Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 738
June 25, 2016
Gun violence and the death of joy: We’re losing the places where we once felt safe
A vigil in Orlando, Florida. June 19, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)
I used to love going to the movies. It didn’t even really matter what was playing. Through my teenage years and early twenties whenever I was stressed, I liked to go to the local movie theater. I liked it when the lights went down and everybody got really quiet. I liked how hopeful and expectant that moment was. I liked the feeling that everyone in the theater was experiencing something together. We didn’t have to talk. We were united just because we’d paid our $14 to go someplace and escape our daily worries. I know movie theaters aren’t really sacred, and I don’t want to blow their importance out of proportion – I can’t say anything beyond the fact that I really, really liked them. They were a place where I felt safe and happy.
Everyone probably has some place like that. For some people it’s church. For some people it’s school. For some people it’s a nightclub.
Or, more and more, people used to have places like that.
I don’t especially like going to the movies anymore. After Aurora, I suddenly found that I was skittish in theaters. If somebody entered too boisterously after the movie had started, I no longer thought, “They must have gotten here late.” I immediately thought, “Oh, God, do they have a gun?” And, once I’d convinced myself that was surely an isolated event, it happened again in Lafayette. When I go to the movies now, at the end, I think, “well, that was a nice movie” and I also think, “I’m glad I did not die in the course of it.” There are a lot of people who feel similarly, perhaps, about flying on a plane. And I do still go to movies. But the unfettered pleasure of it, the joy, that is gone.
To which some people reply, “Well, the world was always a dangerous place!” It was, that’s true. However, America was not historically this dangerous. There were 32 gunfights and shootouts in the Wild West from 1840 to 1918. There have been 173 mass shootings in America this year. That may have had a great deal to do with the fact that – despite the NRA’s attempts to glorify it is a period where manly vigilantes were free to be men – gun control was stricter in the Wild West than it is today.
Besides. There used to be places and activities that were understood to be dangerous. You could avoid those places. Not so much anymore. I’m not planning to play chicken on the railway tracks. I just want to go see “The Lobster.”
I know that not being able to enjoy going to the movies anymore is a minor loss. Being sad about that loss seems like such a trifling concern compared to the pain of families who have lost their loved ones in Orlando, or Sandy Hook, or Santa Barbara, or Colorado Springs, or San Bernadino or… the list is too long.
Losing places and peace of mind is nothing like losing people.
But it is still a loss.
And the more we allow gun violence to go on unchecked in America, the more we all lose. We lose the places where we felt safe. We lose the places where we felt unafraid to connect with each other. We lose the places that brought us joy.
It’s not a loss I would mind so much, if it seemed to be a sacrifice I was making for something good. But giving up something for nothing always feels like a bad trade, and I’ve yet to see an instance where modern-day assault weapons have brought about anything marvelous.
To which some people will say, “They brought us America.”
Those people are thinking of muskets.
A Brown Bess musket, such as was used during the American Revolution, can fire around four bullets a minute. That is if it’s operated by a very well trained soldier. A modern AR-15 (the weapon used at Aurora and Sandy Hook) fires 15 bullets per second. That’s 900 bullets a minute. In some states, like Florida, there’s no waiting time to purchase it. George Washington would not have been able to conceive of every individual citizen having access to a weapon as effectively murderous as an AR-15. Interpreting the Constitution to that extreme is like saying that the right to a pursuit of happiness insured in the Declaration of Independence should allow everyone to shoot heroin directly into their eyeballs.
Society’s perception of a great many things has changed since Washington, because society itself has changed. You will notice that we are not all inoculated for smallpox these days, and we don’t get our teeth pulled by our barbers. That is because we live in a world the founders of America would have found all but unrecognizable. If the founders were transported to the modern day, it seems likely they would declare, “I did not mean to sign off on the 15-bullets-a-second sticks.” They would then say, “Where are all my slaves? The constitution clearly states they are 3/5ths of a person.”
Those slaves are not around because the Constitution has undergone changes since the founders wrote it. But then, the founders expected that. The Constitution was a document intended to evolve. That is why the writers included The Elastic Clause, which allows Congress to alter laws as is “necessary and proper.” That is a provision that insures the people of the future will be able to exercise their common sense.
However, many people still share constitutional founder George Mason’s fear that “once a standing army is established, in any country, the people lose their liberty. When against a regular and disciplined army, yeomanry are the only defence — yeomanry, unskillful & unarmed, what chance is there for preserving freedom?… to disarm the people [is] the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
That’s the notion people who feel a need to keep their guns so they can one day fight the government cling to, albeit a notion they express rather less eloquently.
Here’s the bad news for those people: You have already been effectively disarmed. Mason is presupposing a world where the government has arms that are comparable to the citizenry. That is not the world we live in. A man with a house full of AK-47s will not be able to stand up against the 101st Airborne. He certainly won’t be able to stand up against a nuclear threat from a corrupt government. This is not speculation, because people have tried. The siege at Waco in 1993 against the FBI did not end victoriously for the heavily armed Branch Davidians (82 of them died, nine survived). Earlier, the standoff at Ruby Ridge in 1992 ended with a man’s wife and child getting shot. The occupation at Burns, Oregon, this year, ended with a civilian dead. These stories never end with one well-armed man becoming the new King of Texas. They only end with dead civilians. And those are cases where the government is trying not to kill people.
The people who exclaim that the government “is coming to take away our guns!” think that we are naïve about the corruptibility of government. We’re not. Because, dude, they don’t need to come to take away your guns. If they want to, they can just drone bomb your house. If they’re not doing so, it’s because they don’t feel a need to.
Those weapons that people cherish the right to are not very good when it comes to standing up against the government. They are, however, excellent at killing people sitting in movie theaters or dancing at nightclubs.
But then, if people want to find a way to kill people, they can always find some way to do it, right? Well, not as easily. It’s pretty obvious that someone armed with a knife would have a more difficult time killing 50 people in rapid succession than he might have with a gun. At the very least, he would have to get very close to them. That said, we shouldn’t be dismissive of the idea of knife violence. There are countries like China where knife violence is a huge problem. The year 2010 saw a horrific number of knife attacks at schools in China: 27 people died from them. That sounds terrible, but 30 people are murdered by guns in the U.S. per day.
And the proportion of people who survive knife attacks tends to be higher. Compare the survival statistics from the stabbing at Zhongxin Kindergarten in Beijing in 2010 to those at Sandy Hook in 2012. Both crimes are horrific. However, at the Zhongxin Kindergarten, when a man stabbed 29 children and three adults, no one was killed, although five children ended up in the hospital in critical condition. At Sandy Hook, when a man shot 20 children and eight adults, everyone but two adults died.
Both outcomes are very bad, but one is worse.
If your aim is to kill people, knives don’t work as well as guns. That’s probably why 70 percent of homicides in America employ guns. Studies indicate that attacks carried out with any weapon other than a gun result in less harm to the victims.
But honestly, anyone who has watched “Indiana Jones” should have already figured that out.
Bombs certainly grab the public’s attention, and they’re better at killing a great number of people than knives. But then you have to figure out how to build a bomb. You can’t just buy one, load it up with bullets, and start killing people. If you wanted to create a fertilizer truck bomb, like the one Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombings, you’d find that the materials required to create one are now tracked by authorities. Wired explains that:
The FBI and affiliated law enforcement agencies have spent countless hours convincing manufacturers, distributors and retailers to alert the authorities when suspicious or anomalously large purchases of chemical fertilizer or other potential explosives occur. “You would know a lot more about people who buy chemical fertilizer than people who buy firearms,” says Aki Peritz, a former National Counterterrorism Center analyst.
In that case, since guns are relatively easy to get and so good at killing people, would I be better able to enjoy “Finding Dory” with my own gun gently cradled in my lap? Would that make me safer? Again, there are people who believe it would. After the shooting at Pulse, Donald Trump claimed, “If you had guns in that room, if you had — even if you had a number of people having them strapped to their ankle or strapped to their waist where bullets could have flown in the other direction right at him, you wouldn’t have had that tragedy.”
We can take a moment to ponder at how anyone thinks the world would be a safer place if drunk people dancing in a nightclub were all waving around firearms.
Now that we’ve done that, it’s worth addressing the myth of a “good guy with a gun.” While guns are good at killing unarmed people, they haven’t proven terribly effective at saving other people from the killers. In 2012, there were 259 justifiable homicides where someone killed someone else – a bad guy – with a gun. Meanwhile, there were 8,342 criminal homicides in which a gun was used. That means you are 32 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than saving yourself or someone else with one. Those are terrible odds.
You’re even less likely to be able to save yourself or others in a crowded situation like the one at Pulse nightclub. Senior Chief Petty Officer James Hatch (USN, Ret.) explains:
I’ve been in dark rooms with “good guys and bad guys” going at it with guns, and let me tell you something:
Gunfights are crazy.
Gunfights are hard.
On my final combat mission, I was shot in the leg with an AK-47 from about 30 feet away and it blew my femur in half… In some cases, can a “good guy” with a gun neutralize the threat and help save lives? Absolutely. But it doesn’t happen very often. It is, for the most part, a myth perpetuated by people who’ve never been shot at.
That’s one reason the armed security guards – the good guys with guns! – at Pulse were not able to take out Omar Mateen. Because “gunfights are crazy” and overwhelming even for people who are trained for them.
Besides. The notion that I ought to arm myself always seems to overlook the simple fact that I do not want to have to kill anyone. I do not have Rambo-like fantasies of mowing down a deeply mentally ill young man who is shooting other people. Many people seem to have that fantasy. However, that does not strike me as a good outcome. It strikes me as heartbreaking and unnatural. Telling people they should carry around a gun because there’s always a chance they’ll need to shoot one of their fellow Americans is not a notion that makes people feel safer and brings them together. A country where everyone is constantly armed to the teeth and ready to shoot one another does not strike me as a happy place to live. It strikes me as a terrifying dystopia.
“But if we outlaw guns, then only bad guys will have the guns!” The bad guys already have them. At least with a few regulations we’d be able to clearly identify them as bad guys instead of pretending they are freedom-loving patriots. The FBI had twice investigated Omar Mateen. He had been on a terrorist watch list. The owner of the gun store would be required to report Mateen’s purchases to the FBI so they could run his name against the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. However, a U.S. official claimed, “It’s unlikely it would have raised any red flags… Even if it had, Mateen still could have purchased the weapons legally. The U.S. official says that, at most, the FBI would be alerted that he was trying to buy the weapons and perhaps agents would have watched Mateen more closely.”
Because God forbid anyone not be able to get a gun for any reason.
Mateen was an outspoken homophobe who abused his wife and held her hostage. He was described by his co-workers as “unhinged and unstable.” He’s someone we’d probably look at with a wary eye in every aspect of life – unless, of course, we’re selling him guns. Then apparently we should just all assume he’s a really good guy.
The only really good argument, as Jim Jeffries states, for wanting to have unchecked access to guns is “Fuck off! I like guns!”
Well, that’s fair. But a great many Americans are sacrificing an awful lot of joy and peace of mind so that some people can keep weapons they think are cool.
As for people who, perhaps most honestly, just want to keep assault rifles around because they just plain really, really like them, well, hell, I used to really, really like movie theaters. If they’re harder to get, you’ll be able to get over your emotional loss without anyone getting murdered.
June 24, 2016
How to be a SoHo nanny and survive — just barely
Scarlett Johansson and Nicholas Art in "The Nanny Diaries" (Credit: The Weinstein Company)
I was hired to replace the old nanny, who was too fat to climb the stairs. Soon, we would move into a new apartment with an elevator that wouldn’t work all summer. Imagine me plus a child who could barely walk plus a diaper bag plus groceries, climbing seven flights in the heat multiple times a day. It was hell.
My first day at work, I took B to music class. We stopped at the bathroom first. My boss had told me B was going through a phase where she hated the changing table. This was true. She writhed and kicked. I thought she’d fall off and die, so I set her feet down on the floor and put her hands on the wall, kind of like an arrest. I rifled through the diaper bag, but not fast enough. Something warm hit my leg. No. No no no, but yes. B had pooped on my thigh.
We joined the circle. All of the other nannies were Caribbean and texting. They recognized B. “Where’s Shauna?” they asked me. Shauna, I put together, was the old nanny. “She go back to Jamaica?”
I shrugged. I looked guilty.
A new nanny arrived. She saw B. She looked at me. “Where’s Shauna?”
B recognized Shauna’s name this time and screamed it in her broken toddler English.
“She wants Shauna,” the woman said.
B yelled Shauna’s name again.
All the women shook their heads at the same time, and then went back to texting. They were probably texting poor Shauna, who was at home, depressed, eating Fritos she could no longer afford. They were writing, “The new girl smells like shit.”
***
Days were long, sometimes 12 hours long. My boss was a very active person. She liked to be out all the time. I would have liked that, too, if my house were filled with children and caretakers and a cleaning lady I was constantly replacing. Not to mention the construction workers, because the apartment wasn’t done yet.
If she was out, everyone else should be out. This applied long after the construction was done. Employees were strongly discouraged from hanging out at home unless (a) your child was sick, or (b) you had thought of an extremely inventive crafting project, and even then, it would have to be raining for the boss to consider it.
But this turned out to be a gift, because being home was worse than trolling around Manhattan all day with your stroller. At home, the boss could appear at any time. She had a job, but not the regular kind where you have to show up. I’m still not even sure what her job was. And I didn’t care. All I cared about was when she was coming home. This was the constant riddle we nannies were trying to solve. There were four of us, plus one just for overnights, and a bunch of other guest stars. All day, we wondered, What is her ETA?
The boss was elusive with her facts, and I think it was on purpose. She wanted us to think that at any moment, she could pop out of the elevator. Every time that thing beeped, we froze.
Only the newbies would directly ask, “What is your ETA?” This was seen as intrusive, and why do you need to know? Are you doing something bad? Also, that text went unanswered 90 percent of the time.
So instead, we gathered in the blind spot near the fridge to exchange information. If she had told me she was getting a blow-out at noon, and she’d told Nanny 2 she might meet her to go to the park, which would be after naptime, around 3, then she would either be home around 1 or around 3. We debated in the quietest whispers, because some of us were paranoid that the cameras had sound.
Yes, we were being filmed. It wasn’t a Nanny Cam. It was for the art collection. When the cameras were installed, my boss’s husband said, “Don’t worry! We’re not watching you!”
But she was watching us, and we knew it, because she would text about things she could only possibly know from watching us. “Why is the architect there?” She had an app for the camera on her iPhone.
We were paranoid and frazzled. No, in the beginning, we were paranoid and frazzled. By the end, we were basically dead, but still walking.
The worst thing was when you were in the blind spot, whispering about when she might come home, and then her phone rang. And then she picked it up! From her office perch in the corner, which you could only see if you walked all the way back there, and there was no reason to do that except to check on her, and then the cameras would see you checking on her! We’d mouth Fuuuuuuuck! What had she heard? What had we said?
We tried to track her by her footwear – her shoes were not by the elevator! Yay! – but she changed her shoes multiple times a day, so that didn’t work.
When we weren’t whispering, we were texting. You know that alien-face emoji on your phone? That was code for “boss.” Some of us also called her Fil, as in filbert, which everyone knows is the least desirable nut.
But wait. I should stop and explain. My boss was not a bad person. She was just a very stressed person, with tons of energy and maybe a little too much time on her hands. She also, I think, had forgotten what it was like to be a peon. Because she wasn’t born rich. She’d been a peon once, too.
***
Even though we often had no idea where she was, she wanted to know where we were all the time. And she wanted proof. Pics, pics, more pics! One of the nannies devised a brilliant plan. She’d go to the park in the morning and stage a bunch of pics – on the swing set, on the slide, in front of an unidentifiable wall – and then use the pics later in the day when the boss wanted pics. The trick, she told me, was to do it in the shade because the light in the afternoon is different. And you had to make sure your kid’s outfit hadn’t changed. If that happened, your pic was no longer usable.
But if it did work, you could conceivably be shopping at Bloomindgale’s while the boss thought you were at the park. This sounds conniving, and it was. The atmosphere of fear had turned us into conniving people. Every time the boss upset us, we charged another $10 green juice to her credit card. No, these were not for the kids. They were ours. We drank them in a vain attempt to cleanse the stress from our souls. The woo-woo nanny, in another version of that same vain attempt, put a black rock crystal in her bra before work. This was supposed to diffuse the boss’s bad vibes. Later, she was actually diagnosed with something by her doctor. I forget what it was, technically, but the cause was too much green juice.
***
We did our best, but nothing we did was right. The salmon you’d cooked for the kids was either undercooked or overcooked. Your outfit choice for her daughter was “dyke-y.” You were told that the stroller belonged in the corner, so you put it in the corner. The next day that was wrong. Why didn’t you know that it belonged in the hallway now?
The easiest part of the job was taking care of the kids, and I loved them. We spent so much time together; how could I not fall in love? Along with my PTSD, there are good memories. Of hours spent in Washington Square Park with B, who was scared of grass for a while and that was hilarious. Of feeding the older daughter watermelon and rubbing her feet; those were her favorite things.
***
The weather got worse, but the days didn’t get shorter. And they didn’t change either. For B, it was library, music class, eat, nap, eat, park, eat, park, sleep. For L, the older kid with special needs, it was physical therapy, speech therapy, and swimming lessons, followed by dinner out at a restaurant with a TV. Because that was the other goal: find a TV.
Have you ever been to the Scholastic store in Soho? If you’re a nanny in the area, the answer is yes. Because inside that store, there is the Magic School Bus, and inside the school bus, there is a TV that plays “Magic School Bus” episodes on repeat all day long. This is nanny heaven. Space is limited, so you might have to wait. Or, no, you’re too tired to wait. Just ditch the stroller (it won’t get stolen) and squeeze in. Have a green juice from the diaper bag. Not enough? Eat all your kid’s granola bars and Goldfish. This will sugar-shock you into waking up.
The school bus was the best, but we had other havens. Whole Foods Tribeca had a playground with foam blocks. Live music in Washington Square Park when it was warm could buy you 45 minutes on a good day. Or, you could just keep walking. Just walk and walk and walk until your kid falls asleep. Walk until the West 40s, or until the East River. Walk until the stroller kind of feels like a nice crutch, like a walker, and forget this is your job. And then remember, and take a pic, and keep walking in the hopes that you’d walk straight into a brand-new destiny.
***
We knew it was bad, but we didn’t know how bad it was until it was over. All of the nannies, and also the housekeepers, said they were going to quit on pretty much a daily basis. But.
Our buts were always the same. But we love the kids. But we love the cash. But what would our lives be like without unlimited spending at Whole Foods?
***
By the end, I was insane. I had dreams about the diaper bag. I woke up in a panic. Had I bought the salmon? I’d be at home, doing something, and then I would realize I was performing a little. And then I remembered that oh yeah, there are no cameras here. I’d started smoking again. I’d reverted to my teenage self with those rebellious green juice purchases, and my alien emojis were obviously from the 4th grade. Someone was holding a lighter up to a piece of thread, and that was the thread I was hanging on by.
***
I did the honorable thing and waited until after my Christmas bonus to quit. I got the bonus, plus a very nice journal (thank you, boss), and then I went on vacation. I wrote B a letter about how much I loved her; she could read it in 10 years, or 20. L couldn’t read, so I would rub her feet for an extra long time before leaving. The day I came back, I said, “Soooo….”
My boss was totally cool about it. “We’ll find another one,” she said. “Maybe Shauna can come back, since we have an elevator now.”
Todd Solondz’s comedy of despair: “I am always trying to navigate a line that is not too far, and not too soft”
Keaton Nigel Cooke in "Weiner-Dog" (Credit: Amazon Studios)
For more than two decades, writer/director Todd Solondz has been making audiences squirm with films designed to be discomfiting. His latest pitch-black comedy, “Wiener-Dog,” traces a dachshund as it is cared for by various characters including: Remi (Keaton Nigel Cook), a young cancer-riddled boy; Dawn Wiener (Greta Gerwig), an adult version of his “Welcome to the Dollhouse” protagonist; Dave Schmerz (Danny DeVito), a fading screenwriter/professor; and a cantankerous grandmother with a soft side (Ellen Burstyn).
As one might expect from Solondz, the screenplay is full of darkly funny dialogue, most notably when Remi’s mother, Dina (Julie Delpy) tells her son a blackly comic tale about the suffering of her own childhood pet, Croissant. But Solondz also addresses serious questions about death, the meaning of life, as well as love and family as the various characters try to combat their despair with the aid of the wiener dog.
The filmmaker met with Salon to talk about his new film.
Do you currently own any pets?
I don’t own any pets. I haven’t as an adult. It’s too much responsibility. It really is a commitment. When I was a child, we didn’t have to pick up after them. Now, that’s what it seems people have to do.
What pets did you have as a child?
Our family went through a lot of pets. None of them survived very long [because] we were a feisty family—at least the children were.
Why did you select a wiener dog as a device to link the four episodes in your film? What was it about the dog that made it the perfect vessel?
Obviously, it came from the idea of Dawn. [She was nicknamed “Wiener-Dog” in “Welcome to the Dollhouse”] I knew I wanted to do a dog movie. I thought of “Au Hasard Balthazar,” which is not a dog movie, on one end of the spectrum, and “Benji” on the other end. I wanted to be on that spectrum. When I thought of the wiener dog, it clicked. Not just because of the connection to Dawn, but it is, I think, seen as one of the cutest possible little pets.
Your films walk a fine line between celebrating and satirizing their characters. How do you construct your characters and make them both authentic/realistic, but also funny and pathetic?
I like that you used the word “construct,” but I don’t really think in those terms. I think about what moves me, and what makes me laugh, what provokes, what excites me. It’s an ambivalence that I feel towards my characters or a situation. On the one hand, there may be some cruelty, but there is also some tenderness. There may be some comedy, but there is also a kind of pathos. There’s a friction that those juxtapositions ignite that excites me and from which all of this evolves. It starts there on the page.
You tend to write dialogue with acid. I’ll never forget Ellen Barkin’s character in “Palindromes” saying her abortion was “the happiest day of her life.” In “Wiener-Dog,” Dina (Julie Delpy) tells her son Remi an imaginative story about her childhood poodle, Croissant, being raped. Both AIDS and cancer are used as punchlines in the film. How do you determine how far to push things? Do you not have a filter?
I do filter myself! I’m always pulling punches! I am always trying to navigate a line that is not too far, and not too soft. Life is always much too cruel. All you have to do is read the paper any day of the week. It’s much more horrific than anything I’ve put out there. I am always softening to it try to make it acceptable to my audience. I want to subvert expectations; to be provoking in a way that I like to be provoked when I go to the movies—which is to experience the world anew, afresh in some way. That you see something articulated that maybe even you yourself have not articulated amongst your friends and intimates. That’s what I seek out in movies, and what I try to provide. Certainly, in the [Croissant] scene with Julie Delpy, I have one little element in that speech that did scare me a little, but I feel like I can count on my under-the-radar-ness.
While this film has not yet sparked censorship issues, you have had trouble with the censors before, notably with your film “Storytelling.” Do you think about how people will respond to your edgy style?
I call this a comedy of despair. It’s not in fact about a dog, even though I used the dog as a kind of conceit. It’s about mortality, and how that hovers and shadows each of these stories and characters. I have to be true to that. Dogs are very often a vessel for projections. They are innocent of some things, but innocence only makes sense within a context. They have their own dog-ness, with their own yearnings, needs and desires. And that is often hard to penetrate when they are functioning as a repository for the owner’s needs and issues.
Let’s talk more about why you made this film about death and mortality…
I think it would have subverted expectations if I’d come out and done some really fluffy movie, but it doesn’t interest me. Why death? It’s a subject. I am a filmmaker, and this is where I am. I think about these things. Over the course of writing this, that’s what came out. I saw that [death] was what this film was about.
You have had multiple actors play the same role, such as in “Palindromes,” or have multiple stories within one film, as in “Wiener-Dog.” Why do you play with narrative in these ways?
I like to play. Not everyone wants to play with me. I like to play with form. That said, I wouldn’t have made any of these movies had I not had very strong feelings about these characters, and their worlds. If I weren’t moved by their plights, I wouldn’t have put myself through the ordeal of making these films.
I love the idea—unlike real life, where we have but one life—that in movies and in fiction, you can create characters who have other lives. And you can create “other lives;” in other words, I can give you one movie where Dawn dies, and another where she has a very hopeful, romantic possibility. I can have a character played by the same actor, or by different actors. The idea of different possible trajectories is something we all think about.
It’s the “What if?” questions that Danny DeVito’s character repeats!
There’s that, and the climax with Ellen Burstyn’s character looking at the many possibilities of lives not led. So this is something that is very human. Every decision we make is a decision to do something other than what we could have done. It’s human nature. It’s our lives. This is something I can play with for different effects.
Do you think you will continue to feature Dawn Wiener in your future films? Are you working something out with her character?
I don’t have any grand plan. I don’t. I didn’t know that I would bring her back. Heather [Matarazzo, who played Dawn in “Welcome to the Dollhouse”] kind of freed me when she told me years ago—because I’d written yet another movie with the character—that she didn’t want to be an “Antoine Doinel” [the protagonist in a series of Truffaut’s early films]. She didn’t want to reprise the character. And that freed me up and made me want to push this freedom even further.
How The Cure endures: This is how a band turns 40 with style
Robert Smith (Credit: AP/Owen Sweeney)
When bands reach a milestone birthday, it’s an easy way to advertise concerts or give lapsed fans an excuse to attend a show. More than that, however, it’s a good excuse to celebrate; especially when the anniversary is significant—for example, the Stones turning 50 a few years ago—making a big deal about longevity is also a way to commemorate survival. Bands have precarious chemistry, and any group able to weather lineup changes and deal with mercurial personalities for decades deserves to be commended.
The downside, of course, is that these anniversary tours can become bloated with (or obscured by) nostalgia. At worst, bands inadvertently come across as self-aggrandizing or overly pleased with themselves and their accomplishments; at best, artists might reshape their own mythologies using rose-colored glasses. For example, when Roger Waters brought “The Wall” tour around the U.S. several years ago, it was jarring and sometimes incongruous to see the concert take an almost exuberant approach to the album’s very serious material.
The Cure, however, are not like most bands. And so although the U.K. group coalesced in 1976, the announcement of their 2016 U.S. tour came with no fanfare about them turning 40. This lack of fuss has continued as the group arrived in the States and started playing shows; Frontman Robert Smith hasn’t been on the interview circuit and the band’s social media accounts aren’t giving behind-the-scenes dissections of the gigs, giving the trek a low-key, almost secretive air. This intrigue amplified after tour setlists started rolling in: The Cure were dusting off tunes they haven’t played in decades (“The Perfect Girl”), debuting new songs (“Step Into the Light,” “It Can Never Be the Same”), pulling out random b-sides and dipping deep into albums for out non-singles (“Like Cockatoos,” “The Snakepit”). “Burn,” the gothic smolder from 1994’s “The Crow” soundtrack, even landed in heavy rotation.
It’s a cliché to say that a tour is “for the die-hards,” but the sequencing and song choices of these shows felt calibrated squarely for loyalists, those who would lose their minds to hear such rarities. Yet because the Cure are known for their marathon sets, casual fans wouldn’t necessarily be bored. Even better, nobody was quite sure what the band would play each night—a rarity for an act playing even mid-sized arenas. Bands that are 40 years into their career aren’t supposed to sound this vital and flexible.
The band’s June 10 Chicago concert in particular struck an incredible balance between commercial success and catalog depth. After opening with a trio of gloriously desolate tunes—the gnarled, gloomy “Shake Dog Shake,” doom-laden “Kyoto Song” and despairing “A Night Like This”—the set snaked through a series of oddities (the scabrous “Screw,” the mysterious “Like Cockatoos”) and moody faves such as “Pictures of You” and “Lovesong.” Smith was well aware of the balance the Cure needed to strike, however. “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten it’s Friday night,” he joked after “Just Like Heaven,” one of the few hits the band had played thus far midway through the set. “It’s called pacing ourselves.”
He kept his promise: The main set crescendoed to the angsty, textured “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and ended with a one-two sucker punch: a howling, desperate take on “One Hundred Years” from 1982’s “Pornography” and “The Top” album cut “Give Me It.” The latter song was all-consuming and immersive, courtesy of relentless, dizzying spotlights and disorienting video, as well as Reeves Gabrels’ squealing, agonizing guitars; the arena felt like it was levitating from the song’s power. The night followed up with a tour debut, the rarely played title track from 1984’s “The Top,” and then three more encores with even more rarities (the soaring b-side “Exploding Boy”) and then a procession of hits. By the end, Smith was even unleashing some lighthearted, goofy dance moves along with the crowd during the spirited “Let’s Go to Bed,” a manicured “Close to Me” and the strutting “Why Can’t I Be You?”
But despite being such a comprehensive spin through the band’s back catalog, the concert didn’t feel at all nostalgic. If anything, The Cure sounded invigorated by their own music. Smith’s voice sounded ageless and pristine—at turns desperate, playful, yearning, romantic and ferocious—while guitarist Gabrels unleashed psychedelic fury throughout “Never Enough” and layered swirling, morose atmosphere over “Fascination Street.” Keyboardist Roger O’Donnell, meanwhile, added classical flair and grace to “Charlotte Sometimes” and “In Between Days,” while bassist Simon Gallup leapt and darted around the stage, flitting around the band members. Jason Cooper’s drums, meanwhile, were arena-ready and powerful. The Cure have had various members cycle in and out over the years, but this particular configuration jelled in dynamic ways.
It’s not correct to say The Cure is underrated—after all, no band selling out 10,000-seat (and up) arenas is. But it’s almost too easy to take them for granted, since the group haven’t released a new studio album in eight years and, even then, tend to keep a low profile. Yet the Chicago concert—and, frankly, this entire tour—underscores the singularity of the band’s music. Post-punk, dream-pop, synthpunk, goth and psychedelic rock —all of these influences coalesce into something that can only be described as sounding like The Cure. That’s always been the case; after all, even their pop crossover hits “Lovesong” and “Friday I’m In Love” sounded like outliers. It’s significant that groups inspired by The Cure tend to only mimic certain facets of the band: the dark guitar creases, the sparkling keyboards, the roiling post-punk storms. No band has been able to capture the depth—and nooks and crannies—of the group’s sonic chemistry.
Near the start of the Chicago show, The Cure launched into “Push,” a fan favorite from 1985’s “The Head on the Door.” The crowd let out a huge, cheering roar as the song began, dancing joyfully to the extended instrumental intro and pumping their fists to the song’s “Go, go, go!” chorus exhortation. That communal ecstasy cropped up again and again throughout the night, as the audience reveled in the familiar and the unexpected. The Cure’s music and reputation was predicated on unifying outsiders—those drawn to (or plagued by) unrequited or missing love, fatalistic romances and general melancholy—but this outlaw attitude has only become more of a bonding experience as the years have progressed. Forty years on, the misfits haven’t exactly won—but at a Cure concert, they’ve certainly found a place they can feel at home.
Europe’s far-right parties declare victory after Brexit, call for more referendums
Far-right European leaders at the European Parliament in May 2014. (Left to right) Matteo Salvini, member of Italy's Lega Nord; Harald Vilimsky, member of Austria's Freedom Party; Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front; Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherland's Freedom Party; and Gerolf Annemans, member of Belgium's Vlaams Belang (Credit: Reuters/Francois Lenoir)
The European far-right just got a big shot of adrenaline.
The U.K. voted on Thursday to leave the European Union. The so-called Brexit vote was applauded by far-right parties and movements throughout the continent.
Immediately after the vote, nationalist, racist, anti-immigrant leaders in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and more called for exit referendums in their own countries.
Far-right parties are claiming victory, and are using Britain’s example to recruit. These reactionary nationalist movements, which have been gaining strength in recent years, argue that the unexpected widespread support for leaving shows how the dominant center-right and center-left parties in Europe, which called on their members to vote for staying in the E.U., are out of touch with the people.
Instead of blaming the neoliberal economic policies and harsh austerity measures that have made the lives of working people throughout the continent worse, however, these right-wing nationalist parties scapegoat immigration and E.U. regulations as the supposed source of citizens’ increasing hardship.
Greece
Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, one of the most extreme movements in Europe, applauded “the brave decision of the British people.”
“A direct consequence of Brexit will be the empowerment of patriotic and nationalist forces across Europe,” said a spokesperson for Golden Dawn, which admires Adolf Hitler and uses a modified swastika on its flag.
France
Marine Le Pen, head of France’s far-right National Front party, described the vote as a “victory for freedom.”
“As I have been asking for years, now we should have the same referendum in France and E.U. countries,” she tweeted.
The National Front promptly created a petition calling for a referendum for France to leave the E.U. — what some are calling a “Frexit.”
The far-right party is using the slogan, “And now France!”
« Pour un référendum sur notre appartenance à l'Union Européenne ! » | Signez la pétition : https://t.co/dduhq3rlP3 pic.twitter.com/7Vz82JKy8f
— Front National (@FN_officiel) June 24, 2016
In a speech at the National Front headquarters outside Paris, Le Pen declared, “The U.K. has begun a movement that can’t be stopped,” The Guardian reported.
Le Pen has pledged to hold a Frexit referendum if she is elected president in the 2017 election.
The Netherlands
Geert Wilders, the leader of the Netherlands’ far-right Party for Freedom, congratulated Britain and Nigel Farage, the head of the far-right U.K. Independence Party, which helped lead the Brexit campaign.
Congratulations Britain!
Congratulations @Nigel_Farage pic.twitter.com/VH7c8cStW0
— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) June 24, 2016
“Hurrah for the British! Now it is our turn. Time for a Dutch referendum! #ByeByeEU,” he tweeted.
Wilders called for a referendum for the Netherlands to leave the E.U. as well — a “Nexit.” Like Le Pen, he pledged to hold a vote if he is elected prime minister in 2017.
“The Dutch would like to be in charge again of their own budget, their national borders and their immigration policy,” Wilders said.
The far-right leader said exiting the E.U. would allow countries to stop “the Islamization of Europe, immigration, the threat of Islamic terrorism that we see growing, the emergence of asylum seekers,” Reuters reported.
Denmark
In Denmark, the far-right Danish People’s Party similarly called for its own referendum.
A spokesperson for the anti-immigrant party congratulated Britons for their “brave” and “correct choice.”
Sweden
Neighboring Sweden saw the same. Jimme Akesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, vowed to “increase our pressure on the government” to have a “Swexit” referendum on E.U. membership.
Italy
Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right Lega Nord party, wrote, “Hurrah for the courage of free citizens!”
“Now it’s our turn,” he tweeted, accompanied by photos of Salvini with other far-right European leaders, including Le Pen, Wilders and more.
LIBERI! Ora tocca a noi! #brexit #renxit #BrexitVote pic.twitter.com/bbJovmPc3l
— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) June 24, 2016
Belgium
Belgium’s Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang was ecstatic about Brexit. At a meeting of far-right anti-E.U. politicians before the vote, member Gerolf Annemans excitedly predicted that it “would be the start of a process that cannot be turned back anymore.”
Germany
Alternative for Germany, a far-right German party, likewise expressed enthusiasm about Britain’s vote.
Frauke Petry, the leader of the anti-immigrant party, insisted that “the time is ripe for a new Europe.”
U.S.
Far-right Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump also applauded the Brexit vote, writing “America is proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a free and independent U.K.”
America is proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder w/a free & ind UK. We stand together as friends, as allies, & as a people w/a shared history.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2016
News that will shock exactly no woman: Female body confidence is at an all-time low
Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in New York, November 13, 2013. (Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson)
It’s hard for me to list the daily challenges of being a woman. Between catcalling, manspreading and the ever-present fear a man might try to rape or kill us, psychological battles are also fought that have nothing to do with the opposite sex and everything to do with how the lens we view ourselves from filters our perspective of the world. From a young age girls are exposed to the idea of having it all. We’re told by our parents, teachers and the media we can be both popular and intelligent, pretty and successful — anything we want. The pressure, however, can be stifling as women try to find a “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” level of just right when it comes to meeting personal and societal expectations.
The Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report was published earlier this week and revealed alarming data in terms of how women of the world perceive themselves. More than 10,000 women from 13 countries were surveyed, and researchers found body confidence is at an all-time low despite the emergence of body-positive media campaigns to promote the acceptance of different shapes and sizes through body diversity.
The data reports nearly 85 percent of women and 79 percent of girls have admitted to opting out of attending important events — such as family gatherings or trying out for an athletic team — when they’re not feeling confident about their appearances, a troubling statistic in the age of FOMO.
Additionally, 7 out of 10 girls said they’re significantly less assertive in other aspects of their lives when they don’t feel confident or comfortable in their skin. An alarming statistic reports 87 percent of women will starve themselves if and when they’re unhappy with the way they look, with 78 percent confirming they feel pressure not to show weakness or vulnerability, or make mistakes.
Beauty and appearance anxiety have an extreme psychological impact, and has yet to be fully studied. With the health risks that stem from starvation or caloric restriction also come emotional challenges. Starvation becomes a form of control, an attempt at stoicism in the face of myriad challenges. To discuss it would mean to admit weakness and make oneself susceptible to accusations of shallowness, and yet our preoccupation with being beautiful, thin and toned enough persists. We fear we’re not enough, but often told we’re too much.
A recent “Ask Polly” article from New York Magazine centered on one woman’s concern she’s “too much” for men. The excuse, that a woman is “too much” of something, has become the modern day version of the old “it’s not you, it’s me” rejection. It’s not uncommon to hear we’re too emotional, too intense, too whatever to satisfy a man or maintain a relationship, like overfilled cups in danger of spilling its contents. The impulse is to correct the behavior, this perceived degree of “too much,” but the problem is that it’s quite difficult to measure. The result, then, is to attempt to take control of the situation and correct this state of too much-ness with something that will somehow reduce it, and the most common method is to limit our caloric intake through starvation in an effort to shrink in size. To make ourselves disappear.
It seems stupid to be so concerned with beauty, but it’s an unfortunate result of how we’re conditioned. The Dove research found an interesting dichotomy in that 60 percent of respondents reported they feel pressured to maintain a certain standard of beauty, while 77 percent value being their own person. Essentially, the sample of women survey believe it’s important to be beautiful, but want it on their own terms.
So how do we achieve this?
Along with other body-positive campaigns in the media, it’s important we talk about body diversity and the severe impact eating disorders can have on our bodies and our minds. Celebrities like Amy Schumer have become advocates for body empowerment, and it’s important that the conversation is extended beyond headlines and social media posts. We need to strike a balance between not only being told — but vehemently believing — we’re either too much or not enough.
Hopefully someday we get it just right.
The Syria dilemma: Dissecting the leaked diplomats memo calling for Obama to get tougher on Assad
Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas)
It has been clear for some time that the Syria conflict was bound to turn into some magnitude of Waterloo for the policy cliques in Washington. It is doing so as we speak. Read into this carefully and you find that you are living through a moment of history.
Prompting this thought is a State Department memorandum intentionally shared last week with the government-supervised New York Times. It is nominally the work of 51 dissenting diplomats none of whom are named — and calls for “a more muscular military posture” in Syria. There is a lot of subtle choreography in this development — the document, the pre-arranged “leak,” the Times’ unusually extensive parse of the memorandum’s language, the staged public debate that ensued. A certain story is being conveyed. It is worth understanding it—providing you understand it is a story and it is being told to advise you of the proper way to think about Syria, what we have done there and what we may do in the future.
Before proceeding further, the “dissent channel” letter provided for publication in the Times is here in draft form. And here is the Times’ careful interpretation of it as carried in Wednesday’s paper.
I urge readers to consider the document and the Times’ analysis with a couple of thoughts halfway back in the mind:
One, you are reading an expression of “frustration, even outrage,” as the Times put it, as those who execute American policy abroad discover they no longer enjoy the limitless prerogative they were trained to expect and exercise. This is the larger interpretation of what has just been put before us, and it is very large. It is at last dawning on the Foggy Bottom set that they are living in the 21st century. The news may arrive bitterly, but those favored in a given era are always going to regret its passing. These we call reactionaries.
Two, Hillary Clinton is likely to be elected Barack Obama’s successor in a few short months. This may seem entirely unrelated to the newly disclosed memo, but in my view just the opposite is the case: Clinton’s anticipated victory in November is what this document is all about.
I will return to both these points.
*
Where were we on the Syria question Thursday, June 15, when State gave the Times a supposedly in-house, diplomat-to-diplomat letter the administration plainly wanted to disseminate to America’s paying-attention minority? What was the state of play?
The C.I.A.’s long-established practice of funding and arming people we ought not have anything to do with long ago exposed the freedom-fighter narrative as the farcical flop watchful people always understood it to be. Regime change—that term we Americans use to avoid honest reference to our actual behavior—did not work out in Syria and, it is now clear, will not. Coups unlawfully backed by a great power have to proceed quickly to succeed: They otherwise turn into swamps—precisely as Syria has for Washington.
The coup de foudre struck on the last day of last September, when Russian jets set out on their first bombing sorties on behalf of the Syrian Arab Army. From that moment to this, it has become ever easier to discern in the Syria conflict the anatomy of a very consequential failure in post–Cold War American foreign policy. There was a reason Moscow’s move prompted Keystone Kops mayhem among the suddenly spluttering policy cliques. The larger implications of the Syria conflict announced themselves that day, and in my read there is no going back from them. We are watching the tide turn on American prerogative, if I have this right, and I cannot see how our frustrated, outraged younger diplomats will retrieve what they were taught to assume as their birthright.
To the extent Washington ever had the initiative in Syria— and that is a question—it had lost it by mid–June. A policy apparently based on what is sometimes called “strategic ambiguity”—usually another term for duplicity—had more or less crashed, the problem being there was never anything ambiguous about it. The Islamic State’s swift rise in Syria obliged Washington to say—always weakly and foggily, never clearly—that it had overcome its obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with fomenting a coup in Damascus. But little since suggests this is so, and the world beyond our shores has taken notice.
Even in the peace talks the U.S. jointly sponsored with Russia last February, it is apparent that removing Bashar al–Assad from power—not defeating ISIS, not creating a space wherein Syrians can determine their future government for themselves—remains the American imperative. Secretary of State Kerry, apparently thinking he could put this over on the Russians and force Assad out of power by way of negotiation, seems to have invested heavily in the Geneva process. But he over-estimated his own wizardry in blurring America’s intentions and under-estimated Moscow’s contempt for Islamists dressed up as “moderates” and hence its commitment to a settlement that leaves Syria to Syrians. So it seems to me. At the mahogany table as in the Syrian desert, it has not worked for the Americans.
This has been my conclusion for some time, but it is plainly shared in Washington by an apparently widening circle. Now comes the memorandum everyone makes a fuss about. How shall we read this peculiar document? What makes it worth thinking about?
In the simplest terms, it argues for the use of force against the Assad government. It advocates “a more militarily assertive use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hardnose U.S.–led diplomatic process.” Stand-off weapons refers to cruise missiles and long-range artillery; air weapons is an apparent reference to a no-fly zone that would effectively ground the Syrian air force. There is no mention, I need to add right away, of the Russian jets still conducting bombing runs in what would be the no-fly zone. As to the diplomatic process just noted, this refers to “talks… to produce a transitional government.” No mention, either, of democratic process or the will of Syrians.
The striking thing is there is nothing new in any of this. In effect, the letter is a classic example of military-force-first policies that are rooted in the Cold War decades and are now standard fare among diplomats and in the international-relations programs wherein they are trained. “What is with all this diplomacy,” the 51 dissenters, who are sharply critical of the Obama administration’s Syria strategy, may as well have asked.
This argument on the Syria question has been evident in Washington for several years. Why is it news now, one has to ask. Why, the day after the Times was handed a draft of the letter, did it lead the paper with this story? This makes no sense to me: A memo complaining diplomats with no power send their superiors via internal mail is not a page 1 lead by any balanced professional measure. So the search for an agenda begins. (There is not, you may wish to note, any kind of hunt on for the man or woman who divulged this “SBU”—sensitive but unclassified—text.)
Two other dimensions of this document are worth noting briefly.
One, the arguments marshaled to justify military intervention in Syria short of a commitment of American troops deserve consideration. There are umpteen mentions of “daily mass killings of civilians,” “egregious violations of human rights” and other such things the Assad government is charged with committing. All, some or none of this may be true, a question addressed in my last column. Whichever is the case, one would have to be dim beyond imagining to take this kind of talk seriously as it emanates from the policy cliques. These are the same people who re-installed the dictatorship in Egypt three years ago to bloody effect and who have nothing to say about Erdoğan’s horror show in Turkey, the Saudi bombings in Yemen or the atrocious violations of rights the Saudis and the Gulf monarchies commit as matters of routine.
A couple of sentences in the letter attracted me for telling us more than they were intended to. “We believe the moral rationale for taking steps to end the deaths and suffering in Syria … is evident and unquestionable,” the dissenters asserted. “The strategic imperatives for taking steps the end the bloodshed are numerous and equally compelling.”
Revealing, as I read it. A rationale is a credible justification, not a reason and not necessarily an authentic motive. The moral dimensions of the Syria crisis are indeed evident and unquestionable, but State’s dissenters, in Washington’s long tradition, are merely attempting to leverage them.
Second point. There are by definition no “strategic imperatives” attaching to “ending bloodshed.” This is just the kind of smudgy, nonsensical language Washington uses to muddle the minds of righteous Americans. Strategic imperatives are the very name of the game in Syria, but they have nothing to do with ending bloodshed. They are to counter the Russians by ousting Moscow’s remaining ally in the Middle East and host to its only Mediterranean naval base. This is great-power rivalry in its 21st century variation—our post–Cold War Cold War, which has nothing to do with humane conduct and everything to do with power.
The arguments advanced in the dissenters’ letter, in sum, are the kind of moral boilerplate that routinely issues from Washington but cannot stand up to even a glancing reference to history. They are certainly not the basis on which policy is determined and executed. As any honest veteran of the State Department will tell you, it is those strategic imperatives that count within the policy cliques—a point so obvious I ought not have to make it. These are not once elaborated in the dissenters’ letter—a point much worth making.
The lesson I draw is simple: This memo simply does not pass as the kind of thing diplomats say to one another. We will never know and I claim no certainty, but public consumption was in all likelihood the reason this document—nicely sexed up with that “SBU” designation—was written. In no wise do I put this kind of ruse past either State or the Times.
*
What are the intentions—stated and unstated—of this memorandum? What does it purport to advocate? Why, once again, is a long-running argument in Washington’s policy circles suddenly punched up into front-page news? And why all the artifice, which I rate as pretty good but not good enough to achieve invisibility?
The letter’s argument is obvious but not without its subtleties. The dissenters—assuming for the moment there are 51 dissenting diplomats at State and this memo was not written by the department’s leadership—think the U.S. should counter the Syrian Arab Army—Assad’s army, the only uniformed military fighting the Islamic State. The S.A.A.’s progress against ISIS has been evident since the Russian bombing campaign began, and this, it is plain, is the problem.
It comes down, once again, to those elusive moderates we never get to see or hear, whose leaders are never invited to Washington and are never on the Sunday morning news shows, whose names and alliances change regularly, whose intentions and ideologies are never made plain in our news reports—and, let us not omit, whose numerous and grotesque human rights violations are never mentioned. Those moderates. To the dissenters, the important thing is “to bolster moderate rebels’ role in defeating Da’esh,” as the Islamic State is also known. They want to “shift the tide in the war against the regime.”
See what is going on here? By their own description these people are not especially concerned about defeating the Islamic State. Its atrocities and dangers, it is worth noting, are never mentioned. ISIS matters only insofar as it bears upon the project as it has always been—the coup-in-Damascus project. The problem since last autumn has been Assad’s progress against ISIS. This is objectionable and must be countered. If there must be progress against ISIS, our moderates must get in on it. Otherwise, the S.A.A. may eventually defeat the Islamic State decisively and Washington’s coup will be yet further off.
Ask yourself: Is this smart? Do these people have clear minds? Their argument is that we must “shift the tide in the war against the regime.” This is the priority and we must think hard about it. The best way to defeat the radical Islamists the regime is fighting, they assert, is to support those fighting the regime (and not, so far as one can make out, the Islamic State, because many of them are also radical Islamists). You may need to read that sentence twice, but I cannot help you this time: Bowl-of-noodles logic such as we have in the memorandum put before us comes out as a bowl of noodles when described.
The larger project, as already suggested, is to regain—or maybe just gain—the American initiative in the Syria conflict. It is “sending a clear signal to the regime and its backers that there will not be a military solution to the conflict,” the letter states. This will be accomplished by forcing, via military intervention, those attempting to negotiate a settlement to accept American preference—its demand that the Assad government be removed without reference to democratic process. “The United States needs to commandeer the negotiations and force Syria to compromise,” as Max Fisher, the New York Times analyst assigned to this letter, puts it.
Got that? Commandeer. And then compromise, you see. We want compromise after we are finished commandeering.
I do not see success inscribed anywhere in this ridiculous excuse for reasoning. I see continued crisis and suffering in Syria and an American policy failure whose implications grow ever larger with every effort to salvage what history incessantly tells us is unsalvageable.
The publication of the dissenters’ letter has been followed by a carefully managed airing of the administration’s views: Vice-President Biden went on the talk shows last Sunday to refute the memo’s contents; David Sanger, the Times’ national security correspondent, subsequently reported on Kerry’s encounter with the dissenters in a meeting held in his office. Plainly the administration intends to put the Syria question before us, but there are a couple of ways to understand why it has chosen this moment to rehash old arguments.
Both of the most plausible explanations have to do with Hillary Clinton’s near-certain success in her presidential campaign, in my read. I do not see how this cannot bear upon the Obama administration’s motives. Read the document. However else one may interpret its thesis, it is a straight-out recitation of Clinton’s position on what to do to resolve the Syrian crisis and retrieve America’s pretensions to global leadership (with which Clinton is obsessed).
It may be that President Obama, who still inclines to diplomacy over force, now seeks to distance himself from Clinton’s decidedly more hawkish plans for American policy in Syria. In effect, this implies he is replying in advance to what he is now more or less certain is coming soon enough after November 8.
Or is the administration courteously preparing the ground for Clinton’s shift into a policy of greater military engagement? This could also be the case.
Alternatively, it could be both of the above, given that these explanations do not necessarily cancel each other out.
Let us watch.
Footnote: This column marks my third anniversary at Salon. With it the byline changes in accordance with my name and confusion readers have mentioned in the mail can be done away with: “Patrick L. Smith” is now Patrick Lawrence.
Shocked about Brexit? Watch UK voters explain why they voted to leave the European Union
(Credit: Guardian)
A majority of voters in the United Kingdom supported a referendum to leave the European Union on Thursday, shocking their fellow countrymen, markets and the world. If like many Americans, you awoke shocked to find hear the news and are now scrambling to get caught up and to find an answer for the “why” of the matter (nobody seems able to answer the “now what”) the Guardian published an eye-opening video on the mood in England on the eve of the historic vote.
In the immediate aftermath of the vote, media coverage has focused on the stark geographical and generational breakdown of the vote. The young, urbanites, Scotts and the Irish generally voted to while the older generation and those residents in suburban and rural areas overwhelmingly voted to leave. But according to an 11-minute video with various voters, the Brexit vote breakdown isn’t as simple as it superficially appears.
“In so many places, there has long been the same mixture of deep worry and often seething anger,” the Guardian’s John Harris, co-host of the online political travel show “Anywhere But Westminster,” notes in the video. “Only rarely has it tipped into outright hate”
Brexit is the consequence of the economic bargain struck in the early 1980s, whereby we waved goodbye to the security and certainties of the postwar settlement, and were given instead an economic model that has just about served the most populous parts of the country, while leaving too much of the rest to anxiously decline. Look at the map of those results, and that huge island of “in” voting in London and the south-east; or those jaw-dropping vote-shares for remain in the centre of the capital: 69% in Tory Kensington and Chelsea; 75% in Camden; 78% in Hackney, contrasted with comparable shares for leave in such places as Great Yarmouth (71%), Castle Point in Essex (73%), and Redcar and Cleveland (66%).
[…]
Of course, most of the media, which is largely now part of the same detached London entity that great English patriot William Cobbett called “the thing”, failed to see this coming.
So here, in their own words, Britons explain why they voted to exit the EU:
Obama, Hillary, Ryan react to United Kingdom’s stunning exit from the EU
President Obama (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
The United Kingdom’s historic vote to leave the European Union, has reverberated around the world. While, obviously, the long-term effect is impossible to predict, pessimism is rampant regarding the futures of both the U.K. and the European Union.
From many U.S. leaders today, however, we’ve heard mostly affirmations regarding U.K.’s “special relationship” with our nation as well as respect for their stunning vote:
— President Barack Obama said in a statement this morning, “The special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is enduring, and the United Kingdom’s membership in NATO remains a vital cornerstone of U.S. foreign, security, and economic policy.”
— Speaker of the House Paul Ryan struck a similar tone, noting his “respect for the decision.” He added, “The UK is an indispensable ally of the United States, and that special relationship is unaffected by this vote.”
— Vice President Joe Biden made basically the same comment, and added at an event in Dublin, “We preferred a different outcome. And I imagine many of you here felt the same way.”
— Hillary Clinton, meanwhile took the opportunity to low-key bash her rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, saying, “This time of uncertainty only underscores the need for calm, steady, experienced leadership in the White House to protect Americans’ pocketbooks and livelihoods, to support our friends and allies, to stand up to our adversaries, and to defend our interests. It also underscores the need for us to pull together to solve our challenges as a country, not tear each other down.”
— A few politicians, a little more outside the establishment, made comments breaking from the respect and special bond mold. Rep. John Lewis, who led the sit-in in the House earlier this week, said on “CBS” This Morning, “I believe it is going to have a devastating effect and amazing impact on the market all around the world.”
— Sen. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and said he saw it as an indication of income inequality. “What I think this vote is about is an indication that the global economy is not working for everybody,” he said. “You know, it’s not working in the United States for everybody, and it’s not working in the U.K. for everybody.”
Celebs couldn’t stop Brexit: J.K. Rowling, Eddie Izzard and more urged Remain — to no avail
J.K. Rowling (Credit: AP/Dan Hallman)
For all kinds of reasons, the decision by British voters to leave the European Union has led to shocked reactions around the world. Part of it is that the vote seems fueled by a kind of xenophobia that seemed to be fading out in Britain. Part of it comes from the fact that polls were predicting a slight victory for remaining in the EU. And part of it comes from the fact that the vast majority of cultural figures and celebrities sided – often quite vocally – to remain as well.
So one of the messages of Brexit may be: Despite a world in which musicians, actors, and bestselling novelists are more visible than ever, and in which social media takes up more time and space in our lives, the political views of artists and entertainers don’t matter that much, in the end. They can start or further a conversation, as some celebrities have done over issues like sexual assault, the law’s treatment of black people, and the availability of handguns. But a popular vote reveals that their influence is severely limited.
There were a handful of exceptions, including Michael Caine, who knocked the “faceless civil servants” in Brussels. But the well-known cultural figures urging Britain to remain included “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling (who wrote about the Leave campaign “benefiting from our widespread cynicism and, unsurprisingly, fanning it”), Steve Coogan, Jude Law, Keira Knightley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Billy Bragg, the band Franz Ferdinand, Hot Chip, Patrick Stewart, visual artist Tracy Emin, Eddie Izzard, and on and on and on.
Why so many arts and entertainment figures on the anti-Brexit side? It’s partly that the worlds of the theater, cinema, music, and so on tend to be culturally liberal. It’s partly because these fields are increasingly international, with artists depending on ease of travel between nations. (In the days after September 11, it was not uncommon for touring cultural groups from abroad to have to cancel or delay performance in the U.S. because of complicated and restrictive paperwork: This could happen to musicians and dance troupes traveling between the U.K. and Europe.)
And it’s also because the British culture industry receives some funding from the European Union. This funding, of course, helps British culture – including non-famous culture makers – in all kinds of ways. Not surprisingly, Britain’s populist right has claimed these figures supported the Leave campaign because they were spoiled, subsidized members of the cultural elite – a notion with a long history in American politics as well.
Why wasn’t the lobbying by actors and others enough to push what was a very close vote into the Remain column? The cultural and economic barriers in the U.K. – the resentment of small-town people, some of them poor, to famous, wealthy people telling them how to vote – may be steeper than the people who did the predicting guessed. In London, the country’s center of finance and culture, Remain drew overwhelming support. But the poorer and more rural parts of Britain, many of which were hit hard by the Great Recession and not treated well by austerity policies, tended to vote Leave. Some of this came from racism or resentment of immigrants. But some of it was, if not entirely rational – because Brexit could hurt them too – at least partly justified by the way the urban, entertainment-and-finance-fueled Britain had overlooked these areas.
The Brexit vote, and the futility of the celebrity and cultural class’s opposition to it, has implications for American democracy of course. Many observers have pointed out the similarities between Brexit voters and Donald Trump supporters. It’s not a perfect parallel, of course. But since those most upset about Trump have often relied on late-night hosts, liberal comedians, and lefty celebrities to attack his candidacy, they may find themselves learning a similar lesson when November comes. Many of us may think “the conversation” all takes place when Amy Schumer or Stephen Colbert weigh in on a subject and set Twitter on fire. But in a popular vote, that may not be enough. There’s another conversation, some of it reasonable, some of it not. And the anti-Trump crowd ignores it at its peril.
