Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 267
October 18, 2017
Roy Moore believes that NFL anthem protests are magically “against the law”
Roy Moore (Credit: AP/Brynn Anderson)
Candidate for one of Alabama’s Congressional Senate seats Roy Moore insisted that it’s illegal for professional athletes to kneel during the national anthem Wednesday. It really, really isn’t.
“It’s against the law, you know that?” Moore said in an interview with TIME Magazine. “It was a act of Congress that every man stand and put their hand over their heart. That’s the law.”
The disgraced Alabama Supreme Court chief justice argued that the current athletes (NFL players in particular) who engage in protest are in violation of, as TIME noted “a section of the U.S. code which outlines how people should conduct themselves when the anthem is played.” The publication helpfully added that “the code merely outlines proper etiquette, and there are no legal penalties outlined in the law.” Phew.
To that point, Moore himself didn’t speak of any punishments that might be doled out to players or really anyone anywhere on U.S. soil who does not stand during the national anthem (look around any baseball stadium during its signing on a balmy August night and you’ll see that our jails would be overflowing with a new crop of indolent Americans.) It’s pretty nice we all have that whole First Amendment thing going for us.
Here, Moore’s rhetoric echoes that of President Donald Trump who has repeatedly demanded the NFL change its policy on the national anthem. Tuesday and again in a press conference Wednesday morning, the league demurred. Following a series meetings between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, team owners, union representatives and players, the league decided that a new rule compelling anyone to stand during the national anthem would not be established. Yes, the league and team owners will continue to work to end the protests, but through dialogue, not diktat.
“We just had two days of conversation with our owners. Our clubs all see this the same way. We all want our players to stand,” Goodell said on Wednesday, according to NBC News. “We have about a half a dozen players protesting, and we’re going to continue to work to try and get that to zero.”
Late on Wednesday afternoon Trump continued his habit of talking to, and criticizing, the league directly through social media. “.@NFL: Too much talk, not enough action. Stand for the National Anthem,” Trump tweeted.
.@NFL: Too much talk, not enough action. Stand for the National Anthem.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2017
Moore, for his part, said he supported the president’s criticism of the league and athletes who kneel during the anthem to highly racial injustices including the police killing of unarmed black men. “I back the President in upholding respect for the patriotism for our country, on two grounds,” Moore said, according to TIME. “One, it’s respect for the law. If we don’t respect the law, what kind of country are we going to have? Two, it’s respect for those who have fallen and given the ultimate sacrifice. I’m surprised that no one brought this up.”
It is actually not surprising that no one brought this up in the past given that the U.S. code is, again, not enforceable law. One would hope a former (albeit disgraced) judge such as Moore would know the difference, but what can you do?
“If they didn’t have it in there, it would just be tradition,” more continued. “But this is law. If we disobey this, what else are we going to disobey?” It is, again, not law.
Moore is backed by former White House chief strategist and current Breitbart News head, Steve Bannon as part of a larger attempt to challenge the Republican establishment in the 2018 primaries. Trump had initially supported Moore’s primary opponent, Luther Strange, but then deleted his tweets of support following the outcome. The president has since turned to lauding Moore.
In other Moore news Wednesday, recent reporting has revealed that his foundation took a $1,000 donation from a group founded by white supremacist neo-Nazi, Willis Carto, in 2005. As well, polls have his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, ascendent and now pulling even with the Republican — so there’s that.
Twitter is loving this bonkers Melania body-double conspiracy theory
Melania Trump (Credit: Getty/Olivier Douliery)
So the latest, sexiest Twitter conspiracy theory seems to be originating from the account @Joe Vargas of BuyLegalMeds.com. It alleges — wait for it — that during a recent appearance with President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump was replaced by a body double.
Basing his theory — if indeed he offers it in good faith — on comparative analysis of various photos, Vargas tweeted that he was confused over the appearance of the supposed imposter, noting that while she is superficially similar to the first lady, there appears to be an extra ridge on her face.
In the video displayed below, the camera slowly zooms in on a sunglasses clad Melania as Trump references his “wife Melania who happens to be standing right here.” It’s . . . something.
This is not Melania. To think they would go this far & try & make us think its her on TV is mind blowing. Makes me wonder what else is a lie pic.twitter.com/JhPVmXdGit
— BuyLegalMeds.com (@JoeVargas) October 18, 2017
Because that is what they do, Twitter erupted with memes and opinions for both sides of the argument. Some Twitter users actually agreed with the theory.
I mean if you think this is Melania Trump then you’re a blind person https://t.co/qxoyQFouvm
— Trent (@BarstoolTrent) October 18, 2017
Some laughed the conspiracy theory off.
I’m dying laughing at the thought they hired a double for Melania Trump
— Doc Savage (@SoloChills) October 18, 2017
Others created memes.
Fake Melania Trump leaving the press conference after securing the bag pic.twitter.com/SYsYUnH2Cn
— Spooky X (@XLNB) October 18, 2017
Some even weighed in on who this imposter might be.
RNC “cloakroom” was secretly funded by corporate cash
President-elect Donald Trump talks with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis. on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. () (Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump pledged to drain the swamp when he took over the White House and vowed to end Washington’s addiction to corporate money and influence.
During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, Trump said he would not be “able to look the other way” when the nation’s political system “has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash.”
But records obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show that a myriad of corporations and trade groups secretly “bankrolled a plush hideaway for lawmakers at the same Republican National Convention in Cleveland.”
The “cloakroom” was a lavish, “exclusive office, lounge and gathering space for Republican lawmakers — including House Speaker Paul Ryan.”
The “cloakroom” was built on the practice court inside Quicken Loans Arena, according to CPI.
The corporations and lobbying giants that funded the cloakroom included Comcast, the Koch Companies, the National Retail Federation, Microsoft, Chevron, Health Care Service Corp., AT&T and the American Petroleum Institute, CPI noted.
“The immediate effect is it looks like it hid certain donors to the convention,” Lawrence Noble, senior director and general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for campaign finance reform, told CPI.
A limited liability company called “Friends of the House 2016 LLC” paid for the secret room which afforded its contributors with entry space.
“As a sponsor of the hospitality venue, we were invited to use it, as well,” Jori Fine, a spokeswoman for Health Care Service Corp., told CPI. Health Care Service Corp. gave $100,000 to Friends of the House LLC, bank records show.
The purpose of the payments and what contributors expected to receive in return is still currently unclear, but Jeffrey Livingston is listed as the company’s registered agent. A court filing by Livingston’s lawyer showed that the LLC was “established to manage and raise funds for hospitality activities and events during the 2016 Republican National Convention.”
Master Plan Design and Joe Mineo Creative were credited as the contractors for the room on a marketing booklet, CPI reported. They said that “Ryan’s representatives helped design the space and supervise construction,” however Ryan’s office disputed that claim.
Kevin Seifert, a spokesman for Paul Ryan’s congressional campaign committee, told CPI that Ryan nor his office were “involved in supervising construction or consulted about the design of the cloakroom.”
Facing pressure from activists, corporations were skeptical about openly sponsoring the convention, but discreetly funding Friends of the House 2016 LLC gave them the opportunity they were looking for, with no public backlash.
CPI elaborated:
But national political conventions are legendary opportunities for access to lawmakers, despite ethics reforms Congress passed in the wake of influence peddling scandals. Complex rules govern even the details of events, such as food menus, but often turn on technical points, forcing lawyers to double-check legal advice every four years.
For example, although individual congressional members can’t be honored by special interests, certain delegations of lawmakers can be — and frequently are. The rules for U.S. House members and U.S. senators aren’t identical. And companies have many routes to court those in power, like sponsoring delegations or events that raise money for charity.
Microsoft donated $1.8 million in software to the Cleveland Host Committee, without records of a cash donation.
“We decided last fall to provide a variety of Microsoft technology products and services instead of making a cash donation,” Fred Humphries, corporate vice president of U.S. government affairs for Microsoft, wrote in an April 2016 email.
Microsoft did, however, make a $100,000 cash donation to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, and they weren’t alone.
“The convention is one big loophole to the limits of corrupting money on politics,” Paul S. Ryan (who is unrelated to Speaker Ryan), vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for limits on money in politics, told CPI.
Comcast donated $200,000 to the LLC company, but isn’t listed as a donor by the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee.
As CPI noted:
“Koch Companies Public Sector, which wrote a $100,000 check to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, [is not listed as a donor]. In fact, a Koch Industries spokesman in June said the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, well-known Republican megadonors, weren’t planning to contribute to the convention at all.”
On the eve of Richard Spencer’s rally, see when 20,000 Nazis took over Madison Square Garden
Charlottesville wasn’t the beginning of white supremacist demonstrations in the United States. It certainly won’t be the end, either. Just look to Nazi sympathizer Richard Spencer’s upcoming rally in Florida.
But today we had a stark reminder that someone once stood on center stage at New York City’s Madison Square Garden and tried to sell the notion that Nazism was as American as apple pie, as 20,000 applauded.
Wednesday, Gothamist published a stirring interview with filmmaker Marshall Curry, who just last week released a chilling short called “A Night at the Garden” in collaboration with the documentary project, Field of Vision. In it, Curry talks about his compilation of rarely seen or unused footage from the 1939 “Pro American Rally,” held by the American Nazi group called the German American Bund at Madison Square Garden. Between the 20,000 who attended inside and the protestors against it outside, the rally sparked the biggest police mobilization for a single local event in the city’s history.
“It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget. We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled,” Curry told Gothamist. “But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message.”
In the video, Americans offer the Nazi salute to the American flag, rush a Jewish activist who crashed the stage, and yield to a charismatic leader belittling a press that he claims is “Jewish controlled.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow Americans and American patriots. I’m sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger,” says Bund leader Fritz Julius Kuhn. “You all have heard of me through the Jewish controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof and a long tail.”
“We, with American ideals demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it. If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter: First, a socially just, Gentile ruled United States. Second, Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination,” he continued.
You’d be forgiven if you thought the above sounded almost like a 2016 campaign address.
“The footage is so powerful, it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because it’s scary and embarrassing,” said Curry. “When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times that were passively supportive.”
Most telling is when Curry reminds us that “These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. But two years after this rally, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. And at that point this sort of philosophy became unacceptable,” he said
“When the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever shared their philosophy.” So perhaps it wasn’t a humanitarian crisis and the deaths of a million innocent Jewish people that the United States was fighting for, but the death of American soldiers. And truly chilling, is the fact that these were everyday people, Americans we live alongside — just like those who held Tiki Torches in Charlottesville, just like those who may greet Spencer in Florida.
“We’d like to believe that there are sharp lines between good people and bad people,” said Curry. “But I think most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up by a demagogue who is funny and mean, who can convince us that decency is for the weak, that democracy is naïve, and that kindness and respect for others are just ridiculous political correctness.”
Unlike Charlottesville, which was touted by Trump as having “fine people” on both sides, leadership in New York was quick to separate themselves from ideals of the Nazis. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called the rally an “exhibition of international cooties,” calling out the attendees for the germs they were.
The German American Bund, or “the Bund,” was a collaboration of sorts between two pre-existing, native-born German-American organizations and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government. Founded in 1933 as Nazi Germany was ascendant on the international stage, the group was primarily made up of German immigrants and their children and espoused a message that was simultaneously nationalistic toward German and American interests.
Pro-Nazi without apology, the distinctly racist Bund flourished for a short period that decade, eventually surpassing 25,000 before a series of investigations and turn in public sentiment against Germany and Nazism led to its dissolution in 1941. The U.S. government would imprison its leader, the German-born Kuhn, for embezzlement and later revoke his American citizenship, ultimately deporting him back to his home country in 1945. He died six years later, poor and forgotten.
Back in 1933, The New York Times, the American Jewish Committee spoke against the Bund’s Garden rally, noting that while they saw it as “completely anti-American and anti-Democratic . . . we believe that the basic rights of free speech and free assembly must never be tampered with in the United States, we are opposed to any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views.”
Florida Governor Rick Scott echoed that sentiment as he announced he was preparing for Spencer’s upcoming rally by declaring a state of emergency. “We live in a country where everyone has the right to voice their opinion. However, we have zero tolerance for violence and public safety is always our number one priority,” Scott said.
The best course of action as these echoes continue is to document new atrocities and remember past ones. Forgetting this brought us where we are today.
Watch “A Night at the Garden” below.
October 17, 2017
A new reissue of the Rolling Stones’ oft-demeaned “Their Satanic Majesties Request” flips the script
If you were alive in 1967 and old enough to be listening to music, I imagine the last thing you would have expected, after the summer of that year, was for the Rolling Stones to get in on the lovey-dovey act of prevailing good vibes. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” had happened, Monterey Pop had happened, but the Stones had had a quiet year, as if they were busy formulating a response.
That rejoinder to the zeitgeist came in the form of “Their Satanic Majesties Request,” which has just been lavishly reissued by Universal Music in a set that is intended to make you stop and take notice, not of what might have been, but what, perhaps, we’ve been getting wrong for a long time.
Namely, that the almost-always-panned “Satanic Majesties” not only wasn’t that bad, but was about as lovey-dovey as a hug that finished off with the other participant kneeing you in the balls. Let us call it a mixed message, then.
I used to have an editor who loved to say, “this doesn’t track.” He said it about everything in life. The Starbucks could have their holiday cups in in early November, and he’d say, “this doesn’t track.” Sometimes I’d imagine him listening to this Stones LP, then or now. The Stones ought not to track with our sociopolitical times, where everything, it seems, is either bad, or waiting to be labeled as bad. For the Stones could be, to put it simply, quite bad. They were bad within the context of art, which is something rather different than bad. Is “Lolita” bad? It’s not Brock Turner — it’s art. It exists within its own world, to provide insight on our outer one.
But to set the context: the Stones had had a monster year in 1966. We regularly think of that campaign in rock history as the time of the Beatles — who dropped their best album, “Revolver,” on the world — and Dylan, who truckled to no contender back then, releasing his own “Blonde on Blonde.” The Stones roared and soared in 1965 with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the single that broke them across the globe.
But I don’t know if the Stones were ever better than in 1966, with singles like “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” — the former being a cross of folk-jangle and cosmos-gallivanting energy, the latter a claustrophobic rush of sound to break down the door of the room it was briefly trapped in.
Then there was the “Aftermath” album, full of exotic sounds, with African instruments broadening the rhythm and blues experience, as the Stones dished out some pretty nasty things. “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” weren’t ever exactly mix tape material for the woman you wished to woo. You hear them now, and you wonder when the Stones backlash is coming. Surely there are SJWs who would like us never to hear this material again?
But that’s the things with songs: they often don’t mean what they say, in the sense that they are not directives, not advisory notes on how to live your life. They’re sonic snapshots of personas. Consider the blues, that genre from which the Stones pulled a lot of their early power: there is more boasting in the blues than in any rap song, and there is also more lamenting than in the lowest circles of Dante’s “Inferno,” because life can get like that, can’t it?
Still, you can’t deny that the musical persona version of the Stones churned and burned with a real animus at this stage. Artistically, it was good for them. It certainly didn’t hurt with their arrangements, which were becoming more sophisticated by galaxies than the Bo Diddley pastiches they had traded in, with the band itself being tight enough to rival some of the jazz units that drummer Charlie Watts loved so much.
Were they super aggro at time? Yep. But you were listening in on a world, not looking for a self-help manual on the best way to be a prick at times. In a way, the Stones trafficked in a version of ethical tourism; that is, they let your id up and dance on a wilder side, before you returned back to your world. They helped you exorcise your moral system, your darker moods, your black thoughts, via your stereo.
The knock against “Their Satanic Majesties Request” was that the Stones did not have their heart in anything even remotely hippie-related. Love was not their drug. The Stones and rock’s great year of love did not, you might say, track. This was a pack of Byrons, not lovelorn poets who were even sappier now that Day-Glo sprayed affection was all the rage. Consequently, the songs on “Satanic Majesties” were said to suffer. They noodled, went nowhere, and were imprecise compositionally, emotionally, you name it. Flat.
Listening again to the reissue, I don’t hear that. I hear a tableau, a record that unfurls less as a collection of songs and more like a musical Pangea. Everything is gummed together, the continents have yet to break up, and the Stones are doing that bit where they embrace you, with the dagger clutched over your shoulder. Mind you, they are not plunging it in, but the thought is there, and it is that thought that will flesh itself out into cuts like “Stray Cat Blues” and the utterly brilliant “Sympathy for the Devil” the following year.
The lenticular album cover gave you some idea of what was held inside. Certain things would resemble what was going on at the time in rock music, but the Stones would be taking a sidestep or three in another direction. It’s a music of refractions. “Sing this All Together (See What Happens)” is the communal, “All You Need Is Love” kind of number, a song as tour guide to a happier world, but in that sidestep style it becomes a beckoning to follow these particular pied pipers who you know you probably shouldn’t trust. Instead, you’re just checking out their lair, seeing how they live, incapable of resisting your own curiosity.
The Stones were always great bewitchers. Not a lot of musical acts could put you under a spell as they could, and “Satanic Majesties” is their sustained LP version of this. Even the titles reflect new geography: “In Another Land,” “Citadel.” Who says “citadel?” There’s an old-timey word for you. This is a darkened citadel, so we have need of a song like “The Lantern.” Remember that Zeppelin poster where there’s some wizard dude on this great steep point, and it’s dark and he has a lantern, presumably so he can find his way and you can follow him? That’s “Satanic Majesties” in a single image. But what we also have is a development in songwriting that is going to take the band forward to the artistic riches of “Beggars Banquet” and “Let It Bleed.”
“She’s a Rainbow” is the Stones’ most beautiful song, and for artists known for nastiness, it’s interesting how often they could send the bucket down into this particular romantic well and pull up a winner. Their early cover of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On” was flecked with a vulnerability that could even be considered unnerving — for a heart laid bare can do that — and “Ruby Tuesday” is every bit the lovely English pastoral as anything Vaughan Williams ever wrote. “She’s a Rainbow” is downright benevolent.
The Stones were starting to figure out how to meld openness with individuality, songs that were great at processing what was unfolding in a given world — be it the actual world, a romantic one, an emotional one, what have you — while not forfeiting a singular identity and bringing that new knowledge to bear on how to best move forward, even if that meant doing so while out of kilter with the systems of the time. I think that is why outsiders have always flocked to the band, just as you see with the Who. The Stones, though, had the more populist version of that, because their musical approach tended to be universal, whereas the Who had a pronounced English aspect.
We also mustn’t forget that “Satanic Majesties” features one of your half dozen best Stones songs in “2000 Light Years from Home.” Again, the title packs extra meaning, as the Stones are, indeed, rather removed from their home base, at least as far as their discography went up until late 1967.
Has a song ever sounded more empoweringly badass than the opening bars of “2000 Light Years from Home?” You can’t even tell what genre this might be. It’s blues but exotic, it’s proto-metal but Sun Ra-like in its weird rhythms. When the primary beat kicks in and Mick Jagger’s vocals take over, we share a new form of collective musical high.
You are not remotely sure where that is going to take you, on this soupy, strange record. Do you care? I never cared. You venture into the lair of these pied pipers who look suspiciously like highwaymen, and you’re both happy you went in and happy you got out. Then you, and they, go on, your one-off assignation complete.
The uphill battle facing “The Mayor,” ABC’s aspirational comedy
Brandon Micheal Hall in "The Mayor" (Credit: ABC)
A year ago prime-time television contended with a problem whose magnitude programming executives did not foresee: the nerve-racking live performance art piece that was the presidential election. Distracted, exhausted viewers tuned out most of the new scripted offerings for fall 2016-2017 schedule, and this lead the networks to turn into the skid during pilot season by picking up series about military and political outsiders.
ABC’s “The Mayor,” airing Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m., is one of the beneficiaries of that move, a pleasant comedy about a rapper named Courtney Rose (Brandon Micheal Hall) runs for public office solely as a publicity stunt. Unfortunately for Courtney, his statements during the debate actually appeal to voters and he wins, becoming the Mayor of the small down of Fort Grey, California.
The first two episodes of “The Mayor” depict Courtney coming to grips with the responsibilities that come with holding office. His sweet, goofy best friends T.K. (Marcel Spears) and Jermaine (Bernard David Jones) act as his official advisors alongside his more capable aide Valentina (Lea Michele), a classmate of his from high-school who has some idea of what it takes to govern a city. Courtney’s mother Dina (Yvette Nicole Brown) acts as the unofficial moral compass of Fort Grey’s top elected official.
Nearly all of them are untested outsiders with zero political experience, an intentional conceit on the part of executive producer Jeremy Bronson, who spent seven and a half years as a producer for “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” Over the summer Bronson explained to critics that his goal was not to satirize America’s least experienced, least qualified political leader in its history but to demonstrate what’s possible if people, regardless of political affiliation, pulled together on behalf of the greater good.
This approach makes “The Mayor” successful, if perhaps overly gentle, as a character comedy as well as an aspiration tale. Courtney, T.K., Jermaine and Valentina make the usual mistakes millennial men and women who suddenly have massive responsibility dropped into their laps would be expected to make.
They have the optimism, energy and desire to do the right thing, but they also feel the obligation to make their mark on the world by polishing their own image. In the second episode, for example, Courtney overcomes a city council-imposed block to his political will — which, to his credit, he flexes in order to preserve and expand arts funding to local schools — by live streaming a musical performance by the youth who would be affected to his constituents. The gambit works, and it also makes his brand look good. A win-win all around.
“The Mayor” is a sweet, family friendly comedy that fits in well with a block populated by series catering to nearly every major audience psychographic. Taken as a whole, ABC’s Tuesday night line-up is a quilt of the American family experience: The highest rated show, “The Middle,” reflects the tribulations white middle class families face in terms of schooling, parenting and scraping by financially.
“Fresh Off the Boat” filters that through the framework of a first-generation immigrant family. Leading in to “The Mayor,” the fourth season of “Black-ish” opened the season with the creatively bold “Juneteenth” episode which addressed the dilution of history to downplay and negate the contributions and tribulations of blacks and other minorities.
All of these comedies, and “Black-ish” in particular, find accessible and intelligent ways to invite the audience into discussions about topics politicians and commentators would rather not talk about. In that respect these comedies provide a stealthy service to viewers by urging in engagement through entertainment. This is no small task at a time when so many of us are exhausted by mean-spirited national politics.
However, while “Black-ish” still performs well in its 18-49 target demographic, “The Mayor” is struggling to find and audience due, in part, to a very standard counter-programming decision made by its competition. The pair airs against America’s feel-good obsession of the moment, NBC’s “This Is Us.”
NBC originally intended to move “This Is Us” to Thursdays, which would have boded well for ABC’s critically acclaimed veteran comedy and its newcomer. But when NBC changed its mind, ABC did not.
Further hampering its prospects, “The Mayor” also had the miserable fortune of debuting days after the Las Vegas mass shooting. In an ideal world its upbeat tone should have been welcome. But who’s been in the mood for idealism lately? Any one?
It’s too early to evaluate the long-term prospects for ABC’s kindhearted new family show about civil service and the yearning to employ democracy in the service of the greater good. “The Mayor” appears to have the right running mate in its timeslot, and it is part of a comedy block that speaks honestly and in unifying terms about what it means to be American, how America’s families live. But when upheaval is the new normal, it’s hard to predict whether it can inspire potential constituents to show up in enough numbers to keep it around.
Trump’s Puerto Rico debacle: 81 years ago, we were better at disaster relief
The remnants of a destroyed home stand more than two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit the island on October 6, 2017. (Credit: Getty/Mario Tama)
It’s been an unprecedented season of natural disasters. From Houston to Puerto Rico, California to Florida, hurricanes and wildfires have decimated cities and rural areas, bringing death and destruction to the doorstep of thousands. These disasters have raised the stakes in questions about whose bodies matter and whose don’t, whose histories will be told and whose buried in the rubble, who counts as a citizen and who doesn’t.
In times like these, the past can teach us something about how to move forward.
Case in point: the Tupelo, Mississippi tornado of 1936. It roared in like a run-away train at 9 p.m. on Palm Sunday, April 5, registering an F5, the highest level on the Fujita Scale, and leveling 48 city blocks. Afterward, the dead and dying were strewn about the town, dangling in the sheared limbs of leafless trees, buried under the wreckage, pinned to the bottom of a small lake called Gum Pond. Debris littered the neighboring state of Tennessee. The official death toll was 233, with about 1,000 residents listed as injured, many seriously. Based on these figures, it remains today the fourth most deadly tornado in the history of the United States.
The tornado occurred in the midst of a disaster of even greater proportion, the Great Depression, which had seized the country in its iron grip throughout the 1930s. Ironically, a large part of Tupelo’s remarkable recovery is the result of that very fact. President Roosevelt’s massive government safety net of New Deal projects, employing millions of laborers, artists, scholars, engineers and teachers, was firmly in place in Tupelo. The city had had the distinction, in 1934, of becoming the nation’s first community powered by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal agency that had built dams throughout the region to prevent devastating floods and provide cheap electricity. Incredibly, two hours after the tornado struck, TVA construction crews had run temporary wires to light locations where the injured were being treated. By midnight, TVA lines were being used for long distance calls to summon help from the outside world. Around 250 TVA engineers and workers rushed to the city and had the electricity fully restored three days after the disaster.
More crucially, a group of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program for impoverished young men, was working nearby. Alongside local residents, “the CCC boys,” as they were called, saved countless lives, rescuing the injured from crumbled houses, putting out the fires that burned throughout the night and later digging hundreds of graves. Meanwhile, within hours, the National Guard leapt into action, stationing hundreds of reserve soldiers around town to prevent looting, and the American Red Cross began setting up food stations and providing people with shelter and clothing.
By April 10, five days out, the U.S. Resettlement Administration had begun clearing 32 acres for housing, and a day later, a special WPA grant of $1,000,000 — an eye-boggling amount in those times — was released for relief work. By April 18, thirteen days later, the President had signed a bill which would lend up to $50,000,000 to those who had lost homes and possessions. Meanwhile, bolstered by the federal government’s concretely demonstrable commitment to restore Tupelo, state and local officials, business and religious leaders, and transportation carriers like the Frisco railway and Greyhound bus lines were providing assistance. As J.M. Thomas of the Federal Land Bank of New Orleans telegraphed to Tupelo’s mayor: “I want to be of service. . . . Please command me.”*
The difference between the federal responses to the Tupelo and Puerto Rico disasters is stark. Nearly four weeks have passed since Puerto Rico was laid low by Hurricane Maria. Despite enormous advances in transportation, technology and communication over the past 80 years, scant electric power has been restored, and communication lines are still largely down. Federal troops are just now being sent to rural areas to make sure aid gets to the people who need it. This lack of immediate action is literally the difference between life and death, as news headlines continue to ominously report: “Puerto Rico’s Health Care Is in Dire Condition”; “Puerto Rico: US Officials Privately Acknowledge Serious Food Shortage”; “Puerto Rico’s Death Toll From Hurricane Maria Climbs to 48.”
This calamitous situation is not for lack of relief efforts organized by ordinary citizens and celebrities alike. From Lin-Manuel Miranda’s release of the song “Almost Like Praying” to meal preparations by chef José Andres to the millions of dollars raised by celebrities like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon and smaller amounts donated by everyday Americans, the response to the Puerto Rican tragedy has been overwhelmingly compassionate. But money alone, compassion alone, doesn’t turn on the lights. It takes a monumental, organized federal effort.
Why did it take so long for the Trump administration to suspend the Jones Act (eight days) and only allow it to stay suspended for ten? Why did it take more than a week for the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort to leave port and 11 days for it to reach Puerto Rico — and why are doctors still having problems getting their patients aboard? Why did the President chide Puerto Ricans for breaking the federal budget? Why did he attack the mayor of San Juan while she begged for help that wasn’t forthcoming? It was five days before the first Trump administration officials even visited the island.
A key to some of these questions may lie in President Trump’s own rejoinder to Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz’s desperate pleas: “They want everything done for them when it should be a community effort.” This statement raises larger questions: What kind of safety net do Americans — and Puerto Ricans are Americans — deserve? What counts as timely, effective federal assistance in times of utter disaster? Rolls of paper towels tossed to survivors? Self-congratulatory press conferences and photo ops?
And who counts as a citizen in Trump’s America?
Millennial candidates are changing Pennsylvania politics
Joe Michael (Credit: Ashley Murray)
Emily Marburger sits at a cafe table at the Muddy Cup, a coffee shop on Bellevue’s main street, Lincoln Avenue. When she lifts her iced drink, a henna tattoo on her hand is visible. Members of the local Somali Bantu refugee community applied it at a fundraising table they had at Bellevue’s weekly farmer’s market.
“It’s a huge strength to have diversity in your community,” said Marburger, 30, who won the Democratic mayoral primary in Bellevue in May. “As soon as we embrace that diversity and allow different voices come in, that’s when you’re going to get a stronger population and really flourish and come back.”
Marburger is just one of several Millennial candidates who won local primary races in Western Pennsylvania.
Marburger, an M.B.A graduate who works in finance, began to look in her own backyard after Republican candidate Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
His “hatred, xenophobia and sexism” are “dividing the country,” she said. And on the recent local primary ballot, she saw two mayoral candidates whom she didn’t think represented the Democratic majority in Bellevue — and one who openly supported Trump.
She bought her house in the borough — just four miles along the Ohio River past Pittsburgh — in 2010.
“We have a lot of deferred maintenance on our roads, we have a lot of empty storefronts, and in the seven years I’ve lived here, I can’t say that any of that seems to be changing too dramatically.”
The one-square mile borough has been steadily losing population since the 1960s, but its percentage of non-white residents has been growing — from 2 percent in the 1980s to nearly 15 percent in 2016.
Marburger’s plan if she wins in November: to attract small businesses and young families to the affordable real estate in a location just minutes from Downtown Pittsburgh.
Marburger said she’s feeling confident about November when she will face Tom Fodi, 34-year-old pastor, who previously ran in 2014 for state house and lost. Fodi lost the Democratic primary to Marburger but won as a write-in for the Republican ticket.
Just three miles from Bellevue, another young, first-time candidate is running for office in Emsworth, a smaller borough with 2,500 residents along the Ohio River.
The same August Saturday that Marburger sipped her iced coffee and lamented Trump’s response to Charlottesville, Joe Michael, 22, of Emsworth stood along Route 65 — the main artery connecting the northern boroughs to Pittsburgh — holding a Trump sign with a small crowd, asking for “honks” to drain the swamp.
Michael, who works at a car dealership north of Pittsburgh, won the Republican primary for mayor of Emsworth as well as a write-in campaign for a council seat.
He said that while several things Trump says make him “face palm,” he still believes in supporting the sitting U.S. president.
National politics aside, Michael said, he’s been honing his reputation among local Republicans since he was a teenager — volunteering for local state races and for Republican presidential candidate John Kasich last year.
He credits his admiration for 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his involvement in politics.
His plans for Emsworth if he’s elected are to institute a neighborhood watch — as one police department covers several northern boroughs — and securing private sponsors to fund things like park maintenance.
“I think I have a very good chance at a getting a council,” Michael said.
How to connect with people you hate
“It is so different to express your opinion to someone when you’re voice to voice than when you don’t have to be accountable to it,” Dylan Marron, writer and video creator told me on “Salon Talks.”
Marron is known for his social justice video content like “Every Single Word,” where he edited down popular films to just words spoken by people of color and “Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People,” all of which has garnered him some serious flack online.
In his newest venture, as host of the Night Vale Presents podcast “Conversations with People Who Hate Me,” Marron calls some of the people who’ve left him hateful comments. But it is not to confront them, he says, it’s to open a dialogue.
“When you start with a question rather than an accusation, that is like the magical key to understanding a lot,” Marron said. “Whereas if you start with ‘here is why you’re wrong about this social movement,’ the only thing they can say is a comeback.”
Marron finds this back and forth, of just “poking holes in each other’s arguments” as unproductive.
In the podcast, he finds the balance between defending himself, as a gay man and person of color, and standing in solidarity with movements like Black Lives Matter, without isolating the caller, whose beliefs often differ substantially from Marron’s.
“Listening to someone and considering what they’re saying and then having a dialogue with them does not mean that you are switching sides,” Marron said. “That itself I find really toxic. We are not this dichotomous species.”
For Marron, there’s room to complicate that.
When I asked him if he was surprised by the way his callers were able to take ownership of some of the hurtful things they had said and engage in a civil conversation with him, he said, he was surprised, but then again, not really.
Rather it was a reminder: “That’s what humans are, humans are good,” he said.
Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.
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Hollywood’s brightest join the 10-year-old #MeToo movement, but will that change anything?
Jennifer Lawrence (Credit: Getty/Matt Winkelmeyer)
Not just a rolling, instantly updated account of the ubiquity of sexual violence, the #MeToo hashtag is providing women a safe, yet public, space to tell their own stories through posting on social media, and to see that they are not alone by just sitting back and reading.
As well, it might — just might — help some men understand that sexual assault is not some distant phenomenon, but a regular part of the lives of the women they love. More than that, it can remind them that it’s something they often perpetuate, something only they can truly end. Coming after an ongoing cycle of allegations against Harvey Weinstein and other shocking — but not surprising — revelations, its surging popularity over the last few days feels well placed, even necessary at time.
Yet, the hashtag is no simple thing. It’s far from new, either.
While many news outlets credited actor Alyssa Milano for starting the viral hashtag, it was originally a grassroots movement begun a decade ago by activist Tarana Burke with the purpose of connecting sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities. Burke said that she started the necessary work after she experienced how rape-crisis centers did not go or reach the communities she worked in.
“This was a movement that was started for marginalized people,” she told Salon. “This was work that was started for people who didn’t have access to resources and for people whose voices were not listed when we talk about survivors.” As she tells it, Burke’s vision was less about “amplifying the number of people who are survivors,” she said, “but really it’s about a conversation between survivors.”
Right now that conversation between survivors has been joined by many high-profile actors, something that itself seems a very direct response to the allegations against Weinstein.
Monday night, actor America Ferrara shared her heartbreaking story of sexual assault at age 9 on Instagram. “I told no one and lived with the shame and guilt thinking all along that I, a 9-year-old child, was somehow responsible for the actions of a grown man,” Ferrara wrote. “Ladies, let’s break the silence to the next generation of girls won’t have to live with this bullshit.”
A post shared by America Ferrera (@americaferrera) on Oct 16, 2017 at 6:52pm PDT
That same evening, Jennifer Lawrence told a traumatic story of sexual harassment at the Elle Women in Hollywood event. Early in her career, Lawrence said producers pressured her to lose weight. She said one male director quipped: “I don’t know why everyone thinks you’re fat. I’d sleep with you,” according to USA Today.
At the same event, actor Reese Witherspoon also revealed that she was sexually assaulted by a director at the age of 16. She said she feels “disgust” at her assailant and “anger at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.”
Many other stories of sexual violence against celebrities have been uncovered this week. Singers Sheryl Crow, Christina Perri and Lady Gaga, actor Anika Noni Rose, the list goes on. The come on top of a constant stream of new claims against Weinstein (Lena Headey offered hers today).
With the current rise of #MeToo and the fall of Weinstein, have we entered a new time, an era when the cumulative mass of all this sharing, all these stories so difficult to tell, done so often by such high-profile people will have some sort of true and lasting effect?
The New York Times published a story Monday titled “Harvey Weinstein’s Fall Opens the Floodgates in Hollywood.” The article suggests, in part, that this is a watershed moment for sexual misconduct and rape culture, one that has the potential to shift the paradigm in Hollywood and beyond. But when the Oscar glamour wears off, what will happen to the rest of us?
To an obvious extent, it makes sense that the coverage around #MeToo has revolved around women with fame. Those with Oscar wins and Grammy-decorated records highlight the way celebrity status is only a protective cloak for some powerful men when it comes to cases of sexual violence.
But we’ve been here many times before, like 10 years ago when Burke first began the movement. The same thing happened two years ago when a similar wave caught on internationally under the hashtag #tellyourstory. We saw the same thing after the allegations against Bill Cosby, and then after Roger Ailes, and then after Bill O’Reilly.
Yes, there are more high-profile voices this time, more Tweets, but is now any different from then? You have to wonder if this space women have carved out online will have any deep impact on the misogynistic culture embedded in Hollywood and the world around it. No matter what powerful figure falls, no matter what hashtags we use, sexual violence always seems to bounce back.
Let’s hope the Times is right, that the floodgates are open. But let’s hope that for all women — those of us without Oscars and fans, those of us whose names hold no public weight — that those gates stay open.
“It is an epidemic, and the news and media have to treat it like it’s an epidemic,” Burke said.
“For every R. Kelly, or Bill Cosby, or Harvey Weinstein, there’s the owner at the grocery store, the coach, the teacher, the neighbor, who are doing the same things,” She told Democracy Now. “But we don’t pay attention until it’s a big name. We don’t pay attention until it’s a big celebrity.” It’s true, we often don’t.
But Burke’s aware of what’s ahead of us when the headlines and hashtags fade, when we start talking about what Lawrence is wearing instead of what she’s saying again. “This work is ongoing,” she says, “because this is pervasive.”
