November 24, 2010 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • Page 15 Iraq. Shame on them! Next argument: “All of the world’s great technical achievements originated in the United States.” The greatest technical achievements of all time, no contest, were the specific eradications of lethal diseases. Edward Jenner, an Englishman who never set foot in the United States, found a workable cure for smallpox by infecting healthy people with cowpox, so they built up immunity to smallpox. Score one for the Anglo-Saxons, but Jenner was not American. Both the Chinese and the Turks were using dried pus from smallpox victims for hundreds of years before Jenner to immunize healthy people. Cowpox worked better, but it wasn’t the first example of immunology. Prussian Rudolf Virchow and Frenchman Louis Pasteur independently discovered the “germ theory” of disease. Pasteur discovered the cure for rabies and ended “milk sick,” which had killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother and thousands of other people, with his invention of pasteurization. (Did George W. Bush remember Pasteur when he wanted us all to hate France?) A cluster of Germans and Japanese built on Virchow’s and Pasteur’s legacy, discovering cures for many diseases. Emil von Behring discovered the cure for diphtheria, and Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburo discovered the cure for tetanus. (Try saying the Japanese man’s name and imagine how much harder it would be if you had lockjaw.) Robert Koch discovered the bacillus that causes tuberculosis, the “white plague” that killed millions every year, including my own grandmother, and his findings led to improved prevention and, eventually, to an antidote. Paul Ehrlich, a German Jew working with the help of Sahachiro Hata, a Japanese, found the cure for syphilis, the disease that killed Schubert, Manet, Baudelaire, de Maupassant, and millions of others. Salvarsan became the world’s bestselling drug. The Campbell Kids, mascots of the soup market, were originally made to look rosy-cheeked and chubby so buyers would subconsciously see the soup as an antidote for the ravages of tuberculosis and congenital syphilis, two major child killers until the early 20th century. Thanks to Koch and Ehrlich, nobody today remembers what the ravages even looked like. A century later, two more Jewish scientists, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, independently found the antidotes for polio, another awful crippling disease. A Japanese, Baron Kanehiro Takaki, discovered the cure for beriberi and introduced the knowledge of B vitamins, which opened the way for Casimir Funk, a Pole, to discover the importance of vitamins in general. American prosperity made these remedies more affordable. Engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi was half Italian and half Irish. He transmitted long-wave radio signals across the Atlantic in 1901 and shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics. The British invented radar and sonar without American input. Television was invented in Germany. So was the first useful gasoline engine (1868), though the prototype that used gas vapor was invented in France. An Irishman, John Holland, developed the first practical submarine on the Passaic River and the Hudson River. Frenchman Clement Ader flew a powered aircraft before the Wright brothers based on the glider experiments of a German named Otto Lilienthal. A German-American named Gus Whitehead, born Gustav Weisshaupt in Bavaria, flew a better airplane than the Wright brothers did two years before Kitty Hawk. He forgot the critical component, a movie camera, and his dozen witnesses didn’t stand up well to Orville and Wilbur’s photographs. The Wright Brothers had to bring in Glenn Curtis to make airplanes that could turn in flight. Whitehead’s prototype could turn in flight and flew farther than the Kitty Hawk aircraft. Most of the original inventions that led to advanced civilization came from China, home of the stirrup, the compass, the astrolabe, movable type, silk, pulp paper, paper money, eyeglasses, and gunpowder. More recently, a Scot named James Watt invented the reciprocating steam engine. Steam jet engines date back to ancient Greece, and odometers to ancient Rome. The Carthaginians were the first to use iron plows. The Phoenicians invented the phonetic alphabet which, filtered through the Greeks and the Etruscans, became the Roman alphabet, which became the American alphabet. The Koreans and the Cherokee Indians independently invented phonetic alphabets of their own. Now on to: “Americans were the first to reach the moon.” Yeah, but the Russians launched the first satellite, which jolted us awake with the help of captive German scientists who had improved rockets that were first designed in China and later developed by American Robert Goddard. “Our” German, Werner von Braun, was the prime instigator of America’s ultimately victorious space program. Americans used to claim that the formidable Mitsubishi A-6 fighter plane, the Zero, was designed by a British or American engineer. The Zero was an exclusively Japanese design and the Americans studied an A-6 Zero that crashed intact in the Aleutian Islands to design the F-6-F Hellcat, the first American fighter that could take the Zero in a dogfight. Technical progress is virtually independent of race and nationality, and can be advanced or emulated by anybody who takes the trouble to read the books, do the math, and skip most of the sports and drinking until the party’s over in high school and it’s time to go out and get a job in a factory that closed 20 years ago because the Germans and the Japanese did it better and the Chinese are now doing it cheaper. If you’re proud to be dumb, you’re bound to be doomed. Racism won’t help. Neither will the politicians who know that race-baiting gets votes. It doesn’t make American jobs. I recently encountered a racist – several, in fact, and so have a few other people I know. The recent catastrophe the party of the president with an African father suffered appears to have convinced racists it’s cool to be racist again since, in two more years, failing a return to full employment, a booming stock market, and double-digit bank interest, there will be a white man or woman in the White House and we can all go back to white supremacy. My wife and I once had a conversation with a man whose family had come from Asia to North American about 9,000 years ago and he set it all up for me: “The white man is finished in Asia, he’s finished in Africa, and he’s finished in South America. Pretty soon he’ll be finished in North America, which is why you married Suzie. You know we won’t hurt you as long as she’s still married to you. Unlike most white people, you’re actually somewhat intelligent, in an evil sort of way.” Most suburbanites don’t have conversations like this with people who accept loaded guns and butcher knives in boots the way we accept iPODs, so they assume only whites are racist and that if we all get over it, everything will be great, and in the meantime we can all get away with it if we don’t admit it. Only the densest of white people take it to such extremes that the only clean sheets and pillowcases in the house are part of their night-time wardrobe. It’s not going to be “all right” until those white folks who still have a future finally realize that we blue-eyed former blonds no longer have a stranglehold on the world’s economy,) a great many nonwhite ethnic groups can manufacture nuclear weapons and some already have, the sun was not created to illuminate football stadiums, and the schools that really matter are more interested in math and verbal skills than in who sat on the bench at the big game. Some arguments one hears extolling racism: “America was a better place when everybody was Anglo-Saxon.” That never happened. The Spanish and the French both got to North America before the English did. By the time the Europeans got the edge on the Real Americans (due to fatal doses of smallpox) the English and the Dutch were already importing kidnapped Africans whose immune systems could cope with anything. America has never been all white. Africans did most of the hard work that built the South. Even before the American Revolution, Africans constituted about 10 percent of the English-speaking population, including a substantial inventory of skilled tradesmen and about eight percent of the soldiers in George Washington’s Continental Army. About 30 percent of George Washington’s Continental Army was Irish-born, and Washington also had two whole regiments of Germans who spoke their own language and helped talk the Hessians who fought for the British into surrendering on lenient terms at the Battle of Trenton. The victory at Trenton saved Washington’s Army from disintegration. The French, incidentally, helped win the American Revolution when they brought the Dutch and Spanish in on our side. They also tried to warn us about Racism returns, but is doomed in any case Eight confirmed at Redeemer The Rite of Confirmation was celebrated at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Ramsey. The eight young people who studied for two years and were approved for confirmation are: Ashley Pacenza, Alexa DiGruttila, Jessica Cozine, and Steven Mones of Ramsey; Brianna Brochhausen, Kristen Grotheer, and Justin Royle of Mahwah; and Jack Farquharson of Suffern, New York. The sermon for Confirmation Sunday was comprised of selections from the stories the youths wrote to describe their faith. The youths received books, certificates, and flowers; and a special reception was held in their honor following the service. Front row: Justin Royle, Jack Farquharson, and Steven Mones. Back row: Brianna Brochhausen, Ashley Pacenza, Alexa DiGruttila, Kristen Grotheer, Jessica Cozine, and Rev. Moacir Weirich, interim pastor.