Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 725
July 8, 2016
“Justice will be done”: President Obama, party leaders respond to tragedy in Dallas
President Barack Obama pauses as he makes a statement on the fatal police shootings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota after arriving in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, July 8, 2016. (Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Thursday night in Dallas, as protesters marched, several people opened fire on police officers, killing five and leaving seven in the hospital. The shooting is believed to be the deadliest day for law enforcement officers since 9/11.
In the aftermath, the nation’s leaders have weighed in with their thoughts. Here’s what they’ve had to say:
President Barack Obama is currently in Warsaw for a meeting with NATO, so for the second time in less than twelve hours he had to make a statement on a senseless act of violence.
Watch @POTUS's statement on last night's attack on law enforcement in Dallas, Texas. https://t.co/lqd4OaofxM
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 8, 2016
“There is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any violence against law enforcement,” Obama said. “Anyone involved in the senseless murders will be held fully accountable. Justice will be done.”
So far, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has only tweeted the following:
I mourn for the officers shot while doing their sacred duty to protect peaceful protesters, for their families & all who serve with them. -H
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 8, 2016
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan issued a statement from the House floor.
“We are all stunned by the events last night in Dallas,” he said. “An attack on the people who protect us is an attack on all of us.
Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump tweeted and issued a statement on his website.
Prayers and condolences to all of the families who are so thoroughly devastated by the horrors we are all watching take place in our country
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2016
“We must restore the confidence of our people to be safe and secure in their homes and on the street,” his statement reads. “The senseless, tragic deaths of two people in Louisiana and Minnesota reminds us how much more needs to be done.”
The statement closes: “This is a time, perhaps more than ever, for strong leadership, love and compassion.”
4 Dallas police officers killed, 7 injured in sniper attack at protest
Police and others gather at the emergency entrance to Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, where several police officers were taken after shootings Thursday, July 7, 2016 (Credit: AP/Emily Schmall)
At least two snipers opened fire on police officers in Dallas on Thursday night, killing four officers and injuring seven others.
The attack took place during protests over two recent police killings of black men, although it is unclear if the two were related.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters the snipers fired “ambush style” upon the officers.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said one member of the public was also wounded in the gunfire.
Police later said in a statement that a suspect was is in custody and a “person of interest” had surrendered.
The person of interest named in the police statement is not the shooter, however, ThinkProgress noted, as video uploaded by local media shows the man on the street when the shooting began.
Shots fired at #blacklivesmattertx March @dallasnews pic.twitter.com/2TqIQgkXVm
— DMN Photo (@dallasnewsphoto) July 8, 2016
Local media interviewed the man, who expressed anger at falsely being accused.
KTVT found the man Dallas Police earlier called a shooting suspect. He's pissed. pic.twitter.com/wXhmGektYo
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) July 8, 2016
Authorities also said a suspicious package was being secured by a bomb squad.
There were reports on social media that there may have been four shooters, in different parts of the city, although this is unconfirmed.
The gunfire broke out around 8:45 p.m. on Thursday while hundreds of people were gathered to protest fatal police shootings this week in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota.
The protests in Dallas were among several across the country that were held after a Minnesota officer on Wednesday shot Philando Castile while he was in a car with a woman and a child in a St. Paul suburb, killing him.
A day earlier, two white officers in Louisiana pinned Alton Sterling to the pavement and shot him in the chest, killing him. That, too, was captured on a cellphone video.
Video footage from the scene in Dallas showed that protesters were marching along a street in downtown, about half a mile from City Hall, when the shots erupted and the crowd scattered, seeking cover.
Bystanders uploaded videos that were widely circulated on social media. Michael Kevin Bautista shared a Facebook video that, as of 2:30 a.m. EST, had 3 million views.
Posted by Michael Kevin Bautista on Thursday, July 7, 2016
The local CBS affiliate reported that police had asked everyone to leave downtown Dallas. Public transportation in the city was also shut down.
Brown said that it appeared the shooters “planned to injure and kill as many officers as they could.”
The search for the shooters stretched throughout downtown, an area of hotels, restaurants, businesses and some residential apartments. The scene was chaotic, with helicopters hovering overhead and officers with automatic rifles on the street corners.
“Everyone just started running,” Devante Odom, 21, told The Dallas Morning News. “We lost touch with two of our friends just trying to get out of there.”
Carlos Harris, who lives downtown told the newspaper that the shooters “were strategic. It was tap tap pause. Tap tap pause.”
Demonstrator Brittaney Peete told The Associated Press that she didn’t hear the gunshots, but she “saw people rushing back toward me saying there was an active shooter.”
Late Thursday, Dallas police in uniform and in plainclothes were standing behind a police line at the entrance to the emergency room at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas. It was unclear how many injured officers were taken there. The hospital spokeswoman, Julie Smith, had no immediate comment.
It is not known whether the shootings were related in any way to the protests.
A wave of protests against police brutality were held throughout the country on Thursday. In midtown Manhattan, protesters first gathered in Union Square Park, where they chanted “The people united, never be divided!” and “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”
In Minnesota, where Castile was killed, hundreds of protesters marched in the rain from a vigil to the governor’s official residence. Protesters also marched in Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia.
July 7, 2016
“I’m not ready for the dirt nap yet”: How Toto outlasted the haters, took back their career and won over a new generation
Steve Lukather (Credit: AP/Andrew Medichini)
Toto guitarist/vocalist Steve Lukather is an early riser, and his strongest vice these days is coffee. Being a morning person suits him well, however: It’s when he digs into the group’s business—he and a team of people have taken over managing Toto in recent years—and does freewheeling press interviews, in which he’s candid about the legacy, up-and-down fortunes and burgeoning comeback of his band.
“Our biggest Achilles heel has always been, we want to fucking build our audience back again in the United States,” he says. “In the last few years, it’s turned around. When we took our career back ourselves, the ‘no’s’ became ‘yeses,’ and that was just the most amazing thing. We were told, ‘It can’t be done. Sorry guys, you tried, you had your time,’ whatever. But I’m not buying this shit. Not when I look around and see our peers doing what they’re doing. I go, ‘Why them and not us?'”
More and more these days, the answer is, “Why not us?” Once a critical punching bag, Toto has become an ingrained and even beloved part of pop culture, courtesy of songs such as “Rosanna,” “Hold The Line” and especially “Africa.” The latter has been sampled countless times—to name a few, Wiz Khalifa, Nas, Ja Rule and Jason Derulo—while in early 2016, Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard released a viral vacation video set to (of course) “Africa.”
In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that younger generations have come around to Toto’s meticulous, sonically pristine approach to classic rock, which combines studio finesse, instrumental technique and onstage charisma and chemistry. It’s a long time coming, in a sense: Toto’s members boast extensive (and impressive) studio résumés—it’s what brought the band together in the first place back in 1977—and their session work is legendary. Lukather’s discography is a whopping thirteen pages on his official website, owing to work with Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, Cher, Chicago, Hall & Oates, Cheap Trick and basically nearly every other massive rock and pop star of the ’70s and ’80s. The sound of “Thriller”? It’s not just Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones—the members of Toto had a massive influence on the LP’s sound as well.
As Toto gears up for their 40th anniversary in 2017, expect high-quality reissues—”Eliot Scheiner, who worked for Steely Dan, legendary, 28-time Grammy winning guy, he’s a dear friend of ours, engineer is gonna do all the remastering for our first generation, unEQd shit,” Lukather says—and an extensive world tour, among other things. Lukather’s also working on his autobiography, an opportunity which came about after a colorful appearance at the GRAMMY Museum.
“I had these people literally pissing in the aisles laughing at my stories about Miles Davis and all these things that happened to me,” he says. “I have so many stories. And right afterwards my agent goes, ‘You have to write a book now. This is it, man. You have stories that you’ve gotta get down. People would love to read this shit.'”
In the near future, Toto is doing a U.S. headlining tour starting August 12—they’re in part supporting 2015’s “Toto XIV,” their latest album—while keyboardist/vocalist Steve Porcaro recently issued his first solo album, “Someday Somehow.”
Lukather himself chatted with Salon from the road, as he was spending a few weeks on the road as part of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band: He’s been a member of that supergroup since 2012.
“He’s become a very, very dear friend of mine, I really love the guy,” Lukather says of Starr. “He lives near me so we hang out at home, so I wrote two songs with him for his new album. So I’m sitting in his room writing, and I’m playing guitar looking at Ringo Starr playing drums and I go, ‘Okay, you gotta be fucking kidding me.’
“He’s unbelievable; he’s an inspiration to us all. He’s every bit as witty and funny as he ever was in ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ And he’s in incredible physical shape, he’s not hobbling around at all. Shit, I got a fucked up shoulder, I’m hobbling around more than he is. He’s incredible! His mind and body are in the right mental place, like I said he’s an incredible inspiration of how to grow old gracefully.”
Ever garrulous and animated, Lukather jumped right into conversation after some small talk about Toto playing Cleveland, a city the band (incredibly) hasn’t played in 25 years.
[Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
There was a lot of career errors made. Since I took over managing the band, along with my staff, all of the no’s turned into yeses and all these really positive things are happening. Things are on a huge upswing. I just made a brand new deal with Sony for the 40th anniversary that’s coming up. There’s a lot of really great stuff going on. For a classic rock band like us, taking over your own career and us managing ourselves, with a wonderful staff of people that are knowledgeable—I’ve got all the skin in the game.
I found out a lot of things and dug deep and was able to find a lot of money that was owed to us and make friends with all the streaming services in the deal that we had. We got a really great streaming deal. I don’t think Sony realized how valuable we were. When I found out that in the last four years Toto has had 365 million streams, their jaws hit the floor. They underestimated the little dog, as I like to say. [Laughs.]
Over the years, I have friends that I’ve made that have moved up the food chain at a lot of these new companies, and they’re like, “Hey man, I just wanted to tell you, you might want to make the call, because I saw some checks go out that would throw your jaw on the floor.” So I did some homework. As I get up early, soberly and together, I actually really enjoy the job of looking after my boys. It’s a band—we all throw the ball around—but I’m just being proactive in a leadership sort of way.
I always suspect sometimes bands get into situations where people are acting on their behalf and the players have no idea what’s going on.
That happened to us. There were so many fucked up things. You just have to sit down and reassess your whole life and career and go, “Something’s not right about this. I hear about all this money that everybody’s supposed to be getting. How come we haven’t gotten it?” A lot of musicians, we start out young, we’re jumping off tables, we’re getting high, we’re chasing girls, whatever it is you do when you’re a teenager. And then you get into your 50s, and even looking at 60 years old, and going, “Okay, that was all fine and dandy 35 years ago, but what’s going on now?” Because unfortunately, the part that’s not fun is being a businessman.
To be in a band that actually can say, “We’re gonna have a 40th anniversary and we’re still doing great business around the world and there’s a lot of interest in what we’re doing, we’re making some music” — it doesn’t feel like we just got together for a victory lap to make some money before we start throwing dirt on our own faces.
I’m not ready for the dirt nap yet. I’m still on fire. I jump out of bed more on fire than I was 25 years ago. I think I’m just excited about life and trying to get as much out of it as I can and having a blast. I’m very grateful—underline the word grateful—to still be around.
What are the 40th anniversary plans?
First off, I’m in the middle of writing my autobiography, which will coincide with the 40th anniversary with new music, a whole bundle of all of our old stuff, some unearthed stuff that we’ve found, the remastered stuff from the originals. All this “remastered” bullshit, people remaster from the remaster of the remaster of the CD, and it’s like putting too much frosting on a cake — there’s no cake in it anymore.
I went back into the vaults about two weeks ago in New York and heard the original half-inch, un-EQd master tape of [1982’s] “Toto IV,” and I almost had tears in my eyes. You could crawl inside of it, the transfers. I haven’t heard anything sound that good in so long. I had forgotten what the original thing was all about, and that’s what we want to get out to people. Everything is so digital, streaming, high-tech, that there’s a certain reality—it’s like listening to a cello in a room, there’s a sound that resonates that you can’t record. You try to just go back to the egg.
We have some stuff that has been unreleased and maybe unfinished that we may mess around with. We have a two-year tour that we’re starting to plan around the world, and our career in the United States has gone up 300 percent, so we’re gonna finally have the U.S. catch up to what’s been going on.
We’re still playing arenas and headlining festivals around the world. We co-headlined Sweden Rock with Def Leppard, 45,000 people last year. We just did 17,000 people, hard tickets, in Amsterdam at the Ziggo Dome, sold out the Budokan in Japan, so we’ve got some value out there. We’re sort of like this old Les Paul found underneath the bed that you had forgotten about. Classic rock bands these days, the same eight bands go out every year in some various permutation, and we never were a part of that. We’re playing really well right now and everybody is really fired up, so when people come see us and they’re very surprised.
What I found out is, my buddy who works at Spotify who hipped me to all this stuff, he goes, “By the way, I want you to know that your average audience is under 35 years old.” So we look out in our audience and it’s not the sea of white-haired people that you would think. A lot of people are into our band that somehow got turned onto us through “Africa” because all of the EDM people are using the song to end their sets.
We did a collaboration with this band What So Not and Skrillex on a piece that we wrote together that’s gonna be coming out. So we’re embracing the old and the new. We’re not like a bunch of stiffs going, [affects grouchy voice] “Oh, I hate all this new music. I hate everything.”
Quite the contrary, actually. I’m excited about it. It was really interesting to work with those guys and see their process, and then they saw us doing our thing, and we all collaborated in the same room together. It was quite a cool experience. That happened about a year and change ago, and it’s gonna be coming out hopefully before probably next year by the time this is all said and done. It will coincide with everything, which will be pretty cool.
It’s funny that you say that so much of Toto’s audience is younger, as that’s the sense I get, too.
I’m really surprised. Let me give you an example: 2012 was our 35th anniversary from when we started the first album, and we had sold 35 million records worldwide. Fairly impressive for a bunch of people that think we had, like, three songs that were worth a shit—when in fact we had a lot more hit singles than people think. What happened was, between that moment and last year when we played Barclays Center in New York, Sony came out to us and handed us a plaque for 40 million sales. We’re like, “Okay, what happened in the last couple years?” [Laughs.]
I think what’s happening is these kids hear the song and they go, “Well, what else have these guys got?” And they find out we’ve got 14 other albums and they buy ’em, and all of a sudden we’ve got this new interest. We’re almost like an underground thing. People like to be into shit that’s under the radar, and then they find out that they actually like some of the other stuff that we do. They come see us live, and we’re really fucking good live, and we’re creating a new audience for ourselves in a very organic way. Which is very exciting and very surprising, I have to be honest, I look up in the sky and go, “Thank you God! Thank you!”
We are like the tortoise and the hare. We’ve taken so much shit from day one from the press and the rock critics and all that stuff. They tried to kill us, and we can’t be killed. After a nuclear disaster there will be very little life on earth and us. [Laughs.] Because we’ve withstood every disaster. Two brothers dying in the band. Death, drugs, divorce, being ripped off by business people and bad management, getting screwed over by the ex-record company, which now all those people are gone. We just stayed the course. People lapped us, passed us, laughed at us, and now all of a sudden we get this respect, like, “Wow, you guys really hung in there. You guys are good.”
One of the guys writing my book with me is this guy Paul Rees, he used to be the editor of Q Magazine in the U.K. And he said, “We were not allowed to write about you.” The fucking editor said, “We can’t write about you.” It’s like that whole Jann Wenner attitude, they deny the fact that my band has played on over 5,000 records, 220 nominated records, some of the biggest records in history, and we’ve sold 40 million records on our own, yet we don’t exist. They’re gonna eventually have to deal with us face to face, because we’re not gonna die.
Why was it that they wouldn’t cover you?
I’ll never know! There’s nobody like us in rock history. I’m not saying we’re the greatest band in the world—that would be ridiculous. I’m standing next to a guy who used to be in the greatest band in the world, the Beatles, so I know what greatness really is. But we have contributed a lot. We were the fucking house band for “Thriller,” but nobody ever mentions our name. Stuff like that.
I mean, I’m cool enough for Miles Davis to call me on the phone and go, “You want to join my band?” So if Miles Davis thinks that we’re cool, I don’t really give a shit what some smarmy rock critic says. And we’re so over it—I think they’re on to picking on Nickelback now, which is maybe a more worthy subject.
We can play. We played on a lot of different records in a lot of different styles. Played on a lot of hit records—either wrote, played, produced, arranged. We’re always there, but nobody wants to admit that we exist, as far as mainstream media. Which doesn’t bother me, because all of a sudden we’ve become this underground band. You can’t be out of style if you were never in style, so we just sort of existed, bubbling under. People like our stuff, some people hate it, but that’s like anything, right? Some people love donuts, some people are allergic to ’em. It’s all the same shit.
There’s a lot of options out there, but we’re classic rock that hasn’t been overridden like a horse. Some of these bands are like, “Okay, I’ve seen it, I’ve heard it.” They play the same 12 songs every time, which is great for memories every once in awhile, but we’re not that band. Some people think, “Oh it’s that ‘Africa’ band, I hate that fucking song,” and for some reason they think that’s all we do.
Which really, that’s the most oddball song we’ve ever written in our career, and it turns out to be our biggest song. I was the guy saying, “This is a great fun track, but what the fuck is this song about, David [Paich, Toto keyboardist/vocalist]?” I said, “If this song is a hit I will run naked down Hollywood Boulevard.” Well, being 58 years old, I don’t think anyone wants to see me run around naked anyway, certainly not in the light of day.
The other thing people don’t realize is we have a great sense of humor about this shit. I’m sitting there watching “South Park,” I’m a “South Park” character. I’m watching “American Dad” and the alien’s getting fucked in the ass by Stan listening to one of my songs. What the fuck? [Laughs.] “Family Guy” did a whole episode on “Africa,” which is hysterical, and I’m just sitting here watching this on TV and it comes up. A “Jeopardy” question. And so you realize, we’re part of pop culture. I love the Jimmy Fallon-Justin Timberlake summer camp thing, that was fucking hilarious.
How cool is it to be part of pop culture? People laugh, and nobody laughs harder than we do. But at the end of the day we plug in and fucking play and blow minds. That’s what we do.
It’s funny you say that people don’t realize that you’re on “Thriller,” because that’s so obvious to me when I think about you guys.
Let me give you an example. “Human Nature” is a Toto song, written, played, and produced pretty much by us, with Michael singing. “Beat It” is Steve Porcaro and me, and Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo. I played everything else—bass, all the guitar parts, Jeff [Porcaro] played drums, Steve [Porcaro] the synth. We did the McCartney duet [“The Girl Is Mine”] live and all that stuff. We were all part of that. I was Quincy’s go-to guy since I was 21, 22 years old. I played on all “The Dude” [Jones’ 1981 LP] stuff.
If you look at our collective discography, not only is it eclectic, but it’s like every famous person you’ve ever thought of in the last 50 years of music, one of us had something to do with at least once. I’m not saying this to be egotistical—I’m saying this to say that we’ve had our hands in a lot more shit than just that “Africa” band. It just doesn’t get any press, which is why I’m writing a book to finally set the record straight. I just happened to be offered the book first before anybody else because I’m, I guess, somewhat of the mouthpiece of the band. But it’s certainly a group effort.
There is that trend that a lot of bands that were critical punching bags are getting critically reexamined. It’s good to hear you guys are getting that shine.
I remember, I was doing a Don Henley record, his first solo album, in 1980. We did “Dirty Laundry” and all those great songs. Henley’s one of my favorite singers. I’ve maintained a friendship with Don over the years. I played on all the Eagles solo records. I was sitting with Don once at the end of a session, we were getting the shit beat out of us at the time, and I said, “What the fuck is it Henley? Why?” He goes, “Look man, you hang in there long enough, they’ll turn around. If you take your punches….”
At the end of the day, we’ve taken more punches than just about anybody in rock ‘n’ roll that I can think of anymore. And we’re still here. And we can laugh at it! It’s like, “Okay, is that all you got, man? Really? Okay.” And ha ha ha they make fun of us, I think some of the shit is hilarious. Like, what else you got to say, man? I’m still here, we’re still doing it. I still get up and practice my guitar every day, I still love music. I haven’t become bitter and tainted. My book ain’t gonna be about me wasting my time getting even with my critics. That would just be sad as well—unless of course I have a really humorous anecdote and something that would be funny. Nobody loves everybody. Everybody gets kicked in the balls these days, metaphorically speaking.
What’s the biggest challenge for you writing the book, because you do have so much to choose from?
I want my own TV show, that’s the end game. Imagine if Daryl Hall was funny. And no disrespect to Daryl, who I dig. I’ve worked with him, I love those guys. But Daryl’s a pretty serious cat. Imagine if there was a little bit of Howard Stern in Daryl, and that’s how I would be with my own TV show, without necessarily the vagina jokes or anything like that. But I just have a whacked out sense of humor. My end game is to have a really cool music, arts TV show, which I might be able to parlay out of my book, plus play live all the time. I love to play music, this is what I love to do. I’m not waking up in the morning going, “Fuck, I wish I wasn’t on the road. I fucking hate the road.”
Don’t think for a second that I don’t know how fucking lucky I am, because I do. But at the same time, there’s a lot of work involved in keeping an almost 40-year career going, despite all odds. You have to be versatile. Certainly we’ve taken our punches at this point. It’s come to “thank you, may I have another” more times than just about any band in fucking history, and yet we’re still here and we’re looking at somewhat of a resurgence in our band for some reason.
Kids are listening to our music, they don’t even know who it is, they go, “I like that. What is that?” They didn’t read that Jann Wenner thinks we’re the worst thing in the fucking world. They don’t give a shit. Kids don’t care, they just like what they like, and there’s something really positive about that. If I want to look at criticism, I’ll look at our Facebook page where the fans that spend money on us go, “I don’t like this,” or “Why did you do this?” or “Why don’t you play this?” or “You guys could be doing this,” not just “You suck, fuck off and die.”
Everybody has to deal with that: “You ugly piece of shit! Die motherfucker.” It’s amazing what people will write on the fucking internet. [Laughs.] You gotta go like, “Wow man, really?” We had one review that said that our parents should have been sterilized so we could never be born to play the shit music we make. You want to sterilize my mom, man? What the fuck?
That’s really harsh.
[Laughs.] I mean are we that bad? God, we must have hit a nerve with someone. But we laugh at this shit. I mean, I think we’re no different from anybody else. If you’re an artist, not everybody loves you, but we have this innate desire for everyone to love you. “Why won’t people love me?” [Laughs] It’s actually pretty funny when you say it out loud.
[But] I come out of bed laughing. I go, “Wow, another day above ground, and I get to play the guitar for a living.” I write “musician” on my tax returns for the last 40-some odd years. It’s a great gig. Hard to get these days–certainly hard to sustain any length of a career. When we all die out, all of us classic rock guys, it ain’t never gonna happen again.
I know. I think about that too.
I look at Ringo and I go, “There’s never gonna be another Beatles. You guys changed the fucking world.” And I was standing there. If you’d have told me 50 years ago that I’d have worked with three of the four Beatles, and I’m in a band with Ringo for five years, I would have said, “Fuck, you gotta be kidding me.” Because I’m standing there when I’m a little kid seeing them on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” I go, “That’s what I’m doing for the rest of my life.” My parents say, “Oh, isn’t that cute.” They give me a guitar and a copy of the record.
Fifty years later, I’m standing ready to go onstage at the Beatles’ 50th anniversary of “The Ed Sullivan Show” on TV, and I’m in the All-Starr hand-picked band, and there’s Paul and Ringo, and I’m going, “I really fucking pulled this fucking thing off! In spite of all odds, I’m standing here with the guys that changed the world, the reason why I play, and they invited me to be a part of this.”
And I’m beyond honored. Beyond. I can’t even put it into an adjective to let you know how much that meant to me. It actually choked me up. I was like, “Wow, I really fucking pulled this off.” When you’re a little kid, and you have a dream and you pull off that dream, how many people on planet Earth can say that? And I can say it out loud and mean it and have lived it and gone, “Well, if somebody took me out tomorrow,” and after losing 34 friends in two years, anything’s possible. Every day I wake up and take a breath and look out the window and go, “I’m the luckiest motherfucker in show business.” I’ve got four great kids, even my ex-wives like me. So I’m not that bad of a person. [Laughs.]
In writing this memoir, because you’ve done so much, how are you narrowing things down?
That’s hard. That’s why I have a co-writer in Paul Rees. I have every year-at-a-glance datebook since 1977, so I know every session I’ve done, where I was, who I did. I have a lot of pictures, I’ve kept a lot of memorabilia that’s interesting stuff, but it’s gonna be really hard to put that into 300 pages. I’ve got stories about every artist I’ve ever worked with, just about. Funny ones. Some really weird ones, too. I’m not writing the book to shit on anybody or how much drugs I used to do back in the heyday or sexual stuff. That’s, like, so cliché and just like, yawn, boring. I have really great stories about how certain records were made, who did what, funny scenarios, things that happened in the studio, things that happened on the road that are really fun and informative without being salacious or weird.
Well, and that’s the interesting stuff.
Yeah, nobody wants to [hear], “Oh, yeah, I did a bunch of blow in 1983.” So fucking what? So did everybody else walking the planet in the music business. Like with that show “Vinyl,” I couldn’t watch it. It was like the cliché of clichés. It’s like just a caricature of really what happened. People try to write about music or do TV that were not there, didn’t live it, or if they did they don’t want to admit the truth of it. Or some TV executive wants to schmaltz it up for reasons unknown. “Oh, it’ll be better for ratings.” What happened to just good, hard truth? Because sometimes the truth is hysterical.
I know you played on Stevie Nicks’ hit “Stand Back.” Did you cross paths with Prince in the studio?
I did, I did when I was young. I worked with him before anybody knew who he was on a record for Valerie Carter, who was signed to the same management label. James Newton Howard, the famous film composer now, was then a keyboard player/record producer. I was the same age as Prince, I’m just a few months older than him, and here was this guy, this little dude, like. I’m playing guitar on an overdub and we’re at Sunset Sound, and all of the sudden, I’d be playing and his little head would pop up and I’d just see his eyes, and he’d just stare at me and go back down again. I’m going, “Who the fuck is this guy?” Oh, he’s Prince, he’s like this new genius guy from Minneapolis. Well, it’d be nice if he actually talked.
And then I remember I was doing a record at Sunset Sound years later, and he was mixing “Purple Rain.” He was sitting out on the basketball court at 10 am in the morning, in this silver lamé suit, sitting on the ‘Purple Rain” motorcycle that was not on, with a bodyguard. And I was like, “Hey man, how’s it going?” And he’d just kind of nod his head at me. But then he hung out with Jeff Porcaro, who was our drummer who passed away, he hung out with Jeff once and said how much he liked our music, which was really nice, I thought that was pretty cool to hear. And I was very sad to hear how he died, because I was a big fan.
Awesome, that’s very cool. Do you have anything else you want to add?
I think the bottom line of this whole conversation is the fact that I’m very fired up about my career right now and the band. There’s a lot of exciting ideas, fresh ideas. Not just a bunch of old guys trying to cash in for the last desperate suck.
And fans can tell the bands that do that. It’s so transparent.
Oh man, people smell shit from ten miles away these days. You can’t bullshit people, they know if it’s fake, they know if it’s real. They know if you’re passionate about it or you’re walking through it. We want to give people value for what they’re throwing down. It’s hard to make a living these days. If somebody throws down their hard money, we got to deliver. It’s more important than anything to us.
And fuck it, we’re all-in. I gotta do this. This to us, is like, I don’t want to say a victory lap, but we’re determined to do this, and we’re really excited and motivated. We’re not just rolling our eyes going, “Well, I gotta pay ex-wife number 45 all my money, so I have to go on the road and play ‘Hold the Line’ until I fucking drop in some bar in a casino somewhere in buttfuck nowhere.” You know what I mean? “One original member left.” [Laughs.] I love these bands that there’s no original members. It’s like, “Wow, how do you do that?”
Phil Robertson’s hate speech continues: Why won’t A&E take a stand against its “Duck Dynasty” star?
Phil Robertson (Credit: A&E)
Why is A&E still supporting Phil Robertson?
That’s the question of the day after Robertson, the family patriarch who stars on the channel’s “Duck Dynasty” program, is raising eyebrows yet again for his virulently anti-gay views. Robertson was a keynote speaker at last weekend’s Western Conservative Summit, an annual GOP conference held in Denver. As LGBTQ Nation reported, the self-described “Bible-thumper” likened the LGBT community to murderers in his speech, responsible for the death of thousands of innocent Americans.
“How many did we lose in Iraq and Afghanistan—with all that firepower?” he asks. “Six or seven thousand. Guess how many were murdered on streets of America during the same time frame? About 160,000. … Sounds like we’ve got a bigger war going on here than over there.”
Robertson claimed that high death rate, which has actually decreased in recent years, is the fault of LGBT people. “When you allow men to determine what’s right and what’s wrong, you get decisions like the five judges who said, ‘I may not know we have 7,000 years of history of men marrying women,” Robertson continued. “A male and a female. For that reason, they’ll leave their father and mother and cleave to one another and become one flesh. I know it’s been that way for 7,000 years, but we know best for what’s everybody.’”
A&E has yet to make a statement on his remarks, but the network isn’t likely to reprimand him. If you have to ask why, a memorable quote from Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky” is here to explain it to you: “What’s the answer to 99 out of 100 questions? Money.”
In a 2013 profile for GQ, Robertson first stirred up controversy by infamously comparing homosexuality to bestiality. “It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus,” Robertson told the magazine. “That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
Following enormous backlash from the LGBT community, A&E suspended Robertson “indefinitely,” but that decision didn’t last long. Just nine days after his punishment was announced, the network welcomed him back to the show in an abrupt about face.
“As a global media content company, A+E Networks’ core values are centered around creativity, inclusion and mutual respect,” the company said in a statement, adding: “While Phil’s comments made in the interview reflect his personal views based on his own beliefs and his own personal journey, he and his family have publicly stated they regret the ‘coarse language’ he used and the misinterpretation of his core beliefs based only on the article. He also made it clear he would ‘never incite or encourage hate.’”
That, however, isn’t true: Robertson’s remarks were highly reflective of his personal worldview, which is informed by a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity. Since his initial remarks on the LGBT community went viral, Robertson has only gotten more extreme in recent years.
Just months after A&E claimed that he didn’t mean it, Robertson gave a speech at his local church, in which he liberally paraphrased from Corinthians in order to condemn LGBT people to hell. “Neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolators, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexual offenders, nor thieves, nor greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God,” he said.
Robertson also claimed that contracting HIV is a punishment from God in a September 2014 interview with Tony Perkins, the head of the anti-gay Family Research Council.
“A clean guy—a disease-free guy and a disease-free woman—they marry and they keep their sex between the two of them,” the reality star told Perkins on his radio show. “They’re not going to get chlamydia, and gonorrhea, and syphilis, and AIDS. It’s safe. To me, either it’s the wildest coincidence ever that horrible diseases follow immoral conduct, or, it’s God saying, ‘There’s a penalty for that kind of conduct.’” (He, of course, did not bring up his own history of adultery in the interview.)
In recent years, Robertson’s comments have turned increasingly violent. While stumping for Ted Cruz earlier this year, he said that politicians who support same-sex marriage should be wiped off the face of the planet. “It is nonsense,” Robertson told Cruz supporters at a February rally. “It is evil. It’s wicked. It’s sinful. … We have to run this bunch out of Washington, D.C. We have to rid the earth of them. Get them out of there.”
LGBT people aren’t the only community that should be upset that the anti-gay figure has been continually given a very public platform to spout vile hate speech.
One aspect of his 2013 interview with GQ that was widely overlooked were his extraordinarily backward views on racial equality. Robertson told the magazine that black people were better off in the Jim Crow-era South, before the days of welfare and affirmative action. “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person,” he said. “Not once. … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!”
Robertson has also come out in support of child brides. During a 2009 speech at a “Sportsmen’s Ministry” event, he told the crowd that the ideal age to find a wife is when she’s “15 or 16.”
“Duck Dynasty,” now in its tenth season, is in a very different place today than it was when Robertson first began his years-long tear of racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks. Once the most-watched reality program in cable history, viewership has declined in recent years. The show’s viewership peaked in August 2013 with 11.8 million viewers, but last year it averaged 3.44 million viewers, according to Nielsen. (Note: “Duck Dynasty” was still the 10th most-watched show on cable.)
Those numbers are modest compared to what the show used to be, but the reality program remains a cultural force to be reckoned with, particularly when it comes to retail and advertising. During its peak, it was more expensive to advertise on “Duck Dynasty” than “NCIS,” the biggest show on television. Variety reported that a 30-second spot on the long-running (and older-skewing) CBS program went for $154,025. On “Duck Dynasty,” similar airtime would cost $170,000 to $180,000.
In 2013, Bloomberg estimated that the show brought in over $80 million in ad revenue, while netting over $400 million dollars in merchandising during the calendar year alone.
Half of the show’s retail revenue comes from Walmart, as Forbes reported in 2013. On the big box chain’s website, you can buy everything from “Duck Dynasty” plush toys to duck whistles, wall art, bobbleheads, DVDs playing cards, t-shirts, hats, and even a fake beard designed to make you look like Phil Robertson himself. The truly devoted can also pick up “Duck the Halls,” the Robertson clan’s Christmas album, which features songs like “Hairy Christmas,” “Ragin’ Cajun Redneck Christmas,” and “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”
In 2013, few advertisers or brands spoke out against Robertson’s comments or threatened to discontinue their relationship with the show. “Across our client base, it didn’t really reach the level of a reason to remove advertising—at least, not yet,” one ad buyer told Variety. Without public pressure, A&E continued to make a killing off the Robertsons, but there’s signs that the boom times may be coming to an end. “Duck Commander: The Musical,” a stage spin-off of the reality program, was a major flop in Las Vegas, closing just a month after it opened.
But if “Duck Dynasty” isn’t quite the cash cow it used to be, there’s no reason for A&E to continue to support Robertson, especially during what is an extremely crucial moment for LGBT people.
The attacks on Pulse nightclub in Orlando last month showed how extraordinarily vulnerable the LGBT community is. On June 12, a lone shooter opened fire on the Florida gay bar, killing 49 people and injuring 53 more. Across the country, queer people are more likely than any other population to be the victim of a hate crime. Despite the fact that LGBT folks make up an estimated five percent of the population, we represent 21 percent of crimes motivated by identity-based hate.
Nonetheless, fundamentalist preachers have continued to suggest that LGBT people are deserving of being killed.
“There’s no tragedy,” said Sacramento’s Pastor Roger Jimenez. “I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a wall, put a firing squad in front of them and blow their brains out.” Another pastor in Fort Worth referred to the Pulse victims as “perverts and pedophiles” and “the scum of the earth.” Sentiments like these will only encourage future violence and the loss of more innocent lives, but sadly, they don’t sound all that different than Phil Robertson.
Robertson has continued to compare LGBT people to murderers in the wake of the most horrific mass shooting in U.S. history, a crime perpetrated against a community he and others like him have bashed for years. It’s time for A&E to take a long overdue stand against bigotry. When it comes to violent hate speech, the buck has to stop somewhere.
The digital media age is all about the past: “The Internet is not an extension of television”
Boris Johnson; Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Alastair Grant/Reuters/Carlo Allegri/Photo montage by Salon)
Over the last few weeks, numerous pundits have tried to liken the craze for Donald Trump’s candidacy to the British enthusiasm to leave the European Union despite likely economic damage.
Douglas Rushkoff, the critic of media and technology, has come up with one of the more original reads of the situation. He has just published a fascinating article on Fast Company that argues, as the headline has it, “The New Nationalism Of Brexit And Trump Is A Product Of The Digital Age: TV may have been about global unity, but the Internet inspires the opposite.”
Rushkoff is an heir to Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, and is in some ways inspired by the late Alvin Toffler: Rushkoff’s book “Present Shock” takes its name from Toffler’s “Future Shock.” Salon spoke to Rushkoff, whose latest book is “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,” from suburban New York; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
You argue that the support for Donald Trump and the puzzling Brexit vote both have to do, in important ways, with the dominance of the Internet. Not with anything political, but in the ways we communicate. How do you see these things related?
I don’t know if I’d blame the Internet as much as the idea that we’re in a digital media environment. The idea of being in a media environment, a technological environment, is really old – this guy [Lewis] Mumford is the one who came up with it…. And the beauty of that analysis is not that it says that one thing causes another – that the printing press led to the mechanization of world culture — but it sort of went hand in hand. We developed mechanical abilities, we made machines, then we took on some of the qualities of those machines. Because they’re around us, they’re part of the world we live in.
The thing I’ve been interested in is the shift from the television media environment, which we all grew up in, which was so globalist in spirit, and in funding — it promoted a global view and global markets and global simultaneity.
The digital media environment is so different in the way it’s structured and biased. We know that the algorithms in our social-media feeds tend to isolate us in our highly individuated factions or filter bubble — so we don’t interact with people with different ideas.
What are the biases of these technologies? All of these revolutions have been very discrete — we’re going to restore Egypt, we’re going to restore the caliphate — there’s this sense of nationalism and segmentation and difference.
And nationalism is part of what’s fueled Trump and Brexit.
Yeah, exactly — and it’s what Arab Spring has in common with them, and the WGO protests. And I wonder if it’s nationalism they have in common, or anti-globalism. I’m not settled on it yet. I do know people are trying to break away from this one-world mentality.
And what about the harkening back to some other time — these fictional times. I know that digital media is all memory based. These are machines based on memory. The Industrial age was machines that were based on efficiency, so we had time-is-money, what’s-the-productivity-of-a-person. But in a digital age we end up harkening back — it’s all about the past. “Make America Great Again,” or return to good-old England.
And the weird thing about it is that America wasn’t really like that, and England wasn’t really like that. But that’s not the way memory works.
We’re in a major media transition, and now we’re seeing what that is. No, the Internet is not an extension of television — it doesn’t unite the world in one big, great network the way we kinda thought it would. That’s because we’re TV kids, looking at the Internet. It’s something else.
I’m not saying the Internet is bad, I’m saying it’s biased toward memory and individuation.
You’re talking about a fierce tribalism.
In a way it’s kind of a re-tribalization.
The editors you originally approached over this story didn’t like it or didn’t understand it. Do you have a guess why?
I think we look at this kind of analysis as being techno-determinist. But it’s not. [Marshall] McLuhan got accused of that a lot, that he was a media determinist. When you’re living in a different media environment, you’re prone to different ways of seeing things. Media is the culture we’re growing in. You change the medium, you change how thing grow.
The futurist Alvin Toffler, who wrote about some of these things, died recently. Was he an important figure or an influence on you? How well does his work stand up?
More important than any specific prognostication was his method — he was looking at larger trends and how they might intersect. He’s gonna be right sometimes and wrong sometimes. But he was right about this crescendo that we were moving towards. I wrote “Present Shock” to say that the crescendo has happened — the future is now, we have arrived at what he was saying. The way he was thinking is the way everyone thinks these days. He was as important as McLuhan.
And he popularized it — my parents had a copy of the paperback in their house.
In the last day or so, there have been two more black men shot and killed by police. Some people who are outraged by the shootings have said they consider the videos of the shootings valuable pieces of evidence, but that they don’t want to watch any more. What do you make of this shift?
It’s interesting. The thing that’s most significant about it is people understanding that these technologies, and the way they present things, are biased. I don’t mean biased left-right, but that they have certain tendencies, they promote certain emotional responses. And people are deciding, “I’m going to choose how I interact with these things, rather that just seeing how it goes.”
For like 400 years, there were rabbis who refused a written Torah. “This is an oral tradition, and if we write it down, it will irreversibly change how this religion works.” Same with after the printing press happened. A lot of Catholic said, “No, people can’t have their own printed Bibles.”
The fact that people are resisting it says they realize that the technology itself changes the way the respond. And they want to respond in a way that’s more willful and autonomous rather than programmed.
“It is so painful”: Black lawmakers use GOP grilling of FBI director to highlight police shootings
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016. The State Department watchdog has found that former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the immediate staff of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also received classified national security information on their personal email accounts, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. said Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) (Credit: AP)
The Congressional Black Caucus is demanding to meet with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and the nation’s top law enforcement groups over the fatal shootings of two black men by police officers this week. And some CBC member used their rare opportunity to question Comey live on at least three cable news stations to highlight the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando
“[I]s it not important that we saved their names to remind people of the loss of a Tamir Rice to an Eric Garner to an Alton Sterling to a John Crawford to a Michael Brown to a Walter Scott and even a Sandra Bland,” New Jersey Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman asked Comey during the House Oversight Committee hearing on Thursday.
Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, called the FBI director to Capitol Hill to explain his recommendation not to criminally charge the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server only two days after Comey announced the findings of his investigation.
For some House Democrats, the audacity of House Republicans rushing to investigate the nation’s top investigator while remaining mum on the rash of cop shootings of black men was too much to bare hours after the release of another graphic video.
U.S. Virgin Islands Rep. Stacey Plaskett defended Comey while castigating Republicans for their silence.
“I am concerned about another issue that I think really is resonating with the people in this country and that issue has to do with experiences that we had just the last two day,” Rep. Watson Coleman told Comey when she got her time at to question him.
“This morning we woke up to another graphic and deeply disturbing video that actually brought me to tears when my staff played it for me,” Watson Coleman said, referring to the shooting of Philando Castile.
“Do you feel that you have the sufficient resources from the legal imperative to the funding to address these cases and what seems to be a disturbing pattern in our country today,” she asked the FBI head.
Saying he was inspired by Watson Coleman’s questioning, the ranking Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings, a member of the CBC, revealed to Comey that he woke up Thursday morning “to my wife literally crying” while watching a video of Baton Rouge black man Anton Sterling being shot by a police officer.
“I hope you watch them,” he told Comey. “There’s something wrong with this picture.”
“As an African American man in this country, 66 years old, moving toward the twilight of my life, we cannot allow black men to continue being slaughtered,” Cummings emotionally testified.
“Mr. Director, if you do nothing else in your 2,000-plus days left, you have to go help us get a hold of this issue,” Cummings said. “It is so painful. I can’t even begin to tell you.”
For their part, House Republicans spent the day dodging both the issue of police violence and guns.
After vowing to finally allow a floor vote on moderate background check legislation, House Speaker Paul Ryan suddenly cancelled the vote Thursday, telling reporters “we’re not going to rush it. We’re going to get it right.”
Watch CNN’s Chris Coumo grill Republican Congressman Jim Jordan about his apparent inaction on the issue.
“When you see these shootings, does it make you think that maybe that’s a better discussion to be having right now than the politics of email?”
“These fatal shootings are not isolated incidents”: President Obama responds to Alton Sterling, Philando Castile shooting deaths
Alton Sterling; Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
President Barack Obama on Thursday weighed in on the recent police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) and Philando Castile (Falcon Heights, Minnesota).
“What’s clear is that these fatal shootings are not isolated incidents,” Obama wrote in a Facebook post. “They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.”
President Obama further discouraged activists from responding with violence, but rather to “come together as a nation, and keep faith with one another.”
“All Americans should recognize the anger, frustration, and grief that so many Americans are feeling — feelings that are being expressed in peaceful protests and vigils,” he continued. “Michelle and I share those feelings. Rather than fall into a predictable pattern of division and political posturing, let’s reflect on what we can do better.”
Read the full post below:
A modern day lynching: Why I will not watch the video of Alton Sterling being killed by Baton Rouge police
Alton Brown (Credit: Facebook)
Another person has been added to the Necropolis of Black Death in the Age of Obama. On Tuesday, Alton Sterling was killed by two Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers. They used a taser, held him down, and then proceeded to shoot him multiple times with their pistols. Alton Sterling had committed no crime. He had no weapon in his hands. What was his capital offense? Being black, a man, and selling CDs and DVDs outside of a convenience store — a store which was owned by his friend Abdullah Muflahi.
Muflahi managed to record the killing of Alton Sterling by the Baton Rouge police. He would later describe the two officers who killed Sterling as acting unnecessarily “aggressive” towards him. If not for Muflahi’s footage, Sterling would be just another black man killed by America’s police under “suspicious circumstances.” The Justice Department is now investigating.
I have made a decision to not watch the video of Sterling being killed by two Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers. I know what black men who have been killed by state violence, racial pogroms, and street vigilantes look like.
I have seen those broken black bodies portrayed on lynching postcards as white men, women, boys, and girls stand proudly nearby, confident and without any shame after they vanquished the black body from their midst.
I watched a New York police officer choke to death Eric Garner as he pleaded for his life, gasping that, “I can’t breathe”.
I saw Michael Brown’s body left in the street like common refuse after a white cop named Darren Wilson shot him repeatedly. Wilson would later summon the racial logic of the white lynchers who ran amok during Jim and Jane Crow America as he told a Ferguson, Missouri jury a fantastical story about Michael Brown: “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.” Wilson would continue his racist fables about Michael Brown with, “”When I look up after that, I see him start to run and I see a cloud of dust behind him.”
In that moment of testimony, Michael Brown was transformed into the “black imp of the inferno”; human kindling for a pyre of hate. Americans should never forget that it is not just Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS/ISIL who burn people alive. Immolation was a central feature of the ritualistic violence that white Americans committed against thousands of black people in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.
I will never forget the body of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, his white and red sneakers pointing upward as he lay on the grass after being shot to death by the street vigilante and wannabe cop George Zimmerman. The latter is a man whose reckless and criminal behavior since that encounter (and, yes even before) has repeatedly demonstrated to any fair observer that it was Trayvon and not Zimmerman who should have been in fear of his life.
And then there is young Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old year boy killed by an incompetent Cleveland police officer who took less than 2 seconds to decide if he should steal away the life a child.
The video-recorded killings of black and brown people by police in the United States are a type of political violence. They do the work of intimidating, frightening, and bullying entire neighborhoods and communities in the service of white supremacy and institutional racism. As I recently discussed with Professor Courtney Baker, the attacks by police, street vigilantes, and other agents of the state on black Americans is a contemporary version of lynching culture in the digital age.
I believe that it is psychologically and spiritually unhealthy for black Americans to watch such imagery. Police brutality is not a surprise to us; it is an all too common personal experience; it is not the stuff of anecdotes, abstraction, or apocryphal storytelling. Police thuggery against people of color is a continuity and fixture along the color line in the United States and around the world.
Perhaps such images are of use for raising awareness among white folks about the realities of police thuggery and violence against non-whites? White Americans need this education much more so than people of color, as it is an antidote against white denial, white lies, and the many other aspects of white privilege that allow too many of them to say they are “shocked” or “surprised”, when (again), another story about police brutality against non-whites is forced, if even for a moment, onto the national stage.
But there should be caution here too: in a moment when “old fashioned” white racism is resurgent with Donald Trump and his minions, and the Republican Party functions as the United States’ largest white identity organization, there are likely a good number of white Americans who are titillated by video recordings of police violence against people of color. Here, the killing of black folks is made to justify white on black murder and other types of violence.
I will not and cannot feign surprise or shock at the killing of Alton Sterling by the Baton Rouge, Louisiana police. I have written many essays on such happenings during the last ten years. It is a type of painful tedium, a rerun of sorts—as opposed to being a bug or outlier or aberration—in American life and culture.
Because this story is so familiar, I can already predict the dominant narrative.
Alton Sterling will be called a “thug” by conservatives and the right-wing media. This ugly word is a polite way of calling Alton Sterling a “nigger,” and thus justifying his killing by the Baton Rouge police.
The comment sections on Fox News, Breitbart, and the other Right-wing “news” outlets will drop the veneer of “polite” racism and will most closely resemble those of overt white supremacist websites run by the by Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis.
Police apologists and fetishists will trot out tired talking points about how America’s cops have a “difficult job” that is “extremely dangerous.” In reality, being a police officer in the United States does not even rank among the 10 professions with the highest fatality rates. Truck drivers, loggers, and commercial fisherman have more dangerous jobs. Most police officers are killed in traffic accidents as opposed to being gunned down in the streets.
These same police excuse-makers will say if “black people” just “submitted” to the police or “cooperated” they would not be shot dead. This ignores how black and brown folks have been killed by America’s police while sleeping in cars, seeking help, answering the door, pulling out their wallets to get identification, surrendering, and innocently standing outside on street corners or sitting on the porches of their homes.
The lie that is the “Ferguson Effect,” will of course, make an appearance. This is an obligatory deflection in the moment of Black Lives Matter.
The same voices will speak of how most cops are “good” and the “problems” are caused by a few “bad apples. It is outside the narrow limits of approved public discourse to highlight how the so-called “good cops” are complicit with the “bad cops” because the former, more often than not, give cover to and protect the latter.
Right-wing pundits will find a way to blame Alton Sterling for his own death. If Trayvon Martin was “armed” with a bottle of ice tea, and Michael Brown had a deadly weapon with his “big, black, scary self,” perhaps Alton Sterling was trained to use CDs and DVD’s like ninja throwing stars?
Black conservatives will be trotted out like Pavlov’s dogs to talk about the “dysfunction” and “bad culture” within the African-American community.
The fact that Alton Sterling had a gun in his pocket, in a state with one of the country’s most lenient gun laws, will be referenced repeatedly. White folks can brandish weapons with impunity; black folks who choose to have guns on their person do so at their mortal peril in the extreme.
White racial paranoiac thinking and the White Gaze will combine to generate a narrative where two heavily armed police had a reason to be “in fear of their lives” as they used a stun gun on, beat, subdued, and then shot to death Alton Sterling as he lay on the ground. “Negrophobia” is a powerful force that is often used to escape punishment when America’s police violate African-Americans’ human rights.
Alton Sterling’s criminal record will be discussed as a way of legitimating his killing. The Baton Rouge police would not have had this information when they attacked him. Moreover, an individual’s criminal record does not empower police officers to act as judge, jury, and executioner.
Ethically corrupt, morally deranged, and dishonest voices will want to somehow connect the police killing of Alton Sterling to so-called “black on black” street violence in cities such as Chicago. A complication: police are sworn to protect and serve the public. Gang members and drug dealers are not.
The most confused and intellectually challenged members of the American Right-wing will even go so far as to suggest that protesters should focus on the numbers of “black babies” who are “murdered” each year by “abortions” instead of the black folks unjustly killed by the police. A parallel argument will be summoned that the killing of black people by America’s police is “infrequent” and “uncommon”. Thus, protests and anger are better directed towards other issues. This too is empty, dishonest, and problematic reasoning.
For example, the kidnapping and murder of white women and children is a highly uncommon event. Yet, the moral panic that has been described by media scholars as “missing white girl syndrome” routinely dominates news programming in America. Apparently, “White Lives Matter” much more so than those of people of color.
There are many questions that should be asked about the killing of Alton Sterling by the Baton Rouge, Louisiana police department. They include, why do America’s police routinely kill black people at a rate three times higher than whites?
[The rate is twelve times higher as compared to other “developed” countries.]
As a matter of policy, America’s police do not report the number of people they kill to either the public or the Department of Justice. Why is this tolerated? America’s police are much more likely to quickly escalate to the use of lethal force than are police officers in other countries—even when faced with similar threats. What is wrong with police culture in the United States?
And rarely asked or considered, what has gone so wrong with America’s economy that adult men such as Eric Garner in cities such as New York and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge are forced to sell cigarettes, CDs, and DVDs in order to provide for their families?
When America’s police unjustly kill black and brown people, members of the poor and working classes, the handicapped, mentally ill, homeless, disabled, and other people stigmatized as “the Other” with impunity, such a public policy outcome is a choice. Consequently, Alton Sterling and so many others are dead because a large portion of the White American public, as well as private interests, opinion leaders, and other elites deem it so. There will be no substantive or transformative criminal justice reform in the United States because police brutality is a type of social control that maintains a racist and classist status quo. Alton Sterling is dead because of that fact. He will not be the last person who is killed by America’s police in order to enforce such a wrong, bigoted, and anti-democratic political order.
Harassed on air: Gretchen Carlson gets creeped on over and over again by former “Fox & Freinds” co-hosts
Bloomberg Politics on Thursday killed the game when it dropped this supercut of creepy old white dudes commenting on former-“Fox & Friends” co-host Gretchen Carlson’s looks.
Carlson on Wednesday filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, alleging the 76-year-old “retaliated against her and derailed her career” after she denied his advances.
It seems that after an interrupted decade on the show, “Fox & Friends” producers learned to keep Camera A tight on Carlson’s face to get her fourth-wall-breaking reaction shots.
Watch below:
But, really, watch below:
NRA’s offensive hypocrisy: When will the organization demand justice for black gun owners shot by police?
Protesters in Baton Rouge, La., July 6, 2016. (Credit: AP/Gerald Herbert)
Right in the midst of a national outrage over a video of police in Louisiana shooting Alton Sterling while holding him on the ground, yet another video of a police shooting of a black man has come out.
This video, filmed in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shows a man named Philando Castile writhing in pain with blood splattered all over his car while his girlfriend says that a police officer shot Castile after asking Castile, responding to requests for his license, reached for his wallet. Castile later died of his wounds.
Beyond being yet more videos of senseless violence by police against African-Americans, what these two videos have in common is the police in question excuse their actions by citing the presence of a gun.
In the Minnesota video, the woman tells the camera that Castile informed the office that he had a licensed gun on him before he reached for his wallet. The officer then returns, arguing, “I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out.”
In the Louisiana video, officers can be heard yelling, “He’s got a gun!”
In both cases, there seems to be no question that the shooting victims were armed. It’s a point that’s already being flogged by conservatives in an effort to excuse these officers.
However, and conservatives should be the first to remember this, guns are legal in this country.
Guns are legal in this country. Louisiana is an open carry state. Minnesota allows concealed carry. Police officers in these states know full well that people have a legal right to carry. They have, according to conservatives themselves, no reason to believe that a man with a gun is a bad guy. Why, he could very well be one of those good guys with a gun, at the ready to stop crime, that we keep hearing about from conservatives.
Which brings up a critical question: Where is the gun rights lobby?
Here are two American citizens that were killed while doing what the NRA claims is a constitutional right. Surely this must be a gross injustice in the eyes of the NRA! Surely they will be demanding action, petitioning congressmen, demanding the Department of Justice to step forward and make sure that every American has a right to arm themselves without fear of being gunned down by the police! Right?
But while progressive Twitter is all about protesting these deaths, if you go to the NRA Twitter feed, this is what you’ll find: Whining about Matt Damon’s gun opinions. Harping on some impolitic words from a community college professor. Putting up some free advertising for Remington.
But when it comes to the deaths of these two Americans who appear to be killed while exercising their legal right to carry guns? Crickets.
What you do get, however, is some overt race-baiting from the NRA, tweets that unsubtly try to imply to their largely white audience that they are in danger of being victimized, mostly by people of color, and that they need to arm themselves in response.
Licensed concealed carrier shoots at attackers https://t.co/yyIV8X0PlL #2A #armedcitizen
— NRA (@NRA) July 6, 2016
(The two men in this screen grab, by the way, have nothing to do with the crime and just happened to be standing there while the news crew was filming.)
Good guy with gun stops suspected robber, holds him until police arrive https://t.co/pLl3p9VG6h #2A #armedcitizen
— NRA (@NRA) July 6, 2016
(Quote from the news story: “Everything seemed normal until he saw a guy with a wallet in his hands trying to run past the restaurant. ‘He couldn’t run though; his pants were sagging too far,’ Caddy said.”)
Gun-Controlled Chicago: More Homicides Than LA, NY Combined https://t.co/yv6e7HmaLX #2A
— NRA (@NRA) July 7, 2016
The NRA bills itself as a guns rights lobby. But whoever runs their Twitter feed is more interested in chronicling stories about muggers, pickpockets, and teenage gang wars than they are these two national stories about cops killing people who were exercising the right that the NRA claims they exist to protect.
Any true rights organization would be up in arms about these deaths, but the NRA can’t even be bothered to take a break in the “scary muggers so buy guns!” drumbeat to make even a peep of protest.
While not all gun owners are racist (obviously), a growing body of research suggests that hostility to gun control is less about belief that guns are a “right” and more about white paranoia about people of color and crime.
Last year, social scientists Alexandra Filindra and Noah J. Kaplan published a study in the journal Political Behavior that found that showing pictures of black people to white people reduced white support for gun control. The effect was much stronger in white people who held higher levels of racial prejudice.
“Juxtapositions of ‘law abiding citizens’ and ‘criminals’ [are] evocative of racialized themes as crime has long been associated with blacks in the white mind,” the researchers wrote.
Gun ownership is a way of “expressing my ‘more-equal-than-others’ status in a society where egalitarianism is the norm,” Filindra told the Washington Post.
This confirms previous research, published in PLoS One in 2013 that found that the more racist a white person is, the likelier he is to own a gun.
It’s time to admit the NRA is not a “gun rights” organization. The NRA — and their allies in the Republican party — are about one thing and one thing only: Stoking racialized fears of crime amongst paranoid white people for political gain and gun profits. The inability to give two hoots about the police killings of two gun owners, who happen to be black, just confirms it.
