Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 851
February 27, 2016
Noam Chomsky for secretary of education: Bernie Sanders needs to make this revolutionary call for our public schools
Throughout 1969, when he was in his late 20s and living in Vermont, Bernie Sanders wrote a series of diatribes on the American education system. “It is quite clear the basic function of schools,” he opined in a letter to the Vermont Freeman, “is to set up in children patterns of docility and conformity — patterns designed not to create independent and free adults, but adults who will obey orders, be ‘faithful’ uncomplaining employees and ‘good’ citizens.” In another piece, he offered this question to parents: “With regard to the schools that you send your children to, are you concerned that many of these institutions serve no other function than to squash the life, joy, and curiosity out of kids.” Sanders was an unwavering critic of the fact that schooling was compulsory in the United States, concerned that the coercive powers of the state were decimating citizens’ self-determination in education, particularly those of children. He observed in a piece for the Vermont Freeman, “The revolution comes . . . when a father refuses to send his child to school because schools destroy children.” Sanders, himself, had just fathered a son in March 1969. And he hadn’t been the most academically astute student in school. At the University of Chicago, he was on the brink of failing his classes and the dean told him to take a year off. He told the New Yorker that “he found the classroom boring and irrelevant — and that he learned ‘infinitely more on the streets and in the community.’” He worked for a union and a political campaign, participated in and organized protests against segregated campus housing and public schools, and retreated to the library, where “I read everything I could get my hands on — except what I was required to read for class,” Sanders noted in his book "An Outsider in the House." He says he read the works of intellectuals such as Karl Marx, progressive educator John Dewey, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, psychologist Erich Fromm and many others. In a letter to the editor of the Freeman, Sanders wrote, “One of the most heartening signs in recent years is the growing belief among many people that the formal educational process (i.e. schools) are not only ‘not good’; — but that they are positively destructive and harmful. People are becoming aware that the function of schools is not to educate children but, in fact, to do the very opposite — to PREVENT education.” What he was referring to was a subversive, radical educational philosophy that had made inroads in communities across the country known as the free school movement. This was at a time when the nation was rocked by the countercultural phenomenon, marked by the anti-war, anti-nuclear, civil rights, feminist and free speech student movements as well. Free school stalwarts identified the conventional school system as one of their enemies, because it crushed its captives’ curiosity, creativity and love of learning and ranked and sorted them for the capitalistic war machine. So they aimed to create small alternative schools outside of the government’s clutches and without grades, tests, or anti-democratic structures. They reckoned that the education system couldn’t be salvaged by making tweaks in instruction or curriculum. “So long as schooling was set up to serve the interests of a competitive, consumerist, mass-mentality society, it could never fully educate young people for lives of meaning and personal integrity, no matter how well-intentioned were its reformers,” as Ron Miller explained in his book "Free Schools, Free People." One of the catalysts for the movement was a book by Alexander Sutherland Neill, a British educator who founded a progressive school in England called Summerhill. The school, which is still alive today, featured non-compulsory classes; freedom in learning; endless opportunities for children to play, explore and work on projects and individual endeavors; and democratic meetings where students and staff members alike met weekly to vote on school policies and matters. In 1960, Neill’s manifesto Summerhill, which outlined the school’s educational doctrines and his thoughts on childhood, learning and schooling, was published for an American audience. It sold millions of copies. Similar to Sanders' writings, several other educators and writers rose to national prominence with their searing indictments of traditional schooling, including educators John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, George Dennison, and James Herndon, social critic Paul Goodman, and former Catholic priest Ivan Illich. During the same time college students were raising hell on campus by occupying buildings in civil rights protests and against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early '70s, hundreds of free schools were established whose main purpose was to educate not for obedience and preparation for technocratic capitalism, but rather for freedom and living in a peaceful, democratic and humanistic society. The power and influence of the free school movement diminished in congruence with the decline of the popular uprisings and the final chapters of the Vietnam War. Today, there is a renewed interest in alternative, democratic education at a time when public education has been thoroughly gutted by corporate education reformers, billionaires and foundations through privatization, austerity policies, school closure and neoliberal restructuring schemes. Students have also been fed a reckless diet of high-stakes standardized tests, which have burgeoned under President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (Senator Bernie Sanders voted against it) and President Obama’s Race to the Top program. During this presidential race, there has been an astonishing lack of debate and discussion about K-12 education. This is quite unusual considering that more than 50 million students and educators are enrolled and employed by the system and in December, President Obama signed the most monumental federal education legislation in over a decade: the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaces the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. While the legislation has many shortcomings, such as maintaining the policy that students will be tested annually in reading and mathematics in grades three through eight, there are several benefits worth applauding. One is the statute that a state may evaluate a school’s effectiveness based on measures such as student and educator engagement and school climate and safety. Indeed, Sanders (full disclosure: I once bought a T-shirt from his campaign), as a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, strongly advocated for this policy. Another and one of the most significant parts of the legislation is the formation of the Innovative Assessment and Accountability Demonstration Authority, which is a pilot program that allows up to seven states and the potential for more to implement holistic performance-based assessments that examine students’ critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity as opposed to their ability to fill in bubbles on a standardized test. Once again, Sanders was the primary architect of this initiative. However, public education advocates have expressed some worries about other aspects of Sanders’ K-12 education record. Along with his colleague Senator Elizabeth Warren, he voted in favor of the Murphy Amendment, which historian Diane Ravitch has written, “would have enacted tough, federal-mandated accountability, akin to setting up an ‘achievement school district’ in every state.” The amendment urges for the creation of a system of “annually identifying and meaningfully differentiating among all public schools” and singling out the lowest-performing bottom 5 percent of schools and schools that miss their goals for two consecutive years, or, in other words, grading and ranking schools based on test scores and preserving the ruthless accountability regime. It also requires that states carry out “any changes to personnel necessary to improve educational opportunities for children in the [low-performing] school.” This is neoliberal doublespeak for firing teachers. Sanders’ support for this amendment is odd since he has declared, “We should not be firing teachers, we should be hiring teachers.” Moreover, the senator voted against the Lee Amendment, which would have given parents the right to opt their children out of of state standardized tests without negative repercussions to their school’s funding. Sanders needs to loudly and clearly say: The education policies under the Obama administration have failed. Public education needs to be funded equitably. I will appoint a progressive education thinker like Deborah Meier, Sir Ken Robinson, Howard Gardner, or Noam Chomsky to the position of Secretary of Education. Our schools should be democratically run by the students and teachers. Children have the right to learn freely and experientially, play, have voice and ownership in their schools, and access to respectful, well-paid teachers, counselors, nurses, mental health specialists and librarians. We must abolish corporal punishment in schools, a heinous practice that is currently legal in 19 states. We must reject high-stakes standardized testing. And parents should have the right to opt their children out of tests. Over recent years, hundreds of thousands of parents, more than 200,000 in New York State alone, have opted their children out of standardized tests and droves of students, parents and educators in cities like Chicago, Newark, Seattle and Philadelphia have taken to the streets demanding the fall of the testing empire and the end to corporations’ jihad on public education. For a man who once called traditional schooling authoritarian and spirit-crushing, who was radicalized during the countercultural transformation, and who has spent his political life beating the drum for the redistribution of power and resources from the wealthy and elite to the masses, advocating for non-coercive, progressive public education for all seems firmly in Sanders’ wheelhouse. Arguably, there is no better national politician who can speak to this growing and organized movement and help disseminate across the nation an inspiring vision of how our education system should be revolutionized.
Secrets, lies and the iPhone: A CIA whistleblower talks about Obama’s bizarre secrecy obsession — and why Hillary and Bernie won’t talk about it
It’s one of the enduring mysteries of Barack Obama’s presidency, as it sinks toward the sunset: How did this suave and intelligent guy, with the cosmopolitan demeanor, the sardonic sense of humor and the instinct for an irresistible photo-op, end up running the most hidden, most clandestine and most secrecy-obsessed administration in American history? And what does the fact that nobody in the 2016 campaign — not Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, not anybody — ever talks about this mean for the future? The answer to the second question is easy: Nothing good. The answer to the first one might be that those things are unrelated: Personality doesn’t tell us anything about policy, and our superficial judgments about political leaders are often meaningless. Bill Moyers warned me about this some years ago, when I asked him how he evaluated George W. Bush as a person. He wasn’t much interested in character or personality in politics, he said. Lyndon Johnson had been one of the most difficult people he’d ever known, and Moyers had never liked him, but Johnson was an extraordinarily effective politician. I wasn’t sharp enough to ask the obvious follow-up question, which was whether Johnson’s personal flaws had fed into his disastrous policy errors in Vietnam. Bill Moyers has forgotten more about politics than I will ever know, but the thing is, I do perceive a relationship between surface and substance, and I believe we learn something important about people almost right away. George W. Bush was profoundly incurious about the world, and insulated by layers of smarter people and money. Richard Nixon was always a creep. Bill Clinton wanted to make you cry and get your panties off. Ronald Reagan never had any idea what day it was. Barack Obama seems like a smart, funny, cool guy, and maybe he’s too much of all those things for his own good. Maybe we will look back decades from now and perceive the Obama paradox — the baffling relationship between his appealing persona and his abysmal record on surveillance, government secrecy and national security — in a different light. For one thing, whatever they told him between November of 2008 and January of 2009 must have been really scary. I called up John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who spent 23 months in federal prison thinking this stuff over, to see if he could help. Kiriakou is one of the nine government leakers or whistleblowers that the Obama White House and/or the Justice Department has sought to prosecute under the Espionage Act, a law passed under Woodrow Wilson during World War I that was meant to target double agents working for foreign governments. (Among the other eight actual or prospective defendants are Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.) Under all previous presidents, incurious George included, the Espionage Act was used for that purpose exactly three times. If you’re keeping score, that’s nine attempted prosecutions in seven years, versus three in 91 years. Kiriakou had a whole lot to say, especially about former Attorney General Eric Holder and current CIA director John Brennan, whom he sees as the prime movers behind the administration’s secrets-and-lies agenda — and also as the guys who railroaded him over what he describes as a minor indiscretion. Kiriakou spent 15 years in the CIA, first as an analyst and then as a covert operative. He was involved in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, and apparently knew that the alleged senior al-Qaida operative was waterboarded by CIA interrogators, although he was not directly involved. Kiriakou’s decision to talk about CIA torture in a 2007 interview ultimately landed him in prison. But it’s an arcane and suggestive tale and, at least officially, his crime had nothing to do with what he said about Zubaydah and waterboarding. Kiriakou revealed the last name of a covert agent — inadvertently and in passing, he says — to an ABC News journalist named Matthew Cole, who said he was planning to write a book but was actually gathering information for defense lawyers working with detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Later, Kiriakou believes, Cole became a government informant. The whole thing would puzzle John le Carré and Immanuel Kant put together. Even though Kiriakou’s purported offense occurred when George W. Bush was in the White House, it was Obama’s Justice Department that decided to investigate and prosecute him, a three-year process that left him bankrupt, unemployed and more than a million dollars in debt. In the end, he would up spending nearly two years in prison because he mentioned one person’s last name in one email. When it comes to why the Obama administration has repeatedly taken that approach, Kiriakou sounds just about as puzzled as the rest of us. I laid out my limited understanding of the Obama paradox, pretty much the way I did a few paragraphs ago, and Kiriakou sighed. “If this had not happened to me, I would be looking at the Obama presidency as one of the most successful and most progressive presidencies in my lifetime, on everything from gay rights to the economy,” he said. “His foreign policy has been largely successful, if you don't necessarily focus on the Middle East. But I just can't get past these whistleblower prosecutions, most especially my own. “People ask me all the time if I blame Obama for this, and I tell them I don't think Obama has any idea who I am,” he went on. Holder and Brennan had the president’s ear, Kiriakou believes, and for reasons of their own they were devoted to punishing all leakers who made the administration look bad. “I still have friends in the White House. I still have friends in the CIA. They tell me that it was John Brennan who was the real impetus behind these prosecutions, when he was assistant national security advisor for counterterrorism. Brennan was obsessed with leaks just like Holder was obsessed with leaks, and it was Brennan who pushed these prosecutions forward.” What we see now, at the tail end of Obama’s presidency, is the FBI (which is under the authority of the Justice Department and hence the White House) trying to force Apple to hack open the world’s most popular and beloved handheld device, one of whose principal selling points is its unbreakable encryption. Although the president has taken no visible role in the iPhone struggle, it exemplifies what you might call the Obama line: I’m a reasonable guy and this is a special case. Don’t you trust me with your secrets? “People just don't seem to understand that this case has very broad civil liberties connotations,” Kiriakou says. “This is not a fight between Apple and the FBI. If Apple allows the FBI in this one time, what's gonna stop them from asking another time? Indeed, the FBI has now asked for access to nine different phones in nine different cases. All the other cases are drug cases. So that has started already. Then, if such a back door exists, repressive regimes are going to use it and hackers are going to use it and the next thing you know everybody's got access to your phone. I mean, haven't we given up enough of our civil liberties already? All these incremental losses of our civil liberties over the years, that people either don't sense or don't care about, are bad enough. Now we have to worry about the FBI going into our phones anytime they want." Obama came into office promising to run the most transparent and open White House in history and has done precisely the opposite. His administration has kept entire areas of national security, intelligence and anti-terrorism policy under the cloak of executive privilege. That includes the drone war that has killed several thousand people in at least six different countries. Despite the best efforts of international watchdog groups, we will probably never know its full scale and scope, or how many civilians have died in drone strikes. It also includes the infamous “kill list” of individuals whom the president has personally determined are subject to summary execution without trial. If one person has Obama’s ear on this question, it would seem to be John Brennan, who during his tenure at the CIA has transformed the agency into a clandestine military force with no uniforms, no systems of accountability and no obligation to respect the ordinary rules of war. At least two known individuals on the kill list have been United States citizens, including the influential al-Qaida imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico. (Awlaki’s teenage son, also an American citizen, was himself killed by a drone a few weeks after his father. His death is believed to have been collateral damage.) It was a year and a half after Awlaki’s death before the legal framework that supposedly authorized the president to kill him was discussed in public, and that only happened after a non-classified Justice Department memo was leaked to the press, perhaps with permission from above. That all sounds like old news in the middle of an increasingly unhinged election year whose sole foreign policy issue is the national panic over ISIS, a group that, if we stretch the point, might plausibly be held responsible for the deaths of a few dozen Americans. But just because none of this is a campaign issue does not mean it has gone away. Drone pilots are beginning to speak out about the video-game deaths they inflict on strangers thousands of miles away. A group of Air Force veterans recently published a letter to Obama in the Guardian describing the drone war as a “fundamental recruitment tool” for groups like ISIS and a driving force of terrorism. The wife of another imprisoned CIA leaker, Jeffrey Sterling (who has consistently denied any wrongdoing), has mounted a campaign aimed at convincing Obama to pardon her husband before he leaves office, which is one reason I had John Kiriakou’s phone number. On the other end of the spectrum, Donald Trump has captured a different segment of the national mood by suggesting that however many people Obama is killing in secret, it isn’t enough. Other Republican candidates are somewhat less eager to talk about the drone war or the previous president’s policies of “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation.” Trump, to say the least, is not other Republicans. He has more or less promised to bring back the Bush torture policy on steroids, stripped of any prevarication or mixed emotions. It would be ludicrous to expect Hillary Clinton, a longtime national-security insider with close ties to the intelligence community, to adopt a different approach in the White House. Kiriakou says that an aide to Bernie Sanders wrote him a letter while he was in prison, telling him that the Vermont senator believed he had provided an important national service by revealing the CIA torture program. But issues of surveillance, spying and secrecy are never mentioned in Sanders’ fire-and-brimstone campaign speeches, which largely focus on the “free stuff.” That’s “extremely disappointing,” Kiriakou says, but suggests that Sanders’ team tested out that material and discovered that it didn’t resonate with voters. So what’s the deal with Barack Obama? How did our coolest-ever president also turn out to be the one who pursued leakers and whistleblowers with a vengefulness and vigor without precedent in American history? To paraphrase what one of Stalin’s defeated rivals wrote in a letter to the dictator on the eve of his execution, why was John Kiriakou’s destruction useful or necessary to Obama? “I’m not sure that I can answer that question,” Kiriakou said, “and, believe me, I’ve thought about this a lot over the last four years.” Then he pretty much did answer it, and the answer is depressing. “When you've got four shiny stars on your shoulder and you're described as the ‘president's favorite general’ and you say something that makes the president look good, you're not going to get an espionage charge.” He is talking there about retired Gen. James Cartwright, who is suspected of leaking info about Stuxnet, the CIA computer virus that targeted Iran’s nuclear program, but was never prosecuted. “Or when you have those four shiny stars on your shoulder and you leak to your freaking girlfriend the names of 10 covert operatives, you get a pass.” That would be Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA head who revealed far more information than Kiriakou did, and served no jail time. “Or when you're Hillary Clinton and you've got whatever it is now, 83 top-secret documents on your private server, you're gonna get a pass,” Kiriakou continued. “It's when you report on waste, fraud, abuse or illegality, or you embarrass the government or contradict a policy, that’s when the whole weight of the government is gonna crash down on your head.”It’s one of the enduring mysteries of Barack Obama’s presidency, as it sinks toward the sunset: How did this suave and intelligent guy, with the cosmopolitan demeanor, the sardonic sense of humor and the instinct for an irresistible photo-op, end up running the most hidden, most clandestine and most secrecy-obsessed administration in American history? And what does the fact that nobody in the 2016 campaign — not Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, not anybody — ever talks about this mean for the future? The answer to the second question is easy: Nothing good. The answer to the first one might be that those things are unrelated: Personality doesn’t tell us anything about policy, and our superficial judgments about political leaders are often meaningless. Bill Moyers warned me about this some years ago, when I asked him how he evaluated George W. Bush as a person. He wasn’t much interested in character or personality in politics, he said. Lyndon Johnson had been one of the most difficult people he’d ever known, and Moyers had never liked him, but Johnson was an extraordinarily effective politician. I wasn’t sharp enough to ask the obvious follow-up question, which was whether Johnson’s personal flaws had fed into his disastrous policy errors in Vietnam. Bill Moyers has forgotten more about politics than I will ever know, but the thing is, I do perceive a relationship between surface and substance, and I believe we learn something important about people almost right away. George W. Bush was profoundly incurious about the world, and insulated by layers of smarter people and money. Richard Nixon was always a creep. Bill Clinton wanted to make you cry and get your panties off. Ronald Reagan never had any idea what day it was. Barack Obama seems like a smart, funny, cool guy, and maybe he’s too much of all those things for his own good. Maybe we will look back decades from now and perceive the Obama paradox — the baffling relationship between his appealing persona and his abysmal record on surveillance, government secrecy and national security — in a different light. For one thing, whatever they told him between November of 2008 and January of 2009 must have been really scary. I called up John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who spent 23 months in federal prison thinking this stuff over, to see if he could help. Kiriakou is one of the nine government leakers or whistleblowers that the Obama White House and/or the Justice Department has sought to prosecute under the Espionage Act, a law passed under Woodrow Wilson during World War I that was meant to target double agents working for foreign governments. (Among the other eight actual or prospective defendants are Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.) Under all previous presidents, incurious George included, the Espionage Act was used for that purpose exactly three times. If you’re keeping score, that’s nine attempted prosecutions in seven years, versus three in 91 years. Kiriakou had a whole lot to say, especially about former Attorney General Eric Holder and current CIA director John Brennan, whom he sees as the prime movers behind the administration’s secrets-and-lies agenda — and also as the guys who railroaded him over what he describes as a minor indiscretion. Kiriakou spent 15 years in the CIA, first as an analyst and then as a covert operative. He was involved in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, and apparently knew that the alleged senior al-Qaida operative was waterboarded by CIA interrogators, although he was not directly involved. Kiriakou’s decision to talk about CIA torture in a 2007 interview ultimately landed him in prison. But it’s an arcane and suggestive tale and, at least officially, his crime had nothing to do with what he said about Zubaydah and waterboarding. Kiriakou revealed the last name of a covert agent — inadvertently and in passing, he says — to an ABC News journalist named Matthew Cole, who said he was planning to write a book but was actually gathering information for defense lawyers working with detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Later, Kiriakou believes, Cole became a government informant. The whole thing would puzzle John le Carré and Immanuel Kant put together. Even though Kiriakou’s purported offense occurred when George W. Bush was in the White House, it was Obama’s Justice Department that decided to investigate and prosecute him, a three-year process that left him bankrupt, unemployed and more than a million dollars in debt. In the end, he would up spending nearly two years in prison because he mentioned one person’s last name in one email. When it comes to why the Obama administration has repeatedly taken that approach, Kiriakou sounds just about as puzzled as the rest of us. I laid out my limited understanding of the Obama paradox, pretty much the way I did a few paragraphs ago, and Kiriakou sighed. “If this had not happened to me, I would be looking at the Obama presidency as one of the most successful and most progressive presidencies in my lifetime, on everything from gay rights to the economy,” he said. “His foreign policy has been largely successful, if you don't necessarily focus on the Middle East. But I just can't get past these whistleblower prosecutions, most especially my own. “People ask me all the time if I blame Obama for this, and I tell them I don't think Obama has any idea who I am,” he went on. Holder and Brennan had the president’s ear, Kiriakou believes, and for reasons of their own they were devoted to punishing all leakers who made the administration look bad. “I still have friends in the White House. I still have friends in the CIA. They tell me that it was John Brennan who was the real impetus behind these prosecutions, when he was assistant national security advisor for counterterrorism. Brennan was obsessed with leaks just like Holder was obsessed with leaks, and it was Brennan who pushed these prosecutions forward.” What we see now, at the tail end of Obama’s presidency, is the FBI (which is under the authority of the Justice Department and hence the White House) trying to force Apple to hack open the world’s most popular and beloved handheld device, one of whose principal selling points is its unbreakable encryption. Although the president has taken no visible role in the iPhone struggle, it exemplifies what you might call the Obama line: I’m a reasonable guy and this is a special case. Don’t you trust me with your secrets? “People just don't seem to understand that this case has very broad civil liberties connotations,” Kiriakou says. “This is not a fight between Apple and the FBI. If Apple allows the FBI in this one time, what's gonna stop them from asking another time? Indeed, the FBI has now asked for access to nine different phones in nine different cases. All the other cases are drug cases. So that has started already. Then, if such a back door exists, repressive regimes are going to use it and hackers are going to use it and the next thing you know everybody's got access to your phone. I mean, haven't we given up enough of our civil liberties already? All these incremental losses of our civil liberties over the years, that people either don't sense or don't care about, are bad enough. Now we have to worry about the FBI going into our phones anytime they want." Obama came into office promising to run the most transparent and open White House in history and has done precisely the opposite. His administration has kept entire areas of national security, intelligence and anti-terrorism policy under the cloak of executive privilege. That includes the drone war that has killed several thousand people in at least six different countries. Despite the best efforts of international watchdog groups, we will probably never know its full scale and scope, or how many civilians have died in drone strikes. It also includes the infamous “kill list” of individuals whom the president has personally determined are subject to summary execution without trial. If one person has Obama’s ear on this question, it would seem to be John Brennan, who during his tenure at the CIA has transformed the agency into a clandestine military force with no uniforms, no systems of accountability and no obligation to respect the ordinary rules of war. At least two known individuals on the kill list have been United States citizens, including the influential al-Qaida imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico. (Awlaki’s teenage son, also an American citizen, was himself killed by a drone a few weeks after his father. His death is believed to have been collateral damage.) It was a year and a half after Awlaki’s death before the legal framework that supposedly authorized the president to kill him was discussed in public, and that only happened after a non-classified Justice Department memo was leaked to the press, perhaps with permission from above. That all sounds like old news in the middle of an increasingly unhinged election year whose sole foreign policy issue is the national panic over ISIS, a group that, if we stretch the point, might plausibly be held responsible for the deaths of a few dozen Americans. But just because none of this is a campaign issue does not mean it has gone away. Drone pilots are beginning to speak out about the video-game deaths they inflict on strangers thousands of miles away. A group of Air Force veterans recently published a letter to Obama in the Guardian describing the drone war as a “fundamental recruitment tool” for groups like ISIS and a driving force of terrorism. The wife of another imprisoned CIA leaker, Jeffrey Sterling (who has consistently denied any wrongdoing), has mounted a campaign aimed at convincing Obama to pardon her husband before he leaves office, which is one reason I had John Kiriakou’s phone number. On the other end of the spectrum, Donald Trump has captured a different segment of the national mood by suggesting that however many people Obama is killing in secret, it isn’t enough. Other Republican candidates are somewhat less eager to talk about the drone war or the previous president’s policies of “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation.” Trump, to say the least, is not other Republicans. He has more or less promised to bring back the Bush torture policy on steroids, stripped of any prevarication or mixed emotions. It would be ludicrous to expect Hillary Clinton, a longtime national-security insider with close ties to the intelligence community, to adopt a different approach in the White House. Kiriakou says that an aide to Bernie Sanders wrote him a letter while he was in prison, telling him that the Vermont senator believed he had provided an important national service by revealing the CIA torture program. But issues of surveillance, spying and secrecy are never mentioned in Sanders’ fire-and-brimstone campaign speeches, which largely focus on the “free stuff.” That’s “extremely disappointing,” Kiriakou says, but suggests that Sanders’ team tested out that material and discovered that it didn’t resonate with voters. So what’s the deal with Barack Obama? How did our coolest-ever president also turn out to be the one who pursued leakers and whistleblowers with a vengefulness and vigor without precedent in American history? To paraphrase what one of Stalin’s defeated rivals wrote in a letter to the dictator on the eve of his execution, why was John Kiriakou’s destruction useful or necessary to Obama? “I’m not sure that I can answer that question,” Kiriakou said, “and, believe me, I’ve thought about this a lot over the last four years.” Then he pretty much did answer it, and the answer is depressing. “When you've got four shiny stars on your shoulder and you're described as the ‘president's favorite general’ and you say something that makes the president look good, you're not going to get an espionage charge.” He is talking there about retired Gen. James Cartwright, who is suspected of leaking info about Stuxnet, the CIA computer virus that targeted Iran’s nuclear program, but was never prosecuted. “Or when you have those four shiny stars on your shoulder and you leak to your freaking girlfriend the names of 10 covert operatives, you get a pass.” That would be Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA head who revealed far more information than Kiriakou did, and served no jail time. “Or when you're Hillary Clinton and you've got whatever it is now, 83 top-secret documents on your private server, you're gonna get a pass,” Kiriakou continued. “It's when you report on waste, fraud, abuse or illegality, or you embarrass the government or contradict a policy, that’s when the whole weight of the government is gonna crash down on your head.”
The New York Times embarrasses itself again: Grey Lady holds Hillary to separate disclosure standard
Comparing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a "mischievous child," the New York Times editorial page has endorsed the idea that the Democratic front-runner be held to a new disclosure standard and compelled to release transcripts for the paid speeches she gave to banks as a private citizen. She needs to do so, the Times insists, to prove that she's an honest person, otherwise "Mrs. Clinton fuels speculation about why she's stonewalling." It's all about bad optics, the Times claims: "Mrs. Clinton is laboring to convince struggling Americans that she will rein in big banks, despite taking their money." The paper is sure that after winning Democratic votes in Iowa and Nevada and being heavily favored to do so again in South Carolina on Saturday, and in most of the Super Tuesday primary states next week, Clinton is "laboring" to convince voters of her intentions. The key here is that a lot of other people have made money off paid speeches -- including speeches to financial institutions -- before becoming presidential candidates, and they weren't told over and over to release dozens of transcripts. That list includes: Mike Huckabee Donald Trump Ben Carson Jeb Bush Carly Fiorina Mitt Romney Herman Cain Newt Gingrich Rudy Giuliani Do you spot the same trend I do? And note that some of those Republicans gave paid speeches
while
running for office. Responding to a speech inquiry from the press, Clinton recently said she'd release the transcripts "if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans." The Times deemed that to be a "terrible answer" and seemed to suggest all other candidates don't have to disclose their speech transcripts, only Clinton. "Public interest in these speeches is legitimate, and it is the public -- not the candidate -- who decides how much disclosure is enough," the Times instructed, focused only at Clinton. And that's always been the giveaway on this gotcha pursuit: If the point is to demand more transparency from candidates (and that's a good thing), then all candidates would be asked to do the same thing. If the point is to hold Clinton to a separate standard that nobody else has to match, then publish editorials demanding she jump through hoops that every other candidate is allowed to walk around. It's more of the Clinton Rules; the established double standard that the press uses for Clinton. Last year Jonathan Allen at Vox outlined two of the guiding principles behind Hillary Clinton coverage:
The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise.And:
Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false.Meanwhile, the Times' clarion call that Clinton adhere to new guidelines only confirms the point Media Mattersmade this week: The press seems to be adopting two entirely different standards for covering Clinton and for covering Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Because while the Times is fixated on Clinton's speech transcripts, Trump, for now, is refusing to release his tax returns, which has been a standard disclosure for every major candidate running for the White House. Clinton last summer released eight years of tax returns. To date, Trump refuses to do the same and is now offering up baffling explanations as for why he won't. At Thursday night's debate Trump backtracked from previous promises to release his tax returns by saying he's constantly being audited by the IRS (because he's Christian?), and since he's currently being audited he can't release previous filings. But he can. From Politico [emphasis added]:
Stanford law professor Joseph Bankman said it's not so odd for a man of Trump's wealth to be subjected to repeated audits. "A lot of super wealthy individuals, and all large companies, are audited every year," Bankman said Thursday night. But he said Trump's statement that he "can't" publicly release his returns is a headscratcher. "I'm not sure why that prevents him from releasing his returns. They are his to release," Bankman said.So when will the Times demand Trump release his tax returns? When will the Times call for transparency from the Republican front-runner?Comparing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a "mischievous child," the New York Times editorial page has endorsed the idea that the Democratic front-runner be held to a new disclosure standard and compelled to release transcripts for the paid speeches she gave to banks as a private citizen. She needs to do so, the Times insists, to prove that she's an honest person, otherwise "Mrs. Clinton fuels speculation about why she's stonewalling." It's all about bad optics, the Times claims: "Mrs. Clinton is laboring to convince struggling Americans that she will rein in big banks, despite taking their money." The paper is sure that after winning Democratic votes in Iowa and Nevada and being heavily favored to do so again in South Carolina on Saturday, and in most of the Super Tuesday primary states next week, Clinton is "laboring" to convince voters of her intentions. The key here is that a lot of other people have made money off paid speeches -- including speeches to financial institutions -- before becoming presidential candidates, and they weren't told over and over to release dozens of transcripts. That list includes: Mike Huckabee Donald Trump Ben Carson Jeb Bush Carly Fiorina Mitt Romney Herman Cain Newt Gingrich Rudy Giuliani Do you spot the same trend I do? And note that some of those Republicans gave paid speeches while running for office. Responding to a speech inquiry from the press, Clinton recently said she'd release the transcripts "if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans." The Times deemed that to be a "terrible answer" and seemed to suggest all other candidates don't have to disclose their speech transcripts, only Clinton. "Public interest in these speeches is legitimate, and it is the public -- not the candidate -- who decides how much disclosure is enough," the Times instructed, focused only at Clinton. And that's always been the giveaway on this gotcha pursuit: If the point is to demand more transparency from candidates (and that's a good thing), then all candidates would be asked to do the same thing. If the point is to hold Clinton to a separate standard that nobody else has to match, then publish editorials demanding she jump through hoops that every other candidate is allowed to walk around. It's more of the Clinton Rules; the established double standard that the press uses for Clinton. Last year Jonathan Allen at Vox outlined two of the guiding principles behind Hillary Clinton coverage:
The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there's hard evidence otherwise.And:
Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false.Meanwhile, the Times' clarion call that Clinton adhere to new guidelines only confirms the point Media Mattersmade this week: The press seems to be adopting two entirely different standards for covering Clinton and for covering Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Because while the Times is fixated on Clinton's speech transcripts, Trump, for now, is refusing to release his tax returns, which has been a standard disclosure for every major candidate running for the White House. Clinton last summer released eight years of tax returns. To date, Trump refuses to do the same and is now offering up baffling explanations as for why he won't. At Thursday night's debate Trump backtracked from previous promises to release his tax returns by saying he's constantly being audited by the IRS (because he's Christian?), and since he's currently being audited he can't release previous filings. But he can. From Politico [emphasis added]:
Stanford law professor Joseph Bankman said it's not so odd for a man of Trump's wealth to be subjected to repeated audits. "A lot of super wealthy individuals, and all large companies, are audited every year," Bankman said Thursday night. But he said Trump's statement that he "can't" publicly release his returns is a headscratcher. "I'm not sure why that prevents him from releasing his returns. They are his to release," Bankman said.So when will the Times demand Trump release his tax returns? When will the Times call for transparency from the Republican front-runner?
This is a war for America’s soul: Donald Trump reflects frustrations of an embittered white America
The focus of discussion on Donald Trump is, understandably, the man himself—but the phenomenon of his success arises elsewhere. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, that “there is no there there,” applies to the man: all we have “there” is a massive ego. Trump is simply a skilled entertainer, Howard Beale of the movie "Network" brought to life. He exhorts people to yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" but doesn’t even care what “it” is. The applause, the votes—that’s all that matters to him. Trump’s supporters, however, are something else again. Finally feeling a spotlight on themselves, they are people who have felt forgotten for generations. They are not descended from the American identity as was it imagined and written in New England and imagined and crafted separately by the Southern white elite. That identity was only endured by them. The great debates of the 19th century only saw them as grounds for extension of the North/South conflict as they moved west, or those debates ignored them. Ignored them, that is, until they were useful to the new myths concerning the West, ones crafted by the intellectual elite of New England and by East Coast writers generally. But those myths had nothing to do with the real lives on the prairies or in the mountains—and the people there knew it. While New England and New York were developing the first real American intellectual and artistic culture and the South was building its antebellum “paradise” on the backs of slaves, the poor Americans of the Appalachians and then of the West were busily engaged in a genocide of Native Americans that no one wanted to praise or even admit was happening. At the same time, they were eking out a living on land that often, as soon as they tried to lay claim to it, turned out to be “owned” by someone from the East. They had no time for what Leo Marx calls the "fully articulated pastoral idea of America" that had emerged on the back of the Enlightenment and that was popular as an ideal in the East. Whatever garden these poorer Americans could find or create or conquer or defend was not often even theirs for very long. More frequently than we imagine, they were forced once again to move farther west and to start from scratch—again. Poverty breathed down their necks; little of their lives would ever qualify as "pastoral." Numerous theories have been put forward to explain the differences between the uncouth of the frontier (and then settled) "interior" of America and the civilized East (and then, West) Coast. Some writers blame the land that had seemed so promising, others blame class distinctions, and still others see the lack of civilizing government as the problem. Unfortunately, all the writers were from the East (or from Europe) until well into the 19th century; those actually from the frontier culture had little voice in the discussion, no ability to ground the debate in the actual facts of the matter as seen by the people there. As they would remain for generations more, these people had been made mute. Few outsiders understood either their perspective or their background, allowing erroneous conceptions to be put forward unchallenged and then to become received wisdom. The anger of the Bundy family and its supporters, for example, is real, even if we on the coasts see it as misplaced. Trump’s campaign is giving such people voice in a way that their “champions,” those already stalwart in the Republican Party, never have. Trump is not telling them what they believe or even what they should believe but is reflecting frustrations that have been bubbling up within them for generations. The leaders of the party, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and the others, are acting on old assumption about the mass of white America, that it has no real culture of its own—believing it their duty to impose one. This belief in bringing culture to the masses has an old pedigree: Reflecting views popular as the 19th century progressed to its end, Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant himself (like Trump’s mother, from Scotland), saw Americans as one culture, writing that "they are essentially British." Those who could not live up to the coastal anglophone ideal were ignored or seen as debased anomalies. At best, they needed to be taught and changed. Though we no longer see that culture as British, pretty much the same view holds true today among the Republican elite. They don’t understand that those they wish to lead are often fundamentally different from their leaders. The distinction goes back even further into America’s past. Though today’s Tea Partiers and fundamentalist Christians try to gainsay it, the United States was founded on Enlightenment principles that excluded religion, for example, from the public political sphere and made science and “rational thought” the pillars for what was hoped would be a new type of society. Though the secular-liberal founders of the country themselves tried to deny it—even going so far as to construct the Constitution in both a populist and an elitist fashion (witness the distinct structures of the House of Representatives and the Senate)—most of them were elitists in terms of both class and culture. They believed that the vast majority of their fellow Americans were not as “enlightened” as they were and that many of them needed instruction as well as learned guidance. Our leaders today, both Republicans and Democrats, are the inheritors of that attitude. Many Trump supporters, on the other hand, base their attitudes on a Calvinist (and pre-Enlightenment) vision of individualism that starts within each of them, with faith in the person and in their God. It next moves, in a spreading circle, to family, to friends, and only then to others in the broad realm of human interaction and politics. If each person acted responsibly, by these lights, there would be little need for government—each individual having a tempering effect on those they interact with. The secular-liberal vision starts in a different place, with a structured base created and maintained by the group. Once responsibilities to it are met, the individual is free to—is encouraged to—act on his or her own to whatever ends seem appropriate, as long as those ends do not threaten or compromise the group structure. The secular-liberal sees a duty to resist the state when it becomes corrupt, while these others seek to remove it or to avoid it, or to move away from it, as has been done since first arrival in America, if not before. In these ways and others, Trump supporters are fundamentally different from the Americans of the coastal cities and the media and political elites, even if they do overlap in political goals a great deal of the time or end up looking the same to political pundits with no real experience with this large portion of white America. Though the words used to describe many of the people on the right are the same, the meanings assumed by those people are not. There have long been two cultures within the conservative movement, one manipulating the other. These two cultures, today, are speaking at cross-purposes, neither one able to understand how the other half lives. The manipulated among the conservative Americans have finally found their voice. Unfortunately for the rest of us, its articulation comes through a circus entertainer of little substance. This is driving the Republican establishment crazy—and may well do the same to the Democrats in the general election this fall. Neither group knows how to deal with the Trump phenomenon. Both are seeing the man, not the movement. In the 1960s, science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick created a "news clown" in a trademark flaming-red wig who runs for president. Donald Trump is that clown brought to life by the inchoate anger of a pressured and politically abused section of the American populace. To understand the "movement" he represents, we need to look at them, not him. Otherwise, their candidate is going to become the president of all of us.The focus of discussion on Donald Trump is, understandably, the man himself—but the phenomenon of his success arises elsewhere. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, that “there is no there there,” applies to the man: all we have “there” is a massive ego. Trump is simply a skilled entertainer, Howard Beale of the movie "Network" brought to life. He exhorts people to yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" but doesn’t even care what “it” is. The applause, the votes—that’s all that matters to him. Trump’s supporters, however, are something else again. Finally feeling a spotlight on themselves, they are people who have felt forgotten for generations. They are not descended from the American identity as was it imagined and written in New England and imagined and crafted separately by the Southern white elite. That identity was only endured by them. The great debates of the 19th century only saw them as grounds for extension of the North/South conflict as they moved west, or those debates ignored them. Ignored them, that is, until they were useful to the new myths concerning the West, ones crafted by the intellectual elite of New England and by East Coast writers generally. But those myths had nothing to do with the real lives on the prairies or in the mountains—and the people there knew it. While New England and New York were developing the first real American intellectual and artistic culture and the South was building its antebellum “paradise” on the backs of slaves, the poor Americans of the Appalachians and then of the West were busily engaged in a genocide of Native Americans that no one wanted to praise or even admit was happening. At the same time, they were eking out a living on land that often, as soon as they tried to lay claim to it, turned out to be “owned” by someone from the East. They had no time for what Leo Marx calls the "fully articulated pastoral idea of America" that had emerged on the back of the Enlightenment and that was popular as an ideal in the East. Whatever garden these poorer Americans could find or create or conquer or defend was not often even theirs for very long. More frequently than we imagine, they were forced once again to move farther west and to start from scratch—again. Poverty breathed down their necks; little of their lives would ever qualify as "pastoral." Numerous theories have been put forward to explain the differences between the uncouth of the frontier (and then settled) "interior" of America and the civilized East (and then, West) Coast. Some writers blame the land that had seemed so promising, others blame class distinctions, and still others see the lack of civilizing government as the problem. Unfortunately, all the writers were from the East (or from Europe) until well into the 19th century; those actually from the frontier culture had little voice in the discussion, no ability to ground the debate in the actual facts of the matter as seen by the people there. As they would remain for generations more, these people had been made mute. Few outsiders understood either their perspective or their background, allowing erroneous conceptions to be put forward unchallenged and then to become received wisdom. The anger of the Bundy family and its supporters, for example, is real, even if we on the coasts see it as misplaced. Trump’s campaign is giving such people voice in a way that their “champions,” those already stalwart in the Republican Party, never have. Trump is not telling them what they believe or even what they should believe but is reflecting frustrations that have been bubbling up within them for generations. The leaders of the party, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and the others, are acting on old assumption about the mass of white America, that it has no real culture of its own—believing it their duty to impose one. This belief in bringing culture to the masses has an old pedigree: Reflecting views popular as the 19th century progressed to its end, Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant himself (like Trump’s mother, from Scotland), saw Americans as one culture, writing that "they are essentially British." Those who could not live up to the coastal anglophone ideal were ignored or seen as debased anomalies. At best, they needed to be taught and changed. Though we no longer see that culture as British, pretty much the same view holds true today among the Republican elite. They don’t understand that those they wish to lead are often fundamentally different from their leaders. The distinction goes back even further into America’s past. Though today’s Tea Partiers and fundamentalist Christians try to gainsay it, the United States was founded on Enlightenment principles that excluded religion, for example, from the public political sphere and made science and “rational thought” the pillars for what was hoped would be a new type of society. Though the secular-liberal founders of the country themselves tried to deny it—even going so far as to construct the Constitution in both a populist and an elitist fashion (witness the distinct structures of the House of Representatives and the Senate)—most of them were elitists in terms of both class and culture. They believed that the vast majority of their fellow Americans were not as “enlightened” as they were and that many of them needed instruction as well as learned guidance. Our leaders today, both Republicans and Democrats, are the inheritors of that attitude. Many Trump supporters, on the other hand, base their attitudes on a Calvinist (and pre-Enlightenment) vision of individualism that starts within each of them, with faith in the person and in their God. It next moves, in a spreading circle, to family, to friends, and only then to others in the broad realm of human interaction and politics. If each person acted responsibly, by these lights, there would be little need for government—each individual having a tempering effect on those they interact with. The secular-liberal vision starts in a different place, with a structured base created and maintained by the group. Once responsibilities to it are met, the individual is free to—is encouraged to—act on his or her own to whatever ends seem appropriate, as long as those ends do not threaten or compromise the group structure. The secular-liberal sees a duty to resist the state when it becomes corrupt, while these others seek to remove it or to avoid it, or to move away from it, as has been done since first arrival in America, if not before. In these ways and others, Trump supporters are fundamentally different from the Americans of the coastal cities and the media and political elites, even if they do overlap in political goals a great deal of the time or end up looking the same to political pundits with no real experience with this large portion of white America. Though the words used to describe many of the people on the right are the same, the meanings assumed by those people are not. There have long been two cultures within the conservative movement, one manipulating the other. These two cultures, today, are speaking at cross-purposes, neither one able to understand how the other half lives. The manipulated among the conservative Americans have finally found their voice. Unfortunately for the rest of us, its articulation comes through a circus entertainer of little substance. This is driving the Republican establishment crazy—and may well do the same to the Democrats in the general election this fall. Neither group knows how to deal with the Trump phenomenon. Both are seeing the man, not the movement. In the 1960s, science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick created a "news clown" in a trademark flaming-red wig who runs for president. Donald Trump is that clown brought to life by the inchoate anger of a pressured and politically abused section of the American populace. To understand the "movement" he represents, we need to look at them, not him. Otherwise, their candidate is going to become the president of all of us.
February 26, 2016
The trouble with Duckie: How “Pretty in Pink’s” most lovable character gave a generation of teenage boys the wrong idea
Find me an American adult male who identifies with Blane McDonough, Andrew McCarthy’s character in 1986’s "Pretty in Pink" and I’ll show you a giraffe wearing a prom dress. Blane is the rich, handsome, well-meaning teenager who falls in love with the movie’s protagonist, a young working-class woman named Andie Walsh played by Molly Ringwald. Blane loves Andie’s strength, individuality and beauty. Andie loves Blane’s kindness, devotion and beauty. They end up together in a memorable kiss in the parking lot outside the prom, an ending that still infuriates a critical mass of the fanbase of "Pretty in Pink," which celebrates its 30th birthday this weekend. Those fans thought Andie should have kissed her best friend Phil “Duckie” Dale (Jon Cryer), a fellow working-class kid in thrift-store finery who loves her and can’t seem to tell her so. To identify with a privileged dreamboat like Blane, even though McCarthy plays him with great sensitivity and longing, feels either like being too proud of being rich, popular and handsome yourself, or like cheering for Big Tobacco in a class action lawsuit. Instead, a generation of American male teenagers, me included, saw themselves in Duckie—charming, quirky and overlooked. Duckie belonged an elite gang of best friends "Pretty in Pink" screenwriter John Hughes made the beating heart of his ’80s teen filmography—Cameron Frye in "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off," Farmer Ted in "Sixteen Candles" and Watts in "Some Kind of Wonderful"—characters who embodied the pain of being young and not yet able to be honest about your own desires. Beyond Hughes’ other sidekicks, “Duckie” has become synonymous with “weird friend thrown over for safe, popular choice,” adolescent canon reinforced by a generation of boys who mimicked Duckie—in dress, manner and seduction—to joke and serenade their way into the hearts of their dream girls. Disciples of Duckie, we had it all wrong. No, you don’t get to be with the girl of your dreams just because you want to. No, you don’t get to avoid telling her how you feel and then resent her for showing interest in another guy. No, it’s not romantic, but rather a little sad that you can only express how you feel to her father and in charming but empty gestures like lip-synching Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” And no, you aren’t an unsung hero because your dream girl doesn’t dream of you. You’re a bad best friend for not respecting her decisions and thinking that means her love for you isn’t worth anything. Re-watch "Pretty in Pink" and Duckie comes off not as a role model but as a cautionary tale about what we can destroy while growing up: The movie may end happily for everyone — even Duckie, who doesn’t win Andie’s heart but nobly tells her to forgive Blane for canceling on taking her to the prom. Before all that, Duckie comes dangerously close to losing Andie forever: Not 30 seconds after the Otis Redding serenade, Blane shows up to take Andie on their first date. Duckie, not knowing about the date, accuses Andie of disrespecting herself by going out with a rich guy, and then threatens to not be there (i.e., not be her friend) if she gets her heart broken. Never mind that Duckie doesn’t know Blane and has no claim on Andie, and, since Andie is a smart, self-possessed, attractive young woman, she has probably received this kind of attention before. Since Andie and Duckie have been friends since childhood, Duckie having his world rocked when Andie goes on a date feels less like unfairness and more like Duckie ignoring an entire adolescence's worth of evidence that Andie isn’t just his pal or his valentine, but a woman and a person in her own right. “But Duckie’s pain was real!,” I just heard a squad of ex-Duckies cry. I used this excuse to not grieve my own teenage heartbreak but instead make it the heartbreaker’s fault. I wish had known better than to think my high school best friend/crush would fall for me after months of not letting on, and then getting mad when she fell for someone else, and in between trying to woo her with a lip-synch performance (mine was Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home.” Laugh all you want.). I can only imagine what it would have been like for a girl in Andie’s position who likes a guy who likes her and doesn’t want to hurt her best friend, who seems have trouble being straight with her anyway. I wish someone had clued me -- and teenagers like me -- in to the realization that writer Todd Goldberg outlined in his 2007 essay “That’s Not a Name, That’s a Major Appliance: How Andrew McCarthy Ruined my Life”:
After I realized that being Duckie was a recipe for being a complete and total reject… I came to the first day of school just as me. I climbed the social ladder because I simply didn’t give a fuck anymore, which is apparently very attractive to young men and women alike.But even Goldberg’s about-face on the Way of the Duckman acknowledges both the character’s power and its limitations. It’s Jon Cryer’s most fully realized performance, outdistancing in 96 minutes the 13 years he’s put in as Alan Harper on "Two and a Half Men." And Ringwald, killing it in a movie written for her, is both tender and firm at once, making Duckie’s behavior seem not righteous but misguided. First-time director Howard Deutch chose Cryer for the role and skillfully gave the character a room of his own apart from the love story, but also room to change more than any other character in the film John Hughes originally wrote "Pretty in Pink" with Blane leaving the prom and Andie and Duckie ending up together — if not romantically, then at least geographically on the dance floor. Test audiences booed this ending, so the filmmakers reshot it to have Andie and Blane end up together, which test audiences liked a lot more. Fans who hated the change refer to it as “Duckiegate,” highlighting the seeming unfairness of the quirky kid having to sacrifice the object of his love because her popular cute boyfriend isn’t actually the jerk the quirky kid thought he was. The other way to see this ending is to take both Cryer’s word for it when he told author Susannah Gora, “The whole movie seems to be about trying to bridge that divide between rich and and poor… You can’t send the message that interclass romances can’t possibly work,” and Ringwald’s. Ringwald campaigned for McCarthy to get the role of Blane because he wasn’t a square-jawed GQ model like Michael Schoeffling (Jake Ryan in "Sixteen Candles") but rather what the film’s producers called “a shy twerpy little guy” and what the actress called “definitely the kind of guy I would fall in love with.” In other words, Ringwald saw her character having a best friend like Duckie, yet also falling for a guy with a whole lot of Duckie-like qualities. Thirty years on, Phil “Duckie” Dale is no longer a movie character but a constellation of archetypes and aspirations—high school iconoclast, ’80s dream boyfriend (second only to "Say Anything's" Lloyd Dobler and his boombox), smart(er) romantic choice (“Team Duckie” t-shirts are way easier to find and probably sell a lot more than the “Team Blane” alternative”), knowing cultural signifier (the movie’s 25th anniversary DVD is called the “Everything’s Duckie” edition) and gay icon. Ringwald and Cryer came to an agreement on that last one at an EW-sponsored 25th anniversary photo shoot in 2010. Before that, Cryer was on record as saying he never saw that in the character and thought there should be a place onscreen for heterosexual guys who were dorky and weird. Perhaps more importantly, both he and Ringwald agreed that although Blane and Andie do not date long-term, Duckie and Andie will likely be friends for the rest of their lives. The world we live in is far more Duckie than Blane. Quirky has moved from the fringe to the center of teen cinema — without Duckie as a supporting character in "Pretty in Pink," we would have no children-of-Duckie as the main characters of "Juno," "Perks of Being a Wallflower," "Paper Towns" and "Dope." The elaborate “will you go to the prom” performances teenagers now put on for prospective dates are a blend of Duckie’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and, well, the prom. Duckies are Mark Zuckerbergs, Trevor Noahs and Joss Whedons. Blanes are the guys in khakis giving them money and trying to stay out of their way. What we acolytes (Duck-alytes?) should have learned from Phil Dale was not who he was but who he became, not what he did but what he learned. Of all the characters in "Pretty in Pink," Duckie grows up the most and narrowly avoids losing what his creators see as a lifelong friendship. I fear most of us junior Duckies missed that entirely and instead glommed onto how justified we felt Duckie was in his anger and hurt. We probably lost a lot of best friendships along the way.
If you liked “The Big Short,” you might not love “99 Homes” — but you should watch it anyway
"The Big Short" is a sly film. Based on a Michael Lewis’s novel of the same title, "Short" interweaves a bushel of megawatt-charged pop cultural devices to explain the driving forces behind the Wall Street financial meltdown of 2008. Perhaps we didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the millions of pages of studies, articles and books, all of which persuasively argued that our country’s housing market crisis was evident well before the 2008 meltdown. Perhaps our favorite digital and sitcom distractions had something to do with this neglect. But in 2016, eight years later and with the repercussions still felt, "The Big Short" has a nice late-game solution to all of this: a ton of people would go check out a film on finance in which an A-List dream team cast of Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt are the leading Wall Street warriors. According to "Short," however, not even this line-up may be enough to hold the audience’s attention. We’re an ADD-addled generation so prone to jumping onto YouTube for a cat video every 10 minutes that an animatedly excitable Christian Bale may not be enough to pique our interest. So the film compensates with a bunch of little YouTube-style vignettes here and there. Margot Robbie shows up in a bubble bath to explain sub-prime lending. Selena Gomez dazzles in a chic evening gown to discuss collateralized debt obligations. In "Short," the audience is never asked to focus on one thing for too long. However, there is a necessary trade-off here. For every crummy reveal, there’s a delicious movie-moment speech, a quirky pop star, or a ritzy Manhattan setting to temper any lasting feeling of disgust. In this regard, the cleverly delivered message in "The Big Short" — that we tend to easily forgive the charismatic for their misdeeds—is also what makes the film itself a little sneaky. "The Big Short" knows when to hedge its own bets, and its reasons aren’t too different from the finance sector’s ultimate goal. For instance, midway through the film, Steve Carrel and his posse of comically foul-mouthed brokers take a trip to Florida to see what’s really going on in the housing market crisis. We get a brief glimpse of a land ravaged by banking foreclosures and vulturous brokers dealing away even more fiscally irresponsible sub-prime mortgages to buyers with highly questionable financial qualifications. There’s a promise that things are about to get very dark and unbearably true in Florida, and in an awful hurry. But in a quick turn of events, we see Carell uncomfortably receiving a lap dance at a Florida strip club. His dancer has some intel on just how frighteningly out of control predatory mortgage agreements have gotten. As soon as Carrel gets his intel, he scurries back to his posh NYC office so he can bet heavily against the banks. Carell’s animated discomfort is played for laughs — here’s America’s favorite social-phobe getting an uncomfortable lap dance. As a result, we quickly lose traction over what we’re really supposed to be feeling uncomfortable about: those increasingly desolate suburban streets and the evicted homeowners who are scrabbling about for answers, or at least a voice.
***
Where "The Big Short" hedges, "99 Homes" goes for broke. In "Homes," unusual lengths are taken to give foreclosed Florida homeowners a sympathetic voice, even if at the great risk of relentless earnestness or tragedian tones. Set in Central Florida against the backdrop of the 2008 housing market crisis, the film follows cold-blooded real estate agent Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) as he, along with two stone-cold police officers and a roughneck construction crew, forcibly evict countless panic-stricken families from their foreclosed homes. One of Carver’s victims, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) — a jack-of-all-trades construction worker living with his mother (Laura Dern) and his son (Connor Nash) — compromises his moral indignation to join Carver’s crew in an effort to reclaim his home. While "The Big Short" delivers some rapid-fire speeches about Social Darwinism in ritzy clubs and boardrooms, "99 Homes" goes into painstaking detail to account for just what Darwinism means to the working American family.Here are families begging a broker and police officers for more time until their legal appeal is decided, only to be met by precisely scripted denials, recitations of court-ordered procedure, and harsh ultimatums: get out, get your stuff, or we’ll force you out. There’s no cut to Margot Robbie in a bubble bath. Rather, we stay on Laura Dern slowly sinking into utter shock when it finally hits her that, yes, she has only two minutes to get her grandson’s clothes and blankets before a police officer moves her to the curb.
"99 Homes'" big bet was on emotional continuity. After their eviction, the Nash family scurries to a motel, which evokes a nightmarish scene reminiscent of Steinbeck’s depiction of migrant camps in "The Grapes of Wrath." It’s overpopulated with recently evicted homeowners clustered on balconies. Nash’s tiny room, with its cheap mattresses and paper-thin walls, won’t protect the family from the bubbling rage just outside: profane tirades and loud music that will carry on throughout the night. Nash’s quick decision to join Carver’s crew is based on a survivalist impulse. There’s no time to ruminate on Carver’s various fraudulent practices and icy mantras. Nash has a son he wants to provide a stable home for, and he needs money fast to buy a new one. Nash can only do what he feels he needs to do, and feel awful about it. Yes, Nash’s face is racked with pain when he forcibly evicts a senile old man who has absolutely nowhere else to go. But he does so anyway, continuously clinging onto an advantageous side of a zero-sum game for as long as he can. The audience is challenged to stay along for the ride and emotionally experience some tough questions of their own.***
"The Big Short" is everything audiences instantly covet in a film: star studded, not unintelligent, and not too much of a bummer; that paid off handsomely. The film’s release peaked at 2,500 theaters and it has raked in $66 million and climbing at the domestic box office. The Academy has lavished "Short" with five Oscar nominations, and it’s generally considered one of the top contenders for best picture. "99 Homes" is a universally acclaimed film, with a 91 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a slew of deeply felt reviews. It is a deeply American film in that it deals with property ownership over a diverse racial and age demographic. And yet, it suffered terribly at the box office. That’s not entirely due to lack of distribution. "99 Homes" was released in 640 theaters nationwide, certainly not an anemic number. Still, it is currently taking a loss at the box office, having earned only $1.4 million domestic on a $8 million budget since its September 2015 release. Like thousands of foreclosed homeowners with little to no voice in the system, a film about the same also faded into oblivion. "99 Homes'" lack of commercial momentum enraged Oliver Stone, who called Shannon's performance "as exciting and visceral as Gordon Gekko in 'Wall Street.'" But really, it shouldn’t only be about what Stone has to say. It should be about how we each individually look at our preferences, and what they mean toward changing the current homogenization of our film industry, even beyond the overdue scrutiny of Hollywood diversity and #OscarsSoWhite. The gross disparity between "The Big Short" and "99 Homes'" commercial success speaks to what’s arguably the encompassing problem: the American film market is focused on entertainment not only from a single race and gender, but from the same iconic stars, from the same big cities, and from the same formulaic lenses used to deliver the same derivative story lines. As a result, innumerable stories about massive components of America continue to be grossly unrecognized. Admittedly, I helped perpetuate this cycle in December. Like most Americans, my bank account is closer to the characters in "99 Homes" than the mega-millionaires in "The Big Short," which is to say that I can’t afford to hit the movie theater too often. Still, when it came time to drop $15 on a matinee this December, I went past one "Big Short" billboard after the next, straight to the theater. I didn’t even consider "99 Homes." When "99 Homes" was finally released on demand, I shelled out $5 to see it in my apartment. But that’s still $10 less than I spent on "The Big Short," and well after the box office numbers had already left their mark. These choices I made are important, and have left on impression on me since. How I--and other moviegoers--choose to spend time in the theaters will be the single most important factor in determining the direction of film production and distribution over the next few years — perhaps bringing about a greater emphasis on racial, economic, gender and geographic diversity that will be necessary to bridge the gap between the "99 Homes" and "The Big Short"s of the world."The Big Short" is a sly film. Based on a Michael Lewis’s novel of the same title, "Short" interweaves a bushel of megawatt-charged pop cultural devices to explain the driving forces behind the Wall Street financial meltdown of 2008. Perhaps we didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the millions of pages of studies, articles and books, all of which persuasively argued that our country’s housing market crisis was evident well before the 2008 meltdown. Perhaps our favorite digital and sitcom distractions had something to do with this neglect. But in 2016, eight years later and with the repercussions still felt, "The Big Short" has a nice late-game solution to all of this: a ton of people would go check out a film on finance in which an A-List dream team cast of Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt are the leading Wall Street warriors. According to "Short," however, not even this line-up may be enough to hold the audience’s attention. We’re an ADD-addled generation so prone to jumping onto YouTube for a cat video every 10 minutes that an animatedly excitable Christian Bale may not be enough to pique our interest. So the film compensates with a bunch of little YouTube-style vignettes here and there. Margot Robbie shows up in a bubble bath to explain sub-prime lending. Selena Gomez dazzles in a chic evening gown to discuss collateralized debt obligations. In "Short," the audience is never asked to focus on one thing for too long. However, there is a necessary trade-off here. For every crummy reveal, there’s a delicious movie-moment speech, a quirky pop star, or a ritzy Manhattan setting to temper any lasting feeling of disgust. In this regard, the cleverly delivered message in "The Big Short" — that we tend to easily forgive the charismatic for their misdeeds—is also what makes the film itself a little sneaky. "The Big Short" knows when to hedge its own bets, and its reasons aren’t too different from the finance sector’s ultimate goal. For instance, midway through the film, Steve Carrel and his posse of comically foul-mouthed brokers take a trip to Florida to see what’s really going on in the housing market crisis. We get a brief glimpse of a land ravaged by banking foreclosures and vulturous brokers dealing away even more fiscally irresponsible sub-prime mortgages to buyers with highly questionable financial qualifications. There’s a promise that things are about to get very dark and unbearably true in Florida, and in an awful hurry. But in a quick turn of events, we see Carell uncomfortably receiving a lap dance at a Florida strip club. His dancer has some intel on just how frighteningly out of control predatory mortgage agreements have gotten. As soon as Carrel gets his intel, he scurries back to his posh NYC office so he can bet heavily against the banks. Carell’s animated discomfort is played for laughs — here’s America’s favorite social-phobe getting an uncomfortable lap dance. As a result, we quickly lose traction over what we’re really supposed to be feeling uncomfortable about: those increasingly desolate suburban streets and the evicted homeowners who are scrabbling about for answers, or at least a voice.***
Where "The Big Short" hedges, "99 Homes" goes for broke. In "Homes," unusual lengths are taken to give foreclosed Florida homeowners a sympathetic voice, even if at the great risk of relentless earnestness or tragedian tones. Set in Central Florida against the backdrop of the 2008 housing market crisis, the film follows cold-blooded real estate agent Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) as he, along with two stone-cold police officers and a roughneck construction crew, forcibly evict countless panic-stricken families from their foreclosed homes. One of Carver’s victims, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) — a jack-of-all-trades construction worker living with his mother (Laura Dern) and his son (Connor Nash) — compromises his moral indignation to join Carver’s crew in an effort to reclaim his home. While "The Big Short" delivers some rapid-fire speeches about Social Darwinism in ritzy clubs and boardrooms, "99 Homes" goes into painstaking detail to account for just what Darwinism means to the working American family.Here are families begging a broker and police officers for more time until their legal appeal is decided, only to be met by precisely scripted denials, recitations of court-ordered procedure, and harsh ultimatums: get out, get your stuff, or we’ll force you out. There’s no cut to Margot Robbie in a bubble bath. Rather, we stay on Laura Dern slowly sinking into utter shock when it finally hits her that, yes, she has only two minutes to get her grandson’s clothes and blankets before a police officer moves her to the curb.
"99 Homes'" big bet was on emotional continuity. After their eviction, the Nash family scurries to a motel, which evokes a nightmarish scene reminiscent of Steinbeck’s depiction of migrant camps in "The Grapes of Wrath." It’s overpopulated with recently evicted homeowners clustered on balconies. Nash’s tiny room, with its cheap mattresses and paper-thin walls, won’t protect the family from the bubbling rage just outside: profane tirades and loud music that will carry on throughout the night. Nash’s quick decision to join Carver’s crew is based on a survivalist impulse. There’s no time to ruminate on Carver’s various fraudulent practices and icy mantras. Nash has a son he wants to provide a stable home for, and he needs money fast to buy a new one. Nash can only do what he feels he needs to do, and feel awful about it. Yes, Nash’s face is racked with pain when he forcibly evicts a senile old man who has absolutely nowhere else to go. But he does so anyway, continuously clinging onto an advantageous side of a zero-sum game for as long as he can. The audience is challenged to stay along for the ride and emotionally experience some tough questions of their own.***
"The Big Short" is everything audiences instantly covet in a film: star studded, not unintelligent, and not too much of a bummer; that paid off handsomely. The film’s release peaked at 2,500 theaters and it has raked in $66 million and climbing at the domestic box office. The Academy has lavished "Short" with five Oscar nominations, and it’s generally considered one of the top contenders for best picture. "99 Homes" is a universally acclaimed film, with a 91 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a slew of deeply felt reviews. It is a deeply American film in that it deals with property ownership over a diverse racial and age demographic. And yet, it suffered terribly at the box office. That’s not entirely due to lack of distribution. "99 Homes" was released in 640 theaters nationwide, certainly not an anemic number. Still, it is currently taking a loss at the box office, having earned only $1.4 million domestic on a $8 million budget since its September 2015 release. Like thousands of foreclosed homeowners with little to no voice in the system, a film about the same also faded into oblivion. "99 Homes'" lack of commercial momentum enraged Oliver Stone, who called Shannon's performance "as exciting and visceral as Gordon Gekko in 'Wall Street.'" But really, it shouldn’t only be about what Stone has to say. It should be about how we each individually look at our preferences, and what they mean toward changing the current homogenization of our film industry, even beyond the overdue scrutiny of Hollywood diversity and #OscarsSoWhite. The gross disparity between "The Big Short" and "99 Homes'" commercial success speaks to what’s arguably the encompassing problem: the American film market is focused on entertainment not only from a single race and gender, but from the same iconic stars, from the same big cities, and from the same formulaic lenses used to deliver the same derivative story lines. As a result, innumerable stories about massive components of America continue to be grossly unrecognized. Admittedly, I helped perpetuate this cycle in December. Like most Americans, my bank account is closer to the characters in "99 Homes" than the mega-millionaires in "The Big Short," which is to say that I can’t afford to hit the movie theater too often. Still, when it came time to drop $15 on a matinee this December, I went past one "Big Short" billboard after the next, straight to the theater. I didn’t even consider "99 Homes." When "99 Homes" was finally released on demand, I shelled out $5 to see it in my apartment. But that’s still $10 less than I spent on "The Big Short," and well after the box office numbers had already left their mark. These choices I made are important, and have left on impression on me since. How I--and other moviegoers--choose to spend time in the theaters will be the single most important factor in determining the direction of film production and distribution over the next few years — perhaps bringing about a greater emphasis on racial, economic, gender and geographic diversity that will be necessary to bridge the gap between the "99 Homes" and "The Big Short"s of the world."The Big Short" is a sly film. Based on a Michael Lewis’s novel of the same title, "Short" interweaves a bushel of megawatt-charged pop cultural devices to explain the driving forces behind the Wall Street financial meltdown of 2008. Perhaps we didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the millions of pages of studies, articles and books, all of which persuasively argued that our country’s housing market crisis was evident well before the 2008 meltdown. Perhaps our favorite digital and sitcom distractions had something to do with this neglect. But in 2016, eight years later and with the repercussions still felt, "The Big Short" has a nice late-game solution to all of this: a ton of people would go check out a film on finance in which an A-List dream team cast of Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt are the leading Wall Street warriors. According to "Short," however, not even this line-up may be enough to hold the audience’s attention. We’re an ADD-addled generation so prone to jumping onto YouTube for a cat video every 10 minutes that an animatedly excitable Christian Bale may not be enough to pique our interest. So the film compensates with a bunch of little YouTube-style vignettes here and there. Margot Robbie shows up in a bubble bath to explain sub-prime lending. Selena Gomez dazzles in a chic evening gown to discuss collateralized debt obligations. In "Short," the audience is never asked to focus on one thing for too long. However, there is a necessary trade-off here. For every crummy reveal, there’s a delicious movie-moment speech, a quirky pop star, or a ritzy Manhattan setting to temper any lasting feeling of disgust. In this regard, the cleverly delivered message in "The Big Short" — that we tend to easily forgive the charismatic for their misdeeds—is also what makes the film itself a little sneaky. "The Big Short" knows when to hedge its own bets, and its reasons aren’t too different from the finance sector’s ultimate goal. For instance, midway through the film, Steve Carrel and his posse of comically foul-mouthed brokers take a trip to Florida to see what’s really going on in the housing market crisis. We get a brief glimpse of a land ravaged by banking foreclosures and vulturous brokers dealing away even more fiscally irresponsible sub-prime mortgages to buyers with highly questionable financial qualifications. There’s a promise that things are about to get very dark and unbearably true in Florida, and in an awful hurry. But in a quick turn of events, we see Carell uncomfortably receiving a lap dance at a Florida strip club. His dancer has some intel on just how frighteningly out of control predatory mortgage agreements have gotten. As soon as Carrel gets his intel, he scurries back to his posh NYC office so he can bet heavily against the banks. Carell’s animated discomfort is played for laughs — here’s America’s favorite social-phobe getting an uncomfortable lap dance. As a result, we quickly lose traction over what we’re really supposed to be feeling uncomfortable about: those increasingly desolate suburban streets and the evicted homeowners who are scrabbling about for answers, or at least a voice.***
Where "The Big Short" hedges, "99 Homes" goes for broke. In "Homes," unusual lengths are taken to give foreclosed Florida homeowners a sympathetic voice, even if at the great risk of relentless earnestness or tragedian tones. Set in Central Florida against the backdrop of the 2008 housing market crisis, the film follows cold-blooded real estate agent Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) as he, along with two stone-cold police officers and a roughneck construction crew, forcibly evict countless panic-stricken families from their foreclosed homes. One of Carver’s victims, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) — a jack-of-all-trades construction worker living with his mother (Laura Dern) and his son (Connor Nash) — compromises his moral indignation to join Carver’s crew in an effort to reclaim his home. While "The Big Short" delivers some rapid-fire speeches about Social Darwinism in ritzy clubs and boardrooms, "99 Homes" goes into painstaking detail to account for just what Darwinism means to the working American family.Here are families begging a broker and police officers for more time until their legal appeal is decided, only to be met by precisely scripted denials, recitations of court-ordered procedure, and harsh ultimatums: get out, get your stuff, or we’ll force you out. There’s no cut to Margot Robbie in a bubble bath. Rather, we stay on Laura Dern slowly sinking into utter shock when it finally hits her that, yes, she has only two minutes to get her grandson’s clothes and blankets before a police officer moves her to the curb.
"99 Homes'" big bet was on emotional continuity. After their eviction, the Nash family scurries to a motel, which evokes a nightmarish scene reminiscent of Steinbeck’s depiction of migrant camps in "The Grapes of Wrath." It’s overpopulated with recently evicted homeowners clustered on balconies. Nash’s tiny room, with its cheap mattresses and paper-thin walls, won’t protect the family from the bubbling rage just outside: profane tirades and loud music that will carry on throughout the night. Nash’s quick decision to join Carver’s crew is based on a survivalist impulse. There’s no time to ruminate on Carver’s various fraudulent practices and icy mantras. Nash has a son he wants to provide a stable home for, and he needs money fast to buy a new one. Nash can only do what he feels he needs to do, and feel awful about it. Yes, Nash’s face is racked with pain when he forcibly evicts a senile old man who has absolutely nowhere else to go. But he does so anyway, continuously clinging onto an advantageous side of a zero-sum game for as long as he can. The audience is challenged to stay along for the ride and emotionally experience some tough questions of their own.***
"The Big Short" is everything audiences instantly covet in a film: star studded, not unintelligent, and not too much of a bummer; that paid off handsomely. The film’s release peaked at 2,500 theaters and it has raked in $66 million and climbing at the domestic box office. The Academy has lavished "Short" with five Oscar nominations, and it’s generally considered one of the top contenders for best picture. "99 Homes" is a universally acclaimed film, with a 91 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a slew of deeply felt reviews. It is a deeply American film in that it deals with property ownership over a diverse racial and age demographic. And yet, it suffered terribly at the box office. That’s not entirely due to lack of distribution. "99 Homes" was released in 640 theaters nationwide, certainly not an anemic number. Still, it is currently taking a loss at the box office, having earned only $1.4 million domestic on a $8 million budget since its September 2015 release. Like thousands of foreclosed homeowners with little to no voice in the system, a film about the same also faded into oblivion. "99 Homes'" lack of commercial momentum enraged Oliver Stone, who called Shannon's performance "as exciting and visceral as Gordon Gekko in 'Wall Street.'" But really, it shouldn’t only be about what Stone has to say. It should be about how we each individually look at our preferences, and what they mean toward changing the current homogenization of our film industry, even beyond the overdue scrutiny of Hollywood diversity and #OscarsSoWhite. The gross disparity between "The Big Short" and "99 Homes'" commercial success speaks to what’s arguably the encompassing problem: the American film market is focused on entertainment not only from a single race and gender, but from the same iconic stars, from the same big cities, and from the same formulaic lenses used to deliver the same derivative story lines. As a result, innumerable stories about massive components of America continue to be grossly unrecognized. Admittedly, I helped perpetuate this cycle in December. Like most Americans, my bank account is closer to the characters in "99 Homes" than the mega-millionaires in "The Big Short," which is to say that I can’t afford to hit the movie theater too often. Still, when it came time to drop $15 on a matinee this December, I went past one "Big Short" billboard after the next, straight to the theater. I didn’t even consider "99 Homes." When "99 Homes" was finally released on demand, I shelled out $5 to see it in my apartment. But that’s still $10 less than I spent on "The Big Short," and well after the box office numbers had already left their mark. These choices I made are important, and have left on impression on me since. How I--and other moviegoers--choose to spend time in the theaters will be the single most important factor in determining the direction of film production and distribution over the next few years — perhaps bringing about a greater emphasis on racial, economic, gender and geographic diversity that will be necessary to bridge the gap between the "99 Homes" and "The Big Short"s of the world.
“Bridge of Spies” is my grandfather’s story
I once heard director Sydney Pollack speak about the importance of the passage of time for artists to have enough perspective and distance from a subject to create real art. In 1964, my grandfather, James B. Donovan, published a memoir called “Strangers on a Bridge,” in which he recounted in diary format his legal defense of Russian spy Col. Rudolf Abel and his negotiations with the Soviet Union for the exchange of Abel for the captured American U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. At that time, the book was to have become a movie starring Gregory Peck. But that movie never materialized. Cold War tensions were too high and the political climate too strained, so the studio decided not to make it. With the significant passage of time, though, has come a movie that has not only brought his story to the world, but is also a piece of timeless, classic art: Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” starring Tom Hanks as my grandfather, depicts the same historical events shared firsthand in Jim Donovan’s book. It was largely because of the release of this beautifully crafted film that I was successful in getting the book republished, giving the storytelling in the film some authentic historical context. Growing up, I always knew that my grandfather was “someone.” My paternal grandfather had died before my parents married and James Donovan – my maternal grandfather – died when I was only 3, so I have very little, if any, memory of him. The grandfather I knew was through the pictures and books in the breakfront of my parents’ living room, through his medals encased in a wooden box with a glass display case, and through the images of his den that are etched in my memory. I remember his den (and the apartment in which my mother was raised) vividly – a cozy oasis of dark wood and leather, a warm rainbow of midnight blue, mahogany and hunter green forming a cozy sanctuary for learning, teaching, reflecting and sharing ideas. I looked at his picture daily, his cherubic grin, shaking hands with President Kennedy, fishing with Fidel Castro, and at his kind gaze in the portrait hanging in my grandmother’s living room on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. I heard about him from the man with a front row seat to history – my grandfather’s driver and a loving member of our family, Aston Taylor. Most of all, I heard about him from my grandmother, who spoke so proudly of his achievements, and for years of how Hollywood needed to tell his story. Sadly, she is not here to enjoy these exciting moments celebrating my grandfather’s life story with us. She would want to thank Mr. Spielberg herself. I grew up in these shadows of history, not fully realizing the gravity of what my grandfather had accomplished until I began to write my admissions essay for college, the subject of which was my role models. Needless to say, he was the inspiration for my chosen topic. He was a Harvard Law graduate, general counsel for the OSS in WWII, associate prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials; and following the historic Abel-Powers exchange, President Kennedy sent him to Cuba, where he successfully negotiated the release of 1,100 Bay of Pigs prisoners (9,700 people’s freedom was ultimately secured as the direct result of those negotiations). He also ran for U.S. Senate, was president of the New York Board of Education during busing and integration, and was president of Pratt Institute during the late '60s student uprisings. He accomplished all of this, yet died at 53 years old in 1970. Healthy role models are vital for society, particularly for the next generation and for those who aren’t as fortunate as I to have grown up in a loving, supportive home. My grandfather’s life embodies so many things that are worth emulating: a commitment to excellence and craft, an ongoing thirst for learning, a strong work ethic, an ability to welcome and rise to challenges, an appreciation of the values of courage, tenacity and, most of all, standing up for one’s beliefs at any cost. These were the ideals I was raised with and that I try to emulate in my own life. While we lost him way too soon, I have held onto his ideals throughout my life, to help me reach for the stars, hopefully inspiring others to do the same. With the telling of his story, I hope that people will not only be moved to action of their own, but also enriched by the teachable moments of history. It is these moments that help to provide a hopeful future for our children -- the next generation of role models -- to cast their own formidable shadows upon all future generations. As we celebrate my grandfather’s centennial birthday this year, the formidable shadow of James Donovan’s contributions has become a cultural touchstone. Like a great piece of art, the realization of his life in film has proved to be worth the wait. What an extraordinary way to celebrate my grandfather’s centennial birthday on Feb. 29. Oscar or no Oscar, “Bridge of Spies” wins by standing the test of time. Beth Amorosi is a marketing communications strategist and lives in New York City. She has also founded the Donovan Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of diplomacy and the art of negotiation. For additional information, please visit
www.jamesbdonovan.com
.
“I will not be used as a tool for their purposes”: Melissa Harris-Perry walks off MSNBC show
Melissa Harris-Perry is refusing to appear this weekend on the MSNBC show she hosts, according to The New York Times. In a letter to colleagues, Harris-Perry cited frustrations that show had been repeatedly pre-empted by election coverage of "relative novices and certified liars" in recent weeks. “Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote in the letter. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.” Harris-Perry's show has aired on MSNBC since 2012 and has regularly explored issues of race and diversity. "Now, MSNBC would like me to appear for four inconsequential hours to read news that they deem relevant without returning to our team any of the editorial control and authority that makes MHP Show distinctive," Harris-Perry wrote. “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head [...] I love our show. I want it back." Harris later downplayed any racial interpretation of her letter in a follow-up interview with The New York Times, saying, “I don’t know if there is a personal racial component. I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.” In a statement to Mediaite, MSNBC called Harris-Perry's decision "surprising, confusing and disappointing."Melissa Harris-Perry is refusing to appear this weekend on the MSNBC show she hosts, according to The New York Times. In a letter to colleagues, Harris-Perry cited frustrations that show had been repeatedly pre-empted by election coverage of "relative novices and certified liars" in recent weeks. “Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote in the letter. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.” Harris-Perry's show has aired on MSNBC since 2012 and has regularly explored issues of race and diversity. "Now, MSNBC would like me to appear for four inconsequential hours to read news that they deem relevant without returning to our team any of the editorial control and authority that makes MHP Show distinctive," Harris-Perry wrote. “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head [...] I love our show. I want it back." Harris later downplayed any racial interpretation of her letter in a follow-up interview with The New York Times, saying, “I don’t know if there is a personal racial component. I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.” In a statement to Mediaite, MSNBC called Harris-Perry's decision "surprising, confusing and disappointing."Melissa Harris-Perry is refusing to appear this weekend on the MSNBC show she hosts, according to The New York Times. In a letter to colleagues, Harris-Perry cited frustrations that show had been repeatedly pre-empted by election coverage of "relative novices and certified liars" in recent weeks. “Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote in the letter. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.” Harris-Perry's show has aired on MSNBC since 2012 and has regularly explored issues of race and diversity. "Now, MSNBC would like me to appear for four inconsequential hours to read news that they deem relevant without returning to our team any of the editorial control and authority that makes MHP Show distinctive," Harris-Perry wrote. “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head [...] I love our show. I want it back." Harris later downplayed any racial interpretation of her letter in a follow-up interview with The New York Times, saying, “I don’t know if there is a personal racial component. I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.” In a statement to Mediaite, MSNBC called Harris-Perry's decision "surprising, confusing and disappointing."
