Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 59

Florida's Extended Voter Registration Deadline

NEWS BRIEF A federal judge ruled Wednesday to extend the registration deadline for voters in Florida by six more days due to Hurricane Matthew, which passed near the key battleground state last week.

“No right is more precious than having a voice in our elections,” Mark Walker, the U.S. district judge for the northern district of Florida, said Wednesday in Tallahassee during the hearing.

Walker ruled in favor of the Florida Democratic Party, which on Sunday sued Rick Scott, the Florida governor, demanding that the voter registration deadline be pushed back by one week. The lawsuit said the looming October 11 deadline and the storm forced voters “to choose between their safety and the safety of their families, on one hand, and their fundamental right to vote, on the other hand.”

Nearly 1.5 million Florida residents were told Thursday to evacuate because of Hurricane Matthew, which passed several hundred miles offshore but produced heavy rains and powerful winds in the northern part of the state. The damage caused by the storm resulted in the deaths of at least five people and caused nearly 1 million people to lose power. It remains unclear how many people have been able to return to their homes.

Scott refused initial requests made by Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Thursday to extend the registration deadline on account of the storm, so the state’s Democratic Party decided to legal action, the Miami Herald reported.

“Everybody has had a lot of time to register,” the Republican governor said in response to requests. “On top of that, we have lots of opportunities to vote: early voting, absentee voting, Election Day. So I don’t intend to make any changes.”

The ruling could affect the electoral outcome of the key swing state, which boasts 29 electoral votes. According to a recent poll by Real Clear Politics, Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, holds a nearly three-point lead in the state over her opponent, Donald Trump.

Other states affected by Hurricane Matthew have also taken action to ensure voters’ access to the polls. South Carolina extended its voter registration deadline and Georgia encouraged voters to register online.

Fresh Off the Boat and the Elusiveness of Home

The following contains spoilers through the most recent episodes of   Fresh Off the Boat and The Good Place .

Late in Tuesday’s season-three premiere of Fresh Off the Boat, Louis and Jessica Huang had an epiphany near the end of their trip to see family in Taiwan. Earlier, Jessica (Constance Wu)—who’d been the most excited about the visit—had told her three American-born sons, “You’re not tourists. You’re home.” But as the vacation unfolded, she began to feel things were a little off. The “night markets” she’d loved when she lived in Taiwan seemed to operate by new rules. The man who once sold her swordfish soup every day treated her like a stranger. Everyone—everyone—kept making outdated references to the 1990 film Ghost.

Later, this gave Louis (Randall Park) some insight into the couple’s disillusionment with their homeland. “We are Patrick Swayze in Ghost,” he said to his Jessica, looking a little surprised by the analogy. “Stuck between two worlds. Part of both, belonging to neither.” Their Taiwanese American immigrant experience in a nutshell.

The couple ostensibly came to this powerful conclusion after less than 22 minutes of screen time. But the ’90s-set Fresh Off the Boat had really been building to that moment for two years. It spent its first and second seasons following the Huangs’ new lives in Orlando, Florida, after they moved south from Washington, D.C. As only the second-ever sitcom to star an Asian American family, the show has mapped thoughtful explorations of race and culture onto more familiar sitcom storylines. But Tuesday’s episode, “Coming From America,” offered its most straightforward and original confrontation yet of the the way immigrants, their children, and many people of color in the U.S. often find themselves feeling like perennial outsiders.

The notion of “belonging” can be an abstract one, so the particular wisdom of Fresh Off the Boat’s latest episode was connecting it to a physical sense of place—something another fall sitcom, NBC’s The Good Place, has also done recently, if by more philosophical and subtle means. Capturing this tension between identity and location was so crucial to Fresh Off the Boat’s creators and producers that they shot “Coming From America” on location in Taiwan—the first time a U.S. network show has filmed in Asia. The decision helped with authenticity, but also with storytelling: It’s easier for viewers of different backgrounds to empathize with Jessica and Louis’s internal identity crisis when they can actually see all the specific ways in which the couple no longer fit in.

In Louis’s case, his feeling of estrangement from his home is embodied by relationship with his brother, Gene (Ken Jeong), who stayed in Taiwan instead of moving to America. Louis’s view of himself as a success story who’s achieved the American dream is deflated by his brother’s comparative wealth. (In one exchange, his youngest son asks, “Dad, are we poor?” “What? No. American middle-class is like Taiwan rich, ” Louis explains, to which his middle son replies, “I’d rather be Taiwan rich!”) But Louis eventually expresses regret about his decision to leave Taiwan and the advantages, connections, and social capital he had there. As he tells Gene: “We’re the white people of here.” The trip only throws into relief for Louis the vastly different social statuses Taiwan and America each confers on him; who he is depends a great deal on where he is.

Even when the Huangs were back in Orlando, Fresh Off the Boat explored the concept of competing identities, as well as the myriad small ways the family’s race made them stand out in a mostly white suburban community. In season one, the show’s young protagonist Eddie (Hudson Yang) was briefly paired by his school with a new Chinese-Jewish student, Phillip Goldstein, because they were both Asian—despite the fact that they had nothing else in common. The season-two episode “Good Morning Orlando” found Louis struggling with the burden being a good representative for all Asian people when he was given the rare chance to appear on a local talk show. After agonizing over the “right” way to present himself, he finally acknowledged, “One person can’t be everything.” But Tuesday’s “Coming From America” marked the show’s most direct effort to portray the Huangs as being stuck between two cultures.

Like Fresh Off the Boat, The Good Place also has ideas of belonging, geography, and identity baked into its premise. The sitcom takes place in a nondenominational heaven and centers on Eleanor (Kristen Bell), who accidentally ended up there despite a lifetime of misdeeds and is trying to become a better person to earn her place. But the character whose situation has most relevance to the Huangs is Jianyu (Manny Jacinto), who’s introduced in the pilot as a Buddhist monk who’s taken a vow of silence. After almost three full episodes of not speaking and placid nodding,“Jianyu” is revealed to actually be Jason Mendoza: a slightly dim amateur DJ who loves EDM, sold fake drugs to college kids, and hails from Jacksonville, Florida. He, like Eleanor, ended up in The Good Place by mistake, only his not-belonging has another dimension from the start. “Everyone here thinks I’m Taiwanese. I’m Filipino,” Jason told Eleanor after confiding in her his true identity. “That’s racist. Heaven is so racist.”

His comment is especially apt considering the nature of The Good Place: It’s a supernaturally perfect world, both highly inclusive and highly individualistic in a way that overlaps with typical understandings of America. Jianyu and Eleanor’s neighborhood is a cosmopolitan planned community where everything—houses, food, soul mates—are chosen to custom-fit the person, and language barriers don’t exist. And yet despite the utopian promises of The Good Place’s organizers, Jason has to pretend to be the silent, nodding Buddhist monk for all of eternity if he doesn’t want to risk being banished. That is, he can’t be himself.

Fresh Off the Boat and The Good Place understand how geography, as it relates to identity, is often deeply aspirational.

The arc of the episode “Jason Mendoza,” which tells the character’s backstory isn’t specifically about Asianness in the way “Coming From America” was, but The Good Place is certainly racially and culturally aware. At one point in the episode, Eleanor and Jason attended a dinner where everyone’s favorite dishes on earth were magically recreated; Jason lifted the lid on his plate to find a slab of plain wet tofu. In reality, his favorite meal was “the buffalo wings at Stupid Nick’s Wing Dump in Gainesville,” but Eleanor begged him to keep quiet so he wouldn’t blow both of their covers. Jason pushed back: “No! I’m sick of pretending to be Jianyu the tofu man!” The Good Place cleverly shows how alienating it can be for Asian people to be expected to identify with wholeheartedly with things of “their culture,” and revels in Jason’s deviation from expected norms.

Both Fresh Off the Boat and The Good Place also understand how geography, as it relates to identity, is often deeply aspirational—where you are or where you want to be reflects on the kind of person you are. “We did it, Louis. We moved to America, and we made it,” Jessica told her husband comfortingly, while also confessing that she was homesick for Orlando. During his lifetime, too, Jason Mendoza tied his sense of self to place. “I don’t want to be a DJ in Jacksonville forever,” he told his friend, in a flashback. “I wanna DJ in Daytona. Tallahassee. Tampa, even. I want it all.”

By investing so many of their storylines in physical space, both shows are able to better dramatize the feelings of loss that come with being away from home. Jason spent much of his episode recalling (via flashbacks) his life in Jacksonville, and his decision to never pretend to be someone else again—a decision that’s thwarted, of course, when he dies, and is sent to The Good Place, where he has to be both Jianyu and Jason at all times. He’s literally a ghost, part of both “heaven” and “hell,” but tragically belonging to neither. Likewise, Fresh Off the Boat set high emotional stakes for the Huangs’ family visit to Taiwan, making it that much more bittersweet to see Jessica and Louis accept that, though they’ll never feel fully at home anywhere, their connections to both worlds can still be meaningful.

That Fresh Off the Boat and The Good Place explored such similar territory within mere weeks of each other, but through totally different narrative and stylistic means, is a testament to the richness of the experiences of people of color—and in this case specifically, Asian Americans. For all the discussion of 2015 being an important year for the group in terms of small-screen representation, just 6 percent of network TV shows featured main characters of Asian descent, and casual racism crops up in the medium with some regularity.

And so when shows like Fresh Off the Boat, or The Good Place, or Master of None, or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, make it on air and offer up original, complex, and thoughtful portrayals of Asian Americans, they more than prove the artistic and social value of pushing those stories in the first place. It means viewers get sensitive meditations on immigrant selfhood and hyphenated Americanness, but also more universal explorations of what it means to belong, and to feel at home, and to accept oneself. In that light, perhaps, Jason’s maudlin proclamation in one flashback takes on a deeper meaning. “I believe in myself,” he said, smiling. “Some day, the world will see what I already know. That Jason Mendoza is a beautiful, unique soul, who has so much to give the world.”

Donald Trump Is Terrific Protest-Music Inspiration

Some very lovely music about Donald Trump has been released this week. That’s thanks to the launch of the “30 Songs, 30 Days” project in which the author Dave Eggers has gotten medium-to-big names in rock to record songs advocating for a “Trump-free America.” The effort might seem like it’d be purely propagandistic—surprise, pop culture supports Democrats! But the results, three days in, have been surprisingly enjoyable examples of artists taking creative inspiration from politics.

The best track so far is Aimee Mann’s “Can’t You Tell,” which the rock singer says was inspired by the theory that Trump spitefully decided to run for president after Barack Obama roasted him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s a straightforward, lilting folk song sung from Trump’s point of view. The verses brag of invulnerability—“You ask about my plan but baby my plan is to win / I wind up all the tops and watch the others keep the spin”—but the chorus is surprisingly vulnerable. In an ever-more-fragile tone, Mann pleads,  “Isn’t anybody going to stop me? / I don’t want this job / I don’t want this job, my God / Can’t you tell / I’m unwell.” The notion that Trump never truly desired to be president is an liberal caricature, but Mann is imagining it with humanity—you feel bad for the guy, and for everyone affected by him.

The contribution from Death Cab for Cutie has a similar effect, depicting Trump as a human being—albeit a solitary, self-deluding, and troubled one. The song’s title, “Million Dollar Loan,” refers to the money Trump’s dad gave him, money that undercuts Trump’s boasts of self-reliance and singular genius. Gibbard has written a wistful, repetitive chorus here that swaths you like the artificial mist that swathed Trump at the RNC (which has been recreated in the simple and effective video for the song). The bridge offers a painterly, neutral-seeming couplet that captures the mood here: “A siren screams through the city as he falls asleep / The campaign begins again at the break of day.”

Today brings Bhi Bhiman’s “With Love From Russia,” a dance-punk stompalong inspired by Trump’s ties with Putin. “Vladimir says hi,” Bhiman sings, later imagining the nu-Cold War as a game of Monopoly: “He’ll take the Baltics and Park Avenue / I’ll sell him Boardwalk / And there’s nothing you can do.” The tone is light and satirical, but even here there’s a some pathos poking through as Bhiman repeatedly cries “I don’t wanna be the end of your world” and “I am the life of the party.”

In just three songs, the “30 Days” project has injected some poignance into the spectacle of this campaign season. But the tracks have also taken very different angles on Trump, using very different sonic approaches—a testament to have varied protest music can be, and how rich this particular text of a candidate is. We’ll see if the diversity continues as the project develops till Election Day; Eggers and the other organizers have promised future entries from R.E.M. and Jim James of My Morning Jacket.

The music-world fallout from this election isn’t limited to this one project, of course. YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)” has been rap’s great, fearless, and ever-evolving 2016 election song, spawning remixes, sequels, and a tour. At the Desert Trip festival in Southern California this weekend, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters went on a headline-grabbing rant against Trump: a case of a politically minded classic rocker doing exactly what he’s supposed to at a time like this. And, as was probably inevitable, the internet has also provided a catchy remix of Trump saying “grab them by the pussy.”

The Joshua Generation: Did Barack Obama Fulfill His Promise?

GREENSBORO, N.C.—Barack Obama didn’t even wait to start speaking. No sooner had he stepped to a lectern Tuesday afternoon than he stepped back away and took off his jacket.

President Obama’s appearances on the trail on behalf of Hillary Clinton this year show a man who is cutting loose and seems to be having a good time. He is, at once, a politician who has nothing to lose, because he never has to face voters again; and a politician who has everything to lose, because a Donald Trump victory would likely doom much of his broad but fragile legacy on everything from foreign policy to climate change to health care.

It’s no surprise, then, that Obama’s speech on behalf of Clinton in this crucial swing state was comprised largely of two things: a prideful look back, and a wrathful ridicule of Trump, whose name he deigned to mention only four times in almost 50 minutes.

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The first part was more entertaining. Obama said that Trump “doesn’t have the temperament, or the judgment, or the knowledge—or, apparently, the desire to obtain the knowledge—or the basic honesty that a president needs to have.” Of the video in which Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women, he said, “You don’t have to be a husband or a father to hear what we heard just a few days ago and say, that’s not right. You just have to be a decent human being to say, that’s not right.”

Obama said that tweeting and soundbites don’t qualify one for the presidency, and he made fun of Trump for saying a bad mic accounted for his poor performance in the first presidential debate. He quipped, “I also don’t know a lot of casino operators who manage to lose almost a billion dollars in a year.” He said Trump’s comments would disqualify him from working at 7-Eleven.

“You watch these debates, and everybody is all like, well—the commentators afterwards, they are all like, well, she was really maybe explaining some stuff in great detail in contrast to the other candidate,” he said. “That’s because she actually knows what she’s talking about. Which is helpful, when you’re president of the United States, to know what you’re talking about. C’mon, people. Come on. This isn’t an audition for some show. This ain’t a show.”

He also appeared to take a swipe at House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has torturedly announced he will not defend or campaign for Trump in the wake of the video, but has not changed his official stance of backing the GOP nominee.

“C’mon, people. Come on. This isn’t an audition for some show. This ain’t a show.”

“Now you’ve got people saying, ‘Well, we strongly disapprove, we really disagree, we find those comments disgusting, but we’re still endorsing him, we still think he should be president’—that doesn’t make sense to me,” Obama said. Surreally, he alluded to the conspiracy-theorizing radio host Alex Jones, who recently said Obama and Clinton were demons who smelled of sulfur. “Ain’t that something?” Obama laughed. (Several protesters interrupted the speech, perhaps inspired by Jones’s InfoWars, which is offering a bounty for people who say that Bill Clinton is a rapist. Obama first grinned, and later heckled back: “Here’s the deal: Try to get your own rally.”)

The danger of the Obama tour-de-force stump speech is that it threatens to overshadow his would-be successor. As the crowd surged out, someone behind me said, “I miss him already.” “Another eight years, please,” a friend replied.

If that was the entertaining section of the night, the passages focused on legacy were more interesting. Obama had jokes there, too. “No wonder I’ve gone gray, because we’ve been busy,” he said, capping off a list of accomplishments. He quipped that he and Michelle are “already looking around making sure we haven’t broken any china or messed anything up, Bo and Sunny haven’t ruined any of the carpets. Because we want to get our security deposit back.”

There was a wistful mood in the air, and not just because it was the end of a president’s term, but because it was the end of this president’s term, this black president. The crowd of 7,700—with another 1,500 in an overflow space—was heavily African American, with a strong contingent from North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black college in the city, whose band performed the National Anthem, and whose most famous alumnus, Jesse Jackson, was campaigning elsewhere in the state for Clinton. Before his speech, Obama had conducted a town hall at North Carolina A&T hosted by The Undefeated, ESPN’s race-interested website.

In part by virtue of its large black population and North Carolina A&T’s presence, Greensboro was an important center of civil-rights activism. In 1960, four North Carolina A&T students launched a sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. The site is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. (In September, Trump asked to host an event at the museum and was refused.)

During his first run for president, Obama seemed poised to achieve many of the goals that activists like the Greensboro Four had first set. It was a mantle that he explicitly took up, calling himself a member of the “Joshua Generation.” As in: Moses got the Hebrews out of Egypt and nearly to the Promised Land, but he couldn’t cross over the Jordan. That task was left to Joshua.

“The previous generation, the Moses generation, pointed the way. They took us 90 percent of the way there. We still got that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side,” Obama said in Selma, Alabama, in March 2007. “So the question, I guess, that I have today is what’s called of us in this Joshua generation?” The not-yet-gray Obama viewed himself as part of the youth movement. He went on:

A hope gap that still pervades too many communities all across the country and right here in Alabama. So the question is, then, what are we, the Joshua generation, doing to close those gaps? Are we doing every single thing that we can do in Congress in order to make sure that early education is adequately funded and making sure that we are raising the minimum wage so people can have dignity and respect?

Are we ensuring that, if somebody loses a job, that they're getting retrained? And that, if they've lost their health care and pension, somebody is there to help them get back on their feet? Are we making sure we're giving a second chance to those who have strayed and gone to prison but want to start a new life? Government alone can't solve all those problems, but government can help. It's the responsibility of the Joshua generation to make sure that we have a government that is as responsive as the need that exists all across America. That brings me to one other point, about the Joshua generation, and that is this—that it's not enough just to ask what the government can do for us—it's important for us to ask what we can do for ourselves.

Today, the young senator’s words seem in places prophetic and in other places naively optimistic. To many Americans, of both colors, the fact of Obama’s election 20 months after this speech was a symbol of progress; some even believed that they showed that the United States had solved a race problem that predated the republic. Obama’s election was a milestone, but it’s clear today how far the nation is from post-racialism.

By many standards, black Americans are much better off than they were eight years ago. Yet black unemployment remains far higher than white unemployment. Early education gaps have not been closed. There has been no increase in the federal minimum wage. The Affordable Care Act helped plug some holes in insurance, but even its champions view it as a flawed work in progress. The Voting Rights Law that Obama celebrated in Selma on that 2007 day was eviscerated by the Supreme Court in 2013. Meanwhile, the nation is regularly captivated by the spectacle of police shooting African American men—not a new phenomenon by any means, but one that is newly visible to the entire nation—and the assertion that “black lives matter” is somehow controversial. Trump continues to conflate “inner cities” with ’60s-style squalor.

Many of these problems are outside the scope of any president. But because of his experience, Obama could address black issues in a way no white president could. The next president will not be an African American, and no one knows when there might be another. Trump has gone so far as to say that there will not be another one “for generations” because of backlash to Obama.

Before the event began, I walked around the line, talking to African American voters. They expressed a mixture of appreciation for Obama with a sense that his potential accomplishments had been stymied by political resistance and bad timing, entering office in the midst of a historic recession. While most of the people I spoke with were eager to vote for Clinton, if largely due to opposition to Trump, they were circumspect about what she might accomplishment on civil-rights issues.

“The biggest thing about his legacy is that racism was more exposed,” said Nikolaus Knight, a 19-year-old North Carolina A&T student who wore a T-shirt reading “Unapologetically black.” “It’s something that’s always existed. It was exposed when an African American male was put in a position of power. People like to say that racial tension grew. It didn’t grow. It was exposed.”

“A lot of African Americans felt because we had an African American president, we’d achieve change overnight.”

Knight hoped to see Clinton push hard on police accountability, and he wanted her to help HBCUs. As for her 1990s support for the crime bill her husband signed and her remarks about “superpredators,” Knight said, “Now that she has acknowledged that she said those things, and acknowledged that she was wrong, she has a chance to make amends.”

Nepri James, another 19-year-old North Carolina A&T student, recounted hearing the Mothers of the Movement speak on behalf of Clinton. “She’s asking good questions, but what we need to know is if she’ll take action,” James said. “If we push it, she will,” her classmate Tayanna Lee replied.

Older voters tended to give Obama more leeway. “He’s done the best he could do. He could have done more if the situation was better,” said Bil Lewis of Raleigh. Fred Bellamy said the president left behind a great legacy on civil rights. “A lot of African Americans felt because we had an African American president, we’d achieve change overnight,” the Greensboro resident said. “Donald Trump needs to understand this: You don’t become president and do what you want to, even if it is good.”

Standing beside him, his friend Ezekiel Ben-Israel practically did a spit take at the notion that Obama left a great legacy. He said Obamacare was an important accomplishment, but that was about it. Not that Ben-Israel laid all the blame on president. In his 2007 speech, Obama asked, “Are we doing every single thing that we can do in Congress in order to make sure that early education is adequately funded and making sure that we are raising the minimum wage so people can have dignity and respect?” In practice, he’d found a Congress that often had no interest in working with him.

“If I shoot right into a bucket of snakes, they’re not going to stop being snakes just because I put an arrow into them.”

“Boehner spoke in the same vein as George Wallace,” Ben-Israel. “When he said ‘Hell no,’ I saw George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.” But Ben-Israel wasn’t convinced that bipartisanship would be much help either, saying the biggest bipartisan agreement that came to mind was NAFTA, which “sucked the jobs out of the country.” Anyway, he was skeptical that a Clinton victory would—to borrow Obama’s phrase—break the fever among Republicans: “If I shoot right into a bucket of snakes, they’re not going to stop being snakes just because I put an arrow into them.”

Sandra Smith, who wore an old-school “HOPE” T-shirt to the rally, felt similarly. “What he had to work with was very little. Everything he wanted, they said so because he wanted it,” she said, and doubted Clinton would have more luck if she won: “They’re not going to look at it as male vs. female, they’re not going to look at it color-wise, they’re going to look at it as a party thing.”

Little of Obama’s speech was explicitly pitched at black voters, but in practice, the intended audience was clear. Democrats believe that if minority turnout is high enough, it can produce a Democratic victory, as it did in 2008, and they’ve focused on registering more black and Hispanic voters. They were aided by a federal-court ruling in July that overturned a state law restricting early voting and registration as well as requiring photo ID. The Fourth Circuit ruled that the law had been intended to suppress minority votes.

The warm-up speakers on Tuesday included a slate of African American politicians, as well as Senate candidate Deborah Ross. Obama himself was introduced by Henry Frye, a North Carolina A&T grad who in 1968 became North Carolina’s first black legislator since Reconstruction, and later the first black justice on the state Supreme Court. Frye described how, as an Air Force veteran, he was in 1956 refused the right to register to vote.

During his remarks, Obama deployed his masterful, oft-remarked-upon command of code-switching. The closest he came to making the pitch explicit came near the end. “I promise you, your vote matters,” Obama said:

Read up on your history. You just heard from Judge Frye. There was a time, right here in North Carolina … when folks had to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. The number of bubbles on a bar of soap. It wasn’t that long ago where folks were beaten to register voters in Mississippi. It wasn’t that long ago that a man like Justice Frye, who had already graduated college, was denied the right to vote because he failed the so-called literacy test. That just happened. And the reason it changed was because young people said it’s going to change. And folks risked everything so we could pull that lever. Freedom Riders came down so that people could have the right to vote.

His imprecation against youth apathy echoed a concern he voiced in the Joshua generation speech. “Imagine young people, 16, 17, 20, 21, backs straight, eyes clear, suit and tie, sitting down at a lunch counter,” he said then. “I can’t say for certain that we have instilled that same sense of moral clarity and purpose in this generation.”

However disillusioned the last eight years may have left Obama about his ability to bring epochal change, he seemed to have a rosier view about the youngest adults. “The young people I meet, they are more tolerant, and they are more sophisticated, and they are more interested in the world,” he said. “And when I meet young people, as strange as this seems, I see the values that my mom and my grandparents tried to instill in me—decent, honest, hardworking, civil, courteous, polite, yes ma’am, no ma’am, how can I help you, ma’am.”

Two hours earlier, I’d been talking with North Carolina A&T student Natalie Presley. She was, as Obama said, sophisticated, polite, and engaged. When I asked her what impact Obama had had on civil rights, she answered the question not in terms of what he’d accomplished in office, but in terms of his symbolic importance. “His legacy is that he’s paved the road for black young men and women, showing they’re capable and can run for office,” she said.

In other words, Presley viewed Obama not as the vanguard of some new generation, but as another important forebear, laying out the path. Whatever the rest of his legacy, the sense among young people that the president remains on the other side of the River Jordan, and that they are the true Joshua generation that must take up the banner now, seems like a bittersweet validation of his words nearly a decade ago.

American Housewife Has a Weight Problem

Could I propose a corollary to the Bechdel test? It would go like this: To pass the test, a work of fiction would need to

have at least two women characters, who
talk to each other, about
something other than their weight.

American Housewife, ABC’s new Tuesday-night sitcom, would fail that test. Repeatedly. Aggressively. Weight, here, isn’t just a visual element of the show’s sitcomic universe; it is its own Strong Female Lead. Here is how the Housewife in question, Katie, introduces herself to viewers—in the very first scene of the sitcom’s very first episode:

They say one day a meteor will strike the earth, obliterating life as we know it. But it’s not coming soon enough to help me. You see, my neighbor, Fat Pam, is giving up and moving to Vermont. She’s had enough of the skinnies in this town. And once Fat Pam is gone, I am going to be the second fattest—

Katie interrupts her musings when she notices her young daughter, Anna-Kat, peeing on the family’s lawn.

With this, American Housewife, as its sweepingly sociological title might suggest, presents itself as yet one more example of the now-typical network sitcom: edgy, relatably wacky, normal in its abnormality. From the outset, via its talk of pee and Pam, the show promises that its gaze will be more gimlet-eyed than rosy-lensed; that it will take the regressive idealism of the early family sitcom and replace it with misbehaving children, frazzled parents, and the overriding sense that there is never quite enough time to get done all the things that need doing.

The Ottos are the American Family this time around. Besides Katie (Katy Mixon), wife of one and mother of three, there’s Greg (Diedrich Bader), her husband. Their kids are Taylor (Meg Donnelly), a teenager who has just emerged from an awkward phase to become pretty and popular; Oliver (Daniel DiMaggio), 12, an Alex P. Keaton in the making; and Anna-Kat (Julia Butters), the youngest—who we learn, per Katie’s narration, “has a touch of the anxieties. Not Rain Man anxiety, but it’s not in the family newsletter.”

The show’s sympathies, though—as its title might also suggest—lie with Katie. It’s Katie who narrates the action. It’s Katie who admits, of Oliver, “I’m not gonna lie to you: We boned it pretty bad with this one.” And it’s Katie who, through her outspokenness, promises some much-needed RealTalk™ when it comes to that most still-taboo of subjects in American culture: weight. Weight, in particular, that has the added audacity of being carried by a woman.

American Housewife makes good on that promise (Fat Pam!), but it does so to a fault: The show’s pilot, it soon becomes wincingly clear, revolves entirely around the problem Katie lays out in her introduction. Over the next 30 minutes, this particular American housewife will obsessively attempt to fill the house that had been occupied by Fat Pam with … someone even fatter. Or, at the very least, someone equally fat. So that Katie can maintain her status as Third Fattest in town, without being relegated to Second.

Nearly everything that occupies the gleaming suburban universe American Housewife builds for itself revolves, somehow, around weight.

Had that been a passing joke, it might have been funny—a wry recognition of the way women are taught that their aesthetic value is both cruelly fixed and geographically relative. “Fat Pam,” however, is not a passing joke. Katie’s quest to replace her permeates the episode’s extremely petty Hero’s Journey. “Oh, Fat Pam, why are you abandoning me?” Katie wails, approximately two minutes after we’ve first met her. She repeats the stakes of all this: “Once Fat Pam is gone, I am going to be the second fattest housewife in Westport! Damn you, Fat Pam!”

It’s not, however, just Pam: Nearly everything else that occupies the gleaming suburban universe American Housewife has built for itself revolves, somehow, around weight, and not just Katie’s. The Ottos live in the tony New York suburb of Westport, Connecticut—and Westport, Katie explains, is not just a town, but “the kind of town where people have big houses and tiny butts.” Taylor, Katie’s daughter, isn’t just blossoming physically; she’s also, Katie confides, in danger of becoming a teenage version of the “Westport mommies” that Katie resents so much (on account of their “flat stomachs, tight, high asses,” and “thighs that don’t touch”—and also of the fact that they seem always to be sipping “those stupid green drinks”). Katie talks about her weight with Greg (think that conversation will involve her uttering the line “This is the part where you say I’m not fat”? Then you are correct). Katie talks about her weight with her two best friends (Carly Hughes and Ali Wong, shining even in small roles), as the trio enjoys “second breakfast.”

And: She keeps talking about it. Katie enlists her husband and Anna-Kat (yes, the young daughter with “a touch of the anxieties”) to help her scare away the “skinnies” at the open house taking place in Fat Pam’s former home—via discussions of murders that took place on its premises, etc. The plan backfires, though. This is Westport. “There hasn’t been a single tubby person in this place all afternoon!” Katie laments at the parade of Fitbit-wearing thin people who come to see the fancy house. “We might as well accept it: I’m going to be vice fattest!”

Even class, in the show’s universe, is determined not by one’s wealth, but by one’s weight.

This … is meant to be sad? And/or funny? It is both, but likely not in the way the show was intending. The whole thing reads, fat joke after fat joke, as a waste—of time, of talent, of good will. The writing here is strong, for the most part (save for a joke about, ooof, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson that unsurprisingly fails to justify itself). And the acting here is strong, too, for the most part. (Julia Butters, as Anna-Kat, is a particular delight.)

But these qualities might have been applied to more worthy subjects than (no offense, Fat Pam, but) Fat Pam. Katie mentions, off-handedly, that the Ottos rent their house—they moved to Westport, Katie explains, because the schools there offer programs that benefit Anna-Kat, whose “anxiety” seems to manifest, via several jokes about hand-washing and stair-hopping, as OCD. That would seem to offer a rich premise for the exploration of class, the 5 percent clashing with the 1—a built-in tension that would give American Housewife a sense of cultural urgency. But there’s little beyond the seeming here: Even class, in the show’s universe, is determined not by wealth, but by weight. Weight determines everything. “I used to look like that—let’s see what she looks like after having three kids,” Katie says, sizing up another woman.

The other woman is her teenage daughter.

Mixon (who, tellingly, previously co-starred in Mike & Molly, another sitcomic ode to the determinative forces of weight) is a charismatic presence. She’s theatrical in manner and blessed with a voice that is Chenowethian in its elasticity—with the result that Katie, delightfully if inexplicably, tends to pronounces “again” as “uh-GAY-yan” and “I am” as “I AY-am.” It’s all very winning. And it’s immensely refreshing, of course, that this particular American housewife doesn’t conform to the body type of a Desperate one. But Mixon’s casting would have been much more meaningful had her show more frequently let her form speak for itself. American Housewife’s star, so far, is Katie’s weight—and a number is a pretty boring premise for a story.

What Drug an Unarmed Black Man Had in His System When He Was Killed by Police

NEWS BRIEF The unarmed black man shot and killed by Tulsa police last month had the hallucinogenic drug PCP in his system, according to a toxicology report released Tuesday.

Terence Crutcher had his hands in the air when he was shot in the chest by one officer, Betty Shelby. The officer has since been charged with first-degree manslaughter, a felony in Oklahoma that could carry a life sentence.

Shelby claims Crutcher did not respond to commands. She also said she thought he was under the influence of drugs. This report will surely be used in Shelby’s defense. But NBC News adds:

It is unclear how the toxicology results could impact the case against Shelby, who prosecutors said “reacted unreasonably” and became “emotionally involved to the point that she overreacted.”

The toxicology report also found traces of another hallucinogenic drug Tenocyclidine in his system. Police first arrived at the scene because of reports of a man running away from his SUV, claiming the vehicle was going to blow up.

The Justice Department is currently conducting a separate civil-rights investigation. Crutcher’s death inspired protests across the country, demonstrating against police brutality.

The Terrorist Plot Thwarted by Syrian Refugees

For two days over the weekend, German police searched for suspected Syrian terrorist Jaber al-Bakr, a refugee who had come to Germany last year, and whom they believed was plotting to bomb a train station or airport. Officers raided his apartment in the eastern city of Chemnitz and found explosive materials, but al-Bakr had slipped away. Police asked the public for help, spreading his name and photo on television and across the internet.

This is the sort of news that has fueled anti-Syrian refugee sentiment in nationalist parties across Europe in the last year. In the last few months, several attacks carried out by refugees, including a stabbing and shooting, prompted critics to blame Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies for allowing foreign individuals into the country without thorough screening—specifically the 1 million refugees granted asylum last year. It was her government’s resettlement plans that were thought to have doomed her party in last month’s regional elections, when her Christian Democratic Union lost to a new right-wing populist party. But the refugees Merkel’s opponents are set on keeping out were the ones who led the police to al-Bakr: On Monday, three Syrian refugees turned the suspect terrorist into police when they realized he was on the run.

Al-Bakr had come to Germany from Syria in February 2015, and was granted refugee status five months later, The New York Times reported. In the last several months, he had come under surveillance by German authorities, and police raided his home Friday after agents received information al-Bakr planned to bomb a public place in Germany, possibly an airport in Berlin. They found the same explosive-making materials used by Islamic State terrorists to kill hundreds in the Brussels and Paris bombings last year. Al-Bakr escaped the raid, and police continued their search.

Early Monday morning, about an hour north of Chemnitz, in Leipzig, al-Bakr met a fellow Syrian at the train station. Al-Bakr told the man he was in need of immediate housing, according to Deutsche Welle, and, wanting to help a fellow Syrian, the man offered him a place to stay. The man and two other Syrians recognized that day that their new roommate was the suspect sought by German police, and they tied him up.

According to Deutsche Welle, one of the Syrians told a TV station that al-Bakr tried to bribe them, but the men refused. The man, identified only as Mohammed A., said he told al-Bakr: “You can give us as much as you like, but we are not letting you go. … I was so angry at him. I won't accept such a thing—especially here in Germany, the country that opened its door to us.”

The three Syrians called police, but officers couldn’t understand them, Deutsche Welle reported. So they took a cellphone picture of al-Bakr and went to the police station. Police arrested al-Bakr early Monday, and also took into custody a second suspect who is believed to have rented al-Bakr his apartment in Chemnitz.  

But the Good Samaritan act is unlikely to quell the growing chorus opposed to Merkel’s refugee policy. The policy was initially a point of pride among Germans in early 2015, during a time when other European countries had closed off their borders or pushed Syrian refugees along train lines and into other countries. Over the last year, however, several terrorist attacks led to shifts in public opinion and propelled a nationalist movement—in Germany and other European nations—that seeks to end refugee resettlement. The policy is considered Merkel’s most challenging issue in next year’s general election, which could give her a fourth term—or signal the rise of Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s right-wing populist party.

The Anger of Samantha Bee

During an extended monologue on her TBS show Full Frontal on Monday evening, Samantha Bee described Donald Trump and Billy Bush as “two drooling hyenas” and “two leering dildos.” She referred to the vehicle that carried the pair, in that now iconically infamous Access Hollywood video, as “the adolescent boner bus” and, later, “Donny and Billy’s fun-time pussy wagon.” She compared Bush’s deference to Trump to George W. Bush’s deference to Dick Cheney, and then referred to both of the latter as “a bullying, cold-hearted alpha male who was completely in charge.”

Later, in response to the non-apology apology that Trump read dutifully off of a Teleprompter, Bee said, “I’m sorry, you were handing out words like a first-grader with a head injury.”

This … was funny! It was, many of Bee’s viewers would likely agree, correct! But it was also a lot of empty vitriol, even for a comedian who’s known for channeling rage into lols. With her “leering dildo” burns, the host was effectively summoning the disgust that many women—indeed, many sentient humans—felt upon hearing the Republican presidential candidate casually brag about his sexual predations to a guy who verbally high-fived him in response. But she was also compounding the frustration as much as offering catharsis from it. Bee, in dismissing Trump and Bush as “drooling hyenas,” was living in the tenor of this anger-reveling election, meeting the Trump revelations not with the Democrats’ borrowed motto—“when they go low, we go high”—but rather with the opposite logic: “When they go low, we limbo right along with them.”

Bee met “when they go low, we go high” with the opposite logic: “When they go low, we limbo right along.”

Bee’s job, certainly, is not to reflect campaign-driven talking points. Nor is it to model civility. Nor is it, officially, to do anything beyond making viewers love her or hate her and thereby watch her, week after week. Full Frontal, though, is one of the many current late-night shows—hybrids of comedy and commentary—that strive to live in the legacy of the Jon Stewart-helmed Daily Show: to use humor, as The Wrap put it, to “become part of the cultural conversation.” Full Frontal set as its challenge from the outset, Rebecca Traister reported, to parse the delicate lines “between horror and humor, between outrage and hilarity,” provoking not just laughter, but action and impact. And Full Frontal has been for the most part extremely effective at striking that balance, via segments that marry the best of investigative journalism with the worst of cathartic indignation.

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Monday’s show, though, featured very little of either. It offered, for the most part, a string of invective that simply reiterated what anyone who had paid attention as “Pussyghazi” played out over the weekend was already well aware of: that “pussy,” the word, was not the problem; that bragging about sexual predation was; that it’s extremely hypocritical for GOP lawmakers who endorsed a known racist/misogynist/demagogue to decide that the Access Hollywood revelations represented the thing that, in the end, would make the candidate unworthy of the presidency. Mostly, though, the episode offered anger—anger that didn’t attempt to temper itself under the guise of “satire.” Anger that seethed. Anger that directed itself at the “leering dildos” who presented themselves on the tapes. Anger that trusted in itself as its own end.

It had reason to do that trusting. “Samantha Bee Takes Down ‘Leering Dildo’ Donald Trump ‘Like a Bitch,’” The Daily Beast summed it up, appreciatively. “Samantha Bee pulled no punches,” the Huffington Post countered. It’s worth wondering, though, what else is accomplished when even comedy—even the thing meant to give us a little levity among all the ugliness—gets angry. The cliche about Trump is that he’s extremely hard to parody precisely because he so neatly parodies himself. There’s no work the comedian can add to make him funnier, no insight that can be added to make him more cartoonish or outlandish than he already is. But the corollary to all that might be that Trump also makes comedy hard precisely because comedy demands a certain emotional detachment on the part of both the comedian and the audience. You have to distance yourself from something to be able to laugh at it; and Trump, at this point, is very, very hard to laugh at.

It’s sometimes said about Trevor Noah, by way of explaining why he doesn’t enjoy the same rabid enthusiasm that his predecessor did, that he’s a little too cold, a little too detached, a little too balanced to endear himself fully to partisan viewers. Noah, the South African, sees American politics with a global perspective, but doesn’t grok the outrage—and often, with the rise of Trump, the full-on rage—that so many people on the left feel about the current state of the world. You could think of Noah, Slate’s Willa Paskin argued, as “a Potemkin Jon Stewart, someone smooth and ingratiating who is reaching for unconverted viewers, instead of an inveterate political satirist preaching to the deeply informed.”

Bee may have just illustrated the opposite problem: Heat can be just as challenging as coolness. It is very, very hard to do satire when you are angry. It’s very hard to do, actually, much of anything when you’re angry. Bee has acknowledged that perfectly in previous episodes of Full Frontal (“Is it okay if, instead of making jokes, I just scream for seven minutes until we cut to commercial?” she asked after the Orlando shootings). But while her anger about Trump may be similarly righteous, it’s an open question how productive it is. In a previous episode, she referred to Trump as “a tangerine-tinted trash can fire,” which is funny but not much more than that. Audiences may look for catharsis in their comedy, but they also look for sense-making—for jokes that don’t simply mock the world, but help to explain it. Anger is one way of making sense of things. Very rarely, however, is it a terribly good one.

Halt and Catch Fire’s Sad Ballad of the Future

Despite being set 30 years in the past, Halt and Catch Fire is a show about the future. Its characters, all part of the 1980s personal-computing revolution, are constantly trying to figure out what their pioneering work is pointing toward. Their conflicts often hinge on their struggles to communicate—which is made all the more ironic by the fact that they’re laying the groundwork for a world where everyone can speak to each other instantly, despite being more polarized than ever. Since its debut in 2014, Halt and Catch Fire has been the rare period drama that perfectly leverages its era to talk about the current one, and its third season has been a particular marvel in that regard.

The show has been a marginal hit for AMC for each of its three years on air—critically respected while maintaining a tiny audience—but it was happily renewed for a fourth (and final) season on Monday. That means viewers can watch the two-hour, season-three finale Tuesday night without worrying about the fascinating narrative being left incomplete. Without spoiling anything, I can say the episode makes an audacious storytelling decision for the series that promises to pay off magnificently. The finale is a great capper to a season that explored the dark side of start-up success, and the clash of big-picture tech thinking with cold financial realities, in a way that felt both deeply personal and incredibly prescient.

Halt and Catch Fire began its run as a Mad Men of the 1980s, with Lee Pace playing Joe MacMillan, a Steve Jobsian tech renegade who’s full of ideas but lacks even basic coding skills.  The series initially seemed enamored of Joe MacMillan as a typical tortured male protagonist, but the show’s creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers have since upended the stereotype of the haunted genius who barks mysterious aphorisms at the people around him and always proves his naysayers wrong. This season took that creative shift to its logical extreme, building Joe up to messianic levels of fame before reducing him to nothing.

Though he began the series working with the other main characters, Joe eventually became estranged from them all. He started the third season as the head of a tech corporation hawking anti-virus software to new PC users, warning them of the dangers of the connected world. His plan was to offer the software for free to hook customers, with the intention of up-charging them later—a strategy that has since become routine. Joe’s speechifying about a grand programming rebellion drew the devotion of Ryan Ray (Manish Dayal), a new character who became Joe’s eager stooge, lapping up his vague proclamations and frustratingly trying to imitate his aloof personality. But where Joe could impress boardrooms through sheer force of will, Ryan always seemed more foolish, even as his coding work turned Joe’s ideas into reality.

Eventually, Ryan became so enamored, and Joe’s relationship with his corporate overlords became so adversarial, that Ryan illegally released the anti-virus software’s code to the public. Assuming he’d be rewarded for his cavalier approach, Ryan ended up facing arrest, and a horrified Joe tried to convince him to turn himself in to the police. Instead, in last week’s episode he committed suicide, leaving behind a note that spoke hopefully of the future that Joe’s philosophies, and the approaching internet revolution, envisioned. “It’s a huge danger, a gigantic risk,” Ryan intoned in a posthumous voice-over. “But it’s worth it. If only we can learn to take care of each other. Then this awesome, destructive new connection won’t destroy us. It won’t leave us, in the end, so totally alone.” It was a tragic realization: Ryan still expressed optimism for the future, even as his efforts to jump toward it left him dead.

The finale thus sees Joe in a fully humbled state, robbed of his powers, with the rest of the cast similarly scattered. Parallel to Joe’s breakdown, the third season charted the rapid rise and disintegration of Mutiny, the company created by the show’s female leads. Founded as an online-gaming forum, Mutiny evolved to reflect the beginnings of social networking on the internet, embracing instant messaging and adding a marketplace that was reminiscent of an early eBay or Craigslist. But as Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) and Donna (Kerry Bishé) saw things take off, the former started fearing that the independent spirit of her web community was being lost to marketing opportunities, while the latter pressed to go public quickly and capitalize on their buzz.

Halt and Catch Fire was promising in its first season, delivered on that promise in season two, and then only got better this year.

Cameron and Donna’s close relationship has become the emotional backbone of the series, and the decision to pivot from gloomy tech bros to upstart female entrepreneurship was what made Halt and Catch Fire’s second season stand out. The third has been tougher to watch, and even more emotionally involving, as Cameron and Donna grew more distant and eventually dissolved their business partnership. Rather than patronize the viewer with a simple tale of success, sisterhood, and girl power, Cantwell and Rogers dug into their differences and the irony of their communications breakdown, and the underlying challenges of being women in a heavily male industry.

Cameron, an introverted, prickly hacker by nature, had the same blind certitude about her ideas as Joe, but she struggled to get them across without seeming “difficult,” even as Joe’s stubbornness was hailed by the press as brilliance. Donna, a more business-minded sort who struggled to fit Mutiny into a traditional Silicon Valley mold, was undone by her eagerness to vault it into the big leagues by taking it public, which backfired after a disastrous initial public offering. The finale sees the entire group trying to rebuild, working together to try and monetize the NSFNet (a government program that ended up being a crucial building block of the World Wide Web), but it’s unsparingly brutal about the damage done, personally and professionally, to their former partnerships.

That Halt and Catch Fire’s fourth season will be its last is bittersweet news. Considering what happens in the season-three finale, it makes sense that there’s only one big chapter left in the overarching story, but it’s sad to think that a series this good has struggled to even stay on the air for its entire run. Still, this is a show that was promising in its first season, delivered on that promise in season two, and then only got better this year, to the point where declaring it TV’s best drama no longer feels like a wincingly hot take. All Halt and Catch Fire needs to do now is find a satisfying conclusion, as its technology catches up to the present day. Given the ambition and craft on display in Tuesday’s finale, viewers shouldn’t expect to be disappointed.

The Debate Over Australia's Same-Sex Marriage Vote

NEWS BRIEF Leaders of Australia’s opposition Labor Party said Tuesday they will oppose the government’s plan to hold a national referendum on same-sex marriage next year, making it increasingly unlikely the vote will take place.

The Labor Party’s unanimous vote to oppose the plebiscite follows a nationwide debate over whether Australia’s existing laws, which prohibit same-sex marriage, should be changed. Though a majority of Australians—including the leaders of both the ruling and opposition parties—support legalizing same-sex marriage, they disagree on how the government should do it.

Malcom Turnbull, the Australian prime minister and the leader of the country’s conservative Liberal Party, advocates for putting the issue to a non-binding national referendum, which would ask all eligible Australian voters if they think the law should be changed to allow gay couples to marry. The opposition, however, argues the issue shouldn’t be put up to a vote at all on the grounds that a referendum would be costly and divisive, calling instead for parliament to legislate on the issue without a plebiscite.

Bill Shorten, Labor’s parliamentary leader, said Tuesday he feared the referendum could prompt divisive and hateful rhetoric toward the country’s LGBT community.

“I could not in good conscience recommend to the Labor Party that we support the plebiscite about marriage equality … children do not need to go to school in the climate of a plebiscite and have the integrity of their parents’ relationship challenged,” he said.

Turnbull accused Shorten Tuesday of “trying to subvert a straightforward, democratic process.”

“He has decided he does not want a plebiscite on any terms. He does not want the Australian people to have any say on any terms,” Turnbull said. “Well we do, we have a mandate for it, and we are asking the Senate to do their job and support it.”

Labor’s opposition to the referendum makes the chances of such a vote taking place nearly impossible. In order for the plebiscite to pass the Senate, the ruling Liberal coalition would need to convince nine senators to support the vote—an attempt that the 26-member Labor Party, the nine-member Green party, the three-member Nick Xenophon Team, and the lone senator in Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party have vowed to oppose. Mathematically, this leaves only seven remaining votes in play.

Australia remains one of the few remaining Western nations where same-sex marriage isn’t legal.