Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 798

My “rapidly fatal” diagnosis: My worst nightmare was also a miraculous stroke of luck

In the summer of 2010, Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams was diagnosed with malignant melanoma and underwent lifesaving surgery. A year later, her cancer had returned — and metastasized into her lung and soft tissue. With aggressive Stage 4 cancer and few treatment options, she took a chance as one of the first patients in a clinical trial for a new form of treatment: immunotherapy. Three months later, she was cancer free. 

In this exclusive Salon excerpt from her new memoir, "A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles," Williams recalls her first post-remission checkup — shortly after the cancer death of a good friend.  

The city is turning green early this year—winter had been so warm and mild, so damn near snowless—it couldn’t resist bursting into color well before the official first day of spring. I lived to see the cherry blossoms after all. Cassandra’s boys have now left the children’s [cancer support] group. On their last night, the kids and Emily threw a going-away party for them. There was cake, and the kids made cards and sang songs and played games. It was so sweet and warm and joyful that every time I think about that going-away party—which is almost daily—I feel like my heart’s being smashed in pieces. The boys are off somewhere else now, playing soccer and greeting the spring. Their first spring without their mother.

I’m here today for another set of scans. They call my name and I head back to the women’s waiting area to change. I surrender my clothes and walk past tiny examination rooms filled with snugly wrapped sick people. “Would you like a warm blanket?” the nurse says, proffering it, along with a stress ball, as she gestures to my chair. Don’t mind if I do!

I settle in as she tries to jab a long needle into a vein in my right arm. “There’s nothing there,” she says, puzzled. Her face is furrowed with concern. “Can you squeeze the ball again, my love?”

I have known her about a minute but, okay, I’ll be her love. I take a quick glance at her name tag: Marie. I’ll try to make my broken veins behave for you, Marie, but they were uncooperative, stingy little guys even before the cancer. The few IVs and blood draws I had in my old life were almost always punctuated by frustrated mutterings from the phlebotomist du jour. I swear to God, if I ever decide to become a junkie, I am totally sticking to smoking my heroin.

Now, however, my veins have achieved a whole new level of reluctance. Because of the trial, I have to come in every week for either monitoring or treatment. The nurses take alarming amounts of blood—dozens of vials at a time. I’ve been jabbed in a variety of exciting locations about my person. The crooks of both elbows. The middle of my forearms. The backs of my hands. Once, for a particularly memorable test of lung function, the artery in my wrist. My veins have been tapped and sapped on a more consistent, unrelenting basis than a keg at the end of Greek Week, and they are becoming hardened and blown out. Sometimes, I imagine Dracula stealing into my bedroom on a moonless night, slowly lowering his mouth onto my neck, and quickly pulling away with a disgusted, “This is BULLSHIT.”

Marie reties the piece of tubing around my left bicep this time, and I give the stress ball firm rhythmic squeezes as she firmly smacks the crook of my elbow, searching for a point of entry. Beads of sweat are forming on Marie’s forehead now. She pushes the needle in and begins rooting around under the skin. I gasp in surprise at the sharp, clean pain as a tear spontaneously slides down my face. Marie looks horrified.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” she says, “and you’re a tough one, my love. I’m so sorry, but I have to stop.” She pitches unsteadily forward toward the sink as she adds, “I’m having a hot flash.” She places a paper towel under a stream of water, and dabs at her neck and forehead. Apparently, I’ve just given my nurse menopause. “Would you like one too?” she offers, but I decline. She composes herself and asks, “Do you mind if we try it in your hand?” I look away as I feel the needle go in. I always thought “You can’t get blood from a stone” was a figure of speech. I am a stone.

Marie leads me now to the CT scan tube as she shrouds my warm blanket around me like I’m the James Brown of cancer, delivering a bravura performance. I lie on the table. “Take a deep breath,” an unseen voice commands. Seven seconds later it directs, “Let it out.” Easy for her to say. After a few more times like this, the technician comes in and adjusts my IV. A metallic rush of saline floods my mouth and an icy charge shoots straight up through the vein in my arm. Then there it is. The warm, pissed-in-my my-pants feeling strikes below. It happens every time, and every time I am positive I really have wet myself. It is the most mortifying conceivable possibility since I pooped a little on the bed somewhere in the throes of my first childbirth.

“You’re done,” the technician says. “Swing your legs around to the left and we’ll help you off.”

There’s no puddle on the table. There never is. I still have a year and a half of treatment to go.

Afterward, trembling with chills, I go around the corner to cup my hands around an oversized bowl of ramen, and absently poke the yolk of the egg that floats on top. My dessert is a sweet jewel of mochi ice cream. I am strangely touched by it, feel oddly nurtured, as if the weird dollop of whipped cream on a lettuce leaf was meant as comfort just for me, an offering from my surrogate Japanese mother. I feel fortified and in control. An hour later I am walking back toward the subway when Dr. Wolchok calls to tell me I’m still clear. I am six months cancer free. And when you’re on a virtually untested treatment protocol, it’s still quite a novelty.

In some ways, I did get the good kind of cancer after all. I realize it when I am talking to [leading immunotherapist Dr.] James Allison on a summer day, right near the anniversary of my diagnosis, about why melanoma has been such a source of interest to researchers. I’d assumed it was because, as [researcher] Nils Lonberg puts it, “There were no effective treatments for melanoma, so the immunotherapists were allowed to play in that little area. They weren’t crowded out by the non-immunotherapists, because there was just nothing there. We were given the playground that nobody else wanted to play in. We were dismissed. You would not believe it. It was terrible. At conferences we had the tiniest rooms.” But Dr. Allison offers me another reason. “You work with melanoma because it’s accessible. It’s a bad disease,” he says. “It has many mutations. People want to deal with it because it’s so bad. It’s rapidly fatal.”

It’s a vicious, unpredictable, and often swift-moving disease, and that makes it challenging to treat. It historically responds better to immune system-based treatments than other cancers have. And also, though Allison doesn’t come directly out and say it, if a treatment for it isn’t working, you’re going to find out pretty quickly. Because it’s rapidly fatal. That’s why when he tells me this, I start to cry. My horrible bad luck was my miraculous good fortune. I got the cancer that was intriguing to a bunch of geniuses, and I got it at exactly the right time.In the summer of 2010, Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams was diagnosed with malignant melanoma and underwent lifesaving surgery. A year later, her cancer had returned — and metastasized into her lung and soft tissue. With aggressive Stage 4 cancer and few treatment options, she took a chance as one of the first patients in a clinical trial for a new form of treatment: immunotherapy. Three months later, she was cancer free. 

In this exclusive Salon excerpt from her new memoir, "A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles," Williams recalls her first post-remission checkup — shortly after the cancer death of a good friend.  

The city is turning green early this year—winter had been so warm and mild, so damn near snowless—it couldn’t resist bursting into color well before the official first day of spring. I lived to see the cherry blossoms after all. Cassandra’s boys have now left the children’s [cancer support] group. On their last night, the kids and Emily threw a going-away party for them. There was cake, and the kids made cards and sang songs and played games. It was so sweet and warm and joyful that every time I think about that going-away party—which is almost daily—I feel like my heart’s being smashed in pieces. The boys are off somewhere else now, playing soccer and greeting the spring. Their first spring without their mother.

I’m here today for another set of scans. They call my name and I head back to the women’s waiting area to change. I surrender my clothes and walk past tiny examination rooms filled with snugly wrapped sick people. “Would you like a warm blanket?” the nurse says, proffering it, along with a stress ball, as she gestures to my chair. Don’t mind if I do!

I settle in as she tries to jab a long needle into a vein in my right arm. “There’s nothing there,” she says, puzzled. Her face is furrowed with concern. “Can you squeeze the ball again, my love?”

I have known her about a minute but, okay, I’ll be her love. I take a quick glance at her name tag: Marie. I’ll try to make my broken veins behave for you, Marie, but they were uncooperative, stingy little guys even before the cancer. The few IVs and blood draws I had in my old life were almost always punctuated by frustrated mutterings from the phlebotomist du jour. I swear to God, if I ever decide to become a junkie, I am totally sticking to smoking my heroin.

Now, however, my veins have achieved a whole new level of reluctance. Because of the trial, I have to come in every week for either monitoring or treatment. The nurses take alarming amounts of blood—dozens of vials at a time. I’ve been jabbed in a variety of exciting locations about my person. The crooks of both elbows. The middle of my forearms. The backs of my hands. Once, for a particularly memorable test of lung function, the artery in my wrist. My veins have been tapped and sapped on a more consistent, unrelenting basis than a keg at the end of Greek Week, and they are becoming hardened and blown out. Sometimes, I imagine Dracula stealing into my bedroom on a moonless night, slowly lowering his mouth onto my neck, and quickly pulling away with a disgusted, “This is BULLSHIT.”

Marie reties the piece of tubing around my left bicep this time, and I give the stress ball firm rhythmic squeezes as she firmly smacks the crook of my elbow, searching for a point of entry. Beads of sweat are forming on Marie’s forehead now. She pushes the needle in and begins rooting around under the skin. I gasp in surprise at the sharp, clean pain as a tear spontaneously slides down my face. Marie looks horrified.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” she says, “and you’re a tough one, my love. I’m so sorry, but I have to stop.” She pitches unsteadily forward toward the sink as she adds, “I’m having a hot flash.” She places a paper towel under a stream of water, and dabs at her neck and forehead. Apparently, I’ve just given my nurse menopause. “Would you like one too?” she offers, but I decline. She composes herself and asks, “Do you mind if we try it in your hand?” I look away as I feel the needle go in. I always thought “You can’t get blood from a stone” was a figure of speech. I am a stone.

Marie leads me now to the CT scan tube as she shrouds my warm blanket around me like I’m the James Brown of cancer, delivering a bravura performance. I lie on the table. “Take a deep breath,” an unseen voice commands. Seven seconds later it directs, “Let it out.” Easy for her to say. After a few more times like this, the technician comes in and adjusts my IV. A metallic rush of saline floods my mouth and an icy charge shoots straight up through the vein in my arm. Then there it is. The warm, pissed-in-my my-pants feeling strikes below. It happens every time, and every time I am positive I really have wet myself. It is the most mortifying conceivable possibility since I pooped a little on the bed somewhere in the throes of my first childbirth.

“You’re done,” the technician says. “Swing your legs around to the left and we’ll help you off.”

There’s no puddle on the table. There never is. I still have a year and a half of treatment to go.

Afterward, trembling with chills, I go around the corner to cup my hands around an oversized bowl of ramen, and absently poke the yolk of the egg that floats on top. My dessert is a sweet jewel of mochi ice cream. I am strangely touched by it, feel oddly nurtured, as if the weird dollop of whipped cream on a lettuce leaf was meant as comfort just for me, an offering from my surrogate Japanese mother. I feel fortified and in control. An hour later I am walking back toward the subway when Dr. Wolchok calls to tell me I’m still clear. I am six months cancer free. And when you’re on a virtually untested treatment protocol, it’s still quite a novelty.

In some ways, I did get the good kind of cancer after all. I realize it when I am talking to [leading immunotherapist Dr.] James Allison on a summer day, right near the anniversary of my diagnosis, about why melanoma has been such a source of interest to researchers. I’d assumed it was because, as [researcher] Nils Lonberg puts it, “There were no effective treatments for melanoma, so the immunotherapists were allowed to play in that little area. They weren’t crowded out by the non-immunotherapists, because there was just nothing there. We were given the playground that nobody else wanted to play in. We were dismissed. You would not believe it. It was terrible. At conferences we had the tiniest rooms.” But Dr. Allison offers me another reason. “You work with melanoma because it’s accessible. It’s a bad disease,” he says. “It has many mutations. People want to deal with it because it’s so bad. It’s rapidly fatal.”

It’s a vicious, unpredictable, and often swift-moving disease, and that makes it challenging to treat. It historically responds better to immune system-based treatments than other cancers have. And also, though Allison doesn’t come directly out and say it, if a treatment for it isn’t working, you’re going to find out pretty quickly. Because it’s rapidly fatal. That’s why when he tells me this, I start to cry. My horrible bad luck was my miraculous good fortune. I got the cancer that was intriguing to a bunch of geniuses, and I got it at exactly the right time.

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The Buddist I am not: Reflecting on my conversation with the Dalai Lama about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal

Eighteen years ago, I interviewed the Dalai Lama on the very morning that every news outlet on the planet ran the story of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. It made headlines from the New York Times to the Hindustan Times, where I was camped out in Dharamsala, India at what felt like an upscale hotel to me at the time, hovering as I was between the backpacker I’d been in my 20s and the 30-year-old who had recently taken a liking to private hot showers.

The night before my interview I did not yet know about Clinton and Lewinsky – nor, presumably, did His Holiness. I had been on a journey of all things Tibetan for two months, going from the refugee center outside of Kathmandu where newly arrived refugees stay until they are healthy enough to move to Dharamsala (many suffer frostbite so severe during their month-long walk that they lose limbs or skin. Many, in fact, lose their lives). From Kathmandu we flew to Lhasa. One afternoon, we saw a Tibetan man beaten on his calves with a white stick by a police officer, as several other officers watched. When they spied us gaping, they dragged him out of sight around a corner.

We’d planned to drive from Lhasa back to Nepal – a five-day journey on a single road by four wheel drive at the time – but three days into the drive we learned heavy rains had washed out huge chunks of the road when we nearly drove directly into a mountain of mud with chunks of road the size of boulders. We sat there for several hours as if some well-stocked construction crew might happen by out there in the middle of the stark, uninhabited mountains of western Tibet. Finally, our driver put the car in reverse and went backwards down the curvy mountain road for a good twenty or thirty minutes while we white-knuckled the dashboard and held our breath; after a while he was able to turn the car around properly and head back toward Lhasa, where we managed to fly back to Kathmandu, and then on to Dharamsala. By the time we arrived– weeks behind schedule – the Dalai Lama had just returned from a Portugal trip, which was a stroke of pure dumb luck on our part.

So I wrote him a note. Like a high school kid. A harried scribble on notebook paper in green pen, asking for an interview. This detail stays with me because of its informality, its utter lack of pretension, yes, but also its blatant amateurism. I was a freelancer and had done very few notable stories yet. This trip would mark a turning point in my career, not only because a call at my hotel later that afternoon granted me the interview, but also because I managed to report on my most difficult story to date: the forced sterilizations of Tibetan women.

The day of the interview, I woke early. The cleanest clothes I had in my olive green backpack included a black and white fish sarong, trekker sandals, and an orange “Life is Good” t-shirt. Slid under the hotel door was that day’s Hindustan Times, where a bold headline declared “Clinton Admits to Improper Relationship.” My heart dropped. Please don’t let the Dalai Lama read this headline, I prayed. (I feared he’d cancel the interview for some reason, put all Americans in some sort of immoral zone of no conduct). We arrived an hour early to go through security, which involved two sets of metal detectors, a bag check, and a pat down behind a curtained off corner of the room, where a Tibetan woman asked us a series of security questions. Where had we traveled and why, where had we stayed and for how long? Already, the afternoon before, I’d been summoned to the monastery where I had to submit my questions in advance to his secretaries, who then said to limit myself to two questions given their boss’s penchant for verbosity (his answers were “very thorough” is how it was put to me. Ever the vigilant journalist, I came prepared with three).  

By the time I was led to the where the Dalai Lama stood flanked by his two secretaries, my body shook from nerves. What had I gotten myself into? I wasn’t Connie Chung, arriving with her gear, her entourage. I was a nobody, walking up in trekkers beside a photographer, who also happened to be my best friend, Ann — equally underdressed for the occasion in hiking pants, a gray t-shirt, and boots. My prepared questions covered Pakistan and India’s nuclear testing, and President Clinton’s visit to Beijing, both of which had happened earlier that summer. And both things, if I’m honest, I couldn’t have cared less about (except in a purely existential sense – as in, please let’s not nuke each other). What I really wondered – what Ann and I had stayed up late discussing, and what I later wrote about for Salon – was whether the Dalai Lama was a great man because he embodied greatness organically, or whether he was a great man because so many people elevated him to this.

Much of what surprised me about Dalai Lama I’ve long since written. How he was taller than I expected – maybe 5’9. How he was gruff initially, and yanked me by the hand so hard into the interviewing room that there were indentations from my own knuckles. How I’d mumbled through my first question about nuclear testing, and he’d given some rehearsed this or that answer which totally escapes me today. And how, by the time I got to my second question, ten minutes in, I was shaking so visibly I could hear my paper rattling, and my voice tremor. “Clinton,” I began, “I have to ask you…”

“Oh,” he leaned forward suddenly, gave me a half nod, and whispered, “you mean L-E-W-I-N-S-K-Y?”

It stopped me cold. By that time of the morning, I’d forgotten entirely about the foibles of my president. The Dalai Lama brought me back so abruptly that I yelped – unfortunately, I know this because I have it on tape. A clear unequivocal yelp. The irony was immediate: I’m interviewing the world’s most famously celibate man while discussing the world’s most famously unfaithful. The cigar. The blue dress. It all came to me in a rush, and I immediately diverted the question of Clinton’s visit to China entirely. “Now that you mention it,” I began, and we began to howl with laughter. We laughed even harder when I offered up a lame apology “on behalf of my president and of the American people.” Really. I said this. My president and the American people. As if I was some sort of moral ambassador.

The Clinton/Lewinsky affair feels almost quaint, now, given today’s political vitriol. In an age of terrorism, of ISIS, of toxic divisiveness, of severe economic disparity, of failing unions and wars on women, of police shootings of young Black men, of Boko Haram and floods of refugees, what in the hell does anyone care about a blow job?

The Lewinsky/Clinton affair broke the ice with the Dalai Lama. Suddenly, we were laughing, talking like old pals. I wrote about how he thought Americans were both smart and spoiled, about how he’d looked at me, after a time, and asked me about Tibet and how it was only then, nearly an hour into our talk, that I realized why I’d been granted this interview at all. I was one of the few journalists who met him having just days earlier come from the place he yearned to return. I hadn’t been given an interview with the Dalai Lama; the Dalai Lama had wanted an interview with me.

I told him what I’d seen. That the monks carry thumb-sized pictures of him tucked in their robes. That the Chinese military do maneuvers at dawn outside his old winter palace, the Potala. That the mountains still look like giant cloth napkins, draped from the sky. That the lakes and rivers glittered like sequins in a way I’d never seen. How yak butter tea was the most vile thing I’d ever tasted.  he gave me a coin when we finished, from a trunk of Tibetan money he’d escaped with in 1959 and which hadn’t been in circulation since. Much of this I’ve told and retold, written and rewritten.

He asked me about my religion, and I told him my mother had been Jewish, but died when I was eight, and my father had been an Evangelical Christian who raised us in a house so severe, so rigid in its rules and its admonitions – no secular music, no secular television, no secular books, church three times a week, private Christian school – that it had turned me off to any kind of formal religion, a fact which still holds true today. I cannot enter a church without physically recoiling, without feeling it as a clench in my abdomen, a shortening of my breath. I spent a month in Italy with Ann some years ago, and she wanted to visit the soaring cathedrals, to take a meditative moment in their quiet afternoon sanctuaries. To San Ciriaco in Ancona, San Lorenzo and San Pietro in Perugia, to tiny San Settimio in Jesi. And I tried. I tried to separate exploration from upbringing, experience from association. Tried to find the peace inside them, to remember how they were – along with everything else – a symbol of human ingenuity and imagination. But I could not, and I’d go and wait for her on the sidewalks outside.

So I told him this brief bit of my childhood and then I said to him, “I’m sorry, but I could never be Buddhist.” Even then. Even him. The minute I said this, I felt an instant shame that I could not rise above the treachery of my own past for this moment, not even in the presence of this man.

And he said to me: “It is as important to know what you are not, as what you are.”

I went on from that day and built my career covering more and more stories of terrible violence, of what we are capable of doing to one another, but also of what we can endure and survive. The forced sterilization story was the first in what would become a career covering horrific stories. I wrote about natural disasters like Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and the Asian Tsunami in Indonesia. Stood atop mounds of dried dirt that contained the remnants of lives: broken furniture and schoolbooks and sometimes bodies. I covered gang rape and homicide and violent trauma, a woman whose husband threw a blanket over her head and duct-taped her around the neck, a father who’d slit the throats of his children’s family pets, kids who lived in the Bucharest sewers deep underground. I spent an entire summer interviewing a man who’d killed his family with a barbell. I do not look at these stories as simply dark, but as possibilities for light to penetrate. Why do you cover what you cover, I am so often asked. My father has asked me. Other relatives. Friends. Audiences. Why, why, why.

Because I believe in the power and possibility of change, is what I say most often. Which is true. But what I don’t say and what is equally true is this: because I understand despair.

There is not a victim or perpetrator of any crime anywhere on this planet who does not understand despair. It travels beyond cultures, beyond languages and geographies, beyond class and economics.

I understood despair from losing my mother. I understood despair from living inside a proscribed doctrine that barred me from most of the world. I understood despair from raging and fighting, trying to eradicate my teenage self with drugs and alcohol so completely that I was booted first from high school, and then from my father’s house when I was sixteen. I lived in my car. I lived on friend’s couches. I slept with anyone who even bothered to glance at me. When James Baldwin wrote, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose,” I thought he was channeling a future me.

And then, one day, I was given a second chance, accepted to a college even though I only had a GED, and I built a life in which despair was not the overriding emotion, a life in which I did in fact have something to lose.

In 2003, I moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and stayed there for six years. And in those years, I’d listen as the monks wandered by asking for alms, or as they’d blare prayers into their tinny speakers for the deceased, or the married, or the ancestors. I’d watch as my neighbor, Ieng Sary, one of the architects of the Cambodian genocide who would later be put on trial, would back his Toyota Camry out of his gated house and go off into the city, and his neighbors – the former victims of his terrible crimes – would go about their tasks without even so much as a glance in his direction. How such dichotomies can exist side by side is something I would ponder for years – the victims and the criminals, the innocents and the executioners, how love and violence can coexist so easily. (“How could they forgive him?” I am always asked. My answer is, “Who says they did?”). I would come to understand that the pagoda wasn’t like the churches of my youth, where the world was kept at bay, but instead was like the heartbeat of the world, the fulcrum from which everything else emanated. I’d watch as my landlord’s family went to the pagoda on Pchum Ben to honor the dead with offerings, and Ieng Sary would go, too. I’d watch the pagoda come to my street and set up enormous tents for days on end, blocking traffic, in order to pay homage to the newly deceased with early morning prayers, and meals throughout the day. The pagoda would march down streets in ceremonies. The pagoda would bless marriages, children, families, new years. The pagoda was not something to believe in or not believe in the same way that evil and good exist without demanding our belief in them; instead the pagoda was like the tide, always there minute by minute, second by second, sometimes taking up your entire view, and sometimes simply, quietly in the background.

Several months after I gave birth to my daughter, I took her to a pagoda across the Sap River in Phnom Penh on the anniversary of my mother’s death. The pagoda was shaped like a golden boat. My Khmer was not fluent enough for me to talk about why I was there, on that October 7th, but I took three incense sticks from the woman sitting near the altar, and I folded some riel notes into her hand as payment, and I lit the incense and I bowed, pressing my hands to my forehead. I was not bowing to Buddha, or to God, or to any sentient being. I was bowing to the memory of a woman I barely knew and yet yearned for every day of my life, in the same way that the Dalai Lama had learned to live without his home country, but yearned for it all the same. I breathed in the incense while my husband held our infant daughter. The quiet in the afternoon heat felt like a shield. In the distance I could hear giggling children splashing in the river, the deep thunk of water buffalo bells, distant chattering in Khmer. I kneeled there, my forehead pressed to the cool tiles, for a long while, and when I righted myself, the woman nodded at me and I could see that she understood something.

Since that day, I have sometimes sought out pagodas. Once, in Korea, I had a writing conundrum I could not figure my way out of, and I went to a pagoda and I kneeled there trying to empty my mind, focus my frenetic thoughts, and my father – who happened to be with me (we were in Korea for my brother’s wedding) said, “What? Are you a Buddhist now?”

“No,” I told him. But I also could not say what I was. I am a believer. I believe in quiet. I believe in stillness. I believe in my own kind of messy, individual, disorganized religion. I do not like people by day – I am hermetic to an extreme – but I am the most connected socializer I know by night. “No,” I might have said to my father. “I am not a Buddhist. I am not a Christian. I am not a Jew. I am not a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Zoroastrian. I am nothing. I am everything.”

At the Korean pagoda, there was a monk who’d studied for some years in Michigan and I spoke with him, told him I was wrestling with a problem. I recounted some of my time in Cambodia, and how I loved the quiet of an afternoon in a pagoda. I asked him if he had any advice. “I do not know the specifics of your problem,” he said, “but I can say that it is best to never put yourself in a position where you have only two possible outcomes.”

It was, in fact, perhaps the greatest piece of advice I have ever gotten.

Another way to say, there is always a third path.

What might I say to the Dalai Lama today? I am still not Buddhist. But I believe in Buddhism, and I do not find this paradoxical. I have thought often of the violence he has endured as a human, and a leader, and the violence I have covered as a journalist. Thought of what we’ve survived, all of us, the great chaotic mass of us, how I think he would understand if I told him the criminals, the perpetrators of violence need to be heard as much as the victims, maybe more since so few people are interested in what they have to say. And how this very attitude, I believe, was planted in me that afternoon in 1998, when the Dalai Lama answered my question on what exactly he thought of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.  

“You Americans,” he said. “Always concerned over such minor matters.”

Because after that day, I have tried very hard to not concern myself with minor matters. Have tried to take risks, to listen to the stories of those who often don’t get a chance to speak, to create a life in which I have something – quite a lot, in fact – to lose.

I am not Buddhist, I would say to him again, even now, 18 years later.

I am not Buddhist. I’d say it without shame.

I am not Buddhist.

I am not —

I am –

I.

And he would understand.

 

Rachel Louise Snyder’s work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times magazine. Her books include Fugitive Denim and the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing and she teaches journalism and creative writing at American University in Washington, DC.Eighteen years ago, I interviewed the Dalai Lama on the very morning that every news outlet on the planet ran the story of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. It made headlines from the New York Times to the Hindustan Times, where I was camped out in Dharamsala, India at what felt like an upscale hotel to me at the time, hovering as I was between the backpacker I’d been in my 20s and the 30-year-old who had recently taken a liking to private hot showers.

The night before my interview I did not yet know about Clinton and Lewinsky – nor, presumably, did His Holiness. I had been on a journey of all things Tibetan for two months, going from the refugee center outside of Kathmandu where newly arrived refugees stay until they are healthy enough to move to Dharamsala (many suffer frostbite so severe during their month-long walk that they lose limbs or skin. Many, in fact, lose their lives). From Kathmandu we flew to Lhasa. One afternoon, we saw a Tibetan man beaten on his calves with a white stick by a police officer, as several other officers watched. When they spied us gaping, they dragged him out of sight around a corner.

We’d planned to drive from Lhasa back to Nepal – a five-day journey on a single road by four wheel drive at the time – but three days into the drive we learned heavy rains had washed out huge chunks of the road when we nearly drove directly into a mountain of mud with chunks of road the size of boulders. We sat there for several hours as if some well-stocked construction crew might happen by out there in the middle of the stark, uninhabited mountains of western Tibet. Finally, our driver put the car in reverse and went backwards down the curvy mountain road for a good twenty or thirty minutes while we white-knuckled the dashboard and held our breath; after a while he was able to turn the car around properly and head back toward Lhasa, where we managed to fly back to Kathmandu, and then on to Dharamsala. By the time we arrived– weeks behind schedule – the Dalai Lama had just returned from a Portugal trip, which was a stroke of pure dumb luck on our part.

So I wrote him a note. Like a high school kid. A harried scribble on notebook paper in green pen, asking for an interview. This detail stays with me because of its informality, its utter lack of pretension, yes, but also its blatant amateurism. I was a freelancer and had done very few notable stories yet. This trip would mark a turning point in my career, not only because a call at my hotel later that afternoon granted me the interview, but also because I managed to report on my most difficult story to date: the forced sterilizations of Tibetan women.

The day of the interview, I woke early. The cleanest clothes I had in my olive green backpack included a black and white fish sarong, trekker sandals, and an orange “Life is Good” t-shirt. Slid under the hotel door was that day’s Hindustan Times, where a bold headline declared “Clinton Admits to Improper Relationship.” My heart dropped. Please don’t let the Dalai Lama read this headline, I prayed. (I feared he’d cancel the interview for some reason, put all Americans in some sort of immoral zone of no conduct). We arrived an hour early to go through security, which involved two sets of metal detectors, a bag check, and a pat down behind a curtained off corner of the room, where a Tibetan woman asked us a series of security questions. Where had we traveled and why, where had we stayed and for how long? Already, the afternoon before, I’d been summoned to the monastery where I had to submit my questions in advance to his secretaries, who then said to limit myself to two questions given their boss’s penchant for verbosity (his answers were “very thorough” is how it was put to me. Ever the vigilant journalist, I came prepared with three).  

By the time I was led to the where the Dalai Lama stood flanked by his two secretaries, my body shook from nerves. What had I gotten myself into? I wasn’t Connie Chung, arriving with her gear, her entourage. I was a nobody, walking up in trekkers beside a photographer, who also happened to be my best friend, Ann — equally underdressed for the occasion in hiking pants, a gray t-shirt, and boots. My prepared questions covered Pakistan and India’s nuclear testing, and President Clinton’s visit to Beijing, both of which had happened earlier that summer. And both things, if I’m honest, I couldn’t have cared less about (except in a purely existential sense – as in, please let’s not nuke each other). What I really wondered – what Ann and I had stayed up late discussing, and what I later wrote about for Salon – was whether the Dalai Lama was a great man because he embodied greatness organically, or whether he was a great man because so many people elevated him to this.

Much of what surprised me about Dalai Lama I’ve long since written. How he was taller than I expected – maybe 5’9. How he was gruff initially, and yanked me by the hand so hard into the interviewing room that there were indentations from my own knuckles. How I’d mumbled through my first question about nuclear testing, and he’d given some rehearsed this or that answer which totally escapes me today. And how, by the time I got to my second question, ten minutes in, I was shaking so visibly I could hear my paper rattling, and my voice tremor. “Clinton,” I began, “I have to ask you…”

“Oh,” he leaned forward suddenly, gave me a half nod, and whispered, “you mean L-E-W-I-N-S-K-Y?”

It stopped me cold. By that time of the morning, I’d forgotten entirely about the foibles of my president. The Dalai Lama brought me back so abruptly that I yelped – unfortunately, I know this because I have it on tape. A clear unequivocal yelp. The irony was immediate: I’m interviewing the world’s most famously celibate man while discussing the world’s most famously unfaithful. The cigar. The blue dress. It all came to me in a rush, and I immediately diverted the question of Clinton’s visit to China entirely. “Now that you mention it,” I began, and we began to howl with laughter. We laughed even harder when I offered up a lame apology “on behalf of my president and of the American people.” Really. I said this. My president and the American people. As if I was some sort of moral ambassador.

The Clinton/Lewinsky affair feels almost quaint, now, given today’s political vitriol. In an age of terrorism, of ISIS, of toxic divisiveness, of severe economic disparity, of failing unions and wars on women, of police shootings of young Black men, of Boko Haram and floods of refugees, what in the hell does anyone care about a blow job?

The Lewinsky/Clinton affair broke the ice with the Dalai Lama. Suddenly, we were laughing, talking like old pals. I wrote about how he thought Americans were both smart and spoiled, about how he’d looked at me, after a time, and asked me about Tibet and how it was only then, nearly an hour into our talk, that I realized why I’d been granted this interview at all. I was one of the few journalists who met him having just days earlier come from the place he yearned to return. I hadn’t been given an interview with the Dalai Lama; the Dalai Lama had wanted an interview with me.

I told him what I’d seen. That the monks carry thumb-sized pictures of him tucked in their robes. That the Chinese military do maneuvers at dawn outside his old winter palace, the Potala. That the mountains still look like giant cloth napkins, draped from the sky. That the lakes and rivers glittered like sequins in a way I’d never seen. How yak butter tea was the most vile thing I’d ever tasted.  he gave me a coin when we finished, from a trunk of Tibetan money he’d escaped with in 1959 and which hadn’t been in circulation since. Much of this I’ve told and retold, written and rewritten.

He asked me about my religion, and I told him my mother had been Jewish, but died when I was eight, and my father had been an Evangelical Christian who raised us in a house so severe, so rigid in its rules and its admonitions – no secular music, no secular television, no secular books, church three times a week, private Christian school – that it had turned me off to any kind of formal religion, a fact which still holds true today. I cannot enter a church without physically recoiling, without feeling it as a clench in my abdomen, a shortening of my breath. I spent a month in Italy with Ann some years ago, and she wanted to visit the soaring cathedrals, to take a meditative moment in their quiet afternoon sanctuaries. To San Ciriaco in Ancona, San Lorenzo and San Pietro in Perugia, to tiny San Settimio in Jesi. And I tried. I tried to separate exploration from upbringing, experience from association. Tried to find the peace inside them, to remember how they were – along with everything else – a symbol of human ingenuity and imagination. But I could not, and I’d go and wait for her on the sidewalks outside.

So I told him this brief bit of my childhood and then I said to him, “I’m sorry, but I could never be Buddhist.” Even then. Even him. The minute I said this, I felt an instant shame that I could not rise above the treachery of my own past for this moment, not even in the presence of this man.

And he said to me: “It is as important to know what you are not, as what you are.”

I went on from that day and built my career covering more and more stories of terrible violence, of what we are capable of doing to one another, but also of what we can endure and survive. The forced sterilization story was the first in what would become a career covering horrific stories. I wrote about natural disasters like Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and the Asian Tsunami in Indonesia. Stood atop mounds of dried dirt that contained the remnants of lives: broken furniture and schoolbooks and sometimes bodies. I covered gang rape and homicide and violent trauma, a woman whose husband threw a blanket over her head and duct-taped her around the neck, a father who’d slit the throats of his children’s family pets, kids who lived in the Bucharest sewers deep underground. I spent an entire summer interviewing a man who’d killed his family with a barbell. I do not look at these stories as simply dark, but as possibilities for light to penetrate. Why do you cover what you cover, I am so often asked. My father has asked me. Other relatives. Friends. Audiences. Why, why, why.

Because I believe in the power and possibility of change, is what I say most often. Which is true. But what I don’t say and what is equally true is this: because I understand despair.

There is not a victim or perpetrator of any crime anywhere on this planet who does not understand despair. It travels beyond cultures, beyond languages and geographies, beyond class and economics.

I understood despair from losing my mother. I understood despair from living inside a proscribed doctrine that barred me from most of the world. I understood despair from raging and fighting, trying to eradicate my teenage self with drugs and alcohol so completely that I was booted first from high school, and then from my father’s house when I was sixteen. I lived in my car. I lived on friend’s couches. I slept with anyone who even bothered to glance at me. When James Baldwin wrote, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose,” I thought he was channeling a future me.

And then, one day, I was given a second chance, accepted to a college even though I only had a GED, and I built a life in which despair was not the overriding emotion, a life in which I did in fact have something to lose.

In 2003, I moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and stayed there for six years. And in those years, I’d listen as the monks wandered by asking for alms, or as they’d blare prayers into their tinny speakers for the deceased, or the married, or the ancestors. I’d watch as my neighbor, Ieng Sary, one of the architects of the Cambodian genocide who would later be put on trial, would back his Toyota Camry out of his gated house and go off into the city, and his neighbors – the former victims of his terrible crimes – would go about their tasks without even so much as a glance in his direction. How such dichotomies can exist side by side is something I would ponder for years – the victims and the criminals, the innocents and the executioners, how love and violence can coexist so easily. (“How could they forgive him?” I am always asked. My answer is, “Who says they did?”). I would come to understand that the pagoda wasn’t like the churches of my youth, where the world was kept at bay, but instead was like the heartbeat of the world, the fulcrum from which everything else emanated. I’d watch as my landlord’s family went to the pagoda on Pchum Ben to honor the dead with offerings, and Ieng Sary would go, too. I’d watch the pagoda come to my street and set up enormous tents for days on end, blocking traffic, in order to pay homage to the newly deceased with early morning prayers, and meals throughout the day. The pagoda would march down streets in ceremonies. The pagoda would bless marriages, children, families, new years. The pagoda was not something to believe in or not believe in the same way that evil and good exist without demanding our belief in them; instead the pagoda was like the tide, always there minute by minute, second by second, sometimes taking up your entire view, and sometimes simply, quietly in the background.

Several months after I gave birth to my daughter, I took her to a pagoda across the Sap River in Phnom Penh on the anniversary of my mother’s death. The pagoda was shaped like a golden boat. My Khmer was not fluent enough for me to talk about why I was there, on that October 7th, but I took three incense sticks from the woman sitting near the altar, and I folded some riel notes into her hand as payment, and I lit the incense and I bowed, pressing my hands to my forehead. I was not bowing to Buddha, or to God, or to any sentient being. I was bowing to the memory of a woman I barely knew and yet yearned for every day of my life, in the same way that the Dalai Lama had learned to live without his home country, but yearned for it all the same. I breathed in the incense while my husband held our infant daughter. The quiet in the afternoon heat felt like a shield. In the distance I could hear giggling children splashing in the river, the deep thunk of water buffalo bells, distant chattering in Khmer. I kneeled there, my forehead pressed to the cool tiles, for a long while, and when I righted myself, the woman nodded at me and I could see that she understood something.

Since that day, I have sometimes sought out pagodas. Once, in Korea, I had a writing conundrum I could not figure my way out of, and I went to a pagoda and I kneeled there trying to empty my mind, focus my frenetic thoughts, and my father – who happened to be with me (we were in Korea for my brother’s wedding) said, “What? Are you a Buddhist now?”

“No,” I told him. But I also could not say what I was. I am a believer. I believe in quiet. I believe in stillness. I believe in my own kind of messy, individual, disorganized religion. I do not like people by day – I am hermetic to an extreme – but I am the most connected socializer I know by night. “No,” I might have said to my father. “I am not a Buddhist. I am not a Christian. I am not a Jew. I am not a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Zoroastrian. I am nothing. I am everything.”

At the Korean pagoda, there was a monk who’d studied for some years in Michigan and I spoke with him, told him I was wrestling with a problem. I recounted some of my time in Cambodia, and how I loved the quiet of an afternoon in a pagoda. I asked him if he had any advice. “I do not know the specifics of your problem,” he said, “but I can say that it is best to never put yourself in a position where you have only two possible outcomes.”

It was, in fact, perhaps the greatest piece of advice I have ever gotten.

Another way to say, there is always a third path.

What might I say to the Dalai Lama today? I am still not Buddhist. But I believe in Buddhism, and I do not find this paradoxical. I have thought often of the violence he has endured as a human, and a leader, and the violence I have covered as a journalist. Thought of what we’ve survived, all of us, the great chaotic mass of us, how I think he would understand if I told him the criminals, the perpetrators of violence need to be heard as much as the victims, maybe more since so few people are interested in what they have to say. And how this very attitude, I believe, was planted in me that afternoon in 1998, when the Dalai Lama answered my question on what exactly he thought of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.  

“You Americans,” he said. “Always concerned over such minor matters.”

Because after that day, I have tried very hard to not concern myself with minor matters. Have tried to take risks, to listen to the stories of those who often don’t get a chance to speak, to create a life in which I have something – quite a lot, in fact – to lose.

I am not Buddhist, I would say to him again, even now, 18 years later.

I am not Buddhist. I’d say it without shame.

I am not Buddhist.

I am not —

I am –

I.

And he would understand.

 

Rachel Louise Snyder’s work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times magazine. Her books include Fugitive Denim and the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing and she teaches journalism and creative writing at American University in Washington, DC.

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“The worst thing that can happen is that friends disappear”: Love, loss, and the unappreciated art of checking in

A year ago this March, when I found out that my friend Lisa had died, my first instinct on that cold black night was to text her: Are you ok? Thinking about you. Will check in again tomorrow. Because as ridiculous as that sounds, that was the habit of our relationship: Checking in on each other, by text, was what we did.

It’s what she did with everyone.

Lisa Bonchek Adams — 45, a mother of three and a prolific and well-known blogger and tweeter on metastatic breast cancer — had spent years checking in on her vast universe of friends and fans, countless stars blinking their sad struggles. Checking in — that familial, maternal, intimate act of knowing enough about the minutiae of someone else’s daily life to be able to ask about it — was Lisa’s signature act, and became, to those of us lucky enough to be checked on regularly by her, her legacy. Cancer may have been the demise of her DNA, but emotional connection was in every molecule of its complex spiral. To her, illness — including emotional struggle of any kind — was a lonely parallel universe from which muted awkward friends retreat, but Lisa proved that where medicine failed and fear prevailed, checking in and staying in touch could make all the difference. Sickness and dying might sometimes be inevitable, but isolation didn’t have to be.

This was news to me.

When I first joined Twitter in 2009, Lisa found me through my novels and my blog about my own experience with breast cancer. We became Twitter friends, and after a trip brought her to Boston, where I live, we became actual friends. Perfect timing. Months later, when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I retreated, but Lisa didn’t: she emailed and texted to ask about test results, procedures, treatments. What did the biopsy show? Did the chemo-port insertion go smoothly? Was her pain being managed? How was my young son handling it? Was there anything I needed? Was there something she could do? I answered her from waiting rooms, hospital cafeterias, from my bed late at night after long days gutted by bad news, sometimes in short bursts; other times in lengthy threads. Proof that Lisa’s method worked lies in the fact that years later, much of what I remember most from that terrible time besides my mother’s steady and awful decline was Lisa:

Checking in. Always, always checking in.

Until Lisa, I’d resisted check-ins. I’d had a complicated relationship with my mother whose check-in calls when I was young and single and living in New York, though undoubtedly well-meaning, always felt intrusive, judgmental, and disapproving. Later, after I’d published books, married, had a son, and moved home to where my parents still lived, the seams of my life started to unravel, and I continued to avoid my mother’s calls and those of well-intentioned friends, too. I didn’t want to be checked on; I didn’t want to have to explain my depression, or my husband’s; I didn’t want to have to catalogue my latest career disappointments or financial concerns. Checking out seemed infinitely easier instead of consistently checking in and exposing myself to criticism and judgment, real or imagined. It was also much lonelier.

But illness changes everything.

On my phone I still have five saved check-in messages my mother left me after she got sick. In each, her voice is just a little softer, a little gentler, a little weaker. As she was dying, her check-ins got warmer and sweeter. I’ve saved them — from Blackberry to iPhone, miraculously — for almost six years, and while I can’t bring myself to listen to them, knowing they’re there gives me immeasurable comfort. It’s an irony that isn’t lost on me.

Another irony that isn’t lost on me: Despite everything Lisa taught me about the simple grace of checking in, I sometimes found it difficult to consistently stay in touch with her when all the treatments she tried, every last one of them, stopped working and her cancer overtook her with a vengeance. My emails and texts slowed, not because I’d stopped thinking about her — I thought about her almost constantly, in fact — but because I’d run out of things to say. “The worst thing that can happen is that friends disappear,” Lisa wrote in one of her most popular posts, and yet that is what almost always happens when all hope seems lost: fear of saying the wrong thing and fear itself — of sickness and loss, of emotional agony, of life gone awry — makes us go mute when friends who are suffering need us the most.

So what can we do when words fail? How can we try to help the ones we love through physical illness and emotional distress? We can start by starting small:

We can check in on each other, with a rhythm of regularity and consistency. 

We can talk less and listen more. 

We can try our hardest not to disappear. 

And when we fail, which we will, because we’re human and struggling, too, we can try again. 

We must always try again.

The night Lisa died I instantly checked in on a mutual friend in Vermont. As our messages fired back and forth, we decided the best way we could honor her life and process our grief was to prove that we’d learned her biggest lesson. We agreed that we would check in with each other more, even when we were busy and especially when every cell in our private, isolation-loving beings was telling us to hide, to disappear, to retreat. And we have. Every week or two since then one of us sends the other an email, subject line: Checking in! And every time we do, we think of Lisa.

Because she taught us all how to be better and more caring friends to each other, and how to feel less alone in the world, one tiny check-in at a time.

A year ago this March, when I found out that my friend Lisa had died, my first instinct on that cold black night was to text her: Are you ok? Thinking about you. Will check in again tomorrow. Because as ridiculous as that sounds, that was the habit of our relationship: Checking in on each other, by text, was what we did.

It’s what she did with everyone.

Lisa Bonchek Adams — 45, a mother of three and a prolific and well-known blogger and tweeter on metastatic breast cancer — had spent years checking in on her vast universe of friends and fans, countless stars blinking their sad struggles. Checking in — that familial, maternal, intimate act of knowing enough about the minutiae of someone else’s daily life to be able to ask about it — was Lisa’s signature act, and became, to those of us lucky enough to be checked on regularly by her, her legacy. Cancer may have been the demise of her DNA, but emotional connection was in every molecule of its complex spiral. To her, illness — including emotional struggle of any kind — was a lonely parallel universe from which muted awkward friends retreat, but Lisa proved that where medicine failed and fear prevailed, checking in and staying in touch could make all the difference. Sickness and dying might sometimes be inevitable, but isolation didn’t have to be.

This was news to me.

When I first joined Twitter in 2009, Lisa found me through my novels and my blog about my own experience with breast cancer. We became Twitter friends, and after a trip brought her to Boston, where I live, we became actual friends. Perfect timing. Months later, when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I retreated, but Lisa didn’t: she emailed and texted to ask about test results, procedures, treatments. What did the biopsy show? Did the chemo-port insertion go smoothly? Was her pain being managed? How was my young son handling it? Was there anything I needed? Was there something she could do? I answered her from waiting rooms, hospital cafeterias, from my bed late at night after long days gutted by bad news, sometimes in short bursts; other times in lengthy threads. Proof that Lisa’s method worked lies in the fact that years later, much of what I remember most from that terrible time besides my mother’s steady and awful decline was Lisa:

Checking in. Always, always checking in.

Until Lisa, I’d resisted check-ins. I’d had a complicated relationship with my mother whose check-in calls when I was young and single and living in New York, though undoubtedly well-meaning, always felt intrusive, judgmental, and disapproving. Later, after I’d published books, married, had a son, and moved home to where my parents still lived, the seams of my life started to unravel, and I continued to avoid my mother’s calls and those of well-intentioned friends, too. I didn’t want to be checked on; I didn’t want to have to explain my depression, or my husband’s; I didn’t want to have to catalogue my latest career disappointments or financial concerns. Checking out seemed infinitely easier instead of consistently checking in and exposing myself to criticism and judgment, real or imagined. It was also much lonelier.

But illness changes everything.

On my phone I still have five saved check-in messages my mother left me after she got sick. In each, her voice is just a little softer, a little gentler, a little weaker. As she was dying, her check-ins got warmer and sweeter. I’ve saved them — from Blackberry to iPhone, miraculously — for almost six years, and while I can’t bring myself to listen to them, knowing they’re there gives me immeasurable comfort. It’s an irony that isn’t lost on me.

Another irony that isn’t lost on me: Despite everything Lisa taught me about the simple grace of checking in, I sometimes found it difficult to consistently stay in touch with her when all the treatments she tried, every last one of them, stopped working and her cancer overtook her with a vengeance. My emails and texts slowed, not because I’d stopped thinking about her — I thought about her almost constantly, in fact — but because I’d run out of things to say. “The worst thing that can happen is that friends disappear,” Lisa wrote in one of her most popular posts, and yet that is what almost always happens when all hope seems lost: fear of saying the wrong thing and fear itself — of sickness and loss, of emotional agony, of life gone awry — makes us go mute when friends who are suffering need us the most.

So what can we do when words fail? How can we try to help the ones we love through physical illness and emotional distress? We can start by starting small:

We can check in on each other, with a rhythm of regularity and consistency. 

We can talk less and listen more. 

We can try our hardest not to disappear. 

And when we fail, which we will, because we’re human and struggling, too, we can try again. 

We must always try again.

The night Lisa died I instantly checked in on a mutual friend in Vermont. As our messages fired back and forth, we decided the best way we could honor her life and process our grief was to prove that we’d learned her biggest lesson. We agreed that we would check in with each other more, even when we were busy and especially when every cell in our private, isolation-loving beings was telling us to hide, to disappear, to retreat. And we have. Every week or two since then one of us sends the other an email, subject line: Checking in! And every time we do, we think of Lisa.

Because she taught us all how to be better and more caring friends to each other, and how to feel less alone in the world, one tiny check-in at a time.

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Not anyone’s “crazy bitch”: Smashing the “Fatal Attraction” clichés of the “female breakdown”

On their self-titled debut album, the Seattle queer electroclash band, Le Tigre, debates the merits of John Cassavetes. Singing in unison, the band chants: “We've talked about it in letters/And we've talked about it on the phone/But how you really feel about it/I don't really know.” Is Cassavetes a misogynist, genius, alcoholic, or messiah? Or is he all of the above?

The tune is an overt response to the great director’s “A Woman Under the Influence,” the powerful 1974 drama starring his wife, Gena Rowlands, as a Los Angeles housewife, Mabel, who begins to behave in bizarre, irrational ways. To resolve the issue, her husband, Nick (Peter Falk), commits her to a mental institution. It doesn’t help. Mabel returns as volatile and suicidal as when she left, even as her husband insists on normalcy. “Normal conversation,” he scolds Mabel during a breakdown.  “I don't know how to make it,” she confesses. “At the hospital, they come in every morning and give you a shot.”

Although John Cassavetes’ film is one of the most emotionally wrenching depictions of mental illness ever committed to celluloid, the trouble is its perspective. “A Woman Under the Influence” views its subject not as a breathing, living human than a moth pinned to a board—on display to be viewed. It’s Nick who serves as the closest thing to a surrogate for the audience as Cassavetes slowly tears off her wings.

This is a trait shared by the later Danish auteur of female misery, Lars von Trier. In films like “Dancer in the Dark,” “Breaking the Waves,” “Melancholia,” and “Antichrist,” the director heaps unimaginable tragedy onto his subjects in order to push them to extremes of suffering. In “Antichrist,” a couple (played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) lose their newborn baby, who falls to his death. Von Trier, however, is seemingly uninterested in his pain, staging her descent into madness as a violent rampage. During the film’s most infamous scene, the woman—who is unnamed—makes it very difficult for her partner to ever have another child. (Google it, if you must.)

These directors rip women apart to examine their insides, but movies about the “female breakdown” are rarely invested in the woman’s internal emotional journey. Perhaps the most famous example is “Fatal Attraction,” which is a very different film if told from the woman’s point of view.

Let’s try it: Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) is a high-powered editor at a publishing company. Wealthy, beautiful, and successful, she meets a man, Dan (Michael Douglas), with whom she has a passionate, tumultuous affair. (She’s got her own emotional baggage, after all.) Alex gets pregnant, but there’s a problem: He’s married. Terrified that this might be her last shot at motherhood (she’s nearing her 40s), Alex decides to keep the child. Dan is unsupportive of her decision and repeatedly tries to avoid communication with her or responsibility for the situation. After Alex has a protracted meltdown, Dan later kills her.

This is a selective reading, of course, but so is the movie Adrian Lyne actually made: one that views women as “crazy bitches” (or as “Wayne’s World” would later put it, “psycho hose beasts”) determined to blackmail you or murder your rabbit. These women do not have rich inner lives or lives at all. After all, a bug doesn’t have interiority. It waits to be squashed.

***

Why do people sing in musicals? As the old saying goes, characters break out into song when they have emotions that are too grand to express through dialogue, ones that otherwise that might not have the words to share.

In the CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which just wrapped its second season, its sparkling numbers offer a portal into the brain of Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom). After she single-handedly wrecks her chance of happiness with Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), the childhood sweetheart whom she moved across the country to be with, Rebecca sulks in her apartment, literally cleaning up the mess she’s made. To underscore the moment, she sings “You Stupid Bitch” in a fantasy sequence. “It’s so wonderful to be back here, even though I’m here singing this song a lot,” Rebecca says to an imaginary audience.

The song itself is an internal monologue of self-loathing and self-pity, filled with the sorts of painful, raw observations accrued from absorbing a lifetime of listening to what others say about you. While calling herself a “poopy little slut who doesn’t think and deceives the people she loves,” Rebecca looks into her own black void: “Yes, Josh completes me, but how can that be if there’s no me left to complete?”

The show’s title recalls “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” the Ivan Reitman film in which a clingy superheroine (Uma Thurman) wreaks havoc on the life of the guy who dumped her (Luke Wilson). What’s important about the CW program, however, is that it drops the possessive. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is firmly grounded in Rebecca’s own perspective, rather than viewing her through the male gaze or treating her as a trope. If feminist critic Susan Faludi once argued in her seminal 1991 book, “Backlash,” that films like “Fatal Attraction” framed women’s lives “as morality tales” for men, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is finally about Rebecca’s own flawed, treacherous journey.

Rebecca is less a “crazy bitch” in the Adrian Lyne sense of the term than a type the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum once classified in her “Hummingbird Theory.” Embodied by characters like Sue (Eden Sher) in “The Middle” and Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) from the great, underloved “Enlightened,” the hummingbird is both relentlessly optimistic and provokes a certain sense of anxiety. “[Amy] makes viewers, and everyone who meets her, wildly uncomfortable: Amy’s inner vision of herself as a chill New Age seeker is rarely matched by her outward appearance,” Nussbaum writes. “She’s needy, she’s manipulative, she’s passive-aggressive.”

“Enlightened” depicts Amy as constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the pilot, Amy has her Gena Rowlands moment: She’s been demoted at work after her fellow employees learn of her alcoholism and a lengthy streak of bad behavior—including an affair with her married boss. Amy shatters spectacularly, just as the shelves coming crashing down inside her. She’s subsequently fired and goes on a holistic retreat to deal with her anger management issues. After reintegrating into her old life two months later, Amy finds healing to be more of a struggle than she bargained for. Despite her goals, she always appears one or two negative plot developments away from another mental break.

If the Washington Post’s Harris O’Malley once argued that words like “crazy” are used to “shame women into compliance,” such outbursts of emotion are often used to stigmatize female characters. To impress her old flame, Rebecca rents a party bus, where she has a stripper-pole-induced meltdown in front of all his friends. In “Fatal Attraction,” such behavior would make her an untouchable. But when given agency and dramatic depth, these women become something truer—fragile things that relentlessly beat their wings, trying to take flight.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), the central figure in Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult,” isn’t the optimist either of these women are—at least, not in any conventional way. Mavis is a children’s book author and one-time prom queen determined to win back her high school love, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), at any costs. She’s blunt to the point of ruthlessness. In one scene, an old classmate (Patton Oswalt) explains that there’s a hole in Mavis’ plan: Her ex-beau is married with a kid on the way. “The kid’s here,” Mavis responds. “She had the baby. I don’t care though. I have baggage, too.” When Buddy informs her of the same, Mavis is still undeterred. “I know, we can beat this thing together!” she exclaims.

Mavis is the kind of character who begs for an armchair diagnosis. Clearly there’s something going on. In Roger Ebert’s review of “Young Adult,” he referred to her as an alcoholic. By her own admission, she’s a depressive. In a memorable exchange, Buddy’s wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), explains that she often uses a feelings chart on the special needs students with whom she works. “What about neutral?” Mavis responds. “What if you don’t feel anything?” If Cassavetes’ women were hysterical, Mavis’ breakdown is quieter and more complicated.

But what’s so refreshing about pop culture’s wave of women in emotional crisis is that they defy easy characterization. As the Huffington Post’s Emma Gray points out, it’s very probable that Rebecca Bunch has a mental illness—and the show seems to point toward a history of clinical depression. In the pilot, Rebecca pours a bottle of pills down the drain, and she spends a great deal of the first season avoiding her reluctant therapist, Dr. Akopian (Michael Hyatt). “But she’s also intelligent, funny, professionally competent, flirtatious, goofy, charming and brave,” Gray writes. “Basically, she’s a human being.” She might be damaged and messy, but she’s also deeply relatable.

That’s the thing about women like Rebecca, Mavis, and Amy: We’ve been so interested in trying to pin them down that we haven’t ever given them a chance to fly.On their self-titled debut album, the Seattle queer electroclash band, Le Tigre, debates the merits of John Cassavetes. Singing in unison, the band chants: “We've talked about it in letters/And we've talked about it on the phone/But how you really feel about it/I don't really know.” Is Cassavetes a misogynist, genius, alcoholic, or messiah? Or is he all of the above?

The tune is an overt response to the great director’s “A Woman Under the Influence,” the powerful 1974 drama starring his wife, Gena Rowlands, as a Los Angeles housewife, Mabel, who begins to behave in bizarre, irrational ways. To resolve the issue, her husband, Nick (Peter Falk), commits her to a mental institution. It doesn’t help. Mabel returns as volatile and suicidal as when she left, even as her husband insists on normalcy. “Normal conversation,” he scolds Mabel during a breakdown.  “I don't know how to make it,” she confesses. “At the hospital, they come in every morning and give you a shot.”

Although John Cassavetes’ film is one of the most emotionally wrenching depictions of mental illness ever committed to celluloid, the trouble is its perspective. “A Woman Under the Influence” views its subject not as a breathing, living human than a moth pinned to a board—on display to be viewed. It’s Nick who serves as the closest thing to a surrogate for the audience as Cassavetes slowly tears off her wings.

This is a trait shared by the later Danish auteur of female misery, Lars von Trier. In films like “Dancer in the Dark,” “Breaking the Waves,” “Melancholia,” and “Antichrist,” the director heaps unimaginable tragedy onto his subjects in order to push them to extremes of suffering. In “Antichrist,” a couple (played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) lose their newborn baby, who falls to his death. Von Trier, however, is seemingly uninterested in his pain, staging her descent into madness as a violent rampage. During the film’s most infamous scene, the woman—who is unnamed—makes it very difficult for her partner to ever have another child. (Google it, if you must.)

These directors rip women apart to examine their insides, but movies about the “female breakdown” are rarely invested in the woman’s internal emotional journey. Perhaps the most famous example is “Fatal Attraction,” which is a very different film if told from the woman’s point of view.

Let’s try it: Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) is a high-powered editor at a publishing company. Wealthy, beautiful, and successful, she meets a man, Dan (Michael Douglas), with whom she has a passionate, tumultuous affair. (She’s got her own emotional baggage, after all.) Alex gets pregnant, but there’s a problem: He’s married. Terrified that this might be her last shot at motherhood (she’s nearing her 40s), Alex decides to keep the child. Dan is unsupportive of her decision and repeatedly tries to avoid communication with her or responsibility for the situation. After Alex has a protracted meltdown, Dan later kills her.

This is a selective reading, of course, but so is the movie Adrian Lyne actually made: one that views women as “crazy bitches” (or as “Wayne’s World” would later put it, “psycho hose beasts”) determined to blackmail you or murder your rabbit. These women do not have rich inner lives or lives at all. After all, a bug doesn’t have interiority. It waits to be squashed.

***

Why do people sing in musicals? As the old saying goes, characters break out into song when they have emotions that are too grand to express through dialogue, ones that otherwise that might not have the words to share.

In the CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which just wrapped its second season, its sparkling numbers offer a portal into the brain of Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom). After she single-handedly wrecks her chance of happiness with Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III), the childhood sweetheart whom she moved across the country to be with, Rebecca sulks in her apartment, literally cleaning up the mess she’s made. To underscore the moment, she sings “You Stupid Bitch” in a fantasy sequence. “It’s so wonderful to be back here, even though I’m here singing this song a lot,” Rebecca says to an imaginary audience.

The song itself is an internal monologue of self-loathing and self-pity, filled with the sorts of painful, raw observations accrued from absorbing a lifetime of listening to what others say about you. While calling herself a “poopy little slut who doesn’t think and deceives the people she loves,” Rebecca looks into her own black void: “Yes, Josh completes me, but how can that be if there’s no me left to complete?”

The show’s title recalls “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” the Ivan Reitman film in which a clingy superheroine (Uma Thurman) wreaks havoc on the life of the guy who dumped her (Luke Wilson). What’s important about the CW program, however, is that it drops the possessive. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is firmly grounded in Rebecca’s own perspective, rather than viewing her through the male gaze or treating her as a trope. If feminist critic Susan Faludi once argued in her seminal 1991 book, “Backlash,” that films like “Fatal Attraction” framed women’s lives “as morality tales” for men, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is finally about Rebecca’s own flawed, treacherous journey.

Rebecca is less a “crazy bitch” in the Adrian Lyne sense of the term than a type the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum once classified in her “Hummingbird Theory.” Embodied by characters like Sue (Eden Sher) in “The Middle” and Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) from the great, underloved “Enlightened,” the hummingbird is both relentlessly optimistic and provokes a certain sense of anxiety. “[Amy] makes viewers, and everyone who meets her, wildly uncomfortable: Amy’s inner vision of herself as a chill New Age seeker is rarely matched by her outward appearance,” Nussbaum writes. “She’s needy, she’s manipulative, she’s passive-aggressive.”

“Enlightened” depicts Amy as constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the pilot, Amy has her Gena Rowlands moment: She’s been demoted at work after her fellow employees learn of her alcoholism and a lengthy streak of bad behavior—including an affair with her married boss. Amy shatters spectacularly, just as the shelves coming crashing down inside her. She’s subsequently fired and goes on a holistic retreat to deal with her anger management issues. After reintegrating into her old life two months later, Amy finds healing to be more of a struggle than she bargained for. Despite her goals, she always appears one or two negative plot developments away from another mental break.

If the Washington Post’s Harris O’Malley once argued that words like “crazy” are used to “shame women into compliance,” such outbursts of emotion are often used to stigmatize female characters. To impress her old flame, Rebecca rents a party bus, where she has a stripper-pole-induced meltdown in front of all his friends. In “Fatal Attraction,” such behavior would make her an untouchable. But when given agency and dramatic depth, these women become something truer—fragile things that relentlessly beat their wings, trying to take flight.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), the central figure in Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult,” isn’t the optimist either of these women are—at least, not in any conventional way. Mavis is a children’s book author and one-time prom queen determined to win back her high school love, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), at any costs. She’s blunt to the point of ruthlessness. In one scene, an old classmate (Patton Oswalt) explains that there’s a hole in Mavis’ plan: Her ex-beau is married with a kid on the way. “The kid’s here,” Mavis responds. “She had the baby. I don’t care though. I have baggage, too.” When Buddy informs her of the same, Mavis is still undeterred. “I know, we can beat this thing together!” she exclaims.

Mavis is the kind of character who begs for an armchair diagnosis. Clearly there’s something going on. In Roger Ebert’s review of “Young Adult,” he referred to her as an alcoholic. By her own admission, she’s a depressive. In a memorable exchange, Buddy’s wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), explains that she often uses a feelings chart on the special needs students with whom she works. “What about neutral?” Mavis responds. “What if you don’t feel anything?” If Cassavetes’ women were hysterical, Mavis’ breakdown is quieter and more complicated.

But what’s so refreshing about pop culture’s wave of women in emotional crisis is that they defy easy characterization. As the Huffington Post’s Emma Gray points out, it’s very probable that Rebecca Bunch has a mental illness—and the show seems to point toward a history of clinical depression. In the pilot, Rebecca pours a bottle of pills down the drain, and she spends a great deal of the first season avoiding her reluctant therapist, Dr. Akopian (Michael Hyatt). “But she’s also intelligent, funny, professionally competent, flirtatious, goofy, charming and brave,” Gray writes. “Basically, she’s a human being.” She might be damaged and messy, but she’s also deeply relatable.

That’s the thing about women like Rebecca, Mavis, and Amy: We’ve been so interested in trying to pin them down that we haven’t ever given them a chance to fly.

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Donald Trump is poisoning us: America’s new gutter politics aren’t just embarrassing — they’re harming our kids

On the day before Easter, PEZ Candy USA had to cancel its annual egg hunt in Orange, Connecticut. Adults rushed the fields where the eggs and candy had been put out, pushing aside and trampling the little ones in a mad scramble to grab the goodies for their own children. Noses bled, tears were shed and next time — if there is one — PEZ will have to have lots of security guards on hand to keep the grown-ups from behaving like idiots.

The debacle kind of reminded me of this year’s election.

As this grim electoral season cycles on, I sometimes think we’re all living in Ghostbusters II, with that river of ugly pink slime coursing underneath our feet, violently reacting to our collective negativity and hate and making them worse.

The decline in the level of discourse in this year’s election cycle has been a disgrace, with Democrats behaving better than Republicans — one egregious GOP candidate, of course, in particular. But even supporters of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have stooped to disingenuous arguments, gratuitous sniping and ad hominem attacks. The trolls and zealots have been out in force with their name-calling and sometimes threats of physical violence and none of it’s helping anyone.
The tone of this election, the bullying, the lack of civility is punishing not only ourselves but, it turns out, our kids.
And before you say, well, mud of the filthiest kind has been slung in every American presidential campaign since George Washington was passing out the whiskey in exchange for votes, yes, it’s true. But such invective came before the 24/7 news cycle and social media could relentlessly batter us with it from every corner all the time. And while it is good for everyone to be given more and more of an opportunity to have their voices heard, like those who would falsely shout fire in a crowded theater, sometimes they should just shut the hell up and silently lead themselves to the exit sign.

Unfortunately, this year, the vituperation has too often escalated into actual violence among the supporters of Donald Trump, who has done his best to encourage their attacks on anti-Trump demonstrators — and even to suggest the possibility of some degree of carnage at July’s Republican convention — while loudly proclaiming innocence and trying to pin the blame on the protesters.

This craziness has infected a political party which welcomed it in. Symptoms have manifested for years, but at last the virus has consumed its host. Here’s Lauren Fox at theTalking Points Memo website, describing a gathering last weekend of the Virgin Islands Republican Party, so incredible it’s worth quoting her story at length:

The Republican Territorial Committee held a joint meeting Saturday at a gun range in St. Croix, but the meeting erupted into chaos with attendees shouting over one another, calling for points of order, and at one point, Gwen Brady, an elected delegate, being allegedly shoved to the ground, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News.

This is just the latest in the civil war within the island’s Republican Party where a fight over delegates to the 2016 convention in Cleveland has left the group in disarray.

Virgin Islands Republican Party Vice Chairman Herb Schoenbohm told the paper that Brady was “slammed against the wall and thrown to the floor because she objected to the Gestapo-like tactics of the V.I. Chairman John Canegata.”

Schoenbohm also blasted the location of the meeting, telling the paper that Canegata was “banging the table with a large ammunition cartridge being used as a gavel” and walking around with a “firearm on his belt.”

Not exactly the Age of Pericles, is it?

It’s undeniable that the anger that stalks the landscape has roots in real despair, that in the face of record profits the lack of jobs and fair wages is enraging, that the gross disparity of income inequality creates a hunger that can only lead to lashing out. But the tone of this election, the bullying, the lack of civility is punishing not only ourselves but, it turns out, our kids. Sort of like that misbegotten Easter egg hunt writ large.

There’s a new study from SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools. According to the report, “the campaign is having a profoundly negative effect on children and classrooms.

It’s 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.

Other students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign. Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail.”

SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project notes that the report’s survey of 2000 K-12 teachers was not scientific and “did not identify any candidates.” Nevertheless, “out of 5,000 total comments, more than 1,000 mentioned Donald Trump. In contrast, a total of fewer than 200 contained the names Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton…

The gains made by years of anti-bullying work in schools have been rolled back in a few short months. Teachers report that students have been “emboldened” to use slurs, engage in name-calling and make inflammatory statements toward each other. When confronted, students point to the candidates and claim they are “just saying what everyone is thinking.” Kids use the names of candidates as pejoratives to taunt each other.

Never has the teaching of civics and politics been more important, yet many of the teachers commented that they have been stymied by “gag orders” from principals and department heads, ordered not to discuss this year’s election for fear of stirring trouble and offending parents. But as Maureen B. Costello, author of the SPLC report and director of Teaching Tolerance, writes, “What’s at stake in 2016 is not simply who will be our 45th president or how the parties might realign, but how well we are preparing young people for their most important job: the job of being a citizen. If schools avoid the election — or fail to find ways to help students discuss it productively — it’s akin to taking civics out of the curriculum.”

Which brings us full circle; as our public education system has eroded, teaching civics (and American history) already has been run out of the curriculum in far too many schools or so watered down or distorted as to be almost meaningless. That in turn contributes to our current pickle by which too few recognize the responsibilities as well as the freedoms of citizenship and self-government that are taught in such courses and resort instead to mindless bellicosity and a blind belief in hollow promises. A New York City high school teacher told the SPLC that her students “are increasingly political (which is good), but the extreme rhetoric being modeled is not helping to utilize reason and evidence rather than replying in kind.”

In the words of SPLC President Richard Cohen, “We’ve seen Donald Trump behave like a 12-year-old, and now we’re seeing 12-year-olds behave like Donald Trump.”

America, this is why we can’t have nice things.On the day before Easter, PEZ Candy USA had to cancel its annual egg hunt in Orange, Connecticut. Adults rushed the fields where the eggs and candy had been put out, pushing aside and trampling the little ones in a mad scramble to grab the goodies for their own children. Noses bled, tears were shed and next time — if there is one — PEZ will have to have lots of security guards on hand to keep the grown-ups from behaving like idiots.

The debacle kind of reminded me of this year’s election.

As this grim electoral season cycles on, I sometimes think we’re all living in Ghostbusters II, with that river of ugly pink slime coursing underneath our feet, violently reacting to our collective negativity and hate and making them worse.

The decline in the level of discourse in this year’s election cycle has been a disgrace, with Democrats behaving better than Republicans — one egregious GOP candidate, of course, in particular. But even supporters of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have stooped to disingenuous arguments, gratuitous sniping and ad hominem attacks. The trolls and zealots have been out in force with their name-calling and sometimes threats of physical violence and none of it’s helping anyone.
The tone of this election, the bullying, the lack of civility is punishing not only ourselves but, it turns out, our kids.
And before you say, well, mud of the filthiest kind has been slung in every American presidential campaign since George Washington was passing out the whiskey in exchange for votes, yes, it’s true. But such invective came before the 24/7 news cycle and social media could relentlessly batter us with it from every corner all the time. And while it is good for everyone to be given more and more of an opportunity to have their voices heard, like those who would falsely shout fire in a crowded theater, sometimes they should just shut the hell up and silently lead themselves to the exit sign.

Unfortunately, this year, the vituperation has too often escalated into actual violence among the supporters of Donald Trump, who has done his best to encourage their attacks on anti-Trump demonstrators — and even to suggest the possibility of some degree of carnage at July’s Republican convention — while loudly proclaiming innocence and trying to pin the blame on the protesters.

This craziness has infected a political party which welcomed it in. Symptoms have manifested for years, but at last the virus has consumed its host. Here’s Lauren Fox at theTalking Points Memo website, describing a gathering last weekend of the Virgin Islands Republican Party, so incredible it’s worth quoting her story at length:

The Republican Territorial Committee held a joint meeting Saturday at a gun range in St. Croix, but the meeting erupted into chaos with attendees shouting over one another, calling for points of order, and at one point, Gwen Brady, an elected delegate, being allegedly shoved to the ground, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News.

This is just the latest in the civil war within the island’s Republican Party where a fight over delegates to the 2016 convention in Cleveland has left the group in disarray.

Virgin Islands Republican Party Vice Chairman Herb Schoenbohm told the paper that Brady was “slammed against the wall and thrown to the floor because she objected to the Gestapo-like tactics of the V.I. Chairman John Canegata.”

Schoenbohm also blasted the location of the meeting, telling the paper that Canegata was “banging the table with a large ammunition cartridge being used as a gavel” and walking around with a “firearm on his belt.”

Not exactly the Age of Pericles, is it?

It’s undeniable that the anger that stalks the landscape has roots in real despair, that in the face of record profits the lack of jobs and fair wages is enraging, that the gross disparity of income inequality creates a hunger that can only lead to lashing out. But the tone of this election, the bullying, the lack of civility is punishing not only ourselves but, it turns out, our kids. Sort of like that misbegotten Easter egg hunt writ large.

There’s a new study from SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools. According to the report, “the campaign is having a profoundly negative effect on children and classrooms.

It’s 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.

Other students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign. Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail.”

SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project notes that the report’s survey of 2000 K-12 teachers was not scientific and “did not identify any candidates.” Nevertheless, “out of 5,000 total comments, more than 1,000 mentioned Donald Trump. In contrast, a total of fewer than 200 contained the names Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton…

The gains made by years of anti-bullying work in schools have been rolled back in a few short months. Teachers report that students have been “emboldened” to use slurs, engage in name-calling and make inflammatory statements toward each other. When confronted, students point to the candidates and claim they are “just saying what everyone is thinking.” Kids use the names of candidates as pejoratives to taunt each other.

Never has the teaching of civics and politics been more important, yet many of the teachers commented that they have been stymied by “gag orders” from principals and department heads, ordered not to discuss this year’s election for fear of stirring trouble and offending parents. But as Maureen B. Costello, author of the SPLC report and director of Teaching Tolerance, writes, “What’s at stake in 2016 is not simply who will be our 45th president or how the parties might realign, but how well we are preparing young people for their most important job: the job of being a citizen. If schools avoid the election — or fail to find ways to help students discuss it productively — it’s akin to taking civics out of the curriculum.”

Which brings us full circle; as our public education system has eroded, teaching civics (and American history) already has been run out of the curriculum in far too many schools or so watered down or distorted as to be almost meaningless. That in turn contributes to our current pickle by which too few recognize the responsibilities as well as the freedoms of citizenship and self-government that are taught in such courses and resort instead to mindless bellicosity and a blind belief in hollow promises. A New York City high school teacher told the SPLC that her students “are increasingly political (which is good), but the extreme rhetoric being modeled is not helping to utilize reason and evidence rather than replying in kind.”

In the words of SPLC President Richard Cohen, “We’ve seen Donald Trump behave like a 12-year-old, and now we’re seeing 12-year-olds behave like Donald Trump.”

America, this is why we can’t have nice things.On the day before Easter, PEZ Candy USA had to cancel its annual egg hunt in Orange, Connecticut. Adults rushed the fields where the eggs and candy had been put out, pushing aside and trampling the little ones in a mad scramble to grab the goodies for their own children. Noses bled, tears were shed and next time — if there is one — PEZ will have to have lots of security guards on hand to keep the grown-ups from behaving like idiots.

The debacle kind of reminded me of this year’s election.

As this grim electoral season cycles on, I sometimes think we’re all living in Ghostbusters II, with that river of ugly pink slime coursing underneath our feet, violently reacting to our collective negativity and hate and making them worse.

The decline in the level of discourse in this year’s election cycle has been a disgrace, with Democrats behaving better than Republicans — one egregious GOP candidate, of course, in particular. But even supporters of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have stooped to disingenuous arguments, gratuitous sniping and ad hominem attacks. The trolls and zealots have been out in force with their name-calling and sometimes threats of physical violence and none of it’s helping anyone.
The tone of this election, the bullying, the lack of civility is punishing not only ourselves but, it turns out, our kids.
And before you say, well, mud of the filthiest kind has been slung in every American presidential campaign since George Washington was passing out the whiskey in exchange for votes, yes, it’s true. But such invective came before the 24/7 news cycle and social media could relentlessly batter us with it from every corner all the time. And while it is good for everyone to be given more and more of an opportunity to have their voices heard, like those who would falsely shout fire in a crowded theater, sometimes they should just shut the hell up and silently lead themselves to the exit sign.

Unfortunately, this year, the vituperation has too often escalated into actual violence among the supporters of Donald Trump, who has done his best to encourage their attacks on anti-Trump demonstrators — and even to suggest the possibility of some degree of carnage at July’s Republican convention — while loudly proclaiming innocence and trying to pin the blame on the protesters.

This craziness has infected a political party which welcomed it in. Symptoms have manifested for years, but at last the virus has consumed its host. Here’s Lauren Fox at theTalking Points Memo website, describing a gathering last weekend of the Virgin Islands Republican Party, so incredible it’s worth quoting her story at length:

The Republican Territorial Committee held a joint meeting Saturday at a gun range in St. Croix, but the meeting erupted into chaos with attendees shouting over one another, calling for points of order, and at one point, Gwen Brady, an elected delegate, being allegedly shoved to the ground, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News.

This is just the latest in the civil war within the island’s Republican Party where a fight over delegates to the 2016 convention in Cleveland has left the group in disarray.

Virgin Islands Republican Party Vice Chairman Herb Schoenbohm told the paper that Brady was “slammed against the wall and thrown to the floor because she objected to the Gestapo-like tactics of the V.I. Chairman John Canegata.”

Schoenbohm also blasted the location of the meeting, telling the paper that Canegata was “banging the table with a large ammunition cartridge being used as a gavel” and walking around with a “firearm on his belt.”

Not exactly the Age of Pericles, is it?

It’s undeniable that the anger that stalks the landscape has roots in real despair, that in the face of record profits the lack of jobs and fair wages is enraging, that the gross disparity of income inequality creates a hunger that can only lead to lashing out. But the tone of this election, the bullying, the lack of civility is punishing not only ourselves but, it turns out, our kids. Sort of like that misbegotten Easter egg hunt writ large.

There’s a new study from SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools. According to the report, “the campaign is having a profoundly negative effect on children and classrooms.

It’s 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.

Other students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign. Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail.”

SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project notes that the report’s survey of 2000 K-12 teachers was not scientific and “did not identify any candidates.” Nevertheless, “out of 5,000 total comments, more than 1,000 mentioned Donald Trump. In contrast, a total of fewer than 200 contained the names Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton…

The gains made by years of anti-bullying work in schools have been rolled back in a few short months. Teachers report that students have been “emboldened” to use slurs, engage in name-calling and make inflammatory statements toward each other. When confronted, students point to the candidates and claim they are “just saying what everyone is thinking.” Kids use the names of candidates as pejoratives to taunt each other.

Never has the teaching of civics and politics been more important, yet many of the teachers commented that they have been stymied by “gag orders” from principals and department heads, ordered not to discuss this year’s election for fear of stirring trouble and offending parents. But as Maureen B. Costello, author of the SPLC report and director of Teaching Tolerance, writes, “What’s at stake in 2016 is not simply who will be our 45th president or how the parties might realign, but how well we are preparing young people for their most important job: the job of being a citizen. If schools avoid the election — or fail to find ways to help students discuss it productively — it’s akin to taking civics out of the curriculum.”

Which brings us full circle; as our public education system has eroded, teaching civics (and American history) already has been run out of the curriculum in far too many schools or so watered down or distorted as to be almost meaningless. That in turn contributes to our current pickle by which too few recognize the responsibilities as well as the freedoms of citizenship and self-government that are taught in such courses and resort instead to mindless bellicosity and a blind belief in hollow promises. A New York City high school teacher told the SPLC that her students “are increasingly political (which is good), but the extreme rhetoric being modeled is not helping to utilize reason and evidence rather than replying in kind.”

In the words of SPLC President Richard Cohen, “We’ve seen Donald Trump behave like a 12-year-old, and now we’re seeing 12-year-olds behave like Donald Trump.”

America, this is why we can’t have nice things.

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These are the geeks who run our world: So why is “Silicon Valley” just another workplace comedy?

Tonight, one of the funniest shows on television – in its quiet, nerdy way – will return: HBO's “Silicon Valley” will kick off its third season, reassembling its cast of intellectually brilliant, socially stunted techies and entrepreneurs. The season begins as Richard (Thomas Middleditch), perhaps the most awkward of the bunch, is fired from the leadership of Pied Piper, a company he started, and follows the chaos that ensues as he tries to find a new role. The rest of his posse alternately tries to encourage or undermine him in pitch-perfect displays of male primate behavior.

These characters are supposed to be in their 20s, but they behave like teenagers. Ehrlich (T.J. Miller) is an arrogant doper. Jared (Zach Woods) is a nice, lukewarm guy who’s often the butt of jokes he doesn’t quite get; he fights with Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), who dresses well and says mean-spirited things. Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) is a brilliant and deadpan Canadian. As a study of a geeky guy subculture, the show is not far off from “The Big Bang Theory,” which is to say, it’s consistently funny -- lighthearted, gently satiric, and basically friendly toward its characters. The show pokes fun at these guys for their various failings – Ehrlich is always lecturing people and has over-emphatic facial hair, Richard can barely make eye contact -- but they’re mostly lovable dorks.

The sole new major character this season is veteran executive “Action” Jack Barker, who comes in to save the company from the low ambitions and misfired idealism of its founders. Stephen Tobolowsky gives a great, nuanced performance as a guy who convinces everyone he can “scale” Pied Piper, but turns out to be more complicated than the reassuring father figure he seems at first. (I’m tempted, but I won’t spoil a bizarre scene involving a horse.)

There’s a lot to like in the three episodes HBO sent journalists, and in some ways it’s funnier than earlier seasons. But two problems that “Silicon Valley” had in the past are still around -- and, despite the fact that the show seems to be improving at the level of its acting and its dialogue, as well as widening its scope, they’re not getting any better. First, the series doesn’t have major female characters, despite a very strong turn by Suzanne Cryer as Laurie Bream, the head of the venture-capital firm that funds Pied Piper, and Amanda Crew as Monica, her assistant. Neither gets nearly as much screen time as she should. Silicon Valley startup culture is known for being male-dominated, but is it really this bad?

The show’s other problem is also one that “Silicon Valley” shares with the world it portrays: It’s insular. Most sitcoms are character studies to some degree, and the good ones know their limits. But the series is looking at what’s becoming the most powerful subculture in the country, and it rarely gets beyond their navels.

It’s not that these characters don’t think in big terms. In one of the first scenes in the new season, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), the hard-charging founder of the Google-like Hooli, gives a classic Silicon Valley lecture about how failure is really success before firing a whole wing of his company. He’s also got the weird opportunistic utopianism down cold. “If we can make your audio and video files smaller,” he offered in an earlier season, “we can make cancer smaller… And hunger. And AIDS.” But this is about as pointed as the satire gets.

As Pied Piper moves outside its incubator into a flashy office, the show is getting sharper and funnier. But the outside world still doesn’t seem to exist. That wouldn’t be a problem – it's also barely there in, say, either version of “The Office.” But these guys aren’t peddling paper: The people who work at tech companies are now major players in book publishing, in the music industry, in public education, in journalism and the media. They’ve changed the way San Francisco and much of Northern California feels, and what it costs. They've reshaped the U.S. economy.

They’ve done some great things and some awful things, and some things it will take us a decade to really figure out.

In the real Silicon Valley, the future, for better and worse, is taking shape. In “Silicon Valley,” the stakes in season 3 are, at least in its early episodes, mostly about a data compression box and Dinesh’s new gold chain.

The show, of course, doesn’t need to demonize its characters: The people who work in Silicon Valley are not all devils. Some of them are well-intentioned, some of them are nasty and selfish, but most of them are in that complicated place in between. But they are – to use one of their favorite phrases – changing the world.

Mike Judge, who created the show, spent some time at a Silicon Valley startup in the late ‘80s, and he’s clearly picked up some of its slang and self-conception quite well. But he was also there at a time when techie hijinks were a lot less consequential: What happened in those companies back then didn’t radically redraw people’s lives, at least not right away. But now we’re living in a world for which Silicon Valley is basically the capital.

“Silicon Valley” is a comedy, and its first job is to make viewers laugh. There’s only so much a sitcom can or should do to get at the larger implications of its characters’ actions. But it can go beyond just shrugging it off with “Boys will be boys.” Here’s hoping the rest of the season manages to widen the lens a little bit.Tonight, one of the funniest shows on television – in its quiet, nerdy way – will return: HBO's “Silicon Valley” will kick off its third season, reassembling its cast of intellectually brilliant, socially stunted techies and entrepreneurs. The season begins as Richard (Thomas Middleditch), perhaps the most awkward of the bunch, is fired from the leadership of Pied Piper, a company he started, and follows the chaos that ensues as he tries to find a new role. The rest of his posse alternately tries to encourage or undermine him in pitch-perfect displays of male primate behavior.

These characters are supposed to be in their 20s, but they behave like teenagers. Ehrlich (T.J. Miller) is an arrogant doper. Jared (Zach Woods) is a nice, lukewarm guy who’s often the butt of jokes he doesn’t quite get; he fights with Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), who dresses well and says mean-spirited things. Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) is a brilliant and deadpan Canadian. As a study of a geeky guy subculture, the show is not far off from “The Big Bang Theory,” which is to say, it’s consistently funny -- lighthearted, gently satiric, and basically friendly toward its characters. The show pokes fun at these guys for their various failings – Ehrlich is always lecturing people and has over-emphatic facial hair, Richard can barely make eye contact -- but they’re mostly lovable dorks.

The sole new major character this season is veteran executive “Action” Jack Barker, who comes in to save the company from the low ambitions and misfired idealism of its founders. Stephen Tobolowsky gives a great, nuanced performance as a guy who convinces everyone he can “scale” Pied Piper, but turns out to be more complicated than the reassuring father figure he seems at first. (I’m tempted, but I won’t spoil a bizarre scene involving a horse.)

There’s a lot to like in the three episodes HBO sent journalists, and in some ways it’s funnier than earlier seasons. But two problems that “Silicon Valley” had in the past are still around -- and, despite the fact that the show seems to be improving at the level of its acting and its dialogue, as well as widening its scope, they’re not getting any better. First, the series doesn’t have major female characters, despite a very strong turn by Suzanne Cryer as Laurie Bream, the head of the venture-capital firm that funds Pied Piper, and Amanda Crew as Monica, her assistant. Neither gets nearly as much screen time as she should. Silicon Valley startup culture is known for being male-dominated, but is it really this bad?

The show’s other problem is also one that “Silicon Valley” shares with the world it portrays: It’s insular. Most sitcoms are character studies to some degree, and the good ones know their limits. But the series is looking at what’s becoming the most powerful subculture in the country, and it rarely gets beyond their navels.

It’s not that these characters don’t think in big terms. In one of the first scenes in the new season, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), the hard-charging founder of the Google-like Hooli, gives a classic Silicon Valley lecture about how failure is really success before firing a whole wing of his company. He’s also got the weird opportunistic utopianism down cold. “If we can make your audio and video files smaller,” he offered in an earlier season, “we can make cancer smaller… And hunger. And AIDS.” But this is about as pointed as the satire gets.

As Pied Piper moves outside its incubator into a flashy office, the show is getting sharper and funnier. But the outside world still doesn’t seem to exist. That wouldn’t be a problem – it's also barely there in, say, either version of “The Office.” But these guys aren’t peddling paper: The people who work at tech companies are now major players in book publishing, in the music industry, in public education, in journalism and the media. They’ve changed the way San Francisco and much of Northern California feels, and what it costs. They've reshaped the U.S. economy.

They’ve done some great things and some awful things, and some things it will take us a decade to really figure out.

In the real Silicon Valley, the future, for better and worse, is taking shape. In “Silicon Valley,” the stakes in season 3 are, at least in its early episodes, mostly about a data compression box and Dinesh’s new gold chain.

The show, of course, doesn’t need to demonize its characters: The people who work in Silicon Valley are not all devils. Some of them are well-intentioned, some of them are nasty and selfish, but most of them are in that complicated place in between. But they are – to use one of their favorite phrases – changing the world.

Mike Judge, who created the show, spent some time at a Silicon Valley startup in the late ‘80s, and he’s clearly picked up some of its slang and self-conception quite well. But he was also there at a time when techie hijinks were a lot less consequential: What happened in those companies back then didn’t radically redraw people’s lives, at least not right away. But now we’re living in a world for which Silicon Valley is basically the capital.

“Silicon Valley” is a comedy, and its first job is to make viewers laugh. There’s only so much a sitcom can or should do to get at the larger implications of its characters’ actions. But it can go beyond just shrugging it off with “Boys will be boys.” Here’s hoping the rest of the season manages to widen the lens a little bit.

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“Stop trying to polish my d*ck you f**cking four-eyed failure”: Veep’s most profane, brutal and brilliant burns

In honor of the fifth season premiere of HBO's Veep this Sunday we rounded up the most profane, brutal and brilliant zingers from the first four seasons. It wasn't easy to narrow down, given this show's genius at fierce retorts and stinging one-liners, but we gave it our best and the result is 160 seconds of hilarity. Enjoy.

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Europe is a moral wasteland: Countless refugees continue to die while the West turns a blind eye

After days of rumored disaster, United Nations officials now estimate that as many as 500 migrants died earlier this month in the Mediterranean after their ship capsized en route from Libya to Italy. Many appear to be Somalis.

“The flow consists almost exclusively of people from sub-Saharan Africa,” The Guardian reports. “Syrians have yet to reach Libya following the closure of the Greek route, but migration specialists expect them to try again from Libya in increasing numbers later in the year.”

The tragedy won’t make headlines for long, and fresh ones are sure to follow. Sub-Saharan Africans, who may represent the bulk of last week’s mass drowning, never won much sympathy to begin with. Now Europe, under siege from an insurgent far right, is trying to slam the door shut on Syrians as well: Since recent attacks in France, Belgium, and San Bernardino, tenuous solidarity for ISIS victims has been replaced by a conviction that refugees are in fact ISIS.

Never mind that attacks have mostly been carried out by European-born men. Rather than take a look in a mirror, France has imposed a draconian and alienating state of emergency, and Europe has cut a deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, exchanging cash and political legitimacy in return for accepting refugees forcefully returned from Greece in contravention of international and European law.

Arrivals on Greek shores have plummeted since the accord’s enactment. But both desperation and aspiration find a way, and the lack of a regular process for migrants and refugees only encourages people to take irregular and dangerous routes. And so people die.

“You patrol the seas better, then land routes are exploited,” Nigar Göksel, a Turkey analyst at International Crisis Group, told Frontline. “Or the price of smuggling goes up, or different ways of creating fake documents are discovered. Smugglers often win out in these circumstances.”

Or, they might die in Syria.

Turkey, according to Human Rights Watch, has all but closed its border with Syria since March 2015, even as refugees stuck inside the country flee camps threatened by ISIS and the Assad regime. Recently, Turkish border police allegedly shot at refugees fleeing ISIS advances. According to an Amnesty International report, investigations on “Turkey’s southern border provinces suggests that Turkish authorities have been rounding up and expelling groups of around 100 Syrian men, women and children to Syria on a near-daily basis since mid-January.”

Disturbingly, Turkey’s adherence to international refugee law is explicitly limited to those fleeing European conflicts.

“The EU deal is based on the deceptive premise that all returned people are safe in Turkey, when the facts say otherwise,” said Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch, in what seems like a significant understatement.

Europe has pledged to accept one Syrian refugee from Turkey for every one sent back. The accord is purportedly meant to discourage refugees from making a dangerous sea crossing. But perversely, the number of Syrian refugees that Europe accepts under the deal is tied to the number who irregularly cross and are then sent back to Turkey.

What’s worse, this not-so-magnanimous deal does not even extend to other refugees, including, remarkably, Afghans, thousands of whom are already stuck in Turkey with access to neither refugee camps nor legal work. Turkey allegedly deported about 30 Afghan asylum seekers to Kabul “just hours after” the accord with Europe was signed, according to Amnesty International. People from Iraq aren’t covered either. Europe is distinguishing not only between refugees and economic migrants but between those refugees who are deserving and those who are not. And what do these distinctions even mean when it comes to people willing to risk death?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after years of migrants dying at sea, finally became a limited-purpose hero last year, dubbed “compassionate mother” by grateful refugees after resettling many of the more than one million that crossed into Europe. Anti-migrant sentiment and violence cut that solidarity short soon thereafter, and countries including Austria and Macedonia closed their borders. And so Turkey is now the supposed save haven.

Europe’s priority is not saving lives. The Italian Mare Nostrum sea rescue mission, which according to the Italian government saved the lives of roughly 166,000 in 2014, was shut down under heavy criticism from Germany. Europe condemns smugglers, and has even pondered military operations against them. But they ignore the fact that their military and economic policies have for centuries created the condition of their possibility.

* * *

The accord is purportedly about safety but the notion that refugees belong in Turkey and not Europe is simply a racist one: They are mostly Muslims like in Turkey, and not Christians like in Europe. Ironically, it is Turkey’s Muslim population and its terrible human rights record that have long frustrated its desired ascension to the European Union. Now, Europe has proven willing to trade quite a lot to Turkey, where the human rights situation has rapidly deteriorated in recent years, for the sake of ethno-national homogeneity: Last week, after a satirist dared mock Erdogan, Merkel green-lighted a prosecution, under a very illiberal and very old German law, on behalf of the thin-skinned and authoritarian leader.

It’s often said that there’s a migrant crisis in Europe. In reality, the crisis in Europe is mostly a political one. According to the UN Refugee Agency, just “slightly more than 10 percent of those who have fled the conflict [in Syria are] seeking safety in Europe.” Today, there are roughly 4,841,807 registered Syrian refugees worldwide. By April 2014, nearly one in five people in tiny, constantly-destabilized Lebanon were already Syrian refugees.

Merkel’s initial response was laudable. But her brutal response to Europe’s financial crisis had helped lay the groundwork for today’s meanness, rallying the continent’s worst instincts to break Greece’s uprising against austerity. In turn, that austerity further worsened the living conditions of European workers—making them all the more susceptible to right-wing demagogues.

The U.S., of course, has behaved even more horribly, accepting roughly 3,100 total Syrian refugees since 2011, as of a Boston Globe overview published in late March. That included just about 1,200 of the mere 10,000 refugees that President Obama had pledged to settle by this October. The leading Republican presidential candidate, of course, wants to bar Muslims from the country.

There is something profoundly stupid but predictable about countries that invaded Iraq and colonized Africa, that foster a global system that exploits the poor for the benefit of the rich, that supported the overthrow of the Somalia’s government and carved up the Middle East into a despotic jigsaw puzzle now wondering just how the world came to be such a mess. Europe is clinging to a vision of the nation-state that colonialism has always made impossible. The hypocrisy is the same for economic migrants: People migrate from Africa fleeing poverty and war, but yes, also just to seek a better life. Moralizing about whether those people are deserving is beside the point, because a global economy entails a global labor market and migration. The trajectory of capital, like that of violence, boomerangs.

Shutting the doors on refugees and migrants requires a profound lack of the basic human solidarity required by most any existing moral system that I’m aware of. This cruelty, however, is also premised upon the idea that it’s not our problem. The belief that one, and one’s nation, are innocent of whatever crime has sent these people trekking across continents and risking their lives at sea.

The West, however, has been eager to wage wars in the name of human rights. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries,” President Obama bragged in 2011 over NATO’s intervention in Libya. “The United States of America is different.”

The humans in whose name these wars have been fought are now being deported back toward war zones. They are dying at sea in enormous numbers. They live or are detained in squalid camps and are abused by security forces.

The European Union was “founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

It's now clear that the moral posturing of the West is fraudulent.

This is of course not to suggest that other places are of better moral quality. Far from it: consider the Thai junta returning Chinese dissidents to China, the Egyptian military dictatorship’s complicity in Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the Gulf states’ systematic exploitation of guest workers, or the alleged abuses committed by Mexican agents, on behalf of the United States, against Central Americans fleeing gangster terror. The world is in large part run by mean, venal and greedy pfeople. But the next time the West invokes its moral superiority remember that they have already failed humanity’s most basic test.After days of rumored disaster, United Nations officials now estimate that as many as 500 migrants died earlier this month in the Mediterranean after their ship capsized en route from Libya to Italy. Many appear to be Somalis.

“The flow consists almost exclusively of people from sub-Saharan Africa,” The Guardian reports. “Syrians have yet to reach Libya following the closure of the Greek route, but migration specialists expect them to try again from Libya in increasing numbers later in the year.”

The tragedy won’t make headlines for long, and fresh ones are sure to follow. Sub-Saharan Africans, who may represent the bulk of last week’s mass drowning, never won much sympathy to begin with. Now Europe, under siege from an insurgent far right, is trying to slam the door shut on Syrians as well: Since recent attacks in France, Belgium, and San Bernardino, tenuous solidarity for ISIS victims has been replaced by a conviction that refugees are in fact ISIS.

Never mind that attacks have mostly been carried out by European-born men. Rather than take a look in a mirror, France has imposed a draconian and alienating state of emergency, and Europe has cut a deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, exchanging cash and political legitimacy in return for accepting refugees forcefully returned from Greece in contravention of international and European law.

Arrivals on Greek shores have plummeted since the accord’s enactment. But both desperation and aspiration find a way, and the lack of a regular process for migrants and refugees only encourages people to take irregular and dangerous routes. And so people die.

“You patrol the seas better, then land routes are exploited,” Nigar Göksel, a Turkey analyst at International Crisis Group, told Frontline. “Or the price of smuggling goes up, or different ways of creating fake documents are discovered. Smugglers often win out in these circumstances.”

Or, they might die in Syria.

Turkey, according to Human Rights Watch, has all but closed its border with Syria since March 2015, even as refugees stuck inside the country flee camps threatened by ISIS and the Assad regime. Recently, Turkish border police allegedly shot at refugees fleeing ISIS advances. According to an Amnesty International report, investigations on “Turkey’s southern border provinces suggests that Turkish authorities have been rounding up and expelling groups of around 100 Syrian men, women and children to Syria on a near-daily basis since mid-January.”

Disturbingly, Turkey’s adherence to international refugee law is explicitly limited to those fleeing European conflicts.

“The EU deal is based on the deceptive premise that all returned people are safe in Turkey, when the facts say otherwise,” said Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch, in what seems like a significant understatement.

Europe has pledged to accept one Syrian refugee from Turkey for every one sent back. The accord is purportedly meant to discourage refugees from making a dangerous sea crossing. But perversely, the number of Syrian refugees that Europe accepts under the deal is tied to the number who irregularly cross and are then sent back to Turkey.

What’s worse, this not-so-magnanimous deal does not even extend to other refugees, including, remarkably, Afghans, thousands of whom are already stuck in Turkey with access to neither refugee camps nor legal work. Turkey allegedly deported about 30 Afghan asylum seekers to Kabul “just hours after” the accord with Europe was signed, according to Amnesty International. People from Iraq aren’t covered either. Europe is distinguishing not only between refugees and economic migrants but between those refugees who are deserving and those who are not. And what do these distinctions even mean when it comes to people willing to risk death?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after years of migrants dying at sea, finally became a limited-purpose hero last year, dubbed “compassionate mother” by grateful refugees after resettling many of the more than one million that crossed into Europe. Anti-migrant sentiment and violence cut that solidarity short soon thereafter, and countries including Austria and Macedonia closed their borders. And so Turkey is now the supposed save haven.

Europe’s priority is not saving lives. The Italian Mare Nostrum sea rescue mission, which according to the Italian government saved the lives of roughly 166,000 in 2014, was shut down under heavy criticism from Germany. Europe condemns smugglers, and has even pondered military operations against them. But they ignore the fact that their military and economic policies have for centuries created the condition of their possibility.

* * *

The accord is purportedly about safety but the notion that refugees belong in Turkey and not Europe is simply a racist one: They are mostly Muslims like in Turkey, and not Christians like in Europe. Ironically, it is Turkey’s Muslim population and its terrible human rights record that have long frustrated its desired ascension to the European Union. Now, Europe has proven willing to trade quite a lot to Turkey, where the human rights situation has rapidly deteriorated in recent years, for the sake of ethno-national homogeneity: Last week, after a satirist dared mock Erdogan, Merkel green-lighted a prosecution, under a very illiberal and very old German law, on behalf of the thin-skinned and authoritarian leader.

It’s often said that there’s a migrant crisis in Europe. In reality, the crisis in Europe is mostly a political one. According to the UN Refugee Agency, just “slightly more than 10 percent of those who have fled the conflict [in Syria are] seeking safety in Europe.” Today, there are roughly 4,841,807 registered Syrian refugees worldwide. By April 2014, nearly one in five people in tiny, constantly-destabilized Lebanon were already Syrian refugees.

Merkel’s initial response was laudable. But her brutal response to Europe’s financial crisis had helped lay the groundwork for today’s meanness, rallying the continent’s worst instincts to break Greece’s uprising against austerity. In turn, that austerity further worsened the living conditions of European workers—making them all the more susceptible to right-wing demagogues.

The U.S., of course, has behaved even more horribly, accepting roughly 3,100 total Syrian refugees since 2011, as of a Boston Globe overview published in late March. That included just about 1,200 of the mere 10,000 refugees that President Obama had pledged to settle by this October. The leading Republican presidential candidate, of course, wants to bar Muslims from the country.

There is something profoundly stupid but predictable about countries that invaded Iraq and colonized Africa, that foster a global system that exploits the poor for the benefit of the rich, that supported the overthrow of the Somalia’s government and carved up the Middle East into a despotic jigsaw puzzle now wondering just how the world came to be such a mess. Europe is clinging to a vision of the nation-state that colonialism has always made impossible. The hypocrisy is the same for economic migrants: People migrate from Africa fleeing poverty and war, but yes, also just to seek a better life. Moralizing about whether those people are deserving is beside the point, because a global economy entails a global labor market and migration. The trajectory of capital, like that of violence, boomerangs.

Shutting the doors on refugees and migrants requires a profound lack of the basic human solidarity required by most any existing moral system that I’m aware of. This cruelty, however, is also premised upon the idea that it’s not our problem. The belief that one, and one’s nation, are innocent of whatever crime has sent these people trekking across continents and risking their lives at sea.

The West, however, has been eager to wage wars in the name of human rights. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries,” President Obama bragged in 2011 over NATO’s intervention in Libya. “The United States of America is different.”

The humans in whose name these wars have been fought are now being deported back toward war zones. They are dying at sea in enormous numbers. They live or are detained in squalid camps and are abused by security forces.

The European Union was “founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

It's now clear that the moral posturing of the West is fraudulent.

This is of course not to suggest that other places are of better moral quality. Far from it: consider the Thai junta returning Chinese dissidents to China, the Egyptian military dictatorship’s complicity in Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the Gulf states’ systematic exploitation of guest workers, or the alleged abuses committed by Mexican agents, on behalf of the United States, against Central Americans fleeing gangster terror. The world is in large part run by mean, venal and greedy pfeople. But the next time the West invokes its moral superiority remember that they have already failed humanity’s most basic test.

Continue Reading...

“Game of Thrones” goes to war: The once-radical fantasy is now the establishment—for better and for worse

The biggest show on television is returning this weekend. Love it or hate it, HBO’s “Game Of Thrones” cannot be ignored, either for the scope of its production, its massive audience engagement, or the influence it’s had on the rest of the television landscape. With 20 million viewers per episode across all platforms, “Game Of Thrones”’ viewership makes it one of the most watched television shows in America; and on top of those legal numbers, illegal piracy for the show set new records in season five. To add hype to buzz, season five got the show its first Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, but the show was an awards juggernaut before that—26 Emmy wins and 83 nominations over the last five seasons.

HBO is thanking its lucky stars that “Game Of Thrones” is both as good and as popular as it is. In 2011, when “Game Of Thrones” debuted, the network had “Boardwalk Empire” and “True Blood” to add to its uneven but prestigious drama slate. Right now, HBO has “Vinyl” and “The Leftovers,” two shows with dismal first seasons and major retools for its second. Audiences haven’t shown up to either. And as rising star “True Detective” first shone brightly and then fell to earth in a heap of ashes, HBO’s ability to tell powerful dramatic stories has been called into doubt. And though it would probably take just one more hit for HBO to seem back on top of the television industry, “Game Of Thrones” sixth-season premiere meanwhile feels a bit more desperate to make a splash.

The good news, for you the viewer, is that the talent behind “Game Of Thrones” hasn’t gone anywhere. I can’t say so firsthand—the network chose not to make any advance screeners available to critics (though President Obama got a few episodes, which prompted Refinery29's Vanessa Golembewski to cheekily file a Freedom Of Information Act request for them). But nothing behind the scenes of “Game Of Thrones” has changed; this isn’t even the first season that the show has had to substantially create a narrative beyond what is outlined in the original book series, “A Song Of Ice And Fire,” which has yet to be completed by author George R.R. Martin.

And yet, I am curious to see if watching “Game Of Thrones” in 2016 is going to feel a bit like watching a televisual relic. Partly that’s because the show is so unique in its mastery and appeal—the closest analogue to “Game Of Thrones” is probably AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” which started a year before the HBO show. It’s based on a popular genre comic-book series and has even more per-week viewers; AMC’s post-show talk-show, “Talking Dead,” inspired HBO’s upcoming post-show talk-show, “After The Thrones.” But “Game Of Thrones” is just better—richer, smarter, and more cinematic, especially compared to “The Walking Dead”’s clunker of a season that ended just a few weeks ago. I will be the first to say, as a fan of the books as well, that “Game Of Thrones” is a tight, stunning adaptation of perceptive but longwinded books, with extraordinary resonance about power, identity, and belief, in their world as in ours.

In 2011, it was difficult to imagine a prestige adult television series based on an unfinished set of fantasy novels published mostly in the late ‘90s. The “Harry Potter” and “Lord Of The Rings” books and movies were successful, but decidedly not sexy. In 2016, there are multiple such shows, including “Outlander” on Starz and “The Shannara Chronicles” on MTV. “Game Of Thrones” became so popular with a mainstream audience that it moved from the stuff of niche nerds to everyday watercooler discussion. In bridging the gap between the nerds and the bros, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss created a show that had the high production values and male angst of so many prestige dramas, with the added injection of magic, boobs, and magical boobs. It was quite a coup, as far as leading one wealthy and powerful demographic to unoccupied territory goes; “Game Of Thrones” made it more cool to be into dragons than “The Goblet Of Fire” and “The Desolation Of Smaug” combined.

But over the past five years, the television landscape has changed. We have moved, very quickly, from praising the Golden Age of television to critiquing its blind spots; as the amount of programming has mushroomed, so has the conversation around it. “Game Of Thrones” has transformed from being emblematic of the innovative potential of television to being emblematic of some of its most stubborn problems. Reflecting this, the shows around “Game Of Thrones” have changed quite a bit, too. The cinematic male-oriented dramas that dominated the conversation in the late 2000s have almost, with a few notable exceptions like "Fargo" and "Better Call Saul," entirely yielded the territory of critical adoration to quirky and smart half-hour comedies. On HBO’s rival networks, prestige cable hits like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” ended their runs on AMC, Showtime’s flagship “Homeland” faded into irrelevancy, and upstart Netflix hasn’t been able to produce a drama worth investing in. Meanwhile, half-hour shows across television, like “Girls,” “Transparent,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” and “You’re The Worst,” have charmed audiences and critics alike.

The innovations in drama have not been at the expensive prestige level, with cable’s loose censorship regulations; they’ve been on broadcast, where executives saw an opportunity in an audience very underserved by “Game Of Thrones”—women of color. Delivering programming aimed at and starring women of color — see “How To Get Away With Murder,” “Empire,” or newer offerings like “Shades Of Blue” — has become not just a creative innovation but a network mandate. Meanwhile, "Transparent" home Amazon Studios and Starz, with “Outlander” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” are creating programming that engages with the once-academic, now-real notion of the female gaze, exploring feminine fantasy and desire as so many prestige dramas have done for male viewers.

The result is that “Game Of Thrones” does not, today, feel particularly different or relevant. In a world where the media portrayals of sexual assault, race relations, and the transgender experience are rapidly becoming not just familiar but de rigueur, the HBO drama’s nearly all-white fantasy world that so deliberately caters to the male gaze feels frustratingly antiquated. “A Song Of Ice And Fire,” when it first came out in the late ‘90s, wasn’t just an adult fantasy series—it was also one that consciously sought to deconstruct the tropes of fantasy novels like “The Lord Of The Rings” trilogy. In a world where magic either lived in the whimsical tea cozy of Hogwarts or the curiously neutered realm of Middle-Earth, Westeros was both fantastical and recognizable as a crueler world, very much like our own. The book "Game Of Thrones" chose to center its female characters as equally important as its male characters; in 1996, this was revolutionary.

But it’s been 20 years since then, and six years of watching “Game Of Thrones” evolve on the screen. As “Game Of Thrones” airs its sixth season, the worldview encapsulated within it will feel quaintly conservative to many television viewers. To be sure, it’s quite difficult to make the sixth season of a show about a medieval-ish fantasy world feel current and relevant—and to its credit, “Game Of Thrones” has attempted to. Specifically, it has had to radically adjust the way it filmed and presented rape scenes after season three’s “Breaker Of Chains.” But it’s necessarily hamstrung, too. Perhaps a show like “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” can get meta by making an episode engaging with the tumultuous and evolving Internet conversation about intersectionality and representation. But “Game Of Thrones” definitively can’t produce an episode where Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) goes online and reads what people are saying about him (though it would be funny).

It’s not just Westeros, though, that makes it hard for “Game Of Thrones” to evolve further. It’s that massive industry clout, that aforementioned ravenous demographic, and that desperation that HBO has to make sure that season six of “Game Of Thrones” hits their audience and subscriber expectations. Perhaps Benioff and Weiss find the themes underpinning the sexposition and gore of “Game Of Thrones” to be resonant and significant. But as I’ve written before, the violence of “Game Of Thrones” is pitched to a privileged male audience, for their fascination and delight. At the risk of sounding too cynical, I think the moments of exploitation are there mostly for exploitation’s sake; this is an adaptation of Martin’s books that has written in a pregnant woman being stabbed to death just because they could, for example.

This is a big, defining season for “Game Of Thrones,” and a shaky one for its parent network, HBO, which is pinning most of its hopes and dreams on its one fierce dragon. But spectacular trailers and special effects aside, I’m not expecting “Game Of Thrones” to push the envelope in any exciting or interesting ways; when stressed, HBO errs toward bro, instead of the proverbial ho. Because “Game Of Thrones” is HBO’s flagship program, it’s cheating conservative to stay popular. That’s how money works, of course—HBO’s subscribers pay their cable bills expecting a certain product from “Game Of Thrones,” and six seasons in, the show must of course deliver. But for the biggest show on television, it’s a little sad, too.

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Countdown to the RNC apocalypse: Republicans still can’t control Trump as the clock ticks down to the convention

Even in an election year, the quarterly meeting of the Republican National Committee would likely attract little to no attention. Why should it? Three days of a couple of hundred Republicans gathered at some nice resort to hear some speeches, drink bourbon and glad-hand sounds pretty much like one of Rush Limbaugh’s weddings, which occur almost as often.

But this is no ordinary election year, which is why last week’s RNC meeting garnered more press coverage than usual. It was the last meeting before the party’s nominating convention in July, which meant a last chance for the establishment to exert any influence on the conduct of the proceedings in Cleveland, and for the candidates or the surrogates attending in their stead to make their pitches to party insiders.

This last part led to Ted Cruz pretending that the assembled RNC members were not the establishment figures he has spent his entire Senate career railing against, but were instead the grassroots of the party, the heart and soul, the true conservatives sold out by the Washington cartel. Cruz is really flailing, trying to come up with a new identity for himself. He has spent a year portraying himself as a bomb-thrower who would energize conservatives, leaving squishy establishment moderates in his dust. Now that he has realized how difficult it is to win the nomination if everyone in the party thinks he’s a hateful dick, he’s trying to be conciliatory with insiders while not giving up pandering to the fears of the hard right voters who want to regulate which bathrooms people are allowed to use. It is a bad time for an identity crisis, which is why you have to wonder if the normally unflappable Cruz is melting down as he sees his dream of becoming president slipping away.

Cruz’s floundering highlights just how uncharted this election’s territory is for the RNC members gathered in Florida. A less fractured party, one where the RNC is an actual power center helping to order events rather than scrambling to keep up with them, would use such a meeting to enforce discipline and start unifying the GOP before the convention. Some members could take Donald Trump’s surrogates aside (Trump was the only candidate to not attend the meeting) and tell them to let their boss know that they are working hard to smooth the way for his coronation in Cleveland.

Others would take Cruz and John Kasich for long walks along the Florida shore, like Carlos Trafficante having a come-to-Jesus moment with one of his wayward capos. During these walks, RNC members would make clear to the candidates that their futures as members in good standing of the Republican Party depend on how much longer they stay in the race, sniping at the front-runner and giving the Democrats ammunition for the general election. A few promises are made -- to support presidential runs in 2020 or later, or campaigns for other elected office. (Cruz is up for re-election to the Senate in 2018.) But the overall message would be clear: Get out now, or we’ll get you out.

But the RNC can’t do that, because it has no power. Any favorable nods towards Cruz or Kasich risk alienating Trump voters, who have so far made him the frontrunner by a lot, and who are constantly being egged on by Trump’s telling them the party has “rigged” the primary to take away the nomination. (These speeches have had the cumulative effect of bringing a small handful of Trump’s crazier supporters out of the woodwork.) Any hints of pushing a compromise candidate if no one gets a majority of delegates on the first or several subsequent ballots at the convention will get shouted down by activists. Basically, the RNC is in a no-win situation.

So everyone walked a fine line. RNC chairman Reince Priebus, perhaps the saddest figure in national politics right now, seems to have capitulated to the near-inevitability of Trump’s nomination. In Florida, he gave a speech in which he told the “Never Trump” forces that they are going to have to quit that campaign and start unifying behind the party. Which should be easy, since the “Never Trump” campaign has been nearly invisible for weeks now, barely spending any resources in New York before last Tuesday’s election, which might have put Trump over the top. A real party chairman would have been cracking heads. Priebus is reduced to pleading with everyone to believe him when he says that the process of selecting a nominee will be conducted fairly.

The most significant news to come out of Florida was that the RNC’s 56-member rules committee voted down a proposal to change the procedural rules used to govern the floor during the convention. The current method is based on that used by the House of Representatives, which gives enormous power to the convention chair to decide motions and keep things moving along. The rejected proposal would have switched the convention to Robert’s Rules of Order, which would have given much more power to the 2,500 delegates who will be seated in Cleveland. Any of those delegates could hold up proceedings with objections to convention business, requiring extra votes to get things moving again and likely ensuring a much longer, more frustrating convention.

Ironically, the convention chairman who will preside over the floor is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who has found himself unable to move business through the House partly because he has devolved some of his power back to committee chairs and other members of his caucus. If he’s as successful at running the convention floor as he is at running the House of Representatives, it is entirely possible the delegates will still be sitting in Quicken Loans Arena when the November election rolls around.

But that’s for later. For now, the RNC members look like the rest of the party and many observers have for a solid year: Standing around scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the hell is going on and, wondering whether they can climb out of this mess.

 Even in an election year, the quarterly meeting of the Republican National Committee would likely attract little to no attention. Why should it? Three days of a couple of hundred Republicans gathered at some nice resort to hear some speeches, drink bourbon and glad-hand sounds pretty much like one of Rush Limbaugh’s weddings, which occur almost as often.

But this is no ordinary election year, which is why last week’s RNC meeting garnered more press coverage than usual. It was the last meeting before the party’s nominating convention in July, which meant a last chance for the establishment to exert any influence on the conduct of the proceedings in Cleveland, and for the candidates or the surrogates attending in their stead to make their pitches to party insiders.

This last part led to Ted Cruz pretending that the assembled RNC members were not the establishment figures he has spent his entire Senate career railing against, but were instead the grassroots of the party, the heart and soul, the true conservatives sold out by the Washington cartel. Cruz is really flailing, trying to come up with a new identity for himself. He has spent a year portraying himself as a bomb-thrower who would energize conservatives, leaving squishy establishment moderates in his dust. Now that he has realized how difficult it is to win the nomination if everyone in the party thinks he’s a hateful dick, he’s trying to be conciliatory with insiders while not giving up pandering to the fears of the hard right voters who want to regulate which bathrooms people are allowed to use. It is a bad time for an identity crisis, which is why you have to wonder if the normally unflappable Cruz is melting down as he sees his dream of becoming president slipping away.

Cruz’s floundering highlights just how uncharted this election’s territory is for the RNC members gathered in Florida. A less fractured party, one where the RNC is an actual power center helping to order events rather than scrambling to keep up with them, would use such a meeting to enforce discipline and start unifying the GOP before the convention. Some members could take Donald Trump’s surrogates aside (Trump was the only candidate to not attend the meeting) and tell them to let their boss know that they are working hard to smooth the way for his coronation in Cleveland.

Others would take Cruz and John Kasich for long walks along the Florida shore, like Carlos Trafficante having a come-to-Jesus moment with one of his wayward capos. During these walks, RNC members would make clear to the candidates that their futures as members in good standing of the Republican Party depend on how much longer they stay in the race, sniping at the front-runner and giving the Democrats ammunition for the general election. A few promises are made -- to support presidential runs in 2020 or later, or campaigns for other elected office. (Cruz is up for re-election to the Senate in 2018.) But the overall message would be clear: Get out now, or we’ll get you out.

But the RNC can’t do that, because it has no power. Any favorable nods towards Cruz or Kasich risk alienating Trump voters, who have so far made him the frontrunner by a lot, and who are constantly being egged on by Trump’s telling them the party has “rigged” the primary to take away the nomination. (These speeches have had the cumulative effect of bringing a small handful of Trump’s crazier supporters out of the woodwork.) Any hints of pushing a compromise candidate if no one gets a majority of delegates on the first or several subsequent ballots at the convention will get shouted down by activists. Basically, the RNC is in a no-win situation.

So everyone walked a fine line. RNC chairman Reince Priebus, perhaps the saddest figure in national politics right now, seems to have capitulated to the near-inevitability of Trump’s nomination. In Florida, he gave a speech in which he told the “Never Trump” forces that they are going to have to quit that campaign and start unifying behind the party. Which should be easy, since the “Never Trump” campaign has been nearly invisible for weeks now, barely spending any resources in New York before last Tuesday’s election, which might have put Trump over the top. A real party chairman would have been cracking heads. Priebus is reduced to pleading with everyone to believe him when he says that the process of selecting a nominee will be conducted fairly.

The most significant news to come out of Florida was that the RNC’s 56-member rules committee voted down a proposal to change the procedural rules used to govern the floor during the convention. The current method is based on that used by the House of Representatives, which gives enormous power to the convention chair to decide motions and keep things moving along. The rejected proposal would have switched the convention to Robert’s Rules of Order, which would have given much more power to the 2,500 delegates who will be seated in Cleveland. Any of those delegates could hold up proceedings with objections to convention business, requiring extra votes to get things moving again and likely ensuring a much longer, more frustrating convention.

Ironically, the convention chairman who will preside over the floor is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who has found himself unable to move business through the House partly because he has devolved some of his power back to committee chairs and other members of his caucus. If he’s as successful at running the convention floor as he is at running the House of Representatives, it is entirely possible the delegates will still be sitting in Quicken Loans Arena when the November election rolls around.

But that’s for later. For now, the RNC members look like the rest of the party and many observers have for a solid year: Standing around scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the hell is going on and, wondering whether they can climb out of this mess.

 

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