Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 285

A New Jersey swim team embraces autism in the pool

Despite the fact that New Jersey reports the highest rate of autism in the country, with one in every 26 boys falling somewhere on the spectrum, public resources for these individuals remain woefully inadequate.

When New Jersey residents Michael and Maria McQuay were told that their autistic son would never be self-sufficient, the couple knew that over the course of their son’s life he would likely be relying upon a variety of public services. To the family’s dismay, however, they found that the resources available to them were distinctly limited.

In the eye-opening documentary “Swim Team,” from filmmaker Lara Stolman, we see the McQuays taking matters into their own hands by forming a Paralympic swim team, the Jersey Hammerheads, exclusively for kids who have been diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities.

The film follows three of the older members of the team — Michael “Mikey” McQuay Jr., Robert Justino and Kelvin Truong — and their parents as they try to navigate the complexities of entering adulthood with a developmental disability. The McQuays, for example, are dismayed to find out that by accepting their son’s high school diploma, they have unknowingly exempted him from any further help from the state.

Despite the inadequacies of the public system, the film champions the tenacity of parents who are determined to provide the best for their children, and the capacity that these young men possess to excel if given the opportunity. Against the dramatic backdrop of competitive sports, “Swim Team” explores not only the challenges these individuals face, but also their exceptional ability to overcome them.

You can watch the full film, “Swim Team,” on POV Monday, Oct. 2, at 10 p.m. (check local listings) on your local PBS station, online at pov.org/video or on your favorite streaming device.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/swimteam/

Pixies’ “Doolittle” and the long shadow of the White Album

(Credit: AP/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

As the [Doolittle] sessions began, Charles Thompson got into the role of Black Francis the face-squinching squealer. “I do sing a little bit differently when I’m singing with the Pixies,” he says now. “Some other little character or something enters in. It’s more nasally, more spazzy or something.”

Jonathan Claude Fixler saw the transformation while recording the “Whore” demos. “I noticed that these songs had character voices,” he says, “the voice singing ‘Dead’ and ‘Tame’ was not really him. It was funny.” He made a remark to Thompson about the personae. “It was a bit like the Beatles’ White Album, with the character voices in ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ ‘Sexy Sadie,’ ‘Helter Skelter.’” Thompson looked up and told Fixler, dude!, he had been listening to the White Album obsessively for like the last two weeks! But it had likely been far longer—the Pixies had recorded a shrill version of “Wild Honey Pie” at their first BBC session, on May 3, 1988, and the song had been a staple of their live set that year.

As a work of fragmented, jarring pop, the White Album is an aesthetic precursor to “Doolittle.” It relies on stark minimalism (“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” “Julia”), sudden violence (“Helter Skelter,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), and goofy irony (“Rocky Raccoon,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey”), and throughout remains emotionally remote. Sung by a cast of mostly two-dimensional figures, it is a riddle that teases the listener yet evades easy interpretation, and it launched a tradition of rock built on eclecticism and obscurity. No wonder Thompson was gaga over it.

* * *

The White Album was important to Joey Santiago as well. He may have cribbed from Hendrix and Wes Montgomery, but the most recognizable Santiagoism, the bent note that whines into dissonance, came from George Harrison. “‘Savoy Truffle,’” Santiago nods. “When you hear that song, you go, ‘Ah, there it is!’ Every time that part came on, it’s like, ‘Hey!’” (Remember, man of few words.) That magical part is a bluesy E that veers upward nearly half a step in a quick, mousy squeak. The technique turns up, beautifully twisted, all over the Pixies oeuvre, from “Vamos” to “Broken Face,” “Where Is My Mind?” to “I Bleed,” “Number 13 Baby” to “Planet of Sound.” In the Santiago school of notebending, two strings are preferred, one bent and one not, or both slightly off, creating a beat frequency through the interference of two close but clashing sound waves. “You can hear it shaking when it’s off,” Santiago says now. “And I loved it, you know. I think in high school I even showed a friend of mine, ‘Listen to this.’ And I wasn’t bending it—it was making those shaky notes. ‘Oh, that’s because it’s out of tune!’ I like it!”

Throughout “Doolittle,” Santiago’s crying bent notes are a melodic motif, from the double-tracked solo in “Monkey Gone to Heaven” to the five-second taste of brine at the beginning of “There Goes My Gun” to the siren call in “Gouge Away.” The opening to “There Goes My Gun” was one of Norton’s few indulgences in the sound of pure guitar—in the song’s original demo, and on a Peel Session version recorded just weeks before “Doolittle,” Santiago’s squall was buried within a drum intro, but on the album Santiago has a wide field all to himself. “He can play one note,” Norton says, “and make it sing, make that note do things that no one else has ever done with it.”

Thompson had long toyed with the classic power-pop trope of playing the verses tense and restrained and then letting the noise and emotion burst forth on the big kick-ass chorus, the New Wave apotheosis of which is the Cars’ “Just What I Needed.” It was not the only songwriting trick in Thompson’s book, though he happened to have used it in his two best songs to date, “Gigantic” and “Where Is My Mind?” But it was now very much on his mind. “Doolittle” is where Thompson—with the help of Norton’s crisp production—perfected the quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamic, and the album remains the blueprint of the style. “Tame” is its Platonic ideal, with just three chords and three sing-songy bass notes that could have been in a Ronettes song. On the chorus the same three notes persist, this time twice as loud, with an ugly monochord by Joey Santiago blaring and Black Francis’s big head making the most raucous sound of all. The valve turns off, then on again, then off—a simple binary function. It’s a jerky technique, and it can be terrifying, but it’s jokey, too. “It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek,” Thompson says. “It’s a little bit, well, not self-mocking, but it’s got a little bit of a grin on it, you know what I mean? It’s just sort of like, ‘I’ll be quiet, I’ll be loud, I’ll be quiet.’ It’s kind of playful or childish. It’s simple.”

Musical opposition was spread over the entire album. “Debaser” opens it with an orgy of guitars slashing in every direction, while in the middle of it all Black Francis writhes in degenerate ecstasy like Z-Man from “Beyond the Valley of the

Dolls.” (Or at least like Nick Cave howling, “Release the bats! Release the bats!”) Next is “Tame,” the demonstration of the dynamic dyad. From there Thompson spaces things out, and patterns emerge: slowish dirges driven by Deal’s bass and Santiago’s acrid guitar (“I Bleed,” “There Goes My Gun,” “Dead”), sunny pop strummers led by Thompson’s rhythm guitar (“Wave of Mutilation,” “Here Comes Your Man”). Ugliness and prettiness are constantly in conflict—Thompson’s comforting acoustic guitar against Santiago’s caustic electric, the angelic feminine of Deal’s voice versus the demonic masculine of Thompson’s.

The artful play of opposites is part of the band’s basic musical DNA. Take away Santiago’s lead guitar and Thompson’s vocals and you are left with a steady, bouncy rhythm section and peaceable acoustic chords that wouldn’t be out of place in an R.E.M. song. Against this, the screams and lead guitar are a monstrous mutation, something that has gone fascinatingly wrong. Thompson kept the songs in a further unstable state by doctoring their time signatures, adding and deleting beats here and there to form irregular shapes in repetition. The instrumental break in “Number 13 Baby” is an example of this. After three bars of 4/4 time, it drops two beats and then goes back: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2.

But for all its truculence, its spacewarp dynamic switches and wobbly time signatures, “Doolittle” remains tightly wound, irresistible pop. “Wave of Mutilation,” “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” “Here Comes Your Man,” and “Gouge Away” are sleek, tuneful ditties without a pinch of fat. Like a Buddy Holly song—or a Ramones song, or a Beach Boys song— they catch your ear just long enough for you to fall in love, and then they’re over.

Can MDMA help people with autism overcome social anxiety?

Ecstasy pills, which contain MDMA as their main chemical (Credit: DEA)

For the nightly news and cop shows, Ecstasy is the scourge of music festivals, the substance of interest in raves and DEA raids. For veterans of war, survivors of abuse, and autistic people, the drug increasingly suggests a feeling of tentative hope.

Each weekend, thousands of electronic music lovers dance and sweat under the empathogenic effects of Ecstasy, or Molly. This illegal drug is famous for generating feelings of love and connection between people from all walks of life, and may now be put to use for patients in whom these connections are pathologically broken.

“Breakthrough therapy”

In April 2017, the FDA approved MDMA, as a “breakthrough therapy” in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. The designation comes after 10-plus years of research and pressure from numerous angles, including psychotherapists and legal-cultural advocates such as MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Although this endorsement was hard fought, the early evidence is impressive: MDMA used in conjunction with trained psychotherapists can have significant, positive and long-lasting effects for patients suffering from PTSD. And now, there is hope this remarkable effect can be utilized to treat additional diseases of dissociation and social stress.

Following the successes of MDMA for PTSD patients, doctors Alicia Danforth and Charles Grob suggested the drug may have a similar therapeutic potential for a surprising group of patients: adults with autism.

In the United States, one out of 68 children is diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, an umbrella developmental disorder primarily indicated by difficulties with social interactions, sensory hypersensitivity, and repetitive behaviors. Psychotherapists who work with people with autism know that early intervention is the most important modifier of a patient’s progress, and they have many tools to improve patients’ quality of life remarkably. Unfortunately, many patients with autism also suffer from a number of comorbid issues, including anxiety, trauma, depression, and most commonly, difficulty with social adaptability.

These issues present two major problems for the psychotherapeutic approaches which therapists typically apply. The first, patients with autism tend not to respond to commonly used drugs for anxiety-like behaviors, such as SSRIs and Benzodiazepines. Patients without autism will often use a combination of prescriptions and therapy to treat these clinical diagnoses. But for those with autism, whose social interactions are complicated by their disorder, it can often be difficult to form the extremely important “psychotherapeutic alliance” between therapist and patient.

Fortunately for these patients, there is a compound currently flirting with acceptance in the medical pharmacopeia which seems likely to ameliorate both of these concerns: MDMA.

Internet research

MDMA is still illegal in the US, and patients with autism should be cautious about advertising from the rooftops their surreptitious experiments with the drug. Nonetheless, while conducting her research, Danforth found an exhaustive repository of anecdotes and first-person drug accounts exactly where you’d expect: on internet forums and message boards.

Although these user reports were far from academic in style, Danforth’s overall impression was that most patients who had tried the substance found it useful, from “increased feelings of empathy [and] connectedness” to “more comfort in social settings.” According to some of the reports she found, these effects could be felt for months or years following a single experience with MDMA.

These impressions were bolstered via more thorough survey answers Danforth and Grob collected from 150 patients in 13 countries. Strikingly, there was not a single report of a serious adverse effect from taking the drug, despite the unscientific manner in which the drugs were taken. In addition to the anecdotes, Danforth and Grob also propose that the known (but incomplete) physiology of autism and social anxiety disorders may be directly affected by the known neurological effects of MDMA.

For example, MDMA has been shown to robustly increase oxytocin levels in the mammalian brain, where the neurohormone  promotes positive social affiliations in mammals. Scientists know oxytocin levels are reduced in brains of people with autism. Danforth and Grob suggest the MDMA experience in conjunction with therapy may serve to correct this deficiency, reducing social anxiety.

Next steps?

For the two doctors, the stage has been set: MDMA has been used successfully in combination with psychotherapy for patients with PTSD, and autism-based social anxiety is a disorder with no effective treatment currently. Based on neurophysiological and anecdotal research, psychotherapy assisted by MDMA may be one treatment option. Danforth and Grob have suggested a clinical trial to test the safety and efficacy of this therapy, and they raised funds for it themselves, since most granting agencies are hesitant to support such a controversial experiment.

Because it is an illegal drug, MDMA comes with a pervasive stigma, even among psychotherapists. Some autism advocacy groups are staying neutral on the topic until Danforth gathers new evidence, but others, such as the Autism Science Foundation, have spoken out strongly against the research in the past. The foundation maintains MDMA is neurotoxic, citing an old paper which has since been debunked and retracted. This neurotoxicity paper continues to spread scientific misinformation even after it was shown the authors massively overdosed the monkeys used in the experiment, likely with methamphetamine instead of MDMA.

Nonetheless, ethically, Danforth and Grob’s proposed study raises some concerns. MDMA can induce an intense experience, which patients with autism may be less well-equipped to handle than other types of patients. Additionally, the study requires adult patients who give their informed consent, but acquiring this informed consent from people with autism remains controversial in the field. Like all psychological experiments, the putative positive outcomes must be weighed against the potential for negative impacts for the study patients. In this case specifically, there seems to be a wealth of evidence that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy has a low risk of serious adverse effects, and a high potential for alleviating the social anxiety which so often afflicts patients with autism.

Danforth and Grob began their pilot study in March of 2014 with cautious optimism. As of July 2017, they have prescribed MDMA and psychotherapy for 12 adults with autism and comorbid social anxiety. They are currently preparing these results for publication, which will help determine whether more clinical trials will follow.

Both doctors are quick to point out that this treatment would not be a cure for autism. However, if taking MDMA in the presence of a trained psychotherapist helps alleviate the social phobias so often found in combination with autism, the treatment could improve the lives of millions of people across the United States. Of course, even if their results show dramatic improvements for the patients, convincing the public that there are medical benefits to a Schedule I illegal drug often featured negatively in the news would present an entirely separate challenge.

Peer commentary

Gregory Logan-Graf: This is very interesting and I hope that it can be an effective therapy for individuals on the autism spectrum. But before I get too excited, I’m reminding myself that the drug approval process is notoriously long, and most drugs don’t make it through clinical trials, because they are found to be ineffective or harmful under controlled settings. Not to mention the policy changes that would be required to get an illegal drug with such a negative stigma on the market. I’d be surprised to see it at the drug store anytime soon. But if it is found to be effective, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that politics don’t get in the way of its approval and future use.

Daniel Bear: This is a balanced, cautiously optimistic take on an issue that lots of people feel strongly about. That’s what we need more of in the world![image error]

One thing that might help people accept the idea of using schedule I drugs therapeutically is to point out that many (most?) of the pharmaceuticals we use today were originally developed for another purpose. The history of why certain drugs are illegal can be illuminating, too – and often shows that it has little to do with danger and everything to do with politics.

Silicon Valley’s $300M donation to STEM education is not what it seems

Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: AP/Manu Fernadez)

Many educators cheered the news, announced earlier this week, that a consortium of tech firms had pledged a collective $300 million towards bettering STEM education in the United States. A New York Times article on their donation spoke of it in glowing terms — a trade group executive described its potential to advance “opportunity,” while Ivanka Trump called STEM skills “foundational.” The positive press about a charitable gift is probably not too surprising. Most of us have a gut reaction to the word “charity.” It implies goodwill, and a philanthropic spirit. Because of this cultural understanding of charitable giving as “pure,” giving is generally tax-deductible.

Yet, as with any monetary relationship, charity is a form of control. It also teaches an idea about the way the world works — about what kinds of things are important to fund and what aren’t, about how social change happens, and about who is responsible for “fixing” the world’s problems. Charity’s answer to that last question, usually, is “the rich.”

While philanthropy is near-universally thought of as a “good” thing, a society that ran its social welfare state solely through charity would be a nightmare. The problem is that because the rich are interested in advancing their agendas, they generally only donate to prospects that fund those agendas. Learning the arts or the humanities, or learning to be a critical thinker, are useless — perhaps even harmful — skills to creating supple, pliant, obedient employees for the world’s corporations. (That is a big reason why you rarely hear of any corporations donating vast sums to education in those money-poor disciplines.)

When we let donors dictate which educational programs are well-funded and which aren’t, we cede control of our values and our minds to the whims of the wealthy. We, in effect, become their subordinates. We lose the collective value of democratic control, of living in a world in which all of us— not merely corporate donors and the foundations they fund — have a say as to how education function and how society operates.

But perhaps you are a centrist or a conservative who does not take issue with the anti-democratic maxim that we must leave rich technocrats to oil the gears of progress. Even if you think that the rich deserve the power that comes with their wealth — and that the rest of us poors should have no say in how our lives go — this STEM education gift should still alarm you. That’s because these tech companies don’t really care about your children, or their education. They just want to pay lower wages to future engineers.

Because there is an ongoing shortage of STEM skills, those professions’ wages are comparably quite high. Glassdoor, a job and recruiting site that tracks wages for different professions, pegs the average salary for a Bay Area software engineer to be over $124,000.  The comparatively high salaries of middle-management tech workers has fueled the income inequality of the Bay Area and driven gentrification, both here and in other cities with big tech sectors like New York. And while the tech companies often seem proud of their hand in fueling an unequally distributed economic boom in the Bay Area, they are also desperate to end that, by paying their workers less if possible — ideally, much, much less.

This is a general maxim for any capitalist enterprise: in order to maximize profits, one wants to pay one’s employees as little as possible, and get the most labor out of them. The latter half of that equation the tech sector has down pat: by making their workplaces “fun,” full of amenities like ping-pong, snacks, gourmet meals, showers, massage rooms and commuter shuttles, employees are encouraged to spend as much time as possible at work. The tech companies know that their investment in these oft-parodied amenities pays off in terms of increased productivity. It also inspires a certain reverence for one’s employer, which articulates itself in the social sphere, as many techies literally see themselves as forming a distinct culture and interest group (and sometimes, ironically, believe they are oppressed).

But the first part of that corporate maxim — to pay one’s employees less — ay, there’s the rub. For as long as programming and engineering skills are in high demand, wages will be high for those professions. What is to be done to drive them down?

Over the past decade, Silicon Valley companies did find one creative solution to this problem, albeit a blatantly illegal one: colluding to drive down wages, and not poach each other’s employees. In case you forgot about this quickly-buried scandal, here’s a primer: an antitrust investigation in 2010 revealed that Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar and other large tech firms colluded to pay 100,000 of their employees far less than they were worth. These companies stole a collective $9 billion in wages from programmers. Interestingly, the much-lauded $300 million gift for STEM education represents a sum of one-thirtieth the amount of money stolen from employees through this collusion.

Even though the gig is up, tech companies are certainly still interested in paying their employees less — but through legal means. One potential solution to this is to make STEM skills as commonplace as possible, as normal as learning addition and subtraction, so that software engineering is not a difficult skill to find — and hence, not as valuable.

Just as the corporate investment in employee amenities pays off in terms of productivity and loyalty, this $300 million donation to STEM education will eventually pay off in the form of lower wages for programmers and engineers. It’s a very long game, true. But to think of this $300 million charitable donation as somehow pure of heart, or a “gift” of some sort, is mistaken. Eventually, the tech industry will reap the rewards, and the profits.

Grammy winner Dan Wilson plays his ’90s hit “Closing Time”

(Credit: Peter Cooper)

“I’ve worked with a lot of really brilliant people,” Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum songwriter Dan Wilson said on “Salon Stage.” “Some of those really brilliant people are extremely well-known — famous people. But some of the really brilliant people I’ve worked with, not a lot of people have heard of. Music is a real equalizer among people; if you have an ability and a vibe, that comes through in your music, you can almost collaborate with anybody.”

Wilson has authored songs with some of the music industry’s giants: Adele, Nas, Taylor Swift, John Legend, Weezer, Dixie Chicks. There are many others. But on Wilson’s new album “Recovered,” he reimagines songs from various points in his career — songs he wrote for himself while in the rock band Semisonic and songs he penned for others. On “Salon Stage,” he performed the album’s final track: “Closing Time.”

“I love the lyrics of ‘Closing Time,'” Wilson said, “and I like that line ‘every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,’ and I don’t know where that came from. In fact, none of the things that I really like in my songs — I usually can’t place where they come from. Some of the lines that I like best about my songs are the lines that my collaborators wrote.”

As an artist and songwriter, Wilson deeply values collaboration, at least when it’s mutual. “If I’m going to collaborate with someone to write a song, I want them to already have written a great song without me,” he said. “Not to feel like oh, they need me to make a great song, more like we can come together as two people that have already done good work and make something really great, because we can put those talents together.”

Watch Wilson’s  full “Salon Stage” set 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.

“Soy Nero”: Battling terrorists and cops in a war film where victory is a Green Card

Johnny Ortiz in "Soy Nero"

“Soy Nero,” directed and co-written by Iranian-born filmmaker Rafi Pitts, depicts Nero (Johnny Ortiz), a “Green Card” soldier (a non-citizen who serves in the military to fast-track citizenship). According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website, since Oct. 1, 2001, USCIS has naturalized 109,321 members of the military through Fiscal Year 2015.

Pitts’ film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2016, is getting a release now — rather timely given President Trump’s recent decisions about DACA. In the opening scenes of this absorbing drama, Nero is caught trying to cross into America. Questioned by border patrolmen, he explains that he is 17 and grew up in Los Angeles. He says his family was evicted and deported. The officers do not believe him and he is returned to Mexico.

Nero, however, is determined to cross back into the United States to take advantage of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors). He decides to sneak back in to America and enlist in the military to gain access to citizenship.

The first half of “Soy Nero” charts Nero’s journey to and in America. There is a poetic scene of Nero playing volleyball over the U.S.-Mexican border wall. Successfully crossing into the U.S., he hitches a ride with Seymour (Michael Harney), who gives him an unfiltered perspective about boundaries. Nero seeks out his brother, Jesus (Ian Casselberry), who is living in a posh Beverly Hills mansion — the embodiment of the American Dream. However, Nero is stopped and harassed by the cops in his brother’s neighborhood.

The second half of the film is set in the Middle East, where Nero, now a soldier, has adopted his brother’s name. On patrol with Bronx (Aml Ameen) and Compton (Darrell Britt-Gibson), he and his squad make it back to safety after an ambush.

Wisely, “Soy Nero” does not show the process of becoming a Green Card soldier. Instead, Pitts uses Nero’s observations and experiences to draw parallels about identity and citizenship and how these individuals are treated.

The filmmaker chatted via Skype with Salon about “Soy Nero.”

You were born in Iran, educated in England and now live in Los Angeles. Can you discuss your thoughts on citizenship and identity —  key themes in the film?

It’s ironic, but I have an Iranian mother, an English father and a French stepfather. The French think I come from England, and the English think I come from Iran. It’s fascinating that these people close to me think I come from one country.

As a filmmaker, I make films I relate to, so I can understand myself and the behavior of others. The world is becoming more radical in its extremes and in its simplification of who people are. When you make a film about immigration, America is the best country because everyone is represented from all over the world. You have your personal story, but the cinema is bigger. You want to talk to the world and to people in the larger sense, so you have to go beyond yourself. You start from the heart and work your way out.

What prompted you to make a film about the Green Card Soldier? 

I wrote this story pre-Trump. I wanted to find an extreme angle. I was familiar with the wall in Tijuana. There is a wall that Bush, after 9/11, wanted constructed along the border. What is Trump going to do with the current wall? What I find fascinating is that these walls are symbolic borders in people’s heads. Being in a democratic country, like America — a country that depends on Latinos for its economy — that is as obscene as you can get.

There have been documentaries about immigrating to the U.S., so I wanted to find something that I could relate to further. I researched and came across the Green Card solider. This story hasn’t been told. I met Green Card soldiers in Tijuana who talked about being deported. They were shattered, as they believe themselves to be American, and they are rejected by Mexico for serving the U.S.

You dedicated the film to all the deported soldiers who served America. Can you talk statistics?

My source is the Green Card soldiers themselves. They say there have been 100,000 Green Card soldiers, and 8,000 have been deported over time, since [the] Vietnam War until today. Ironically, if you die [in service], you become a U.S. citizen. These soldiers are not just deported randomly. They don’t think of filing citizenship papers. If they don’t apply immediately for citizenship and do something wrong, like getting a DUI, they are deported.

The person fighting most on their behalf is Senator John McCain, R-Ariz. The supporters, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, want to bring these deported Green Card soldiers back. They feel that if they serve in the Army for two years, they should be considered Americans. Some feel if they committed a crime, [they] should serve their time. Others say if you have committed a crime, they should be deported. No one seems to agree, because the number of the deported soldiers isn’t high enough.

The film is certainly timely now with the Dreamers and DACA in the news, but your film is more allegorical than political or procedural. Can you discuss your approach to the topic?

A Green Card soldier is important, since America is a country of immigrants. Addressing immigration and identity and how humans behave, you are addressing the world. It concerns not just America, but Europe. They simplify their politics and blame immigrants for what’s wrong with their country. For me, the film concerns Europe as much as America.

Why does Nero want to be a citizen of a country that treats him so badly?

You’d think that. The Cartels in Tijuana want these [returned] soldiers because they are trained military. If the soldiers refuse, their lives are in danger. They want to come home because they feel America is their home. I find it fascinating that people become soldiers, whether they are immigrants or not. Why would anyone want to be a soldier? The idea of killing is already a question mark to me. They are Dreamers, and 19, and believe they can be heroes.

What is happening to a young man with a machine gun in the desert? My goal as a filmmaker is to ask questions, or hold up a mirror on society and tell me what you think. I don’t have the answers. What audiences see and feel is important to me. They may understand it better than I do. Why does a young man or woman get to a point in their life, that in order to be loved, they join the Army and fight to prove they are part of that flag?

What can you say about the role of police or authority figures in the film? Nero is often made to feel powerless.



The police are as close as I can get to authority, the governing body. The average man on the street sees the police as a representation of the country. I’ve always been concerned by the average guy on the street and how powerless an individual is when faced with authority and how little authority cares about that individual. I’ve always had a problem with authority. I think the governing body doesn’t look at the single average man on the street. They don’t like the marginal. I make films to defend the guy who is in the margin, the one the system doesn’t allow in. Not being part of any single country, I relate to the marginal guy.

How did you develop the film’s tension and sense of danger? The scenes in America were as intense as the ones in the Middle East.

The idea of danger is the red line, the thread of the film. It’s the point of view of this man in constant danger of the rejection of his life. When I use wide-angle shots, I show he’s free. All the rest of the film is boxing him in — subconsciously making the audience feel that there is no escape from the situation he’s in.

That’s the danger Nero’s living in: He can’t be. He assumes his brother’s name. Seymour can’t be. His brother can’t be either. The two soldiers, Bronx and Compton can’t be themselves. The sergeant [Rory Cochrane] is suicidal and disillusioned. I talk about the others through the story of this immigrant. Do we have the right to be ourselves in the world that we’re given? That’s what makes one feel the danger. That’s the first right any human should have: just to be.

In the event that Trump would see this film, what do you want him to take away from it?

I don’t think would Trump would care for this film or have the attention for it. But I’d like Trump supporters to see the film. If they knew immigrants fought for this country, they might look at them differently. That could create a debate that helps things move forward. I don’t judge them; I just think they are misinformed. I’d love them to see the film and hear what they think about Green Card soldiers.

Does “American Made” really glorify drug smuggling and weapons dealing?

Tom Cruise as Barry Seal in "American Made" (Credit: Universal Pictures)

In “American Made,” the new run-and-gun Barry Seal biopic from Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Edge of Tomorrow”), Tom Cruise plays Seal, the real-life commercial pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medellin cartel and then an undercover operative under the Reagan administration.

Seal was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Cruise plays him with the sort of Southern accent that sounds like someone who’s not from the South speaking in a Southern accent. And that’s about as far as Cruise sinks into the role. He doesn’t gain weight to imitate Seal’s paunch. Nor does he push his impressive hairline back so that it resembles Seal’s. Even his wardrobe is barely period attire: He wears dark timeless jeans and washed button-downs that are vaguely cowboyish in their cut and wrinkle. He might even have borrowed a few shirts from his character in “Knight and Day.”

The performance is unconvincing, but that seems intentional. This is Tom Cruise as Barry Seal as Tom Cruise. You know, the action hero who was donning aviators, bedding bombshells and shooting down bad guys on screen during the actual Iran-Contra affair? The guy with the million-dollar grin, intrepid eyes and maniacal commitment to honing his characters’ skillsets? All the Cruisiness that audiences have come to expect is baked into Cruise’s Barry Seal and captured in intimate bursts by Liman’s frenetic handheld camera.

Liman shoots the movie in the style of an old music video, with lots of jump cuts, colorful text and constant motion. There’s even some “Schoolhouse Rock”-type animation. Interstitched is Seal in the future, recording his story on a batch of grainy homemade VHS tapes. The rest could be the way Seal remembers it: in bursts and flashes.   

Between Cruise’s performance and the boom-bam-yeehaw style and tone, what all transpires is made to look as cool as a pair of aviators on Tom Cruise’s age-defying face. And what all transpires is a whole lot of speedy airplane flying, inventive cocaine smuggling, shady weapons supplying and careless money laundering.

Does Liman glorify those things? On the surface, sure, but it’s not that simple.

From takeoff, the story is in heavy turbulence. “American Made” begins with Seal, bored by flying commercial planes, opting out of the job’s comfort and security for a hazy, unsanctioned adventure with the CIA. As he’ll reflect in one of the homemade tapes, he probably didn’t give it enough consideration. That’s how this adventure goes. One foot in front of the other, gut, wallet and dick guiding the way.

Seal’s lack of forethought foreshadows an unhappy ending. As does history. But “American Made” is “Goodfellas” or “Casino” without the long, dark third act. You know the figurative plane’s going down, but when it does, it just nosedives; the ride’s all over before you can pull your oxygen mask down and really struggle for air.

The way Liman condenses a seven-year period into 115 minutes is clever. The movie is bookended by two era-defining American political moments — Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech and the Iran-Contra scandal — and Seal’s trajectory is framed reflecting that of the country. As voters are rejecting President Carter’s condemnation of excess and electing the country’s first movie star president, Seal is rejecting stability and modest, legal living in favor of bags full of cash and a movie star lifestyle. The film, with its tight shots and loose footing, has the feel of a highlight reel labeled “The Good Old Days.”

That the good old days come to an abrupt, blazing end doesn’t make them any less glorious to relive. It’s always the come-up that sticks. Which helps to explain characters like Seal and government operations like Iran-Contra. Everyone wants to imagine themselves as Tom Cruise. That’s the American way.

Tom Price resigns over private jet scandal — but Trump’s golf trips cost taxpayers far more

(Credit: AP/Patrick Semansky)

Tom Price, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, was forced to resign on Friday after an investigation by Politico revealed that he had spent more than $1 million in taxpayer funds for travel expenses since May.

“I will tell you personally, I’m not happy about it. I am not happy about it. I’m going to look at it. I let him know it,” Trump said when he was asked about the controversy.

While Trump is purportedly upset about Price’s expensive travel plans, he has expressed no concern about the great cost that his own trips to his golf resorts have cost taxpayers.

Since logistical information about presidential travel is not usually released to the public, there is no official record of how much Trump’s many visits to his Mar-a-Lago and other clubs. According to a government report about a 2013 golf trip by former President Barack Obama, the cost of each commander-in-chief golfing expedition is about $3.6 million. The current administration has received a formal request to divulge details on expenditures of each of Trump’s trips but thus far, it does not appear to have been answered.

Back when he was a private citizen, Trump and many Republicans repeatedly criticized then-president Barack Obama for wasting public money on his golfing habit.

In 2014, he attacked Obama for making the government pay for a fundraising trip during which the president also hit the links: “We pay for Obama’s travel so he can fundraise millions so Democrats can run on lies. Then we pay for his golf.”

The habitual vacationer, @BarackObama, is now in Hawaii. This vacation is costing taxpayers $4 milion +++ while there is 20% unemployment.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2011

Despite his criticism of Obama, however, Trump has been a more avid golfer since he took office, hitting the links at least 36 times as of this week compared to the 21 times that Obama had by this time in his term.

According to the website Trump Golf Count, the president has traveled to his courses at least 60 times since his inauguration . Assuming each trip costs $3 million each, this means that U.S. taxpayers have spent $180 million indulging Trump’s desire to visit his golf properties. The $1 million spent by Price pales in comparison.

The cost of the president’s frequent traveling to his golf courses has become so enormous that it is literally making the Secret Service go broke trying to pay agents to protect him, USA Today reported in August. The protective service is also having trouble retaining agents due to the large amounts of overtime they are forced to work because of the trips.

By what standard are Tom Price’s trips unacceptably expensive while Donald Trump’s are perfectly permissible?

Trump knows his tax plan is already in trouble

Mitch McConnell; Donald Trump; Paul Ryan (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon/Reuters/Rick Wilking/AP/J. Scott Applewhite/Photo montage by Salon)

The tax framework that the White House and Republicans in Congress have crafted over several months of private negotiations has already come under heavy criticism from multiple directions, greatly reducing the chance that the GOP will be able to create a large tax code rewrite and instead have to settle for something less ambitious.

Making sweeping changes to the federal tax code has proven extremely difficult for elected officials, primarily because eliminating various deductions invariably provokes anger from people and groups who benefit from them. The last time lawmakers were able to pull it off was in 1986 under then-president Ronald Reagan.

To make things easier for themselves, Republicans appear to have decided to mostly make their reform effort a strictly partisan affair. They also have deliberately left out some of the details about the legislation, particularly the areas where taxes will be increased.

One of the most politically risky aspects of the GOP proposal — raising the bottom tax rate from 10 percent to 12 percent in an effort to offset the larger standard deduction — is making President Donald Trump worry, according to a report from Axios writer Jonathan Swan. In response to rumors that the president might not be fully committed to the plan, Republicans are now fearing a repeat of what happened on health care repeal when Trump called the bill which the House passed “mean,” potentially harming the Senate GOP’s efforts to pass a measure of their own.

Many people have already registered opposition to Republicans’ plan, including residents of expensive, high-tax states like California and New York who would be harmed by a provision which makes it so that state and local taxes cannot be deducted from federal income tax liabilities.

Kevin de León, the Democratic leader in California’s senate, accused Trump and the GOP of deliberately trying to harm his state.

“Republicans in Washington have once again zeroed in on California to punish us and make our state the single biggest loser in their reckless tax scheme,” he said, referring to provisions in the final, failed GOP health care bill which would have taken some money from the mostly Democratic states which had expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act  and given it to the Republican-leaning states which had not.

The tax code revision has also come under attack from people affiliated with the housing industry who have argued that a provision which expands the standard amount that taxpayers can deduct will lead to fewer people purchasing houses. While the plan explicitly calls for keeping the existing mortgage interest deduction, real estate agent groups say they fear it will make filers less interested in explicitly claiming a mortgage deduction.

“We have always said that tax reform — a worthy endeavor — should first do no harm to homeowners,” William E. Brown, president of the National Association of Realtors, said in a statement.

Gary Cohn, the administration’s top economic adviser, strongly disputed that the proposed revision would discourage home purchases in a Thursday news conference.

“People don’t buy homes because of the mortgage deduction,” he said. “The No. 1 reason why people buy homes is they’re excited and optimistic about the economy.”

The GOP plan has also come under fire from some business lobbyists who argue that one of its provisions which would prohibit corporations from deducting interest on loans would discourage investment. That tax increase is designed to offset another provision of the bill which lowers the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.

While the administration is marketing this combination as a way to make the tax code simpler and more fair for smaller businesses who cannot afford to hire large teams of accountants to find loopholes, another provision of the code which lowers the tax rate for limited liability companies is likely to lead to even greater benefits for extremely wealthy businesses since they can restructure themselves to be taxed at the lower rate for LLCs.

“There has always been talk of how to carve out ‘good’ pass-through income from ‘bad’ pass-through income,” Seth Hanlon, a tax research fellow at the Center for American Progress, told CNBC. “The problem is it’s exceedingly hard to do and there is no way to draw clear lines that won’t be manipulated.”

That provision is one of several that left-leaning and centrist groups have said will disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans. According to an analysis from the Tax Policy Center, nearly 80 percent of the tax cuts contained in the Republican proposal would go to the top 1 percent of income earners.

The killer chart: the top 1% would get 79.7% of all the tax cuts under the Trump plan. The top *0.1%* would get 39.6%. pic.twitter.com/Ed93TGZ6jh

— Matt O’Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) September 29, 2017

Further complicating the GOP’s plans is the reality that making a large tax cut that primarily benefits wealthier people is unpopular, even among people who vote for Republicans.

All of the criticisms against the many pieces of the tax reform plan (which will only increase as the GOP starts to formally debate what increases it will push to make the legislation revenue neutral) may mean that the administration and Congress will have to abandon plans to make permanent changes and instead push a smaller proposal which would automatically expire after 10 years.

That’s exactly what happened to a 2014 proposal by then-Rep. Dave Camp, a Republican tax expert who proposed his own tax reform idea which never went anywhere. Former president George W. Bush also had to resort to a smaller measure shortly after he came into office in 2001.

Another one bites the dust: Tom Price booted as HHS secretary

Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price arrive on Capitol Hill, March 21, 2017. (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Another Friday in the Trump era, another Friday evening news dump.

Just before 5 pm on the East Coast, The White House got ahead of Donald Trump’s weekend tweets to announce that Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned his Cabinet post.

“Price offered his resignation earlier today and the President accepted,” a statement from Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders read.

Price, a former conservative congressman from Georgia, not only failed to shepherd Republicans third attempt to repeal Obamacare through Congress this week, it was revealed that his travel practices cost taxpayers a reported $1 million since May.

“He’s a very fine man, but we’re going to make a decision sometime tonight,” the president told reporters before boarding Marine One at the White House on Friday afternoon. Price was booted less than one hour later.

Republicans spent millions to hold Price’s congressional seat against an upstart Democratic challenger, only to see the fiscal conservative fail at his one job and then resign in scandal.

Price — a longtime critic of wasteful federal spending — was caught using private jets to attend business meetings while making more extravagant endeavors, including a trip to a property he owns on an island to eat lunch with his son and wife. Politico also reported this week that he took military aircraft for official trips to Africa, Europe and Asia, costing taxpayers more than $500,000.

Price is hardly the only member of Trump’s Cabinet to come under scrutiny for their travel habits:

The Washington Post on Friday reported that Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin attended a Wimbledon tennis match, toured Westminster Abbey and took a cruise on the Thames this summer during a 10-day trip to discuss veterans’ health issues in Britain and Denmark.

Shulkin, who traveled on a commercial airline, was accompanied on the trip by his wife, whose airfare was paid for by the government and who received a per diem for meals, the Post said, noting that the Department of Veterans Affairs said she was traveling on “approved invitational orders.”

His six-person traveling party included an acting undersecretary of health and her husband as well as two aides. They were accompanied by a security detail of as many as six people, the Post said.

The trip came less than two weeks after Shulkin signed a memo instructing top VA staff to determine whether employee travel in their organization was essential, the Post said. His predecessor took no foreign work trips, the newspaper said, citing an anonymous former VA official.

After coming under bipartisan criticism, Price initially agreed to repay only for the cost of his own seat, only about $51,887.31.

“The taxpayers won’t pay a dime for my seat on those planes,” Price pledged before he was fired on Friday.

An investigation was launched into Price’s actions by HHS’s inspector general late last week.

The White House said in a statement that President Trump intends to tap Don Wright to serve as acting secretary. Wright currently serves as deputy assistant secretary for Health and director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

Since the president took office in January, he has seen the departure of his FBI director, White House chief of staff, press secretary, communications director (x2), national security adviser and chief strategist.