I'll keep this short, but since I come from the home of lost causes, and you can't get a cause more lost than the Neanderthals, I'd better step up. I wish the president had chosen another target for his thoughtless adjective. He might have chosen one of any number of examples from our branch of hominids thinking rashly, impatiently, stupidly, some even in our own gloriously enlightened age, even among the intellectual demigods of our current political elite.
I don't know much about those lost cousins of ours - but I gather that their brains were larger than ours, that they survived millennia of climate change and many kinds of microbes, that they had religious and burial practices, that they had two- and three-dimensional art, music and a form of creativity deep inside the caverns of the Earth at least 170,000 years ago the significance of which we have no idea, that they cared for their elderly and disabled, that in the end they didn't become extinct because many of us carry their genes, a fact not proven until 2009, which shows how much we are still learning about them. We don't even know what form of speech they had - maybe they didn't need to talk much, being telepathic or perhaps with a different way with words and meaning anyway.
In the play I'm writing for Snapdragon, "Strangers" - they are half the strangers - we are the other half. I published a novel a year or two ago called "We Am The Song", which speculates on our shared heritage. I believe that some losers are worth respect, and a second look - but am told that that is very English of me, and that Amercians are much tougher on losers. I'm repeating the word to see how it feels, and I confess I don't like it.
Richard Posner
