Lily Salter's Blog, page 984

Benghazi farce blows up in GOP’s face: The political witch hunt faces unwanted scrutiny

The chaos and dysfunction currently roiling the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has made life difficult for the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, the committee had been maintaining a low profile, keeping quiet and staying out of the news as it dug up dirt on Hillary Clinton to strategically leak to the press. The low-profile game plan was shot to hell by Kevin McCarthy, who bragged of the committee’s political agenda on national television, and was then forced to walk back his comments and deny saying the thing he said several times over. Suddenly, Gowdy and his committee were facing the one thing they’d hoped to avoid: scrutiny. That scrutiny has taken the form of a front-page New York Times investigation into what the committee has been up to over the past year and half. What the paper turned up is an investigation that didn’t really seem to be going anywhere until Hillary Clinton’s emails emerged as an issue, at which point its focus “shifted” from the actual attacks in Benghazi to Clinton’s electronic communications. And, in keeping with the general disarray of the House Republican caucus, the Republicans on the Benghazi committee are offering confused and contradictory explanations for what is going on with the investigation. As the Times notes, the official response from the Republicans on the committee is to “dispute any suggestion that their inquiry… has been partisan or ineffective or that it has changed course.” That has been the consistent refrain from Republicans since the committee was established, though it became harder to maintain that fiction in the aftermath of McCarthy’s inopportune truth-telling. But the unofficial Republican response to the committee’s recent troubles is a bit more enlightening:

Senior Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential conversations, said that Mr. Boehner had long been suspicious of the administration’s handling of the attacks and that Mrs. Clinton’s emails gave him a way to keep the issue alive and to cause political problems for her campaign. But he thought that the task was too delicate to entrust to others and that it should remain with Mr. Gowdy, the former prosecutor.

Boehner announces he’s stepping down as Speaker, McCarthy gives up the game on the committee’s real purpose, and now Republican officials are dishing to the Times about how it was all the outgoing Speaker’s idea to focus on Hillary’s emails for political benefit. This has all the hallmarks of a cover-your-ass operation – Paul Waldman sees this as Gowdy and his people working to push away any responsibility for what is turning into a damaging story for his committee. One can understand why the chairman would want to do that, given that Gowdy’s and the committee’s credibility are intertwined. His reputation as a serious, “prosecutorial” investigator was offered by the committee’s supporters as a defense against claims that the investigation would become a partisan fishing expedition. But it doesn’t really matter what excuses Republicans come up with. The Times story has punched a hole in the committee’s credibility and made clear just how little trust one can place in the public statements emerging from the Benghazi investigators. Way back in May, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released was is, to date, its only official publication: an interim progress report detailing what the committee had accomplished in the first year of its existence. Even by its own reckoning, the committee couldn’t point to much in the way of meaningful discoveries – a large portion of the report is devoted to complaints about delays in obtaining documents. But Gowdy and the Republican majority insisted that the investigation was proceeding apace and focused on “three broad questions” related to the Benghazi attacks: why we were there, what actions “relevant agencies” took during the attacks, and the White House’s response. They wrote that they were going to start conducting interviews with personnel outside the State Department. “The Committee takes its mandate seriously,” the report concluded. We now know that none of that was true. The three-pronged investigation was supplanted by a singular focus on Clinton’s emails. The interviews they promised would happen were, per the Times, “never followed up on.” And its mandate seems to have been abandoned in a messy political fight that is threatening to blow up in their faces.

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Columbus Day is the next Confederate Flag: The holiday’s political context is too unsavory to keep ignoring

It wasn’t long ago that Columbus Day – which was begun as a Colorado state holiday 1907 by Italian-Americans in Denver – was just one on those days most people didn’t think about much. If you went to school or worked for the government or most companies, you got the day off. (It became a federal holiday in 1930, courtesy of the Knights of Columbus.) Some Italians of Italian descent loved it, Native American activists and Howard Zinn disciples campaigned against it, but most were just grateful for a free October day and didn't really question why. But over the years, as Americans have become more aware of issues of race, more sensitive to the oppression of Native Americans, and more critical of received myths about our history, the consensus over Columbus Day has been gradually chipped away. One by one, cities – Seattle, Minneapolis, Albuquerque -- have reversed the date the once celebrated the arrival of a European who would turn American life upside down and renamed it Indigenous Peoples Day. It probably hasn’t helped, either, that a lot of employers have removed it from the day-off list. Indifference seems to be dooming it in some places. “The Pew Research Center found the second Monday in October is ‘one of the most inconsistently celebrated’ holidays,” The Washington Post reports. “Just 23 states and the District of Columbia (plus Puerto Rico and American Samoa) recognize Columbus Day as a paid holiday.” The Post suggests that the holiday could fade out from apathy, quoting poll data that show how few people care about it. But what's more interesting is how the polarization of American life has focused on Columbus Day. There are people who love and will defend the holiday, but many of the most vocal are nativists and extreme racists; the hashtag #ColumbusWasAHero has been inspiring white supremacists all day. Many of these posts are harsh indictments about those evil, naïve liberals, of course. (Only a few of these take the even-handed approach of a commenter who argues, “If Columbus hadn't discovered America for the Spanish, then the Danes could have, and tacos would have herring on them.”) On the left, the tone is almost as extreme. Last year, “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” came up with a classic “How Is That Still a Thing?” on Columbus Day, which includes images of Americans binge-drinking and throwing up in public as it describes Columbus inaugurating “a long tradition of obnoxious white people visiting Caribbean islands and acting like they own the place.” (The bit closes by describing “America’s least favorite holiday” as dedicated to “a murderous egomaniac whose most famous discovery was a case of getting lost and refusing to ask directions.”) But the laugh-out loud parody of Oliver’s show is positively lightweight compared to the indictment of Columbus himself by Vox earlier today. Dylan Matt’s piece gives us “9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.” (Here are three: “Columbus kidnapped a Carib woman and gave her to a crew member to rape,” “On Hispaniola, a member of Columbus's crew publicly cut off an Indian's ears to shock others into submission,” and “56 years after Columbus's first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 Indians remained on Hispaniola,” due to suicide and murder by Columbus’s men.) It's not just a war of words, either: The Detroit Free Press reports that a Columbus statue going back to 1910 "has been splashed with fake blood, and a hatchet has been taped to his forehead as if it had just been struck." At this point, it's probably too late for Christopher Columbus — you can't unlearn those history lessons. If a more nuanced point of view is possible at this point – and it’s pretty distasteful to argue in favor of the destruction and enslavement of native people, no matter what – it’ll surely get lost in the noise of social media. It’s not that people on each side are “politicizing” Columbus Day – it’s that the holiday's political context, which has always been there, has become more explicit, and more part of the larger national conversation. If this kind of intensity keeps up – angry shouters on the pro-Columbus right, angry pleas on the anti-Columbus left – we won't have Columbus Day to kick around. There are surely moderates left of the issue – likely the same kind of Italian-Americans who inaugurated the holiday almost a century ago, motivated more by ethnic pride than ideology – but they won’t matter much longer. We seem very likely headed for a world where Columbus Day resembles the Confederate Flag: if it’s just a mix of Limbaugh-loving crazies defending it, who would want to be seen cheering on "1492 and the ocean blue?" Knowing what we know now about Columbus, of course, it's hard to be upset about this. We hate to see anyone's day off disappearing in a country dedicated to overwork, but it's time for Columbus to take his last sail.It wasn’t long ago that Columbus Day – which was begun as a Colorado state holiday 1907 by Italian-Americans in Denver – was just one on those days most people didn’t think about much. If you went to school or worked for the government or most companies, you got the day off. (It became a federal holiday in 1930, courtesy of the Knights of Columbus.) Some Italians of Italian descent loved it, Native American activists and Howard Zinn disciples campaigned against it, but most were just grateful for a free October day and didn't really question why. But over the years, as Americans have become more aware of issues of race, more sensitive to the oppression of Native Americans, and more critical of received myths about our history, the consensus over Columbus Day has been gradually chipped away. One by one, cities – Seattle, Minneapolis, Albuquerque -- have reversed the date the once celebrated the arrival of a European who would turn American life upside down and renamed it Indigenous Peoples Day. It probably hasn’t helped, either, that a lot of employers have removed it from the day-off list. Indifference seems to be dooming it in some places. “The Pew Research Center found the second Monday in October is ‘one of the most inconsistently celebrated’ holidays,” The Washington Post reports. “Just 23 states and the District of Columbia (plus Puerto Rico and American Samoa) recognize Columbus Day as a paid holiday.” The Post suggests that the holiday could fade out from apathy, quoting poll data that show how few people care about it. But what's more interesting is how the polarization of American life has focused on Columbus Day. There are people who love and will defend the holiday, but many of the most vocal are nativists and extreme racists; the hashtag #ColumbusWasAHero has been inspiring white supremacists all day. Many of these posts are harsh indictments about those evil, naïve liberals, of course. (Only a few of these take the even-handed approach of a commenter who argues, “If Columbus hadn't discovered America for the Spanish, then the Danes could have, and tacos would have herring on them.”) On the left, the tone is almost as extreme. Last year, “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” came up with a classic “How Is That Still a Thing?” on Columbus Day, which includes images of Americans binge-drinking and throwing up in public as it describes Columbus inaugurating “a long tradition of obnoxious white people visiting Caribbean islands and acting like they own the place.” (The bit closes by describing “America’s least favorite holiday” as dedicated to “a murderous egomaniac whose most famous discovery was a case of getting lost and refusing to ask directions.”) But the laugh-out loud parody of Oliver’s show is positively lightweight compared to the indictment of Columbus himself by Vox earlier today. Dylan Matt’s piece gives us “9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.” (Here are three: “Columbus kidnapped a Carib woman and gave her to a crew member to rape,” “On Hispaniola, a member of Columbus's crew publicly cut off an Indian's ears to shock others into submission,” and “56 years after Columbus's first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 Indians remained on Hispaniola,” due to suicide and murder by Columbus’s men.) It's not just a war of words, either: The Detroit Free Press reports that a Columbus statue going back to 1910 "has been splashed with fake blood, and a hatchet has been taped to his forehead as if it had just been struck." At this point, it's probably too late for Christopher Columbus — you can't unlearn those history lessons. If a more nuanced point of view is possible at this point – and it’s pretty distasteful to argue in favor of the destruction and enslavement of native people, no matter what – it’ll surely get lost in the noise of social media. It’s not that people on each side are “politicizing” Columbus Day – it’s that the holiday's political context, which has always been there, has become more explicit, and more part of the larger national conversation. If this kind of intensity keeps up – angry shouters on the pro-Columbus right, angry pleas on the anti-Columbus left – we won't have Columbus Day to kick around. There are surely moderates left of the issue – likely the same kind of Italian-Americans who inaugurated the holiday almost a century ago, motivated more by ethnic pride than ideology – but they won’t matter much longer. We seem very likely headed for a world where Columbus Day resembles the Confederate Flag: if it’s just a mix of Limbaugh-loving crazies defending it, who would want to be seen cheering on "1492 and the ocean blue?" Knowing what we know now about Columbus, of course, it's hard to be upset about this. We hate to see anyone's day off disappearing in a country dedicated to overwork, but it's time for Columbus to take his last sail.

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The DNC screwed Hillary — now get ready for a Bernie Sanders earthquake

With so many people thinking the system is rigged and that politics has devolved into mere vulgar entertainment, the Democratic Party’s choice of a Las Vegas casino as the venue for its first presidential debate seems counterintuitive. That the casino in question bears the surname of Steve Wynn seems odd as well. In 2012, Wynn, once a Democrat of sorts, dropped $10 million on Karl Rove’s Super PAC. He’s gone on Fox News to lambaste Obama, whom he calls a socialist. His punishment: a ton of free publicity plus whatever it cost to rent the hall. The Democratic National Committee delayed the debates as long as it could and limited their total number to six. By way of comparison, there were 26 debates in 2008. The first was held in April 2007; by this point in the cycle there had already been 13. To enforce its new limit the party threatens a drastic sanction: anyone caught participating in a rogue debate will be locked out of all party debates. The phrase ‘Democratic National Committee’ is imprecise. When DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced the schedule last August she didn’t say who made the decision or how. Nor did anyone ask. It seems like an awfully closed system for an outfit with the word ‘democratic’ right there in its name. I wondered how the party picked it.  Did its national committee hold a meeting? If so, was it public? Was there a notice, agenda, or minutes?  Was there even a vote? On Thursday I spoke to the DNC communications director, a nice man named Luis Miranda. After a few minutes of polite evasions I had my answers: no, no, no, no, no and no. From what I could glean, staff made recommendations to Schultz and she then made the call all on her own. It isn’t clear that party rules authorize her to do so. What is clear is that they shouldn’t. Miranda told me the party consults with all the candidates. I don’t doubt him, but the consultations don’t appear to mean much, in that four of the five candidates wanted more debates. The fifth is Hillary Clinton, who recently said in a low whisper that she’s ‘open’ to more debates. Clinton is still the nominal frontrunner and the establishment choice. In 2008 Schultz was in the bunker with Clinton till the bitter end. Clinton is the only candidate in the field likely to retain Schultz in her present job or otherwise advance her career. There’s a good chance the only important consultation Schultz had was with Clinton. This should come as no surprise. Every four years party insiders tweak the process in hopes that some establishment favorite can wrap things up early. Due to the law of unintended consequences, and because these people aren’t nearly as smart as they think, this almost always backfires. Republicans did it this year with delegate selection rules that starting March 15, Super Tuesday, award candidates who win a mere plurality of the vote all of the delegates. The idea was to save Jeb Bush, or some Bush doppelganger, the trouble of a long, messy nomination fight. Among the variables left out of their equation: Donald Trump and a field the size of the Boston Marathon. Their new nightmare: seven of their 15 candidates survive to Super Tuesday, when Trump gets 24 percent of the vote and 100 percent of the delegates, including in Florida where he waves adios to Jeb and Marco Rubio. That’s right. Trump’s only possible path to victory comes via rules meant to send him packing before he broke any crockery. Nice work, fellas. Schultz’s brazen move to muzzle debate wasn’t any smarter. As Trump points out, debates are free advertising. Democrats could use some. The contrast with the Republicans might have helped. Trump’s made them so rabid Democrats could have scored points just by being polite. Debates could have helped Clinton by reminding voters there’s more to her than the email scandal. And they’d have gotten her outdoors. If she had her druthers, she’d never leave her comfort zone. It’s one reason Bernie Sanders could cut her lead from 60 to 16 points. By limiting debate Schultz is enabling Clinton, not helping her. All of which raises the stakes Tuesday night. What Bernie Sanders has done is all the more remarkable for his having done it without benefit of a primetime debate and despite a virtual media blackout imposed by a know-it-all press. In 2008 Obama drew crowds half the size Sanders pulls and got written up like the Beatles at Shea Stadium. The press believes only in polls and money. In September 2007 Clinton led the young, charismatic Obama by 14 points after debating him every other week for six months. She still led by 8 in national polls the night he ran her over in Iowa. On the eve of their first debate she leads Sanders, a disheveled, 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, by 16 points. Last week Sanders’ finance report showed over a million small donors, better than Obama’s record 2008 pace. More impressive to the press, he pulled even with Hillary in total money raised. This week it began giving him some of the coverage he deserved all along. In a primary, packed stadiums and an army of volunteers and small-dollar donors mean more than polls and Super PACs. Some say Sanders has hit his ceiling but he hasn’t even had a chance to reach his audience. Tuesday will be the first long look many centrist Democrats have had at him and the first time anyone has examined him side by side with Clinton. If he picks up as many points for his performance as Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio did for theirs, it will be an earthquake. No one should underestimate Clinton’s forensic skills. She’s never lost a debate to anyone but Barack Obama and even those were close. There are two dangers for her. One is stylistic. Urged on by the media, her maladroit staff still pursues its five-year, 10-point plan to make her seem more “spontaneous” and “authentic.” These are the same folks who taught her to say ‘ordinary Americans’ and who pepper her speeches with the flattest jokes in the history of politics. Her best bet between now and Tuesday is to have as little to do with them as possible. Clinton somehow translates ‘being authentic’ into being more like someone else, someone more ‘ordinary.’ In April she got in a van and rode from New York to Iowa. She named the van ‘Scooby’ even though it wasn’t hers, ate at a Chipotle and rhapsodized about people she met glancingly along the way. No one told her that ordinary people don’t drive 1,000 miles except in an emergency or on a camping trip, or that she’s far too old to be naming her van after a cartoon character. Little has changed. Now she gets down with the common folk by flipping pancakes with Savannah Guthrie on the "Today" show. No one is fooled. She’s Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t touched a griddle since Bill got elected governor of Arkansas. The closest she’s come to seeming like a regular gal was on "Saturday Night Live" reading from a script written by sketch comedy writers for a TV show. If you’re a passionate, cerebral wonk, busting a move with Ellen or yucking it up with Jimmy Kimmel won’t make you seem any more real; just the opposite. Clinton doesn’t need to be more authentic, she needs to be more honest. The email affair may go down as the ultimate example of the old saw that it isn’t the crime, it’s the cover up. I don’t know if she broke any law. I do know everything she said in that circus of a press conference at the UN has thus far proved untrue. And to what end? Imagine if she’d taken a different approach. Imagine if instead of all the folderol about the server being just for convenience, the emails being personal, and her being just the most transparent person ever, she’d looked straight into a camera and said something like this: I don’t know all the facts but I know I made mistakes. I always meant to abide by the letter of the law. Americans are right to worry about the excesses and abuses that arise from government secrecy. If I’m your president, I promise you a truly open and accountable government. She couldn’t say it because admitting fault comes hard to her, and because she doesn’t believe it. From her tenure as Secretary of State, from her remarks on the Edward Snowden case and for lots of other reasons we know her basic take on government secrets is ‘the more the better.’ This is her problem; misunderstanding many of the issues she studies so hard. She can’t speak with conviction of the evils of globalization, she spent years cheering it on and doesn’t really get what’s wrong with it. She can’t get too worked up about pay to play politics; she perfected it and still deems it the best way to win elections. After four years as Secretary of State she still doesn’t see the folly of exporting democracy by force of arms, or that our safety lies in the rule of law. Clinton has reversed herself on two huge issues: the Keystone pipeline and the Trans Pacific Partnership. She’ll get less credit than she’d like and fume about how hard it is to satisfy liberals. But in making each switch she looked and sounded as if she were moving pawns on a chess board. She announced the Keystone decision in a blog that provided almost no rationale; the line the "SNL" writers gave her was stronger than anything she said about it in real life. Her TPP interview makes clear her commitment there is provisional. (She hasn’t seen the text) She speaks of jobs and currency but not a word on the issue many progressives find most galling, the ceding to corporate interests of the prerogatives of democracy. Nothing she’s ever said in public suggests she’s given that much thought. Sanders faces different challenges. He takes justifiable pride in never having run an attack ad and has taken care throughout this race never to attack Hillary. On Tuesday he must lay out their differences and explain why they matter. It wouldn’t be ‘negative’ or personal, it would be logical and factual and also indispensable. Bernie doesn’t have an authenticity problem. He is that rare politician who stood his ground and waited for the world to come to him.  The bum advice he gets from the Zeitgeist consultants pertains to anger. They equate him to Trump, the idea being that both are vessels of populist anger. It’s only a tiny bit true. The violent rage of Trump’s base has to do with race, gender, sexuality and status. Those who feel it would be happy sitting in the audience of the Howard Beale Show, or just listening to Rush in their car. When Trump gets vicious they get a vicarious thrill. The rest of America is over the condition of the middle class, the democracy and the planet. All they want to hear is a plan. Only a portion of the hard core of Bernie’s base is in the least bit dogmatic. They may like a little anger but what they really like is the truth. Sanders’ enemies hope to paint him as an ideologue and a grouch.  He must make it through the night without giving them any ammunition. Hillary’s recent epiphanies attest to just how much Sanders has moved the debate. If the TPP dies he more than anyone will deserve the credit. Trump has shown that a rich celebrity can succeed in politics without buying very many TV ads. Bernie’s proving that anyone can. In 2008 Obama built the biggest grass movement in the history of politics, but once he won he took it private. Bernie’s movement is built for his supporters and built to last. Bernie’s miles ahead of Hillary on the issues that count the most but there are two things he still needs to do. The first is to speak more to the problem of public corruption and inefficiency. On most issues most voters are Democrats, yet Republicans run two of the three branches of the federal government and stand a very good chance of perfecting their monopoly in 2016. Voters want to know that the party of government is ready to fix the government. The second thing he or any progressive must do is help people connect the dots: show how climate change, globalization, pay-to-play politics and mindless militarism reinforce one another, then offer them not just another liberal to do list but a coherent theory of the problem and a strategy for solving it rooted in values deeper than ideology. It’s been so long since any politician in America has done that and he’s one of the few who could. If he starts that discussion on Tuesday night, there’s no telling where this will all go.With so many people thinking the system is rigged and that politics has devolved into mere vulgar entertainment, the Democratic Party’s choice of a Las Vegas casino as the venue for its first presidential debate seems counterintuitive. That the casino in question bears the surname of Steve Wynn seems odd as well. In 2012, Wynn, once a Democrat of sorts, dropped $10 million on Karl Rove’s Super PAC. He’s gone on Fox News to lambaste Obama, whom he calls a socialist. His punishment: a ton of free publicity plus whatever it cost to rent the hall. The Democratic National Committee delayed the debates as long as it could and limited their total number to six. By way of comparison, there were 26 debates in 2008. The first was held in April 2007; by this point in the cycle there had already been 13. To enforce its new limit the party threatens a drastic sanction: anyone caught participating in a rogue debate will be locked out of all party debates. The phrase ‘Democratic National Committee’ is imprecise. When DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced the schedule last August she didn’t say who made the decision or how. Nor did anyone ask. It seems like an awfully closed system for an outfit with the word ‘democratic’ right there in its name. I wondered how the party picked it.  Did its national committee hold a meeting? If so, was it public? Was there a notice, agenda, or minutes?  Was there even a vote? On Thursday I spoke to the DNC communications director, a nice man named Luis Miranda. After a few minutes of polite evasions I had my answers: no, no, no, no, no and no. From what I could glean, staff made recommendations to Schultz and she then made the call all on her own. It isn’t clear that party rules authorize her to do so. What is clear is that they shouldn’t. Miranda told me the party consults with all the candidates. I don’t doubt him, but the consultations don’t appear to mean much, in that four of the five candidates wanted more debates. The fifth is Hillary Clinton, who recently said in a low whisper that she’s ‘open’ to more debates. Clinton is still the nominal frontrunner and the establishment choice. In 2008 Schultz was in the bunker with Clinton till the bitter end. Clinton is the only candidate in the field likely to retain Schultz in her present job or otherwise advance her career. There’s a good chance the only important consultation Schultz had was with Clinton. This should come as no surprise. Every four years party insiders tweak the process in hopes that some establishment favorite can wrap things up early. Due to the law of unintended consequences, and because these people aren’t nearly as smart as they think, this almost always backfires. Republicans did it this year with delegate selection rules that starting March 15, Super Tuesday, award candidates who win a mere plurality of the vote all of the delegates. The idea was to save Jeb Bush, or some Bush doppelganger, the trouble of a long, messy nomination fight. Among the variables left out of their equation: Donald Trump and a field the size of the Boston Marathon. Their new nightmare: seven of their 15 candidates survive to Super Tuesday, when Trump gets 24 percent of the vote and 100 percent of the delegates, including in Florida where he waves adios to Jeb and Marco Rubio. That’s right. Trump’s only possible path to victory comes via rules meant to send him packing before he broke any crockery. Nice work, fellas. Schultz’s brazen move to muzzle debate wasn’t any smarter. As Trump points out, debates are free advertising. Democrats could use some. The contrast with the Republicans might have helped. Trump’s made them so rabid Democrats could have scored points just by being polite. Debates could have helped Clinton by reminding voters there’s more to her than the email scandal. And they’d have gotten her outdoors. If she had her druthers, she’d never leave her comfort zone. It’s one reason Bernie Sanders could cut her lead from 60 to 16 points. By limiting debate Schultz is enabling Clinton, not helping her. All of which raises the stakes Tuesday night. What Bernie Sanders has done is all the more remarkable for his having done it without benefit of a primetime debate and despite a virtual media blackout imposed by a know-it-all press. In 2008 Obama drew crowds half the size Sanders pulls and got written up like the Beatles at Shea Stadium. The press believes only in polls and money. In September 2007 Clinton led the young, charismatic Obama by 14 points after debating him every other week for six months. She still led by 8 in national polls the night he ran her over in Iowa. On the eve of their first debate she leads Sanders, a disheveled, 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, by 16 points. Last week Sanders’ finance report showed over a million small donors, better than Obama’s record 2008 pace. More impressive to the press, he pulled even with Hillary in total money raised. This week it began giving him some of the coverage he deserved all along. In a primary, packed stadiums and an army of volunteers and small-dollar donors mean more than polls and Super PACs. Some say Sanders has hit his ceiling but he hasn’t even had a chance to reach his audience. Tuesday will be the first long look many centrist Democrats have had at him and the first time anyone has examined him side by side with Clinton. If he picks up as many points for his performance as Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio did for theirs, it will be an earthquake. No one should underestimate Clinton’s forensic skills. She’s never lost a debate to anyone but Barack Obama and even those were close. There are two dangers for her. One is stylistic. Urged on by the media, her maladroit staff still pursues its five-year, 10-point plan to make her seem more “spontaneous” and “authentic.” These are the same folks who taught her to say ‘ordinary Americans’ and who pepper her speeches with the flattest jokes in the history of politics. Her best bet between now and Tuesday is to have as little to do with them as possible. Clinton somehow translates ‘being authentic’ into being more like someone else, someone more ‘ordinary.’ In April she got in a van and rode from New York to Iowa. She named the van ‘Scooby’ even though it wasn’t hers, ate at a Chipotle and rhapsodized about people she met glancingly along the way. No one told her that ordinary people don’t drive 1,000 miles except in an emergency or on a camping trip, or that she’s far too old to be naming her van after a cartoon character. Little has changed. Now she gets down with the common folk by flipping pancakes with Savannah Guthrie on the "Today" show. No one is fooled. She’s Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t touched a griddle since Bill got elected governor of Arkansas. The closest she’s come to seeming like a regular gal was on "Saturday Night Live" reading from a script written by sketch comedy writers for a TV show. If you’re a passionate, cerebral wonk, busting a move with Ellen or yucking it up with Jimmy Kimmel won’t make you seem any more real; just the opposite. Clinton doesn’t need to be more authentic, she needs to be more honest. The email affair may go down as the ultimate example of the old saw that it isn’t the crime, it’s the cover up. I don’t know if she broke any law. I do know everything she said in that circus of a press conference at the UN has thus far proved untrue. And to what end? Imagine if she’d taken a different approach. Imagine if instead of all the folderol about the server being just for convenience, the emails being personal, and her being just the most transparent person ever, she’d looked straight into a camera and said something like this: I don’t know all the facts but I know I made mistakes. I always meant to abide by the letter of the law. Americans are right to worry about the excesses and abuses that arise from government secrecy. If I’m your president, I promise you a truly open and accountable government. She couldn’t say it because admitting fault comes hard to her, and because she doesn’t believe it. From her tenure as Secretary of State, from her remarks on the Edward Snowden case and for lots of other reasons we know her basic take on government secrets is ‘the more the better.’ This is her problem; misunderstanding many of the issues she studies so hard. She can’t speak with conviction of the evils of globalization, she spent years cheering it on and doesn’t really get what’s wrong with it. She can’t get too worked up about pay to play politics; she perfected it and still deems it the best way to win elections. After four years as Secretary of State she still doesn’t see the folly of exporting democracy by force of arms, or that our safety lies in the rule of law. Clinton has reversed herself on two huge issues: the Keystone pipeline and the Trans Pacific Partnership. She’ll get less credit than she’d like and fume about how hard it is to satisfy liberals. But in making each switch she looked and sounded as if she were moving pawns on a chess board. She announced the Keystone decision in a blog that provided almost no rationale; the line the "SNL" writers gave her was stronger than anything she said about it in real life. Her TPP interview makes clear her commitment there is provisional. (She hasn’t seen the text) She speaks of jobs and currency but not a word on the issue many progressives find most galling, the ceding to corporate interests of the prerogatives of democracy. Nothing she’s ever said in public suggests she’s given that much thought. Sanders faces different challenges. He takes justifiable pride in never having run an attack ad and has taken care throughout this race never to attack Hillary. On Tuesday he must lay out their differences and explain why they matter. It wouldn’t be ‘negative’ or personal, it would be logical and factual and also indispensable. Bernie doesn’t have an authenticity problem. He is that rare politician who stood his ground and waited for the world to come to him.  The bum advice he gets from the Zeitgeist consultants pertains to anger. They equate him to Trump, the idea being that both are vessels of populist anger. It’s only a tiny bit true. The violent rage of Trump’s base has to do with race, gender, sexuality and status. Those who feel it would be happy sitting in the audience of the Howard Beale Show, or just listening to Rush in their car. When Trump gets vicious they get a vicarious thrill. The rest of America is over the condition of the middle class, the democracy and the planet. All they want to hear is a plan. Only a portion of the hard core of Bernie’s base is in the least bit dogmatic. They may like a little anger but what they really like is the truth. Sanders’ enemies hope to paint him as an ideologue and a grouch.  He must make it through the night without giving them any ammunition. Hillary’s recent epiphanies attest to just how much Sanders has moved the debate. If the TPP dies he more than anyone will deserve the credit. Trump has shown that a rich celebrity can succeed in politics without buying very many TV ads. Bernie’s proving that anyone can. In 2008 Obama built the biggest grass movement in the history of politics, but once he won he took it private. Bernie’s movement is built for his supporters and built to last. Bernie’s miles ahead of Hillary on the issues that count the most but there are two things he still needs to do. The first is to speak more to the problem of public corruption and inefficiency. On most issues most voters are Democrats, yet Republicans run two of the three branches of the federal government and stand a very good chance of perfecting their monopoly in 2016. Voters want to know that the party of government is ready to fix the government. The second thing he or any progressive must do is help people connect the dots: show how climate change, globalization, pay-to-play politics and mindless militarism reinforce one another, then offer them not just another liberal to do list but a coherent theory of the problem and a strategy for solving it rooted in values deeper than ideology. It’s been so long since any politician in America has done that and he’s one of the few who could. If he starts that discussion on Tuesday night, there’s no telling where this will all go.

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The right’s nauseating Columbus Day hate: Fox News, Trump, Limbaugh embolden white supremacist Twitter

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The Rolling Stones of Gen X: “David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen are our Jagger and Richards”

So you thought you knew Van Halen? I did. But I had no clue they’ve been around in some form since 1971, or that the brothers basically hated David Lee Roth but let him in because it was cheaper than renting his P.A. week after week, or that even after Dave joined they were the house band at Gazzarri’s for over two years before they got a break. Greg Renoff devotes his entire book, "Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal," to their formative years and nearly every page is a revelation. Reading it is like finding some lost demo tape every bit as awesome as "Fair Warning," or stumbling on a bitchen Camaro time machine kegger where Jeff Spicoli shows up with his hand in the back pocket of Kim Kelly’s bell bottom jeans. We have so much to discuss with author Greg Renoff. But before we get to the book, we must, must, must discuss Van Halen 2015. What do you think about this recent reunion? It’s hard for me to see Diamond Dave this way. I just had a conversation with a musician who worked with Dave for a number of years during his solo career. He said that Roth is a guy with very wide ranging interests, from origami to cattle herding with dogs, and as a result, one thing that suffers is his vocal performances because Dave doesn’t give singing as a technical matter the attention it deserves. In other words, because David Lee Roth isn’t a boring simple-minded guy who only likes to do one thing, he doesn’t always perform as well as he could as a vocalist. I thought that provided good food for thought, especially since DLR’s early live performances during this album cycle weren’t great out of the gate and he has improved as the band has played more shows. I wrote a grad school paper about the personality dynamics of Van Halen and how I thought Michael Anthony was the secret key to the band’s appeal. That solid blue-collar working man who holds the foundation down so the other guys can all be flamboyant. I don’t know if the band works without Mike for me. I think VH fans, at least those who came of age as fans from the 70s-90s, understand Anthony’s contributions to the band’s success were substantial, to say the least. He didn’t write the songs or end up on the cover of the magazines, but he was the guy, for instance, who was always spot-on with his background vocals in a live setting while Roth was jumping around and swigging JD. That made a big difference when it came to making Van Halen sound good back in the day. And Templeman also doubled Anthony’s background vocals in the studio because clearly he understood that he had a certain sound that made a difference on their records. So for me, yes, I do miss Anthony, even though I am glad VH is a going concern these days. You think Mike’ll ever be back? I think Wolf is a talented musician who is in an impossible position because of the messy situation with Anthony. Regardless, he’s handled everything with maturity and class and for however long his Dad wants him in VH, Wolf will be in VH, regardless of former members or what anyone else thinks. Why did you decide to focus "Van Halen Rising" on the early years? I’m a fanatical Van Halen fan who happens to be a historian by training. So I think I was pretty attuned to what was known and not known about the band’s past. I’d read just about every book about the band, and it always seemed that while the band’s post-1978 history had been detailed fairly well, VH’s origins and years in L.A. got short shrift. In the meantime, I’d read little mentions in Dave and Eddie’s interviews about these wet-T-shirt contests the band was involved in, the insanely big backyard parties, and about how Ed and Al had a power trio called Genesis way back in 1971 or so. As fans we knew almost nothing about VH’s history prior to 1978. I wanted to know a lot more, and that’s what inspired me. But it all came down to one key question — how did VH develop into a band powerful enough to blow Black Sabbath off the stage in 1978? That could only be answered by looking at their pre-fame years. Eddie and Alex had Mammoth and Dave had Red Ball Jet. And they really didn’t like each other at all. So how did Van Halen the band ever come together? I have a whole chapter in the book about “How David Lee Roth joined VH.” But the short answer is two-fold. EVH was not much of a singer, and he was an introvert at heart. He didn’t like fronting Mammoth (which was the band name before it was changed to Van Halen). Roth was confident and talked a good game, so even though his voice wasn’t great, he surely knew how to attract attention and draw a crowd while onstage. In addition, Dave had a PA system that he’d been renting to the brothers, which helped them think it would be cheaper to get him in the band. But when people read the book, they will see that David Lee Roth was very strategic about how he approached trying to join Mammoth. It’s a great untold story. Van Halen gigged for years before getting any sort of breakthrough. What role did Gene Simmons play in getting them signed? Gene Simmons will tell you he discovered Van Halen. I’m not sure that’s true, but Simmons did take the entire band to NYC and into Electric Ladyland, where a demo was recorded. In the long run, I’d say that even though KISS’s management passed on VH, the band got a boost from the demo because it was played on KROQ in LA by Rodney Bingenheimer. How about Ted Templeman? In late 1977, Van Halen’s media guide offered up a story that implied that Templeman just wandered into the Starwood club one evening earlier that year, was wowed by Van Halen, and signed them. That’s only true in the outlines. The truth is that Marshall Berle, who was booking bands at the Whisky in late 1976, got a tip about Van Halen. He then saw them perform in Pasadena and was blown away. A few months later, Berle, who’d promised to help VH get a record deal, called up his old friend Ted Templeman and said, come check out this band. Templeman told me that before Berle’s call he had no idea there was a band called Van Halen playing regularly in Hollywood. Templeman also said that he knew Berle had good instincts when it came to bands, so he thought it would be worth his time to go to the Starwood. So the truth is that without Berle making that call, Templeman doesn’t show up at the Starwood that night. In your opinion, what made Van Halen so magic? It’s hard to boil that down, but let me try. Like many of the great rock bands of the '70s, the creative push and pull between the frontman and the guitarist made the big difference. When he first joined the band in 1973, Roth had a vision for the group to have more of a pop sound. EVH, of course, was a brilliant technician and songwriter. Between those two things, we get the classic Van Halen sound. For kids like me who were born during the Nixon administration, Roth and EVH are our Page and Plant, our Tyler and Perry, our Jagger and Richards. What’s your favorite / most curious tidbit you discovered about the band? Early on in my research, I learned that Van Halen, soon after Roth joined in the summer of 1973, was performing “Cold Sweat” by James Brown. This really seemed like something out of left field for a hard rock band like Van Halen, but after I learned more about Roth’s background (he was bussed to a majority-black high school in Pasadena starting in 1970) and musical tastes, it all made perfect sense. Explain “Backyard Party Band”  — how did that work in Southern California in the '70s? The backyard party phenomenon ran hot in LA in the early 1970s. I think it was part of the Woodstock effect – the early 70s were the golden age of festivals: Isle of Wight, Watkins Glen, Altamont, and so on. I think rock music had really set kids afire and so the obvious thing to do was to try to imitate that on a local level. Parents would leave town, kids would hire a band like Van Halen, make flyers, get some kegs, and things would be off and running. You mention that Al called the shots because he could hands down whip anybody in the band but that was early on, before Mike Anthony joined. Just for fun – who do you think was tougher in ’75? Alex was bigger and more physically imposing than his brother. He was also an intimidating guy when he was drunk and not in a good mood. A number of people mentioned that to me. And Michael Anthony told me that when Alex and Ed would get in fistfights, Alex was very careful not to hurt Ed’s hands. Mike Anthony looked like a brawler, but from all accounts, was very nice and easygoing, so I don’t think he was kicking anyone’s ass back then. From "Van Halen Rising," one gets the notion there is a huge trove of unreleased tracks. What are your five favorite rare VH songs? Good question. “Believe Me” showed off VH’s prog-rock side. Would have been a great song maybe for the second side of Fair Warning. I love “Young and Wild” – that was the Kim Fowley, Steven Tetsch penned song, recorded on VH’s Warner Bros demo at the behest of Fowley, who’d told Marshall Berle, Van Halen’s then manager, about VH. I love the original “House of Pain” from the Simmons demo, complete with the horror movie lyrics. Also a big fan of “Voodoo Queen” from the WB demo, mostly because of the killer ending that has Anthony and Roth trading screams. And then “Angel Eyes,” which is Roth’s take on 70s soft rock, like the Eagles. The band recorded in in 1974 on a demo they did at Cherokee Studios. Supposedly it was worked up for Van Halen II too. Is there more coming? "Women & Children First" to "1984"? Van Hagar? In theory, I’d be interested in writing another book, but I think that comes down to how well this one sells, and if the other three band members — the Van Halen brothers and Roth -- would be willing to speak to me about their recollections. I think it would be more challenging to do a book about say, 1978-1985, without their participation. But nothing’s set in stone and my mind is open about all of this.   So you thought you knew Van Halen? I did. But I had no clue they’ve been around in some form since 1971, or that the brothers basically hated David Lee Roth but let him in because it was cheaper than renting his P.A. week after week, or that even after Dave joined they were the house band at Gazzarri’s for over two years before they got a break. Greg Renoff devotes his entire book, "Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal," to their formative years and nearly every page is a revelation. Reading it is like finding some lost demo tape every bit as awesome as "Fair Warning," or stumbling on a bitchen Camaro time machine kegger where Jeff Spicoli shows up with his hand in the back pocket of Kim Kelly’s bell bottom jeans. We have so much to discuss with author Greg Renoff. But before we get to the book, we must, must, must discuss Van Halen 2015. What do you think about this recent reunion? It’s hard for me to see Diamond Dave this way. I just had a conversation with a musician who worked with Dave for a number of years during his solo career. He said that Roth is a guy with very wide ranging interests, from origami to cattle herding with dogs, and as a result, one thing that suffers is his vocal performances because Dave doesn’t give singing as a technical matter the attention it deserves. In other words, because David Lee Roth isn’t a boring simple-minded guy who only likes to do one thing, he doesn’t always perform as well as he could as a vocalist. I thought that provided good food for thought, especially since DLR’s early live performances during this album cycle weren’t great out of the gate and he has improved as the band has played more shows. I wrote a grad school paper about the personality dynamics of Van Halen and how I thought Michael Anthony was the secret key to the band’s appeal. That solid blue-collar working man who holds the foundation down so the other guys can all be flamboyant. I don’t know if the band works without Mike for me. I think VH fans, at least those who came of age as fans from the 70s-90s, understand Anthony’s contributions to the band’s success were substantial, to say the least. He didn’t write the songs or end up on the cover of the magazines, but he was the guy, for instance, who was always spot-on with his background vocals in a live setting while Roth was jumping around and swigging JD. That made a big difference when it came to making Van Halen sound good back in the day. And Templeman also doubled Anthony’s background vocals in the studio because clearly he understood that he had a certain sound that made a difference on their records. So for me, yes, I do miss Anthony, even though I am glad VH is a going concern these days. You think Mike’ll ever be back? I think Wolf is a talented musician who is in an impossible position because of the messy situation with Anthony. Regardless, he’s handled everything with maturity and class and for however long his Dad wants him in VH, Wolf will be in VH, regardless of former members or what anyone else thinks. Why did you decide to focus "Van Halen Rising" on the early years? I’m a fanatical Van Halen fan who happens to be a historian by training. So I think I was pretty attuned to what was known and not known about the band’s past. I’d read just about every book about the band, and it always seemed that while the band’s post-1978 history had been detailed fairly well, VH’s origins and years in L.A. got short shrift. In the meantime, I’d read little mentions in Dave and Eddie’s interviews about these wet-T-shirt contests the band was involved in, the insanely big backyard parties, and about how Ed and Al had a power trio called Genesis way back in 1971 or so. As fans we knew almost nothing about VH’s history prior to 1978. I wanted to know a lot more, and that’s what inspired me. But it all came down to one key question — how did VH develop into a band powerful enough to blow Black Sabbath off the stage in 1978? That could only be answered by looking at their pre-fame years. Eddie and Alex had Mammoth and Dave had Red Ball Jet. And they really didn’t like each other at all. So how did Van Halen the band ever come together? I have a whole chapter in the book about “How David Lee Roth joined VH.” But the short answer is two-fold. EVH was not much of a singer, and he was an introvert at heart. He didn’t like fronting Mammoth (which was the band name before it was changed to Van Halen). Roth was confident and talked a good game, so even though his voice wasn’t great, he surely knew how to attract attention and draw a crowd while onstage. In addition, Dave had a PA system that he’d been renting to the brothers, which helped them think it would be cheaper to get him in the band. But when people read the book, they will see that David Lee Roth was very strategic about how he approached trying to join Mammoth. It’s a great untold story. Van Halen gigged for years before getting any sort of breakthrough. What role did Gene Simmons play in getting them signed? Gene Simmons will tell you he discovered Van Halen. I’m not sure that’s true, but Simmons did take the entire band to NYC and into Electric Ladyland, where a demo was recorded. In the long run, I’d say that even though KISS’s management passed on VH, the band got a boost from the demo because it was played on KROQ in LA by Rodney Bingenheimer. How about Ted Templeman? In late 1977, Van Halen’s media guide offered up a story that implied that Templeman just wandered into the Starwood club one evening earlier that year, was wowed by Van Halen, and signed them. That’s only true in the outlines. The truth is that Marshall Berle, who was booking bands at the Whisky in late 1976, got a tip about Van Halen. He then saw them perform in Pasadena and was blown away. A few months later, Berle, who’d promised to help VH get a record deal, called up his old friend Ted Templeman and said, come check out this band. Templeman told me that before Berle’s call he had no idea there was a band called Van Halen playing regularly in Hollywood. Templeman also said that he knew Berle had good instincts when it came to bands, so he thought it would be worth his time to go to the Starwood. So the truth is that without Berle making that call, Templeman doesn’t show up at the Starwood that night. In your opinion, what made Van Halen so magic? It’s hard to boil that down, but let me try. Like many of the great rock bands of the '70s, the creative push and pull between the frontman and the guitarist made the big difference. When he first joined the band in 1973, Roth had a vision for the group to have more of a pop sound. EVH, of course, was a brilliant technician and songwriter. Between those two things, we get the classic Van Halen sound. For kids like me who were born during the Nixon administration, Roth and EVH are our Page and Plant, our Tyler and Perry, our Jagger and Richards. What’s your favorite / most curious tidbit you discovered about the band? Early on in my research, I learned that Van Halen, soon after Roth joined in the summer of 1973, was performing “Cold Sweat” by James Brown. This really seemed like something out of left field for a hard rock band like Van Halen, but after I learned more about Roth’s background (he was bussed to a majority-black high school in Pasadena starting in 1970) and musical tastes, it all made perfect sense. Explain “Backyard Party Band”  — how did that work in Southern California in the '70s? The backyard party phenomenon ran hot in LA in the early 1970s. I think it was part of the Woodstock effect – the early 70s were the golden age of festivals: Isle of Wight, Watkins Glen, Altamont, and so on. I think rock music had really set kids afire and so the obvious thing to do was to try to imitate that on a local level. Parents would leave town, kids would hire a band like Van Halen, make flyers, get some kegs, and things would be off and running. You mention that Al called the shots because he could hands down whip anybody in the band but that was early on, before Mike Anthony joined. Just for fun – who do you think was tougher in ’75? Alex was bigger and more physically imposing than his brother. He was also an intimidating guy when he was drunk and not in a good mood. A number of people mentioned that to me. And Michael Anthony told me that when Alex and Ed would get in fistfights, Alex was very careful not to hurt Ed’s hands. Mike Anthony looked like a brawler, but from all accounts, was very nice and easygoing, so I don’t think he was kicking anyone’s ass back then. From "Van Halen Rising," one gets the notion there is a huge trove of unreleased tracks. What are your five favorite rare VH songs? Good question. “Believe Me” showed off VH’s prog-rock side. Would have been a great song maybe for the second side of Fair Warning. I love “Young and Wild” – that was the Kim Fowley, Steven Tetsch penned song, recorded on VH’s Warner Bros demo at the behest of Fowley, who’d told Marshall Berle, Van Halen’s then manager, about VH. I love the original “House of Pain” from the Simmons demo, complete with the horror movie lyrics. Also a big fan of “Voodoo Queen” from the WB demo, mostly because of the killer ending that has Anthony and Roth trading screams. And then “Angel Eyes,” which is Roth’s take on 70s soft rock, like the Eagles. The band recorded in in 1974 on a demo they did at Cherokee Studios. Supposedly it was worked up for Van Halen II too. Is there more coming? "Women & Children First" to "1984"? Van Hagar? In theory, I’d be interested in writing another book, but I think that comes down to how well this one sells, and if the other three band members — the Van Halen brothers and Roth -- would be willing to speak to me about their recollections. I think it would be more challenging to do a book about say, 1978-1985, without their participation. But nothing’s set in stone and my mind is open about all of this.  

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We get it, you love the ’80s! John Hughes nostalgia trap catches “Red Oaks”

The maddening thing about “Red Oaks” is that it’s not all bad. If it were, it would be easier to dismiss it. But the Amazon Studios comedy, which debuted today, is executed with a lot of flair and sophistication--a nearly deceptive amount of sophistication, really. One of the biggest tells of prestige television is just how much money has been spent on the production, and “Red Oaks” has the recognizable names and high production values to prove its pedigree. Richard Kind, Jennifer Grey, and Paul Reiser are in the main cast; attached producers and directors include Steven Soderbergh and Amy Heckerling. And the setting—Red Oaks, a Jewish country club in suburban New Jersey in 1985—is meticulously rendered, with the kind of attention to detail that only the familiar view of hindsight can deliver. Walkmen, VHS tapes, big hair, blue eyeshadow, aerobics and a thorough misunderstanding of the dangers of date rape: “Red Oaks” offers the whole nine yards of ’80s minutiae, in an appealing and approachable format. The problem is that “Red Oaks” is only minutiae, really. It’s a love letter to the ’80s, with all the aimless sentimentality and wishful thinking that the medium implies. Because the Amazon Studios model is to drop every episode at once, the 10 episodes of “Red Oaks” are less like a traditional sitcom and more like a long, meandering movie, split into bite-sized chunks. This feeds into “Red Oaks'” backwards glances, too; “Red Oaks” feels like mash-up of “Dirty Dancing,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Say Anything” and “Pretty in Pink.” Just to seal the deal, Jennifer Grey—a star of two of those films—is a series regular for “Red Oaks,” and Alexandra Socha, another regular, is a dead ringer for Ally Sheedy in “The Breakfast Club”(albeit playing a role that is essentially Molly Ringwald's character in “The Breakfast Club”). Music rights for the era appear to have been too expensive to purchase, but otherwise “Red Oaks” is pitched and lobbed directly to whatever algorithm suggests John Hughes movies, in rapid succession, as you comb through streaming options. The series follows David Myers (Craig Roberts), an awkward-but-not-too-awkward NYU sophomore who has taken a summer job teaching tennis at Red Oaks. His girlfriend Karen (Gage Golightly) leads the aerobics classes; his stoner friend Wheeler (Oliver Cooper) works valet. It being a country club—and David still being quite young—“Red Oaks” is populated with weirdos of every stripe. Such as: the “artist” who takes an interest in “photographing” Karen; David’s out-of-touch mom and dad; the filthy-rich club president; and, of course, the club president’s untouchable, damaged and alluring daughter, Skye. [This is Socha—who in addition to behaving like Claire from "The Breakfast Club," and looking like Sheedy, has a name that sounds awfully familiar to fans of “Say Anything.”] Roberts as David is a serviceable hero, in that he’s mostly a blank slate; the only characteristic he seems to have, besides being good at tennis, is being interested in filmmaking. (I wonder if any of the show’s producers identify with David.) The narrative, such as it is, follows the arc of the summer, as David fools around with Karen, falls for Skye, wins the respect of Skye’s father (Paul Reiser) and comes to terms with his parents’ loveless marriage (played with typical dramedy by Richard Kind and Grey). There are times where the sophistication of the show creates sublime little juxtapositions—for example, there’s an episode where two different sets of people go on dates, and the half-hour offers us two parallel nights on the town without making much of a fuss about the device. And especially with some of the minor characters, like Wheeler, Karen, and Nash (Ennis Esmer), “Red Oaks” offers a rich sympathy that neither apologizes for nor judges them as they go on adventures David barely knows about. But mostly, the story is scattered and unfulfilling—a portrait of youth that doesn’t quite go anywhere, a collection of disjointed vignettes that follow nearly every predictable story beat in cinema. It has a lived-in quality that draws in the viewer—but once there, the furniture turns out to be covered in plastic, shrink-wrapped against the encroaching forces of time. “Red Oaks” is mired in nostalgia, both carefully rendered and just as carefully unconsidered. It’s comfort food for a certain class of individuals—the individuals, probably, that Amazon hopes to reach with “Red Oaks.” But the show offers merely an airless hall full of mirrors; there is no vision or thematic content to this show aside from scene-setting. “Red Oaks” is just reflected memories and the vague outlines of coming-of-age movies. This is most apparent in the way the show treats its female characters. It seems quaint to drag the term “male gaze” out of the film theory classroom, but I cannot think of a more perfect example than “Red Oaks”—whose all-male writing and producing team looks back on the hot girls of their youth with pure objectivity. “Red Oaks”’ female characters are interesting, but the show struggles to give them interiority; they are all just about licking their lips while running around in their swimsuits and leotards, and it’s all the camera can do to listen while they talk. Each one of the female characters is tangled in a relationship with a man or men who are not as chivalrous or heroic as the main characters—pretty lifeguard Misty (Alexandra Turshen) is with a jock who doesn’t pay attention to her; Skye has several toxic flirtations with older men; Karen is too credulous of the advances of lecherous photographer Barry (Josh Meyers), who is after her to “pose” for him. The camera watches, with barely concealed indignation, as these women are ensnared by these men; the camera waits, with barely concealed impatience, until they see the error of their ways and embrace the nice guys. (David is the nice guy for both Karen and Skye; Wheeler is the nice guy for Misty.) Even David’s mom—Judy, played by Grey—is stuck in a weird, sad relationship. The pilot introduces the Myers family in the midst of father Sam’s heart attack. It’s minor, but it forces everyone to reevaluate. As he’s collapsing, Sam tells David that he’s always believed Judy to be bisexual, or a lesbian. This is then left to percolate, uncomfortably, for the next several episodes, until barely becoming a C-plot late in the season. Judy’s appreciably repressed and kooky, but there’s still something so painful and strange about the plot point—as if it is supposed to be funny, when it feels anything but. Indeed—to bring out another dusty term from the film theory classroom—I don’t think “Red Oaks” passes the Bechdel test. If it does, it’s mere seconds against what is a five-hour series. There is a glass wall past which the show does not even attempt to pass; I got the impression it would be too much of a distraction from the main purpose of “Red Oaks,” which is to manufacture nostalgia. It’s not that I don’t understand it. Our happy memories of the past are a security blanket; even some sadder ones can be looked back on fondly as difficulties now surmounted. When you’re 20, the world looks quite different than it does at 40, or 50, or 60. It’s not for nothing that David’s most formative conversations happen with his father or Skye’s father; “Red Oaks” is at least partly about being the same age as your parents once were, and remembering what they tried to teach you. But nostalgia is not just an emotional refuge. In the scope of a story, it is—like everything else!—a political act. There is so much casual exclusion and marginalization in “Red Oaks”—so many dropped threads that could have challenged the characters and the audience with a little more courage. The way we tell the stories of our past is fundamental to the way we think about our present and our future; that is at the root of America’s divide between red and blue. “Red Oaks” paints a past that is just a closed-ended cocoon for some man’s injured feelings. I have come to expect more complexity from television.

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Your fake Fendi has a human cost: Indentured servants fuel Italy’s knockoff luxury goods market

I could tell that Sam wasn’t lying, but the bags he had laid out on a white bedsheet were. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermès, Fendi. They were good, but not quite good enough. Sam [not his real name] came from Western Africa to Italy as an indentured servant. I didn’t get the details of his story when I offered to buy him a bottle of juice this summer while I was, as chance would have it, teaching a course on forgery, but what he did tell me meshed with what I had been told by a member of the Italian Carabinieri military police (a force with which I’ve collaborated over the years in my role as a specialist in art crime). He was selling fake luxury goods, but a very high level of fake that takes an educated eye to spot the difference. He isn’t quite aware of the distinction, but has been told not to accept less than 50 Euro per bag, which makes his wares fairly high-end, when it comes to fakes, when the originals sell in the hundreds. Sam is part of what is a subsection of human trafficking, not quite a modern-day slave, but not far from it. He volunteered to be smuggled out of his home in Africa to a new life in Italy. He is housed and fed, and bused into the city center, where he sells alongside a team of fellow refugees, catering mostly to tourists. He is paid, but barely, and is expected to repay those who organized his transfer from Africa to the promise of Italy, and who keep him fed and housed, in a system designed for him never to quite buy his independence. My Carabinieri colleague had pointed out, with a smile that I found out of place, a sort of game between these sellers of fake luxury goods and the local Italian police. You can spot it if you watch them long enough. The sellers are unlicensed and have no legal status in Italy, but are tolerated by the government because refugees like them are willing to do the sort of work that Italians don’t want to (factories, mining, messy manual labor), and are therefore a key, but nearly invisible, cog in the Italian economy. In exchange, their sale of counterfeit goods is accepted, as long as they superficially demonstrate respect for the police. I’ve seen it many times in Rome and Florence and Venice: Police saunter over, and the illegal immigrants are expected to quickly pull up their white sheets and run off with their counterfeit goods, around a corner and out of sight. If they do this, the police do not pursue or arrest them, and when the police pass, they return to their trade. If, however, they fail to kowtow and flee, the police are very unhappy, their authority visibly questioned, and things can get ugly. Sam was offering a mid-range quality of forged luxury good—one that holds up to closer inspection and requires a keen eye to spot the difference between this counterfeit handbag, available for 100 Euro (if he can haggle you successfully), and the original that might sell for 800 at the real shop on Rome’s posh Via Condotti. A lot of us buy luxury goods, which cost us hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars. It’s always safest to go to the Louis Vuitton or Fendi store, but there is a ravenous appetite for “designer impostor” luxury goods. We spend hundreds of billions per year on fake versions of what we think we’re buying, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Products labeled as “designer imposters,” or some equivalent are usually safe, because they are overt imitations (though the conditions of the workers who produce them may be objectionable). But when we buy imitation luxury goods, there’s always a chance that we are donating our cash to the continuation of a form of human trafficking. Want a Hermès handbag, but it’s being offered by someone like Sam, at a suspiciously accessible price? The problem is hardly limited to Europe. A 2004 report stated that the counterfeit goods industry in the United States alone brings in around $287 billion, which would make it one of the highest-grossing criminal trades worldwide. An estimated $1 billion per year is lost in tax revenue for New York City alone, where some 8 percent of all U.S. counterfeit goods are traded. In December 2007, federal officials seized over $200 million in smuggled goods in just one raid at the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey. Most of what was seized consisted of luxury counterfeits from China, including fake Nike sneakers, which had been labeled as “refrigerated noodles” on the manifests of the ship that had imported them. There are several categories of counterfeit luxury goods. At the top level are those created at the original factories, by the original craftsmen, but which are made after hours, smuggled out and sold privately. The quality and materials are identical to the originals, and these sell for the same price as originals, just not from licensed retailers. The mid-level (Sam’s fare) features handmade, quality imitations that are made off-site, often using stolen components, materials and molds or forged versions of them. But these are expensive and require skill to produce, so can still be costly. The most common, and cheapest, knockoffs are made elsewhere (often in China), using no original molds or materials, are meant to look only superficially like the real thing, and are of questionable quality. These are the easiest to spot, because there is little to no effort made to reproduce key details, like tooling or hand-stitching or lined interiors (if the interior of a bag feels like thin synthetic cloth, you’re certainly dealing with a fake). Leather should feel dry and substantial: if it feels greasy or sticky or too light, it’s probably fake. These cheaper knock-offs also employ versions of logos that are not exact copies, but are meant to look like the logo in question only at a glance, and may even include misspellings. Check for quality and quantity of stitches—the fewer the stitches, the less likely it is to be of high quality, and therefore authentic, and stitches should be perfectly aligned, with no loose strands. If there are seams to the product, like those joining sections of fabric inside bags, they should match perfectly, with logos lined up from one section to the next. Check images of the real deal online and compare them directly to the product on offer. And don’t underestimate the abstract “feel” of the product. Does it feel well-made, luxurious? Do the details, like zippers, feel good in the hand? If not, buyer beware. Buying online is particularly risky because there’s no guarantee that the seller’s photographs of the product are real, or that the product you’ll be sent matches the one advertised. It’s best to invest in products that are overt imitations, if you’re not going to purchase an original. But above all this, keep in mind that there are real people who suffer from the trade in fake luxury goods, and that your purchase may encourage practices like the one Sam has been caught in to continue. It’s easy to forget that there are complex human costs involved in bringing a product, particularly an illicit one, to the consumer. Just like buying an antiquity that seems to come from Syria or Iraq these days might place cash into the hands of terrorists, the desire for a discount knockoff handbag may encourage a practice that is little removed from indentured servitude, and not a far cry from slavery.

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“Transition makes things easier, but it doesn’t fix everything”: “Trans” author Juliet Jacques

Juliet Jacques has written a memoir, "Trans" (available now from Verso), based around her transition but encompassing a wide sweep of her life, from disaffected teendom in rural England to politically angry but established adulthood in London. Jacques’ transition was chronicled in the Orwell Prize-nominated column she wrote for the Guardian, "My Transgender Journey," which began in 2010 and lasted three years. However, "Trans" is a broader take on what it was like coming of age in the transphobic '90s, navigating an identity via music, film, literature, football, gender theory and a slowly expanding circle of role models. Jacques writes in a detached way, and descriptions of her attempted suicide and the unrelenting stigma she faced – tempered though they are with accounts of warm friendships – will strike you with their matter-of-factness. It’s an honest book, without being gratuitous. Hard to write, for sure; Jacques says she spent six months unable to type another word after she submitted the manuscript. Salon caught up with Jacques for a conversation about writing, censorship, politics and parents. You’ve already been in the public eye, but still, writing this book must have been terrifying. Absolutely. Writing this memoir was much more public, more permanent than anything I’ve done before. I had to have a quite stressful conversation with my parents, saying "This is what’s going in about you." The same thing with friends. I had lots of anxieties about the wider public. Arguments about how trans people are represented in the media, and how we represent ourselves, are very heated at the moment, so publishing this book in that context was terrifying. To what extent did you feel you had to censor yourself because of that? Some issues that would have been really controversial don’t concern me or didn’t fit the narrative. But I think we live in a climate that’s becoming increasingly censorious. There’s so much pressure on trans people to be good role models and, yes, maybe I could have said more about my sex life and my relationship with my body if there weren’t all these competing pressures from conservatives, certain feminists and the trans community. Some scenes are heartbreaking to read and must have been painful to write. How did you look after yourself through that? It was really difficult to reinhabit some moments in the book, and to do so thoroughly enough to create something interesting, poetic, or politically worthwhile. The hardest part was in chapter five, where I decided to kill myself. I knew that bit was coming for a long time and was building up to writing it. The way I dealt with that was to make sure I wrote the next episode – where I decide not to and, the following day, I’m still alive and I play football, well, feeling that nothing else mattered – at same time. After I’d written that, nothing else seemed quite so daunting. You say explicitly in your book that you see who you are as inherently political. How have you been aware of your politics shaping your identity? I became very conscious of my mindset changing around 2005, when I discovered that line of (mainly North American) transgender theory: Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Pat Califia and others, leading to Julia Serano and Paul Preciado. This theory wasn’t so much about making a smooth move from male to female or vice versa, more about creating areas between them or around them, and creating a better language to discuss our experiences. As a child I had the terms "transvestite" or "transsexual" and neither really suited me. "Transvestite" had all these sexual connotations and the stereotype was of a high-powered male lawyer wearing his wife’s underwear. "Transsexual" described someone who’d gone through a medical process, which I hadn’t and, at the time, wasn’t sure I wanted to. "Transgender" gave me this grey area; it gave me some intellectual space to move in. Trans memoirs like Jan Morris’s and Lili Elbe’s seem very "of their time" now and make you realize how dialogue has changed. Do you imagine yourself looking back at your book in the same way one day? Absolutely. Really, this book aims to make itself irrelevant. It’s reflexive about the way memoirs have been used and the obligation on trans people to write autobiographically. I do use that form but I critique it heavily and try to infuse it with politics, theory and history. I’m trying to move the conversation on to those things. You say in the book that inclusion in feminist spaces isn’t the most pressing issues for trans people but that, once those debates begin to influence health and social care policy, they become a bigger deal. Given that, how much attention do you give these days to feminist battles over trans issues? Like you say, I don’t feel that this argument around feminism is necessarily the most important thing in and of itself. Where it becomes a problem is when anti-trans feminists end up being involved in policy decisions that affect trans people. Lots of my writing on trans issues to date has been an effort to make sure that trans perspectives on trans lives are the ones that reach policy-makers. Really, the whole point of putting a lot of material in this book was just the feeling that, OK, I’ve done all I can. It would have been irresponsible not to get involved in this conflict at all, but I’m not going to let it define my entire writing career. It’s clear from your book that the abuse you’ve received has differed: Men have gone from shouting "Are you a bloke?" to shouting "Get your tits out," whereas women have tended to attack from a distance and from a more theoretical place. Yes, I don’t think I got any face-to-face abuse from women, or even particularly intrusive questioning. Towards the end of book I talk about two big scandals around trans media coverage. One was Julie Burchill in the Observer, the other was Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. It’s telling that the Burchill attack was on trans people as a group – quite abstract and relying on a set of crude, outdated stereotypes – whereas Littlejohn’s piece singles out an individual, which is even crueler. That reflected the gendered way that I experienced hostility from people. There’s a point in your book where you have an epiphany about why so many trans women end up doing sex work. Your whole book reinforced for me why there’s such an alliance between trans and sex work activism; there are huge similarities in the way these groups are talked over and basically held responsible for propping up patriarchy. The alliance completely makes sense to me. In a feminist context we get attacked by the same people, so there’s a need to unite against that. Also, particularly in the U.S., the workings of the healthcare system mean that a lot of trans people do survival sex work to pay for medical treatment. Employment discrimination and the way that heterosexual male attraction to trans women is treated socially adds to this. I think these alliances are incredibly important. Minority politics that unites over shared experience rather than splits over differences is what we should be aiming for. I love the line in the book where, a few weeks after surgery, you have this realization that, after all you’ve been through, "David Cameron is still prime minister." I wonder if you’re feeling similar now that your book is out? Yes. A lot of the book is a reaction against this preconception that transition is going to be a panacea, and the transphobic argument that if you transition and you’re not the happiest person ever, then transition was wrong for you and, by extension, is wrong for everybody. Transition makes things easier but it doesn’t fix everything. At the end of the process, there’s a psychological toll, let alone the other things we all have to be depressed about: the Tories are still here and we literally have a prime minister who can get away with, as Lord Ashcroft recently alleged, fucking a dead pig! You talk a lot about your parents in the book. Are they proud now that it’s out? I think they are. I called my dad when he was halfway through reading the draft. My dad being my dad, he told me about his allotment for 10 minutes and I was really anxious and had to say "What do you think?" and then all he said was ‘There’s a typo on one page!" And my mum’s told me that Shirley down the road, whose son I used to walk to school with 20 years ago, wants to read it. So what next? You’ve said you want to move away from being a "professional trans person?" I certainly don’t want to be on the front line anymore. I’ve been there for five years and the burnout has been really difficult to deal with. I want to do more arts criticism, which is what I was doing 10 years ago, and also I’m doing a PhD in creative and critical writing. I think academia will suit me better; it allows me to work in a slower, quieter, more thoughtful way. At some point there will be a volume of short stories with a trans theme. I think that’s the final trans-related project I want to do. @frankiemullin            Juliet Jacques has written a memoir, "Trans" (available now from Verso), based around her transition but encompassing a wide sweep of her life, from disaffected teendom in rural England to politically angry but established adulthood in London. Jacques’ transition was chronicled in the Orwell Prize-nominated column she wrote for the Guardian, "My Transgender Journey," which began in 2010 and lasted three years. However, "Trans" is a broader take on what it was like coming of age in the transphobic '90s, navigating an identity via music, film, literature, football, gender theory and a slowly expanding circle of role models. Jacques writes in a detached way, and descriptions of her attempted suicide and the unrelenting stigma she faced – tempered though they are with accounts of warm friendships – will strike you with their matter-of-factness. It’s an honest book, without being gratuitous. Hard to write, for sure; Jacques says she spent six months unable to type another word after she submitted the manuscript. Salon caught up with Jacques for a conversation about writing, censorship, politics and parents. You’ve already been in the public eye, but still, writing this book must have been terrifying. Absolutely. Writing this memoir was much more public, more permanent than anything I’ve done before. I had to have a quite stressful conversation with my parents, saying "This is what’s going in about you." The same thing with friends. I had lots of anxieties about the wider public. Arguments about how trans people are represented in the media, and how we represent ourselves, are very heated at the moment, so publishing this book in that context was terrifying. To what extent did you feel you had to censor yourself because of that? Some issues that would have been really controversial don’t concern me or didn’t fit the narrative. But I think we live in a climate that’s becoming increasingly censorious. There’s so much pressure on trans people to be good role models and, yes, maybe I could have said more about my sex life and my relationship with my body if there weren’t all these competing pressures from conservatives, certain feminists and the trans community. Some scenes are heartbreaking to read and must have been painful to write. How did you look after yourself through that? It was really difficult to reinhabit some moments in the book, and to do so thoroughly enough to create something interesting, poetic, or politically worthwhile. The hardest part was in chapter five, where I decided to kill myself. I knew that bit was coming for a long time and was building up to writing it. The way I dealt with that was to make sure I wrote the next episode – where I decide not to and, the following day, I’m still alive and I play football, well, feeling that nothing else mattered – at same time. After I’d written that, nothing else seemed quite so daunting. You say explicitly in your book that you see who you are as inherently political. How have you been aware of your politics shaping your identity? I became very conscious of my mindset changing around 2005, when I discovered that line of (mainly North American) transgender theory: Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Pat Califia and others, leading to Julia Serano and Paul Preciado. This theory wasn’t so much about making a smooth move from male to female or vice versa, more about creating areas between them or around them, and creating a better language to discuss our experiences. As a child I had the terms "transvestite" or "transsexual" and neither really suited me. "Transvestite" had all these sexual connotations and the stereotype was of a high-powered male lawyer wearing his wife’s underwear. "Transsexual" described someone who’d gone through a medical process, which I hadn’t and, at the time, wasn’t sure I wanted to. "Transgender" gave me this grey area; it gave me some intellectual space to move in. Trans memoirs like Jan Morris’s and Lili Elbe’s seem very "of their time" now and make you realize how dialogue has changed. Do you imagine yourself looking back at your book in the same way one day? Absolutely. Really, this book aims to make itself irrelevant. It’s reflexive about the way memoirs have been used and the obligation on trans people to write autobiographically. I do use that form but I critique it heavily and try to infuse it with politics, theory and history. I’m trying to move the conversation on to those things. You say in the book that inclusion in feminist spaces isn’t the most pressing issues for trans people but that, once those debates begin to influence health and social care policy, they become a bigger deal. Given that, how much attention do you give these days to feminist battles over trans issues? Like you say, I don’t feel that this argument around feminism is necessarily the most important thing in and of itself. Where it becomes a problem is when anti-trans feminists end up being involved in policy decisions that affect trans people. Lots of my writing on trans issues to date has been an effort to make sure that trans perspectives on trans lives are the ones that reach policy-makers. Really, the whole point of putting a lot of material in this book was just the feeling that, OK, I’ve done all I can. It would have been irresponsible not to get involved in this conflict at all, but I’m not going to let it define my entire writing career. It’s clear from your book that the abuse you’ve received has differed: Men have gone from shouting "Are you a bloke?" to shouting "Get your tits out," whereas women have tended to attack from a distance and from a more theoretical place. Yes, I don’t think I got any face-to-face abuse from women, or even particularly intrusive questioning. Towards the end of book I talk about two big scandals around trans media coverage. One was Julie Burchill in the Observer, the other was Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. It’s telling that the Burchill attack was on trans people as a group – quite abstract and relying on a set of crude, outdated stereotypes – whereas Littlejohn’s piece singles out an individual, which is even crueler. That reflected the gendered way that I experienced hostility from people. There’s a point in your book where you have an epiphany about why so many trans women end up doing sex work. Your whole book reinforced for me why there’s such an alliance between trans and sex work activism; there are huge similarities in the way these groups are talked over and basically held responsible for propping up patriarchy. The alliance completely makes sense to me. In a feminist context we get attacked by the same people, so there’s a need to unite against that. Also, particularly in the U.S., the workings of the healthcare system mean that a lot of trans people do survival sex work to pay for medical treatment. Employment discrimination and the way that heterosexual male attraction to trans women is treated socially adds to this. I think these alliances are incredibly important. Minority politics that unites over shared experience rather than splits over differences is what we should be aiming for. I love the line in the book where, a few weeks after surgery, you have this realization that, after all you’ve been through, "David Cameron is still prime minister." I wonder if you’re feeling similar now that your book is out? Yes. A lot of the book is a reaction against this preconception that transition is going to be a panacea, and the transphobic argument that if you transition and you’re not the happiest person ever, then transition was wrong for you and, by extension, is wrong for everybody. Transition makes things easier but it doesn’t fix everything. At the end of the process, there’s a psychological toll, let alone the other things we all have to be depressed about: the Tories are still here and we literally have a prime minister who can get away with, as Lord Ashcroft recently alleged, fucking a dead pig! You talk a lot about your parents in the book. Are they proud now that it’s out? I think they are. I called my dad when he was halfway through reading the draft. My dad being my dad, he told me about his allotment for 10 minutes and I was really anxious and had to say "What do you think?" and then all he said was ‘There’s a typo on one page!" And my mum’s told me that Shirley down the road, whose son I used to walk to school with 20 years ago, wants to read it. So what next? You’ve said you want to move away from being a "professional trans person?" I certainly don’t want to be on the front line anymore. I’ve been there for five years and the burnout has been really difficult to deal with. I want to do more arts criticism, which is what I was doing 10 years ago, and also I’m doing a PhD in creative and critical writing. I think academia will suit me better; it allows me to work in a slower, quieter, more thoughtful way. At some point there will be a volume of short stories with a trans theme. I think that’s the final trans-related project I want to do. @frankiemullin            

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The Great Barrier Reef’s last great hope

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Being black can be bad for your health: Race, medicine and the cruelest unfairness of all

On a spring morning in 1997, Jim Harper, a young man from Durham, North Carolina, woke up in his two-bedroom apartment with no clue that he would soon become gravely ill. The first signs of trouble seemed innocent enough: some numbness on the right side of his face and in his right arm and hand, easily chalked up to having slept on that side of his body. He stumbled as he got out of bed, but figured he was simply tired from the previous day’s shift managing angry teens at a group home. His fiancée, Regina, asked if he needed to see a doctor; he smiled and told her that she worried too much. Her anxiety ebbed as she went off to her job at Kmart, only to resurface when he didn’t answer the phone during her lunch break. When Regina rushed home a few hours later at the end of her shift, she found Jim sprawled across their bathroom tile. His eyes were wide open and he clearly recognized her, but his words were garbled. He couldn’t tell her what was wrong or how long he’d been that way. She frantically dialed 911. Within a half-hour of his arrival at the emergency department, after a neurological exam and rapid CT scan of his brain, it was clear what had transpired: Jim, just a few weeks shy of forty, had suffered a massive stroke. The doctors learned that Jim had high blood pressure that had been poorly treated, but found nothing else to account for his tragic fate. He had no heart problems. No clotting disorders. No aneurysms. No diabetes or high cholesterol. He didn’t smoke, rarely drank, and avoided street drugs. Ultimately, as best they could tell, Jim mostly had a lot of bad luck. * About two weeks later, I stood at the foot of Jim’s bed at Duke Hospital. Along with another first-year medical student, I was shadowing Dr. Wilson, a faculty neurologist, as part of a weekly seminar that introduced us to clinical medicine. This class was the highlight of our week, as it gave us a brief break from the lecture hall and laboratory, where we memorized biochemical pathways and micro-organism names, and provided a peek at our future lives on the hospital wards. We wore perfectly knotted ties and crisp white coats for the occasion, trying hard to look like the doctors we would one day become. Jim’s future seemed far less promising than ours did. A big man, he had once been a football player. Now he could not move the right side of his body. His face drooped as saliva dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. His words came out choppy, like those of a toddler; when frustrated, he cried like a child in the midst of his “terrible twos.” Given his lack of improvement, the doctors had begun to doubt that he could make any significant recovery. They were preparing to send him to a rehabilitation facility. This place also had a long-term care unit, where, if he made no real progress, Jim might spend the rest of his life. According to the nurses, Regina’s visits were already becoming shorter and less frequent. “It’s a very sad case,” Dr. Wilson said, as we left the room and walked to a nearby conference area to discuss our patient and his illness. He started by telling us that stroke was consistently one of the top five causes of disability and death in America. Then he drilled us about the major risk factors, going back and forth between us in a competition of sorts. In eager medical student fashion, we rattled off the usual suspects: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, advanced age, smoking, and high cholesterol. When it was my turn again, Dr. Wilson indicated that there was one important risk factor we had yet to mention. He looked at me with a worried frown. Come on, his look said, for you of all people, this should be easy. I sighed. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but, as I was quickly learning, it always did. “Race,” I said, looking down at my dark hand against my pristine white coat. “Our patient is black.” “Exactly,” Dr. Wilson responded, as if I’d now earned a top score on my exam. “Some would say that this is the most important variable of all.” He rattled off damning statistics about race and stroke: “The risk is twice as high for blacks compared to whites for those over sixty-five. And in younger groups, such as with our patient here, the ratio is more like three-to-one or even four-to-one.” I’d seen the impact of stroke on both sides of my family. When I was fourteen, my dad’s brother—who would often drive five hours each way on a Saturday to visit us for a few hours—died within days of collapsing at his home, putting an abrupt end to his unexpected and always enthusiastic visits that I so enjoyed. A few years later, my maternal grandmother—Grandma Flossie—developed dementia from a series of minor strokes that slowly stole her mind and, eventually, her body. Like Jim, both had high blood pressure. “Our patient’s other major risk factor is hypertension,” Dr. Wilson continued. “This also is much more prevalent in blacks—nearly twice as common. No matter how you slice it, race is a very big deal when it comes to stroke.” Dr. Wilson had hammered home something I would learn time and again, both at Duke and beyond: Being black can be bad for your health. * “Of all the forms of inequality,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a gathering of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966, “injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.” At the time of his remarks, the United States had begun to take several formal steps to end its century-long practice of state-sponsored segregation that had followed the end of slavery. In medicine, this meant that black people could begin to receive treatment side by side with whites rather than being relegated to separate and unequal facilities or sectioned off in run-down areas of white hospitals. Such practices had undoubtedly contributed to their poorer health, especially in the Deep South of Dr. King’s time, where black people on average had a life expectancy nearly nine years less than whites. While the civil rights movement ultimately stirred remarkable racial progress in various areas of American life, many of King’s concerns about health and health care remain valid to this day. From cradle to grave, these health differences, often called health disparities, are found virtually anywhere one might choose to look. Whether it is premature birth, infant mortality, homicide, childhood obesity, or HIV infection, black children and young adults disproportionately bear the brunt of these medical and social ills. By middle age, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, kidney failure, and cancer have a suffocating grip on the health of black people and maintain this stranglehold on them well into their senior years. Thus, it is no surprise that the life expectancy among black people, despite real progress over the last twenty-five years, still significantly lags behind whites. In suffering a crippling stroke at age thirty-nine, Jim had become another casualty of inequality, a fresh case that Dr. Wilson could use to illustrate the health burden of being black. * Three decades after Dr. King’s 1966 remarks, I entered Duke University School of Medicine as one of a half-dozen black students on scholarship. With the scholarships, Duke sought to cast aside its history of racial exclusion and become a national leader in producing a new generation of black physicians who could change the face of medicine. My goal as I headed for Durham was much less ambitious and civic-minded. I simply wanted to make my parents proud of me and set myself up to earn a good living. Race-based concerns ranked low on my list of priorities. But my professors couldn’t stop talking about race. During my early months, as they taught us about diseases both common and rare, they inevitably cited the demographics, explaining which disorders were more common in the young or old, women or men, and one racial group or another. When they spoke about race, they would sometimes mention Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Yet invariably, as it always seems to in America, their analysis came down to comparing blacks and whites. It seemed that no matter the body part or organ system affected, the lecturers would sound a familiar refrain: “It’s more common in blacks than in whites.” Each time the demographics of a new disease came up in a lecture, my stomach twisted. I knew where this was heading. Seated in a sea of mostly white and Asian faces, I wondered how this information affected their views of black people, whether they already had biases against us, and whether any of this impacted the way they saw me. This racial health data intensified my already uneasy feelings about my place at Duke. My classmates largely hailed from well-to-do suburbs and had attended prestigious, brand-name schools; I came from a working-class neighborhood and had attended a state university with little name recognition. Their parents all seemed to be doctors, lawyers, or professors. My dad didn’t finish high school and worked as a meatcutter in a grocery store; my mom attended segregated inner-city public schools before embarking on a forty-year career in the federal government. From the moment I walked along Duke’s manicured lawns and inside its Gothic buildings, I worried that I was at a stark disadvantage, both socially and academically. Constantly hearing about the medical frailties of black people picked at the scab of my insecurity. Over time, I came to dread this racial aspect of the lectures so much that I felt intense, perverse relief whenever a professor mentioned that a disease was more common among white people. But this list was short and the refrain that accompanied it proved equally painful. For example, while breast cancer got diagnosed more often in white women, “black women who get this disease do much worse,” the professors would say. While I was learning about the health woes of my race, my own body began to betray me. The first sign occurred not long after I’d met Jim, the young stroke victim. As part of that same introductory course, my classmates and I learned basic medical skills by practicing on each other. One day, we measured blood pressures. My classmate frowned as she took mine. The reading was 150/95. Our supervisor, a family physician, rechecked and confirmed the reading. The doctor I saw soon afterward gave even worse news: My kidneys were showing early signs of failure. To a twenty-three-year-old first-year medical student, high blood pressure and kidney disease sounded like a death sentence. Worst-case scenarios flashed through my mind: Dialysis. Kidney transplant. Transplant rejection. More dialysis. Infection. Death. Was I destined for a similar fate as my uncle and grandmother? Or something worse? Would I even reach fifty? The image of Jim flashed through my mind. A few weeks after leaving the hospital and moving into the rehab facility, he died from a massive blood clot that lodged in his lungs. He had just turned forty. I drove home from the clinic picturing Jim in an open casket. But instead of a stirring eulogy and traditional funeral hymnals, I heard Dr. Wilson’s voice reciting statistics on race and stroke. * As I struggled to make sense of the prospect of facing chronic illness in my twenties, I became consumed by the broader health problems of my race. Along with the many patients I saw who gave life to my professors’ statistics came reports of prominent black men who had met similar fates. Harvard Law graduate and billionaire CEO Reginald Lewis died at age fifty from cancer, while football legends Walter Payton and Reggie White died in their mid-forties from rare disorders, just a few years before 60 Minutes mainstay Ed Bradley succumbed in his mid-sixties to cancer. Journalist Ron Howell chronicled the premature deaths of his black classmates from Yale in a 2011 article for the university’s alumni magazine that generated national interest. A large bank account, Ivy League schooling, Hall of Fame busts, and a quarter-century run on America’s most-watched program stood no match against early death for these black men. Why do black people suffer more health problems than other groups? What do these challenges mean in their everyday lives? How do their struggles play out before a largely white medical community? How can we begin to solve these seemingly intractable problems? Do I have a special role to play as a black physician? Confronting these questions has led me on an intellectual and emotional journey, one that I’ve tried to capture in the pages that follow. I’ve divided the book into three sections, corresponding to the different phases of my medical life. Part I surveys my medical school years. Part II explores my grueling twelve months of medical internship as a newly minted doctor. Part III examines my subsequent years in psychiatry training and in early clinical practice. Throughout each stage, race played a recurrent role, at turns predictable and unexpected, often annoying, sometimes disheartening, and occasionally uplifting. By sharing my story, as well as the stories of some of the patients I’ve met over the past fifteen years, I hope to humanize the dire statistics and bitter racial debates and paint a fuller picture of the experiences of black patients, as well as that of the black doctors who navigate between the black community and the predominately white medical world. In tracing my journey along the intersection of race and medicine at the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, I make no claim to speak for all black physicians or black patients, yet I am confident that much of what I have written will ring true to their varied experiences. By putting human faces on these serious dilemmas, I hope to contribute to a much-needed public dialogue on improving the health of black people. Jim’s fate—a young black person robbed of his future—is one that far too many of us suffer. Excerpted from "Black Man in a White Coat" by Damon Tweedy. "Black Man in a White Coat" copyright © 2015 by Damon Tweedy. First hardcover edition published Sept. 8, 2015, by Picador. All rights reserved.On a spring morning in 1997, Jim Harper, a young man from Durham, North Carolina, woke up in his two-bedroom apartment with no clue that he would soon become gravely ill. The first signs of trouble seemed innocent enough: some numbness on the right side of his face and in his right arm and hand, easily chalked up to having slept on that side of his body. He stumbled as he got out of bed, but figured he was simply tired from the previous day’s shift managing angry teens at a group home. His fiancée, Regina, asked if he needed to see a doctor; he smiled and told her that she worried too much. Her anxiety ebbed as she went off to her job at Kmart, only to resurface when he didn’t answer the phone during her lunch break. When Regina rushed home a few hours later at the end of her shift, she found Jim sprawled across their bathroom tile. His eyes were wide open and he clearly recognized her, but his words were garbled. He couldn’t tell her what was wrong or how long he’d been that way. She frantically dialed 911. Within a half-hour of his arrival at the emergency department, after a neurological exam and rapid CT scan of his brain, it was clear what had transpired: Jim, just a few weeks shy of forty, had suffered a massive stroke. The doctors learned that Jim had high blood pressure that had been poorly treated, but found nothing else to account for his tragic fate. He had no heart problems. No clotting disorders. No aneurysms. No diabetes or high cholesterol. He didn’t smoke, rarely drank, and avoided street drugs. Ultimately, as best they could tell, Jim mostly had a lot of bad luck. * About two weeks later, I stood at the foot of Jim’s bed at Duke Hospital. Along with another first-year medical student, I was shadowing Dr. Wilson, a faculty neurologist, as part of a weekly seminar that introduced us to clinical medicine. This class was the highlight of our week, as it gave us a brief break from the lecture hall and laboratory, where we memorized biochemical pathways and micro-organism names, and provided a peek at our future lives on the hospital wards. We wore perfectly knotted ties and crisp white coats for the occasion, trying hard to look like the doctors we would one day become. Jim’s future seemed far less promising than ours did. A big man, he had once been a football player. Now he could not move the right side of his body. His face drooped as saliva dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. His words came out choppy, like those of a toddler; when frustrated, he cried like a child in the midst of his “terrible twos.” Given his lack of improvement, the doctors had begun to doubt that he could make any significant recovery. They were preparing to send him to a rehabilitation facility. This place also had a long-term care unit, where, if he made no real progress, Jim might spend the rest of his life. According to the nurses, Regina’s visits were already becoming shorter and less frequent. “It’s a very sad case,” Dr. Wilson said, as we left the room and walked to a nearby conference area to discuss our patient and his illness. He started by telling us that stroke was consistently one of the top five causes of disability and death in America. Then he drilled us about the major risk factors, going back and forth between us in a competition of sorts. In eager medical student fashion, we rattled off the usual suspects: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, advanced age, smoking, and high cholesterol. When it was my turn again, Dr. Wilson indicated that there was one important risk factor we had yet to mention. He looked at me with a worried frown. Come on, his look said, for you of all people, this should be easy. I sighed. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but, as I was quickly learning, it always did. “Race,” I said, looking down at my dark hand against my pristine white coat. “Our patient is black.” “Exactly,” Dr. Wilson responded, as if I’d now earned a top score on my exam. “Some would say that this is the most important variable of all.” He rattled off damning statistics about race and stroke: “The risk is twice as high for blacks compared to whites for those over sixty-five. And in younger groups, such as with our patient here, the ratio is more like three-to-one or even four-to-one.” I’d seen the impact of stroke on both sides of my family. When I was fourteen, my dad’s brother—who would often drive five hours each way on a Saturday to visit us for a few hours—died within days of collapsing at his home, putting an abrupt end to his unexpected and always enthusiastic visits that I so enjoyed. A few years later, my maternal grandmother—Grandma Flossie—developed dementia from a series of minor strokes that slowly stole her mind and, eventually, her body. Like Jim, both had high blood pressure. “Our patient’s other major risk factor is hypertension,” Dr. Wilson continued. “This also is much more prevalent in blacks—nearly twice as common. No matter how you slice it, race is a very big deal when it comes to stroke.” Dr. Wilson had hammered home something I would learn time and again, both at Duke and beyond: Being black can be bad for your health. * “Of all the forms of inequality,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a gathering of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966, “injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.” At the time of his remarks, the United States had begun to take several formal steps to end its century-long practice of state-sponsored segregation that had followed the end of slavery. In medicine, this meant that black people could begin to receive treatment side by side with whites rather than being relegated to separate and unequal facilities or sectioned off in run-down areas of white hospitals. Such practices had undoubtedly contributed to their poorer health, especially in the Deep South of Dr. King’s time, where black people on average had a life expectancy nearly nine years less than whites. While the civil rights movement ultimately stirred remarkable racial progress in various areas of American life, many of King’s concerns about health and health care remain valid to this day. From cradle to grave, these health differences, often called health disparities, are found virtually anywhere one might choose to look. Whether it is premature birth, infant mortality, homicide, childhood obesity, or HIV infection, black children and young adults disproportionately bear the brunt of these medical and social ills. By middle age, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, kidney failure, and cancer have a suffocating grip on the health of black people and maintain this stranglehold on them well into their senior years. Thus, it is no surprise that the life expectancy among black people, despite real progress over the last twenty-five years, still significantly lags behind whites. In suffering a crippling stroke at age thirty-nine, Jim had become another casualty of inequality, a fresh case that Dr. Wilson could use to illustrate the health burden of being black. * Three decades after Dr. King’s 1966 remarks, I entered Duke University School of Medicine as one of a half-dozen black students on scholarship. With the scholarships, Duke sought to cast aside its history of racial exclusion and become a national leader in producing a new generation of black physicians who could change the face of medicine. My goal as I headed for Durham was much less ambitious and civic-minded. I simply wanted to make my parents proud of me and set myself up to earn a good living. Race-based concerns ranked low on my list of priorities. But my professors couldn’t stop talking about race. During my early months, as they taught us about diseases both common and rare, they inevitably cited the demographics, explaining which disorders were more common in the young or old, women or men, and one racial group or another. When they spoke about race, they would sometimes mention Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Yet invariably, as it always seems to in America, their analysis came down to comparing blacks and whites. It seemed that no matter the body part or organ system affected, the lecturers would sound a familiar refrain: “It’s more common in blacks than in whites.” Each time the demographics of a new disease came up in a lecture, my stomach twisted. I knew where this was heading. Seated in a sea of mostly white and Asian faces, I wondered how this information affected their views of black people, whether they already had biases against us, and whether any of this impacted the way they saw me. This racial health data intensified my already uneasy feelings about my place at Duke. My classmates largely hailed from well-to-do suburbs and had attended prestigious, brand-name schools; I came from a working-class neighborhood and had attended a state university with little name recognition. Their parents all seemed to be doctors, lawyers, or professors. My dad didn’t finish high school and worked as a meatcutter in a grocery store; my mom attended segregated inner-city public schools before embarking on a forty-year career in the federal government. From the moment I walked along Duke’s manicured lawns and inside its Gothic buildings, I worried that I was at a stark disadvantage, both socially and academically. Constantly hearing about the medical frailties of black people picked at the scab of my insecurity. Over time, I came to dread this racial aspect of the lectures so much that I felt intense, perverse relief whenever a professor mentioned that a disease was more common among white people. But this list was short and the refrain that accompanied it proved equally painful. For example, while breast cancer got diagnosed more often in white women, “black women who get this disease do much worse,” the professors would say. While I was learning about the health woes of my race, my own body began to betray me. The first sign occurred not long after I’d met Jim, the young stroke victim. As part of that same introductory course, my classmates and I learned basic medical skills by practicing on each other. One day, we measured blood pressures. My classmate frowned as she took mine. The reading was 150/95. Our supervisor, a family physician, rechecked and confirmed the reading. The doctor I saw soon afterward gave even worse news: My kidneys were showing early signs of failure. To a twenty-three-year-old first-year medical student, high blood pressure and kidney disease sounded like a death sentence. Worst-case scenarios flashed through my mind: Dialysis. Kidney transplant. Transplant rejection. More dialysis. Infection. Death. Was I destined for a similar fate as my uncle and grandmother? Or something worse? Would I even reach fifty? The image of Jim flashed through my mind. A few weeks after leaving the hospital and moving into the rehab facility, he died from a massive blood clot that lodged in his lungs. He had just turned forty. I drove home from the clinic picturing Jim in an open casket. But instead of a stirring eulogy and traditional funeral hymnals, I heard Dr. Wilson’s voice reciting statistics on race and stroke. * As I struggled to make sense of the prospect of facing chronic illness in my twenties, I became consumed by the broader health problems of my race. Along with the many patients I saw who gave life to my professors’ statistics came reports of prominent black men who had met similar fates. Harvard Law graduate and billionaire CEO Reginald Lewis died at age fifty from cancer, while football legends Walter Payton and Reggie White died in their mid-forties from rare disorders, just a few years before 60 Minutes mainstay Ed Bradley succumbed in his mid-sixties to cancer. Journalist Ron Howell chronicled the premature deaths of his black classmates from Yale in a 2011 article for the university’s alumni magazine that generated national interest. A large bank account, Ivy League schooling, Hall of Fame busts, and a quarter-century run on America’s most-watched program stood no match against early death for these black men. Why do black people suffer more health problems than other groups? What do these challenges mean in their everyday lives? How do their struggles play out before a largely white medical community? How can we begin to solve these seemingly intractable problems? Do I have a special role to play as a black physician? Confronting these questions has led me on an intellectual and emotional journey, one that I’ve tried to capture in the pages that follow. I’ve divided the book into three sections, corresponding to the different phases of my medical life. Part I surveys my medical school years. Part II explores my grueling twelve months of medical internship as a newly minted doctor. Part III examines my subsequent years in psychiatry training and in early clinical practice. Throughout each stage, race played a recurrent role, at turns predictable and unexpected, often annoying, sometimes disheartening, and occasionally uplifting. By sharing my story, as well as the stories of some of the patients I’ve met over the past fifteen years, I hope to humanize the dire statistics and bitter racial debates and paint a fuller picture of the experiences of black patients, as well as that of the black doctors who navigate between the black community and the predominately white medical world. In tracing my journey along the intersection of race and medicine at the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, I make no claim to speak for all black physicians or black patients, yet I am confident that much of what I have written will ring true to their varied experiences. By putting human faces on these serious dilemmas, I hope to contribute to a much-needed public dialogue on improving the health of black people. Jim’s fate—a young black person robbed of his future—is one that far too many of us suffer. Excerpted from "Black Man in a White Coat" by Damon Tweedy. "Black Man in a White Coat" copyright © 2015 by Damon Tweedy. First hardcover edition published Sept. 8, 2015, by Picador. All rights reserved.

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