Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 202

“The Greatest Showman” is a giant step backward

Zac Efron and Zendaya in "The Greatest Showman" (Credit: 20th Century Fox)

Hasn’t our popular culture evolved beyond biopics like “The Greatest Showman”?

The lavish movie-musical about the 19th century showman and circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum certainly could have told an interesting story. Barnum was a fascinating and complex individual, a man who championed abolitionism and served as a reasonably competent politician in his later years but made his fortune through schemes that mislead paying audiences about what he was displaying and exploited the physical difference of so-called “freaks.” He was a philanthropist who always insisted on making a buck off of his charitable works if possible, a huckster who was beloved by those who knew him well, a charlatan entertainer who tried to debunk spiritualists and others whose deceptions he considered morally worse than his own.

I am not of the school that argues that biopics about historical figures need to vilify them, or even that they need to be terribly accurate. We can have fare like the musical “Hamilton” which, though glossing over Alexander Hamilton’s economic elitism and other unsavory political views, still manages to capture the nuances of his character in an intelligent and convincing way. It doesn’t even bother me that much of “The Greatest Showman” is grossly inaccurate in many ways (for example, Barnum was much older than Hugh Jackman is portrayed when he created the modern circus). These are understandable compromises, necessary for the sake of displaying a work of art — a fact that, appropriately enough, Barnum himself would have understood.

At the same time, there is something disheartening about the way that “The Greatest Showman” insists on transforming a three-dimensional human being into a generic musical protagonist. This isn’t the story of Barnum’s life, but a formulaic rags-to-riches story grafted onto the broad outlines of Barnum’s career as a circus entrepreneur. It’s remarkably unambitious as a result, turning its real-life characters into cardboard cutouts — Barnum is the con man with a heart of gold, his wife Charity is the long-suffering but loyal partner, New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett is a snooty and joyless art critic, etc. — and ignoring the thorny ethical questions that made Barnum’s story so intriguing.

Take its depiction of the “freaks” such as the morbidly obese man, the bearded lady, General Tom Thumb, the giant, the dog boy and so on. Considering that these marginalized individuals were vital to Barnum’s cultural legacy — without them, he never would have had his legendary circus — it is impossible to honestly tell Barnum’s story without exploring the moral questions at the core of their contribution. On the one hand, Barnum was offering them a much better living than they could have received in any other way during that era and was much less cruel to them than many of their contemporaries. He was also undeniably exploiting their suffering for cash, and what the movie describes as a “celebration of humanity” was to many 19th century consumers an easy way to poke fun at and feel superior to men and women who could be “othered.”

This is perhaps the most interesting story in “The Greatest Showman,” but it’s one that the musical never bothers telling. Aside from a single showstopping number “This Is Me” — and while the song is good, it is a standard empowerment piece that doesn’t address the specifics of its characters’ situation — this theme is almost entirely ignored. The closest it ever comes to having a meaningful confrontation with this issue is when Barnum recruits a reluctant Charles Stratton (later Tom Thumb) by inquiring, if people are going to laugh at you anyway, why not get paid for it? The fact that Barnum both has a valid point and is yet contributing to the way little people are brutally demeaned and dehumanized speaks to the central moral quandary that exists at the film’s soul. While this would merely be a storytelling shortcoming if “The Greatest Showman” was purely fictional, it becomes morally problematic considering that it exists to celebrate Barnum as both a pioneering entertainer and a lovable rogue.

There is also the problematic subtext in the story told through two of the fictional characters in “The Greatest Showman” — Zac Efron’s playwright-turned-business partner Phillip Carlyle and Zendaya’s trapeze artist Anne Wheeler. Again, there is nothing wrong with creating fictional characters in an otherwise real-life story, but the main purpose of the Ephron and Zendaya characters seems to be to offer social commentary on how an interracial couple would have been rejected in 19th century America. Yet because this tale is told in such overwrought and simplistic terms, it feels more self-congratulatory than insightful. For condemnations of racism to be effective, both the heroes and the racists need to be depicted in a realistic way. When the heroes are instead little more than blandly likable and the racists are over-the-top, most mainstream audiences — including many that have racial prejudices of their own — will be able to sit smugly in their seats with the certainty that they would never have embraced such bigoted views.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t things to admire about “The Greatest Showman.” Hugh Jackman is an immensely talented singer and dancer, the music and choreography are incredibly impressive and the lush visuals keep you engrossed even when the plot itself is overly predictable. But in an era when social justice politics have encouraged many artists to become more thoughtful in their depictions of historical figures, “The Greatest Showman” feels like an unnecessary step backward toward a more simplistic type of storytelling.

The scariest animated Christmas special you haven’t seen (yet)

"A Christmas Carol" (Credit: ABC)

Being an imaginative people contending with shorter and shorter days and coming from a place where the spirits of the past always held sway, the English do something with Christmas that we Americans tend not to do. They use the holiday as an opportunity to amuse themselves, and stoke their senses of wonder, by scaring each other out of their minds with ghost stories.

Picture this: you are hanging out with your friends, the mulled wine is flowing, it is a Saturday, dark at 4:45 in the afternoon, and someone has an idea to see who can come up with the scariest story concerning the vapory dead. Fun, no?

Because of its trappings as family theater — that production you attend, yet again, come December, to keep the kids happy — we commonly view Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as a largely benign holiday reminder — which we will almost certainly overlook — to not be horrible to your fellow human, to be good to yourself, to let the past be the past, to be present in your present, and know that the future can hold more love and meaning than what you’ve experienced to date. Dickens intended to frighten you — after all, ever try and confront your past and who you really are? — though most adapters of his novella aren’t focused on this themselves.

The most notable exception is the 1951 film version, “Scrooge,” which I am now spending daily time with, having been contracted to write a book looking at it as a work of horror cinema.

This is the version with Alastair Sim, one that premiered, tellingly, on Halloween in this country, and was thought to be too frightful for American audiences that wanted copious amounts of red-fruited holly spread over their cinematic holiday repasts. The film is shot as though it were an example of German Expressionist terror, with Michael Hordern as a Jacob Marley who practically vomits ectoplasmic blood when Sim’s Scrooge dares to question his authenticity.

The film has come to be known as the definitive version of “A Christmas Carol” on screen, but even most fans of the movie — which has long played late at night, on random stations, as though it, too, were a ghost that couldn’t venture into the light of the afternoon — don’t know of its television offshoot, which was to follow twenty years later.

There are all kinds of animated versions of “A Christmas Carol.” You almost surely know “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” with Scrooge McDuck essentially taking a spin in his own origin story long before he was swimming through mountains of coins in his money vault. (Who knows? Maybe before the bejeezus was scared out of him he merely walked those hills of gold grumpily.)

The animated versions of “A Christmas Carol,” of course, are primarily intended for children, who may prefer softer edges for the minatory tablet Dickens was trying to stuff down their gullets. Let’s be clear about Dickens: he was a lot more like Kafka giggling to himself over having turned a dude into a bug than we ever think, a man who walked the streets of London late at night, laughing about how much like a puss-leaking dead body his Jacob Marley was and what a hoot it was to station Scrooge over his own grave. That onesie of yours, dear child, best have a diaper sewn into it.

None of the animated specials retain these Dickensian qualities, save one, which featured Sim and Hordern reprising their roles with animator Richard Williams — helped out by Ken Harris — as a kind of postscript, two decades on, to the cinematic genius of 1951’s “Scrooge.”



A cartoony codicil after the fact to give you another jolt, lest you had become the recidivist version of a dire prick and forget those drenched-in-terror lessons of Sim and Hordern.

It’s not common to think of an animated work as having qualities like continuous long shots, but this 1971 cartoon effort opens with a single camera movement that is the animated analogue of what we see with the famous starting sequence of Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.”

The camera starts its dizzying journey atop the clock face of Big Ben, before traveling down that structure, flipping over — and flipping out sensibilities of what will be possible already in this production — and traveling over the rooftops of smoky, clogged, huddled London, which manages to feel both a representative of the (then) modern metropolis and still an urban center not far removed from the older world of thatched roofs and plough horses. We are already in the past, present and future, when the camera passes through the window of a counting house, belonging to, well, you know who it belongs to.

The devil is so in these details. The soundtrack of the counting house scene is a ticking clock, as if counting down our very hours on earth. Sim’s Scrooge, more bored by the alms-seeking solicitors than angry — which feels more like an existential crisis for him — taps his finger as they talk. More drumming to mirror the steady beat of the clock. The human agency is now a part of a march to the grave in 2/2 time. Tick tock, tick tock, bastards.

At his house, Scrooge is entirely in darkness upon entering, something that just does not happen in animated TV programs any more than dead air is sought in radio broadcasts. From this darkness a faintly defined coffin becomes ever-so-slightly illuminated and ascends the stairs as if shot from the Reaper’s personal trebuchet. When we see Scrooge’s reaction, he is no longer a product of animation but rather the owner of a face that has regressed to simple black-and-white pen rendering. The color has literally left him. It is around this point that you think to yourself, “Wait . . . this is for kids? This is not for kids. Maybe some awfully brave kids. Maybe for the brave kid in me. Let us see what happens . . . ”

Hordern’s Marley turns up, and his exchange with Scrooge has to necessarily be sped along, since this particular holiday visitation is taking place, from life of sin to life of redemption, in about 25 minutes. To really put the screws to Scrooge, Marley indulges in a version of ghostly terror porn. He unfastens the dirty bandage holding his face together, and his jaw immediately descends to his breast, like someone with an invisible foot had just kicked hard at a rotting skull. That his voice then emanates from this oral abyss with a pre-electricity electronic effect, complete with charnel house echo, is every bit as unnerving.

The following tour of Scrooge’s past, with the aid of the first of the three ghosts, then becomes a different kind of visage study, but one just as wracking, with the pain of what was and what could have been etched into Scrooge’s face. This is the visual version of that game we all do late at night, when we can’t sleep, when we wonder what so and so is up to now, if there is something we might have said to that person we loved, or if we would have been better if we hadn’t approached them that on that first day, if they were happier in these intervening years for having stopped knowing us. Or, worse yet, if we will ever know peace and contentment before our time is up. Tick tock, etc.  

Normally I put little stock in Academy Awards, because the best works rarely win them, but this television special, amazingly, won one for Best Animated Short Film on account of having gained a brief theatrical release after ABC first aired it. Industry peeps were so bothered by a television program scooping an award that they changed the rules. But hey, you can’t touch a good ghost.

My own first viewing of the work was not unlike my first viewing of 1951’s “Scrooge.” In the case of the latter, seven-year-old me snuck downstairs — having consulted TV Guide in advance — to see a middle-of-the-night showing of the film, the sound on low, so as not to wake my parents, with the glow from the television feeling like a ghostly proxy between my shaking, transfixed self and that cinematic London that had lurched out of the horror history of German Expressionism and early Frankenstein pictures. This was a perpetual here-and-now that knew no one single age, no one single kind of person, no one single time of the day, no one limited corner of the human condition. It was a kind of all-ness.

A few years later, when I was allowed to stay up later, I asked my parents to let that be a little later still, because the 1971 animated version was going to be on and it occurred to me that this all-ness might even extend to a cartoon. They probably thought eleven at night was a strange time for a cartoon to air. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but a form of inculcation had already happened to me. Like Scrooge by the time he gets to the third ghost, I would be ready for whatever was in store.

But as post-transformation Scrooge would wisely remind us, ideally via the voice of Alastair Sim, the people who are prepared to know are those that allow that they don’t know yet.

Damn, I did not know what was coming, and damn, I felt all over again that some forms of our life are most present before they’ve even happened, and we are as alive as we will ever be in trying to get to them. In a Scrooge-ian sense — and I hope a good one — that opening shot down the clock face has never let me go.  

Lawsuit: Corporations use Facebook to discriminate against older job applicants

(Credit: AP/Noah Berger)

In 2015, the millennial cohort (adults ages 18 to 34) became the largest percentage of the American workforce, surpassing Generation X and baby boomers. The Pew Research Report credited the retirements of baby boomers and an influx of young immigrants for the rise. But as of late, it appears that there might be another reason as to why more millennials are joining the workforce—big companies have been allegedly actively targeting them on Facebook with job ads.

In an investigation led by ProPublica and the New York Times, companies like Verizon, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target, and Facebook, have reportedly targeted specific job ads to limited age groups, according to the report, which have many questioning if this practice is a violation of the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

Facebook has, of course, defended the practice, which uses the social media platform’s ability to target people by location, age, gender and interests.

“US law forbids discrimination in employment based on age, race, gender and other legally protected characteristics. That said, simply showing certain job ads to different age groups on services like Facebook or Google may not in itself be discriminatory — just as it can be OK to run employment ads in magazines and on TV shows targeted at younger or older people,” Rob Goldman, Facebook’s VP of Ads, said in a statement.

But on Wednesday, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against T-Mobile US, Amazon, Cox Communications and Media Group, and hundreds of other large employers who have allegedly been engaging in this discriminatory practice.

The lawsuit provides examples of the alleged discriminatory ads:

“This pattern or practice of discrimination denies job opportunities to individuals who are searching for and interested in jobs, reduces the number of older workers who apply for jobs with the offending employers and employment agencies, and depresses the number of older workers who are hired by such employers and employment agencies, causing working families to lose out on wages, benefits, and the dignity that comes with a good job.”

The CWA filed the lawsuit with three plaintiffs: Lura Callahan and Linda Maxwell Bradley, both of whom are former call center workers, and a former cable technician, 57-year-old Maurice Anscombe.

“Living in Ohio, it’s hard to find a good job that pays a living wage. I’m upset that so many companies are blocking me and other workers from even learning about job opportunities,” Callahan said in a press statement.

The workers are asking the Court to declare the alleged practice a violation of the law, issue an injunction to stop the companies from engaging in the practice, and compensate older workers who have been denied job opportunities.

Russia probe closes in on Trump’s inner circle

Donald Trump; Felix Sater; Vladimir Putin (Credit: Getty/Jim Watson/Sergei Karpukhin//Youtube/Felix Sater)

Several members of the House intelligence committee have traveled to New York to hear testimony from two long-time business associates of President Donald Trump. One of them is Rhona Graff, his former secretary who is now a senior vice president at his umbrella company, the Trump Organization. She was interviewed on Friday, according to multiple reports. Committee members heard from on Wednesday.

Sater became a person of interest in the wide-ranging Russian influence story after the New York Times revealed in August that he had written an email to Trump’s top attorney, Michael Cohen, in which he vowed to enlist the help of Russian president Vladimir Putin to approve a real estate deal. According to Sater, getting a Trump Tower built in Moscow would demonstrate how good the future president was at negotiating.

“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in his message. “I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Graff has become a person of interest to the committee due to her decades-long role as an informational gatekeeper for Trump. She was also mentioned in a June 3, 2016 email sent to Donald Trump Jr. when he was attempting to coordinate a meeting with a Russian attorney he believed had incriminating information about then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In that message, sent by publicist Rob Goldstone, the information was described as being “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” The younger Trump, Eric, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort agreed to meet with the attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, just days later. All three men said later that Veselnitskaya did not present any damaging information about Clinton. Veselnitskaya has since claimed that she never had presented herself as having such details.

High-ranking Democrats on the committee and within the party’s House leadership have condemned the move to question Graff and Sater out of state and during a time when the House is officially out of session.

“Political haste must not cut short valid investigatory threats,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, according to an NBC News report. “Key questions about foreign interference in our elections remain, and must be thoroughly investigated. Nothing less than America’s democracy and national security at stake.”

Democrats on the House intelligence committee have also argued that Republicans are trying to pack too much into the investigation right before the end of the year. By contrast, the Senate intelligence committee is set to issue a preliminary report early next year dealing only with direct electoral matters but continue onward into related topics.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s ranking Democratic member, told NBC that Republicans were moving too fast. “In several cases we’ve only received hundreds of pages of documents the day of the interview, or the majority has received hundreds of pages of documents without informing the minority,” he said. “It’s no way to conduct an investigation. Not if you’re serious about getting to the truth. It is a way to conduct an investigation if you want to give the appearance of legitimacy or you want to bring things to an end.”

New studio merger continues media consolidation trend

The Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Disneyland, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015. (Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong)

In the U.S., only a handful of media companies control what children and adults watch and read.

Now that number could get even smaller.

The proposed US$52.4 billion merger of Disney and 21st Century Fox would merge the first and third largest film companies in the world. Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Pixar, Searchlight, 20th Century Fox and Big Sky would all be under the same umbrella. Disney would also acquire control of TV channels like FX and National Geographic, adding to a portfolio that already includes ABC and ESPN. It would have majority stake in Hulu, which would position the streaming service to take on Netflix head-to-head in what many industry insiders expect will be a battle for market control.

As someone who studies global media power, I find the potential Disney-Fox merger troubling not just because one corporation will control production of narratives about popular culture and politics on television, film and streaming services, but because it will also create a media powerhouse worth so much that it could be as powerful as a state actor on the world stage.

‘Weapons of mass distraction’

For children and adults, media isn’t just entertainment. It is, in many ways, the tapestry of American life.

We grow up in front of the television screen, the silver screen and the computer screen, spending in the United States an astounding 12 hours daily engaged with media. It shapes our attitudes and beliefs, our likes and dislikes, our wants and desires and even our basic definitions of what it means to be normal.

Studies have found that Americans’ attitudes about everything from terrorism to race relations are largely formed by what they watch and hear. For example, a 2015 study was able to show that negative stereotyping of Muslims in news reports led to increased support for military action against Muslim countries.

Meanwhile, fictional television shows like “Homeland,” “The Americans” and “24” routinely cast foreigners as villains, making it easier for audiences to demonize citizens from other countries and immigrants. These attitudes have been shown to have a real effect on public policy.

Advertising to children is a $17 billion industry. According to the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, children’s ads have all been connected to “eating disorders, precocious sexuality, youth violence and family stress,” while contributing to “children’s diminished capability to play creatively.”

As is the case with all businesses, the bottom line for media companies trumps any consideration of the public good. Studios ultimately produce shows that attract the most viewers and sell the most ads and movie tickets: cheaply produced reality television, celebrity gossip, political drama, and films packed with action and special effects.

The result is a media system that has become what media scholar Marty Kaplan calls a “weapon of mass distraction.”

A consolidation frenzy

Media control, then, has powerful implications in our society: The stories that appear influence how citizens make sense of the world.

When journalist and media critic Ben Bagdikian wrote his 1983 book “The Media Monopoly,” 50 companies controlled a majority of what Americans watched, read and heard.

Bagdikian predicted that further media consolidation of ownership would weaken coverage of lobbying, environmental issues, war, labor fights and corporate wrongdoing.

By the time he wrote his sequel in 2004, Bagdikian’s predictions had largely come true. But even he didn’t think that 90 percent of American media outlets would fall under the control of just five big media corporations. He wrote that these conglomerates operated as a kind of cartel that controlled our “most important institutions,” from newspapers to film.

Disney, of course, was one of the five media conglomerates Bagdikian named. Another was Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which, at the time, included parts of what would become 21st Century Fox.

Money talks

If the $52 billion price tag sounds big, consider this: The payoff will be massive. The hybrid corporation control will give Disney a third of all domestic box office revenue, which, in 2017, amounted to about $3 billion.

Because the deal further shrinks the dwindling number of voices controlling media, Disney’s merger with Fox has a long way to go to pass Department of Justice muster. Three major anti-trust laws are supposed to guide Department of Justice principles related to mergers and the resulting market conditions left in their wake.

But I expect we’ll see what’s happened in the past when regulators have attempted to control the ownership structure of other media conglomerates: a massive lobbying campaign. The $72 billion deal that merged Comcast and AT&T Broadband in 2001 was given the go-ahead. A decade later, Comcast bought NBC Universal for $30 billion, a merger that passed both FCC and Department of Justice scrutiny after being called a “lobbying frenzy” by Roll Call.

Disney already spends millions of dollars annually lobbying Congress, the U.S. State Department, the Federal Communications Commission and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the federal agency responsible for negotiating with China to alter how it accepts and runs Hollywood films.

I also predict this merger will strengthen Disney’s bargaining power with China, which controls film’s release dates. China, the world’s second-largest film market, typically blacks out American films during crucial summer blockbuster months to focus on domestic films, and it allows just 34 foreign films to be released each year. Yet some believe China will be more willing to negotiate with the mega-company that will emerge after the merger because of its sheer financial clout.

The merger, of course, will also influence what information reaches Americans, including content citizens need to govern themselves in a democracy.

Disney shares members of its board of directors with companies like Anheuser-Busch, Chase Manhattan, Coca-Cola, Unilever and Pfizer. Citizens should ask: How might this influence the information disseminated about food, banking regulations, consumer products and pharmaceuticals?

And consider how a stronger China-U.S. media alliance could impact U.S. films, television and news. Would American media companies be hesitant to cover human rights violations, factory conditions or pollution in Asia for fear that they would anger the Chinese government and, therefore, lose bargaining power and access to audiences?

What gets left out of coverage is sometimes as important as what makes it in.

If just four companies get to decide, we should all be concerned.

# # #

Margot Susca, Professorial Lecturer, American University School of Communication

Let it go: The Arctic will never be frozen again

This image provided by NASA shows Arctic sea ice at it maximum, the lowest on record. The winter maximum level of Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest on record, thanks to extraordinarily warm temperatures, federal scientists said. The National Snow and Ice Data Center says sea ice spread to a maximum of 5.607 million square miles in 2016. That’s 5,000 square miles less than the old record set in 2015, a difference slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut. NASA via AP) (Credit: NASA via AP)

Last week, at a New Orleans conference center that once doubled as a storm shelter for thousands during Hurricane Katrina, a group of polar scientists made a startling declaration: The Arctic as we once knew it is no more.

The region is now definitively trending toward an ice-free state, the scientists said, with wide-ranging ramifications for ecosystems, national security, and the stability of the global climate system. It was a fitting venue for an eye-opening reminder that, on its current path, civilization is engaged in an existential gamble with the planet’s life-support system.

In an accompanying annual report on the Arctic’s health — titled “Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades” — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees all official U.S. research in the region, coined a term: “New Arctic.”

Until roughly a decade or so ago, the region was holding up relatively well, despite warming at roughly twice the rate of the planet as a whole. But in recent years, it’s undergone an abrupt change, which now defines it. The Arctic is our glimpse of an Earth in flux, transforming into something that’s radically different from today.

At a press conference announcing the new assessment, acting NOAA Administrator Timothy Gallaudet emphasizes the “huge impact” these changes were having on everything from tourism to fisheries to worldwide weather patterns.

“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic — it affects the rest of the planet,” Gallaudet said.

Monthly #Arctic temperature ranks (1=warmest [red], 39=coldest [blue]) over the satellite era – including November 2017

Available at https://t.co/kO5ufUWrKq pic.twitter.com/a2pr9u3gdV

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) December 4, 2017

In an interview with NPR, marine scientist Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic Program, went a step further. When it comes to the Arctic, Mathis said “there is no normal” anymore: “The environment is changing so quickly in such a short amount of time that we can’t quite get a handle on what this new state is going to look like.”

Using 1,500 years of natural records compiled from lake sediments, ice cores, and tree rings as context, the NOAA report says the Arctic is changing at a rate far beyond what’s occurred in the region for millennia.

“The rate of change is unprecedented in at least the last 1,500 years and probably going back even further than that,” Mathis said. “Not only are we seeing big changes, we’re seeing the pace of that change begin to increase.”

In the NOAA report, Arctic scientists lay out their best ideas of what this shift could mean for the world. Their depictions are sobering.

Take, for instance, the hypothesis of University of Alaska-Fairbanks permafrost scientist Vladimir Romanovsky: So far, 2017 has seen the highest permafrost temperatures in Alaska on record. If that warming continues at the current rate, widespread thawing could begin in as few as 10 years. The impact of such defrosting “will be very very severe,” Romanovsky says, and could include destruction of local infrastructure — like roads and buildings — throughout the Northern Hemisphere and the release of additional greenhouse gases that have been locked for generations in the ice.

 

NOAA: Arctic saw 2nd warmest year, smallest winter sea ice coverage on record in 2017 https://t.co/25mVT4MoaJ pic.twitter.com/P2Lr3BfR1z

— BuzzFeed Storm (@BuzzFeedStorm) December 12, 2017

The loss of sea ice is already having profound changes all the way down at the base of the Arctic food web. As more sunlight hits darkly-colored open water, more heat energy is retained, and temperatures are rising further. That’s kicking off what Mathis, of NOAA’s Arctic Program characterizes as “an almost runaway effect,” involving a lengthening of the growing season, a greening of the tundra, a surge in wildfires, and a boom in plankton growth. All that adds up to a wide-ranging disruption to patterns that Arctic natives have relied on for millennia.

 

'The Inuit have a word for changes they are seeing to their environment: uggianaqtuq, meaning “to behave strangely”': strong, sad NYT article on lost ice, lost hope & solastalgia in northern communities. https://t.co/XL3U5gz4r6

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) November 25, 2017

The effects are being felt further afield, too. “We’re fairly confident now,” Mathis said, that the warming Arctic is “creating conditions where more extreme weather events are beginning to show up in North America.” For example, separate research published earlier this month found a robust link between dwindling Arctic sea ice and an expanding risk of California drought.

The report’s urgent language begs the question: What concrete actions will a science-denying White House take as a result of this new information?

Acting NOAA Administrator Gallaudet said he personally presented the report at the White House last month, adding that Trump administration officials are “addressing it and acknowledging it and factoring it into their agenda.”

That the Arctic is now a relic of a time gone by — the first major part of the planet on a countdown clock — should shock us. It’s one of those facts that those of us who closely follow climate change knew was coming. And with its arrival, it is devastating in its totality.

The loss of the Old Arctic is as close as humanity has come so far to irreversibly transforming its planet into something fundamentally different than what has given rise to civilization over the past 10,000 years. This is a terrifying transition, and one worth mourning. But it’s also a reminder that our path as individuals and as a society is not fixed.

If the Arctic can change this quickly, then so must we.

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Land use report highlights America’s wealth gap

This undated photo provided by Barbara Cleary's Realty Guild shows the rear view of a 52-acre estate that sold for $14.3 million on Monday, April 14, 2014, in New Canaan, Conn. (AP Photo/Barbara Cleary's Realty Guild) (Credit: AP)

Wealthy Americans are reportedly investing more in their so-called roots — American land.

In 2007, the Land Report, an American trade magazine about land ownership, compiled data on how much land was owned by the nation’s 100 largest private landowners. Their findings concluded that the top 100 owned a collective 27 million acres of land, a tract roughly the size of Tennessee. One decade later, a new report by the magazine has concluded that the top private landowners have collective holdings near 40.2 million acres, a size more comparable to the state of Georgia.

Among the top landowners in the report are American billionaires John Malone, who owns 2.2 million acres of land; Ted Turner with 2 million acres; Jeff Bezos, 400,000 acres; and the Koch family, with 239,000 acres.

The increase in land ownership by the wealthiest could be linked to their lessening trust in the stock market; or, as some have reported, the fear of an impending apocalypse, which has triggered some billionaires to secure land for underground bunkers. Regardless of the reason why, if this trend continues, it’s worth asking: how much American land can a small group of billionaires own? If this trend continues, will wealthy billionaires own 80 million acres of America’s land in another decade? 160 million in two decades?

Still, the biggest landowner right now is — unsurprisingly — the federal government, which owns 640 million acres of the United States’ 2.27 billion acres. The land is managed by four separate federal agencies including the National Park Service and Department of Agriculture. The Department of Defense administers 11.4 million acres in the United States too, which consists of military bases and training zones. Much federally-owned land is open to the public for recreation and/or camping. 

This rise in land ownership by the wealthy comes at a critical point in America’s history, one where the middle class is shrinking and the inequality gap growing. Incidentally, earlier this month President Donald Trump made a controversial decision to drastically reduce the size of two protected national monuments. “By reducing the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, Trump would make it easier for extraction industries to exploit the lands no longer under federal protection,” Matt Rozsa wrote in Salon at the time.

“Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away,” Trump remarked at the time of the announcement. “I’ve come to Utah to take a very historic action to reverse federal overreach and restore the rights of this land to your citizens.”

Of course, land has always been a controversial and heated issue in American history, going back to British settlers and Native Americans. The fight over American land and borders has caused wars with several countries, and between states.  Today, the fight over land symbolizes our nation’s income inequality. Land is an expensive asset now — no longer something a poor farmer can easily acquire to make a living and support the family. 

Bigfoot, bullets and bud: My insane Humboldt County weed harvest

(Credit: Shutterstock)

“All aboard,” Brady snickered, as he opened the rear door of a horse trailer hitched to a narcoleptic mid-‘90s Suzuki Samurai. The trailer’s windows were boarded over with stained scraps of plywood. I climbed right in, along with 16 others who had trekked to this remote mountain farm in Humboldt County, California, to trim marijuana. Brady slammed the door shut and padlocked it from the outside. Inside was pitch black and filthy. I fell on my ass when we started winding down the road. The trailer creaked and swayed with every bend, threatening to come loose and tumble off the mountainside. It was my first day of work.

In my real life, I’m a filmmaker living in Los Angeles. I’d been lured to the farm with the promise of choice footage and cold hard cash. My friend Summer had been living up in Humboldt for the past few years trimming weed during harvest season and thought the scene would make a great subject for a documentary. I agreed. She ran the idea by the farm’s owners, who said if I came with her to work, they’d be open to me shooting some interviews. Growers are a notoriously insular and suspicious bunch, and they don’t take kindly to outsiders. I’d seen a few documentaries that touched on the subject but never one in which the director immersed herself in their world and portrayed it from the inside. This level of access was unprecedented and promised to be exciting.

I didn’t realize how insane this project would turn out to be.

Since 1996, growing medicinal marijuana has been legal in California under Proposition 215. The state is set to legalize the recreational use and cultivation of the plant in January of 2018, but it’s still illegal federally. Which means that at any point, the DEA can bust one of these pot farms and arrest everyone on it. “If the feds show up, just run into the woods,” Summer said nonchalantly. “But don’t worry, they won’t.”

Most Humboldt growers actually opposed legalization out of fear that it would completely decimate the county’s almost exclusively cash economy. With legalization came a whole slew of problems, starting with the permitting and licensing fees. Grows would be subject to taxation and government regulation, and growers would have a harder time paying trimmers under the table. Then there was the concern that the process would favor large industrial farms and push mom-and-pop operations out of business. The black market also kept marijuana prices high; when it became less dangerous to grow, more product would be available, and that would drive prices down.

The current legal gray area also means that banks won’t take marijuana money, so growers dig holes in the forest and bury their cash. Rumor was, this farm’s owners had around $250,000 stashed on their property. The average wholesale price for a pound of marijuana in California is around $2,000, and a medium-sized farm like this one can easily produce 400 pounds of weed in a season. All of that cash and all of that crop makes growers paranoid. They don’t want workers to be seen coming or going, so trimmers live in tents on the mountain for months at a time. Security is necessary — staff is well armed, and the property is gated and locked. Once I drove onto the land, I couldn’t leave without someone letting me out.

I’d met up with Summer a couple of days earlier at her place in Arcata, a quaint northern California coastal town known for Victorian architecture and marijuana. My new boyfriend Paul was with me. We’d been together for all of a month and a half, so I’d thought it was a great idea to bring him along. By the time I left trim camp, we’d spent half our relationship sharing a tent in the woods. Before we headed to the mountain, Summer took us shopping for the supplies we’d need: ultrasharp scissors made in Japan specifically for trimming weed (at least two pairs were necessary), small plastic perforated baskets to collect trimmed buds, aprons to protect our clothes.

As we left town, we passed clusters of gutter punks roaming the streets, some hitchhiking, some holding up signs saying things like “Looking for 420 Work.” These were “trimmigrants,” Humboldt speak for the seasonal workers who flood the area during the harvest hoping to land a trimming job. They came from all parts of the U.S. and the world, mostly in their twenties and broke. There was the potential to earn a decent amount of money in a short amount of time — some would make around $60,000 cash in a season, then spend the rest of the year traveling the world — but many would show up without knowing anyone, not realizing how difficult it would be to find a job with no connections. They’d run out of money and end up squatting in the town square, essentially homeless. Others would head to a supermarket parking lot in neighboring Garberville, a place growers cruised in their pickups, looking for extra labor. It was very dangerous to find work this way. “You never know who’s going to pick you up,” Summer warned. “There’s a reason why they call it Murder Mountain.” The area above Garberville had first earned this nickname back in the ‘80s after a string of serial killings, and a spate of recent deaths and disappearances kept it going strong.

Last year, there were 22 homicides in Humboldt County — the most since 1986 — and 348 adults reported missing, many of them trimmigrants, in a county of less than 150,000 people. It was especially dangerous for women. In recent years, there had been numerous accounts of sexual assault perpetrated against female trimmers by the growers who’d hired them.

But it was hard to imagine all of this violence as I drove along the bucolic winding stretch of the Redwood Highway towards the mountain farm. My mind was focused on what I wanted to accomplish as a filmmaker: to interview the owners and some of the workers, to shoot some b-roll and to put together a pitch tape for a feature length documentary.

And this is how I found myself riding in a windowless horse trailer in the middle of nowhere. After an excruciating ten minutes, Brady, the farm hand, let us out. The smell of dank weed filled the air. Massive stalks of harvested pot plants, the largest seven feet tall, lay piled on the ground, soaking up the sun. I’d never seen marijuana plants in person before, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that they could be this tall. It blew my mind. Even though I’d been a casual weed smoker for most of my life, and had my medical card, I thought about the origins of my weed about as much as I thought about the origins of the blueberries I bought at Trader Joe’s. Which is to say, I didn’t think about it at all.

We wouldn’t be trimming today, we’d be bucking — serious farm labor. In lieu of an orientation video, I learned by watching the others. Put on a pair of latex gloves, dip your fingers in coconut oil to counteract the sticky resin, snip the buds off the stalk with a pair of rusty scissors, pluck off the fan leaves, drop it in your tub. A full tub paid $20. I filled seven tubs in eight hours, less than most people. Another day with a different strain of weed, I only filled two.

After work, we gathered around the camp’s fire pit, waiting for Tyson, the meth-eyed farm manager, to bring dinner. Campfires were forbidden those first few days; the ground was too dry, the threat of brushfire eruption too strong. It was early October. The chill in the air would only get worse as the days got shorter. We took swigs from bottles of whiskey to keep warm.

My fellow “trimmigrants” were an eclectic bunch: Sally, the Midwestern masseuse who was sleeping with the owner’s brother; Darian, the Norwegian vegan who woke up daily before sunrise to do calisthenics; Tracee and Vance, the older alcoholic couple who once owned a pig farm in West Virginia; Rico, the shit-talking Colombian scuba instructor; Rob, the conspiracy theorist and Bigfoot enthusiast. We were deep in the heart of Bigfoot country here amongst the redwoods, and many were true believers.

Most outdoor grows in Humboldt operated like this farm, although some were a bit less rustic. They housed their trimmers in cabins with power and heat, instead of making them set up tents on the property. All were far removed from civilization — Summer had worked on one where she’d had to take a canoe to get there. Before this, I’d only slept outdoors twice in my life. Neither time prepared me for the extreme nature of this camp. There was no electricity. We did have a generator, but it was always running out of gas. The single toilet and shower were housed in a wooden shed with no insulation. To get hot water, the generator needed to be hooked up to the water heater. I could never quite get it right, so my showers were brutal. Food was provided for us from a fiercely American menu: burgers, hot dogs, chili. Darian was served a baked potato for every single meal. I’m vegetarian, but sometimes the cook forgot and I’d end up eating hamburger buns for dinner. Lunch was cold cuts and American cheese, delivered to the work site in a cooler. There was no refrigeration, so everything stayed in there for weeks until it became slimy. This didn’t stop people from eating it. I lost 15 pounds.

It was a ten-minute hike through the redwoods to the decrepit single-wide trailer that functioned as the trim room. Fluorescent lights, folding tables and chairs, no ventilation. The smell of weed worked its way into every pore, every fiber of clothing.

I sat next to Summer so I could watch her work. “You’re basically giving the bud a haircut,” she explained, her scissors furiously snipping away, tiny leaves flying off in all directions, as she rotated the bud in her hand. The pay was between $175 and $200 per pound of trimmed weed. Summer was really fast — she did between three and four pounds a day. I was lucky if I made two.

The trim boss, a short, round-faced woman named Aylen, inspected our work and made sure no one pocketed any weed. Every night, Tyson collected our trimmed buds and weighed them in private. We’d get paid in cash when we left the mountain for good, not a moment before. I had no way to know if I was being shafted. But even if I was, what could I do about it?

Sometime during my second week, I finally met the owners, Wanda and Rex, a married couple built from hardcore Humboldt farming stock. Wanda thought the idea of a documentary sounded “interesting.” She offered to come by the camp after work so we could discuss it further. She never showed. She’d do this a few more times over the next couple of weeks. None of the other trimmigrants agreed to be filmed, especially not without the owners’ permission, so I decided to work and wait until they all felt more comfortable with me.

One day bled into the next. Rise with the sun, work all day, whiskey and weed by the fire before bed. Repeat. The temperature dropped until it reached the point where it became necessary to choose between foregoing any semblance of hygiene or contracting pneumonia. I went with the former. The only place with heat was the trim room, where Rob would play back-to-back episodes of “Coast to Coast AM,” a radio show devoted to the paranormal, junk science and conspiracy theories, while we worked.

Sitting in a folding chair under screaming fluorescent lights trimming weed for 12 hours a day while listening to George Noory really starts to mess with your mind. Maybe that noise I’d heard really was Bigfoot tree-knocking. “Did you hear that gunshot last night?” Rico asked one morning. I hadn’t. He said he’d gone to investigate and saw someone running out of the camp towards the road. Aylen insisted the noise had been a car backfiring. I didn’t know who to believe.

When they found the mold, things really started to go south. “See this?” Aylen asked, holding up a nug flecked with tiny white dots. “These buds you guys trimmed are no good. You gotta cut the mold out.” She returned the bags we’d handed over the night before. The first day we did as she asked. Then Tyson showed up with a truckload of 30-gallon trash bags filled with weed we’d already trimmed. They wanted us to redo it all. For free.

According to the experienced trimmers, the mold had erupted because the weed hadn’t been dried or stored properly, which wasn’t our fault. They whispered that what we were doing amounted to slave labor. But no one spoke up. Day after day we trimmed that moldy weed.

The air was thick with bud rot and revolution. Tyson took to carrying his pistol in plain view, stuck in the back of his dad jeans. Rex got wind of a potential worker uprising and showed up to set us straight.

“My 12-year-old daughter thinks you’re all a bunch of babies,” he taunted. “Stop complaining. Get through the mold, then you’ll get the good stuff. Anyone got a problem with that?”

No one dared look him in the eye. People like Tracee and Vance couldn’t afford to complain. They’d banked on this money. They had to hope that the new crop would be healthier, the buds would be bigger, and the money would start flowing. There was no other option. I was lucky — I had a life I could go back to. When Wanda flaked on me again, I decided to cut my losses.

Tyson cashed me out in the morning. Five hideous weeks of work amounted to just under $4,200. Before my time on the mountain, I’d had a romantic idea of hippies living on the edge of the law, getting stoned every day, trimming weed and raking in cash. The harsh reality was that this was mind-numbing, back-breaking work, and trimmers had no recourse to fight back against unfair or dangerous employment practices. People who were slow like me could work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and barely make more than minimum wage. It wasn’t worth it. I left Paul there — it turned out he was a trimming prodigy and wanted to take advantage of it. Aylen unlocked the gate and I hit the road, driving back through the fog and the redwoods towards Highway One. I’ll never look at weed the same way again.

All names and some identifying personal details have been changed.

“The Last Post”: Why?

Jessica Raine in "The Last Post" (Credit: BBC One)

“Why am I watching this?” Every halfway worthwhile series should answer that question with the first 20 minutes of its first episode, and that’s a generous span. But that gives a series plenty of time to introduce the central characters worth caring about and sell its core appeal.

“The Last Post,” Amazon’s co-production with the BBC, bombs this test in spectacular fashion and on several fronts from the opening moments of premiere. A good deal of blame for its flaws can be placed on series creator Peter Moffat’s failure to reconcile his presentation of setting and time period with the reality of how the world looks and operates right now.

This likely informed Amazon’s enthusiastic snagging of “The Last Post” in August by a drama development department under ousted studio head Roy Price who, in addition to being accused of sexual harassment, was reported to be a deadly combination of desperate to find a prestige drama hit as well as easily star-struck. Enter this project by Moffat, a name is most familiar to American viewers who devoured HBO’s “The Night Of,” a limited series based on his acclaimed U.K. series “Criminal Justice.”

But “The Last Post,” available Friday to Prime subscribers, is not one of Moffat’s finest works, even if it is notably personal. Moffat’s recreation of life on a 1965- era Royal Military Police base in Aden, a coastal city on the Arabian Peninsula that’s part of the country now known as Yemen, is inspired by his father’s tour as a member of Colonial Police Force in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

This explains, somewhat, the overtly romantic emphasis of the British characters’ humanity and heroism, and the near-total lack of personality development for any of its brown characters. Compiling a list of why that’s inexcusable in 2017 is fairly simple, but let’s start with the fact that there are only two or three recurring characters with dialogue in the three episodes sent to critics, only one of which is bestowed with a shred of backstory or distinctive personality.

Even ignoring the impolitic elements of character development, however — which again, Moffat really shouldn’t have — the greater sin of “The Last Post” is that the writing is stodgy and unrealistic plot is as parched for tension and excitement as the dunes in the desert where these men and their families are stationed.

Moffat’s script is spiked with scenes that defy the accepted viewpoint of the era, which he could get away with if the declarations weren’t so contrived and sanctimonious.

“None of us should apologize for what we’ve given to those parts of the world lucky enough to have us!” declares a stiffly-marching officer to his subordinate seen, only moments prior to this exchange, as a good cop in a thoroughly modern-looking torture scenario.

Said man, by the way, having already declared that “torture the best recruiting sergeant for terrorists” — in a 1965 colonial military force, asks his boss to share the longest conversation he’s had with an Aden-born Middle Eastern person. “They hate you sir,” he retorts, “and everything you stand for.” And just like that, “The Last Post” gets to have its tea and its cakes, and devour them with abandon.

One glimpse at a few frames of “The Last Post” reveals why a studio head with questionable evaluative abilities and boobs on the brain might be fooled into mistaking this misfire for a direct hit. Within moments of the premiere’s openers Moffat introduces a collage of derivative personalities lifted from any number of “Mad Men” clones, starting with Jessica Raine’s fabulously dressed yet tragic, drunk and cheating wife Alison. Jessie Buckley’s wide-eyed Pollyanna-type, a freshly married newcomer to the base, is simply begging to be corrupted. To put a cherry on it, Buckley’s character’s name is . . . Honor.

Honor makes Alison’s acquaintance shortly after Alison’s smashed another officer who isn’t her husband. Their first meeting happens at in the bedroom Honor will soon share with her stick-in-the-mud young Captain Joe Martin (Jeremy Neumark Jones), where Alison has passed out.

The dramatic divide between the secret lives of the military wives and the officers’ daily dramas, including the emotional toll of being an occupational force in a region whose native population hates you, is styled to resemble a pale imitation of the long gone but highly acclaimed “Manhattan,” only with undertones of “Gunga Din.”

The fraternity among the men takes priority over the wives left behind in the barracks, including Mary Markham (Amanda Drew) a pregnant Major’s wife. Given the danger posed by  faceless groups of jabbering brown people shooting at these noble folk from the hills surrounding the base, perhaps the producers believed viewers would buy the familiar notion of the time-honored team of virgin, mother and whore waiting at home, making it all worth fighting for.

But what do most of us know about that era in British history? Not a lot, I’d wager, and “The Last Post” doesn’t do much to school the unfamiliar viewer about this chapter in Britain’s history of colonization. Even the presumption that the series was intended primarily for a British audience (and, indeed, it originally aired in October in the U.K) does not excuse the scripts complete lack of context. This is part of that nation’s history, yes. But remember: we’re also talking about a nation full of people who did a Google search to find out what the European Union is the day after voting for Brexit.

These days we cannot presume anything with regard to an audience’s base of historical knowledge or, sadly, whether people will recognize a cultural portrayal so imbalanced as to court comparisons to old-school Orientalist propaganda. At minimum, however, a producer should assume that viewers are savvy enough to spot a creative knock-off when they see it. So, why watch at all?