Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 856

Oscars reward actors of color when they play stereotypes: “They were not the same kinds of roles that a non-minority would have”

By now, the news about #OscarsSoWhite is out. But a new report collects data and presents with in a series of graphics in a fresh and revealing way. The project – “6 Facts That Prove the Oscars Are More Racist Than You Think,” by Venngage – mixes text and interactive imagery to tell the story. Besides the impact that a visual approach brings to the issue, the report is interesting for reason that have to do with its exposition and not just its presentation. The text of “6 Facts” considers roles for actors of color going back to Hattie McDaniel, who in 1940 became the first black actor to win an Oscar. She collected her best supporting actress award, for her performance as a maid in “Gone With the Wind,” and returned to her seat in a segregated part of the hall. In addition to looking at raw numbers, the project considers the types of roles available to nonwhite actors as well. The report doesn’t come out and say it, but suggests that as bad as things are now, the Academy Awards were significantly more limiting to actors of color in the past. Some racial stereotypes -- the Latin Lover, the Noble Savage, the Sexpot, the Sapphire (a sassy or angry black woman) and the Thug – persist, but were much more prevalent in previous decades. It may not make you feel better about The Academy, though. Salon spoke to Eugene Woo, a Toronto-based data scientist who did the research and analysis for the project and helped found the company. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It’s not a secret at this point that there’s a problem with the Academy Awards. Working on this, did you find that the Oscars – if you consider it historically -- was worse than you expected? We all knew, on the surface, about the numbers. We knew that going in. But we said, let’s dig a little bit deeper. The thing that surprised us that when we looked at roles where minorities were winning awards: We saw that a lot of them were stereotypes. They were not the same kinds of roles that a non-minority would have. That was the thing that was interesting. Not just a shortage of roles, but the kinds of roles an actor of color can play are limited compared to what a white actor can play. Correct. And not only limited. But also from the numbers, the Academy Awards rewards certain kind of roles for minorities. For [playing] famous people -- that is very disproportionate: A little over half the roles won by minorities were depictions of famous people. What kinds of stereotypes are showing up for black and other nonwhite actors? The further back you go in time, the more examples you have. In the early days, the black roles were very stereotypical. Starting with the first winner, Hattie McDaniel – with the Mammy stereotype. She won that role playing a stereotype. And later the Magic Negro role – it was still fairly common when Whoopi Goldberg won her award in “Ghost.” She played a fortune teller who could actually see the ghost – and so she was giving advice to the protagonist Patrick Swayze. Which fits the Magical Negro stereotype. Yes, you’ve put a minority in there, but often it’s a minority who has some sort of power. Spike Lee really went off on the Magical Negro stereotypes. What about the old stereotype of black men playing criminals and thugs? I don’t think that’s as bad a problem now. The thug stereotype – if you ask me, I haven’t done any crazy research – I think Latinos are probably more likely to be more stereotyped as a criminal thug, with an inner-city gang. It’s become more of a Latino stereotype now. So I guess for every nonwhite actor playing a maid, a magical figure, a criminal, a famous historical character, there are roles they’re not able to play. What are the kinds of minority roles that are going missing? Where they don’t seem to be represented. Professionals, educated people, intellectuals? Is that where we see very few actors of color? In general, if you look at the lead roles, you don’t see a minority playing an everyday parent with a family, or what you’d call a non-stereotypical role. It’s obviously gotten a lot better. And in general stories about minorities in the lead roles. If you look at what’s coming in the theaters this week, it’s few and far between. What seems to be the root of the problem? Does it seem to be bigger than the Academy? Academy members are fairly white and male. But if you go beyond that, it’s a systemic problem. We’re not the only ones saying it. If you look at film executives and film studio heads, it’s about 90 percent white, and 83 to 61 percent male [respectively]. So if you look at the gatekeepers – the ones who make decisions – they’re not very diverse. And the same with directors. There’s a study from the University of Southern California, where they looked at the top 107 top grossing films, only seven movies were made by black directors – seven movies and five black directors. Obviously directors have a lot of influence over what stories to tell. So the actors are just a symptom of what’s going on – the actors aren’t diverse, the executives aren’t diverse. So the stories don’t get told. The stories written and approved and funded reflect that. So the idea behind the project is that graphics can tell the story in a way that word and numbers can’t? Yes. I read a lot of articles that just looked at the numbers. If you look at the numbers for African-Americans, they aren’t that bad: Ten percent of black actors have won, and the black population is 12 to 15 percent. So there’s a 15 to 20 percent discrepancy, but it’s not that bad. But when you dig deeper, and see the roles they play – the acting was great, nothing against the acting – some of them were stereotypical roles. So we tried to give a different perspective on the numbers. There was an article in The Economist that said, “Oh there isn’t that much discrepancy.” But when you look at the stereotypes. And when you look at the breakdown between lead and supporting roles – there’s very few winners in lead roles from minorities. Less than 10. Once you break it down, it’s not true that the discrepancy is small. This presentation is pretty damning. Does it seem like things are getting better; are you optimistic? Yes — there’s been lots and lots of publicity around this. The Academy has already passed a proposal – I think they will change. If you look back historically, you see they have changed. I’m fairly optimistic about that.By now, the news about #OscarsSoWhite is out. But a new report collects data and presents with in a series of graphics in a fresh and revealing way. The project – “6 Facts That Prove the Oscars Are More Racist Than You Think,” by Venngage – mixes text and interactive imagery to tell the story. Besides the impact that a visual approach brings to the issue, the report is interesting for reason that have to do with its exposition and not just its presentation. The text of “6 Facts” considers roles for actors of color going back to Hattie McDaniel, who in 1940 became the first black actor to win an Oscar. She collected her best supporting actress award, for her performance as a maid in “Gone With the Wind,” and returned to her seat in a segregated part of the hall. In addition to looking at raw numbers, the project considers the types of roles available to nonwhite actors as well. The report doesn’t come out and say it, but suggests that as bad as things are now, the Academy Awards were significantly more limiting to actors of color in the past. Some racial stereotypes -- the Latin Lover, the Noble Savage, the Sexpot, the Sapphire (a sassy or angry black woman) and the Thug – persist, but were much more prevalent in previous decades. It may not make you feel better about The Academy, though. Salon spoke to Eugene Woo, a Toronto-based data scientist who did the research and analysis for the project and helped found the company. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It’s not a secret at this point that there’s a problem with the Academy Awards. Working on this, did you find that the Oscars – if you consider it historically -- was worse than you expected? We all knew, on the surface, about the numbers. We knew that going in. But we said, let’s dig a little bit deeper. The thing that surprised us that when we looked at roles where minorities were winning awards: We saw that a lot of them were stereotypes. They were not the same kinds of roles that a non-minority would have. That was the thing that was interesting. Not just a shortage of roles, but the kinds of roles an actor of color can play are limited compared to what a white actor can play. Correct. And not only limited. But also from the numbers, the Academy Awards rewards certain kind of roles for minorities. For [playing] famous people -- that is very disproportionate: A little over half the roles won by minorities were depictions of famous people. What kinds of stereotypes are showing up for black and other nonwhite actors? The further back you go in time, the more examples you have. In the early days, the black roles were very stereotypical. Starting with the first winner, Hattie McDaniel – with the Mammy stereotype. She won that role playing a stereotype. And later the Magic Negro role – it was still fairly common when Whoopi Goldberg won her award in “Ghost.” She played a fortune teller who could actually see the ghost – and so she was giving advice to the protagonist Patrick Swayze. Which fits the Magical Negro stereotype. Yes, you’ve put a minority in there, but often it’s a minority who has some sort of power. Spike Lee really went off on the Magical Negro stereotypes. What about the old stereotype of black men playing criminals and thugs? I don’t think that’s as bad a problem now. The thug stereotype – if you ask me, I haven’t done any crazy research – I think Latinos are probably more likely to be more stereotyped as a criminal thug, with an inner-city gang. It’s become more of a Latino stereotype now. So I guess for every nonwhite actor playing a maid, a magical figure, a criminal, a famous historical character, there are roles they’re not able to play. What are the kinds of minority roles that are going missing? Where they don’t seem to be represented. Professionals, educated people, intellectuals? Is that where we see very few actors of color? In general, if you look at the lead roles, you don’t see a minority playing an everyday parent with a family, or what you’d call a non-stereotypical role. It’s obviously gotten a lot better. And in general stories about minorities in the lead roles. If you look at what’s coming in the theaters this week, it’s few and far between. What seems to be the root of the problem? Does it seem to be bigger than the Academy? Academy members are fairly white and male. But if you go beyond that, it’s a systemic problem. We’re not the only ones saying it. If you look at film executives and film studio heads, it’s about 90 percent white, and 83 to 61 percent male [respectively]. So if you look at the gatekeepers – the ones who make decisions – they’re not very diverse. And the same with directors. There’s a study from the University of Southern California, where they looked at the top 107 top grossing films, only seven movies were made by black directors – seven movies and five black directors. Obviously directors have a lot of influence over what stories to tell. So the actors are just a symptom of what’s going on – the actors aren’t diverse, the executives aren’t diverse. So the stories don’t get told. The stories written and approved and funded reflect that. So the idea behind the project is that graphics can tell the story in a way that word and numbers can’t? Yes. I read a lot of articles that just looked at the numbers. If you look at the numbers for African-Americans, they aren’t that bad: Ten percent of black actors have won, and the black population is 12 to 15 percent. So there’s a 15 to 20 percent discrepancy, but it’s not that bad. But when you dig deeper, and see the roles they play – the acting was great, nothing against the acting – some of them were stereotypical roles. So we tried to give a different perspective on the numbers. There was an article in The Economist that said, “Oh there isn’t that much discrepancy.” But when you look at the stereotypes. And when you look at the breakdown between lead and supporting roles – there’s very few winners in lead roles from minorities. Less than 10. Once you break it down, it’s not true that the discrepancy is small. This presentation is pretty damning. Does it seem like things are getting better; are you optimistic? Yes — there’s been lots and lots of publicity around this. The Academy has already passed a proposal – I think they will change. If you look back historically, you see they have changed. I’m fairly optimistic about that.By now, the news about #OscarsSoWhite is out. But a new report collects data and presents with in a series of graphics in a fresh and revealing way. The project – “6 Facts That Prove the Oscars Are More Racist Than You Think,” by Venngage – mixes text and interactive imagery to tell the story. Besides the impact that a visual approach brings to the issue, the report is interesting for reason that have to do with its exposition and not just its presentation. The text of “6 Facts” considers roles for actors of color going back to Hattie McDaniel, who in 1940 became the first black actor to win an Oscar. She collected her best supporting actress award, for her performance as a maid in “Gone With the Wind,” and returned to her seat in a segregated part of the hall. In addition to looking at raw numbers, the project considers the types of roles available to nonwhite actors as well. The report doesn’t come out and say it, but suggests that as bad as things are now, the Academy Awards were significantly more limiting to actors of color in the past. Some racial stereotypes -- the Latin Lover, the Noble Savage, the Sexpot, the Sapphire (a sassy or angry black woman) and the Thug – persist, but were much more prevalent in previous decades. It may not make you feel better about The Academy, though. Salon spoke to Eugene Woo, a Toronto-based data scientist who did the research and analysis for the project and helped found the company. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It’s not a secret at this point that there’s a problem with the Academy Awards. Working on this, did you find that the Oscars – if you consider it historically -- was worse than you expected? We all knew, on the surface, about the numbers. We knew that going in. But we said, let’s dig a little bit deeper. The thing that surprised us that when we looked at roles where minorities were winning awards: We saw that a lot of them were stereotypes. They were not the same kinds of roles that a non-minority would have. That was the thing that was interesting. Not just a shortage of roles, but the kinds of roles an actor of color can play are limited compared to what a white actor can play. Correct. And not only limited. But also from the numbers, the Academy Awards rewards certain kind of roles for minorities. For [playing] famous people -- that is very disproportionate: A little over half the roles won by minorities were depictions of famous people. What kinds of stereotypes are showing up for black and other nonwhite actors? The further back you go in time, the more examples you have. In the early days, the black roles were very stereotypical. Starting with the first winner, Hattie McDaniel – with the Mammy stereotype. She won that role playing a stereotype. And later the Magic Negro role – it was still fairly common when Whoopi Goldberg won her award in “Ghost.” She played a fortune teller who could actually see the ghost – and so she was giving advice to the protagonist Patrick Swayze. Which fits the Magical Negro stereotype. Yes, you’ve put a minority in there, but often it’s a minority who has some sort of power. Spike Lee really went off on the Magical Negro stereotypes. What about the old stereotype of black men playing criminals and thugs? I don’t think that’s as bad a problem now. The thug stereotype – if you ask me, I haven’t done any crazy research – I think Latinos are probably more likely to be more stereotyped as a criminal thug, with an inner-city gang. It’s become more of a Latino stereotype now. So I guess for every nonwhite actor playing a maid, a magical figure, a criminal, a famous historical character, there are roles they’re not able to play. What are the kinds of minority roles that are going missing? Where they don’t seem to be represented. Professionals, educated people, intellectuals? Is that where we see very few actors of color? In general, if you look at the lead roles, you don’t see a minority playing an everyday parent with a family, or what you’d call a non-stereotypical role. It’s obviously gotten a lot better. And in general stories about minorities in the lead roles. If you look at what’s coming in the theaters this week, it’s few and far between. What seems to be the root of the problem? Does it seem to be bigger than the Academy? Academy members are fairly white and male. But if you go beyond that, it’s a systemic problem. We’re not the only ones saying it. If you look at film executives and film studio heads, it’s about 90 percent white, and 83 to 61 percent male [respectively]. So if you look at the gatekeepers – the ones who make decisions – they’re not very diverse. And the same with directors. There’s a study from the University of Southern California, where they looked at the top 107 top grossing films, only seven movies were made by black directors – seven movies and five black directors. Obviously directors have a lot of influence over what stories to tell. So the actors are just a symptom of what’s going on – the actors aren’t diverse, the executives aren’t diverse. So the stories don’t get told. The stories written and approved and funded reflect that. So the idea behind the project is that graphics can tell the story in a way that word and numbers can’t? Yes. I read a lot of articles that just looked at the numbers. If you look at the numbers for African-Americans, they aren’t that bad: Ten percent of black actors have won, and the black population is 12 to 15 percent. So there’s a 15 to 20 percent discrepancy, but it’s not that bad. But when you dig deeper, and see the roles they play – the acting was great, nothing against the acting – some of them were stereotypical roles. So we tried to give a different perspective on the numbers. There was an article in The Economist that said, “Oh there isn’t that much discrepancy.” But when you look at the stereotypes. And when you look at the breakdown between lead and supporting roles – there’s very few winners in lead roles from minorities. Less than 10. Once you break it down, it’s not true that the discrepancy is small. This presentation is pretty damning. Does it seem like things are getting better; are you optimistic? Yes — there’s been lots and lots of publicity around this. The Academy has already passed a proposal – I think they will change. If you look back historically, you see they have changed. I’m fairly optimistic about that.

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This 110-year-old woman doesn’t care about anything, just wants whiskey and naps

The sinister seduction of “Cherry Wine”: Domestic violence, filtered through a soft Instagram gloss

It’s been 25 years since Camille Paglia proclaimed that women stay in abusive relationships because “the sex is hot,” and precious little in popular culture has compellingly suggested otherwise. Released on Valentine’s Day, singer-songwriter Hozier's video for "Cherry Wine" stars Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan (whom I kept hoping would go all "Hanna" on her partner) as a woman in a violently abusive relationship. The video itself, however, most closely resembles a Lindt chocolate commercial, replete with soft low-key lighting, exposed wood floors, and a plushy living room couch. Throughout the film narrative, a heart motif surfaces in the form of a golden pendant and wicker wall hanging; at the end, we are told the video is part of the #FaceUpToDomesticViolence campaign, with proceeds from purchasing the single going to domestic violence charity organizations. Aside from Ronan's gradually revealed eye contusions and what might be some faint bruising on the forearm (it’s hard to tell for lack of illumination) the video avidly steers clear of any typical signs that something might be wrong. Romanticizing trauma in the name of “facing up to domestic violence,” the video ultimately leaves one wondering, "facing up for what?" Compared to the overt glamorization of abuse in Rihanna and Eminem’s 2010 “Love the Way You Lie”—a video that may have inspired many to steal a bottle of Stoli and get it on in a summer wheat field—Hozier’s PSA initially seems like a shift from the myth of the wife-beater in a wife-beater (the term itself a sartorial nod to an intrinsically classist nomenclature). If it's really a revelation that flannel-clad beardos can also punch their partners in the face, then, yes, “Cherry Wine” is “powerful”. And perhaps (sadly) this will prove a revelation to many, so spoon-fed are we by expired tropes of tattooed bench-pressers battering women. In that respect, and that alone, it’s great that the guy depicted is not a clichéd abuser — he sports a tidy beard and wouldn’t stand out at a poetry reading. He doesn’t look like he just slammed eight scoops of protein shake or a six pack of Coors. He’s white and wrapped in a Cuomo Cardigan that a million hip white guys are wearing right now. And his behavior throughout the entire narrative is unremittingly tender—horrifyingly so when tacitly acknowledging his partner’s blackened eye. These aren't typical depictions of domestic abuse. But look past these soulful gazes and gentle cheek caresses, and beneath this shoe-gaze image of a bad boyfriend lurks a dangerous sentimentality. It is dangerous to suggest that when an abusive partner leads to a black eye camouflaged with makeup, that one need only “face up” to one’s face in a three-panel mirror and the problem will solve itself. It is dangerous to once again suggest (as did Paglia decades ago) that a violent man is necessarily a more sexually virile one, the kind who will push you against a wall (or doorway or sofa) and ravish you like the Harlequin hipster he was born to be. It is dangerous because plenty of women (and men) would love to be pushed against a wall and ravished, but that is very, very different than being struck across the face. To imply the two intrinsically go together is not a far cry from Eminem, in the "Love the Way You Lie" video, threatening to tie his counterpart “to the bed and set this house on fire”—the same bed that a few scenes earlier hosted an array of steamy relations between Megan Fox's character and the actor playing her lover, Dominic Monaghan. Of course, it is equally unfair to suggest that it is easy to leave, or to conclude that a woman who stays is unintelligent, or implicitly consenting to her partner’s behavior. In “Sin by Silence,” a 2009 documentary about abuse survivors incarcerated after defending themselves, the late Dr. Elizabeth Leonard shares the harrowing statistic that a battered woman is 75 percent more at risk of being killed in the two years after she leaves. Within the flirty wine-and-kiss exchanges between Ronan and her partner, she may seem to earnestly reciprocate, but it's important to point out that once the cycle starts, there is zero real romance, and women who are in abusive situations often walk on eggshells as to not upset their batterers. They may put on a show, but the fear that they are navigating around the clock is real. Many batterers, unsurprisingly, tend to be soft and kind after an attack, expecting their victims to be a fountain of forgiveness. “If you are not,” one survivor put it to me, “expect life to get a lot more difficult.” The lyrics to “Cherry Wine” (from the incongruous vantage point of a man being abused by a woman) further reflect how complicated the choice might be to stay or to leave, and how some in abusive relationships feel genuinely infatuated with their abusers. “Open hand or closed fist would be fine,” goes the plaintive refrain. “The blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine.” Later Hozier croons, “…I want it, it’s a crime.” Vampiric rationale aside, these lines, and the visual narrative they convolutedly accompany, ultimately fail in their imperative to confront the issue, especially with respect to the fact that it is suggested that Ronan’s character is a mother. Legally in many states, the DCFS can open a case against a woman for “neglect” if a mother stays and her child remains a witness to abuse (maybe this isn’t the case in the Hozier-hood, but most of his audience is across the pond). With at least two pans across a framed portrait of Ronan and a similarly blue-eyed wee one, the video glides over the repercussions of staying for the child. Battering isn’t consensual sexual aggression; it isn’t Lena Dunham in “Tiny Furniture” commanding “Pull my hair” to a coworker during a rooftop quickie; it isn’t Lana Del Rey imploring “give me all of that ultraviolence” while veiled in retro bridal lace (though that line has trouble of its own). As Daisey LaFarge explains in The New Republic, “The glamorization of sexual violence has reached its tipping point in popular culture…it’s a positive sign that the diversity of sexual preferences is being acknowledged by mainstream culture. What can be dangerous, and send out a sinister message, is those depictions which do not represent an image of consent, and can appear to legitimize physical abuse.” Just as Lorde expressed concern that the irony (and direct appropriation) in Del Rey’s lyrics could not be appreciated by her younger listeners, so too might one worry that “Cherry Wine” might leave an heady aftertaste in those who don’t know any better. Herein lies the conundrum in terms of depicting domestic violence onscreen: if the physicality of the abuse is highlighted vis-a-vis carnal tension, it’s very easy for aggressive behaviors to seem a prelude to rough sex, and for peril to be conflated with passion. But if, as in "Cherry Wine," the visceral ugliness of abuse and its aftermath is replaced with soporific kitties and single-tear pathos, the real danger dissolves like too many tealights. At least a third of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by male partners, but it’s hard to believe that is a potential outcome for this woman, set as she is against a backdrop of acoustic strumming and low-wattage bulbs, no matter how awful that purpled eye is meant to look. Some will say that popular artists are not beholden to accurately reflect common culture. I agree. If reflections were accurate, they would not be so popular; who wants to watch Ronan file a restraining order with a sprained wrist and pack up a bag of binkies? If Hozier’s hashtagging indirectly leads to such measures, let me be the first to applaud. But for they who have survived domestic violence—who have not only stoically “faced up” to their reflections but to their abusers and said “no”— the sappy aesthetics of “Cherry Wine” could add insult to injury.It’s been 25 years since Camille Paglia proclaimed that women stay in abusive relationships because “the sex is hot,” and precious little in popular culture has compellingly suggested otherwise. Released on Valentine’s Day, singer-songwriter Hozier's video for "Cherry Wine" stars Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan (whom I kept hoping would go all "Hanna" on her partner) as a woman in a violently abusive relationship. The video itself, however, most closely resembles a Lindt chocolate commercial, replete with soft low-key lighting, exposed wood floors, and a plushy living room couch. Throughout the film narrative, a heart motif surfaces in the form of a golden pendant and wicker wall hanging; at the end, we are told the video is part of the #FaceUpToDomesticViolence campaign, with proceeds from purchasing the single going to domestic violence charity organizations. Aside from Ronan's gradually revealed eye contusions and what might be some faint bruising on the forearm (it’s hard to tell for lack of illumination) the video avidly steers clear of any typical signs that something might be wrong. Romanticizing trauma in the name of “facing up to domestic violence,” the video ultimately leaves one wondering, "facing up for what?" Compared to the overt glamorization of abuse in Rihanna and Eminem’s 2010 “Love the Way You Lie”—a video that may have inspired many to steal a bottle of Stoli and get it on in a summer wheat field—Hozier’s PSA initially seems like a shift from the myth of the wife-beater in a wife-beater (the term itself a sartorial nod to an intrinsically classist nomenclature). If it's really a revelation that flannel-clad beardos can also punch their partners in the face, then, yes, “Cherry Wine” is “powerful”. And perhaps (sadly) this will prove a revelation to many, so spoon-fed are we by expired tropes of tattooed bench-pressers battering women. In that respect, and that alone, it’s great that the guy depicted is not a clichéd abuser — he sports a tidy beard and wouldn’t stand out at a poetry reading. He doesn’t look like he just slammed eight scoops of protein shake or a six pack of Coors. He’s white and wrapped in a Cuomo Cardigan that a million hip white guys are wearing right now. And his behavior throughout the entire narrative is unremittingly tender—horrifyingly so when tacitly acknowledging his partner’s blackened eye. These aren't typical depictions of domestic abuse. But look past these soulful gazes and gentle cheek caresses, and beneath this shoe-gaze image of a bad boyfriend lurks a dangerous sentimentality. It is dangerous to suggest that when an abusive partner leads to a black eye camouflaged with makeup, that one need only “face up” to one’s face in a three-panel mirror and the problem will solve itself. It is dangerous to once again suggest (as did Paglia decades ago) that a violent man is necessarily a more sexually virile one, the kind who will push you against a wall (or doorway or sofa) and ravish you like the Harlequin hipster he was born to be. It is dangerous because plenty of women (and men) would love to be pushed against a wall and ravished, but that is very, very different than being struck across the face. To imply the two intrinsically go together is not a far cry from Eminem, in the "Love the Way You Lie" video, threatening to tie his counterpart “to the bed and set this house on fire”—the same bed that a few scenes earlier hosted an array of steamy relations between Megan Fox's character and the actor playing her lover, Dominic Monaghan. Of course, it is equally unfair to suggest that it is easy to leave, or to conclude that a woman who stays is unintelligent, or implicitly consenting to her partner’s behavior. In “Sin by Silence,” a 2009 documentary about abuse survivors incarcerated after defending themselves, the late Dr. Elizabeth Leonard shares the harrowing statistic that a battered woman is 75 percent more at risk of being killed in the two years after she leaves. Within the flirty wine-and-kiss exchanges between Ronan and her partner, she may seem to earnestly reciprocate, but it's important to point out that once the cycle starts, there is zero real romance, and women who are in abusive situations often walk on eggshells as to not upset their batterers. They may put on a show, but the fear that they are navigating around the clock is real. Many batterers, unsurprisingly, tend to be soft and kind after an attack, expecting their victims to be a fountain of forgiveness. “If you are not,” one survivor put it to me, “expect life to get a lot more difficult.” The lyrics to “Cherry Wine” (from the incongruous vantage point of a man being abused by a woman) further reflect how complicated the choice might be to stay or to leave, and how some in abusive relationships feel genuinely infatuated with their abusers. “Open hand or closed fist would be fine,” goes the plaintive refrain. “The blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine.” Later Hozier croons, “…I want it, it’s a crime.” Vampiric rationale aside, these lines, and the visual narrative they convolutedly accompany, ultimately fail in their imperative to confront the issue, especially with respect to the fact that it is suggested that Ronan’s character is a mother. Legally in many states, the DCFS can open a case against a woman for “neglect” if a mother stays and her child remains a witness to abuse (maybe this isn’t the case in the Hozier-hood, but most of his audience is across the pond). With at least two pans across a framed portrait of Ronan and a similarly blue-eyed wee one, the video glides over the repercussions of staying for the child. Battering isn’t consensual sexual aggression; it isn’t Lena Dunham in “Tiny Furniture” commanding “Pull my hair” to a coworker during a rooftop quickie; it isn’t Lana Del Rey imploring “give me all of that ultraviolence” while veiled in retro bridal lace (though that line has trouble of its own). As Daisey LaFarge explains in The New Republic, “The glamorization of sexual violence has reached its tipping point in popular culture…it’s a positive sign that the diversity of sexual preferences is being acknowledged by mainstream culture. What can be dangerous, and send out a sinister message, is those depictions which do not represent an image of consent, and can appear to legitimize physical abuse.” Just as Lorde expressed concern that the irony (and direct appropriation) in Del Rey’s lyrics could not be appreciated by her younger listeners, so too might one worry that “Cherry Wine” might leave an heady aftertaste in those who don’t know any better. Herein lies the conundrum in terms of depicting domestic violence onscreen: if the physicality of the abuse is highlighted vis-a-vis carnal tension, it’s very easy for aggressive behaviors to seem a prelude to rough sex, and for peril to be conflated with passion. But if, as in "Cherry Wine," the visceral ugliness of abuse and its aftermath is replaced with soporific kitties and single-tear pathos, the real danger dissolves like too many tealights. At least a third of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by male partners, but it’s hard to believe that is a potential outcome for this woman, set as she is against a backdrop of acoustic strumming and low-wattage bulbs, no matter how awful that purpled eye is meant to look. Some will say that popular artists are not beholden to accurately reflect common culture. I agree. If reflections were accurate, they would not be so popular; who wants to watch Ronan file a restraining order with a sprained wrist and pack up a bag of binkies? If Hozier’s hashtagging indirectly leads to such measures, let me be the first to applaud. But for they who have survived domestic violence—who have not only stoically “faced up” to their reflections but to their abusers and said “no”— the sappy aesthetics of “Cherry Wine” could add insult to injury.It’s been 25 years since Camille Paglia proclaimed that women stay in abusive relationships because “the sex is hot,” and precious little in popular culture has compellingly suggested otherwise. Released on Valentine’s Day, singer-songwriter Hozier's video for "Cherry Wine" stars Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan (whom I kept hoping would go all "Hanna" on her partner) as a woman in a violently abusive relationship. The video itself, however, most closely resembles a Lindt chocolate commercial, replete with soft low-key lighting, exposed wood floors, and a plushy living room couch. Throughout the film narrative, a heart motif surfaces in the form of a golden pendant and wicker wall hanging; at the end, we are told the video is part of the #FaceUpToDomesticViolence campaign, with proceeds from purchasing the single going to domestic violence charity organizations. Aside from Ronan's gradually revealed eye contusions and what might be some faint bruising on the forearm (it’s hard to tell for lack of illumination) the video avidly steers clear of any typical signs that something might be wrong. Romanticizing trauma in the name of “facing up to domestic violence,” the video ultimately leaves one wondering, "facing up for what?" Compared to the overt glamorization of abuse in Rihanna and Eminem’s 2010 “Love the Way You Lie”—a video that may have inspired many to steal a bottle of Stoli and get it on in a summer wheat field—Hozier’s PSA initially seems like a shift from the myth of the wife-beater in a wife-beater (the term itself a sartorial nod to an intrinsically classist nomenclature). If it's really a revelation that flannel-clad beardos can also punch their partners in the face, then, yes, “Cherry Wine” is “powerful”. And perhaps (sadly) this will prove a revelation to many, so spoon-fed are we by expired tropes of tattooed bench-pressers battering women. In that respect, and that alone, it’s great that the guy depicted is not a clichéd abuser — he sports a tidy beard and wouldn’t stand out at a poetry reading. He doesn’t look like he just slammed eight scoops of protein shake or a six pack of Coors. He’s white and wrapped in a Cuomo Cardigan that a million hip white guys are wearing right now. And his behavior throughout the entire narrative is unremittingly tender—horrifyingly so when tacitly acknowledging his partner’s blackened eye. These aren't typical depictions of domestic abuse. But look past these soulful gazes and gentle cheek caresses, and beneath this shoe-gaze image of a bad boyfriend lurks a dangerous sentimentality. It is dangerous to suggest that when an abusive partner leads to a black eye camouflaged with makeup, that one need only “face up” to one’s face in a three-panel mirror and the problem will solve itself. It is dangerous to once again suggest (as did Paglia decades ago) that a violent man is necessarily a more sexually virile one, the kind who will push you against a wall (or doorway or sofa) and ravish you like the Harlequin hipster he was born to be. It is dangerous because plenty of women (and men) would love to be pushed against a wall and ravished, but that is very, very different than being struck across the face. To imply the two intrinsically go together is not a far cry from Eminem, in the "Love the Way You Lie" video, threatening to tie his counterpart “to the bed and set this house on fire”—the same bed that a few scenes earlier hosted an array of steamy relations between Megan Fox's character and the actor playing her lover, Dominic Monaghan. Of course, it is equally unfair to suggest that it is easy to leave, or to conclude that a woman who stays is unintelligent, or implicitly consenting to her partner’s behavior. In “Sin by Silence,” a 2009 documentary about abuse survivors incarcerated after defending themselves, the late Dr. Elizabeth Leonard shares the harrowing statistic that a battered woman is 75 percent more at risk of being killed in the two years after she leaves. Within the flirty wine-and-kiss exchanges between Ronan and her partner, she may seem to earnestly reciprocate, but it's important to point out that once the cycle starts, there is zero real romance, and women who are in abusive situations often walk on eggshells as to not upset their batterers. They may put on a show, but the fear that they are navigating around the clock is real. Many batterers, unsurprisingly, tend to be soft and kind after an attack, expecting their victims to be a fountain of forgiveness. “If you are not,” one survivor put it to me, “expect life to get a lot more difficult.” The lyrics to “Cherry Wine” (from the incongruous vantage point of a man being abused by a woman) further reflect how complicated the choice might be to stay or to leave, and how some in abusive relationships feel genuinely infatuated with their abusers. “Open hand or closed fist would be fine,” goes the plaintive refrain. “The blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine.” Later Hozier croons, “…I want it, it’s a crime.” Vampiric rationale aside, these lines, and the visual narrative they convolutedly accompany, ultimately fail in their imperative to confront the issue, especially with respect to the fact that it is suggested that Ronan’s character is a mother. Legally in many states, the DCFS can open a case against a woman for “neglect” if a mother stays and her child remains a witness to abuse (maybe this isn’t the case in the Hozier-hood, but most of his audience is across the pond). With at least two pans across a framed portrait of Ronan and a similarly blue-eyed wee one, the video glides over the repercussions of staying for the child. Battering isn’t consensual sexual aggression; it isn’t Lena Dunham in “Tiny Furniture” commanding “Pull my hair” to a coworker during a rooftop quickie; it isn’t Lana Del Rey imploring “give me all of that ultraviolence” while veiled in retro bridal lace (though that line has trouble of its own). As Daisey LaFarge explains in The New Republic, “The glamorization of sexual violence has reached its tipping point in popular culture…it’s a positive sign that the diversity of sexual preferences is being acknowledged by mainstream culture. What can be dangerous, and send out a sinister message, is those depictions which do not represent an image of consent, and can appear to legitimize physical abuse.” Just as Lorde expressed concern that the irony (and direct appropriation) in Del Rey’s lyrics could not be appreciated by her younger listeners, so too might one worry that “Cherry Wine” might leave an heady aftertaste in those who don’t know any better. Herein lies the conundrum in terms of depicting domestic violence onscreen: if the physicality of the abuse is highlighted vis-a-vis carnal tension, it’s very easy for aggressive behaviors to seem a prelude to rough sex, and for peril to be conflated with passion. But if, as in "Cherry Wine," the visceral ugliness of abuse and its aftermath is replaced with soporific kitties and single-tear pathos, the real danger dissolves like too many tealights. At least a third of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by male partners, but it’s hard to believe that is a potential outcome for this woman, set as she is against a backdrop of acoustic strumming and low-wattage bulbs, no matter how awful that purpled eye is meant to look. Some will say that popular artists are not beholden to accurately reflect common culture. I agree. If reflections were accurate, they would not be so popular; who wants to watch Ronan file a restraining order with a sprained wrist and pack up a bag of binkies? If Hozier’s hashtagging indirectly leads to such measures, let me be the first to applaud. But for they who have survived domestic violence—who have not only stoically “faced up” to their reflections but to their abusers and said “no”— the sappy aesthetics of “Cherry Wine” could add insult to injury.

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John Lewis staunchly opposed the Clintons’ gutting of welfare in 1996, yet now endorses Hillary and slams Sanders

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Cruz campaign forced to fire national spokesman, apologize for one of its “dirty tricks”

Another Republican presidential primary contest, another rival campaign accusing Ted Cruz of dirty tricks and this time, after losing out to Marco Rubio in South Carolina on Saturday, Cruz's campaign is finally fessing up to their underhanded tactics and apologizing. A day after Rubio narrowly defeated Cruz for second place in the South Carolina primary, the Cruz campaign put up a video purportedly showing Rubio dismissing the Bible as “not having many answers in it.” In South Carolina, no less. In the version posted to right-wing websites over the weekend, Rubio is walking into a hotel lobby past Cruz's father Rafael and a Cruz staffer who is apparently reading the Bible. The video subtitles claim that Rubio points to the Bible while saying, "Got a good book there, not many answers in it": Rubio's campaign wasted little time in responding to the video, claiming that it misquoted the Florida senator and frequenter touter of his Christian faith. Rubio communications director Alex Conant tweeted the video, originally recorded by the University of Pennsylvania's independent student news organization The Daily Pennsylvanian, with a "correct transcript" showing Rubio saying, instead, "all the answers are in there." Contant blasted what he called "another dirty trick by Cruz camp":  https://twitter.com/AlexConant/status... Cruz national spokesman Rick Tyler, who initially shared the misquoted video on Facebook, returned to the social media site late Sunday to retract his post and apologize for spreading a falsehood. "Since the audio was unclear, I should not have assumed the story was correct. I've deleted the post because I would not knowingly post a false story. But the fact remains that I did post it when I should have checked its accuracy first. I regret the mistake," Tyler wrote.

I want to apologize to Senator Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today. The story... Posted by Rick Tyler on Sunday, February 21, 2016

During an appearance on Fox News' "America's Newsroom," Tyler elaborated, claiming he asked for the Daily Pennsylvanian video to be corrected and taken down. "I posted it in haste," Tyler told host Martha MacCallum, apologizing for the video. "I should not have done it. I apologized to Marco Rubio. I apologized to the campaign. I shared [the apology] on Twitter. And I'm sharing it here. It was a mistake and I would not knowingly post something I know to be false. The judgment about what he said was wrong so I apologize about that." Despite Tyler's public apology tour, Rubio continued to hit what he called a "disturbing pattern of deceptive campaigning" by the Cruz camp. "Who is going to be held accountable for making up this video," Rubio asked during a campaign stop in Nevada on Monday. "Who was held accountable for lying about Ben Carson?": Tyler was forced to apologize to Ben Carson's campaign earlier this month for falsely suggesting that the retired neurosurgeon had dropped out of the race in the middle of voting during the Iowa caucuses. The Cruz campaign had initially denied any wrongdoing in that case. UPDATE: At a press conference this afternoon, Cruz announced that he asked and received the resignation of national spokesman Rick Tyler:

JUST IN: @tedcruz asks for the resignation of spokesman Rick Tyler. https://t.co/HmEOskR0VR

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) February 22, 2016

Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com"&am... Another Republican presidential primary contest, another rival campaign accusing Ted Cruz of dirty tricks and this time, after losing out to Marco Rubio in South Carolina on Saturday, Cruz's campaign is finally fessing up to their underhanded tactics and apologizing. A day after Rubio narrowly defeated Cruz for second place in the South Carolina primary, the Cruz campaign put up a video purportedly showing Rubio dismissing the Bible as “not having many answers in it.” In South Carolina, no less. In the version posted to right-wing websites over the weekend, Rubio is walking into a hotel lobby past Cruz's father Rafael and a Cruz staffer who is apparently reading the Bible. The video subtitles claim that Rubio points to the Bible while saying, "Got a good book there, not many answers in it": Rubio's campaign wasted little time in responding to the video, claiming that it misquoted the Florida senator and frequenter touter of his Christian faith. Rubio communications director Alex Conant tweeted the video, originally recorded by the University of Pennsylvania's independent student news organization The Daily Pennsylvanian, with a "correct transcript" showing Rubio saying, instead, "all the answers are in there." Contant blasted what he called "another dirty trick by Cruz camp":  https://twitter.com/AlexConant/status... Cruz national spokesman Rick Tyler, who initially shared the misquoted video on Facebook, returned to the social media site late Sunday to retract his post and apologize for spreading a falsehood. "Since the audio was unclear, I should not have assumed the story was correct. I've deleted the post because I would not knowingly post a false story. But the fact remains that I did post it when I should have checked its accuracy first. I regret the mistake," Tyler wrote.

I want to apologize to Senator Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today. The story... Posted by Rick Tyler on Sunday, February 21, 2016

During an appearance on Fox News' "America's Newsroom," Tyler elaborated, claiming he asked for the Daily Pennsylvanian video to be corrected and taken down. "I posted it in haste," Tyler told host Martha MacCallum, apologizing for the video. "I should not have done it. I apologized to Marco Rubio. I apologized to the campaign. I shared [the apology] on Twitter. And I'm sharing it here. It was a mistake and I would not knowingly post something I know to be false. The judgment about what he said was wrong so I apologize about that." Despite Tyler's public apology tour, Rubio continued to hit what he called a "disturbing pattern of deceptive campaigning" by the Cruz camp. "Who is going to be held accountable for making up this video," Rubio asked during a campaign stop in Nevada on Monday. "Who was held accountable for lying about Ben Carson?": Tyler was forced to apologize to Ben Carson's campaign earlier this month for falsely suggesting that the retired neurosurgeon had dropped out of the race in the middle of voting during the Iowa caucuses. The Cruz campaign had initially denied any wrongdoing in that case. UPDATE: At a press conference this afternoon, Cruz announced that he asked and received the resignation of national spokesman Rick Tyler:

JUST IN: @tedcruz asks for the resignation of spokesman Rick Tyler. https://t.co/HmEOskR0VR

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) February 22, 2016

Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com"&am...

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Getting off (line): I’m giving up online porn, and so should you

        Every technology amputates the function it extends.

          Marshall McLuhan

It’s a rhetorical question – I don’t need a show of hands:  How many men have recently "lain with a woman," as the prophets might say, and found themselves unmanned because they’d been partaking of too much porn?  Or found that, in order to man themselves, they needed to superimpose a recollected online image onto the scene like a high-school biology teacher placing a transparency of the endocrine system on the overhead projector?

It’s a fair question, maybe even -- given the unsolicited anecdotes I’ve been picking up from the men and women who are confident enough to talk about the issue – an important one.  Important because the case of online porn opens a small window onto what happens when we outsource our imaginations, when we begin to accept generic, instantly accessible fantasies in place of the ones we used to have to work for.  Extend ourselves for, as it were.

What happens is we’re screwed, that’s what happens.  Not in a good way.

To make my case, I have to digress from porn to the University of Chicago, where I once professed, and from thence to a crack house in Winslow, Arizona. Bear with me. 

Though at present I’m a sojourner in civilized life again, I taught college for 30 years, during which time, not surprisingly, I saw some changes:  office hours grew virtual, chalk was digitalized, professors (with heroic exceptions) morphed into entertainers teaching to customer satisfaction surveys filled out at the end of the term. So far, so good; nothing’s perfect. Underlying all this "progress," though, was a steady, graphable rise in student itchiness, an inability to stay the fuck still. To follow an idea, to immerse in a book -- to go deep.  I’d watch it in the library, make bets with myself: two minutes before she checks her phone? Less?  Worse, I began to notice the same thing in myself – a current of distraction, like static in the brain.

Not long after I saw a distracted colleague sweep his index finger across the cover of a physical magazine, I left the halls of almost-ivy and, having nowhere much else to go, moved with my family to a small house in Winslow, Arizona, where my desk looked out on Route 66, dust storms and a crack house.

I liked working at that desk.  Whenever the novel I was working on gave me trouble, I’d look up and study the young man with the cantaloupe-size biceps who sat on the porch across the street, tilted back on a wooden chair in front of the plywood-covered windows.  His leg jerking like he was carrying a charge, he’d sit for 20 or 30 seconds, fidgeting, scratching, then grab his phone. Sometimes he’d leap up and walk quickly back and forth on the cracked sidewalk, talking – laughing, yelling, cursing – until a customer pulled up, at which point he’d exchange goods for legal tender through the passenger-side window, walk rapidly back to the chair, shift the phone to his left hand, snatch a barbell off the floorboards and do a few quick curls. Then the phone again. 

This would go on for hours.  I’d disappear into my book for an hour or more, then reemerge and there he’d be: pacing, scratching, fiddling with the phone, pumping iron – a hundred sets of two – most sincerely strung out.

And then a desert epiphany came to me as it came to John the Baptist: subtract the barbell, ratchet down the craziness, upgrade for decency (if not necessarily IQ), and I was looking at one of my former students.  Here was the same inability to be still, to do one thing, any thing. To throw one leg over the other and watch the dust storm coming in, to be in your own skull.  The conclusion was as inescapable as it was uncomfortable: We – maybe all of us, to one degree or another -- were exhibiting signs of addiction; the drug might be legal (in fact, universally sanctioned and more or less mandatory), and the effects less toxic, but the similarities were striking.

I was wrong: The effects were just as toxic, they just manifested themselves more gradually, less visibly; instead of targeting your liver, say, this drug hit your ability to think, to contemplate your world, to use your imagination, to be alone. It let you keep your teeth and your job while it quietly paved your soul.

All of which brings us back around to online porn, something I’ve partaken of – might as well clear that right up -- as has pretty much every man capable of curiosity and possessed of a penis.  Truly, there’s something extraordinary about this virtual edifice, this million-room whorehouse catering at a keystroke to every conceivable taste and fancy, entirely free of the old-timey risks of disease, danger and social embarrassment.  A parody of the marketplace?  This is the quintessence of it.  This is what the piled centuries since Adam Smith have been building toward: a universal human need -- for most of our lives nearly as essential as shelter -- commodified, then abstracted into light, then delivered friction-free to the customer waiting dry-mouthed by the door. What could be more perfect?

Unfortunately, the term "friction-free" is the thread that, once pulled, starts the unraveling. Why?  Because beyond the method of delivery there’s really nothing friction-free about it, because even the slightest deviation from the main channel suddenly finds you backpedaling out of ugly back eddies where the subjects look like they’re in eighth grade and the forces of manipulation, coercion (and worse) are all too visible.  Because, at the end of the process, actual human beings are actually involved, many of whom don’t get a vote.  Because there’s fucking -- to speak plainly -- and then there’s fucked-up. 

But setting aside the truly insane shit – the kids and the rape porn and the crush videos, etc., best left to the cops – still leaves us with a continent’s worth of stuff catering to people who just want to get off.  Which is where the second problem with "friction-free" delivery comes up, namely, that it’s just that.

A certain amount of friction – in the bedroom as in a democracy – is a good thing, a beneficial thing. It tells us we’re alive in a world of skin and fur and opinions not our own; it forces us to reckon with others, to contend and argue and accommodate. It asks something of us. It makes us stronger. Ultimately, despite the headaches, it makes us happier, too, if only because we evolved in relation to the messy, physical world, and you don’t erase a million years of evolutionary adaptation in the space of a generation without some interesting side effects. 

So what’s the appeal of friction-free?  Simple: convenience, comfort, cost.  Physical space requires energy and money to cross; social interaction carries risk. As human beings, we’ve been courting the Big Easy – softening the hard edges of the world, conquering distance and time, developing technological prostheses that enhance our limited natural abilities – for half a millennium and more. The problem, though, is that we’ve gotten too good at it, too indiscriminate about which edges we plane smooth. Having saved ourselves a great deal of time and labor (easier, faster, smoother) we’re moving on to saving ourselves the trouble of thinking. Conquering the world, we’ve allowed ourselves to be conquered.

At times it has the feeling of a natural law: soften the hard edges, you soften yourself. It’s not hard to see where this leads. Eventually, surrounded by the accessible, the instant, and the effortless, you can barely feel your life at all – except as an occasional source of irritation that things aren’t more accessible, instant, effortless.  At which point it occurs to you that "friction-free" is a synonym for "dead."

How does all this apply to pornhub? Pretty well, I think. The irresistible lure of online porn is that it’s easy, risk-free; the sting in the tail is that not only is there no accountability, there’s no presence. We’re not involved, really. We’re an army of unmanned drones, piloting our libido through the ether, one hand firmly on the controls, risking nothing. 

And yet, we are – more than we think.   

To explain the fine print charges on your last, more-or-less friction-free transaction with Brandi Love requires a brief, impressionistic history of porn and the male imagination.

A Brief Impressionistic History of Porn and the Male Imagination

In the beginning, or near enough, there was probably shape: the soft cleft in the skin of a fruit, the curve of a root. With the object of our affections elsewhere and absence making our heart grow fonder, we saw her (or a reasonable stand-in) everywhere, and knew what to do. Eventually, to enhance our doing, representation kicked in: a finger drawing in the dust, perhaps a cave painting not like the ones usually found on the Discovery Channel.

Over time we lent substance to our musings, carving fertility goddesses with impossible breasts and mountainous buttocks (and, because it doesn’t hurt to dream, gentlemen sporting phalluses that would require a 12-foot partner to put into practice) and so forth.  Other modes and materials – pigment on canvas, stone, etc. followed.  Some of these, because they were good, became art (and blasphemous though it may sound, one can imagine the artist’s pulse ticking up a bit as he chisels the undercurve of that marble ass), the vast majority did not.

Since nothing much happens for a while, skip a few centuries to 1970,  where we find my 12-year-old, sullen self walking down the side of a country road in Tarrytown, New York, kicking at garbage on the shoulder.  When I boot a rain-soaked paper bag, magazines spill out.  I peel back the tearing, sodden pages -- how erotic that memory still is -- and there they are! Girls -- because that’s what they were then. With breasts! My heart beating  like a jackhammer, anticipatory shame reddening my face, I stuff them in my jacket, praying to whatever gods there be that my mother doesn’t find out.  She doesn’t.  The contraband is successfully transferred to my friends, Matt and Andy, who secret it in the clubhouse under the floorboards where it remains, fingered over, until it disintegrates into molecules.

So far, then, from tree roots to, I don’t know, Japanese erotic prints to Swank magazine, nothing much has changed.  Admittedly, photography has added a layer of realism, but one all-important constant holds: The object of desire is static, silent.  To animate her we have to imagine how she’d move, what she’d do, how she’d sound. 

In the 1970s she begins to move and, in a manner of speaking, speak.  Pornographic films, heretofore a specialty interest, and quite illegal, go mainstream; a last few legal hurdles are cleared, and the floodgates of the wonder-world swing open. For a short time, Linda Lovelace does what she does amusingly broken up by the censors into a hundred tiny frames (forcing some last, tired twitch from our imagination), and then, thanks to the Supreme Court, she and the requisite part of her costar, Mr. Harry Reems, cohere into a single image.  Our brain is no longer needed; in fact, given the "dialogue," it’s probably best left at home. 

There’s only one problem left to solve. To get where we want to go, we still have to get up – that is, move our corporeal body to that drugstore or newsstand to buy the mag where we may have to brave the sales girl who takes one look and knows it’s another Saturday night and we ain’t got nobody; we have to take the subway to Times Square and walk into that movie house on 43rd and 8th, then sit next to nasty old guys in raincoats, staring at a movie that’s two hours too long and doesn’t really fit the bill anyway . . . This takes dedication.

But the powers that would improve our lives never rest. The video player introduces a wider range of consumer options, at-home convenience and the miracle of the rewind button (though the actual cassette still has to be secreted away in the sock drawer), and then, before we know it, the digital revolution is upon us and the last barriers fall: from here in, to quote Don Henley, it’s everything, all the time. The options are endless, and endlessly gratifying; instantly here and – equally helpful -- instantly gone.  No need to get dressed, go out, spend money, court rejection, perform, talk, escape. Better still, we can get off pretty much anywhere, any time - no fuss, no muss.  Having a little trouble with that report today, or maybe just bored?  A few quick strokes and we’re in, glandular overload in five, four, three, two seconds. Given men’s more objective, fuel-injected mechanics (“Breasts?  Wham!), this is freebasing sex, and, as with the other, there’s nothing free about it.

Stuff yourself at the All-U-Can-Eat long enough, you forget to taste the food; after a while, you forget how. Stuff yourself on others’ fantasies, and you lose the ability to form your own.  There’s something paternalistic about the process, infantilizing: “You just sit there, baby – I’ll do everything.  No need to trouble your little head.”  Not that one, anyway.

In this context, Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “every new technology amputates the function it extends” has a particularly unfortunate ring. Still, whatever literal un-manning may be taking place (and who can fail to see the link between skyrocketing impotence rates and the expansion of on-line porn), the real violence is being done to our heads, which are, after all, connected to the rest of us. Step by step, to recall e.e.cummings, the world of the made replaces the world of the born; the machine colonizes the mind.

To experience, um, firsthand, what I’m talking about, try the following experiment – call it Independent Study No. 1. The next time your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, tap into whatever site you’d ordinarily tap into, and pay attention. Remember – this is homework. Notice how quickly your interest peaks -- tap, tap, in! – and how swiftly you disconnect once the mission’s been completed – exit, exit, now back to that report.

A graphic representation (horizontal axis for duration, vertical for pleasure), would resemble an alp. I’m not going to draw it for you – imagine it.     

We’re not done.  The next time the urge befalls, resist going the usual route and instead, go solo, all by your lonesome, in your very own, unmediated head. Call it Independent Study No. 2.  It may feel unfamiliar at first -- a bit like reading a novel, which, come to think of it, requires much the same equipment -- but persevere anyway.  If it’s difficult, boring or impossible, stop to consider how scary this is (“This is your brain on technology”), recall that line from McLuhan, then dedicate yourself to regrowing your sexuality by reclaiming your imagination. If, on the other hand, you’re able to find a nice place in the sun in which to spend a fruitful moment or two, notice how different it is from Study No. 1. Note, first, how much slower the buildup is, how your mind flutters and dips from flower to flower before it settles in for the ride, how you actually have to work that muscle a bit (still talking about your brain) before arriving at the station, just to mix a few metaphors. Notice, above all, after duly getting off at that station, how comparatively nice it is there. How you’re in no hurry to get back to work; how you want to just sit on the bench a while, and smile.

        Every technology amputates the function it extends.

          Marshall McLuhan

It’s a rhetorical question – I don’t need a show of hands:  How many men have recently "lain with a woman," as the prophets might say, and found themselves unmanned because they’d been partaking of too much porn?  Or found that, in order to man themselves, they needed to superimpose a recollected online image onto the scene like a high-school biology teacher placing a transparency of the endocrine system on the overhead projector?

It’s a fair question, maybe even -- given the unsolicited anecdotes I’ve been picking up from the men and women who are confident enough to talk about the issue – an important one.  Important because the case of online porn opens a small window onto what happens when we outsource our imaginations, when we begin to accept generic, instantly accessible fantasies in place of the ones we used to have to work for.  Extend ourselves for, as it were.

What happens is we’re screwed, that’s what happens.  Not in a good way.

To make my case, I have to digress from porn to the University of Chicago, where I once professed, and from thence to a crack house in Winslow, Arizona. Bear with me. 

Though at present I’m a sojourner in civilized life again, I taught college for 30 years, during which time, not surprisingly, I saw some changes:  office hours grew virtual, chalk was digitalized, professors (with heroic exceptions) morphed into entertainers teaching to customer satisfaction surveys filled out at the end of the term. So far, so good; nothing’s perfect. Underlying all this "progress," though, was a steady, graphable rise in student itchiness, an inability to stay the fuck still. To follow an idea, to immerse in a book -- to go deep.  I’d watch it in the library, make bets with myself: two minutes before she checks her phone? Less?  Worse, I began to notice the same thing in myself – a current of distraction, like static in the brain.

Not long after I saw a distracted colleague sweep his index finger across the cover of a physical magazine, I left the halls of almost-ivy and, having nowhere much else to go, moved with my family to a small house in Winslow, Arizona, where my desk looked out on Route 66, dust storms and a crack house.

I liked working at that desk.  Whenever the novel I was working on gave me trouble, I’d look up and study the young man with the cantaloupe-size biceps who sat on the porch across the street, tilted back on a wooden chair in front of the plywood-covered windows.  His leg jerking like he was carrying a charge, he’d sit for 20 or 30 seconds, fidgeting, scratching, then grab his phone. Sometimes he’d leap up and walk quickly back and forth on the cracked sidewalk, talking – laughing, yelling, cursing – until a customer pulled up, at which point he’d exchange goods for legal tender through the passenger-side window, walk rapidly back to the chair, shift the phone to his left hand, snatch a barbell off the floorboards and do a few quick curls. Then the phone again. 

This would go on for hours.  I’d disappear into my book for an hour or more, then reemerge and there he’d be: pacing, scratching, fiddling with the phone, pumping iron – a hundred sets of two – most sincerely strung out.

And then a desert epiphany came to me as it came to John the Baptist: subtract the barbell, ratchet down the craziness, upgrade for decency (if not necessarily IQ), and I was looking at one of my former students.  Here was the same inability to be still, to do one thing, any thing. To throw one leg over the other and watch the dust storm coming in, to be in your own skull.  The conclusion was as inescapable as it was uncomfortable: We – maybe all of us, to one degree or another -- were exhibiting signs of addiction; the drug might be legal (in fact, universally sanctioned and more or less mandatory), and the effects less toxic, but the similarities were striking.

I was wrong: The effects were just as toxic, they just manifested themselves more gradually, less visibly; instead of targeting your liver, say, this drug hit your ability to think, to contemplate your world, to use your imagination, to be alone. It let you keep your teeth and your job while it quietly paved your soul.

All of which brings us back around to online porn, something I’ve partaken of – might as well clear that right up -- as has pretty much every man capable of curiosity and possessed of a penis.  Truly, there’s something extraordinary about this virtual edifice, this million-room whorehouse catering at a keystroke to every conceivable taste and fancy, entirely free of the old-timey risks of disease, danger and social embarrassment.  A parody of the marketplace?  This is the quintessence of it.  This is what the piled centuries since Adam Smith have been building toward: a universal human need -- for most of our lives nearly as essential as shelter -- commodified, then abstracted into light, then delivered friction-free to the customer waiting dry-mouthed by the door. What could be more perfect?

Unfortunately, the term "friction-free" is the thread that, once pulled, starts the unraveling. Why?  Because beyond the method of delivery there’s really nothing friction-free about it, because even the slightest deviation from the main channel suddenly finds you backpedaling out of ugly back eddies where the subjects look like they’re in eighth grade and the forces of manipulation, coercion (and worse) are all too visible.  Because, at the end of the process, actual human beings are actually involved, many of whom don’t get a vote.  Because there’s fucking -- to speak plainly -- and then there’s fucked-up. 

But setting aside the truly insane shit – the kids and the rape porn and the crush videos, etc., best left to the cops – still leaves us with a continent’s worth of stuff catering to people who just want to get off.  Which is where the second problem with "friction-free" delivery comes up, namely, that it’s just that.

A certain amount of friction – in the bedroom as in a democracy – is a good thing, a beneficial thing. It tells us we’re alive in a world of skin and fur and opinions not our own; it forces us to reckon with others, to contend and argue and accommodate. It asks something of us. It makes us stronger. Ultimately, despite the headaches, it makes us happier, too, if only because we evolved in relation to the messy, physical world, and you don’t erase a million years of evolutionary adaptation in the space of a generation without some interesting side effects. 

So what’s the appeal of friction-free?  Simple: convenience, comfort, cost.  Physical space requires energy and money to cross; social interaction carries risk. As human beings, we’ve been courting the Big Easy – softening the hard edges of the world, conquering distance and time, developing technological prostheses that enhance our limited natural abilities – for half a millennium and more. The problem, though, is that we’ve gotten too good at it, too indiscriminate about which edges we plane smooth. Having saved ourselves a great deal of time and labor (easier, faster, smoother) we’re moving on to saving ourselves the trouble of thinking. Conquering the world, we’ve allowed ourselves to be conquered.

At times it has the feeling of a natural law: soften the hard edges, you soften yourself. It’s not hard to see where this leads. Eventually, surrounded by the accessible, the instant, and the effortless, you can barely feel your life at all – except as an occasional source of irritation that things aren’t more accessible, instant, effortless.  At which point it occurs to you that "friction-free" is a synonym for "dead."

How does all this apply to pornhub? Pretty well, I think. The irresistible lure of online porn is that it’s easy, risk-free; the sting in the tail is that not only is there no accountability, there’s no presence. We’re not involved, really. We’re an army of unmanned drones, piloting our libido through the ether, one hand firmly on the controls, risking nothing. 

And yet, we are – more than we think.   

To explain the fine print charges on your last, more-or-less friction-free transaction with Brandi Love requires a brief, impressionistic history of porn and the male imagination.

A Brief Impressionistic History of Porn and the Male Imagination

In the beginning, or near enough, there was probably shape: the soft cleft in the skin of a fruit, the curve of a root. With the object of our affections elsewhere and absence making our heart grow fonder, we saw her (or a reasonable stand-in) everywhere, and knew what to do. Eventually, to enhance our doing, representation kicked in: a finger drawing in the dust, perhaps a cave painting not like the ones usually found on the Discovery Channel.

Over time we lent substance to our musings, carving fertility goddesses with impossible breasts and mountainous buttocks (and, because it doesn’t hurt to dream, gentlemen sporting phalluses that would require a 12-foot partner to put into practice) and so forth.  Other modes and materials – pigment on canvas, stone, etc. followed.  Some of these, because they were good, became art (and blasphemous though it may sound, one can imagine the artist’s pulse ticking up a bit as he chisels the undercurve of that marble ass), the vast majority did not.

Since nothing much happens for a while, skip a few centuries to 1970,  where we find my 12-year-old, sullen self walking down the side of a country road in Tarrytown, New York, kicking at garbage on the shoulder.  When I boot a rain-soaked paper bag, magazines spill out.  I peel back the tearing, sodden pages -- how erotic that memory still is -- and there they are! Girls -- because that’s what they were then. With breasts! My heart beating  like a jackhammer, anticipatory shame reddening my face, I stuff them in my jacket, praying to whatever gods there be that my mother doesn’t find out.  She doesn’t.  The contraband is successfully transferred to my friends, Matt and Andy, who secret it in the clubhouse under the floorboards where it remains, fingered over, until it disintegrates into molecules.

So far, then, from tree roots to, I don’t know, Japanese erotic prints to Swank magazine, nothing much has changed.  Admittedly, photography has added a layer of realism, but one all-important constant holds: The object of desire is static, silent.  To animate her we have to imagine how she’d move, what she’d do, how she’d sound. 

In the 1970s she begins to move and, in a manner of speaking, speak.  Pornographic films, heretofore a specialty interest, and quite illegal, go mainstream; a last few legal hurdles are cleared, and the floodgates of the wonder-world swing open. For a short time, Linda Lovelace does what she does amusingly broken up by the censors into a hundred tiny frames (forcing some last, tired twitch from our imagination), and then, thanks to the Supreme Court, she and the requisite part of her costar, Mr. Harry Reems, cohere into a single image.  Our brain is no longer needed; in fact, given the "dialogue," it’s probably best left at home. 

There’s only one problem left to solve. To get where we want to go, we still have to get up – that is, move our corporeal body to that drugstore or newsstand to buy the mag where we may have to brave the sales girl who takes one look and knows it’s another Saturday night and we ain’t got nobody; we have to take the subway to Times Square and walk into that movie house on 43rd and 8th, then sit next to nasty old guys in raincoats, staring at a movie that’s two hours too long and doesn’t really fit the bill anyway . . . This takes dedication.

But the powers that would improve our lives never rest. The video player introduces a wider range of consumer options, at-home convenience and the miracle of the rewind button (though the actual cassette still has to be secreted away in the sock drawer), and then, before we know it, the digital revolution is upon us and the last barriers fall: from here in, to quote Don Henley, it’s everything, all the time. The options are endless, and endlessly gratifying; instantly here and – equally helpful -- instantly gone.  No need to get dressed, go out, spend money, court rejection, perform, talk, escape. Better still, we can get off pretty much anywhere, any time - no fuss, no muss.  Having a little trouble with that report today, or maybe just bored?  A few quick strokes and we’re in, glandular overload in five, four, three, two seconds. Given men’s more objective, fuel-injected mechanics (“Breasts?  Wham!), this is freebasing sex, and, as with the other, there’s nothing free about it.

Stuff yourself at the All-U-Can-Eat long enough, you forget to taste the food; after a while, you forget how. Stuff yourself on others’ fantasies, and you lose the ability to form your own.  There’s something paternalistic about the process, infantilizing: “You just sit there, baby – I’ll do everything.  No need to trouble your little head.”  Not that one, anyway.

In this context, Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “every new technology amputates the function it extends” has a particularly unfortunate ring. Still, whatever literal un-manning may be taking place (and who can fail to see the link between skyrocketing impotence rates and the expansion of on-line porn), the real violence is being done to our heads, which are, after all, connected to the rest of us. Step by step, to recall e.e.cummings, the world of the made replaces the world of the born; the machine colonizes the mind.

To experience, um, firsthand, what I’m talking about, try the following experiment – call it Independent Study No. 1. The next time your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, tap into whatever site you’d ordinarily tap into, and pay attention. Remember – this is homework. Notice how quickly your interest peaks -- tap, tap, in! – and how swiftly you disconnect once the mission’s been completed – exit, exit, now back to that report.

A graphic representation (horizontal axis for duration, vertical for pleasure), would resemble an alp. I’m not going to draw it for you – imagine it.     

We’re not done.  The next time the urge befalls, resist going the usual route and instead, go solo, all by your lonesome, in your very own, unmediated head. Call it Independent Study No. 2.  It may feel unfamiliar at first -- a bit like reading a novel, which, come to think of it, requires much the same equipment -- but persevere anyway.  If it’s difficult, boring or impossible, stop to consider how scary this is (“This is your brain on technology”), recall that line from McLuhan, then dedicate yourself to regrowing your sexuality by reclaiming your imagination. If, on the other hand, you’re able to find a nice place in the sun in which to spend a fruitful moment or two, notice how different it is from Study No. 1. Note, first, how much slower the buildup is, how your mind flutters and dips from flower to flower before it settles in for the ride, how you actually have to work that muscle a bit (still talking about your brain) before arriving at the station, just to mix a few metaphors. Notice, above all, after duly getting off at that station, how comparatively nice it is there. How you’re in no hurry to get back to work; how you want to just sit on the bench a while, and smile.

        Every technology amputates the function it extends.

          Marshall McLuhan

It’s a rhetorical question – I don’t need a show of hands:  How many men have recently "lain with a woman," as the prophets might say, and found themselves unmanned because they’d been partaking of too much porn?  Or found that, in order to man themselves, they needed to superimpose a recollected online image onto the scene like a high-school biology teacher placing a transparency of the endocrine system on the overhead projector?

It’s a fair question, maybe even -- given the unsolicited anecdotes I’ve been picking up from the men and women who are confident enough to talk about the issue – an important one.  Important because the case of online porn opens a small window onto what happens when we outsource our imaginations, when we begin to accept generic, instantly accessible fantasies in place of the ones we used to have to work for.  Extend ourselves for, as it were.

What happens is we’re screwed, that’s what happens.  Not in a good way.

To make my case, I have to digress from porn to the University of Chicago, where I once professed, and from thence to a crack house in Winslow, Arizona. Bear with me. 

Though at present I’m a sojourner in civilized life again, I taught college for 30 years, during which time, not surprisingly, I saw some changes:  office hours grew virtual, chalk was digitalized, professors (with heroic exceptions) morphed into entertainers teaching to customer satisfaction surveys filled out at the end of the term. So far, so good; nothing’s perfect. Underlying all this "progress," though, was a steady, graphable rise in student itchiness, an inability to stay the fuck still. To follow an idea, to immerse in a book -- to go deep.  I’d watch it in the library, make bets with myself: two minutes before she checks her phone? Less?  Worse, I began to notice the same thing in myself – a current of distraction, like static in the brain.

Not long after I saw a distracted colleague sweep his index finger across the cover of a physical magazine, I left the halls of almost-ivy and, having nowhere much else to go, moved with my family to a small house in Winslow, Arizona, where my desk looked out on Route 66, dust storms and a crack house.

I liked working at that desk.  Whenever the novel I was working on gave me trouble, I’d look up and study the young man with the cantaloupe-size biceps who sat on the porch across the street, tilted back on a wooden chair in front of the plywood-covered windows.  His leg jerking like he was carrying a charge, he’d sit for 20 or 30 seconds, fidgeting, scratching, then grab his phone. Sometimes he’d leap up and walk quickly back and forth on the cracked sidewalk, talking – laughing, yelling, cursing – until a customer pulled up, at which point he’d exchange goods for legal tender through the passenger-side window, walk rapidly back to the chair, shift the phone to his left hand, snatch a barbell off the floorboards and do a few quick curls. Then the phone again. 

This would go on for hours.  I’d disappear into my book for an hour or more, then reemerge and there he’d be: pacing, scratching, fiddling with the phone, pumping iron – a hundred sets of two – most sincerely strung out.

And then a desert epiphany came to me as it came to John the Baptist: subtract the barbell, ratchet down the craziness, upgrade for decency (if not necessarily IQ), and I was looking at one of my former students.  Here was the same inability to be still, to do one thing, any thing. To throw one leg over the other and watch the dust storm coming in, to be in your own skull.  The conclusion was as inescapable as it was uncomfortable: We – maybe all of us, to one degree or another -- were exhibiting signs of addiction; the drug might be legal (in fact, universally sanctioned and more or less mandatory), and the effects less toxic, but the similarities were striking.

I was wrong: The effects were just as toxic, they just manifested themselves more gradually, less visibly; instead of targeting your liver, say, this drug hit your ability to think, to contemplate your world, to use your imagination, to be alone. It let you keep your teeth and your job while it quietly paved your soul.

All of which brings us back around to online porn, something I’ve partaken of – might as well clear that right up -- as has pretty much every man capable of curiosity and possessed of a penis.  Truly, there’s something extraordinary about this virtual edifice, this million-room whorehouse catering at a keystroke to every conceivable taste and fancy, entirely free of the old-timey risks of disease, danger and social embarrassment.  A parody of the marketplace?  This is the quintessence of it.  This is what the piled centuries since Adam Smith have been building toward: a universal human need -- for most of our lives nearly as essential as shelter -- commodified, then abstracted into light, then delivered friction-free to the customer waiting dry-mouthed by the door. What could be more perfect?

Unfortunately, the term "friction-free" is the thread that, once pulled, starts the unraveling. Why?  Because beyond the method of delivery there’s really nothing friction-free about it, because even the slightest deviation from the main channel suddenly finds you backpedaling out of ugly back eddies where the subjects look like they’re in eighth grade and the forces of manipulation, coercion (and worse) are all too visible.  Because, at the end of the process, actual human beings are actually involved, many of whom don’t get a vote.  Because there’s fucking -- to speak plainly -- and then there’s fucked-up. 

But setting aside the truly insane shit – the kids and the rape porn and the crush videos, etc., best left to the cops – still leaves us with a continent’s worth of stuff catering to people who just want to get off.  Which is where the second problem with "friction-free" delivery comes up, namely, that it’s just that.

A certain amount of friction – in the bedroom as in a democracy – is a good thing, a beneficial thing. It tells us we’re alive in a world of skin and fur and opinions not our own; it forces us to reckon with others, to contend and argue and accommodate. It asks something of us. It makes us stronger. Ultimately, despite the headaches, it makes us happier, too, if only because we evolved in relation to the messy, physical world, and you don’t erase a million years of evolutionary adaptation in the space of a generation without some interesting side effects. 

So what’s the appeal of friction-free?  Simple: convenience, comfort, cost.  Physical space requires energy and money to cross; social interaction carries risk. As human beings, we’ve been courting the Big Easy – softening the hard edges of the world, conquering distance and time, developing technological prostheses that enhance our limited natural abilities – for half a millennium and more. The problem, though, is that we’ve gotten too good at it, too indiscriminate about which edges we plane smooth. Having saved ourselves a great deal of time and labor (easier, faster, smoother) we’re moving on to saving ourselves the trouble of thinking. Conquering the world, we’ve allowed ourselves to be conquered.

At times it has the feeling of a natural law: soften the hard edges, you soften yourself. It’s not hard to see where this leads. Eventually, surrounded by the accessible, the instant, and the effortless, you can barely feel your life at all – except as an occasional source of irritation that things aren’t more accessible, instant, effortless.  At which point it occurs to you that "friction-free" is a synonym for "dead."

How does all this apply to pornhub? Pretty well, I think. The irresistible lure of online porn is that it’s easy, risk-free; the sting in the tail is that not only is there no accountability, there’s no presence. We’re not involved, really. We’re an army of unmanned drones, piloting our libido through the ether, one hand firmly on the controls, risking nothing. 

And yet, we are – more than we think.   

To explain the fine print charges on your last, more-or-less friction-free transaction with Brandi Love requires a brief, impressionistic history of porn and the male imagination.

A Brief Impressionistic History of Porn and the Male Imagination

In the beginning, or near enough, there was probably shape: the soft cleft in the skin of a fruit, the curve of a root. With the object of our affections elsewhere and absence making our heart grow fonder, we saw her (or a reasonable stand-in) everywhere, and knew what to do. Eventually, to enhance our doing, representation kicked in: a finger drawing in the dust, perhaps a cave painting not like the ones usually found on the Discovery Channel.

Over time we lent substance to our musings, carving fertility goddesses with impossible breasts and mountainous buttocks (and, because it doesn’t hurt to dream, gentlemen sporting phalluses that would require a 12-foot partner to put into practice) and so forth.  Other modes and materials – pigment on canvas, stone, etc. followed.  Some of these, because they were good, became art (and blasphemous though it may sound, one can imagine the artist’s pulse ticking up a bit as he chisels the undercurve of that marble ass), the vast majority did not.

Since nothing much happens for a while, skip a few centuries to 1970,  where we find my 12-year-old, sullen self walking down the side of a country road in Tarrytown, New York, kicking at garbage on the shoulder.  When I boot a rain-soaked paper bag, magazines spill out.  I peel back the tearing, sodden pages -- how erotic that memory still is -- and there they are! Girls -- because that’s what they were then. With breasts! My heart beating  like a jackhammer, anticipatory shame reddening my face, I stuff them in my jacket, praying to whatever gods there be that my mother doesn’t find out.  She doesn’t.  The contraband is successfully transferred to my friends, Matt and Andy, who secret it in the clubhouse under the floorboards where it remains, fingered over, until it disintegrates into molecules.

So far, then, from tree roots to, I don’t know, Japanese erotic prints to Swank magazine, nothing much has changed.  Admittedly, photography has added a layer of realism, but one all-important constant holds: The object of desire is static, silent.  To animate her we have to imagine how she’d move, what she’d do, how she’d sound. 

In the 1970s she begins to move and, in a manner of speaking, speak.  Pornographic films, heretofore a specialty interest, and quite illegal, go mainstream; a last few legal hurdles are cleared, and the floodgates of the wonder-world swing open. For a short time, Linda Lovelace does what she does amusingly broken up by the censors into a hundred tiny frames (forcing some last, tired twitch from our imagination), and then, thanks to the Supreme Court, she and the requisite part of her costar, Mr. Harry Reems, cohere into a single image.  Our brain is no longer needed; in fact, given the "dialogue," it’s probably best left at home. 

There’s only one problem left to solve. To get where we want to go, we still have to get up – that is, move our corporeal body to that drugstore or newsstand to buy the mag where we may have to brave the sales girl who takes one look and knows it’s another Saturday night and we ain’t got nobody; we have to take the subway to Times Square and walk into that movie house on 43rd and 8th, then sit next to nasty old guys in raincoats, staring at a movie that’s two hours too long and doesn’t really fit the bill anyway . . . This takes dedication.

But the powers that would improve our lives never rest. The video player introduces a wider range of consumer options, at-home convenience and the miracle of the rewind button (though the actual cassette still has to be secreted away in the sock drawer), and then, before we know it, the digital revolution is upon us and the last barriers fall: from here in, to quote Don Henley, it’s everything, all the time. The options are endless, and endlessly gratifying; instantly here and – equally helpful -- instantly gone.  No need to get dressed, go out, spend money, court rejection, perform, talk, escape. Better still, we can get off pretty much anywhere, any time - no fuss, no muss.  Having a little trouble with that report today, or maybe just bored?  A few quick strokes and we’re in, glandular overload in five, four, three, two seconds. Given men’s more objective, fuel-injected mechanics (“Breasts?  Wham!), this is freebasing sex, and, as with the other, there’s nothing free about it.

Stuff yourself at the All-U-Can-Eat long enough, you forget to taste the food; after a while, you forget how. Stuff yourself on others’ fantasies, and you lose the ability to form your own.  There’s something paternalistic about the process, infantilizing: “You just sit there, baby – I’ll do everything.  No need to trouble your little head.”  Not that one, anyway.

In this context, Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “every new technology amputates the function it extends” has a particularly unfortunate ring. Still, whatever literal un-manning may be taking place (and who can fail to see the link between skyrocketing impotence rates and the expansion of on-line porn), the real violence is being done to our heads, which are, after all, connected to the rest of us. Step by step, to recall e.e.cummings, the world of the made replaces the world of the born; the machine colonizes the mind.

To experience, um, firsthand, what I’m talking about, try the following experiment – call it Independent Study No. 1. The next time your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, tap into whatever site you’d ordinarily tap into, and pay attention. Remember – this is homework. Notice how quickly your interest peaks -- tap, tap, in! – and how swiftly you disconnect once the mission’s been completed – exit, exit, now back to that report.

A graphic representation (horizontal axis for duration, vertical for pleasure), would resemble an alp. I’m not going to draw it for you – imagine it.     

We’re not done.  The next time the urge befalls, resist going the usual route and instead, go solo, all by your lonesome, in your very own, unmediated head. Call it Independent Study No. 2.  It may feel unfamiliar at first -- a bit like reading a novel, which, come to think of it, requires much the same equipment -- but persevere anyway.  If it’s difficult, boring or impossible, stop to consider how scary this is (“This is your brain on technology”), recall that line from McLuhan, then dedicate yourself to regrowing your sexuality by reclaiming your imagination. If, on the other hand, you’re able to find a nice place in the sun in which to spend a fruitful moment or two, notice how different it is from Study No. 1. Note, first, how much slower the buildup is, how your mind flutters and dips from flower to flower before it settles in for the ride, how you actually have to work that muscle a bit (still talking about your brain) before arriving at the station, just to mix a few metaphors. Notice, above all, after duly getting off at that station, how comparatively nice it is there. How you’re in no hurry to get back to work; how you want to just sit on the bench a while, and smile.

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Bernie’s not “too old” to be president: Voters need to stop obsessing over Sanders’ age

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A brother’s mourning clothes: I wanted a uniform of grief

Grieving Victorians in upper-middle-class society once wore mourning clothes as a public demonstration of their private losses. The rules on what to wear, and for how long, depended on the relationship of the griever to the grieved. A spouse or a sibling rated higher than a third cousin or a workplace “connection.” This determination was so complex that popular etiquette guides such as “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management” contained lengthy charts that the grief-stricken might consult.

These rules were primarily for women of the age. Men got off light, with black gloves, cravats and bands on their hats and arms. But a woman who was grieving, let’s say, a departed husband, would begin in “full mourning,” meaning that for “1 year and 1 day” she would wear “bombazine covered with crepe; widow’s cap, lawn cuffs, collars.”

All black, all the time, naturally. Letters were sent on special black-bordered paper and envelopes sealed with black wax.

After the allotted 366 days, she’d move into “second mourning,” a six-month phase that involved slightly less crepe. That would be followed by six more months of “ordinary mourning,” reintroducing fabrics of silk and wool. During the final months, jewelry and ribbons again became permissible, as a segue into the ultimate six months of “half mourning,” when colors such as gray, lavender and mauve would gradually re-enter the wardrobe.

I was fond of showing this chart to my literature students when we reached the Victorian section of the syllabus, hoping to impress upon them the inflexible, even oppressive, social order to which a 6-year-old girl like Alice in "Alice in Wonderland" would soon be expected to conform, as well as the commonplace nature of death and grieving in a society where illness and wars took people, especially the young, at a regular clip.

But after my younger sister, Jennifer, died from cancer at the age of 22, I came to see things differently.

Staring at the chart, afterward, I felt jealous. What a relief it would be, I imagined, to simply crack open “Mrs. Beeton’s” and there, just past the proper instructions for sending a thank you letter, find a chart explaining that, for the loss of a sibling, I should spend four to six months in full mourning clothes, with crepe for exactly half of that time, before skipping over the second mourning and moving right into ordinary mourning (half crepe, half black), followed by a month of half mourning when I’d gradually reintroduce color. After that, presumably, I’d be fine.

Not only might it give some outline to my pangs of overwhelming grief, but it would also clue in everyone around me to what was going on. If I blew past someone in the street in a rage, or broke down weeping on the F Train, my fellow New Yorkers would be able to look over and say, “Oh, he’s in mourning. Let’s all give him some space.” All right, they’d probably jostle me on the train as usual, but at least they’d know.

The next time I taught my lesson about Alice’s crepe-filled future, I came home and hung my dark blue jacket in the closet. Inside I saw only more blues, deep grays and, of course, black.

Each day I’d wear one of these jackets to work, always with dark jeans, black socks and black shoes. My collared shirts also ranged from blue to gray to black. I rarely went out without dark sunglasses and a pair of big, black noise-canceling headphones.

Maybe I had been in mourning clothes all along, I just hadn’t known it. Neither had anyone else.

Fashion and clothes had always been my sister Jennifer’s domain. In high school she read Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and unfailingly dressed on trend. Everything I owned came from Hot Topic; most of it was black. My friends were all on the theater’s technical crew; our main goal both backstage and in school was to avoid being seen.

Jenn would take me to the mall and try to interest me in bright, colorful Gap and Tommy Hilfiger options, but I fought her efforts to get me into preppy clothes, explaining that my grungy look was part of being a bohemian, counterculture, artsy type. My sister would beg me to, once in my life, spend more than $6 on a shirt. She thought that cargo pants were the devil’s work; I once flipped out when I saw her buy a shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves that was more expensive than the same design in full-length. “You’re literally paying more for less!” I’d yelled.

Though she was three years younger, we were around the same height and weighed about the same. In her case, the result of 20 hours a week of ballet practice and in mine the result of a coffee addiction I hoped also seemed writerly.

As far back as I can remember, Jenn refused to accept any kind of subordination to birth order. She acted older, bolder and more assertive, pushing all limits that anyone dared impose. In one classic Jansma home-movie moment, I am around 5, poised but frozen on the diving board. Jenn, no more than 2, comes up behind me in the frame and calmly pushes me in. That, more or less, was the nature of our relationship. Sometimes it drove me crazy, but most of the time I was, at least secretly, glad for the push.

Before I left for college, Jenn insisted I go to New York City with her to shop at Urban Outfitters. I went, but defiantly purchased more cargo pants. Then, while she took a ballet class uptown, I ducked into Barnes & Noble and blew my birthday money on books that I hoped would telegraph my depth to future classmates: "Nine Stories," "On the Road," "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Mrs. Dalloway," "Love in the Time of Cholera"—none of which I would actually read for years, but which merely sat on my shelf, posturing. Naturally I bought them all in hardcover, though there were cheaper paperbacks right there, immune to the irony at my own version of three-quarter-length sleeves.

I considered myself the smart one, but her grades were better than mine and she’d read all of Jane Austen for fun. (To this day I have yet to finish a single one of her novels.) She loved classic romance films, especially any with Audrey Hepburn or Cary Grant. I liked "The X-Files." She knew all kinds of things about classical music after years of pas de deux that took her all over the Tristate area. These days I’ll sometimes put on Strauss or Chopin while I’m writing and suddenly recognize a symphony or prelude I once heard while watching her soar across a stage. I was really into Aerosmith that year.

Jenn and I rarely got along, except while watching reruns of "90210." Maybe there was something about Brandon and Brenda that appealed to us, the idea that siblings could be best friends making it through their crazy adolescence together.

Jenn left home at the age of 14, a year after I had moved out for college, and went to Philadelphia by herself to attend an intensive dance program and to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer. There she lived in a one-bedroom apartment with another dancer, eventually completing high school online.

While I finally learned how to go into a Banana Republic by myself, she toured the country and, later, with the Miami City Ballet, the world. Meanwhile, she took online classes through Penn State, determined to be a lawyer someday, since most dance careers ended by age 30. She had no way of knowing she’d never get close to that age.

At age 20, Jenn was dancing professionally in North Carolina, touring in Europe and China. She struggled with her weight, a common source of stress in the dance world, but unlike many of her friends, who’d use nicotine to tamp down their appetites, she was never much of a smoker. So when she first noticed a painful sore on her tongue no one suspected anything too sinister.

Dentists gave her numbing sprays and mouth guards. Used to working through pain, as anyone who ever saw her feet would know, she ignored the problem for a year until it became unbearable.

Finally someone thought it might be a good idea to do a biopsy, and the result came back positive for squamous-cell carcinoma.

More than a few times we were told that 21-year-old women who don’t smoke or chew tobacco don’t get oral cancer. But there it was. A tumor. In her year of treatment, we’d begin to hear more about cases popping up in young women, possibly connected to HPV, though no one seemed sure and by then it hardly mattered.

While undergoing her initial treatments in North Carolina, Jenn’s top priority was to get back to ballet. That summer I stayed with her for a week, shuttling her to the hospital and setting her up on the couch after we got home. Mostly, she felt fine. We went antiquing, hitting up secondhand shops and flea markets around Raleigh, looking for furniture with the fashionable “vintage” look. When we found things that looked too clean and polished, I was tasked with distressing them. One day, while she slept off a radiation treatment indoors, I stood out on the hot porch for hours, brushing a dresser with gold paint, and then a coat of white, before going at it with sandpaper to give it the proper aesthetic.

By the end of the summer the treatments were done and things were looking up. She was just getting back to dancing when they found a new lump down at the base of her throat. It had already swelled to the size of a golf ball by the time she came to New York, where I lived, to have it removed.

Jenn soon moved into the one-bedroom apartment I shared with Leah, my then-fiancée, and began a fresh course of treatment at Sloan-Kettering. There she had excellent doctors, who tried all manner of things to force the cancer into retreat. We slept on the couch so that she could have the bedroom, and she went to dance classes between doses of radiation. It was the fall of the Hollywood writers’ strike, so we watched a lot of reruns of "The Hills" and "America’s Next Top Model." Brandon and Brenda couldn’t have done better. We grew closer than we’d ever been.

The treatments had no end of side effects. The radiation left burns in her mouth that made swallowing impossible. Eventually she lost so much weight that her doctors implanted a tube directly into her stomach, which allowed us to feed her calorie-rich milkshakes from an IV bag. The walls of our apartment were soon covered in little stick-on Command hooks. We worked out a color-coded schedule to track the timings of the ever-multiplying medications Jenn needed to fight off nausea, infections, pain and more pain. But she kept losing weight; at one point she told me that her lifelong struggle to stay thin enough for ballet now seemed like a cruel joke.

Jenn stayed with Leah and me for about five months, and our parents flew up every other week. Each time we’d begun to believe we’d gotten ahead of it, new tumors popped up somewhere else. The cancer moved from her head and neck to her lymph nodes, out to her arms and her legs. Barely a year after the initial diagnosis, it was over. There with her right up to the end, I felt more relieved than anything else, exhausted and hating to see her frustrated, weak, disabled—hardly herself at all. Sadness crept in later, building up over months and then years.

After the funeral I flew home and went back to work. I finished my novel and threw it out. Leah and I continued to plan our wedding. Life continued, with me just grieving in my street clothes. On the sidewalk, the bus, the train, I’d be feeling lost, knowing that to anyone else around me I seemed like just another person, dodging eye contact, pretending not to notice that someone nearby wanted my seat.

My grief manifested in different ways. I once had to stop myself from yanking a cigarette from the lips of a student outside my building. Ten minutes later I wanted to strangle an idiot at the coffee shop obsessing over the fat content of his muffin. What mattered, and what didn’t? What did I know?

Friends would talk about job or relationship problems as if they were catastrophic. Sometimes I’d want to scream at them, but often would just find excuses to get away. I felt distant from the rest of my family, whose grieving seemed to take roads that I couldn’t find my own way down. I was overwhelmed by the idea that for the first time in my life I had truly failed at something that couldn’t be simply tried over.

I wanted a uniform of grief to wear, a black band for my hat, though I’d have settled for a heavy crepe bombazine. Something that would remind everyone else what had happened. I was glad of my ability to fake it. I could slip through the crowd without having to confront this thing stuck in my heart.

For a long time I resisted any urge to write about what had happened. Fiction makes sense of things, gives events purpose. I didn’t want any sense or purpose assigned to my sister’s death.

Four more years passed and I felt worse. I struggled to find words. Then I became a father and started seeing a therapist. At some point I realized I wanted to write something that mapped different routes through the chaos that comes after loss.

I like to think that I was lucky that Jenn was always trying to take over as older sibling, that she became the grown person she did while she had time. I like to think that, since she passed, I’ve figured out how to be a lot of the better things she was convinced I could be. I still haven’t read Austen, but I have made my way through a lot of those hardcovers that I bought when we first went to the city and began to explore what it could mean to be brother and sister on our own terms.

Now I look up in my closet and see stripes and patterns. Teals and royal purples and sunny yellows I’d never have worn, even before mourning. Colors like she’d hoped I’d wear, once upon a time.

Grieving Victorians in upper-middle-class society once wore mourning clothes as a public demonstration of their private losses. The rules on what to wear, and for how long, depended on the relationship of the griever to the grieved. A spouse or a sibling rated higher than a third cousin or a workplace “connection.” This determination was so complex that popular etiquette guides such as “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management” contained lengthy charts that the grief-stricken might consult.

These rules were primarily for women of the age. Men got off light, with black gloves, cravats and bands on their hats and arms. But a woman who was grieving, let’s say, a departed husband, would begin in “full mourning,” meaning that for “1 year and 1 day” she would wear “bombazine covered with crepe; widow’s cap, lawn cuffs, collars.”

All black, all the time, naturally. Letters were sent on special black-bordered paper and envelopes sealed with black wax.

After the allotted 366 days, she’d move into “second mourning,” a six-month phase that involved slightly less crepe. That would be followed by six more months of “ordinary mourning,” reintroducing fabrics of silk and wool. During the final months, jewelry and ribbons again became permissible, as a segue into the ultimate six months of “half mourning,” when colors such as gray, lavender and mauve would gradually re-enter the wardrobe.

I was fond of showing this chart to my literature students when we reached the Victorian section of the syllabus, hoping to impress upon them the inflexible, even oppressive, social order to which a 6-year-old girl like Alice in "Alice in Wonderland" would soon be expected to conform, as well as the commonplace nature of death and grieving in a society where illness and wars took people, especially the young, at a regular clip.

But after my younger sister, Jennifer, died from cancer at the age of 22, I came to see things differently.

Staring at the chart, afterward, I felt jealous. What a relief it would be, I imagined, to simply crack open “Mrs. Beeton’s” and there, just past the proper instructions for sending a thank you letter, find a chart explaining that, for the loss of a sibling, I should spend four to six months in full mourning clothes, with crepe for exactly half of that time, before skipping over the second mourning and moving right into ordinary mourning (half crepe, half black), followed by a month of half mourning when I’d gradually reintroduce color. After that, presumably, I’d be fine.

Not only might it give some outline to my pangs of overwhelming grief, but it would also clue in everyone around me to what was going on. If I blew past someone in the street in a rage, or broke down weeping on the F Train, my fellow New Yorkers would be able to look over and say, “Oh, he’s in mourning. Let’s all give him some space.” All right, they’d probably jostle me on the train as usual, but at least they’d know.

The next time I taught my lesson about Alice’s crepe-filled future, I came home and hung my dark blue jacket in the closet. Inside I saw only more blues, deep grays and, of course, black.

Each day I’d wear one of these jackets to work, always with dark jeans, black socks and black shoes. My collared shirts also ranged from blue to gray to black. I rarely went out without dark sunglasses and a pair of big, black noise-canceling headphones.

Maybe I had been in mourning clothes all along, I just hadn’t known it. Neither had anyone else.

Fashion and clothes had always been my sister Jennifer’s domain. In high school she read Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and unfailingly dressed on trend. Everything I owned came from Hot Topic; most of it was black. My friends were all on the theater’s technical crew; our main goal both backstage and in school was to avoid being seen.

Jenn would take me to the mall and try to interest me in bright, colorful Gap and Tommy Hilfiger options, but I fought her efforts to get me into preppy clothes, explaining that my grungy look was part of being a bohemian, counterculture, artsy type. My sister would beg me to, once in my life, spend more than $6 on a shirt. She thought that cargo pants were the devil’s work; I once flipped out when I saw her buy a shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves that was more expensive than the same design in full-length. “You’re literally paying more for less!” I’d yelled.

Though she was three years younger, we were around the same height and weighed about the same. In her case, the result of 20 hours a week of ballet practice and in mine the result of a coffee addiction I hoped also seemed writerly.

As far back as I can remember, Jenn refused to accept any kind of subordination to birth order. She acted older, bolder and more assertive, pushing all limits that anyone dared impose. In one classic Jansma home-movie moment, I am around 5, poised but frozen on the diving board. Jenn, no more than 2, comes up behind me in the frame and calmly pushes me in. That, more or less, was the nature of our relationship. Sometimes it drove me crazy, but most of the time I was, at least secretly, glad for the push.

Before I left for college, Jenn insisted I go to New York City with her to shop at Urban Outfitters. I went, but defiantly purchased more cargo pants. Then, while she took a ballet class uptown, I ducked into Barnes & Noble and blew my birthday money on books that I hoped would telegraph my depth to future classmates: "Nine Stories," "On the Road," "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Mrs. Dalloway," "Love in the Time of Cholera"—none of which I would actually read for years, but which merely sat on my shelf, posturing. Naturally I bought them all in hardcover, though there were cheaper paperbacks right there, immune to the irony at my own version of three-quarter-length sleeves.

I considered myself the smart one, but her grades were better than mine and she’d read all of Jane Austen for fun. (To this day I have yet to finish a single one of her novels.) She loved classic romance films, especially any with Audrey Hepburn or Cary Grant. I liked "The X-Files." She knew all kinds of things about classical music after years of pas de deux that took her all over the Tristate area. These days I’ll sometimes put on Strauss or Chopin while I’m writing and suddenly recognize a symphony or prelude I once heard while watching her soar across a stage. I was really into Aerosmith that year.

Jenn and I rarely got along, except while watching reruns of "90210." Maybe there was something about Brandon and Brenda that appealed to us, the idea that siblings could be best friends making it through their crazy adolescence together.

Jenn left home at the age of 14, a year after I had moved out for college, and went to Philadelphia by herself to attend an intensive dance program and to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer. There she lived in a one-bedroom apartment with another dancer, eventually completing high school online.

While I finally learned how to go into a Banana Republic by myself, she toured the country and, later, with the Miami City Ballet, the world. Meanwhile, she took online classes through Penn State, determined to be a lawyer someday, since most dance careers ended by age 30. She had no way of knowing she’d never get close to that age.

At age 20, Jenn was dancing professionally in North Carolina, touring in Europe and China. She struggled with her weight, a common source of stress in the dance world, but unlike many of her friends, who’d use nicotine to tamp down their appetites, she was never much of a smoker. So when she first noticed a painful sore on her tongue no one suspected anything too sinister.

Dentists gave her numbing sprays and mouth guards. Used to working through pain, as anyone who ever saw her feet would know, she ignored the problem for a year until it became unbearable.

Finally someone thought it might be a good idea to do a biopsy, and the result came back positive for squamous-cell carcinoma.

More than a few times we were told that 21-year-old women who don’t smoke or chew tobacco don’t get oral cancer. But there it was. A tumor. In her year of treatment, we’d begin to hear more about cases popping up in young women, possibly connected to HPV, though no one seemed sure and by then it hardly mattered.

While undergoing her initial treatments in North Carolina, Jenn’s top priority was to get back to ballet. That summer I stayed with her for a week, shuttling her to the hospital and setting her up on the couch after we got home. Mostly, she felt fine. We went antiquing, hitting up secondhand shops and flea markets around Raleigh, looking for furniture with the fashionable “vintage” look. When we found things that looked too clean and polished, I was tasked with distressing them. One day, while she slept off a radiation treatment indoors, I stood out on the hot porch for hours, brushing a dresser with gold paint, and then a coat of white, before going at it with sandpaper to give it the proper aesthetic.

By the end of the summer the treatments were done and things were looking up. She was just getting back to dancing when they found a new lump down at the base of her throat. It had already swelled to the size of a golf ball by the time she came to New York, where I lived, to have it removed.

Jenn soon moved into the one-bedroom apartment I shared with Leah, my then-fiancée, and began a fresh course of treatment at Sloan-Kettering. There she had excellent doctors, who tried all manner of things to force the cancer into retreat. We slept on the couch so that she could have the bedroom, and she went to dance classes between doses of radiation. It was the fall of the Hollywood writers’ strike, so we watched a lot of reruns of "The Hills" and "America’s Next Top Model." Brandon and Brenda couldn’t have done better. We grew closer than we’d ever been.

The treatments had no end of side effects. The radiation left burns in her mouth that made swallowing impossible. Eventually she lost so much weight that her doctors implanted a tube directly into her stomach, which allowed us to feed her calorie-rich milkshakes from an IV bag. The walls of our apartment were soon covered in little stick-on Command hooks. We worked out a color-coded schedule to track the timings of the ever-multiplying medications Jenn needed to fight off nausea, infections, pain and more pain. But she kept losing weight; at one point she told me that her lifelong struggle to stay thin enough for ballet now seemed like a cruel joke.

Jenn stayed with Leah and me for about five months, and our parents flew up every other week. Each time we’d begun to believe we’d gotten ahead of it, new tumors popped up somewhere else. The cancer moved from her head and neck to her lymph nodes, out to her arms and her legs. Barely a year after the initial diagnosis, it was over. There with her right up to the end, I felt more relieved than anything else, exhausted and hating to see her frustrated, weak, disabled—hardly herself at all. Sadness crept in later, building up over months and then years.

After the funeral I flew home and went back to work. I finished my novel and threw it out. Leah and I continued to plan our wedding. Life continued, with me just grieving in my street clothes. On the sidewalk, the bus, the train, I’d be feeling lost, knowing that to anyone else around me I seemed like just another person, dodging eye contact, pretending not to notice that someone nearby wanted my seat.

My grief manifested in different ways. I once had to stop myself from yanking a cigarette from the lips of a student outside my building. Ten minutes later I wanted to strangle an idiot at the coffee shop obsessing over the fat content of his muffin. What mattered, and what didn’t? What did I know?

Friends would talk about job or relationship problems as if they were catastrophic. Sometimes I’d want to scream at them, but often would just find excuses to get away. I felt distant from the rest of my family, whose grieving seemed to take roads that I couldn’t find my own way down. I was overwhelmed by the idea that for the first time in my life I had truly failed at something that couldn’t be simply tried over.

I wanted a uniform of grief to wear, a black band for my hat, though I’d have settled for a heavy crepe bombazine. Something that would remind everyone else what had happened. I was glad of my ability to fake it. I could slip through the crowd without having to confront this thing stuck in my heart.

For a long time I resisted any urge to write about what had happened. Fiction makes sense of things, gives events purpose. I didn’t want any sense or purpose assigned to my sister’s death.

Four more years passed and I felt worse. I struggled to find words. Then I became a father and started seeing a therapist. At some point I realized I wanted to write something that mapped different routes through the chaos that comes after loss.

I like to think that I was lucky that Jenn was always trying to take over as older sibling, that she became the grown person she did while she had time. I like to think that, since she passed, I’ve figured out how to be a lot of the better things she was convinced I could be. I still haven’t read Austen, but I have made my way through a lot of those hardcovers that I bought when we first went to the city and began to explore what it could mean to be brother and sister on our own terms.

Now I look up in my closet and see stripes and patterns. Teals and royal purples and sunny yellows I’d never have worn, even before mourning. Colors like she’d hoped I’d wear, once upon a time.

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Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit”: Inside the Jim Crow childhood of the High Priestess of Soul

When “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Avatar” star Zoe Saldana was cast as Nina Simone in the yet to be released biopic “Nina,” much was made of the fact that Saldana’s skin was darkened for the role. Simone’s daughter told the New York Times, “My mother was raised at a time when she was told her nose was too wide, her skin was too dark … Appearance-wise this is not the best choice.” There’s an important intersection between Nina Simone’s dark skin color and her political awakening, underscored by her 1965 rendition of the anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit.” Simone’s version of the classic song is especially powerful given her own childhood in the Jim Crow South, where violence was a part of the landscape. “Strange Fruit” has always been Billie Holiday’s song. In 1939 Holiday took Abel Meeropol’s song and transformed it into a bitter lamentation on the apotheosis of Jim Crow-era race relations in the United States—the fact that the life of a black man meant very little in this country. Nina Simone’s version, the next to last track on her 1965 album “Pastel Blues,” picks up where Holiday left off. Simone biographer Nadine Cahodas points out that Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” sounds more like an “indictment, not a lament.” Simone herself once said “Strange Fruit” was “the ugliest song I have heard. Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country.” When she sings it, that ugliness comes through. She snaps and spits it out; every syllable is painful. In 1965 a French critic wrote that she “attacked” the song. The verb is apt. Unlike Holiday’s version, Simone’s begins with no introduction, just a note and then, “Southern trees bearing strange fruit.” By the time she gets to the final verse, she wails the words, holding the note of the next to last line for 10 ominous seconds. “Strange Fruit” was a song that fit that cultural moment because it underscored the reasons for the shifting national tone on race. Peaceful resistance and gradual change weren’t working for everyone. And now, it would seem, it’s a song for our current social and cultural moment as well. Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, a mountain retreat that attracted the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Gershwin and Lady Nancy Astor, at one time or the other. As a child, Eunice’s musical gifts were cultivated by friends and family, but others outside Tryon’s close-knit black community were listening as well. Her talent became a source of community pride and pleasure—to the extent that she was able to use it to challenge Jim Crow. When she was 11 she gave a recital and before it started her parents were told to move from the front row so a white family could sit there. She told the audience she wouldn’t play unless her parents were allowed to sit where they were sitting. But there were some things Eunice Waymon couldn’t change. A childhood friend of hers named Fred Counts told me that she was remarkable, brilliant academically and emotionally—introspective beyond her age. One summer day Counts ran into Eunice as she was making her way home from a piano lesson. The two stopped at a pharmacy for sodas and kept walking homeward. Counts says she became unusually quiet and then said, “You know, we don’t serve the same God.” He looked at her confused, “Eunice, what are you talking about?” She said, “Well, we go in the drug store and we buy our sodas and we gotta drink ‘em walking up the hill. And they’re sitting under them Casablanca fans cooling off.” Counts paused from the telling, “I’d been used to it. And she’d been used to it, but she couldn’t throw it out, see. She never did dismiss it.” In her autobiography “I Put a Spell on You,” Simone is ambivalent about growing up in Tryon. While race relations may have been generally “cordial,” she writes, “there was no policy of racial justice in Tryon.” Simone remembers that the day after she stood up for her parents at the piano recital she “walked around feeling as if I had been flayed and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.” In a sense, she’s saying that her skin was a marker for the viciousness of her experiences. Jim Crow surrounded Eunice Waymon—separate water fountains, restrooms, movie theaters, bowling alleys—things she couldn’t touch, places she couldn’t go. The gorgeous neoclassical school building for white children stood in stark contrast to the Tryon Colored School, a pathetic wooden building with no running water or central heat, and castoff books from the white school. Nina Simone biographer David Brun-Lambert claims that while there was segregation, “White and black communities lived in peace—there were no lynchings in Tryon, no racial violence of any sort.” It’s true that there are few stories of gross violence against black people within the city limits of Tryon during Eunice Waymon’s childhood. But the possibility of racial violence was ever-present. Locals speak of the Klan’s presence in the area lasting well into the 1980s. At one point she heard that a “lynching” had happened close by and she asked her father what the word meant. He didn’t answer. If Simone’s father had replied, he might have told her about Dick Wofford, a local black man accused of raping a white woman in 1894. Wofford was tried in the Polk County Courthouse in Columbus, just down the road from Tryon. A jury of white men found Dick Wofford not guilty. The sheriff quickly released Wofford, pointed toward some woods behind the courthouse and told him to run for his life. The next morning Dick Wofford was found dead, hanging from a wild cherry tree—three miles from Eunice Waymon’s birthplace. There was no song written about Dick Wofford. He was just another lynching story passed along from one black person to the next like the story about George Green (lynched the year Waymon was born over the border in South Carolina) or Willie Earle (lynched in nearby Greenville in 1947, the year Waymon started boarding school in Asheville). Such stories and the daily indignities of racism must have imposed a quiet and horrible discipline that young Eunice Waymon would have felt personally. After she graduated from high school in 1950, Eunice Waymon was turned away from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and took a gig singing in an Atlantic City nightclub. She changed her name to Nina Simone and developed from night club chanteuse to High Priestess of Soul, provocateur and political activist. Throughout the '60s, her friends cultivated her political awareness—people like Langston Hughes, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry—a transformation detailed in Liz Garbus’ Oscar-nominated documentary, “What Happened Miss Simone?” Simone performed at numerous benefits for civil rights organizations like CORE, NAACP and SNCC. She performed down South, too, including during the Selma to Montgomery march. In 1963, her songwriting took a dramatic shift with “Mississippi Goddam,” a response to the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The song was written a month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and struck a very different chord—no longer interested in the mantra of “Go slow,” Simone sings, “I don’t trust you anymore.” She wasn’t afraid to take on the slow-moving liberals or ignore America’s violent past. This is an important shift toward the self-determining ethos of black power. While some sang “We Shall Overcome,” Nina Simone sang her tough rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Nina Simone returned to Tryon in 2001 for her mother’s funeral. Fred Counts saw her resting in her car and walked over to say hello, but was blocked by a bodyguard. Simone saw her old friend and told the bodyguard to let him by. “I grew about 2 inches!” Counts said. Simone and Counts reminisced about the past—she spoke of her persistent anger over the things she experienced growing up in Tryon. “And I told her,” Counts said, “you can understand your life by looking back, but you gotta live your life moving forward.” She replied, “Yes, I know.” Counts told me that the song that he thinks best depicts her childhood is “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” and he gave me the lines, “Young, gifted and black/ How I long to know the truth/ There are times when I look back/ And I am haunted by my youth.” “She’s not talking about lynching, exactly, but she’s talking about her childhood treatment in a segregated town.” When I interviewed him, just a few years before he passed away, Counts was in his late 70s, but it didn’t show. His svelte frame was covered by a white polo shirt, gray slacks and dark loafers. A straw newsboy cap was perched on his head. In a soft baritone he told me that during Jim Crow, black people in the South learned the rules and where they stood in the game at a young age. “I never rode in a school bus,” he explained. “Black folks never had a school bus. We used to get a half-day off for the annual Tryon horse show, but we couldn’t go to it unless we were working in the stables or cooking.” The rules were passed down from one generation to the next. His own parents had been sharecroppers in South Carolina. When they moved to Tryon, he said, “They were fleeing. It was worse down there. Now let’s understand this. There ain’t a thing you can do about what happened yesterday. You can’t add to it or take anything away from it.” But I have a hard time believing that he believed that himself. Right before I left he remarked, “You know, what my ancestors were denied, it crippled the next few generations. They were kept in the field and couldn’t afford to send us to college. And then I couldn’t go to certain schools or get certain grants. Jim Crow did a lot of things that weren’t acceptable. It still penetrates.”When “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Avatar” star Zoe Saldana was cast as Nina Simone in the yet to be released biopic “Nina,” much was made of the fact that Saldana’s skin was darkened for the role. Simone’s daughter told the New York Times, “My mother was raised at a time when she was told her nose was too wide, her skin was too dark … Appearance-wise this is not the best choice.” There’s an important intersection between Nina Simone’s dark skin color and her political awakening, underscored by her 1965 rendition of the anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit.” Simone’s version of the classic song is especially powerful given her own childhood in the Jim Crow South, where violence was a part of the landscape. “Strange Fruit” has always been Billie Holiday’s song. In 1939 Holiday took Abel Meeropol’s song and transformed it into a bitter lamentation on the apotheosis of Jim Crow-era race relations in the United States—the fact that the life of a black man meant very little in this country. Nina Simone’s version, the next to last track on her 1965 album “Pastel Blues,” picks up where Holiday left off. Simone biographer Nadine Cahodas points out that Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” sounds more like an “indictment, not a lament.” Simone herself once said “Strange Fruit” was “the ugliest song I have heard. Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country.” When she sings it, that ugliness comes through. She snaps and spits it out; every syllable is painful. In 1965 a French critic wrote that she “attacked” the song. The verb is apt. Unlike Holiday’s version, Simone’s begins with no introduction, just a note and then, “Southern trees bearing strange fruit.” By the time she gets to the final verse, she wails the words, holding the note of the next to last line for 10 ominous seconds. “Strange Fruit” was a song that fit that cultural moment because it underscored the reasons for the shifting national tone on race. Peaceful resistance and gradual change weren’t working for everyone. And now, it would seem, it’s a song for our current social and cultural moment as well. Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, a mountain retreat that attracted the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Gershwin and Lady Nancy Astor, at one time or the other. As a child, Eunice’s musical gifts were cultivated by friends and family, but others outside Tryon’s close-knit black community were listening as well. Her talent became a source of community pride and pleasure—to the extent that she was able to use it to challenge Jim Crow. When she was 11 she gave a recital and before it started her parents were told to move from the front row so a white family could sit there. She told the audience she wouldn’t play unless her parents were allowed to sit where they were sitting. But there were some things Eunice Waymon couldn’t change. A childhood friend of hers named Fred Counts told me that she was remarkable, brilliant academically and emotionally—introspective beyond her age. One summer day Counts ran into Eunice as she was making her way home from a piano lesson. The two stopped at a pharmacy for sodas and kept walking homeward. Counts says she became unusually quiet and then said, “You know, we don’t serve the same God.” He looked at her confused, “Eunice, what are you talking about?” She said, “Well, we go in the drug store and we buy our sodas and we gotta drink ‘em walking up the hill. And they’re sitting under them Casablanca fans cooling off.” Counts paused from the telling, “I’d been used to it. And she’d been used to it, but she couldn’t throw it out, see. She never did dismiss it.” In her autobiography “I Put a Spell on You,” Simone is ambivalent about growing up in Tryon. While race relations may have been generally “cordial,” she writes, “there was no policy of racial justice in Tryon.” Simone remembers that the day after she stood up for her parents at the piano recital she “walked around feeling as if I had been flayed and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.” In a sense, she’s saying that her skin was a marker for the viciousness of her experiences. Jim Crow surrounded Eunice Waymon—separate water fountains, restrooms, movie theaters, bowling alleys—things she couldn’t touch, places she couldn’t go. The gorgeous neoclassical school building for white children stood in stark contrast to the Tryon Colored School, a pathetic wooden building with no running water or central heat, and castoff books from the white school. Nina Simone biographer David Brun-Lambert claims that while there was segregation, “White and black communities lived in peace—there were no lynchings in Tryon, no racial violence of any sort.” It’s true that there are few stories of gross violence against black people within the city limits of Tryon during Eunice Waymon’s childhood. But the possibility of racial violence was ever-present. Locals speak of the Klan’s presence in the area lasting well into the 1980s. At one point she heard that a “lynching” had happened close by and she asked her father what the word meant. He didn’t answer. If Simone’s father had replied, he might have told her about Dick Wofford, a local black man accused of raping a white woman in 1894. Wofford was tried in the Polk County Courthouse in Columbus, just down the road from Tryon. A jury of white men found Dick Wofford not guilty. The sheriff quickly released Wofford, pointed toward some woods behind the courthouse and told him to run for his life. The next morning Dick Wofford was found dead, hanging from a wild cherry tree—three miles from Eunice Waymon’s birthplace. There was no song written about Dick Wofford. He was just another lynching story passed along from one black person to the next like the story about George Green (lynched the year Waymon was born over the border in South Carolina) or Willie Earle (lynched in nearby Greenville in 1947, the year Waymon started boarding school in Asheville). Such stories and the daily indignities of racism must have imposed a quiet and horrible discipline that young Eunice Waymon would have felt personally. After she graduated from high school in 1950, Eunice Waymon was turned away from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and took a gig singing in an Atlantic City nightclub. She changed her name to Nina Simone and developed from night club chanteuse to High Priestess of Soul, provocateur and political activist. Throughout the '60s, her friends cultivated her political awareness—people like Langston Hughes, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry—a transformation detailed in Liz Garbus’ Oscar-nominated documentary, “What Happened Miss Simone?” Simone performed at numerous benefits for civil rights organizations like CORE, NAACP and SNCC. She performed down South, too, including during the Selma to Montgomery march. In 1963, her songwriting took a dramatic shift with “Mississippi Goddam,” a response to the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The song was written a month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and struck a very different chord—no longer interested in the mantra of “Go slow,” Simone sings, “I don’t trust you anymore.” She wasn’t afraid to take on the slow-moving liberals or ignore America’s violent past. This is an important shift toward the self-determining ethos of black power. While some sang “We Shall Overcome,” Nina Simone sang her tough rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Nina Simone returned to Tryon in 2001 for her mother’s funeral. Fred Counts saw her resting in her car and walked over to say hello, but was blocked by a bodyguard. Simone saw her old friend and told the bodyguard to let him by. “I grew about 2 inches!” Counts said. Simone and Counts reminisced about the past—she spoke of her persistent anger over the things she experienced growing up in Tryon. “And I told her,” Counts said, “you can understand your life by looking back, but you gotta live your life moving forward.” She replied, “Yes, I know.” Counts told me that the song that he thinks best depicts her childhood is “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” and he gave me the lines, “Young, gifted and black/ How I long to know the truth/ There are times when I look back/ And I am haunted by my youth.” “She’s not talking about lynching, exactly, but she’s talking about her childhood treatment in a segregated town.” When I interviewed him, just a few years before he passed away, Counts was in his late 70s, but it didn’t show. His svelte frame was covered by a white polo shirt, gray slacks and dark loafers. A straw newsboy cap was perched on his head. In a soft baritone he told me that during Jim Crow, black people in the South learned the rules and where they stood in the game at a young age. “I never rode in a school bus,” he explained. “Black folks never had a school bus. We used to get a half-day off for the annual Tryon horse show, but we couldn’t go to it unless we were working in the stables or cooking.” The rules were passed down from one generation to the next. His own parents had been sharecroppers in South Carolina. When they moved to Tryon, he said, “They were fleeing. It was worse down there. Now let’s understand this. There ain’t a thing you can do about what happened yesterday. You can’t add to it or take anything away from it.” But I have a hard time believing that he believed that himself. Right before I left he remarked, “You know, what my ancestors were denied, it crippled the next few generations. They were kept in the field and couldn’t afford to send us to college. And then I couldn’t go to certain schools or get certain grants. Jim Crow did a lot of things that weren’t acceptable. It still penetrates.”When “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Avatar” star Zoe Saldana was cast as Nina Simone in the yet to be released biopic “Nina,” much was made of the fact that Saldana’s skin was darkened for the role. Simone’s daughter told the New York Times, “My mother was raised at a time when she was told her nose was too wide, her skin was too dark … Appearance-wise this is not the best choice.” There’s an important intersection between Nina Simone’s dark skin color and her political awakening, underscored by her 1965 rendition of the anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit.” Simone’s version of the classic song is especially powerful given her own childhood in the Jim Crow South, where violence was a part of the landscape. “Strange Fruit” has always been Billie Holiday’s song. In 1939 Holiday took Abel Meeropol’s song and transformed it into a bitter lamentation on the apotheosis of Jim Crow-era race relations in the United States—the fact that the life of a black man meant very little in this country. Nina Simone’s version, the next to last track on her 1965 album “Pastel Blues,” picks up where Holiday left off. Simone biographer Nadine Cahodas points out that Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” sounds more like an “indictment, not a lament.” Simone herself once said “Strange Fruit” was “the ugliest song I have heard. Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country.” When she sings it, that ugliness comes through. She snaps and spits it out; every syllable is painful. In 1965 a French critic wrote that she “attacked” the song. The verb is apt. Unlike Holiday’s version, Simone’s begins with no introduction, just a note and then, “Southern trees bearing strange fruit.” By the time she gets to the final verse, she wails the words, holding the note of the next to last line for 10 ominous seconds. “Strange Fruit” was a song that fit that cultural moment because it underscored the reasons for the shifting national tone on race. Peaceful resistance and gradual change weren’t working for everyone. And now, it would seem, it’s a song for our current social and cultural moment as well. Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, a mountain retreat that attracted the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Gershwin and Lady Nancy Astor, at one time or the other. As a child, Eunice’s musical gifts were cultivated by friends and family, but others outside Tryon’s close-knit black community were listening as well. Her talent became a source of community pride and pleasure—to the extent that she was able to use it to challenge Jim Crow. When she was 11 she gave a recital and before it started her parents were told to move from the front row so a white family could sit there. She told the audience she wouldn’t play unless her parents were allowed to sit where they were sitting. But there were some things Eunice Waymon couldn’t change. A childhood friend of hers named Fred Counts told me that she was remarkable, brilliant academically and emotionally—introspective beyond her age. One summer day Counts ran into Eunice as she was making her way home from a piano lesson. The two stopped at a pharmacy for sodas and kept walking homeward. Counts says she became unusually quiet and then said, “You know, we don’t serve the same God.” He looked at her confused, “Eunice, what are you talking about?” She said, “Well, we go in the drug store and we buy our sodas and we gotta drink ‘em walking up the hill. And they’re sitting under them Casablanca fans cooling off.” Counts paused from the telling, “I’d been used to it. And she’d been used to it, but she couldn’t throw it out, see. She never did dismiss it.” In her autobiography “I Put a Spell on You,” Simone is ambivalent about growing up in Tryon. While race relations may have been generally “cordial,” she writes, “there was no policy of racial justice in Tryon.” Simone remembers that the day after she stood up for her parents at the piano recital she “walked around feeling as if I had been flayed and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.” In a sense, she’s saying that her skin was a marker for the viciousness of her experiences. Jim Crow surrounded Eunice Waymon—separate water fountains, restrooms, movie theaters, bowling alleys—things she couldn’t touch, places she couldn’t go. The gorgeous neoclassical school building for white children stood in stark contrast to the Tryon Colored School, a pathetic wooden building with no running water or central heat, and castoff books from the white school. Nina Simone biographer David Brun-Lambert claims that while there was segregation, “White and black communities lived in peace—there were no lynchings in Tryon, no racial violence of any sort.” It’s true that there are few stories of gross violence against black people within the city limits of Tryon during Eunice Waymon’s childhood. But the possibility of racial violence was ever-present. Locals speak of the Klan’s presence in the area lasting well into the 1980s. At one point she heard that a “lynching” had happened close by and she asked her father what the word meant. He didn’t answer. If Simone’s father had replied, he might have told her about Dick Wofford, a local black man accused of raping a white woman in 1894. Wofford was tried in the Polk County Courthouse in Columbus, just down the road from Tryon. A jury of white men found Dick Wofford not guilty. The sheriff quickly released Wofford, pointed toward some woods behind the courthouse and told him to run for his life. The next morning Dick Wofford was found dead, hanging from a wild cherry tree—three miles from Eunice Waymon’s birthplace. There was no song written about Dick Wofford. He was just another lynching story passed along from one black person to the next like the story about George Green (lynched the year Waymon was born over the border in South Carolina) or Willie Earle (lynched in nearby Greenville in 1947, the year Waymon started boarding school in Asheville). Such stories and the daily indignities of racism must have imposed a quiet and horrible discipline that young Eunice Waymon would have felt personally. After she graduated from high school in 1950, Eunice Waymon was turned away from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and took a gig singing in an Atlantic City nightclub. She changed her name to Nina Simone and developed from night club chanteuse to High Priestess of Soul, provocateur and political activist. Throughout the '60s, her friends cultivated her political awareness—people like Langston Hughes, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry—a transformation detailed in Liz Garbus’ Oscar-nominated documentary, “What Happened Miss Simone?” Simone performed at numerous benefits for civil rights organizations like CORE, NAACP and SNCC. She performed down South, too, including during the Selma to Montgomery march. In 1963, her songwriting took a dramatic shift with “Mississippi Goddam,” a response to the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The song was written a month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and struck a very different chord—no longer interested in the mantra of “Go slow,” Simone sings, “I don’t trust you anymore.” She wasn’t afraid to take on the slow-moving liberals or ignore America’s violent past. This is an important shift toward the self-determining ethos of black power. While some sang “We Shall Overcome,” Nina Simone sang her tough rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Nina Simone returned to Tryon in 2001 for her mother’s funeral. Fred Counts saw her resting in her car and walked over to say hello, but was blocked by a bodyguard. Simone saw her old friend and told the bodyguard to let him by. “I grew about 2 inches!” Counts said. Simone and Counts reminisced about the past—she spoke of her persistent anger over the things she experienced growing up in Tryon. “And I told her,” Counts said, “you can understand your life by looking back, but you gotta live your life moving forward.” She replied, “Yes, I know.” Counts told me that the song that he thinks best depicts her childhood is “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” and he gave me the lines, “Young, gifted and black/ How I long to know the truth/ There are times when I look back/ And I am haunted by my youth.” “She’s not talking about lynching, exactly, but she’s talking about her childhood treatment in a segregated town.” When I interviewed him, just a few years before he passed away, Counts was in his late 70s, but it didn’t show. His svelte frame was covered by a white polo shirt, gray slacks and dark loafers. A straw newsboy cap was perched on his head. In a soft baritone he told me that during Jim Crow, black people in the South learned the rules and where they stood in the game at a young age. “I never rode in a school bus,” he explained. “Black folks never had a school bus. We used to get a half-day off for the annual Tryon horse show, but we couldn’t go to it unless we were working in the stables or cooking.” The rules were passed down from one generation to the next. His own parents had been sharecroppers in South Carolina. When they moved to Tryon, he said, “They were fleeing. It was worse down there. Now let’s understand this. There ain’t a thing you can do about what happened yesterday. You can’t add to it or take anything away from it.” But I have a hard time believing that he believed that himself. Right before I left he remarked, “You know, what my ancestors were denied, it crippled the next few generations. They were kept in the field and couldn’t afford to send us to college. And then I couldn’t go to certain schools or get certain grants. Jim Crow did a lot of things that weren’t acceptable. It still penetrates.”When “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Avatar” star Zoe Saldana was cast as Nina Simone in the yet to be released biopic “Nina,” much was made of the fact that Saldana’s skin was darkened for the role. Simone’s daughter told the New York Times, “My mother was raised at a time when she was told her nose was too wide, her skin was too dark … Appearance-wise this is not the best choice.” There’s an important intersection between Nina Simone’s dark skin color and her political awakening, underscored by her 1965 rendition of the anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit.” Simone’s version of the classic song is especially powerful given her own childhood in the Jim Crow South, where violence was a part of the landscape. “Strange Fruit” has always been Billie Holiday’s song. In 1939 Holiday took Abel Meeropol’s song and transformed it into a bitter lamentation on the apotheosis of Jim Crow-era race relations in the United States—the fact that the life of a black man meant very little in this country. Nina Simone’s version, the next to last track on her 1965 album “Pastel Blues,” picks up where Holiday left off. Simone biographer Nadine Cahodas points out that Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” sounds more like an “indictment, not a lament.” Simone herself once said “Strange Fruit” was “the ugliest song I have heard. Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country.” When she sings it, that ugliness comes through. She snaps and spits it out; every syllable is painful. In 1965 a French critic wrote that she “attacked” the song. The verb is apt. Unlike Holiday’s version, Simone’s begins with no introduction, just a note and then, “Southern trees bearing strange fruit.” By the time she gets to the final verse, she wails the words, holding the note of the next to last line for 10 ominous seconds. “Strange Fruit” was a song that fit that cultural moment because it underscored the reasons for the shifting national tone on race. Peaceful resistance and gradual change weren’t working for everyone. And now, it would seem, it’s a song for our current social and cultural moment as well. Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, a mountain retreat that attracted the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Gershwin and Lady Nancy Astor, at one time or the other. As a child, Eunice’s musical gifts were cultivated by friends and family, but others outside Tryon’s close-knit black community were listening as well. Her talent became a source of community pride and pleasure—to the extent that she was able to use it to challenge Jim Crow. When she was 11 she gave a recital and before it started her parents were told to move from the front row so a white family could sit there. She told the audience she wouldn’t play unless her parents were allowed to sit where they were sitting. But there were some things Eunice Waymon couldn’t change. A childhood friend of hers named Fred Counts told me that she was remarkable, brilliant academically and emotionally—introspective beyond her age. One summer day Counts ran into Eunice as she was making her way home from a piano lesson. The two stopped at a pharmacy for sodas and kept walking homeward. Counts says she became unusually quiet and then said, “You know, we don’t serve the same God.” He looked at her confused, “Eunice, what are you talking about?” She said, “Well, we go in the drug store and we buy our sodas and we gotta drink ‘em walking up the hill. And they’re sitting under them Casablanca fans cooling off.” Counts paused from the telling, “I’d been used to it. And she’d been used to it, but she couldn’t throw it out, see. She never did dismiss it.” In her autobiography “I Put a Spell on You,” Simone is ambivalent about growing up in Tryon. While race relations may have been generally “cordial,” she writes, “there was no policy of racial justice in Tryon.” Simone remembers that the day after she stood up for her parents at the piano recital she “walked around feeling as if I had been flayed and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But the skin grew back again a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.” In a sense, she’s saying that her skin was a marker for the viciousness of her experiences. Jim Crow surrounded Eunice Waymon—separate water fountains, restrooms, movie theaters, bowling alleys—things she couldn’t touch, places she couldn’t go. The gorgeous neoclassical school building for white children stood in stark contrast to the Tryon Colored School, a pathetic wooden building with no running water or central heat, and castoff books from the white school. Nina Simone biographer David Brun-Lambert claims that while there was segregation, “White and black communities lived in peace—there were no lynchings in Tryon, no racial violence of any sort.” It’s true that there are few stories of gross violence against black people within the city limits of Tryon during Eunice Waymon’s childhood. But the possibility of racial violence was ever-present. Locals speak of the Klan’s presence in the area lasting well into the 1980s. At one point she heard that a “lynching” had happened close by and she asked her father what the word meant. He didn’t answer. If Simone’s father had replied, he might have told her about Dick Wofford, a local black man accused of raping a white woman in 1894. Wofford was tried in the Polk County Courthouse in Columbus, just down the road from Tryon. A jury of white men found Dick Wofford not guilty. The sheriff quickly released Wofford, pointed toward some woods behind the courthouse and told him to run for his life. The next morning Dick Wofford was found dead, hanging from a wild cherry tree—three miles from Eunice Waymon’s birthplace. There was no song written about Dick Wofford. He was just another lynching story passed along from one black person to the next like the story about George Green (lynched the year Waymon was born over the border in South Carolina) or Willie Earle (lynched in nearby Greenville in 1947, the year Waymon started boarding school in Asheville). Such stories and the daily indignities of racism must have imposed a quiet and horrible discipline that young Eunice Waymon would have felt personally. After she graduated from high school in 1950, Eunice Waymon was turned away from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and took a gig singing in an Atlantic City nightclub. She changed her name to Nina Simone and developed from night club chanteuse to High Priestess of Soul, provocateur and political activist. Throughout the '60s, her friends cultivated her political awareness—people like Langston Hughes, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry—a transformation detailed in Liz Garbus’ Oscar-nominated documentary, “What Happened Miss Simone?” Simone performed at numerous benefits for civil rights organizations like CORE, NAACP and SNCC. She performed down South, too, including during the Selma to Montgomery march. In 1963, her songwriting took a dramatic shift with “Mississippi Goddam,” a response to the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The song was written a month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and struck a very different chord—no longer interested in the mantra of “Go slow,” Simone sings, “I don’t trust you anymore.” She wasn’t afraid to take on the slow-moving liberals or ignore America’s violent past. This is an important shift toward the self-determining ethos of black power. While some sang “We Shall Overcome,” Nina Simone sang her tough rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Nina Simone returned to Tryon in 2001 for her mother’s funeral. Fred Counts saw her resting in her car and walked over to say hello, but was blocked by a bodyguard. Simone saw her old friend and told the bodyguard to let him by. “I grew about 2 inches!” Counts said. Simone and Counts reminisced about the past—she spoke of her persistent anger over the things she experienced growing up in Tryon. “And I told her,” Counts said, “you can understand your life by looking back, but you gotta live your life moving forward.” She replied, “Yes, I know.” Counts told me that the song that he thinks best depicts her childhood is “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” and he gave me the lines, “Young, gifted and black/ How I long to know the truth/ There are times when I look back/ And I am haunted by my youth.” “She’s not talking about lynching, exactly, but she’s talking about her childhood treatment in a segregated town.” When I interviewed him, just a few years before he passed away, Counts was in his late 70s, but it didn’t show. His svelte frame was covered by a white polo shirt, gray slacks and dark loafers. A straw newsboy cap was perched on his head. In a soft baritone he told me that during Jim Crow, black people in the South learned the rules and where they stood in the game at a young age. “I never rode in a school bus,” he explained. “Black folks never had a school bus. We used to get a half-day off for the annual Tryon horse show, but we couldn’t go to it unless we were working in the stables or cooking.” The rules were passed down from one generation to the next. His own parents had been sharecroppers in South Carolina. When they moved to Tryon, he said, “They were fleeing. It was worse down there. Now let’s understand this. There ain’t a thing you can do about what happened yesterday. You can’t add to it or take anything away from it.” But I have a hard time believing that he believed that himself. Right before I left he remarked, “You know, what my ancestors were denied, it crippled the next few generations. They were kept in the field and couldn’t afford to send us to college. And then I couldn’t go to certain schools or get certain grants. Jim Crow did a lot of things that weren’t acceptable. It still penetrates.”

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America’s shameful state of decay: Sanders is campaigning on rebuilding the country’s infrastructure — will it work?

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

  Thomas Jefferson

Infrastructure. Not a very exciting word, and certainly not one to whip up the hysteria of the electorate in an election year. We have other words for that: immigration, terrorism, religious extremism or Russian aggression. The usual suspects. Yet, perhaps the word "infrastructure" will become more exciting if we unpack it, learn what it is – and understand that it is not any external cause that most threatens America, but instead decades of negligence to the very "infrastructure" of this nation. There is that word again: infrastructure. But, what does it mean? A short list will suffice: water treatment, roads, bridges, public housing, passenger and freight rail, marine ports and inland waterways, national parks, broadband, the electric grid, schools, hospitals, government buildings, dams – in other words, to use a medical metaphor, the conditions for the healthy life of a nation. Perhaps the people of Flint, Michigan, and the increasing number of cities affected by the lead poisoning crisis know better than most the critical importance of the timely maintenance and transformation of our nation’s infrastructure. On Jan. 27, 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the “Rebuild America Act,” which was meant to begin to tackle decades of neglect. At the time, Sanders explained the intentions of the bill: “For too many years, we’ve underfunded our nation’s physical infrastructure. We have to change that and that’s what the Rebuild America Act is all about. We must modernize our infrastructure and create millions of new jobs that will put people back to work and help the economy.” However, Sanders' bill did not, as he suggested at the time, only concern the long overdue task of rebuilding the necessary conditions for the life of a healthy nation. His bill, calling for a $1 trillion investment, would also create 13 million jobs in five years – good jobs -- which would be exciting not only for the many unemployed and underemployed (for those living on starvation wages), but also for local, state and federal treasuries that would benefit from increased revenue, and for the many peripheral businesses, such as restaurants, retailers and other small businesses, that would benefit from the added purchasing power of working families across the nation. Such a targeted program would, in this way, provide the seeds for the multiplication of many millions of new jobs in all sectors. Yet, Sanders’ bill was blocked by Senate Republicans whose filibuster talked the bill to death. To put the Rebuild America Act in perspective, we need only compare its ambitions with the numbers Barack Obama touted in his own $50 billion Rebuild America Act of 2011. In the wake of the daunting challenges, his effort was merely a drop in the ocean.   Sanders, who is now running for president – and who has won the New Hampshire primary against Hillary Clinton – has taken the ideas of his filibustered bill onto the campaign trail. If he wins, his presidency will work to eclipse the weak economic recovery under Obama with an FDR-style public works project that will restore not only the health of the nation, but will also accelerate real economic growth through a people’s recovery.   Departing from Obama’s 2011 infrastructure plan, which would have been financed by a gas tax, Sanders intends to fund his initiative through a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, which is, after all, the root of the failed economic strategies that caused the financial crisis of 2008. Of course, there is much more to the Sanders’ agenda than only the infrastructure bill – but, in itself, such an initiative would not only be a very good start, but would also outshine all previous efforts in this direction since World War II. Sanders' plan for American renewal is, moreover, supported by the AFL-CIO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Society of Civil Engineers, and by millions of American working families.    After decades of foreign adventures and war, America, in all its aspects, subsists in a state of decay within and would be unrecognizable to the founders of our nation. Long ago, Benjamin Franklin’s maxim "A stitch in time saves nine" was left to the history books, along with its wisdom of timely action. Now, however, one stitch will no longer do – but nine, and these have been set forth in Sanders' program, not only for infrastructure, but also measures for working families, among which include jobs, healthcare, tax justice, criminal justice reform, climate change, civil liberties and putting an end to banks that are “too big to fail.” The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders has identified the vast problems facing our nation, and is propelled and exclusively funded by an unprecedented grass-roots movement promising a “political revolution." Most of us know these problems, for they affect the overwhelming majority of Americans in our daily lives: in the developed world, the highest inequality, highest child poverty, highest incarceration rates, highest rates of domestic gun violence outside of war zones, and the list goes on and on -- all of this is truly exceptional.   From Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian democratic republic to our unacknowledged and costly global empire (more than 1,000 military bases around the world and a permanent war economy), we, the people, like the Romans before us, are threatened by an enemy within that has placed our democracy on the cusp of tyranny.  The billionaire class sits behind its guarded walls, oblivious to the lives and struggles of ordinary citizens. Without the overt titles of princes and kings, we are on the verge of becoming exactly what our Founding Fathers had struggled to eliminate from the new revolutionary Republic. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, and perhaps also his enemies, have recognized this greatest of all threats to our democracy – vast inequality -- and have initiated the beginning of a political transformation that seeks to reclaim our democracy for the millions of hardworking families who feel each day that they have been left behind by the age of greed.

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

  Thomas Jefferson

Infrastructure. Not a very exciting word, and certainly not one to whip up the hysteria of the electorate in an election year. We have other words for that: immigration, terrorism, religious extremism or Russian aggression. The usual suspects. Yet, perhaps the word "infrastructure" will become more exciting if we unpack it, learn what it is – and understand that it is not any external cause that most threatens America, but instead decades of negligence to the very "infrastructure" of this nation. There is that word again: infrastructure. But, what does it mean? A short list will suffice: water treatment, roads, bridges, public housing, passenger and freight rail, marine ports and inland waterways, national parks, broadband, the electric grid, schools, hospitals, government buildings, dams – in other words, to use a medical metaphor, the conditions for the healthy life of a nation. Perhaps the people of Flint, Michigan, and the increasing number of cities affected by the lead poisoning crisis know better than most the critical importance of the timely maintenance and transformation of our nation’s infrastructure. On Jan. 27, 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the “Rebuild America Act,” which was meant to begin to tackle decades of neglect. At the time, Sanders explained the intentions of the bill: “For too many years, we’ve underfunded our nation’s physical infrastructure. We have to change that and that’s what the Rebuild America Act is all about. We must modernize our infrastructure and create millions of new jobs that will put people back to work and help the economy.” However, Sanders' bill did not, as he suggested at the time, only concern the long overdue task of rebuilding the necessary conditions for the life of a healthy nation. His bill, calling for a $1 trillion investment, would also create 13 million jobs in five years – good jobs -- which would be exciting not only for the many unemployed and underemployed (for those living on starvation wages), but also for local, state and federal treasuries that would benefit from increased revenue, and for the many peripheral businesses, such as restaurants, retailers and other small businesses, that would benefit from the added purchasing power of working families across the nation. Such a targeted program would, in this way, provide the seeds for the multiplication of many millions of new jobs in all sectors. Yet, Sanders’ bill was blocked by Senate Republicans whose filibuster talked the bill to death. To put the Rebuild America Act in perspective, we need only compare its ambitions with the numbers Barack Obama touted in his own $50 billion Rebuild America Act of 2011. In the wake of the daunting challenges, his effort was merely a drop in the ocean.   Sanders, who is now running for president – and who has won the New Hampshire primary against Hillary Clinton – has taken the ideas of his filibustered bill onto the campaign trail. If he wins, his presidency will work to eclipse the weak economic recovery under Obama with an FDR-style public works project that will restore not only the health of the nation, but will also accelerate real economic growth through a people’s recovery.   Departing from Obama’s 2011 infrastructure plan, which would have been financed by a gas tax, Sanders intends to fund his initiative through a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, which is, after all, the root of the failed economic strategies that caused the financial crisis of 2008. Of course, there is much more to the Sanders’ agenda than only the infrastructure bill – but, in itself, such an initiative would not only be a very good start, but would also outshine all previous efforts in this direction since World War II. Sanders' plan for American renewal is, moreover, supported by the AFL-CIO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Society of Civil Engineers, and by millions of American working families.    After decades of foreign adventures and war, America, in all its aspects, subsists in a state of decay within and would be unrecognizable to the founders of our nation. Long ago, Benjamin Franklin’s maxim "A stitch in time saves nine" was left to the history books, along with its wisdom of timely action. Now, however, one stitch will no longer do – but nine, and these have been set forth in Sanders' program, not only for infrastructure, but also measures for working families, among which include jobs, healthcare, tax justice, criminal justice reform, climate change, civil liberties and putting an end to banks that are “too big to fail.” The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders has identified the vast problems facing our nation, and is propelled and exclusively funded by an unprecedented grass-roots movement promising a “political revolution." Most of us know these problems, for they affect the overwhelming majority of Americans in our daily lives: in the developed world, the highest inequality, highest child poverty, highest incarceration rates, highest rates of domestic gun violence outside of war zones, and the list goes on and on -- all of this is truly exceptional.   From Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian democratic republic to our unacknowledged and costly global empire (more than 1,000 military bases around the world and a permanent war economy), we, the people, like the Romans before us, are threatened by an enemy within that has placed our democracy on the cusp of tyranny.  The billionaire class sits behind its guarded walls, oblivious to the lives and struggles of ordinary citizens. Without the overt titles of princes and kings, we are on the verge of becoming exactly what our Founding Fathers had struggled to eliminate from the new revolutionary Republic. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, and perhaps also his enemies, have recognized this greatest of all threats to our democracy – vast inequality -- and have initiated the beginning of a political transformation that seeks to reclaim our democracy for the millions of hardworking families who feel each day that they have been left behind by the age of greed.

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

  Thomas Jefferson

Infrastructure. Not a very exciting word, and certainly not one to whip up the hysteria of the electorate in an election year. We have other words for that: immigration, terrorism, religious extremism or Russian aggression. The usual suspects. Yet, perhaps the word "infrastructure" will become more exciting if we unpack it, learn what it is – and understand that it is not any external cause that most threatens America, but instead decades of negligence to the very "infrastructure" of this nation. There is that word again: infrastructure. But, what does it mean? A short list will suffice: water treatment, roads, bridges, public housing, passenger and freight rail, marine ports and inland waterways, national parks, broadband, the electric grid, schools, hospitals, government buildings, dams – in other words, to use a medical metaphor, the conditions for the healthy life of a nation. Perhaps the people of Flint, Michigan, and the increasing number of cities affected by the lead poisoning crisis know better than most the critical importance of the timely maintenance and transformation of our nation’s infrastructure. On Jan. 27, 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the “Rebuild America Act,” which was meant to begin to tackle decades of neglect. At the time, Sanders explained the intentions of the bill: “For too many years, we’ve underfunded our nation’s physical infrastructure. We have to change that and that’s what the Rebuild America Act is all about. We must modernize our infrastructure and create millions of new jobs that will put people back to work and help the economy.” However, Sanders' bill did not, as he suggested at the time, only concern the long overdue task of rebuilding the necessary conditions for the life of a healthy nation. His bill, calling for a $1 trillion investment, would also create 13 million jobs in five years – good jobs -- which would be exciting not only for the many unemployed and underemployed (for those living on starvation wages), but also for local, state and federal treasuries that would benefit from increased revenue, and for the many peripheral businesses, such as restaurants, retailers and other small businesses, that would benefit from the added purchasing power of working families across the nation. Such a targeted program would, in this way, provide the seeds for the multiplication of many millions of new jobs in all sectors. Yet, Sanders’ bill was blocked by Senate Republicans whose filibuster talked the bill to death. To put the Rebuild America Act in perspective, we need only compare its ambitions with the numbers Barack Obama touted in his own $50 billion Rebuild America Act of 2011. In the wake of the daunting challenges, his effort was merely a drop in the ocean.   Sanders, who is now running for president – and who has won the New Hampshire primary against Hillary Clinton – has taken the ideas of his filibustered bill onto the campaign trail. If he wins, his presidency will work to eclipse the weak economic recovery under Obama with an FDR-style public works project that will restore not only the health of the nation, but will also accelerate real economic growth through a people’s recovery.   Departing from Obama’s 2011 infrastructure plan, which would have been financed by a gas tax, Sanders intends to fund his initiative through a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, which is, after all, the root of the failed economic strategies that caused the financial crisis of 2008. Of course, there is much more to the Sanders’ agenda than only the infrastructure bill – but, in itself, such an initiative would not only be a very good start, but would also outshine all previous efforts in this direction since World War II. Sanders' plan for American renewal is, moreover, supported by the AFL-CIO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Society of Civil Engineers, and by millions of American working families.    After decades of foreign adventures and war, America, in all its aspects, subsists in a state of decay within and would be unrecognizable to the founders of our nation. Long ago, Benjamin Franklin’s maxim "A stitch in time saves nine" was left to the history books, along with its wisdom of timely action. Now, however, one stitch will no longer do – but nine, and these have been set forth in Sanders' program, not only for infrastructure, but also measures for working families, among which include jobs, healthcare, tax justice, criminal justice reform, climate change, civil liberties and putting an end to banks that are “too big to fail.” The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders has identified the vast problems facing our nation, and is propelled and exclusively funded by an unprecedented grass-roots movement promising a “political revolution." Most of us know these problems, for they affect the overwhelming majority of Americans in our daily lives: in the developed world, the highest inequality, highest child poverty, highest incarceration rates, highest rates of domestic gun violence outside of war zones, and the list goes on and on -- all of this is truly exceptional.   From Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian democratic republic to our unacknowledged and costly global empire (more than 1,000 military bases around the world and a permanent war economy), we, the people, like the Romans before us, are threatened by an enemy within that has placed our democracy on the cusp of tyranny.  The billionaire class sits behind its guarded walls, oblivious to the lives and struggles of ordinary citizens. Without the overt titles of princes and kings, we are on the verge of becoming exactly what our Founding Fathers had struggled to eliminate from the new revolutionary Republic. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, and perhaps also his enemies, have recognized this greatest of all threats to our democracy – vast inequality -- and have initiated the beginning of a political transformation that seeks to reclaim our democracy for the millions of hardworking families who feel each day that they have been left behind by the age of greed.

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