Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 792

Our “Game of Thrones” fantasy: Democracy is almost nonexistent in Westeros—and we like it that way

The 6th season of “Game of Thrones” is off to a strong start; ratings are high, and fans are enjoying the show’s unfolding narrative of graphic intrigue, infighting, and incest.

No-one knows how the game will end, but one thing is for certain. Amidst all the bloodshed, backstabbing, and bare breasts, what fans don’t expect, wouldn’t want, and won’t get is the winner to assume executive power through representing the will of the people by winning the majority of their votes in a free and fair election, and then determining policy through an ongoing process of negotiation with a separately elected legislative branch in a power-sharing arrangement demarcated by a constitution. You know, like they’re supposed to.

The secret to the pop culture omnipresence of “Game of Thrones” lies in how it has succeeded in getting us to root for the rival great houses of Westeros – Stark, Tully, Tyrell, Lannister, Baratheon, Martell – like they are sports teams. We identify (some of us more than others) with the individual characters playing out the song of ice and fire. We celebrate their triumphs, and mourn (or convulse with horror) at their demise.

But really, why should we – citizens of a 21st Century federal republic – care about any of them? Unless you, gentle reader, are a highborn scion of the landed aristocracy, the inheritor of wealth and privilege, the proud bearer of a patrician sigil, do you imagine they would care about you? America was founded on the principle that “that all men are created equal” in a state where government derives its legitimacy “from the consent of the governed.” Westeros lacks even a Magna Carta. However much you might empathize with the pluckiness of Arya Stark, sympathize with the travails of her sister Sansa, or lament the loss of their brother Robb, their world has no place in ours. The Declaration of Independence specifically repudiated monarchy, and the Constitution was intended to negate any possibility of power passing to a Caligula, a Richard III, or a Joffrey Baratheon.

We cherish our democracy, but this fundamental right is defined by its almost total absence in literary high fantasy, which has achieved its apotheosis in “Game of Thrones.” The mercantile Free Cities of Essos each fall somewhere on the spectrum of oligarchy/plutocracy/timocracy/thalassocracy. The Night’s Watch elect their Lord Commander, but democracy otherwise is marginalized to the anarchic fringes of Westeros; the Free Folk from north of the Wall (who call those south of it, who bow and scrape to lords and ladies, “kneelers”), the rogue Brotherhood Without Banners (“We are brothers here, holy brothers, sworn to the realm, to our god, and to each other”), and the barbarous clans who live in the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon. The communal politics practiced by the latter arouses nothing but disdain amongst the high-born elite, even fan-favorite Tyrion Lannister. Although he finds them useful, his frustration in having to win over an entire people, as opposed to cutting deals with a peer, is typical of the attitude of his class:

That was the trouble with the clans; they had an absurd notion that every man’s voice should be heard in council, so they argued about everything, endlessly. Even their women were allowed to speak.

When Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, seized Astapor and Yunkai in Essos her immediate priority was emancipating the slave populations of those cities. But that’s where the revolution ended. Having eliminated one elite, she simply imposed her own alternative. The former slaves are now not citizens but subjects, free only to petition, not participate, in government. Whatever maternal affection she feels for the peoples now under her authority is ultimately outweighed by her material interest in using them as a stepping-stone to the restoration of her dynasty on the Iron Throne of Westeros. In fantasy, the rule is always, “the [usurper] king is dead, long live the [legitimate] king,” never “the king is dead, long live the republic.”

So why are we emotionally invested in the claims of Daenerys Targaryen, Robb Stark, Stannis Baratheon, Renly Baratheon, Tommen “Baratheon,” or for that matter Rickon Stark versus those of any other contender? In the words of The Hound, himself an amoral sociopath, they are all, or will become, killers, and their world “is built by killers.”

This does reflect history; the rule of law can stake only a very recent, and very tenuous, claim to being the political norm. From history comes literature. In the fairy tales we grow up with – “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “Shrek” – the smallfolk achieve their apotheosis by marrying into royal families, not seizing and redistributing power from them. Even modern, feminist interpretations – “Frozen,” “Brave,” “Maleficent” – don’t alter the underlying basis of political power being monopolized by elite bloodlines. At the end, everyone on the inside of the charmed circle lives happily ever after, with not a single dangling chad to lose sleep over.

This template was reinforced by the adult sagas of the Classical and Medieval eras. There is no democracy in the “Iliad,” the “Aeneid,” “Beowulf,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” or anywhere in the Camelot of King Arthur (not even in its Monty Python equivalent, which is defined by the violence inherent in the system).

Modern fantasy reflects the legacy of this tradition, which was reimagined for a 20th Century audience by J.R.R. Tolkien. Every subsequent sword and sorcery epic was crafted in his shadow, and this is significant because, even setting aside its Eurocentric geopolitical context, “The Lord of the Rings” is a deeply conservative work (for which Tolkien has been taken to task by a later generation of sci-fi and fantasy writers, such as China Miéville, David Brin and Michael Moorcock). Complementing his ingrained Romantic anti-modernism (which is most evident in his hostility towards technology), Tolkien was deeply pessimistic about democracy, which he considered just another road to serfdom. He defined true equality as a spiritual principle that had been corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize it through the ballot box, “with the result we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride,” through which “we get and are getting slavery.” The only self-governing people in Middle Earth are the humble hobbits (the original small folk). Tolkien referred to the Shire as being “half republic half aristocracy,” which, as Patrick Curry describes it, “functions by a sort of municipal (not representative) democracy,” and even that is marked by “quasi-feudal paternalism and deference.” If the Shire was an idealized Olde England, the hobbits represented the physical manifestation of Tolkien’s belief in social hierarchy and the status quo: “Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire but it’s damn good for you.”

This institutionalization of privilege became even more prevalent when it was amalgamated with a plot dedicated to the apotheosis of a prophesized “chosen one.” The crowning of Aragorn as king of Gondor heralds the dawn of a new golden age at the conclusion to “The Return of the King” (the title of the book spoils both its ending and its theoretical framework). This was taken to its logical, messianic conclusion in the Narnia tales of Tolkien’s fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis, and continued to play out not just in later fantasy epics (to cite just some examples, the sagas of Stephan Donaldson, David Eddings, and J.K. Rowling) but in the emerging genre of science fiction. Democracy plays no part in the grand arena of Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” which, as feudalism in space, is the sci-fi equivalent to “Game of Thrones,” complete with great houses as rivals for the grand prize. “Atreides power must never be marginalized by the chaos of democracy,” intones Alia Atreides, sister of Paul Atreides and regent of the Atreides Empire, for reasons as self-evident as they are self-serving.

Ever since :Metropolis,” much contemporary science fiction projects a bleak future for representative government; the universes of James Cameron (“Aliens,” “Avatar”) and Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Blade Runner”) are dominated by corporate as opposed to democratic powerbrokers. Most space operas don’t even bother fleshing out any political context to the flashy action. The original “Star Wars” drops us right into the middle of a civil war, in progress. Beyond the opening crawl, the only exposition we get is Grand Moff Tarkin informing his subordinates, “The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us,” having been dissolved by the Emperor; “The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away forever.” All we need to know beyond that point is, Empire Bad: Rebels Good. What exactly the Rebel Alliance alternative government would be after its defeat of the Empire was left up to the imagination, because the original trilogy ended with everyone partying to the strains of “Yub-Nub” at precisely that point. The most recent film incarnation, set decades later, didn’t fill in any of the blanks; the Galactic Senate was accorded about five seconds of screen time before being wiped out.

Much of this is owed to sheer laziness on the part of genre writers, who apparently lack faith in their ability to hold an audience’s attention on any subject beyond the questing, wenching, and dragon slaying it presumably is looking for. This need not necessarily be the case. With his “Coriolanus” more than four centuries ago, Shakespeare proved a drama set in a functioning republic could be as immersive, character driven, and bloody as any dynastic family squabble. Over the course of his prequel trilogy, George Lucas sought to expand his narrative by incorporating an honest investigation into how and why a republic fails. In his commentary on Episode III he discusses coming of age during the Vietnam War to Watergate era, which left him with an abiding interest in “how democracies turn into dictatorships,” not via a coup or a putsch, “but how the democracy turns itself over to a tyrant.” Unfortunately, his efforts to add politico-historical heft wound up being widely lampooned and only succeeded in jar-jaring fans, who were happy to imagine it never happened.

The simple fact is, while everyone honors democracy in the abstract, no one enjoys having to make it actually work. Popular participation in participatory government is very limited; declining electoral turnout figures reflect this. No one appreciates the actual nuts and bolts of the legislative process; the caucuses and sub-caucuses, the committee and subcommittee meetings, etc. etc. And no one is satisfied with the tepid, compromised, watered-down legislation they get, if any.

So we dream of a simpler time, a better place, where real men (and/or women) step up and deliver what they promise. Some find this is in the past, but even that is no longer immune from reinterpretation (ask Andrew Jackson), hence the need for fantasy to fill the void. “Societies need heroes,” “Legend” author David Gemmell once said, “So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great.”

Those places don’t include our own nation’s capital any more. Gone are the days when the President could always be trusted to do what was right on TV. Popular culture interacts with the political process now through a new genre of hate watching Washington.

This hate is what makes the appeal of government by divine right so seductive. When the electorate is polarized and the political process is institutionally gridlocked, when the front runners for the presidential nominations of both major parties have record low approval ratings, when disgust with Congress is endemic, when the people lost their trust in government itself two generations ago and when America’s political identity, socioeconomic prospects, and manifest destiny itself are called into question, of course it is natural to fantasize about an alternative. Many Americans are openly brooding over extraconstitutional alternatives. In a YouGov poll released last year, 70 percent of respondents opined military officers “generally want what is best for the country,” compared to only 12 percent of members of Congress. When asked, “Is there any situation in which you could imagine yourself supporting the U.S. military taking over the powers of federal government,” 29 percent of those surveyed responded yes, to just 41 percent saying no. When that was broken down by party affiliation, a plurality of Republicans (43 percent yes to 32 percent no) actually were open to the possibility.

The innate human desire to surrender the burden of power to an anointed individual, a chosen one, has marked the downfall of democratic polities throughout history. Despite the powerful warning against surrendering sovereignty to a monarch in the earliest scripture, as Benjamin Franklin observed, “there is a natural inclination in mankind to kingly government.” From Octavian Caesar in Rome to Napoleon Bonaparte in France to Sheev Palpatine in the Galactic Republic, ambitious men were presented with supreme authority “to compensate for the fact that the elected representatives can’t agree on anything and are corrupt,” George Lucas explains. “And therefore, in order to clean up the mess, somebody is allowed to come in and fix things,” typically to thunderous applause. At some innate level, therefore, we want someone to take charge because “the great questions of the time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions,” as Otto von Bismarck put it, “but by iron and blood.”

There is plenty of both in the world of “Game of Thrones,” justifying its ultimate value in giving us a graphic representation of precisely why we should reject everything it stands for and celebrate our democracy. For all the faults in our system of government, the longest congressional investigation in the history of the nation’s capital is still preferable to the briefest of sieges at its gates; the ugliest election is still a better method of securing the transfer of executive power than the most picturesque assassination (or coup-d’état).

So feel free to enjoy watching “Game of Thrones,” discussing it, studying it; just don’t get too emotionally invested in it. Team Sansa or Team Daenerys? A plague on both your houses; valar morghulis, but the republic endures.

Jen Kirkman speaks the truth: On casual sexism, comedy, feminism, the real work of relationships, and why your job won’t save you

Jen Kirkman’s new memoir opens with a line you might not expect from a stand-up comedian who jokes mercilessly in her recent Netflix special, “I’m Gonna Die Alone (and I Feel Fine),” about turning 40 and discovering her own gray pubic hairs. For context, here’s a quote from that set:

“If it was white hair, no problem, I’d grow that out silky, like Kenny Rogers’ beard. Or I’d shave it into a mohawk like Billy Idol — punk rock pussy, you know? But gray is a mean color—and when it finally all grows in? Gray is the color of barbed wire, and it sends a message, right? GET OUT OF HERE.”

By contrast, “I Know What I’m Doing—and Other Lies I Tell Myself” opens not with a pubes joke, but a sigh: “Ugh, my parents are going to read this.”

What seems like an odd contradiction — fearless comedian metaphorically undressing on TV to make us laugh at the humiliations our aging human bodies deal us also stressing over what her family thinks about her personal life?  — is just one more thing about Kirkman that makes her so (and this is a terrible word, I think we can all agree, but with apologies) relatable. Her memoir is an intimate, funny, quasi-confessional examination of life at 40 — divorcing with dignity, dating and hooking up, falling in love, being unsure about the future but fiercely committed to career and freedom, keeping proper wine and wine glasses in the home like a real adult, accidentally pissing off most of Ireland on a work trip, and, like Kenny Rogers, knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em, with strangers and loved ones alike.

Kirkman, a veteran of the stand-up scene whose first memoir, “I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales from a Happy Life Without Kids,” was a New York Times bestseller, is a former writer for “Chelsea Lately,” where she also appeared frequently on camera, and “After Lately,” as well as a narrator for the cult hit “Drunk History.” Kirkman doesn’t have a sitcom named after her yet — she has a podcast, “I Seem Fun” — but neither is she a comedy ingénue mining 20-something bewilderment for laughs. She’s a hard-working, mid-career successful adult responsible for herself who — like so many of us — still worries what her mom will say if she writes about her sex life. (And, as it turns out, that random people will refuse to believe that the judgey doctor who diagnosed her with Hepatitis C was actually mistaken—she does not have it, you guys, but her willingness to keep talking about that episode anyway speaks volumes about the courage it takes to be a woman telling the story of her life in public.)

“I Know What I’m Doing” covers Kirkman’s marriage and split, single life, living alone, airplane anxiety, dating and sex — including a long on-again/off-again only-when-we’re-both-single Friend With Benefits, as well as the pleasures and pitfalls of hooking up with a 23-year-old musician (a chapter titled “Jen Cougar Mellencamp,” be still my Midwestern pun-appreciating heart) — and alternates no-bullshit advice like “When their kids are teenagers, you can see your friends again” with the self-deprecating play-by-play of what happens when she decides to “opt out of the mandatory fun” of New Year’s Eve and stay home alone (spoiler: It is not the GOOP-ish Zen experience she plans for).

In other words — at least for this reader — throughout the book, Kirkman makes good on her promise to be “a voice in your head, other than your own, that sounds like you.” As it turns out, Kirkman kind of does know what she’s doing — and, you know, maybe so do you.

I spoke with Kirkman over the phone about the tension between privacy and public life, sexism online and how much work it takes to keep relationships going, both casual and committed. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

I know you say this book isn’t a traditional advice book, but thanks to you I’ve really re-thought my stemless wine glasses.

By the way, that would be the only thing I’d want people to take away from it. [Laughs.]

I’ve started thinking: Are these juvenile?

I’ve always been under the impression that they’re supposed to be more sophisticated because they’re European. Then there’s this whole culture where people do actually put [wine] in really pretty juice glasses. I hate it. So my thing is, people can drink however they want but if you have guests coming over for wine, you’ve got to have a stem option. When I order white wine and it comes and the stem isn’t there, it just ruins my mood. Although sometimes a nice red, I don’t mind holding it in a glass.

Your hand gets the glass all warm if it’s a chilled wine.

But I don’t want to ask, because I don’t want to be wine-shamed. Like, “Oh no, actually the way your hand goes on the glass makes it colder.” Someone will have an answer for that, you know?

The answer is probably more like we didn’t want people breaking our wine glasses?

That’s probably exactly what it is.

Your new book is a very candid memoir about your divorce and the single life. It’s funny, but it also feels very real and emotional and authentic, not played for defensive laughs. In the intro you write, “For a stand-up comedian who talks about life on stage, I’m weirdly, fiercely private.” Are you nervous about being this open about your life?

I’m actually kicking myself for not being more honest. I feel like I didn’t really still explain what went on. It takes so long to realize why any of that happened [in a divorce], so in a weird way, I’m upset that I didn’t get more honest. I think there’s more to be said about what I thought feelings of love felt like, and how sad that can be when you’re looking for someone that doesn’t make you feel anything. I really thought that’s what love was, and he must’ve, too.

That whole chapter where I blame myself for having no sex drive, I forgot to add that he had never made a move on me in a long time. So there are things that I’m like, why didn’t I put that in there?

But the weird stuff that I didn’t want my parents to read about is any of the sex stuff. Well, my dad probably won’t read it. My mom will, and I think she probably might not like it. I don’t know.

There’s having a boyfriend, and there’s having one-night stands. Or that doctor who misdiagnosed me with Hep-C. For some reason, that story freaks me out, because I’m afraid people won’t believe me, even though I don’t have hepatitis. I’m afraid people will read it and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, she just wanted to tell that story, but I know she has it. Once it’s in someone’s hands, I can’t explain anything they might not understand.

Now that I look back on it, I’m very critical of myself. I wanted to be as honest as possible. I feel like since I’m not a professional prose writer who knows certain techniques of writing, for me, all I have is my honesty and humor. So when I had to re-read it recently, I was like, “This isn’t honest enough. This is a bunch of crap.”

That’s so interesting that you think people won’t believe you were misdiagnosed — I never thought there would be Jen Kirkman Truthers out there. Do you think people understand there’s a difference between your public, on-stage persona and who you really are?

If I had to pick something to worry about, that would be it. But I’m truly not worried. I think for me, I really love my podcast because I can just be totally honest and boring, explain every single thing I mean. I think there’s a flip-side: If everyone understood what I said every second, maybe I would have a very limited amount of fans.

If you think about it in terms of song lyrics, so many songs were written just about me and oh my God, I went through that and I bet if I asked the songwriter he’d be like, “Oh, that was about this road trip I took.” And I’m like, “Oh, it sounded like this break-up I had once,” you know?

So I did this gig in London recently. I don’t have any stand-up jokes about my actual separation, or divorce proceedings. I literally just say as my legal identity, “Hey, so I’m divorced,” just so they know the context isn’t “single woman who’s never been married who may be looking for that,” but more “single woman who has been married and is very gun shy about doing it again.” This woman came up to me after, and she was crying, and she was like, “My husband was abusive, too, and I’m leaving him tonight, and that’s why I have my backpack and I’m staying at my friend’s house and thank you for speaking for us.” I was like, “Whoa! Wait, what? My husband couldn’t be less abusive. He’s the nicest person. I was not abused. I didn’t say anything about abuse.”

But because I said I’m divorced she projected all this stuff onto me, and for her I was the voice of it’s ok to go out on your own. If she hadn’t done that, maybe she wouldn’t like me as much. So in a weird way, sometimes being misunderstood can be good for the artist, but at the same time it’s what drives me crazy.

What really frustrates me is that I get contacted by people who don’t understand that my Netflix special is jokes about relationships — about being married, being single, being in a sexual relationship. I wrote some of those jokes when I was married. I wrote some when I was in a relationship, I wrote some when I was single. I’ve been performing it for years, and I just taped it last year. You don’t know where I’m at in life the day you contact me about that special. And so I hate when men ask me out because I made a few jokes about a time I was single, and what they hear is that I’m looking to be rescued by them. Even if they’re joking, it makes me livid.

I wish I just had jokes about the weather, because then nobody would like, “Hey, can I take you to dinner? You must get lonely on the road.” I think being misunderstood bothers me more than having everyone know my business in a weird way.

One of the memorable chapters in the book builds on a bit you have in your stand-up about sleeping with a younger guy. How do people react to that story? Do you get approached by a lot of younger guys?

About every other day I get the same joke: “I’m 20 and I’m a drummer. Do you want to date me?” And I’m like, did you not see the routine where I spent one night with him and hated it because he was so young? So I get it a lot online. Luckily, no one comes up to me in person or else I would probably … either yell at them or run away.

On Twitter, you’ve been amplifying other women’s stories of sexual harassment, and you’ve been vocal about confronting some of the sexism pointed at Hillary Clinton during this campaign. A lot of artists use Twitter for harmless promotion, but this really puts you out there and exposes you to, well, all the sexist harassment that Twitter can attract.

I’ve always been a feminist, and really loud about it, and I do it because I’m sick of seeing these little things that aren’t getting fixed. Like stuff about feminism that I was really excited about in the ‘90s. Kurt Cobain used to say — he used to be friends with Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill — “Why is it always on women, that they should do this or that to prevent rape? Why don’t we teach the guys not to rape?” I mean, people have been saying that since I was a teenage girl in the ‘90s and [back then] I thought, good, we’re getting somewhere. But I have to keep repeating that 20 years later, as each generation comes up and does not seem to have learned one damn thing about women’s issues.

The problem is when women teach people, people don’t want to listen. I am starting to speak out more because I’m seeing a lot of men in comedy do feminist comedy and they’re getting lauded for it and I’m like wait, we just skipped over all the women that have been doing this forever.

I’m also not famous. And I don’t say that as, oh woe is me, but it’s literally the difference between [me and] an actual celebrity comedian like Amy Schumer, who is an industry. I am just a person in a two-bedroom apartment who has fans, but I am not an industry. So she has to be careful in everything she says. Money stands to be lost by other people if she says the wrong thing. I’m not implying at all that she cares — I’m just saying that I don’t have anything to worry about. No one loses a job if my Twitter gets boring.

One thing that I really appreciate in the book is how detailed you get in describing your work — how you got to where you are, how it works for you. Your “there are a lot of ways to be successful” line to the guy on the airplane to Australia really resonated. How did you know when you made it?

I will get one person that recognizes me in the airport and then everyone else crowding around, asking them why they’re recognizing me. For me it’s like, I can pay the bills, I can probably put down cash and buy a house in some small part of America. But for what I’m doing, I’m still at the phase of I can’t believe I get to do what I do. The freedom. There’s annoying stuff about it, but the freedom is pretty great.

I don’t want anyone to be like, “wow, you really made it,” because if that’s all they’re aspiring to then they’re going to be very disappointed when they get here. You know when you think something is something because you’re young and then you get there and you go, “Oh it’s great, but I see what…” It’s not going to save you. It’s just going to be your job.

You write that “career” is often written about as some kind of albatross around a woman’s neck that’s keeping her from settling down. Especially for a woman who has decided not to have kids, how do you push back against that?

I swear to God, the only time I talk about it is in interviews. No one really bothers me about it. I wrote the first book about not wanting to have kids, because I just happened to be at that sweet spot in life where I was getting married, and other people my age were getting married, but they were having kids and so people were confused about why I was getting married and not having kids. But it doesn’t happen that much anymore.

Any time someone says something stupid to me about career, is usually a complete stranger — a cab driver. It just happened to me in Sydney, Australia. I had four suitcases, I was getting into a cab going to the airport, and I think the guy was probably like, “That load of suitcases — is there somebody else?” I was like, “no it’s just me.” And then he was like, “So, no man?”

First of all, it’s just so weird to me. Maybe there is a man, maybe he’s just not on the trip with me, maybe this, maybe that, who cares? But I just file that all under sexism. I never have people in real life saying, “Oh, your career is keeping you from this or that,” because I think my relatives can see my life is just not normal. I don’t have regular hours, and they can also see I love what I do and I can still live a really full life outside of it.

Honestly, I’m just kind of rude to people when they talk to me that way, because I think it’s rude of them. So I’ll just say, “If you could just butt out, I didn’t get into this cab to be questioned about my life.” But it is always strangers.

The chapter about your long-time friend-with-benefits was really touching. The book seems like in many ways a high-five to living the unconventional life .

It’s so funny, because I’ve changed so much since I wrote the book. And in the book I do mention that he and I, my old friend with benefits, we haven’t had any benefits in years.

But in my next relationship, whenever or whatever that will be like — my new thing is, just for me and the problems that it causes me, I don’t do sex outside of relationships anymore. I don’t do one-night stands. I don’t do online dating. I don’t do anything. So if I happen to get into a relationship, great. If I don’t, then that actually works better for me, it keeps me sane.

But there were times in my life when unconventional relationships had just as much meaning. In a weird way, I had better communication with my friend with benefits a lot of times in my life than I did with my husband. They never overlapped or anything, but I think there’s this sense that only if you’re in a traditional relationship or marriage can you have a deep thing, otherwise it’s just trivial or sexual.

I believe in marriage, too. I would get married again. I have no beef with any of it. But I just feel like if you said to someone I’m 50 and I have a lover who’s my friend but we’re never going to make it official, or it’s technically open, even though we’re not seeing anyone else, I think people would feel really sad for that person.

I think people are threatened by it.

I don’t know. Although I’ve changed so much, because I used to think that, and I used to think the friends-with-benefits people had it all figured out. And then I realized it’s just as much work as anything else. The person that’s on Tinder every day, swiping, swiping, dating, trying it out. The person that has a friend with benefits, every day they have to work to keep it not a real relationship. And then the people in a relationship that are working to keep it interesting. Everyone’s always probably spending way too much time on relationships than they need to be.

Listen, no one’s having any fun, even the friends-with-benefits people. In one way I’m saying that, and in another way I’m saying it is possible these things can be as deep — but it’s a case by case basis, just like a marriage is.

It doesn’t mean anyone who’s married is automatically happy or in something that’s actually honest. Everything takes time, and I mean that in a negative way. Everything can be time-consuming, and everything can sort of make you feel devalued unless someone else is swiping you or marrying you or whatever-ing you.

So I feel, in those moments when people do not have someone like that, they better be OK with themselves or it can get so bad. My friends-with-benefits relationship during those years was so, so important for me. It was the friendship part that was really bonding — but I guess that’s what you would say about a marriage, too.

White isn’t a neutral color: “Doctor Strange,” Tilda Swinton and the “unwinnable” diversity argument

In a recent interview, “Doctor Strange” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill insisted that the casting of the iconic the Ancient One was “absolutely unwinnable.” Asked by the hosts of the Double Toasted podcast about the decision to cast Tilda Swinton as a traditionally Asian character, Cargill declared, “It all comes down onto which way you’re willing to lose,” listing off a litany of concerns. The character himself, as historically depicted, is a “racist stereotype.” And because he is from Tibet, “a region of the world that is in a very weird political place,” to recognize his origins is to “risk alienating one billion people who think that that’s bull shit.” The background of Doctor Strange is itself Orientalist, another “white guy goes to the Orient and adopts their ways and it’s a great white hero story.” Faced with this supposedly losing proposition, Cargill claimed that director and co-screenwriter Scott Derrickson decided to “give a great meaty role to an actress.” “The hill Scott decided to die on was the one of feminism,” Cargill said.

The metaphor is an apt one, for Cargill seemed to point to a casting choice that challenged gender assumptions as somehow redemptive for its catering to racial ones. But it is possible to simultaneously challenge both. (Intersectionality might have been a better resting place for Derrickson.) Cargill’s rhetorical technique is also entirely disingenuous. Yes, he, Derrickson, and their fellow screenwriters are all white men. But Cargill did note that critics have suggested Michelle Yeoh, a Chinese-Malaysian actress, as an alternative casting choice, and is thus presumably aware that minority women exist.

At times, Cargill seemed to justify harsh critiques, but blamed his Marvel predecessors for creating such an “awkward” character to begin with. A host leaped in to present a sympathetic analysis. “All these characters were created back in the early ’60s,” he offered.

“By a bunch of white men,” Cargill noted, with nary a hint of self-awareness.

Yet though he acknowledged that “everyone has a right to be upset,” Cargill repeatedly referred to people who are as “the social justice warriors” with an air of scoffing dismissal. After one of his countless self-congratulatory mentions of Derrickson’s deigning to cast Oscar-winning Swinton in his film, he echoed his earlier sentiment that this was a lose-lose situation. “Everybody kind of pats us on the back for that and then decides to scold us for her not being Tibetan,” he said, as though those seeking greater representation are nagging harpies. Cargill consistently exhibited a pigheaded refusal to acknowledge that people might actually care about these issues for reasons that are non-performative.

Even if we grant Cargill that he had no explicit role in the casting decision he vehemently defended, he conceded that the premise of Doctor Strange is fundamentally racist, albeit with a tone of faux self-importance. He did so as further evidence that he could do no right by the social justice brigade, that even if he had cast a Tibetan actress in the role of the Ancient One, he would have been left with a “great white hero story.” Did it honestly never occur to Cargill or either of his colleagues that they were changing the race of the wrong character? That this problem might have been remedied by presenting audiences with a Tibetan-American protagonist, and with more Asian characters, not fewer? If so, the sheer lack of imagination is astounding.

Adopting a more cynical view, the screenwriting team was working under creative limitations that were self-imposed. In attempting to prove that the Ancient One is a “cultural landmine,” Cargill elaborated on concerns that casting a Tibetan would have turned off Chinese viewers. He cannot possibly believe that the entire, billion person population of China has monolithic views on Tibet and categorically refuses to acknowledge that there are people who are from there. His next comment was more revealing. “[You] risk the Chinese government going, ‘Hey, you know,’ one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world, ‘we’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political,’” he said.

The implication is that, when it came to the Ancient One’s race, a decision was made to take no stance. But white is not neutral. Constructing white characters for white actors is also a political choice. Ultimately, Cargill’s attempts to grapple with these issues, which many would have viewed as an interesting creative problem, amount to no less than whining that his handsomely compensated job is too hard. Well, then, perhaps he should get another one. One that does charge him with controlling the images that will be projected on screens worldwide, filled with messages that tens of millions of people will absorb.

Which raises a far more difficult question than any that was asked of Cargill. I am generally not a fan of boycotting art– if you will recall, I exchanged government-issued currency for a ticket to “God’s Not Dead 2″ – and think that consuming culture is crucial to developing a shared language around the difficult issues it explores. But in this case, no further intellectual legwork is needed. Cargill has acknowledged the legitimacy of counterarguments, but refuses to modify his stance or even tone accordingly. And he has made clear that the only way such criticisms will be respected rather than ridiculed, the only way they will have the power to alter decision-making processes, is if they pose a serious threat to a film’s financial success. It is now up to Asians and their allies to decide whether thoughtful, conscientious inclusion is a hill they’re willing to die on. To decide which way, so to speak, they’re willing to lose.

Why it’s impossible to actually be a vegetarian

In case you’ve forgotten the section on the food web from high school biology, here’s a quick refresher.

Plants make up the base of every food chain of the food web (also called the food cycle). Plants use available sunlight to convert water from the soil and carbon dioxide from the air into glucose, which gives them the energy they need to live. Unlike plants, animals can’t synthesize their own food. They survive by eating plants or other animals.

Clearly, animals eat plants. What’s not so clear from this picture is that plants also eat animals. They thrive on them, in fact (just Google “fish emulsion”). In my new book, “A Critique of the Moral Defense of Vegetarianism,” I call it the transitivity of eating. And I argue that this means one can’t be a vegetarian.

Chew on this

I’ll pause to let the collective yowls of both biologists and (erstwhile) vegetarians subside.

A transitive property says that if one element in a sequence relates in a certain way to a second element, and the second element relates in the same way to a third, then the first and third elements relate in the same way as well.

Take the well-worn trope “you are what you eat.” Let’s say instead that we are “who” we eat. This makes the claim more personal and also implies that the beings who we make our food aren’t just things.

How our food lives and dies matters. If we are who we eat, our food is who our food eats, too. This means that we are who our food eats in equal measure.

Plants acquire nutrients from the soil, which is composed, among other things, of decayed plant and animal remains. So even those who assume they subsist solely on a plant-based diet actually eat animal remains as well.

This is why it’s impossible to be a vegetarian.

For the record, I’ve been a “vegetarian” for about 20 years and nearly “vegan” for six. I’m not opposed to these eating practices. That isn’t my point. But I do think that many “vegetarians” and “vegans” could stand to pay closer attention to the experiences of the beings who we make our food.

For example, many vegetarians cite the sentience of animals as a reason to abstain from eating them. But there’s good reason to believe that plants are sentient, too. In other words, they’re acutely aware of and responsive to their surroundings, and they respond, in kind, to both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.

Check out the work of plant scientists Anthony Trewavas, Stefano Mancuso, Daniel Chamowitz and František Baluška if you don’t believe me. They’ve shown that plants share our five senses – and have something like 20 more. They have a hormonal information-processing system that’s homologous to animals’ neural network. They exhibit clear signs of self-awareness and intentionality. And they can even learn and teach.

It’s also important to be aware that “vegetarianism” and “veganism” aren’t always eco-friendly. Look no further than the carbon footprint of your morning coffee, or how much water is required to produce the almonds you enjoy as an afternoon snack.

A word for the skeptics

I suspect how some biologists may respond: first, plants don’t actually eat since eating involves the ingestion – via chewing and swallowing – of other life forms. Second, while it’s true that plants absorb nutrients from the soil and that these nutrients could have come from animals, they’re strictly inorganic: nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and trace amounts of other elements. They’re the constituents of recycled minerals, devoid of any vestiges of animality.

As for the first concern, maybe it would help if I said that both plants and animals take in, consume or make use of, rather than using the word “eat.” I guess I’m just not picky about how I conceptualize what eating entails. The point is that plants ingest carbon dioxide, sunlight, water and minerals that are then used to build and sustain their bodies. Plants consume inasmuch as they produce, and they aren’t the least bit particular about the origins of the minerals they acquire.

With respect to the second concern, why should it matter that the nutrients drawn by plants from animals are inorganic? The point is that they once played in essential role in facilitating animals’ lives. Are we who we eat only if we take in organic matter from the beings who become our food? I confess that I don’t understand why this should be. Privileging organic matter strikes me as a biologist’s bias.

Then there’s the argument that mineral recycling cleanses the nutrients of their animality. This is a contentious claim, and I don’t think this is a fact of the matter. It goes to the core of the way we view our relationship with our food. You could say that there are spiritual issues at stake here, not just matters of biochemistry.

Changing how we view our food

Let’s view our relationship with our food in a different way: by taking into account the fact that we’re part of a community of living beings – plant and animal – who inhabit the place that we make our home.

We’re eaters, yes, and we’re also eaten. That’s right, we’re part of the food web, too! And the well-being of each is dependent on the well-being of all.

From this perspective, what the self-proclaimed “farmosopher” Glenn Albrecht calls sumbiotarianism (from the Greek word sumbioun, to live together) has clear advantages.

Sumbioculture is a form of permaculture, or sustainable agriculture. It’s an organic and biodynamic way of farming that’s consistent with the health of entire ecosystems.

Sumbiotarians eat in harmony with their ecosystem. So they embody, literally, the idea that the well-being of our food – hence, our own well-being – is a function of the health of the land.

In order for our needs to be met, the needs and interests of the land must come first. And in areas where it’s prohibitively difficult to acquire the essential fats that we need from pressed oils alone, this may include forms of animal use – for meat, manure and so forth.

Simply put, living sustainably in such an area – whether it’s New England or the Australian Outback – may well entail relying on animals for food, at least in a limited way.

All life is bound together in a complex web of interdependent relationships among individuals, species and entire ecosystems. Each of us borrows, uses and returns nutrients. This cycle is what permits life to continue. Rich, black soil is so fertile because it’s chock full of the composted remains of the dead along with the waste of the living.

Indeed, it’s not uncommon for indigenous peoples to identify veneration of their ancestors and of their ancestral land with the celebration of the life-giving character of the earth. Consider this from cultural ecologist and Indigenous scholar-activist Melissa Nelson:

The bones of our ancestors have become the soil, the soil grows our food, the food nourishes our bodies, and we become one, literally and metaphorically, with our homelands and territories.

You’re welcome to disagree with me, of course. But it’s worth noting that what I propose has conceptual roots that may be as old as humanity itself. It’s probably worth taking some time to digest this.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

“Veep”’s exquisite edge: A profane catharsis for the nastiest presidential election in memory

By chance, one of the funniest, harshest shows on TV – HBO’s “Veep,” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus – recently started its fifth season as one of the funniest, harshest presidential races in history heats up. There are enough parallels: Selina Meyer, the vice president who became president in the last season and is now running for her first full term, is foul-mouthed and ego-driven. Donald Trump is indisputably both of those things. And Ted Cruz recently named Carly Fiorina as his own ego-mad female vice president. (Of course, he has to be nominated and elected first, neither of which seems likely.)

Either way, there are a lot of opportunities to write stories drawing parallels between “Veep” and the real-world campaign. Here’s one of them, from The Guardian:

“The masses have called out for a president known for duplicity, covering up inappropriate and even racist comments, and an obsession with the media’s opinion about certain anatomical shortcomings. No, not Donald Trump, as he steadily marches toward the White House – Selina Meyer, the woman who’s already there.”

“Both politicians have a way with gaffes… Trump and Meyer have even more in common. Both accused prominent politicians of not being eligible to be president. Trump said Ted Cruz, a former dual US-Canadian citizen, might not be able to run for the White House. Meyer questioned whether an Asian American governor was born in the US or China.”

If you watch all five seasons of the show you’ll pick up several handfuls of parallels like these. But the essential truth of “Veep” is that we see things on the show that are far nastier and more profane and cynical that what we get to see in national politics. (Are things just as bad as the show under the surface? Probably.)

So as crude as Trump’s reference to his penis size (“I guarantee you there’s no problem”) might be, it’s nothing next to the characters in “Veep” likening each other to penises, testicles, and anuses. “It’s the way we talk in the White House,” the officious Amy (Anna Chlumsky) says when she’s called on a lesbian-mocking joke by another character. “I’m not even aware I’m doing it any more.”

I’ll keep most of this vague for now because a) I don’t want to destroy the humor that comes with comic surprise, and b) many of the show’s lines are too profane to reproduce here. But just as a sample: Jonah Ryan is known as “Jack and the Giant Jackoff,” “Scrotum Pole,” and a handful of other nicknames I don’t feel comfortable writing. A new campaign hand comes in for season five and almost immediately tosses out a flurry of cruel, insulting, and homophobic lines. When he bumps into an old associate he recalls a bunch of sexually humiliating nicknames. In one episode, characters joke around as the close relative of one of them breathes a final breath.

Compared to some of these characters, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is a humanitarian.

Some of the insults and metaphors are either in bad taste or pretty close. There’s a mocking line about wounded soldiers in a hospital, a joking reference to a child molester at a kid’s theme park, and a reference to Anne Frank that’s just over the top. This is in addition to the general narcissism of several of the show’s characters, the way they rank on either other, or the way Selina, for instance, neglects and belittles her daughter.

It’s worth mentioning, of course, that much of the show is also funny, smartly acted, and engaging. The first four episodes of the season are about a recount of the Nevada vote, which tied the electoral vote, and the tension gives them enough structure to hang everything else on.

But the brutal tone of the show is hard to get around. Why, with all the unpleasantness in the real world of the 2016 presidential campaign – Trump’s race-baiting, the insulting things Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters say to each other, partisan media on both sides shouting accusations back and forth – why do audiences keep watching “Veep”?

Writing in The Atlantic, David Sims guesses that they won’t–that “like so much current satire, from “SNL” to “The Daily Show” to “Scandal”’s Donald Trump analogue—it’s struggling to match the unpredictable political pulse of the moment.”

But I’m going to speculate that audiences will continue to watch “Veep” in large numbers. Some of the reason is, of course, the show’s humor and intelligence. But some of it is that compared to “Veep,” the real presidential race is reasonably low-key, its characters well-behaved. We can laugh at the outrageousness of Selina Meyer and the rest, and then, when we walk away from it, it’s gone.

It’s the kind of thing that a lot of us wish we could do with the real political race. “Veep” acts as a kind of wish fulfillment for those of us who wish that contemporary electoral politics was just a rude joke, a piece of fiction, and not our reality. As long as it is, “Veep” is a weird kind of comfort food.

Why we can’t reform our cops: Race, guns and the failure to police the police

On April 4, 2015, a black man, Walter Scott, was shot dead by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager following a routine traffic stop for a defective brake light. Scott fled on foot, possibly because he was afraid of going to jail for failing to make child support payments. A video taken by a bystander captured the later stages of the foot pursuit and clearly showed Officer Slager discharging eight rounds from his service weapon as Scott was running away from him. Five of the bullets hit Scott, who died at the scene.

We learn more about the problem of police violence and how it can persist and might be covered up when a video only surfaces after some significant delay. That allows time for the police to provide their account of the incident before the video evidence is available, and possibly before they even know that any video recording exists. In the case of Walter Scott’s death, it took more than two days before the video became available to authorities. Feidin Santana, who captured the shooting on his cellphone camera, initially kept quiet about the video, fearing retribution, but was angered when he heard the police account of the incident and made the recording available to Scott’s family and to the media.

Presumably Officer Slager, in providing his initial account of the incident, had no idea that any video existed. He claimed that Scott, during a scuffle, reached for the Taser on his (Officer Slager’s) belt, and that he (Slager), therefore, felt his own life was in danger. He immediately gave an explanation over the police radio—“Shots fired and the subject is down; he took my Taser”—knowing that such transmissions are recorded, hence, putting his story on the record.

Without the video evidence, that story might well have stood. But the video became public on April 7, showing Slager repeatedly firing at Scott as he ran away, and Slager was arrested within a few hours and charged with murder.

The video of Scott’s shooting immediately went viral, of course, along with the revelations about Slager’s original and clearly false account. For the general public, the case raises serious concerns about other police incidents not captured on video, where there is little or no objective evidence about what happened, and where officers provide similar justifications for shooting an unarmed person. How often do stories such as Slager’s get told? What chance is there that investigations into officer-involved shootings—typically conducted by detectives from the same department (that is, by the involved officer’s own colleagues)—will actually establish the truth? How widespread is the practice of lying to conceal police abuse of force?

It would be interesting to know some basic facts and figures. For instance, how many times a year do American police officers shoot unarmed suspects and subsequently justify their actions by claiming they felt their own life was in immediate danger, either because the suspect appeared to be about to pull something out of a pocket or, in the course of a scuffle, the suspect seemed to be reaching for the officer’s own weapon? In the absence of witnesses or video evidence or contradictory forensic evidence, such accounts are unlikely to be refuted. Such incidents would normally end up classified as justifiable homicides—or, to use the peculiar language of the police profession, as “good shootings.”

The fact of the matter is that we have no idea how often this happens, as the United States does not gather any reliable national statistics on officer-involved shootings, or on other deaths at the hands of police, or on deaths that occur in police custody. Federal databases exist, but submission of those data by law enforcement agencies remains voluntary and is, consequently, acknowledged to be woefully incomplete.

Why can the United States not produce reliable statistics on the number of civilians shot and killed by police? The usual explanations point to the difficulty of categorizing incidents in sufficiently consistent ways to make the figures meaningful, as well as the cost and difficulties involved in gathering data from the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies that operate in America. But it seems incongruous that the U.S. federal government manages to report annually and nationwide (through the Uniform Crime Reports) on matters such as burglaries, larcenies, robberies, and sexual assaults—where all the same definitional complexities and data collection difficulties apply—but they cannot do the same when it comes to officer-involved shootings despite the fact that these events are much less numerous, somewhat easier to define, and much more significant.

In an attempt to fill the information vacuum, the Washington Post began compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The study focused only on fatal shootings, and, therefore, did not include other deaths at the hands of police, or deaths in police custody, or nonfatal shootings. Even so, the Post’s tally as of December 24, 2015, was 965, which equates to roughly 2.7 people shot dead by police, on average, per day. This is more than double the rate revealed by the official statistics compiled at the federal level for previous years. Analysis conducted by the Washington Post showed that at least 243 (25 percent) of the 965 shot dead showed signs of mental illness at the time they died at the hands of police.

 The Guardian newspaper, which also tracked the number of people killed by U.S. police in 2015 (whether by shooting or otherwise), showed a year-end tally of 1,134. According to the Guardian’s crowd-sourced information, 1,010 of these deaths were by gunshot. Their analysis also showed black people were killed by police at more than double the rate for whites and Hispanics/Latinos. Of the African Americans killed by police, 25 percent were unarmed, while 17 percent of the whites killed were unarmed. According to the Washington Post’s analysis of 385 police shootings that occurred during the first five months of 2015, officers had been charged in only three cases. Officer Slager in North Charleston was one of these. In all three cases that led to indictments against police officers, video evidence had surfaced that showed officers shooting suspects during or at the end of pursuits on foot.

In a different study using multiyear data, the Washington Post examined the rate at which police officers were charged as a result of fatal shootings. They found only fifty-four cases where officers had been charged since 2005, representing a tiny fraction of the thousands of police shooting incidents that had occurred in a decade.

The Post’s analysis showed that in most of the cases where prosecutors did press charges the victim was unarmed, and there were also “other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers, or allegations of a cover-up.” According to prosecutors interviewed by the Post, to charge a police officer requires “compelling proof that at the time of the shooting the victim posed no threat either to the officer or to bystanders.” Absent one of these exceptional factors, it seems generally impossible to disprove officers’ claims that they felt themselves endangered. According to Philip Stinson, one of the criminologists working with the Post on the study, “To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way.”

Even where individual killings are justified, the patterns of practice that result in so many deaths can still be alarming. Ronald L. Davis, head of the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Post reporters, “We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most [police shootings] are preventable.” According to the Department of Justice, “The shooting of unarmed people who pose no threat is disturbingly common.”

The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which released its final report in May 2015, addressed the need for reliable data on police use of force and the need to bolster the credibility and independence of investigations into use-of-force incidents. With respect to the gathering of data, the task force noted the existence of voluntary reporting programs on arrest-related and in-custody deaths, but recommended mandating law enforcement agencies to “collect, maintain, and report data to the Federal Government on all officer-involved shootings, whether fatal or nonfatal, as well as any in-custody death.” The task force also recommended mandating “external and independent criminal investigations in cases of police use of force resulting in death, officer-involved shootings resulting in injury or death, and in-custody deaths.”

Baltimore, April 2015

On April 12, 2015, Baltimore police arrested Freddie Carlos Gray Jr., a twenty-five- year- old African American man. Gray had run away from police, even though the police did not know why. They gave chase and apprehended him, alleging that he was in possession of an illegal switchblade. The arrest itself was videotaped by bystanders, but did not appear violent. Gray was handcuffed and transported to a police station in a van without being secured by a seatbelt as departmental policy requires. At the end of the trip, Gray was in a coma and was taken to a trauma center. He died on April 19 from spinal cord injuries. Six Baltimore police officers were immediately suspended and have since been criminally charged with various counts relating to Gray’s death.

Protests over Gray’s death in Baltimore were mostly peaceful, but turned violent the day of his funeral and resulted in millions of dollars’ worth of looting, property damage, and destruction within the city. The violence was short-lived, however (partly due to the imposition of a citywide curfew and influx of substantial law-enforcement assistance), and appears in retrospect largely attributable to the coordinated actions of opportunistic high-school kids intent on looting and capitalizing on the unrest. Some of the criminal opportunism seems to have been highly targeted. During the rioting, thirty-seven pharmacies in Baltimore were entered, and oxycodone availability on the streets reached unprecedented levels shortly thereafter.

Baltimore’s police commissioner, Anthony Batts, who had been brought in from Oakland in 2012 to reform the Baltimore Police Department, asked the Department of Justice to come in and conduct a systematic review of Baltimore’s departmental policies and practices.

The fact that the Department of Justice has the power to examine and intervene in the practices of local police departments is a curious legacy of the videotaped beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department in March 1991. The Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 contains a provision inserted as a result of the reforming efforts of Representative Henry Waxman of California. This provision makes it illegal to “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers [or other officials within the criminal justice system] that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

The 1994 act also grants the attorney general of the United States, given reasonable cause to believe that such a violation has occurred, the right to intervene “to obtain appropriate equitable and declaratory relief to eliminate the pattern or practice.” Over the last twenty years, this provision has provided the foundation for federal intervention into local policing issues and the imposition of consent decrees on numerous major city police departments, especially when infringements of constitutional rights are alleged. It provides an important opportunity for national values and constitutional rights to be reasserted when local police management conceals patterns of abuse or fails to control officers’ conduct, when departmental culture stifles or defeats local reform efforts, or, for that matter, when local leaders completely lose their moral bearings.

Excerpted from “Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform” by Malcolm K. Sparrow. Published by Brookings Institution Press. Copyright © 2016 by Malcolm K. Sparrow. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

“Your hair is so white, it tried to punch me at a Trump rally”: 10 best lines from Larry Wilmore’s scathing White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue

Last night, “The Nightly Show” host Larry Wilmore delivered the traditional roast/monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, also known as Nerd Prom, because I guess Wolf Blitzer and Kerry Washington are “nerds,” just like every supermodel who likes “Star Wars” is, too. President Barack Obama dropped some amazing lines, as was expected — among other things we’ll miss in 2017 is having a president with killer joke timing — before literally dropping the mic on his way out.

You can read Wilmore’s epic transcript of shade here, but here are the 10 best lines, including what he said to Don Lemon to make the CNN anchor give him the finger.

1. First order of business: Taking down Fox News.

“Well, welcome to ‘Negro Night’ here at the Washington Hilton, or as Fox News will report, ‘Two thugs disrupt elegant dinner in D.C.’”

Later he trashed them for pushing the inane “Beyconé hates cops” narrative after her Super Bowl performance, and now the Beyhive might be coming for Megyn Kelly.

“I think Fox News secretly likes Beyoncé, though. They just renamed ‘The Kelly File,’ ‘Becky with the good hair.’”

2. Putting smug network news on notice with two words he doesn’t even say aloud: Brian Williams.

“I am a black man who replaced a white man who pretended to be a TV newscaster. So, yeah, in that way Lester Holt and I have a lot in common.”

3. CNN did not get off lightly last night, either.

“Speaking of drones, how is Wolf Blitzer still on television? Ask a follow-up question. Hey, Wolf, I’m ready to project tonight’s winner: Anyone that isn’t watching ‘The Situation Room.’”

“You know, I should say some of America’s finest black journalists are here tonight. Don Lemon’s here, too. Hey, Don, how’s it going? Alleged journalist Don Lemon, everybody.”

Watch this on a loop, it’s mesmerizing (they made up at the after-party, apparently — Don Lemon is nothing if not in possession of a finely-tuned sense of humor about himself)

Don Lemon.gif pic.twitter.com/mcBZBZRkq3

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) May 1, 2016

4. In Wilmore’s hands, even a de rigueur gag about how the president has aged over 8 years turns into a multi-layered joke about race.

“Your hair is so white, it tried to punch me at a Trump rally. President’s hair is so white it keeps saying ‘all lives matter.’”

5. Speaking of “all lives matter,” Wilmore will not let the room forget he is a black man roasting them in honor of a black man ending two terms as president and it is nothing short of amazing.

“Oh, by the way, you guys, Black Lives Matter is here tonight. I’m just kidding. Relax, white people, they’re not here. It’s just a joke. Just relax, just relax.”

6. Melissa Harris-Perry’s reaction to this bit about MSNBC and race is everything:

“MSNBC — MSNBC here tonight? No? Which actually now stands for ‘Missing a Significant Number of Black Correspondents.’ Am I wrong? They like fired Melissa Harris-Perry, they canceled Joy Reid, they booted Touré. I heard they put Chris Hayes on probation because they thought he was related to Isaac Hayes. That’s wrong. MSNBC got rid of so many black people I thought Boko Haram was running that network.”

Oh yes I enjoyed the deafening silenced that arose from the #MSNBC table during Wilmore's monologue. pic.twitter.com/5GRmRtLVvi

— Melissa Harris-Perry (@MHarrisPerry) May 1, 2016

7. Here’s a two-fer on Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton:

“I am confused with Bernie’s stance on guns. He seems to be anti-gun everywhere except Vermont. Bernie doesn’t care who gets a gun in Vermont. (*whispers*) There are no black people in Vermont.

“I have to give you credit though, Bernie, you are trying hard to get the black vote. I think it’s great. Bernie’s been hanging around with rapper Killer Mike. Or as Hillary Clinton calls him, Super Predator Mike.”

8. And of course, the orange elephant in the room, reminding everyone in attendance that next year they might have to endure a “good-natured” Donald Trump roast:

“I am not surprised Donald Trump is happening to America because I watch movies, I do. And every time there’s a black president, something always comes to destroy the earth.”

9. Jokes on Obama included shade over drone warfare and broken promises:

“I just got a note from the president saying that if you want another drink, you should order it now because the bar will be closing down. Of course, he said the same thing about Guantanamo, so you have at least another eight years.”

10. But it’s his last line that everyone’s talking about:

“When I was a kid, I lived in a country where people couldn’t accept a black quarterback. Now think about that. A black man was thought by his mere color not good enough to lead a football team — and now, to live in your time, Mr. President, when a black man can lead the entire free world. Words alone do me no justice.”

“So, Mr. President, if I’m going to keep it 100: Yo, Barry, you did it, my n***a. You did it.”

Watch the entire set, and then go read Damon Young on why that moment was “peak white tears.”

The movement to end mass incarceration is still too weak to win big

Once upon a time (last year), there was purportedly growing bipartisan consensus in Congress that mass incarceration needed to end. The resulting criminal justice reform legislation, however, ran into big trouble thanks to opposition from unreconstructed anti-crime warriors in the mold of Senator Tom Cotton, who says things like “it’s the victims of crime who will bear the costs of this dangerous experiment in criminal leniency.” So in classic Congressional fashion the bill is being deformed to attract more support.

The most recent iteration of the Senate legislation, unveiled last week, frees judges to deal more leniently with low-level offenders and decreases harsh federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. It would also bring retroactive relief to thousands imprisoned under the old and racially-disproportionate crack sentencing regime. But it creates new mandatory minimums as well, including in cases involving fentanyl, a dangerously powerful opioid that is increasingly mixed with or substituted for heroin. Measures to decrease certain harsh firearm penalties have been cut. And while mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders will be lower, they are are still remarkably draconian.

“When first-time, nonviolent drug addicts…still get 15-year mandatory minimum sentences, we have to question how much reform is really being achieved,” Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) President Julie Stewart said in a statement that stopped short of either condemning or endorsing the bill. “The bill also takes some steps backward. It would now require courts to impose extra prison time for crimes involving fentanyl.”

“But long sentences have been a dismal failure at stopping drug crime and abuse,” Stewart continued. “Congress would do better to invest more money in treatment rather than spend it on locking people up longer for drug crimes.”

Sentencing Project Executive Director Marc Mauer criticized the bill but suggested that the positives outweighed the negatives, calling on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “to bring the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act to the Senate floor without delay, so that Congress can send a criminal justice reform measure to the President’s desk this year.”

There is rarely progress without compromise, and the bill is very likely better than the status quo. But the new mandatory minimum for fentanyl — five years that will be stacked on top of others — is troubling, because it will put an unknown number of new offenders in prison for longer. Fentanyl now rivals heroin as a killer, and those caught dealing it are a growing priority for law enforcement. Already, the opioid crisis has caused politicians and prosecutors to revert to their most retrograde drug war instincts, even going so far as pursuing murder charges against dealers in fatal overdose cases. If prosecutors crack down even harder on fentanyl dealers, the new mandatory minimum could temper the bill’s decarcerating impact. By how much, we don’t know.

As criminal defense attorney and activist David Menschel tweeted in a series of comments on the bill: “I have no idea whether the new-new Sentencing Reform Bill in DC is ‘worth it.'” He continued: “I can’t even get an analysis of what impact the changes to the bill would have, because no one really knows (cares?)…what is the overall anticipated carceral impact? We can’t possibly know whether to support the bill without that, can we?”

The reform’s meagerness — and, in the case of fentanyl, backwardness — reflect the current movement for criminal justice reform’s limits. While Black Lives Matter and the broader movement to end mass incarceration have scored notable victories, the sorry state of what now passes for reform in Congress is a reminder that they are still too weak to win big: Many politicians still fear the specter of Willie Horton more than they fear facing activists’ wrath. What’s more, the movement must contend with a formidable backlash animated by anti-crime hysterics from the law-and-order right, including the contrary-to-the-evidence scaremongering that protesting police and relaxing harsh sentences are raising or will raise the crime rate.

Meanwhile, Congress’s one step forward, one step back approach highlights the difficulty of dismantling a carceral state that continues to create new public enemies de jure, deserving of merciless punishment. The onward march toward marijuana legalization, for one, takes place even as the opioid crisis foments classic and failed law-and-order responses to users and sellers of heroin and fentanyl. As German Lopez writes at Vox, the measure “suggests at least some federal lawmakers have truly learned nothing from the failures of the war on drugs.”

Similarly, the removal of measures to decrease certain harsh federal sentences for those convicted of firearm offenses reflects the inherent shortcomings of emphasizing relief for nonviolent drug offenders: an estimated majority of prisoners in state prisons, where most prisoners are held, are locked up for violent crimes. That’s not true in the federal system, where roughly half are incarcerated for drugs. The federal legislation, of course, doesn’t address state prisoners. But it shows how emphasizing the plight of nonviolent offenders at the expense of the violent, while politically tempting, serves to perpetuate mass incarceration. Note the calls from Democratic officials and liberal gun control advocates for harsher mandatory minimums for illegal gun possession, which is another way to describe guns possessed by young black men.

I’m not pessimistic. This movement can win. Black Lives Matter has helped to oust top prosecutors in Chicago and Cleveland in March, and transformed the Democratic primary debate. The incarceration rate has declined in recent years. President Obama is speeding early releases for unjustly sentenced federal prisoners, though not speedily enough. Cities including New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans, have won big grants to make significant reductions in their jail populations. But the mess in Congress is a sobering reminder that piecemeal reform leaves too much undone. Mass incarceration is amongst the United States’ greatest injustices. It will require a truly enormous movement to shut it down.

Google’s new media apocalypse: How the search giant wants to accelerate the end of the age of websites

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported something that, in hindsight, was completely inevitable: Google is rolling out a feature that allows media companies to publish material directly on its platform.

From the Journal report:

Google is experimenting with a new feature that allows marketers, media companies, politicians and other organizations [to] publish content directly to Google and have it appear instantly in search results.

The search giant said it began testing the feature in January and has since opened it up to a range of small businesses, media companies and political candidates.

Fox News has worked with Google to post content related to political debates, for example, while People.com published posts related to the Oscars in February. Earlier this week, HBO published “news” articles related to fictitious characters in its popular show “Silicon Valley” to promote the season 3 premiere.

Google has built a Web-based interface through which posts can be formatted and uploaded directly to its systems. The posts can be up to 14,400 characters in length and can include links and up to 10 images or videos. The pages also include options to share them via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Welcome to another harbinger of our glorious future, everyone! Google is announcing that it wants to cut out the middleman—that is to say, other websites—and serve you content within its own lovely little walled garden. That sound you just heard was a bunch of media publishers rushing to book an extra appointment with their shrink.

You can point to lots of things for this state of affairs, but let’s start at the beginning.

Back when search, and not social media, ruled the internet, Google was the sun around which the news industry orbited. Getting to the top of Google’s results was the key that unlocked buckets of page views. Outlet after outlet spent countless hours trying to figure out how to game Google’s prized, secretive algorithm. Whole swaths of the industry were killed instantly if Google tweaked the algorithm.

Then Facebook took over. Facebook is now the sun. Facebook is the company keeping everyone up at night. Facebook is the place shaping how stories get chosen, how they get written, how they are packaged and how they show up on its site. And Facebook does all of this with just as much secrecy and just as little accountability as Google did. Last week, for instance, it took down the page of popular gossip outlet The Shade Room with no notice or explanation. Its employees have privately wondered whether they should use their power to help thwart a Donald Trump presidency.

More importantly, Facebook just opened up its Instant Articles feature to all publishers. The feature allows external outlets to publish their content directly onto Facebook’s platform, eliminating that pesky journey to their actual website. They can either place their own ads on the content or join a revenue-sharing program with Facebook. Facebook has touted this plan as one which provides a better user experience and has noted the ability for publishers to create ads on the platform as well.

The benefit to Facebook is obvious: It gets to keep people inside its house. They don’t have to leave for even a second. The publisher essentially has to accept this reality, sigh about the gradual death of websites and hope that everything works out on the financial side.

The next couple of years in the media business are probably going to be very hairy. There are already signs that the air in the digital news bubble is starting to leak. Meanwhile, Facebook just announced eye-watering, globe-smashing revenues.

Google will surely have looked at this state of affairs and thought it would quite like to get back to being a big dog in the media world. Why should Facebook keep all of that iron-fisted control to itself? Why should Google sit idly by and watch Facebook be the biggest sun in the media galaxy?

It’s all part of a much bigger story: that of how the internet, that supposed smasher of gates and leveler of playing fields, has coalesced around a mere handful of mega-giants in the space of just a couple of decades. The gates didn’t really come down. The identities of the gatekeepers just changed. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon: How many people can really say that some portion of every day of their lives isn’t mediated by at least one of these companies? (Apple, by the way, has its own news platform; it wants publishers to—you guessed it—place material directly there. If Amazon isn’t testing a similar feature, I’ll be shocked.) It seems that, at least for the moment, we are destined to live in the world that they create—and that includes everyone in the media business.

Get sick, get sued: Nebraska’s poor have never had it worse

Two years ago, the president of Credit Management Services, a collection agency in Grand Island, Nebraska, presented a struggling local family with the keys to a used 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis. To commemorate the donation, the company held a ceremony that concluded outside its offices, where the couple and their two young girls could try out their new car.

The family’s story was dire: their eight-year-old daughter’s failing kidney had led to multiple surgeries and a deluge of medical bills, according to an article in the local newspaper.

But CMS played another role in the family’s life, one the article didn’t mention. The company had previously sued the couple eight times over unpaid medical bills and garnished both of their wages. As recently as two weeks earlier, CMS had seized $156, a quarter of the girl’s father’s paycheck.

Shortly after the ceremony, CMS released the family from further garnishment, court records show. But just four months later, the company filed a motion to start up again. The couple, who did not respond to attempts by ProPublica to contact them, has since declared bankruptcy.

In almost any other state, such a barrage of lawsuits against a family in desperate financial straits would be remarkable. Not in Nebraska. There, debt collectors frequently sue over medical debts as small as $60 and a simple missed doctor’s bill can quickly land you in court.

Filing suit is one of the most aggressive ways to collect debt, but no one tracks how frequently it happens or to whom. An examination of Nebraska’s courts, however, shows that where debtors live can have an enormous, and unexpected, impact on the quantity and types of lawsuits.

Nebraska’s flood of suits isn’t merely a reflection of residents’ inability to pay their bills. About 79,000 debt collection lawsuits were filed in Nebraska courts in 2013 alone, according to a ProPublica analysis. In New Mexico, a state with a population, like Nebraska’s, of around two million, about 30,000 suits were filed. Yet by virtually any measure, households in Nebraska are significantly better off than those in New Mexico: Income is higher. Poverty is lower. And fewer families fall behind on their bills.

The reason for the difference is simple. Suing someone in Nebraska is cheaper and easier.

The cost to file a lawsuit in Nebraska is $45. In New Mexico, where suits are filed at about one-third the rate as in Nebraska, the fee for smaller debts starts at $77.

Nebraska lawmakers, of course, didn’t set out to turn the Cornhusker State into the Lawsuit State. Instead, it appears no one understood the consequences of having cheap court fees: Suing became an irresistible bargain for debt collectors. It’s a deal collectors have fought to keep, opposing even the slightest increase.

For debtors, unaffordable debts turn into unaffordable garnishments, destroying already tight budgets and sending them into a loop. “It’s just been a vicious cycle,” said Tanya Glasgow, a single mother in Lincoln, Nebraska who’s been sued several times. “It’s been horrible.”

“I resent the stereotype that these are not hard-working people” said Katherine Owen, managing attorney in Legal Aid of Nebraska’s Omaha office. “Truly the majority of them simply cannot afford it. That’s it.”

Lawsuits over medical debts are, of course, filed in other states, usually by hospitals. What makes Nebraska unusual is that almost all the suits are brought by locally owned collection agencies that pursue debts on behalf of medical providers. Although ProPublica found collection agencies filing suits in large numbers in other states, particularly Indiana and Washington, none could match the sheer volume in Nebraska.

It’s a difference that came as a surprise to researchers, consumer advocates, and collection professionals both in and outside of Nebraska.

“There’s very little information, period” on the number of collection lawsuits in different states, said April Kuehnhoff, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. Policymakers in Nebraska and other states should pay attention, she said. “Being sued on a debt has very serious negative consequences for consumers.”

In a statement, the Nebraska Collectors Association said collection agencies file suits as “a last resort,” after attempts by the original provider and the agency to resolve the debt have failed. “Cooperatively working with the consumer is always the preferred approach to the collection process,” it said.

Credit Management Services’ offices are housed in a squat, brick building that’s conveniently located just a block away from the county courthouse in Grand Island, a city of about 51,000 in central Nebraska.

Local businessman Michael Morledge has owned the company since 1995. His son serves as president and his daughter as vice president of customer relations. CMS, with about 200 employees, boasts of having “the industry’s highest recovery rates” on its website and counts two-thirds of Nebraska hospitals among its clients. In addition to other medical clients like doctor’s offices and clinics, CMS also handles non-medical debts such as overdrawn bank accounts, utility bills and payday loans.

Like other collection agencies in the state, CMS employs collectors to persuade debtors to make voluntary payments. And like those other agencies, CMS routinely sues those who don’t. But it’s here that CMS sets itself apart.

In 2013, CMS filed almost 30,000 lawsuits in Nebraska, more than the rest of the collection agencies in Nebraska combined. That would be a staggering number of suits in any state. In New Jersey, with a population nearly five times larger, only one company, the nation’s largest debt buyer, filed more than 30,000 lawsuits that year.

To file those suits – about 120 per working day – CMS has its own staff of six attorneys. The complaints are prepped by support staff and then presented to the attorneys for review, CMS’s general counsel Tessa Hermanson said in a 2012 deposition from a class action lawsuit against the company.

Debtors aren’t sued unless “the individual has a means to pay,” she said. But when pressed about how CMS determines this, Hermanson, who supervises the company’s lawyers, said she didn’t know if it was done by “one person or a department.”

A review of CMS’s lawsuits shows the company is routinely aggressive even when it’s obvious the debtor is poor. In one case, CMS emptied a debtor’s bank account 11 times over the course of two years, even though in all but three instances the debtor had under $100. One garnishment netted the company $6.50.

Competition for clients can encourage this sort of approach, said Judge Craig McDermott, former counsel at a CMS rival and current presiding judge of the Douglas County Court in Omaha. Companies may sue even when it’s apparent the debtor can’t pay just to prove to the original creditor that they are making an effort: “Otherwise they’ll go to another agency down the street,” he told ProPublica in a 2014 interview.

CMS’s frequent use of the courts has brought millions back to the company, which retains a percentage of what it collects, and its clients. From 2008 through 2014, CMS seized at least $88 million from Nebraskans’ wages and bank accounts, according to court data analyzed by ProPublica.

In a brief response to a list of questions from ProPublica, CMS wrote that it “plays an active and important role in assisting creditors in Nebraska with recovering money owed for goods and services” and that it “strives to comply with all applicable laws and regulations” and only files suit after other collection attempts fail. The company declined to discuss any individual debtor case.

Earlier this year, state Sen. Adam Morfeld introduced a bill in the Nebraska legislature that seemed too benign for anyone to oppose: It proposed raising the fee for filing a lawsuit by $1. The extra money would go to civil legal aid organizations to provide more services to low-income residents.

But, to Morfeld’s surprise, his bill quickly encountered stiff resistance. Tim Keigher, CMS’s lobbyist in the state capital, made it clear the company would fight the bill every step of the way, said Morfeld, a Democrat. Keigher did not respond to requests for comment.

At a February judicial committee hearing, CMS’s Hermanson appeared on behalf of the Nebraska Collectors Association to oppose the bill. Raising the cost of filing suit in county courts from $45 to $46, she said, would create a “burden” on the businesses that hire collection agencies. Collection agencies ask, “is it worth it to pay X amount to recover a small, you know, medical debt of $200?” she said. A higher filing fee may cause them to decide “it’s just not worth it,” she said.

The gathered senators were skeptical. After Hermanson testified that collection agencies filed thousands of suits each month, one senator volunteered that maybe increasing the filing fee “would be better” if it meant fewer suits.

Sen. Matt Williams, a Republican and former president of the American Bankers Association, asked Hermanson, “So your testimony is that a one dollar increase in this fee that your client is going to pay, not you, would stop you from filing claims for $200, $300 medical bills?”

Hermanson, perhaps betraying an industry fear that opening the door to a dollar would ease the way for further hikes, said “There’s always a need for increased funds and at some point it becomes less practical to continue to pay for those fees.”

“So you would weigh that one dollar against the ability to provide legal services for the poor people of Nebraska?” asked Williams.

“No, certainly not,” she replied.

“But that’s what your testimony is.”

“My testimony is that the legal services fund, we’re not disputing that it’s needed,” said Hermanson, “just that maybe there’s a better way to do it than increasing the court cost.”

Ultimately, CMS’s efforts to halt the bill were unsuccessful. On a 40–0 vote, the bill passed the legislature earlier this month and was quickly signed by the governor. But Morfeld said, “It’s really been eye-opening. I think we have a broader problem.”

ProPublica’s review of court data across several states suggests a relationship between court costs and the number of collection suits filed.

In 2013, Cook County, Illinois, which contains Chicago and has a population of over 5 million, had about the same number of collection suits as Nebraska with its population of fewer than 2 million. That year, it cost $172 in Cook County to file suit for the sort of small amounts that predominate in Nebraska, where the fee was $45.

Not surprisingly, lawsuits over debts of a few hundred dollars are extremely rare in Cook County. The typical collection suit in 2013 sought around $3,000, according to ProPublica’s analysis.

In fact, suits for a few hundred dollars are generally rare. Debt buyers, for instance, usually don’t file suits for debts smaller than $1,000 due to the costs involved in suing, said Jan Stieger, executive director of the industry’s trade group, DBA International. Debt buyers, which primarily purchase defaulted credit card accounts, file more collection suits nationwide than any other type of company.

Some states, like Missouri and New Jersey, have filing fees comparable to Nebraska’s. But even there the rate of suits, when adjusted for the population, was still substantially lower.

Kuehnoff of the National Consumer Law Center said the volume of suits in a state is also a reflection of how easy it is to sue. Nebraska has a number of collector-friendly policies, such as looser standards for serving debtors with a lawsuit. Tougher standards – such as requiring collectors to serve defendants personally with a suit or provide more documentation of debts – can decrease the number of suits and make the process fairer to consumers, she said.

In February, a federal judge deemed CMS’s practices unfair, siding with the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against the company. CMS, ruled U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon, had deceived consumers with its collection suits by wrongly claiming interest and attorney fees — charges that CMS adds to debts and keeps for itself. CMS agreed to settle the class action earlier this month, but the settlement’s details remain under seal.

In his ruling, Bataillon wrote that the extra charges were just one part of a process that can be bewildering for defendants, who are very rarely represented by an attorney.

“Without any special knowledge of the law, a layperson could not figure out, on the face of the collection complaint, what the claim was for or to whom he or she was indebted,”he wrote.

To get a sense of who is affected by collection suits in Nebraska, ProPublica reviewed 100 randomly selected cases where a collection agency had garnished the debtor’s pay or bank account. Most of the debtors were lower-income: more than half earned below a rate of $30,000 a year.

“I have to work two jobs just to try to make ends meet,” said Robin Kerr, 55, of Norfolk, a city of about 24,000 in northeastern Nebraska. Kerr has been sued four times, three times by CMS, and in each case, the agency sought to seize a chunk of her wages at Burger King.

Most of the suits we reviewed sought less than $700, and 40 sought less than $500. Four of the suits, all filed by CMS, were for under $100. In one case, a $66 chiropractic bill transformed into a $275 court judgment after court costs, attorney fees, and interest were tacked on.

The vast majority of suits were over unpaid medical bills: the providers ranged from rural hospitals to the largest in the state, from specialists to family doctors. Debts from multiple providers were often combined in the same suit, even bundled with non-medical bills.

The suits sometimes came quickly, in some cases only three months after the provider sent the patient a bill. That speed is in contrast to recent national reforms meant to protect consumers from being penalized for medical billing errors. Last year, the three main credit reporting agencies announced a new 180-day waiting period from the time a medical account is created until it can appear on a patient’s credit report as in collections.

But in Nebraska, said legal aid attorneys, once an account is sent to a collection agency, the patient has little hope of sorting out a billing issue. Instead, collection agencies often give them the option of paying in full or facing a lawsuit, they said.

Tanya Glasgow, 39, has had health problems for years, at one point requiring surgery to remove her gall bladder and recently suffering from epileptic seizures. Making matters worse, she’s gone for stretches without health insurance, which she’s struggled to afford. She has two teenagers at home and a third child in college and works the graveyard shift at a nursing home for $18.50 an hour.

Glasgow’s tried various strategies for dealing with her medical debt, which she estimates at about $20,000, but any plan can suddenly fall apart. “I’m paying on three of them and then the fourth one sues me,” she said. She’s been sued five times, four by CMS.

The worst blow came last fall. CMS had filed its third suit, a bundle of radiology and emergency room bills, for over $1,000. A week after obtaining a judgment, CMS moved to garnish her pay. But the same day, CMS also filed to seize funds from her bank account.

The action froze Glasgow’s account and secured the entirety of what she owed under the judgment, $1,315. But because it took several weeks for CMS to actually receive that money through the court, CMS allowed the garnishment of her wages to continue.

Glasgow said she struggled for two weeks to put food on the table. But when her paycheck arrived, it was short $226, because CMS had taken money she no longer owed. CMS garnished her next paycheck, too, before the case was finally closed.

Glasgow said she had to call both the court and CMS to get her money returned, and then CMS took more than a month to do so.

The experience convinced Glasgow it was time to pursue something she’d put off considering: bankruptcy.

It’s a step that wouldn’t be necessary if she lived in a state where lawsuits over medical debt weren’t so common, she said.

“The amount of stress this has brought into my life has been almost unbearable.”