Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 811
April 8, 2016
Bruce Springsteen’s North Carolina concert cancellation in support of LGBT rights: 6 other times The Boss took a stand
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have announced the cancellation of its Greensboro, North Carolina show scheduled for Sunday, citing recently passed state legislation that "attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace," Springsteen wrote in a message to fans. Cancelling the concert, Springsteen wrote, "is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards." Like his heroes Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Springsteen's music and activism have always been closely linked. Here are six other times when The Boss took a stand: 1. South African Apartheid In 1985, E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt recruited Springsteen and dozens of other stars, including Miles Davis and Bono, to record "Sun City," a protest anthem against the South African government's apartheid policy. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band did not perform in South Africa until 2014, years after the end of apartheid. The band opened its first Cape Town show with a cover of the Special A.K.A.'s "Free Nelson Mandela" in tribute to the South African leader. 2. American Skin (41 Shots) "You can get killed just for living in your American Skin" sings Springsteen in this song about Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old Guinean immigrant who was killed by police in the Bronx in 1999. NYPD officers fired 41 bullets at Diallo, who was unarmed. Springsteen performed the song at Madison Square Garden in 2000, prompting criticism from then-NYPD commissioner Howard Safir and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. Springsteen has since dedicated performances of "American Skin" to Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in Florida. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQMqW... 3. No Nukes Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at Madison Square Garden in September 1979 as part of the No Nukes concert series. Musicians United for Safe Energy, an activist organization founded by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall, held the concerts in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster to protest the use of nuclear energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvQt3... 4. Human Rights Now! Amnesty International organized a blockbuster 1988 world tour in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that included Springsteen, U2, Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Tracy Chapman. The six-week Human Rights Now! tour included 20 shows on five continents, and each concert concluded with a group performance of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released." "There were about 60 seconds where you could feel people sussing us out, and then the whole place just exploded," Springsteen said recently of the tour's stop in the Ivory Coast. "The band came off feeling like it was the first show we'd ever done." 5. We Are The World USA for Africa's star-studded 1985 charity single raised over $74 million for famine relief and featured a call-and-response section between Springsteen and Stevie Wonder. "Anytime somebody asks you to take one night of your time to stop people starving to death, it's pretty hard — you can't say no," Springsteen later said of the experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BNo... 6. Israel's Palestine policy? The E Street Band is reportedly scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv in July, prompting activists to petition Springsteen to join a boycott against playing in Israel. Other artists, including Roger Waters and Brian Eno, have refused to perform in the country in protest of the Israeli government's policy towards Palestinians. The rumored tour date does not currently appear on the band's official website, and Springsteen has not yet commented.Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have announced the cancellation of its Greensboro, North Carolina show scheduled for Sunday, citing recently passed state legislation that "attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace," Springsteen wrote in a message to fans. Cancelling the concert, Springsteen wrote, "is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards." Like his heroes Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Springsteen's music and activism have always been closely linked. Here are six other times when The Boss took a stand: 1. South African Apartheid In 1985, E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt recruited Springsteen and dozens of other stars, including Miles Davis and Bono, to record "Sun City," a protest anthem against the South African government's apartheid policy. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band did not perform in South Africa until 2014, years after the end of apartheid. The band opened its first Cape Town show with a cover of the Special A.K.A.'s "Free Nelson Mandela" in tribute to the South African leader. 2. American Skin (41 Shots) "You can get killed just for living in your American Skin" sings Springsteen in this song about Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old Guinean immigrant who was killed by police in the Bronx in 1999. NYPD officers fired 41 bullets at Diallo, who was unarmed. Springsteen performed the song at Madison Square Garden in 2000, prompting criticism from then-NYPD commissioner Howard Safir and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. Springsteen has since dedicated performances of "American Skin" to Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in Florida. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQMqW... 3. No Nukes Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at Madison Square Garden in September 1979 as part of the No Nukes concert series. Musicians United for Safe Energy, an activist organization founded by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall, held the concerts in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster to protest the use of nuclear energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvQt3... 4. Human Rights Now! Amnesty International organized a blockbuster 1988 world tour in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that included Springsteen, U2, Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Tracy Chapman. The six-week Human Rights Now! tour included 20 shows on five continents, and each concert concluded with a group performance of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released." "There were about 60 seconds where you could feel people sussing us out, and then the whole place just exploded," Springsteen said recently of the tour's stop in the Ivory Coast. "The band came off feeling like it was the first show we'd ever done." 5. We Are The World USA for Africa's star-studded 1985 charity single raised over $74 million for famine relief and featured a call-and-response section between Springsteen and Stevie Wonder. "Anytime somebody asks you to take one night of your time to stop people starving to death, it's pretty hard — you can't say no," Springsteen later said of the experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BNo... 6. Israel's Palestine policy? The E Street Band is reportedly scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv in July, prompting activists to petition Springsteen to join a boycott against playing in Israel. Other artists, including Roger Waters and Brian Eno, have refused to perform in the country in protest of the Israeli government's policy towards Palestinians. The rumored tour date does not currently appear on the band's official website, and Springsteen has not yet commented.Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have announced the cancellation of its Greensboro, North Carolina show scheduled for Sunday, citing recently passed state legislation that "attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace," Springsteen wrote in a message to fans. Cancelling the concert, Springsteen wrote, "is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards." Like his heroes Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Springsteen's music and activism have always been closely linked. Here are six other times when The Boss took a stand: 1. South African Apartheid In 1985, E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt recruited Springsteen and dozens of other stars, including Miles Davis and Bono, to record "Sun City," a protest anthem against the South African government's apartheid policy. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band did not perform in South Africa until 2014, years after the end of apartheid. The band opened its first Cape Town show with a cover of the Special A.K.A.'s "Free Nelson Mandela" in tribute to the South African leader. 2. American Skin (41 Shots) "You can get killed just for living in your American Skin" sings Springsteen in this song about Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old Guinean immigrant who was killed by police in the Bronx in 1999. NYPD officers fired 41 bullets at Diallo, who was unarmed. Springsteen performed the song at Madison Square Garden in 2000, prompting criticism from then-NYPD commissioner Howard Safir and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. Springsteen has since dedicated performances of "American Skin" to Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in Florida. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQMqW... 3. No Nukes Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at Madison Square Garden in September 1979 as part of the No Nukes concert series. Musicians United for Safe Energy, an activist organization founded by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall, held the concerts in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster to protest the use of nuclear energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvQt3... 4. Human Rights Now! Amnesty International organized a blockbuster 1988 world tour in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that included Springsteen, U2, Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Tracy Chapman. The six-week Human Rights Now! tour included 20 shows on five continents, and each concert concluded with a group performance of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released." "There were about 60 seconds where you could feel people sussing us out, and then the whole place just exploded," Springsteen said recently of the tour's stop in the Ivory Coast. "The band came off feeling like it was the first show we'd ever done." 5. We Are The World USA for Africa's star-studded 1985 charity single raised over $74 million for famine relief and featured a call-and-response section between Springsteen and Stevie Wonder. "Anytime somebody asks you to take one night of your time to stop people starving to death, it's pretty hard — you can't say no," Springsteen later said of the experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BNo... 6. Israel's Palestine policy? The E Street Band is reportedly scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv in July, prompting activists to petition Springsteen to join a boycott against playing in Israel. Other artists, including Roger Waters and Brian Eno, have refused to perform in the country in protest of the Israeli government's policy towards Palestinians. The rumored tour date does not currently appear on the band's official website, and Springsteen has not yet commented.
What’s going on at The Washington Post? The paper played a willing role in the silly Sanders-Clinton “qualifications” flap
Hillary Clinton's tiff this week with Bernie Sanders over their respective qualifications to serve as president is a bit of a head-spinner. Let's begin with a brief recap. In an interview on the Wednesday edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough pressed Clinton on whether she thinks Sanders is "qualified" to serve as president. Clinton stopped short of explicitly saying she thinks Sanders is unqualified, but said this: "I think he hadn't done his homework and he'd been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn't really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions." [Emphasis mine] The Washington Post then ran a story with the headline "Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president." Later that evening, Sanders attacked Clinton at a rally in Philadelphia: "[Clinton] has been saying lately that she thinks I am quote-unquote not qualified to be president. Let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton, I don't believe that she is qualified." Sanders reportedly based his statement on the aforementioned Washington Post article. The Clinton campaign responded with sanctimonious incredulity. “This is a ridiculous and irresponsible attack for someone to make,” Clinton spokeswoman Christina Reynolds wrote in a fundraising email. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon took to Twitter: https://twitter.com/brianefallon/stat... The crux of the Clinton camp's argument is that Hillary Clinton never "quote-unquote" said that Sanders was unqualified. Rather, she simply noted that his record "raises questions" about his qualifications. "Raising questions" is a classic move that allows politicians to bring up an issue while maintaining deniability about their stance on it. Compare Clinton's "questions" to what Donald Trump said in 2012 regarding Barack Obama's birth certificate: "I don't consider myself birther or not birther, but there are some major questions here." Who me? I'm not a birther! I'm just asking questions! The Washington Post is surely familiar with this kind of kindergarten legalism, but for some reason the paper did little but echo the Clinton campaign's talking points in a Thursday article under the headline "Sanders’s incorrect claim that Clinton called him ‘not qualified’ for the presidency." The Post gave Sanders "three-out-of-four pinocchios" for his statement, on the following grounds: "Sanders is putting words in Clinton’s mouth. She never said 'quote unquote' that he was not qualified to be president. In fact, she diplomatically went out of her way to avoid saying that, without at the same time saying he was qualified." Really? Diplomatically? Sanders is perhaps guilty of clumsy phrasing, but not dishonesty. Meanwhile, the Post excused itself for writing the headline partially responsible for starting the whole thing:
The art of headline writing is an imperfect art. The editor often has to summarize the meaning of a complex and nuanced article in just a few words. Many Washington-based reporters have experienced the frustration of having an accurate article denied by an agency spokesman because of a headline that went a little far off the mark.
In this case, however, The Post headline or article did not quote Clinton as saying Sanders was unqualified. Instead, it drew attention to an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" in which Clinton sidestepped questions about whether Sanders was qualified.
So if you're keeping score at home, The Washington Post reported that Clinton had questioned Sanders' qualifications, Sanders attacked Clinton based upon that very article, and then the Post attacked Sanders using the Clinton campaign's spin and washed its hands of its own role in the controversy. The Post is happy to clear both itself and the Clinton campaign because, according to its reasoning, "Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president" is light years different than "Clinton says Sanders is qualified to be president." But isn't that a distinction without a difference? This whole conflict is exceedingly silly, and the Washington Post played a willing role in the circus.Hillary Clinton's tiff this week with Bernie Sanders over their respective qualifications to serve as president is a bit of a head-spinner. Let's begin with a brief recap. In an interview on the Wednesday edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough pressed Clinton on whether she thinks Sanders is "qualified" to serve as president. Clinton stopped short of explicitly saying she thinks Sanders is unqualified, but said this: "I think he hadn't done his homework and he'd been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn't really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions." [Emphasis mine] The Washington Post then ran a story with the headline "Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president." Later that evening, Sanders attacked Clinton at a rally in Philadelphia: "[Clinton] has been saying lately that she thinks I am quote-unquote not qualified to be president. Let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton, I don't believe that she is qualified." Sanders reportedly based his statement on the aforementioned Washington Post article. The Clinton campaign responded with sanctimonious incredulity. “This is a ridiculous and irresponsible attack for someone to make,” Clinton spokeswoman Christina Reynolds wrote in a fundraising email. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon took to Twitter: https://twitter.com/brianefallon/stat... The crux of the Clinton camp's argument is that Hillary Clinton never "quote-unquote" said that Sanders was unqualified. Rather, she simply noted that his record "raises questions" about his qualifications. "Raising questions" is a classic move that allows politicians to bring up an issue while maintaining deniability about their stance on it. Compare Clinton's "questions" to what Donald Trump said in 2012 regarding Barack Obama's birth certificate: "I don't consider myself birther or not birther, but there are some major questions here." Who me? I'm not a birther! I'm just asking questions! The Washington Post is surely familiar with this kind of kindergarten legalism, but for some reason the paper did little but echo the Clinton campaign's talking points in a Thursday article under the headline "Sanders’s incorrect claim that Clinton called him ‘not qualified’ for the presidency." The Post gave Sanders "three-out-of-four pinocchios" for his statement, on the following grounds: "Sanders is putting words in Clinton’s mouth. She never said 'quote unquote' that he was not qualified to be president. In fact, she diplomatically went out of her way to avoid saying that, without at the same time saying he was qualified." Really? Diplomatically? Sanders is perhaps guilty of clumsy phrasing, but not dishonesty. Meanwhile, the Post excused itself for writing the headline partially responsible for starting the whole thing:The art of headline writing is an imperfect art. The editor often has to summarize the meaning of a complex and nuanced article in just a few words. Many Washington-based reporters have experienced the frustration of having an accurate article denied by an agency spokesman because of a headline that went a little far off the mark.
In this case, however, The Post headline or article did not quote Clinton as saying Sanders was unqualified. Instead, it drew attention to an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" in which Clinton sidestepped questions about whether Sanders was qualified.
So if you're keeping score at home, The Washington Post reported that Clinton had questioned Sanders' qualifications, Sanders attacked Clinton based upon that very article, and then the Post attacked Sanders using the Clinton campaign's spin and washed its hands of its own role in the controversy. The Post is happy to clear both itself and the Clinton campaign because, according to its reasoning, "Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president" is light years different than "Clinton says Sanders is qualified to be president." But isn't that a distinction without a difference? This whole conflict is exceedingly silly, and the Washington Post played a willing role in the circus.
“Suicide vest included?”: Right-wing nutjobs go bonkers as “Sesame Street” unveils hijab-clad puppet, Zari
After the female-led "Rogue One" trailer dropped Thursday morning, conservative values were already working for the weekend. The last thing conservative white males needed was to see this: https://twitter.com/SesameWorkshop/st... Meet Zari, "a curious and eager six year-old girl" who "will be featured in new, locally produced segments that focus on curriculum topics like girls’ empowerment, national identity, physical health, and social and emotional wellbeing," according to a Sesame Street press release. Needless to say, conservative heads exploded faster than you could say, "make America great again." The backlash, played out on Twitter, is truly a sight to behold: https://twitter.com/ArRuple/status/71... https://twitter.com/CorruptMsm/status... https://twitter.com/pearlskylar1/stat... https://twitter.com/Uncle_Jimbo/statu... https://twitter.com/FlyoverTruth/stat... https://twitter.com/_LucidHurricane/s... https://twitter.com/Al_Waisman/status... https://twitter.com/Rambobiggs/status... https://twitter.com/QuintonQuayle/sta... https://twitter.com/logicallyknot/sta... https://twitter.com/whitleypedia/stat... https://twitter.com/perskeptive/statu... https://twitter.com/JamieAgathaRose/s... the female-led "Rogue One" trailer dropped Thursday morning, conservative values were already working for the weekend. The last thing conservative white males needed was to see this: https://twitter.com/SesameWorkshop/st... Meet Zari, "a curious and eager six year-old girl" who "will be featured in new, locally produced segments that focus on curriculum topics like girls’ empowerment, national identity, physical health, and social and emotional wellbeing," according to a Sesame Street press release. Needless to say, conservative heads exploded faster than you could say, "make America great again." The backlash, played out on Twitter, is truly a sight to behold: https://twitter.com/ArRuple/status/71... https://twitter.com/CorruptMsm/status... https://twitter.com/pearlskylar1/stat... https://twitter.com/Uncle_Jimbo/statu... https://twitter.com/FlyoverTruth/stat... https://twitter.com/_LucidHurricane/s... https://twitter.com/Al_Waisman/status... https://twitter.com/Rambobiggs/status... https://twitter.com/QuintonQuayle/sta... https://twitter.com/logicallyknot/sta... https://twitter.com/whitleypedia/stat... https://twitter.com/perskeptive/statu... https://twitter.com/JamieAgathaRose/s...
Go ahead Republicans, nominate Paul Ryan: Why this brokered-convention scheme is doomed to fail spectacularly
On Thursday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan posted a video to YouTube. The video, which was set to stirring music, showed Ryan saying this in a speech:
"What really bothers me the most about politics these days is this notion of identity politics: that we’re going to win an election by dividing people, rather than inspiring people on our common humanity and our common ideals and our common culture on the things that should unify us. We all want to be prosperous. We all want to be healthy. We want everybody to succeed. We want people to reach their potential in their lives. Now, liberals and conservatives are going to disagree with one another on that. No problem. That’s what this is all about. So let’s have a battle of ideas. Let’s have a contest of whose ideas are better and why our ideas are better."
Ryan staffers denied that the video was some sort of political campaign ad, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt on that. The video wasn't an ad. It was just a regular video with the look, feel, music can't-we-all-get-along tone of a general election presidential campaign ad that was released just as speculation about Ryan's prospects in the 2016 campaign have been rapidly escalating.
Besides all that, nothing to see here.
Obviously, Ryan knew what he was doing. He has played a curious role throughout the deranged GOP primary, popping up now and then to give vaguely worded criticisms of one Donald Trump comment or another, and then receding into the background. But in the past week, as the chances of a brokered Republican convention have spiked, Ryan's name has kept popping up.
The scenario is simple enough: the Republicans get to Cleveland, Donald Trump can't get a majority of delegates to back him, and instead of going with runner-up Ted Cruz—who, unlike Ryan, has actually been winning lots of votes and primaries—the party installs Ryan as its savior for November. Ryan then presumably sails across America, uniting the people behind his cheerful conservative vision.
Of course, as with everything about Republican politics, this has relatively little to do with substance. Despite Ryan's gee-whiz persona, he's the most right-wing House Speaker in decades, with a well-documented devotion to Ayn Rand and a long history of pushing extreme economic proposals.
No, Ryan is really attractive because the GOP machine thinks that he'll do what Marco Rubio, that other alleged youthful optimist, couldn't. Rubio was supposed to be able to cloak his decidedly conservative vision in a gentle rhetorical sweater, to woo people with his boyishness and his charm. He failed miserably, of course, but unlike him, Ryan wouldn't have to subject himself to the whims of the Republican electorate, so that problem would be fixed.Ryan is currently playing the same coy games about the presidency that he played with the speakership. Then, he went from absolutely being against the idea to making it clear that he would only take the job if he could be crowned without a fight to getting what he wanted and taking the job. Sound familiar?
There's one big problem with all of this, though: The presidency is not the speakership. Ryan's potential backers, are kidding themselves if they think the sight of the will of the voters being so totally defied will go down easily, either at the convention or in a general election campaign. The problem with the Republican Party is that it's hopelessly divided and unable to figure out how to deal with the repercussions of its decades of political extremism. Paul Ryan is not going to be able to change that by running roughshod over the democratic process. The notion that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz supporters will quietly assent to such a thing seems completely absurd—and really, why should they go along with that sort of hijacking? Frankly, it's a wonder that Ryan appears to be contemplating a 2016 run at all. He'd be better staying far, far away from the whole unhinged mess. But in the meantime, he should stop putting out quasi-campaign videos that are too clever by half. Either run, or don't.
Our body standards are f**ked: J-Law’s “curvy,” Amy Schumer is “plus size” and a Victoria’s Secret angel was told she had to lose weight
"I think we've gotten so used to underweight that when you are a normal weight it's like, 'Oh, my God, she's curvy.'" says Jennifer Lawrence. "Which," she adds, "is crazy." In the new issue of Harper's Bazaar, the Oscar winner and totally regular person opens up in her typically candid way about planning her awards show dresses based on her menstrual cycle, and the ever changing goalposts for what constitutes a "normal" body. "I would like us to make a new normal-body type," she explains. "Everybody says, 'We love that there is somebody with a normal body!' And I'm like, 'I don't feel like I have a normal body.' I do Pilates every day. I eat, but I work out a lot more than a normal person… The bare minimum, just for me, would be to up the ante. At least so I don't feel like the fattest one." It's been ten years since Andy Sacks, the put upon fictional young assistant with the boss from hell in "The Devil Wears Prada," asked,"So none of the girls here eat anything?"and received the reply from a colleague, "Not since two became new four and zero became the new two" and that six, damningly, is "the new fourteen." In the ensuing years, what once was satire now sounds remarkably like actual public conversation around women's bodies. Just earlier this week, Amy Schumer called out Glamour for including her among the "women who inspire us" -- in a special plus size edition of the magazine -- saying, "Plus size is considered size 16 in America. I go between a size 6 and an 8. @glamourmag put me in their plus size only issue without asking or letting me know and it doesn’t feel right to me. Young girls seeing my body type thinking that is plus size?" And in her memoir "Why Not Me?" Mindy Kaling similarly talks about the backhanded compliment when people say she "doesn't conform to any normal standards of beauty," and of wondering what the hell magazines mean when they include her among "Curvy Celebs We Adore!" Of course beauty comes in all sizes — the world is full of amazing women built like Zendaya and Rebel Wilson, among many other shapes and sizes. But the idea that any public figure who is not a J Crew size 000 is striking a bold blow for body positivity is ludicrous. And the fact that women are still being body shamed if they don't conform exactly to the aesthetic standards of computer generated special effects is totally crazy. Earlier this week, British model Iskra Lawrence responded to an Instagram commenter who called her a "fat cow" — by posting a video of herself in her underwear, looking frankly sexy as hell, eating potato chips in slow motion. And at another point on the body wars spectrum, former Victoria's Secret model Erin Heatherton came forward with the revelation that "My last two Victoria’s Secret shows, I was told I had to lose weight." She admitted, "I got to a point where one night I got home from a workout and I remember staring at my food and thinking maybe I should just not eat. I realized I couldn’t go out into the world—parading my body and myself in front of all these women who look up to me—and tell them that this is easy and simple and everyone can do this." Jennifer Lawrence, meanwhile, has been called "curvy" since the beginning of her career -- and from a remarkably varied roster of sources. A few years ago, The New York Times famously doubted that a creature with her "womanly figure" was capable of playing Katniss in "The Hunger Games." She's said in the past, "In Hollywood, I’m obese. I’m considered a fat actress, I’m Val Kilmer in that one picture on the beach." Four years later, sadly, it doesn't sound like much has changed for the industry — or for her. Lawrence tells Bazaar this week that she chose her show-stopping, cutout Golden Globes Awards gown this year in part because "It was loose at the front. And I didn't have to worry about sucking anything in. The other dress was really tight, and I'm not going to suck in my uterus. I don't have to do that."
Ann Coulter slams Pope Francis for urging acceptance of gays but not Donald Trump
Bernie Sanders accepted an invitation from Pope Francis to speak at the Vatican next week, so naturally, professional flamethrower Ann Coulter is reacting with a hissy fit demanding that the Pontiff show some love for her favorite American politician, Donald Trump. On Twitter Friday afternoon, the proactive (and frankly tired) pundit reacted to news of the Pope's call for a more progressive approach from the Church. Francis released a 256-page document called "Amoris Laetitia," or "The Joy of Love" on Friday, urging priests to preach a more compassionate vision for the church on social issues like divorce and LGBT members. “I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion,” the pope wrote. “But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness.” For some reason, Pope Francis' failure to explicitly endorse Donald Trump came as shock to Coulter: https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status... Of course, Francis slammed Trump during his recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, saying, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the gospel."
Patton Oswalt mercilessly skewers his own “Star Wars” obsession
Everyone's losing their minds about this "Rogue One" (or is it "Rouge One"?) teaser that dropped yesterday, but let's not let it overshadow announcement of Patton Oswalt's new hour of stand-up, "Talking for Clapping." The trailer dropped today on YouTube: Among the topics of discussion: San Francisco, "the capitol of the snappy answer for the completely reasonable question"; the missed opportunity of being able to talk to terminal patients about "Star Wars"; gay prom vs. straight prom. And, perhaps best of all, "Talking for Clapping" will be streaming on Netflix starting April 22, so you won't have to wait 'til December.Everyone's losing their minds about this "Rogue One" (or is it "Rouge One"?) teaser that dropped yesterday, but let's not let it overshadow announcement of Patton Oswalt's new hour of stand-up, "Talking for Clapping." The trailer dropped today on YouTube: Among the topics of discussion: San Francisco, "the capitol of the snappy answer for the completely reasonable question"; the missed opportunity of being able to talk to terminal patients about "Star Wars"; gay prom vs. straight prom. And, perhaps best of all, "Talking for Clapping" will be streaming on Netflix starting April 22, so you won't have to wait 'til December.Everyone's losing their minds about this "Rogue One" (or is it "Rouge One"?) teaser that dropped yesterday, but let's not let it overshadow announcement of Patton Oswalt's new hour of stand-up, "Talking for Clapping." The trailer dropped today on YouTube: Among the topics of discussion: San Francisco, "the capitol of the snappy answer for the completely reasonable question"; the missed opportunity of being able to talk to terminal patients about "Star Wars"; gay prom vs. straight prom. And, perhaps best of all, "Talking for Clapping" will be streaming on Netflix starting April 22, so you won't have to wait 'til December.Everyone's losing their minds about this "Rogue One" (or is it "Rouge One"?) teaser that dropped yesterday, but let's not let it overshadow announcement of Patton Oswalt's new hour of stand-up, "Talking for Clapping." The trailer dropped today on YouTube: Among the topics of discussion: San Francisco, "the capitol of the snappy answer for the completely reasonable question"; the missed opportunity of being able to talk to terminal patients about "Star Wars"; gay prom vs. straight prom. And, perhaps best of all, "Talking for Clapping" will be streaming on Netflix starting April 22, so you won't have to wait 'til December.Everyone's losing their minds about this "Rogue One" (or is it "Rouge One"?) teaser that dropped yesterday, but let's not let it overshadow announcement of Patton Oswalt's new hour of stand-up, "Talking for Clapping." The trailer dropped today on YouTube: Among the topics of discussion: San Francisco, "the capitol of the snappy answer for the completely reasonable question"; the missed opportunity of being able to talk to terminal patients about "Star Wars"; gay prom vs. straight prom. And, perhaps best of all, "Talking for Clapping" will be streaming on Netflix starting April 22, so you won't have to wait 'til December.
“When there is no middle class, there cannot be real democracy”
It's no secret that America's middle class is in decline. But while we focus on how that decline started (and who is to blame), we often forget to consider what happens if our middle class is wiped out entirely. If we don't work to restore the American middle class to the vibrant, robust segment of our nation it once was, we may soon witness the end of small-d democracy as we know it. As history and nature both show us, working for the collective good is essential to a functioning democracy, and the natural outcome of that work is a strong and vibrant middle class. The most ancient form of democracy is found among virtually all indigenous peoples of the world. It's the way humans have lived for more than 150,000 years. There are no rich and no poor among most tribal people: everybody is "middle class." There is also little hierarchy. The concept of chief is one that Europeans brought with them to America, which in large part is what produced so much confusion in the 1600s and 1700s as most Native American tribes would never delegate absolute authority to any one person to sign a treaty. Instead decisions were made by consensus in these most ancient cauldrons of democracy. The Founders of this nation, and the framers of our Constitution were heavily influenced and inspired by the democracy they saw all around them. Much of the U.S. Constitution is based on the Iroquois Confederacy: the five (later six) tribes who occupied territories from New England to the edge of the Midwest. It was a democracy with elected representatives, an upper and lower house, and a supreme court (made up entirely of women, who held final say in five of the six tribes). As Benjamin Franklin noted to his contemporaries at the Constitutional Convention: "It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies." The framers modeled the oldest democracies, and the oldest forms of the middle class, and thus helped create the truly widespread and strong first middle class in the history of modern civilization. That first American middle class was a far cry from the 1950s stereotype that is often referenced in discussions of the ideal middle-income lifestyle. During our nation's early history, “middle class” was much closer to what we consider today as “working class,” and it was only open to the white, male population. But that early middle class was still a distinct and separate segment of the population from the ruling elites who held great fortunes or the servant class who were considered nothing more than property. For the first time in modern history, that middle group of individuals had a voice and power, and they helped shape our young democracy. Back in Europe, however, the sort of democracy the framers were borrowing and inventing, and even the existence of a middle class itself, was considered unnatural. For most of the 7,000 years of recorded human history, all the way back to the Gilgamesh Epic, the oldest written story, what we call a middle class is virtually unheard of—as was democracy. Throughout most of the history of what we call civilization, an unrestrained economy and the idea of hierarchical social organization has always produced a small ruling elite and a large number of nearly impoverished workers. Up until the founding of America, the middle class was considered unnatural by many political philosophers. Thomas Hobbes wrote in his 1651 magnum opus Leviathan that the world was better off with the rule of the few over the many, even if that meant that the many were impoverished. Without a strong and iron-fisted ruler, Hobbes wrote, there would be "no place for industry...no arts, no letters, no society." Because Hobbes believed that ordinary people couldn't govern themselves, he believed that most people would be happy to exchange personal freedom and economic opportunity for the ability to live in safety and security. For the working class to have both freedom and security, Hobbes suggested, was impossible. Our nation's Founders disagreed. They believed in the rights of ordinary people to self-determination, so they created a form of government in which We the People rule. They declared that all people, not just the elite, have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." (In that declaration, Thomas Jefferson replaced John Locke's famous "life, liberty, and property" with "life, liberty, and happiness"—the first time the word had ever appeared in the founding document of any nation.) They believed that the people could create a country founded on personal freedom and economic opportunity for all. The Founders believed in the power of a middle class; and in defiance of Hobbes and the conventional wisdom of Europe, they believed democracy and a middle class were the "natural state of man." As John Quincy Adams argued before the Supreme Court in 1841 on behalf of freeing rebelling slaves in the Amistad case, he stood before and pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence: That DECLARATION says that every man is "endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights," and that "among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"....I will not here discuss the right or the rights of slavery, but I say that the doctrine of Hobbes, that War is the natural state of man, has for ages been exploded, as equally disclaimed and rejected by the philosopher and the Christian. That it is utterly incompatible with any theory of human rights, and especially with the rights which the Declaration of Independence proclaims as self-evident truths.As he had so many times before, John Qunicy Adams used his oral arguments in the Amistad case to insert the word “slavery” into a discussion. He believed so strongly in personal freedom and economic opportunity for all that he went back to Congress for another eight years after his term as president just to help overturn the so-called "Gag Rule" which automatically “tabled,” or postponed any anti-slavery legislation without it ever even being heard. While it would be years before that law was overturned and decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, John Qunicy Adams recognized that our strength as a nation came from our democracy, and that the strength of our democracy came from individual freedom and opportunity. In a letter to James Loyd in October of 1822, he wrote, “Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation.” In other words, he recognized Hobbes was wrong, and that the “natural state of man” gave him a voice and the power to use it. It turns out that the Founders knew something Hobbes didn't: political democracy and an economic middle class is the natural state of humankind. Indeed, it's the natural state of the entire animal kingdom. Biologists used to think animal societies were ruled by alpha males. Recent studies have found that while it's true alpha males (and females, in some species) have the advantage in courtship rituals, that's where their power ends. Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt discovered that animals don't follow a leader, but instead move together. James Randerson did a followup study with red deer to prove the point. How does a herd of deer decide it's time to stop grazing and go toward the watering hole? As they're grazing, various deer point their bodies in seemingly random directions, until it comes time to go drink. Then individuals begin to graze while facing one of several watering holes. When a majority of deer are pointing toward one particular watering hole, they all move in that direction. Randerson saw instances where the alpha deer was actually one of the last to move toward the hole rather than one of the first. When I interviewed Tim Roper about his research at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, he told me that when his findings were first published, scientists from all over the world called to tell him they were seeing the same thing with their research subjects. Birds flying in flocks aren't following a leader but monitoring the motions of those around them for variations in the flight path; when more than 50 percent have moved in a particular direction—even if it's only a quarter-inch in one direction or another—the entire flock veers off that way. It's the same with fish and even swarms of gnats. Roper said his colleagues were telling him that from ants to gorillas, democracy is the norm among animals. Just like with indigenous human societies—which have had hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error to work out the best ways to live—democracy is the norm among animals, and (other than for the Darwinian purpose of finding the best mate) hierarchy/kingdom is the rarity. Thus, we discover, this close relationship between the middle class and democracy is burned into our DNA, along with that of the entire animal kingdom. In a democracy there may be an elite (like the alpha male deer), but they don't rule the others. Instead the group is ruled by the vast middle—what in economic terms we would call a middle class. A true democracy both produces a middle class and requires a middle class for survival. Like the twin strands of DNA, democracy and the middle class are inextricably intertwined, and to break either is to destroy the viability of both. In human society as well, to have a democracy we must have a middle class. And to have a true middle class, a majority of the people in a nation must be educated and economically secure and must have full and easy access to real news so they can make informed decisions. Democracy requires that its citizens be able to afford to take care of themselves and their families when they get sick, to afford a decent place to live, to find meaningful and well-paying work, and to anticipate, and enjoy, a secure retirement. This is the American Dream. It's the America my dad grew up in and the America I grew up in. It's the America that is quickly slipping away from us under the burden of crony capitalism and a political system corrupted by it. When there is no American Dream, when there is no middle class, there cannot be real democracy. That's why when elections are brought to nations that are in crisis or that don't have a broad, stable, well-educated middle class—such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian territories—the result is aristocrats, "strongmen," or theocrats exploiting those elections as a way of gaining decidedly undemocratic power. America's Founders understood the relationship between the middle class—what Thomas Jefferson called the yeomanry—and democracy. Jefferson's greatest fear for the young American nation was not a new king but a new economic aristocracy. He worried that if a small group of citizens became too wealthy—if America became polarized between the very rich and the very poor—democracy would vanish. Our democracy depends upon our ability to play referee to the game of business and to protect labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson insisted, to control "overgrown wealth" from becoming "dangerous to the state," which is, so long as we are a democratic republic, We the People. When wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few and the middle class shrinks to the point where it's no longer a politically potent force, democracy becomes a feudal aristocracy: the rule of the elite. As Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out in 1936, the rule of the many requires that We the People have a degree of economic as well as political freedom. When We the People are given the opportunity to educate ourselves, earn a living wage, own our own homes, and feel confident that we have good child care, health care and care in our old age—in short, when America has a thriving middle class—America also has a thriving democracy. It's time to restore that thriving middle class to its former glory. But, we must correct the sins of our past and make certain that economic opportunity in our nation is not reserved solely for the white, male population. We need a middle class that is open to all Americas, so that each of us has the individual freedom and power to participate in the process and shape this country's freedom. If we don't fight for the programs that protect and restore our middle class to its former glory and beyond, we may as well kiss our democracy goodbye.
April 7, 2016
Addiction is a learning disorder: Why the war on drugs is useless, AA undermines treatment, and addiction studies can learn a lot from autism
In September of 1986, Maia Szalavitz was charged with felony possession – nearly 2.5 kilos – of cocaine and faced 15 years to life under New York’s unduly harsh Rockefeller drug laws. Before then, she was a student at Columbia University, but had been suspended for dealing. After getting kicked out of a school she had worked her whole life to get into, her cocaine use accelerated to the point where she was injecting up to 40 times a day, and eventually escalated to speedballs, a powerful mixture of cocaine and heroin in a single shot. At 23, when the thought crossed her mind of sleeping with a man for drugs, she knew it was time to get help, and voluntarily entered treatment. After her drug charge was eventually dismissed, she built a career dedicated to understanding one of the most complex entanglements human beings endure: addiction. She has since gone on to write about drugs, policy, and science for nearly 30 years with remarkable consistency. In her impressive new book, "Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction," Szalavitz dives into the science of her development, to re-think a condition shrouded in myth and misconception. Her writing is quick and sharp, and takes immediate aim at “a system that calls you ‘dirty’ if you relapse; one that assumes you are a liar, a thief, or worse.” With science, logic, and experience, Szalavitz debunks old, moralistic ideas and replaces them with elegant new ones. Salon spoke to Szalavitz about how re-thinking addiction can lead to more compassionate treatments and policies that aim to help rather than criminalize people with different wiring. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. Addiction, in your view, is a neuro-developmental learning disorder. What does that mean? It means that for one, addiction can’t occur without learning. When I say that, what I mean is literally if you don’t learn that the drug comforts you, makes you feel euphoric or allows you to cope in some way, you cannot be addicted to it—because you cannot crave it, because you don’t know what to pursue despite negative consequences. And that’s important, because people have often thought addiction is just this physiological process that hijacks your brain. That’s really not quite accurate. It involves learning, it involves interacting with the environment, interpreting the environment, and it involves making choices. The other reason that I think it’s important to see addiction as a developmental disorder is that 90 percent of all addiction occurs between the teens and 20s. That is similar to other developmental conditions such as schizophrenia and depression, which tend to start at that age. That suggests there is a particular period of vulnerability that the brain has and also probably has to do with your life history, as well. When you hit your teens or 20s you’re learning the coping skills you need to handle the adult relationships that are necessary for survival and reproduction. If you are using drugs to escape during this time not only is your brain developmentally vulnerable to not being able to control the use of the drug, but you’re also missing out on developmental experiences that allow you to create other methods of coping. Your book is scientific and steeped in research, but it is also extremely personal. What was it like researching yourself? Your development? It was funny because I have done a lot of books that I’ve co-authored with people where I have a similar structure, using their experience to explain certain types of science. I thought, oh, this will be really easy because I don’t have to nag anybody to schedule interviews; I just have to nag myself. It was a lot harder than I thought and I felt a lot more vulnerable than I expected. Looking back on that stuff was really intense. It sometimes makes me feel old because I look back and think, how the hell could I have done that? And you know at the time it didn’t seem as absurd and messed up as it does to me now. Once you are able to have your cortex exert proper control over your behavior it comes to seem completely alien behaving as an adolescent. You kicked for good at 23. What’s the significance of that age? What’s going on in the brain developmentally around that time? That is very interesting, because at that age between, say 23 and 25, is when the final sculpting of the prefrontal cortex is happening. I wondered if I stopped at that age because I had an insight that I needed to stop or because I had the neural ability to carry it out. That’s really not answerable. But at that age it is definitely the case that you are finally developing self-control and greater leverage over the motivational and pleasure areas that can drive you astray. There is the scene in which you describe having that epiphany, where afterward you voluntarily enter treatment, right around that age. That’s the way I’ve always framed it. Especially during my 12-step days, it made a good story. I certainly wasn’t being dishonest, that is how I believed it happened. It’s really difficult to determine causality in your own behavior and that’s actually one of the points I’m trying to make in the book. People always ask, “Well, how’d you do it?” And I can only tell you how I think I did it. But I don’t have 20 identical twins that did something different so I can prove this is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, in the addictions field, we’ve developed this idea that one size fits all, and whatever works for me is going to work for you, and we can extrapolate from my experience to be the experience of all people with addiction. That’s why I like the saying from the autism community, which is: if you met one person with autism you’ve met one person with autism. We should be saying that about addictions. I find it really annoying when people say “all addicts do X or Y.” Well, maybe you do X or Y, but don’t speak for me. I sort of see you as this addiction myth buster. A lot of my work has been to try and break down these myths and try to look at more of the complexity without this criminal framing. Along those lines, the medical establishment frames addiction as a “chronic, relapsing brain disease” and yet the prescription is unscientific, like AA. You argue this bolsters the moralistic and law enforcement approaches. Can you elaborate on how these frameworks are all connected? Imagine I’m trying to argue that the medical condition I have is a disease. But, everybody who has that medical condition can be locked up for having that medical condition, and, if they’re not locked up, they are sent to treatment that involves prayer and restitution. So, am I going to believe that’s a disease? If I go to cancer treatment and I get told I’m going to be locked up if my tumor grows or I’m going to have to pray to a higher power and surrender in order to get better, I’m going to definitely think that I’m not in mainstream medicine. I’m definitely going to be thinking that this is not a medical condition, that it’s some kind of sin. The 12-step people don’t see any contradiction in saying addiction is a disease and the treatment is prayer, meeting, and confession. But, from the outside that sounds completely absurd. It does not bolster the disease argument at all. When I talk about addiction being a learning disorder, I’m not saying that it isn’t a problem of the brain, obviously. I’m saying the kind of problem it is is more like ADHD than it is Alzheimer's. And I think that fits the data. If addiction is actually progressive, it should be harder to recover as you get older and that is not actually true. It also gives a much more hopeful message. Because when people hear “chronic progressive brain disease” they think dementia. When they hear hijacked brain they think: oh my god, these are zombies who are dangerous and we better lock them up for the protection of the rest of us. They think of people who have no responsibility for their actions so therefore we can treat them like children. For all of AA’s flaws, it does seem to have stumbled upon some useful notions, such as sense of community and peer-to-peer support. For many, this is irreplaceable. My feeling is that it doesn’t need to be replaced, because it exists! Let AA be a self-help group that provides social support. Let treatment be treatment. Don’t make people pay for stuff that you can get for free. It’s not exactly rocket science. If you use the cancer analogy, it’s like your oncologist is not your cancer support group. And you don’t take treatment advice from somebody whose only experience of cancer is having had it. You may swap information, but you’re probably better off looking to the medical literature and speaking to the medical experts. It was your experience in AA that people were not encouraging the use of medicine, even antidepressants. There was this idea that if you have any psychoactive substance in your bloodstream, you are therefore not in recovery anymore. And I mean people went to extreme lengths, like if you took a single sip of alcohol by mistake, then you’re back to day one. Recovery means not having that evil substance within you. It’s like, no, that is not the case. Meanwhile, it’s okay to smoke a pack of cigarettes and drink 5 cups of coffee a day. Well, there is that, too. What’s really important in recovery is: how are you functioning socially? Are you being there for your family? Are you being there for your partner? How are you doing in your career? That stuff is way more important than what chemicals are in your body. That is why some people can recover by moderation. You also take aim at our drug policies. You wrote, “If addiction is a learning disorder, fighting a ‘war on drugs’ is useless.” Given this definition, why is prohibition such a futile undertaking? The fundamental summary definition in the DSM is: compulsive behavior or drug use despite negative consequences. “Negative consequences” is basically a phrase that is synonymous with punishment. If punishment really worked to stop addiction, then by definition addiction wouldn’t exist. This seems like a really obvious point to me. But it is not obvious because we’ve continued to try and use punishment. Think how punishing the experience of being addicted is? You lose everything important to you, pretty much (or are at risk of losing everything), yet you continue. Why would adding additional punishment like prison be any different than losing your children? It makes no sense. Since addiction is a learning disorder, the learning that is going awry is the learning that involves punishment, and you are failing to respond to punishment the way somebody would if they were behaving rationally. It is obviously the case that sometimes people get better when faced with the criminal justice system. Sometimes they clearly don’t. What kind of policy prescriptions do you advocate? I advocate complete decriminalization of possession and user-dealing. Locking people up in a cage does nothing to fight addiction—it often makes it worse. In terms of marijuana: it should be legalized. It is the least harmful, not completely unharmful, but the least harmful psychoactive substance that is regularly used. It makes absolutely no sense to give that profit to the mafia. What about other drugs? The other drugs are more complicated and I think we need to think through very clearly the ways of regulating, like heroin maintenance and safe injecting facilities. But I personally can’t see how you deal with some of the horrific violence that goes on in Mexico without getting this money and power outside the hands of the mob. An ideal drug control system recognizes that human beings are going to always want to get high, and tries to channel that desire towards the least harmful substances. It should also try to help the people who are prone to addiction—10 to 20 percent of the population, often heavily weighted towards people who were traumatized as children and people who have predispositions for mental illness or developmental disorders. Help those people to avoid the predisposition actually becoming the illness, i.e. reduce child trauma. Try to do things like teaching people cognitive-behavioral skills before they become depressed and before they spend 10 years attacking themselves mentally. There are all kinds of innovative prevention stuff you can do once you recognize it’s learned. Try not to get them to learn it in the first place. That doesn’t mean that the answer is to get rid of the supply. I use the analogy of OCD (and handwashing) in the book. You are not going to stop OCD by banning X or Y hand soaps. The problem is not in the soap. While certain drugs are more harmful than others, the reason that people are desperately seeking escape is not because they’ve been exposed to a substance, it’s because the substance filled a need that helped them do something they couldn’t do without it. Unless we see that as the problem rather than the substance, we’re never going to fix this. Where you end is a comment on neurodiversity, the idea that people with different wiring do not only have impediments, but also assets that ought to be celebrated and respected. Can you explain how this relates more to your work? It’s quite obvious for some people on the autism spectrum that they’re quite good at things like programming but quite horrible at socializing. I think the neurodiveristy movement is really cool in valuing everybody and letting people see that what may look scary or different or totally weird on the outside may, from the inside, make total sense. It expands the world for everybody. It’s not just that people who have disabling conditions benefit from the world being friendlier towards us, but we also benefit from being able to function and offer things that we are uniquely equipped to do. I think with addictions in particular, you can’t succeed as a writer if you can’t persist despite negative consequences. Absolutely not. You are going to get rejected, a lot! If you can’t deal with that then you just can’t do it. Being addicted sort of gives you a very vivid experience of the fact that you can persist. People are resourceful. If you put that resourcefulness and that drive in light of a goal that is not addiction, it can be remarkable and you can really have a lot to give.
How a failed rebellion changed the world: The Easter Rising’s strange centennial
Everything about the Easter Rising of 1916 is controversial, including when to celebrate its centennial. By longstanding tradition, the anniversary of the doomed rebellion that ultimately led to the creation of an independent Irish state is celebrated on Easter Monday, the day picked by the insurgents for the most overtly Catholic revolt in the long history of Irish-British discord. So the centennial observation of the Rising happened in Dublin last week, complete with speeches, parades, wreath-laying ceremonies and the kinds of Irish sectarian disputes that are nearly impossible to explain to outsiders. (A small group of protesters described as “dissident republicans” — essentially a fragment of a fragment of the old IRA — were angry that the observance encompassed not just the Irish martyrs of the Rising but also the British soldiers who died in suppressing it.) As a historical matter, however, that’s complete nonsense. It’s like saying that the Fourth of July will be celebrated on June 10 this year, because of divinations found in Thomas Jefferson’s horoscope. The Easter Rising began on April 24, 1916, so we’re still two weeks away from the actual 100th anniversary. What’s more important: Historical fact, or the complex ecclesiastical rules governing the date of Easter, which (since you asked) were established by the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.? The fact that this question comes up even in 2016, when the Church has lost so much of its power and influence in everyday life, is, if I may say so, so Irish. There can be no doubt that the Easter Rising was and is a quintessentially Irish phenomenon, right down to the mythic symbolism, the theological murkiness, the petty political disputes and the consciousness, evident even in contemporary accounts, that the rebels were writing a historical narrative aimed at future generations. Does any other nation on earth honor a failed revolution, conducted by a poorly armed, fatally disorganized and ideologically incoherent band of rebels with little popular support, as the supposed moment of its birth? For that matter, does any other modern nation feel such profound ambivalence or uncertainty about its own origins? In a 2014 speech, former Irish Taoiseach (or prime minister) John Bruton described the Easter Rising as “completely unnecessary” and suggested it had “damaged the Irish psyche” and “led directly to the brutal violence” that afflicted Ireland in later decades. Granted, Bruton is something of a political outlier and a known “West Brit” (to use an Irish insult), but it’s still striking to hear those views expressed by someone who headed a government that traces its ancestry to the event in question. Imagine a former U.S. president expressing the view that maybe the American colonists should just have laid down their guns at Lexington and Concord and walked away. Surely we could have worked out that taxation dispute through nonviolent means! But from this historical distance Easter 1916 also looks like a global phenomenon, a tiny event with a long tail that shaped much of the 20th century and beyond, and whose repercussions extend much further than a damp little island on the western edge of Europe. It’s somewhat possible, after 100 years, to look past the “terrible beauty” of William Butler Yeats’ propaganda poem — one of the greatest ever written, but still a propaganda poem — past Sinéad O’Connor singing “The Foggy Dew” and past the sentimental melodrama of Irish blood sacrifice, which the Rising simultaneously fed upon and helped create. If the Easter Rising possesses unique and intensely contested significance in Irish history, one reason for that is because it’s also an important chapter in world history, whose meaning has not been easy to perceive through the mind-altering mists of Erin. No historian would propose that the Easter Rising marked the first instance of urban guerrilla warfare, or the first time women served as military combatants, or the first illustration of the maxim that one man’s terrorism is another man’s patriotism. It might not have been the first time that the forces of nationalism, socialism and anti-imperialism (along with currents of feminism and trade unionism) coalesced into one revolutionary movement, although I can’t think of an earlier example that reflected the same degree of self-consciousness. But the fact that those things all came together during the botched six-day existence of the Irish Republic, which never controlled more than a few square miles of central Dublin, had an explosive impact around the world. What actually happened in Dublin 100 years ago is relatively simple to recount, which hasn’t stopped successive generations of historians from retelling and reinterpreting the story through various perspectives. There have been various waves of nationalist history, “revisionist” history (meaning hostile to the Rising, and to Irish nationalism more generally) and then counter-revisionist history, but these days one can find accounts that at least try to resist the magnetic poles of Irish politics, and to steer away from tales of Great Men and their Great Deeds. The best of these are probably Charles Townshend’s 2005 “Easter 1916” (recently republished in a revised centenary edition) and Fearghal McGarry’s newer “The Rising,” which makes extensive use of the Irish government’s recently released archive of oral history. After seven centuries or so of direct or indirect British rule and numerous failed revolts, a group of Irish nationalists and republicans (the latter word signifying an openness to armed rebellion) saw the political and military chaos of World War I as the perfect context to strike a fateful blow for freedom. Their cause was deeply unpopular at the time, a central factor that many non-Irish people don’t understand and many Irish people strive to forget. Most of the Irish Catholic population subscribed to the views John Bruton still holds, and supported the moderate nationalist politics of John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, who advocated home rule, meaning limited self-government within the United Kingdom. Nearly everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong; under the circumstances, it’s impressive that the Easter rebels held out for six hours, let alone six days. Perhaps as many as 10,000 Irish Volunteers and allied militia groups had hypothetically prepared for the Rising, but their training was slapdash at best and communication was abysmal. Pádraig Pearse, who would briefly become the Irish Republic’s self-appointed president, called for an uprising during Easter week, but Eoin MacNeill, the Irish Volunteers’ nominal leader, countermanded his order. Barely 1,200 rebels answered the call on Easter Monday in Dublin, and hardly any in the rest of the country. Several hundred more showed up as events progressed, but the total number of participants in the Rising was well below 2,500. One of the numerous ways the British government overreacted to this crisis was by vastly overestimating the size and scale of the Rising, and exaggerating the threat it posed to British rule in Ireland. (Which was virtually nil, at least at first.) More than 3,500 people were arrested after the rebellion was quelled, many of whom had absolutely nothing to do with it. Socialist leader James Connolly, the greatest political thinker and foremost internationalist among the rebels, had confidently predicted that the British would never use heavy artillery in the heart of what was technically a major British city. He was wrong about that one: In a classic example of military overkill, the Royal Navy gunship Helga steamed up the Liffey and shelled the city center relentlessly for several days, reducing the main commercial strip of Sackville Street (today’s O’Connell Street) to smoldering rubble. Then came the most famous, and most spectacularly counterproductive, of British overreactions: the staggered executions of Pearse and Connolly and Joseph Plunkett and Seán Mac Diarmada and 11 other rebel leaders, including all signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic that Pearse had read outside the General Post Office on Easter Monday. Instead of shooting them all at once, British authorities spread their deaths across a two-week period in May. If the intention was to demoralize and intimidate the civilian population, the effect was precisely the opposite. The parade of noble widows refusing to weep, and the anecdotes of heroes stoically facing the firing squad while praying for their executioners, played into deeply rooted Irish and Catholic narratives of sainthood and martyrdom, and radicalized public opinion within a fortnight. After James Connolly was shot — tied to a chair, because he was too badly injured to stand — the British had done the work of the Rising more effectively than its idealistic and unprepared leadership could ever have done. After five ensuing years of deepening political resistance and worsening guerrilla conflict, the world’s most powerful empire was forced into an unprecedented decision. It allowed a nation that for the previous 115 years had been considered an integral part of the United Kingdom to separate and go its own way. These are the true lessons of the Easter Rising, which remain profoundly uncomfortable in contemporary Ireland, as in most of the Western world: First of all, a seemingly pointless and pathetic act of resistance provoked a vastly more powerful opponent into disastrous mistakes. Second, confrontational and theatrical violence proved capable of transforming political reality, and achieved rapid results in a context where 40 years or more of respectable parliamentary politics had completely failed. Do I really need to point out how clearly we can hear those lessons resound through the post-9/11 world, especially in the American superpower’s relentless campaign of self-destruction in the Middle East? One can plausibly argue that the Easter Rising shaped the history of 20th-century global revolution far more clearly than it shaped the future of Ireland, which has never been quite sure how to feel about the lessons of 1916. This comes through clearly in the Ken Burns-style public TV documentary “The 1916 Irish Rebellion” (and accompanying coffee-table book), supervised by Notre Dame Irish studies scholar Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, which offers an excellent starting point for newcomers. If you want the advanced course in how the Irish changed history (perhaps more than they wanted to), I recommend the witty and surprising book “Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising?” by radical historians James Heartfield and Kevin Rooney. They go deep into how the Rising has bedeviled Irish politicians and historians, and how its ripple effects were felt among anti-imperialist movements in India, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Lenin and Trotsky perceived the Easter Rising as the opening salvo in a wave of European revolution that would overthrow bourgeois imperialism. As you may recall, they staged a somewhat more successful version 18 months later, and while the relationship between the two events is not linear, it's also not accidental. Ho Chi Minh, who was quite likely living in Brooklyn in April 1916, reportedly wept at the news of the Irish rebels’ execution. Marcus Garvey cited the dedication and self-sacrifice of the Irish Volunteers as an inspiration for his own movement, and named his meeting hall in Harlem after theirs. Those examples led in various ambiguous directions, not all of them necessarily positive. We could say the same about the modern nation of Ireland, a cautious and conservative society that seems partly European, partly American and partly British, and in no way resembles the glorious cultural rebirth imagined by Pearse and Connolly. The Irish people know that we're supposed to remember Easter 1916, and commemorate those who died. But we're still not quite sure why.
