Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 837

March 12, 2016

“Dad, could we talk?”: My father and I had not been close for years, but with his illness everything changed

When my father became ill, something remarkable happened: I discovered a depth of devotion to him I’d not known was there. This came as a surprise because of what I had long thought was the nature of our relationship—warm and for the most part free of conflict, but marked by a distance between us, a distance, in part, due to our each being fiercely independent; we’d both moved out of the family home shortly after I turned 17, and hadn’t spent more than a dozen nights under the same roof since. Once, when he was in his 80s, about to embark on one of his far-flung travels, and I’d suggested he carry a cellphone, he’d replied that the point of traveling was to be out of touch. Even when he was home, weeks would sometimes pass without our speaking—and then, impromptu, he’d come for Sunday dinner: pour himself a scotch from the bottle we kept for him, and inevitably the atlas or globe would find its way to the kitchen table while he discussed Russia’s role in World War II with my younger son, or Lucretius’ prescient understanding of atomic theory with my older son, or developments in plastics and LED technology with my husband. My own pursuits, as a psychoanalyst and then as a fiction writer, were a language as a scientist he didn’t speak—Freud, in his view, a witch doctor; Philip Roth, the last contemporary novelist he’d read—though he did ask me each time I served him my roasted cauliflower how I cooked it. With his illness, everything changed. We had a shared project: uncovering a diagnosis, and then attempting to synthesize three radically different treatment recommendations from six stellar medical centers. I hadn’t talked to my father daily since I was a child, but now we were in touch every day. Rather than feeling like a burden, the conversations filled me with admiration for my father’s dispassionate view of his situation and his lack of self-pity. He’d been well most of his life and now he was not. He did not believe that he had been dealt a bad hand; rather, this was a hand. He wanted to live for as long as he could maintain a reasonable quality of life—but he never sugarcoated the grim prognosis. Most of all, he remained himself: living alone, reading the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, setting himself mathematical problems, going to movies and lectures, cooking ribs in his toaster oven. As the months passed and my father grew weaker, as much from the treatment as from the progression of his illness, he became essentially homebound. Because he insisted that he needed no more help than the same cleaning person he’d had for years, three hours every other week, I began to visit him most days. He refused to lock his front door, so I would let myself in, and if he was napping, as he often was, I would stealthily wash the piled-up dishes, bag the trash. Puttering about, surrounded by the relics from his life—the samovar his grandparents had brought from Russia, the fossils from Montana, the yellow pads with his calculations—I would wonder about the dedication to him I’d discovered, aware that it came from somewhere primal, from something that must have transpired between us when I was very young. A year after my father commenced his journey into illness, he collapsed in the middle of the night. In the emergency room, it was my father, not the medical staff, who correctly identified the reason for his collapse—and it was he who discerned that he’d fallen off a cliff and was now plummeting, not drifting, toward death. Had he been able to control his fate, he would have ended his life then, rather than returning home bedridden. His affairs were in order and he felt, he told me, at peace. But I was not: There were things I still wanted to talk with him about. But what? What did I want to say to him? What I wanted to tell him, I realized, had to do with the deep influence, I’d come to see, he’d had on my most basic pursuits, an influence that had been obscured by our glaring differences and the divergent paths we’d taken. By now, though, he was sleeping nearly all the time and when he was up, it was rarely for more than 20 minutes at a stretch. I planted myself next to the hospital bed we’d set up in his living room. When his eyes opened, I said, “Dad, could we talk?” With a look of curiosity on his face—this was something new—he said, “OK.” “There are some things I’d like to tell you.” I took his hand. “I know I’ve never said anything like this before, but I want to tell you what I’m grateful to you for.” I told him how to my surprise—surprise because family lore was that he was an absent-minded professor, his mind more on the equations that describe wave formations than on the inner lives of people—I’d come to see how perceptive and tolerant of me he’d always been. “Do you remember when I was in second grade and I was terrified of an icy hill outside my school?” He gave me a half-smile. “All that winter you would park the car, and then, taking my arm, walk me to the door. You never made me feel badly that I was afraid of slipping.” “And later that year, when I was scared of a dead bird on the sidewalk, you never chided me for taking a different street so I would avoid seeing it. You just accepted that about me.” My eyes welled with tears as I reminded my father that after my younger son was born and we were all lost in the bliss of a new baby, he’d been the one who’d privately warned me not to overlook the dislocation for our older son, no longer the solitary prince. How, more recently, when there’d been some family discord about which I’d not spoken to him, he’d asked me to share with him my experience—and then, never taking sides, distilled what I’d said in a way that had left me feeling utterly understood. Only now did I see that what I’d learned from his way of absorbing distress without minimizing it or compulsively giving advice were at the heart of my work as an analyst and novelist. When I finished, he said, “Thank you, Dear. I’m grateful for your having told me. But now I need to close my eyes.” He closed his eyes and slept and I sat by his bed, and when he woke up, I gave him some apple juice and said, “Dad, there’s something more I want to tell you.” “OK,” he said, and I could see that this conversation was important to him too. And here’s the second thing I told him. I told him that I understood now that I’d become a writer because of him. That behind my own drive to tell stories was what I’d learned and been inspired by and imprinted with from his omnivorous curiosity and adventurous spirit—a spirit that led him to the wild places in Central Park where there are feral raccoons and waterfalls, to corner bars in Tehran and Baku from where he’d brought back tales of guys who work in concrete factories and on oil rigs. He’d made me believe that with bravery and persistence and creativity, narratives could be fashioned: how the universe came into being, scientific discoveries scaffold one atop another, ethnic identities fold and unfold within the shifting borders of nations. “Well, I’m glad,” he said. During my father’s final week, I watched his death arrive, step by step—the end of foods and then liquids and finally consciousness itself—with a crescendo that reminded me of childbirth. “I am not afraid,” my father had told me, and I realized that I, too, was unafraid: that he’d shown me, who had once taken circuitous routes to avoid a bird corpse, how simple and natural death can be. Sitting at his bedside his last afternoon, I could see that he’d reached the portal: his eyes open, his gaze fixed on the ceiling, his breath halting. I swabbed his parched mouth and cracked lips, and decided to put faith in our hospice nurse’s claim that he could still hear us. “Dad,” I said, “it’s very near, you are nearly there. I hope you remember what I told you,” and then I said again how very much I loved him and would miss him. The final thing I learned from my father is something I never got to tell him. As I stayed with him through the evening after he died, holding his hand, feeling his body cool, I was no longer surprised by the depth of my dedication to him. I understood whereby it came, and I was thankful to have discovered it: this devotion that had supplanted obligation and guilt and carried me through my father’s final year, down a river of filial love as ancient, I imagine, as humankind.

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Published on March 12, 2016 15:30

“The mob responds well to a toupeed con-man who talks about his penis”: Witness the Great Phallic Unraveling of 2016

As we contemplate the Great Phallic Unraveling that comprises the political rise of Donald Trump, it’s important to have historical perspective on the presidency. Since I’m the author of a five-volume unofficial biography of Richard Nixon—"Devil in Gethsemane"—and "Harlot’s Empanada," a 3,000-page novel about the CIA’s involvement in Central America, I have more perspective than anyone. Somewhat due to attrition but mostly due to talent, I remain The Greatest Living American Writer. Therefore, it’s my job to call our present moment into focus. But to understand the present, we must journey backward into the gauzy, cisgendered American past. In one of those halcyon moments in the late 1930s before the world fell, I sat in a rowboat with the Roosevelts on the Hudson River, gladly pulling along America’s first family with the strength of my lithe, hairless, proto-bisexual arms. My family had been friendly with the Roosevelts since the dawn of Gotham. Hedging our bets, along with our hedges, we also befriended the Kennedys and Bushes, sponsored the early career of Ronald Reagan, and owned property in Arkansas where the Clintons picked their nits. Needless to say, my access to the corridors of presidential power has been unparalleled throughout the decades. This is somewhat surprising, given that I’m also the foremost literary critic of America’s imperial adventures. Regardless, on that drizzly day on the Hudson as Hitler contemplated Poland, FDR and Eleanor warned me to monitor the rise of fascism in America. “Be wary of aggressive promises,” FDR said. “The mob responds well to a toupeed con-man who talks about his penis.” At the time, it seemed to me that a mischievous house-servant had once again mixed laudanum into the president’s morning Ovaltine, and I dismissed his comment with a witty Thorstein Veblen reference that caused him and the first lady to roar with laughter. But decades later, while doing mushrooms with Ken Kesey in Panama, I thought of what FDR had said. So when I returned home, I dropped the same wisdom on "Firing Line," as I debated Germaine Greer about the publication of my essay, "The World Is a Diseased Vagina," in Esquire’s special “women’s lib” issue. “FDR once told me that the mob responds well to a toupeed con-man who talks about his penis,” I said, and then Gore Vidal leapt from the audience and smacked me over the head with a thick Winter Fiction issue of the Partisan Review. The thought didn’t occur to me again until I met Donald Trump. It was 1986, and, even though I hardly needed the money, I worked as a roving correspondent for Spy magazine, penning vicious celebrity profiles under the pseudonym “Sidney Falco.” I enjoyed countless gold-plated lunches in the Age of Greed. Trump was a speaker at one of them. “He was a really nasty guy,” Trump said of one of his real-estate rivals. “Very lousy. So I mailed him a shit-stained dildo to tell him what I thought of him. Later, he called me and said, ‘You know, I just want to thank you.’” The crowd chuckled uncomfortably. I mean, who among them hadn’t embarrassed a competitor with a soiled sex toy? But to actually talk about it in public? “The dildo was about the size of my penis,” Trump said. “Maybe a little smaller.” And then I knew: This was the man about whom FDR had warned me. I wrote the event up in Spy, hoping that anyone would care. No one did. Afterward, I repeatedly tried to alert the American public, through my self-published 1990s zine Trump Alert, which I hand-copied myself in a Seattle coffeehouse, and then in a monograph published by Soft Skull Press, and, finally, while live-recapping the first season of "The Apprentice" for Television Without Pity. Unfortunately, no one was much paying attention to my work during my “indie period.” Here’s what I wrote in the final edition of Trump Alert, before I turned my literary attentions to daddyblogging:

“The mob—not to be confused with Married To the Mob, an unsuccessful satire of The Godfather—responds best to totalitarian rhetoric that the party leaders deem taboo, or that even the game Taboo deems taboo. Someone truly dangerous like Donald Trump will do anything to get elected. If he ever runs for President, he’ll win with a joke about ejaculating on a stripper’s tits. Respectable society will sniff, but the mob will vote him in, like hungry dogs jumping on his throbbing bone.”

Today, as I reclaim my literary throne, I stand by those words. The intellectuals of the world must rise above the Trump rabble, to explain, to inform, to bring back that old-timey democracy. Only through our words can America be saved from the ultimate defilement, the back-flap rear entry of a candidate no one wanted. We’ll write him out of existence, or we’ll die trying. My somewhat lesser fellow writers, we must unite to tell the people! I don’t care to belong to a country in which Donald Trump has a member. Neal Pollack, the Greatest Living American Writer and a contributor to Salon since before some of you were born, is the author of 10 books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest is " Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You ," a Kindle Single about his failure to make it in Hollywood.

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Published on March 12, 2016 14:30

They’re not eviscerating Trump: John Oliver and Stephen Colbert will never save us from fascism

@Toure if Trump is the nominee, I actually think we should fund a SuperPAC that hires professional comedians to take him down with funny ads
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) February 29, 2016

Sometimes a tweet is just a tweet, and sometimes it's something a little bit more. In the case of Daily Beast columnist Jon Favreau's recent musing on the Republican primary, it's a window into the pathos of the American left on the eve of the 2016 elections. The country is confronted with a growing threat of authoritarianism, born of a neoliberal economic model it's helped implement and a right-wing hysteria that has been festering for years, and the solution to this crisis is a Citizens United-enabled super fund for Sarah Silverman to make more Hitler jokes. This ongoing fetishization of comedians is not exclusive to the former Obama speechwriter, of course. With a few notable exceptions, the #BlackLivesMatter movement chief among, liberals have abandoned actual politics for political theater -- without even realizing they've replaced one for the other. So how did we get here? * * * Online journalism has a peculiar if predictable biorhythm. Every Sunday night, season schedules permitting, "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" airs on HBO. And every Monday morning, the major news publications are atwitter, literally and figuratively, over his latest piece of reporting. If these sites' headlines are to be believed, Oliver routinely Crushes It, whatever "it' happens to be the focus of his attention that week -- the prison industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry, predatory payday lenders, FIFA. Readers get a free taste of premium cable, and publishers get a viral hit if things break right on social media. They often do. Perhaps that explains why his recent 22-minute evisceration, methodically dismantling Trump's appeal to the working class, was such a full-moon event. Buzzfeed declared that John Oliver had "destroyed" Donald Trump; Rolling Stone hailed that he had "annihilated" the Donald; Salon announced that Oliver had given Trump "exactly what he deserves"; while Vox, in a telling bit of hyperbole, proclaimed that he had delivered the takedown that "America has been waiting for." Two days later, Donald Trump would snatch seven of the 11 states up for grabs on Super Tuesday, all but cementing his place as the favorite for the Republican nomination. One week after John Oliver #MadeDonaldDrumpfAgain, "SNL" took its swing with "Racists for Trump," a fake ad featuring seemingly wholesome-looking Americans who just so happen to be white supremacists, Klan members and neo-Nazis. The spot worked, not as any kind of political deterrent -- Trump has since captured three states and is favored to win Michigan and Florida as of this writing -- but as a piece of viral advertising for "SNL" itself, a remarkable feat considering how widely the show was criticized for inviting him to host four months prior. If you happened to log onto Facebook Sunday morning, you were unlikely to miss it. This week alone has seen both Stephen Colbert and Louis C.K. attempt to cut the short-fingered vulgarian down to the size of his "tiny doll hands," the former in a series of freewheeling late-night monologues and the latter in an impassioned (if fatuous) email to his fans. Like John Oliver before them, both lay bare the crass opportunism of his presidential run. And like John Oliver, neither is likely to make so much as a dent in his campaign. Which brings us back to those headlines. By what metric is Donald Trump being "destroyed"? Which America has been waiting for a self-described parrot banker to tell it just how loutish and disgusting the Republican frontrunner really is? The answers to both questions might appear obvious. News sites routinely gin up titles in the hopes of generating web traffic, a practice glibly dismissed as "clickbaiting." (Only the dullest of readers could believe they're being sold a bill of goods with a headline like "Watch John Oliver MURDERSLAY Donald Trump"). And with the possible exceptions of Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon, late-show hosts of recent vintage have either tacitly or enthusiastically embraced center-left politics. It follows, then, that "Last Week Tonight" (and "The Daily Show" and "SNL" and their myriad offspring) are playing to their audiences. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of John Oliver viewers and Vox Americans, you'd be left with a perfect circle. That these routines have left Trump unscathed is a testament not only to the insularity of their audiences but the slipperiness of their subject. The Donald, with his neon complexion and taste for Mussolini cosplay, has demonstrated a stubborn resistance to the late-night treatment. "How do you spoof a candidate who treats campaigning like a roast?" asks New York Times television critic James Poniewozik. "Satire exposes candidates' contradictions and absurdities. Mr. Trump blows past those, while his supporters cheer." They do a lot more than cheer. What makes Trump's fascist descriptor so alluring -- and his run for president so horrifying -- is that his violent rhetoric is inspiring physical acts of violence. In August, two men in Boston savagely beat a homeless, Hispanic man, later citing the Republican demagogue's immigration policies. Trump would only concede that his followers are "very passionate." Last month, three people were stabbed at a KKK rally in Southern California. The episode would see him feign amnesia about David Duke and white supremacist organizations. Meanwhile, Trump rally confrontations have emerged as their own distinct YouTube sub-genre. "The Nightly Show's" Larry Wilmore, to name one comedian, has tried and failed to find the humor in these incidents. As Salon's Sonia Saraiya writes, "[They're] just too true to really laugh at." * * * The 2016 election cycle can be traced around the outline of Jon Stewart and David Letterman's vacant late-night chairs. Prior to his departure from "The Daily Show," the former was equal parts news anchor and therapist for liberals of a certain persuasion -- a modern-day Walter Cronkite, with f-bombs. He was smart and he was a mensch and more often than not he was very funny. Letterman, wry and laconic, was arguably even more subversive, his political satire targeted for Democratic and Republican viewers alike, even as his liberalism shown through. His blistering McCain monologue on the heels of the Arizona senator's "Late Show" cancellation remains one of the defining moments of the 2008 election. Even now, six months removed from Stewart's exit and nine months after Letterman's retirement, we are openly pining for their returns. And yet for all of their brilliance, neither was able to move the Overton window to the left, in as much as the "Late Show" host even cared to. None of Jon Stewart's penguin-like impressions of Dick Cheney could prevent a second term of George W. Bush, and if this Republican primary is any indication, his Rally to Restore Sanity was an abject failure. But even Stewart understood the limits of his influence. In one of the "The Daily Show's" more memorable segments, he addressed the media's fantasies about his work. "The world is demonstrably worse than when I started," he observed, not a little forlornly. Which is why the seemingly endless barrage of late-night slayings, maulings and disembowelments are so thoroughly maddening. Taken in their totality, these news items read like an expression of collective myopia if not outright delusion, and betray a poverty of ideas in addressing the increasingly violent rise of Trumpism or worse: a complacency with the present course. Literally anything could happen in the next week. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz come could form a Dr. Moreau ticket to steal the nomination from the GOP frontrunner, or Donald Trump could decide he'd rather drive a golf cart around Mar-a-Lago and bathe himself in champagne than be president of the United States. (He might just as easily do both of those things and still become the GOP nominee.) Until the left abandons its self-satisfaction with its own politics and embraces a movement to counter the fanaticism and demagoguery of the right, America will remain one election from outright disaster, and Cheeto-dick jokes may be all we have left.

@Toure if Trump is the nominee, I actually think we should fund a SuperPAC that hires professional comedians to take him down with funny ads
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) February 29, 2016

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Published on March 12, 2016 13:30

Israeli airstrikes kill 2 Palestinian children in the besieged Gaza Strip

Israeli airstrikes in the northern Gaza Strip killed two Palestinian children on Saturday, according to medical officials. The two children were siblings — 10-year-old Yassin Abu Khoussa and his six-year-old sister Israa, Reuters reports. Yassin died after an Israeli plane bombed their home. Israa was seriously wounded in the attack, and later died in the hospital. Local Palestinian news outlet Ma'an reported the family's home had been partially destroyed in Israel's summer 2014 war in Gaza. The Israeli government says it was targeting training camps for the Palestinian political party Hamas, and that the children's home was next to one of these camps. Israel claims its airstrikes were in retaliation after four missiles were launched into open areas in southern Israel, resulting in no casualties. However, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon also admitted that rogue militant groups were responsible for the rockets, not Hamas leadership, even though it was Hamas infrastructure that the Israeli military targeted.

The Israeli military says there have been three more rockets fired into Israel from Gaza since the beginning of the year, which neither injured nor killed anyone.

In its 51-day war in July and August 2014, the Israeli military killed more than 2,250 Palestinians, around two-thirds of whom were civilians, including more than 550 children, according to the U.N. On the other side, 66 Israeli soldiers were killed, along with six civilians. 92 percent of those killed by Palestinian militants were soldiers. Almost 18 months after the war, reconstruction or repair of the homes of 74 percent of Palestinian families who were displaced had not even begun, according to the U.N., with more than 16,000 families — roughly 90,000 Palestinians — displaced or homeless. Violence for Palestinians living under illegal military occupation in the West Bank or under de facto occupation in Gaza is a part of everyday life. In the past few months, nevertheless, this violence has skyrocketed. Approximately 190 Palestinians and 30 Israelis have been killed since October 2015. Close to 30 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. In October 2015, Israel also bombed a home in southern Gaza City, killing a pregnant Palestinian woman and her two-year-old child. Reuters' report did mention that there were casualties in this attack, but did not acknowledge that the Israeli military had killed a Palestinian baby and her pregnant mother. Neither Reuters nor AFP mentioned the almost decade-long Israeli blockade of Gaza in their reports on the Israeli airstrikes. After Hamas was democratically elected in 2006, Israel worked with the Palestinian Authority to attempt to prevent it from consolidating power. The U.S. even plotted a violent coup to overthrow the Palestinians' elected government. Since this time, Israel has besieged Gaza. The Israeli government controls virtually everything that enters the densely populated strip, and has put Gazans "on a diet," restricting the food allowed in. U.N. rights experts have said since 2011 that Israel's siege of Gaza is illegal. A U.S. government cable released by WikiLeaks quotes Israeli officials admitting that the blockade keeps the Gazan economy "functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis." Israeli government officials told the U.S. that they are pursuing policies to "keep Gaza's economy on the brink of collapse."

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Published on March 12, 2016 13:30

Play it again, Uncle Sam: America keeps fighting the same war and losing

With General John Campbell’s tour of duty in Afghanistan finished, a new commander has taken over. Admittedly, things did not go well during Campbell’s year and a half heading up the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) there, but that’s par for the course. In late 2015, while he was in the saddle, the Taliban took the provincial capital of Kunduz, the first city to be (briefly) theirs since the American invasion of 2001. In response, U.S. forces devastated a Doctors Without Borders hospital. The Taliban is also now in control of more territory than at any time since the invasion and gaining an ever-firmer grip on contested Helmand Province in the heart of the country’s poppy-growing region (and so the staggering drug funds that go with it). In that same province, only about half of the “on duty” Afghan security forces the United States trained, equipped, and largely funded (to the tune of more than $65 billion over the years) were reportedly even present. On his way into retirement, General Campbell has been vigorously urging the Obama administration to expand its operations in that country. (“I’m not going to leave,” he said, “without making sure my leadership understands that there are things we need to do.”) In this, he’s been in good company. Behind the scenes, “top U.S. military commanders” have reportedly been talking up a renewed, decades-long commitment to Afghanistan and its security forces, what one general has termed a “generational approach” to the war there. And yes, as Campbell headed off stage, General John Nicholson, Jr., beginning his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, has officially taken command of ISAF. Though it wasn’t a major news item, he happens to be its 17th commander in the 14-plus years of Washington’s Afghan War. If this pattern holds, by 2030 that international force, dominated by the U.S., will have had 34 commanders and have fought, by at least a multiple of two, the longest war in our history. Talk about all-American records! (USA! USA!) If such a scenario isn’t the essence of déjà vu all over again, what is? Imagine, for a minute, each of those 17 ISAF commanders (recently, but not always, Americans, including still resonant names like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal as well as those like Dan McNeill and David McKiernan already lost in the fog of time) arriving at yearly intervals, each scrambling to catch-up, get the big picture, and run the show. Imagine that process time after time, and you have the definition of what, in kid culture, might be called a do-over -- a chance to get something right after doing it wrong the first time. Of course, yearly do-overs are a hell of a way to run a war, but they’re a great mechanism for ensuring that no one will need to take responsibility for a disaster of 14 years and counting. How to Play Do-Over For journalists, when it comes to twenty-first-century American war, do-overs are a boon. From collapsing U.S.-trained, funded, and equipped local militaries to that revolving door for commanders in Afghanistan to terror groups whose leaderships are eternally beingeviscerated yet are never wiped out, do-overs ensure that your daily copy is essentially pre-written for you. In fact, when it comes to American-style war across the Greater Middle East and increasingly much of Africa, do-over is the name of the game. In movie terms, you could think of Washington’s war policies in the post-9/11 era as pure “play it again, Sam.” If this weren’t the grimmest “game” around, involving death, destruction, failed states, spreading terror movements, and a region flooded with the uprooted -- refugees, internal exiles, transient terrorists, and god knows who else -- it could instantly be transmuted into a popular parlor game. We could call it “Do-Over.” The rules would be easy to grasp, though -- fair warning -- given the recent record of American war making, it could be a very long game. Modest preparation would be involved, since you’d be using actual headlines from the previous weeks. Given the nature of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (now the Obama administration’s no-name war on terror), however, this shouldn't be a daunting proposition. Any cursory reader of the news, aged 12 to 75, will find it easy to take part. Let me give you just a handful of examples of how Do-Over would work from a plethora of recent news stories: * Here, for instance, is a typical, can’t-miss, Do-Over headline: “Back to Iraq: U.S. Military Contractors Return In Droves.” For Washington’s third Iraq War, with a military that now heads into any battle zone hand-in-hand with a set of warrior corporations, the private contractors are returning to Iraq in significant numbers. In the good old days, after the invasion of 2003, for every American soldier in Iraq, there was at least one private contractor. As RAND’s Molly Dunnigan wrote back in 2013, “By 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq -- and 152,275 troops. This degree of privatization is unprecedented in modern warfare.” (Afghan War figures were remarkably similar: in 2010, there were 94,413 contractors and 91,600 American troops in that country.) Now, in the ongoing war against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, contractors, 70% American, hired by the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies outnumber the 3,700 U.S. military personnel on the ground by two to one or more and the names of the companies putting them there should ring a distinctly Do-Over bell from the previous round of war:KBR, DynCorp, and Fluor Corporation, among others. Of course, since it’s a Do-Over and we know just what happened the last time around, what could possibly go wrong? * Here’s another kind of headline for the game. Think of it as a “new” Do-Over (a story that looks like a first-timer, but couldn’t be more repetitive): “U.S. Plans to Put Advisers on Front Lines of Nigeria’s War Against Boko Haram.” As theNew York Times reports, a plan developed by Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, U.S. Special Operations commander for Africa, to “send dozens of Special Operations advisers to the front lines of Nigeria’s fight against the West African militant group Boko Haram” is expected to be approved by the Pentagon and the White House. Those special ops forces, “dozens” of them, are slated to advise Nigerian troops for the first time in the embattled northern part of their country. Though theirs will not officially be a combat role, they will be stationed in an area where anything might happen. At first glance, this may seem like something new under the sun in Washington’s expanding “war against the Islamic State” (to which Boko Haram has pledged its fealty), but only until you consider a remarkably similar October 2015 headline about a neighboring country: “The U.S. Is Sending 300 Military Personnel to Cameroon to Help Fight Boko Haram.” Those special ops troops were to conduct “airborne intelligence and reconnaissance operations” against that grim Nigerian terror group. Or to leap back another year, consider this headline from May 2014: “U.S. Deploys 80 Troops to Chad to Help Find Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolgirls.” (They weren’t found.) And of course, similar headlines could be multiplied across the Greater Middle East over the last decade against groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State from Yemen to, most recently, Iraq and Syria, with similarly dismal results. For your success in finding such a headline, you get a bonus question: Fourteen-plus years later, after U.S. special ops forces have repeatedly been sent to scads of countries, and the terror situation has only worsened, what exactly do they have to teach Nigerians or anyone else for that matter? What is it that Washington’s guys know about the world of terror and how to fight it that locals don’t? Given the global record over these years, call that a mystery of our moment. * Now, here’s an even rarer form of Do-Over, a headline that calls up not one, but -- count ‘em! -- two repetitive themes in the American war on terror: “U.S. Captures ISIS Operative, Ushering in Tricky Phase.” The story itself is fairly straightforward. A secretive elite Special Operations team in Iraq has captured “a significant Islamic State operative,” with more such prisoners expected in the near future. The captive is presently being held and questioned “at a temporary detention facility in the city of Erbil in northern Iraq.” What no one in Washington has yet sorted out is: Where are such detainees to be kept in the future? It’s a question that, as you might imagine (and the accompanying New York Times story makes clear), instantly brings to mind Guantanamo and, in Iraq, Abu Ghraib (with itsnightmarish photos), and that’s just to begin a longer list of grim places, including a string of “black sites,” and military and CIA prisons begged, borrowed, or appropriated across the planet in the Bush years. In all of them, American intelligence and military personnel (and private contractors) grossly abused, mistreated, tortured and in some cases actually killedprisoners. So in the conundrum of what to do with that single Islamic State captive lies an almost endless set of Do-Over possibilities. Lurking in that same headline, however, is another kind of Do-Over of these last years reflecting another set of repetitive war on terror practices: “U.S. drone strike kills a senior Islamic State militant in Syria,” “U.S. drone strike kills Yemen al-Qaida leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi,” “U.S. Commandos Raid Terrorist Hideouts in Libya, Somalia, Capture Senior Al-Qaeda Official.” In these and so many other headlines like them lies evidence of a deeply held Washington conviction that terror outfits can be successfully disabled and in the end dismantled, as can repressive states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, by taking out key leadership figures. This heavily militarized top-down approach, labeled “the kingpin strategy,” has been brought to bear time and again in America’s post-9/11 conflicts. That there is no evidence at all of its effectiveness (and significant evidence that it actually succeeds in making such groups more brutal and efficient and such states into failed ones) seems not to matter. So in any headline about a terror leader or lieutenant captured in a U.S. special ops raid, there is automatically a second classic Do-Over theme. * Now, what about a Do-Over round for events that haven’t even happened and yet are already in reruns? Take this recent headline: “After Gains Against ISIS, Pentagon Focuses on Mosul.” We’re talking about a much-predicted U.S.-backed Iraqi (and Kurdish) offensive against Mosul. Small numbers of Islamic State militants took Iraq's second largest city in June 2014 after the American-trained Iraqi army collapsed and fled, shedding quantities of American-provided equipment and their uniforms. The offensive to retake it was being touted in a somewhat similar manner a year ago by U.S. Central Command. At that time, 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops were supposedly being prepared to recapture the city in a spring 2015 offensive that somehow never came to be (perhaps because those 20,000 or more troops essentially didn’t then exist). That “pivotal battle” to come was at the time being promoted by American military officials. As Reuters wrote, it was “highly unusual for the U.S. military to openly telegraph the timing of an upcoming offensive, especially to a large group of reporters.” As it turned out, they tipped those reporters off to nothing. At the moment, Pentagon officials are touting such an offensive all over again for spring 2016, or if not quite now, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford put it recently, at least not in “the deep, deep future.” (Iraqi military officials, however, already beg to differ, predicting that such an offensive will be at least many months away "or longer." Welcome to the Mosul offensive of 2017!) Of course, we already have a remarkably clear idea of what Mosul will look like in the wake of such an offensive, should it ever happen. After all, we know just how the smaller Iraqi city of Ramadi ended up after a six-month campaign by U.S.-trained and backed Iraqi troops to retake it from Islamic State militants: largely depopulated, 80% destroyed, and a landscape of rubble thanks to hundreds of U.S. air strikes, street-by-street fighting, and IS booby traps (with no rebuilding fundsavailable). In other words, we already have a Do-Over vision of a future Mosul, should 2016 finally be the year when those Iraqi troops (and American advisers and planes) arrive in the IS-occupied city. (Perhaps the only non-Do-Over possibility is the grimmest of all -- that, as the American Embassy in Baghdad has suddenly taken to warning, Mosul’s massive, compromised dam could collapse as the winter snows melt, essentially sweeping the city away and possibly killing hundreds of thousands of downstream Iraqis.) On the positive side, since the American war on terror shows no sign of abating or succeeding, and as no one in Washington seems ready to consider anything strategically or tactically but more (or slightly less) of the same, Do-Over has a potentially glowing future as a war game. After all, based on almost 15 years of experience from Afghanistan to Nigeria, further destruction, chaos, the growth of failed states, the spread of terror groups, and monumental flows of refugees seem guaranteed, which means that there should never be a dearth of Do-Over-style headlines to draw on. One warning, though: in the annals of such games, this one is unique. Because of the nature of the American way of war in our time, Do-Over may be the only game ever invented in which there can be no ultimate winner and, unfortunately, the tag line “Everyone's a loser!” doesn’t seem like a selling way to go. Though the game is still in its planning stages, perhaps the ending has to be something realistic and yet thrilling like: “You’ve been Done-In!”

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Published on March 12, 2016 13:00

Sorry, Sacha Baron Cohen, AIDS is no joke even when it’s Donald Trump who gets it

Sacha Baron Cohen is catching heat for a joke in his new film, “The Brothers Grimsby,” in which Donald Trump gets “full-blown AIDS,” but the comic thinks you should stand up and cheer. “We’ve just shown the movie in Germany, Holland, England, around America, Norway, Spain—and when Donald Trump contracts HIV, people are standing up and applauding,” Cohen told Entertainment Weekly’s SiriusXM radio station. According to the 44-year-old, best known for playing the title character in 2006’s “Borat,” Sony fought him to take out the joke—or at least put in a disclaimer. He should have listened. But the controversy appears to have missed the point: The real issue is not that Sacha Baron Cohen has attacked the widely hated Republican front-runner—noted for his racist views on Latinos and proposal to expel Muslims from the U.S.—but that the joke is a hideous throwback to the worst of 1980s HIV panic. That was a time which the virus was deemed a “punishment” for those who contracted it. Back in 1992, a little more than two decades ago, 36 percent of Americans told Gallup that HIV was a tool of God’s wrath, his own personal divine condemnation. Today, about one in 10 still believe HIV is a punishment for immoral behavior. This seems like a small number but it isn’t, really—and that minority is incredibly vocal. According to Gallup, these populations include white evangelicals, Latino Catholics, and black Protestants. Two years ago, “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson famously told the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins: “Now to me either it’s the wildest coincidence ever that horrible diseases follow immoral conduct, or it’s God saying, ‘There’s a penalty for that kind of conduct.’ I’m leanin’ toward there’s a penalty toward it.’” You might think he’s just a dumb redneck, but he’s one with a huge platform: At its peak, “Duck Dynasty” shattered cable ratings records. If the number of Americans who agree with Phil Robertson’s sentiments has shrunk in the past 20 years, that doesn’t mean society has reached a point of tolerance and understanding when it comes to those living with HIV. That same Gallup poll—conducted in 2014—showed that nearly two-thirds of respondents believed infections were caused by “irresponsible behavior.” That means that even if they didn’t believe HIV was God’s punishment, a majority of Americans still felt it was payback for individuals’ choices. A 2011 report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation further showed that HIV stigma is alive and well. The group surveyed 2,583 respondents about their beliefs and prejudices in regards to people living with HIV, finding that “substantial shares of Americans continue to express discomfort at the idea of interacting with people living with HIV.” The results aren’t pretty: “45 percent say they’d be uncomfortable having their food prepared by someone who is HIV-positive, 36 percent with having an HIV-positive roommate, 29 percent having their child in a classroom with an HIV-positive teacher, and 18 percent working with someone with HIV.” Last year, these myriad biases reared their ugly head when former “Two and a Half Men” star Charlie Sheen announced that he was HIV positive in an interview with Matt Lauer. But he didn’t come out willingly: He was forced out of the closet by blackmail, as he told Lauer that former partners were currently extorting him for money, threatening to reveal his status. In addition, news outlets like the National Enquirer had promised a juicy expose on “Charlie Sheen's AIDS Cover-Up,” as if his own right to privacy on the subject were somehow nefarious. In a similar story from RadarOnline, the outlet links Sheen’s status to his history with substance abuse and excessive lifestyle—right in the story’s lede. “Sex maniac Charlie Sheen not only bedded porn stars, groupies, call girls and strippers—he also slept with transsexuals and men!” RadarOnline further describes the “Caligula”-like scenario that allegedly led to his infection—one filled with “sex swap escorts and gay lovers.” “He’s had sex partners of all kind," an anonymous source claimed. “He’d regularly spent thousands of dollars to sleep with transsexual hookers who he would hire and have them service him at his Mulholland Estate mansion.” Sheen’s disclosure came almost 25 years after former NBA star Magic Johnson helped put a face on the disease and humanize it for many Americans. In 1991, Johnson came out as HIV positive in a speech announcing his retirement from professional basketball. “[L]ife is going to go on for me, and I'm going to be a happy man,” he said. But it seems that many are still having difficulty viewing those who are HIV positive as anything but a disease—or somehow morally suspect. When learning of Sheen’s status, actress Jenny McCarthy (who guest starred on “Two and a Half Men”) simply said: “Ick!” As both Phil Robertson’s comments and the RadarOnline story show, this is largely due to the perceived linkage between homosexuality and the spread of HIV. After all, classic film icon Rock Hudson became the first well-known celebrity to die from the disease, after he passed away suddenly in 1985, and his death generated considerable hysteria in the media. The National Enquirer noted that his “Dynasty” co-stars were terrified that he might have given them HIV, particularly Linda Evans. “He kissed her on the show!” the mag noted. But in addition to treating Hudson’s HIV status as gross, he was also widely mocked for it, made into a national punch line. If you were alive in the '80s, you might have even heard a couple of Rock Hudson jokes. For instance: Q: “Why was Rock Hudson's car insurance so high?” A: “Because he got rammed in the rear too many times!” Q: “Do you know what the doctors told Rock Hudson?” A: “Don't worry, we'll have you back on your knees in no time.” Q: “Did you hear they found out Rock Hudson doesn't have AIDS, he has food poisoning?” A: “He ate a bad weenie.” Q: “What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair?” A: “Roll-AIDS.” Other jokes spread at the time quipped that the AIDS acronym actually stood for one of a number of things, depending on which version of the joke you heard. The answers included: “Already Infected Dick Sucker,” “Adios, Infected Dick Sucker,” and “Another Infected Dick Sucker.” If these are new to you, they shouldn’t be all that surprising. A year before Hudson’s death, the president of American Airlines told attendees at a Republican National Convention breakfast that “gay” stood for “Got AIDS Yet?” These might seem like harmless jokes, but they are widely reflective of real-world discrimination against people living with HIV. As BuzzFeed’s Chris Geidner noted, Rock Hudson’s longtime friend Nancy Reagan refused to grant Hudson a transfer to a military hospital in France that would offer him treatment, as the 59-year-old was ailing on his deathbed. After Hudson first collapsed at the Paris Ritz, he would die just 10 days later. Instead of getting involved, a White House spokesman said that the first couple sent him their best: “President Reagan wished him well and let him know that he and Mrs. Reagan were keeping him in their thoughts and prayers.” Reagan wouldn’t even say the word “AIDS” publicly for another two years. In some ways, we’ve come a long way since the Reagan era: Today, people living with HIV are a protected class under the Americans With Disabilities Act, which grants them equal access to public accommodations and prohibits discrimination on the basis of status. But as the U.N. noted in a 2015 report, people living with HIV continue to be denied healthcare and other services: 1-in-8 HIV-positive individuals aren't getting the care they need based on lingering prejudice. In addition, these people may be expelled from their communities and families. These populations aren’t just being ridiculed and shunned from their communities because of pervasive stigma—or even left to die. In the United States, they’re also criminalized. Currently, 24 states have laws on the books that force the HIV positive to disclose their status to partners—or risk possible jail time. In 2015, a former wrestler at the University of Missouri, Michael Johnson, was sentenced to 30.5 years in prison for lack of disclosure. In the Guardian, Zach Stafford wrote that the “Class A felony that Johnson was convicted under makes exposing a person to HIV the same as murder or child abandonment resulting in death.” If folks like Phil Robertson believe that HIV is a punishment, clearly our justice system is doing little to disabuse Americans of that notion. Currently, there are around 1.2 million Americans living with HIV, and an estimated 1 in 10 don’t know that they’re positive. Nearly a majority (46 percent) of those between the ages of 18 and 64 have never been tested at all—likely due to the low premium our abstinence-only culture places on sexual health, education or prevention. Our sex-negative culture creates folks like Michael Johnson and then locks them away for it. While Sacha Baron Cohen might see himself as a comedy hero for speaking truth to power, his offensive jabs at Donald Trump only reinforce these damaging notions of who contracts HIV, why they become positive, and how we should treat them. Who gets HIV? If you listen to Phil Robertson, it’s gays and moral degenerates, dancing while God rains fire on them. If you listen to RadarOnline, it’s lowlife scum involved in risky, unsafe behaviors. And if you listen to Cohen, it’s the most horrible, hideous human being imaginable: America’s potential megalomaniac in chief. However, no one—not even Donald Trump—deserves HIV. And those who do live with the disease should have their lives treated with greater dignity and respect. Thirty years after Rock Hudson’s death, it’s getting better for people living with HIV all over the world: In 2016, they have access to lifesaving medications like Truvada, which were denied to previous generations. But when it comes to creating a society free of HIV shame or stigma, we clearly have a long way to go.

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Published on March 12, 2016 12:30

Noam Chomksy: “I have never seen such lunatics in the political system”

Professor Chomsky was interviewed in Boston by the writer and activist Simone Chun for the Hankyoreh newspaper. Here is the English translation of the interview, courtesy of Ms. Chun. She was accompanied in her first meeting with Prof. Chomsky in November 2015 (pictured) by Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, which led a historic march across the North-South Korean border last May (full disclosure, Ms. Chun, Ms. Ahn and myself are all affiliated with the Korea Peace Institute). Ms. Chun’s interview recently took place, at Professor Chomsky’s office at MIT. Here is the Q&A. Chun: Do you feel that there will be any significant change in the foreign policy of the United States after President Obama? Chomsky: If Republicans are elected, there could be major changes that will be awful. I have never seen such lunatics in the political system. For instance, Ted Cruz’s response to terrorism is to carpet-bomb everyone. Chun: Would you expect that Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy would be different from President Obama’s? Chomsky: Judging by the record, she is kind of hawkish—much more militant than the centrist democrats, including Obama. Take for instance Libya: she was the one pressing the hardest for bombing, and look at what happened. They not only destroyed the country, but Libya has become the center for jihad all over Africa and the Middle East. It’s a total disaster in every respect, but it does not matter. Look at the so-called global war on terror. It started in 15 years ago with a small cell in a tribal sector in Afghanistan. Now it is all over, and you can understand why. It’s about comparative advantage of force. Chun: How about Bernie Sanders–what do you think his foreign policy will be? Chomsky: He is doing a lot better than I expected, but he doesn’t have much to say about foreign policy. He is a kind of New Deal Democrat and focuses primarily on domestic issues. Chun: Some people in South Korea speculate that if Bernie Sanders gets elected, he may take a non-interventionist position towards foreign policy, which would then give more power to South Korea’s right-wing government. Chomsky: The dynamics could be different. His emphasis on domestic policy might require an aggressive foreign policy. In order to shore up support for domestic policies, he may be forced to attack somebody weak. Chun: Do you believe that Americans would support another war? Chomsky: The public is easily amenable to lies: the more lies there are, the greater the support for war. For instance, when the public was told that Saddam Hussein would attack the U.S., this increased support for the war. Chun: Do you mean that the media fuels lies? Chomsky: The media is uncritical, and their so-called the concept of objectivity translates into keeping everything within the Beltway. However, Iraq was quite different. Here, there were flat-out lies, and they sort of knew it. They were desperately trying to make connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Chun: Do you think that the Iran nuclear deal is a good thing? Chomsky: I don’t think that any deal was needed: Iran was not a threat. Even if Iran were a threat, there was a very easy way to handle it–by establishing a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, which is something that nearly everyone in the world wants. Iran has been calling for it for years, and the Arab countries support it. Everyone except the United States and Israel support it. The U.S. won’t allow it because it means inspecting Israel’s nuclear weapons. The U.S. has continued to block it, and in fact blocked it again just a couple of days ago; it just wasn’t widely reported. Iran’s nuclear program, as U.S. intelligence points out, is deterrent, and the bottom line is that the U.S. and Israel don’t want Iran to have a deterrent. In any case, it is better to have some deal than no deal, but it’s interesting that Obama picked the day of implementing of Iran deal to impose new sanctions on North Korea. Chun: And do you think that the same can be said about North Korea? Chomsky: You can understand why. If North Korea doesn’t have a deterrent, they will be wiped out. Chun: What is the most constructive way to address the nuclear issue in the Korean peninsula? Chomsky: In 2005, there was a very sensible deal between the U.S. and North Korea. This deal would have settled North Korea’s so-called nuclear threat, but was subsequently undermined by George W. Bush, who attacked North Korean banks in Macau and blocked the North’s access to outside the world. Chun: Why does the United States undermine efforts to reach an agreement with North Korea? Chomsky: I don’t think that the United States cares. They just assume that North Korea will soon have nuclear weapons. Chun: Can you elaborate? Chomsky: If you look at the record, the United States has done very little to stop nuclear weapons. As soon as George W. Bush was elected, he did everything to encourage North Korea to act aggressively. In 2005 we were close to a deal, but North Korea has always been a low priority issue for the United States. In fact, look at the entire nuclear weapons strategy of the United States: from the beginning, in the 1950s, the United States didn’t worry much about a nuclear threat. It would have been possible to enter into a treaty with the one potential threat—the Soviet Union—and block development of these weapons. At that time, the Russians were way behind technologically, and Stalin wanted a peace deal, but the U.S. didn’t want to hear the USSR’s offer. The implication is that the U.S. is ready to have a terminal war at any time. Chun: What do you think about U.S. “Pivot to Asia” policy? Chomsky: It is aimed at China. China is already surrounded by hostile powers such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Guam, but the United States wants to build up more tension. For example, few days ago, a B-52 nuclear bomber flew within a couple of miles of China. It is very provocative. Nuclear war ends everything, but the United States always plays with fire. Chun: What do you think about Japan? Do you think Japan is remilitarizing, and if so, does this pose a threat to the region and the world? Chomsky: Yes, Japan is trying very hard, but it is not certain that it will succeed. Take for instance Okinawa. There is no actual military purpose, but the United States insists on maintaining a base there. Chun: As you know, part of my work centers on supporting individual activists in South Korea who do not tend to receive media attention. Your statements of solidarity in support of them enable them to receive much-needed attention by the Korean media. It has been very effective. Chomsky: I hope that my support has been helpful. Is there any hope or mood in Korea in support of Sunshine Policy? Chun: It is difficult due to the incumbent right-wing government. Chomsky: How about South Korean public opinion? Chun: As you know, successive conservative governments have obstructed engagement with the North, and this has greatly deflated the public mood on the matter. Opposition parties remain divided and ineffective, and the current government exercises tight control over the media and represses any activists who would express criticism. South Korea appears to be heading back to the authoritarianism of the 1960s and 1970s. Chomsky: Part of the reason why the United States doesn’t care about North Korea is that the North Korean threat provides justification for the right-wing conservative regime in the South. Chun: Yes, many people argue that the biggest obstacle in dealing with North Korea is South Korean right-wing politics. Chomsky: Relaxation with North Korea would mean conservatives losing power in the South. That’s why, for instance, we have to keep the war on terrorism. Chun: Professor Chomsky, thank you again for your time and your support.

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Published on March 12, 2016 12:30

Sexual transmission of Zika virus more common than previously believed

Meet Zika, the latest virus that turns out to be a sexually transmitted disease. The mosquito-borne pathogen is getting a little extra help from humans who are passing it among themselves via sexual contact. And it is happening a lot more often than scientists previously knew. Earlier this week the World Health Organization announced that transmission of the virus via sexual contact is “more common than we thought.” The U.S. is now feeling that reality firsthand. Yesterday, officials from Florida, the state that has amassed the highest number of travel-related cases of Zika, announced its first case of virus transmission via sexual contact. Officials from New Hampshire announced their own case of sexually transmitted Zika last week and Texas and Colorado have also had similar occurrences. “Documentation of sexual transmission being possible is now proven,” says Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In each instance, a male who traveled to an area with active transmission of the virus returned to the U.S. and passed the virus on to a female who had not traveled—making it easier to tease apart how the woman contracted the virus in the first place. But difficulties understanding how common this mode of transmission is in areas where people also encounter Zika-carrying mosquitoes continue to hinder any efforts to get a better sense of sexual transmission occurrences worldwide. Brian Foy, a Colorado State University researcher who unwittingly transmitted the virus to his wife via sexual contact in 2008, is planning to lead one effort to try to get some answers in Brazil. In a study that is still awaiting federal funding his team plans to administer testing and sexual history questionnaires to both patients in the acute throes of Zika virus and to a control group of patients that instead have chikungunya or dengue—hoping to glean some overarching indications about Zika via sexual transmission. But the study will be far from definitive. “The idea is to conduct this study during the time of year with low levels of mosquito-mediated infection, in the Southern Hemisphere winter,” and to ask these patients about their sexual histories, says Ernesto Marques, an infectious diseases public health researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who is working with Foy. “But I can’t rule out [that these infections are from mosquito bites],” he adds. Getting answers about the incidence of sexually transmitted Zika is essential. “If we spend a lot of money on mosquito vectors and find out most transmission is sexual, then it won’t do anything,” Marques says. “The other issue is we don’t know if the form of transmission of the virus has an implication for congenital disease. Perhaps sexual transmission is more likely to induce or result in congenital disease,” he says. Right now there is no evidence to support or refute that idea but it is important to get that information, he says. Already there is a growing body of literature linking Zika virus with serious birth defects, among them microcephaly. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine last week found that 12 of 42 pregnant Brazilian women who tested positive for Zika—29 percent—had fetal abnormalities that were apparent via ultrasound. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says that the finding is particularly concerning because there will likely be many more birth defects that are not apparent until after birth. It is also “alarming,” he says, that the study found there were issues among women who contracted Zika later in pregnancy, too—not just the first trimester—suggesting there may be Zika-linked problems no matter when the initial infection takes place. The more we learn about Zika virus “the worse things seem to get,” Fauci says. Ongoing studies suggest that, at least in some areas, the mosquitoes carrying Zika have significant resistance to common insecticides. And Zika’s links with the autoimmune disease Guillain–Barré syndrome are only getting stronger. Work published last month in The Lancet documenting links between Guillain–Barré and an earlier Zika outbreak in French Polynesia is “highly suggestive,” according to Frieden, but it is not yet definitive. By the end of the month his agency will be publishing work replicating those findings in partnership with Brazilian public health authorities, he says. For now, the CDC is trying to help control the virus in Puerto Rico where it is already actively spreading via mosquito bite. Ahead of the U.S. territory’s rainy months—and likely Zika explosion—the agency is handing out Zika prevention kits there that include condoms, insecticides and information for women about how to protect themselves against the virus.

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Published on March 12, 2016 12:00

March 11, 2016

Gordon Gekko for Bernie: Inspiration for “Wall Street” villain endorses Sanders for president

Gordon "Greed is Good" Gekko remains an enduring symbol of Wall Street greed, corporate lawlessness and 1980s excess. That’s why it’s pretty surprising that the guy on whom the Wall Street character was based—former corporate raider Asher Edelman—says Bernie Sanders is the strongest presidential candidate. Appearing on CNBC’s "Fast Money" this morning, Edelman responded immediately when asked who he thought the best candidate for the economy would be. “Bernie Sanders,” Edelman said, without missing a beat. “No question.” Asked to elaborate, Edelman stated his case. “Well, I think it’s quite simple," he began. "If you look at something called ‘velocity of money’—you guys know what that is, I presume—that means how much gets spent and turns around. When you have the top one percent getting money, they spend five, 10 percent of what they earn. When you have the lower end of the economy getting money, they spend 100, or 110 percent of what they earn. As you’ve had a transfer of wealth to the top, and a transfer of income to the top, you have a shrinking consumer base, basically, and you have a shrinking velocity of money. Bernie is the only person out there who I think is talking at all about both fiscal stimulation and banking rules that will get the banks to begin to generate lending again as opposed to speculation. So from an economic point of view, it’s straightforward.” Watch the clip of Edelman explaining himself, and big-upping Sanders, below.

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Published on March 11, 2016 17:00

“It was like an overdose of porn”: Chris Offutt reflects on writing about his family’s big secret, after his father’s death

Ever since he burst onto the literary scene almost 25 years ago, writer Chris Offutt has been offering lyrical and insightful looks into the lives of working people. His latest book gives us a peek into a world of work few of us might ever see: pornography literature at the height of its heydey in the ’60s and ’70s. Even better, the man at work here is Offutt’s father, Andrew Offutt, who wrote about 400 porn novels over the course of six decades. Andrew Offutt also wrote science fiction, fantasy novels and thrillers. The memoir that recounts this working man’s epic output is “My Father, the Pornographer,” and it is already being hailed by the likes of author Michael Chabon as a masterpiece. In a glowing review, the New York Times called it “unexpectedly moving”; the Washington Post says it is “touching” and “haunting,” while a reviewer at the Boston Globe proclaims it “One of the most sensitive, nuanced examinations of father and son relationships I’ve read.” “My Father, the Pornographer” is much more than a look at a man who is regarded as one of the most prolific writers of pornography. In the book, the pornographer’s son carefully goes through his father’s astonishing legacy: more than 1,800 pounds of writing. Meanwhile, he also recounts his childhood with a man whom he found terrifying. “My father was a brilliant man, a true iconoclast,” Offutt writes, “fiercely self-reliant, a dark genius, cruel, selfish, and eternally optimistic.” His memoir is a tender and compassionate book that takes on a specific premise while revealing the universal complexities of child-parent relationships and the struggle of having family members whom we must accept can never love us properly. Chris Offutt is at the top of his game with "My Father, the Pornographer," delivering on the acclaim he received in 1992 with his debut, the widely read short story collection “Kentucky Straight.” Since then he’s published a novel, “The Good Brother” (1997), another story collection, “Out of the Woods” (1999), and two other memoirs: “The Same River Twice” (1993) and “No Heroes” (2002), as well as a host of writing in some of the country’s best magazines and anthologies. Over the last few years he has turned to television writing and has written episodes for shows such as “True Blood” and “Weeds.” Offutt recently sat down with Salon contributor Silas House for a conversation that is compelling and deeply moving, just like his remarkable new book itself. Early on in the book you recount a moment when your father tells you that he didn’t know he’d given you a childhood “terrible enough to make you a writer.” The rest of the book recounts the fear, dread and loneliness you experienced as a child. Did what he defined as a “terrible childhood” make you the writer you became? No. Dad's comment was more about his view of his own childhood than mine. He had a Freudian view of psychology: if this, then that. He believed he was unhappy as a child and that in turn made him a writer. When I got in print he assumed the same about me. I included that anecdote because it was such a surprising response. I'd wanted something else from him--approval or pride--but he made my book about him. Both about his childhood and his own perceived failure as a father. It was one of the two times he'd admitted his own culpability to anything. Do you believe that artists—whether they be writers, or actors, or whatever—need to have experienced real trouble in their lives to excel at their art, or is that just a stereotype? I believe anyone can do anything they want. There's no recipe for being a writer, actor, composer, or painter. And there's certainly no prerequisites. You just have to want it bad enough, and be willing to make very real sacrifices to get it. Most career criminals have experienced real trouble. Does that make them better crooks? Many of our politicians come from a background of privilege, but turn out to be terrible at their job. There exists a glamorized view of hardship and artistic achievement. Young people who believe this can easily become self-destructive in their desire to "suffer for their art.” They think they need hardship. But we all have hardship in our own way. Genuine suffering can lead to wisdom. It can also lead to despair and cruelty, drug addiction and violence. Artists are people who manage to take all this and turn it into something new. They make something. All artists excel for the same reasons: they are disciplined, diligent, and possess endurance. In order to develop artistic skill, you must have time to do so. Due to circumstances, some people simply don't have the time and energy. Others who do, squander it. While the book’s title explicitly points to this being your father’s story, your mother is just as powerful a character throughout the memoir, and passages about her are often very revealing and sometimes difficult truths. Since she is still living, did these passages lead to uncomfortable moments with her? Not really. Mom was much more reticent about Dad when he was alive. After he died, we had very frank and open conversations. She typed all of Dad's final manuscripts for submission to the publisher. She also knew that she'd asked a lot of me as a child--to take care of my younger siblings while she typed and took care of Dad. Mom was my primary source, other than Dad's massive archive. I consulted her regularly on my progress. She read the book in galley form before publication. I was concerned about her response, fearful that she might not like it. What she said surprised me: "It made me miss Andy." Do you think she was held back in what all she could have accomplished by being deeply in love with this all-encompassing man who was your father? No, I don't think so. Mom believed being married to Dad enhanced her life. She had four kids and didn't have to work outside the home. She went to college in her forties and fifties, taught college and worked for a lawyer. Due to Dad's work, Mom traveled to SF (science-fiction) conventions and had friendships with diverse people. Mom is not a particularly ambitious person. She was born in the Depression and came of the age in the 1950s. She was a product of the conventions of the era--she wanted to be a good housewife and mother. She did her best. At the same time, I've never seen her happier than the past few years. So do you chalk that new kind of happiness up to a new kind of freedom for her, or just a new phase in her life? Not a feeling of being released from him? I think it's a combination of things. She'd never lived alone and is still excited about that. She lived with her father until she got married, then with her husband until he died. Her own mother died very young, and Mom took care of her sister and father. Then she took care of her children and husband. At 78 she was released from the responsibility of having to look after others. Dad's secret life as a pornographer meant she had to keep that secret as well. I grew up in Rowan County, which was in the news last year because the county court clerk refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. I know the clerk [Kim Davis] and knew her mother. They knew my parents. This level of conservative thought was part of the reason Mom and Dad kept their porn enterprise secret. Leaving that area released her from the pressure of maintaining secrecy. The first thing she noticed when she moved to Oxford, Mississippi, was that she could order a glass of wine at lunch in a restaurant and nobody thought anything of it. She and I are probably the only people in America who moved to Mississippi for the more progressive politics! Your relationship with your mother comes through beautifully in the book. In many ways the memoir is largely about the relationships between parents and children. So there are many universal scenes throughout the book. In one powerful scene where you write on the wall of your parents’ home as an adult in your fifties, you think “If Dad found out, he wouldn’t like it, and I’d get in trouble.” Do we ever get over trying to please our parents? In my case, it was nearly impossible to please my father. Trying to avoid making him mad was always a bigger priority. This was due to fear. I'm not convinced that fear is a good motivation for trying to please anyone--parents, children, partner, friend, or neighbor. If you're afraid of someone, you can appease but rarely please. When I wrote instructions on the basement wall for the plumber, I experienced a very childlike element of sheer defiance. Embarrassing to admit. Perhaps on some level I knew that Dad would never know. He couldn't get down the steps. But that anxiousness is well earned. I mean, your father does some pretty unforgivable things—chief among them is the fact that he took the money from a college fund your aunt and grandmother had set up for you and your siblings and used it for himself. He sold your comic book collection. He cashed your brother’s college financial-aid check. Yet you still went to him when he was sick, and you paid his literary archives the respect of delving into them when others might have just lit a match. Is the fact that you and your siblings even managed to keep speaking to him a testament to the powerful bond between child and parent? I went to see him because my mother called and asked me to come home. Dad was hospitalized and she wasn't sure why. She called me because I'm the oldest and she'd always relied on me. I helped her deal with doctors and the hospital, and arranged for a wheelchair ramp to be built at home. Dad was extremely dramatic and prone to grandiosity. After his own mother died, he sent me a "Secret Will" that put me in charge of his literary archive. I took on that task because none of my siblings wanted to. They wanted to destroy it and my mother didn't care one way or another. So with that in mind, do you think you took on the task and were more curious about it than your siblings mostly because you’re a writer? And is that probably why he wanted you to be the one who did it? Or was there another reason at play? Dad wasn't close to any of us, but he talked to me about his work more than he did to them. I believe he feared their judgment. I was more curious about Dad and his work than they were. We all knew that. Dad made no arrangements for his archive. He just put me in charge. It was an odd form of posthumous trust. Going through it was a way to learn about my father that he never allowed while he was alive. As a writer, I believed that Dad deserved a bibliography. The book evolved from my efforts to assemble it. After finishing the book, I moved all 1,800 pounds to a storage unit. I had no interest in keeping the material in my house. Would there have been some satisfaction in putting a match to the literary archives? In destroying them instead of preserving them? Yes, absolutely. It would have saved me a lot of stress and let me finish the novel I set aside to deal with his death. But it would have been a grand gesture, one I'd have probably come to regret. Plus, it would have taken a long time. Stacks of paper don't burn readily. I'd have to dig a hole and douse it all with kerosene and hope the wind didn't kick up. There is a common thought that a streak of meanness or antisocial behavior is even more rampant amongst geniuses. You describe your father as both a genius and as cruel. Are those two things related, or do we just excuse the cruelty of geniuses more because of their genius? No, I don't think being cruel and a genius are related. There are many kinds of genius: physical, visual, literary, scientific, etc. Most writers are social misfits as children. The world of literature provides a healthy escape and the next step is to create those worlds oneself. The occupation requires years of time spent alone in a room, which can erode social skills. It is necessarily a selfish occupation. Conversely, you have to turn away from the world to write about it. Cruelty is not a side effect of being a genius, or of artistic achievement. It is often an expression of poor self-esteem and inner pain. People lash out because they are scared or hurt. I think it was both for my father. Some part of him also enjoyed being cruel. I don't know why. Dad often referred to himself as the happiest man in the world. I don't think that was true. He spent 15 years as a salesman, and I believe he became adept at selling himself on whatever he needed to believe at the time. This book is also about grief, although most of the media around it has centered more on the sensational aspects of your father being a pornographer, while overlooking this fact. In one way, I lost my father many years ago. I understood that he was damaged somehow, that he couldn't change or improve, would not visit his children. I was able to accept that I'd never have the father I wished I'd had. That was a more profound grief than his death. Would you say, then, that you’ve had a long bout of grief since accepting that you’d never have the father you wanted? That, in some way, you’ve had a grief-haunted life because of that realization? Most people don't have the parents they might have preferred. And some parents don't get the kids they prefer, either. For both parties, the best route is acceptance, not grief. Like you, I grew up in the hills of Appalachia. It is a hard world, with high unemployment, poor education and lack of opportunity. That results in dire social problems. By the time I was 30 I knew about 25 people my age who'd died. That's not the case in all environments. If I'm grief-haunted, it's because I can't comfortably live in the most beautiful part of the world. So which allowed you to work through the grief of losing your father better: dealing with his eighteen hundred pounds of written legacy or writing your own book about that process? Dealing with his archive and writing the book are inseparable. I didn't intend to write a book, but put together a bibliography. None of his material was organized. To keep track, I started taking notes about his work. Then I took notes about the notes, and added comments. It was like a private form of Midrash. Pretty soon those notes evolved to narrative. By the time I completed his bibliography, I had a 400-page manuscript. I then cut 150 pages and tried to make a coherent story. His death meant he could no longer hurt me. That in turn supplied a compassion and generosity toward him that ultimately benefitted the book. So the book allowed you to look at your relationship to him with more complexity than you had before? No, not the book so much as the archive itself. Dad saved everything he wrote going back 60 years. Most adult children don't have the degree of unfiltered access to a parent that I had. He didn't save it for me, he just kept it all. Going through it and writing the book didn't change our relationship, or our history. But it gave me a great deal of insight into my father, which in turn provided some about myself. Throughout the memoir, you find comfort in nature. At one point you tell us that you have even recorded the birdsong of your native hills to comfort you in hard times. A couple of times you realize that the family members you are most devoted to are the hills you grew up with. What is there in the woods that offers a balm to you? Beauty and peace. Tranquility and calmness. There is nothing prettier than light in the woods, wildflowers, the sound of a creek and birds. I feel safe in the woods, safer when I'm alone. Some people find that solace in church, others by listening to music, or reading quietly by a fireplace. For me it's always been nature. Yesterday I took a long walk in the woods behind my house. I've been there dozens of times, but each time I see something new. Nature is brutal and relentless, but it is also gorgeous and balanced. I came home dirty, wet and happy. I've learned more from being alone in the woods than anything else. I can't fully explain it. One thing that is so interesting—and universal—about this book is the way that even while we are striving to not become like our parents, we unconsciously do. Can you talk about that a bit? Because I was the oldest, I didn't have an older brother or sister to emulate, and we didn't live near any family. As a boy, I naturally copied my father. His opinions were always strident, extreme and self-righteous. Not much nuance. He was a strong thinker, but mainly an either/or thinker. During my teenage years, I began to rebel. I didn't want to be anything like my father and rejected many of his values. This let me form my own opinions and values. I believe all this is typical of many people. When I had sons, I was determined not to raise them the way my father had raised me. At the same time, I often felt the impulse to respond to them the same way Dad did to me. I tried to resist it. The result is that I'm very close with my sons. Writing this book required a deep examination of my father's mind. I had to "enter" his way of thinking at times. And yes, we are much alike. Same occupation of writer. A similar preference toward solitude. For nearly three years I worked 10 to 12 hours a day to the exclusion of most else. That's how Dad worked, and now I was doing the same on a book about him. Dad was obsessed with sex and porn. At a certain point I realized that I was obsessed with Dad's obsession with sex and porn. It was a strange moment and I didn't like it much. At the same time, we are also very different. My wife and sons consistently pointed this out. I needed to hear it. Another parallel between the two of you is that your father started writing porn to support his children and you turned to writing for Hollywood to put your sons through college. Which is the darkest territory to enter: the porn scene of the ’60s and ’70s inhabited by your father, or modern Hollywood? The porn market exploded in the 1970s. Consumer demand had never been higher. Publishers needed content, which meant they needed writers. Dad exploited that demand for money. In the 2000s the television market exploded in a similar fashion. Today there are more networks and means of distribution than ever before. Consumer demand has never been higher. And there is an incredible need for content and writers. I exploited that demand for money. Neither territory is dark, per se. It's how people react to it. My first response was to walk everywhere because driving in L.A. scared me. Hollywood is an intensely alluring place. It requires a collaborative effort, which I enjoyed. After years of writing alone in a room, it was nice to have people around, and most are incredibly talented. The stakes are very high--money, status, power--and that influences all decisions. Working there was intoxicating but draining. I learned a lot. This is a memoir about pornography, but your book never becomes dirty—it’s gritty, but never gratuitous. Why did you decide to not include excerpts of his pornographic sex scenes? I wanted the book to be about my father, and our relationship. That he wrote porn made him more unusual than most fathers. That he did it in eastern Kentucky made the story, and my childhood, equally unusual. I believed that including excerpts of his porn would bring down the overall tone, and undermine what I was trying to do. Besides, if people want to read porn, they can do it on their phones! The most disturbing sections of the book are the ones about your father’s fantasies about torturing and demeaning women. Those passages are obviously the hardest on you, as his son, too. Have you come to terms with that writing of his? Not really. It was the biggest and worst surprise in his archive. Reading it or looking at the comic books he created made me feel terrible--physically and emotionally. He didn't understand his own impulses, and at times expressed shame and confusion about them. But he followed them to the extreme. It was a kind of addictive habit that fastened on him young. His work didn't evolve much, didn't progress. He got better at it, but his ideas became more extreme instead of interesting or deeper. He thought there was something wrong with him, that he couldn't help it. One thing that surprised me--I wound up with a kind of sympathy for a person, any person, who had such awful violent thoughts and imagery in his head. That it was my own father made it worse. I’d venture to say that your father’s writing has received more mainstream media attention because of your one book about him that the more than 400 he wrote himself. How do you think he would feel about that? I think Dad wanted people to know how prolific he'd been. I'm speculating after the fact. My mother recently told me that Dad would have loved the attention. I believe Dad judged himself very harshly and assumed everyone else did, too. He wanted to be known for his work, but didn't want anyone to know he'd done it. A very difficult spot to be in. When he died, all his books were out of print, every writer's worst nightmare. It's been the fate of many genre writers, some undeservedly so. I think it made him sad and angry, which in turn made him more isolated. Perhaps that resentment led to the extreme violence in his later work. But to answer the question, Dad probably would like the attention but figure out a way to be angry and resentful about it, too. How much of an emotional and physical toll did writing this book take on you? Well, as we say in the hills, it plumb wore me out. I was exhausted in every way, and to a certain extent I am still recovering from it. To be objective about his work I had to create a distance from myself and the content. That distance crept into my life. I became distant from myself. I gained weight and started smoking again, then quit and started back six times. For a while I had absolutely no interest in sex whatsoever. It was like an overdose of porn. I put everything into the book, which meant it took everything out of me. After finishing it, I felt relieved, a little lighter in every way, unburdened.Ever since he burst onto the literary scene almost 25 years ago, writer Chris Offutt has been offering lyrical and insightful looks into the lives of working people. His latest book gives us a peek into a world of work few of us might ever see: pornography literature at the height of its heydey in the ’60s and ’70s. Even better, the man at work here is Offutt’s father, Andrew Offutt, who wrote about 400 porn novels over the course of six decades. Andrew Offutt also wrote science fiction, fantasy novels and thrillers. The memoir that recounts this working man’s epic output is “My Father, the Pornographer,” and it is already being hailed by the likes of author Michael Chabon as a masterpiece. In a glowing review, the New York Times called it “unexpectedly moving”; the Washington Post says it is “touching” and “haunting,” while a reviewer at the Boston Globe proclaims it “One of the most sensitive, nuanced examinations of father and son relationships I’ve read.” “My Father, the Pornographer” is much more than a look at a man who is regarded as one of the most prolific writers of pornography. In the book, the pornographer’s son carefully goes through his father’s astonishing legacy: more than 1,800 pounds of writing. Meanwhile, he also recounts his childhood with a man whom he found terrifying. “My father was a brilliant man, a true iconoclast,” Offutt writes, “fiercely self-reliant, a dark genius, cruel, selfish, and eternally optimistic.” His memoir is a tender and compassionate book that takes on a specific premise while revealing the universal complexities of child-parent relationships and the struggle of having family members whom we must accept can never love us properly. Chris Offutt is at the top of his game with "My Father, the Pornographer," delivering on the acclaim he received in 1992 with his debut, the widely read short story collection “Kentucky Straight.” Since then he’s published a novel, “The Good Brother” (1997), another story collection, “Out of the Woods” (1999), and two other memoirs: “The Same River Twice” (1993) and “No Heroes” (2002), as well as a host of writing in some of the country’s best magazines and anthologies. Over the last few years he has turned to television writing and has written episodes for shows such as “True Blood” and “Weeds.” Offutt recently sat down with Salon contributor Silas House for a conversation that is compelling and deeply moving, just like his remarkable new book itself. Early on in the book you recount a moment when your father tells you that he didn’t know he’d given you a childhood “terrible enough to make you a writer.” The rest of the book recounts the fear, dread and loneliness you experienced as a child. Did what he defined as a “terrible childhood” make you the writer you became? No. Dad's comment was more about his view of his own childhood than mine. He had a Freudian view of psychology: if this, then that. He believed he was unhappy as a child and that in turn made him a writer. When I got in print he assumed the same about me. I included that anecdote because it was such a surprising response. I'd wanted something else from him--approval or pride--but he made my book about him. Both about his childhood and his own perceived failure as a father. It was one of the two times he'd admitted his own culpability to anything. Do you believe that artists—whether they be writers, or actors, or whatever—need to have experienced real trouble in their lives to excel at their art, or is that just a stereotype? I believe anyone can do anything they want. There's no recipe for being a writer, actor, composer, or painter. And there's certainly no prerequisites. You just have to want it bad enough, and be willing to make very real sacrifices to get it. Most career criminals have experienced real trouble. Does that make them better crooks? Many of our politicians come from a background of privilege, but turn out to be terrible at their job. There exists a glamorized view of hardship and artistic achievement. Young people who believe this can easily become self-destructive in their desire to "suffer for their art.” They think they need hardship. But we all have hardship in our own way. Genuine suffering can lead to wisdom. It can also lead to despair and cruelty, drug addiction and violence. Artists are people who manage to take all this and turn it into something new. They make something. All artists excel for the same reasons: they are disciplined, diligent, and possess endurance. In order to develop artistic skill, you must have time to do so. Due to circumstances, some people simply don't have the time and energy. Others who do, squander it. While the book’s title explicitly points to this being your father’s story, your mother is just as powerful a character throughout the memoir, and passages about her are often very revealing and sometimes difficult truths. Since she is still living, did these passages lead to uncomfortable moments with her? Not really. Mom was much more reticent about Dad when he was alive. After he died, we had very frank and open conversations. She typed all of Dad's final manuscripts for submission to the publisher. She also knew that she'd asked a lot of me as a child--to take care of my younger siblings while she typed and took care of Dad. Mom was my primary source, other than Dad's massive archive. I consulted her regularly on my progress. She read the book in galley form before publication. I was concerned about her response, fearful that she might not like it. What she said surprised me: "It made me miss Andy." Do you think she was held back in what all she could have accomplished by being deeply in love with this all-encompassing man who was your father? No, I don't think so. Mom believed being married to Dad enhanced her life. She had four kids and didn't have to work outside the home. She went to college in her forties and fifties, taught college and worked for a lawyer. Due to Dad's work, Mom traveled to SF (science-fiction) conventions and had friendships with diverse people. Mom is not a particularly ambitious person. She was born in the Depression and came of the age in the 1950s. She was a product of the conventions of the era--she wanted to be a good housewife and mother. She did her best. At the same time, I've never seen her happier than the past few years. So do you chalk that new kind of happiness up to a new kind of freedom for her, or just a new phase in her life? Not a feeling of being released from him? I think it's a combination of things. She'd never lived alone and is still excited about that. She lived with her father until she got married, then with her husband until he died. Her own mother died very young, and Mom took care of her sister and father. Then she took care of her children and husband. At 78 she was released from the responsibility of having to look after others. Dad's secret life as a pornographer meant she had to keep that secret as well. I grew up in Rowan County, which was in the news last year because the county court clerk refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. I know the clerk [Kim Davis] and knew her mother. They knew my parents. This level of conservative thought was part of the reason Mom and Dad kept their porn enterprise secret. Leaving that area released her from the pressure of maintaining secrecy. The first thing she noticed when she moved to Oxford, Mississippi, was that she could order a glass of wine at lunch in a restaurant and nobody thought anything of it. She and I are probably the only people in America who moved to Mississippi for the more progressive politics! Your relationship with your mother comes through beautifully in the book. In many ways the memoir is largely about the relationships between parents and children. So there are many universal scenes throughout the book. In one powerful scene where you write on the wall of your parents’ home as an adult in your fifties, you think “If Dad found out, he wouldn’t like it, and I’d get in trouble.” Do we ever get over trying to please our parents? In my case, it was nearly impossible to please my father. Trying to avoid making him mad was always a bigger priority. This was due to fear. I'm not convinced that fear is a good motivation for trying to please anyone--parents, children, partner, friend, or neighbor. If you're afraid of someone, you can appease but rarely please. When I wrote instructions on the basement wall for the plumber, I experienced a very childlike element of sheer defiance. Embarrassing to admit. Perhaps on some level I knew that Dad would never know. He couldn't get down the steps. But that anxiousness is well earned. I mean, your father does some pretty unforgivable things—chief among them is the fact that he took the money from a college fund your aunt and grandmother had set up for you and your siblings and used it for himself. He sold your comic book collection. He cashed your brother’s college financial-aid check. Yet you still went to him when he was sick, and you paid his literary archives the respect of delving into them when others might have just lit a match. Is the fact that you and your siblings even managed to keep speaking to him a testament to the powerful bond between child and parent? I went to see him because my mother called and asked me to come home. Dad was hospitalized and she wasn't sure why. She called me because I'm the oldest and she'd always relied on me. I helped her deal with doctors and the hospital, and arranged for a wheelchair ramp to be built at home. Dad was extremely dramatic and prone to grandiosity. After his own mother died, he sent me a "Secret Will" that put me in charge of his literary archive. I took on that task because none of my siblings wanted to. They wanted to destroy it and my mother didn't care one way or another. So with that in mind, do you think you took on the task and were more curious about it than your siblings mostly because you’re a writer? And is that probably why he wanted you to be the one who did it? Or was there another reason at play? Dad wasn't close to any of us, but he talked to me about his work more than he did to them. I believe he feared their judgment. I was more curious about Dad and his work than they were. We all knew that. Dad made no arrangements for his archive. He just put me in charge. It was an odd form of posthumous trust. Going through it was a way to learn about my father that he never allowed while he was alive. As a writer, I believed that Dad deserved a bibliography. The book evolved from my efforts to assemble it. After finishing the book, I moved all 1,800 pounds to a storage unit. I had no interest in keeping the material in my house. Would there have been some satisfaction in putting a match to the literary archives? In destroying them instead of preserving them? Yes, absolutely. It would have saved me a lot of stress and let me finish the novel I set aside to deal with his death. But it would have been a grand gesture, one I'd have probably come to regret. Plus, it would have taken a long time. Stacks of paper don't burn readily. I'd have to dig a hole and douse it all with kerosene and hope the wind didn't kick up. There is a common thought that a streak of meanness or antisocial behavior is even more rampant amongst geniuses. You describe your father as both a genius and as cruel. Are those two things related, or do we just excuse the cruelty of geniuses more because of their genius? No, I don't think being cruel and a genius are related. There are many kinds of genius: physical, visual, literary, scientific, etc. Most writers are social misfits as children. The world of literature provides a healthy escape and the next step is to create those worlds oneself. The occupation requires years of time spent alone in a room, which can erode social skills. It is necessarily a selfish occupation. Conversely, you have to turn away from the world to write about it. Cruelty is not a side effect of being a genius, or of artistic achievement. It is often an expression of poor self-esteem and inner pain. People lash out because they are scared or hurt. I think it was both for my father. Some part of him also enjoyed being cruel. I don't know why. Dad often referred to himself as the happiest man in the world. I don't think that was true. He spent 15 years as a salesman, and I believe he became adept at selling himself on whatever he needed to believe at the time. This book is also about grief, although most of the media around it has centered more on the sensational aspects of your father being a pornographer, while overlooking this fact. In one way, I lost my father many years ago. I understood that he was damaged somehow, that he couldn't change or improve, would not visit his children. I was able to accept that I'd never have the father I wished I'd had. That was a more profound grief than his death. Would you say, then, that you’ve had a long bout of grief since accepting that you’d never have the father you wanted? That, in some way, you’ve had a grief-haunted life because of that realization? Most people don't have the parents they might have preferred. And some parents don't get the kids they prefer, either. For both parties, the best route is acceptance, not grief. Like you, I grew up in the hills of Appalachia. It is a hard world, with high unemployment, poor education and lack of opportunity. That results in dire social problems. By the time I was 30 I knew about 25 people my age who'd died. That's not the case in all environments. If I'm grief-haunted, it's because I can't comfortably live in the most beautiful part of the world. So which allowed you to work through the grief of losing your father better: dealing with his eighteen hundred pounds of written legacy or writing your own book about that process? Dealing with his archive and writing the book are inseparable. I didn't intend to write a book, but put together a bibliography. None of his material was organized. To keep track, I started taking notes about his work. Then I took notes about the notes, and added comments. It was like a private form of Midrash. Pretty soon those notes evolved to narrative. By the time I completed his bibliography, I had a 400-page manuscript. I then cut 150 pages and tried to make a coherent story. His death meant he could no longer hurt me. That in turn supplied a compassion and generosity toward him that ultimately benefitted the book. So the book allowed you to look at your relationship to him with more complexity than you had before? No, not the book so much as the archive itself. Dad saved everything he wrote going back 60 years. Most adult children don't have the degree of unfiltered access to a parent that I had. He didn't save it for me, he just kept it all. Going through it and writing the book didn't change our relationship, or our history. But it gave me a great deal of insight into my father, which in turn provided some about myself. Throughout the memoir, you find comfort in nature. At one point you tell us that you have even recorded the birdsong of your native hills to comfort you in hard times. A couple of times you realize that the family members you are most devoted to are the hills you grew up with. What is there in the woods that offers a balm to you? Beauty and peace. Tranquility and calmness. There is nothing prettier than light in the woods, wildflowers, the sound of a creek and birds. I feel safe in the woods, safer when I'm alone. Some people find that solace in church, others by listening to music, or reading quietly by a fireplace. For me it's always been nature. Yesterday I took a long walk in the woods behind my house. I've been there dozens of times, but each time I see something new. Nature is brutal and relentless, but it is also gorgeous and balanced. I came home dirty, wet and happy. I've learned more from being alone in the woods than anything else. I can't fully explain it. One thing that is so interesting—and universal—about this book is the way that even while we are striving to not become like our parents, we unconsciously do. Can you talk about that a bit? Because I was the oldest, I didn't have an older brother or sister to emulate, and we didn't live near any family. As a boy, I naturally copied my father. His opinions were always strident, extreme and self-righteous. Not much nuance. He was a strong thinker, but mainly an either/or thinker. During my teenage years, I began to rebel. I didn't want to be anything like my father and rejected many of his values. This let me form my own opinions and values. I believe all this is typical of many people. When I had sons, I was determined not to raise them the way my father had raised me. At the same time, I often felt the impulse to respond to them the same way Dad did to me. I tried to resist it. The result is that I'm very close with my sons. Writing this book required a deep examination of my father's mind. I had to "enter" his way of thinking at times. And yes, we are much alike. Same occupation of writer. A similar preference toward solitude. For nearly three years I worked 10 to 12 hours a day to the exclusion of most else. That's how Dad worked, and now I was doing the same on a book about him. Dad was obsessed with sex and porn. At a certain point I realized that I was obsessed with Dad's obsession with sex and porn. It was a strange moment and I didn't like it much. At the same time, we are also very different. My wife and sons consistently pointed this out. I needed to hear it. Another parallel between the two of you is that your father started writing porn to support his children and you turned to writing for Hollywood to put your sons through college. Which is the darkest territory to enter: the porn scene of the ’60s and ’70s inhabited by your father, or modern Hollywood? The porn market exploded in the 1970s. Consumer demand had never been higher. Publishers needed content, which meant they needed writers. Dad exploited that demand for money. In the 2000s the television market exploded in a similar fashion. Today there are more networks and means of distribution than ever before. Consumer demand has never been higher. And there is an incredible need for content and writers. I exploited that demand for money. Neither territory is dark, per se. It's how people react to it. My first response was to walk everywhere because driving in L.A. scared me. Hollywood is an intensely alluring place. It requires a collaborative effort, which I enjoyed. After years of writing alone in a room, it was nice to have people around, and most are incredibly talented. The stakes are very high--money, status, power--and that influences all decisions. Working there was intoxicating but draining. I learned a lot. This is a memoir about pornography, but your book never becomes dirty—it’s gritty, but never gratuitous. Why did you decide to not include excerpts of his pornographic sex scenes? I wanted the book to be about my father, and our relationship. That he wrote porn made him more unusual than most fathers. That he did it in eastern Kentucky made the story, and my childhood, equally unusual. I believed that including excerpts of his porn would bring down the overall tone, and undermine what I was trying to do. Besides, if people want to read porn, they can do it on their phones! The most disturbing sections of the book are the ones about your father’s fantasies about torturing and demeaning women. Those passages are obviously the hardest on you, as his son, too. Have you come to terms with that writing of his? Not really. It was the biggest and worst surprise in his archive. Reading it or looking at the comic books he created made me feel terrible--physically and emotionally. He didn't understand his own impulses, and at times expressed shame and confusion about them. But he followed them to the extreme. It was a kind of addictive habit that fastened on him young. His work didn't evolve much, didn't progress. He got better at it, but his ideas became more extreme instead of interesting or deeper. He thought there was something wrong with him, that he couldn't help it. One thing that surprised me--I wound up with a kind of sympathy for a person, any person, who had such awful violent thoughts and imagery in his head. That it was my own father made it worse. I’d venture to say that your father’s writing has received more mainstream media attention because of your one book about him that the more than 400 he wrote himself. How do you think he would feel about that? I think Dad wanted people to know how prolific he'd been. I'm speculating after the fact. My mother recently told me that Dad would have loved the attention. I believe Dad judged himself very harshly and assumed everyone else did, too. He wanted to be known for his work, but didn't want anyone to know he'd done it. A very difficult spot to be in. When he died, all his books were out of print, every writer's worst nightmare. It's been the fate of many genre writers, some undeservedly so. I think it made him sad and angry, which in turn made him more isolated. Perhaps that resentment led to the extreme violence in his later work. But to answer the question, Dad probably would like the attention but figure out a way to be angry and resentful about it, too. How much of an emotional and physical toll did writing this book take on you? Well, as we say in the hills, it plumb wore me out. I was exhausted in every way, and to a certain extent I am still recovering from it. To be objective about his work I had to create a distance from myself and the content. That distance crept into my life. I became distant from myself. I gained weight and started smoking again, then quit and started back six times. For a while I had absolutely no interest in sex whatsoever. It was like an overdose of porn. I put everything into the book, which meant it took everything out of me. After finishing it, I felt relieved, a little lighter in every way, unburdened.