Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 743
June 20, 2016
Danke Schoen! “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is finally getting an official film soundtrack
Matthew Broderick in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (Credit: Paramount Pictures)
Three decades later, writer/director John Hughes’s classic teen comedy, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is finally getting a soundtrack.
Salon noted earlier this month that the film, starring Matthew Broderick, was oddly released without a soundtrack “in the middle years of a decade dominated by movie soundtracks.”
“‘The Breakfast Club’ soundtrack,” wrote Kevin Smokler, “released the year before, had peaked at No. 17, with its theme song ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ by Simple Minds hitting No. 1.”
Tim Greiving, an arts journalist who specializes in film music, told Salon that La-La Land Records, which specializes in movie soundtracks and scores, struck a deal with Paramount Pictures to release an authorized “Ferris Bueller” soundtrack, with songs and score, later this year. The track list is not yet finalized.
Greiving said Hughes’s son James, the film’s music supervisor Tarquin Gotch, composer Ira Newborn, and editor Paul Hirsch were all interviewed for the liner notes, which Greiving has been commissioned to write.
A release date is yet to be determined, but it could happen as early as September.
June 19, 2016
“Star Trek” actor Anton Yelchin dead at 27
Anton Yelchin (Credit: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Anton Yelchin, a rising actor best known for playing Chekov in the new “Star Trek” films, was killed by his own car as it rolled down his driveway early Sunday, police and his publicist said.
The car pinned Yelchin, 27, against a brick mailbox pillar and a security fence at his home in Los Angeles, Officer Jenny Hosier said. He had gotten out of the vehicle momentarily, but police did not say why he was behind it when it started rolling.
Yelchin was on his way to meet friends for a rehearsal, Hosier said. When he didn’t show up, the group came to his home and found him dead.
The freak accident tragically cuts short the promising career of an actor whom audiences were still getting to know and who had great artistic ambition. “Star Trek Beyond,” the third film in the rebooted series, comes out in July.
Director J.J. Abrams, who cast Yelchin in the franchise, wrote in a statement that he was “brilliant … kind … funny as hell, and supremely talented.”
His death was felt throughout the industry.
“He was a ferocious movie buff who put us all to shame,” said Gabe Klinger, who directed Yelchin in the upcoming film “Porto,” likely to be released this fall. “He was watching four or five movies every night — silent movies.”
Yelchin began acting as a child, taking small roles in independent films and various television shows, such as “ER,” ”The Practice,” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” His breakout big-screen role came opposite Anthony Hopkins in 2001’s “Hearts in Atlantis.”
He transitioned into teen roles in films such as the crime thriller “Alpha Dog” and the comedy “Charlie Bartlett.” He also played a young Kyle Reese in 2009’s “Terminator Salvation.”
Yelchin, an only child, was born in Russia. His parents were professional figure skaters who moved the family to the United States when Yelchin was a baby. He briefly flirted with skating lessons, too, before discovering that he wasn’t very skilled on the ice. That led him to acting class.
“I loved the improvisation part of it the most, because it was a lot like just playing around with stuff. There was something about it that I just felt completely comfortable doing and happy doing,” Yelchin told The Associated Press in 2011 while promoting the romantic drama “Like Crazy.” He starred opposite Felicity Jones.
“(My father) still wanted me to apply to college and stuff, and I did,” Yelchin said. “But this is what I wanted.”
The discipline that Yelchin learned from his athlete parents translated into his work as an actor, which he treated with seriousness and professionalism, said Klinger, the director.
He drew on his Russian roots for his role as the heavily accented navigator Chekov in the “Star Trek” films, his most high-profile to date.
“What’s great about him is he can do anything. He’s a chameleon. He can do bigger movies or smaller, more intimate ones,” ”Like Crazy” director Drake Doremus told the AP in 2011. “There are a lot of people who can’t, who can only do one or the other. … That’s what blows my mind.”
Yelchin seemed to fit in anywhere in Hollywood. He could do big sci-fi franchises and vocal work in “The Smurfs,” while also appearing in more eccentric and artier fare, like Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film “Only Lovers Left Alive” and Jeremy Saulnier’s horror thriller “Green Room,” a cult favorite that came out earlier this year.
Klinger recalled a conversation with Jarmusch about Yelchin before Klinger cast him in “Porto.”
“Jim was like, ‘Watch out. Anton read Dostoyevsky when he was like 11 years old!'” Klinger said.
The director said that for Yelchin, every film was an opportunity to learn and study more. He admired Nicolas Cage’s laser-focus on the Paul Schrader film “Dying of the Light” and also got to work with one of his acting heroes, Willem Dafoe, on the film “Odd Thomas.”
“He used to refer to Willem as an artist, not an actor,” Klinger said. “That’s the kind of actor he aspired to be, where people didn’t regard him as an actor, they regarded him as an artist.”
Yelchin’s publicist, Jennifer Allen, confirmed his death and said his family requests privacy.
We need you, Seth Meyers: Don’t ban Donald Trump from your show—take him down
Donald Trump, Seth Meyers (Credit: Reuters/Dominick Reuter/AP/Jordan Strauss/Photo montage by Salon)
Seth Meyers is dumping Trump.
The late night host issued a lifetime ban to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump in response to the billionaire CEO’s announcement that he would be revoking the press credentials of the Washington Post. The loose-lipped businessman has a history of refusing to engage with media outlets critical of his outlandish statements on Muslims and Latinos, whom he has threatened to ban and deport, respectively, from the United States. These outlets include the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Politico, and the Daily Beast, all of whom Trump has blocked from media invite lists.
“As long as the Washington Post is banned from Donald Trump’s campaign, Donald Trump will be banned from ever coming on this show,” Meyers said Wednesday evening. Stating that the CEO’s candidacy is “stoking fear and spreading hate,” the late night host continued: “We instituted this ban despite the fact he’s never been here, or asked to be here, or would ever be caught dead here.”
While Meyers’ stance on not allowing his program to be used as a megaphone for hate speech is commendable, banning Trump isn’t the answer. Recent polls have shown that the more the general public hears what Donald Trump has to say on the issues, the less they like him. While the businessman’s outlandish, xenophobic views attracted interest to his campaign in the primaries, Trump is quickly experiencing a freefall in the general election. His penchant for “telling it like it is” and distaste for “political correctness” might have won him the nomination, but the platform he built may be the very thing that destroys him.
Seth Meyers shouldn’t disinvite Trump. If Meyers really wants to take a stand against hate, he should let him talk until he alienates every single person in America.
As the latest polls show, Trump is digging his own grave with the laser-focused precision of an expert undertaker. Data from RealClearPolitics, which averages election surveys from across the country, shows that the candidate’s support has plummeted in recent weeks. Trump’s popularity recently peaked between May 22 and 25, a brief window in which he actually led presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in national polls. That surge, bolstered by a GOP rallying around its likely contender, rapidly eroded. Currently, Trump is polling with just 38.3 percent in a head-to-head matchup against Clinton. Those are his lowest numbers since last August.
Those are historically low numbers for a man who—in the halcyon days of national Trump Fever—threatened to remake the electoral map in his image.
As the National Review points out, he’s on pace to fare worse than any candidate in the previous three elections. Mitt Romney’s lowest numbers were logged his very first day in the race on February 3, 2011—when he polled at 41.5 percent. Like George W. Bush. He never polled below a 40 percent. John McCain’s worst days as a candidate were between November 23 and 29 in 2007, when he earned just 38.3 percent of likely votes. But after hitting rock bottom, McCain’s campaign surged in the two months following those polls.
Meanwhile, Trump is already on a downward spiral. A recent survey from the Washington Post showed that 70 percent of voters view him unfavorably.
What happened in the past two weeks, you might wonder? On Sunday, Orlando witnessed the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history when an armed shooter gunned down 49 people at Pulse nightclub, a gay bar that served as an oasis for LGBT people in the city. Police speculate that the gunman may have been motivated by an extreme fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. He apparently, though, didn’t know the difference between Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, despite the fact that the three terrorist groups are sworn enemies.
Trump used the shooter’s very tenuous connections to terrorist organizations to congratulate himself for being right about Muslims all along. The CEO has restated his intent, if elected president, to “suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we understand how to end these threats.” He has previously discussed entering U.S. Muslims in a database to track them.
Trump wasn’t even close to being finished. He also admonished Muslims for not doing more to stop the attacks. “They know what’s going on,” Trump said. “But you know what? They didn’t turn them in.” In addition, the candidate suggested that President Barack Obama, whom he criticized for not calling “radical Islam” out directly during his response to the Orlando shooting, may be a terrorist. “[Obama] doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Trump said of the president’s Sunday address. “It’s one or the other. And either one is unacceptable.”
For Trump, these statements make brand sense. During the primary elections, he noted that the more he discussed terrorism—thus, stoking America’s underbelly of racism and Islamophobia—the better he did. “This is a subject that is very dear and near to my heart, because I’ve been talking about it much more than anybody else,” he told NBC News in March. “And it’s probably why I’m number one in the polls.”
That strategy, however, has fared very poorly in the wake of the Orlando shooting. A poll from CBS News showed that the public overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s calls to demonize Muslims. Just 25 percent of Americans said that they felt positively about his response, while a majority said that they disagreed with how he reacted to the crisis. This is partially because few believe it was motivated purely by religious malice. While a majority of Americans labeled the act as both a hate crime and a terrorist attack, more were likely to view Orlando solely as an act of anti-gay hate than one motivated by fundamentalism.
Meanwhile, the same CBS poll showed Americans strongly support stricter gun laws, banning assault weapons, and stricter background checks.
Trump’s “one-hate-fits-all” approach worked well in the primaries, which are a kind of safe space for extremism. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post noted that the more inflammatory his statements got, the more voters supported him.
Let’s face it: Those already converted to Trump’s brand of single-minded bigotry may always remain part of the faithful, right down to election day. But when it comes to appealing to the swing voters and moderates who decide general elections, Trump is electoral poison. The CEO lacks any nuanced analysis of the way the world works, an unappealing quality when you’re trying to cross partisan divides. He is currently being decimated by Clinton in battleground states, where the former Secretary of State is beating him by a solid five points. According to Politico, she’s ahead in eight of the 11 coveted swing states.
Given that Trump has been on an anti-Islamic tirade in the past week, it makes sense that Seth Meyers would want to treat Trump like a drunk at the bar and cut him off. The host’s stance is markedly similar to “no-platforming,” a tactic popular with students in the U.K. Its intent is to “deny fascists, organised racists and other haters the freedom to spread their poison within communities unchallenged,” as Hope Not Hate founder Nick Lowles told The Independent.
The problem is, though, that Trump’s platform is strongest when he remains unchallenged. Were every late night show to disinvite him and every news channel decline to cover him, Trump would still have his 9 million followers on Twitter to console him, a platform that allows him to routinely spout dangerous misinformation and outright lies. The problem isn’t that too many people have been willing to give Trump a platform, but that few have used the platform they have to stand up to him. He was given a free pass by the media for months before the grave danger he poses to every single American was taken seriously.
Should Meyers change his mind, he is in a unique position to use his show to challenge Donald Trump face-to-face. Since taking over late night duties from Jimmy Fallon last year (after the former SNL giggle machine upgraded to Jay Leno’s former chair), he’s become broadcast’s answer to Jon Stewart. But given his own background as an anchor for “Saturday Night Live”’s Weekend Update, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Meyers’ show has been so explicitly political.
In his stint as a host, Seth Meyers has taken on topics like Planned Parenthood, campaign contributions, and House Bill 2, the anti-transgender bathroom law in North Carolina. His take on the latter is actually a valuable explainer to those unaware of why the issue matters to trans folks everywhere. “Fighting over bathrooms is the oldest move in the prejudice playbook,” Meyers said. “America has a long history of using bathrooms to scare people … and politicians are happy to exploit that fear.” After HB 2 was pushed through the North Carolina legislature in March, transgender people were effectively barred from using the public restroom that most closely corresponds with their gender identity.
Meyers’ most famous moment as a host, though, was likely when he invited on former presidential candidate Ted Cruz to discuss a town hall gaffe that quickly went viral on the Internet. While Cruz discussed the threats facing America today, he hyperbolically claimed, “The world is on fire!” A young girl took his statement literally and got very upset. “The world is on fire?” she cried.
In their interview, Cruz clearly believes that he’s there to be chummy with Meyers, as if he were appearing on Jimmy Fallon’s show. Fallon doesn’t challenge his guests. He doesn’t push back. He’s there to make it look like the two of you are best friends and having tons of fun, like the world’s most public slumber party. When Fallon invited Trump on the show last year, the host played Trump interviewing himself in the mirror. “Saturday Night Live” took a similarly puffy approach with Donald Trump, treating him like America’s favorite in-joke. In one sketch, Trump rewrites the Constitution, frequently inserting the word “huge.”
Meyers wasn’t playing nice, however. He was giving Cruz enough rope.
Meyers quips that he hoped that Cruz’s town hall speech was actually an appeal to do something about climate change and that the Texas Republican had finally come around on the issue. “I think the world is on fire—literally,” Meyers said. “Hottest year on record.” The Tea Party favorite quickly launches into his absurd climate change denialism, which sounds no more coherent than the speech that landed him on late night to begin with.
Instead of taking Trump’s mic away, Meyers should treat Trump exactly the same he did Cruz: Turn up the volume as loud as possible. Maybe then those who are still on the fence about him (which is a surprisingly large number of people) will finally hear his racist demagoguery for what it really is.
The courage to let her fly: Sometimes, a dad has to let his daughter soar alone
James Campbell (Credit: Elizabeth Campbell)
Adapted from “Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild” Copyright © 2016 by James Campbell. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
In 2013, James Campbell and his 15-year-old daughter Aidan made their first of three trips to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Campbell chronicles in his book “Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild.” After a month-long cabin building project in the Refuge, they stopped in Talkeetna as a reward to Aidan. There Aidan demonstrates her newfound independence as she makes her first solo adventure, a thrilling plane ride to Denali.
One afternoon we arrived at the Talkeetna Air Taxi (TAT) airstrip for the last flight of the day and saw the mechanics readying the de Havilland Turbo Otter. As we’d hoped, the clouds had burned off, and, according to the woman at the front desk, the mountain was out. Visibility was as good as it had been in weeks. But she warned us that Denali and the other pinnacles of the Alaska Range—a rugged, four-hundred-mile-long chain of snowy peaks, where winds had been clocked in excess of 120 miles per hour—made their own weather. Fair skies could last for days or mere minutes.
The prospect of sending Aidan up alone with a bunch of people she’d never met before made me uneasy, but I had consulted the travel record for TAT online; it was excellent. I had emailed an old Alaskan friend, too, who said they were the best in the business, but then added, “Hope the weather is good. Flying the mountain is a life-changing experience—unless you run into the mountain, then it’s a life-ending experience.” In a follow-up email, he wrote, “Don’t worry about the local air taxis, they haven’t had an incident since Tuesday.”
I don’t mind dark humor, but when it involves my children I usually write the jokester off as an asshole. In this case, however, we had a long-standing friendship. What my buddy was referring to was the crash of a similar plane just the month before in Soldotna, on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. The aircraft, operated by an air charter company, was flying two families, parents and children, to a fishing lodge when it struck the runway and burned shortly after takeoff. All ten people aboard had died.
Aidan had also heard about the crash, but if she was anxious about the flight she didn’t show it. Walking to the plane, she made a half turn and waved good-bye. There was an extra seat on the tour; I had to restrain myself from running into the office and buying it at the last minute. Later it would strike me as melodramatic, but as I watched her move away I wondered if I would see her again.
As the plane sped down the runway I realized that I, like many others, craved the illusion of control, the belief that I could exert influence over every aspect of Aidan’s life. I also realized that I was a hypocrite, plain and simple. Months before, I’d accused my wife, Elizabeth, of “catastrophizing,” of imagining the worst. Now, here I was, consigned to her role of waiting and worrying, allowing dark thoughts to fill my head. And yet, as the pilot lifted the Otter over the trees, I asked myself a simple question: what could I do if the pilot encountered a violent storm or high winds? The answer, of course, was not a damn thing.
Two hours later, I heard the Otter’s engines. The plane touched down and the pilot taxied over to where I was standing. Aidan was one of the last people to exit, and when she did, a smile lit up her face. She practically bounced over to me.
“It was amazing, Dad, beyond anything I ever imagined. I wish you could have been there, too.”
On the way into town she was manic, stumbling over her words, trying to find the language to convey what the experience meant to her, talking at a decibel level that might have made the scree tumble from the nearby mountains. She was joyful. She was not just counting her blessings, she was shouting them to the world.
She turned and spun around with her arms outstretched. “I know why he does it now.”
“Who?” I reply.
“Heimo,” she said, referring to my cousin, whose cabin we’d helped build in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “He feels it.”
I looked at her, trying to follow, and she frowned. “The bliss,” she said. “Up there, flying close to the mountain, I felt like I was filled with nothing but joy. And I still feel it.” She ran away like a colt bolting across a meadow of spring grass.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, sticking her head in the belly of a plywood bear cutout. It read, catch ’em in talkeetna. “Take my picture. Who says I’m afraid of bears?”
It was a cheesy tourist’s photo, the kind that normally wouldn’t interest me. But Aidan was grinning from ear to ear, looking freer, fresher, and perhaps happier than I’d ever seen her.
The fine line between snark and mean: The biting satire of “Odd Mom Out” in danger of dulling
"Odd Mom Out" (Credit: Bravo)
“How can you possibly watch that?” is a question about my Bravo habit that I’m forced to answer with irritating frequency. Having already dissected the broader societal value of Bravo’s slew of reality television offerings, the Real Housewives franchises in particular, I’ve settled on a far simpler go-to response. Because it’s fun. It’s fun to observe wealthy Manhattan or Beverly Hills women in their natural habitats, primping themselves and picking at each other, and to feel completely detached from their petty bickering. And it’s even more fun to do so with friends, to plop down on a couch and dissect, discuss and, occasionally, learn from their behavior over a bottle of cheap wine.
“Odd Mom Out,” one of the channel’s few forays into scripted television, does our work for us. The show, returning for Season 2 on Monday, is loosely autobiographical, with creator Jill Kargman playing lead character Jill Weber. The character Jill is not-your-typical Upper East Side housewife, who vacillates between trying to win the acceptance and approval of her WASP-y sister-in-law Brooke and her friends, and trying to avoid them altogether. Season One’s parodies of our favorite reality stars, much like its slew of pop culture references, were charmingly specific. (One sight gag in season one depicted a mom, reeling from her child’s private kindergarten rejection, hyperventilating into a paper Ladurée bag.) The mockery was so specific to a tiny clique of obviously privileged women that it could hardly be interpreted as demeaning to the female population at large. It felt, much like other Bravo offerings, anthropological.
The same could be said of an episode that pulled Jill out of her supposedly discomfort zone and into Brooklyn. At first charmed by her new, seemingly relaxed surroundings, Jill slowly learned that the rules were different, but just as overbearing, and the moms crunchy, but still, in their own way, tyrannical. The take-away from the episode was, again, also that of its fellow Bravo offerings: rich people are all ridiculous. The episode was crucial because it forced Jill to admit she had a degree of affection for her fellow UES moms, and even some loyalty to them. As viewers, we began to develop something nearing that as well. At times, such as when Brooke dismissed her army of staff just so she could pass gas in private, we even began to pity them.
But the truly glorious innovation of “Odd Mom Out” was the portrayal of Jill’s relationship with best friend Vanessa. In an inversion of television tropes, Jill’s husband Andy serves as a bedrock of stability and a winning side character. Vanessa, in contrast, is Jill’s true partner and confidante, with the two exhibiting behavior that would be annoyingly cutesy or hyper-dependent in a romantic relationship but feels new and refreshing between female friends of a certain age. In turn, Jill and Vanessa’s friendship also provides much of the dramatic tension of Season One. When Jill begins to prioritize Brooke over Vanessa, she pours salt in an open wound by suggesting that her obligations to her relatives constituted “adult” responsibilities, and her obligations to her single, childless best friend are comparably trivial. “I thought I was your family,” a dismayed Vanessa replied. Eventually, Jill came around completely, affirming that platonic friendships can be familial bonds, and that friends are thus entitled to place demands on one another for the cornerstones of any healthy relationship: attention, respect, and time.
The manner in which the two reconciled also affirmed Vanessa’s lifestyle — a professionally successful, satisfied human who isn’t especially interested in meeting a man or having kids. Her strains of self-doubt stem less from internal frustration than the sneering judgment of strangers and subtle diminution of loved ones which accompany that lifestyle, and so she occasionally needs reassurance that she’s doing just fine. (Last season saw such support coming from unexpected sources in unexpectedly moving moments.) When Vanessa, reeling from Jill’s charge of immaturity, called up an old flame, the show faced the danger of entering cliché territory. Instead, she later shrugged off her newly acquired date for the evening but beamed with excitement and pride about acquiring a new apartment.
Such empowering moments, unfortunately, present a contrast to the season 2 premiere, whose satirical portrayals are less pointedly specific. Some are even hackneyed tropes. When Jill returns to her old office to meet with her former assistant Kate, the assistant learns she’s been fired. “I gave this place my twenties. And my thirties. I have no husband, no kids, no sex life,” she shouts. “And I’m losing my hair!” Kate adds, weeping as she tears out her extensions. Read generously, these difficult moments are meta satire on pop culture portrayals of women, or a statement about the constant, impossibly high standards for women in and out of the workplace, and the inevitable futility of trying to meet them. But such readings are very generous indeed, and it’s hard not to begrudgingly acknowledge that the premiere teeters toward the misogynistic and, perhaps more cringe-inducing, mean.
There are, however, reasons to be hopeful. Brooke’s character development this season, in which she successfully launches a line of handbags, serves as a nice reminder that stay-at-home moms can also be savvy and resilient. Though she is being, realistically, bankrolled by her ex, she’s also smart and tough and, as even Vanessa must admit, quite good at this. Jill, on the other hand, is told by her former boss – another stereotype straight out of “The Devil Wears Prada” who complains that her assistant cries when she hits her – that her work lacks “moxie” or “balls.” Brooke’s seamless entry into a world Jill is struggling to reclaim her place in might prompt some internal reflection from our heroine.
We saw suggestions last season that Jill’s insecurity tends to manifest itself as meanness, always in the form of snide side-commentary. Like Brooke, she was occasionally a bully, just a less honest one. Jill’s growth as an artist might also result in some personal growth and introspection in episodes to come. One hopes we do get to watch her develop some balls, and channel her side snark into creative output. If “Odd Mom Out” chooses to navigate this terrain, it will continue its streak of originality: middle-aged female characters are rarely afforded space to privilege their self-exploration and redefinition within the very real confines of their everyday lives and the “adult responsibilities” they entail. It is, unfortunately, a realm where scripted is but a reflection of reality.
4 music videos that make domestic violence look very pretty
There is nothing romantic about domestic violence — though we’ve noticed a trend in music videos where violence looks more like “being in love” than it should. Earlier this year Hozier released a video for their song “Cherry Wine” that used ethereal filters and soft lighting and featured birds chirping throughout the video. The effect was a romanticized version of what violence is actually like. Other music videos in recent years also make domestic abuse look a little too pretty for comfort— watch our roundup of some of the worst offenders.
Innuendo, conspiracy and outright delusion: The bizarro “truth” according to Donald Trump
Donald Trump delivers a campaign speech about national security in Manchester, New Hampshire, June 13, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder)
After the carnage in Orlando, Donald Trump didn’t wait long before launching yet another guided missile full of insinuation. He didn’t exactly say that the massacre was the doing of an unreconstructed Mau-Mau descendant born in Kenya. Trump is craftier than that. Monday morning, he told Fox News:
Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on… [Obama] doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other and either one is unacceptable. [My italics]
Later he told NBC’s Today’s Savannah Guthrie:
… There are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. He doesn’t want to see what’s really happening. And that could be. [My italics]
Something else in mind… Can’t believe it… There’s something going on… Maybe he doesn’t want to get it… People cannot believe… A lot of people think… These are Trump’s characteristic high-frequency whistles, repeated and restated and re-repeated to make sure he gets through to the feebler dogs out on the periphery of his adoring crowd.
There are two intertwined strands to the Trump brand of insinuation. One is that traitors have crept into our midst. They are Muslims, Mexicans and other alien inhabitants of Trojan horses, aided and abetted by those who cover up for them, who reassure you that these sinister forces are harmless.
The second strand is that Trump speaks for a movement of folks who get it. He’s not just the leader who glimpses the buried truth. The leader, after all, has the wisdom to channel the “people,” the stouthearted ones, the deprogrammed, those brave souls who can handle the awful truth, who all together will rise to strip the masquerade bare, to evict the aliens — along with corrupting serpents — so as to restore Edenic greatness. The truth that matters, in all fascist and para-fascist movements, is the truth that the savior-masters have unearthed.
In the minds of circle of the adepts, there’s always “something going on” — the inside story that compactly explains the apparent mysteries of the world. What’s “going on” is always deep and dark. A special craft of intelligence is required to discern it. They, the conspirators, either are invisible to the official channels of information, who are at best naïve — at worst, complicit — because they ignore the common sense of the common folks who do get it.
In this view, official opinion is made up by know-it-alls who really know nothing, because they have an interest in concealment. They’re cover-up artists, the liberal-mainstream-lamestream media and their elite pals. They suppress the knowledge that, against all odds, the circle of deep knowers have patiently scraped together. It takes a special brand of astuteness to join the ranks of the adepts, to get down with the connoisseurs of the International Communist Conspiracy and the grassy knoll and the “false flag” and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Jews who stayed home from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Here are words out of Trump’s mouth, to Bill O’Reilly, in 2011:
I’m a very smart guy. I went to the best college. I had good marks. I was a very smart guy, good student and all that stuff. Because what they do to the birthers, which is a term I hate because a lot of these birthers are just really quality people that just want the truth.”
We get it. They don’t. They refuse to. Because — well — you know about them…
Conspiracy nuts despise official knowledge. What they relish is their own knowingness. Just when you think you’ve refuted their canards, they dance away. One mark of this sort of conspiracy theory is that it never says die. Blocked at the end of one cul-de-sac, it reverses field and rushes off to find another one. So, during his effort in 2011 to force Obama to present his birth certificate to prove his citizenship, Trump implied to Fox News that the reason for the president not showing it was “because maybe it says he is a Muslim.”
Having lifted that rock, Trump couldn’t let it go undisturbed. Just this February, he tweeted: “I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a Mosque?” Well, he didn’t say Obama was a Muslim, did he? He only implied that Obama has a special feeling for Muslims. Which takes us straight to his insinuations about Orlando.
Fortunately for the Trumps of the world, they have their own efficient, instantaneous, echo chambers at their disposal. They delude themselves that what other people think doesn’t matter, because they are deafened by the applause that reverberates through their own arenas.
This doesn’t mean that what mainstream media say and don’t say, expose and fail to expose, are irrelevant. Writing in The Washington Post, Paul Waldman goes too far when he laments that mainstream media exposés are now helpless because there is no single media figure who has the audience or the stature that Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite had. But the multiplication of sources hasled to a Balkanization of information — there’s no common text among voters that functions the way the evening news functioned a half-century ago. Further, the profusion of opinion available to everyone means that there’s no perspective or analysis, no matter how extreme, to which the public doesn’t have access.
As I noted last week, a good many journalists are at long, long last finding their ways through the conundrum of how to cover a serial liar without covering up. Untruths that passed unchallenged as run-of-the-mill Republican rhetoric during the primaries have now slipped into what the media scholar Daniel Hallin has called “the sphere of legitimate controversy.” Reporters are not so fearful of highlighting and challenging Trump’s steady assaults on truth. Investigative reports are catching up with his past of deception, greed and fraud. One reads this, for example, by Jenna Johnson in The Washington Post:
For months, Trump has slyly suggested that the president is not Christian and has questioned his compassion toward Muslims. Years ago, Trump was a major force in calls for the president to release his birth certificate and prove that he was born in the United States. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly stated as fact conspiracy theories about the president, his rivals and Muslims, often refusing to back down from his assertions even when they are proven to be false.
No wonder Trump just took the step of revoking the Post’s credentials for upcoming events. He made this decision before the Post did him the favor of this weasely headline: “Donald Trump spreads unproven theories.” Not “unproven” — false and crackpot!
What took journalists so long to rise to the occasion? Aside from normal, everyday deference, false equivalencies and the fear of being seen as knowing too much (aka “partisanship”), mainstream journalists suffered from lack of material from campaign rivals. The New Republic’s Brian Beutler usefully explains that one reason journalists failed to puncture so many of Trump’s hot-air balloons is that they weren’t getting any help from other candidates’ opposition — or “oppo” — research:
Political reporters have done a pretty good job unearthing the unflattering details of Trump’s past, but they can only do so much on their own. If the media could document everything untoward every candidate had ever done, campaigns and advocacy groups wouldn’t employ opposition researchers. But there’s a reason they do: In general, campaigns outgun and outpace the press at investigating rival candidates (particularly with respect to archival information that can’t be found online, and that requires expertise to obtain and decipher). They have more resources, no daily print deadlines and no need to worry about impartiality.
…[R]epublican campaigns and anti-Trump activists did an absolutely abysmal job sifting through his dirty laundry between June 2015 and today… [F]or too long, most Republicans mistakenly assumed Trump would collapse on his own… They were also inhibited from attacking his wealth (or lack thereof), his tax avoidance and his barking-mad tax reform plan, because that would contradict fundamental conservative dogma: that taxes are terrible, that they can’t be cut enough and that the wealthy are wise to pay as little as possible.
Most Republicans were loath to attack Trump in any meaningful way at all, until it was too late, because they didn’t want to alienate the front-runner and his millions of supporters.
Can millions of supporters be wrong? As Lindsey Graham said in December: “[T]here’s about 40 percent of the Republican primary voter[s] who believes [sic] that Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim.”
The freak show is not over. Fatuous commentaries and foolish questions still resound through cable TV land. On Fox, Howard Kurtz opined that “it probably would have been better if Trump had let one of his aides or surrogates” make the points the candidate made that he was “right on radical Islamic terrorism” and, “I said this was going to happen—and it is only going to get worse.” Not better in the sense of more revealing of the actual sentiments of the putative Republican nominee — better in the sense of less damaging to Trump’s reputation, such as it is. No doubt more advice to Trump about how to airbrush his dirty pictures will be forthcoming in days to come.
Trump’s lies aren’t unique to America: Post-truth politics are killing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic
Boris Johnson, Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Matt Dunham/LM Otero)
“There was a time, not long ago, when we would differ on the interpretation of the facts. We would differ on the analysis. We would differ on prescriptions for our problems. But fundamentally we agreed on the facts. That was then. Today, many feel entitled to their own facts.”
So said Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, in a speech he gave to Temple University’s newest Media and Communication graduates not two weeks ago. Baron was talking about a new form of politics that’s been taking hold, a kind that brings into question the prospects of these hopeful future journos, a kind that threatens democracy as we know it.
As Donald Trump makes another one of the countless absurd claims he’s made during his campaign (this time, following what happened in Florida last weekend, we’re to believe Barack Obama supports ISIS), on the other side of the Atlantic potential future Prime Minister Boris Johnson continues to stoke voter immigration fears. Now, his campaign is assuring fellow Britons that a vote to Remain in the European Union will see Turkish migrants flooding across the border.
Neither of these claims are true. It should go without saying that the president of the United States takes no pleasure in a man massacring 49 of his fellow Americans in Orlando, while the chances of Turkey ever joining the EU are slim to non-existent. All the same, these two politicians are popular – immensely so – because they’ve discovered they can reach the top simply by inventing their own versions of the truth. For various reasons, not only are they getting away with cooking up their own “facts,” but Trump and Johnson are as a result of their fabrications gaining new supporters all the time. He didn’t use the term in his Temple speech, but there’s a name for what Marty Baron was talking about: post-truth politics.
The danger today is that the most unscrupulous of politicians, figures with a real contempt for the electorate, are the ones most likely to exploit voters in the post-truth era. Enter Donald Trump and the Leave campaign. Trump and Leave, headed up by Boris Johnson, are but products of this new system, pushing bigger and bigger fibs and always finding there are zero repercussions for deceiving the electorate – not when the media and the voters fail to sufficiently hold them to account.
The information age hasn’t yet liberated us quite like it could have done. We live today in a world where all the facts we could ever need or want are readily available to us in seconds flat, at the clack of a few keys. In the age of the internet every single one of us can personally hold our politicians to account, cutting out the media middle man by acting as our own fact-finders. It’s increasingly clear, however, that many of us aren’t necessarily interested in facts.
Chris Cillizza at The Independent argues that there has been a “death of the belief in fact” for a number of reasons. There are two major factors: 1) we increasingly self-sort ourselves into like-minded communities (whether physically or online, or both), and 2) despite all our choice, we insist on visiting sites and watching shows that affirm views we already hold. According to Cillizza, this results in a “siloing effect” in which one can “go through each day as a well(-ish)-informed person without ever hearing a sliver of news that contradicts what you already believe.” Would so many continue to support Trump if they just looked out their own window for an hour, and discovered he was lying through his teeth on an almost daily basis? Most likely not.
Still, we aren’t solely the ones at fault. Back in February, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, citing Trump as “damn good” for business, was quoted as saying: “It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” The bottom line hasn’t been whether or not Trump and his regularly wild statements deserve the air time, but whether he helps turn a profit. Moonves and many other network execs have done very well this presidential season thanks to Trump, so they’ve given him $2 billion in free coverage. The media helped to create Donald Trump by insisting that whatever he said, no matter how outrageous, was worth airing, thus giving import to his nonsense. Even if there has been scrutiny of the Trump campaign, most notably from political comedians (often doing more impactful journalistic work these days than the full-time journalists), what Trump supporter – assured for years by a paranoid right-wing press not to trust anything from the mouths of liberals – would think to believe it?
So, we now have Trump competing to enter the White House; we have Britain potentially about to leave the EU despite the vast majority of experts advising voters against it. Voters in the UK, as in the US, have very little faith in the so-called experts anymore, and without proper scrutiny from a media more interested in turning the Brexit battle into a spectator sport, the Leave campaign is winning voters based on fallacies it peddles and promotes. This is the post-truth system: our least honest politicians tell untruths, and the media – the prism through which many of us still view this world – too often declines to correct them.
For example, when UK headlines had Leave claiming Britain was under threat from a wave of Turkish settlers, it was not widely reported that Turkey – far from being a contender for EU membership – meets only one of the 35 criteria required to join, and that member states like Greece and Cyprus would almost certainly veto the country joining regardless. Nor was it mentioned that Leave leader Johnson had only recently campaigned FOR Turkey to join the EU, or the fact that Johnson, so terrified of those dastardly Turks, is himself part-Turkish, the great-grandson of an Ottoman journalist named Ali Kemal. Proper reporting of such facts would, of course, have undermined Johnson and the Leave campaign. The press, however, remained largely silent on those things.
Such inaction has helped give rise to a dangerous new form of politician. Surely little good can come of post-truth politics from here on out. As long as such behaviour is deemed acceptable, we shouldn’t be surprised that our leaders continue to be so flippantly untruthful. As long as the media declines to hold post-truth politicians to account, and as long as we fail to do the job ourselves, there will only continue to be a disconnect between the truth and what the general electorate believes. There will be consequences. Donald Trump may become the next President of the United States, and Britain is quite probably about to exit the European Union. It could get worse than that.
On Thursday, in the UK, we perhaps saw how post-truth politics can prove fatal, when Jo Cox – a Labour MP – was killed by a man yelling “Britain first,” a rallying cry for those who believe that immigration into the country is too high. Cox had used some of her brief time spent in politics campaigning on behalf of refugees and migrants, but in an environment where the more deceitful politicians and media have convinced the electorate that immigration figures are double what they actually are, she was, to some, the enemy. It could be argued – indeed, it has already been argued – that Jo Cox was killed because lies and exaggerations from up above have taken hold as hard facts. What else might happen simply because the truth is no longer being heard?
“We are not a threat to you”: A video diary of people living with HIV
It is somewhat common knowledge in the United States today that contracting HIV is no longer a death sentence and that people can live healthy, active and long lives with the virus.
Still, negative stigmas and misinformation remain and many HIV positive people feel that while treatments and science around the virus have advanced in leaps and bounds over the last twenty years — attitudes about HIV remain stuck in the past.
“Most people in terms of the general public have an understanding of HIV from 20 years ago,” said Alex Garner who tested positive in 1996.
Today more than 1.2 million people are living in the United States with HIV and even though the majority of the population knows that using protection during sexual contact can help stop the spread of the virus there are still about 50,000 people that get infected with HIV each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. Only 39.5 percent of American adults age 18 and older have received an HIV test at some point in their lives.
“You want to end HIV right now?” Mark S. King, who tested positive in 1985 said, “Then go get an HIV test.”
“That is still the greatest tool that we have,” he added. “Is for people to know their status and to continually know it if you’re negative, to continually get tested.”
Salon interviewed nine people from all walks of life who are living with or affected by HIV. One man contracted the disease when he was in sixth grade through contaminated blood products used to treat his hemophilia, another was told he had three years to live but has been living with the virus for three decades, and one woman kept her status quiet for ten years before becoming an active voice in the movement to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS.
For all of them, the act of speaking out about their status was a necessary step in living an authentic life with HIV.
“Until, as a population, we can stand up united and say out-loud ‘we are HIV+’ we’re not going to shift the conversation,” Richard Cordova, who credits the virus with turning his life around, has run eight marathons, participated in the California AIDS Ride, and completed the Chicago AIDS ride three times (a two-day, 200 mile cycling event). “So you’re not going to sit there and tell me that this is the end of your life,” Cordova added, “because you know what, the same disease that’s in your body is in mine.”
Gwenn Barringer, Richard Cordova, Shawn Decker, Frank Fraioli, Alex Garner, Mark S. King, Jack Mackenroth, Maria “HIV” Mejia and Adam Sank were interviewed for this video.
Criminalizing poverty: Homeless in Harlem complain of NYPD harassment
(Credit: AP/Seth Wenig)
Living on the streets of East Harlem, Jazmin Berges wasn’t surprised to watch NYPD officers dump her belongings into a garbage truck. It was last summer, and police had demanded that she and her friends, sitting in Marcus Garvey Park, leave. When Berges, according to her account, protested that they weren’t causing any trouble, officers told her to “shut up;” they then confiscated a pushcart containing her clothes, blankets and a Bible, and destroyed it. Berges didn’t interfere. She knew they would have arrested her had she tried.
Advocates say that Berges’ experience is commonplace amid a widespread police crackdown in the neighborhood.
“The police department can be very cruel at times,” says Berges, a member of Picture the Homeless who spent years on the streets of East Harlem, a neighborhood where rapid gentrification is colliding against a large homeless population. “It’s gone. It’s crushed. It’s a garbage truck.”
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(Jazmin Berges)
In May, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint on behalf of Picture the Homeless with the city’s Commission on Human Rights alleging that the NYPD last summer launched “a concerted effort to disrupt East Harlem’s community of street homeless people by ordering them to ‘move along’ when they violated no laws and were merely present on streets, sidewalks, and in other public spaces.” When someone, like Berges, “refuses to comply or expresses disagreement with the order, officers often threaten or carry out arrests, ticketing, removals to psychiatric hospitals, or destruction of their property.”
The crackdown appears to stem from official policy. According to the complaint, officers from East Harlem’s 25th Precinct have told Picture the Homeless members and staff that police superiors instructed them to issue “move along” orders during roll call and that Mayor Bill de Blasio “wants the area cleaned up.”
Responding to an interview request, de Blasio spokeswoman Monica Klein emailed that “The City respects the rights of our homeless New Yorkers and has put in place a new comprehensive plan to reduce homelessness.” A spokesperson for the Commission on Human Rights says that the complaint is being reviewed.
If there is such a policy, however, it would dovetail with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s longtime embrace of “broken windows” policing, which holds that cracking down on small-scale quality of life issues helps bring down more serious crime. Beginning last summer, The New York Post began to hammer the mayor for letting street homelessness run wild. It hit de Blasio where he was weak, and alongside fear-mongering about a nonexistent crime surge became a key talking point in a conservative campaign to paint the mayor as a feckless liberal returning New York to the bad old days.
The Post’s headlines included: “Bums think de Blasio is the best mayor ever,” “Third World diplomats say NYC is grosser than the Third World,” “Going to the park? Don’t trip on a bum,” “Squeegee man is city’s latest blast from the past,” and “Cops part sea of bums in Harlem ahead of papal visit.”
By August, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was boasting that he’d personally visited a police precinct to complain about a homeless man on his street. Giuliani, by his own account, chided the cops: “You chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em, and they either get the treatment that they need or you chase ’em out of the city.” Meanwhile, one police union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, urged members to take pictures of homeless people—and uploaded them online.
On Sept. 2, the hysteria took on more a respectable guise as The New York Times reported that 125th St. “between Park and Lexington Avenues appears at times to be a street of zombies” thanks to the large numbers of homeless people high on a synthetic cannabinoid called K2.
Bratton and the mayor took notice. The police commissioner announced the creation of a new unit to attack homelessness in East Harlem, and law enforcement cracked down on K2, driving it out of East Harlem bodegas. Three weeks after the original K2 story was published, a Times article by the same reporter marveled at “the sudden spotlight on the one-block stretch.”
By November, de Blasio appeared to be on the defensive, saying the administration had made a major mistake in its approach to homelessness—or at least to communicating that approach to the public. Polls showed de Blasio’s support plummeting, especially amongst whites, with many citing homelessness and crime as major concerns. The media-fomented scandal tarnished de Blasio’s image. But it’s not clear that Bratton, who seemed to stoke public criticism without his boss’s permission, took issue with the media campaign: it ultimately gave him more leeway to double down on his favored policing methods.
In January, the NYPD circulated a memo directing officers on how to deal with encampments and “hot-spots of homeless persons,” which were defined as “outdoor locations where two or more individuals are gathered without a structure,” including “parks or other popular areas where homeless individuals convene.”
Officers were instructed to deal with encampments and hot-spots only in coordination with a multi-agency task force, and to confiscate and voucher “reasonably small” items if a person would not remove them from the scene on their own. Larger or hazardous items were to be discarded. While the memo seemed directed at ensuring that police did not discard important personal items like medication and identification, it also served to confirm that a large-scale program to target homeless people was underway.
Bratton recently took to the pages of the conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal to defend broken windows in an article co-authored by one of its principle architects, George L. Kelling.
“Apart from the deterrent effect that minor arrests may have on individual offenders, the management of public spaces to reduce disorderly behavior also lessens daily opportunities for crime,” Bratton and Kelling wrote. “Just as disorder encourages crime, order breeds more order.”
It’s unclear, however, why policing would deter someone from being homeless: it’s not a way of life that most actively seek out.
In response to a request for an interview with an NYPD official, Salon received this curt response by email: “The NYPD’s outreach services and interactions involving the homeless are carried out in a lawful and appropriate manner.”
**
If the problem were really about K2, that problem now seems to be mostly gone: homeless people report that a crackdown on bodega sales has all but dried up the supply. That aggressive policing targeting homeless people continues suggests that the crackdown might have been more pretext than noble cause.
“K2 is simply being used as an excuse to try to make it seem to the public that these people are deserving of mistreatment and abuse,” says Alyssa Aguilera, co-executive director of the advocacy group VOCAL-NY, criticizing the police rhetoric around K2 as sensational and overblown.
As for Berges, she says that police told her to move every day when she was on the streets, even as she obsessively focused on her hygiene, carefully planning when and where to shower and do laundry, in an effort to not look homeless and not get hassled. Police always asked her to move. But she had nowhere to go.
“That’s the problem,” says Berges, who recently moved into transitional housing and hopes to soon find an apartment of her own. “We were always walking; we were always moving. We would get tired, we would sit on the train and just ride until we weren’t tired.”
On Park Ave., just below the Metro-North tracks, a group of homeless black men recently shared stories of police harassment just after an NYPD van pulled away from the curb.
“They told us we can’t be sitting here, we gotta’ move,” says Jamyles, 43, who believes that he has an open warrant stemming from K2.
“Police is constantly out here criticizing people, saying things and telling us where we can’t sit, where we can sit,” he says. “And it’s not necessary… We on the struggle. We homeless.”
“It doesn’t matter where we go, they always coming and tell us to move,” says another homeless man, who assumes he has an open warrant, probably stemming from an open container. “Any chance they get, they try to give us tickets… Many of us don’t even go to court because there are so many tickets.”
Police in cities around the country have cracked down hard on homeless people on the streets in recent years, as the number of visibly homeless people has soared alongside housing prices, says Megan Hustings, the interim director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “Homelessness services funding has not kept up with the need nationally.”
In New York, the number of homeless people in shelters began to grow during the Giuliani administration, fluctuated for most of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s time in office, and then skyrocketed after Gov. Andrew Cuomo cut rental subsidies, and Bloomberg eliminated the program, in 2011.
The result, according to advocates, was a booming number of people in shelters and a smaller number, lacking access to housing, mental healthcare, and other supports, who make their home on the streets. While de Blasio is pursuing investments in supportive housing, his administration still relies on policing in a futile effort to make that all-too-visible tip of a much larger crisis disappear.
“What we’ve seen is that these laws have led to an ongoing dehumanization of people experiencing homelessness,” says Hustings. She says that police have “become the first response to homeless as opposed to social services or housing or other sorts of humane response.”
The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty reports that bans on sleeping, loitering, camping and panhandling skyrocketed between 2011 and 2014 even as funding for homeless services and housing has failed to meet the need. The crackdowns effectively criminalize the mere status of being homeless.
Bernard Harcourt, a political theorist and policing expert at Columbia Law School, emails that this reflects a “recurring problem in the city of turning social problems into policing disorders. It’s chronic and the cost typically falls on the most vulnerable and marginalized in our communities… The problem is that we’ve turned the police, institutionally, into the default, go-to responders. In large part, it’s because they have enforcement authority, which speeds up the interaction. The trouble, fundamentally, is that we don’t seem, as a society, to have the social patience to deal with social issues through social processes.”
In Los Angeles, the city has been locked in long-running legal battles over measures to shut down encampments and confiscate belongings. Last year, Honolulu began what its mayor has called a “war on homelessness” but that actually looks a lot more like a war on homeless people: closing parks at night, banning sitting and lying on sidewalks and breaking up a large homeless encampment. Homeless people sued the city, according to the Washington Post, alleging that the city illegally confiscated and destroyed medicine, identification and food.
Maria Foscarinis, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty’s executive director, says that de Blasio has generally moved homelessness policy in the right direction.
“This is striking to me in New York City because the mayor actually has a pretty good plan” to deal with homelessness by investing in housing, says Foscarinis. “Pursuing criminalization at the same time is at cross purposes with that plan.”
In New York, city data show that the enforcement of low-level offenses has declined significantly in recent years: by 2015 criminal summonses fell 45 percent since 2009 and marijuana arrests were down 69 percent since 2011. But critics say that enforcement is still too aggressive, and summonses for public consumption of alcohol remained high as of 2014. In East Harlem, homeless people say that open warrants for small-time offenses are the norm.
“The NYPD is still deeply committed to the broken windows theory and the mayor has reinforced this, and of course Bratton has reinforced this, so the fact that we might see some aggressive policing toward homeless people comes as no surprise,” says Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and expert on policing and homelessness.
Jose, an immigrant from Mexico lying on the grass in Marcus Garvey Park, says that police make his already rough life much worse.
“You do nothing and they give you a ticket for nothing,” he said, speaking in Spanish and looking much older than his professed 27 years. He complains that police kick him in the legs to roust him from sleep, and estimates that he has received five tickets in the last two months. There is a warrant out for him but what can he do? He can’t pay the fines. The NYPD seems to want homeless people out of East Harlem without much an idea as to where they should go.
“The NYPD does not have the right to tell anyone to move off of public space,” says Berges, sitting at a McDonald’s in the Bronx, near her transitional apartment. “That’s why it’s public space. And there is no law against homeless people sitting or occupying public space.”
