A Question of Charity

Let us give thanks for the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate the “non-profit” front organizations that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into clandestine political campaigns. Let’s hope it’s a step toward getting rid of the fraudulent 501(c)4s that have poisoned American politics. Their $300 million in annual contributions have neither edified the public conversation nor enlightened the public. But why stop there? Perhaps it’s time to rethink the non-profit concept entirely. What was once a creative incentive for charitable giving has become big business. American non-profits now have assets in excess of $4.3 trillion, almost twice the net worth of the continent of Africa. The largest foundations, which control billions of dollars, behave like independent countries, setting their own domestic and foreign-policy agendas. Universities, once citadels of free inquiry, are increasingly wedded to lucrative commercial contracts clouded in secrecy and dependent on proprietary information. America’s taxpayers subsidize elite private schools where they couldn’t possibly afford to send their children but to which donations are tax deductible. At the other end of the spectrum, small social-service agencies are so strapped for money that they often must alter their mission to meet a donor’s demands. Fundraising in the non-profit world has become an end in itself.

Collectively, these organizations do enormous good. Often they take on responsibilities that governments, employers, even neighbors have abdicated in a society that undervalues the public good. In doing so, however, do they also risk shrinking the commons by substituting private charity for our communal commitment to each other?

Pregnant Corporation Seeks Maternity Leave

Another case on the constitutional rights of corporations is heading for the Supreme Court. In its 2010 Citizens United decision, the Court banned limits on political contributions from corporations and labor unions, asserting that such spending constitutes free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment to all persons. Never mind that corporations can’t talk, write, hold up protest signs or do any of the other things we normally associate with speech. They are nonetheless constitutionally entitled to spend their shareholders’ money to influence elections. But why stop at speech? What about the rest of the Bill of Rights? Sure enough, the Court will next decide whether the Constitution protects a corporation’s religious beliefs, now that the 10^th Court of Appeals has applied “the First-Amendment logic of Citizens United” to uphold Hobby Lobby’s right to “religious expression.” Indeed, wrote Justice Harris Hartz, “A corporation exercising religious beliefs is not corrupting anyone.” Religious beliefs? Might Exxon believe in God? Can Google be baptized? We have entered an absurd semantic world, whose dangers are more than linguistic. “If thought can corrupt language,” wrote George Orwell in 1984, “language can also corrupt thought.”

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master – that’s all."

Next up for corporations: the Second Amendment.

Family Values

Mike Enzi is the senior senator from Wyoming, a conservative Republican from a red state. How conservative? Enzi supports privatizing Social Security and opposes Medicare expansion. He favors drilling almost everywhere and abhors alternative energy. He loves fossil fuels, which doesn’t hurt in a state that mines 40% of America’s coal and ranks second in overall energy production. Enzi opposes all abortions, supports a border fence, thinks Guantanamo is just fine, and rejects gay marriage. He has a 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee and an A+ from the NRA. He is also, they say, a nice man for a senator and takes constituent services seriously. A perfect fit for Wyoming, right? Apparently not, says Liz Cheney, who insists Wyoming needs a real conservative in the Senate. So she is running against Enzi from the right! It’s not easy to find daylight to the right of Mike Enzi, but it gets really complicated when your sister is married to someone named Heather Poe. Naturally, the Enzi campaign attacked, with a super-PAC-funded ad campaign blasting Cheney as soft on gay marriage, and (surprise!) it worked. A recent poll has Cheney losing by 52 points. So she publicly disavowed her sister’s lifestyle this week, and there are rumors of huge money ready to come into Wyoming on her behalf. The only thing missing from this campaign are issues. But Cheney will let neither that nor her sister stand in the way of her ambition. Is this what our politics have come to?

Those Poor Poor

In an apparent coincidence, Warsaw is hosting both the International Coal and Climate Summit and the United Nations’ Convention on Climate Change. Guess which one the Poles, who rely on coal for 90% of their electricity, like better? While the two meetings have little in common but the word “climate”, both emphasize the impact of coal on “the poor”. Unsurprisingly, they see things differently. There are “1.3 billion people in the world who live without electricity,” said Godfrey Gomwe, of the World Coal Association. “A life lived without access to modern energy is a life lived in poverty.” Coal is here to stay.

Across town, representatives of some of the world’s poorest countries argue that, far from paving the way out of poverty, coal is the major contributor to climate change, whose impacts are already overwhelming the poor. They talk of “climate injustice” and demand compensation.

There seems little likelihood much will change. “Lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy makers and their publics,” said Todd Stern, America’s climate envoy. Meanwhile, the U.S., which has scaled way back on domestic coal use, now exports millions of tons to Asia.

So we are left with a conundrum: the only path to prosperity we understand is an economic growth so dependent on energy extraction that it threatens to become our road to ruin. In either case, the primary victims are the poor, real people who have become an abstraction. We need a different way.

Don’t Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eggs

The problem with screwing up something as badly as the administration appears to have screwed up the Obamacare rollout is that you don’t just get egg on your face, you create huge problems for those who support you. I still hope that Obamacare is the critical first step toward universal health coverage – and ultimately a single-payer system, which many doctors insist is the only way to provide it. But we are now in danger of heading in the opposite direction, as feckless Democrats rush for political cover. The current comparisons to George Bush’s bungled reaction to Katrina seem unwarranted because (1) Bush hadn’t spent the previous five years planning for a large hurricane and (2) his administration’s response seemed based as much on callousness as incompetence. The Affordable Care Act, on the other hand, was meant to be about compassion – particularly for the millions of Americans without health coverage. It was the president’s signature act and meant to be his legacy. Now its opponents tout it as Exhibit A of government’s inability to do anything.

People warned me that the law was not 11,000 pages for nothing – that it was meant to obscure the giveaways to all manner of special interests, including the insurance companies who now dance happily atop what they hope is Obamacare’s grave. Meanwhile, America continues to have the most expensive, least comprehensive and most bureaucratic (yes, insurance companies are bureaucracies, too) health care of any developed country. We can’t afford to fumble away the chance to change that.

The Value of Art

My right-leaning friends insist that the market is the fairest and most efficient arbiter of value. From this I deduce that Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, which sold this week for $142.4 million, is the finest picture ever painted. Its price, Roberta Smith noted, exceeds the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Clearly, art is less in the beholder’s eye than the investor’s pocket. My own modest foray into the art world, however, might contain a gram of caution. Many years ago I bought at Christie’s a very large painting for $1,800. When it arrived at our door, my wife took one look and decreed it would not hang in our apartment. That seemed no way to treat a serious collector, especially one with a formula: I had observed that big paintings generally sold for more than small ones – and mine had the highest square-inch value in the entire auction. Plus, the artist was dead. This was a slam dunk.

Because the painting wouldn’t fit in a taxi, I had to haul it back uptown on the subway. It sold at the next auction for $850.

The value of art also made news in Detroit, where the city-owned Institute of Art teems daily with schoolchildren, staring wondrously at Diego Rivera’s epic mural celebrating the common man. Creditors are pushing the city to sell some of its “priceless” art to pay down some of its $18-billion debt. I wonder what the children think. I wonder what Rivera thinks.

Yomamacare

You’ve got to love the Koch Brothers. Well, maybe love isn’t the right word, but those guys and their proxies pop up everywhere. Their latest stunt is a $750,000 tailgate tour of 20 college campuses by Generation Opportunity, a “non-partisan” 501(c)(4) non-profit that, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, does not have to reveal the names of its donors. So far, though, it has received over $5 million from groups associated with the Kochs. The motorcade’s mission is to persuade students across America to reject Obamacare.

First stop: the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game, where, GO spokesman David Pasch emailed the Tampa Bay Times, “we rolled in with a fleet of Hummers, F-150’s and Suburbans, each vehicle equipped with an 8-foot-high balloon bouquet floating overhead.”

Then “brand ambassadors (aka models with bullhorns)” rolled out a full suite of alternative health options, ranging from cardio exercises (beer pong) to balanced nutrition (pizza and beer) to something called “cornholing” (which turns out to be a combination of beanbag and a warning about what Obamacare will do to you).

“And,” added Pasch, “we educated students about their healthcare options outside the expensive and creepy Obamacare exchanges."

The kids had a ball. I mean, free beer, loud music and hot models vs. creepy Obamacare? That’s some choice for college students, especially those still on their family’s health plan.

The Kochs’ (rhymes with “just folks”) commitment to family values and home remedies is unwavering, so perhaps we should call their health-care alternative “Yomamacare”.

The Lost Generation

While analysts of last week’s elections focus on the fight for the soul of the Republican Party, they pay little attention to Democratic divisions. Yet, it would be hard to find two winners more different than Bill de Blasio, mayor-elect of New York, and Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s next governor. Pundits hold their noses when discussing McAuliffe, a smarmy backroom dealmaker who outspent his Republican opponent by $15 million. De Blasio is an unabashed liberal who makes no apologies for his support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and whose campaign focused less on the middle class than on the forgotten poor. McAuliffe’s first post-electoral act was to call up Republicans – to reach across the aisle. De Blasio plans to tax the richest New Yorkers to provide universal pre-school education. Yet only 4% of Virginia’s Republicans voted for McAuliffe, whereas, the Daily News noted, de Blasio “captured the majority of hearts and minds in New York, winning virtually every kind of resident – blacks, whites, rich, poor, Jews, Christians – in his sweeping victory.”

Both candidates won over 90% of the black vote, which is now critical to the Democratic Party. But centrist Democrats aren’t addressing the critical issue for the black community: the millions of young men, particularly in America’s big and troubled cities, who have dropped out of the system. They have become invisible to us, except as symbols of society’s “takers”. De Blasio seems intent on reaching them – and in doing so recapturing the soul of the Democratic Party.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Detroit, which is 83% black, made headlines by electing its first white mayor since 1973. The significance of that result is clouded by the fact that (1) the state-appointed emergency manager makes all key decisions for this bankrupt city and (2) 80% of the people didn’t bother to go to the polls. “This city,” my friend Charity Hicks said, “has given up on government.” Yet, like every desert when you look closely, Detroit is teeming with life. The city, said Jamie Shea, who guided me through this underworld, attracts risk takers because “ideas are welcome and you can make an impact.” Ideas like:

• A hydroponics farm in Detroit’s most desolate neighborhood.
• Detroit Soup, which hold monthly dinners where “for $5, you get soup, salad, bread and a vote” for one of the entrepreneurs presenting a social-impact project.
• The Empowerment Plan, where homeless women make winter coats that turn into sleeping bags for homeless women.
• A project to sell organic food in the city’s ubiquitous liquor stores because “that’s where people shop.”
• Sit On It Detroit, which turns repurposed hardwood into bus stop benches with attached bookshelves to create interactive outdoor libraries.

In this third-world city where three of five children live in poverty, an exciting movement is incubating: the ingenuity of entrepreneurs is melding with the social conscience of community organizers to produce a “third way” – that navigates between a capitalism obsessed with profits and a government entrenched in bureaucracy to create mission-driven projects focused on the needs of people and the health of communities.

The Big Empty

There is an emptiness about Detroit that you feel everywhere in this sprawling 139-square-mile city. Weeds grow in empty lots, creating neighborhoods of lonely, locked and isolated houses. The dark window frames of 78,000 derelict buildings stare down like indifferent eyes. The sidewalks are empty, especially at night, in a city where violent crime is epidemic and half the streetlights don’t work. The city’s population has declined from 1.8 million in 1950 to less than 700,000 today – a quarter of the residents have left since 2000. Over half the property owners are tax-delinquent, two-thirds of the murders are unsolved, 20 percent of the housing stock is vacant. Detroit has suffered an extreme form of the inner-city decline that has afflicted all urban America: post-WWII white flight transformed a melting pot of ethnic groups in 1950 to a city 80-percent black and overwhelmingly poor. Racial redlining bred de facto segregation. Government corruption is rampant – former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick began a 28-year prison sentence last month – as are crime and drugs. The hollowing out of American manufacturing staggered the greatest manufacturing city in America.

Detroit was also a victim of its success. The modern city was built by and for the automobile industry, whose cars took people off the sidewalks and sped them out of their neighborhoods in insulated bubbles. Detroit’s grand boulevards and ubiquitous freeways cut through and killed struggling communities.

Yet, as in all deserts, if you look closely you will find Detroit teeming with life, which I will try to describe next time.

Enemies of the State

On this day in 1646, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law making it a capital offense to deny the divine origin of the Bible. Only 16 years after a small group of Puritans had set up be a rigorously intolerant community of believers, enough people were questioning its basic principles to raise alarm among those in command. The dissenting had been going on for a while – Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had been exiled a decade earlier – but the death penalty indicates that harsher steps were required. Colonial Massachusetts did not execute people the way modern Texas does (506 in the last 30 years), but they did hang a few Quakers and other heretics who kept trying to undermine the social order. It didn’t work terribly well, as conditions in 17^th-century New England were clearly not conducive to the persistence of a theocratic state. One reason, I think, was the evolution of individualism – both theologically  (in the growing belief that one could talk directly with God) and socially (where the idea of a rigid hierarchy was under assault).

Individualism is itself under attack these days, viewed as the foundation of capitalist greed and the enemy of community. But America has a long history of dissenters who refused to be buckle under to the tyranny of the group, who followed their conscience and dared to dream. It takes courage to stand alone.

PS Today is also the day in 1884 when Grover Cleveland upset James G. Blaine to become president of the United States in 1884. We continue to demand a recount.

Stumble of the Week

An occasionally regular Friday feature • According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Michael McStay of Newcastle-upon-Tyne filled his room with gas with the intention of committing suicide. He changed his mind, shut off the gas and opened his window. He then lit a cigarette and blew the roof off his apartment building.

• Notre Dame quarterback, Everett Golson, suspended last spring for academic transgressions, assured Sports Illustrated that "it wasn't due to poor grades or anything like that." No, "I had poor judgment on a test." "Did you cheat?" asked Andy Staples. "Yeah, something like that," said Golson.

• Having used Citizens United to establish freedom of speech for corporations, the Supreme Court may soon decide they also have freedom of religion. Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based evangelical crafts store, has sued the government over the Affordable Care Act’s inclusion of morning-after pills and IUDs, which the company argues violates its religious beliefs. The 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, seeing “no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression.”

• Barack Obama stumbled mightily this week as criticisms of the health care rollout – and more generally of his disappointing second term – went bipartisan. I have issues, but I also ask myself which signature legacy I would prefer: passage, over vitriolic opposition, of legislation that has many flaws but the goal of providing every American with decent health care – or the invasion of Iraq, approved over spineless opposition and predicated on a lie?

The Climbing Boys

As I wander around Glasgow admiring the striking buildings produced during the Industrial Revolution, I remember reading somewhere that the worst job ever was that of chimney sweep. Beginning at the age of six, these “climbing boys” were made to shimmy up the flues of chimneys, 14 inches by 9 inches wide, with several sharp twists along the way. To harden the sweeps’ knees and elbows against the awful scraping, their masters would stand them nightly before a hot fire and rub brine into their bodies with a wire brush. Often the sweeps got stuck in the chimneys and suffocated in the soot – or burned to death from the heat. Almost all developed bodily deformities, blindness and “chimney sweep cancer”, an excruciating and fatal disease of the scrotum. The coal whose dust they “swept” was itself mined by men working under conditions only slightly better than their own. Glasgow was built by the Industrial Revolution. Its wealth came from textile mills that were powered by the vast coal deposits nearby, as well as from international trade in, among other things, tobacco and slaves. Glasgow became one of the richest cities in the world – “the Second City of the British Empire” – and its story reflects the history of the industrial age. In many ways it has been an extraordinary journey, propelled by human ingenuity, inquisitiveness and imagination, as well as human greed. But as the chimney sweeps’ short and miserable lives bear witness, it came also at enormous human cost.

Dateline: Glasgow

As I was waiting to board my plane to Glasgow, an elderly woman from rural Maine talked about her fear of the impending implementation of Obamacare. She is self-employed and has never had health insurance. “I don’t know how we can afford the premium’” she said. “We are really scared about what will happen.” I thought, if you can't afford the premium, what will you do when you get sick? This is precisely the reason that the Affordable Care Act makes health insurance mandatory – an idea, we should remember, that came out of the conservative think tanks in the 1990s and, however much he tried to deny it during the last campaign, was the cornerstone of Mitt Romney’s policy in Massachusetts. I have come to Glasgow to visit a childhood friend who was recently diagnosed with cancer. He is a painter, with little money, living in a country where health care is free – and where taking care of the sick is considered a national responsibility, not an unwelcome burden. To people here, the American model of health insurance is simply unfathomable, as is the ferocity of the attack on Obamacare as an infringement on individual freedom. When we do get sick, as all of us will, we feel vulnerable, scared and alone. Knowing that good care is both available and affordable is not just a medical benefit for us as individuals, it is a reaffirmation of the importance of community in each of our lives.

Friends Like Us

Everybody’s doing it, but nobody does it quite like us. I’m talking, of course, about America’s insatiable penchant for scarfing up information from tapped telephones and redirected emails around the world. Le Monde reported, for example, that in a single month the U.S. collected data from 70 million French phones. And that’s just France. And yet, it was only 84 ago that Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down the government’s cryptanalytic office with the words, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." Now we are told we should have no expectations of privacy because if the government isn’t reading our mail, Google is.

Still, yesterday’s revelations that the National Security Agency had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal cellphone has Europe seething, even though this is hardly a novel practice there. The most famous episode was the 1989 bugging that overheard Prince Charles telling Camilla Parker Bowles he wanted to be reincarnated as her tampon. It’s important to know these things.

While the U.S. government offers fumbling explanations for spying on its foreign friends – not to mention its own citizens – it sees little irony in its indictment of Edward Snowden for espionage. And Senator Diane Feinstein has urged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange be “prosecuted under the Espionage Act.”

As for me, the final damage from the computer crash I reported last week is the permanent loss of seven months of files that contain pretty much my entire life. Not to worry, I have a call in to the NSA.

McDonald’s Happy Deal

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the journey of steer 534 from a South Dakota pasture to the take-out window at McDonald’s. By the time his steer gets to a feedlot in Kansas, Pollan can no longer track him individually, and by the time what’s left of 534 ends up between two buns in a Happy Meal, he’s become more vegetable than animal. In fact, the entire meal the Pollan family consumes at McDonald’s is made primarily of corn. “Animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass,” Pollan writes, “must be adapted by us — at considerable cost to their health, the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their eaters — to live on corn.” It turns out that Pollan’s list is incomplete. In a just-released study, “Super-Sizing Public Costs: How Low Wages at Top Fast Food Chains Leave Taxpayers Footing the Bill”, the National Employment Law Project estimates that McDonald’s also costs U.S. taxpayers $1.2 billion a year. That's what we pay in public assistance to augment the “low wages, non-existent benefits, and limited work hours” of the company’s 700,000 front-line workers. And let’s not forget, 534 – and the corn he is force-fed – is also taxpayer-subsidized every step of his short, miserable life.

Meanwhile, the company, its shareholders and its brass are doing just fine: $5.5 billion in both profits and shareholder returns last year, and a CEO earning $13.7 million. Maybe those who excoriate the “takers” in our country should look up as well as down.

Context Matters

To understand something, you must know the context in which it occurs. Take, for example, the phrase, “No need to dress for dinner.” Its meaning differed markedly when uttered on 1930s Park Avenue or 1960s Haight Ashbury. In the former, it meant, you don’t need to put on white tie and tails – what Bertie Wooster called ''the full soup-and-fish”. In the latter, if you came over in anything more than your sandals, you’d probably be overdressed. So too with Obamacare. Some people are so pathologically obsessed with it that they drown out rational debate with barrages of invective against the law and the man for whom it is named. Others, however, talk reasonably about the program’s huge future costs and the unseemly legislative process that turned a good intention into a garbage bag of special interests. We should listen to them. But I hope we also consider the full context of the national conversation. America has over 48 million people without health insurance, which among other things causes 48,000 preventable deaths annually. Estimates of covering them are high: a 5% increase in health spending, about 1% of GDP. The costs of not covering them are staggering on two levels. The first is the impact on our economy from the combination of ultimately higher treatment outlays and lost productivity of the uninsured, both of which are eventually borne by taxpayers. The second is the impact on our community from tolerating the presence of such a large marginalized group. Life is short; dignity is precious.

Losers Win

As I read the smug headlines about “The Republican Collapse” and “The Republican Surrender”, I keep asking: why can’t you see that yesterday’s big winner was the Tea Party? How can that be? Didn’t they lose by 2-1 in the House and 4.5-1 in the Senate?

Yes, but they emerged from the disaster they themselves created with their “principles” unsullied and their standing in their districts enhanced. Moreover, they didn’t have to take the blame for – or even cope with – the consequences of a government default. They got to have their cake and eat it too. Preferring posturing to governing, they are the heroes of talk radio and the billionaires who bankroll the hard right. And with the sequester cuts intact, they established the new baseline for fiscal debate.

Like all absolutist movements – from Oliver Cromwell to Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler to Mao to Khomeini – Tea Party Republicans are now turning on their own, seeking to purge all traces of moderation from the party. And thanks to the roll call vote in both houses, they have a hit list in their hands. Having been bailed out by their colleagues, they now savage them.

“The surrender caucus is the whiner caucus,” Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas) said of his colleagues who made the difficult choices – and who in his view are nothing more than spineless traitors. “It’s pretty hard when [Boehner] has a circle of 20 people that step up every day and say, ‘Can we surrender today, Mr. Speaker?’”

A Dark Tan in an Empty Suit

In a country where the people govern, the people stand helplessly by as those who govern in their name drive their country off a cliff. Yesterday the House Republican caucus opened its meeting by singing “Amazing Grace”. That was the high point for the band of self-congratulatory know-nothings who call themselves the Tea Party Caucus. We knew all three verses, Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said. “Isn’t that impressive?” Adding his bass voice to the chorus was John Boehner, the most inept Speaker in history, rivaled only by James Orr (1857-9), the South Carolina Democrat who used his post to promote slavery, support secession and open the way to Civil War.

Some express pity for Boehner, sympathizing with the difficulty of “herding cats” and trying to placate the hardline reactionaries in his party. And it’s clear that many Republicans are hiding behind the Speaker because they fear, above all, a primary challenge from their party’s fanatic fringe. This isn’t about principle; this is politics, pure, simple and in-your-face.

As Speaker of the House and third in line for the presidency, Boehner’s role is to lead his colleagues, not pander to them. “We’re trying to find a way forward in a bipartisan way that would continue to provide fairness to the American people under Obamacare,” he said yesterday, a statement both utterly meaningless and totally dishonest, since the ransom his caucus sought when it kidnapped the country was the destruction of Obamacare.

Why do I keep thinking of the last throes of the Weimar Republic?

"Because We Care"

Lost among the avalanche of headlines on the government crisis last week was the heartbreaking story of Anjelica Castillo. For 22 years she was known only as “Baby Hope”, and the New York City Police Department continues to piece together the details of her short life and violent death. It’s a story that probes the depths of the human capacity for evil and our equally strong capacity for love – even the love of an unidentified four-year-old child whose decomposed body was found in a blue picnic cooler just below the Henry Hudson Parkway on a sweltering July day in 1991. Two years later, after an investigation in which every lead hit a dead end, the officers of the 34^th precinct buried Baby Hope in a Bronx cemetery. “We are her family,” said Jerry Giorgio, the detective leading the investigation. “We are burying our baby.” But they never forgot her. They kept watch over her grave, which had a toll-free number for tips. They kept the investigation open. And this weekend they charged her cousin with rape and murder. No one ever reported Anjelica missing. No one who had seen anything came forward to report it. Even Anjelica’s body revealed no clue of her identity. I don’t think any other species treats its own kind with the malevolent cruelty that marked her life. But I also don’t think any other species has the devotion that drove Giorgio, now 79, and his colleagues all those years. Who else would have named such a child “Hope”?