Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 821

Horrors of the Trump doctrine: Inside the GOP frontrunner’s terrifying interview with the NY Times

Donald Trump managed to shock the world once again. Last week, he actually sank so low that he publicly attacked Ted Cruz's wife Heidi's looks. Not that anyone thought he wasn't the type to say such rude things.  He's made a habit of it for many years. But he is running for president and, more importantly, he did this during a period when all eyes were on Europe in the wake of another devastating terrorist attack, and he was simultaneously criticizing the president for continuing on his historic diplomatic mission to Cuba and Argentina. But that wasn't what shocked the world. What has put every government on the planet on high alert was his alarming interview in the New York Times on the subject of foreign policy. We already had some inkling of his general incomprehension in this regard throughout the campaign as he cavalierly talked about torture, the banning of Muslims, and "bombing the shit out of" our supposed enemies. I wrote previously about his bizarre trek to the the capitol to speak with the Washington Post and AIPAC earlier last week. But as MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell said on his show Monday night, the interview in the Times over the weekend was "like taking a world tour of Donald Trumps ignorance." Trump spoke with reporters David Sanger and Maggie Habermann on the telephone for over 90 minutes and on virtually every question they asked he was clearly vamping like a 12 year old giving the book report on a book he hadn't read.  Romney spokesman Kevin Madden characterized the transcript of the interview as being "just full of tautological nonsense." He complains incessantly about the money the U.S. is spending on security, which is fair enough, but his solution is to put a gun to the whole world's head and demand they pay up or the U.S. will let the world burn. Trump is  calling for the U.S. to stop being the world's policeman and start being the world's mobster extortionist: nice little country you've got here, be a shame if anything happened to it. After all, he's calling for a gigantic increase in military spending, which doesn't make a lot of sense if he's believes we should pull back from the world. Indeed, he never says the US should pull back at all. He's just going to blackmail the world into ponying up the cash for the huge buildup he's planning and if they don't agree, they'll be sorry. Basically, he thinks of world affairs the same way he thinks of his political opponents. It's all about whether they've been "friendly" to him. When asked if he would be willing to lend humanitarian aid he said:

You know, to help I would be, depending on where and who and what. And, you know, again — generally speaking — I’d have to see the country; I’d have to see what’s going on in the region and you just cannot have a blanket. The one blanket you could say is, “protection of our country.” That’s the one blanket. After that it depends on the country, the region, how friendly they’ve been toward us. You have countries that haven’t been friendly to us that we’re protecting.

Too bad about the humans inside those countries. But then empathy isn't his strong suit. He constantly berates George W. Bush for "destabilizing" the Middle East (which is correct) but it never occurs to him that the consequences of say, telling Japan and South Korea to go build their own nukes or putting NATO in mothballs because it costs too much money might just have the effect of "destabilizing"   the entire planet.  Like a child, when he can't think of an answer to a difficult question, he claims he doesn't want other countries to know his plans so he won't share them with the press, but he does seem to truly believe that it makes sense for the United States to be "unpredictable." Nothing could be further from the truth. A nation as powerful as the U.S. has to be as transparent as possible or allies and enemies alike will find it untrustworthy and provocative. We have enough problems with our national security state as it is --- caprice is the last element we need to put into the mix. For 70 years the world has been organized around the idea of collective security backed by the United States. The idea was to prevent another world war and, even more importantly, a nuclear war. There have been huge downsides to that project but withdrawing from that abruptly out of pique or withholding our protection unless they pay up would be disaster. In the eyes of the rest of the world, the U.S. will have become a rogue superpower that has to be stopped. There are plenty of good reasons for a presidential candidate to question our military commitments and seek new ways to secure the stability of the country and the planet. But sane people should no more turn to this man to do that than they would turn to the Olson twins. It's very, very dangerous. Perhaps more telling than any of this, though, is Trump's equally thoughtless appropriation of the term "America First," last heard in common usage by anti-semite xenophobe Pat Buchanan, but which originally was the name of an isolationist group that put pressure on President Roosevelt to keep America out of World War II. It was mostly a respectable group of citizens but there were some at the top, notably flying ace Charles Lindberg who had more than a little bit of fondness for Hitler's Germany. Trump might want to steer clear of any more of those associations. His mass deportation and torture policies are already close enough. "America First" undoubtedly sounds great to a lot of people and it's not unreasonable or unusual for a candidate to argue for a foreign policy that puts national interest before global interest. It's not even unprecedented for a candidate to run as a "Fortress America" isolationist calling for a withdrawal from all global obligations. But if anyone thinks the man who says this is the type of person who will turn the other cheek and refuse to respond unless our shores are directly threatened, I think they do not understand this man's character:

Look at what China’s doing in the South China Sea. I mean they are totally disregarding our country and yet we have made China a rich country because of our bad trade deals. Our trade deals are so bad. And we have made them – we have rebuilt China and yet they will go in the South China Sea and build a military fortress the likes of which perhaps the world has not seen. Amazing, actually. They do that, and they do that at will because they have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country.

He went on to blather incoherently about negotiating some trade deal in retaliation and using it as a bargaining chip but in the end he said he wouldn't want them to know if he was prepared to go to war over these islands. That unpredictability again. Donald Trump is actually entirely predictable. He has laid it all out many times. He commonly threatens people, telling them to "be careful" or they'd "better watch out." You can bet money that when he feels disrespected, this is exactly what he will do:

"Get even. When somebody screws you, screw the back in spades. I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve got to hit people hard and it’s not so much for that person, it’s that other people watch."

Trump has expressed true admiration for only four leaders: Generals Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton, both of whom were removed from duty for exceeding their authority, and authoritarian strongmen Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.  He says all the time, "We've got to be strong," by which he means dominant. These foreign policy interviews have not shown us an "America First isolationist" by the historical definition and people would be foolish to see those allusions in any literal way. He wants America to be a gangster protection racket, holding up other countries for money lest they "disrespect us" by refusing. If that happens he's going to have to "hit hard," because "other people watch." This is all just the tip of the iceberg of the ignorance, incoherence and lunacy on display by the GOP frontrunner and everyone who follows politics should read the transcript of this stunning interview. You can bet that every foreign leader has read it and is already making contingency plans. Secretary of State John Kerry said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday:

Everywhere I go, every leader I meet, they ask about what is happening in America. They cannot believe it. I think it is fair to say that they're shocked. They don't know where it's taking the United States of America. It upsets people's sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability. And to some degree, I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they are posed to me, it's clear to me that what's happening is an embarrassment to our country.

It's not just an embarrassment. It's dangerous.

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First ghosted, now zombied: The only thing worse than a love fading away is when it comes staggering back to life

I think about the social dynamics of relationships a lot. Part of it has to do with my interest in why we do what we do, and another part has to do with wanting to seek answers to questions I don’t fully understand. He seemed to have interest… that look couldn’t have meant nothing, right? That date was superb, what next? The act/attempt of dating has the simultaneous capacity to make a person feel like the center of someone’s universe or mere ash in the dust of the cosmos. The ease of accessibility introduced by social media and dating apps have made taking the steps of establishing a relationship simple enough: swipe, “like”, whatever. But severing contact is typically reduced to the online equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand in the form of ghosting: an desperate attempt to disappear in plain sight. Ghosting has received a lot of attention within the last few years as people become increasingly pissed off about it. And why wouldn’t they? The only thing more uncomfortable than having the icky breakup talk is feeling your ass hit the floor once the rug has been pulled from underneath you. Cold, painful and embarrassing. Actress Charlize Theron caught a lot of heat for her apparent icy break up with Sean Penn. Reports went viral that she ghosted Penn, seemingly opting to simply cease contact. We should all know better than to believe a relationship could end so simply. In a new feature in the Wall Street Journal, the often private Theron addressed the ghosting rumors and called BS on the exaggerated reports of the terms of the breakup. “When you leave a relationship there has to be some f—ing crazy story or some crazy drama. And the f—ing ghosting thing, like literally I still don’t even know what it is.” She shrugs and shakes her head. “It’s just its own beast. We were in a relationship and then it didn’t work anymore. And we both decided to separate. That’s it,” she said. While the internet has the tendency to hyperbolize news in order to gain traffic, the public found the news so readily believable because the act of ghosting has permeated our culture. According to a recent survey conducted by dating app Plenty of Fish, nearly 80 percent of the 800 participants reported they’ve been broken up with via ghosting. It’s not a shocking statistic, but it is sad. Breakups suck, but moving in on is easier on firm ground. Once ghosted, the question becomes not if, but when, a former flame might reignite. It happens so often that it’s now become laughable. A relationship will end, and just as unexpectedly, POOF! The ghost reappears, and evolves into a zombie. PrimeMind first reported about zombieing a few weeks ago, and the description couldn’t be more accurate: “To be zombied is to have someone you care about disappear from your life altogether only to have them bring a relationship back from the dead with an out-of-the-blue text or interaction on social media.” Few things are more infuriating. After the sting of ghosting has numbed, and you get over the fact that someone you were intimate with didn’t feel the need to provide a heads up that the relationship had run its course, they somehow pop back into your life. Zombieing typically starts with a feeler message such as a like on Facebook or social media, and is usually followed up with by a dumb message or text like “Hey” or an inane observation. Yes, Mr. Zombie, I am aware of the fact that it’s spring. Thanks for the update, but you can crawl back under a rock now. It’s an exercise in entitlement. As if time has stopped since you left this person hanging however long ago and you can pick up where you left off, like reaching for a record you shelved but wish to revisit. The zombie doesn’t feel the need to explain their re-entrance in your life because they didn’t feel the need to announce their exit in the first place. It’s time we give up the ghost. I get that it’s awkward and uncomfortable, and may feel unnecessary given the state of undefined relationship parameters we often find ourselves in, but it’s unkind to treat people as if they don’t matter. It’s my guess that in time the ghost will feel more haunted by it than the ghostee.I think about the social dynamics of relationships a lot. Part of it has to do with my interest in why we do what we do, and another part has to do with wanting to seek answers to questions I don’t fully understand. He seemed to have interest… that look couldn’t have meant nothing, right? That date was superb, what next? The act/attempt of dating has the simultaneous capacity to make a person feel like the center of someone’s universe or mere ash in the dust of the cosmos. The ease of accessibility introduced by social media and dating apps have made taking the steps of establishing a relationship simple enough: swipe, “like”, whatever. But severing contact is typically reduced to the online equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand in the form of ghosting: an desperate attempt to disappear in plain sight. Ghosting has received a lot of attention within the last few years as people become increasingly pissed off about it. And why wouldn’t they? The only thing more uncomfortable than having the icky breakup talk is feeling your ass hit the floor once the rug has been pulled from underneath you. Cold, painful and embarrassing. Actress Charlize Theron caught a lot of heat for her apparent icy break up with Sean Penn. Reports went viral that she ghosted Penn, seemingly opting to simply cease contact. We should all know better than to believe a relationship could end so simply. In a new feature in the Wall Street Journal, the often private Theron addressed the ghosting rumors and called BS on the exaggerated reports of the terms of the breakup. “When you leave a relationship there has to be some f—ing crazy story or some crazy drama. And the f—ing ghosting thing, like literally I still don’t even know what it is.” She shrugs and shakes her head. “It’s just its own beast. We were in a relationship and then it didn’t work anymore. And we both decided to separate. That’s it,” she said. While the internet has the tendency to hyperbolize news in order to gain traffic, the public found the news so readily believable because the act of ghosting has permeated our culture. According to a recent survey conducted by dating app Plenty of Fish, nearly 80 percent of the 800 participants reported they’ve been broken up with via ghosting. It’s not a shocking statistic, but it is sad. Breakups suck, but moving in on is easier on firm ground. Once ghosted, the question becomes not if, but when, a former flame might reignite. It happens so often that it’s now become laughable. A relationship will end, and just as unexpectedly, POOF! The ghost reappears, and evolves into a zombie. PrimeMind first reported about zombieing a few weeks ago, and the description couldn’t be more accurate: “To be zombied is to have someone you care about disappear from your life altogether only to have them bring a relationship back from the dead with an out-of-the-blue text or interaction on social media.” Few things are more infuriating. After the sting of ghosting has numbed, and you get over the fact that someone you were intimate with didn’t feel the need to provide a heads up that the relationship had run its course, they somehow pop back into your life. Zombieing typically starts with a feeler message such as a like on Facebook or social media, and is usually followed up with by a dumb message or text like “Hey” or an inane observation. Yes, Mr. Zombie, I am aware of the fact that it’s spring. Thanks for the update, but you can crawl back under a rock now. It’s an exercise in entitlement. As if time has stopped since you left this person hanging however long ago and you can pick up where you left off, like reaching for a record you shelved but wish to revisit. The zombie doesn’t feel the need to explain their re-entrance in your life because they didn’t feel the need to announce their exit in the first place. It’s time we give up the ghost. I get that it’s awkward and uncomfortable, and may feel unnecessary given the state of undefined relationship parameters we often find ourselves in, but it’s unkind to treat people as if they don’t matter. It’s my guess that in time the ghost will feel more haunted by it than the ghostee.I think about the social dynamics of relationships a lot. Part of it has to do with my interest in why we do what we do, and another part has to do with wanting to seek answers to questions I don’t fully understand. He seemed to have interest… that look couldn’t have meant nothing, right? That date was superb, what next? The act/attempt of dating has the simultaneous capacity to make a person feel like the center of someone’s universe or mere ash in the dust of the cosmos. The ease of accessibility introduced by social media and dating apps have made taking the steps of establishing a relationship simple enough: swipe, “like”, whatever. But severing contact is typically reduced to the online equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand in the form of ghosting: an desperate attempt to disappear in plain sight. Ghosting has received a lot of attention within the last few years as people become increasingly pissed off about it. And why wouldn’t they? The only thing more uncomfortable than having the icky breakup talk is feeling your ass hit the floor once the rug has been pulled from underneath you. Cold, painful and embarrassing. Actress Charlize Theron caught a lot of heat for her apparent icy break up with Sean Penn. Reports went viral that she ghosted Penn, seemingly opting to simply cease contact. We should all know better than to believe a relationship could end so simply. In a new feature in the Wall Street Journal, the often private Theron addressed the ghosting rumors and called BS on the exaggerated reports of the terms of the breakup. “When you leave a relationship there has to be some f—ing crazy story or some crazy drama. And the f—ing ghosting thing, like literally I still don’t even know what it is.” She shrugs and shakes her head. “It’s just its own beast. We were in a relationship and then it didn’t work anymore. And we both decided to separate. That’s it,” she said. While the internet has the tendency to hyperbolize news in order to gain traffic, the public found the news so readily believable because the act of ghosting has permeated our culture. According to a recent survey conducted by dating app Plenty of Fish, nearly 80 percent of the 800 participants reported they’ve been broken up with via ghosting. It’s not a shocking statistic, but it is sad. Breakups suck, but moving in on is easier on firm ground. Once ghosted, the question becomes not if, but when, a former flame might reignite. It happens so often that it’s now become laughable. A relationship will end, and just as unexpectedly, POOF! The ghost reappears, and evolves into a zombie. PrimeMind first reported about zombieing a few weeks ago, and the description couldn’t be more accurate: “To be zombied is to have someone you care about disappear from your life altogether only to have them bring a relationship back from the dead with an out-of-the-blue text or interaction on social media.” Few things are more infuriating. After the sting of ghosting has numbed, and you get over the fact that someone you were intimate with didn’t feel the need to provide a heads up that the relationship had run its course, they somehow pop back into your life. Zombieing typically starts with a feeler message such as a like on Facebook or social media, and is usually followed up with by a dumb message or text like “Hey” or an inane observation. Yes, Mr. Zombie, I am aware of the fact that it’s spring. Thanks for the update, but you can crawl back under a rock now. It’s an exercise in entitlement. As if time has stopped since you left this person hanging however long ago and you can pick up where you left off, like reaching for a record you shelved but wish to revisit. The zombie doesn’t feel the need to explain their re-entrance in your life because they didn’t feel the need to announce their exit in the first place. It’s time we give up the ghost. I get that it’s awkward and uncomfortable, and may feel unnecessary given the state of undefined relationship parameters we often find ourselves in, but it’s unkind to treat people as if they don’t matter. It’s my guess that in time the ghost will feel more haunted by it than the ghostee.I think about the social dynamics of relationships a lot. Part of it has to do with my interest in why we do what we do, and another part has to do with wanting to seek answers to questions I don’t fully understand. He seemed to have interest… that look couldn’t have meant nothing, right? That date was superb, what next? The act/attempt of dating has the simultaneous capacity to make a person feel like the center of someone’s universe or mere ash in the dust of the cosmos. The ease of accessibility introduced by social media and dating apps have made taking the steps of establishing a relationship simple enough: swipe, “like”, whatever. But severing contact is typically reduced to the online equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand in the form of ghosting: an desperate attempt to disappear in plain sight. Ghosting has received a lot of attention within the last few years as people become increasingly pissed off about it. And why wouldn’t they? The only thing more uncomfortable than having the icky breakup talk is feeling your ass hit the floor once the rug has been pulled from underneath you. Cold, painful and embarrassing. Actress Charlize Theron caught a lot of heat for her apparent icy break up with Sean Penn. Reports went viral that she ghosted Penn, seemingly opting to simply cease contact. We should all know better than to believe a relationship could end so simply. In a new feature in the Wall Street Journal, the often private Theron addressed the ghosting rumors and called BS on the exaggerated reports of the terms of the breakup. “When you leave a relationship there has to be some f—ing crazy story or some crazy drama. And the f—ing ghosting thing, like literally I still don’t even know what it is.” She shrugs and shakes her head. “It’s just its own beast. We were in a relationship and then it didn’t work anymore. And we both decided to separate. That’s it,” she said. While the internet has the tendency to hyperbolize news in order to gain traffic, the public found the news so readily believable because the act of ghosting has permeated our culture. According to a recent survey conducted by dating app Plenty of Fish, nearly 80 percent of the 800 participants reported they’ve been broken up with via ghosting. It’s not a shocking statistic, but it is sad. Breakups suck, but moving in on is easier on firm ground. Once ghosted, the question becomes not if, but when, a former flame might reignite. It happens so often that it’s now become laughable. A relationship will end, and just as unexpectedly, POOF! The ghost reappears, and evolves into a zombie. PrimeMind first reported about zombieing a few weeks ago, and the description couldn’t be more accurate: “To be zombied is to have someone you care about disappear from your life altogether only to have them bring a relationship back from the dead with an out-of-the-blue text or interaction on social media.” Few things are more infuriating. After the sting of ghosting has numbed, and you get over the fact that someone you were intimate with didn’t feel the need to provide a heads up that the relationship had run its course, they somehow pop back into your life. Zombieing typically starts with a feeler message such as a like on Facebook or social media, and is usually followed up with by a dumb message or text like “Hey” or an inane observation. Yes, Mr. Zombie, I am aware of the fact that it’s spring. Thanks for the update, but you can crawl back under a rock now. It’s an exercise in entitlement. As if time has stopped since you left this person hanging however long ago and you can pick up where you left off, like reaching for a record you shelved but wish to revisit. The zombie doesn’t feel the need to explain their re-entrance in your life because they didn’t feel the need to announce their exit in the first place. It’s time we give up the ghost. I get that it’s awkward and uncomfortable, and may feel unnecessary given the state of undefined relationship parameters we often find ourselves in, but it’s unkind to treat people as if they don’t matter. It’s my guess that in time the ghost will feel more haunted by it than the ghostee.I think about the social dynamics of relationships a lot. Part of it has to do with my interest in why we do what we do, and another part has to do with wanting to seek answers to questions I don’t fully understand. He seemed to have interest… that look couldn’t have meant nothing, right? That date was superb, what next? The act/attempt of dating has the simultaneous capacity to make a person feel like the center of someone’s universe or mere ash in the dust of the cosmos. The ease of accessibility introduced by social media and dating apps have made taking the steps of establishing a relationship simple enough: swipe, “like”, whatever. But severing contact is typically reduced to the online equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand in the form of ghosting: an desperate attempt to disappear in plain sight. Ghosting has received a lot of attention within the last few years as people become increasingly pissed off about it. And why wouldn’t they? The only thing more uncomfortable than having the icky breakup talk is feeling your ass hit the floor once the rug has been pulled from underneath you. Cold, painful and embarrassing. Actress Charlize Theron caught a lot of heat for her apparent icy break up with Sean Penn. Reports went viral that she ghosted Penn, seemingly opting to simply cease contact. We should all know better than to believe a relationship could end so simply. In a new feature in the Wall Street Journal, the often private Theron addressed the ghosting rumors and called BS on the exaggerated reports of the terms of the breakup. “When you leave a relationship there has to be some f—ing crazy story or some crazy drama. And the f—ing ghosting thing, like literally I still don’t even know what it is.” She shrugs and shakes her head. “It’s just its own beast. We were in a relationship and then it didn’t work anymore. And we both decided to separate. That’s it,” she said. While the internet has the tendency to hyperbolize news in order to gain traffic, the public found the news so readily believable because the act of ghosting has permeated our culture. According to a recent survey conducted by dating app Plenty of Fish, nearly 80 percent of the 800 participants reported they’ve been broken up with via ghosting. It’s not a shocking statistic, but it is sad. Breakups suck, but moving in on is easier on firm ground. Once ghosted, the question becomes not if, but when, a former flame might reignite. It happens so often that it’s now become laughable. A relationship will end, and just as unexpectedly, POOF! The ghost reappears, and evolves into a zombie. PrimeMind first reported about zombieing a few weeks ago, and the description couldn’t be more accurate: “To be zombied is to have someone you care about disappear from your life altogether only to have them bring a relationship back from the dead with an out-of-the-blue text or interaction on social media.” Few things are more infuriating. After the sting of ghosting has numbed, and you get over the fact that someone you were intimate with didn’t feel the need to provide a heads up that the relationship had run its course, they somehow pop back into your life. Zombieing typically starts with a feeler message such as a like on Facebook or social media, and is usually followed up with by a dumb message or text like “Hey” or an inane observation. Yes, Mr. Zombie, I am aware of the fact that it’s spring. Thanks for the update, but you can crawl back under a rock now. It’s an exercise in entitlement. As if time has stopped since you left this person hanging however long ago and you can pick up where you left off, like reaching for a record you shelved but wish to revisit. The zombie doesn’t feel the need to explain their re-entrance in your life because they didn’t feel the need to announce their exit in the first place. It’s time we give up the ghost. I get that it’s awkward and uncomfortable, and may feel unnecessary given the state of undefined relationship parameters we often find ourselves in, but it’s unkind to treat people as if they don’t matter. It’s my guess that in time the ghost will feel more haunted by it than the ghostee.

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“Blue Velvet”’s mystery of masculinity: How David Lynch’s masterwork reshaped American consciousness

Right about the midpoint of David Lynch’s 1986 breakthrough “Blue Velvet” — and given Lynch’s structural obsessions, it may literally be the midpoint — there is a brief sequence that captures this powerful, disorienting film and all its themes in miniature. It begins when Frank Booth, the psychotic, charismatic antihero played by Dennis Hopper, turns and looks at the audience (he certainly isn’t speaking to any specific person) and announces, “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” Then Frank disappears, literally. The room where he’s standing, in a dreary apartment Frank has described as “pussy heaven,” is seen empty for a second or two. I don’t know if I have the shot order right, but then the scene shifts and we get a number of shots in rapid succession: the double yellow line on a rural highway; the front grill of Frank’s Dodge Charger; Frank’s sweaty face, looking demented or ecstatic; the face of our hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), looking nervous; the movie’s femme fatale, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), wedged between two guys in the back seat; and the speedometer as it nudges above 100 mph. The bad guy, the good guy, the dangerous girl and a fast car on a midnight ride. All the most alluring, addictive and ambiguous elements of American cinema, in about six seconds. I’m old enough to remember the impact “Blue Velvet” had on its initial release, and I was already old enough then to have screwed-up relationships. I was mad because my then-girlfriend went to see it with another guy, so I was determined to have a bad opinion of the film: Oh, sure, a dreamlike, perverse and erotic crime thriller from the director of “Eraserhead,” starring the counterculture hero of “Easy Rider” and the gorgeous daughter of a legendary Italian filmmaker! How good could that be? To make matters worse, one of my roommates, a crazy, chain-smoking French girl I never successfully slept with, came home from seeing it completely freaked out, and electrified, and made me stay up all night so she could tell me what a horrible and amazing experience it was. I tried to fact-check this anecdote with another ex-roommate, who was then her boyfriend, and he reports that she actually walked out of the movie after the scene when Jeffrey hides in the closet and watches Frank and Dorothy have kinky sex that’s right on the border between consensual BDSM and rape. So he was mad at the time, and now he’s going to be mad at me for saying that I wanted to sleep with his girlfriend, 30 years ago. This is how “Blue Velvet” messes up people’s lives. Anyway, at some point I went to see “Blue Velvet” myself, however resentfully, and of course I was traumatized and blown away. In terms of alternative culture during the Reagan year — not just independent film but fashion and visual art and overall psychic Zeitgeist — there was before “Blue Velvet” and there was after. Consider Frank’s immortal line of dialogue: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” We are still dealing with the effects of that decades later, when recent college graduates in Williamsburg and Austin and Echo Park know that they are supposed to drink the crappy, watery beer with the awesome logo design, but don’t really know why. (Heineken is of course much better beer. Hell, Coors is better beer.) Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” which came along eight years later, was both a more popular film and more widely imitated. It was easier to imitate, for one thing, but I don’t think “Pulp Fiction” has anywhere near the mysterious psychological profundity of “Blue Velvet,” or that its effects were ultimately as far-reaching. Lynch and Tarantino are far more different than similar, but there is certainly some overlap: Both translated a set of arcane 20th-century artistic and cinematic references into the language of post-boomer pop culture, and both created works that became poles of an ambiguous new American canon. Lynch often talks in interviews about his love for “movies that make you dream,” often referring back to 1960s European art films his fans quite likely have not seen. (This is shorthand, but if Tarantino is the offspring of Jean-Luc Godard, Lynch’s parentage leads to Bergman and Fellini.) In one sense, that’s Lynch’s admission that he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing or why he’s doing it when he makes a film. “Blue Velvet” bears more resemblance to normal narrative cinema than several of the Lynch movies that followed it, including “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive” (subject of this legendary exegesis published on Salon) and the nearly impenetrable “Inland Empire.” It has a hero and a villain, a blonde and a brunette, and a slowly unfolding criminal mystery that almost makes sense. But the seeds of those ambiguous, shape-shifting and often nightmarish later works are clearly visible in “Blue Velvet” now, and its similarity to a classic American crime movie is deceptive. “Blue Velvet” treats crime cinema as a dream spun from the collective American unconscious; it both evoked the dream state and shaped the dreams of everyone who watched it. I recently watched the spectacular 30th-anniversary digital restoration of “Blue Velvet” at New York’s Film Forum, where it opened this weekend. (Other cities and dates will follow, and it’s safe to assume a home-video rerelease is in the works.) I think I saw the film on VHS at some point in the ‘90s, but I hadn’t seen it projected since the original release. Yes, the cars and the hairstyles look dated — Frank Booth’s American-hoodlum wardrobe remains timeless — but even after 30 years of quotation and emulation, “Blue Velvet” is as powerful and strange as ever. It doesn’t feel contemporary, exactly, but it never did. Lynch’s vision of polymorphous, perverse, gender-blurred sexuality was far ahead of its time in 1986, and remains so in a different register today, in our neo-Puritan age of terminological caution and mandatory sensitivity. Rather than write another review of one of the most discussed and debated films ever made, I bounced a few questions and observations off my friend Martha P. Nochimson, a critic and scholar who knows Lynch and has interviewed him numerous times. Martha has published two outstanding books that illuminate his life and his films: “The Passion of David Lynch,” on the director’s early years, up to and including and foray into Hollywood with the 1990 “Wild at Heart,” and “David Lynch Swerves,” which focuses on the later, more disorienting works that followed. Even where I disagree with Martha’s opinions or interpretations, or especially then, she compels me to see things in this director, and his 1986 masterwork, that I hadn’t seen before. Martha, I will start with the obvious observation that in “Blue Velvet,” David Lynch employs or evokes many of the symbols or plot devices of film noir, but the end product barely resembles noir at all. There is a hero drawn into the criminal underworld, a good girl (fair) and a bad girl (dark), a charismatic but dangerous antihero. I could go on: the bad girl is a nightclub singer, the bad guy has a fast car that expresses sexual potency, there’s an elaborate criminal scheme that makes no sense, and for unexplained reasons the protagonist descends into creepy erotic obsession. What do you see in the film that helps Lynch both fulfill all these conventions of American crime cinema and also leave them behind? Applying the conventions of noir to Lynch loses both the poetry and originality of Lynch and the power of noir. The dark, dangerous woman and the fair, nurturing girl are longstanding literary conventions -- but not of noir. The essential femme fatale of noir is not always dark. Does the name Elsa Bannister strike a familiar chord? [She is the title character played by Rita Hayworth in Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai.”] And there aren't always the dark and light pair. See the same film for reference, and many more. The noir hero tends to be world-weary and deeply scarred when he meets the femme fatale. [Whereas Jeffrey Beaumont, the character played by Kyle MacLachlan in “Blue Velvet,” is innocent and unworldly.] But what is constant in noir is that all the problems of the world are linked to female sexuality. The opposite is true in “Blue Velvet.” The darkness Jeffrey finds is in masculinity -- Frank and his minions. Nor are Sandy [Laura Dern] and Dorothy [Rossellini] neatly polarized. Dorothy is sensual but overwhelmed. Sandy is naive but strong, and has her own connections to darkness. That's where she emerges for Jeffrey. That said, this movie is not the anti-noir either. When Lynch says that 90 percent of the time he doesn't know what he's found he's not kidding. That's how artists work. It's craftsmen-storytellers who intentionally work within and against conventions. For Lynch, there is only vision, and all he has seen or heard will be used by his vision. But to reduce “Blue Velvet” to familiar fragments that have gotten caught up in his vision is to be estranged from the film. And what is the vision of “Blue Velvet?” The mystery of masculinity, which reaches critical mass in Meadow Lane when Frank tells Jeffrey: “You're like me.” Well, that’s one of the questions and challenges people keep posing to Jeffrey, which present an intriguing pattern and speak to the dreamlike quality of the film, and the dream logic of the storytelling. On this viewing, I felt strongly that the performances of the supporting cast — his older female relatives, or Detective Williams, the cop who is also Sandy’s dad, or Mike, Sandy’s ridiculous letterman boyfriend — are intentionally flat or blank. It has the effect of suggesting that those people don’t matter or aren’t quite real, and makes the four principal characters (Jeffrey, Sandy, Dorothy and Frank) stand out even more. One way to interpret the narrative, it seems to me, is that the severed ear Jeffrey finds in a field is like the rabbit hole of “Alice in Wonderland,” a portal or passage into a symbolic realm that may not be the same one where Jeffrey’s story begins. Sandy asks Jeffrey, “Are you a detective or a pervert?” He does not answer the question. Dorothy Vallens asks him “Do you like me?” — but only after she has seduced him into sexual acts that, at least officially, he doesn’t want to perform. (The real question might be whether Jeffrey likes himself.) Frank asks Jeffrey whether he wants to go for a ride, and whether he has ever been to “Pussy Heaven.” (That one cracks me up, partly because of how profoundly unsexy Pussy Heaven turns out to be.) Again, the answers to both questions are officially no, but out in the audience we know better. One of the oddest and most striking moments in the film comes when Jeffrey says to Sandy, “You’re a neat girl,” and she responds without hesitation, “So are you.” It takes a full beat before she corrects herself, and she seems confused about why she said that. You just mentioned “the mystery of masculinity” as the central issue. Sandy’s strange response suggests that Jeffrey is literally “unmanned,” and that this story presents a realm where heterosexual, monogamous norms of sexuality and gender have been overthrown. What gender is Jeffrey? Are his two female lovers different people or the same person? Is Frank straight, gay or bisexual? Is Dorothy abused and victimized, or a woman exploring her sexuality? Those questions don’t have answers, partly because Lynch never offers us any moral high ground or platform of narrative certainty from which to render such verdicts. Let's go back to the line I quoted above. In the original script for “Blue Velvet,” what Frank tells Jeffrey before the beating in Meadow Lane is “You like me.” But in the filmed scene it sounds like, “You're like me.” Lynch was receptive to a happy accident that enlivened his art, and either re-recorded the line to make it clearer or kept the mistake. Just as Lynch's artistry is founded on receptivity, Jeffrey's journey leads him to evolve a receptive manhood by following the images in his subconscious as he crosses the line that separates the flat, blank, normal people you mention from the depraved Frank. “Blue Velvet” depicts normality as an illusion that limits aggression by forbidding knowledge and vision. Jeffrey will not have masculine identity like that of the darkly comic normal Detective Williams or Mike [Sandy’s boyfriend], with their pale frustrated aggressions. Mike even sounds like Frank manqué when he tries to get even with Jeffrey for taking Sandy away from him. But he won't develop the sadistic aggressions of Frank either, though he sees the attraction. Frank knows only the base lower depths of the subconscious. Jeffrey gains vision, by going through the depths to a larger receptive knowledge. The beating in Meadow Lane liberates Jeffrey, instead of intimidating him as Frank intends. Both Lynch as artist and Jeffrey as detective expose themselves to being thought of as perverts as they build the architecture of visionary, receptive manhood, in opposition to the cultural myth that aggression and violence are the hallmarks of a "real man.” The 30th-anniversary restoration of ”Blue Velvet” is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with further dates and cities to follow.Right about the midpoint of David Lynch’s 1986 breakthrough “Blue Velvet” — and given Lynch’s structural obsessions, it may literally be the midpoint — there is a brief sequence that captures this powerful, disorienting film and all its themes in miniature. It begins when Frank Booth, the psychotic, charismatic antihero played by Dennis Hopper, turns and looks at the audience (he certainly isn’t speaking to any specific person) and announces, “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” Then Frank disappears, literally. The room where he’s standing, in a dreary apartment Frank has described as “pussy heaven,” is seen empty for a second or two. I don’t know if I have the shot order right, but then the scene shifts and we get a number of shots in rapid succession: the double yellow line on a rural highway; the front grill of Frank’s Dodge Charger; Frank’s sweaty face, looking demented or ecstatic; the face of our hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), looking nervous; the movie’s femme fatale, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), wedged between two guys in the back seat; and the speedometer as it nudges above 100 mph. The bad guy, the good guy, the dangerous girl and a fast car on a midnight ride. All the most alluring, addictive and ambiguous elements of American cinema, in about six seconds. I’m old enough to remember the impact “Blue Velvet” had on its initial release, and I was already old enough then to have screwed-up relationships. I was mad because my then-girlfriend went to see it with another guy, so I was determined to have a bad opinion of the film: Oh, sure, a dreamlike, perverse and erotic crime thriller from the director of “Eraserhead,” starring the counterculture hero of “Easy Rider” and the gorgeous daughter of a legendary Italian filmmaker! How good could that be? To make matters worse, one of my roommates, a crazy, chain-smoking French girl I never successfully slept with, came home from seeing it completely freaked out, and electrified, and made me stay up all night so she could tell me what a horrible and amazing experience it was. I tried to fact-check this anecdote with another ex-roommate, who was then her boyfriend, and he reports that she actually walked out of the movie after the scene when Jeffrey hides in the closet and watches Frank and Dorothy have kinky sex that’s right on the border between consensual BDSM and rape. So he was mad at the time, and now he’s going to be mad at me for saying that I wanted to sleep with his girlfriend, 30 years ago. This is how “Blue Velvet” messes up people’s lives. Anyway, at some point I went to see “Blue Velvet” myself, however resentfully, and of course I was traumatized and blown away. In terms of alternative culture during the Reagan year — not just independent film but fashion and visual art and overall psychic Zeitgeist — there was before “Blue Velvet” and there was after. Consider Frank’s immortal line of dialogue: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” We are still dealing with the effects of that decades later, when recent college graduates in Williamsburg and Austin and Echo Park know that they are supposed to drink the crappy, watery beer with the awesome logo design, but don’t really know why. (Heineken is of course much better beer. Hell, Coors is better beer.) Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” which came along eight years later, was both a more popular film and more widely imitated. It was easier to imitate, for one thing, but I don’t think “Pulp Fiction” has anywhere near the mysterious psychological profundity of “Blue Velvet,” or that its effects were ultimately as far-reaching. Lynch and Tarantino are far more different than similar, but there is certainly some overlap: Both translated a set of arcane 20th-century artistic and cinematic references into the language of post-boomer pop culture, and both created works that became poles of an ambiguous new American canon. Lynch often talks in interviews about his love for “movies that make you dream,” often referring back to 1960s European art films his fans quite likely have not seen. (This is shorthand, but if Tarantino is the offspring of Jean-Luc Godard, Lynch’s parentage leads to Bergman and Fellini.) In one sense, that’s Lynch’s admission that he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing or why he’s doing it when he makes a film. “Blue Velvet” bears more resemblance to normal narrative cinema than several of the Lynch movies that followed it, including “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive” (subject of this legendary exegesis published on Salon) and the nearly impenetrable “Inland Empire.” It has a hero and a villain, a blonde and a brunette, and a slowly unfolding criminal mystery that almost makes sense. But the seeds of those ambiguous, shape-shifting and often nightmarish later works are clearly visible in “Blue Velvet” now, and its similarity to a classic American crime movie is deceptive. “Blue Velvet” treats crime cinema as a dream spun from the collective American unconscious; it both evoked the dream state and shaped the dreams of everyone who watched it. I recently watched the spectacular 30th-anniversary digital restoration of “Blue Velvet” at New York’s Film Forum, where it opened this weekend. (Other cities and dates will follow, and it’s safe to assume a home-video rerelease is in the works.) I think I saw the film on VHS at some point in the ‘90s, but I hadn’t seen it projected since the original release. Yes, the cars and the hairstyles look dated — Frank Booth’s American-hoodlum wardrobe remains timeless — but even after 30 years of quotation and emulation, “Blue Velvet” is as powerful and strange as ever. It doesn’t feel contemporary, exactly, but it never did. Lynch’s vision of polymorphous, perverse, gender-blurred sexuality was far ahead of its time in 1986, and remains so in a different register today, in our neo-Puritan age of terminological caution and mandatory sensitivity. Rather than write another review of one of the most discussed and debated films ever made, I bounced a few questions and observations off my friend Martha P. Nochimson, a critic and scholar who knows Lynch and has interviewed him numerous times. Martha has published two outstanding books that illuminate his life and his films: “The Passion of David Lynch,” on the director’s early years, up to and including and foray into Hollywood with the 1990 “Wild at Heart,” and “David Lynch Swerves,” which focuses on the later, more disorienting works that followed. Even where I disagree with Martha’s opinions or interpretations, or especially then, she compels me to see things in this director, and his 1986 masterwork, that I hadn’t seen before. Martha, I will start with the obvious observation that in “Blue Velvet,” David Lynch employs or evokes many of the symbols or plot devices of film noir, but the end product barely resembles noir at all. There is a hero drawn into the criminal underworld, a good girl (fair) and a bad girl (dark), a charismatic but dangerous antihero. I could go on: the bad girl is a nightclub singer, the bad guy has a fast car that expresses sexual potency, there’s an elaborate criminal scheme that makes no sense, and for unexplained reasons the protagonist descends into creepy erotic obsession. What do you see in the film that helps Lynch both fulfill all these conventions of American crime cinema and also leave them behind? Applying the conventions of noir to Lynch loses both the poetry and originality of Lynch and the power of noir. The dark, dangerous woman and the fair, nurturing girl are longstanding literary conventions -- but not of noir. The essential femme fatale of noir is not always dark. Does the name Elsa Bannister strike a familiar chord? [She is the title character played by Rita Hayworth in Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai.”] And there aren't always the dark and light pair. See the same film for reference, and many more. The noir hero tends to be world-weary and deeply scarred when he meets the femme fatale. [Whereas Jeffrey Beaumont, the character played by Kyle MacLachlan in “Blue Velvet,” is innocent and unworldly.] But what is constant in noir is that all the problems of the world are linked to female sexuality. The opposite is true in “Blue Velvet.” The darkness Jeffrey finds is in masculinity -- Frank and his minions. Nor are Sandy [Laura Dern] and Dorothy [Rossellini] neatly polarized. Dorothy is sensual but overwhelmed. Sandy is naive but strong, and has her own connections to darkness. That's where she emerges for Jeffrey. That said, this movie is not the anti-noir either. When Lynch says that 90 percent of the time he doesn't know what he's found he's not kidding. That's how artists work. It's craftsmen-storytellers who intentionally work within and against conventions. For Lynch, there is only vision, and all he has seen or heard will be used by his vision. But to reduce “Blue Velvet” to familiar fragments that have gotten caught up in his vision is to be estranged from the film. And what is the vision of “Blue Velvet?” The mystery of masculinity, which reaches critical mass in Meadow Lane when Frank tells Jeffrey: “You're like me.” Well, that’s one of the questions and challenges people keep posing to Jeffrey, which present an intriguing pattern and speak to the dreamlike quality of the film, and the dream logic of the storytelling. On this viewing, I felt strongly that the performances of the supporting cast — his older female relatives, or Detective Williams, the cop who is also Sandy’s dad, or Mike, Sandy’s ridiculous letterman boyfriend — are intentionally flat or blank. It has the effect of suggesting that those people don’t matter or aren’t quite real, and makes the four principal characters (Jeffrey, Sandy, Dorothy and Frank) stand out even more. One way to interpret the narrative, it seems to me, is that the severed ear Jeffrey finds in a field is like the rabbit hole of “Alice in Wonderland,” a portal or passage into a symbolic realm that may not be the same one where Jeffrey’s story begins. Sandy asks Jeffrey, “Are you a detective or a pervert?” He does not answer the question. Dorothy Vallens asks him “Do you like me?” — but only after she has seduced him into sexual acts that, at least officially, he doesn’t want to perform. (The real question might be whether Jeffrey likes himself.) Frank asks Jeffrey whether he wants to go for a ride, and whether he has ever been to “Pussy Heaven.” (That one cracks me up, partly because of how profoundly unsexy Pussy Heaven turns out to be.) Again, the answers to both questions are officially no, but out in the audience we know better. One of the oddest and most striking moments in the film comes when Jeffrey says to Sandy, “You’re a neat girl,” and she responds without hesitation, “So are you.” It takes a full beat before she corrects herself, and she seems confused about why she said that. You just mentioned “the mystery of masculinity” as the central issue. Sandy’s strange response suggests that Jeffrey is literally “unmanned,” and that this story presents a realm where heterosexual, monogamous norms of sexuality and gender have been overthrown. What gender is Jeffrey? Are his two female lovers different people or the same person? Is Frank straight, gay or bisexual? Is Dorothy abused and victimized, or a woman exploring her sexuality? Those questions don’t have answers, partly because Lynch never offers us any moral high ground or platform of narrative certainty from which to render such verdicts. Let's go back to the line I quoted above. In the original script for “Blue Velvet,” what Frank tells Jeffrey before the beating in Meadow Lane is “You like me.” But in the filmed scene it sounds like, “You're like me.” Lynch was receptive to a happy accident that enlivened his art, and either re-recorded the line to make it clearer or kept the mistake. Just as Lynch's artistry is founded on receptivity, Jeffrey's journey leads him to evolve a receptive manhood by following the images in his subconscious as he crosses the line that separates the flat, blank, normal people you mention from the depraved Frank. “Blue Velvet” depicts normality as an illusion that limits aggression by forbidding knowledge and vision. Jeffrey will not have masculine identity like that of the darkly comic normal Detective Williams or Mike [Sandy’s boyfriend], with their pale frustrated aggressions. Mike even sounds like Frank manqué when he tries to get even with Jeffrey for taking Sandy away from him. But he won't develop the sadistic aggressions of Frank either, though he sees the attraction. Frank knows only the base lower depths of the subconscious. Jeffrey gains vision, by going through the depths to a larger receptive knowledge. The beating in Meadow Lane liberates Jeffrey, instead of intimidating him as Frank intends. Both Lynch as artist and Jeffrey as detective expose themselves to being thought of as perverts as they build the architecture of visionary, receptive manhood, in opposition to the cultural myth that aggression and violence are the hallmarks of a "real man.” The 30th-anniversary restoration of ”Blue Velvet” is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with further dates and cities to follow.

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Consent alone is a low bar for sex: “We have become more comfortable talking about girls’ victimization than girls’ pleasure”

I'm not going to tell you to go right now and buy a copy of Peggy Orenstein's "Girls & Sex." I'm going to tell you to buy two copies: One for yourself, and one for the teenager in your life. Because kids — boys and girls, gay and straight — need to understand not just what a new generation of girls is doing in their intimate lives. They need to know what they're not doing. Like when they're not saying no to stuff they're not into, because it's easier than arguing about it. Like when they're not asking themselves what feels good — for them. And it's high time, in a cultural moment fraught with sexual panic about hookups and sexting and questions of consent, to shift the conversation — and to fight for young women's right to orgasm. Peggy Orenstein is a uniquely qualified advocate. As she told me recently in a raucous, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"-referencing Skype session, "I feel this really intense connection and resonance with girls. I love talking to girls; I love hanging out with girls. That's why I keep coming back." That she does — Orenstein has spent much of her journalistic career in girl world, from 1994's "Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap" through her 2011 bestseller “Cinderella Ate My Daughter." It's been five years since Orenstein's bold, hilarious and occasionally terrifying foray into the princess industrial complex. Now, the same girls she wrote about then — including those high heels-wearing baby divas — are hitting puberty and beyond, and Orenstein is back to see what happens after growing up with "that 21-piece Disney princess makeup set." Her newest book is an exploration of the lives of high school and college-aged girls today, shown through their various forays into purity balls and walks of shame, into hooking up and coming out. It is not, refreshingly, a condemnation of millennials and their successors — or a hand-wringing call to alarmism. Yes, it discusses frankly the often performative aspects of female adolescent sexuality and doesn't ignore the realities of sexual assault, but "Girls & Sex" refuses to be judgmental or doom and gloom. Instead, it offers something else — a demand for education, enlightenment, and ultimately, the radical notion of equal satisfaction. When I got your book, I got a copy for myself, and one for my teen daughter. Now she's passed it around among her friends and having conversations with them. Did you imagine it would be used that way? I keep hearing that, and that's exactly what I'd hoped. Generally what happens with my books is that the first line is parents, but that it quickly migrates to high school girls and college girls. They can just read it themselves and talk with their friends. It gives them information. And that's power. I thought, I'm going to give this book to my daughter the summer before she goes into ninth grade. I wrote it because my daughter's going to be going to a gigantic high school where all bets are off and I was hearing a lot of stuff from my friends whose kids go there. I thought, I need to understand this, and I need to make the world better before my kid gets there. One of the things that bums me out is seeing young girls who can be so empowered and forthright everywhere else, and then in private they don't even know that they're allowed to want things. They're giving sexual favors and getting nothing in return. You talk about how revelatory it is for these girls when they have an orgasm. Yeah. One of them said, "I cried. I cried." I mean, that's amazing. One of my favorite stories is talking to girls about the nonreciprocal thing and saying, "What if guys asked you to get a glass of water, over and over, and they never offered to get you a glass of water? Or if they did, it was totally begrudging?" They would laugh. It's less insulting to be told that you're never going to have reciprocal oral sex and you're always going to be expected to go down on a guy than get him a glass of water. But we set girls up for that from the get go. Everything in the culture tells them that they are supposed to perform, that they are supposed to pay more attention to being desirable than their own desire. We don't as parents name that whole area between belly button and knees. We don't tell them what a clitoris is. We don't even tell them what a vulva is. We just avoid the whole situation. [Kids] go into puberty ed class, and female pleasure is not necessary to talk about when you're talking about reproduction. So we don't. We talk about periods. We talk about unwanted pregnancy. And with boys we talk about erections and ejaculation. Then, no surprise, only a third of girls masturbate regularly, only half have ever masturbated. And then we tell them to go into their sexual encounters with a sense of equality. How is that supposed to happen? We have completely shrouded them. Maybe they figure it out. Maybe they do. But maybe they don't, or maybe they have to get over their early experience, and that's wrong. Look at research: When we talk about sexual satisfaction, we're not talking about the same thing. Young women tend to measure sexual satisfaction by their partner's satisfaction — which is why lesbians are more likely to have orgasms. They're like, "I want you to feel good! No, I want you to feel good!" Heterosexual girls will say, "If he's satisfied, I'm satisfied." Boys are more likely to measure sexual satisfaction by their own orgasm and their own pleasure. On the flipside, when they talk about bad sex they use completely different language. Boys will say, "I didn't come or I wasn't that attracted to her." Girls will talk about pain and humiliation and degradation. Boys never use that language. We're talking about really different experiences going into it. That's why I love that term "intimate justice." To think about this in terms of equity and power dynamics and who is entitled to engage sexually. Who is entitled to enjoy? Who is the primary beneficiary? So what is different now? What is it about this generation that is not just historic "girls pleasing boys" crap that we've all gone through? Some of it is the same. When I think about that I think, why is it the same? When girls are so much more empowered, when they are so much more vocal — why have things changed so much in the public life and not in the private life? I think all of those things that have grown more intense in an age when the culture has grown so visual and so focused and even more saturated in sexuality. You have a hookup culture where sex precedes intimacy rather than the other way around. And that's not saying, "Only have sex in relationships," because that's not true. It's not a moral judgment. We're not saying, "Oh heavens." We're saying, what are you getting out of your sexual experiences? What do you want to get from those experiences? What are you entitled to, and how do you get there? What I wanted to do is say, this is what it looks like. This is what you'll probably get out of it. This is what you won't get out of it. Once you know all that, you make your informed choices. Otherwise, the choices are just presented by the media and it's like, we rip off half our clothes, we have intercourse with nothing preceding it. We both have orgasms in three seconds and it's great. Then real girls go into real encounters and think, "What's wrong with me?" When you have not even yet had your first kiss, nobody says to you, "It's a symbolic repression that if acted out isn't going to feel particularly good for women." That's part of trying to normalize conversations around sex. It's not about "the talk" when we've never told them they have a vagina and now we're going to tell them about reproduction. That's about talking about these ideas about rights and entitlement in sexual relationships. You make it clear that kids who have abstinence-only education are going to have sex pretty much at around the same time their peers are and they're going to do with less protection. So what can we learn from religious conservatives about what they're doing right? I went to a purity ball in Louisiana. I feel like it would be really easy to go to one of those things and just slam them, because the idea behind them is completely wrong. Kids are not going to abstain. We know that maybe they delay sex a little longer. But they have greater rates of pregnancy, they have way higher rates of disease. The boys are six times more likely to engage in anal sex and both boys and girls are more likely to engage in oral sex and not see that as compromising their virginity. So we know that that's really crap. That said, there was something really moving about the event, and seeing that the fathers there were having this conversation about their values around sexuality and their expectations around sexuality and their hopes around sexuality with their daughters. It wasn't the conversation I wished they'd have. But when I talked to the girls who were from more typical families, if I asked what their fathers said to them, they just laughed. Their mothers — not always but often — talked to them about risk and danger. Their fathers said nothing. It was almost as if, once we stopped saying, "Don't do it till you're married," we didn't know what to replace it with. And we just thought, we aren't going to look. I didn't like what those fathers were saying. I didn't think it was the right conversation to be having with girls. But I thought at least they're having some conversation and I can't say that that's true among my peers. I also think there's a lot of things our kids don't want to talk about. I think we have to normalize the conversation. What I try now to do with my daughters [aged 16 and 12] is say, "You deserve to be with people who think you're great. Who think you're awesome. That's who deserves your company." And I talk about people and I don't talk about "boys," because fewer and fewer teenagers identity as exclusively heterosexual. I say that I want the people you date to respect you, to like you, to see how funny you are and I want you to have fun within that. And if it does't feel good for you, then there's something wrong. I always say that this conversation that we're having about consent is so important. But consent is such a low bar for a sexual experience. We've got to do better than that. We have put a lot of emphasis on consent, because we should, but the for girls, sometimes they feel, "It ought to feel good because I said yes." And if it's not good, that's confusing and upsetting and hard to understand. We have to say, yes, consent, obviously consent, but consent is the baseline. It's not the experience. We are weird that as a culture we have become more comfortable talking about girls' victimization than girls' pleasure. I have had a lot of conversations about this over the years with my nieces and my friends' daughters, and a lot of times I would give anything for the earth to swallow me up so I don't have to talk to them about orgasms. But I make myself do it. With one friend's teenage daughter I said, "I'm not going to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. I want you to think about these questions. Do you know where your clitoris is? Have you masturbated? Have you had an orgasm? With yourself? With him? Are you comfortable telling him what you like sexually?" A lot of adult women aren't comfortable with that. If what you're trying to do is express intimacy and mutual pleasure, I'm not sure that rushing to intercourse without understanding that pool of experience is going to get you there. So why are you doing it? I'm not saying it's wrong from a moral perspective, but from the perspective of understanding yourself and your sexuality and exploring, building agency and strength. Ask yourself those questions. It's so important for girls. What do you think this generation is doing right? What gives you hope for change? I had this conversation with a girl and she was saying that all the women in her family were super strong, and then she told me this litany of non-reciprocal experiences and I said, "Why did that happen?" And she told me, "Well, I guess girls are taught to be so meek and deferential." I said, "Wait a second, You just told me how strong you are." She said, "I didn't know that 'strong woman' applied to sex." But then she said, "I'm not doing any other girls favors by pretending these things are okay. I'm going to start going into my encounters demanding reciprocity and demanding respect, because otherwise these guys are going to think this is okay -- and they're going to keep doing this with somebody else too."

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Michael Ware’s Iraq War doc doesn’t hold up: “Only The Dead See The End Of War” captures the horror and confusion, but skimps on analysis

“Only The Dead See The End Of War” is difficult to interpret without context. This is frustrating, because documentaries, usually, are vehicles that provide context—and for the topic of fomenting insurgency during the Iraq War, context would be extraordinarily useful. The documentary’s title is a slightly different form of a famous quote from one of George Santayana’s soliloquies, “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” which is often erroneously attributed to Plato and used as the epigraph for 2001’s “Blackhawk Down.” In a confusing twist that appears to prove my point, the film was released as simply “Only The Dead,” and only has the extra words for HBO’s premiere this Monday night. Context helps. But it is hard to see context when you are in a lot of pain. The subject of the pain in question is Australian war correspondent Michael Ware, who spent seven years in Iraq as a journalist for Time magazine. His docu-memoir, distilled from hundreds of hours of handheld-camera footage, is devoid of explanation and analysis, even while the story he is telling has profound implications for our present-day War on Terror. Ware witnessed firsthand the breakdown of national stability into factional conflict waged by militants and mujahideen; he became a trusted reporter for both the occupying military and the homegrown insurgents, one that was privy to grisly combat operations on both sides of the battlefield. But what he learned, and what the viewer could extrapolate from what he saw, is generally abandoned by the narrative itself. Instead—and understandably so—“Only The Dead” is preoccupied with Ware’s trauma, one earned both honestly and dishonestly. The journalist’s assignment in Iraq was only supposed to last three weeks, which is when he started filming the proceedings, almost compulsively, on his camcorder. But as the weeks stretched into months, and the months into years, Ware describes feeling both trapped by the intricacies of the war and of his own “dark heart.” “Only The Dead” features unflinching, nearly raw footage of the aftermath of violence all over Iraq—from a live feed in the press room of the United Nations headquarters there, when it was bombed, to the carnage outside the Jordanian embassy, where Ware’s handycam tracks damaged and blown apart bodies being dragged out of rubble and through crowds of onlookers. These events end up shaping the arc of Ware’s time in Iraq. His obsession with what drives men to suicide-bombing leads him to follow the rise, reign, and fall, of sorts, of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose organization in the shattered remains of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is a progenitor of today’s ISIS. Not that you would know that from watching the film, though maybe you would guess, driving through Zarqawi-occupied Haifa Street—at one time, the commercial center of Baghdad, but when filmed, festooned with the militant’s black flags. Ware’s memoir comes from the footage he has, so his tape from that day driving through Haifa ends when one of Zarqawi’s men stops their car, pulling a pin out of a grenade to coerce them. Ware goes on to narrate his apprehension and near-execution, were it not for a few choice words and a warning. The episode haunted him so deeply that shaving—the act of putting a blade to his throat—still, he says, destabilizes him. But for all that the series of events is a powerful one, putting it together in this way doesn’t let the impact of the kidnapping resonate. “Only The Dead” is a documentary made by a non-filmmaker, and it shows. As understandably horrible as the events were—and as obviously unfair as it is to ask for a better-quality production out of seven years spent in horror in Iraq—this film is difficult to watch and even more difficult to make sense of. The events are graphic, but disconnected, or filmed incompletely. And though that is, in and of itself, a valid stylistic choice, it’s not one that facilitates greater understanding of combat in Iraq. It might facilitate an atmosphere of increasingly unhinged chaos and despair—a kind of nonfictional “The Hurt Locker,” the 2008 Kathryn Bigelow film—but even that is undercut by Ware’s own heavy-handed narration and the too-cinematic score from Michael Yezerski. The fact is that “Only The Dead See The End Of War” doesn’t hold up against the major, defining documentaries of the Iraq War. Alex Gibney’s “Taxi To The Dark Side” (2007), for example, is a documentary about the American War on Terror that creates rock-solid narrative out of slippery details and incomplete records; Deborah Scranton’s “The War Tapes,” from 2006, uses footage filmed by three soldiers in Operation Iraqi Freedom, creating a visual atmosphere much like Ware’s here. We are too saturated by brilliant documentary film, on all topics, to not see the flaws in “Only The Dead,” even as a purely personal journey of trauma. Ware struggles to create a narrative out of his footage, and he ultimately fails to frame his handycam experience in a way that adequately communicates its relevance. What the film does have, though, is an absolutely haunting series of images, even when it’s difficult to understand what Ware and co-director Bill Guttentag are trying to make you understand. Ware's closeness with militants brought him to witnessing the final moments of an anointed suicide bomber being sent to blow up an American ammunition depot. His on-the-ground reporting unearthed a roadside execution, being conducted without fanfare or secrecy, in the rapidly destabilizing environs of Baghdad. And in the last half of the film, several long takes from Ware’s camera are featured without much commentary, and the result is unnervingly immersive, whether that is in a building being stormed in Fallujah under cover of darkness or—in the film’s most enduring image—a teenage boy slowly dying at the feet of a group of disinterested marines. “Hurry up and die, motherfucker,” one says. Another carelessly throws a rag over the boy's still-breathing face. Ware is fully aware of his own complicity; he does not speak up for the boy, but instead just films him twitching and gasping to death. Following that scene, which is nearly at the end of the film, Ware apparently began to realize just how much he had lost his own humanity. According to Ware’s former colleague Phil Zabriskie, Ware (to put it inelegantly, and non-medically) lost his mind after leaving Iraq, and made this film as one of the many ways he was trying to cope with the horrors he’d seen. Ware quit working at CNN—his job after Time—because the network would not give him time off to recover from post-traumatic stress. He also later called out the network for refusing to air the footage of the boy gasping to death—a depiction of what Ware called a war crime. None of that journey makes it into the film, except for the film itself; Ware cannot quite articulate what Zabriskie describes thusly:

I never did go back to Iraq, and I certainly did not do what Ware did, but I later spent time in Afghanistan, Gaza, and other conflict zones, reporting on war, trauma—and what comes after. I carry all of it with me all the time. I know how alluring and exhilarating that sort of reporting can be, and I know what it feels like later, when you can’t sleep, can’t concentrate, and struggle to relate to people in your life, including those who love you. That’s part of the horrible privilege of seeing the worst humanity has to offer.

Watching “Only The Dead See The End Of War” is best accompanied by the writing around the film, including Zabriskie’s piece, the film’s tepid reviews, interviews with Ware, and more context on insurgency, PTSD, and the particulars of the Iraq War. It is an unhelpfully shocking piece of filmmaking on its own, but I do appreciate that it made me find that context on my own, to struggle through reams of information to find what Ware was going on about. I wish the film were a bit more accessible, but it is impossible to deny that is deeply and purely felt.

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Scientists have discovered an unbelievably simple new way to fight childhood obesity

Children in America are steadily getting more and more obese. The numbers are staggering. In 1980, 7 percent of American children aged 6-11 years were obese. By 2012, that figure more than doubled, to 18 percent. During the same period, adolescent obesity rose from 5 percent to nearly 21 percent. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, who has set his sights on tackling America’s obesity epidemic, has singled out the problem of childhood obesity in particular. Last October, he welcomed two dozen children from the I’m A Star Foundation to the nation’s capital to present nearly a year’s worth of research on the topic and ask their suggestions to combat it. In his speech to Murthy, Aaron Johnson, Jr., 13, a seventh-grade student at James Weldon Johnson Middle School in Jacksonville, Florida, said the main hurdle to overcoming childhood obesity was the fact that kids aren't involved in the solutions. “Our concern is that the vast majority of the ‘call to actions’ and strategic plans for childhood obesity are written by adults, shared by adults, discussed by adults, and the information never gets out to the people most impacted: the children,” Aaron said. One of the main battlefronts in the war against childhood obesity are the nation’s schools. After all, kids are in school for around eight hours every weekday in a controlled sitution. “Schools can create environments supportive of students’ efforts to eat healthy and be active by implementing policies and practices that support healthy eating and regular physical activity,” notes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has provided a set of guidelines for schools to follow. The CDC reminds schools in its guidelines that access to water fountains is required by law. Water fountains are "a healthy alternative to sugar-sweetened beverages and can help increase students’ overall water consumption. … As a result of participation in a K–12 health education curriculum that includes nutrition, students should have the knowledge and skills to … [d]rink plenty of water. It may seem odd to say that kids need the “skills” to drink water, but a central part of the problem is that kids aren’t drinking enough of it, instead gulping sugary beverages like soda and sports drinks, which contribute to weight gain and an unhealthy lifestyle, not to mention tooth decay. As I noted in an earlierarticle about how beverage companies use marketing to target the poor, sugary beverages make up the third highest source of calories for kids and teens. New research proves that water may be the key to solving the childhood obesity crisis. A five-year study conducted by researchers at New York University and Syracuse University, and published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics, has concluded that making water more available in public schools through self-serve water dispensers in cafeterias resulted in “statistically significant” declines in students’ weight. Over the course of the study period, about 40 percent of New York City’s schools received a water jet as part of a program designed by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Department of Education. The water jets—large, clear, electronically powered jugs with a push lever to dispense water—each cost around $1,000. The researchers analyzed more than one million students in over 1,200 elementary and middle schools across New York City, and compared students in schools with and without the water jets. Kids at schools that had water jets for at least three months experienced a reduction in standardized body mass index—.025 for boys and .022 for girls—compared to kids at schools without water jets. The adoption of water jets was associated with a .9 percentage point reduction in boys' likelihood of being overweight, while girls showed a .6 percentage point reduction. “This study demonstrates that doing something as simple as providing free and readily available water to students may have positive impacts on their overall health, particularly weight management,” said the study’s senior investigator Brian Elbel, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone and NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “Our findings suggest that this relatively low-cost intervention is, in fact, working.” “We are in a place right now where we are trying to find anything to help with childhood obesity,” Elbel told the New York Post. “It’s great that a straightforward, fairly low-cost intervention had an effect on kids’ BMI, and I think it makes us want to look a lot closer at simple policies to improve water availability.” Drinking water can help simply by being a substitute for sugary beverages and other caloric drinks, like milk and chocolate milk, which kids often drink. “Decreasing the amount of caloric beverages consumed and simultaneously increasing water consumption is important to promote children’s health and decrease the prevalence of childhood obesity,” said Amy Ellen Schwartz, director of NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy. “Schools are a natural setting for such interventions.” But that's not the only way increased water intake can help. As Brooke Alpert, a registered dietician and founder of B Nutritious, a Manhattan-based nutrition counseling firm, says, “Water consumption is directly correlated with weight loss." Scientific research supports that idea. According to a 2008 study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Dietetic Association, dieting obese adults who drank two cups of water before breakfast lost five more pounds than dieters who didn’t increase their water intake. There may be a physiological response to increased water intake. Some research suggests that the body may produce more heat in response to water consumption, thereby increasing metabolic rates, which in turn burns off more calories. Whatever the reason, it appears that drinking more water can help keep the pounds off, and for America’s kids, that’s great news. There are also important anti-obesity initiatives underway, like a bill in Baltimore that seeks to put warning labels wherever sugary drinks are sold. But the simple prescription to drink more water is one initiative that should make seventh-grader Aaron Johnson—who wants kids to participate in their own battle against obesity—particularly happy. After all, for the vast majority of kids out there, taking a drink from a water fountain is a piece of (calorie-free) cake. Children in America are steadily getting more and more obese. The numbers are staggering. In 1980, 7 percent of American children aged 6-11 years were obese. By 2012, that figure more than doubled, to 18 percent. During the same period, adolescent obesity rose from 5 percent to nearly 21 percent. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, who has set his sights on tackling America’s obesity epidemic, has singled out the problem of childhood obesity in particular. Last October, he welcomed two dozen children from the I’m A Star Foundation to the nation’s capital to present nearly a year’s worth of research on the topic and ask their suggestions to combat it. In his speech to Murthy, Aaron Johnson, Jr., 13, a seventh-grade student at James Weldon Johnson Middle School in Jacksonville, Florida, said the main hurdle to overcoming childhood obesity was the fact that kids aren't involved in the solutions. “Our concern is that the vast majority of the ‘call to actions’ and strategic plans for childhood obesity are written by adults, shared by adults, discussed by adults, and the information never gets out to the people most impacted: the children,” Aaron said. One of the main battlefronts in the war against childhood obesity are the nation’s schools. After all, kids are in school for around eight hours every weekday in a controlled sitution. “Schools can create environments supportive of students’ efforts to eat healthy and be active by implementing policies and practices that support healthy eating and regular physical activity,” notes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has provided a set of guidelines for schools to follow. The CDC reminds schools in its guidelines that access to water fountains is required by law. Water fountains are "a healthy alternative to sugar-sweetened beverages and can help increase students’ overall water consumption. … As a result of participation in a K–12 health education curriculum that includes nutrition, students should have the knowledge and skills to … [d]rink plenty of water. It may seem odd to say that kids need the “skills” to drink water, but a central part of the problem is that kids aren’t drinking enough of it, instead gulping sugary beverages like soda and sports drinks, which contribute to weight gain and an unhealthy lifestyle, not to mention tooth decay. As I noted in an earlierarticle about how beverage companies use marketing to target the poor, sugary beverages make up the third highest source of calories for kids and teens. New research proves that water may be the key to solving the childhood obesity crisis. A five-year study conducted by researchers at New York University and Syracuse University, and published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics, has concluded that making water more available in public schools through self-serve water dispensers in cafeterias resulted in “statistically significant” declines in students’ weight. Over the course of the study period, about 40 percent of New York City’s schools received a water jet as part of a program designed by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Department of Education. The water jets—large, clear, electronically powered jugs with a push lever to dispense water—each cost around $1,000. The researchers analyzed more than one million students in over 1,200 elementary and middle schools across New York City, and compared students in schools with and without the water jets. Kids at schools that had water jets for at least three months experienced a reduction in standardized body mass index—.025 for boys and .022 for girls—compared to kids at schools without water jets. The adoption of water jets was associated with a .9 percentage point reduction in boys' likelihood of being overweight, while girls showed a .6 percentage point reduction. “This study demonstrates that doing something as simple as providing free and readily available water to students may have positive impacts on their overall health, particularly weight management,” said the study’s senior investigator Brian Elbel, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone and NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “Our findings suggest that this relatively low-cost intervention is, in fact, working.” “We are in a place right now where we are trying to find anything to help with childhood obesity,” Elbel told the New York Post. “It’s great that a straightforward, fairly low-cost intervention had an effect on kids’ BMI, and I think it makes us want to look a lot closer at simple policies to improve water availability.” Drinking water can help simply by being a substitute for sugary beverages and other caloric drinks, like milk and chocolate milk, which kids often drink. “Decreasing the amount of caloric beverages consumed and simultaneously increasing water consumption is important to promote children’s health and decrease the prevalence of childhood obesity,” said Amy Ellen Schwartz, director of NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy. “Schools are a natural setting for such interventions.” But that's not the only way increased water intake can help. As Brooke Alpert, a registered dietician and founder of B Nutritious, a Manhattan-based nutrition counseling firm, says, “Water consumption is directly correlated with weight loss." Scientific research supports that idea. According to a 2008 study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Dietetic Association, dieting obese adults who drank two cups of water before breakfast lost five more pounds than dieters who didn’t increase their water intake. There may be a physiological response to increased water intake. Some research suggests that the body may produce more heat in response to water consumption, thereby increasing metabolic rates, which in turn burns off more calories. Whatever the reason, it appears that drinking more water can help keep the pounds off, and for America’s kids, that’s great news. There are also important anti-obesity initiatives underway, like a bill in Baltimore that seeks to put warning labels wherever sugary drinks are sold. But the simple prescription to drink more water is one initiative that should make seventh-grader Aaron Johnson—who wants kids to participate in their own battle against obesity—particularly happy. After all, for the vast majority of kids out there, taking a drink from a water fountain is a piece of (calorie-free) cake.

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Jackie Robinson, A New Ken Burns Film, Only On PBS

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The truth about Donald Trump’s angry white men: Inside the media narrative that the media doesn’t understand

The press is doing a whole lot of navel gazing at the moment, wondering how they went so wrong about Donald Trump's appeal. Apparently, they all thought it was joke until this weekend or something. And the big takeaway is best exemplified by this observation by Nicholos Kristof in the New York Times:

Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don't adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to Senators, not enough to the jobless.

It mystifying why Kristof thinks media elites inhabit a "middle class" world, but that's beside the point. It's the rest that's truly laughable. Evidently, Kristof believes that if you're talking about racial, ethnic and gender diversity you aren't talking about the jobless or the part of America that is struggling. Basically, he's saying the media's ignoring white men. Again. This conversation has been going on since the 1960s. Here's the Kristof of his day, Joseph Kraft, wringing his hands over the media elite failing to properly take into consideration the needs and concerns of "average Americans" back in 1968 after the violence at the Democratic convention:

"Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own? "The answer, I think is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the of presidential candidates who appeal to them. "To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation. "The most important organs of and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites. "In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public."

This began the decades-long self-flagellation by the media (and the cynical exploitation of it by the Republicans) wherein it was assumed that the most misunderstood and underserved people in the whole country were salt-of-the-earth white folks nobody ever thinks about. Except that it's anything but the truth. Every single election cycle since 1968 the press has been obsessed with this mythical Real American who is always angry, always frustrated, always railing against the so-called elites because they allegedly only care about the racial minorities or the women or somebody other than them. Then we end up with a mass soul search in which we all come to understand that the key to the election is to address these people's grievances. In those early days it was referred to as "The Silent Majority" of Richard Nixon, which Donald Trump has unoriginally revived. Since then, pollsters have come up with slogans to target certain demographics (NASCAR Dads and Waitress Moms are two examples), which the press then uses as symbols of this Real America, representing the breathing heart and soul of the country. 1976 featured media obsessing over the everyman outsider Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian from the South who spoke to Real Americans who just wanted a president who wouldn't lie to them. It wasn't long before they discovered that he didn't really fit the bill. The Real Americans, it turned out, were more conservative than Carter and really wanted the Gipper to Make America Great Again. And thus the most Real Americans in the whole country were discovered: the Reagan Democrat:

The work of Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is a classic study of Reagan Democrats. Greenberg analyzed white ethnic voters (largely unionized auto workers) in Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for John F. Kennedy in 1960, but 66 percent for Reagan in 1980. He concluded that "Reagan Democrats" no longer saw the Democratic party as champions of their working class aspirations, but instead saw them as working primarily for the benefit of others: the very poor, feminists, the unemployed, African Americans, Latinos, and other groups. In addition, Reagan Democrats enjoyed gains during the period of economic prosperity that coincided with the Reagan administration following the "malaise" of the Carter administration. They also supported Reagan's strong stance on national security and opposed the 1980s Democratic Party on such issues as pornography, crime, and high taxes.

These are people we now refer to as "Republicans" but the myth of these alleged swing voters has persisted even to this day, as reporters commonly wonder if Trump is going to be able to nab those Reagan Democrats, who no longer exist. (Even pollster Stan Greenberg, who followed Macomb County in Michigan for decades, gave up the ghost on that project after 2008, when Barack Obama won there. It turns out that all the Real Americans there had either moved or stopped being Real.) During the '80s, the ecstatic canonization of these voters was overwhelming with political reporters rushing to their enclaves in various parts of the heartland like anthropologists in search of lost tribes of the Amazon. They would sit down in diners and cafes and listen raptly to white men in cat hats talk about how the country is going to hell in a handbasket because we can't afford to keep giving handouts to foreigners and people who won't work. Sound familiar? About the same time, the Democratic Party began their quest to once more bag their great white whale -- the Southern white male; they recruited their presidential candidates among the ranks of the white Southerners of the New South and crafted their message to appeal to him. And once again, the press "discovered" that this demographic was deeply in need of more coverage so the country could understand their plight. In 1994, the term "Angry White men" was found to have been used more than 1,500 times in the run-up to Newt Gingrich's mid-term sweep of the House. On the day after the election, USA Today ran a famous story by Patricia Edmonds and Richard Benedetto called "Angry White Men; Their Votes Turn the Tide for GOP; 'Men Want to Torch' Washington." Sound familiar? By 2004 the press once again donned the proverbial hair shirt and castigated itself for failing to properly cover the Real Americans.  The New York Times even began a "conservative beat," presumably so they could understand the message underlying songs like "The Angry American" which had been the perfect expression of angry white men who wanted revenge after 9/11. Now we are witnessing yet another iteration of the phenomenon with the Trump voter of 2016, a very, very angry white guy everyone supposedly ignored for years. But the truth is that whether they are Reagan Democrats or Reagan Republicans or Heartland voters or Southern white males, these citizens' needs and desires are always at the forefront of media attention in virtually every election. And their concerns are always the same: They believe they are personally getting screwed because immigrants and welfare queens and gays and feminists and foreigners are all taking what they aren't entitled to and America is weaker and less significant because of it. This has been going on for almost 50 years. It's been the backbone of conservative resentment and the Republican Party has exploited it every step of the way.  The press has been covering it for that long as well, over and over again putting these same people at the center of our elections as if they are the most important voters in the country, who have suffered a tremendous indignity by having to put up with the likes of immigrants and African Americans and women getting any attention at all. That's certainly how these so-called Real Americans feel about it. But there's no reason for the press to keep buying into it.

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Stop trying to make Bernie disappear: While the establishment pretends nothing has changed, Sanders continues to win big

A specter appears to be haunting American liberalism — the specter of democratic socialism. As Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) continues to pick up surprising victories across the country, decisively winning Washington state, Alaska, and Hawaii over the weekend, it is becoming clear that his brand of democratic socialism (what some might simply call social democracy) is not a passing fad, but the future of Democratic party politics. While he may not win the 2016 nomination, he is winning the hearts and minds of Democratic voters and Independents. And with his growing popularity, particularly among millennial voters, it has not been surprising to see some liberals dusting off red-scare tactics from the ash heap of history. In January, for example, Clinton allies prepared a dossier to paint Sanders as a Soviet-sympathizing communist, while her surrogates have been vocal about his “radical” left-wing politics. “[Republicans] can’t wait to run an ad with a hammer and sickle,” said Missouri Senator and Clinton supporter Claire McCaskill, while Clinton surrogate and former Republican attack dog David Brock spoke plainly: “He’s a socialist... He’s got a 30 year history of affiliation with a lot of whack-doodle ideas and parties.” With this red scare in the air, it was only a matter of time until a leading liberal decided to remind everyone that “socialism” and “Marxism” have produced some of the most brutal and repressive dictatorships in the world. And last week, as President Obama was making the rounds in Cuba, New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait did just that in his article, “Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, and Marxism Has Always Failed,” in which he opines that liberalism “has never been stronger than now.” Considering that economic inequality is at 80-year highs, Washington is controlled by monied interests, union membership is at historic lows, and American healthcare, though the most expensive in the world, is ranked at the bottom of the developed world, it’s an interesting time to be so optimistic about New Democrat liberalism. But alas, surely it’s better than Marxism, which Chait defines as a “theory of class justice” that only respects the political rights “exercised by members of the oppressed class” (in other words, a brand of left-wing authoritarianism). This narrow and erroneous definition explains why half of his unfocused screed is dedicated to the “political correctness” movement in academia, which does indeed have authoritarian tendencies, but has nothing to do with Marxism, which is essentially a method of socioeconomic analysis. Reading his piece, one could easily get the impression that all Marxists and socialists were on board with the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union; that is to say, all Marxists (and socialists) are inherently authoritarian and anti-democratic. This is about as absurd as calling President Obama a communist. Of course, there can be no denying that the states that identified themselves communist were repressive authoritarian regimes where civil rights and liberties were almost nonexistent. But Marxism as school of thought has a wide variety of theorists and adherents, both democratic and anti-democratic, revolutionary and reformist. (Marx himself offered very little advice in how to achieve socialism, and dedicated most of his energy to the study of capitalism.) Consider Karl Kautsky, a friend of both Marx and Friedrich Engels and a prominent Marxist theorist of his day, who vehemently opposed the Bolsheviks and their authoritarian politics. In his work, "Social Democracy versus Communism," Kautsky explains what Marx did and did not intend with his work:

“There was nothing that Marx feared so much as the degeneration of his school into a rigid sect... To Marx there was no ultimate knowledge, only an infinite process of learning. Therefore, his own theory is not to be conceived as a collection of tenets which we must accept on faith. Marxism itself is nothing but a definite process of learning; founded upon a definite method introduced by Marx and Engels. This method itself, which Marx and Engels called the materialist conception of history, is not unalterable... Every form of doctrinaire fanaticism, every attempt to turn Marxism into an unalterable dogma is contrary to Marxist thought, which recognizes no absolute truth but only relative truth.”

Relative to modern global capitalism, Marx’s three-volume critique of capitalism, "Das Kapital," remains highly relevant and insightful. The past 40 years have proven how resilient and revolutionary capital is, undermining the welfare states and worker movements that developed over the 20th century. (Marx, who wrote extensively about capital’s revolutionary nature, perhaps underestimated just how revolutionary it could be.) With the financial crash of 2008-09 and ever-increasing economic inequality in the United States and around the world, is it any wonder Marx’s work has become pertinent again? The New Yorker's John Cassidy summed up Marx’s importance in his 1997 essay, "The Return of Karl Marx":

“[Marx’s] books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.”

In his New York essay, Chait concludes that Marxism, or socialism, “has failed everywhere it has been tried,” by which he means authoritarian communism has failed — essentially omitting all anti-authoritarian socialists and socialist parties from history. However, as another article from last week, "Is Socialism Undemocratic?," written by Joseph M. Schwartz and published in Jacobin — a publication that Chait directed much of his invective at — points out, socialists were “consistent opponents of authoritarianism of both left and right varieties” throughout the 20th century. “Despite the common assertion that ‘capitalism equals democracy,’” writes Schwartz, “capitalists themselves, absent the pressure from an organized working class, have never supported democratic reforms... For many socialists, the support for democratic reforms was unconditional; but they also believed that the class power needed to restrain the power of capital had to be furthered so that working people could fully control their social and economic destiny. While criticizing capitalism as antidemocratic, democratic socialists consistently opposed authoritarian governments that claimed to be socialist.” Social reforms enacted throughout the 20th century in “liberal” states would have never come about without strong popular movements, made up largely of socialists and Marxists. Indeed, one simply has to go through the list of major political parties in Europe — the UK Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party of Sweden, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the French Socialist Party, the Labour Party of Norway — all of which are rooted in socialist/Marxian politics, to see how important socialist movements were in forming modern Social democracies. The United States is unique in not having a major socialist party, although the reforms enacted by New Deal Democrats would have been unlikely without radical pressure from below. Many of these parties discarded their left-wing politics as the 20th century advanced, moving towards a neoliberal “third way,” and, as mentioned above, global capital has proven impressively resilient. Though certain socialist institutions remain strong in many of these countries (consider the UK’s National Health Service, which was implemented by the democratic socialist Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan of the Labour Party), reactionary politics, exemplified by Reaganism and Thatcherism, but also the third way capitulation represented by Blair and Clinton, have done great harm to working class and egalitarian movements. In the United States, labor unions and the middle class have been in terminal decline for the past four decades, while corporations have become transnational behemoths whose executives make hundreds of times more than their average workers. In Washington, monied interests have seized more influence on policy than ever before, and legislation is virtually impossible without major concessions to corporate powers. And as the French economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book "Capital In The Twenty-First Century" (a title that clearly alludes to Marx’s masterwork), income and wealth inequality have returned to pre-Great Depression levels, and there is no reason to think this will change without radical solutions. The revival of left-wing politics in America and around the world is not random. Sanders has succeeded because of his economic progressivism, not in spite of it. Towards the end of the 20th century, the liberal establishment abandoned many of the egalitarian ideals that FDR laid out in his Second Bill of Rights, and the inequities of modern America are to some extent a product of this abandonment. Consequently, the resurgence of leftism is a product of these inequities. For millions of people, modern liberalism has failed. What better time to get a little radical?

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Anthony Weiner on his failed NYC mayoral bid and second sex scandal: “I was just falling apart”

Former congressman and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner says he won't be running for office again anytime soon, but boasts that his ability to win elections is still second to none. “I’m probably the best campaign politician you’ll ever interview. I mean, I’m like perfectly evolved. I’m like the Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator,” Weiner told Huffington Post's Candidate Confessional podcast, as reported by the New York Daily News. “I love it. ... I’m just really good at it and take great joy in it.” Weiner demonstrated his electioneering skill by winning seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, but his most recent campaign to become New York's mayor ended in failure. The mayoral race was intended to serve as Weiner's big comeback after an extramarital sexting scandal spurred his resignation from Congress in 2011. Weiner led in the polls early in the campaign, but the revelation of additional online affairs proved too much to overcome. Weiner said that when he decided to enter the mayoral race, he knew the details of the second scandal were lurking and would possibly emerge, leading him to feel "perpetual anxiety" during the campaign. “It’s kind of like PTSD,” head said. “I knew that behind the headline could be this hammer that could come down on me.” Eventually, the hammer did come down. Lurid messages between Weiner and a young woman named Sydney Leathers were published online. “I obviously knew it was bad,” he said. Weiner's campaign collapsed in the wake of the scandal. Weiner was captured on video arguing with a voter in a Brooklyn bakery. “Actually, that moment, I felt very good. That actually had a weird cathartic sense, like I’m just getting in some guy’s face and telling him to go fuck himself,” Weiner said of the confrontation. “I had this ‘Bulworth’ sensibility at some moments toward the end where I just felt somewhat like, let me just say whatever I want to say.” “I was just falling apart at that point. I mean, I was just falling apart,” Weiner said. He eventually finished with just 4.9 percent of the vote, and his post-election party devolved into a circus when Leathers showed up and attempted to confront Weiner. Weiner said that another comeback attempt is unlikely: “I would be a better elected official than a lot of these people are, but I think I’m practical enough to realize it is not going to happen”Former congressman and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner says he won't be running for office again anytime soon, but boasts that his ability to win elections is still second to none. “I’m probably the best campaign politician you’ll ever interview. I mean, I’m like perfectly evolved. I’m like the Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator,” Weiner told Huffington Post's Candidate Confessional podcast, as reported by the New York Daily News. “I love it. ... I’m just really good at it and take great joy in it.” Weiner demonstrated his electioneering skill by winning seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, but his most recent campaign to become New York's mayor ended in failure. The mayoral race was intended to serve as Weiner's big comeback after an extramarital sexting scandal spurred his resignation from Congress in 2011. Weiner led in the polls early in the campaign, but the revelation of additional online affairs proved too much to overcome. Weiner said that when he decided to enter the mayoral race, he knew the details of the second scandal were lurking and would possibly emerge, leading him to feel "perpetual anxiety" during the campaign. “It’s kind of like PTSD,” head said. “I knew that behind the headline could be this hammer that could come down on me.” Eventually, the hammer did come down. Lurid messages between Weiner and a young woman named Sydney Leathers were published online. “I obviously knew it was bad,” he said. Weiner's campaign collapsed in the wake of the scandal. Weiner was captured on video arguing with a voter in a Brooklyn bakery. “Actually, that moment, I felt very good. That actually had a weird cathartic sense, like I’m just getting in some guy’s face and telling him to go fuck himself,” Weiner said of the confrontation. “I had this ‘Bulworth’ sensibility at some moments toward the end where I just felt somewhat like, let me just say whatever I want to say.” “I was just falling apart at that point. I mean, I was just falling apart,” Weiner said. He eventually finished with just 4.9 percent of the vote, and his post-election party devolved into a circus when Leathers showed up and attempted to confront Weiner. Weiner said that another comeback attempt is unlikely: “I would be a better elected official than a lot of these people are, but I think I’m practical enough to realize it is not going to happen”

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