BIRDS' BRAINS HAVE MUCH IN COMMON WITH HUMANS'
Perhaps more than any other animal in America, the turkey symbolizes the ambivalence that many people have about animals. The turkey figures simultaneously as a sacrificial victim, a figure of fun, and a sacred player in America's mythic drama about itself as a nation.
The word turkey as an all-purpose term of derision has been traced to the American theater meaning a "third rate production." In James T. Farrell's 1932 novel, "Young Lonigan," the character Dooley is described as "one comical turkey, funnier than anything you'd find in real life."
The term "gobbledygook" is attributed to U.S. Rep. Maury Maverick from Texas, who, as chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corp. during World War II, issued a 1944 order banning the bureaucratic jargon he said reminded him of his "old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas who was always gobbledy-gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity."
The idea of the comical turkey persists in the litany of sarcasm that accompanies the piety of Thanksgiving each year in the United States, when newspapers and other media poke fun at the "Thanksgiving Day bird" along with the human "turkeys" in power, and holiday rituals include, or have included, everything from throwing turkeys off scaffolds and out of airplanes to forcing them to participate in turkey "Olympics" and in White House "turkey pardoning" ceremonies.
America celebrates its heritage paradoxically by feasting on a bird reflexively despised
by mainstream culture as stupid, dirty and silly, a misunderstanding reinforced by the turkey food industry, which alternates between caricaturing the turkey as a ludicrous "personality" vs. representing the bird as an anonymous "production animal." Stock photos of thousands of de-beaked turkeys crowded together awaiting slaughter in nondescript sheds reinforce the popular idea that turkeys are worthless except as objects of sport and meat.
Even so, the derogatory turkey stereotype is starting to change. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the creation of farmed animal sanctuaries and turkey-adoption programs offered new opportunities for people to get to know turkeys differently from the demeaning stock versions of the bird.
Partly in response to these encounters, a growth in vegetarianism is occurring in the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, the avian sciences are debunking the prejudice against birds in general, and ground-nesting birds such as turkeys and chickens in particular, as "primitive."
Avian scientists are calling for a whole new bird-brain nomenclature based on the now overwhelming evidence that birds share with humans a complexly evolved brain that processes information and gives rise to experience in much the same way as the human cerebral cortex, findings summarized by the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium in Nature Neuroscience Reviews in 2005.
An irony of the low esteem in which domestic turkeys have been held is that, as wildlife biologist William Healy points out, much of what is known about the wild turkey's intelligence is based on work with domestic turkeys. He defends domestic turkeys from the charge of stupidity by observing that genetic selection for "such gross breast development that few adult males can even walk" fuels the fallacy that they are "stupid."
A further irony is that the wary turkey that dominates modern hunters' discourse is not exactly the bird the early European explorers and colonists encountered. As John Madson writes in the Smithsonian, "Wild turkeys, as the first settlers found them, were as trusting and unwary as they were plentiful."
From the 17th through the 19th centuries, wild turkeys were characterized repeatedly as showing the same kind of friendly curiosity toward people that modern visitors often discover with surprise and delight when they meet domestic turkeys at animal sanctuaries. "They often sat with their young on my fences so trustingly that I found it difficult to bring myself to shoot them," said one person of the wild turkey's amiableness toward the settlers.
It remains to be seen whether modern experiences and the advancing sciences of avian cognition and ethology will lead people to rethink, as did naturalist Joe Hutto in the course of raising young turkeys to adulthood, many of their attitudes and presumptions about "the complexity and profoundly subtle nature of the experience within other species."
As the single most visible animal symbol in America, the de facto symbol of the nation and "icon of American food," the turkey highlights the growing conflict in Western culture between the age-old presumption that animals exist solely for humans to exploit and the view that non-human animals are kin to humans with value and autonomy in their own right.
Ellen Goodman: Gore models life's second act
Until now, I believed that the smallest unit of time was between the moment the traffic light turned green and the car behind you honked. I was wrong. The shortest unit is between the moment you win the Nobel Peace Prize and someone asks if you're running for president.
This is the story of Al Gore. It's wrapped succinctly in the Time magazine headline: "Gore Wins the Nobel. But Will He Run?" The best answer came from congenitally sardonic congressman, Rahm Emanuel: "Why would he run for president when he can be a demigod?"
Indeed, the man who is free at last from politics has learned anything, it's that becoming a candidate means open season on his weight, his wit, his wisdom and his son's arrest record. Besides, which would you rather do, save the Earth or dial for dollars in Iowa?
The attention on Al Gore's trajectory from loser to laureate misses something about this second act and second actor. As he approaches 60, Gore's staking out something of a new path for his generation.
Consider the new sixtysomethings. Last week, 61-year-old Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, the first baby boomer and a retired teacher, signed up for early Social Security benefits. Next Friday, Hillary Clinton turns 60 and her second act is running for president. And when the new Harvard president, Drew Faust, 60, met with her Bryn Mawr classmates last summer? Many were talking about leaving their "extreme jobs" just as she was installed in hers.
Baby boomers are the first generation that can look forward to such a lengthy and (fingers crossed) healthy stage of later life. They are as likely to be talking about what they want to do next as about where they want to retire. Never mind all those declarations that 60 is the new 40. In fact, 60 is the new 60.
The stage of life called adolescence was only invented a century ago. Today, says Rosabeth Kanter, Harvard Business School professor, "We have a chance to invent another stage of life that doesn't have a name yet."
But Gore is its poster child, the model for what Marc Freedman calls the "encore career." The head of Civic Ventures, a think tank promoting civic engagement as the second act for boomers, Freedman says, "Gore found himself by losing himself -- literally losing -- and being liberated from ambition, the idea that there's a particular ladder you have to scurry up and if you don't make it to the top it's all over. Essentially he found a different ladder."
Alas, Gore's "liberation" came with a little help from the Supreme Court. But he spent time in the wilderness -- bearded and academic, rested and restless -- before reconnecting with what he cared most about.
There's an inconvenient hole in "An Inconvenient Truth." Gore never confronts his failure to accomplish more on climate change while vice president. But elsewhere he has implied that he'll be better at "creating that sea change in mass opinion" to force this agenda from the outside. This, says Freedman, "is the classic baby-boomer pattern of returning to an earlier dream unclouded by the compromises of midlife."
We have a roster of famous second actors, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Gates. The transition is a lot easier for folks not worrying about 401(k)s and pharmacy bills. Nevertheless, many in what Kanter calls the "Al Gore population" approach their 60s with a different set of values ... and, it must be said, urgency.
As a country, we are at the beginning of an enormous transition. Under the old compact, sixtysomethings were supposed to get out of the way and out of work. They were encouraged by financial incentives and prodded by discrimination. Now we are drawing blueprints for people who see themselves more as citizens than seniors.
"We used to say that the choices ran from A to B&B," says Kanter, author of "America the Principled." Today, she says, "we have an opportunity to define it as a time when your wisdom gets put to work on complex problems."
Demigod or demographic? Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, but the "Al Gore population" is reinventing this altogether new stage of life.
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