Stars and ... cripes! How to talk to Americans

Comment from Australia

Five years ago, freshly arrived in the US of A with a plan to call San Francisco home for a spell, the Australian Consul General took me aside for a quiet word.

“Be aware,” he cautioned, “that you will constantly be perceived as arrogant. Australians don't have the respect for authority that Americans take for granted – and our directness scares them. Try and be gentle.”

I vowed to approach my new American friends with deference for their effusive turn of phrase, and an eager ear for Americanisms to temper my natural Aussie bluntness. Five years wiser, I have a swag of local takeaways that would make a linguist slaver. So lean in for the catbird seat on some hella bunk verbiage.

Tall means small

Navigating Starbucks-speak is the first challenge of the day. When a country's largest coffee chain uses three different languages to describe its joe, you know you're dealing with a complex culture. “Tall”, it transpires, means “small”. “ Venti” is Italian for 20 (ounces, as it turns out). Only in America would 2.5 cups of coffee be considered a “medium”. If you like your java by the bucket, it's “grande” with some Spanish swagger.

In order to herald your intent in truly genial fashion, you must take a sentence to verbally frame your action. That coffee, for instance, needs to be eased into being. “You know what? I'm feeling … a coffee. I'm gonna order a coffee,” you need to announce to the world in general before any move to order can take place.

It's no wonder an Australian bounding up to the counter and barking, “double espresso please” with harsh vowels and no preamble is a shock to the local ear. They love us, but we're scary.

Make it a double

The Yanks like to double-dip when it comes to food nomenclature. “Tunafish” confirms that, yep, it's marine alright, and not, say, an exotic variety of chicken; “sodapop” double-checks for bubbles. “Tinfoil”? Metal, for sure. Not much scope for misunderstanding there, then.

But it gets trickier: “hamburger” refers to minced meat, while the “burger” is actually the rissole; “broil” means grill while “grill” means to barbeque, and “barbeque” is very specifically about ribs and sauce, so don't use it lightly. A “biscuit” is a savoury side for those ribs. “Cookies” are the sweet treats.

The “drugstore” is a legit chemist, and there is no such thing as a newsagency. Newspapers sit in randomly placed boxes. And doctors for lady issues, for reasons nobody can adequately explain to me, are referred to as a string of letters: O.B.G.Y.N. Um, righto then.

Just don't dew it

Then there's the pronunciation crossover, for which we'll circle back on our old friend, the tunafish. Go with “toona” rather than “tune-a”. Oh, and use “doo” for your casual observance on a cool morning, “what's up with that crazy dew?”, lest you induce horrified silence and sideways stares. Are you feeling my pain? Don't dew it. Don't mention Smiggle, that shop full of rubbers for children. Or the thongs your kids wear. Cue more furtive glances at the weirdo Aussie with the offspring who wear … what, exactly?

However, I'm also truly fond of some brilliant, “evergreen” business-speak I have learned in my adopted home. “Freemium” is the new buzzword for those dotcoms providing quality free stuff to the public, with the extra specials stashed “behind the paywall”. The results can be “hella bunk” or totally “ratchet” if you listen to the “NorCal” teens where I live.

Verbiage for traction

“Healthful” touts the benefits of vitamin-infused water, “catastrophize” is a verb and “verbiage” has ironically been adopted by some as a term for desirable wording rather than excess blather. A warm-down is “active recovery”, and office managers are acutely aware of maintaining “office hygiene”, via those practices that are necessary for smooth day-to-day running but not sufficient to actually progress anything or give a business “traction”.

Everybody is “reaching out” these days with storytelling, and it's beneficial to use humble terms like “blessed” and “grateful”, and to refer gently to money in terms of “purchasing” rather than buying or paying.

Riffing with new workmates in one of those free-pouring local bars? Just insert “that's what she said” after pretty much any sentence and you are in with a universal American nudge-nudge.
No i-dear

And just when you think you've got the cadence of interpersonal communication sorted comes a good ol' American curveball (that'd be a googly back home) in the form of email etiquette.

What may take several sentences to say to your face, will be emailed in short, sharp jabs, and without any preface.

When the curt emails began rolling in, it seemed clear that I must have mortally offended most of the people I was working with. No “dear”, no “hi” or “hello”; in fact, no pleasantries of any kind. No friendly sign-off, either. Viz: “Sally – blah blah blah – John.” Or even no sign-off at all.

My Aussie hubby and I spent hours trying to read between the lines and understand how our communication could have inspired such brusque replies. Finally, consultation with a local pal (not a mate, that means something else entirely here) revealed that Americans barely say "Hi" in written communication and NEVER say “dear”. Emails are business only – don't waste letters if you don't have to. “Dear” is for love letters. Period.

So, with these words of advice, sally forth and reach out to this verbose, yet friendly nation. And remember: you are MORE than welcome.

 http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/culture/stars-and--cripes-how-to-talk-to-americans-20140311-34ivo.html

A joke-cracking, hymn-singing, wife-loving psycho

Review of: THE NAZI AND THE PSYCHIATRIST BY JACK EL-HAI

By Peter Lewis

Viewers of the photographs of the Nazi leaders in the dock at Nuremberg War Crimes Trial in 1945 are often struck by the same thing. How ordinary they look! Not a pair of horns or a forked tail between them.

These balding men in sober suits could have stepped off any commuter train. Could they have run the most criminally murderous regime in modern Europe without some hint of the evil within being detectable on their faces?

There was one exception to the general air of mediocrity. In the end seat sat Reichsmarschall Herman Goering, Hitler’s Number Two, a giant of a man with obvious magnetism and an air of genial command.

Apart from Goering, this admittedly was the Second XI. The leading actors of the Nazi horror film - Himmler, Bormann and Goebbels - had already escaped the consequences by committing suicide like Hitler.

Nevertheless, the Americans were determined to discover the essence of the enemy’s make-up, the nature of ‘the Nazi mind’. Did evil on this scale have a formula, a recognisable pattern by which it could be spotted and prevented in the future?

This was the object of the inquiries of Major Douglas Kelley, the most senior American army psychiatrist assigned to study the 22 Nazis in the cells at Nuremberg.

His official task was to discover whether they were fit - ie. sane - enough to be tried. His personal quest was to analyse and interpret their behaviour by the magic of psychiatry, then held in the highest esteem as the new explanation of human behaviour.

He soon decided that none of them was mad - not even Rudolph Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer who had flown to Britain in 1941 and was now evading all questions by pretending he couldn’t remember anything. Kelley decided he was lying.

Goering by contrast was only too pleased to talk. He greeted Kelley in his cell with a smile and a handshake. He looked forward to interrogation as an opportunity for some civilised conversation.

So began a curious relationship and rapport which became far more personal than the usual interaction of doctor and patient.

Picked up by the Americans the day before Germany surrendered, he was a bloated caricature of the national hero he had once been. The WWI flying ace of the Richthofen Circus was vastly obese and half out of his mind on drugs.

When the Americans decided to move him, the light plane, a Piper, simply could not take off: he weighed too much. They found a larger plane: his seat belt could not be fastened.

He arrived at his first jail with a personal valet, a dozen monogrammed suitcases and a red hat box containing a collection of jewellery and medals - and cash worth the equivalent of a million dollars. When he sat down in his cell, the chair broke.

These farcical notes were reduced by prison routine. The doctors weaned him off the drug Paracodeine, which was making him nearly insensible. And the prison diet shaved more than four stone off him in five months. His trouser waistband was taken in by six inches.

The old Goering, once the most popular man in Germany after Hitler, reappeared - a highly intelligent, powerful, humorous personality who immediately assumed leadership of his fellow prisoners.

During exercise, he tried to cheer them up with a non-stop stream of jokes. These weren’t very funny, but humour was notably absent in Nazi circles. In his yellow-topped boots, he was first to be seated in the chapel and sang the hymns louder than anyone.

He wrote regularly to his wife, Emmy, but his letters did not reach her until Kelley volunteered to take one personally. Emmy wrote a reply on the spot. Both letters are couched in the most tender terms. Goering said he prayed every day for their reunion but they must be prepared for the worst, adding: ‘Why did it have to turn out this way?’ Their seven-year-old daughter, Edda, wrote: ‘My dear Daddy, come back to me soon. I am longing for you so much.’

Goering kept their photographs in his cell and asked Kelley to take care of Edda should both her parents die. He wrote to his wife that Kelley was ‘a gentleman you can trust completely’.

Kelley realised that Goering, the fond husband and father and friendly companion, was only one side of the man. At other times, Goering showed complete disregard for other people.

Of Auschwitz he commented: ‘Well, it was good propaganda.’ And Kelley asked him how he could have ordered the shooting of his close friend Ernst Roehm in the Nazi Party purge of 1934. He stared back uncomprehendingly: ‘But he was in my way.’

Goering was determined to justify Nazism at the trial. ‘You know I shall hang,’ he told Kelley, ‘I am ready - but in 50 or 60 years there will be Goering statues all over Germany.’

Douglas Kelley had in some ways a similar personality: ambitious, go-getting, workaholic, he had made his reputation by treating ‘battle fatigue’ - now called post-traumatic stress - and had risen high in the U.S. Army’s medical circles.

Psychiatry was a new wonder-weapon. Kelley, up with the latest developments, administered the Rorschach inkblot test to all his patients. It was solemnly believed that by interpreting a series of inkblots on cards, people gave away profound clues to their mental make-up.

Kelley believed the inkblot readings would reveal the common flaw in ‘the Nazi mind’. Unfortunately, he could not find one. The Nazis interpreted the blots they were shown as variously as anyone could. His fellow psychiatrist at Nuremberg, Gustave Gilbert, saw their interpretations quite differently from Kelley. It was hardly an exact science.

Halfway through the trial, Kelley left Nuremberg to go home, taking with him his interview notes and test results in order to write a book on the Nazis.

All the prisoners thanked him when he left. Goering wept. A few months later, Kelley was astonished to learn that Goering had crunched a cyanide capsule, which he had succeeded in concealing, the night before he was due to hang. He had thought hanging like a criminal was too degrading; he had asked to be shot, but had been denied his request.

Now came the extraordinary denouement to their odd relationship. Kelley brought out his book, 22 Cells In Nuremberg. It concluded that, though the Nazis had exhibited unbridled ambition, excessive patriotism and ethical deficiency, they were not monsters. Large numbers of ordinary people had the potential to act like them in certain circumstances. Hitler had supplied the megalomania that drove each of them.

What alarmed Kelley was the thought that similar characters could easily be recruited in the U.S., which was then in the grip of anti-Communist hysteria. He mounted a personal campaign to warn Americans by giving lectures, TV shows and interviews. Germany’s problem could become theirs, too, he told them. It was not a popular message.

Meanwhile, Gilbert, his fellow interrogator, published his own book saying that all of the Nazis had been psychopaths - then a new term in psychiatry, signifying a complete lack of empathy with other people’s feelings or suffering hidden beneath a normal exterior. This was much more what victorious Americans wanted to hear.

Kelley was a driven man. He took on a vast number of projects - university teaching, criminal psychology and police work. But his behaviour at home with his wife, Dukie, and their three young children became disturbed, with increasing outbursts of rage and noisy fights over trivialities with the wife who had waited throughout the war for his return.

His office at the top of their sprawling California villa was sacrosanct, closed to the family. Here he kept his records of Nuremberg, a private chemical laboratory, collections of specimens including human skulls - and some guns.

Once, he confronted Dukie on the landing below his study with a levelled gun. He pulled the trigger but deflected the bullet into the floor at her feet. His children lived in fear.

On the first day of 1958, during an extra-violent row in the kitchen, he dashed upstairs to his study and emerged on the landing with a capsule in his hand. He shouted: ‘I don’t have to take this any more. I’m going to take this cyanide and nobody will care!’

His wife, his father and their children were watching below. ‘Don’t do it!’ they screamed. But he did - and fell down the stairs, gasping and foaming at the mouth, into his wife’s hands.

In the Berkeley newspapers reporting his death, two questions dominated: ‘Why cyanide?’ and ‘Did Goering give him the capsule?’

Neither has ever been answered. Psychiatrists have continued to debate the question whether there was such a thing as ‘a Nazi mind’. The current majority opinion is that it was a myth.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2536478/A-joke-cracking-hymn-singing-wife-loving-psycho-THE-NAZI-AND-THE-PSYCHIATRIST-BY-JACK-EL-HAI.html

Etiquette

You should break up your bread roll with your fingers, rather than cutting into it with a knife. Why? Who knows? It's just a code, designed to make it easier to spot the social origins of those with whom you are sharing a table.

When eating soup, it is acceptable to tip the soup bowl away from you in order to retrieve the final spoonfuls. Just don't ever tip it the other way. Why? We can make up some explanation about not wanting to splash our shirt front, but again it's just a code. ''Ah, good, he's one of ours.''

Real etiquette, of course, is pretty much the opposite of all this. It's about making people feel more comfortable, not less. It's about holding the ladder up against the wall, and helping someone over, rather than pushing it away.

The BBC broadcaster Sandi Toksvig tells a great story about true etiquette in her native Denmark. The photographer (and British aristocrat) Patrick Lichfield had been invited to dinner with Denmark's King Frederick IX. At the time, a gentleman wore a shirt with no collar, on top of which was placed a separate stiff shirt front, with detachable collar and cuffs. Lichfield, short of funds, lacked a fresh shirt, so simply wore the shirt front assembly, all tucked beneath his formal jacket. With the jacket buttoned up, no one could tell the difference.

Alas, after dinner, the party shifted to the terrace and the king removed his jacket, causing all the other men to follow the royal lead. Mortified, Lichfield removed his own jacket, revealing both his nakedness and his lack of funds.

The king glanced up, said ''what a splendid idea'', and immediately removed his own shirt. Again everyone followed suit, and soon the whole party was happily bare-chested around the royal table.

The king's motivation was a desire that his guest not feel socially awkward - an example of true good manners, of which there are less examples every day. Sorry, I think I meant fewer. I hope you weren't about to correct me.

 http://www.smh.com.au/comment/phew-at-last-a-case-of-true-class-20140102-306ix.html

The Thought Leader

"The Leftist intellectual" could be an alternative title to this

By DAVID BROOKS

Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be philosophers. In Renaissance Florence they dreamed of becoming Humanists. But now a new phrase and a new intellectual paragon has emerged to command our admiration: The Thought Leader.

The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.

He doesn’t have students, but he does have clients. He doesn’t have dark nights of the soul, but his eyes blaze at the echo of the words “breakout session.”

Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.

In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. On campus he finds himself enmeshed in a new social contract: Young people provide their middle-aged professors with optimism and flattery, and the professors provide them with grade inflation. He is widely recognized for his concern for humanity. (He spends spring break unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers.)

Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.

Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”

Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was never really that into Macklemore.

Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre.

By now the Thought Leader uses the word “space” a lot — as in, “Earlier in my career I spent a lot of time in the abject sycophancy space, but now I’m devoting more of my energies to the corporate responsibility space.”

The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out.

He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you were in this moment until after it is gone.

The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots.

In the end, though, a lifetime of bullet points are replaced by foreboding. Toward the end of his life the Thought Leader is regularly engaging in a phenomenon known as the powerless lunch. He and another formerly prominent person gather to have a portentous conversation of no importance whatsoever. In the fading of the light, he is gravely concerned about the way everything is going to hell.

Still, one rarely finds an octogenarian with status anxiety. He is beyond the battle for attention. Death approaches. Cruelly, it smells like reverence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/opinion/brooks-the-thought-leader.html?ref=opinion&_r=1&

Why are Parsi elites welcomed, while Jewish and Chinese elites are reviled?

Foreign ethnic elites who have a disproportionate influence in their host society's economy are called market-dominant minorities. The two best examples are the Chinese who settled southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, and the Ashkenazi Jews who lived mostly in the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe, and more recently in western Europe and its offshoots.

In her book World on Fire, Amy Chua looks at how the presence of market-dominant minorities can easily spark ethnic tensions, as the lower-status natives feel envy and anger toward what they come to perceive as an intrusive race of bloodsuckers. Again the Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese provide the strongest examples -- no matter where they go, the locals usually come to view them with antipathy. Occasionally that escalates into full-blown ethnic riots, like the pogroms against Jews in eastern Europe and the series of anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia.

Explanations for the psychology underlying the native masses' hatred of ethnic elites tend to portray the envy and resentment as an inevitable consequence of the presence of market-dominant minorities. Yet there is a clear counter-example of a market-dominant minority group that has been welcomed wholeheartedly by most of the host society -- the Parsis of India, who have a disproportionate influence at the higher levels of the Indian economy.

Even though they are only one case, it is such a strong counter-example that it must make us reconsider what truly underlies the psychology of anger toward ethnic elites. The Parsis, like the Jews and the Chinese, are not a native ethnic group of the society where they have strong influence, having come from Persia into India. (While they do share some genetic and cultural heritage, it would still be like a group of Armenians settling and wielding much control over the economy in Ireland.) They also came to their high status gradually through greater intelligence and industriousness, not through force. And they have been living in their host society for hundreds of years -- plenty of time for the seeds of envy and rioting to have been sown.

And yet, there has been no history of pogroms against the Parsis. If anything, they're seen as more of a national treasure, not that Indians worship them or anything. All the ingredients for an explosion of ethnic hatred and rioting would seem to have been present for centuries, so what gives?

The general consensus by native Indians and by European observers, for at least the last several hundred years, is that the Parsis are incredibly charitable, preferring to spread around their wealth. (See some representative quotes in their Wikipedia entry.) They themselves emphasize this aspect of their community in the phrase "Parsi, thy name is charity." Most importantly, they aren't only generous toward one another, but toward the masses of their host society. A 20th-century Parsi captain of industry, J.R.D. Tata, was right out of the progressive mold of Andrew Carnegie and Milton S. Hershey.

So, it looks like the primary way that they've avoided the fate of so many other market-dominant minorities is to not behave like a bunch of greedy gold-hoarders. They don't give away all of their wealth, but they do donate enough to prove their generosity. Moreover, no one sees them as doing so without any real care for others -- i.e., just being charitable to gain approval or to keep the would-be rioters content. All observers seem to agree that it's out of a sense of duty and empathy.

And it's empathy where the Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese are lacking. I touched on this in a longer post about why they tend not to be very good social scientists. Popular stereotypes everywhere that they've settled depict Jewish and Chinese people as brusque and rude, whereas the opposite stereotype prevails about the Parsis. They would also not fail basic tests of the recognition of facial emotions like the East Asians do. And unlike Jews, the equally high-IQ Parsis haven't produced scores of fruitcake intellectuals and political "thinkers," from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand, whose failures stem from nothing more than their inability to get other people.

In general, looking over this list of famous Parsis, they don't seem to produce many autistic or nerdy people. It looks more like professionals, entrepreneurs, and entertainers. (The Han Chinese have over 10,000 times as many people as the Parsis, and yet they can't produce a single Freddie Mercury.)

What was it about their niche in India that preserved their empathy, unlike other market-dominant minorities like the Chinese and Jews? Beats me, I don't know their history well enough. Something about the types of white-collar jobs they held must not have selected for having a dim and suspicious view of other people, unlike the case of Jewish tax farmers in Europe.

Their story should give us hope that it is possible for an ecological niche to select for higher average IQ, as well as for business skills, while not corroding our social nature. Sadly they do have very low birth rates, but then what brainy group these days does not?

Move over Mrs Queen - Philip is our king

Review of: "MAN BELONG MRS QUEEN: ADVENTURES WITH THE PHILIP WORSHIPPERS" BY MATTHEW BAYLIS (Old Street Publishing £10.99)



Like a surreal sitcom or a movie Ealing never made is the island in the South Pacific where Prince Philip is worshipped as the ‘son of the local mountain god’.

In the jungle there are bamboo tabernacles ‘filled with royal mugs and Jubilee cake tins.’ A mouldering pile of newspaper clippings about Prince Charles’s organic farms is a Holy Relic.

The locals who pray to His Royal Highness on ‘telephones made of creeper vines’ expect him any day to appear from the clouds, bringing forth a ‘huge shipment of fridges, guns, trucks and washing machines,’ says Matthew Baylis, like ‘some messianic version of Sale Of The Century.’ Is it truly Prince Philip they want or the TV show’s host Nicholas Parsons?

It is easy to mock. Baylis, who because he’d joked: ‘I’ve brought English weather with me!’ was taken by the natives for a witch-doctor, thus the one personally responsible for the endless unseasonal rain, tries to portray himself throughout this book as: ‘a clumsy clown blundering into that frail, delicate mountain society.’

He certainly has a hard time keeping a straight face when he outlines the pidgin dialect, where ‘bugarup’ means broken and ‘rubba belong fak-fak’ is a condom.

Prince Philip’s private secretary, Brigadier Sir Miles Hunt-Davis, is Big Ass Dear Summer Lance Daisies. If HRH didn’t know that before, and is reading this over his breakfast egg, I don’t want to be responsible for his choking to death laughing. But it could happen.

The cult began, it seems, when the Royal Yacht sailed around Polynesia about 40 years ago. The good natives on Tanna, ‘a kidney-shaped isle of 18,000 souls,’ 18 km in extent, which cost the Empire £23,362 annually to run and which yielded £10,719 in sandalwood sales, liked the sound of this man of French, German, Russian and Danish descent, who’d operated a searchlight during the Battle of Mattapan and had diverted enemy shells away from HMS Wallace in the war.

Prince Philip was ‘an all-action chap, the very kind they admired on Tanna,’ and, furthermore, he ‘didn’t belong to France or England or America, or any of the other nations the Tannese knew.’

They saw him as a foundling or changeling out of mythology, a baby who’d been taken from Corfu in 1922 in ‘his orange-crate bed,’ distinguished himself as a fighting hero, married a princess and lived in a castle. Covered with his medals, he looked made of metal.

This is no nuttier, in fact, than Germanic myths about Siegfried or the Vikings and Beowulf.

A theme in Baylis’s book, indeed, is how religions evolve, the combination of imagination, fancifulness and wishful thinking.

The Tannese believe Buckingham Palace, ‘a big house with soldiers around it,’ means ‘back-e-g-home-paradise,’ because the prince ‘is sick with longing for Tanna.’ Like Siegfried yearning for Valhalla.

Good sport that he is, HRH has sent ceremonial clay pipes and signed photographs to the islanders, two in 1978 and another in 2000, ‘veritable icons’ kept in a hut on stilts.

In gratitude and reciprocation, Prince Philip has been promised ‘three virgin wives’, if only he’d return to his village.

Kwin Lisbet, his current wife, could come, too, they added.

Were he to get Big Ass Daisies to dispatch, on his behalf, an autographed copy of his gripping book, Competition Carriage Driving, I have no doubt that Siko Nathuan, the current chieftain, would extend the islanders’ warm invitation even to Fergie, who could be allowed a job in the kitchens.

As Baylis acknowledges, it all sounds ‘barking mad’, the product of ‘mud-bespattered tribesmen, deluded by their home-grown drugs’. Baylis has had experience of the latter.

‘Kava’ is a lethal brew, made from a fibrous root, milled in a mincing machine and mixed with rainwater and spit. It is drunk straight from a coconut shell and makes you collapse and have visions. Baylis also knows what it is like to spend months eating nothing but yams: ‘My stomach began to boil with angry gasses.’ So he has done his best to be as the Tannese are, and he fell in love with them.

The touching brilliance of Man Belong Mrs Queen is that the ‘machete-wielding cultists’ are taken seriously. Like a professional anthropologist, Baylis comes to appreciate how a society that seems at first so alien is nevertheless ‘inherently sensible and logical.’

For example, if Prince Philip is ‘unpopular, misunderstood and mocked’ at home, the Tannese can see that his belief that ‘rising populations lead to epidemics and food shortages’ is not an ‘attack upon the poor and hungry’ but makes utter common sense.

How weird, in fact, Europeans must seem to the South Seas islanders - pale ghosts appearing on floating houses, killing people with ‘exploding sticks.’ When Westerners took their shoes off, it seemed that they had no toes - the Tannese hadn’t seen socks before. The maddest thing the natives ever heard was the story of wives in England and the U.S. who go out to work in order to earn money to pay for the women who look after their children. Indeed, what kind of topsy-turvy world is it that has nannies?

And what about taps installed by well-meaning missionaries? The tribal elders destroyed them, because otherwise what would women do all day, if they couldn’t spend three hours walking to the well and three hours walking back? With time on their hands they’d gossip and squabble, that’s what. There’s wisdom there.

If the Tannese exchange vegetables and daughters with neighbours at festivals, don’t we do that at the Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells?

Furthermore, if young tribesmen, at initiation ceremonies, are ‘starved and fed rotten food, beaten and deliberately bewildered,’ how does that differ in essence from a traditional English public school education?

The only thing that worried me was the National Dress - ‘a cover for the penis made of a dried palm-like pandanus leaf and secured in place by a belt around the waist’ - because you’d not get away with wearing that in Windsor Castle, though you probably could in Balmoral.

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2490934/Move-Mrs-Queen--Philip-king-MAN-BELONG-MRS-QUEEN-ADVENTURES-WITH-THE-PHILIP-WORSHIPPERS-BY-MATTHEW-BAYLIS.html

Famous 'Nazi in all of us' experiment manipulated: Australian psychologist

ARGUABLY, there is no more famous experiment in psychology. In 1962, Dr Stanley Milgram took a group of normal people, put them in a laboratory, and ordered them to electrocute someone.

Two thirds obeyed - applying, they thought, 450V shocks to an actor who writhed in apparent agony. For a world looking to explain how the Holocaust had happened, how ordinary people could commit unspeakable acts simply because they were ordered to, the Milgram experiment offered an insight. It is an experiment that has found new resonance with each generation - with those looking to understand the My Lai massacre, the Rwanda genocide and Abu Ghraib.

There is just one problem. According to an Australian psychologist who has reviewed the original recordings of the test and spoken to some of those involved, it could be that Milgram's experiment explains nothing at all - except his willingness to manipulate results. "It became clear to me that Milgram had an idea of the kind of results he wanted," Gina Perry said. "He enacted the experiment to ensure that result".

Ms Perry's investigations began as an attempt to interview the original subjects of the experiment for a book. However, the more she researched, the more she became concerned that they had been treated unfairly by Milgram - and by history. "It's a bit heart breaking to listen to the recordings. These people have been so unjustly depicted. They have been portrayed as evil incarnate."

The volunteers were told that they were testing the extent to which punishment aided learning. Split into two groups, one half would be learners - who would have to remember word pairs - the other half teachers, who would electrocute the learner if he or she made a mistake. In fact, the learners were all actors.

If the teachers refused to electrocute the learners, an experimenter would prompt them to do so four times before giving up. What is not widely known though is that there were 24 iterations of this experiment, with slightly different setups. In only one - the famous one - did 65 per cent obey. "Overall, over half disobeyed," said Ms Perry.

Even among those who obeyed, the experiment was not as described. On one occasion far from having only four promptings, a subject was ordered 26 times before obeying, Perry recounts in her book Behind the Shock Machine.

"The common perception is that they were all slavishly obedient - that they entered a zombie-like state of compliance," Ms Perry said.

"When you listen to the recordings you can hear people bargaining. They're concerned, they're worried, they're distressed.

"You can hear them emphasising the right answer, wanting to get the learner to pick up the right answer." On several occasions, people even offered to swap places with the learner.

Then there was the issue of how many actually believed it was real. Candid Camera was the most popular TV show in the US at the time. A lot of people told Ms Perry they expected to see a TV crew afterwards. A lot said they had spotted tell-tale flaws in the experiment. "The whole focus of this experiment is that there's a Nazi camp guard inside all of us," Ms Perry said.

"We've come to accept it as a statement about humankind." She added, however, that it simply cannot show that.

Other psychologists cautioned that Milgram, who died in 1984, could not be so easily dismissed. "Yes, this undermines certain findings, but this effect has been found in many other experiments," Gisli Gudjonsson, from King's College London, said.

"In those days ethical rules were different. We mustn't lose sight of the fundamental truth though, that ordinary people - most people - are capable of very cruel things when put in certain circumstances," she said.

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/famous-nazi-in-all-of-us-experiment-manipulated-australian-psychologist/story-fnb64oi6-1226734772611