Lily Salter's Blog, page 972

I’m a feminist with a football obsession: “I’m interested in the way we love things that aren’t good for us: chocolate, booze, narcissists, football”

For those fans tortured by the moral quandaries that now surround the multi-billion dollar college football industry — quandaries that begin with an unpaid workforce and proceed all the way to potential brain damage — Diane Roberts’ new book will offer little solace. "Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America" is a penetrating examination of how and why football has infiltrated our system of higher education, and what role it serves at a school like Florida State University, where Roberts has taught English and creative writing for eight years. (She spent another fifteen at the gridiron-gaga University of Alabama.) The kicker is that Roberts, an avowed feminist who contributes to National Public Radio and The New York Times, is a passionate fan of the Seminoles. In the midst of another glorious and thus far undefeated season for FSU, Roberts sat down with Salon to discuss what her new book says about old loyalties. Early on in "Tribal" you talk about how fandom “takes the edge off this painful self-examination, offering a kind of energetic clarity.” But the book complicates the experience of fandom, by suggesting all the toxic attitudes and outcomes football fosters. Does the game still provide you with that clarity? I can still disappear into the hold-your-breath moment of the game. I holler. I cheer. I sing. I clap. If I’m home watching on television, I coach. I’m really good at calling plays when nobody can hear me. It’s so comfortable and fine to belong, to be part of the tribe, to know that the people around you in the stadium — people who don’t see the world as you do, who might hate your politics — will share the general triumph when your guys score. For a moment, you’re all one family. It’s why people join churches, political parties, sororities, fraternities, gangs, book clubs. Most of us live tangled in paradox. Loving a college football team is simple and comforting — even when that team loses. When I’m praying that FSU’s quarterback can actually get the ball to that open receiver, I forget all about climate change, Syria and the NRA. When the ball lands in the boy’s waiting hands, the world falls away. Joy takes over. As a devout fan for many years, I get it. But can I just ask why you decided to open this particular can of worms? Because it’s my can of worms. I’m trying to figure out how and why this absurd (and gorgeous and thrilling and destructive) game has such a hold on me and other people. I’m particularly interested in the way we often love things that aren’t good for us: chocolate, booze, narcissists, football. I’m also a product of my culture — a culture I love and celebrate, a culture I deplore and critique, a culture I also try to understand so that its less attractive aspects (those little issues with racism, sexism, glorified violence and the like, all deep-rooted in the history of America and, particularly, the South) don’t prevail unchallenged. Maybe I’m trying to have my tailgate and eat it, too. I dissect the game, disparage it and yet keep on consuming. It’s a part of me. Sometimes I suspect I’m just creating a cover story that allows me to feed my addiction. You know, like some fundamentalist who assures the faithful that he’s an expert on sin; he’s studied the decadent works of secular society and can declare that, Yes! It’s all filth and wickedness! As a “feminist with a football problem” how do you feel about cheering for Jameis Winston, the FSU quarterback famously accused of raping a classmate? You write about the accusations, and the negligent police investigation of those accusations, with such disgust. Do you feel that same disgust toward the accused? I still don’t know what to think. Winston plays with such joy and grace (I will admit to sneaking a look at him quarterbacking the Tampa Bay Bucs). He’s an extraordinary athlete. I think he’s also a bit of an idiot. Most young men are idiots. It’s not entirely their fault: their brains don’t get fully formed until they’re in their late twenties, especially the judgment centers. Thanks to the half-assed investigation carried out by the Tallahassee cops and the collusion of the athletic department, we’ll never know if Jameis committed rape. Erica Kinsman thinks he did, though her story was not terribly credible in some ways. Clearly something happened that distressed her. I hate to get all postmodern on you, but it may be that each kid is utterly convinced that he or she is telling the truth. As a college professor for more than 20 years, I can say with authority that 19 and 20 year-old boys are the stupidest creatures on the planet. One of the most fascinating sections of "Tribal" is the investigation of so-called “muscular Christianity.” Can you tell the folks at home what it is and how it fits into America’s football addiction? I always wondered about all the praying and the thanking the Lord for a touchdown and Tim Tebow advertising Bible verses in his eye-black. I mean, I grew up in the South, where people would say Jesus is Love, then go nuts for a vicious open-field tackle. We went to football on Saturday and divine service on Sunday, often wearing the same kind of clothes — this was back when we dressed properly for a game. But the knitting of Church and football has increased over the past 20 or 30 years, along with the rise of the Evangelicals in American society. Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school. Swinney’s not alone. Many college football teams have chaplains, often hired by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes but given offices on campus and allowed to travel with the team. Many coaches take their players to church. Bobby Bowden at Florida State was completely unapologetic about it. He saw his job as saving souls as well as winning championships. In Victorian times, certain manly types, including the writer Thomas Hughes, worried that the Anglican Church was becoming “feminized,” with gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild and Victorian angels who looked like cuddly nannies. He favored a badass Jesus, the Jesus who kicks over the money-changers’s tables, eats your lunch and makes you say thank you. Hughes created a hero, Tom Brown, who read just enough to graduate college but played a lot of sports: rugby-football especially. The exemplary Christian is not a flesh-denying weedy saint starving to death in a desert hut, but a buff, tough, butt-kicking mother who takes up the white man’s burden with a “gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.” Theodore Roosevelt, who admired the British Empire and wanted some of that stuff for the United States, pushed Muscular Christianity as the path for the true American manly man. Sports channeled sexual desire into athletic prowess. Roosevelt particularly loved football, which he thought built character through bone-cracking tackles. The South took to football like crazy, knotting sports and religion even more tightly. These days, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, with its thousands of chapters, keeps Muscular Christianity thriving. Peace, love and understanding are all fine, but beating the hell out of your opponent on the gridiron makes Jesus smile. As a college professor, what you make of football’s influence on the mission of higher education? Does it trouble you that most Americans think of FSU as a football team, not a college? I hate that people think FSU is nothing but football. When I taught at the University of Alabama, I hated that people associated it only with football, too — that and George Wallace standing “in the schoolhouse door.” FSU should be known as the site of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Or the home of Carlisle Floyd, America’s pre-eminent opera composer. UA has great schools of law and journalism and a famous Shakespeare program. Doesn’t matter. It’s all Bear Bryant and Bobby Bowden, Jameis Winston, Roll Tide and rapey players. It ain’t fair and it ain’t right, but it’s reality. I don’t see how we change it until we uncouple big money sport from big educational institutions. How we do that uncoupling beats me. The NCAA will have to go — that really will happen in maybe the next decade or so. Then football will have to change as a result of years of lawsuits by people harmed by brain damage. Maybe then we’ll decide that college teams are NFL farm teams. It’s hard to say that football serves any kind of educational mission. Deion Sanders didn’t bother to go to class his last season of playing for FSU. Much as I’d love to holler that the football program takes money away from the library, it doesn’t really. When FSU won the National Championship in 2013, applications for admission went up quite a bit. This means we can raise our academic standards. That’s a good thing. Money came in, though not for the academic departments. What happens is that the state legislature, on which we depend for a chunk of our funding, gets most excited about a winning football program. Many of our legislators (Florida is particularly bad about this) deny evolution, the Big Bang, climate change. They don’t like scholars. We distrust eggheads. We’re more comfortable with meatheads. Howling for blood with 85,000 members of your tribe is more satisfying to most people than listening to a poet read his work. Can football and academics be uncoupled if college football fans and other members of the academic community demand it? Would you be one of those who demands it? Much as I’d love to think that professors could demand that universities divert resources and energy from football and basketball, we have very little power. In the sports economy (always far bigger than the academic economy) we’re replaceable. The people with the power are the ones who buy the tickets. And the parents of kids who play the game. You can’t have a game without players and if more parents decide that their kid isn’t going to endanger his body and brain, that might force a conversation, maybe even change. But until we stop telling poor kids that being a hot-shit athlete — instead of a hot-shit physicist or coder — is your ticket to the American Dream, underfunded high schools in places like Cairo, Georgia; Hoover, Alabama; Batteville, Mississippi and the less salubrious parts of Miami will continue to stress playing over studying. I hate to sound like Donald Trump, but in America, money wins. Football makes money. Until colleges and the NCAA start having to pay out gigantic dollars in the lawsuits over the exploitation of young people’s labor, as well as wrecked brains and bodies, not much will improve. This will take a long, long time. It’s like climate change: most of us know it’s real. We know it’s dangerous. But we’re comfortable living the way we do, with coal plants spitting out nasty stuff but giving us cheap energy. We’d rather the scientists come up with a way to somehow fix the planet. That’s easier than changing our destructive behavior. In football, we’ll assume that somebody will make a better helmet. Or more padding. Or something. That’s easier than actually confronting reality. Americans aren’t comfortable with too much reality.For those fans tortured by the moral quandaries that now surround the multi-billion dollar college football industry — quandaries that begin with an unpaid workforce and proceed all the way to potential brain damage — Diane Roberts’ new book will offer little solace. "Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America" is a penetrating examination of how and why football has infiltrated our system of higher education, and what role it serves at a school like Florida State University, where Roberts has taught English and creative writing for eight years. (She spent another fifteen at the gridiron-gaga University of Alabama.) The kicker is that Roberts, an avowed feminist who contributes to National Public Radio and The New York Times, is a passionate fan of the Seminoles. In the midst of another glorious and thus far undefeated season for FSU, Roberts sat down with Salon to discuss what her new book says about old loyalties. Early on in "Tribal" you talk about how fandom “takes the edge off this painful self-examination, offering a kind of energetic clarity.” But the book complicates the experience of fandom, by suggesting all the toxic attitudes and outcomes football fosters. Does the game still provide you with that clarity? I can still disappear into the hold-your-breath moment of the game. I holler. I cheer. I sing. I clap. If I’m home watching on television, I coach. I’m really good at calling plays when nobody can hear me. It’s so comfortable and fine to belong, to be part of the tribe, to know that the people around you in the stadium — people who don’t see the world as you do, who might hate your politics — will share the general triumph when your guys score. For a moment, you’re all one family. It’s why people join churches, political parties, sororities, fraternities, gangs, book clubs. Most of us live tangled in paradox. Loving a college football team is simple and comforting — even when that team loses. When I’m praying that FSU’s quarterback can actually get the ball to that open receiver, I forget all about climate change, Syria and the NRA. When the ball lands in the boy’s waiting hands, the world falls away. Joy takes over. As a devout fan for many years, I get it. But can I just ask why you decided to open this particular can of worms? Because it’s my can of worms. I’m trying to figure out how and why this absurd (and gorgeous and thrilling and destructive) game has such a hold on me and other people. I’m particularly interested in the way we often love things that aren’t good for us: chocolate, booze, narcissists, football. I’m also a product of my culture — a culture I love and celebrate, a culture I deplore and critique, a culture I also try to understand so that its less attractive aspects (those little issues with racism, sexism, glorified violence and the like, all deep-rooted in the history of America and, particularly, the South) don’t prevail unchallenged. Maybe I’m trying to have my tailgate and eat it, too. I dissect the game, disparage it and yet keep on consuming. It’s a part of me. Sometimes I suspect I’m just creating a cover story that allows me to feed my addiction. You know, like some fundamentalist who assures the faithful that he’s an expert on sin; he’s studied the decadent works of secular society and can declare that, Yes! It’s all filth and wickedness! As a “feminist with a football problem” how do you feel about cheering for Jameis Winston, the FSU quarterback famously accused of raping a classmate? You write about the accusations, and the negligent police investigation of those accusations, with such disgust. Do you feel that same disgust toward the accused? I still don’t know what to think. Winston plays with such joy and grace (I will admit to sneaking a look at him quarterbacking the Tampa Bay Bucs). He’s an extraordinary athlete. I think he’s also a bit of an idiot. Most young men are idiots. It’s not entirely their fault: their brains don’t get fully formed until they’re in their late twenties, especially the judgment centers. Thanks to the half-assed investigation carried out by the Tallahassee cops and the collusion of the athletic department, we’ll never know if Jameis committed rape. Erica Kinsman thinks he did, though her story was not terribly credible in some ways. Clearly something happened that distressed her. I hate to get all postmodern on you, but it may be that each kid is utterly convinced that he or she is telling the truth. As a college professor for more than 20 years, I can say with authority that 19 and 20 year-old boys are the stupidest creatures on the planet. One of the most fascinating sections of "Tribal" is the investigation of so-called “muscular Christianity.” Can you tell the folks at home what it is and how it fits into America’s football addiction? I always wondered about all the praying and the thanking the Lord for a touchdown and Tim Tebow advertising Bible verses in his eye-black. I mean, I grew up in the South, where people would say Jesus is Love, then go nuts for a vicious open-field tackle. We went to football on Saturday and divine service on Sunday, often wearing the same kind of clothes — this was back when we dressed properly for a game. But the knitting of Church and football has increased over the past 20 or 30 years, along with the rise of the Evangelicals in American society. Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school. Swinney’s not alone. Many college football teams have chaplains, often hired by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes but given offices on campus and allowed to travel with the team. Many coaches take their players to church. Bobby Bowden at Florida State was completely unapologetic about it. He saw his job as saving souls as well as winning championships. In Victorian times, certain manly types, including the writer Thomas Hughes, worried that the Anglican Church was becoming “feminized,” with gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild and Victorian angels who looked like cuddly nannies. He favored a badass Jesus, the Jesus who kicks over the money-changers’s tables, eats your lunch and makes you say thank you. Hughes created a hero, Tom Brown, who read just enough to graduate college but played a lot of sports: rugby-football especially. The exemplary Christian is not a flesh-denying weedy saint starving to death in a desert hut, but a buff, tough, butt-kicking mother who takes up the white man’s burden with a “gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.” Theodore Roosevelt, who admired the British Empire and wanted some of that stuff for the United States, pushed Muscular Christianity as the path for the true American manly man. Sports channeled sexual desire into athletic prowess. Roosevelt particularly loved football, which he thought built character through bone-cracking tackles. The South took to football like crazy, knotting sports and religion even more tightly. These days, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, with its thousands of chapters, keeps Muscular Christianity thriving. Peace, love and understanding are all fine, but beating the hell out of your opponent on the gridiron makes Jesus smile. As a college professor, what you make of football’s influence on the mission of higher education? Does it trouble you that most Americans think of FSU as a football team, not a college? I hate that people think FSU is nothing but football. When I taught at the University of Alabama, I hated that people associated it only with football, too — that and George Wallace standing “in the schoolhouse door.” FSU should be known as the site of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Or the home of Carlisle Floyd, America’s pre-eminent opera composer. UA has great schools of law and journalism and a famous Shakespeare program. Doesn’t matter. It’s all Bear Bryant and Bobby Bowden, Jameis Winston, Roll Tide and rapey players. It ain’t fair and it ain’t right, but it’s reality. I don’t see how we change it until we uncouple big money sport from big educational institutions. How we do that uncoupling beats me. The NCAA will have to go — that really will happen in maybe the next decade or so. Then football will have to change as a result of years of lawsuits by people harmed by brain damage. Maybe then we’ll decide that college teams are NFL farm teams. It’s hard to say that football serves any kind of educational mission. Deion Sanders didn’t bother to go to class his last season of playing for FSU. Much as I’d love to holler that the football program takes money away from the library, it doesn’t really. When FSU won the National Championship in 2013, applications for admission went up quite a bit. This means we can raise our academic standards. That’s a good thing. Money came in, though not for the academic departments. What happens is that the state legislature, on which we depend for a chunk of our funding, gets most excited about a winning football program. Many of our legislators (Florida is particularly bad about this) deny evolution, the Big Bang, climate change. They don’t like scholars. We distrust eggheads. We’re more comfortable with meatheads. Howling for blood with 85,000 members of your tribe is more satisfying to most people than listening to a poet read his work. Can football and academics be uncoupled if college football fans and other members of the academic community demand it? Would you be one of those who demands it? Much as I’d love to think that professors could demand that universities divert resources and energy from football and basketball, we have very little power. In the sports economy (always far bigger than the academic economy) we’re replaceable. The people with the power are the ones who buy the tickets. And the parents of kids who play the game. You can’t have a game without players and if more parents decide that their kid isn’t going to endanger his body and brain, that might force a conversation, maybe even change. But until we stop telling poor kids that being a hot-shit athlete — instead of a hot-shit physicist or coder — is your ticket to the American Dream, underfunded high schools in places like Cairo, Georgia; Hoover, Alabama; Batteville, Mississippi and the less salubrious parts of Miami will continue to stress playing over studying. I hate to sound like Donald Trump, but in America, money wins. Football makes money. Until colleges and the NCAA start having to pay out gigantic dollars in the lawsuits over the exploitation of young people’s labor, as well as wrecked brains and bodies, not much will improve. This will take a long, long time. It’s like climate change: most of us know it’s real. We know it’s dangerous. But we’re comfortable living the way we do, with coal plants spitting out nasty stuff but giving us cheap energy. We’d rather the scientists come up with a way to somehow fix the planet. That’s easier than changing our destructive behavior. In football, we’ll assume that somebody will make a better helmet. Or more padding. Or something. That’s easier than actually confronting reality. Americans aren’t comfortable with too much reality.For those fans tortured by the moral quandaries that now surround the multi-billion dollar college football industry — quandaries that begin with an unpaid workforce and proceed all the way to potential brain damage — Diane Roberts’ new book will offer little solace. "Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America" is a penetrating examination of how and why football has infiltrated our system of higher education, and what role it serves at a school like Florida State University, where Roberts has taught English and creative writing for eight years. (She spent another fifteen at the gridiron-gaga University of Alabama.) The kicker is that Roberts, an avowed feminist who contributes to National Public Radio and The New York Times, is a passionate fan of the Seminoles. In the midst of another glorious and thus far undefeated season for FSU, Roberts sat down with Salon to discuss what her new book says about old loyalties. Early on in "Tribal" you talk about how fandom “takes the edge off this painful self-examination, offering a kind of energetic clarity.” But the book complicates the experience of fandom, by suggesting all the toxic attitudes and outcomes football fosters. Does the game still provide you with that clarity? I can still disappear into the hold-your-breath moment of the game. I holler. I cheer. I sing. I clap. If I’m home watching on television, I coach. I’m really good at calling plays when nobody can hear me. It’s so comfortable and fine to belong, to be part of the tribe, to know that the people around you in the stadium — people who don’t see the world as you do, who might hate your politics — will share the general triumph when your guys score. For a moment, you’re all one family. It’s why people join churches, political parties, sororities, fraternities, gangs, book clubs. Most of us live tangled in paradox. Loving a college football team is simple and comforting — even when that team loses. When I’m praying that FSU’s quarterback can actually get the ball to that open receiver, I forget all about climate change, Syria and the NRA. When the ball lands in the boy’s waiting hands, the world falls away. Joy takes over. As a devout fan for many years, I get it. But can I just ask why you decided to open this particular can of worms? Because it’s my can of worms. I’m trying to figure out how and why this absurd (and gorgeous and thrilling and destructive) game has such a hold on me and other people. I’m particularly interested in the way we often love things that aren’t good for us: chocolate, booze, narcissists, football. I’m also a product of my culture — a culture I love and celebrate, a culture I deplore and critique, a culture I also try to understand so that its less attractive aspects (those little issues with racism, sexism, glorified violence and the like, all deep-rooted in the history of America and, particularly, the South) don’t prevail unchallenged. Maybe I’m trying to have my tailgate and eat it, too. I dissect the game, disparage it and yet keep on consuming. It’s a part of me. Sometimes I suspect I’m just creating a cover story that allows me to feed my addiction. You know, like some fundamentalist who assures the faithful that he’s an expert on sin; he’s studied the decadent works of secular society and can declare that, Yes! It’s all filth and wickedness! As a “feminist with a football problem” how do you feel about cheering for Jameis Winston, the FSU quarterback famously accused of raping a classmate? You write about the accusations, and the negligent police investigation of those accusations, with such disgust. Do you feel that same disgust toward the accused? I still don’t know what to think. Winston plays with such joy and grace (I will admit to sneaking a look at him quarterbacking the Tampa Bay Bucs). He’s an extraordinary athlete. I think he’s also a bit of an idiot. Most young men are idiots. It’s not entirely their fault: their brains don’t get fully formed until they’re in their late twenties, especially the judgment centers. Thanks to the half-assed investigation carried out by the Tallahassee cops and the collusion of the athletic department, we’ll never know if Jameis committed rape. Erica Kinsman thinks he did, though her story was not terribly credible in some ways. Clearly something happened that distressed her. I hate to get all postmodern on you, but it may be that each kid is utterly convinced that he or she is telling the truth. As a college professor for more than 20 years, I can say with authority that 19 and 20 year-old boys are the stupidest creatures on the planet. One of the most fascinating sections of "Tribal" is the investigation of so-called “muscular Christianity.” Can you tell the folks at home what it is and how it fits into America’s football addiction? I always wondered about all the praying and the thanking the Lord for a touchdown and Tim Tebow advertising Bible verses in his eye-black. I mean, I grew up in the South, where people would say Jesus is Love, then go nuts for a vicious open-field tackle. We went to football on Saturday and divine service on Sunday, often wearing the same kind of clothes — this was back when we dressed properly for a game. But the knitting of Church and football has increased over the past 20 or 30 years, along with the rise of the Evangelicals in American society. Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school. Swinney’s not alone. Many college football teams have chaplains, often hired by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes but given offices on campus and allowed to travel with the team. Many coaches take their players to church. Bobby Bowden at Florida State was completely unapologetic about it. He saw his job as saving souls as well as winning championships. In Victorian times, certain manly types, including the writer Thomas Hughes, worried that the Anglican Church was becoming “feminized,” with gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild and Victorian angels who looked like cuddly nannies. He favored a badass Jesus, the Jesus who kicks over the money-changers’s tables, eats your lunch and makes you say thank you. Hughes created a hero, Tom Brown, who read just enough to graduate college but played a lot of sports: rugby-football especially. The exemplary Christian is not a flesh-denying weedy saint starving to death in a desert hut, but a buff, tough, butt-kicking mother who takes up the white man’s burden with a “gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.” Theodore Roosevelt, who admired the British Empire and wanted some of that stuff for the United States, pushed Muscular Christianity as the path for the true American manly man. Sports channeled sexual desire into athletic prowess. Roosevelt particularly loved football, which he thought built character through bone-cracking tackles. The South took to football like crazy, knotting sports and religion even more tightly. These days, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, with its thousands of chapters, keeps Muscular Christianity thriving. Peace, love and understanding are all fine, but beating the hell out of your opponent on the gridiron makes Jesus smile. As a college professor, what you make of football’s influence on the mission of higher education? Does it trouble you that most Americans think of FSU as a football team, not a college? I hate that people think FSU is nothing but football. When I taught at the University of Alabama, I hated that people associated it only with football, too — that and George Wallace standing “in the schoolhouse door.” FSU should be known as the site of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Or the home of Carlisle Floyd, America’s pre-eminent opera composer. UA has great schools of law and journalism and a famous Shakespeare program. Doesn’t matter. It’s all Bear Bryant and Bobby Bowden, Jameis Winston, Roll Tide and rapey players. It ain’t fair and it ain’t right, but it’s reality. I don’t see how we change it until we uncouple big money sport from big educational institutions. How we do that uncoupling beats me. The NCAA will have to go — that really will happen in maybe the next decade or so. Then football will have to change as a result of years of lawsuits by people harmed by brain damage. Maybe then we’ll decide that college teams are NFL farm teams. It’s hard to say that football serves any kind of educational mission. Deion Sanders didn’t bother to go to class his last season of playing for FSU. Much as I’d love to holler that the football program takes money away from the library, it doesn’t really. When FSU won the National Championship in 2013, applications for admission went up quite a bit. This means we can raise our academic standards. That’s a good thing. Money came in, though not for the academic departments. What happens is that the state legislature, on which we depend for a chunk of our funding, gets most excited about a winning football program. Many of our legislators (Florida is particularly bad about this) deny evolution, the Big Bang, climate change. They don’t like scholars. We distrust eggheads. We’re more comfortable with meatheads. Howling for blood with 85,000 members of your tribe is more satisfying to most people than listening to a poet read his work. Can football and academics be uncoupled if college football fans and other members of the academic community demand it? Would you be one of those who demands it? Much as I’d love to think that professors could demand that universities divert resources and energy from football and basketball, we have very little power. In the sports economy (always far bigger than the academic economy) we’re replaceable. The people with the power are the ones who buy the tickets. And the parents of kids who play the game. You can’t have a game without players and if more parents decide that their kid isn’t going to endanger his body and brain, that might force a conversation, maybe even change. But until we stop telling poor kids that being a hot-shit athlete — instead of a hot-shit physicist or coder — is your ticket to the American Dream, underfunded high schools in places like Cairo, Georgia; Hoover, Alabama; Batteville, Mississippi and the less salubrious parts of Miami will continue to stress playing over studying. I hate to sound like Donald Trump, but in America, money wins. Football makes money. Until colleges and the NCAA start having to pay out gigantic dollars in the lawsuits over the exploitation of young people’s labor, as well as wrecked brains and bodies, not much will improve. This will take a long, long time. It’s like climate change: most of us know it’s real. We know it’s dangerous. But we’re comfortable living the way we do, with coal plants spitting out nasty stuff but giving us cheap energy. We’d rather the scientists come up with a way to somehow fix the planet. That’s easier than changing our destructive behavior. In football, we’ll assume that somebody will make a better helmet. Or more padding. Or something. That’s easier than actually confronting reality. Americans aren’t comfortable with too much reality.

Continue Reading...

Let’s make the banks serve us: How the government subsidizes the super-rich, while we pay the overdraft fees

The United States has two personal banking systems. One of these systems is carefully regulated. It benefits from substantial government subsidies, and it offers extensive protections to consumers. The other system serves the poor. “One of the great ironies in American life is that the less money you have, the more you have to pay to use it,” writes Mehrsa Baradaran at the beginning of her new book, "How the Other Half Banks." Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia, is keying in on a deep social inequity: for millions of Americans, the main options for basic banking services are payday lenders and check cashers. These services charge exorbitant rates and fees. In many states, they’re barely regulated. They form an exploitative shadow market to the brick-and-mortar, federally-subsidized-and-guaranteed banks that serve more affluent Americans. Baradaran is unconvinced that the private sector can offer good banking services to low-income Americans. Other than Wal-Mart, few companies are even trying. In "How the Other Half Banks," Baradaran looks for another option — ideally, an institution with a national network of locations already in place and a commitment to public service. If only we had an institution like that! And, of course, we do: the United States Postal Service. The idea isn’t outlandish: a number of countries have postal banks. The United States did, too, from 1911-1967. The Postal Service itself has suggested this idea, in a 2014 white paper, and Bernie Sanders expressed support for postal banking in a recent interview. The Postal Service could offer low-cost checking services, and perhaps even affordable loans. Bank access is a social issue that rarely gets attention in national policy debates. Baradaran is trying to change that. Over the phone, she spoke with Salon about post office lines, bank bailouts and why banking services are a bit like healthcare. If we were to ask Bank of America executives why they don't serve a huge chunk of America, how would they explain it? It’s just not their model. It’s incredibly expensive to service a small deposit. They would say, “Look, it’s not profitable for us, and we would lose money if we went after these deposits.” What about community banks? They have the very same profitability problem as Bank of America. They’ve followed the big banks out of these areas into higher profits, which are big loans, syndicates, huge commercial loans. The deposit area is just not a profitable business anymore, especially small deposits and small loans. Still, it’s possible to open a small account at most banks. What holds so many people back? Fees have a way of repelling small depositors, which I think is mainly the point. You put $100 in a bank, and you have to keep drawing it out, and you get a $35 dollar fee every time it goes below a certain number. So, one, it’s a rational decision, if you have small deposits or volatile deposits. Two, there are substantial cultural barriers. Banks for years have had these marble buildings. That’s a real sort of class barrier — purposely so. A lot of people speak a different language and don’t feel comfortable in the bank. A lot of banks are open 9 to 5, and low-income folks work during those hours, and they need to come in later. Payday lenders, on the other hand, are in their neighborhoods. They’re open all night. They speak their language. They have this informality, [even though] they’re huge, publicly traded, very profitable organizations. Are there designers sitting at Bank of America or Citibank, thinking “How can we push away small depositors?” I don’t think it’s quite that sinister. But when a business does not want a certain customer, they will repel that customer. What does Walmart do when you overdraw on a Wal-Mart account? They just freeze it. They don’t charge you that $35, $45 fee. Now, Bank of America does do that. They could freeze it. But they don’t; they charge the fee. Why? I think it’s used as a repellent for the small accounts, whether they’re going to say it or not. How do payday lenders and check cashers justify their exorbitant fees? One argument that a lot of payday lenders use is that this is the market price. They’re taking a risk by lending to people who are low income, and the way lenders fight that risk is by high interest. But for a market price, you would see a competition on price with these payday lenders. You just don’t see that. Payday lenders will lend to you at the absolute maximum interest rate allowed by law per state. People aren’t shopping around; they’ve exhausted their friends and family, credit cards or whatever. They go to the payday lender as a lender of last resort. They would borrow at almost any price. As for the check cashers, why are they taking 10% off these checks? These are virtually risk-free. A lot of them are Social Security or military checks. The federal government isn’t going to default on their obligation to pay these checks. Now, [check cashers] do have to pay for the storefront, they have to pay for their personnel. It is the cost of doing business, certainly. Can we do it better? Can we do it by not making the poor pay for things that the rich just get for free? This reminds me of the debate over healthcare. Some people argue that healthcare works like a free market, and should be treated as such. The rebuttal is that when you’re dying or in terrible pain, you’re going to pay anything. It’s not like buying a car. We talk about banks being short on cash — illiquid. They have more liabilities than they have assets. The Federal Reserve gives money to banks that are just illiquid. When [these banks] have a cash crunch, they just need to pay out and they’ll make it. People, I think, can be seen the same way. A lot of people are just illiquid. They’ve got a cash crunch. I have to pay $500 to fix my car, and I’m good for it: if I can get my car, I can go back to work, I can make the money. But quickly that illiquidity can turn into bankruptcy. If I don’t get the $500, I have no income. But, if I get that $500, and it costs me $1,500 to pay down that $500 [loan], I’m all of a sudden bankrupt. Banks are the same way. You just have a cash crunch: if you have a bunch of depositors coming in your door, that’s a run. I can either get that money quickly as a loan, pay them out, and be safe — or my bank goes under. We help those banks out. But with people who are financially dying, we say, “Tough. You should have been less stupid and made more money.” Whatever the cultural judgements are that we put on people with debt, we put it out harsher for the poor. In general, we tend to blame the debtor, not the creditor. Well, there definitely is a disdain for the banker and the moneylender, historically and today. We have a hatred of bankers, but we also, paradoxically, have a hatred of debtors. Rick Santelli, the Tea Party, you know: “These are despicable people; we don’t want to help them.” They talk about people borrowing from payday lenders as being stupid or shortsighted. That’s not the case. They’re using it to survive. Certainly, you see rage directed against Goldman Sachs and other large Wall Street firms. It’s more difficult to generate sustained political outrage about payday lenders or check cashers. You’ve got a collective action problem. Whenever the cost is borne by a population that is politically weak — these are politically voiceless people. How do you organize people who are being crushed by the load of life and poverty to really mount a serious effort against the payday lenders? The payday lenders are very organized. There’s a very small group of organizations that have a really strong grasp on political parties and politicians at the state level and the federal level. Access to credit is a necessity for healthy communities. Is there a right to credit, though? I don't think credit is a right, in the way that we think of [the concept]. Access to credit for those who are creditworthy is part of the democratic principles of this country. There shouldn’t be false barriers or political barriers to access to credit. And certainly the state shouldn't favor certain credit institutions and their customers as opposed to others. The federal government builds a foundation for the banks it regulates. You have this huge federal subsidy — and to even call it a subsidy, it’s like calling the wheels on your car a bonus feature. Without the state, these banks do not exist. So you have this federal government foundation on top of which the banking system rests, and then you've got a huge portion of the population that is totally left out of that government largesse. That becomes a selective democracy: when you have so much taxpayer money funding a system that purposefully leaves out those too poor to bank, I think it’s a social, a political problem. It’s not an economic problem any longer. So is Wal-Mart’s bank the solution? It could be. It seems like we're going that way. Look, we're in the world of national banking. Community banking has been dying since the '80s. I wish that it hadn't happened, but that is the world we live in. We are in a national banking era. So we either outsource the needs of the low-income to Wal-Mart, or we bring in a government option or a public option, which I think the Post Office is incredibly well suited for. What makes the Post Office able to bank this way, when others can’t? I think Wal-Mart can do it or the Post Office can do it — those are our choices. You need a large institution; banking has become an economy of scale sort of business. The Post Office could do it, because it’s located everywhere that banks are not located. It’s a community institution, and one of the last relics of the federal government in communities. Once Wal-Mart learns how to turn a profit, we worry about what happens to their customers. Wal-Mart has a tendency to come into communities, underprice everyone, and then jack up prices after everyone else has gone out of business. Whereas the Post Office is still a not-for-profit institution. So let's say I'm making $1,500 dollars each month. I'm breaking even most of the time, but it’s a close call. I decide to start banking with the Post Office. What would that look like? One thing: you don't have to pay ten percent of your check just to cash it, like you would at the check casher. This is my proposal, not something that the Post Office is considering, but how would lending work? You're breaking even, but one month you have an extra expense: your kid gets sick, your car breaks down, you need $500. You can go to a payday lender, and when all is said and done you end up paying 400 percent interest, you've rolled it over several times, and you're in debt. Or you go to the Post Office and get a $500 loan. They can price that at a much cheaper rate — something closer to 10 percent interest. One thing the Post Office can do to protect themselves is to garnish your tax return if necessary. Where payday lenders will hunt you and spend a ton of money collecting that loan, the Post Office can use their position as a government entity to lower their cost of collection. Could the Post Office actually handle this kind of expansion? Would the lines just get even longer? They'll have ATMs, they'll have online banking, right? Any sort of services that banks offer, the Post Office can do. We really are thinking about a modern banking network that's just administered by the Post Office. Now can they handle it? I think so. I mean, if Wal-Mart employees can handle it, postal workers can handle it. They get mail to everyone's door every single day. And yes, there are lines, but they’re doing it: they’re self-sustaining and they’re efficient. It’s funny — I keep thinking of this as the government banking option versus the free market banking option. But it’s not like we have any banking system that’s somehow free of government influence. There are all sorts of ways that our financial services can be improved by market innovations. I think that's all fantastic, right? I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the government-supported banking system. Why is it that the poor, for their financial service and credit needs, have to rely on non-government lenders that end up charging them market or above-market rates? And then we have this hugely government-supported banking industry that doesn't operate in a normal market, that operates with huge taxpayer wealth and federal subsidies, that ends up servicing the rest of us. So this isn’t creeping government socialism? If you think we have a private banking market now, you're wrong. If it were truly a private market industry, you would have had a lot of bank failures in 2008. Banks are special. To say, “Well, this new thing — postal banking or public options — that's socialism,” is a misunderstanding of how banks actually work.The United States has two personal banking systems. One of these systems is carefully regulated. It benefits from substantial government subsidies, and it offers extensive protections to consumers. The other system serves the poor. “One of the great ironies in American life is that the less money you have, the more you have to pay to use it,” writes Mehrsa Baradaran at the beginning of her new book, "How the Other Half Banks." Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia, is keying in on a deep social inequity: for millions of Americans, the main options for basic banking services are payday lenders and check cashers. These services charge exorbitant rates and fees. In many states, they’re barely regulated. They form an exploitative shadow market to the brick-and-mortar, federally-subsidized-and-guaranteed banks that serve more affluent Americans. Baradaran is unconvinced that the private sector can offer good banking services to low-income Americans. Other than Wal-Mart, few companies are even trying. In "How the Other Half Banks," Baradaran looks for another option — ideally, an institution with a national network of locations already in place and a commitment to public service. If only we had an institution like that! And, of course, we do: the United States Postal Service. The idea isn’t outlandish: a number of countries have postal banks. The United States did, too, from 1911-1967. The Postal Service itself has suggested this idea, in a 2014 white paper, and Bernie Sanders expressed support for postal banking in a recent interview. The Postal Service could offer low-cost checking services, and perhaps even affordable loans. Bank access is a social issue that rarely gets attention in national policy debates. Baradaran is trying to change that. Over the phone, she spoke with Salon about post office lines, bank bailouts and why banking services are a bit like healthcare. If we were to ask Bank of America executives why they don't serve a huge chunk of America, how would they explain it? It’s just not their model. It’s incredibly expensive to service a small deposit. They would say, “Look, it’s not profitable for us, and we would lose money if we went after these deposits.” What about community banks? They have the very same profitability problem as Bank of America. They’ve followed the big banks out of these areas into higher profits, which are big loans, syndicates, huge commercial loans. The deposit area is just not a profitable business anymore, especially small deposits and small loans. Still, it’s possible to open a small account at most banks. What holds so many people back? Fees have a way of repelling small depositors, which I think is mainly the point. You put $100 in a bank, and you have to keep drawing it out, and you get a $35 dollar fee every time it goes below a certain number. So, one, it’s a rational decision, if you have small deposits or volatile deposits. Two, there are substantial cultural barriers. Banks for years have had these marble buildings. That’s a real sort of class barrier — purposely so. A lot of people speak a different language and don’t feel comfortable in the bank. A lot of banks are open 9 to 5, and low-income folks work during those hours, and they need to come in later. Payday lenders, on the other hand, are in their neighborhoods. They’re open all night. They speak their language. They have this informality, [even though] they’re huge, publicly traded, very profitable organizations. Are there designers sitting at Bank of America or Citibank, thinking “How can we push away small depositors?” I don’t think it’s quite that sinister. But when a business does not want a certain customer, they will repel that customer. What does Walmart do when you overdraw on a Wal-Mart account? They just freeze it. They don’t charge you that $35, $45 fee. Now, Bank of America does do that. They could freeze it. But they don’t; they charge the fee. Why? I think it’s used as a repellent for the small accounts, whether they’re going to say it or not. How do payday lenders and check cashers justify their exorbitant fees? One argument that a lot of payday lenders use is that this is the market price. They’re taking a risk by lending to people who are low income, and the way lenders fight that risk is by high interest. But for a market price, you would see a competition on price with these payday lenders. You just don’t see that. Payday lenders will lend to you at the absolute maximum interest rate allowed by law per state. People aren’t shopping around; they’ve exhausted their friends and family, credit cards or whatever. They go to the payday lender as a lender of last resort. They would borrow at almost any price. As for the check cashers, why are they taking 10% off these checks? These are virtually risk-free. A lot of them are Social Security or military checks. The federal government isn’t going to default on their obligation to pay these checks. Now, [check cashers] do have to pay for the storefront, they have to pay for their personnel. It is the cost of doing business, certainly. Can we do it better? Can we do it by not making the poor pay for things that the rich just get for free? This reminds me of the debate over healthcare. Some people argue that healthcare works like a free market, and should be treated as such. The rebuttal is that when you’re dying or in terrible pain, you’re going to pay anything. It’s not like buying a car. We talk about banks being short on cash — illiquid. They have more liabilities than they have assets. The Federal Reserve gives money to banks that are just illiquid. When [these banks] have a cash crunch, they just need to pay out and they’ll make it. People, I think, can be seen the same way. A lot of people are just illiquid. They’ve got a cash crunch. I have to pay $500 to fix my car, and I’m good for it: if I can get my car, I can go back to work, I can make the money. But quickly that illiquidity can turn into bankruptcy. If I don’t get the $500, I have no income. But, if I get that $500, and it costs me $1,500 to pay down that $500 [loan], I’m all of a sudden bankrupt. Banks are the same way. You just have a cash crunch: if you have a bunch of depositors coming in your door, that’s a run. I can either get that money quickly as a loan, pay them out, and be safe — or my bank goes under. We help those banks out. But with people who are financially dying, we say, “Tough. You should have been less stupid and made more money.” Whatever the cultural judgements are that we put on people with debt, we put it out harsher for the poor. In general, we tend to blame the debtor, not the creditor. Well, there definitely is a disdain for the banker and the moneylender, historically and today. We have a hatred of bankers, but we also, paradoxically, have a hatred of debtors. Rick Santelli, the Tea Party, you know: “These are despicable people; we don’t want to help them.” They talk about people borrowing from payday lenders as being stupid or shortsighted. That’s not the case. They’re using it to survive. Certainly, you see rage directed against Goldman Sachs and other large Wall Street firms. It’s more difficult to generate sustained political outrage about payday lenders or check cashers. You’ve got a collective action problem. Whenever the cost is borne by a population that is politically weak — these are politically voiceless people. How do you organize people who are being crushed by the load of life and poverty to really mount a serious effort against the payday lenders? The payday lenders are very organized. There’s a very small group of organizations that have a really strong grasp on political parties and politicians at the state level and the federal level. Access to credit is a necessity for healthy communities. Is there a right to credit, though? I don't think credit is a right, in the way that we think of [the concept]. Access to credit for those who are creditworthy is part of the democratic principles of this country. There shouldn’t be false barriers or political barriers to access to credit. And certainly the state shouldn't favor certain credit institutions and their customers as opposed to others. The federal government builds a foundation for the banks it regulates. You have this huge federal subsidy — and to even call it a subsidy, it’s like calling the wheels on your car a bonus feature. Without the state, these banks do not exist. So you have this federal government foundation on top of which the banking system rests, and then you've got a huge portion of the population that is totally left out of that government largesse. That becomes a selective democracy: when you have so much taxpayer money funding a system that purposefully leaves out those too poor to bank, I think it’s a social, a political problem. It’s not an economic problem any longer. So is Wal-Mart’s bank the solution? It could be. It seems like we're going that way. Look, we're in the world of national banking. Community banking has been dying since the '80s. I wish that it hadn't happened, but that is the world we live in. We are in a national banking era. So we either outsource the needs of the low-income to Wal-Mart, or we bring in a government option or a public option, which I think the Post Office is incredibly well suited for. What makes the Post Office able to bank this way, when others can’t? I think Wal-Mart can do it or the Post Office can do it — those are our choices. You need a large institution; banking has become an economy of scale sort of business. The Post Office could do it, because it’s located everywhere that banks are not located. It’s a community institution, and one of the last relics of the federal government in communities. Once Wal-Mart learns how to turn a profit, we worry about what happens to their customers. Wal-Mart has a tendency to come into communities, underprice everyone, and then jack up prices after everyone else has gone out of business. Whereas the Post Office is still a not-for-profit institution. So let's say I'm making $1,500 dollars each month. I'm breaking even most of the time, but it’s a close call. I decide to start banking with the Post Office. What would that look like? One thing: you don't have to pay ten percent of your check just to cash it, like you would at the check casher. This is my proposal, not something that the Post Office is considering, but how would lending work? You're breaking even, but one month you have an extra expense: your kid gets sick, your car breaks down, you need $500. You can go to a payday lender, and when all is said and done you end up paying 400 percent interest, you've rolled it over several times, and you're in debt. Or you go to the Post Office and get a $500 loan. They can price that at a much cheaper rate — something closer to 10 percent interest. One thing the Post Office can do to protect themselves is to garnish your tax return if necessary. Where payday lenders will hunt you and spend a ton of money collecting that loan, the Post Office can use their position as a government entity to lower their cost of collection. Could the Post Office actually handle this kind of expansion? Would the lines just get even longer? They'll have ATMs, they'll have online banking, right? Any sort of services that banks offer, the Post Office can do. We really are thinking about a modern banking network that's just administered by the Post Office. Now can they handle it? I think so. I mean, if Wal-Mart employees can handle it, postal workers can handle it. They get mail to everyone's door every single day. And yes, there are lines, but they’re doing it: they’re self-sustaining and they’re efficient. It’s funny — I keep thinking of this as the government banking option versus the free market banking option. But it’s not like we have any banking system that’s somehow free of government influence. There are all sorts of ways that our financial services can be improved by market innovations. I think that's all fantastic, right? I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the government-supported banking system. Why is it that the poor, for their financial service and credit needs, have to rely on non-government lenders that end up charging them market or above-market rates? And then we have this hugely government-supported banking industry that doesn't operate in a normal market, that operates with huge taxpayer wealth and federal subsidies, that ends up servicing the rest of us. So this isn’t creeping government socialism? If you think we have a private banking market now, you're wrong. If it were truly a private market industry, you would have had a lot of bank failures in 2008. Banks are special. To say, “Well, this new thing — postal banking or public options — that's socialism,” is a misunderstanding of how banks actually work.

Continue Reading...

Speedy Ortiz: “The level of idiocy that is so widespread sometimes gets depressing”

Continue Reading...

Benghazi, Joe McCarthy and the witch trials: Trey Gowdy’s farcical hearings tap into a deep, dark American current

Benghazi is many things to many people, but it’s not about Benghazi. What I mean is that the meme or mantra or ideological touchstone known as “Benghazi” has virtually nothing to do with the Libyan port city of that name, or what happened there in September 2012. (Which – can we just say this? – barely registers in the historical scale of American foreign-policy tragedies, blunders and miscalculations.) For the Republican Party and its agonized cadre of true believers, Benghazi is like Yoko Ono, in the legendary National Lampoon spoof from the early ’70s: a concept by which we measure our pain. The House Select Committee on Benghazi, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, before which Hillary Clinton testified for nearly 11 hours on Thursday, is not really investigating the Benghazi incident, in which Libyan militants overran a United States diplomatic compound and four Americans were killed. Or to put it another way, Gowdy’s committee is seeking the truth about Benghazi in the same sense that Joe McCarthy investigated actual Communist spies in the U.S. government, or that Cotton Mather pursued actual witches in Salem Village. Those things are all connected, at least in the nightmare imagination of the Benghazi-verse: If one of the committee members had had the temerity to denounce Clinton as a Communist and a witch (as well as a traitor and murderess and lesbian and whatever the hell else), the “Republican base” would have risen from its collective sofa and roared in Old Milwaukee-spumed delight. It must have been hard to resist. Nothing quite so revealing occurred, but it was revealing enough. To get back to history, Joe McCarthy genuinely feared the Reds and Cotton Mather feared the Devil; those guys may have been sociopaths, but they were not hypocrites. But like the Benghazi-hunters, both men were really after something else, something larger and more numinous and almost impossible to define. That fatal vagueness and sense of mission-creep was precisely what enabled Clinton to humiliate the Benghazi committee’s leading Republicans so thoroughly and repeatedly. She stuck to the putative subject matter, which largely does not interest them. To Gowdy’s most zealous followers on that committee and among the public, the Benghazi incident is not important in itself, despite the ritual utterances of patriotism and the semi-divine status accorded any American who dies in defense of the empire: Dulce et decorum est, and all that. Benghazi is important because of where the faithful believe it will lead, and what they hope it will prove. Let me hasten to add that Democratic loyalists who cast the Benghazi hearings as a purely partisan exercise aimed at sabotaging Clinton’s presidential campaign only reveal their own limitations. Do not misjudge the scale, ambition and imagination at work in the Benghazi myth! Gowdy forcefully rejected such insinuations at the opening of Thursday’s proceedings, telling Clinton, “Not a single member of this committee signed up to investigate you or your email.” Let’s give the chairman a point, or half a point, for irrelevantly dredging up the email scandal just in case we had forgotten about it, but in a sense he is correct: The true mission of the Benghazi committee goes far beyond a crude effort to destroy Hillary. It is much, much crazier than that. This was precisely what got Rep. Kevin McCarthy pitched into the Dumpster of history by the zealots of his own caucus. Sure, it was a media faux pas for the presumptive House Speaker to suggest that the Benghazi investigation he and John Boehner had authorized might have had a political agenda. Heaven forfend! But it was also, and far more importantly, too cynical a note for McCarthy to strike, at a moment when Republican true believers are fighting (as they see it) to save America’s soul. No, I'm serious. Defeating Clinton and electing a Republican president, while clearly desirable, are collateral benefits the GOP fire-breathers hope will flow from Benghazi fervor. But the driving force behind the Gowdy hearings, and the hard right’s inability to let go of the Benghazi meme in the face of widespread mockery, lies in the profound belief that America, or at least “America,” is isolated, persecuted and under constant attack. Such a belief may be objectively insane, not to mention historically and politically ludicrous, but if you think it does not exist or is not genuine, you simply haven’t paid attention to the last 40 years – or, we might say, to the last 400. Joe McCarthy and Cotton Mather represent earlier manifestations of the same tendency, immortalized by historian Richard Hofstadter as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter’s original essay was published in 1964, largely in response to the apocalyptic anti-Communism of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, which marked the birth of the New Right. Paranoia has come a long way. For all his nutso John Birch leanings, Goldwater hewed to a reasonably coherent set of libertarian principles; set against today’s Republican radicals he looks like Voltaire. In the 21st century, we see the paranoid style honed to near-perfection among a significant cadre of Americans – predominantly male and Southern, and almost entirely white – who are ideologically and geographically exiled from their own society but who see themselves, paradoxically or otherwise, as its spiritual inheritors and most ardent defenders. They perceive themselves surrounded on all sides, at home as around the world, by murderous, treasonous and corrosive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism (and in many cases also by anti-white racism and anti-Christian bigotry). They discern those forces at work in the Democratic Party and the big cities and multiculturalism and Planned Parenthood and “political correctness”; in the spread of mosques and taco trucks and ambiguous gender assignments; in Black Lives Matter and the still-baffling black president with the funny name, in the stagnant or declining real incomes of the last several decades and the fact that the mightiest military superpower in the history of the world has not conclusively won a war since 1945. What Benghazi promised the paranoid faithful, or still promises – we can’t presume that one embarrassing hearing will bring an end to this charade – was a chance to turn the tide, to strip the scales from the eyes of their benighted and deluded fellow countrymen and reveal the scope of the hideous plot to destroy America. For the conspiratorial right-wing hive mind, Benghazi is the gate and the key to the gate, like H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient and indescribable entity Yog-Sothoth. But as with the One-in-All and All-in-One of the Lovecraftian universe, opening that gate leads only to madness and oblivion: What lies beyond is the “amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity,” otherwise known as the legislative agenda of the House Freedom Caucus. It’s important to stress that many “conservatives” (an especially ridiculous term of art in the contemporary American context) still believe they can win in a fair fight, if they can only overcome the mind-control tactics of the feminazis, socialists and Muslim-coddlers in the “liberal media.” For the Republican Party’s Beltway leadership and its financial backers among the plutocrat class, the equation clearly looks different. As I have previously argued, the Koch brothers’ many-stranded assault on democracy represents a sophisticated strategic response to the demographic challenges facing the GOP. As it becomes increasingly difficult for Republicans to win elections -- at least when a representative sample of the public shows up to vote -- the oligarchy’s most efficient path to hegemonic rule lies in paralyzing the political process, depressing or restricting voter turnout and making elections appear meaningless. Or, better still, making them become meaningless. Those tactics have produced the largest Republican congressional majority in more than 70 years, and have shifted the GOP’s ideological center of gravity sharply toward the Puritan right. As we’ve learned over the last few weeks, that is turning out to be a double-edged sword when it comes to the party’s ability to govern and its electoral future. The Tea Partyers and Boehner-scourgers and Benghazi-hunters elected in 2010 and 2014 are largely free of Machiavellian and/or Kochian cynicism and calculation. What they believe may be difficult to describe and impossible to achieve, but they believe it. They are men of principle (with a woman or two thrown in for effect), who were sent to Washington by “real Americans” to save the country from itself, by destroying it if necessary. To the ideologues of the Freedom Caucus and their public cohort, it is axiomatic that Benghazi, if properly understood, will reveal the perverted depths of the left-wing conspiracy to enfeeble America still further and enslave us to Sharia law and soccer and gender-neutral bathrooms. If polls suggest that a large majority of the public does not want Congress to shut down the government or slash “discretionary spending” to zero or cut taxes for billionaires even further or spend millions on a pointless investigation of a murky but minor three-year-old tragedy – well, those polls reflect the dire effects of leftist media brainwashing and Communist witchcraft. The exaggerated and enduring power of the paranoid right in American politics stems from a quality that is otherwise rare, and has been virtually extinct in the Democratic Party since 1972: They know they’re right and they know they will win, and all evidence to the contrary is simply ignored. Cotton Mather never repented of his crusade to drive Satan out of Massachusetts, and Joe McCarthy felt sure that history would vindicate his purge of imaginary Reds, even as he drank himself to death at age 48. (His ideological heirs have done their best: Consider McCarthy’s Wikipedia entry, which amounts to an extensive whitewashing of his legacy.) The paranoid style admits no doubt or ambiguity, let alone the possibility that the diabolical forces it perceives are nothing more than its own fears projected onto the world. Considered on its own dubious merits, Benghazi may look like a feeble parody of those more famous campaigns of persecution, one that is more likely to help Hillary Clinton and hurt the Republicans than the other way around. But even if the Gowdy hearings collapse and the issue fades away (which is no sure thing), “Benghazi” will always be with us. It marks the resurgence of a toxic and dangerous current that has flowed beneath American politics and culture since the first Europeans arrived on this continent, and finds itself newly empowered and militant. That current yearns for a final victory that reaches far beyond such petty matters as politics and elections, all the way to Salvation. Failing that, it will take the Day of Judgment.Benghazi is many things to many people, but it’s not about Benghazi. What I mean is that the meme or mantra or ideological touchstone known as “Benghazi” has virtually nothing to do with the Libyan port city of that name, or what happened there in September 2012. (Which – can we just say this? – barely registers in the historical scale of American foreign-policy tragedies, blunders and miscalculations.) For the Republican Party and its agonized cadre of true believers, Benghazi is like Yoko Ono, in the legendary National Lampoon spoof from the early ’70s: a concept by which we measure our pain. The House Select Committee on Benghazi, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, before which Hillary Clinton testified for nearly 11 hours on Thursday, is not really investigating the Benghazi incident, in which Libyan militants overran a United States diplomatic compound and four Americans were killed. Or to put it another way, Gowdy’s committee is seeking the truth about Benghazi in the same sense that Joe McCarthy investigated actual Communist spies in the U.S. government, or that Cotton Mather pursued actual witches in Salem Village. Those things are all connected, at least in the nightmare imagination of the Benghazi-verse: If one of the committee members had had the temerity to denounce Clinton as a Communist and a witch (as well as a traitor and murderess and lesbian and whatever the hell else), the “Republican base” would have risen from its collective sofa and roared in Old Milwaukee-spumed delight. It must have been hard to resist. Nothing quite so revealing occurred, but it was revealing enough. To get back to history, Joe McCarthy genuinely feared the Reds and Cotton Mather feared the Devil; those guys may have been sociopaths, but they were not hypocrites. But like the Benghazi-hunters, both men were really after something else, something larger and more numinous and almost impossible to define. That fatal vagueness and sense of mission-creep was precisely what enabled Clinton to humiliate the Benghazi committee’s leading Republicans so thoroughly and repeatedly. She stuck to the putative subject matter, which largely does not interest them. To Gowdy’s most zealous followers on that committee and among the public, the Benghazi incident is not important in itself, despite the ritual utterances of patriotism and the semi-divine status accorded any American who dies in defense of the empire: Dulce et decorum est, and all that. Benghazi is important because of where the faithful believe it will lead, and what they hope it will prove. Let me hasten to add that Democratic loyalists who cast the Benghazi hearings as a purely partisan exercise aimed at sabotaging Clinton’s presidential campaign only reveal their own limitations. Do not misjudge the scale, ambition and imagination at work in the Benghazi myth! Gowdy forcefully rejected such insinuations at the opening of Thursday’s proceedings, telling Clinton, “Not a single member of this committee signed up to investigate you or your email.” Let’s give the chairman a point, or half a point, for irrelevantly dredging up the email scandal just in case we had forgotten about it, but in a sense he is correct: The true mission of the Benghazi committee goes far beyond a crude effort to destroy Hillary. It is much, much crazier than that. This was precisely what got Rep. Kevin McCarthy pitched into the Dumpster of history by the zealots of his own caucus. Sure, it was a media faux pas for the presumptive House Speaker to suggest that the Benghazi investigation he and John Boehner had authorized might have had a political agenda. Heaven forfend! But it was also, and far more importantly, too cynical a note for McCarthy to strike, at a moment when Republican true believers are fighting (as they see it) to save America’s soul. No, I'm serious. Defeating Clinton and electing a Republican president, while clearly desirable, are collateral benefits the GOP fire-breathers hope will flow from Benghazi fervor. But the driving force behind the Gowdy hearings, and the hard right’s inability to let go of the Benghazi meme in the face of widespread mockery, lies in the profound belief that America, or at least “America,” is isolated, persecuted and under constant attack. Such a belief may be objectively insane, not to mention historically and politically ludicrous, but if you think it does not exist or is not genuine, you simply haven’t paid attention to the last 40 years – or, we might say, to the last 400. Joe McCarthy and Cotton Mather represent earlier manifestations of the same tendency, immortalized by historian Richard Hofstadter as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter’s original essay was published in 1964, largely in response to the apocalyptic anti-Communism of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, which marked the birth of the New Right. Paranoia has come a long way. For all his nutso John Birch leanings, Goldwater hewed to a reasonably coherent set of libertarian principles; set against today’s Republican radicals he looks like Voltaire. In the 21st century, we see the paranoid style honed to near-perfection among a significant cadre of Americans – predominantly male and Southern, and almost entirely white – who are ideologically and geographically exiled from their own society but who see themselves, paradoxically or otherwise, as its spiritual inheritors and most ardent defenders. They perceive themselves surrounded on all sides, at home as around the world, by murderous, treasonous and corrosive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism (and in many cases also by anti-white racism and anti-Christian bigotry). They discern those forces at work in the Democratic Party and the big cities and multiculturalism and Planned Parenthood and “political correctness”; in the spread of mosques and taco trucks and ambiguous gender assignments; in Black Lives Matter and the still-baffling black president with the funny name, in the stagnant or declining real incomes of the last several decades and the fact that the mightiest military superpower in the history of the world has not conclusively won a war since 1945. What Benghazi promised the paranoid faithful, or still promises – we can’t presume that one embarrassing hearing will bring an end to this charade – was a chance to turn the tide, to strip the scales from the eyes of their benighted and deluded fellow countrymen and reveal the scope of the hideous plot to destroy America. For the conspiratorial right-wing hive mind, Benghazi is the gate and the key to the gate, like H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient and indescribable entity Yog-Sothoth. But as with the One-in-All and All-in-One of the Lovecraftian universe, opening that gate leads only to madness and oblivion: What lies beyond is the “amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity,” otherwise known as the legislative agenda of the House Freedom Caucus. It’s important to stress that many “conservatives” (an especially ridiculous term of art in the contemporary American context) still believe they can win in a fair fight, if they can only overcome the mind-control tactics of the feminazis, socialists and Muslim-coddlers in the “liberal media.” For the Republican Party’s Beltway leadership and its financial backers among the plutocrat class, the equation clearly looks different. As I have previously argued, the Koch brothers’ many-stranded assault on democracy represents a sophisticated strategic response to the demographic challenges facing the GOP. As it becomes increasingly difficult for Republicans to win elections -- at least when a representative sample of the public shows up to vote -- the oligarchy’s most efficient path to hegemonic rule lies in paralyzing the political process, depressing or restricting voter turnout and making elections appear meaningless. Or, better still, making them become meaningless. Those tactics have produced the largest Republican congressional majority in more than 70 years, and have shifted the GOP’s ideological center of gravity sharply toward the Puritan right. As we’ve learned over the last few weeks, that is turning out to be a double-edged sword when it comes to the party’s ability to govern and its electoral future. The Tea Partyers and Boehner-scourgers and Benghazi-hunters elected in 2010 and 2014 are largely free of Machiavellian and/or Kochian cynicism and calculation. What they believe may be difficult to describe and impossible to achieve, but they believe it. They are men of principle (with a woman or two thrown in for effect), who were sent to Washington by “real Americans” to save the country from itself, by destroying it if necessary. To the ideologues of the Freedom Caucus and their public cohort, it is axiomatic that Benghazi, if properly understood, will reveal the perverted depths of the left-wing conspiracy to enfeeble America still further and enslave us to Sharia law and soccer and gender-neutral bathrooms. If polls suggest that a large majority of the public does not want Congress to shut down the government or slash “discretionary spending” to zero or cut taxes for billionaires even further or spend millions on a pointless investigation of a murky but minor three-year-old tragedy – well, those polls reflect the dire effects of leftist media brainwashing and Communist witchcraft. The exaggerated and enduring power of the paranoid right in American politics stems from a quality that is otherwise rare, and has been virtually extinct in the Democratic Party since 1972: They know they’re right and they know they will win, and all evidence to the contrary is simply ignored. Cotton Mather never repented of his crusade to drive Satan out of Massachusetts, and Joe McCarthy felt sure that history would vindicate his purge of imaginary Reds, even as he drank himself to death at age 48. (His ideological heirs have done their best: Consider McCarthy’s Wikipedia entry, which amounts to an extensive whitewashing of his legacy.) The paranoid style admits no doubt or ambiguity, let alone the possibility that the diabolical forces it perceives are nothing more than its own fears projected onto the world. Considered on its own dubious merits, Benghazi may look like a feeble parody of those more famous campaigns of persecution, one that is more likely to help Hillary Clinton and hurt the Republicans than the other way around. But even if the Gowdy hearings collapse and the issue fades away (which is no sure thing), “Benghazi” will always be with us. It marks the resurgence of a toxic and dangerous current that has flowed beneath American politics and culture since the first Europeans arrived on this continent, and finds itself newly empowered and militant. That current yearns for a final victory that reaches far beyond such petty matters as politics and elections, all the way to Salvation. Failing that, it will take the Day of Judgment.

Continue Reading...

The climate change fix we need: We’ll never solve the problem until we do this

Democracy has not been doing well. For this reason, now is an awkward time to argue that it must be the fulcrum of the Anthropocene. In the United States and Europe, democracies have rushed into foolish wars and stumbled in the face of economic crises—or created those crises. At the time of writing, the North Atlantic democracies are splitting into elite technocrats, who wish they could govern without consulting the masses, and angry populists, who would like to liquidate the technocrats. Nondemocratic governments openly disdain democratic pieties. Official Chinese voices even suggest that American failures prove the future does not belong to democracies. Democratic failures are often failures to impose self-restraint, and self-restraint is exactly what environmental politics needs. In the past fifteen years, democracies have failed to pay their burgeoning debts and have started wars that turned out to have little credible rationale and no decent ending. Climate change looks like another unsustainable deficit that is going to keep growing, a burden on future generations to pay for today’s convenience. The preferred responses to climate change, too, have an aspect of militarized fantasy: satellite mirrors to deflect solar energy from the earth, and other sci-fi technologies. These climate failures are part of a broader environmental failure. Although there have been important successes, notably anti-pollution laws, resource use and environmental impact continue to accelerate in the world’s richest democracies, and all the more in fast-growing poorer countries. Water shortage, soil health, toxicity, and loss of biodiversity are all looming sources of future crises. In recent decades, too, a basic change in the terms of government has narrowed the scope of democratic rule. Independent central banks, supra-national organizations like the World Trade Organization and the European Union, and constitutional limitations on taxation and spending have all taken economic governance out of the hands of popular majorities and placed it with technocrats and judges. The ideas behind these moves are twofold: first, that democracies are not to be trusted with their own most basic affairs, and, second, that there is one right way to organize economic life, which experts know and administer and everyone else must accept. These ideas coincide with a broader exhaustion in the rich modern tradition of political economy. In the last Gilded Age and in earlier economic crises, many alternative visions of economic life competed for popular attention: some of these influenced antitrust law, labor legislation, unionization, and the New Deal. In the past decade, economic crises and suffering, even widespread discontent with the way our market capitalism is working, have inspired mainly austerity in Europe and gridlock in the United States. Democratic citizens’ capacity to rework their own common lives has been hollowed out in overt and explicit ways, and eroded by a decline in political imagination. At the same time, the power of organized money in politics has only increased. It is a common—and fair— complaint that the U.S. government is distorted through and through by the political power of wealth. In environmental matters, the problem is even worse. Wealth is produced and sustained by an economy that effectively subsidizes fossil fuels (by treating greenhouse-gas emissions as costless) and industrial agriculture (through explicit subsidies to big producers and regulatory tolerance of massive feedlots and slaughter houses), along with every individual decision to buy from those industries. It’s as if the Constitution gave three votes to everyone who wants to keep things as they are, and only one vote to those who seek to change them. Real environmental reform is a matter of political economy. That is, it requires engaging the foundations of economic life: what kind of wealth an economy produces, how it distributes that wealth, what kind of freedom and equality it promotes, and what provision it makes for the future. These are political questions whose answers must be worked out through economic institutions. But the politics of modern democracies has become less able to engage such questions, even as the questions have become harder and more urgent. This is the crux of the difficulty. The problem is not entirely new. In the 1970s, some environmentalists took democratic failures as reason to hope that nondemocratic governments would save the natural world. Such arguments were motivated by the hope that state socialism could avoid capitalism’s demands for economic growth. The environmental record of the Soviet bloc established that, on the contrary, the pressure for economic growth was just as powerful there as in the West. Worse, those nondemocratic systems gave ordinary people no way to resist environmental destruction: while environmental politics was emerging in its modern form in the West, the heavy industry of the Eastern bloc created some of the worst disasters of the century, from the Chernobyl reactor meltdown to the death of the Aral Sea. Nonetheless, today there are resurgent fantasies of green authoritarianism, this time hung on China, with its state-led investment in solar cells. Where older hopes for an authoritarian savior expressed discontent with capitalism, today’s attraction to China is rooted in weariness of sclerotic democracy. China’s overall environmental record, though, is hardly better than the Soviet Union’s was, and its economic growth has massively increased the human impact on the planet. The lesson of the past fifty years is that humanity itself is the challenge. No political system has succeeded by contradicting the demand for more: more energy, more calories, more technology, and so more pressure on natural resources of all kinds. It is not surprising, then, that many people hope technology will save the world. The greatest optimism rests on clean and renewable energy sources, carbon-eating organisms, and other fixes that could reduce human pressure on natural systems as thoroughly as steam power and internal combustion lightened the economy’s demands on human muscles. Those technologies freed people from exhausting labor and early deaths. Mightn’t the next wave of technology free the planet from some of the more crushing human demands? A weaker form of optimism looks to technology as the key to managing a continuing crisis: geo-engineering will not free the planet, but it may make a carbon-dense atmosphere more livable by reducing its effect on temperature and climate. Maybe technological optimism will prove apt. Any environmentally responsible future would become much more likely if technology lessened the conflict between human flourishing and ecological health. There are, however, two reasons to doubt that technology alone could do the job. First, the environmental impact of innovation has always been a double-edged sword. With one edge, new technologies have made resource use much more efficient; for instance, the so-called carbon density of advanced economies, their carbon production per unit of economic activity, is much lower than in developing countries. This is a benefit of efficient energy production and use. The other edge of the sword, though, is a vast increase in overall resource use. As China has developed, for instance, its carbon density has dropped, but its overall carbon emissions have exploded, so that it in 2007 it surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter. This example captures the general pattern: as human powers increase, each individual puts more pressure on the natural world. The second limit on technology’s power to stem environmental crisis is that no technology can tell its users how to use it, or how to shape the earth with it. But those questions will need answers. Whatever innovation brings, people will continue to shape the earth by inhabiting it, changing everything from its atmospheric cycles to its soils and habitats. It is much too late to imagine that any technology could enable humanity to “stop disturbing” the earth. Instead, every technology will become part of the joint human-natural system in which we make and remake the world just by living here. Technology, then, brings efficiency, but it brings neither restraint nor purpose. People need both in engaging the planet. Understandably, then, many look for environmental hope in culture and consciousness. These, after all, are where individuals, families, and communities find both restraint and purpose. At some point, many meditations on environmental questions conclude that consciousness must change, or nothing will change. People must learn to make more modest choices, find satisfactions that exact a smaller toll on the natural world. After all, technology and democratic politics channel the values and priorities of individuals, families, and communities. In some way, these are always the local roots of a national failure of self-restraint and purpose. The emphasis on culture and consciousness, then, cannot be wrong. But is it helpful? History suggests that changes in consciousness are a necessary precondition for big and material changes in the human relation to the natural world, but also that they are not enough. By themselves, changes in personal values make differences on the margins of, say, buying decisions, or even choices of career, but they do little to change the larger systems that organize the relationship between humans and nature. Say that 60 percent of Americans come to value sustainably raised food and low-energy commutes enough to spend money on them. As most U.S. readers will realize on the basis of experience, the effect of this change will be to make sustainable food and urban housing into luxuries, inducing more production of these things, but also pushing the less wealthy into exurbs and utilitarian supermarkets. Some environmentally beneficial changes can follow from shifts in consciousness alone, but the biggest material changes happen through changes in the legal and economic infrastructure that guide human energies and activity. So long as the economy treats greenhouse-gas emissions and soil exhaustion as free and the legal system permits the mass feeding operations and slaughter houses of industrial agriculture, a good deal of changed consciousness will mean no more than shuffling furniture between the first-class and second-class cabins of the Titanic. Excerpted from "After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene" by Jedediah Purdy. Published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 2015 by Jedediah Purdy. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.Democracy has not been doing well. For this reason, now is an awkward time to argue that it must be the fulcrum of the Anthropocene. In the United States and Europe, democracies have rushed into foolish wars and stumbled in the face of economic crises—or created those crises. At the time of writing, the North Atlantic democracies are splitting into elite technocrats, who wish they could govern without consulting the masses, and angry populists, who would like to liquidate the technocrats. Nondemocratic governments openly disdain democratic pieties. Official Chinese voices even suggest that American failures prove the future does not belong to democracies. Democratic failures are often failures to impose self-restraint, and self-restraint is exactly what environmental politics needs. In the past fifteen years, democracies have failed to pay their burgeoning debts and have started wars that turned out to have little credible rationale and no decent ending. Climate change looks like another unsustainable deficit that is going to keep growing, a burden on future generations to pay for today’s convenience. The preferred responses to climate change, too, have an aspect of militarized fantasy: satellite mirrors to deflect solar energy from the earth, and other sci-fi technologies. These climate failures are part of a broader environmental failure. Although there have been important successes, notably anti-pollution laws, resource use and environmental impact continue to accelerate in the world’s richest democracies, and all the more in fast-growing poorer countries. Water shortage, soil health, toxicity, and loss of biodiversity are all looming sources of future crises. In recent decades, too, a basic change in the terms of government has narrowed the scope of democratic rule. Independent central banks, supra-national organizations like the World Trade Organization and the European Union, and constitutional limitations on taxation and spending have all taken economic governance out of the hands of popular majorities and placed it with technocrats and judges. The ideas behind these moves are twofold: first, that democracies are not to be trusted with their own most basic affairs, and, second, that there is one right way to organize economic life, which experts know and administer and everyone else must accept. These ideas coincide with a broader exhaustion in the rich modern tradition of political economy. In the last Gilded Age and in earlier economic crises, many alternative visions of economic life competed for popular attention: some of these influenced antitrust law, labor legislation, unionization, and the New Deal. In the past decade, economic crises and suffering, even widespread discontent with the way our market capitalism is working, have inspired mainly austerity in Europe and gridlock in the United States. Democratic citizens’ capacity to rework their own common lives has been hollowed out in overt and explicit ways, and eroded by a decline in political imagination. At the same time, the power of organized money in politics has only increased. It is a common—and fair— complaint that the U.S. government is distorted through and through by the political power of wealth. In environmental matters, the problem is even worse. Wealth is produced and sustained by an economy that effectively subsidizes fossil fuels (by treating greenhouse-gas emissions as costless) and industrial agriculture (through explicit subsidies to big producers and regulatory tolerance of massive feedlots and slaughter houses), along with every individual decision to buy from those industries. It’s as if the Constitution gave three votes to everyone who wants to keep things as they are, and only one vote to those who seek to change them. Real environmental reform is a matter of political economy. That is, it requires engaging the foundations of economic life: what kind of wealth an economy produces, how it distributes that wealth, what kind of freedom and equality it promotes, and what provision it makes for the future. These are political questions whose answers must be worked out through economic institutions. But the politics of modern democracies has become less able to engage such questions, even as the questions have become harder and more urgent. This is the crux of the difficulty. The problem is not entirely new. In the 1970s, some environmentalists took democratic failures as reason to hope that nondemocratic governments would save the natural world. Such arguments were motivated by the hope that state socialism could avoid capitalism’s demands for economic growth. The environmental record of the Soviet bloc established that, on the contrary, the pressure for economic growth was just as powerful there as in the West. Worse, those nondemocratic systems gave ordinary people no way to resist environmental destruction: while environmental politics was emerging in its modern form in the West, the heavy industry of the Eastern bloc created some of the worst disasters of the century, from the Chernobyl reactor meltdown to the death of the Aral Sea. Nonetheless, today there are resurgent fantasies of green authoritarianism, this time hung on China, with its state-led investment in solar cells. Where older hopes for an authoritarian savior expressed discontent with capitalism, today’s attraction to China is rooted in weariness of sclerotic democracy. China’s overall environmental record, though, is hardly better than the Soviet Union’s was, and its economic growth has massively increased the human impact on the planet. The lesson of the past fifty years is that humanity itself is the challenge. No political system has succeeded by contradicting the demand for more: more energy, more calories, more technology, and so more pressure on natural resources of all kinds. It is not surprising, then, that many people hope technology will save the world. The greatest optimism rests on clean and renewable energy sources, carbon-eating organisms, and other fixes that could reduce human pressure on natural systems as thoroughly as steam power and internal combustion lightened the economy’s demands on human muscles. Those technologies freed people from exhausting labor and early deaths. Mightn’t the next wave of technology free the planet from some of the more crushing human demands? A weaker form of optimism looks to technology as the key to managing a continuing crisis: geo-engineering will not free the planet, but it may make a carbon-dense atmosphere more livable by reducing its effect on temperature and climate. Maybe technological optimism will prove apt. Any environmentally responsible future would become much more likely if technology lessened the conflict between human flourishing and ecological health. There are, however, two reasons to doubt that technology alone could do the job. First, the environmental impact of innovation has always been a double-edged sword. With one edge, new technologies have made resource use much more efficient; for instance, the so-called carbon density of advanced economies, their carbon production per unit of economic activity, is much lower than in developing countries. This is a benefit of efficient energy production and use. The other edge of the sword, though, is a vast increase in overall resource use. As China has developed, for instance, its carbon density has dropped, but its overall carbon emissions have exploded, so that it in 2007 it surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter. This example captures the general pattern: as human powers increase, each individual puts more pressure on the natural world. The second limit on technology’s power to stem environmental crisis is that no technology can tell its users how to use it, or how to shape the earth with it. But those questions will need answers. Whatever innovation brings, people will continue to shape the earth by inhabiting it, changing everything from its atmospheric cycles to its soils and habitats. It is much too late to imagine that any technology could enable humanity to “stop disturbing” the earth. Instead, every technology will become part of the joint human-natural system in which we make and remake the world just by living here. Technology, then, brings efficiency, but it brings neither restraint nor purpose. People need both in engaging the planet. Understandably, then, many look for environmental hope in culture and consciousness. These, after all, are where individuals, families, and communities find both restraint and purpose. At some point, many meditations on environmental questions conclude that consciousness must change, or nothing will change. People must learn to make more modest choices, find satisfactions that exact a smaller toll on the natural world. After all, technology and democratic politics channel the values and priorities of individuals, families, and communities. In some way, these are always the local roots of a national failure of self-restraint and purpose. The emphasis on culture and consciousness, then, cannot be wrong. But is it helpful? History suggests that changes in consciousness are a necessary precondition for big and material changes in the human relation to the natural world, but also that they are not enough. By themselves, changes in personal values make differences on the margins of, say, buying decisions, or even choices of career, but they do little to change the larger systems that organize the relationship between humans and nature. Say that 60 percent of Americans come to value sustainably raised food and low-energy commutes enough to spend money on them. As most U.S. readers will realize on the basis of experience, the effect of this change will be to make sustainable food and urban housing into luxuries, inducing more production of these things, but also pushing the less wealthy into exurbs and utilitarian supermarkets. Some environmentally beneficial changes can follow from shifts in consciousness alone, but the biggest material changes happen through changes in the legal and economic infrastructure that guide human energies and activity. So long as the economy treats greenhouse-gas emissions and soil exhaustion as free and the legal system permits the mass feeding operations and slaughter houses of industrial agriculture, a good deal of changed consciousness will mean no more than shuffling furniture between the first-class and second-class cabins of the Titanic. Excerpted from "After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene" by Jedediah Purdy. Published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 2015 by Jedediah Purdy. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Continue Reading...

Thrown under the train: How the railroad industry systematically targets its whistleblowers

As both a veteran railroad worker and union official responsible for safety, Mike Elliott became alarmed when he learned of trouble-plagued train signals in his home state of Washington. Signals, he said, at times would inexplicably switch from red to yellow to green – potentially creating confusion that could lead to a crash. Elliott raised that and other signal issues repeatedly with his managers at BNSF Railway Co. But eventually, Elliott concluded that “these guys are running me around in circles.” So Elliott, 57, of Tacoma, Wash., pressed his concerns with the Federal Railroad Administration, summarizing the matter in a January 2011 letter. The FRA investigated, and discovered 357 safety violations, including 112 signal system defects. Speaking up for safety, though, only made matters worse for Elliott at BNSF, where he already had clashed with managers. Within weeks the company fired Elliott from his job as a locomotive engineer – an act that a federal jury this summer ruled was illegal retaliation by BNSF against a whistleblower. The June 30 decision by the Tacoma jury, which awarded Elliott $1.25 million but is being appealed, spotlights the unjust punishment that critics say sometimes is meted out to railroad workers who report injuries or safety problems. These critics, including plaintiff lawyers and union officials, along with others who have examined railroad practices, say the harsh treatment reflects old, hard-line management tactics that persist in corners of the industry. Under the 22 federal whistleblower laws administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, American workers who disclose hazards or engage in other “protected activity” are shielded against retaliation by their employers. The protected activities vary by industry, but include reporting injuries, disclosing the misuse of public funds and refusing to perform dangerous tasks that would violate safety rules. OSHA protection covers, among many others, truck drivers, public transit employees, nuclear plant operators and, since 2007, railroad workers. Yet despite the broad safeguards for railroaders – or perhaps partly because of them – complaints of illegal retaliation abound in the industry. From October 2007 through June 2015, OSHA figures show, railroad workers filed more than 2,000 retaliation complaints, although the pace has slowed lately. Among the top 10 targets of complaints over the nearly eight-year period, seven were railroads, led by the two largest U.S. railroads, BNSF (409 complaints) and Union Pacific (360). OSHA investigators and Labor Department administrative law judges repeatedly have upheld complaints against the railroads, more than half of which involve illegal retaliation against workers who report personal injuries. In one such case an administrative law judge in 2013 ruled against Union Pacific, declaring: “The actions by Union Pacific have been so egregious in this case, and Union Pacific has been so openly blatant in ignoring the provisions of [federal law], that I find punitive damages are necessary to ensure that this reprehensible conduct is not repeated.” In January of that year, BNSF, without admitting wrongdoing, signed an unprecedented accord with OSHA after the federal agency alleged that several of the company’s policies discriminated against injured employees. Among other things, the accord eliminated giving demerit points to workers who report injuries. At the time, OSHA’s chief, David Michaels, said in a statement that the accord “sets the tone for other railroad employers throughout the U.S. to take steps to ensure that their workers are not harassed, intimidated or terminated, in whole or part, for reporting workplace injuries.” Safety “a top priority” Officials of the Association of American Railroads, the leading industry group, declined to be interviewed for this story. Instead, the AAR issued a brief statement saying, “The safety of employees and communities along the nation’s 140,000-mile rail network remains a top priority for the entire industry and is taken very seriously.” Union Pacific also refused interview requests. So did BNSF, which was created by the 1995 merger of Burlington Northern Inc. and Santa Fe Pacific Corp., and is now a unit of investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. However, in a prepared statement after the jury decision in the Elliott case, BNSF said it “is proud of its safety culture and retaliation against safety complaints is contrary to how we operate and the training our people receive.” The company added that Elliott “was dismissed for unrelated rules violations.” (On Oct. 1, the federal judge who heard Elliott’s case, Ronald B. Leighton, a Republican appointed by George W. Bush, rejected BNSF’s motion for a new trial. He ruled that the disciplinary proceedings against the former employee were “seriously flawed” and that BNSF executives “displayed personal animosity against Mr. Elliott.”) The alleged violations defy a key intent of federal whistleblower laws: to encourage employees who discover possible hazards to come forward before an accident happens. The potential value of such an early warning system is underscored by the deadly passenger rail accidents and oil train wrecks in recent years. Joseph C. Szabo, who headed the FRA from 2009 until this January, said industry supervisors often are under “immense pressure” to curb costs by moving trains quickly out of rail yards. That, in turn, translates into pressure on rank-and-file workers “to ignore safety protocols and to just get the damn train out of town.” That’s why, Szabo said, it’s “critically important” that railroad workers are “very comfortable in doing the right thing without any fear of retribution.” Award is canceled Likewise, safety advocates say, the ability of workers to report injuries without jeopardizing their livelihoods is crucial in a field with many hazardous jobs. Railroads have relatively high rates of on-the-job fatalities – although the toll has fallen dramatically over the last three decades. What’s more, injury totals may be substantially higher than reported. In 2012, amid widespread suspicion that railroads were undercounting injuries, in part by pressuring workers not to report them, the industry dropped its 99-year-old annual Harriman safety award, which was largely based on employee injury reports. Norfolk Southern, which had won Harriman safety “gold award” 23 years in a row before the honor was scrapped, was the target of 247 whistleblower complaints during the nearly eight-year period tracked. That was the fifth-highest total among all U.S. employers. Railroad whistleblowers under federal law must first file complaints with OSHA; they can pursue their cases through conclusion with the agency or, if their issues haven’t been resolved, after 120 days they can opt out and take their cases to court. In fact, both OSHA and federal juries over the past year have issued a string of big decisions against railroads in cases brought by whistleblowers, although the companies have appealed many of the rulings. Those whistleblowers include: –Mike Koziara, 55, who in March won an award of $425,725 after a federal jury found that BNSF illegally fired him for reporting an on-the-job injury. In September 2010, Koziara, a 32-year veteran of the company, was a section foreman, a job that put him in charge of track maintenance for a 40-mile stretch of rail along the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. The day he was hurt, Koziara was leading a group of employees tasked with removing large, wooden planks from a road crossing in East Winona, Wis., when he was struck in the left ankle by a 1,200-pound plank. “It hurt,” Koziara said, but he didn’t think it was serious. Three days later, after the 72-hour period allowed for reporting injuries was over, he went to see his doctor for a physical. There, she took one look at his leg and sent him for an X-ray. The results showed Koziara had a cracked tibia, or shinbone. “I just don’t get the railroads” He reported the injury to BNSF the next day. A few days later, the company charged him with failing to be “alert and attentive.” As punishment, he was given a 30-day suspension and a one-year probation. But it didn’t stop there. While the railroad investigated Koziara’s injury, it learned that he recently had given about 20 used rail ties to a local farmer. Koziara maintains he had gotten permission to take some ties – and that it otherwise would have cost the railroad money to dispose of used ties – but BNSF charged him with theft. He was fired on Nov. 9, exactly two months after he was injured. “I don’t know why they’re so hard on their employees,” Osaid Koziara, who is now retired. “They’ll get more out of us if they were just better to us. I just don’t get the railroads at all.” –Steven Annucci, a coach cleaner for Metro-North Commuter Railroad. Last December OSHA found that he should receive $250,000 in punitive damages, the maximum permitted in a railroad retaliation case. Annucci hurt his knee in November 2011, when he tripped on a wooden board sticking up about six inches above a paved walkway in a train yard in Stamford, Conn. General Foreman Prena Beliveau drove Annucci to the hospital. On the way there, Annucci secretly recorded their conversation. According to OSHA, Beliveau told Annucci that if you have an injury on your record at Metro-North you’re not going to move up — you’re going to be a car cleaner for the rest of your career. Beliveau also said everybody at Metro-North who gets hurt is written up for safety. Animus is clear Annucci reported the injury anyway. A couple weeks later, Metro-North formally reprimanded him for safety violations, although he kept his job. A year later Annucci was charged with failing to properly clean vomit from a train car, and was reprimanded again. In its December ruling, OSHA found that “animus is clear in this case” and ordered Metro-North to pay Annucci attorney’s fees and $10,000 in compensatory damages, along with the punitive damages. –Union Pacific apprentice machinist Brian Petersen, 31, who was fired after a co-worker drove over his feet in the parking lot of a train yard in North Platte, Neb.. In a pair of rulings last November and February, the railroad was ordered to pay Petersen more than $400,000 in back pay, attorney fees and damages. In the spring, the two sides reached a confidential settlement. The case stemmed from a 2009 accident. Petersen claimed he was leaning against his car, checking his cell phone for messages, when a colleague roared into the space next to him. Union Pacific concluded that Petersen was inattentive and careless, then fired him a few days later when he was seen standing on some motors to write down their serial numbers when he should have been using a ladder. The administrative law judge who considered the case in 2013 – the one who condemned Union Pacific for “egregious” actions – said the rules the company charged Petersen with breaking “are written in such a manner that anyone who is injured and reports it will have violated at least a part of one or more of them.” Experts often trace railroad managers’ behavior to the way the industry emerged in the mid-19th century. Back then, many railroad officials came from the officer ranks of the Civil War armies. “It was traditionally an industry in which the boss is the absolute boss … all the way up the hierarchy. You don’t question the boss’ authority,” said historian Maury Klein, the author of a half-dozen books on railroads. Paramilitary structure Szabo, the former FRA chief, said railroads have embraced more enlightened practices over the past decade or so, but management still has elements of “a paramilitary structure, very much command and control.” To this day, railroads remain discipline-minded. Operating and safety manuals run hundreds of pages. Suspected violators, including workers who get hurt, face internal investigations. Critics still echo Congressional investigators who in 2007 found that railroad companies, along with federal regulators, are “more oriented toward assigning blame to a single individual, without a thorough examination of the underlying causes that led that single individual to commit an error.” In part, the hard-nosed culture reflects an effort to cope with the inherent dangers of rail transportation. “Small screw-ups can sometimes lead to somebody getting killed,” said Mark Aldrich, author of the 2006 book, “Death Rode the Rails.” Safety has improved substantially in recent decades, Aldrich and other experts say, but the pressure on middle-managers to move as quickly as possible while also holding injuries to a minimum still creates incentives to ignore or conceal mishaps. “I don’t think this is a problem that’s going to go away,” Aldrich said. Defenders of the industry say the volume of whistleblower cases isn’t a good barometer of actual wrongdoing because the discipline in dispute often stems from violations by the employees that are completely unrelated to their injuries. “In many cases, the [employee’s] argument is simply, ‘Well, the railroad managers didn’t like the fact that I reported my injury so they were looking for an excuse to get me,” said James Whitehead, a management lawyer who has represented railroads and who teaches employment law at the University of Chicago. Experts say much of the worker litigiousness stems from a 1908 law that excluded railroad employees from state workers compensation systems. Instead, it required them to go to court if they wanted to seek compensation for on-the-job injuries. That created a strong market for personal injury attorneys who specialize in railroad litigation. And those lawyers were quick to file whistleblower complaints after Congress in 2007 and 2008 modified the Federal Railroad Safety Act, adding anti-retaliation measures for rail workers. As a result of those measures, railroad employees often have a lighter burden of proof when they pursue retaliation claims than do workers in other fields. Likewise, railroad employees often have rights other workers lack, such as the ability to file complaints over alleged retaliation due to reporting personal injuries. They also can take claims to federal court if their cases aren’t resolved within 210 days – a prospect that railroads often dread. “There can be a lot of emotion in these cases, and they can be challenging cases to defend” when they go before a jury, Whitehead said. Tensions smolder Mike Elliott’s case reflects the workplace tensions that sometimes smolder in the railroad industry. The beginning of the end for Elliott at BNSF came in March 2011, when he was chairman of the Washington legislative board of his union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. Elliott, an ex-Marine, got into a parking lot scuffle with Dennis Kautzmann, a supervisor who Elliott claimed harassed him for several years due to his safety advocacy. The parking lot incident, Elliott’s lawyers argued in their successful federal lawsuit, was instigated as part of a scheme by BNSF managers to get Elliott fired because he triggered the federal safety investigation. They said Kautzmann had no other reason, after Elliott had clocked out for the day, for pursuing him from a BNSF building into the parking lot. (In his Oct. 1 ruling rejecting a new trial, Judge Leighton agreed that Kautzmann “staged” the conflict.) Kautzmann, in a memo describing the March 2011 confrontation, said he followed Elliott into the parking lot simply to make sure Elliott understood the details about an upcoming engineer recertification evaluation. He said he brought along another BNSF employee “to assist me in having Mr. Elliott stop.” Kautzmann said he then stepped in front of Elliott’s car, but Elliot didn’t stop and ran into him, throwing Kautzmann onto the car’s hood. After that, Kautzmann said, Elliott angrily got out of the car and punched him in the mouth. Kautzmann pressed charges after the parking lot incident, and Elliott was criminally prosecuted, but a jury acquitted him. Yet BNSF conducted two internal investigations, and issued decisions both times calling for Elliott’s firing. A federal arbitration board upheld the findings. At the federal trial challenging the firing, BNSF argued that Elliott’s firing couldn’t have been retaliation for reporting safety problems because it had little knowledge of Elliott’s recent contacts with federal regulators. But Elliott’s lawyers presented evidence that BNSF was well aware that their client was in touch with regulators in the months before his firing. For instance, the lawyers pointed to an email about train signal problems that Elliott sent to a government official, and “cc-d” to company officials, in September 2010, several months before the federal inspections. Despite winning the federal suit, Elliott expects a drawn-out appeals process, and he has decided against seeking reinstatement to his job at BNSF. Instead, he is working these days as a lobbyist and spokesman for the union. The role is crucial, he says, because his former co-workers at BNSF need someone to speak out about safety issues. “The culture and the workplace fear of reporting injuries or safety problems hasn’t changed,” Elliott said. “Our members are still afraid.”

Continue Reading...

Bring back the Jay Leno and David Letterman feuds: What’s lost in the nice, new late-night of Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel

When Stephen Colbert took over “The Late Show,” some wondered if he would now begin feuding with network rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. Given the historic feud between Jay Leno and David Letterman, then between Kimmel and Leno, late-night comedy had come to be defined, in part, by attention-getting fights rivalry. Leno once said that rivalry would make late night “more exciting.” Now over one month into Colbert’s new show, we can note a new era in late-night comedy: One that is more defined by bromance than feuds. What does this new vibe mean for late night?  And what should we make of it? The story of Colbert’s connection to Fallon is almost the direct opposite of the Leno-Letterman feud.   From the start the two seemed to truly enjoy joking about their competition. When Colbert hosted “The Colbert Report” he had a long history of pretending to be rivals with Jimmy Fallon. They pretended to fight over things like which host had a better flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and they actually raised money for charity during a "feud" that ended with Colbert and Fallon singing together on Fallon’s show. When Colbert was announced to replace Letterman, some wondered whether the playful connection could continue, given that they would now compete for the same viewers and guests. Those worries were allayed, though, when Fallon appeared on Colbert’s debut to wish him well. Until last week, when Kimmel was a guest on “The Late Show,” there had been no real interaction between Kimmel and Colbert. During Kimmel’s interview, the two comedians discussed the fact that everyone expects them to be at war. Kimmel dismissed the idea outright: "It's a weird thing. I think it was established with Letterman and Leno and people thought it would just continue like the Crusades.” He then went on to say that he might "might even love" Colbert: "If you died, I’d cry like a baby.” Then viewers learned an interesting fact that certainly affects the bromance story. Both Colbert and Kimmel share the same agent: James “Babydoll” Dixon, who also represents Jon Stewart, Adam Carolla and Carson Daly. As Colbert and Kimmel discussed Dixon, they referred to him as the true “king of late night.” This leads us to the real feature of the late night wars that has shifted since the Leno-Letterman era: the industry is different today. First, with consolidation of the media industry, we now have a case where the same agent works for two network hosts. Imagine if Leno and Letterman had had the same agent negotiating contracts for both of them. The story simply would not have been the same. The even bigger shift, though, was referenced by Colbert moments before Kimmel sat down for the interview.  Colbert told viewers they could watch Kimmel every night “at 12:35 on your DVRs.” When Letterman and Leno went at it in the 1990s, viewers literally had to choose which one to watch. That era is over. As Time reported last year, “fewer people than ever are watching TV.”  This is especially true of the millennial demographic, which prefers on-demand viewing over linear television. Less than half of millennials watch live TV at all. Shows that air during the same slot simply don’t have to compete, especially if many of their viewers will be watching them the next day over their morning coffee. The fight over guests is mostly a thing of the past too, especially in the realm of political guests. Late-night television has simply become a staple for politicians. Those appearances lead to social media bumps that far exceed an appearance on a news program. Research showed, too, that candidates that appeared on “The Colbert Report” got bumps not just in polls but also in donations. Nabbing a political guest is no longer a big deal. If anything, it is the opposite. Politicians vie to get airtime with as many shows as possible. Sure, the shows compete to get the most viral interview, but they aren’t in the same race against each other for the guests themselves. The good news for viewers is that the sense of loyalty that was ushered in by the linear TV era of the Leno-Letterman feud is a thing of the past. Viewers can sample their comedy and watch bits from a range of shows. It means that rather than be bogged down in personality disputes, viewers can benefit from the sharp sarcasm of Larry Wilmore and the goofy charm of Fallon. They can appreciate the long-form satire of John Oliver and the interview strategies of Colbert. They can have it all. The end of the late-night feuds is overall a good step in late-night comedy, but there is a downside as well. It is worth asking what happens when the comedians are no longer being critical of each other. Powerful comedy needs a baseline of critique for it to have impact. If everyone plays too nice, then the comedy lacks needed bite. We got a glimpse of this in a series of videos released by Vanity Fair and Conde Nast that focused on Colbert’s debut. In a companion piece, Vanity Fair highlighted the comedians they claimed were redefining the genre: Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Wilmore, Oliver, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Trevor Noah and Bill Maher. The videos show the comedians giving Colbert advice, acting out impressions of one another, group texting and talking about pets. If they had really wanted to shake things up, they might have also included Lee Camp from RT America. But instead, the videos were silly and self-congratulatory, smacking of frat boy backslapping more than smart comedy. One even ends with Wilmore laughing at the “dick pic” he has sent to all of them. The point is that gathering all of these guys together in a love fest does actually lead to some pretty dumb comedy. The end of the feud era is great, but the bromance is a bit nauseating. And while feuds are no good, blind adoration is a problem too. When that blind adoration is part of a boys club, it is even worse. As Vanity Fair points out, “How gobsmackingly insane is it that no TV network has had the common sense — and that’s all we’re talking about in 2015, not courage, bravery, or even decency — to hand over the reins of an existing late-night comedy program to a female person?” The funny thing is that the same outlet that published that sentence also silenced the female comedians that could have been interviewed for their article or taped for their videos. Certainly they could have included female comedians that are making major public impact, even if they're not hosting a late-night comedy program. But they didn’t. While it is refreshing to consider an era when feuds are a thing of the past, it is worth questioning the impact of a comedy landscape that is too congenial — and too male.    When Stephen Colbert took over “The Late Show,” some wondered if he would now begin feuding with network rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. Given the historic feud between Jay Leno and David Letterman, then between Kimmel and Leno, late-night comedy had come to be defined, in part, by attention-getting fights rivalry. Leno once said that rivalry would make late night “more exciting.” Now over one month into Colbert’s new show, we can note a new era in late-night comedy: One that is more defined by bromance than feuds. What does this new vibe mean for late night?  And what should we make of it? The story of Colbert’s connection to Fallon is almost the direct opposite of the Leno-Letterman feud.   From the start the two seemed to truly enjoy joking about their competition. When Colbert hosted “The Colbert Report” he had a long history of pretending to be rivals with Jimmy Fallon. They pretended to fight over things like which host had a better flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and they actually raised money for charity during a "feud" that ended with Colbert and Fallon singing together on Fallon’s show. When Colbert was announced to replace Letterman, some wondered whether the playful connection could continue, given that they would now compete for the same viewers and guests. Those worries were allayed, though, when Fallon appeared on Colbert’s debut to wish him well. Until last week, when Kimmel was a guest on “The Late Show,” there had been no real interaction between Kimmel and Colbert. During Kimmel’s interview, the two comedians discussed the fact that everyone expects them to be at war. Kimmel dismissed the idea outright: "It's a weird thing. I think it was established with Letterman and Leno and people thought it would just continue like the Crusades.” He then went on to say that he might "might even love" Colbert: "If you died, I’d cry like a baby.” Then viewers learned an interesting fact that certainly affects the bromance story. Both Colbert and Kimmel share the same agent: James “Babydoll” Dixon, who also represents Jon Stewart, Adam Carolla and Carson Daly. As Colbert and Kimmel discussed Dixon, they referred to him as the true “king of late night.” This leads us to the real feature of the late night wars that has shifted since the Leno-Letterman era: the industry is different today. First, with consolidation of the media industry, we now have a case where the same agent works for two network hosts. Imagine if Leno and Letterman had had the same agent negotiating contracts for both of them. The story simply would not have been the same. The even bigger shift, though, was referenced by Colbert moments before Kimmel sat down for the interview.  Colbert told viewers they could watch Kimmel every night “at 12:35 on your DVRs.” When Letterman and Leno went at it in the 1990s, viewers literally had to choose which one to watch. That era is over. As Time reported last year, “fewer people than ever are watching TV.”  This is especially true of the millennial demographic, which prefers on-demand viewing over linear television. Less than half of millennials watch live TV at all. Shows that air during the same slot simply don’t have to compete, especially if many of their viewers will be watching them the next day over their morning coffee. The fight over guests is mostly a thing of the past too, especially in the realm of political guests. Late-night television has simply become a staple for politicians. Those appearances lead to social media bumps that far exceed an appearance on a news program. Research showed, too, that candidates that appeared on “The Colbert Report” got bumps not just in polls but also in donations. Nabbing a political guest is no longer a big deal. If anything, it is the opposite. Politicians vie to get airtime with as many shows as possible. Sure, the shows compete to get the most viral interview, but they aren’t in the same race against each other for the guests themselves. The good news for viewers is that the sense of loyalty that was ushered in by the linear TV era of the Leno-Letterman feud is a thing of the past. Viewers can sample their comedy and watch bits from a range of shows. It means that rather than be bogged down in personality disputes, viewers can benefit from the sharp sarcasm of Larry Wilmore and the goofy charm of Fallon. They can appreciate the long-form satire of John Oliver and the interview strategies of Colbert. They can have it all. The end of the late-night feuds is overall a good step in late-night comedy, but there is a downside as well. It is worth asking what happens when the comedians are no longer being critical of each other. Powerful comedy needs a baseline of critique for it to have impact. If everyone plays too nice, then the comedy lacks needed bite. We got a glimpse of this in a series of videos released by Vanity Fair and Conde Nast that focused on Colbert’s debut. In a companion piece, Vanity Fair highlighted the comedians they claimed were redefining the genre: Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Wilmore, Oliver, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, James Corden, Trevor Noah and Bill Maher. The videos show the comedians giving Colbert advice, acting out impressions of one another, group texting and talking about pets. If they had really wanted to shake things up, they might have also included Lee Camp from RT America. But instead, the videos were silly and self-congratulatory, smacking of frat boy backslapping more than smart comedy. One even ends with Wilmore laughing at the “dick pic” he has sent to all of them. The point is that gathering all of these guys together in a love fest does actually lead to some pretty dumb comedy. The end of the feud era is great, but the bromance is a bit nauseating. And while feuds are no good, blind adoration is a problem too. When that blind adoration is part of a boys club, it is even worse. As Vanity Fair points out, “How gobsmackingly insane is it that no TV network has had the common sense — and that’s all we’re talking about in 2015, not courage, bravery, or even decency — to hand over the reins of an existing late-night comedy program to a female person?” The funny thing is that the same outlet that published that sentence also silenced the female comedians that could have been interviewed for their article or taped for their videos. Certainly they could have included female comedians that are making major public impact, even if they're not hosting a late-night comedy program. But they didn’t. While it is refreshing to consider an era when feuds are a thing of the past, it is worth questioning the impact of a comedy landscape that is too congenial — and too male.    

Continue Reading...

The tragedy of the Barney Frank film: Watching Congress fall apart before our very eyes

As a documentary, “Compared To What: The Improbable Journey Of Barney Frank” is not, frankly, amazing. It’s enlightening, but rarely serves as more than a rah-rah rally for Rep. Frank, who is the subject and source material for the film. It’s welcome cheerleading if you’re a fan of Frank as a politician — and there are times the documentary does some desperately needed truth-telling about the financial crisis of 2008 and the current intractable state of Congress. But the 90-minute documentary that premieres on Showtime tonight is too sweet and rosy to really be a work of journalism; if documentaries are supposed to be investigative, this is the filmic version of a puff piece. It’s still an engaging enough documentary for anyone interested in Frank, Congressional politics, or most of all, gay rights in the center of government. Frank came out while serving in the House of Representatives, and he managed to weather the homophobia of the era and a minor scandal to keep his seat in his home district of Newton, Taunton and New Bedford in Massachusetts. Frank served for 32 years, leaving office in 2013. The documentary follows his last days in office: from the first election in decades where he hasn’t been on the ballot, through his marriage — the first same-sex marriage of a sitting Congressperson — and finally to an uneasy retirement, where he still makes calls, argues politics and campaigns for fellow Democrats. Frank is a fantastic subject, because he is (seemingly) unable to be inauthentic. The congressman has a national profile because of his bluntness, humor and dogged determination — he would not back down either during questioning in his House subcommittee or during a televised interview. He’s constantly quotable, even just in the 90-minute documentary, quipping, “Vote Democratic. We're not perfect, but they're nuts” when campaigning for his replacement, Joe Kennedy III, in 2012. And it’s not just bluster and jokes — he tears up at grand occasions, including statements on the House floor, press conferences and his own wedding. Outside of chambers, his shoes are untied, he runs into walls, his hair and clothing are bound to be askew. On the floor, he’s in his element, engaging in the back-and-forth repartee of House debate with a rowdy, brash enthusiasm that is the epitome of politics in the lower house. “Compared To What” is particularly interested in Frank as a gay man, because of his openness about it so early in the conversation and his relentless support for gay rights, even when it was really not politically expedient. It offers a surprising and moving portrait of his experience, especially in the years before he would even admit he was gay to his closest friends. That Frank survived coming out in the House is a testament to how beloved he was, even by his political rivals; he was (and is) a consummate politician, able to build alliances across the aisle while holding firm to what mattered most to him. “Compared To What” reveres him for this, framing it as both integrity and pragmatism. But the focus comes at the expense of letting the viewer decide for themselves how well Frank’s approach succeeded in government. Indeed, even as someone who has no ideological faults with Frank, the framing of the documentary is at times rather suspicious. Unsavory details are glossed over, with just occasional lines of text explaining hiccups or digressions in Frank’s career. As is probably to be expected, the film is stacked with character witnesses; only one person dares to utter a cross word on Frank, and that is Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black, who organized a national day for gay equality that Barney Frank wouldn’t endorse. Not because he didn’t agree, but because it was happening at a time when Congress was on holiday, and Frank didn’t see the point. As notes of dissension go, it’s a rather adorably crochety one. “Compared To What?” goes even further — it hauls in an expert on the financial crisis to defend Frank’s actions related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while Frank’s scandal — that a prostitute he hired, who eventually became his driver, ran a prostitution ring out of his apartment — is explained in lines of perfunctory text, Frank’s apology speech for the scandal is given its own scene. In the eyes of this film, the man could do no wrong. And perhaps he couldn’t, but 90 minutes of repeating the same thing is a bit tiresome. What’s more interesting in “Compared To What” than the Frank adulation is the history of federal government it offers over his career — specifically, a history of the House of Representatives, and its gradual inability to function in any meaningful fashion. The documentary lays the blame at the feet of Newt Gingrich, and whether or not that’s true, it offers compelling insight into how much the atmosphere of even Frank’s financial services committee turned acrimonious, even with legislators he’d worked with for 20 years. The film pieces together news coverage of Frank and Congress starting from the ‘70s, from black-and-white photography to color. Clips and excerpts from commentators as diverse as Rachel Maddow, Charles Krauthammer, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly make it into the documentary, as well as one-on-one interviews with Frank’s political friends. It recalls an image of a Congress that used to at least occasionally do things, as opposed to our own. It’s certainly not a Congress that has a place for Frank anymore. The title of the documentary comes from a joke often repeated by Frank himself — from a Borscht Belt comedian cracking wise about the old ball-and-chain. The setup: "How’s the wife?" The answer: "Compared to what?" Frank explains that he used the semi-rhetorical question as a guiding principle for his politics — pushing him for solutions, not ideology; practicality, not principle. And though the documentary did frustrate, at times, with its feature-length heart-eyes-emoji directed at Frank, partly I think it’s because the filmmakers were caught up in the title of their own documentary. Sure, Barney Frank might not be perfect. But compared to almost everyone else in this Republican-controlled Congress, he seems like the last sensible man standing — and woe is us, because he just left the building.As a documentary, “Compared To What: The Improbable Journey Of Barney Frank” is not, frankly, amazing. It’s enlightening, but rarely serves as more than a rah-rah rally for Rep. Frank, who is the subject and source material for the film. It’s welcome cheerleading if you’re a fan of Frank as a politician — and there are times the documentary does some desperately needed truth-telling about the financial crisis of 2008 and the current intractable state of Congress. But the 90-minute documentary that premieres on Showtime tonight is too sweet and rosy to really be a work of journalism; if documentaries are supposed to be investigative, this is the filmic version of a puff piece. It’s still an engaging enough documentary for anyone interested in Frank, Congressional politics, or most of all, gay rights in the center of government. Frank came out while serving in the House of Representatives, and he managed to weather the homophobia of the era and a minor scandal to keep his seat in his home district of Newton, Taunton and New Bedford in Massachusetts. Frank served for 32 years, leaving office in 2013. The documentary follows his last days in office: from the first election in decades where he hasn’t been on the ballot, through his marriage — the first same-sex marriage of a sitting Congressperson — and finally to an uneasy retirement, where he still makes calls, argues politics and campaigns for fellow Democrats. Frank is a fantastic subject, because he is (seemingly) unable to be inauthentic. The congressman has a national profile because of his bluntness, humor and dogged determination — he would not back down either during questioning in his House subcommittee or during a televised interview. He’s constantly quotable, even just in the 90-minute documentary, quipping, “Vote Democratic. We're not perfect, but they're nuts” when campaigning for his replacement, Joe Kennedy III, in 2012. And it’s not just bluster and jokes — he tears up at grand occasions, including statements on the House floor, press conferences and his own wedding. Outside of chambers, his shoes are untied, he runs into walls, his hair and clothing are bound to be askew. On the floor, he’s in his element, engaging in the back-and-forth repartee of House debate with a rowdy, brash enthusiasm that is the epitome of politics in the lower house. “Compared To What” is particularly interested in Frank as a gay man, because of his openness about it so early in the conversation and his relentless support for gay rights, even when it was really not politically expedient. It offers a surprising and moving portrait of his experience, especially in the years before he would even admit he was gay to his closest friends. That Frank survived coming out in the House is a testament to how beloved he was, even by his political rivals; he was (and is) a consummate politician, able to build alliances across the aisle while holding firm to what mattered most to him. “Compared To What” reveres him for this, framing it as both integrity and pragmatism. But the focus comes at the expense of letting the viewer decide for themselves how well Frank’s approach succeeded in government. Indeed, even as someone who has no ideological faults with Frank, the framing of the documentary is at times rather suspicious. Unsavory details are glossed over, with just occasional lines of text explaining hiccups or digressions in Frank’s career. As is probably to be expected, the film is stacked with character witnesses; only one person dares to utter a cross word on Frank, and that is Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black, who organized a national day for gay equality that Barney Frank wouldn’t endorse. Not because he didn’t agree, but because it was happening at a time when Congress was on holiday, and Frank didn’t see the point. As notes of dissension go, it’s a rather adorably crochety one. “Compared To What?” goes even further — it hauls in an expert on the financial crisis to defend Frank’s actions related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while Frank’s scandal — that a prostitute he hired, who eventually became his driver, ran a prostitution ring out of his apartment — is explained in lines of perfunctory text, Frank’s apology speech for the scandal is given its own scene. In the eyes of this film, the man could do no wrong. And perhaps he couldn’t, but 90 minutes of repeating the same thing is a bit tiresome. What’s more interesting in “Compared To What” than the Frank adulation is the history of federal government it offers over his career — specifically, a history of the House of Representatives, and its gradual inability to function in any meaningful fashion. The documentary lays the blame at the feet of Newt Gingrich, and whether or not that’s true, it offers compelling insight into how much the atmosphere of even Frank’s financial services committee turned acrimonious, even with legislators he’d worked with for 20 years. The film pieces together news coverage of Frank and Congress starting from the ‘70s, from black-and-white photography to color. Clips and excerpts from commentators as diverse as Rachel Maddow, Charles Krauthammer, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly make it into the documentary, as well as one-on-one interviews with Frank’s political friends. It recalls an image of a Congress that used to at least occasionally do things, as opposed to our own. It’s certainly not a Congress that has a place for Frank anymore. The title of the documentary comes from a joke often repeated by Frank himself — from a Borscht Belt comedian cracking wise about the old ball-and-chain. The setup: "How’s the wife?" The answer: "Compared to what?" Frank explains that he used the semi-rhetorical question as a guiding principle for his politics — pushing him for solutions, not ideology; practicality, not principle. And though the documentary did frustrate, at times, with its feature-length heart-eyes-emoji directed at Frank, partly I think it’s because the filmmakers were caught up in the title of their own documentary. Sure, Barney Frank might not be perfect. But compared to almost everyone else in this Republican-controlled Congress, he seems like the last sensible man standing — and woe is us, because he just left the building.

Continue Reading...

“Netflix and kill baby Hitler”: A massive Twitter pile-on mocks the New York Times’ time-travel vigilante poll

On this sunny Friday afternoon, The New York Times Magazine inexplicably decided to poll its readers on whether or not they would go back and kill Hitler as a baby, given the option (worst "Back to the Future" brand tie-in ever). Ultimately, 42 percent of readers said they would, 30 percent said they wouldn't, and 28 percent said they weren't sure. Meanwhile, a seeming 100 percent of Twitter users found the whole proposition ridiculous, and chimed in with droll 140-character rebuttals to that effect. Take a look! https://twitter.com/THEKIDMERO/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status... https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/sta... https://twitter.com/marmolheater/stat... https://twitter.com/IAmSpilly/status/... https://twitter.com/trillotto/status/... https://twitter.com/atotalmonet/statu... https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/statu... https://twitter.com/jaypugz/status/65... https://twitter.com/delrayser/status/... https://twitter.com/tut___/status/657... https://twitter.com/mariabustillos/st... https://twitter.com/lindsayism/status... https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status... https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/sta... https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... https://twitter.com/pourmecoffee/stat... https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/657... https://twitter.com/bad_garrett/statu... https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/... https://twitter.com/marklisanti/statu... https://twitter.com/the818/status/657... https://twitter.com/NickTavares/statu... https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status... https://twitter.com/Smorgasboredom/st... https://twitter.com/robdelaney/status... [image error]On this sunny Friday afternoon, The New York Times Magazine inexplicably decided to poll its readers on whether or not they would go back and kill Hitler as a baby, given the option (worst "Back to the Future" brand tie-in ever). Ultimately, 42 percent of readers said they would, 30 percent said they wouldn't, and 28 percent said they weren't sure. Meanwhile, a seeming 100 percent of Twitter users found the whole proposition ridiculous, and chimed in with droll 140-character rebuttals to that effect. Take a look! https://twitter.com/THEKIDMERO/status... https://twitter.com/joshgondelman/sta... https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status... https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/sta... https://twitter.com/marmolheater/stat... https://twitter.com/IAmSpilly/status/... https://twitter.com/trillotto/status/... https://twitter.com/atotalmonet/statu... https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/statu... https://twitter.com/jaypugz/status/65... https://twitter.com/delrayser/status/... https://twitter.com/tut___/status/657... https://twitter.com/mariabustillos/st... https://twitter.com/lindsayism/status... https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status... https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/sta... https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status... https://twitter.com/pourmecoffee/stat... https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/657... https://twitter.com/bad_garrett/statu... https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/... https://twitter.com/marklisanti/statu... https://twitter.com/the818/status/657... https://twitter.com/NickTavares/statu... https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status... https://twitter.com/Smorgasboredom/st... https://twitter.com/robdelaney/status... [image error]

Continue Reading...

Mitt Romney takes credit for inspiring Obamacare — then “clarifies” that he still opposes it

A proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu... proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu... proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu... proper eulogy is honest in its reverence for the deceased. Today, while remarking on the passing of an old friend, Mitt Romney inadvertently admitted a simple truth that amounts to Republican heresy these days -- Romneycare is the foundation of Obamacare. When Mitt Romney lauded the lifetime accomplishments of Staples cofounder, Thomas Stemberg, in a Boston Globe obituary today, the former Massachusetts governor praised his close friend for advocating on behalf of the Massachusetts state initiative to provide affordable health insurance to all residents. It was Romney's Bain Capital that helped back the opening of Stemberg's Staples stores and Romney praised his friend as “an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary." “Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,” Romney explained. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare." "So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he honestly pronounced. Romney's admission is a far cry from his claims during the 2012 election against President Obama. "I … recognize that a lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should say that was a bone-headed idea, and I presume folks would think that would be good for me politically,” Romney said of his signature health care law back in May 2011. “But there’s only one problem with that. It wouldn’t be honest.” Obviously catching wind of an oncoming backlash, Romney again changed his mind on what would be an honest assessment of his Romneycare, breathlessly rushing out this this nonsensical "correction": https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status...

Getting people health insurance is a good thing, and that’s what Tom Stemberg fought for. I oppose Obamacare and believe... Posted by Mitt Romney on Friday, October 23, 2015

Meanwhile, Mitt's son, Matt, is busy quipping that Katy Perry's skintight dresses caused his father's 2012 downfall: https://twitter.com/DonMarkRVA/status... https://twitter.com/Matt_Romney/statu...

Continue Reading...