Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 244

Roy Moore’s disgraceful fan club: Republican defenders smear accusers, reporters

Roy Moore (Credit: Getty/Scott Olson)

The Washington Post’s bombshell report that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore pursued romantic relationships with teenage girls continued reverberating throughout politics on Friday with the National Republican Senatorial Committee formally telling government regulators that it would not be contributing funds toward his campaign.

Most national Republicans have been taking a line that Moore should end his campaign “if the allegations are true” but some, including retiring Arizona Sen. John McCain and former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have said that Moore should step down.

“Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman,” Romney tweeted Friday morning, referring to the woman who had accused Moore of molesting her when she was 14. “Her account is too serious to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside.”

And yet, many local Republican supporters of Moore and his Breitbart News booster Steve Bannon have remained obdurate that their candidate did nothing wrong and is merely being slimed by the fake news media. Some are finding ever-more disgraceful ways to stand by their man.

Ed Henry, an Alabama state representative took the cake in remarks made to a local newspaper in which he condemned the three women accusing Moore for not speaking out sooner, adding that Moore’s alleged victims deserved to be prosecuted. Repeating a frequent refrain of the far-right, he blamed “the establishment” Republicans for the allegations.

“If they believe this man is predatory, they are guilty of allowing him to exist for 40 years. I think someone should prosecute and go after them. You can’t be a victim 40 years later, in my opinion,” Henry told the Cullman Times.

Prominent fundamentalist evangelical Jerry Falwell Jr. came to Moore’s defense in a statement which claimed that the word of a twice-censured former judge outweighed the Post’s careful account based upon interviews with more than 30 people.

“It comes down to a question who is more credible in the eyes of the voters — the candidate or the accuser,” Falwell Jr. told the Religious News Service.

Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler cited the Bible in an attempt to justify an adult seeking sexual relations with a child.

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus,” Zeigler told the Washington Examiner.

Others on the far right have responded to the report by trying to smear the accusers or even the Post reporters themselves.

Alex Jones, the radio host who was known for talking about alien takeovers before becoming interested in Republican politics, spread false and unsubstantiated claims on his Infowars website that the women alleging improper conduct by Moore were being paid.

“There’s a claim spreading on social media that a reporter was taped while reportedly offering a woman $1000 to accuse Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual improprieties,” he tweeted. The Infowars article Jones linked cited tweets from unknown individuals claiming second-hand knowledge of recorded audio between a Post reporter and one of Moore’s accusers.

GotNews, a discredited news site run by alt-right blogger Chuck Johnson wrote a piece attacking Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen for alleged traffic violations, claiming that speeding tickets and an early conviction for a bad check amounted to McCrummen having a “criminal career.”

Moore’s family has also gotten into the defense act. According to CNN, his younger brother, Jerry, compared Roy Moore to Jesus Christ and said that he was being unfairly persecuted.

The former judge also enlisted his wife Kayla Moore in a Friday appeal which sought to blame Satan for the allegations.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the attacks launched against my husband by the forces of evil trying to rip apart our nation,” she told Moore’s fans in an email fund-raising message.

“Roy’s been through the fire before,” she continued. “He needs you right now.

In a conversation with conservative radio host Sean Hannity on Friday, Moore claimed that he did not remember dating teen girls while in his 30s. He denied having any interactions with Corfman.

Hannity defended Moore on his Fox News show the night before by suggesting that Moore’s accuser was lying in search of a big payday:

“Few and Far Between” … this is quite a segment. Watch pic.twitter.com/rN9PPZYBH5

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 10, 2017

The perspective on divorce

(Credit: Mincemeat via Shutterstock)

Research indicates that one divorce occurs per an estimated 13 seconds in the United States. This sobering tidbit makes one wonder: When the going gets tough, should couples cut their losses and divorce, or should they push through and remain a family unit? Below are three arguments for and against divorce.

Three reasons why divorce is the answer

Longer life expectancies make lifetime monogamy unrealistic

Early marriages, often arranged to form strategic alliances between families, arose in an era when life expectancies were significantly shorter than they are today. Now that people are living into their eighties, nineties and beyond, staying together “till death do us part” is unrealistic. Humans are the only animals to practice monogamy as a lifestyle. And as the divorce rate currently stands at 52.7%, i.e., only half of all marriages actually work, one might begin to wonder whether humans were even made to be monogamous. The possibility that humans will be naturally compelled to explore the world and seek self fulfilment just might make monogamy a pipe dream. If a couple is struggling to live together as a unit or remain monogamous, they should be able to part ways, instead of suffering alongside each other for decades to come.

Divorce frees you from harm and incompatibility

Marriage is an institution meant to promote and safeguard relationships. However, if those relationships turn sour – whether due to infidelity, physical or emotional abuse, or incompatibility, divorce is the channel that can help free affected partners from their suffering. It prevents the development of physical, emotional or mental health consequences. Divorce also enables incompatible partners to go their separate ways. Armed with the knowledge and experience acquired during their first marriages, divorcees have a better perspective of what they want and need in a new partner. If harnessed, this know-how can serve divorcees and help them find more compatible partners, the second time around.

Divorce can be healthier for your children’s mental stability

While research evidences that divorce does have an impact on children, it fails to take into account the permanent emotional damage children suffer when they are forced to live under the same roof as parents who can’t get along. A good divorce can be better than a bad marriage for the children involved. This is because it provides kids with a calmer emotional baseline, educating them on compromise and helping them place personal happiness as a life priority.

Three reasons why divorce is not the answer

Divorce promotes a casual attitude towards marriage

Marriage is more than a relationship between two people. It is a social institution, governed by legal, moral and community obligations. During wedding ceremonies, couples pledge to remain together, “as long as we both shall live.” Divorce devalues the meaning of these vows – and consequently of the entire institution of marriage. This devaluation promotes an overall casual attitude towards marriage, leading people to enter marriages lightly and without due consideration; they know they can always obtain a divorce if the marriage doesn’t work out, instead of fighting for the survival of the relationship.

Divorce creates financial hardship

Divorce almost always hurts the finances of all parties involved. Marriage researchers have found that more than a 30% increase in income is required to maintain the same standard of living divorced couples had prior to the dissolution of their marriage. Fathers must pay child support and, in some cases, alimony as well. Nearly 55% of divorced mothers do not receive the full child support payments they are owed. This leads 20% of mothers to fall into poverty, as they must also cut back on work hours to provide after school care for their children. When there is only a single parent left with the children at a given time, it can be difficult for that parent to hold a full-time job and earn a decent living.

Divorce is lonely

Regardless of the circumstances, divorce always causes a degree of emotional pain and detachment from a way of life you have grown accustomed to. Even if you have children with you, it is not the same as being with an adult partner. An Australian study found that one year after divorce, 48% of still-single men reported feeling lonely. The loneliness that accompanies divorce is intense and often feels like it will never end. It is also associated with worse physical and mental health, more so for men than women, who are more likely to develop related suicidality after a separation. What’s more, children of divorce often feel lonely and devastated by the breakup of their families, a fact any devoted parent must consider.

Bottom line: Divorce can be the answer unhappy couples seek, but it can also cause much strain and life dissatisfaction. Whether divorce is the answer to a couple’s marital strife is a deeply personal matter and should be weighed on an individual basis. How do you feel about divorce?

Writer accuses Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner trying to trade sexual favors for a contract

Jann Wenner (Credit: AP/Charles Sykes)

Writer Ben Ryan is accusing Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner of sexual harassment. In a report published on Buzzfeed, he describes a night 12 years ago when Wenner invited Ryan to his townhouse. There, he claims, Wenner offered him a writing contract in exchange for sex.

Ryan, a 27-year-old freelance writer at the time, recalls the excitement he felt when Wenner called and expressed interest in hearing his story ideas. “I felt like this was the beginning of me making it,” Ryan told Buzzfeed. “That’s how naïve I was.”

Their first meeting resulted in Ryan securing an assignment for Men’s Journal, then a subsidiary of Wenner Media. Ryan says that sometime later, Wenner asked him to come by his home.

Ryan says the publisher made him a drink and sat with him on a couch. Then, Ryan said, Wenner kissed him.

“I had Jann Wenner’s tongue in my mouth,” Ryan tells Buzzfeed. “I went along for a second but then said something to the effect of ‘Oh please, I’m not that kind of girl.’”

After Ryan pulled away, he claims “It was like the entire temperature of the room changed in a flash,” and that Wenner “got very upset and was pseudo-threatening of how bad it could be if this got out.”

Ryan got up to leave. The claims that Wenner then propositioned him, offering him a writing contract if he stayed with the publisher. “I think there was that moment where it’s like time stood still, and you’re imagining how this could be the answer to all my struggles. All I would have to do is this one thing,” Ryan tells Buzzfeed. “But that’s not me. I would never do that.”

Ryan supplied Buzzfeed with a journal entry he claims he made at the time:

Thursday, August 11, 2005. Last night Jann Wenner asked me to come to his townhouse for a drink at 10:30 p.m. I knew this would happen sooner or later, I just didn’t think he’d take such a direct approach. It was the most pure form of sexual harassment: he pawed and groped and I insisted no but he persisted promising me a “25 article contract” in the most disingenuous voice. “Preferential treatment.” I was forced to kiss him. His mouth was dry and he was a serpent-like kisser, lashing with his tongue. After 90 minutes I left dignity relatively intact.

Ryan’s boyfriend at the time and three other friends of his confirm to Buzzfeed that he told them about the encounter afterwards.

In a statement to Variety responding to the claims, Wenner said: “I met Ben 12 years ago, and I attempted to have a sexual liaison with him. He turned me down, which I respected. I had no intention of making him feel uncomfortable. His piece was subsequently published in any case; no work was promised and no work was lost. I have never and would never make an offer of this kind.”

Ryan says that he felt compelled to come forward because “I feel we are in such a unique moment in our evolution as a society — a moment when people are genuinely ready to listen to stories such as this — that I must take a stand to help continue the public conversation about sexual harassment and assault in all its forms.”

Fifty years after co-founding Rolling Stone in 1967, Wenner remains the publisher of the legendary, highly influential music, culture and politics publication, though in September the flagging Wenner Media announced that it was putting a 51 percent stake of the company on the market.

Anthony Edwards alleges a Hollywood producer sexually molested him for years

Anthony Edwards (Credit: AP/Charles Sykes)

On Friday, actor Anthony Edwards alleged in a powerful essay that he was molested as a young teenager by Gary Goddard, a director, screenwriter, producer and founder of a Hollywood design firm.

The news comes as several prominent male figures have been accused of sexual assault, or otherwise misconduct, by both male and female victims over the course of many years.

Edwards’ published his story, titled “Yes Mom, There is Something Wrong,” on Medium.

“When I was 14 years old, my mother opened the door for me to answer honestly about the rumors she had heard about Gary Goddard — who was my mentor, teacher and friend —  being a pedophile,” Edwards wrote. He instead denied it “through tears of complete panic.”

He continued, “To face that truth was not an option as my sense of self was completely enmeshed in my gang of five friends who were all led by this sick father figure.”

Edwards met Goddard when he was 12, he wrote, and Goddard immediately became an influential person in his life. “He taught me about the value of acting, respect for friendship, and the importance of studying,” Edwards explained.

He continued, “Pedophiles prey on the weak. My father, who suffered from undiagnosed PTSD from WWII, was not emotionally available. Everyone has the need to bond, and I was no exception.”

“My vulnerability was exploited. I was molested by Goddard, my best friend was raped by him  —  and this went on for years,” Edwards revealed. “The group of us,” he said, “stayed quiet.”

Edwards explained that the reason for this, as in many similar acts, is that “the victims often feel deeply responsible — as if it is somehow their fault.”

“The use of fear to control and manipulate can be both obvious and subtle,” Edwards wrote. “Abusers will often use the word ‘love’ to define their horrific actions, which constitutes a total betrayal of trust.”

The actor added, “The resulting damage to the emotional development of a child is deep and unforgivable.”

“I have been so fortunate to have had access to therapy and fellow survivors. Shame can thrive easily when we are isolated, but it loses its power when people come together to share their common experiences,” Edwards explained.

Edwards adds that he ran into Goddard at an airport roughly 22 years ago and vented his built-up anger. But news about Goddard abusing others resurfaced in recent years, and so did Edwards’ frustration.

“At 51 years old, I was directed by a group of loving friends to a therapist who specializes in this kind of abuse,” Edwards wrote. “By processing my anger in a safe place with a professional, I was finally able to have the conversation that I wish I could have had with my mom when I was 14.”

Edwards ended his story with a message to survivors of sexual abuse and those who are afraid to speak up out of fear.

“I did not go from being a victim to a survivor alone. No one does. I had to ask for help, and I am so grateful that I did.”

Goddard, noted mostly for his work with amusement-park attractions based off of movie properties and a number of animated shows, has yet to respond to the allegations.

Steven Mnuchin, foreclosure king of America

(Credit: (AP Photo/Evan Vucci))

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doesn’t exactly come across as the guy you’d want in your corner in a playground tussle. In the Trump administration, he’s been more like the kid trying to cop favor with the school bully. That, at least, is the role he seems to have taken in the Trump White House. When he isn’t circling the Sunday shows stooging for the president, he regularly plays the willing fall guy for tax policies guaranteed to stoke further inequality in America and for legislation that will remove just about any consumer protections against Wall Street.

Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner, arrived in Washington with a distinct reputation.  Back in 2009, he had corralled a bundle of rich financiers to take over California’s IndyMac bank, shut down amid the 2008 foreclosure crisis by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).  Bought for $13.9 billion (but only $1.3 billion in actual cash), Mnuchin turned it into a genuine foreclosure machine, in the process sealing his own fate when it came to his future reputation. At the time, he didn’t appear concerned about public approval. Something far more valuable was at stake: the $200 million that, according to Bloomberg News, he raked in personally, thanks to the deal.

No such luck, of course, for the bank’s ordinary borrowers. During Mnuchin’s reign, IndyMac carried out more than 36,000 foreclosures, tossing former homeowners (including active duty military servicemen and women) onto the street without hesitation or pity by any means necessary. According to a memo obtained by investigative reporter David Dayen, OneWest, the new name that Mnuchin and his billionaire posse coined for Indybank, of which Mnuchin was now CEO and chairman, “rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.”

Now, Mnuchin remains bitter and frustrated that he can’t kick the reputation he got in those days.  As he told a House Financial Services Committee Congressional hearing this July, “I take great offense to anybody who calls me the foreclosure king.”  Such indignation would ring truer if, in May, one of Mnuchin’s banking units, a company called Financial Freedom, hadn’t agreed to pay a more than $89 million settlement to the government for taking unreasonable advantage of thousands of seniors through reverse mortgages which convert equity in a home into a loan. (A few months later, in August, a watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, called upon the Justice Department to investigate Mnuchin for allegedly making false statements under oath to Congress about his actions at OneWest between 2009 and 2015.)

Like Donald Trump, Mnuchin is a man intent on making the rich richer and to hell with everyone else. Continually channeling Trump’s ego, whatever his smoldering resentments may be, he soldiers on — and in the context of the Trump White House successfully indeed. After all, this administration has lost 14 key people in less than a year, including an FBI director, a national security adviser, a White House chief of staff, and a White House communications director. Through it all, Mnuchin has remained in place, one of the relatively few members of The Donald’s original team not related by blood or marriage who is seemingly thriving. (Admittedly, he and the president were linked in what CNN once called a “business capacity” even before he became Trump’s campaign finance director in May 2016.)

Hamilton, Trump, and a playbill for the economy

There’s a history of Treasury secretaries having a special rapport with presidents that snakes back to the founding of the Republic. Alexander Hamilton, the first of them, had the full confidence of the first president, George Washington. With such backing, he established federal taxes and came up with plans for real economic development. He understood federal taxes to be essential to building America. In contrast, Mnuchin thinks the stock market is the ultimate arbiter of economic health and appears to consider taxation without representation (by the wealthy) the order of the day.

Since Mnuchin bagged one of the most influential economic positions on the planet, he’s been remarkably consistent on just one thing: making sure he lends a helping hand to the world of big finance, his former universe. He has, for instance, pushed hard for more bank deregulation by claiming that it will help the smaller banks. Don’t believe it for a second.  His disdain for reenacting the Glass-Steagall Act, which once made the merging of commercial and investment banking operations illegal and so curtailed the too-big-to-fail status of the largest banks, tells you all you need to know.  It reflects his real thinking when it comes to banks and the stability of the economy. Emblematic of this has been the way he steered the Financial Stability Oversight Council that he chairs to give AIG, the insurance company at the core of the 2008 financial meltdown, a gateway back to prominence by removing its too-big-to-fail label.

He’s proven adept at blurring the lines between what effective banking regulation would actually involve and how he can wordsmith out of pushing for it. In May, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, for example, he noted that “we do not support [the] separation of banks and investment banks.” When Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out that this was hardly the position Donald Trump and his team had taken during campaign 2016 (or of the Republican platform, which had explicitly called for the reinstitution of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933), he promptly waffled: “We, during the campaign . . . specifically came out and said we do support a twenty-first-century Glass-Steagall. . . That means there are aspects of it that we think may make sense, but we never said before that we supported a full separation of banks and investment banks.”

In June, when pressed on the matter by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Treasury secretary argued that Trump was not responsible for the language in the Republican party platform and remained opposed to breaking up the big banks. He added, “We think that that would hurt the economy, that would ruin liquidity in the market. What we are focused on is safe and prudent regulation for the large banks so we don’t have taxpayer risk.”

In other words, this is a man who has a real sense of the opportunity that’s embedded in this moment — for the large banks and their CEOs to make a bundle of money — but no appropriate sense of the risks involved or fear for a future in which he and his president might find themselves bailing out such banks, 2008-style.

Lessons unlearned? If that isn’t the Trump administration, what is?

Threatening the market

Mnuchin may have little grasp of what constitutes real risk, but he can still make threats about it. In an October interview with Politico Money, he credited the stock market’s postelection rally to positive expectations that Congress would pass a major tax “reform” bill.  If that bill doesn’t go through, he warned, the markets will suffer big time — and so will everyone else.

Coming from a Goldman Sachs alum, that should have rung a few bells. After all, in the fall of 2008, with the stock market tanking and banks imploding, then-Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson took a similar position with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Following that chamber’s initial rejection of a $700 billion bank bailout bill that sent the markets into a tailspin, he warned that, if she didn’t get it through, the big banks would stop providing money to the American public.  Sure enough, Congress complied. With 91 Republicans joining 172 Democrats, the bill passed by a vote of 263 to 171.

Nine years and a plethora of big bank subsidies later, Mnuchin conflated market levels with legislation in a similarly threatening manner. As he told Politico, “There is no question that the rally in the stock market has baked into it reasonably high expectations of us getting tax cuts and tax reform done.” He then added, “To the extent we get the tax deal done, the stock market will go up higher.” But with that, of course, went a warning: “There’s no question in my mind that if we don’t get it done you’re going to see a reversal of a significant amount of these gains.”

And speaking of reversals, the “Mnuchin Rule,” as it was dubbed in January, 2017, underscored the then-prevailing Trump administration position that the wealthy should not be afforded tax cuts. By October, however, Mnuchin had changed his rule. “When you’re cutting taxes across the board,” he explained to Politico, “it’s very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class. The math, given how much you are collecting, is just hard to do.”

Actually, the math isn’t hard to do at all. My eight-year-old niece could do it.  If you make more than a certain amount, your tax rates shouldn’t get cut. That’s the only math that makes sense. But in the land of tax subterfuge, even if you leave a top tax bracket rate as it is, you can still ensure that the wealthy get all the breaks in other ways.

On November 2nd, the Republicans finally released their “Tax Cuts and Job Act,” which contained new blows to middle-class wellbeing, including the elimination of deductions for medical expenses, student loan interest, and state and local taxes. For corporations, already flush with cash, the plan calls for a significant, not to say staggering, tax break.  Their tax rate would be slashed from 35% to 20%.

And don’t forget repealing the estate tax, that other classic benefit for “the masses.” Count on one thing: there will be no reversals from Mnuchin or Trump on that because the math couldn’t be clearer.  Only the hyper-wealthy have estates big enough to reap rewards from such a change. At an Institute for International Finance conference, even Mnuchin had to agree that this was a benefit of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich: “Obviously, the estate tax, I will concede, disproportionately helps rich people.” Indeed, the heirs to the estates of fewer than 1 in 500 Americans who die each year would benefit in any way from such a repeal, though the children or other relatives of 13 of the 24 members of Donald Trump’s cabinet and the president himself would baga collective estate tax break of about $1.5 billion.

Still, don’t think that everything’s coming up roses for our latest secretary of the Treasury.  Wall Street may now be king in Washington, but Mnuchin is not (though he is clearly a prince to the one man who truly matters right now, Donald Trump). In his efforts to promote the Trump vision (whatever that might be), the Treasury secretary seems to be coming up distinctly short, even with Republicans in Congress who have described his approach to lawmaking in terms ranging from “uncomfortable” to “intellectually insulting.”

Donald Trump, of course, campaigned as an anti-establishment candidate who would offer a hand to regular people, drain the Washington swamp, and have our backs. Then he promptly began filling his administration, especially when it came to the economy, with the richest of the rich, figures guaranteed to promote the dismantling of whatever tepid regulations remained to protect citizens from economic disaster while enriching the usual .01%.

Mnuchin has yet to even do something as simple and seemingly straightforward as posting a full-scale explanation of the tax plan he’s plugging so hard at the Treasury Department’s web page. Even though until November 2nd it remained a chimera, that hasn’t stopped him from rushing to its defense — the defense that is, of giving the extremely wealthy yet more of their money back. Welcome to the twenty-first-century American politics of the .01%.

Meanwhile, Mnuchin has noted that he’s a big fan of biographies, though his schedule doesn’t allow much time for “pleasure reading.” When asked about Alexander Hamilton, he said, “I have a beautiful painting of him in my office. He stares at me every day and I look at him for great advice.”

But Hamilton understood that, without adequate taxation, you couldn’t run a country, or pay its debts, a stance that informed how he implemented federal taxes in the new nation. As he said in 1801, “As to taxes, they are evidently inseparable from government. It is impossible without them to pay the debts of the nation, to protect it from foreign danger, or to secure individuals from lawless violence and rapine.” He also believed that those with more money should pay more taxes. His excise tax plan, for example, required the taxation of luxury items, bastions of the rich.

This government has, in fact, received more than $2.96 trillion in total tax revenues so far in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2017. That figure comes with a budget deficit of $673.7 billion, which means that if the rich or corporations were to cease to pay various taxes (at least at present rates), money would still have to come from somewhere. To begin to make up for the shortfall, the less wealthy will simply have to pay more in some fashion, as will states and cities, and cuts in social spending will undoubtedly follow as night does day.

The high-flying Treasury Secretary covers Trump’s back

Mnuchin himself knows a situation ripe for the picking when he sees it, in government or out.  Take, for instance, his prodigious use of military planes for his personal travel, both on government business and for pleasure.  These flights have pushed the boundaries of judgement, if not legality.  According to a report from Rich Delmar, the counsel to the Treasury Department’s inspector general, Mnuchin took military aircraft on at least seven occasions without obtaining appropriate authorization, skirting a “rigorous” preapproval process established to avoid undue use of such expensive amenities.  And though he withdrew a request to take his wife on their honeymoon to Europe last summer by military aircraft, he did use an Air Force jet to fly to Kentucky with her to watch the solar eclipse and — he carefully added — to “review the gold” at Fort Knox. Unlike Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price whose government aircraft fetish cost him his job, Fort Knox covered the solar eclipse for Mnuchin.

He classified each of those trips as a “White House support mission,” which sounds dramatic and is a category technically reserved for situations in which commercial flights aren’t available or there is a national security or other emergency. I checked, however.  There are several $200 economy flights from Washington to Kentucky, which more than beats the $10,000 per hour the Pentagon charges as its official aircraft expense when its planes are used in this way.

In addition to those flights, Mnuchin has been flying high as a kind of second Kellyanne Conway on all sorts of non-Treasury-related topics that threaten to eclipse his boss. With Trump embroiled in a bitter war of words with National Football League players taking a knee over racism, Mnuchin saw an opportunity and cruised the Sunday talk-show circuit attacking the players. He used his platform to insist that they should “do free speech on their own time” — “off the field,” not on it.

About a week later, he responded to the flak over the president’s lackluster support for Puerto Rican recovery after Hurricane Maria devastated that island. Defending his boss and his tweets in another circuit of those talk shows, he doubled down on White House criticisms of San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz.  “When the president gets attacked, he attacks back,” he told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding, “I think the mayor’s comments were unfair given what the government has done.”

While the head of the Treasury isn’t an elected official, his words do hold considerable weight — and he is, after all, fifth in the line of succession for the presidency. The value, insights, and credibility of the Treasury Department impact economies, markets, investors, and confidence the world over.

Simply swampy

Call it lying, misleading, flip-flopping, or the invocation of the “rights” of privilege, but Mnuchin has already amassed quite a catalogue of questionable statements in his brief career in public office and, while he’s been at it, he’s even made extra money along the way: at least $15 million and possibly as much as $53 million, reports Fortune, from “entertainment and real estate interests that he sold to comply with federal conflict of interest rules.”

For him, as for his boss, whatever anyone says, the bottom line and their allegiance remains simple and clear: it’s not to the middle class; it’s to their class, the half-billion and up folks.

Alexander Hamilton was no stranger to wealth either, but he understood that the nation’s wealth should be shared more evenly.  He attempted to use his office as a national unifier and a place to coordinate efforts to pay off debts from the Revolutionary War. Mnuchin’s doctrine is one of returning to a world of fewer rules for Wall Street and fewer taxes on corporations and the wealthy, which, in translation, means greater risks and costs for the rest of us and for the country as a whole. While President Trump isn’t exactly the cannot-tell-a-lie inheritor of the Washingtonian tradition, his Treasury Secretary, the foreclosure king of America, is distinctly no Alexander Hamilton.

3 things I learned from delivering medical aid to a remote part of Puerto Rico

A section of collapsed road after Hurricane Maria, October 7, 2017 in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico. (Credit: Getty/Joe Raedle)

I belong to a group called Doctors for Puerto Rico.

We have been dispatching medicine and small teams of medical staff to the island, in coordination with local health authorities since two-and-a-half weeks after Hurricane Maria. When we started, we weren’t sure what kind of assistance would do the most good amid a situation threatening to become a humanitarian disaster.

Sending doctors, nurses and emergency responders? Delivering medical supplies? Evacuating patients? Evacuating medical and nursing students to Florida so they can continue their studies?

Two of us went there to find out.

Out of range

To get started, I traveled to Puerto Rico in early October with Dr. Elimarys Perez-Colon, a colleague at the University of South Florida, where I work as a primary care physician and teach doctors in training.

When we landed in San Juan, everything at the airport seemed eerily normal. The lights were working. The bathrooms were clean and had running water. The shops were open and blasting bachata music.

We stopped at one to buy a 4-foot-long Puerto Rican flag, having no trouble paying with a credit card.

But once we left the Southwest Airlines terminal, we passed under a leaking roof and the entrance to other terminals that were closed, dark and empty. This experience sums up what’s going on there in general. Puerto Ricans’ spirits are showing through as they try hard to return to normal, but this is possible only in small pockets so far.

Driving around San Juan was a lot like being at the airport. Some areas were running on generators and had strong 4G mobile phone signals. Other areas were abandoned, with significantly damaged buildings and downed power lines. Outside the city, trees were barren and rivers engorged.

Our phones stopped working about 10 miles outside the city. They never worked anywhere else as we spent several days visiting hospitals, clinics and shelters across the central mountainous regions of Caguas, Villalba and Juana Diaz.

We slept in the homes of my colleague’s relatives, moving around for the most basic reasons. We would shower in her aunt’s house because they had water, then leave when the water stopped running.

Some guidance

In general, aid experts recommend that people who want to help with disaster recovery make monetary donations rather than ship clothing, food or other goods.

But in Puerto Rico’s case, my aid group has determined that there is also a clear need for universities, hospitals and other centers of expertise to help. Relief efforts underway — including the assistance by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross — are not meeting the island’s needs for technical personnel.

Based on what we learned and how we are lending a hand, here are some suggestions for people who either want to send aid to Puerto Rico or go there themselves:

1. Realize that you can make a difference.

When we got to remote areas of Puerto Rico, we were glad we ignored excuses like “it’s an island” or “they were in bad shape before the hurricane.”

The medical director of Hospital Menonita, a 400-bed referral hospital in the town of Caguas, told us that we were the first group to bring supplies and aid to their hospital. We were shocked to learn this, as we arrived 17 days after Hurricane Maria.

My aid group is sending this hospital asthma drugs, intravenous antibiotics and other supplies, based on its own updated inventory information. As of early November, everything we’ve sent has made it there — 4,000 pounds in total.

We are also sending prescription drugs to smaller hospitals in the towns of Villalba and Juana Diaz. Grants from the Hope and Health Foundation, Tampa General Hospital, University of South Florida and several private foundations around Tampa Bay have provided the roughly US$100,000 in funds and medical supplies for this project. Jabil, a medical supply company, is providing logistical support like flights and shipping.

Yes, we have to ship these supplies on plane or cargo barge instead of driving the stuff there. But our effort shows that it can be done.

2. Work with the locals

We initially thought that we could help the most by sending dozens of doctors and nurses to pitch in.

But we encountered highly qualified medical staff in every hospital and clinic we visited. When we realized that the pharmacists could easily give us an inventory of the most depleted medications or supplies, we changed our plans.

That made us shelve our plans to offer medical students an opportunity to temporarily transfer to our medical school.

We asked local medical officials from the Puerto Rican Department of Health how we could help.

Were there any underserved areas where visiting medical professionals could fill gaps? Would it help if we checked on the spread of infectious diseases?

We also offered to send doctors from our team in Florida to relieve some Puerto Rican doctors who had been working nonstop.

Then we met with staff from the Villalba mayor’s office and police force. They reviewed paper records for every house in the district of 25,000 people, looking for children, elderly and sick people and those with disabilities.

We left their office with a detailed medical wish list. The list included formula for newborns, nebulizer machines for asthmatics and insulin for diabetics. There were also requests for visiting doctors to examine bed-bound patients.

Together with the command center’s nurse, we drove around the mountainside town to complete this list, taking the time to do medical exams in shelters and homes as we made our rounds.

3. Refrain from ‘disaster tourism’

We were mindful that everyone who travels to Puerto Rico these days is adding to strains on the limited supplies of water, food and energy. Even before Hurricane Maria, the majority of the island’s food came from the U.S. mainland or was imported.

That is why only two of us went on the initial assessment. It is also the rationale we are following as we focus on sending targeted medical supplies and small, mobile teams from Florida who join with the local medical staff to extend their reach into rural areas.

We believe that people who plan to visit their relatives in Puerto Rico or travel there to provide aid of any kind should plan their trips ahead of time and have an extremely clear purpose for this travel. They can also take a few common-sense precautions to ensure they are truly helping out.

For example, they can secure lodging in advance, perhaps in the homes of the locals. It’s best not to depend on hotels right now because many of them are housing Puerto Ricans who lost their homes.

Because clean water is in short supply and grocery stores are rationing it, it’s important for visitors to bring their own water filters and some bottled water as well. This will ensure that they don’t hog bottled water at their hosts’ homes.

Finally, it’s important to book your return flight before you go.

Otherwise, you could wind up stuck there for weeks due to the exodus of locals who are leaving for short-term stints or rebuilding their lives on the mainland.

Doctors for Puerto Rico plans to continue to work with the Puerto Rican Department of Health to recover the health sector for at least another six months. We are staying in Florida but responding to requests for help from the island’s vulnerable patients and health care providers.

Asa Oxner Myers, Assistant Professor, Internal Medicine, University of South Florida

Fox’s new prime-time lineup is Breitbart TV

(Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Two months ago, Steve Bannon left his position as White House chief strategist and returned to his “weapons” at Breitbart.com. At the time, news reports were thick with rumors that Bannon might try to extend Breitbart’s brand from digital media and satellite radio to television. “Bannon has told friends he sees a massive opening to the right of Fox News, raising the possibility that he’s going to start a network,” Axios reported.

This talk has largely subsided. Perhaps Bannon has prioritized molding the Republican Party into the party of Trump; perhaps the formidable financial and logistical hurdles involved with launching a cable network have given the Breitbart executive chairman and his patrons, the right-wing megadonor Mercer family, pause. But it certainly doesn’t help the effort that Fox’s moves since President Donald Trump’s election have been geared toward infusing the channel’s prime-time programming with Breitbartian values.

Last month, the network announced that it is turning over the 10 p.m. hour to longtime contributor Laura Ingraham, forestalling the rumors that Bannon might hire her away (there are no hard feelings; last week, Bannon and Breitbart hosted a party for Ingraham’s new book). On Monday, when her show debuts following the programs of rising Fox star Tucker Carlson and network stalwart Sean Hannity, Fox’s evening block will feature three consecutive hours of the same cocktail — of anti-immigrant and anti-diversity invective, pro-Trump fanaticism, and vindictive opposition to the Republican establishment, the press, and cultural elites — that made Breitbart a force on the right.

Fox always takes on the spirit of the ascendant wing of the conservative movement. The network’s throughline is serving as the communications arm of the Republican Party, and its hires and the narratives they pursue tend to be in sync with the party itself. In this way, Fox mimics the official party organ, the Republican National Committee, which, following Trump’s election, hired pro-Trump pundit Kayleigh McEnany as its new national spokesperson.

After President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, for example, Fox executives declared the network the “voice of opposition” and “the Alamo,” standing shoulder to shoulder with Republican leaders who refused to compromise with the new administration. The network’s new star was conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, hired away from CNN; “was removed from the program; former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who emerged from the election as a leader on the right, joined the team soon after she resigned as Alaska’s governor; and Fox’s endless promotion turned the tea party into a GOP force.

As the 2012 election approached, a group of candidates who had kept themselves in the spotlight as Fox contributors fought for the GOP nomination on the network’s airwaves. When former Gov. Mitt Romney won, the network rallied around him as he pushed attacks on Obama ripped from Fox, stocked his campaign with network staffers, and picked the then-network hero Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis, as his running mate.

And over the past few years, Trump slowly swallowed the network until it became an authoritarian propaganda outlet for first his campaign and then his presidency.

Since then, Trump and Bannon have dominated Republican politics. Most conservative and Republican leaders publicly extol the president’s virtues and prescriptions for the country; those who do not either lack power or are leaving office before they have to face the primary challenges Bannon is backing.

With evening hosts Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, and Eric Bolling all having left the network since the 2016 election, Fox had a rare opportunity to reload its lineup. The result is three hosts who channel the mentality of the ascendant Breitbart wing, each with a focus on a different facet of the website’s editorial thrust.

Carlson both defends and apes the site’s winking relationship with white nationalism, which has earned him the adoration of racists and anti-Semites. He condemns the role of immigrants and Muslims in supposedly corrupting the “European culture” he holds so dear, frequently issues polemics on the dangers of diversity, and is much more interested in defending the rights of white supremacists than he is in condemning their hatred. Like the late Andrew Breitbart, Carlson seems to believe that “politics is downstream from culture,” and his show always has a new cultural enemy to mock and destroy, be it obscure college professors, “Gypsies,” people who tear down statues of Confederate generals, or witches.

Hannity is the host most in line with Breitbart’s propagandistic loyalty to the president and drive to annihilate Trump’s foes, including recalcitrant Republicans. Both are particularly obsessed with convincing their audience that the mainstream press is so intrinsically opposed to Trump and other conservatives that it cannot be trusted, only replaced. Hannity’s fanaticism leads to him to provide the president with shockingly obsequious interviews and offer up despicable conspiracy theories on his behalf.

Ingraham, the newest member of the lineup, shares many of the Breitbartian attributes of her colleagues, combining Hannity’s loyalty to the president and disdain for establishment Republicans and Carlson’s fixation on the perils of immigration and diversity. What she adds is Breitbart’s interest in trying to directly shape the Republican Party by pushing out officeholders considered insufficiently loyal to the president and his agenda. Indeed, Ingraham teamed up with Bannon to back a primary challenger to Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., earlier this month. Her show will likely end up featuring a parade of anti-establishment politicians seeking her support.

Fox’s prime-time lineup has historically been extremely stable, and bearing future surprises, Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham could spearhead the network for years to come. It’s in Fox’s interest to stay in Breitbart TV mode until a new aspect of the party gains preeminence, so we shouldn’t expect any of their shows to vary widely from what we’ve seen recently.

The establishment wing of the Republican Party seems exhausted, unwilling to fight back against the insurgent Breitbarters who have seized control of the party’s base. Any shift in the conservative movement may be some time in coming.

Until then, if Bannon turns on his television during Fox’s prime-time hours, he’ll have reason to smile.

A paranoid veteran, the “deep state,” and his disturbing death

"A Gray State" (Credit: First Run Features)

For those of us who feel like we’ve been tumbling down a rabbit hole of despair since the election of Donald Trump, it’s worth grabbing hold of something solid for a moment to take a look at Erik Nelson’s new documentary, “A Gray State,” now in theaters.

The film gets its name from its subject, David Crowley, an aspiring filmmaker and war veteran who was making a movie called “Gray State,” a paranoid’s message to audiences about the demise of democracy by a big government under the power of a New World Order. And then, in real life, he killed himself, his wife and his child.

But the weirdness, and awfulness, didn’t stop there; conspiracy theorists glommed onto Crowley’s case and whipped up a frenzy of suspicion, suggesting he may have been murdered by the very forces he was trying to document. Talk about a tangled web.

Nelson, a veteran director and longtime producer behind Werner Herzog, including his “Grizzly Man,” another film about a charismatic, delusional man who ends up tragically dying, sat down on “Salon Talks” with me relayed his belief that when Crowley was, “writing and creating ‘Gray State,’ he was really writing about himself,” he said. “It was a very intensely personal description of his own life and demons.”

But like fellow, deep-thinking Herzog, Nelson sees all of humanity reflected in Crowley, especially now for those of us wrestling with our strange Trumpian reality. Watch the video above to hear Nelson relate his takeaways from following Crowley to the state of mind many of us experience today.

There is a “gray state that we’re all living in as we woke up on election morning,” Nelson said.  “There is this parallel universe that we didn’t believe existed.”

Watch our full conversation on Facebook.

Tune into SalonTV’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

Forgiving yourself and rebuilding the world that broke you, in Mark Webber’s “Flesh and Blood”

"Flesh and Blood" (Credit: Monument Releasing)

Mark Webber has been acting in films for nearly 20 years, often appearing in cult movies ranging from “Shrink” and “Broken Flowers” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” to “Green Room.” On screen, he projects both grittiness and edginess — qualities that likely stem from his tough upbringing. Webber, along with his single mother, Cheri Honkala, struggled with homelessness during his formative years.

Honkala is also someone of note. She works tirelessly as an anti-poverty activist in Philadelphia and was the Vice Presidential nominee for the Green Party in 2012. She is now running for Representative in the Pennsylvania State House.

In the superb new film, “Flesh and Blood,” which Webber wrote and directed, mother and son play themselves. There are a few fictional elements thrown in — such as Mark’s “character” being released from prison as the film opens. Mark returns home and reconnects with his real-life brother Guillermo Santos (playing himself), a nerdy, bullied teenager who has been recently diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Mark readjusts to life on the outside and grapples with his feelings of remorse about a failed relationship. Meanwhile, Guillermo, who is interested in filmmaking, starts documenting his mother talking about her life and the cycles of abuse and addiction.

“Flesh and Blood” is captivating because Webber immerses viewers in the characters’ difficult lives. Honkala talks candidly about the mistakes she has made and being a teen mom. Guillermo has a very powerful heart-to-heart with his ill father. Webber too, connects with his own estranged real-life dad in a critical scene.

Honkala and Webber met with Salon at the recent Philadelphia Film Festival to discuss their relationship and their experiences making their affecting film, “Flesh and Blood.”

What was the motivation to make this film, a fictionalized documentary of your family’s lives, struggles and relationships?

Mark: After “Explicit Ills” [Webber’s 2008 directorial debut], I made “The End of Love” [2012] with my son Isaac, when he was two. And that’s where I like to say I found my voice as a filmmaker. I realized I was carving out the space in the indie film world for myself. I defined it as “reality cinema,” which is using real-life relationships and building traditional narrative around it. I knew that for “Flesh and Blood,” I wanted to make a movie about family. That coincided with a point in my life where I was doing a lot of work on myself with healing and being in a place of forgiveness. Thankfully, I’ve had a colorful upbringing and amazing family that was willing to participate in this piece of art. Because everyone is bringing themselves to their roles, it has a disarming effect.

How much of the film was improvised?

Mark: I call it a 50/50 split because even within scenes where dialogue is improvised, there is dialogue that is written. There are also moments that play out as extended vérité, like Guillermo with his father. I have been compelled to put out independent films that are unique. I love films that push the boundaries and confines of normal filmmaking techniques.

You often place the camera in ways that have viewers eavesdropping or observing the characters expressing themselves in a way that is honest, and real and unfiltered. Can you describe your approach to the material?

Mark: I have an obsession with realism, and real vulnerability and real emotion. I’ve always been looking at how I can bring that to my work as an actor in traditional films. In my own movies that I make, I really lean into that. There is no normal manipulation of music indicating how you are supposed to feel. It’s about being present. Mark is a changed person, and he is trying to be present and listen. That’s a device in the film, to observe and listen and see what’s going on; being inspired by what is going on with my mom and my brother. The movie is very much about forgiveness and in order to forgive yourself and to love yourself, you need to listen. We really tried to sit in real uncomfortable moments.

You based much of the “drama” on real life, but Mark’s character gets out of prison, which is a fictional construction. Can you talk about that decision, and how it informed the film?

Mark: I’ve been locked up a few times at demonstrations for civil disobedience, but the prison worked metaphorically in the film with how we imprison ourselves with pain and trauma in our own minds — how that can be a prison. There’s also the reality of the majority of people in that community where I grew up — and where my mom and my brother still live — there are people in prison every day. My friend Charles in the movie was unjustly imprisoned for seven years. It’s that harsh messed-up reality of young Black and Latino men in the neighborhood who are being thrown away. [Prison] wasn’t my actual reality, but it is the reality of so many individuals.

Cheri, you were a teen mom who escaped abuse and exited homelessness. I’m impressed by your survival skills. Can you discuss your strength and how you prevailed in hard times?

Cheri: My son Mark does a really good job with showing the humanity. The film was very hard for me. If I were to write a movie about me, this would not be it. It would be a whole different movie! But I think he does a good job not glamorizing any of this. He can go into the art aspect of it, but I think he is as good as he is because of the life that he led. He knows what it means to steal my change and count it. He knows what it was to struggle. I learned that there were two choices. One was figuring out how to survive.  

I had an older brother named Mark who was a filmmaker who killed himself. And I had a younger sister who is an addict who has never chosen recovery. She was a hardcore addict, and I had to grieve that relationship decades ago. I knew I had to deal with the reality around me, and going insane, losing my mind or sedating myself were not an option because I saw what happens when people do that. And I learned that being mentally healthy is a lot of work. Even when I didn’t know what I was doing — I was 15 years old! — but mental health and teaching my kids to love themselves was important.

Where do I get that strength? I read. Everything I know I steal from somebody in history. I relate to slave narratives. I love Harriet Tubman. I love the film “12 Years a Slave,” because people outside the world that I live in can afford to have all these moral judgments about why I decided to do different things. But I think when somebody is in that situation there are only certain choices you can make.

I also want to probe into your VP run with Jill Stein and the Green Party in 2012. Can you talk about that experience?

Cheri: Even though people think I have a very loud mouth and am very opinionated and our house is very much a matriarchal household, I have such a sense of service and responsibility. I joke that my mom named me Cheri, because she wants me to share. I had a really difficult time with material things when other people don’t have things. Living where I live, it made sense when I was asked to run for Vice President, because people made me the leader that I am right now — whether I like it or not. In hindsight, I wish I would have been a librarian. I didn’t realize how heavy the crown is, but I felt I had a responsibility to take that big mic that I had and to talk about all the social issues. I clearly believe that we need to have more choices in the country than Pepsi and Coke. That’s how I view the Democratic and Republican Party. All around the world there are 10, 15 different political parties. We have a responsibility to the generation to come that we have more choices than Pepsi and Coke.

Can you explain how you continue your anti-poverty activism to create awareness and help foment change?

Cheri: It’s much harder now that people know who I am, and it’s further magnified by Mark being a celebrity. The bigger the light, the more people, the bigger the problems that have to be resolved. The more money you need, and there’s never enough. It keeps bringing me back to taking political positions on things. Whether I like it or not, I take whatever money I can from Mark or Teresa [Palmer, Mark’s wife] or having Guillermo share his room, or me going without paying necessary bills, or taking food out of our cupboard to feed other people — it’s never going to be enough.

Mark gives a drunken speech where he says, “Shit happens to you,” and suggests that life is one let down after another. He says we must control how we react. This seems like a good mantra for the age of Trump. What are your thoughts on how to react when shit happens?

Mark: There’s a meditative throughline in the film, which is at its core, a central theme of mindfulness and being aware and being present. Sometimes the best thing to do is be there and be in the moment; not be so reactionary. Take a beat and pause. We live in our heads a lot and the stories we tell ourselves run rampant. In my drunken stupor, there is a central nugget of being mindful. It comes out in a pessimistic, negative way, but I’m trying to import real wisdom there.

Let me ask you a question Guillermo asks his father in the film: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

Mark: I think that picking up drugs, pills, for me — the pain and the added level of messiness I had to go through because of that was really shitty. I grew up with this narrative in my head that I’m never going to be like my dad. So the fact that I wound up with a pretty hardcore drug habit was a big bummer. But then, it’s also one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. That’s the story of my life, right? Being homeless [when I was 10] and going through all the shit with my mom really sucked, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but because I did go through that, I gained a lot of beautiful perspectives on the world that have served me as an adult. I’m fortunate that I have a lot of incredible people around me and that I got the support to tackle my issues with addiction head on, and in turn, made a film about it.

Cheri: The worst thing I ever did was have such a low self-esteem as a young girl and really not love myself enough. Part of it was that I didn’t have any other choices, but if I had learned to love myself as a young, teenage mom, I would have prevented myself from getting in a lot of different relationships that were hurtful. Women’s experience in poverty is different. I used my sexuality for years to figure out how to eat and feed my kids, and that does something to a person’s soul.

At one point in my life, I had to make a decision. Mark calls it mindfulness. I call it “healing through struggle,” is that you have to repair the world that made you sick. I think you have to be careful not just to repair yourself, because at the end of the day, all we have is each other, and that’s the only way we can change things socially and for ourselves, too.

Mark reconnects with his father after many years in a fascinating scene. Mark, how did that episode come about? Cheri, you were married to Mark’s father. What would you say to him now if you’d met?

Cheri: I didn’t recognize him. I had no idea who he was. He looked so fundamentally different. He was 15 years older than me [when I had Mark]. That was one of those things you’re not supposed to do.

Mark: I didn’t have any relationship with my father. What you see in the movie is me seeing my dad for the second time in my entire life since I was five years old. We shot it in one take. It was all very real. I did it selfishly for my own well-being. It started there first. The gift of forgiveness: it was to provide my dad some relief for the pain and shame and guilt he had been harboring. I owed it to myself, first and foremost. I’m happy that what happened because of me wanting to look after myself, he doesn’t have to suffer as much. I became a father, and I realize people make mistakes. My dad made a choice, clearly, to do what he thought was best. I know how guilt and shame works: they can keep you really shackled. I can empathize with that. You need to be a catalyst to take some action, especially to forgive yourself and forgive whomever you are harboring ill will for.

The film’s tag line is “We Build the House We Live in.” How would you describe the house you build and live in?

Mark: I’ve had an interesting journey becoming a man, a father, in recovery, and growing up with a radical mom who takes action against things that are unjust. I can go really big picture about stuff and zoom in really close. On a human level, no matter what situation you are in, you do have power, as I say in the movie. You can deal with how you process things and the choices you make and the way in which you react. The world is suffering, and it starts with you and how you relate to that suffering and the choices that you make and how you react. Leading a life of service that my mom has led her entire life, I learned that I needed to be of service to myself too in order to effectively help others.

Why America rejects surrealism and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”

Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" (Credit: A24)

The Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s newest film, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (out Oct. 27), is about a man confronted with a nightmarish (and mythic) choice: kill his son, his daughter or his wife, or watch them all die slow horrific deaths.

But even before the nightmare unfolds, the film resembles a dream. In one of the first shots, said man, a surgeon named Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), walks with his anaesthetist (Bill Camp) down a long, cream-colored hall in the hospital where they work; the camera captures the men head-on and moves with them, making it appear as though the hallway is infinite. And, as has become a hallmark of Lanthimos’s films (such as 2009’s “Dogtooth” and 2015’s “The Lobster”), the characters speak in a dry, uninflected rhythm; they say matter-of-factly what most people leave unsaid. “Our daughter started menstruating last week,” Murphy casually tells a colleague at a formal banquet, for instance.

While the deadpan tone of “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is distinctly Lanthimos’s, the surreal sensation the film produces has been a prominent feature in the year’s cinema. “Get Out,” “Beatriz at Dinner” and “Mother!” have been among the other films released this year in which reality has been twisted and upended, in which viewers have been made to question, “Is what I’m watching really happening?”

These films come in surrealism’s centennial. The concept was coined in May of 1917, when the French playwright, critic and impresario Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in the program notes of Serge Diaghilev’s avant-garde play, “Parade,” that this new alliance of all the arts had “given rise, in “Parade,” to a kind of surrealism.”   

Surrealism became a movement in the following years, born in part out of Dada, the satirical art of nonsense. Dada, and then surrealism, was a response to the vast death and destruction caused by World War I. “For many intellectuals, World War I produced a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric — if not the principles — of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment,” Leah Dickerman, a curator for the National Gallery, once wrote in the Gallery’s catalog.

Dada was, in the words of the French art critic Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (who was also the wife of the Surrealist artist, Francis Picabia), an effort “to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today with an illogical nonsense.” The aim of surrealism was similar. Surrealists invented techniques like automatic drawing and games like Exquisite Corpse to unleash the subconscious and allow randomness to reign.

In 1924, Andre Breton created the movement’s first manifesto, titled “Surrealist Manifesto.” He described surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”

The movement splintered and then dissolved in the intervening years. Today surrealism is primarily an influence. There is no real movement, only the methods and the recreation of surrealism’s effects.

Most of the contemporary films that we think of as being surreal are not surrealistic in the way Breton conceived the movement. Yorgos Lanthimos, for instance, did not forfeit control and employ automatism when making “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.”

Quite the contrary. In an interview last month, Lanthimos described his process to me as being guided by logic. His films often originate with a strange rule or an absurd scenario that he or his frequent co-writer Efthymis Filippou come up with and then blossom out rationally. “If you have the initial idea that seems interesting to you then you basically start solving problems with logic,” he said. “And where do you go from there? It’s always a logical step. And because you’ve started with something maybe kind of absurd and surreal, the logic then continues that way.”

Filmmakers still portray the subconscious in film and create worlds where the boundaries between real and imaginary, high and low, life and death are erased. But with the exception of David Lynch, most contemporary filmmakers who infuse their work with the surreal do so, like Lanthimos, in a way that is considered and rational.

A century after the birth of surrealism, the nonsense of the world leadership is no longer even veiled in logic. The American president is a reality star whose dialect often mirrors Dada. The country’s governing body rejects science. Last year, British voters neglected warnings of sure economic collapse and elected to leave the EU. And with the rise of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, the specter of nuclear war — an illogical proposition if there ever was one — hangs over much of the world.

In this landscape of illogical nonsense, the surreal has taken on a progressive logic. In “Get Out,” the eerily docile behavior of black people in a wealthy white suburb is the result of white people capturing, brainwashing and enslaving them. In “Beatriz at Dinner,” we watch Beatriz (Salma Hayek), an environmentally-conscious Mexican masseuse, fantasize about violently killing Doug (John Lithgow), a wealthy Trump-like conservative; instead, she walks into the ocean at the side of a highway and disappears. And Darren Aronofsky has said that “Mother!”, which finds a horde of guests visiting and proceeding to destroy Mother’s (Jennifer Lawrence) mysterious and isolated home, was intended to be an environmental allegory about humanity’s destruction of Earth.  

These films reminded me of a conversation I had not long after the election with Daniel Kwan, the co-creator of “Swiss Army Man,” the movie in which Daniel Radcliffe very surreally plays a farting corpse. Kwan told me that the election affected what he wants to make going forward. “Our stuff is known to be weird and disruptive and kind of crazy, but that stuff doesn’t really make sense to me anymore in the context of a post-Trump world,” he said. “I think a lot of our world was created in order to shake the boat and disrupt an industry that felt in some ways stagnant. And I think the world doesn’t need that right now. Trump has already shaken that boat. I think right now what the world needs is a lot more healing.”

If Kwan is right and healing through art is what the world needs, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” best be avoided. Lanthimos doesn’t let Steven Murphy out of his nightmare by waking up. The spell that is cast on his family cannot be broken. They can’t be cured through sound medical treatment, through money or by beating up the boy (played by) who cast the spell. Though this world is slightly detached from how we conceive of reality, there are rules all the same. I found the enforcement of those rules, in particular characters contending with the consequences of revenge, to be excruciating to behold in a way that was also satisfying. It felt real.