Oxford University Press's Blog, page 949

The Henry Ford you know

By Vincent Curcio

When you hear the name “Henry Ford” do you feel a certain shiver inside? Does a sober look come over your face as you mumble, “Well, he was a terrible anti-Semite”? You aren’t wrong of course, as many books and articles have documented through the years. In fact, that reaction probably places you in the majority. Of course, you know about the Model T and the assembly line too.

But do you also know that 100 years ago he wrote about the ruinous effects of tobacco, and promoted the salubrious effects of a healthy diet and a good deal of exercise on a long and productive life? Furthermore, since he realized that oil wouldn’t last forever, he spent years trying to invent alternative fuels made from vegetable materials. Due to his abhorrence of waste, some 53 industries were created through his attempts to find uses for the byproducts of his factories — just one was the invention of the charcoal briquette from the wood shavings on his shop floor.

The assembly line itself was only one aspect of his most important creation: mass production, which was the foundation of our modern culture of material abundance, that replaced the age old culture of scarcity and want. The Model T, built on the assembly line, was probably the most important and influential piece of technology since the printing press. It was the basis on which mass production was built; the end result of the process was a new type of person, the worker-customer. Ford’s employment policies toward blacks, women and the handicapped, among others, were decades ahead of their time. His work in agriculture on soybeans alone would have made him a significant figure in 20th century American history.

But then there was the other side. His relentless self-promotion led to self-aggrandizement that was breathtaking in its scope, eventually allowing him to live on a reputation for socially-advanced ideas and achievements long after they began to warp and break down. Uneducated though he was, a rural 19th century man in background and outlook, he nevertheless came to believe that his preeminent success as a businessman ordained him as a modern sage, a leader who could guide ordinary men to a better life through his ideas. Unfortunately, many of his ideas were regressive and small-minded; sometimes they were far worse.

One of these ideas was anti-Semitism. He spent over six years and millions of dollars promoting vile Judeophobia through a series of articles called The International Jew in his Dearborn Independent periodical, reprinting them in books and publishing the notorious (and discredited) Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which even today have a pernicious anti-Semitic effect in certain parts of the world.

Furthermore, by 1937 a growing meanness in this increasingly isolated man led to an oppressive, militaristic atmosphere in his workplaces. The friend of the workingman had nearly become his enemy. Another demerit in his ledger was his ability to clothe personal greed in a mantle of civic virtue, as he did in the Muscle Shoals affair in the Tennessee Valley in 1923 and the Detroit banking Crisis of 1933.

Soaring heights and abysmal depths in his character produced a wildly mixed record in his public life and subsequent reputation. He remains an ambiguous figure, as much of a puzzle and a mystery today as he was when he lived.

Vincent Curcio is the author of Henry Ford; Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame; Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius; and, with Steven Englund, Charlie’s Prep. He was the General Manager and Producer of Lucille Lortel’s White Barn Theater for 25 years.

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Image credit: (1) Henry Ford, full-length portrait, standing, facing slightly left, leaving the White House after calling on the president. 1927. National Photo Company Collection via Library of Congress. (2) Vincent Curcio author photo by Michael Domenick Tedesco.

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More malignant than cancer?

In anticipation of Heart Failure Awareness Day on 10 May, Oxford University Press has pulled together information across the press to provide resources on heart failure. We’re also running a series of blog posts on this dangerous disease. To kick us off today, we chatted with Professors Theresa MacDonagh, past Chair of the British Society for Heart Failure, and Andrew Clark, Chair-elect, about the diagnosis of heart failure and the importance and benefit of adequate treatment.

So what is heart failure?

Andrew Clark: It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? It must be an awful thing for a patient to hear during a consultation as it sounds on the face of it as if the heart is about to stop. That’s absolutely not what it means, of course. Heart failure is just the term used to describe the situation in which the heart does not pump as strongly as it should to drive blood round the body. The consequences can be dramatic: if heart failure develops suddenly, then a patient can develop fluid in their lungs, called pulmonary oedema, very rapidly; but more commonly, patients gradually retain fluid and present with breathlessness and swollen ankles. It’s a very common reason for people to be referred to medical clinics at hospital.

Theresa MacDonagh: I think that makes the point that it’s important for patients to have someone with them when they first encounter heart failure. It’s a complex disease, and whilst medical treatment is hugely beneficial, there’s a lot of information to take in. Education of the patient and their supporters is a key part of good management.

What are the causes of heart failure? How common is it?

Andrew Clark: Well, the most common cause of heart failure is one or more previous heart attacks. This is the cause in perhaps a half of patients. During a heart attack, some of the heart muscle itself dies and is replaced by scar tissue. Enough heart muscle can be damaged that heart failure develops. A cause in about a third of patients is dilated cardiomyopathy in which all the heart muscle is damaged by a disease process. It’s not completely clear how this happens: in some people there is a genetic cause, in others an infective one. In many cases, we simply don’t know as yet. There are many other less common causes of heart failure, such as heart valve disease.

Heart failure is very common. As your work showed, around 1% of the population have heart failure due to impairment of the pump function of the heart, and another 1% have damage to the heart but have no symptoms.

Theresa MacDonagh: The diagnosis of heart failure carries such a bleak prognosis. We know from data collected for the National Heart Failure Audit that around a third of patients being discharged from hospital after an admission for heart failure will die during the subsequent year.

What treatment is there, or is it just a diagnosis with no hope?

Andrew Clark: The fluid retention of heart failure can usually be managed quite straightforwardly with diuretics, medications that make the kidneys produce more urine. The more profound treatment, though, arises from the realisation that heart failure causes many of the body’s natural hormonal systems to be greatly activated. Patients with heart failure have high levels of adrenaline and a closely related chemical, noradrenaline, in the circulation, together with other hormones, particularly angiotensin II and aldosterone. High levels of hormones are implicated in the progression of heart failure and eventual death.

The mainstays of modern medical therapy are blockers of these hormones, particularly betablockers (such as carvedilol), angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (such as ramipril) and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists (such as spironolactone). Used together, these drugs have a profound effect on the outlook of patients with heart failure and can approximately double life expectancy.

Theresa MacDonagh: We should also mention the role of implantable devices, such as defibrillators, which can stop life-threatening fast heart rhythms by administering an internal electric shock, and cardiac resynchronisation pacemakers, or CRT, which can improve the overall function of the heart in selected patients. Both can improve outlook, and CRT can result in a dramatic improvement in exercise capacity.

Andrew Clark: One of the main challenges for heart failure cardiologists is devising care pathways and systems to get this therapy to as many patients as possible. Indeed, and that’s one of the major aims of the Heart Failure Audit and the British Society for Heart Failure.

What information is there available for patients and their carers?

Theresa MacDonagh: There can be a bewildering amount of information on the web which can be very unhelpful and give conflicting advice. One excellent resource is the site run by the European Society of Cardiology, Heart Failure Matters, which is well-written and emphasises individual patient experience as well as being a comprehensive factual resource.

Andrew Clark is Professor of Clinical Cardiology in the University of Hull. He trained in Manchester, London and Glasgow, and has research interests in exercise physiology and clinical aspects of heart failure. He is Chair-elect of the British Society for Heart Failure. Theresa A. McDonagh is a consultant cardiologist at King’s College Hospital in London, UK. They are the editors of the Oxford Textbook of Heart Failure with Roy S. Gardner and Henry Dargie.

Oxford University Press is supporting Heart Failure Awareness Day with resources from across the press.

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Image credit: Male anatomy of human organs in x-ray view. Image by janulla, iStockphoto.

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The Oi! movement and British punk

By Matthew Worley

According to the Daily Mail, Oi! records were ‘evil’. According to the Socialist Worker, Oi! was a conduit for Nazism. According to the NME, Oi! was a means to inject ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes into popular music.

The year is 1981, and on 3 July the Harmbrough Tavern is set ablaze in the London borough of Southall. Trapped inside the pub are three bands aligned to the Oi! movement initiated the previous year from within the pages of the Sounds music weekly. Therein, by contrast, Oi! is defined as a form of ‘working-class protest’, a ‘loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. Oi!, for most of those involved with it, was punk without the art school pretensions; a street-level music that sought to align working-class youth cults in the face of welfare cuts and growing unemployment. And there lay the rub. For Oi! comprised skinheads; and by 1981, skinheads were being recruited as foot-soldiers for the British far right, both the National Front and the British Movement. An Oi! gig in Southall, therefore, where a large Asian community had previously felt the brunt of cowardly racist attacks and witnessed the violent aftermath of an NF election rally in 1979, was a red-rag to a community fed up with being on the defensive and ready to respond. And respond the community most certainly did.

Covers of the first four Oi! compilations, released 1980–2. Source: “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” by Matthew Worley in Twentieth Century British History

The events of July 1981 have forever tainted Oi! Caught in the reductionist media snare, Oi! fell into an equation the broadly read: Oi! = skinheads = racism. In truth, however, Oi! was a rather more complex phenomenon. Though its lyrics and imagery tended to combine social resentment and patriotism in a way that provided a potential pathway to and from the far right, Oi! also contained a class awareness and a cultural heritage that suggested it was far more than a musical wing of the NF or BM. Indeed, many involved in Oi! actively (and literally) fought back against right-wing attempts to appropriate their music, a struggle that led eventually to the NF setting up its on ‘white power’ scene circa 1983. Rather, Oi!’s focus and lyrical preoccupations reflected tensions inherent within the socio-economic and political realities of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Like the punk culture from which it emerged, Oi! provided a contested site of critical engagement that allowed voices rarely heard in public debate to articulate a protest that cut across existing notions of ‘left’, ‘right’ and formal political organisation. More specifically, it revealed and articulated processes of political and socio-cultural realignment directly relevant to the advent of Thatcherism and collapse of the so-called ‘consensus’ that informed British politics from 1945.

As this suggests, an analysis of the bands, audience and ephemera associated with Oi! reveals much about class identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a snapshot of working-class youth in a period of significant socio-economic change. Notably, too, the debates that surrounded Oi! were informed by realignments on-going within British politics, both in terms of youthful disengagement from the political mainstream and the ‘cultural turn’ generated by a growing emphasis on ‘new’ spheres of struggle (race, gender, sexuality, youth, culture, language, consumption). Put bluntly, the politics of class were being overtaken by what some on the left called a ‘consciousness of oppression’ located in personal identity. This, in turn, shifted attention from the socio-economic to the cultural and, in the process, served to scramble some of the class and racial certainties that had once underpinned the politics of left and right. As the left became associated with students and ‘minority groups’ that made headway on questions of race and identity, so sections of the far right set out to ensure that the ‘grass-roots movement of workers and leadership of the working class does not rest with the communists and left but with the right’. In amidst all this, Oi! was caught in the crossfire: a medium for working-class protest interpreted as a recruiting ground for fascism.

Oi! then was not a vehicle for ‘evil’, Nazism or any other sort of ‘ism’. Its protest was made in primarily class terms, with its working-class origins serving as a common denominator across those associated with it. True, politics – along with youth cultural identities and, on occasion, football rivalries – provided points of tension. But the bands, poets, writers and audience associated with Oi! forged a class-conscious version of punk that sought for a political and cultural impact that looked beyond the rarefied confines of the students’ union, Daily Mail and NME.

Matthew Worley is a professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books and articles on British politics, and is currently writing a study of British youth culture and politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His article “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” is available free in Twentieth Century British History for a limited time.

Twentieth Century British History covers the variety of British history in the twentieth century in all its aspects. It links the many different and specialized branches of historical scholarship with work in political science and related disciplines. The journal seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to foster the study of patterns of change and continuity across the twentieth century.

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“If a child can be born in a stable, I guess I can die in a hospital.”

By Sinéad Donnelly

A palliative medicine physician colleague of mine asked an audience of physicians where they would like to die: at home, hospice, or hospital? Sitting in the audience I can only remember the number in favour of the third option. One person — and that was me.

If a child can be born in a stable, I guess I can die in a hospital. With 22 years experience of palliative medicine, hospital does not seem to me like the worst place to die. More than anything, I want someone to care for me and about me, and the first line in my advanced care directive will make this preference clear. Then I may add that I don’t want to be on a Care Pathway to Anywhere. I don’t want nurses and doctors to say I had one “variant” last night according to the protocol but instead talk about me as a human being with pain or nausea or anxiety or comfortable, at peace, tearful, whatever. Don’t distance yourselves from me and the reality of my dying, a reality that you too will share one day. By the way, I don’t actually want to die. That’s another story.

If you really want my opinion about acronyms (and this is an opinion blog), one more abbreviation might well be the death of me. I don’t want an ANP asking about my ACP before putting me on the LCP.

A patient dying in hospital should be an honoured guest in an honoured place. What a novel concept! This idea is adapted from an inspiring essay by Ken Warpole. Commissioned by the Irish Hospice Foundation in 2005, Warpole reviewed the architecture and design of the hospital spaces in which the dying find themselves. The idea of hospital being an honoured place with dying patients as honoured guests opens a new window into our daily reality of working in hospitals.

The Royal College of Physicians in 2012 cautioned against the introduction of tools for the care of dying without an extensive programme of education and support to hospital staff. They discouraged the counterproductive tick-box approach to care of the dying patient. More recent literature points to a need to look at our behaviour towards dying patients, their families, and our colleagues. In addition to resources such as pathways or protocols, we need to pose new questions about hospital care of the dying patient:

How do we behave towards other people within the hospital environment?
How do staff members show that they care for the dying patient and grieving family?
How can we make time for the dying patient and family?
How can senior doctors and nurses show leadership and model compassionate and competent behaviour?
How do we support our less experienced staff and colleagues in the face of dying and death in hospital?

Let’s imagine that I am the dying person in hospital. Imagine that you as hospital staff believe and know that you work in an honoured place. Let’s imagine that I feel like an honoured guest, that you make me feel like an honoured guest. Can we imagine how that might be?

Dr Sinéad Donnelly is a Consultant in Palliative Medicine at Wellington Regional Hospital, New Zealand. Her article, ‘Patient dying in hospital: an honoured guest in an honoured place?‘ appears in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine.

QJM is a long-established, leading general medical journal. It focuses on internal medicine and publishes peer-reviewed articles which promote medical science and practice. Published monthly, QJM includes original papers, editorials, reviews, commentary papers to air controversial issues, and a correspondence column.

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Image credit: Old and young hands photo by SilviaJansen via iStockPhoto.

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Gleanings from Dickens

By Anatoly Liberman

Some time ago I read Sidney P. Moss’s 1984 book Charles Dickens’ Quarrel with America. Those who remember Martin Cuzzlewit and the last chapter of American Notes must have a good idea of the “quarrel.” However, this post is, naturally, not on the book or on Dickens’s nice statement: “I have to go to America—on my way to the Devil” (this statement is used as an epigraph to Moss’s work). In Chapter 10, titled “The Reading Tour,” Moss recounts the impressions of the listeners who had the good luck to hear Dickens in 1867-1868, during his second and last trip to the United States. He was a splendid actor (it is not for nothing that he enjoyed describing theaters and circuses), and newspapers followed his tour at every step.

Two places aroused my curiosity. The Boston Daily Journal (3 December 1867) described Dickens’s appearance, his suit of faultless black, a profusion of gold chains festooned across his vest, and so forth. The description ended so: “A cashy, good-natured, shrewd English face it is, one that would be associated with the out-door life of a smart man of business, not particularly troubled with the sentiments, and most unmindful of good cheer, brusque, not beautiful, wide-awake and honest” (p. 271). The florid style of the description does not appeal to me, but this is beyond the point. I stumbled at the phrase cashy face. Judging by the general tenor of the article and the situation (a performance by a worldwide celebrity), the word could not be too conversational, and indeed, cashy did not turn up in slang dictionaries with the sense that might fit the context. It is also absent from Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles and A Dictionary of American Regional English. I finally hunted it down in John Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, from which it made its way into Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary. Wright rearranged the senses, but the information remained intact.

Cashy, recorded in the form cashie, means “delicate, not able to endure fatigue; soft, flabby, not of good quality (said about vegetables); luxuriant, succulent (said about plants).” Most senses seem to carry negative overtones. Obviously, Dickens’s face was “delicate.” But why should the reporter have used a word that in his days had restricted currency even in Scotland? Cashy could not be an over-subtle allusion to Dickens’s fondness for the word. We may be certain that it does not occur in Dickens, for otherwise James Murray would have included it in the OED, but he did not. I assume that in 1867 the readers of the Boston Daily Journal were expected to understand what was written in their newspaper. It would be interesting to know whether our correspondents from Boston and Scotland still know this adjective.

Charles Dickens: A cashy face and rising inflection.

From an etymological point of view cashy looks like cash-y (expensive? involving great care?). All the modern senses of this adjective go back to cash. A cashy job is one performed “under the table,” usually by individuals who are not qualified or by persons avoiding taxes. A finished (“cashed”) box of marijuana is called cashy, and the simplest sense of cashy is “wealthy.” But it is most doubtful that the adjective meaning “delicate, flabby, succulent, luxuriant” can be traced to cash. Nor does it seem likely that cashy is an Anglicized form of French caché “secret, hidden.” Once again I would like to appeal to our readers. Someone may know something about the derivation of this troublesome adjective.

The New York Tribune (14 December) was equally laudatory. However, it criticized Dickens’s “partiality for rising inflection and some Cockneyisms of pronunciation” (p. 282 of Moss’s book). Since the “Cockneyisms of pronunciation” were not cited (did Dickens say toime instead of time?), we will let them be. It is the rising inflection that merits a moment’s attention. Rather long ago, I discussed the rising intonation in American English but would like to return to it in connection with Dickens’s speech habits. I remember my embarrassment when I came to Minnesota and could not interpret statements, all of which sounded like questions to my ear. “Where is that building?” “It is two blocks away from here…” (with a strong rise). The dean informed us (among many other things): “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year…” (again with a strong rise). Someone told me that this intonation is peculiarly Midwestern: people are shy here and raise their voice to leave room for retreat (“That building is two blocks away from here, but, if you miss it, don’t blame me…”; “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year; yet, it may come earlier, who knows? I am really not sure”). The explanation struck me as fanciful and unconvincing. Later, much to my satisfaction, I discovered that the timidity of the allegedly self-effacing Midwesterners is a myth. They are people like everybody else. Some are timid, while others are not.

Then, I think about ten years ago or so, everybody suddenly began to speak about young women in California using exactly this rise. It was discussed in the media, and journalists ascribed the phenomenon to the emancipatory trend among the female segment of the population, as though a rise were a challenge (“This is what I say. Will you dare to disagree?”). I was amused by a theory opposite to the one I had heard in my semi-native Minnesota. It should be noted that the history of intonation does not exist. English vowels and consonants have been described by schoolmasters and other interested people since the seventeenth century, and old spelling tells its own story, but we have no record of intonation predating the late eighteen-hundreds. Remarks like people in this area “sing” abound, but such remarks are not informative. They only tell us that the outsider did not “sing” in the same way. Also, those observations usually refer to tone languages and dialects rather than intonation. Some conclusions about pauses in the uninhibited speech of the past can be drawn from the division of an old text into words, lines, and paragraphs, and poetry provides us with clues about sentence stress. Other than that, the “singing” of our ancestors is lost.

It is hard to account for some rules. In principle, one expects a rise in a question. But in English only questions beginning with a verb have a rise (“Is he your friend? Do you know him well? Have you ever lived together?”), while so-called special questions end like statements in a dip (“When was he born? Where does he live? Who is he?”). This also holds for the second part of disjunctive questions (“Do they call him Bob [a rise] or Rob [a fall]?”). One and the same intonation can have different functions. I have read several descriptions of Cockney, but I don’t remember whether anyone mentioned a rising intonation as a special feature of that dialect. What will Londoners say? There is no certainty that the correspondent of the New York Tribune was a trustworthy judge of Cockney speech. But seemingly, Dickens did raise his voice the way they do in Minnesota and California (only in Minnesota this intonation is not “gender-specific”). The three identical patterns need not have a common origin, and it would be interesting to hear the opinion of people from the Midwest, California, London, and elsewhere.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Charles Dickens – Scenes in his life. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.

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Preparing for International Trademark Association Annual Meeting 2013

By Christopher Wogan

In Trade Mark Law: a Practical Anatomy, Jeremy Phillips’ classic analysis of trademarks, Jeremy notes that how a trademark functions depends on “(i) how the trade mark owner uses it and (ii) how the purchaser views it.” The purpose of the trademark system is not only for those who own trademarks and their competitors, but also for those consumers who may or may not choose to use goods and services provided by the trade mark owner.

Trademark law is an interesting field because it is defined not only by legislation and legal books and treaties but also by the uses to which it is put. Trademark lawyers are at the forefront of deciding the legality of issues that affect commerce, companies, and consumers the world over. Do you ever wonder when you ask for a Coke whether what you are really asking for is any carbonated cola beverage or the drink specifically made by Coca-Cola? If you want to stitch your favorite football team’s name on your scarf do you need permission? Trademark lawyers regularly answer and deal with these finer points of intellectual property law.

A group of around 10,000 intellectual property law practitioners and trademark specialists will convene in Dallas, Texas from 4-8 May at the International Trademark Association’s 135th Annual Meeting. They will come together to talk about the latest trademark and intellectual property law issues, to catch up with friends from around the world, and to meet new ones. They will ask themselves how intellectual property and trademarks will evolve in a world that is more commercial and digitally connected than ever before.

Those who have been to the INTA annual meeting before know that it is a five day conference packed with informative panel discussions and networking events. This year’s conference is no different. The program sounds fascinating, with a keynote address from Jerry Jones, Owner, President, and General Manager of the Dallas Cowboys, while the Welcome Reception and INTA Gala are not to be missed.

If you’re wondering what to do when you’re not attending sessions, check out these conference-related happenings:

Saturday: First-Time Attendee Annual Meeting Orientation. Take full advantage of the INTA Annual Meeting and learn about the resources and opportunities for education, networking, navigating the Exhibition Hall and making the best use of your time. This session is for first-time attendees, as well as new members, who want to learn more about the most recent events and resources available on-site. 3:00 pm–4:00 pm
Monday: Meet Oxford authors David Stone and Neil Wilkof. From noon onwards you can meet David Stone, author of European Union Design Law and Neil Wilkof, author of Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights at the Oxford University Press booth #815.  Also on Monday evening there is an Academic and Young Practitioner Happy Hour, an excellent networking opportunity for law and paralegal students, practitioners new to trade mark law, professors and adjunct professors to discuss, over cocktails, interesting new trade mark law developments.
Wednesday: Grand Finale – Gilley’s Dallas. Enjoy your final night of the 2013 Annual Meeting at Gilley’s and get a real taste of Dallas culture. 7:00 pm–11:00 pm

Also, here are a few tips on what to expect when you get to Dallas:

The weather in Dallas in May will be hot. Expect temperatures to reach between 27-30 degrees Celsius, 80-86 degrees Fahrenheit.
Accessing the Internet: At the Convention Center, free wi-fi is available for attendees with wi-fi-compliant devices in public spaces such as concourses, food courts and common areas inside the Center.
Finding your way around: You find can directions to the Dallas Convention Center and take a virtual tour of the Center.
INTA have posted an orientation video explaining what the conference is like for first-time attendees.

If you are lucky enough to be joining us in Dallas, don’t forget to visit the Oxford University Press booth number 815, where you can browse our award-winning books, pick up a sample copy of one of our intellectual property journals or find out more about the JIPLP competition for 2013 – the $1 billion question!

To follow the latest updates about the INTA Conference as it happens, follow us @OUPAcademic and the hashtag #INTA13. See you in Dallas!

Christopher Wogan is the Marketing Manager for Intellectual Property Law products at Oxford University Press.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in intellectual property law including the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, edited by Professor Jeremy Phillips, and Reports of Patent, Design and Trade Mark Cases, as well as the latest titles from experts in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from trade marks to patents, designs and copyrights, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide.

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Saints and sinners, politicians and priests, and the 2013 local elections

By Matthew Flinders

Justin Welby recently used his first Easter sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury to warn of the dangers of investing too much faith in frail and fallible human leaders, be they politicians or priests. Blind belief in the power of any single individual to bring about true change in any sphere, he argued, was simplistic and wrong, and led inevitably to disillusionment and disappointment. Surely this was the point in the sermon when a member of his flock was duty-bound to heckle ‘But what about that bloke called Jesus!’ Unfortunately, good manners triumphed and the leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans was able to continue his sermon. ‘Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation’ he told the congregation at Canterbury cathedral. ‘They may well be good and necessary, but will to some degree fail. Human sin means pinning hopes on individuals is always a mistake, and assuming that any organisation is able to have such good systems that human failure will be eliminated is naïve’.

Bishop Welby’s sermon reminded me of Max Weber’s famous essay of 1919 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ with its warnings against ‘infantile’ understandings of politics and its emphasis on the complexities of governing and the need to hold realistic expectations of what politics – and therefore politicians – can deliver. ‘Politics is’ as Weber maintained ‘a strong and slow boring of hard woods’ and one might argue that almost a century later the challenges of governing have, if anything, become far greater and more complex. And yet there was a nagging part of Bishop Welby’s sermon that left me disheartened, frustrated, and possibly even angry. It was, for me, as if the new Bishop had accepted the advice of Bernard Baruch to ‘vote for the man [or woman] who promises the least as they’ll be least disappointing’. Surely one of the key social roles of politicians and priests is to inspire, to promote hope, to make their communities believe they can deliver positive social change. Might it therefore be that in warning against ‘the hero leader culture’, Bishop Welby revealed his own weakness? In the sense that he seemingly does not understand exactly why certain social groups seem so willing to grasp ‘quick, easy and gratifying solutions’ to even the most intractable problems.

Bishop Welby suggests that people could only escape ‘cynical despair’ by acknowledging God and trusting in his power but if you’re living in poverty, and face a multitude of social challenges that conspire to limit your life chances from birth, then I can understand why individuals fall for the cheap tricks and empty promises of rogue politicians. Put slightly differently, instead of arguing that too many people look to politicians for simple and pain free solutions to complex and painful problems that simply do not exist, might it not be equally true to suggest that encouraging people to accept human fallibility and to trust on God is just a different form of expectation inflation that is almost guaranteed to fail – a ‘mere cruelty’ of a different kind?

Canterbury Cathedral, and the Portal Nave Cross-spire

I for one am actually quite glad that Barack Obama did not turn out to be Superman and Bishop Welby is surely correct that we should not set people or institutions up to the heights where they cannot do anything but fail. But it would be quite wrong to suggest that individuals cannot make a positive difference, or to deny that some politicians have in fact delivered on their promises, or that – when all is said and done – democratic politics generally delivers far more than most people seem to recognise. Welby concluded his sermon by quoting the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas, from his poem Threshold, on the human need for communication with God,

‘I am alone on the surface / of a turning planet. What / to do but, like Michelangelo’s / Adam, put my hand / out into unknown space, / hoping for the reciprocating touch?

And yet once again my moral soul was irked by such platitudes; I could not help but think that what most humans crave is not so much communication with God but communication with each other. It is the increased social fragmentation that threatens humanity not some form of existential angst or theological breakdown. My concern is therefore not so much that the public demands too much of politics and politicians but that at many levels the public’s expectations are actually too low. Local elections, for example, are due to take place in the UK in a matter of days but have so far been met with a deafening silence in terms of public debate or interest. There seems little evidence of the blind faith or hero leader culture that Bishop Welby warns against in any of the 36 English and Welsh Councils that will be contested on 2 May. I’m not suggesting that one sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury has single-handedly dampened expectations that would otherwise have had the local election campaign buzzing across the country, but I am suggesting that the Bishop’s position is too simplistic. We actually need more trust in political leaders and more active community engagement at the local level alongside a measured dose of healthy scepticism about what our local political leaders can realistically deliver.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was educated at a succession of Catholic schools and is still recovering from this experience. Author of Defending Politics (2012), you can find Matthew Flinders on Twitter @PoliticalSpike and read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts here.

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Image credit: Canterbury Cathedral and the Portal Nave Cross-spire. Photo by Hans Musil. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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Mediterranean diets and health risks for the elderly at high cardiovascular risk

What is the relationship between a Mediterranean diet and the risk of hyperuricemia in the elderly? Dr. Salas-Salvado joins us to discuss his most recent research in the The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

What is hyperuricemia, how common is it, and what can be its consequences?

Hyperuricemia is defined as elevated concentrations of serum uric acid in plasma (higher than 7 mg/dL in men and higher than 6 mg/dL in women). It occurs when there is an overproduction or underexcretion of uric acid or often the combination of both.

The prevalence of both gout and hyperuricemia has increased over the past two decades, which is related to increasing frequencies of adiposity and hypertension. It has been estimated that the prevalence of gout among US adults was 3.9%, 5.9% for men and 2% for women, this mean that 8.3 million individuals suffer from gout in the United States. It has also been estimated that 21.4% of adults had elevated serum uric acid levels, namely 43.3 million of individuals in the United States. It has also been shown that its prevalence increases with age.

Hyperuricemia has also been regarded as the precursor of gout; an inflammatory arthritis triggered by the crystallization of uric acid within the joints, decreasing life quality. Moreover, it has been strongly associated with metabolic syndrome, hypertension, type-2 diabetes mellitus, and chronic kidney disease and also with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.

Why is your study significant? What are its significant findings?

We have evaluated the associations between adherence to the Mediterranean Diet (MeDiet) and the prevalence, incidence and reversion of hyperuricemia in elderly subjects at high cardiovascular risk participating in a primary prevention randomized trial. Also, we have assessed which of the specific typical components of the MeDiet were associated with hyperuricemia. We have shown that after a median follow-up of five years, 24.9% of subjects who did not have hyperuricemia at baseline developed hyperuricemia, whereas 43.2% of hyperuricemic individuals at baseline reverted this condition. In the cross-sectional analyses, we have observed that an increase in the adherence to the MeDiet was associated to a decreased prevalence of hyperuricemia. The baseline consumption of red meat, fish and seafood, and wine were associated with a higher prevalence of hyperuricemia. We have also found that those individuals who have a higher adherence to the MeDiet had more probabilities to reverse this condition than those individuals with a lower adherence. Furthermore, these associations were independent of other risk factors for hyperuricemia, such as age, body-mass-index, smoking, physical activity, hypertension, and diabetes.

Even though previous studies have assessed the relationship between some dietary factors and hyperuricemia, the association between dietary patterns and hyperuricemia remains unknown. Our study is unique in prospectively evaluating the adherence to the MeDiet and hyperuricemia. Our findings provide evidence of the benefits of healthy dietary patterns on the reversion of hyperuricemia. What is more, reversion was achieved by the MeDiet alone, without weight loss or physical activity counselling.

What constitutes a MeDiet?

The traditional Mediterranean diet is characterized by a high consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, olive oil, nuts, and whole grain; a moderate consumption of wine, dairy products, and poultry; and a low consumption of red meat, sweet beverages, creams, and pastries. The sofrito sauce is also another component of the Mediterranean diet; it is made with tomato, onion, spices, garlic and simmered with olive oil. Its high content in antioxidants makes it anti-inflammatory.

Is a MeDiet beneficial in other ways, such as in decreasing or reversing the risk of gout?

It has been consistently demonstrated that Mediterranean Diet has many healthy benefits mainly due to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. It has been inversely related with dyslipidemia, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hypertension, and other chronic diseases. Recently, the findings of the PREDIMED Study — a large, multicenter randomized clinical trial — showed that among persons at high cardiovascular risk, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts reduced the incidence of major cardiovascular events. So, Mediterranean diet has also been strongly and inversely related with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.

Jordi Salas-Salvadó is in the author of “Mediterranean Diet and Risk of Hyperuricemia in Elderly Participants at High Cardiovascular Risk” (available to read for free for a limited time) in the latest issue of The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences. He has occupied teaching and research posts at the Faculty of Medicine in Reus (UB) since 1984. At present, he is professor of Nutrition (Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology) and director of the Human Nutrition Unit of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the Rovira i Virgili University (URV). He has directed 12 research projects financed by public bodies and 21 projects in conjunction with the pharmaceutical or food industries. He is one of the leaders of the PREDIMED clinical trial and has published more than 220 original articles in national and international journals, as well as numerous reviews and editorials. Editor of 7 books, he has also co-authored more than 50 books.

The Journals of Gerontology were the first journals on aging published in the United States. The tradition of excellence in these peer-reviewed scientific journals, established in 1946, continues today. The Journals of Gerontology, Series A publishes within its covers the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences and the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

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Image credit: Rustic Italian Dinner with red wine olives and salad. Photo by edoneil, iStockphoto.

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Celebrating Kierkegaard’s bicentenary

By Daphne Hampson

The fifth of May 2013 marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Danish philosopher, theologian, and man of literature Søren Kierkegaard. He will be celebrated in Copenhagen and around the world. What estimate should we form of him today?

Kierkegaard did not doubt his mission: ‘I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be . . . to every person’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not’. Christianity, he contended, entailed belief in an interruptive event (an Incarnation of God) which does not fit the normal flow of history. The Enlightenment had been a blow to the Christian claim. Politely suggesting that any such ‘historical’ religion was the business of theologians, Kant treated the biblical saga of Fall and redemption as but a mythical expression of human self-understanding. In his wake, Hegel reduced Christianity simply to ‘concepts’ and thought these concepts a mere stage in human development, while Feuerbach pronounced Christian doctrine a projection. As a student, Kierkegaard witnessed the advance of scholarship that sought to explain biblical texts in terms of their setting of origin.

Cognisant that the notion of an Incarnation, a God/man, is to reason paradoxical (a contradiction in terms), Kierkegaard advocated relating to it out of the passion of subjective inwardness that is ‘faith’. We should recognise, however, that he held to pre-modern suppositions that made such a notion, if not rational, at least conceivable. Living a century and a half after Newton, Kierkegaard had little sense that nature and history form an inter-related causal nexus; that events are one of a kind, predictable and repeatable, there being no one-off occurrences. He was, in the parlance of the day, a ‘supernaturalist’ not a ‘naturalist’, believing in miracles. God is conceived to be directly behind each and every happening, such that just about anything can transpire.

For Kierkegaard, pressing directly on our world, the eternal is bound into each moment in time. It is within such a context that the human being is held to be a synthesis of body and spirit, through his very nature made for divinity. Thus Kierkegaard commented that, while it is true that (as Aristotle had said) a plant gives rise to a plant, a man to a man, ‘by this nothing is explained, thought is not satisfied … for an eternal being cannot be born’. Within such a context, once more the idea of Incarnation acquires plausibility. Was it the subsequent Darwinian revolution that led humanity to conceive of their nature otherwise?

Kierkegaard’s outlook had social implications. Far from uncaring, his former professor remarked: ‘It was typical of him to want to look after precisely those people whom the public did not value’. Nevertheless, in view of eternity, our present existence becomes for him a ‘meanwhile’. Thus he considered it of more importance that a beggar behave beautifully, mindful that, disturbed by his presence, others may be led to question God’s goodness, than whether the man live or die. He advises that a charwoman should not aspire to be called ‘Madame’, given that the world is but a stage on which we act our roles, while before God she is anyone’s equal. No wonder Hegel had averred that ‘the eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world’. His disciple Marx was five years Kierkegaard’s junior.

In his Works of Love, a spiritual classic, Kierkegaard entreats us to love and respect each ‘other’ as God loves us, never assimilating that other person to self. Horrified by the advent of democracy, ‘government by the numerical’ as he quips derisively, he was nonetheless quick to take advantage of freedom of the press to attack a complacent establishment in both church and state. He writes sarcastically of the ‘distinguished corruption’ of those who flee from one distinguished circle to another, taking care lest in the poor they should meet another human being. If today in celebration of their famous son the Queen of Denmark will parade from church to university, it was not ever thus. Rather, it was a motley crew of students and the poor who accompanied his funeral cortège from that same church to grave. These things are far from simple.

Fearing in his blacker moods that his authorship, penned in a minor European tongue, might lie undiscovered, Kierkegaard remarked of his fellow countrymen: ‘I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric; my literary activity… a sort of hobby [like] fishing and such’. Would he could but know of the affection and respect in which in our day he is held by those who will gather to celebrate his bicentennial. His work is translated into languages from Korean to Hungarian. An eclectic and imaginative author, Kierkegaard is considered the Ur-father of existentialism, the originator of dialectical theology and (on account of his style) the progenitor of post-modernism. Regarded by many Danes as the greatest prose writer of their language, his provocative authorship in equal measure engages and delights.

Confronted with one who in terms of the span of history lived so recently yet whose thought-world is so foreign, we are brought to recognise the remarkable revolutions that we in Europe have undergone. Fascinated by steam engines and hot air balloons, Kierkegaard (inconsistently) did not much like the march of history, thinking scientific progress to distract man from his true ends. To step into his shoes is a startling revelation as to differences in presuppositions. What, however, would seem to make little sense is to contend that Christians have always proclaimed ‘faith’ in the face of ‘reason’, failing to consider the context that made the object of such a faith thinkable. From this it does not follow that we should not think out how today we had best conceive of that dimension of reality that is ‘God’.

Daphne Hampson holds doctorates in history from Oxford, in theology from Harvard, and a master’s in Continental Philosophy from Warwick. The author of Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought, she has for many years engaged with the Lutheran tradition, in particular the work of Kierkegaard. Author of Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique, you can find more about Daphne Hampson by visiting her website.

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Image credit: Kierkegaard statue. Photo by Arne List. Creative commons license via Wikimedia Commons.

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“Forever Let Us Hold Our Banner High!”

By Ron Rodman

Annette Funicello

The death of Annette Funicello this month set off a wave of nostalgia among baby boomers who remember her as the star of the “Mouseketeers” of the original Mickey Mouse Club (MMC). MMC was the brainchild of Walt Disney, studio founder, entertainer, and entrepreneur, originally as a means of promoting the then new Disneyland, which opened in Anaheim, California on 17 July 1955.

The MMC premiered on 3 October 1955 on the ABC television network to coincide with the opening of Disneyland. MMC was Disney’s second venture in network television, the first being an anthology series, the short-lived Disneyland that later became Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.

MMC was essentially a variety show for children, complete with a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial, musical numbers performed by the Mouseketeers, and talent and comedy segments. The show aired five days a week in the afternoons and each day of the week had a different theme:

Monday: Fun with Music.
Tuesday: Guest Star.
Wednesday: Anything Can Happen.
Thursday: Circus.
Friday: Talent Round-up.

One unique feature of the show was the Mouseketeer Roll Call, in which many (but not all) of that day’s line-up of regular performers would introduce themselves rhythmically by name to the television audience. In the serials, teens faced challenges in everyday situations, often overcome by their common sense or through recourse to the advice of respected elders.

Cast

Originally, Disney wanted “ordinary” kids on the show, but his idea was abandoned as the audition process began for the show in March 1955. Thirty-nine children were hired to become “Mouseketeers,” with nine becoming the “Red Team” which consisted of Funicello, Tommy Cole, Darlene Gillespie, Bobby Burgess, Doreen Tracey, Cubby O’Brien, Karen Pendleton, Lonnie Burr, and Sharon Baird. Cheryl Holdridge joined the team during the second season.

MMC was hosted by , a songwriter and the “Head Mouseketeer”, who provided leadership both on and off screen. In addition to his other contributions, he often provided short segments encouraging young viewers to make the right moral choices. These little homilies became known as “Doddisms”.

Dodd composed and performed much of the music for the show, including the “Mickey Mouse March” that opened the show, as well as the slow “alma mater” version that closed each episode.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Roy Williams, a staff artist at Disney, also appeared in the show as the “Big Mouseketeer”. It was Williams who suggested that all characters on the show wear the Mickey Mouse ears (“Mouseke-ears”), which he helped create.

Annette Funicello

The “Mouseketeers” performed in a variety of musical and dance numbers on the show as well as some informational segments, but it was Annette Funicello who was Walt Disney’s favorite. Born on 22 October 1942 in Utica, New York, the family had moved to California when she was still young. Disney himself saw her performing the lead role in “Swan Lake” at her ballet school’s year-end recital in Burbank and decided to have her audition along with two hundred other children. Annette became the last Mouseketeer of the twenty-four that was picked.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Annette was the only Mouseketeer that Disney kept under exclusive contract. He personally managed aspects of her career, and created one of the show’s serials especially for her, a serial called “Annette.” Disney had plans for a film career for her and fashioned the serial to see if she was ready for film. The other popular serials on MMC, such as “The Adventures of Spin and Marty,” “Adventure in Dairyland,” and the “Hardy Boys Mysteries,” gave way to “Annette” which aired during the third season of the MMC and was the last serial broadcast on the show.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through Disney’s supervision, Annette appeared on other TV shows, notably, Danny Thomas’ Make Room for Daddy in 1958. Disney also featured her in several of his own productions like the TV series Zorro, and the films The Shaggy Dog and Babes in Toyland.

In the 1960s, Funicello went on to co-star with Frankie Avalon in many Bikini Beach movies through the American International studios. Disney gave his permission for her to appear in these movies as long as she wore a bathing suit that didn’t show her navel. She also made some popular records, notably the hit “Tall Paul” in 1959.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the 1980s, she became the celebrity spokesperson for Skippy Peanut Butter, appearing on many TV commercials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A MMC “Reunion Special” aired on NBC in 1980:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The original MMC aired from 1955 until it was cancelled in 1959. Other versions of the show aired later, like The New Mickey Mouse Club (1977-79), The All New Mickey Mouse Club (1989-1996) and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006 and current).

Dodd died in 1964 of cancer in Hawaii. Funicello died on 8 April 2013 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.

Now it’s time to say goodbye….

Why? Because we LIKE YOU!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

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