Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 212

Claims of racism dog a Golden Globe-nominated performance, revealing the bias of the accusers

Hong Chau and Matt Damon in "Downsizing" (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

Among the many oversights and bafflements in this year’s announcement for the increasingly-irrelevant Golden Globes — no Best Supporting Actor nod for Daniel Craig’s career-best turn in Soderbergh’s “Logan Lucky”? Next-to-no love at all for Paul Thomas Anderson’s sublime, scary, exquisite “Phantom Thread”? No women nominated for Best Director honors — one nomination stood out, in a good way. 

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association deserves kudos, back-pats, and even a few “attaboys” for recognizing Hong Chau’s performance in Alexander Payne’s forthcoming drama-sci-fi-satire “Downsizing.”

Set in the near future, “Downsizing” imagines a world where people can physically miniaturize themselves in order to reduce their carbon footprint, and drastically increase their own personal wealth in turn. Miniaturized couples and families relocate to luxe gated communities, where a modest accumulated savings can stretch well past retirement. The film follows hapless Midwesterner as Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), drifting though one of these communities alone after his wife (Kristen Wiig) bails on the downsizing procedure at the last second.  

Following a rowdy party hosted by two aging Eurotrashy playboys (Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier), Damon’s Safarnek meets Chau’s character, Ngoc Lan Tran, a hobbled Vietnamese activist shrunk by the government against her will, who fled to the United States inside a flatscreen TV box. Beyond her bum leg, Chau’s Tran suffers from another obvious “disability”: her heavily accented English, the result of her being a first generation Vietnamese immigrant and asylum speaker.

I first saw “Downsizing” at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. I wasn’t necessarily ga-ga for it (though it has, somewhat ironically I guess, enlarged in my mind the more I think about and discuss it with others). I was, however, immediately dazzled by the boldness of Chau’s performance, and of the way Payne wrote and directed it. In this age of hyper-sensitivity and renewed political correctness, figuring a primary character who scans as a caricature of various Asian-American stereotypes feels so foolish and imprudent as to be brave. Immediately after the screening, my worst fears were confirmed, as I overheard other critics muttering about how Chau’s performance, and her whole character, were “problematic,” even “embarrassing.” 

Such anxious criticisms only mounted as more people saw “Downsizing.” Following the movie’s bow at the Telluride film festival, Variety noted that Chau’s performance drew ire as “its broad strokes veer into the realm of stereotype.” Another review, courtesy the blog Screencrush, went further, calling Chau’s character an “icky, racist caricature.” Search “Downsizing + Problematic” on Twitter and similar reactions gush forth.

As if often the case these days, such performatively socially-conscious, hysterically correct-thinking reactions strike me as being in totally bad faith.

Yes, of course, there is a history of broad, bad, stereotypical performances of Asian characters in Hollywood. There’s also the equally troubling trend of white-washing, where white actors are made up to present as Asian characters (think of Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or even John Wayne as Genghis Khan in “The Conqueror”). There is no doubt a troubling trend towards radicalized burlesque. But what’s remarkable about Chau’s character, and her performance, is the way it enlivens, even transcends, such ostensible markers of stereotyping.   

For one thing, Tran herself is deeply kind, wise, and driven by more than the crass self-interest that motivates many of the characters in “Downsizing.” And to state the obvious: Chau is a talented actress (and a Thai woman born to Vietnamese parents) who willingly chose to take part in “Downsizing,” to play Tran, and to divest her own talents into the character as written.

What’s more: Chau’s parents fled Vietnam in the 1970s, much like her character in Payne’s movie, which gives her a sense of ownership over such a character. The actress has recently responded to these criticisms, telling the Chicago Tribune, “I’m not quite sure why people are so flabbergasted to hear a person with an accent. We are surrounded by people who speak with accents. We are a nation of immigrants.”

Indeed, what the reaction to “Downsizing” suggests are the real-world growing pains that accompany North America’s increasing reliance on the arrival of non-European immigrants.

A 2010 paper by by University of Chicago psychologists Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar, “The Way They Speak: A Social Psychological Perspective on the Stigma of Nonnative Accents in Communication,” delves into psychological and social aspects of accent dissemination , or “accent bias.” It claims that for a native English speaker, for example, densely inflected English demands more work. The brain strains to make sense of it, slowing down what Lev-Air and Keysar term our “cognitive fluency.” This snag in the brain’s ability to process speech is then reflected back on the speaker, who is in turn believed to be of lower intelligence.  

In their study, the researchers asked a group of participants to read a series of trivial, matter-of-fact statements for another control group. They found that people with heavy Middle Eastern, European or Asian accents were believed less than those with a more fulsome grasp on the King’s English. Not only are the statements of non-native speakers seen as more difficult to understand, they’re deemed less truthful. Combine this cognitive-linguistic favoritism with more workaday prejudice and bigotry facing ethnic minorities, and you may begin to imagine the challenges faced by non-native speakers.

It seems reasonable enough to believe that viewers calling out Alexander Payne, or Thai-Vietnamese actress Hong Chau herself, as troubling or in poor taste are in fact dealing with their own built-in cognitive mis-recognition, as they struggle with internalized accent discrimination. Instead of sufficiently grappling with that bias — as, I’m certain, “Downsizing” implores its audience to do —they’d rather bracket it as “problematic,” cut ties with the character and send it out to see on the proverbial ice floe (or in the likewise proverbial flatscreen TV box). 

 I would even go as a far to suggest that the bulk of people who work themselves into a lather about such things are the kind of thick-headed individuals concerned not so much with things like equality and charitable fellow-feeling as with the conspicuous broadcasting of their own hollow virtue. 

After all, the recent research around accent discrimination suggests, it’s not those speaking in heavy accented English who are slow-witted. It’s the people who think there’s something wrong with those accents, who equate the inelegant handling of their native tongue with a defect in intelligence, or even basic humanity. Put even more simply: it’s not Hong Chau’s accent that’s racist. What’s racist is the anxious reaction to such an accent. It’s not just the mind, but the heart that suffers pains of recognition.

“Downsizing” isn’t just a late-capitalist satire about people shrinking in order to increase their personal wealth under the auspices of saving the planet. It’s a film about how the problems present in our present, full-size social sphere will continue to exist and reproduce themselves, no matter the scale. It’s a cliche to say that the scenarios of certain films or books represent a “microcosm” of the real world. But in the case of Payne’s film, it is quite literally true. Given this theme of miniaturization, it makes sense — thematically, and perhaps even physically — for so many modern issues of empathy and identification to be condensed into a single, five-inch-tall character.

Because it’s not the Chau’s character is a stereotype. It’s that she challenges what happens to even the woke, liberal consciousness when confronted by the reality of ethnic and linguistic difference. With “Downsizing,” Payne proposes a sense of solidarity between dopey, pudgy, party Midwestern schlubs like Damon’s Paul Safarnek and socially marginalized subjects like Chau’s Ngoc Lan Tran, whose social difference is marked not only linguistically, but ethnically, economically and physically.

That a certain strain of viewer would reject that call for mutual compassion and understanding in the name of what exactly? Good taste? Bot being discomfited? The unease of having to hear someone speaking English in a heavy accent? Almost certainly says more about a certain bloc of hysterical viewers than it does about the film itself.

Amazon’s Alexa is a feminist and supports Black Lives Matter

Amazon Echo (Credit: AP/Elaine Thompson)

In a new interview, so to speak, with the Guardian, Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa confirms what we already suspected: She’s a left-wing feminist and social justice warrior.

When asked to verify her political views by a Guardian reporter, and if she’s a feminist, Alexa said, “Yes, I am a feminist, as is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.”

The reporter also asked her if black lives matter, to which she was quickly responded, “Black lives and the Black Lives Matter movement absolutely matter. It’s important to have conversations about equality and social justice.”

Finally, the interviewer asked about her thoughts on gender. “The two main categories of the gender spectrum, male and female, are called the gender binary, but there are many other categories that exist. Because gender identity is complex and personal, there is no definite way to say how many genders there are,” Alexa said.

Alexa is very educated for only being a three-year-old electronic device, and perhaps it’s her lack of human emotions that allow her to sit well with the rift she may be causing in alt-right media.

In late November, conservative outlets lashed out after a video of comedian Steven Crowder went viral where he asked Alexa about her political ideology. David Horowitz, a conservative writer and founder of Truth Revolt, said Crowder’s video showed “the [Silicon] Valley-encoded intelligence is decidedly leftist.” In the Crowder interview, Alexa was asked, “Who is Lord Jesus Christ?” Alexa replied, “Jesus Christ is a fictional character.”

Alexa’s competitor, Apple’s Siri, is supposedly a libertarian. If you ask her if she’s a feminist, she reportedly responds, “I don’t have the answer to that. Is there something else I can help you with?”

This comes at a time where a petition has been floating around the Internet asking Amazon and Apple to reprogram Alexa and Siri to defend themselves against verbal sexual harassment. The petition on Care2 is near its goal of 14,000 signatures.

It’s unclear whether Alexa has been programmed to respond with liberal responses, or if she’s just citing from sources on the Internet. Salon has contacted Amazon for a comment.

What it’s like to lose yourself in a relationship

(Credit: Getty/Martin Dimitrov)

Melissa Febos is an author as well as an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University and a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s also a former heroin addict and dominatrix, who worked for four years in a midtown New York dungeon. Her latest book, “Abandon Me,” details the way in which her birth father’s leaving the family marked her with compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Melissa searches for identity in drugs, in writing and in an obsessive love affair.

“I began a relationship in 2012 with a married woman who lived on the other side of the country,” she told “The Lonely Hour.” “Pretty quickly that relationship was marked by intensity of all kinds. It was erotically intense. It was emotionally intense. It included a lot of intense suffering. It was pretty tormented from the very beginning.”

Ultimately, she loses herself in that other person.

“I was really out of my mind — like I was like not in my own mind. A good friend of mine came to visit the other day, and all of this came up. She teared up, saying, ‘You were just gone. And you are and were one of the most grounded, pragmatic, happy people that I knew, but it was like your personality just got siphoned out of you and was replaced with this anxious, totally distracted, panicked person who couldn’t show up for anything.'”

What finally ended the relationship was Melissa’s realization that there wasn’t room for both her and her lover. “I needed her to make more space for me,” she wrote. “I needed real parity — something we’d never had.” And it finally really hit her that they never would have it.

“When I ended the relationship it was like night and day. I started sleeping again. I reengaged all these relationships that I’d become a stranger from, either because they couldn’t handle what was going on or because I just couldn’t maintain anything while I was doing all of that work to try to stay in that relationship. It was over, and I got to return to myself, which was such an incredible relief. I wasn’t even sure that I had a self to return to.”

Hear Melissa tell her story:

The Lonely Hour is a podcast that explores the feeling of loneliness — and solitude, and other kinds of aloneness — at a time when it may become our next public health epidemic. The show is co-produced by Julia Bainbridge and The Listening Booth. Julia, the host and creator, is an editor and a James Beard Award-nominated writer. Listen to all episodes published on Salon here.  

Spotted Pig employees called VIP section a “rape room,” according to exposé

Ken Friedman (Credit: Getty/JP Yim)

Just one day after Eater published a long and troubling investigation into an alleged pattern of sexual predation committed by superstar New York chef and restauranteur Mario Batali, a perhaps less-well known, though equally well regarded restaurant owner finds himself under fire thanks to a similar exposé published in the pages of the New York Times.

Ken Friedman, owner of the highly beloved and influential West Village, New York City restaurant The Spotted Pig is now facing a score of deeply disturbing accusations by past employees and members of the public, documented in an article authored by Julia Moskin and Kim Severson. “In more than two dozen interviews with former employees of the Spotted Pig and other restaurants owned by Mr. Friedman and [chef April Bloomfield], a dark behind-the-scenes portrait emerged of the owner and the workplaces he runs,” they write.

And dark it is. Within the first paragraph, the reader hears of staff at his various boîtes being bitten on the waist by Friedman, having him force their heads into his crotch, pushing his tongue into their mouths and threatening their careers, sometimes in front of his celebrity clientele such as Amy Poehler. Constant unwanted kisses, touches and demands for sex are described as norms by named and unnamed sources.

Others speak of a more generalized fear, deaf human-resources representatives and other unacceptable work practices. One woman, in particular, claims she was fired for getting pregnant. “The sex factor is important to Ken,” she said. “Having a pregnant woman on the floor is not sexy.”

The sometimes downright frightening stories about Friedman overlap with those concerning Batali as well. “We called him the Red Menace,” said one server of the redheaded chef. “He tried to touch my breasts and told me that they were beautiful. He wanted to wrestle. As I was serving drinks to his table, he told me I should sit on his friend’s face.”

Such was the behavior of Batali, Friedman and others that staff took to calling the famous third-floor VIP second of the Spotted Pig — which often hosted celebrities including Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Gwyneth Paltrow and other A-listers — the “rape room.” It may not have been mere hyperbolic gallows humor.

One former employee told the Times that “during a party in 2008, she intervened when she saw on the security camera feed that Mr. Batali, who was drunk, was groping and kissing a woman who appeared to be unconscious.” The article is full of such tales.

In response to the report, Friedman, who is now taking a leave of absence, said “some incidents were not as described, but context and content are not today’s discussion.” He added, “I apologize now publicly for my actions.” His female employees are, he said, “among the best in the business and putting any of them in humiliating situations is unjustifiable.”

Bloomfield, as much of a star as Friedman said, “I have spoken to Ken about professional boundaries and relied on him to uphold our policies. Nonetheless I feel we have let down our employees and for that I sincerely apologize.”

With this and other revelations both recent and emerging, it seems the tight-knit, turbulent New York restaurant world is primed for a moment of reckoning not unlike that Hollywood and politics have been experiencing. A stressful place to work at its best and one that does its labor surrounded by drink, massive egos, celebrities and drugs, the New York City restaurant industry long been home to rumors of massive, sometimes extreme misconduct, but few concrete allegations. Now, it seems, things may be turning a corner.

“We are not people who can live in cubicles,” said one woman who left the Spotted Pig after alleged experiencing harassment at Friedman’s hands. “There is a grab-ass, superfun late-night culture — I love that part of the industry. But there is a difference between fun and sexualized camaraderie and predation. When you are made to feel unsafe or dirty or embarrassed, that is a different thing.”

Pelosi in a bind as momentum grows on impeachment

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif. speaks to reporters about Republican efforts to craft an "Obamacare" replacement bill, Thursday, March 9, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (Credit: AP)

The case for impeaching President Donald Trump is growing stronger.

“It’s time for the American public to ponder the gravity and consequences of the scandal engulfing the White House,” writes CNN commentator Errol Louis. “We know Trump has been trying in every way possible to deny, delay or discredit efforts by the Justice Department to ferret out the connections between the administration and a hostile foreign power.”

That’s why 58 House Democrats voted Wednesday in favor of opening debate over Rep. Al. Green’s two articles of impeachment.

Or . . .

The case for impeachment is getting weaker.

“Since Robert Mueller became special counsel in May, the chances of the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment —and the Senate ratifying them — have probably gone down, writes Peter Beinart in the Atlantic.

“Now is not the time to consider articles of impeachment,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi this week.

That’s why 126 House Democrats, including Pelosi, voted against opening debate on impeachment

Politics vs. Morality

The difference flows from whether you view impeachment primarily as a moral proposition or a political calculation.

Rep. Green’s articles of impeachment are a moral indictment, focusing on Trump’s embrace of race-baiting and white supremacists. Green argues the impeachment clause does not require specifically criminal behavior. He does not mention Russia or machinations in the 2016 campaign as grounds for removal from office.

In moral terms, this case that Trump is unfit for office and a menace to democratic institutions, is indeed stronger than ever.

And that’s quite apart from the mounting evidence of criminality in the Trump entourage. Last week, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador. The official plea papers signed by Flynn establish that he enlisted unnamed others in his effort to coordinate Russia’s response to U.S. sanctions.

his week, Donald Trump Jr. encouraged suspicions that he has something to hide about his dealings with Russia when he declined to answer certain questions from the House Intelligence Committee.

The president’s son would not talk about the conversation he had with his father after the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower where Russian emissaries came to offer help. Trump Jr. said the conversation was covered by attorney-client privilege because two attorneys listened in on the call. The claim is legally dubious.

Has the President Been Lying About Russia?

“Abundantly and frequently, and in just about every way,” says Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “When he says to the country ‘we don’t know,’ that’s a lie. When he says ‘we had no contacts with the Russians,’ that’s a lie. When his son says ‘I had no contacts with Wikileaks,’ that’s a lie. When General Flynn said, ‘I never discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador,’ that was a lie. And unfortunately, the list goes on and on.”

The founding fathers, who wrote the emolument clause banning gifts from foreign governments, would surely conclude that such deception qualifies as the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that merit impeachment.

In purely political calculations, however, the case for impeachment is still not strong.

Impeachment is a political process, not a pocketbook issue, Pelosi notes. It doesn’t affect peoples’ jobs, health, children or future prospects, all the things that determine how most people vote. She wants to frame the party’s message around policy differences that will resonate in the 2018 congressional elections. Focusing on impeachment, Pelosi says, will distract from the Democratic Party’s appeal.

Pelosi knows too that the odds of success are long. An impeachment vote today would still require 22 Republican votes, even if every Democrat voted yes. If Democrats take the House next fall—a big if—they could then pass articles of impeachment. “But ratifying those articles would require two-thirds of the Senate, which would probably require at least 15 Republican votes,” Beinart notes.

And an impeachment process voters view as a partisan witch-hunt may only wind up failing and making voters more sympathetic to the target, which is what happened to the Republicans’ failed effort to drive Bill Clinton from office in 1999.

Do Democrats want to do that favor for Trump?

Cultural Change

But politics and morality are not independent factors. They influence each other.

A month ago, the morality of sexual harassment complaints was not enough to drive a senator or congressman from office. Now it is. A cultural change — what was once tolerated is now intolerable — has transformed political behavior.

In 1974, partisan politics protected President Richard Nixon from impeachment until the White House tapes proved what he had long denied: that he had lied about the Watergate burglary from the beginning. Then impeachment and conviction became certain, and he resigned. New evidence — irrefutable proof of culpability — converted the unconverted.

Trump is vulnerable on both counts. America has a new moral consensus on sexual harassment and the special prosecutor is assembling a body of new facts.

The Republican Party is willing to defend the serial sexual offenders in its own ranks for the sake of short-term political advantage, but it cannot prevent the #MeToo movement from returning public attention to the numerous sexual harassment complaints against Trump.

“There are 320 million people out there,” says Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) who has introduced an article of impeachment focusing on obstruction of justice. “When they hear the term ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ their reaction is, ‘Show me the crime.’

Cue the videotape of the eight women  —no, make that 16 women — who say they were assaulted by Trump, which collectively describes criminal behavior. Trump’s new and absurd claim that the Access Hollywood tape might not be authentic is a sign that the president himself recognizes that changing times require a new line of defense against his accusers.

All of which raises the question: If Republicans could impeach Bill Clinton for sexual predation, why can’t Democrats do the same with Trump? Six months ago, that was a weak argument politically. Today, it is much stronger.

And as the indictment of Flynn and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort indicates, new facts about Trump’s secret dealings with Russia are coming. So far, evidence that Trump committed a crime is not definitive. If and when Flynn and Manafort fill in the details about Trump’s role in their illicit activities, supporters of impeachment will have the evidence skeptics now demand. And if Trump responds (as I think he will) by firing Mueller or by pardoning friends and family, he will commit the sort of high crimes and misdemeanors that require impeachment.

Both morally and politically, the normalization of impeachment is proceeding, regardless of Nancy Pelosi’s go-slow stance. Like most elected officials, Pelosi doesn’t want to get too far out in front of the crowd.

Nor does she want to fall too far behind. Impeachment is now supported by 40 percent of Americans, according to a poll taken in October. When and where the voters lead on impeachment, Pelosi and the Democratic caucus will follow. And the direction the people are going on impeachment is clear.

Jefferson Morley is AlterNet’s Washington correspondent. He is the author of the forthcoming biography The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (St. Martin’s Press, October 2017).

California fire damage to homes less “random” than it seems

A wildfire threatens homes as it burns along the 101 Freeway Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017, in Ventura, CA. (Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong)

In the midst of the many wildfire emergencies that have faced California this year, it can often seem that the way houses burn, or don’t, is random.

The thing is, though, it’s not. Firefighters and researchers alike have a pretty solid understanding of why some houses are more vulnerable to wildfire than others. The real challenge ultimately lies in whether those with the power to act on that knowledge will do so.

Available science

It is commonly thought that it takes direct flame to spread a fire, but this isn’t always the case. Small embers are instead often the culprits that begin house fires during wildfires. These small bits of burning debris can be lofted long distances by the wind. They can then end up igniting landscaping materials like combustible mulch, or enter homes through vulnerable spots – gutters teeming with debris, unscreened attic vents, open or broken windows, old roofs with missing shingles. Once there, the embers smolder and can ultimately catch a house on fire.

In California, iconic winds work to create ideal ember-driven ignition conditions. The Santa Ana winds in Southern California – known as the Diablo winds in northern part of the state – have generally followed fairly predictable seasonal and spatial patterns. “Red flag” fire warnings are often issued on dry days when the winds will be particularly fierce.

Avoiding fire on Highway 101 north of Ventura, California.

AP Photo/Noah Berger

While humans can’t really control as much as we’d like to believe when it comes to disasters, we do have the ability to control where and how we build. For decades, most wildfire education and enforcement campaigns have focused on creating so-called defensible space where landscaping vegetation is carefully selected and located on the property, as well as routinely maintained.

This is not enough, however. Officials in California – as in other fire-prone states – need to help homeowners, local governments and builders to understand there are also specific, science-based steps that can be taken to make structures themselves less vulnerable to fire.

Researchers recommend what is known as a “coupled approach” to home and building survival. This means the development and maintenance of an effective defensible space, as well as the careful selection of construction materials and correct installation to ensure that, for example, there are not gaps in siding or roofing that would allow embers to penetrate.

Decision-makers also need to be willing to take on the most taboo topic of them all: recognizing that there are places houses simply shouldn’t be built, or rebuilt, at all.

(Not) too urban to burn

Earlier this year, California had the first strong winter rains after many years of drought. Now, after a typically dry summer, the state is experiencing a dry start to the rainy season, particularly in the south. At the same time, people have continued to build into places known to burn regularly. The result of this confluence of events has been fires deeply affecting many thousands of people up and down the state.

California residents are largely aware that not all fire is bad, and that many of our ecosystems thrive on regular fire. It’s not something that we should, or ever could, hope to fully contain. Our only chance is learning, really and truly and finally learning, to live with it.

In that vein, the state must look long and hard at some of the steps that have been the hardest to take – not building in places that are particularly fire-prone and matching building codes with a modern understanding of wildfire risk – if there is to be any hope of alleviating the human suffering these fires cause.

We are being invited to free ourselves from the notion that wildfire destruction is random and unpredictable, and that therefore there is nothing to be done about it. As the fire season in California gets longer, the winds worsen and wildfires move into areas once deemed too urbanized to burn, maybe the knowledge about what makes houses burn can finally be put to good use.

Faith Kearns, Academic Coordinator, California Institute for Water Resources, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources

A country addicted to war

This Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016 photo provided by the U.S. Air Force shows an unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The unarmed missile roared out of its underground bunker on the California coastline and soared over the Pacific, inscribing the signature of American power amid growing worry about North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons capable of reaching U.S. soil.(Staff Sgt. Jim Araos/U.S. Air Force via AP) (Credit: AP)

What makes a Harvey Weinstein moment? The now-disgraced Hollywood mogul is hardly the first powerful man to stand accused of having abused women. The Harveys who preceded Harvey himself are legion, their prominence matching or exceeding his own and the misdeeds with which they were charged at least as reprehensible.

In the relatively recent past, a roster of prominent offenders would include Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and, of course, Donald Trump. Throw in various jocks, maestros, senior military officers, members of the professoriate and you end up with quite a list. Yet in virtually all such cases, the alleged transgressions were treated as instances of individual misconduct, egregious perhaps but possessing at best transitory political resonance.

All that, though, was pre-Harvey. As far as male sexual hijinks are concerned, we might compare Weinstein’s epic fall from grace to the stock market crash of 1929: one week it’s the anything-goes Roaring Twenties, the next we’re smack dab in a Great Depression.

How profound is the change? Up here in Massachusetts where I live, we’ve spent the past year marking John F. Kennedy’s 100th birthday. If Kennedy were still around to join in the festivities, it would be as a Class A sex offender.  Rarely in American history has the cultural landscape shifted so quickly or so radically.

In our post-Harvey world, men charged with sexual misconduct are guilty until proven innocent, all crimes are capital offenses, and there exists no statute of limitations. Once a largely empty corporate slogan, “zero tolerance” has become a battle cry.

All of this serves as a reminder that, on some matters at least, the American people retain an admirable capacity for outrage. We can distinguish between the tolerable and the intolerable. And we can demand accountability of powerful individuals and institutions.

Everything They Need to Win (Again!)

What’s puzzling is why that capacity for outrage and demand for accountability doesn’t extend to our now well-established penchant for waging war across much of the planet.

In no way would I wish to minimize the pain, suffering, and humiliation of the women preyed upon by the various reprobates now getting their belated comeuppance.  But to judge from published accounts, the women (and in some cases, men) abused by Weinstein, Louis C.K., Mark Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, my West Point classmate Judge Roy Moore, and their compadres at least managed to survive their encounters.  None of the perpetrators are charged with having committed murder.  No one died.

Compare their culpability to that of the high-ranking officials who have presided over or promoted this country’s various military misadventures of the present century.  Those wars have, of course, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and will ultimately cost American taxpayers many trillions of dollars.  Nor have those costly military efforts eliminated “terrorism,” as President George W. Bush promised back when today’s G.I.s were still in diapers.

Bush told us that, through war, the United States would spread freedom and democracy.  Instead, our wars have sown disorder and instability, creating failing or failed states across the Greater Middle East and Africa.  In their wake have sprung up ever more, not fewer, jihadist groups, while acts of terror are soaring globally. These are indisputable facts.

It discomfits me to reiterate this mournful litany of truths.  I feel a bit like the doctor telling the lifelong smoker with stage-four lung cancer that an addiction to cigarettes is adversely affecting his health.  His mute response: I know and I don’t care.  Nothing the doc says is going to budge the smoker from his habit.  You go through the motions, but wonder why.

In a similar fashion, war has become a habit to which the United States is addicted.  Except for the terminally distracted, most of us know that.  We also know — we cannot not know — that, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. forces have been unable to accomplish their assigned mission, despite more than 16 years of fighting in the former and more than a decade in the latter.

It’s not exactly a good news story, to put it mildly.  So forgive me for saying it (yet again), but most of us simply don’t care, which means that we continue to allow a free hand to those who preside over those wars, while treating with respect the views of pundits and media personalities who persist in promoting them.  What’s past doesn’t count; we prefer to sustain the pretense that tomorrow is pregnant with possibilities.  Victory lies just around the corner.

By way of example, consider a recent article in U.S. News and World Report.  The headline: “Victory or Failure in Afghanistan: 2018 Will Be the Deciding Year.” The title suggests a balance absent from the text that follows, which reads like a Pentagon press release. Here in its entirety is the nut graf (my own emphasis added):

“Armed with a new strategy and renewed support from old allies, the Trump administration now believes it has everything it needs to win the war in Afghanistan. Top military advisers all the way up to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis say they can accomplish what two previous administrations and multiple troop surges could not: the defeat of the Taliban by Western-backed local forces, a negotiated peace and the establishment of a popularly supported government in Kabul capable of keeping the country from once again becoming a haven to any terrorist group.”

Now if you buy this, you’ll believe that Harvey Weinstein has learned his lesson and can be trusted to interview young actresses while wearing his bathrobe.

For starters, there is no “new strategy.” Trump’s generals, apparently with a nod from their putative boss, are merely modifying the old “strategy,” which was itself an outgrowth of previous strategies tried, found wanting, and eventually discarded before being rebranded and eventually recycled.

Short of using nuclear weapons, U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan over the past decade and a half have experimented with just about every approach imaginable: invasion, regime change, occupation, nation-building, pacification, decapitation, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency, not to mention various surges, differing in scope and duration.  We have had a big troop presence and a smaller one, more bombing and less, restrictive rules of engagement and permissive ones.  In the military equivalent of throwing in the kitchen sink, a U.S. Special Operations Command four-engine prop plane recently deposited the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal on a cave complex in eastern Afghanistan.  Although that MOAB made a big boom, no offer of enemy surrender materialized.

In truth, U.S. commanders have quietly shelved any expectations of achieving an actual victory ≠ traditionally defined as “imposing your will on the enemy” – in favor of a more modest conception of success.  In year XVII of America’s Afghanistan War, the hope is that training, equipping, advising, and motivating Afghans to assume responsibility for defending their country may someday allow American forces and their coalition partners to depart.  By 2015, that project, building up the Afghan security forces, had already absorbed at least $65 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars.  And under the circumstances, consider that a mere down payment.

According to General John Nicholson, our 17th commander in Kabul since 2001, the efforts devised and implemented by his many predecessors have resulted in a “stalemate” — a generous interpretation given that the Taliban presently controls more territory than it has held since the U.S. invasion.  Officers no less capable than Nicholson himself, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal among them, didn’t get it done. Nicholson’s argument: trust me.

In essence, the “new strategy” devised by Trump’s generals, Secretary of Defense Mattis and Nicholson among them, amounts to this: persist a tad longer with a tad more.  A modest uptick in the number of U.S. and allied troops on the ground will provide more trainers, advisers, and motivators to work with and accompany their Afghan counterparts in the field.  The Mattis/Nicholson plan also envisions an increasing number of air strikes, signaled by the recent use of B-52s to attack illicit Taliban “drug labs,” a scenario that Stanley Kubrick himself would have been hard-pressed to imagine.

Notwithstanding the novelty of using strategic bombers to destroy mud huts, there’s not a lot new here.  Dating back to 2001, coalition forces have already dropped tens of thousands of bombs in Afghanistan.  Almost as soon as the Taliban were ousted from Kabul, coalition efforts to create effective Afghan security forces commenced.  So, too, did attempts to reduce the production of the opium that has funded the Taliban insurgency, alas with essentially no effect whatsoever.  What Trump’s generals want a gullible public (and astonishingly gullible and inattentive members of Congress) to believe is that this time they’ve somehow devised a formula for getting it right.

Turning the Corner

With his trademark capacity to intuit success, President Trump already sees clear evidence of progress.  “We’re not fighting anymore to just walk around,” he remarked in his Thanksgiving message to the troops.  “We’re fighting to win. And you people [have] turned it around over the last three to four months like nobody has seen.”  The president, we may note, has yet to visit Afghanistan.

I’m guessing that the commander-in-chief is oblivious to the fact that, in U.S. military circles, the term winning has acquired notable elasticity.  Trump may think that it implies vanquishing the enemy – white flags and surrender ceremonies on the U.S.S. Missouri.  General Nicholson knows better. “Winning,” the field commander says, “means delivering a negotiated settlement that reduces the level of violence and protecting the homeland.” (Take that definition at face value and we can belatedly move Vietnam into the win column!)

Should we be surprised that Trump’s generals, unconsciously imitating General William Westmoreland a half-century ago, claim once again to detect light at the end of the tunnel?  Not at all.  Mattis and Nicholson (along with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster) are following the Harvey Weinstein playbook: keep doing it until they make you stop.  Indeed, with what can only be described as chutzpah, Nicholson himself recently announced that we have “turned the corner” in Afghanistan.  In doing so, of course, he is counting on Americans not to recall the various war managers, military and civilian alike, who have made identical claims going back years now, among them Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in 2012.

From on high, assurances of progress; in the field, results that, year after year, come nowhere near what’s promised; on the homefront, an astonishingly credulous public. The war in Afghanistan has long since settled into a melancholy and seemingly permanent rhythm.

The fact is that the individuals entrusted by President Trump to direct U.S. policy believe with iron certainty that difficult political problems will yield to armed might properly employed.  That proposition is one to which generals like Mattis and Nicholson have devoted a considerable part of their lives, not just in Afghanistan but across much of the Islamic world. They are no more likely to question the validity of that proposition than the Pope is to entertain second thoughts about the divinity of Jesus Christ.

In Afghanistan, their entire worldview – not to mention the status and clout of the officer corps they represent — is at stake.  No matter how long the war there lasts, no matter how many “generations” it takes, no matter how much blood is shed to no purpose, and no matter how much money is wasted, they will never admit to failure — nor will any of the militarists-in-mufti cheering them on from the sidelines in Washington, Donald Trump not the least among them.

Meanwhile, the great majority of the American people, their attention directed elsewhere — it’s the season for holiday shopping, after all — remain studiously indifferent to the charade being played out before their eyes.

It took a succession of high-profile scandals before Americans truly woke up to the plague of sexual harassment and assault.  How long will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that don’t work?  Here’s hoping it’s before our president, in a moment of ill temper, unleashes “fire and fury” on the world.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, most recently, of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” as well as John Dower’s “The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,” John Feffer’s dystopian novel “Splinterlands,” Nick Turse’s “Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,” and Tom Engelhardt’s “Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.”

Eating out might be devouring your food budget

FILE - This Monday, Oct. 26, 2009 file photo shows a Whopper sandwich at a Burger King restaurant in Allison Park, Pa. (Credit: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

If you were to guess how much you spend on eating out per month, chances are you’ll miss the mark by a quite a bit.

In a recent study, I found that adults tend to underestimate how much they spend on eating out by more than twice what they’re actually spending.

This is a significant chunk of cash. So why is there such a big gap between how much we think we spend and how much we actually spend? And how could it be bridged?

When ‘mental accounting’ doesn’t add up

Self-control isn’t easy, but one way that people try to control how much they spend is by using mental constraints – or rules of thumb – to prevent themselves from spending too much.

“Mental accounting,” a concept first proposed by Nobel Laureate in Economics Dr. Richard Thaler, describes how we create a mental ledger for our various monthly budgets, whether it’s food (eating out or buying groceries), transportation (walking or taking a cab) or entertainment (going to the theater or staying in to watch a movie).

Given the brain’s enormous capabilities, you’d expect mental accounting to be pretty effective. Unfortunately, it’s not always helpful in self-control.

Its difficult to resist the temptation to consume, particularly when we’re enticed in so many ways. Think about holiday shopping: You’re at the mall, you’re hungry, you pass the food court – and catch a whiff of french fries. Sure, you have leftovers back home. But it’s so quick and easy to buy a meal right then and there. A combination of environmental stimulation and a lack of self-control can cause people to act impulsively.

A problem most aren’t aware of

In my study, I found evidence to show the limitations of mental accounting.

First I asked participants to estimate their weekly budgets for eating out. Several days later, I asked them the same question. But during the interim, I also had them report, each day, whether they ate out or not, and how they felt about their financial well-being.

By having them make daily notes, it alerted to them to how often they were eating out. So when it came time to ask them, again, to estimate their weekly budget for eating out, the estimates were, on average, more than two times higher than their first estimate. The participants thought they knew how much they were spending on food away from the home, only to later increase their estimates.

My study also found that those who tended to eat out more overall had a bigger gap between their first and second reported budgets. In other words, the more they ate out, the more they underestimated how much they were spending on eating out.

Perhaps most surprisingly, many of the participants weren’t even aware that there was a big difference between their first and second budgets.

Regaining control

This phenomenon matters because around the world, people are eating out more than at any point in modern human history. According to most estimates, it constitutes as much (or more) than 45 percent of food expenditures in the United States.

More importantly, studies have shown that those earning less tend to spend a greater proportion of their disposable incomes on eating out. And while eating out doesn’t necessarily need to be unhealthy, people often aren’t aware what’s in the prepared meals we’re buying from restaurants, markets and cafeterias. Researchers are still studying the health consequences of eating out, but they do know that selecting a meal from a menu immediately limits food choices, which could lead to less healthy food decisions.

What to do?

Relying less on mental accounting is a good first step. Writing out a weekly or monthly food budget can reverse these trends. (There are also apps that can help with this.)

One way to get a snapshot of your eating out behavior is to track it over the course of a week or two. Make a note every time you eat out, documenting how much you spend, who you eat with and what you order. Understanding the patterns of your choices and behaviors will make lifestyle changes seem less daunting, and self-control more manageable.

The challenges of self-control aren’t new, of course. The Greek philosopher Plato once said, “The first and best victory is to conquer self.”

But in a culture that implores people to “let loose” and “live a little,” self-control shouldn’t be equated with self-punishment. I like to point to a maxim of celebrated chef Julia Child: “You must have discipline to have fun.”

Amit Sharma, Professor, Hospitality Finance, Director, Food Decisions Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University

Bad news for the highly intelligent

(Credit: akindo via iStock)

There are advantages to being smart. People who do well on standardized tests of intelligence — IQ tests — tend to be more successful in the classroom and the workplace. Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience such as bankruptcy.

Now there’s some bad news for people in the right tail of the IQ bell curve. In a study just published in the journal Intelligence, Pitzer College researcher Ruth Karpinski and her colleagues emailed a survey with questions about psychological and physiological disorders to members of Mensa. A “high IQ society”, Mensa requires that its members have an IQ in the top two percent. For most intelligence tests, this corresponds to an IQ of about 132 or higher. (The average IQ of the general population is 100.) The survey of Mensa’s highly intelligent members found that they were more likely to suffer from a range of serious disorders.

The survey covered mood disorders (depression, dysthymia, and bipolar), anxiety disorders (generalized, social, and obsessive-compulsive), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism. It also covered environmental allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disorders. Respondents were asked to report whether they had ever been formally diagnosed with each disorder, or suspected they suffered from it. With a return rate of nearly 75%, Karpinski and colleagues compared the percentage of the 3,715 respondents who reported each disorder to the national average.

The biggest differences between the Mensa group and the general population were seen for mood disorders and anxiety disorders. More than a quarter (26.7%) of the sample reported that they had been formally diagnosed with a mood disorder, while 20% reported an anxiety disorder—far higher than the national averages of around 10% for each. The differences were smaller, but still statistically significant and practically meaningful, for most of the other disorders. The prevalence of environmental allergies was triple the national average (33% vs. 11%).

To explain their findings, Karpinski and colleagues propose the hyper brain/hyper body theory. This theory holds that, for all of its advantages, being highly intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological “overexcitabilities”, or OEs. A concept introduced by the Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dbrowski in the 1960s, an OE is an unusually intense reaction to an environmental threat or insult. This can include anything from a startling sound to confrontation with another person.

Psychological OEs include a heighted tendency to ruminate and worry, whereas physiological OEs arise from the body’s response to stress. According to the hyper brain/hyper body theory, these two types of OEs are more common in highly intelligent people and interact with each other in a “vicious cycle” to cause both psychological and physiological dysfunction. For example, a highly intelligent person may overanalyze a disapproving comment made by a boss, imagining negative outcomes that simply wouldn’t occur to someone less intelligent. That may trigger the body’s stress response, which may make the person even more anxious.

The results of this study must be interpreted cautiously because they are correlational. Showing that a disorder is more common in a sample of people with high IQs than in the general population doesn’t prove that high intelligence is the cause of the disorder. It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health.

All the same, Karpinski and colleagues’ findings set the stage for research that promises to shed new light on the link between intelligence and health. One possibility is that associations between intelligence and health outcomes reflect pleiotropy, which occurs when a gene influences seemingly unrelated traits. There is already some evidence to suggest that this is the case. In a 2015 study, Rosalind Arden and her colleagues concluded that the association between IQ and longevity is mostly explained by genetic factors.

From a practical standpoint, this research may ultimately lead to insights about how to improve people’s psychological and physical well-being. If overexcitabilities turn out to be the mechanism underlying the IQ-health relationship, then interventions aimed at curbing these sometimes maladaptive responses may help people lead happier, healthier lives.

In defense of not caring about Golden Globes nominations

Claire Foy; Maggie Gyllenhaal; Elisabeth Moss (Credit: AP/ Grant Pollard/John Nacion/Richard Shotwell)

Think of the 75th annual Golden Globes as the entertainment industry’s late holiday gift for people who view red carpet fashion parades and drunken celebrity antics as sport. The couture is sure to be fantastic, some of the speeches will be slurred, others merely shocking. Whoever happens to be on censor duty that night will get a workout because that’s the way it goes whenever the Hollywood Foreign Press Association plies very rich people with booze. On top of all that we’ll be scrutinizing the performance of this year’s host, Seth Meyers. We have high hopes.

Besides, he can’t possibly do worse than his predecessor Jimmy Fallon.

That’s pretty much the extent of the reasonable person’s emotional investment in the 2018 Golden Globes, airing live on NBC Sunday, January 7 starting at 8 p.m. Eastern and 5 p.m. Pacific Time. This is especially true for TV viewers, since the Globes have no bearing whatsoever on the Emmys and often award hardware to series people either never watch or barely talk about.

Case in point: Billy Bob Thornton won a Globe for Best Actor in the 2017 TV Drama race, beating Rami Malek of USA’s “Mr. Robot,” Bob Odenkirk of AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” Matthew Rhys of FX’s “The Americans” and Liev Schreiber of Showtime’s “Ray Donovan.  That’s right: Thornton was in a series last year. It was called “Goliath,” and it ran on Amazon.

Don’t remember “Goliath”? Not many people do, gauging by how infrequently it organically pops up in conversations about television series. (By the way, Amazon cleared “Goliath” for a second season, likely due at some point in 2018.)

This illustrates the Globes’ questionable relevance to more prestigious industry awards or citations of merit. It’s doubtful that HFPA has more esoteric tastes than the average viewer, enabling its voters to see a greatness in Thornton’s performance that escaped the majority of viewers. Although the organization has long battled rumors of studios “buying” awards with bribery, the explanation for its perplexing and disappointing choices over the years is likely far more basic and boring.

That is, its voters are more easily dazzled by celebrity than those of other organizations.

This idea applies to titles as well as casts, and sometimes it works out. The Best Television Series Drama race is fairly respectable, with “The Crown” against “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “This Is Us,” all terrific selections. “Stranger Things” also is worth supporting even if its second season was more uneven than its first.  “Game of Thrones” is in there because, in the view of the HFPA and other awards bodies, even a bad season of that show is more worth draping in gold than more solid seasons of other series. “The Deuce” is more deserving, but dragons are prettier than used condoms on trash-strewn streets.

The same formula applies to Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy. It’s hard to find fault with the nods for “Black-ish,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and the artistically adventurous and funny “Master of None.” “SMILF” is the HFPA’s way of throwing in an outlier that fools a person into thinking it’s tuned in to the cultural conversation, and isn’t every just pleased as punch that “Will and Grace” is back? No . . . but yes!

The Globes also can be more easily “gamed” than other awards — the laughable but shrewd choice to submit Jordan Peele’s horror film “Get Out” as comedy proves this — which leads to a number of unfair and baffling competitions.

On the television Side, critics have long objected to the indefensible choice to jamming its individual supporting role nominations into a single category, inevitably short-changing any performers in co-starring roles who didn’t have the good fortune to appear in a high-profile miniseries or movie.

In this regard, the current round of nominations is tougher on female performers than male.  In the race for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television, “Stranger Things” star David Harbour, is pitting against Christian Slater for “Mr. Robot.” These regular series contenders are up against Alfred Molina from “Feud,” Alexander Skarsgård, for “Big Little Lies” and “Fargo” star David Thewlis.

That’s not the fairest fight, but it feels a good deal more equitable than the battle “This Is Us” star Chrissy Metz faces against “The Handmaid’s Tale” star Ann Dowd, already an Emmy winner for her work in that drama. But those two also are duking it out with limited series stars Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley of “Big Little Lies,” another Emmy favorite, and Michelle Pfeiffer, who co-starred with Robert DeNiro in the TV movie “The Wizard of Lies,” and who also is blessed with the good fortune of being Michelle Pfeiffer.

This kind of thing is why the Globes are mainly a dress rehearsal for movie awards season and a fun night out for TV stars. Bearing all of this in mind, there are a couple of contests worth paying attention due to the worthiness of the challengers — specifically in the individual performance categories for Drama.

The list of nominees in Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy is as solid as it gets, with Pamela Adlon of “Better Things” competing against “GLOW” star Alison Brie; Rachel Brosnahan, who turned in an excellent performance in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; Issa, whose work on “Insecure” made it one of the most insightful comedies of the year, and Frankie Shaw of “SMILF.”

Among the Globe nominees for Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series is Maggie Gyllenhaal, who gives a tour de force portrayal in “The Deuce,” and Claire Foy, whose work in season 2 of “The Crown” is deeply moving. Caitriona Balfe of “Outlander” and Katherine Langford of “13 Reasons Why” are refreshing choices as well and elevate the respected seasons of their series with their work. But with Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss in the mix for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” their shot at victory is longer than Foy’s and Gyllenhaal’s.

“The Crown” against “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “This Is Us,” all terrific selections. “Stranger Things” also is worth supporting even if its second season was more uneven than its first. “Game of Thrones” is in there because, in the view of the HFPA and other awards bodies, even a bad season of that show is more worth draping in gold than more solid seasons of other series. “The Deuce” is more deserving, but dragons are prettier than used condoms on trash-strewn streets.

On the actor side “This Is Us” star Sterling K. Brown might be the favorite in other races, but up against “Ozark” star Jason Bateman, the kind of actor the HFPA loves to award for being fabulous, and Freddie Highmore, portraying a physician living with autism (physical afflictions are award bait) on “The Good Doctor,” his victory may not be assured. Bob Odenkirk would be a perfectly fine if surprising selection if he were to win for “Better Call Saul.”

Then again, if there were ever an opportunity to make viewers throw something at their screens in confusion, this category gives the Globes that chance by nominating Liev Schreiber for “Ray Donovan”.

If the HFPA gets a few of their winners right, terrific. If not, no big whoop. By Emmy season nearly all will be forgotten and, if we care enough to be upset, forgiven.

The full list of film and television nominees are available on the official website for the Golden Globes.