Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 854
February 24, 2016
Chris Rock is ready: The Oscar host’s historic opportunity is the moment his entire career has led toward
At some point in the murky prehistoric era otherwise known as Bill Clinton’s second term, I found myself in the living room of a modest apartment in Fort Worth, Texas, with a couple of self-described gun nuts named Darrell and Bo. We were sitting around drinking the beer I had purchased while they showed me their alarming array of weapons — there were at least two dozen firearms in that apartment — and discussed their African-American neighbors, using an epithet I am not allowed to print. Sensing my discomfort, Bo and Darrell hastened to assure me they were not bigots. That word did not apply to all black people, only some of them. And they were big fans of Chris Rock, who drew the same distinction in one of his infamous ‘90s stand-up routines. (If you're not familiar with this bit from his 1996 special "Bring the Pain," you can watch it here.) I think about those guys a lot in the context of 2016, when Donald Trump is about to become the Republican presidential nominee and Chris Rock will host an Oscar ceremony that features an all-white list of acting nominees for the second year running. At the time, Bo and Darrell struck me as likable losers with good intentions and a delusional worldview, and that’s what I said in the article I wrote about them for a now-defunct men’s magazine. They were good sports about it: Darrell called to tell me the only thing he didn’t like about the article was that I said his TV was too big. In my head, Darrell and Bo serve as a reminder that the “Trump demographic” is more complicated than it appears from a distance. So too is Chris Rock, who finds himself at the center of a major pop-culture controversy and the center of America’s overheated racial discourse, all in the same moment. Sunday night’s Oscar telecast is arguably the moment that Rock’s entire career has pointed toward — and if that feels like putting way too much pressure on one guy, I’m sure I can’t compete with the pressure Rock is putting on himself. As he well knows, every crack he makes will immediately be dissected for possible meanings. Every laugh line will be evaluated for signs of Hollywood’s collective guilt; every dud and every groan will be perused for possible racist defiance. At this point, if Rock doesn’t open the show with a slam-bang musical number, featuring Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Bill Cosby in KKK robes, half of Twitter will announce that he sucks. (And if he does, the other half will profess undying outrage.) But he’s the right man for the job; I honestly can’t think of anyone who is better positioned to tackle the #OscarsSoWhite moment with humor and anger and just a little cerebral detachment. It isn’t entirely irrelevant that Bo and Darrell in Fort Worth were such big fans, although good middle-class progressives of all races will no doubt be distressed that those guys took Rock’s comedy as implicit permission to use the N-word and as cover for casual racism. Rock is conspicuously not interested in placating middle-class progressives of all races, which is one of the big reasons why he’s perfectly situated to call out the Hollywood establishment for its deeply ingrained racial blindness and denial. Unlike Spike Lee or Danny Glover or even Denzel Washington, he’s not perceived as a scold or a preacher or an “activist.” He’s a whole lot funnier than any of those guys, and he might well be the smartest and most culturally literate person who will appear on the Dolby Theatre stage on Sunday. (In this conversation with Frank Rich in New York magazine, he cracks deep film-nerd jokes about the “difficult” Woody Allen movies of the ‘80s.) Even in the less sensitized cultural climate of the ‘90s, lots of people found Rock’s exaggerated tirade invoking the forbidden word as a sub-category of black people profoundly offensive. It was offensive, and that was pretty much the point. (Rock has said he wouldn’t deliver that material the same way today.) Like much of the most effective comedy, it was deliberate thought-crime, designed to make all possible audience members uncomfortable. That applies to Bo and Darrell as well, in my estimation. It’s too simplistic to say, “Oh, he gave racists permission to say racist stuff and that’s terrible.” He did no such thing. Chris Rock is not responsible for my gun-totin’ pals’ attitudes or utterances, which are going to come out in some other form, by the way, if we deliver stern lectures to the Bos and Darrells of the world about how such things are unsayable and unthinkable. (See also: Trump, Donald, 2016 campaign of.) In that Frank Rich conversation from 2014, Rock imagines doing a TV special on race in which he would interview only white people. “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress,” he says, “it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy … The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced.” Whether or not you agree with that, it speaks to the analytical perspective beneath Rock’s comic persona. He is in no sense trying to be a non-racial or “post-racial” entertainer (as Bill Cosby arguably did in his heyday). He’s a black man with deep roots in the African-American comedy tradition, who has spent much of his professional life in rooms full of white people without code-switching or “acting white.” So yeah, Bo and Darrell on their imitation leather sofa in 1998 were way too eager to embrace Rock’s problematic racial dichotomy, and to use it as license to say things they probably shouldn’t have said in front of a bespectacled left-wing journalist from New York City. Rock might say that it’s better for those guys to say that stuff out loud than to bottle it up, and I would say that beneath Bo and Darrell’s eagerness I could feel a nervous, electrical buzz of excitement and unease: Why is this liberal black guy who went to college and has a lot of money saying this stuff? That’s the Chris Rock effect, and at its best it works on everyone. Let’s be direct about the obvious fact that I am writing about Chris Rock from a middle-class white person’s perspective (since that’s the only one I have available) and that I do not propose to speak for the wide range of heterogeneous black opinions about Rock’s career and comic persona. What I observed in that living room was that Rock had succeeded in reaching two working-class white guys on the downscale suburban fringe of Fort Worth, without condescension or falsehood, in a way I could not easily manage. Essentially he told Bo and Darrell and a bunch of other white folks that, yeah, black people sometimes talk this way among themselves, and he wasn’t going to lie to them about it or treat them like bewildered children, because he wasn’t scared of them. Because white people are not quite as crazy as they used to be. What they did with that information and whether they took it in a constructive or destructive direction — that was on them. No doubt it’s a symptom of Hollywood’s race problem that Chris Rock possesses unique status in the entertainment industry. Everyone who will be in that room on Sunday night respects him, and most of them like him. They know he could have cashed out in bad movies and TV sitcoms years ago, and has consistently pursued a more challenging and less predictable path as an actor, producer and director. They know how smart he is and how sharply tuned his cultural and political radar is. They know they have to give the appearance of listening to him for political reasons, but they also know that he will be funny and will never retreat to clichés or platitudes and will tell them the truth as he sees it. It’s an immense and profoundly unfair responsibility, but the whole world will be watching and no one could possibly be better prepared. Fast forward a decade or so from Fort Worth, and I found myself on a different sofa, talking to Chris Rock at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. He was there with his HBO documentary “Good Hair,” and I tried to make a joke about that: Here we were at a ski resort in Utah, the whitest place imaginable. What a perfect spot for a movie about African-American hair! Rock didn’t even crack a smile. Actually, it kind of was perfect, he said. People from Salt Lake City’s modest black community were coming up by the busload to see the film, he told me; it was more color than Sundance had seen in years. That was his primary audience and his main responsibility. If he could make African-Americans feel that the movie was authentic and truthful to their experience, and also get some Mormon lady in Utah to engage with this subject and laugh about it and leave knowing things she didn’t know before … He shrugged: “Then I’ve done the job.” Rock’s job on Sunday night is bigger, and the task of addressing multiple audiences without dissimulation -- the studio heads and the academy and Bo and Darrell and people of color around the world with Oscar-flavored dreams -- is fraught with danger. He’s ready.
“Queer sexual bodies are despised”: Garth Greenwell on writing his debut novel and why everything comes back to Kentucky for him, “for better and for worse”
Garth Greenwell begins his reading at the Morris Book Shop in Lexington, Kentucky, with the hint of a tremor in his voice. Maybe it’s shyness, or just a slight case of nerves, a response to the emotions of the moment, which must be running high. His sister is smiling up at him from the front row. He’s reading a passage from his new novel that is set here in this state, a place that raises complicated feelings in him. After all, who could blame him? Although Greenwell was born and raised near Louisville, about an hour away, this is only the second time he has returned to his native state since leaving home in the mid-'90s, after his father kicked him out of the house for being gay. But at 37, he has returned triumphant, a sterling debut novel in hand. Since its release in January, “What Belongs to You” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has garnered praise sweeter than a glass of Southern iced tea, heralded as “the first great novel of 2016” by Publisher’s Weekly and “incandescent” by the New York Times. The book opens underground, in a public bathroom beneath the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria, where a young, gay American teacher has gone cruising for sex. He finds what he’s looking for with Mitko, a slender, gritty Bulgarian with “an air of criminality” about him. Mitko charges him for sex, and the narrator is more than willing to pay—again and again as it turns out, setting off a dilemma for the narrator, whose confrontations with desire, loneliness and violence spark memories of his troubled childhood in Kentucky. Written with a poet’s eye for detail in lyrical, looping prose, “What Belongs to You” explores how the scars we carry from childhood can wreak havoc in our lives, as well as create startling possibilities. “What Belongs to You” is set in Bulgaria, in Sofia, where you lived for four years. How did being in that city—being a foreigner, having to grapple with a different language, new customs—help to inspire the novel? It was my first time really living abroad. I had only spent a few weeks one summer in France before that. I had never been to Eastern Europe, and so I think I was really kind of overwhelmed by the strangeness of it. The most powerful response I had to the place was that I fell in love with the language absolutely. I think it’s the most beautiful language in the world, and I loved speaking a language other than English every day. And on days that I didn’t teach, or when we were in break or on vacation, I would go days without speaking English, and that really did change my relationship to English and change my relationship to the act of writing. It made my writing more private...I don’t understand why this happened, but somehow being in Bulgaria made me write prose. I had only written poetry. I did an MFA in poetry, I was really attached to an identity as a poet...I had never studied prose, and I had no workshop voices in my head when it came to prose...The sort of metaphor I use is I really felt like I was like inching forward in the dark, kind of clause by clause, just writing a sentence... The real spark of the novel came from [being] in Bulgaria and meeting gay men in the kinds of communities I found [there], which were these cruising bathrooms and places, [and I realized] that men were saying to me the same things that men in those kinds of places said to me in Kentucky in the early '90s. And also I was working as a high school teacher [at the American College of Sofia]...I was the only openly gay person in the school community, I was the only openly gay person almost any of my students had ever met, because all of my students were Bulgarian...That meant that all of my students who were queer, who thought they might be queer, came to talk to me, and they told me stories that, even though they were in this foreign landscape and this culture that's very far away from the culture of Kentucky, I felt like they were telling me my own story. And I felt like both the adult men I was meeting in bathrooms and then my students who were coming to talk to me [had] exactly the same horizon of possibility for their lives that queer people in Kentucky did in the early '90s. The first section of the book was originally published [by Miami University Press] in 2011 as a novella titled “Mitko.” When did you realize that this story wasn’t done with you? In the first section of the novel, Kentucky’s not really at play. But there are two things that I didn’t really understand why they had to be in that first section...One of them is that when Mitko says that he works construction—the narrator doesn’t speak Bulgarian very well and Mitko doesn’t speak any English, and so he like acts out these construction things—and the narrator thinks of his father, because his father worked construction one summer. And then I thought that’s weird. I remember questioning it because there’s nothing else about the father in that section...And then the other thing is there’s this weird little scene [in which] the narrator sees this little girl playing with her father by a river in this mountain town. When I went into revision mode, I tried to convince myself to take that out because it just doesn’t make any sense in that first section, but I just knew it had to be there. I couldn’t take it out. And it wasn’t until I was halfway through that second section which I had not been planning to write—the one set in Kentucky and all one paragraph and very much out of control—that I realized...those things that were so confusing in that first section were like seeds set for this, and really preparing the way. But I really didn't think of it as a novel until I finished all three parts...I never had any idea of the shape of the whole thing until maybe I was halfway through the third section, and then I started consciously doing some things to try to make it cohere and give it some kind of symmetry. When I finished it, I looked back over this thing and I thought...it feels like a novel. But it took a long time for me to trust my intuition that there was this kind of gravity holding these parts together. And to a certain extent I had to have other people point out some of those things and the way that there are these echoes. And then I read a book that was...revelatory for me—David Galgut's “In a Strange Room,” which has these three disconnected, or not obviously connected, narratives. And I read that book, and I just thought a novel can work this way, and the gravity holding these parts together doesn't have to be a kind of obvious narrative logic. It sounds like your being a poet and coming at it from that [perspective]—rather than knowing the rules of prose—was liberating. I think it really was. And that was true [because] I was just so overeducated in poetry. I had an incredibly privileged education in poetry. I got to work with extraordinary poets who've just filled up my head—their voices filled up my head, their advice filled up my head. I studied poetry in the Ph.D. program at Harvard for three years as a scholar, and...memorizing poetry is something I do. And all of that just went away with prose. At the same time, though, I do think this is really like the novel a poet writes. I mean, to a certain extent I feel like every scene is this sort of lyric moment. I feel like the book is really interested in those moments where time thickens and slows down, and it's interested in excavating moments in the way that lyric poetry does. Sometimes people read the book and they're like, But there's basic information we're missing. And I think one reason that I was really comfortable with that was just because when you deal with the lyric subject, you're just not burdened with that information. And so the fact that I hadn't studied fiction meant that I just didn't know enough to miss a lot of that stuff—which is a way of saying that when I first wrote “Mitko,” I had this very powerful feeling of This is just better than anything I've written, and it's better than any of the poems, and it just demolishes the poems. And that was really upsetting to me, because I had invested so much in thinking of myself as a poet. But to a certain extent, the lines between genres don't seem always all that meaningful to me. Part of the book obviously focuses on cruising, which historically [is related to] society's rejection of gay men. But in a lot of quarters of mainstream culture, that is looked down upon as lewd, as dangerous. What made you want to explore that on the page? Those communities—and I do think that's the right word for them, community—have been central to my sense of [self] since I was 14 years old. And to me, they seem like extraordinarily rich places, and places where people have extraordinarily rich encounters of all kinds. And some of those—as in any other human space—are negative or painful or damaging, and some of them are intimate and sustaining and I would say loving. And I want to write about those communities and those places in a way that recognizes that richness and [where] the whole gamut, the whole range, of human feeling and of human ethical response is at play. And while it may be true—although I also think it may be too simple to be entirely true, to say that those places came into being as a response to the fact that sort of other kinds of spaces were closed off to queer people or were limited to queer people—they haven't disappeared. They are spaces that should be valued, because I think...a lot of what is potentially radical in queer identity and queer life comes to the fore in places like these. Because in these places, all of the usual categories by which we organize our lives—like race and class—get scrambled. This is one reason why desire is always causing trouble. Desire just scrambles those things. People have encounters in these places that they wouldn't in other spaces, and any time those kinds of encounters happen I think there is the possibility for that kind of spark of empathy. It's not to say—I mean, I don't want to romanticize these places. They are places where people are exploited and assaulted and all of those things, but they are also places where I think there is the possibility of an empathetic response and of a compassionate response across the kinds of divisions and rooms of privilege and class that keep us separate. And you know, there's something that I fear in the marriage equality sort of version of queer life that is dominant right now in sort of the American public consciousness. We've obviously seen a lot of gains in our country— Absolutely. No question. —with marriage equality being the most recent—that [have helped] bring the LGBTQ community into the mainstream. But do you think that we're also losing some things that have helped to define gay culture in that process? I think there's a risk of that. I 100 percent [believe] marriage equality is important. I think it was an important battle. I'm really glad we won the battle. I think it's tragic that we won that battle at the cost of so many other battles that we need to fight. And I think it's tragic that we won that battle at the cost of further marginalizing the most marginalized parts of the LGBTQ community...That was a battle fought in the language of advertising. And when you look at those advertisements, the people in them are almost all affluent, they're almost all white, they're almost all of a certain age, they've almost all organized their lives in a kind of model that looks very heterosexual to monogamous people who have formed a relationship around the raising of a child. And that is an important model of life that should be open to queer people, and queer people should have the rights and responsibilities that come with that model of life. But that is not the only model of life, and that is not the only model of queer life, and to the extent that the battle for marriage equality meant pushing those other models to the side and kind of disavowing them, I think that [is] unpardonable. And I do think there is a risk that that radical potential of queer life can be lost if the only model our community recognizes as legitimate is a kind of heteronormative model. I mean, look—one of the great and terrible accomplishments of America today is that we have so carefully separated the rich and the poor. And those other models of queer life were places where that division got scrambled, and where queer life kept its contact with the culture of poverty, and I think that's really important...I have really strong feelings about these places and that they are valuable, and that even if they did come into being as a response to shame...they are also places of joy, and they are also places of compassion and of something that I would call love and of intimacy... There's just something intensely radical in having this extraordinary intimacy with a stranger, and with someone who's not just potentially unknown to you in your everyday life, but someone who belongs to categories that your life is structured in a way to avoid or to keep you from. To me, we should not be dismissive of the ethical potential of that. A lot of this, I think, revolves around [this idea of] what a gay person looks like, who a gay person is. By a lot of people's notions, gay people only live in cities— Absolutely. —when we both know that there are plenty of gay people growing up in rural areas that have an experience that looks different. And those stories have not been told. And I really think that my next novel project is going to be set in Kentucky, and I want to sort of think about those communities that were so important to me when I was a kid and the stories of the people I met and the friendships I formed. But what you say is so important, because I think it's true that people think about queerness as kind of an urban phenomenon...Because there was this sort of overly facile attack on marriage equality that was this is just about gay white men—this is about the most privileged part of the queer community, this is about gay white men living in urban areas— With tons of disposable income. And that's just bullshit. Because we know that in fact the majority...of queer families with children are not in those urban [areas], that in fact they're in the South, that many of them are in rural populations, that many of them involve people of color. And you know, marriage is incredibly important for those families. And marriage is incredibly important for sort of day-to-day life on the ground, like feeding my kids, protecting my kids, protecting my spouse. And to sort of deny that and say this is just about rich white guys, that's just false. At the same time, you know, gay kids are still dying on the streets, and gay men are still dying of AIDS— Getting kicked out of homes— Getting kicked out of homes, and those are vitally important issues for the queer community to address. I was very moved and intrigued by how you write about touch. It appears throughout the book, obviously in sex, but also in other situations and places...I think of that passage on the train with the narrator and his mother [watching] the grandmother and grandson, the boy “draped across her lap, his arms cast about her, a posture so sweet it was almost painful to see, as it was painful to see my mother, who watched them with such longing I had to look away.” [I’m wondering] how you’ve noticed the concept of touch changing as you’ve gotten older, because I think that [theme is] there in the book. That's such an interesting question. I'll start by saying that it was a reader who pointed out that there is this pattern of scenes where there are...often non-sexual embraces. That's one of the echoes throughout the book. And I thought, right, because this is a narrator who has real issues with intimacy. This is a narrator that is in a lot of ways distant, and who feels in a lot of ways really locked away from other people, from himself...I feel like the narrator imagines that there was a time when intimacy was kind of the air he breathed, and childhood [was] that time. And these moments that he has with K. [a character] or with Mitko...or that he projects on to what he sees with that girl by the river and with that boy on the train—it's like they gesture to this world he has been shut out of completely. And maybe it's true that—just shifting from the narrator to me—as an adult that sense of being excluded from that doesn't feel so absolute... As I get older more things seem possible to me, in my own potential for response, which is a great gift of getting older. There were stories about myself and about my life I took for granted for a long time, and maybe those stories are finally less determinative of my life than I thought they might be. For me—for my experience growing up in Kentucky as a gay kid in the early '90s—I really felt like I was taught one lesson about my life and that was the lesson that made it really hard to live. And even as I have moved away from that—and even as I have taught myself other lessons [and] been taught other lessons—I feel very painfully the fact that you never get to be the person who didn't learn that first lesson you're taught about yourself. You can learn other lessons, but you never get to not have learned that first lesson. And as I get older I do feel like, well, maybe that hasn't shut as many doors as I...thought. Maybe that's just wishful thinking. But it's interesting that that kind of hope is available to me more now than it ever has been. We're both from Kentucky [and] grew up in different parts of the state around the same time, but in a time and place where being gay was scorned, and it was connected certainly with AIDS. How did this place both create and damage you? Oh. Lord. [laughs] In an earlier interview, a guy asked me, “Do you think of yourself as a Kentucky writer?”—because at this point I’ve spent more of my life away from Kentucky than I [have] lived in Kentucky. And I just hadn’t really thought about that question before, but I just immediately said, “Yes, of course, absolutely I am.” And that’s true...I sort of feel like everything goes back to this place. This was the place where I learned those lessons that to be queer meant your life had no value. To be queer meant that either you never had sex or you got AIDS and died and you were punished. This was the place that shaped my father, and shaped him in such a way that when his kid turned out to be queer he said, “Well, you’re not my kid.” This was also the place where—it was in Kentucky public school that I discovered art, and the choir director, David Brown, really saved my life by showing me what art was and how art can be an escape. It's where I found cruising and came into my first understanding of myself as a gay person and first experienced the joys of being a queer person, not just the trauma of being a queer person. Everything I am is this place, really. And also the landscape of this place—just driving [the other day] I had to pull off the side of the road and look at how beautiful this place is. My ideas of beauty go back to this place...The only other place that has had kind of similar impact to me is Bulgaria, and...I think the reason I had such a chemical response to Bulgaria was because of all the ways it reminded me of Kentucky...Everything goes back to Kentucky. There's no question. For better and for worse. Sex is obviously a big part of this book, [and] many of the reviews and coverage have focused on that. I read one of the headlines the other day that said "Garth Greenwell on writing sex." Yeah. [laughs] And so it's an important part of the book, but it's not the whole book. It's not the whole book. There's a deep family story here. You [compare] two regions of the world that feel familiar. Has any of that coverage and focus been a bit annoying? Do you ever get the feeling that it's being focused on because it's gay sex? That's a really interesting question. You know, it hasn't annoyed me, and one reason it hasn't is that it has just been amazing to me that a book in which [queer] people [and queer sexual bodies] are central—I mean, there basically aren't straight people in this book for straight readers to identify with and emotionally invest in—it's just been the biggest surprise of my life that this book has been received as it has been. Those are things that often keep books from...being seen. I guess I kind of welcome that discussion of sex in the book...Writing sex is really important to me [because] when you write about something, when you make art out of something, you’re making a declaration. And that declaration is that this thing has value. And it’s certainly the kind of book that I’m writing—that this is beautiful. Even in our world of marriage equality, that is not something we can take for granted when it comes to the queer body and to queer sex. To a large extent, the push for marriage equality has been about convincing people who are disgusted by gay people that gay lives have value. That is such an important message. Gay sex remains something that our culture thinks is dirty. And queer bodies are despised, and especially queer sexual bodies are despised, and we're told that they're dirty, and we're told that they're diseased. And to write them in a way that I hope—I mean, to the greatest extent I'm capable of, that uses the full resources of the English literary heritage, that uses all the resources of lyric poetry—to say this has value, this is beautiful, this belongs in art—I think that's really important work for queer writers, for writers, to do. It’s one reason why I feel so inspired by somebody like [novelist and memoirist] Lidia Yuknavitch who is putting sexuality—and not just sexuality, [but] acts of sex—front and center in her books in a way that says very clearly I am not interested in making this acceptable to you. I am not interested in turning you on. I am not interested in making you feel comfortable—that's not what this book is going to do. I hope that my book makes similar declarations.
Beyond condoms: 4 more ways to cut the risk of catching an STD
Americans are really scared of catching sexual transmitted diseases. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Scrotoguard, a latex panty for men designed to cover all the bases a condom doesn’t reach. Fortunately, most people run in mellower circles. For them, the condom seems to suffice. And as the Condom Facts campaign reminds us, "Condoms provide the best protection against STDs and HIV. Every time." Still, whenever the subject comes up, people tend to ask, what more can I do? How can I keep clean, and stay clean? Nobody, it seems, wants the stigma of getting a big bad STD. Roger V. Short, a reproductive biologist at Australia's University of Melbourne, might have some answers. Beyond condoms, a set of measures exists that might help arm us in the fight against STDs. 1. Wash your penis. Taking a shower after sex is pretty common. For a lot of people, it’s a sign of good personal hygiene. In the past, bathing was actually thought to be an effective way to protect against STDs. A social hygiene poster from 1940 instructs soldiers to guard against infection by washing with “plenty of soap and water.” The method is actually said to have helped prevent chancroid. But it’s not a piece of advice you’re likely to hear from medical professionals today, and evidence seems to suggest that ordinary soap might not do the trick. As most of us already know, a circumcised penis is one that has had the skin covering the tip removed, whereas uncircumcised men have the foreskin intact. The inner surface of a man’s foreskin contains something called Langerhans cells (also found in the vagina). Experts believe this area to be especially vulnerable to certain sexually transmitted infections like the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Of the men who contract HIV through sexual intercourse, the foreskin is the primary point of entry. So if we’re looking to protect uncircumcised men from undue exposure to certain sexually transmitted infections, it makes sense to start with the foreskin. What can we medicate the area with to effectively prevent against infection after sex? The answer, it turns out, comes in the form of microbicides. Microbicides, as defined by the World Health Organization, are gels, films or suppositories that can kill or neutralize viruses and bacteria. Often, they’re applied inside the vagina or rectum. In some cases, the use of microbicides has proved effective in protecting against certain infections, like HPV. Short suggests that even your garden-variety soap might do the trick. Most advocates recommend using them in conjunction with condom use. Short suggests we expand the use of microbicides to the penis. As he writes in one article, “Post-coital penile hygiene, wiping the penis, and in particular the inner aspect of the foreskin, with a potent microbicide within minutes of penile withdrawal from the vagina (or rectum) may significantly reduce a man's chances of becoming infected.” He added, "Male post-coital hygiene is a seriously neglected area of research." So yes, washing your just-withdrawn penis with a potent microbicide could be somewhat helpful in stopping spread of STDs. But you probably shouldn't rely on this technique alone to stay safe. 2. Take the Pill, or its ingredients … vaginally. The Pill is pretty much considered synonymous with oral contraceptive for women. But the mouth isn’t the only way to take medication. Roger Short suggests we take a look at the vagina as a potential pathway. Here’s his logic: Keratin works as a defensive protein in the skin. Estrogen (a hormone found in birth control pills) can increase our keratin layers by up to four times, maybe more. Short believes that by introducing that extra boost of estrogen directly into the vagina (the primary route of HIV infection in women), we stand a much better chance at blocking the virus from entering the body. He’s not the first one to notice the powerful effect estrogen has on the body and its defenses. One report suggests, "Estrogen-deficient women are at increased risk of HIV infection, because their vaginal microenvironments are rendered more susceptible.” According to one study, postmenopausal women, who have experienced a significant drop in estrogen levels, are 4-8 times more likely to be infected with HIV than premenopausal women. If Short’s theory holds up, topical estrogen treatments could provide a dual benefit. “Vaginal pills could protect women against both pregnancy and HIV infection,” he writes. And it could work on men, too. Short told the Psychiatric Times that applying estrogen to the penis essentially creates a “living condom” that can shield men from HIV and other viruses. Amesh A. Adalja, an infectious disease specialist, cautions that this treatment is an ongoing process. “Estrogen applied topically is something that has been shown in animal models to diminish HIV acquisition but this is not a one-time application post-sex — in trials it was daily application,” he wrote AlterNet in an email. 3. Get circumcised. Circumcision isn't just a religious ritual; many doctors say it serves a medical purpose. As it turns out, males who have undergone the procedure tend to have a lot less bacteria in and around their penis. And that becomes significant in the battle against STDs for a number of reasons. According to an article published by Time, a “high burden” of bacteria could disrupt the ability of specialized immune cells to activate immune defenses. It’s been reported that circumcision can help prevent the risk of HIV by up to 60% (though this figure only holds true in the context of vaginal sex). The procedure has also been associated with a decrease in the rate of HPV infection (Human papillomavirus, the virus that causes genital warts and increased risk of certain cancers), as well as genital herpes. Of course, the decision to get circumcised is a personal one (and usually made by one's parents). Some fear the effects it will have on penile sensation and sexual function, not to mention the concerns over getting a botched job. When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a set of guidelines on circumcision two years ago, it avoided an outright call for the procedures, but asserted, “The scientific evidence is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks.” 4. Lime juice? In an interview with National Geographic, Short explained that lime and lemon juice has been used as contraceptive in the Mediterranean for almost 300 years. Today, he’d like to see their use expanded in the way of STD prevention In his 2006 paper, Short explains that the citric acid content found in lemon juice produces very low levels of pH. Turns out, HIV is extremely susceptible to low pH, which got Short and his team wondering, “Might this age-old contraceptive be a new natural microbicide?” Short asserts that in his lab, the juices have been effective in killing the HIV virus. But some in the field are worried about the effects this kind of treatment will have on patients; specifically women. Some experts have even found an association between lemon and lime juice douching and cervical dysplasias (abnormal changes in the cell wall), which puts one at increased risk for cervical cancer. Adalja told us, “Lime juice loses its activity in the presence of semen and high concentrations applied intravaginally can be toxic.” Such damage leaves one vulnerable to infections and abrasions, which would actually increase one’s chance of becoming infected with a sexually transmitted disease. Carrie Weisman is an AlterNet staff writer who focuses on sex, relationships and culture. Got tips, ideas or a first-person story? Email her.
Americans are really scared of catching sexual transmitted diseases. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Scrotoguard, a latex panty for men designed to cover all the bases a condom doesn’t reach. Fortunately, most people run in mellower circles. For them, the condom seems to suffice. And as the Condom Facts campaign reminds us, "Condoms provide the best protection against STDs and HIV. Every time." Still, whenever the subject comes up, people tend to ask, what more can I do? How can I keep clean, and stay clean? Nobody, it seems, wants the stigma of getting a big bad STD. Roger V. Short, a reproductive biologist at Australia's University of Melbourne, might have some answers. Beyond condoms, a set of measures exists that might help arm us in the fight against STDs. 1. Wash your penis. Taking a shower after sex is pretty common. For a lot of people, it’s a sign of good personal hygiene. In the past, bathing was actually thought to be an effective way to protect against STDs. A social hygiene poster from 1940 instructs soldiers to guard against infection by washing with “plenty of soap and water.” The method is actually said to have helped prevent chancroid. But it’s not a piece of advice you’re likely to hear from medical professionals today, and evidence seems to suggest that ordinary soap might not do the trick. As most of us already know, a circumcised penis is one that has had the skin covering the tip removed, whereas uncircumcised men have the foreskin intact. The inner surface of a man’s foreskin contains something called Langerhans cells (also found in the vagina). Experts believe this area to be especially vulnerable to certain sexually transmitted infections like the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Of the men who contract HIV through sexual intercourse, the foreskin is the primary point of entry. So if we’re looking to protect uncircumcised men from undue exposure to certain sexually transmitted infections, it makes sense to start with the foreskin. What can we medicate the area with to effectively prevent against infection after sex? The answer, it turns out, comes in the form of microbicides. Microbicides, as defined by the World Health Organization, are gels, films or suppositories that can kill or neutralize viruses and bacteria. Often, they’re applied inside the vagina or rectum. In some cases, the use of microbicides has proved effective in protecting against certain infections, like HPV. Short suggests that even your garden-variety soap might do the trick. Most advocates recommend using them in conjunction with condom use. Short suggests we expand the use of microbicides to the penis. As he writes in one article, “Post-coital penile hygiene, wiping the penis, and in particular the inner aspect of the foreskin, with a potent microbicide within minutes of penile withdrawal from the vagina (or rectum) may significantly reduce a man's chances of becoming infected.” He added, "Male post-coital hygiene is a seriously neglected area of research." So yes, washing your just-withdrawn penis with a potent microbicide could be somewhat helpful in stopping spread of STDs. But you probably shouldn't rely on this technique alone to stay safe. 2. Take the Pill, or its ingredients … vaginally. The Pill is pretty much considered synonymous with oral contraceptive for women. But the mouth isn’t the only way to take medication. Roger Short suggests we take a look at the vagina as a potential pathway. Here’s his logic: Keratin works as a defensive protein in the skin. Estrogen (a hormone found in birth control pills) can increase our keratin layers by up to four times, maybe more. Short believes that by introducing that extra boost of estrogen directly into the vagina (the primary route of HIV infection in women), we stand a much better chance at blocking the virus from entering the body. He’s not the first one to notice the powerful effect estrogen has on the body and its defenses. One report suggests, "Estrogen-deficient women are at increased risk of HIV infection, because their vaginal microenvironments are rendered more susceptible.” According to one study, postmenopausal women, who have experienced a significant drop in estrogen levels, are 4-8 times more likely to be infected with HIV than premenopausal women. If Short’s theory holds up, topical estrogen treatments could provide a dual benefit. “Vaginal pills could protect women against both pregnancy and HIV infection,” he writes. And it could work on men, too. Short told the Psychiatric Times that applying estrogen to the penis essentially creates a “living condom” that can shield men from HIV and other viruses. Amesh A. Adalja, an infectious disease specialist, cautions that this treatment is an ongoing process. “Estrogen applied topically is something that has been shown in animal models to diminish HIV acquisition but this is not a one-time application post-sex — in trials it was daily application,” he wrote AlterNet in an email. 3. Get circumcised. Circumcision isn't just a religious ritual; many doctors say it serves a medical purpose. As it turns out, males who have undergone the procedure tend to have a lot less bacteria in and around their penis. And that becomes significant in the battle against STDs for a number of reasons. According to an article published by Time, a “high burden” of bacteria could disrupt the ability of specialized immune cells to activate immune defenses. It’s been reported that circumcision can help prevent the risk of HIV by up to 60% (though this figure only holds true in the context of vaginal sex). The procedure has also been associated with a decrease in the rate of HPV infection (Human papillomavirus, the virus that causes genital warts and increased risk of certain cancers), as well as genital herpes. Of course, the decision to get circumcised is a personal one (and usually made by one's parents). Some fear the effects it will have on penile sensation and sexual function, not to mention the concerns over getting a botched job. When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a set of guidelines on circumcision two years ago, it avoided an outright call for the procedures, but asserted, “The scientific evidence is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks.” 4. Lime juice? In an interview with National Geographic, Short explained that lime and lemon juice has been used as contraceptive in the Mediterranean for almost 300 years. Today, he’d like to see their use expanded in the way of STD prevention In his 2006 paper, Short explains that the citric acid content found in lemon juice produces very low levels of pH. Turns out, HIV is extremely susceptible to low pH, which got Short and his team wondering, “Might this age-old contraceptive be a new natural microbicide?” Short asserts that in his lab, the juices have been effective in killing the HIV virus. But some in the field are worried about the effects this kind of treatment will have on patients; specifically women. Some experts have even found an association between lemon and lime juice douching and cervical dysplasias (abnormal changes in the cell wall), which puts one at increased risk for cervical cancer. Adalja told us, “Lime juice loses its activity in the presence of semen and high concentrations applied intravaginally can be toxic.” Such damage leaves one vulnerable to infections and abrasions, which would actually increase one’s chance of becoming infected with a sexually transmitted disease. Carrie Weisman is an AlterNet staff writer who focuses on sex, relationships and culture. Got tips, ideas or a first-person story? Email her. 
Profit over the planet: WTO’s lawsuit ruling could be a giant blow to the renewable energy movement
A new ruling by the World Trade Organization could be a big blow to the growing renewable energy movement around the world. A WTO tribunal ruled Wednesday that India's national solar energy program violates trade law, in a lawsuit initiated by the U.S. Almost half of states in the U.S. have programs that are similar to India's, which subsidize the renewable energy industry and create local, environmentally friendly jobs. Environmental groups say the deal shows that the WTO and U.S. care more about free trade policies and profit than they do about moving toward renewable energy sources. Bill Waren, senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth, said the organization "is dismayed that climate policy is being made by an international trade tribunal." "The government of India reasonably provided some preferences for local producers of solar energy in order to convert from a carbon economy to a green economy," Waren explained, calling the WTO decision "an outrage." Environmental groups also warned that the WTO ruling could undermine the international agreement reached after two weeks of deliberation at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. The Sierra Club called India's subsidy program "a common-sense solar energy initiative in India that is a core component of the country's contribution to the Paris agreement to tackle climate disruption." "Trade law trumps the Paris climate accord," Friends of the Earth said. India's program fueled a huge solar energy boom. Ben Beachy, senior policy advisor for the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program, explained that, in "just five years, thanks to India's National Solar Mission, India has gone from having virtually no solar capacity to boasting one of the world's fastest-growing solar industries." The country's original goal was to create 100,000 megawatts of solar power capacity by 2022 — which, the Sierra Club notes, is "more than the current solar capacity of the world's top five solar producers combined." Approximately 300 million Indians, or one-fourth of the country's enormous population, don't have access to electricity. India's solar energy program hoped to help millions of Indians gain more access to electricity, while limiting pollution and reliance on fossil fuels. Washington, on the other hand, insists the ruling will do the opposite, and will actually accelerate the spread of solar energy and create clean-energy jobs, Reuters reported. President Obama has claimed the same about the international trade agreement the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which environmental and labor groups warn will be catastrophic for the planet and the local economy. Former President Bill Clinton made similar promises about NAFTA, but the opposite of what he promised came true. The U.S. sued India in the WTO tribunal because India's subsidized solar energy program required that particular parts be made in the country. Washington claims that, because of this program, its solar exports to India have fallen by 90 percent since 2011, when the program started. As the Sierra Club's Ben Beachy noted, however, India had almost no solar capacity at this time. In September 2015, the WTO made a similar ruling in regard to India's solar program. "The WTO ruling is a step in the wrong direction, away from the climate progress that the global community committed to achieve in December's Paris climate agreement," stressed Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program, in a statement. "The U.S. should drop this case to avoid undermining climate protections abroad and at home," she continued. Solomon warned this ruling could be a sign of what is to come with the TPP. Fossil fuel company TransCanada is already suing the U.S. government, after the Obama administration rejected its proposed Keystone XL Pipeline on environmental grounds. Former NASA environmental scientist and now Columbia University professor James Hansen emphasized that, if the pipeline were built and the vast oil reserves in Alberta, Canada's tar sands were used, it would mean "game over for the climate," yet the corporation is demanding $15 billion in compensation from American taxpayers.A new ruling by the World Trade Organization could be a big blow to the growing renewable energy movement around the world. A WTO tribunal ruled Wednesday that India's national solar energy program violates trade law, in a lawsuit initiated by the U.S. Almost half of states in the U.S. have programs that are similar to India's, which subsidize the renewable energy industry and create local, environmentally friendly jobs. Environmental groups say the deal shows that the WTO and U.S. care more about free trade policies and profit than they do about moving toward renewable energy sources. Bill Waren, senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth, said the organization "is dismayed that climate policy is being made by an international trade tribunal." "The government of India reasonably provided some preferences for local producers of solar energy in order to convert from a carbon economy to a green economy," Waren explained, calling the WTO decision "an outrage." Environmental groups also warned that the WTO ruling could undermine the international agreement reached after two weeks of deliberation at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. The Sierra Club called India's subsidy program "a common-sense solar energy initiative in India that is a core component of the country's contribution to the Paris agreement to tackle climate disruption." "Trade law trumps the Paris climate accord," Friends of the Earth said. India's program fueled a huge solar energy boom. Ben Beachy, senior policy advisor for the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program, explained that, in "just five years, thanks to India's National Solar Mission, India has gone from having virtually no solar capacity to boasting one of the world's fastest-growing solar industries." The country's original goal was to create 100,000 megawatts of solar power capacity by 2022 — which, the Sierra Club notes, is "more than the current solar capacity of the world's top five solar producers combined." Approximately 300 million Indians, or one-fourth of the country's enormous population, don't have access to electricity. India's solar energy program hoped to help millions of Indians gain more access to electricity, while limiting pollution and reliance on fossil fuels. Washington, on the other hand, insists the ruling will do the opposite, and will actually accelerate the spread of solar energy and create clean-energy jobs, Reuters reported. President Obama has claimed the same about the international trade agreement the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which environmental and labor groups warn will be catastrophic for the planet and the local economy. Former President Bill Clinton made similar promises about NAFTA, but the opposite of what he promised came true. The U.S. sued India in the WTO tribunal because India's subsidized solar energy program required that particular parts be made in the country. Washington claims that, because of this program, its solar exports to India have fallen by 90 percent since 2011, when the program started. As the Sierra Club's Ben Beachy noted, however, India had almost no solar capacity at this time. In September 2015, the WTO made a similar ruling in regard to India's solar program. "The WTO ruling is a step in the wrong direction, away from the climate progress that the global community committed to achieve in December's Paris climate agreement," stressed Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program, in a statement. "The U.S. should drop this case to avoid undermining climate protections abroad and at home," she continued. Solomon warned this ruling could be a sign of what is to come with the TPP. Fossil fuel company TransCanada is already suing the U.S. government, after the Obama administration rejected its proposed Keystone XL Pipeline on environmental grounds. Former NASA environmental scientist and now Columbia University professor James Hansen emphasized that, if the pipeline were built and the vast oil reserves in Alberta, Canada's tar sands were used, it would mean "game over for the climate," yet the corporation is demanding $15 billion in compensation from American taxpayers.
If you love the planet, you might not want to vote for Cruz or Trump: Here’s a rundown of where the presidential candidates stand on climate change
Last month was recorded as the warmest January in history according to two analyses by NASA. Climate change, now a widely accepted condition, means that the current and future governments of the world will have to take into account a drastically altering natural landscape, and shape their policies around how we can ensure a livable and healthy planet for future generations. The next president will greatly define the course the world will take in either pushing back or stepping forward the solutions of environmental concerns. Even as the Supreme Court recently attempted to stall the White House Clean Power Plan, polls show that the environment is one of the most important priorities for the U.S electorate. So we’ve summed up the top candidates’ stances on renewable energy and their efforts so far. Starting off with the worst: Sen. Ted Cruz: ranked the No. 1 recipient of oil and gas donors in 2016 on OpenSecrets, he famously said that the Obama administration “Waged A War” on oil, gas, and the coal industries. Instead of focusing on renewables, the senator thinks the U.S should pursue every type of energy. “We’ve got to stop this business of selecting one group, that’s the left’s trick – they want to buy everyone off. I think we should abolish all of the energy preferences across the board, and allow competition to play out.” Opposed production tax credit for wind energy. Voted against legislation that would set national goal of 25% renewable energy by 2025. Voted against installing solar panels on ten million roofs in 10 Years by 2025. Sen. Rubio: ranked 6th (just under Hillary Clinton) on the top recipients of oil and gas donors in 2016, Rubio claims America is at a global disadvantage because it’s currently not allowed to export oil. If elected president, Rubio plans on deregulating the oil and gas drilling process, especially the federal regulations on fracking. “The Bureau of Land management’s costly, misguided, and illegal hydraulic fracturing rule, undermines state regulators and does not produce any additional environmental or public health benefit.” Vows to remove five-year offshore drilling ban and immediately increase frequency and expedite exports. Has promised to “break the higher education cartel,” and help put graduates on career path in oil and gas. Did not vote on legislation that would set national goal of 25% renewable energy by 2025. Did not support the installation of solar panels on ten million roofs in 10 years. Hillary Clinton: ranked 5th on the top recipients of oil and gas donors in 2016, Clinton has used her words more prolifically than her actions in the fight for green energy. When asked about taking oil money in the Feb. 4, Democratic primary debate Clinton said, “They must have put it in the wrong envelope. I want to take away all their subsidies.” She has affirmed a definite ban of oil and gas extraction on public lands. On the other hand, a pro-Clinton super PAC champions the secretary for channeling the domestic energy boom “into a geopolitical tool to advance American interests around the world.” Clinton’s “Climate Change Fact Sheet” commits to reducing oil consumption, but has no mention of the same efforts for natural gas. Vows to generate enough renewable energy to power every home in America within ten years. Has rallied for 500 Million solar panels in the next 4 years. Promised to build on Obama's Clean Power Plan, vowing to treat it as the "floor, not the ceiling." Donald Trump: the real estate magnate has been vocal on every other issue, but renewable energy. Nonetheless, it is safe to assume that the Donald is not a great fan of wind turbines. In April 2012, Trump urged Scotland’s parliament to end plans for an offshore wind farm he feared would spoil the view at his exclusive $1.2-billion golf resort. He also reemphasized his hatred for wind during a November 2015 campaign stop in New Hampshire, when he said to a 12-year-old girl, “windmills look nice, but they kill a lot of birds. Did you know that?” Has called for a “No cap-and-tax on oil,” labelling it as the “country's lifeblood.” Stated green energy is "way behind the times" and that solar panels are a 32-year payback. Hasn't taken a stance on climate change but did once joke that “China created climate change.” Sen. Sanders: undoubtedly the most vocal on climate change; in January 2016 the senator expressed the need for us to “act immediately” and move to “100 percent renewable energy.” On November 4, 2015, Sanders, along with senators Jeff Merkley and Patrick Leahy, introduced legislation to ban “all new federal leases for oil, gas or coal extraction on public lands and waters.” According to a fact sheet released by his campaign “the bill would prohibit offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic; stop new leases and end non-producing leases for offshore drilling, in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.” The Vermont senator has also supported Pope Francis’ view on climate change, “I believe, and Pope Francis made this point – this is a moral issue. The scientists are telling us that we need to move extremely boldly." Introduced first piece of climate change legislation in 2013 with Senator Barbara Boxer that called for a tax on carbon. In January 2015, he voted for legislation that would set a goal for the nation to get 25% of its electricity from renewable sources. Voted To Advance To Legislation Extending Production Tax Credit For Wind Energy Voted in support of ten million solar panels in ten years by 2025.
February 23, 2016
White killers get redemption: Sympathetic coverage of Dylan Klebold’s mother’s book reveals deep racial biases in the media
The media's role as the gatekeeper of whiteness cannot be overstated. There is no greater tool in constantly shaping and reinforcing the association of whiteness and white people with integrity, benevolence and superiority. This perpetual humanization of whiteness has the obvious, and perhaps deliberate, effect of dehumanizing blackness. That's the difference in black and white in America. When white people commit unspeakable acts, journalists spend years -- decades even -- on tireless expeditions digging through the killer's life, talking to investigators, schoolmates and co-workers, trying to find some redeeming quality in the accused. Apologetic, tearful loved ones tell Diane Sawyer or Matt Lauer how the devil everyone knows is not the son they raised, the brother they grew up with or the husband they married. No attempt is made to redeem black killers. That’s the obvious takeaway. The truest display of the purification of whiteness at the expense of blackness, though, is not found in how black killers are treated in contrast to white ones, but how the media tries black victims while bolstering the defense of white killers. In the past week, press surrounding the release of "A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy," a memoir by Sue Klebold, the mother of then 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, the Colorado teen who conspired with a friend to plan and execute the murder of more than a dozen people at Columbine High School in 1999, provides virtually irrefutable evidence of the media's steadfast commitment to upholding the imagery paramount to the denial of systemic racism. The reviews of Klebold’s book are a quintessential demonstration of the ongoing campaign to preserve white humanity, no matter the cost, as the kind of tenderness and empathy one would expect to be reserved for victims is afforded to this mother, providing a platform for her to sand, buff and repaint the monstrous image of her son. The Washington Post describes Klebold's memoirs as a "mother’s love letter to her son, for whom she mourned no less deeply than did the parents of the children he killed." With the callousness characteristic of the boundless audacity employed to protect the narrative of the inherent goodness of whiteness, this mother is positioned as not merely "the mother of a killer " but "one of his victims, too," somehow balancing the scales of sorrow, grief and despair equally between the woman who raised a murderer and the loved ones of that murderer's victims. Yet, in a piece the Post ran nearly three years ago, "Richard Cohen: Racism vs. Reality," another 17-year-old involved in a murder, and his mother by proxy, were not afforded that sympathy. Despite the fact that Trayvon Martin was the victim and not the killer, the author explains that while there’s no doubt that Zimmerman “profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism,” Trayvon was “understandably suspected because he was black,” in an opinion piece piled with double talk that attempts to simultaneously legitimize and condemn the racial profiling of black men and boys, specifically those wearing the hoodies now synonymous with Martin. Noticeably, though, the Post’s recent coverage of Dylan Klebold’s crimes neglected to mention the black trench coats he and his accomplice wore. In an even more illustrative display of the practice of redeeming whiteness, the New York Times reviews Klebold’s memoir with a fervor best likened to that of an attorney desperate to obtain clemency for a client scheduled for execution. The review notes that Klebold describes the life she and her husband provided for their son as “if not perfect, better than ordinary,” going on to explain how "A Mother’s Reckoning" recounts that “Dylan grew up with happily married parents: a work-from-home dad who shared a snack and the sports pages with his teenage son every day after school, and a mom who worked with disabled college students, setting a moral example at the office before coming home at night…” With words meticulously chosen, the Times stresses how the boy’s parents did all that could be expected to raise him to be a good person. A reference to Dylan’s arrest for breaking into a van in his junior year of high school seems presented only to highlight Dylan’s rapid rehabilitation, noting that he “sailed through a counseling program offered as an alternative, even graduating from it early.” That pat on the killer’s back for cleaning up milk he spilled is typical of the lens through which white criminals are viewed. Conversely, the Times described 18-year-old Mike Brown, a victim of a police shooting, as “no angel,” mentioning that Brown “lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol.” That we still know more about Mike Brown’s upbringing than that of his killer, Darren Wilson, is indicative of the trial black victims face in the media. Even with its criticism that Klebold's book "doesn't dig deep enough," the Boston Globe still lends sympathy and understanding to the mother of one of the boys infamous for forcing the term "school shooting" into our lexicon. The reviewer assesses that it is "as if the writer [Sue Klebold] were reluctant to dig into her story in the first place," going on to wonder, "Who could blame her?" Klebold, the writer expounds, "endured one of the most horrifying ordeals that any parent could face — her son’s death, along with the anguished questions of how the boy she raised became a murderer. She was vilified in the media, endured cancer, bankruptcy, and divorce." The latter details of the financial, health and marital issues Klebold battled seem offered strategically, inserted to highlight how life plays no favorites. This woman, who reared and raised a child who, for whatever reason, killed 13 people, is painted as the ultimate victim fighting a hybrid grief — grappling with the fact that she raised a monster and the eternal pain of losing a child. These are stark contrasts to the categorizing of the mother of Freddie Gray, the young man killed at the hands of Baltimore City police in April 2015, as “an illiterate heroin addict” by CNN. As the mother of a killer is being granted the benefit of the doubt, the mother of a victim is being denied her dignity. Still, the most dangerous commonality of these reviews is the references to the book’s discussion of Dylan’s mental illness. This focal point has the effect, however unintentionally, of virtually absolving his parents of any responsibility. The greater impact of this narrative is simultaneously and preemptively exonerating the parents of, and crafting the defense for, the next Dylan Klebold. Discussing mental illness as a motivator in under 1,000 words further stigmatizes those who battle chronic mental conditions, while advancing the narrative that white killers are almost always driven to evil by psychosis or depression. I have not nor do I plan to read Sue Klebold’s memoir. As such, I am in no position to review her book. I don’t doubt that she loves her child. Nor would I seek to deny any parent the opportunity to redeem herself or attempt to redeem the child she lost. But those opportunities for redemption have been denied to women like Sybrina Fulton and Leslie McSpadden, the mothers of black boys whose attempts to present the loving child they knew are characterized as opportunism and exploitation. These women have been forced to defend their parenting, explaining that they did not raise the “thugs” the media is portraying, allowing the boys a quasi-victimhood at most, one that assigns the burden of their deaths to their actions. Sue Klebold is donating all the proceeds from sales of “A Mother’s Reckoning” to charity, an act the reviews note proves her motivation is not financial. I can’t argue to the contrary, but the profits forgone could never compare to what she’s already been given: redemption, humanity and pardon.
Bernie’s political funeral may be premature — and Hillary supporters should be careful what they wish for
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Hillary fans. Because right now? You’re at that moment in the movie where the teenage girl and her friends high-five each other for escaping from the monster’s den, and out in the audience we see the guy with the chainsaw come out of the woods behind you and we start screaming. Political commentators by the dozen have spent the last few days digging Bernie Sanders’ political grave, arranging the flowers and ordering the blintzes. Much as it galls me to say this, they probably aren’t wrong. In the first place, they aren’t wrong because the outcome of this race was known in advance, and only briefly seemed in doubt after Sanders’ unexpectedly big win in New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton’s narrow victory in the Nevada caucuses provides at least the flavor of legitimacy to a narrative that was already written. One of the many truths behind Joan Didion’s long-ago assertion that politics is more a subset of show business than the other way around lies in the fact that both enterprises demand the suspension of disbelief. We have to pretend that we didn’t know what would happen. If conventional wisdom holds true, and if a wider victory in South Carolina this weekend and a big delegate haul on March 1 leaves Clinton with a clear pathway to the Democratic nomination — well, first of all, that’s a lot of “ifs” and this is not a big year for conventional wisdom. Consider the predicament of that other party, the one that appears ready to nominate Lord Voldemort as played by Al Pacino in a Funny or Die skit instead of an actual candidate, and where the guy who consistently polled well against both Clinton and Sanders has already dropped out. But let’s stick with the hypothesis that Nevada means that Bernie’s all but toast and Hillary’s once again inevitable, at least for now. I would encourage Clinton supporters to keep the gloating and the grave-dancing to a minimum, and not to put down nonrefundable deposits for Inauguration Day hotel rooms quite yet. Even with the infusion of younger voters galvanized by the Sanders campaign, the ugly truth of 2016 to this point is that the Democratic electorate appears dispirited and downsized. If you think this primary campaign has featured the gnawing of fingers and the rending of garments among the left-liberal contingent, just wait. Turnout has been way down in three very different Democratic contests so far, relative to the Clinton-Obama campaign of 2008. Clinton’s operatives are correct when they say that Sanders’ strong numbers in hypothetical matchups with Republican opponents don’t tell us much. Her weak numbers in such matchups, on the other hand, tell us plenty. Most voters still know little about Sanders or the scale of his proposed “political revolution,” and we can only imagine the cans of Red-baiting rhetorical whoop-ass being prepared in the GOP kitchen. A fall campaign with Sanders as the Democratic nominee would be wildly unpredictable, and fraught with peril. A campaign with Clinton as the nominee is all too predictable, and not in a good way. Maybe somebody is out there saying, “Gee, I wish I knew more about Hillary Clinton! If she ever figures out where she stands on the Trans-Pacific Partnership I’ll make up my mind!” But maybe not. As the Sanders campaign has reminded, Clinton has enduring high negatives as a candidate, among voters across the political spectrum. Much of that stems from her unique gender status and all the right-wing bile flung at her over the decades, but some of it reflects her ingrained and ineluctable Hillary-ness, the quality that leads to “That’s what they offered me” and “Every other candidate in this race has given speeches to private groups” and dozens of other refusals to be pinned down on anything ever. When you consider how things looked right after New Hampshire, the Clinton team’s wishes have come true: Her irritating gadfly opponent is suddenly perceived as being on the ropes, and she is positioned to run as the voice of reason against a wacko billionaire with an incoherent agenda and no discernible ideology. But this has not been a year for the voice of reason, has it, Gov. Bush? It’s the year when America cranked itself to 11 on WTF and “oh no, you didn’t” and “be careful what you wish for.” There is one 2016 candidate who has sparked widespread enthusiasm among ordinary people and who has pulled disgruntled nonvoters off the couch in impressive numbers, and his name does not start with H or B. It’s the joke candidate who has punked the whole country, that guy from reality TV who’s wearing an Al Pacino mask under a Voldemort mask under a Mussolini mask. We should pause for a moment to recognize that all the Sanders obituaries may be premature and that the political narrative promulgated by the mainstream media is idiotic, not to mention that our method of picking a president is laughably flawed. It’s stupid to claim that the Nevada result — a margin of a few thousand votes in a low-turnout caucus state — has decided anything, or that it comes anywhere near resolving the cultural and ideological (and now generational) conflict within the leftward quadrant of the American electorate. Ascribing immense importance to one ambiguous result reflects the “horse-race” problem in American politics in its most extreme form. Election campaigns are understood as mystical, tidal phenomena driven by superstition, perceived momentum and empty symbolism. Six or eight weeks ago, if Lucifer himself had offered Sanders’ strategists a 5-point defeat in a Western purple state with a large nonwhite population, Tad Devine would have signed away his grandkids on the dotted line. Now the Nevada loss is a disabling setback that left Bernie doing sputtering spin control on the Sunday talk shows. But here’s the thing: American electoral politics is primarily symbolic psychodrama, and has little to do with “issues” or policy in any material form. It’s legitimate to wish it were otherwise, but it doesn’t help to shoot the messenger. Blathering articles in the New York Times about Clinton’s insurmountable delegate lead — at a moment when she and Sanders have exactly the same number of pledged delegates, and he has received more votes from actual humans — may be transparently propagandistic, on a level their authors and editors are incapable of perceiving. (Readers noticed! Which was invigorating.) But mainstream media groupthink is only one aspect of the problem, and reflects an underlying shared understanding of what politics is and how leaders are chosen that for better or worse has proven out in practice many times over. Richard Nixon sweated on TV. Michael Dukakis looked silly in a tank helmet and set black killers free. George H.W. Bush had never seen a supermarket scanner before (untrue), while Bill Clinton wore shades and played the saxophone (atrociously). Howard Dean was a screaming lunatic; John Kerry was “electable” until he became too French and too cowardly. A guy born into one of the Northeast Corridor’s most elite families and educated at prep school, Yale and Harvard became a companionable West Texas rancher, ready to crack open a non-alcoholic beer and set awhile. Let’s leave the skillful but enigmatic messaging around the current occupant of the White House — who was briefly my classmate at Columbia, where he wore white slacks and a Members Only jacket and sat by himself during poli-sci lectures — for another occasion. Way back into American political history, long before Lee Atwater or “Morning in America” or Pat Buchanan’s Southern strategy, elections have been about who tells a better story about themselves and the country. Here’s what I noticed about the Nevada caucuses, even more than the result: Both Democratic narratives are in big trouble. Bernie Sanders’ only realistic shot at winning the nomination lay in an Obama-like snowball effect, in which a series of surprising victories would create the sense that he stood at the head of an unstoppable social movement, while Hillary Clinton once again stood on the wrong side of the Democratic electorate and the wrong side of history. That does not seem to have worked. Instead, Clinton won her first clear victory of the campaign in a state her team thought she might lose, or thought might end in an Iowa-style stalemate. But instead of crowing about superior organization and coalition building and so on (as they had every right to do), Clinton supporters on social media immediately went after the plausible-seeming polling data that suggested Sanders had won a majority of the Latino vote in Nevada. I offer no argument about who’s right and who’s wrong here, or about the viability of "entrance polling." I don’t think that’s the important part. That fact, if it was a fact, was dangerous because it threatened to undermine the moral legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 narrative. Once it became clear that moderation, pragmatism and experience were not big selling points in 2016, Clinton has positioned herself as the decaf Bernie, who largely agrees with his agenda and can bring some of its less ambitious proposals to fruition. In essence she has capitulated across the board on ideology and issues, and even on labeling. (I don't recall her embracing the term "progressive" eight years ago.) Her campaign largely rests on the idea that she has wide appeal to the demographic groups that make up the future of the Democratic electorate and the country, whereas Sanders’ revolutionary crusade speaks largely to privileged white folks. If Clinton’s victory in Nevada was built on low turnout and the support of older white voters, on the other hand, she is left with no story at all, facing a likely fall opponent who has nothing but stories, and spins a new one every day.Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Hillary fans. Because right now? You’re at that moment in the movie where the teenage girl and her friends high-five each other for escaping from the monster’s den, and out in the audience we see the guy with the chainsaw come out of the woods behind you and we start screaming. Political commentators by the dozen have spent the last few days digging Bernie Sanders’ political grave, arranging the flowers and ordering the blintzes. Much as it galls me to say this, they probably aren’t wrong. In the first place, they aren’t wrong because the outcome of this race was known in advance, and only briefly seemed in doubt after Sanders’ unexpectedly big win in New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton’s narrow victory in the Nevada caucuses provides at least the flavor of legitimacy to a narrative that was already written. One of the many truths behind Joan Didion’s long-ago assertion that politics is more a subset of show business than the other way around lies in the fact that both enterprises demand the suspension of disbelief. We have to pretend that we didn’t know what would happen. If conventional wisdom holds true, and if a wider victory in South Carolina this weekend and a big delegate haul on March 1 leaves Clinton with a clear pathway to the Democratic nomination — well, first of all, that’s a lot of “ifs” and this is not a big year for conventional wisdom. Consider the predicament of that other party, the one that appears ready to nominate Lord Voldemort as played by Al Pacino in a Funny or Die skit instead of an actual candidate, and where the guy who consistently polled well against both Clinton and Sanders has already dropped out. But let’s stick with the hypothesis that Nevada means that Bernie’s all but toast and Hillary’s once again inevitable, at least for now. I would encourage Clinton supporters to keep the gloating and the grave-dancing to a minimum, and not to put down nonrefundable deposits for Inauguration Day hotel rooms quite yet. Even with the infusion of younger voters galvanized by the Sanders campaign, the ugly truth of 2016 to this point is that the Democratic electorate appears dispirited and downsized. If you think this primary campaign has featured the gnawing of fingers and the rending of garments among the left-liberal contingent, just wait. Turnout has been way down in three very different Democratic contests so far, relative to the Clinton-Obama campaign of 2008. Clinton’s operatives are correct when they say that Sanders’ strong numbers in hypothetical matchups with Republican opponents don’t tell us much. Her weak numbers in such matchups, on the other hand, tell us plenty. Most voters still know little about Sanders or the scale of his proposed “political revolution,” and we can only imagine the cans of Red-baiting rhetorical whoop-ass being prepared in the GOP kitchen. A fall campaign with Sanders as the Democratic nominee would be wildly unpredictable, and fraught with peril. A campaign with Clinton as the nominee is all too predictable, and not in a good way. Maybe somebody is out there saying, “Gee, I wish I knew more about Hillary Clinton! If she ever figures out where she stands on the Trans-Pacific Partnership I’ll make up my mind!” But maybe not. As the Sanders campaign has reminded, Clinton has enduring high negatives as a candidate, among voters across the political spectrum. Much of that stems from her unique gender status and all the right-wing bile flung at her over the decades, but some of it reflects her ingrained and ineluctable Hillary-ness, the quality that leads to “That’s what they offered me” and “Every other candidate in this race has given speeches to private groups” and dozens of other refusals to be pinned down on anything ever. When you consider how things looked right after New Hampshire, the Clinton team’s wishes have come true: Her irritating gadfly opponent is suddenly perceived as being on the ropes, and she is positioned to run as the voice of reason against a wacko billionaire with an incoherent agenda and no discernible ideology. But this has not been a year for the voice of reason, has it, Gov. Bush? It’s the year when America cranked itself to 11 on WTF and “oh no, you didn’t” and “be careful what you wish for.” There is one 2016 candidate who has sparked widespread enthusiasm among ordinary people and who has pulled disgruntled nonvoters off the couch in impressive numbers, and his name does not start with H or B. It’s the joke candidate who has punked the whole country, that guy from reality TV who’s wearing an Al Pacino mask under a Voldemort mask under a Mussolini mask. We should pause for a moment to recognize that all the Sanders obituaries may be premature and that the political narrative promulgated by the mainstream media is idiotic, not to mention that our method of picking a president is laughably flawed. It’s stupid to claim that the Nevada result — a margin of a few thousand votes in a low-turnout caucus state — has decided anything, or that it comes anywhere near resolving the cultural and ideological (and now generational) conflict within the leftward quadrant of the American electorate. Ascribing immense importance to one ambiguous result reflects the “horse-race” problem in American politics in its most extreme form. Election campaigns are understood as mystical, tidal phenomena driven by superstition, perceived momentum and empty symbolism. Six or eight weeks ago, if Lucifer himself had offered Sanders’ strategists a 5-point defeat in a Western purple state with a large nonwhite population, Tad Devine would have signed away his grandkids on the dotted line. Now the Nevada loss is a disabling setback that left Bernie doing sputtering spin control on the Sunday talk shows. But here’s the thing: American electoral politics is primarily symbolic psychodrama, and has little to do with “issues” or policy in any material form. It’s legitimate to wish it were otherwise, but it doesn’t help to shoot the messenger. Blathering articles in the New York Times about Clinton’s insurmountable delegate lead — at a moment when she and Sanders have exactly the same number of pledged delegates, and he has received more votes from actual humans — may be transparently propagandistic, on a level their authors and editors are incapable of perceiving. (Readers noticed! Which was invigorating.) But mainstream media groupthink is only one aspect of the problem, and reflects an underlying shared understanding of what politics is and how leaders are chosen that for better or worse has proven out in practice many times over. Richard Nixon sweated on TV. Michael Dukakis looked silly in a tank helmet and set black killers free. George H.W. Bush had never seen a supermarket scanner before (untrue), while Bill Clinton wore shades and played the saxophone (atrociously). Howard Dean was a screaming lunatic; John Kerry was “electable” until he became too French and too cowardly. A guy born into one of the Northeast Corridor’s most elite families and educated at prep school, Yale and Harvard became a companionable West Texas rancher, ready to crack open a non-alcoholic beer and set awhile. Let’s leave the skillful but enigmatic messaging around the current occupant of the White House — who was briefly my classmate at Columbia, where he wore white slacks and a Members Only jacket and sat by himself during poli-sci lectures — for another occasion. Way back into American political history, long before Lee Atwater or “Morning in America” or Pat Buchanan’s Southern strategy, elections have been about who tells a better story about themselves and the country. Here’s what I noticed about the Nevada caucuses, even more than the result: Both Democratic narratives are in big trouble. Bernie Sanders’ only realistic shot at winning the nomination lay in an Obama-like snowball effect, in which a series of surprising victories would create the sense that he stood at the head of an unstoppable social movement, while Hillary Clinton once again stood on the wrong side of the Democratic electorate and the wrong side of history. That does not seem to have worked. Instead, Clinton won her first clear victory of the campaign in a state her team thought she might lose, or thought might end in an Iowa-style stalemate. But instead of crowing about superior organization and coalition building and so on (as they had every right to do), Clinton supporters on social media immediately went after the plausible-seeming polling data that suggested Sanders had won a majority of the Latino vote in Nevada. I offer no argument about who’s right and who’s wrong here, or about the viability of "entrance polling." I don’t think that’s the important part. That fact, if it was a fact, was dangerous because it threatened to undermine the moral legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 narrative. Once it became clear that moderation, pragmatism and experience were not big selling points in 2016, Clinton has positioned herself as the decaf Bernie, who largely agrees with his agenda and can bring some of its less ambitious proposals to fruition. In essence she has capitulated across the board on ideology and issues, and even on labeling. (I don't recall her embracing the term "progressive" eight years ago.) Her campaign largely rests on the idea that she has wide appeal to the demographic groups that make up the future of the Democratic electorate and the country, whereas Sanders’ revolutionary crusade speaks largely to privileged white folks. If Clinton’s victory in Nevada was built on low turnout and the support of older white voters, on the other hand, she is left with no story at all, facing a likely fall opponent who has nothing but stories, and spins a new one every day.
This is how we spooked Putin: What the New York Times won’t tell you about the American adventure in Ukraine
All of a sudden, straight out of nowhere, Ukraine creeps back into the news. There is renewed fighting in the rebellious eastern regions. There is political warfare in Kiev. There is paralysis in the upper reaches. There is some new formation called the Revolutionary Right Forces occupying the Maidan—the very same Independence Square where, two years ago this past Sunday, months of protests tipped into violence and an elected president was ousted. All of a sudden. Straight out of nowhere. Now you know what you are supposed to think as the flowers of corruption and ultra-right atavism burst forth in Ukraine. Shall we insist together on remaining in what is quaintly called the real world? Ukraine has gone from political crisis to armed conflict to humanitarian crisis with no break in the regress since the American-cultivated coup in February 2014. But for many months now we have had before us a textbook example of what I call the Power of Leaving Out. The most daring attempt at “regime change” since righteous Clintonians invented this self-deceiving euphemism in the 1990s has come to six-figure casualties, mass deprivation, a divided nation and a wrecked economy. If you abide within the policy cliques or the corporate-owned media, it is best to go quiet as long as you can in the face of such eventualities. The short of it, readers, is that all three chickens now take up their roosts at once: The Poroshenko government is on the brink of collapse, neo-Nazi extremists have forced it to renew hostilities in the east and there is no letup in the blockade Kiev imposes on rebelling regions. The last differs from a punitive starvation strategy only in degree. The very short of it is that the more or less complete failure of Washington’s most adventurous assertion of power in the post-Cold War period can no longer be papered over. Even the most corrupted correspondents have to file something when political mutiny and warfare break into the open—and when non-American media, as is their peculiar habit, report on these things. It is for this reason alone you can read a smidge—but only a smidge—about the events now unfolding in Ukraine in the New York Times and all other media that reliably do as the Times does. * This column has cheered for an American failure in Ukraine since first forecasting one in the spring of 2014. Brilliant that it is upon us at last. Forcing a nation to live under a neoliberal economic regime so that American corporations can exploit it freely, as the Obama administration proposed when it designated Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister in 2014, is never to be cheered. Turning a nation of 46 million into a bare-toothed front line in America’s obsessive campaign against Russia is never to be cheered. Forcing the Russian-speaking half of the country to live under a government that would ban Russian as a national language if it could is never to be cheered. The only regret, a great regret of mind and heart, is that American failures almost always prove so costly in consequence of the blindness and arrogance of the policy cliques. Readers may remember when, with a defense authorization bill in debate last June, two congressmen advanced an amendment banning military assistance to “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascist” militias waging war against Ukraine’s eastern regions. John Conyers and Ted Yoho got two things done in a stroke: They forced public acknowledgment that “the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov battalion,” as Conyers put it, was active, and they shamed the (also repulsive) Republican House to pass their legislative amendment unanimously. Obama signed the defense bill then at issue into law just before Thanksgiving. The Conyers-Yoho amendment was deleted but for a single phrase. The bill thus authorizes, among much, much else, $300 million in aid this year to “the military and national security forces in Ukraine.” In a land ruled by euphemisms, the latter category designates the Azov battalion and the numerous other fascist militias on which the Poroshenko government is wholly dependent for its existence. An omnibus spending bill Obama signed a month later included an additional $250 million for the Ukraine army and its rightist adjuncts. This is your money, taxpayers, should you need reminding. As Obama signed these bills, the White House expressed its satisfaction that “ideological riders” had been stripped out of them. No, you read next to nothing of this in any American newspaper. Yes, you now know what the often-lethal combination of blindness and arrogance looks like in action. Yes, you can now see why American policy in Ukraine must fail if this crisis is ever to come to a rational, humane resolution. The funds just noted are in addition to a $1 billion loan guarantee—in essence another form of aid—that Secretary of State Kerry announced with fanfare last year. And that is in addition to the International Monetary Fund’s $40 billion bailout program, a $17.5 billion tranche of which is now pending. Since the I.M.F. is the external-relations arm of the U.S. Treasury (and Managing Director Christine Lagarde thus the Treasury’s public-relations face) this is a big commitment on the Obama administration’s part (which is to say yours and mine). How are things on the receiving end, it is natural to ask. Our money goes to exactly what? Until recently, what one heard and read of Ukraine’s progress into a neoliberal future was almost all happy talk (or silence, of course). Vice President Biden, who carries the Ukraine portfolio in the administration, makes regular trips to laud the Poroshenko government and the reformist zeal of Premier Yatsenyuk. This is perhaps only natural, given Biden’s son is neck-deep in Ukraine’s resource extraction industry. Biden sounded a different note during his latest trip to Kiev, which came in December. Yes, there was another handout, this one $190 million to help the Poroshenko government implement “structural reforms” of the usual antidemocratic kind. (Are you toting up all these checks?) But Biden was stern, make no mistake. He shook his finger from the podium in parliament. “We understand how difficult some of the votes for reforms are, but they are critical for putting Ukraine back on the right path,” Biden said. “As long as you continue to make progress in fighting corruption and build a future of opportunity for all Ukraine, the U.S. will stand with you.” Back on the right path? Continue to make progress? Since euphemisms are an American export item, familiar in euphemism markets the world over, a translation: You are embarrassing us because you have done nothing. We gave you a window to pass legislation before the Ukrainian people figured out how awful it would make their lives. You’re blowing it as we speak. Hurry up. Meantime, here is another couple of hundred million. A few days ago Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador in Kiev, put in his two cents. (No check this time.) Pyatt, readers will surely recall, did the gumshoe work for Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state who engineered Yatsenyuk’s elevation to the premiership two years ago. His concern was grave as he addressed a defense and security seminar: He wants to see “meaningful steps to reform the trade and investment climate.” These are, of course, the abiding passions of every un- or under-employed Ukrainian. “Ukraine has said that it wants to become a major defense exporter,” the ambassador elaborated. “I know that is possible, given the extraordinary capabilities that I have seen the Ukrainian industry demonstrate, but it can only happen if Ukraine continues to press ahead on critical reforms, tackles corruption, and works to meet NATO standards. This will require a paradigm shift in Ukraine’s defense industry, and a move away from a mindset of state-owned enterprises….” Pyatt refers to a very specific circumstance in the above passage. Ukraine is a cesspit of illegal arms dealing, and this is a wellspring of corruption and illicit profit American defense contractors want to partake of. A source in Europe who is familiar with the trade but not part of it explained things this way in a note the other day:
“Ukraine has been the plaque tournant [hub, lively market] of illegal arms trade since the end of the U.S.S.R. The mob, the Kiev military, the far-right groups and some of the oligarchs all participate at different levels in this very, very dirty business…. None, as in none of this has been touched by the Kiev regime….”This tableau of trade in deadly devices is surely what Pyatt meant by “the extraordinary capabilities” he has witnessed among Ukraine’s weapons dealers. * See where we are headed here? The project is to neoliberalize Ukraine and make its defense machine, now so corrupt nobody but the Pentagon will provide it any assistance, NATO-compatible. But none of this is proceeding to plan. The absence of “structural reform”—a phrase I have loved since my correspondent days for all the anti-social savagery it masks—is one problem. But it is the corruption that comes to crisis of late. There has been no sign of improvement since the February 2014 events; now it is worse than under any previous government, including the one ousted two years ago, my sources in Europe report. “Corruption continues to be the worst at any time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R.,” a source with close contacts in Kiev writes. “Recently even the I.M.F.—i.e., the international office of U.S. Treasury, run by [Under Secretary] David Lipton—read the riot act…. The economy is in free fall…. The most competent ministers have left, resigned due to the inability to get anything significant done. Berlin and Paris are, I am told by Quai d'Orsay [French foreign ministry] contacts, “completement exacerbés” [highly aggravated, made furious] by the Kiev regime. There are demos practically every day against the gov’t.—of course, not reported in the int’l. media.” The resignation this source had in mind was that of Aivaras Abromavicius, who stepped down earlier this month as economic development minister with this parting comment: “Neither me, nor my team, has any desire to serve as a cover-up for the covert corruption, or become puppets for those who, very much like the ‘old’ government, are trying to exercise control over the flow of public funds.” Abromavicius, a Lithuanian by birth and a former fund manager, was among several foreign technocrats appointed to the Poroshenko cabinet—more or less by the I.M.F., and hence the Americans—to see through the neoliberal project. Subsequent to his departure, Lagarde let loose with her well-publicized warning: Clean up the act or the $17.5 billion check on my desk does not get signed. The act that needs to be scoured has two parts. Apart from the questions of corruption and “free-market” reform, there are the terms of the ceasefire agreement signed last year and known as Minsk II for the city where it was negotiated. Minsk II calls for constitutional revision allowing the eastern regions a significant degree of autonomy, their own elections, and a decentralization of administrative authority to give Ukraine something like a federalized national structure. This is, of course, the rational way to a resolution of the Ukraine crisis given the nation’s history, culture and languages. Why is Kiev paralyzed on both fronts? The corruption question is easy. Nothing gets done because the same people in power when Viktor Yanukovych was ousted two years ago are in power now. Washington’s problem with Yanukovych was never corruption, we need to note. It was his view of Ukraine: An easterner, he considered that the nation’s long and close involvement with Russia had to be accommodated along with the western region’s tilt toward Europe. Many deaths and much destruction later, this is what Minsk II is intended to do. No, Washington has a problem with Ukraine’s corruption now for the reasons Joe Biden and Geoffrey Pyatt make perfectly plain: Western corporations cannot put their money down on the table so long as Ukrainian bureaucrats, generals and business people keep stealing it at so obnoxious a rate. As to Minsk II, we can also note that none the visitors to Ukraine of late appears to give a hoot that the Proshenko government has done nothing to fulfill its obligations. This is because they have no hoot to give. As of Monday we have two exceptions, however. Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Jean-Marc Ayrault, the German and French foreign ministers, have just finished talks in Kiev en route to Russia to negotiate the forward motion of Minsk II’s provisions after months of stagnation. At the outset, as one of my European sources said, they were “completement exacerbés.” And they were exacerbés, understandably, because it is lately clear that the Poroshenko government is incapable of moving on Minsk II. It is, in effect, the hostage of the right-wing militias that were long said to exist only in the imaginations of Russian propagandists. Azov and the other militias, the Svoboda party and Right Sektor, a Svoboda offspring, have made their position clear since Germany, France and Christine Lagarde forced Poroshenko to sign Minsk II last year: Make one move to accommodate the accord and we will bring you down. At this point the barely competent maker of chocolates is squeezed into a corner so tight it is not clear he will be able to breathe much longer. On one hand the exacerbés Europeans want Minsk II implemented; it was supposed to be by the end of last year. They want tensions on their border with Russia to ease, they are impatient with Washington’s sanctions regime and it is as plain as day now that Ash Carter’s Pentagon and General Breedlove’s NATO will run all the miles they can so long as Ukraine gives them an excuse to do so. This pair loves Ukraine to bits—and may literally do so, depending on how things go. As Stephen Cohen, the noted Russianist, writes in a comment published in The Nation this week, with Defense Secretary Carter’s recent announcement that the Pentagon will quadruple spending on U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, “Western military power has never been positioned so close to Russia.” This kind of Russian roulette, as Cohen terms it, is not a game Europeans like playing. Although “the Europeans have no foreign policy of their own,” as Vladimir Putin astutely observed in a video recording released last week, they have at least recognized that Russia is more logically a partner, however attenuated the partnership, than an adversary. That is the one hand. On the other, Poroshenko is fighting for his political life in Kiev. Last week he called for the universally unpopular Yatsenyuk—bearer of the neoliberal banner, whose approval rating is below 5 percent—to resign. But it shapes up as too little and too late. Over the weekend and into this week, sections of the ultra-right, calling themselves Revolutionary Right Forces, gathered in Maidan to mark the second anniversary of the revolution. Having bombed three Russian banks while the police stood by without intervening, they effectively called for another revolt by way of a hefty list of demands. They want Poroshenko’s head, too. They want mass resignations of the generals, the bureaucrats, and the politicians. They demand the government repudiate Minsk II en bloc and impose martial law in the eastern regions and Crimea. Now tell me, are you surprised that the war in the east has suddenly resumed? Are you surprised that nowhere in any American news account is it made clear who recommenced the hostilities? The Times account carried in Monday’s paper is so pointedly evasive one must conclude they ran the story only because the Power of Leaving Out no longer quite does it. There is movement in Ukraine: This we can say. Sometime this year the Americans and the I.M.F. may quietly acknowledge that they chose the wrong puppets and step back, in which case failure will be self-evident. This is doubtful, however. They are not smart enough and lack sufficient integrity. Berlin, Paris and Moscow may continue to make common cause and more or less impose Minsk II on Kiev. It is quite possible. In this case the American failure will also be evident, if more subtly. Washington will claim the success, if it stays true to form. Or the war in the eastern regions will escalate and grow very dangerous well beyond Ukraine. This is all too possible at the moment. It is probably the favored way forward in Washington and Kiev, but it will turn out to be merely failure of another, more brutal kind. No ideological riders, as the Obama White House likes to put it.All of a sudden, straight out of nowhere, Ukraine creeps back into the news. There is renewed fighting in the rebellious eastern regions. There is political warfare in Kiev. There is paralysis in the upper reaches. There is some new formation called the Revolutionary Right Forces occupying the Maidan—the very same Independence Square where, two years ago this past Sunday, months of protests tipped into violence and an elected president was ousted. All of a sudden. Straight out of nowhere. Now you know what you are supposed to think as the flowers of corruption and ultra-right atavism burst forth in Ukraine. Shall we insist together on remaining in what is quaintly called the real world? Ukraine has gone from political crisis to armed conflict to humanitarian crisis with no break in the regress since the American-cultivated coup in February 2014. But for many months now we have had before us a textbook example of what I call the Power of Leaving Out. The most daring attempt at “regime change” since righteous Clintonians invented this self-deceiving euphemism in the 1990s has come to six-figure casualties, mass deprivation, a divided nation and a wrecked economy. If you abide within the policy cliques or the corporate-owned media, it is best to go quiet as long as you can in the face of such eventualities. The short of it, readers, is that all three chickens now take up their roosts at once: The Poroshenko government is on the brink of collapse, neo-Nazi extremists have forced it to renew hostilities in the east and there is no letup in the blockade Kiev imposes on rebelling regions. The last differs from a punitive starvation strategy only in degree. The very short of it is that the more or less complete failure of Washington’s most adventurous assertion of power in the post-Cold War period can no longer be papered over. Even the most corrupted correspondents have to file something when political mutiny and warfare break into the open—and when non-American media, as is their peculiar habit, report on these things. It is for this reason alone you can read a smidge—but only a smidge—about the events now unfolding in Ukraine in the New York Times and all other media that reliably do as the Times does. * This column has cheered for an American failure in Ukraine since first forecasting one in the spring of 2014. Brilliant that it is upon us at last. Forcing a nation to live under a neoliberal economic regime so that American corporations can exploit it freely, as the Obama administration proposed when it designated Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister in 2014, is never to be cheered. Turning a nation of 46 million into a bare-toothed front line in America’s obsessive campaign against Russia is never to be cheered. Forcing the Russian-speaking half of the country to live under a government that would ban Russian as a national language if it could is never to be cheered. The only regret, a great regret of mind and heart, is that American failures almost always prove so costly in consequence of the blindness and arrogance of the policy cliques. Readers may remember when, with a defense authorization bill in debate last June, two congressmen advanced an amendment banning military assistance to “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascist” militias waging war against Ukraine’s eastern regions. John Conyers and Ted Yoho got two things done in a stroke: They forced public acknowledgment that “the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov battalion,” as Conyers put it, was active, and they shamed the (also repulsive) Republican House to pass their legislative amendment unanimously. Obama signed the defense bill then at issue into law just before Thanksgiving. The Conyers-Yoho amendment was deleted but for a single phrase. The bill thus authorizes, among much, much else, $300 million in aid this year to “the military and national security forces in Ukraine.” In a land ruled by euphemisms, the latter category designates the Azov battalion and the numerous other fascist militias on which the Poroshenko government is wholly dependent for its existence. An omnibus spending bill Obama signed a month later included an additional $250 million for the Ukraine army and its rightist adjuncts. This is your money, taxpayers, should you need reminding. As Obama signed these bills, the White House expressed its satisfaction that “ideological riders” had been stripped out of them. No, you read next to nothing of this in any American newspaper. Yes, you now know what the often-lethal combination of blindness and arrogance looks like in action. Yes, you can now see why American policy in Ukraine must fail if this crisis is ever to come to a rational, humane resolution. The funds just noted are in addition to a $1 billion loan guarantee—in essence another form of aid—that Secretary of State Kerry announced with fanfare last year. And that is in addition to the International Monetary Fund’s $40 billion bailout program, a $17.5 billion tranche of which is now pending. Since the I.M.F. is the external-relations arm of the U.S. Treasury (and Managing Director Christine Lagarde thus the Treasury’s public-relations face) this is a big commitment on the Obama administration’s part (which is to say yours and mine). How are things on the receiving end, it is natural to ask. Our money goes to exactly what? Until recently, what one heard and read of Ukraine’s progress into a neoliberal future was almost all happy talk (or silence, of course). Vice President Biden, who carries the Ukraine portfolio in the administration, makes regular trips to laud the Poroshenko government and the reformist zeal of Premier Yatsenyuk. This is perhaps only natural, given Biden’s son is neck-deep in Ukraine’s resource extraction industry. Biden sounded a different note during his latest trip to Kiev, which came in December. Yes, there was another handout, this one $190 million to help the Poroshenko government implement “structural reforms” of the usual antidemocratic kind. (Are you toting up all these checks?) But Biden was stern, make no mistake. He shook his finger from the podium in parliament. “We understand how difficult some of the votes for reforms are, but they are critical for putting Ukraine back on the right path,” Biden said. “As long as you continue to make progress in fighting corruption and build a future of opportunity for all Ukraine, the U.S. will stand with you.” Back on the right path? Continue to make progress? Since euphemisms are an American export item, familiar in euphemism markets the world over, a translation: You are embarrassing us because you have done nothing. We gave you a window to pass legislation before the Ukrainian people figured out how awful it would make their lives. You’re blowing it as we speak. Hurry up. Meantime, here is another couple of hundred million. A few days ago Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador in Kiev, put in his two cents. (No check this time.) Pyatt, readers will surely recall, did the gumshoe work for Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state who engineered Yatsenyuk’s elevation to the premiership two years ago. His concern was grave as he addressed a defense and security seminar: He wants to see “meaningful steps to reform the trade and investment climate.” These are, of course, the abiding passions of every un- or under-employed Ukrainian. “Ukraine has said that it wants to become a major defense exporter,” the ambassador elaborated. “I know that is possible, given the extraordinary capabilities that I have seen the Ukrainian industry demonstrate, but it can only happen if Ukraine continues to press ahead on critical reforms, tackles corruption, and works to meet NATO standards. This will require a paradigm shift in Ukraine’s defense industry, and a move away from a mindset of state-owned enterprises….” Pyatt refers to a very specific circumstance in the above passage. Ukraine is a cesspit of illegal arms dealing, and this is a wellspring of corruption and illicit profit American defense contractors want to partake of. A source in Europe who is familiar with the trade but not part of it explained things this way in a note the other day:
“Ukraine has been the plaque tournant [hub, lively market] of illegal arms trade since the end of the U.S.S.R. The mob, the Kiev military, the far-right groups and some of the oligarchs all participate at different levels in this very, very dirty business…. None, as in none of this has been touched by the Kiev regime….”This tableau of trade in deadly devices is surely what Pyatt meant by “the extraordinary capabilities” he has witnessed among Ukraine’s weapons dealers. * See where we are headed here? The project is to neoliberalize Ukraine and make its defense machine, now so corrupt nobody but the Pentagon will provide it any assistance, NATO-compatible. But none of this is proceeding to plan. The absence of “structural reform”—a phrase I have loved since my correspondent days for all the anti-social savagery it masks—is one problem. But it is the corruption that comes to crisis of late. There has been no sign of improvement since the February 2014 events; now it is worse than under any previous government, including the one ousted two years ago, my sources in Europe report. “Corruption continues to be the worst at any time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R.,” a source with close contacts in Kiev writes. “Recently even the I.M.F.—i.e., the international office of U.S. Treasury, run by [Under Secretary] David Lipton—read the riot act…. The economy is in free fall…. The most competent ministers have left, resigned due to the inability to get anything significant done. Berlin and Paris are, I am told by Quai d'Orsay [French foreign ministry] contacts, “completement exacerbés” [highly aggravated, made furious] by the Kiev regime. There are demos practically every day against the gov’t.—of course, not reported in the int’l. media.” The resignation this source had in mind was that of Aivaras Abromavicius, who stepped down earlier this month as economic development minister with this parting comment: “Neither me, nor my team, has any desire to serve as a cover-up for the covert corruption, or become puppets for those who, very much like the ‘old’ government, are trying to exercise control over the flow of public funds.” Abromavicius, a Lithuanian by birth and a former fund manager, was among several foreign technocrats appointed to the Poroshenko cabinet—more or less by the I.M.F., and hence the Americans—to see through the neoliberal project. Subsequent to his departure, Lagarde let loose with her well-publicized warning: Clean up the act or the $17.5 billion check on my desk does not get signed. The act that needs to be scoured has two parts. Apart from the questions of corruption and “free-market” reform, there are the terms of the ceasefire agreement signed last year and known as Minsk II for the city where it was negotiated. Minsk II calls for constitutional revision allowing the eastern regions a significant degree of autonomy, their own elections, and a decentralization of administrative authority to give Ukraine something like a federalized national structure. This is, of course, the rational way to a resolution of the Ukraine crisis given the nation’s history, culture and languages. Why is Kiev paralyzed on both fronts? The corruption question is easy. Nothing gets done because the same people in power when Viktor Yanukovych was ousted two years ago are in power now. Washington’s problem with Yanukovych was never corruption, we need to note. It was his view of Ukraine: An easterner, he considered that the nation’s long and close involvement with Russia had to be accommodated along with the western region’s tilt toward Europe. Many deaths and much destruction later, this is what Minsk II is intended to do. No, Washington has a problem with Ukraine’s corruption now for the reasons Joe Biden and Geoffrey Pyatt make perfectly plain: Western corporations cannot put their money down on the table so long as Ukrainian bureaucrats, generals and business people keep stealing it at so obnoxious a rate. As to Minsk II, we can also note that none the visitors to Ukraine of late appears to give a hoot that the Proshenko government has done nothing to fulfill its obligations. This is because they have no hoot to give. As of Monday we have two exceptions, however. Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Jean-Marc Ayrault, the German and French foreign ministers, have just finished talks in Kiev en route to Russia to negotiate the forward motion of Minsk II’s provisions after months of stagnation. At the outset, as one of my European sources said, they were “completement exacerbés.” And they were exacerbés, understandably, because it is lately clear that the Poroshenko government is incapable of moving on Minsk II. It is, in effect, the hostage of the right-wing militias that were long said to exist only in the imaginations of Russian propagandists. Azov and the other militias, the Svoboda party and Right Sektor, a Svoboda offspring, have made their position clear since Germany, France and Christine Lagarde forced Poroshenko to sign Minsk II last year: Make one move to accommodate the accord and we will bring you down. At this point the barely competent maker of chocolates is squeezed into a corner so tight it is not clear he will be able to breathe much longer. On one hand the exacerbés Europeans want Minsk II implemented; it was supposed to be by the end of last year. They want tensions on their border with Russia to ease, they are impatient with Washington’s sanctions regime and it is as plain as day now that Ash Carter’s Pentagon and General Breedlove’s NATO will run all the miles they can so long as Ukraine gives them an excuse to do so. This pair loves Ukraine to bits—and may literally do so, depending on how things go. As Stephen Cohen, the noted Russianist, writes in a comment published in The Nation this week, with Defense Secretary Carter’s recent announcement that the Pentagon will quadruple spending on U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, “Western military power has never been positioned so close to Russia.” This kind of Russian roulette, as Cohen terms it, is not a game Europeans like playing. Although “the Europeans have no foreign policy of their own,” as Vladimir Putin astutely observed in a video recording released last week, they have at least recognized that Russia is more logically a partner, however attenuated the partnership, than an adversary. That is the one hand. On the other, Poroshenko is fighting for his political life in Kiev. Last week he called for the universally unpopular Yatsenyuk—bearer of the neoliberal banner, whose approval rating is below 5 percent—to resign. But it shapes up as too little and too late. Over the weekend and into this week, sections of the ultra-right, calling themselves Revolutionary Right Forces, gathered in Maidan to mark the second anniversary of the revolution. Having bombed three Russian banks while the police stood by without intervening, they effectively called for another revolt by way of a hefty list of demands. They want Poroshenko’s head, too. They want mass resignations of the generals, the bureaucrats, and the politicians. They demand the government repudiate Minsk II en bloc and impose martial law in the eastern regions and Crimea. Now tell me, are you surprised that the war in the east has suddenly resumed? Are you surprised that nowhere in any American news account is it made clear who recommenced the hostilities? The Times account carried in Monday’s paper is so pointedly evasive one must conclude they ran the story only because the Power of Leaving Out no longer quite does it. There is movement in Ukraine: This we can say. Sometime this year the Americans and the I.M.F. may quietly acknowledge that they chose the wrong puppets and step back, in which case failure will be self-evident. This is doubtful, however. They are not smart enough and lack sufficient integrity. Berlin, Paris and Moscow may continue to make common cause and more or less impose Minsk II on Kiev. It is quite possible. In this case the American failure will also be evident, if more subtly. Washington will claim the success, if it stays true to form. Or the war in the eastern regions will escalate and grow very dangerous well beyond Ukraine. This is all too possible at the moment. It is probably the favored way forward in Washington and Kiev, but it will turn out to be merely failure of another, more brutal kind. No ideological riders, as the Obama White House likes to put it.
Sorry, the last thing adoptees need is strangers’ cuddles
Have you ever wanted to get paid for cuddling babies? According to the Internet, there’s finally a job for you.
Last week, a series of articles about “baby cuddling” opportunities at adoption agencies hijacked my social media feeds as friends shared BuzzFeed’s article on the subject, which was presented as a cursory listicle. “Do you love cuddling babies?” the list asked. “OF COURSE YOU DO.” The accompanying photos showed sleepy infants in various angelic poses. Wouldn’t everyone love to spend time with easy, perfect infants, on a day when everyone happens to be clean and well rested? A slate of news outlets have also jumped on the story, from Fox News to publications in the UK and Canada. “Adoption agencies are desperately seeking skilled baby cuddlers, and no, this is not a drill,” an AOL headline blared, describing the position as a “dream job.” (“Found my calling!!” more than one of my Facebook friends affirmed as they shared the post.) “Ever dreamed of having your very own baby bundle of joy, but balk at the whole take-care-of-them-for-life thing?” Metro Toronto wrote, also on Facebook. “Sound like your rent-a-baby dream job? It gets better.” You know that thing people say--that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are? Unfortunately, that’s the case with both these stories and the first moments of an adoptee’s life. For people who are unfamiliar with the nuances of adoption, it seems like a simple formula: A parent with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy has a child to spare, and someone desperate to become a parent steps in at the right moment. At first glance, it’s an elegant, equitable solution that provides children in vulnerable situations with loving homes. While this characterization does hold truth, adoption bears out a more complicated reality. The notion of “baby cuddling,” as presented in the articles that have cluttered social media, perpetuates the stereotype that adoption agencies are places where quick fixes are made. It’s a damaging idea that undermines the reality that adoption isn’t an event--it’s a lifelong identity with lasting impact. When adoption occurs, biological families don’t simply stop existing. I’m fortunate to consider my own adoption a profound success, but even in the best possible outcomes, adoptees typically lose access to everything from a complete medical history to the opportunity to grow up around people who resemble them physically. The time after birth and before adoption, when biological parents may reconsider the decision to surrender their child to anxiously hopeful adoptive parents, represents one of the most sensitive periods of the adoption process for everyone involved. It’s a moment when time seems suspended, and the blissful, cuddly infant we might be tempted to envision hangs in between two potential futures, each as possible and vivid as the other until a final, legally binding decision is made. If, knowing this, it seems wildly inappropriate to offer strangers the opportunity to score quick emotional fulfillment from a cuddle session at this critical point in the adoption process, that’s because it is. By capitalizing on the Internet-friendly notion of “baby cuddling,” BuzzFeed and other media outlets succeeded both in creating a viral story and in completely mischaracterizing the program they attempted to describe. The actual program, formally called Interim Care, is run by a New York-based adoption agency called Spence-Chapin. Though Interim Care is short term, providers are responsible for round-the-clock attention to newborns for a period that lasts days or weeks--not a quick cuddle sesh volunteers can slot into their days between lunch and a Target run. Volunteers can’t simply show up for an hour or two the way they might if they were volunteering to socialize service dogs or play with animals at a local shelter; instead, Interim Care providers must undergo screening, attend regular training sessions, and take responsibility for record keeping and even participation in the adoption negotiations between a biological family and prospective adoptive parents. (It’s also worth noting that Spence-Chapin welcomes applications from all kinds of potential care providers, from single retirees to LGBT couples.) Providing care to an infant while biological parents are given additional time to consider their options has the potential to be a release valve on one of the highest pressure decisions they will likely ever make. No one in my adoptive family knows what happened to me during my first three days of life, while my teenage birth mother made up her mind before ultimately surrendering me to the wonderful family who raised me. I could have been alone in the hospital, been with my birth mom and her family--or for all I know, I could have been manhandled by enthusiastic strangers. Although I might lack that information, I am certain that a few hours of cuddling by a total stranger would not have had a significant impact on my situation. A homestay with a highly qualified, trained Interim Care provider who was committed to recording my history while everyone made sure they could live with their choices could have. Worse still, Today reports that the Spence-Chapin Interim Care Program has been overwhelmed by the response to the story. “Please don't call,” a caveat at the bottom of the Today story warns, “as the program is currently inundated by callers who think they can sign up to snuggle babies.” Not only has the story perpetuated stereotypes about adoptees that erase their biological families and their experience of loss--it has actually hampered the Interim Care program’s ability to connect with new care providers. I’ll freely admit that it would be lovely to live in a world where cuddly babies are infinitely available for snuggling upon demand--but it would be even better to live in a world that doesn’t misunderstand adoption so consistently.Have you ever wanted to get paid for cuddling babies? According to the Internet, there’s finally a job for you.
Last week, a series of articles about “baby cuddling” opportunities at adoption agencies hijacked my social media feeds as friends shared BuzzFeed’s article on the subject, which was presented as a cursory listicle. “Do you love cuddling babies?” the list asked. “OF COURSE YOU DO.” The accompanying photos showed sleepy infants in various angelic poses. Wouldn’t everyone love to spend time with easy, perfect infants, on a day when everyone happens to be clean and well rested? A slate of news outlets have also jumped on the story, from Fox News to publications in the UK and Canada. “Adoption agencies are desperately seeking skilled baby cuddlers, and no, this is not a drill,” an AOL headline blared, describing the position as a “dream job.” (“Found my calling!!” more than one of my Facebook friends affirmed as they shared the post.) “Ever dreamed of having your very own baby bundle of joy, but balk at the whole take-care-of-them-for-life thing?” Metro Toronto wrote, also on Facebook. “Sound like your rent-a-baby dream job? It gets better.” You know that thing people say--that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are? Unfortunately, that’s the case with both these stories and the first moments of an adoptee’s life. For people who are unfamiliar with the nuances of adoption, it seems like a simple formula: A parent with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy has a child to spare, and someone desperate to become a parent steps in at the right moment. At first glance, it’s an elegant, equitable solution that provides children in vulnerable situations with loving homes. While this characterization does hold truth, adoption bears out a more complicated reality. The notion of “baby cuddling,” as presented in the articles that have cluttered social media, perpetuates the stereotype that adoption agencies are places where quick fixes are made. It’s a damaging idea that undermines the reality that adoption isn’t an event--it’s a lifelong identity with lasting impact. When adoption occurs, biological families don’t simply stop existing. I’m fortunate to consider my own adoption a profound success, but even in the best possible outcomes, adoptees typically lose access to everything from a complete medical history to the opportunity to grow up around people who resemble them physically. The time after birth and before adoption, when biological parents may reconsider the decision to surrender their child to anxiously hopeful adoptive parents, represents one of the most sensitive periods of the adoption process for everyone involved. It’s a moment when time seems suspended, and the blissful, cuddly infant we might be tempted to envision hangs in between two potential futures, each as possible and vivid as the other until a final, legally binding decision is made. If, knowing this, it seems wildly inappropriate to offer strangers the opportunity to score quick emotional fulfillment from a cuddle session at this critical point in the adoption process, that’s because it is. By capitalizing on the Internet-friendly notion of “baby cuddling,” BuzzFeed and other media outlets succeeded both in creating a viral story and in completely mischaracterizing the program they attempted to describe. The actual program, formally called Interim Care, is run by a New York-based adoption agency called Spence-Chapin. Though Interim Care is short term, providers are responsible for round-the-clock attention to newborns for a period that lasts days or weeks--not a quick cuddle sesh volunteers can slot into their days between lunch and a Target run. Volunteers can’t simply show up for an hour or two the way they might if they were volunteering to socialize service dogs or play with animals at a local shelter; instead, Interim Care providers must undergo screening, attend regular training sessions, and take responsibility for record keeping and even participation in the adoption negotiations between a biological family and prospective adoptive parents. (It’s also worth noting that Spence-Chapin welcomes applications from all kinds of potential care providers, from single retirees to LGBT couples.) Providing care to an infant while biological parents are given additional time to consider their options has the potential to be a release valve on one of the highest pressure decisions they will likely ever make. No one in my adoptive family knows what happened to me during my first three days of life, while my teenage birth mother made up her mind before ultimately surrendering me to the wonderful family who raised me. I could have been alone in the hospital, been with my birth mom and her family--or for all I know, I could have been manhandled by enthusiastic strangers. Although I might lack that information, I am certain that a few hours of cuddling by a total stranger would not have had a significant impact on my situation. A homestay with a highly qualified, trained Interim Care provider who was committed to recording my history while everyone made sure they could live with their choices could have. Worse still, Today reports that the Spence-Chapin Interim Care Program has been overwhelmed by the response to the story. “Please don't call,” a caveat at the bottom of the Today story warns, “as the program is currently inundated by callers who think they can sign up to snuggle babies.” Not only has the story perpetuated stereotypes about adoptees that erase their biological families and their experience of loss--it has actually hampered the Interim Care program’s ability to connect with new care providers. I’ll freely admit that it would be lovely to live in a world where cuddly babies are infinitely available for snuggling upon demand--but it would be even better to live in a world that doesn’t misunderstand adoption so consistently.Have you ever wanted to get paid for cuddling babies? According to the Internet, there’s finally a job for you.
Last week, a series of articles about “baby cuddling” opportunities at adoption agencies hijacked my social media feeds as friends shared BuzzFeed’s article on the subject, which was presented as a cursory listicle. “Do you love cuddling babies?” the list asked. “OF COURSE YOU DO.” The accompanying photos showed sleepy infants in various angelic poses. Wouldn’t everyone love to spend time with easy, perfect infants, on a day when everyone happens to be clean and well rested? A slate of news outlets have also jumped on the story, from Fox News to publications in the UK and Canada. “Adoption agencies are desperately seeking skilled baby cuddlers, and no, this is not a drill,” an AOL headline blared, describing the position as a “dream job.” (“Found my calling!!” more than one of my Facebook friends affirmed as they shared the post.) “Ever dreamed of having your very own baby bundle of joy, but balk at the whole take-care-of-them-for-life thing?” Metro Toronto wrote, also on Facebook. “Sound like your rent-a-baby dream job? It gets better.” You know that thing people say--that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are? Unfortunately, that’s the case with both these stories and the first moments of an adoptee’s life. For people who are unfamiliar with the nuances of adoption, it seems like a simple formula: A parent with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy has a child to spare, and someone desperate to become a parent steps in at the right moment. At first glance, it’s an elegant, equitable solution that provides children in vulnerable situations with loving homes. While this characterization does hold truth, adoption bears out a more complicated reality. The notion of “baby cuddling,” as presented in the articles that have cluttered social media, perpetuates the stereotype that adoption agencies are places where quick fixes are made. It’s a damaging idea that undermines the reality that adoption isn’t an event--it’s a lifelong identity with lasting impact. When adoption occurs, biological families don’t simply stop existing. I’m fortunate to consider my own adoption a profound success, but even in the best possible outcomes, adoptees typically lose access to everything from a complete medical history to the opportunity to grow up around people who resemble them physically. The time after birth and before adoption, when biological parents may reconsider the decision to surrender their child to anxiously hopeful adoptive parents, represents one of the most sensitive periods of the adoption process for everyone involved. It’s a moment when time seems suspended, and the blissful, cuddly infant we might be tempted to envision hangs in between two potential futures, each as possible and vivid as the other until a final, legally binding decision is made. If, knowing this, it seems wildly inappropriate to offer strangers the opportunity to score quick emotional fulfillment from a cuddle session at this critical point in the adoption process, that’s because it is. By capitalizing on the Internet-friendly notion of “baby cuddling,” BuzzFeed and other media outlets succeeded both in creating a viral story and in completely mischaracterizing the program they attempted to describe. The actual program, formally called Interim Care, is run by a New York-based adoption agency called Spence-Chapin. Though Interim Care is short term, providers are responsible for round-the-clock attention to newborns for a period that lasts days or weeks--not a quick cuddle sesh volunteers can slot into their days between lunch and a Target run. Volunteers can’t simply show up for an hour or two the way they might if they were volunteering to socialize service dogs or play with animals at a local shelter; instead, Interim Care providers must undergo screening, attend regular training sessions, and take responsibility for record keeping and even participation in the adoption negotiations between a biological family and prospective adoptive parents. (It’s also worth noting that Spence-Chapin welcomes applications from all kinds of potential care providers, from single retirees to LGBT couples.) Providing care to an infant while biological parents are given additional time to consider their options has the potential to be a release valve on one of the highest pressure decisions they will likely ever make. No one in my adoptive family knows what happened to me during my first three days of life, while my teenage birth mother made up her mind before ultimately surrendering me to the wonderful family who raised me. I could have been alone in the hospital, been with my birth mom and her family--or for all I know, I could have been manhandled by enthusiastic strangers. Although I might lack that information, I am certain that a few hours of cuddling by a total stranger would not have had a significant impact on my situation. A homestay with a highly qualified, trained Interim Care provider who was committed to recording my history while everyone made sure they could live with their choices could have. Worse still, Today reports that the Spence-Chapin Interim Care Program has been overwhelmed by the response to the story. “Please don't call,” a caveat at the bottom of the Today story warns, “as the program is currently inundated by callers who think they can sign up to snuggle babies.” Not only has the story perpetuated stereotypes about adoptees that erase their biological families and their experience of loss--it has actually hampered the Interim Care program’s ability to connect with new care providers. I’ll freely admit that it would be lovely to live in a world where cuddly babies are infinitely available for snuggling upon demand--but it would be even better to live in a world that doesn’t misunderstand adoption so consistently.
You think the fastest talkers in America live in New York? Guess again
There’s a stereotype about New Yorkers doing everything fast, especially talking. You can see it portrayed in films dating back to the 1930s, featuring stars like James Cagney spitting rapid-fire, rat-a-tat dialogue. Conversely, the pervasive image of Southern American speech is that of the loping drawl—essentially, a British accent, only slowed to a fraction of its original speed. A recent study of the speech patterns of Americans suggests the Southern stereotype isn’t so off the mark, while New York City talkers aren’t quite as speedy as they, or anyone else, imagines they are. Marchex, a mobile advertising analytics company, used “technology that automatically monitors speech, silence, ringtones and hold times” to determine the tortoises and the hares as far as speech goes, state by state. The fastest talkers, it turns out, live in Oregon. Second place goes to the denizens of Minnesota. In fact, you have to look down to third place before you come across a state that’s near New York City: Massachusetts. New York doesn’t actually appear on the list until the 38th slot. And the top five slowest talkers in the country? They live in Southern states, unsurprisingly. Mississippians topped the list for the slowest speech, compared to the rest of the country. Here’s how the rest of the list shook out:
Fastest talkers:
Oregon Minnesota Massachusetts Kansas Iowa Slowest talkers: Mississippi Louisiana South Carolina Alabama North CarolinaA look at the speed of speech in all 50 states, from fastest to slowest:
Oregon Minnesota Massachusetts Kansas Iowa Vermont Alaska South Dakota New Hampshire Nebraska Connecticut North Dakota Washington Wisconsin Rhode Island Idaho Florida Pennsylvania New Jersey West Virginia Maine Colorado California Missouri Montana Indiana Hawaii Virginia Nevada Arizona Utah Michigan Tennessee Maryland Oklahoma Wyoming Delaware New York Kentucky Illinois Ohio Arkansas Georgia Texas New Mexico North Carolina Alabama South Carolina Louisiana Mississippi Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
There’s a stereotype about New Yorkers doing everything fast, especially talking. You can see it portrayed in films dating back to the 1930s, featuring stars like James Cagney spitting rapid-fire, rat-a-tat dialogue. Conversely, the pervasive image of Southern American speech is that of the loping drawl—essentially, a British accent, only slowed to a fraction of its original speed. A recent study of the speech patterns of Americans suggests the Southern stereotype isn’t so off the mark, while New York City talkers aren’t quite as speedy as they, or anyone else, imagines they are. Marchex, a mobile advertising analytics company, used “technology that automatically monitors speech, silence, ringtones and hold times” to determine the tortoises and the hares as far as speech goes, state by state. The fastest talkers, it turns out, live in Oregon. Second place goes to the denizens of Minnesota. In fact, you have to look down to third place before you come across a state that’s near New York City: Massachusetts. New York doesn’t actually appear on the list until the 38th slot. And the top five slowest talkers in the country? They live in Southern states, unsurprisingly. Mississippians topped the list for the slowest speech, compared to the rest of the country. Here’s how the rest of the list shook out:
Fastest talkers:
Oregon Minnesota Massachusetts Kansas Iowa Slowest talkers: Mississippi Louisiana South Carolina Alabama North CarolinaA look at the speed of speech in all 50 states, from fastest to slowest:
Oregon Minnesota Massachusetts Kansas Iowa Vermont Alaska South Dakota New Hampshire Nebraska Connecticut North Dakota Washington Wisconsin Rhode Island Idaho Florida Pennsylvania New Jersey West Virginia Maine Colorado California Missouri Montana Indiana Hawaii Virginia Nevada Arizona Utah Michigan Tennessee Maryland Oklahoma Wyoming Delaware New York Kentucky Illinois Ohio Arkansas Georgia Texas New Mexico North Carolina Alabama South Carolina Louisiana Mississippi Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
There’s a stereotype about New Yorkers doing everything fast, especially talking. You can see it portrayed in films dating back to the 1930s, featuring stars like James Cagney spitting rapid-fire, rat-a-tat dialogue. Conversely, the pervasive image of Southern American speech is that of the loping drawl—essentially, a British accent, only slowed to a fraction of its original speed. A recent study of the speech patterns of Americans suggests the Southern stereotype isn’t so off the mark, while New York City talkers aren’t quite as speedy as they, or anyone else, imagines they are. Marchex, a mobile advertising analytics company, used “technology that automatically monitors speech, silence, ringtones and hold times” to determine the tortoises and the hares as far as speech goes, state by state. The fastest talkers, it turns out, live in Oregon. Second place goes to the denizens of Minnesota. In fact, you have to look down to third place before you come across a state that’s near New York City: Massachusetts. New York doesn’t actually appear on the list until the 38th slot. And the top five slowest talkers in the country? They live in Southern states, unsurprisingly. Mississippians topped the list for the slowest speech, compared to the rest of the country. Here’s how the rest of the list shook out:
Fastest talkers:
Oregon Minnesota Massachusetts Kansas Iowa Slowest talkers: Mississippi Louisiana South Carolina Alabama North CarolinaA look at the speed of speech in all 50 states, from fastest to slowest:
Oregon Minnesota Massachusetts Kansas Iowa Vermont Alaska South Dakota New Hampshire Nebraska Connecticut North Dakota Washington Wisconsin Rhode Island Idaho Florida Pennsylvania New Jersey West Virginia Maine Colorado California Missouri Montana Indiana Hawaii Virginia Nevada Arizona Utah Michigan Tennessee Maryland Oklahoma Wyoming Delaware New York Kentucky Illinois Ohio Arkansas Georgia Texas New Mexico North Carolina Alabama South Carolina Louisiana Mississippi Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
