Lily Salter's Blog, page 1014

So, college “p.c. culture” stifles comedy? Ever hear a comedian sh*t on the American Dream at a Wal-Mart shareholders meeting?

So lately I’ve had people passing around this article by Caitlin Flanagan about the p.c. police ruining campus comedy, which appears to be stage one of a one-two punch from the Atlantic about how p.c.-ness is ruining college in general, with the haymaker being Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s magnum opus about how p.c. culture is somehow not only killing academic discourse but also infecting us all with mental illness. Well. That’s a lot to take in. Let me start with the comedy bit. Flanagan is not talking about all comedy performances on college campuses. She’s specifically talking about gigs paid for by student-activities committees out of common funds that students have no choice but to pay into along with their tuition. (In my long-ago college days I remember that drunkenly bitching “My student-activities fee paid for this?!” was a common refrain at campus events, sometimes before the event even started.) She’s talking about gigs that pay $1,000 a pop, which, as she acknowledges, is a big deal in the world of stand-up comedy in any venue. This isn’t a “normal” gig, in other words, it’s an institutional gig. You’re not playing to an audience of paying customers who’ve been warned--caveat emptor--that the $10 cover you’re putting down for a night’s entertainment might piss you off. You’re being approved by a committee that’s been entrusted with other people’s money in order to provide entertainment for an entire organization. You’re being guaranteed a more-or-less captive audience--these large-scale student events are always well-attended since they’re generally available at low or no cost to students and preempt any other scheduled events for the evening--and a big fat check. In return, you sacrifice a lot of the creative freedom that comes from running your own show and charging tickets for it. This ought not be news to anyone who works in entertainment. It’s pretty standard, and even 10 years ago when I was in college the comedy geeks all knew and expected that officially sanctioned campus events would be less edgy and exciting than the student-run open mics and improv shows that constituted the bulk of our weekend entertainment. Indeed, that’s the reason our one “large-scale event” every year was usually a musical act and not a comedy act, because music was more of a universal crowd-pleaser than comedy. Flanagan correctly notes that campuses being a paying venue for stand-up comedy at all is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that is itself a result of campuses marketing themselves as “all-inclusive resorts” and bulking up their “student activities funds” to keep students happy--something she seems to paradoxically decry even as she laments the comics who aren’t getting that student-activities money. Well, look. At one point in time I performed improv regularly and aspired to be a stand-up comic. I went to all the requisite classes and workshops. I had one coach I really liked because he was very blunt about treating your performing career as a business and being well aware that the legendarily successful comics who were “hard to work with” were an exception, not a rule. He talked a lot about how comedians more than any other artist must not just be aware of their audience but neurotically obsessed with their audience--making people laugh is the hardest emotion to elicit from an audience, and it’s a binary thing, you either succeed or you fail. Unlike other actors or speakers, stand-up comics must tape their sets and listen to them over and over again, gauging the reaction of the crowd from moment to moment. A stand-up comic who genuinely does not give a fuck what people think is a stand-up comic who stops getting booked for shows. And you know what his advice was? If you can “clean up” your act and still keep it authentic, alive and fresh, you should do it, because pissing people off is bad for business. Many people can’t clean up their act and still be funny, of course, which means they’ll make less money than the people who can. That’s unfortunately how business works. And the place he said to go if you really wanted to make a career of it? Not comedy clubs, where the pay even for comics who bring down the house is generally pitiful and the chance of being abused by drunk hecklers is high. Not colleges, either, which are cushy institutional gigs if you can get them but where the slots are limited and competition is fierce, as Flanagan observed at her NACA conference. No, the place to get the big bucks is the motivational corporate speaking circuit. Get booked at corporate “leadership” conferences, or “networking” events, or the corporate “retreats” given out as rewards to a company’s top-performing executives. Those people command fees of multiple thousands per gig, making the $1,000 purse for a campus gig seem paltry. And if you can come off as credibly inspirational or positive about whatever the company’s business is, you don’t even have to be all that funny, as long as people leave feeling good. Let’s recap Flanagan’s horror at the “herd opinions” that campus comics must bow to--that campus comics can’t make overtly sexist, racist or anti-gay jokes, that their jokes have to be safe, inclusive jokes about “Costco, camping, and pets,” and that being a gay dude who jokes about sassy black women--something some black women are legitimately pissed off by--gets you “only” 18 offers for a gig as opposed to the 40 or 50 you “deserve.” Well, the corporate speaking set has pretty much the same rules, only you trade a certain leeway when it comes to sexist humor--not much leeway, since HR departments are as lawsuit-averse as campus administrations--for adding the requirement that you also can’t bad-mouth capitalism, business or the general concept of working hard to achieve the American Dream. Right-wing media has been having a freakout over a handout (a handout freakout, or HOFO) at a University of California faculty training session describing “meritocracy” as an un-p.c. term, seeing this as part of the unrelenting academic assault on freedom. I find it very hard to see it as anything but one very small counterattack against the much larger “real-world” p.c. culture where you’re not allowed to say anything against “meritocracy.” I can’t help seeing all this hand-wringing over campus culture as coming from people who are mentally and emotionally stuck on campus--without seeing the degree to which “campus culture” is just a reaction against this “real world” they speak so highly of. I’ll speak from my own experience. I did do my time at the extremely left-wing Swarthmore College, “the Kremlin on the Crum,” as they call it, where the handful of officially sanctioned student events every year were predictably inoffensively anodyne, though that didn’t stop them from booking a local stand-up comic who inspired a mass walkout due to an endless onslaught of Monica Lewinsky jokes. (Whether this was because they were offensively sexist or offensively unfunny, I don’t personally know, although he was telling these jokes in fucking 2005.) I also heard a lot more jokes from student comics, improv troupes and uncategorizable open-mic performance artists, many of which were quite outrageously “offensive” (graphic violence, graphic depictions of rape, liberal use of slurs, etc.) even though they all came from the same kind of incoherently rebellious campus left perspective. Some of them were really funny, though none of them were particularly liberatory or profound, any more than your typical comedy club’s litany of jokes about alcoholism and oral sex are. But then I graduated, had a bunch of adventures in the working world and, for a time, found myself doing “business development” for a small IT company, a job for which I was direly unqualified. I spent a great deal of time in this position attending lots and lots and lots of corporate events--Chamber of Commerce events, tech-centric “disruption” events, Networking for Good fundraisers. I got a lot of free meals out of my company expense account in return for almost no success at developing actual business contacts, but I consider myself karmically justified because I have never had to sit through so many direly boring and unfunny speakers in my life. I spent a year listening to speakers billed as “funny” and “entertaining” who made those boring campus entertainers seem like George Carlin. And everything was not only obnoxiously “p.c.” but also obnoxiously pollyannaish and optimistic--any joke that might come off as cynical or subversive was off-limits. Every speaker, no matter how they varied their jokes to play to an audience of Young Millennial Tech Brats or Grizzled Commercial Real Estate Development Veterans or African-American Owners of Independent Dental Practices, hewed to the same “You Are Responsible for Your Success” script as faithfully as pastors to the Bible. To me, this is the real “p.c.”--literally what is “politically correct” to say in America, what you have to say to get on the good side of the politically powerful regardless of its truth. This other “p.c.” everyone talks about is just a weak attempt to oppose it -- which just as often gets co-opted or absorbed by it. George Carlin would be banned from both the campus and the corporate comedy circuit not just for his “Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd” joke but for his loud, vicious denunciation of the U.S. as mass-murdering brown people. Even if you somehow “cleaned up” the act of one of my favorite and foulest comics, Rick Shapiro, the fact that he trades in the relentless bleakness of poverty—“Nothing works out for anyone! I sucked dick for heroin, you will too!”--would permanently lock him out of those $5,000-a-pop “inspirational” gigs. Even at the Kremlin on the Crum you had to go to the beer-soaked student open mics to hear anything the least bit “subversive”--by which I mean fiercely anti-sexist or anti-racist as much as I mean fiercely sexist or racist, by which I mean anything fierce at all. I myself went through college a thoroughly obnoxious “anti-p.c.” gadfly, arguing with every crunchy activist and social justice crusader I met. I didn’t engage in “self-censorship” until I went around hurriedly locking all my Facebook and LiveJournal posts so none of my respectable business contacts would see my anguish about Trayvon Martin or my insomnia-fueled rants about the brutality of capitalism, because I knew there would be no vigorous debate or social media shaming if I were found out, I’d just quietly lose my job. This isn’t just about the fact that, as Scott Timberg points out, conservatives still ban far more books from libraries and curricula than liberals. It’s about how one professor coming under Title IX investigation for an article containing a veiled attack on a student is part of the “political correctness gone mad” narrative but another professor straight-up losing his job for negative tweets about Israel is not. It’s about how conservatives get to revise the AP U.S. history exam and kill a Smithsonian exhibit about the Hiroshima bombing because they both contain facts that make them uncomfortable, but this isn’t labeled as “political correctness.” It’s about how Mel Gibson kills his Hollywood career with a rambling anti-Semitic rant and Rose McGowan gets blacklisted for a single snarky tweet about sexist casting notices--but only the former is “censorious p.c. culture,” the latter is just Hollywood businessmen protecting the feelings of the people who sign their checks. That’s it, isn’t it? It’s only “p.c. gone mad” if it’s the wrong people whose feelings are being policed, the people who are “normally” in the check-signing position. I didn’t take my coach’s advice, when I got my brief window to fame and fortune by being the "Jeopardy!" guy. He called me and told me my 15 minutes of fame were the perfect vehicle to a cushy life on the corporate-speaking circuit, that if I reworked my public image enough I could make money in my sleep telling entrepreneurs and executives how to “disrupt the rules” to make big profits. It wouldn’t even really be contrary to my beliefs to do so. It would just be leaving out certain parts of my beliefs--the parts likely to step on the toes of the check-signing elites of the world. I ultimately made the other choice--I went public with my SJW beliefs, I wrote incendiary political think pieces for left-wing rags, I made myself unhirable as a cheerleader for the American Dream. I’m working the “p.c. left” college-campus-speaker diversity circuit, which, as a cursory look at any speaking-gig website will tell you, has a whole lot less money floating around it than the inspirational/corporate circuit, despite its supposed tyrannical power. The fact that people like me get shut out of the Chamber of Commerce isn’t “political correctness,” though. It’s just “the free market,” or “the way the world works,” or, as my parents would call it, “simple common sense.” Actual political correctness doesn’t get perceived as political correctness. If it’s really “politically correct” to believe something then that belief isn’t perceived at all--any more than fish perceive water. “Political correctness” is the label we put on any attempt to change what’s politically correct — "political correctness gone mad" is what we call it when that change happens too fast for our tastes. The fact is George Carlin wouldn’t have been welcome as institutionally endorsed entertainment in the 1940s, or the 1960s (the decade in which he was arrested for public profanity, the decade when the Smothers Brothers were forced off the air), or the 1980s, or the 2000s--but it’s only the 2000s-specific rape-joke critiques that are treated as a new, horrifying era of “political correctness” that must be resisted. Everything else that makes something like him controversial--and has always made someone like him controversial--is chalked up to “the way the marketplace works” and to “common sense.” You know, things we don’t question because they are politically correct. Which brings me back to the Lukianoff/Haidt piece and its insulting thesis that college campuses are incubators for mental illness and emotional fragility because they make students hypersensitive to oppression--ignoring that the entire rest of the world is a hypersensitive minefield ready to blow the fuck up when you so much as mention the concept of oppression. They inappropriately borrow the language of cognitive behavioral therapy--a practice meant to deal with personal emotional problems on an individual basis--to diagnose an entire social movement as mentally ill. So I’ll borrow their use of mental-health rhetoric and point out that what they’re doing is called gaslighting. They’re treating real, society-wide problems as though they’re just individual mental hang-ups. They’re treating the oppressive culture of “political correctness” that silences dissent and enforces conformity that we have always had as normal and sane, and treating the resistance to it--the flawed attempt to come up with new social norms that comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable instead of vice versa--as though it’s the real sickness. It’s a textbook example of the Martha Mitchell effect, of deciding you’re paranoid before even asking if they really are out to get you. It’s an unfair criticism. It’s a criticism that comes from a place of immense privilege and comfort. And it is, most of all, tiresomely and predictably politically correct.So lately I’ve had people passing around this article by Caitlin Flanagan about the p.c. police ruining campus comedy, which appears to be stage one of a one-two punch from the Atlantic about how p.c.-ness is ruining college in general, with the haymaker being Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s magnum opus about how p.c. culture is somehow not only killing academic discourse but also infecting us all with mental illness. Well. That’s a lot to take in. Let me start with the comedy bit. Flanagan is not talking about all comedy performances on college campuses. She’s specifically talking about gigs paid for by student-activities committees out of common funds that students have no choice but to pay into along with their tuition. (In my long-ago college days I remember that drunkenly bitching “My student-activities fee paid for this?!” was a common refrain at campus events, sometimes before the event even started.) She’s talking about gigs that pay $1,000 a pop, which, as she acknowledges, is a big deal in the world of stand-up comedy in any venue. This isn’t a “normal” gig, in other words, it’s an institutional gig. You’re not playing to an audience of paying customers who’ve been warned--caveat emptor--that the $10 cover you’re putting down for a night’s entertainment might piss you off. You’re being approved by a committee that’s been entrusted with other people’s money in order to provide entertainment for an entire organization. You’re being guaranteed a more-or-less captive audience--these large-scale student events are always well-attended since they’re generally available at low or no cost to students and preempt any other scheduled events for the evening--and a big fat check. In return, you sacrifice a lot of the creative freedom that comes from running your own show and charging tickets for it. This ought not be news to anyone who works in entertainment. It’s pretty standard, and even 10 years ago when I was in college the comedy geeks all knew and expected that officially sanctioned campus events would be less edgy and exciting than the student-run open mics and improv shows that constituted the bulk of our weekend entertainment. Indeed, that’s the reason our one “large-scale event” every year was usually a musical act and not a comedy act, because music was more of a universal crowd-pleaser than comedy. Flanagan correctly notes that campuses being a paying venue for stand-up comedy at all is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that is itself a result of campuses marketing themselves as “all-inclusive resorts” and bulking up their “student activities funds” to keep students happy--something she seems to paradoxically decry even as she laments the comics who aren’t getting that student-activities money. Well, look. At one point in time I performed improv regularly and aspired to be a stand-up comic. I went to all the requisite classes and workshops. I had one coach I really liked because he was very blunt about treating your performing career as a business and being well aware that the legendarily successful comics who were “hard to work with” were an exception, not a rule. He talked a lot about how comedians more than any other artist must not just be aware of their audience but neurotically obsessed with their audience--making people laugh is the hardest emotion to elicit from an audience, and it’s a binary thing, you either succeed or you fail. Unlike other actors or speakers, stand-up comics must tape their sets and listen to them over and over again, gauging the reaction of the crowd from moment to moment. A stand-up comic who genuinely does not give a fuck what people think is a stand-up comic who stops getting booked for shows. And you know what his advice was? If you can “clean up” your act and still keep it authentic, alive and fresh, you should do it, because pissing people off is bad for business. Many people can’t clean up their act and still be funny, of course, which means they’ll make less money than the people who can. That’s unfortunately how business works. And the place he said to go if you really wanted to make a career of it? Not comedy clubs, where the pay even for comics who bring down the house is generally pitiful and the chance of being abused by drunk hecklers is high. Not colleges, either, which are cushy institutional gigs if you can get them but where the slots are limited and competition is fierce, as Flanagan observed at her NACA conference. No, the place to get the big bucks is the motivational corporate speaking circuit. Get booked at corporate “leadership” conferences, or “networking” events, or the corporate “retreats” given out as rewards to a company’s top-performing executives. Those people command fees of multiple thousands per gig, making the $1,000 purse for a campus gig seem paltry. And if you can come off as credibly inspirational or positive about whatever the company’s business is, you don’t even have to be all that funny, as long as people leave feeling good. Let’s recap Flanagan’s horror at the “herd opinions” that campus comics must bow to--that campus comics can’t make overtly sexist, racist or anti-gay jokes, that their jokes have to be safe, inclusive jokes about “Costco, camping, and pets,” and that being a gay dude who jokes about sassy black women--something some black women are legitimately pissed off by--gets you “only” 18 offers for a gig as opposed to the 40 or 50 you “deserve.” Well, the corporate speaking set has pretty much the same rules, only you trade a certain leeway when it comes to sexist humor--not much leeway, since HR departments are as lawsuit-averse as campus administrations--for adding the requirement that you also can’t bad-mouth capitalism, business or the general concept of working hard to achieve the American Dream. Right-wing media has been having a freakout over a handout (a handout freakout, or HOFO) at a University of California faculty training session describing “meritocracy” as an un-p.c. term, seeing this as part of the unrelenting academic assault on freedom. I find it very hard to see it as anything but one very small counterattack against the much larger “real-world” p.c. culture where you’re not allowed to say anything against “meritocracy.” I can’t help seeing all this hand-wringing over campus culture as coming from people who are mentally and emotionally stuck on campus--without seeing the degree to which “campus culture” is just a reaction against this “real world” they speak so highly of. I’ll speak from my own experience. I did do my time at the extremely left-wing Swarthmore College, “the Kremlin on the Crum,” as they call it, where the handful of officially sanctioned student events every year were predictably inoffensively anodyne, though that didn’t stop them from booking a local stand-up comic who inspired a mass walkout due to an endless onslaught of Monica Lewinsky jokes. (Whether this was because they were offensively sexist or offensively unfunny, I don’t personally know, although he was telling these jokes in fucking 2005.) I also heard a lot more jokes from student comics, improv troupes and uncategorizable open-mic performance artists, many of which were quite outrageously “offensive” (graphic violence, graphic depictions of rape, liberal use of slurs, etc.) even though they all came from the same kind of incoherently rebellious campus left perspective. Some of them were really funny, though none of them were particularly liberatory or profound, any more than your typical comedy club’s litany of jokes about alcoholism and oral sex are. But then I graduated, had a bunch of adventures in the working world and, for a time, found myself doing “business development” for a small IT company, a job for which I was direly unqualified. I spent a great deal of time in this position attending lots and lots and lots of corporate events--Chamber of Commerce events, tech-centric “disruption” events, Networking for Good fundraisers. I got a lot of free meals out of my company expense account in return for almost no success at developing actual business contacts, but I consider myself karmically justified because I have never had to sit through so many direly boring and unfunny speakers in my life. I spent a year listening to speakers billed as “funny” and “entertaining” who made those boring campus entertainers seem like George Carlin. And everything was not only obnoxiously “p.c.” but also obnoxiously pollyannaish and optimistic--any joke that might come off as cynical or subversive was off-limits. Every speaker, no matter how they varied their jokes to play to an audience of Young Millennial Tech Brats or Grizzled Commercial Real Estate Development Veterans or African-American Owners of Independent Dental Practices, hewed to the same “You Are Responsible for Your Success” script as faithfully as pastors to the Bible. To me, this is the real “p.c.”--literally what is “politically correct” to say in America, what you have to say to get on the good side of the politically powerful regardless of its truth. This other “p.c.” everyone talks about is just a weak attempt to oppose it -- which just as often gets co-opted or absorbed by it. George Carlin would be banned from both the campus and the corporate comedy circuit not just for his “Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd” joke but for his loud, vicious denunciation of the U.S. as mass-murdering brown people. Even if you somehow “cleaned up” the act of one of my favorite and foulest comics, Rick Shapiro, the fact that he trades in the relentless bleakness of poverty—“Nothing works out for anyone! I sucked dick for heroin, you will too!”--would permanently lock him out of those $5,000-a-pop “inspirational” gigs. Even at the Kremlin on the Crum you had to go to the beer-soaked student open mics to hear anything the least bit “subversive”--by which I mean fiercely anti-sexist or anti-racist as much as I mean fiercely sexist or racist, by which I mean anything fierce at all. I myself went through college a thoroughly obnoxious “anti-p.c.” gadfly, arguing with every crunchy activist and social justice crusader I met. I didn’t engage in “self-censorship” until I went around hurriedly locking all my Facebook and LiveJournal posts so none of my respectable business contacts would see my anguish about Trayvon Martin or my insomnia-fueled rants about the brutality of capitalism, because I knew there would be no vigorous debate or social media shaming if I were found out, I’d just quietly lose my job. This isn’t just about the fact that, as Scott Timberg points out, conservatives still ban far more books from libraries and curricula than liberals. It’s about how one professor coming under Title IX investigation for an article containing a veiled attack on a student is part of the “political correctness gone mad” narrative but another professor straight-up losing his job for negative tweets about Israel is not. It’s about how conservatives get to revise the AP U.S. history exam and kill a Smithsonian exhibit about the Hiroshima bombing because they both contain facts that make them uncomfortable, but this isn’t labeled as “political correctness.” It’s about how Mel Gibson kills his Hollywood career with a rambling anti-Semitic rant and Rose McGowan gets blacklisted for a single snarky tweet about sexist casting notices--but only the former is “censorious p.c. culture,” the latter is just Hollywood businessmen protecting the feelings of the people who sign their checks. That’s it, isn’t it? It’s only “p.c. gone mad” if it’s the wrong people whose feelings are being policed, the people who are “normally” in the check-signing position. I didn’t take my coach’s advice, when I got my brief window to fame and fortune by being the "Jeopardy!" guy. He called me and told me my 15 minutes of fame were the perfect vehicle to a cushy life on the corporate-speaking circuit, that if I reworked my public image enough I could make money in my sleep telling entrepreneurs and executives how to “disrupt the rules” to make big profits. It wouldn’t even really be contrary to my beliefs to do so. It would just be leaving out certain parts of my beliefs--the parts likely to step on the toes of the check-signing elites of the world. I ultimately made the other choice--I went public with my SJW beliefs, I wrote incendiary political think pieces for left-wing rags, I made myself unhirable as a cheerleader for the American Dream. I’m working the “p.c. left” college-campus-speaker diversity circuit, which, as a cursory look at any speaking-gig website will tell you, has a whole lot less money floating around it than the inspirational/corporate circuit, despite its supposed tyrannical power. The fact that people like me get shut out of the Chamber of Commerce isn’t “political correctness,” though. It’s just “the free market,” or “the way the world works,” or, as my parents would call it, “simple common sense.” Actual political correctness doesn’t get perceived as political correctness. If it’s really “politically correct” to believe something then that belief isn’t perceived at all--any more than fish perceive water. “Political correctness” is the label we put on any attempt to change what’s politically correct — "political correctness gone mad" is what we call it when that change happens too fast for our tastes. The fact is George Carlin wouldn’t have been welcome as institutionally endorsed entertainment in the 1940s, or the 1960s (the decade in which he was arrested for public profanity, the decade when the Smothers Brothers were forced off the air), or the 1980s, or the 2000s--but it’s only the 2000s-specific rape-joke critiques that are treated as a new, horrifying era of “political correctness” that must be resisted. Everything else that makes something like him controversial--and has always made someone like him controversial--is chalked up to “the way the marketplace works” and to “common sense.” You know, things we don’t question because they are politically correct. Which brings me back to the Lukianoff/Haidt piece and its insulting thesis that college campuses are incubators for mental illness and emotional fragility because they make students hypersensitive to oppression--ignoring that the entire rest of the world is a hypersensitive minefield ready to blow the fuck up when you so much as mention the concept of oppression. They inappropriately borrow the language of cognitive behavioral therapy--a practice meant to deal with personal emotional problems on an individual basis--to diagnose an entire social movement as mentally ill. So I’ll borrow their use of mental-health rhetoric and point out that what they’re doing is called gaslighting. They’re treating real, society-wide problems as though they’re just individual mental hang-ups. They’re treating the oppressive culture of “political correctness” that silences dissent and enforces conformity that we have always had as normal and sane, and treating the resistance to it--the flawed attempt to come up with new social norms that comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable instead of vice versa--as though it’s the real sickness. It’s a textbook example of the Martha Mitchell effect, of deciding you’re paranoid before even asking if they really are out to get you. It’s an unfair criticism. It’s a criticism that comes from a place of immense privilege and comfort. And it is, most of all, tiresomely and predictably politically correct.

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Paul Haggis on “Show Me a Hero” and bringing the politics of fear to life: “That’s still what we do all the time. It’s how politics is practiced in America”

Now that you’ve (hopefully) watched the first two hours of HBO’s “Show Me a Hero,” which debuted last night, let’s talk about the way the show looks. When you’re making a story about public housing based on a nonfiction book, the visuals are going to be crucial toward making the show feel like TV, not a textbook. Enter director Paul Haggis, the Academy Award-winning writer behind two back-to-back best pictures: “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash,” which he also directed. “Show Me a Hero” is his first project that he’s coming to solely as a director, based purely on the pedigree of David Simon, and as I said in my review of the miniseries, it might be his best work yet. Simon and co-writer William F. Zorzi’s bureaucratic and detail-oriented sensibility is complemented by Haggis’ cinematic intimacy, making for a lived-in and involved six hours. I spoke to Haggis about how he created the visual element of “Show Me a Hero”—who would have guessed sourcing the mid-range cars from the late 1980s would have been one of the hardest parts? Note: I get into some of the details of the first two episodes with Haggis — so fair warning, if you haven't yet watched — as well as discussing the framing device in the first episode, but at his request I have not revealed the (historically accurate) ending of “Show Me a Hero.” How did you come to this project? I was in England and prepping a movie that was going to go, and the actor I wanted wasn’t available for a year, so we pushed. So I had nothing to do. I called my representation and they said, “Look, we have a bunch of interest, some features we want you to direct.” They started going down the list, and they got to No. 3 and said, “Oh, David Simon has a miniseries.” I said, “Stop there. Say yes.” They said, “Great, we’ll send you the script, and we’ll discuss.” I said: “No. Say yes, and then send me the script.” They thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t, because I’m a huge fan of his, always have been. “The Wire” is one of my favorite series of all time. And, you know, his work from “The Corner” and “Treme” and “Generation Kill,” all series I watched and loved. Then I read the script before meeting him. Luckily, it was something I had a great interest in because it was talking about what I like to talk about: the fact that this wasn’t the civil rights battle in the '60s. This is a civil rights battle in the north, in 1990. It’s not those bad people down there. It’s us here in New York. I’m a New Yorker now. And it’s those small decisions, of the “Not in my backyard” mentality. Oh yes. There’s literally that line in one of the episodes: "I’m not going to have that in my backyard ... It is literally in my backyard." I’m not doing it, it’s in my backyard. On reading it, I could empathize with every single one of the characters on the screen. Because even those who were cast as villains in this had a really good point. I mean, you look at Schlobohm. You look at those towers, especially in that period. Do you really want that in your street? I don’t. I know it’s not a matter of race. I know no affluent African-American or Hispanic family would want that on their street. So that wasn’t a race issue, it was a class issue. There’s also an issue about the way we had mismanaged public housing from the beginning and how we continue to mismanage it, and how we just love to take problems and just shove them someplace and go, “Oh, they’re solved. All those people, we’re just going to warehouse them over there, and that’s solved.” And it’s not. There’s a bureaucrat in this—Oscar Newman, played by Peter Riegert, with the long beard. He’s the only one who’s battling. He’s a bureaucrat, and he’s battling the left, he’s battling the right, he’s battling the NAACP. He’s battling HUD, he’s battling everybody—because he wants a solution that actually works. He doesn’t just want the easy solution. We just want easy solutions in this country. In Yonkers, they finally constructed housing that works for low-income families. But the fear-mongering, the hatred, everything that came out of that — it was stunning to see that actually happen, and to re-create that was something that I thought would be tremendously difficult. I like doing tremendously difficult things. At first glance, zoning doesn’t seem like such a dynamic and political thing, but it is. How do you make that happen visually? What were the motifs or sets that you would fall to? Early on, they gave me the script. Dave and Bill gave me a script that’s basically all true, even if some of the characters are combined, or whatever. It’s all true; everything happened. My job is to make it feel true. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do that, how to make you feel like you were in that crowd. I said early on to David [Simon, executive producer and writer] and Nina [Kostroff-Noble, executive producer], “There’s not going to be a perfect frame in this. I’m going to find imperfection and drag it into every single frame.” If you’re in a crowd, and you’re trying to get a glimpse of the mayor, there will be two people standing in front of you, and somebody with a big hat. And if you’re looking at somebody in a close-up, there will be a microphone in the wrong place. You’ll see later in a scene with Alfred Molina [who plays city councilor Henry Spallone], there’s a pole right in his face. That’s not an accident. I moved the camera to make sure that the pole was right in his face, so that you feel like you’re a participant in this. If you feel like that, two things will happen. One is you’ll feel real. Two, you will be able to see these people with all their flaws, because the flaws are evident in the frame. If you do that, you’ll be able to empathize. You’ll be able to say, “Yeah, that’s sort of me. I sort of feel that.” And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do in my dramas: to make you empathize with people that you don’t want to empathize with and challenge your beliefs, on the left and on the right. Many decisions that the left was making were just too easy. And the right was all fear-mongering. It was all trying to make our constituents fear the Other, and that’s still what we do all the time. It’s how politics is practiced in America. They appeal to our basest fears. Absolutely. Always have. And it works, and you see it working right now. You want people to go, “Can we stop? Just a second. This decision you’re making is against your best interests. You understand that, right?” But it gives you an identity to make that, to say that we should not help the poor. “OK, fine, that’s other people. But we should certainly not have public healthcare, even though my daughter is sick and might need it and my wife has bad teeth — but no, that would be bad because that’s socialism and we’re not socialists.” Then, you go, “OK, let’s just apply a little common sense to this, rather than the demagoguery.” [“Show Me a Hero”] is about really flawed human beings. The central character is an opportunist. He’s just a guy who wants to be the mayor. Why? Because he wants to be the mayor. He’s not even a racist. Right! He’s just like, “Oh, I can win on this. OK, yeah, fine. I just want to win — I don’t really care why.” That original sin is what is going to damn him. That personality flaw, so that as he turns and as he champions this, everything comes at a cost to him. His own ego is frail. He’s so human, it makes this story and his bravery, I guess, that much more brave. He had to fight his own demons as well as those that surrounded him. What was the decision behind starting the miniseries with Nick Wasicsko at his father’s grave, in 1993, and then jumping back to 1987? Just a dramatic device that David and Bill [William F. Zorzi, writer] came up with. I wanted to keep the audience off balance. I wanted to give them a sense that something might not be good here. Exactly what? We’re not sure. Even at the end, I think you’re not sure. I like to keep the audience guessing. There’s something beautifully understated about your cast. I didn’t even realize Vinni Restiano was Winona Ryder at first. She’s just droning on! People talking about zoning, parking regulations, and that’s how she’s introduced. They do a great job of blending into the surroundings. And yet, as you see going on, it’s really fascinating to see that every single one of those city councilmen—every single person in this city hall is memorable in that role. They’re all specific. That’s a great testament to those actors, who did their research, who watched the tapes of their counterparts, who brought their own suggestions about how to do this thing. And they all found their own idiosyncrasies. It was wonderful, a very talented group of actors. What was your favorite scene? I loved the city hall scenes in episode two, when all hell has broken loose—and finding a way to shoot it so that you felt like you were there and you were a part of it. Shooting behind a lot of people, and having my cameras behind people, having people block us, not being able to see, having to poke around, having a lot of foreground so you felt that you were part of it. The frame was always imperfect in some way so that it talked about who these characters were: These imperfect people who were trying to serve in some way. Yonkers is this very unglamorous location. What was it like filming there? It was great. As much as we could, we shot in the actual location. Some had changed. Some places we couldn’t. For instance, my production designer, Larry Bennett, had to go through, and we had to create a lot of the city offices. We had to build one of the tenements. We had to build one of the apartments inside Schlobohm because we couldn’t go in and kick all the people out of their homes to shoot. The offices at City Hall had changed radically—they’d been renovated. But we did shoot in the city council chamber. We did shoot in the corridors. Everything was the same; we made it a point. Mary Dorman’s house was Mary Dorman’s house. That was very important to all of us: to feel what they were feeling at the time and to put our actors in real locations. You want to understand how small Mary Dorman’s house was. It’s a little brick house on a nice little street, and she was trying to protect that little brick house on the nice little street. It was important. Of course, it was really impossible to shoot. It was so tiny. But it made you feel that her life is not that dissimilar from those who are in public housing, who just want to have that. Just a little house someplace. Is there an inherent challenge in doing a period piece, or something that’s not a very glamorous period piece? Yes, it’s much harder than you expect. People did not keep their cars from 1987. You’ve got to find them all, and the people who did keep their cars, they kept Cadillacs. [Laughs.] It was so hard finding the Gremlins or the Pintos, whatever the hell we were driving back then. The Ford Rancheros. So hard, but we had to find them. And you can’t just walk out into the street and shoot. We had to shoot this very quickly. In a normal movie, you shoot maybe one to three pages a day. This, we were shooting between six and 10 pages a day. That was a struggle. We had to shoot very quickly. A lot of locations. Over 40 speaking roles, and make it all feel real. [We had to] shoot really fast. Make decisions very quickly—how you’re going to do it—and stick to it. You’ve had the opportunity to make your own masterpieces. What’s it like going into a situation where you’re creating things on the fly? It’s great. I’ve never directed anything I haven’t written. It’s my first, ever. And I wanted to do it because I wanted to learn. It’s a great challenge to go in with someone else’s script, and as a director you get to give notes. You’re not putting pen to paper — that’s their job. They protect that, rightfully. They’re the writers. My job is to guide that where I can, to understand it, and to try to figure out how to do it where I can’t. And to bring it to life. If there’s a scene that requires just a truckload of exposition, how do I make it sound like those people really should be saying those things to each other at that moment, even though they both know it. How do I make it sound like that? How do I make the actors understand that? If I add this little thing, try to improvise around this little bit, and then find the life in it. Bring it to life, and then shoot it in a way that it’ll feel like it’s happening right now, but not do it in a strictly verité way, and do it in a way that has a style that hopefully helps tell the story. I had to keep focusing on, “What’s the emotional arc here?” Yes, we have all this going on, but what’s actually happening underneath that? So when this vote comes down like that, what’s the emotional impact on our character. Ah, he thought he had it in his pocket. He thought he had this ally. This ally just turned him into an enemy, and I have to see that on his face. I have to understand that by just looking at it.Now that you’ve (hopefully) watched the first two hours of HBO’s “Show Me a Hero,” which debuted last night, let’s talk about the way the show looks. When you’re making a story about public housing based on a nonfiction book, the visuals are going to be crucial toward making the show feel like TV, not a textbook. Enter director Paul Haggis, the Academy Award-winning writer behind two back-to-back best pictures: “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash,” which he also directed. “Show Me a Hero” is his first project that he’s coming to solely as a director, based purely on the pedigree of David Simon, and as I said in my review of the miniseries, it might be his best work yet. Simon and co-writer William F. Zorzi’s bureaucratic and detail-oriented sensibility is complemented by Haggis’ cinematic intimacy, making for a lived-in and involved six hours. I spoke to Haggis about how he created the visual element of “Show Me a Hero”—who would have guessed sourcing the mid-range cars from the late 1980s would have been one of the hardest parts? Note: I get into some of the details of the first two episodes with Haggis — so fair warning, if you haven't yet watched — as well as discussing the framing device in the first episode, but at his request I have not revealed the (historically accurate) ending of “Show Me a Hero.” How did you come to this project? I was in England and prepping a movie that was going to go, and the actor I wanted wasn’t available for a year, so we pushed. So I had nothing to do. I called my representation and they said, “Look, we have a bunch of interest, some features we want you to direct.” They started going down the list, and they got to No. 3 and said, “Oh, David Simon has a miniseries.” I said, “Stop there. Say yes.” They said, “Great, we’ll send you the script, and we’ll discuss.” I said: “No. Say yes, and then send me the script.” They thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t, because I’m a huge fan of his, always have been. “The Wire” is one of my favorite series of all time. And, you know, his work from “The Corner” and “Treme” and “Generation Kill,” all series I watched and loved. Then I read the script before meeting him. Luckily, it was something I had a great interest in because it was talking about what I like to talk about: the fact that this wasn’t the civil rights battle in the '60s. This is a civil rights battle in the north, in 1990. It’s not those bad people down there. It’s us here in New York. I’m a New Yorker now. And it’s those small decisions, of the “Not in my backyard” mentality. Oh yes. There’s literally that line in one of the episodes: "I’m not going to have that in my backyard ... It is literally in my backyard." I’m not doing it, it’s in my backyard. On reading it, I could empathize with every single one of the characters on the screen. Because even those who were cast as villains in this had a really good point. I mean, you look at Schlobohm. You look at those towers, especially in that period. Do you really want that in your street? I don’t. I know it’s not a matter of race. I know no affluent African-American or Hispanic family would want that on their street. So that wasn’t a race issue, it was a class issue. There’s also an issue about the way we had mismanaged public housing from the beginning and how we continue to mismanage it, and how we just love to take problems and just shove them someplace and go, “Oh, they’re solved. All those people, we’re just going to warehouse them over there, and that’s solved.” And it’s not. There’s a bureaucrat in this—Oscar Newman, played by Peter Riegert, with the long beard. He’s the only one who’s battling. He’s a bureaucrat, and he’s battling the left, he’s battling the right, he’s battling the NAACP. He’s battling HUD, he’s battling everybody—because he wants a solution that actually works. He doesn’t just want the easy solution. We just want easy solutions in this country. In Yonkers, they finally constructed housing that works for low-income families. But the fear-mongering, the hatred, everything that came out of that — it was stunning to see that actually happen, and to re-create that was something that I thought would be tremendously difficult. I like doing tremendously difficult things. At first glance, zoning doesn’t seem like such a dynamic and political thing, but it is. How do you make that happen visually? What were the motifs or sets that you would fall to? Early on, they gave me the script. Dave and Bill gave me a script that’s basically all true, even if some of the characters are combined, or whatever. It’s all true; everything happened. My job is to make it feel true. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do that, how to make you feel like you were in that crowd. I said early on to David [Simon, executive producer and writer] and Nina [Kostroff-Noble, executive producer], “There’s not going to be a perfect frame in this. I’m going to find imperfection and drag it into every single frame.” If you’re in a crowd, and you’re trying to get a glimpse of the mayor, there will be two people standing in front of you, and somebody with a big hat. And if you’re looking at somebody in a close-up, there will be a microphone in the wrong place. You’ll see later in a scene with Alfred Molina [who plays city councilor Henry Spallone], there’s a pole right in his face. That’s not an accident. I moved the camera to make sure that the pole was right in his face, so that you feel like you’re a participant in this. If you feel like that, two things will happen. One is you’ll feel real. Two, you will be able to see these people with all their flaws, because the flaws are evident in the frame. If you do that, you’ll be able to empathize. You’ll be able to say, “Yeah, that’s sort of me. I sort of feel that.” And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do in my dramas: to make you empathize with people that you don’t want to empathize with and challenge your beliefs, on the left and on the right. Many decisions that the left was making were just too easy. And the right was all fear-mongering. It was all trying to make our constituents fear the Other, and that’s still what we do all the time. It’s how politics is practiced in America. They appeal to our basest fears. Absolutely. Always have. And it works, and you see it working right now. You want people to go, “Can we stop? Just a second. This decision you’re making is against your best interests. You understand that, right?” But it gives you an identity to make that, to say that we should not help the poor. “OK, fine, that’s other people. But we should certainly not have public healthcare, even though my daughter is sick and might need it and my wife has bad teeth — but no, that would be bad because that’s socialism and we’re not socialists.” Then, you go, “OK, let’s just apply a little common sense to this, rather than the demagoguery.” [“Show Me a Hero”] is about really flawed human beings. The central character is an opportunist. He’s just a guy who wants to be the mayor. Why? Because he wants to be the mayor. He’s not even a racist. Right! He’s just like, “Oh, I can win on this. OK, yeah, fine. I just want to win — I don’t really care why.” That original sin is what is going to damn him. That personality flaw, so that as he turns and as he champions this, everything comes at a cost to him. His own ego is frail. He’s so human, it makes this story and his bravery, I guess, that much more brave. He had to fight his own demons as well as those that surrounded him. What was the decision behind starting the miniseries with Nick Wasicsko at his father’s grave, in 1993, and then jumping back to 1987? Just a dramatic device that David and Bill [William F. Zorzi, writer] came up with. I wanted to keep the audience off balance. I wanted to give them a sense that something might not be good here. Exactly what? We’re not sure. Even at the end, I think you’re not sure. I like to keep the audience guessing. There’s something beautifully understated about your cast. I didn’t even realize Vinni Restiano was Winona Ryder at first. She’s just droning on! People talking about zoning, parking regulations, and that’s how she’s introduced. They do a great job of blending into the surroundings. And yet, as you see going on, it’s really fascinating to see that every single one of those city councilmen—every single person in this city hall is memorable in that role. They’re all specific. That’s a great testament to those actors, who did their research, who watched the tapes of their counterparts, who brought their own suggestions about how to do this thing. And they all found their own idiosyncrasies. It was wonderful, a very talented group of actors. What was your favorite scene? I loved the city hall scenes in episode two, when all hell has broken loose—and finding a way to shoot it so that you felt like you were there and you were a part of it. Shooting behind a lot of people, and having my cameras behind people, having people block us, not being able to see, having to poke around, having a lot of foreground so you felt that you were part of it. The frame was always imperfect in some way so that it talked about who these characters were: These imperfect people who were trying to serve in some way. Yonkers is this very unglamorous location. What was it like filming there? It was great. As much as we could, we shot in the actual location. Some had changed. Some places we couldn’t. For instance, my production designer, Larry Bennett, had to go through, and we had to create a lot of the city offices. We had to build one of the tenements. We had to build one of the apartments inside Schlobohm because we couldn’t go in and kick all the people out of their homes to shoot. The offices at City Hall had changed radically—they’d been renovated. But we did shoot in the city council chamber. We did shoot in the corridors. Everything was the same; we made it a point. Mary Dorman’s house was Mary Dorman’s house. That was very important to all of us: to feel what they were feeling at the time and to put our actors in real locations. You want to understand how small Mary Dorman’s house was. It’s a little brick house on a nice little street, and she was trying to protect that little brick house on the nice little street. It was important. Of course, it was really impossible to shoot. It was so tiny. But it made you feel that her life is not that dissimilar from those who are in public housing, who just want to have that. Just a little house someplace. Is there an inherent challenge in doing a period piece, or something that’s not a very glamorous period piece? Yes, it’s much harder than you expect. People did not keep their cars from 1987. You’ve got to find them all, and the people who did keep their cars, they kept Cadillacs. [Laughs.] It was so hard finding the Gremlins or the Pintos, whatever the hell we were driving back then. The Ford Rancheros. So hard, but we had to find them. And you can’t just walk out into the street and shoot. We had to shoot this very quickly. In a normal movie, you shoot maybe one to three pages a day. This, we were shooting between six and 10 pages a day. That was a struggle. We had to shoot very quickly. A lot of locations. Over 40 speaking roles, and make it all feel real. [We had to] shoot really fast. Make decisions very quickly—how you’re going to do it—and stick to it. You’ve had the opportunity to make your own masterpieces. What’s it like going into a situation where you’re creating things on the fly? It’s great. I’ve never directed anything I haven’t written. It’s my first, ever. And I wanted to do it because I wanted to learn. It’s a great challenge to go in with someone else’s script, and as a director you get to give notes. You’re not putting pen to paper — that’s their job. They protect that, rightfully. They’re the writers. My job is to guide that where I can, to understand it, and to try to figure out how to do it where I can’t. And to bring it to life. If there’s a scene that requires just a truckload of exposition, how do I make it sound like those people really should be saying those things to each other at that moment, even though they both know it. How do I make it sound like that? How do I make the actors understand that? If I add this little thing, try to improvise around this little bit, and then find the life in it. Bring it to life, and then shoot it in a way that it’ll feel like it’s happening right now, but not do it in a strictly verité way, and do it in a way that has a style that hopefully helps tell the story. I had to keep focusing on, “What’s the emotional arc here?” Yes, we have all this going on, but what’s actually happening underneath that? So when this vote comes down like that, what’s the emotional impact on our character. Ah, he thought he had it in his pocket. He thought he had this ally. This ally just turned him into an enemy, and I have to see that on his face. I have to understand that by just looking at it.

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Africa’s great awakening: Amid capitalist plunder and environmental catastrophe, a new consciousness rises

You can’t possibly summarize the history of modern Africa in 30 seconds, but the guy we hear talking at the beginning of Hubert Sauper’s film “We Come as Friends” does a pretty good job. He’s speaking in an African language very few viewers of this film will understand or recognize, but he isn’t delivering some ancient myth or village wisdom. People came from Europe and took Africa by force, he explains. They plundered its natural resources and carved up the continent into different countries with arbitrary boundaries, leaving Africans to fight among themselves. When they were done with that, they went and conquered the Moon. “Did you know,” he concludes, “that the Moon belongs to the white man?” One might respond that the Moon has pretty much been relinquished by the white man, largely because nothing of value was discovered there. But in most respects that’s a startlingly accurate account of the 20th century from Africa’s point of view. As we see in Sauper’s acrid and disturbing ground-level documentary about the creation of South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, the forces that pillaged and brutalized Africa for more than 300 years have definitely not departed, although these days they find it necessary to modulate their message and wear a subtler disguise. There’s an obvious level of contradiction in a film by a white European radical that means to reflect the increasing self-awareness and political sophistication of ordinary Africans, even in conditions of endemic poverty and violence. Indeed, that contradiction is to some degree the subject of “We Come as Friends,” right down to the ruthless historical irony of its title. If some hope for the future can be discerned in a century when Africa faces multiple levels of political, economic and environmental crisis at the same time, it lies here: In our interconnected world, Africans can no longer be viewed through the West’s conventional “Heart of Darkness” prism of pity, condescension or contempt, as if they were the objects of a historical process they could not possibly understand. Even amid its unstinting portrait of the power still wielded in Africa by the twin forces of foreign capital and evangelical religion, Sauper’s film finds shreds of this hope in the unlikeliest places. Another recent film by a white European, Göran Hugo Olsson’s historical collage “Concerning Violence,” comes at the same subject from a different direction, challenging us to reconsider the true legacy of Africa’s revolutionary movements in the 1960s and ‘70s, which sought to turn colonial oppression upside down with a single stroke and were universally isolated, vilified and undermined by America and the capitalist world. Filmmakers like Olsson and Sauper have ample access to production funding and technical infrastructure, as well as the political freedom to explore controversial points of view, all of which is difficult to impossible in most African nations. Journalistic or historical films made by outsiders, no matter how carefully framed, are no substitute for Africans telling their own stories, as those two would surely agree. Given that urgent context, I would argue that the brilliant Mauritanian-born director Abderrahmane Sissako is among the world’s most important artists, even if few Westerners have heard of him. But Sissako lives in Paris (as does Hubert Sauper) and both his Oscar-nominated drama of life under sharia, “Timbuktu,” and his mesmerizing Brechtian courtroom drama “Bamako” – in which the West’s financial institutions are put on trial for their crimes against Africa – were made with European funding. One aspect of the systematic underdevelopment of Africa, one could argue, is that its film industries are entirely geared to entertainment product, and have no way to support noncommercial and unconventional work. Sauper has spent several years flying around Africa in his homemade plane, in search of the people, stories and images that other visitors don’t notice or deliberately ignore. (His previous film, the Oscar-nominated “Darwin’s Nightmare,” was more direct and didactic in tone but had a similar hypnotic power.) He is well aware that he belongs to the long tradition of “explorers” and “adventurers” who paved the way for the vicious exploitation of Africa’s natural and human resources, and that his claims to have different intentions may be viewed with reasonable suspicion. Even going back to the worst Western atrocities in Africa, like the near-genocidal reign of terror in the Belgian Congo, white interlopers have always persuaded themselves they were bringing the benefits of civilization to the “Dark Continent.” After Sauper lands his rickety aircraft in a remote Sudanese field, a young man who can read English translates his government papers for a local leader. “It says the whites come as friends,” he tells the dubious chief. They’ve heard that one before. I think Sauper is more than adroit enough to defend himself from charges of intellectual neocolonialism – or, more properly, to recognize that it’s there and use it to his advantage. By presenting himself as a holy fool in a flying tin can or a visiting space alien – in interviews, he has compared himself to the naïve, blustering and idealistic Captain Kirk, of the Starship Enterprise – he’s able to get inside institutional defenses in a way no ordinary journalist ever could. He attends an increasingly strange drunken party inside a Chinese-owned oil facility in northern Sudan, and somewhat later listens to a United Nations official blandly explain that the “development program” for South Sudan consists almost entirely of leasing the oil rights to Western energy conglomerates. On the other hand, Sauper makes no effort to speak to George Clooney, when the beneficent star shows up for a press event to celebrate South Sudan’s independence. Clooney and the Western media convinced us that the breakup of Sudan was necessary because of a brutal civil war between Arab Muslims and black Christians, which in turn produced the genocidal killings in Darfur. OK, yes -- but what lay behind those dreadful events? Sauper challenges us to see that as an ideological narrative that allows us to avoid deeper issues, including the historical power struggle that brought Christianity and Islam into conflict in that part of the world in the first place, and the present-day power struggle in which China and the United States carved up a poor, petroleum-rich and dysfunctional nation much as the Allies carved up Berlin in 1945. As in Joseph Conrad’s day, Africans are paying the price for the grand dreams cooked up in distant capitals. They also understand those dreams for what they are, and perceive the costs more clearly than we ever will. "We Come as Friends" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens Aug. 21 in Los Angeles and Washington; Aug. 26 in Boston; Aug. 28 in Chicago and San Francisco; and Sept. 11 in Denver, Santa Fe, N.M., Seattle and Columbus, Ohio, with more cities and home video to follow.

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8 food myths that just won’t go away

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Hillary’s in danger, Trump is sunk: The hard truths America is ignoring this election season

In January, I began writing a weekly column for Salon. Hillary Clinton was still in pre-campaign mode but already losing ground -- churning out formulaic answers to stock questions, delivering pricey speeches to the privileged, hobnobbing with Wall Street players while we peasants, now a working majority of the body politic, stocked up on torches and pitchforks. I wrote that her political model -- neoliberal economics wed, as it must be, to pay-to-play politics -- felt spent. In March, her emails surfaced. She waited a whole week to stage a brief, dodgy, purposefully chaotic press conference. I thought it a serious problem, especially when viewed in the context of her political history and persona, so I wrote that too. On both points I got hurricane-force blowback from Clinton backers. As is the custom now, a lot of it was personal (why do you hate the Clintons, we hate you, you’re stupid.) or warmed over consultant speak ( the election’s so far off everyone will forget, the issue’s so abstract no one will care). What my critics shared, apart from their devotion to Hillary and contempt for me, was polling data. In surveys taken after the story broke, Clinton held on to her huge lead. (Had I not seen them? How could Salon hire a political columnist who didn’t even read polls?) Last week, I wrote of another politician in trouble (at least if you regard Donald Trump as a politician).  I said his debate performance ended any chance he had of being seen as a serious person, let alone a serious presidential candidate. It was a cringe-inducing spectacle, best understood in psychological rather than political terms, a portrait of a man unhinged by narcissistic rage. In the history of presidential debates, it had no equal and anyone not unhinged by rage or ideology should have seen it. I got the same sort of feedback about Trump, albeit from different folks; personal attacks and political clichés wrapped in polling data. For three days after the debate, there was no data, so reporters hedged their bets. Of the few who took a flier most got it wrong, many writing admiringly of Trump’s feistiness and flair. On Sunday, NBC released a poll showing him at 23 percent; up a point among GOP primary voters. Armed with data, everybody got it wrong, again. Trump was proclaimed “Teflon Don,” spokesmodel of the month for an America that’s even madder than you thought. I tell Clintonites upset by my columns that rather than try to get me to stop writing them they should get her to start reading them. One reason they don’t may be the hypnotic power of polls to keep us from seeing what’s in front of our noses. Like Chico Marx asking, “Who you gonna believe, me or you own eyes?” polls make us question what we see. If you didn’t see that Clinton was digging herself a deeper hole every day, or that Trump came across in Cleveland as arrogant, vindictive, uninformed and out of control, you probably read too many polls and think too much about politics. Read all together and in their entirety, polls can tell a bit more of the truth. That NBC poll also put Trump ahead on the question of who did worst in debate: 29 percent picked him; 14 percent picked Rand Paul; 11 percent said Jeb Bush. No one else was in double digits. In a Suffolk Univ. poll, 55 percent of Iowa Republicans said the debate left them less inclined to vote for Trump. In the same way, Hillary’s horse race numbers held steady for a while after the email eruption, but other numbers went south fast, including those in which a majority of voters tell any pollster who asks that she isn’t honest or trustworthy. Sooner or later polls may catch up to where the truth is, or at least was. In the latest ones Clinton trails Walker, Huckabee, Rubio and Carson in Iowa; Walker, Bush and Paul in New Hampshire, and Sanders in New Hampshire. I’ve no faith in their predictive power, but they do affirm a deepening disaffection. I once said by the time Clinton fell behind in polls it would be too late to save her. That overstates the case but this much is clear: She must change and polls alone can’t tell her how. She has to see it for herself, and then believe what she sees. I’m not sure she can. Polls do worse things than get races wrong. Their most insidious effect is on the quality and direction of public debate. They blind us to glaring truths about issues as well as people. A key issue in this race is the integrity, accountability and efficiency of government. Republicans talk more and more about it, Democrats hardly at all. In case you didn’t notice, the fallen state of politics and government is what Trump talks about most; that he does so vividly and bluntly is a big part of what some must consider his charm. Credit Trump this far: When he says he didn’t arrive at his message via a poll, he’s probably telling the truth. He looked at government, stopped talking long enough to listen to a few people, and saw it was an issue voters really care about. Hillary Clinton on the other hand, relying on polls to plot her every step, never talks about it, except to repeat the Democrats’ mantric vow to overturn Citizens United and say a few words in a single speech about getting agencies better computers and improving management. It’s what happens when we let polls obscure core values and gut instincts. Here, even Trump’s gut instinct works better than Clinton’s polls. With issues as with horseraces, polls can eventually catch up to the truth, or get close to it. Scott Rasmussen was the first major pollster to discover how much we care about nonfeasance and malfeasance in government. More recently, Stanley Greenberg has argued that these issues are the key to Democrats winning the votes of the white working class. A big reason other pollsters don’t draw the same conclusion is that they never ask. A big reason for that is that they’re paid not to. The biggest driver of government waste and inefficiency is corruption by special interests, mainly powerful corporate interests. Nearly all major pollsters, including Democratic pollsters, make most of their living off corporate clients. So do most Democratic officeholders: either now in the form of campaign contributions or later in the form of cushy corporate lobbying gigs. So on the topic of the root cause of government dysfunction, Democrats observe a simple rule: don’t ask, don’t tell. Their denial is killing them. After their midterm thrashing, Chuck Schumer, Wall Street’s best friend in the Senate, went to the press club to say his party’s biggest mistake was not to embrace government. It’s the opposite of the truth and could only make sense to a guy who spends too much time reading polls and raising money. Democrats must fix government, not hug it. People are furious at it. If your pollster hasn’t told you, ask a neighbor, or someone at work, or the next person you see on the street. There are of course other reasons for the general decline in public debate. Both parties sidle and stutter step their way into every debate because both say different things to different people and live in fear of getting caught. Democrats tell their donors one thing and their base another. Republicans tell their base one thing and the broader public another. You have to admire how well they run this scam, but shame on us for letting them get away with it for so long. The third big deterrent to honest, open debate is modern media, including social media. Fifty years ago, Marshal McLuhan told us that media pulls us into the past. He once said we live in “Bonanza Land” a reference to a then-popular TV western. Like polling, media can leave us with impressions of the world that are stale and second-hand. It’s one reason so many people say falling crime rates are rising and think their own local schools are doing fine but that most others are failing. The most harmful thing media does is reduce all debate to mere sloganeering. We deal not in fully formed ideas but in tweets and memes and endless ads. TV ads are widely seen as a blight on politics, but the internet, billed as a great democratizing force, is also a disappointment. Politicians hide behind Facebook and Twitter and send endless fundraising pleas via email. Notice how every email takes your side on an issue you care a lot about? Did you by chance sign one or two "petitions"?  If not, data miners will build your profile.  The email you’ll never get is the one detailing all your member does for banks or insurers or any moneyed interest that funds campaigns and lure them with visions of future rewards. It is progressives, or rather progressivism, that suffers most from how the game is played. A poll identifies an existing consensus. Progressive must build a new one. Media cuts "message" to the bone. New ideas require longer formed analysis and exposition. Moneyed interests pay to maintain the old order, not disrupt it, and support only such innovation as enables them to do so. Reform, the engine of the most vital innovations, is all about disruption. When Democrats put their faith in polls, media and high-dollar fundraising, they render real debate and real progress nearly impossible and help turn all of politics into mere entertainment, a cheap burlesque just waiting for a Donald Trump to steal its spotlight. There is no progress without debate. This presidential race shows how campaigns displace rather than foster debate. As sea levels rise, aquifers shrink and wildfires rage, Republicans in one presidential forum and two debates entertained but a single question on climate change; of five hours, a single minute spent on a call for "energy independence." In his first term, Obama soft peddled the issue because polls showed the country divided on it. He’s better lately, but if the scientists Democrats love to cite are even close to being right, it isn’t nearly enough. After the Cleveland debate, Clinton rightly went after Republicans on women’s issues, in part because they are so close to her heart but also because they poll so well and are so easily framed. No Democrat challenged Republican silence on climate change. If a party can’t push the envelope on the overarching issue of its time when the weather makes the case every day, can it call itself progressive? It’s the same on most big issues. Democrats ask Republicans how they would fix Obamacare but they must answer the same question. Five years after its passage, half the country still opposes it and not just because Fox News tells them to. Single people earning over $46,000 a year get no subsidy but face rising premiums, copays and deductibles. Governments haven’t come close to realizing the savings they need to fund other vital services. Democrats must admit the program’s flaws and fight for a reform that makes health care truly affordable to all. If they aren’t too proud or scared, they can take advantage of the opening Trump gave them when he told a Republican audience how well single payer works in Scotland. The biggest casualty of the campaign may be the Iran pact. The administration assures reporters that despite Schumer’s craven defection the votes are there to preserve it. I pray they are, but they’re hard to count. One reason is that a public that once supported the deal by a comfortable margin is now evenly split. Its foes didn’t hesitate to attack it despite the polls while its defenders, anxious as always to duck a debate, sat mute. Obama has come a long way on foreign policy and national security. The agreement is as important to his legacy as anything he has done. More important it is the clearest choice between the force of arms and the rule of law America has faced since it entered upon the Iraq War. For six weeks its debate has been background noise to Trump’s latest reality show.  Shame on every Democrat and every reporter and every press mogul who let it happen. If you’ve been thinking critically while reading along you may have noted a seeming oversight. Not every Democrat deserves such censure. As it happens one who doesn’t is running for president. Bernie Sanders calls unabashedly for a single payer health system, offers full throated support to the Iran pact and has spoken out long enough and loud enough about climate change to earn the blessing of Bill McKibben. His extraordinary success to date is stirring testimony to the good that comes of holding fast to your convictions and waiting for the polls to come to you. He isn’t a perfect candidate-- you’d think that guy who participated in so many protests would approach protesters in a different way—but he is a leader with a clear vision and a clear conscience who is trying to spark the debate we must have. Democratic elites don’t like debates. In 2008 there, were 24 Democratic presidential debates. This year there will be six, only four of which have been set. Party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz assures us this will be enough for the candidates to air all their differences. She also says any candidate appearing in an unsanctioned debate will be barred from official debates.  She says network sponsors agreed to this assault on the 1st amendment. I hope not. At a July town hall meeting in New Hampshire, a voter asked Hillary Clinton her position on the Keystone Pipeline. She said if it were still undecided when she took office she’d let him know then. Perhaps a poll told her it was the right thing to say. She has lately tried to engage Jeb Bush and Marco in some debate like sparring, but so far it isn’t worth a listen. Bernie Sanders is trying to engage Clinton, the Democratic Party and the country in a debate worth having. To draw them in he’ll need all the help he can get.

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Ben Affleck’s nanny scandal, monetized? How Christine Ouzounian is set to milk her ambiguous role in his divorce for all it’s worth

My heart broke a bit earlier this summer at the news of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s divorce. After the demise of the relationships of Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton, and Kermit and Miss Piggy, suffice to say my perspective on love was shaken as so many couples I admired fell apart. I think it’s natural to seek answers once a relationship has ended, and now it seems we might be able to put a name and face to a factor in Garner and Affleck’s split. According to the usual tabloid gossip sources, Affleck allegedly carried on some sort of fling with the family’s former nanny, Christine Ouzounian. The allegations may not even be true, just vicious. Either way, reputations have been made or broken, and the public and media crave a glimpse into this intimate arrangement. And it seems Ouzounian is more than happy to provide it. Grantland detailed a timeline describing “nannygate” that includes the two being spotted outside Affleck’s house in July, and it’s believed he’s footing the bill for her stay at Hotel Bel Air. Last week photos were posted of Ouzounian en route to Vegas with Affleck alongside Tom Brady as she sported each of Brady’s Super Bowl rings on her fingers. Other recent photos feature the former nanny posing in front of a shiny new white Lexus convertible, which has made her easy for the paparazzi to spot. This does not read like a woman shamed. She seems happy to provide insight and access to her life. In fact, so willing is Ouzounian to be in the public eye that she’s seeking to be on “The Bachelorette,” according to Gawker. Ouzounian may or may not have carried on a relationship with a high-profile married man, but I think it’s fascinating that she seems to be basking in the attention either way. As a culture bombarded by a constant stream of news and gossip, scandals reign supreme in feeding our insatiable appetite for discourse. It’s almost a self-policing social strategy. We whisper (or write essays) about infidelities, try to make sense of them, pass judgment, the whole routine. But we also learn what happens when certain social barriers are broken. In her book “How to Become a Scandal,” author Laura Kipnis writes, “Culture needs scandal, it’s a necessary feature of the system, a social purification ritual, with the socially non-compliant branded and expelled, allowing the system to assert itself and its muscle.” As New York magazine points out, Ouzounian is subverting the social system by not demurring. Her brazen invitation for attention suggests she has nothing to lose — people are going to talk, and it’s almost a dare for us to watch her journey now that she’s crossed certain lines. This, too has precedent. “Think of it as an unspoken sadomasochistic pact,” writes Kipnis, in which “scandalizers parade their irrepressible ids around in public, possibly even soliciting punishment, and the rest of us willingly deliver it.” Knowledge of extramarital affairs exponentially increased in Europe after the Reformation as letter writing grew in popularity. Royals and noblemen penned letters to their mistresses, creating paper trails to their indiscretions. Since the invention of the printing press helped influence a rise in literacy, between-the-sheets activities of lovers were made available to readers on neatly printed pages. Take Tiger Woods’ fall from grace, for example. In 2010, Vanity Fair featured the golf star’s many affairs in the magazine along with seductive photos by Mark Seliger in a piece called “Tiger Woods’s Inconvenient Women.” The stories accompanied by the photos are almost as lascivious as the affairs themselves — a sexy cocktail of power, lust and attention that we may not necessarily want to find ourselves involved with, but that doesn’t stop us from fantasizing about it. What’s missing from these scandals is the attachment we feel to marriages we used to romanticize, the Ben and Jens of the celebrity world. Far too often we rationalize transgressions with adages like “the heart wants what the heart wants,” but in the face of lust and scandal, we're reminded that at the end of the day, the thing the heart really needs is blood.

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Comedians are calling out “The Fat Jew” for theft: Why the online backlash against stealing jokes is long overdue

What do you get when you start calling all elements of culture “content?” When entire business plans are based on stealing the work of musicians? When even educated people – professors, say -- denigrate the idea of copyright and intellectual property? When you turn Jeff Koons into one of the art world’s biggest stars? When we lay off the librarians who could tell kids that photos, ideas, images, and passages of prose are created by someone and still belong to them until they choose to give them away? You get a world in which a social media "comedian" like Josh Ostrovsky can become rich. From the Hollywood Reporter:

Ostrovsky, 30, has parlayed social media fame — he has more than 5.6 million followers on his Instagram account, @TheFatJewish — into a full-fledged entertainment career. In July he signed a modeling contract with One Management Agency; he recently launched wine brand White Girl Rosé and will publish his first book, Money Pizza Respect with Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, later this year. Ostrovsky is also looking for opportunities to bring his brand of comedy to television screens and currently has a pilot in development at Comedy Central. His résumé also includes a hosting gig for a radio show on Apple Music's Beats 1 station and brand deals with Virgin Mobile, Burger King and others.

Most of what Ostrovsky does, according to his critics, is steal other people’s work. He goes a bit further than most run-of-the-mill online thieves: For years, Ostrovsky has, according to many accusers, both comedians and fans, been ripping off jokes from comedians and posting them without attribution. (He sometimes offers little cute statements when he’s called out, or says that aggregation is now the name of the game.) And he’s used product placement to make a mint on it; it’s the equivalent of companies that steal a song from a musician and run an ad next to it. Everybody but the actual creator gets something out of the deal. Ostrovsly recently allegedly stole a joke from Davon Magwood, provoking an angry response from the comedian: “If it’s my stuff you’re posting, and if you give me credit, then I get traffic to my site,” Magwood wrote on his blog. “You make money from the traffic you generate and guess what, I’d also … like to be paid and credited for the traffic that I’ve generated.” The kicker: “I’m not producing shit so you can make more money off of my work, no one is.” I keep hearing about how liberating the Internet is, all the artistic careers it makes possible, all the types of “content” it allows us to access. Some of this is true. But it’s also been murder on many creative beings – musicians, journalists, photographers, graphic artists, and now, we're seeing, comedians. And this is why the whole Fat Jew backlash makes me smile a bit — it's making it clear to a lot of people who wouldn’t normally care just what a cesspool that Internet can be, and showing them that the work of creative folks is worth protecting. It’s also provoked the most intense and wide-ranging response from comedians since the mass rebellion against campus political correctness. Patton Oswalt and Ben Rosen (“Thanks FatJewish for straight up stealing my tweet without any credit whatsoever. “) are tearing him down. Here, SideSplitter offers a pretty good list of comedian’s disses. Writer Maura Quint posted an enraged essay on Facebook arguing that, “The people he steals from are struggling writers, comedians, etc… he is a leach, he is a virus… He is pure trash.” This is refreshing given the fact that the profiles of Ostrovsky in The New York Times and Financial Times treat him as an irreverent, lovable rogue. As Luke O’Neil points out on The Daily Beast: “Neither of those profiles, incidentally, use the words ‘plagiarism’ or ‘theft,’ which, in large part, is what has irked so much of the online comedy community about Ostrovksy’s success.” But the tide may be turning on all of this. Often, when creative people rant about being ripped off by tech companies or other revenue-generating elements of the online economy, very little happens. Witness authors complaining about Amazon, or musicians complaining about YouTube or pirate sites. Amazon is bigger than ever, and musicians keep getting screwed. But somehow, this mass indignation by comedians is making real noise. And now Comedy Central has reportedly canceled Ostrovsky’s pilot, although the network's vice president for communications, Jenny Runyan,  told Tech Insider that the decision not to progress happened "months ago." As SideSplitter puts it: “That doesn’t fix the countless jokes Ostrovsky has and continues to poach for profit, but hopefully Comedy Central is the first of many big companies that decide not to work with him or pay him $2,500 for a sponsored Instagram post.” Writers, comedians, and others – please keep your posts and tweets coming. And if you are a civilian who’s just begun to notice this stuff, keep your ears open for the other online outrages. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. The chattering class -- and the general public -- may be waking up.What do you get when you start calling all elements of culture “content?” When entire business plans are based on stealing the work of musicians? When even educated people – professors, say -- denigrate the idea of copyright and intellectual property? When you turn Jeff Koons into one of the art world’s biggest stars? When we lay off the librarians who could tell kids that photos, ideas, images, and passages of prose are created by someone and still belong to them until they choose to give them away? You get a world in which a social media "comedian" like Josh Ostrovsky can become rich. From the Hollywood Reporter:

Ostrovsky, 30, has parlayed social media fame — he has more than 5.6 million followers on his Instagram account, @TheFatJewish — into a full-fledged entertainment career. In July he signed a modeling contract with One Management Agency; he recently launched wine brand White Girl Rosé and will publish his first book, Money Pizza Respect with Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, later this year. Ostrovsky is also looking for opportunities to bring his brand of comedy to television screens and currently has a pilot in development at Comedy Central. His résumé also includes a hosting gig for a radio show on Apple Music's Beats 1 station and brand deals with Virgin Mobile, Burger King and others.

Most of what Ostrovsky does, according to his critics, is steal other people’s work. He goes a bit further than most run-of-the-mill online thieves: For years, Ostrovsky has, according to many accusers, both comedians and fans, been ripping off jokes from comedians and posting them without attribution. (He sometimes offers little cute statements when he’s called out, or says that aggregation is now the name of the game.) And he’s used product placement to make a mint on it; it’s the equivalent of companies that steal a song from a musician and run an ad next to it. Everybody but the actual creator gets something out of the deal. Ostrovsly recently allegedly stole a joke from Davon Magwood, provoking an angry response from the comedian: “If it’s my stuff you’re posting, and if you give me credit, then I get traffic to my site,” Magwood wrote on his blog. “You make money from the traffic you generate and guess what, I’d also … like to be paid and credited for the traffic that I’ve generated.” The kicker: “I’m not producing shit so you can make more money off of my work, no one is.” I keep hearing about how liberating the Internet is, all the artistic careers it makes possible, all the types of “content” it allows us to access. Some of this is true. But it’s also been murder on many creative beings – musicians, journalists, photographers, graphic artists, and now, we're seeing, comedians. And this is why the whole Fat Jew backlash makes me smile a bit — it's making it clear to a lot of people who wouldn’t normally care just what a cesspool that Internet can be, and showing them that the work of creative folks is worth protecting. It’s also provoked the most intense and wide-ranging response from comedians since the mass rebellion against campus political correctness. Patton Oswalt and Ben Rosen (“Thanks FatJewish for straight up stealing my tweet without any credit whatsoever. “) are tearing him down. Here, SideSplitter offers a pretty good list of comedian’s disses. Writer Maura Quint posted an enraged essay on Facebook arguing that, “The people he steals from are struggling writers, comedians, etc… he is a leach, he is a virus… He is pure trash.” This is refreshing given the fact that the profiles of Ostrovsky in The New York Times and Financial Times treat him as an irreverent, lovable rogue. As Luke O’Neil points out on The Daily Beast: “Neither of those profiles, incidentally, use the words ‘plagiarism’ or ‘theft,’ which, in large part, is what has irked so much of the online comedy community about Ostrovksy’s success.” But the tide may be turning on all of this. Often, when creative people rant about being ripped off by tech companies or other revenue-generating elements of the online economy, very little happens. Witness authors complaining about Amazon, or musicians complaining about YouTube or pirate sites. Amazon is bigger than ever, and musicians keep getting screwed. But somehow, this mass indignation by comedians is making real noise. And now Comedy Central has reportedly canceled Ostrovsky’s pilot, although the network's vice president for communications, Jenny Runyan,  told Tech Insider that the decision not to progress happened "months ago." As SideSplitter puts it: “That doesn’t fix the countless jokes Ostrovsky has and continues to poach for profit, but hopefully Comedy Central is the first of many big companies that decide not to work with him or pay him $2,500 for a sponsored Instagram post.” Writers, comedians, and others – please keep your posts and tweets coming. And if you are a civilian who’s just begun to notice this stuff, keep your ears open for the other online outrages. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. The chattering class -- and the general public -- may be waking up.

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Rubio reaffirms opposition to rape and incest exceptions: He backs abortion ban “irrespective of the circumstances”

It's an exchange that's sure to be replayed endlessly if Marco Rubio winds up as the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nominee. During this month's GOP primary debate in Cleveland, co-moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked the Florida senator to explain how, if he believes "life begins at conception," he could support rape and incest exceptions to abortion bans. Rubio quickly swatted down the notion he'd ever supported such exceptions. "Well, Megyn, first of all, I'm not sure that that's a correct assessment of my record," he responded. Kelly sought clarity: "You don't favor a rape and incest exception?" "I have never said that, and I have never advocated that," Rubio affirmed. As Vox's Jonathan Allen noted, however, Rubio did co-sponsor the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act and the PROTECT Act, both pieces of anti-abortion legislation that included those exceptions. But Rubio, it appears, is perfectly willing to sign onto legislation that lacks rape and incest exemptions. Appearing on Glenn Beck's radio program Monday, Rubio doubled down on his hard-line stance, calling for a near-total abortion ban. "I believe a human being is entitled to life, irrespective of the circumstances in which that human being was conceived and so forth," Rubio said. "Now I recognize that other people don't hold that view and in order to save lives in this country, I have supported bills that had to have exceptions in them, and I know a lot of people who are pro-life but support exceptions because they feel it goes too far." One such "pro-life" figure is current GOP poll leader Donald Trump, who told "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd this weekend that he favored exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother -- a position shared by GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, but one that is to the left of where many elected conservatives (and the GOP platform) now stand. Though Rubio's ultra-conservative stance is shared by an overwhelming number of Republican officials, inartful defenses of that stance have landed some Republicans in hot water in recent years. In 2012, Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, once seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats, handily defeated Rep. Todd Akin after he suggested that women's bodies would "shut [a pregnancy] down" if they had experienced "a legitimate rape." That same year, Richard Mourdock, the GOP Senate nominee in Indiana, lost to Democrat Joe Donnelly after calling pregnancies resulting from rape "something that God intended to happen." Rubio, Akin, and Mourdock are well to the right of public opinion on this issue. Most polls show that upwards of three-quarters of voters back exceptions for rape or when the mother's health is endangered. Listen to Rubio's comments below, via Right Wing Watch: It's an exchange that's sure to be replayed endlessly if Marco Rubio winds up as the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nominee. During this month's GOP primary debate in Cleveland, co-moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked the Florida senator to explain how, if he believes "life begins at conception," he could support rape and incest exceptions to abortion bans. Rubio quickly swatted down the notion he'd ever supported such exceptions. "Well, Megyn, first of all, I'm not sure that that's a correct assessment of my record," he responded. Kelly sought clarity: "You don't favor a rape and incest exception?" "I have never said that, and I have never advocated that," Rubio affirmed. As Vox's Jonathan Allen noted, however, Rubio did co-sponsor the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act and the PROTECT Act, both pieces of anti-abortion legislation that included those exceptions. But Rubio, it appears, is perfectly willing to sign onto legislation that lacks rape and incest exemptions. Appearing on Glenn Beck's radio program Monday, Rubio doubled down on his hard-line stance, calling for a near-total abortion ban. "I believe a human being is entitled to life, irrespective of the circumstances in which that human being was conceived and so forth," Rubio said. "Now I recognize that other people don't hold that view and in order to save lives in this country, I have supported bills that had to have exceptions in them, and I know a lot of people who are pro-life but support exceptions because they feel it goes too far." One such "pro-life" figure is current GOP poll leader Donald Trump, who told "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd this weekend that he favored exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother -- a position shared by GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, but one that is to the left of where many elected conservatives (and the GOP platform) now stand. Though Rubio's ultra-conservative stance is shared by an overwhelming number of Republican officials, inartful defenses of that stance have landed some Republicans in hot water in recent years. In 2012, Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, once seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats, handily defeated Rep. Todd Akin after he suggested that women's bodies would "shut [a pregnancy] down" if they had experienced "a legitimate rape." That same year, Richard Mourdock, the GOP Senate nominee in Indiana, lost to Democrat Joe Donnelly after calling pregnancies resulting from rape "something that God intended to happen." Rubio, Akin, and Mourdock are well to the right of public opinion on this issue. Most polls show that upwards of three-quarters of voters back exceptions for rape or when the mother's health is endangered. Listen to Rubio's comments below, via Right Wing Watch:

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The Obama administration just gave Shell the final okay to start drilling in the Arctic

The bridge danglers have been cleared, the damaged vessel repaired and, with the final okay from the federal government, Shell officially has everything it needs to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued a modified permit Monday afternoon that gives Shell, which has already drilled 3,000 feet into the seafloor, to penetrate deeper, to the reserves of oil it's betting are located there. “Now that the required well control system is in place and can be deployed, Shell will be allowed to explore into oil-bearing zones for Burger J [the well],” BSEE director Brian Salerno said in a statement. The drilling, he added, is “being held to the highest safety, environmental protection, and emergency response standards.” Shell experienced a number of setbacks on its path to the Arctic; the new permit became necessary after its icebreaker, the Fennica, was damaged in an Alaskan harbor and sent back to Portland for repairs. And the company's original plan, to drill two separate exploration wells, was cut short by the Obama administration determined that the rigs needed to be spaces 15 miles apart to account for wildlife protections -- Shell's proposal had allowed for only nine feet between them. With all of the hurdles cleared, it's now going to be a waiting game to see if Shell's able to live up to its promise to conduct drilling safely -- and to see whether the company ends up striking oil. “Everybody’s watching to see if we’re going to fail or succeed out there,” Ann Pickard, who runs Shell’s Arctic division, told the Wall Street Journal in July. And if they don't find the oil they're looking for, she added, “I would probably recommend that we walk away.” Those worried about the fragile Arctic environment are hoping that first part goes well; while everyone concerned about our reliance on fossil fuels and worsening climate change is hoping that after this, Big Oil will just go home.The bridge danglers have been cleared, the damaged vessel repaired and, with the final okay from the federal government, Shell officially has everything it needs to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued a modified permit Monday afternoon that gives Shell, which has already drilled 3,000 feet into the seafloor, to penetrate deeper, to the reserves of oil it's betting are located there. “Now that the required well control system is in place and can be deployed, Shell will be allowed to explore into oil-bearing zones for Burger J [the well],” BSEE director Brian Salerno said in a statement. The drilling, he added, is “being held to the highest safety, environmental protection, and emergency response standards.” Shell experienced a number of setbacks on its path to the Arctic; the new permit became necessary after its icebreaker, the Fennica, was damaged in an Alaskan harbor and sent back to Portland for repairs. And the company's original plan, to drill two separate exploration wells, was cut short by the Obama administration determined that the rigs needed to be spaces 15 miles apart to account for wildlife protections -- Shell's proposal had allowed for only nine feet between them. With all of the hurdles cleared, it's now going to be a waiting game to see if Shell's able to live up to its promise to conduct drilling safely -- and to see whether the company ends up striking oil. “Everybody’s watching to see if we’re going to fail or succeed out there,” Ann Pickard, who runs Shell’s Arctic division, told the Wall Street Journal in July. And if they don't find the oil they're looking for, she added, “I would probably recommend that we walk away.” Those worried about the fragile Arctic environment are hoping that first part goes well; while everyone concerned about our reliance on fossil fuels and worsening climate change is hoping that after this, Big Oil will just go home.

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Janelle Monáe will not be silenced: “Today” should have aired her stand against police brutality in full

Would you like some completely relevant social commentary with your pleasant morning musical entertainment? Apparently if you're the "Today" show, the answer is, "No thank you." On Friday, singer Janelle Monae appeared on the show as part of its famed outdoor summer concert series. Monae performed her 2010 breakout single "Tightrope," as well as her current hit, "Yoga." And on Instagram Thursday, Monae introduced a new track from Wonderland Records called "Hell You Talmbout," an anthem for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and a call to keep speaking the names of black men and women killed by police officers — including Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Sandra Bland. She said, "This song is a vessel. It carries the unbearable anguish of millions. We recorded it to channel the pain, fear, and trauma caused by the ongoing slaughter of our brothers and sisters. We recorded it to challenge the indifference, disregard, and negligence of all who remain quiet about this issue. Silence is our enemy. Sound is our weapon. They say a question lives forever until it gets the answer it deserves... Won't you say their names?" Earlier this month, Monae also led a march against police brutality in Philadelphia. In her interview on the "Today" show, Monae spoke optimistically about her current musical lineup of "visionary artists," and proudly said, "I feel so complete… The thing that we have in common is community. We really care about our community, and most of our music is to uplift and inspire, and do it in a jamming-ass way." And before she took to the stage, she spoke emphatically about wanting to "show a different perspective of young black artists." But things got strange right after she did an extended, two minute long, cape-clad James Brown-like ending to "Tightrope" — as the song was still winding down, she began to speak to the crowd outside of 30 Rock. "Yes Lord! God bless America!" she said. "God bless all the lost lives to police brutality. We want white America to know that we stand tall today. We want black America to know we stand tall today. We will not be silenced." In a perfect moment of irony, that's exactly when she was cut off, with the camera pulling back and Savannah Guthrie promising, "We'll have much more from Janelle Monáe… but first, this is 'Today.'" For what it's worth, immediately after the performance, Monáe seemed pleased with how it had gone, saying, "Thank you, Today Show!" on Instagram. I don't know if it was a concerted effort to silence her. Live television is a precise business, and it's entirely possible that a performance that may well have already been running long did not allow any room for the airing of a few words to the audience afterward. Certainly after Monáe did "Yoga," the cut to commercial was swift. What might to many look like a deliberate attempt to silence an artist speaking on violence and racial profiling might well have simply been the result of a control room full of people trying to move on to the next segment. But I'd like to think "Today" could have considered more carefully what the best moment for a white woman to cut in on a black woman making a heartfelt statement about race might be, and how that would appear to viewers. And it's interesting that on the "Today" site, the clip ends right when Monáe says "God bless America!" That drastically changes the message from a call to action to a seemingly far more simple declaration of patriotism. And the captions for the performance conspicuously note Monáe's "signature hairdos and tuxedo outfits," but not her activism. It's one thing to make an honest if imperfect judgment call in the moment. It's another, however, to seemingly attempt to whitewash the message that Monae was very clearly trying to get across. And that message, amply demonstrated, is that "Silence is our enemy. Sound is our weapon."

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