Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 294

People who trip on psychedelics are more likely to be environmentally conscious

(Credit: agsandrew via Shutterstock)

A common refrain of people emerging from hallucinatory highs, whether LSD, mescaline or peyote, is that consciousness-altering psychedelic drugs can make one more attuned to the natural world. But does that psychedelicized sense of the connectedness of all things persist once the high has faded?

A recent study from the Journal of Psychopharmacology suggests it does. In the study, psychologists from Yale University and the University of Innsbruck asked 1,487 about their psychedelic experiences and their self-reported environmentalist behaviors and affiliation for things “green.” The researchers also sought to identify common personality traits associated with drug use or relating to nature, such as openness to experience, conscientiousness and conservatism.

The researchers found that people who had used psychedelic drugs reported more environmentally friendly behaviors, such as recycling and reducing their carbon footprint. Many also reported a greater sense of oneness with nature. They also found that the more psychedelics used, the greater the sense of connectedness, and the greater the reported pro-environmental activities.

“The more people had experience with classic psychedelics, the more they enjoyed spending time in nature, and the more they construed their self as being a part of nature,” the study authors wrote.

The study reports only a correlation between psychedelic use and respect for the environment, leaving open the question of causation. It could be that people who are strongly environmentally conscious are more open to using drugs. But the researchers don’t think so. They reported that the association is only reported with psychedelics, not other drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, or other illegal substances. And they hinted that “there is strong reason to believe that psychedelic substances increase nature relatedness as a function of their ego-dissolving effects.”

Naturally, the researchers found a need for more studies about the role of psychedelics in nature-relatedness and pro-environmental behavior, for the sake of both humans and the earth.

“Identifying factors that contribute to this process is therefore an important scientific endeavor — for individual wellbeing as well as for our planet’s future,” the study concluded.

Comics captured U.S. ambivalence about the Vietnam War

(Credit: Associated Press)

In America’s imagination, the Vietnam War is not so much celebrated as it is assiduously contemplated. This inward-looking approach is reflected in films like “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now,” best-selling novels and popular memoirs that dwell on the psychological impact of the war.

Was the war worth the cost, human and otherwise? Was it a winnable war or doomed from the outset? What are its lessons and legacies?

These questions also underpin Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary, which premiered September 17. But many forget that before the Vietnam War ended as a Cold War quagmire, it began as a clear-eyed anti-communist endeavor.

As a child, I was always fascinated by comics; now, as a cultural studies scholar, I’ve been able to fuse this passion with an interest in war narratives. Comics – more than any medium – reflect the narrative trajectory of the war, and how the American public evolved from being generally supportive of the war to ambivalent about its purpose and prospects.

The voice of the people

Histories of war are often told through the major battles and the views of the generals and politicians in power.

American comics, on the other hand, tend to reflect the popular attitudes of the era in which they are produced. Due to serialization and mass production, they’re uniquely equipped to respond to changing dynamics and shifting politics.

During the Great Depression, Superman battled corrupt landlords. At the height of World War II, Captain America clashed with the fascist Red Skull. Tony Stark’s transformation into Iron Man occurred alongside the growth of the military industrial complex during the Cold War. And the diverse team of X-Men first appeared during the civil rights movement. These storylines reflect the shifting attitudes of regular people, the target audience of these comics.

More recent plots have included Tea Party rallies, failed peace missions in Iran and coming-out stories – all of which underscore the fact that comics continue to engage with current affairs and politics.

As modes of “modern memory,” comics – to quote French historian Pierre Nora – “confront us with the brutal realization of the difference of real memory…and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past.”

In other words, comics are a type of historical record; they’re a window into what people were thinking and how they were interpreting events – almost in real time.

From hawks to doves

The comics produced in the years during, after and leading up to the Vietnam War were no different.

The conflict, its soldiers and its returning veterans appear in mainstream comics franchises such as “The Amazing Spider Man,” “Iron Man,” “Punisher,” “Thor,” “The X-Men” and “Daredevil.” But the portrayal of soldiers – and the war – shifted considerably over the course of the conflict.

Prior to 1968 and the Tet Offensive, Marvel comics tended to feature pro-war plots that involved superhero battles involving U.S. compatriots and the South Vietnamese battling National Liberation Front operatives and Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces. These Manichean plots were reminiscent of World War II comics, wherein the “good guys” were clearly distinguished from their evil counterparts.

But as the anti-war protest movement started to gain momentum – and as public opinion about the conflict turned – the focus of such works shifted from heroic campaigns to traumatic aftermaths. More often than not, these included storylines about returning Vietnam War veterans, who struggled to return to civilian life, who were haunted by the horrors of conflict and who often lamented those “left behind” (namely their South Vietnamese allies).

Such transformations – superhero hawks becoming everyday doves – actually foreshadowed a common trauma trope in the Hollywood films that would be made about the war.

No ‘supermen’ in ‘The ‘Nam’

Marvel Comics’ “The ‘Nam” (1986-1993), written and edited by Vietnam War veterans Doug Murray and Larry Hama, reflects the medium’s ability to narrate the past while addressing the politics of the present. The plots, for example, balanced the early jingoism with a now familiar, post-conflict cynicism.

Each issue was chronological – spanning 1966 to 1972 – and told from the point of view of a soldier named Ed Marks.

As Hama wrote in the introduction to Volume One, “Every time a month went by in the real world, a month went by in the comic… It had to be about the guys on the ground who got jungle rot, malaria, and dysentery. It had to be about people, not ideas, and the people had to be real, not cardboard heroes or super-men.”

The ’Nam’s 84 issues placed historical events such as the Tet Offensive alongside personal stories involving “search and destroy” campaigns, conflicts with commanding officers and love affairs.

The ‘Nam’s initial success was critical and commercial: the inaugural December 1986 issue outsold a concurrent installment of the widely popular X-Men series.

While Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fund, questioned whether the war should be the subject of a comic book, Newsweek editor William Broyles praised the series, noting its “gritty reality.”

The most telling praise came from Bravo Organization, a notable Vietnam veterans’ group. The ‘Nam was recognized by the organization as the “best media portrayal of the Vietnam War,” beating out Oliver Stone’s “Platoon.”

As works of art, the Vietnam War comics are only one of many places the Vietnam War has been restaged, remembered and recollected. One of the war’s enduring legacies is the way it has inspired its veterans, its victims and its historians to try to piece together a portrait of what actually happened – an ongoing process that continues with Burns’ documentary. There has been no universal consensus, no final word.

As Pulitizer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote, “All wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

This article was updated on Sept. 21 to correct which forces Marvel characters fought in comics.

Cathy Schlund-Vials, Professor of English and Asian American Studies, University of Connecticut

 

“Transparent” returns with an opaque muddle of a new season

Jeffrey Tambor in "Transparent" (Credit: Amazon Studios)

Sometimes it’s helpful to remember that as viewers we only spend small chunks of time visiting with our favorite TV characters, relatively speaking. Depending on the type of series we’re following, these regular visits can repeat on a weekly basis for years on end and we’re happy to keep coming back. Part of this is because their characters maintain a core integrity regardless of where the plot takes them, and the writers believably evolve these figures without violating what we know about them.

“Transparent,” rolling out a new season to Amazon Prime members on Friday, is an uncommon half-hour concerned foremost with identity, specifically as that concept pertains to the individual members of the Pfefferman family.

Traveling with each on his or her various quests is moving experience in the show’s first three seasons. It can be irritating in varying degrees as well, but in general Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), her adult children Sarah (Amy Landecker), Josh (Jay Duplass) and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) and ex-wife Shelly (Judith Light) are consistently engrossing.

Their separate but frequently overlapping existential journeys are sparked by their parent’s late-in-life gender transition.  Previous sojourns found significance in each character’s evaluation of his or her life in light of Maura’s transition, eventually broadening the view to include glimpses into the family’s heritage to infer the hereditary nature of their underlying dissatisfaction.

Season 4 adds new pages to the Pfefferman’s history but feels muddled and confused in comparison to past episodes. The first season is an intimate look at Maura’s transition, while the second tenderly walks us through the fallout resulting from her shedding of her male self. It’s relatively easy to characterize season 3 as a concisely examination of the meaning of contentment and disillusion, but the fourth flooding the series with so many developments that fail to find emotional purchase that its tough to get a handle on what it’s attempting to tell us.

These latest 10 episodes of “Transparent” bombard us with dissonance as opposed to augmenting the plot dramatic profundity. Shelly’s narcissism takes on the blaring honk of a Southerly migrating goose; Josh and Sarah struggle mightily with the direction their lives have taken; Maura further settles into life as a transgender woman; and Ali is still defining who she is.

We know these people, in other words. We’re familiar with them enough for their various personality quirks to trouble our nerves — and the writers not only seem aware of this feeling, they sharply poke at it.

In an early scene during the premiere (written by Faith Soloway and directed by “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway) the Pfeffermans’ weekly family meal descends into a monsoon of loud chatter as everyone talks over each other. All the while Ali slowly recedes into her grandmother’s crocheted blanket in a failed attempt to block out the room and the scattered anxiety inside her skull.

This is in line with Ali’s reflex to lose interest in the status quo, but it also mirrors the nagging sensation a viewer may feel while watching the scene unfold. Much of the new season feels like this, but not in a good way.

The fourth season is a cacophonous tangle of the familiar narratives of “Transparent,” diluted by the clan’s trip to Israel. That vacation that coaxes forth out the truest versions, good and terrible, of each family member — travel has a knack of doing that. But the itinerary includes an overload of competing threads, obstacles and disclosures, a few of which come too late in the season for the viewer to fully appreciate their impact. But nothing in this pile of revelations leads to any place meaningful, psychologically speaking, not even to Shell and Back.

Visually “Transparent” increasingly evokes nostalgia, and this sepia-toned trip looks and feels more like a collection of old family movies than others. The central reason for their Israel trip explains this stylistic choice to some extent, but elsewhere the filter highlights the dinginess of other subplots.

As always the saving grace of “Transparent” is its performances. The entire cast is outstanding, but Tambor is the soul of this show. His arc as Maura is less central in season 4, and this may be part of the reason it feels like the poorer sibling of previous seasons. But this trains more focus on Hoffman’s Ali as she grows closer to Maura. Hoffman embraces a storyline that veers into indulgent territory but maintains a firm command of her character the entire time.

Season 4 crashes Duplass’ and Light’s stories together as Shelly moves in with Josh as he comes to terms with how he views and treats women, sexually and otherwise. Josh’s thread allows Duplass to showcase an emotional sincerity not as fully explored in previous seasons by forcing the character to face a pivotal turn in his history with sensitivity.

“Transparent” tends to use the insistent rigidity of Light’s character to provide comic relief or as an object of frustration for her children and ex-husband. This continues to be true this season, although the writers eventually enable her to find some redemption, though in a way that feels forced. Getting there can be grating, though, especially during Shelly’s side adventures involving her latest creative outlet, improv, indubitably the new season’s worst subplot.

Season 4’s shallowest dramatic gambit concerns Sarah and Len (Rob Huebel), who fall into a sexual arrangement with a woman played by Alia Shawkat. Shawkat is terrific, although the threesome’s tale is primarily notable for its steamy love scenes and an odd, mildly disturbing development that inspires Sarah to apply her S&M proclivities to another relationship dynamic in her life.

At its best, “Transparent” invites us to view the world through the prism of individual realization and one family’s increasingly fluid and shifting relationship to gender, to the value of a shared past, and to culture. Better seasons prioritize these devices over narrative explosions, and it’s unfortunate that its fourth time out emphasize the latter to the point of diminishing the show’s uniqueness.

The net result is a season that’s successful in parts but hangs together awkwardly as a whole. Previous visits to the Pfeffermans’ households are riveting and heartfelt even in less successful moments, but the new season’s get-together may be one you’ll be tempted to ghost.

Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere”: Your book club’s next big debate novel

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Credit: Penguin Press/Kevin Day Photography)

At a time when any book not involving dystopian futures struggles for public attention, author Celeste Ng has managed to release the most buzzed about novel of the fall, with a family drama set at the height of the Clinton era.

It’s not that Ng’s second novel, “Little Fires Everywhere,” doesn’t feel supremely timely. Set in Ng’s own childhood turf of Shaker Heights, Ohio, “Little Fires” tells the tale of Elena Richardson and her seemingly perfect family, her free spirited tenant Mia and teen daughter Pearl, and a controversial custody battle that divides the community. As the characters careen toward cataclysmic events, they’re swept up in debates about race, class and what it means to be a mother.

On the heels of praise from the likes of John Green and Reese Witherspoon, Salon spoke by phone to Ng during a break in her national book tour.

I’m going to admit I was embarrassingly far into the book before I realized that it does not take place in the present tense — like, “Wait a minute, they’re talking about Jerry Springer and they’re faxing things, and no one is looking at their phone.”

No one has their phone, that’s right, and they don’t go to the internet. They just call directory services to try and find out somebody’s address.

What made you want to set it in this different time period?

The first reason was that that was the era in which I lived in Shaker Heights. I grew up there in the ‘90s. I would have been [the same] age as Lexie, who is the oldest daughter in the Richardson family. That was an era that I knew that I could flash back to really well. I knew what you could have done, what you wouldn’t be available to do. I had all these details ready, and that was the Shaker Heights that I felt like I was portraying. I don’t live there now; I remember what I experienced when I was there.

The second reason is that I knew I was writing about characters who had a lot of secrets and who were trying to keep them from each other. I feel like that can be done now, but it’s really difficult. You have to work really hard to not have an internet presence. You have to work really hard to not be so interconnected with other people that you could just move away and never be heard from again.

I needed to set a book in a time period where the characters had that space to preserve some of their mystery and where people would have to work hard to find out somebody else’s past and somebody else’s secrets.

It seems also that this was a period where these issues around what it means to be someone’s mother and who really is a mother were at the forefront of legal battles.

The ’90s was an era in which those things were really coming to the front of the conversation. There was the Baby Jessica adoption case that happened in the early ’90s, where a mother had given up her baby to a couple and then wanted her back. The sympathy at that time was almost entirely with the adoptive parents, and the child was eventually returned to the birth parents. 

The ’90s was also a period when China opened up its orphanages to overseas adoptions. I feel like that was the first time that a lot of people were having to think about these things. That hadn’t really happened before. Surrogacy was only really starting to be a real possibility at that time. We were starting to think really hard about, who is a mother? What does it mean to be a mother? All that was starting to be the conversation.

One of the things I also really love about the book is that there are very few real villains in it.

I didn’t want there to be a villain. I didn’t want there to be a hero either. I didn’t want anybody to come out looking shiny.

My goal is that the reader would at least see how they got there, even if they didn’t agree to all they were doing. I have a school-age son, so we talk about the whole “good guys versus bad guys” concept. One of the things that we’ve been talking about is that bad guys don’t really think that they are bad guys; they usually think that they are the good guys. They think that they are trying to do the right thing. And I think that’s true of most of the people in the book. They really are trying to do the right thing; it’s just that they can’t see, because of their blind spots, how their actions are affecting other people.

Even the least sympathetic character in the book, you can see why she does the things she does and what her process is, and also what her damage is.

There’s a difference between humanizing someone, recognizing what they do, and excusing them. And I think in a lot of ways, understanding how people get to those extremes would hopefully allow us to prevent that from happening again.

I think about this, because I live in Boston, about the marathon bombing. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went to the public high school in Cambridge that is across the street from the coffee shop where I work a lot and next to the library, where I also work a lot. There was a backlash against the few teachers who said, “You know he was such a sweet kid in class, I remember really liking him.” They were still trying to work through reconciling what he did. And a lot of people said, “No, he’s a monster!” 

The thing is, if you say somebody is a monster, it’s not only bad because they lose their humanity, it’s also bad because you have no way to try and prevent other people from becoming “monsters,” right? He felt ostracized. He felt out of place. His brother felt out of place. Not to excuse it, but maybe that means that we need to try and make sure that people who are outsiders feel welcome in their communities, that they don’t want to take revenge. But I think we’re in an era when it’s becoming really hard, and I guess a lot of my work ends up being an argument for nuance and contradictory feelings.

You also bring out later in the book that it’s also important to understand that people who seem good in certain ways can do bad things.

That’s how it works, right? People have really good intentions, and it doesn’t prevent them from making bad decisions, knowing that. And it doesn’t prevent them from having blind spots.

One of the things I realized I was writing about in the book was the way that we often have really good intentions, and we have these principles, and we believe that we live by them — up until the moment when it makes us personally uncomfortable. A lot of times those principles go out the window. I’m really interested in that breaking point, because I feel like that’s the point at which people are deciding which road they’re going to go down, and it’s something that you need to think about.

Do you feel that the book is spurring a lot of debate and conversation? I can so easily picture book clubs talking about, “Well, what side would you have taken in this story?”

Yes. I hope that it will. I hope that it does spark those kinds of debates, because frankly, I think we need that now. . . . I feel like it’s really important to have those conversations, because otherwise it becomes a topic that we’re really scared to touch.

This is part of the problem with “I don’t see race,” which is what I really remember from when I was living in Shaker Heights. That was really how we — myself included — kind of thought about race. I think now we realize how not effective, but also, kind of, how harmful that is. Because it suggests that we should just ignore all of these experiences and all of the context in history that you really can’t.

On social media you talk so much about politics, and you talk about little things that we can do. Do you feel like we can use social media in a way that it isn’t just a total garbage fire?

I hope so. Maybe I am overly optimistic, I don’t know. I started talking about politics largely because I felt like I have that responsibility. I don’t know how I got all these Twitter followers, but since they are here, I feel like it is important for me to talk about something that is important.

I was very much raised in that attitude that you should be a service to your community, service to the world, that we are here to try and like make things better. If people are listening, then I want to talk about those things. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How to read Donald Trump

(Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

The organizers of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville last month knew just what they were doing when they decided to carry torches on their nocturnal march to protest the dethroning of a statue of Robert E. Lee. That brandishing of fire in the night was meant to evoke memories of terror, of past parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany.

The organizers wanted to issue a warning to those watching: that past violence, perpetrated in defense of the “blood and soil” of the white race, would once again be harnessed and deployed in Donald Trump’s America. Indeed, the very next day, that fatal August 12th, those nationalist fanatics unleashed an orgy of brutality that led to the deaths of three people and the injuring of many more.

Millions around America and the world were horrified and revolted by that parade of torches.  In my case, however, they also brought to mind deeply personal memories of other fires that had burned darkly so many decades before, far from the United States or Nazi Europe. As I watched footage of that rally, I couldn’t help remembering the bonfires that lit up my own country, Chile, in the aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s September 11th coup in 1973 — that “first 9/11,” which, with the active support of Washington and the CIA, had overthrown the popularly elected government of Salvador Allende.

The Chilean people had voted Allende in as their president three years earlier, launching an exceptional democratic experiment in peaceful social change. It would be an unprecedented attempt to build socialism through the ballot box, based on the promise that a revolution need not kill or silence its enemies in order to succeed. It was thrilling to be alive during the thousand days that Allende governed. In that brief period, a mobilized nation wrested control of its natural resources and telecommunication systems from multinational (primarily U.S.) corporations; large estates were redistributed to the peasants who had long farmed them in near servitude; and workers became the owners of the factories they labored in, while bank employees managed their nationalized institutions previously in the hands of rich conglomerates. 

As an entire country shook off the chains of yesteryear, intellectuals and artists were also challenged. We faced the task of finding the words for, the look of, a new reality. In that spirit, Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart and I wrote a booklet that we called “Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck).” It was meant to respond to a very practical need: the mass media stories Chileans had been consuming, that mentally colonized the way they lived and dreamed of their everyday circumstances, didn’t faintly match the extraordinary new situation in their country. Largely imported from the United States and available via outlets of every sort (comics, magazines, television, radio), they needed to be critiqued and the models and values they espoused, all the hidden messages of greed, domination, and prejudice they contained, exposed.

If there was a single company that embodied the overarching influence of the U.S. — not just in Chile but in so many other lands then known as the Third World — it was the Walt Disney Corporation. Today, in addition to the many amusement parks that bear its name, the Disney brand conjures up a panoply of Pixar princesses, avatars of cars and planes, and tales of teen-age angst and Caribbean piracy. But in Chile, in the early 1970s, Disney’s influence was epitomized by a flood of inexpensive comic books available at every newsstand. So Armand and I decided to focus on them and in particular on the character who then seemed to us the most symbolic and popular of the denizens of the Disney universe. What better way to expose the nature of American cultural imperialism than to unmask the most innocent and wholesome of Walt Disney’s characters, to show what authoritarian tenets a duck’s smiling face could smuggle into Third World hearts and minds?

We would soon discover what an attack on Disney would be met with — and it wasn’t smiles.

Roast Author, Not Duck

“Para Leer al Pato Donald,” published in Chile in 1971, quickly became a runaway bestseller. Less than two years later, however, it suffered the fate of the revolution and of the people who had sustained that revolution.

The military coup of 1973 led to savage repression against those who had dared to dream of an alternative existence: executions, torture, imprisonment, persecution, exile, and, yes, book burnings, too. Hundreds of thousands of volumes went up in flames.

Among them was our book. A few days after the neo-fascist takeover of Chile’s long-standing democracy, I was in hiding in a clandestine house when I happened to see a live TV transmission of a group of soldiers throwing books onto a pyre — and there was “Para Leer al Pato Donald.” I wasn’t entirely surprised by this inquisitorial blaze. The book had touched a nerve among Chilean right-wingers. Even in pre-coup times, I had barely avoided being run over by an irate motorist who shouted, “Viva el Pato Donald!” I was saved by a comrade from being beaten up by an anti-Semitic mob and the modest bungalow where my wife and I lived with our young son Rodrigo had been the object of protests.  The children of neighbors had held up placards denouncing my assault on their innocence, while their parents shattered our living-room windows with some well-placed rocks.

Seeing your own book being burned on television was, however, another matter. I had mistakenly assumed — an assumption I still find hard to dislodge, even in Donald Trump’s America — that after the infamous Nazi bonfires of May 1933 in which tons of volumes deemed subversive and “un-German” had been consigned to the flames, such acts would be considered too reprehensible to be done in public. Instead, four decades after those Nazi pyres, the Chilean military was broadcasting their fury and bigotry in the most flagrant way imaginable. And of course it brought home to me in an alarming fashion a simple fact of that moment: given the public fate of my book, the perpetrators would have no compunctions about acting with the same virulence against its author. The experience undoubtedly helped persuade me, a month later, to reluctantly accept orders from the underground Chilean resistance to leave the country to assist in the campaign against General Pinochet from abroad.

From exile, I would then witness how our country became a laboratory for the shock-therapy treatments of the Chicago boys, a group of economists mentored by Milton Friedman who were eager to apply the economic strategies of a brutal laissez-fare capitalism that would conquer England and the United States, too, in the Thatcher and Reagan eras.  They still, of course, reign supreme among conservatives everywhere, especially the plutocrats around Donald Trump. Indeed, many of the policies instituted and attitudes displayed in post-coup Chile would prove models for the Trump era: extreme nationalism, an absolute reverence for law and order, the savage deregulation of business and industry, callousness regarding worker safety, the opening of state lands to unfettered resource extraction and exploitation, the proliferation of charter schools, and the militarization of society. To all this must be added one more crucial trait: a raging anti-intellectualism and hatred of “elites” that, in the case of Chile in 1973, led to the burning of books like ours.

I carried into exile that image of our book in flames. We had intended to roast Disney and the Duck. Instead, like Chile itself, the book was consumed in a conflagration that seemed to know no end. That the military conspirators and their oligarchic civilian masters had been financed and aided by the American government and the CIA, that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had worked to destabilize and bring down the whole Allende experiment, only added a bitter scent of defeat to the suppression of our book (and so of our critique of their country and its ideology). We had been so sure that our words — and the marching workers who had stimulated them — were stronger than the empire and its acolytes.  Now, the empire had struck back and we were the ones being roasted.

And yet, though so many copies of “Para Leer al Pato Donald” were obliterated — the entire third edition of the book was thrown into Valparaíso Bay by Chilean navy sailors — as with the Nazis, as with the Inquisition, books are hard things to truly destroy.  Ours was, in fact, being translated and published abroad at the very moment it was being burned in Chile. As a result, Armand and I nursed the hope that even if “How to Read Donald Duck” could no longer circulate in the country that had given it birth, the version translated by art critic David Kunzle might, at least, penetrate the country that had birthed Walt Disney.

It soon became apparent, however, that Disney, too, was more powerful than we had anticipated. No publisher in the U.S. was willing to risk bringing our book out because we had reproduced — obviously without authorization — a series of images from Disney’s comics to prove our points and Walt’s company was (and still is) notorious for defending its copyright material and characters with an armada of lawyers and threats.

Indeed, thanks to the Disney Corporation, when 4,000 copies of “How to Read Donald Duck,” printed in London, were imported into the United States in July 1975, the whole shipment was impounded by the Treasury Department. The U.S. Customs Service’s Import Compliance Branch labeled the book an act of “piratical copying” and proceeded to “detain,” “seize,” and “hold [it] in custody” under the provisions of the Copyright Act (Title 17 U.S.C. 106).  The parties involved in the dispute were then invited to submit briefs regarding a final determination of the book’s fate.

The Center for Constitutional Rights took up our defense and, incredibly enough, under the leadership of Peter Weiss, beat the serried ranks of Disney barristers. On June 9th, 1976, Eleanor Suske, head of the Imports Compliance Board, wrote that “the books do not constitute piratical copies of any Walt Disney copyright recorded with Customs.” As philosopher John Shelton Lawrence pointed out in his account of the incident in “Fair Use and Free Inquiry,” there was, however, a catch to this “victory,” a “serious snag in the final determination of the Customs Department.” Alluding to an arcane law from the late nineteenth century as justification, it allowed only 1,500 copies of the book into the country. The rest of the shipment was prohibited, blocking many American readers from becoming acquainted with the text and turning the few copies that made it to these shores into collector’s items.

Duck, it’s another Donald!

More than four decades have since passed and only now, eerily enough in this Trumpian moment, is the text of “How To Read Donald Duck“ finally being published in the land of Disney.  It is part of a catalogue accompanying an exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.

I would hardly deny that, so many years later, I find satisfaction in the continuing life of a book once consigned to the flames, no less that its “birth” in this country is taking place not so far from Disneyland or, for that matter, from the grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery where the cremated remains of Walt himself lie. (No, he was not frozen cryogenically, as urban legend has it.) No less important to me, our scorched book has snuck into the United States at the very moment when its citizens, animated by the sort of nativism and xenophobia I remember from my own Chile when General Pinochet reigned, have elected to the presidency another Donald — albeit one more akin to Uncle Scrooge McDuck than his once well-known nephew — based on his vow to “build the wall” and “make America great again.” We are clearly in a moment when a yearning to regress to the supposedly uncomplicated, spotless, and innocent America of those Disney cartoons, the sort of America that Walt once imagined as eternal, fills Trump and so many of his followers with an inchoate nostalgia.

It intrigues me that our ideas, forged in the heat and hope of the Chilean revolution, have finally arrived here just as some Americans are picking up torches like the ones that once consumed our book, while millions of others are asking themselves about the conditions that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office where he could fan the flames of hatred. I wonder whether there’s anything those who are now my fellow citizens could learn from our ancient assessment of this country’s deep ideology. Can we today read a second Donald into “How to Read Donald Duck”?

Certainly, many of the values we impaled in that book — greed, ultra-competitiveness, the subjection of darker races, a deep-seated suspicion and derision of foreigners (Mexicans, Arabs, Asians), all enwreathed in a credo of unattainable happiness — animate many of Trump’s enthusiasts (and not merely them). But such targets are now the obvious ones. Perhaps more crucial today is the cardinal, still largely unexamined, all-American sin at the heart of those Disney comics: a belief in an essential American innocence, in the utter exceptionality, the ethical singularity and manifest destiny of the United States.

Back then, this meant (as it still largely does today) the inability of the country Walt was exporting in such a pristine state to recognize its own history. Bring to an end the erasure of, and recurring amnesia about, its past transgressions and violence (the enslavement of blacks, the extermination of natives, the massacres of striking workers, the persecution and deportation of aliens and rebels, all those imperial and military adventures, invasions, and annexations in foreign lands, and a never-ending complicity with dictatorships and autocracy globally), and the immaculate Disney worldview crumbles, opening space for quite another country to make an appearance.

Though we chose Walt Disney and his cartoons as our foil, this deep-seated belief in American innocence was hardly his property alone.  Consider, for instance, the recent decision by the generally admirable Ken Burns, that quintessential chronicler of the depths and surfaces of Americana, to launch his new documentary on the Vietnam War, a disastrous and near-genocidal intervention in a faraway land, by insisting that it “was begun in good faith by decent people” and was a “failure,” not a “defeat.”

Take that as just one small indication of how difficult it will be to get rid of the deeply ingrained idea that the United States, despite its flaws, is an unquestionable force for good in the world. Only an America that continues to bathe in this mythology of innocence, of a God-given exceptionalism and virtue destined to rule the Earth, could have produced a Trump victory.  Only a recognition of how malevolent and blinding that innocence is could begin to open the way to a fuller understanding of the causes of Trump’s ascendancy and his almost mesmerizing hold upon those now referred to as “his base.” My small hope: that our book, once reduced to ashes thanks to an anything-but-innocent CIA-backed coup, might in some small way participate in the renewal of America as its better angels search the mirror of history for the reasons that led to the current debacle.

There is, however, an aspect of “How to Read Donald Duck” that might offer a contribution of another sort to the quest upon which so many patriots in the United States are now embarked.  What stirs me as I reread that document of ours today is its tone — the insolence, outrage, and humor that flow through every page. It’s a book that makes fun of itself even as it mocks Donald, his nephews, and his pals.  It pushes the envelope of language and, behind its language, I can still hear the chants of a pueblo on the march.  It brings back to me the imaginative enormity that every true demand for radical change insists upon.  It catches a missing feeling of our age: the belief that alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives. “Para Leer Al Pato Donald” was and still is a celebration of such imaginative joy that was its own best reward and that could never be turned into ashes in Santiago or drowned in the bay of Valparaíso or anywhere else.

It is that joy in liberation, that alegría, that spirit of resistance that I would love to share with Americans via the book Pinochet’s soldiers could not liquidate or Disney’s lawyers ban from this country.  Now, it finally finds its way into the very land that invented both Donald Duck and Donald Trump.  At a terrible moment, I hope it’s a modest reminder that we really don’t have to leave this world as it was when we were born.  If I could, I might retitle it though.  What about: “How to Read Donald Trump”?

Even when sitting in storage, coal threatens human health

FILE - In this Jan. 9, 2014, file photo, rail cars are filled with coal and sprayed with a topper agent to suppress dust at Cloud Peak Energy's Antelope Mine north of Douglas, Wyo. President Trump's latest move to support coal mining is unlikely to turn around the industry's prospects immediately. Experts say the biggest problem faced by the mining industry today isn't a coal shortage of coal or even the prospect of climate change regulations, but an abundance of cheap natural gas. (Ryan Dorgan/Casper Star-Tribune via AP, File) (Credit: AP)

President Trump and his appointees have pledged to end what they call the “war on coal” – policies designed to reduce the health and environmental impacts from producing and burning coal, such as toxic air pollution and mine waste disposal in streams. But while it is true that coal production and use in the United States is subject to many long-standing regulations, they exist for good reason.

Burning coal generates air pollutants that cause thousands of premature deaths and hospitalizations every year. Coal mining, especially mountaintop mining, has been linked to increased exposure to toxic pollutants, increased morbidity and mortality, and adverse impacts on mental health for people living nearby.

In a recent study, Nicholas Muller and I uncovered a source of air pollution from coal that has not received much policy scrutiny: the storage and handling of coal piles. We found that wind blowing over uncovered coal piles at U.S. power plants plus gaseous emissions from the piles significantly increased concentrations of airborne fine particulates within 25 miles of these plants. Our findings suggest that this dimension of coal use should be regulated as well.

Pollution from shipping, handling and storage

For this study, we linked monthly data on the amount of coal stored on-site at each of 236 coal-fired power plants across the United States to measurements from nearby air quality monitors. These devices measure fine particulate pollution — termed PM2.5 because the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. To put this in perspective, PM2.5 particles are about 30 times thinner than a strand of hair. By linking changes in coal stockpiles to changes in PM2.5 at nearby monitors, we were able to estimate how much particulate matter is generated per ton of coal stored.

Coal stockpiles emit fine particulate pollution in several ways. First, wind blowing over uncovered coal stockpiles results in fugitive coal dust emissions that are a source of PM2.5. Second, coal stockpiles emit volatile gases that can also lead to formation of PM2.5. Finally, when coal is delivered to a power plant, it goes through a lot of handling, including unloading, separating “light dust” from the coal and crushing the coal to make it suitable for burning. These processes all generate fine particulates.

Coal is also stored on-site at mines and coal export terminals, and roughly 67 percent of it is delivered by train, typically in uncovered freight cars. Barges and trucks carrying coal are also typically uncovered. Though our analysis focused on areas around coal-fired power plants, people living near mines, rail lines or coal export terminals are also likely to experience increases in fine particulate pollution from coal storage and handling.

Coal dust blowing from a train in western Pennsylvania.

Major local impacts

Exposure to fine particulate pollution has been linked to increased deaths and illnesses due to cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. Economists often are asked to place a dollar value on this pollution-induced increase in mortality rates. To do this, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assigns a monetary value to a “statistical life.” The agency typically uses this “value of statistical life” approach to quantify the benefits of the environmental regulations that reduce local air pollution.

For example, in 1990, Congress amended the Clean Air Act to limit emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are major sources of fine particulates. The EPA estimates that these limits will prevent roughly 230,000 adult deaths due to fine particles just in the year 2020. Using a value of US$9.85 million per statistical life, this translates into $2.3 trillion in total benefits in 2020 just from reduced mortality from particles. Overall, EPA calculates that the total benefits from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments from 1990 through 2020 exceed the costs of complying with the law by a factor of more than 30 to 1.

Using this same approach, our findings indicate that in addition to the social costs of particulate pollution from burning coal, storage and handling creates PM2.5 pollution that generates additional local health costs of about $183 per ton of coal stored. For context, the average power plant pays roughly $48 per ton for coal, stores roughly 213,000 tons of coal on-site and receives deliveries of roughly 106,000 tons of coal per month.

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Gallatin Fossil Plant in central Tennessee burns about 13,000 tons of coal daily.

TVA

Communities push back

The coal industry is subject to many environmental regulations. There are laws and rules that address the impacts of current mining operations and abandoned mine sites; air pollution from coal combustion; and disposal of the ash left over after coal is burned.

In contrast, there is no federal legislation explicitly targeting fine particulate emissions from coal storage and handling. However, since this air pollution is quite local, cities and counties can take action to mitigate it instead of relying on state or federal policy.

For example, companies have been seeking permission to build coal export terminals on the Pacific coast for several years. In 2016, Oakland, California banned large-scale transportation of coal through its ports, due in part to concerns over the health impacts of coal dust. Local opponents blocked a proposed terminal in Bellingham, Washington, and are hotly contesting another in Longview.

A relatively low-cost solution would be to simply require railroad companies to cover train cars carrying coal and electricity generation companies to cover coal piles. I’ve heard three objections to this idea from industry:

Coal sitting in enclosed train cars may have a higher risk of combustion.
Covering train cars increases drag, which will slow trains down and increase fuel costs.
Operators would have to change the automated process by which coal is dumped into trains at mines, transported to power plants and handled at the plants.

However, based on the significant levels of local air pollution from coal storage and handling that we have documented in our study, we believe that policymakers should at least explore the costs and benefits of requiring coal piles to be covered. Opponents of the alleged war on coal often assert that environmental regulations harm the economically disadvantaged communities where coal production occurs. In this case, however, for the disproportionately poor and minority communities who live near coal-burning power plants, our view is that more regulation, rather than less, may be required.

Akshaya Jha, Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

Trump’s favorite prime minister

(Credit: AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

Irma, Houston, Russiagate, tax reform, and don’t forget North Korea. Big stories consuming our media landscape in a country both enthnocentric and myopic, even on the sleepiest news day. So I will keep this brief.

In 2014, after he and Najib Razak played a round of golf, Donald J. Trump gave a photo of himself to the Malaysian leader, inscribed, “To my favorite prime minister.” This is according to reporting by Mark Landler, in a New York Times article, “Trump Welcomes Najib Razak, the Malaysian Leader, as President, and owner of a Fine Hotel.”

Some of Najib’s qualifications for this designation may include his crackdown on journalists in Malaysia. It could be they share being investigated by the Justice Department. Or Najib’s firing of investigators in his home country looking into his behavior. Or maybe it is simply because Najib stays in Trump hotels on his travels abroad. Go figure.

The Justice Department believes Najib and his cronies diverted $3.5 billion of government funds to “buy jewelry, real estate and the rights to Hollywood films,” according to the Times. I guess we should consider it progress, since he was at least attempting to buy the rights to the films.

The White House avoided the traditional head-of-state photo-op hand shake with a rather stiff gathering captured by WH.gov.

Najib arrived with goodies, including his promise to purchase 25 Boeing 737s and eight 787 Dreamliners, and have one of Malaysia’s biggest pension funds invest up to $4 billion in OUR infrastructure. You gotta love that. Our own Congress won’t invest in infrastructure, but Trump’s authoritarian friends will.

Malaysia has been cozy with North Korea, but claims to have backed off. You may remember Kuala Lumpur International Airport as the site where North Korean agents poisoned Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un’s half brother. My favorite tidbit is this: Najib is running for re-election, and the fact that he was able to enter the United States — without being detained — was considered a victory. Hooray!

To be fair, President Obama played golf with Najib in 2014, but long before any Justice Department investigation. President Trump seems to relish in his embrace of leaders of a certain ilk and Najib fits that pattern. Now back to our regular programming.

Entire island of Puerto Rico loses power

The aftermath of Hurricane Maria, San Juan, Puerto Rico, September 20, 2017. (Credit: Getty/Hector Retamal)

As a category 4 hurricane battered Puerto Rico on Wednesday, residents suffered a total collapse of the electric grid as the island experienced major flooding and intense winds. Hurricane Maria struck the U.S. territory a mere two weeks since it had been grazed by Hurricane Irma, which Bloomberg estimated to have caused $1 billion worth of damage.

Hurricane Maria’s path over the island was more direct than Irma’s, however. “No generation has seen a hurricane like [Maria] since San Felipe II in 1928,” Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, said in a press release.

“When we can get outside — we will find our island destroyed,” Abner Gomez, the island’s emergency management director, was quoted as saying in the Washington Post.

In addition to the blackout, National Weather Service meteorologist Carlos Anselmi was quoted in the New York Times as saying that there had been “multiple reports . . .  of coastal flooding along the south, north and east of Puerto Rico.”

The governor of Puerto Rico instituted a curfew across the island from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., which was to last until Sunday, according to the Times.

Though the brunt of the intense winds have passed, the hurricane’s rain bands will continue to sweep over the island; an estimated two feet of rain is expected to drench the island between now and Friday, according to forecasters quoted in the New York Times. The storm had weakened prior to lashing Puerto Rico, but only slightly: Hurricane Maria was considered a category 5 storm only hours prior, when it made landfall at the U.S. Virgin Islands. By the time it hit Puerto Rico, it was a category 4, with wind speeds as high as 155 miles per hour.

How the one percent put the fix in at 30,000 feet

(Credit: Getty/Alexander Klein/Kubrak78)

How long has it been since you’ve seen some burled walnut? Not familiar with the stuff, you say? I guess it’s been quite a while then, hasn’t it. I don’t blame you. Used to be, you’d run across it fairly frequently — burled walnut on the dashboard on a Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special in the 50’s or 60’s, or maybe the Fleetwood Brougham in the 70’s or 80’s. Top-of-the-line Mercedes had some in their interiors, and of course there was so much burled walnut in a Rolls Royce or Bentley, it felt like being in the woods.

Expensive stuff, burled walnut. And very rare. Same with birdseye maple, which you’d also run across in high end cars back in the day. It turns out that a sugar maple or black walnut tree has to get sick to produce these rare hardwoods. A burl is a growth a tree forms when it’s injured or develops a fungus or virus. The burl surrounds the injured part to protect the rest of the tree. Birdseye patterns in maple wood are formed when a sugar maple grows too close to other trees. Trying to get sunlight, the shoots out buds which die off and form tiny knots in the wood. Cut in thin slices to form a veneer, the sunlight-deprived maple or walnut burls reveal uncommonly beautiful patterns in the wood — the kind of patterns that look good on the dashboards of expensive automobiles, and as it happens, on wall panels and table tops of private jets.

Hit Google and have a gander the interiors of these things. It’s the fucking 70’s up there on Gulfstreams and Falcons and Bombardiers and Cessnas. The seats look like something out of an Angelo Donghia showroom on Lexington Avenue, the sofas like the ones Liza Minelli and Halston lounged on at Studio 54 — all neutral colored overstuffed and pillowy — plop-things with arch-modern rounded ultra-comfy arms, and the side tables are polished burled walnut, natch. There’s the occasional flash of marble, and the indirect lighting! Yards and yards of overhead and under counter fixtures designed to — what’s the word? Yes! To flatter! To give you that 10 years younger glow, like you just stepped off your beach in St. Barts. Except your beach in St. Barts is three feet deep in roof tiles and sheets of tin and dead flipped-over SUV’s at the moment, awaiting clean up by the help. But you get what I mean.

You’re flying around up there 29,000 feet above the schmucks standing in the TSA line getting ready to jam themselves into a 17 inch wide upright coffin, and you’re looking and feeling like a million bucks, and man, you’ve made it! You’re among the privileged few who get to fly on one of the 12,000 or so private jets that scream in and out of places like Palm Beach and East Hampton and Santa Monica! You don’t wait in those security lines! You don’t take off your damn shoes and belt! You want to take your fuzzy little Yapso Apso on your lap? Great! You want to talk to your broker on your brand new I Phone quadruple X? Go right ahead! You want someone to call ahead and arrange for a foot massage in the backseat of your Mongo-stretcho blacked out bullet-proof Suburban when you touch down in Aspen? Done! Welcome aboard!

You’ve heard of the Friendly Skies? Meet the We’ve Got Ours So Fuck You Skies. It’s very, very exclusive up there. According to a recent story in Forbes, the average number of people on a private jet flight in this country is 4.12. Twelve percent of them decided to fly and made the booking on the same day. At the bottom end of the private jet cost structure is a typical flight on an Embraer jet seating four from Miami to the Bahamas for about $7,500. That’s four people traveling 181 miles taking less than 30 minutes for $1,875 each. An average long range private jet charter costs $76,500.

Who owns these things? Have a look at these figures from CNBC and take a big fat guess. Private jets can cost from $3 million to $90 million, although the Sultan of Brunei and guys like him have spent upwards of $230 million on an Airbus 340-12 decorated like Trump’s New York apartment in gold and precious stones. Down-to-earth ordinary multi-millionaires and billionaires can spend anywhere between $700,000 to $4 million to operate their own jets. That’s per-year, not over the life of the plane, which they usually trade in after four years and buy a brand new one.

But the zillionaires aren’t the only ones doing the high-flyin’ of course. The American political class has decided that they really can’t do with this plebeian TSA shoeless Joe shit and waiting for Rows 32 to 39 to be called for seating. Not today they can’t. See, our politicians could put up with standing in line and flying coach back when boring stuff like the Cold War was going on, and the United States and Russia were facing each other down with nuclear weapons over missiles in Cuba and we were sending 500,000 young men a year to “fight for freedom” in Vietnam, because they didn’t really have any pressing business. But today is different. There’s so much Really Important Shit going on in Washington D.C.! Our Congress can’t pass a bill renaming a post office in Peoria, but the political class can’t be kept waiting! They’re wanted back in their districts to, uh, well, er, ahhh, what is it they’re wanted for anyway? Oh, I remember now! To raise money so they can run for re-election and get back to Washington to sit around and wait for CNN or Fox to call so they can go on the TV and talk about how why they want to strip health insurance from 20 million or so of their fellow citizens, or why they think it’s a really, really wonderful idea to dispatch 8,000 or so warm bodies over to Afghanistan so they can continue “fighting” the “war” the politicians have been telling us that we’ve been “winning” for the past 16 fucking years. Or something anyway.

It took the ethics reform following the Jack Abramoff scandal of 2007 to put the brakes on politicians flying around the country on Gulfstreams owned by their favorite corporate executives looking for a little influence peddling at 30,000 feet. Nowadays, politicians can accept flights on their friends’ jets but they have to compensate them by paying the cost of a First Class ticket for a comparable commercial flight. So let’s see. Operating a Gulfstream G2 from Los Angeles to London roundtrip costs about $160,000. A round trip first class ticket on commercial air is about $8,800. So our prospective congressman or senator would pay about five percent of the actual cost to fly on his billionaire buddy’s Gulfstream. Pretty good deal, huh?

Far more common is the practice of chartering private jets. Donald Trump’s campaign spent tens of millions on air travel between July 2015 and Nov. 2017. $9.3 million alone was paid out by the campaign to TAG Air to charter Trump’s own 757-200 private jet — which cost the Trump Organization more than $100 million, what with its gold plated bathroom fixtures and seat belt closures and all. According to National Journal, Trump spent more money on jet fuel than on campaign staff over the course of the campaign.

The campaign of Hillary Clinton made some 48 payments of more than $2 million chartering private jets from June 2015 to January 2016, according to FEC documents. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, one of her contracts for a speech to a convention specified that she required a 16 person “Gulfstream 450 or larger jet” for the occasion. Elsewhere, it’s been widely reported that the Clinton Foundation spent more than $50 million in travel expenses over the ten years from 2003 to 2013. You don’t run up those kinds of bills flying coach and staying in the Comfort Inn.

According to a 2014 story in Politico, Clinton’s potential rival, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee spent more than $250,000 on private jets to travel around the country making political speeches when he was considering his run for the White House. Jeb Bush and other Republican candidates spent similar amounts on private jets during the primary.

The political tip-sheet Roll Call spoke to Meredith McGehee, of the Campaign Legal Center, one of the groups that pushed for the reform of congressional ethics when it was revealed that former House Speaker Tom Delay was given a ride on a tobacco company private jet on his way to making a court appearance. “The dangers are grave because the benefits are so valued. Time is valuable. It’s a very valuable thing,” McGehee said. “Such flights provide a great opportunity for the very select class of people that can afford to own a private airplane to win goodwill and some face time with members, she explained,” Roll Call pointed out.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his wife “actress” Louise Linton took a government jet last month to fly out to Kentucky on a spurious visit to check up on the Gold Depository at Fort Knox that just happened to coincide with the eclipse of the sun that would be visible from there that day. We’ve also learned that the newlywed Mnunchins asked for a $25,000 private government jet to take them on their European honeymoon in August because, as the good Treasury Secretary explained, he needed the jet as his “mobile office.”

Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price took five flights on chartered private jets over a two day period for travel around the east coast. Two of the flights were round trip between Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, a distance of 135 miles. According to Politico, chartering a private jet to make those flights would cost about $25,000, while making the trip on the train would have cost $72 per person each way. Going by car would have taken two and half hours and cost about $30 each way in gas, plus tolls.

The thing with all of this travel by politicians on private jets is that they may be public servants, but they’re not the public, are they? You get to be a Trump, a Clinton, a Huckabee or a Price, and the rules are written so that you don’t have to live like the rest of us. The Congress put a Band- Aid on the problem when they mandated that government officials taking a ride on a private jet only have to pay the equivalent of a first class airfare for the same flight. They could have done the obvious, of course. You’re a congressman or a cabinet secretary and you want to fly up to some resort or back home to your district on a private jet, then charter one and pay the full cost of the charter. Democrats like the Clintons have made the utterly stupid mistake of ceding the high ground with their exploitation of these rules by joining Republicans in private jet-setting around the country. We expect Republicans to cozy up to corporate chieftains on their private jets, but Democrats? What was Hillary thinking when she was out of office and demanding Gulfstream 450’s for her speaking engagements? Nobody would notice?

And that pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? Time is money, and the wealthy and their political lackeys have been able to use the one to buy the other with their Gulfstreams and Falcons and Bombardiers. They don’t wait in line. Nobody tells them to turn off their cell phones and other electronic devices. A big black car drops them off at the steps to a gleaming jet and moments later, they’re aloft, above the fray, flying over the heads of the rest of us plebes down here dragging our crummy carry-ons and sweating out whether we remembered to take that damn bottle of mouthwash and transfer three ounces of it into a little travel bottle and stick that goddamned thing in a fucking plastic bag, or somebody in dark trousers and a blue shirt is going to tell us to open our bag and go jamming their hands in our underwear and socks until they come up with the offending bottle of dangerous mouthwash so we can be given the choice of going back to the counter and checking it, or throwing the damn stuff in the nearby trash bin supplied for just that purpose.

You want to talk about income inequality? It’s not just income. It’s not just lifestyle. It’s not just second homes in the Hamptons and the occasional $350,000 Ferrari. It’s a whole class of people who have achieved the Dream of Modern Wealth. They can’t get away from us in restaurants, which allow us to smack our lips right next to them if we, too, can pay $75 for an organic pork chop from a guy up the Hudson Valley with three pigs he hand raises and gives a back rub to every night. They can’t leave us behind on the highway, where even they are subject to the indignity of the speed limit. They can’t move completely away from us, because Manhattan and San Francisco apartment buildings, sadly, have been built next to other apartment buildings where lowly plebes are still permitted to reside if they have $5,700 a month for a studio apartment over near the High Line. But by god, they can fly above us in the clouds swaddled in glove soft leather, sipping champagne from actual glass flutes, their tans back-lit by custom LED’s, their Manolo’s and John Lobbs kicked casually into the aisle, their Laradoodles sitting on the overstuffed lounger across the table snacking on scraps of filet mignon from the lunch entrée. Nobody’s going to comment, nobody’s going to complain, because there’s nobody there but the reflection they can see in the polished burled walnut table atop which they drum their manicured fingers as they wait for the wheels of their Gulfstream to touch down any goddamn place they want them to.

Memo to Berkeley: Stop confusing “free speech” with “subsidized speech”

Demonstrators rally to protest a speech by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro (Credit: Getty/Elijah Nouvelage)

For the past decade, a local character named Frank Chu has wandered around the San Francisco Bay Area with a black protest sign featuring inscrutable phrases. “Shellley / 12 Galaxies / jextroxetikul seismograph,” read one of his signs photographed in the San Francisco Chronicle. The colorful, strange signs have made Frank Chu something of a local celebrity: he has his own Wikipedia entry, and has become a popular Halloween costume. Briefly, a local bar, “12 Galaxies,” named itself after his signage.

Although most people probably don’t understand Chu’s enigmatic protest signs, because he enjoys free speech, he is free to wave them where he pleases. And he is not obnoxious: no one pays for his words to be plastered on billboards or for him to speak to vast crowds at Berkeley. Frank Chu epitomizes free speech in this regard: he says what he wants. Yet his platform is not subsidized by a rich benefactor or shoved in the faces of those who dislike his ideology.

This is a key distinction, and it speaks to the current culture wars, where many on the right decry the left for “suppressing free speech” whenever a protest erupts over a far-right speaker, or antifa stages a counter-protest against a motley crew of alt-right and neofascists, as happened in Charlottesville. There are two separable phenomena going on here: first, the assumption that protesting constitutes a suppression of free speech (it doesn’t). People have protested speakers, artists, politicians, even the Beatles. A protest against a person does not constitute a protest against free speech itself.

But there is another misplaced argument when it comes to the terms on which we debate free speech. All of the current kerfuffles over “suppression” of free speech — particularly those in Berkeley, which celebrated Free Speech Week recently — ignore the fact that the speech that students are protesting is not really free in the sense of that word. It is paid-for speech, the promoted speech of conservatives given a platform by rich benefactors. There is a demonstrable difference between Frank Chu’s whimsical protest signs, and rich people forking over money to have those who share their oppressive ideologies foist their shared ideas on others.

The recently-protested speech by Ben Shapiro at the famously liberal campus falls into this category. Shapiro, a Breitbart columnist and co-founder of the Daily Wire, had his visit to Berkeley funded by a peculiar nonprofit called the “Young America Foundation,” which spent over $8 million bringing speakers to campuses around the country in 2015. The Young America Foundation donor list reads like a whos-who list of prominent American archconservatives, including the DeVos family and the Koch brothers.

So then, in what sense of the word is Ben Shapiro’s speech “free”? The only reason he was given an elevated platform in Berkeley is because of the funding of astonishingly wealthy far-right donors, who have an agenda to pursue, and know clearly that they will win on their terms by letting their speakers stoke protests, then publicizing a sophistic vision of the left “suppressing” free speech. Of course, you or I or a stranger who scrawls slurs on bathroom stalls will never be granted the privilege to speak in front of a comparable audience. Our speech may be “free,” but right-wing foundations aren’t paying us to speak in front of unwilling crowds. Doing so doesn’t benefit their rich benefactors, or advance their agendas.

Imagine the scenario turned on its head. Imagine if rich foundation backers paid to send, say, former Black Panther Bobby Seale to speak in front of a crowd at Bob Jones University. Comparable protests would erupt, as do when a Yiannopoulos or a Shapiro is foisted on the hyper-liberal city of Berkeley. Perhaps there would even be violence. And the hypocrisy of anyone on the right who claims to be a champion of free speech would be called into question, and they would mocked by liberals and leftists.

But this reverse scenario never happens, because there are no “leftist” rich benefactors that are sending leftist speakers into conservative bastions. Because the left is more into redistributive income and anti-elitism — the kinds of politics that the rich tend to abhor because it cuts into their power — the opposite situation is unimaginable. And so we are stuck in a cultural purgatory where, because of a misplaced popular narrative of what free speech means, the right has come to claim the mantle of a “free speech” that is about as free as a Super Bowl advertisement — that is to say, visible only because of the money that bought it. Free speech is free speech, but when mediated by the money of the rich, some people’s speech is freer than others’.