Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 138

If polls say people want gun control, why doesn’t Congress just pass it?

(AP Photo/The Oregonian, Jamie Francis, file) (Credit: AP)

Why doesn’t the government do what the people want?

After the recent deadly shooting at a Florida high school, many Americans are asking that question about the federal government’s firearms policy. Recent polls show that a majority of Americans support stronger gun laws — including tighter restrictions on purchasing and a ban on assault weapons — in the wake of the shooting.

Students demand that elected officials “do something,” and many adults echo that sentiment.

But policy does not always follow public opinion. Why are the public’s pleas on this and other issues ignored?

I am a pollster and a political scientist who studies gun control. I have examined the issue from different perspectives.

I have found that there are three major reasons that policy does not always follow public opinion: the structure of the U.S. government, the overlooked complexities of public opinion and the influence of voters and interest groups.

Citizens don’t make policy

First, the United States is a republic, not a direct democracy. Citizens choose representatives who make policy decisions; citizens do not make those decisions directly. The Founders, who were not all fans of democracy and feared mob rule, established our governmental structure over 200 years ago, and those foundations remain today.

While about half the states have some form of initiative or referendum process to allow voters to directly enact policy, there is no such provision in the U.S. Constitution. And for those who advocate for repealing the Second Amendment as a way to restrict gun ownership in the U.S., that’s not accomplished directly by citizens, either. Such changes would have to be voted on by elected representatives in Congress and legislatures across the country.

The composition and rules of Congress are also crucial, especially in the Senate, where each state has two votes. This allocation of senators disproportionately represents the interests of less populous states.

So California and New York, the first and fourth largest states and ones that favor stricter gun laws, comprise about 18 percent of the population of the United States but only 4 percent of the senators. Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Idaho, which tend to favor gun rights, comprise about 2 percent of the population and 12 percent of the Senate. The House of Representatives, where each state is guaranteed at least one representative, also advantages lower-population states, albeit to a much lesser extent. The House is also subject to the partisan drawing of districts which has advantaged Republicans — who tend to support gun rights — since the 2010 Census.

The ubiquitous use of the filibuster, which can allow a Senate minority to block majority-supported legislation, has led to the point that most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass. In a closely divided Senate, 60 votes are almost impossible to muster. In addition, national sentiment is not mirrored in every state or congressional district.

Policy often doesn’t follow polling

Second: Polling and public opinion are not as straightforward as they seem.

Focusing on only one or two poll questions can distort the public’s views regarding gun control.

Polling numbers generally show strong support for gun control measures such as universal background checks and an assault weapons ban.

Simultaneously, most Americans think that additional gun control measures won’t reduce violent crime. This is not surprising because most Americans don’t blame guns for these tragedies.

We should also keep in mind that gun control is not the only issue in which policy does not follow opinion. Other such issues include policies as diverse as education, foreign aid and abortion.

And policy that reflects the “will of the people” may collide with legitimate legal constraints. Crafting legislation that disqualifies those we all agree should not possess firearms but protects the rights of law-abiding citizens is quite difficult.

For example, the American Civil Liberties Union opposed an order that would have prevented Social Security recipients with mental disabilities who have others managing their benefits from purchasing firearms. “Assault weapons” are difficult to define — and thus legally ban — because semi-automatic rifles can be used for hunting, too, as can AR-style rifles, although they are not commonly used for that purpose.

People vote, not polls

Finally, the influence of voters and interest groups can counteract the influence of the majority’s opinion in swaying policy.

For example, who votes matters. Gun owners are more likely than non-owners to vote based on the issue of gun control, to have contacted an elected official about gun rights, and to have contributed money to an organization that takes a position on gun control. Such differing rates of political activity are to be expected because many gun owners fear their rights are or will be restricted, and that drives them to the polls. But the frequent appearances of gun control advocates in the news can lead to the erroneous impression that they are more passionate than gun rights supporters.

The National Rifle Association is a critical player in this discussion. In some ways a victim of its own success, the gun owners’ rights group is thought by many to have outsized power that it wields indiscriminately.

Its critics have called it a terrorist organization with blood on its hands and legislators who support gun rights have been referred to as “NRA-complicit bloody hannded (sic) mass murder enablers.”

It is reasonable to assume NRA members can deduce that others see their dues and contributions as making them complicit in the deaths of many. I contend that neither these attacks nor boycotts are likely to deter support. At the major national annual conference for conservatives in February 2018, known as CPAC, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre responded to that criticism by talking about a “socialist agenda.” He said NRA critics and “the elite” wanted to “eradicate all individual freedoms.”

The rhetoric is toxic, and both sides are guilty.

Whatever power the NRA possesses is a result of its membership and their votes. Its approximately 5 million members pay attention to the group’s candidate ratings and generally vote accordingly. Many others who are not members also agree with the group as evidenced by its consistent “favorable” ratings, typically measured in the 50 percent-plus range. Support for stricter gun laws typically increases after a mass shooting, but it tends to revert back to the trend line over time.

Elected officials want votes. There is no doubt that money is essential for political campaigns, but votes, not money or polls, are what determine elections. If a group can supply votes, then it has power. As such, the NRA is very powerful in some parts of the country and quite weak in others.

Many factors influence how legislation is drafted, amended, enacted and implemented. Searching for a direct causal connection from public opinion to specific policies, including gun control, may be akin to a search for the holy grail.

Our elected officials care more about the opinions of those who vote for them than what the nation as a whole thinks. On most issues they represent the interests of the majority of voters in their districts — or they get voted out of office.

Harry L. Wilson, Professor of Public Affairs, Roanoke College

Donald Trump’s lawyer might be able to keep Stormy Daniels silent — but that won’t end this scandal

Stormy Daniels (Credit: AP/Matt Sayles)

Amid all of his other scandals and often-deliberately outrageous actions, the allegation that President Donald Trump conducted a months-long affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels, the stage name of Stephanie Clifford, ought to have been a blip on the political radar.

Tony Perkins, the ultra-conservative president of a far-right lobbyist group, proclaimed that he was going to give Trump a “mulligan” on the Clifford allegation. In a February survey conducted by Quinnipiac University, only 14 percent of Republican respondents said they believed Trump had not been faithful to his wife, Melania. A much larger number, 42 percent, told pollsters that they thought that Trump, who has boasted of his extramarital sexual exploits for decades, had been loyal. Forty-four percent said they were unwilling to render an opinion.

Yet despite his die-hard supporters’ lack of interest, the Daniels imbroglio seems to be expanding.

On Monday, Daniels informed Trump via a letter from her attorney that she is willing to return the $130,000 payment she received from the president’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen in October of 2016. In exchange, Daniels wants a confidentiality agreement that she and Cohen had signed to be considered “null and void.” In the letter, Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, says that Trump’s lawyers have until 12:01pm ET tomorrow to respond.

In statements to the press, Cohen said that the funds he provided to Daniels through a shell corporation were entirely his own and that his only motivation was to protect his innocent client.

“Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage. I will always protect Mr. Trump,” Cohen told CNN in February when he was asked why he had taken it upon himself to make a large payment to Daniels.

Cohen has repeatedly claimed that Trump did not have knowledge of the settlement negotiations or agreement.

“In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford,” Cohen said in a February statement. “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”

Despite Cohen’s attempts to buy Daniels’ silence, the story became public knowledge after the Wall Street Journal reported on the payment in January. Last month, In Touch magazine published an extensive interview with Daniels that it had conducted in 2011 about what she says was a sexual relationship with Trump that began in 2006, shortly after the birth of his third son, and ended in 2007.

Under the terms of the contract, disputes between the parties are to be handled via confidential arbitration rather than court proceedings. NBC News reported that on Feb. 27, Cohen had successfully obtained a temporary restraining order that prohibited Daniels from speaking publicly about the alleged affair. She has already conducted an interview with CBS News about the alleged affair.

The letter is Daniels’ latest effort to speak at length publicly about her claims. The actress and director filed a lawsuit last Tuesday in a California state court seeking to have the contract declared void because Trump had not signed it, even though he was referred to throughout it via a pseudonym.

“Despite having detailed knowledge of the Hush Agreement and its terms, including the proposed payment of monies to Ms. Clifford … Mr. Trump purposely did not sign the agreement so he could later, if need be, publicly disavow any knowledge of the Hush Agreement and Ms. Clifford,” Daniels alleges in her plaintiff’s brief.

While it may seem as thought Daniels may prevail in court since Trump allegedly did not sign the contract, several recent decisions have laid down the precedent that agreements that are not fully executed can still be legally enforceable.

That is what a Massachusetts-based federal district court ruled in a 2015 case called Lease America.org, Inc. v. Rowe International Corporation, which involved a dispute over two companies that sold and manufactured electronic jukeboxes, respectively.

In his ruling, Judge Timothy Hillman wrote that even though the president of Lease America had not fully signed the contract between the two businesses, the fact that they both operated as if it had been fully executed meant that the contract was to be considered valid.

“A written contract signed by only one party may be binding and enforceable where the non-signing party manifests acceptance,” the decision reads.

The Lease America ruling appears to be the only one of its kind in a federal court, but an Ohio appellate court made a similar ruling in 2012, according to Laura J. Bowman, an Ohio-based attorney.

While Cohen may have a strong case in regards to the validity of the allegedly unsigned contract, his statement that Trump knew nothing of the negotiations with Daniels could jeopardize Cohen’s case since the president’s personal attorney is barred in the state of New York, where the rules explicitly require lawyers to keep their clients apprised of any significant legal developments pertaining to them.

The Daniels plaintiff brief highlights this regulation:

The extent of Mr. Trump’s involvement in these efforts is presently unknown, but it strains credibility to conclude that Mr. Cohen is acting on his own accord without the express approval and knowledge of his client Mr. Trump.

Indeed, Rule 1.4 of New York Rules of Professional Conduct governing attorneys has required Mr. Cohen at all times to promptly communicate all material information relating to the matter to Mr. Trump … [U]nless Mr. Cohen flagrantly violated his ethical obligations and the most basic rules governing his license to practice law (which is highly unlikely), there can be no doubt that Mr. Trump at all times has been fully aware of the negotiations with Ms. Clifford. [emphasis in original]

Depending on how mischievous someone is feeling, Cohen could have just opened himself up to a formal bar complaint. That’s in addition to the campaign finance complaints that the left-leaning group Common Cause has filed with the Federal Election Commission asking for an investigation into the payment to Daniels.

The Stormy Daniels legal drama is just getting started.

The box office made history this weekend

Black Panther; A Wrinkle in Time (Credit: Marvel/Walt Disney)

You know what we could all use at the end of a long, bleak winter? How about box office-smashing blockbuster, one that’s actually terrific? You know what, make it two. And then have them helmed by and starring people of color. And women. “Black Panther” and “A Wrinkle in Time” — you earned this.

The period between December Oscar bait and Memorial Day weekend blockbuster season kickoff has long been considered the Hollywood dead zone — the notorious “dump months” when studios slough off the schlockiest movies they expect critics to hate and audience to avoid. Think “Mall Cop.”

That all changed a year ago, when Jordan Peele’s scary, smart “Get Out” bowed in late February, and immediately rewrote the rules. It’s grossed over $250 million worldwide, was the most profitable film of the year, earned an Academy Award for Peele’s screenwriting and oh, by the way, immediately entered the pantheon of iconic horror. And of the mere five black filmmakers ever nominated for a Best Director Oscar, two of them were in the past two years. (“Moonlight’s” Barry Jenkins and Jordan Peele). The last time a winter thriller had that combination of prestige and impact, it was “The Silence of the Lambs.” In 1991. 

But this moment of dual success has been even longer in coming. Director Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” has been all but unstoppable since its late January opening, and this past weekend it soared past the one billon dollar mark in grosses. Domestically, it’s already the seventh highest grossing film of all time and biggest single superhero release of all time (surpassing “The Dark Knight”). A month ago, Deadline called the film’s juggernaut “insane” — and its reign seems likely to stay unbroken for some time to come.

Don’t cry yet, however, for what all of this means for the film coming in at second place.

By Monday, Forbes and Fox News had already weighed in with their takes on the “disappointment” of Ava DuVernay’s highly anticipated “A Wrinkle in Time.” The first film with a $100 million-plus budget to be directed by an African American woman opened to a string of solid reviews — the New York Times called it “gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre”) — and cracked a respectable $33.3 million its opening weekend.

But compared with “Black Panther’s” off-the-charts success, that’s the kind of response that can unfortunately read as underwhelming. Writing in Forbes, Scott Mendelson pondered that “Much of the conversation around the film’s performance will concern the film as a proverbial test-case for a big-budget fantasy flick starring women of varying races.” OUCH. Sure, Matt Damon and Will Ferrell can star in two of the biggest flops of 2017 and nobody takes it as evidence that the middle-aged white man caper just doesn’t play. Put a biracial little girl in the center role of a film, however, and the fate of cinematic representation seems to rest on her small shoulders.

Yet pull back from the concern trolling, and the significance that this success represents remains. For the first time in cinematic history, the two highest grossing films at the box office were directed by African-American filmmakers — one of whom is also female. “I think about it like a wall crumbling,” Jeff Bock, senior analyst at Exhibitor Relations, told The New York Times earlier this year. “In terms of ‘Black Panther,’ no studio can say again, ‘Oh, black movies don’t travel, overseas interest will be minimal.'” And that means richer, more exciting stories for audiences everywhere. Even in March.

Your NCAA bracket is a reverse Turing test

(Credit: Shutterstock/AP/Salon)

March Madness has begun. Cue the studies and stories about lost productivity, sports betting and consumerism run amok. But for all of the “sick” days taken, office pools created and revenues generated, March Madness shows us something remarkable — that we are, without a doubt, human.

Scholars like me worry that humans are starting to behave like predictable and even programmable machines. We’re surrendering our humanity to smartphones, digital assistants and fitness trackers one tap, swipe and click at a time.

Surveillance capitalism, or the monetization of data acquired through surveillance, allows high-tech media to grab and keep our attention while collecting, selling and using data about our moods, preferences, habits and lifestyles to nudge us. Just think of all the ads in your social media feed from brands with which you’ve never interacted.

And then there’s the endless supply of apps to solve our problems and manage our lives. Waze for navigation. Mint for spending. Moment for managing screen time. That the phrase “there’s an app for that” has become cliché only reveals how complacent we’ve become.

As we outsource our thinking to supposedly smart technical systems, as we mindlessly follow life-scripts written by others for the sake of convenience, we’re allowing ourselves to be engineered.

Yet despite these very real significant concerns about the techno-social world we’re building and what it means for us and future generations, rest assured that we’ve not yet been engineered to be machines. March Madness of all things provides proof!

Consider how we fill out our own brackets. Do we stick to the statistics and pursue the most rational strategy? Probably not. When we fill out a bracket, we are predictably irrational and distinctly human.

We believe — without evidence or reasoned justification — that our alma mater or our hometown team will win it all. We’re influenced by our emotions — love and hate — and a myriad of irrational factors — the most amusing mascots, the flashiest coaches, underdog status, the deep-rooted rivalries and even the rowdiness of a school’s fan base. Wishful thinking and holding grudges are distinguishing characteristics of humans not machines.

Now suppose someone programmed a machine to enter and win your March Madness bracket competition — say the one you run at the office, the local tavern, or at home with your family.

Can a computer program possibly understand basketball? Could it appreciate the differences between Villanova and UVA basketball? The truth is it wouldn’t need to.

Time and time again we’ve seen sophisticated artificial intelligence programs best humans in various complex games. Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer back in 1997. AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind, defeated master Go players.

The computers didn’t need to understand anything. They just needed sufficient computing power and data to be trained. Most of a machine’s strategic decisions would be determined by statistical analysis of data coupled with a firm, unwavering commitment to rationality.

Placed side-by-side, brackets created by humans would stand out among those generated by computers programmed to win. An effective reverse Turing test — like those CAPTCHA tests used to distinguish humans from bots — could even be designed using March Madness brackets.

A machine programmed to win would probably only include 1, 2, or 3 seeds in its Final Four. After all, with the exception of the 7th seed UConn, every national champion in the past 15 years has been a 1, 2, or 3 seed.

There is, however, an interesting caveat. If a machine generated its own statistically-based ranking that differed substantially from the seeds assigned by the NCAA selection committee, it might put a #4 or lower seed in the Final Four. After all, no matter how objective the committee might strive to be, it is comprised of humans and not machines.

But even with that in mind, only a human would have picked the No. 9 Wichita State to reach the Final Four in 2013, besting No. 1 Gonzaga and No. 2 Ohio State on the way. No rational, data-driven analysis could have ranked Wichita State high enough to merit such a decision. In fact, according to FiveThirtyEight, Wichita State had only a 1.3 percent chance of reaching the Final Four when the tournament began and brackets were filled.

Of course, what makes March Madness exciting, fun and crazy mad is the collective fantasy and social experience. For most of us, the bracket-filling game is about much more than winning. We think differently when we play.

We socialize through our brackets. Competitions within offices, homes and virtual communities celebrate our idiosyncratic human beliefs and commitments. Even those of us who dig into the stats and develop our own ranking algorithms get caught up in the madness of being human and engaging with our peers.

So rest assured, as you click, tap and swipe, your humanity hasn’t completely disappeared. At least, we still have March Madness.

Dancing with the blade: “Papa Machete” explores a secret Haitian martial art

(Credit: Jonathan David Kane)

If you’re interested in the grace and wisdom to be found in a country that our president considers a “shithole,” consider the documentary “Papa Machete,” a stirring film about “Professor” Alfred Avril, a teacher of the little-known art of Haitian machete fencing.

You can watch the full “Papa Machete” documentary on Salon Premium, our new ad-free, content-rich app. Here’s how. 

Director Jonathan David Kane and writer-producer Jason Fitzroy Jeffers brought Salon inside the making of the film, the mysterious art of Tire Machèt and why this humble tool is known as the “Excalibur of the Caribbean.” You will probably never look at a machete, or Haiti for that matter, the same way again.

How did you find the Professor?

Kane: One of my producers on the project, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, found a YouTube video on a Reddit martial arts thread of Professor Avril fencing that was made by his long time student Mike Rogers. Mike had been training with the Professor for over ten years, steadily building a bond of trust with the intention of studying and aiding in the preservation of this esoteric fighting form. Jason, being from the island of Barbados and having always considered the machete to be the “Excalibur of the Caribbean,” was ecstatic to learn that this martial art form existed, and wanted to go down to Haiti to train and tell this story. He sent me the video and I was drawn to the idea that there was this secretive martial art being practiced by this old master in the hills of Haiti. It reminded me of an old mystic Kung Fu story. I told Jason I was down to join him on the adventure, and so three weeks later, we were down in Haiti. It all came together like that really, really fast.

Your use of slow motion is quite effective. Can you describe your creative approach to telling the Professor’s story and the art of machete fencing?

Kane: Going into production, I knew two things: The Professor’s words were going to be the structure on which the film was built upon, and slow motion was needed to highlight the precision, grace, and strength of the swordplay. Other than those two things, my approach to telling this story was very fluid. We would go up the hill to Professor Avril’s home each day and train with him, and each day we’d experience something new. Some of those things we learned were good for the film, others were good for the soul.

What’s significant about the machete in Haitian history and culture?

Jeffers: The fact that the tool, which the slaves used to reap harvests and ultimately create wealth for their colonial masters and became the instrument of their liberation, echoes through Haitian history. You see it in the statue of Nèg Mawon — (Maroon Man) — located in Port-Au-Prince. In one hand, he holds aloft a conch shell, which he’s blowing into, rallying his fellow slaves to revolt. In the other hand, he grips a machete. It’s also the weapon of Ogun, the loa in Haitian Vodou who embodies war and justice, among other things. Ogun and machete symbolism in general can be found in other syncretic religions which trace their origins back to West Africa, and taken together, it all transforms the machete into a revolutionary totem that many, many people from the so-called “Third World” intuitively respond to.

How dangerous is Tire Machèt? Did you give it a try?

Kane: Yes, our whole crew participated in Tire Machèt lessons, and fenced at some point during production. I really enjoyed fencing with the Professor. There were some nicks and cuts. Our initial trailer for the film had footage of a bleeding thumb, but at no point did any of us ever feel danger while fencing. It was more entrancing than anything. I felt a rush of excitement and a calm focus at the same time. Then again, it’s possible that my gauge for what’s dangerous is broken. Make no mistake, this is a deadly art form, but Professor Avril’s practice is spiritual.

Who was that white dude who fought the Professor?

Kane: That is Michael Dylan Rogers. He’s Professor Avril’s first foreign student and the founder of the Haitian Machete Fencing Project.  Mike has been training with the Professor for over ten years, steadily building a bond of trust with the intention of studying and aiding in the preservation of this esoteric fighting form. Without the help of Mike Rogers, the film would not exist and we likely would never have learned of the existence of Tire Machèt. When Mike first met Professor Avril and began his training, the Professor would not allow anyone to witness lessons. They had to construct a circular palm frond fence to conceal their training from the neighbors. Ten years later, our team was allowed to document this practice and share it with the world.

In light of President Trump’s recent reference to Haiti as a “shithole,” what do you think Americans should know about the country?

Kane: First of all, let me say that man needs to wash his mouth out with soap. I’ve been to six of the seven continents on this Earth, and Haiti is one of the most beautiful and mystical places I’ve ever had the privilege of visiting. The city of Jacmel is full of life, music, and art. The French Colonial architecture there reminds me of New Orleans. The cuisine is delicious. The people of Haiti are proud of their home, and rightfully so. Their culture and history is possibly the richest in the Western Hemisphere.

What are you working on now?

Jeffers: “Papa Machete” was the first project from Third Horizon, a filmmaking and creative collaborative based here in Miami which focuses on the stories of the Caribbean, the Diasporas which formed it, and the Diasporas formed by it. Next up, we have a satirical fictional documentary by Papa Machete producer and writer Keisha Rae Witherspoon, which explores Miami’s inner city sometime in the future when it’s beset by a spiraling culture of violence, government surveillance and sea level rise. We’re also working on a doc about the history and gentrification of Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, which is the cultural capital of the Haitian diaspora, and also a target for a lot of the prejudice the Haitian community has faced, now, from no less than the President himself. We’re also gearing up for the third edition of Third Horizon Film Festival, which showcases other work from the emerging Caribbean film community.

Watch “Papa Machete” on Salon Premium, our new ad-free, content-rich app. Reading this interview in the app already? Select “SalonTV” to find all of our films and shows.

Confessions of a bystander: Why intervening in abuse can be so hard

(Credit: Getty Images)

When I was ten years old, my best friend Karen and I made an excursion one Saturday to the public library. With our bags full of newly checked-out books, we were unlocking our bikes when a couple of teenaged girls, smoking cigarettes on a nearby bench, started to harass us. “Is that bike for sale?” one of them asked, wrenching it out of Karen’s grasp. “Or maybe it’s for free!” Over our protests she hopped on and started to ride it in circles around us, until its chain fell off and, uttering a shocking string of curse words, she threw it to the ground.

Meanwhile her friend had relieved Karen of her backpack and was scattering the library books in the damp grass. Laughing, they pushed Karen back and forth between them until she fell down. They held their lit cigarettes to her arms. They shouted things like “you little pussy” (because she started crying) and “you’re a dirty lesbian” (because of her short hair, perhaps??).

What was I doing while all this was happening? I was backing away. I was clutching the straps of my backpack as if my life depended on it. “Stop it, stop it,” I mewled, but when one of the girls jabbed her cigarette-tip in my direction and asked if I wanted the same treatment, I shook my head mutely, vigorously, and I stayed quiet.

We writers are, by constitution and by habit, bystanders. We don’t get involved. Instead, we pay close attention to what goes on around us, and we faithfully record all the details. This is how we create compelling stories. I started writing my first diary a few months after the library incident, when I saw one of the bullies lifeguarding at the local pool. She has a cast on her arm, I noted. It has a plastic bag on it in case she needs to save someone.

There was a girl in my high school named Susy who was, in common estimation, a slut. Susy has a 24 year old boyfriend. With a motorcycle!! I wrote, and She is two-timing him with Dave V. At a house party, my friend’s older brother asked Susy to come down to the rec room where his friends were hanging out. When I asked what was going on, I was told they were “teaching Susy a lesson on the weight bench.”

A couple of years later, at a fraternity party in college I watched a passed-out sorority sister getting handed around the dance floor like a life-sized puppet, her shirt removed and her bra cups tucked down to expose her nipples. There’s nothing in my journal about her, but I clearly remember thinking, Gross, and What a stupid girl.

Merriam-Webster says a bystander is “one who is present but not taking part in a situation or event; a chance spectator.” A benign word, then, by definition (as in, “the getaway car struck an innocent bystander.”) But how exactly do you decide whether you are taking part in what you are seeing? What’s the difference between spectating by “chance” and plain old spectating? To what extent should a bystander be held responsible (to intervene, to lend a hand, to report)? Our sense of the bystander’s innocence has certainly changed over time. It wasn’t until I was a parent and read Barbara Coloroso’s 2002 book “The Bully, The Bullied and the Bystander” that I recognized standing by as part of the problem. Coloroso helped popularize the idea that it’s not only those instigating, joining in, or encouraging the bullying but also the much larger numbers passively accepting what’s taking place who qualify as “harmful bystanders.”

Witnessing acts of abuse and not speaking, not acting — I look back on these memories now as moments of moral failure on my part, or at least failure of character. But I only sort of looked at them that way at the time. I felt awful about Karen’s cigarette burns, which scabbed up like raisins in the days that followed and left her upper arm polka dotted with white scars, but I also felt very lucky it hadn’t been me. About Susy, I was confused: My guilt was mixed with a queasy fascination and envy (I harbored a secret crush on the older brother). About the sorority girl? Smugness, disdain. By my 20s I had thoroughly internalized the idea that some girls deserve it.

These recollections all played a part in writing my novel, “The Red Word.” In this campus story, my narrator, sophomore Karen (named half-consciously in honor of that childhood best friend), is a bystander-witness to all kinds of sexual misbehavior. Her inability, or refusal, to intervene in the tragedy ensuing from one particular incident results in a prolonged self-incarceration: 15 years after graduation, Karen is still isolated and stuck in her grief and guilt.

In her brilliant book “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag argues that people turn away from other people’s suffering not because they are callous, but because they feel helpless and afraid. Was I afraid? Is that why I didn’t say anything to the boys I watched treating girls like shit? What happened to me between age ten and age 20, I think, was that my fear went underground. I stopped feeling it as fear, and it became something else. “Compassion is an unstable emotion,” Sontag says. “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

If violence against women never stops — if we keep denying its existence or throwing up our hands in despair — then compassion turns into cynicism, apathy, victim-blaming and self-protectiveness. My compassion for Susy downstairs on the weight bench was drowned out by other, louder voices clamoring inside me, the ones telling me Susy was not my problem and warning me not to align myself with her lest I be painted with the same brush.

Coming at these themes as a fiction writer, the story that I chose to tell is not a morally straightforward one. The ardent young feminists in my novel who believe that college fraternities embody misogyny and rape culture stage an elaborate setup in hopes of getting frats banned from campus. In other words, they lie. And the ripple effect of their actions harms a fellow female student as well as a frat brother who, even if he’s guilty, doesn’t deserve punishment like that. What I sought for the story, at a structural level, was the widest possible range of interpretations and outcomes given its parameters (1990s time period, campus setting). I wanted to explore ongoing issues of gender and power but also in-group psychology, codes of purity, and the damaging effects of self-righteousness on all sides.

For my bystander narrator Karen, the only way to restore self-respect and vitality is to revisit the painful events she witnessed in the past. And maybe this is true for me, the novelist, as well. Sontag says that the act of remembering “is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.” Memory is the only connection we have with the dead, with the past, and our own mortality can steer us, via memory, toward more compassionate behavior: “heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together.” Tracing the path by which my fear of violence became twisted, over the years, into gendered shame and denial might be the first step toward becoming a braver, more vocal sort of bystander.

A major component of rape culture is, of course, bystander syndrome. Social media campaigns like #MeToo help foster dialogue and give survivors space to share their experiences, but many activists are frustrated by the way “hashtag activism” is so easily ignored by bystanders, including bystanders with power like government and law enforcement. On my own campus (Ryerson University, in Toronto), the Office for Sexual Violence Support recently launched a different kind of campaign, directly addressing the bystander, titled “This is How We Take Care of Each Other.” Posters around campus offer concrete examples of consent-based, supportive actions bystanders can take, such as “He gently asked if I wanted him to get help,” “We used a signal when things got weird at a party,” and “They ran to get my friends to get me out of there.” Modeling a collective culture of responsibility and care encourages students (and faculty, and administrators) to pay attention to what goes on around us and to steer toward, not around, scenes that make us uncomfortable.

And what about writers? If writers are by nature bystanders — inclined to notice things rather than ink them on placards — can we still make a difference? Can noticing become an act of resistance, of intervention or change? When I write fiction, I dive deep into my experience and into my memory and resurface with the details that trouble me, that make me burn with curiosity and confusion, that call out to me for more attention and care. If I do it right — if I dedicate the necessary attention and care in my writing — then maybe the resulting story can induce others to care, too.

Trump’s “fake news” smear is starting to have dangerous consequences

(Credit: AP/Jorge Silva/Twitter/Salon)

President Donald Trump has long used the epithet “fake news” to discredit news outlets and stories that depict him in an unfavorable light. It appears, however, that the Orwellian term has started to leak beyond Trump’s own immediate political fortunes.

The most conspicuous example emerges from Libya, where the broadcaster Libya 218 has used one of Trump’s tweets attacking CNN as “fake news” to cast doubt on that network’s recent report of slave auctions being held in that country, according to The Guardian. Although nations like France have called on the United Nations to impose sanctions on Libya to help eliminate trafficking, at least one Libyan media outlet has echoed Trump’s words to delegitimize the story.

“Here the possibility arises that the channel has published the report of slavery in Libya to secure an as yet hidden political objective,” Libya 218 proclaimed in one of the broadcasts challenging the veracity of CNN’s report. On Monday, they even suggested that Trump’s tweet meant CNN itself could face an investigation.

.@FoxNews is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly. The outside world does not see the truth from them!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2017

A recent story from the Associated Press highlighted the extent of the damage that Trump’s “fake news” smear has done to legitimate reporting:

An Idaho state lawmaker urges her constituents to submit entries for her “fake news awards.” The Kentucky governor tweets #FAKENEWS to dismiss questions about his purchase of a home from a supporter. An aide to the Texas land commissioner uses the phrase to downplay the significance of his boss receiving donations from employees of a company that landed a multimillion-dollar contract.

“I worry about the ongoing attack on the legitimacy of the media by President Trump and some of his supporters. The press is hardly perfect, of course, but it is also an important mechanism of accountability for people in power. This kind of rhetoric is potentially corrosive to trust in the media and to people’s willingness to accept information that is critical of politicians they support,” Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, told the AP. Nyhan was a co-author of a recent study by the Poynter Institute which determined that Republicans were now more likely to believe extreme and baseless claims about the media than Democrats.

Republicans on House Intel committee say “no collusion” between Trump associates and Russia

FILE - In this Oct. 7, 2015 file photo, Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. Conaway has been tapped to lead the House probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File) (Credit: AP)

The deeply divided House Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing to wrap up its contested investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election, Rep. Mike Conaway announced Monday.

“We found no evidence that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it colluded with the Russians,” he said. According to the Texas Republican, the GOP-dominated committee has concluded that Russians did attempt to influence Americans during the election.

Republican GOP members of the committee have been publicly speaking about closing the investigation since December, while some have cited the much-larger criminal investigation of Department of Justice special prosecutor Robert Mueller as making the congressional panel’s investigation obsolete.

“We’re not a criminal investigation,” Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla, told NBC last December. “If I honestly thought that there was fire somewhere we have an obligation constitutionally to look further into, I would have no problem doing that. But when you don’t and you’ve got to the point where you’re getting into the fifth and sixth level of people coming in here, then you’re spinning your wheels.”

During its yearlong inquiry, the House committee interviewed more than 50 people and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. The next phase will be the writing of a summary report based on that information.

According to CNN, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the committee, had not been told by the Republican majority about plans to wind down the investigation.

Committee Democrats have criticized their Republican counterparts throughout the investigation. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chairman of the committee, was forced to remove himself after he was accused of leaking classified information. Several GOP House members lodged a similar leak complaint about an interview the committee conducted with Donald Trump Jr. in December.

Democratic members of the committee had requested to compel testimony from 6 people in February, but were denied by the GOP majority.

Both sides have already released competing preliminary reports about federal law enforcement officials’ conduct during the early stages of the FBI investigation into Russian operations in 2016. Republicans have claimed that executive branch officials had relied heavily on a private sector report on connections between Trump and Russia, an assertion which committee Democrats rebutted in an analysis of their own.

Tensions between the two parties had become so heightened that in February, GOP members of the committee proposed building a physical wall to separate the staffs of both parties from each other. That plan was scrapped last week, however.

Democrats on the Intelligence Committee are expected to issue their own statement about the investigation Monday evening.

Conor Lamb edges out Saccone ahead of Pennsylvania special election: poll

Conor Lamb (Credit: AP/Keith Srakocic)

A new poll yielded the most positive results yet for Democratic candidate Conor Lamb in the upcoming special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, giving him a slight edge over his opponent for tomorrow (Tuesday)’s special election.

Monday’s Monmouth University poll showed that Lamb holds a 51 percent to 45 percent lead over his Republican rival Rep. Rick Saccone, provided the voter turnout reflects the “Democratic surge similar to voting patterns seen in other special elections over the past year.”

Interestingly enough, Lamb still holds a lead — 49 percent to 47 percent — when “using a historical midterm lower turnout model,” though the lead is much slimmer. Using a more optimistic model that measures turnout as similar to that of a presidential election year, Lamb commands a 51 percent to 44 percent advantage.

“This marks a turnaround from last month’s Monmouth poll of the race, when Saccone held a small lead in all the models – 49% to 46% in the surge model, 48% to 44% in the high turnout model, and 50% to 45% in the low turnout model,” the poll showed.

For the Democrats to come away with a significant upset victory, the strategy is obvious: high turnout.

Saccone’s favorability rating among likely voters — 47 percent to 43 percent — is also lower than Lamb’s, which sits at 53 percent to 33 percent, the poll showed.

President Donald Trump threw his weight behind Saccone on Saturday night when he attended a rally where he endorsed him in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. The poll results showed that it is still unclear if the president’s recent decision to impose new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports swayed voters. Only 3 percent of likely voters said they were more likely to support Saccone as a result of the tariffs, and 1 percent expressed they’d support Lamb.

Interestingly, 96 percent of voters said “the tariff announcement did nothing to change their vote in this race,” the poll showed.

Republicans, however, have expressed skepticism of Saccone as a candidate that can come away victorious against a young, former Marine who leans towards the center in a district that has gone Republican, but holds deep blue-collar roots.

“This district has voted overwhelmingly Republican in recent elections, but a large number of these voters have blue-collar Democratic roots. Lamb seems to have connected with them,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Lamb’s campaign has also spent far more money, while Saccone has relied on heavy backing from the National Republican Congressional Committee. In total, both parties are on track to exceed $12 million in advertisement spending.

That a Democrat is polling ahead in a March special election in a district that hasn’t chosen a Democrat since the 2000 election is a quite a feat in itself. Lamb does have a chance to come away with an upset, which would be perceived as a major rebuke of Trump — who won the district by 20 points in the 2016 election.

Clearing the radioactive rubble heap that was Fukushima Daiichi, 7 years on

FILE - In this Feb. 21, 2012, file photo, workers spray the roof of a radiation-contaminated warehouse as a massive cleanup begins in Fukushima, Japan. Five years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami sent the nuclear power plant in the country into multiple meltdowns, cleaning up the mess both onsite and in surrounding towns remains a work in progress. (AP Photo/Greg Baker, File) (Credit: AP Photo/Greg Baker, File)

Seven years after one of the largest earthquakes on record unleashed a massive tsunami and triggered a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials say they are at last getting a handle on the mammoth task of cleaning the site before it is ultimately dismantled. But the process is still expected to be a long, expensive slog, requiring as-yet untried feats of engineering — and not all the details have yet been worked out.

When the disaster knocked out off- and on-site power supplies on March 11, 2011, three of the cooling systems for the plant’s four reactor units were disabled. This caused the nuclear fuel inside to overheat, leading to a meltdown and hydrogen explosions that spewed out radiation. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), responded by cooling the reactors with water, which continues today. Meanwhile thousands of people living in the surrounding area were evacuated and Japan’s other nuclear plants were temporarily shut down.

In the years since the disaster and the immediate effort to stanch the release of radioactive material, officials have been working out how to decontaminate the site without unleashing more radiation into the environment. It will take a complex engineering effort to deal with thousands of fuel rods, along with the mangled debris of the reactors and the water used to cool them. Despite setbacks, that effort is now moving forward in earnest, officials say. “We are still conducting studies on the location of the molten fuel, but despite this we have made the judgment that the units are stable,” says Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s chief decommissioning officer for Daiichi.

Waterworks

Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion. The Japan Center for Economic Research, a private think tank, said the cleanup costs could mount to some $470 billion to $660 billion, however.

Under a government roadmap, TEPCO hopes to finish the job in 30 to 40 years. But some experts say even that could be an underestimate. “In general, estimates of work involving decontamination and disposal of nuclear materials are underestimated by decades,” says Rod Ewing, a professor of nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University. “I think that we have to expect that the job will extend beyond the estimated time.”

The considerable time and expense are due to the cleanup being a veritable hydra that involves unprecedented engineering. TEPCO and its many contractors will be focusing on several battlefronts.

Water is being deliberately circulated through each reactor every day to cool the fuel within — but the plant lies on a slope, and water from precipitation keeps flowing into the buildings as well. Workers built an elaborate scrubbing system that removes cesium, strontium and dozens of other radioactive particles from the water; some of it is recirculated into the reactors, and some goes into row upon row of giant tanks at the site. There’s about one million tons of water kept in 1,000 tanks and the volume grows by 100 tons a day, down from 400 tons four years ago.

To keep more water from seeping into the ground and being tainted, more than 90 percent of the site has been paved. A series of drains and underground barriers including a $325-billion supposedly impermeable “wall” of frozen soil was also constructed to keep water from flowing into the reactors and the ocean. These have not worked as well as expected, though, especially during typhoons when precipitation spikes, so groundwater continues to be contaminated.

Despite the fact contaminated water was dumped into the sea after the disaster, studies by Japanese and foreign labs have shown radioactive cesium in fish caught in the region has fallen and is now within Japan’s food safety limits. TEPCO will not say when it will decide what to do with all the stored water, because dumping it in the ocean again would invite censure at home and abroad — but there are worries that another powerful quake could cause it to slosh out of the tanks.

Fuel mop-up

A second major issue at Fukushima is how to handle the fuel the melted uranium cores as well as spent and unused fuel rods stored at the reactors. Using robotic probes and 3-D imaging with muons (a type of subatomic particle), workers have found pebbly deposits and debris at various areas inside the primary containment vessels in the three of the plant’s reactor units. These highly radioactive remains are thought to be melted fuel as well as supporting structures. TEPCO has not yet worked out how it can remove the remains, but it wants to start the job in 2021. There are few precedents for the task. Lake Barrett — director of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant during its decommissioning after a partial meltdown at the Middletown, Pa., facility in 1979 — says TEPCO will use robots to remotely dig out the melted fuel and store it in canisters on-site before shipping to its final disposal spot. “This is similar to what we did at Three Mile Island, just much larger and with much more sophisticated engineering because their damage is greater than ours was,” Barrett says. “So although the work is technically much more challenging than ours was, Japan has excellent technological capabilities, and worldwide robotic technology has advanced tremendously in the last 30-plus years.”

Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany, doubts the ambitious cleanup effort can be completed in the time cited, and questions whether the radioactivity can be completely contained. Until TEPCO can verify the conditions of the molten fuel, he says, “there can be no confirmation of what impact and damage the material has had” on the various components of the reactors — and therefore how radiation might leak into the environment in the future.

Although the utility managed to safely remove all 1,533 fuel bundles from the plant’s unit No. 4 reactor by December 2014, it still has to do the same for the hundreds of rods stored at the other three units. This involves clearing rubble, installing shields, dismantling the building roofs, and setting up platforms and special rooftop equipment to remove the rods. Last month a 55-ton dome roof was installed on unit No. 3 to facilitate the safe removal of the 533 fuel bundles that remain in a storage pool there. Whereas removal should begin at No. 3 sometime before April 2019, the fuel at units No. 1 and 2 will not be ready for transfer before 2023, according to TEPCO. And just where all the fuel and other radioactive solid debris on the site will be stored or disposed of long-term has yet to be decided; last month the site’s ninth solid waste storage building, with a capacity of about 61,000 cubic meters, went into operation.

As for what the site itself might look like decades from now, cleanup officials refuse to say. But they are quick to differentiate it from the sarcophagus-style containment of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in the Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. Whereas the Chernobyl plant is sealed off and the surrounding area remains off-limits except for brief visits — leaving behind several ghost towns — Japanese officials want as many areas as possible around the Daiichi site to eventually be habitable again.

“To accelerate reconstruction and rebuilding of Fukushima as a region, and the lives of locals, the key is to reduce the mid- and long-term risk,” says Satoru Toyomoto, director for international issues at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Nuclear Accident Response Office. “In that regard, keeping debris on the premises without approval is not an option.”