Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 838

Tay-Sachs couldn’t break us: My story of sex, love and grief

The first time my husband and I had sex with a condom, I thought it was great. Easier, less messy, a change up from the norm. Win-win for me. I didn’t particularly like condoms: the feel, the smell, the timeout in the heat of the moment while fumbling over a loudly crackling wrapper. How romantic. And I’m sure my husband was no fan of them, either, but it did make it better for me once we were done. He’d just pull it off and toss it in the trash. I didn’t have to lie there waiting for him to throw me his T-shirt to clean up with; I could just happily roll over and drift off to sleep. 

There was only one problem with this scenario--we weren’t choosing to use condoms; we needed them, which made them feel less like a novelty, a change-up from the norm, and more like a reminder of what we were now facing, and how, in so many ways, our relationship—our sex life--would never be the same.

In 2009, my husband Loren and I had been happily married for six and a half years. Our marriage was loving, committed and stable. We had two beautiful daughters, Skylar, 5, and Miss Elliott, 10 months, when we learned that we were carriers of Tay-Sachs disease. We had no idea this genetic mutation existed in our lineage or that we had passed it on to our youngest daughter, who at this point was beginning to show signs of missing her milestones as she grew. Watching my seemingly healthy infant unable to master age-appropriate tasks such as crawling, holding her bottle, or imitating our speech, I suspected something much more was going on besides the usual variances in development, and unfortunately, I was right.  With no treatment or cure, this neurodegenerative disorder would rob her of all of her physical and mental functioning before finally taking her life at the age of 4.

You might think that when a couple loses a child to a horrible and incurable disease, when a couple must face the excruciating loss of this person they have made and love beyond reason or description, sex simply stops, that sexual connection is not a blip on their radar, let alone even possible in the midst of such grief. And of course, for us, that was the case. When Miss Elliott passed away in 2012, I felt  lost, numb, nothing but a shell of my former self. It was hard to see any future at all, to conceptualize one without her. We didn’t know where to go from there, or even who we were anymore. But gradually, over time, I realized that beneath and above and around this pain was my love for my husband, that this love, far from perishing with our daughter, was still very much alive.

That first time we had sex after her diagnosis, I was full of conflicting emotions. It was awkward, as it had been a full month since we were intimate, the longest period in our relationship. But it was also comforting, being with him, holding each other, sharing an intimacy and sorrow mixed together the way only the two of us could understand. And it scared me to consider the future and the potential consequences of what should have otherwise seemed routine at this point in our lives: sex as a married couple.

We’ve had our share of odds to overcome in our relationship over time; we married young, eloping across state lines. We had career changes, moves across the country, children, deaths in the family, and through it all we remained committed to each other. It may be easy to see many of the outward ways that such circumstances can affect normal daily functioning and add stress to life; new social situations and cultural changes with new jobs in a new state, far away--no friends or family to lean on. And obviously loss, mourning and grief in death, especially when that death is of your own child, can be catastrophic to many couples. Anger, resentment, emptiness, longing: most of these feelings are typical and even to be expected, but sometimes there are situations that remain unseen to the outside world looking in on a grieving couple, situations that are much more private and intimate and only known to those affected by them. In the wake of this earth-shattering loss, we did our best to carry on, to live our lives, to love our family, and to stay connected to one another, all the while feeling physically and emotionally exhausted. We leaned on each other for our strength. And as a result, our desire for both emotional and physical intimacy persisted.

Certainly, my idea of sex and what it means has changed over time. From the spontaneous lustful romps of newlyweds who couldn’t pull each other’s clothes off fast enough, to a purposeful route to procreation, and then to consistency--a consistency to be relied on as time went by. We arrived at a point in our marriage when sex became a touchstone in our relationship, something dependable and known—this was how our sex life evolved. Though sex became routine, it wasn’t mundane. It was comfortable, but still passionate—not just about a physical connection, but a mental and emotional one as well. I’ve never felt safer anywhere than in my husband’s arms.

The idea of having sex after finding out that any and all of our future children could be born terminally ill was extraordinarily difficult, but despite this difficulty, my husband and I were still attracted to each other. We still loved each other, and now the one thing that we should be able to share openly as husband and wife suddenly rocked me to my core. Sex. I desired it, but at the same time, it terrified me. Not the act of sex itself, but the potential outcome. Having sex with my husband meant potential pregnancy that we couldn’t risk, not again, not now knowing that every child we conceived had a 25 percent chance of being affected by Tay-Sachs.

For various reasons, including our moral and religious beliefs, termination was not an option for us. I doubled up on birth control methods to avoid becoming pregnant. 

The condoms got old, fast. I didn’t like them, and I’m sure he didn’t. Eventually, one night, we didn’t have any condoms left and so we decided he'd pull out instead. After I came he pulled out and jerked off onto my stomach. It felt sterile, insincere, and not at all like the act of giving yourself to someone through love or connection. This has been our routine for six years now, and I hate it. The desire I have to share this sense of closeness with my husband hasn’t dissipated over time, even as I had to care for our daughter around the clock. She was no longer able to hold her body or head upright, she was losing her eyesight, losing the ability to swallow, and she’d begun having seizures.

Just once, on our first anniversary after our daughter was diagnosed, my husband either forgot, or it happened too quickly and he ejaculated into me. I cried. I bawled nearly inconsolably, ruining our romantic night. I couldn’t conceive of the idea of my body growing and nurturing another child for whom a medieval fate awaited. “How could you do that to me?” I cried, in what still seems an unreasonable fashion. He hadn’t meant to scare me. I knew that. He felt bad. I felt bad. We went back to our method of pulling out and we’ve maintained it ever since. And yet, I miss the way we used to make love. I feel robbed of a form of intimacy that we should be able to share freely as husband and wife.

Losing your child takes away so many things. Feelings of comfort, stability, reason. It’s a struggle to stay present, level-headed, to keep moving forward. It feels like we’re winning just by having a strong marriage that can survive the nuclear explosion of child loss. It feels like winning every time we make love, even now, 13 years into our marriage. Or maybe even more so now because it means we’re carrying on. The idea of pregnancy still terrifies us. The heartbreak of losing our daughter still weighs heavily on every aspect of our lives. It presents itself in expected as well as unexpected ways, often at inconvenient times, but we won’t let it keep us apart. 

These days, sex is weightier for us. The stakes were heightened by our genetic condition, but our relationship has grown stronger through the trials. When we consider the potential outcome of every time we’re intimate, we know there’s a risk, but we take our own precautions to manage them as best we can. I know I could get my tubes tied, or he could have a vasectomy, but we resist these measures. I can’t stand the idea of our genetic makeup taking anything more from us. It should be our decision to take such extreme measures to alter our bodies, and not one forced on us because of our genetic near-incompatibility in procreation. It seems so unnatural to permanently sterilize ourselves just because we love each other, to let Tay-Sachs take this other part of us. So for now, we just keep going.

When we make love, we forge a stronger bond; we share a silent sorrow. 

The first time my husband and I had sex with a condom, I thought it was great. Easier, less messy, a change up from the norm. Win-win for me. I didn’t particularly like condoms: the feel, the smell, the timeout in the heat of the moment while fumbling over a loudly crackling wrapper. How romantic. And I’m sure my husband was no fan of them, either, but it did make it better for me once we were done. He’d just pull it off and toss it in the trash. I didn’t have to lie there waiting for him to throw me his T-shirt to clean up with; I could just happily roll over and drift off to sleep. 

There was only one problem with this scenario--we weren’t choosing to use condoms; we needed them, which made them feel less like a novelty, a change-up from the norm, and more like a reminder of what we were now facing, and how, in so many ways, our relationship—our sex life--would never be the same.

In 2009, my husband Loren and I had been happily married for six and a half years. Our marriage was loving, committed and stable. We had two beautiful daughters, Skylar, 5, and Miss Elliott, 10 months, when we learned that we were carriers of Tay-Sachs disease. We had no idea this genetic mutation existed in our lineage or that we had passed it on to our youngest daughter, who at this point was beginning to show signs of missing her milestones as she grew. Watching my seemingly healthy infant unable to master age-appropriate tasks such as crawling, holding her bottle, or imitating our speech, I suspected something much more was going on besides the usual variances in development, and unfortunately, I was right.  With no treatment or cure, this neurodegenerative disorder would rob her of all of her physical and mental functioning before finally taking her life at the age of 4.

You might think that when a couple loses a child to a horrible and incurable disease, when a couple must face the excruciating loss of this person they have made and love beyond reason or description, sex simply stops, that sexual connection is not a blip on their radar, let alone even possible in the midst of such grief. And of course, for us, that was the case. When Miss Elliott passed away in 2012, I felt  lost, numb, nothing but a shell of my former self. It was hard to see any future at all, to conceptualize one without her. We didn’t know where to go from there, or even who we were anymore. But gradually, over time, I realized that beneath and above and around this pain was my love for my husband, that this love, far from perishing with our daughter, was still very much alive.

That first time we had sex after her diagnosis, I was full of conflicting emotions. It was awkward, as it had been a full month since we were intimate, the longest period in our relationship. But it was also comforting, being with him, holding each other, sharing an intimacy and sorrow mixed together the way only the two of us could understand. And it scared me to consider the future and the potential consequences of what should have otherwise seemed routine at this point in our lives: sex as a married couple.

We’ve had our share of odds to overcome in our relationship over time; we married young, eloping across state lines. We had career changes, moves across the country, children, deaths in the family, and through it all we remained committed to each other. It may be easy to see many of the outward ways that such circumstances can affect normal daily functioning and add stress to life; new social situations and cultural changes with new jobs in a new state, far away--no friends or family to lean on. And obviously loss, mourning and grief in death, especially when that death is of your own child, can be catastrophic to many couples. Anger, resentment, emptiness, longing: most of these feelings are typical and even to be expected, but sometimes there are situations that remain unseen to the outside world looking in on a grieving couple, situations that are much more private and intimate and only known to those affected by them. In the wake of this earth-shattering loss, we did our best to carry on, to live our lives, to love our family, and to stay connected to one another, all the while feeling physically and emotionally exhausted. We leaned on each other for our strength. And as a result, our desire for both emotional and physical intimacy persisted.

Certainly, my idea of sex and what it means has changed over time. From the spontaneous lustful romps of newlyweds who couldn’t pull each other’s clothes off fast enough, to a purposeful route to procreation, and then to consistency--a consistency to be relied on as time went by. We arrived at a point in our marriage when sex became a touchstone in our relationship, something dependable and known—this was how our sex life evolved. Though sex became routine, it wasn’t mundane. It was comfortable, but still passionate—not just about a physical connection, but a mental and emotional one as well. I’ve never felt safer anywhere than in my husband’s arms.

The idea of having sex after finding out that any and all of our future children could be born terminally ill was extraordinarily difficult, but despite this difficulty, my husband and I were still attracted to each other. We still loved each other, and now the one thing that we should be able to share openly as husband and wife suddenly rocked me to my core. Sex. I desired it, but at the same time, it terrified me. Not the act of sex itself, but the potential outcome. Having sex with my husband meant potential pregnancy that we couldn’t risk, not again, not now knowing that every child we conceived had a 25 percent chance of being affected by Tay-Sachs.

For various reasons, including our moral and religious beliefs, termination was not an option for us. I doubled up on birth control methods to avoid becoming pregnant. 

The condoms got old, fast. I didn’t like them, and I’m sure he didn’t. Eventually, one night, we didn’t have any condoms left and so we decided he'd pull out instead. After I came he pulled out and jerked off onto my stomach. It felt sterile, insincere, and not at all like the act of giving yourself to someone through love or connection. This has been our routine for six years now, and I hate it. The desire I have to share this sense of closeness with my husband hasn’t dissipated over time, even as I had to care for our daughter around the clock. She was no longer able to hold her body or head upright, she was losing her eyesight, losing the ability to swallow, and she’d begun having seizures.

Just once, on our first anniversary after our daughter was diagnosed, my husband either forgot, or it happened too quickly and he ejaculated into me. I cried. I bawled nearly inconsolably, ruining our romantic night. I couldn’t conceive of the idea of my body growing and nurturing another child for whom a medieval fate awaited. “How could you do that to me?” I cried, in what still seems an unreasonable fashion. He hadn’t meant to scare me. I knew that. He felt bad. I felt bad. We went back to our method of pulling out and we’ve maintained it ever since. And yet, I miss the way we used to make love. I feel robbed of a form of intimacy that we should be able to share freely as husband and wife.

Losing your child takes away so many things. Feelings of comfort, stability, reason. It’s a struggle to stay present, level-headed, to keep moving forward. It feels like we’re winning just by having a strong marriage that can survive the nuclear explosion of child loss. It feels like winning every time we make love, even now, 13 years into our marriage. Or maybe even more so now because it means we’re carrying on. The idea of pregnancy still terrifies us. The heartbreak of losing our daughter still weighs heavily on every aspect of our lives. It presents itself in expected as well as unexpected ways, often at inconvenient times, but we won’t let it keep us apart. 

These days, sex is weightier for us. The stakes were heightened by our genetic condition, but our relationship has grown stronger through the trials. When we consider the potential outcome of every time we’re intimate, we know there’s a risk, but we take our own precautions to manage them as best we can. I know I could get my tubes tied, or he could have a vasectomy, but we resist these measures. I can’t stand the idea of our genetic makeup taking anything more from us. It should be our decision to take such extreme measures to alter our bodies, and not one forced on us because of our genetic near-incompatibility in procreation. It seems so unnatural to permanently sterilize ourselves just because we love each other, to let Tay-Sachs take this other part of us. So for now, we just keep going.

When we make love, we forge a stronger bond; we share a silent sorrow. 

Continue Reading...

Trump’s not Hitler, he’s Mussolini: How GOP anti-intellectualism created a modern fascist movement in America

In an interview with Slate, the historian of fascism Robert Paxton warns against describing Donald Trump as fascist because “it’s almost the most powerful epithet you can use.”  But in this case, the shoe fits.  And here is why. Like Mussolini, Trump rails against intruders (Mexicans) and enemies (Muslims), mocks those perceived as weak, encourages a violent reckoning with those his followers perceive as the enemy within (the roughing up of protesters at his rallies), flouts the rules of civil political discourse (the Megyn Kelly menstruation spat), and promises to restore the nation to its greatness not by a series of policies, but by the force of his own personality (“I will be great for” fill in the blank).   To quote Paxton again, this time from his seminal "The Anatomy of Fascism": “Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program.” This explains why Trump supporters are not bothered by his ideological malleability and policy contradictions: He was pro-choice before he was pro-life; donated to politicians while now he rails against that practice; married three times and now embraces evangelical Christianity; is the embodiment of capitalism and yet promises to crack down on free trade.  In the words of the Italian writer Umberto Eco, fascism was “a beehive of contradictions.” It bears noting that Mussolini was a socialist unionizer before becoming a fascist union buster, a journalist before cracking down on free press, a republican before becoming a monarchist. Like Mussolini, Trump is dismissive of democratic institutions.  He selfishly guards his image of a self-made outsider who will “dismantle the establishment” in the words of one of his supporters.  That this includes cracking down on a free press by toughening libel laws, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 11 million people (“illegals”), stripping away citizenship of those seen as illegitimate members of the nation (children of the “illegals”), and committing war crimes in the protection of the nation (killing the families of suspected terrorists) only enhances his stature among his supporters.  The discrepancy between their love of America and these brutal and undemocratic methods does not bother them one iota.  To borrow from Paxton again: “Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.”  For Trump and his supporters, the struggle against “political correctness” in all its forms is more important than the fine print of the Constitution. To be fair, there are many differences between Italian Fascism of interwar Europe and Trumpism of (soon to be) post-Obama America.  For one, Mussolini was better read and more articulate than Trump.  Starting out as a schoolteacher, the Italian Fascist read voraciously and was heavily influenced by the German and French philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Marie Guyau, respectively. I doubt Trump would know who either of these two people were.  According to the Boston Globe, Trump speaks at the level of a fourth grader. There are other more consequential differences, of course: the interwar Italy was a much bigger mess than the USA is today; the democratic institutions of this country are certainly more resilient and durable than those of the young unstable post-World War I Italy; the economy, both U.S. and worldwide, is not in the apocalyptic state it was in the interwar period; and the demographics of the USA mitigate against the election of a racist demagogue.  So, Trump’s blackshirts are not marching on Washington, yet. Also, as a historian I have learned to beware of historical analogies and generally eschew them whenever I can, particularly when it comes to an ideology that during World War II caused the deaths of 60 million human beings. The oversaturation of our discourse with Hitler comparisons is not only exasperating for any historian, but is offensive to the memory of Hitler’s many victims most notably the six million Jews his regime murdered in cold blood. Finally, rather than explaining it, historical analogies often distort the present, sometimes with devastating consequences.  The example that comes to mind is the Saddam-is-like-Hitler analogy many in the George W. Bush administration used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was an unmitigated disaster.  The overuse, or misuse, of a historical analogy can also make policy makers more hesitant to act with equally disastrous consequences: the prime examples are Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s when the West attributed their inaction to stop the slaughter in each country by arguing that these massacres were “not like the Holocaust.” Thus, for a historical analogy to be useful to us, it has to advance our understanding of the present.  And the Trumpism-Fascism axis (pun intended) does this in three ways: it explains the origins of Trump the demagogue; it enables us to read the Trump rally as a phenomenon in its own right; and it allows those of us who are unequivocally opposed to hate, bigotry, and intolerance, to rally around an alternative, equally historical, program: anti-fascism. The Very Fascist Origins of Trumpism That white supremacist groups back Donald Trump for president of the United States, and his slowness to disavow the support of David Duke, all illuminate the fascistic origins of Trump the phenomenon.  In fact, Paxton acknowledges that while Fascism began in France and Italy, “the first version of the Klan in the defeated American south was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.” That the KKK was drawn to the Trump candidacy, and that he refused to disavow them speak volumes about his fascistic roots. Like Fascism, Trumpism has come about on the heels of a protracted period of ideological restlessness.  Within the Republican Party this restlessness has resulted in a complete de-legitimization of the so-called GOP establishment. Benito Mussolini came to the scene in the 1920s at a time when all the known “isms” of the time had lost their mojos.  Conservatism, which since the French Revolution had been advocating for monarchy, nobility, and tradition, was dealt a devastating blow by the First World War, which destroyed four major empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German), made universal male suffrage (mostly) the norm, and eliminated a generation of aristocrats.  Although initially seen as victorious, liberalism, in its emphasis on equality, constitutions, parliaments, and civil debates, quickly proved unable to solve the mammoth problems facing Europe after the war.  To the millions of unemployed, angry, and hungry Europeans, the backroom politicking and obscure party debates seemed petty at best, and deserving of destruction at worst.  Shoving millions of Europeans into nation-states they saw as alien to their ethnicity created huge minority problems and sparked irredentist movements including fascists and their many copycats.  The success of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia and their protracted, terrifying, civil war made Communism unpalatable for most Europeans. Enter Fascism. Fascism promised people deliverance from politics.  Fascism was not just different type of politics, but anti-politics.  On the post-WWI ruins of the Enlightenment beliefs in progress and essential human goodness, Fascism embraced emotion over reason, action over politics.  Violence was not just a means to an end, but the end in itself because it brought man closer to his true inner nature.  War was an inevitable part of this inner essence of man.  Millions of European men had found this sense of purpose and camaraderie in the trenches of the First World War and were not going to sit idly by while politicians took it away from them after the war (famously, after the war Hitler was slow to demobilize and take off his uniform).  Fascists’ main enemies were not just Marxist politicians, or liberal politicians, but politicians in general. It is therefore no coincidence that the most common explanation Trump supporters muster when asked about their vote is that “he is no politician.”  Trump did not invent this anti-politics mood, but he tamed it in accordance with his own needs.  Ever since the election of Barack Obama the Republicans have refused to co-govern.  Senator Mitch McConnell’s vow that his main purpose would be to deny the president a second term was only the first of many actions by which the Republicans have retreated from politics.  The Tea Party wave meant an absolute refusal to compromise on even the most essential issues, which were central to the economic survival of the government if not the entire country (the Debt ceiling fiasco anyone?!).  But since then it has gotten worse: now even the establishment Republicans who had been initially demonized by the Tea Party, such as Mitch McConnell, have openly abrogated their own constitutional powers by refusing to exercise them.  This has been most evident in their blanket refusal to even hold a hearing for a Scalia replacement on the Supreme Court.  In other words, the Republicans themselves, not Trump, broke politics. The anti-intellectualism of Trump has also been a long time in the making.  It was the Republican establishment that has for decades refused to even consider the science of climate change and has through local education boards strove to prevent the teaching of evolution. Although not as explicit as the Fascists were in their efforts to use the woman’s body for reproducing the nation, the Republican attempts at restricting abortion rights, and women access to healthcare in general have often been designed with the same purpose in mind.  Of course American historians have pointed to this larger strand of anti-intellectualism in American politics, but what is different about this moment is that Trump has successfully wedded this anti-Enlightenment mood with the anti-political rage of the Republican base. Still, for a fascist to be accepted as legitimate he has to move the crowd and from the very beginning of his candidacy Trump has done this by stoking racial animosity and grievances.  It is no coincidence that the Trump phenomenon emerges during the tenure of the first black President.  It bears remembering that Trump’s first flirtation with running for office was nothing more than his insistent, nonsensical, irrational, and blatantly racist demand that President Obama show his birth certificate and his Harvard grades.  This was more than a dog whistle to the angry whites that the first black President was not only un-American, literally, but that he was intellectually inferior to them, despite graduating from Harvard Law.  If one considers this “original sin” of Trump then the KKK endorsement of his candidacy and Trump’s acceptance of it seem less strange. Like Mussolini, Trump is lucky in his timing.  When Mussolini created his Fascists in 1919 there were numerous other far right, authoritarian movements popping up all over Europe.  As Robert Paxton reminds us, by the early 20th century Europe had gotten “swollen” by refugees, mostly Ashkenazi Jews who had since the 1880s been escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe.  Culturally and religiously different they caused reactions amongst the Europeans that are strikingly similar to the way in which many European politicians have reacted to the influx of Muslim refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.  The Hungarian government’s building of a fence to prevent Muslim migrants from coming in and its rhetoric of foreign, Islamic, invasion is just one of more noted examples of Islamophobic euphoria sweeping rightwing and fascistic movements into power all across Europe.  As Hugh Eakin points out in the New York Review of Books, even Denmark, the beacon of civilized, tolerant, Europe has become susceptible to the xenophobic fear mongering: hate speech now passes for mainstream discussion (the Speaker of the Danish Parliament claims Muslim migrants to be at “a lower stage of civilization”). The head of the newly elected right-wing party in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, has described migrants as "parasites" who bring diseases." Thus, it is no coincidence that Trump often references the refugee crisis to point to the ineptitude of European politicians and to simultaneously warn of a yet another jihadist terrorist attack. Trump would feel perfectly at home in the company of the new generation of European authoritarians like Viktor Orban of Hungary or Vladimir Putin of Russia.  He does not care that Putin considers America Russia’s historic enemy because for Trump the real enemy is within. The Trump Rally: An exercise in community building If we historicize Trump in such a way, his rallies become much easier to read.  For Trump’s supporters, the pushing and shoving, and even the outright violence, against protesters, and the menacingly carnivalesque atmosphere are, to an extent, an end in itself. Just observe how groups at Trump rallies spontaneously come together to roughen up a protester.  The sheer emotional intensity of their facial expressions shows us precisely why they support Trump and why no policy proposal from any of his competitors can ever come close to diminishing Trump in his supporters’ eyes.  Violence is electrifying and community building as much as it is devastating for those on the receiving end.  Action over politics. But it bears reminding that the crowds have transformed Trump as well.  At the beginning of the campaign he seemed taken aback by protesters, but recently he has begin to egg them on (“I’d like to punch him in the face”).  Simultaneously, he has gotten more confident on stage, bolder in his outrage proposals (ban all Muslims from the U.S.), and more theatrical. This transformation brings to mind a moment in the history of another authoritarian, the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic whose ascent to power wrecked the country of Yugoslavia and caused a series of vicious civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. When Milosevic first appeared on TV he did so as a mid-level member of the Communist party and spoke with the dry jargon of a Marxist intellectual.  In 1987, party bosses sent Milosevic to the volatile Serbian province of Kosovo to quell a riot by Serb locals who were complaining that the majority Albanians had been perpetrating violence, and even genocide, against them. Feeling abandoned by the government, the Serb nationalists surrounded Milosevic telling him that Albanians were beating them.  Milosevic hesitated.  He began to employ the party jargon of national unity and promised to solve their problems, but the crowd grew rowdier and at one point, Milosevic looked scared.  That’s when he uttered the phrase that would transform him from an anonymous politician to a Serb nationalist leader: “no one can dare to beat you!” The crowd erupted in cheers, propelling his career during which he destroyed not only his own party, but also the country at large.  He would die nineteen years later in a prison cell at the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands. This is not to say that Trump will cause a civil war in the U.S., or that he will commit war crimes (although he did promise to do the latter).  But the destruction of the GOP looks all but imminent should he be the nominee.  We should be warned that fascist demagogues are often made on the sly, almost imperceptibly, and that the fires they stir up tend to spread rather quickly. The pull of history on individuals is often inexorable.  In his excellent portrayal of Nazification of German life, the historian Peter Fritzsche recounts a story of Karl Dürkefälden, a German living in the town of Peine during Hitler’s ascent to power.  An opponent of Nazis, Karl expressed in his diary a profound sense of shock at how quickly his whole family—mother, father, and his sister—underwent a conversion to Nazism during the early 1933.  In one particularly poignant scene, Karl is standing at the window of his house alongside his wife looking at the Nazi May Day celebrations, in which the entire, now Nazified, community participates, including his father. He struggles to remain on the sidelines not because he is a convinced Nazi, but because his entire community is caught up in what he called Umstellung, “a rapid...adjustment or conversion to Nazism,” in the words of Fritzsche.   Individuals who successfully resist historical Umstellungs are unfortunately few and far between.  This is why we celebrate them.  Those who succumb to them are much more common.  The case of a young man by the name of Drazen Erdemovic from the Bosnian war is telling in this regard.  Born in a mixed Croat-Serb family, the twenty-four year old Erdemovic found himself in 1995 a part of the Bosnian Serb firing squad executing Muslim men around the town of Srebrenica: by his own admission, he personally murdered seventy Muslims.  After surrendering to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, Erdemovic said: I have lost many very good friends of all nationalities because of that war, and I am convinced that all of them, all of my friends, were not in favor of a war.  I am convinced of that.  But simply they had no other choice.  This war came and there was no way out.  The same happened to me. “They had no other choice.”  “This war came and there was no way out.”  Once unleashed, the demons of history are too difficult for any individual to resist on his/or her/ own no matter what their backgrounds or political beliefs of the moment.  This is why resistance to such atrocities always requires a movement, a community, and in fighting Fascists this was Anti-Fascism. Branding Trumpism Fascist has the political benefit of mobilizing disparate forces in the fight against him just like the antifascist coalition of World War II led to unprecedented alliances between ideologically disparate forces (the Soviet-American alliance being the primary example).  In the American context, seeing Trump as a 2016 reincarnation of Mussolini can unite Democrats, Republicans, independents, Naderites, neo-cons, constitutionalists, and others, into a broad anti-Fascist coalition which would bring Trump down and save our democracy. In conclusion, the Fascism analogy is admittedly not a perfect fit.  When it comes to ideologies, no analogy is.  This is because ideologies change through time.  The religious anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages was very different from its racial reincarnation during the nineteenth century, the latter of which was picked up by the Nazis (although religious anti-Semitism still remained a part of it).  The anti-imperial, liberal, nationalism of the first half of the nineteenth century was very different from its more virulent, expansionist, and repressive kind at the beginning of the twentieth.  Stalin’s Bolshevism was much scarier and arbitrarily deadlier than Lenin’s.  In other words, just like the overuse of historical analogies should not make us too quick to embrace them, a search for a perfect ideological replica of interwar Fascism should not blind us to its ugly re-emergence in 2016. Today, the echoes of Fascism are all too audible to anyone willing to hear them.  Having lost one country, Yugoslavia, I really don’t want to lose another one.In an interview with Slate, the historian of fascism Robert Paxton warns against describing Donald Trump as fascist because “it’s almost the most powerful epithet you can use.”  But in this case, the shoe fits.  And here is why. Like Mussolini, Trump rails against intruders (Mexicans) and enemies (Muslims), mocks those perceived as weak, encourages a violent reckoning with those his followers perceive as the enemy within (the roughing up of protesters at his rallies), flouts the rules of civil political discourse (the Megyn Kelly menstruation spat), and promises to restore the nation to its greatness not by a series of policies, but by the force of his own personality (“I will be great for” fill in the blank).   To quote Paxton again, this time from his seminal "The Anatomy of Fascism": “Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program.” This explains why Trump supporters are not bothered by his ideological malleability and policy contradictions: He was pro-choice before he was pro-life; donated to politicians while now he rails against that practice; married three times and now embraces evangelical Christianity; is the embodiment of capitalism and yet promises to crack down on free trade.  In the words of the Italian writer Umberto Eco, fascism was “a beehive of contradictions.” It bears noting that Mussolini was a socialist unionizer before becoming a fascist union buster, a journalist before cracking down on free press, a republican before becoming a monarchist. Like Mussolini, Trump is dismissive of democratic institutions.  He selfishly guards his image of a self-made outsider who will “dismantle the establishment” in the words of one of his supporters.  That this includes cracking down on a free press by toughening libel laws, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 11 million people (“illegals”), stripping away citizenship of those seen as illegitimate members of the nation (children of the “illegals”), and committing war crimes in the protection of the nation (killing the families of suspected terrorists) only enhances his stature among his supporters.  The discrepancy between their love of America and these brutal and undemocratic methods does not bother them one iota.  To borrow from Paxton again: “Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.”  For Trump and his supporters, the struggle against “political correctness” in all its forms is more important than the fine print of the Constitution. To be fair, there are many differences between Italian Fascism of interwar Europe and Trumpism of (soon to be) post-Obama America.  For one, Mussolini was better read and more articulate than Trump.  Starting out as a schoolteacher, the Italian Fascist read voraciously and was heavily influenced by the German and French philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Marie Guyau, respectively. I doubt Trump would know who either of these two people were.  According to the Boston Globe, Trump speaks at the level of a fourth grader. There are other more consequential differences, of course: the interwar Italy was a much bigger mess than the USA is today; the democratic institutions of this country are certainly more resilient and durable than those of the young unstable post-World War I Italy; the economy, both U.S. and worldwide, is not in the apocalyptic state it was in the interwar period; and the demographics of the USA mitigate against the election of a racist demagogue.  So, Trump’s blackshirts are not marching on Washington, yet. Also, as a historian I have learned to beware of historical analogies and generally eschew them whenever I can, particularly when it comes to an ideology that during World War II caused the deaths of 60 million human beings. The oversaturation of our discourse with Hitler comparisons is not only exasperating for any historian, but is offensive to the memory of Hitler’s many victims most notably the six million Jews his regime murdered in cold blood. Finally, rather than explaining it, historical analogies often distort the present, sometimes with devastating consequences.  The example that comes to mind is the Saddam-is-like-Hitler analogy many in the George W. Bush administration used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was an unmitigated disaster.  The overuse, or misuse, of a historical analogy can also make policy makers more hesitant to act with equally disastrous consequences: the prime examples are Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s when the West attributed their inaction to stop the slaughter in each country by arguing that these massacres were “not like the Holocaust.” Thus, for a historical analogy to be useful to us, it has to advance our understanding of the present.  And the Trumpism-Fascism axis (pun intended) does this in three ways: it explains the origins of Trump the demagogue; it enables us to read the Trump rally as a phenomenon in its own right; and it allows those of us who are unequivocally opposed to hate, bigotry, and intolerance, to rally around an alternative, equally historical, program: anti-fascism. The Very Fascist Origins of Trumpism That white supremacist groups back Donald Trump for president of the United States, and his slowness to disavow the support of David Duke, all illuminate the fascistic origins of Trump the phenomenon.  In fact, Paxton acknowledges that while Fascism began in France and Italy, “the first version of the Klan in the defeated American south was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.” That the KKK was drawn to the Trump candidacy, and that he refused to disavow them speak volumes about his fascistic roots. Like Fascism, Trumpism has come about on the heels of a protracted period of ideological restlessness.  Within the Republican Party this restlessness has resulted in a complete de-legitimization of the so-called GOP establishment. Benito Mussolini came to the scene in the 1920s at a time when all the known “isms” of the time had lost their mojos.  Conservatism, which since the French Revolution had been advocating for monarchy, nobility, and tradition, was dealt a devastating blow by the First World War, which destroyed four major empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German), made universal male suffrage (mostly) the norm, and eliminated a generation of aristocrats.  Although initially seen as victorious, liberalism, in its emphasis on equality, constitutions, parliaments, and civil debates, quickly proved unable to solve the mammoth problems facing Europe after the war.  To the millions of unemployed, angry, and hungry Europeans, the backroom politicking and obscure party debates seemed petty at best, and deserving of destruction at worst.  Shoving millions of Europeans into nation-states they saw as alien to their ethnicity created huge minority problems and sparked irredentist movements including fascists and their many copycats.  The success of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia and their protracted, terrifying, civil war made Communism unpalatable for most Europeans. Enter Fascism. Fascism promised people deliverance from politics.  Fascism was not just different type of politics, but anti-politics.  On the post-WWI ruins of the Enlightenment beliefs in progress and essential human goodness, Fascism embraced emotion over reason, action over politics.  Violence was not just a means to an end, but the end in itself because it brought man closer to his true inner nature.  War was an inevitable part of this inner essence of man.  Millions of European men had found this sense of purpose and camaraderie in the trenches of the First World War and were not going to sit idly by while politicians took it away from them after the war (famously, after the war Hitler was slow to demobilize and take off his uniform).  Fascists’ main enemies were not just Marxist politicians, or liberal politicians, but politicians in general. It is therefore no coincidence that the most common explanation Trump supporters muster when asked about their vote is that “he is no politician.”  Trump did not invent this anti-politics mood, but he tamed it in accordance with his own needs.  Ever since the election of Barack Obama the Republicans have refused to co-govern.  Senator Mitch McConnell’s vow that his main purpose would be to deny the president a second term was only the first of many actions by which the Republicans have retreated from politics.  The Tea Party wave meant an absolute refusal to compromise on even the most essential issues, which were central to the economic survival of the government if not the entire country (the Debt ceiling fiasco anyone?!).  But since then it has gotten worse: now even the establishment Republicans who had been initially demonized by the Tea Party, such as Mitch McConnell, have openly abrogated their own constitutional powers by refusing to exercise them.  This has been most evident in their blanket refusal to even hold a hearing for a Scalia replacement on the Supreme Court.  In other words, the Republicans themselves, not Trump, broke politics. The anti-intellectualism of Trump has also been a long time in the making.  It was the Republican establishment that has for decades refused to even consider the science of climate change and has through local education boards strove to prevent the teaching of evolution. Although not as explicit as the Fascists were in their efforts to use the woman’s body for reproducing the nation, the Republican attempts at restricting abortion rights, and women access to healthcare in general have often been designed with the same purpose in mind.  Of course American historians have pointed to this larger strand of anti-intellectualism in American politics, but what is different about this moment is that Trump has successfully wedded this anti-Enlightenment mood with the anti-political rage of the Republican base. Still, for a fascist to be accepted as legitimate he has to move the crowd and from the very beginning of his candidacy Trump has done this by stoking racial animosity and grievances.  It is no coincidence that the Trump phenomenon emerges during the tenure of the first black President.  It bears remembering that Trump’s first flirtation with running for office was nothing more than his insistent, nonsensical, irrational, and blatantly racist demand that President Obama show his birth certificate and his Harvard grades.  This was more than a dog whistle to the angry whites that the first black President was not only un-American, literally, but that he was intellectually inferior to them, despite graduating from Harvard Law.  If one considers this “original sin” of Trump then the KKK endorsement of his candidacy and Trump’s acceptance of it seem less strange. Like Mussolini, Trump is lucky in his timing.  When Mussolini created his Fascists in 1919 there were numerous other far right, authoritarian movements popping up all over Europe.  As Robert Paxton reminds us, by the early 20th century Europe had gotten “swollen” by refugees, mostly Ashkenazi Jews who had since the 1880s been escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe.  Culturally and religiously different they caused reactions amongst the Europeans that are strikingly similar to the way in which many European politicians have reacted to the influx of Muslim refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.  The Hungarian government’s building of a fence to prevent Muslim migrants from coming in and its rhetoric of foreign, Islamic, invasion is just one of more noted examples of Islamophobic euphoria sweeping rightwing and fascistic movements into power all across Europe.  As Hugh Eakin points out in the New York Review of Books, even Denmark, the beacon of civilized, tolerant, Europe has become susceptible to the xenophobic fear mongering: hate speech now passes for mainstream discussion (the Speaker of the Danish Parliament claims Muslim migrants to be at “a lower stage of civilization”). The head of the newly elected right-wing party in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, has described migrants as "parasites" who bring diseases." Thus, it is no coincidence that Trump often references the refugee crisis to point to the ineptitude of European politicians and to simultaneously warn of a yet another jihadist terrorist attack. Trump would feel perfectly at home in the company of the new generation of European authoritarians like Viktor Orban of Hungary or Vladimir Putin of Russia.  He does not care that Putin considers America Russia’s historic enemy because for Trump the real enemy is within. The Trump Rally: An exercise in community building If we historicize Trump in such a way, his rallies become much easier to read.  For Trump’s supporters, the pushing and shoving, and even the outright violence, against protesters, and the menacingly carnivalesque atmosphere are, to an extent, an end in itself. Just observe how groups at Trump rallies spontaneously come together to roughen up a protester.  The sheer emotional intensity of their facial expressions shows us precisely why they support Trump and why no policy proposal from any of his competitors can ever come close to diminishing Trump in his supporters’ eyes.  Violence is electrifying and community building as much as it is devastating for those on the receiving end.  Action over politics. But it bears reminding that the crowds have transformed Trump as well.  At the beginning of the campaign he seemed taken aback by protesters, but recently he has begin to egg them on (“I’d like to punch him in the face”).  Simultaneously, he has gotten more confident on stage, bolder in his outrage proposals (ban all Muslims from the U.S.), and more theatrical. This transformation brings to mind a moment in the history of another authoritarian, the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic whose ascent to power wrecked the country of Yugoslavia and caused a series of vicious civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. When Milosevic first appeared on TV he did so as a mid-level member of the Communist party and spoke with the dry jargon of a Marxist intellectual.  In 1987, party bosses sent Milosevic to the volatile Serbian province of Kosovo to quell a riot by Serb locals who were complaining that the majority Albanians had been perpetrating violence, and even genocide, against them. Feeling abandoned by the government, the Serb nationalists surrounded Milosevic telling him that Albanians were beating them.  Milosevic hesitated.  He began to employ the party jargon of national unity and promised to solve their problems, but the crowd grew rowdier and at one point, Milosevic looked scared.  That’s when he uttered the phrase that would transform him from an anonymous politician to a Serb nationalist leader: “no one can dare to beat you!” The crowd erupted in cheers, propelling his career during which he destroyed not only his own party, but also the country at large.  He would die nineteen years later in a prison cell at the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands. This is not to say that Trump will cause a civil war in the U.S., or that he will commit war crimes (although he did promise to do the latter).  But the destruction of the GOP looks all but imminent should he be the nominee.  We should be warned that fascist demagogues are often made on the sly, almost imperceptibly, and that the fires they stir up tend to spread rather quickly. The pull of history on individuals is often inexorable.  In his excellent portrayal of Nazification of German life, the historian Peter Fritzsche recounts a story of Karl Dürkefälden, a German living in the town of Peine during Hitler’s ascent to power.  An opponent of Nazis, Karl expressed in his diary a profound sense of shock at how quickly his whole family—mother, father, and his sister—underwent a conversion to Nazism during the early 1933.  In one particularly poignant scene, Karl is standing at the window of his house alongside his wife looking at the Nazi May Day celebrations, in which the entire, now Nazified, community participates, including his father. He struggles to remain on the sidelines not because he is a convinced Nazi, but because his entire community is caught up in what he called Umstellung, “a rapid...adjustment or conversion to Nazism,” in the words of Fritzsche.   Individuals who successfully resist historical Umstellungs are unfortunately few and far between.  This is why we celebrate them.  Those who succumb to them are much more common.  The case of a young man by the name of Drazen Erdemovic from the Bosnian war is telling in this regard.  Born in a mixed Croat-Serb family, the twenty-four year old Erdemovic found himself in 1995 a part of the Bosnian Serb firing squad executing Muslim men around the town of Srebrenica: by his own admission, he personally murdered seventy Muslims.  After surrendering to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, Erdemovic said: I have lost many very good friends of all nationalities because of that war, and I am convinced that all of them, all of my friends, were not in favor of a war.  I am convinced of that.  But simply they had no other choice.  This war came and there was no way out.  The same happened to me. “They had no other choice.”  “This war came and there was no way out.”  Once unleashed, the demons of history are too difficult for any individual to resist on his/or her/ own no matter what their backgrounds or political beliefs of the moment.  This is why resistance to such atrocities always requires a movement, a community, and in fighting Fascists this was Anti-Fascism. Branding Trumpism Fascist has the political benefit of mobilizing disparate forces in the fight against him just like the antifascist coalition of World War II led to unprecedented alliances between ideologically disparate forces (the Soviet-American alliance being the primary example).  In the American context, seeing Trump as a 2016 reincarnation of Mussolini can unite Democrats, Republicans, independents, Naderites, neo-cons, constitutionalists, and others, into a broad anti-Fascist coalition which would bring Trump down and save our democracy. In conclusion, the Fascism analogy is admittedly not a perfect fit.  When it comes to ideologies, no analogy is.  This is because ideologies change through time.  The religious anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages was very different from its racial reincarnation during the nineteenth century, the latter of which was picked up by the Nazis (although religious anti-Semitism still remained a part of it).  The anti-imperial, liberal, nationalism of the first half of the nineteenth century was very different from its more virulent, expansionist, and repressive kind at the beginning of the twentieth.  Stalin’s Bolshevism was much scarier and arbitrarily deadlier than Lenin’s.  In other words, just like the overuse of historical analogies should not make us too quick to embrace them, a search for a perfect ideological replica of interwar Fascism should not blind us to its ugly re-emergence in 2016. Today, the echoes of Fascism are all too audible to anyone willing to hear them.  Having lost one country, Yugoslavia, I really don’t want to lose another one.

Continue Reading...

“As a Jew, there’s a need to keep that atrocity alive”: Martin Landau on his new Holocaust drama, “Remember,” about guilt & forgiveness, history & revenge

Martin Landau has had an extraordinary career that spans more than 50 years in show business. A student from the Actor’s Studio—his classmates included James Dean and Steve McQueen—Landau still teaches at the West Coast Actor’s Studio, where he is the artistic director. Perhaps best known for his Oscar-winning performance as Bela Lugosi in “Ed Wood,” his career highlights included such roles as a gay villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” back in 1959 and as the morally conflicted Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In the new film “Remember,” directed by Atom Egoyan, Landau plays Max Rosenbaum, a Holocaust survivor who lives in a nursing home with Zev Gutman (Christopher Plummer). Because Max is wheelchair-bound, he gives Zev — who has dementia — a letter with instructions to complete a mission to track down Rudy Kurlander, the Nazi officer who killed both of their families in Auschwitz. With Max as the mind and Zev as the body, Zev travels across North America to find Kurlander. “Remember” spins an intriguing drama that raises questions about guilt and forgiveness, history and revenge. The actor spoke with Salon about “Remember” and his memories of making movies. In “Remember,” you play a kind of puppet master who manipulates things from behind the scenes. Max is in a wheelchair, and carries an oxygen tank but masterminds a devious revenge. How did you connect with the character? One of the things I wanted to do was get the wheelchair down to the point where I looked as if I lived in it for a while. It becomes part of my characterization. Living in that room, where the telephone is important when Plummer’s Zev is out on the road, or doesn’t call me, there are little details ... I run the Actor’s Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach — many of whom are acting teachers — is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present. Half the things I choose to do are not seen by the audience, but for me, to make me more comfortable. Most of the performances are like a locomotive — a character going on a track. In reality, people are in doubt. So what an actor does has to fill that space, and fill in that blank created by the writer. That’s what I care about. I like this film because in 10 years, Holocaust movies are going to be period pieces. This was an opportunity to do one. On that last point, why do you think people keep making Holocaust movies? I played Simon Wiesenthal in “Max and Helen” and I asked [Wiesenthal], “If you hadn’t done what you did, would anyone else have?” He said, “That’s why I did it. Everyone else wants to forget.” As a Jew, there’s a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust too. It’s amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There’s a need to make these films, and reiterate it happened. There are groups that have denied it, including Mel Gibson’s father. “Remember” is to say this did happen and it's something that needs to be spoken about and not swept under the carpet. When I read the script for “Remember,” it resonated. I hadn’t worked with Atom [Egoyan] in 28 years. Balance in this picture is very important and I gave Atom different versions of every scene I did. Every one was true and honest, yet had different textures, so in editing he could modulate what I did to balance out other things. Your character, Max, seeks revenge in “Remember.” You also excel at playing villains, as in “North by Northwest” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Do you like playing sinister characters? I don’t think villains think they are villains. When I first started in Hollywood after training for the theater, I played Hispanics, and Native Americans—things I would never be cast in today if I were a young actor. But those castings helped me—I tried to humanize those characters. In “North by Northwest,” my character, Leonard, was written as a heavy. But I played him as a homosexual, which gave him a reason for wanting to get rid of Eva Marie Saint’s character. Everyone told me not to, and people thought it would give people the wrong impression of me; that it would hurt me as an actor. But Ernest Lehman [the film’s screenwriter] added a line which was, “Call it my women’s intuition, if you will.” I say it in the scene where I teach Mason the gun was filled with blanks. I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn’t know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms. I never thought of my characters — particularly in episodic TV — as bad guys. Any choice an actor makes affects the performance: Who is this person, where is he from, what does he sound like? In most writing today, everyone sounds the same. But people come from different places, went to different schools, attend different churches, etc. Did this character go to school on a Sunday happily? Did his parents insist he go? Did he go to college at Yale or Northwestern or UCLA? Did he not finish high school? You have to bring a lot of stuff to a character. The more you convince yourself, the better you feel sitting on set. Max and Zev are seeking revenge for something decades in their past. Are you someone who likes to hold grudges? I don’t live out my grudges. I started out as a newspaper artist, and there are lots of grudges I could be holding. Anger takes an awful lot of energy, and it has no real value. I don’t think feelings have names. We give feelings names—when a script read “angrily, violently, jealously, humorously” that’s to let you know about a scene. Feelings are feelings. A well-trained actor lets feelings flow through them if they allow them to. If you hold onto a feeling, it can short-circuit you. Living in the present allows feelings to flow through you. You enjoy yourself more than people harboring all kinds of resentments. I had to find stuff to allow those feelings of revenge to enter my feeling as Max. Chris [Plummer] is the physical being that I can’t be. I’m the mind he doesn’t have. He’s radically affected by dementia, and has good days and bad days. He has lapses and functions well. I have to say wonderful things about Chris. He came in to do some off-camera voice on the telephone so I wouldn’t have to do it with a script clerk. That’s a mensch. There is a sense of reinvention in “Remember,” with characters shifting identities and even reality. What are your thoughts on this topic, especially as someone whose career has renewed itself probably every decade. I think that if you stagnate, reinvention is part of being human. We’re the only mammals who can say, “Should I, or shouldn’t I?” Other mammals work on instinct and impulses. If we should and don’t—uh-oh. Or shouldn’t and do--uh-oh. Let’s talk memories. What do you remember about James Dean and Steve McQueen? They were friends of mine. Half the people I grew up with and did theater with are gone. The other half don’t recall breakfast. I’m fortunate to have long- and short-term memory and still able to work at this age. I’ll quote Adolph Zukor who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” I have a sense of humor about this. Jimmy was 24 when he died; Steve was 50. Those were guys I started with. I have memories of everyone I came up and along with. I’m writing my memoirs. I have enough for three books. I have anecdotes about everything. I have massive memories of both of them, because I knew them both and worked with them. Jimmy was my closest friend for a couple of years. I was a little older. Those years were crammed full of wonderful moments and lots of life. I had great memories of Walter Matthau. There’s all kinds of stuff I could dredge up. Alfred Hitchcock? He became a good friend of mine. He was depressed that he couldn’t have the stamina or the energy to do all the movies he wanted to do. He talked about his wife, Alma, who was ill at the time, but she survived him. He was a provocateur, and we got along as well as we did because we came from two different worlds—I was from the theater, and he was London and from film. We got along because he trusted me—like playing Leonard as a gay character. Peggy, Hitchcock’s secretary, said he really liked me a lot. He was very nice to me and I treated him with a lot of respect. He loved to startle people with his sense of humor. "Mission Impossible"? It was a lot of fun.   Woody Allen? Woody doesn’t direct at all. If he doesn’t like what you are doing, he’ll fire you. With “Purple Rose,” Jeff Daniels was the fourth actor to play that role. I haven’t been directed by anyone in 35 to 40 years. If they don’t like it they’ll tell me. I hit the marks. If a good actor comes in with stuff that fits, he’ll work. A director can’t teach acting. Casting is an enormous part of directing. If the actor can play the big scene, they can play the part. Woody doesn’t direct at all. He says he doesn’t know how. He hires you and hopes you can do it. “Ed Wood”? Tim [Burton] and I get along very well. I understand Tim. If you were watching us, we’d finish each other’s sentences. When I rehearse a scene for Tim, our conversation working is monosyllabic. I’ll rehearse with a fellow actor, like Johnny Depp, and Tim will come up and he’ll say, “You know …” and I’ll say, “Yeah,” and then I’ll insert something, and Tim will say, “Exactly!” And then we shoot. It’s like we don’t talk to each other. Or we do, but it’s not a sentence. We know what we want. We don’t have to talk about it. When we’re not working, we’re very verbose. “B.A.P.S”? I was the token white. After that film, Halle [Berry] asked me to do a narration of a bio on her. I love Halle. She’s a great girl. Everyone was black on “B.A.P.S” except me and one other actor. It was a reverse of how things were in the 1950s, where no one black was on the set. Max and Zev want to leave a legacy. What do you want your legacy to be?  My philosophy at the Actors’ Studio is: If I didn’t do what I was telling them to do, they wouldn’t show up. I’d like people to realize I’ve never repeated a character, because I’ve never met two people who were alike. Everyone is distinctive and unique. I approach a role that way. My job was to become the best actor I could — and live many lives, not just my own, pretty fully — and I’m still learning how to do it. What’s next for you? I just finished a film with Paul Sorvino where I play a doc named Howard Weiner.  Is it pronounced “weener” or “whiner”? Either way you can’t win. Three years ago he made a documentary called “What Is Life?” where he interviews all kinds of people for an hour and a half. And at the end, no one knows. He’s a scientist, and he needs proof. But no one has proof. People have faith. I just ask myself when I finish a crossword puzzle, why did I learn all this shit?Martin Landau has had an extraordinary career that spans more than 50 years in show business. A student from the Actor’s Studio—his classmates included James Dean and Steve McQueen—Landau still teaches at the West Coast Actor’s Studio, where he is the artistic director. Perhaps best known for his Oscar-winning performance as Bela Lugosi in “Ed Wood,” his career highlights included such roles as a gay villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” back in 1959 and as the morally conflicted Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In the new film “Remember,” directed by Atom Egoyan, Landau plays Max Rosenbaum, a Holocaust survivor who lives in a nursing home with Zev Gutman (Christopher Plummer). Because Max is wheelchair-bound, he gives Zev — who has dementia — a letter with instructions to complete a mission to track down Rudy Kurlander, the Nazi officer who killed both of their families in Auschwitz. With Max as the mind and Zev as the body, Zev travels across North America to find Kurlander. “Remember” spins an intriguing drama that raises questions about guilt and forgiveness, history and revenge. The actor spoke with Salon about “Remember” and his memories of making movies. In “Remember,” you play a kind of puppet master who manipulates things from behind the scenes. Max is in a wheelchair, and carries an oxygen tank but masterminds a devious revenge. How did you connect with the character? One of the things I wanted to do was get the wheelchair down to the point where I looked as if I lived in it for a while. It becomes part of my characterization. Living in that room, where the telephone is important when Plummer’s Zev is out on the road, or doesn’t call me, there are little details ... I run the Actor’s Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach — many of whom are acting teachers — is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present. Half the things I choose to do are not seen by the audience, but for me, to make me more comfortable. Most of the performances are like a locomotive — a character going on a track. In reality, people are in doubt. So what an actor does has to fill that space, and fill in that blank created by the writer. That’s what I care about. I like this film because in 10 years, Holocaust movies are going to be period pieces. This was an opportunity to do one. On that last point, why do you think people keep making Holocaust movies? I played Simon Wiesenthal in “Max and Helen” and I asked [Wiesenthal], “If you hadn’t done what you did, would anyone else have?” He said, “That’s why I did it. Everyone else wants to forget.” As a Jew, there’s a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust too. It’s amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There’s a need to make these films, and reiterate it happened. There are groups that have denied it, including Mel Gibson’s father. “Remember” is to say this did happen and it's something that needs to be spoken about and not swept under the carpet. When I read the script for “Remember,” it resonated. I hadn’t worked with Atom [Egoyan] in 28 years. Balance in this picture is very important and I gave Atom different versions of every scene I did. Every one was true and honest, yet had different textures, so in editing he could modulate what I did to balance out other things. Your character, Max, seeks revenge in “Remember.” You also excel at playing villains, as in “North by Northwest” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Do you like playing sinister characters? I don’t think villains think they are villains. When I first started in Hollywood after training for the theater, I played Hispanics, and Native Americans—things I would never be cast in today if I were a young actor. But those castings helped me—I tried to humanize those characters. In “North by Northwest,” my character, Leonard, was written as a heavy. But I played him as a homosexual, which gave him a reason for wanting to get rid of Eva Marie Saint’s character. Everyone told me not to, and people thought it would give people the wrong impression of me; that it would hurt me as an actor. But Ernest Lehman [the film’s screenwriter] added a line which was, “Call it my women’s intuition, if you will.” I say it in the scene where I teach Mason the gun was filled with blanks. I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn’t know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms. I never thought of my characters — particularly in episodic TV — as bad guys. Any choice an actor makes affects the performance: Who is this person, where is he from, what does he sound like? In most writing today, everyone sounds the same. But people come from different places, went to different schools, attend different churches, etc. Did this character go to school on a Sunday happily? Did his parents insist he go? Did he go to college at Yale or Northwestern or UCLA? Did he not finish high school? You have to bring a lot of stuff to a character. The more you convince yourself, the better you feel sitting on set. Max and Zev are seeking revenge for something decades in their past. Are you someone who likes to hold grudges? I don’t live out my grudges. I started out as a newspaper artist, and there are lots of grudges I could be holding. Anger takes an awful lot of energy, and it has no real value. I don’t think feelings have names. We give feelings names—when a script read “angrily, violently, jealously, humorously” that’s to let you know about a scene. Feelings are feelings. A well-trained actor lets feelings flow through them if they allow them to. If you hold onto a feeling, it can short-circuit you. Living in the present allows feelings to flow through you. You enjoy yourself more than people harboring all kinds of resentments. I had to find stuff to allow those feelings of revenge to enter my feeling as Max. Chris [Plummer] is the physical being that I can’t be. I’m the mind he doesn’t have. He’s radically affected by dementia, and has good days and bad days. He has lapses and functions well. I have to say wonderful things about Chris. He came in to do some off-camera voice on the telephone so I wouldn’t have to do it with a script clerk. That’s a mensch. There is a sense of reinvention in “Remember,” with characters shifting identities and even reality. What are your thoughts on this topic, especially as someone whose career has renewed itself probably every decade. I think that if you stagnate, reinvention is part of being human. We’re the only mammals who can say, “Should I, or shouldn’t I?” Other mammals work on instinct and impulses. If we should and don’t—uh-oh. Or shouldn’t and do--uh-oh. Let’s talk memories. What do you remember about James Dean and Steve McQueen? They were friends of mine. Half the people I grew up with and did theater with are gone. The other half don’t recall breakfast. I’m fortunate to have long- and short-term memory and still able to work at this age. I’ll quote Adolph Zukor who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” I have a sense of humor about this. Jimmy was 24 when he died; Steve was 50. Those were guys I started with. I have memories of everyone I came up and along with. I’m writing my memoirs. I have enough for three books. I have anecdotes about everything. I have massive memories of both of them, because I knew them both and worked with them. Jimmy was my closest friend for a couple of years. I was a little older. Those years were crammed full of wonderful moments and lots of life. I had great memories of Walter Matthau. There’s all kinds of stuff I could dredge up. Alfred Hitchcock? He became a good friend of mine. He was depressed that he couldn’t have the stamina or the energy to do all the movies he wanted to do. He talked about his wife, Alma, who was ill at the time, but she survived him. He was a provocateur, and we got along as well as we did because we came from two different worlds—I was from the theater, and he was London and from film. We got along because he trusted me—like playing Leonard as a gay character. Peggy, Hitchcock’s secretary, said he really liked me a lot. He was very nice to me and I treated him with a lot of respect. He loved to startle people with his sense of humor. "Mission Impossible"? It was a lot of fun.   Woody Allen? Woody doesn’t direct at all. If he doesn’t like what you are doing, he’ll fire you. With “Purple Rose,” Jeff Daniels was the fourth actor to play that role. I haven’t been directed by anyone in 35 to 40 years. If they don’t like it they’ll tell me. I hit the marks. If a good actor comes in with stuff that fits, he’ll work. A director can’t teach acting. Casting is an enormous part of directing. If the actor can play the big scene, they can play the part. Woody doesn’t direct at all. He says he doesn’t know how. He hires you and hopes you can do it. “Ed Wood”? Tim [Burton] and I get along very well. I understand Tim. If you were watching us, we’d finish each other’s sentences. When I rehearse a scene for Tim, our conversation working is monosyllabic. I’ll rehearse with a fellow actor, like Johnny Depp, and Tim will come up and he’ll say, “You know …” and I’ll say, “Yeah,” and then I’ll insert something, and Tim will say, “Exactly!” And then we shoot. It’s like we don’t talk to each other. Or we do, but it’s not a sentence. We know what we want. We don’t have to talk about it. When we’re not working, we’re very verbose. “B.A.P.S”? I was the token white. After that film, Halle [Berry] asked me to do a narration of a bio on her. I love Halle. She’s a great girl. Everyone was black on “B.A.P.S” except me and one other actor. It was a reverse of how things were in the 1950s, where no one black was on the set. Max and Zev want to leave a legacy. What do you want your legacy to be?  My philosophy at the Actors’ Studio is: If I didn’t do what I was telling them to do, they wouldn’t show up. I’d like people to realize I’ve never repeated a character, because I’ve never met two people who were alike. Everyone is distinctive and unique. I approach a role that way. My job was to become the best actor I could — and live many lives, not just my own, pretty fully — and I’m still learning how to do it. What’s next for you? I just finished a film with Paul Sorvino where I play a doc named Howard Weiner.  Is it pronounced “weener” or “whiner”? Either way you can’t win. Three years ago he made a documentary called “What Is Life?” where he interviews all kinds of people for an hour and a half. And at the end, no one knows. He’s a scientist, and he needs proof. But no one has proof. People have faith. I just ask myself when I finish a crossword puzzle, why did I learn all this shit?Martin Landau has had an extraordinary career that spans more than 50 years in show business. A student from the Actor’s Studio—his classmates included James Dean and Steve McQueen—Landau still teaches at the West Coast Actor’s Studio, where he is the artistic director. Perhaps best known for his Oscar-winning performance as Bela Lugosi in “Ed Wood,” his career highlights included such roles as a gay villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” back in 1959 and as the morally conflicted Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In the new film “Remember,” directed by Atom Egoyan, Landau plays Max Rosenbaum, a Holocaust survivor who lives in a nursing home with Zev Gutman (Christopher Plummer). Because Max is wheelchair-bound, he gives Zev — who has dementia — a letter with instructions to complete a mission to track down Rudy Kurlander, the Nazi officer who killed both of their families in Auschwitz. With Max as the mind and Zev as the body, Zev travels across North America to find Kurlander. “Remember” spins an intriguing drama that raises questions about guilt and forgiveness, history and revenge. The actor spoke with Salon about “Remember” and his memories of making movies. In “Remember,” you play a kind of puppet master who manipulates things from behind the scenes. Max is in a wheelchair, and carries an oxygen tank but masterminds a devious revenge. How did you connect with the character? One of the things I wanted to do was get the wheelchair down to the point where I looked as if I lived in it for a while. It becomes part of my characterization. Living in that room, where the telephone is important when Plummer’s Zev is out on the road, or doesn’t call me, there are little details ... I run the Actor’s Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach — many of whom are acting teachers — is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present. Half the things I choose to do are not seen by the audience, but for me, to make me more comfortable. Most of the performances are like a locomotive — a character going on a track. In reality, people are in doubt. So what an actor does has to fill that space, and fill in that blank created by the writer. That’s what I care about. I like this film because in 10 years, Holocaust movies are going to be period pieces. This was an opportunity to do one. On that last point, why do you think people keep making Holocaust movies? I played Simon Wiesenthal in “Max and Helen” and I asked [Wiesenthal], “If you hadn’t done what you did, would anyone else have?” He said, “That’s why I did it. Everyone else wants to forget.” As a Jew, there’s a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust too. It’s amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There’s a need to make these films, and reiterate it happened. There are groups that have denied it, including Mel Gibson’s father. “Remember” is to say this did happen and it's something that needs to be spoken about and not swept under the carpet. When I read the script for “Remember,” it resonated. I hadn’t worked with Atom [Egoyan] in 28 years. Balance in this picture is very important and I gave Atom different versions of every scene I did. Every one was true and honest, yet had different textures, so in editing he could modulate what I did to balance out other things. Your character, Max, seeks revenge in “Remember.” You also excel at playing villains, as in “North by Northwest” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Do you like playing sinister characters? I don’t think villains think they are villains. When I first started in Hollywood after training for the theater, I played Hispanics, and Native Americans—things I would never be cast in today if I were a young actor. But those castings helped me—I tried to humanize those characters. In “North by Northwest,” my character, Leonard, was written as a heavy. But I played him as a homosexual, which gave him a reason for wanting to get rid of Eva Marie Saint’s character. Everyone told me not to, and people thought it would give people the wrong impression of me; that it would hurt me as an actor. But Ernest Lehman [the film’s screenwriter] added a line which was, “Call it my women’s intuition, if you will.” I say it in the scene where I teach Mason the gun was filled with blanks. I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn’t know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms. I never thought of my characters — particularly in episodic TV — as bad guys. Any choice an actor makes affects the performance: Who is this person, where is he from, what does he sound like? In most writing today, everyone sounds the same. But people come from different places, went to different schools, attend different churches, etc. Did this character go to school on a Sunday happily? Did his parents insist he go? Did he go to college at Yale or Northwestern or UCLA? Did he not finish high school? You have to bring a lot of stuff to a character. The more you convince yourself, the better you feel sitting on set. Max and Zev are seeking revenge for something decades in their past. Are you someone who likes to hold grudges? I don’t live out my grudges. I started out as a newspaper artist, and there are lots of grudges I could be holding. Anger takes an awful lot of energy, and it has no real value. I don’t think feelings have names. We give feelings names—when a script read “angrily, violently, jealously, humorously” that’s to let you know about a scene. Feelings are feelings. A well-trained actor lets feelings flow through them if they allow them to. If you hold onto a feeling, it can short-circuit you. Living in the present allows feelings to flow through you. You enjoy yourself more than people harboring all kinds of resentments. I had to find stuff to allow those feelings of revenge to enter my feeling as Max. Chris [Plummer] is the physical being that I can’t be. I’m the mind he doesn’t have. He’s radically affected by dementia, and has good days and bad days. He has lapses and functions well. I have to say wonderful things about Chris. He came in to do some off-camera voice on the telephone so I wouldn’t have to do it with a script clerk. That’s a mensch. There is a sense of reinvention in “Remember,” with characters shifting identities and even reality. What are your thoughts on this topic, especially as someone whose career has renewed itself probably every decade. I think that if you stagnate, reinvention is part of being human. We’re the only mammals who can say, “Should I, or shouldn’t I?” Other mammals work on instinct and impulses. If we should and don’t—uh-oh. Or shouldn’t and do--uh-oh. Let’s talk memories. What do you remember about James Dean and Steve McQueen? They were friends of mine. Half the people I grew up with and did theater with are gone. The other half don’t recall breakfast. I’m fortunate to have long- and short-term memory and still able to work at this age. I’ll quote Adolph Zukor who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” I have a sense of humor about this. Jimmy was 24 when he died; Steve was 50. Those were guys I started with. I have memories of everyone I came up and along with. I’m writing my memoirs. I have enough for three books. I have anecdotes about everything. I have massive memories of both of them, because I knew them both and worked with them. Jimmy was my closest friend for a couple of years. I was a little older. Those years were crammed full of wonderful moments and lots of life. I had great memories of Walter Matthau. There’s all kinds of stuff I could dredge up. Alfred Hitchcock? He became a good friend of mine. He was depressed that he couldn’t have the stamina or the energy to do all the movies he wanted to do. He talked about his wife, Alma, who was ill at the time, but she survived him. He was a provocateur, and we got along as well as we did because we came from two different worlds—I was from the theater, and he was London and from film. We got along because he trusted me—like playing Leonard as a gay character. Peggy, Hitchcock’s secretary, said he really liked me a lot. He was very nice to me and I treated him with a lot of respect. He loved to startle people with his sense of humor. "Mission Impossible"? It was a lot of fun.   Woody Allen? Woody doesn’t direct at all. If he doesn’t like what you are doing, he’ll fire you. With “Purple Rose,” Jeff Daniels was the fourth actor to play that role. I haven’t been directed by anyone in 35 to 40 years. If they don’t like it they’ll tell me. I hit the marks. If a good actor comes in with stuff that fits, he’ll work. A director can’t teach acting. Casting is an enormous part of directing. If the actor can play the big scene, they can play the part. Woody doesn’t direct at all. He says he doesn’t know how. He hires you and hopes you can do it. “Ed Wood”? Tim [Burton] and I get along very well. I understand Tim. If you were watching us, we’d finish each other’s sentences. When I rehearse a scene for Tim, our conversation working is monosyllabic. I’ll rehearse with a fellow actor, like Johnny Depp, and Tim will come up and he’ll say, “You know …” and I’ll say, “Yeah,” and then I’ll insert something, and Tim will say, “Exactly!” And then we shoot. It’s like we don’t talk to each other. Or we do, but it’s not a sentence. We know what we want. We don’t have to talk about it. When we’re not working, we’re very verbose. “B.A.P.S”? I was the token white. After that film, Halle [Berry] asked me to do a narration of a bio on her. I love Halle. She’s a great girl. Everyone was black on “B.A.P.S” except me and one other actor. It was a reverse of how things were in the 1950s, where no one black was on the set. Max and Zev want to leave a legacy. What do you want your legacy to be?  My philosophy at the Actors’ Studio is: If I didn’t do what I was telling them to do, they wouldn’t show up. I’d like people to realize I’ve never repeated a character, because I’ve never met two people who were alike. Everyone is distinctive and unique. I approach a role that way. My job was to become the best actor I could — and live many lives, not just my own, pretty fully — and I’m still learning how to do it. What’s next for you? I just finished a film with Paul Sorvino where I play a doc named Howard Weiner.  Is it pronounced “weener” or “whiner”? Either way you can’t win. Three years ago he made a documentary called “What Is Life?” where he interviews all kinds of people for an hour and a half. And at the end, no one knows. He’s a scientist, and he needs proof. But no one has proof. People have faith. I just ask myself when I finish a crossword puzzle, why did I learn all this shit?

Continue Reading...

It’s so much worse than Trump: The GOP crack-up predates Trump — even if the media wants to pretend otherwise

Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop assault on the “short-fingered vulgarian” named Donald Trump, would have you believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday that “we’re seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes.” But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals. The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story – one the popularity of Trump’s candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest political story of the last 50 years — is the decades-long transformation of Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of beliefs into quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless. It is a story you didn’t read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in lefty journals likeThe Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman’s. And it wasn’t exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they chose not to tell it – to pretend it wasn’t happening. They are still pretending. It is hardly a surprise that the GOP establishment and their enablers in the media are acting as if Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is a break from the party’s supposedly genteel past. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who was “shocked, shocked,” to find gambling in Rick’s establishment, the GOP solons profess to be “shocked, shocked” by Trump’s demagogic racism and nativism. Their protestations remind me of an old gambit of comedian Milton Berle. When the audience was applauding him, he would shush them demonstratively with one hand while encouraging them gently with the other. Neither is it a surprise that the conservative media have been doing the same thing — decrying Trump while giving us Trump Lite. Indeed, even less blatant partisans who ought to know better, like every “thinking man’s” favorite conservative David Brooks, deliver the same hypocrisy. No, Brooks isn’t too keen on Trump (or Cruz for that matter), but he is very keen on some mythological Republican Party that exudes decency. On the PBS NewsHour last week he said with great earnestness, “For almost a century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has stood for a certain free market version of America – an America that’s about openness, that’s about markets and opportunity, and a definition of what this country is.” Free markets? That’s what he thinks defines America? Let me rephrase what I said earlier: Trump hasn’t just fulfilled the Republican Party’s purpose; he has exposed it. And he also has exposed the media’s indifference to what the party has become. Obviously, I am not saying that the transmogrification of the Republican Party happened surreptitiously. It happened in plain sight, and it was extensively chronicled — but not by the MSM. The sainted Reagan blew his party’s cover when to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered in 1964. He wasn’t there to demonstrate his sympathy to the civil rights movement, but to demonstrate his sympathy to those who opposed it. This was an ugly moment, and it didn’t go entirely unnoticed in the media. In fact, David Brooks would later be moved to defend the speech, which invoked the not-so-subtle buzz words “states’ rights,” and to act as if Reagan had been slandered by those who called him out on it. But if some in the media did call out Reagan on his disgusting curtsy to George Wallace voters, the press seemed to lose its nerve once Reagan became president and the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but extremist-ward. Do you remember these headlines: “Republicans Oppose Civil Rights”; “Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance”; “Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits”; “Republicans Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights”; “Republicans Call Climate Change a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases”? No, you don’t remember, because no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the media behaved as if extremism were business as usual. I don’t think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they don’t take sides. They’re neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox News and MSNBC. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent health care costs skyrocketing – both of which are screamingly false. I am not holding my breath. But even if it were true that the media are not referees, not taking sides against extremism is just another way of taking sides by legitimizing extremism and making it the new normal, which it now is – so long, apparently, as you don’t shout it. In any case, objectivity is a rationalization. We know the media are afraid of a right-wing backlash. We know that they protect themselves by insisting that our two major parties are equidistant from the political center – more nonsense. And we know that every story is framed by its political consequences, not its human ones. We see that every day. But if you really want to know why the media skipped the story about Republican extremism all these years, you have to look to the force of extremism itself and the way it reconfigures the political spectrum, basically disorienting us. In Europe, fringe parties on the right and left get savaged by the press all the time. If we had them here, no doubt the same thing would happen, press objectivity notwithstanding. The difference between Europe and America is that our right-wing extremists happen to control one of our two major parties and theirs don’t. To take on extremism would reveal not only the Republicans’ deficiencies, both of its elected officials and its rank and file, but the deficiencies of the entire American political system. That takes a courage very, very few people (OK, nobody) in the MSM have. And yet we now know that the media can be assertive if they want to be, that they can take sides, and even correct the record if they choose. We know because that is precisely what they are doing against Trump, but only because they see Trump as an outlier from the GOP establishment – a disruptive, fringe force. Trump has a right to feel blindsided by the double standard to which he is being subjected. Cruz may be even more of an outlier from the American mainstream than Trump, and yet the media don’t seem anywhere near as lathered about him. But back to the big story: Something happened in American politics over the last 25 or 30 years to release our demons and remove our shame. The media didn’t want to look. Now Trump has come along to reap what the conservatives had sown, and stir up those demons, and the media are suddenly in high dudgeon. Where were they when America needed them?Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop assault on the “short-fingered vulgarian” named Donald Trump, would have you believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday that “we’re seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes.” But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals. The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story – one the popularity of Trump’s candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest political story of the last 50 years — is the decades-long transformation of Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of beliefs into quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless. It is a story you didn’t read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in lefty journals likeThe Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman’s. And it wasn’t exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they chose not to tell it – to pretend it wasn’t happening. They are still pretending. It is hardly a surprise that the GOP establishment and their enablers in the media are acting as if Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is a break from the party’s supposedly genteel past. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who was “shocked, shocked,” to find gambling in Rick’s establishment, the GOP solons profess to be “shocked, shocked” by Trump’s demagogic racism and nativism. Their protestations remind me of an old gambit of comedian Milton Berle. When the audience was applauding him, he would shush them demonstratively with one hand while encouraging them gently with the other. Neither is it a surprise that the conservative media have been doing the same thing — decrying Trump while giving us Trump Lite. Indeed, even less blatant partisans who ought to know better, like every “thinking man’s” favorite conservative David Brooks, deliver the same hypocrisy. No, Brooks isn’t too keen on Trump (or Cruz for that matter), but he is very keen on some mythological Republican Party that exudes decency. On the PBS NewsHour last week he said with great earnestness, “For almost a century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has stood for a certain free market version of America – an America that’s about openness, that’s about markets and opportunity, and a definition of what this country is.” Free markets? That’s what he thinks defines America? Let me rephrase what I said earlier: Trump hasn’t just fulfilled the Republican Party’s purpose; he has exposed it. And he also has exposed the media’s indifference to what the party has become. Obviously, I am not saying that the transmogrification of the Republican Party happened surreptitiously. It happened in plain sight, and it was extensively chronicled — but not by the MSM. The sainted Reagan blew his party’s cover when to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered in 1964. He wasn’t there to demonstrate his sympathy to the civil rights movement, but to demonstrate his sympathy to those who opposed it. This was an ugly moment, and it didn’t go entirely unnoticed in the media. In fact, David Brooks would later be moved to defend the speech, which invoked the not-so-subtle buzz words “states’ rights,” and to act as if Reagan had been slandered by those who called him out on it. But if some in the media did call out Reagan on his disgusting curtsy to George Wallace voters, the press seemed to lose its nerve once Reagan became president and the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but extremist-ward. Do you remember these headlines: “Republicans Oppose Civil Rights”; “Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance”; “Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits”; “Republicans Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights”; “Republicans Call Climate Change a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases”? No, you don’t remember, because no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the media behaved as if extremism were business as usual. I don’t think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they don’t take sides. They’re neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox News and MSNBC. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent health care costs skyrocketing – both of which are screamingly false. I am not holding my breath. But even if it were true that the media are not referees, not taking sides against extremism is just another way of taking sides by legitimizing extremism and making it the new normal, which it now is – so long, apparently, as you don’t shout it. In any case, objectivity is a rationalization. We know the media are afraid of a right-wing backlash. We know that they protect themselves by insisting that our two major parties are equidistant from the political center – more nonsense. And we know that every story is framed by its political consequences, not its human ones. We see that every day. But if you really want to know why the media skipped the story about Republican extremism all these years, you have to look to the force of extremism itself and the way it reconfigures the political spectrum, basically disorienting us. In Europe, fringe parties on the right and left get savaged by the press all the time. If we had them here, no doubt the same thing would happen, press objectivity notwithstanding. The difference between Europe and America is that our right-wing extremists happen to control one of our two major parties and theirs don’t. To take on extremism would reveal not only the Republicans’ deficiencies, both of its elected officials and its rank and file, but the deficiencies of the entire American political system. That takes a courage very, very few people (OK, nobody) in the MSM have. And yet we now know that the media can be assertive if they want to be, that they can take sides, and even correct the record if they choose. We know because that is precisely what they are doing against Trump, but only because they see Trump as an outlier from the GOP establishment – a disruptive, fringe force. Trump has a right to feel blindsided by the double standard to which he is being subjected. Cruz may be even more of an outlier from the American mainstream than Trump, and yet the media don’t seem anywhere near as lathered about him. But back to the big story: Something happened in American politics over the last 25 or 30 years to release our demons and remove our shame. The media didn’t want to look. Now Trump has come along to reap what the conservatives had sown, and stir up those demons, and the media are suddenly in high dudgeon. Where were they when America needed them?Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop assault on the “short-fingered vulgarian” named Donald Trump, would have you believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday that “we’re seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes.” But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals. The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story – one the popularity of Trump’s candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest political story of the last 50 years — is the decades-long transformation of Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of beliefs into quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless. It is a story you didn’t read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in lefty journals likeThe Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman’s. And it wasn’t exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they chose not to tell it – to pretend it wasn’t happening. They are still pretending. It is hardly a surprise that the GOP establishment and their enablers in the media are acting as if Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is a break from the party’s supposedly genteel past. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who was “shocked, shocked,” to find gambling in Rick’s establishment, the GOP solons profess to be “shocked, shocked” by Trump’s demagogic racism and nativism. Their protestations remind me of an old gambit of comedian Milton Berle. When the audience was applauding him, he would shush them demonstratively with one hand while encouraging them gently with the other. Neither is it a surprise that the conservative media have been doing the same thing — decrying Trump while giving us Trump Lite. Indeed, even less blatant partisans who ought to know better, like every “thinking man’s” favorite conservative David Brooks, deliver the same hypocrisy. No, Brooks isn’t too keen on Trump (or Cruz for that matter), but he is very keen on some mythological Republican Party that exudes decency. On the PBS NewsHour last week he said with great earnestness, “For almost a century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has stood for a certain free market version of America – an America that’s about openness, that’s about markets and opportunity, and a definition of what this country is.” Free markets? That’s what he thinks defines America? Let me rephrase what I said earlier: Trump hasn’t just fulfilled the Republican Party’s purpose; he has exposed it. And he also has exposed the media’s indifference to what the party has become. Obviously, I am not saying that the transmogrification of the Republican Party happened surreptitiously. It happened in plain sight, and it was extensively chronicled — but not by the MSM. The sainted Reagan blew his party’s cover when to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered in 1964. He wasn’t there to demonstrate his sympathy to the civil rights movement, but to demonstrate his sympathy to those who opposed it. This was an ugly moment, and it didn’t go entirely unnoticed in the media. In fact, David Brooks would later be moved to defend the speech, which invoked the not-so-subtle buzz words “states’ rights,” and to act as if Reagan had been slandered by those who called him out on it. But if some in the media did call out Reagan on his disgusting curtsy to George Wallace voters, the press seemed to lose its nerve once Reagan became president and the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but extremist-ward. Do you remember these headlines: “Republicans Oppose Civil Rights”; “Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance”; “Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits”; “Republicans Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights”; “Republicans Call Climate Change a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases”? No, you don’t remember, because no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the media behaved as if extremism were business as usual. I don’t think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they don’t take sides. They’re neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox News and MSNBC. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent health care costs skyrocketing – both of which are screamingly false. I am not holding my breath. But even if it were true that the media are not referees, not taking sides against extremism is just another way of taking sides by legitimizing extremism and making it the new normal, which it now is – so long, apparently, as you don’t shout it. In any case, objectivity is a rationalization. We know the media are afraid of a right-wing backlash. We know that they protect themselves by insisting that our two major parties are equidistant from the political center – more nonsense. And we know that every story is framed by its political consequences, not its human ones. We see that every day. But if you really want to know why the media skipped the story about Republican extremism all these years, you have to look to the force of extremism itself and the way it reconfigures the political spectrum, basically disorienting us. In Europe, fringe parties on the right and left get savaged by the press all the time. If we had them here, no doubt the same thing would happen, press objectivity notwithstanding. The difference between Europe and America is that our right-wing extremists happen to control one of our two major parties and theirs don’t. To take on extremism would reveal not only the Republicans’ deficiencies, both of its elected officials and its rank and file, but the deficiencies of the entire American political system. That takes a courage very, very few people (OK, nobody) in the MSM have. And yet we now know that the media can be assertive if they want to be, that they can take sides, and even correct the record if they choose. We know because that is precisely what they are doing against Trump, but only because they see Trump as an outlier from the GOP establishment – a disruptive, fringe force. Trump has a right to feel blindsided by the double standard to which he is being subjected. Cruz may be even more of an outlier from the American mainstream than Trump, and yet the media don’t seem anywhere near as lathered about him. But back to the big story: Something happened in American politics over the last 25 or 30 years to release our demons and remove our shame. The media didn’t want to look. Now Trump has come along to reap what the conservatives had sown, and stir up those demons, and the media are suddenly in high dudgeon. Where were they when America needed them?

Continue Reading...

“There used to be consequences”: Trump complains protesters aren’t dealt with more forcefully at St. Louis rally where Black Lives Matter activists are arrested

Amid controversy surrounding violence at campaign events from supporters and even top campaign officials, Donald Trump took his clown show to St. Louis, a mere 12 minutes away from Ferguson, Missouri, where he waxed nostalgic for an unknown time when citizens expressing their 1st Amendment right to protest were met with "consequences." Unveiling his latest endorsement from right-wing icon Phyllis Schlafly, who recently called for a ban on foreign players in Major League Baseball because they are taking "positions that should have gone to American players," Trump found himself, again, facing a seemingly endless stream of interruptions and protests from some inside the Peabody Opera House. The scene outside was much worse:

Hard to believe that anyone would get assaulted at rallies with these sorts of attendees pic.twitter.com/ShhTKouFwL

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) March 11, 2016

Inside, Trump complained to the crowd of 3,000 that “part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to kick protesters out] is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” "There used to be consequences. There are none anymore,” he said. “These people are so bad for our country. You have no idea folks, you have no idea.” As protestors continued to interrupt him, Trump hit harder: "They contribute nothing. Nothing. And look at the police, they take their lives in their hands." "We don't even win here with protesters anymore," he complained. "The protesters end up taking over. And frankly, I mean, have to be honest: From my standpoint it makes it a little more exciting, and it gives me time to think about where I want to go next. It's beautiful. It's like intermission. And the guys that are near the event, they see some pretty good stuff." “Get him out,” Trump said as a protester was pulled out by police. “Go home to mommy.” Meanwhile, outside... https://twitter.com/kodacohen/status/...

An arrest at the Trump rally in St. Louis (sorry for the video, phone is acting up) pic.twitter.com/wjlcDnJgrR — Junius Randolph (@JuniusRandolph) March 11, 2016

The first arrest. A yelling match nearly turned into a fistfight. The crowd cheered as they dragged him away. pic.twitter.com/YzTsrTApQo

— Trymaine Lee (@trymainelee) March 11, 2016

The people United pic.twitter.com/IzpxHg9Ghr — Marissa (@southards_3) March 11, 2016

Amid controversy surrounding violence at campaign events from supporters and even top campaign officials, Donald Trump took his clown show to St. Louis, a mere 12 minutes away from Ferguson, Missouri, where he waxed nostalgic for an unknown time when citizens expressing their 1st Amendment right to protest were met with "consequences." Unveiling his latest endorsement from right-wing icon Phyllis Schlafly, who recently called for a ban on foreign players in Major League Baseball because they are taking "positions that should have gone to American players," Trump found himself, again, facing a seemingly endless stream of interruptions and protests from some inside the Peabody Opera House. The scene outside was much worse:

Hard to believe that anyone would get assaulted at rallies with these sorts of attendees pic.twitter.com/ShhTKouFwL

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) March 11, 2016

Inside, Trump complained to the crowd of 3,000 that “part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to kick protesters out] is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” "There used to be consequences. There are none anymore,” he said. “These people are so bad for our country. You have no idea folks, you have no idea.” As protestors continued to interrupt him, Trump hit harder: "They contribute nothing. Nothing. And look at the police, they take their lives in their hands." "We don't even win here with protesters anymore," he complained. "The protesters end up taking over. And frankly, I mean, have to be honest: From my standpoint it makes it a little more exciting, and it gives me time to think about where I want to go next. It's beautiful. It's like intermission. And the guys that are near the event, they see some pretty good stuff." “Get him out,” Trump said as a protester was pulled out by police. “Go home to mommy.” Meanwhile, outside... https://twitter.com/kodacohen/status/...

An arrest at the Trump rally in St. Louis (sorry for the video, phone is acting up) pic.twitter.com/wjlcDnJgrR — Junius Randolph (@JuniusRandolph) March 11, 2016

The first arrest. A yelling match nearly turned into a fistfight. The crowd cheered as they dragged him away. pic.twitter.com/YzTsrTApQo

— Trymaine Lee (@trymainelee) March 11, 2016

The people United pic.twitter.com/IzpxHg9Ghr — Marissa (@southards_3) March 11, 2016

Continue Reading...

Clinton’s Reagan overreach: Hillary’s HIV trip-up shows she really needs to learn the political art of shade

Well, she stepped in it this time. Hillary Clinton went on air and said something so profoundly untrue that it's hard not to laugh when you hear it: "It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan, in particular Mrs. Reagan, we started a national conversation." Outrage has ensued, understandably, because the historical record shows the exact opposite was true. The Reagans basically refused to talk about AIDS in public. Clinton's initial efforts at kicking dirt over this so far are laughably weak, as well. The fact that this happened at all is just baffling. Look, no one is under any illusions that Clinton actually thinks something so stupid. (She later apologized) She was on air, talking about Nancy Reagan's death, and knowing that Americans are a superstitious people that are afraid of speaking ill of the dead she groped around for something nice to say. That she had to reach so far tells us that this was a very difficult task indeed. Still, one has to wonder if Clinton learned nothing from her years living in Arkansas while her husband worked his way through politics there. Oh, she can do the accent and talk about the food, but clearly she never learned the Southern art of blessing someone's heart, which is to say finding a way to appear to be complimenting them while saying nothing nice at all. (Or, if you're a true master, throwing some shade.) Being called upon to speak about a recently deceased but distasteful person is just when you need such a skill. And Nancy Reagan's life provided such wonderful opportunities! "She certainly was an influential first lady, and I felt quite a bit of pressure to live up to her example." "She definitely saw herself as a glamorous woman in the style of Jackie Kennedy." "Nancy knew how to wear red!" "Bill would often say to me, 'Why don't you look at me the way Nancy does Ronald?'" (Strict adherence to the facts is not necessary here.) "Her efforts at getting kids to say no to drugs really do remind me of my attempts to pass universal health care." See? You can both delight your base while simultaneously not saying anything that can be read directly as an insult. I'm sure you have some old female friends from Arkansas who can give you lessons.

Continue Reading...

Is this the end of an iconic edition of “To Kill a Mockingbird”?

I live in a small apartment and don't have a copious book collection, but I nevertheless own two copies of "To Kill a Mockingbird." There's the beautiful Folio Society edition I bought a few years ago as a special keepsake, because it's one of my favorite works of literature. And then there's the battered, grubby copy I first bought decades ago, the cheapest edition I could find — and the one my daughters would later read in time. It's a version that's now on its way to extinction. As the New Republic's Alex Shephard reports Friday, the estate of the late author Harper Lee — who died three weeks ago at the age of 89 — has already moved to cease publication of the mass market paperback of her masterpiece. And according to an an email from the Hachette Book Group to booksellers dated March 4, "No other publisher will be able to produce the edition either, meaning there will no longer be a mass-market version of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' available in the United States." The New Republic adds, "The email contains a discount code for the mass-market paperback effective Tuesday, March 1, one day after Lee’s will was sealed." "To Kill a Mockingbird" isn't going away, of course; Shephard notes that "HarperCollins publishes the trade paperback, hardcover, and special editions of To Kill a Mockingbird." Readers can also find the book at these incredible, little known places called libraries, where one can borrow a copy for a limited time and then return it, free of charge. But by cutting off the lowest cost option for getting a new copy — and of finding it easily at the airport or the train station or the big box chain store — the Lee estate is potentially making it harder for readers on a tight budget to get a new copy of their own. Even sadder, as TNR notes, "the disappearance of the mass-market edition could have a significant impact on schools," where it remains one of the most assigned books in the American educational curriculum. And the Hachette email remarks that "more than two-thirds of the 30 million copies sold worldwide since publication have been Hachette’s low-priced edition." In the past few years leading up to her recent demise, the famously reclusive Lee found herself at the center of controversies over how aware — and approving — she truly was over decisions being made about her works. Her novel "Go Set a Watchman" — an early draft featuring the major characters of "To Kill a Mockingbird" several years later in life — was released in 2015 amidst a flurry of questions and investigation. Joseph Borg, the director of the Alabama Securities Commission, understatedly told the New York Times a year ago that Lee "seems to be aware of what is going on with her book and the book deal." Just last month, along with the announcement of a new Broadway production of "To Kill a Mockingbird" adapted by Aaron Sorkin — a choice many critics found peculiar. And an email message about the end of the mass market paperback describes the decision as "per the wishes of the author’s estate." Is this all what Harper Lee would have wished for her book — and its readers, especially the schoolchildren who, every academic year for generations now, have come to her story new? I don't know. Is this latest move part of a bigger business decision to consolidate how Lee's works are distributed? Could be. But I do know that when I thumb through my own well-worn copy of a book I first found when I couldn't have been much older than Scout Finch, I find that I underlined an observation, written by Harper Lee in the voice of a child hungry for knowledge. "I could not help receiving the impression," she says, "that I was being cheated out of something."I live in a small apartment and don't have a copious book collection, but I nevertheless own two copies of "To Kill a Mockingbird." There's the beautiful Folio Society edition I bought a few years ago as a special keepsake, because it's one of my favorite works of literature. And then there's the battered, grubby copy I first bought decades ago, the cheapest edition I could find — and the one my daughters would later read in time. It's a version that's now on its way to extinction. As the New Republic's Alex Shephard reports Friday, the estate of the late author Harper Lee — who died three weeks ago at the age of 89 — has already moved to cease publication of the mass market paperback of her masterpiece. And according to an an email from the Hachette Book Group to booksellers dated March 4, "No other publisher will be able to produce the edition either, meaning there will no longer be a mass-market version of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' available in the United States." The New Republic adds, "The email contains a discount code for the mass-market paperback effective Tuesday, March 1, one day after Lee’s will was sealed." "To Kill a Mockingbird" isn't going away, of course; Shephard notes that "HarperCollins publishes the trade paperback, hardcover, and special editions of To Kill a Mockingbird." Readers can also find the book at these incredible, little known places called libraries, where one can borrow a copy for a limited time and then return it, free of charge. But by cutting off the lowest cost option for getting a new copy — and of finding it easily at the airport or the train station or the big box chain store — the Lee estate is potentially making it harder for readers on a tight budget to get a new copy of their own. Even sadder, as TNR notes, "the disappearance of the mass-market edition could have a significant impact on schools," where it remains one of the most assigned books in the American educational curriculum. And the Hachette email remarks that "more than two-thirds of the 30 million copies sold worldwide since publication have been Hachette’s low-priced edition." In the past few years leading up to her recent demise, the famously reclusive Lee found herself at the center of controversies over how aware — and approving — she truly was over decisions being made about her works. Her novel "Go Set a Watchman" — an early draft featuring the major characters of "To Kill a Mockingbird" several years later in life — was released in 2015 amidst a flurry of questions and investigation. Joseph Borg, the director of the Alabama Securities Commission, understatedly told the New York Times a year ago that Lee "seems to be aware of what is going on with her book and the book deal." Just last month, along with the announcement of a new Broadway production of "To Kill a Mockingbird" adapted by Aaron Sorkin — a choice many critics found peculiar. And an email message about the end of the mass market paperback describes the decision as "per the wishes of the author’s estate." Is this all what Harper Lee would have wished for her book — and its readers, especially the schoolchildren who, every academic year for generations now, have come to her story new? I don't know. Is this latest move part of a bigger business decision to consolidate how Lee's works are distributed? Could be. But I do know that when I thumb through my own well-worn copy of a book I first found when I couldn't have been much older than Scout Finch, I find that I underlined an observation, written by Harper Lee in the voice of a child hungry for knowledge. "I could not help receiving the impression," she says, "that I was being cheated out of something."

Continue Reading...

“What the hell is she on?”: Hillary Clinton destroyed on Twitter for praising Nancy Reagan’s “very effective, low-key advocacy” for HIV/AIDS

Speaking to MSNBC Friday morning, Hillary Clinton made the delusional argument that Nancy Reagan helped start "a national conversation" about HIV and AIDS: https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/7083... "It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s," Clinton said. And, thanks to Ronald and, "in particular," Nancy Reagan, "we started a national conversation, when before, no one would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it." Clinton said she appreciated Nancy Reagan's "very effective, low-key advocacy," which she said, "penetrated the public conscience." Clinton's mischaracterization of the Reagans' impact on the AIDS epidemic is, put mildly, very wrong. And Twitter is responding accordingly: https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/st... https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/7... https://twitter.com/fakedansavage/sta... https://twitter.com/alexanderchee/sta... https://twitter.com/JAdomian/status/7... https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/statu... https://twitter.com/chrisgeidner/stat... The Clinton camp tweeted the following apology, but as you see, the damage is done: https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/st... to MSNBC Friday morning, Hillary Clinton made the delusional argument that Nancy Reagan helped start "a national conversation" about HIV and AIDS: https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/7083... "It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s," Clinton said. And, thanks to Ronald and, "in particular," Nancy Reagan, "we started a national conversation, when before, no one would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it." Clinton said she appreciated Nancy Reagan's "very effective, low-key advocacy," which she said, "penetrated the public conscience." Clinton's mischaracterization of the Reagans' impact on the AIDS epidemic is, put mildly, very wrong. And Twitter is responding accordingly: https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/st... https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/7... https://twitter.com/fakedansavage/sta... https://twitter.com/alexanderchee/sta... https://twitter.com/JAdomian/status/7... https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/statu... https://twitter.com/chrisgeidner/stat... The Clinton camp tweeted the following apology, but as you see, the damage is done: https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/st...

Continue Reading...

We are witnessing the decline of Saudi Arabia as a major power

Five years ago, when the Arab Spring seemed at its most hopeful point, a Saudi diplomat told me, scornfully, that it would come to nothing. I had met him in the halls of the United Nations, where I had been asking diplomats about their views on Libya. The Saudis were eager to have the UN validate armed action to remove Muammar Qaddafi. A Saudi news outlet, al-Arabiya, had suggested that the Libyan military was killing its citizens with abandon. Fog surrounded Libya. The U.S. State Department seemed clueless. It did not have any reliable intelligence. Hillary Clinton, who pushed for war, relied upon the French and the Saudis for their assessment of Libya. These were unreliable narrators. Saudi Arabia, at least, wanted the Arab Spring shut down. It threatened its own undemocratic regime. The diplomat’s scorn grew out of this anxiety. Like an angry dragon, Saudi Arabia lashed around the region, throwing money and arms, encouraging chaos in this and that country. One underestimates the biliousness of monarchs: at a 2009 Arab League meeting, Qaddafi had cavalierly dismissed the King of Saudi Arabia as a creation of the British and a protectorate of the Americans. It was evident that the monarchs would not tolerate his existence for much longer. Two years later, they—with Western help—dismissed him. Qaddafi was a personal affront to the Saudi King. More serious was the imagined threat America’s Kingdom perceived in Iran. When the Shah of Iran ruled there, the Kings of Arabia smiled. It was Islamic republicanism they hated, for it directly threatened them. Saudi Arabia’s fear of Islamic republicanism is what drives its policy. Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West pushed back against Iranian influence through the U.S.’ Syria Accountability Act (2003), the Israeli war on Lebanon (2006) and the nuclear sanctions regime of 2006. None of these worked. Just as the Arab Spring provided the opportunity for the Saudis to intervene in Libya, so too did it provide the Saudis with the pretext for regime change in Syria and in other theaters where it fantasized about Iranian influence (Bahrain, Yemen and Lebanon). The Saudi ambition was to erase Iran’s presence. Five years later, the detritus of that policy is clear: Libya, Syria and Yemen are destroyed, whereas Bahrain has been reduced to a prison of dreams. The Saudi diplomat’s scorn was prophetic. But much of the Saudi dream, given encouragement by the United States, has now turned. Syria and Yemen have been destroyed, but they remain standing. Iran has been welcomed into the fraternity of nations, whether with the slow erasure of the nuclear sanctions regime or integration into the Chinese and Russian networks. Saudi Arabia’s oil civil war has served to bankrupt Saudi Arabia as much as its adversaries. No flag of truce has gone up yet on the palaces of Riyadh. Nonetheless, there are inklings that King Salman’s circle is aware of their grave miscalculation. Syria. Russia’s direct intervention into Syria ended all expectations of a regime change operation by the West. No Western bombing of Damascus is now possible short of a full-scale war with Russia. Even Ted Cruz will not be able to get the U.S. generals to agree to such insanity. Absent massive Western bombardment, the government of Bashar al-Assad is not going to fall. Saudi Arabia’s main proxy force—Jaish al-Islam—lost its leader, Zahran Alloush, in a bombing run last December. It has not recovered. Saudi Arabia called in the opposition to Riyadh hastily, stuffed them into the High Negotiating Committee and warned them that any Geneva meeting would demand their surrender. The Committee dithered about the peace talks, and then watched as the Russians and the United States agreed to a “cessation of hostilities.” It would have been callous of them not to go along with anything that resembled a humanitarian pause. Saudi Arabia was furious. It said it would send in ground troops of its own. But where would these troops come from? Saudi Arabia does not have an adequate army. It buys billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry, largely as a boondoggle for U.S. arms manufacturers. Saudi subjects are happy in the cockpit of a jet fighter as long as they can bomb countries that do not have jets of their own or air defenses. Few Saudi subjects would be pleased to die on the misery of a battlefield. For this, Saudi Arabia hires mercenaries from Pakistan and Morocco, from the Horn of Africa and Colombia. When Pakistan’s parliament refused to send troops to fight in Yemen last year, it meant that Saudi Arabia’s ground forces were unavailable. Saudi generals whispered to the King’s circle that they thought an intervention into Syria was a bad idea. It had to be suspended. No road is open for Saudi ambitions in Syria. Yemen. King Salman’s son Mohammed bin Salman has staked his legitimacy on the Saudi bombardment of Yemen. The richest country in the Arab world has bombed the poorest country in the Arab world since March 26 of last year. No strategic gains have been met by the Saudi bombing. The forces of the Houthis and former president Abdullah Saleh are the Saudi targets. Their resistance has been fierce, but it has also been from a position of unevenness. Saudi Arabia has the best equipment, fully supplied by the West. As human rights groups have warned, responsibility for the considerable Saudi war crimes in Yemen are shared between Riyadh and its Western suppliers. Al-Qaeda’s gains in southern Yemen have been serious. It has used the Saudi air power as its airforce. This is what Mohammed bin Salman’s war has come to mean. An exit from the quagmire in Yemen is not apparent. King Salman wants a dignified way to withdraw. He summoned a Houthi delegation to Riyadh last week. They are now in the palaces of the King, listening to their proposals. This is the first time that the Houthis have sent an envoy to Saudi Arabia, but it is not the first attempt at a peace process. Mohammed Abdel-Salam, the Houthi spokesperson who is now in Riyadh for these talks, led the delegation to Oman last year, when the two sides created a process that led to the ill-starred Geneva talks in June. But hope now is greater. Starvation stalks Yemen, whose infrastructure has been destroyed. There is desperation in the country. Saudi Arabia knows it cannot make gains absent Pakistani ground troops (and even then nothing is guaranteed). A cessation of hostilities is on the cards. Oil. I have written earlier (part one, part two) about the truce in the oil wars. Certainly oil prices follow the trend lines of all commodity prices, which have dropped as a result of slack demand. But oil prices dipped further than those of other raw materials, suggesting that this had more to do with politics than economics. The meeting in Doha that pushed for a freeze in production level already raised the world oil price—Brent Crude—from $30 to $40. A closer approximation to market prices will soon appear. Saudi Arabia had to make a deal with Russia (and behind Moscow, Iran) to get this relief to its otherwise rattled exchequer. The cessation of hostilities in the oil market is one more indication of a weakened Saudi Arabia. I reached out to the scornful diplomat to ask him what he thought now about the failures of Saudi Arabia. He returned my message this afternoon with a dampened sensibility. “Difficulties are clear,” he wrote. “The Kingdom will have to find a way forward. The West betrayed us.” The last sentence is of interest. Rather than take responsibility for its dangerous gambits, Saudi Arabia will start to blame the West, particularly President Barack Obama, for not bombing Syria and for the end to the Iranian nuclear sanctions. This is a cliché. It is not near reality. America’s Kingdom overreached. In doing so, it destroyed several Arab states. This is not the time for scorn. This is the time for great sadness for what has befallen great Arab societies, which will have to dig deep into their resilience to rebuild their communities.

Continue Reading...

Donald Trump minimizes the violence of his most fervent followers: “I heard about it, I don’t like it,” he pinky-swears

In Thursday evening's Republican debate, GOP front-runner Donald Trump insisted that the majority of the people at his rallies who are violent are those protesting his candidacy, as opposed to those supporting it. Of course, there hasn't been much video evidence of people protesting his candidacy who are violent, whereas evidence of people who support him turning violent on those who protest his events abounds. When asked about it, Trump said that "I heard about it, I don't like it," and professed when asked whether he's encouraged said violence, replied "I hope not, I truly hope not." Trump added that he doesn't "condone that [violence] at all," but immediately began discussing the "bad dudes," who "have done some bad things" at his events -- even though there's no evidence of any dudes, bad or otherwise, who have systemically engaged in violent behavior against Trump supporters. In Thursday evening's Republican debate, GOP front-runner Donald Trump insisted that the majority of the people at his rallies who are violent are those protesting his candidacy, as opposed to those supporting it. Of course, there hasn't been much video evidence of people protesting his candidacy who are violent, whereas evidence of people who support him turning violent on those who protest his events abounds. When asked about it, Trump said that "I heard about it, I don't like it," and professed when asked whether he's encouraged said violence, replied "I hope not, I truly hope not." Trump added that he doesn't "condone that [violence] at all," but immediately began discussing the "bad dudes," who "have done some bad things" at his events -- even though there's no evidence of any dudes, bad or otherwise, who have systemically engaged in violent behavior against Trump supporters. In Thursday evening's Republican debate, GOP front-runner Donald Trump insisted that the majority of the people at his rallies who are violent are those protesting his candidacy, as opposed to those supporting it. Of course, there hasn't been much video evidence of people protesting his candidacy who are violent, whereas evidence of people who support him turning violent on those who protest his events abounds. When asked about it, Trump said that "I heard about it, I don't like it," and professed when asked whether he's encouraged said violence, replied "I hope not, I truly hope not." Trump added that he doesn't "condone that [violence] at all," but immediately began discussing the "bad dudes," who "have done some bad things" at his events -- even though there's no evidence of any dudes, bad or otherwise, who have systemically engaged in violent behavior against Trump supporters. In Thursday evening's Republican debate, GOP front-runner Donald Trump insisted that the majority of the people at his rallies who are violent are those protesting his candidacy, as opposed to those supporting it. Of course, there hasn't been much video evidence of people protesting his candidacy who are violent, whereas evidence of people who support him turning violent on those who protest his events abounds. When asked about it, Trump said that "I heard about it, I don't like it," and professed when asked whether he's encouraged said violence, replied "I hope not, I truly hope not." Trump added that he doesn't "condone that [violence] at all," but immediately began discussing the "bad dudes," who "have done some bad things" at his events -- even though there's no evidence of any dudes, bad or otherwise, who have systemically engaged in violent behavior against Trump supporters.

Continue Reading...