Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 796
April 27, 2016
A symbol of our steep decline: Donald Trump has unwittingly exposed America for what it’s become
"Low-energy Jeb." "Little Marco." "Lyin’ Ted." "." Give Donald Trump credit. He has a memorable way with insults. His have a way of etching themselves on the brain. And they’ve garnered media coverage, analysis, and commentary almost beyond imagining. Memorable as they might be, however, they won’t be what last of Trump’s 2016 election run. That’s surely reserved for a single slogan that will sum up his candidacy when it’s all over (no matter how it ends). He arrived with it on that Trump Tower escalator in the first moments of his campaign and it now headlines his website, where it's also emblazoned on an array of products from hats to t-shirts.
You already know which line I mean: “Make America Great Again!” With that exclamation point ensuring that you won’t miss the hyperbolic, Trumpian nature of its promise to return the country to its former glory days. In it lies the essence of his campaign, of what he’s promising his followers and Americans generally -- and yet, strangely enough, of all his lines, it’s the one most taken for granted, the one that’s been given the least thought and analysis. And that’s a shame, because it represents something new in our American age. The problem, I suspect, is that what first catches the eye is the phrase “Make America Great” and then, of course, the exclamation point, while the single most important word in the slogan, historically speaking, is barely noted: “again.”
With that “again,” Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that, until his escalator moment, represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the United States, the “sole” superpower of Planet Earth, is an “exceptional” nation, an “indispensable” country, or even in an unqualified sense a “great” one. His claim is the opposite. That, at present, America is anything but exceptional, indispensable, or great, though he alone could make it “great again.” In that claim lies a curiosity that, in a court of law, might be considered an admission of guilt. Yes, it says, if one man is allowed to enter the White House in January 2017, this could be a different country, but -- and in this lies the originality of the slogan -- it is not great now, and in that admission-that-hasn’t-been-seen-as-an-admission lies something new on the American landscape.
Donald Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline. Think about that for a moment. “Make America Great Again!” is indeed an admission in the form of a boast. As he tells his audiences repeatedly, America, the formerly great, is today a punching bag for China, Mexico... well, you know the pitch. You don’t have to agree with him on the specifics. What’s interesting is the overall vision of a country lacking in its former greatness.
Perhaps a little history of American greatness and presidents (as well as presidential candidates) is in order here.
“City Upon a Hill”
Once upon a time, in a distant America, the words “greatest,” “exceptional,” and “indispensable” weren’t even part of the political vocabulary. American presidents didn’t bother to claim any of them for this country, largely because American wealth and global preeminence were so indisputable. We’re talking about the 1950s and early 1960s, the post-World War II and pre-Vietnam “golden” years of American power. Despite a certain hysteria about the supposed dangers of domestic communists, few Americans then doubted the singularly unchallengeable power and greatness of the country. It was such a given, in fact, that it was simply too self-evident for presidents to cite, hail, or praise.
So if you look, for instance, at the speeches of John F. Kennedy, you won’t find them littered with exceptionals, indispensables, or their equivalents. In a pre-inaugural speechhe gave in January 1961 on the kind of government he planned to bring to Washington, for instance, he did cite the birth of a “great republic,” the United States, and quoted Puritan John Winthrop on the desirability of creating a country that would be “a city upon a hill” to the rest of the world, with all of humanity’s eyes upon us. In his inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you...”), he invoked a kind of unspoken greatness, saying, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It was then common to speak of the U.S. with pride as a “free nation” (as opposed to the “enslaved” ones of the communist bloc) rather than an exceptional one. His only use of “great” was to invoke the U.S.-led and Soviet Union-led blocs as “two great and powerful groups of nations.”
Kennedy could even fall back on a certain modesty in describing the U.S. role in the world (that, in those years, from Guatemala to Iran to Cuba, all too often did not carry over into actual policy), saying in one speech, “we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient -- that we are only six percent of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” In that same speech, he typically spoke of America as “a great power” -- but not “the greatest power.”
If you didn’t grow up in that era, you may not grasp that none of this in any way implied a lack of national self-esteem. Quite the opposite, it implied a deep and abiding confidence in the overwhelming power and presence of this country, a confidence so unshakeable that there was no need to speak of it.
If you want a pop cultural equivalent for this, consider America’s movie heroes of that time, actors like John Wayne and Gary Cooper, whose Westerns and in the case of Wayne, war movies, were iconic. What’s striking when you look back at them from the present moment is this: while neither of those actors was anything but an imposing figure, they were also remarkably ordinary looking. They were in no way over-muscled nor in their films were they over-armed in the modern fashion. It was only in the years after the Vietnam War, when the country had absorbed what felt like a grim defeat, been wracked by oppositional movements, riots, and assassinations, when a general sense of loss had swept over the polity, that the over-muscled hero, the exceptional killing machine, made the scene. (Think:Rambo.)
Consider this, then, if you want a definition of decline: when you have to state openly (and repeatedly) what previously had been too obvious to say, you’re heading, as the opinion polls always like to phrase it, in the wrong direction; in other words, once you have to say it, especially in an overemphatic way, you no longer have it.
The Reagan Reboot
That note of defensiveness first crept into the American political lexicon with the unlikeliest of politicians: Ronald Reagan, the man who seemed like the least defensive, most genial guy on the planet. On this subject at least, think of him as Trumpian before the advent of The Donald, or at least as the man who (thanks to his ad writers) invented the political use of the word “again.” It was, after all, employed in 1984 in the seminal ad of his political run for a second term in office. While that bucolic-looking TV commercial was entitled “Prouder, Stronger, Better,” its first line ever so memorably went, “It’s morning again in America.” (“Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”)
Think of this as part of a post-Vietnam Reagan reboot, a time when the U.S. in Rambo-esque fashion was quite literally muscling up and over-arming in a major way. Reagan presided over “the biggest peacetime defense build-up in history” against what, referencing Star Wars, he called an “evil empire” -- the Soviet Union. In those years, he also worked to rid the country of what was then termed “the Vietnam Syndrome” in part by rebranding that war a “noble cause.” In a time when loss and decline were much on the American brain, he dismissed them both, even as he set the country on a path toward the present moment of 1% dysfunction in a country that no longer invests fully in its own infrastructure, whose wages are stagnant, whose poor are a growth industry, whose wealth now flows eternally upward in a political environment awash in the money of the ultra-wealthy, and whose over-armed military continues to pursue a path of endless failure in the Greater Middle East.
Reagan, who spoke directly about American declinist thinking in his time -- “Let's reject the nonsense that America is doomed to decline” -- was hardly shy about his superlatives when it came to this country. He didn’t hesitate to re-channel classic American rhetoric ranging from Winthop’s “shining city upon a hill” (perhaps cribbed from Kennedy) in his farewell address to Lincoln-esque (“the last best hope of man on Earth”) invocations like “here in the heartland of America lives the hope of the world” or “in a world wracked by hatred, economic crisis, and political tension, America remains mankind's best hope.”
And yet, in the 1980s, there were still limits to what needed to be said about America. Surveying the planet, you didn’t yet have to refer to us as the “greatest” country of all or as the planet’s sole truly “exceptional” country. Think of such repeated superlatives of our own moment as defensive markers on the declinist slope. The now commonplace adjective “indispensable” as a stand-in for American greatness globally, for instance, didn’t even arrive until Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began using it in 1996. It only became an indispensable part of the rhetorical arsenal of American politicians, fromPresident Obama on down, a decade-plus into the twenty-first century when the country’s eerie dispensability (unless you were a junkie for failed states and regional chaos) became ever more apparent.
As for the U.S. being the planet’s “exceptional” nation, a phrase that now seems indelibly in the American grain and that no president or presidential candidate has avoided, it’s surprising how late that entered the presidential lexicon. As John Gans Jr. wrote in the Atlantic in 2011, “Obama has talked more about American exceptionalism than Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush combined: a search on UC Santa Barbara's exhaustive presidential records library finds that no president from 1981 to today uttered the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ except Obama. As U.S. News' Robert Schlesinger wrote, ‘American exceptionalism’ is not a traditional part of presidential vocabulary. According to Schlesinger's search of public records, Obama is the only president in 82 years to use the term.”
And yet in recent years it has become a commonplace of Republicans and Democrats alike. In other words, as the country has become politically shakier, the rhetoric about its greatness has only escalated in an American version of “the lady doth protest too much.” Such descriptors have become the political equivalent of litmus tests: you couldn’t be president or much of anything else without eternally testifying to your unwavering belief in American greatness.
This, of course, is the line that Trump crossed in a curiously unnoticed fashion in this election campaign. He did so by initially upping the rhetorical ante, adding that exclamation point (which even Reagan avoided). Yet in the process of being more patriotically correct than thou, he somehow also waded straight into American decline so bluntly that his own audience could hardly miss it (even if his critics did).
Think of it as an irony, if you wish, but the ultimate American narcissist, in promoting his own rise, has also openly promoted a version of decline and fall to striking numbers of Americans. For his followers, a major political figure has quit with the defensive BS and started saying it the way it is.
Of course, don’t furl the flag or shut down those offshore accounts or start writing the complete history of American decline quite yet. After all, the United States still looms “lone” on an ever more chaotic planet. Its wealth remains stunning, its economic clout something to behold, its tycoons the envy of the Earth, and its military beyond compare when it comes to how much and how destructively, even if not how successfully. Still, make no mistake about it, Donald Trump is a harbinger, however bizarre, of a new American century in which this country will indeed no longer be (with a bow to Muhammad Ali) "the Greatest" or, for all but a shrinking crew, exceptional.
So mark your calendars: 2016 is the official year the U.S. first went public as a declinist power and for that you can thank Donald -- or rather Donald! -- Trump.
You already know which line I mean: “Make America Great Again!” With that exclamation point ensuring that you won’t miss the hyperbolic, Trumpian nature of its promise to return the country to its former glory days. In it lies the essence of his campaign, of what he’s promising his followers and Americans generally -- and yet, strangely enough, of all his lines, it’s the one most taken for granted, the one that’s been given the least thought and analysis. And that’s a shame, because it represents something new in our American age. The problem, I suspect, is that what first catches the eye is the phrase “Make America Great” and then, of course, the exclamation point, while the single most important word in the slogan, historically speaking, is barely noted: “again.”
With that “again,” Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that, until his escalator moment, represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the United States, the “sole” superpower of Planet Earth, is an “exceptional” nation, an “indispensable” country, or even in an unqualified sense a “great” one. His claim is the opposite. That, at present, America is anything but exceptional, indispensable, or great, though he alone could make it “great again.” In that claim lies a curiosity that, in a court of law, might be considered an admission of guilt. Yes, it says, if one man is allowed to enter the White House in January 2017, this could be a different country, but -- and in this lies the originality of the slogan -- it is not great now, and in that admission-that-hasn’t-been-seen-as-an-admission lies something new on the American landscape.
Donald Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline. Think about that for a moment. “Make America Great Again!” is indeed an admission in the form of a boast. As he tells his audiences repeatedly, America, the formerly great, is today a punching bag for China, Mexico... well, you know the pitch. You don’t have to agree with him on the specifics. What’s interesting is the overall vision of a country lacking in its former greatness.
Perhaps a little history of American greatness and presidents (as well as presidential candidates) is in order here.
“City Upon a Hill”
Once upon a time, in a distant America, the words “greatest,” “exceptional,” and “indispensable” weren’t even part of the political vocabulary. American presidents didn’t bother to claim any of them for this country, largely because American wealth and global preeminence were so indisputable. We’re talking about the 1950s and early 1960s, the post-World War II and pre-Vietnam “golden” years of American power. Despite a certain hysteria about the supposed dangers of domestic communists, few Americans then doubted the singularly unchallengeable power and greatness of the country. It was such a given, in fact, that it was simply too self-evident for presidents to cite, hail, or praise.
So if you look, for instance, at the speeches of John F. Kennedy, you won’t find them littered with exceptionals, indispensables, or their equivalents. In a pre-inaugural speechhe gave in January 1961 on the kind of government he planned to bring to Washington, for instance, he did cite the birth of a “great republic,” the United States, and quoted Puritan John Winthrop on the desirability of creating a country that would be “a city upon a hill” to the rest of the world, with all of humanity’s eyes upon us. In his inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you...”), he invoked a kind of unspoken greatness, saying, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It was then common to speak of the U.S. with pride as a “free nation” (as opposed to the “enslaved” ones of the communist bloc) rather than an exceptional one. His only use of “great” was to invoke the U.S.-led and Soviet Union-led blocs as “two great and powerful groups of nations.”
Kennedy could even fall back on a certain modesty in describing the U.S. role in the world (that, in those years, from Guatemala to Iran to Cuba, all too often did not carry over into actual policy), saying in one speech, “we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient -- that we are only six percent of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” In that same speech, he typically spoke of America as “a great power” -- but not “the greatest power.”
If you didn’t grow up in that era, you may not grasp that none of this in any way implied a lack of national self-esteem. Quite the opposite, it implied a deep and abiding confidence in the overwhelming power and presence of this country, a confidence so unshakeable that there was no need to speak of it.
If you want a pop cultural equivalent for this, consider America’s movie heroes of that time, actors like John Wayne and Gary Cooper, whose Westerns and in the case of Wayne, war movies, were iconic. What’s striking when you look back at them from the present moment is this: while neither of those actors was anything but an imposing figure, they were also remarkably ordinary looking. They were in no way over-muscled nor in their films were they over-armed in the modern fashion. It was only in the years after the Vietnam War, when the country had absorbed what felt like a grim defeat, been wracked by oppositional movements, riots, and assassinations, when a general sense of loss had swept over the polity, that the over-muscled hero, the exceptional killing machine, made the scene. (Think:Rambo.)
Consider this, then, if you want a definition of decline: when you have to state openly (and repeatedly) what previously had been too obvious to say, you’re heading, as the opinion polls always like to phrase it, in the wrong direction; in other words, once you have to say it, especially in an overemphatic way, you no longer have it.
The Reagan Reboot
That note of defensiveness first crept into the American political lexicon with the unlikeliest of politicians: Ronald Reagan, the man who seemed like the least defensive, most genial guy on the planet. On this subject at least, think of him as Trumpian before the advent of The Donald, or at least as the man who (thanks to his ad writers) invented the political use of the word “again.” It was, after all, employed in 1984 in the seminal ad of his political run for a second term in office. While that bucolic-looking TV commercial was entitled “Prouder, Stronger, Better,” its first line ever so memorably went, “It’s morning again in America.” (“Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”)
Think of this as part of a post-Vietnam Reagan reboot, a time when the U.S. in Rambo-esque fashion was quite literally muscling up and over-arming in a major way. Reagan presided over “the biggest peacetime defense build-up in history” against what, referencing Star Wars, he called an “evil empire” -- the Soviet Union. In those years, he also worked to rid the country of what was then termed “the Vietnam Syndrome” in part by rebranding that war a “noble cause.” In a time when loss and decline were much on the American brain, he dismissed them both, even as he set the country on a path toward the present moment of 1% dysfunction in a country that no longer invests fully in its own infrastructure, whose wages are stagnant, whose poor are a growth industry, whose wealth now flows eternally upward in a political environment awash in the money of the ultra-wealthy, and whose over-armed military continues to pursue a path of endless failure in the Greater Middle East.
Reagan, who spoke directly about American declinist thinking in his time -- “Let's reject the nonsense that America is doomed to decline” -- was hardly shy about his superlatives when it came to this country. He didn’t hesitate to re-channel classic American rhetoric ranging from Winthop’s “shining city upon a hill” (perhaps cribbed from Kennedy) in his farewell address to Lincoln-esque (“the last best hope of man on Earth”) invocations like “here in the heartland of America lives the hope of the world” or “in a world wracked by hatred, economic crisis, and political tension, America remains mankind's best hope.”
And yet, in the 1980s, there were still limits to what needed to be said about America. Surveying the planet, you didn’t yet have to refer to us as the “greatest” country of all or as the planet’s sole truly “exceptional” country. Think of such repeated superlatives of our own moment as defensive markers on the declinist slope. The now commonplace adjective “indispensable” as a stand-in for American greatness globally, for instance, didn’t even arrive until Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began using it in 1996. It only became an indispensable part of the rhetorical arsenal of American politicians, fromPresident Obama on down, a decade-plus into the twenty-first century when the country’s eerie dispensability (unless you were a junkie for failed states and regional chaos) became ever more apparent.
As for the U.S. being the planet’s “exceptional” nation, a phrase that now seems indelibly in the American grain and that no president or presidential candidate has avoided, it’s surprising how late that entered the presidential lexicon. As John Gans Jr. wrote in the Atlantic in 2011, “Obama has talked more about American exceptionalism than Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush combined: a search on UC Santa Barbara's exhaustive presidential records library finds that no president from 1981 to today uttered the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ except Obama. As U.S. News' Robert Schlesinger wrote, ‘American exceptionalism’ is not a traditional part of presidential vocabulary. According to Schlesinger's search of public records, Obama is the only president in 82 years to use the term.”
And yet in recent years it has become a commonplace of Republicans and Democrats alike. In other words, as the country has become politically shakier, the rhetoric about its greatness has only escalated in an American version of “the lady doth protest too much.” Such descriptors have become the political equivalent of litmus tests: you couldn’t be president or much of anything else without eternally testifying to your unwavering belief in American greatness.
This, of course, is the line that Trump crossed in a curiously unnoticed fashion in this election campaign. He did so by initially upping the rhetorical ante, adding that exclamation point (which even Reagan avoided). Yet in the process of being more patriotically correct than thou, he somehow also waded straight into American decline so bluntly that his own audience could hardly miss it (even if his critics did).
Think of it as an irony, if you wish, but the ultimate American narcissist, in promoting his own rise, has also openly promoted a version of decline and fall to striking numbers of Americans. For his followers, a major political figure has quit with the defensive BS and started saying it the way it is.
Of course, don’t furl the flag or shut down those offshore accounts or start writing the complete history of American decline quite yet. After all, the United States still looms “lone” on an ever more chaotic planet. Its wealth remains stunning, its economic clout something to behold, its tycoons the envy of the Earth, and its military beyond compare when it comes to how much and how destructively, even if not how successfully. Still, make no mistake about it, Donald Trump is a harbinger, however bizarre, of a new American century in which this country will indeed no longer be (with a bow to Muhammad Ali) "the Greatest" or, for all but a shrinking crew, exceptional.
So mark your calendars: 2016 is the official year the U.S. first went public as a declinist power and for that you can thank Donald -- or rather Donald! -- Trump.
April 26, 2016
Hillary Clinton surges toward nomination with at least 3 more primary wins
Hillary Clinton added at least three more states to her victory column Tuesday night, strengthening what's rapidly becoming an all-but-unstoppable march to the Democratic presidential nomination.
The Democratic front-runner expanded her sizable delegate lead with wins in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware. But Bernie Sanders stopped her from sweeping the night with a win in Rhode Island. The primary in Connecticut remained too close to call.
Already, Clinton can lose every remaining primary by a wide margin and still capture her party's nomination, according to an Associated Press analysis. Her wins Tuesday put her fewer than 300 delegates away from clinching the Democratic nomination. She can reach that goal by winning just 21 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates.
"We will unify our party to win this election and build an America where we can all rise together," she told supporters at a rally in Philadelphia.
Still, the Vermont senator continues to attract tens of thousands to his rallies and raise millions of dollars online. He's vowing to stay in the race through the last primary contest in June.
Sanders turned his focus to coming primary contests, spending the evening in West Virginia, which votes next month. He must win 73 percent of the remaining delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination.
"With your help, we're going to win here in West Virginia," he told several thousand supporters gathered in Huntington.
Clinton, meanwhile, spent Tuesday in Pennsylvania and Indiana - two states her campaign believes could be critical in the fall election.
After exchanging sharp barbs with Sanders earlier this month, she barely mentioned him in the run-up to Tuesday's contests, underscoring her campaign's growing confidence in her primary standing. Instead, she turned her attention to trying to unify a fractious Democratic party.
"I am going to do everything I can to unify our country over all the lines that divide us," Clinton said in Mishawaka, Indiana, on Tuesday.
In exit polls conducted in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Maryland, less than a fifth of Democratic voters said they would not support Clinton if she gets the nomination.
In a town hall on MSNBC on Monday night, Clinton questioned the idea that she would need to adopt parts of Sanders' platform to win over his supporters, saying that she did not make demands when she lost the primary to President Barack Obama eight years ago.
Sanders is not committing to easing Clinton's path. Senior adviser Tad Devine said that campaign would "wait and see what the numbers are" Tuesday before making any decisions about strategy going forward.
But there were signs that some of his supporters were beginning to accept that he might not make it all the way to the White House.
Charles Chamberlain, head of a liberal group backing Sanders, said the question isn't whether the senator would win delegates. "It's whether the Democratic establishment is going to bring our party together by embracing our fight," Chamberlain said.
Democratic voters say the closely contested primary has excited the party. In Pennsylvania, about seven in 10 voters in Pennsylvania said the primary has energized the party rather than divided it, according to the exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks by Edison Research.
Among Democrats, Clinton is 88 percent of the way to capturing the Democratic nomination with 2,097 delegates to Sanders' 1,271. Those totals include both pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses and superdelegates, the party insiders who can back the candidate of their choice regardless of how their state votes. It takes 2,383 to win the Democratic nomination.
Donald Trump sweeps primaries: Billionaire pockets another five states
Donald Trump rolled up victories in five more states on Tuesday, giving the Republican front-runner fresh momentum in his push for the nomination even if his pathway has little room for error.
The New York billionaire scored wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island - all five states that held GOP primary contests on Tuesday.
"This is really something special. It's a movement," Trump said on Fox News before polls closed.
Anticipating a big night for Trump, chief rival Ted Cruz retreated to next-up Indiana days ago. The Texas senator and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are fighting to deny Trump the delegate majority and force a contested national convention this summer.
"I got good news for you," Cruz told cheering supporters at an Indianapolis rally. "Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain."
Tuesday's strong performance marked a setback for the GOP's vocal anti-Trump movement, which is skeptical about his commitment to conservative values and worries about his electability in the general election.
Exit polls found that about 6 in 10 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say the GOP campaign this year has divided the party. While 7 in 10 Democrats in the state say they've been energized by the campaign, only 4 in 10 Republican voters say the same.
Trump remains the only Republican who has a shot at reaching the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But his lead is fragile, and any major setbacks in the contests ahead could lead him to fall sort of that magic number.
Adding a wrinkle to his efforts, Cruz and Kasich announced late Sunday that they had reached a tentative, new alliance aimed at undermining him. Under the deal, Kasich will forgo campaigning in Indiana, allowing Cruz to take on Trump head-to-head in the state, while Cruz will do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
Tuesday's victories help Trump expand his big lead in the race for delegates. If he keeps it up, he can stay on track to win the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7.
Trump will win at least half of the 118 delegates up for grabs Tuesday. And he has a chance to win a lot more.
In Pennsylvania, Trump collected 17 delegates for winning the state. An additional 54 delegates are elected directly by voters - three in each congressional district. However, their names are listed on the ballot with no information about which presidential candidate they support.
At a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump decried Pennsylvania's voting rules as "crazy."
Trump recently overhauled his campaign team, bringing on new and more experienced operatives. But his main rival, Cruz, got a head start in the intricate game of delegate-courting, directing some of his resources to states where he knew he could get his supporters named as delegates.
Pennsylvania voter Laura Seyler described herself as "a very solid Cruz fan," but favored Trump because he's "a bigger bully."
"That may sound strange, but I think that's kind of what we need," Seyler, 63, a senior buyer for a direct marketer, said Tuesday at a polling place in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump rolled up victories in five more states on Tuesday, giving the Republican front-runner fresh momentum in his push for the nomination even if his pathway has little room for error.
The New York billionaire scored wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island - all five states that held GOP primary contests on Tuesday.
"This is really something special. It's a movement," Trump said on Fox News before polls closed.
Anticipating a big night for Trump, chief rival Ted Cruz retreated to next-up Indiana days ago. The Texas senator and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are fighting to deny Trump the delegate majority and force a contested national convention this summer.
"I got good news for you," Cruz told cheering supporters at an Indianapolis rally. "Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain."
Tuesday's strong performance marked a setback for the GOP's vocal anti-Trump movement, which is skeptical about his commitment to conservative values and worries about his electability in the general election.
Exit polls found that about 6 in 10 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say the GOP campaign this year has divided the party. While 7 in 10 Democrats in the state say they've been energized by the campaign, only 4 in 10 Republican voters say the same.
Trump remains the only Republican who has a shot at reaching the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But his lead is fragile, and any major setbacks in the contests ahead could lead him to fall sort of that magic number.
Adding a wrinkle to his efforts, Cruz and Kasich announced late Sunday that they had reached a tentative, new alliance aimed at undermining him. Under the deal, Kasich will forgo campaigning in Indiana, allowing Cruz to take on Trump head-to-head in the state, while Cruz will do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
Tuesday's victories help Trump expand his big lead in the race for delegates. If he keeps it up, he can stay on track to win the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7.
Trump will win at least half of the 118 delegates up for grabs Tuesday. And he has a chance to win a lot more.
In Pennsylvania, Trump collected 17 delegates for winning the state. An additional 54 delegates are elected directly by voters - three in each congressional district. However, their names are listed on the ballot with no information about which presidential candidate they support.
At a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump decried Pennsylvania's voting rules as "crazy."
Trump recently overhauled his campaign team, bringing on new and more experienced operatives. But his main rival, Cruz, got a head start in the intricate game of delegate-courting, directing some of his resources to states where he knew he could get his supporters named as delegates.
Pennsylvania voter Laura Seyler described herself as "a very solid Cruz fan," but favored Trump because he's "a bigger bully."
"That may sound strange, but I think that's kind of what we need," Seyler, 63, a senior buyer for a direct marketer, said Tuesday at a polling place in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump rolled up victories in five more states on Tuesday, giving the Republican front-runner fresh momentum in his push for the nomination even if his pathway has little room for error.
The New York billionaire scored wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island - all five states that held GOP primary contests on Tuesday.
"This is really something special. It's a movement," Trump said on Fox News before polls closed.
Anticipating a big night for Trump, chief rival Ted Cruz retreated to next-up Indiana days ago. The Texas senator and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are fighting to deny Trump the delegate majority and force a contested national convention this summer.
"I got good news for you," Cruz told cheering supporters at an Indianapolis rally. "Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain."
Tuesday's strong performance marked a setback for the GOP's vocal anti-Trump movement, which is skeptical about his commitment to conservative values and worries about his electability in the general election.
Exit polls found that about 6 in 10 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say the GOP campaign this year has divided the party. While 7 in 10 Democrats in the state say they've been energized by the campaign, only 4 in 10 Republican voters say the same.
Trump remains the only Republican who has a shot at reaching the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But his lead is fragile, and any major setbacks in the contests ahead could lead him to fall sort of that magic number.
Adding a wrinkle to his efforts, Cruz and Kasich announced late Sunday that they had reached a tentative, new alliance aimed at undermining him. Under the deal, Kasich will forgo campaigning in Indiana, allowing Cruz to take on Trump head-to-head in the state, while Cruz will do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
Tuesday's victories help Trump expand his big lead in the race for delegates. If he keeps it up, he can stay on track to win the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7.
Trump will win at least half of the 118 delegates up for grabs Tuesday. And he has a chance to win a lot more.
In Pennsylvania, Trump collected 17 delegates for winning the state. An additional 54 delegates are elected directly by voters - three in each congressional district. However, their names are listed on the ballot with no information about which presidential candidate they support.
At a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump decried Pennsylvania's voting rules as "crazy."
Trump recently overhauled his campaign team, bringing on new and more experienced operatives. But his main rival, Cruz, got a head start in the intricate game of delegate-courting, directing some of his resources to states where he knew he could get his supporters named as delegates.
Pennsylvania voter Laura Seyler described herself as "a very solid Cruz fan," but favored Trump because he's "a bigger bully."
"That may sound strange, but I think that's kind of what we need," Seyler, 63, a senior buyer for a direct marketer, said Tuesday at a polling place in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump rolled up victories in five more states on Tuesday, giving the Republican front-runner fresh momentum in his push for the nomination even if his pathway has little room for error.
The New York billionaire scored wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island - all five states that held GOP primary contests on Tuesday.
"This is really something special. It's a movement," Trump said on Fox News before polls closed.
Anticipating a big night for Trump, chief rival Ted Cruz retreated to next-up Indiana days ago. The Texas senator and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are fighting to deny Trump the delegate majority and force a contested national convention this summer.
"I got good news for you," Cruz told cheering supporters at an Indianapolis rally. "Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain."
Tuesday's strong performance marked a setback for the GOP's vocal anti-Trump movement, which is skeptical about his commitment to conservative values and worries about his electability in the general election.
Exit polls found that about 6 in 10 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say the GOP campaign this year has divided the party. While 7 in 10 Democrats in the state say they've been energized by the campaign, only 4 in 10 Republican voters say the same.
Trump remains the only Republican who has a shot at reaching the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But his lead is fragile, and any major setbacks in the contests ahead could lead him to fall sort of that magic number.
Adding a wrinkle to his efforts, Cruz and Kasich announced late Sunday that they had reached a tentative, new alliance aimed at undermining him. Under the deal, Kasich will forgo campaigning in Indiana, allowing Cruz to take on Trump head-to-head in the state, while Cruz will do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
Tuesday's victories help Trump expand his big lead in the race for delegates. If he keeps it up, he can stay on track to win the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7.
Trump will win at least half of the 118 delegates up for grabs Tuesday. And he has a chance to win a lot more.
In Pennsylvania, Trump collected 17 delegates for winning the state. An additional 54 delegates are elected directly by voters - three in each congressional district. However, their names are listed on the ballot with no information about which presidential candidate they support.
At a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump decried Pennsylvania's voting rules as "crazy."
Trump recently overhauled his campaign team, bringing on new and more experienced operatives. But his main rival, Cruz, got a head start in the intricate game of delegate-courting, directing some of his resources to states where he knew he could get his supporters named as delegates.
Pennsylvania voter Laura Seyler described herself as "a very solid Cruz fan," but favored Trump because he's "a bigger bully."
"That may sound strange, but I think that's kind of what we need," Seyler, 63, a senior buyer for a direct marketer, said Tuesday at a polling place in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump rolled up victories in five more states on Tuesday, giving the Republican front-runner fresh momentum in his push for the nomination even if his pathway has little room for error.
The New York billionaire scored wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island - all five states that held GOP primary contests on Tuesday.
"This is really something special. It's a movement," Trump said on Fox News before polls closed.
Anticipating a big night for Trump, chief rival Ted Cruz retreated to next-up Indiana days ago. The Texas senator and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are fighting to deny Trump the delegate majority and force a contested national convention this summer.
"I got good news for you," Cruz told cheering supporters at an Indianapolis rally. "Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain."
Tuesday's strong performance marked a setback for the GOP's vocal anti-Trump movement, which is skeptical about his commitment to conservative values and worries about his electability in the general election.
Exit polls found that about 6 in 10 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say the GOP campaign this year has divided the party. While 7 in 10 Democrats in the state say they've been energized by the campaign, only 4 in 10 Republican voters say the same.
Trump remains the only Republican who has a shot at reaching the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But his lead is fragile, and any major setbacks in the contests ahead could lead him to fall sort of that magic number.
Adding a wrinkle to his efforts, Cruz and Kasich announced late Sunday that they had reached a tentative, new alliance aimed at undermining him. Under the deal, Kasich will forgo campaigning in Indiana, allowing Cruz to take on Trump head-to-head in the state, while Cruz will do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
Tuesday's victories help Trump expand his big lead in the race for delegates. If he keeps it up, he can stay on track to win the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7.
Trump will win at least half of the 118 delegates up for grabs Tuesday. And he has a chance to win a lot more.
In Pennsylvania, Trump collected 17 delegates for winning the state. An additional 54 delegates are elected directly by voters - three in each congressional district. However, their names are listed on the ballot with no information about which presidential candidate they support.
At a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump decried Pennsylvania's voting rules as "crazy."
Trump recently overhauled his campaign team, bringing on new and more experienced operatives. But his main rival, Cruz, got a head start in the intricate game of delegate-courting, directing some of his resources to states where he knew he could get his supporters named as delegates.
Pennsylvania voter Laura Seyler described herself as "a very solid Cruz fan," but favored Trump because he's "a bigger bully."
"That may sound strange, but I think that's kind of what we need," Seyler, 63, a senior buyer for a direct marketer, said Tuesday at a polling place in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump rolled up victories in five more states on Tuesday, giving the Republican front-runner fresh momentum in his push for the nomination even if his pathway has little room for error.
The New York billionaire scored wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island - all five states that held GOP primary contests on Tuesday.
"This is really something special. It's a movement," Trump said on Fox News before polls closed.
Anticipating a big night for Trump, chief rival Ted Cruz retreated to next-up Indiana days ago. The Texas senator and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are fighting to deny Trump the delegate majority and force a contested national convention this summer.
"I got good news for you," Cruz told cheering supporters at an Indianapolis rally. "Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain."
Tuesday's strong performance marked a setback for the GOP's vocal anti-Trump movement, which is skeptical about his commitment to conservative values and worries about his electability in the general election.
Exit polls found that about 6 in 10 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say the GOP campaign this year has divided the party. While 7 in 10 Democrats in the state say they've been energized by the campaign, only 4 in 10 Republican voters say the same.
Trump remains the only Republican who has a shot at reaching the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But his lead is fragile, and any major setbacks in the contests ahead could lead him to fall sort of that magic number.
Adding a wrinkle to his efforts, Cruz and Kasich announced late Sunday that they had reached a tentative, new alliance aimed at undermining him. Under the deal, Kasich will forgo campaigning in Indiana, allowing Cruz to take on Trump head-to-head in the state, while Cruz will do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
Tuesday's victories help Trump expand his big lead in the race for delegates. If he keeps it up, he can stay on track to win the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7.
Trump will win at least half of the 118 delegates up for grabs Tuesday. And he has a chance to win a lot more.
In Pennsylvania, Trump collected 17 delegates for winning the state. An additional 54 delegates are elected directly by voters - three in each congressional district. However, their names are listed on the ballot with no information about which presidential candidate they support.
At a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump decried Pennsylvania's voting rules as "crazy."
Trump recently overhauled his campaign team, bringing on new and more experienced operatives. But his main rival, Cruz, got a head start in the intricate game of delegate-courting, directing some of his resources to states where he knew he could get his supporters named as delegates.
Pennsylvania voter Laura Seyler described herself as "a very solid Cruz fan," but favored Trump because he's "a bigger bully."
"That may sound strange, but I think that's kind of what we need," Seyler, 63, a senior buyer for a direct marketer, said Tuesday at a polling place in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump rolled up victories in five more states on Tuesday, giving the Republican front-runner fresh momentum in his push for the nomination even if his pathway has little room for error.
The New York billionaire scored wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island - all five states that held GOP primary contests on Tuesday.
"This is really something special. It's a movement," Trump said on Fox News before polls closed.
Anticipating a big night for Trump, chief rival Ted Cruz retreated to next-up Indiana days ago. The Texas senator and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are fighting to deny Trump the delegate majority and force a contested national convention this summer.
"I got good news for you," Cruz told cheering supporters at an Indianapolis rally. "Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain."
Tuesday's strong performance marked a setback for the GOP's vocal anti-Trump movement, which is skeptical about his commitment to conservative values and worries about his electability in the general election.
Exit polls found that about 6 in 10 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say the GOP campaign this year has divided the party. While 7 in 10 Democrats in the state say they've been energized by the campaign, only 4 in 10 Republican voters say the same.
Trump remains the only Republican who has a shot at reaching the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But his lead is fragile, and any major setbacks in the contests ahead could lead him to fall sort of that magic number.
Adding a wrinkle to his efforts, Cruz and Kasich announced late Sunday that they had reached a tentative, new alliance aimed at undermining him. Under the deal, Kasich will forgo campaigning in Indiana, allowing Cruz to take on Trump head-to-head in the state, while Cruz will do the same for Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
Tuesday's victories help Trump expand his big lead in the race for delegates. If he keeps it up, he can stay on track to win the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7.
Trump will win at least half of the 118 delegates up for grabs Tuesday. And he has a chance to win a lot more.
In Pennsylvania, Trump collected 17 delegates for winning the state. An additional 54 delegates are elected directly by voters - three in each congressional district. However, their names are listed on the ballot with no information about which presidential candidate they support.
At a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump decried Pennsylvania's voting rules as "crazy."
Trump recently overhauled his campaign team, bringing on new and more experienced operatives. But his main rival, Cruz, got a head start in the intricate game of delegate-courting, directing some of his resources to states where he knew he could get his supporters named as delegates.
Pennsylvania voter Laura Seyler described herself as "a very solid Cruz fan," but favored Trump because he's "a bigger bully."
"That may sound strange, but I think that's kind of what we need," Seyler, 63, a senior buyer for a direct marketer, said Tuesday at a polling place in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.
Hollywood’s nanny-cheating cliché hits home: “There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women”
Lauren Weedman has never enjoyed the perks of major movie stardom. On the contrary, the 47-year-old Indiana native has built a career one character at a time, from Horny Patty on the HBO comedy "Hung" to Doris on the short-lived (but much loved) "Looking."
But two years ago, Weedman suffered the ultimate Hollywood betrayal when she discovered that her husband was carrying on an affair with their young son’s twenty-something babysitter.
Weedman would be the first one to tell you that the tabloids took little notice. (“I’m not famous enough to be infamous, apparently.”) Instead, she’s written about the episode—among other mortifications—in her remarkable new book of essays, "Miss Fortune."
Salon caught up with Weedman on the Boston leg of her national book tour and sat down to ask her what it’s like to be a feminist in Hollywood, how she now regards other victims of adultery, and, of course, what it’s like to have pretend sex on camera.
Early in "Miss Fortune" you write about the teenage son of your boyfriend, who, after crashing your car, reveals that he was upset with you for telling a joke about his dead mother. You justify that joke by telling him that you’re an artist, and artists talk about their lives. Given how much raw material is in "Miss Fortune"—about yourself, your ex, your child, your birth and adoptive mothers, etc.—how do you deal with this anxiety about the other people in your stories?
That’s actually the exact incident that taught me that if you write stories about real live human beings—even if you change their names, hair color, drugs of choice—you will incite real live human reactions. What I’ve discovered works for me is to show everyone the stories before they are published, so they don’t feel ambushed. I also give them full power to veto aspects of the story, or change elements that bother them, or make them feel like suing me. The last thing I want is for my work to cause someone pain. Unless they enjoy pain—then I’m honored to be a part of it.
The big goal for me is to find out what’s going on with myself in stories. To shit-talk myself, not others.
Okay, but what about your five-year-old son. Do you worry about him reading about the demise of your marriage?
My son’s actually six, so he’s already asking about the sex tape. Kidding!
I actually thought about that a lot while I was writing the book. It never leaves you once you have a kid. At least it hasn’t for me. Dear god, don’t let my mother find out! was replaced by What will my son think? the day after he was born. Should I be worried? People keep mentioning that to me, but somehow I’m not worried.
I didn’t do an XXX-rated movie or take part in the Killing Fields. I wrote about what it was like for me after the split up. I was careful to not get lurid or petty about it. Everything about my break up that I wrote about is exactly how I’d explain it to my son when the time seemed right.
Explaining why I played “Horny Patty” and did a sex scene while I was pregnant with him may be tougher. I’ll rip those pages out.
I was just going to ask you to talk about what it’s really like to film a sex scene?
If you can be in the right headspace and not worry about what you’re looking like, it can feel like pretending to have sex … with someone who’s wearing a tiny burlap bag tied around their penis.
For the record, I don’t do hot sex scenes. As Patty, I’m this weird lonely sex addict masturbating with a Sharpie in the office. In "Looking," I actually got to be an attractive woman having sex with a big old attractive man. No, wait; we didn’t actually have fake film sex. We just lay in bed after sex and I kept getting the note that it looked like I was trying to hide by boobs from the camera. Which I was, even though the actor in the scene with me told me, “a tittie is a tittie. And men like titties, so let’s see them.” Very sweet.
This feels like the right moment to ask how you deal with the Hollywood bullshit as a smart feminist? I guess I’m wondering why you’d subject yourself to the youth-and-beauty worshipping of it all?
Because someone’s got to play the “Ew! She touched me!” characters. [Laughs]. Actually it’s because I’m actor and I wanted to tell stories. I’m not a part of the youth-and-beauty-worship set, aka Network TV. There’s a place for character actors.
But the mindset has taken its toll on me and I regret that I’ve let that happen. It’s not uncommon for me to refer to myself as “a fat troll who’s almost 50.”
The heart of your book is about discovering that your husband had an affair with your son’s babysitter. Did going through this give you any sympathy for the lurid tabloid tales we read about this happening to movie stars?
Oh my god, yes. Geez. I could go off on this subject. My mailman Eddie is sick of hearing me talk about it. I’ve been stuck on this one element: the fact that the journalists are often women. Women have been slapping the shit out of other women directly and indirectly for decades, yet that’s the element that’s been upsetting me.
It’s hard enough to get through the day. Why would you want to make life so much harder for someone? I guess a part of it is that people think “Oh, they’re celebrities! Boo-hoo. Go back to shining their diamonds and buying $59 cold-press juices.” But suffering is suffering and no amount of thousand-dollar face creams helps with the delicate state of being alive. It’s hard for everyone.
There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women. Leaving behind their old, aging, bossy wives—like that old biddy Gwen Stefani. Just today I read that the definition of “ingénue” was a girl that was young and naive. My entire life I’d thought that it meant “young and pretty.” It never dawned on me that naive was a selling point.
You talked about finishing a draft of the book before it all went down with your ex. Can you talk about how that changed the arc of the book?
The first draft of the book felt like a desperate attempt to deliver something that read like a string of ‘wacky anecdotes.’ No depth or narrative arc. I couldn’t see the stories I needed to tell because I was still living it and because I didn’t know the real stories.
For instance, the story about going to a strip club with my ex- husband was all about how weirded out I was by strip clubs. Yet I couldn’t put my finger on why sitting next to him in the club had been so awful. Until the moment I found out the truth about what had been happening between my ex and our babysitter. Then the sense of doom and angst started to make sense. It was like somebody cut the rope and the bucket I’d been sitting in went crashing deep into the well.
That’s not a good analogy. It leaves me trapped down there, waiting for a fireman to save me. Clearly I need a new husband to tell me to stop answering these questions and put on some heels and dance for him. That sounds so flattering yet depressing. Just like Hollywood.Lauren Weedman has never enjoyed the perks of major movie stardom. On the contrary, the 47-year-old Indiana native has built a career one character at a time, from Horny Patty on the HBO comedy "Hung" to Doris on the short-lived (but much loved) "Looking."
But two years ago, Weedman suffered the ultimate Hollywood betrayal when she discovered that her husband was carrying on an affair with their young son’s twenty-something babysitter.
Weedman would be the first one to tell you that the tabloids took little notice. (“I’m not famous enough to be infamous, apparently.”) Instead, she’s written about the episode—among other mortifications—in her remarkable new book of essays, "Miss Fortune."
Salon caught up with Weedman on the Boston leg of her national book tour and sat down to ask her what it’s like to be a feminist in Hollywood, how she now regards other victims of adultery, and, of course, what it’s like to have pretend sex on camera.
Early in "Miss Fortune" you write about the teenage son of your boyfriend, who, after crashing your car, reveals that he was upset with you for telling a joke about his dead mother. You justify that joke by telling him that you’re an artist, and artists talk about their lives. Given how much raw material is in "Miss Fortune"—about yourself, your ex, your child, your birth and adoptive mothers, etc.—how do you deal with this anxiety about the other people in your stories?
That’s actually the exact incident that taught me that if you write stories about real live human beings—even if you change their names, hair color, drugs of choice—you will incite real live human reactions. What I’ve discovered works for me is to show everyone the stories before they are published, so they don’t feel ambushed. I also give them full power to veto aspects of the story, or change elements that bother them, or make them feel like suing me. The last thing I want is for my work to cause someone pain. Unless they enjoy pain—then I’m honored to be a part of it.
The big goal for me is to find out what’s going on with myself in stories. To shit-talk myself, not others.
Okay, but what about your five-year-old son. Do you worry about him reading about the demise of your marriage?
My son’s actually six, so he’s already asking about the sex tape. Kidding!
I actually thought about that a lot while I was writing the book. It never leaves you once you have a kid. At least it hasn’t for me. Dear god, don’t let my mother find out! was replaced by What will my son think? the day after he was born. Should I be worried? People keep mentioning that to me, but somehow I’m not worried.
I didn’t do an XXX-rated movie or take part in the Killing Fields. I wrote about what it was like for me after the split up. I was careful to not get lurid or petty about it. Everything about my break up that I wrote about is exactly how I’d explain it to my son when the time seemed right.
Explaining why I played “Horny Patty” and did a sex scene while I was pregnant with him may be tougher. I’ll rip those pages out.
I was just going to ask you to talk about what it’s really like to film a sex scene?
If you can be in the right headspace and not worry about what you’re looking like, it can feel like pretending to have sex … with someone who’s wearing a tiny burlap bag tied around their penis.
For the record, I don’t do hot sex scenes. As Patty, I’m this weird lonely sex addict masturbating with a Sharpie in the office. In "Looking," I actually got to be an attractive woman having sex with a big old attractive man. No, wait; we didn’t actually have fake film sex. We just lay in bed after sex and I kept getting the note that it looked like I was trying to hide by boobs from the camera. Which I was, even though the actor in the scene with me told me, “a tittie is a tittie. And men like titties, so let’s see them.” Very sweet.
This feels like the right moment to ask how you deal with the Hollywood bullshit as a smart feminist? I guess I’m wondering why you’d subject yourself to the youth-and-beauty worshipping of it all?
Because someone’s got to play the “Ew! She touched me!” characters. [Laughs]. Actually it’s because I’m actor and I wanted to tell stories. I’m not a part of the youth-and-beauty-worship set, aka Network TV. There’s a place for character actors.
But the mindset has taken its toll on me and I regret that I’ve let that happen. It’s not uncommon for me to refer to myself as “a fat troll who’s almost 50.”
The heart of your book is about discovering that your husband had an affair with your son’s babysitter. Did going through this give you any sympathy for the lurid tabloid tales we read about this happening to movie stars?
Oh my god, yes. Geez. I could go off on this subject. My mailman Eddie is sick of hearing me talk about it. I’ve been stuck on this one element: the fact that the journalists are often women. Women have been slapping the shit out of other women directly and indirectly for decades, yet that’s the element that’s been upsetting me.
It’s hard enough to get through the day. Why would you want to make life so much harder for someone? I guess a part of it is that people think “Oh, they’re celebrities! Boo-hoo. Go back to shining their diamonds and buying $59 cold-press juices.” But suffering is suffering and no amount of thousand-dollar face creams helps with the delicate state of being alive. It’s hard for everyone.
There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women. Leaving behind their old, aging, bossy wives—like that old biddy Gwen Stefani. Just today I read that the definition of “ingénue” was a girl that was young and naive. My entire life I’d thought that it meant “young and pretty.” It never dawned on me that naive was a selling point.
You talked about finishing a draft of the book before it all went down with your ex. Can you talk about how that changed the arc of the book?
The first draft of the book felt like a desperate attempt to deliver something that read like a string of ‘wacky anecdotes.’ No depth or narrative arc. I couldn’t see the stories I needed to tell because I was still living it and because I didn’t know the real stories.
For instance, the story about going to a strip club with my ex- husband was all about how weirded out I was by strip clubs. Yet I couldn’t put my finger on why sitting next to him in the club had been so awful. Until the moment I found out the truth about what had been happening between my ex and our babysitter. Then the sense of doom and angst started to make sense. It was like somebody cut the rope and the bucket I’d been sitting in went crashing deep into the well.
That’s not a good analogy. It leaves me trapped down there, waiting for a fireman to save me. Clearly I need a new husband to tell me to stop answering these questions and put on some heels and dance for him. That sounds so flattering yet depressing. Just like Hollywood.Lauren Weedman has never enjoyed the perks of major movie stardom. On the contrary, the 47-year-old Indiana native has built a career one character at a time, from Horny Patty on the HBO comedy "Hung" to Doris on the short-lived (but much loved) "Looking."
But two years ago, Weedman suffered the ultimate Hollywood betrayal when she discovered that her husband was carrying on an affair with their young son’s twenty-something babysitter.
Weedman would be the first one to tell you that the tabloids took little notice. (“I’m not famous enough to be infamous, apparently.”) Instead, she’s written about the episode—among other mortifications—in her remarkable new book of essays, "Miss Fortune."
Salon caught up with Weedman on the Boston leg of her national book tour and sat down to ask her what it’s like to be a feminist in Hollywood, how she now regards other victims of adultery, and, of course, what it’s like to have pretend sex on camera.
Early in "Miss Fortune" you write about the teenage son of your boyfriend, who, after crashing your car, reveals that he was upset with you for telling a joke about his dead mother. You justify that joke by telling him that you’re an artist, and artists talk about their lives. Given how much raw material is in "Miss Fortune"—about yourself, your ex, your child, your birth and adoptive mothers, etc.—how do you deal with this anxiety about the other people in your stories?
That’s actually the exact incident that taught me that if you write stories about real live human beings—even if you change their names, hair color, drugs of choice—you will incite real live human reactions. What I’ve discovered works for me is to show everyone the stories before they are published, so they don’t feel ambushed. I also give them full power to veto aspects of the story, or change elements that bother them, or make them feel like suing me. The last thing I want is for my work to cause someone pain. Unless they enjoy pain—then I’m honored to be a part of it.
The big goal for me is to find out what’s going on with myself in stories. To shit-talk myself, not others.
Okay, but what about your five-year-old son. Do you worry about him reading about the demise of your marriage?
My son’s actually six, so he’s already asking about the sex tape. Kidding!
I actually thought about that a lot while I was writing the book. It never leaves you once you have a kid. At least it hasn’t for me. Dear god, don’t let my mother find out! was replaced by What will my son think? the day after he was born. Should I be worried? People keep mentioning that to me, but somehow I’m not worried.
I didn’t do an XXX-rated movie or take part in the Killing Fields. I wrote about what it was like for me after the split up. I was careful to not get lurid or petty about it. Everything about my break up that I wrote about is exactly how I’d explain it to my son when the time seemed right.
Explaining why I played “Horny Patty” and did a sex scene while I was pregnant with him may be tougher. I’ll rip those pages out.
I was just going to ask you to talk about what it’s really like to film a sex scene?
If you can be in the right headspace and not worry about what you’re looking like, it can feel like pretending to have sex … with someone who’s wearing a tiny burlap bag tied around their penis.
For the record, I don’t do hot sex scenes. As Patty, I’m this weird lonely sex addict masturbating with a Sharpie in the office. In "Looking," I actually got to be an attractive woman having sex with a big old attractive man. No, wait; we didn’t actually have fake film sex. We just lay in bed after sex and I kept getting the note that it looked like I was trying to hide by boobs from the camera. Which I was, even though the actor in the scene with me told me, “a tittie is a tittie. And men like titties, so let’s see them.” Very sweet.
This feels like the right moment to ask how you deal with the Hollywood bullshit as a smart feminist? I guess I’m wondering why you’d subject yourself to the youth-and-beauty worshipping of it all?
Because someone’s got to play the “Ew! She touched me!” characters. [Laughs]. Actually it’s because I’m actor and I wanted to tell stories. I’m not a part of the youth-and-beauty-worship set, aka Network TV. There’s a place for character actors.
But the mindset has taken its toll on me and I regret that I’ve let that happen. It’s not uncommon for me to refer to myself as “a fat troll who’s almost 50.”
The heart of your book is about discovering that your husband had an affair with your son’s babysitter. Did going through this give you any sympathy for the lurid tabloid tales we read about this happening to movie stars?
Oh my god, yes. Geez. I could go off on this subject. My mailman Eddie is sick of hearing me talk about it. I’ve been stuck on this one element: the fact that the journalists are often women. Women have been slapping the shit out of other women directly and indirectly for decades, yet that’s the element that’s been upsetting me.
It’s hard enough to get through the day. Why would you want to make life so much harder for someone? I guess a part of it is that people think “Oh, they’re celebrities! Boo-hoo. Go back to shining their diamonds and buying $59 cold-press juices.” But suffering is suffering and no amount of thousand-dollar face creams helps with the delicate state of being alive. It’s hard for everyone.
There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women. Leaving behind their old, aging, bossy wives—like that old biddy Gwen Stefani. Just today I read that the definition of “ingénue” was a girl that was young and naive. My entire life I’d thought that it meant “young and pretty.” It never dawned on me that naive was a selling point.
You talked about finishing a draft of the book before it all went down with your ex. Can you talk about how that changed the arc of the book?
The first draft of the book felt like a desperate attempt to deliver something that read like a string of ‘wacky anecdotes.’ No depth or narrative arc. I couldn’t see the stories I needed to tell because I was still living it and because I didn’t know the real stories.
For instance, the story about going to a strip club with my ex- husband was all about how weirded out I was by strip clubs. Yet I couldn’t put my finger on why sitting next to him in the club had been so awful. Until the moment I found out the truth about what had been happening between my ex and our babysitter. Then the sense of doom and angst started to make sense. It was like somebody cut the rope and the bucket I’d been sitting in went crashing deep into the well.
That’s not a good analogy. It leaves me trapped down there, waiting for a fireman to save me. Clearly I need a new husband to tell me to stop answering these questions and put on some heels and dance for him. That sounds so flattering yet depressing. Just like Hollywood.
But two years ago, Weedman suffered the ultimate Hollywood betrayal when she discovered that her husband was carrying on an affair with their young son’s twenty-something babysitter.
Weedman would be the first one to tell you that the tabloids took little notice. (“I’m not famous enough to be infamous, apparently.”) Instead, she’s written about the episode—among other mortifications—in her remarkable new book of essays, "Miss Fortune."
Salon caught up with Weedman on the Boston leg of her national book tour and sat down to ask her what it’s like to be a feminist in Hollywood, how she now regards other victims of adultery, and, of course, what it’s like to have pretend sex on camera.
Early in "Miss Fortune" you write about the teenage son of your boyfriend, who, after crashing your car, reveals that he was upset with you for telling a joke about his dead mother. You justify that joke by telling him that you’re an artist, and artists talk about their lives. Given how much raw material is in "Miss Fortune"—about yourself, your ex, your child, your birth and adoptive mothers, etc.—how do you deal with this anxiety about the other people in your stories?
That’s actually the exact incident that taught me that if you write stories about real live human beings—even if you change their names, hair color, drugs of choice—you will incite real live human reactions. What I’ve discovered works for me is to show everyone the stories before they are published, so they don’t feel ambushed. I also give them full power to veto aspects of the story, or change elements that bother them, or make them feel like suing me. The last thing I want is for my work to cause someone pain. Unless they enjoy pain—then I’m honored to be a part of it.
The big goal for me is to find out what’s going on with myself in stories. To shit-talk myself, not others.
Okay, but what about your five-year-old son. Do you worry about him reading about the demise of your marriage?
My son’s actually six, so he’s already asking about the sex tape. Kidding!
I actually thought about that a lot while I was writing the book. It never leaves you once you have a kid. At least it hasn’t for me. Dear god, don’t let my mother find out! was replaced by What will my son think? the day after he was born. Should I be worried? People keep mentioning that to me, but somehow I’m not worried.
I didn’t do an XXX-rated movie or take part in the Killing Fields. I wrote about what it was like for me after the split up. I was careful to not get lurid or petty about it. Everything about my break up that I wrote about is exactly how I’d explain it to my son when the time seemed right.
Explaining why I played “Horny Patty” and did a sex scene while I was pregnant with him may be tougher. I’ll rip those pages out.
I was just going to ask you to talk about what it’s really like to film a sex scene?
If you can be in the right headspace and not worry about what you’re looking like, it can feel like pretending to have sex … with someone who’s wearing a tiny burlap bag tied around their penis.
For the record, I don’t do hot sex scenes. As Patty, I’m this weird lonely sex addict masturbating with a Sharpie in the office. In "Looking," I actually got to be an attractive woman having sex with a big old attractive man. No, wait; we didn’t actually have fake film sex. We just lay in bed after sex and I kept getting the note that it looked like I was trying to hide by boobs from the camera. Which I was, even though the actor in the scene with me told me, “a tittie is a tittie. And men like titties, so let’s see them.” Very sweet.
This feels like the right moment to ask how you deal with the Hollywood bullshit as a smart feminist? I guess I’m wondering why you’d subject yourself to the youth-and-beauty worshipping of it all?
Because someone’s got to play the “Ew! She touched me!” characters. [Laughs]. Actually it’s because I’m actor and I wanted to tell stories. I’m not a part of the youth-and-beauty-worship set, aka Network TV. There’s a place for character actors.
But the mindset has taken its toll on me and I regret that I’ve let that happen. It’s not uncommon for me to refer to myself as “a fat troll who’s almost 50.”
The heart of your book is about discovering that your husband had an affair with your son’s babysitter. Did going through this give you any sympathy for the lurid tabloid tales we read about this happening to movie stars?
Oh my god, yes. Geez. I could go off on this subject. My mailman Eddie is sick of hearing me talk about it. I’ve been stuck on this one element: the fact that the journalists are often women. Women have been slapping the shit out of other women directly and indirectly for decades, yet that’s the element that’s been upsetting me.
It’s hard enough to get through the day. Why would you want to make life so much harder for someone? I guess a part of it is that people think “Oh, they’re celebrities! Boo-hoo. Go back to shining their diamonds and buying $59 cold-press juices.” But suffering is suffering and no amount of thousand-dollar face creams helps with the delicate state of being alive. It’s hard for everyone.
There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women. Leaving behind their old, aging, bossy wives—like that old biddy Gwen Stefani. Just today I read that the definition of “ingénue” was a girl that was young and naive. My entire life I’d thought that it meant “young and pretty.” It never dawned on me that naive was a selling point.
You talked about finishing a draft of the book before it all went down with your ex. Can you talk about how that changed the arc of the book?
The first draft of the book felt like a desperate attempt to deliver something that read like a string of ‘wacky anecdotes.’ No depth or narrative arc. I couldn’t see the stories I needed to tell because I was still living it and because I didn’t know the real stories.
For instance, the story about going to a strip club with my ex- husband was all about how weirded out I was by strip clubs. Yet I couldn’t put my finger on why sitting next to him in the club had been so awful. Until the moment I found out the truth about what had been happening between my ex and our babysitter. Then the sense of doom and angst started to make sense. It was like somebody cut the rope and the bucket I’d been sitting in went crashing deep into the well.
That’s not a good analogy. It leaves me trapped down there, waiting for a fireman to save me. Clearly I need a new husband to tell me to stop answering these questions and put on some heels and dance for him. That sounds so flattering yet depressing. Just like Hollywood.Lauren Weedman has never enjoyed the perks of major movie stardom. On the contrary, the 47-year-old Indiana native has built a career one character at a time, from Horny Patty on the HBO comedy "Hung" to Doris on the short-lived (but much loved) "Looking."
But two years ago, Weedman suffered the ultimate Hollywood betrayal when she discovered that her husband was carrying on an affair with their young son’s twenty-something babysitter.
Weedman would be the first one to tell you that the tabloids took little notice. (“I’m not famous enough to be infamous, apparently.”) Instead, she’s written about the episode—among other mortifications—in her remarkable new book of essays, "Miss Fortune."
Salon caught up with Weedman on the Boston leg of her national book tour and sat down to ask her what it’s like to be a feminist in Hollywood, how she now regards other victims of adultery, and, of course, what it’s like to have pretend sex on camera.
Early in "Miss Fortune" you write about the teenage son of your boyfriend, who, after crashing your car, reveals that he was upset with you for telling a joke about his dead mother. You justify that joke by telling him that you’re an artist, and artists talk about their lives. Given how much raw material is in "Miss Fortune"—about yourself, your ex, your child, your birth and adoptive mothers, etc.—how do you deal with this anxiety about the other people in your stories?
That’s actually the exact incident that taught me that if you write stories about real live human beings—even if you change their names, hair color, drugs of choice—you will incite real live human reactions. What I’ve discovered works for me is to show everyone the stories before they are published, so they don’t feel ambushed. I also give them full power to veto aspects of the story, or change elements that bother them, or make them feel like suing me. The last thing I want is for my work to cause someone pain. Unless they enjoy pain—then I’m honored to be a part of it.
The big goal for me is to find out what’s going on with myself in stories. To shit-talk myself, not others.
Okay, but what about your five-year-old son. Do you worry about him reading about the demise of your marriage?
My son’s actually six, so he’s already asking about the sex tape. Kidding!
I actually thought about that a lot while I was writing the book. It never leaves you once you have a kid. At least it hasn’t for me. Dear god, don’t let my mother find out! was replaced by What will my son think? the day after he was born. Should I be worried? People keep mentioning that to me, but somehow I’m not worried.
I didn’t do an XXX-rated movie or take part in the Killing Fields. I wrote about what it was like for me after the split up. I was careful to not get lurid or petty about it. Everything about my break up that I wrote about is exactly how I’d explain it to my son when the time seemed right.
Explaining why I played “Horny Patty” and did a sex scene while I was pregnant with him may be tougher. I’ll rip those pages out.
I was just going to ask you to talk about what it’s really like to film a sex scene?
If you can be in the right headspace and not worry about what you’re looking like, it can feel like pretending to have sex … with someone who’s wearing a tiny burlap bag tied around their penis.
For the record, I don’t do hot sex scenes. As Patty, I’m this weird lonely sex addict masturbating with a Sharpie in the office. In "Looking," I actually got to be an attractive woman having sex with a big old attractive man. No, wait; we didn’t actually have fake film sex. We just lay in bed after sex and I kept getting the note that it looked like I was trying to hide by boobs from the camera. Which I was, even though the actor in the scene with me told me, “a tittie is a tittie. And men like titties, so let’s see them.” Very sweet.
This feels like the right moment to ask how you deal with the Hollywood bullshit as a smart feminist? I guess I’m wondering why you’d subject yourself to the youth-and-beauty worshipping of it all?
Because someone’s got to play the “Ew! She touched me!” characters. [Laughs]. Actually it’s because I’m actor and I wanted to tell stories. I’m not a part of the youth-and-beauty-worship set, aka Network TV. There’s a place for character actors.
But the mindset has taken its toll on me and I regret that I’ve let that happen. It’s not uncommon for me to refer to myself as “a fat troll who’s almost 50.”
The heart of your book is about discovering that your husband had an affair with your son’s babysitter. Did going through this give you any sympathy for the lurid tabloid tales we read about this happening to movie stars?
Oh my god, yes. Geez. I could go off on this subject. My mailman Eddie is sick of hearing me talk about it. I’ve been stuck on this one element: the fact that the journalists are often women. Women have been slapping the shit out of other women directly and indirectly for decades, yet that’s the element that’s been upsetting me.
It’s hard enough to get through the day. Why would you want to make life so much harder for someone? I guess a part of it is that people think “Oh, they’re celebrities! Boo-hoo. Go back to shining their diamonds and buying $59 cold-press juices.” But suffering is suffering and no amount of thousand-dollar face creams helps with the delicate state of being alive. It’s hard for everyone.
There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women. Leaving behind their old, aging, bossy wives—like that old biddy Gwen Stefani. Just today I read that the definition of “ingénue” was a girl that was young and naive. My entire life I’d thought that it meant “young and pretty.” It never dawned on me that naive was a selling point.
You talked about finishing a draft of the book before it all went down with your ex. Can you talk about how that changed the arc of the book?
The first draft of the book felt like a desperate attempt to deliver something that read like a string of ‘wacky anecdotes.’ No depth or narrative arc. I couldn’t see the stories I needed to tell because I was still living it and because I didn’t know the real stories.
For instance, the story about going to a strip club with my ex- husband was all about how weirded out I was by strip clubs. Yet I couldn’t put my finger on why sitting next to him in the club had been so awful. Until the moment I found out the truth about what had been happening between my ex and our babysitter. Then the sense of doom and angst started to make sense. It was like somebody cut the rope and the bucket I’d been sitting in went crashing deep into the well.
That’s not a good analogy. It leaves me trapped down there, waiting for a fireman to save me. Clearly I need a new husband to tell me to stop answering these questions and put on some heels and dance for him. That sounds so flattering yet depressing. Just like Hollywood.Lauren Weedman has never enjoyed the perks of major movie stardom. On the contrary, the 47-year-old Indiana native has built a career one character at a time, from Horny Patty on the HBO comedy "Hung" to Doris on the short-lived (but much loved) "Looking."
But two years ago, Weedman suffered the ultimate Hollywood betrayal when she discovered that her husband was carrying on an affair with their young son’s twenty-something babysitter.
Weedman would be the first one to tell you that the tabloids took little notice. (“I’m not famous enough to be infamous, apparently.”) Instead, she’s written about the episode—among other mortifications—in her remarkable new book of essays, "Miss Fortune."
Salon caught up with Weedman on the Boston leg of her national book tour and sat down to ask her what it’s like to be a feminist in Hollywood, how she now regards other victims of adultery, and, of course, what it’s like to have pretend sex on camera.
Early in "Miss Fortune" you write about the teenage son of your boyfriend, who, after crashing your car, reveals that he was upset with you for telling a joke about his dead mother. You justify that joke by telling him that you’re an artist, and artists talk about their lives. Given how much raw material is in "Miss Fortune"—about yourself, your ex, your child, your birth and adoptive mothers, etc.—how do you deal with this anxiety about the other people in your stories?
That’s actually the exact incident that taught me that if you write stories about real live human beings—even if you change their names, hair color, drugs of choice—you will incite real live human reactions. What I’ve discovered works for me is to show everyone the stories before they are published, so they don’t feel ambushed. I also give them full power to veto aspects of the story, or change elements that bother them, or make them feel like suing me. The last thing I want is for my work to cause someone pain. Unless they enjoy pain—then I’m honored to be a part of it.
The big goal for me is to find out what’s going on with myself in stories. To shit-talk myself, not others.
Okay, but what about your five-year-old son. Do you worry about him reading about the demise of your marriage?
My son’s actually six, so he’s already asking about the sex tape. Kidding!
I actually thought about that a lot while I was writing the book. It never leaves you once you have a kid. At least it hasn’t for me. Dear god, don’t let my mother find out! was replaced by What will my son think? the day after he was born. Should I be worried? People keep mentioning that to me, but somehow I’m not worried.
I didn’t do an XXX-rated movie or take part in the Killing Fields. I wrote about what it was like for me after the split up. I was careful to not get lurid or petty about it. Everything about my break up that I wrote about is exactly how I’d explain it to my son when the time seemed right.
Explaining why I played “Horny Patty” and did a sex scene while I was pregnant with him may be tougher. I’ll rip those pages out.
I was just going to ask you to talk about what it’s really like to film a sex scene?
If you can be in the right headspace and not worry about what you’re looking like, it can feel like pretending to have sex … with someone who’s wearing a tiny burlap bag tied around their penis.
For the record, I don’t do hot sex scenes. As Patty, I’m this weird lonely sex addict masturbating with a Sharpie in the office. In "Looking," I actually got to be an attractive woman having sex with a big old attractive man. No, wait; we didn’t actually have fake film sex. We just lay in bed after sex and I kept getting the note that it looked like I was trying to hide by boobs from the camera. Which I was, even though the actor in the scene with me told me, “a tittie is a tittie. And men like titties, so let’s see them.” Very sweet.
This feels like the right moment to ask how you deal with the Hollywood bullshit as a smart feminist? I guess I’m wondering why you’d subject yourself to the youth-and-beauty worshipping of it all?
Because someone’s got to play the “Ew! She touched me!” characters. [Laughs]. Actually it’s because I’m actor and I wanted to tell stories. I’m not a part of the youth-and-beauty-worship set, aka Network TV. There’s a place for character actors.
But the mindset has taken its toll on me and I regret that I’ve let that happen. It’s not uncommon for me to refer to myself as “a fat troll who’s almost 50.”
The heart of your book is about discovering that your husband had an affair with your son’s babysitter. Did going through this give you any sympathy for the lurid tabloid tales we read about this happening to movie stars?
Oh my god, yes. Geez. I could go off on this subject. My mailman Eddie is sick of hearing me talk about it. I’ve been stuck on this one element: the fact that the journalists are often women. Women have been slapping the shit out of other women directly and indirectly for decades, yet that’s the element that’s been upsetting me.
It’s hard enough to get through the day. Why would you want to make life so much harder for someone? I guess a part of it is that people think “Oh, they’re celebrities! Boo-hoo. Go back to shining their diamonds and buying $59 cold-press juices.” But suffering is suffering and no amount of thousand-dollar face creams helps with the delicate state of being alive. It’s hard for everyone.
There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women. Leaving behind their old, aging, bossy wives—like that old biddy Gwen Stefani. Just today I read that the definition of “ingénue” was a girl that was young and naive. My entire life I’d thought that it meant “young and pretty.” It never dawned on me that naive was a selling point.
You talked about finishing a draft of the book before it all went down with your ex. Can you talk about how that changed the arc of the book?
The first draft of the book felt like a desperate attempt to deliver something that read like a string of ‘wacky anecdotes.’ No depth or narrative arc. I couldn’t see the stories I needed to tell because I was still living it and because I didn’t know the real stories.
For instance, the story about going to a strip club with my ex- husband was all about how weirded out I was by strip clubs. Yet I couldn’t put my finger on why sitting next to him in the club had been so awful. Until the moment I found out the truth about what had been happening between my ex and our babysitter. Then the sense of doom and angst started to make sense. It was like somebody cut the rope and the bucket I’d been sitting in went crashing deep into the well.
That’s not a good analogy. It leaves me trapped down there, waiting for a fireman to save me. Clearly I need a new husband to tell me to stop answering these questions and put on some heels and dance for him. That sounds so flattering yet depressing. Just like Hollywood.
Humor and the Holocaust? Documentary explores the boundaries of comedy and tragedy
Is it inappropriate to joke about the Holocaust? Is it acceptable to make fun of slavery? Can we find humor in topics like cancer and AIDS? Is it too soon to crack wise about 9/11? These are some of the questions raised by “The Last Laugh,” director Ferne Pearlstein’s thoughtful, provocative, and yes, funny documentary about Holocaust humor that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week.
Pearlstein, who co-wrote the film with her husband, Robert Edwards, makes her case by using an array of clips from Mel Brook’s audacious “The Producers,” to Sarah Silverman’s outrageous stand-up concert film, “Jesus is Magic,” to even those Holocaust “comedies” such as “The Day the Clown Cried” and “Life is Beautiful.” But she also balances the gallows humor with scenes featuring Renee Firestone, a Holocaust survivor who has an upbeat, optimistic view of life, but still doesn’t laugh at every joke.
Whether viewers will be amused or angered by “The Last Laugh” remains to be seen, but the writers and actors and comedians interviewed in the film, which include Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl and Rob Reiner, Judy Gold, Gilbert Gottfried, Etgar Keret, and Lisa Lampanelli, along with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, weigh in on what’s offensive, and how, why, and where (as well as if) they find humor in the Holocaust.
Salon met with Pearlstein, Edwards and Firestone to see who gets “The Last Laugh.”
I really appreciate that you have made a film about a taboo topic. What made you forge ahead with this project, and what resistance did you encounter, if any?
Pearlstein: We encountered a lot of resistance in a different ways than I think you would expect. In trying to make the film, the first people we came in contact with were people looking for funding, or comedians who would work with us. It wasn’t until all of that was in place that we met Renee, which was 2011.
Edwards: But we had been working on it since 1998. She had been working on the film since 1993.
Firestone: You’re kidding!?
Pearlstein: In the film we talk about how things change over time. Talk about things changing over time—the resistance, or reaction in 1993 or 1998, when we talked about the subject of this film, until now, is dramatically different. Even in 2011, when we met Renee, it was still walking on eggshells. I imagined hate mail and protesting. That’s how much things have changed. I feel like we’re getting a different response. There have been so many types of satire over taboo subjects lately. The world is more schooled in it now.
Edwards: That’s kind of the point of the film—time is passing, and even in the interim of making the film the public response to the Holocaust is different. It’s changing all the time and will continue to change. Some of the examples of humor from the time period, which we researched—which were very shocking then—don’t feel shocking now. 70 years have gone by. You bring up 9/11, or child molestation or AIDS—other issues elicit a shocking response from people.
Pearlstein: Because that’s something they can remember. If you can remember it, it’s still taboo in a weird way.
You alternate a joke with a scene of drama, such as Renee recounting being examined by Dr. Mengele. Can you describe the structure of your film?
Pearlstein: The opening was so hard, because we had to strike that balance, and interweave two film styles. We also had to give the audience permission to laugh.
Edwards: And we also had to let the audience know early on that we were going to do that. Ferne was very adamant not to just have talking heads and clips, but an observational element to it. To combine those is very hard, never mind the subject matter…it was tricky. It was in the editing, not the planning. It was a very delicate process to walk that line.
I suspect Jewish film festivals might be disinclined to show your film. How do you think the Jewish audiences will respond?
Pearlstein: A lot of Jewish film festivals are writing me about the film on a daily basis.
Edwards: It could be the programmers are interested. We don’t know what the audience response will be. This film is not a comedy. It’s about comedy and it’s a film about bad taste. Ferne has made it in a tasteful way, in my opinion. We hope people understand this documentary itself is not trying to make light of any kind of tragedy, but illuminate it in a way that is new and fresh.
Pearlstein: And that’s why it was so important to bring Renee on. Here’s a woman who is not a comedian, but she has a good sense of humor. It shows through in every conversation, every experience she has. She can tell a story about one of her darkest situations, and she will still put a joke in there, almost every time.
Firestone: I remember when Mengele questioned me, “Who in [your] family is Jewish?” I thought it was ridiculous. I laughed at it. He kept asking me about my mother, my father, my grandparents. And I thought go myself: Here I am, with all these Jews. We don’t know where we are going, or what’s going to happen to us, and that’s what he wants to know—whether my parents are Jewish? I mean, what else would I be doing here? If you think about it, it’s really funny. And that was before I knew where I was, or what the place was about. Before my head was shaved, or I was undressed. Humor is not fun. That’s the difference for me. To make fun of something, or laugh about something, it’s different than if you talk about humor. When we looked at each other with the shaved heads, it was funny—we looked ridiculous. We had no idea why they did it to us. It was a terrible what they did to us, but when we looked at each other, we looked ridiculous. We didn’t make jokes about it.
Pearlstein: People look back on that era and close it off to humor, but most of the European Jews who were going to the camps experienced years of discrimination and anti-Semitism. They got off that train, and [experienced] another form of degradation, and it’s terrible. But they didn’t think they were going that day to their death. It’s only in retrospect that we know what happened. So when Renee tells that story, and she says, “I see my friend, and we looked at each other, and they were wearing these huge outfits, and whatever…” it was a little funny.
I like the exchanges between Renee and her friend Elly, two survivors who have different outlooks on life. You can’t deny people their feelings and sensitivities; it is wrong to make jokes that might offend them?
Firestone: Jokes about the Holocaust are not proper. About the perpetrators, I don’t care, but about our situation, nothing is really funny. As I say, to make fun, and to have a sense of humor are two different things.
Several interviewees describe humor as being a coping mechanism for horror. Renee says that when she remembers she cries, but when she doesn’t, she laughs. There is also talk about time passing, which makes taboo humor acceptable. Can you talk about these aspects addressed in your film?
Edwards: When Gilbert Gottfried says in the film, “Why wait!?” [a reversal on “too soon?”], it is funny. But I think we all understand why people wait. We can’t joke about Lincoln’s assassination that night. That’s the joke. The passage of time changes it. It’s context, which is really the bigger issue. We started out talking about this film and jokes and humor feels very different depending on who says it, when they say it, and what context they say it in. If it’s self-deprecating within the group, as opposed to the oppressor making the same joke, it’s all context.
Firestone: That’s true also, that the Holocaust survivors, amongst themselves, will talk about some funny things. They won’t tell it to anyone who wasn’t there.
Pearlstein: That’s right, and children of survivors have a very dark sense of humor amongst themselves. I tried to uncover that [with Etgar Keret]. They will tell jokes to each other, which is also letting off steam. It’s not an easy existence as the child of a survivor. They are survivors of a tragedy they didn’t experience, so it’s bigger in their imagination. And that can be very horrifying.
Joan Rivers got into hot water for her Holocaust humor, but she defends it as “creating awareness.” Sarah Silverman jokes about the “alleged Holocaust,” mocking Holocaust deniers and gets a laugh. It’s all contextual, but one gets in trouble and one gets by. Can you defend either position?
Edwards: It’s hard to explain why one comedian gets a pass and another doesn’t. It depends on lots of things, like the audience, and their history. But this issue of opening the door to abuse is in the film. Within the community of survivors and the Jewish community, where this kind of humor is somewhat acceptable, there is the fear that once the door is open, the next thing you know is Neo-Nazis adopting the same [humor]. And we get at that with Sasha Baron Cohen, and with “All in the Family.” It is like Sarah [Silverman] says, “Once you tell the joke, it’s no longer yours. You can’t control how it’s inferred.” When people laugh at the wrong thing, then you get into a Free Speech argument: Should you never make these jokes, or any art form for fear it will be misinterpreted? Then you have a really chilling effect.
Pearlstein: Context is really important. We saw Sarah Silverman’s early days of “Jesus is Magic” in a little black box theatre on Bleecker Street, and we laughed. She did 15-20 minutes of Holocaust jokes, and in that community of people, it was very funny. I had Renee watch YouTube clips of Holocaust jokes, and I blanched while I was filming that. The context of seeing these jokes through the eyes of a 90-year-old survivor was different.
Whenever another Holocaust film comes out, a friend of mine—who’s Jewish, mind you—says, “Holocaust, Smolocaust.” She finds the topic overworked in cinema. What can you say about people who are tired of hearing about the Holocaust?
Edwards: The point of Holocaust fatigue is another one the movie gets at. The subject feels overworked, but that’s as dangerous as joking about it. When it gets to the point where people roll their eyes and it has no effect anymore, then you have a real problem. We are looking for new ways to approach this topic that feels overworked, and humor is one—because it has hardly ever been approached. Ferne is always mindful of the seriousness of the subject matter and the tragedy, and not let it become fodder for comedy.
Pearlstein: And it’s a way to get eye-rollers in the theater to see something they haven’t seen.
Renee, you have been an activist for other genocides, such as Rwanda. What observations do you have about these tragedies?
Firestone: The difference between genocide and the Holocaust is that none of the other genocides concentrated on children. Most of the genocides are about adults. The [Nazis] concentrated on the children so there is no future. There is no other genocide where they used modern technology to destroy groups of people. Every other genocide was individuals being killed. To date, 1½ million children were put in a room and gassed—it was the way it was performed. It was industrial wholesale slaughter. It’s interesting that Rwanda struck me in a very different way. The Holocaust lasted 12 years, and there were six million murders. But in Rwanda, the genocide lasted only four months, and almost a million Tutsis were murdered.
We just returned from New Orleans, and we toured this plantation with this great guide. And I heard some of the stories that happened to black children, and saw pictures and I thought, “When does the world really learn?” That should have been already a message. Then I found out the plantation was owned by Germans. It blew my mind. [Laughter]. And we’re laughing about it. How terrible!
Pearlstein: This is why I chose Renee. She doesn’t just look at the Holocaust with blinders on. She sees every genocide. She has this experience in New Orleans. She’s had this experience in Rwanda. She’s constantly talking to people about “Never Forget.” But “Never Forget” what happened here, either…
I like the way you parse out the difference between jokes about the Holocaust vs. jokes against Nazis. Can you discuss this?
Pearlstein: I was filming a bunch of comedians, and I wanted them to bring humor to the interviews, and not feel—because of the topic—that they had to be serious. I wanted to disarm them by starting with “Do you have a Holocaust joke?” And that set a tone for the interview. I didn’t realize this until I had done a couple of interviews. They would always say, “I don’t have a Holocaust joke, but I have a Nazi joke.” So by the time I met Judy Gold, I changed the question. I explained I used to ask for a Holocaust joke, but then I learned about the distinction. She was like, “Oh, I have a Holocaust joke!” She was the first person to claim it and be proud. I thought, Wow!
Edwards: If you look at the two jokes Joan Rivers gets in trouble with in the movie, they are at the expense of Germans. They should be in that tradition of Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin. But she mentions the facts—ovens, gas. She dares to bring in the machinery.Is it inappropriate to joke about the Holocaust? Is it acceptable to make fun of slavery? Can we find humor in topics like cancer and AIDS? Is it too soon to crack wise about 9/11? These are some of the questions raised by “The Last Laugh,” director Ferne Pearlstein’s thoughtful, provocative, and yes, funny documentary about Holocaust humor that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week.
Pearlstein, who co-wrote the film with her husband, Robert Edwards, makes her case by using an array of clips from Mel Brook’s audacious “The Producers,” to Sarah Silverman’s outrageous stand-up concert film, “Jesus is Magic,” to even those Holocaust “comedies” such as “The Day the Clown Cried” and “Life is Beautiful.” But she also balances the gallows humor with scenes featuring Renee Firestone, a Holocaust survivor who has an upbeat, optimistic view of life, but still doesn’t laugh at every joke.
Whether viewers will be amused or angered by “The Last Laugh” remains to be seen, but the writers and actors and comedians interviewed in the film, which include Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl and Rob Reiner, Judy Gold, Gilbert Gottfried, Etgar Keret, and Lisa Lampanelli, along with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, weigh in on what’s offensive, and how, why, and where (as well as if) they find humor in the Holocaust.
Salon met with Pearlstein, Edwards and Firestone to see who gets “The Last Laugh.”
I really appreciate that you have made a film about a taboo topic. What made you forge ahead with this project, and what resistance did you encounter, if any?
Pearlstein: We encountered a lot of resistance in a different ways than I think you would expect. In trying to make the film, the first people we came in contact with were people looking for funding, or comedians who would work with us. It wasn’t until all of that was in place that we met Renee, which was 2011.
Edwards: But we had been working on it since 1998. She had been working on the film since 1993.
Firestone: You’re kidding!?
Pearlstein: In the film we talk about how things change over time. Talk about things changing over time—the resistance, or reaction in 1993 or 1998, when we talked about the subject of this film, until now, is dramatically different. Even in 2011, when we met Renee, it was still walking on eggshells. I imagined hate mail and protesting. That’s how much things have changed. I feel like we’re getting a different response. There have been so many types of satire over taboo subjects lately. The world is more schooled in it now.
Edwards: That’s kind of the point of the film—time is passing, and even in the interim of making the film the public response to the Holocaust is different. It’s changing all the time and will continue to change. Some of the examples of humor from the time period, which we researched—which were very shocking then—don’t feel shocking now. 70 years have gone by. You bring up 9/11, or child molestation or AIDS—other issues elicit a shocking response from people.
Pearlstein: Because that’s something they can remember. If you can remember it, it’s still taboo in a weird way.
You alternate a joke with a scene of drama, such as Renee recounting being examined by Dr. Mengele. Can you describe the structure of your film?
Pearlstein: The opening was so hard, because we had to strike that balance, and interweave two film styles. We also had to give the audience permission to laugh.
Edwards: And we also had to let the audience know early on that we were going to do that. Ferne was very adamant not to just have talking heads and clips, but an observational element to it. To combine those is very hard, never mind the subject matter…it was tricky. It was in the editing, not the planning. It was a very delicate process to walk that line.
I suspect Jewish film festivals might be disinclined to show your film. How do you think the Jewish audiences will respond?
Pearlstein: A lot of Jewish film festivals are writing me about the film on a daily basis.
Edwards: It could be the programmers are interested. We don’t know what the audience response will be. This film is not a comedy. It’s about comedy and it’s a film about bad taste. Ferne has made it in a tasteful way, in my opinion. We hope people understand this documentary itself is not trying to make light of any kind of tragedy, but illuminate it in a way that is new and fresh.
Pearlstein: And that’s why it was so important to bring Renee on. Here’s a woman who is not a comedian, but she has a good sense of humor. It shows through in every conversation, every experience she has. She can tell a story about one of her darkest situations, and she will still put a joke in there, almost every time.
Firestone: I remember when Mengele questioned me, “Who in [your] family is Jewish?” I thought it was ridiculous. I laughed at it. He kept asking me about my mother, my father, my grandparents. And I thought go myself: Here I am, with all these Jews. We don’t know where we are going, or what’s going to happen to us, and that’s what he wants to know—whether my parents are Jewish? I mean, what else would I be doing here? If you think about it, it’s really funny. And that was before I knew where I was, or what the place was about. Before my head was shaved, or I was undressed. Humor is not fun. That’s the difference for me. To make fun of something, or laugh about something, it’s different than if you talk about humor. When we looked at each other with the shaved heads, it was funny—we looked ridiculous. We had no idea why they did it to us. It was a terrible what they did to us, but when we looked at each other, we looked ridiculous. We didn’t make jokes about it.
Pearlstein: People look back on that era and close it off to humor, but most of the European Jews who were going to the camps experienced years of discrimination and anti-Semitism. They got off that train, and [experienced] another form of degradation, and it’s terrible. But they didn’t think they were going that day to their death. It’s only in retrospect that we know what happened. So when Renee tells that story, and she says, “I see my friend, and we looked at each other, and they were wearing these huge outfits, and whatever…” it was a little funny.
I like the exchanges between Renee and her friend Elly, two survivors who have different outlooks on life. You can’t deny people their feelings and sensitivities; it is wrong to make jokes that might offend them?
Firestone: Jokes about the Holocaust are not proper. About the perpetrators, I don’t care, but about our situation, nothing is really funny. As I say, to make fun, and to have a sense of humor are two different things.
Several interviewees describe humor as being a coping mechanism for horror. Renee says that when she remembers she cries, but when she doesn’t, she laughs. There is also talk about time passing, which makes taboo humor acceptable. Can you talk about these aspects addressed in your film?
Edwards: When Gilbert Gottfried says in the film, “Why wait!?” [a reversal on “too soon?”], it is funny. But I think we all understand why people wait. We can’t joke about Lincoln’s assassination that night. That’s the joke. The passage of time changes it. It’s context, which is really the bigger issue. We started out talking about this film and jokes and humor feels very different depending on who says it, when they say it, and what context they say it in. If it’s self-deprecating within the group, as opposed to the oppressor making the same joke, it’s all context.
Firestone: That’s true also, that the Holocaust survivors, amongst themselves, will talk about some funny things. They won’t tell it to anyone who wasn’t there.
Pearlstein: That’s right, and children of survivors have a very dark sense of humor amongst themselves. I tried to uncover that [with Etgar Keret]. They will tell jokes to each other, which is also letting off steam. It’s not an easy existence as the child of a survivor. They are survivors of a tragedy they didn’t experience, so it’s bigger in their imagination. And that can be very horrifying.
Joan Rivers got into hot water for her Holocaust humor, but she defends it as “creating awareness.” Sarah Silverman jokes about the “alleged Holocaust,” mocking Holocaust deniers and gets a laugh. It’s all contextual, but one gets in trouble and one gets by. Can you defend either position?
Edwards: It’s hard to explain why one comedian gets a pass and another doesn’t. It depends on lots of things, like the audience, and their history. But this issue of opening the door to abuse is in the film. Within the community of survivors and the Jewish community, where this kind of humor is somewhat acceptable, there is the fear that once the door is open, the next thing you know is Neo-Nazis adopting the same [humor]. And we get at that with Sasha Baron Cohen, and with “All in the Family.” It is like Sarah [Silverman] says, “Once you tell the joke, it’s no longer yours. You can’t control how it’s inferred.” When people laugh at the wrong thing, then you get into a Free Speech argument: Should you never make these jokes, or any art form for fear it will be misinterpreted? Then you have a really chilling effect.
Pearlstein: Context is really important. We saw Sarah Silverman’s early days of “Jesus is Magic” in a little black box theatre on Bleecker Street, and we laughed. She did 15-20 minutes of Holocaust jokes, and in that community of people, it was very funny. I had Renee watch YouTube clips of Holocaust jokes, and I blanched while I was filming that. The context of seeing these jokes through the eyes of a 90-year-old survivor was different.
Whenever another Holocaust film comes out, a friend of mine—who’s Jewish, mind you—says, “Holocaust, Smolocaust.” She finds the topic overworked in cinema. What can you say about people who are tired of hearing about the Holocaust?
Edwards: The point of Holocaust fatigue is another one the movie gets at. The subject feels overworked, but that’s as dangerous as joking about it. When it gets to the point where people roll their eyes and it has no effect anymore, then you have a real problem. We are looking for new ways to approach this topic that feels overworked, and humor is one—because it has hardly ever been approached. Ferne is always mindful of the seriousness of the subject matter and the tragedy, and not let it become fodder for comedy.
Pearlstein: And it’s a way to get eye-rollers in the theater to see something they haven’t seen.
Renee, you have been an activist for other genocides, such as Rwanda. What observations do you have about these tragedies?
Firestone: The difference between genocide and the Holocaust is that none of the other genocides concentrated on children. Most of the genocides are about adults. The [Nazis] concentrated on the children so there is no future. There is no other genocide where they used modern technology to destroy groups of people. Every other genocide was individuals being killed. To date, 1½ million children were put in a room and gassed—it was the way it was performed. It was industrial wholesale slaughter. It’s interesting that Rwanda struck me in a very different way. The Holocaust lasted 12 years, and there were six million murders. But in Rwanda, the genocide lasted only four months, and almost a million Tutsis were murdered.
We just returned from New Orleans, and we toured this plantation with this great guide. And I heard some of the stories that happened to black children, and saw pictures and I thought, “When does the world really learn?” That should have been already a message. Then I found out the plantation was owned by Germans. It blew my mind. [Laughter]. And we’re laughing about it. How terrible!
Pearlstein: This is why I chose Renee. She doesn’t just look at the Holocaust with blinders on. She sees every genocide. She has this experience in New Orleans. She’s had this experience in Rwanda. She’s constantly talking to people about “Never Forget.” But “Never Forget” what happened here, either…
I like the way you parse out the difference between jokes about the Holocaust vs. jokes against Nazis. Can you discuss this?
Pearlstein: I was filming a bunch of comedians, and I wanted them to bring humor to the interviews, and not feel—because of the topic—that they had to be serious. I wanted to disarm them by starting with “Do you have a Holocaust joke?” And that set a tone for the interview. I didn’t realize this until I had done a couple of interviews. They would always say, “I don’t have a Holocaust joke, but I have a Nazi joke.” So by the time I met Judy Gold, I changed the question. I explained I used to ask for a Holocaust joke, but then I learned about the distinction. She was like, “Oh, I have a Holocaust joke!” She was the first person to claim it and be proud. I thought, Wow!
Edwards: If you look at the two jokes Joan Rivers gets in trouble with in the movie, they are at the expense of Germans. They should be in that tradition of Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin. But she mentions the facts—ovens, gas. She dares to bring in the machinery.Is it inappropriate to joke about the Holocaust? Is it acceptable to make fun of slavery? Can we find humor in topics like cancer and AIDS? Is it too soon to crack wise about 9/11? These are some of the questions raised by “The Last Laugh,” director Ferne Pearlstein’s thoughtful, provocative, and yes, funny documentary about Holocaust humor that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week.
Pearlstein, who co-wrote the film with her husband, Robert Edwards, makes her case by using an array of clips from Mel Brook’s audacious “The Producers,” to Sarah Silverman’s outrageous stand-up concert film, “Jesus is Magic,” to even those Holocaust “comedies” such as “The Day the Clown Cried” and “Life is Beautiful.” But she also balances the gallows humor with scenes featuring Renee Firestone, a Holocaust survivor who has an upbeat, optimistic view of life, but still doesn’t laugh at every joke.
Whether viewers will be amused or angered by “The Last Laugh” remains to be seen, but the writers and actors and comedians interviewed in the film, which include Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl and Rob Reiner, Judy Gold, Gilbert Gottfried, Etgar Keret, and Lisa Lampanelli, along with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, weigh in on what’s offensive, and how, why, and where (as well as if) they find humor in the Holocaust.
Salon met with Pearlstein, Edwards and Firestone to see who gets “The Last Laugh.”
I really appreciate that you have made a film about a taboo topic. What made you forge ahead with this project, and what resistance did you encounter, if any?
Pearlstein: We encountered a lot of resistance in a different ways than I think you would expect. In trying to make the film, the first people we came in contact with were people looking for funding, or comedians who would work with us. It wasn’t until all of that was in place that we met Renee, which was 2011.
Edwards: But we had been working on it since 1998. She had been working on the film since 1993.
Firestone: You’re kidding!?
Pearlstein: In the film we talk about how things change over time. Talk about things changing over time—the resistance, or reaction in 1993 or 1998, when we talked about the subject of this film, until now, is dramatically different. Even in 2011, when we met Renee, it was still walking on eggshells. I imagined hate mail and protesting. That’s how much things have changed. I feel like we’re getting a different response. There have been so many types of satire over taboo subjects lately. The world is more schooled in it now.
Edwards: That’s kind of the point of the film—time is passing, and even in the interim of making the film the public response to the Holocaust is different. It’s changing all the time and will continue to change. Some of the examples of humor from the time period, which we researched—which were very shocking then—don’t feel shocking now. 70 years have gone by. You bring up 9/11, or child molestation or AIDS—other issues elicit a shocking response from people.
Pearlstein: Because that’s something they can remember. If you can remember it, it’s still taboo in a weird way.
You alternate a joke with a scene of drama, such as Renee recounting being examined by Dr. Mengele. Can you describe the structure of your film?
Pearlstein: The opening was so hard, because we had to strike that balance, and interweave two film styles. We also had to give the audience permission to laugh.
Edwards: And we also had to let the audience know early on that we were going to do that. Ferne was very adamant not to just have talking heads and clips, but an observational element to it. To combine those is very hard, never mind the subject matter…it was tricky. It was in the editing, not the planning. It was a very delicate process to walk that line.
I suspect Jewish film festivals might be disinclined to show your film. How do you think the Jewish audiences will respond?
Pearlstein: A lot of Jewish film festivals are writing me about the film on a daily basis.
Edwards: It could be the programmers are interested. We don’t know what the audience response will be. This film is not a comedy. It’s about comedy and it’s a film about bad taste. Ferne has made it in a tasteful way, in my opinion. We hope people understand this documentary itself is not trying to make light of any kind of tragedy, but illuminate it in a way that is new and fresh.
Pearlstein: And that’s why it was so important to bring Renee on. Here’s a woman who is not a comedian, but she has a good sense of humor. It shows through in every conversation, every experience she has. She can tell a story about one of her darkest situations, and she will still put a joke in there, almost every time.
Firestone: I remember when Mengele questioned me, “Who in [your] family is Jewish?” I thought it was ridiculous. I laughed at it. He kept asking me about my mother, my father, my grandparents. And I thought go myself: Here I am, with all these Jews. We don’t know where we are going, or what’s going to happen to us, and that’s what he wants to know—whether my parents are Jewish? I mean, what else would I be doing here? If you think about it, it’s really funny. And that was before I knew where I was, or what the place was about. Before my head was shaved, or I was undressed. Humor is not fun. That’s the difference for me. To make fun of something, or laugh about something, it’s different than if you talk about humor. When we looked at each other with the shaved heads, it was funny—we looked ridiculous. We had no idea why they did it to us. It was a terrible what they did to us, but when we looked at each other, we looked ridiculous. We didn’t make jokes about it.
Pearlstein: People look back on that era and close it off to humor, but most of the European Jews who were going to the camps experienced years of discrimination and anti-Semitism. They got off that train, and [experienced] another form of degradation, and it’s terrible. But they didn’t think they were going that day to their death. It’s only in retrospect that we know what happened. So when Renee tells that story, and she says, “I see my friend, and we looked at each other, and they were wearing these huge outfits, and whatever…” it was a little funny.
I like the exchanges between Renee and her friend Elly, two survivors who have different outlooks on life. You can’t deny people their feelings and sensitivities; it is wrong to make jokes that might offend them?
Firestone: Jokes about the Holocaust are not proper. About the perpetrators, I don’t care, but about our situation, nothing is really funny. As I say, to make fun, and to have a sense of humor are two different things.
Several interviewees describe humor as being a coping mechanism for horror. Renee says that when she remembers she cries, but when she doesn’t, she laughs. There is also talk about time passing, which makes taboo humor acceptable. Can you talk about these aspects addressed in your film?
Edwards: When Gilbert Gottfried says in the film, “Why wait!?” [a reversal on “too soon?”], it is funny. But I think we all understand why people wait. We can’t joke about Lincoln’s assassination that night. That’s the joke. The passage of time changes it. It’s context, which is really the bigger issue. We started out talking about this film and jokes and humor feels very different depending on who says it, when they say it, and what context they say it in. If it’s self-deprecating within the group, as opposed to the oppressor making the same joke, it’s all context.
Firestone: That’s true also, that the Holocaust survivors, amongst themselves, will talk about some funny things. They won’t tell it to anyone who wasn’t there.
Pearlstein: That’s right, and children of survivors have a very dark sense of humor amongst themselves. I tried to uncover that [with Etgar Keret]. They will tell jokes to each other, which is also letting off steam. It’s not an easy existence as the child of a survivor. They are survivors of a tragedy they didn’t experience, so it’s bigger in their imagination. And that can be very horrifying.
Joan Rivers got into hot water for her Holocaust humor, but she defends it as “creating awareness.” Sarah Silverman jokes about the “alleged Holocaust,” mocking Holocaust deniers and gets a laugh. It’s all contextual, but one gets in trouble and one gets by. Can you defend either position?
Edwards: It’s hard to explain why one comedian gets a pass and another doesn’t. It depends on lots of things, like the audience, and their history. But this issue of opening the door to abuse is in the film. Within the community of survivors and the Jewish community, where this kind of humor is somewhat acceptable, there is the fear that once the door is open, the next thing you know is Neo-Nazis adopting the same [humor]. And we get at that with Sasha Baron Cohen, and with “All in the Family.” It is like Sarah [Silverman] says, “Once you tell the joke, it’s no longer yours. You can’t control how it’s inferred.” When people laugh at the wrong thing, then you get into a Free Speech argument: Should you never make these jokes, or any art form for fear it will be misinterpreted? Then you have a really chilling effect.
Pearlstein: Context is really important. We saw Sarah Silverman’s early days of “Jesus is Magic” in a little black box theatre on Bleecker Street, and we laughed. She did 15-20 minutes of Holocaust jokes, and in that community of people, it was very funny. I had Renee watch YouTube clips of Holocaust jokes, and I blanched while I was filming that. The context of seeing these jokes through the eyes of a 90-year-old survivor was different.
Whenever another Holocaust film comes out, a friend of mine—who’s Jewish, mind you—says, “Holocaust, Smolocaust.” She finds the topic overworked in cinema. What can you say about people who are tired of hearing about the Holocaust?
Edwards: The point of Holocaust fatigue is another one the movie gets at. The subject feels overworked, but that’s as dangerous as joking about it. When it gets to the point where people roll their eyes and it has no effect anymore, then you have a real problem. We are looking for new ways to approach this topic that feels overworked, and humor is one—because it has hardly ever been approached. Ferne is always mindful of the seriousness of the subject matter and the tragedy, and not let it become fodder for comedy.
Pearlstein: And it’s a way to get eye-rollers in the theater to see something they haven’t seen.
Renee, you have been an activist for other genocides, such as Rwanda. What observations do you have about these tragedies?
Firestone: The difference between genocide and the Holocaust is that none of the other genocides concentrated on children. Most of the genocides are about adults. The [Nazis] concentrated on the children so there is no future. There is no other genocide where they used modern technology to destroy groups of people. Every other genocide was individuals being killed. To date, 1½ million children were put in a room and gassed—it was the way it was performed. It was industrial wholesale slaughter. It’s interesting that Rwanda struck me in a very different way. The Holocaust lasted 12 years, and there were six million murders. But in Rwanda, the genocide lasted only four months, and almost a million Tutsis were murdered.
We just returned from New Orleans, and we toured this plantation with this great guide. And I heard some of the stories that happened to black children, and saw pictures and I thought, “When does the world really learn?” That should have been already a message. Then I found out the plantation was owned by Germans. It blew my mind. [Laughter]. And we’re laughing about it. How terrible!
Pearlstein: This is why I chose Renee. She doesn’t just look at the Holocaust with blinders on. She sees every genocide. She has this experience in New Orleans. She’s had this experience in Rwanda. She’s constantly talking to people about “Never Forget.” But “Never Forget” what happened here, either…
I like the way you parse out the difference between jokes about the Holocaust vs. jokes against Nazis. Can you discuss this?
Pearlstein: I was filming a bunch of comedians, and I wanted them to bring humor to the interviews, and not feel—because of the topic—that they had to be serious. I wanted to disarm them by starting with “Do you have a Holocaust joke?” And that set a tone for the interview. I didn’t realize this until I had done a couple of interviews. They would always say, “I don’t have a Holocaust joke, but I have a Nazi joke.” So by the time I met Judy Gold, I changed the question. I explained I used to ask for a Holocaust joke, but then I learned about the distinction. She was like, “Oh, I have a Holocaust joke!” She was the first person to claim it and be proud. I thought, Wow!
Edwards: If you look at the two jokes Joan Rivers gets in trouble with in the movie, they are at the expense of Germans. They should be in that tradition of Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin. But she mentions the facts—ovens, gas. She dares to bring in the machinery.
Pearlstein, who co-wrote the film with her husband, Robert Edwards, makes her case by using an array of clips from Mel Brook’s audacious “The Producers,” to Sarah Silverman’s outrageous stand-up concert film, “Jesus is Magic,” to even those Holocaust “comedies” such as “The Day the Clown Cried” and “Life is Beautiful.” But she also balances the gallows humor with scenes featuring Renee Firestone, a Holocaust survivor who has an upbeat, optimistic view of life, but still doesn’t laugh at every joke.
Whether viewers will be amused or angered by “The Last Laugh” remains to be seen, but the writers and actors and comedians interviewed in the film, which include Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl and Rob Reiner, Judy Gold, Gilbert Gottfried, Etgar Keret, and Lisa Lampanelli, along with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, weigh in on what’s offensive, and how, why, and where (as well as if) they find humor in the Holocaust.
Salon met with Pearlstein, Edwards and Firestone to see who gets “The Last Laugh.”
I really appreciate that you have made a film about a taboo topic. What made you forge ahead with this project, and what resistance did you encounter, if any?
Pearlstein: We encountered a lot of resistance in a different ways than I think you would expect. In trying to make the film, the first people we came in contact with were people looking for funding, or comedians who would work with us. It wasn’t until all of that was in place that we met Renee, which was 2011.
Edwards: But we had been working on it since 1998. She had been working on the film since 1993.
Firestone: You’re kidding!?
Pearlstein: In the film we talk about how things change over time. Talk about things changing over time—the resistance, or reaction in 1993 or 1998, when we talked about the subject of this film, until now, is dramatically different. Even in 2011, when we met Renee, it was still walking on eggshells. I imagined hate mail and protesting. That’s how much things have changed. I feel like we’re getting a different response. There have been so many types of satire over taboo subjects lately. The world is more schooled in it now.
Edwards: That’s kind of the point of the film—time is passing, and even in the interim of making the film the public response to the Holocaust is different. It’s changing all the time and will continue to change. Some of the examples of humor from the time period, which we researched—which were very shocking then—don’t feel shocking now. 70 years have gone by. You bring up 9/11, or child molestation or AIDS—other issues elicit a shocking response from people.
Pearlstein: Because that’s something they can remember. If you can remember it, it’s still taboo in a weird way.
You alternate a joke with a scene of drama, such as Renee recounting being examined by Dr. Mengele. Can you describe the structure of your film?
Pearlstein: The opening was so hard, because we had to strike that balance, and interweave two film styles. We also had to give the audience permission to laugh.
Edwards: And we also had to let the audience know early on that we were going to do that. Ferne was very adamant not to just have talking heads and clips, but an observational element to it. To combine those is very hard, never mind the subject matter…it was tricky. It was in the editing, not the planning. It was a very delicate process to walk that line.
I suspect Jewish film festivals might be disinclined to show your film. How do you think the Jewish audiences will respond?
Pearlstein: A lot of Jewish film festivals are writing me about the film on a daily basis.
Edwards: It could be the programmers are interested. We don’t know what the audience response will be. This film is not a comedy. It’s about comedy and it’s a film about bad taste. Ferne has made it in a tasteful way, in my opinion. We hope people understand this documentary itself is not trying to make light of any kind of tragedy, but illuminate it in a way that is new and fresh.
Pearlstein: And that’s why it was so important to bring Renee on. Here’s a woman who is not a comedian, but she has a good sense of humor. It shows through in every conversation, every experience she has. She can tell a story about one of her darkest situations, and she will still put a joke in there, almost every time.
Firestone: I remember when Mengele questioned me, “Who in [your] family is Jewish?” I thought it was ridiculous. I laughed at it. He kept asking me about my mother, my father, my grandparents. And I thought go myself: Here I am, with all these Jews. We don’t know where we are going, or what’s going to happen to us, and that’s what he wants to know—whether my parents are Jewish? I mean, what else would I be doing here? If you think about it, it’s really funny. And that was before I knew where I was, or what the place was about. Before my head was shaved, or I was undressed. Humor is not fun. That’s the difference for me. To make fun of something, or laugh about something, it’s different than if you talk about humor. When we looked at each other with the shaved heads, it was funny—we looked ridiculous. We had no idea why they did it to us. It was a terrible what they did to us, but when we looked at each other, we looked ridiculous. We didn’t make jokes about it.
Pearlstein: People look back on that era and close it off to humor, but most of the European Jews who were going to the camps experienced years of discrimination and anti-Semitism. They got off that train, and [experienced] another form of degradation, and it’s terrible. But they didn’t think they were going that day to their death. It’s only in retrospect that we know what happened. So when Renee tells that story, and she says, “I see my friend, and we looked at each other, and they were wearing these huge outfits, and whatever…” it was a little funny.
I like the exchanges between Renee and her friend Elly, two survivors who have different outlooks on life. You can’t deny people their feelings and sensitivities; it is wrong to make jokes that might offend them?
Firestone: Jokes about the Holocaust are not proper. About the perpetrators, I don’t care, but about our situation, nothing is really funny. As I say, to make fun, and to have a sense of humor are two different things.
Several interviewees describe humor as being a coping mechanism for horror. Renee says that when she remembers she cries, but when she doesn’t, she laughs. There is also talk about time passing, which makes taboo humor acceptable. Can you talk about these aspects addressed in your film?
Edwards: When Gilbert Gottfried says in the film, “Why wait!?” [a reversal on “too soon?”], it is funny. But I think we all understand why people wait. We can’t joke about Lincoln’s assassination that night. That’s the joke. The passage of time changes it. It’s context, which is really the bigger issue. We started out talking about this film and jokes and humor feels very different depending on who says it, when they say it, and what context they say it in. If it’s self-deprecating within the group, as opposed to the oppressor making the same joke, it’s all context.
Firestone: That’s true also, that the Holocaust survivors, amongst themselves, will talk about some funny things. They won’t tell it to anyone who wasn’t there.
Pearlstein: That’s right, and children of survivors have a very dark sense of humor amongst themselves. I tried to uncover that [with Etgar Keret]. They will tell jokes to each other, which is also letting off steam. It’s not an easy existence as the child of a survivor. They are survivors of a tragedy they didn’t experience, so it’s bigger in their imagination. And that can be very horrifying.
Joan Rivers got into hot water for her Holocaust humor, but she defends it as “creating awareness.” Sarah Silverman jokes about the “alleged Holocaust,” mocking Holocaust deniers and gets a laugh. It’s all contextual, but one gets in trouble and one gets by. Can you defend either position?
Edwards: It’s hard to explain why one comedian gets a pass and another doesn’t. It depends on lots of things, like the audience, and their history. But this issue of opening the door to abuse is in the film. Within the community of survivors and the Jewish community, where this kind of humor is somewhat acceptable, there is the fear that once the door is open, the next thing you know is Neo-Nazis adopting the same [humor]. And we get at that with Sasha Baron Cohen, and with “All in the Family.” It is like Sarah [Silverman] says, “Once you tell the joke, it’s no longer yours. You can’t control how it’s inferred.” When people laugh at the wrong thing, then you get into a Free Speech argument: Should you never make these jokes, or any art form for fear it will be misinterpreted? Then you have a really chilling effect.
Pearlstein: Context is really important. We saw Sarah Silverman’s early days of “Jesus is Magic” in a little black box theatre on Bleecker Street, and we laughed. She did 15-20 minutes of Holocaust jokes, and in that community of people, it was very funny. I had Renee watch YouTube clips of Holocaust jokes, and I blanched while I was filming that. The context of seeing these jokes through the eyes of a 90-year-old survivor was different.
Whenever another Holocaust film comes out, a friend of mine—who’s Jewish, mind you—says, “Holocaust, Smolocaust.” She finds the topic overworked in cinema. What can you say about people who are tired of hearing about the Holocaust?
Edwards: The point of Holocaust fatigue is another one the movie gets at. The subject feels overworked, but that’s as dangerous as joking about it. When it gets to the point where people roll their eyes and it has no effect anymore, then you have a real problem. We are looking for new ways to approach this topic that feels overworked, and humor is one—because it has hardly ever been approached. Ferne is always mindful of the seriousness of the subject matter and the tragedy, and not let it become fodder for comedy.
Pearlstein: And it’s a way to get eye-rollers in the theater to see something they haven’t seen.
Renee, you have been an activist for other genocides, such as Rwanda. What observations do you have about these tragedies?
Firestone: The difference between genocide and the Holocaust is that none of the other genocides concentrated on children. Most of the genocides are about adults. The [Nazis] concentrated on the children so there is no future. There is no other genocide where they used modern technology to destroy groups of people. Every other genocide was individuals being killed. To date, 1½ million children were put in a room and gassed—it was the way it was performed. It was industrial wholesale slaughter. It’s interesting that Rwanda struck me in a very different way. The Holocaust lasted 12 years, and there were six million murders. But in Rwanda, the genocide lasted only four months, and almost a million Tutsis were murdered.
We just returned from New Orleans, and we toured this plantation with this great guide. And I heard some of the stories that happened to black children, and saw pictures and I thought, “When does the world really learn?” That should have been already a message. Then I found out the plantation was owned by Germans. It blew my mind. [Laughter]. And we’re laughing about it. How terrible!
Pearlstein: This is why I chose Renee. She doesn’t just look at the Holocaust with blinders on. She sees every genocide. She has this experience in New Orleans. She’s had this experience in Rwanda. She’s constantly talking to people about “Never Forget.” But “Never Forget” what happened here, either…
I like the way you parse out the difference between jokes about the Holocaust vs. jokes against Nazis. Can you discuss this?
Pearlstein: I was filming a bunch of comedians, and I wanted them to bring humor to the interviews, and not feel—because of the topic—that they had to be serious. I wanted to disarm them by starting with “Do you have a Holocaust joke?” And that set a tone for the interview. I didn’t realize this until I had done a couple of interviews. They would always say, “I don’t have a Holocaust joke, but I have a Nazi joke.” So by the time I met Judy Gold, I changed the question. I explained I used to ask for a Holocaust joke, but then I learned about the distinction. She was like, “Oh, I have a Holocaust joke!” She was the first person to claim it and be proud. I thought, Wow!
Edwards: If you look at the two jokes Joan Rivers gets in trouble with in the movie, they are at the expense of Germans. They should be in that tradition of Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin. But she mentions the facts—ovens, gas. She dares to bring in the machinery.Is it inappropriate to joke about the Holocaust? Is it acceptable to make fun of slavery? Can we find humor in topics like cancer and AIDS? Is it too soon to crack wise about 9/11? These are some of the questions raised by “The Last Laugh,” director Ferne Pearlstein’s thoughtful, provocative, and yes, funny documentary about Holocaust humor that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week.
Pearlstein, who co-wrote the film with her husband, Robert Edwards, makes her case by using an array of clips from Mel Brook’s audacious “The Producers,” to Sarah Silverman’s outrageous stand-up concert film, “Jesus is Magic,” to even those Holocaust “comedies” such as “The Day the Clown Cried” and “Life is Beautiful.” But she also balances the gallows humor with scenes featuring Renee Firestone, a Holocaust survivor who has an upbeat, optimistic view of life, but still doesn’t laugh at every joke.
Whether viewers will be amused or angered by “The Last Laugh” remains to be seen, but the writers and actors and comedians interviewed in the film, which include Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl and Rob Reiner, Judy Gold, Gilbert Gottfried, Etgar Keret, and Lisa Lampanelli, along with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, weigh in on what’s offensive, and how, why, and where (as well as if) they find humor in the Holocaust.
Salon met with Pearlstein, Edwards and Firestone to see who gets “The Last Laugh.”
I really appreciate that you have made a film about a taboo topic. What made you forge ahead with this project, and what resistance did you encounter, if any?
Pearlstein: We encountered a lot of resistance in a different ways than I think you would expect. In trying to make the film, the first people we came in contact with were people looking for funding, or comedians who would work with us. It wasn’t until all of that was in place that we met Renee, which was 2011.
Edwards: But we had been working on it since 1998. She had been working on the film since 1993.
Firestone: You’re kidding!?
Pearlstein: In the film we talk about how things change over time. Talk about things changing over time—the resistance, or reaction in 1993 or 1998, when we talked about the subject of this film, until now, is dramatically different. Even in 2011, when we met Renee, it was still walking on eggshells. I imagined hate mail and protesting. That’s how much things have changed. I feel like we’re getting a different response. There have been so many types of satire over taboo subjects lately. The world is more schooled in it now.
Edwards: That’s kind of the point of the film—time is passing, and even in the interim of making the film the public response to the Holocaust is different. It’s changing all the time and will continue to change. Some of the examples of humor from the time period, which we researched—which were very shocking then—don’t feel shocking now. 70 years have gone by. You bring up 9/11, or child molestation or AIDS—other issues elicit a shocking response from people.
Pearlstein: Because that’s something they can remember. If you can remember it, it’s still taboo in a weird way.
You alternate a joke with a scene of drama, such as Renee recounting being examined by Dr. Mengele. Can you describe the structure of your film?
Pearlstein: The opening was so hard, because we had to strike that balance, and interweave two film styles. We also had to give the audience permission to laugh.
Edwards: And we also had to let the audience know early on that we were going to do that. Ferne was very adamant not to just have talking heads and clips, but an observational element to it. To combine those is very hard, never mind the subject matter…it was tricky. It was in the editing, not the planning. It was a very delicate process to walk that line.
I suspect Jewish film festivals might be disinclined to show your film. How do you think the Jewish audiences will respond?
Pearlstein: A lot of Jewish film festivals are writing me about the film on a daily basis.
Edwards: It could be the programmers are interested. We don’t know what the audience response will be. This film is not a comedy. It’s about comedy and it’s a film about bad taste. Ferne has made it in a tasteful way, in my opinion. We hope people understand this documentary itself is not trying to make light of any kind of tragedy, but illuminate it in a way that is new and fresh.
Pearlstein: And that’s why it was so important to bring Renee on. Here’s a woman who is not a comedian, but she has a good sense of humor. It shows through in every conversation, every experience she has. She can tell a story about one of her darkest situations, and she will still put a joke in there, almost every time.
Firestone: I remember when Mengele questioned me, “Who in [your] family is Jewish?” I thought it was ridiculous. I laughed at it. He kept asking me about my mother, my father, my grandparents. And I thought go myself: Here I am, with all these Jews. We don’t know where we are going, or what’s going to happen to us, and that’s what he wants to know—whether my parents are Jewish? I mean, what else would I be doing here? If you think about it, it’s really funny. And that was before I knew where I was, or what the place was about. Before my head was shaved, or I was undressed. Humor is not fun. That’s the difference for me. To make fun of something, or laugh about something, it’s different than if you talk about humor. When we looked at each other with the shaved heads, it was funny—we looked ridiculous. We had no idea why they did it to us. It was a terrible what they did to us, but when we looked at each other, we looked ridiculous. We didn’t make jokes about it.
Pearlstein: People look back on that era and close it off to humor, but most of the European Jews who were going to the camps experienced years of discrimination and anti-Semitism. They got off that train, and [experienced] another form of degradation, and it’s terrible. But they didn’t think they were going that day to their death. It’s only in retrospect that we know what happened. So when Renee tells that story, and she says, “I see my friend, and we looked at each other, and they were wearing these huge outfits, and whatever…” it was a little funny.
I like the exchanges between Renee and her friend Elly, two survivors who have different outlooks on life. You can’t deny people their feelings and sensitivities; it is wrong to make jokes that might offend them?
Firestone: Jokes about the Holocaust are not proper. About the perpetrators, I don’t care, but about our situation, nothing is really funny. As I say, to make fun, and to have a sense of humor are two different things.
Several interviewees describe humor as being a coping mechanism for horror. Renee says that when she remembers she cries, but when she doesn’t, she laughs. There is also talk about time passing, which makes taboo humor acceptable. Can you talk about these aspects addressed in your film?
Edwards: When Gilbert Gottfried says in the film, “Why wait!?” [a reversal on “too soon?”], it is funny. But I think we all understand why people wait. We can’t joke about Lincoln’s assassination that night. That’s the joke. The passage of time changes it. It’s context, which is really the bigger issue. We started out talking about this film and jokes and humor feels very different depending on who says it, when they say it, and what context they say it in. If it’s self-deprecating within the group, as opposed to the oppressor making the same joke, it’s all context.
Firestone: That’s true also, that the Holocaust survivors, amongst themselves, will talk about some funny things. They won’t tell it to anyone who wasn’t there.
Pearlstein: That’s right, and children of survivors have a very dark sense of humor amongst themselves. I tried to uncover that [with Etgar Keret]. They will tell jokes to each other, which is also letting off steam. It’s not an easy existence as the child of a survivor. They are survivors of a tragedy they didn’t experience, so it’s bigger in their imagination. And that can be very horrifying.
Joan Rivers got into hot water for her Holocaust humor, but she defends it as “creating awareness.” Sarah Silverman jokes about the “alleged Holocaust,” mocking Holocaust deniers and gets a laugh. It’s all contextual, but one gets in trouble and one gets by. Can you defend either position?
Edwards: It’s hard to explain why one comedian gets a pass and another doesn’t. It depends on lots of things, like the audience, and their history. But this issue of opening the door to abuse is in the film. Within the community of survivors and the Jewish community, where this kind of humor is somewhat acceptable, there is the fear that once the door is open, the next thing you know is Neo-Nazis adopting the same [humor]. And we get at that with Sasha Baron Cohen, and with “All in the Family.” It is like Sarah [Silverman] says, “Once you tell the joke, it’s no longer yours. You can’t control how it’s inferred.” When people laugh at the wrong thing, then you get into a Free Speech argument: Should you never make these jokes, or any art form for fear it will be misinterpreted? Then you have a really chilling effect.
Pearlstein: Context is really important. We saw Sarah Silverman’s early days of “Jesus is Magic” in a little black box theatre on Bleecker Street, and we laughed. She did 15-20 minutes of Holocaust jokes, and in that community of people, it was very funny. I had Renee watch YouTube clips of Holocaust jokes, and I blanched while I was filming that. The context of seeing these jokes through the eyes of a 90-year-old survivor was different.
Whenever another Holocaust film comes out, a friend of mine—who’s Jewish, mind you—says, “Holocaust, Smolocaust.” She finds the topic overworked in cinema. What can you say about people who are tired of hearing about the Holocaust?
Edwards: The point of Holocaust fatigue is another one the movie gets at. The subject feels overworked, but that’s as dangerous as joking about it. When it gets to the point where people roll their eyes and it has no effect anymore, then you have a real problem. We are looking for new ways to approach this topic that feels overworked, and humor is one—because it has hardly ever been approached. Ferne is always mindful of the seriousness of the subject matter and the tragedy, and not let it become fodder for comedy.
Pearlstein: And it’s a way to get eye-rollers in the theater to see something they haven’t seen.
Renee, you have been an activist for other genocides, such as Rwanda. What observations do you have about these tragedies?
Firestone: The difference between genocide and the Holocaust is that none of the other genocides concentrated on children. Most of the genocides are about adults. The [Nazis] concentrated on the children so there is no future. There is no other genocide where they used modern technology to destroy groups of people. Every other genocide was individuals being killed. To date, 1½ million children were put in a room and gassed—it was the way it was performed. It was industrial wholesale slaughter. It’s interesting that Rwanda struck me in a very different way. The Holocaust lasted 12 years, and there were six million murders. But in Rwanda, the genocide lasted only four months, and almost a million Tutsis were murdered.
We just returned from New Orleans, and we toured this plantation with this great guide. And I heard some of the stories that happened to black children, and saw pictures and I thought, “When does the world really learn?” That should have been already a message. Then I found out the plantation was owned by Germans. It blew my mind. [Laughter]. And we’re laughing about it. How terrible!
Pearlstein: This is why I chose Renee. She doesn’t just look at the Holocaust with blinders on. She sees every genocide. She has this experience in New Orleans. She’s had this experience in Rwanda. She’s constantly talking to people about “Never Forget.” But “Never Forget” what happened here, either…
I like the way you parse out the difference between jokes about the Holocaust vs. jokes against Nazis. Can you discuss this?
Pearlstein: I was filming a bunch of comedians, and I wanted them to bring humor to the interviews, and not feel—because of the topic—that they had to be serious. I wanted to disarm them by starting with “Do you have a Holocaust joke?” And that set a tone for the interview. I didn’t realize this until I had done a couple of interviews. They would always say, “I don’t have a Holocaust joke, but I have a Nazi joke.” So by the time I met Judy Gold, I changed the question. I explained I used to ask for a Holocaust joke, but then I learned about the distinction. She was like, “Oh, I have a Holocaust joke!” She was the first person to claim it and be proud. I thought, Wow!
Edwards: If you look at the two jokes Joan Rivers gets in trouble with in the movie, they are at the expense of Germans. They should be in that tradition of Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin. But she mentions the facts—ovens, gas. She dares to bring in the machinery.Is it inappropriate to joke about the Holocaust? Is it acceptable to make fun of slavery? Can we find humor in topics like cancer and AIDS? Is it too soon to crack wise about 9/11? These are some of the questions raised by “The Last Laugh,” director Ferne Pearlstein’s thoughtful, provocative, and yes, funny documentary about Holocaust humor that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week.
Pearlstein, who co-wrote the film with her husband, Robert Edwards, makes her case by using an array of clips from Mel Brook’s audacious “The Producers,” to Sarah Silverman’s outrageous stand-up concert film, “Jesus is Magic,” to even those Holocaust “comedies” such as “The Day the Clown Cried” and “Life is Beautiful.” But she also balances the gallows humor with scenes featuring Renee Firestone, a Holocaust survivor who has an upbeat, optimistic view of life, but still doesn’t laugh at every joke.
Whether viewers will be amused or angered by “The Last Laugh” remains to be seen, but the writers and actors and comedians interviewed in the film, which include Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl and Rob Reiner, Judy Gold, Gilbert Gottfried, Etgar Keret, and Lisa Lampanelli, along with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, weigh in on what’s offensive, and how, why, and where (as well as if) they find humor in the Holocaust.
Salon met with Pearlstein, Edwards and Firestone to see who gets “The Last Laugh.”
I really appreciate that you have made a film about a taboo topic. What made you forge ahead with this project, and what resistance did you encounter, if any?
Pearlstein: We encountered a lot of resistance in a different ways than I think you would expect. In trying to make the film, the first people we came in contact with were people looking for funding, or comedians who would work with us. It wasn’t until all of that was in place that we met Renee, which was 2011.
Edwards: But we had been working on it since 1998. She had been working on the film since 1993.
Firestone: You’re kidding!?
Pearlstein: In the film we talk about how things change over time. Talk about things changing over time—the resistance, or reaction in 1993 or 1998, when we talked about the subject of this film, until now, is dramatically different. Even in 2011, when we met Renee, it was still walking on eggshells. I imagined hate mail and protesting. That’s how much things have changed. I feel like we’re getting a different response. There have been so many types of satire over taboo subjects lately. The world is more schooled in it now.
Edwards: That’s kind of the point of the film—time is passing, and even in the interim of making the film the public response to the Holocaust is different. It’s changing all the time and will continue to change. Some of the examples of humor from the time period, which we researched—which were very shocking then—don’t feel shocking now. 70 years have gone by. You bring up 9/11, or child molestation or AIDS—other issues elicit a shocking response from people.
Pearlstein: Because that’s something they can remember. If you can remember it, it’s still taboo in a weird way.
You alternate a joke with a scene of drama, such as Renee recounting being examined by Dr. Mengele. Can you describe the structure of your film?
Pearlstein: The opening was so hard, because we had to strike that balance, and interweave two film styles. We also had to give the audience permission to laugh.
Edwards: And we also had to let the audience know early on that we were going to do that. Ferne was very adamant not to just have talking heads and clips, but an observational element to it. To combine those is very hard, never mind the subject matter…it was tricky. It was in the editing, not the planning. It was a very delicate process to walk that line.
I suspect Jewish film festivals might be disinclined to show your film. How do you think the Jewish audiences will respond?
Pearlstein: A lot of Jewish film festivals are writing me about the film on a daily basis.
Edwards: It could be the programmers are interested. We don’t know what the audience response will be. This film is not a comedy. It’s about comedy and it’s a film about bad taste. Ferne has made it in a tasteful way, in my opinion. We hope people understand this documentary itself is not trying to make light of any kind of tragedy, but illuminate it in a way that is new and fresh.
Pearlstein: And that’s why it was so important to bring Renee on. Here’s a woman who is not a comedian, but she has a good sense of humor. It shows through in every conversation, every experience she has. She can tell a story about one of her darkest situations, and she will still put a joke in there, almost every time.
Firestone: I remember when Mengele questioned me, “Who in [your] family is Jewish?” I thought it was ridiculous. I laughed at it. He kept asking me about my mother, my father, my grandparents. And I thought go myself: Here I am, with all these Jews. We don’t know where we are going, or what’s going to happen to us, and that’s what he wants to know—whether my parents are Jewish? I mean, what else would I be doing here? If you think about it, it’s really funny. And that was before I knew where I was, or what the place was about. Before my head was shaved, or I was undressed. Humor is not fun. That’s the difference for me. To make fun of something, or laugh about something, it’s different than if you talk about humor. When we looked at each other with the shaved heads, it was funny—we looked ridiculous. We had no idea why they did it to us. It was a terrible what they did to us, but when we looked at each other, we looked ridiculous. We didn’t make jokes about it.
Pearlstein: People look back on that era and close it off to humor, but most of the European Jews who were going to the camps experienced years of discrimination and anti-Semitism. They got off that train, and [experienced] another form of degradation, and it’s terrible. But they didn’t think they were going that day to their death. It’s only in retrospect that we know what happened. So when Renee tells that story, and she says, “I see my friend, and we looked at each other, and they were wearing these huge outfits, and whatever…” it was a little funny.
I like the exchanges between Renee and her friend Elly, two survivors who have different outlooks on life. You can’t deny people their feelings and sensitivities; it is wrong to make jokes that might offend them?
Firestone: Jokes about the Holocaust are not proper. About the perpetrators, I don’t care, but about our situation, nothing is really funny. As I say, to make fun, and to have a sense of humor are two different things.
Several interviewees describe humor as being a coping mechanism for horror. Renee says that when she remembers she cries, but when she doesn’t, she laughs. There is also talk about time passing, which makes taboo humor acceptable. Can you talk about these aspects addressed in your film?
Edwards: When Gilbert Gottfried says in the film, “Why wait!?” [a reversal on “too soon?”], it is funny. But I think we all understand why people wait. We can’t joke about Lincoln’s assassination that night. That’s the joke. The passage of time changes it. It’s context, which is really the bigger issue. We started out talking about this film and jokes and humor feels very different depending on who says it, when they say it, and what context they say it in. If it’s self-deprecating within the group, as opposed to the oppressor making the same joke, it’s all context.
Firestone: That’s true also, that the Holocaust survivors, amongst themselves, will talk about some funny things. They won’t tell it to anyone who wasn’t there.
Pearlstein: That’s right, and children of survivors have a very dark sense of humor amongst themselves. I tried to uncover that [with Etgar Keret]. They will tell jokes to each other, which is also letting off steam. It’s not an easy existence as the child of a survivor. They are survivors of a tragedy they didn’t experience, so it’s bigger in their imagination. And that can be very horrifying.
Joan Rivers got into hot water for her Holocaust humor, but she defends it as “creating awareness.” Sarah Silverman jokes about the “alleged Holocaust,” mocking Holocaust deniers and gets a laugh. It’s all contextual, but one gets in trouble and one gets by. Can you defend either position?
Edwards: It’s hard to explain why one comedian gets a pass and another doesn’t. It depends on lots of things, like the audience, and their history. But this issue of opening the door to abuse is in the film. Within the community of survivors and the Jewish community, where this kind of humor is somewhat acceptable, there is the fear that once the door is open, the next thing you know is Neo-Nazis adopting the same [humor]. And we get at that with Sasha Baron Cohen, and with “All in the Family.” It is like Sarah [Silverman] says, “Once you tell the joke, it’s no longer yours. You can’t control how it’s inferred.” When people laugh at the wrong thing, then you get into a Free Speech argument: Should you never make these jokes, or any art form for fear it will be misinterpreted? Then you have a really chilling effect.
Pearlstein: Context is really important. We saw Sarah Silverman’s early days of “Jesus is Magic” in a little black box theatre on Bleecker Street, and we laughed. She did 15-20 minutes of Holocaust jokes, and in that community of people, it was very funny. I had Renee watch YouTube clips of Holocaust jokes, and I blanched while I was filming that. The context of seeing these jokes through the eyes of a 90-year-old survivor was different.
Whenever another Holocaust film comes out, a friend of mine—who’s Jewish, mind you—says, “Holocaust, Smolocaust.” She finds the topic overworked in cinema. What can you say about people who are tired of hearing about the Holocaust?
Edwards: The point of Holocaust fatigue is another one the movie gets at. The subject feels overworked, but that’s as dangerous as joking about it. When it gets to the point where people roll their eyes and it has no effect anymore, then you have a real problem. We are looking for new ways to approach this topic that feels overworked, and humor is one—because it has hardly ever been approached. Ferne is always mindful of the seriousness of the subject matter and the tragedy, and not let it become fodder for comedy.
Pearlstein: And it’s a way to get eye-rollers in the theater to see something they haven’t seen.
Renee, you have been an activist for other genocides, such as Rwanda. What observations do you have about these tragedies?
Firestone: The difference between genocide and the Holocaust is that none of the other genocides concentrated on children. Most of the genocides are about adults. The [Nazis] concentrated on the children so there is no future. There is no other genocide where they used modern technology to destroy groups of people. Every other genocide was individuals being killed. To date, 1½ million children were put in a room and gassed—it was the way it was performed. It was industrial wholesale slaughter. It’s interesting that Rwanda struck me in a very different way. The Holocaust lasted 12 years, and there were six million murders. But in Rwanda, the genocide lasted only four months, and almost a million Tutsis were murdered.
We just returned from New Orleans, and we toured this plantation with this great guide. And I heard some of the stories that happened to black children, and saw pictures and I thought, “When does the world really learn?” That should have been already a message. Then I found out the plantation was owned by Germans. It blew my mind. [Laughter]. And we’re laughing about it. How terrible!
Pearlstein: This is why I chose Renee. She doesn’t just look at the Holocaust with blinders on. She sees every genocide. She has this experience in New Orleans. She’s had this experience in Rwanda. She’s constantly talking to people about “Never Forget.” But “Never Forget” what happened here, either…
I like the way you parse out the difference between jokes about the Holocaust vs. jokes against Nazis. Can you discuss this?
Pearlstein: I was filming a bunch of comedians, and I wanted them to bring humor to the interviews, and not feel—because of the topic—that they had to be serious. I wanted to disarm them by starting with “Do you have a Holocaust joke?” And that set a tone for the interview. I didn’t realize this until I had done a couple of interviews. They would always say, “I don’t have a Holocaust joke, but I have a Nazi joke.” So by the time I met Judy Gold, I changed the question. I explained I used to ask for a Holocaust joke, but then I learned about the distinction. She was like, “Oh, I have a Holocaust joke!” She was the first person to claim it and be proud. I thought, Wow!
Edwards: If you look at the two jokes Joan Rivers gets in trouble with in the movie, they are at the expense of Germans. They should be in that tradition of Mel Brooks and Charlie Chaplin. But she mentions the facts—ovens, gas. She dares to bring in the machinery.
“The Trump Effect” is freaking out our kids: “Trump is acting like a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are now acting like Trump”
Every political race has attacks, bad blood, insults, and negative ads, but the 2016 contest may be the harshest, nastiest campaign ever. A new survey of almost 2,000 teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that the anger and hatred is filtering down to school children.
Here’s the SPLC:
A black student worried about black people being sent back to Africa; a Latino boy asked, “Is the wall here yet?” Teachers, most of who try to stay politically neutral, are confused as how to deal with it the fear and anxiety they’re picking up from their students.
We spoke to Richard Cohen, the president of the Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s discuss your report showing what the tone of the election has done to children. Can you give people who haven’t seen the report what it tells us, in general terms?
What it says is that the ugly rhetoric that’s characterized the election has had a profound impact on our nation’s schoolchildren. An impact for the worse. People are scared, people are confused and students are worried. It’s also had an impact on teaching in our schools. Teachers don’t know how to deal with the election. Teachers are supposed to be nonpartisan, yet how do they respond to some of the ugly rhetoric, particularly from Mr. Trump?
There’s been a sharp tone in both parties, but how much of what your study finds has to do with Trump specifically?
We called the report “The Trump Effect” because that’s what the data shows. We had comments from 2,000 teachers. We didn’t mention any candidate’s name, yet 1,000 of them mentioned Trump. Many, many others made comments that obviously were referring to him. The other candidates, in total, only were mentioned 200 times, usually somewhat inadvertently. The ugly rhetoric is about Trump. The impact on our schools is a result of Mr. Trump.
Are all students feeling pressured or are there specific groups that are feeling bullied or singled out?
It’s primarily students of color, recent immigrants, Muslim students. I think the impact on students who are younger has been greater. We had comments that people are scared that they’re going to be deported. I think that’s something that’s much more likely to happen with a student under 15 than a student over 15, from the comments that we see. Let me point out that people are free to draw their own conclusions. We published all 2,000 comments that we’ve received, and if you look through them I think it’s really quite depressing.
You want children to be aware of what’s happening politically, but you don’t want to scare or terrorize them. What do you think the right response is from parents and teachers?
Well, it’s teachers who we’re primarily focusing on. Because that’s what our study was: children in schools. What we’ve published are guidelines for civil discourse in one’s classroom. How one can disagree without being disagreeable. Stuff like that. We’ll publish things like myths about immigration. We’ll publish or curate materials that relate to misconceptions people have about the Muslim community—headscarves and whatnot—just to dispel some of the stereotypes that are being bandied about.
Let me say though that the job that teachers have is a really, really hard one, because children are being bombarded with the same 24/7 news cycle that everyone else is seeing. And the more incendiary, the more press particular comments get; they get repeated over and over again. It’s a tough job. Teachers are facing an uphill battle.
The president is the leader of the free world, the leader of our country, and little kids grow up in this country saying or being told, “This is the land of opportunity. You, too, could be the President of the United States one day.” Well, how do people act who are the president? How do people act who want to be the president? This is what they see. You call your opponents names. It can’t be good.
One retort to this is that there has always been negative campaigning and angry rhetoric. Does this year seem very different to you that it was in the past?
I think so. In campaigns, you always try to distinguish yourself from your opponent and you always try to suggest that your opponent is of low character. That’s common in our campaigns. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone start saying that most Mexicans coming over the border are rapist and murderers, or calling for the wholesale restriction of religious groups coming into this country. I mean, this is of a really, really different order this time.
I’ll tell you something else that reflects that it’s a different order, and that is the reaction of the white supremacist world to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Typically, the attitude of the white supremacist world is “a pox on both their homes”: both the political parties are corrupt. This time, Trump is being embraced like no other candidate ever. The only other person who ever got any kind of glimmer of this kind of support was Pat Buchanan, who I would consider to be a white nationalist on a smaller order. So I think the fact that white supremacists are rallying to his cause, calling him the glorious leader, tells us that something different is going on in Mr. Trump’s campaign than in others.
There has been racist and divisive rhetoric in the past, but it’s usually been coded. This year the code is gone. It seems like candidates are much more open about singling out specific groups.
The Southern Strategy of the Republican Party used a lot of coded language to whip up white hysteria against black people. Now we’re having kind of a reprise of that in a more open way against other groups of minorities.
Trump is acting like a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are now acting like Trump.Every political race has attacks, bad blood, insults, and negative ads, but the 2016 contest may be the harshest, nastiest campaign ever. A new survey of almost 2,000 teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that the anger and hatred is filtering down to school children.
Here’s the SPLC:
A black student worried about black people being sent back to Africa; a Latino boy asked, “Is the wall here yet?” Teachers, most of who try to stay politically neutral, are confused as how to deal with it the fear and anxiety they’re picking up from their students.
We spoke to Richard Cohen, the president of the Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s discuss your report showing what the tone of the election has done to children. Can you give people who haven’t seen the report what it tells us, in general terms?
What it says is that the ugly rhetoric that’s characterized the election has had a profound impact on our nation’s schoolchildren. An impact for the worse. People are scared, people are confused and students are worried. It’s also had an impact on teaching in our schools. Teachers don’t know how to deal with the election. Teachers are supposed to be nonpartisan, yet how do they respond to some of the ugly rhetoric, particularly from Mr. Trump?
There’s been a sharp tone in both parties, but how much of what your study finds has to do with Trump specifically?
We called the report “The Trump Effect” because that’s what the data shows. We had comments from 2,000 teachers. We didn’t mention any candidate’s name, yet 1,000 of them mentioned Trump. Many, many others made comments that obviously were referring to him. The other candidates, in total, only were mentioned 200 times, usually somewhat inadvertently. The ugly rhetoric is about Trump. The impact on our schools is a result of Mr. Trump.
Are all students feeling pressured or are there specific groups that are feeling bullied or singled out?
It’s primarily students of color, recent immigrants, Muslim students. I think the impact on students who are younger has been greater. We had comments that people are scared that they’re going to be deported. I think that’s something that’s much more likely to happen with a student under 15 than a student over 15, from the comments that we see. Let me point out that people are free to draw their own conclusions. We published all 2,000 comments that we’ve received, and if you look through them I think it’s really quite depressing.
You want children to be aware of what’s happening politically, but you don’t want to scare or terrorize them. What do you think the right response is from parents and teachers?
Well, it’s teachers who we’re primarily focusing on. Because that’s what our study was: children in schools. What we’ve published are guidelines for civil discourse in one’s classroom. How one can disagree without being disagreeable. Stuff like that. We’ll publish things like myths about immigration. We’ll publish or curate materials that relate to misconceptions people have about the Muslim community—headscarves and whatnot—just to dispel some of the stereotypes that are being bandied about.
Let me say though that the job that teachers have is a really, really hard one, because children are being bombarded with the same 24/7 news cycle that everyone else is seeing. And the more incendiary, the more press particular comments get; they get repeated over and over again. It’s a tough job. Teachers are facing an uphill battle.
The president is the leader of the free world, the leader of our country, and little kids grow up in this country saying or being told, “This is the land of opportunity. You, too, could be the President of the United States one day.” Well, how do people act who are the president? How do people act who want to be the president? This is what they see. You call your opponents names. It can’t be good.
One retort to this is that there has always been negative campaigning and angry rhetoric. Does this year seem very different to you that it was in the past?
I think so. In campaigns, you always try to distinguish yourself from your opponent and you always try to suggest that your opponent is of low character. That’s common in our campaigns. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone start saying that most Mexicans coming over the border are rapist and murderers, or calling for the wholesale restriction of religious groups coming into this country. I mean, this is of a really, really different order this time.
I’ll tell you something else that reflects that it’s a different order, and that is the reaction of the white supremacist world to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Typically, the attitude of the white supremacist world is “a pox on both their homes”: both the political parties are corrupt. This time, Trump is being embraced like no other candidate ever. The only other person who ever got any kind of glimmer of this kind of support was Pat Buchanan, who I would consider to be a white nationalist on a smaller order. So I think the fact that white supremacists are rallying to his cause, calling him the glorious leader, tells us that something different is going on in Mr. Trump’s campaign than in others.
There has been racist and divisive rhetoric in the past, but it’s usually been coded. This year the code is gone. It seems like candidates are much more open about singling out specific groups.
The Southern Strategy of the Republican Party used a lot of coded language to whip up white hysteria against black people. Now we’re having kind of a reprise of that in a more open way against other groups of minorities.
Trump is acting like a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are now acting like Trump.Every political race has attacks, bad blood, insults, and negative ads, but the 2016 contest may be the harshest, nastiest campaign ever. A new survey of almost 2,000 teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that the anger and hatred is filtering down to school children.
Here’s the SPLC:
A black student worried about black people being sent back to Africa; a Latino boy asked, “Is the wall here yet?” Teachers, most of who try to stay politically neutral, are confused as how to deal with it the fear and anxiety they’re picking up from their students.
We spoke to Richard Cohen, the president of the Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s discuss your report showing what the tone of the election has done to children. Can you give people who haven’t seen the report what it tells us, in general terms?
What it says is that the ugly rhetoric that’s characterized the election has had a profound impact on our nation’s schoolchildren. An impact for the worse. People are scared, people are confused and students are worried. It’s also had an impact on teaching in our schools. Teachers don’t know how to deal with the election. Teachers are supposed to be nonpartisan, yet how do they respond to some of the ugly rhetoric, particularly from Mr. Trump?
There’s been a sharp tone in both parties, but how much of what your study finds has to do with Trump specifically?
We called the report “The Trump Effect” because that’s what the data shows. We had comments from 2,000 teachers. We didn’t mention any candidate’s name, yet 1,000 of them mentioned Trump. Many, many others made comments that obviously were referring to him. The other candidates, in total, only were mentioned 200 times, usually somewhat inadvertently. The ugly rhetoric is about Trump. The impact on our schools is a result of Mr. Trump.
Are all students feeling pressured or are there specific groups that are feeling bullied or singled out?
It’s primarily students of color, recent immigrants, Muslim students. I think the impact on students who are younger has been greater. We had comments that people are scared that they’re going to be deported. I think that’s something that’s much more likely to happen with a student under 15 than a student over 15, from the comments that we see. Let me point out that people are free to draw their own conclusions. We published all 2,000 comments that we’ve received, and if you look through them I think it’s really quite depressing.
You want children to be aware of what’s happening politically, but you don’t want to scare or terrorize them. What do you think the right response is from parents and teachers?
Well, it’s teachers who we’re primarily focusing on. Because that’s what our study was: children in schools. What we’ve published are guidelines for civil discourse in one’s classroom. How one can disagree without being disagreeable. Stuff like that. We’ll publish things like myths about immigration. We’ll publish or curate materials that relate to misconceptions people have about the Muslim community—headscarves and whatnot—just to dispel some of the stereotypes that are being bandied about.
Let me say though that the job that teachers have is a really, really hard one, because children are being bombarded with the same 24/7 news cycle that everyone else is seeing. And the more incendiary, the more press particular comments get; they get repeated over and over again. It’s a tough job. Teachers are facing an uphill battle.
The president is the leader of the free world, the leader of our country, and little kids grow up in this country saying or being told, “This is the land of opportunity. You, too, could be the President of the United States one day.” Well, how do people act who are the president? How do people act who want to be the president? This is what they see. You call your opponents names. It can’t be good.
One retort to this is that there has always been negative campaigning and angry rhetoric. Does this year seem very different to you that it was in the past?
I think so. In campaigns, you always try to distinguish yourself from your opponent and you always try to suggest that your opponent is of low character. That’s common in our campaigns. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone start saying that most Mexicans coming over the border are rapist and murderers, or calling for the wholesale restriction of religious groups coming into this country. I mean, this is of a really, really different order this time.
I’ll tell you something else that reflects that it’s a different order, and that is the reaction of the white supremacist world to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Typically, the attitude of the white supremacist world is “a pox on both their homes”: both the political parties are corrupt. This time, Trump is being embraced like no other candidate ever. The only other person who ever got any kind of glimmer of this kind of support was Pat Buchanan, who I would consider to be a white nationalist on a smaller order. So I think the fact that white supremacists are rallying to his cause, calling him the glorious leader, tells us that something different is going on in Mr. Trump’s campaign than in others.
There has been racist and divisive rhetoric in the past, but it’s usually been coded. This year the code is gone. It seems like candidates are much more open about singling out specific groups.
The Southern Strategy of the Republican Party used a lot of coded language to whip up white hysteria against black people. Now we’re having kind of a reprise of that in a more open way against other groups of minorities.
Trump is acting like a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are now acting like Trump.
Here’s the SPLC:
The report – “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools” – found that the campaign is producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported.
Teachers also reported an increase in the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates.
A black student worried about black people being sent back to Africa; a Latino boy asked, “Is the wall here yet?” Teachers, most of who try to stay politically neutral, are confused as how to deal with it the fear and anxiety they’re picking up from their students.
We spoke to Richard Cohen, the president of the Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s discuss your report showing what the tone of the election has done to children. Can you give people who haven’t seen the report what it tells us, in general terms?
What it says is that the ugly rhetoric that’s characterized the election has had a profound impact on our nation’s schoolchildren. An impact for the worse. People are scared, people are confused and students are worried. It’s also had an impact on teaching in our schools. Teachers don’t know how to deal with the election. Teachers are supposed to be nonpartisan, yet how do they respond to some of the ugly rhetoric, particularly from Mr. Trump?
There’s been a sharp tone in both parties, but how much of what your study finds has to do with Trump specifically?
We called the report “The Trump Effect” because that’s what the data shows. We had comments from 2,000 teachers. We didn’t mention any candidate’s name, yet 1,000 of them mentioned Trump. Many, many others made comments that obviously were referring to him. The other candidates, in total, only were mentioned 200 times, usually somewhat inadvertently. The ugly rhetoric is about Trump. The impact on our schools is a result of Mr. Trump.
Are all students feeling pressured or are there specific groups that are feeling bullied or singled out?
It’s primarily students of color, recent immigrants, Muslim students. I think the impact on students who are younger has been greater. We had comments that people are scared that they’re going to be deported. I think that’s something that’s much more likely to happen with a student under 15 than a student over 15, from the comments that we see. Let me point out that people are free to draw their own conclusions. We published all 2,000 comments that we’ve received, and if you look through them I think it’s really quite depressing.
You want children to be aware of what’s happening politically, but you don’t want to scare or terrorize them. What do you think the right response is from parents and teachers?
Well, it’s teachers who we’re primarily focusing on. Because that’s what our study was: children in schools. What we’ve published are guidelines for civil discourse in one’s classroom. How one can disagree without being disagreeable. Stuff like that. We’ll publish things like myths about immigration. We’ll publish or curate materials that relate to misconceptions people have about the Muslim community—headscarves and whatnot—just to dispel some of the stereotypes that are being bandied about.
Let me say though that the job that teachers have is a really, really hard one, because children are being bombarded with the same 24/7 news cycle that everyone else is seeing. And the more incendiary, the more press particular comments get; they get repeated over and over again. It’s a tough job. Teachers are facing an uphill battle.
The president is the leader of the free world, the leader of our country, and little kids grow up in this country saying or being told, “This is the land of opportunity. You, too, could be the President of the United States one day.” Well, how do people act who are the president? How do people act who want to be the president? This is what they see. You call your opponents names. It can’t be good.
One retort to this is that there has always been negative campaigning and angry rhetoric. Does this year seem very different to you that it was in the past?
I think so. In campaigns, you always try to distinguish yourself from your opponent and you always try to suggest that your opponent is of low character. That’s common in our campaigns. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone start saying that most Mexicans coming over the border are rapist and murderers, or calling for the wholesale restriction of religious groups coming into this country. I mean, this is of a really, really different order this time.
I’ll tell you something else that reflects that it’s a different order, and that is the reaction of the white supremacist world to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Typically, the attitude of the white supremacist world is “a pox on both their homes”: both the political parties are corrupt. This time, Trump is being embraced like no other candidate ever. The only other person who ever got any kind of glimmer of this kind of support was Pat Buchanan, who I would consider to be a white nationalist on a smaller order. So I think the fact that white supremacists are rallying to his cause, calling him the glorious leader, tells us that something different is going on in Mr. Trump’s campaign than in others.
There has been racist and divisive rhetoric in the past, but it’s usually been coded. This year the code is gone. It seems like candidates are much more open about singling out specific groups.
The Southern Strategy of the Republican Party used a lot of coded language to whip up white hysteria against black people. Now we’re having kind of a reprise of that in a more open way against other groups of minorities.
Trump is acting like a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are now acting like Trump.Every political race has attacks, bad blood, insults, and negative ads, but the 2016 contest may be the harshest, nastiest campaign ever. A new survey of almost 2,000 teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that the anger and hatred is filtering down to school children.
Here’s the SPLC:
The report – “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools” – found that the campaign is producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported.
Teachers also reported an increase in the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates.
A black student worried about black people being sent back to Africa; a Latino boy asked, “Is the wall here yet?” Teachers, most of who try to stay politically neutral, are confused as how to deal with it the fear and anxiety they’re picking up from their students.
We spoke to Richard Cohen, the president of the Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s discuss your report showing what the tone of the election has done to children. Can you give people who haven’t seen the report what it tells us, in general terms?
What it says is that the ugly rhetoric that’s characterized the election has had a profound impact on our nation’s schoolchildren. An impact for the worse. People are scared, people are confused and students are worried. It’s also had an impact on teaching in our schools. Teachers don’t know how to deal with the election. Teachers are supposed to be nonpartisan, yet how do they respond to some of the ugly rhetoric, particularly from Mr. Trump?
There’s been a sharp tone in both parties, but how much of what your study finds has to do with Trump specifically?
We called the report “The Trump Effect” because that’s what the data shows. We had comments from 2,000 teachers. We didn’t mention any candidate’s name, yet 1,000 of them mentioned Trump. Many, many others made comments that obviously were referring to him. The other candidates, in total, only were mentioned 200 times, usually somewhat inadvertently. The ugly rhetoric is about Trump. The impact on our schools is a result of Mr. Trump.
Are all students feeling pressured or are there specific groups that are feeling bullied or singled out?
It’s primarily students of color, recent immigrants, Muslim students. I think the impact on students who are younger has been greater. We had comments that people are scared that they’re going to be deported. I think that’s something that’s much more likely to happen with a student under 15 than a student over 15, from the comments that we see. Let me point out that people are free to draw their own conclusions. We published all 2,000 comments that we’ve received, and if you look through them I think it’s really quite depressing.
You want children to be aware of what’s happening politically, but you don’t want to scare or terrorize them. What do you think the right response is from parents and teachers?
Well, it’s teachers who we’re primarily focusing on. Because that’s what our study was: children in schools. What we’ve published are guidelines for civil discourse in one’s classroom. How one can disagree without being disagreeable. Stuff like that. We’ll publish things like myths about immigration. We’ll publish or curate materials that relate to misconceptions people have about the Muslim community—headscarves and whatnot—just to dispel some of the stereotypes that are being bandied about.
Let me say though that the job that teachers have is a really, really hard one, because children are being bombarded with the same 24/7 news cycle that everyone else is seeing. And the more incendiary, the more press particular comments get; they get repeated over and over again. It’s a tough job. Teachers are facing an uphill battle.
The president is the leader of the free world, the leader of our country, and little kids grow up in this country saying or being told, “This is the land of opportunity. You, too, could be the President of the United States one day.” Well, how do people act who are the president? How do people act who want to be the president? This is what they see. You call your opponents names. It can’t be good.
One retort to this is that there has always been negative campaigning and angry rhetoric. Does this year seem very different to you that it was in the past?
I think so. In campaigns, you always try to distinguish yourself from your opponent and you always try to suggest that your opponent is of low character. That’s common in our campaigns. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone start saying that most Mexicans coming over the border are rapist and murderers, or calling for the wholesale restriction of religious groups coming into this country. I mean, this is of a really, really different order this time.
I’ll tell you something else that reflects that it’s a different order, and that is the reaction of the white supremacist world to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Typically, the attitude of the white supremacist world is “a pox on both their homes”: both the political parties are corrupt. This time, Trump is being embraced like no other candidate ever. The only other person who ever got any kind of glimmer of this kind of support was Pat Buchanan, who I would consider to be a white nationalist on a smaller order. So I think the fact that white supremacists are rallying to his cause, calling him the glorious leader, tells us that something different is going on in Mr. Trump’s campaign than in others.
There has been racist and divisive rhetoric in the past, but it’s usually been coded. This year the code is gone. It seems like candidates are much more open about singling out specific groups.
The Southern Strategy of the Republican Party used a lot of coded language to whip up white hysteria against black people. Now we’re having kind of a reprise of that in a more open way against other groups of minorities.
Trump is acting like a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are now acting like Trump.Every political race has attacks, bad blood, insults, and negative ads, but the 2016 contest may be the harshest, nastiest campaign ever. A new survey of almost 2,000 teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that the anger and hatred is filtering down to school children.
Here’s the SPLC:
The report – “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools” – found that the campaign is producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported.
Teachers also reported an increase in the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates.
A black student worried about black people being sent back to Africa; a Latino boy asked, “Is the wall here yet?” Teachers, most of who try to stay politically neutral, are confused as how to deal with it the fear and anxiety they’re picking up from their students.
We spoke to Richard Cohen, the president of the Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s discuss your report showing what the tone of the election has done to children. Can you give people who haven’t seen the report what it tells us, in general terms?
What it says is that the ugly rhetoric that’s characterized the election has had a profound impact on our nation’s schoolchildren. An impact for the worse. People are scared, people are confused and students are worried. It’s also had an impact on teaching in our schools. Teachers don’t know how to deal with the election. Teachers are supposed to be nonpartisan, yet how do they respond to some of the ugly rhetoric, particularly from Mr. Trump?
There’s been a sharp tone in both parties, but how much of what your study finds has to do with Trump specifically?
We called the report “The Trump Effect” because that’s what the data shows. We had comments from 2,000 teachers. We didn’t mention any candidate’s name, yet 1,000 of them mentioned Trump. Many, many others made comments that obviously were referring to him. The other candidates, in total, only were mentioned 200 times, usually somewhat inadvertently. The ugly rhetoric is about Trump. The impact on our schools is a result of Mr. Trump.
Are all students feeling pressured or are there specific groups that are feeling bullied or singled out?
It’s primarily students of color, recent immigrants, Muslim students. I think the impact on students who are younger has been greater. We had comments that people are scared that they’re going to be deported. I think that’s something that’s much more likely to happen with a student under 15 than a student over 15, from the comments that we see. Let me point out that people are free to draw their own conclusions. We published all 2,000 comments that we’ve received, and if you look through them I think it’s really quite depressing.
You want children to be aware of what’s happening politically, but you don’t want to scare or terrorize them. What do you think the right response is from parents and teachers?
Well, it’s teachers who we’re primarily focusing on. Because that’s what our study was: children in schools. What we’ve published are guidelines for civil discourse in one’s classroom. How one can disagree without being disagreeable. Stuff like that. We’ll publish things like myths about immigration. We’ll publish or curate materials that relate to misconceptions people have about the Muslim community—headscarves and whatnot—just to dispel some of the stereotypes that are being bandied about.
Let me say though that the job that teachers have is a really, really hard one, because children are being bombarded with the same 24/7 news cycle that everyone else is seeing. And the more incendiary, the more press particular comments get; they get repeated over and over again. It’s a tough job. Teachers are facing an uphill battle.
The president is the leader of the free world, the leader of our country, and little kids grow up in this country saying or being told, “This is the land of opportunity. You, too, could be the President of the United States one day.” Well, how do people act who are the president? How do people act who want to be the president? This is what they see. You call your opponents names. It can’t be good.
One retort to this is that there has always been negative campaigning and angry rhetoric. Does this year seem very different to you that it was in the past?
I think so. In campaigns, you always try to distinguish yourself from your opponent and you always try to suggest that your opponent is of low character. That’s common in our campaigns. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone start saying that most Mexicans coming over the border are rapist and murderers, or calling for the wholesale restriction of religious groups coming into this country. I mean, this is of a really, really different order this time.
I’ll tell you something else that reflects that it’s a different order, and that is the reaction of the white supremacist world to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Typically, the attitude of the white supremacist world is “a pox on both their homes”: both the political parties are corrupt. This time, Trump is being embraced like no other candidate ever. The only other person who ever got any kind of glimmer of this kind of support was Pat Buchanan, who I would consider to be a white nationalist on a smaller order. So I think the fact that white supremacists are rallying to his cause, calling him the glorious leader, tells us that something different is going on in Mr. Trump’s campaign than in others.
There has been racist and divisive rhetoric in the past, but it’s usually been coded. This year the code is gone. It seems like candidates are much more open about singling out specific groups.
The Southern Strategy of the Republican Party used a lot of coded language to whip up white hysteria against black people. Now we’re having kind of a reprise of that in a more open way against other groups of minorities.
Trump is acting like a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are now acting like Trump.
Sean Hannity whines about “anti-cop” Beyoncé and Michelle Obama in bizarre defense of Curt Schilling’s transphobia
Sean Hannity has long held objections to Beyonce. He also suffers from a clear case of Obama Derangement Syndrome and he's been a vocal defender of Curt Schilling -- recently fired from his job as an ESPN commentator for posting transphobic social media posts. Perhaps in some effort to one-up his fellow right-wing talker Alex Jones, Hannity has garbled his latest anti-Beyonce rant to include an incoherent defense of Schilling along with a gratuitous swipe at the judgement of the Obamas as parents for good measure.
"I feel so bad for Curt Schilling. Oh, Curt Schilling raised the question of transgendered bathrooms, now he's fired from ESPN. Oh, isn’t that nice?" Hannity began on his radio show Monday. Schilling, a 49 year-old former MLB pitcher, was previously suspended from ESPN for Islamophobic tweets he shared before being permanently booted last Wednesday for sharing transphobic memes in support of North Carolina's discriminatory transgender bathroom ban. Since then, Schilling has served as a useful conservative victim of the so-called "pc police." Hannity, who argued Schilling "isn't so wrong" shortly after the commentator's firing, was quick to wrangle another favorite conservative boogeyman into his latest defense of Schilling.
"Remember the great role model, Beyoncé? As described as a role model, friend of Barack and Michelle Obama?" he continued. "The role model is now smashing to smithereens," Hannity whined. "In her new video from the visual album 'Lemonade' shows the queen of pop smashing dozens of cars and other objects to smithereens with a baseball bat."
"Isn't that a great," he asked, reminding his audience that Obama once called Beyonce a great role model for his daughters. "Oh, the Beyoncé that just did the anti-cop video -- that one?" Hannity mockingly asked, referring to the singer's "Formation" music video.
"Do you really want your daughters dressing like Beyoncé?" Hannity continued, in the tired tradition of conservative Beyoncé haters like Bill O'Reilly and Mike Huckabee. "I don’t think so."
"What a great way to raise your kids," he concluded, seemingly not having to explicitly finish his suggestion that Schilling is a much more valid role model than Beyoncé. Of course, this is the same Hannity that when Walmart moved to end sales of the confederate flag in the wake of the Charleston shootings last year, complained that they should cease selling Prince albums in fairness.
Listen to Hannity's latest ridiculous rant, via Media Matters:
"I feel so bad for Curt Schilling. Oh, Curt Schilling raised the question of transgendered bathrooms, now he's fired from ESPN. Oh, isn’t that nice?" Hannity began on his radio show Monday. Schilling, a 49 year-old former MLB pitcher, was previously suspended from ESPN for Islamophobic tweets he shared before being permanently booted last Wednesday for sharing transphobic memes in support of North Carolina's discriminatory transgender bathroom ban. Since then, Schilling has served as a useful conservative victim of the so-called "pc police." Hannity, who argued Schilling "isn't so wrong" shortly after the commentator's firing, was quick to wrangle another favorite conservative boogeyman into his latest defense of Schilling.
"Remember the great role model, Beyoncé? As described as a role model, friend of Barack and Michelle Obama?" he continued. "The role model is now smashing to smithereens," Hannity whined. "In her new video from the visual album 'Lemonade' shows the queen of pop smashing dozens of cars and other objects to smithereens with a baseball bat."
"Isn't that a great," he asked, reminding his audience that Obama once called Beyonce a great role model for his daughters. "Oh, the Beyoncé that just did the anti-cop video -- that one?" Hannity mockingly asked, referring to the singer's "Formation" music video.
"Do you really want your daughters dressing like Beyoncé?" Hannity continued, in the tired tradition of conservative Beyoncé haters like Bill O'Reilly and Mike Huckabee. "I don’t think so."
"What a great way to raise your kids," he concluded, seemingly not having to explicitly finish his suggestion that Schilling is a much more valid role model than Beyoncé. Of course, this is the same Hannity that when Walmart moved to end sales of the confederate flag in the wake of the Charleston shootings last year, complained that they should cease selling Prince albums in fairness.
Listen to Hannity's latest ridiculous rant, via Media Matters:
We’re sure Bernie will take his advice: Donald Trump says Sanders should run as an independent
In a surprise turn of events, Donald Trump offered Bernie Sanders some campaign advice on Tuesday, saying that the Democratic candidate had been treated "terribly" by the establishment and should run as an independent instead, according to ABC News.
Sanders chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination have grown slim, with Hillary Clinton projected to win Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary and already pondering on a
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted,"Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats — both with delegates & otherwise"
Although the Republican front-runner seemed expressed empathy for his Democratic rival, his words were less than sugary at an event in Rochester, New York earlier this month where he said: "This is a crooked system. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about Bernie. But he wins. And he wins. Like me.” Referring to the similarities between both him and Sanders in the way they have amassed historic numbers at rallys, through their populist message.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has decried the primary system of both parties, calling it "rigged," and accusing the votes of being in the hands of the delegates and not the public.
Obviously, Trump could largely be "advising" Sanders for his own interests, knowing full-well he'd siphon millions of votes from Hillary in a match-up with the billionaire in the general election.
The Vermont senator is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, but joined the Democratic Party to run for president. Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Bloomberg News in an interview that Sanders would now remain a Democrat for the rest of his life.
In a surprise turn of events, Donald Trump offered Bernie Sanders some campaign advice on Tuesday, saying that the Democratic candidate had been treated "terribly" by the establishment and should run as an independent instead, according to ABC News.
Sanders chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination have grown slim, with Hillary Clinton projected to win Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary and already pondering on a
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted,"Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats — both with delegates & otherwise"
Although the Republican front-runner seemed expressed empathy for his Democratic rival, his words were less than sugary at an event in Rochester, New York earlier this month where he said: "This is a crooked system. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about Bernie. But he wins. And he wins. Like me.” Referring to the similarities between both him and Sanders in the way they have amassed historic numbers at rallys, through their populist message.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has decried the primary system of both parties, calling it "rigged," and accusing the votes of being in the hands of the delegates and not the public.
Obviously, Trump could largely be "advising" Sanders for his own interests, knowing full-well he'd siphon millions of votes from Hillary in a match-up with the billionaire in the general election.
The Vermont senator is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, but joined the Democratic Party to run for president. Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Bloomberg News in an interview that Sanders would now remain a Democrat for the rest of his life.
In a surprise turn of events, Donald Trump offered Bernie Sanders some campaign advice on Tuesday, saying that the Democratic candidate had been treated "terribly" by the establishment and should run as an independent instead, according to ABC News.
Sanders chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination have grown slim, with Hillary Clinton projected to win Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary and already pondering on a
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted,"Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats — both with delegates & otherwise"
Although the Republican front-runner seemed expressed empathy for his Democratic rival, his words were less than sugary at an event in Rochester, New York earlier this month where he said: "This is a crooked system. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about Bernie. But he wins. And he wins. Like me.” Referring to the similarities between both him and Sanders in the way they have amassed historic numbers at rallys, through their populist message.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has decried the primary system of both parties, calling it "rigged," and accusing the votes of being in the hands of the delegates and not the public.
Obviously, Trump could largely be "advising" Sanders for his own interests, knowing full-well he'd siphon millions of votes from Hillary in a match-up with the billionaire in the general election.
The Vermont senator is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, but joined the Democratic Party to run for president. Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Bloomberg News in an interview that Sanders would now remain a Democrat for the rest of his life.
Sanders chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination have grown slim, with Hillary Clinton projected to win Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary and already pondering on a
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted,"Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats — both with delegates & otherwise"
Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise. He should show them, and run as an Independent!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2016
Although the Republican front-runner seemed expressed empathy for his Democratic rival, his words were less than sugary at an event in Rochester, New York earlier this month where he said: "This is a crooked system. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about Bernie. But he wins. And he wins. Like me.” Referring to the similarities between both him and Sanders in the way they have amassed historic numbers at rallys, through their populist message.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has decried the primary system of both parties, calling it "rigged," and accusing the votes of being in the hands of the delegates and not the public.
Obviously, Trump could largely be "advising" Sanders for his own interests, knowing full-well he'd siphon millions of votes from Hillary in a match-up with the billionaire in the general election.
The Vermont senator is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, but joined the Democratic Party to run for president. Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Bloomberg News in an interview that Sanders would now remain a Democrat for the rest of his life.
In a surprise turn of events, Donald Trump offered Bernie Sanders some campaign advice on Tuesday, saying that the Democratic candidate had been treated "terribly" by the establishment and should run as an independent instead, according to ABC News.
Sanders chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination have grown slim, with Hillary Clinton projected to win Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary and already pondering on a
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted,"Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats — both with delegates & otherwise"
Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise. He should show them, and run as an Independent!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2016
Although the Republican front-runner seemed expressed empathy for his Democratic rival, his words were less than sugary at an event in Rochester, New York earlier this month where he said: "This is a crooked system. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about Bernie. But he wins. And he wins. Like me.” Referring to the similarities between both him and Sanders in the way they have amassed historic numbers at rallys, through their populist message.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has decried the primary system of both parties, calling it "rigged," and accusing the votes of being in the hands of the delegates and not the public.
Obviously, Trump could largely be "advising" Sanders for his own interests, knowing full-well he'd siphon millions of votes from Hillary in a match-up with the billionaire in the general election.
The Vermont senator is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, but joined the Democratic Party to run for president. Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Bloomberg News in an interview that Sanders would now remain a Democrat for the rest of his life.
In a surprise turn of events, Donald Trump offered Bernie Sanders some campaign advice on Tuesday, saying that the Democratic candidate had been treated "terribly" by the establishment and should run as an independent instead, according to ABC News.
Sanders chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination have grown slim, with Hillary Clinton projected to win Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary and already pondering on a
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted,"Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats — both with delegates & otherwise"
Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise. He should show them, and run as an Independent!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2016
Although the Republican front-runner seemed expressed empathy for his Democratic rival, his words were less than sugary at an event in Rochester, New York earlier this month where he said: "This is a crooked system. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about Bernie. But he wins. And he wins. Like me.” Referring to the similarities between both him and Sanders in the way they have amassed historic numbers at rallys, through their populist message.
Over the past few weeks, Trump has decried the primary system of both parties, calling it "rigged," and accusing the votes of being in the hands of the delegates and not the public.
Obviously, Trump could largely be "advising" Sanders for his own interests, knowing full-well he'd siphon millions of votes from Hillary in a match-up with the billionaire in the general election.
The Vermont senator is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, but joined the Democratic Party to run for president. Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Bloomberg News in an interview that Sanders would now remain a Democrat for the rest of his life.
A progressive in name only: Charles Koch joins a long list of right-wingers who have lauded Hillary Clinton
Billionaire industrialist and right-wing moneyman Charles Koch insisted in an interview this week that he could potentially support Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, speculating she could be a better commander in chief than her Republican counterparts.
This indirect endorsement is coming from one of the Koch Brothers, two of the richest human beings on the planet. The Kochs have for years used their enormous wealth to bankroll countless right-wing causes, from anti-tax activism to climate science denial.
Many liberal pundits were quite shocked at Koch's remarks, but an even cursory look at the historical record should quickly dispel any surprise. Clinton has long been a preferred candidate of much of the right wing — namely the pro-war right, which shares Clinton's extremely hawkish foreign policy.
Koch is not alone — not by any means. He joins a long list of right-wingers who have thrown their weight behind Clinton. Left-wing website In These Times compiled a list of leading conservative figures who have supported Clinton, in a piece titled "Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump. No Surprise — They’ve Always Backed Her."
Max Boot
Leading neoconservative Max Boot insists Clinton would be “vastly preferable” to Trump.
Boot is a figure who openly supports "American imperialism" — no need to run away from the label, he maintains. "The greatest danger is that we won't use all of our power for fear of the 'I' word," Boot says.
The neocon Clinton backer ardently defends the idea of "American exceptionalism" and loudly cheerleaded for the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq — and practically every war and military intervention since.
A Trump presidency, Boot warns, could threaten the U.S. empire he embraces; Clinton would ensure its longevity.
Robert Kagan
Robert Kagan, another prominent neocon who served as foreign policy adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain in his 2008 presidential campaign, has strongly come out in support of Clinton.
Historian Andrew Bacevich has described Kagan as "the neoconservative movement's chief foreign policy theorist." In his defense of Clinton, Kagan told the New York Times he is “comfortable with her on foreign policy.”
Clinton's foreign policy is "something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else," Kagan explained.
Richard Perle
Neocon Richard Perle, an architect of the Iraq War, expressed great relief when Clinton was nominated for secretary of state in 2008, In These Times pointed out.
“There's not going to be as much change as we were led to believe,” Perle rejoiced, when he heard Obama was letting Hillary shape his foreign policy.
"I think she's very much in the mainstream. By now, I think the Bush foreign policy is, as a practical matter, the same policy as the policy of the Department of State — which is what I'd expect it to be under Hillary Clinton," he continued.
"Contrary to expectations, I don't think we would see a lot of change."
"The Great Right Hope"
George Shultz, former Reagan-era secretary of state, stands beside a host of other conservatives who have expressed support for Clinton.
Even Lindsey Graham and John McCain have said good things about Hillary and her extreme hawkishness.
And Bush-era Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that Clinton was "great."
Perhaps the most telling characterization came from right-wing writer Noemie Emery, who described Clinton as “The Great Right Hope” in 2008, In These Times noted. Emery triumphantly referred to Clinton as "the Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem."
Charles Koch joins this motley crew of right-wingers. Yet these are not all. Even more right-wing leaders can be added to the list of at least indirect Clinton supporters.
Henry Kissinger
Clinton still today flaunts her relationship with former Nixon-era Secretary of State and longtime U.S. foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger, an accused war criminal who oversaw policies that led to millions of deaths.
Salon exposed how emails released from Clinton’s State Department reveal her close ties to Kissinger. One of the emails suggests Clinton saw Kissinger as her role model.
In a 2012 email, Kissinger returned the favor, sending Clinton an intimate handwritten message reading “I greatly admire the skill and aplomb with which you conduct our foreign policy.”
New York University historian Greg Grandin, a leading expert on the statesman, estimates that "Kissinger’s policies resulted in at least 4,124,000 civilian deaths, probably many times that number of wounded and refugees."
"I've known her for many years now, and I respect her intellect," Kissinger said of Clinton in a 2014 interview. "She ran the State Department in the most effective way that I've ever seen," the accused war criminal maintained.
Dick Cheney
Moreover, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the mastermind behind the Iraq War — a man legendary journalist Seymour Hersh has referred to as the U.S.'s "Darth Vader" — has said good things about Clinton.
In 2011, Cheney heaped praise on Clinton in a Fox News interview. He called her "one of the more competent members of the current administration" and added that "it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president."
Cheney said he did not want to go so far as to endorse Clinton, as it could prove to "be the kiss of death for her," but he did applaud her. In the past year, he has returned to criticizing Clinton over her email scandal, but his critiques have been lukewarm.
Robert Gates
This is not the only Bush official with nice things to say about Hillary. When she was secretary of state in the Obama administration, Clinton had a good relationship with Robert Gates, former secretary of defense who served under Bush and was kept on a fear years after under Obama.
Gates decided Clinton "was someone he could do business with," the New York Times explained. Himself a hawk, Gates recognized Clinton's shared values, admirably calling her "a tough lady."
Rupert Murdoch
That's not all. A list of prominent conservatives who have backed Clinton would not be complete without right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who joined the Hillary fan club before her first presidential campaign.
In 2006, the Fox News owner raised money for Clinton's upcoming presidential bid. CBS put it quite bluntly at the time: "Rupert Murdoch Loves Hillary Clinton."
"The mating ritual of the unlikely allies has been under way for months," CBS reported. "Clinton set political tongues to wagging [in April] by attending a Washington party celebrating the 10th anniversary of Fox News, the cable news channel owned by Murdoch."
An unnamed source explained Clinton and Murdoch "have a respectful and cordial relationship. He has respect for the work she has done on behalf of New York."
"Clinton has worked hard to take the edge off her reputation as a card-carrying liberal," CBS said. "She has has collaborated with congressional conservatives on some pieces of legislation, called for a 'common ground' on abortion and cut a political figure some on the left see as decidedly un-liberal."
CBS also noted that the Hawkish senator "never voted against any major Iraq military spending legislation."
From Barry Goldwater Republican to New Democrat
In its article on the Clinton-Murdoch relationship, The New York Times quoted liberal writer Paul Waldman, who remarked, "People on the left don't like it because they find new things not to like about Hillary all the time."
Today, almost a decade later, this comment rings just as true. Again and again, Clinton shows her reactionary stripes, in her whitewashing the Reagans' inaction during the AIDS epidemic, to her embracing George Bush at Nancy Reagan's funeral, to her support for gutting welfare, to her pushing for war after war.
Clinton may suddenly claim to be a progressive, when under pressure from her leftist opponent Bernie Sanders, but she has been remarkably consistent from her days as a Young Republican leader working for Barry Goldwater to now.
In fact, Clinton once boasted of this on her website, writing, "I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained constant: individual responsibility and community."
It is not just that the Republicans have become so extreme that ruling-class figures will choose any alternative. Charles Koch or any other plutocrat would never say he could endorse self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders — who, in opposition to Clinton, proudly proclaimed "Kissinger is not my friend."
Clinton, rather, embodies the "New Democrat" movement — the post-Reagan Democrat who has embraced neoliberal economics, defending free trade agreements and privatization, who steadfastly backs each and every war, pushing for militarized "humanitarian intervention."
Charles Koch's indirect endorsement should not come as a surprise. The media and commentariat simply need to do a better job of placing it in a larger historical and political context.
This indirect endorsement is coming from one of the Koch Brothers, two of the richest human beings on the planet. The Kochs have for years used their enormous wealth to bankroll countless right-wing causes, from anti-tax activism to climate science denial.
Many liberal pundits were quite shocked at Koch's remarks, but an even cursory look at the historical record should quickly dispel any surprise. Clinton has long been a preferred candidate of much of the right wing — namely the pro-war right, which shares Clinton's extremely hawkish foreign policy.
Koch is not alone — not by any means. He joins a long list of right-wingers who have thrown their weight behind Clinton. Left-wing website In These Times compiled a list of leading conservative figures who have supported Clinton, in a piece titled "Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump. No Surprise — They’ve Always Backed Her."
Max Boot
Leading neoconservative Max Boot insists Clinton would be “vastly preferable” to Trump.
Boot is a figure who openly supports "American imperialism" — no need to run away from the label, he maintains. "The greatest danger is that we won't use all of our power for fear of the 'I' word," Boot says.
The neocon Clinton backer ardently defends the idea of "American exceptionalism" and loudly cheerleaded for the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq — and practically every war and military intervention since.
A Trump presidency, Boot warns, could threaten the U.S. empire he embraces; Clinton would ensure its longevity.
Robert Kagan
Robert Kagan, another prominent neocon who served as foreign policy adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain in his 2008 presidential campaign, has strongly come out in support of Clinton.
Historian Andrew Bacevich has described Kagan as "the neoconservative movement's chief foreign policy theorist." In his defense of Clinton, Kagan told the New York Times he is “comfortable with her on foreign policy.”
Clinton's foreign policy is "something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else," Kagan explained.
Richard Perle
Neocon Richard Perle, an architect of the Iraq War, expressed great relief when Clinton was nominated for secretary of state in 2008, In These Times pointed out.
“There's not going to be as much change as we were led to believe,” Perle rejoiced, when he heard Obama was letting Hillary shape his foreign policy.
"I think she's very much in the mainstream. By now, I think the Bush foreign policy is, as a practical matter, the same policy as the policy of the Department of State — which is what I'd expect it to be under Hillary Clinton," he continued.
"Contrary to expectations, I don't think we would see a lot of change."
"The Great Right Hope"
George Shultz, former Reagan-era secretary of state, stands beside a host of other conservatives who have expressed support for Clinton.
Even Lindsey Graham and John McCain have said good things about Hillary and her extreme hawkishness.
And Bush-era Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that Clinton was "great."
Perhaps the most telling characterization came from right-wing writer Noemie Emery, who described Clinton as “The Great Right Hope” in 2008, In These Times noted. Emery triumphantly referred to Clinton as "the Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem."
Charles Koch joins this motley crew of right-wingers. Yet these are not all. Even more right-wing leaders can be added to the list of at least indirect Clinton supporters.
Henry Kissinger
Clinton still today flaunts her relationship with former Nixon-era Secretary of State and longtime U.S. foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger, an accused war criminal who oversaw policies that led to millions of deaths.
Salon exposed how emails released from Clinton’s State Department reveal her close ties to Kissinger. One of the emails suggests Clinton saw Kissinger as her role model.
In a 2012 email, Kissinger returned the favor, sending Clinton an intimate handwritten message reading “I greatly admire the skill and aplomb with which you conduct our foreign policy.”
New York University historian Greg Grandin, a leading expert on the statesman, estimates that "Kissinger’s policies resulted in at least 4,124,000 civilian deaths, probably many times that number of wounded and refugees."
"I've known her for many years now, and I respect her intellect," Kissinger said of Clinton in a 2014 interview. "She ran the State Department in the most effective way that I've ever seen," the accused war criminal maintained.
Dick Cheney
Moreover, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the mastermind behind the Iraq War — a man legendary journalist Seymour Hersh has referred to as the U.S.'s "Darth Vader" — has said good things about Clinton.
In 2011, Cheney heaped praise on Clinton in a Fox News interview. He called her "one of the more competent members of the current administration" and added that "it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president."
Cheney said he did not want to go so far as to endorse Clinton, as it could prove to "be the kiss of death for her," but he did applaud her. In the past year, he has returned to criticizing Clinton over her email scandal, but his critiques have been lukewarm.
Robert Gates
This is not the only Bush official with nice things to say about Hillary. When she was secretary of state in the Obama administration, Clinton had a good relationship with Robert Gates, former secretary of defense who served under Bush and was kept on a fear years after under Obama.
Gates decided Clinton "was someone he could do business with," the New York Times explained. Himself a hawk, Gates recognized Clinton's shared values, admirably calling her "a tough lady."
Rupert Murdoch
That's not all. A list of prominent conservatives who have backed Clinton would not be complete without right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who joined the Hillary fan club before her first presidential campaign.
In 2006, the Fox News owner raised money for Clinton's upcoming presidential bid. CBS put it quite bluntly at the time: "Rupert Murdoch Loves Hillary Clinton."
"The mating ritual of the unlikely allies has been under way for months," CBS reported. "Clinton set political tongues to wagging [in April] by attending a Washington party celebrating the 10th anniversary of Fox News, the cable news channel owned by Murdoch."
An unnamed source explained Clinton and Murdoch "have a respectful and cordial relationship. He has respect for the work she has done on behalf of New York."
"Clinton has worked hard to take the edge off her reputation as a card-carrying liberal," CBS said. "She has has collaborated with congressional conservatives on some pieces of legislation, called for a 'common ground' on abortion and cut a political figure some on the left see as decidedly un-liberal."
CBS also noted that the Hawkish senator "never voted against any major Iraq military spending legislation."
From Barry Goldwater Republican to New Democrat
In its article on the Clinton-Murdoch relationship, The New York Times quoted liberal writer Paul Waldman, who remarked, "People on the left don't like it because they find new things not to like about Hillary all the time."
Today, almost a decade later, this comment rings just as true. Again and again, Clinton shows her reactionary stripes, in her whitewashing the Reagans' inaction during the AIDS epidemic, to her embracing George Bush at Nancy Reagan's funeral, to her support for gutting welfare, to her pushing for war after war.
Clinton may suddenly claim to be a progressive, when under pressure from her leftist opponent Bernie Sanders, but she has been remarkably consistent from her days as a Young Republican leader working for Barry Goldwater to now.
In fact, Clinton once boasted of this on her website, writing, "I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained constant: individual responsibility and community."
It is not just that the Republicans have become so extreme that ruling-class figures will choose any alternative. Charles Koch or any other plutocrat would never say he could endorse self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders — who, in opposition to Clinton, proudly proclaimed "Kissinger is not my friend."
Clinton, rather, embodies the "New Democrat" movement — the post-Reagan Democrat who has embraced neoliberal economics, defending free trade agreements and privatization, who steadfastly backs each and every war, pushing for militarized "humanitarian intervention."
Charles Koch's indirect endorsement should not come as a surprise. The media and commentariat simply need to do a better job of placing it in a larger historical and political context.
