Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 32

The Man In the High Castle: Fake News in Nazi America

In our reality, Fritz Julius Kuhn died in 1951 in Munich, Germany, “a poor and obscure chemist, unheralded and unsung.” The former leader of an American organization that promoted Nazism within the United States, Kuhn was found guilty in 1939 of embezzling funds to spend on his mistress, and deported to Germany in 1945. But in the reality of the Amazon series The Man In the High Castle, Kuhn is an American hero. In the first scene of the second season, released in its entirety on Friday, school buses pull into Fritz Julius Kuhn High School, as girls and boys in Nazi sashes pile into classrooms. They pledge allegiance until death to the leader of the Nazi Empire, Adolf Hitler. They raise their right arms in unison and chant, “Sieg heil. Sieg heil. Sieg heil.”

It’s a scene that might have played a little differently a few months ago, before a man who tweeted anti-Semitic imagery was elected to the highest office in the land, or before video revealed a roomful of white supremacists assembled in Washington hailing President Trump with the very same language and salute. Suddenly, The Man In the High Castle has unexpected resonance. Only a few weeks after the election, Amazon was forced to remove promotional material that festooned subway cars with Nazi-American imagery, after Mayor Bill de Blasio described it as “irresponsible and offensive.”

But if the show seems newly painful, it’s also newly relevant. The first season, which debuted in 2015, was based loosely on the 1962 speculative novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick, in which the Axis countries won World War II and portioned up America. Nazi Germany controls the East Coast and Japan the Pacific states, with a kind of neutral mountain zone in the middle. In the book, a banned novel featuring an alternate history in which the Allies won the war becomes popular. In the TV show, the subversive novel is reimagined as newsreels depicting strange parallel realities, which the heroes of the show can use to influence the one they live in. But the metaphor is the same: Storytelling can change the world. Whether in print or onscreen, fictional societies are thought experiments that allow us to hold our own up to greater scrutiny—to probe its weaknesses and imagine the worst. In contemporary America, watching this dystopian fantasy of Nazi rule is as often illuminating as it’s uncomfortable.

That The Man In the High Castle is a valuable show doesn’t mean it’s a perfect one, although the second season is stronger than the first, which invested much more heavily in visuals and style than it did in story or characters. In the pilot episode, set in 1961, Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), a Nazi, infiltrated a resistance movement in New York, escaping from a shootout with a mysterious film reel. Juliana Crane (Alexa Davalos), a young woman living in Japanese-controlled San Francisco, watched as her sister was shot dead in the street minutes after she gave Juliana a similar reel. Then, Juliana’s boyfriend Frank (Rupert Evans) was tortured by the Japanese, and his sister and her children were murdered in retaliation for Juliana’s escape to the free zone.

The rest of the first season had both Juliana and Joe caught between the resistance, the Nazis, and the Japanese Kempeitai, while the Nazi and Japanese governments engaged in covert hostilities prompted by a power struggle in Berlin. But as much as the show focused on its heroes and their journeys, it delved into the motivations of the villains: John Smith (Rufus Sewell), a cruel SS officer; Nobusuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the Japanese trade minister; and Chief Inspector Takeshi Kido (Joel de la Fuente), the head of the Kempeitai. While Kido’s loyalty to Japan remained steadfast throughout (he was willing to sacrifice his own life to prevent war with Germany), Tagomi’s was more ambiguous, and at the end of the series, while meditating, he appeared to transport himself into a parallel reality where the U.S. had won the war and the Cuban Missile Crisis was ongoing.

The one figure uniting all the characters was the Man in the High Castle, a shadowy figure who was somehow responsible for the fake newsreels in circulation. The first film Juliana watched showed the Allies winning World War II; the second, at the end of the season, showed San Francisco being leveled by an atom bomb and Frank being shot in the head by Joe, wearing a Nazi uniform. The question for the second season, then, is what could such different newsreels mean? How is it possible to see these oppositional versions of reality, and how, if at all, can they be used in the present?

The noirish feel of the first season continues in Hitchcock-inspired scenes in immaculate apartments, framed by dramatic light and shadow.

None of these are directly answered, although the surprise of the first episode is that after helping Joe escape the resistance, Juliana is taken to the elusive Man in the High Castle. He’s predictably eccentric, aggressive, and obsessed with having her identify a man in one of his films—whose death seems to be directly connected with American nuclear annihilation. Although each film shows a different world with different versions of the same people—altered by the circumstances they’ve experienced—it’s apparently possible to use certain events in them to effect change in the real world. Although it’s tempting to use the proliferation of fake news as an analogy, The Man In the High Castle seems to be pointing to fiction as a metaphor, implying that speculative works that expand the scope of real-world events can be a warning of their potential consequences.

The world of the show is more vividly drawn than ever, and more stylishly rendered. The noirish feel of the first season translates into Hitchcock-inspired scenes in immaculate 1960s apartments, framed by dramatic light and shadow. The show continues to excel in regard to world-building, filling in its arresting cityscapes and period street scenes with intricate detail. The downside is that the plot is dizzyingly complicated, both on a structural level and a philosophical one. Frank is cast in a ludicrous resistance subplot that feels like unnecessary padding. Joe is sent to Berlin to meet his father, which introduces an entirely new, if intriguing, society into the show. Juliana, with both the Kempeitai and the resistance trying to kill her, seeks asylum with the Nazis, while also chasing down the one man she believes can save San Francisco.

In juggling so many stories at once, the show tends to give them all equal shrift, which means extended, tedious scenes building up conflict, and not enough analysis of how people’s lives are being affected by the various regimes. The most powerful scenes involve Obengruppenführer Smith (Sewell), who discovered in the first season that his teenage son has a degenerative disease, meaning he will immediately be euthanized by the state if they find out. His efforts to protect him, and Sewell’s forceful performance as a brutal man who also loves his family fiercely, make the character easily the most compelling in the show. But they also shed light on the unthinkable cruelty of the authoritarian state, which sometimes gets lost amid the range of characters and threads.

The show is also fascinating when it considers the power of propaganda, and how fake news has the ability to influence a nation.

The Man In the High Castle resists the urge to infer that all occupiers are bad and all Americans are faultless. Smith, an American, does diabolical things to resistance members but is humanized by his Norman Rockwell-esque wife and children. Joe, a reluctant Nazi, is a hero. One of the new characters in season two, Gary (Callum Rennie), the leader of the West Coast resistance, is sociopathically violent to enemies and friends alike. The resistance have been forced to become as uncompromising as the forces they oppose, which often puts them at odds with the show’s main characters. Tagomi, the trade minister, seems so disturbed by his current reality that he’s able to physically access an alternative one. It’s a kind of moral complexity that encourages the viewer to think about and analyze the behavior they witness rather than tacitly go along with it.

The show is also fascinating when it considers the power of propaganda, and how fake news has the ability to influence a nation. The Man in the High Castle’s films have become objects of obsession on all sides. Hitler (Wolf Muser) rages over them, refusing to let anybody watch them but himself. For the resistance, they’re messages of hope, but perplexing in their meaning. But there are also odd details: a pro-Nazi police drama called American Reich, a banned-books section that features work by Huxley and Dickens, radio stations that only play squeaky clean pop without “negro influences.” In being this self-aware about the influence of culture, The Man In the High Castle doubles down on its message that stories wield great power.

All this means that it’s frequently an interesting series rather than an absorbing one, and that it encourages a kind of detached contemplation that not many dramas can offer. It also often drags (the 50-minute episodes are notably tighter than the hour-long installments, and it could benefit from still more pruning). But its visuals—sophisticated, meticulously planned, and presumably very expensive—make up for some of the puffiness of the plot, while the thought experiment the show poses bears considerable weight. In its first season, The Man In the High Castle wondered what a Nazi America might look like. In its second, it’s wondering what might be done to stop it.

Republicans Forge Ahead With Their North Carolina Power Grab

DURHAM, N.C.—A Republican effort to handcuff incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper rolled forward on Thursday, in a day marked by somewhat acrimonious debate and fierce protests at the General Assembly in Raleigh. About 20 demonstrators as well as one journalist were arrested amid demonstrations against what liberal groups are describing as a “legislative coup.”

Cooper offered brief remarks Thursday morning, firing back at Republicans and threatening to sue over them.

“If I believe that laws passed by the legislature hurt working families and are unconstitutional, they will see me in court,” said Cooper, who is currently the state attorney general. “And they don’t have a very good track record there.”

The state senate passed a bill overhauling the state board of elections, combining it with the state ethics commission, as well as county boards of elections, by a 30-16 margin, along party lines. It’s the latest in a long-running, partially successful effort by state Republicans to rework the state’s elections system to benefit themselves. The state house passed a bill that will reduce the number of jobs appointed to the governor from 1,500 to 300, make Cabinet picks subject to state senate approval, and withdraw the governor’s ability to make appointments to University of North Carolina system boards of trustees and the state school board. (In effect, that will convert many of the political appointments made by outgoing Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, into permanent jobs.) That bill passed 70-35.

The session, complete with fervent protests, was a replay of a common scene over the last four years: Republicans in the legislature introduce a bill; Democrats argue against fiercely; a large number of protestors arrive and demonstrate; but the bills roll on with little impediment, thanks to large Republican majorities in both houses. Those majorities exist in part thanks to gerrymandered districts, some of which were so extreme that a federal court has ordered them redrawn and has shortened the terms of some legislators to a year in order to accommodate special elections in 2017.

But Republicans feel emboldened, knowing that it doesn’t matter how many hundreds of people show up to demonstrate in Raleigh, because the legislative map guarantees there’s little prospect of Democrats taking back either chamber any time soon. There is minimal pretense that the bills under consideration are anything other than an attempt to undercut Cooper. On Wednesday, the chairman of the House rules committee said they were intended to reassert legislative power, but he also admitted that they might not have happened if not for McCrory’s defeat.

It is not as if the legislature has been timid in asserting its powers, even during McCrory’s tenure. When the governor has on occasion tried to veto laws, lawmakers have been happy to override him. When he declined to call a special session this spring to pass HB2, the “bathroom bill,” they called one themselves, using a workaround. In 2014, McCrory sued after legislators asserted the authority to make appointments to certain commission. He was joined by former Governors Jim Hunt, a Democrat, and Jim Martin, a Republican, and ultimately prevailed.

Martin and Hunt on Thursday spoke out again, blasting the Republican moves as overreach. “I am very, very concerned,” Hunt told The Charlotte Observer. “I’m afraid if allowed to stand, it will result in education being much less effective in North Carolina hurting the people and economy of our state.” Martin said, “I think they’d be going too far in taking away appointments to the board of [education] and the UNC system.” McCrory has been quiet. But even if he wanted to veto the bills, the legislature could likely override him.

Instead of arguing the moves have anything other than a partisan motivation—after all, if the reforms were essential, they could have been introduced at any time over the last four years—Republicans have pointed to past moves by Democrats to seize power. In 1976, for example, Governor Hunt demanded the resignations of scores of staffers in an attempt to install his own loyalists. In 1985, during the first year of Governor Martin’s term, the Democrat-controlled legislature limited the number of appointments he could make.

With the voting arithmetic clear, and stacked against them; little factual debate over the Republican motivation; and little turf for political compromise, Democrats resorted to appeals to Republican shame and critiques of the process. They have also said they are attending the special session under protest and have challenged its constitutionality. Democrats said that the power grabs cited by Republicans were decades ago, before almost any of them were in power, and furthermore contended that Republicans had promised to curb just these sorts of abuses when they took control of both chambers in 2010 for the first time in 140 years—carried to power in part by voter disgust with Democrats’ employment of just this sort of abuse. Now, Democrats contended, the GOP had embraced the tactics they once abhorred.

“I just ask you to treat us with fairness,” said Representative Darren Jackson. Other colleagues offered variations on the old saw that two wrongs don’t make a right. Representative Mickey Michaux, one of the few legislators who was around in 1976, conceded that Republicans might have the authority to make the changes they had. “Just because you can doesn't mean you should,” Michaux scolded.

Democrats also complained that there had been insufficient time to review and debate the measures. Cooper said during his press conference that he hadn’t even had time to fully review the bills on offer. He and other Democrats warned Republicans that the session could end up like HB2, a law that was introduced, debated, passed, and signed, all within less than 12 hours. (Emails made public later suggested that McCrory did not fully understand the legislation at the time he signed it.) They also derided Republicans for bringing up the legislation at a time when lawmakers had ostensibly returned to Raleigh to pass disaster-relief bills after flooding in eastern North Carolina and wildfires in the west.

Cooper said the bills should be brought forth not “in the dark of night,” but in a standard session, when citizens and lawmakers had time to deliberate.

“We don’t want another disaster like House Bill 2,” he said. “It’s time for them to go home. Let’s stop this last-minute process that could really end up hurting North Carolinians, just like they did with HB2.”

Some out-of-state progressives took to social media to criticize North Carolina Democrats for not fighting hard enough, but it’s a mystery what methods they might use to derail the legislation. For the last four years, General Assembly Democrats have tried and mostly failed to find ways to block the Republican supermajorities. Their most potent tool, and one that some analysts credit with electing Cooper, is the vast activist base gathered under the Moral Monday banner. The protestors were out in force on Thursday. At different times, the presiding officers had both galleries cleared after members of the public cheered loudly during debate. It happened first in the senate, forcing members to take a brief break while protestors were ushered out.

Later, it happened again in the house, while Michaux was speaking. This interruption was longer, with protestors filing out but remaining outside the chamber, chanting loud enough to stall the hearing, for some time. A reporter, Joe Killian of N.C. Policy Watch, was arrested. So were about 20 other protestors who refused to leave. (Such mass arrests are a formalized process at this point; Moral Movement organizers sign up willing arrestees ahead of time, and late in the protest Thursday an organizer announced that anyone who didn’t intend to be arrested should skedaddle.)

Michaux, a fiery veteran of the civil-rights movement and friend of Martin Luther King, spoke in defense of the demonstrators, telling the chamber, “The reason I’m able to be here is because I broke the law in civil protest.”

But Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the state Republican Party, called the protestors “nuts” and demanded they denounce Hunt’s 1976 “Christmas Massacre.” Assuming the bills continue to move apace, they are likely to face legal challenges, though what those challenges might look like, where they would be filed, and what their chances are still remain too far off to predict. It’s interesting, though, that Woodhouse did not mention one important detail of that episode: Hunt’s Democratic allies in the legislature passed a law that allowed him to fire anyone hired by his Republican predecessor, a court later ruled that law unconstitutional and reinstated fired staffers. Sometimes precedents are less clear-cut than they initially appear.

The Last of the Birthers

Of everything that can be said about Joe Arpaio, the soon-to-be former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, it would be remiss to leave out persistence. He is 84 years old and has helmed the largest sheriff’s office in the state for six terms. He conducted “crime-suppression operations,” which a federal judge determined to be racial profiling, long after he was ordered to stop. For willfully ignoring that court-order, he now faces misdemeanor criminal contempt of court charges. This November, he was defeated in his reelection, but he has one last investigation to finish.

On Thursday night, Arpaio released the findings of his five-year probe into the citizenship of President Obama. In a more than hour-long press conference, Arpaio and his lead investigator in the case, Mike Zullo, who heads a nonprofit called the Cold Case Posse, a group of volunteers, presented what they said was “profound” evidence, which was “quite disturbing” and clear proof that Obama’s birth certificate from Hawaii was a “fraudulently created document.” What followed would have been comical, were the implications into what the birther movement really means not so concerning: a conspiracy elevated to a national spectacle that sought to discredit the first black U.S. president.

“I did not care where the president was born,” Arpaio said, as he began the presentation. The investigation, he said, “had nothing to do with that. But we were going to investigate a possible government forged document.”

Zullo took over and played a video that laid out the findings of two document examiners, one based in Hawaii, and another in Italy. The revelation centered on how the copy of Obama’s 1961 birth certificate matched up with another certificate, made 16 days later, by the same office. Zullo never clearly explained why the second certificate had been included in the investigation, or how Arpaio’s posse came across it. The video purported to show how the alignment of nine stampings on both certificates matched up, seemingly edited by “Photoshop, or God only knows what else,” Zullo said. The implication was that Obama’s birth certificate had been forged using this as a model.

Another unanswered thread in the presentation was the involvement of a man named Jerome Corsi, who, it turns out, has written a book about Obama’s birth certificate conspiracy. Coris has also written books claiming Adolf Hitler escaped World War II’s Allied Forces and hid in Argentina, and another about a 9/11 conspiracy.

Arpaio is the last of the birthers. Not even President-elect Donald Trump still believes (publicly) that Obama was born in Kenya, forged his birth certificate, planted a birth announcement in an August 13, 1961 issue of The Honolulu Advertiser, and duped the nation.

This September, Trump renounced his five-year quest to prove Obama was not a citizen, by saying, “President Obama was born in the United States — period."

But still, Arpaio continued.

Trump had been integral in the elevation of this conspiracy from right-wing internet forums to national media. It had surfaced in 2008, during Obama’s first campaign, and resurfaced during his reelection.

“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump asked Whoopi Goldberg in 2011 when he appeared on The View. “I wish he would because I think it’s a terrible pall that’s hanging over him... There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.”

Obama had released a version of his birth certificate four years earlier, but that did not satisfy Arpaio, nor did it appease Trump, who at the time was not politically involved. Indeed, Trump became politicized because of his incessant hounding that the president of the U.S. was born in Africa.

Let's take a closer look at that birth certificate. @BarackObama was described in 2003 as being "born in Kenya." http://t.co/vfqJesJL

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2012

For months after this, Trump crisscrossed the country and advised fellow birthers who held political office on how they might write laws to require future presidents to ante up a birth certificate. Most zealous of his followers was Arpaio. In August 2011, during the furor of birther conspiracy, Arpaio began his investigation at the behest of the Tea Party Patriots. They, in turn, were motivated to do so after listening to a speech at an Arizona chapter house given by Corsi, the conspiracy theory author. Arpaio began his investigation a week later, joined by Trump, and soon appointed Zullo to lead the investigation. Then Zullo left for Hawaii in a highly publicized attempt to drum up the real birth certificate (funded by taxpayers).

Being an election year, it played well for Arpaio, who at the time was under federal investigation for racial profiling. In fact, Arpaio made it a habit to plan birther press conferences ahead of potentially negative announcements in his case. These seemed to serve both as a means to direct attention away from the federal investigation into his department, and also to pad his reelection campaign with millions of out-of-state donations. “We feel that that document is a forgery,” Arpaio had said. “We’re trying to figure out who did it. That’s good police work.” And more money came in.

In a July 2012 birther press conference, Zullo laid out the investigation and the 10 days he and others spent in Hawaii. Over the course of an hour, Zullo recounted a rabbit hole of conspiracies, buttressed only by a 95-year-old woman, a former registrar, who said the numbers on Obama’s birth certificate seemed to be inconsistent. With that, and because Hawaii officials would not let Zullo examine the original copy of the certificate, Arpaio declared it a phony.

Four years passed, and about every politician, including Trump, has cast off the birther claim for what it is.

Arpaio, if anything, has been persistent. But he has also been masterfully duplicitous when it comes to working the media. In the 90s, he reinstated chain gangs and forced prisoners to dress in pink underwear. It became a media spectacle. He later learned that if he repeated rumors to reporters that he’d  been placed on a Mexican cartel hit list, and questioned the illegitimacy of the first black U.S. president, people paid attention. The press raised his political profile. And because a good conspiracy is inherently unprovable, he never let down those supporters who loved him for it. It made sense, then, that he and Trump became such perfect bedfellows.

Arpaio praised Trump this summer at the Republican National Convention, and it even looked like he might receive a cabinet position. But those spots are almost filled, and the criminal case against Arpaio is ramping up. In two weeks he will be out of a job. It was a perfect time for another birther press conference.

Barry Is an Obama Biopic for an Uneasy Moment

The first of this year’s two “Young Barack Obama” biopics, the summery, sweet Southside With You, was a paean to the outgoing U.S. president’s optimism and charm, a date movie about him wooing his future wife (and, by extension, the viewing audience). The second entry in this unexpected mini-genre is Barry, debuting Friday on Netflix, and it’s a far moodier project about a much less self-assured protagonist. If Southside With You was ideal pre-Election Day viewing for the president’s fans, a gentle celebration of Obama’s transformative legacy, Barry is a more suitably uneasy film for an uneasy time.

The titular hero of Vikram Gandhi’s film still goes by “Barry,” one of the many ways the 20-year-old Obama endeavored to fit in as a younger man. A junior who has just transferred to Columbia University, Barry (Devon Terrell) is roiled by his confused sense of racial identity. Adam Mansbach’s script tweaks many real-life incidents from Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father to fit into a transformation narrative, so the film portrays a sort of curious nexus point that pushes Barry toward his more assured adulthood. Like Southside With You, the film is sometimes too cute for its own good, but it tries to avoid making too many obvious winks to the camera about Obama’s future, instead rooting itself in his uncertainty.

It is 1981, after all, an uncertain time for the still fiscally unstable New York City. Barry, after a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and two years at college in Los Angeles, has arrived at Columbia an unsettled, slightly timid, but obviously brilliant student. A debate in a philosophy class ends with a white student sighing and rolling his eyes when Barry invokes the legacy of slavery, accusing him of cheap identity politics. When Barry tries to join a pickup basketball game in Harlem, the other African American players eye him warily. Gandhi punches his point home early and often—here is a man caught uneasily between two worlds, not yet gifted with his vaunted communication skills or a sense of what he wants to do with his life.

“Politics is bullshit!” he tells his new girlfriend Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy), a fictional character clearly based on a real-life romance from his Columbia days. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” she asks incredulously. “I mean, come on, the president’s an actor,” he scoffs about the country’s new leader Ronald Reagan. “So how does change happen, then?” she retorts. “Or do you not believe in change, either?”

It’s moments like this, when it feels like Barry’s script is excitedly nudging the audience in the ribs, that the film loses its luster. The idea of an Obama biopic coming out while the president is still in office already feels silly; drawing attention to these ironic moments is nothing short of obnoxious, upsetting an otherwise muted tone. Thankfully, Barry does not delight in watching its hero behave in various un-presidential ways—his smoking, bad language, and occasional drug use feel as unremarkable as they should for a 1981-set drama about a 20-year-old man trying to find his way in the world.

Much as with Southside With You, Barry is buoyed by its tremendous lead performer. Terrell somehow manages to meld a (subtle) Obama impression with an actually textured piece of acting, successfully straddling the line between person and myth. The ensemble around him is similarly grounded—Taylor-Joy (who made her name in The Witch earlier this year) is a delightful romantic foil, a difficult task given that viewers know the future of Obama’s love life. Jason Mitchell (Straight Outta Compton) is terrific as a charismatic friend who acts as Barry’s guide to Harlem. Ashley Judd drops by for an extended sequence as Barry’s free-spirited, fearsomely intellectual mother Ann Dunham, sparking the best moments of the movie.

Barry is an origin story for Obama’s insightfulness.

Barry is grappling not just with his own sense of identity but with the absence of his father, a man he met only once as a child. He’s still far from the understanding that led him to write Dreams From My Father, where he reckoned with the life of the Kenyan academic who gave him his name but left Obama’s mother when he was only two years old. Barry is far angrier about the incomplete legacy Barack Obama Sr. left him with, and grumpily takes it out on his mother. In Barry’s most fascinating scene, the two go to see Black Orpheus, a 1959 French film that his mother admired and that Obama wrote about watching with her.

Ann’s obvious fascination with the “childlike” African characters in the film both interests and depresses Barry, granting new (and perhaps unfair) insight into what drove her relationship with his father. It’s an intriguing look at Barry’s sense of isolation even from his own family, and the complex racial dynamics of his upbringing that he’d never stop analyzing. Judd makes Ann a formidable, likable personality without hiding her obvious blind spots; she can opine on upending gender binaries to Charlotte and then give a corny “right on, brother!” to a street musician singing “This Land Is Your Land.”

It’s those moments, and the quiet honesty Gandhi finds in them, that make Barry interesting viewing no matter what your level of interest in the president. Considering that Obama’s future is so well known, it’s amazing how adeptly the film dramatizes the uncertainty of 1981, not only for its protagonist, but also for America, of which Barry, in all his confusion, is strangely representative. If Southside With You was a celebration of Obama’s magnetism, Barry is an origin story for his insightfulness, and for his unique perspective as a citizen of a country that both welcomes and repels its outsiders, now as much as ever.

Why Did California Police Shoot a Grandfather Holding a Crucifix?

Just after midnight on Monday, police in Bakersfield, California, responded to a call that a man was wandering around a neighborhood holding a gun. When officers arrived, they found 73-year-old Francisco Serna, a grandfather suffering from sleeplessness and signs of dementia. Serna did not make any hostile movements, but when officers asked him to remove his hand form his pocket, he refused. Police shot him seven times. By Tuesday night, the Bakersfield Police Department (BPD) revealed that Serna was not holding a gun, but a “a dark colored simulated woodgrain crucifix.”

Serna’s death has led to protests and candlelight vigils outside his house in Bakersfield, an inland city two hours north of Los Angeles. It was the 45th police shooting in the U.S. this year of an unarmed person, and, more specifically, the latest in what is in one of the deadliest counties in the country when it comes to shootings by officers. On Wednesday, Serna’s family demanded an independent state and federal investigation. “Our Dad was treated like a criminal,” the family said in a statement, “and we feel like he was left to die alone without his family by his side.”

The statement was released the same day as Lyle Martin was sworn in as the BPD’s newest police chief. He is off to a trying start. The Guardian, in an investigation last year, called the police departments in Kern County places where “deputies dole out tough justice.” This year two detectives pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges for stealing methamphetamine from drug dealers, then selling it. Martin’s task is to turn the department around.

The events that led to Serna’s death began at 12:30 a.m. Monday, when a woman arrived home and Serna approached her. The woman was unpacking items from the car, and Serna, who was acting strangely, asked why she was at her house, Martin later said at a press conference. Serna’s family said he often had trouble sleeping, and that he took long walks late at night to tire himself. He’d also shown early signs of dementia starting in 2015, sometimes suffering delusions, which had become much worse in the last month. The woman later told officers she saw Serna gripping something in his pocket, ran inside, and called police. BPD released the audio from that call, which The San Francisco Chronicle detailed like this:

First, a boy can be heard saying, “There’s a man outside my house with a gun.”

Then, his voice is replaced with a deeper one. That person told police that a “Mexican gentleman” in his late 60s outside their house was in possession of a revolver and was “brandishing it at women outside.”

When asked by the dispatcher about the gun, the man said, “It looked like a revolver.”

This was the second time police had been called to the neighborhood in a day. At about 4 p.m. on Sunday, one of Serna’s neighbors reported that the man had been banging on his doors and windows. When the person answered the door, Serna tried to pull the resident out, Martin said. Serna’s family told the Los Angeles Times they’d bought him a medical alarm, and officers had responded twice before when Serna became confused and activated it.

When police responded that second time Monday, the officers took cover and demanded Serna take his hand out of his pocket. When he did not, from about 20 feet away, Officer Reagan Selman shot Serna seven times. Serna died in front of his home. A search of his body, and of his house, turned up no guns.

Selman and six other officers who were at the scene have been placed on routine administrative leave.

Criticism of the shooting has focused on many of the same issues other departments in the U.S. have been criticized for: the officers too quickly resorted to deadly force; possible racial profiling; and poor training and lack of preparation to intervene with people who may have mental-health issues. While these may be common problems in departments all over the country, Bakersfield and the county it lies in have struggled in particular.

In 2015, police killed 14 people in Kern County, which has a population of 875,000. As The Guardian pointed out, officers in New York City, with a population 10 times the size, killed 10 people last year. Of the many issues raised by the report, one of the more concerning was that investigations into shootings were regularly conducted by the officer’s colleagues, a policy the newspaper said led to an environment of impunity.

Police in Bakersfield, CA shot and killed #FranciscoSerna, a 73-year-old Great-Grandfather who was unarmed https://t.co/n5NM4ISFwW @vicenews pic.twitter.com/XRqVpVBttz

— Tess Owen (@misstessowen) December 14, 2016

Even as Martin takes over the department, faith leaders and community activists are wary. Some say they still don’t trust the new administration to conduct a fair investigation, and they’re hoping the federal authorities step in—as they have in other parts of the country.

At the vigil outside Serna’s home on Tuesday, Joey Williams, the director of a nonprofit aimed at reducing violence in Kern County, said, "We’re not against the police. We want every officer to come home safely, but things need to change. Enough is enough.”

Rogue One and the Challenge of the New(ish)

Not long after Disney acquired the Star Wars universe in 2012—insert evil empire joke here—the studio announced that in addition to the sequel trilogy that began with last year’s The Force Awakens, it would produce occasional “anthology” films. Though set in the same cinematic universe, these stories would not be tied directly to the characters and story arc of the new and original trilogies.

How this would work in practice was always a bit of an open question, and now, with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, we have the beginnings of an answer. The movie, directed by Gareth Edwards (Godzilla), is largely free of the weight of myth and expectation that were borne by The Force Awakens, and this turns out to be both a good and a bad thing.

The story takes place more or less immediately before that of the first Star Wars film (and yes, by this I mean George Lucas’s 1977 original). The Empire is in the final phase of building a super-weapon capable of crushing the Rebel Alliance, even as the Alliance itself is fragile and indecisive, riven with disagreements over means and ends. One radical leader, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), has broken altogether with the other rebels and is conducting his own small-scale insurgency against the Empire on the desert moon of Jedha.

As it happens, years earlier Gerrera had rescued a young girl, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), when her father was captured by the Empire. Said father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), was a preeminent scientist whose skills were needed in order to construct the aforementioned super-weapon… Okay, fine, it’s the Death Star. As if you hadn’t figured that out already. After Jyn receives a hologram message (yep, that old saw) from her captive father, it becomes clear that the rebels’ only hope is to get their hands on the plans to the Death Star. That way, they can find any hidden weakness that might—oh, let’s just say for the sake of argument—render it vulnerable to a single, well-placed proton torpedo shot.

The bulk of Rogue One’s plot, about which I won’t say more, concerns Jyn’s efforts to verify her father’s message and acquire the Death Star plans. In this, she is assisted by a motley group consisting of Rebel intelligence agent Cassian Andor (Diego Luna); his reprogrammed Imperial enforcer droid, K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk); a blind warrior-monk, Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen); his shaggily martial companion, Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen); and a former Imperial pilot, Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), who has defected to the rebels.

Is that an awful lot of new characters to keep track of? Yes it is, and Rogue One largely fails to establish them as distinct and three-dimensional. Jones and Luna are both intriguing in the principal roles, but their backstories are scant, and the central relationship between the two is never adequately developed, a shortcoming that becomes more significant as the film cycles toward its somewhat surprising conclusion. Among the lesser roles, Hong Kong action star Yen has some good moments as a monk trying desperately but unsuccessfully to connect with the Force, and Tudyk is customarily droll as K-2SO, the saucy droid whose rebel reprogramming has resulted in his saying “whatever comes into his circuits.”

On the Imperial side of the ledger, Ben Mendelsohn is a nefarious pleasure as Orson Krennic, the head of Imperial weapons research, alternating, depending on his audience, between preening malevolence and groveling toadiehood. A couple of old friends return as well, including Grand Moff Tarkin, who is creepily played by a CGI version of the original actor, Peter Cushing, who passed away in 1994. Whatever one’s thoughts on the tastefulness (or lack thereof) of this particular “casting” decision, it’s a gimmick that wears exceedingly thin over the multiple scenes in which Tarkin appears.

Conceived primarily as a war movie rather than a Chosen One fable, Rogue One has a different story to tell.

The movie’s relatively shallow characterizations are in part a byproduct of the overall pace of the script (by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy), which leaps from planet to planet and battle to battle with dizzying velocity: from Jedha to the rainy crags of Eadu to the beachfront Imperial HQ of Scarif. (Not to mention a trading post in deep space, the rebel base on Yavin 4, the Wobani Imperial Labor Camp…) Anyone who, like me, has ever over-planned a family vacation will be familiar with the sensation that perhaps, ultimately, there was one stop too many.

Taken individually, however, Rogue One’s stops rarely disappoint. The action sequences are vivid and kinetic, and the effects first-rate. Of particular note is an early test of the Death Star that is all the more stunning—equal parts beautiful and horrifying—for being limited to a pinpoint attack. From that designated ground zero, the ground itself ripples outward like the surface of a lake shivering in the aftermath of a powerful splash.

In many respects, the contrast between Rogue One and The Force Awakens is illustrative. Several of the protagonists of the latter film were variations on familiar themes: Rey a female Luke, Kylo Ren an adolescent Darth Vader, and Han Solo, well, an aging Han Solo. To some degree, we already knew them, or at least the tropes from which they were assembled. Moreover, they were embedded in a well-established story arc involving themes both large (the multigenerational saga of the Skywalker clan) and small (gaining knowledge of, and skill with, the Force).

Conceived primarily as a war movie rather than a Chosen One fable, Rogue One has a different, and somewhat more impersonal, story to tell. None of its protagonists are discovering hidden blood relatives or training to be Jedi masters. Because it stands on its own, the movie does not labor under the expectations of The Force Awakens, but it also lacks the mythology to lean on. (In this, it is not unlike another recent spin-off of a beloved series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.)

With the clash between Light and Dark sides of the Force relegated to the margins, Rogue One is a story more often told in shades of gray. Jyn is initially reluctant to join “the Alliance, the rebels—whatever you’re calling yourself these days.” And who can blame her? They’re a bickery crowd that includes radicals and cowards alike, and they’re not above performing ugly acts in service of the cause. At one point Cassian confesses, “We’ve all done terrible things on behalf of the rebellion”—and indeed, we’ve witnessed one such act on his part and the preparation for another. There are compelling themes of remorse and redemption here, and it’s a shame they weren’t developed further.

Which might also be said of Rogue One more broadly. Despite many promising elements, the overall enterprise is somewhat wobbly, like a calf emerging from its mother’s shadow. These are the risks and rewards of trying something new (or new-ish): Rogue One is neither as good as a good Star Wars movie nor as bad as a bad one.

The Ugly Manipulations of Collateral Beauty

Collateral Beauty is a movie that insists grief can be beautiful. In the service of this extraordinarily bland, empty message, it takes the subject most likely to provoke an emotional response—the death of a child—and treats it cheaply, employing pseudobabble, chicken-soup-for-the-soul platitudes, and naked manipulation to tug at its audience’s heartstrings. It’s transparently cynical, with no apparent endgame in mind other than simple profit.

That it’s able to waste such a fleet of capable actors and such elegant cinematography in the process is its main achievement. In the movie’s opening scene, Howard (Will Smith) is an ad executive feted as a Steve Jobs-ish “resident poet-philosopher of product,” who insists to his team in an excruciating kind of internal TED Talk that advertising is in no way about selling things. It’s about improving people’s lives. The three fundamentals, he explains, are love, time, and death, which people crave, want more of, and fear, respectively.

Three years later, Howard has descended into a catatonic state of grief after the death of his daughter. He’s returned to work only to spend his time building increasingly complex structures out of dominoes (what this repetitive action is a metaphor for is nebulous at best). His three partners in the firm, hoping to sell it and cash out on their shares but impeded by the fact that he’s the major shareholder, come up with a plan to have him rendered mentally incapacitated. First, they have him tailed by a private detective (Ann Dowd, wasted in this role). Then, when they find out he’s writing impassioned letters to Love, Time, and Death that he drops into a mailbox, they hire three actors to play those roles, accosting Howard in public places in the hope that they’ll provoke a response that will prove he’s out of his mind.

The remarkable cruelty of this plan is noted only by one of the partners, Claire (Kate Winslet), while the others (Edward Norton and Michael Peña) don’t seem particularly concerned about gaslighting their best friend and former mentor while he’s still coming to terms with the worst experience of his life. Death (Helen Mirren) harasses Howard on a park bench. Time (Jacob Latimore) visits him at the office. Love (Keira Knightley) interrupts his meal at a diner. Dowd’s private detective films all the increasingly aggressive confrontations for legal purposes. In the meantime, Howard visits a grief counseling group led by Madeleine (Naomie Harris), where he tries to accept the fact that his daughter is really gone.

Collateral Beauty was directed by David Frankel, who helmed the similarly treacly Marley and Me, not to mention One Chance, a dramatized retelling of the rise of Paul Potts, the 2007 winner of the reality show Britain’s Got Talent. Written by Allan Loeb (Just Go With It), it was originally going to be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) starring Hugh Jackman and Rooney Mara, but Gomez-Rejon left the project after Smith was cast, citing creative differences.

That likely explains why the movie is so tonally inconsistent: Smith gives a performance that implies he’s fishing for serious-actor trophies, while Norton, Winslet, Mirren, and Knightley seem like they’re in a quirky, Birdman-esque comedy about death. Brigitte, Mirren’s gloriously loopy actress, raves about the notes of Grotowski and Stella Adler in her own performance as Death, while Norton is so casually awful in a Silicon Valley way (he notes at one point how ungrateful Howard was about the ayahuasca shaman he shipped over from Peru) that it’s hard to believe he’s taking things totally seriously.

That’s not to say that Smith is bad, simply that he seems to think he’s in a different movie. In Howard’s silent scenes his physicality is tense, with his features set into a semi-permanent grimace; when his character has something to say, he’s quietly understated in communicating the depths of his grief. The plot to have him undermined professionally by his three closest friends, though, is as manipulative and ill-conceived as the movie’s attempts to wring profundity from its ludicrous philosophizing. Its message that time is abundant comes through in the glacial pace of its one hour 36 minute running time, but its Hallmark wisdom about the collateral beauty to be found in the kindness of strangers (or something) remains elusive, even as Howard’s path feels inevitable. That actors this gifted (Winslet and Mirren particularly) can’t disguise what a confused, contemptuous product they’re in isn’t on them; rather, it’s a tragedy something this hollow was made in the first place.

North Carolina Republicans Try to Curtail the New Democratic Governor's Power

DURHAM, N.C.—With a Democratic governor scheduled to take the reins in Raleigh on January 1, Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly are taking advantage of an emergency session for disaster relief to bring forward a raft of bills designed to sharply curtail the governor’s power.

Among the bills introduced on Wednesday are measures that would make Cabinet appointees subject to state senate approval, remove the governor’s power to appoint trustees of the University of North Carolina system and the state board of education, and eliminate other gubernatorial appointments.

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Another bill would overhaul the state’s elections boards, the latest in a long series of steps Republicans have taken to alter the voting process in the state, many of which have been turned back by federal courts. Others steps would slash currently required environmental reports and reduce regulation elsewhere.

It’s a brazen and unabashed attempt to undercut the Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor-elect, in the wake of a hard-fought election that spilled well into December when Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, refused to concede and challenged results in several counties. Voting on the bills will start Tuesday, though it’s unclear whether all of them will move forward. Republicans hold large majorities in both houses of the legislature, making it difficult for Democrats to stop the bills. Even if only a few are passed, it will be the latest trick from a legislature that has proven to be one of the most ingenious and powerful in the country since a Republican takeover in 2010. The North Carolina NAACP, which organized the influential Moral Mondays protests, has called for a major demonstration Thursday morning. Legislators could also amend the bills later in the process, tucking other measures into them.

Special sessions have proven to be a playground for mischief this year in North Carolina. In March, there was HB2, the “bathroom bill” that divided the state and created national headlines. This week, legislators returned to Raleigh for a special session billed as being about disaster relief for residents hit by flooding after Hurricane Matthew or wild fires in the western part of the state. For days ahead of the session, rumors flew that Republicans would attempt to pack the state Supreme Court, which has a 4-3 Democratic edge following November’s election, by adding two new justices, to be appointed by McCrory. On Tuesday, the rumors reached such a pitch that Dallas Woodhouse, the colorful executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, issued a blistering statement attacking reporters for even mentioning the rumor.

On Wednesday, the General Assembly wrapped up its disaster-relief. Then Republican leaders suddenly announced that they would adjourn the special session and then promptly reopen a second special session. They said they wanted the session to be separate from the disaster-relief work, but wouldn’t say what they intended to consider during the additional session. While a governor typically calls a special session—as McCrory had for disaster relief—legislators used the same obscure maneuver they did when they passed HB2, calling themselves back into session with the support of three-fifths of legislators. House Speaker Tim Moore said the decision to open the second special session had been made only Wednesday, a lie that was quickly revealed by the list of signatures from legislators needed to call the session, dated December 12. Furious Democrats announced they were challenging the constitutionality of the new session.

In total, the bills on offer would reduce the number of appointments available to Governor Cooper to 300, a steep reduction from 1,500 for McCrory. The governor previously appointed 400 people, before Republicans increased that number to give McCrory more latitude.

The deregulation bill includes an olio of measures, from eliminating car-emissions testing in some counties to ending some state environmental reports. In lieu of packing the court, another bill would remove the ability to make a direct challenge on a constitutional matter to the state supreme court, sending them first to a state appeals court. Legislators also want to make state supreme court elections, which are currently nonpartisan, into partisan races, apparently in the belief that Mike Morgan, a Democrat, would not have defeated Justice Robert Edmunds, a Republican, if he’d had a (D) next to his name. As Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine, points out, the state supreme court may also be called on to resolve legal challenges to any law that is passed.

While the moves to limit the governor directly may be the splashiest, the changes to the state boards are worthy of note. North Carolina’s somewhat idiosyncratic structure for the boards reached national consciousness this year, as Governor Pat McCrory and his allies challenged his narrow loss to Democrat Roy Cooper, the current attorney general. The election ended only in early December, with McCrory’s concession. Currently, every county election board consists of three members, two belonging to the governor’s party and one belonging to the minority party. The State Board of Elections has five members, three from the governor’s party and two from the opposition party.

Under the bill offered Wednesday night, the state board would be overhauled into an eight-member panel, with four representatives from each party—two of each appointed by the governor, and one from each party appointed by both the speaker of the house and the president pro tempore of the senate. The board would also require six votes to move on anything, likely ensuring frequent deadlocks. Moreover, the opposition party would chair the board in even-numbered years—in other words, Republicans would control the board during congressional-election years.

County boards would expand from three people to four people, two from each party. The bill would also merge the State Ethics Commission with the elections board.

It’s a ingenious political maneuver, because it allows General Assembly Republicans to paint the overhaul as bipartisan. That’s not exactly wrong, but it is extremely cynical, a critique that can be extended to many of the bills. If bipartisan boards of elections are a good idea, they were presumably an equally good idea in 2013, when McCrory took over the governorship. The same is true of Senate approval for Cabinet appointments, or reducing gubernatorial appointments. It’s also true of the appeals process, before Democrats won control of the state supreme court.

Seeking precedent, Woodhouse reached back to a 1976 power grab by Governor Jim Hunt, a Democrat. The chairman of the House Rules Committee, Representative David Lewis argued it was simply a rebalancing.

“I think to be candid with you, that you will see the General Assembly look to reassert its constitutional authority in areas that may have been previously delegated to the executive branch,” he told reporters. But Lewis also admitted, “Some of the stuff we’re doing, obviously if the election results were different, we might not be moving quite as fast on, but a lot of this stuff would have been done anyway and has been talked about for quite some time.”

Democratic Representative Darren Jackson was having none of it: “This is why people don’t trust us. This is why they hate us,” he said.

North Carolina Republicans have taken every opportunity they can to tinker with the state’s voting rules. In 2013, they passed a sweeping overhaul of voting laws, described by some experts as the most aggressive in the nation. It required voters to show ID when voting, cut back sharply on early voting, and eliminated same-day registration, among other measures. They cited the threat of voter fraud, though repeated efforts have failed to show widespread fraud. But a federal court struck most of the law down in July, saying the law had been designed to disenfranchise minorities. When McCrory came up short in November, Republicans insisted that fraud was to blame, and mounted a series of protests—most of which were rejected by Republican-led county elections board. The state did order a recount of votes in Durham County, which produced little change in the final tally.

By winning control of the legislature in 2010, Republicans also won control of the redistricting process that followed that year’s Census. They produced a map that was favorable to Republicans—a standard partisan move for either party. But they went too far. Federal judges ruled that the state’s congressional districts and state legislative districts represented unconstitutional gerrymanders. In late November, a panel of judges ruled that the state must hold special off-year elections in 2017 to correct those gerrymanders, and it ruled that legislators elected this year in unconstitutional districts will serve only a single year.

The current state legislature may be the product of unconstitutional gerrymandering, but its Republican majorities don’t have any intention of letting that stand in the way of a huge, 11th-hour legislative burst for partisan benefit.

The Pathos of El Faro's Final Hours

Few forms of literature carry quite the mix of feelings that a National Transportation Safety Board docket does. The federal commission produces reams and reams of evidence on each accident it investigates, much of it rendered in dry, technical language and buttressed by pages of mechanical data. But these reports also tell the story of people’s deaths, sometimes in excruciating detail.

On Tuesday, the NTSB released a transcript of audio recordings from the bridge of El Faro, the freighter that sank near the Bahamas in October 2015, after sailing into Hurricane Joaquin. Over more than 500 pages of transcript, the ship’s sinking unfolds. Anyone reading it knows from the start it will end with the deaths of all 33 sailors aboard. But the characters in the drama don’t know of their impending fate until the last moments, though some of them clearly had their hesitations. Although the NTSB redacts conversation that isn’t pertinent, the transcript captures small talk that lays bare the crew’s hesitations, the captain’s frustrations, and the day-to-day tensions in any workplace.

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The NTSB has not yet drawn any conclusions about why the freighter sank. Such sinkings are extremely rare today. But the boat sailed directly into the path of the hurricane, and the recordings, as well as previously known phone calls that Captain Michael Davidson made to land, show that the vessel began listing and was taking on water, and that El Faro lost power before sinking. Davidson gave the order to abandon ship, but the sailors, equipped with life vests, immersion suits, and open life rafts and open lifeboats, must have stood little chance in the middle of a howling hurricane. Although rescuers spotted what they believe was one body in an immersion suit, they were unable to recover it, nor were bodies of any of the other sailors found.

As the drama opens, it’s 6:35 a.m. on September 30, and Davidson and Chief Mate Steven Shultz are discussing what course to pursue as they head north, toward the hurricane. They puzzle at the storm’s name. Davidson had been a captain for 10 years and worked at Tote Marine, El Faro’s owner, for three. Shultz was new to the boat, having arrived in August.

“Should I be scared?” Shultz asks. There’s no clear answer. It’s one of the many moments of foreshadowing in the transcript. A few minutes later, Davidson looks up. “Oh, look at that red sky over there,” he says. “Red in the morning, sailors take warning. That is bright.” They chat about ways to skirt the storm, and Davidson chuckles at nervous types who might be worried.

Later that morning, Third Mate Jeremie Riehm is chatting with another sailor on the bridge. “We’re gonna get slammed tonight,” he warns. They keep talking, as Riehm complains about staffing issues on the boat and the impossibility of getting competent electricians to join the crew. The sailor agrees, but adds that El Faro’s current crew is one of the more competent and less tension-ridden ones he’s worked on. “This is just a breath of fresh air from what I'm used to,” he says.

Around 9:20 a.m., the captain is back on the bridge. “This ship is solid, it’s just all the … associated bits and pieces … . The hull itself is fine—the plant, no problem,” he says. “We’re gonna make it, we’re gonna make it.”

An hour later, Riehm and the sailor chat about the shock that early Spanish sailors crossing the Atlantic must have felt at discovering hurricanes, and the impossibility of explaining them to people back home. “Yeah, they said no one believed ’em– the survivors that told ’em about it in Spain—they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. We know what storms are.’ No, you don’t know what this storm’s like or even what this is.”

Just before noon, Second Mate Danielle Randolph is speaking with a sailor on the bridge. They discuss why the ship is headed off course, and question Davidson’s decision. “Think he’s just trying to play it down because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way,” she says. A few minutes later, another possibility enters into play: pressure to arrive at a certain time. “Who cares what time we get there as long as we get there?” Randolph says. Around 3:30 p.m., the pair discuss El Yunque, a sister ship that was steering away from the storm.

“Nobody in their right mind would be driving into it,” the sailor says.

“We are,” Randolph says, to laughter. “Yaaay!”

Pressure to complete the journey quickly has emerged as a common theory for why El Faro headed right into the teeth of the storm. Davidson’s friends and family have said he was a conscientious, safety-minded sailor, citing an incident during his tenure at a previous company when he had refused to sail a ship he thought wasn’t seaworthy, setting off a quarrel with management. But that incident might have cut both ways. Davidson was no longer so young, and he was hoping for promotion to a newer, fancier boat, Rachel Slade reported in a definitive piece in Yankee in September. “He interviewed for the position in May, and was awaiting an answer when he arrived in Jacksonville in September,” Slade wrote. “If Davidson didn’t get the promotion, he would probably follow the old boat through the Panama Canal back to Alaska, where it was slated to do the Northwest route once again.”

What Davidson didn’t know is that Tote, the company that owned El Faro, had already decided to install younger captains on the new ships, Slade wrote. He might have been hoping to impress Tote, not knowing it was too late. His apparent frustrations with management show in a conversation with Randolph, the second mate, around 2 p.m. He explains that he’s asked the Tote office for permission to change course.

“It used to be just, ‘We’re doing it. You people are sitting in your office behind a desk and we’re out here—we’re doing it,’” Randolph says.

“Well I’m extending that professional courtesy because it does add a hundred and sixty nautical miles to the distance,” Davidson replies.

That 160-nautical-mile figure seemed to haunt Davidson. He repeats the number several times in conversation with Shultz, the chief mate, around 4 p.m. He keeps saying he wants to ask before he changes course. (Tote told the Associated Press that the company had no say in route.) Despite the reservations of the second and third mates ( Randolph and Riehm, respectively), it eventually becomes clear that El Faro is going to keep heading through the storm, though Davidson decided to take the Old Bahama Channel, a slightly different path. When a sailor asks if they might turn around, Davidson rules it out flatly. But the decisions on the bridge were in part hobbled by rapidly changing forecasts.

“We’re gonna get our ass ripped,” a sailor says at 5 p.m.

At 7 p.m., Davidson and Shultz are again on the bridge together. Davidson is talking about discussions with the company about when he can take vacation. Both men seem apprehensive about management.

“I hear what you’re saying, captain. I’m in line for the chopping block,” Shultz says. “I’m waiting to get screwed.”

“Same here,” Davidson answers.

Still, Davidson and Shultz don’t evince any anxiety about the storm, at least in their words. It’s the lower-ranking members of the crew, and particularly Randolph, who sense the danger facing them. But in the hierarchical, almost military environment of a ship, the captain holds authority, and there’s little questioning him.

Around 9:30 on the evening of September 30, a sailor and Third Mate Riehm are discussing their predicament.

“Oh man, if you gotta divert if that hurricane veers quickly—how much time do you have to, you know, when it's set up—if you gotta duck inside?” the sailor asks.

“Well, right now, we got nowhere to go. You would have to—but later on there’s a gap in the chart—you can head south,” Riehm says. “It's a good idea to have a— really, ideally—what you should have is another alternate—you should have a backup route...”

“Yeah right,” the sailor says. “There's no escape plan.”

An hour passes.

“Guess I'm just turning into a Chicken Little but I have a feeling like something bad is gonna happen,” Riehm remarks.

At 11:30 p.m., the sailor tells Riehm he’s laid out his immersion suit and life jacket.

“We don't have any options here,” Riehm says. “We got nowhere to go.”

“Jesus man—don’t tell me anymore. I don’t even wanna hear it,” the sailor answers. They laugh a little bit. Riehm does an Elmer Fudd impression.

The storm rolls on, and so does the boat. At 1:40 a.m. on October 1, Randolph indulges some gallows humor.

“Usually people don't take the whole umm—uh—survival suit-safety meeting thing very seriously,” she says. “Then it's, ‘Yeah, whatever. It fits,’ but nobody actually sees to see if their survival suit fits. I think today would be a good day for the fire and boat drill—just be like, ‘So we just wanna make sure everyone’s survival suit fits,’ and then with the storm people are gonna be like, ‘Holy shit. I really need to see if my survival suit fits—for reaaal.’”

By 3:45 a.m. or so, the sound of an alarm informing the crew that the ship is off course is sounding regularly. The crew is struggling to keep the boat where they want it because of the waves and wind. At 4:10 a.m., the captain tries to buoy spirits.

“There’s nothing bad about this ride,” Davidson says. “Sleeping like a baby.”

“Not me,” Shultz replies.

“What? Who’s not sleeping good? Home come?”

Shultz replies with a string of expletives.

At 5:15 a.m., an engineer notes that the ship is listing badly, more than he’s ever seen it. “Only gonna get better from here,” Davidson says.

It’s almost possible to believe him, to take heart in his courage and imagine that somehow El Faro will make it through. That makes it even more of a gut-punch when, at 6:12 a.m., Davidson says, “I’m not liking this list.” A minute later: “I think we just lost the plant,” the ship’s power. But he assures the crew that they’ll get it back up and running.

At 6:55 a.m., Davidson makes a telephone call:

It’s miserable right now. We got all the uhh—all the wind on the starboard side here. Now a scuttle was left open or popped open or whatever so we got some flooding down in three hold—a significant amount. Umm, everybody’s safe right now, we’re not gonna abandon ship—we’re gonna stay with the ship. We are in dire straits right now. Okay, I’m gonna call the office and tell ’em [expletives]. Okay? Umm there’s no need to ring the general alarm yet—we’re not abandoning ship. The engineers are trying to get the plant back. So we’re working on it—okay?

Just after 7 a.m., Davidson calls to report a marine emergency.

At 7:15 a.m., he tells a crew member, “Wake everybody up. Wake ’em up,” but insists, “We're gonna be good.”

At 7:27, he gives the order to ring a general alarm across the whole ship. At 7:28, on the UHF radio, he says he wants to make sure everyone has their immersion suits. At 7:29, Davidson gives the order to abandon ship.

In the final minutes of the recording, Davidson pleads with a sailor to move.

“We gotta move. You gotta get up. You gotta snap out of it and we gotta get out,” he says.

“Okay,” the sailor answers. “Help me.”

“You gotta get to safety,” Davidson shouts.

“Help me,” the sailor cries. “Help me.”

“Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Work your way up here,” the captain says. He refuses to leave.

“I can’t. I’m a goner.”

“It's time to come this way,” Davidson shouts. Then the recording stops.

The transcript is one of the most gripping things published this year, and yet it feels uncomfortably voyeuristic to catch this glimpse into the last moments of these people’s lives. It’s a little like watching a snuff film. Despite an extensive search effort, no human remains from the ship’s 33 crewmembers have been recovered. One lifeboat was recovered, badly damaged, while the other was eventually found on the sea floor, with one half shorn off. Even finding the audio recording was difficult. It was only in April that the recorder was found, after pressure from Senator Bill Graham of Florida (no relation to this writer), and only in August that it was recovered.

It’s unclear when the NTSB might release its conclusions, though as the Miami Herald notes, the information released so far seems to point toward a focus on the difficulty of forecasting Hurricane Joaquin, whether the ship was receiving up-to-date forecasts, and the condition of El Faro. Until then, we’re left with the haunting transcript of the ship’s final hours.

Did Putin Direct Russian Hacking? And Other Big Questions

Updated on December 15, 2016

What’s the latest?

Intelligence officials have leaked word to NBC and ABC that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “personally involved” in cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the United States presidential election. NBC’s report relies on “two senior officials with direct access to the information,” ABC’s on “U.S. and foreign intelligence officials.”

Didn’t we already know about Russia hacking the Democratic National Committee and others? Why all the fuss?

The newest reports purport to add detail on both actors and intent. Putin personally has not been previously blamed for hacks resulting in leaks damaging to the Clinton campaign, though in October Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stopped just short of doing so, saying that “based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts ... only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” Secondly, separate intelligence leaks to The New York Times and The Washington Post last week for the first time claimed that the intent of the hacking was to sway the election in favor of Trump, rather than simply sow generalized distrust. It has not yet been suggested that cyberattacks managed to change the actual vote tally in favor of either presidential candidate.

Information on what exactly happened has been dripping out slowly, and often anonymously and unofficially, for months. Way back in mid-June, the Democratic National Committee reported an intrusion into its computer network, and the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike publicly blamed Russian hackers after analyzing the breach. In July, after emails stolen from the committee appeared on WikiLeaks, Democratic members of congress also blamed the Russians, with Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook alleging that “It was the Russians who perpetrated this leak for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.”

It wasn’t until September that anonymous federal officials confirmed to The New York Times the intelligence community’s “high confidence” of Russian government involvement in the hack, if not the subsequent leak, and leaving doubt as to whether the hacks were “routine cyberespionage” or actually intended to influence the election. And it wasn’t until October that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, went on the record to blame Russia—government actors, not, say, cybercriminals who happened to be Russian, “based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts,” and further declaring that they were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” Days later, emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta appeared on WikiLeaks.

So as of fall, the United States government had officially blamed Russia for the hacks, and stated that the hacks were intended to interfere with the American election. Until Friday, intelligence officials were not claiming that the Russians wanted specifically to help Trump win, as opposed to undermining faith in the overall process. Then The Washington Post disclosed a “secret CIA assessment”—again described by anonymous officials—declaring it “quite clear” that a Trump presidency was the ultimate goal of the hacks. A Times investigation published Tuesday provided more background on how the hacks actually worked. Yet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has not publicly embraced the CIA’s findings, and the FBI has given a more “ambiguous” picture of Russia’s goals in congressional briefings. Meanwhile, Congress is planning to investigate.

Who else has been hacked?

Thomas Rid, writing in Esquire in October, noted that Russia began hacking the U.S. as early as 1996, five years after the demise of the Soviet Union, and added that the DNC hack concealed an even bigger prize for the Russians: the National Security Agency, whose secret files were dumped this August on Github and other file-sharing sites.

Then there is Germany. In May, BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said hackers linked to the Russian government had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, as well as German state computers. In September, Arne Schoenbohm, who heads Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), briefed German lawmakers about Russian hacking. Schoenbohm told Sudduetsche Zeitung, after reports emerged in the U.S. of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, that “[g]iven the background of the American situation, I have to protect our political parties from spying.” Those warnings became more urgent after the U.S. presidential election. Bruno Kahl, the head of the Germany’s foreign intelligence service, told the newspaper last month that Russia could seek to disrupt Germany’s elections next year to create “political uncertainty.” Merkel, who is seeking a fourth term in those elections, said in November after an attack targeted Deutsche Telekom customers that “[s]uch cyber attacks, or hybrid conflicts as they are known in Russian doctrine, are now part of daily life and we must learn to cope with them.”

Suspected Russian hacking has targeted other countries, as well. In April 2007, websites and servers belonging to the government, banks, and media in the former Soviet republic of Estonia came under a sustained monthlong attack. A U.S. diplomatic cable, published in WikiLeaks, called the Baltic state an “unprecedented victim of the world's first cyber attacks against a nation state.” Similar attacks targeted the former Soviet republic of Georgia a year later, and Ukraine more recently. All three countries have pro-Western leaders that are deeply critical of what they see as Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin.

And prior to perhaps their most high-value target thus far, the DNC, Russian hackers allegedly targeted the World Anti-Doping Agency ahead of the Rio Olympics this summer. WADA had reported a widespread Russian state-run doping program that involved the country’s track-and-field program. That revelation resulted in the Russian track-and-field team being banned from the games. WADA was hacked in apparent response, and the personal information of several athletes, including the Russian whistleblower who alerted WADA to the scandal, was leaked online. It’s worth pointing out that the Russian government has dismissed claims that it is involved.

What does “hacking” actually entail?

It depends: Hackers believed to be from Russia have accessed computers and servers belonging to government and political parties in rival countries. In some cases, such as in the DNC or WADA hack, those hacks resulted in the leak of information on websites such as WikiLeaks. In other cases, the attacks focused on national infrastructure: In Ukraine, for instance, according to Wired, hackers targeted the power grid; they then attacked the telephone service so customers couldn’t call to report the outages. When they hit the NSA, hackers posted the agency’s  “cyber-weapons” to file-sharing sites, according to Esquire. The hackers don’t just target states and institutions. Frequently, individuals are caught up, as well. On December 9, the Times reported that suspected Russian hackers targeted critics of the country’s government who live overseas by posting child porn on their computers.    

How solid is the CIA’s case that Russia tried to tilt the election for Trump?

An unnamed official told Reuters on Tuesday that “ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can’t prove intent.” The Post noted this problem in its Friday report, citing “the United States’ long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladi­mir Putin and those closest to him.” Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, American intelligence agencies have deprioritized Russia. The Post reported in fall, citing U.S. officials, that the “CIA and other agencies now devote at most 10 percent of their budgets to Russia-related espionage, a percentage that has risen over the past two years,” but is still dwarfed by the Cold War peak of about 40 percent.

As for the actual evidence of intent, what’s publicly available is circumstantial, including Russian state TV’s pushing of Trump’s candidacy, and reports that the Republican National Committee, too, was hacked though suffered none of the same embarrassing leaks as the DNC. (The RNC has denied it was hacked.) All of this was occurring in an international political context in which Trump was one of the most pro-Russian presidential candidates in recent memory, while Vladimir Putin personally blamed Hillary Clinton for inciting protests against his rule when she was secretary of state.

Meanwhile, the denials. Many of Trump’s surrogates have publicly suggested that Russia is the victim of a false-flag operation planned by U.S. intelligence—an assertion that doesn’t appear to be based on any fact in the public realm. Russian officials themselves have rejected the idea they are involved, as have Russian cyber-security experts, one of whom dismissed it as “a classic stereotype of the nineties and early 2000s.” They say that it’s virtually impossible to trace the origin of a hack.

But as Kaveh Waddell explained this week, while it can be difficult to catch the culprit of a hack, it’s by no means impossible. Esquire, in its story, noted that sloppy errors committed by the hackers pointed U.S. intelligence to their whereabouts. Andrei Soldatov, who wrote Red Web, told The Telegraph the Russian government is using its computer industry to hack its targets. “We have maybe the biggest engineer community in the world, and lots of great specialists,” he told the newspaper. “They are not criminals, they are professionals—and they are not bothered or afraid to refuse requests from government agencies.”

But Trump says we shouldn’t trust the CIA because they were wrong about Iraq’s WMD. Shouldn’t we take that history into consideration?

“There's a big difference between Iraq WMD and Russian cyber hacking,” wrote Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert at Stanford, in an email. “For starters, we're talking about different people making the assessments, a different problem to unravel (hidden nuclear capabilities in a foreign country versus cyber attacks on US systems), and a different analysis process. Intelligence analysis was thoroughly revamped after Iraq, as it should have been. But saying that these are same people who brought us Iraq WMD is like saying this year's Golden State Warriors must be terrible, because the Warriors lost so many games in the 90s.”

Which isn’t to say that past intelligence failures writ large have no relevance to today. The relevance is: Intelligence sometimes fails. As Zegart notes: “The best experts didn't predict Trump's win, and that's Americans predicting what Americans will do in an open society with frequent polling. In intelligence, adversaries are working hard and spending billions to hide their activities and deceive us.”

Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Clinton National Security Council staffer who argued for invading Iraq in 2003, said in an interview that Saddam Hussein did a “totally insane” version of this: “Saddam’s whole thinking was, ‘I’m going to get rid of my weapons of mass destruction, basically after 1995, but I can’t tell my people that. I want my people to continue to fear me, and believe that I have this.’ … The U.S., and the rest of the world, frankly … all picks up on the fact that that he is putting it out to all of his people that, ‘Yeah I still have WMD.’ And that strikes me as a really fundamental difference.”

He continued: “The intelligence community certainly can be wrong about these kinds of things, and you do want to take everything with a certain amount of skepticism. That said, it seems like in this case, they’ve found the tracks—that’s kind of the nice thing about cyber, as best as I understand it, is you can actually go back and see the keystrokes … which was not something that we had in Iraq.”

Do you have any lingering questions about Russian hacking? Please let us know and we’ll try to answer them: hello@theatlantic.com.