Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 281

Syrian Refugees in Texas

Twelve Syrian refugees, including six children, will arrive Monday in Dallas and Houston despite Texas saying it does not want them. An additional nine Syrian refugees will arrive Thursday in Houston.

The development comes just days after Texas withdrew its request for a temporary court order that would have halted the resettlement. The state’s lawsuit against the federal government and a refugee-resettlement agency is moving ahead, however. In that suit, Texas is arguing that the Refugee Act of 1980 requires the federal government to consult with governors and mayors before relocating refugees to their jurisdictions. A judge could hear arguments in the case this week.

As my colleague Matt Ford reported last week:

States lack the constitutional mechanisms to directly bar refugees under current Supreme Court precedent. From a legal standpoint, refugees fall under immigration policy, which the Constitution exclusively delegates to the federal government, not the states. In 2012, for example, the Supreme Court struck down part of an Arizona law targeting undocumented immigrants because it conflicted with federal immigration law.

Instead, Texas is challenging the resettlement based on the language of the Refugee Act of 1980, which requires the federal government to “consult regularly (not less often than quarterly) with State and local governments and private nonprofit voluntary agencies” about the sponsorship and distribution of refugees “before their placement in those States and localities.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott began his effort to block the resettlement of Syrian refugees on November 17, just three days after the deadly Paris attacks. Those attacks were carried out by at least one person carrying a Syrian passport who was known to have crossed into Europe as a refugee. That passport was later shown to be a fake. The nearly five-year-long Syrian civil war has spawned a humanitarian crisis, killing hundreds of thousands, and creating more than 4 million refugees. The conflict has also created a brisk trade in false Syrian passports because Syrians fleeing the civil war are more likely to be given refugee status in Europe.

That process of granting asylum, as we have previously reported, is much more stringent in the U.S. than in Europe. Refugees undergo a more rigorous screening than any other visitor to the U.S. The bulk of asylum-seeker are first referred for asylum status by the U.N. U.S. officials then conduct in-person interviews in the countries where the applicants are present, and then rule on the application. The entire process—from referral to asylum—takes between 18 months and 24 months.

But the Paris attacks raised fears of similar terrorist attacks in the U.S. Governors in 30 states, besides Texas, also issued statements against Syrian refugee resettlement.

The U.S. has taken in fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees so far, of which 238 have been resettled in Texas. The overall number of Syrian refugees in the U.S. is likely to increase  to 10,000 next year.

An Opposition Victory in Venezuela

Venezuela’s opposition has won a stunning victory in the National Assembly, delivering a blow to the ruling Socialists who have controlled the chamber for almost two decades.

Tibisay Lucena, the head of the electoral commission, announced early Monday that Democratic Unity, the opposition coalition, had won 99 seats in the National Assembly. The United Socialist Party won 46; 22 seats were still to be declared, she said.

“We have come with our morality and our ethics to recognize these adverse results, to accept them and to tell our Venezuela, ‘The Constitution and democracy have triumphed,’ ” President Nicolas Maduro said on television, shortly after the results were announced.

Jesús Torrealba, the head of the opposition coalition, said: “Change has started today in Venezuela.”

The opposition’s victory comes 17 years after Hugo Chavez began the Bolivarian Revolution, a series of economic measures that led to what he saw as equitable distribution of Venezuela’s wealth. But the policies had disastrous economic results, including, in recent years, high prices and food shortages. PDVSA, the state-run oil company that was once the pride of Latin America, is now a shell of its former self, and oil production, the country’s main earner, has been in decline for years, and the global decline in oil prices have not helped.

“I always used to support the government, but not anymore,” Gabriela León, 37, told The New York Times after voting in a slum long known as a pro-government bastion. “I feel let down.”

Chavez, who died in 2013, and his handpicked successor, Maduro, blamed outside forces for the country’s economic troubles—a claim the president repeated on Monday.

“In Venezuela the opposition has not won,” he said. “For now, a counterrevolution that is at our doorstep has won.”

The opposition’s victory also marks the continued decline of left-wing parties and candidates in Latin America, who were elected in droves in the early aughts. In last month’s presidential election, Argentines elected Mauricio Macri over a candidate handpicked by Cristina Fernandez, the outgoing president who was a close ally of Chavez. In Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff is facing impeachment over a growing corruption scandal that threatens the left-leaning Workers’ Party.

The Miami Herald adds:

Some hardliners are vowing to seek a recall referendum to cut short Maduro’s term before it ends in 2019. But reining in Maduro, who became president after Chavez died in 2013, would require new laws needing at least a three-fifths majority, or 101 seats – two more than now held by the socialists. Maduro’s near-complete grip on other branches of government like the Supreme Court mean he can easily outflank a hostile congress.

The opposition, with little cash and little access to broadcast media, has struggled to compete in far-flung rural districts against the government’s campaign machine. In 2010, voting nationwide was almost evenly split yet the government ended up seating 33 more lawmakers due to Venezuela’s complicated electoral system.

A Knife Attack on the London Tube

A man wielding a knife injured two people in a London Underground station on Saturday night in what police are describing as a “terrorist incident.”

At about 7 p.m. local time, police responded to reports of a stabbing attack at Leytonstone. Video footage of the scene posted to social media shows people running away as the man threatens them. The man reportedly shouted “this is for Syria.”

The footage shows officers approach the man and use a Taser gun to subdue him. As the man is handcuffed on the ground, an officer can be seen kicking something away on the floor. A pool of blood is visible in one shot. A bystander can be heard saying, “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv,” in apparent mocking of the attacker.

A 56-year-old man was seriously wounded, but his injuries are not life-threatening. One person sustained minor injuries and did not require medical assistance, according to The Guardian.

Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command is investigating the attack.

“As a result of information received at the time from people who were at the scene and subsequent investigations, I am treating this as a terrorist incident,” said Commander Richard Walton, who leads the agency.

Here’s one witness account, from the BBC:

Witness Michael Garcia, 24, a financial analyst from Leytonstone, said he was walking along an underground passage that runs through the station when he saw people running outside.

“I realised it wasn't a fight but something more sinister,” he said.

He then saw “a guy, an adult, lying on the floor with a guy standing next to him brandishing a knife of about three inches... maybe a hobby knife”.

"It had a thin blade, but looked fairly long," Mr Garcia said.

“He was screaming ‘go on, then, run’ to everyone else. He was pacing back and forth next to the guy on the floor. He came up to the barriers.”

The stabbing attacks comes days after Britain’s Parliament voted to authorize the military to conduct airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria in response to the Paris attacks. The United Kingdom has bombed the terrorist group in Iraq as part of a U.S.-led coalition since September 2014.

The current United Kingdom threat level remains at “severe,” which means an attack is highly likely.

The Revolution Will Be Advertised

It’s been widely lambasted as one of the most “bizarre” ads in recent history. Kim Kardashian, dressed as Audrey Hepburn, rides a bicycle with a basket full of Hype energy drinks. The bike topples. Cans of Hype roll. And a knocked-out Kardashian has a dream in which she becomes another historical fashion icon, the soon-to-be-beheaded Queen Marie Antoinette. She takes a sip of Hype from a crystal goblet, and wakes up as Audrey Hepburn again.

Strange as it might seem, this commercial is just the latest in an ongoing advertising trend that wistfully evokes the opulence of the ancien régime of the deposed French Bourbon monarchy, and it speaks to more than just marketing. Economists have made much of the fact that income inequality is at a level not seen since 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. On September 4, 2013, Forbes asked in all seriousness: “Could America’s Wealth Gap Lead to a Revolt?” And the wealth gap isn’t just an American phenomenon. By the most recent estimates, one percent of the world’s population holds half of its wealth. Today, when the media throw around terms like domestic terrorism, redistribution of wealth, or the 99 percent, they’re using the language of the French Revolution.

But that language can also be visual. Over the past few years, French Revolution-inspired imagery has crept into ads for products as diverse as breakfast cereal, perfume, airlines, and, now, energy drinks. Though usually tempered by humor, these images play on fears as much as fantasies, alternately inviting consumers to identify with the angry peasants and the pampered aristocrats. The result is often advertisements that fetishize luxury and royalty, while also playing up the spirit of rebellion.

Sometimes this trend takes the form of gallows (or guillotine) humor. Take “Revolutionary Chocolatier,” a commercial for Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Chocolate Cornflakes that aired in the U.K. in 2013. In it, an unruly mob of sans-culottes sporting tricolor cockades storms the shop of an elderly chocolatier, where two aristocrats cower beneath the floorboards. One of them can’t resist digging into a bowl of chocolate cereal so crunchy that it gives away their hiding place. The ad ends with the pair of them (and the traitorous chocolatier) being carted off to the guillotine; the blade even drops in shadow.

This wry reenactment of the Reign of Terror is an exception—in most cases, the one percent is depicted more sympathetically, particularly when represented by supermodels dolled up as Marie Antoinette. Gisele Bündchen wore pearls and a pink corset to channel the doomed queen in a 2012 commercial touting Sky TV Brazil. A mob of ruffians invades the palace where she’s obsessively watching the channel, but instead of losing her head, she calmly invites them to join her, proclaiming: “Everybody has the right to watch Sky!” It’s the digital-revolution equivalent of “Let them eat cake!”—an optimistic, modern update that has a subtly political point to make: That television is a democratic medium, a great equalizer that can break down class distinctions and defuse societal resentment.

Some of music’s most successful image-makers have taken inspiration from Marie Antoinette, including Madonna, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Nicki Minaj. Indeed, Perry and Minaj took strikingly similar approaches to the 2013 ad campaigns for their royalty-themed fragrances, Killer Queen and Minajesty. In both TV spots, the singers start out in full 18th-century Marie-Antoinette garb—complete with wigs, corsets, jewels, makeup, and hoop petticoats—before they revolt, stripping off their royal regalia piece by piece as the music surges and they run away in slow motion. Neither dwells much on the tragedy of the monarch’s real-life story. Instead, they summon the spirit of the underclass and end up dressed in fetching rags (but also fetish-worthy shoes).

Perry’s version is the fiercer of the two, embracing a more subversive take. Her gown is blood red; her hair, beneath the powdered wig, is jet black. The classical soundtrack is drowned out by pulsing guitars as Perry struts through her palace, eliciting gasps from the stuffy courtiers. She approaches her throne, but instead of seating herself, the Killer Queen embraces her inner angry peasant and topples it, declaring: “Own the throne!” Of course, more generic messages underly the whole commercial—that the rules and conventions of the past are stifling, that beauty products offer a route toward independence and self-definition. In keeping with the historical angle, though, Perry’s newest fragrance is called Royal Revolution, an even richer oxymoron.

Minaj takes a more traditional, but no less paradoxical, approach. Her gown is pink, as is her hair. Soft piano music plays beneath a dreamy voice-over. She starts out in a misty forest on her way to a castle, where “she will reign forever.” The armored guards catch a whiff of her signature scent, and—voilà!—the gates are opened. Like the Killer Queen ad, it’s a fascinating conflation of two opposing fantasies: on the one hand, indulging in ancien-régime levels of luxury and power, and, on the other, harnessing the rebellious, individualistic spirit of the French Revolution.

It’s the digital-revolution equivalent of “Let them eat cake!”

Nowhere is this modern-day dilemma better expressed than in the current Air France campaign, in which the Argentine fashion photographers Sofia & Mauro tweak French institutions like the Eiffel Tower and the Folies Bergère. In the most widely circulated print ad, a model in a pink ball gown lounges in the gardens of Versailles in a business-class airline seat that’s been transformed into an 18th-century sedan chair. The message: Fly Air France, and you’ll be treated like a queen. Only, this queen wears a tricolor cockade in her hair rather than a crown, and the copy alludes to the seat’s “revolutionary comfort.” She is at once Marie Antoinette and Marianne, the patriotic female symbol of the French Republic.

In its own shallow and clumsy way, the Hype ad accomplishes a similarly improbable transformation. With her ponytail and thick bangs, Kardashian isn’t just any Audrey Hepburn; she’s Audrey Hepburn in 1957’s Funny Face, wearing the black turtleneck, capri pants, and ballet flats of the would-be Left Bank beatnik turned fashion model Jo Stockton. Circling unsteadily on her bike, smiling for the photographer, she’s perky political insurgence personified, thanks to her instantly recognizable sartorial markers. Her Marie Antoinette alter ego is equally French and fashionable, but curiously static in contrast to the playful cyclist. As she lounges on a divan, asleep, Kardashian’s Marie Antoinette is neither heroine nor villain; she’s pure icon.

Like the Kardashian of the commercial, viewers want it both ways: the perky beatnik and the aloof queen, the revolution and the comfort. And why shouldn’t they? Consumerism isn’t just for the superrich. These ads may not be a realistic approach to social harmony or fiscal responsibility, but as a way of selling stuff, they’re insightful. What Kim, Katy, Kellogg’s, and the rest understand is that the French Revolution is a powerful metaphor for the ambitions and anxieties of modern life. These consumer fantasies rewrite Marie Antoinette’s story with a happy ending; they let the masses have their cake—or cereal—and eat it, too.

Jerry Falwell Jr.'s Troubling Remarks on Guns

Liberty University’s motto is “training champions for Christ.” Apparently, the training offered by the evangelical college will now include a free concealed-weapons course for its students.

At Liberty’s convocation service on Friday, the school president, Jerry Falwell Jr., responded to the San Bernardino shooting, saying, “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.” He encouraged students to enroll in the university’s gratis certification course and said he was carrying a weapon “in my back pocket right now.” He concluded by saying, “Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here.”

Falwell’s comments are the latest in a string of proclamations by conservative Christians appealing to religious authority and yet apparently devoid of biblical reflection. Can they claim the Bible as their chief authority if they ignore it when politically expedient?

Falwell Jr. inherited the leadership of the school from his better-known father, but Liberty (my alma mater) has remained a popular stop for conservative politicians. Former Republican Senator Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, spoke in chapel prior to Falwell’s comments, which included a criticism of President Obama’s push for more gun control. While the school claims to put Jesus at the center of its curriculum, its president never referred to the Prince of Peace’s teachings in his remarks about gun violence. The absence is unsurprising. It’s hard to imagine how Jesus’s teachings could support his case.

The New Testament recounts many comments Jesus made about violence, and almost all of them seem like an outright contradiction of Falwell’s remarks. In his famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus blesses peacemakers and commends the merciful. Jesus advised people to love, not kill, their enemies and urged them not to take an eye for an eye, but rather to turn the other cheek. When he hung on a Roman cross, he did not ask his followers to arm themselves. Instead, he prayed: “Father, forgive them.”

One of the most telling stories of Jesus’s view of violence takes place during his arrest prior to crucifixion. The Apostle Peter, acting in self-defense, pulls out a sword and cuts off a Roman soldier’s ear. Jesus heals the man’s ear and scolds Peter: “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”

The challenge Falwell was ostensibly trying to address in his speech to students was this: What should Christians do in the face of terrifying violence like the San Bernardino? In the wake of the attacks, this was a hotly debated question—Christian leaders such as Russell Moore, the head of the political-advocacy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and my colleague Emma Green, argued that some were “prayer shaming” those who called for prayer for the victims. But Christians and other religious Americans have long tethered prayer to action.

For Christians, the Bible speaks to this. The Apostles James and John warn against religious rhetoric that is unaccompanied by action. Jesus himself reprimanded pious leaders of his day for being people who “preach, but do not practice.” Those who hesitate to critique prayer divorced from action should consider that Jesus did it more than once.

How do Moore and other Christian leaders account for the Bible’s coupling of prayer and action? They don’t say.

This seeming gap between conservative Christians’ political views and the teachings of the Bible is not just limited to the issue of gun control. In debates about whether the United States should accept Syrian refugees, Republican presidential candidates, dozens of governors, and Christian political organizations like the Family Research Council and American Family Association opposed admitting refugees. Franklin Graham, son of the prominent evangelist and head of Samaritan’s Purse, warned that accepting refugees would lead to an attack similar to what happened in Paris.

These Christians made arguments almost completely on the grounds of national security, despite the consensus among security experts that America’s refugee-vetting process is one of the most rigorous in the world. They failed to mention that the Bible calls for people to welcome, feed, and care for immigrants and those in need.

Sometimes the Bible does not speak directly to contemporary political issues, and in those cases, Christian have to rely on logic, history, science, and the Almighty’s good gift of common sense. But violence, and charity towards those in need, are not among those issues. One of the core doctrines held by evangelical Christians is a belief that “the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.” Conservative Christians cannot appeal to the Bible on issues like abortion, but skip over the Good Book’s teachings on other issues. Such waffling makes it difficult to take their convictions seriously and diminishes their ability to influence American politics.

Triple Suicide Bombings in Chad

Three suicide bombings at a market on an island of Lake Chad on Saturday have killed and injured dozens of people.

The exact number of victims is unclear. The Associated Press reports 27 people were killed and 90 were injured, while AFP and Reuters report 30 people killed and 80 wounded. The news outlets cite government and security officials in Chad.

The bombings were carried out by females. Most of Lake Chad is inside Chad; smaller parts of the lake fall within the borders of Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger.

No one has claimed responsibility for the explosion, but Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist group, is suspected. The group is largely based in northeastern Nigeria, but has launched attacks in Chad, Cameroon, and Niger. Last month, Chad imposed a state of emergency in the Lake Chad region, following multiple deadly suicide attacks in the area that were also carried out by female bombers.

Nigeria’s president, elected in May, has vowed to destroy Boko Haram, and the governments of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Benin have contributed troops to the cause. This week, Cameroon’s defense minister said the military had killed more than 100 members of the militant group and freed more than 900 people the group was holding hostage near Cameroon’s border with Nigeria.

Boko Haram has abducted hundreds, killed thousands, and displaced millions of people since launching military operations in 2009. The group this year aligned itself with the Islamic State, calling itself the organization’s “West African province.”

Last month, an index that tracks terrorism-related deaths designated Boko Haram as the deadliest terrorist organization in the world. The group has on multiple occasions used young girls as suicide bombers, often against their will.

The Potential Terrorism Behind the San Bernardino Shooting

Updated on December 5 at 1:30 p.m. EST

The FBI is investigating the deadly shooting in San Bernardino, California, as an act of terrorism that may have been inspired by Islamist militant groups, officials said Friday.

The shooters—a husband and wife—had turned part of their home into a bomb-making factory, and the woman had apparently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook post around the time she and her husband opened fire at a holiday party on Wednesday, killing 14 people and injuring 21 others.

“The investigation so far has developed indications of radicalization by the killers, and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations,” FBI Director James Comey said at a news conference on Friday, according to The New York Times.

David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, has said Thursday that his agency was treating the attack as “an act of terrorism.”

Investigators believe Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, 27, were not part of a larger terrorist network, and likely acted on their own accord. Facebook removed the post—which mentioned Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has declared himself the leader of the terrorist organization—the day of the shooting. Reuters reported that the Islamic State acknowledged the shooting in the group’s daly online radio broadcast on Saturday.

“Two followers of Islamic State attacked several days ago a center in San Bernadino in California,” the group said.

If investigators conclude that the shooters were inspired by the Islamic State, this week’s shooting would be the deadliest terrorist attack by Islamist militants in the United States since September 11, 2001. The assault would also be a product of the Islamic State’s latest strategy in spreading terror beyond the land it controls. As my colleague David Graham wrote Friday, “as ISIS has lost physical ground in Iraq and seen its cities pounded by airstrikes, it has shifted its tactics away from controlling territory—that is, the actual work of being a state—and begun calling on sympathizers to launch attacks in Western countries.”

The shooting occurred at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, where the county health department had rented out a conference room for its employees, which included Farook, an environmental health inspector. Farook left the event at some point, and returned with Malik at about 11 a.m. local time. They carried assault rifles and handguns and wore masks and military-style vests. After gunning down dozens of people, the couple fled in a dark-colored SUV, and were eventually killed in a shootout with police.

Most of the victims were Farook’s coworkers; the oldest was 60 years old, the youngest was 26.

Farook was born in Illinois and Malik in Pakistan. They met on a dating website for Muslims, and Malik arrived in the U.S. last summer on a visa that allows individuals to enter the country to marry American citizens. The couple had a six-month-old child and lived with Farook’s mother in Redlands, less than a 15-minute drive from where the attack occurred. Farook’s sister has called the shooting “horrific,” and her husband said he has “no idea why [Farook] would do something like this.” A relative of Malik in Pakistan told the Associated Press  that Malik had grown more religious in recent years.

Officials said the stockpile of ammunition and explosive devices discovered in their home suggested the couple may have planned to carry out more attacks. From the Times:

[Officials] found 12 completed pipe bombs and a stockpile of thousands of rounds of ammunition. … Among the components investigators seized from the couple’s house were items common to the manufacture of pipe bombs but also “miniature Christmas tree lamps.” A recent issue of Inspire, an online magazine published by an arm of Al Qaeda, included an article, “Designing a Timed Hand Grenade,” with step-by-step instructions for making a delayed igniter with a Christmas tree lamp.

Investigators also found evidence that the killers had planned the attack ahead of time:

[I}n their final days, Mr. Farook and Ms. Malik tried to erase their electronic footprints, another sign of premeditation. They destroyed several electronic devices, including two smashed cellphones found in a trash can near their home, and erased emails, officials said.

Investigators will examine the information on these devices in the coming days.

President Obama said Saturday in his weekly address that investigators are “working to get a full picture” of the killers’ motives.

“It is entirely possible that these two attackers were radicalized to commit this act of terror,” Obama said. “And if so, it would underscore a threat we’ve been focused on for years—the danger of people succumbing to violent extremist ideologies.”

The president called on Congress to pass legislation that would tighten rules governing the purchase of guns. This week’s mass shooting, he said, is “another tragic reminder that here in America, it’s way too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun.”

James Deen and 'The Big Short': The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

James Deen Was Never a Feminist Idol
Amanda Hess | Slate “‘Finding a fellow fan of your favorite performer is kinda like when you meet someone who loves your favorite band. You share a special bond and stick together like a family,’ a Deenager named Jade told me in 2012. ‘We always have each others’ backs.’ That is subversive. They are the feminist icons. As soon as these girls launched Deen to mainstream recognition, however, they were recast into minor supporting roles in Deen’s narrative.”

The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience’
Parul Sehgal | The New York Times Magazine
“But where ‘resilience’ can suggest new avenues for civic infrastructure—admitting that disaster can’t always be diverted and shifting the focus to survival strategies—it is indistinguishable from classic American bootstrap logic when it is applied to individuals, placing all the burden of success and failure on a person’s character.”

How To Read a Movie Like a Book
Bridget Read | Literary Hub
“To watch it like a movie instead of read it like a book will disappoint you, or make it seem small, which it isn’t. Such responses to Brooklyn reveal how both cinematic and literary narratives are caught up in and come up against the gendered aspects of genre, and the gendered aspects of viewing and reading.”

The Ultimate Feel-Furious Movie About Wall Street
Jessica Pressler | Vulture
“The Big Short: The Movie is a very weird product—for starters, it’s a comedy about deadly serious things and a leftish movie lionizing hedge-funders. Nor is it a solid investment, not in these distractible, budget-minded, please-everyone times. As a package, it is composed of bets upon bets upon bets.”

Review: In David Mamet’s China Doll, Al Pacino as an Urban Warrior in Winter
Ben Brantley | The New York Times
“Of the plays opening on Broadway this fall, none have had a more fraught back story than China Doll, though it was always guaranteed to be a commercial slam dunk. Mr. Mamet is one of the few living American playwrights whose names have sexy marquee appeal.”

Access Denied
John Herman | The Awl
“By giving subjects—powerful or weak—the ability to bypass organizations they used to have to work with, platforms alter the terms considerably. That’s why so many disparate media parties are descending into panic at the same time. That’s why their subjects are asserting themselves. That’s why so many professional communicators are, when it comes to their own jobs, at a loss for words.”

Is Electronic Music on the Brink of Its Grunge Moment?
Jamieson Cox | The Verge
“The people making electronic grunge are either expressing a part of their lived experience that differs from the norm or are approaching their music from the avant-garde. Their work is dependent on electronics, but it also frequently references aspects of devices and computers—their physical presences, their capabilities, the sounds they make, and heat they give off—at a deeper musical and conceptual level.”

American Untouchable
Emily Nussbaum | The New Yorker
“White-centered programs ‘imply, insinuate, suggest—and I will use this word in the special way that possibly only Negroes will understand—they signify’ that African Americans were not truly citizens. Black audiences absorbed this message, too, learning to discount their own power—their economic leverage, especially. Sidney’s speech urged viewers to demand their place onscreen. Read today, it feels like a map to a world always just beyond the horizon.”

Peterson’s Automotive Museum’s New Look Conveys a Happily Tasteless Exterior
Christopher Hawthorne | Los Angeles Times
“It would be extreme—irresponsible, really—to suggest that staring too long at the new façade of the Petersen Automotive Museum, set to reopen Monday after a $90-million makeover, might leave you cross-eyed, cause your hair to spontaneously catch fire or turn you, Old Testament style, into a pillar of salt.”

Star Wars: The Merch Awakens

The legend goes like this: George Lucas was struggling with the story for Star Wars. He knew the ideas he wanted to tackle with the series; he wasn’t exactly sure, though, how to convert them into a screenplay. Then he remembered an academic text he’d been assigned to read back in college: Joseph Campbell’s deep exploration of universal mythologies, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In a combination of procrastination and desperation that will be familiar to any struggling artist, he re-read the book. And then, suddenly—finally—he knew what he had to do: He had to narrow his epic to focus on its hero, Luke Skywalker, and the journey Young Skywalker would take. Lucas had to make Star Wars an example of what Campbell called “the monomyth.”

It was a decision that would make Campbell, not to mention Lucas and his stars and the fictive universe they created together, famous. So much so that, two generations later, anticipation for the latest Star Wars film has reached appropriately stratospheric proportions. Just one of the film’s multiple trailers has garnered 66.5 million views on YouTube. Websites attempting to sell advance tickets to the mid-December screenings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens have crashed from the influx of fans. For months, the world has been awash in Star Wars Mania.  

target.com

And yet the most striking aspect of the run-up to December 18 has been not the low-grade hum of anticipation for the new Star Wars tale, but something much more palpable: the stuff. All the stuff! So. Much. Stuff. A search for “star wars the force awakens” on Amazon will net you more than 15,500 results. (Change that to “star wars” alone, and you’ll get nearly 1.5 million.) Target has dedicated a section of its website to Star Wars merch (“here, your favorite Star Wars gear is”). Within that mini-store you can buy not just Star Wars bedding and a Star Wars-themed pizza cutter and an R2D2 thermos, but also “Chewbacca-spiced latte”-flavored Coffeemate and Yoda-branded Kraft macaroni and cheese and a can of Campbell’s ‘Star Wars Dark Side’ soup (10.5 oz, heat-and-serve, $1.04).

Which is also to say: The Star Wars universe has encroached, soup can by soup can, into the actual one. The universal story here may involve Luke and Leia and the Galactic Empire, but it involves just as much the commercial products of Luke and Leia and the Galactic Empire. Mythology and merchandising have become tied up into one another, so intricately that it is impossible to tell where the one ends and the other begins. Campbell, basically, has met Campbell’s.

Which makes Star Wars, on the one hand, like pretty much any recent Hollywood blockbuster out there, successful-at-the-box-office or sadly-not-so-much. Movies have a long and lucrative relationship with the tie-products they sell (and vice versa), such that the most blockbustery films out there are not films so much as they are, more properly, franchises. It’s product placement that treats the product in question as literally anything in the movie, from character to costume to prop. It leads to things like the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack. And the McDonald’s Minions-themed Happy Meal. And the continuing hegemony of Elsa. And on and on and on. And there’s an automation to all of it: an assumption that the stuff of the silver screen will be converted, via capitalism’s alchemy, into, simply, stuff.

Mythology and merchandising have become tied up into one another, so intricately that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

What’s remarkable about the Star Wars merchandising, though, is how extensive it is, and how tentacularly it has spread throughout all levels of the culture. Minions and McDonald’s, Batman and Target … all of that is to be expected. With Star Wars, though, the infiltration is broader. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, via their spoof Star Wars: The Farce Awakens, converted Star Wars mania into an advertisement for a totally different movie (Sisters, which also premieres on December 18). And the merch itself has gone far beyond the typical Target/Toys R Us/Burger King nexus. Neiman Marcus sells Darth Vader cuff links. Bloomingdale’s is hosting a “pop-up Star Wars store” featuring pseudo-ironic items like the American Tourister 28” Spinner Star Wars R2D2 ($199), the Limited Edition Star Wars: The Force Awakens Captain Phasma Tote ($28), and the Eleven Paris Mido R2-D2 Sweatshirt ($108).

Bloomingdale’s has also been taking Star Wars from mere fashion (tote bags, Storm Trooper t-shirts, etc.) to ... Fashion. The store is currently running a charity event, in collaboration with the organization Force4Fashion, that is auctioning off Star Wars-inspired pieces designed by the likes of Rag & Bone, Ovadia & Sonds, Timo Weiland, Halston Heritage, Diane Von Furstenberg, Todd Snyder, Parker, and Cynthia Rowley. Items up for bid include the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Limited Edition Watch by Devon (current top bid: $7,500); the Star Wars: The Force Awakens One-of-a-Kind Rey Inspired Look by Diane von Furstenberg ($750); and the Star Wars: The Force Awakens One-of-a-Kind Kylo Ren Inspired Look by Rag & Bone ($7,500).

It’s a reminder of Rodarte, which last year released its own Star Wars-inspired collection. But it’s also a reminder of how much things have changed since Joseph Campbell wrote his books and since George Lucas was inspired by them. The toys and the clothes and the home goods and the Chewie-branded Coffeemate—these are not just products. They have also become an integral part of how audiences experience Star Wars. They suggest the extent to which today’s monomyths include not just stories, but stuff. Commercial goods—monomythic merch—are now integral to the legends we tell ourselves about who we are and where we’re going. The hero may have a thousand faces; as Star Wars’s force awakens, though, a good portion of those faces may soon be obscured by the plastic Vader masks that can be had for just $12.45 plus shipping.

San Bernardino Shooting: An ISIS Link?

Updated on December 4 at 2:49 p.m.

The FBI says it is investigating the San Bernardino, California, as an act of terrorism. The development comes as multiple news organizations are reporting that Tashfeen Malik, the wife of Syed Rizwan Farook, swore allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, on the morning the couple killed 14 people at a social-services center.

“We are now investigating this as an act of terrorism,” David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said Thursday.

He said the couple had attempted to destroy their digital fingerprints. Investigators found two cell phones in a a trash can, which they have recovered and are analyzing, along with other digital equipment from the apartment Malik and Farook were renting.

Bowdich said he is aware of the reports of Malik’s Facebook post, but would not elaborate. He said he did not know at this point whether the attack was ISIS-inspired.

Unnamed federal law-enforcement officials, told The New York Times there’s no evidence ISIS directed Malik, 27, and Farook, 28, to launch the attacks.

“At this point we believe they were more self-radicalized and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting,” one of the officials told the newspaper.

The Times added: “The posting had been removed from the social media site and it’s not clear when federal authorities obtained it.”

CNN and NBC News are also reporting the Facebook posting, citing multiple U.S. officials and law-enforcement sources. One of CNN’s three sources said the Facebook account was under a different name, but the source did not specify how (s)he knew the account belonged to Malik.

CNBC quoted an unnamed official at Facebook saying a post was made from an alias account belonging to Malik as the attack commenced, but it was quickly taken down, and the company notified the FBI.

The Atlantic has not independently verified any of these reports.

Islamic militants are known to use a bayat—or oath of allegiance—to declare their fidelity to groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. ISIS, for example, has urged its supporters to record not only their bayats, but also their wills before their actions.

Investigators have publicly refused to speculate on a motive for the shooting, but have refused to rule anything out, including terrorism or whether the attack at the Inland Regional Center was prompted by a workplace dispute. The weapons, massive cache of ammunition, and pipe bombs discovered in the couple’s SUV and a home they rented led investigators to say Farook and  Malik were planning something.

“There was obviously a mission here,” Bowdich said Wednesday. “We know that. We do not know why. We don’t know if this was the intended target or if there was something that triggered him to do this immediately.”

The Times reported Friday that in the days leading up to the shooting, the couple deleted electronic information, lending credence to the idea the shooting was premeditated.

Farook was born in Illinois and Malik in Pakistan. They apparently met on a dating site for Muslims. Malik, who lived in Saudi Arabia, came to the U.S. on a K-1 fiancee visa in July 2014 with Farook, who had briefly traveled overseas. The couple was soon married. They had a six-month-old daughter, whom they left behind on the morning of the killings.

Farook had worked as an environmental engineer with the San Bernardino County Health Department for five years, inspecting restaurants, bakeries, and public swimming pools.

Officials say he had attended the health department’s holiday party at the Inland Regional Center on Wednesday, left after a dispute, returned with Malik, in tactical gear, carrying weapons and explosives, and opened fire, killing 14 people and wounding 21 others.

This is a developing story and we’ll update it as we learn more.