03/08/05

LC050308

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Chimpanzees and humans. We have a lot in common genetically.
Should we also share some legal rights?

Tibor Machan>> We are animals, but we are the kind of animals
with culture, with the capacity for civilization, which we do
not share with other animals.

Val>> And then, time was when African-Americans couldn't appear
in mainstream movies, let alone win Oscars. We look at black
Hollywood stars of the silver screen.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> It was a shocking attack. Two chimpanzees at an animal
sanctuary near Bakersfield ferociously mauled a man. He lost
all his fingers, an eye and part of his nose. Experts say these
chimps can be aggressive, though it's rare, and they often
experience very human emotions, which begs the question of how
human are they? Some animal activists say they're so close to
human that they should be given certain legal rights. Saul
Gonzalez looks at how science is exploring the similarities
between apes and humans.

Saul Gonzalez>> Human beings. Many of us believe our intellect
and reason put us head and shoulders above the rest of the
animal kingdom. However, do people too often exaggerate their
distinctiveness? Especially when we compare ourselves to our
closest evolutionary kin, the great apes? They are primates
like chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans which, according to
recent genetic studies, share between ninety-seven and ninety-
nine percent of their DNA with human beings.

Craig Stanford>> We are great apes, they are us. There is
enough of them in us and enough of us in them that you would not
draw this bold line.

Saul Gonzalez>> Craig Stanford, chair of the Anthropology
Department at the University of Southern California, is one of
the country's leading experts on great ape behavior. He says
his African field research with chimpanzee and gorilla
communities has convinced him of the close parallels between
great ape and human societies. A case in point? How leaders
climb to the top.

Craig Stanford>> Male chimps rise through the dominance
hierarchy not by being big, not by being strong, but by being
clever, by knowing exactly who to network with, by knowing
exactly whose favor to curry. In that way, of course, they're
strikingly reminiscent of what people do. We look at people in
Congress. You don't need to be six foot five to be a successful
politician. You just need to be socially, politically, really
shrewd and it's exactly the same for chimps and also for other
great apes.

Saul Gonzalez>> In anthropology circles, Stanford is best known
for his assertion that great apes are so smart that there is
virtually no difference between them and young human children.

Craig Stanford>> The fact is that, if you compared a human
child, a one and a half or two or two and a half year old child,
with an adult chimp, what you'd find is that in many ways,
neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, cognitively,
they're very similar. In some ways, the chimp is dramatically
smarter. It can navigate its way through a very complicated
rainforest. If you put the two, a child and a chimp, on the
same psychological battery of tests in the laboratory somewhere,
what you'd find is some very striking similarities.

Saul Gonzalez>> In fact, so much so that a community of animal
welfare activists, scientists and legal scholars are championing
a provocative idea on behalf of the great apes. Their argument
is this: if primates like gorillas and chimpanzees have so much
in common with people, biologically, intellectually and
emotionally, then humanity has a special moral duty. It must
surrender its monopoly on certain human rights and liberties and
begin offering them to the great apes.

Craig Stanford>> I feel that we can't ethically in good
conscience do the things to them that we do to them and continue
to call ourselves modern, open-minded, caring people. I think
the goal right now for great apes is to raise their critical
status to the absolute highest level.

Saul Gonzalez>> Animal rights activists say that means
extending to great apes the right to life, protection of
individual liberty and the prohibition of torture. Translating
such principles into laws could mean banning all medical testing
involving great apes, prohibiting the economic exploitation of
the animals in movies, advertising and circuses and even
stopping, or at least vastly improving, the keeping of great
apes in zoos. In the legal arena, some activists even envision
the day when great apes, acting through human guardians, will be
able to seek justice in court when their rights are violated.

Craig Stanford>> There are legal scholars who have advocated
applying anti-slavery laws to the great apes. So you have
people out there in society who are thinking in very human terms
about these non-human animals.

Saul Gonzalez>> These possibilities were explored last
September at Harvard University when prominent scientists,
animal rights activists and legal experts gathered to discuss
extending rights to great apes. Attorney and author, Steven
Wise, is considered one of the fathers of the primate rights
movement.

Steven Wise>> "Liberty and equality are two of the
overwhelming, over-weaning, over-arching values in our legal
system and that we should apply them to the search for the legal
rights for chimpanzees."

Saul Gonzalez>> But Wise acknowledges that religious ideals in
our laws and society make the notion of rights for great apes
ludicrous to many people.

Steven Wise>> "The whole idea of dominion, that God made us
superior to non-human animals, is one that is certainly deeply
imbedded in our religious ideas and our cultural ideas and it
would be utterly shocking if it was not imbedded in our law, and
indeed it is imbedded in our law."

Saul Gonzalez>> However, some scholars oppose sharing human
rights with great apes for secular, philosophical reasons.

Tibor Machan>> We are animals, but we are the kind of animals
with culture, with the capacity for civilization, which we do
not share with other animals.

Saul Gonzalez>> Tibor Machan, a Professor of Ethics at Southern
California's Chapman University, is writing a critical study of
the animal rights movement. He says, despite some behavioral
and biological similarities, a moral chasm still separates human
beings and great apes.

Tibor Machan>> Human beings are unique in this moral dimension.
They can do right and wrong. I don't know of any other species
of living things where this kind of vocabulary of blame or
praise, of responsibility, of guilt and of rights is
appropriate.

Saul Gonzalez>> And because, he says, they lack a sense of
human right and wrong, Machan is especially appalled by the idea
of giving legal standing to great apes.

Tibor Machan>> The problems are that rights usually have
something to do with their being capable of being violated. The
law usually tries to prevent that or, if it can't prevent it,
punish the violation. This doesn't make sense with animals.
You don't punish an animal for, say, devouring another animal.
It would be idiotic to suggest that they ought to be taken to
court. That used to be done in the Middle Ages, by the way.
Animals were sued and it was a circus.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, the bitterest clashes in the debate
over whether to extend human rights to primates involves the
ethics of using the animals for scientific research. Machan
favors such research if it benefits human beings and avoids
needless cruelty.

Tibor Machan>> The limits is wanton hurt where there is no
higher purpose served by it. Now if an animal is mistreated in
a laboratory experiment which is supposedly aimed at solving a
problem like curing AIDS or something, then there is nothing
wrong with that.

Craig Stanford>> What I have a terrible problem with is when we
use animals that are so much like us, psychologically and
emotionally -- and I'm talking about great apes in particular --
using them in experiments that we would never consider doing
except in the worst holocaust kind of scenario on ourselves.
That to me makes absolutely no rational or ethical sense.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, the greatest threat to the world's
great apes isn't their treatment in labs and zoos. It's
extinction in the wild. From sub-Saharan Africa to Indonesia,
the animals' survival is at stake as humans encroach on their
habitats.

Craig Stanford>> Here are our very closest kin and we're
watching them. We in our generation today are watching them
disappear. They are so much like us that, to let them just slip
away, this is to me the ultimate sin for a human species.

Saul Gonzalez>> Great ape advocates favor lobbying the United
Nations to step in and administer these threatened habitats for
the benefit of primates, not people.

Val>> Our thanks to Saul Gonzalez who first produced that story
for Religion and Ethics News Weekly. As for the two attacking
chimpanzees, they were both shot and killed during the attack.

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Val>> It's often said that, when too many people are in charge,
no one's in charge. Take, for example, Los Angeles County.
It's run by five supervisors. Would we be better off if we had
a county mayor? A chief? A top dog? A czar? One supervisor
says yes. Vicki Curry talked to Zev Yaroslavsky about why he
thinks a county chief executive would be a good idea.

Vicki Curry>> Zev Yaroslavsky, you are on the Los Angeles
County Board of Supervisors and you're proposing the creation of
a new office, a county executive. What would that office be?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> It would be an elected executive. It would
be an elected county mayor, if you will, a county executive to
replace the current appointed county administrative officer. It
would not be an added cost to the county, but it would be in the
hands of the people the selection of the person who is
responsible to all of the people of the county for the
administration of county government.

This is the biggest local government outside of New York City,
an eighteen billion dollar a year organization with almost
ninety thousand employees, and it has no head. It has a five-
headed head and there is no organization of any size, certainly
not this size, in America or in the world today that runs the
way we run with a five-member committee.

Vicki Curry>> You have proposed creating this office in the
past and those attempts have been unsuccessful. What's
different today?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> Well, I only proposed it once and it never
got to the ballot. It's been on the ballot before I was a
supervisor, maybe fifteen years ago or a little less, and it
narrowly failed. I think what's changed is -- I think there's
been brought into clear and unmistakable relief the Martin
Luther King Hospital situation, but it's not the only situation
where the lack of one person in charge, the lack of one
executive who's accountable to the people, may have contributed
to a prolonged tolerance of incompetence.

Vicki Curry>> Well, was it the situation at Martin Luther King
Hospital that prompted you to bring this up again?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> Well, it certainly is one of the primary
reasons that I've been thinking about this for many months.
Everybody around here at the hall of administration knows that
this is a problem. Our county administrative officer -- and
I've had a number of conversations with him -- I think would
tell you that what you need is an elected county executive.
Most of the counties in the eastern United States and many in
the midwest of the United States have elected county executives.

Let me put it to you this way. The State Constitution
structures local county government the same way whether you're
Mono County where cows outnumber people a hundred to one or
whether you're Los Angeles County with ten million people. It's
the same structure, five supervisors. We have five very
different people. We have five different points of view. We
have five different world views. We have three Democrats and
two Republicans. We have people who immigrated here from Texas
in the midwest and people who were born and raised here. So to
develop a consensus among the five of us, which is usually what
is striven for, is difficult.

Vicki Curry>> Well, as you point out, Los Angeles is the
largest county in the country. I know there have been concerns
in the past that a county executive would have too much power.
He'd be one of the most powerful people in the country. What
are your thoughts about that?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> He wouldn't be a dictator. There would be a
board of supervisors and there would be a check and balance,
which is kind of our system of government. You'd have a chief
executive elected by the people and you'd have a board of
supervisors who would perform the legislative function. It just
does not make sense to merge -- talk about too much power -- to
vest both the legislative and executive power in one body, the
board of supervisors, for a county this size. It's
unprecedented. That's too much power.

Vicki Curry>> So you're saying you need to reduce your own
power?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> Yeah, I do think that's what it is and I
think that's why it's never gotten on the ballot, at least not
in the last thirteen years. You know, a lot of people say why
would you do that? Why would you reduce your own power? Leave
well enough alone. You've got a good thing going. Yeah, if you
have a good thing going, if you look at it kind of myopically
and day to day and don't see the big picture. But the big
picture is that, when you have a system that is structurally
flawed and ours is, then you have problems like MLK, Martin
Luther King-Drew Hospital. So there's a lot more riding on this
than just whether I have a good thing going or anybody else.

Vicki Curry>> Well, now are you interested in this executive
position?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> No (laughter).

Vicki Curry>> You sure about that?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> Don't worry about that. By the time this
thing gets going -- no, this is not for me. This is a long-term
structural change. I'll be very satisfied if I can succeed in
getting this charter change adopted by the people and let the
next generation or future generations be the beneficiaries of it
and be the practitioners of it.

Vicki Curry>> So the big picture question, though, is, given
all the problems in Los Angeles County and how huge it is, would
this even really help? Would it really make a difference?

Zev Yaroslavsky>> Oh, of course, it would make a difference.
Structure matters. The way you govern matters. Somebody has
got to be around to make a decision. We had a hundred-year
flood this year. It took us a week and a half until the next
Board of Supervisors meeting to declare a county-wide disaster.
There was never any doubt that we would declare that disaster,
but it would have been helpful if we could have declared it the
first day and not waited a week and a half, and it goes on and
on.

You know, if somebody on the board -- I don't want to burden you
with all of our internal dirty linen -- but if somebody on the
board is not ready to deal with an issue on a given Tuesday, it
gets put over for a week or two or three and everybody is going
to defer to that person. Maybe they haven't had a chance to
read the report. Maybe they're not ready to vote on it. Maybe
the politics don't add up. So it gets deferred for two to four
weeks or longer, sometimes for months, sometimes for years.

That's no way to run an organization when you have decisions to
make. There is no doubt in my mind that putting one person in
charge who is elected by all of the people and who is
accountable to all of the people and who sees the big picture
and is not parochial in the way they look at things is far
superior to the system we have now.

Vicki Curry>> Well, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, thank you so
much for taking the time to speak with us.

Zev Yaroslavsky>> My pleasure. Thank you.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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Val>> It was a whole world unto itself. Black stars, talent
agents and nightclubs created opportunities when the movie
industry often shut out African-Americans. It's now the subject
of a new book and Vicki Curry talked with historian, Donald
Bogle, about black Hollywood in the 1930's and 1940's.

Vicki Curry>> Donald Bogle, your book is "Bright Boulevard,
Bold Dream, The Story of Black Hollywood", but you chose to
focus not just on what happened on screen, but also on what
happened off screen. Why did you go in that direction?

Donald Bogle>> Well, you know, I had written before about black
movie images and black television images and I wanted to do
something else because I discovered that there had been a real
black community of film people in Los Angeles going back to the
early years of the twentieth century and I wanted to explore
that. I wanted to see what happened when African-Americans
first came to Hollywood, how it was that they got to work in the
industry.

I wanted to look at the town itself, how the town changed, and
also how black performers struggling to get roles in the
beginning and then questioning those roles and struggling for
better roles and to really trace this history of a really
vibrant, energetic black film colony within the midst of the
larger film industry.

Vicki Curry>> Well, some of the pioneers of black Hollywood are
obviously well-known, like Dorothy Dandridge or Bill "Bojangles"
Robinson, but many of them came later in the 1930's, 1940's and
1950's. Who were some of the earliest pioneers?

Donald Bogle>> Well, it's very interesting when you look at the
history because really black Hollywood probably starts with a
woman that most people are not going to know anything about. It
was a woman who came to Los Angeles. She had been born in
Kentucky. She came here in the teens of the twentieth century
and her name, or the name she gave herself, was Madame Sul-Te-
Wan, but that wasn't her real name. Her real name was Nellie
Conley. She struggled to find work and then she was able to get
an introduction to D.W. Griffith, the filmmaker who was shooting
"The Birth of a Nation". But she was the first really to come
and make a place for herself in the industry. She keeps working
in bits. Sometimes she lucks up in supporting roles and she
keeps going for decades.

The other thing that was interesting was that there was an actor
by the name of Noble Johnson, a very handsome actor who came to
Hollywood in the teens. Noble Johnson did bits and supporting
roles. He didn't just do black parts. He played other ethnic
characters. He might play a Native-American. He might play an
Arab. He worked in silents and kept working into the sound era.
The interesting thing about Noble Johnson was that Noble Johnson
helped found the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and this was a
company that made race movies. Race movies were black-cast
movies made for black audiences. So those two were Madame Sul-
Te-Wan and Noble Johnson. They were early, but the interesting
thing is the first real kind of black star in Hollywood was a
child.

Vicki Curry>> Oh, really?

Donald Bogle>> It was a child actor. His name was Ernest
Morrison. He was known as Sunshine Sammy and he worked with
Harold Lloyd. He worked in the early Our Gang series. He was
very well-known within the black community in Los Angeles.
People knew him and admired him. But they were the early ones.
The other thing that was also interesting was that, in the very
early days, there were a number who ended up working as servants
for major white stars.

Vicki Curry>> Yeah, I thought it was interesting that you spend
quite a bit of time in the book talking about that. Why is
that?

Donald Bogle>> Well, I found that interesting because the black
servants working for these white stars understood that, in
Hollywood if you know any secrets, you've got some power or
you've got some influence and the black servants knew a lot of
secrets. They really saw the whole thing of being a servant as
a stepping stone and they never really saw themselves as
servants. That's really interesting. But that's how the town
began to open up and the real shift came once sound pictures
came into being. Then you do find more blacks working regularly
in Hollywood films and you get the rise of Step'n Fetchit in the
late 1920's and 1930's. Fetchit, I mean, lived in high style.
I mean, he had mansions, he had limousines.

But you know, the other thing that's so interesting about black
Hollywood is that it's a mythic place, but it's also real
because there was this black part of town. There was the big
thoroughfare, Central Avenue, and Central Avenue was this place
where there were black nightclubs and restaurants and shops and
there was the great Dunbar Hotel. So there really was a
definite part of town where there was all of this energy and all
of this excitement.

Vicki Curry>> Well, you also talk about sort of the lavishness
of many of the stars.

Donald Bogle>> Well, what happened in the early 1940's was
that, by the early 1940's, Hattie McDaniel had won her Oscar for
"Gone With the Wind", the Nicholas Brothers had come to
Hollywood to live from the East Coast. They were these
extraordinary dancers, both of them very, very dapper.

There emerges in the early 1940's within black show business
circles a black elite. They were able to make enough money and
to live comfortably and there was a part of town, originally
called Blueberry Hill, but it became known as Sugar Hill. There
you had these beautiful homes, really these mansions, and these
beautifully tended landscaped lawns. So there was just this
whole other world there. It was a very enclosed world and
eventually it was a world that disappeared.

Vicki Curry>> One of the movies in the book that you spent some
time on is one that I had never heard of. It was quite
significant. It was "Imitation of Life".

Donald Bogle>> Yes, "Imitation of Life". There were two
versions of "Imitation of Life", but the first one made in 1934
was one that proved to be very important to the African-American
community. The subplot of "Imitation of Life" dealt with a
light-skinned young black woman and she wants to pass for white.
The thing about "Imitation of Life", I mean, it just indicated
really that you had all this talent out here, these black
performers and so forth, and to get in the movies, to get roles,
was a real accomplishment, but then they really wanted roles
with more substance. They wanted roles that said more and spoke
about life in America for them.

Vicki Curry>> So you take your book from the earliest days of
Hollywood through the 1950's, but that's where you stop. Why
did you end at that time.

Donald Bogle>> Well, the book ends at the close of the 1950's,
a little bit into the 1960's, and I talk about the death of
people like Nat King Cole and Dorothy Dandridge. Because what
happens really by the end of the 1950's, certainly into the
1960's, with the changes in America, socially Hollywood opens up
in another kind of way and so we move on to a new kind of new
black Hollywood, but the old one really does start to vanish.
The sad thing is that not only is it fading and does it
disappear, but it also disappears from the history books.

Vicki Curry>> Well, Donald Bogle, author of "Bright Boulevard,
Bold Dream", thank you for bringing us the story of black
Hollywood.

Donald Bogle>> Thank you, Vicki.

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

And then there were two, but does it really matter to the rest
of Southern California who's elected mayor of Los Angeles?

>> Traffic doesn't automatically disappear or start at city
boundaries. People don't live in one city, work in one city or
shop in one city, that we are a very mobile community.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.