Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 823

Big Coal dealt a big blow: Montanans shut down largest mine in North America

Montana communities won a victory against one of the world’s biggest coal companies earlier this month, when Arch Coal abandoned the Otter Creek mine – the largest proposed new coal strip mine in North America. The story of how the project imploded is one of people power triumphing over a company once thought to be nearly invincible. To many observers, the Otter Creek project once seemed unstoppable. It certainly appeared that way in 2011, the year I moved to Missoula, Montana for graduate school. Then-Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer enthusiastically supported the mine, and coal more generally. Forrest Mars, Jr., the billionaire heir to the Mars candy fortune, had just joined Arch and BNSF Railways in backing a proposed railroad spur meant to service Otter Creek. Arch and politicians like Schweitzer predicted a boom in coal demand from economies in Asia. But what they weren’t counting on was a vocal and active region-wide opposition. The coming together of ordinary people — first in southeast Montana, then an ever-growing number of communities throughout the Northwest —to oppose the Otter Creek mine says much about how land defenders and climate activists are learning to fight back against the planet’s biggest energy companies. The roots of this recent victory go back more than 30 years. Origins of the Otter Creek mine Eastern Montana is known for its arid climate, but the Tongue River Valley just north of the Wyoming border supports a lush landscape of willows, pines, sagebrush and grassy pastures. The river and underground aquifers make the valley ideal for agriculture. On the east side of the river, where the Otter Creek tracts are located, a mix of state and private land supports farms and cattle ranches. To the west is the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Decades before Arch proposed the Otter Creek mine, Southeast Montana was already ground zero in a fight over the nation’s energy future. In 1971, as the United States looked for alternatives to foreign oil, the Bureau of Land Management published a study calling for massively increased coal production in northern Plains states. It proposed building 21 new coal-fired power plants in Montana and opening vast new mines to feed them. Implicit was the assumption that energy developers would run into little resistance in the sparsely populated Plains. Corporate representatives tried to persuade ranching families to sell their land for mines, then threatened them with eminent domain. However, many landowners didn’t back down. “I told that son-of-a-bitch with a briefcase that I knew he represented one of the biggest coal companies and he was backed by one of the richest industries in the world, but no matter how much money they came up with, they would always be $4.60 short of the price of my ranch,” said landowner Boyd Charter, according to Northern Plains Resource Council, an organization that formed in 1972 to oppose the mining. By the end of the decade only one major new coal plant had broken ground in Montana, and plans to turn the state into a large-scale coal sacrifice zone were in tatters. Then, in the 1980s, the coal industry proposed a new Tongue River Railroad to link northern Wyoming coal fields to existing Montana rail lines. The plan floundered for decades amid local opposition, but in 2011 the Tongue River Company was bought up by Arch Coal, BNSF Railways and Forrest Mars, Jr. Mars, who owns a private ranch in area, formerly opposed the railroad but apparently bought in with the understanding that the preferred route would be shortened to not cross his property. Instead of hauling Wyoming coal, this new version of the Tongue River Railroad would service Arch’s Otter Creek mine. The coal industry would try again to turn Montana into a coal extraction colony. Their plan was helped along the previous year, in March 2010, when the Montana State Land Board, chaired by Gov. Schweitzer, voted on whether to lease state lands at Otter Creek to Arch. Ranchers concerned about damage to aquifers, high school students worried about climate change and other concerned citizens at the meeting urged the board to vote no. Just before the vote, activists from Northern Rockies Rising Tide disrupted proceedings by chaining themselves to Land Board members’ desks. The protest drew attention to what was at stake. But Land Board members reconvened and voted 3-2 in favor of the lease. Now all Arch needed to break ground was a mining permit from the state, and a permit to build the Tongue River Railroad from the U.S. Surface Transportation Board. The battle lines were drawn. From Tongue River to the coast What happened at Otter Creek would affect communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. Coal train traffic through the area was already up, hauling coal from existing Wyoming and Montana mines to British Columbia ports. If Otter Creek and a series of proposed new coal export terminals in the United States were built, the number of these trains would skyrocket. “I noticed more and more coal trains rumbling past my home,” said Lowell Chandler, who was a senior at the University of Montana and lived next to the railroad in Missoula when I met him in 2011. “They were polluting my air with toxic diesel emissions and coal dust. Then I found out about the massive coal export proposals in my state and the Northwest region.” In places like Missoula, disproportionately lower-income neighborhoods are directly across the street from the railroad. An industrial yard used to refuel trains and connect and reconnect train cars is a major source of pollution. Residents told of sounds like bombs going off in the middle of the night as rail cars were joined together, of coal dust on their windowsills, and of choking on diesel fumes from idling locomotives. I joined Chandler and other UM students in starting a group called Blue Skies Campaign in 2011, to work in coordination with rail line neighborhood residents and push back against the coal trains. Blue Skies’ first action was a protest outside a Wells Fargo, at the time a major coal industry funder. Later we partnered with Northern Plains Resource Council and other groups on a coal trains forum that drew over 200 people. We organized to attend city council meetings, coordinated rallies, and held street theater and protests. But we knew we had to do more. In August 2012, Blue Skies coordinated the largest energy-related nonviolent civil disobedience in Montana up to that time. The Coal Export Action, a five-day sit-in at the State Capitol, was a protest against leasing of state lands to coal companies. Twenty-three people were arrested and hundreds more attended to show support. “Before putting my body on the line during a sit-in, I had never participated in nonviolent civil disobedience,” said Corey Bressler, a UM student arrested on the second day. “This swelling of people sent a powerful message to decision makers that Montanans and Americans want to shift away from fossil fuels toward a greener future.” The next few years saw rail line communities turn to direct action repeatedly. Protests on the railroad tracks delayed coal trains, with a 2015 blockade preventing a train from entering downtown Missoula for almost an hour. In April 2014, 1,500 Montanans in more than a dozen communities rallied in a day of actions for clean energy. Other rallies and smaller protests occurred with increasing regularity. “There is personal power in a collaborative response to a shared threat,” said Cate Campbell, a retired railroad brakeman from Frenchtown, Montana who was arrested multiple times. “In taking direct action I found an inner feeling of purpose and commitment.” Meanwhile, Montana had just experienced some of its worst-ever droughts and fire seasons, moving climate change to the forefront of the coal debate. In 2013 a new group, 350-Missoula (a grassroots affiliate of the climate group 350.org) made stopping the Otter Creek mine its priority. 350-Missoula – a group of retirees, teachers, nurses, educators and others – worked with Blue Skies to organize rallies and civil disobedience. They also pushed elected officials to take a side in the Otter Creek fight. In 2014, Missoula’s City Council formally asked that environmental reviews for Otter Creek and the Tongue River Railroad include public hearings in Missoula. Local state legislators supported this request. In Whitefish (along Montana’s northern rail line) groups like Glacier Climate Action persuaded their city council to take similar action. In the summer of 2015, the Surface Transportation Board opened a public comment period on the Tongue River Railroad. Activists in Missoula tabled at public events and street corners, gathering more than 4,000 written comments. Groups throughout the Northwest sent alerts to their members. Legislators and local governments, including the city of Missoula and Missoula County, submitted concerns about coal trains. Communities closest to the mine site mobilized. Public hearings in Ashland and Lame Deer, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, were attended by 100 and 300 people respectively (the total populations of Lame Deer and Ashland are about 1,000 and 800). Most attendees were Northern Cheyenne members opposed to the railroad. The coal industry had tried to win over residents with promises of jobs, but these efforts seemed to have failed miserably. Toward the end of the comment period, the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council unanimously passed a resolution opposing the Tongue River Railroad. More than 100,000 comments were submitted by groups opposed to the railroad before the comment period ended. That fall, over a hundred people representing most of Montana’s major towns gathered at the State Capitol for a “Keep It In The Ground” climate rally. Meanwhile, regional and global pressures on Arch Coal compounded local opposition to the mine, changing the equation in an approval process that had once seemed inevitable. The decline of King Coal In 2010, Arch Coal competitor Peabody announced “coal’s best days are ahead.” However, it was clear even then that a combination of grassroots organizing, new regulations for polluting power plants, and falling prices for cleaner energy was causing U.S. coal use to drop. What came as a surprise was that coal consumption in Asia, especially China, failed to make up for declining U.S. demand. Some racism was implied in the coal industry’s assumption that residents of China and India would willingly tolerate pollution levels unacceptable to North Americans. In fact, public concern about pollution created a crisis for the Chinese government. Last April, 10,000 people in China’s Guangdong Province turned out to protest a recently-built coal plant. The government has begun closing mines, reducing coal imports and ramping up renewables. China’s coal consumption declined 3 percent in 2014, and 4 percent in 2015. India’s coal use is still growing, but new power plants have run into such fierce opposition that many will likely never be built. It turned out U.S. coal companies couldn’t even maintain export levels from a couple years ago. In 2015, Cloud Peak Energy announced it would stop exporting coal through British Columbia. In this environment, a series of announcements beginning late last year showed cracks forming in Arch’s Otter Creek plans. In November, Arch announced it was asking the Surface Transportation Board to put the Tongue River Railroad permit review on hold. Companies rarely make requests like this when they are confident a review will go well for them. Statements from Arch claimed Otter Creek would still move forward, but an updated mining application Arch intended to file with the state in December never materialized. In January, Arch filed for bankruptcy. Arch was just the latest (and biggest) U.S. coal company to go bankrupt in the last few years. The move was long anticipated, but now Montanans waited in suspense. Would this be the final blow to the Otter Creek mine, or would Arch find a way to salvage the project and turn the company’s troubles around? On March 10, Arch announced it was suspending attempts to extract coal at Otter Creek. A statement released by Northern Plains Resource Council, from Otter Creek rancher Dawson Dunning, summed up the feelings of many locals: “Ranchers and irrigators in southeast Montana can sleep well knowing their water will be protected.” A turning point? “How many times have I read about projects that would increase carbon emissions, and felt helpless to stop them?” said Marta Meengs, a nurse who helped start 350-Missoula. “Otter Creek was different. People’s civil disobedience, tabling for public comments, and conversations with legislators actually showed results and helped stop what would have been one of the largest coal mines in North America.” The defeat of the Otter Creek mine is one example of a larger, encouraging trend. Climate activists and land defenders are learning to take on the world’s biggest energy companies, fight huge fossil fuel projects, and win. Every industry loss strengthens the position of activists going into the next round, just as declining coal consumption in China contributed to the Otter Creek victory. And the fossil fuel industry is losing more and more often, from Shell and Arctic oil to TransCanada and the Keystone XL Pipeline to Arch Coal and Otter Creek. The worldwide climate movement is driving down global carbon emissions in concrete, measurable ways. It’s a grassroots movement where people lead and government officials follow (when they show up at all). There’s still a long way to go before all remaining fossil fuels are left in the ground. But progress is undeniable, and we can expect more wins as the movement grows. In the words of Lee Metzgar, a retired biologist and member of 350-Missoula who participated in the Otter Creek protests, “Our political system has demonstrated its inability to find adequate solutions to the climate crisis. It is time for everyone who wants to leave future generations a livable world to be in the streets.”

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The vile core of Trump’s appeal: Here’s the research that shows how racism animates his campaign

As the idea of Donald Trump winning a major party nomination goes from ugly nightmare to increasingly real possibility, pundits are wondering why they didn’t see it coming. One reason is that many pundits, particularly on the right, have spent decades pretending that the ugly racial sentiments Trump panders to either don’t exist or are a minor aberrance on the radical fringe. Others have tried to blame economic conditions, an important factor that can’t fully explain the Trump phenomenon (there aren’t many poor Blacks rushing to vote Trump). Research suggests that racial animus is a much more powerful predictor of Trump support than “economic anxiety.” We argue that the core of the Trump phenomenon is decades of dog-whistle race-baiting made real: Trump is animating white racial fears in order to race toward the Republican nomination.

The newest American National Election Studies 2016 pilot survey provides an ideal way to explore the Trump phenomenon. It’s a 1,200 person internet survey performed by YouGov between January 22 and 28 of 2016 that includes incredibly detailed questions about race and racism. Though some are skeptical of online surveys, these concerns are overblown. Leading political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Brian Schaffner have shown that opt-in panel surveys are just as reliable as telephone surveys.

We examine the stereotyping variables which explore how many white respondents harbor and report negative stereotypes about Black people. The first question asks, “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe members of each group?” and includes Blacks, Whites, Hispanics and Muslims. The question is phrased the same way for “lazy.” To explore how Trump supporters differ, we examine three categories: Republicans, Democrats and Trump Supporters. (We don’t show independents or people who said “something else” separately; they’re mostly between Republicans and Democrats). The categories are not mutually exclusive: about half of Trump supporters are Republican, and half are independent or other (we don’t count the relatively small number of self-identified Democrats who said they would vote for Trump if they were to vote in a Republican primary, because he’s probably not their first choice)

Trump supporters are dramatically more likely to embrace racial stereotypes than the average Republican or Democrat. A full 45 percent of Trump supporters say that the word “violent” describes Blacks “extremely” or “very” well, compared with 31 percent of Republicans and 24 percent of Democrats. (Overall, 25 percent chose “extremely” or “very” well, as did 25 percent of all Whites and 19 percent of Black people, but the number of Black respondents in the survey is small.) On the other hand, 28 percent of Democrats said that violent describes Blacks “not well at all,” compared with 18 percent of Republicans and only 7 percent of Trump supporters. These results suggest that while far too many Americans of all parties hold destructive stereotypes about Black people, Trump’s supporters are far more likely to believe Black people are violent.

Yet, while many Trump supporters Black people as violent, it is these very supporters who have committed racially motivated violence. At a recent Louisville, Kentucky event, Trump supporters violently shoved a Black woman to cheers from the crowd. Last October Trump supporters spit on immigrant advocates. After a November incident when Trump’s followers attacked a Black man, Trump responded by saying, “maybe he should have been roughed up.”

Trump supporters were also far more likely to stereotype Black people as lazy. A full 38 percent of Trump supporters say “lazy” describes Black people “extremely” or “very well,” with one-fifth saying “extremely well.” (Overall, 20 percent of whites and 12 percent of Black people agreed.) Only a quarter of Republicans and less than a fifth of Democrats say that “lazy” describes Black people “extremely” or “very” well. Far too many, certainly, but far fewer than the number of Trump supporters.

The ANES survey also included a feeling thermometer test, which asks respondents to place their feelings for different groups on a scale from 0 (very cold) to 100 (very warm). The model below shows that as a positive feeling towards Blacks increases, individuals become more likely to identify as Democrat, but less likely to identify as Republican and support Trump. Note also the relationship is strongest for Trump support, which shows that  negative feeling toward Blacks is most closely associated with his supporters. The model controls for age, gender and education.

These data make it incredibly difficult to deny that racial animus is driving support, not just for Trump, but for the Republican party in general. For decades, Republicans relied on the Southern Strategy to win the White House. By using coded racial appeals like complaints about “welfare queens,” “crack babies” and school busing programs, they pulled whites disenchanted with the Democratic embrace of civil rights. The media inadvertently aided the Republican Party by inflating and racializing violent crime and welfare. Political scientist Martin Gilens finds that, “network TV news and weekly newsmagazines portray the poor as substantially more black than is really the case.” The strategy worked. Economists Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington find that racist Southern whites leaving the Democratic Party explains nearly all of the decline in Southern White support for Democrats between 1958 and 2000. Instead of calling out this racism, many centrist Democrats succumbed to it, for instance when The New Republic famously defended welfare reform by placing a Black mother with a baby on the cover. The unwillingness of most mainstream liberals to call out dog-whistle racism has let it fester. As leading scholar of race, Ian Haney-Lopez writes, “By staying silent on race, the left effectively disappeared: no one was arguing for direct responses to racial injustice.”

Many white liberals have laughed off the Trump phenomenon. One economist who chaired the Council of Economic Advisors told Politico “You want to quote me as saying ‘hahahahahahaha’?” when asked about Trump. But the Trump phenomenon isn’t quite as humorous for the people of color being violently attacked by newly empowered white supremacists. And there is increasing evidence that Trump has unleashed forces that will remain potent in American politics for decades. In a New Yorker article early during the rise of Trump, Evan Osnos describes Tony Hovater, a white nationalist who is running for city council in New Carlisle, Ohio and says that Trump’s success is what motivated him to run. Elsewhere in the article, Osnos writes,

All the men wanted to roll back anti-discrimination laws in order to restore restrictive covenants and allow them to carve out all-white enclaves. Henry, a twenty-six-year-old with cropped blond hair, said, “We all see some hope in Donald Trump, because it’s conceivable that he could benefit the country in a way that we feel would be helpful.”

White students in Des Moines, Iowa recently chanted “Trump! Trump!” after losing a game to Perry High School, which has a large Latino population. A Latino student from Perry said that it was fourth time that Trump’s name had been chanted at a basketball game. There have been reports of similar activities in Indiana. One mother took to Facebook to describe how two students in her son’s third grade class “decided to point out the ‘immigrants’ in class who would be sent ‘home’ when Trump becomes president.”

These new data show conclusively that racism is driving many whites to support Trump. It also suggests that the forces Trump released are not a joke; and the rise of white nationalism and violence against people of color confirm this. The rise of Trump isn’t just an indictment of the GOP, it’s an indictment of the unwillingness of mainstream commentators and politicians on both sides of the aisle to clearly call out racism. The problem is that now, it might be too late.

Philip Cohen is a sociologist at the University of Maryland who runs a blog called "Family Inequality." His twitter handle is @familyunequal. 

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“Death is not always the worst outcome”: We’re so good at saving babies, and so bad at respecting the limits of medicine and the rights of families

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the first major abortion case to reach the Supreme Court in almost a decade. The Supreme Court will be considering whether the requirements for facilities that provide abortions in Texas are unreasonably restrictive, but the same bill aims to ban all abortions after 20 weeks, with an exception only for fetal anomalies that are considered “incompatible with life,” a deceptively complicated designation that may not provide either legal protection or clarity to parents forced to make difficult decisions regarding a wide range of serious fetal anomalies, many of which are not discoverable until close to that 20 week cutoff. This case, along with, the new vacancy on the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and the presidential primaries, has thrust the abortion debate back into the national spotlight. Abortions performed due to fetal anomalies, and late-term abortions generally, represent a minority of abortions performed in this country. But much of the recent legislation regarding abortion around the country targets or impacts this subset of cases specifically, and these new laws threaten to do grave harm.

Another state law currently being debated in Ohio would prohibit abortion at any gestational age whenever a diagnosis of Down syndrome has been made, and the state’s governor, the presidential candidate John Kasich, has stated publicly that were the bill to reach his desk, he would not hesitate to sign it into law. An even more restrictive bill has just been passed by the Indiana state Legislature, prohibiting abortion in the case of “a diagnosis or potential diagnosis of Down Syndrome or any other disability,” a shockingly broad category that ironically does nothing to address abortions of healthy fetuses. These bills have the potential to create serious socioeconomic disparities, as women with the resources to do so will almost certainly travel across state lines to obtain abortions when that is the medical decision they have made.

In all of these cases, it is taken for granted that the idea of viability – the point in a pregnancy at which the fetus has a reasonable chance of surviving outside the uterus when supported by modern medicine – provides a useful guidepost for making ethical policy decisions. Think about a perfectly healthy fetus who is old enough that, if born at that very moment, he or she would in all likelihood thrive with the support of the appropriate neonatal intensive care. The idea of injecting potassium chloride directly into that fetus’s heart is distressing enough that it ought to give even the most staunchly pro-choice advocate pause. Then, think instead about a fetus of the same gestational age who has a severe abnormality – a heart, say, that is essentially missing one of its chambers, or a diaphragm with a hole so large all of the contents of the abdomen are up in the chest compressing the lungs. In cases like this, in which survival would require extensive intervention with uncertain outcomes and a risk-benefit profile that cannot be universally agreed upon, the concept of viability based on arbitrary gestational age cutoffs quickly starts to break down.

At the beginning of my fourth year of medical school, I had an abortion, an experience about which I have written previously in detail. At the time, we had a 2-year-old daughter, and we found out during our routine anatomy scan around 19 weeks that the baby boy I was carrying had a severe disease. His kidneys were irreversibly damaged, and as a result, his lungs could not develop properly. No one could predict whether he would die during the pregnancy, shortly after birth, or perhaps survive into childhood if he received neonatal dialysis and qualified for a kidney transplant in the future. For us, the risk of prolonged suffering, pain and grave disability – a kidney transplant at best has a lifespan of 20 years – outweighed the possibility of what we considered to be meaningful quality of life, and we chose to terminate the pregnancy. Preventing our baby’s suffering is a motivation that most can relate to even if they disagree with our ultimate choice. But the aspect of our decision that is harder to talk about – because as mothers, specifically, we are still widely expected to sacrifice everything in the interest of our children – is the fact that we also took into account what it might mean for our careers, for our growing family, and for the trajectory of our lives, if we chose to carry the pregnancy to term.

Late-term abortion and abortion for fetal anomalies are hard to talk about. For many moderates, the idea of simply limiting abortions to the first half of pregnancy, or to undoubtedly lethal conditions only – a surprisingly difficult prediction to make, as I will discuss later – seems like a reasonable and fair compromise. Don’t we have to draw the line somewhere, or else run the risk of allowing unrestrained euthanasia? Absolutist opponents of abortion often point to perinatal hospice and adoption as the morally acceptable alternatives, while unconditional proponents of abortion rights often shy away from the topic entirely, perhaps because it raises questions about a fetus’s perceived humanity and potential human rights that are conveniently avoided if one accepts the formulation that life begins only when the fetus reaches the point of viability.

The problem with all of these arguments, and with the legislation around the country that speaks in broad strokes about “viability,” “lethal” anomalies, and “protecting women and children,” is that these simple "political" concepts are surprisingly resistant to having any serious medical, ethical or practical meanings. We are now so good at “saving” babies, and yet still so bad at having frank discussions, even within the medical community, about quality of life and the limits of medicine, that what gets lost in the middle is the fundamental rights and interests of the women, families and children who are at the center of these stories.

As a pediatrician-in-training and now the mother of three healthy daughters, I think frequently about our son, and the decision we made. One of the first patients I took care of as a resident was a toddler whose prenatal diagnosis was eerily parallel to our son’s. Every morning when I walked into his room to examine him and see how his night had been, I would see his tiny body curled up in the hospital crib, his G-tube hooked up to continuous feeds. I would see his mother sleeping on the fold-out chair underneath a scratchy hospital sheet, and I would wonder what it would be like if it were my son in that crib, if it were me sleeping on the makeshift bed. I can’t pretend to know anything about that mother’s beliefs or the decisions she made while pregnant, about the dreams and plans she had for her boy’s future, or about how her life may have changed when she took on her role as his mother and protector, always by his side. What was obvious, though, was that she loved her son dearly, just as I would have loved our son had he been born. When I think about our son, I wonder what color his soft, sweet hair would have been, and I check the perpetually running calendar in my mind to see how old he would be today. I wonder if, had we continued the pregnancy, I would be here in this hospital room as a resident or as a mother; if I would have quit my medical training entirely, a path that was already challenging enough with a young daughter and a husband with a busy career.

Critics of abortion frequently leverage the accusation that abortion is tantamount to “playing God.” Many perceive a fundamental difference between withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining care, on the one hand, and abortion, an active procedure intended to cause fetal death. One needn’t spend long in an academic tertiary care hospital to understand, however, that the provision of intensive perinatal care is far from passive, and that the lengths we go to preserve life could just as fairly be considered “playing God.” The potential pain and suffering associated with life-prolonging medical interventions, and the downstream consequences for families, society and the economy – these are not automatically ethical or noble just because they are undertaken in the pursuit of life and survival. And as one of my mentors, a kind and accomplished physician who was born and trained in Europe, told me after my termination, “death is not always the worst outcome.”

Part of the trouble comes from a naïve understanding – widespread even among many medical professionals – of the murky complexities of medical prognostication and interventions. Standards of care for many fetal conditions – the majority of which are not diagnosed until the routine anatomy ultrasound that is recommended at 18 to 20 weeks gestation – are shockingly dependent on differences in institutional culture and resources, and on personal differences among doctors. For our son, if he had survived past birth, would the nephrologist who was on call in the neonatal intensive care unit have been one who believes that starting dialysis in a newborn is ethically obligatory, or one who feels that it is morally permissible to decline? For babies born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition that is uniformly fatal without surgical repair, some pediatric cardiologists believe that palliative care is not an ethical option to offer anymore; others, likely thinking of children like the 5-year-old I took care of who had been in the hospital since his third birthday, contending with heart failure, then a heart transplant, and then post-transplant cancer, feel strongly that it remains a morally acceptable and personal choice.

For some families, the phenomenal advances that have been made in neonatal intensive care and in medicine more broadly have opened up wonderful, meaningful choices. Opting for certain life-prolonging interventions may allow a family to gain more information by seeing how their child responds to a “trial” of therapy; to prevent complicated grief about “giving up without trying”; or to extend and shape the quantity and quality of time they have with their child. A recent study of families of children with trisomy 13 and 18 – conditions historically considered lethal, though such infants can sometimes survive well into childhood – concluded that many families find deep meaning and satisfaction in pursuing life-prolonging measures, which is an important challenge to the long-established paternalistic assumptions throughout the medical community that babies with trisomy 13 and 18 have lives that are uniformly not worth living.

There is a grave risk, however, of idealizing and glorifying such choices, and thereby perpetuating deeply entrenched forms of sexism and discrimination. The meaning and consequences of caring for a child with a severe, chronic medical condition may be vastly different for a young single mother with limited financial resources and secular beliefs than for a stay-at-home mother in a religious, financially comfortable, two-parent household. Continuing a pregnancy complicated by severe anomalies can have significant physical, psychological and socioeconomic effects on mothers and families. There are non-trivial concerns about the risks associated with pregnancy and delivery, the emotional impact of continuing a pregnancy with a gravely ill fetus, the psychological impact on siblings and family dynamics, and the logistical and financial details of how to access and afford the intensive medical care their child may need. Different families will prioritize these considerations differently, but the bottom line is that these perinatal decisions simply do not occur in a moral vacuum. It is certainly not possible to pick a point in time – like 20 weeks, in Texas – and conclude that reasonable and ethical choices are possible on one side of that line, but not possible on the other.

Ultimately, reasonable individuals – physicians and non-physicians alike – will continue to hold diverging views about abortion and fetal anomalies, views that are on both sides rooted in strong and earnest beliefs about compassion and justice. In a country in which the political right is railing against government involvement in healthcare, let us not accept the hypocritical stance of permitting vast and increasing government restrictions on what for many is an intimate, wrenching and personal medical decision. In the thick of the political chaos, amid the rhetoric and the vitriol, let us not fall prey to the belief that medical heroism is the only answer and that life and survival must be valued above all else. As a senior medical student facing our baby’s diagnosis, I had already gotten glimpses not just of heartwarming medical triumphs, but also of cases in which outcomes were poor, and families were left to navigate through the aftermath and the potential for strained finances, strained relationships, and hard decisions about life-prolonging treatments and quality of life, in a society and a medical system that is poorly equipped to provide the needed help and support. I had learned the resistance profile of antibiotics and the indications for starting dialysis, but I had also learned that a great deal of medicine remains as much an art as a science, and that among the statistics and quoted prognoses, no one could tell us what the right thing was for our family given the particular constellation of risks, challenges and possibilities. So, we made the gut-wrenching decision for our son to live and die knowing only the warmth and safety of my body. For us, it was the most right and just decision in a situation that was, by all measures, impossibly wrong.

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For white folks who teach in the hood: A lesson in campus colonialism

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No photos, please! Families of my dying patients shy away from taking pictures in hospice, but why?

“How could you think about taking pictures at a time like this?” A well-dressed man was admonishing his daughter not to take an iPhone picture of her grandmother. Chastened, his daughter put her iPhone away. “This isn’t a time for that,” he said. Then: “It’s not right.” The two of them were at a hospice unit where I’m a physician, visiting Gillian, one of my patients. Their conversation is one that I hear surprisingly often. As my patients near the end of life, a sense of decorum seems to descend on everyone. Visiting family members talk in whispers, jokes disappear, and cellphones selfies are banished. That loss of a photographic record is a shame. Families like Gillian’s are giving up a chance to record an event—and a person—they’ll all want to remember. In a digital age in which it’s normal to record every aspect of daily life, from a day at the beach to a particularly picturesque plate of oysters, it’s odd that the end of someone’s life should be off-limits to photography. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask Gillian if she agreed with me. She was sleeping comfortably, surrounded by a somber but friendly crowd of adult children and a smattering of nieces, nephews and grandchildren. But I bet she wouldn’t have minded a bit. On a shelf along one side of the room were dozens of pictures of her extended family. Images from weddings and parties and vacations at the Jersey Shore were carefully arranged so that no picture crowded out its neighbor. Each one was turned toward the head of the bed so that Nana could see them easily from where she lay.  One photo in the front row displayed her at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, immortalized by Rocky’s famous training run. And like Rocky, Gillian had both hands raised in a triumphant gesture. Unlike Rocky, though, Nana was wearing a pink velour tracksuit with the words “Train like a beast.  Look like a beauty” embroidered in glittery thread across the front. And Gillian was grinning maniacally as if this adventure was entirely her idea. This was apparently a family that documented events with the assiduity of photojournalists. Gillian didn’t seem to be shy about being recorded for posterity in moments that others would just as soon forget. So why the admonition to put the iPhone away now? When I pressed him, her son couldn’t explain. “It doesn’t seem right,” he said.  “It’s not proper.” In my work as a hospice physician, I often hear this admonition to put the camera or smartphone away. Or not to take it out in the first place.   It’s driven by a feeling that pictures of someone at this stage of life are …wrong, somehow. I get that. It does seem wrong. Disrespectful, even.   But it’s not, if it’s done in the right way, in the right spirit, and for the right reasons. In fact, there are three good reasons why taking a few selfies at the bedside of a dying friend or family member is one of the best things you can do for them, and for yourself. First, the pictures you take will help you remember the person you’re about to lose. Her smile. Her sense of humor. And, maybe, the way she was willing to pose for a picture despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that this would be one of the last images that you’d ever capture of her. Second, those pictures will help you remember each other. The bedside of a dying person is one of the most compelling gathering places in a family, drawing people together from thousands of miles away. Those images will help you connect with each other, leaving a record of who was there, what you wore, and how you looked when you got off the plane from Albuquerque or Miami, or Hong Kong. If you look disheveled, so what? Wear that look as a badge of honor. I can tell you that no family member visiting our hospice impressed us more than the son who took time off from training sled dogs in Alaska to be at his father’s bedside. He showed up in a stained parka, canvas pants and rough knee-high boots. I only wish that someone had snapped a photo of his appearance as he strode onto the unit with a backpack slung over one shoulder, looking like he’d mushed his way to Philadelphia from Fort Yukon. Finally, I’d like to see more of these pictures because I think they would make death a little less frightening for my patients and their families. Visitors like Gillian’s family who come to our hospice unit often tell us how comfortable and home-like it is. And how glad they are to be there, and how they wished they had come sooner. I’m not sure what they expected, but they all seem surprised by what they find. I suppose that without any information at all, it’s easy to fear the worst. So a smattering of bedside hospice pictures on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram would help to make death—and hospice—a little less scary. Of course, I know that in our last weeks of life, none of us looks our best. But when do we ever? Besides, I doubt that Gillian would have minded a photo or two popping up on Facebook. If that Rocky pose didn’t bother her, then I’m pretty sure she would have welcomed a few pictures with her family. Before I left the hospice unit that day, the cautious son stepped out to take a call. I snapped a quick picture of Gillian and her granddaughter, who perched on the bed next to her. That seemed to break the taboo, and other grandchildren and nieces and nephews crowded around her, each taking a turn. Gillian died a few days later, but I’d like to think that those pictures are still out there somewhere. Maybe they continue to offer some comfort to her friends and family who were there.  And some connection for those who weren’t. David Casarett, MD, MA, is a palliative care physician and health services researcher whose work focuses on improving systems of care for people with serious, life-threatening illnesses. He is also the author of three nonfiction books, the most recent of which was "Stoned: A Doctor's Case for Medical Marijuana," published in 2015 by Penguin Random House. His first novel, "The Ethical Chiang Mai Detective Agency," will be published in September 2016.“How could you think about taking pictures at a time like this?” A well-dressed man was admonishing his daughter not to take an iPhone picture of her grandmother. Chastened, his daughter put her iPhone away. “This isn’t a time for that,” he said. Then: “It’s not right.” The two of them were at a hospice unit where I’m a physician, visiting Gillian, one of my patients. Their conversation is one that I hear surprisingly often. As my patients near the end of life, a sense of decorum seems to descend on everyone. Visiting family members talk in whispers, jokes disappear, and cellphones selfies are banished. That loss of a photographic record is a shame. Families like Gillian’s are giving up a chance to record an event—and a person—they’ll all want to remember. In a digital age in which it’s normal to record every aspect of daily life, from a day at the beach to a particularly picturesque plate of oysters, it’s odd that the end of someone’s life should be off-limits to photography. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask Gillian if she agreed with me. She was sleeping comfortably, surrounded by a somber but friendly crowd of adult children and a smattering of nieces, nephews and grandchildren. But I bet she wouldn’t have minded a bit. On a shelf along one side of the room were dozens of pictures of her extended family. Images from weddings and parties and vacations at the Jersey Shore were carefully arranged so that no picture crowded out its neighbor. Each one was turned toward the head of the bed so that Nana could see them easily from where she lay.  One photo in the front row displayed her at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, immortalized by Rocky’s famous training run. And like Rocky, Gillian had both hands raised in a triumphant gesture. Unlike Rocky, though, Nana was wearing a pink velour tracksuit with the words “Train like a beast.  Look like a beauty” embroidered in glittery thread across the front. And Gillian was grinning maniacally as if this adventure was entirely her idea. This was apparently a family that documented events with the assiduity of photojournalists. Gillian didn’t seem to be shy about being recorded for posterity in moments that others would just as soon forget. So why the admonition to put the iPhone away now? When I pressed him, her son couldn’t explain. “It doesn’t seem right,” he said.  “It’s not proper.” In my work as a hospice physician, I often hear this admonition to put the camera or smartphone away. Or not to take it out in the first place.   It’s driven by a feeling that pictures of someone at this stage of life are …wrong, somehow. I get that. It does seem wrong. Disrespectful, even.   But it’s not, if it’s done in the right way, in the right spirit, and for the right reasons. In fact, there are three good reasons why taking a few selfies at the bedside of a dying friend or family member is one of the best things you can do for them, and for yourself. First, the pictures you take will help you remember the person you’re about to lose. Her smile. Her sense of humor. And, maybe, the way she was willing to pose for a picture despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that this would be one of the last images that you’d ever capture of her. Second, those pictures will help you remember each other. The bedside of a dying person is one of the most compelling gathering places in a family, drawing people together from thousands of miles away. Those images will help you connect with each other, leaving a record of who was there, what you wore, and how you looked when you got off the plane from Albuquerque or Miami, or Hong Kong. If you look disheveled, so what? Wear that look as a badge of honor. I can tell you that no family member visiting our hospice impressed us more than the son who took time off from training sled dogs in Alaska to be at his father’s bedside. He showed up in a stained parka, canvas pants and rough knee-high boots. I only wish that someone had snapped a photo of his appearance as he strode onto the unit with a backpack slung over one shoulder, looking like he’d mushed his way to Philadelphia from Fort Yukon. Finally, I’d like to see more of these pictures because I think they would make death a little less frightening for my patients and their families. Visitors like Gillian’s family who come to our hospice unit often tell us how comfortable and home-like it is. And how glad they are to be there, and how they wished they had come sooner. I’m not sure what they expected, but they all seem surprised by what they find. I suppose that without any information at all, it’s easy to fear the worst. So a smattering of bedside hospice pictures on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram would help to make death—and hospice—a little less scary. Of course, I know that in our last weeks of life, none of us looks our best. But when do we ever? Besides, I doubt that Gillian would have minded a photo or two popping up on Facebook. If that Rocky pose didn’t bother her, then I’m pretty sure she would have welcomed a few pictures with her family. Before I left the hospice unit that day, the cautious son stepped out to take a call. I snapped a quick picture of Gillian and her granddaughter, who perched on the bed next to her. That seemed to break the taboo, and other grandchildren and nieces and nephews crowded around her, each taking a turn. Gillian died a few days later, but I’d like to think that those pictures are still out there somewhere. Maybe they continue to offer some comfort to her friends and family who were there.  And some connection for those who weren’t. David Casarett, MD, MA, is a palliative care physician and health services researcher whose work focuses on improving systems of care for people with serious, life-threatening illnesses. He is also the author of three nonfiction books, the most recent of which was "Stoned: A Doctor's Case for Medical Marijuana," published in 2015 by Penguin Random House. His first novel, "The Ethical Chiang Mai Detective Agency," will be published in September 2016.“How could you think about taking pictures at a time like this?” A well-dressed man was admonishing his daughter not to take an iPhone picture of her grandmother. Chastened, his daughter put her iPhone away. “This isn’t a time for that,” he said. Then: “It’s not right.” The two of them were at a hospice unit where I’m a physician, visiting Gillian, one of my patients. Their conversation is one that I hear surprisingly often. As my patients near the end of life, a sense of decorum seems to descend on everyone. Visiting family members talk in whispers, jokes disappear, and cellphones selfies are banished. That loss of a photographic record is a shame. Families like Gillian’s are giving up a chance to record an event—and a person—they’ll all want to remember. In a digital age in which it’s normal to record every aspect of daily life, from a day at the beach to a particularly picturesque plate of oysters, it’s odd that the end of someone’s life should be off-limits to photography. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask Gillian if she agreed with me. She was sleeping comfortably, surrounded by a somber but friendly crowd of adult children and a smattering of nieces, nephews and grandchildren. But I bet she wouldn’t have minded a bit. On a shelf along one side of the room were dozens of pictures of her extended family. Images from weddings and parties and vacations at the Jersey Shore were carefully arranged so that no picture crowded out its neighbor. Each one was turned toward the head of the bed so that Nana could see them easily from where she lay.  One photo in the front row displayed her at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, immortalized by Rocky’s famous training run. And like Rocky, Gillian had both hands raised in a triumphant gesture. Unlike Rocky, though, Nana was wearing a pink velour tracksuit with the words “Train like a beast.  Look like a beauty” embroidered in glittery thread across the front. And Gillian was grinning maniacally as if this adventure was entirely her idea. This was apparently a family that documented events with the assiduity of photojournalists. Gillian didn’t seem to be shy about being recorded for posterity in moments that others would just as soon forget. So why the admonition to put the iPhone away now? When I pressed him, her son couldn’t explain. “It doesn’t seem right,” he said.  “It’s not proper.” In my work as a hospice physician, I often hear this admonition to put the camera or smartphone away. Or not to take it out in the first place.   It’s driven by a feeling that pictures of someone at this stage of life are …wrong, somehow. I get that. It does seem wrong. Disrespectful, even.   But it’s not, if it’s done in the right way, in the right spirit, and for the right reasons. In fact, there are three good reasons why taking a few selfies at the bedside of a dying friend or family member is one of the best things you can do for them, and for yourself. First, the pictures you take will help you remember the person you’re about to lose. Her smile. Her sense of humor. And, maybe, the way she was willing to pose for a picture despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that this would be one of the last images that you’d ever capture of her. Second, those pictures will help you remember each other. The bedside of a dying person is one of the most compelling gathering places in a family, drawing people together from thousands of miles away. Those images will help you connect with each other, leaving a record of who was there, what you wore, and how you looked when you got off the plane from Albuquerque or Miami, or Hong Kong. If you look disheveled, so what? Wear that look as a badge of honor. I can tell you that no family member visiting our hospice impressed us more than the son who took time off from training sled dogs in Alaska to be at his father’s bedside. He showed up in a stained parka, canvas pants and rough knee-high boots. I only wish that someone had snapped a photo of his appearance as he strode onto the unit with a backpack slung over one shoulder, looking like he’d mushed his way to Philadelphia from Fort Yukon. Finally, I’d like to see more of these pictures because I think they would make death a little less frightening for my patients and their families. Visitors like Gillian’s family who come to our hospice unit often tell us how comfortable and home-like it is. And how glad they are to be there, and how they wished they had come sooner. I’m not sure what they expected, but they all seem surprised by what they find. I suppose that without any information at all, it’s easy to fear the worst. So a smattering of bedside hospice pictures on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram would help to make death—and hospice—a little less scary. Of course, I know that in our last weeks of life, none of us looks our best. But when do we ever? Besides, I doubt that Gillian would have minded a photo or two popping up on Facebook. If that Rocky pose didn’t bother her, then I’m pretty sure she would have welcomed a few pictures with her family. Before I left the hospice unit that day, the cautious son stepped out to take a call. I snapped a quick picture of Gillian and her granddaughter, who perched on the bed next to her. That seemed to break the taboo, and other grandchildren and nieces and nephews crowded around her, each taking a turn. Gillian died a few days later, but I’d like to think that those pictures are still out there somewhere. Maybe they continue to offer some comfort to her friends and family who were there.  And some connection for those who weren’t. David Casarett, MD, MA, is a palliative care physician and health services researcher whose work focuses on improving systems of care for people with serious, life-threatening illnesses. He is also the author of three nonfiction books, the most recent of which was "Stoned: A Doctor's Case for Medical Marijuana," published in 2015 by Penguin Random House. His first novel, "The Ethical Chiang Mai Detective Agency," will be published in September 2016.“How could you think about taking pictures at a time like this?” A well-dressed man was admonishing his daughter not to take an iPhone picture of her grandmother. Chastened, his daughter put her iPhone away. “This isn’t a time for that,” he said. Then: “It’s not right.” The two of them were at a hospice unit where I’m a physician, visiting Gillian, one of my patients. Their conversation is one that I hear surprisingly often. As my patients near the end of life, a sense of decorum seems to descend on everyone. Visiting family members talk in whispers, jokes disappear, and cellphones selfies are banished. That loss of a photographic record is a shame. Families like Gillian’s are giving up a chance to record an event—and a person—they’ll all want to remember. In a digital age in which it’s normal to record every aspect of daily life, from a day at the beach to a particularly picturesque plate of oysters, it’s odd that the end of someone’s life should be off-limits to photography. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask Gillian if she agreed with me. She was sleeping comfortably, surrounded by a somber but friendly crowd of adult children and a smattering of nieces, nephews and grandchildren. But I bet she wouldn’t have minded a bit. On a shelf along one side of the room were dozens of pictures of her extended family. Images from weddings and parties and vacations at the Jersey Shore were carefully arranged so that no picture crowded out its neighbor. Each one was turned toward the head of the bed so that Nana could see them easily from where she lay.  One photo in the front row displayed her at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, immortalized by Rocky’s famous training run. And like Rocky, Gillian had both hands raised in a triumphant gesture. Unlike Rocky, though, Nana was wearing a pink velour tracksuit with the words “Train like a beast.  Look like a beauty” embroidered in glittery thread across the front. And Gillian was grinning maniacally as if this adventure was entirely her idea. This was apparently a family that documented events with the assiduity of photojournalists. Gillian didn’t seem to be shy about being recorded for posterity in moments that others would just as soon forget. So why the admonition to put the iPhone away now? When I pressed him, her son couldn’t explain. “It doesn’t seem right,” he said.  “It’s not proper.” In my work as a hospice physician, I often hear this admonition to put the camera or smartphone away. Or not to take it out in the first place.   It’s driven by a feeling that pictures of someone at this stage of life are …wrong, somehow. I get that. It does seem wrong. Disrespectful, even.   But it’s not, if it’s done in the right way, in the right spirit, and for the right reasons. In fact, there are three good reasons why taking a few selfies at the bedside of a dying friend or family member is one of the best things you can do for them, and for yourself. First, the pictures you take will help you remember the person you’re about to lose. Her smile. Her sense of humor. And, maybe, the way she was willing to pose for a picture despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that this would be one of the last images that you’d ever capture of her. Second, those pictures will help you remember each other. The bedside of a dying person is one of the most compelling gathering places in a family, drawing people together from thousands of miles away. Those images will help you connect with each other, leaving a record of who was there, what you wore, and how you looked when you got off the plane from Albuquerque or Miami, or Hong Kong. If you look disheveled, so what? Wear that look as a badge of honor. I can tell you that no family member visiting our hospice impressed us more than the son who took time off from training sled dogs in Alaska to be at his father’s bedside. He showed up in a stained parka, canvas pants and rough knee-high boots. I only wish that someone had snapped a photo of his appearance as he strode onto the unit with a backpack slung over one shoulder, looking like he’d mushed his way to Philadelphia from Fort Yukon. Finally, I’d like to see more of these pictures because I think they would make death a little less frightening for my patients and their families. Visitors like Gillian’s family who come to our hospice unit often tell us how comfortable and home-like it is. And how glad they are to be there, and how they wished they had come sooner. I’m not sure what they expected, but they all seem surprised by what they find. I suppose that without any information at all, it’s easy to fear the worst. So a smattering of bedside hospice pictures on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram would help to make death—and hospice—a little less scary. Of course, I know that in our last weeks of life, none of us looks our best. But when do we ever? Besides, I doubt that Gillian would have minded a photo or two popping up on Facebook. If that Rocky pose didn’t bother her, then I’m pretty sure she would have welcomed a few pictures with her family. Before I left the hospice unit that day, the cautious son stepped out to take a call. I snapped a quick picture of Gillian and her granddaughter, who perched on the bed next to her. That seemed to break the taboo, and other grandchildren and nieces and nephews crowded around her, each taking a turn. Gillian died a few days later, but I’d like to think that those pictures are still out there somewhere. Maybe they continue to offer some comfort to her friends and family who were there.  And some connection for those who weren’t. David Casarett, MD, MA, is a palliative care physician and health services researcher whose work focuses on improving systems of care for people with serious, life-threatening illnesses. He is also the author of three nonfiction books, the most recent of which was "Stoned: A Doctor's Case for Medical Marijuana," published in 2015 by Penguin Random House. His first novel, "The Ethical Chiang Mai Detective Agency," will be published in September 2016.

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Can Bernie catch Hillary? Momentum is on his side if the math isn’t

Bernie Sanders’ momentum appears to be growing as he heads into West Coast contests Saturday, including the largest state to hold a Democratic Party caucus—Washington. Sanders is drawing huge crowds, speaking to 7,000 people on Thursday in Washington in the SunDome arena on the Yakama Nation’s treaty territory. “Native Americans have been lied to. They’ve been cheated,” he said. “If elected president, there will be a new relationship with the Native American community.” Sanders was also slightly ahead of Hillary Clinton in a new national poll from Bloomberg Politics, which found he was the first choice of 49 percent of people who already voted or planned to participate in this year’s Democratic nominating contests. He also held larger leads than Clinton against all remaining GOP contenders in hypothetical fall match-ups. But the more concrete signs of Sanders’ steady monentum come from developments this week, where Sanders won more delegates than Clinton in Tuesday’s contests in Arizona, Utah and Idaho. An analysis by MSNBC found that “he ended up taking away a tidy 57 percent of the pledged delegates up for grabs that day. And as it happens, 58 percent is the percentage of outstanding pledged delegates Sanders needs to win from now on in order to finish the primary calendar with more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton.” Sanders has won seven out of the nine caucuses held so far in 2016—he tied in Iowa—and by larger margins than in states holding primaries. That edge, exemplified by his getting 80 percent of the vote in Utah and Idaho this week—has helped him win more delegates than Clinton, cutting into her lead after sweeping southern states. These ongoing competitive results show why Sanders is forging ahead and maintaining that he can still get the nomination, not just make a symbolic showing where he becomes the Democratic Party’s moral compass. Saturday’s caucus in Washington, 2016’s largest with 101 delegates, has great potential to show he can keep cutting into Clinton’s lead. Alaska and Hawaii also are holding caucuses this weekend, bringing the total number of pledged delegates in play to 142. In all of these states, Sanders has key endorsements that go beyond his already large base among young voters. On Thursday, Sanders won the endorsement of the Longshoreman’s Union, which has 50,000 members in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. “Bernie is best on the issues that matter most to American workers: better trade agreements, support for unions, fair wages, tuition for students at public colleges, Medicare for all, fighting a corrupt campaign finance system and confronting the power of Wall Street that’s making life harder for most Americans,” said ILWU International President Robert McEllrath. Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has also made a powerful new 90-second ad, entitled “The Cost of War,” that should resonate aming, especially veterans. “Being a warrior is about believing what you are fighting for and holding strong to those convictions,” she says. “I felt a sense of duty. I could not in good conscience stay back here in beautiful Hawaii and watch my brothers and sisters in uniform go off into combat. These are people and friends who we never forget.” “Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq war,” Gabbard continues. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend out country and take the trillionsa of dollars on these interventionist, regime-change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home. The American people are not looking to settle for inches. They’re looking for real change.” Sanders also is looking past this weekend’s Pacific state contests. On Saturday, he heads to Madison, Wisconsin, where he has booked a 10,000-seat arena for a rally in advance of the state’s April 5 primary. As the Washington Post noted Friday, Sanders is expecting large crowds while Clinton campaign sent Chelsea Clinton to talk to 100 volunteers at their Madison headquarters, which they called “hostile territory” for Clinton backers. Bernie Sanders’ momentum appears to be growing as he heads into West Coast contests Saturday, including the largest state to hold a Democratic Party caucus—Washington. Sanders is drawing huge crowds, speaking to 7,000 people on Thursday in Washington in the SunDome arena on the Yakama Nation’s treaty territory. “Native Americans have been lied to. They’ve been cheated,” he said. “If elected president, there will be a new relationship with the Native American community.” Sanders was also slightly ahead of Hillary Clinton in a new national poll from Bloomberg Politics, which found he was the first choice of 49 percent of people who already voted or planned to participate in this year’s Democratic nominating contests. He also held larger leads than Clinton against all remaining GOP contenders in hypothetical fall match-ups. But the more concrete signs of Sanders’ steady monentum come from developments this week, where Sanders won more delegates than Clinton in Tuesday’s contests in Arizona, Utah and Idaho. An analysis by MSNBC found that “he ended up taking away a tidy 57 percent of the pledged delegates up for grabs that day. And as it happens, 58 percent is the percentage of outstanding pledged delegates Sanders needs to win from now on in order to finish the primary calendar with more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton.” Sanders has won seven out of the nine caucuses held so far in 2016—he tied in Iowa—and by larger margins than in states holding primaries. That edge, exemplified by his getting 80 percent of the vote in Utah and Idaho this week—has helped him win more delegates than Clinton, cutting into her lead after sweeping southern states. These ongoing competitive results show why Sanders is forging ahead and maintaining that he can still get the nomination, not just make a symbolic showing where he becomes the Democratic Party’s moral compass. Saturday’s caucus in Washington, 2016’s largest with 101 delegates, has great potential to show he can keep cutting into Clinton’s lead. Alaska and Hawaii also are holding caucuses this weekend, bringing the total number of pledged delegates in play to 142. In all of these states, Sanders has key endorsements that go beyond his already large base among young voters. On Thursday, Sanders won the endorsement of the Longshoreman’s Union, which has 50,000 members in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. “Bernie is best on the issues that matter most to American workers: better trade agreements, support for unions, fair wages, tuition for students at public colleges, Medicare for all, fighting a corrupt campaign finance system and confronting the power of Wall Street that’s making life harder for most Americans,” said ILWU International President Robert McEllrath. Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has also made a powerful new 90-second ad, entitled “The Cost of War,” that should resonate aming, especially veterans. “Being a warrior is about believing what you are fighting for and holding strong to those convictions,” she says. “I felt a sense of duty. I could not in good conscience stay back here in beautiful Hawaii and watch my brothers and sisters in uniform go off into combat. These are people and friends who we never forget.” “Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq war,” Gabbard continues. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend out country and take the trillionsa of dollars on these interventionist, regime-change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home. The American people are not looking to settle for inches. They’re looking for real change.” Sanders also is looking past this weekend’s Pacific state contests. On Saturday, he heads to Madison, Wisconsin, where he has booked a 10,000-seat arena for a rally in advance of the state’s April 5 primary. As the Washington Post noted Friday, Sanders is expecting large crowds while Clinton campaign sent Chelsea Clinton to talk to 100 volunteers at their Madison headquarters, which they called “hostile territory” for Clinton backers. Bernie Sanders’ momentum appears to be growing as he heads into West Coast contests Saturday, including the largest state to hold a Democratic Party caucus—Washington. Sanders is drawing huge crowds, speaking to 7,000 people on Thursday in Washington in the SunDome arena on the Yakama Nation’s treaty territory. “Native Americans have been lied to. They’ve been cheated,” he said. “If elected president, there will be a new relationship with the Native American community.” Sanders was also slightly ahead of Hillary Clinton in a new national poll from Bloomberg Politics, which found he was the first choice of 49 percent of people who already voted or planned to participate in this year’s Democratic nominating contests. He also held larger leads than Clinton against all remaining GOP contenders in hypothetical fall match-ups. But the more concrete signs of Sanders’ steady monentum come from developments this week, where Sanders won more delegates than Clinton in Tuesday’s contests in Arizona, Utah and Idaho. An analysis by MSNBC found that “he ended up taking away a tidy 57 percent of the pledged delegates up for grabs that day. And as it happens, 58 percent is the percentage of outstanding pledged delegates Sanders needs to win from now on in order to finish the primary calendar with more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton.” Sanders has won seven out of the nine caucuses held so far in 2016—he tied in Iowa—and by larger margins than in states holding primaries. That edge, exemplified by his getting 80 percent of the vote in Utah and Idaho this week—has helped him win more delegates than Clinton, cutting into her lead after sweeping southern states. These ongoing competitive results show why Sanders is forging ahead and maintaining that he can still get the nomination, not just make a symbolic showing where he becomes the Democratic Party’s moral compass. Saturday’s caucus in Washington, 2016’s largest with 101 delegates, has great potential to show he can keep cutting into Clinton’s lead. Alaska and Hawaii also are holding caucuses this weekend, bringing the total number of pledged delegates in play to 142. In all of these states, Sanders has key endorsements that go beyond his already large base among young voters. On Thursday, Sanders won the endorsement of the Longshoreman’s Union, which has 50,000 members in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. “Bernie is best on the issues that matter most to American workers: better trade agreements, support for unions, fair wages, tuition for students at public colleges, Medicare for all, fighting a corrupt campaign finance system and confronting the power of Wall Street that’s making life harder for most Americans,” said ILWU International President Robert McEllrath. Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has also made a powerful new 90-second ad, entitled “The Cost of War,” that should resonate aming, especially veterans. “Being a warrior is about believing what you are fighting for and holding strong to those convictions,” she says. “I felt a sense of duty. I could not in good conscience stay back here in beautiful Hawaii and watch my brothers and sisters in uniform go off into combat. These are people and friends who we never forget.” “Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq war,” Gabbard continues. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend out country and take the trillionsa of dollars on these interventionist, regime-change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home. The American people are not looking to settle for inches. They’re looking for real change.” Sanders also is looking past this weekend’s Pacific state contests. On Saturday, he heads to Madison, Wisconsin, where he has booked a 10,000-seat arena for a rally in advance of the state’s April 5 primary. As the Washington Post noted Friday, Sanders is expecting large crowds while Clinton campaign sent Chelsea Clinton to talk to 100 volunteers at their Madison headquarters, which they called “hostile territory” for Clinton backers.

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Ethan Hawke on coping with failure, success and insecurity: “Sometimes I feel that my whole life has been a war with my nervous system”

Back in the ’90s, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater developed a movie about Chet Baker in his 20s. It never materialized. Two decades later, Hawke has fulfilled his destiny and picked up the trumpet in “Born to Be Blue.” This time around, he’s working with director Robert Budreau to paint an impressionistic picture of the legendary jazz trumpeter’s 40s, imagining Baker as he tries to clean up his act. We sat down with Hawke at South by Southwest in Austin to discuss the role of drugs in creativity, the idea of disappearing into a character, and honoring the essence of Baker’s music.  Talking about Chet Baker, you said something along the lines of, “The drugs don’t help. They just help you deal with the anxiety.” Yeah, there’s no talent inside the drugs. The talent is inside you. You know, sometimes people love to apply a lot of judgment to it, and I’ve lost several friends to drugs and alcohol. So I certainly don’t look at it with a tremendous amount of sympathy, but you also have to understand that a lot of people are in a lot of pain. How they manage their pain and their confusion and their depression and their loneliness and their insecurities — those things are painkillers. When you’re hurting, it’s very human to want to stop hurting. Part and parcel of that is, when you’re an artist, you’re sort of front and center with all of those things people use television or movies to ignore. When you’re an artist, you maybe can’t hide from it, because it’s your work. It’s your entire life. Your whole being goes into what you do. I think for a guy like... I don’t even know Chet Baker. I don’t want to talk about him specifically as a man. The two great actor-artists of my generation that influenced me are River Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who both died of heroin overdoses. It’s just kind of brutal. You see there was a ferocity of honesty in both of those guys. They just despised lying. The world is full of a lot of little lies you have to tell to get through the day. For a certain amount of people who are extremely sensitive, it’s really hard. If you don’t have the proper tools inside yourself to navigate those waters, they can be pretty treacherous waters. And you add into the mix the immense success and failure, because the higher you go, the higher you fall. We all know that everybody’s equal in our hearts, so there’s a certain sense of fraudulence you have when you’re being celebrated too much. I think there’s some kind of base note that... we don’t know why we’re born, we don’t know where we come from, we don’t know what kind of magic is running the world. So to take responsibility for it like you’re somebody fabulous or God’s working through you — you know there’s a lie manifest in there. That creates an immense amount of insecurity, the more success you get. Then failure is even more dangerous. I know that’s something present for everyone in the arts. How does that play out for you personally? With much difficulty. Sometimes I feel that my whole life has been a war with my nervous system. The person you want to be with the person you actually are is sometimes so disappointing that it creates... you find yourself tripping on yourself. I find that when I was younger, I had a lot more hubris. To put it nicely, I just loved acting and I loved the arts! I just wanted to be a part of it, and I couldn’t imagine any downside. So I just did it. I remember making my Broadway debut. I remember walking out onstage and thinking, “Wow, I’m making my Broadway debut! Not nervous at all. This is awesome!” Just had that kind of attitude.   As you get older and you start to care more, you realize how rare the opportunities to contribute are, how much you value the arts, and how much responsibility comes with any success. There’s this voice inside you. Publishing something, you go to the bookstore and see all the great novels nobody’s read. The records ... you go on iTunes and go, “What?!? Why would I bother making a movie; there are so many great movies nobody’s ever seen!” That voice can become kind of crippling to me. “Who are you? What are you pretending to do?” But you have to fight through it. Each generation has to keep talking to each other. That’s how I solve it with myself. If anybody acting is worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile for any of us to try. If none of us try, none of it will ever happen. It’s up to the culture to decide what’s really of value, and God knows that changes. We’re rewriting the past all the time. Chet Baker is an interesting example. He loved to sing and wanted to do it, but he was wildly made fun of for doing it at the time. Now those records are still selling. The people making fun of him, that’s gone. I’m really glad that he believed in himself to do it. That’s one of the interesting things about especially music. Because of what happened to him, his music was at times incredibly personal. Sometimes when you’re really personal, people don’t always understand it. Especially initially. Especially if you’re really sincere. People are thrown by it. If you’re ironic or glib or cool, people can kind of understand it. If you come out and go, “Hey, this is my heart here. Hold it in your hands”... people are like, “Uhhhh, I don’t want to hold your heart.” But it’s powerful and it’s moving. Over time, they can start to handle it. One thing that I’ve always respected about your career is that, while you’ve done a lot of different kinds of movies, you’ve never gotten away from telling personal stories. Those are my favorite. I’ve kind of understood my own limitations as an actor. One of the ways I can push myself to be better is to work inside lots of different genres. The nice thing about my brain is that I actually love all the genres. It was exciting to me to be in a good horror movie. I was really proud of “Sinister.” It’s hard to make a good scary movie. There’s a time and a place for a lot of different kinds of movies. There’s a time that it’s really right to tell a great scary story. Then there’s a time to tell a deeply romantic, artful, soul-expressing movie like “Before Sunrise.” There’s a time for a good cop picture. So I’ve been challenging myself throughout my career to keep hunting and searching for different genres to play inside. I also like directors. Each director has different strong suits. I see myself as a little bit like a first mate on a ship, when you’re acting. The captain is gonna sail this thing. We’re gonna get across the ocean, but you need a good first mate as kind of the tip of the spear. That’s what the leading actor is. I know every actor feels a little bit differently about how you interact with everyone else on the crew. Sometimes it can be more like, “It’s my job to be me, and it’s his job to corral me.” So it’s interesting to hear you talk... but I guess that makes sense when you have relationships with directors like Richard Linklater. You know, I’m sure a lot of good work’s been done the way you said. “I’m gonna be a wild animal!” I bet you a lot of good work’s been done. For me, there’s a great Brando quote. He said, “You have to spiritually marry your director.” You have to be so in touch with their imagination that you can help it manifest. If you resist it, the whole thing can break down. I just like to think that I try to spiritually marry the dude or the woman I’m working with. Man, that means you’re a theatrical polygamist. [Laughing] Yeah, sometimes I have three wives in a year. I like that. I guess that’s what is really intriguing, that you’re not just talking about one type of director either. You’re talking about trying to get in the head of… Like when you work with the Spierig brothers, who did this movie I did called “Predestination” — that’s very different than the Richard Linklater brain or the Antoine Fuqua brain. The Spierig brothers are intense; deeply saturated inside the history of cinema. But they love sci-fi, and they love good sci-fi. We spent weeks in a room just like this one, spinning through various timelines and equations, because we all agreed that we’d never seen a time-travel movie that actually made sense. Could we try to do it? Could we try to all troubleshoot each other? “No, that doesn’t make sense! That couldn’t happen. That wouldn’t be.” It was a movie where our dream was that the third time you watched it would be better than the first time you watched it. Time-travel movies need to be able to work— And they very rarely do, because the creative team assumes the audience will give the benefit of the doubt. Most people can’t make sense of it in the first place. But it sounds like you guys weren’t… I’m just saying, that’s the fun of acting. If you’re doing "Macbeth" on Broadway, the fun is to just get inside that world completely; dive into that language completely and see what that language does to you. It’s almost like an incantation. Each one of these movies is a prayer of sorts, and you’re the manifestation of the words. So you either cast a spell or you don’t, and a good movie casts a spell. I wanted, with the Chet Baker movie... if you lay down right now, you closed your eyes, and listened to three Chet Baker records in a row, you’d be in a mood. You’d be in some weird emotional place. A great musician does that to you. Well, the movie should do that. Whatever the movie does, it shouldn’t violate that. It has to conjure that mood. So what was the first time you experienced something like that while working on a movie or a play? There’s a scene in “Dead Poets Society” where Robin Williams writes on the chalkboard “I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.” It was this scene where I was supposed to make up a poem, and the director wanted to do it in one take. So we really got to play it out. It was the early days of the Steadicam. It was this new toy. And that was the first time I felt what acting was about and what was interesting about it. You think it’s gonna be about the celebration of personality or making you feel fabulous or important. But in fact, it’s like disappearing. It’s like being absolutely translucent. That’s what it feels like. I see it in other actors. When somebody’s doing it really well, they just disappear. I’ve come to know that a great stage performance or a good take in a movie is when you can’t remember how it went. Whenever you think, “I did great,” that means you were self-conscious and full of yourself. Whenever you think you’re terrible, you probably were. But when you can’t remember how it went... Back in the ’90s, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater developed a movie about Chet Baker in his 20s. It never materialized. Two decades later, Hawke has fulfilled his destiny and picked up the trumpet in “Born to Be Blue.” This time around, he’s working with director Robert Budreau to paint an impressionistic picture of the legendary jazz trumpeter’s 40s, imagining Baker as he tries to clean up his act. We sat down with Hawke at South by Southwest in Austin to discuss the role of drugs in creativity, the idea of disappearing into a character, and honoring the essence of Baker’s music.  Talking about Chet Baker, you said something along the lines of, “The drugs don’t help. They just help you deal with the anxiety.” Yeah, there’s no talent inside the drugs. The talent is inside you. You know, sometimes people love to apply a lot of judgment to it, and I’ve lost several friends to drugs and alcohol. So I certainly don’t look at it with a tremendous amount of sympathy, but you also have to understand that a lot of people are in a lot of pain. How they manage their pain and their confusion and their depression and their loneliness and their insecurities — those things are painkillers. When you’re hurting, it’s very human to want to stop hurting. Part and parcel of that is, when you’re an artist, you’re sort of front and center with all of those things people use television or movies to ignore. When you’re an artist, you maybe can’t hide from it, because it’s your work. It’s your entire life. Your whole being goes into what you do. I think for a guy like... I don’t even know Chet Baker. I don’t want to talk about him specifically as a man. The two great actor-artists of my generation that influenced me are River Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who both died of heroin overdoses. It’s just kind of brutal. You see there was a ferocity of honesty in both of those guys. They just despised lying. The world is full of a lot of little lies you have to tell to get through the day. For a certain amount of people who are extremely sensitive, it’s really hard. If you don’t have the proper tools inside yourself to navigate those waters, they can be pretty treacherous waters. And you add into the mix the immense success and failure, because the higher you go, the higher you fall. We all know that everybody’s equal in our hearts, so there’s a certain sense of fraudulence you have when you’re being celebrated too much. I think there’s some kind of base note that... we don’t know why we’re born, we don’t know where we come from, we don’t know what kind of magic is running the world. So to take responsibility for it like you’re somebody fabulous or God’s working through you — you know there’s a lie manifest in there. That creates an immense amount of insecurity, the more success you get. Then failure is even more dangerous. I know that’s something present for everyone in the arts. How does that play out for you personally? With much difficulty. Sometimes I feel that my whole life has been a war with my nervous system. The person you want to be with the person you actually are is sometimes so disappointing that it creates... you find yourself tripping on yourself. I find that when I was younger, I had a lot more hubris. To put it nicely, I just loved acting and I loved the arts! I just wanted to be a part of it, and I couldn’t imagine any downside. So I just did it. I remember making my Broadway debut. I remember walking out onstage and thinking, “Wow, I’m making my Broadway debut! Not nervous at all. This is awesome!” Just had that kind of attitude.   As you get older and you start to care more, you realize how rare the opportunities to contribute are, how much you value the arts, and how much responsibility comes with any success. There’s this voice inside you. Publishing something, you go to the bookstore and see all the great novels nobody’s read. The records ... you go on iTunes and go, “What?!? Why would I bother making a movie; there are so many great movies nobody’s ever seen!” That voice can become kind of crippling to me. “Who are you? What are you pretending to do?” But you have to fight through it. Each generation has to keep talking to each other. That’s how I solve it with myself. If anybody acting is worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile for any of us to try. If none of us try, none of it will ever happen. It’s up to the culture to decide what’s really of value, and God knows that changes. We’re rewriting the past all the time. Chet Baker is an interesting example. He loved to sing and wanted to do it, but he was wildly made fun of for doing it at the time. Now those records are still selling. The people making fun of him, that’s gone. I’m really glad that he believed in himself to do it. That’s one of the interesting things about especially music. Because of what happened to him, his music was at times incredibly personal. Sometimes when you’re really personal, people don’t always understand it. Especially initially. Especially if you’re really sincere. People are thrown by it. If you’re ironic or glib or cool, people can kind of understand it. If you come out and go, “Hey, this is my heart here. Hold it in your hands”... people are like, “Uhhhh, I don’t want to hold your heart.” But it’s powerful and it’s moving. Over time, they can start to handle it. One thing that I’ve always respected about your career is that, while you’ve done a lot of different kinds of movies, you’ve never gotten away from telling personal stories. Those are my favorite. I’ve kind of understood my own limitations as an actor. One of the ways I can push myself to be better is to work inside lots of different genres. The nice thing about my brain is that I actually love all the genres. It was exciting to me to be in a good horror movie. I was really proud of “Sinister.” It’s hard to make a good scary movie. There’s a time and a place for a lot of different kinds of movies. There’s a time that it’s really right to tell a great scary story. Then there’s a time to tell a deeply romantic, artful, soul-expressing movie like “Before Sunrise.” There’s a time for a good cop picture. So I’ve been challenging myself throughout my career to keep hunting and searching for different genres to play inside. I also like directors. Each director has different strong suits. I see myself as a little bit like a first mate on a ship, when you’re acting. The captain is gonna sail this thing. We’re gonna get across the ocean, but you need a good first mate as kind of the tip of the spear. That’s what the leading actor is. I know every actor feels a little bit differently about how you interact with everyone else on the crew. Sometimes it can be more like, “It’s my job to be me, and it’s his job to corral me.” So it’s interesting to hear you talk... but I guess that makes sense when you have relationships with directors like Richard Linklater. You know, I’m sure a lot of good work’s been done the way you said. “I’m gonna be a wild animal!” I bet you a lot of good work’s been done. For me, there’s a great Brando quote. He said, “You have to spiritually marry your director.” You have to be so in touch with their imagination that you can help it manifest. If you resist it, the whole thing can break down. I just like to think that I try to spiritually marry the dude or the woman I’m working with. Man, that means you’re a theatrical polygamist. [Laughing] Yeah, sometimes I have three wives in a year. I like that. I guess that’s what is really intriguing, that you’re not just talking about one type of director either. You’re talking about trying to get in the head of… Like when you work with the Spierig brothers, who did this movie I did called “Predestination” — that’s very different than the Richard Linklater brain or the Antoine Fuqua brain. The Spierig brothers are intense; deeply saturated inside the history of cinema. But they love sci-fi, and they love good sci-fi. We spent weeks in a room just like this one, spinning through various timelines and equations, because we all agreed that we’d never seen a time-travel movie that actually made sense. Could we try to do it? Could we try to all troubleshoot each other? “No, that doesn’t make sense! That couldn’t happen. That wouldn’t be.” It was a movie where our dream was that the third time you watched it would be better than the first time you watched it. Time-travel movies need to be able to work— And they very rarely do, because the creative team assumes the audience will give the benefit of the doubt. Most people can’t make sense of it in the first place. But it sounds like you guys weren’t… I’m just saying, that’s the fun of acting. If you’re doing "Macbeth" on Broadway, the fun is to just get inside that world completely; dive into that language completely and see what that language does to you. It’s almost like an incantation. Each one of these movies is a prayer of sorts, and you’re the manifestation of the words. So you either cast a spell or you don’t, and a good movie casts a spell. I wanted, with the Chet Baker movie... if you lay down right now, you closed your eyes, and listened to three Chet Baker records in a row, you’d be in a mood. You’d be in some weird emotional place. A great musician does that to you. Well, the movie should do that. Whatever the movie does, it shouldn’t violate that. It has to conjure that mood. So what was the first time you experienced something like that while working on a movie or a play? There’s a scene in “Dead Poets Society” where Robin Williams writes on the chalkboard “I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.” It was this scene where I was supposed to make up a poem, and the director wanted to do it in one take. So we really got to play it out. It was the early days of the Steadicam. It was this new toy. And that was the first time I felt what acting was about and what was interesting about it. You think it’s gonna be about the celebration of personality or making you feel fabulous or important. But in fact, it’s like disappearing. It’s like being absolutely translucent. That’s what it feels like. I see it in other actors. When somebody’s doing it really well, they just disappear. I’ve come to know that a great stage performance or a good take in a movie is when you can’t remember how it went. Whenever you think, “I did great,” that means you were self-conscious and full of yourself. Whenever you think you’re terrible, you probably were. But when you can’t remember how it went... Back in the ’90s, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater developed a movie about Chet Baker in his 20s. It never materialized. Two decades later, Hawke has fulfilled his destiny and picked up the trumpet in “Born to Be Blue.” This time around, he’s working with director Robert Budreau to paint an impressionistic picture of the legendary jazz trumpeter’s 40s, imagining Baker as he tries to clean up his act. We sat down with Hawke at South by Southwest in Austin to discuss the role of drugs in creativity, the idea of disappearing into a character, and honoring the essence of Baker’s music.  Talking about Chet Baker, you said something along the lines of, “The drugs don’t help. They just help you deal with the anxiety.” Yeah, there’s no talent inside the drugs. The talent is inside you. You know, sometimes people love to apply a lot of judgment to it, and I’ve lost several friends to drugs and alcohol. So I certainly don’t look at it with a tremendous amount of sympathy, but you also have to understand that a lot of people are in a lot of pain. How they manage their pain and their confusion and their depression and their loneliness and their insecurities — those things are painkillers. When you’re hurting, it’s very human to want to stop hurting. Part and parcel of that is, when you’re an artist, you’re sort of front and center with all of those things people use television or movies to ignore. When you’re an artist, you maybe can’t hide from it, because it’s your work. It’s your entire life. Your whole being goes into what you do. I think for a guy like... I don’t even know Chet Baker. I don’t want to talk about him specifically as a man. The two great actor-artists of my generation that influenced me are River Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who both died of heroin overdoses. It’s just kind of brutal. You see there was a ferocity of honesty in both of those guys. They just despised lying. The world is full of a lot of little lies you have to tell to get through the day. For a certain amount of people who are extremely sensitive, it’s really hard. If you don’t have the proper tools inside yourself to navigate those waters, they can be pretty treacherous waters. And you add into the mix the immense success and failure, because the higher you go, the higher you fall. We all know that everybody’s equal in our hearts, so there’s a certain sense of fraudulence you have when you’re being celebrated too much. I think there’s some kind of base note that... we don’t know why we’re born, we don’t know where we come from, we don’t know what kind of magic is running the world. So to take responsibility for it like you’re somebody fabulous or God’s working through you — you know there’s a lie manifest in there. That creates an immense amount of insecurity, the more success you get. Then failure is even more dangerous. I know that’s something present for everyone in the arts. How does that play out for you personally? With much difficulty. Sometimes I feel that my whole life has been a war with my nervous system. The person you want to be with the person you actually are is sometimes so disappointing that it creates... you find yourself tripping on yourself. I find that when I was younger, I had a lot more hubris. To put it nicely, I just loved acting and I loved the arts! I just wanted to be a part of it, and I couldn’t imagine any downside. So I just did it. I remember making my Broadway debut. I remember walking out onstage and thinking, “Wow, I’m making my Broadway debut! Not nervous at all. This is awesome!” Just had that kind of attitude.   As you get older and you start to care more, you realize how rare the opportunities to contribute are, how much you value the arts, and how much responsibility comes with any success. There’s this voice inside you. Publishing something, you go to the bookstore and see all the great novels nobody’s read. The records ... you go on iTunes and go, “What?!? Why would I bother making a movie; there are so many great movies nobody’s ever seen!” That voice can become kind of crippling to me. “Who are you? What are you pretending to do?” But you have to fight through it. Each generation has to keep talking to each other. That’s how I solve it with myself. If anybody acting is worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile for any of us to try. If none of us try, none of it will ever happen. It’s up to the culture to decide what’s really of value, and God knows that changes. We’re rewriting the past all the time. Chet Baker is an interesting example. He loved to sing and wanted to do it, but he was wildly made fun of for doing it at the time. Now those records are still selling. The people making fun of him, that’s gone. I’m really glad that he believed in himself to do it. That’s one of the interesting things about especially music. Because of what happened to him, his music was at times incredibly personal. Sometimes when you’re really personal, people don’t always understand it. Especially initially. Especially if you’re really sincere. People are thrown by it. If you’re ironic or glib or cool, people can kind of understand it. If you come out and go, “Hey, this is my heart here. Hold it in your hands”... people are like, “Uhhhh, I don’t want to hold your heart.” But it’s powerful and it’s moving. Over time, they can start to handle it. One thing that I’ve always respected about your career is that, while you’ve done a lot of different kinds of movies, you’ve never gotten away from telling personal stories. Those are my favorite. I’ve kind of understood my own limitations as an actor. One of the ways I can push myself to be better is to work inside lots of different genres. The nice thing about my brain is that I actually love all the genres. It was exciting to me to be in a good horror movie. I was really proud of “Sinister.” It’s hard to make a good scary movie. There’s a time and a place for a lot of different kinds of movies. There’s a time that it’s really right to tell a great scary story. Then there’s a time to tell a deeply romantic, artful, soul-expressing movie like “Before Sunrise.” There’s a time for a good cop picture. So I’ve been challenging myself throughout my career to keep hunting and searching for different genres to play inside. I also like directors. Each director has different strong suits. I see myself as a little bit like a first mate on a ship, when you’re acting. The captain is gonna sail this thing. We’re gonna get across the ocean, but you need a good first mate as kind of the tip of the spear. That’s what the leading actor is. I know every actor feels a little bit differently about how you interact with everyone else on the crew. Sometimes it can be more like, “It’s my job to be me, and it’s his job to corral me.” So it’s interesting to hear you talk... but I guess that makes sense when you have relationships with directors like Richard Linklater. You know, I’m sure a lot of good work’s been done the way you said. “I’m gonna be a wild animal!” I bet you a lot of good work’s been done. For me, there’s a great Brando quote. He said, “You have to spiritually marry your director.” You have to be so in touch with their imagination that you can help it manifest. If you resist it, the whole thing can break down. I just like to think that I try to spiritually marry the dude or the woman I’m working with. Man, that means you’re a theatrical polygamist. [Laughing] Yeah, sometimes I have three wives in a year. I like that. I guess that’s what is really intriguing, that you’re not just talking about one type of director either. You’re talking about trying to get in the head of… Like when you work with the Spierig brothers, who did this movie I did called “Predestination” — that’s very different than the Richard Linklater brain or the Antoine Fuqua brain. The Spierig brothers are intense; deeply saturated inside the history of cinema. But they love sci-fi, and they love good sci-fi. We spent weeks in a room just like this one, spinning through various timelines and equations, because we all agreed that we’d never seen a time-travel movie that actually made sense. Could we try to do it? Could we try to all troubleshoot each other? “No, that doesn’t make sense! That couldn’t happen. That wouldn’t be.” It was a movie where our dream was that the third time you watched it would be better than the first time you watched it. Time-travel movies need to be able to work— And they very rarely do, because the creative team assumes the audience will give the benefit of the doubt. Most people can’t make sense of it in the first place. But it sounds like you guys weren’t… I’m just saying, that’s the fun of acting. If you’re doing "Macbeth" on Broadway, the fun is to just get inside that world completely; dive into that language completely and see what that language does to you. It’s almost like an incantation. Each one of these movies is a prayer of sorts, and you’re the manifestation of the words. So you either cast a spell or you don’t, and a good movie casts a spell. I wanted, with the Chet Baker movie... if you lay down right now, you closed your eyes, and listened to three Chet Baker records in a row, you’d be in a mood. You’d be in some weird emotional place. A great musician does that to you. Well, the movie should do that. Whatever the movie does, it shouldn’t violate that. It has to conjure that mood. So what was the first time you experienced something like that while working on a movie or a play? There’s a scene in “Dead Poets Society” where Robin Williams writes on the chalkboard “I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.” It was this scene where I was supposed to make up a poem, and the director wanted to do it in one take. So we really got to play it out. It was the early days of the Steadicam. It was this new toy. And that was the first time I felt what acting was about and what was interesting about it. You think it’s gonna be about the celebration of personality or making you feel fabulous or important. But in fact, it’s like disappearing. It’s like being absolutely translucent. That’s what it feels like. I see it in other actors. When somebody’s doing it really well, they just disappear. I’ve come to know that a great stage performance or a good take in a movie is when you can’t remember how it went. Whenever you think, “I did great,” that means you were self-conscious and full of yourself. Whenever you think you’re terrible, you probably were. But when you can’t remember how it went... Back in the ’90s, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater developed a movie about Chet Baker in his 20s. It never materialized. Two decades later, Hawke has fulfilled his destiny and picked up the trumpet in “Born to Be Blue.” This time around, he’s working with director Robert Budreau to paint an impressionistic picture of the legendary jazz trumpeter’s 40s, imagining Baker as he tries to clean up his act. We sat down with Hawke at South by Southwest in Austin to discuss the role of drugs in creativity, the idea of disappearing into a character, and honoring the essence of Baker’s music.  Talking about Chet Baker, you said something along the lines of, “The drugs don’t help. They just help you deal with the anxiety.” Yeah, there’s no talent inside the drugs. The talent is inside you. You know, sometimes people love to apply a lot of judgment to it, and I’ve lost several friends to drugs and alcohol. So I certainly don’t look at it with a tremendous amount of sympathy, but you also have to understand that a lot of people are in a lot of pain. How they manage their pain and their confusion and their depression and their loneliness and their insecurities — those things are painkillers. When you’re hurting, it’s very human to want to stop hurting. Part and parcel of that is, when you’re an artist, you’re sort of front and center with all of those things people use television or movies to ignore. When you’re an artist, you maybe can’t hide from it, because it’s your work. It’s your entire life. Your whole being goes into what you do. I think for a guy like... I don’t even know Chet Baker. I don’t want to talk about him specifically as a man. The two great actor-artists of my generation that influenced me are River Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who both died of heroin overdoses. It’s just kind of brutal. You see there was a ferocity of honesty in both of those guys. They just despised lying. The world is full of a lot of little lies you have to tell to get through the day. For a certain amount of people who are extremely sensitive, it’s really hard. If you don’t have the proper tools inside yourself to navigate those waters, they can be pretty treacherous waters. And you add into the mix the immense success and failure, because the higher you go, the higher you fall. We all know that everybody’s equal in our hearts, so there’s a certain sense of fraudulence you have when you’re being celebrated too much. I think there’s some kind of base note that... we don’t know why we’re born, we don’t know where we come from, we don’t know what kind of magic is running the world. So to take responsibility for it like you’re somebody fabulous or God’s working through you — you know there’s a lie manifest in there. That creates an immense amount of insecurity, the more success you get. Then failure is even more dangerous. I know that’s something present for everyone in the arts. How does that play out for you personally? With much difficulty. Sometimes I feel that my whole life has been a war with my nervous system. The person you want to be with the person you actually are is sometimes so disappointing that it creates... you find yourself tripping on yourself. I find that when I was younger, I had a lot more hubris. To put it nicely, I just loved acting and I loved the arts! I just wanted to be a part of it, and I couldn’t imagine any downside. So I just did it. I remember making my Broadway debut. I remember walking out onstage and thinking, “Wow, I’m making my Broadway debut! Not nervous at all. This is awesome!” Just had that kind of attitude.   As you get older and you start to care more, you realize how rare the opportunities to contribute are, how much you value the arts, and how much responsibility comes with any success. There’s this voice inside you. Publishing something, you go to the bookstore and see all the great novels nobody’s read. The records ... you go on iTunes and go, “What?!? Why would I bother making a movie; there are so many great movies nobody’s ever seen!” That voice can become kind of crippling to me. “Who are you? What are you pretending to do?” But you have to fight through it. Each generation has to keep talking to each other. That’s how I solve it with myself. If anybody acting is worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile for any of us to try. If none of us try, none of it will ever happen. It’s up to the culture to decide what’s really of value, and God knows that changes. We’re rewriting the past all the time. Chet Baker is an interesting example. He loved to sing and wanted to do it, but he was wildly made fun of for doing it at the time. Now those records are still selling. The people making fun of him, that’s gone. I’m really glad that he believed in himself to do it. That’s one of the interesting things about especially music. Because of what happened to him, his music was at times incredibly personal. Sometimes when you’re really personal, people don’t always understand it. Especially initially. Especially if you’re really sincere. People are thrown by it. If you’re ironic or glib or cool, people can kind of understand it. If you come out and go, “Hey, this is my heart here. Hold it in your hands”... people are like, “Uhhhh, I don’t want to hold your heart.” But it’s powerful and it’s moving. Over time, they can start to handle it. One thing that I’ve always respected about your career is that, while you’ve done a lot of different kinds of movies, you’ve never gotten away from telling personal stories. Those are my favorite. I’ve kind of understood my own limitations as an actor. One of the ways I can push myself to be better is to work inside lots of different genres. The nice thing about my brain is that I actually love all the genres. It was exciting to me to be in a good horror movie. I was really proud of “Sinister.” It’s hard to make a good scary movie. There’s a time and a place for a lot of different kinds of movies. There’s a time that it’s really right to tell a great scary story. Then there’s a time to tell a deeply romantic, artful, soul-expressing movie like “Before Sunrise.” There’s a time for a good cop picture. So I’ve been challenging myself throughout my career to keep hunting and searching for different genres to play inside. I also like directors. Each director has different strong suits. I see myself as a little bit like a first mate on a ship, when you’re acting. The captain is gonna sail this thing. We’re gonna get across the ocean, but you need a good first mate as kind of the tip of the spear. That’s what the leading actor is. I know every actor feels a little bit differently about how you interact with everyone else on the crew. Sometimes it can be more like, “It’s my job to be me, and it’s his job to corral me.” So it’s interesting to hear you talk... but I guess that makes sense when you have relationships with directors like Richard Linklater. You know, I’m sure a lot of good work’s been done the way you said. “I’m gonna be a wild animal!” I bet you a lot of good work’s been done. For me, there’s a great Brando quote. He said, “You have to spiritually marry your director.” You have to be so in touch with their imagination that you can help it manifest. If you resist it, the whole thing can break down. I just like to think that I try to spiritually marry the dude or the woman I’m working with. Man, that means you’re a theatrical polygamist. [Laughing] Yeah, sometimes I have three wives in a year. I like that. I guess that’s what is really intriguing, that you’re not just talking about one type of director either. You’re talking about trying to get in the head of… Like when you work with the Spierig brothers, who did this movie I did called “Predestination” — that’s very different than the Richard Linklater brain or the Antoine Fuqua brain. The Spierig brothers are intense; deeply saturated inside the history of cinema. But they love sci-fi, and they love good sci-fi. We spent weeks in a room just like this one, spinning through various timelines and equations, because we all agreed that we’d never seen a time-travel movie that actually made sense. Could we try to do it? Could we try to all troubleshoot each other? “No, that doesn’t make sense! That couldn’t happen. That wouldn’t be.” It was a movie where our dream was that the third time you watched it would be better than the first time you watched it. Time-travel movies need to be able to work— And they very rarely do, because the creative team assumes the audience will give the benefit of the doubt. Most people can’t make sense of it in the first place. But it sounds like you guys weren’t… I’m just saying, that’s the fun of acting. If you’re doing "Macbeth" on Broadway, the fun is to just get inside that world completely; dive into that language completely and see what that language does to you. It’s almost like an incantation. Each one of these movies is a prayer of sorts, and you’re the manifestation of the words. So you either cast a spell or you don’t, and a good movie casts a spell. I wanted, with the Chet Baker movie... if you lay down right now, you closed your eyes, and listened to three Chet Baker records in a row, you’d be in a mood. You’d be in some weird emotional place. A great musician does that to you. Well, the movie should do that. Whatever the movie does, it shouldn’t violate that. It has to conjure that mood. So what was the first time you experienced something like that while working on a movie or a play? There’s a scene in “Dead Poets Society” where Robin Williams writes on the chalkboard “I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.” It was this scene where I was supposed to make up a poem, and the director wanted to do it in one take. So we really got to play it out. It was the early days of the Steadicam. It was this new toy. And that was the first time I felt what acting was about and what was interesting about it. You think it’s gonna be about the celebration of personality or making you feel fabulous or important. But in fact, it’s like disappearing. It’s like being absolutely translucent. That’s what it feels like. I see it in other actors. When somebody’s doing it really well, they just disappear. I’ve come to know that a great stage performance or a good take in a movie is when you can’t remember how it went. Whenever you think, “I did great,” that means you were self-conscious and full of yourself. Whenever you think you’re terrible, you probably were. But when you can’t remember how it went...

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“David Lynch should be shot”: Looking back on the madness and chaos of “Blue Velvet” and Ronald Reagan’s ’80s

David Lynch’s films have rarely fared well at test screenings, and Blue Velvet triggered some of the worst early reactions of his career. One response card read: “David Lynch should be shot.” (Producer) Dino De Laurentiis was unfazed, but the negative feedback lowered expectations considerably, which may have worked to Lynch’s advantage. When Blue Velvet opened on September 19, 1986, in fifteen American cities, some of the most influential critics were effusive in their praise. J. Hoberman proclaimed it “a film of ecstatic creepiness” and lauded its “boldly alien perspective” in the Village Voice. In the Chicago Tribune, Dave Kehr raved: “There isn’t anything else quite like it, and it’s pretty wonderful.” The detractors were no less vociferous. Roger Ebert’s one-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times bemoaned its “sophomoric satire and cheap shots.” In the New York Post, Rex Reed pronounced it “one of the sickest films ever made.” Pro or con, the reviews tended to make things personal, as befits a film that was unmistakably “charged with its maker’s psychosexual energy,” in Hoberman’s words. Ebert accused Lynch of being even more sadistic than the psychopathic Frank Booth in submitting Rossellini to all manner of on-screen humiliations. In her New York Times rave, Janet Maslin wrote that the film confirmed Lynch’s “stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.” Blue Velvet became an instant cult film, a lightning rod for think pieces, and as more people saw it, the reactions grew ever more polarized. The conservative journal National Review branded the movie pornographic, “a piece of mindless junk.” The Christian Century named it the magazine’s film of the year, praising its serious treatment of sin and evil and even invoking Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Lines formed around the block in New York City and Los Angeles; there were reports of mass walkouts and refund demands. A Newsweek article, headlined “Black and Blue Is Beautiful?”, described the clamorous scene at theaters. A man fainted at a Chicago screening; after having his pacemaker checked, he went back to catch the ending. Outside a Los Angeles cinema, two strangers got into a heated disagreement, which they decided to resolve by going back in for a second viewing. For Hopper, Blue Velvet was the crowning achievement of his latest comeback from Hollywood exile. While Frank Booth is remembered as one of his defining roles, he earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for playing the town drunk in that same year’s much tamer sports movie Hoosiers. Rossellini had by far the riskier part, as the reactions made clear. Her agents at ICM dropped her upon seeing the film; the nuns at her old school in Rome called to say they were praying for her. (After the media storm subsided, Lynch and Rossellini confirmed that they were a couple. He separated from Mary Fisk in 1987.) “It’s a strange world,” the people of Lumberton keep telling one another, and the lasting impression is that it never gets less strange. So too with Blue Velvet. The critical enthusiasm at the time of its release — many reviewers put it on their year-end lists — propelled Lynch to a second, even less probable Academy Award nomination for directing. He lost to Oliver Stone for Platoon, which also won Best Picture. Yet Blue Velvet has weathered the passage of time better than any other Oscar nominee that year, possibly better than any Hollywood movie of its decade. The shock of the new fades by definition, but if it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet, that may be because its tone remains forever elusive. To peruse the early reviews is to sense the emergence of the slipperiest of sensibilities, one that no one quite knew how to talk about. To encounter or revisit the film now, decades later, is to realize that we still don’t. The stiff acting and stilted dialogue inch Blue Velvet just past the realm of realism into a space without signposts that gets more disorienting the longer you stay in it. MacLachlan modeled some aspects of his straight-faced, bright-eyed character on his director — Jeffrey wears his shirts buttoned to the top — and he also sounds an awful lot like him, especially when he gets excited. (“There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience.” “I’m in the middle of a mystery.”) The difficulties of interpreting Blue Velvet are best illustrated in the night scene in the car opposite the church, when Jeffrey poses his pained rhetorical questions about the existence of evil and Sandy responds with her dewy, evangelical vision of the robins bringing love and light. Are they serious? Is Lynch? Some journalists asked him if the characters’ exaggerated sincerity was meant to be funny. “You can’t help but squirt out a laugh,” he told the Village Voice. “These days to be cool, you don’t say stuff like that out loud. It’s almost more embarrassing in a certain way than Frank stuffing blue velvet up Dorothy.” Ebert’s review faulted the film precisely for combining both kinds of embarrassment: encouraging laughter one minute, subjecting characters and viewers to obscene brutalities the next. The incursion of humor was taken as proof of an ironic stance, which in turn signaled subversive intent or a cynical detachment from the material. But things are never so clear-cut in the Lynchian universe, where sincerity and irony can coexist without canceling each other out. If anything his natural instinct is to combine them, nest one within the other, twist these familiar categories together until new registers of feeling materialize. In 1993, three years before he published Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay on the deadening effects of television on literary fiction and the tyranny of “institutionalized irony,” a language and a lens that had become our default mode of communication. Lynch, without exactly intending to, was already resisting this mode with Blue Velvet. This is a particularly tricky film not for an audience that doesn’t recognize irony, but for one that can see only through irony. Blue Velvet is a critical theorist’s dream, a dark comedy of category confusion. “Hello, baby,” Dorothy greets Frank, who snaps, “It’s Daddy, you shithead.” Within minutes, he’s calling her “Mommy” and moaning “Baby wants to fuck.” What is left to decipher when everything has been declared? An emblem of the postmodern moment, the film was also several steps ahead. It seemed to demand a new way of understanding narrative art, one that had little to do with traditional identification or protective irony or the sifting of symbols and metaphors for deeper meanings. What usually lurks on the level of subtext is here elevated to the status of text. When Jeffrey says he’s “seeing something that was always hidden,” he’s also voicing the modus operandi of a film that is rife with signs yet impervious to decoding. Blue Velvet leaves the unnerving impression that it has done for us the work of analysis without so much as scratching the bright, shiny surface. * Lynch would engineer more decisive temporal ruptures in his later films, but Blue Velvet represents his most haunting manipulation of time in cinema, a palimpsest through which multiple eras and genres are visible. On the most obvious level, cars and interior decor, wardrobes and hairstyles all seem to have drifted in from different decades. Jeffrey’s skinny tie and pierced ear, which goes unremarked, are very much of the 1980s, but Sandy and her classmates favor the long skirts of a more conservative time. Beyond such period markers, the movie also activates a host of archetypes from old Hollywood genres, slightly warped in their transposition to the present. Jeffrey on occasion resembles a film noir patsy, just as Dorothy evokes a femme fatale; Sandy, meanwhile, could have wandered out of a Sandra Dee vehicle. The stars came with their own cultural baggage. The method actor who veered closest to madness, Hopper was a one-man history of the counterculture, born to be wild, as Easy Rider’s signature anthem puts it. Frank seethes with the cumulative rage and mania of all the hell-raisers who preceded him, from the juvenile delinquent in Rebel Without a Cause to the ranting lunatic in Apocalypse Now. Rossellini’s resemblance to her mother is impossible to miss from certain angles, even more so when she speaks in that husky alto. The sense that she is acting out scenarios that were expressly forbidden, maybe never even dreamed of, in the Hollywood heyday of Ingrid Bergman, who played her share of masochists in films like Gaslight and Notorious, lends the sex scenes a ghostly Oedipal charge. Free-floating signifiers abound, redolent of national myths and traumas. Dorothy is apparently named after the heroine of The Wizard of Oz, a parallel-universe urtext and a touchstone for Lynch; Hopper, as Lynch pointed out to some interviewers, was from Kansas. Dorothy lives in the bad part of town on Lincoln Street (an ominous close-up lingers on the street sign), and Frank Booth seems to be named for the sixteenth president’s assassin. But for all the mismatched period details in Blue Velvet, the film has a special relationship with the American midcentury, with what Lynch has called “euphoric 1950s chrome optimism.” “From the ’20s up to 1958, or maybe 1963, are my favorite years,” Lynch has said, adding, “The ’70s, to me, were about the worst! There can be things in the ’80s that I love — high-tech things, New Wave things which echo the ’50s.” It wasn’t just Lynch: The 1950s obsession was a 1980s phenomenon. Blue Velvet came a year after Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, the highest-grossing film of 1985, which sent teen idol Michael J. Fox, a clean-scrubbed Kyle MacLachlan type minus the dark side, via time machine three decades into the past. Having assimilated the postmodern tendency toward pastiche and the pop art trope of repurposing the relics of mass culture, the zeitgeist was especially prone to backward glances, sometimes quizzical but mostly fond and even longing. Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) and George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), both set in prelapsarian times, anticipated the nostalgia cycle. By the 1980s, most major American directors had made their contributions. High school reunions serve as jumping-off points for Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), bracketed by Fredric Jameson with Blue Velvet as a quintessential “nostalgia film,” and Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), in which a middle-aged woman winds up trapped inside her seventeen-year-old self. Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction fables Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) fused two strains of Cold War nostalgia, combining alien fantasies with Norman Rockwell imagery. The postwar years marked a watershed in the development of the American self-image. With the rise of mass media and consumer culture, the country’s ideas of itself were being shaped and disseminated on an unprecedented scale. From the vantage point of the 1980s, the 1950s was both a cultural lodestone and a memory bank with plenty of recyclable imagery. This wave of boomer nostalgia crested under the auspices of a movie-star president who promised a return to the values of an earlier era and himself personified that era’s popular entertainment. It has become critical custom to consider Blue Velvet as a Reaganite text. Reagan, a hologram-like president who sometimes confused Hollywood and actual history, also had his Lynchian aspects. Reviewing the 1942 drama Kings Row, in which Reagan had his breakthrough role, Pauline Kael could just as well have been describing Blue Velvet: “The typical nostalgic view of American small-town life turned inside out: instead of sweetness and health we get fear, sanctimoniousness, sadism, and insanity.” In one of the ghastlier twists in Kings Row, a garish tale of secrets and lies in the titular town, Reagan’s character loses his legs to a vindictive surgeon. The macabre one-liner he delivers upon waking, postamputation, provides the Lynchian title of the future president’s 1965 autobiography: Where’s the Rest of Me? The year Blue Velvet was released, Jean Baudrillard published America, a postmodern update of de Tocqueville’s sociological travelogue. “America is neither dream nor reality,” Baudrillard wrote. “It is a hyperreality . . . a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved.” He also called it “the only country which gives you the opportunity to be so brutally naive.” At first blush the Reagan presidency and Blue Velvet, opening with a sequence that is the very definition of aesthetic hyperrealism, may seem to tell similar stories about America. There was a strong ideological bent to Reagan-era nostalgia, which is premised on pretending the 1960s never happened. Some have concluded that the politics of Blue Velvet are similarly reactionary. But the film doesn’t indulge in nostalgia so much as induce the inexplicable chill of déjà vu. The return to the past goes hand in glove with the return of the repressed. Lynch has used the phrase “neighborhood story” to describe several of his films, including Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and even the planned sequels he wrote for Dune, which would have taken place in more hermetic worlds. Reagan often invoked the sentimental concept of neighborliness. He reminisced about growing up in small-town Illinois, where “every day you saw a neighbor helping neighbor.” In the picture-book America of his imagination, wholesome values like patriotism were in the air: “If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood.” In his famous “Evil Empire” speech, Reagan quoted the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” In Blue Velvet Dorothy introduces Jeffrey to Frank as “a friend . . . from the neighborhood.” For the rest of the film, Frank calls him “neighbor,” a word that becomes more absurd and menacing with each utterance. A long joyride scene culminates with Frank smearing Jeffrey’s face with lipstick and warning him to stay away from Dorothy, in the process giving a terrifying new spin to what it might mean to love one’s neighbor: “Don’t be a good neighbor to her. I’ll send you a love letter. Straight from my heart, fucker . . . You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever.” The neighborhood in Blue Velvet is a variable environment, a relative space. Jeffrey finds the ear in a wasteland “behind the neighborhood.” When Sandy tells Jeffrey where Dorothy lives, she says, “That’s what’s scary, it’s so close.” The point of this neighborhood story is that whatever Jeffrey fears is “so close” it may already lie within him. Like Blue Velvet, Reagan insisted that “there is sin and evil in the world,” at a time when the growing secularization of the American mainstream had paved the way for the rise of a politically powerful religious right. As the critic Nicholas Rombes notes in his close reading of Blue Velvet, Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech — could this have been the one that struck a chord with Lynch? — even shares some of the movie’s concerns. “We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil,” Reagan said, “or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin.” Jeffrey uses plainer language: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?” Lynch, who tends to depict moral forces in absolute terms, is often thought to hold a worldview as Manichean as Reagan’s. This fits the standard description of Blue Velvet as a kind of exposé, a film that peels away the facade of normality to reveal a rotting underbelly, just as the camera moves past the grass to discover the bugs beneath. But this greatly oversimplifies the moral scheme of a film that, like so many of Lynch’s, thrives on oppositions — or, to be more precise, on the ever-shifting gaps between things and their opposites, which can widen and narrow and even disappear without warning. “I’m not crazy. I know the difference between right and wrong,” Dorothy tells Jeffrey, sounding positively crazed. * Lynch has said that “contrast is what makes things work.” The stark binaries in his films — good and evil, darkness and light, innocence and experience, reality and fantasy — are not exactly pitted against each other, but combined and recombined for their potential for disorientation, as reflections that heighten the overall hall-of-mirrors effect. Blue Velvet could have taken an even darker turn. In one filmed scene that never made the final cut, Dorothy, clad in her blue velvet bathrobe, leads Jeffrey to her rooftop. She removes her red shoe — an obvious reference to the film version of The Wizard of Oz — and throws it off the building. She threatens to follow, leaning over the ledge for a few heart-stopping moments, before Jeffrey pulls her back from the brink. Dorothy’s suicidal impulses are more muted in the finished film: We hear Frank ordering her to “stay alive,” and she screams, “I’m falling,” as she’s driven off in an ambulance. Blue Velvet ends with order restored — Frank dead, Dorothy reunited with her son, Jeffrey and Sandy together — in an epilogue that has the suspiciously heightened feel of the prologue. The filmmaker Douglas Sirk, whom the painter David Salle once termed “the first hyper-real artist,” perfected the “unhappy happy ending” in his Technicolor weepies of the 1950s. Sirk staged his studio-mandated finales for maximum dissonance, often by calling attention to their flagrant artifice. Almost every review that mentions the manifestly fake robin that shows up at the end of Blue Velvet has described it as mechanical — incorrectly, as it turns out. The story of the robin is so bizarre it could have fit right into the movie. Lynch wanted a real bird, but as Elmes remembers it, the animal wrangler came up short: “The robin they brought us was molting, a ratty-looking bird. It didn’t even look like a robin.” Word got back to the production that a school bus full of kids in Wilmington had struck and killed a robin and that the driver had decided to have it stuffed for the school’s science department. (Could this be the source of the non sequitur scene of wailing kids in a school bus in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me?) The robin was not in fact mechanized but freshly taxidermied, dropped off at the set on its way back to school. Lynch glued the bug to its mouth and animated the bird by attaching wires that he was pulling off-screen. Explaining the creepiness of dolls and waxworks, Freud described the uncanny as that which disturbs the boundary between the living and the dead. ( Just a few scenes earlier, in a gruesome tableau in Dorothy’s apartment, Detective Gordon, the man in the yellow suit, was standing upright, suspended between life and death, with a hole in his head but one last shocking spasm left in him.) Elmes recalled that from behind the camera, he told Lynch that the bird he was attempting to puppeteer looked too mechanical: “And he’d say, ‘Yeah, it’ll be great. You’re going to love this!’ Clearly that was his vision for the robin.” Excerpted from “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place” by Dennis Lim. ©2015 by Dennis Lim. Published by Amazon Publishing/New Harvest November 2015. All Rights Reserved.

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Trumped again: The diabolical GOP frontrunner slimes Cruz, shames Fox & controls the news cycle

When is a news story not a news story? That question hung in the air much of the day on Friday, as the major cable news networks laboriously steered around any direct reference to the political bombshell that had set social media aflame since the small hours. Once again the mainstream media had been Trumped, made to look floundering and foolish by the Republican clown-prince even as it wrestled with one of the biggest news days of the year. Belgian authorities had apparently captured a leading suspect in the Brussels attacks, and the United States military had apparently killed an ISIS leader in Syria. But for at least half the day, those headlines felt like footnotes to the hot topic TV news wouldn’t even touch. With no apparent sense of irony, Fox News sought to recast itself as a sober, responsible news organization, whose guests and commentators are deeply concerned about the toxic nature of American political discourse. During the 11 a.m. hour of Fox’s “Happening Now,” an entire group of panelists earnestly embraced Hillary Clinton’s recent complaint that moderate, centrist, reasonable voices had been excluded from public debate and political media, and that this was harming democracy. The old saw about putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t begin to capture it. Friday’s display of cable-news hypocrisy and paralysis, as the talking heads danced along the edges of the unmentionable story everyone in the real world was talking about, was more bizarre and more far-reaching than that. It was like Vlad the Impaler taking a break from roasting infants on skewers to lament the decline of table manners. It was as if all the pathology and bad karma of American politics in 2016 had been compressed into a few unhappy hours of avoidance and denial and enforced foolishness. Republican leaders and their media enablers have devoted many years’ worth of cynicism and manipulation and fear-mongering into seeding the ground for Donald Trump. Now he’s here, and those people act shocked every single day to wake up and discover that Trump is pulling their strings instead of the other way around. Of course the sober, responsible can’t-we-get-along shtick didn’t last long on Fox. An hour or so later, during the female-centric midday program “Outnumbered,” which is a nightmarish parody of “The View” featuring a phalanx of women in high heels and short skirts surrounding Tucker Carlson, the tone shifted back to the Fox default setting of “Hillary Clinton: Destroyer of Worlds.” Casting about for potential girl-talk topics that would somehow avoid the obvious, the panel conceded that Trump might have a problem with female voters. This, Carlson observed, was patently unfair. After all, who had actually abused and mistreated more women: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? His companions nodded and furrowed their brows: Intriguing question, Tucker! A few minutes before that, Carlson had waggishly noted that the central question of the Republican contest had now become “whose wife is hotter.” Oh, he got scolded for that: You dog, you! Then the strain of not mentioning the name of a certain tabloid publication, or gossiping about who might be depicted in its tantalizingly blurry photographs, drove the “Outnumbered” couch-cluster into bitterness and madness. One of Carlson’s fembot co-hosts, possibly Andrea Tantaros — it wasn’t Meghan McCain or the token liberal or the one with the Southern accent — acridly suggested that “feminists” were eager to judge Melania Trump for taking her clothes off, “but when Lena Dunham does it, they think it’s great.” McCain lamented that bad sexual mojo in the Republican race was interfering with important issues, such as the fact that Hillary Clinton’s husband was a “sexual predator.” When Republicans try to distract their base with Lena Dunham, they’re desperate; when they drag out Monica Lewinsky, they’re lost and lonely and afraid. Worst of all, the “Outnumbered” panel concluded, the Trump-Cruz catfight and its ugly but unmentionable new twist had ruined the prospect of a Republican “unity ticket.” (For which the rest of us should send both candidates fruit baskets.) But Friday’s disorder was not limited to Fox News. On their mid-morning news shows, both CNN and MSNBC hosted cagey, half-hearted segments about whether the name-calling, spouse-mocking playground feud between Trump and Ted Cruz had gone too far — but without explaining exactly how far it had gone. Gratefully seizing on breaking news from Brussels and the Middle East, both networks kept those segments brief and cryptic. We heard (several more times) about the nude photo of Melania Trump tweeted by a pro-Cruz PAC, and about Trump threatening to “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz. We repeatedly got to see Cruz’s unconvincing tough-guy act, where he wore a bomber jacket and stared down the TV cameras and called Trump a “sniveling coward,” looking somewhat like a sixth-grader trying to deliver Marlon Brando’s lines from “The Wild One.” By the standards of the 2016 news cycle, that was all moldy cheese from the back of the fridge, used as a coy placeholder for something else. All these purported adult news professionals had to pretend, for reasons they couldn’t quite define, that they had just rolled out of bed and hadn’t noticed the day’s biggest political plot twist. What I’m talking about, of course, are the latest revelations about Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, which will surely land her in prison one of these days! (That was actually floated as one of Friday’s big stories, however briefly, during the fevered last few minutes of “Outnumbered.” Carlson played buzzkill, ruefully admitting that he didn’t think Attorney General Loretta Lynch would indict Clinton.) OK, no I’m not. As virtually everyone in the viewing audience for Friday’s news shows already knew, the National Enquirer had published an overnight cover story claiming that Ted Cruz has had at least five extramarital relationships, accompanied by fuzzy but easily decoded photos of his alleged lovers. (Several of the women in those pictures appear to be prominent Republican operatives who have worked for Cruz and other candidates, including Trump.) By mid-morning on Friday, Cruz and Trump supporters on Twitter were engaged in open warfare, while left-leaning observers offered Schadenfreude-tinged commentary and media types debated the credibility of the Enquirer and told us they’d heard all this before. As indeed they had: I don’t know whether the allegations about Cruz’s private life are true and I don’t care, but the rumors are nothing new. There is plausible social-media evidence to suggest that Marco Rubio supporters tried to plant similar stories weeks ago, in hopes of rescuing Rubio’s dying campaign. That didn’t happen, and it probably wouldn’t have worked. One measure of Trump’s Mephistophelean ability to manipulate the news cycle is that the Enquirer story didn’t hit until now, when Rubio is toast and Trump is the only candidate who stands to benefit from the destruction of Cruz’s image as squeaky-clean Christian family man. But Trump’s dark powers go far beyond dirty tricks and shrewd timing, and no one has yet discovered an effective counterspell. Hillary Clinton’s strategists can talk all they want to about their terrific poll numbers and Trump’s huge negatives among women and voters of color and all the rest of it. But Jeb Bush and Rubio and Cruz and those other people all thought the laws of political physics were on their side too. When you do battle with the Necromancer, those laws are suspended and strange things happen. As he has repeatedly proven during the Republican campaign, Trump can attack his opponents at their weakest point and in the most shameless manner, and can drag them down to his level without damaging himself. He is invulnerable to facts and reason, and thrives on sleaze and insults. If Trump possesses no other visible talents and knows almost nothing about the world, he is a Jedi master of humiliation. Yet as the most avowedly amoral presidential candidate in American history — or at least since Andrew Jackson, who might be his role model if Trump had ever heard of him — he cannot be humiliated. It doesn’t matter whether the National Enquirer article is a total fabrication. It doesn’t matter whether the Trump campaign planted it directly, fed it through Rubio’s people or (implausible as this sounds) had nothing to do with it at all. It was another turn of the screw in a story Trump has controlled since the beginning. His obligatory denial felt like it came with a broad wink and an elbow to the ribs: Wow, they’re sayin’ Lyin’ Ted is a big old horndog now! Hadn’t heard about that! Not as big as me LOL. As various people plaintively observed later in the cable-news day, after Cruz had turned the Enquirer story into a quasi-legitimate topic, Donald Trump is the last person who should lecture anyone on moral fiber or marital fidelity. That doesn’t matter either, because the secret of Trumpian alchemy is to elevate himself by demeaning and debasing others. We keep being told that Trump’s evident viciousness and venality, and his lack of anything resembling a coherent ideology or a policy agenda, will eventually bite him in the ass. We’re still waiting, while the asses of others continue to get bitten. It’s now become routine to say that those things are his strengths, because the people who vote for him are angry and ignorant, but it goes deeper than that. I called him a clown in the opening paragraph, and I think it’s a powerful metaphor. Trump seems only intermittently aware that he himself is ridiculous, which is one of the reasons he’s so dangerous. But he is keenly aware of his ability to make others look ridiculous, which is precisely the social role of the clown. What mattered, in the Trumpian calculus, was not the content of the Enquirer article but the fact that it left Ted Cruz, the pompous, Princeton-educated firebrand who presents himself as the most virtuous conservative in the land, looking ridiculous. On a day when Cruz no doubt yearned to ramp up the tough talk about persecuting American Muslims and bombing ISIS backwards in time, he had to face the cameras, quivering with rage and looking even more like Eddie Munster than usual, to denounce a scurrilous tabloid story for being scurrilous and tabloid-ish. It was almost the definition of a no-win situation, and you can’t say Cruz didn’t deserve it. Perhaps just as important, the Enquirer episode made all those cable-news talking heads Trump has alternately groomed and antagonized, who have belittled him and predicted his demise and become hopelessly hypnotized by his cobra-dingbat genius, look ridiculous too. They couldn’t talk about the thing everybody was talking about, thanks to an obscure code of ethics they no longer understood and whose meaning has long since drained away in the age of Twitter and Trump. You could almost feel the collective bafflement and irritation emanating from the screen: It was like a bunch of old Irish ladies ordering the Filet-O-Fish on Friday, because they dimly suspect God still prefers it that way. Clowning can be a powerful political weapon, but it demands a moral compass and precise targeting. Trump barely pretends to respect any moral norms — the ones about torture and incest are on the table, apparently — and directs his mockery at the powerful and the powerless with indiscriminate glee. He displays no actual interest in politics at all, “conservative” or otherwise, which is why his answers to policy questions are so disconnected from reality, and vary from day to day. He’s like an overgrown adolescent who seeks endless adulation from the world, and who yearns to humiliate or destroy all those who resist him. Although Trump appears to be both ignorant and stupid, and to revel in those qualities, his clowning has a cruel precision and carries hints of dark genius. All his opponents to date have underestimated his popular appeal and his ability to shape the campaign narrative to his own ends, and all have paid the price. If that isn’t keeping Hillary Clinton’s aides up nights, it should be. When he urges his supporters to beat protesters, derides middle-aged women for no longer looking young or makes fun of a reporter with a disability, you can feel faint echoes of those concentration-camp newsreels in which guards fall over laughing while elderly rabbis are compelled to clean latrines with their beards. I’m not saying Trump is a Nazi; that wouldn't be fair. I’m saying that someone would have to explain to him why that’s not funny, and he still wouldn't really get it.When is a news story not a news story? That question hung in the air much of the day on Friday, as the major cable news networks laboriously steered around any direct reference to the political bombshell that had set social media aflame since the small hours. Once again the mainstream media had been Trumped, made to look floundering and foolish by the Republican clown-prince even as it wrestled with one of the biggest news days of the year. Belgian authorities had apparently captured a leading suspect in the Brussels attacks, and the United States military had apparently killed an ISIS leader in Syria. But for at least half the day, those headlines felt like footnotes to the hot topic TV news wouldn’t even touch. With no apparent sense of irony, Fox News sought to recast itself as a sober, responsible news organization, whose guests and commentators are deeply concerned about the toxic nature of American political discourse. During the 11 a.m. hour of Fox’s “Happening Now,” an entire group of panelists earnestly embraced Hillary Clinton’s recent complaint that moderate, centrist, reasonable voices had been excluded from public debate and political media, and that this was harming democracy. The old saw about putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t begin to capture it. Friday’s display of cable-news hypocrisy and paralysis, as the talking heads danced along the edges of the unmentionable story everyone in the real world was talking about, was more bizarre and more far-reaching than that. It was like Vlad the Impaler taking a break from roasting infants on skewers to lament the decline of table manners. It was as if all the pathology and bad karma of American politics in 2016 had been compressed into a few unhappy hours of avoidance and denial and enforced foolishness. Republican leaders and their media enablers have devoted many years’ worth of cynicism and manipulation and fear-mongering into seeding the ground for Donald Trump. Now he’s here, and those people act shocked every single day to wake up and discover that Trump is pulling their strings instead of the other way around. Of course the sober, responsible can’t-we-get-along shtick didn’t last long on Fox. An hour or so later, during the female-centric midday program “Outnumbered,” which is a nightmarish parody of “The View” featuring a phalanx of women in high heels and short skirts surrounding Tucker Carlson, the tone shifted back to the Fox default setting of “Hillary Clinton: Destroyer of Worlds.” Casting about for potential girl-talk topics that would somehow avoid the obvious, the panel conceded that Trump might have a problem with female voters. This, Carlson observed, was patently unfair. After all, who had actually abused and mistreated more women: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? His companions nodded and furrowed their brows: Intriguing question, Tucker! A few minutes before that, Carlson had waggishly noted that the central question of the Republican contest had now become “whose wife is hotter.” Oh, he got scolded for that: You dog, you! Then the strain of not mentioning the name of a certain tabloid publication, or gossiping about who might be depicted in its tantalizingly blurry photographs, drove the “Outnumbered” couch-cluster into bitterness and madness. One of Carlson’s fembot co-hosts, possibly Andrea Tantaros — it wasn’t Meghan McCain or the token liberal or the one with the Southern accent — acridly suggested that “feminists” were eager to judge Melania Trump for taking her clothes off, “but when Lena Dunham does it, they think it’s great.” McCain lamented that bad sexual mojo in the Republican race was interfering with important issues, such as the fact that Hillary Clinton’s husband was a “sexual predator.” When Republicans try to distract their base with Lena Dunham, they’re desperate; when they drag out Monica Lewinsky, they’re lost and lonely and afraid. Worst of all, the “Outnumbered” panel concluded, the Trump-Cruz catfight and its ugly but unmentionable new twist had ruined the prospect of a Republican “unity ticket.” (For which the rest of us should send both candidates fruit baskets.) But Friday’s disorder was not limited to Fox News. On their mid-morning news shows, both CNN and MSNBC hosted cagey, half-hearted segments about whether the name-calling, spouse-mocking playground feud between Trump and Ted Cruz had gone too far — but without explaining exactly how far it had gone. Gratefully seizing on breaking news from Brussels and the Middle East, both networks kept those segments brief and cryptic. We heard (several more times) about the nude photo of Melania Trump tweeted by a pro-Cruz PAC, and about Trump threatening to “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz. We repeatedly got to see Cruz’s unconvincing tough-guy act, where he wore a bomber jacket and stared down the TV cameras and called Trump a “sniveling coward,” looking somewhat like a sixth-grader trying to deliver Marlon Brando’s lines from “The Wild One.” By the standards of the 2016 news cycle, that was all moldy cheese from the back of the fridge, used as a coy placeholder for something else. All these purported adult news professionals had to pretend, for reasons they couldn’t quite define, that they had just rolled out of bed and hadn’t noticed the day’s biggest political plot twist. What I’m talking about, of course, are the latest revelations about Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, which will surely land her in prison one of these days! (That was actually floated as one of Friday’s big stories, however briefly, during the fevered last few minutes of “Outnumbered.” Carlson played buzzkill, ruefully admitting that he didn’t think Attorney General Loretta Lynch would indict Clinton.) OK, no I’m not. As virtually everyone in the viewing audience for Friday’s news shows already knew, the National Enquirer had published an overnight cover story claiming that Ted Cruz has had at least five extramarital relationships, accompanied by fuzzy but easily decoded photos of his alleged lovers. (Several of the women in those pictures appear to be prominent Republican operatives who have worked for Cruz and other candidates, including Trump.) By mid-morning on Friday, Cruz and Trump supporters on Twitter were engaged in open warfare, while left-leaning observers offered Schadenfreude-tinged commentary and media types debated the credibility of the Enquirer and told us they’d heard all this before. As indeed they had: I don’t know whether the allegations about Cruz’s private life are true and I don’t care, but the rumors are nothing new. There is plausible social-media evidence to suggest that Marco Rubio supporters tried to plant similar stories weeks ago, in hopes of rescuing Rubio’s dying campaign. That didn’t happen, and it probably wouldn’t have worked. One measure of Trump’s Mephistophelean ability to manipulate the news cycle is that the Enquirer story didn’t hit until now, when Rubio is toast and Trump is the only candidate who stands to benefit from the destruction of Cruz’s image as squeaky-clean Christian family man. But Trump’s dark powers go far beyond dirty tricks and shrewd timing, and no one has yet discovered an effective counterspell. Hillary Clinton’s strategists can talk all they want to about their terrific poll numbers and Trump’s huge negatives among women and voters of color and all the rest of it. But Jeb Bush and Rubio and Cruz and those other people all thought the laws of political physics were on their side too. When you do battle with the Necromancer, those laws are suspended and strange things happen. As he has repeatedly proven during the Republican campaign, Trump can attack his opponents at their weakest point and in the most shameless manner, and can drag them down to his level without damaging himself. He is invulnerable to facts and reason, and thrives on sleaze and insults. If Trump possesses no other visible talents and knows almost nothing about the world, he is a Jedi master of humiliation. Yet as the most avowedly amoral presidential candidate in American history — or at least since Andrew Jackson, who might be his role model if Trump had ever heard of him — he cannot be humiliated. It doesn’t matter whether the National Enquirer article is a total fabrication. It doesn’t matter whether the Trump campaign planted it directly, fed it through Rubio’s people or (implausible as this sounds) had nothing to do with it at all. It was another turn of the screw in a story Trump has controlled since the beginning. His obligatory denial felt like it came with a broad wink and an elbow to the ribs: Wow, they’re sayin’ Lyin’ Ted is a big old horndog now! Hadn’t heard about that! Not as big as me LOL. As various people plaintively observed later in the cable-news day, after Cruz had turned the Enquirer story into a quasi-legitimate topic, Donald Trump is the last person who should lecture anyone on moral fiber or marital fidelity. That doesn’t matter either, because the secret of Trumpian alchemy is to elevate himself by demeaning and debasing others. We keep being told that Trump’s evident viciousness and venality, and his lack of anything resembling a coherent ideology or a policy agenda, will eventually bite him in the ass. We’re still waiting, while the asses of others continue to get bitten. It’s now become routine to say that those things are his strengths, because the people who vote for him are angry and ignorant, but it goes deeper than that. I called him a clown in the opening paragraph, and I think it’s a powerful metaphor. Trump seems only intermittently aware that he himself is ridiculous, which is one of the reasons he’s so dangerous. But he is keenly aware of his ability to make others look ridiculous, which is precisely the social role of the clown. What mattered, in the Trumpian calculus, was not the content of the Enquirer article but the fact that it left Ted Cruz, the pompous, Princeton-educated firebrand who presents himself as the most virtuous conservative in the land, looking ridiculous. On a day when Cruz no doubt yearned to ramp up the tough talk about persecuting American Muslims and bombing ISIS backwards in time, he had to face the cameras, quivering with rage and looking even more like Eddie Munster than usual, to denounce a scurrilous tabloid story for being scurrilous and tabloid-ish. It was almost the definition of a no-win situation, and you can’t say Cruz didn’t deserve it. Perhaps just as important, the Enquirer episode made all those cable-news talking heads Trump has alternately groomed and antagonized, who have belittled him and predicted his demise and become hopelessly hypnotized by his cobra-dingbat genius, look ridiculous too. They couldn’t talk about the thing everybody was talking about, thanks to an obscure code of ethics they no longer understood and whose meaning has long since drained away in the age of Twitter and Trump. You could almost feel the collective bafflement and irritation emanating from the screen: It was like a bunch of old Irish ladies ordering the Filet-O-Fish on Friday, because they dimly suspect God still prefers it that way. Clowning can be a powerful political weapon, but it demands a moral compass and precise targeting. Trump barely pretends to respect any moral norms — the ones about torture and incest are on the table, apparently — and directs his mockery at the powerful and the powerless with indiscriminate glee. He displays no actual interest in politics at all, “conservative” or otherwise, which is why his answers to policy questions are so disconnected from reality, and vary from day to day. He’s like an overgrown adolescent who seeks endless adulation from the world, and who yearns to humiliate or destroy all those who resist him. Although Trump appears to be both ignorant and stupid, and to revel in those qualities, his clowning has a cruel precision and carries hints of dark genius. All his opponents to date have underestimated his popular appeal and his ability to shape the campaign narrative to his own ends, and all have paid the price. If that isn’t keeping Hillary Clinton’s aides up nights, it should be. When he urges his supporters to beat protesters, derides middle-aged women for no longer looking young or makes fun of a reporter with a disability, you can feel faint echoes of those concentration-camp newsreels in which guards fall over laughing while elderly rabbis are compelled to clean latrines with their beards. I’m not saying Trump is a Nazi; that wouldn't be fair. I’m saying that someone would have to explain to him why that’s not funny, and he still wouldn't really get it.

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It wasn’t “politically correct” when W. said it: Why Trump’s Islamophobia is a dangerous American bellwether

“Our nation is waging a war on a radical network of terrorists, not on a religion. And not on a civilization. As we wage this war to defend our principles, we must live up to those principles ourselves. And one of the deepest commitments of America is tolerance. No on should be treated unkindly because of the color of their skin or the content of their creed. No one should be judged by appearance or ethnic background, or religious faith.”

Back in 2002, when President George W. Bush made these comments at the annual White House Iftar Dinner, there was no outcry from his Republican colleagues for being too “politically correct,” or for avoiding the term “radical Islam” — which the president consciously refrained from using in speeches. No one questioned where the president's loyalties were, or whether the terrorists could be defeated if he didn’t constantly emphasize their twisted Islamic ideology. After invading one Muslim country and planning to invade another, the Bush administration considered it wise to emphasize that the United States was not at war with a religion, especially a religion with over 1 billion followers. In another speech shortly after the attacks of September 11, at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., Bush condemned the Islamophobia that had emerged across the country, declaring that Americans who felt they could “intimidate our fellow [Muslim] citizens to take out their anger” did not “represent the best of America,” but “the worst of humankind.” Once again, these statements were not at all controversial. As the president of the United States, Bush was expected to keep the peace, not exacerbate violence and hatred against religious minorities. While there could be sharp disagreements over foreign policy, being commander-in-chief required at the very least an appearance of calm and sensible leadership, not hysterical and alienating rhetoric. It had nothing to do with “political correctness,” it was simply a matter of being presidential. Today, top Republican presidential candidates no longer subscribe to this kind of leadership. Over the past 10 months, GOP candidates have often given the impression that they are running for fearmonger-in-chief, rather than commander-in-chief, where new rules of leadership apply. For these candidates, levelheaded discourse is considered a sign of weakness, and thinking before speaking is deemed phony and “politically correct.” When our Democratic president avoids generalizations and confronts intolerance — as his Republican predecessor did — he is called “an apologist for radical Islamic terrorism” by one of the current frontrunners. When he does not become hysterical after a terrorist attack and rejects discriminatory and bellicose rhetoric, he is considered soft — or worse, his loyalties are questioned. Of the three candidates left in the Republican primaries, the party’s two biggest demagogues — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Donald Trump — have managed to stay on top by being about as unhinged and impulsive as General Ripper from "Dr. Strangelove." And while communists are no longer trying to impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, now Muslims are, according to one of Cruz’s foreign policy advisors, planning to implement Sharia law in America and destroy the West from within (starting with “America’s first Muslim president”). Unsurprisingly, after the attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, Republican candidates did not disappoint Muslim-fearing Americans. This is “just the beginning,” warned a frantic Trump, while Cruz called for law enforcement to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized” (because everyone knows that treating an entire community like second-class citizens prevents radicalization). Trump also renewed his call for a “complete ban” on all Muslims entering the the United States and once again advocated torture, promising uneasy Americans that an attack would “happen in the United States” without his extreme and constitutionally dubious measures. Like other terrorist attacks, Brussels was a gift to Trump, who understands just how effective fear can be in politics. Likewise, Trump’s Islamophobic response was a gift to ISIS recruiters, who understand how effective anti-Muslim rhetoric can be in radicalizing young Muslims. The extreme and careless rhetoric that has come from these leading Republicans, solely to scare voters into supporting them, is a brand of demagoguery that was once reserved for the fringe of the GOP. While the Republican Party has long been militant and imperialistic, the establishment had for decades managed to keep outright demagogues at bay. President Bush is a good example of this. The former president was belligerent and dishonest, and his foreign policies were immoral, but he was not a demagogue (although, as Matt Taibbi recently argued, his simpleton appeal paved the way for Trump). As the quotes from above reveal, Bush did not shamelessly exploit the prejudices of the populace or scapegoat minorities. He condemned intolerance and rejected foolish generalizations. The same cannot be said for Trump, Cruz and the Republican Party at large, which has moved to the far right over the past decade. The “I don’t have time for political correctness” mantra has been routinely used to excuse inflammatory and provocative rhetoric. But this has nothing to do with political correctness. While there are legitimate arguments to be made against p.c. culture when it stifles debate (particularly in academia), this is simply about responsibility. Trump is a leading political figure, not someone’s drunk uncle or a trollish blogger. Unfortunately, eight years of GOP obstructionism and hard-line rhetoric in Washington has paved the way for the likes of Trump and Cruz, and vulgar demagoguery is now a mainstay of modern Republican politics.

“Our nation is waging a war on a radical network of terrorists, not on a religion. And not on a civilization. As we wage this war to defend our principles, we must live up to those principles ourselves. And one of the deepest commitments of America is tolerance. No on should be treated unkindly because of the color of their skin or the content of their creed. No one should be judged by appearance or ethnic background, or religious faith.”

Back in 2002, when President George W. Bush made these comments at the annual White House Iftar Dinner, there was no outcry from his Republican colleagues for being too “politically correct,” or for avoiding the term “radical Islam” — which the president consciously refrained from using in speeches. No one questioned where the president's loyalties were, or whether the terrorists could be defeated if he didn’t constantly emphasize their twisted Islamic ideology. After invading one Muslim country and planning to invade another, the Bush administration considered it wise to emphasize that the United States was not at war with a religion, especially a religion with over 1 billion followers. In another speech shortly after the attacks of September 11, at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., Bush condemned the Islamophobia that had emerged across the country, declaring that Americans who felt they could “intimidate our fellow [Muslim] citizens to take out their anger” did not “represent the best of America,” but “the worst of humankind.” Once again, these statements were not at all controversial. As the president of the United States, Bush was expected to keep the peace, not exacerbate violence and hatred against religious minorities. While there could be sharp disagreements over foreign policy, being commander-in-chief required at the very least an appearance of calm and sensible leadership, not hysterical and alienating rhetoric. It had nothing to do with “political correctness,” it was simply a matter of being presidential. Today, top Republican presidential candidates no longer subscribe to this kind of leadership. Over the past 10 months, GOP candidates have often given the impression that they are running for fearmonger-in-chief, rather than commander-in-chief, where new rules of leadership apply. For these candidates, levelheaded discourse is considered a sign of weakness, and thinking before speaking is deemed phony and “politically correct.” When our Democratic president avoids generalizations and confronts intolerance — as his Republican predecessor did — he is called “an apologist for radical Islamic terrorism” by one of the current frontrunners. When he does not become hysterical after a terrorist attack and rejects discriminatory and bellicose rhetoric, he is considered soft — or worse, his loyalties are questioned. Of the three candidates left in the Republican primaries, the party’s two biggest demagogues — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Donald Trump — have managed to stay on top by being about as unhinged and impulsive as General Ripper from "Dr. Strangelove." And while communists are no longer trying to impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, now Muslims are, according to one of Cruz’s foreign policy advisors, planning to implement Sharia law in America and destroy the West from within (starting with “America’s first Muslim president”). Unsurprisingly, after the attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, Republican candidates did not disappoint Muslim-fearing Americans. This is “just the beginning,” warned a frantic Trump, while Cruz called for law enforcement to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized” (because everyone knows that treating an entire community like second-class citizens prevents radicalization). Trump also renewed his call for a “complete ban” on all Muslims entering the the United States and once again advocated torture, promising uneasy Americans that an attack would “happen in the United States” without his extreme and constitutionally dubious measures. Like other terrorist attacks, Brussels was a gift to Trump, who understands just how effective fear can be in politics. Likewise, Trump’s Islamophobic response was a gift to ISIS recruiters, who understand how effective anti-Muslim rhetoric can be in radicalizing young Muslims. The extreme and careless rhetoric that has come from these leading Republicans, solely to scare voters into supporting them, is a brand of demagoguery that was once reserved for the fringe of the GOP. While the Republican Party has long been militant and imperialistic, the establishment had for decades managed to keep outright demagogues at bay. President Bush is a good example of this. The former president was belligerent and dishonest, and his foreign policies were immoral, but he was not a demagogue (although, as Matt Taibbi recently argued, his simpleton appeal paved the way for Trump). As the quotes from above reveal, Bush did not shamelessly exploit the prejudices of the populace or scapegoat minorities. He condemned intolerance and rejected foolish generalizations. The same cannot be said for Trump, Cruz and the Republican Party at large, which has moved to the far right over the past decade. The “I don’t have time for political correctness” mantra has been routinely used to excuse inflammatory and provocative rhetoric. But this has nothing to do with political correctness. While there are legitimate arguments to be made against p.c. culture when it stifles debate (particularly in academia), this is simply about responsibility. Trump is a leading political figure, not someone’s drunk uncle or a trollish blogger. Unfortunately, eight years of GOP obstructionism and hard-line rhetoric in Washington has paved the way for the likes of Trump and Cruz, and vulgar demagoguery is now a mainstay of modern Republican politics.

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