Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 695
August 8, 2016
It’s still Trump’s show: Journalists should avoid the temptation to assume Mike Pence is the power behind the throne
Donald Trump, Mike Pence (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)
The Donald Trump candidacy has created a major problem for mainstream journalists. The campaign “upsets balance, that idealistic form of journalism with a capital ‘J’ we’ve been trained to always strive for,” argues Jim Rutenberg in the Sunday New York Times.
In the past, journalists, striving to avoid accusations of bias, tended to frame elections as a contest of equals. Whatever bumps and scandals might come along, the assumption was that both the Democrat and Republican are experienced politicians who adhere to prevailing norms and play by the rules. But Trump has thrown a wrench into that process, by running a campaign so incredibly dishonest, so indifferent to the regular rules of politics, and so demagogic that the pretense of “balance” has been thrown out in favor of coverage that highlights the wide gulf of professionalism between the Trump and Clinton campaigns.
“This campaign is not merely a choice between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between a normal political party and an abnormal one,” Ezra Klein at Vox argued. It’s throwing mainstream journalists into a tailspin, struggling to navigate this whole new world where maintaining the pretense of “balance” feels impossible.
Enter Mike Pence. The Indiana governor chosen by Trump — barely chosen, anyway — as his running mate comes straight out of central casting, if you’re looking for a boring, standard-issue conservative Republican: Religious, conservative, knows how to pander to racists and misogynists without saying anything too shockingly bigoted that makes headlines.
If Pence were the nominee, he would be enjoying the same “balanced” coverage that previous Republican presidential candidates get, where he’s portrayed as roughly equivalent to Clinton in honesty and experience. His right-wing radicalism, from his creationist views to his belief that Disney is in the thralls of a feminist propaganda machine, would never get the same level of coverage that Trump gets for his racist comments or erratic behavior.
Because of this, Pence represents a very real temptation for the press, to recast him as the power behind the throne, a “real” nominee to slot into the standard “both sides”, balance-focused coverage that has been typical of elections past. To paint this race as a Pence/Clinton one, in other words, and treat Trump like an entertaining sideshow who is bracketed off from regular election coverage.
After all, it’s not ridiculous to think that Pence could have an unusual amount of sway over a Trump administration.
“It’s pretty clear that Trump isn’t going to have much interest in the details of government, which would lead to a lot of power vacuums being filled by other people in the executive branch,” Scott Lemieux, a political scientist at the College of Saint Rose, explained to me.
Lemieux suggested it’s not unreasonable to give a lot of weight to what Pence thinks about the issues, since “Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would be setting the legislative agenda” of the Republican party “and Pence is a conservative in a similar mold.”
Certainly, many of the Republican delegates I spoke with at the Republican National Convention looked to Pence as justification for voting for Trump come November. In late July, the New York Times even reported a story, shared by John Kasich advisors, about Donald Trump Jr. promising potential running mate picks that the vice president would have control over both domestic and foreign policy, while Trump himself would take on the vague task of making “America great again”.
Already, there’s indications that Pence is stepping into the role of being the “real” candidate who will get the forgiving, “balanced” coverage the Republican usually gets against a Democratic nominee. After Trump made headlines by issuing baseless attacks on Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who criticized Trump at the Democratic National Convention and who lost their son in the Iraq War in 2004, Pence stepped up to do clean-up work, issuing a statement calling Captain Human Khan a “hero” and making all the respectful noises we expect out of a major party candidate to make when asked about soldiers who die in battle.
Pence has since dug in, using his rally time to praise Captain Khan and grab headlines that read far more like the ones you’d get in a typical election cycle, where candidates busy themselves praising our troops for their service instead of hinting that their parents are secretly terrorist sympathizers.
But journalists should not give into the temptation to allow Pence to hoodwink them into thinking he’s the true voice of the campaign.
“Ultimately, vice presidents only have the power that presidents want to give them,” Lemieux noted.
“Especially on foreign policy, I wouldn’t bet that Trump delegates on big decisions,” he added. “And it only takes one bad decision to potentially blow up much of the world.”
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, a man that couldn’t resist talking about his penis during a primary debate and who had to be pried, kicking and screaming, off attacking the family of a fallen soldier. Even if he intends to let Pence be the power behind the throne, a man as impetuous and domineering as Trump will probably marginalize Pence the second his VP offers any real disagreement.
So no matter how comforting — or comfortable — as it may be for mainstream journalists to make Pence more central to their coverage of the Trump campaign, it’s an urge that should be resisted. The man is only as powerful as Trump’s whims allow him to be. And it’s those whims, and how erratic they clearly are, that should stay at the center of coverage of this unusual election cycle.
August 7, 2016
The war on cancer comes home
(Credit: OSIPOVEV via Shutterstock/Salon)
My dad still looks pretty healthy. His thick black hair is increasingly peppered with silver strands and his wide, broad face only gently creased with wrinkles. He walks with a limp, the hobble of his right leg compensating for its less-than-ideal rotation in his hip socket, but that’s the only sign he might not be in perfect health. His mind is still sharp, he plays guitar daily and reads voraciously — recommending books for me to check out. I have promised him that I will read “Infinite Jest,” and while at first I was worried I might not finish it in time to discuss it with him, now I feel less urgency, and the book sits gathering dust on my bookshelf. I refuse to use David Foster Wallace as my timekeeper for the end of my dad’s life, because if the doctors haven’t set a countdown clock, why should the rest of us?
***
When I first started working as a technical writer for an immigration law firm almost two years ago, I feared that the work might be boring. Or worse, legal. Then I learned that I would be translating the research of doctors, medical researchers and basic scientists — many in the biomedical fields — into plain, layperson’s English, and hazy memories of high school biology came flying back. Or rather, they didn’t. I had to Google such basic questions as, “Where is the pancreas?” “What is a pulmonary embolism?” and “What do the four chambers of the heart look like?” Knowing so little about the subjects I needed to write about, I had to educate myself in biology and human anatomy at a rudimentary level, in order to render these subjects convincingly to someone without a background in science.
As my job drafting referee letters for the visa applications of foreign medical graduates progressed, the human body came to life in a way it never had while I passed notes and daydreamed through my high school science classes. In the intervening years, I had studied literature, earned my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and worked to become a professional storyteller. In fact, that’s why I was hired — early in my job, my boss was frustrated by continued obtuseness in my medical writing, and she grilled me: “What’s the story here? Is the great conflict that repairing heart aneurysms is dangerous? That this patch closing the outside of the myocardium engenders dangerous complications? Or that no one had ever thought to look for a better way?”
I dug deeper, calling my clients and asking them to walk me through their complex surgical procedures, to explain the tools required to replace heart valves or suture leg arteries. Their words animated a mysterious new sci-fi galaxy where I now live each day at work: the world of blood cells, organs and digestive juices flowing through our bodies. Some of our clients work at a miniscule level of detail — tracing the interactions of proteins binding with each other within the nucleus of a single cell — while others look at whole organ systems, and create devices that have direct clinical applications for treating any number of diseases.
The most common shared topic across the work of my clients is cancer. It is omnipresent, all-pervasive — cancer is everywhere, and so is cancer research. Explanations of a new cancer type begin with blanket statements like, “Last year, [a giant number of people] were diagnosed with [this type of cancer], and [another surprisingly high number] died from it.” For example, I now know that skin cancer is the most common type of cancer, non-small-cell lung cancer is the most common and aggressive sub-type of lung cancer and pancreatic cancer is the most deadly, since it is virtually untreatable if the tumor can’t be surgically removed.
As more and more of my cases became “writing about cancer,” Cancer with a capital C came to life like an epic Star Wars battle for the ages: Cancer is Darth Vader, the Force gone evil, doctors are the powerful but flawed Jedi knights and “the Force” is the body’s mysterious immune system, which regulates (or in the case of cancer, is unable to recognize and regulate) cellular proliferation and termination. Yet my emotions were largely untouched, as “Cancer” became a disembodied conceptual enemy, like “Communism” was during the Cold War.
My aunt had succumbed to non-small cell lung cancer several years earlier over a very fast and dramatic few months, which had been tragic for our family and shocking in its speed — almost so shocking that I didn’t identify her with the disease, and saw her death as a sudden catastrophe, like a car crash or a heart attack. I remained bolstered by a terribly naïve sense of invincibility. Cancer, great, yeah, let’s treat it and give all of these researchers green cards, I thought, as I drafted letter after letter detailing the genetic, cellular and biological mechanisms of “tumorigenesis,” the abnormal growth of cells in a particular region of the body that eventually turn cancerous.
***
The week before my father told me he was diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney cancer, I started the case of a pathologist who specialized in clear cell renal carcinoma — the most common form of kidney cancer. My dad and stepmom told me about his case of renal carcinoma over brunch that weekend at a restaurant on the Upper East Side and ordered me not to cry in public. When we went back to their apartment across the street, he gave me his set of house keys — he was moving up to their condo in Connecticut full-time to get treated at the Yale Cancer Center. While my stepmom was going to keep working and commuting up to Connecticut on the weekends, could I please hang onto a set of their keys in case anything happened and she needed to stay up there? What would I need to do if she had to stay in Connecticut? Oh, get the mail.
As we carried his guitars downstairs in the elevator, my dad looked at me and smiled. “Oh Kim, stop crying, it’s not the end,” he said. I felt like a maudlin character who had accidentally wandered into a Sartre play. Of course people die, of cancer or of other things. Why on earth are you so surprised?
I helped them pack up their car and while they offered to drive me to the subway, I demurred and waved them off, feeling as if my father were driving off to the suburbs to dig his grave and climb right in. I took a cab back to Brooklyn, and started reading up on Stage 4 renal carcinoma with a distant metastasis (it had metastasized to his pelvic bone, but not to the lymph nodes, spinal cord or brain), as if I were preparing a case for work.
I looked at statistics — less than 50 percent one-year survival rate and less than a 10 percent five-year survival rate — and started looking at clinical trials to see what treatments were most recommended. If I were discussing my dad’s illness at work, I would have used phrases like, “Renal cell carcinoma, while easily treatable in its earliest stages, paints a grim prognosis by Stage 4 — with inoperable cases having a dismal survival rate of less than a year.” This was not, as they say, good news.
I called my best friend from high school, who is in medical school and who speaks medical-ese better than the language of emotions, and we agreed that it was probably not a good idea to have a lot of hope. Then I went to my writing group and told my boyfriend, and in his safe arms, no other words were necessary.
***
The hardest writing I’ve ever had to do for money was writing the case for the renal carcinoma pathologist during the two months after I first learned of my father’s diagnosis. All of the things that make writing exciting and powerful and interesting for me — the great leap of empathy into the topic I’m learning about, the research, the drama of what happens if the protagonist (in this case, our pathologist and my father) isn’t successful in their fight against Darth Renal Carcinoma — threatened to make me dissolve into a little ineffectual puddle of desperation on my office floor. Not to mention the fact that I shared my office with two other writers and had firmly decided to tell no one at work about my father unless (or until) his disease forced me to change my physical work set up (i.e. take time off or work remotely). Except for his two tumors, his health was outstanding, so he was slated to go in for a super-intensive week of high-intensity chemotherapy in December. The nuclear bombs of cancer treatment, but he could handle it, we all hoped.
As I studied the pathologist’s work, I was struck by the way he learned things about the behavior of renal cell carcinoma, by studying the tumor’s “microenvironment” — i.e., the cells composing and directly surrounding the primary tumor in the kidney. I began to imagine my father’s kidney like a coral reef, populated with all manner of different types of cells, which each contributed to the functioning of kidney cells, and his tumor as a lumpy offshoot of coral that had grown in a different texture, shape and color. Apparently, in the microenvironment, immune cells identify, latch onto and disable tumor cells, like trapping ghosts in “Ghostbusters,” while tumor cells hijack other cells and use them for their own nefarious devices — like how zombies infect humans in “The Walking Dead.”
Thanks to working on the pathologist’s case, while my dad was getting his week of in-patient Interleukin-2 pumped through him, I imagined the battle in his tumors’ microenvironments playing out like Jedi attacks on the Death Star. I later learned that IL-2 was a biologic, a new type of drug to spur the activity of the immune system, but it is usually administered on an in-patient basis in the ICU due to its horrific side effects. In this case, my partial knowledge of the science, at a molecular level, didn’t help me feel better — it only made the experience worse. It was all far too immediate.
***
Immunotherapy is a fairly new type of experimental, targeted treatment for cancer and is being piloted in many major cancer treatment centers across the country. In the spring, after two rounds of the nuclear weaponry of IL-2 that ravaged every system in his body but whose side effects departed as swiftly as they descended, my dad’s oncologist got him enrolled in an immunotherapy study that he could participate in on an outpatient basis.
Once every three weeks, he goes for a personalized infusion of a serum concocted for him from his own blood, in which certain antibodies (I think) are activated in order to be able to recognize his body’s tumor cells (or something) and are re-injected back into his body for about an hour or two. He has no side effects; he drives himself to and from treatments, goes home and eats dinner and still has about 97 percent of his hair. He actually looks healthier, now, almost a year after his diagnosis, than he did before. Although his doctors did not advise surgical removal of either tumor, he’s had some targeted radiation, and his leg is getting stronger. Both tumors are smaller than they originally were. They are not gone, nor will they necessarily ever be. But he has reached a tentative status quo.
I don’t know any more than this because he and my stepmom don’t ask their doctor follow-up questions. I suppose that’s their right, to be agreeable but not inquisitive; they do what she says, and want nothing more to do with it. I know who his doctor is, but I don’t know which clinical trial it is, which immune system cells are being activated or what the previous research has said about these interventions. I don’t know what his current duration of survival is predicted to be or how confident his doctor would be in that prediction. In fact, I only know that his clinical trial is immunotherapy — rather than traditional forms of chemotherapy — from a lot of extremely researched and careful guesswork.
But while at first, I wanted to know everything — which cells, which proteins, and which drugs — now I don’t push it. I never told them what I read about survival rates for Stage 4 Renal Carcinoma, and I don’t plan to. My good friend’s husband is an oncologist, and she told me that he “never gives patients survival rate percentages, because those are from clinical studies, and they’re an average. Every patient’s case is different.”
I read some clinical studies on IL-2 when he was taking that, and according to one study, there was a 3-5 percent chance that it would cure him completely, approximately the same rate as acceptance to Harvard. So I started to hope that my dad would win the Harvard acceptance of cancer treatments and be one of the lucky ones. But disappointed hopes are far worse than worst-case scenarios not quite fulfilled. So I’ve mainly stopped reading about renal carcinoma. I am mainly just grateful that he doesn’t have to suffer from the excruciating side effects of traditional chemotherapy.
In my job navigating through the vast terrain of clinical cancer research, I learned how to animate every biological function within the human body in epic narrative proportions. Yet now all I want is to surrender my humanity to the process, seeing the tumor microenvironment as a shifting battle of cells signaling through viscous liquid, quietly watching the cells resolve their conflicts without further explanation.
Expand your punk knowledge: Slash magazine collection will school you on the ’70s L.A. scene
The Hollywood- and outer Los Angeles-based punk rock scene was usually and unfairly considered the third-most vital community when compared with New York City and London. This, despite producing some of the most influential bands of the past four decades, including X, The Germs, Black Flag, The Go-Go’s and Gun Club, as well as transplants like Devo and The Cramps. Other noteworthy local bands included The Screamers, The Weirdos, The Adolescents, T.S.O.L., Alice Bag and The Eyes among many, many others.
The West Coast scene even had its own bible, Slash Magazine, co-founded by Steve Samioff and Melanie Nissen. A folded newsprint publication which ran out of Hollywood from 1977 to 1980, Slash published gossip, serious record reviews (some by Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce), art (Gary Panter was a contributor) and features on punk music.
And not just confined to LA, either — Dave Vanian of The Damned lurks out from the debut issue, and there were also cover features on Debbie Harry, reggae star Peter Tosh, as well as Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene of X Ray Spex, Pere Ubu’s Dave Thomspon and a young David Byrne, then of Talking Heads. Slash had film and culture coverage as well. It also nurtured young writers like Pleasant Gehman and Chris D.
Slash, like its Northern California peer, Search and Destroy, and East Coast publications like the New York Rocker, felt like it was beyond a mere fanzine, but rather some kind of holy cause to give the voices of a misunderstood movement their due — local stars who made the cover include Darby Crash, Exene Cervenka and the Weirdoes’ John Denney.
By the ‘80s, Slash mutated into Slash Records, which was headed up by Bob Biggs, and released classic-era X’s early albums, as well as The Violent Femmes’ immortal debut. Perhaps you’ve noticed the logo t-shirt on the back of a hipster.
If you’ve seen Penelope Spheeris’ 1980 documentary, “The Decline of Western Civilization: Part I,” you’ve seen the inner workings of Slash and met its most controversial editor, one Clause Bessy, aka the cantankerous Frenchman “Kickboy Face.” Kickboy, like Slash, is long gone (he died in 1999), but his intellectualizing of the scene has been resurrected, along with a bygone but violent, funny era, into a long-overdue and complete anthology of the magazines, as well as new essays, including one by co-editor Philomina Winstanley, and interviews that cast reflections on the vital scene.
Before the release of “Slash: A Punk Magazine From Los Angeles: 1977-1980” in late July, if you wanted to procure an issue, your best bet was an expensive and dog-eared copy on Ebay. Now all of LA — the attitude and the fashion, the noise and Nihilism — has been slammed between two jackets for mass consumption. Slash’s humor and passion was so wild and free, it seems a little odd to see it there, contained for posterity, ripe for better coffee tables, but those who were not around when a still-living Darby Crash ordered “Gimme a behyuh,” and the Go-Go’s were punk will surely get an education from picking it up and turning a page or two.
A pop-up exhibit of Slash-era paraphernalia, which had a Los Angeles showing last month, will be on display at the NY Art Book Fair, September 16-18, at MoMA PS1.
Obama’s GMO embarrassment: Why the new labeling bill just signed into law is a sham
(Credit: Shutterstock)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
It is known as the DARK Act — Denying Americans the Right to Know. It was signed by President Obama last week in the afterglow of the Democratic National Convention, without fanfare or major media coverage. The bill’s moniker is apt. With a few strokes of his pen Obama scratched out the laws of Vermont, Connecticut and Maine that required the labeling of genetically engineered foods.
He also nullified the GE seed labeling laws in Vermont and Virginia that allowed farmers to choose what seeds they wanted to buy and plant. And for good measure he preempted Alaska’s law requiring the labeling of any GE fish or fish product, passed to protect the state’s vital fisheries from contamination by recently approved genetically engineered salmon.
The White House justified the DARK Act’s massive onslaught on local democracy on the grounds that the bill would create national standards for labeling of GE foods. It does nothing of the sort. According to Obama’s own Food and Drug Administration, if enacted, the bill would exempt most current GMO foods from being labeled at all. The FDA further commented that it “may be difficult” for any GMO food to qualify for labeling under the bill. And for any GE foods that might be covered, the bill allows for food to be “labeled” through a digital system of QR codes that can only be accessed if the consumer has a smartphone and reliable internet connectivity.
Unfortunately for one-third of Americans, it seems President Obama does not know the digital divide is real. More than 50 percent of America’s poor and rural populations — a disproportionate number of which are minority communities — and more than 65 percent of the elderly don’t even own smartphones, and for those that do, many cannot afford monthly payments or live in areas lacking internet access. A minimum of 100 million Americans will not have access to food information because of this labeling system.
Reverend Jesse Jackson understood this. He wrote a letter to the president urging a veto and saying that the bill raised “serious questions of discrimination” and left “unresolved matters of equal protection of the law.” Do all Americans have rights in an increasingly digital society? Or will they be discriminated against because they have limited means?
Adding insult to discriminatory injury, the bill also allows for labeling through 800 numbers and websites. The idea that Americans can spend hours in the supermarket calling or searching websites to find out if each and every product they buy is genetically engineered is absurd. It’s just another way to masquerade non-labeling.
The president refused to listen to his own FDA, a majority of the Democratic members of the Senate, hundreds of thousands of comments from the public and the pleas of civil rights leaders, and signed a discriminatory phony labeling bill aptly dubbed by Senator Barbara Boxer “a sham and an embarrassment.”
How did this train wreck of a bill even reach the president’s desk in the first place? The answer is a sad commentary on the corruption seen far too often in our federal legislature. The DARK Act was not subject to any hearings. No expert testimony was taken. Rather, it was the result of backroom dealing between a few senators and industrial food and biotech companies. The DARK Act was actually defeated in March in the Senate as Americans involved in the food movement delivered millions of outraged comments to their senators.
But Monsanto and the company’s friends in the Grocery Manufacturers Association were not going to take this loss easily. Republicans in the pocketbook of Big Ag were easy to sway — they actively pushed for the bill they knew would be the next best thing to no GMO labeling. A handful of Democrats, up for election again in 2018, were able to be bought by Monsanto and the other corporations pushing the DARK Act. Senators Stabenow (D-MI), Klobuchar (D-MN), Heitkamp (D-ND) and Donnelly (D-IN) began private negotiations with the GMA and Senator Roberts (R-KS) to see if they could find a way to get the DARK Act across the finish line.
But would bringing in those senators looking for campaign dollars be enough to get the 60 votes needed to bring the bill to a final vote? Probably not. So the bill’s proponents made a deal with the Organic Trade Association, which represents organic food companies but is increasingly influenced by big food companies like Smuckers, General Mills and Kraft — food giants that have only a small percentage of their business in organic brands. While virtually all of the legitimate organic farmer organizations were opposed to the DARK Act, the OTA had “big organic” industry interests in mind and simply sold out for some organic “pork.”
The last provision in the bill, added at the 11th hour, allows all organic foods to be labeled “non-GMO” without any testing to see whether they contain any GMO contamination, as can happen with some organic products. So while non-organic companies that want to label non-GMO will have to undergo testing and verification by third-party verifiers like the Non-GMO Project to ensure that they do not have any significant GMO content, that is not so for organic — they will have a “get out of jail free card.” The OTA endorsement did the trick and the bill was rushed through the Senate, then the House.
So through campaign corruption and an organic industry sellout, the DARK Act wins? Not so fast. Numerous groups (including the author’s) have committed to fighting this bill in federal court. No bill this blatantly discriminatory and unconstitutional should be allowed to stand. So the fight against the DARK Act, and for local democracy and the right to know for all Americans, continues.
Andrew Kimbrell is the founder and executive director of the Center for Food Safety.
Ivanka’s insulating power: What the Trump scion still doesn’t get about sexual harassment
Ivanka Trump (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
Given his knack for despicable behavior, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump leaped to the defense of his go-to propagandist Roger Ailes, who resigned last month amidst a series of horrifying accusations of sexual harassment. The conversation took a personal turn when Trump was asked what daughter Ivanka might have done were she in the position of Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly, or the other women who made similar allegations. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company,” he replied.
Trump’s son Eric and Ivanka, two of the most outspoken and active members of his campaign, had thoughts on the matter as well. When Eric was asked about the remarks, he expressed his support. “I think what he’s saying is, Ivanka is a strong, powerful woman, she wouldn’t allow herself to be objected to it,” he said. “And by the way, you should take it up with Human Resources… at the same time, I don’t think she would allow herself to be subjected to that. I think that’s a point he was making, and I think he did so well.”
Many pointed to a passage from Ivanka’s 2009 book to note that she was indeed the victim of harassment from whistling construction workers. “But in those cases, the workers never realized I was the boss’s daughter,” and they later apologized. Rather than going to HR, she suggested that women “[l]earn to figure out when a hoot or holler is indeed a form of harassment and when it’s merely a good-natured tease that you can give back in kind.”
Speaking more recently on none other than Fox News, Ivanka said, “I think harassment in general, regardless, sexual or otherwise, is totally inexcusable and if it transpires it needs to be reported and it needs to be dealt with on a company level.” She continued, “We have a very strong HR team at the Trump Organization, who is equipped to deal with these issues if they arise … and you hope you have a culture in which they don’t arise. But when they do, it needs to be dealt with swiftly.”
On this point, the substance of Eric Trump’s answer wasn’t especially different than Ivanka’s far better-received remarks. Such complaints ought to be taken seriously, both concede, but these are internal manners to be handled by HR. And while he took a great deal of heat for the assertion, Eric is also right to note that harassment is a matter of strength and power. There is a reason why it took so long for decades’ worth of allegations of sexual harassment against Ailes to come to light, and that targets such as Kelly and Carlson only spoke out after attaining considerable wealth and fame.
In this particular respect, Ivanka’s handling of workplace whistles was a response to harassment that differed from the quid pro quo allegations against Ailes, not just in degree but in kind. (A difference in kind recognized by the law.) It is also worth noting that good-natured teasing, the kind that happens amongst peers, occurs on a level playing field. It is a playing field generally not shared by women and their harassers, often a strategic and intentional choice on the part of the latter.
But we also ought to acknowledge that Ivanka didn’t manufacture her strength and power out of thin air by sheer force of will. She inherited both from her daddy, a man whose candidacy for president she is now publicly supporting. Not all women have the great fortune of being the boss’s daughter. And in case the Trump kids need a refresher on the corporate hierarchy (perhaps they’re confusing it with their family tree), the HR director reports to the CEO, the title of one Roger Ailes. In egregious cases, laws and laws alone are what prevent and curtail harassment. They give strength and power to the powerless.
Ensuring that women don’t have to endure groping from their boss or capitulate to his advances in order to retain economic independence isn’t like free snacks in the break room or casual Fridays. It’s not a matter of corporate culture, but of civil rights. Ivanka seems to be pointing to her father’s company as a somehow representative example of his stance on the issue. Never mind that he’s openly admitted to reporters he hires women based on attractiveness and not qualifications, never mind that he harassed a woman on national TV, Ivanka suggests, the Trump Organization is a great place to work. And trust me, I would know.
But Trump is running for president, not angling for a promotion. And his campaign’s collective response to this incident is representative of a disturbing governing philosophy. It is not unlike Donald’s framing of his accessible buildings as an act of charity and kindness to the disabled community, rather than compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It suggests a reversion to an old world order, a great America, wherein basic protections are luxuries doled out by generous beneficiaries, not rights it is the government’s duty to safeguard.
Ivanka has somehow cultivated and maintained an image as the reasonable and savvy Trump, a badass entrepreneur [who reports directly to her dad at the company founded by her great-grandmother and grandpa.] “As a citizen, I love what he’s doing. As a daughter, it’s obviously more complicated,” she’s said of his campaign. One might forgive her for tolerating or even excusing her father’s misconduct out of filial loyalty, but certainly not out of patriotism. Her continued support of Donald “as a citizen” means that she inherited his grotesque opportunism, his racist brand of stupidity, or some combination thereof. Even if sexual harassment were, as she frames it, a cultural and not a legal matter, Ivanka Trump ought to think long and hard about the cultural impact of the hateful campaign in which she is playing a vital role. And the rest of us ought to think long and hard about the charmed status the socialite and heiress inexplicably continues to enjoy. If Donald Trump’s candidacy has demonstrated anything, it is the danger of false idolatry.
Don’t worry, Berniecrats: The populist insurgency is ratcheting up
Bernie Sanders (Credit: Reuters/Jim Young)
What an amazing Democratic primary season it was! And we now have this happy result: WE WON!
“We” being the millions of young people, mad-as-hell working stiffs, independents, deep-rooted progressives and other “outsiders” who felt The Bern and forged a new, game-changing, populist force of, by and for grassroots Americans. True, this progressive-populist coalition did not win the White House on its first go ’round behind the feisty Sanders insurgency (which the the smug political establishment had literally laughed at when he began his run). But they are not laughing now, for even they can see the outsider revolt against the power elites won something even more momentous than the 2016 election: The future.
Back in April 2015, when the blunt democratic socialist from Vermont issued a call for disenchanted voters to join him, not merely in a campaign for the presidency, but in a long-term movement to “revitalize American democracy so that government works for all of us,” even his more optimistic backers couldn’t have dreamed the movement would come so far so quickly. Let’s reflect on some fundamental changes this progressive uprising has achieved in the past 15 months:
It yanked the national debate out of the hands of the Washington and corporate elites — both devoted for more than 30 years to rigging all the rules to further enrich the 1 percenters at the expense of everyone else — and proved that future success requires Democrats to abandon their effete namby-pambyism and embrace the vision, message and issues of unabashed populism.
It revived true bottom-up campaigning through innovative social media outreach, the empowerment of hundreds of thousands of engaged supporters and volunteers, instantaneous mass communication via cell phones and turning people out by turning them on — by finally addressing inequality head-on and proposing bold policies that appeal directly to the workaday majority’s interests.
It lifted — from the political scrap heap up to the top of our national discourse — the concerns of middle- and low-income families: creating good, middle-class jobs through a national program of infrastructure repair and development of the green economy; enacting a $15 minimum wage; removing crushing education debt from the backs of students; coping with the imminent crisis of climate change; repealing the Supreme Court’s democracy-destroying Citizens United edict; implementing pay equity for women; stopping the war machine’s constant adventurism; expanding Social Security; providing Medicare for all; halting the unjust mass incarceration of African Americans and Latinos; defunding the disastrous drug war; demilitarizing our police forces; replenishing our public treasury by taxing Wall Street speculators; and generally restoring economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity for all as central purposes of public policy.
It raised some $229 million in more than 8 million small donations (averaging only $27 each), including millions from low-income people who sent in $5 or even $1, thus debunking the myth that Democrats can only be competitive by joining Republicans in taking corrupting big money from corporations and setting up “dark money” Super PACs.
More importantly, the Bernie movement created a hopeful, formidable and growing populist political channel that is both insistently democratic and independent of the Democratic Party. This state-based, national network of Berniecrats will keep building its connections, pushing its agenda and backing populist candidates in the House, Senate and other races this fall. Then, on to next year’s campaigns for mayor, city council, etc., which will be charged by the 20,000 Sanders supporters who have, according to Bernie, signed up to get info on running. Then on to the 2018 midterm congressional elections. And then to the 2020 presidential campaign. Onward!
Where to draw the line: Magic blood and carbon-fiber legs at the Brave New Olympics
A worker walks past a set of Olympic rings in the Olympic Park ahead of the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) (Credit: AP)
This article was originally published by Scientific American.
I knew Eero Mäntyranta had magic blood, but I hadn’t expected to see it in his face. I had tracked him down above the Arctic Circle in Finland where he was — what else? — a reindeer farmer.
He was all red. Not just the crimson sweater with knitted reindeer crossing his belly, but his actual skin. It was cardinal dappled with violet, his nose a bulbous purple plum. In the pictures I’d seen of him in Sports Illustrated in the 1960s — when he’d won three Olympic gold medals in cross-country skiing — he was still white. But now, as an older man, his special blood had turned him red.
Mäntyranta, who passed away in late 2013, had a rare gene mutation that spurred his bone marrow to wildly overproduce red blood cells. Red cells convey oxygen to the muscles and the more you have, the better your endurance. That’s why some endurance athletes — most prominently Lance Armstrong — inject erythropoietin (EPO), the hormone that cues your bone marrow to produce red blood cells. Mäntyranta had about 50 percent more red blood cells than a normal man. If Armstrong had as many red blood cells as Mäntyranta, cycling rules would have barred him from even starting a race, unless he could prove it was a natural condition.
During his career, Mäntyranta was accused of doping after his high red blood cell count was discovered. Two decades after he retired, Finnish scientists found his family’s mutation. A niece and nephew also had it — she was a world junior ski champion, he an Olympic gold medalist in the sport. None of the family members who didn’t have it were ski racers. Mäntyranta wasn’t doping, but you would never know that from his physiology. What does “a level playing field” mean for skiers who trained just as hard as Mäntyranta but were left behind him, gasping for air as he won the Olympic 15K race by 40 seconds, a margin never equaled at the Games before or since? Whereas Armstrong became a pariah for blood doping, Mäntyranta’s naturally doped blood is completely acceptable.
So, as the rules stand: having an incredibly rare gene mutation that boosts red blood cells — okay; training at altitude to boost red blood cells — okay; shelling out thousands of dollars to sleep in a tent that simulates altitude — okay; injecting a drug, one approved for other medical uses that causes your body to act as if it’s at altitude — you’re a disgrace. How should we draw the line? Where does a fair advantage end and cheating begin?
In one sense, the answer is simple. Sports have standard rules, not standard genes. Violating the rules, whether or not you agree with them, is cheating. Sports form the ultimate human contrivance: Take agreed-on rules, add meaning. The philosopher Bernard Suits formulated a précis describing the common heart of all sports as “the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles.” If you circumvent obstacles you voluntarily accepted, core values of the endeavor are lost. Still, as enhancement technology has transitioned from a steady march to a flat-out sprint, it is increasingly difficult to determine what is fair in one’s attempt to overcome those obstacles.
A decade ago, the World Anti-Doping Agency considered banning altitude tents. WADA’s ethics committee said the devices are “probably contrary to the spirit of the sport.” But WADA’s scientific committees argued against a ban. Thus, today thousands of elite athletes who don’t live at altitude have the pleasure of keeping their significant others awake at night from the buzz of their altitude tent compressors.
The line is fuzzier still when it comes to augmented biology. South African double-amputee Oscar Pistorius competed on his carbon-fiber “cheetah legs” in both the 2012 Paralympics and Olympics. Is he disabled or hyperabled? Pistorius had been barred from the 2008 Olympics after a scientist commissioned by track and field’s governing body decided he had an unfair advantage. Pistorius appealed the decision before the 2012 Games, and a group of prominent scientists who studied him helped Pistorius argue that he had a disadvantage. The initial ruling was reversed. Then, after the 2012 Games two members of that scientific team split from the others and published a paper suggesting that Pistorius had an enormous advantage. In the smallest of nutshells they found Pistorius did not generate nearly the force of a typical elite sprinter but that he made up for it by swinging his ultralight carbon-fiber blades through the air faster than other sprinters could possibly swing their intact legs.
Putting a force equivalent to about five times his own body weight into the ground in a 10th of a second is the primary differentiator between Usain Bolt and you — not the speed of his leg swing, which is actually quite similar to yours. Pistorius’s blades allowed him to circumvent this main biomechanical requirement of non-disabled elite sprinting. Rather than having to put enormous force into the ground very quickly, Pistorius can leave his carbon-fiber blade on the ground longer than other sprinters, generating force all the while, and then — because the carbon fiber is so light compared with an intact limb — whip the blade through the air fast enough to make up for the time he lost while on the ground longer than his competitors. The two scientists who published that result called it the very definition of an unfair advantage. The others argued that Pistorius is still overall at a net disadvantage. For example, he clearly has trouble exploding out of the starting blocks. But science will have a tidy unified field theory before we are capable of tallying all the pros and cons of carbon-fiber blades to alight on a precise net advantage/disadvantage score. Before the 2012 Olympics I went over the data with eight independent biomechanists — all agreed that Pistorius had abnormally fast leg swing times but four felt that it wasn’t clear he had an unfair advantage and four felt that he certainly did.
When technology replaces training or supplements biology, the lines that limn what is fair will be a bit like Schrödinger’s cat: Our collective gaze will create them. I mean that in the deepest sense. We are long overdue to ask, openly and as a society, just what it is we want from sports. Is it to see superhumans doing superhuman things? Perhaps it is. After all, you were probably aware of the most recent Super Bowl but probably not that the big game’s Most Valuable Player, Von Miller, was once sanctioned for a doping violation that reportedly included conspiring with a urine collector to skirt a positive drug test. (Miller commented that he “made mistakes” but said that his suspension did not “result from a positive test.”) And yet, football fans seem hardly to care. In bodybuilding — which actually created a separate, non-doped division — it would’ve been even less of a story; in baseball it would’ve provoked anger. In an Olympic sport, however, it would have been the apocalypse. But it’s not that fans don’t care about cheating in football, as evidenced by the interminable ripples of “Deflategate.” So let’s get this straight: A form of cheating that was employed by the MVP of the most important game and that would scandalize most sports is essentially ignored, whereas a more novel form of cheating is a big deal even though it didn’t remotely influence the outcome of a game. Make sense?
Not only is it impossible to draw a bright line in many cases regarding what should be fair on basic moral grounds, but even within already placed rules we apply different standards to different sports for reasons that are rarely articulated and difficult to understand. These judgments must be grounded in which of the voluntarily accepted obstacles we deem critical to the meaning of a given sport. We’re in for a lot of arbitrary decisions about fairness. Yes, altitude tents; no, low-friction, full-body swimsuits. The best we can do is start an earnest conversation about what it is we hope to get out of each sport. I hope that is what we are doing right here.
America’s embarrassing silence: Why has the U.S. remained quiet on massacre of drug users in the Philippines?
FILE - In this Monday, July 25, 2016 file photo, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte delivers his first State of the Nation Address before the joint session of the 17th Congress in suburban Quezon city, northeast of Manila, Philippines. Duterte on Thursday, July 28, threatened to withdraw a ceasefire order he gave three days ago after suspected communist rebels killed a government militiaman and wounded four others in an attack. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File) (Credit: AP)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
In the past few weeks, a spate of horrific killings have taken place across the Philippines. Murders of people who use drugs, people who sell drugs and people who have simply been assumed to do either. No trials, no due process, these are state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings encouraged by the new president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.
Upon assuming presidency, Duterte made a public call for police and citizens alike to execute people who use or sell drugs, promising medals for citizens who comply and pardons for police if they are charged with human rights violations while carrying out the executions. Since making this harrowing call to action, over 700 people suspected to have been involved with drugs have been murdered.
A further 114,000 people who use drugs have turned themselves in to authorities — undoubtedly out of fear for their lives — and who will now face time in overcrowded prisons and likely be subjected to inhumane and involuntary drug treatment programs.
This sudden outbreak of extrajudicial killings represents grave human rights violations, yet it has been met with silence from the United States. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with President Duterte and vowed to commit $32 million to support law enforcement training and efforts in the Philippines, making no mention of the unlawful killings currently taking place at the President’s behest.
Wednesday, more than 300 organizations from around the world released a joint letter calling on the United Nations drug control agencies to break their silence on the killings in the Philippines and to urge Duterte’s administration to put an immediate halt to its lethal anti-drug campaign. The letters were sent to the heads of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) — the two bodies in charge of international drug control — which had so far refrained from condemning the Duterte administration for the atrocities committed in the name of drug control.
Finally, months after the initiation of the killings, and undeniably in response to pressure from the open letter, the UNODC released a statement Thursday on the situation in the Philippines, “condemning the apparent endorsement of extrajudicial killing, which is illegal and a breach of fundamental rights and freedoms,” and the INCB followed up with a similar release stating that the murders “constitute a serious breach of the legal obligations to which the Philippines is held by the three UN drug control conventions and by the corpus of international legal instruments to which the country has adhered.”
It is imperative for the United States to now follow suit, condemn these unlawful killings and ensure that any assistance to law enforcement in the Philippines is in line with the Leahy Vetting Process, which requires that the State Department withholds assistance to foreign security forces if recipients are found to have committed gross human rights abuses. It is unconscionable for the United States to provide assistance to the Duterte administration while the state-sanctioned killings of people involved with drugs continue.
Across the world, atrocious, inhumane and severe responses have been undertaken in the name of drug control, from mass incarceration of people who sell or use drugs; to destruction of livelihoods and the environment from aerial fumigation of illicit crops; to militarization and accompanying human rights abuses in the name of the war on drugs; to cruel, degrading and involuntary treatment. Last week, Indonesia resumed executions of people convicted of drug offenses, killing four individuals by firing squad.
In the drug war, lives are taken in the name of saving lives. If the purpose of international drug control is protecting “the health and welfare of mankind,” this must stop.
Hannah Hetzer, who is based out of Montevideo, Uruguay, is the policy manager of the Americas for the Drug Policy Alliance.
Cease all Trump sanctimony: Republicans want to disavow a monster they created because it is devouring them alive
Donald Trump supporters at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa August 5, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer)
Insulting the parents of a soldier killed in action because they are Muslim is unacceptable, Republicans are forced to concede.
“I hope Americans understand that the remarks do not represent the views of our Republican Party, its officers, or candidates,” said Senator John McCain, in response to views expressed by Donald Trump, his party’s candidate for president. “While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us.”
Never forget that McCain, a purported font of maverick sincerity and bipartisan morality, chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate eight years ago. McCain is not a force for moderation. Rather, he is part of the modern conservative movement, which leverages white supremacy to protect the financial prerogatives of the wealthy, and in doing so helped create Donald Trump. The notion that Trump is an unacceptable deviation from acceptable conservatism is useful fodder for mainstream Democrats, too: recall that at the convention, President Obama held up Reagan as an honorable conservative whose legacy Trump has debased. But attacking Trump as an aberration absolves the very conservative movement (and the liberal establishment it helped mold in feeble opposition) that systematically created his base of support.
Meanwhile, leftist analyses of Trump veer between emphasizing that he’s new and scary on the one hand, and that he is a continuation of horrible business as usual on the other. In fairness, it’s a tough balance to strike. Trump’s surprise political career has been built upon violent xenophobic rants, sexist insults and the public stroking of his all-consuming ego. Much of what’s new (aside from the clinical narcissism) is that sentiments once articulated alongside barely plausible deniability are now blasted out unapologetically from a megaphone. This is precisely what years of Fox News, birtherism and culture war hysterics explaining what’s wrong with the world have primed a large chunk of Americans to want.
“They won’t like me for saying that,” said Trump, after saying something horrible. “I like the fact that he is not afraid to say what we’re all thinking,” said a fan.
Both Trump’s claimed rebel identity and the Republican establishment’s response to it exceptionalizes what has long been standard practice on the American right. Basic decency has never been highly valued by conservatives, and even the particulars of Trump’s attack on the parents of Captain Humayun Khan are familiar. In 2004, George W. Bush’s campaign benefited from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s smears that John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran turned protester, had lied about his service. Karl Rove, the brain behind Bush’s rise to power, called Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan, a protester against the Iraq War that killed her son, “a clown.”
For the right, hypocrisy is more a feature than a bug, less a moral failing than a political tool. Bill Clinton’s avoiding service in Vietnam mattered, and Trump and George W. Bush doing the same does not. Bill Clinton’s sexual history matters, and that of Trump—and Newt Gingrich, and for a while at least, David Vitter—have not. Obama’s religion is a matter of debate. Trump gets away with insisting that he likes the Bible even more than “The Art of the Deal.”
Though Trump is not much of a Christian — and is on his third marriage to an immigrant model who has posed nude and may have committed visa fraud—he is beloved by much of the Christian and anti-immigrant right. The right’s professed fetishes for country, family and God have been exposed to be proxies for the fundamentals of conservative politics: order, security, white supremacy, patriarchy. Perpetual war, economic crisis and mass incarceration have showcased the limits of American power rather than its exceptional quality. In 2016, the right’s various pieties have melted away, revealing the naked pathos and violent nostalgia at their core.
It is tempting to think that Trump finally went too far with his attack on the Khans, pushing his campaign perilously close to the edge of a narcissism-driven death spiral that will swallow his authoritarian ambitions in a purifying conflagration. But all the pundits who wrote him off so many times during the primary should refrain, promising new polls notwithstanding, from doing so now. Last July, when Trump insulted John McCain for having been captured in Vietnam, all conventional political norms should have been considered shattered. After all, it was when Joe McCarthy went after members of his own party and the national security establishment, Corey Robin writes, that he met his downfall. With his attack on McCain, it seemed that Trump had likewise turned on the wrong person, and most of the smart people bet against him en masse. A year later, he is the nominee. And feuding with Paul Ryan.
Trump’s rebellion, of course, isn’t about a revolutionary change in relations of power but about putting a more competent person in power. Establishment elites, Trump says, have failed at their job; only an outsider candidate can bolster the status quo of ethno-racial hierarchy and national preeminence. It’s brash, fresh violence intended to resurrect an immiserating status quo that was for decades maintained by the violence of war-making and prison-building. It looks like Trump will lose but it’s as unclear as ever what that means. He has said the election might be rigged, and advisor Roger Stone foresees a Clinton victory unleashing a “bloodbath.” Trump is the apotheosis and unraveling of an American political tradition that has always been indecent.
America’s great mistakes: Has everyone forgotten that the Vietnam and Iraq wars were unnecessary, stupid and destructive?
U.S. Marines on a patrol 15 miles southwest of Da Nang airbase in Vietnam, May 20, 1965. (Credit: AP/John T. Wheeler)
It is always equally nauseating and amusing to see America, an individualistic country, get in touch with its inner Marx and transform into a nation of collectivists whenever discussion of war rises to the level of unavoidable noise pollution. “The pursuit of happiness” mutates into “give your life for your country” with little scrutiny of the nobility or necessity of the military misadventure at hand.
Ever since Donald Trump, in an act of stupidity and indecency now becoming characteristic, spoke ill of the Khan family, whose son died in the Army during the Iraq War, the entire country has communicated a pro-military mindset that papers over the truth regarding America’s foolish and lethal wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
It is basic courtesy and kindness to express sympathy for anyone who has to bury a child, and to demonstrate respect for anyone who suffers injury or dies in war, but in an understandable and natural urge to honor the grief of the Khans, the Democratic Party, major media figures and Republicans desperately trying to distance themselves from the traveling disaster of Donald Trump have dragged out the big, rancid words “service” and “sacrifice.” These words act as censors against honest evaluation of American foreign policy. Throughout the rush to give the Khan family the regard they deserve and that Trump could not offer, it is disturbing to see almost no acknowledgement of the reality that their son, along with 4,485 other Americans, died in a war that should have never taken place. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also died, and many more sustained life-altering wounds and trauma, but Americans are never much for counting the casualties their country creates, rather than endures.
As much as Trump should apologize to the Khan family for his rude and thoughtless remarks, shouldn’t the architects and administrators of the war that killed Humayun Khan also apologize?
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the lack of any operative connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, and the creation of a terrorist playground in place of a once stable, albeit oppressive and miserable, country has led the overwhelming majority of Americans to view the war as a “mistake” and “not worth it.” The Iraq War, like the Vietnam War before it, was unnecessary, stupid and destructive. A rational observer who just awoke from a coma the week before the Democratic Convention would have little awareness of the blunder and crime of the Bush administration, given that for the past week, the entire country has spoken about the optional failure of policy as if it was World War II.
When the words “serve” and “sacrifice” populate political dialogue, it becomes crucial to ask, serve what and sacrifice for what?
Was the war in Iraq launched and managed to serve the edification of neoconservative theorists? Did the deceased sacrifice for the reelection and approval ratings of George W. Bush? Were all the sacrifices of life, health and treasure made for the execution of an abstract geopolitical strategy that did not succeed?
To ignore the consequences of war, fail to investigate the causes of war, and reduce all discussion of war to the bravery and selflessness of those who fought it is to unlock the door leading to the next war.
In a turn of tragic irony, the war in Iraq is proof of the poison in simplifying all conversations about military conflict to the abstract concepts of collective nationalism – “hero,” “service,” “sacrifice.”
The United States had a great window into its past with the Vietnam War, and although there a number of differences between intervention in a Southeast Asian civil war and the occupation of an Arab country, anyone who bothered to look through that window could have forecasted much of the folly and fatality of Iraq. Instead, Americans boarded the window, tied yellow ribbons around their eyes, and proved the accuracy of Gore Vidal’s assessment of the country as the “United States of Amnesia.”
The dementia continues to worsen American functionality as political debate now shifts focus to Donald Trump’s lack of “service” in the Vietnam War. Much like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, he acquired deferments to avoid the draft, and in doing so, successfully managed to stay out of Vietnam.
Americans, one assumes, should express outrage that someone did not risk his life to help test the truth of the Domino Theory, or come home with his legs blown off so that Nixon wouldn’t lose face.
58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese died in a war that history now accepts was wrong, disastrous and, according to the Pentagon Papers and Robert McNamara, was based on lies.
My father is a Vietnam veteran. He has suffered severe heart problems for most of his adult life due to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. I wish that he had found a way out of his “service,” and, if the polls are trustworthy indicators of public opinion, most Americans now wish we had never gone to war in Vietnam or Iraq.
As the old expression goes, “Wish in one hand and shit in the other…” The wish that my father was entirely healthy, and that 58,000 of his generation had not died, just like the wish that Humayun Khan was still alive, will get everyone nowhere.
The United States can only prevent the future waste of life through the prevention of more war. Recognition of the real nature of American foreign policy, and the true catastrophe of its past wars, is the inescapable prerequisite for peace.
