David Michael Newstead's Blog, page 105
January 11, 2017
In Beard News
By David Michael Newstead.
In the last month, there have been several notable news stories about beards. The most prominent of which concerns Sikh and Muslim Americans in the military. After years of debate, the U.S. Army is now allowing greater religious accommodations to grow beards as required by some faiths. It’s worth pointing out, however, that strict anti-beard policies were only instituted by the U.S. military in the 1980s. Prior to that, Sikh Americans in particular served in both World Wars fully bearded.
In related news, the NYPD took similar steps to ease restrictions on beards, which affect Sikh, Jewish, and Muslim officers on the force.
January 8, 2017
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
By David Michael Newstead.
In Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev discusses his nine years working in reality TV in Moscow. It’s a place where beautiful gold diggers who never knew their fathers dream of meeting a rich husband, ex-gangsters become local heroes who direct action movies, and religious cults try to warp the minds of their followers to an absurd degree. But as he looked deeper, the British producer finds the scripted reality of television merging with the scripted reality of authoritarian politics into something new and frightening.
The book opens with Pomerantsev reflecting on his time in Moscow.
“Performance” was the city’s buzzword, a world where gangsters become artists, gold diggers quote Pushkin, Hells Angels hallucinate themselves as saints. Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression – from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich – that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just on glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable. “I want to try on every persona the world has ever known,” Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe would tell me. He was a performance artist and the city’s mascot, the inevitable guest at parties attended by the inevitable tycoons and supermodels, arriving dressed as Gorbachev, a fakir, Tutankhamen, the Russian President. When I first landed in Moscow I thought these infinite transformations the expression of a country liberated, pulling on different costumes in a frenzy of freedom, pushing the limits of personality as far as it could possibly go to what the President’s vizier would call “the heights of creation.” It was only years later that I came to see these endless mutations not as freedom but as forms of delirium, in which scare-puppets and nightmare mystics become convinced they’re almost real and march toward what the President’s vizier would go on to call the “the fifth world war, the first non-linear war of all against all.”
The author discovers how control of the media, particularly of television, allows for Orwellian levels of manipulation over the truth, creating phantom threats to the country and phantom supermen to defend it. And on TV channels like RT, journalism and propaganda go hand in hand, while every political voice seems to just be playing a part in some stage production mimicking a democracy. In particular, Pomerantsev focuses on key Kremlin spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov, as he churns out post-apocalyptic novels and discusses art ad nauseam, while simultaneously orchestrating the elaborate political theatre in Russia as well as the wave of propaganda that engulfed neighboring Ukraine. Of other politicians like Surkov, Pomerantsev writes:
Glance through the careers of these new religious patriots, and you find they were recently committed democrats and liberals, pro-Western, preaching modernization, innovation, and commitment to Russia’s European course, before which they were all good Communists. And though on the one hand their latest incarnations are just new acts in the Moscow political cabaret, something about their delivery is different from the common Russian political performer who gives his rants with a knowing wink and nod. Now the delivery is somewhat deadpan. Flat and hollowed-eyed, as if they have been turned and twisted in so many ways they’ve spun right off the whirligig into something clinical.
He continues:
The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.
But behind that curtain of misinformation, Pomerantsev details a system that robs owners of their businesses, proliferates corruption at all levels, and embezzles massive wealth right out of the country into the welcoming arms of Swiss and British banks. Eventually, the author returns to London only to find it inhabited by many of the Russian oligarchs and supermodels he thought he left behind in Moscow. Dismayed, Pomerantsev learns of a young tax attorney named Sergei Magnitsky who died horribly in a Russian prison for exposing a corruption scheme: money that eventually made its way to safe havens in the West. And in an excruciatingly relevant interview, he quotes Magnitsky’s former boss, Jamison Firestone, on the changes already in progress.
London shocked me. The whole system is built around wanting that money to come here. We want their money. We want their trade. And now you’ve got former German chancellor Schroeder and Lord Mandelson and Lord So-and-So working for these Russian state companies, and you know I think they should just be honest and say ‘some Kremlin company offered me 500,000 to sit on their board and I don’t do anything and I don’t know anything about how the company is run but sometimes they ask me to open some doors.’ And the argument I hear from everyone is ‘well if the money doesn’t go here it will go somewhere else’: well here ain’t going to be here if you take that attitude, here is going to be there. We used to have this self-centered idea that Western democracies were the end point of evolution, and we’re dealing from a position of strength, and people are becoming like us. It’s not that way. Because if you think this thing we have here isn’t fragile you are kidding yourself. This,” and here Jamison takes a breath and waves his hand around to denote Maida Vale, London, the whole of Western civilization, “this is fragile.”
Timely and ominous, the book is a must-read and perhaps a warning of things to come.
Read Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
January 3, 2017
Interview with a Teacher
By David Michael Newstead.
A long-time educator looks back on his years in the classroom and discusses the future of teaching in America. Music by http://www.bensound.com.
January 2, 2017
From NPR: Later That Same Life
Thinking about another year going by, this is a personal favorite from awhile back.
In 1977, an 18-year-old Peter “Stoney” Emshwiller filmed himself asking questions meant for his future self. Emshwiller tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro, “I was going through what I think a lot of 18-year-olds go through — where you’re leaving high school and you’re about to start sort of your real life — and felt like I wanted to ask somebody who knows. And of course there isn’t anybody, but I decided to pretend there was and sit down and talk to a blank wall asking every question I could think of and responding to every answer I thought I might get back.”
Thirty-eight years later, the writer and voice actor sat down to answer his young self’s questions. The result is Later That Same Life, a film cut together to look like one seamless interview.
December 31, 2016
December 27, 2016
Annual 2016
By David Michael Newstead. [image error]
Posted throughout 2016, this collection includes interviews with feminists and gender experts, a conversation with the creators of #MasculinitySoFragile, and an in-depth look at misogyny in America. Other highlights include a feature on the 80th anniversary of the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit and an insider’s view of the on-going investigation into Syrian war crimes.
December 23, 2016
The Quotable Ben Franklin #6
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
December 22, 2016
Best of 2016
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By David Michael Newstead.
Some highlights from throughout the year.
The Origins of #MasculinitySoFragile – The first in a series with the creator of the popular hashtag, discussing gender issues and toxic forms of masculinity.
A Conversation with Paul Elam – An in-depth interview anti-feminist Paul Elam.
Discussing Safe Bars at a Bar – A podcast interview on the launch of the Safe Bars program in the District of Columbia.
An Interview with BEARD PAC – A conversation on politics, facial hair, and American history with the founder of a satirical Super PAC.
Politics and Social Media – A podcast interview with digital strategist Alan Rosenblatt on the role of social media in the 2016 presidential election.
Fatherhood and Feminism with Nikki van der Gaag – Gender expert Nikki van der Gaag discusses new research on fatherhood around the world.
Strange Fruit in America – The first in a series on the songwriter Abel Meeropol and the disturbing significance of his best known work.
Seek Justice for Us: An Interview with David Crane – The former Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone discusses his indictment of Liberian President Charles Taylor, the need for expanded human rights laws, and his on-going investigation into Syrian war crimes.
Chest Hair: A Personal Reflection – Just a random aside on life.
Russia Past & Present with Peter Kenez – An interview with historian Peter Kenez on the impact of the Russian Revolution and Russia in the modern world.
Russia Past & Present with Richard Pipes – An interview with historian Richard Pipes on the impact of the Russian Revolution and the 2016 presidential election.
Re-watching American Psycho – Revisting the renewed significance of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel.
Countering Street Harassment – An interview with DC Councilmember Brianne Nadeau on her efforts to counter street harassment in the nation’s capital.
A Nation of Immigrants, Revisited – A look back at JFK’s classic on the contributions of immigrants to American society.
December 18, 2016
Metro Tied 2016
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December 11, 2016
My Failed Writing Projects
By David Michael Newstead.
This is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction kind of post. For many years, I’ve brainstormed a lot of different writing projects. And I followed through with some of those concepts, while other ideas just never materialized. I bring it up now, because some of the stories were supposed to be so weird that they’d be impossible. They were basically intended as a vehicle for conveying an interesting thought experiment about the world and the people in it. I would make elaborate notes on my idea and I tried to write some drafts, occasionally mentioning it to friends as a “What If?” or “Isn’t this clever?” But not really believing that the world would be where we are now. Two specific examples come to mind and I think they’re pretty relevant. The only problem is, there isn’t any reason to pursue these ideas anymore since the real world has already made whatever point I was trying to make and is far weirder than I could ever be!
The first was called Pangaea. And it was about if the prehistoric super-continent of Pangaea reformed overnight in modern times, reducing the Atlantic Ocean to a small river and closing the geographic distance that separates humanity. All of a sudden, Europe would be directly next to North Africa, Brazil would border Nigeria, and Morocco would sit just off the coast of South Carolina. Then as people began to realize what happened, cultures would clash. Refugees would pour into more affluent countries. Walls would be erected, but eventually the old order would breakdown against the unrelenting tide of change. The world would become more interconnected and globalized and hopefully things would change for the better.
The second was entitled Bat Shit Nation. And the main character was a paranoid, conspiracy theory loving member of the Birther movement who was trying to write a science fiction novel in his spare time. The idea being, the story would shift between the main character’s actual day-to-day life and his post-apocalyptic novel about America’s future. In his book, Barack Obama had become an African-style president-for-life who established a tyrannical left-wing kleptocracy and signed peace treaties with terrorist groups and dictatorships, while arresting his critics. And in this fictional future, any and every nightmare scenario had been realized, requiring a committed band of freedom fighters to come together and save the day. Of course, one of the jokes was that these conspiracy theories were absurd fiction. The other joke was that the main character was basically supposed to be a Bizarro version of myself – doing, saying, and believing the exact opposite of me at any given point in the story.
In both cases, reality defies all expectations. For one, Pangaea doesn’t have to reconstitute itself for cultures to clash or migrants to cross borders. And it turns out, conspiracy theories are standard fare these days and the main character from my story would probably work at the White House now. Today, plenty of people might wonder where we go from here. And far down on that priority list, I think it’s also worth asking what writing fiction even means in a post-truth world.
