Lily Salter's Blog, page 982
October 14, 2015
The real reason the Republican Party is imploding: It’s still all about race
It was only last week that Rep. Kevin McCarthy opted not to run for speaker of the House, effectively driving his party, and the U.S. Congress, into a brick wall. Yet despite having more than 240 options and a pressing need to save the world from another global recession, Republicans in the House are reportedly no closer to finding John Boehner’s successor. As a matter of fact, things have gotten so bad that the conservative establishment is begging Rep. Paul Ryan to take the job. He says he’d rather not. But over the weekend, it started to look like Ryan may not have to resign himself to the miserable fate of being one of the most powerful people on the planet — at least not yet. Because according to reports which first emanated from Breitbart.com and other tribunes of the far right, but which have since been corroborated by the New York Times and others, even Ryan may not be conservative enough to please the 30-40 extremists who felled Boehner, thwarted McCarthy, and call themselves members of the House Freedom Caucus. Yes, that’s right: The Republican Party is now beholden to a faction so zealously reactionary that Paul “Ayn Rand is the reason I got involved in public service” Ryan is, in its reckoning, much too far to the left. These are the rules of the Congress the Tea Party created. It’s enough to put the fear of God into even the most devoted of GOP apologists. David Brooks, for example, is castigating Republicans for “right-wing radicalism.” It’s gotten that bad. Still, recognizing the problem is the easy part. The harder part is acknowledging where it comes from. Brooks chalks the GOP’s militancy up to 30 years of “rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals” and suggests that Republicans are “addicted to a crisis mentality.” But although Brooks is right when he notes that GOP extremists “always” act like the country is “on the brink of collapse,” apocalypticism isn’t the problem here. No, as is so often true in American politics, the problem is race. Some hardliners pay lip service to his supporting the 2008 bailouts when explaining their opposition to Ryan. But if you follow the far-right press, or listen to rank-and-file activists, it’s blindingly obvious that conservatives’ real problem with Paul Ryan is that he not only supports comprehensive immigration reform, but supports higher levels of overall immigration, too. “There’s nobody in the Republican Party who could be worse than Paul Ryan,” said Roy Beck, a leading “immigration control” activist, to Breitbart. “Open Borders is in his ideological DNA. That’s the terrifying thing.” Erick Erickson, meanwhile, has described Ryan as “a dangerous pick for conservatives” and “a creature of Washington.” He’s also called Ryan “not a bad guy” and “a competent, good guy.” But only to soothe the burn of yet another sobriquet: “the draftsman for bailouts behind the scenes.” Conservatives who challenge Speaker Ryan “will immediately be labeled as fascist totalitarians,” Erickson warned. Conspicuous in its absence, though, was an acknowledgement of what they’d be fighting him about. It won’t be the 2008 bank bailouts; it’ll be immigration. That’s in the medium- or long-term. If it’s 2017 and there’s another Democrat in the White House, simply not bringing comprehensive immigration reform up for a vote will probably be enough. But in the short-term, the extremists have bigger plans. Reportedly, they want the next speaker to agree to use a debt-ceiling default and a government shutdown as “leverage” in order to force President Obama to acquiesce to his legacy’s dismantling. The lesson of 2011 and 2013, as they see it, is that the world economy and the federal government are damn good hostages to take. And if we keep in mind that these folks think the world is ending as it is already, their strategy makes sense. In fact, it’s a real mistake to dismiss these people as lunatics, as their critics, both on the right and the left, so often do. Far as I can tell, these “crazy” tactics have borne them plenty of fruit. Where they break from the rest of the political establishment is in their analysis; that apocalyptic stuff about the end of the republic, the New Black Panther Party, and immigration being akin to “invasion.” But that’s not craziness; that’s racism. They’re different. So if Brooks and others really want to know how this dysfunction got started, they’ll have to look back further. Before the Tea Party, and before Paul Ryan was even born. They’ll have to examine the roots of today’s Republican Party. I’d recommend they start with Richard Nixon and the presidential campaign of 1968.
Trump’s America vs. Hillary’s America: The most shocking contrasts between the Democratic & Republican debates
Everyone on the right agreed that the Democratic debate last night was dull as dirt: No fireworks, no pizazz. The candidates didn't insult each other's looks or tell gory tales of mayhem or brag about their poll numbers. In fact, they did the opposite. They behaved like human beings. When the debate moderators insisted on discussing the most tedious beltway obsession since Al Gore and the buddhist temple -- Hillary Clinton's emails -- Bernie Sanders drew huge applause from the audience, and no doubt from every Democrat watching the debate at home, when he said: 
Everyone on the right agreed that the Democratic debate last night was dull as dirt: No fireworks, no pizazz. The candidates didn't insult each other's looks or tell gory tales of mayhem or brag about their poll numbers. In fact, they did the opposite. They behaved like human beings. When the debate moderators insisted on discussing the most tedious beltway obsession since Al Gore and the buddhist temple -- Hillary Clinton's emails -- Bernie Sanders drew huge applause from the audience, and no doubt from every Democrat watching the debate at home, when he said: Everyone on the right agreed that the Democratic debate last night was dull as dirt: No fireworks, no pizazz. The candidates didn't insult each other's looks or tell gory tales of mayhem or brag about their poll numbers. In fact, they did the opposite. They behaved like human beings. When the debate moderators insisted on discussing the most tedious beltway obsession since Al Gore and the buddhist temple -- Hillary Clinton's emails -- Bernie Sanders drew huge applause from the audience, and no doubt from every Democrat watching the debate at home, when he said:
"I think the Secretary is right. And that is I think the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”And that was the end of that. With the exception of some eccentric moments from former senators Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, the Democrats held a lively debate about ideas and exchanged views on how to deal with problems facing the country. They talked about guns and college debt and Syria and Social Security and much more. Not one of them looked like deer in the headlights, clueless about the subject at hand (something that happened frequently in the GOP debates), nor did they weirdly launch into their stump speeches at the slightest provocation. Truth be told, they all seemed somewhat ... normal. (Or at least as normal as any politician can be.) And that is the last thing the Republicans wanted anyone to see. After all, some people who aren't deluded by Fox News and talk radio might then remember that this is serious business, and the GOP can't have that. One never knows how these things will go, but at the very least one hopes that a majority of the Americans are still looking for someone sane and sober to run the country. It may not be as entertaining as Donald Trump raving about his wall or Carly Fiorina delivering a torrent of gruesome accusations against Planned Parenthood, but it's important. There was little suspense -- after all nobody was waiting with bated breath to see what crazy thing one of these candidates would say next. What they got instead was a stage full of experienced public servants with deep knowledge of government policy. If there's one thing that was made obvious last night, it's that the GOP is one big heaping mess of a political party right now. The contrast between it and the Democrats couldn't be sharper and not just in the presidential race. After all, the backdrop of last night's event was a drama happening in the Capitol in which House Republicans can't agree on who should be Speaker. How do they expect, then, to bring the entire country together under one president? It's laughable. They're laughable. The candidates on the stage last night in Las Vegas, on the other hand, were serious. Now it's true that there might have been some Republicans on their debate stage who aren't entirely clownish and who, in other circumstances, could show themselves to better advantage. But it's their party and they can't cry about this even if they want to. Every last one of them has been instrumental in making the GOP what it is today. All of them would likely be happy to see Trump out of the race and most of them wouldn't be sorry to see Carson go either. Every day, those two are out there spewing vile racist and anti-semitic rhetoric (among a dozen other offensive comments), making it almost impossible for the Republicans to gain a national majority and win the presidency -- even if they could past the unpopularity of the mainstream GOP platform, which is only slightly less repellant. The differences between the two parties aren't just matters of debate style unfortunately. Now that we have seen the presidential candidates in both parties on the debate stage, it's clear that the two parties don't just have different political philosophies. They represent two different countries. Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts. And that's just for starters. Democratic America is a very powerful nation struggling with a declining middle class and economic insecurity at the hands of the ultra-rich, requiring some energetic government intervention to mitigate income inequality, solve the looming crisis of climate change and manage global crises without plunging the nation into more wars. They also must hold off that anarchistic opposition which sees the world as a dystopian hellscape and that may be the greatest challenge of all. A little over a year from now voters are going to decide which country they want to live in. Let's hope they choose wisely. The rest of us are going to have to live in it too.
Everyone on the right agreed that the Democratic debate last night was dull as dirt: No fireworks, no pizazz. The candidates didn't insult each other's looks or tell gory tales of mayhem or brag about their poll numbers. In fact, they did the opposite. They behaved like human beings. When the debate moderators insisted on discussing the most tedious beltway obsession since Al Gore and the buddhist temple -- Hillary Clinton's emails -- Bernie Sanders drew huge applause from the audience, and no doubt from every Democrat watching the debate at home, when he said: "I think the Secretary is right. And that is I think the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”And that was the end of that. With the exception of some eccentric moments from former senators Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, the Democrats held a lively debate about ideas and exchanged views on how to deal with problems facing the country. They talked about guns and college debt and Syria and Social Security and much more. Not one of them looked like deer in the headlights, clueless about the subject at hand (something that happened frequently in the GOP debates), nor did they weirdly launch into their stump speeches at the slightest provocation. Truth be told, they all seemed somewhat ... normal. (Or at least as normal as any politician can be.) And that is the last thing the Republicans wanted anyone to see. After all, some people who aren't deluded by Fox News and talk radio might then remember that this is serious business, and the GOP can't have that. One never knows how these things will go, but at the very least one hopes that a majority of the Americans are still looking for someone sane and sober to run the country. It may not be as entertaining as Donald Trump raving about his wall or Carly Fiorina delivering a torrent of gruesome accusations against Planned Parenthood, but it's important. There was little suspense -- after all nobody was waiting with bated breath to see what crazy thing one of these candidates would say next. What they got instead was a stage full of experienced public servants with deep knowledge of government policy. If there's one thing that was made obvious last night, it's that the GOP is one big heaping mess of a political party right now. The contrast between it and the Democrats couldn't be sharper and not just in the presidential race. After all, the backdrop of last night's event was a drama happening in the Capitol in which House Republicans can't agree on who should be Speaker. How do they expect, then, to bring the entire country together under one president? It's laughable. They're laughable. The candidates on the stage last night in Las Vegas, on the other hand, were serious. Now it's true that there might have been some Republicans on their debate stage who aren't entirely clownish and who, in other circumstances, could show themselves to better advantage. But it's their party and they can't cry about this even if they want to. Every last one of them has been instrumental in making the GOP what it is today. All of them would likely be happy to see Trump out of the race and most of them wouldn't be sorry to see Carson go either. Every day, those two are out there spewing vile racist and anti-semitic rhetoric (among a dozen other offensive comments), making it almost impossible for the Republicans to gain a national majority and win the presidency -- even if they could past the unpopularity of the mainstream GOP platform, which is only slightly less repellant. The differences between the two parties aren't just matters of debate style unfortunately. Now that we have seen the presidential candidates in both parties on the debate stage, it's clear that the two parties don't just have different political philosophies. They represent two different countries. Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts. And that's just for starters. Democratic America is a very powerful nation struggling with a declining middle class and economic insecurity at the hands of the ultra-rich, requiring some energetic government intervention to mitigate income inequality, solve the looming crisis of climate change and manage global crises without plunging the nation into more wars. They also must hold off that anarchistic opposition which sees the world as a dystopian hellscape and that may be the greatest challenge of all. A little over a year from now voters are going to decide which country they want to live in. Let's hope they choose wisely. The rest of us are going to have to live in it too.
Everyone on the right agreed that the Democratic debate last night was dull as dirt: No fireworks, no pizazz. The candidates didn't insult each other's looks or tell gory tales of mayhem or brag about their poll numbers. In fact, they did the opposite. They behaved like human beings. When the debate moderators insisted on discussing the most tedious beltway obsession since Al Gore and the buddhist temple -- Hillary Clinton's emails -- Bernie Sanders drew huge applause from the audience, and no doubt from every Democrat watching the debate at home, when he said: "I think the Secretary is right. And that is I think the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”And that was the end of that. With the exception of some eccentric moments from former senators Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, the Democrats held a lively debate about ideas and exchanged views on how to deal with problems facing the country. They talked about guns and college debt and Syria and Social Security and much more. Not one of them looked like deer in the headlights, clueless about the subject at hand (something that happened frequently in the GOP debates), nor did they weirdly launch into their stump speeches at the slightest provocation. Truth be told, they all seemed somewhat ... normal. (Or at least as normal as any politician can be.) And that is the last thing the Republicans wanted anyone to see. After all, some people who aren't deluded by Fox News and talk radio might then remember that this is serious business, and the GOP can't have that. One never knows how these things will go, but at the very least one hopes that a majority of the Americans are still looking for someone sane and sober to run the country. It may not be as entertaining as Donald Trump raving about his wall or Carly Fiorina delivering a torrent of gruesome accusations against Planned Parenthood, but it's important. There was little suspense -- after all nobody was waiting with bated breath to see what crazy thing one of these candidates would say next. What they got instead was a stage full of experienced public servants with deep knowledge of government policy. If there's one thing that was made obvious last night, it's that the GOP is one big heaping mess of a political party right now. The contrast between it and the Democrats couldn't be sharper and not just in the presidential race. After all, the backdrop of last night's event was a drama happening in the Capitol in which House Republicans can't agree on who should be Speaker. How do they expect, then, to bring the entire country together under one president? It's laughable. They're laughable. The candidates on the stage last night in Las Vegas, on the other hand, were serious. Now it's true that there might have been some Republicans on their debate stage who aren't entirely clownish and who, in other circumstances, could show themselves to better advantage. But it's their party and they can't cry about this even if they want to. Every last one of them has been instrumental in making the GOP what it is today. All of them would likely be happy to see Trump out of the race and most of them wouldn't be sorry to see Carson go either. Every day, those two are out there spewing vile racist and anti-semitic rhetoric (among a dozen other offensive comments), making it almost impossible for the Republicans to gain a national majority and win the presidency -- even if they could past the unpopularity of the mainstream GOP platform, which is only slightly less repellant. The differences between the two parties aren't just matters of debate style unfortunately. Now that we have seen the presidential candidates in both parties on the debate stage, it's clear that the two parties don't just have different political philosophies. They represent two different countries. Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts. And that's just for starters. Democratic America is a very powerful nation struggling with a declining middle class and economic insecurity at the hands of the ultra-rich, requiring some energetic government intervention to mitigate income inequality, solve the looming crisis of climate change and manage global crises without plunging the nation into more wars. They also must hold off that anarchistic opposition which sees the world as a dystopian hellscape and that may be the greatest challenge of all. A little over a year from now voters are going to decide which country they want to live in. Let's hope they choose wisely. The rest of us are going to have to live in it too.
Quentin Tarantino clarifies “Selma” Emmy diss: “I haven’t seen it”
In a recent conversation with Bret Easton Ellis about “Selma's” snub at this year’s Academy Awards, Quentin Tarantino appeared to diss the film by saying ‘‘[Director Ava DuVernay] did a really good job on ‘Selma,' but ‘Selma' deserved an Emmy.” Now Tarantino has clarified these marks (well, sort of), telling IndieWire in an email that he hasn’t even seen “Selma” and didn’t mean the Emmy comment as an insult. “I’m writing you to pass on that the quote from the NY Times piece about Selma is wrong. I never saw Selma,” Tarantino wrote. “If you look at the article, it was Bret who was talking about Selma, not me. I did say the line ‘it deserved a Emmy,’ but when I said it, it was more like a question." “Which basically meant, ‘it’s like a TV movie?’ Which Bret and myself being from the same TV generation, was not only understood, but there was no slam intended,” he continued. “Both Bret and myself come from the seventies and eighties when there were a lot of historically based TV movies: the King mini-series written by Abby Mann staring Paul Winfield; 'Crisis at Central High’ with Joanne Woodward. And 'Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys.' These were great TV movies. I’d be honored to be placed next to those films. However, I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.” The moral of this story: Don't opine on things you haven't seen (particularly when Bret Easton Ellis is in earshot).In a recent conversation with Bret Easton Ellis about “Selma's” snub at this year’s Academy Awards, Quentin Tarantino appeared to diss the film by saying ‘‘[Director Ava DuVernay] did a really good job on ‘Selma,' but ‘Selma' deserved an Emmy.” Now Tarantino has clarified these marks (well, sort of), telling IndieWire in an email that he hasn’t even seen “Selma” and didn’t mean the Emmy comment as an insult. “I’m writing you to pass on that the quote from the NY Times piece about Selma is wrong. I never saw Selma,” Tarantino wrote. “If you look at the article, it was Bret who was talking about Selma, not me. I did say the line ‘it deserved a Emmy,’ but when I said it, it was more like a question." “Which basically meant, ‘it’s like a TV movie?’ Which Bret and myself being from the same TV generation, was not only understood, but there was no slam intended,” he continued. “Both Bret and myself come from the seventies and eighties when there were a lot of historically based TV movies: the King mini-series written by Abby Mann staring Paul Winfield; 'Crisis at Central High’ with Joanne Woodward. And 'Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys.' These were great TV movies. I’d be honored to be placed next to those films. However, I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.” The moral of this story: Don't opine on things you haven't seen (particularly when Bret Easton Ellis is in earshot).In a recent conversation with Bret Easton Ellis about “Selma's” snub at this year’s Academy Awards, Quentin Tarantino appeared to diss the film by saying ‘‘[Director Ava DuVernay] did a really good job on ‘Selma,' but ‘Selma' deserved an Emmy.” Now Tarantino has clarified these marks (well, sort of), telling IndieWire in an email that he hasn’t even seen “Selma” and didn’t mean the Emmy comment as an insult. “I’m writing you to pass on that the quote from the NY Times piece about Selma is wrong. I never saw Selma,” Tarantino wrote. “If you look at the article, it was Bret who was talking about Selma, not me. I did say the line ‘it deserved a Emmy,’ but when I said it, it was more like a question." “Which basically meant, ‘it’s like a TV movie?’ Which Bret and myself being from the same TV generation, was not only understood, but there was no slam intended,” he continued. “Both Bret and myself come from the seventies and eighties when there were a lot of historically based TV movies: the King mini-series written by Abby Mann staring Paul Winfield; 'Crisis at Central High’ with Joanne Woodward. And 'Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys.' These were great TV movies. I’d be honored to be placed next to those films. However, I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.” The moral of this story: Don't opine on things you haven't seen (particularly when Bret Easton Ellis is in earshot).
Laura Ingraham and Fox News have a dumb new lie (that sounds a lot like one of their greatest hits)
By all accounts, the biggest loser from Tuesday night's Democratic debate was the Republicans. The Democrats discussed the issues and argued with each other while mostly avoiding personal attacks. It was hard not to draw a mental contrast between these adult-acting Democrats and Republicans, who can't even get it together to elect a House Speaker and whose primary process is dominated by a man who makes facetious remarks about the Holocaust and a literal reality TV star. In response, conservative media and politicians are just doubling down on the lame politics of resentment, accusing Democrats of wanting to give away "free stuff." The problem is that what they are describing as "free stuff" is actually the opposite: Democratic ideas are all about helping people work. Sneering at people's ambitions and desire to work hard as "free stuff" is not going to help overcome the image of conservatives as a bunch of ideologues who don't have the maturity to understand complex issues, much less come up with solutions to help make this country more productive and fairer to everyone. All the social and labor-related policy proposals discussed during the debate last night were geared towards the goal of making it easier for working Americans: A higher minimum wage to make working more worthwhile, child care and family leave so that people with families can continue working at their jobs, health care so that people's lives aren't derailed by illness, and education so that hard-working people can realize their career ambitions. Even the dreaded socialist Bernie Sanders focused his pitch around the idea that people want to work and that the government's job is to help them get and hold on to a job. But to hear conservatives speak of it, giving people the tools they need to work for a living is somehow about laziness and "free stuff." Marco Rubio helped kick things off by complaining, right after the debate, that it was "basically a liberal verses liberal debate about who was going to give away the most free stuff." Also after the debate, the Fox and Friends cast worked the "free stuff" angle. "They're giving stuff away," Stuart Varney complained. "In fact, I keep going back to this. They're buying votes." Laura Ingraham, a guest on Fox and Friends, was particularly incensed at the idea of making college more affordable for everyone. "All the kids in college, like, yeah, we can keep playing foosball and hanging out after college because we're all going to," she argued, "they're going to take care of us." Perhaps Ingraham spent her college years goofing off and not studying---the quality of her radio program certainly is evidence for that---but that's not what college is actually like for most students. The people she's trying to portray as lazy leeches are mostly hard-working kids, many of whom hold jobs in addition to going to school full-time. The Sanders program she's hating on actually proposes expanding the work-study program, so that more college students who want a job can have one. Far from being a giveaway to the lazy, this is about making sure people who want to work and strive have a chance to do so. Right down the line, every item that Rubio and the Fox News folks try to spin as giveaways are actually programs geared towards getting people to work. Look at the lament issued by Brian Kilmeade: "Childhood education, higher minimum wage, public college, public family leave, health care, health care for children, and in-state tuition for illegals, which they were cheering for!" Every single item on that list is about people who work, not people who want to be paid for sitting on their butt. A higher minimum wage? Well, paying people to work is a well-known incentive to getting them to work. Public family leave? That's there so that people with families don't have to choose between their kids and their job. Health care? Keeping people healthy is critical if you want to keep them working. Education programs? Not only are most students getting educated with an eye towards getting a job, but going to school is, in and of itself, hard work. Honestly, looking at that list, you might start to wonder if Democrats don't put a little too much value on work. But one thing is for certain: The notion that they're encouraging free-loading is laughable. You don't tie all your incentive systems to working if you don't want people to work. But it's not surprising to see conservatives flailing like this. The Democratic candidates, particularly Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, laid out an easy-to-understand vision of what they think this country should be like: One where people work hard, absolutely, but one where that hard work pays off. Where getting a job and working on it should result in things like health care and education and a decent life for your family. Indeed, they cast a scornful eye on the real freeloaders in our society, which are the wealthy elite that want to get richer without sharing the wealth with those who created it. It is this vision that clearly frightens Marco Rubio and the Fox News crew. And so we're greeted with this rhetoric that inverts reality, that labels hard workers as freeloaders, to the point where even your paycheck---see all the anger over the minimum wage---is treated like it's some kind of government giveaway. That kind of rhetoric is good for rallying the troops who thrive on the politics of resentment. But it's not going to do much to convince the rest of voters, who know that they work hard and just want to be able to have something to show for it at the end of the day.
October 13, 2015
Quit chasing “passionate millennial males”: Their tastes shouldn’t dictate what we read and hear
In a week with no shortage of seismic media happenings—including The Village Voice being sold and Playboy ceasing publication of nude photos—the news that publishing giant Condé Nast had acquired independent-minded music website Pitchfork Media sent even bigger shock waves around the industry. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, although a New York Times article breaking the news praised the company’s “thriving live event business” and noted the quarterly print publication The Pitchfork Review would continue to exist. The Times also obtained an email from Condé Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg, which noted the deal “reinforces our commitment to building Condé Nast’s premium digital network, focusing on distinctive editorial voices and engaging high-value millennial audiences.” However, another comment in the article from Condé Nast’s chief digital officer, Fred Santarpia, in particular drew the ire of many: Having Pitchfork as part of the company’s portfolio brings “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster.” That Pitchfork is often perceived as being male-dominated is well-documented: 88 percent of respondents to the People’s List, a crowdsourced ranking of best albums during the site’s first 15 years, identified as male. (In response, the site noted that this skewed percentage only represented “contributors to the People's List. And is not indicative of Pitchfork's overall demographics.”) Recent Quantcast U.S. statistics for the domain pitchfork.com don’t fare much better: 82 percent of the site’s visitors are male, while 45 percentof the site’s visitors are males who fall in the 18-34 age range. Of course, Quantcast is just one measure of web traffic, which is a notoriously tricky thing to measure in a definitive way. (Moreover, an archived copy of the 2010 Pitchfork Media overview is far more balanced: The collateral reported that just 64 percent of the site’s visitors were male.) Far more troubling was Santarpia only singling out the site’s “audience of millennial males,” because of what the comment implies about the rest of the site’s readership: that it doesn’t exist or somehow isn’t as dedicated. Quantifying passion for a website is an imprecise science—Is it return visits? Time on a page? Retweets? Facebook shares?—and insinuating that Pitchfork’s non-male-identified and non-millennial audience isn’t as fervent or loyal is insulting. For women in particular, being taken seriously as passionate music fans is often difficult. It’s a bias that’s deeply ingrained—Google the phrase “female music fans” (but without the quotes), and the first hit is a link to the Wikipedia page for Groupie—and it starts early. Teenage girls enthusiastic about their favorite bands frequently earn the tag “fangirl,” a pejorative term that condescends to their excitement, denigrates their loyalty as somehow silly or lacking, and hints they’re only interested in musicians due to good looks. Earlier this year, Monster CEO Noel Lee explained the launch of its Pearl Collection of pink and purple headphones thusly: “Ladies have different priorities — sound quality isn't the top of the list. It's comfort, lightweight, that it doesn't mess up my hair — that's all very important." And then there was the outcry against the blog “My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection,” which dredged up complicated issues about the gendered nature of music discovery, as well as how women are perceived to approach record collecting or critical analysis. When women like music, it often turns into a defensive pose, one burdened by stereotypes or fraught with baggage to overcome. (I was shamefully guilty of this in the recent past: In fact, a knee-jerk tweet I wrote chastising the “Stupid Record Collection” blog nearly went viral, and while I stood by the essence of my words, I subsequently felt bad about casting judgment on a perfect stranger.) Perhaps more troubling, when the new owners of one of the biggest music websites don’t acknowledge over half of its audience, it shows an unsettling lack of understanding of what the site is about. By reducing Pitchfork to its “passionate audience of millennial males,” it undermines the site’s efforts to be inclusive with their masthead, contributing writers and coverage. Neither the site’s staff nor its content is male-dominated. Staff-wise, two of its four senior editors are women; its associate editor is a woman; and two of three contributing editors are women. Non-male bylines aren’t a rarity on the site, which isn’t always the case with other websites or magazines. One of the senior editors, Jessica Hopper, oversees The Pitch, which has recently published articles called “Why Michete is The Worst Queer Rapper You Need to Listen To,” “Searching for Huggy Bear: Riot Grrrl and Queerness in the American South,” and “Op-Ed: Would Chris Brown be Allowed in Australia if He Were White?” along with pieces on Patti Smith’s new book, “M Train”, the evolution of prison songs and on bounce queen Big Freedia’s new book. Earlier this year, the site ran a massive cover story on Bjork which featured an extensive discussion of how she’s not given enough credence for her contributions to her own music, as well as how motherhood’s changed her outlook. These articles were noticeably and deliberately trying to elevate awareness of underrepresented artists and points of view, provocative topics and (in some cases) problematic issues. All of these things are too complex to appeal to just one particular niche group. In fact, boiling the site down into a desirable destination for a coveted advertising demographic, or considering its distinctive traits as conduits for engagement, is a depressing reminder that even the smartest, important and well-intentioned journalism in 2015 is too often viewed as a mere product. That women were excluded from this buzzwordy strategy is equally depressing, though sadly not surprising. Women who enjoy and are knowledgeable about music aren’t always rewarded with authority or treated with respect—they’re overshadowed (or mansplained to), or dismissed outright. That doesn’t mean they’re not out there, however: For the record, Quantcast’s stats show that the highest percentage of pitchfork.com’s female visitors are from the 25-34 age bracket, a group comprised of those considered squarely in the millennial generation. (A mere percentage point behind? Both the 18-24 and 35-44 age groups.) There’s no indication as to how passionate this “female millennial audience” is, but perhaps now that they’ve been actively diminished, it’ll make this group—and the rest of Pitchfork’s ignored readership—even more fired up to reclaim their space in music fandom.
“Bridge of Spies”: Tom Hanks goes full Jimmy Stewart in Spielberg’s flawed but disturbingly timely Cold War history lesson
There are any number of manufactured meaningful moments in Steven Spielberg’s lumbering, old-fashioned and richly engaging Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies,” and I don’t entirely mean that as a diss. This is a Spielberg movie starring Tom Hanks, after all, who comes as close here as he ever has (after 20 years of trying) to playing the Jimmy Stewart role in a classic Frank Capra picture about America’s wounded but essentially decent soul. “Bridge of Spies” takes place at a relatively recent moment of American history that would define so much of what has happened since, and was co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen – who are younger than Spielberg, but also remember that era. If this movie's not going to have wistful, ambiguous moments of resonance, it’s not going to have any damn thing at all. Let me work my way toward the moment in “Bridge of Spies” that simultaneously moved me and rankled me, and that captures the movie’s greatest strengths and most abundant weaknesses – always closely related, in the case of any Spielberg film. Hanks plays an upstanding New York attorney named James B. Donovan (a historical figure, although contained her in one of those Hollywoodized narratives “inspired by true events”), a onetime prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal who has taken on two difficult assignments at the behest of the United States government. One of them gets him in trouble with his wife and his law firm, and pilloried in the press as a Red sympathizer and possible traitor. The other one ends up getting him depicted as a national hero. First off, Donovan agrees to defend accused Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (played here by the marvelous English actor Mark Rylance), an assignment several other prominent attorneys have refused. As the Coens and co-writer Matt Charman tell the story, this begins as a straightforward question of legal principle: Every criminal suspect, guilty or not, is entitled to a competent defense. But when Donovan comes to understand that Abel’s conviction is a foregone conclusion, and that the government wants something that looks like due process rather than the real thing, he moves toward more aggressive tactics. This is largely true, by the way: The real Jim Donovan damn near got Abel’s verdict thrown out, arguing before the Supreme Court that the incriminating evidence seized by the FBI came from a warrantless search, and that even an enemy spy (if charged as a criminal defendant) was entitled to Fourth Amendment rights. He lost that case by a 5-4 vote. A few years later – the chronology of “Bridge of Spies” is, I suppose, deliberately murky – Donovan embarks on a secret mission to East Berlin after the U-2 incident of 1960, when the Soviets shot down a CIA spy plane and captured its pilot, the briefly famous and/or notorious Francis Gary Powers (played here by the bland, WASPy Austin Stowell). It seems ludicrous to protect spoilers in a story about an episode that concluded 53 years ago, but I suppose we can say that there’s plenty of atmospheric Berlin Wall cloak-and-dagger stuff, agreeable performances from Mikhail Gorevoy as an unctuous Soviet negotiator and Sebastian Koch as a shadowy, suave East German, and the obligatory Spielbergian in-jokes drawn from cinema history. (Donovan walks past a Berlin cinema that’s showing a film called “Ein Zwei Drei” – that is, Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three,” a farce about the collision of capitalism and Communism in occupied Berlin.) If you want to know what happened to Rudolf Abel, and how the Americans eventually got Gary Powers back, you can go read Wikipedia. You can also see “Bridge of Spies,” of course, if you keep in mind that it’s a Tom Hanks Oscar-bait movie more than a history lesson. It doesn’t misrepresent the facts, or not exactly, but it shears them free of context to a large and damaging extent. Anyway, towards the end of the film, with all that business squared away, we see Donovan riding an elevated train over the placid outer-borough suburbs of the early 1960s. He’s trying to ignore the fact that the other passengers have noticed him, because his face is on or near the front page of every New York newspaper that morning. (There were at least five of those at the time, maybe more.) So instead Donovan looks out the window in contentment, surveying the sunlit and prosperous nation whose most important principles he has defended. Then the train crosses one of those invisible urban boundaries into a poorer Brooklyn neighborhood of tightly packed multi-story buildings, and he sees a gang of kids scrambling over a back fence from one yard to another, quite likely up to no good. A cloud of fatherly moral concern passes over the sunny Tom Hanks visage, and it’s like a Capra-Stewart monologue, delivered in silence: Are we living up to the promises we made to each other? When we insist that we stand for freedom and equal opportunity, do we really mean it? How much better than the Commies are we, in fact? Spielberg is pushing an entirely unexceptional version of Hollywood liberal idealism here: Yes, we are a better and nobler nation, because at least we still ask ourselves these questions. Rudolf Abel may have been railroaded, but he had a good and honest lawyer, and he was not tortured or subjected to brutal interrogation (as Gary Powers clearly was). But when we lose track of those questions, when we no longer have the Jimmy Stewart-Atticus Finch-Tom Hanks paradigm of Establishment masculine decency to fall back on, we’re in trouble. I have no particular problem with that lesson plan, although one could say that the historical record calls for a sterner admonition, and it’s delivered here with such Hanksian blandness that viewers are clearly offered the opportunity of missing the point entirely. “Bridge of Spies” is meant to be an inspiring Capraesque fable about Jim Donovan, exemplary American, and that's fair enough. But in constructing that fable Spielberg and the writers skip over all the most important and interesting material about the U-2 incident. CIA director Allen Dulles was at once needlessly paranoid about Soviet plans for thermonuclear war and overconfident about American technology. Although depicted to the public as a super-secret, cutting-edge surveillance aircraft, the U-2 was a flimsy, underpowered construction that the Soviets had no trouble detecting and shooting down. Powers did not disable or destroy the plane (as he had been ordered to do) and did not commit suicide when faced with capture (ditto). He probably wound up telling the Russians everything he knew about the CIA and the U-2 program -- and you and I would have too, of course. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev trolled President Dwight Eisenhower for weeks after the initial incident, delaying the news that Powers had been captured alive and inducing the Americans into spinning all kinds of embarrassing falsehoods about the supposed weather-spotting plane that had supposedly wandered of course after its pilot supposedly asphyxiated. Ike felt so despondent after the real story came out that he briefly contemplated resignation. In terms of historical fact, the U-2 episode was a massive Soviet propaganda victory that made the United States look incompetent, arrogant and poorly prepared. There are valid commercial reasons why Steven Spielberg doesn’t want to tell that story, but those reasons make clear that “Bridge of Spies” is itself a form of historical whitewashing, albeit one less noxious and harmful than the customary American variety. I liked the movie a lot – it’s one of Spielberg’s most measured and most adult films in years, with production values every bit as good as you’d expect. And it would be awesome, in terms of cultural and historical impact, if the ideologues at Breitbart and Drudge and so on decide to heap invective on this tale of Jim Donovan’s backstage role in the Cold War as pantywaist, lily-livered, anti-American moral relativism. But to haul out one of the bigger critical truisms (which happens to be true), stories about the past are invariably stories about the present in disguise, and this one has a double edge that goes beyond anything that Spielberg and Hanks and their writers intend. Those who insisted in the late 1950s that the Constitution did not apply to Rudolf Abel – because we faced an implacable foe and it was a time of national emergency and so on -- have made the same argument many times in many ways, and make it today about anyone associated with “terrorism,” no matter how tenuous the linkage or how scanty the evidence. That’s a dangerous ideological illness that is well worth noticing. So is the seductive fiction that a redeemer will arise among us, played by Tom Hanks playing Jimmy Stewart playing an upstanding lawyer who believes in the reasonable middle ground of the American way. Look around you: Where is that hero today?
Sweet Jesus, David Brooks is finally making sense: How Fox News & the GOP insanity caucus pushed him over the edge
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but David Brooks is making sense. In his New York Times column this morning, he appears to discover what at least half the country has long known: The Republican Party has been hijacked by unruly nihilists. “The House Republican caucus,” Brooks writes, “is close to ungovernable these days. How did that situation come about?” I’m not sure what prompted his eureka moment, but it’s nice to see Brooks, a card-carrying member of the conservative intelligentsia, finally reckon with the present state of the GOP. Three months ago I wrote a similar column about the degeneration of conservatism and the Republican Party. I argued that conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, was essentially dead in this country. And that the GOP has abandoned its rich intellectual history, thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and even William F. Buckley, Jr. In today’s Republican Party, there is no place for ideas or compromise or prudent governance; it’s a party of reactionaries and insurgents, people drunk on destruction. To his credit, Brooks grapples honestly with this in his piece. He writes: 
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but David Brooks is making sense. In his New York Times column this morning, he appears to discover what at least half the country has long known: The Republican Party has been hijacked by unruly nihilists. “The House Republican caucus,” Brooks writes, “is close to ungovernable these days. How did that situation come about?” I’m not sure what prompted his eureka moment, but it’s nice to see Brooks, a card-carrying member of the conservative intelligentsia, finally reckon with the present state of the GOP. Three months ago I wrote a similar column about the degeneration of conservatism and the Republican Party. I argued that conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, was essentially dead in this country. And that the GOP has abandoned its rich intellectual history, thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and even William F. Buckley, Jr. In today’s Republican Party, there is no place for ideas or compromise or prudent governance; it’s a party of reactionaries and insurgents, people drunk on destruction. To his credit, Brooks grapples honestly with this in his piece. He writes:
This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.This is all undeniably true, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Today’s GOP is the inevitable result of decades of collusion between the Republican Party and the conservative media-industrial complex. The sane and reasonable conservative voices have been subsumed by the hysterical shrieks of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and the entrepreneurs on right-wing talk radio. These are the voices that represent conservative politics, and they are what’s poisoned the conservative brand. And Brooks makes no effort to deny this:
All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.The lunatics on Fox News and on conservative radio are the ones peddling the crisis narratives and the apocalyptic angst, and over time this mentality has come to define the GOP. Brooks is absolutely right when he writes that “politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions” and that it “involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.” But balancing opposing points of view is impossible for a party of purists, and that’s exactly what the GOP has become, as Brooks himself acknowledges. The collapse of the Republican Party has been a disaster for the country. Like it or not, ours is a two-party system that depends upon cooperation. But, as Brooks notes, “the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship.” Many Republicans appear not to believe in democracy itself. They deny the legitimacy of those who don’t share their views and they cynically work to obstruct rather than advance legislation. The consequences of this have been enormous, and it’s astonishing that a Democratic administration has been able to accomplish anything in the midst of such intransigence. I’m not sure what took him so long, but it’s refreshing to see someone like Brooks write openly about the roots of Republican dysfunction. I don’t imagine his message will penetrate the conservative echo chamber anytime soon, but at least it’s a start.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but David Brooks is making sense. In his New York Times column this morning, he appears to discover what at least half the country has long known: The Republican Party has been hijacked by unruly nihilists. “The House Republican caucus,” Brooks writes, “is close to ungovernable these days. How did that situation come about?” I’m not sure what prompted his eureka moment, but it’s nice to see Brooks, a card-carrying member of the conservative intelligentsia, finally reckon with the present state of the GOP. Three months ago I wrote a similar column about the degeneration of conservatism and the Republican Party. I argued that conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, was essentially dead in this country. And that the GOP has abandoned its rich intellectual history, thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and even William F. Buckley, Jr. In today’s Republican Party, there is no place for ideas or compromise or prudent governance; it’s a party of reactionaries and insurgents, people drunk on destruction. To his credit, Brooks grapples honestly with this in his piece. He writes: This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.This is all undeniably true, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Today’s GOP is the inevitable result of decades of collusion between the Republican Party and the conservative media-industrial complex. The sane and reasonable conservative voices have been subsumed by the hysterical shrieks of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and the entrepreneurs on right-wing talk radio. These are the voices that represent conservative politics, and they are what’s poisoned the conservative brand. And Brooks makes no effort to deny this:
All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.The lunatics on Fox News and on conservative radio are the ones peddling the crisis narratives and the apocalyptic angst, and over time this mentality has come to define the GOP. Brooks is absolutely right when he writes that “politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions” and that it “involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.” But balancing opposing points of view is impossible for a party of purists, and that’s exactly what the GOP has become, as Brooks himself acknowledges. The collapse of the Republican Party has been a disaster for the country. Like it or not, ours is a two-party system that depends upon cooperation. But, as Brooks notes, “the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship.” Many Republicans appear not to believe in democracy itself. They deny the legitimacy of those who don’t share their views and they cynically work to obstruct rather than advance legislation. The consequences of this have been enormous, and it’s astonishing that a Democratic administration has been able to accomplish anything in the midst of such intransigence. I’m not sure what took him so long, but it’s refreshing to see someone like Brooks write openly about the roots of Republican dysfunction. I don’t imagine his message will penetrate the conservative echo chamber anytime soon, but at least it’s a start.
