Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 663
September 12, 2016
Kate Upton calls NFL players protesting national anthem on 9/11 “horrific”
Model Kate Upton attends the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue launch party at Crimson on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013 in New York.(Photo by Brad Barket/Invision/AP) (Credit: Brad Barket)
In an Instagram essay, model Kate Upton joined the pseudo-patriotic ranks of folks criticizing four Miami Dolphins players who knelt during the national anthem on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the World Trade Center terror attacks.
“Sitting or kneeling down during the national anthem is a disgrace to those people who have served and currently serve our country,” Upton captioned a photo of running back Arian Foster, linebacker Jelani Jenkins, safety Michael Thomas, and wide receiver Kenny Stills kneeling in protest of police violence. “Sitting down during the national anthem on September 11th is even more horrific. Protest all you want and use social media all you want. However, during the nearly two minutes when that song is playing, I believe everyone should put their hands on their heart and be proud of our country for we are all truly blessed.”
“Today we are more divided then [sic] ever before,” she continued. “I could never imagine multiple people sitting down during the national anthem on the September 11th anniversary. The lessons of 911 should teach us that if we come together, the world can be a better and more peaceful place #neverforget.”
Taking a knee before a preseason game late last month, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began the trend of NFL players protesting during the national anthem. For his display, Kaepernick drew criticism from GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who suggested he “find a country that works better for him.”
A photo posted by Kate Upton (@kateupton) on Sep 11, 2016 at 4:12pm PDT
(h/t NY Post)
September 11, 2016
Sex in the cornfields: The agony and ecstasy of dating at a strict Christian college
(Credit: MaxyM via Shutterstock)
The Indiana corn weaves like a maze of chastity. My girlfriend, Becca, and I are driving in my black Subaru Forester, hunting for a solitary space. I am a sophomore in college and am studying the Bible in hopes of entering the ministry. My left hand dictates the steering wheel, while my right hand is clasped to Becca’s manicured fingers. A double-looped, olive scarf and a single chestnut braid contrast her blue eyes, dilated juniper berries that have been expertly framed.
Our relationship began in high school. Although her allure lay somewhere beyond my league, she, the graceful cheerleading captain, and I, the mop-headed metal drummer, found an immediate Eros — one that remains clothed and censored by burgeoning, Christian morals.
Now, we drive as college mates, best friends and eager lovers. There is necking and driving, reckless passion born of young frontal lobes. Our relationship needs a hidden roadside without an audience, where we won’t make love but will dream of doing so. And in the process, press upon ingrained religious and physical boundaries.
It is early October, and the dry cornstalk still stands. Time-worn, dirt roads are masked by seven-foot plants. We would like the vegetation to hide us while we enjoy the back seat, but it only masks the oncoming traffic: Farmers in ancient pick-ups appear out of nowhere, flash their headlights and roll down their windows. “You kids OK?”
I am wary of authoritative eyes in the harvest and the lips that call nakedness shame. My staunch, self-induced morality whispers, “Sex is reserved for the shadows.”
I am reminded of a juvenile angst.
It was a midnight high wire act: arms out for balance, white socks moved heel to toe. Wide pupils were focused on the stair railing to my right, and fretful ears were fixed on the copper hinges on my parent’s bedroom door. The maple floorboards were bubbled, and my twelve-year-old stride activated a creak. It echoed. I froze, then wrenched my neck to the head of the hall and listened for movement. The air sat still. My pastor father and stay-at-home mother remained asleep.
I considered my sixth grade English class and Poe’s light-footed night stalker. But I was not on a murderous search for The Tell Tale Heart — I was a libido-driven, fuzz-stached pre-teen in search of late-night cable boobs.
My family had just moved to the Chicago suburbs from North Carolina. This was my seventh house. Preacher’s families are often blown about the country, tossing God’s Word to the common-people, and receiving a free month of HBO with each new city.
I crept down the stairs, back hunched, knees bent — attempting to lower my center of gravity. Our yellow lab, Caleb, named from the Hebrew for “dog,” met me at the ground floor. His tail swayed in anticipation of play; dull claws scratched at linoleum. I pinched his muzzle with my right hand. “Not now,” I whispered. The dog’s brow tilted backward. He let out a muted whimper, promising silence. In sympathy, I let him follow me to the beige-carpeted living room, a companion in the carnal exploration.
The television’s cathode tubes hid behind a forty-inch square of black, bowed glass and rested on a two-foot, red oak cabinet. For months, the TV had prodded my budding hormones. I wasted days by flipping through channels, looking for skin. I would spend a half-hour viewing “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” trying to will the gold-plated bra off of Teela: the long-legged, red-haired Captain of the Royal Guard. I would change the channel to “The Cosby Show” and feel palpable tension between myself and Denise Huxtable, portrayed by the tempting Lisa Bonet. The dreadlocked renegade sported extra-large, cable knit sweaters, leaving everything but her high cheekbones to the imagination.
Conjectured pictures moved in my head: The bare chest of Eve from my Illustrated Children’s Bible was plastered over Teela’s sultry hips — all of this capped by a Huxtable smile. Using the thin, grey remote, I powered the television, expecting to find my fantasy girl gyrating on late-night, premium-cable porn.
The erotic light of channel 501 swallowed the space, and my thumb pressed mute. A pale, blonde female security guard sat alone in a surveillance room: naked. She monitored a video feed of a masked, shirtless burglar. I had seen protruding abdominals like his before on the glistening, blue body of Captain Planet. I stared, bewildered as the woman massaged her tight, left nipple and caressed her inner thigh with petite, red-tipped fingers. She bit at her lower lip with the same euphoric agony as a kid lusting after a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card — “1989 Upper Deck, oh baby!”
I was uncertain as to what the woman was doing or trying to do. But the longer I looked, the warmer I felt. My senses clouded, chest trembled and muscles clenched. My left hand was urged to the fly of my baseball-print pajama pants. A sudden wetness was accompanied by dream-like ecstasy, then a return to perspective with my pulse’s decrescendo.
I powered off the television. There was blackness. I could feel Caleb’s warm pant against my left hip. The dog’s eyes shone green and inserted regret. The experience was unknown and therefore was sin.
Becca winces and my perspective is pulled back to the present car-ride, “You’re crushing my hand.” I apologize and blame a pent-up libido. She leans her shoulders toward the passenger window and fixates on the moonlit fields. “You only care about the physical stuff.” My fingers move to her denim-covered knee, a safer spot to prove a gentle agape.
I speak to her backlit silhouette, “I’m sorry. It’s this place. This school. They make it impossible.”
Taylor University’s 40-foot brick bell tower rises like a stalk from the Indiana corn. The bell tower is split into two columns which meet at a head: a symbol of the integration of faith and learning. The 2,000 students are deeply committed, evangelical Christians. The community is tight and secluded; the campus sits in the middle of a 4,000-resident farm town. In this place, which boasts of conservative roots, there is vocal guilt attached to sex: “Should it actually feel good?”
The wing where I live houses 60 men. Our pleasures are secret. I’ve only seen alcohol here once, have never heard porn through the concrete walls but have a hunch the guy two doors down smoked pot when he went home last weekend. Sin is obsessed upon.
We have a masturbation jar. Each time you get your rocks off, you must stuff a dollar in the jar. God is watching. The jar fills fast. I don’t think they do this at state colleges. A buddy of mine says its alright in God’s eyes to masturbate to inanimate objects, “Just don’t lust after girls.” He’s never kissed one.
Taylor’s academic reputation is strong, but so are its rules. In the 1960s, a handbook was constructed of promoted, Godly conduct, and of restricted behaviors that might lead to sin. The University officials who penned the work named it after Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, “Life Together.” Bonhoeffer, a radiant theologian, was hanged by the Nazis for planning an assassination of Adolf Hitler and reportedly died a virgin. He showed no regret in missing out on sex, claiming to have lived a full life — although a sexual summary is an unfair judge of the honest man.
Upon signing the Life Together Covenant, students agree to refrain from the following behaviors: dancing, lying, profanity, drinking, smoking, premarital sex, involvement with pornography, homosexual relationships and immodest dress, among others. Refusal to sign the covenant may result in expulsion. While consensus might agree that abstinence, or moderation, from some of the aforementioned actions could promote physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, there is a loss of critical thought in the removal of a student’s free choice to act on, or refrain from, “sin.”
Like an authoritative parent, the University’s sexual mistrust is layered. Dorms are categorized by gender. Men and women are allowed in one another’s rooms twice a week, for four hours. Resident Assistants troll the hallways during visiting hours, like nurses in a psych ward, making sure all lights are on and all doors are open. There is plenty of flirting, but no way to act on it.
Raging hormones are repressed to the backs of minds, where they are interpreted as guilt.
The young women are told that having sex is as painful as labor, while the men place the vagina on an ivory pedestal, of sorts: “I’m going to rail her on our wedding night.” In a community so focused on not having sex, there is much lost in the beautiful intricacies of learning to appreciate the soul and body of a loving partner.
Each fall, the school devotes a week to sexual education. The week’s festivities are referred to as “Sex in the Cornfields.” Men and women fill separate auditoriums where speakers romanticize celibacy before marriage, and outline, via animated PowerPoint slides, ways to reduce and quit masturbation. The term “sex” is thrown around as a ubiquitous catch-all for promiscuous sin, but is never defined. Thus, the sexually illiterate evangelical students develop operational definitions of sex based on their childhood and teenage experiences.
In an effort to define sex, I call upon my own late night, cable-enhanced sixth-grade exploration.
Elementary school sex education videos taught me how to hide a random erection: “Here’s a cool tip, carry your books in front of your penis.” These same tapes showed cartoon testes, with bug-eyed sperm swirling about, chomping at the bit to reach the woman’s high-cheeked, Maybellined egg.
I was twelve and, for two years, had been waiting for a chance to examine real semen, to watch my sperm bounce like guppies. The opportunity had finally arisen. There I stood, dog at my side, holding a fresh, albeit fast-cooling, sample in my pants.
I moved to the kitchen, and trod a wide gate to keep the sperm in place. This was a sleuth mission — the Pink Panther theme song crept from the corners of my subconscious. My parent’s bedroom lay above. The white pantry door was ajar, so it opened with a breath of a push. I scanned past the canned soup, most of it split pea, then found the plastic sandwich bags sitting atop a wire shelf. My hand plucked a bag from the cobalt, cardboard box. This was followed by a soft close of the door. The brass knob’s click was consumed by the darkness.
My sly legs moved to the staircase. I exhorted a whisper at the rustling dog: “Caleb, stay. You’re too loud.” He obeyed and watched me climb toward manhood. I avoided the middle of each step, where the bare wood was likely to groan.
The second-floor hall was as I left it: serene. Although I figured the Holy Ghost and his judging eyes were planted in a dim corner. I slid into my room and flipped the snow-white light switch on. Not wanting to waste precious time, I turned the plastic bag inside out, as I was accustomed to doing when picking Caleb’s poop from the neighbor’s lawn, and reached into the front of my pants. I pulled out a hoard of creamed, buried treasure. With surgical efficiency, I flipped and sealed the bag.
Several thousand loose baseball cards, stacked in eighteen-inch piles atop my honey-cedar desk, were swept to make room for the semen sample. I then rummaged my closet, whose cramped, carpeted floor ramped above the staircase. My hands dug through die-cast cars, a stiff catcher’s mitt, once-lost math worksheets and a battery powered X-wing starfighter; liquid freeze pops, American Girl doll glasses, stale tightie whities and a “Check yes if you like me” note. Then the all-powerful semen-deducing tool emerged: a Wendy’s-brand, Peter Pan magnifying glass.
My eye almost touched the glass, turning it into a monocle of sorts. As the first person to examine my semen, all observations were noted as discoveries. The initial revelation pertained to color. I’d been under the impression that semen was bleach white, but it was more of a linen with a hint of French vanilla. I wondered if my blonde hair affected my semen color. The second detection was of odor. The viscous sample smelled of must — not unlike mildewed baseball pants; I considered a washed uniform to be bad luck. I thereupon became statuesque, with pupils focused on a centimeter-wide portion of the specimen. My eyes were fishing for sperm. In held breath and wishful thought — I swore I saw one move.
A roadside clearing jogs my mind back to the meandering path beside Taylor University. I turn onto a rocky, dim road and ask Becca if she can see any houses. Her vision is better than mine, “I think there’s a house way up there, but it could be a silo. Nothing to worry about. Just pull off here.” I slow the car. Weeds whip beneath the tires. I cut the engine; I turn the lights off. We coincide a sigh and sit for a moment, listening to the wind against the windows. I turn and lean to kiss her, but my seatbelt impedes my progress. She unlocks the belt, then climbs from her chair.
We lay in the backseat, stuck to faux leather, our desires enhanced by the full moon. I am focused on her eyes — not the world outside. She reaches for my jeans.
Suppressed longing escapes.
Fog rises.
A heavy thud hits the passenger side window.
“Oh, shit.”
I force my body off of Becca, hitting my head on the glass moon-roof. She groans, “Your knee is in my crotch.” I look to the window, ready to appease an angry farmer. But all I see is a cud-chewing, flared-nosed, voyeuristic cow — sent by God to protect my virginity. We laugh, re-assume the upright position, turn the car back on and meander beneath the moon.
Miss America 1968: When civil rights and feminist activists converged on Atlantic City
This Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016 photo shows Miss America contestants at a welcoming ceremony in Atlantic City. The first night of preliminary competition in this year's pageant begins Tuesday night, Sept. 6, 2016, with the new Miss America being crowned on Sunday night. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry) (Credit: AP)
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
At this year’s Miss America pageant, the first openly lesbian contestant, Erin O’Flaherty, will compete for the crown in Atlantic City. Flaherty’s participation will represent yet another step toward a more inclusive and diverse pageant. She’ll be following other trailblazers like Bess Myerson (the first Jewish titleholder), Vanessa Williams (the first African-American titleholder) and Heather Whitestone (the first deaf titleholder).
For a pageant with a historically narrow definition of beauty, this progress hasn’t come easy.
The most well-known demonstration against the pageant is the 1968 liberation picket, in which hundreds of women protested the pageant’s oppressive ideal of femininity and, so the media myth goes, burned their bras. But few people know that yet another protest took place that day just a few blocks away: the first-ever Miss Black America contest. The rival contest was organized to challenge the racial exclusion of the Miss America pageant, which had never had a black contestant.
When I was a graduate student in history at Duke University, I had set out to research the Sept. 7, 1968, women’s liberation demonstration in Atlantic City. Early on, however, I was struck by the news headlines announcing the new Miss Black America alongside the white Miss America. I was also surprised to learn that women’s liberation protesters objected to not only the sexism of the pageant, but also its racism.
I found that the Miss America pageant was dogged by two protests that day — not one — and each had been influenced by the other.
Crowning Miss Black America
During the 1930s — the pageant’s early years — regulations explicitly stipulated that contestants must be of “the white race.”
But by 1968, the Atlantic City chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was determined to break the beauty queen color line. In a meeting with pageant officials, chapter leaders pushed for integration. The pageant responded with nominal changes: Organizers added black judges and set up a scholarship fund to encourage black contestants. But without any black state finalists in the ranks, it was too late for any to participate in the 1968 national event.
Dismayed that black women would be sidelined for yet another year, an activist named Phillip Savage and an entrepreneur from Philadelphia named J. Morris Anderson teamed up to create their own all-black pageant to take place in Atlantic City during the Miss America pageant.
As Savage told reporters: “We want to be in Atlantic City at the same time the hypocritical Miss America contest is being held. Theirs will be lily white and ours will be black.” The aim of Miss Black America was to celebrate black women as beautiful, in defiance of American cultural norms that upheld whiteness as the standard of beauty.
The pageant protest drew national media attention: “Contest Slated to Select Miss Black America,” read a Los Angeles Times headline; “Negroes Plan Show to Rival Contest for Miss America,” proclaimed The New York Times.
On the day of the event, black beauty queens rode in a motorcade down the Atlantic City boardwalk before taking the stage of the Ritz-Carlton hotel for swimsuit, talent and evening gown competitions.
The winner — a college student named Saundra Williams — was dressed in a white gown and tiara, much like any Miss America hopeful. But she also wore her hair in a short natural style, performed an African dance as her talent and defended black women as beautiful to reporters. In newspapers across the country, her portrait appeared prominently alongside the newly crowned Miss America, Judith Ann Ford.
In this parallel beauty contest, the organizers and contestants were making a pointed public criticism of the Miss America pageant’s discriminatory practices. But they were also challenging racist standards of beauty in order to fully afford black women their humanity and belonging in the nation.
“No More Miss America!”
Meanwhile, the nascent women’s liberation movement was making rumblings of its own.
In the previous year, women around the country had begun discussing and raising awareness of the sexism ingrained in everyday American life. A loose network of women’s liberation groups soon formed across many cities, and they started planning their first major coordinated protest.
Their target? The Miss America pageant.
Many now hail it as the opening salvo of the second-wave feminist movement in America. Less well known is that they saw the pageant as the nexus of many problems with American society: racism, war, capitalism and even ageism. The organizers had roots in radical leftist causes, including the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
Upon descending on Atlantic City, women’s liberation protestors distributed a leaflet that proclaimed “No More Miss America!” In it they denounced the pageant as “Racism with Roses,” a pointed critique of an event that put white women on a pedestal while ignoring African-American, Latina and Native American women.
Thumbing through handwritten organizing notes and watching video footage of the protest, I also discovered how an African-American lawyer and activist named Florynce Kennedy had played a prominent role in the protest. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Kennedy was involved in a number of movements, including black power, consumer protection and sex workers’ rights. She was known for her theatrical style of demonstrating and intersectional politics — and was always eager to draw connections between racist and sexist oppression.
Kennedy’s participation on the boardwalk was no exception. To emphasize how women were enslaved to beauty standards, she chained herself to a giant puppet of Miss America. Another demonstrator conducted the proceedings as a cattle auction, announcing, “Yessiree boys, step right up! How much am I offered for this number one piece of prime American property? She sings in the kitchen, hums at the typewriter, purrs in bed!”
The protests live on today
Thanks to civil rights and feminist activists, 1968 was perhaps the most exciting year in the Miss America pageant’s history. Newspapers and magazines delighted in the drama of the three events and broadcast the activists’ messages to a mass audience.
The Miss Black America contest, despite starting with only 12 contestants, went on to become an annual event in its own right. The women’s liberation protest instantly became a symbol of the movement, even if it was met with derision from conservative commentators.
The following year, the Miss America pageant grappled with the fallout from 1968 by trying to retain wary sponsors and issuing a restraining order against protesters. But the franchise did evolve in response to the civil rights and feminist movements, placing more emphasis on women’s abilities and finally featuring a black contestant in 1970.
The legacy of these protests lives on when Americans are captivated by what Erin O’Flaherty represents: a progressive step toward a more inclusive pageant and, by extension, nation. But O’Flaherty’s chances will undoubtedly hinge on her ability to conform, in many ways, to what remains a heteronormative and Eurocentric ideal of American womanhood and physical beauty.
For this reason, the protestors’ goal to dismantle or wholly reshape that ideal resonates today.
The half-hour heartbreak: Amazon’s new comedies find laughs in painful places
Tig Notaro and Rya Kihlstedt in "One Mississippi" (Credit: Amazon)
Hybridized genre titles such as “dramedy” or “tragicomedy” are often used by networks and producers out of sheer laziness. That’s understandable if you’re a creative who has made a decent, if not excellent, half-hour comedy series that is oddly devoid of laughter, or an hour-long drama heavy on the punchlines and physical humor. It’s not quite a comedy, and it’s not really a drama, so . . . “dramedy!”
Here’s the thing about “dramedies” or “tragicomedies” or any other genre chimera that can make a viewer feel stabby at hearing it: These terms are often abused as catch-alls to explain away a show’s triteness, masking why episodes don’t quite work. As such, when Amazon dubbed Tig Notaro’s “One Mississippi” a “traumedy,” efforts to refrain from rolling my eyeballs nearly caused me to pop a vessel.
But after watching the six-part first season of “One Mississippi,” which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, it’s clear that Notaro has earned the right to the term. With “One Mississippi” and the upcoming “Fleabag” debuting on September 16, Amazon Prime is (perhaps inadvertently) establishing itself as the home of the heartbreaking half-hour.
These new shows also elucidate the value of concise storytelling and explain why shows clocking in at under 30 minutes are such hot commodities this season. Part of the trend has to do with lower production costs, but creatively speaking, a quality half-hour allows writers to engage in unorthodox storytelling through the paradigms of idiosyncratic personalities.
“Mississippi” and “Fleabag” are intentionally very funny, even as they steadily submerge the viewer into deeply uncomfortable emotional territory. Both Notaro’s Tig and the unnamed protagonist of “Fleabag,” played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, are masters of the witty rejoinder, answering the gentle, strange and occasionally dull people around them with patience or sarcasm that lets the viewer in on the joke. Getting to know these characters can be incredibly entertaining but, like the pets each keeps at arm’s length in their respective shows, they’re best experienced in limited doses.
“One Mississippi” heavily harvests Notaro’s life story to spin a plot informed by loss, family dynamics and the secrets that can arrest a family’s psychological growth in amber. In real life, Notaro is a comedian who became famous for turning a trio of horrible events in her life into an unforgettable set at Los Angeles’s Largo in 2012. Within a short span of time, Notaro nearly died of a gastrointestinal infection from the bacterium C. difficile, experienced the sudden death of her mother and was diagnosed with cancer in both breasts.
Comedian Louis C.K. happened to be there on the night she riskily turned her nightmare into confessional genius and persuaded her to release it to the public. That C.K. executive produces “One Mississippi” is not at all surprising; the show’s low-key cinematic feel is one of his calling cards.
Yet “One Mississippi,” co-created with Diablo Cody, is without a doubt Notaro’s baby. The stand-up comic is an expert in finding the comedy in quiet discomfort, pausing during her sets long enough to leave the audience hanging on a delicate lace of anticipation before ripping it with a punchline.
That energy pervades “One Mississippi,” which shows Tig as an introverted radio host beloved in her small Mississippi hometown of Bayou Saint Lucille, brought back home when an accident leaves her mother on life support.
Even the outsized characters in Bayou Saint Lucille feel genuine, though a sizable portion of humor originates from Tig’s interactions with her tightly-wound stepfather Bill (John Rothman). Tig’s re-entry into Bill’s perfectly organized sphere causes predictable friction; the man’s life is so regimented that his bodily functions are on an internal timer, and he seems to care more about the well-being of his cat than the humans in his family.
But Tig’s brother Remy (Noah Harpster) alleviates that tension by maintaining a good nature, although his life has stagnated. Death has a way of unearthing family secrets, and as an assortment of messy truths surface from under the muck, Tig begins to question how well she knew her mother (portrayed in flashbacks by Rya Kihlstedt) at all.
Each of “One Mississippi’s” characters has scars, both external and internal. The real Notaro owned her post-bilateral mastectomy by famously performing part of a set topless. But the fictionalized Tig undresses with her back to the bathroom mirror and displays an aversion to intimacy, cringing at the affectionate overtures of the girlfriend she left back in Los Angeles (guest star Casey Wilson), even as she pins unrealistic hopes on shallow flirtations.
Tig has another reason for retreating into an emotional shell, explored in later episodes. Although the character revisits that pain, she doesn’t live in it, and she also comes to appreciate her own flaws and the frailty of the souls around her. Even the robotic Bill becomes lovably human in his demand of procedure and precision; control can be a potent bulwark against the unpredictability of despair.
“One Mississippi” also exemplifies the difference between employing tragedy to incite a story’s action and looking at the way trauma folds itself into life like chopped nuts into a foamy batter. That ingredient defies being ignored, and occasionally a rogue hard edge opens new wounds, awakening old ones with a dull throb.
Tig’s homeward journey is lighter than that of “Fleabag’s” hyper-sexual protagonist, who never tells us her name but fondly breaks the fourth wall to share asides that are often at odds with her interactions with other characters.
“Fleabag” began as Waller-Bridge’s one-woman play in the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it won an Olivier Award and a Stage award for the actress and was praised for its examination of feminism and modern sexual mores.
Expanded into a full series, the actress plays a single Briton barely keeping afloat her guinea-pig-themed café. When she’s not wasting her time behind the counter or running after the place’s furry mascot, she’s hooking up with an assortment of men she uses as convenient props, whether to date or to stroke her ego.
There’s nothing hot about this woman’s sexual escapades; one sequence gleans its hilarity from having her hot-and-cold boyfriend walk in on her pleasuring herself to President Obama giving a speech. (About what, she could not tell you.)
The fact that the viewer knows more about her family — her sister Claire (Sian Clifford) and drunk brother-in-law (Brett Gelman), her best friend Boo (Jenny Rainsford), her emotionally distant father (Bill Paterson) and her shrew of a stepmother (Olivia Colman) — than we do about her speaks volumes.
“Fleabags’” loose and free attitude toward sex is comical, to a point. Waller-Bridge makes the viewer complicit in her ribald adventures and wry, seen-it-all attitude as she moves through the streets of London like a confident shark, but even this is a costume that peels away to reveal the ruin underneath. That truth emerges bit by bit with each passing installment, and the cruel genius of the series is only revealed in the first season’s final moments.
This serves less as a moral commentary than a bleak view into what happens when our hunger for fulfillment leads us to devour the meager sustenance on another’s plate. And like “One Mississippi,” “Fleabag” ends in a place of truth, even hope, though all indicators point to both shows’ stabilized situations eventually, predictably falling apart.
Such is the nature of living with trauma, of course — which would be impossible to do if we didn’t search for the laughter inside of the pain.
The last 9/11 survivor: What my dog remembers about that day 15 years ago
A photo of the author's dog.
It seemed like he knew before the rest of us did. Around 8:45 that morning, he was pacing the living room, sticking his nose out the window, sniffing the air. Maybe he recognized that smell of dust, ash, burning metal and melting plastic. Maybe he heard the planes and recognized something different about them — too close. He’d already been out that morning, but he wanted to go again. He kept checking in with us; he paced and whined until we leashed him and took him downstairs and, after we did, he wanted to go a different direction than usual — not east to Central Park, not west to Riverside Drive, but south.
We didn’t get that far: His human caretakers had jobs, responsibilities and soon, when we heard what was happening from one of our neighbors down the block, an unbelievably horrific reality to grapple with. And even if we had made it all the way downtown, the police would have stopped us long before we got to the site. Still, as he rests beside me, I wonder how much he understood. And even now 15 years later, when he shivers at the sound of fire alarms, when his ears twitch at sirens, I wonder how much he remembers.
Let’s be clear: I don’t think his senses are more acute than those of any other dog. He’s not an unusual animal — perhaps a bit more strong-willed than most, perhaps a bit more tolerant of people and a bit less tolerant of other dogs. Perhaps his sense of separation anxiety is more extreme. But really, he’s just a 60-pound mutt — a mix of black Lab and chow, according to the East Harlem city shelter where we rescued him, a “Liverpool Mongrel” according to the British exchange student who met him on 106th Street while she was stranded in New York during that second week of September.
I’m sure just about every one of those dogs that he used to fight, play with or avoid sensed something different in the air on those days — not just the smell or the sounds, the conversations their owners would have on the sidewalk, in the park and in the dog run: about a friend who was still missing, about a neighbor who’d somehow made it down 102 flights of stairs in Tower 2. I’m sure they grasped some of the meaning behind the sensitive but probing questions that people sitting on park benches would ask as we walked by: “I haven’t seen your wife in a few days. Is she all right?”
Probably most dog owners who were in New York during 9/11 would tell a similar story of how their pets behaved, how their dogs seemed more attentive and alert. And if those animals could talk, who knows? Maybe they would say so, too: Prince, the proud yellow Lab who could be heard throughout the neighborhood barking for his tennis ball; Maddie, the sweet springer spaniel who never met a person she didn’t like; Lucy, the greyhound mix fond of opening up purses and eating lip balm; Jackson, who liked to wrestle on the Great Hill in Central Park; Buber and Fig, the best Frisbee-catching dogs I’ve ever seen; Train, the German shepherd who’d grab onto my dog’s collar and refuse to let it go until the two animals were pulled apart.
There are only a couple of differences between those dogs and this one — what they saw, what they remembered and the fact that he’s the only one still here: 80 years old, 87 or 112 and counting, depending on the online dog age calculator you use. In dog years, he was only 7 in 2001. Today he can’t walk anywhere near as far as he used to; his breathing becomes labored on the way to the park, especially when it’s hot outside. But still, he’s here.
In April he couldn’t make it around the block and fell when I tried to get him up the stairs. The throat surgery helped, but he’s still not spry. He likes to go for drives, but it’s tough to get him in the car. I don’t know if he can’t swim anymore or if he’s scared to, but when he gets to the water, he just steps around a bit, then stands and stares. He can see all right and his appetite’s still big, but there are fewer foods he tolerates. But he’s still here.
I don’t know what to attribute his survival to — good genes? The raw food diet? The fact that he seldom goes off-leash? Just plain luck?
He’s fragile now, but he’s a survivor. He has his chin on a paw and licks the air while I consider how many dogs were in New York on that day and are still here. Earlier this year, the last of the 9/11 search and rescue dogs died at the age of 16. This dog is in his 17th year now; maybe he’s one of the very last ones.
But then again, I suppose there’s nothing unusual about that. Every year, it seems, there’s a story of some last survivor remembering, some last survivor passing away. In 2011 Frank Buckles, the last American to fight in World War I, died at 110. “Longevity has never bothered me at all,” he once joked to a reporter in Knoxville, Tennessee. “I have studied longevity for years.”
On Feb. 28 of this year, Delmer Berg, the last surviving American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, died at 101. “It bothers me a little that at 99 you’re going to die any minute because I have a lot of other things I want to do,” he told a New York Times Magazine interviewer in 2015.
Someday there will be more last survivors — of World War II, the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam and, yes, 9/11.
I leash up the dog to take him down to the pond. It takes us a while to get there, and when we do, he stands there watching mayflies dart about on the surface of the water. Those mayflies rarely live longer than one day; in all likelihood, none of them will be here tomorrow. In Alley Pond Park in Queens, there is a tulip tree estimated to be older than the United States of America itself. It was there during the American Revolution and on the morning of the second Tuesday of September when American Airlines Flight 11 and United Flight 175 flew overhead.
My dog is still standing in the water, watching mayflies: Every one of us is the last witness of something.
The PATRIOT Act’s ugly legacy: The US normalized xenophobia after 9/11, and planted the seeds for Trump’s rise
George W. Bush participates in a conversation on the USA Patriot Act, April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York. (Credit: Getty/Luke Frazza)
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was asleep. Never being one for early rising unless I had to, I would be asleep for at least another two hours if my mother hadn’t called to tell me to turn on the TV. Minutes after her call, my phone rang again, this time a friend bringing me news of the event. My television was on, and by then, both towers of the World Trade Center had been hit.
Confused, stunned, speechless news anchors in New York City, wide-eyed with shock, were trying to sputter together coherent sentences that would sum up what they had seen happen live on their studio monitors. The country watched in real-time as the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans was carried out, in broad daylight, by a group of men with box cutters and pilot’s licenses from flight schools in Florida. As the day went on, speculation had already begun in the media that the United States was under terrorist attack. The last event of such proportions had happened six decades earlier, on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and pushed America into entering World War II.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order Number 9066, part of which stated: “By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.”
With the attack on Pearl Harbor fueling longstanding racism against Japanese and Japanese-American residents in the West Coast, eventually between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. born citizens, were relocated to internment camps along the Pacific coast. About 62 percent of those interned were U.S. citizens. While it was not written into 9066 that only persons of Japanese ancestry were to be targeted, the Secretary of War and the Military Commanders interpreted the order’s implicit sense of urgency as a call for the most extreme measures, and acted accordingly, in violation of the Constitution.
On October 26, 2001, George W. Bush signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act, which was short for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” In Bush’s words, the law was intended to “enhance the penalties that will fall on terrorists or anyone who helps them.” From the start, the PATRIOT Act faced its share of legal challenges. There were fears among many in legal communities around the country that it violated civil liberties and rights.
The PATRIOT Act personally affected me twice: first, when I saw a list of countries around the world that were put on a terror watch list and a second time when I received a letter to appear in person to be fingerprinted.
Among the countries on the Department of Homeland Security’s list was Bangladesh. And the list was more than just a seemingly innocuous catalog of nations: They were states where the majority of the population was Muslim, and citizens of those states who were in the United States and were not American citizens were being summoned to present themselves to be fingerprinted and entered into a database. I was still a citizen of Bangladesh at the time, and there was Bangladesh, alphabetically near the top of the watch list. As a citizen of a country billed by the DHS as a potential breeding ground of terrorists, because over 90 percent of Bangladeshis are Muslim, if I failed, or refused, to submit to the fingerprinting, it would suggest guilt or, at the very least, the existence of some nefarious secret I was trying to keep covered.
One of the first stories I covered for the paper where I was working at the time was an evening of readings of poetry, drama and various other spoken word performances bringing awareness to the growing targeting of Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim men. The PATRIOT Act was being enforced. The rule of law was being executed. Just as it had been served when I, along with thousands of others across the United States, submitted to racial profiling.
In the U.S., brown-skinned men, men of Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian descent, became the very image of the enemy. Despite the Saudi royal family’s decades-long close relationship with U.S. presidents and intelligence agencies, the name of Osama Bin Laden, one of the royal family’s many scions, meant nothing to the general American populace. Within weeks of the attacks, Osama Bin Laden became a household name across America. And after the attacks, Bin Laden’s position in U.S. foreign policy tactics in the Middle East went from key ally to Public Enemy Number One.
Four days after 9/11, a former airplane mechanic, who once worked for Boeing, murdered a man in Arizona. The victim was a Sikh man whose beard and turban meant to his killer that he was a terrorist, and the killer in his patriotic rage sought revenge.
The PATRIOT Act, like 9066, never specified whom to target, but the FBI, CIA, NSA and other local, state and federal authorities chose to go with their own interpretations, which echoed those of FDR’s Secretary of War and Military Commanders.
Following the debacle of the 2000 election and the Florida re-count fiasco that haunted it, I was attuned to the unfolding drama, but knew nothing about the former Texas governor and eventual “winner” to get excited about either way. Little did I know in 2000 that, in the light of Bush’s later perjury and illegal invasion of Iraq, getting sober, in my opinion, would remain his most commendable and noble achievement. The man I came to know as president, and whose history I slowly learned, was a spectacular failure in life, and eight years of his presidency left the country broken, the tremors of which are being felt to this day.
Bush declared his “war on terror,” calling it a crusade against the forces of evil. A Christian leader using the word “crusade” to declare war on a Muslim state had historical implications that were seemingly not on Bush’s radar. He then directed this declaration of war on Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and marshaled the powers of his office, and that of the U.S. intelligence community, to craft one of the biggest fabrications of the early 21st century, selling it wholesale to the American public, with no little amount of help from the mainstream media: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. For that reason Iraq had to be bombed, and Hussein, yet another product of U.S. foreign policy in the region, had to be removed from power.
America is now in the post-9/11 era. That has different meanings for different people, different groups. In one way or another, everyone is affected. 9/11 re-defined America; it revitalized old cycles.
A little over a year ago, the blustering, bombastic re-appearance on the national political scene of a narcissist real-estate billionaire had me, along with much of the rest of the country, laughing. The same man that had launched the so-called “birther” narrative, challenging President Obama’s American citizenship and thereby his qualification to be commander-in-chief, had, while stoking the latent racially-motivated angst of those that eventually became his “base,” declared his intent to run for the White House. And still, I, and vast numbers of Americans, kept laughing.
When Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on immigrants, Muslims and others began, they were thought to be the death-knell of his short-lived display of megalomania, his disgraceful exit, right there on national TV for the country to wave goodbye to with boos and cheers. When it didn’t happen — after he had declared Mexicans and Mexican-Americans “rapists,” slammed John McCain’s service record and POW years, ridiculed a reporter with a disability and, in November 2015, issued a statement placing a ban on all Muslim immigration and travel to the United States — the laughter stopped. Mine went out faster than a candle-flame in a hurricane.
Trump reached into a dark side of the American psyche that had been dormant. The droves of Americans that responded to his rhetoric led him all the way to the Republican nomination. And they responded to Trump the way they did not because they suddenly thought they found a “savior” — maybe so, but not entirely — but because they’re the other, extreme arm of the divide America had turned into as a result of 9/11, specifically on the shoulders of the “you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” decree George W. Bush directed at other countries.
Trump’s rise, and the revitalized xenophobia, racism and nationalist hysteria that has been nurtured by it, goes back much further than a year and a few months. The GOP has been setting this stage for him since at least 1980. The post-9/11 resurgence of xenophobic nationalism in the form of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant hostility has been the GOP nominee’s real trump card, whether he has the ability to see it or not. Fifteen years may have passed, but in many ways that decade and half was prologue to where we are now.
The insidious and demoralizing narrative unleashed by the powers that be in the aftermath of 9/11 set the stage for Donald Trump. Law-abiding people are supposed to jump to clear their names and denounce the actions of murderers just because they share with them a faith or a nationality. That is not proving devotion to America. It is allowing ignorance to determine an image I have to fit and redo every time the cycle of xenophobia and racism recur.
Dissent, instead of being lauded as a touchstone of patriotism, is being raged at as treason. The suffocating mess of toxicity that has been the 2016 election year has re-appropriated the “with us or with them” brand of patriotism cultivated by George Bush. Instead of being deeply worried about a growing militaristic image, masses of Americans are lauding, unconditionally, whatever martial stance the country is taking. And the dissenters are being demonized, while hate crimes against Muslims are on a new rise. It feels as though fifteen days haven’t passed, let alone fifteen years.
What the PATRIOT Act left undone might easily be reinstated by a new name, called the rule of law, and enforced, this time far more militantly than before. Whether it’s given the full scope of Executive Order 9066 is a matter of deep conjecture . . . not one to laugh or scoff away.
As for images, here is one I’m happy to spread around: resister, critic, dissenter.
I wasn’t guilty back then, and if required again to give my fingerprints in violation of my Constitutional and civil rights, I will refuse.
White privilege has enormous implications for policy — but whites don’t think it exists
(Credit: Getty/Scott Barbour)
Barack Obama’s presidency has been defined by a new understanding by Americans that the country has yet to truly confront racism. His nomination was greeted with optimism which quickly turned sour, with 69 percent of Americans saying race relations are generally bad, levels equal to those following the Rodney King acquittal. Police violence and structural inequities have led to the Black Lives Matter movement, while on the right, racism propelled Trump to the GOP nomination. It’s clear that solving America’s many problems, from rampant levels of inequality to unemployment to lagging education systems to rising health care costs, will require us to understand how racism and privilege plays out in our society.
Whites Don’t Believe They Have Privilege
How do Americans understand concepts like “white privilege” in our society? The American National Election Study (ANES), a 1,200-person survey performed this past January, is an ideal source of data because it asks questions about privilege that aren’t often included in academic surveys. We analyzed the dataset to explore how views of privilege relate to other views on race and ideology. The question we examine asks respondents, “How many advantages do white people have that minorities do not have in this society?” Respondents can answer, “A great many,” “A lot,” “A moderate number,” “A few” and “None.” We collapsed these answers into three categories.
We find, perhaps unsurprisingly, whites are less likely to accept white privilege (although there is evidence that younger whites are more likely to say they have privilege). Only 25 percent of whites say white people have a great deal of or many advantages, compared with 66 percent of people of color.
There were partisan gaps as well, with white Democrats more likely to say white people have privilege than white Republicans.
White Privilege and Other Views
We also find evidence that a major barrier towards social progress is that people disagree about whether or not white privilege exists in society, and views on white privilege are strongly associated with racial resentment. As the chart below shows, whites who deny privilege also score higher on the battery of questions known as racial resentment (see chart). This relationship remains true even after controlling for party, ideology, gender, age, education and racial stereotypes. Racial stereotypes (the belief that people of color are violent or lazy) among whites aren’t linked to views on white privilege.
Resentment is measured by the following four questions, which were turned into a scale from 0 to 1 (political scientist Jason McDaniel generated the code for the scale):
Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should do the same without any special favors.
It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if black people would only try harder, they could be just as well-off as whites.
Over the past few years, black people have gotten less than they deserve.
Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for black people to work their way out of the lower class.
Views of white privilege have a lot to do with attitudes of resentment against racial minorities. People who acknowledge white privilege are much less likely to blame blacks’ work effort for racial disparities, for example. The chart below shows that whites who deny white privilege also score higher on the resentment scale. Racial resentment measures how sympathetic whites are to the continued existence of structural inequities. Our analysis suggests these views are connected. Whites who believe they have advantages are more likely to accept more structural views of the persistence of racial inequalities.
Those who acknowledge white privilege are also much more likely to recognize that blacks are stopped disproportionately often by police for no good reason:
Why Talking About Privilege Matters
Acknowledging white privilege could present an opportunity for making progress on racial justice. But the problem is that when most pundits talk about race in America, they don’t focus on the complicity of whites in creating racial inequality or the equal stake of whites in eliminating it. They focus instead on nonwhites, so that race gets portrayed as a “people of color” issue instead of as everyone’s shared issue. Race gets pushed to the side as if it’s a specific identity group problem, when in actuality, it is relevant to white and nonwhite alike, because whites are implicated in producing racial inequality and also equally suffer from its existence in society. Spoken word poets, DarkMatter, have aptly captured the flaw in this logic: “Trans problems are not trans people’s problems at all. They’re straight people’s problems with trans people.” Similarly, race problems aren’t people of colors’ problems; they are white people’s problems with people of color, and they are the negative effects of this on everyone through racism and inequality in society.
Our discourse of focusing on people of color instead of on the dominant culture that marginalizes them places the burden of improving race relations on the marginalized themselves, as Toni Morrison has explained. If whites are not explicitly implicated in creating and perpetuating racial inequality — through systemic racist practices like white flight and political elites concentrating resources in white neighborhoods and away from nonwhite neighborhoods, resulting in disasters like Flint, Michigan — then they will not feel equal responsibility in combating it. This will necessarily stall progress, because people of color cannot end the discrimination against themselves; whites will have to join the fight to make progress. And this data suggests that encouraging people to acknowledge white privilege is one way to do it.
This is a barrier to progress on the left and the right, in different ways. The right suffers from not outwardly acknowledging that racism prevents us from achieving a free and equal democracy and instead attempts to treat everyone “the same,” as if race does not exist. Major GOP leaders like Paul Ryan, for example, have criticized Trump for his racist comments about Judge Curiel, while also recently stating that America has a “real culture problem” of inner city men “not working,” which is an indirect yet very racially charged comment. (Trump, of course, is the anomaly in his more blatant racism.)
The left suffers because, while it acknowledges that inequalities exist due to race, it still fails to acknowledge that whites are complicit in producing racial inequality. Many progressives will say without hesitation that black lives matter and understand the racism behind the phrase “all lives matter.” They acknowledge that blacks suffer disproportionately from violence in America. But progressives rarely push this further to explain why: because of the culture of white privilege and supremacy that marginalizes people of color to low-resource neighborhoods. This lens of implicating whiteness in the problem of racial injustice is critical for converting our politicians’ racial rhetoric into real progress on equality.
Until we start talking about race issues as being equally white people’s issues as people of color’s issues, we will fail to enlist whites actively against racism. However, the bright side that this analysis suggests is that if the left and right can successfully switch their racial discourse to acknowledge the role of whites and white privilege instead of solely focusing on people of color, we could see huge progress on racial equality.
A struggle for identity amid the terror: Feeling like a “weird American” after 9/11
A Port Authority police officer watches the ceremony as victims' families walk down the ramp to place flowers in the reflecting pool during the ceremony on Sept. 11, 2007. (Credit: AP/Susan Watts)
On this anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, I want to share why I think of myself as a weird American.
I’m very proud to be a citizen of the United States. America is a beacon of hope for democracy and freedom for millions of people across the globe. Our universities consistently produce ground-breaking research; our companies drive innovation for the global economy; our military helps keep peace in many global conflicts.
Yet I’ve always been uncomfortable thinking of myself as “American” when I see politicians make speeches with the message “America, Right or Wrong.” I much prefer the great American statesman Carl Shurz’s take, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”
This feeling crystallized on the second anniversary of 9/11 in 2003. We had recently invaded Iraq based on the Bush administration claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and also tying Saddam Hussein’s administration to the 9/11 attacks. Despite a thorough search, the CIA’s final report found no weapons of mass destruction, and the claims were later found to be false.
The lack of such weapons of mass destruction was already pretty clear by Sept. 11, 2013, and even Bush admitted no direct ties between Hussein and 9/11. Yet this didn’t prevent him from, in his speech on the second anniversary, making an association between 9/11 and the war in Iraq, when he stated “We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.”
I remember listening to that speech and being really turned off by his using the label “we” — Americans — as if it included me. I was not fighting the enemy and wanted no part of the label of “we” in a war I opposed. I remember taking a walk around my neighborhood after the speech and seeing all the flags out on the streets and feeling put off by such patriotic displays when I thought the country was going in a wrong direction. I recall remembering how the label of “American” felt confining, forcing me to identify with aspects of the United States that I was not happy about.
So I decided to spend some time thinking up a way to address this feeling of discomfort. I came up with an approach that draws on the strategy of reframing, a research-based approach involving changing our framework of thinking.
Specifically, I tried putting the term “weird” before “American.” The term “weird” had a wonderful impact. It fit my desire to identify overall with the label “American” but allowed me to separate myself from any aspects of the label I don’t support. This represents a specific instance of the broader, research-informed strategy of distancing oneself from an uncomfortable situation to think calmly about it and make good decisions about how to proceed forward.
Once I started thinking about myself as a “weird American,” I was freed myself from the anxiety of not fully identifying with that label. I was able to think through, calmly, which aspects of being American I identified with and which I did not and set the latter aside from my identity.
Based on that experience, I started putting “weird” in front of other labels that did not feel fully comfortable to me. For example, while I love my mother greatly, she and I fight occasionally, and it made me feel really bad in the past when we had conflicts. Now, I just think of myself as a weird son when we fight, which makes me much calmer and less stressed.
The term “weird” also enabled me to change my behaviors in useful ways. For example, I am intuitively a kind and gentle person and strive to be nice to everyone. However, being this way has enabled others to exploit my kindness and harm me in the past. Thinking of myself as a “weird nice guy” permits me to be less-than-nice when the occasion calls for it, however unnatural I may find that. Labeling myself as a weird pedestrian has permitted me to stop and smell flowers by the sidewalk despite getting strange looks from others.
Overall, using the term “weird” before any identity category helped me gain greater agency, the quality of living life intentionally to achieve my goals, by freeing me from restrictions associated with socially-imposed identity labels. It allowed me to pick and choose what aspects of these labels best serve my own needs and enable me to feel comfortable in my own skin. I hope some of you may resonate with being a “weird” American on 9/11 and use this strategy of identity management for your own benefit.
Clinton campaign says she left 9/11 event feeling overheated
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, center, accompanied by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., center left, Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., second from left, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, center top, attends a ceremony at the Sept. 11 memorial, in New York. (Credit: AP)
Hillary Clinton unexpectedly left Sunday’s 9/11 anniversary ceremony in New York after feeling “overheated” and retreated to her daughter’s nearby apartment. As she exited the apartment shortly before noon, Clinton said, “I’m feeling great.”
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement that Clinton attended the morning ceremony for 90 minutes “to pay her respects and greet some of the families of the fallen.
“During the ceremony, she felt overheated so departed to go to her daughter’s apartment, and is feeling much better,” Merrill said.
The statement offered no additional details, including whether the 68-year-old Clinton required medical attention. A senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the matter said that after leaving the memorial plaza, Clinton was observed “fainting” in a departure area.
That official spoke on condition of anonymity, because he wasn’t authorized to disclose information publicly.
Clinton walked out of her daughter’s apartment on her own and made only a brief comment to the reporters waiting outside, saying “It’s a beautiful day in New York.” She waved and posed for a photo with a young girl before getting into her motorcade.
Donald Trump supporters have tried to make the case that she’s physically unfit for the White House, citing a concussion she sustained in December 2012 after fainting. Her doctor attributed the episode to a stomach virus and dehydration.
Trump attended the same memorial service at ground zero in lower Manhattan, along with New York’s Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand. The weather was warm and humid in New York on Sunday, and there was a breeze at the crowded memorial plaza during the ceremony.
Clinton’s departure from the event was not witnessed by the reporters who travel with her campaign, which did not offer any information about why she left and her whereabouts for more than an hour.
Asked after the event about Clinton’s health incident, Trump said, “I don’t know anything about it.”
Neither Trump nor Clinton spoke at the event, in keeping with the solemn nature of the annual remembrance of the deadliest terror attack on American soil.
The endless aftermath: Since 9/11, we’ve had 15 years of bloodshed, terror and a constant fear of what’s next
Spc. Angel Batista, 26, left to right, of Bloomingdale, N.J., Spc. Jacob Greene, 22, of Shreveport, La., and Sgt. Joe Altmann, 26, of Marshfield, Wisc., with the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Battalion 27th Infantry Regiment based in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, sit beneath a new American flag just raised to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Sept. 11, 2011 at Forward Operating Base Bostick in Kunar province, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/David Goldman) (Credit: AP/David Goldman)
Fifteen years ago today, I was on the air broadcasting as the national affairs correspondent for Pacifica Network News, which includes WBAI(99.5 FM) in New York City. Because our signal was transmitted from the top of the Empire State Building and not the World Trade Center like so many other broadcasters, we were able to stay on the air.
In the years since, I have chronicled the struggle of both civilians and first responders to make sense of that day and to deal with the chronic health impacts that still continue to produce premature deaths. This further notice burden is particularly borne by the NYPD, the FDNY and the entire first responder community.
In the hundred days that followed the attack, I had to use a ferry to commute into lower Manhattan, even as fires still burned at the World Trade Center site. The smell of the death and fiery destruction from that day, when our bubble burst, hung in the air for months.
The blend of National Guard troops and heavily armed police officers that tightly controlled the flow of commuters gave us the sense that even as we tried to go about our lives again, another assault might come at any moment.
Just going to work or living your life in lower Manhattan became a political statement of defiance. As Americans, we did not see it coming. How could anybody hate us so much? After all, we are the kindest and most generous people on the planet, or so our media tells us repeatedly. We are exceptional.
Here at home, in the decade and a half since, America is still flinching, anticipating the next body blow. We are kept on edge with subsequent murderous attacks in London, Mumbai, Paris, San Bernadino and Orlando.
All of last week, and throughout this weekend, we are pickled in that corporate news media brine, the one that casts the United States of America as just a mere victim of ruthless terrorists on 9/11.
According to this narrative, which always starts on September 11th, the terrorists just want to kill us because “they hate our freedoms.” As a consequence, we have to be ready to kill anybody, anywhere in the world, who threatens our security.
Due process for this summary execution, a clandestine star chamber will reach their verdict based on the latest they hear from the so-called “U.S. intelligence community.”
This would be the same brain trust that got Iraq so wrong and continued to misinform President Obama to the point where, back in early 2014, he called ISIS little more than a “JV team” as a fighting force. A few weeks later, ISIS took Falluja and sections of Ramadi.
The reality is that the U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly failed to see the next big thing coming our way in that part of the world. Just since 9/11, they’ve missed the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, the continent re-defining Arab Spring, the implications of deposing Libya’s Gaddafi, the recent collapse of the Iraqi Army, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the rise of ISIS.
Consider the New York Times reporting last year on a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation into serious allegations from intelligence analysts that the nation’s military fed President Obama doctored intelligence that painted an overly optimistic picture of the capability of Iraqi troops and the effectiveness of the U.S. bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
So here we are, 15 years after 9/11, with the U.S. still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, now with boots on the ground in Syria. We are in this post-9/11 perpetual war campaign that ignores strong evidence that the war on terror actually proliferates it.
Case in point was the recent NBC “Commander-in-Chief” veterans forum, which featured GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. What we got were questions about Clinton’s email and Trump’s bromance with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The forum existed in a parallel universe where there would be no accountability for the last fifteen years of failed U.S. policy, lest it be perceived as being disrespectful to the veterans. Just as with the recent 22 pushup movement (a challenge to do 22 push-ups to draw attention to the fact that 22 veterans commit suicide everyday), there would be no fundamental questions about why soldiers had been put in harm’s way so frequently in the first place.
In the years since we launched our post 9/11 military response, our efforts have led to the collapse and weakening of nation-states throughout the region, spawned a new generation of terrorists, contributed to the death of as many as 1.3 million civilians and set off the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
It has also resulted in huge swaths of territory where human settlement is now impossible. According to the Journal of Mine Action, in 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa there are close to 60 million landmines and unexploded remnant ordinance sprinkled throughout the landscape.
While not all of this legacy ordinance is the result of post-9/11 military action, there’s no doubt the pace of their proliferation has accelerated since our post-September 11th military response.
This ample supply of readily available explosive munitions just laying around is estimated at weighing 16,000 plus tons. In addition to posing an around the clock danger to civilians, especially children, the stuff can be re-purposed. That’s what happened back in 2003, when recycled explosives were used in the attack on the United Nations Headquarters in Baghdad that killed Sergio Viera de Mello, the highly regarded and effective United Nations envoy.
The war without end has also helped to induce ecological destruction in places that were already fragile to begin with, where the impacts of global warming were already being keenly felt. It has collapsed public health systems and taken a particular toll on children in the Mid-East-Northern Africa region, which will no doubt help recruit yet another generation of anti-Crusader fighters.
This weekend, as our media serves up more in-depth portraits of some of the more than 2,000 civilians killed in the attacks, it is my fervent prayer that at some point we have the courage to open our aperture wider. We need to also hold in our mind’s eye the faces of the exponentially larger number of civilians that have perished around the world since the horrific day in September of 2001.
We need to do as author and historian Colonel Andrew Bacevich suggests and wind our narrative to back in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter declared his doctrine that the U.S. would use military force to protect its “national interests” in the Persian Gulf.
“For well over 30 years now, intensive and continuing U.S. military engagement in various quarters of the Islamic world deserves to be seen not simply as one damn thing after another, but as one war, a war with many facets, conducted in many theaters, but nonetheless, one war,” Bacevich told a lecture audience at Boston University, where he is a professor emeritus, back in 2014.
In the years since Carter’s Doctrine, Bacevich notes the U.S. has taken some kind of military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Libya, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Yemen, Sudan, Somali, Pakistan and Syria. “The list just keeps getting longer,” said Bacevich.
Bacevich, a West Point graduate, served in the Vietnam War and right up through the early 1990s, and says the U.S. is in deep denial about its failures in prosecuting its war on terrorism. “We have not won this war,” Bacevich told his audience. “We are not winning this war and simply pressing on is unlikely to produce more positive results this year or the year after.”
Bacevich, author of several books including “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” maintains that the forces benefiting from the perpetual war on terror are “too powerful and too entrenched” and include a vast array of contractors, lobbyists, think tanks and even elements of the academy itself which prosper by virtue of the status quo.
“The mantra of the national security lobby is this, ‘The world of today is more dangerous than it was yesterday and all signs indicate that it will still be more dangerous tomorrow,’” said Bacevich.
And what about holding the national security apparatus accountable for their horrific track record so far? Shouldn’t results matter?
“To insist on accountability is to go out on a limb,” said Bacevich, whose son, an Army first lieutenant, was killed in Iraq in 2007. “You would open yourself up to the charge of not supporting the troops or of being an isolationist or of not believing in American global leadership and, worst of all, in not believing in American exceptionalism’s unique calling to save the world.”
Bacevich tells Salon his latest book, “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,” is an effort to open the American aperture to see “among other things, that the U.S. military had been mucking around in the region for two decades before 9/11. Those prior U.S. efforts managed both to instigate resentment, thereby promoting violent jihadism, and to reveal U.S. vulnerabilities, thereby inviting attack.
“Americans can choose to believe that 9/11 came out of the blue, just as they choose even today to believe that the events of Dec. 7, 1941 came out of nowhere,” Bacevich wrote in an e-mail. “But sustaining that belief requires an exercise in historical amnesia — forgetting all that went before. Sadly, Americans have a remarkable aptitude for forgetting what they find inconvenient to remember.“
