Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 726

Chipotle’s marketing magic: If your brand is troubled, rock music to the rescue

Jim James, Brittany Howard (Credit: AP/Owen Sweeney/Reuters/Mario Anzuoni)

A young boy and girl pursue their dreams, finding a way to channel their love of making fresh-squeezed juices into healthy businesses. But before long, runaway growth has led them into running faceless corporate businesses and peddling phony ingredients. The two fall in love, realize that returning to their roots, going small, and selling healthy food out of a taco truck is the way to go. A campaign spot for Bernie Sanders? A documentary funded by Michael Pollan and Alice Waters?

Weirdly, it’s an ad for Chipotle, the enormous Mexican-food chain that was for years part owned by McDonald’s and has had problems with food-borne illness since at least 2008. Perhaps even stranger, the music behind it comes from My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard covering an overplayed and gooey Backstreet Boys song, “I Want It That Way.”

The whole thing, then, is pretty confounding. So what’s going on?

Chipotle has more than 2,000 locations, and earned $4.5 billion in revenues last year, but it still imagines itself a scruffy upstart crusading for the triumph of healthy food. It’s tried to come up with all kinds of ways to distinguish itself from chains like Taco Bell and Burger King. In 2014 it began its “Cultivating Thought Author Series,” printing words of wisdom from Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison, and George Saunders on cups and to-go bags. It’s taken out ads about its “food with integrity” commitment and has stopped selling genetically modified ingredients. It’s been giving out free food, in certain circumstances, for almost two decades now.

For every step toward indie credibility, though, Chipotle has been publicly criticized or seen a health crisis – hepatitis, norovirus, E. coli – crop up. Is the solution better food-safety habits by employees? More oversight of the meat and produce that comes into the stores? Less salt and high-calorie ingredients?

It turns out the answer is: rock ‘n’ roll cool.

Chipotle has already hired Fiona Apple and Willie Nelson to record commercials. Its use of the singers for My Morning Jacket and Alabama Shakes is a perfect bit of marketing symbolism. Both bands are beloved by critics and music insiders; they have substantial fan bases but have not become so big they’ve inspired a U2-like backlash. And though their music can be eclectic, both bands are considered earthy: The Louisville-based MMJ have a lot of alt-country twang, and Alabama Shakes are, ultimately, a blues-rock band. These are bands – and singers – whose music is not only strong and original, it’s considered “honest.” MMJ and Howard have previously covered a luminous song by The Band, “It Makes No Difference”: It doesn’t get much more earthy and sincere than that.

For what it’s worth, the latest video was set in motion before last year’s Salmonella and E. coli outbreaks. But if you’re a company looking to reassure consumers that you mean what you say, this combination is about as good as it gets.

As for why Chipotle used a song by the notorious Backstreet Boys instead of something better? That’s still puzzling, unless it’s a big for millenials who fell for the song as kids. It’s a big improvement on the original – James and Howard have two of the best voices in music today, and while their version of the song certainly sounds like a commercial, it’s not overwrought and saccharine like the 1999 original.

The idea of Chipotle as having anything to do with a taco truck is a bit over the top. Despite the lack of sense here, I’m going to try to enjoy this as a summer pleasure. There is so much vile in the world right now that we all need something to smile about. So if this video makes you forgive Chipotle for its spotty health record, or makes you want to “Join Our Summer Rewards Program,” be my guest. Just make sure your immune system is in good shape – you may need it.

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The poetry of “Mad Men”: When Matthew Weiner first read Frank O’Hara, “it was just like total time travel”

Matt Weiner; Frank O'Hara (Credit: AP/Richard Shotwell/Wikimedia/Salon)

The series “Mad Men” was woven through with the music, literature, and other culture of the years in which it took place, even when it wasn’t made explicit. The New York poet Frank O’Hara, whose work came out a few years before and during the 1960-1970 period covered in the show, was both a visible and invisible presence in “Mad Men.”

In the first episode of the second season, a disoriented Don Draper picks up one of O’Hara’s books, “Meditations in an Emergency,” and a voiceover has him reading one of its poems, “Mayakovsky,” aloud. He then mails his copy to someone who we find out, episodes later, is Anna Draper, the California woman whose husband Don fought alongside in Korea. These small gestures tell us an enormous amount about Don Draper: His confusion about his own identity, his need to search for meaning, and his respect for Anna, who he sees as the only person who understands him.

The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, became a major O’Hara fan soon after discovering his work, and next week Audible Studios will release a recording of him reading O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems.” One of the classics of American poetry, “Lunch Poems” came out in 1964 and captures O’Hara’s distinctive combination of the daily mundane — walking through New York past taxicabs — as well as moments of the sublime and his engagement with the work of artistic titans like Jackson Pollock, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. O’Hara was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and in some ways his writing resembles Abstract Expressionism and mid-century jazz,

We spoke to Weiner, who studied poetry as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, about O’Hara, his favorite writers, “Mad Men” and the complicated soul of Don Draper. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Let’s start with the fact that you describe Frank O’Hara, or at least his book “Lunch Poems,” as something that changed your life. How did you discover these poems and what appealed to you about them?

[“Mad Men”] was already underway. I had a pretty extensive education in poetry and everything that had excluded him, I guess because he was such an unusual… I don’t know why he wasn’t part of the canon, but he’s not. I don’t know why. It was not part of my education and like I said, I had a lot of poetry in my education, so that was weird.

But what happened is that my wife went to an exhibit for the Museum of the City of New York. It was photographs, mostly Garry Winogrand I think and some Weegee and just some stuff from the city, and in addition to that, next to each of the pictures was a poem on a sheet of paper, and they were all from “Lunch Poems.” So she brought me one of these poems back, I went and saw the exhibit, and I was just kind of blown away by the whole experience. It was just like total time travel, and he writes in a voice that you could say is conspiratorial, but it’s really more than that. It’s very present and it’s hard to believe that someone like that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s very alive. That’s the big compliment that I guess you give to something like that.

It’s a very romantic view of New York.

Yeah, some of it’s kind of sardonic and sarcastic and stuff, but yeah, it is romantic. It’s also very personal. But it’s very commonplace, it’s very workaday and familiar.

So when I got back to do the show for that season, which I believe is the beginning of Season Two, we had left Don in a kind of terrible place at the end of Season One where he was filled with regret, and Jon Hamm had talked to me about how this guy is probably going to get bored. So we had him go and get his physical and mix with people out in the street. I found out that “Lunch Poems” had not come out yet, so the rules of the show made it harder, but it still allowed me to get into Frank O’Hara, because “Meditations in an Emergency” had come out, which ended up being very fruitful and related to what I was doing and one of those coincidences that you can’t replicate. The show knows more than you do. It’s almost mysterious. I’m not kidding.

So that was my first interaction with him. And then I just really ate everything that I could find of his. I just read every single thing I could find. “Lunch Poems” was the book I bought and ripped my way through it, and then I found some recordings of him. Just his sense of humor, and he had such a large role at the Museum of Modern Art, so there’s an intellectual part of him also that’s not even in the poems.

My favorite sources for the show were people’s diaries, and I would always try and find any diaries that I could, either published diaries or sometimes people gave me friends’ and parents’ diaries, but anything that really had a kind of quotidian representation of life at that time. And the most important part of it is that when you’re dealing with historical context, when you read somebody’s diary you realize that, of course like any other thing in the world, that what’s going on for them personally has nothing to do with politics most of the time.

Frank really had that quality of, “This is what life is like. This is what’s on my mind. This is what I think is funny. This is what’s ironic.” And the whole process of writing “Lunch Poems,” which is what I liked about it, was that he was turning the necessity of doing his job into a poetic experience because he was compelled to write. That, to me, was related to Don at that time, and of course it became closely related to me.

Your job with these poems was to recite them, and you had heard recordings of O’Hara reading them.

I heard recordings of two of the poems that are in there. I tried not to imitate. But what you get is a man with a sense of humor who is performing in front of a crowd. There’s a series called “Poetry Speaks,” which has recordings of most of the poets of the 20th Century, at least most of the men, including Walt Whitman by the way. It’s a really amazing series.

I tried not to imitate him because he’s really mostly a stand-up, I think on some level, when he’s reading his poems. He had “Ave Maria” and “Greta Garbo has Collapsed.” The best thing is you can hear that he’s perfectly aware of the ironic, humorous voice that he’s giving and you can hear the laughter of the crowd.

I think the Billie Holiday poem, “The Day Lady Died,” is probably the other most famous Frank O’Hara poem.

From the “Lunch Poems,” yeah. I actually think that, Ironically, when we did find a piece of “Meditations in an Emergency,” my writer’s assistant at the time was like, “Are we gonna know what’s in the book or is he just sending this book” — we didn’t know it at the time — “to Anna Draper, and sort of saying even though I’m a suit and I’m an ad man, I am interested in poetry and I am interested in feelings and I don’t know what I am.” So I just flipped to the last page of “Meditations in an Emergency” and had him read it, and it’s from the poem “Mayakovsky,” which is probably one of the most-quoted things, which is the thing that Don reads in the show.

But as far as “Lunch Poems” goes, those are the most famous poems from “Lunch Poems,” and what I got when I was reading it, a book of poetry is sort of like being a D.J., I guess, like changing the pace up and putting different kinds of poems next to each other, and he knows a lot of French and a lot of it is about his travels and a lot of it is about his lovers, and so you get this kind of poetic diary when you read the whole thing at once. That was really one of the most moving things about the experience. There’s a conceit to this, which is that he’s writing these at lunch, supposedly some of them on typewriters that are in stores, just devoting himself to them.

There’s correspondence with him and Ferlinghetti, where he’s like, “I can’t find some of them,” and you get a feeling like, no, as a writer, he’s probably writing more of them. It’s kind of like, “I don’t have my homework.” But there’s an immediacy and a lack of formality, but the craft and his ability is kind of being hidden. It’s almost like a kind of modesty, that the construction is kind of being thrown away under the immediacy of the process that he’s describing.

Yeah, they’re so spontaneous.

Spontaneous, exactly. But they’re not. They’re not. When you read them you’re like, wow, this is not spontaneous. This thought is evolving over the next 30 lines, and this is not just a joke that’s being uttered.

I also like his I. And I don’t mean the eye as a visual eye, I mean the “I”. That’s very, you can’t use the word modern because it means so many other things, but it just cuts through time. You have someone standing next to you who feels so contemporary. I was always looking for it. It was one of the points of the show, just to say, “people haven’t changed.”

What other poets have moved you over the years?

I had a class called “20th Century Poetry,” taught by Gertrude Hughes, a Wallace Stevens scholar, but really what it was about, was women. So on the one hand, I’m coming out of high school with this personal relationship with Eliot and “The Waste Land.” Everyone gets into Eliot. I went to an all boys school. As soon as you read “J. Alfred Prufrock,” it’s basically like “Catcher in the Rye,” it just sticks with you. It’s a piece of art that resonates for a long time.

So I knew “The Waste Land” very well, and then everything else that we read, whether it was H.D (Hilda Doolittle), or Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov was really big, you start to get the political aspects of it. But also, I mean, Adrienne Rich’s book is called “The Dream of a Common Language,” and I would say emphatically that was what was going on in almost all of my poetry education.

I wanted to write poetry and I sought out Frank Reeve to be my personal tutor because I couldn’t get into a writing class, so I wrote with him for like three years.

He was a great teacher. And he made me read a lot of stuff that I would have never come in contact with. Obviously I have a real education in a lot of romantic poetry, I read Baudelaire, I read Wordsworth. But poets would come to read there. Mark Strand came to read, Derek Walcott came to read, Sharon Olds, I love Sharon Olds. You’d start to meet people who were alive right now, writing in a voice sometimes profane, whatever was the style. I love the density of poetry. I’m not a great reader of large things. I’m a slow reader, but I was always good, from high school on, we did “Paradise Lost” and a close reading of Milton, and I could take apart five or six paragraphs of that with complete understanding of ambiguity. I don’t know, poetry used to be a big part of the curriculum. I don’t see my kids doing it that much. We had to memorize everything. We had to memorize “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the preamble of Chaucer. I was in “Under Milk Wood,” so I had memorized all this Dylan Thomas. You just get this linguistic fireworks. I love Sylvia Plath too, I have to say. Sylvia Plath is all over “Mad Men.”

I was about to ask, to what extent did O’Hara and other poets of the ‘60s have a shaping influence on “Mad Men” and its characters? Did you ever think about which characters might be into certain poets?

I did sort of think about the standard of education and that this was a more popular art form. Certainly you’ll see Jack Kerouac all over the first season. You’ll see Allen Ginsberg throughout the entire series. You’ll see Bob Dylan all over. You’re trying to say, what is the language of people’s lives? What are the thoughts that are coming through in the culture? You can’t talk about that decade without talking about “Catch-22,” for example. What were the poems that were the equivalent of that?

But in the end, what I really like about it is I feel like poetry is best unexplained. In this case it’s an audiobook so my voice might be interfering with Frank’s, but the writers that I love have moments of poetry whether they’re writing poetry by itself [or not]. That is, images, ideas, presented in their full ambiguity, where your brain understands it even if you can’t write a paper about it. Your brain understands the opposites being held together. So we always tried to do that with stories, so that emotional resonance wouldn’t be explained, and I always thought that that was inspired by my attempt at poetic storytelling.

As for characters, Peggy didn’t go to college, so she’s self-educated. Don is curious. Don will read anything. Don has an appetite for everything, so he’s not going to exclude anything.

He was interested in bohemia even though he wasn’t a bohemian himself. He was always searching for the edges of things, it seemed like.

Yeah. I mean, he’s the enemy of the bohemians. That’s the funny part, saying like, “Don’t just a book by its cover. You don’t actually know what’s going on in my mind.” Which I do think was part of the story of the show. The uniform that people are wearing, even if it has to do with their job, their money, their life, does not have anything to do with what their inner life is. But I love that everybody was educated. Roger can quote poems. It might be “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or something like that, but it’s education. Duck, I’m sure, had memorized some Kipling. Bert Cooper, he’s definitely an educated person. It’s where big ideas are held in few words, so that’s something that people carry around with them. Also, it’s a common language at that time. You’re expected to know what something’s in reference too.

Yeah, you can see Joan, as she went on after the show, getting into Anne Sexton or something like that.

Or Rod McKuen. [Laughs]

Yeah. Reassuring poetry.

Yeah, exactly. Joan probably has a weakness for the troubadours. I think it’s all about concentrated thought and the common reference of language that everyone is supposed to share. I don’t know what’s left now as our common references because we read so many different things and people have their phones so they’re not expected to actually know anything. But I suppose the Bible is still present, Shakespeare is still present, “Casablanca,” “The Wizard of Oz,” these are things that you’re expected to know. If someone 20 years old says something like, “Of all the gin joints” or “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” that’s the way a poem would function as shared cultural experience.

But you’re right, there are fewer and fewer of those. Part of the story of “Mad Men” is seeing that consensus fragment.

That is the best way to put it. Consensus fragmenting. I always felt like, you look at the bestsellers and they have such a high standard of attention required.

The bestsellers of that era you mean?

The bestsellers like “Catch-22” or “The Naked and the Dead.”… Popular entertainment is not always meaningless just because it’s not considered art. This is gonna make me sound older than anything else I’ve said in this conversation, but I do think that there’s a pride and expectation in being educated.

In that era, you mean?

Yeah. Bobby Kennedy is writing one of the great speeches that he gave, on the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, where he’s going to Indianapolis, to help hopefully alleviate all of the social tension that’s pent up and all the rage that’s going on about the assassination, and he writes this down like the Gettysburg address on the back of a napkin and it starts off with a quote from Aeschylus, and no one said to him, “Hey the audience is gonna hear the word Aeschylus and walk away.” [Laughs.]

And maybe everybody doesn’t know what that is, but you might go and find out what it is or know that it’s something very old, and that if this man has picked it as his reference point when he’s talking about, for the first time actually, talking publicly about the loss of his own brother to an assassin, it just becomes huge shades of emotional tone that are… I don’t know, the sort of anti-intellectual populism… I know that it’s dropped out of the culture for the time being. Which is funny because all of the predictions not reading were wrong. People are reading plenty. They’re just not proud of it. Or using it to communicate.

It sounds like you need to do a few more seasons of “Mad Men”; I’d like to see some of these ideas worked through in 1973 and 1974.

I’ll find something else to work it out in. The greatest thing is that I was surrounded by such smart people whether it was the actors, the writers, everybody was constantly bringing in pieces of art of all different forms. Whether it was a movie, or poem or comic, a song, the reflection that art can offer in troubling times, and that artists can offer who are often observing what’s going on rather than participating, sometimes, it was very stimulating and comforting, and so I’m always looking for a way to do that. I think that when people read “Lunch Poems,” they’ll be shocked that it’s so old, and they’ll be shocked that you can feel Frank — that you know somebody like Frank, probably. And you’ll be shocked at what he thinks is important to tell you, because it’s very intimate. And hopefully the recording brings that to it.

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Tony Blair, Iraq and the struggle for the British left: Why the U.K.’s political soap opera is important

This is why the British hate Tony Blair. (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

Two nations divided by a common language, as the old joke about Britain and America holds — and two nations haunted by the mistakes of the recent past, each now facing an unexpected and potentially calamitous political crisis. I suppose it’s no surprise that Britain and the United States serve as distorted reflections of each other, given how closely intertwined we are by history. It’s a paradoxical relationship: We’ve been the master rather than the dog for at least the last 70 years, but deep inside we’ll always be the uncouth colony that got away, and never quite mastered the use of knife and fork. We often notice the differences more than the similarities: Britain is an old country and America still a young one; Britain has the Royal Family and national health insurance and low rates of gun violence and public TV that the public actually watches.

So, no, the gripping drama of political meltdown in Britain that has followed the public vote to leave the European Union is not exactly the same as the American horror-show of 2016. But, man, is it full of familiar echoes. As I (and many others) observed in the aftermath of the recent referendum, Brexit is the British translation for Donald Trump — a bit more polite, and shaped by the peculiar regional politics of the multinational United Kingdom, but expressing much the same set of frustrations. Both major political parties in both countries now find themselves beset by internal division and turmoil, although at least on the surface Britain’s ruling Conservatives are in much better shape than the Republicans, while (surprisingly) the left-center Labor Party is in much worse shape than the Democrats.

Over the last two weeks, moderates among the Labor Party’s members of Parliament have tried to stage a coup against left-wing party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected to his post just 10 months ago by an overwhelming majority of the party’s registered membership. That’s a peculiar situation that couldn’t quite happen in the U.S., but it bears some relationship to the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton split in the Democratic Party, and also to the conflict between leadership classes and base voters that has roiled both major American parties.

Furthermore, the anti-Corbyn plot — depending on your perspective, it’s either an anti-democratic power grab or a heroic effort to rescue Labor from hard-left electoral doom — is not entirely unconnected to this week’s even bigger British news. I mean the release of the “Chilcot report,” the end product of an eight-year independent inquiry into Britain’s decision to go to war in Iraq, largely at the behest of the U.S. This enormous data dump, which runs to 12 published volumes and 2.6 million words, has variously been described as a “scathing verdict” and a “devastating critique” directed at former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a ghost from the recent past that most Britons (and especially most Laborites) would like to stay buried.

There are anomalies heaped on top of anomalies here. Britain is the country that lacks a written constitution, where freedom of the press is sharply limited (by our standards) and whose legal and political systems often appear to lack transparency. Yet nothing on the scale of Chilcot’s public investigation, not to mention public shaming, of a former government leader has ever happened in the U.S. — not after Watergate or Iran-contra, and certainly not after the Iraq war.

After Barack Obama took office in 2009, he slammed the door on any possible large-scale investigation of the Bush administration’s lies, war crimes and human-rights violations. There were a few limited, quasi-public inquiries into technical questions: Why the pre-war intelligence was so wrong, or the multiple failures of the Iraq occupation. But that was it. Can you even imagine the media civil war (or the actual civil war) that would have erupted if some Chilcot-style commission had spent years examining the misdeeds of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the other scoundrels implicated in what Bush biographer Jean Edward Smith has described as “easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president”?

Because a British prime minister has nothing akin to an American president’s executive privilege — he or she is simply a member of Parliament, elected to a leadership position by other members — Blair’s humiliating BFF mash-notes to George W. Bush, circa 2002, have been included in the Chilcot report. In a long memo written eight months before the Iraq invasion, Blair tells Bush that the task awaiting them in the Middle East “is absolutely awesome.” No, I’m not kidding. He really did. Blair begins that note by assuring the president, “I will be with you, whatever.” There are probably quotations from “The Greatest Love of All” or “My Heart Must Go On” in there too, but the damn thing is 2.6 million words and nobody’s read them all yet. (Bush’s responses remain classified, although I’m guessing they were less fulsome: “Love U 2 U crzy Limey!”)

In the context of the Labor counterrevolution against Corbyn, it’s important to note that the Chilcot inquiry was not launched by Blair’s political enemies but by Gordon Brown, the longtime Labor ally who succeeded him as prime minister in 2007. These two phenomena are opposite sides of the same coin, that being a struggle for the soul of Britain’s formerly-socialist opposition party, which radically transformed British culture and society under the postwar prime ministers Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. If the American right seems embroiled in terminal chaos and confusion with the rise of Trump, across the pond it’s the left (broadly speaking) that faces an existential crisis. As Irish historian Fearghal McGarry recently told me, the Brexit vote was a vivid testament to the weakness of the British left, which saw numerous Labor strongholds in Wales and the north of England vote heavily to leave the E.U.

Labor’s role in world history is much larger than that played by social-democratic parties in other middle-sized nations; it is almost certainly a more significant institution than the Democratic Party ever was or could ever be. It was Labor that introduced the National Health Service and nationalized the Bank of England, the major utilities and the railroads (until Maggie Thatcher sold many of them off again). More clearly than any other party in the Western world that actually held power, Labor between 1945 and about 1970 stood for empowering working people through the trade union movement, and at least tried to represent a “middle way” between Soviet Communism and American capitalism.

All that was a long time ago indeed, but the Corbyn-Blair conflagration of 2016 represents the lingering hangover or unfinished endgame of that era. Both men made major public speeches on Wednesday in response to the Chilcot report — the embattled current Labor leader who has sought to rekindle its socialist heart, and the one who led the party to its greatest electoral victories in history (not to mention its only electoral victories since 1974). The tone of open warfare was unmistakable, and once again the whole spectacle bore no resemblance to anything we would ever see in American politics.

Unlike Bush, Tony Blair has expressed varying degrees of regret and contrition for everything that went south in Iraq, but by any standard his remarks on Wednesday were remarkable. He agreed that the war was based on faulty intelligence and that its outcome was catastrophic, and then said: “For all of this I express more sorrow, regret and apology and in greater measure than you can know or may believe.” But as Andrew Sparrow of the Guardian has put it, not far below the surface Blair’s remarks were “a statement of defiance,” a reassertion of his stated belief that it’s time for “the political class as a whole” to “stand up for itself.” Blair went on to say, after all, that he would make the same decision all over again, faced with the same situation and the same flawed information. He had acted in “good faith” and done the “right thing,” even if it was the ultimate example of a bad idea gone wrong. I’m honestly not sure if that’s admirable candor or profound perversity. Or both.

One obvious target for the renewed machismo of the “political class” would be Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong political outsider whom Blair forcefully opposed during last summer’s Labor leadership campaign. (As many people observed at the time, the former prime minister has become such a punching bag that he probably helped Corbyn more than hurt him.) That was hardly surprising, since Blair’s “New Labor” legacy, his reinvention of the party as a moderate, pro-business, Bill Clinton-style coalition of upscale urban liberals, was precisely what Corbyn hoped to dismantle. Corbyn’s campaign against the Labor establishment had obvious pre-echoes of the Clinton-Sanders primary struggle in the U.S., except that the mainstream opposition was divided and disorganized, and Corbyn swept to victory with almost 60 percent of the vote from registered party members.

So it can’t have made Blair’s terrible, awful, no-good day any better to see the official leader of his own party apologize to the people of Iraq and the British public, and denounce the Iraq invasion as “a stain on our party and our country” and “an act of military aggression based on a false pretext.” One semi-plausible interpretation of the attempted anti-Corbyn coup by Labor M.P.’s is that Blair defenders or loyalists hoped to prevent Corbyn from ever making such a speech, either because they believed it was unfair or because they believed it was political suicide.

As usual in politics, you probably can’t boil the crisis on the British left (or in the center-left) down to a single issue. Some “Old New Labor” types didn’t want to watch Corbyn enthusiastically throw Blair under the bus — or, potentially, accuse their former leader of war crimes. (To be clear, Corbyn didn’t do that.) Perhaps others, as left-wing journalist Tom Barker has suggested, “would rather sabotage their own party than see it elected with a socialist leader.” But leading a British political party is a strange job that demands an unusual skill set; it’s roughly like being a congressional leader, a party chair and a presidential candidate, all at the same time. Corbyn is a fiery orator with undoubted principles and a rumpled, Old Left anti-charisma (Bernie minus Brooklyn, with more academic Marxism and a lot more rain). But by many accounts he’s a standoffish and difficult person, not well suited for a management role.

It’s impossible to evaluate that spin from this distance, but many more or less well-meaning people on what we might call the mainstream British left, from J.K. Rowling to the editors of the Guardian, have evidently convinced themselves that Corbyn effectively is Bernie Sanders — a galvanizing force with no hope of ever winning an election — and that Labor can never regain power and begin to undo the Tory neoliberal austerity agenda with Corbyn at the helm. That’s not an inherently irrational argument, but it carefully steers around the fact that Corbyn was the overwhelming choice of the party’s core constituencies and still has hundreds of thousands of grassroots Labor supporters. It also threatens to lead in a circle right back to the Blair-Clinton free-trade globalization agenda that those voters so forcefully rejected.

If everyone in Britain agrees on one thing, it’s that Labor has wasted the post-Brexit moment on bitter infighting rather than confronting the Conservatives, who appeared to be in deep disarray after David Cameron’s decision to resign. Thanks to the Tories’ tightly controlled leadership selection process, they are likely to produce a moderate-seeming female prime minister — current Home Secretary Theresa May, who will get along splendidly with President Hillary Clinton — and head toward the next general election in better shape than anyone expected. In other words, the Brexit soap opera has dramatized the same Jefferson vs. Hamilton problem that plagues both American parties, and many other quasi-democratic institutions around the world. Plato worried about this, and so did Nietzsche, but nobody’s ever figured it out. Who gets to decide things: the stupid, crazy and easily deluded people, or the self-appointed elite that believes it knows better? Which terrible option is worse?

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Millennials, money and monogamy: “Having too many choices can be as much a curse as a blessing”

Hannah Tennant-Moore (Credit: Wyatt Mason)

Hannah Tennant-Moore’s debut novel “Wreck and Order” is much more than the story of a privileged young woman trying to figure out her place in the world. In her book, Tennant-Moore boldly chronicles the adventures and misadventures of Elsie Shore, who, supported by a family inheritance, decides to travel instead of attend college. She repeatedly returns to a destructive relationship with her boyfriend, Jared—even during the period of time that she lives in New York City, when the reader thinks that maybe, just maybe, Elsie has decided to conform with society. Elsie, however, is a non-conformist and continually and futilely seeks out change.

Tennant-Moore’s writing never abandons its rawness and is wrought with detail and emotion. While fiercely tackling a gamut of subjects, Tennant-Moore takes the reader on Elsie’s brilliantly-written ride, as she tries to come to terms with the fact that she really is quite lost.

The main character in your novel, Elsie Shore, is a young woman struggling to find her true self. I know that sounds completely generic, and your novel is anything but (I’ll get to that soon!)—however, stripped of everything else, your reader is left with a lost soul.

Elsie is in her early 30s, and is frankly, quite privileged. She is supported financially by her father, and the small fortune that he inherited from his mother. Because of this, she never needs to worry about money even as she travels jobless from New England to California, to Sri Lanka, to New York City and back and forth and in-between. Because there are so many young female protagonists already sitting on bookstore shelves who fall under this “lost soul” label, and because Elsie’s whims are funded by her father, I could see her coming under attack by some readers. What led you to create a character vulnerable to criticism? What do you say to defend Elsie if/when she is criticized?

I specifically wanted to tie economic privilege to a sense of being lost. In many books about aimless or hapless millennials, finances are never mentioned at all, which always leads me as a reader to wonder: how can this character even afford her reckless lifestyle? I wanted to make it clear upfront that part of Elsie’s confusion comes from having too much freedom: she lacks the strictures of financial responsibility or a stable relationship to organize her days. So she is able to give herself over to her desires of the moment, which often betray her spirit, what she truly wants in life. I also wanted to make it clear that I, the author, am well-aware that having the time for the kind of self-inquiry Elsie engages in, such as going on a meditation retreat, is a privilege that is accessible to only a very small population of the world. Elsie is also aware of this privilege, which makes her feel alternately guilty and determined to make something useful out of her free time. That said, Elsie is far from rich. She never has a stable job, but she does work. And when she gets offered a job for $40,000 a year, that sounds to her like a ton of money. I wanted her to inhabit a kind of no-man’s financial land: she has no ambitions to make money since she knows she can ask her father to bail her out in a crisis, but she also doesn’t have nearly enough money to settle down in a nice apartment or plan for her future. Her financial situation is “just one more way I was a stranger to what most people considered the real world,” as she puts it.

Making a character who is vulnerable to criticism is a way of pointing out a particular human problem that is not uncommon in middle class society today: having too many choices can be as much a curse as a blessing. So I’m okay with Elsie being criticized. She is deeply flawed — and no one knows this better than she does. What makes her flaws and mistakes revelatory, rather than simply frustrating, is her self-awareness: she is genuinely interested in coming to terms with the ways that she hurts herself and others, and she wants to learn to be a decent person.

Yes, I find myself wondering on occasion how a character, and sometimes a real-life person, can afford a reckless lifestyle. It’s like Cake’s “How Do You Afford Your Rock ‘n Roll Lifestyle” song. The first time I heard that song, I was excited that I wasn’t the only person who wondered this about others. 

One of the strengths of “Wreck and Order” is its characters—they are dynamic, alive, and beautifully flawed. I want to go back to the quote you mentioned about Elsie, that she feels a stranger to what most people consider the real world. Aside from finances, she is also lost when it comes to relationships with men. Throughout the novel, she has an ongoing complete mess of a relationship with her boyfriend, Jared. For a short time, though, she settles into what most people would refer to as a “real world relationship” with a man she meets in New York, Brian. I felt guilty as I read for cheering Elsie on during this time because I wrongly wanted her to just marry Brian and be saved from herself. My guilt was due to the fact that I knew Elsie was so unhappy with him, and the general notion of settling down. When I think back on all of the characters in the novel, Brian strikes me as the one of the only, maybe the only character, who is “real world.” He has a somewhat normal family, a really nice townhouse, a great job—at least on paper, he’s got it made. What were you hoping to achieve by bringing Brian’s character into your writing?

This is such a smart way to situate Brian within the book, and you’ve read the relationship between Elsie and Brian exactly the way I hoped a reader would: thank you! With Brian’s character — which is impeccable, as you say, “on paper” — I wanted to show how strong the pull of external security is, even at the risk of happiness. Brian is appealing to Elsie mostly because he would make her life look good from the outside, and she’s weary of living in a way that is not all “impressive” or “successful” to others. Through their relationship, I hoped to show the danger of being so busy curating your identity that you stop valuing how your life feels from the inside. Brian has every characteristic of a typically desirable man, but he is not an active participant in his own life; it’s as if he’s following a script that was written long before he was born.

As for the notion of settling down, there was a wildly popular Atlantic article a few years back called “Marry Him!” by Lori Gottlieb, which urged women to “settle for Mr. Good Enough.” And “Eat Pray Love” argued that you shouldn’t marry your soulmate because it’s too scary. And in “Trainwreck,” the women agreed that the man with whom you have the best sex of your life is not husband material. So there seems to be a common argument directed at women that mediocrity and monogamy go hand in hand. It may be true for some women that stability is more important than passion or true love. But what my marriage has taught me is that sharing a life with someone requires so much energy and commitment and selflessness that I cannot imagine doing it with someone who was not my soulmate and my true love (and the best sex I’ve ever had). I’m lucky to have a mother who is single and has perhaps the richest, most stable, most interesting life of anyone I know. And some of the happiest times of my life have been spent in solitude. So I’ve always known, cerebrally, that I did not need another person to complete me. Even so, societal pressure to couple off is so strong that I used to feel I should seek out a man like Brian. Through Brian and Elsie’s relationship, I wanted to show the dangers of that “should” feeling, particularly when it comes to love.

Elsie seems to have the urge to couple off constantly. If not with Brian, then with Jared, and even Suriya. She certainly tries solitude several times in the novel, the epitome of which was when she spent some time in Sri Lanka attempting to learn the ways of Buddhist monks. Why did you choose for Elsie to go to Sri Lanka? Do you think that people who struggle with this “should” feeling can overcome their obstacles and eventually accept themselves as suitable companions?

I wouldn’t say Elsie’s urge is exactly for coupledom. She certainly longs for intimate relationships, but often sabotages them when they threaten her freedom. But you’re right that one of the main paradoxes of Elsie’s personality is that she finds so much joy in solitude, but can’t seem to stop getting caught up in complicated engagements with others.

Elsie’s time in Sri Lanka was originally the whole framework for the novel, so that wasn’t exactly a narrative choice, but more the impetus: I began writing the story of a young woman who returns to Sri Lanka as an act of desperation, survival, and the rest followed from there. I wanted to write a novel based in Sri Lanka because, during my solitary backpacking trips through the country, I’d found such richness in all aspects of daily life — from the landscape to the politics to the gender dynamics to the food — that my brain naturally began to create stories out of my interactions and experiences there. In terms of Elsie’s interest in Buddhism and meditation, I wanted to show how spending time in silence, watching the mind’s movements, can benefit an ordinary person in ordinary ways. But I certainly did not want to send Elsie on a cliche spiritual journey, in which a privileged, white woman finds inner peace in an ashram in East Asia. So while meditation gives Elsie a framework for getting to know herself, most of her insights and inner growth results from being out in the world — getting her heart broken, spending time with Suriya and her family.

I do believe that people can overcome inner obstacles to contentment. Buddhism teaches that there is no particular person or event that can rescue you from suffering; true happiness is not dependent on circumstance. Of course, this is an ideal, one that comforts Elsie even as she is unable to live up to it. Even those of us who are lucky enough to live in the most favorable circumstances — enough food, comfortable shelter, not surrounded by daily violence — put up barriers to our own sense of ease in the world, telling ourselves that we will not be okay if we do not get a husband or a promotion or a new hair color. And then we get those things and we’re still not happy! Real change, real redemption does not result from a circumstantial transformation (the drunken sex addict becomes a happily married Buddhist!), but from a much subtler shift in the way one experiences everyday life — a sense of openness and relaxation toward moments as they unfold. Through Elsie, I wanted to show how meditation and self-reflection can change an ordinary, damaged, confused human in ways that may not be readily apparent from the outside.

My favorite parts of the book were those spent with Suriya and her family. You said that you spent time in Sri Lanka yourself. Was Suriya inspired by anyone you met during your travels? She is such a great character, with so many admirable traits.

I’m so glad to hear that you appreciated Suriya’s character! She was difficult to write because I wanted her to be genuinely good and kind, but also complicated and interesting. Suriya is loosely inspired by a dear friend of mine, whom I met on my first trip to Sri Lanka six years ago and with whom I have stayed close. Although the village setting and Suriya’s manner of speaking come from time spent with my friend and her family, the details of Suriya’s life and the action scenes in Sri Lanka are nearly all invented. My friend does not have a brother in the military or an abusive father, etc. When I told my friend that I was writing a novel based partly in her village but that I had made up most of the events and dialogue there, she said, “Of course. My life is interesting to you, but it is boring to most people.”

I was reading in some background information from your publisher that you started taking notes for this book on a trip to Sri Lanka soon after you completed your MFA program. Did you have a goal, or hope, to be inspired enough to write when you set off for this trip, or were you completely surprised that a book came out of your travels there? How long did it take you to complete the book all together—from the initial note taking to the completed manuscript?

I had no ambitions at all for my first Sri Lanka trip, aside from appreciating the country and the rare chunk of free, solitary time I had to spend there. This of course made for a very special trip. There was no context for my life in Sri Lanka — nothing particular to do — so I got to just observe and marvel. And what I observed was such richness in all aspects of daily life — the landscape, the politics, the gender dynamics, the food — that I ended up filling up notebooks with my impressions. I had no plans for these notebooks, until the initial thread of “Wreck and Order” came to me on my 28th birthday, several months after I returned to the States, and then I used my notes to create a sense of place. I returned to Sri Lanka twice during the writing of the novel, those times with the intention of doing research into customs and rituals and getting to know locals’ stories about the civil war. It took me about two years to complete a first draft of “Wreck and Order,” and then another year-and-a-half to edit it on my own. Then I sent the manuscript out and began the final editing process with my agent and editor. All in all, it’s been five-and-a-half years since I first began writing.

I would suspect that those subsequent trips to Sri Lanka were slightly more constraining as your initial trip because at that point you had the book in mind. Do you have any plans to go back to Sri Lanka again now that the book is complete?   

You’re exactly right: on my last two trips to Sri Lanka, there was a calculated purposefulness to my observations and experiences that detracted from the joyful, easy self-forgetfulness of my first trip. I am looking very forward to going back now that the book is finished, and I will once again have no goal but to connect with the place and the people I love so much. I don’t know when I will be able to return–my work is more constraining now that it was a few years ago and my first baby is due in June–but I know I will make it happen before too long, perhaps this time bringing my family.

Five and a half years is a long time to be with a book, or really any all-encompassing project. Were you relieved to send “Wreck and Order” off onto bookshelves at that point, or were you more hesitant after spending so much time with it?

Watching “Wreck and Order” enter the world has been as scary as it is wonderful. The best part so far is when someone like you reads the book with care and engages me in a thoughtful conversation about it. I am relieved to have seen the project through to the end, so that I can now focus on my second novel, a book I have been researching and thinking about for close to a decade. But there was a lot of sadness, too, when I completed my last major edit of my first novel: it had been my constant companion for so long, and now I had to let it go have its own life, independent of me.

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Darrell Issa challenges House GOP to “shutdown the government” over Clinton email investigation: “Are you willing to shutdown all business of the people for this?”

Darrell Issa (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

Darell Issa is apparently still a little salty over being pushed out of his chairmanship over the House Oversight Committee in favor of a young and ambitious congressman. Hours after his replacement, Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, announced an unprecedented hearing into the FBI’s recommendation not to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server as secretary of state, calling Director James Comey to Capitol Hill to testify this week, Issa attempted to one-up his replacement.

Calling previous Republican-led government shutdowns over things like Obamacare “small points compared to the actual balance of our republic,” the California Republican who once vowed never to vote for a government shutdown, called for one over the FBI’s email investigation.

“I received and accepted their unanimous recommendation that the thorough, year-long investigation be closed and that no charges be brought against any individuals within the scope of the investigation,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement after meeting with FBI Director James Comey Wednesday.

“The administration is covering its own backend,” Issa alleged on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily Wednesday. “That is the crisis we face.”

“We are in a crisis because Hillary Clinton, if the voters do not stop her, will be the next President of the United States,” Issa, who has claimed that “there is more than enough for an indictment,” said.

“She will, in fact, on day one say, ‘Pardon me,’ and she’ll mean it. She’ll have pardoned herself,” he quipped.

Issa then called on Breitbart listeners to demand a government shutdown over the FBI’s failure to recommend criminal charges against Clinton.

“We cannot simply wait for a president that is willing to voluntarily sign away some of his or her own power,” Issa insisted.“We should be willing to shut down the government if the president won’t limit his power.”

“Are you willing to shutdown all business of the people for this?” Issa challenged the House GOP leadership:

Issa’s statement comes as a dozen protesters held a sit-in at his office Tuesday night to demand that he support tougher gun restrictions before the House Wednesday.

Rep. D. Issa's office target of sit in demonstration, folks want stricter gun background checks. Fox5 at 4,5&6pm pic.twitter.com/6PHDUtBsCx

— Salvador (@SalvadorSDnews) July 5, 2016

And Issa’s idea comes on the heels of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s suggestion that Clinton be stripped of her access to classified government information.

“Comey said short of prosecution some kind of administration action should occur bringing consequences. I think the DNI, the director of national intelligence, should block her access to classified information given how recklessly she handled this during the presidential campaign,” Ryan told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly.

“She becomes president that’s one thing. But I don’t think she should get classified information and I think the DNI should block it given how recklessly she handled this.”

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Republicans have also called on the FBI to release its evidence against Clinton.

[H/T: ThinkProgress]

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“Not justified”: The biggest findings of Chilcot report, which blasts British role in catastrophic Iraq war

(Credit: AP/Reuters/Jim Young/Hadyn West/Jerome Delay/Photo montage by Salon)

After seven years of investigation, the British government has released its exhaustive investigation into the Iraq war.

The Iraq Inquiry, also known as the Chilcot report, is massive, at a staggering 2.6 million words in length. The executive summary alone is 150 pages long. It is accompanied by a full 12 volumes of evidence, findings and conclusions.

The report meticulously chronologizes what happened before, during and after the invasion and occupation. It has been referred to as the British government’s “last word” on the war.

Then Prime Minister Gordon Brown commissioned the inquiry in 2009, to look at U.K. policy on Iraq from 2001 to 2009.

John Chilcot, a senior politician who sits on the British government’s Privy Council advisory board, was appointed as chair of the inquiry.

Chilcot has long been criticized for the extreme delay in the release of the report. Early reports originally suggested it would take just over one year.

Since the investigation was announced, politicians and activists have also condemned its secrecy and lack of transparency.

From day one, Prime Minister Brown said the inquiry would not seek to “apportion blame” and would instead identify “lessons learned.”

Despite its large limitations, nevertheless, the report reaches damning conclusions. It officially confirms that the invasion of Iraq was not necessary; that the British government sold the war to the public based on exaggerated, faulty intelligence; and that the foreign occupation fueled instability and violence inside Iraq.

Unnecessary

“We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort,” Chilcot made clear in his public statement on Wednesday, July 6.

The report notes that the British government’s decision to use force “became even more controversial when it was subsequently found that Iraq’s programmes to develop and produce  chemical, biological and nuclear weapons had been dismantled.”

After the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that the U.K. would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the U.S. to fight extremism. Blair joined the U.S. in its war in Afghanistan, and sided with President George W. Bush in his plans to subsequently invade Iraq.

“In December 2001, Mr Blair suggested a strategy for regime change in Iraq that would build over time, including ‘if necessary’ taking military action,” the report says.

To justify the war, Bush and Blair claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had developed what they called “weapons of mass destruction.”

Chilcot emphasized that the British government’s judgments about Iraq’s weapons capabilities “were presented with a certainty that was not justified.”

“It quickly became apparent that it was unlikely that significant stockpiles would be found,” the report notes, referring to the weapons of mass destruction accusation. “This led to challenges to the credibility of both the Government and the intelligence community.”

Chilcot stressed that it “is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments.”

“They were not challenged, and they should have been,” he added. He did not mention the millions upon millions of people in the U.K., the U.S. and other countries throughout the world who did challenge the U.S.-led invasion.

The report highlights that “there was no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaida,” although the U.S. and U.K. implied this to sell the war effort.

In March 2003, when the invasion began, “There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein,” Chilcot stated.

He said a strategy of containment could have been continued, pointing out that the majority of the Security Council supported continuing U.N. inspections and monitoring, not a military invasion.

Sectarianism

Prime Minister Blair insisted that the problems that arose in Iraq could not have been foreseen. The inquiry came to the opposite conclusion, stressing that many of the difficulties arose from risks that were evident from the beginning.

“The consequences of the invasion and of the conflict within Iraq which followed are still being felt in Iraq and the wider Middle East, as well as in the UK,” the report says.

“It left families bereaved and many individuals wounded, mentally as well as physically. After harsh deprivation under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iraqi people suffered further years of violence.”

That violence continues to this day, with the spread of extremist groups throughout the country. Prime Minister Blair has previously admitted that the invasion of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS, a genocidal fascist group.

The report notes that the U.S. and U.K. “exacerbated” violent sectarianism in Iraq with their actions and programs, particularly with de-Ba’athification and the demobilization of the Iraqi army.

The harsh de-Ba’athification program, in which members of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Ba’ath Party were fired from the government and banned from future positions, “had a significant and lasting negative impact on Iraq,” and was greatly “damaging to Iraq’s post‑invasion recovery and political stability,” the report says.

Extremism

The war also allowed “Al Qaida space in which to operate and unsecured borders across which its members might move,” the inquiry adds.

In March 2003, in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Blair insisted that the possibility of extremist groups getting their hands on WMDs was “a real and present danger to Britain and its national security.”

Before he made these remarks, Chilcot made clear, “Blair had been warned, however, that military action would increase the threat from Al Qaida to the UK and to UK interests.”

“He had also been warned that an invasion might lead to Iraq’s weapons and capabilities being transferred into the hands of terrorists.”

The report emphasizes that the U.K.’s Joint Intelligence Committee, or JIC, had concluded in October 2002 that “the greatest terrorist threat in the event of military action against Iraq will come from Al Qaida and other Islamic extremists.”

Civilian suffering

Iraqi civilians paid the biggest price for the war, which the report makes clear was sold on faulty intelligence.

From 2003 to July 2009, the inquiry found, the U.S.-led war resulted in the deaths of at least 150,000 Iraqis, most of whom were civilians — “and probably many more,” Chilcot added. It estimates that another 1 million Iraqis were displaced.

A 2015 study authored by the Nobel Prize-winning medical organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that more than 1 million Iraqis died because of the war, “And this is only a conservative estimate.”

“The people of Iraq have suffered greatly,” Chilcot said.

By the end of March 2004, one year into the occupation, “more than 200 attacks targeting Iraqi citizens were being reported each week,” the report notes.

“The significant worsening of security, coupled with revelations of abuse by members of the US military of Iraqi detainees held in Abu Ghraib prison, led many of the Inquiry’s witnesses to conclude that the spring of 2004 had been a turning point,” it adds.

Despite the rapid increase in violence, the British government did little to document, not to mention stop, the escalating civilian casualties. In fact, it put more energy into quibbling about responsibilities than carrying out those responsibilities.

“The Government’s consideration of the issue of Iraqi civilian casualties was driven by its concern to rebut accusations that Coalition Forces were responsible for the deaths of large numbers of civilians,” the report says.

It concludes, “greater efforts should have been made in the post-conflict period to determine the number of civilian casualties and the broader effects of military operations on civilians.”

“More time was devoted to the question of which department should have responsibility for the issue of civilian casualties than it was to efforts to determine the actual number,” the report underscores.

Incompetence

The Chilcot report details how British policy in Iraq was not just disastrous; it was also plagued by sheer incompetence.

“The UK did not achieve its objectives,” the report states clearly.

“The Government was unprepared for the role in which the UK found itself from April 2003,” it adds. “Much of what went wrong stemmed from that lack of preparation.”

It cites a 2008 report by Transparency International, which found U.S.-occupied Iraq to be the world’s third-most corrupt country.

Internally within the government, negative reports were covered up, the inquiry found. On numerous occasions, British politicians visiting Iraq — including the prime minister, the foreign secretary and the chief of the general staff — “found the situation on the ground to be much worse than had been reported to them.”

“When the UK acceded to the US request that it assume leadership of a military Area of Responsibility encompassing four provinces in southern Iraq, it did so without a robust analysis either of the strategic implications for the UK or of the military’s capacity to support the UK’s potential obligations in the region,” the report says.

Chilcot noted that, by 2007, militias had come to dominate the major southern Iraqi city Basra, to such a degree that British military commanders were unable to challenge them. Because of this, the U.K. had to make what Chilcot called a “humiliating” agreement with a militia that had been actively targeting British forces.

Legality

As was made clear when the investigation began seven years ago, the report does not make any legal decisions.

In his public statement, Chilcot noted that the “Inquiry has not expressed a view on whether military action was legal,” adding that this could only be decided by a court.

The report does, however, state clearly, “The circumstances in which it was ultimately decided that there was a legal basis for UK participation were far from satisfactory.”

It furthermore indicates that there “were also concerns over both the continued legal basis for operations in the  No‑Fly Zones (NFZs) and the conduct of individual operations.”

U.S.-U.K. relationship

The inquiry criticizes the British relationship with the U.S. as well.

After the 2003 invasion, the U.S. and U.K. became joint occupying powers in Iraq. In the following year, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority took the place of Iraq’s toppled government.

“The UK was fully implicated in the Authority’s decisions, but struggled to have a decisive effect on its policies,” Chilcot stressed in his public statement.

This is echoed in the report, which notes, “The US and UK are close allies, but the relationship between the two is unequal.”

Impact

The report calls for independent scrutiny of government intelligence that is used to support future policy decisions.

It explains that ambiguous government language obfuscated facts. “Constant use of the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ without further clarification,” for instance, “obscured the differences between the potential impact of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.”

Trumped-up claims based on faulty intelligence has led to widespread mistrust of government institutions, the report notes.

Prime Minister Blair’s insistence that his administration had evidence on Iraq’s capabilities and intentions, the report says, “has produced a damaging legacy, including undermining trust and confidence in Government statements, particularly those which rely on intelligence which cannot be independently verified.”

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“Mr. Trump believes in putting your oxygen mask on first before helping others”: Watch Katrina Pierson’s desperate attempt to defend Trump’s bankruptcies

Katrina Pierson, Wolf Blitzer (Credit: CNN)

“He got rich and got out.”

That, in summary, is how Donald Trump’s top campaign spokesperson defended her boss against rival Hillary Clinton’s latest line of attack declaring Trump’s casino dealings in Atlantic City, New Jersey, an abysmal failure.

On Wednesday, Clinton traveled to the oceanside gambling mecca to spotlight Trump’s serial casino bankruptcies, arguing that he left a wake of destruction while enriching himself.

“He always rigged it so he got paid no matter how his companies performed,” Clinton said on the boardwalk next to the former Trump Plaza casino, and only steps away from where employees at Trump’s Taj Mahal were on strike.

Trump opened three new casinos in Atlantic City starting in the early 1980s and ran two separate public companies that operated casinos in the city. But a recent USA Today investigation found that Trump’s casinos repeatedly broke New Jersey state rules and were fined more than a million dollars. A Wall Street Journal investigation earlier this year showed that Trump made a net profit of $160 million in between 1990 and 1996, even as his casinos all went through bankruptcy-court proceedings.

Clinton pointed out that Trump has bragged about being “the King of Debt” and highlighted the numerous lawsuits filed against him. “For many years I took money out of Atlantic City,” Trump said in an interview last year. “The money I made in Atlantic City fueled a lot of projects.”

“Many of those lawsuits were filed by ordinary Americans who worked for Donald Trump and never got paid. Painters, waiters, plumbers, people who needed the money they earned and didn’t get it. Not because Donald Trump couldn’t pay, but because he wouldn’t,” Clinton said on Wednesday:

Appearing on CNN following Clinton’s blistering assault against Trump’s business record, spokesperson Katrina Pierson made no attempt to sugarcoat her boss’ record.

“[H]e thinks that’s something to be proud of,” the controversial spokesperson bizarrely told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “That says everything you need to know about Donald Trump.”

“Mr. Trump had four bankruptcies on the business side,” Pierson explained. “Never a personal bankruptcy. A lot of times, you have to use restructures to preserve jobs.”

“Mr. Trump believes in putting your oxygen mask on first before helping others.”

Trump, himself, went on the defensive after Clinton’s speech, releasing a statement and appearing on Fox News’ “The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson,” hours after it was announced that the host and 11-year Fox News veteran had filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.

“It is an effective and commonly used practice in business to use bankruptcy proceedings to restructure a business and ultimately save jobs. Nobody understands the economy like I do and no one, especially not Crooked Hillary Clinton, will do more for the economy than I will,” Trump said in the statement.

Still, however, Trump did not get the last word. Clinton’s rapid response team quickly tweeted out its own amended version of Trump’s statement:

.@realDonaldTrump fixed pic.twitter.com/lrmn7TMnk7

— Gwen Rocco (@gwenrocco) July 6, 2016

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Gretchen Carlson isn’t the first to speak out: Roger Ailes has a long history of alleged sexism

Roger Ailes (Credit: AP/Brian Ach)

Longtime Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed a bombshell sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit Wednesday alleging that Fox News chief Roger Ailes fired her because she pushed back against rampant sexism at the network and rebuffed Ailes’ attempts to establish a sexual relationship.

Carlson’s complaint, filed in New Jersey Superior Court on Wednesday, alleges that Ailes “sabotaged her career because she refused his sexual advances and complained about severe and pervasive sexual harassment.”

According to Carlson, Ailes acted in a sexist manner towards her on numerous occasions, commenting repeatedly about her legs, “asking her to turn around so he could view her posterior,” and telling her that she was “sexy,” but “too much hard work.”

Carlson also says that her former “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy “engaged in a pattern of severe and pervasive sexual harassment” of her and “regularly treated her in a sexist and condescending way.”

After Carlson complained to Ailes about Doocy’s behavior, she says Ailes retaliated against her by assigning her fewer high-profile interviews and eventually firing her from “Fox & Friends.”

In September 2015, Carlson says she met with Ailes in an attempt to stop the discriminatory treatment. According to Carlson’s complaint, Ailes responded by suggesting that the issue could have been best addressed sexually: “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better,” Ailes allegedly said, adding that “sometimes problems are easier to solve” that way.

Fox News terminated Carlson’s employment on June 23, 2016.

***

Carlson’s allegations are not the first such complaints leveled at Ailes.

New York Magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman recounted a number of anecdotes purporting to exhibit Ailes’ sexism in “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” his 2014 book chronicling the history of Ailes and Fox News.

When Ailes was serving as the executive producer of an NBC late-night show in the 1980s, Sherman reports that a female staffer complained to Ailes during salary negotiations that his $400-a-week offer was too low.

“If you agree to have sex with me whenever I want I will add an extra hundred dollars a week,” Ailes allegedly responded.

“I was in tears by the time I hit the street,” the staffer later recalled.

A Fox News spokesperson later refuted the story.

On another occasion, during a job interview with Shelley Ross, who would go on to become the executive producer of “Good Morning America,” Sherman reports that Ailes “posed romantically suggestive questions and made flirtatious comments about her appearance. ‘This is making me uncomfortable,’ Ross recalled telling Ailes.”

Sherman’s book, which Ailes and Fox News have roundly dismissed, also relates several examples of sexist comments Ailes allegedly made towards female anchors at Fox, which Media Matters has collected into a single post:

“Anchor Bob Sellers remembered Ailes once calling the control booth. ‘I was doing the weekend show with Kiran Chetry. He called up and said, ‘Move that damn laptop, I can’t see her legs!’ “


“No one was spared from Ailes’s eruptions. He vented constantly about his talent. […] When Gretchen Carlson’s name came up, Ailes pointed out she was once Miss America, then added, ‘It must not have been a good year.’ “


” ‘[Ailes] had admiration for [Former Fox News anchor Catherine Crier’s] legs,’ a senior executive said. In one meeting, Ailes barked, ‘Tell Catherine I did not spend x-number of dollars on a glass desk for her to wear pant suits.’ “

Gretchen Carlson said in 2013 that she was not allowed to wear pants on the air during her time as a “Fox & Friends” co-host.

Ailes’ fondness for female anchors’ bare legs is characterized by Fox’s use of what staffers reportedly refer to as the “leg cam,” a camera strategically positioned to highlight the figure of hosts such as Andrea Tantaros, whom Ailes once reportedly referred to as “The Leg.”

In 1994, Ailes, who was then running CNBC, appeared on Don Imus’ radio program and made disparaging remarks about two of his employees, joking that then-CNBC hosts Mary Matalin and Jane Wallace were like “girls who if you went into a bar around seven, you wouldn’t pay a lot of attention, but [they] get to be tens around closing time.”

“He had no right to say something like that,” Wallace later said. “He was our boss. It was completely sexist. It was disgusting. It was outrageous. I thought it was a hideously awful thing to say.”

However, as Sherman reports, Wallace never expressed her anger directly to Ailes. “I didn’t say so out loud,” she explained. “I was working for the guy.”

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Jonah Lehrer is back: Does a disgraced writer deserve another shot at nonfiction?

Jonah Lehrer (Credit: Simon & Schuster/Leah Lehrer)

It is at least somewhat poetic that in a year in which lying is no longer a career-killing scandal but a viable vocational strategy we should see the triumphant return of Jonah Lehrer.

You remember Lehrer — the wunderkind science writer for The New Yorker and author whose reputation at least temporarily went kablooey four years ago, when a cascade of revelations about his shaky relationship with the truth emerged. Turned out, young Lehrer, who was barely into his thirties at the time, had already grown so weary of writing new material that he’d repeatedly plagiarized himself, pasting old lines in new stories. Worse, it soon after emerged that the best-selling author straight up fabricated quotes from none other than Bob Dylan in his book “Imagine: How Creativity Works” — and had lied to a Tablet journalist about it. He then resigned from The New Yorker, had to have his book withdrawn from shelves, and admitted in a statement, “The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers…. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed.”

In Jon Ronson’s 2015 “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” Lehrer spoke of being “just drenched in shame and regret… The shaming process is f—ing brutal.” He claimed that “There’s a tremendous amount of remorse. And as time passes, that isn’t going away. It is miserable and haunting.” 

But he also very quickly and astutely figured out how to leverage that shame drenching into attention and money. Less than six months after his apparent withdrawal from public life, he was paid $20,000 to give a talk about plagiarism for a Knight Foundation luncheon. Who says bad behavior doesn’t pay?

In a confession that would have been gold on a vintage episode of “Oprah,” he said at the time that “By not accepting responsibility… I kept myself from getting better…. What I will tell my daughter is that my failure was painful but the pain had a purpose.” And he said that “Being careless is a choice, it’s choosing not to care,” as if fabricating quotes is the result of carelessness and not conscious action. As he spoke, by the way, he stood in front of a screen of the live Twitter stream of responses, lending a scathingly critical, real-time fact checking aspect to the proceedings.

“What I clearly need,” he said then, “is a new list of rules, a stricter set of standard operating procedures.” I don’t know, unlike Lehrer, I didn’t go to Columbia and I’ve never written for The New Yorker, but I did write a science-based nonfiction book recently and I’m pretty sure the “standard operating procedure” is just do not make stuff up.

Lehrer soon after scored deal to write a book about love with Simon & Schuster. At the time, publisher and president Jonathan Karp cheerfully said that “We believe Jonah Lehrer is an unusually talented writer with a distinctive approach to a subject with enormous appeal.” A year later, Lehrer’s former colleague Malcolm Gladwell was praising his new blog and declaring, “It is well worth reading. Welcome back Jonah.” Last year, on said blog, he conspicuously told his readers of “the power of redemption stories” and asked, “Does suffering always lead to something better? Of course not. But sometimes we need to believe.” 

And now, his new work, “A Book About Love” is set to be published next week. His Amazon bio lists him as an author who’s “written for The New Yorker, Nature, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal” but neglects to touch upon his history of questionable ethics. Yet the Washington Post says that Lehrer does address the elephant in the room in his foreword, in which he explains, “In early August 2012, a book I wrote called ‘Imagine’ was taken out of print and pulled from stores. This happened because I made several serious mistakes in the text. The worst of these mistakes involved fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan…. In the months that followed, other mistakes and failures came to light. In one instance, I plagiarized from another writer on my blog. My second book, How We Decide, was later taken out of print due to factual errors and improper citation.”

He then explains the process by which he has assured what he has done “to prevent these mistakes from happening again” — you know, quote checking and fact checking.

Look, very few of us deserve to be known only for the worst thing we’ve ever done. Forgiveness and redemption must be accessible to all, otherwise, what’s the point of picking up and trying to do better? Yet here we see an adult who’s written books still calling blatant lying “mistakes” and apparently only just realizing that facts need to be independently substantiated.  Congratulations, Jonah Lehrer, you’ve just attained the level of a high school journalism class, on the salary of an A-list, big publishing house author. And while I continue to have zero interest ever again in what he has to say about science, I have to admit I’d love to know how he’s managed to pull off such an elaborately successful, morally depressing publishing stunt.

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The Ailes lawsuit: The latest chapter in Fox News’ rich history of alleged sexual harassment

Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly (Credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser/AP/Kathy Willens/Photo montage by Salon)

Four years ago, there was a flurry of headlines when “Fox and Friends” hosts Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade had an on-air spat, an incident that was all Kilmeade’s fault. It started when Kilmeade made a sexist comment complaining that, “Women are everywhere.”

“We’re letting them play golf and tennis now. It’s out of control,” he lamented.

At this Carlson marched off set, saying, “You read the headlines. Since men are so great.”

Kilmeade celebrated, saying, “Finally” he got to have his “all-male crew.”

“She needed a shower,” he told the camera.

This little incident was largely treated as a joke at the time, but now it isn’t looking so funny anymore. Carlson is now suing Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News, for sexual harassment.

Her lawsuit alleges the worst kind of sexual harassment, too. This isn’t just sneering comments. She is alleging that Ailes fired her for refusing to have sex with him.

Hopefully, more information will come out about the particulars of this case. But we don’t need a full trial to know that Fox News, as an institution, is ideologically geared towards minimizing, defending, and even promoting sexual harassment and the objectification of women.

Under Ailes’ leadership, Fox News has put a premium on protecting a man’s “right” to harass and demean women.

In 2014, the show “Outnumbered” had a segment in which the hosts crawled over each other to defend cat-calling. The female hosts argued that it’s “flattering” and that we should “let men be men.” (In the world of Fox News, treating women with the same basic respect you offer men somehow robs a man of manhood.)

Then the male host, Arthur Aidala, bragged about sexually harassing women, demonstrating his cat-calling strategy. (His preferred method for creeping women out is to applaud slowly at them, a method clearly designed to draw out the  interaction while forcing the target to pretend to appreciate the “compliment” in order to escape without argument.)

After a video showing how unpleasant it is for women to be followed and cat-called went viral, then-Fox host Bob Beckel sneered at women for daring to complain.

“She got 100 catcalls, let me add 101,” he mocked. “Damn, baby, you’re a piece of woman.”

“The O’Reilly Factor” has a regular segment where they send anchor Jesse Watters out on the street to mock and bully random people for “comedy,” and, unsurprisingly, a lot of that involves sexual harassment.

You’d think Bill O’Reilly would be a little more careful about that sort of thing, since he had to settle out of court after an employee taped him sexually harassing her. But that’s clearly not a problem for Fox News, where taking this demeaning attitude towards women seems normal.

One of the all-time creepiest examples involved a segment where three men were invited on-air to both leer at and judge women for wearing leggings. Women were paraded out in front of the men — all supposedly chosen because they are fathers of daughters — and the men were asked to comment on whether they would “allow” their daughters to wear the clothes in question.

The segment had it all: Assertions of male ownership over bodies, blaming women for men’s treatment of them, and reducing a woman to an object for men to peruse as if they were buying coffee mugs at the local gift shop. The possibility that a man can see a woman in leggings and still choose to keep his opinions to himself — instead of leering, harassing, or otherwise trying to assert control — was not even considered as a possibility.

The head boss himself, Ailes, is notorious for treating women like they are sex objects who exist solely for his aesthetic appreciation.

Anyone who watches Fox News is bound to notice the disturbing sameness of the way women look on the channel. It’s all miniskirts coupled with skyscraper heels, with slacks or short heels being oddities that stick out like someone wearing paisley bellbottoms.

This is not an accident. Gabriel Sherman’s book about Ailes, “The Loudest Voice in the Room”, details how Ailes is obsessed with women’s legs to the point where it goes well beyond creepy.

One source recalled Ailes getting mad because a female anchor was using a laptop that somewhat obscured his view of her legs.

“Tell Catherine I did not spend x-number of dollars on a glass desk for her to wear pant suits,” Ailes allegedly said when an anchor had the nerve to try to mix it up by wearing a pantsuit.

In 2013, Carlson let it slip on-air that women were not allowed to wear slacks on “Fox and Friends.”

On the various segments minimizing sexual harassment at Fox News, the usual line of defense is to argue that it’s no big deal and women should be able to take men’s sexual interest as a compliment. But, as Carlson’s allegations show, the issue with sexual harassment isn’t men simply finding women attractive.

No, the real issue is the disrespect. In all these incidents, both alleged and visible on-air, women are being reduced to objects for men to control.

Cat-calling isn’t a compliment, it’s about telling a woman that a man’s desire to sexually interact with her trumps her right to be left alone. Controlling what women wear — whether it’s telling them to cover up or take it off — isn’t a compliment, either, but about control. Pretending to hit on women who show you up is about putting them in their place.

It’s these attitudes that lead directly to the kind of quid pro quo sexual harassment Ailes is being accused of. If you think women are nothing but sex objects, then it’s not much of a leap to demand they have sex with you in exchange for decent treatment at work — decent treatment that’s offered to men without any sexual demands attached to it.

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