Lily Salter's Blog, page 959
November 9, 2015
John Oliver’s best piece ever: This brilliant expose on our endless prison cycle is an absolute must
In just one year, John Oliver has covered several facets of the U.S.'s truly jacked-up criminal justice system from mandatory minimums, to how bail punishes the poor, to over-stretched public defenders and small municipal violations putting you in the fuckbarrel. It's so depressing, Oliver encouraged viewers Sunday evening during "Last Week Tonight" to eat their feelings at Dairy Queen. Instead of discussing the depressing ways in which we lock people away, Oliver addressed what happens when people leave prison. Since President Obama commuted the sentences of the largest number of federal prisoners, this is particularly relevant. Fox News might be freaking out about the 6,000 people being released, but Oliver says that most of these people were going to be released over the course of the next several years anyway. More than 600,000 people are released from prison each year. However, despite what Hollywood wants you to believe, leaving jail isn't exactly all blue skies, rainbows and sparkly shit falling from the sky. "For a surprisingly high number of prisoners their time on the outside may be brief," Oliver says because the national average of recidivism is 50 percent. Pennsylvania's Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel says we're spending $80 billion to fail half of the time. But when you look at the challenges that those who served their time face on the outside, it isn't hard to see why they end up back in jail. First, many former prisoners are denied government services, which makes it difficult to get a job and pay for life on the outside. Ever been applying for a job and see that line that says "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" You have to imagine most of those that check "yes" end up on the bottom of the stack. In fact, in some states it's even illegal to hire ex-prisoners for some jobs such as nurses, teachers and even in Mississippi an alligator rancher. Seriously. Which makes sense, I guess, if you understand how creative people coming out of prisons must get just to find jobs. Finding work is so difficult the Ohio State Rehabilitation and Corrections Reentry Resource Manual gives tips such as refraining from using negative words like "went to jail" on forms that ask why you left job and instead put "relocated" or "contract ended" both of which are totally legitimate. If an ex-con does manage to find work and "are trying their hardest, satisfying the conditions of parole can be maddeningly difficult," Oliver said because "two-thirds of parolees who go back to prison do so, not due to a new crime, but because of parole violations." Sometimes these can be as simple as "missing appointments or failing a drug test. For some, it may be because they're dealing with untreated substance abuse or mental illness." Such was the case of one man named Bilal Chatman who worked hard to get his life back on track after spending a decade in prison. He began having problems scheduling meetings with his parole officer while also working his full-time job. Chatman worked a normal 9 to 5 job, but his parole officer left work at 4:30 and wouldn't allow him to come in early. "I felt set up," Chatman said. "I feel like most people in that situation are set up to fail." Get this, in most states, you have to actually pay for parole services. In Pennsylvania, they charge a $60 fee just to enter the program. "And if you don't have the fees they charge, you can be forced to make a truly ridiculous choice," Oliver said showing a clip of a woman saying the parole officer will hold you in prison until you do have the money. One parolee said that he ended up having to sell drugs just to pay back the state of Pennsylvania. Many of these policies began in the 1990s when we were all trying to figure out how to be "tough on crime." Most were passed without a second thought or any debate, but the outcomes have been terrible. "It's not always easy to care about the welfare of ex-prisoners, and some are going to re-offend no matter what you do," Oliver said. "But the fact remains, over 95 percent of all prisoners will eventually be released, so it's in everyone's interest that we try to give them a better chance of success." Check out the rest below:
“A life sentence to poverty”: How our laws deny ex-offenders a true second chance
President Barack Obama has always supported criminal justice reform, broadly speaking. Recently, though, the president has moved criminal justice reform issues to the front-and-center of his public agenda. This summer, for example, he became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. Soon after, he held a (remarkably worthwhile) discussion on reform at the White House, too. These were important victories for those who support reform. But they were also primarily symbolic. Last week, however, Obama went one step further and announced a handful of new executive actions intended to put some policy meat on those symbolic bones. And while the devil is always in the details, multiple reform groups endorsed the president’s directives, all of which are intended to make it easier for the formerly incarcerated to truly start their lives again. Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Rebecca Vallas , the director of policy for the Center for American Progress’ Poverty to Prosperity Program. We discussed the president’s recent actions, his executive orders, and the next step for the criminal justice reform movement. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length. What was your initial, gut reaction to President Obama’s announcement last week? It’s been wonderful to see the bipartisan momentum continue to grow for criminal justice reform, and see policymakers of all political stripes calling for sentencing reform, for prison reform, and so on. But, most notably, what was fantastic to hear from the president was the focus on policies to give people a second chance. We can’t leave out the reentry piece of the puzzle; if we do, we’re basically guaranteeing that whatever gains we see from reducing mass incarceration will be short-lived, because a huge share of the people that we released from correctional facilities are just going to end up right back behind bars. So, it is really important to see the president emphasizing the importance to support reentry, and also of removing obstacles to reentry, when we can. Tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that there’s been a marked shift within pro-reform circles toward more discussion of reentry and reinvestment. Is that true? I think we’re seeing growing awareness that we need to focus on it. Between 70 million and 100 million Americans — that’s as many as one-in-three of us — have some type of criminal record. That’s the legacy of our nation’s failed experiment with mass incarceration. There is also a growing awareness that having even a minor criminal record can present obstacles to employment, to housing, education, family reunification — I could go on. And the lifelong consequences of having a criminal record really stand in stark contrast to the research we have on redemption, which finds that once an individual with a prior non-violent conviction has stayed crime-free for just three to four years, that person’s risk of recidivism is no different from the risk of arrest for the general population. So, we end up with the situation where having a criminal record is basically a life sentence to poverty — and it’s really out of sync with the reality of the risk that these people, whom we’re sentencing to poverty for life, actually pose. Let’s talk about the president’s announcement. On the policy side, the part that got the most attention was Obama’s directive to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to, according to some observers, “ban the box.” What doest that mean? When we talk about ban the box policies — which are now in effect in 19 states and some 100 municipalities, possibly more — it doesn’t mean not considering a criminal record in the hiring process. What it means is delaying the point in the process where that criminal record is considered. The idea is to give job seekers with records a chance to actually be considered and demonstrate their qualifications, rather than having their resume automatically fall into the trash; which is what happens with many people with records. We know that 9 in 10 employers today conduct criminal background checks on their applicants; so criminal records can really be an intractable barrier to employment for tens of millions of Americans. (And this is even the case with just an arrest that never led to a conviction.) People tend to be familiar with the costs of mass incarceration. But the barriers associated with bearing a criminal record — most notably regarding employment — come at a really significant cost to the economy as well. In terms of lost GDP, the cost of employment losses amongst people with criminal records is a whopping $65 billion per year. So by calling on OPM to issue ban the box rules, the president has taken a very important first step. But we need to watch to see if there will be proof in the pudding. What do you mean? What I mean by that is, where in the hiring process is the record considered? That matters a great deal. Is it just [removing it from] the job application? Or, better, is it pushing it [back] until what is called the “conditional offer stage,” when the employer has already decided that they want to hire a job applicant? The rule that the president has called on OPM to issue is unclear. It’s something that will be developed in the rule-making process. So that is something that must be watched, because it will make a big difference. Are there any other to-be-decided details that supporters of the general policy should keep an eye on? The rule will only apply to federal agencies — not to federal contractors. In his speech, the president called on Congress to pass bipartisan legislation [to that effect], which is being championed by Senator Cory Booker and Senator Ron Johnson. That legislation would delay consideration of a criminal record until the conditional offer stage, and it would also extend to federal contractors. So the bipartisan legislation is the next needed step after the president’s action. Just to be clear, then: “Ban the box” does not always mean getting rid of the question entirely? I saw some people saying that because the president’s directive doesn’t completely remove the question from the hiring process, it wasn’t really banning the box. “Ban the box” is the main phrase people use to describe these kinds of policies; but it can be a little bit misleading, because it isn’t completely eliminating consideration of the record. I like to call it “fair chance hiring.” It’s about giving job seekers with records a chance to demonstrate their qualifications before the record is actually considered. That is what the president called on OPM to do. Obama also called for public housing authorities to change the way they dealt with the formerly incarcerated. What problem is he trying to solve on that front? People get, on a common sense level, that safe and stable housing is foundational to economic security. But it also has powerful anti-recidivism effects for people with criminal histories. Unfortunately, many people who are released from incarceration have no idea where they are going to go to live. (About one-third, expect to go to homeless shelters once they are released.) We have policies in place that basically shut every door in people’s faces as they seek to find safe and stable housing; public housing authorities have broad discretion to deny housing — or even evict whole families — just because there is this “one-strike-and-you’re-out” policy that public housing authorities have interpreted in a very broad way. How is the administration trying to redress this? The guidance that the Department of Housing and Urban Development released last week, under the president’s direction, makes clear to housing authorities that they are not required to use a “one-strike” policy; that they are not required to exclude everybody with a criminal record from public housing; that they are not required to evict families and households because one member has a criminal record. Most importantly, the guidance lays out factors that public housing authorities should consider. Such as? Basic, common sense factors: Whether the offense is relevant to the safety of other residents, the time since the conviction; and whether, since then, the person has rehabilitated. The guidance also makes clear that arrests that didn’t lead to convictions cannot be grounds for denial of housing or for evictions. This is a huge deal, because a really big part of the trend [of criminal justice policy] in the past several decades has not just been mass incarceration; it has also been hyper-criminalization. We’ve seen the over-policing of communities of color leave millions of Americans with arrest records even though they were never convicted. It sounds like the general, unifying theme of these reforms is that people cannot successfully reintegrate into society unless they have a foundation — and that a foundation requires not just family or friends but a steady income and a place to rest your head, too. That’s exactly right. Making sure that that foundation is there by removing government-sanctioned obstacles is something that the president has made a commitment to, and something that state and local policy makers across the country are trying to do. And It has to be part of the puzzle as we seek to have a conversation about how best to reduce mass incarceration.
“That is old-fashioned racism!” Bernie Sanders tears down Donald Trump over never-ending campaign insanity
At a campaign rally Sunday in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders criticized Donald Trump’s mischaracterization of undocumented immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
“That is old-fashioned racism,” Sanders told the crowd. “It is not an American value to talk about rounding up millions of people and simply say that we are going to throw them out of the country. That is xenophobia.”
Sanders went on to promise “the beginning of the dismantling of an excessively wasteful $18 billion deportation regime.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, Sanders was played on by “a dozen mariachi musicians” before speaking to the crowd of more than 2,800 at the Cheyenne Sports Complex in North Las Vegas, where more than a third of the population is Hispanic.
Watch the Ruptly video below:
(h/t Raw Story)At a campaign rally Sunday in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders criticized Donald Trump’s mischaracterization of undocumented immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
“That is old-fashioned racism,” Sanders told the crowd. “It is not an American value to talk about rounding up millions of people and simply say that we are going to throw them out of the country. That is xenophobia.”
Sanders went on to promise “the beginning of the dismantling of an excessively wasteful $18 billion deportation regime.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, Sanders was played on by “a dozen mariachi musicians” before speaking to the crowd of more than 2,800 at the Cheyenne Sports Complex in North Las Vegas, where more than a third of the population is Hispanic.
Watch the Ruptly video below:
(h/t Raw Story)At a campaign rally Sunday in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders criticized Donald Trump’s mischaracterization of undocumented immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
“That is old-fashioned racism,” Sanders told the crowd. “It is not an American value to talk about rounding up millions of people and simply say that we are going to throw them out of the country. That is xenophobia.”
Sanders went on to promise “the beginning of the dismantling of an excessively wasteful $18 billion deportation regime.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, Sanders was played on by “a dozen mariachi musicians” before speaking to the crowd of more than 2,800 at the Cheyenne Sports Complex in North Las Vegas, where more than a third of the population is Hispanic.
Watch the Ruptly video below:
(h/t Raw Story)
November 7, 2015
The Hero’s Journey: The idea you never knew had shaped “Star Wars”
The opening of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, would have been the most ambitious single shot in cinema. It was to begin outside a spiral galaxy and then continuously track in, into the blazing light of billions of stars, past planets and wrecked spacecraft. The music was to be written and performed by Pink Floyd. The scene would have continued past convoys of mining trucks designed by the crème of European science fiction and surrealist artists, including Chris Foss, Moebius and H.R. Giger. We would see bands of space pirates attacking these craft and fighting to the death over their cargo, a life-giving drug known as Spice. Still the camera would continue forwards, past inhabited asteroids and the deep-space industrial complexes which refine the drug, until it found a small spacecraft carrying away the end result of this galactic economy: the dead bodies of those involved in the spice trade. The shot would have been a couple of minutes long and would have established an entire universe. It was a wildly ambitious undertaking, especially in the pre-computer graphics days of cinema. But that wasn’t going to deter Jodorowsky. This scale of Jodorowsky’s vision was a reflection of his philosophy of filmmaking. “What is the goal of life? It is to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art more than an industry. The search for the human soul as painting, as literature, as poetry: movies are that for me,” he said. From that perspective, there was no point in settling for anything small. “My ambition for Dune was for the film to be a Prophet, to change the young minds of all the world. For me Dune would be the coming of a God, an artistic and cinematic God. "For me the aim was not to make a picture, it was something deeper. I wanted to make something sacred.” The English maverick theatre director Ken Campbell, who formed the Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool in 1976, also recognised that this level of ambition could arise from science fiction, even if he viewed it from a more grounded perspective. “When you think about it,” he explained, “the entire history of literature is nothing more than people coming in and out of doors. Science fiction is about everything else.” Jodorowsky began putting a team together, one capable of realising his dream. He chose collaborators he believed to be “spiritual warriors.” The entire project seemed blessed by good fortune and synchronicity. When he decided that he needed superstars like Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí or Mick Jagger to play certain parts, he would somehow meet these people by happenstance and persuade them to agree. But when pre-production was complete, he went to pitch the film to the Hollywood studios. Jodorowsky pitched Dune in the years before the success of Star Wars, when science fiction was still seen as strange and embarrassing. As impressive and groundbreaking as his pitch was, it was still a science fiction film. They all said “no.” By the time this genre was first named, in the 1920s, it was already marginalised. It was fine for the kids, needless to say, but critics looked down upon it. In many ways this was a blessing. Away from the cultural centre, science fiction authors were free to explore and experiment. In this less pressured environment science fiction became, in the opinion of the English novelist J.G. Ballard, the last genre capable of adequately representing present-day reality. Science fiction was able to get under the skin of the times in a different way to more respected literature. A century of uncertainty, relative perspectives and endless technological revolutions was frequently invisible to mainstream culture, but was not ignored by science fiction.
* * *
The script for George Lucas’s 1977 movie Star Wars was influenced by The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a 1949 book by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell believed that at the heart of all the wild and varied myths and stories which mankind has dreamt lies one single archetypal story of profound psychological importance. He called this the monomyth. As Campbell saw it, the myths and legends of the world were all imperfect variations on this one, pure story structure. As Campbell summarised the monomyth, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell found echoes of this story wherever he looked; myths as diverse as those of Ulysses, Osiris or Prometheus, the lives of religious figures such as Moses, Christ or Buddha, and in plays and stories ranging from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and Dickens. This story is now known as “The Hero’s Journey.” It is a story that begins with an ordinary man (it is almost always a man) in a recognisable world. That man typically receives a call to adventure, encounters an older patriarchal mentor, undergoes many trials in his journey to confront and destroy a great evil, and returns to his previous life rewarded and transformed. George Lucas was always open about the fact that he consciously shaped the original Star Wars film into a modern expression of Campbell’s monomyth, and has done much to raise the profile of Campbell and his work. Star Wars was so successful that the American film industry has never really recovered. Together with the films of Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg, it changed Hollywood into an industry of blockbusters, tent-pole releases and high-concept pitches. American film was always a democratic affair which gave the audience what it wanted, and the audience demonstrated what they wanted by the purchase of tickets. The shock with which Hollywood reacted to Star Wars was as much about recognising how out of step with the audience’s interests it had become as it was about how much money was up for grabs. Had it realised this a few years earlier, it might have green-lit Jodorowsky’s Dune. The fact that Lucas had used Campbell’s monomyth as his tool for bottling magic did not go unnoticed. As far as Hollywood was concerned, The Hero’s Journey was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Studio script-readers used it to analyse submitted scripts and determine whether or not they should be rejected. Screenwriting theorists and professionals internalised it, until they were unable to produce stories that differed from its basic structure. Readers and writers alike all knew at exactly which point in the script the hero needed their inciting incident, their reversal into their darkest hour and their third-act resolution. In an industry dominated by the bottom line and massive job insecurity, Campbell’s monomyth gained a stranglehold over the structure of cinema. Campbell’s monomyth has been criticised for being Eurocentric and patriarchal. But it has a more significant problem, in that Campbell was wrong. There is not one pure archetypal story at the heart of human storytelling. The monomyth was not a treasure he discovered at the heart of myth, but an invention of his own that he projected onto the stories of the ages. It’s unarguably a good story, but it is most definitely not the only one we have. As the American media critic Philip Sandifer notes, Campbell “identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other ‘fundamental stories’ that you could also find in world mythology.” Campbell’s story revolves around one single individual, a lowly born person with whom the audience identifies. This hero is the single most important person in the world of the story, a fact understood not just by the hero, but by everyone else in that world. A triumph is only a triumph if the hero is responsible, and a tragedy is only a tragedy if it affects the hero personally. Supporting characters cheer or weep for the hero in ways they do not for other people. The death of a character the hero did not know is presented in a manner emotionally far removed from the death of someone the hero loved. Clearly, this was a story structure ideally suited to the prevailing culture. Out of all the potential monomyths that he could have run with, Campbell, a twentieth-century American, chose perhaps the most individualistic one possible. The success of this monomyth in the later decades of the twentieth century is an indication of how firmly entrenched the individualism became. Yet in the early twenty-first century, there are signs that this magic formula may be waning. The truly absorbing and successful narratives of our age are moving beyond the limited, individual perspective of The Hero’s Journey. Critically applauded series like The Wire and mainstream commercial hit series such as Game of Thrones are loved for the complexity of their politics and group relationships. These are stories told not from the point of view of one person, but from many interrelated perspectives, and the relationships between a complex network of different characters can engage us more than the story of a single man being brave. In the twenty-first century audiences are drawn to complicated, lengthy engagements with characters, from their own long-term avatar in World of Warcraft and other online gameworlds to characters like Doctor Who who have a fifty-years-plus history. The superhero films in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” are all connected, because Marvel understands that the sum is greater than the parts. A simple Hero’s Journey story such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit becomes, when adapted for a twenty-first-century cinema audience, a lengthy trilogy of films far more complex than the original book. We now seem to look for stories of greater complexity than can be offered by a single perspective. If science fiction is our cultural early-warning system, its move away from individualism tells us something about the direction we are headed. This should grab our attention, especially when, in the years after the Second World War, it became apparent just how dark the cult of the self could get. Excerpted from "Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century" by John Higgs. Copyright © 2015 by John Higgs. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint. The opening of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, would have been the most ambitious single shot in cinema. It was to begin outside a spiral galaxy and then continuously track in, into the blazing light of billions of stars, past planets and wrecked spacecraft. The music was to be written and performed by Pink Floyd. The scene would have continued past convoys of mining trucks designed by the crème of European science fiction and surrealist artists, including Chris Foss, Moebius and H.R. Giger. We would see bands of space pirates attacking these craft and fighting to the death over their cargo, a life-giving drug known as Spice. Still the camera would continue forwards, past inhabited asteroids and the deep-space industrial complexes which refine the drug, until it found a small spacecraft carrying away the end result of this galactic economy: the dead bodies of those involved in the spice trade. The shot would have been a couple of minutes long and would have established an entire universe. It was a wildly ambitious undertaking, especially in the pre-computer graphics days of cinema. But that wasn’t going to deter Jodorowsky. This scale of Jodorowsky’s vision was a reflection of his philosophy of filmmaking. “What is the goal of life? It is to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art more than an industry. The search for the human soul as painting, as literature, as poetry: movies are that for me,” he said. From that perspective, there was no point in settling for anything small. “My ambition for Dune was for the film to be a Prophet, to change the young minds of all the world. For me Dune would be the coming of a God, an artistic and cinematic God. "For me the aim was not to make a picture, it was something deeper. I wanted to make something sacred.” The English maverick theatre director Ken Campbell, who formed the Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool in 1976, also recognised that this level of ambition could arise from science fiction, even if he viewed it from a more grounded perspective. “When you think about it,” he explained, “the entire history of literature is nothing more than people coming in and out of doors. Science fiction is about everything else.” Jodorowsky began putting a team together, one capable of realising his dream. He chose collaborators he believed to be “spiritual warriors.” The entire project seemed blessed by good fortune and synchronicity. When he decided that he needed superstars like Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí or Mick Jagger to play certain parts, he would somehow meet these people by happenstance and persuade them to agree. But when pre-production was complete, he went to pitch the film to the Hollywood studios. Jodorowsky pitched Dune in the years before the success of Star Wars, when science fiction was still seen as strange and embarrassing. As impressive and groundbreaking as his pitch was, it was still a science fiction film. They all said “no.” By the time this genre was first named, in the 1920s, it was already marginalised. It was fine for the kids, needless to say, but critics looked down upon it. In many ways this was a blessing. Away from the cultural centre, science fiction authors were free to explore and experiment. In this less pressured environment science fiction became, in the opinion of the English novelist J.G. Ballard, the last genre capable of adequately representing present-day reality. Science fiction was able to get under the skin of the times in a different way to more respected literature. A century of uncertainty, relative perspectives and endless technological revolutions was frequently invisible to mainstream culture, but was not ignored by science fiction.* * *
The script for George Lucas’s 1977 movie Star Wars was influenced by The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a 1949 book by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell believed that at the heart of all the wild and varied myths and stories which mankind has dreamt lies one single archetypal story of profound psychological importance. He called this the monomyth. As Campbell saw it, the myths and legends of the world were all imperfect variations on this one, pure story structure. As Campbell summarised the monomyth, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell found echoes of this story wherever he looked; myths as diverse as those of Ulysses, Osiris or Prometheus, the lives of religious figures such as Moses, Christ or Buddha, and in plays and stories ranging from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and Dickens. This story is now known as “The Hero’s Journey.” It is a story that begins with an ordinary man (it is almost always a man) in a recognisable world. That man typically receives a call to adventure, encounters an older patriarchal mentor, undergoes many trials in his journey to confront and destroy a great evil, and returns to his previous life rewarded and transformed. George Lucas was always open about the fact that he consciously shaped the original Star Wars film into a modern expression of Campbell’s monomyth, and has done much to raise the profile of Campbell and his work. Star Wars was so successful that the American film industry has never really recovered. Together with the films of Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg, it changed Hollywood into an industry of blockbusters, tent-pole releases and high-concept pitches. American film was always a democratic affair which gave the audience what it wanted, and the audience demonstrated what they wanted by the purchase of tickets. The shock with which Hollywood reacted to Star Wars was as much about recognising how out of step with the audience’s interests it had become as it was about how much money was up for grabs. Had it realised this a few years earlier, it might have green-lit Jodorowsky’s Dune. The fact that Lucas had used Campbell’s monomyth as his tool for bottling magic did not go unnoticed. As far as Hollywood was concerned, The Hero’s Journey was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Studio script-readers used it to analyse submitted scripts and determine whether or not they should be rejected. Screenwriting theorists and professionals internalised it, until they were unable to produce stories that differed from its basic structure. Readers and writers alike all knew at exactly which point in the script the hero needed their inciting incident, their reversal into their darkest hour and their third-act resolution. In an industry dominated by the bottom line and massive job insecurity, Campbell’s monomyth gained a stranglehold over the structure of cinema. Campbell’s monomyth has been criticised for being Eurocentric and patriarchal. But it has a more significant problem, in that Campbell was wrong. There is not one pure archetypal story at the heart of human storytelling. The monomyth was not a treasure he discovered at the heart of myth, but an invention of his own that he projected onto the stories of the ages. It’s unarguably a good story, but it is most definitely not the only one we have. As the American media critic Philip Sandifer notes, Campbell “identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other ‘fundamental stories’ that you could also find in world mythology.” Campbell’s story revolves around one single individual, a lowly born person with whom the audience identifies. This hero is the single most important person in the world of the story, a fact understood not just by the hero, but by everyone else in that world. A triumph is only a triumph if the hero is responsible, and a tragedy is only a tragedy if it affects the hero personally. Supporting characters cheer or weep for the hero in ways they do not for other people. The death of a character the hero did not know is presented in a manner emotionally far removed from the death of someone the hero loved. Clearly, this was a story structure ideally suited to the prevailing culture. Out of all the potential monomyths that he could have run with, Campbell, a twentieth-century American, chose perhaps the most individualistic one possible. The success of this monomyth in the later decades of the twentieth century is an indication of how firmly entrenched the individualism became. Yet in the early twenty-first century, there are signs that this magic formula may be waning. The truly absorbing and successful narratives of our age are moving beyond the limited, individual perspective of The Hero’s Journey. Critically applauded series like The Wire and mainstream commercial hit series such as Game of Thrones are loved for the complexity of their politics and group relationships. These are stories told not from the point of view of one person, but from many interrelated perspectives, and the relationships between a complex network of different characters can engage us more than the story of a single man being brave. In the twenty-first century audiences are drawn to complicated, lengthy engagements with characters, from their own long-term avatar in World of Warcraft and other online gameworlds to characters like Doctor Who who have a fifty-years-plus history. The superhero films in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” are all connected, because Marvel understands that the sum is greater than the parts. A simple Hero’s Journey story such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit becomes, when adapted for a twenty-first-century cinema audience, a lengthy trilogy of films far more complex than the original book. We now seem to look for stories of greater complexity than can be offered by a single perspective. If science fiction is our cultural early-warning system, its move away from individualism tells us something about the direction we are headed. This should grab our attention, especially when, in the years after the Second World War, it became apparent just how dark the cult of the self could get. Excerpted from "Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century" by John Higgs. Copyright © 2015 by John Higgs. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.
There is sex after childbirth: What to expect in the bedroom when you’re done expecting
Even though I’m still in the trying-to-get-pregnant stage of my sex life, I’ve found myself wondering every time I contemplate parenting: Will becoming a mom disrupt my sex life? And if so, will the damage be permanent? To get a sense of what might be in store for me, I asked friends and experts whether moms really can continue to get it on. As far as I can tell, there seem to be two stages of sex after a woman becomes a mother: the immediate changes a new child brings, and the more long-term effects. As for the former, in her book
Mama Tried,
cartoonist and author Emily Flake writes of postpartum sex, “I wanted to have sex again very soon after I had the baby. But not in a sexy way, not in a way that felt anything like sexual desire. What I felt was a physical jonesing for my husband’s body that felt like starving … I did not want anything done to my lady parts…But I desperately, viscerally needed to be close to John.” While much has been written about the need for skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies, the intimate kind of touch Flake is talking about, between adults, which may or may not be sexual per se, is also important. More from DAME: "Do We Have to Get Married?" In a similar way, writer Jordan Rosenfeld credits having a child with improving her sex life—yes, you read that right. In an essay on the topic, she reports that while she and her husband miss “the sleepy ease of morning sex,” there are other ways their passion for each other has been rekindled. Cue the so-called “cuddle hormone” oxytocin. Rosenfeld writes, “We quickly realized that for all the ways that children pull at the threads of a marriage, sex could weave those threads back into place.” In bed. For some moms, that’s an uphill battle. Blogger Crista Anne told me that after becoming a mom, intense postpartum depression “completely killed my libido.” When her libido returned, she was hit with another complication: “I felt extreme guilt that having a high sex drive somehow made me the dreaded ‘bad mommy,’” Anne said. What helped her navigate those extremes? Self-love. “Masturbation helped me immensely as I figured out the various changes I'd gone through. Learning how to allow myself to experience pleasure without another person around was vital. From there I was more confident to make changes within my interpersonal sex life. You may never be the same sexual being you were before, but I've found that prioritizing my pleasure has taken me to a point where I am having by far the best sex of my life.” So for moms who may not have lost that lovin’ feeling, but don’t quite know how to act on it, what steps can they take? Rosenfeld’s advice is simple: “If you feel even slightly in the mood, go for it. My mantra about sex is, you may not feel like it at the moment, but you always have a good time once you're there.” HIV-testing counselor and single mom Alicia Beth says the best thing you can do is give yourself a break. Don’t feel pressured, whether by your partner, society, or your own expectations, to be horny on demand. “It's humanly impossible to be fabulous, sexy, a new mom and do all the other things our lives call for,” said Beth. “Give you and your partner room to adjust to your new roles as parents. Slowly start to take time to rekindle what you had before baby.” Beth also noted that after her marriage ended and she was back in the dating game, what wound up working in her favor is good old-fashioned confidence. “When I accepted that I had a ‘mom body,’ for lack of a better phrase, my confidence attracted plenty of men who could've cared less about the changes my body had taken on. The more comfortable I felt with myself, the better my sex became.” More from DAME: "I Wasn't Supposed to Get Breast Cancer" Balancing time with your child and time with your partner (or partners) becomes extremely tricky. Meaghan O’Connell of The Cut hilariously dissects her overnight date with her husband at a pricey hotel, in which they were very conscious of spending money specifically in order to have sex. As she put it, “It’s a little absurd in concept: Did I just spent two years physically building a life with my own body, only to turn around and spend hundreds of dollars to escape it for less than 24 hours?” Mom of two Kristina Wright, who had her first child at 42, found what’s worked as a solution so parenthood didn’t completely take over her life—or her marriage. “I think I was very conscious of being focused on our relationship and making time for each other because we'd been together for 19 years; I didn't want this wonderful intimacy we'd always had to go away,” recalled Wright. “We had almost weekly date nights from the time our first was six months old, and that really helped us stay connected.” Hillary Frank, host of parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time, has some tips based on two episodes on the theme Parents’ Guide to Doing It (you can listen to those here and here). First, remember that you get to define what sex looks like for you—and it’s okay if it looks different than it did in your pre-mom days. “If full-on penetrative sex feels too scary or painful or involved, make it easy on yourself: don't do it. There are lots of other ways to be sexual with your partner that are just as intimate. Be creative,” suggested Frank. She also endorses sex columnist Dan Savage’s suggestion from the podcast that new parents, whether or not they’ve given birth, should get a pass from having sex for a year. Even though those who’ve given birth might be given the medical all clear for nookie after six weeks, Frank admits, “Most women I've talked to don't feel anywhere ready by then.” So don’t feel like just because you can after six weeks (or any other time period), you should, if it’s not feeling right for you. As it turns out, I’ve got good timing in thinking about how to keep things hot with my partner before I’m in the thick of parenting. According to Shar Rednour, co-author of
The Sex & Pleasure Book,
who adopted three kids with her partner, the time to start building up your sex life is before kids enter your life. “We had lots of sex while waiting to become parents because we knew we wouldn’t be able to have sex as often once we were parents,” Rednour explained. This isn’t just an issue of time management, but a way of reaffirming your passion for each other that you can draw inspiration from down the road. More from DAME: "I Donated My Dead Body to Give My Life a Purpose" After all the stress kids can bring, “it’s pretty easy to get snarky and resentful with partners and turn on each other,” said Rednour. “Why do you think there are so many divorces once people become parents? If you have some reserve intimacy ‘in the bank’ then it’s easier to believe your partner/spouse when they say ‘I want to fuck your brains out right now but I’m exhausted.’” In other words, they’ll remember how hot you were for them and be assured that you still want them, even if you’re too busy or tired in the early days of parenting to make good on that desire. And new moms (who, in all likelihood, are probably too busy to do more than skim this column): Here’s some good news. Wright wants you to “remember that it's a stage. The baby won't always be a baby, and any lack of interest due to exhaustion and hormones will shift with time. You will feel like yourself again, probably sooner than you expect.”
“He had a vision for rock ‘n’ roll long before the music existed”: Peter Guralnick digs deep into the history of the man who made Elvis Presley
The music writer Peter Guralnick has spent his long and celebrated career warming up for his new book. The author of books about country, blues, soul, and a definitive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, he’s now turned to one of the great taproots of American music. “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll” describes the life and cultural context of the Sun Records founder. And it looks at Phillips’s relationships with Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner (whose “Rocket 88” is sometimes called the first rock song), Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, all of whom he recorded. “It’s worth pausing, for a moment, to consider how lucky it was that Presley walked into Phillips’s studio and not someone else’s,” Dwight Garner wrote in a rave New York Times review of the Guralnick book. “Another producer (that term had not yet come into use in the record industry) might have put him to work singing country-pop ditties with string sections. He might have been another Eddy Arnold.” We’re also lucky that Guralnick – who wrote the script for a Phillips documentary made by A&E – tackled Phillips’s complex life and times. We spoke to him from his home near Boston. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The subtitle of your book is “The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll.” I don’t think you’re the first person to call him that, and the phrase served as the title for a documentary years ago. Overall, give us a sense of how important Phillips was to the birth and early evolution of the music. What I think was remarkable about Sam, besides the fact that from a tiny little storefront studio in Memphis, so much music came out of such a tiny space, from something that was essentially a one-man operation. From Elvis to Carl Perkins to Johnny Cash to Jerry Lee Lewis, [he created] what was essentially the dominant strain of rock ‘n’ roll during the first few years of its existence. What I think is extraordinary about Sam is that he had a vision for rock ‘n’ roll long before the music existed, long before he was even able to give expression to it… Years before he even conceived of building a recording studio, he conceived a music that could bridge all gaps, that could deny category… An African-American-based music that could leap across the chasms of race and social origin and class. And when he opened his studio, the first hit he had come out was [Ike Turner’s] “Rocket 88.” It doesn’t matter how you label it – the fact is, it was an extraordinary hit, it sold over 100,000 copies. In his first public utterances, in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he spoke of that same vision. Of “Rocket 88” being the kind of music that could appeal to all kinds, that could reach a mainstream audience, that could bridge that gap. While the record may not have fully realized what we envisioned for it, that was clearly what he was looking to achieve from the moment he started recording anyone. He had the same vision for Howlin’ Wolf. What was the racial situation like in the South when he was growing up? How much black music was he exposed to? Anybody growing up in the South would be exposed to a lot of black music unless they were deaf to it, either for reasons of prejudice or because they couldn’t hear. The South has always been different from the North because while the legal system was always tangled in segregation, everything about day-to-day life argued against the formal practice. Whereas in the North, where segregation was not institutionalized, there was far greater separation. So for Sam, growing up initially on that 323-acre farm outside of Florence, Alabama – his father rented the farm, but didn’t own it, and couldn’t hold onto it after the depression hit – he had sharecroppers, both black and white, working in the fields. Sam worked with them. What he was drawn to most of all was the sounds that were all around him – it could be a whippoorwill, it could be a hoe striking rock, it could be the music that came primarily from the black sharecroppers. But he was also acutely aware of the racial disparities which existed. And we’re talking about a 6- or 7-year-old kid. When I spoke to his family… they weren’t altogether thrilled by the manner in which he expressed himself. Or the views he expressed. He was drawn to this music; he was drawn to all sorts of music. H loved John Philip Sousa. He loved hillbilly music. He loved gospel music. What he was most drawn to was black music of all kinds. After he went to church with his family, he would go to the black church, a block and a half from the church he attended… He described himself as being spellbound by the music coming out of there, particularly in the summer when the windows were open and you could hear every beat of the music. So when he opened his studio it was explicitly to give some of “those great Negro singers of the South an opportunity to record” – I’m not getting the quote quite right – where previously they’d not had one. How central was that to his ambition to open a studio? That was entirely what he opened his studio for. This was the Memphis Recording Service, not Sun Records. But he was stymied – how do you get some of these African-American artists to record? Joe Hill Louis, the great one-man-band who performed frequently on Beale Street, just wandered into the studio one day and asked him what he was doing. Sam said, Well, I’m opening a recording studio, and explained what his purpose was. And Lewis said, That’s just what Memphis needs. And Joe Hill Louis became Sam’s ambassador to the [black] community. I’ve spoken about “Rocket 88.” Ike Turner bumped into a friend, Riley B. King [B.B. King], who told him, You should go up to Memphis – I’m making records with this man, Sam Phillips. How did the rockabilly musicians find the place? Elvis was the first, and it was really in the wake of Elvis that everybody else came in. Jerry Lee Lewis talks about reading an article in one of the fan magazines about Elvis Presley, that spoke about Sam Phillips and how he’d recorded B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf. Most of the so-called rockabilly singers were well aware of B.B. King. Elvis came into the studio – there’s no way of proving this – in the immediate aftermath of a story that ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, I think it was, about the Prisonaires, a group Sam had just recorded in July of 1953, who were incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. They recorded there and a reporter described Sam as a man open to talent of any kind, who was looking for original talent, would record people no one else would record. I don’t think there’s any doubt, this is what emboldened Elvis to go in there. And his excuse for going in there was to cut a personal record – one side for three dollars and two sides for four dollars. He was trying to put himself in the way of discovery of this man he’d heard about. Elvis was such a walking encyclopedia of music of every type – he was an ethnomusicologist without a degree. And it was the openness of Mr. Phillips. That drew him to the studio, and then he kept coming back again and again… Then Sam set up a rehearsal with Scotty Moore, and that’s what, on July 5, 1954, led to “That’s All Right.” It was a torturous process; it took a lot of patience from the man in the booth. It’s not that he didn’t recognize Elvis’s talent – he didn’t recognize the thing that best expressed Elvis’s talent, or had any hope of selling. That’s a great song. It was through the success that Elvis enjoyed throughout the South, particularly the mid-South – he was a star in the region – that led to everyone from Johnny Cash to Carl Perkins, to lesser-known talents, they were all drawn to the studio. It wasn’t just the success Elvis had – it was the original sound coming out of the studio. You got to know Phillips a bit, starting in the ’70s. What was it like to be around him? It was great – the most unexpected and biggest fun in the world. He was probably the most charismatic man I ever met. From the moment I met him in ’79. I was inspired by that first meeting. I had no idea that what he would talk about would so encapsulate a philosophy of the creative life. He’s talking about having the courage of your convictions, doing everything in your powers to realize your vision…. He was a person insistent on his originality; he wasn’t a rude person but he wasn’t interested in small talk. As he said, “I love chaos.” It was a remarkable experience knowing him over 25 years…. He kept his distance; he didn’t give himself over all at once. He was a solitary person, like so many people who lived his life in public. There was nothing that could have been more challenging or more fun. The music writer Peter Guralnick has spent his long and celebrated career warming up for his new book. The author of books about country, blues, soul, and a definitive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, he’s now turned to one of the great taproots of American music. “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll” describes the life and cultural context of the Sun Records founder. And it looks at Phillips’s relationships with Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner (whose “Rocket 88” is sometimes called the first rock song), Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, all of whom he recorded. “It’s worth pausing, for a moment, to consider how lucky it was that Presley walked into Phillips’s studio and not someone else’s,” Dwight Garner wrote in a rave New York Times review of the Guralnick book. “Another producer (that term had not yet come into use in the record industry) might have put him to work singing country-pop ditties with string sections. He might have been another Eddy Arnold.” We’re also lucky that Guralnick – who wrote the script for a Phillips documentary made by A&E – tackled Phillips’s complex life and times. We spoke to him from his home near Boston. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The subtitle of your book is “The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll.” I don’t think you’re the first person to call him that, and the phrase served as the title for a documentary years ago. Overall, give us a sense of how important Phillips was to the birth and early evolution of the music. What I think was remarkable about Sam, besides the fact that from a tiny little storefront studio in Memphis, so much music came out of such a tiny space, from something that was essentially a one-man operation. From Elvis to Carl Perkins to Johnny Cash to Jerry Lee Lewis, [he created] what was essentially the dominant strain of rock ‘n’ roll during the first few years of its existence. What I think is extraordinary about Sam is that he had a vision for rock ‘n’ roll long before the music existed, long before he was even able to give expression to it… Years before he even conceived of building a recording studio, he conceived a music that could bridge all gaps, that could deny category… An African-American-based music that could leap across the chasms of race and social origin and class. And when he opened his studio, the first hit he had come out was [Ike Turner’s] “Rocket 88.” It doesn’t matter how you label it – the fact is, it was an extraordinary hit, it sold over 100,000 copies. In his first public utterances, in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he spoke of that same vision. Of “Rocket 88” being the kind of music that could appeal to all kinds, that could reach a mainstream audience, that could bridge that gap. While the record may not have fully realized what we envisioned for it, that was clearly what he was looking to achieve from the moment he started recording anyone. He had the same vision for Howlin’ Wolf. What was the racial situation like in the South when he was growing up? How much black music was he exposed to? Anybody growing up in the South would be exposed to a lot of black music unless they were deaf to it, either for reasons of prejudice or because they couldn’t hear. The South has always been different from the North because while the legal system was always tangled in segregation, everything about day-to-day life argued against the formal practice. Whereas in the North, where segregation was not institutionalized, there was far greater separation. So for Sam, growing up initially on that 323-acre farm outside of Florence, Alabama – his father rented the farm, but didn’t own it, and couldn’t hold onto it after the depression hit – he had sharecroppers, both black and white, working in the fields. Sam worked with them. What he was drawn to most of all was the sounds that were all around him – it could be a whippoorwill, it could be a hoe striking rock, it could be the music that came primarily from the black sharecroppers. But he was also acutely aware of the racial disparities which existed. And we’re talking about a 6- or 7-year-old kid. When I spoke to his family… they weren’t altogether thrilled by the manner in which he expressed himself. Or the views he expressed. He was drawn to this music; he was drawn to all sorts of music. H loved John Philip Sousa. He loved hillbilly music. He loved gospel music. What he was most drawn to was black music of all kinds. After he went to church with his family, he would go to the black church, a block and a half from the church he attended… He described himself as being spellbound by the music coming out of there, particularly in the summer when the windows were open and you could hear every beat of the music. So when he opened his studio it was explicitly to give some of “those great Negro singers of the South an opportunity to record” – I’m not getting the quote quite right – where previously they’d not had one. How central was that to his ambition to open a studio? That was entirely what he opened his studio for. This was the Memphis Recording Service, not Sun Records. But he was stymied – how do you get some of these African-American artists to record? Joe Hill Louis, the great one-man-band who performed frequently on Beale Street, just wandered into the studio one day and asked him what he was doing. Sam said, Well, I’m opening a recording studio, and explained what his purpose was. And Lewis said, That’s just what Memphis needs. And Joe Hill Louis became Sam’s ambassador to the [black] community. I’ve spoken about “Rocket 88.” Ike Turner bumped into a friend, Riley B. King [B.B. King], who told him, You should go up to Memphis – I’m making records with this man, Sam Phillips. How did the rockabilly musicians find the place? Elvis was the first, and it was really in the wake of Elvis that everybody else came in. Jerry Lee Lewis talks about reading an article in one of the fan magazines about Elvis Presley, that spoke about Sam Phillips and how he’d recorded B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf. Most of the so-called rockabilly singers were well aware of B.B. King. Elvis came into the studio – there’s no way of proving this – in the immediate aftermath of a story that ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, I think it was, about the Prisonaires, a group Sam had just recorded in July of 1953, who were incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. They recorded there and a reporter described Sam as a man open to talent of any kind, who was looking for original talent, would record people no one else would record. I don’t think there’s any doubt, this is what emboldened Elvis to go in there. And his excuse for going in there was to cut a personal record – one side for three dollars and two sides for four dollars. He was trying to put himself in the way of discovery of this man he’d heard about. Elvis was such a walking encyclopedia of music of every type – he was an ethnomusicologist without a degree. And it was the openness of Mr. Phillips. That drew him to the studio, and then he kept coming back again and again… Then Sam set up a rehearsal with Scotty Moore, and that’s what, on July 5, 1954, led to “That’s All Right.” It was a torturous process; it took a lot of patience from the man in the booth. It’s not that he didn’t recognize Elvis’s talent – he didn’t recognize the thing that best expressed Elvis’s talent, or had any hope of selling. That’s a great song. It was through the success that Elvis enjoyed throughout the South, particularly the mid-South – he was a star in the region – that led to everyone from Johnny Cash to Carl Perkins, to lesser-known talents, they were all drawn to the studio. It wasn’t just the success Elvis had – it was the original sound coming out of the studio. You got to know Phillips a bit, starting in the ’70s. What was it like to be around him? It was great – the most unexpected and biggest fun in the world. He was probably the most charismatic man I ever met. From the moment I met him in ’79. I was inspired by that first meeting. I had no idea that what he would talk about would so encapsulate a philosophy of the creative life. He’s talking about having the courage of your convictions, doing everything in your powers to realize your vision…. He was a person insistent on his originality; he wasn’t a rude person but he wasn’t interested in small talk. As he said, “I love chaos.” It was a remarkable experience knowing him over 25 years…. He kept his distance; he didn’t give himself over all at once. He was a solitary person, like so many people who lived his life in public. There was nothing that could have been more challenging or more fun.
#MerryChristmas Starbucks! Watch the absurd “war on Christmas” call-to-arms over red coffee cups
The War on Christmas Season starts earlier every year. Days after Starbucks announced the ritual switch from white cups to red that signals the traditional end of Pumpkin Spice season — complete with custom emoji and everything — the paranoid culture warriors found this season’s cause célèbre. This year’s #redcups are just that — red cups, vaguely reminiscent of the lowly Solo cup, even, stripped of decoration other than the ubiquitous Starbucks logo. And people are
pissed
. Not just any people, of course, but the people who readily share videos on Facebook posted by a guy named Joshua Feuerstein. If you were thinking that it was time the Christian right found its very own Guy Fieri, wait no longer. Feuerstein’s a professional fundamentalist Christian social media evangelist — sure, that’s a thing — specializing in carefully-orchestrated videos designed to go viral like “Dear Mr. Atheist … allow me to destroy evolution in 3 minutes!” Feuerstein, who is quite a bit rougher around the edges than your average Duggar, sports a kind of Fred Durstian throwback bro-aesthetic to go with his incredibly shallow sense of where faith and public life should and could intersect. And now he’s taking Starbucks down, because the coffee chain had the audacity to eschew the “winter seasonal” graphic designs that decorated red cups in previous years in favor of a simpler look. Where have the snowmen and reindeer of yesteryear gone? Why does Starbucks hate Jesus?! In a video that has been viewed more than 7 million times at this time, Feuerstein opens with a little joke that he’s hoping will get him a job on the Trump campaign: “I think in the age of political correctness we’ve become so open minded our brains have literally fallen out of our head. Did you realize Starbucks wanted to take CHRIST and Christmas off of their brand new cups? That’s why they’re just plain red.” Feuerstein continues: “In fact, do you realize that Starbucks isn’t allowed to say Merry Christmas to customers?" Shots. Fired. “I decided instead of boycotting, why don’t we start a movement?” St. Paul would be proud, bro. Here's the plan: He went into Starbucks and placed his order, and when the cashier asked his name, he gave them
“SNL’s” inexplicable Trump fiasco: Why the Donald’s unprecedented hosting gig deserves all the criticism
It's easy to see why "Saturday Night Live" has decided to let Donald Trump host the show tonight. From the protests being held at NBC to the drama surrounding some promos Trump cut for his appearance, "SNL" has garnered a healthy dose of what every show wants—attention and controversy. The ratings will surely jump, and "SNL" will be able to maintain its place in the cultural conversation for another week. So it's understandable. But that doesn't mean it's not bizarre and objectionable on several levels.
From what I can tell, Trump is the first top-flight presidential candidate to host "SNL" during the middle of an active campaign. Political cameos on the show are a time-honored staple—hello, Val!—and politicians have hosted before, but they've all been in between races, with the exception of barely-a-candidate Al Sharpton in early 2003. This time, "SNL" is giving Trump an extended platform it's not giving to any of the other candidates in either the Republican or Democratic race. This isn't illegal—the equal time rules for candidates are byzantine and stacked in favor of not actually giving people equal time—but it's a notable and rather strange intervention by "SNL" nonetheless. Trump may be, in many ways, a joke, but his presidential campaign long since crossed the line from entertainment into serious reality. The haste with which NBC yanked a promo in which Trump called Ben Carson a "total loser" shows the risky waters the network is wading in.
Then there is the very real fact of Trump's racism. It seems an eon ago, but his comments about Mexicans and Latinos were toxic enough that a certain network called NBC severed all ties with him. Now that same network is welcoming him back with open arms, much to the chagrin of Latino groups. It's not the greatest look for "SNL," a show that has an appalling record when it comes to Latinos. And that's before you get to Trump's tacit acceptance of anti-Muslim racism—something nobody ever has to pay a price for—or his openly bigoted birther crusade. Let the hilarity ensue!
Now, "SNL" is not required to have its hosts pass political litmus tests, and it has no particular responsibility to endorse or reject any views. (Hell, Hillary Clinton has enough objectionable beliefs all by herself.) However, just because it's a comedy show doesn't mean it's exempt from scrutiny. We're talking about a program with enormous influence. At best, its willingness to play with Trump is representative of a wider problem. It says something—if not about "SNL" specifically, then perhaps about the rest of us—that Trump is able to peddle such open racism and not only get away with it, but be rewarded for it with such a highly coveted prize. "SNL" will surely lampoon Trump, but this time, Trump will be in on the joke. The satire never stings quite as much when its subject is going along with it.
"SNL" is giving Trump a prime opportunity to neutralize some of the more rancid parts of his candidacy, all while delivering Lorne Michaels a nice bump in the audience figures. It's a win-win for everyone—everyone, that is, except "SNL," and Donald Trump, and maybe all of us in the world of Internet content, who will disseminate every last clip of this dire ordeal to you, the reader. Can't you feel the fun?
