detained in connection with the case. Torture was meticulously monitored by an SS doctor to gauge the effect on the prisoners' health. Official records showed that Harro Schulze-Boysen's questioning began with twelve blows of an ax handle. Arvid Harnack, John Graudenz, and Adam Kuckoff were beaten with rubber truncheons. Seventy-nine defendants linked to the Red Orchestra group were tried in a total of nineteen trials in the seven months between December 15, 1942, and July 1943. Forty -five were sentenced to death, twenty-nine were sent to prison, and two were acquitted for lack of evidence, though one of these was sent directly to Ravensbruck concentration camp anyway.


Our forces were few. The goal lay far in the distance.
It was clearly visible, though I probably wouldn't reach it myself.
So went the time I was granted on earth.

You, who will emerge from the flood that submerged us,
Also remember, when you speak of our weaknesses,
The dark times you have been spared.


-Bertolt Brecht-

Note to the Reader

Comments on my blog are now open to all readers without delay, if I got the settings right. That they have not been open was just uncomprehending oversight when I started nearly one year ago.

Our National Catastrophe by James Farmer

This book has shown that fundamental disconnects between and among government agencies, between the bureaucracies within the agencies and also between the different agencies and the national leadership had existed throughout the five year struggle against al Qaeda. These disconnects beset every agency of government charged with adapting to the new threat: the FBI; the CIA; the State Department; the Department of Defense; the Department of Transportation. In each case, agencies were able to identify the threat but were thoroughly incapable of changing they way they were configured, in order to respond to it. Emblematic of these failures is the ultimate Whiskey Tango Foxtrot* moment to emerge from the 9./11 Commission's investigation: the image of former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger hiding documents in his socks, so desperate to prevent the public from seeing certain papers that he sneaked out of the National Archives and hid the documents at a nearby construction site so that he could shred them later. The desire to inhibit the discovery of historical truth, it turns out, is truly bipartisan, and- as the revelation that the CIA destroyed the tapes of its interrogation of detainees reveals- is not limited by government agency; it is endemic to the modern way of government.

Taken as a whole, the government's response to the emerging threat of terrorist attack was a stunning collapse of competence; 9/11 was its trailing consequence. The response on 9/11 replicated in compressed time the mis-communications, the garbled signals, the years of bureaucratic frustration that had preceded it. It was the product of a government that doesn't work, and the false story put forward about the event of that morning allowed the government to avoid the kind of searching reexamination that was appropriate to the situation. Thus, years later, Richard Clarke could still believe that his high-level videoconference had been the nerve center of the nation's response; no one had done the thoroughgoing analysis that would have exposed the reality that national leadership was irrelevant during those critical moments. As a consequence, no one had acted to ensure that similar disconnects would not recur in a future.

Instead, the principal response to the failure of bureaucracy was not an attempt to redefine government itself, but the creation of more government, more bureaucracy [ while continuing to blame government and bureaucracy per se]. Thus, in 2002, Congress and the Bush Administration [ blackmailed by their own lies] collaborated in forming a new federal department whose principal aim was to provide "homeland security." A loose conglomeration of disparate agencies, such as Immigration, Transportation Security, Secret Service, FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, all of which had some relation to homeland security, the department would face its first stern test in September 2005, when a long-anticipated threat approached the homeland. This threat came not in a human form but in the form of a natural disaster. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the bureaucratic failures that resulted in 9/11 would be replicated, in every respect, in the government's response to Hurricane Katrina.

* Whiskey Tango Foxtrot:

One of my staff members on the 9/11 Commission was Kevin Shaeffer, a rising star in the Navy before 9/11 who had, by chance, been standing behind a pillar when American 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Everyone in his vicinity was killed. Kevin suffered severe burns over most of his body, and flatlined twice in the course of his recovery. His injuries forced him to retire from the military at the age of thirty. He brought to our work a dedication and intense desire to know the truth of what had occurred that inspired all of us.

I walked past Kevin's work space one afternoon late in the summer of 2003 and heard him muttering, under his breath, "whiskey tango foxtrot, man. Whiskey tango foxtrot." What's that?" I asked. Kevin and Miles Kara (a Vietnam veteran) laughed and explained: a military euphemism for "What the fuck!",.

I don't recall today the particular discrepancy between the official version of what happened on 9/11 and what we were discovering that prompted Kevin's utterance; there were so many that "Whiskey tango foxtrot" became a regular refrain from the members of me team.

Thelonious Monk by Robin D.G. Kelley

Monk's refusal to play and his reluctance to leave his room were regarded by virtually everyone close to him as symptomatic of his mental illness. But as Nica said, his mind worked; he was alert, alive and still incredibly witty. In March of 1976, Thelonious happened to be listening to a special broadcast by Columbia University's radio station, WKCR, dedicated to his music. A guest expert began droning on about how Monk created extraordinary music, in spite of "playing the wrong notes on the piano." Perturbed, Monk dialed the Columbia switchboard and left a message to "tell the guy on the air, ' The piano ain't got no wrong notes.'

So to label Monk's reclusive behavior as evidence of deep depression is a little too simple, especially since his mental and physical health improved dramatically during this period. So why did he stop playing? Having spent the better part of fourteen years tracing Monk's every step, I am not surprised by his decision. In fact, I wonder why he didn't retire earlier. Consider the final years of his working career: his record label dropped him, he could barely sustain a working band, the money was inadequate, he was practically reduced to opening for rock and R&B bands, he endured unremitting criticism for playing the same music, he lost all inspiration to compose, the lithium treatments deadened his senses and slowed his creative drive, and his ongoing battle with an enlarged prostate made performing an ordeal. And his old friends kept dying. So why should he feel like playing? His siblings were among the few loved ones who understood and accepted his decision. During one of his many visits, Thomas asked, "Brother, what should I tell everybody? They want to know why you don't play anymore? You want me to tell them you retired?' And he said, 'Yes, tell them I retired.'" Marion would come over every so often and take walks with Thelonious. He made it clear to her that "he didn't feel like playing or appearing in front of the public.."

Today the music world accepts Thelonious Monk as an American master. He has been the subject of award-winning documentaries, scholarly studies, prime-time television tributes, and in 2006 was awarded a posthumous Pultizer Prize for his contribution to jazz. His compositions constitute the core of jazz repertory and are performed by artists from many different genres. "Round Midnight", "Straight, No Chaser," "Well, You Needn't,", "Ruby, My Dear, " among others, have become bona-fide jazz standards; no self-respecting jazz musician today can get a job or participate in a jam session without knowing these tunes.

Yet, for all the accolades and formal recognition, for all the efforts to canonize Monk and place his bust on the mantel alongside Bach and Beethoven, we must remember that Monk was essentially a rebel. To know the man and his music requires digging Monk- out of the golden dustbins of posterity, out of the protected cells of museums,- and restoring him to a tradition of sonic disturbance that forced the entire world to take notice. He broke the rules and created a body of work and a sound no one has been able to duplicate.

If I have learned anything from this fourteen year adventure, it is that duplicating Monk's sound has never been the point. "Play yourself!" he'd say. "Play yourself" lay at the core of Monk's philosophy; he understood it as art's universal injunction. He demanded originality in others and he embodied it in everything he did- in his piano technique, in his dress, in his language, his humor, in the way he danced, in the way he loved his family and raised his children, and above all in his compositions. Original did not mean being different for the hell of it. For Monk, to be original meant reaching higher than one's limits, striving for the startling and memorable, and never being afraid to make mistakes. Original is not always mastery, nor does it always yield success. But it is very hard work.

'Melodius Thunk' in the News by Robin D.G. Kelley

The Monk story came entirely through Barry Farrell's initiative. Recently hired as Time magazine's music writer, the editors wanted him to write a cover story featuring George Szell of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, which Farrell wasn't keen to do. He negotiated: he would write it in exchange for a major cover story on a jazz musician. The editors initially proposed Ray Charles and the Miles Davis, but nixed Charles because of his drug problems and Miles Davis was just too incorrigible. To Farrell's great pleasure, they settled on Thelonious Monk- always his first choice.

Farrell was one of the regulars at the Five Spot, and had just penned a piece in Time casting a critical eye on the folks who populated the "Home of Thelonious Monk". He noted rather disdainfully how Monk "will spend the whole night horsing around on his piano while his side men accompany him with all the enthusiasm of cops frisking drunks. On other nights he plays brilliantly and the sidemen follow with insight and devotion- but the applause is just the same, Monk's audience is far too devoted to him to worry about his music."


Once his managing editor gave him the green light, Farrell approached Monk every chance he got, "mostly walking around outside the Five Spot...or sitting in some dark bar at 2 a.m." In time Thelonious and Nellie came to trust Farrell. He visited Monk's home a couple of times and learned that he and Thelonious shared some things in common besides a sense of style and devotion to music. Farrell loved basketball, had visited Japan, and enjoyed a hit of reefer every so often. And the man was hip- twenty-eight, handsome, strawberry blond hair, he smoked Gauloise cigarettes and, like his subject, dressed stylishly. "Women loved him," proclaimed writer John Gregory Dunne. "He was that rare writer who looked the way a writer should look." For the next two or three months, he would become Monk's shadow.

Farrell had finished conducting some thirty interviews by early fall and as he spent the next few weeks distilling his observations into a 5,000 word essay, Thelonious had to take time out to sit for his cover portrait. The artist, Russian painter Boris Chaliapin, grew frustrated with Monk because during the course of four sittings he always fell asleep. Chaliapin called it strange; I would call in exhaustion. At the time Monk was preparing his big band for an appearance at Lincoln Center's newly completed Philharmonic Hall, one of the year's most anticipated events in the jazz world.

Farrell's Time cover story was slated to run on November 29, 1963, as was Monk's appearance at the Philharmonic but on November 22, President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas, sending shock waves throughout the nation and world. The concert and the story on Monk was pushed back and Time substituted a color portrait of the newly sworn-in President Lyndon Baines Johnson, reportedly destroying three million copies they had already printed bearing Chaliapin's portrait of Monk.

The story on Monk ran on February 28, 1964. Farrell describes a strange, reclusive genius, with an eccentric taste for hats, little connection to reality, a childlike demeanor, who depends on women to care for him (his wife Nellie and Nica-Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter), and, often, in the same breath, portrays a family man, honest and pure, deserving of his long waited recognition. The writing was eloquent but somewhat schizophrenic. He quoted Monk vehemently protesting the "mad genius" label, and then he went on to reproduce it by recounting incidents in which he had been confined to mental institutions or speculating on his drug use. If Thelonious, Nellie, and his manager Harry Colomby had hoped the article would help mainstream Monk's image, they were disappointed. In one particularly damaging passage, Farrell wrote: "every day is a brand-new pharmaceutical event for Monk: alcohol, Dexedrine, sleeping potions, whatever is at hand, charge through his bloodstream in baffling combinations."

By the end of the piece, Farrell took an interesting turn, suggesting that Monk isn't so colorful or controversial at all, especially compared to the brooding Miles Davids, the mystical Sonny Rollins, or the volatile Charles Mingus. Here he hit on one of the main points of the piece: Monk is a good guy because he is not caught up in the "racial woes at the heart of much bad behavior in jazz." Farrell was referring to a recent Time editorial on "Crow Jim" in jazz, and black artists who criticized whites like Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton for exploiting "their music", and who employed jazz as a vehicle for black protest. Like most white liberals uncomfortable with rising black militancy, Farrell felt betrayed by the strident racial politics of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite or the "angry" sounds of the "New Thing". Monk, much to Farrell's relief, was above the fray.

In some respects, Farrell had little new to say. What is different from most stories about Monk dating back to the late 1940s is that he pushed racial politics to the foreground. Monk's story isn't just about Monk. For some he was a symbol of black genius; for others he was the last bastion of color-blindness in an increasingly polarized world. One reader, self-identified as "an aspiring young Negro artist raised in the ghetto", praised the article for its "authenticity" and for illuminating the "forces that shape the Monk-type personality." Another reader challenged the article's characterization of Monk's stage behavior, arguing that it is "vital to the dignity, humor and discipline of his music." Still others read it as classic racial stereotyping. Critic Ralph J. Gleason called the piece "revolting" and "libelous to jazz," and castigated Time for turning Monk into "the symbol of the native genius...sweaty and bizarre, so as not to ruffle the preconceptions of Time-thought. While praising Farrell for writing "an accurate, well-rounded portrait in depth of a complex personality," Leonard Feather nevertheless concluded that the essay might actually harm jazz and race relations. To middle America, the Negro jazz musician comes across as both drug-addicted and a clownish buffoon donning a funny hat. "Not too long ago such verbs as shuffle and grin were part of the Southern whites' primitive concept of the Negro. Are we to return to that also?". Feather implicitly placed some of the blame on Monk for the way he behaved in public, suggesting that more deserving musicians were overlooked because they have "never enjoyed what is presumably Time's idea of a rich, full, adventurous, newsworthy life. [Art] Tatum and [Jack] Teagarden never wore funny hats; [Errol] Garner, [Count] Basie, and [Oscar] Peterson do not get up and dance in the middle of their performances*; Gillespie does not arrive every day at a brand-new pharmaceutical discovery."

To black nationalists and other radicals, the Time article constituted an attack on one of their heroes. Writer Theodore Pontiflet published a sharply worded salvo in the Harlem-based Liberator magazine criticizing what he considered Farrell's obsession with Monk's relationship with the baroness. The implications of the Time piece, he argued, not only rendered black women to "the background reduced to the domestic chores" but "warns white America that in these days of talking integration and on the fatal eve of passing a watered-down civil rights bill, they should remember that it could mean more of their daughter will be bringing home the occasional black genius." Pontiflet suggested that Monk was unaware of his own exploitation , thus unwittingly reinforcing the dominant image of him as naive and child-like. Throughout the entire ordeal- he writes, "Thelonious Monk and his wife Nellie remain pure as honey. The patron baroness. She was part of the deal- a bitter part of the sweet."

Ironically, the left-wing Pontiflet shared much in common with the right-wing National Review critic Ralph de Toledano. They both treated Monk as a kind of idiot savant, unaware of the world around him, and they both believed he embodied their political position. De Tokledano praised Monk for not confusing music with politics. "Like most of the best jazzmen... he doesn't believe that he must make is art a sledge hammer to pound away at political themes." And yet, in spite de Toledano's plea for color-blindness in jazz, he nonetheless embraced a racialized construction of jazz as more physical and emotional than cerebral. He chided Monk for being too cerebral, for not tapping into his "soul", and for removing any sense of "dance" from his music! In other words, while Monk is not too black politically, musically de Toledano finds he's not black enough.

And what about Monk? What did he think about Farrell's story? According to Ben Riley, the article "made Thelonious feel very good about himself because I think finally he understood that there were a number of people very interested in what he was playing and what he was doing." But he did have complaints and used the occasion of another major profile, by Lewis Lapham for the Saturday Evening Post, to challenge Farrell and other journalists who had painted him as a crazy eccentric. "That's a drag picture they're paintin' of me, man," he told Lapham just a couple of weeks after the Time story appeared. "A lot of people still think I'm nuts or somethin'...but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft. He even hinted that his sudden fame may have more to do with his image than his music. "I was playing the same stuff twenty years ago, man...and nobody was painting any portrait."

Harry Colomby also used the occasion to do some damage control. Besides emphasizing the fact that Monk wasn't one of those angry musicians who hated whitey, he portrayed his client as a hardworking musician who went straight home to Nellie every night and cared for his family. Colomby told Lapham, "He's so straight, it makes you nervous." Lapham himself took a swipe at Farrell, insisting that Monk was neither crazy nor eccentric but rather "an honest man in a not-so-honest world... Monk never learned to tell the convenient lies or make customary compromises. That he should have been proclaimed the complete and perfect hipster is an absurd irony." And yet, for all his defense of Monk's sanity, Lapham fell for the oldest myth of all: "An emotional and intuitive man, possessing a child's vision of the world, Monk talks, sleeps, eats, walks or dances as the spirit moves him."

For a so-called "child", Monk was tactful and shrewd enough to keep his criticisms of Time oblique. He understood the importance of publicity and did not want to burn any bridges. He did have a complaint about the piece that he was willing to share with the public: he insisted that Nellie never called him "Melodius Thunk". "That's a lie, man. I never heard my wife call me that. It's those reporters, man, you can't trust them."

The Beginning of P.C. in America by Robin Kelley

In late 1958, after Thelonious Monk's bust for crossing the color line to get a glass of water at a hotel in Delaware and the inevitable revocation of his cabaret license by the N.Y.C Police Department, he had to wonder if his moment in the sun was over. If so, his fears were quickly allayed when his manager Harry Colomby ( a high school teacher in Queens) called with the news that the CBS television show The Twentieth Century wanted to film Monk's band at the Five Spot. Hosted by Walter Cronkite, The Twentieth Century was a prime-time half hour documentary program that aired on Sunday nights. Relying mostly on archival footage, the program was designed to examine important historical events but twice a year it aired a one-hour special meant to examine contemporary issues. These one-hour specials were produced by Stephen Fleischman, a former Communist still sympathetic to the Left who somehow dodged the worst of McCarthyism. Fleischman had already produced a couple of controversial episodes, including an expose of prison conditions in America. Now he set out to explore the culture and attitudes of college students- the generation narrator Walter Cronkite labeled "the most baffling in our history". Calling it "Generation Without a Cause," the bulk of the segment was devoted to interviews with white students at Rutgers University who described themselves as conformists concerned about marriage, family, home ownership, and obtaining a good job. Fleischman then wanted to juxtapose the "typical" college student with the "Beat Generation", young people whose posture was one of political detachment but engagement with matters of art and culture. Jazz was their music and the Five Spot their hangout.

Monk must have found the filming itself rather baffling. CBS bused in about eighty-odd students from Rutgers who filed into the Five Spot around 8:00 a.m. They were almost entirely white and very preppy- indeed, when the camera pans the room the first time all we see is white faces. As Harry Colomby put it, "They looked like an advertising agent put them together. All white. They politely applauded. It was like the beginning of political correctness." Although the students sat attentively, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, nodding their heads silently to Monk's "Rhythym-a-ning", they did not look like the usual Five Spot crowd. Missing was the clubs famous diversity of race, age, and status. The band looked exhausted if not uninterested, probably because they had been up all night. At one point, the director had a young man come on the bandstand and read some bad poetry ("Sometimes, I'm really convinced/we are sterile dishes/ watching with ever beginning patience/ germs/ to see if they will grow") while Monk played a rather somber rendition of "Pannonica".


As Thelonious and his band wailed away in the opening clip of the documentary, Walter Cronkite described the current generation of youth as "silent, tranquil, beat." For the next fifteen minutes, they listened to academic experts and students describe the new generation as materialistic and selfish, before returning to the Five Spot to meet the "Beats" and hear Monk. (Unless one noticed the sign over the bar, the un-hip would not have known who was playing since Monk's name is never mentioned.) The scene was surreal; the camera pans from the bandstand to the bar where we "eavesdrop" on a conversation between a young woman defending modern jazz and a young man criticizing it: "I think it's going too far. I enjoy something like Turk Murphy, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Johnny Smith Quartet- something I can relax and enjoy." They asked the poet who had just performed what he thought jazz meant for his generation. "To me it means something interesting, a a different kind of sound." And then the camera cuts to Monk jamming away, arms crossed, lips pursed, and intensely focused. The next shot pans the Five Spot, capturing a sea of white faces and their expressions as they contemplate the music. Walter Cronkite concludes: "Nowhere have we found any indication of this generation having a new movement or cause of its own." Senator William J. Fulbright of Arkansas has the last word, criticizing youth for "conformity, self-centeredness, and complacency."

Now Thelonious was neither a news hound nor an activist, but as he and is wife Nellie watched the show they were well aware of the changing world around them. They knew, for example, that young people in Fulbright's own state faced mobs in order to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, and that the distinguished Senator had opposed Brown v. Board of Education and participated in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957. And most African-Americans were aware of the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, D.C.....There was, indeed, a generation with a cause; they just didn't look like the kids CBS portrayed at the Five Spot.

.........................................

*Regulars at the Five Spot included painters Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jack Tworkov, Mike Goldberg, Roy Newell, Howard Kanovitz, and writers Jack Kerouac, Ted Joans, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara and Amiri Baraka ( when he was still Leroy Jones.) Ted Joans- poet, painter, sometimes jazz vocalist and trumpeter- was probably the first black Five Spot regular. While he found the Five Spot friendly and hospitable, the neighborhood was not. "It was dangerous. The Italians did not want any 'spades' in their territory, so we had to be careful. Don't let them catch you with a white woman! I used to carry a blackjack and a napkin filled with hot pepper to throw in their eyes in case I was attacked. Baraka took to carrying" a lead pipe in a manila envelope, the envelop under my arm like a good messenger, not intimidating but never-the-less ready." While most working class residents were hostile to all bohemian artists, "the general resentment the locals felt toward white bohemians", mused Jones, "was quadrupled at the sight of the black species."

Paradoxes — Compel us to think by Sandy Szwarc

We may know, intellectually, that correlations can never show causation, but when a correlation seems to confirm a reason we believe, it’s very easy to find ourselves falling for the fallacy, anyway, and to not even consider other explanations. We may call our belief “common sense” or what “everyone knows,” without realizing that we’ve come to believe it simply because it’s all we ever hear. It may never even occur to us to question an axiom — especially if we never hear about the evidence which contradicts or disproves it. The obesity paradox wouldn’t be a paradox at all, for example, if the public had been hearing objective reports of medical research all along.

The next four posts will share with you four recently published studies in peer-reviewed medical journals that the media ignored. Like countless other studies that the public never hears about, these articles probably didn’t come with press releases because there was nothing to sell you or to promote. In JFS’s objective to help you get a fuller story and to encourage all of us to think critically and for ourselves*, we’ll share these studies. They could be said to be about the obesity paradox, healthy lifestyle paradox and figure flaw-paradox…

Anymore, epidemiology has become a vehicle to find associations[1] between every aspect of our everyday lives or our physical features and risks for some feared disease. And it’s being misused[2] to convince us that our diets and lifestyles or appearances are the cause of ill-health. Blame, guilt and fear are the bread and butter of health marketing. That’s why carefully controlled epidemiological studies that find no link — those null studies that rarely get reported — are especially valuable. If there’s not even a strong link between two variables, then a variable can’t possibly have a causal role. Null studies tell credible scientists, and should tell us, to move on and stop worrying about that.

It can often be difficult for the public to understand what makes some epidemiological studies stronger than others — such as dredging through data compiled from self-reported questionnaires versus actual measurements from medical exams. Epidemiological studies have reported contradictory[3)]correlations between fatness and mortality risk among mature adults and it’s often suggested that it’s because cardiovascular fitness hadn’t been considered and could be an independent confounding factor.


Fat and fitness

Researchers, led by Dr. Paul McAuley with the Department of Human Performance and Sport Sciences at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, set to test the hypothesis that high cardiovascular fitness and high BMI were associated with a lower risk for death among healthy older men. As they noted, most studies, and the strongest ones, point to an inverse relationship between BMI among mature adults and mortality, with obesity having a protective role[4]. Obesity’s survival advantage among patients with a wide range of diseases and health problems has also been especially well documented in the medical literature. Could being fat be associated with lower risk for premature death among healthy adults, and is fitness an independent risk factor?

Method. The researchers examined the data of 2,469 men consecutively enrolled in the Veterans Exercise Testing Study who had completed a full physical medical exam and maximal exercise testing at one of two university-affiliated Veterans Affairs medical centers during 1987-2004. The men were age 65 years and older. Mortality data was gathered from the Social Security Death Index and the California Death Registry. They restricted their study to healthy men to rule-out those who might be underweight or physically inactive because of health problems. Their results were published[5] in the Journal of Gerontology A Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

Findings. Among 981 healthy older men, 208 died during 6.9 years of follow-up. Compared to the reference ideal of a “healthy” BMI (20-24.9), men who were overweight were associated with a 34% lower risk for all-cause mortality, while the obese men (regardless of the degree of obesity) were associated with a 44% lower risk. In contrast, men with BMIs under 20 had more than a two-fold higher risk for premature death. When cardiovascular fitness was controlled for (as measured by MET = 3.5 mL/kg/min oxygen uptake on exercise tests), the slim men with BMIs below 20 were associated with an even higher 2.5 fold higher risk for premature death. Meanwhile, the most obese men had the lowest risk for all-cause mortality of all, at less than half (HR= 0.44) the “normal” weight men. As the authors noted, none of these correlations were significant. However, they do help to dispel popular beliefs about the deadliness of being fat as we age.

The researchers attempted to parse out these relationships by looking at obesity and physical fitness as they relate to risks for all-cause mortality. They eliminated all of the underweight men with BMIs below 20. Still, the overweight men had a lower risk for death than the “normal” weight men, and the obese men had the lowest risks of all (about half that of “normal” weight men), at every level of fitness.

In fact, the men who were the most obese and sedentary had a similar risk for all-cause mortality (HR=0.56) as the “normal” weight men who were the most physically fit (HR=0.49). This finding certainly didn’t make the headlines. Beliefs among the general public about both the benefits of exercise and the dangers of obesity as people age appear beyond what the evidence supports.

These results are consistent with the largest Aerobic Center Longitudinal Study (ACLS) at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, Texas, on younger adults which had focused on fitness and reported it attenuates the risks associated with obesity. The ACLS had clinically followed more than 25,000 civilian men for over ten years and the data actually found a small, consistent survival advantage the heavier the men were. The Cooper Institute of Aerobics Research has performed similar studies on more than 113,000 women.

Lessons lost


Not surprisingly, the media largely ignored this latest study. While it’s an epidemiological study and not evidence of causation, its value as a null study was lost. The public also didn’t hear another point the authors made: that cardiovascular fitness is influenced by many factors, which includes age and heredity.

Yet the popular condemnation of people without high fitness levels is rarely recognized as a form of discrimination. Fitness and lifestyle preventive medicine [6] have become such big business, and bigger politics, many people have come to believe that everyone must engage in similar types and intensities of activity (i.e. exercise) to live longer and be healthy. Those who don’t follow leisure-time exercise regimens [7] are labeled[8] as having sedentary lifestyles and blamed for putting themselves at risk for premature death, even when they're active all day in their work.

Besides wordsmith plays on definitions, correlations between exercise and lifespan can mislead us when we fail to remember that leisure-time exercise and sports activities are largely markers for youth and socioeconomic status — yet older age, and lower class and poverty, are two of the biggest risk factors for chronic diseases of aging and death. Fitness, body type, physical abilities and strength also have strong hereditary components [9]. Yet a correlation between people who don’t have athletic physiques and their lower participation in sports activities is often mistaken for reverse causation.

Today’s beliefs in exercise can also mean we fail to explore other potential links that are equally, if not more, important to people’s overall health and well being. The most careful exercise intervention studies show that inappropriate conclusions[10] about causes and effects have overlooked more significant social and productive activities.

Beliefs can also mean we fail to weigh the risks for harm of imposing our beliefs that everyone needs to have the same lifestyles and follow one-size-fits-all exercise prescriptions, in order to be healthy. What may be healthful for some 20-year olds, for example, may not be for a growing child or older adult or senior.

Babyboomers, the first generation to grow up exercising, have led to what’s known among medical professionals as boomeritis [12]. Sports and exercise injuries have become the number two [13] reason for doctor’s visits, behind the common cold, according to the CDC’s National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys. Athletic activities among middle-aged adults were the source of 488 million work day restrictions in 2002, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the Consumer Product Safety Commission documented that by 1998, sports-related injuries among boomers were responsible for $18.7 Billion in medical costs. The AHRQ's [14] Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) found that injury-related medical care accounted for about 57 percent of all payments made by Worker's Compensation programs in 2002. The medical literature continues to bring reports [15] of similar risks for injuries among children [16].

Scientists understand the importance of testing hypotheses about causes and effects — and balancing overall benefits over risks — using carefully designed randomized, controlled clinical trials and measuring hard clinical outcomes. Yet, every randomized, controlled clinical trial of “healthy lifestyles,” as popularly defined, has failed[17] to significantly reduce premature deaths from all causes or to prevent chronic diseases of old age.

As the recent review in the Journal of the American Medical Association pointed out, this is what separates science from ideology.

© 2009 Sandy Szwarc. All rights reserved.
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/paradoxes-compel-us-to-think.html


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* Social media marketing is sadly helping to train us not to think. It’s more comfortable to see what everyone else says and what’s popular, such as on online forums, before deciding what we will believe.

[1]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/05/greatest-myth-of-health-risk-factors.html
[2]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/10/jfs-special-food-and-heart-attacks-is.html
[3]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/japanese-researchers-find-no-support.html
[4]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/04/news-women-can-use.html
[5]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19196639
[6]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/02/australian-doctors-are-introduced-to.html
[7]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/09/reading-comprehension-or-why-we.html
[8]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/01/myth-of-sloth.html
[9]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/03/mia-all-sides-of-healthy-physical.html
[10]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/05/is-fit-and-fat-nonissue.html
[12]http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/sports/16boomers.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
[13]http://orthoinfo.aaos.org/topic.cfm?topic=A00130
[14]http://www.ahrq.gov/
[15]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/06/costs-of-efforts-to-whip-kids-into.html
[16]http://www.google.com/search?q=sports+injuries+children&sitesearch=junkfoodscience.blogspot.com&sitesearch=junkfoodscience.blogspot.com
[17]http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-do-healthy-eating-and-lifestyles.html