Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 266

Downton Abbey star on redefining Hollywood casting

“The bones of the show really are about people wanting to be the best version of themselves,” Michelle Dockery, star of TNT’s “Good Behavior,” said on “Salon Talks.”

“I think that’s what we’re all trying to do in life,” Dockery continued. “We’re all sort of trying to better ourselves. That’s essentially the through line of it.”

“Good Behavior” returned to TNT for its second season on October 15. Dockery has also appeared in the hit show “Downton Abbey” and the Netflix series “Godless.”

Dockery reflected on the importance of female characters going beyond portraying women as any one given thing. It’s about bringing depth and truth to a character, she says.

“It’s not just about women being strong,” Dockery said. “It’s about creators who are writing real women. Women that are complex, multi-faceted, vulnerable, weak. They don’t necessarily have to be strong.”

“I think there’s something about our show that is very, very honest,” she added. “At the heart of it, it’s very truthful about people and about the way that we are with one another.”

For Dockery, that is the type of drama she enjoys the most. When a character, no matter how complex or corrupt they are, but at the core, has these redeeming qualities, that feel relatable and universal.

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’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.

Little Rock says “no” to Amazon. Other cities should follow suit

(Credit: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Amazon’s deadline to submit a proposal for its second headquarters ended Thursday, and one city brilliantly the navigated the bidding process. Little Rock, Arkansas took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post Thursday morning, announcing it wold not be entering the contested race.

The mid-market city capitalized on the opportunity to advertise to other businesses and start-ups looking to establish a headquarters.

“Amazon, you’ve got so much going for you, and you’ll find what you’re looking for,” the ad said. “But it’s just not us. We’re happy knowing that many great companies find our natural good looks coupled with our brains for business irresistible.”

“If another expansion opportunity comes up and you’re ready to join the visionaries, dreamers, romantics and the idealists who know that bigger isn’t always better, give us a call,” the ad continued. “We would love to find a away to make *us* work out.”

Little Rock breaks up with Amazon via the Washington Post pic.twitter.com/ND8Ef4cyuh

— Andrew Beaujon (@abeaujon) October 19, 2017

It was an effective PR campaign for a city that had a zero percent chance of attracting the tech giant. And while full page ads in The Post typically cost $80,000, the city may have gotten better press and actually saved money by not paying for all the research and analysis that would have gone into their bid for the tech giant’s second headquarters.

While Little Rock’s Chamber of Commerce is milking the attention for future business, other cities and metropolitan areas will have to patiently wait to find out if their proposals were enough to win over Amazon.

Amazon says it will invest $5 billion and create 50,000 jobs to support its second headquarters, which is expected to be in similar size and weight to the original headquarters in Seattle. In return, cities and states have lined up to give the online retailer tax breaks.

New Jersey, for example, proposed $7 billion in potential credits if Amazon moved to Newark, Reuters reported.

The city of Worcester, Massachusetts offered $500 million in local property tax breaks, spread out over 20 years, CNN Tech reported.

On the other hand, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul took a different route. Minnesota submitted “a business-like proposal without the gimmicks or the gadgetry and all the sensational PR stuff,” Gov. Mark Dayton said. The pitch did not include any offers of massive tax breaks, just facts about the metro area’s impressive economic development, the Pioneer Press reported. One possible explanation: Minneapolis is home to Amazon competitors Target and Best Buy.

John McCain floats subpoena power to compel details on Niger ambush

John McCain (Credit: Ron Sachs)

With several questions looming after four U.S. Special Forces soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger more than two weeks ago, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has not ruled out seeking a subpoena in order to find answers.

“It may require a subpoena,” McCain, the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, told CNN on Thursday.

Four Green Berets were killed and two more were injured on Oct. 4, when they had been “ambushed while conducting a joint patrol with about 40 Nigerian soldiers,” as Salon previously reported.

The White House was silent on the deaths of four Americans for 12 days, despite the president being notified immediately, and despite a statement having been drafted the very next day.

Covert military operations in West Africa receive almost no attention but under the umbrella of the interminable war on terror, U.S. special forces have been conducting missions across the continent for quite some time. Niger alone is home to roughly 800 U.S. troops and a drone base in the capital, Niamey.

The Pentagon is conducting “an initial review” to search for answers surrounding the attack, but McCain is not looking to wait for more details.

“That’s not how the system works. We’re coequal branches of government,” McCain told CNN. “We should be informed at all times.”

McCain said President Donald Trump’s administration had not provided enough details about the ambush and would consider supporting an investigation by Congress upon receiving the information his committee “deserves and needs,” CNN reported.

“That’s why we’re called the Senate armed services committee. It’s because we have oversight of our military,” McCain said. “So we deserve to have all the information.”

The so-called war on terror has reached its third U.S. president, one who promised torture and indiscriminate bombing when he was on the campaign trail. However, what the U.S. military has been doing in Africa, including any potential ramifications, has remained almost entirely secret under the guise of national security.

Faced with defeat, North Carolina Republicans want to change the rules

Roy Cooper (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Drake)

Republicans in North Carolina hold a strong grip on the state legislature and have sought to limit the powers of the Democratic governor, as well as institute strict voting laws, presumably to prevent further Democratic wins at the ballot box. But after several recent rejections in the courts, the GOP in the Tar Heel state has shifted its agenda to seize control of the judiciary.

As of this year, judges in North Carolina’s state courts are required to identify their party affiliation on voting ballots. As The New York Times pointed out, North Carolina was the first state to implement such a requirement in nearly a century.

In response, the Republican-led General Assembly stripped the state’s Democratic governor of his power to name replacements for retiring Republican judges by reducing the size of the state Court of Appeals, the Times reported.

“Instead of changing the way they write their laws, they want to change the judges,” Gov. Roy Cooper told the Times.

Almost a dozen of Cooper’s vetoes have been overridden by the legislature so far, most recently on Monday “when lawmakers sustained a bill to eliminate judicial primary elections, which Mr. Cooper called part of an effort to ‘rig the system,'” the Times reported.

In the month of October “lawmakers drew new boundaries for judicial districts statewide, which critics say are meant to increase the number of Republican judges on district and superior courts and would force many African-Americans on the bench into runoffs against other incumbents,” the Times also reported.

Republicans such as Rep. Justin Burr have said the party is just “making good policy,” according to the Times.

Judicial courts have become increasingly polarized over the years in general, and North Carolina hasn’t just followed suit — it’s quietly lead the way.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., refused to let former President Barack Obama nominate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court for his final 10 months in office, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, ensuring the seat would be vacant for President Donald Trump to fill. While Trump has struggled to push his agenda and achieve legislative wins, he has silently made moves that could have a long lasting impact on federal courts, all with the help from the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation.

Salon has previously reported:

When Trump entered office, he inherited over 100 judicial vacancies. The number of judicial vacancies grew during the Obama administration, when Senate Republicans refused to confirm many of Obama’s nominees to the seats Trump is now filling. When Obama entered office, there were 54 judicial vacancies. President Trump now has the opportunity to fill over 130.

Those who closely watch the courts — legal reporters, scholars left and right, and US senators — agree: Trump’s efforts to transform the federal judiciary may be the most enduring accomplishment of his presidency.

Still, the power grab Republicans are looking to make in North Carolina has been described as unprecedented.

“We’re the first state since 1921 moving toward partisan elections for judges,” Representative Marcia Morey, a Democrat who was a district court judge before entering the legislature, told the Times. “I feel like we’re taking off the black robes and we’re putting on red and blue robes, and does that really serve the interests of justice?”

Almost $20 million in TV advertisements flooded the State Supreme Court races last year, the Times reported, all of which was funded by outside groups. After $2.8 million in ads dominated a race in which a Democrat unseated a Republican, the balance of the court was shifted. According to the Times, “Republican lawmakers shortly after required Supreme Court candidates — who had run without party labels — to appear on a partisan ballot.”

North Carolina has also been the subject of a brutal voter suppression campaign. In May, the Supreme Court refused to allow a voting law in the state that was struck down by a federal court and described as a law that would “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Michael Crowell, a former associate director of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, told the Times, “anybody who has been around for a while will tell you what’s happened in the last few years is on an entirely different level than anything done before.”

Crowley, who said he is not affiliated with a political party, added, “the common feature here is that so much of it seems to be designed to manipulate the election process.”

Trump’s birth control “moral exemption” is geared to just 2 groups

(Credit: Getty/Saul Loeb)

Few people were surprised last week when the Trump administration issued a rule to make it easier for some religious employers to opt out of offering no-cost prescription birth control to their female employees under the Affordable Care Act.

But a separate regulation issued at the same time raised eyebrows. It creates a new exemption from the requirement that most employers offer contraceptive coverage. This one is for “non-religious organizations with sincerely held moral convictions inconsistent with providing coverage for some or all contraceptive services.”

So what’s the difference between religious beliefs and moral convictions?

“Theoretically, it would be someone who says ‘I don’t have a belief in God,’ but ‘I oppose contraception for reasons that have nothing to do with religion or God,’ ” said Mark Rienzi, a senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented many of the organizations that sued the Obama administration over the contraceptive mandate.

Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said it would apply to “an organization that has strong moral convictions but does not associate itself with any particular religion.”

What kind of an organization would that be? It turns out not to be such a mystery, Rienzi and Bagley agreed.

Among the hundreds of organizations that sued over the mandate, two — the Washington, D.C.-based March for Life and the Pennsylvania-based Real Alternatives — are anti-abortion groups that do not qualify for religious exemptions. While their employees may be religious, the groups themselves are not.

March for Life argued that the ACA requirement to cover all contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration includes methods that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus and therefore are a type of abortion. Real Alternatives opposes the use of all contraceptives.

March for Life, which coordinates an annual abortion protest each year, won its suit before a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C.

But a federal appeals court ruled in August that Real Alternatives, which offers counseling services designed to help women choose not to have an abortion, does not qualify as a religious entity and thus cannot claim the exemption. That decision cited a lower-court ruling that “finding a singular moral objection to law on par with a religious objection could very well lead to a flood of similar objections.”

The departments of Treasury, Labor and Health and Human Services, however, suggest that, at least in this case, that will not happen. The regulation issued by those departments says officials “assume the exemption will be used by nine nonprofit entities” and “nine for-profit entities.” Among the latter, it said, “we estimate that 15 women may incur contraceptive costs due to for-profit entities using the expanded exemption provided” in the rules.

The regulation also seeks comments on whether the moral exemption should be extended to publicly traded firms.

Rienzi agrees that the universe for the moral exemption is likely to be small. “The odds that anyone new is going to come up and say ‘Aha, I finally have my way out,’ ” he said, “is crazy.”

Women’s health advocates, however, are not so sure.

“The parameters of what constitutes a moral objection is unclear,” said Mara Gandal-Powers, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, which is preparing to sue to stop both rules. “There is nothing in the regulatory language itself that says what a moral belief is that would rise to the level of making an organization eligible for the exemption.”

Louise Melling, deputy legal director at the ACLU, which has already filed a lawsuit, agreed. “We don’t know how many other entities are out there that would assert a moral objection,” she said. “Not everybody wanted to file a suit,” particularly smaller organizations.

All of that, however, presupposes that the rule laying out the moral objection exemption will stand up in court.

Bagley said he’s doubtful. The legal arguments making the case for the exemption, he said, are “the kind of things that would be laughed out of a [first-year] class on statutory interpretation.”

Specifically, he said, the rule lays out all the times Congress has included provisions in laws for moral objections. But rather than justifying the case, “it suggests that Congress knew a lot about how to craft a moral objection if it wanted to,” and it did not in the health law, he noted.

Bagley said the fact that the moral exemption was laid out in a separate rule from the religious one demonstrates that the administration is concerned the former might not stand up to court proceedings. “The administration must sense this rule is on thin legal ice,” he said.

Which leads to the question of why Trump officials even bothered doing a separate rule. Bagley said he thinks the act was more political than substantive. “The administration is doing something that signals to religious employers … that they are on their sides, that they have their backs.”

Why astrophysicists observing merging neutron stars

(Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Toronto/M.Durant et al; Optical: DSS/Davide De Martin)

When LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, first detected gravitational waves from merging black holes, it opened up a new window in astrophysics and provided the most powerful confirmation yet of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Now LIGO has done it again, together with the Virgo interferometer, this time by observing merging neutron stars – something astrophysicists had known must happen but had never been able to detect definitively until now.

Observing two neutron stars smash together is important for much more than just the thrill of discovery. This news may confirm a longstanding theory: that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs for short), which are among the most energetic, luminous events in the universe, are the result of merging neutron stars. And it is in the crucible of these mergers that most heavy elements may be forged. Researchers can’t produce anything like the temperatures or pressures of neutron stars in a laboratory, so observation of these exotic objects provides a way to test what happens to matter at such extremes.

Astronomers are excited because for the first time they have gravitational waves and light signals stemming from the same event. These truly independent measurements are separate avenues that together add to the physical understanding of the neutron star merger.

Gravitational waves just one part of this news

The LIGO project has thus far announced the detection of four mergers of binary black holes – observed via the gravitational waves they emitted. These are ripples in the fabric of spacetime propagating in all directions, like waves emanating out from a pebble dropped in a pond. Encoded in the gravitational wave signal is information about the pre- and post-merger masses of the objects. Black holes are much more massive than neutron stars, so the energy they release as gravitational waves is much higher. Because light cannot escape from a black hole, you expect (and see) no light from these mergers.

Artist’s rendering of a gamma-ray burst, the most energetic form of light.

NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde, CC BY

The merger of neutron stars should produce both a gravitational wave and a short gamma-ray burst signal. These brief, incredibly intense flashes of gamma-ray light are seen from galaxies across the universe. They come in two types, classified by their duration. Short GRBs are thought to come from the mergers of neutron stars, while long GRBs are known to be coincident with supernovas.

Key to unlocking the mystery of any astronomical object is knowing its distance. In recent years, astronomers have identified the host galaxies of a handful of short GRBs. Determining those galaxies’ distances allows astronomers to calculate the power emitted in gamma-rays during the burst, and to determine (or rule out) physical scenarios that could produce that power.

But for LIGO to detect two neutron stars spiraling in toward each other and merging, it would need to happen relatively nearby – within around 250 million light-years. That such an event was not detected during the first year and a half of LIGO observations already lets astronomers place a constraint on how frequently they happen in the nearby universe.

Galaxy NGC 4993 seemed unassuming enough….

Palomar Observatory – Space Telescope Science Institute Digital Sky Survey, CC BY

So the rumor of a merging neutron star detection by LIGO with a coincident short gamma-ray burst (GRB170817A) seen by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope spread through the astronomical community like wildfire this past summer. Astronomers watched from the sidelines as most of the major telescopes in (and above) the world slewed toward an otherwise unremarkable old, nearby (130 million light-years) elliptical galaxy named NGC 4993.

What we’ve known about neutron stars

Most stars end their lives relatively calmly; no longer supported by the fusion of hydrogen into helium, their outer layers glide slowly off into space while their cores collapse to the very limits allowed by normal matter – burning embers the size of the Earth called white dwarf stars.

For the rare stars whose masses are a bit higher, 10 to 20 times that of the sun, the picture is a bit different. These stars die the way they lived: quickly and violently, ejecting their outer layers as supernovas and leaving behind something far stranger – a neutron star.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

AP Photo

The details of this story were worked out in 1930 by then 19-year-old Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. He determined precisely how far you can compress normal matter before the relentless pressure of gravity forces electrons into the nuclei of their atoms where they merge with protons to form neutrons. Instead of an Earth-sized remnant, a massive star’s core collapses further to become a highly compressed ball of exotic matter as small as a city but whose mass can be twice that of the sun.

Neutron stars rotate incredibly rapidly. The collapse from millions to tens of kilometers in extent increases their spin due to conservation of angular momentum, like an ice skater pulling in her arms. While the parent star may have rotated once a month, a newly born neutron star can spin hundreds of times per second.

This rapid spinning led to their initial discovery. 50 years ago, Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first radio pulsar: a neutron star emitting radio waves which appear to observers as pulses as the star rotates, like a lighthouse. Hewish would win the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery, while Bell Burnell was controversially overlooked.

But what are neutron stars really made of? Are they neutrons all the way through or can they break down further again, into what physicists call “quark soup”? The answer lies in measuring their size. A larger neutron star is mostly neutrons, a smaller star has a more complicated interior made of quarks – the building blocks of protons and neutrons. Untangling how this works is important for our understanding of the fundamental properties of subatomic particles. A new telescope on the International Space Station aims to address this question by targeting neutron stars and measuring their sizes.

The orbiting neutron stars rapidly lose energy by emitting gravitational waves and merge after about three orbits, or in less than 8 milliseconds. A black hole forms and the magnetic field becomes more organized, eventually producing structures capable of supporting the jets that power short gamma-ray bursts.

NASA/AEI/ZIB/M. Koppitz and L. Rezzolla, CC BY

When neutron stars merge

Over half of all stars are part of binary pairs, and massive stars are more likely to occur in binaries. These pairs of massive stars will co-evolve, and when they die, a pair of neutron stars may remain, orbiting one another.

An orbiting pair of neutron stars loses energy by emitting gravitational waves, and over time this loss of energy will cause them to migrate closer and closer until they eventually collide. While the eventual merger is nearly instantaneous, the gradual inspiral takes tens to hundreds of millions of years, so we expect to see mergers in more evolved galaxies – like NGC 4993, for instance – rather than those that are still rapidly forming new stars.

For decades, it has been suggested that merging neutron stars may provide a mechanism for producing most of the elements on the periodic table heavier than iron. These so-called r-process elements must form in a neutron-rich environment, and have been formed by humans only during the explosion of nuclear bombs.

The signal from such an event is suspected to rapidly cascade through the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma-rays to X-rays, visible light and infrared. Known as kilonovas, these afterglows have been seen from past short GRBs.

Finally all the pieces fall into place with this gravitational wave detected by the LIGO and Virgo teams, and all the subsequent supporting observations made by astronomers around the world. We know the neutron star masses, the duration of the event, and the distance of the host galaxy. This not only confirms the hypothesis that merging neutron stars produce short GRBs; it lays the foundation for astronomers to produce models of the merger backed both by fundamental physics and real world observations. It’s a rare event to see something new for the first time, and rarer still that it confirms a longstanding theory.

Roy Kilgard, Research Associate Professor of Astronomy, Wesleyan University

How corporate “speech” turns citizens into manic consumers and endangers civil society

We’ve heard good arguments about gun control and its suppression. We’ve also heard good ones about mental illness and its under-funded treatment. And we’ve heard good arguments about the armed alt-right. But almost every time over the past 20 years after a gruesome massacre of civilians — at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Orlando, and now Las Vegas — I find myself recalling a TV movie I happened to catch one evening in 1994 — four years before Columbine —  when I turned on my set to find the actor Richard Thomas stalking a corporate office building, an arsenal of assault weapons on his back.

Every time I recall that movie, I wonder why we can’t see that the interpretations of the Second Amendment that enable such mayhem have something to do with bad interpretations of the First Amendment that treat gratuitously violent entertainment and advertising as “speech” we need to protect.

Like most Americans, I watch violence on TV willingly in documentaries, newscasts and dramas that draw us into unflinching moral engagement with human history and behavior. But I do tend to click the remote whenever the music and body language tell me I’m about to see bloodshed just for Nielsen ratings. That night in 1994, though, I lingered on “I Can Make You Love Me: The Stalking of Laura Black” with a clammy revulsion for 15 minutes as Thomas coolly blew away a dozen people, at the water cooler, on the phone. Bloody, writhing bodies everywhere.

The psychopathic eruption and bloodshed — based on a true story, of course — are the film’s only reason for being. Variety’s reviewer wrote that it combines “woman in jeopardy and mass-killer genres into a predictable and often gruesome concoction that has little to offer other than gratuitous violence.”

In other words, this isn’t drama. It doesn’t bring us artists’ art or activists’ political messages, however transgressive and threatening, all of which would and should be protected by the First Amendment. Instead, it’s proactively destroying the very preconditions of freedoms of inquiry and expression, not out of malevolence but out of a civically mindless, market-driven lust to boost profits by stimulating whatever is perverse and vulnerable in our body politic.

Why do we keep on pretending that we really can’t tell the difference between up-front nihilism and free speech? What the Constitution rightly protects in free speech, a healthy civil society rightly modulates — but not if we license powerful, brilliantly effective engines to sicken civil society itself. If we really want to tackle destructive interpretations of the Second Amendment, we need to acknowledge that by treating corporations as “persons” whose speech rights the First Amendment was meant to protect, the Supreme Court, most conservatives and even ACLU liberals have wrongly demoted the kind of “speaker” the First was really meant to protect and empower — the flesh and blood citizen — in favor of “speech” as an abstraction that includes algorithmically driven signals purchased by the fiduciaries of shareholders.

These buyers are themselves money-making abstractions because they pay no attention to the content of the “speech” that’s making them money. I argue that it’s not mainly malevolence, but mindlessness, that is fueling the slaughter. Contrary to what Mitt Romney claimed in his 2012 campaign, these media corporations are not “people, too,” and they’re certainly not democracy’s friends.

Like the real-life massacres, movies such as “I Can Make You Love Me” and mindlessly violent videos prove that, even after 9/11 and other terroristic acts from abroad, the greatest threat to our democratic freedoms of expression and inquiry isn’t coming from Al Qaeda, ISIS, immigrants, or the alt-right. Nor is it (yet) coming from an overbearing federal government that some Americans always blame for everything.

Government does intrude upon and track us more than ever before, partly in response to terrorism. But the deepest danger to our freedoms isn’t official censors. It’s corporate marketing sensors that determine which come-ons like “I Can Make You Love Me” will profit their investors most by stimulating gut instincts, not deliberative inclinations. All this groping, goosing, tracking, and indebting of us not as citizens but as impulse-driven consumers is trapping tens of millions of Americans like flies in a spider’s web of click-baited pick-pocketing machines.

At the same time, it’s “re-educating” us against democracy itself by deluging us with “violence without context and sex without attachment,” as Senator Bill Bradley put it in 1995. Violent, semi-interactive video games prompt young viewers to join in clicking that contributes to the virtual mayhem on their screens. Then the games link the players to gun-sale ads.

For every occasional gamer like Adam Lanza (of Sandy Hook), who acts this out in real life, many are simply benumbed by the demoralizing depictions of society. Today, more Americans probably watch depictions of torture and mayhem impassively now than did so when I watched that TV movie 23 years ago.

The producers and the media corporations tell us piously that repetitive TV violence — 15 violent acts per prime-time hour on many networks, according to one study — has no measurable effect on behavior. But they tell their advertisers that the more often a message is repeated, the more it will influence behavior. That’s like tobacco company shills who used to claim there was no link between smoking and cancer.

Inspiring young citizens of a republic to think beyond immediate personal survival and to act on behalf of a greater good enhances self-interest itself. But it requires real work — in social movements and in civic and political institutions (churches, unions, public schools). Rampant market forces are devouring these, too, not least in higher education, which, drained of public support, hustles student “customers” into treating liberal education as a personal investment in a career, not as preparation for shared citizenship capable of facing challenges to politics and the human spirit.

What’s driving our entrapment in an “everyone for themself,” sauve qui peut society is this relentless, undeclared assault on reason and mutual respect, not only on our screens but in the casino-like financing, predatory lending and advertising and “entertainment,” that bypasses our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and our wallets — and that has made a financer of casinos and predatory self-marketer our president.

This juggernaut has panicked and stampeded not just the campus “cry-bullies” whom “free market” shills like Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt, a founder of the Heterodox Academy, love to blame for responding to the mayhem censoriously. It’s also driving millions of others to arm themselves and to seek “safe spaces,” in gated communities and rigid codes of protection. It’s fine to criticize such responses, but not to orchestrate national campaigns to spotlight and condemn feckless 19-year-olds and not the producers, networks, and demagogues who feed on the damage.

We need more urgently than ever to cultivate public narratives that inspire democratic inclinations and habits by showing the young who they are as citizens with obligations to one another who can trust one another. We also do need to challenge interpretations of the First Amendment that protect the commercial strip-mining and perversion of civic narratives by these algorithmically driven engines.

We can’t and shouldn’t legislate great public narratives or censor bad ones. No one could have ordered J.K. Rowling to produce Harry Potter. But we can and should curb media violence that serves no social purpose other than to feed on public distress.

What about the “slippery slope” that leads from curbing one kind of speech to its curbing another? We’re already descending on another slippery slope from the cacophony of a free-for-all into an empty, violent free-for-none. We need to identify the “speakers” in violent video games, in degrading, misleading Big Pharma ads, and in other come-ons whose voices are only anonymous hirelings whose one-way messages aren’t open to the persuasion and rebuttal that the First Amendment was meant to promote as well as protect.

Democracy dies when managers of anonymous, ever-shifting whorls of investors use their funds to buy huge megaphones while the rest of us get laryngitis from straining to be heard. (Recall that even Occupy Wall Street protestors were denied megaphones.)

Shortly after Sandy Hook, Hofstra University law professor Daniel J.H. Greenwood and I explained why we can curb such purchased, anonymous, unanswerable speech in an essay in The Atlantic. As the legal scholar Robert C. Post explained as early as 1990 in Dissent magazine and more recently in his book “Citizens Divided,” although the Supreme Court has rightly interpreted the Constitution to protect the speech of citizens challenging and even offending communal norms, it has erred in protecting the “speakers” that equate money with speech to work overtime at destroying any possibility of an open democratic or republican playing field.

Post explains that the First Amendment was written to allow people of diverse backgrounds and convictions to join in productive deliberations by empowering them to challenge and contradict one another’s distinctive views. In other words, the legitimacy of what can be contested depends on the legitimacy of what is accepted: certain ground rules and standards of discourse that all agree to follow if they want to keep a republic.

Over-regulation would be destructive, stifling free markets as well as free speech. But markets that are no longer really free need to be saved from themselves, their “animal spirits” reined in by citizens who think and act politically, not just instrumentally and commercially. We can’t rein in perversely violent video games if their investors capture the regulators and degrade the popular sovereignty and virtues that markets themselves require.

We’re living through this destruction right now, at the hands of corporations that our bought-and-paid-for president and representatives and our addled Supreme Court have enabled to amass tremendous profits by any means they deem necessary. It’s time to reclaim our sovereignty over them and shed our subservience to them. Before there was even a Supreme Court, there was an American Revolution “in the hearts and minds of the people,” as John Adams put it. So now, too, again.

America’s other tycoon president also failed with Congress

America has had two presidents who, without question, deserve to have been labeled as tycoons prior to their presidencies—Herbert Hoover and Donald Trump.

For both men, their past successes in business comprised core parts of their personal image. Each one embodied a notion that Americans have romanticized for generations: the idea of the successful businessman who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and changed the world for the better.

It is only natural, indeed American, that such men should eventually lead the rest of the nation. However, there are several crucial differences between Hoover and Trump.

“They’re very different personalities,” Kenneth Whyte, author of the biography “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times,” explained to me on “Salon Talks.”

“Hoover had a great regard for the office of the presidency, never embarrassed the presidency, had no scandal in his term,” Whyte continued, “And, you know, took his public service very, very much to heart.”

The differences go beyond that. Unlike Trump, Hoover was genuinely self-made. Orphaned at the age of nine and remembered by those who knew him as a child as poverty-stricken, Hoover quite literally started out with nothing, whereas Trump was born into wealth. Every cent that Hoover owned, he earned entirely through his own effort, which Trump can never honestly claim.

Also unlike Trump, Hoover had a strong belief in public service. It was his unwavering conviction that the wealthy had a moral responsibility to give back to society, to use their riches for a common good that was greater than themselves.

Hoover also had a tremendous respect for science. His policies may not have always been the correct ones, but he firmly believed that rational inquiry was the best way to ensure human progress.

On the other hand, there are some similarities to Trump. According to Whyte, Hoover liked the spotlight too. He attempted to take politics out of the problem, go around Congress and bring experts in to weigh in on pressing decisions.

When comparing this similarity to Trump, though, Whyte did make a distinction about Trump: “Instead of expert commissions and conferences, his solution is all of the tweets, all of the rallies, all of executive orders. They’re acts of showmanship that allow him to bypass Congress.”

Before one assumes that this comparison is meant solely to disparage Trump, it must be noted that it really says more about the deterioration of American culture.

Both Hoover and Trump were archetypes, embodying an ideal held by their fellow countrymen. The fact that Hoover’s archetype was so clearly superior to Trump’s, and that Hoover the man was likewise Trump’s better in virtually every meaningful way, says far more about America than it does about the two men themselves.

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Preyed upon by a Hollywood director

(Credit: Getty/Salon)

It happened on a weekday afternoon in early May 1998, as I walked south along Second Avenue. The man appeared as if from nowhere, panting, sweat beading on his balding brow. Bespectacled and potato-shaped, he looked like he was in his fifties — older than my father. I was 20 years old, but with my rosy cheeks that clung to a baby-faced pudginess, a pixie cut of bleached-blond hair, and my outfit that day — baggy jeans, sneakers, a mechanic-style snap-button shirt and no makeup —I looked younger. A dangerous combination of lonely, bored, curious and trusting, I stopped.

“I was eating lunch at that diner on the corner,” he said, pointing up the block with one sausage finger, “when I saw you walking down the street, and I thought, she would be perfect for this role in my new movie, so I had to chase you down.”

The man flipped open his leather satchel and pulled out a magazine, then rifled through it, opening to a dog-eared page that featured a photo of his face with his name printed underneath. Premeditated proof he was who he claimed to be: A Hollywood director.

Sure of his credentials, I went with him to the diner up the street where he had left his unfinished meal. How much trouble could I get into in the middle of the day, in a crowded restaurant? I sat with him for almost half an hour as he spoke of my potential. When we parted ways, he gave me an assignment. I was to go see his movie (starring famous actors) that was out in theaters that night. We would meet the next day to discuss at a coffee shop uptown.

Finally, the words that should have put a stop to the entire plot before it progressed any further: “Don’t tell anyone about any of this. Go to the movie alone.”

The next day, I arrived early to our meeting spot — a chain coffee shop on the Upper West Side where street numbers were higher than any I’d yet set foot on. To kill time before our appointment, I wandered into a magazine store a few blocks away. Flipping through the latest issue of Seventeen, I felt compelled to look up, turn my head. Silhouetted in the doorway of the store was The Director.

What a coincidence! To have never seen someone before, then to run into him twice in two days? To me, it felt fated, which only added to the seduction. He came in to meet me, and we left together for the coffee shop. On our way out, the man behind the counter said something to The Director about having seen him the week before with Madonna and then asked, “Who’s the new girl?”

At the coffee shop, I followed The Director to a table in the back where it was darker. I don’t remember what I drank or what I was wearing that day; I don’t remember what I told him about the movie, which I had gone to see the night before, though not alone. Keeping our rendezvous secret seemed illicit, so I had confessed to the only other person I knew in town — the boyfriend of a girl I had roomed with in Paris two years earlier — and I made him come with me. He was excited, too, that his friend had possibly just been cast in a Hollywood film. Fame by association is just as alluring.

I sat and listened to The Director talk. About his sex life, his sexual exploits, his famous friends with whom he shared outlandish (and sometimes sex-filled) adventures. He dropped names. Some I had heard of. I’m pretty sure there was talk of illegitimate children in there, too, but that could have been just for effect. I tried to keep any emotion from appearing on my face; I tried to remember this was a “business” meeting.

Then the talk turned to me, and, having nothing at all to add to the conversation, I did the only thing I knew how to do: tell the truth. I admitted that I had never had sex.

Had I been more clued in, I’m sure I would have seen The Director’s pupils react to my admission. “Cha-ching!” they would have declared. Isn’t a virgin a coveted big game trophy of sexual predation?

It was decided that the following Saturday, The Director and I would meet again — this time, at his hotel. Though I don’t remember the whole dialogue, I do remember these words coming out of The Director’s mouth: “Don’t worry. No matter what happens, I won’t fuck you.”

Writing about this 20 years later still brings me to a sad and angry and shameful place. Sad for that innocent and foolish girl. Angry that The Director lured me with promises of Hollywood acclaim; angry that I allowed myself to be dazzled by it. The shame of not having any clue as to what was going on. Mostly, the shame that I had allowed this to happen.

Now that I’m older, emboldened, I’ll wish I had stood up in that uptown coffee shop, thrown my lukewarm drink in his face and walked out. Or slapped his cheek and screamed something to the room like, “The Director is a big fat perv. And his movies suck. Big time!” Or, what he most likely deserved: kicked him — hard — in the nuts. Though he probably would have enjoyed that. Feisty one, he would have thought.

Instead, we walked to a nearby pizza joint where, a few minutes after sitting down, he told me his sick mother lived a couple of blocks away and he had to go check in on her. Did I mind waiting there for a few minutes, to keep an eye on his stuff?

He left and I sat there alone at the table, futzing with the shakers of hot pepper flakes and Parmesan as if they were chess pieces, ignorant as to who the real pawn was. The comforting scent of baking pizza hung thick in the air, making my mouth water.

As the sun shone through the front window, shifting then lengthening the shadows, I waited with The Director’s stuff: a white plastic shopping bag filled with I don’t know what — because I never looked — and an umbrella. I don’t know why I just didn’t leave these surely replaceable items at the counter and get myself out of there. But I was still under the impression that if I did everything right, I would be starring in a movie. And then, who knew where my life would lead me?

Why was being in a movie so important? More important than my safety, apparently. More important than my dignity. I don’t know. Because girls from the Canadian suburbs don’t wind up in Hollywood movies? And aren’t we meant to buy into the fantasy of being “discovered” while simply walking down the street?

At the time, I had been modeling full-time since I graduated high school at 17, but the bookings recently had been slow. For the previous three years, I had made myself amenable to an industry that I didn’t realize at the time only cared about me as long as I booked worked. I was a commodity, an object, bargained over, bought and sold. I told myself acting would be different. I envisioned my rise to fame. With a speaking role.

I don’t know how long I waited at the pizza place, but I do know that it was a long time. Too long.

Looking back, after having learned more about other people and myself, after studying psychology from both textbooks and hours of intentional observation, I’ll view this whole thing as a fucked up set-up. I’ll feel queasy when I admit to myself that there was no ailing mother. What a line. Instead, I’ll create a scenario where The Director scopes out the pizzeria from some third-story window across the street, maybe with binoculars, keeping his eye on the prize, watching to see what it would do. And with this knowledge, The Director would conclude that he had absolute control over me. I mean, I sat and waited for over an hour with a plastic bag and a five-dollar umbrella. (The day was sunny, even, cloudless.) Knowing I was the type of girl who did as I was asked, The Director would know how far he could take things. And, as I would eventually learn from regrettable experiences yet-to-come, when a man says, “I’m not going to have sex with you,” that is in fact exactly what he intends to do.

Eventually The Director did return, grabbed his stuff, and, plans all set for our Saturday afternoon meeting, he handed me a piece of paper. A single page of hotel stationery with his room number and the French phrase, “Ton Avenir,” written across it in an infantile scrawl.

Your Future.

When I first heard about the multiple recent allegations against Harvey Weinstein, my mind immediately retrieved the details from what I experienced with The Director almost two decades ago. I didn’t know who he was back then, but I do now. He’s legit.

Once, when I was 36, a male friend who I thought I respected said to me: “Well, people are always going to try to take advantage of other people. It’s your fault if you allow it to happen.”

(This in response to a news story of a male fashion photographer using his position of power to allegedly manipulate and abuse unknowing models — again.)

My high school basketball coach who commented on my legs as I stepped off the school bus arriving at an away game. A group of construction workers sitting on a sidewalk who serenaded me with a rendition of ZZ Top’s “She got lay-eggs. . . . ” A photographer who peppered his conversation with the words “sexy” and “sensual” — as he spoke about Texas. Another photographer, who grabbed me by the hips, pulling me close, to get me to “loosen up” on set. A nightclub DJ who invited me to join him in his booth only to rub himself against my knees as I sat there, unable to push past him. A modeling agent who told me that I “didn’t want it bad enough,” alluding to girls who did; later, I’ll recognize this as an attempt to get me to ask him what I needed to do to show him just how bad I wanted a modeling career. A date who insisted he never heard the word “no” coming from my mouth. though I had whispered, spoken, then screamed it over and over and over. The Director.

I am no stranger to the varying degrees of sexual harassment and assault that women face. Every day.

Recently, a male fashion photographer said to me he didn’t think female models were taken advantage of sexually as much as male models were.

My response: “It happens more for the girls. They just don’t say anything.”

In the end, I didn’t go to The Director’s hotel as planned. As Saturday neared, I had grown more and more wary. His voice saying “No matter what happens, I won’t fuck you,” played over and over in my mind. No, I didn’t need to see what he meant by No matter what. Maybe I didn’t need to be in a movie that badly after all.

I called him in his room on Saturday morning to tell him I wouldn’t be coming over.

“Who did you talk to?” His words came out harsh, threatening.

“Nobody,” I said. I knew I had made the right decision.

After mumbling something about how I knew how to reach him if I changed my mind, he hung up.

What if I had gone to the hotel? Would I alone have been responsible for what happened next? Would it have been fully my fault if The Director had in fact fucked me?

He was certainly a pro, I have to hand him that. Now I know: I was not the only girl he tried something like this with. And we know he is not the only man in the film industry to try something like this.

I hate to think I live in a world where there are people out there who will try to take advantage, and if I allow that to happen for whatever reason — moment of weakness, lapse in judgment, too many drinks, just plain curious, being utterly fooled — then it becomes my fault.

It is becoming clearer that this is an unfortunate undercurrent flowing below the surface of, well, everything: picking off the vulnerable from the pack to be preyed upon, coerced into doing things they might not feel comfortable with. Because the promised outcome, the hoped-for reward is attention, recognition, a type of acceptance. Along with, of course, money, the desire for which has a strange way of making people do things. I, too, am guilty.

The comfort I can take from this is that I didn’t follow through to the end, that in this particular situation I emerged physically unscathed. But I do have the memory of the entire episode — this episode responsible for removing any last trace of lofty dreamer I had left inside of me and shattering any remnants of trusting others and their stupid promises — and the accompanying feelings that arise sometimes, whether I give them permission to or not. I grieve the loss of that girl, my former self. But I also feel an intense sadness for the girls who didn’t escape and for those who won’t in the future.

No, it’s not their fault.

The Director is still around, doing his thing. I wonder if he’s still using this same technique to cast his films. I wonder how many other women have similar stories to this one. I wonder how many men use their power and influence to target and silence, as they continue to shroud their behavior with shitty excuses.

Even if I were to name The Director, what good would it do? He would claim this didn’t happen. My story? Attention-seeking and bogus. His word against mine. Who am I to be believed? Simply one of many. A nobody. Forgettable.

As with many things I lived through, I only told my mother part of the story, unable to break her heart. Every now and then, I fake a smile as she asks: “Remember the time you were discovered by that Hollywood director?”

But as Amber Tamblyn recently wrote in an Op-Ed for The New York Times: “We are learning that the more we open our mouths, the more we become a choir. And the more we are a choir, the more the tune is forced to change.”

This, finally, is my song.

The coming election season will be the year of the lunatic voter

George Allen, 2012; Roy Moore, 2017 (Credit: AP/Cliff Owen/Getty/Scott Olson)

You are forgiven if you don’t remember a character by the name of George Allen, so just in case the name is stuck back there somewhere in the dim haze of your memory, I’ll remind you who he is. He used to be the United States Senator from Virginia, having run against and won the seat of Democrat Chuck Robb in 2000, the only Republican to beat an incumbent Democrat that year. Allen would probably still be the Senator from Virginia, were it not for the misstep he made on August 11 of 2006 in his campaign against insurgent Democrat Jim Webb. Allen was appearing before a small gathering of supporters in Breaks, Virginia, a little town near the state’s border with Kentucky, when he used the word “macaca,” a racist slur meaning “monkey.” S.R. Sidarth was filming when Allen pointed to him and said, “This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent . . .  Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.” Sidarth was born and raised in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. His parents were Indian-Americans.

Webb won the race by only 8805 votes, less than a third of one percent of the vote. What became known as Allen’s “macaca moment” was blamed for his loss in the closely contested race, after film of the remark hit the cable shows and went viral. Allen had been comfortably ahead in the polls until then, sometimes by as many as ten points. After Allen’s “macaca moment,” the polls tightened and finally flipped shortly before the election. Allen ran for Senate again in 2012 but was defeated by former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, effectively ending his political career.

Why bring up a two-time loser Republican hack like George Allen right now, you might ask? Remember Todd Akin, the loon in Missouri who claimed women who were victims of what he called “legitimate rape” rarely got pregnant? Like Allen’s “macaca moment,” Akin’s rape comment got him beat in his 2012 race against Democrat Claire McCaskill. But today, Steve Bannon, newly liberated from his West Wing office and back at the helm of Breitbart, is out there beating the bushes looking for the Todd Akins and George Allens of 2018, betting the “mistakes” made in past years will add to the electability of his candidates next year.

So far, he’s been right. Bannon backed disgraced former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore against incumbent Senator Luther Strange in September, and Moore pounded him by ten points. Moore, who was removed from his seat on the Alabama Supreme Court not once but twice — once for refusing to remove a stone monument carved with the Ten Commandments from his court house and again for refusing to adhere to the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage — makes Akin and Allen, and even “I am not a witch” 2010 Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell look like level-headed totems of Reason and Moderation. Even backing from President Donald Trump couldn’t save Luther Strange from the runaway Moore train in Alabama. Moore has called homosexuality “abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature,” likened it to bestiality and advocated making homosexual behavior illegal. He has said that the attacks of 9/11 reflected God’s anger and believes that crimes such as murder and rape occur “because we have forgotten God.” He used “macaca” style pejoratives for Asians and Native Americans at a September rally in Alabama, saying “”We have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting,” concluding that “only God” could unite us. He called Islam a “false religion” and claimed that “there is no such thing as evolution” in an interview with The Washington Post. He was a long-time “birther,” claiming President Obama was not born in this country, and claims that “the only source of our law, liberty and government” is God.

Despite a recent poll that has the race in a dead heat, Bannon is betting he can tap Trump’s deep well of support in Alabama, and Moore will beat Democrat Doug Jones like a drum in 2018. He’s betting right-wing loon Kelli Ward will pound incumbent Jeff Flake in the Arizona Republican primary next year with backing from his pal Robert Mercer, who has already contributed $300,000 to the Ward campaign. He told Sean Hannity he is planning on running someone against Dean Heller in Nevada, Senator Deb Fischer in Nebraska, Senator John Barrasso in Wyoming, and Roger Wicker in Mississippi. Their crimes? Not that they aren’t conservative enough, but that they are too close to Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, the putative leader of the “establishment” in Washington, according to Bannon.

Bannon isn’t counting on finding credible candidates to run against these people, because he’s not counting on candidates, he’s depending on the lunatic voters out there. Who would have picked Roy Moore in a credibility contest before he body-slammed Luther Strange in Alabama last month? There isn’t much evidence that Bannon cares about the positions these senators take on the issues, since all of them are right-wing Republicans who voted against Obamacare and for the odious Justice Neil Gorsuch. He could care less whether they have any “macaca moments” in their pasts and would probably rather that they do, because words like “macaca” have long since been eclipsed by Trump and his “good people” white supremacists and NFL race-baiting. The voters Bannon is counting on are actually looking for prejudice-signifiers like “macaca” to point them to candidates they can identify with. Bannon doesn’t want his people to dog-whistle any more. He wants them to wear their prejudices as badges of honor like Roy Moore did when he wore a cowboy hat and a snakeskin vest and waved a pistol at an all-white rally before winning the primary in Alabama. The only thing they stop at is swapping out “I’m Proud to be an American” for “Deutschland Uber Alles,” but I wouldn’t count on it.

Roy Moore is all the evidence you need that 2018 will be the year of the lunatic voter. Bannon’s genius when he was Trump’s campaign manager last year was to let Trump be Trump. He realized that whatever principles that had tethered voters to some semblance of decency in previous elections were long gone, and they were ready to let their freak prejudices fly. Voters who recoiled at George Allen’s use of the word “macaca” were delighted when Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as racists and murderers. Bannon took his declaration of war on the Republican establishment to the so-called “Value Voters Summit” last weekend. “It’s not my war, this is our war and y’all didn’t start it, the establishment started it,” Bannon said. Referring to the forces in the Republican party that favor inclusion and moderation, Bannon told his audience of religious fundamentalist conservatives, “You’ve had a bellyful of it, and you’re taking your country back.” 

Bannon is making a very simple bet: voters who were offended by Todd Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape” in 2012 turned to Trump in 2016, and when he made his racist comments about white supremacists in Charlottesville and black NFL players, he was talking their language. Bannon can completely ignore the national polls that have Trump somewhere in the 35-40 range because he’s not running anyone nationally. He’s running his anti-establishment loons in red states in Republican primaries, and if Alabama tells us one thing, it tells us that the lunatic fringe has taken over the Republican party; they’re registered, and they’re ready to vote not their consciences but their prejudices.

The thing about Bannon is, he doesn’t really care what his senators do when they get to Washington. Trump fired him, so he doesn’t care about Trump except to the extent he can use his methods and his voters. He doesn’t even care about the issues Republicans are trying to push through the Congress. All he cares about is blowing up the Republican establishment. Unshaven, overweight, rumpled, coarse, profane, Steve Bannon is the Harvey Weinstein of Republican politics. He’s wearing black shirts rather than a hotel bathrobe, and he’s not content with abusing only women. Setting out to elect the likes of Roy Moore and more like him, he’s bent on abusing the whole damn country.