When Shipping Containers Sink in the Drink

We’ve supersized our capacity to ship stuff across the seas. As our global supply chains grow, what can we gather from the junk that washes up on shore?

By Kathryn Schulz

There is a stretch of coastline in southern Cornwall known for its dragons. The black ones are rare, the green ones rarer; even a dedicated dragon hunter can go a lifetime without coming across a single one. Unlike the dragons of European myth, these do not hoard treasure, cannot breathe fire, and, lacking wings, cannot fly. They are aquatic, in that they always arrive from the sea, and they are capable of travelling considerable distances. One was spotted, like Saoirse Ronan, on Chesil Beach; another made its home on the otherwise uninhabited Dutch island of Griend, in the Wadden Sea. Mostly, though, they are drawn to the windswept beaches of southwestern England—to Portwrinkle and Perranporth, to Bigbury Bay and Gunwalloe. If you want to go looking for these dragons yourself, it will help to know that they are three inches long, missing their arms and tails, and made by the Lego company.

Cornwall owes its dragon population to the Tokio Express, a container ship that sailed from Rotterdam for North America in February of 1997 and ran into foul weather twenty miles off Land’s End. In heavy seas, it rolled so far abeam that sixty-two of the containers it was carrying wrenched free of their fastenings and fell overboard. One of those containers was filled with Lego pieces—to be specific, 4,756,940 of them. Among those were the dragons (33,427 black ones, 514 green), but, as fate would have it, many of the other pieces were ocean-themed. When the container slid off the ship, into the drink went vast quantities of miniature scuba tanks, spearguns, diving flippers, octopuses, ship’s rigging, submarine parts, sharks, portholes, life rafts, and the bits of underwater seascapes known among Lego aficionados as LURPs and BURPs—Little Ugly Rock Pieces and Big Ugly Rock Pieces, of which 7,200 and 11,520, respectively, were aboard the Tokio Express. Not long afterward, helicopter pilots reported looking down at the surface of the Celtic Sea and seeing “a slick of Lego.” (As with “fish,” “sheep,” and “offspring,” the most widely accepted plural of “Lego” is Lego.) Soon enough, some of the pieces lost overboard started washing ashore, mostly on Cornish beaches.

Things have been tumbling off boats into the ocean for as long as humans have been a seafaring species, which is to say, at least ten thousand and possibly more than a hundred thousand years. But the specific kind of tumbling off a boat that befell the nearly five million Lego pieces of the Tokio Express is part of a much more recent phenomenon, dating only to about the nineteen-fifties and known in the shipping industry as “container loss.” Technically, the term refers to containers that do not make it to their destination for whatever reason: stolen in port, burned up in a shipboard fire, seized by pirates, blown up in an act of war. But the most common way for a container to get lost is by ending up in the ocean, generally by falling off a ship but occasionally by going down with one when it sinks.

There are many reasons for this kind of container loss, but the most straightforward one is numerical. In today’s world, some six thousand container ships are out on the ocean at any given moment. The largest of these can carry more than twenty thousand shipping containers per voyage; collectively, they transport a quarter of a billion containers around the globe every year. Given the sheer scale of those numbers, plus the factors that have always bedevilled maritime travel—squalls, swells, hurricanes, rogue waves, shallow reefs, equipment failure, human error, the corrosive effects of salt water and wind—some of those containers are bound to end up in the water. The question, of interest to the inquisitive and important for economic and environmental reasons, is: What on earth is inside them?

Astandard shipping container is made of steel, eight feet wide, eight and a half feet tall, and either twenty or forty feet long; it could be described as a glorified box, if there were anywhere for the glory to get in. And yet for one of the world’s least prepossessing objects it has developed something of a cult following in recent years. A surprising number of people now live in shipping containers, some of them because they have no other housing option and some of them because they have opted into the Tiny House movement, but a few in the name of architectural experiments involving several-thousand-foot homes constructed from multiple containers. Others, preferring their shipping containers in the wild, have become passionate container spotters, deducing the provenance of each one based on its color, logo, decals, and other details, as delineated in resources like “The Container Guide,” by Craig Cannon and Tim Hwang, the John James Audubons of shipping containers. Other volumes on the increasingly crowded container-ship shelf range from Craig Martin’s eponymous “Shipping Container,” which forms part of Bloomsbury Academic’s Object Lessons series and cites the likes of the French philosopher Bruno Latour and the American artist Donald Judd, to “Ninety Percent of Everything,” whose author, Rose George, spent five weeks on a container ship, bringing to life not only the inner workings of the shipping industry but also the daily existence of the people charged with transporting the world’s goods across dangerous and largely lawless oceans.

Viewed in a certain light, all this attention makes sense because, during the past half century or so, the shipping container has radically reshaped the global economy and the everyday lives of almost everyone on the planet. The tale of that transformation was recounted a decade and a half ago by Marc Levinson in “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.” Before the rise of the container, moving cargo over water was an expensive, labor-intensive business. To minimize the distance between products and the vessels that transported them, ports were crowded with factories and warehouses, as well as with the stevedores and longshoremen tasked with loading and unloading goods. (The distinction was spatial: stevedores worked on the ship, while longshoremen worked on the dock.) Some of those goods were bulk cargo—a commodity like oil, which can be poured into a tank for relatively easy storage and transport—but most of them were “break-bulk” cargo, which had to be loaded item by item: bagged cement, wheels of cheese, bales of cotton, you name it. All this unrelated stuff had to be packed together carefully, so that it wouldn’t shift in transit, breaking valuable items or, worse, capsizing the ship. For the workers, the labor involved required skill, brawn, and a high tolerance for pain. (In Manchester, in a single year, half of all longshoremen were injured on the job.) For the shipping companies, it required money. Between wages and equipment, up to seventy-five per cent of the cost of transporting goods by water was incurred while a ship was in port.

All of this changed in 1956, because of a man named Malcom McLean. He was not originally a shipping magnate; he was the ambitious owner of a trucking company who figured he would be able to outbid his competitors if he could sometimes transport goods by waterway rather than by highway. When his initial idea of simply driving his trucks onto cargo ships proved economically inefficient, he began tinkering with removable boxes that could be stacked atop one another, as well as easily swapped among trucks, trains, and ships. In pursuit of that vision, he bought and retrofitted a couple of Second World War tankers, and then recruited an engineer who had already been working on aluminum containers that could be lifted by crane from truck to ship. On April 26, 1956, one of the tankers, the SS Ideal-X, sailed from New Jersey to Texas carrying fifty-eight shipping containers. On hand to witness the event was a higher-up in the International Longshoremen’s Association who, when asked what he thought of the ship, supposedly replied, “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch.”

That longshoreman clearly understood what he was seeing: the end of the shipping industry as he and generations of dockworkers before him knew it. At the time the Ideal-X left port, it cost an average of $5.83 per ton to load a cargo ship. With the advent of the shipping container, that price dropped to an estimated sixteen cents—and cargo-related employment plummeted along with it. These days, a computer does the work of figuring out how to pack a ship, and a trolley-and-crane system removes an inbound container and replaces it with an outbound one roughly every ninety seconds, unloading and reloading the ship almost simultaneously. The resulting cost savings have made overseas shipping astonishingly cheap. To borrow Levinson’s example, you can get a twenty-five-ton container of coffeemakers from a factory in Malaysia to a warehouse in Ohio for less than the cost of one business-class plane ticket. “Transportation has become so efficient,” he writes, “that for many purposes, freight costs do not much affect economic decisions.”

In another sense, those costs, in their very insignificance, do affect economic decisions. They are the reason that manufacturers can circumvent wage, workplace, and environmental protections by moving their plants elsewhere, and the reason that all those elsewheres—small cities far from ports, in Vietnam or Thailand or the Chinese hinterlands—can use their cheap land and cheap labor to gain a foothold in the global economy. Thanks to McLean’s innovation, manufacturers can drastically lengthen the supply chain yet still come out on top financially. If you have ever wondered why a shirt you buy in Manhattan costs so much less if it came from a factory in Malacca than from a tailor in midtown, the answer, in large part, is the shipping container.

Like the plastic dragons of Cornwall, a fully loaded container ship looks like something that might have been made by the Lego company. The effect comes from the fact that the containers are painted a single solid color—blue, green, red, orange, pink, yellow, aquamarine—and resemble standard Lego building blocks, especially when stacked atop one another. Those stacks begin down in the hold, and aboveboard they can run as wide as twenty-three abreast and loom as tall as a ten-story building.

The vessels that carry those stacks start at a size that you and I might regard as large—say, four hundred feet from bow to stern, or roughly the length of a baseball field from home plate to the center-field wall—but that the shipping industry describes as a Small Feeder. Then things scale up, from a regular Feeder, a Feedermax, and a Panamax (nine hundred and sixty-five feet, the maximum that could fit through the Panama Canal before recent expansion projects there) all the way to the aptly named Ultra Large Container Vessel, which is about thirteen hundred feet long. Tipped on one end and plunked down on Forty-second Street, a U.L.C.V. would tower over the Chrysler Building. In its normal orientation, as the whole world recently learned to its fascination and dismay, it can block the Suez Canal.

The crews of these ultra-large ships are, by comparison, ultra-tiny; a U.L.C.V. can travel from Hong Kong to California carrying twenty-three thousand containers and just twenty-five people. As a result, it is not unheard-of for a few of those containers to go overboard without anyone even noticing until the vessel arrives in port. (That’s despite the fact that a fully loaded container is roughly the size and weight of a whale shark; imagine the splash when it falls a hundred feet into the ocean.) More often, though, many containers shift and fall together in a dramatic occurrence known as a stack collapse. If fifty or more containers go overboard in a single such incident, the shipping industry deems the episode a “catastrophic event.”

How often any of this happens is a matter of some debate, since shipping companies are typically under no obligation to publicize the matter when their cargo winds up in the ocean. In such instances, the entity that paid to ship the goods is notified, as is the entity that’s meant to receive them. But whether any higher authority learns about the loss largely depends on where it happened, since the ocean is a patchwork of jurisdictions governed by various nations, bodies, and treaties, each of them with different signatories in different states of enforcement. The International Maritime Organization, which is the United Nations agency responsible for setting global shipping standards, has agreed to create a mandatory reporting system and a centralized database of container losses, but that plan has not yet been implemented. In the meantime, the only available data come from the World Shipping Council, a trade organization with twenty-two member companies that control some eighty per cent of global container-ship capacity. Since 2011, the W.S.C. has conducted a triennial survey of those members about container loss, and concluded, in 2020, that, on average, 1,382 containers go overboard each year.

It is reasonable to regard that number warily, since it comes from a voluntary survey conducted by insiders in an industry where all the incentives run in the direction of opacity and obfuscation. “No one reports fully transparent figures,” Gavin Spencer, the head of insurance at Parsyl, a company that focusses on risk management in the supply chain, told me. Insurance companies don’t like to report the individual losses they cover, because doing so would make them seem less profitable, and shipping lines don’t report them, either. (“That would be a bit like airlines declaring how many bags they lose.”) Spencer’s best guess concerning the actual number of containers lost in the ocean is “far more than you can imagine,” and certainly much more than the figures reported by the W.S.C.

The W.S.C. disputes the idea that its data are in any way inaccurate. But, whatever the number, container loss seems to be growing more common. In November of 2020, a ship called the ONE Apus, on its way from China to Long Beach, got caught in a storm in the Pacific and lost more than eighteen hundred containers overboard—more in one incident than the W.S.C.’s estimated average for a year. The same month, another ship headed to Long Beach from China lost a hundred containers in bad weather, while yet another ship capsized in port in East Java with a hundred and thirty-seven containers on board. Two months later, a fourth ship, also on its way from China to California, lost seven hundred and fifty containers in the North Pacific. The past few years have been characterized by a steady stream of reports about some other quantity of containers lost in some other patch of ocean: forty off the east coast of Australia; twenty-one off the coast of Hawaii; thirty-three off Duncansby Head, Scotland; two hundred and sixty off the coast of Japan; a hundred and five off the coast of British Columbia. On and on it goes, or, rather, off and off.

One reason incidents like these are on the rise is that storms and high winds, long the chief culprit in container loss, are growing both more frequent and more intense as the climate becomes more volatile. Another is the trend toward ever-larger container ships, which has compromised the steering of the vessel and the security of the containers (in both cases because the high stacks on deck catch the wind), while simultaneously rendering those ships vulnerable to parametric rolling, a rare phenomenon that places extreme stress on the containers and the systems meant to secure them. More recently, the steep rise in demand for goods during the COVID era has meant that ships that once travelled at partial capacity now set off fully loaded and crews are pressured to adhere to strict timetables, even if doing so requires ignoring problems on board or sailing through storms instead of around them. To make matters worse, shipping containers themselves are in short supply, both because of the increase in demand and because many of them are stuck in the wrong ports owing to earlier shutdowns, and so older containers with aging locking mechanisms have remained in or been returned to circulation. In addition to all this, the risk of human error has gone up during the pandemic as working conditions on container ships, already suboptimal, have further declined—particularly as crew members, too, have sometimes been stuck for weeks or months on a ship in port or at anchor, stranded indefinitely in a worldwide maritime traffic jam.

People who work on oil tankers or aircraft carriers or commercial fishing boats know what they are transporting, but, as a rule, those who work on container ships have no idea what’s in all the boxes that surround them. Nor, for the most part, do customs agents and security officials. A single shipping container can hold five thousand individual boxes, a single ship can offload nine thousand containers within hours, and the largest ports can process as many as a hundred thousand containers every day, all of which means it is essentially impossible to inspect more than a fraction of the world’s shipping containers—a boon to drug cartels, human traffickers, and terrorists, a nightmare for the rest of us.

It is true, of course, that some people do know the contents (or at least the declared contents) of any given shipping container transported by a legal vessel. Each of those containers has a bill of lading—an itemized list of what it is carrying, known to the shipowner, the sender, and the receiver. If any of those containers go overboard, at least two additional parties swiftly learn what was inside them: insurance agents and lawyers. If many of those containers go overboard, the whole incident can become the subject of what’s known as a general average adjustment—an arcane bit of maritime law according to which everyone with cargo aboard a ship that suffers a disaster must help pay for all related expenses, even if the individual’s cargo is intact. (This illogical-seeming arrangement was codified as early as 533 A.D., of logical necessity: if sailors had to jettison cargo from a vessel in distress, they couldn’t afford to waste time selecting the stuff that would cost them the fewest headaches and the least money.) In theory, if you were sufficiently curious and dogged, you could request the court filings for container losses that result in such legal action, then pore over them for information about the contents of the lost containers.

If there are wonderfully obsessive souls who have dedicated their lives to pursuing this kind of information and making it broadly available, I have yet to find them. As a rule, if the public learns about the contents of lost containers at all, it is only in a haphazard fashion—as when those contents make headlines. Back in January, for instance, a ship sailing from Singapore to New York lost sixty-five containers overboard, triggering a wave of news coverage and a bunch of recipe-for-disaster jokes, since the ship had been carrying tens of thousands of copies of two freshly printed cookbooks: Melissa Clark’s “Dinner in One” and Mason Hereford’s “Turkey and the Wolf.”

More often, though, the contents of lost containers become obvious only if they start washing ashore, where they attract the attention of residents and beachcombers, as well as that of regional authorities and environmental organizations, which together often end up funding and coördinating cleanup efforts. The Cornwall dragons, for example, are famous in large part because of a local beachcomber, Tracey Williams, who began tracking them and other ocean-borne Lego pieces on dedicated social media accounts, which proved so popular that she has produced a book on the subject: “Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea,” a charming if desultory stroll through the history and aftermath of the Tokio Express accident. Similarly, when those hundred and five containers were lost off the coast of British Columbia last fall, local volunteers quickly surmised some of the contents, since they found themselves ridding the region’s beaches of baby oil, cologne, Yeti coolers, urinal mats, and inflatable unicorns.

What else has started off on a container ship and wound up in the ocean? Among many, many other things: flat-screen TVs, fireworks, IKEA furniture, French perfume, gym mats, BMW motorbikes, hockey gloves, printer cartridges, lithium batteries, toilet seats, Christmas decorations, barrels of arsenic, bottled water, cannisters that explode to inflate air bags, an entire container’s worth of rice cakes, thousands of cans of chow mein, half a million cans of beer, cigarette lighters, fire extinguishers, liquid ethanol, packets of figs, sacks of chia seeds, knee pads, duvets, the complete household possessions of people moving overseas, flyswatters printed with the logos of college and professional sports teams, decorative grasses on their way to florists in New Zealand, My Little Pony toys, Garfield telephones, surgical masks, bar stools, pet accessories, and gazebos.

Every once in while, some of this lost cargo proves beneficial to science. In 1990, when a container ship headed from Korea to the United States lost tens of thousands of Nike athletic shoes overboard, each one bearing a serial number, an oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, asked beachcombers all over the world to report any that washed ashore. (Alongside the former BBC journalist Mario Cacciottolo, Ebbesmeyer collaborated with Tracey Williams on “Adrift.”) As it turns out, Nikes tolerate salt water well and will float pretty much until they run out of ocean—although, since the two shoes in a pair orient differently in the wind, one beach might be strewn with right sneakers while another is covered in left ones. Ebbesmeyer used the reported location of the shoes to pioneer a field that he calls “flotsametrics”: the study of ocean currents based on the drift patterns of objects that go overboard. In the past three decades, he has studied everything from the Lego incident to a 1992 container loss involving almost twenty-nine thousand plastic bath toys sold under the name Friendly Floatees, from classic yellow duckies to green frogs, one of which took twenty-six years to wash ashore.

As important as the study of ocean currents may be, it is slim recompense for all those containers going overboard—as Ebbesmeyer well knows, since he helped give the Great Pacific Garbage Patch its name. Shipping-industry insiders like to point out that the problem of container loss is a comparatively small one, by which they mean that the number of containers that end up in the ocean is a tiny fraction of the total shipped. That percentage may be useful as a business metric, but it is irrelevant to manatees and crabs and petrels and coral, not to mention all the rest of us who—like it or not, know it or not—are affected by the accumulation of containers and their contents in the ocean.

If those contents include any goods that the International Maritime Organization defines as dangerous (among them, explosives, radioactive substances, toxic gases, asbestos, and things prone to spontaneous combustion), the carrier is obliged to report the incident to the relevant authority. That’s a useful but limited requirement, partly because once the carrier has done so it often has no further responsibilities and partly because a great many items that don’t meet this definition are nonetheless destructive to marine and coastal environments. The Tokio Express might not have been the Exxon Valdez, but five million pieces of plastic are hardly a welcome addition to the ocean. Nor are flyswatters or bottles of detergent or Christmas decorations, to say nothing of their packaging—most of it plastic or, worse still, Styrofoam, which, when buffeted by waves, breaks into pebble-size pieces that are extremely hard to clean up and look, to certain birds and aquatic animals, enticingly edible.

For an object that is fundamentally a box, designed to keep things inside it, the shipping container is a remarkable lesson in the uncontainable nature of modern life—the way our choices, like our goods, ramify around the world. The only thing those flat-screen TVs and Garfield telephones and all the other wildly variable contents of lost shipping containers have in common is that, collectively, they make plain the scale of our excess consumption. The real catastrophe is the vast glut of goods we manufacture and ship and purchase and throw away, but even the small fraction of those goods that go missing makes the consequences apparent. Six weeks after the Tokio Express got into trouble at Land’s End, another container ship ran aground sixteen nautical miles away, sending dozens of containers into the sea just off the coast of the Isles of Scilly. Afterward, among the shells and pebbles and dragons, residents and beachcombers kept coming across some of the cargo: a million plastic bags, headed for a supermarket chain in Ireland, bearing the words “Help protect the environ

The Uncharted Frontier: Will Rogers in John Ford’s America

By Adam Piron Criterion Review

Just slightly northwest of Death Valley, in what is now eastern California, a mountain range carves out the eastern edge of the Owens Valley. Sculpted by bedrock pushed between tectonic faults during the late Proterozoic to Cambrian periods, the Inyo Mountains were a place rooted in the stresses of the earth itself and fated to play its part in those of later mankind.

Since time immemorial, the Numu (the Northern Paiute people) called the valley home, and their lives adapted to its unique and wildly diverse geographies. In the definitive pattern of the young United States’ westward expansion, these tribes faced war, genocide, and forcible relocation to reservations as Manifest Destiny advanced. The eventual influx of settlers staking their claims in this ethnically cleansed territory was fueled by the promise of cheap land on which to start anew, as well as the possibility of striking it big. By the mid-to-late 1800s, the valley’s central river, lake, and wetlands were drained into newly irrigated farmlands, and its mountain ranges were being stripped of their minerals.

At the range’s southern edge, an area known as Cerro Gordo (Spanish for “Fat Hill”) was discovered to be rich in silver deposits in 1865. From the late 1800s and into the coming century, one of the more notable clients of the mine’s lode was Eastman Kodak. The extracted silver was an essential component in the chemistry of their film’s light-sensitive emulsion, and it played a key role in their eventual innovation and dominance of early cinematic technology. Working with Eastman’s funding, William Kennedy Dickson pioneered the use of 35 mm film at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studios. It’s hard to not see an irony in two of Dickson’s landmark Kinetoscope works: Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance, both filmed in 1894. The brief clips feature dancing Indigenous performers from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, themselves survivors of the American Indian Wars. These were later classified as the first known films to depict Native Americans.

The fate of the Owens Valley was to take yet another turn. A series of political events in the early twentieth century known as the California water wars led to the valley’s desiccation and the impoverishment of its farmers. Much of the region’s water was once again diverted, this time via the newly built Los Angeles Aqueduct, designed in 1913 to feed its eponymous city hundreds of miles away. It was a scheme designed by LA’s powers-that-be to grow the once-dusty pueblo on the edge of the desert from a turn-of-the-century population of 102,000 to the megalopolis it would eventually become. A version of this would later be dramatized as the central conspiracy uncovered in Chinatown (1974). Unsurprisingly, this boom fed directly into the growth of the city’s fledgling film industry. When the city of Hollywood merged into Los Angeles in 1910, only ten film companies were in operation. By 1921, the City of Angels held over eighty percent of the world’s film production.

There is a scene in Fox’s 1930 comedy So This Is London in which Hiram Draper, played by Will Rogers, attempts to get a passport. When Hiram is unable to provide a birth certificate, the passport-office official inquires if he is an American citizen. Rogers, in his thick Oklahoman accent, responds: “I think I am. My folks are Indian. Both my mother and father had Cherokee blood in ’em. Born and raised in Indian Territory. Of course, I’m not one of these Americans whose ancestors come over on the Mayflower, but we met ’em when they landed.” It’s a great bit of comedy, a pre-Code jab pointing out an existential absurdity of America itself. It’s also a key to Rogers’s brand of humor and his positioning as a straight-talking outsider lodged in the eye of popular culture’s storm.

Like Hiram Draper, Rogers was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He was born in 1879, raised in a prominent family within his tribe’s territory, and was the grandchild of survivors of the Trail of Tears. By his own account, Rogers was a poor student and found himself drawn to Cherokee ranching culture. His skills led to gigs as a horsebreaker, bringing him to Argentina and later to South Africa, before he took his first steps into show business as a trick roper with a Wild West show. In 1905, he became a sensation on the New York City vaudeville circuit, performing fifty weeks a year over the next decade and refining a signature bit with his pony, lasso, and off-the-cuff commentary on current events. He shot to a new stratum of popularity when he signed on to the Ziegfeld Follies in 1916, and in 1918 he was hired by Samuel Goldwyn’s Goldwyn Pictures to star in his first film, in the title role of Laughing Bill Hyde.

For urban audiences, Rogers became not only the definitive image of the cowboy but also something like a rural Aristophanes: a plain-speaking joker free of institutional bias. Despite his consistent and very vocal pride about being Indigenous, his image did not fit with the public’s assumptions of what a Native American ought to look like, especially those forming in the seventh art. It didn’t matter that Rogers was noticeably darker-skinned than his costars; the thought of connecting him to the Indians in the films of D. W. Griffith, Thomas H. Ince, or even Dickson was a bridge too far. His hair was styled short, he didn’t don regalia, and he was a bankable star with a multidimensional personality. Moreover, his characters were of a humorous disposition and delivered monologues in multisyllabic English. Perhaps even more mind-boggling for audiences was the fact that Rogers’s embodiment of the cowboy persona did not necessarily divorce him from Cherokee traditions, given the tribe’s long history of ranching. In Indians in Unexpected Places, historian Philip Deloria, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, notes that non-Indigenous expectations of Native Americans in the Progressive Era reflected “colonial and imperial relations of power and domination.” Deloria later distinguishes between “the anomalous, which reinforces expectations, and the unexpected, which resists categorization and, thereby, questions expectation itself.” By all measures, Rogers was the unexpected Indian in an unexpected place during Hollywood’s early years.

In keeping with his atypicality, Rogers was one of the lucky few to successfully hopscotch not only from vaudeville to the silent screen, but also later into talkies. Following his debut in Laughing Bill Hyde, he went on to appear in forty-nine other silent films. Although Rogers was consistently given top billing, his films of the era had one major drawback: the lack of his voice. Much of the comedian’s magnetism was powered by his onstage ramblings, peppered with catchy aphorisms and flavored by his signature Southern Plains twang. With the advent of sound in 1929, Rogers became one of film’s most popular actors. That same year, he began hosting his own wildly successful Sunday evening program on the radio (then a new medium), where he read from his weekly syndicated newspaper column and delivered offhand commentary on the news of the day. It was a precursor to the broadcast format of political comedy later defined by Bob Hope, Letterman, Leno, and the many alumni of The Daily Show. As the talking pictures ushered in a new boom in Hollywood, Rogers became the industry’s highest-paid actor of the early 1930s. He went on to star in twenty-one more films in the sound era, three of which were made by John Ford, his favorite director to work with.

In an unaired 1968 interview for the BBC, film journalist Philip Jenkinson, audibly nervous, asks a seventy-four-year-old John Ford about his memories of making Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), Rogers’s penultimate film.

Jenkinson: I believe that Will Rogers had his own way of approaching a script.

Ford: No, that isn’t true, because he never approached a script in his life. I don’t think he ever saw one. I mean, you’d get there in the morning and say: “Will, this is what you’re supposed to say—words to this effect.” He’d read it and memorize it and when the time would come he’d say it in his own words and they were much better than what a writer wrote because no one could write for Will Rogers. He was Will Rogers. He was more human than all the writers in the world, and it was said in his own way, which was good. You never bothered, just let him go along and leave him alone . . . He was a very, very humorous man, but he was always wonderful to work with because he was full of suggestions . . . He was a delight to work with.

It’s a poignant moment in an otherwise tense eighty-three minutes, with the notoriously gruff director relentlessly belittling Jenkinson. During Ford’s Fox years, he made three comedies with Rogers in three years: Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934), and Steamboat. All of their films were among the studio’s biggest hits of their respective years, and this easygoing trilogy reflected the perfect alignment of actor, director, and their signature celebrations of Americana.

In Rogers’s seventy-one-film career, his roles for Ford are generally considered to be among his finest. The director knew how to elevate the comedian’s persona by adding a deeper human layer to his populist-philosopher routine. Whether he was a country physician in Doctor Bull, the quirky officer of a small-town court in Judge Priest, or a benevolent snake-oil salesman in Steamboat, Rogers always embodied a version of Ford’s favorite type of protagonist: the man of a fading generation, yearning for a simpler time and the rural traditions of the late 1800s. His characters solve their communities’ dilemmas by reminding them of their old-fashioned values, helping them to weather modern times and the encroaching storm of their complications. Under Ford’s direction, Rogers channeled his larger-than-life charm beyond his political-outsider shtick and brought it back to the soil, repositioning himself as something like America’s favorite uncle—irreverent, yet radiating a fatherly warmth and healing communities through common sense.

Given their rapport and shared success, it’s not hard to imagine that this pair would have continued their creative streak had not it not been for Rogers’s untimely passing on August 15, 1935. At the age of fifty-five, he perished in an airplane accident over Point Barrow, Alaska. Steamboat Round the Bend opened less than a month after his death and went on to become the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year. As with other premature celebrity departures, the posthumous release was akin to a cultural beatification. The legacy of the man known as Oklahoma’s Favorite Son had crystallized. It was a loss that left Ford personally devastated.

There’s an irony brought forth by the Ford-Rogers films. They add an often-overlooked dimension to a long-debated critical powder keg of Ford’s work: the representation of Indigenous people in his oeuvre. Among his detractors, the accusation is that the director was a central culprit in cementing subhuman imagery of Indigeneity in Hollywood and relegating it to antiquity. Whether the Native Americans in question are the faceless, human targets in Stagecoach (1939), the marauding heathens of Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), or the grunting rapists of The Searchers (1956), their slaughter is, according Ford’s accusers, depicted as cause for celebration, or at the very least as an inevitable necessity to make way for the prevailing American spirit. Ford’s defenders prefer to rationalize these examples as poorly aged narrative traditions of their era, counterweighed by his quasi-sympathetic portrayals of this land’s first people and their plight in Fort Apache (1948), Wagon Master (1950), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

To say that Ford’s approach to matters of race was inconsistent is to put it mildly. One need only compare his films with Stepin Fetchit and Woody Strode to add to the dissonance. As with Rogers’s Shakespearean-fool schtick, Fetchit provided Ford with a popular persona to build upon. Billed as the Laziest Man in the World, Fetchit had crafted a routine that doubled down on negative stereotypes of African Americans, and by the mid-1930s its success made him the first Black actor to become a millionaire. Ford utilized him in four of his Southern-set films: first in The World Moves On (1934), then twice with Rogers in Priest and Steamboat, and finally in a reprisal of his Priest role in The Sun Shines Bright (1953). The last of these was cited by Ford as a favorite among his own films, and it also gave Fetchit his final feature-film role, marking the last gasp of an act that fell out of favor with the civil rights era’s rising tide.

Years later, Ford would blatantly address a history of harmful stereotypes and discrimination against African Americans in 1960’s Sergeant Rutledge. It was the director’s first collaboration with Strode, a football player turned actor who became one of Ford’s favorite performers in the last phase of his career, as well as a friend and caretaker. Strode starred as the film’s titular sergeant, a 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldier and ex-slave falsely accused and court-martialed for the rape of a white girl and the slaughter of both her and her father. As with westerns of the time, courage is framed through the dichotomy of soldiers versus Natives, white civilization against Native savagery—with Rutledge, and by extension African Americans, definitively placed by the director in the former camp. Through Rutledge’s valor, tested in battle against a band of marauding Apaches, Ford offers a corrective to the pejorative traditions he exploited in Fetchit. This vindication comes at the expense of another marginalized group, though, repeating a pattern that recurs throughout Ford’s career, whether it's the noble Irish immigrants facing off against raiding bloodthirsty Indians in The Iron Horse (1924) or the heroines of 7 Women (1966) pitted against uncomprehending Chinese peasants and wily Mongols. The impact of Ford’s iconography is beyond dispute, but it’s matched by the volume of its own contradictions, much like the nation it both celebrates and critiques.

One can trace this erratic development from the Ford films in which Rogers plays figures of white authority, through the boneheaded savagery of Scar (Henry Brandon) in The Searchers, and all the way to the remedial Cheyenne Autumn, Ford’s final western and self-proclaimed atonement to Native Americans. In the end, the Diné (Navajo) actors cast as Cheyenne in Ford’s elegy seemed to have the final word. For the sake of the film, the Indigenous dialogue was meant to come across as Cheyenne, although it was actually in Diné; a distinction that made no difference to Ford or non-Navajo audiences. It wasn’t until after the film’s release that it became something of an inside joke among the tribe. It turned out that the Native actors had been openly using blue humor and crass language that had nothing to do with the narrative throughout the film, most notably commenting on the penis size of a military officer during a scene that was meant to be a lugubrious, “end of the trail” moment centered around, of all things, a treaty being signed. It’s an irreverent gesture worthy of Rogers himself, whose performances also winkingly challenged over-credulous audiences’ assumptions about Native Americans.

Against all odds, Ford’s films with Rogers revolve around a Native American actor given top billing in his most dimensional roles, free of having to “play Indian” for white audiences. They’re rarities in that, nearly a century later, no other Native American actor has been afforded the same opportunity in major studio films. Within cinema’s first four decades, Native Americans went from being depicted as on-screen cannon fodder to having one of their own earn half a million dollars a year as the top-paid star of the industry; both phenomena that Ford had a hand in shaping. To Ford’s detractors and defenders alike, Will Rogers again represents not only the unexpected Indian, but an inconvenient one at that.

In a 1964 interview with Cosmopolitan, Ford remarked: “There’s some merit to the charge that the Indian hasn’t been portrayed accurately or fairly in the western, but again, this charge has been a broad generalization and often unfair. The Indian didn’t welcome the white man . . . and he wasn’t diplomatic . . . If he has been treated unfairly by whites in films, that, unfortunately, was often the case in real life.” It’s not hard to hear Rogers retorting with the final quip in his So This Is London passport scene—taking a dig at the Mayflower’s passengers and their descendants: “It’s always been to the everlasting discredit of the Indian race that we ever let ’em land.”

In 1957, the Cerro Gordo Mines of the Owens Valley closed their operations. It’s not inconceivable that Ford and Rogers’s productions were shot on film still partially sourced from the Inyo Mountains’ silver. One can see a history flowing in a fractal-like pattern, in both a backward and forward motion, with their partnership somewhere near the center. There is the image of the Indian cowboy, captured by the director who created images of Indians fighting cowboys, all formed in a resource made available as a result of cowboys fighting Indians. But, turning to the pattern’s other direction, there is the new image they created three times over, forged from this land’s many contradictions, waiting to be picked up and realized yet again, holding a multitude of possibilities for a new frontier.

 

The cult of Winston Churchill

A new book from Tariq Ali argues that Britain needs to face up to the darker side of its great wartime icon

Review By Priyamvada Gopal Prospect

Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

by Tariq Ali

On the back cover of Tariq Ali’s new book on Winston Churchill, a less flattering and so less familiar portrait of the wartime icon comes into view. Here, the man voted the Greatest Briton ever by over a million of his compatriots in 2002 fulminates against everything from women’s suffrage and liberal causes to “international Jews,” “uncivilised tribes” and “people with slit eyes and pigtails.” Ali also alludes to Churchill’s approval of the Conservative slogan “Keep England White”—at the same time MPs like Fenner Brockway were bringing the Race Discrimination Bill to parliament—and includes an extract from the cringeworthy praise he heaped on Mussolini in 1927. Such pronouncements will not be new to anyone familiar with the subject, but to invoke them in rarefied British company is usually to elicit the dismissive claim that they are not representative of Churchill or that they were simply “of their time.” “Nobody’s perfect” goes the more casual response, as if a view of the world in which Anglo-Saxons were “a higher grade race” entitled to rule the rest was simply a charming upper-class foible.

Nobody’s perfect, indeed, but not everyone had the power to make such a worldview consequential for the lives of millions of people across the globe, often lethally so. At the heart of Ali’s account is this historical reality, one that is evaded in Britain today in favour of a burnished and bullish mythology in which both Churchill and his beloved British Empire emerge with untarnished courage and virtue. The “cult of Churchill” is a full-blown devotional practice, where anyone who demurs is met at the very least with shock and, more probably, tabloid denunciation. “Mythic Churchill,” as some historians have recently argued, has become a “serious fact of modern life” in Britain, “a constant point of reference in political discussion and popular culture,” and, one might add, in the culture wars constantly fomented by politicians.

For Ali, this fact impinges seriously on our ability to reckon clearly with Britain’s past. The cult itself, however, is of relatively recent vintage, assuming its quasi-religious nature during the Falklands conflict in 1982. One of the more astonishingly successful legacies of this propaganda exercise is the ongoing presentation of Churchill, a man of the hard right by any measure, as a figure who transcends political partisanship. This handy fudge enables the presentation of elite Conservative projects as above party politics. No matter how damaging the policy, we are always “all in it together.”

Ironically, Churchill in his own time was far from a unifying figure, famously booted out of office at the end of the conflict that contributes so much to his legend. Prior to the Second World War, Churchill’s career consisted of two related planks, Ali writes: “glorifying colonial atrocities abroad” and “suppressing working-class revolts at home.” Today the British media celebrates his imperialism while quietly consigning his domestic record to a collective amnesia.

Yet working-class communities, especially in Wales, have not forgotten what their grandparents and great-grandparents endured at Churchill’s hands, particularly during his time as home secretary in 1910. Ali cites the actor Richard Burton’s revulsion for Churchill as a “bad man… a vindictive toy soldier child,” a perception embedded in his psyche during his Welsh childhood. A wartime leader Churchill may have become, but on many occasions, from Tonypandy in 1910 to Clydeside in 1919, and during the general strike of 1926, to mention but a few, “Churchill treated his own citizens as enemies,” writes Ali, willing to send in troops to manage “skirmishes on the home front.”

Churchill deemed anticolonialism to be a wilful refusal of “superior science and a superior law”

Even as he switched between Liberal and Tory affiliations, Churchill was consistently hostile to the rise of Labourism. In Britain today, the separation of domestic working-class memories from imperial history is a political sleight-of-hand to which Churchill is central, made to “play a particular role.” Even so, the people whom he led into a necessary war “supported him till the first opportunity arose to get rid of him, which they promptly did.”

In Ali’s telling, which draws on more honest existing historical scholarship than most popular biographies of Churchill, the two-times prime minister emerges not so much as deeply racist—some of his contemporaries remarked on it in shock—as profoundly authoritarian, with a soft spot for fascist strongmen, and a hostility to working-class assertion. It is no accident that in his time, as well as ours, rubbishing any criticism of empire goes hand in hand with assaults on the welfare state and trade unionism. Indeed, British critics of empire from Ernest Jones and Wilfrid Blunt to Sylvia Pankhurst and Nancy Cunard would note that colonial subjects abroad and working-class ones at home were both preyed on by the same exploitative and profiteering interests presented as merely “national” in scope.

For Ali, Churchill’s life is a lens through which to view a less glorious counter-history of empire than those histories generally lionised in Britain. On Churchill’s own life and tendencies, the book is at its strongest in the early chapters, where it details the young aristocrat’s reputation in his milieu as a “self-advertiser” and “medal hunter” possessed of a “vainglorious” enthusiasm for colonial conflicts, including the barbarities of the white-on-white Boer War. The British concentration camps in South Africa, which Hitler is known to have admired, find no mention in Churchill’s own copious account of that war.

The Duke of Marlborough’s scion had an unlimited enthusiasm for colonial wars, most of which involved the use of questionable, if not criminal, “counter-insurgency” tactics against resistant colonial subjects. The terrors of the First World War, about which Ali is unsurprisingly scathing, afforded Churchill not a fulfilment of his “desire to excel at military strategy” but the humiliating naval disaster at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles. Churchill also created the notorious paramilitary “Black and Tans,” which recruited unemployed veterans of the Great War to tame insurgency in Ireland, the only anticolonial uprising to take place close to home and the legacy of which is still with us today. Surprisingly, this gets only a passing mention in Ali’s -account, which otherwise discusses the Irish colonial situation in some detail.

The cult of Churchill is, of course, bound up less with his imperial legacy but his role in the Allied and Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. For Churchill’s hagiographers, this is touted as negating his “flaws” in relation to the duskier peoples of the world. In actuality, both the British Empire and Nazi Germany were invested in white supremacy and a global race hierarchy, commitments that Churchill did not bother to hide. But was the wartime leader at least a committed antifascist? Ali evokes a man who was, in fact, rather admiring of both Mussolini and Hitler, at least until 1937 and, after the war, willing to support fascists in Spain, Greece and elsewhere against leftists and what he deemed “the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” Indeed, he would state openly that if it was a choice between communism and Nazism, he would not choose the former.

Workers united: striking miners in Tony Pandy, Wales, in 1910, one of Churchill’s “skirmishes on the home front”

Ali cites the New Leader, the sternly antifascist and often anticolonial newspaper of the Independent Labour Party, commenting in 1927 on Churchill’s praise for what he deemed “the commanding leadership of Signor Mussolini”: “we always suspected that Mr. Winston Churchill was a fascist at heart. Now he has openly avowed it.” Although he was not alone among Conservatives in this regard, Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Italian strongman, who even at this time was recognized as an unsavory danger, upset the eminently moderate editor of the Guardian, CP Scott, who was also less than approving of Churchill’s own willingness to deploy troops to quell domestic dissent.

“Churchill saw fascism,” Ali writes, “as an extra-parliamentary current with its own armed bands that could defeat the communists.” He is absolutely correct that fascism emerged as a force “prepared to defend capitalism and landlordism by illegal, violent and extraconstitutional methods,” that “it was created to destroy and defeat the left,” and that it “would not have triumphed had the dominant classes refused their financial and political support.” What about Hitler, the danger of whom Churchill did come to recognize before many fellow British politicians, including other Conservatives? Churchill was “the only serious ruling-class politician who understood by late 1938 that a failure to resist the Third Reich would lead to disaster, first for the British Empire and then for Europe.” Before then, however, he had expressed admiration for Hitler’s passionate nationalism and his success in “restoring Germany to the most powerful position in Europe.” Contrary to wider perception of his prescience today, Churchill did not initially dissent from Neville Chamberlain’s soft foreign policy approach to the Third Reich, or indeed “appeasement,” important though it was that he broke from this approach in time.

Once he had established the danger posed by Hitler, Churchill was rightly implacable in a war for European liberation. The unfree subjects of the empire were, however, not consulted before being brought into the war alongside Britain, an “avoidable error” that Indian nationalists, for instance, refused to countenance without protest, although there were differences among them too. This set-in motion the final set of maneuvers and negotiations that would eventually lead to the end of the British Raj and the liquidation of most of the empire, much to Churchill’s fury. His attitude to Indians, always hostile, took on even more intemperate form leading the Conservative secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, to remark: “on the subject of India, Winston is not sane… I don’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.” Already, many Anti colonialists across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean had asked why they should tolerate the British Empire’s racialized subjugation when they were being asked to oppose Hitler’s racist imperialism.

Combined with his rage at challenges to the British Empire, Churchill’s racial thinking had often fatal consequences for the colonised. Nowhere is that more starkly visible than in his callous and criminal response to the entirely avoidable catastrophe that was the Bengal Famine. Between 1942 and 1944, several million Bengalis died of preventable hunger and illness, and from the British Raj’s failure to provide palliative emergency measures. While scholars of South Asia recognise that multiple factors resulted in the cataclysmic loss of life—including Indian hoarding of grains, profiteering and differential “entitlements” to relief—there is little doubt that Churchill’s stubborn racial loathing of the subjects of the Raj played a role in the unfolding of “one of the greatest disasters that had befallen any people under British rule,” as Indian viceroy Archibald Wavell himself put it.

Wavell’s correspondence with the India Office, and with Churchill, makes for startling reading. The viceroy, hardly a left-wing firebrand, pleaded for relief measures, while the prime minister mocked the Indian birth rate (at a banquet!) and inquired why, if the famine was so bad, Gandhi had not died yet. Ali assigns collective responsibility for the catastrophe to the British Cabinet in London while also observing, correctly, that Indian elites were “accessories” to the crime—a fact that is often forgotten by modern Indian politicians expounding on the Bengal Famine today.

The later chapters of the book are concerned with a range of imperial misdeeds in which Churchill and his milieu were implicated—from the use of atomic bombs against Japan, regime change in Iran, backing French colonial violence in Vietnam and unleashing civil war in Greece, where in the latter Churchill is “still regarded by older generations… as a tyrant and a butcher.” In Churchill’s varied career, one potent ideology is consistently manifest: the entitlement of elites—specifically upper-class and wealthy white men—to rule women, the working classes and the darker peoples. Again, the man himself was not coy about stating this—insisting, for instance, that the indigenes of North America and the Aborigines of Australia had not been wronged in their dispossession by the “stronger race” and “more worldly-wise” Europeans. He would claim to a somewhat disapproving US vice-president, Henry Wallace, that there was no need to be “apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority.”

Anticolonial nationalism was deemed by Churchill to be a wilful refusal of “superior science and a superior law” by lesser breeds. Accordingly, he described the inhabitants of Palestine, not keen on having their lands expropriated under a British mandate, as the “dog in the manger” who had no final right to it though “he may have lain there for a very long time.” Others, like the Iraqi Kurds, were deemed suitable for “poison gas” by virtue of being “uncivilized.”

Perhaps the most infamous 20th-century British counter-insurgency took place in Kenya, targeting “naked savages,” as Churchill dubbed the Kikuyu. The resistance that fuelled the “Mau Mau” began under a Labour government, which failed to start the decolonization process, as Ali notes, but the brutal emergency was declared in 1952, after Churchill had been returned to office. The landscape was then dotted with a network of hellish detention camps in which thousands were tortured and died; cover-ups took place, most notoriously in Hola detention camp, where 11 detainees were beaten to death.

Despite the long charge-sheet, Ali’s book is ultimately less about Churchill’s own “crimes” than an ideological cartography of the imperial-national story in which he emerges as both a leading actor and icon. In that sense, the book tries to answer the question what is Churchill, rather than laying out who he was. The book is often digressive without ever seeming irrelevant—although the reader does occasionally find themselves wanting more on the man himself.

There is undoubtedly further work and primary research to be done on excavating Churchill’s copious archives, housed at Churchill College, Cambridge. The college stands as a national memorial to the wartime prime minister, but timidity there hinders an honest engagement with history. A year ago, pursuant to ferocious media and political attacks, including from members of the Churchill family, a series intended to take a critical look at Churchill’s relationship to race and empire that I was involved in as a fellow of the college, was summarily suspended by the college administration. Speakers at an event just prior to the suspension, including me, were subjected to attacks in the media as well as threatening hate mail.

As a man who famously insisted that history would be kind to him because he would write it, Churchill would be pleased at the policed glow around his image, the “media conformity” alone being “beyond his wildest dreams.” For those of us not content with self-serving political biographies by aspirants to the dubious adjective “Churchillian,” more exacting engagements with Churchill and history remain welcome.

Priyamvada Gopal

 

Alone under siege: how older women are being left behind in Ukraine

Alone under siege: how older women are being left behind in Ukraine

With many living alone in dire conditions or unable to care for themselves, these forgotten women are among those least able to escape

Halyna Vasylivna, 94, in her tiny ‘Khrushchevka’ flat in Kyiv’s Podil district, where she lives alone. Photograph: Courtesy of Akas

Angelina Kariakina in Kyiv and Luba Kassova

Halyna Vasylivna lives alone in a tiny “Khrushchevka” flat. At 94, she has outlived her sons and her husband, and her grandchildren live outside the city.

Her apartment, named after the Soviet leader under whom the five-storey buildings in Kyiv’s Podil district were built, is too far from the bunker so she hides in her pantry during airstrikes.

Vasylivna is grateful for her social worker Olya’s visits a few times a week. She wishes she did not live alone. “It’s important to have someone who can listen to you,” she says.

Vasylivna is one of 2 million older women in Ukraine who have remained largely invisible to authorities. Most of Ukraine’s elderly people are women – they make up two-thirds of those aged over 65 and 71% of those aged above 75 – partly because Ukraine has the sixth highest proportion of women in the world.

These women are reliant on tiny state pensions (Vasylivna’s is about £130 a month), and require support from social services, charities and international institutions. They have become the group most likely to be alone, whether through mobility issues, bereavement or a reluctance to leave familiar surroundings. The lucky few get help; many do not. Ukraine’s health and social care system was already under pressure before Russia invaded in February.

I wonder why some young people evacuate their cats and hamsters, but leave their parents behind

Roman Vodyanyk, doctor

Despite progress through reforms, including decentralisation that allowed regional institutions to allocate budgets locally, an overstretched and underfunded health system is again in crisis. Ukraine’s expenditure on healthcare has declined from 7.8% of GDP in 2015 to 7.1% in 2019 (the last available data). The world average was 9.8% in 2019. Now the country is experiencing a humanitarian crisis, with dozens of accounts of rape and murder of Ukrainian elderly women – the biggest group left behind, of those allowed to leave, and least able to escape.

In Kyiv’s Holosiyevo district, there are 786 elderly people – 80% of them women like Vasylivna – alone, unable to leave their homes, and without relatives to care for them. Since Russia attacked, the number of social workers in the local centre has collapsed by more than 75%. Those women who remain are mostly elderly themselves, and now have four times as many clients to look after. They work five days a week, earning about £170 a month to supplement their small state pensions. “We need to support both our elderly clients and ourselves,” says 65-year-old social worker Nataliya Bodnar.

A door opens to the pantry where Halyna Vasylivna hides during airstrike alerts. Photograph: Courtesy of Akas

Social centre manager, Oksana Ruban, says they have faced multiple challenges. “Public transport was closed, the curfew lasted sometimes up to several days, shops closed, too. We had to make sure all of our clients were taken care of by someone – if not relatives or us, at least by neighbours or volunteers. We all worked relentlessly.”

The situation for older people is particularly acute in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions where a survey of more than 1,500 over-60s conducted in March revealed the scale of the problem: 99% do not want to leave their homes; 91% need help to get food; 91% are also experiencing extreme cold, with no heating due to electricity cuts; 75% need basic hygiene items; and 34% need urgent medication for chronic illness. These needs are exacerbated by a shortage of vital medicines and Russia destroying healthcare facilities.

“I wonder why some young people evacuate their cats and hamsters, but leave their parents behind,” says Roman Vodyanyk, head doctor at Severodonetsk hospital in Luhansk, the only functioning hospital left in the city. With no water, gas or electricity in Severodonetsk, Vodyanyk has turned the hospital, which has more than 50 patients, into a humanitarian hub, providing hot food, wifi and medical support. About 220 patients have left in the past month, but many elderly people have no desire to evacuate, with nowhere to go and no one to care for them.

“How do you evacuate a hospital in this situation? How do you leave them all behind?” asks Vodyanyk. So despite the shelling and along with local authorities, NGOs and volunteers, he is not leaving either.

Elderly people are often the forgotten category in any humanitarian crisis – an analysis of Google news search keywords between 24 February and 22 April found that 97% of all Ukraine-headlined articles that mentioned either children or the elderly were focused on children. Only 3% mentioned elderly people, of which only three touched on elderly women. Despite there being more than 50% more retirees in Ukraine than children under 15, the 390 UK NGOs operating in Ukraine are nearly twice as likely to be helping children than elderly people,

‘I didn’t believe stories of atrocities in Ukraine. But then I saw the photos’

According to Justin Derbyshire, CEO of HelpAge International, the problem is global: elderly patients’ specific needs are neglected by governments and international bodies during and after wars. “This is systemic ageism and an example of how bad the global system is at responding to older people’s needs.”

‘I would evacuate if I could take care of myself’: Vasylivna, 94. Photograph: Courtesy of Akas

Elderly people, such as Vasylivna and Bodnar, are at the centre of the crisis in Ukraine, as victims and rescuers. After a lifetime of looking after others, they are now vulnerable, not only to loneliness and hunger, but also to rape and murder.

“I’ve seen everything – the Holodomor [great famine of 1932-33], the second world war, so many horrors. What else could scare me?” says Vasylivna. She never imagined Russia would invade. It is her inability to take care of herself that scares her now. She feels trapped. “I would evacuate if I could take care of myself. I was working my whole life. It’s such a shame I can’t do anything any more.”

 How I Started to See Trees as Smart

First, I took an acid trip. Then I asked scientists about the power of altered states.

By Matthew Hutson The New Yorker

A couple of decades ago, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada, I was marching up a mountain solo under the influence of LSD. Halfway to the top, I took a break near a scrubby tree pushing up through the rocky soil. Gulping water and catching my breath, I admired both its beauty and its resilience. Its twisty, weathered branches had endured by wresting moisture and nutrients from seemingly unwelcoming terrain, solving a puzzle beyond my reckoning. I sensed a kind of wisdom in its conservation of resources. I imagined that the tree somehow wanted me to learn its lessons, to slow down and save my strength for the rest of the climb.

Later, when I told the story to a friend, she noted that I talked about sitting “with” the tree. I’d anthropomorphized it, making the tree sound like an elder or a friend. Given that I became an atheist at the age of ten, and that I always found more comfort in science than any kind of spirituality, these feelings amused me. I know that humans see intention or purposeful design in many places where it doesn’t exist. We see Jesus in pieces of toast, yell at our laptops, concoct conspiracy theories, and say that everything happens for a reason. Psychologists say that humans have “hyperactive agency detection”; psychedelic drugs probably turn up the knob.

Still, over the years, I found myself thinking about that tree. This past February, the American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted a session called Learning Without Neurons, which examined memory in slime molds, electrical circuits, and materials that learn to self-fold in various ways in response to forces. In “The Soul of an Octopus,” the naturalist Sy Montgomery compares scuba diving among sea creatures to taking LSD. “I find myself in an altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically changed,” she writes. In an e-mail, Montgomery told me that, while diving, she feels as if “the mental experience of one species is no more real or valuable than any other.” When I wrote about the biologist Michael Levin, who studies electrical signals that instruct cells to become body parts, he told me, “I look for cognition everywhere. In some places you don’t find it, but I think I see it broader than many people.” Maybe it does make sense to consider a tree’s intelligence.

A couple of years ago, I came across Diverse Intelligences, an initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation that funds research projects with names like “Brainless Intelligence” and “Play, a Computational Perspective.” (T.W.C.F. shares its founder with—and has received donations from—the John Templeton Foundation, an unusual funder of science and spirituality research that has made some scientists uneasy. In the words of one critic, “Templeton plies its enormous wealth with a single aim: to give credibility to religion by blurring its well-demarcated border with science.”) The idea of intelligence without a brain can sound mystical or speculative, but the initiative has attracted quite a lot of human intelligence—including Levin, who has appeared as a guest speaker—so I was intrigued. I applied to attend an online gathering of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which brings together scientists, philosophers, and artists interested in all forms of cognition.

D.I.S.I. helped me recognize just how many people, scientists included, have sensed a kind of intelligence in life-forms that are not usually seen as conscious or smart: cells, slimes, animal swarms, plants. In conversations with participants, I was struck by how many of these perceptions occur to people in altered states, like my younger self on LSD. We can’t always trust what we perceive while our faculties are warped, whether through meditation or medication. But sometimes, my conversations suggested, we grasp new truths.

Sara Niksic, an artist and biologist, studies whale songs. She also swims and dives in the ocean. “I kind of zone out,” she told me. “I’m in this complete meditative state. Everything else just disappears.” Immersed in a medium that transmits sound for miles, she listens, and feels a connection with the animals around her. “When I’m down there, I can imagine how it would be to be this other species, and their cognition, how they see the world through sound.”

Few people would dispute the intelligence of nonhuman animals—just ask anyone who has ever lived with a pet—but altered states lead some to see intelligence in entire living systems. Termites are smart, but so are termite colonies, capable of building elaborate mounds. When Niksic dives, she thinks about the ways that oceans connect and support life around the world, almost like one big organism. Judit Mokos, an evolutionary biologist at Eotvos Lorand University, in Hungary, similarly perceives a kind of collective intelligence, a sense that different species are working together, during her solo trips to the forest. “You are calm, and pay attention to everything, every little detail, as everything could be important,” she told me by e-mail. “It’s like being in the belly of a huge animal, and not near individual creatures. You can just feel somehow that the whole forest is one.”

The experiences with altered states got weirder from there—and some of them made me think, again, of the tree. Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist whose research at Southern Cross University, in Australia, is supported by a million-dollar Templeton grant, has made the provocative argument that plants are conscious and intelligent. In her book “Thus Spoke the Plant,” she writes that drugs inspired her to look for unstudied capabilities in plants, such as the ability to remember or to communicate through sound. “If you are opening up yourself, there’s more space to allow for strange things to emerge,” she told me. “Isn’t this what scientists should be doing? Asking strange questions and seeing what they find?” During one shamanic ritual, she said, an ingested plant seemed to tell her about the design of a new experiment. She planted pea seedlings near a fan and a source of light; even when she moved the fan and removed the light, the seedlings seemed to remember where, in relation to the wind, the light had come from. (Her results were published in Scientific Reports.) Gagliano argued that many activities—meditation, yoga, gardening, or going for a walk in a national park—can spark similar kinds of insight.

Altered states might also make us aware of intelligences within us, according to a computer scientist at a prominent artificial-intelligence lab who enjoys LSD. “Being in altered states has made me realize, to a somewhat greater extent, that the brain is a bit of a kludge,” the scientist said. “It’s lots of different modules, sort of mashed together.” Some portions of our brains seem to play games in social settings—the scientist gave the examples of a “get-people-to-like-you game” and a “be-entertaining game”—and this may become obvious to a person who’s high. “I think of human intelligence as being messier than I thought it was,” the scientist told me, and added that artificial intelligence might need to be modular and messy, too.

Why might altered states lead us to see smarts around us? Given that we learn by finding patterns in the world, one possibility is that intelligence is a kind of pattern that we’re better off imagining than missing. The world actually is full of animacy and intention—notably, in other people. There is such a thing as intelligent design—how else would we get sidewalks, skyscrapers, and spaceships?—and some conspiracies are more than theories. “It is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder,” the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie writes, in “Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.” Likewise, it is better for a hiker to mistake a tree for a friend than to mistake a friend for a tree.

Maybe altered states crank up our search for patterns. In one study, published in 2014, researchers induced awe—one of the feelings associated with altered states—by showing participants videos of the documentary series “Planet Earth.” Awe made people less tolerant of uncertainty, which made them more likely to voice a belief in the supernatural or to perceive patterns in random strings of digits. In another study, published in 2018, participants who watched an awe-inspiring video were better at inventing novel uses for a cardboard box, compared with people who did not watch the video.

If there are times when humans underestimate other intelligences, altered states could counter that bias. I try to apply the concept of intelligence generously; some might dismiss trees as little more than pieces of wood, but I now see them as problem solvers. I can look at something that is clearly not sentient, such as a mountain stream, and think of the cascading and swirling water as the result of an algorithm more efficient than a human could design. Fluid follows gravity and the path of least resistance to lower ground, taking mind-bending turns along the way.

The cognition inside living creatures, crafted through billions of years of evolution, is cause for even greater inspiration. Consider the humble housefly. It can’t complete a human I.Q. test, but its nervous system processes its surroundings and orchestrates its movements far more quickly than my system can. In the game of survival, an insect’s reaction time easily beats my attempts to swat it. I may think of myself as the smartest creature in the room, but a fly can make me look foolish.