Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1027
August 7, 2015
Judge refuses to throw out fired professor Steven Salaita’s case against University of Illinois-UC
A federal judge has just ruled against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which had sought to have Steven Salaita’s case against it tossed out. At the same time, the chancellor who had fired Salaita, Phyllis Wise, has just resigned.
Salaita was the professor whose often acerbic and biting tweets critical of the state of Israel, particularly during its bloody attack on Gaza last summer, led to his being fired from his position at UIUC. His dismissal immediately led to worldwide outrage--thousands signed a petition demanding his reinstatement, and thousands, including Cornel West and Angela Davis, honored a boycott of the university. A dozen prestigious academic organizations wrote letters of protest.
What is at stake are issues of academic freedom, free speech, faculty governance. But also, and tremendously important, is the issue of donor interference in faculty governance. Salaita has sued for the emails that were exchanged between the university and wealthy donors regarding his dismissal.
The big loser in last night’s GOP debates: Our warming planet
Last night's Republican debates made for entertaining television but pretty thin gruel for those waiting for some nice, wild climate claims to counter. Seth Borenstein was able to take the night off, and Bill McKibben enjoyed a sarcastic slow clap.
Spent the last two hours watching GOP debate to factcheck on science, climate & environment issues. Nothing said, nothing to do.
— seth borenstein (@borenbears) August 7, 2015
Glad to see climate change a key theme of tonight's #gopdebate. We may differ on solutions, but at least we're all focused on the crisis! — Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) August 7, 2015
Twitter won the GOP debate: A fitting tribute to Jon Stewart, who made citizen-satirists of us all
Planned or not, the synergy of the first GOP debates and the last episode of Jon Stewart as host of “The Daily Show” was bound to create a sense of loss. The final episode aired after the debates, but it was taped before. So fans assumed that, even though they were going to have a last glimpse of Stewart as host, they weren’t going to benefit from his reaction to the two-ring circus. But then, as we switched channels from Fox News to Comedy Central, we were given a moment of hope: Stewart started the show by telling us that he felt “an obligation to devote the entirety of the last show to our standard post-debate full team coverage.” Yes, we thought, Stewart isn’t abandoning us after all.
Fox News tries to expel Donald Trump — but last night’s debate didn’t finish him
The Fox News hosts of Thursday night’s GOP presidential debate’s worked hard to put Donald Trump back on his heels. At times, it worked – but it’s not clear whether it will matter.
Trump was alternately prickly, crude, menacing and proudly sexist as he took center stage at the first GOP debate. Bret Baier baited him with the very first question, asking the candidates whether they’d promise to support the eventual nominee and forego an independent run. Only Trump refused, and the crowd booed. Trump shrugged. "I will not make the pledge at this time," he demurred.
Megyn Kelly got under Trump’s skin with her first question: about his history of calling women "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” Trump blustered back: “Only Rosie O’Donnell!” But Kelly wouldn’t leave it there, and Trump got nasty: “Honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you although I could probably maybe not be based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.”
Trump occasionally seemed rattled and out of control, but he didn’t melt down. The most potentially damaging segment came when Chris Wallace asked him about his four corporate bankruptcies. Wallace dismissed Trump’s claim that he personally never went bankrupt. “That’s your line,” he needled him.
Thank you, Jon Stewart: You had a big stage in a broken world — and you used it to say something important
Dear Jon:
I started college in 2005. Everything was exploding then. Hurricane Katrina had just bludgeoned my home state. The shadow of 9/11 loomed large. The war drums were beating. Fox News had found its bearings. The dreariness of the Bush-Cheney years was suffocating. Political dysfunction was pervasive. Things were in a bad way.
And there you were, every night, telling it like it was. You were a gadfly to the greedy profiteers and the propagandists and the unaccountable. To people like me, you were a reprieve, an anchor in a cultural whirlwind.
I know you’re not a newsman – you made sure to remind us of that. Perhaps you were something different. If nothing else, you were the bullshit-slayer of your time, our Carlin and our Cronkite. The truth is that newsmen – real newsmen – don’t exist anymore; corporate media is too compromised for that. Our institutions have failed us and we all know it. You filled that void somehow.
You emerged at a time when a voice like yours was desperately needed. Everything about our age invites cynicism. Our discourse is so toxic, so empty, and you managed to navigate it with wit and humor and authenticity. I remember your monologue after 9/11. I remember thinking that something changed that night. You sensed the gravity of the moment, but you also appeared to recognize your responsibility.
There is no such thing as an “unbiased” history class: The right-wing backlash against AP U.S. history masks a deeper problem with how and what we teach
The summer before my senior year of high school, I went on a family vacation to India that was, in and of itself, an education. I had, of course, a connection to the land my mom and dad called home for half their lives, and had been on a handful of trips to the country before. Still, I was struck with jealousy whenever a classmate in AP art history casually spoke of trips to Italy with her parents that seemed, to me, so sophisticated. Our two-week unit on Hinduism during eighth grade social studies, the majority of which was spent memorizing the intricacies of the caste system, hadn't exactly afforded me the same bragging rights.
But a program I'd participated in a month earlier, focused on international studies, had left me uniquely primed for the experience. Many of the 99 New Jersey teens I'd forged strong bonds with the weeks before had similar ties to places they'd also never discussed in their respective high school's curricula, a problem not lost on us as a unit. We debated genocide in Rwanda, and noted the lack of American intervention. The fact that here, in this classroom where we'd all elected to be during our summer vacation, was the first time we'd grappled with the history of the African continent beyond its relation to slave trade, felt deeply relevant.
Hillary sucks up to the middle class: What her TPP flip-flop is really about
In her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has lately promoted herself as a populist defender of the middle class. To that end, she attempted to distance herself last week from a controversial 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would set the rules of commerce for roughly 40 percent of the world’s economy.
As with similar business-backed trade pacts, labor unions, environmental groups and public health organizations are warning that the deal could result in job losses, reduced environmental standards, higher prices for medicine and more power for corporations looking to overturn public interest laws. And so, in her quest for Democratic primary votes, Clinton is suddenly trying to cast herself as a critic of the initiative.
"I did not work on TPP," she said after a meeting with leaders of labor unions who oppose the pact. "I advocated for a multinational trade agreement that would 'be the gold standard.' But that was the responsibility of the United States Trade Representative."
The trouble, of course, is that Clinton’s declaration does not square with the facts.
America is a neoliberal horror movie: Why “They Live” is the perfect film for our depraved times
Legendary professional wrestler "Rowdy” Roddy Piper passed away on Friday, July 31 at the age of 61. He succumbed to a heart attack in his Hollywood, Calif. home.
Roddy Piper is best known for his work with the World Wrestling Federation during the 1980s and feuds with Hulk Hogan, Mr. T and Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. While he is a member of the WWE’s Hall of Fame, I would dare to suggest that in the future it is far more likely that Roddy Piper will be remembered for starring in the 1988 cult classic film They Live,directed by John Carpenter.
The plot of They Live is deceptively simple. Roddy Piper’s character, a semi-homeless day laborer named Nada (Spanish for “nothing”) discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to identify the extraterrestrials who have infiltrated the Earth’s populace. The aliens are part of the global (intergalactic) power elite, a group that has been stealing the Earth’s resources, buying off its leaders and exploiting the masses for their own personal gain. Piper’s character quickly encounters Frank (played by actor Keith David), and together they join the resistance movement in order to bring down the alien overlords.
As I discussed with author Jonathan Lethem several months ago, They Live is a genius film that embraces the culture of disreputability—it is genre entertainment, based on an obscure short story, a professional wrestler is the main character, and the heroes of the movie are an interracial group of homeless, working-class and poor people. For all its B-movie auteur sensibilities, the film is a scathing indictment of the Reagan era, the culture of cruelty and austerity, wealth inequality, plutocrats, corporate media, classism, racism, and greed.
They Live is also an essential film for the current socio-political moment; it has much to teach the American people as they struggle to make sense of wanton police brutality against people of color and the poor in the new Gilded Age, an era of toxic white masculinity, and perverse reactionary right-wing politics.
How people can learn to see reality more clearly
The nature of the truth and its relationship to reality are foundational philosophical concerns from Plato’s classic allegory of the cave through to the immensely popular Matrix films. When Roddy Piper dons his sunglasses he sees an unsettling and terrifying world—one which he initially runs from, in shock and denial. At first, Piper believes he must be insane because the brutal reality of hegemonic power is now laid bare in front of him, with its organs of control through the media, surveillance, advertising, casino capitalism, the corporation, and the police state.
They Live presents one of the fundamental choices citizens must make in this time of neoliberal trouble and tumult: does one choose to live in denial or does one accept the truth?
An indictment of learned helplessness
The neoliberal order through a combination of surveillance, economic brutality, incarceration, and technologies of pleasure and distraction (for example: social media, mass entertainment, consumerism) has been able to limit the possibilities of true democratic action and reform. The American people (and many in the West) have seen true democracy undermined by organized and well-monied interest groups, the rich, and corporate power that pursue policy goals which are antithetical to the will of the people.
The American people know something is amiss and wrong, but many of them are too tired, afraid or distracted to do anything about it. Unfortunately, too many Americans are living a life oriented around survival and pleasure; a life that is neither fulfilling nor transformative.
They Live demonstrates how a group of marginalized people who are written out of the polity can struggle for and win a more humane and just world. These heroes made a choice to overcome learned helpless and become citizens of action.
Interracial alliances across lines of class can change the world for the better. The invention of whiteness in the 17th century is one of the primary means through which white supremacy has come to dominate global society. White supremacy as a system of maintaining unearned advantages for “white” people has historically paid significant material, psychological, political, and economic wages to its owners and other beneficiaries.
But in an age of globalization and gross wealth inequality the central lie of whiteness is further exposed: whiteness has always benefitted white elites at the expense of the material (and often long-term political) interests of the vast majority of white people. In many ways, poor and working-class white people have more in common with poor and working-class people of color than they do rich and upper-class whites. White racial resentment and the intoxicating effects of white supremacy have blinded too many white folks to that reality.
The real enemy
They Live intervenes against the possessive investment in whiteness: the plutocrats, the elites, and the "aliens” are the real enemy that human beings, in service to our shared humanity and the common good, should be fighting. They Live reminds us that there are human beings with no sense of linked fate, compassion or caring for other people. They are engaged in a cruel type of calculus that results in a distorted and wicked biopolitics that uses the "market” to decide human worth: this is homo economicus as sociopathy.
The human traitors in They Live are agents of neoliberal governmentality, where profits trump human dignity and value, who seek to destroy the social safety net, eliminate the “useless eaters,” believe that corporations are people, and live an ethos of robber baron gangster capitalism. The aliens may rule the Earth, but they are only able to do so because they are helped by unethical and immoral human beings.
At the climax of They Live, Nada and Frank embark on a suicide mission to destroy the satellite dish on the roof of a local news station that is broadcasting the signal that keeps the Earth’s people asleep, helpless, enslaved, and enthralled to the alien’s will. In this symbolically potent moment, two poor men, one white and one black, die to awaken humanity to the dynamic of their true oppression.
They Live ends with the ghouls from outer space, their glamour and masks dropped, as the people see them for what they actually are, monsters who are our business leaders, lovers, bosses, media elites, politicians, and dream merchants.
In the present, They Live reflects an America (and world) where some people have put on the glasses, awakened to the ugly reality of the culture of cruelty, austerity and disposability, and decided to resist it. They are the young lions in Baltimore, Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; the people who have fought the IMF and World Bank in places like Greece; the Occupy Wall Street and Jubilee movements; the Greenpeace protesters suspending themselves from a Portland bridge to stop the ravaging of the Earth by oil companies; and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
A potent metaphor
Ultimately, They Live is also a metaphor for how the “aliens” still dominate American politics and life.
This week, the Republican Party will hold the first televised debate to decide which of its candidates will be the presidential nominee in 2016. These debates will feature personalities from an irresponsible political party that has mated racism and conservatism in order to advance a radical agenda which will further destroy the consensus politics that has governed the United States since at least the middle of the 20th century.
The Republican debates are a spectacle and a parade of political ghouls. In the recent past, Republican debates have featured audiences that cheer killing people, electrocuting Hispanic and Latino immigrants, and who boo gay Americans. The 2016 candidates choose to pander to the freak show human zoo that is the Republican base in order to win their approval and subsequent nomination.
Consequently, the potential Republican presidential candidates include people who believe that God has appeared to them and sent magical portends that they should run for president of the United States. They want to destroy the gains of the Civil Rights movement, deny basic scientific facts such as global warming, and yearn to invade and bomb countries around the world. They are birthers, Islamophobes and plutocrats who see the American people as lazy. And of course as a group the Republican presidential nominees want to further destroy the basic guarantees of an already threadbare and frazzled social safety net.
This is the politics of spectacle, illusion, distraction, and absurdity They Live cautioned its viewers about.
In They Live, upon donning his sunglasses and seeing the truth, Roddy Piper decided to kick ass and chew bubble gum…and he was all out of bubble gum. This was a call to action in a smart B-movie that embraced the culture of disreputability in order to tell some basic truths about power, greed and politics in the neoliberal age.
John Carpenter’s They Live was prescient. Roddy Piper was irreplaceable both in the squared circle of the professional wrestling ring and as a man named Nada who reminded us all that we can choose to see reality more clearly, and then fight to make the world a better place.
4 ways women learn to worry about their vaginas — starting with the treachery of porn
Today's beauty standards are tough to keep up with. Women are supposed to be trim, fit, hairless, odorless; the list goes on. It’s hard enough to apply these standards to our outward appearance. It's worse when we’re asked to apply them to our nether regions. Listed below are four ways society teaches women to worry about their vaginas.
1. The treachery of images: This is not a vagina.
Most porn presents us with perfectly trim, tidy little slits that make those of us with differently shaped vaginas look down and go, huh? But let it be said, the “single crease” aesthetic is a bullshit standard to wish for.
A few years back, the Australian television program HungryBeast decided to investigate how the country’s censorship laws have skewed the public’s idea of what a normal vagina should look like. In accordance with the Australian Classification Guidelines, porn producers are allowed to show full frontal nudity, but only “discreet genital details.” The terms state, “Realistic depictions may contain genital detail but there should not be genital emphasis. Prominent and/or frequent realistic depictions of sexualized nudity containing genitalia will not be permitted.”
August 6, 2015
Stephen Colbert brought Jon Stewart to tears with this incredible “Daily Show” tribute
Jon Stewart's final "Daily Show" episode wasn't all giggles.
In one surprisingly tender moment, Stephen Colbert -- former "Daily Show" correspondent, soon-to-be "Late Show" host and Known King of Irony -- sat Stewart down for a heart-to-heart.
It must have caught Stewart by surprise, too; As Colbert delivered his sincerest thanks to the departing host of 16 years for believing in him enough to bring him on the show, Stewart was reduced to tears.
“You can’t stop anyone because they don’t work for you anymore,” Colbert told Stewart. “It will be quick if you just hold still.”
Colbert continued:
