Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 680
August 26, 2016
MIT researchers use light to print shape-shifting 3D objects that could change future of medicine, solar power
"Gripper" (Credit: MIT/SUTD)
Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in conjunction with researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design, announced on Friday that they have used light to produce 3D-printable structures that “remember” their original shapes and are capable, at certain temperatures, of springing back to their original forms.
The researchers are “printing with light” in much the same way dentists currently do. According to Nicholas X. Fang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, “it’s almost like how dentists form replicas of teeth and fill cavities, except that we’re doing it with high-resolution lenses that come from the semiconductor industry, which give us intricate parts, with dimensions comparable to the diameter of a human hair.”
The difference between the lenses used by dentists and those employed in the superconductor industry is significant for another reason — the smaller the scale of the printing, the more quickly the material can respond to variations in temperature, meaning that a biomedical implant would be able to release its ingredients more quickly, or a solar panel would be more responsive to smaller temperature variation.
The applications for such advanced technology are surprisingly mundane, especially given the process used to produce them. A shape-memory polymer such as those his team manufactured could be used, for example, in the construction of solar panels in order to have them turn at a specified temperature in order to mimic the heliotropism of plants.
There are also medical applications, in which changes of body temperature would trigger the release of drugs already in an individual’s system. “We ultimately want to use body temperature as a trigger,” Fang said. “If we can design these polymers properly, we may be able to form a drug delivery device that will only release medicine at the sign of a fever.”
August 22, 2016
“Mysticore” is the New Norm: Inside the trend that’s casting its spell over the culture
(Credit: Jaroslaw Saternus via iStock)
Welcome to the season of the witch. Recently, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a Witches Brew film festival, which included the acclaimed new film “The Witch.” Lately it isn’t uncommon to see glossy magazines like Nylon with headlines that start “The Witches’ Guide to…”, while new publications like Sabat, an aesthetically driven magazine that explores contemporary witchcraft, are attracting attention from readers and design snobs alike.
Stores specializing in metaphysical sundries (think ritual candles, blended oils, sacred herbs) like Spellbound Sky and House of Intuition in Los Angeles, while not brand-new, are suddenly crowded. In Brooklyn, Witches of Bushwick has evolved from a venue on the underground party circuit to a social collective that celebrates witchcraft as a feminist art and collaborates with fashion companies like Chromat. Of course, for those who prefer whipping up potions at home, several new witch- and occult-themed subscription boxes deliver the magical arts to the doorstep.
Not just witches are enjoying a cultural renaissance, though. All manner of magic is in the air, as the New Age movement’s lighter granola-and-Zen fare has given way to the practice of a more modern mysticism, where conversations about conjuring, personal shamans and powerful potions can be intense as they are ubiquitous. While social media and feminism have brought witchcraft to the fore, the new kaleidoscopic array of spell casting, ritual observing (from pagan holidays to full moons) and crystal charging draws from traditional mysticism, magic and paganism. Served buffet style to an eager audience of open-minded converts, it’s shining a white light on everything from fashion and health to politics.
This may be the most prevalent, hidden-in-plain sight trend that you couldn’t quite put a finger on since “normcore.” Last fall the folks at trend-forecasting firm K-Hole — which coined the term “normcore” — looked into the cultural crystal ball to release a paper dubbed “A Report on Doubt.” Normcore, that infinitely hashtag-able trend that tapped into a “post-authenticity coolness that opts into sameness,” stood against style clichés and aggressive street-style peacocking — it promised freedom through assimilation. After an endless stream of articles about how wearing dad jeans was indeed the ultimate hipster power move, time had come for the cultural pendulum to swing. K-Hole’s new prediction was that logic and “sameness” were becoming relics and people were about to head into the mystic.
Call it post-reason or pro-intuition, this new phase rejects the positively beige normcore values in favor of highly personal, emotional responses to fashion, culture and politics. (Donald Trump’s rise certainly reads as more of a manifestation of personal desire than a reasonable course of action paved by logic and solid judgment.) Dubbing this new philosophy “Chaos Magic,” a term that’s been bantered about in the postmodern Magick community for decades), K-Hole prophesied, “The fundamental element of magic is the ability to manifest or sublimate things.”
Plus, K-Hole observed, “Chaos Magic lives in the same realm as the cult of positive thinking. But it goes beyond making mood boards of high end apartments you’d like to will into your possession. . . . You opt into whatever belief system you think will help you reach your intended goals.” Put simply, K-Hole’s version of Chaos Magic is the antidote to overthinking, a means of manifesting individual desires onto the universe — a “radical DIY.”
The report has been cited by Vogue, which found Chaos Magic in the personal imprints of designers like Nicolas Ghesquière (who penned a letter to accompany his debut Louis Vuitton show) and of Riccardo Tisci (who for Givenchy’s spring 2016 show brought in Marina Abramovic to craft a spiritual mood). Meanwhile, designer JW Anderson has evoked the trend more literally, sewing celestial symbols into his knitwear.
Check social media: A search for #witch on Instagram yields about 2,375,000 posts — whereas one for #kardashian scores only 1,630,000. Search next time at a boutique: Tarot decks are coming back in high style, thanks to retailers like the Wild Unknown — its artful cards are in stores across the country, from upscale meccas like ABC Home in New York City to indie hot spots like Skylark in Venice Beach, California. K-Hole was right, “mysticore” is the new norm.
But why? In an editorial earlier this year, N+1 recalled the postwar era’s suspicion of New Age thinking, heralded by Theodor Adorno’s criticism of horoscopes, based on his reading of the Los Angeles Times’ astrology column in 1952. In Adorno’s mind, astrology was a superstition that encouraged political passivity.
Maybe he was onto something. Consider the simple maxim: In uncertain times, people turn to religion to make sense of the world around them.
Today, however, as doors are closing on traditional Western religion (a recent Pew survey found that as of 2104, fewer adults — especially millennials — describe themselves as religiously affiliated), mysticism, witchcraft and magic are stepping in to fill the spiritual void.
“It correlates with nature, clean living movements, and earthy values,” said Elisabeth Krohn, Sabat’s founder and editor. “Whether you blame it on Trump, global capitalism or Internet culture, I feel many crave a less cynical world, something non-linear, even mystical.”
The current surge of mystical thought is also directly tied to the sense of personal empowerment that modern feminism works toward. “The witch as an icon is resonating right now because we’ve entered a fourth wave of feminism,” said Pam Grossman, author of What Is a Witch and co-founder of the Occult Humanities Conference at New York University. “We are redefining what power, leadership, beauty and value look like on our own terms. And the witch is the ultimate symbol of female power. Doing witchcraft is a way to connect to that energy, which is so needed right now, as we’re beginning to collectively course correct thousands of years of sexism and oppression.”
A visit to the temple of Instagram (and Tumblr and Snapchat) makes it easy to see how mysticore appeals to the generation of internet autodidacts that grew up on Harry Potter. In social media, the idea of tapping into something ancient is suddenly accessible, personal and highly individualized, which is very much in line with the idea of Chaos Magic itself (even in its original, non-trend-spotting incarnation).
“I don’t believe that those who dabble in mysticism because it’s a trend or passing curiosity actually take anything away from more ‘serious’ practitioners,” Grossman said. “For some people, that tarot deck that they bought just might be the gateway to a road of deeper inquiry. Or it may be something they toss aside in a month. It doesn’t hurt anyone in either case.”
Whether individuals are searching for obscure Aleister Crowley texts while planning an equinox ritual or just matching their nail color to the crystals the choose-your-own adventure nature of mysticore gives it a flexibility almost unmatched in the world of trends — except for maybe athleisure, which is flexible by nature. And for those looking for a place to start, the Hoodwitch’s Bri Luna, another Vogue favorite, recently collaborated on a nail-polish line with Floss Gloss.
Grossman, for one, doesn’t see mysticore going away anytime soon. “Magic is a shape-shifter,” she said. “It doesn’t care what form it takes. It just wants to flow and be known.”
BREAKING: “Don’t believe the others! ‘Twas I who really killed Gawker!” says The Greatest Living American Writer
(Credit: Christian Carroll via iStock/Salon)
I’ve been the Greatest Living American Writer across countless decades and time zones. Ernest Hemingway once said to me, “you’re in my seat, you son of a bitch.” But of all my literary accomplishments, none caused the world to quake quite like the time I spent as an editor at Gawker.com.
It’s hard to envision now, given that all of its other editors are now being forced into government-sponsored First Amendment re-education camps, but for the last decade, there was no better place on Earth to work than Gawker. I’ve spent decades writing for every English-language publication, and most French-language ones, on both sides of the Atlantic. Gawker was definitely the best, as I’m sure all its former employees who might someday throw me an assignment would agree.
The work I did there—outing several closeted gay men, stuffing several straight men back into the closet, destroying the lives of dozens of unknown writers, mocking wedding announcements, publishing the names of CEO mistresses, and just generally committing a bushel of ass-shittery every day—stands as the highlight of my superlative career, even greater than the six consecutive Pulitzer Prizes I won in the 1970s. My 2,700-word Gawker post On Sleaze: Why The Tabloid Media Is The Rent Boi Of the Apocalypse stands as the best piece of nonfiction writing by anyone, anywhere, at any time, a massive cri de coeur, the Slouching Toward Bethlehem of a generation of narcissistic vipers.
We had career ambitions that sometimes led to unexpected places and, yes, hastily concealed crimes. It happens. But mostly, we did it all for our readers, who smugly imitated us in the comments and then tried to destroy us on their own blogs. What a clusterfuck we created, a forest of semi-anonymous snark to soak up the smarmy deluge of a world full of hypocrites and liars. The next time you need a Gawker, we won’t be there. You’re going to miss us. Just like we’re still going to hate you.
I owe it all to Nick Denton, who gave me a chance, then took that chance away, then gave me another one. He played footsie with my career until he expelled me into the wilderness, a fate I fatefully deserved. Those were the days of illegally published dick pics and roses.
My time at Gawker was filled with ambition, experience, alcoholism, and debt. Here’s how it came about: In the early part of the last decade, I found myself out of work. My editor from Esquire had come down with a rare case of “gluteal gout” while on a bourbon junket, and was forced to abscond to Shelter Island, where he would heal in shame. My liquid assets were running low, as was my liquor cabinet. I needed a gig.
One night, a raven visited me. I shuddered as I prepared for him to squawk the name of my once-great love, Wally Trumbull, whose athletic limbs had been blown off long ago at Guadalcanal. But instead, the bird bore a message, with a Soho address. “Your presence is requested tomorrow night at 7:30 pm. Career opportunities will be discussed. Best, ND.”
I wondered who this “ND” was. Perhaps, I guessed, it had been a typo, and it was actually Nadine Gordimer who awaited me in Soho, hoping to rekindle our once smoldering love. But nothing smoldered save the fires of media bitterness and envy, which I would soon ignite.
I went to Soho as summoned, and entered a natty, modern, expensive loft. There was a long wooden box at the center of the living space. Nick Denton emerged from it looking trim and relaxed.
“Were you tanning?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Tanning. That’s right.”
“I’ve admired your writing for a long time,” Denton said. He told me that since my days as Spy Magazine’s fake theater critic, where I wrote under the pen name Louis Pastiche, he’d kept me on his short list. He hoped to bring me aboard to this relatively new Internet publication, Gawker.com.
“I’m expensive,” I said. “The New York Review Of Books once paid me $60,000 to write a 30,000-word review of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers.”
“I can pay you 30,” he said.
“Thirty thousand an article is still good money,” I said.
“That’s 30 dollars an article,” he said. “And you have to write 17 articles a day.”
“No way,” I said.
“I thought you might say that,” he said. “So wouldn’t it be a shame if I had to publish a piece about your secret life as a Furry who masturbates in public?”
Thinking about the deep and loyal friendships that a career in digital media would bring me, I said, “Where do I sign?”
“You already have,” he said, as he transformed into a bat and flew off into the night.
The next three years of my life were a blur of cocaine, amphetamines, and guys named Alex. We covered the powerful and powered the coverful, always from our laptops, always with two-fifths of whiskey in our belly, arguing, whispering, handjobbing whoever was left at closing time. But even though the bar got hosed off occasionally, Gawker never stopped, and neither did I. With wit and bile unforeseen in human history, I excoriated my lessers, which meant everyone. I was the top dog on the top rung of a tall ladder called Stardom.
I can barely count all the lives we ruined while I was at Gawker, but they all deserved it, especially the innocent. It was a media laboratory like none other. Even the Gawker empire’s lesser sites, like Buttmuncher (male sex), Gobstopper (candy culture) and Vegetable Crisper (refrigerator repair and management), did outstanding work in the two weeks between when Denton green-lit them and capriciously axed them.
If I can trace my demise at Gawker to a single moment, it would have to be when my co-editor at the site — the appropriately named Alex Libelstein — and I published an unsourced anonymous story that linked 16 U.S. Congressmen to a ring of transgendered prostitutes. The story, as it turned out, was untrue, but it had sounded true. However, published on the same day as “Zooey Deschanel and Lena Dunham Reportedly Sell Yellow Babies On The Black Market,” it proved to be just too much for our lawyers. Someone had to take the fall for Gawker’s sins. That someone, at least that week, was me.
In retrospect, maybe I felt too deeply, wrote too intelligently. That’s a problem that all Gawker writers faced. We are and were too beautiful and brilliant for this world. As a cruel and uncaring system snuffs out an amazing coke-whore-baiting candle for the last time today, remember us to Union Square. Let’s pour one out for Gawker, a literary legend unparalleled in the history of literature, or legends. The greatest online publication ever to proudly bear the moniker “bitterly horrible gossip rag” stands defeated, and so do we. But as a lesser scribe once said, “Tis better to have slandered and lost then never to have slandered as all.”
Also, Peter Thiel is totally gay, you guys.
A blind date — to say “I do”: “Married at First Sight” proves the unpredictability of romance
"Married At First Sight" (Credit: A&E)
The wedding of Lillian Vilchez and Tom Wilson was marked by a series of bad omens. As his first gift to her, Tom gave Lillian a necklace strewn with real pearls, not knowing that pearls are considered bad luck for a bride to wear in her culture. She’s Nicaraguan.
It stormed as she walked down the aisle to join her husband at the altar, where he waited under a flimsy umbrella. She hyperventilated as she took in the puddles forming on the aisle; her veil, heavy with the moisture, became stuck on the ground as she attempted to walk.
This also is the way Lillian and Tom first met.
Yes, Lilian and Tom were complete strangers before stepping before the officiant selected by the producers of FYI’s “Married at First Sight,” the unscripted reality hit that kicked off its fourth season on July 26.
In this unscripted series, three couples agree to be matched by a panel of experts, with the twist that they will marry upon their first face-to-face meeting and let cameras film everything that happens for six weeks afterward. In addition to showcasing Lillian and Tom, Season 4 also features Sonia Granados, a very sweet woman who has married Nick Pendergrast, a man not given to much expressiveness. They seem to be faring much better than Heather Seidel, the flight attendant who married Derek Schwartz, an account executive, and found herself weeping in a deck chair not long after the honeymoon kicked off.
Throughout the production, experts check in on the participants to see how they’re faring, lending support and advice when warranted. At the end of the six weeks, each pair decides whether to remain married or seek a divorce.
In exchange, the public gains a view inside the joined lives of six newly married strangers as they learn about their mate’s family background and personality — not to mention how to pronounce his or her name at the altar.
Many reality series seem to enjoy burnishing their central idea by dubbing themselves “experiments.” But “Married at First Sight” feels like one, in terms of its execution and the effects of the show’s structure on its participants and on viewers.
There is a pleasurable voyeuristic aspect to watching the show and only the smallest part of that involves a lovely stroll through America’s Marital Industrial Complex.
Now it’s true that the couples who agree to meet and wed on “Married at First Sight” do have the chance to enjoy a very nice party that would cost many brides and grooms a fortune.
But unlike other series, where it’s clear that some contestants are simply there to launch their acting careers — or in the case of celebrity participants, extend their time in the spotlight — the people in “Married at First Sight” are nervous, hopeful, vulnerable men and women who are yearning to find someone to share their lives with.
Each has his or her own reasons for seeking out the assistance of the show’s team of experts. This season they include University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz (the only remaining expert from Season 1), Pastor Calvin Roberson and communications and relationship expert Rachel DeAlto. Previous seasons have included a sexologist, Logan Levkoff, and a psychologist, Joseph Cilona. Roberson replaces Greg Epstein as the show’s spiritual adviser.
For their part, the experts and producers select three couples from a pool that can run more than 30,000 applicants. Potential participants have to answer a questionnaire that features hundreds of queries and be interviewed by the experts.
Despite the producers and experts’ having undertaken what they profess to be an incredibly rigorous vetting process, even when a team of experts finds suitable matches for these men and women, there’s still no telling if the marriages will work out. And this provides not only the show’s central tension but also an interesting take on the nature of human romance.
For all the background checks and answers about likes and dislikes and the experts’ efforts to match strangers based on data, interaction and gut feeling, some of these marriages go terribly wrong. Others begin on rocky ground; in one of the show’s more memorable first-season moments, participant Jamie Otis excused herself to an empty hallway shortly after she said “I do” to Doug Hehner and wept into her veil. The pair is still together, though.
The quest to find true romance and the allure of witnessing the heartbreak caused by that driving mission, has been a major TV entertainment engine since Chuck Barris channeled it into “The Dating Game” in 1965. But that game show, in which single women prodded single men to charm them with bawdy, blue one-liners on national television, represented a turning point. “The Dating Game” begat many series, including MTV’s mid-1990s series “Singled Out” and, starting in 2002, “The Bachelor” franchise – which airs on ABC, like “The Dating Game” did years ago.
“The Bachelor,” for its part, begat “The Bachelorette,” VH1’s “Flavor of Love” and Fox’s “Joe Millionaire” and a slew of other shows too dumb to list here, all of which made the search for love (with Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav in “Flavor of Love” and former Poison frontman Bret Michaels in “Rock of Love”) into a prize to be won.
These series have taken the competitive factor in the dating world to ridiculous realms. In contrast, “Married at First Sight” skips the circus elements that can be part of “The Bachelor” and other shows of its ilk. What the show does instead is reveal all the things that can get in the way of two people’s forming a lasting bond.
To the show’s credit, out of the nine couples featured during its first three seasons, five chose to remain married after the six-week mark. Two of those couples are still together. That’s a better success rate than that of “The Bachelor,” which only produced one marriage: Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici. (“Bachelor” Jason Resnick married that season’s runner-up Molly Malaney, whom he chose during the “After the Rose” finale after initially choosing Melissa Rycroft.)
On the other hand, a Season 2 couple on “Married at First Sight,” Jessica Castro and Ryan DeNino, initially agreed to remain married only to split up horribly, which was revealed during a broadcast of the show’s six-month check-in special. This was followed by Castro’s suing DeNino for harassment, menacing and stalking.
And it’s this history, as well as what viewers have seen thus far in Season 4, that shows the flaws in the “Married at First Sight” experiment. People present their best selves in surveys and during interviews, especially if they want a job — and particularly if the job is “spouse.” A repeated motif in every season of “Married at First Sight” is that divorce is not part of the vocabulary, it’s not an option and the participants don’t want to fail. This idea is as frequently uttered in this series as the idea of “journeys” are in others, which adds to the fascination and the potential tragedy.
Romance, even when filtered through the mechanics of expertise and especially when exposed to a reality camera lens, is unpredictable. And a huge part of the draw of “Married at First Sight” lies in the chance to read these personalities, guess who isn’t going to make it and cheer for those who look like they will.
This can be somewhat of a psychological exercise for the viewer — odd but not necessarily cruel, as much as it’s a growth experience for the participants.
“Married at First Sight” may initially sell viewers the idea that something so complex can be so easy, with expert intervention and the sense of openness on the part of the participants. But in its own way, the show also provides validation to single viewers who talk about how hard it is to find a love, as well as to married couples who are watching people jump into their ocean before learning to swim.
Lillian and Tom have navigated the first storm together and, as of the most recent episode, appear to be getting along pretty well. Now viewers will just have to see how she takes it when he reveals that he lives on a bus.
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t on the questionnaire.
Amber Heard was the “perfect victim” — and perfect still isn’t good enough
Amber Heard, Johnny Depp (Credit: Reuters/Fred Thornhill)
If the internet loves a “perfect response,” Amber Heard has certainly delivered. After receiving a $7 million divorce settlement from Johnny Depp, her ex-husband who she alleges abused her throughout the course of their volatile three-year relationship, the 30-year-old actress donated the sum to charity. A portion of the proceeds will go to a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union that combats violence against women, while the rest will be donated to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where Heard has been a volunteer for more than a decade.
“I know these organizations will put the funds to good use and look forward to continuing to support them in the future,” Heard said in a press release. “Hopefully, this experience results in a positive change in the lives of people who need it the most.”
The act was one both of charity and of taking back the narrative. After filing for a divorce from Depp in May and an emergency restraining order, Heard has been publicly branded as a “gold digger,” someone who was alleging abuse only for a quick payday. Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro referred to the actress as “manipulative” and “twisted,” while Depp’s friend, comedian Doug Stanhope, claimed that Heard was blackmailing her estranged spouse in an editorial for The Wrap. Even Terry Gilliam — yes, the Terry Gilliam — managed to get in a swipe at her.
The redemption she seeks, though, may prove elusive for Heard, as the deck remains stacked against accusers. One can do everything right and still be labeled a liar and a hustler, someone motivated by nothing more than petty greed and malice. Heard did every single thing that people asked her to. Heard was the “perfect” victim — or as close to perfect as it gets.
The shadow of the “perfect victim” crops up in cases like the Steubenville rape or the death of Michael Brown, as any perceived fault of victims are used to insidiously blame them for their assaults, rapes or even deaths. When Brown, a recent high school graduate, was buried in 2014 after being shot by police, his New York Times obit said he was “no angel.” The Times’ John Eligon referred to “public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life.”
These narratives, based on the victims’ perceived “mistakes,” are used to destroy their credibility. The Steubenville rape victim, following her 2012 assault, had consensual sex with one of her assailants — simply because she didn’t know what he had done. She had been passed out during the incident. The fact, however, that she engaged in intercourse with him afterward threw her story into question. After all, she was no longer “perfect.”
A certain subtext emerges: Because Jane Doe hasn’t followed a proscribed flow chart of how victims are supposed to behave, she deserves whatever happened to her that night. It’s her fault.
Due to the social stigma and culture of disbelief to which survivors are subjected, many of those who have faced abuse and sexual assault will never come forward. Twenty people are abused by an intimate partner every single minute in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, but most will not report their injuries to police. Many will decline to take their assailant to court. Some will not leave their abusers at all. A study from 2003 to 2007 found that the leading cause of death among pregnant women was homicide, with 45 percent of those murders linked to current or former partners.
Amber Heard, though, was not silent. She came forward. She had corroboration.
When Depp allegedly battered her face, Heard provided photographic evidence of the abuse, her bruises a testament to what she said she experienced. A neighbor signed sworn testimony stating that the May events, as Heard remembered them, took place. According to the witness, Heard was “crying, shaking, and very afraid of Johnny.”
In addition, photographs furnished as evidence in the divorce hearings showed that Depp had severed his finger and dipped it in blue paint to write a message on the wall: “Billy Bob,” referring to “Sling Blade” actor Billy Bob Thornton. According to the claim, the actor believed that Heard and Thornton — who had met in 2004 while filming Peter Berg’s “Friday Night Lights” — were having an affair. There are photos of his bloody finger and the eerie warning that he allegedly painted for his wife.
A separate video taken by Heard further attested to the couple’s toxic relationship. Filmed via a hidden camera, the video shows Depp repeatedly slams cabinet doors in their kitchen while swearing at his ex-wife, who attempts to diffuse the situation in a calm voice. “Motherf***er!” he yells, violently kicking the kitchen counter. He storms around the kitchen, throwing a bottle and slamming his fist on the kitchen table. “You want to see crazy?” Depp says, pouring a glass of wine. “I’ll give you f***ing crazy.” After noticing that the exchange is being recorded, he forcibly rips the camera from her hand and turns it off.
Heard went to the police, but the authorities told her that there was no “evidence” of the encounter. She sought the aid of friends (who also support her claims), but those friends were dismissed as enablers — or even people with whom the bisexual actress might be having an affair. Heard spoke up, but people repeatedly told her that her truth wasn’t good enough, especially when weighed against the testimony of a rich, powerful man with the resources to bury her in the court of public opinion.
At every turn, her claims have been derided. Depp’s legal team argued that the leaked video was “heavily edited” before its release. According to his lawyers, sections of the 2-minute segment show his ex-wife “smiling and egging him on.” The gossip network TMZ has repeatedly accused her of falsifying the claims against Depp, including faking the injuries to her face.
A comment thread on Reddit is an instructive lesson in how those who want to discredit abuse victims will ignore even the most cut-and-dried evidence. “There is a pattern here, Gibson case, many others,” wrote one user in R/MensRights in response to the video. “Female sponges off male, then provokes and gaslights male, secretly records, claims abuse, then money.”
Others have also suggested that the tape indicates that Depp is being used: “I think it’s bullshit to judge his anger management on this video. You don’t know how persistant [sic] and manipulative women can be. She could’ve been doing that to him for weeks or months and now he’s enraged.”
Even the headline for the thread reframes the incident to favor Depp. Rather than serving as an indication that their relationship was potentially dangerous to Heard’s safety, the tape is seen as proof of the hoax: “Amber heard [sic] being caught by Depp trying to set him up trends on YouTube.”
To go fishing on Reddit, a notorious haven for trolls, might seem like cherrypicking if the site were not also a horribly transparent microcosm of the abuse that Heard has faced from the media in the past four months. TMZ’s headline on its report about the “Billy Bob” incident includes a snarky, doubting ellipses rather than a straightforward comma: “Johnny Depp cuts off fingertip in fit of rage . . . Amber claims.”
And a write-up from Forbes on her $7 million donation to charity makes fun of her — describing Heard as a nobody and her ex as a washed-up has-been.
“Actress Amber Heard, who you might remember from That One Movie You Slept Through On A Rainy Sunday Afternoon,” wrote the magazine’s Tony Nitti, “and her husband Johnny Depp, who you may remember from Far Too Many Movies You Slept Through On A Rainy Sunday Afternoon, finalized their divorce last week after 15 months of marriage. And let me just say, if a 30-year old, sexually ambiguous, Ayn-Rand disciple and a 52-year old, twice-married, thrice engaged Hollywood leading man can’t make it, then what chance do the rest of us have?”
The abuse allegations are described only fleetingly, as a footnote to the absurdity of Hollywood marriages. But it’s the media’s ongoing treatment of abuse that’s truly absurd. If Amber Heard, who did everything “right,” can’t get a fair shake in the public eye, then what chance does anyone else have?
“The water rose so fast”: Victims of Louisiana’s 1,000-year flood tell Salon their stories
Debris piled up from flooded home on Hodgeson Road in Prairieville, Louisiana on Sunday (Credit: Lisa O'Neill)
Talk to anyone affected by what has been called a “1,000-year-flood” in Louisiana, and they’ll tell you how fast the water rose. Their lawns, their front steps and their homes were bone dry, and then suddenly the water rushed in. Three feet in 20 minutes, they say. Six feet in less than an hour. In a hurricane, at least you can plan. But no one planned for a stalled rainstorm hovering for two days over areas not considered floodplains.
Twenty Louisiana parishes have been declared major disaster areas by the federal government. As of Monday, over a week after the first rainfall, 30,000 people and 1,400 pets had been rescued and an estimated 60,000 homes impacted statewide, according to Grace Weber of the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services. So far, 13 people have been confirmed dead.
Gary Banks’ first priority was evacuating his 98-year-old uncle. Denham Springs and parts of Baton Rouge had already flooded. So even though they didn’t have water yet on their Prairieville street, Banks, 49, didn’t want to take a chance; he and his cousin put his uncle in a truck headed to a family member’s house. Banks decided to wait it out: He walked back inside, put his box spring and mattress up on cinder blocks, and went to sleep.
“When I woke up the next morning, the water was up to here,” Banks said, pointing to his chest. The home his uncle built by hand had filled with four-and-a-half feet of water. He had to be evacuated by boat.
At the peak, 11,054 people, including Banks, were staying in emergency shelters. That number was down to 3,075 by Saturday, as people returned to their neighborhoods and found places to stay with neighbors and loved ones throughout the state.
The Red Cross set up one emergency shelter at the Lamar Dixon Expo — a multi-purpose center owned by Ascension Parish and used for events like shows, 4-H competitions, and rodeos. On Saturday, service tents outside the building teemed with volunteers and sidewalks were stacked with pallets of bottled water. People waited in lines outside to pick up supplies, while inside a gym building, hundreds of cots strewn with blankets, pillowcases and garbage bags lined the building. Men and women in military fatigues stood at stations around the room, while adults sat on beds or in wheelchairs and children played. A command center with a dry-erase board listed phone numbers, needed supplies and the current headcount: 452.
One shelter resident, Eujohn Moses, 38, of Gramercy, Louisiana, was living in the Desire Housing Projects in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He evacuated to Lake Charles before having to leave again — this time to Atlanta — when Hurricane Rita threatened the area just two weeks after Katrina. “I lost everything,” he said. “Right now, I don’t know what I lost.”
At lunchtime, Red Cross volunteers came around with food: First, jambalaya and bread in Styrofoam containers and then hot dogs wrapped in foil.
James Guillory, 50, hunched over on a metal folding chair, his head in his hands. He had been living with friends in a camper on an island in Port Vincent when it began to rain. The area was vulnerable to the Amite River, which crested at more than 17.5 feet. When the water was chest deep, Guillory and his friends filled a party barge with possessions and tied it to a tree, hoping it would stay put through the storm. He walked three miles to Ralph’s Supermarket, where he was picked up and brought to the shelter. Before the flood, he worked in the kitchen at Popeye’s; he hopes to get back there soon and hopes someone will be there to give him his check.
His sister also lived in Port Vincent. “I don’t know where she is,” he says, breaking down. “I don’t know what to do.”
Down a few chairs from him, Sharon Buratt, 46, hasn’t heard from one of her daughters, who has a nine-month-old baby, since the night before their area flooded. She tears up and fellow evacuee Karen Clement tries to comfort her. “I didn’t know that,” Clement says. “I’m sure she’s all right.” The day Buratt arrived at the shelter after narrowly escaping her flooding trailer, she collapsed from a panic attack. Her 11-year-old daughter, who suffers from autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia, is struggling in the chaotic shelter. “Everybody’s having a rough time of it,” says her husband, Ronald Berceguay.
Despite the obstacles or because of them, Buratt, Berceguay and Clement say evacuees have become an impromptu family, looking out for one another and providing support.
Clement’s house, rebuilt in 2010 after a fire, was raised 18 feet off the ground and flooded an inch or more. She points to a young teenager in latex gloves and red baseball cap moving a garbage can.
“You see that young man? That’s Shawn,” she says. “He’s 16 years old and here by himself. When his mom left, he stayed to help volunteer and he’ll be walking up and down the aisles at four in the morning to make sure everybody is safe, to see if anybody needs something.”
Shawn Roger came here after he and his mom had to be evacuated by boat from their trailer home. He says he just likes helping people.
When he and his mom left, there was no time to get his puppy, but when Roger returned, “he was still there,” he says. “He had found higher ground.” Now his puppy is staying just down the road at the animal shelter.
Inside the barn building where rodeos are held, dog barks echo off the walls. Volunteers sort leashes and toys into laundry baskets and bins alongside the three-foot-high stacks of dog food.
“This is only a third of the donations,” says Dr. Renee Poirrier, a veterinarian who volunteers with Louisiana State Animal Response Team. “Others have been stored to release into the community.”
Outside, it has begun to rain again. Poirrier looks at her phone and says, “Oh, that’s great”: another flash flood warning.
She and other volunteers first arrived in Lafayette when the water was high there, moved to East Baton Rouge, and are now in Gonzales where they are housing 1,300 animals, including 350 cats and dogs along with horses, cows, goats, pigs and exotic animals. In a co-located shelter like this one, owners and animals are both occupying the same grounds.
Initially, pet owners had to walk from the shelter to get here. Now they have shuttles running throughout the day for owners to come visit their animals and participate in taking care of them. “Before the shuttle even,” Poirrier says, “one woman in a wheelchair was coming down twice a day to see her animal.”
In a small room, volunteer vets sort through thousands of medications on long folding tables. Dr. Adrianna Smith of the LASPCA said that many of the dogs were treated for heat stress and colitis or diarrhea as a result of stress or change of environment and food. A small black and white dog lying down in one of many crates has a heart condition, and one of the vets noticed her breathing heavy this morning. She was taken out of the general population and put here, in this air-conditioned room. They’ve since been in touch with her owner to find out more about her condition and make sure she’s on the right medications.
On the grass beyond, Kirt Soileau, of St. Amant, and Sarah Rodriguez, of Galvez, walked their horses, Pistol and Two-side, on the grass. They had begun the process of evacuating at near midnight Sunday and by daybreak, the pasture had flooded; they barely got the horses to safety.
Along Highway 933 in Prairieville, signs of the storm are everywhere: An abandoned green boat lies along the side of the road; stop signs bend perpendicular to the road; insulation, couches, wooden furniture, mattresses, sheetrock and appliances pile up as high as house gutters. Homes along streets and subdivisions are turned inside out, the matter of people’s lives wrecked and stacked on the curb.
On Hodgeson Road, one pile has a neon orange sign that reads: “Don’t pick up. Waiting on FEMA.”
Many people in affected areas didn’t have flood insurance. FEMA representative Maria Padron said $5,000 for building and content damage can be made immediately available to flood victims prior to inspection with a signed advance, but only to those who had flood insurance. Applicants for federal assistance can receive a maximum of $35,000, including rental assistance, depending on assessment of damages. Business owners, nonprofits, renters and homeowners can also apply for low-interest disaster loans from the SBA for up to $200,000, and FEMA is collaborating with state and federal partners to provide housing for residents displaced by the storm.
Since a federal disaster was declared on Aug. 14, more than 110,500 Louisiana residents have registered for assistance and more than $55 million has been approved.
“People have been told by geologists and hydrologists that they aren’t likely to flood, to save their money,” says Valerie DeLaune, 56, a Denham Springs resident whose insured home flooded with five feet of water. DeLaune has lived in her home for 34 years and the last time there was any flooding was in 1983, just a year after she moved in. That flood was measured in inches, not feet.
When DeLaune couldn’t drive to work at LSU Office of Disability Services on Friday because of the rain, she wasn’t worried. Not even when her husband, who cares for his elderly mother in Baton Rouge, asked her to join him. Their house was at the highest point in their area in Denham Springs. “We don’t fear water here,” she said. She did promise him she would set her alarm to check every hour. All through the night up to her 6 a.m. check, everything looked normal. When her daughter called at 7:30 a.m., she asked if her mother wanted to be rescued. “What are you talking about?” DeLaune said. “Mom, go look outside,” her daughter said. Opening her front door, she found the water was at her doorstep.
She grabbed the suitcases with changes of clothes that she’d packed just in case and as she walked toward the front door, she could feel the water under her feet. Outside, a stranger in a lifted truck came by and said, “Don’t argue, get in,” quickly helping her into the bed of his truck.
Later, she waded in waist-deep water across four lanes of highway to get to her family’s truck. At one point, she tripped over a curb underwater that she could not see and lost a shoe. “If there had been a big current, I would have been in bad trouble,” she said. “I can’t swim.”
DeLaune, who made it to her mother-in-laws in Baton Rouge, says, “I’m in such a good and blessed position: I have a roof over my head, food in my belly. There are so many people who need so much more help.” An estimated 90 percent of the structures in Denham Springs were destroyed in the flood.
She was amazed by the rescue efforts conducted largely through social media and has been encouraged by the outpouring of support she’s seen from community members. People she hasn’t heard from in 20 years have reached out to see if she and her family are OK. A friend from Atlanta is driving a box truck down with shoes, gift cards, cash donations and other items.
At the store, DeLaune has witnessed countless acts of generosity between strangers. “People need multiples of everything to take care of their house, but they are offering to others.” When DeLaune went to get gloves to clean her home, there were only two pairs left. Yyet a stranger held the package out to her, saying, “Here, you take one.” “People are paying for each other’s groceries. Saying, ‘Hey, take this $20,’” she said. Before they are done with their own homes, people are helping those in their neighborhood and community.
“We are now on a mission to move on,” she says. But that process can be hard on the mind, soul and body. Mildew and mold can develop within 24 to 48 hours of water exposure so many Louisianians flooded have been racing the clock to gut their homes.
When Valerie DeLaune and her husband Dennis were gutting their home, her husband began to have cramp-like pains in his chest and was hospitalized with what they thought was a heart attack. It turned out to be severe dehydration, brought on by working too long in the heat
At the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge on Sunday morning, lyrics projected onto the wall as parishioners sang “I can see clearly now the rain is gone.” The Rev. Nathan Ryan said that when he goes to LSU football games, it doesn’t feel real until he comes home and watches the highlights on TV. “Even though I experience it directly, it doesn’t feel real until someone else notices. That’s what we’ve been seeing on social media this morning, people begging to be noticed.”
He encouraged church members to continue to show up for one another and their community, expressing his worry that this flood would in some ways detract attention from existing community issues, like police violence and divisions of the community along racial lines.
Nearby in North Baton Rouge at Immaculate Conception Parish, a Catholic church with a largely black congregation, an organ played while the voices of the choir and hundreds of congregants raised in song. The Rev. Thomas Clark began Mass by saying: “There’s a saying that goes ‘When you’re down to nothing, God is up to something,’” to notes of affirmation from the crowd. He thanked the community for supporting 80 to 85 parishioners severely affected by the storm. “If you had flooding, our hearts go out to you,” he said. “And for those of us who were spared, let us have the courage and strength to do all we can for our brothers and sisters.”
After Mass, in the activities center, parishioners affected came to collect supplies. In the main hall, long folding tables were lined with rows of cleaning products: paper towels, sanitizers, brooms, buckets and pallets of water and other drinks. Two smaller rooms were sorted into clothing for adults and children. Parishioner Andrea Toles said volunteers and staff had called all 700 registered parishioners and were focusing on those hit the hardest.
Addressing his congregation, Father Clark spoke of visiting parishioners sitting within the wreck of their homes, having lost everything, who told him, “I’m blessed.” “I’ve realized this week,” he said. “That hope is a choice.”
“I’ve realized this week,” he said. “That hope is a choice.”
Look Again: The day’s most compelling images from around the globe
(Credit: Reuters/Ako Rasheed)
Kirkuk, Iraq Ako Rasheed/Reuters
Iraqi security forces detain a boy after removing a suicide vest from him.
In her book, “Syrian Dust,” Francesca Borri — a freelance journalist embedded in Aleppo, Syria — said of wartime photojournalism, “The real photos never end up in the newspapers … so as not to offend people’s sensibilities, and you don’t even submit them, you keep them for yourself … along with your ghosts, along with the words you say only at night.” For each photo of a foiled suicide bomber, how many exist — shielded from our sensibilities — of successful ones?
–Brendan Gauthier
Al Zaatri refugee camp in Mafraq, Jordan Muhammad Hamed/Reuters
Syrian refugee girls play football.
Just last week the devastating image of the dazed, bloodied face Omran Daqneesh, the child who was rescued after an Aleppo airstrike, became an immediate symbol of the devastation of the violence and destruction in Syria. This refugee girl is reminder of another side of the story — the resilience of childhood and the power of play. We are compelled to care about all our children, not just because of their suffering, but precisely because of their joy.
–Mary Elizabeth Williams
Demydiv, Ukraine Efrem Lukatsky/AP
Female White Lion Ivanna
Ivanna flaunts her post-baby body after giving birth to quintuplets — that’s five white tiger babies, yes — earlier this summer. She’s already returned to work as a popular personality at a private zoo outside of Kiev to capitalize on her status as mom of 5 social media-savvy cubs, prompting backlash from critics who say she’s a failure to both feminism and traditional mothering. Meanwhile, lion instincts are difficult to subdue, even in captivity, so father Ludvig has been acting like it’s a huge deal that he didn’t accidentally eat his own offspring while Ivanna does all the work.
–Erin Keane
Tokyo, Japan Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters
Renka Haseo attends the Handsomest Monk Contest at Life Ending Industry Expo.
I do hope Mr. Haseo won the Handsomest Monk award, as he is indeed quite handsome: well-trimmed brows, just the right amount of head sheen, glasses — the complete package. The fact that a funeral industry trade show enlivens its sepulchral proceedings with a world’s sexiest Buddhist contest is immensely satisfying and a testament to the universal allure of the hot monk. This photo is personal to me, as I narrowly lost this competition in 2013.
–Simon Maloy
Gawker says goodbye: Farewells combine nostalgia with irony
Nick Denton (Credit: Wikimedia/Gawker/Salon)
What’s the best way to say goodbye to an institution that’s a mix of bully and martyr? I’m not sure anyone has figured that out yet. But Gawker has spent Monday in a low-key public send-off that mixes nostalgia with irony but at least — as I filed this around 4 p.m. ET — little of its trademark nastiness.
Proof that Gawker didn’t have an ironclad house style is in its farewell posts. The most striking was by Choire Sicha, whose writing style manages to be both campy and warm, sarcastic and friendly:
A cool sunset does more for a hot publication’s glory than all the sweaty days of its actual word-pushing. As night falls — and night always falls, honey — plenty of beloveds return and gather round to tamp down the grave. Some come to tap-dance because every media graveyard has sad ghouls.
Sicha, who has not worked at Gawker for years now, ended the piece by admitting some nostalgia for the site and saying that readers will all feel it some day.
As eccentric as Sicha’s piece may be, Rich Juzwiak’s farewell made it look conventional. He began with a lengthy description of George Michael, offering:
Today, I realize that I’ve been jealous of George Michael’s agency, his ability to steer his career. Granted, he had no idea where it was headed (he never again saw commercial success like he did pre-Listen Without Prejudice), and his decision proved that freedom has its own trappings, but, wow, what a narrative: Pop star at the peak of his fame stops pandering and decides to make the music that he wants to make.
Defiance like that, he suggested, went into his writing for Gawker, along with a sense of humor: “I dusted as much as possible with a thin layer of satire, because this world and its inhabitants are fundamentally ridiculous but, overall, endearingly so.”
Gawker’s role as a satiric site — a kind of overgrown, meaner Spy magazine — may be the way peope will remember it. But I expect that over the next week or so, most of the eulogies will be overreaching. Given the fact that the Gawker empire was brought down by a vengeful billionaire, many of us in the press feel the need to defend it. But even leaving aside its most notorious pieces — the CFO outing and the Hulk Hogan sex tape — Gawker was a real mixed blessing for the online media.
For instance, Alex Balk wrote in The Awl:
Gawker published a lot of garbage, and the strident defense of that garbage by the people who worked at Gawker was all the proof you need that everyone is captured in their own web of dishonesty eventually; Gawker’s biggest lies were the ones it told about itself. But these errors were small in scale when measured up against the pervasive duplicity offered by the other publications Gawker was established to counter . . . Gawker was stupid, loud, bullying and ill-informed, and most days it was the only honest thing you could read.
I’m with Balk until the end. A person can resent some of what the mainstream press does — Judith Miller, for instance, or a least favorite newspaper columnist — but to call Gawker “the only honest thing you could read” is, I’m afraid, nonsense.
And Hamilton Nolan’s sign-off (“Wherever you go in this life, there is some jerk telling you what to do. Almost always. But not always.”) is a little romantic. Gawker set its writers free, and Nolan was one of the best of them. But sometimes limits and a sense of modesty are just as valuable as freedom. Gawker might still be around if it had realized this.
“There was a market for white resentment”: Tim Wise on Trump, David Duke and the bigotry that risen from the shadows
Tim Wise (Credit: City Lights Publishers)
Listen to an excerpt of the interview here:
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The ascendance of Donald Trump over the Republican Party has been met with many questions about racial progress and social justice in the United States. Is Donald Trump’s rise to power fueled primary by “white economic anxiety?” Alternatively, is it a function of white racism and nativism? What of his championing by overt white supremacists such as David Duke and neo-Nazis?
In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Tim Wise, one of the United States’ leading antiracism activists and author of numerous books including “Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority,” as well as “Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America” about the Trump phenomenon and what it portends for the future of American politics and society.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You have been working on antiracism and social justice issues for some time. You fought against David Duke during his first run at elected office, have written several books on white privilege and travel the country speaking about these issues. What do you make of this political moment?
I remember really clearly, even though it’s been a quarter century, the night that David Duke lost the Senate race in 1990. Those of us who were involved in that, we were gathered at the Sheraton, I think it was, on Canal Street in New Orleans. The media was there and they were asking my boss at the time, Lance Hill, [of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism], “What do you make of this?” And his statement was “Well, tonight was a referendum on hate, and hate won.”
Duke lost. He lost by whatever the percentage was, but he received approximately 60 percent of the white vote. I think the overall vote was something like 56 to 44. But he got 60 percent of the white vote. What Lance was saying at the time — and what he would reiterate the next year when Duke lost the governor’s race but still got 55 percent of the [white] vote — was that the problem was never Duke. It was Duke-ism. It was that mentality of blaming black and brown folks for problems that they did not create, scapegoating people of color for every possible social problem.
And even though it’s been a quarter century, it strikes me that in many ways, that’s still where we are. Only the difference, and it’s frightening, is that back in those days many of us believed — my boss, myself, the people I worked with — we all believed that Duke-ism was easily transportable across state lines. I remember Lance used to call it “cocaine politics.” It was very concealable and easily transportable across state lines. And people said, “Well, that’s just Louisiana. That’s just those stupid Louisianans.”
But we always knew that there was a market for white resentment, and a quarter century later I think that market has become much more lucrative in the sense that the kinds of things Duke was saying a quarter century ago are now sort of mainstream.
It’s a formula that they’ve been playing for a very, very long time and which I think the Democratic Party has not taken seriously enough.
Given the history you’ve laid out, do you think Donald Trump is converting new people or is he giving them permission to voice and act on impulses they’ve always had?
My guess is that it’s more of the latter than the former. That might be wishful thinking. But my guess is that the folks who were lining up, and I’m talking the real hard-core base of Trump support, are people who did not need to be convinced by Donald Trump that the “problem” was Mexicans or the “problem” was Black Lives Matter or the “problem” was Muslims. These are people who, according to all the evidence I’ve seen, are probably the kind of folks who believe the president wasn’t born in America.
My guess is that the typical Trump base supporter — I’m not saying every supporter but the people that are really that hard-core one-third of the Republican Party that were out there from the very beginning — are people who probably were not convinced by him but who looked at his candidacy as this sort of excuse for saying all of the crazy bullshit that they’d been thinking and said in their personal emails for years. That’s why so much of this has been about “challenging political correctness.”
But there are people out there who — I guess because of their own fragile masculinity, their own fragile sense of whiteness — believe that “I just can’t say what I want to say anymore.” Well, of course, that’s bullshit. People can say whatever they want to say. We don’t line you up against a wall and shoot you in the head for being a bigot.
But the fact is, if you say bigoted, crazy, misogynistic, racist shit, we have the right to call you a crazy, bigoted misogynistic racist. And if you complain about being labeled the very thing that your own words convince us that you are, you don’t really have a lot of ground to stand on. I think that’s sort of where Trump is. He’s not converting people, but he’s taking people who were already convinced that their voice has somehow been silenced.
Carole Pateman and Charles Mills have written a great book called “The Contract and Domination,” which examines the overlaps between racism and sexism. Taking the long view, how do you think that the racism we’ve seen against Obama from conservatives is going to be related to the sexism and the misogyny that Hillary Clinton is going to experience if she is elected president?
They are definitely conjoined. There is no way to understand the Trump phenomenon, for example, and the hostility toward Hillary Clinton, as a merely sexist issue. And there’s no way to understand the hostility towards Barack Obama as a merely racial issue because all of these things are intertwined.
For example, the argument that people sometimes make about Trump supporters is that “Well, you know, there’s this class element, and they’re just working-class folks who feel battered by the economy, and they just can’t quite find their grasp on the economy, and so we need to understand them.”
Well, if it were really a working-class issue, if it were a class issue as opposed to race or gender or both, then you would expect black and Latino and Asian folks — who are working class in much greater percentages, I should point [out], than white folks — to be flocking to Donald Trump. You would say, well, if it’s a class issue, the disproportionate percentage of working-class people who are people of color should love Donald Trump. And, of course, they don’t.
By the same token, if the hostility toward Hillary Clinton were just an issue of misogyny or patriarchy, you would expect that black men, Latino men, Asian men, indigenous Native North American men would be just as hostile to her and just as supportive of Trump as white men. And yet what does the data say? The data is real clear. It’s pretty much the fact that white men are the base for Donald Trump. So when we talk about gender and sex issues, we need to understand there’s a particularly fragile white masculinity that is at the root of Trump’s movement.
You said the magic phrase there: “fragile white masculinity.” Why is there such a hostile response online and elsewhere to discussions of that concept?
Well, I think it’s certainly a little bit about the general sense of any group that has been so dominant having to actually confront the notion of pluralism and having to share space is probably really frightening, I guess. So there’s part of it that’s generic and there’s part of it that’s very specific. I vacillate between these two poles of wanting to be understanding and wanting to not be.
It seems to me on the one hand, if you wax nostalgic for this era of white, Christian, straight, male hegemony, there’s part of me that wants to say to you, “Fuck you.” There really is part of me that wants to say, “I want your America to die, and I want you to be sad tomorrow, and I want you to deal with the fact painfully that your country is gone. And I don’t care because your country, as you conceived of it, deserved to die.”
And there’s part of me — because I’m not an asshole and I try to be a decent human being — who says, “Wow, you know what? It must really suck to have been told all of your life that the world was yours, that you were entitled to everything and then [you] come to find out that, eh, maybe you’re just gonna have to settle for your portion rather than everything. That sucks and it’s not your fault that you were lied to. It’s not your fault that somebody sort of told you that you were the shit and then come to find out you’re just one of many.”
So there’s part of me that wants to, as the saying goes and I’ve mentioned this many times in my work, “be soft on people and hard on systems” because I know systems are the real problem. But there’s that point where you also say, “You know what? At some point when your personal shit threatens democracy, threatens justice, then I have to just roll over you.”
And I’ll be honest with you because I think we have to be honest in these kind of moments. I don’t know which of those tendencies is the one that’s going to win. I’d love to be able to be really kind and ecumenical and work it all out. And then there’s part of me that’s like, “Shit, you want to kill my people and I’m supposed to be nice to you? You want to roll over the people I care about and I’m supposed to invite you to coffee?” I don’t know. It’s very much up in the air.
I’m not so much worried about the election. I think it’s going to be a lot closer than the pundits are saying that it’s going to be and Trump will lose. What do you think happens the day after with these voters that have lost? Where do they go?
That, I think, is the issue because ultimately there are two things going on. One is these Trump folks, and I’m talking about their hard-core base support. They really believe they’re gonna win. You can see it on Twitter. You can see it on Facebook. You know, Sean Hannity said, Trump’s got more Facebook followers; he has bigger rallies.
So I think the danger is . . . when they lose and I tend to agree with you, I think they’re gonna lose, although it’s not guaranteed. The question is, If the vote total is close — if it’s 10 points, it’s different — but if it’s 4 points or 5 points or less, where do they go? I wrote “Dear White America” in 2012. My argument at the time was, What do these white folks do who have been nurtured in this anxiety and resentment and this idea that they’ve ‘lost their country’?
At the time I was thinking about the Tea Party; I wasn’t even thinking about Trumpkins. My point at the time was, What do these people do? Are these the kind of people who gladly say, “Oh gosh, we lost, that sucks. But we’ll just work harder next time and gosh darn it, in four years we’ll come back and we’ll be ready to go.” My argument was then, and is now, I don’t think that that’s what Trump’s people are like. I don’t think Trump’s people are the kind of people who go, “Gosh darn it. How can we tweak our message to get moderate voters?” These are people who I think, to be perfectly honest, lose in November and then they look around and look at their wall and they say, “Well goddamn. We’ve got a lot of guns. We don’t have the vote, but we got the guns.”
So I hate to believe that that’s what this is coming to, but I honestly believe there’s a point where these folks are more committed to their version of America than they are to what the words of America — the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, all of that — say we’re supposed to be about. So I think those of us who care about pluralism, progressivism, justice, equality, all of those things had better be really clear: These people who are voting for Donald Trump are not convertible. They are not our allies. They are not our potential friends. It is about literally either steamrolling and defeating them and imposing a just and decent society or it is about letting them win. And I don’t believe there is any middle ground between that. I’d love to think that there was, but I just do not see it.
“Good Morning America” host Amy Robach apologizes for discussing the diversity of “colored people” in Hollywood
Amy Robach (Credit: ABC News)
During a segment about the rumored casting of Zendaya as Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming “Spider-Man: Homecoming” film, “Good Morning America” host Amy Robach attempted to discuss recent controversies about diversity in Hollywood when she accidentally sparked a controversy herself.
“We all know,” she said, “Hollywood has received recently quite a bit of criticism for casting white actors in what one might assume should be a role reserved for colored people.”
She was referring to the white-washing of films like “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” “The Last Airbender,” “A Mighty Heart,” and “The Lone Ranger,” to name but a few, but her point fell by the wayside because of how she made it:
@arobach did you just say??? #gma #coloredpeople pic.twitter.com/f8mjjsWeGw
— Mr Sinister (@Csampson71) August 22, 2016
https://twitter.com/ZsaZsa_ATL/status...
In her statement to the Associated Press, Robach insisted that she “mistakenly said ‘colored people’ instead of ‘people of color,'” calling it “a mistake and…not at all a reflection of how I feel or speak in my everyday life.”
