Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 775

America’s mad cowboy disease: The Bundys’ lunacy has infected our state governments

Ammon Bundy (Credit: AP/Rick Bowmer)

It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.

Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and won’t soon go away. Last winter’s armed take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadn’t been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called “terrorists” and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership — or at least that of their leaders, since they weren’t exactly a band of intellectuals — was only loosely linked to reality.

At least some of them took inspiration from the notion that Jesus Christ wrote the Constitution (which would be news to the Deists, like James Madison, who were its actual authors) and that it prohibits federal ownership of any land excepting administrative sites within the United States — a contention that more than two centuries of American jurisprudence has emphatically repudiated.

The troubling thing is that similar delusions infect pockets of unrest throughout the West, lending a kind of twisted legitimacy to efforts at both the state and national level to transfer western public lands to states and counties. To be sure, not all the proponents of this liquidation of America’s national patrimony subscribe to wing-nut doctrines; sometimes they just use them.

Greed can suffice to motivate those who lust for the real estate bonanzas and resource giveaways that would result if states gained title to, say, the 264 million acres presently controlled by the Bureau of Land Management(BLM). General combativeness and hostility toward government also play their roles, and the usual right-wing mega-donors, including the Koch brothers, pump money into a bewildering array of agitator groups to help keep the fires of resentment burning.

The louder the drum chant of crazy “facts” gets, the more the Alice-in-Wonderland logic behind them threatens to seize the popular narrative about America’s public lands — how they came to be and what they represent.  This, in turn, prepares the way for the betrayal of one of the nation’s deepest traditions and for the loss of yet more of its natural heritage. Conversely, those who value American public lands have been laggard in articulating an updated vision for those open spaces appropriate to the twenty-first century and capable of expressing what the unsettled “fruited plains” and “purple mountain majesties” of the West still mean for our national experience and our capacity to meet the challenges of the future.

The Malice at Malheur

The leaders of the Malheur occupation, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, are the sons of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher and public lands scofflaw who gained notoriety two years ago following a standoff with federal law enforcement officers. Back in the 1990s, the elder Bundy had stopped paying grazing fees, claiming that the federal government had no authority to regulate the public lands where his cattle fed. In 2014, with Bundy $1.1 million in arrears and his grazing permits transferred to the local county government, the Bureau of Land Management moved to round up and confiscate his 400 head of cattle.

Via social media, Bundy appealed to militia and “patriot” groups for support, and hundreds of armed resisters rallied to his ranch 90 miles north of Las Vegas. When the ensuing showdown threatened to become a bloodbath like the Waco siege of 1993, the authorities withdrew.

The government’s retreat and its failure to arrest members of the Bundy family or their allies for acts of armed resistance set the stage for the Malheur takeover, but the roots of the incident go back to the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use Movement that succeeded it. The Sagebrush Rebellion was triggered by a national inventory of public lands to identify areas appropriate for designation as “wilderness” (under the National Wilderness Preservation System).  Its advocates also protested the enforcement of government protections for archaeological sites and endangered species. Wise Use groups echoed those complaints and essentially argued against anything the environmental movement was for, urging the amped-up exploitation of natural resources on western lands.

Ammon Bundy put his own rogue-Mormon spin on that message by claiming divine inspiration and sanction for his actions. Ostensibly, the Malheur occupation was intended to show support for nearby ranchers Dwight and Stephen Hammond, who faced jail terms for setting illegal range fires (and who immediately distanced themselves from the occupation). But Bundy didn’t stop there. He called on “patriots all over the country” to join his cause and help “free up” federal land for ranching, mining, and logging, pointedly adding, “We need you to bring your guns.”

Malheur was an odd place for white guys to make a stand in favor of “returning” federal land to its “rightful owners” — that is, themselves. The refuge was established in 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt declared a modest area of public domain to be a wildlife refuge. If anyone then occupied the land, it was members of the Burns Paiute tribe, not white settlers. In the 1930s, the refuge expanded when the government bought the bankrupt remnants of a former cattle baron’s empire. At the time, Malheur was its own mini-Dust Bowl. The purchase, which enlarged protection for once-fabulous wetlands supporting thousands of migrating birds, was essentially a bailout.

The people who joined the Bundys in the Malheur occupation were a strange lot. Few had any relationship to ranching or actual cows, aside from sitting down to eat a hamburger. Some were ex-military; others claimed to be (but weren’t). Quite a few had links to Tea Party groups or to “patriot” organizations including the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and an assortment of other militia outfits. One described himself as “an old hippie from San Francisco,” jazzed by the excitement of the occupation and uncaring about its purposes. He also happened to be a convicted murderer (second degree) — of his father.

Straight thinking was not a requirement for admission to the occupiers’ cause. The fellow who photogenically rode his horse around the refuge while displaying a large American flag, for example, turned out to be acutely concerned lest the federal government divest itself of public lands. He feared the loss of access to cherished places where he liked to ride his horse. Because of that, he joined an armed effort aimed at forcing the government to do exactly what he didn’t want. Go figure.

Following the shooting death of LaVoy Finicum, the Malheur occupier who committed suicide-by-cop at a roadblock on January 26th, the occupation unraveled. At last count, the Bundy brothers and 24 others had been arrested and charged with a laundry list of crimes, including conspiracy to prevent federal employees from carrying out their duties and destruction of public property. All but one or two of them are still in jail.

Nor did the feds stop there. They finally nabbed Cliven Bundy at an airport after he attended a memorial service for Finicum, and also charged 18 others in connection with the 2014 Nevada standoff. Some of the 18 were already in custody for their involvement at Malheur. Bundy’s illegal cattle, which the government unsuccessfully tried to confiscate in 2014, remain at large.

More Mad Cowboy Disease in Utah

Despite the government’s thorough, if belated, crackdown, the hostility toward public lands on display at Malheur has hardly been contained. Such resentments are of a piece with the anger suffusing the presidential campaigns, although paradoxically enough Donald Trump has spoken out in favor of retaining federal lands. (Ted Cruz, by contrast, campaigned against Trump in Nevada by promising to “fight day and night to return full control of Nevada’s lands to its rightful owners, its citizens.”)

The darkest side of this “movement” is undoubtedly its well-documented association with armed militia groups and their persistent threat of violence. Gunmen from the Oath Keepers, for instance, obstructed federal officials from shutting down mines violating environmental regulations in both Oregon and Montana.  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the current, rapid growth of militia groups is unprecedented and appears to have been spurred by the 2014 standoff at the Bundy ranch. Notices for “meet-ups” among “patriots” to show support for the incarcerated Bundys and the “martyred” Finicum are abundant on social media.

A similar virus has infected several western state legislatures, including those of Montana, Oregon, Wyoming, and Nevada. Representative Michele Fiore, who hovered at the fringes of the Malheur occupation, for instance, introduced a bill in the Nevada legislature to transfer federal lands there to state control, irrespective of federal wishes. Considered patently unconstitutional, it was quickly dismissed. A Nevada senate resolution calling on Washington D.C. to initiate action to transfer those lands received more serious consideration.

The game is being played more cagily in Utah. There, lawmakers approved legislation in March that authorized and partly funded the state’s attorney general to sue the federal government for title to approximately 30 million acres of Utah public lands. The suit would pursue strategies advanced via a study produced by a New Orleans law firm outlining “legitimate legal theories” that, it contended, might lead to the wholesale transfer of lands to the state.

The expected cost of the litigation has been estimated at $14 million and Utah has sought allies among other western states. So far, they’ve found no takers willing to join the suit, possibly because other attorneys general have concluded that the legal theories behind it are rubbish.

Utah has also exported its anti-federalism to Capitol Hill. One of its congressmen, Rob Bishop, currently chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and sympathetically held hearings in February on several bills, introduced by representatives from Alaska, Idaho, and Utah, that would place federal lands under state control. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska and chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has promoted similar bills in the Senate.

Hanging on to “the Solace of Open Spaces”

Lost among the headlines, sound bites, and posturing is any serious discussion of America’s public lands and their purposes. Ammon Bundy was completely correct, early in the occupation of Malheur, when he said, “This refuge is rightfully owned by the people.” His problem was that his definition of “people” only included people like him. The Burns Paiute tribe, whose ancestral homeland includes Malheur and whose sacred sites are protected by federal law, certainly did not figure into his plans. The thousands of annual visitors to Malheur, who appreciate its 320 bird species and other wildlife, and the millions more who support the National Wildlife Refuge System, also seem not to be the “people” Bundy had in mind. The same might be said for anyone attracted to the idea of intact natural landscapes and functioning ecosystems.

The greatest vulnerability of America’s public lands is that the millions of their rightful owners scarcely know they exist. Ask the average New Yorker what the Bureau of Land Management is, and the odds are that you’ll get a confused stare. Even many people in the West, who live close to those public lands, have trouble differentiating the National Parks from the National Forests, though those two classes of land are administered for substantially different purposes by two different government departments, Interior and Agriculture. Yet most people agree that the wild open spaces of the nation’s grandest landscapes constitute a collective treasure.

In essence, they are our national commons, our shared resource, not just for material goods, like timber, clean water, and minerals, but for recreation and inspiration. Seventy percent of all hunters are said to use public lands, and the percentages of birders, campers, hikers, and other recreationists must be at least as high. Public lands also help buffer us against the uncertainties of the future. Only public lands, for instance, spread unbroken over great enough distances to offer the connectedness that many plants and animals will require to adapt, to the extent possible, to a warming climate. Moreover, as the struggle to wean the economy away from fossil fuels continues, only public lands, with their unified federal ownership, are susceptible to the kind of sweeping shift in national energy policy necessary to “keep it in the ground.”

For all these reasons, the future of the nation’s 640 million acres of public lands deserves a more prominent place in our national discourse. The patterns of the past, emphasizing extractive, industrial uses of those lands, have long been in decline. An alternate path focused on restoration and biodiversity conservation has instead steadily gained traction, and indeed, its priorities — which include making room for endangered species — have inspired many of the objections of the Malheur occupiers.

Two things are certain: when large acreages of public domain are transferred to the states, significant portions of them end up being sold off to private interests. That creates a new kind of inequality that, in the natural world, parallels this era’s growing economic gap between rich and poor. It is an inequality of access to big, wild lands and to the ineffable something that Wyoming writer Gretel Ehrlich called the “solace of open spaces” and Pulitzer-winning novelist Wallace Stegner termed “the native home of hope.”

Thanks to the great western commons, which the Bundys and their legislative champions would like to dismantle, all Americans still enjoy the freedom to roam on some of the most spectacular lands on the planet. That access and that connection have been part of the American experience from Plymouth Rock through the westward migration to the present day. It is part of what makes us Americans.

The Depression-era folksinger Woody Guthrie understood the issues attending the privatization of common land. He offered his opinion of them in the least sung verse of his most famous song:

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me

Sign was painted, said: “Private Property”

But on the back side it didn’t say nothing —

This land was made for you and me.”

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Noam Chomsky predicted the rise of Donald Trump six years ago

(Credit: WGBHForum)

In an interview with Chris Hedges in 2010, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist and dissident intellectual, remarked that he has “never seen anything like this.”

By this, he meant the state of American society, relative to the time in which he was raised — the Depression years — and to the tumultuous state of Europe during that same period.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky said. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

For decades, Chomsky has warned of the right turn of the Democratic Party, which has, in an effort to win elections, adopted large swaths of the Republican platform and abandoned the form of liberalism that gave us the New Deal and, later, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

“Trump has been viewed with bewilderment by politicians who have divorced themselves from the needs of the people and who have sold them false goods to get ahead. But Trump, as Chomsky’s prescient interview demonstrates, was inevitable.”

This new approach was canonized by Bill Clinton, who triumphantly declared that the “era of big government is over.”

With this declaration, Clinton ushered in a new era of the Democratic Party (the so-called New Democrats), which left behind the working class and cultivated amiable relationships with corporate executives and Wall Street financiers; many of them would eventually occupy key positions in Clinton’s government, and many of them emerged once more during the presidency of Barack Obama.

The philosophical bent of the New Democrats was best summarized by Charles Peters in “A Neoliberal Manifesto,” in which he defines neoliberalism as an ideology perfect for those who “no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business.” Democrats, since Peters penned his manifesto, have far exceeded the bounds of this seemingly neutral stance.

Bill Clinton, for his part, destroyed welfare, deregulated Wall Street, worsened the growing mass incarceration crisis, and signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, a sweeping deal that harmed millions of workers, in the United States, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Today, President Obama, in partnership with congressional Republicans, is lobbying aggressively for the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has been deemed by critics “NAFTA on steroids.” The agreement, if made the law of the land, will encompass 40% of global GDP and will grant massive companies unprecedented power.

Despite President Obama’s promises of transparency, the public has been forced to rely on leaked information to glean any specifics about the deal — and, based on the information we have, the agreement is a disaster for workers and the environment and, unsurprisingly, a boon for multinational corporations.

Democrats, in short, have left the working class in the dust, often using “the excuse,” as a recent New York Times editorial put it, “that they need big-money backers to succeed.”

Republicans, meanwhile, as Chomsky has observed, are “dedicated with utter servility” to the interests of the wealthy, and their party, with its longing for war and denial of climate science, “is a danger to the human species.”

So we are faced with a political system largely devoted to the needs of organized wealth, which leaves working people anxious, worried about the future, and, as we have seen, very angry. In essence, political elites — on both sides — have created a vacuum into which a charismatic and loudmouthed demagogue can emerge.

As Chomsky noted in his interview with Hedges, “The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.”

That was in 2010. Now, in 2016, we have Donald J. Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

Trump is, of course, not “honest” in any meaningful definition of the word, but his supporters believe that he “tells it like it is.” They view him as a no-nonsense straight-talker, a man not confined by the limits of political correctness.

To garner votes, Trump has tapped into the fears and animosities of members of the white working class who previously backed Republicans but now view the party as a collection of bureaucrats who have sold them out.

Trump, they believe, is different. He isn’t bought, they say; he uses his own money, accrued by his uncanny deal-making abilities. He’s an outsider; he’ll stand up to the stuffy elite. And he, above all, speaks the truth about who they perceive as the real enemies — not billionaires like Trump, but illegal immigrants and Muslims.

“What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’?” Chomsky asked. In Germany, he added, “it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority.”

Sound familiar?

“We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation,” Chomsky continued. “Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force.”

As Matt Taibbi has observed, America, specifically America’s political elite, “made Trump unstoppable.”

Trump has been viewed with bewilderment by politicians who have divorced themselves from the needs of the people and who have sold them false goods to get ahead. But Trump, as Chomsky’s prescient interview demonstrates, was inevitable.

“The mood of the country is frightening,” Chomsky concluded. “The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

Trump embodies the fantasy: He is the anger, the hammer with which his supporters hope to smash America’s institutions and take America back to a mythical, blissful past.

America’s political class has not simply faltered under the weight of the Trump phenomenon; its failures created him, and the establishment is now faced with a choice. It will either address the legitimate concerns of the people who are attracted to Trump’s fake populism — from his critiques of disastrous trade deals to his contempt for America’s foreign policy elite — or it will resign itself to the fact that the Republican Party is now the party of Donald Trump, who says out loud what Republicans have been saying in code for decades.

Rather than attempting to do the former, the establishment is doing their best to “train” Trump, and in doing so they are falling in line, demonstrating precisely the point that Trump has been so successful in exploiting: That American politics is merely a struggle for ideological conformity and party unity, not a struggle for the general welfare of the nation.

Now, Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. And the implications, should he emerge from the general election victorious, are grim.

Chomsky has hesitated to put forward any predictions of what a Trump presidency may look like, but, he has said, “to have somebody who’s kind of a wild man with his finger on the button that could destroy the world or make decisions with enormous influence is an extremely frightening prospect.”

There is much more to be said about Trump — and about the state of American politics broadly. But we can’t say we weren’t warned.

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Yes, Bernie’s waging war on the Democratic Party — but if Hillary loses, it won’t be his fault

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik/Michael Conroy/Photo montage by Salon)

Hey, remember what I said about the coming civil war in the Democratic Party, and how it wouldn’t necessarily be a whole lot more polite than the Republican version? Well, everybody who spouts opinions for a living loves to say “I told you so,” but in this case I can’t claim that: Neither I nor anyone else thought it would get here quite this quickly. After the ugly, angry chaos of the Nevada state convention last weekend and Bernie Sanders’ big victory in the Oregon primary on Tuesday — to go with a virtual tie in Kentucky, where Hillary Clinton won by fewer than 2,000 votes — Democrats now face the possibility of a highly contentious convention in Philadelphia this summer, where the outcome may not be in doubt but the mood will hardly be harmonious.

And so we’re being treated to a new round of institutional angst from the Democratic establishment, along with considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth among the pundit class. CNN spent much of Wednesday playing the same clip of rowdy Sanders supporters in Las Vegas over and over again, and then allowing Barbara Boxer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz to express their outrage and dismay that such uncivilized conduct could occur among Democrats. Paul Krugman, who has turned his New York Times column into a mouthpiece for Clinton talking points, told us (not for the first time) that Sanders and his supporters were ill-informed about how things worked in the real world, and needed to get off his lawn. Dianne Feinstein dropped dark hints about “going back” to the disastrous Democratic convention of 1968, a reference that may have been more revealing than she intended.

All of this boils down, pretty much, to the idea that since Sanders has no realistic chance of winning the nomination he has no right to continue his campaign into California and onward to the Democratic convention. By doing so, we are told, he is destroying the mystical commodity known as “party unity” and endangering Hillary Clinton’s prospects in the fall. Intra-party discord like that seen in Nevada, Wasserman Schultz purred to the CNN cameras, can only benefit Donald Trump. On a broader scale, there’s a clear implication that whatever may be going wrong with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party is Bernie Sanders’ fault, and would disappear if he did. The best thing Sanders could do is go back in a time machine, drop out before Iowa and allow Clinton to sail through the primary season unopposed on a rising tide of power-suited smugness. Failing that, he could at least have the decency to drop out of the race immediately, prostrate himself before the Democratic temple and vow undying fealty to a party to which he hasn’t actually belonged since the 1970s.

Virtually all of that is nonsense — well, except for the part about Sanders having no chance to win the nomination, which leads to the legitimate question of why he’s staying in the race and what he hopes to accomplish. There are several interlocking but separate issues in play here, and it’s important not to get them hopelessly confused. What happens to the Democratic Party in the short term — that is, the question of whether its weak, troubled and widely unpopular nominee might actually lose the election to a moronic billionaire blowhard with zero qualifications — is an entirely different question from where the party will find itself in five or 10 years. One thing we can say for sure about Hillary Clinton, win or lose, is that she represents yesterday’s Democratic Party. Tomorrow’s party is up for grabs, and that’s the discussion Sanders and his supporters are trying to drive forward.

When it comes to the immediate past, let’s be clear about that nasty Nevada convention: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. No, seriously: The optics were dreadful and both sides behaved badly, but it’s unlikely to have lasting effects (at least once my former colleague Jake Tapper finally gets sick of it). And no, Sen. Feinstein, it does not portend the beginning of a summer of street violence or a convention whose nominee is chosen in back-room deals. (That was what I meant by unintended significance: Chicago ’68 was the last convention, for either party, in which party officials selected a nominee behind the scenes, without even pretending to care about the primary voters.) Yes, the bitterness you can feel boiling up in those Nevada video clips signals how deep the fractures run in the so-called Democratic coalition, but a few overheated Bernie supporters cursing and kicking over chairs tells us nothing about how the nation will vote in November.

There’s no excuse for personal insults or threats of violence, and the Sanders campaign needs to do more to calm down its most belligerent supporters. What his hothead activists are reacting to, on the other hand, is legitimately enraging: In state after state, the Clinton campaign has used its control of Democratic Party institutions and procedures to manipulate the delegate count and control the process. Maybe that reflected the wagon-circling mentality of power, because as Salon’s Sean Illing pointed out on Tuesday, it simply wasn’t necessary. Hillary Clinton has won a clear majority of Democratic primary voters and a clear majority of pledged delegates, under the rules in place before the process started. Sanders supporters may not like those rules or that process, and are fighting to change them going forward, but that’s a separate issue.

Sanders and his campaign operatives can count. They know that Hillary Clinton is less than 100 delegates away from securing the necessary majority, and that the mathematical possibility behind their last-ditch strategy — finishing about even with Clinton in pledged delegates, and then convincing hundreds of superdelegates to switch sides — has all but disappeared. Sanders knows he will not be the 2016 nominee. He is trying to channel the passion and anger of his supporters into a forceful role at the Philadelphia convention, and then into a different and more open Democratic Party in the years ahead.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have a point, up to a point: Sanders is using the threat of a discordant and contentious convention to try to break down the walls of the Democratic Party fortress they have constructed, and bring an end to their power. But when they shriek and throw up their hands and say that if we don’t have immediate and unquestioned “party unity” we will get 1968 and President Donald Trump and the opening of the Seventh Seal, that’s disingenuous in the extreme.

As has been widely observed during this race, the 2008 contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was at least as bitter and vitriolic as the Clinton-Sanders race, although there was considerably less ideological distance between the candidates. I have previously observed that there is no historical correlation between a bitterly disputed primary contest and what happens in November; citing 1968 is no more than fearmongering. Consider 1992, when former (and present) California governor Jerry Brown — perhaps the closest Sanders-cognate of all recent Democratic dissidents — ran clear to the end against Bill Clinton and went to the New York convention with almost 600 delegates, ensuring himself a speaking spot. Brown hated Clinton’s guts and viewed him as a shameless phony (and should get some credit for getting that right). He never endorsed Clinton — not at the convention, not during the fall campaign and not at any other time. Remind me how the absence of “party unity” destroyed those Democratic nominees?

Every general-election campaign is its own animal, largely determined by its own internal dynamics and by unpredictable news memes or twists of fate. Think of Richard Nixon sweating unpleasantly or Michael Dukakis in that tank (looking, observed David Brinkley, like Rocket J. Squirrel); think of the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, or the fallout from Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks. This year’s Clinton-Trump campaign will also pivot on unknowable unknowns, but one thing I feel sure about is that they’ll have nothing to do with how a few enraged Sanders supporters misbehaved in May.

If the Democratic establishment is increasingly anxious about its prospective nominee, who appears headed for a perilous, nail-biting and shockingly tight race against the most ignorant and least qualified major-party nominee in political history, that’s for good reason. But Bernie Sanders did not create the Democrats’ current dilemma, and cannot solve it.

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Marvel is ruining superhero movies: Corporate synergy is a poor substitute for artistic vision

(Credit: Marvel)

“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” might be the biggest disaster to ever make $870 million. Those numbers would be unspeakably enormous for any other franchise (the folks behind “Divergent” would be dancing in the streets), but they were a huge disappointment for Warner Bros. The final entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, “The Dark Knight Rises,” grossed over $1 billion, while Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” took in $668 million at the box office. With their powers combined, the heroes’ first onscreen meeting should have flown much, much higher.

As it stands, the movie’s grosses have to be extremely embarrassing for WB and DC Comics, who had been hoping to mount a Cinematic Universe to compete with Marvel’s successful “Avengers” franchise. Although “Captain America: Civil War” was released less than two weeks ago, it has already made more money ($966 million at the time of writing) than “Batman v Superman” has in two months. That’s not even the worst of it: Snyder’s film has also been bested—both internationally and domestically—by Disney’s “Zootopia,” which is threatening to cross the billion-dollar threshold. Another children’s movie is also on the verge of surpassing “BVS:DOJ”: Jon Favreau’s live-action remake of “The Jungle Book” has earned $829 million—and counting.

Reports of a massive shakeup at Warner should then be surprising to absolutely no one. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has tapped Jon Berg, the executive vice president of WB, and Geoff Johns, the chief creative officer at DC, to head up DC Films. “With Berg and Johns, Warner Bros. is attempting to unify the disparate elements of the DC movies with a seasoned film exec and a comics veteran that together hopefully can emulate the way Marvel Studios has produced its films under the vision of president Kevin Feige,” THR reports.

In the past, Warner Bros. has lacked a cohesive strategy when it comes to the studio’s superhero products, and rumors of reshoots on “Suicide Squad” to “lighten the tone” of the David Ayer-directed film (which WB denied) did little to assuage those concerns. This announcement, however, is very good news for the future of the studio’s men-in-tights canon: While solidifying its brand, Warner Bros. claims that it will remain committed to putting filmmakers first. Notably, WB canned Seth Grahame-Smith, who was set to direct the Ezra Miller-starring “The Flash.” The “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” writer had never directed a film before, and THR reports that WB is seeking a “more seasoned filmmaker who can not only handle a large $150 million-plus movie but who can also have an authoritative stamp.”

What that means is that Warner Bros. will be allowing name-directors to continue to shape the studio’s films with their own unique creative vision. That decision is in direct contrast with the Marvel template: Aside from Joss Whedon, Feige is known for tapping hired hands, usually up-and-comers, who won’t get in the way. When re-launching “Spider-Man” for the third time in 15 years, Marvel went with Jon Watts, whose only previous credit was “Cop Car,” the modestly received 2015 indie about two kids who steal a police vehicle. Scott Derrickson, best known for directing “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” will take the reins on “Doctor Strange.” Peyton Reed, the man behind “The Break-Up,” replaced Edgar Wright when he dropped out of “Ant-Man.”

The Wright debacle is extremely telling about the state of Marvel’s brand strategy, in which directors often have very little control over the final product. The “Cornetto trilogy” director had been developing “Ant-Man” since 2006, before Marvel was a Hollywood titan. (Those were the days of “Ghost Rider,” after all.) “It’s… important to consider that, in the extended period of time Ant-Man spent gestating,” ScreenRant’s Jeff Carter explains, “the Marvel Cinematic Universe expanded and morphed into an integrated, cohesive world, and Wright’s stylistic, irreverent concepts may have no longer functioned within Marvel’s vision.” When “Ant-Man” was finally set to begin shooting, Marvel presented Wright with script changes “without his input,” as THR reported at the time, and the director parted ways with the project.

Those changes would have likely made “Ant-Man” into less of an Edgar Wright movie—in the style of his “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”—than what Marvel always does. That included a scene that would have established links with the other Marvel Cinematic Universe franchises by throwing in cameos from other superheroes. In the end, Marvel got what they wanted: Anthony Mackie’s Falcon (who appears in the “Captain America” movies) popped by to play pattycake with Scott Lang. Even Whedon himself suggested that parting ways with Wright was a huge mistake for the studio, calling Wright and Joe Cornish’s screenplay the “best script that Marvel had ever had.”

Wright’s departure loomed large over the eventual release of “Ant-Man,” which was the second-lowest grossing MCU entry yet (when adjusting for inflation). The studio has had similar issues with other auteurs: After kickstarting the “Captain America” and “Thor” franchises, both Kenneth Branagh and Joe Johnston declined to shepherd their sequels. The beloved Ava DuVernay (who directed the Oscar-nominated “Selma”) was in talks to direct “Black Panther” before bowing out of consideration due to “creative differences” with the studio. In a diplomatic response, DuVernay told Essence of her exit: “I think I’ll just say we had different ideas about what the story would be. Marvel has a certain way of doing things and I think they’re fantastic and a lot of people love what they do.”

Marvel’s insistence on prizing its brand over unique creative vision is arguably holding its movies back. How much can the Marvel Cinematic Universe expand onto itself before its movies begin feel painfully overstuffed? That’s long been the Marvel movies’ Achilles heel: They attempt to shoehorn in too many characters at the expense of telling a simple story well. That complaint plagued both “Iron Man 2” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” which simply had too much going on for one movie to contain. In directing the sequel to the most successful superhero movie ever made, Whedon was basically tasked with being an air traffic controller.

This was even true of “Captain America: Civil War,” which was a victim of the studio’s worst tendencies. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, “Civil War” contains some of the most eye-popping MCU sequences yet, including action scenes that are thrillingly lightning-paced. Every single blow in their second film under the Steve Rogers banner feels punishingly real. However, many of the supporting players in “Civil War” simply didn’t need to be there, given very little to do. Don Cheadle, playing War Machine, looked actively bored. As nice as it was to see Spider-Man join the Marvel universe, was it all that necessary when Peter Parker is due for yet another franchise? At times, the overabundant ensemble felt more like an Agatha Christie movie than a worthy follow-up to the wonderful “Winter Soldier,” still Marvel’s finest effort.

What made “Captain America: Winter Soldier” such an astonishingly good action film is that at a time when Marvel movies keep getting bigger, the Russo brothers dared to think small. Long stretches of the film are a nimble two-hander, giving Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson some of their finest material to date. (It’s also the only time Black Widow has felt like a human person, rather than a narrative afterthought in a skin-tight leather suit.) The taut film took its cues from paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s, including “The China Syndrome” and “Three Days of the Condor.” It wasn’t happenstance, after all, that “Winter Soldier” co-starred Robert Redford, who appeared in the latter.

The “Captain America” sequel is perhaps the closest thing that Marvel will see to a true auteurist vision, as the studio continues to move away from the singular to the focus-grouped. Their loss could be DC’s gain. After Patty Jenkins was dropped from “Thor 2,” the director—who helped Charlize Theron win an Oscar for “Monster”—found her way to “Wonder Woman.” Slated for release in 2017, the long-gestating film will finally give Diana Prince the franchise she deserves. Gal Gadot, who is set to fly the superhero’s invisible plane, was a standout in the rancid dumpster fire that was “Batman v Superman,” despite the actress’ limited screentime.

Audiences will have to wait another year to see if Warner Bros. learned anything from its brand synergy facepalm, which amounted to two terrible movies for the price of one. But in the meantime, there’s hope the studio could do right by Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent in the future. Ben Affleck has reportedly written the script for the WB’s attempt to relaunch the Batman franchise, and the actor certainly proven himself a force to be reckoned with behind the camera. He co-wrote the screenplays to the acclaimed genre films “The Town” and “Gone Baby Gone,” while directing “Argo” to a Best Picture trophy. Affleck will also sit in the executive producer’s chair on “Justice League.”

DC and Warner Bros. have a long way to go in crafting a cinematic universe to rival the empire Marvel has amassed. But for now, they appear to doing the one thing the MCU never has: giving talented directors the creative freedom to them build it.

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To know Bowie, Kendrick and Gaga, you have to know your jazz: “There is an artisan movement going on in music now just as there is in food”

David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar (Credit: AP/Reuters/Shaun Best/Lucy Nicholson/Scott Roth)

These days, jazz is in a funny state. Musicians like Kamasi Washington and Cecile McLorin Salvant are making memorable music grounded in both the past and the future. Films about trumpeters Miles Davis and Chet Baker have come out recently to good reviews. And David Bowie made his acclaimed final album with New York jazz musicians. (Bowie, who learned the saxophone as a kid, once said that as a teenager, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted “to be a rock’n’roll singer or John Coltrane”.) In some ways, the music is more audible than it’s been in a long time.

And yet, jazz radio is almost nonexistent. Jazz albums sell very poorly. The vast majority of cities have no place to consistently see live jazz. And few newspapers, magazines, or websites aimed at a general audience pay much attention to it. The most serious result of all this is that despite the dedication of a cult audience, many music fans have a curiosity about jazz but little sense of how to enjoy or understand it.

Appropriately, then, music historian Ted Gioia, author of “West Coast Jazz” and “Love Songs,” has just released “How to Listen to Jazz.” The book is mostly nontechnical, looking at history, major artists, and key recordings in a way that assumes some love of music but little specific knowledge of jazz itself. An appealingly old-fashioned book, it may be just what our musically confused times need.

We spoke to Gioia from his home near Fort Worth. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

There are a lot of books published about jazz already: Why do we need a new one?

The last 30 years have been a great period for jazz in some ways. Jazz is more respectable than ever, jazz has gotten entrants into universities where previously it’d have been excluded. Jazz musicians get to visit the White House or get Kennedy Center honors. These are all positive developments. But they’ve also come at a cost; in the eyes of many listeners now, jazz is perceived as a kind of cultural vitamin. Take this, it’s good for you. This counters many of the benefits of getting jazz into these institutions. I wanted to write a book that not only showed people how to listen to jazz, but also to enjoy it.

I had those two goals in mind on every page as I take readers through the process. Jazz shouldn’t be a kind of nutritional supplement, jazz shouldn’t be something people do as a painful process of cultural education: This music is exciting. What brought me into it, what I’m sure brought you into it — you listen to the music, and it grabbed us. I wanted to teach people the listening skills that allow them not only to grasp analytically what’s going on in the music, but also emotionally, so they can feel that visceral excitement of hearing jazz.

What era of jazz tends to grab listeners first?

I’ve found that there is a cut off point in jazz history — it’s driven by the introduction of high fidelity audio recording in the late 1950s. I find that jazz fans tend to know a fair amount about what happens after we have high quality recordings, so in 1958, 1959 you have “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis, you have Dave Brubeck “Time Out,” Charles Mingus, “Mingus Ah Um;” from that period on to the next 10, 20 years you have an area in which jazz fans, even casual listeners have often heard that, but if you really want to understand jazz, you’ve got to go back to the origins.

In my book, I go back to the very beginning, even before the first recordings. You look at the ingredient that allowed jazz to happen in the first place, and try to teach the reader how you listen to those oldest jazz recordings and get enjoyment out of those, and understand what’s happening. And this is all drawn from personal experience — when I first started listening to jazz I found it challenging to go back to some recording made in 1923 and hear it with fresh ears, instead of hearing it as old-fashioned music. I learned to hear it as the revolutionary music that it was. This is one of the most interesting things I’ve run into lately. I talk to college students and their perception of jazz is that it’s old-fashioned music. And one of the things I want to counter in my book is that notion, because in every step of its evolution jazz shook up things, and not just the music world, it shook up the culture. It brought us things like integration, it helped usher in the Civil Rights Movement, it changed cultural attitudes on who are outsiders and insiders in the culture, it changed attitudes on what kind of experimentation in lifestyles was acceptable.

So the idea that jazz is fuddy-duddy music that grandma and grandpa listen to is one I’m trying to dispel. I want to bring out the excitement of the music, the transgressive nature of jazz, because it’s always been a transgressive type of music.

Is there something jazz can do better than any other music?

Jazz is a touchstone for people who care about musical excellence. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that in the last year or so we’ve seen artists as diverse as Lady Gaga, David Bowie, Kendrick Lamar turning to jazz, they’re turning to jazz to raise themselves up to the next level. Even in an age in which much of our music making is created by machines and software, in fact even more because we’re in that age, people still want to have the experience of human music making at its highest. The jazz musician still has a mystique in our society, the jazz musician still has respect and allure, because in an age where much is done by sampling and software and machines, the jazz musician still does it by hand. I like to think that there is an artisan movement going on in music now just as there is in food and these other areas. The craft and the quality of the work and the skills are recognized and for people who want to view music as an artisan activity built on craft and skill, inevitably they’ve got to grapple with jazz because that’s the area of music in which those attributes are at the forefront.

Mention an artist or two for people who don’t know much about jazz but are curious.

In my book I talk about how jazz musicians create melodic phrases and I highlight those artists who seem to have exceptional skill at shaping the music, at creating those alternative melodies that jazz is built on. I call this quality “intentionality.” It’s the ability to put your personal intentions into the flow of the music. It’s a certain confidence and authority that comes out in the playing of these musicians that have learned how to do this. In many instances with musicians, the music seems to play them rather than them playing the music. But I highlight a handful of individuals who I think are outstanding at playing with that kind of musical intentionality.

Dizzy Gillespie, especially his work in the late 1940s, Lee Morgan, Wes Montgomery, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, even in the current day someone like Pat Metheny. I love listening to how they create their phrases, every phrase has a decisive beginning, a shape, a flow and ends with authority. It doesn’t sound like a practice room, it doesn’t sound like something they’ve worked out before the gig, it doesn’t sound like it’s wrought, or being played by the fingers. Some of my favorite musicians are those that you can admire what they do just phrase by phrase. Every melodic phrase seems the perfect one. This doesn’t mean they’re playing loud or boisterous. Someone like Miles Davis is very good at this, sometimes he’ll play with just a whisper or just sort of a note or a couple of notes, but still has that intentionality, that personal authority to it.

Besides listening to jazz, what else helps people get into it?

In our age many of us have lost close listening skills. It’s not just simply the fact that music is often in the background, but even when we focus our attention on it, we don’t have even the basic tools to grapple with it. For example if I took students nowadays and played a recording, just teaching them what’s the saxophone, what’s the trumpet, what’s the trombone, what’s a clarinet; those would be very important learning for them because you can grow up in this society and operate as though all music comes out of a machine.

With jazz there is some homework you have to do, but it’s delightful homework, and I’ve watched the process as I’ve taught students over the years the sense of mastery and satisfaction it has. They identify these songs as more than just combinations of sounds, but as interactions between creative individuals who in real-time were making things happen.

That’s why it’s so important to go to the jazz club. If you read jazz books nowadays you might be forgiven for thinking that jazz is something that exists only on recordings, but to understand what it’s all about, you have to experience it in person in real time. And you’re blessed when you do this because jazz as a spontaneous music will surprise you. The jazz performance is different every night.

In the book I divide people into two groups; the one group wants experiences that are predictable and repetitive, these are the kind of people that like scientific formulas and mathematics and experiments, and the laws of physics. In their world, whenever the experiment is performed it produces the same results. There’s a different group of people and they are searching for the event that will never be repeated, they’re searching for the miraculous. This is the world of your first kiss, or when your child is born or when you got married. These are the events that will never be repeated. Jazz is music for that second group. When a jazz experiment is performed, it never produces the same results. If you’re searching for the miraculous, you turn to jazz. If you’re searching for the predictable, you have many other options out there.

You spend most of book talking about musicians from the 1920s to the ‘60s. Why stop there?

I think jazz is in a great period today because there’s more interaction now between jazz and the rest of the culture than I’ve seen in years. I see a host of young musicians from outside of jazz who are turning to it for inspiration. This is the kind of rebirth of jazz, that many people in the jazz community are skeptical or unhappy about. They see someone like Kamasi Washington who’s made his name on hip-hop records, now turning into a jazz star. For some people I know, this makes them anxious, but I applaud it.

I believe we are on the verge of a great era, in which jazz has strong cultural influence — perhaps not huge record sales, but it will shape the musical dialogue. And so even though in a book of the sort I’ve just written it’s important to take people through the history, I try again and again in the context of the book, to point to things happening right now, what musicians they should hear, in fact at the very end of the book I offer a list of 150 jazz musicians currently in early or mid-career that readers of my book should check out. That’s not an exhaustive list, and I could’ve added more. You can argue about different names, but I wanted to make sure that my readers had some sort of guide to music that was happening in the flesh, at the club or the concert hall. And not just on Spotify or on the compact disc.

So good music still being made, but the sense of roots is as strong as it once was?

People are excited about jazz and the level of interest now, I believe, is higher than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. But the people who are coming into the music, both as performers and fans, often have large gaps in their understanding of the music’s history and the different approaches to it that have flourished over the years. Part of the purpose of my book is to fill those gaps, walk people through the heritage and the various aspects of jazz but do it in a way that is enjoyable and enlightening at the same time.

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Donald Trump’s own top Supreme Court pick is also his biggest Twitter troll

(Credit: Twitter via Don Willett, a justice on the Texas Supreme Court who was included in Trump's Wednesday list of potential nominees)

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump got a little presumptuous on Wednesday and released a list of 11 potential Supreme Court picks likely to come out of a Trump administration should the political novice take the White House in November.

An apparent stunt meant to placate skeptical conservatives without having to be bothered with expounding on actual policy plans, Trump’s list included a mix of stalwart conservative federal justices who have been repeatedly mentioned by Republicans as suitable for the high court as well as some lesser known state judges.

One of the well known conservative justices named by Trump, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, worked for George W. Bush for many years —  and based on his Twitter account — is no fan of Trump.

The blustery businessman who has taken to his preferred social media platform to go after adversaries for years, has actually been on the receiving end of some of the best trolling on Twitter from Willett. Named the “Tweeter Laureate of Texas” by the state legislature in 2015, Willett has loudly professed his own love for the popular social media platform and garnered attention in the past for his comical critiques of Trump in 140 characters of less. According to Business Insider, Willett has trolled Trump with nearly 30 different tweets since 2013.

Below are just some of his finest examples of Trump trolling on Twitter:

Trolling Trump via the law: 

LEFT: The Donald—billionaire

RIGHT: The Donny—not pic.twitter.com/LcxeFEpVSG

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) July 21, 2015

"With malice toward none, with charity for all . . . except for all the losers, clowns, and dummies."
—President Donald Lincoln

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) August 7, 2015

I'm 100% certain than in my 10+ years as a Supreme Court Justice, I've never once signed a bill. pic.twitter.com/H1o5XVcRLi

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) February 26, 2016

Can't wait till Trump rips off his face Mission Impossible-style & reveals a laughing Ruth Bader Ginsburg. pic.twitter.com/LieabD35zb

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) August 27, 2015

Donald Trump haiku—

Who would the Donald
Name to #SCOTUS? The mind reels.
*weeps—can't finish tweet* pic.twitter.com/a326AP0mN1

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) June 16, 2015

That time Donald Trump tried to give Kanye my cell number. pic.twitter.com/E5IgQguOOv

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) July 22, 2015

Trolling Trump via religion:

The Pope/Trump feud has prompted the Vatican to upgrade its security. pic.twitter.com/GPr3FozCcR

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) February 19, 2016

Trump to "the evangelicals"—

"I'll be the best thing that's ever happened to them."

ps—Happy Easter, everyone! pic.twitter.com/a1mGbY8a9p

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) March 9, 2016

Trolling Trump via Trump University: 

What is the Trump University mascot?

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) March 11, 2016

What would be a suitable mascot for Trump Univ.? #Tribble "NY AG Sues Trump & 'Trump University, Claims Fraud" http://t.co/QCwSU4dKSq

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) August 26, 2013

https://twitter.com/JusticeWillett/st...

"I just want to thank my coaches at Trump University summer basketball camp."
—Kris Jenkins #NationalChampionship
pic.twitter.com/Xrvk79ViWO

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) April 5, 2016

Trolling Trump via Ted Cruz: 

https://twitter.com/JusticeWillett/st...

More Trump trolling: 

Trump can only dream of a Sunday this classy and glamorous. ☀️ pic.twitter.com/TrJdHsCtPy

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) August 16, 2015

That time @WilliamShatner flew Trump Airlines. pic.twitter.com/ok8dF0BsOj

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) March 11, 2016

#Election2016 is brought to you by the letters S, M, and H. pic.twitter.com/ymJLlJO3Mg

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) May 17, 2016

"We'll rebuild the Death Star. It'll be amazing, believe me. And the rebels will pay for it."
—Darth Trump pic.twitter.com/y25LADg15J

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) April 8, 2016

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Germany sides with Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian President Erdogan over its own citizen’s free speech

German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Istanbul, Turkey on October 18, 2015 (Credit: Reuters/Tolga Bozoglu)

Germany appears to have sided with the Turkish president over its own citizen’s free speech, as Europe makes concessions to Turkey’s increasingly repressive government in return for its collaboration in the E.U.’s illegal refugee deportation deal.

A regional court in the major German city Hamburg banned recitation and re-publication of most of the verses of a satirical poem by a German comedian in a ruling on Tuesday.

German satirist Jan Böhmermann recited a political protest poem on national television in March that made fun of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The increasingly authoritarian Turkish leader subsequently filed a complaint with German prosecutors, claiming that the poem amounted to libel and abuse.

The regional court ruled that just six of the poem’s 24 verses could be recited, describing the others as “abusive and defaming.” The six lines the court permitted criticize Turkey’s violent suppression of minority groups, namely the Kurds.

If Böhmermann recites the banned 18 verses, he could face a €250,000 (c. $282,000 USD) fine or up to six months in prison.

Christian Schertz, the comedian’s lawyer, called the court’s decision “wrong,” insisting it goes “against artistic freedom.” He will likely appeal the ruling.

The court maintains that it is balancing artistic freedom with Erdoğan’s rights. “Through the poem’s reference to racist prejudice and religious slander as well as sexual habits the verses in question go beyond what the petitioner [Erdoğan] can be expected to tolerate,” the court wrote.

Section 103 of Germany’s criminal code technically does not allow insulting organs or representatives of foreign states. This crime potentially carries up to three years in prison, but is rarely enforced.

Merkel’s political football

German Chancellor Angela Merkel herself personally authorized prosecutors to go after Böhmermann, leading to widespread backlash within her country.

The decision was construed to be a political concession to Turkey, the country to which Europe is deporting refugees and migrants en masse, in what human rights groups and legal experts say is an illegal and immoral program.

In March, the E.U. and Turkey, a NATO member, reached an agreement dictating that all undocumented migrants that cross from Turkey into Greece after March 20 will be deported back to Turkey.

In early April, Greece began sending hundreds of refugees and migrants at a time to Turkey.

The U.N. has said the deal likely violates international law. Legal experts have come to the same conclusion, insisting it “is a flagrant breach of E.U. and international law.”

A human rights lawyer told Salon that E.U. “member states are literally washing their hands of millions of lives.”

Human rights groups have blasted the E.U.-Turkey deal, and have reported that Turkey is deporting hundreds of refugees back to Syria on a daily basis, threatening people’s lives and violating the international legal principle of non-refoulement.

Europe, where a virulent wave of racism and xenophobia is growing, stands to gain more from the deal than Turkey, which is hedging its bets on joining the European Union.

Merkel has been quite supportive of Turkey’s potential E.U. membership. The German chancellor and Erdoğan have played a kind of game of political football, each pushing for quid pro quos.

Critics have accused Merkel “of ignoring human rights violations and actions against journalists in Turkey, a candidate for EU membership,” Reuters wrote.

Other critics have accused “her of kowtowing to Erdogan,” AFP noted.

Merkel was accused of causing the poetry scandal in the first place by telling Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu that the satirical poem is “deliberately insulting.” She later claimed her comment was “a mistake,” but it had already helped fuel the Turkish government’s repression.

A lawmaker from Merkel’s right-wing Christian Democrat party recited the now banned verses of the poem in parliament earlier this month, condemning it for supposedly violating Erdoğan’s “honor.”

From protest song to protest poem

Böhmermann wrote the protest poem in response to the Turkish government’s clampdown on a protest song.

In March, German public broadcaster NDR created a satirical song and video titled “Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan.”

The song criticized the German government for accommodating the repressive Turkish regime in return for its political collaboration.

“Be nice to him, as he’s holding all the cards in his hands,” a singer said. “Hand over your money and he’ll build you a refugee tent.”

The song also harshly condemned Erdoğan’s repression of journalists and protests,

“Press freedom gives him a swollen neck,” the song continued. “With tear gas and water cannons he’s riding through the night.”

“Equal rights for women… beaten up equally,” it added, showing footage of Turkish activists in an International Women’s Day demonstration being beaten with batons by riot police.

Germany’s ambassador to Turkey, Martin Erdmann, was summoned to the Ankara foreign ministry over the satirical song and video. Turkish officials blasted the broadcast and demanded that NDR pull it from air. The German broadcaster refused to do so, and satirized the Turkish government in response.

The song and video also criticized Turkey’s brutal military campaign against Kurdish groups, claiming Erdoğan would “much rather” bomb them than ISIS.

Repression of journalists

Since Erdoğan entered office in 2014, more than 1,800 cases have been opened against people accused of insulting him.

At least 894 journalists in Turkey were dismissed in the first four months of 2016, according to a report by a press freedom group.

Journalists, celebrities and even children have gone to trial, and in some cases prison, for insulting the Turkish government.

In December 2014, 16-year-old Turkish student Mehmet Emin Altunses was arrested at school. He was subsequently thrown in jail for “insulting” Erdoğan. Altunses had referred to the Turkish president as the “thieving owner of the illegal palace,” condemning his government’s corruption.

That same month, Erdoğan claimed insisted, “Nowhere in the world is the press freer than it is in Turkey.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said the exact opposite. In 2012 and 2013, NATO member Turkey imprisoned more journalists than any other country — including longtime Western enemies China and Iran — according to the watchdog group.

In the past year, this repression has escalated.

Amid the scandals in his country, German Federation of Journalists Chairman Frank Überall criticized Erdoğan, saying he has “apparently has lost his grip.” Überall added that “the persecution of critical journalists is bitter reality” in Turkey.

In March, the Turkish government seized newspapers critical of Erdoğan, including the major daily Zaman, and forced them to publish pro-regime propaganda.

That same month, Erdoğan essentially redefined critical journalists and activists as terrorists. He publicly declared that there is no difference between “a terrorist holding a gun or a bomb and those who use their position and pen to serve the aims” of terrorists, adding that this applies to journalists, activists and lawmakers.

At the same moment, the Turkish government has supported extremist groups in Syria, including al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra.

Brutal military campaign against Kurds

Erdoğan has also carried out a vicious military campaign against his country’s Kurdish minority.

The Turkish government has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and killed hundreds more in raids and attacks on Kurdish-majority communities.

Some predominately Kurdish areas have been so ravaged by the fighting that they look like war-torn Syria.

Kurdish fighters in or aligned with the militant groups the YPG/YPJ and the PKK are among the few leftist, secular and feminist forces in the Middle East. For years, they have fought the Turkish government in hopes of creating an independent, autonomous Kurdistan.

Since the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in early 2014, Kurdish militant groups have also proved themselves to be some of ISIS’ most feared opponents.

Turkey, under the leadership of aspiring sultan Erdoğan, has lashed out with enormous violence, in hopes of crushing the Kurdish resistance movement.

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Chloë Sevigny’s creeper tales: “If you’re young and impressionable and really want the part, it might be tempting”

Chloë Sevigny (Credit: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz)

The amount of BS that gets cloaked in the guise of work culture is staggering. And if the field involves creativity and entertainment, what’s the difference between harassment and just… Hollywood?

Speaking at Variety’s Cannes Film Festival panel this week, 41 year-old actress Chloë Sevigny recounted her own experiences as an industry veteran, and the “weirdness” that has followed her. “I’ve had the ‘What are you doing after this?” conversation,” she said, in conversation with Refinery 29’s Amy Emmerich. “I’ve also had the ‘Do you want to go shopping and try on some clothes and, like, I can buy you something in the dressing room’ [conversation]. Just like crossing the line weirdness.”

She also recalled a director who told her, “You should show your body off more. You shouldn’t wait until you’re as old as this certain actress who had just been naked in a film, you should be naked on screen now.” Sevigny added, laughing, “If you know my career, I’ve been naked in every movie.”

But Sevigny said that after rebuffing the advances, she never got the roles those filmmakers were talking to her for. And she wondered, “If you’re young and impressionable and really want the part, it might be a tempting avenue, but I hope not.” Yet looking back, she says, “I would consider it Hollywood. Was it sexual harassment? It’s such a fine line.”

Sevigny is only one of a long list of female stars who’ve come forward over the years with their tales of dealing with gross behavior in the industry. Last year, Ashley Judd said she was sexually harassed “by one of our industry’s most famous, admired-slash-reviled bosses,” while also admitting that “I did not recognize at the time what was happening to me. It took years before I could evaluate that incident and realize that there was something incredibly wrong and illegal about it.” That’s show biz for you.

In 2009, Charlize Theron shared a similar story, recalling, “I thought it was a little odd that the audition was on a Saturday night at his house in Los Angeles, but I thought maybe that was normal. I go inside and he’s offering me a drink, and I’m thinking, My God this acting stuff is very relaxed. But it soon becomes very clear what the situation was. I was like, ‘Not going to happen! Got the wrong girl, buddy!'”

Also in 2009, Megan Fox said that she’d experienced it too. “You think you’re going to meet them and you’re so excited, like, ‘I can’t believe this person wants to have a conversation with me,’ and you get there and you realize that’s not what they want, at all.” But she said she always shut it down, adding, “It’s been so long since someone has told them no, they don’t really know how to deal with it. Because of this non-reality they live in, they’re f__ked up, psychologically.”

This is the way that predatory behavior works — by normalizing it. You’re a young person in a field that prides itself on how exciting and unrestrictive it is — and sometimes it is really is fun to be in that kind of environment. But it can be alarmingly easy to be exploited in it, too. You go along with a famous photographer or powerhouse producer into situations that feel wrong, because you don’t want to get a reputation for being difficult. You don’t want people to think you’re not fun. And you brush off what would in another context be clearcut harassment. For art.

Sevigny says, “When women on set become a little emotional, or impassioned even, they’re labeled as hysterical or crazy and have a hard time getting hired again. The double standard of the man being the wild, crazy, mad director is so embraced.” And as Jennifer Lopez puts it in a new Hollywood Reporter roundtable interview this week, “I’ve always been fascinated by how much more well-behaved we have to be than men.”

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Nate Silver doesn’t need to apologize, since Donald Trump’s nomination was a long shot

Nate Silver, Donald Trump (Credit: MSNBC/Reuters/Brian Snyder/Photo montage by Salon)

American sports fans who don’t pay much attention to soccer might not know it, but 2016 was the year of what was likely the greatest sports upset of all time: Leicester City overcoming 5000-to-1 odds to win the English Premier League title. It’s the equivalent of a middling college basketball team winning the NBA championship. It was an event that caused Leicester City fans to lose their minds, fans of favorites like Manchester City to weep into their beers, and unaligned sports fans to marvel at the improbability and glory of it all.

But what no one did was get on social media and start yelling at oddsmakers for not knowing, at the beginning of the season, that this once-in-a-lifetime event was going to happen. On the contrary, the sports media writes glowing stories about the lucky sonsabitches who got drunk and took that bet,  tossing a pound or two on LC for the championship, mostly on a lark, and walked away with fat pockets for it. (A $5 bet at the top of the season would result in a $25,000 jackpot, for those who are keeping up at home.)

Sadly for professional oddsmaker Nate Silver, he’s working in politics these days and not sports, and therefore is speaking to an audience that seems a little less up on the difference between a long-shot and a no-shot.

Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump 20-to-1 odds against winning the Republican nomination back in September. Within milliseconds of Trump securing the nomination earlier this month, the madding crowd descended on Silver on social media, demanding an apology and possibly his head for supposedly getting it wrong.

Except….there’s no real reason to believe he got it wrong. He gave Trump 20-to-1 odds. That put Trump in the realm of unlikely but not impossible. Less Leicester City and more like rolling a 20 on a 20-sided-die. Which, as any D&D player will tell you, happens more than you’d think.

Still, when the mob is demanding its pound of flesh, sometimes you have to give them something to shut them up, and so it goes with Silver, who published a piece at FiveThirtyEight Wednesday morning, titled, “How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump“.

The move worked. Silver’s critics are now falling all over each other on social media to praise him for his humility and to intone about how great it is that he’s learned his lesson and how he’s going to be better in the future etc etc etc.

It seems few of them actually read the piece, or they’d know it’s a dry explanation of how odds work. Which, if you absorb the lesson, shows you why it’s really not cool to be busting Silver’s chops for this, because he never said Trump was impossible. He just said he wouldn’t bet on him, which was the smart thing to say back in September.

Either way, Silver isn’t really apologizing for getting it “wrong”. Even though he says that his team made “a big mistake” in letting their subjective sense that Trump is too ridiculous of a candidate to really pull this one out, most of his piece is a defense of calling Trump a long-shot. Then, as now, all the prevailing evidence showed that insurgent candidates with so little institutional support face steep odds. (You can soon add Bernie Sanders to the pile, strengthening his argument.) He called Trump a long-shot, not a no-shot, and most of his supposed mea culpa is reminding his critics of what was always true.

The present doesn’t change the past, and thinking otherwise is a fallacy in oddsmaking known as the hindsight bias.

Still, Silver gives some ground to his critics, noting that the precedent examples they looked to of insurgent candidates with little institutional support are few in number, giving them a poor dataset to work with.

This is true enough, but, in his eagerness to meet his critics halfway, Silver gives too much ground. After all, the dataset of such candidates included many people who had, unlike Donald Trump, held office before and therefore had things like an existing constituency and campaign experience, such as Howard Dean, Rudy Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich, which probably distorts Trump’s odds upwards.

When you look at the other candidates in the dataset who match Trump in terms of experience — i.e., businessmen who never held office before and but have a con artist appeal — the number of examples that Silver had in his dataset was one: Herman Cain. You can now add Carly Fiorina to that pile. Not exactly the examples you look to when arguing that Trump had better odds than he seemed to have in September.

If there’s any lesson here, it’s that oddsmaking in politics is less exacting and predictive than in sports, something Silver readily admits throughout this piece. Political datasets are smaller and the system has a lot more chaos, making it harder to predict the future based on the past.

Which is why it’s a shame that Silver, under all this pressure from outsiders, entertains the possibility that more weight should be given to polls, even months before the race, than to historical indicators like economic trends and party endorsements that, right up until Trump, were considered important predictors.

I personally hope he is very careful before making that leap. As Silver knows, better than most, the fact that Trump won doesn’t actually mean he wasn’t facing down 20-to-1 odds. While systems should be adjusted with new information, it’s also important not to fall for hindsight bias. (Silver says as much, warning about the dangers that Trump’s win might cause folks to “overcompensate” for perceived errors, leading them to overrate the odds that the next flavor-of-the-month loony bird GOP candidate pulls it out.)

While I’m no mathematician, I’d argue that 20-to-1 odds against Trump still seem about right to me. The man had a couple of lucky breaks that allowed him to hit that 5% shot: The San Bernardino attacks right after the Paris attacks, his strongest critic (Fiorina) making a fool out of herself on Planned Parenthood at a critical time, another strong opponent (Ted Cruz) backing him instead trying to take him out early, and having 17 opponents to begin with.

Imagine if a long-shot team had a series of games where their opponents kept getting injured or having a bad night, leading to improbable wins. Trump had the same string of good luck, but that doesn’t mean that the odds should be recalculated to take into account unpredictable factors like that.

 

That all said, Silver’s biggest problem was not that he acted too much like a pundit. On the contrary, the statistics-centered approach likely blinded them to a few unique factors of this race, such as the oversized field and the assist that Cruz was giving Trump. If he’d been a little more like a pundit, focused on the present instead of the past, he might have been able to adjust his models a little more to account for those factors.

But the response shouldn’t be to dismiss either data journalism or punditry. As sports fans know, the two can be wed together pretty neatly to give audiences a sense of the big picture. The data guys can tell us that Leicester City has 5000-to-1 odds, but the pundits can tell us how they managed to pull it off anyway.

Same story with Donald Trump. He was a long shot, and the fact that he won doesn’t change that. The job of pundits and historians is not to deny that, but to look at all the various things that had to happen for a man for such an improbable event to occur.

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John McCain’s Trumpian nightmare: New poll shows veteran Arizona senator in the political fight of his life

Republican Arizona Senator John McCain has already admitted he is in the political fight of his life. The former Republican presidential nominee announced early this year that he would actually skip out on this year’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland to focus on campaigning for re-election in Arizona, where he faces a tough primary challenge.

“If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” McCain recently said a closed door fundraiser:

Now a new poll points to the data behind McCain’s fears. According to Public Policy Polling (PPP), the five-term senator “is at pretty serious risk of losing nomination for another term”:

Only 35% of GOP voters approve of the job McCain is doing to 50% who disapprove.

McCain is polling at only 39% in the Republican primary field. He’s benefiting from having multiple opponents. Kelli Ward is at 26%, Alex Meluskey at 4%, Scott McBean at 3%, and Clair Van Steenwyk at 2%. 27% are undecided…. When you narrow the field down to just a choice between McCain and Ward, it’s a tie at 41%. Ward is polling this competitively at this point despite having only 41% name recognition.

Even if McCain does manage to survive the Republican primary, it’s not going to be a walk in the park for him in the general. His overall approval rating is 34/52, and he leads Ann Kirkpatrick only 42/36 in a head to head match up. The race is close despite Kirkpatrick having only 58% name recognition at this point.

These dreadful numbers for McCain come as the presidential candidate at the top of the ticket who invalidity McCain’s status as “war hero” because he was captured by enemy combatants, Donald Trump, receives remarkably greater support from Republicans in Arizona. 65 percent of Arizona Republicans told PPP that they were “comfortable with Trump as their nominee.” And despite the significant #NeverTrump faction remaining amongst Arizona Republicans (22 percent), Arizona’s senior Republican senator doesn’t even garner a boost for enduring Trump’s wrath.

Thank you Arizona! See you soon!#MakeAmericaGreatAgain pic.twitter.com/IC3pe5lRAS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2016

For his part, McCain released a series of campaign attack ads in recent days that really stress his understanding of just dire a situation he finds himself in 2016. From TPM:

Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) re-election campaign on Monday mocked his primary opponent for entertaining constituents’ chemtrail conspiracy theories. But it turns out McCain last year forwarded to the Environmental Protection Agency a letter from a constituent concerned about chemtrails, and asked the EPA to respond.

In the April 2015 cover letter, McCain notified the EPA that a constituent had “encountered a problem.”

“Because the situation is under your jurisdiction, I am respectfully referring this matter to you for consideration,” the letter reads.

Here’s McCain’s original ad:

The McCain campaign has put $120,000 behind another ad targeting his likely Democratic opponent, should he manage to make it out of the primary, and released on Monday:

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