Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 729
July 4, 2016
America has had a tyrant like Trump before: We fought a revolution to get rid of him
King George III, Donald Trump (Credit: Wikimedia/Reuters/Chris Keane/Salon)
As America celebrates its 240th anniversary, the Donald Trump campaign confronts us with the vivid possibility that our democracy could look vastly different if he’s elected.
No, I’m not implying that Trump is another Adolf Hitler. You don’t need to be a latter-day Fuehrer to hold positions antithetical to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. That said, when you look at Trump’s avowed ideology, it becomes apparent that he has inadvertently aped the very tyrant whose reign prompted the American Revolution in the first place… King George III.
To understand why, let’s look at three of the grievances identified by the Continental Congress in 1776:
“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”
The Naturalization Act of 1740 was hardly an ideal immigration law, at least by modern standards, since it only extended to Protestants and (under certain circumstances) Quakers and Jews… and definitely not Catholics. Nevertheless, the statute held that any foreigner who resided in one of the American colonies for at least seven years without being absent for more than two months would automatically become a citizen. Considering that subsequent scholars extended the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal” to groups excluded by the founding fathers (including African-Americans and women), it stands to reason that we can do likewise with the importance of the rights of immigrants. When Trump demonizes undocumented Mexican immigrants who come here in the hope of creating better lives for themselves and their families, or when he threatens to bar all Muslims from coming to this country because of the terrorist acts of a small minority, he puts himself at odds with our formative document.
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”
When Trump attacked U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel for being Mexican-American, he was rightly condemned as a bigot. That said, his comments also revealed a disturbing tendency to violate the doctrine of judicial independence that has been essential to curbing executive power. Trump’s comments about Judge Curiel weren’t just racist; they also contained the implicit threat that he would defy the court if it attempted to act against him during his presidency. Similarly, Trump has promised to “open up the libel laws” so that he can sue his critics, an act that would require him to disregard the entire judicial system when it attempts to protect citizens’ right to free speech. Combine these statements with his basic lack of knowledge about the structure of our Constitution, and it becomes disturbingly clear that Trump doesn’t view himself as beholden to the judiciary.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”
When Trump was told that the military would be obliged to disobey his orders if he told them to kill terrorists’ families (which violates international law), he ominously replied that “if I say do it, they’re gonna do it.” Like his comments about Judge Curiel, Trump’s response here belies a belief that upon being elected president, he would quite literally be the end-all of political power in this country. Bear in mind, this answer came from the same man who admitted that he might have supported interning Japanese-Americans during World War II. Although Trump’s supporters may be voting for an authoritarian, our government was formed in large part to prevent tyrants from using the armed forces to actively violate civil authority and civil rights.
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Although this article has criticized Trump for violating the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, that doesn’t mean he would be the first president to do so. I’m sure that liberals, conservatives and everyone in between can point to past presidents and policies that they believe were similarly disrespectful to the intent of our founding document. Nevertheless, there is a spirit of overt radicalism to Trump’s campaign that has no parallel in American political history. Even the most overzealous conservative critics of Barack Obama or liberal critics of George W. Bush would have to concede that, despite their shrill declarations that these men would destroy our freedom, they at the very least put on the pretense of wanting to preserve the American way of government.
Trump, by contrast, seems to view himself and his movement as something fundamentally different. He wants to “make America great again” through the imprint of his own personality. To do this, he is telling the people that — as Thomas Jefferson wrote — “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” To do this, he says, we simply need to put him in power. This makes it all the more cruelly ironic that Trump has so much more in common with the tyrant we overthrew than the freedom fighters we celebrate today.
July 3, 2016
Girl on girl crimes: “The Neon Demon” makes women look like the real predators in the modeling world
Elle Fanning in "The Neon Demon" (Credit: Amazon Studios)
Warning: Some spoilers ahead for “The Neon Demon.”
“The Neon Demon” wants to shock you. Featuring vampire models, lesbian corpse-fucking, and an eyeball hors d’oeuvre, Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest feature is a sexualized orgy of depravity set in the Southern California modeling industry.
But what’s most surprising is how literal his avant-garde satire, which takes its cues from Aronofsky, DePalma, and Lynch, really is. “The Neon Demon” presents a Los Angeles that eats its young. Jesse (Elle Fanning), a 16-year-old girl straight off the bus from Georgia, is an aspiring model who finds herself the intense object of carnivorous desire. An uncredited Alessandro Nivola plays a male fashion designer who is pointedly bored with the usual suspects at a casting call when he looks up and sees Jesse walking toward him. He’s spellbound by her presence. Guileless and fresh-faced, she exudes that most ineffable of qualities: Jesse has “It.”
As she rises through the ranks of the modeling industry (think more “Black Swan” than “Showgirls”), she is stalked by her competition. Abbey Lee (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) is a standout as Sarah, who worries that she’s aging out of the system; as colleagues remind her, you’re “washed up” as a model after you turn 21. (Lee is 29.) Sarah looks at Jesse like a mountain lion eyeing its prey, and after the up-and-comer lands a gig Sarah badly wanted, she pounces. Sarah slices Jesse’s hand open and begins to drink her blood.
“The Neon Demon,” which Refn co-wrote with playwrights Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, presents a portrait of female competition in a savage industry, in which women feed off each other to stay young. Sarah, who eyes appear perpetually sunken in with hunger, craves what Jesse has to offer: fame, beauty, and desirability, that thing when you walk into a room and you know everyone is looking at you. “It’s the middle of winter and you’re the sun,” says Ruby (Jena Malone), a makeup artist who frequently works with Jesse. Ruby’s overt sexual interest in the young model is treated as more predatory than anything else in the movie.
With “The Neon Demon,” Refn traded his prior portraits of masculine ultraviolence (“Drive,” “Only God Forgives”) for a movie that centers female perspectives. “I always wanted to make a film about the 16-year-old girl inside of me,” Refn has said. To realize that vision, he enlisted Natasha Braier, the gifted cinematographer who worked on David Michôd’s “The Rover.” He also reduces the male roles to afterthoughts. Karl Glusman (“Stonewall”) plays Dean, a mumble-mouthed photographer who quickly is cast aside by Jesse’s career ambitions.
To treat men the way women are historically treated in film—as props and plot devices—is a noble quest. But what reducing the male characters to set dressing does is obscure the very real sexual violence that takes place in the modeling industry, in which men with power and influence can use their positions of authority to manipulate and abuse young women, often underage. In its rush to blame the problems of the fashion world on women, “The Neon Demon” has a way of excusing and ignoring the sexual violence that is an unfortunate staple of an unregulated workplace.
Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, Jesse poses for Jack (Desmond Harrington), a Terry Richardson-like photographer who has a “reputation.” Ruby warns her to not to be alone with him. Refn sets their shoot with thriller-like tension: After instructing Jesse to remove her clothes, Jack turns out the lights. He approaches her and pulls her neck to the side—the savage Nosferatu ready for a taste. The scene, though, envelops more insidiously and ambiguously than expected. Jack instead covers her entire body with gold paint, slightly off camera.
Curiously, “The Neon Demon” views this encounter as a crisis averted instead of a case of sexual abuse. Because Refn isn’t interested in Jack’s behavior, he doesn’t examine what it means for a wealthy, successful photographer to personally apply paint with his hands to every surface of an underage girl’s body. (For the record, Jesse lies about how old she is, saying she’s 19.) Instead the scene is a bait and switch: It’s Ruby who Jesse needs to steer clear of. Driven by same-sex desires, her coworker attempts to coerce the teen girl into sex. When her plans are thwarted, Ruby unleashes that sexual energy on a corpse at the morgue where she works part-time. The sequence, which must be seen to be believed, is straight out of a David Cronenberg movie.
That obfuscation isn’t just homophobic. It’s an affront to an industry where scenes like the one that transpires between Jack and Jesse occur with absurd regularity. The Model Alliance is a nonprofit founded in 2012 by Sara Ziff, whose goal is to advocate for “fair treatment in the workplace… and establish ethical standards that bring real and lasting change to the fashion industry.” According to the group, 30 percent of models claim to have been touched inappropriately during a photoshoot, while 28 percent say they’ve been “pressured to have sex with someone at work.”
Ziff was inspired to start advocating for industry reform after working with Richardson, the aforementioned photographer whose career has been unharmed despite numerous allegations of sexual harassment on his shoots. Richardson has shot everyone from Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus to Lady Gaga and Barack Obama. That’s precisely why Ziff went along with it when she claims Richardson suddenly told her to undress. “I felt pressure to comply,” Ziff told Salon back in 2014, “because my agent had told me to make a good impression because he was an important photographer who shot for all the major magazines and brands.”
More than 86 percent of models have reportedly found themselves in the same situation—of being instructed to disrobe without prior warning. With Richardson, others who have worked with him say that this is the norm. Jamie Peck, who was just 19 when she sat for the photographer, wrote in The Gloss that he asked her to remove her panties. When she informed him it was that time of the month, Richardson reportedly kept insisting, saying that she should take out her feminine hygiene product so he could make “tea.” “I love tampons!” she says he squealed.
Other complaints have been lodged against Richardson, including similar claims from models Rie Rasmussen and Charlotte Waters. Richardson, though, is hardly an isolated case. There’s Anand Jon, the fashion designer once hailed as one of the industry’s future power players, who was convicted of 15 counts of sexual assault in 2008, after seven young women claimed he raped them. Jon will spend the rest of his life behind bars, sentenced to 59 years in prison. But many abusers won’t be caught or even reported in an industry that encourages silence. “As a model, you’re meant to have a face and not an opinion,” model Yomi Abiola told Mashable.
Many of these girls are like Jesse, women who start out in the industry at very young ages. According to the Alliance, the average model makes her debut when she’s between the ages of 13 and 16, and “The Neon Demon” seems to be aware of what a precarious situation Jesse is in. Keanu Reeves (“The Matrix”) briefly appears as a seedy motel manager who offers her boyfriend the chance to sleep with a 13-year-old prostitute. “Real Lolita shit,” he promises. This theme, though, is quickly dropped in pursuit of Refn’s exploration of female jealousy and Sapphic necrophilia.
Nearly two decades into his career, it’s admirable that Nicolas Winding Refn would want to make a movie about his inner teenager and the pressures she might face in an industry where there are a thousand girls that would literally kill for her spot. (In “The Neon Demon,” they do.) It’s meaningless, however, if Refn isn’t willing to hold men accountable for their role in furthering a system where young girls are abused and torn apart. Women might be hungry for youth, but it’s powerful men who are getting away with feeding off it every day.
No justice for Pennsatucky: Watching “Orange Is the New Black” in the wake of Brock Turner
Taryn Manning as Pennsatucky in "Orange Is The New Black" (Credit: Netflix/Jojo Whilden)
Plot details ahead for season 4 of “Orange Is the New Black.”
Out of all the characters featured in Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett (played by Taryn Manning) may be the most challenging to consider. Not at first; Jenji Kohan and the rest of the writers molded her to suit the average viewer’s biased notions of how a poor, white criminal is supposed to look and act.
Finding out that Pennsatucky grew up trading sex for off-brand soda and had five abortions before she came to Litchfield was not at all surprising. That the kind of thing a girl like her does, right? An abortion clinic nurse’s disgusted reaction to her fifth procedure, a remark that led to Pennsatucky returning to the place with a shotgun, was just an example of someone saying out loud what a lot of viewers may have been thinking.
It was so simple to both adore and dismiss Pennsatucky in season one. But that was before she was sexually assaulted by a guard, Charlie Coates (James McMenamin), someone with whom she had cultivated a friendship riddled with troubling power dynamics.
The recently released season of “Orange Is the New Black” takes on an assortment of social and politically charged issues currently swirling in the zeitgeist – white privilege, transgender visibility, and racial discrimination in the legal system. But Pennsatucky’s tale combines the personal and political.
Pennsatucky has a deep Appalachian accent infusing every crumb of bad grammar that spills out of her mouth; her capability for comprehending nuance and metaphor is limited. She is a woman born into an awful family situation and to whom a number of us would therefore expect bad things to happen.
Her rape was one of season three’s most significant shockers and particularly difficult to process in its aftermath. It was the climactic act of one of the series’ most disturbing season three episodes “A Tittin’ and a Hairin’,” which began with a flashback to her mother greeting the onset of her first menstrual period with annoyance. Boys would start to see her differently, explained neglectful Pennsatucky’s mom, and soon after, they would “do” her differently.
“Best thing is to go on and let ‘em do their business, baby,” Pennsatucky’s mother tells her as casually as she serves her an ice cream treat. “If you’re real lucky, most of them’ll be quick, like your daddy. It’s like a bee sting, in and out, over before you knew it was happening.”
The act itself occupied a few violent seconds before the end credits rolled, occurring in a flare of Coates’ anger and ending with a close shot of a single tear rolling down Pennsatucky’s blank face. Coates, still thrusting into her, declared that he loved her.
The season three episode debuted in 2015, as the growing number of rape accusations leveled at Bill Cosby sparked renewed discussions about rape culture and the system’s blatant disregard for victims of assault.
With the fallout of 20-year-old Brock Turner’s light sentencing after being found guilty on three counts of sexual assault still being parsed, Tiffany Doggett’s season four storyline remains just as relevant for different reasons. Turner faced a maximum of 14 years in prison but instead received merely six months in jail, and could end up only serving three.
This, after the shattering letter Turner’s victim read out loud to him was released to the press and after his father wrote a plea to the judge not to ruin his son’s life over what he called “20 minutes of action.”
Our collective rage at a rich kid getting little more than a slap on the wrist after raping a woman by a dumpster, and still failing to take responsibility for doing so, adds a bizarre coloring to Pennsatucky’s journey in her rape’s aftermath.
Coming to terms with what happened and after choosing to halt an act of payback facilitated by close friend Boo (Lea DeLaria), in the current season of “Orange” Pennsatucky embarks on a healing quest that ends with her forgiving Coates.
Our growing acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of rape culture has not left many people in a forgiving mood when it comes to rapists. Women still face a system that erects barriers to receiving justice, starting from the moment that a woman chooses to report an assault, on through the struggle to get physical evidence analyzed and considered, and ending in the all-too-likely scenario that her rapist will escape conviction — or, as is the case with Turner, meaningful justice.
This is not an environment that makes it simple, or palatable, to consider forgiving Charlie Coates, one of Litchfield’s array of misguided “Nice Guys,” a man so clueless that he has to have his crime spelled out to him.
“You think I raped you?” Coates asks Pennsatucky, when she flat-out asks him if he’s similarly assaulting the woman who took over her van driving job, which she abandoned to avoid him.“…But I love you. I told you that. And I said it when… when… I said it.” That, he explains, makes the situation different.
“But that didn’t feel any different,” she tells him, before walking away.
This exchange actually represents character growth for Pennsatucky, a woman who, in the immediate wake of her assault, attempted to take the blame for Coates’s actions on her flirtatiousness.
It’s also the second significant confrontation between a victim of assault and the person responsible that we’ve seen on a recent episode of television. “That didn’t feel any different” is an economic version of the speech Sansa Stark gave to Littlefinger in earlier this season in “Game of Thrones,” when she threw the many abuses she suffered at the hands of Ramsay Bolton back in the face of the man who handed her over to him.
“I can still feel it,” Sansa said harshly. “I don’t mean, ‘in my tender heart, it still pains me so’… I can still feel what he did, in my body, standing here right now.”
The Pennsatucky who confronted Coates is likewise is a character embracing her own power – queasily, and troublingly, but taking the reins nevertheless. Her decision to forgive Coates, she explains to Boo (and the viewer, by proxy) is out of a refusal to continue suffering. “It ain’t about him,” she tells Boo. “I forgave him for me.”
That’s far easier to portray and explore than Coates’ perspective, part of season four’s uncomfortable humanizing of the men in Litchfield who commit terrible acts. Granted, the other guy received the expositional flashback treatment to show viewers that he wasn’t just a jerk. In contrast, all that we know of Coates’s life beyond the prison walls is that he enjoys heavy metal and has a second job at a donut shop.
From there a viewer can fill in the blanks of his psychological profile, if one so chooses. Half of his work life has him interacting with people in ways that are purely transactional. The other half, the one spent in Litchfield, grants him total power over women, including Pennsatucky.
It takes a few more conversations with Pennsatucky before Coates, haltingly, can admit that he raped her and actually say “I’m sorry.” Those words hold meaning for her. But as we witness in the pair’s final interaction, “I’m sorry” doesn’t mean he’s learned his lesson and gives no clues as to what he’ll do in the future.
Just before announcing his intention to quit his job, he admits that it’s taking everything in his power not to force himself on her again…except for one fact: “I don’t want to be what I was to you.”
Words don’t re-script what he’s done.
None of this is easy to digest by any means. But they’re interesting additions to “Orange Is the New Black’s” exploration of sexuality and gender politics.
Pennsatucky’s evolution from a stereotypical cartoon who once sported a mouthful of yellow and black nuggets passing for teeth, into a figure of tragic complexity and relative calm, remains flawed. This is especially true of her womanhood’s origin tale, which stands in stark contrast to some of the most memorable mother-daughter discussions on television, notably a scene in a 1989 episode of “Roseanne.”
And it’s deeply different from the 1990 episode of “The Cosby Show” where it’s revealed that a Huxtable woman’s first period is marked by an event known as Woman’s Day, where Clair takes said daughter out for an elegant celebration that may include brunch at the Plaza Hotel and a carriage ride through the city. (Yes, that feminist moment happened on “The Cosby Show.”)
Comparing her mother’s “a tittin’ and a hairin’” speech to these experiences, Pennsatucky’s story implies that she was doomed to gravitate to a man like Coates from the start. Worse, it places a share of the blame for what happened to her on her mother.
But Pennsatucky’s transformation into a person who acknowledges her own worth, in spite of her history, belongs solely to her. That’s meaningfully highlighted by her attempt to move on, and to live for the life that waits ahead of her, in ways yet to be written.
Parenting as an expat: The Dutch taught me how to loosen up and give my kids some much-needed freedom
A photo of the author.
Parenting as an expat in the Netherlands means surrounding your own children with some of the most confident, self-possessed and happy children in the world.
On good days, I feel like I’ve gifted my children with the opportunity to experience a childhood straight out of a “Leave It To Beaver” episode, where kids are free to play in the street, cycle over to their friend’s house and come home when it’s time for dinner.
On other (not-so-good) days, I feel like the uptight expat mom who is forever telling her kids to be careful on the play equipment or trying to convince them of the health benefits of rice cakes and apple slices while the Dutch kids enjoy their fluffy white bread smothered in butter and chocolate sprinkles.
It turns out that I wasn’t the only one thinking that Dutch kids were enjoying a pretty idyllic childhood. Dutch children have been found by UNICEF to be the happiest kids in the world, twice. Which means that Dutch parents can, by reflected glory, claim the mantle of world’s best parents. After all, isn’t a child’s happiness the ultimate parenting win?
These surveys not only found Dutch kids to be the happiest by UNICEF’s objective standards (education, health and material well-being), but when children were asked to rank their own happiness levels Dutch kids once again came out on top. Not only are Dutch kids doing well in life, but they also recognize just how good they have it.
Living as an expat among the Dutch for seven years, these findings came as no surprise. So what does it mean to parent alongside the Dutch: Is it a series of daily recriminations about your own shortfalls as a parent? Or is it an inspiring jolt to lift up your own parenting game?
The truth over the past seven years has been a little of both.
I may feel like I’m the only person disciplining my kids at the playground, but parenting Dutch style also means letting go—letting kids be kids, not worrying about keeping up with the Joneses (or the van der Meyers) and prioritizing time spent together as a family.
It turns out it’s not just what the Dutch do that are making their kids happy, but what they don’t do.
They aren’t materialistic
The most well-known expression that captures the Dutch approach to life is “doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg,” or “just act normal, that’s crazy enough.”
Everyone may own a bike (or three), but they are just as likely to be 50 Euro rust buckets (often preferred given the high likelihood that your bike will be stolen) as they are to be a 1,200 Euro bakfiets (cargo bikes ideal for carting up to five or six kids, and preferably well insured). Critics claim that the push for conformity devalues excellence and achievement, and makes those who can’t (or don’t want to) conform feel relegated to outsider status. The upside of the be-normal attitude is that those who flaunt their wealth are looked down upon and kids grow up in an environment that doesn’t confuse material possessions for success or happiness.
They don’t helicopter parent
Shorty after moving to the Netherlands, we cycled into our street after school to be met with Beyoncé blasting out of a neighbor’s stereo and kids practicing their “Single Ladies” dance moves on the three-tiered scaffolding construction workers had left behind. The parents of the strutting children were occasionally checking in on them but otherwise the kids were left unsupervised, clamoring for a spot on their improvised podium. I watched both bemused and mentally ticking off all the ways this would never be allowed to happen back home.
These Dutch kids are not being raised shrouded in cotton wool. They had started cycling alongside their parents from the age of 2 or 3 and by their tenth birthday many would be cycling solo to school and weekend sports clubs. Dutch parents clearly care about their kids’ safety, but also invest in preparing their children for the outside world rather than shielding them from it. While I was worrying, the Dutch kids were gaining a sense of achievement, independence and self-confidence.
They don’t avoid the big issues
The Dutch are well known for their liberal attitudes towards the big-ticket issues of soft drugs, prostitution and euthanasia, but don’t expect to encounter a large-scale hippy commune in the lowlands. Their liberal attitudes to these issues are in stark contrast to the regime that dictates everyday Dutch life. You may be able to buy a joint at the local coffee shop, but you should expect a hefty fine if you put your trash out before the designated time.
The Dutch attitude of keeping things out in the open also means that Dutch parents are happy to speak candidly with their children about sex, drugs and everything in between. Dutch teenagers aren’t all saints, but it’s no coincidence that the Netherlands has one of the lowest rates of teen pregnancy in the world, predominantly due to pregnancy prevention.
They don’t treat school as a race to achieve
We moved to the Netherlands, it was a shock to find out that my daughter would be starting school on her 4th birthday. While Dutch kids start school at a young age, it isn’t an early start in a race to see who can learn to read first or memorize the times tables.
Kids are encouraged to explore and play, and the importance of developing social skills is at the forefront of their education, especially in the early years. With 17 million people crammed into a country roughly the size of Maryland, it’s not surprising that a high value is placed on developing the skills to help you live side by side.
They don’t see their kids as a reflection of their parenting
A lifeline for us expat moms were the coffee mornings where we would swap war stories in our shared mother tongue, regardless of our accent. Whether boasting or bemoaning, there was a common thread of viewing our child’s actions as a direct product of our parenting decisions. It seemed like an almost reflexive response to doubt our patenting strategy if our offspring weren’t quite living up to our maternal expectations.
The Dutch moms didn’t appear to regularly indulge in this nagging self-doubt. They seemed, from the outside at least, to view their children as separate people, with their own personalities and strengths, and not a reflection of hours spent pouring over parenting books or coordinating after-school activities.
The Dutch parents I met were proud of their children’s achievements at school. They were happy when their daughter scored a goal at her hockey match or kept a tune on the piano at the school assembly. They felt proud but they didn’t feel responsible, or confuse their child’s achievement with a report card on their parenting skills.
They side-step the rat race
The Dutch are wealthy people and can lay claim to their fair share of high achievers (it’s the home of “The Voice” and “Big Brother” after all), but it’s not achieved at the expense of a work-life balance. The Dutch may work hard, but they don’t let their work hours encroach into family time. The Dutch love to have an early dinner and at 6 p.m. When the boerenkool met worst (mashed potatoes with kale and sausage) is served, odds are that both parents will be sitting around the table with their children.
Our family never could acquire a taste for Dutch processed meat, but we did enjoy being able to spend time together as a family at both ends of the day. Moving far away from family and friends meant relying on each other for support, and living in the Netherlands gave us time together to be able to do just that.
So, can outsiders learn to parent like the Dutch?
Raising children alongside the Dutch undoubtedly motivated me to lift my parenting game. It helped me move out of my comfort zone and let my 9 year old walk alone to the local shops and enjoy the sense of accomplishment that came with this independence. It gave me permission to stand a bit further back and let the kids try and sort out their own battles and boundaries. It also made me realize that despite my best efforts at integrating, there were some things I couldn’t let go of. Much to my children’s disappointment, chocolate sprinkles (hagelslag) never made it onto our breakfast menu and wearing helmets when cycling remained mandatory.
I may never be mistaken for a Dutch parent, but parenting among them gave me the freedom to loosen the reigns, appreciate a culture that values time spent as a family and where my kids weren’t asking for the latest must-have brand of sneakers. It’s hard to imagine who wouldn’t be happy with that.
The list of possible Zika birth defects continues to grow
An inspector with the Miami Dade County mosquito control unit, April 12, 2016, in Miami, Fla. (Credit: AP/Lynne Sladky)
The full scope of Zika-related birth defects may extend far beyond abnormally small heads and brain damage. Research to be presented next week at a teratology conference in San Antonio, Texas, suggests that serious joint problems, seizures, vision impairment, trouble feeding and persistent crying can be added to the list of risks from Zika exposure in the womb.
The new findings confirm doctors’ concerns that even when Zika-exposed babies are born without microcephaly and appear largely normal at birth they can go on to have health issues including seizures and developmental delays that only become apparent in the weeks and months after birth. The new work also reinforces recent findings that suggest the type of outcomes the babies experience also varies by what trimester their mothers were in when they were exposed to Zika—with few cases of microcephaly when mothers were exposed during the third trimester.
The research underscores the steep learning curve that scientists and officials face with this virus, which is transmitted through mosquito bites and sexual contact. Earlier studies chronicling apparent Zika-related damage had also hinted that doctors had much to learn about viral-driven birth defects. In March researchers published findings in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that 29 percent of pregnant women who tested positive for Zika had fetuses with abnormalities already apparent via ultrasound. The finding was particularly alarming because doctors knew many more central nervous system issues would likely only be recognizable months or even years after the child’s birth.
Today it remains unclear exactly how many babies born to women infected with Zika during pregnancy will develop birth defects. But the new findings from Brazil do give a better sense of the breadth of obstacles Zika-affected families may face within the first year of their newborns’ lives.
Brazilian researchers followed 83 infants born since August 2015 to mothers believed to have been infected with Zika. The study included families from eight states, mostly in Brazil’s northeast, where birth defects have soared. Because solid testing for Zika was not yet in place last fall, however, only 10 of the 83 mothers were confirmed as Zika-exposed through laboratory testing—a major caveat that applies to most current Zika-outcome studies. That reality leaves open the possibility that the birth defects could be due to other environmental or genetic factors. Still, about 70 percent of the mothers in this study remember experiencing a rash—a known Zika symptom—during their pregnancies, and the researchers eliminated other leading causes of the birth defects including certain toxic exposures and viral infections from cytomegalovirus.
The Brazilian team found that about 10 percent of the 83 babies had knee or elbow joint limitations so severe that the infants cannot fully extend their arms or legs. Another 43 percent of the babies had less-pronounced joint problems that impeded finger or toe motion, or the babies had other limb abnormalities like clubfeet. And half of the babies had seizures and abnormal eye exams.
This study reflects the situation of a relatively small study group—and only included babies with abnormalities. But it does provide some insights, including that birth defects may vary depending on what trimester the mother became infected with the virus. “These findings are in line with our findings about babies exposed to Zika in utero,” says Karin Nielsen-Saines, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist and senior author of the March NEJM research. Still, she cautioned that because this new study only includes babies with abnormalities it does not give a good snapshot of how common birth defects might really be among the Zika-exposed. “You might be missing children who are normal so you may skew your data toward abnormalities,” she says.
Zika has ushered in a number of unwelcome surprises. It is the first insect-borne disease with a proven link to serious birth defects (vision problems have been linked to West Nile Virus but not yet causally verified). Yet infection with several other viruses during pregnancy—in particular toxoplasmosis, rubella or cytomegalovirus—can also lead to microcephaly, vision problems or hearing loss that may not be immediately apparent at birth, so viral-driven birth defects are not unprecedented. CVM and toxoplasmosis can also, rarely, lead to joint issues, says Dee Quinn, director of the Arizona branch of the nonprofit MotherToBaby and a senior genetic counselor on staff at the Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Arizona.
The new Brazil findings on Zika also echo certain patterns related to those other viral infections. Notably, mothers infected with Zika late in their pregnancies tended to have babies with relatively less-serious side effects: The children more often had developmental delays including trouble sitting up, as well as seizures instead of microcephaly and significant brain calcifications, says Lavinia Schuler-Faccini, the president of the Brazilian Society of Medical Genetics and the scientist presenting the findings next week. Still, that does not mean fetuses exposed during the third trimester are better off. Nielsen-Saines says that in her published work and in ongoing analysis she is seeing that such late exposure is more likely to lead to stillbirths.
Pinning down more concrete answers about how common birth defects may be among pregnant women remains an arduous task, and scientists still do not know if other factors including genetics, exposure to other viruses or how women contracted the virus—via sex or mosquito bite—may play a role. Further complicating efforts to get a handle on the issue: according to the World Health Organization, more pregnant women infected with Zika are now aborting their fetuses.
GOP convention madness: Is Cleveland ready for its close-up?
Workers prepare a camera platform inside Quicken Loans Arena in preparation for the Republican National Convention, June 28, 2016, in Cleveland. (Credit: AP/Mark Gillispie)
With just two weeks to go before the Republican National Convention, the city of Cleveland has much to be proud of downtown. Yet, at the same time, there are neighborhoods, outside the RNC limelight, that are still very much in the throes of a foreclosure crisis the nation is largely ignoring.
Decades of deindustrialization, urban disinvestment and race-based predatory mortgage lending took its toll. From a population of 900,000 in 1950, the city now has about 385,000 residents. Cleveland’s recovery remains very much a spirited work in progress.
“There’s no doubt about the transformation of our downtown thanks to the empty nesters and millennials who have moved in because they don’t want to have to own a car,” said Jim Rokakis, vice president of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy and director of the Thriving Communities Institute. “We’ve just had the grand opening of the $50 million renovation of the Public Square in the heart of downtown.”
“But when it comes to the foreclosure crisis we were the most devastated city in the country with the exception of Detroit,” Rokakis told Salon. “We are still dealing with vacant and derelict homes that need to be torn down. And then there is the catastrophic loss in home values for the senior citizens still here. These people have seen as much as an 80 percent loss in the value of their homes. All totaled, in places like Cleveland, across the country, you’re talking about a trillion dollar loss in the household wealth of African-American and Latino households.”
Rokakis was the former county treasurer for Cuyahoga County and when he was just 22, he was the youngest person to be elected to the Cleveland City Council. Rokakis and his colleagues have raised a half-billion dollars to take down thousands of derelict homes that actually continue to depress the values of the occupied homes that remain. We needed to take down 20,000 and we have 6,000 to go. It will take the next three to four years to remove the residential blight.”
A police department also under major reform
At the same time, Cleveland is just at the very beginning of a multi-year process to rehabilitate its police force. The CPD is under a federal consent decree and has a court-appointed monitor to help reform the local department that the U.S. Department of Justice says for years frequently resorted to excessive force on the civilians it was supposed to protect and serve.
The Cleveland Police Department found itself in a global spotlight, back in November of 2014, when police shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was playing in a park with a toy pellet gun. A widely distributed surveillance video of the incident, and the aftermath, shows an officer shooting Rice within seconds of arriving, as well as police forcing Rice’s 14-year-old sister to the ground, handcuffing her, and placing her in a police car, just feet from where her brother lay bleeding.
The video also supported the alarming contention, of the Rice family and their lawyers, that police waited several minutes to start administering first aid to the mortally wounded 12-year-old. The case generated a national uproar after former Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced that no criminal charges would be brought against the officers involved.
Voters bounced McGinty back in March on Super Tuesday. In April, Cleveland agreed to pay the family $6 million to settle the wrongful death civil case that was brought after the tragedy helped galvanize the national push for increased police accountability.
Complaints over excessive force by the CPD are longstanding. As far back as 2002 the local department was on DOJ’s radar when the feds made 33 recommendations, which the city says were fully implemented. Yet, a decade later, in December of 2012, Mayor Frank Jackson went so far as to ask DOJ intervention to investigate his own police department. That unusual appeal for federal help came after police shot and killed an unarmed African-American man and woman after a 20-minute 100-mile-per-hour chase that involved 60 police cars and over 100 officers.
Police fired more than 130 times, striking Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30, more than 20 times each. Federal investigators determined that the responding officers thought they were returning fire from Russell and Williams, when in reality they were dodging bullets being fired from other officers.
A subsequent DOJ review determined that police had mistakenly initiated the chase after they mistook a car backfiring as gunshots being fired from Russell’s car as he drove by a courthouse. Two years after Mayor Jackson asked for the DOJ, the feds issued a report confirming the CPD had a major problem with resorting to excessive physical force, often on people who were mentally ill or in the midst of a serious crisis.
A monitor is on the job but new “use of force” guidelines still months off
It took until October of last year for the appointment of Matthew Barge as the federal monitor for the CPD. It wasn’t until early this year that the court signed off on the monitor’s action plan. In his first semiannual report, issued last month, Barge conceded that “because the RNC is increasingly imposing substantial operational demands on CPD and the city,” the engagement of the broader community in reviewing the proposed final draft of the CPD’s new use of force guidelines would be put off until later in July or August. Based in the current timeline that new policy, won’t hit the streets until Jan. 1, 2017.
According to the latest monitor’s report, Cleveland’s police department is dealing with a legacy of underinvestment in technology related to records management and its call dispatching system. Efforts at trying to upgrade some of these systems have been hit with setbacks.
Barge was also sharply critical of the agencies within the police deportment charged with reviewing civilian complaints and monitoring police on-the-job performance. “The conditions of the Office of Professional Standards, which investigates civilian complaints, is unacceptable and irresponsible by any measure. The state of the Office of Professional Standards is dire,” concludes the monitor’s report.
In the aftermath of the 2014 Tamir Rice shooting, Mayor Jackson offered a presentation that summed up the results of his efforts to reform the troubled police agency, from 2006, when he was first elected, up until the end of 2014. According to the slides from that speech, available online, Cleveland had made significant progress in reducing police-on-civilian violence in that six-year period. Between 2006 and 2014 the instances of the use of non-lethal tactics, like batons, pepper spray, taser or physical force, dropped from 885 down to 405, a 54 percent decline. Over the same period the instances of deadly force dropped by 48 percent, from 31 deaths in 2006 to 16 in 2014.
In the federal monitor’s June report Barge committed that he and his team “will be on the ground in Cleveland…to the extent that any events may require” them to “monitor any situations that might unfold that implicate the use of force, internal and citizen’s complaint investigations, bias-free policing, supervision, or other Consent Decree issues.”
Shopping for protest insurance in a post Paris and Orlando world
Calls to the mayor’s office for a statistical update on the use-of-force numbers, and to respond to several other RNC related questions, were not returned. Cleveland, like all the municipalities that host one of the major party conventions post 9/11, will get $50 million from Washington to cover costs related to providing security for the event, which is expected to attract tens of thousands of people related to the convention itself and an unknown number of protestors.
Since 9/11 the major party conventions, like the Super Bowl, are declared “national security events,” where the U.S. Secret Service takes the lead on coordinating security with other federal, state, county and local police agencies. In the aftermath of the 2004 RNC confab in New York City it cost that city $18 million to settle civil litigation over the detention of 1,800 people who where either protestors or just pedestrians caught up in large-scale group arrests.
That New York City multi-million dollar payout got the attention of municipal officials who have hosted the Republicans and Democrats since. Evidently, the series of outbreaks of violence during the 2016 primary season, both inside and outside Donald Trump’s rallies, has Cleveland officials concerned. Back in March, the local government signed off on paying a $1.5 million premium to secure $10 million in “protest insurance.” Just a few days ago they signed off on paying $9.5 million to get five times that in coverage from AON Risk Services Northeast. That’s a big jump from the $1.7 million Tampa paid in 2012 to cover themselves for hosting the RNC, where no significant protest materialized.
Cavaliers’ NBA title parade pays it forward
Last month the ACLU of Ohio won a major victory in federal court when Judge James S. Gwin ruled that the city of Cleveland’s plan to create a 3.3 square mile control zone, as an additional buffer around the convention complex defined by the Secret Service, was an unconstitutional infringement on demonstrators’ right to free speech and assembly. The ACLU’s clients in the case represented a very diverse group and included Citizens for Trump, the Northeast Coalition for the Homeless and Organize Ohio, a pro-labor group.
“We got the size of the zone brought down to 48 percent of what it had been,” Christine Link, ACLU of Ohio’s executive director, told Salon. Link says had the city’s plan prevailed it would have been double the perimeters imposed in 2012 in Tampa and Charlotte. “The city wanted to exclude a long list of things like sleeping bags, soapboxes and coolers” in this much wider zone, said Link.
Link said the ACLU was also worried about the impact of the city’s initial plan on the several thousand homeless people who use shelters around the city. “Back in the 1990s when the city was promoting downtown shopping days the cops would drive the homeless several miles out of town to the salt mines and leave them out there.”
Ironically, the timing of the Cavaliers’ NBA title win, and the massive public celebration that drew more than 1.3 million revelers to downtown last month, was raised by Judge Gwin the day after the victory parade when the city was before him making their case for the wider security zone. Gwin openly questioned the city’s lawyers about whether the 3.3-mile security zone they wanted was justified when the number of people expected for the RNC was “maybe one-tenth or one-fifteenth of the people that were on the street yesterday?”
The city’s attorney stood his ground. “There are international enemies, there are domestic enemies that would love to target the Republican National Convention for their political statement,” he said, adding later in the proceedings that letting protestors have access to a public address system in the control zone was a risk to public safety because large speaker systems could contain a bomb.
“I still have some real trepidation about this,” Councilman Michael Polensek told Salon. “If you talk to our local PBA they say there are not enough police or the right kind of equipment.” Calls to the local PBA were not returned.
“We have heard there could be over 30,000 protesters. Where are they going to go to the bathroom? Where will they sleep?” asked Polensek, who has served on the City Council since 1978. Polensek says he dislikes the fact that since 9/11 the conventions have become so militarized in terms of security. “What if I told you that when I was a kid and John Kennedy came here we all ran up to his open car to say hello? If you did that today you’d probably get shot.”
The worst DC has to offer: Influence is a paean to Washington greed and corruption
(Credit: Brandon Bourdages via Shutterstock)
Although it’s difficult to remember those days eight years ago when Democrats seemed to represent something idealistic and hopeful and brave, let’s take a moment and try to recall the stand Barack Obama once took against lobbyists. Those were the days when the nation was learning that George W. Bush’s Washington was, essentially, just a big playground for those lobbyists and that every government operation had been opened to the power of money. Righteous disgust filled the air. “Special interests” were much denounced. And a certain inspiring senator from Illinois promised that, should he be elected president, his administration would contain no lobbyists at all. The revolving door between government and K Street, he assured us, would turn no more.
Instead, the nation got a lesson in all the other ways that “special interests” can get what they want — like simple class solidarity between the Ivy Leaguers who advise the president and the Ivy Leaguers who sell derivative securities to unsuspecting foreigners. As that inspiring young president filled his administration with Wall Street personnel, we learned that the revolving door still works, even if the people passing through it aren’t registered lobbyists.
But whatever became of lobbying itself, which once seemed to exemplify everything wrong with Washington, D.C.? Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that lobbying remains one of the nation’s persistently prosperous industries, and that, since 2011, it has been the focus of Influence, one of the daily email newsletters published by Politico, that great chronicler of the Obama years. Influence was to be, as its very first edition declared, “the must-read crib sheet for Washington’s influence class,” with news of developments on K Street done up in tones of sycophantic smugness. For my money, it is one of the quintessential journalistic artifacts of our time: the constantly unfolding tale of power-for-hire, told always with a discreet sympathy for the man on top.
Capitalizing on Influence
It is true that Americans are more cynical about Washington than ever. To gripe that “the system is rigged” is to utter the catchphrase of the year. But to read Influence every afternoon is to understand how little difference such attitudes make here in the nation’s capital. With each installment, the reader encounters a cast of contented and well-groomed knowledge workers, the sort of people for whom there are never enough suburban mansions or craft cocktails. One imagines them living together in a happy community of favors-for-hire where everyone knows everyone else, the restaurant greeters smile, the senators lie down with the contractors, and the sun shines brilliantly every day. This community’s labors in the influence trade have made the economy of the Washington metro area the envy of the world.
The newsletter describes every squeaking turn of the revolving door with a certain admiration. Influence is where you can read about all the smart former assistants to prominent members of Congress and the new K Street jobs they’ve landed. There are short but meaningful hiring notices — like the recent one announcing that the blue-ribbon lobby firm K&L Gates has snagged its fourth former congressional “member.” There are accounts of prizes that lobbyists give to one another and of rooftop parties for clients and ritual roll calls of Ivy League degrees to be acknowledged and respected. And wherever you look at Influence, it seems like people associated with this or that Podesta can be found registering new clients, holding fundraisers, and “bundling” cash for Hillary Clinton.
As with other entries in the Politico family of tip-sheets, Influence is itself sponsored from time to time — for one exciting week this month, by the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), which announced to the newsletter’s readers that, for the last 50 years, the FAH “has had a seat at the table.” Appropriately enough for a publication whose beat is venality, Influence also took care to report on the FAH’s 50th anniversary party, thrown in an important room in the Capitol building, and carefully listed the many similarly important people who attended: the important lobbyists, the important members of Congress, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the Obama administration’s important former healthcare czar and one of this city’s all-time revolving-door champions.
Describing parties like this is a standard theme in Influence, since the influence trade is by nature a happy one, a flattering one, a business eager to serve you up a bracing Negroni and encourage you to gorge yourself on fancy hors d’oeuvres. And so the newsletter tells us about the city’s many sponsored revelries — who gives them, who attends them, the establishment where the transaction takes place, and whose legislative agenda is advanced by the resulting exchange of booze and bonhomie.
The regular reader of Influence knows, for example, about the big reception scheduled to be hosted by Squire Patton Boggs, one of the most storied names in the influence-for-hire trade, at a certain office in Cleveland during the Republican Convention… about how current and former personnel of the Department of Homeland Security recently enjoyed a gathering thrown for them by a prestigious law firm… about a group called “PAC Pals” and the long list of staffers and lobbying types who attended their recent revelry… about how the Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the gang got together at a much-talked-about bar to sip artisanal cocktails.
There’s a poignant note to the story of former Congressional representative Melissa Bean — once the toast of New Democrats everywhere, now the “Midwest chair of JPMorgan” — who recently returned to D.C. to get together with her old staff. They had also moved on to boldface jobs in lobbying, television, and elsewhere. And there’s a note of the fabulous to the story of the Democratic member who has announced plans to throw a fundraiser at a Beyoncé concert. (“A pair of tickets go for $3,500 for PACs,” Influencenotes.)
Bittersweet is the flavor of the recent story about the closing of Johnny’s Half Shell, a Capitol Hill restaurant renowned for the countless fundraisers it has hosted over the years. On hearing the news of the restaurant’s imminent demise, Influence gave over its pixels to tales from Johnny’s glory days. One reader fondly recounted a tale in which Occupy protesters supposedly interrupted a Johnny’s fundraiser being enjoyed by Senator Lindsey Graham and a bunch of defense contractors. In classic D.C.-style, the story was meant to underscore the stouthearted stoicism of the men of power who reportedly did not flinch at the menacing antics of the lowly ones.
A Blissful Community of Money
Influence is typically written in an abbreviated, matter-of-fact style, but its brief items speak volumes about the realities of American politics. There is, for example, little here about the high-profile battle over how transgender Americans are to be granted access to public restrooms. However, the adventures of dark money in our capital are breathlessly recounted, as the eternal drama of plutocracy plays itself out and mysterious moneymen try to pass their desires off as bona fide democratic demands.
“A group claiming to lobby on behalf of ordinary citizens against large insurance companies is in fact orchestrated by the hospital industry itself,” begins a typical item. The regular reader also knows about the many hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by unknown parties to stop Puerto Rican debt relief and about the mysterious group that has blown vast sums to assail the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) but whose protesters, when questioned outside a CFPB hearing, reportedly admitted that they were “day laborers paid to be there.”
You will have noticed, reader, the curiously bipartisan nature of the items mentioned here. But it really shouldn’t surprise you. After all, for this part of Washington, the only real ideology around is based on money — how much and how quickly you get paid.
Money is divine in this industry, and perhaps that is why Influence is fascinated with libertarianism, a fringe free-market faith which (thanks to its popularity among America’s hard-working billionaires) is massively over-represented in Washington. Readers of Influence know about the Competitive Enterprise Institute and its “Night in Casablanca” party, about the R Street Institute’s “Alice in Wonderland” party, about how former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli came to sign up with FreedomWorks, and how certain libertarians have flown from their former perches in the vast, subsidized free-market coop to the fashionable new Niskanen Center.
There are also plenty of small-bore lobbying embarrassments to report on, as when a currently serving congressional representative sent a mean note to a former senator who is now an official at the American Motorcyclist Association. Or that time two expert witnesses gave “nearly identical written statements” when testifying on Capitol Hill. Oops!
But what most impresses the regular reader of Influence is the brazenness of it all. To say that the people described here appear to feel no shame in the contracting-out of the democratic process is to miss the point. Their doings are a matter of pride, with all the important names gathering at some overpriced eatery to toast one another and get their picture taken and advance some initiative that will always, of course, turn out to be good for money and terrible for everyone else.
This is not an industry, Influence’s upbeat and name-dropping style suggests. It is a community — a community of corruption, perhaps, but a community nevertheless: happy, prosperous, and joyously oblivious to the plight of the country once known as the land of the middle class.
Why Christian Right leader James Dobson blocked me on Twitter
James Dobson (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh)
After I wrote an appeal to GOP delegates to oust Donald Trump, I discovered something odd: Dr. James Dobson had blocked me on Twitter. I only noticed because another account retweeted him and the quoted portion showed as “unavailable.” Another click solved the mystery. Dobson was no fan of mine.
Aside from a stray reference to him in my piece, I don’t even remember the last time he entered my mind. I’ve never met Dobson, despite years of overlapping circles from my fundamentalist childhood. His word was essentially scripture at Spotswood Baptist Church, a powerful right-wing church in Virginia and my second home throughout the 1990s.
I realized Dobson’s blocking of me, a gay vegan political writer and campaign strategist who presents exactly zero threat of harm to anyone, wasn’t all that surprising. He has a long history of ignoring anyone who might expose him as a fraud. So, I figured I should validate his fear and tell the truth about him.
James Dobson is the founder of Focus on the Family, a powerful far-right Christian media organization. He’s authored nearly 30 books on family issues, specifically parenting and marriage. Time ranked him as one of the most influential Evangelicals in the country. He also founded the Family Research Council, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. At the peak of his career, Dobson’s voice was reportedly heard by over 200 million people on a daily basis, including on state-run radio in China via translator.
Dobson was eventually forced out of Focus on the Family in the 2000s as it tried to shake off the hateful image he’d cultivated over the years. He represents a brand of politicized Christianity that dominated the public discourse until the mainstream recognized what a dangerous fraud it really was around the end of the Bush era. Dobson’s credentials as a psychologist gave his work a veneer of authority, despite the fact he was an unapologetic charlatan.
A cursory glance at the beliefs of Dr. James Dobson shows the depravity inherent in his ideology. To start, Dobson advocates physically abusing children by hitting them to break their wills and bend them to parental codes. He’s creepily fixated on how to best inflict pain on kids, in obvious defiance of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Here’s a sampling of his disgusting child abuse advocacy, in which he explains what objects are best for striking children:
I recommend a neutral object of some type. To those who disagree on this point, I’d encourage them to do what seems right. It is not a critical issue to me. The reason I suggest a switch or paddle is because the hand should be seen as an object of love–to hold, hug, pat, and caress. However, if you’re used to suddenly disciplining with the hand, your child may not know when she’s about to be swatted and can develop a pattern of flinching when you make an unexpected move. This is not a problem if you take the time to use a neutral object.
Take a moment to remove your jaw from the floor before we move on to what information the good doctor’s website has about transgender children. Not only does one post attack trans children, his writer endorses reparative therapy and stokes fears of a “homosexual lobby.” This is some of the web text from the piece, which encourages parents to sign a petition targeting trans kids by reversing a California equal rights measure through referendum:
The transgender lie is the root of the problem. For the left, it’s an axiom of faith that children must be allowed to choose a gender identity based on how they perceive themselves, regardless of whether they are born boys or girls. Many liberals go even further, holding the nonsensical position that human beings are meant to be gender-fluid, not boxed into the “binaries” of male and female. Gender, they say, might even change from one day to the next […] When California outlawed reparative therapy (treatment designed to help children overcome unwanted same-sex attraction) for children under 18, New Jersey quickly followed suit. Other states are considering similar legislation. If California’s law stands, it’s not just California students who will suffer from the loss of privacy and threat to their safety and well-being. Other states where the homosexual lobby is strong will soon get in line.
If you’re wondering what he believes should happen to adult trans people, Dobson publicly mused this year about murdering them in bathrooms. We could review all the horrific statements he’s made, but it would take days.
The point of this is not to engage in a media war with James Dobson, rather to highlight the way Evangelicalism and rural America has shown a vulnerability to being hijacked by extremist con men. It’s no mistake that Dobson is using his remaining influence to convince Evangelical Christians to vote for Donald Trump, something millions of genuine Evangelicals have no interest in doing for a host of obvious reasons.
While Jerry Falwell is dead, Pat Robertson lost his audience and James Dobson seems more desperate by the day, there are still relevant con men seeking to use Evangelicals for their own bigoted political purposes. The con isn’t over.
Tony Perkins now leads the aforementioned political hate organization Family Research Council. Franklin Graham riles followers on Facebook with open anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT hatred. Mega-churches like Hillsong are perhaps the most insidious. They exist primarily as money-making machines by affirming bigotry with subtlety while commodifying exclusive Christianity through branded merchandise and music.
Donald Trump may present a more obviously distasteful style of con than we’re used to seeing, but his cozying up to the Christian con men who’ve strangled the Republican Party for decades is no mistake. And, despite the clear breaks all of these people have with reality, their combined appeal remains a threat to our country.
Many Americans still don’t possess the political savvy or cultural knowledge to recognize when they’re being conned. Powerful white men with quick-fix answers, like beating children or tossing immigrants over a really big wall, still hold power over economically vulnerable people in secluded places.
Our job is not only to bring our fearful neighbors into the light, but to show up to support the better forces in our society at every opportunity and address the inequality that informs these con men’s appeal.
Dr. James Dobson may have blocked me on Twitter, but he can’t do a thing about my agency. I’ll be out fighting to make the world a fairer and kinder place, because that’s the only way to stop the hatred that informs a cycle of civil rights violations, child abuse and economic disenfranchisement.
Don’t forget the power of your voice and vote. Use it wisely and often. Don’t become too comfortable to remember that millions of Americans need us standing together with them to help ensure their safety and well-being. It’s not necessary just once every four years in November, but every day of our lives.
Otherwise, we’ll always live among influential con men like James Dobson and Donald Trump.
Sanders voters should learn from Brexit: Don’t make the same mistake as Brits and support right-wing populism
Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Mike Groll)
If Bernie Sanders supporters can learn anything from Brexit, it is that the English-speaking world is in the mood for a certain type of right-wing populism. On one side of the pond, the anti-immigrant and anti-free trade sentiment that swept the United Kingdom prompted that nation to vote for a historic exit from the European Union. In the United States, this phenomenon has manifested itself in the historic presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, who as I’ve explained before is the most anti-free trade major party candidate since Herbert Hoover.
It’s easy to see how, being swept up in all this sentiment, we can forget the core difference between presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican counterpart. While Trump may be effective at using a certain type of populist rhetoric, his economic plans would ultimately favor the wealthy. Clinton, though not as far to the left as Sanders, is pushing for policies that would benefit ordinary Americans.
Before delving into these differences, though, it is important to first explain where Clinton and Trump are the same. When the 2016 campaign started, Clinton had not taken a firm stance on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but since then she has made it clear that she will oppose the agreement and would bar low-priced imports by creating a chief trade prosecutor and increasing the number of trade enforcement officers. While Trump has tried to claim that she initially supported the deal and only switched positions because of him, Clinton’s position is actually consistent with what she wrote in her memoir “Hard Choices,” where she explained that because TPP was still under negotiation “it makes sense to reserve judgment until we can evaluate the final proposed agreement.”
Now that the TPP has been finalized, both of the major presidential candidates have gone on record opposing it – which, as Sanders supporters should already know, is the same position taken by the Vermont Senator. So where do Clinton and Trump differ?
We can start with their tax proposals. As Fortune Magazine explains, the centerpiece of Trump’s tax plan is to replace America’s seven tax rates with three: A top rate of 25 percent (down from 39.6 percent) and two additional rates of 20 percent and 10 percent. In addition to this, Trump would eliminate the tax on large estates and cap dividends and capital gains taxes at 20 percent. All of these policies would benefit wealthier Americans and would most likely force the government to take money away from programs which help the working class – in effect, redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich. Clinton, on the other hand, would increase taxes on wealthier Americans, including increasing the top bracket to 43.6 percent by adding a 4 percent tax surcharge on incomes in excess of $5 million, establishing a minimum 30 percent income tax on individuals earning in excess of $1 million, closing tax loopholes frequently exploited by the wealthy, and increasing the estate tax.
Clinton and Trump also differ on the minimum wage — in large part because Trump, not Clinton, has flip-flopped on this issue. Although Trump used to insist that wages in America were “too high” compared to other countries (!!!), he now says he is “open” to doing something about the hourly rate, although he has failed to specify what. While Clinton’s support for a $12 minimum wage may not go as far as Sanders’ $15 proposal, it is certainly a vast improvement from Trump’s ambiguousness here. What’s more, unlike Trump, Clinton has offered specific proposals to guarantee family leave (12 weeks of paid family leave and 12 weeks of medical leave), break up the big Wall Street banks, and put an “end to the era of mass incarceration” — all economic issues that directly harm low-income Americans, and which Trump has either barely addressed or not at all.
The point here isn’t that Clinton is an ideal candidate; as Sanders demonstrated with his campaign, the Democratic Party establishment is deeply flawed, so naturally any politician produced by that system will share its weaknesses. Nevertheless, there is a clear and undeniable difference between Clinton and Trump on the major economic issues facing this country. Each and every time the two candidates part ways, it is because Trump has aligned his policies with those of the wealthy classes of which he is such a conspicuous part. Clinton, for all of her faults, has offered proposals that would demonstrably improve the lives of working class Americans. These are important differences – so much so that, if Sanders supporters are smart, they’ll make sure they define this election.
This doesn’t mean that they will, though. As the Brexit vote revealed, many on the left are allowing themselves to be co-opted by right-wing populists’ use of issues like immigration (where Clinton doesn’t support bigotry and Trump does) and free trade (where the two candidates are the same). If we don’t learn from the mistakes of our British counterparts, the consequences of this oversight may be dire.
Istanbul and the empathy gap: Why was the West’s response muted compared to Paris or Brussels?
A woman reacts as Family members, colleagues and friends of the victims of Tuesday blasts gather for a memorial ceremony at the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, Thursday, June 30, 2016. (Credit: AP/Emrah Gurel)
Even a cursory glance at social media and the 24-hour news cycle after the carnage in Orlando, Brussels and Paris revealed outrage and solidarity. Televisions were teeming with stories and images of the unconscionable horror and social networks were flush with hashtags, memes and flags. As the atrocities began to mount in Istanbul only days ago after another suicide attack, they were surely certain to elicit similar coverage and sympathy. For remorse over the loss of a life isn’t contingent on its location. Yet in the aftermath of Istanbul’s terror attack, the only things trending on Facebook were Cheetos, Taylor Swift and a man who had jumped into a pool filled with Coca-Cola and Mentos. These 41 dead and 239 injured couldn’t even crack the top ten.
The lives lost on June 28th include teachers, a young woman working part-time to pay her university tuition, a father expecting his second child and a man who was due to be married in ten days. Their stories are the stories of countless others who have similarly lost their lives in heinous terrorist attacks in American and European cities. Despite this humanity, the disparity in the response to Turkey’s tragedy has been stark. Media coverage has remained muted comparatively and there was no prominent television network personality like Anderson Cooper on the ground in Istanbul. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who once raised the Belgian flag above Downing Street after the Brussels attack, only offered lukewarm words. Similar to many prominent buildings and towers around the world, The World Trade Center, which was lit up in France’s and Belgium’s colors after attacks, remained dark. Likewise, the dearth of #prayforistanbul and few Turkish flags on view in profile pictures only made the empathy gap more palpable.
Though many reasons can be posited for this yawning gap, the most cogent explanation relates to expectations. Western societies often view areas like the Middle East, Africa or Pakistan as being unstable and perpetually embroiled in conflict. When viewed through this prism, violence and death are understandable and thus considered a normal part of life here. Though sad, it is merely seen as just another day in this part of the world. And so Beirut, Syria, Yemen and Nigeria become expected and we are automatically inured to their suffering, leaving our scarce stores of empathy intact. As Rafia Zakaria wrote in the wake of a recent suicide bombing in a park of Lahore that claimed the lives of twenty-nine children, “for much of the world, the deaths of Pakistani children are forgettable. They are, after all, the progeny of poor distant others destined to perish in ever more alarming ways.” Those not so distant or different from us, however, garner our sympathies more readily.
Studies done on the brain are revealing here. Observing the pain of others stimulates sensory and emotional areas of the brain (anterior cingulate cortex and insula cortex) that have been associated with empathy. Research using functional MRI (fMRI) to assess brain activity by changes in blood flow has shown that activation of these areas is contingent on the race of the observed person, such that observing someone of one’s own race in pain leads to greater activity in these empathy centers of the brain compared to a person of a different race. People will be more empathetic towards the suffering of someone from their own race or ethnic group. Death of an own-race person from a terrorist attack is thus more likely to be viewed as a tragedy as opposed to the death of an other-race person from a similar cause. Yet fortunately, our ability to empathize is entirely capable of overcoming the confines of race.
A study published in 2015 examined Chinese students who had emigrated to Australia within the past six months to five years to assess whether their abilities to empathize with other-race individuals had improved over time with increased exposure. The participants watched videos of own-race/other-race individuals receiving painful or non-painful touch. As expected, the racial bias was evident and these Chinese students had a greater brain or neural response when observing pain in own-race compared to other-race individuals. However, significantly greater empathy for other-race individuals was observed in Chinese students who had increased contact with different races over time. Just normal, everyday contact with individuals of other races was found to be sufficient in order to achieve this heightened level of empathy and more personal or intimate experience was not necessary. Simple exposure to people of other races thus shows that they are no different from us and inevitably engenders more empathy for their pain.
The empathy gap seen in Istanbul becomes troubling given the specter of a Trump presidency and the emergence of xenophobic and nativist sentiments across Europe that recently contributed to Brexit. As we grapple with the natural inclination of our brains to empathize with the grievances and pain of those similar to us and dangerously gravitate towards a world of exclusion and callousness, the underwhelming media and social response after Istanbul is accentuated. Further, it encourages the belief that Musims are solely viewed as purveyors of terrorism and not deserving of sympathy, even though the violence of ISIS has claimed more Muslim lives than western ones. The narratives of Istanbul’s victims confirm that these were individuals who held aspirations no different from a resident of Chicago or Barcelona. The brain has demonstrated the ability to appreciate this common humanity and close the empathy gap. This may be a prudent time to follow the brain over our hearts, which seem to have been taken over by the demagogues.
