Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 878
January 30, 2016
“Holy smokes, this stuff is all real?”: How I get my best ideas for thrillers from the good ol’ U.S. government
Whenever people ask where I get ideas for my thrillers, I say, “Direct from the U.S. government.” They laugh, but it’s true—in a time of detention (indefinite imprisonment without charge, trial or conviction); enhanced interrogation (torture); targeted killings (extrajudicial assassinations); and, of course, the unprecedented bulk surveillance revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, third-party villains like SMERSH and SPECTRE and the rest can feel a bit beside the point. Indeed, when the NSA, in its own leaked slides, announces its determination to “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Partner it All,” “Sniff it All” and, ultimately, “Know it All,” it’s safe to say we’re living in an age of “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Does that claim sound extreme? Have a look at this National Reconnaissance mission patch. What is this Octopus doing to the earth? 
There are two things worth noting here. First, a giant octopus strangling, eating and/or otherwise assaulting the earth is how our intelligence apparatus (which prefers the friendlier nomenclature “intelligence community”) perceives itself. Second, that apparatus has become so detached and unaccountable that it now believes this kind of logo will create a favorable impression among ordinary people. Naturally, there are dozens of other such patches from various intelligence and military organizations, many of them incorporating figures like poisonous snakes and devils and even the Grim Reaper, variously clutching, encircling and attacking the earth. In fact, Trevor Paglen has written a whole book on the topic: "I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems From the Pentagon’s Black World." The imagery and slogans offer a fascinating look at the leaking id of our metastasized national security state; if you’re curious, here are a few links with many more. As a certified news junkie and civil liberties and anti-torture activist, I’ve long been aware of these patches, along with some of the examples of governmental overreach the patches tend to suggest. After all, New York Times journalist James Risen broke an early NSA domestic spying story all the way back in 2005. So I’d been playing around with a novel based on a top-secret government surveillance program for quite a few years when the Snowden revelations shocked the world in the summer of 2013. I thought, Hmmm, powerful actors doing terrible things for reasons they believe are good—my kind of villainy! So I obsessed over the news articles. I imagined what wasn’t being reported—what even Snowden might not have been able to access. And I remembered one of the things they taught me at the CIA: that sometimes it pays to cover up the commission of a serious crime by confessing to a lesser one. The programs Snowden revealed were appalling, yes, but what would be the even worse ones, the ones that would leak later, if at all? My answer to that question—informed by the abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover years, the history of COINTELPRO, the allegations of NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice, and most of all by Snowden’s revelations themselves—became the foundation for "The God’s Eye View," with an all-seeing surveillance state the novel’s milieu. In fact, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon—the circular prison in which a central watchtower would simultaneously monitor all the prisoners—became a kind of motif for the novel. Within that framework, characters began to evolve. I asked myself, what would you do if you were, say, Evelyn Gallagher—NSA analyst, single mother to a small deaf son, mostly intent on keeping your head down—and you discovered the existence of a program as vast as God’s Eye? And what if you were a contractor assigned to assess and eliminate Gallagher—say, Marvin Manus, a badly damaged giant of a man intent on protecting the director of the NSA and struggling with a growing attraction to the woman you’ve been tasked with killing? How much would you double down if you were, say, Theodore Anders, the director of the NSA itself, and you believed an employee had become an insider threat to the most far-reaching spy program in history? And how far would a mother like Evelyn go to protect her small son with the full might of the national security state arrayed against her? I know not all novelists are comfortable with the notion of depicting our ostensible protectors as villains. But I think that reluctance misses an important dynamic. To analogize for a moment: The body will generate a fever to destroy a pathogen. But a fever that runs too hot and too long can become more dangerous to the body than the original pathogen ever was. This is the world I believe we inhabit post 9/11—a world in which we have less to fear from non-state actors than we do from our own overreactions. After all, America is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. It’s therefore unavoidably true that we can do far more damage to ourselves than any enemy ever could—if we lose our heads, and our values, and turn all that power on ourselves. So even beyond the inherent attraction of realism, if maximum danger means maximum thrills, in a political thriller it makes sense to depict the gravest dangers a society can face. And while the fever analogy applies generally, the NSA is a particularly acute example, both because its original mandate was exclusively overseas, and because the changing nature of technology has enabled the organization to spy on virtually every aspect of human behavior. As I wrote in 2013 on the topic of post-9/11 governmental overreach: There are two things worth noting here. First, a giant octopus strangling, eating and/or otherwise assaulting the earth is how our intelligence apparatus (which prefers the friendlier nomenclature “intelligence community”) perceives itself. Second, that apparatus has become so detached and unaccountable that it now believes this kind of logo will create a favorable impression among ordinary people. Naturally, there are dozens of other such patches from various intelligence and military organizations, many of them incorporating figures like poisonous snakes and devils and even the Grim Reaper, variously clutching, encircling and attacking the earth. In fact, Trevor Paglen has written a whole book on the topic: "I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems From the Pentagon’s Black World." The imagery and slogans offer a fascinating look at the leaking id of our metastasized national security state; if you’re curious, here are a few links with many more. As a certified news junkie and civil liberties and anti-torture activist, I’ve long been aware of these patches, along with some of the examples of governmental overreach the patches tend to suggest. After all, New York Times journalist James Risen broke an early NSA domestic spying story all the way back in 2005. So I’d been playing around with a novel based on a top-secret government surveillance program for quite a few years when the Snowden revelations shocked the world in the summer of 2013. I thought, Hmmm, powerful actors doing terrible things for reasons they believe are good—my kind of villainy! So I obsessed over the news articles. I imagined what wasn’t being reported—what even Snowden might not have been able to access. And I remembered one of the things they taught me at the CIA: that sometimes it pays to cover up the commission of a serious crime by confessing to a lesser one. The programs Snowden revealed were appalling, yes, but what would be the even worse ones, the ones that would leak later, if at all? My answer to that question—informed by the abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover years, the history of COINTELPRO, the allegations of NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice, and most of all by Snowden’s revelations themselves—became the foundation for "The God’s Eye View," with an all-seeing surveillance state the novel’s milieu. In fact, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon—the circular prison in which a central watchtower would simultaneously monitor all the prisoners—became a kind of motif for the novel. Within that framework, characters began to evolve. I asked myself, what would you do if you were, say, Evelyn Gallagher—NSA analyst, single mother to a small deaf son, mostly intent on keeping your head down—and you discovered the existence of a program as vast as God’s Eye? And what if you were a contractor assigned to assess and eliminate Gallagher—say, Marvin Manus, a badly damaged giant of a man intent on protecting the director of the NSA and struggling with a growing attraction to the woman you’ve been tasked with killing? How much would you double down if you were, say, Theodore Anders, the director of the NSA itself, and you believed an employee had become an insider threat to the most far-reaching spy program in history? And how far would a mother like Evelyn go to protect her small son with the full might of the national security state arrayed against her? I know not all novelists are comfortable with the notion of depicting our ostensible protectors as villains. But I think that reluctance misses an important dynamic. To analogize for a moment: The body will generate a fever to destroy a pathogen. But a fever that runs too hot and too long can become more dangerous to the body than the original pathogen ever was. This is the world I believe we inhabit post 9/11—a world in which we have less to fear from non-state actors than we do from our own overreactions. After all, America is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. It’s therefore unavoidably true that we can do far more damage to ourselves than any enemy ever could—if we lose our heads, and our values, and turn all that power on ourselves. So even beyond the inherent attraction of realism, if maximum danger means maximum thrills, in a political thriller it makes sense to depict the gravest dangers a society can face. And while the fever analogy applies generally, the NSA is a particularly acute example, both because its original mandate was exclusively overseas, and because the changing nature of technology has enabled the organization to spy on virtually every aspect of human behavior. As I wrote in 2013 on the topic of post-9/11 governmental overreach:
There are two things worth noting here. First, a giant octopus strangling, eating and/or otherwise assaulting the earth is how our intelligence apparatus (which prefers the friendlier nomenclature “intelligence community”) perceives itself. Second, that apparatus has become so detached and unaccountable that it now believes this kind of logo will create a favorable impression among ordinary people. Naturally, there are dozens of other such patches from various intelligence and military organizations, many of them incorporating figures like poisonous snakes and devils and even the Grim Reaper, variously clutching, encircling and attacking the earth. In fact, Trevor Paglen has written a whole book on the topic: "I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems From the Pentagon’s Black World." The imagery and slogans offer a fascinating look at the leaking id of our metastasized national security state; if you’re curious, here are a few links with many more. As a certified news junkie and civil liberties and anti-torture activist, I’ve long been aware of these patches, along with some of the examples of governmental overreach the patches tend to suggest. After all, New York Times journalist James Risen broke an early NSA domestic spying story all the way back in 2005. So I’d been playing around with a novel based on a top-secret government surveillance program for quite a few years when the Snowden revelations shocked the world in the summer of 2013. I thought, Hmmm, powerful actors doing terrible things for reasons they believe are good—my kind of villainy! So I obsessed over the news articles. I imagined what wasn’t being reported—what even Snowden might not have been able to access. And I remembered one of the things they taught me at the CIA: that sometimes it pays to cover up the commission of a serious crime by confessing to a lesser one. The programs Snowden revealed were appalling, yes, but what would be the even worse ones, the ones that would leak later, if at all? My answer to that question—informed by the abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover years, the history of COINTELPRO, the allegations of NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice, and most of all by Snowden’s revelations themselves—became the foundation for "The God’s Eye View," with an all-seeing surveillance state the novel’s milieu. In fact, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon—the circular prison in which a central watchtower would simultaneously monitor all the prisoners—became a kind of motif for the novel. Within that framework, characters began to evolve. I asked myself, what would you do if you were, say, Evelyn Gallagher—NSA analyst, single mother to a small deaf son, mostly intent on keeping your head down—and you discovered the existence of a program as vast as God’s Eye? And what if you were a contractor assigned to assess and eliminate Gallagher—say, Marvin Manus, a badly damaged giant of a man intent on protecting the director of the NSA and struggling with a growing attraction to the woman you’ve been tasked with killing? How much would you double down if you were, say, Theodore Anders, the director of the NSA itself, and you believed an employee had become an insider threat to the most far-reaching spy program in history? And how far would a mother like Evelyn go to protect her small son with the full might of the national security state arrayed against her? I know not all novelists are comfortable with the notion of depicting our ostensible protectors as villains. But I think that reluctance misses an important dynamic. To analogize for a moment: The body will generate a fever to destroy a pathogen. But a fever that runs too hot and too long can become more dangerous to the body than the original pathogen ever was. This is the world I believe we inhabit post 9/11—a world in which we have less to fear from non-state actors than we do from our own overreactions. After all, America is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. It’s therefore unavoidably true that we can do far more damage to ourselves than any enemy ever could—if we lose our heads, and our values, and turn all that power on ourselves. So even beyond the inherent attraction of realism, if maximum danger means maximum thrills, in a political thriller it makes sense to depict the gravest dangers a society can face. And while the fever analogy applies generally, the NSA is a particularly acute example, both because its original mandate was exclusively overseas, and because the changing nature of technology has enabled the organization to spy on virtually every aspect of human behavior. As I wrote in 2013 on the topic of post-9/11 governmental overreach: The National Surveillance State doesn’t want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication. Think that’s too strong a statement? If so, you’re not paying attention. There’s a reason the government names its programs Total Information Awareness and Boundless Informant and acknowledges it wants to “collect it all” and build its own “haystack” and has redefined the word “relevant” to mean “everything.” The desire to spy on everything totally and boundlessly isn’t even new; what’s changed is just that it’s become more feasible of late. You can argue that the NSA’s nomenclature isn’t (at least not yet) properly descriptive; you can’t argue that it isn’t at least aspirational.As with all my novels, ultimately what I set out to do with "The God’s Eye View" was to drop fictional characters into real situations, both as entertainment and also because “Nonfiction is fact; fiction is truth.” In this regard, early reader reactions have been encouraging: a lot of, “Loved the book, and then I came to the bibliography and thought, ‘Holy smokes, this stuff is all real?’” Yes, it is. And when a program like God’s Eye is revealed in tomorrow’s news articles and history books, remember: “Fiction” got there first.Whenever people ask where I get ideas for my thrillers, I say, “Direct from the U.S. government.” They laugh, but it’s true—in a time of detention (indefinite imprisonment without charge, trial or conviction); enhanced interrogation (torture); targeted killings (extrajudicial assassinations); and, of course, the unprecedented bulk surveillance revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, third-party villains like SMERSH and SPECTRE and the rest can feel a bit beside the point. Indeed, when the NSA, in its own leaked slides, announces its determination to “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Partner it All,” “Sniff it All” and, ultimately, “Know it All,” it’s safe to say we’re living in an age of “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Does that claim sound extreme? Have a look at this National Reconnaissance mission patch. What is this Octopus doing to the earth?
There are two things worth noting here. First, a giant octopus strangling, eating and/or otherwise assaulting the earth is how our intelligence apparatus (which prefers the friendlier nomenclature “intelligence community”) perceives itself. Second, that apparatus has become so detached and unaccountable that it now believes this kind of logo will create a favorable impression among ordinary people. Naturally, there are dozens of other such patches from various intelligence and military organizations, many of them incorporating figures like poisonous snakes and devils and even the Grim Reaper, variously clutching, encircling and attacking the earth. In fact, Trevor Paglen has written a whole book on the topic: "I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems From the Pentagon’s Black World." The imagery and slogans offer a fascinating look at the leaking id of our metastasized national security state; if you’re curious, here are a few links with many more. As a certified news junkie and civil liberties and anti-torture activist, I’ve long been aware of these patches, along with some of the examples of governmental overreach the patches tend to suggest. After all, New York Times journalist James Risen broke an early NSA domestic spying story all the way back in 2005. So I’d been playing around with a novel based on a top-secret government surveillance program for quite a few years when the Snowden revelations shocked the world in the summer of 2013. I thought, Hmmm, powerful actors doing terrible things for reasons they believe are good—my kind of villainy! So I obsessed over the news articles. I imagined what wasn’t being reported—what even Snowden might not have been able to access. And I remembered one of the things they taught me at the CIA: that sometimes it pays to cover up the commission of a serious crime by confessing to a lesser one. The programs Snowden revealed were appalling, yes, but what would be the even worse ones, the ones that would leak later, if at all? My answer to that question—informed by the abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover years, the history of COINTELPRO, the allegations of NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice, and most of all by Snowden’s revelations themselves—became the foundation for "The God’s Eye View," with an all-seeing surveillance state the novel’s milieu. In fact, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon—the circular prison in which a central watchtower would simultaneously monitor all the prisoners—became a kind of motif for the novel. Within that framework, characters began to evolve. I asked myself, what would you do if you were, say, Evelyn Gallagher—NSA analyst, single mother to a small deaf son, mostly intent on keeping your head down—and you discovered the existence of a program as vast as God’s Eye? And what if you were a contractor assigned to assess and eliminate Gallagher—say, Marvin Manus, a badly damaged giant of a man intent on protecting the director of the NSA and struggling with a growing attraction to the woman you’ve been tasked with killing? How much would you double down if you were, say, Theodore Anders, the director of the NSA itself, and you believed an employee had become an insider threat to the most far-reaching spy program in history? And how far would a mother like Evelyn go to protect her small son with the full might of the national security state arrayed against her? I know not all novelists are comfortable with the notion of depicting our ostensible protectors as villains. But I think that reluctance misses an important dynamic. To analogize for a moment: The body will generate a fever to destroy a pathogen. But a fever that runs too hot and too long can become more dangerous to the body than the original pathogen ever was. This is the world I believe we inhabit post 9/11—a world in which we have less to fear from non-state actors than we do from our own overreactions. After all, America is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. It’s therefore unavoidably true that we can do far more damage to ourselves than any enemy ever could—if we lose our heads, and our values, and turn all that power on ourselves. So even beyond the inherent attraction of realism, if maximum danger means maximum thrills, in a political thriller it makes sense to depict the gravest dangers a society can face. And while the fever analogy applies generally, the NSA is a particularly acute example, both because its original mandate was exclusively overseas, and because the changing nature of technology has enabled the organization to spy on virtually every aspect of human behavior. As I wrote in 2013 on the topic of post-9/11 governmental overreach: The National Surveillance State doesn’t want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication. Think that’s too strong a statement? If so, you’re not paying attention. There’s a reason the government names its programs Total Information Awareness and Boundless Informant and acknowledges it wants to “collect it all” and build its own “haystack” and has redefined the word “relevant” to mean “everything.” The desire to spy on everything totally and boundlessly isn’t even new; what’s changed is just that it’s become more feasible of late. You can argue that the NSA’s nomenclature isn’t (at least not yet) properly descriptive; you can’t argue that it isn’t at least aspirational.As with all my novels, ultimately what I set out to do with "The God’s Eye View" was to drop fictional characters into real situations, both as entertainment and also because “Nonfiction is fact; fiction is truth.” In this regard, early reader reactions have been encouraging: a lot of, “Loved the book, and then I came to the bibliography and thought, ‘Holy smokes, this stuff is all real?’” Yes, it is. And when a program like God’s Eye is revealed in tomorrow’s news articles and history books, remember: “Fiction” got there first.
The ugliest Bernie smear yet: Washington Post shows its corporate colors with new Sanders hit piece
The Washington Post has been on something of an anti-Sanders kick lately. Its latest editorial, Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign, is somehow worse than its last one, which derided his single-payer plan in tabloid-like terms. It's entirely predictable that an establishment gatekeeper publication like The Post would not approve of Sanders' relatively radical policy proposals, but the degree to which it keeps offering up hysterical, and often times totally disingenuous critiques, is surprising even by its standards. Let's begin with The Post's first claim: Mr. Sanders’s tale starts with the bad guys: Wall Street and corporate money. The existence of large banks and lax campaign finance laws explains why working Americans are not thriving, he says, and why the progressive agenda has not advanced. Here is a reality check: Wall Street has already undergone a round of reform, significantly reducing the risks big banks pose to the financial system.
Nothing here to see, folks! The claim that Wall Street is more or less reformed and “too big to fail” is a progressive fantasy. But wait, that’s not what theWashington Post itself said in 2014. As International Business Times’ Andrew Perez noted, The Post published a contradictory op-ed a year-and-a-half ago in, "The Post's View: Bank of America faces a hefty fine, but ‘too big to fail’ still threatens":
Just or not, no one should confuse this pending settlement with a solution to the deeper problem of the U.S. financial system —namely that Bank of America and other institutions remain too big to fail.
So which is it? Is Sanders’ too-big-to-fail rhetoric useful or not? It certainly was to the Washington Post a year and a half ago, but now it's not “reality.”
The op-ed goes on, this time to pooh pooh the idea that radical campaign finance reform would have a meaningful impact on how people perceive progressive policies: "And even with radical campaign finance reform, many Americans and their representatives would still oppose the Sanders agenda."
This is fatuous gaslighting. First off, the weasel word “many” is vague to the point of meaningless. Many Americans opposed the war in Iraq, charter schools and the Wall Street bailout, but this didn’t stop the Post from aggressively supporting all three. The whole point of campaign finance reform is you take the big money out of the election process and the voice of the less well-off will make our democracy more robust over time, not overnight. Sanders had said since the beginning of his campaign that his “political revolution” is a long-term process, but now the Post is lambasting Sanders with what he can achieve in the next election cycle based on the objections of some unknown “many.” This is patronizing hand-waving posing as pragmatism.
Similar “realism” arguments are advanced throughout the piece:
Sanders tops off his narrative with a deus ex machina: He assures Democrats concerned about the political obstacles in the way of his agenda that he will lead a “political revolution” that will help him clear the capital of corruption and influence-peddling. This self-regarding analysis implies a national consensus favoring his agenda when there is none and ignores the many legitimate checks and balances in the political system that he cannot wish away.
As I've written elsewhere, establishment gatekeeping—which make no mistake, The Washington Post is doing—is based on a tautology: Sanders can’t change people’s minds because serious people don’t think it will work and we’re serious people. Maybe the Post is right, maybe it's not, but bold policy initiatives are not all or nothing. The idea that Sanders' proposals must be adopted wholesale or not at all is a fallacy; no one thinks the U.S. will have single-payer healthcare overnight with a President Sanders, but this strawman is presented as the case. Of course, compromises will be made, as they always are, but how does starting a negotiation with a principled stand harm anyone? It doesn’t, except for those heavily invested in maintaining the conventional wisdom that single payer—though entirely standard in almost every other developing nation—is a laughable fantasy here in the United States.
That The Post’s sole owner, Jeff Bezos, is an arch-libertarian worth $53.2 billion and has a whole host of investments in private health care, we’ll assume is entirely separate from The Post editorial board's recent swath of hysterical Sanders criticism, including these two gems from last week; the first an editorial, the latter ostensibly straight reporting:
The Post's View: Mr. Sanders needs to come clean about the funding for his health-care plan
Most of Bernie Sanders’s big ideas are dead-on-arrival in Congress. Do Democrats care?
Notice the tone is the same throughout: Sanders is insane and his ideas will never work. There’s very little discussion of substance or evidence to support the idea that his plans are untenable. It’s just asserted as true.
The Post’s latest op-ed is just another example of this type of dismissive establishment ideology policing, much of which has animated Sanders anti-establishment appeal. To this extent, perhaps there's nothing more helpful to the Sanders campaign than an oligarch-owned newspaper bashing your every proposal at every turn.
Obama as folk hero: To be what he’s trying to be — black, idealistic and president — is nothing less than superhuman
The unlikely heroism of Barack Obama began for me the first and only time I saw him, on a warm winter day in Los Angeles in 2007. He had just declared his candidacy for president and was holding a rally at Rancho Cienega Park in the Crenshaw district. Crenshaw is the last primarily black area left in the city; it is next to Dorsey High School, one of three majority black high schools left in the 700,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, and for nearly twenty years it was the site of the African Marketplace and Cultural Faire, held in late summer. In other words, anybody holding an event at Rancho Cienega was trying to get a message out to black folks. The fact that lots of white folks lived pretty close by, some just across the street at Village Green, a leafy condominium community built as a prototype of utopian urban living in the 1940s, didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that whites live in considerable numbers in Ladera Heights, a few miles north of Rancho Cienega, and in much greater numbers in Culver City, a couple of miles southwest. The proximity of these places doesn’t connect them at all. Crenshaw is a black nation-state, so those whites who do live here don’t live outdoors, are never seen on the streets, and more than likely tell their white friends and potential visitors that they live not in Crenshaw but in adjacent places like Culver City or West Los Angeles. They will acknowledge black neighborhoods only when special events are held there such as the African Marketplace or the Martin Luther King Day parade, when the place itself is the point; on those occasions, Crenshaw lights up as local exotica, an in-house tourist destination. But for most of the year, as far as Los Angeles and Southern California and the rest of the country and the rest of the world are concerned, Crenshaw, like black hubs in big cities anywhere else in the United States, lives in shadow and uncertainty. The special occasion of Barack Obama’s rally wasn’t going to change that. I was curious to see him but hardly excited, and if I hadn’t been looking for fodder for a weekly op-ed column I was then writing for the Los Angeles Times, I probably would have stayed home. Obama was all the talk and I knew generally who he was, but I knew nothing specific except the keynote speech he’d made at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004 that had made him a star. I thought Obama was good-looking and remarkably self-possessed, like many aspiring actors I’ve met, but I was not a fan of that speech. It made me uneasy. The call for Americans to overcome their differences and find strength in unity across party and ethnic lines hadn’t moved me in at least twenty years, not since I started college in 1979 and felt almost at that very moment the 1960s officially grinding to a close. I saw a preview of it in fifth grade, when I was bused to a very white school not far west of Rancho Cienega and understood at ten years of age that integration was going to be impossible because whites simply didn’t want it. Blacks would always be tolerated, never invited or freely given space. I didn’t resent this, probably because it didn’t surprise me. I had grown up with a fiercely activist father, a soldier of the movement and a New Orleans native who believed in justice and equality for all, but he harbored no illusions about the depth of white American resistance to both. He was committed to changing laws and behaviors; changing hearts and minds was not a reachable goal. It depended too much on feelings, and in my father’s line of work and in his own life experience, feelings were unreliable, mercurial, even dangerous, for everybody concerned. Anybody talking about feelings as they related to justice and politics had his head in the clouds or was secretly averse to the real work needed for racial progress — work that was tough, unglamorous, and distinctly unsentimental. It was also lonely. Erasing differences and coming together across color lines as a way to effect change was one of those facile ’60s utopian ideas commercialized by companies like Coca-Cola that celebrated brotherhood and equality as the good feeling Americans get singing a song or downing a soda. Now that feeling had been resurrected as a serious message for a seriously disillusioned age that seemed to be always invoking the ’60s, minus its actual events and unfinished business. The sense of possibility, of transformation being eternally on the horizon, was the only use people had for the ’60s anymore. Mainstream politics had long ago stopped talking about its hard lessons and touted only hope and rainbows, talking up the idea of change rather than the mechanics of it. Obama was just the latest politician to do this. By the time I reached the park I was more than halfway annoyed with Barack Obama and his campaign of hope. I had decided that it was hollow. The fact that he was a black man exactly my age who could make extraordinary history and put our generation on the map moved me less than the eternal question of, hope for whom? Nobody ever asked black folks what they needed. Yet everybody was always giving them something they claimed was good for them, and always at places like Rancho Cienega, throwing out encouraging words that shimmered on delivery, like strings of beads tossed from a Mardi Gras float, but that started to dull the minute the event / rally was done and everybody was walking away. The words dropped on the ground and stayed there, with good reason; no use taking anything home. I knew this firsthand. I had sat through these kinds of faux events for fifteen years now, since the citywide unrest in 1992 had made a prophet out of every black leader or figure who claimed to have a piece of the answer Going Forward, sometimes the whole answer. They called a press conference and I would come, making it as significant as I could in a write-up the following week. (The real prophets were not written about because they rarely had press conferences.) I anticipated Obama scaling down his prophetic message to fit this place, this black island in the ocean of Los Angeles that was itself by an ocean and because of that, perhaps a more hopeful place than a similar island in Des Moines or St. Louis. Los Angeles is not hallowed ground or the heartland but the end-land, the great western flourish of the American continent, a shining sea. Obama chose well, I thought: plenty of room for expanding in all directions about possibility and hope and whatnot. His warm-up act was a choir on a stage erected in the middle of Rancho: a dozen or so bright-faced people singing and swaying to a gospel-like tune. They were black, white, Latino, and maybe an Asian or two, a human rainbow rising over the sea. They looked serene and perfectly oblivious to the fact that they were in Crenshaw, or perfectly happy that they were here and not in St. Louis. The crowd of rally-goers was considerably black, but very mixed; of course, I thought, glancing around with more than a little contempt, people hired to drive home the message of multicultural togetherness. Fellow actors. I stood and folded my arms tighter and tilted my face up to the sun. Though I’m a native, I appreciate the sun and never take it for granted, especially in winter. Sun here is ubiquitous, but it is not guaranteed, never a given in any season. It is generous but sly, temperamental. I closed my eyes in appreciation, and when I opened them, Obama was on stage. I blinked. The sky and commanding sun had shrunk, willingly transformed into a backdrop for a figure who was striding — or pacing — in front of the choir in a white shirt and tie, holding a microphone. He was taller than I expected, more imposing, and he radiated something that I didn’t expect at all. Not charisma — well, charisma, yes, but something more unwieldy than that, a restlessness that was used to sitting on itself and showing an even, polished surface that the world read as charisma. Something had pierced that surface, and now a ray of agitation that was knitting Obama’s brow almost into a frown and turning his measured strides into emphatic stomps here and there that made the raised wooden stage shudder. I know what you’re thinking, he was saying to us. I know. You’re tired. Tired of war, tired of Washington. Tired of too many people in prison . . . His tenor boomed over the crowd, which cheered his every line. But that booming voice was also intimate. This was not just a voice of aspiring authority or practiced salesmanship — please vote for me — or even charisma. It was overwhelmingly the voice of Obama, one man in a white shirt and dark tie talking encouragingly to the rest of us about how crappy things had become in America and how his own ideas about the country could make it better. Not just make the country better, but make it realize the potential that it has for greatness despite a history, including a very recent history, of bullshit and broken promises and racial hypocrisy and fake populism and all the rest. So certain was he of this idea that he forgot himself — or he remembered himself — and flashed a bit of the agitation and anger that I immediately recognized as all of ours. Oh lord, I thought, amazed, he is one of us. Most remarkably, he is one of us, a black man who understands the grieved nature of black anger toward crappy America and its bullshit promise, understands it even if he has not exactly lived the bullshit in the way many of us have lived and continue to live it, even if he can’t describe it aloud. I forgave him that. What was more important was that despite his Harvard pedigree and lofty idea about America and his Hollywood-approved handsomeness, Obama was a common man, certainly gifted but as ordinary as so many black people with many gifts who live in agitation their whole lives, people who might be told they are somebody but who never find a stage or listening ears. For all of those folks and for everybody else, Obama was offering redemption, a voice. He was offering hope. Another amazing thing was that unlike most black figures, including Jesse Jackson, Obama was not chasing the American ideal of togetherness — praising it but really chastising it for betraying black folks so badly. He was out in front of it, calmly extending the ideal in both hands as if it actually belonged to him. When he said, “You all are tired,” he was saying he was sorry that his ideal had disappointed but assured us it was going to be restored; he was giving us his word about something I always thought we as black people had none to give. It had never felt possible. Obama didn’t change that reality on the spot, but his confidence touched me. He was seeing something I couldn’t, looking over our heads at something, largely invisible to most of us, that drove him, that had driven him all over — Chicago, St. Louis, and now here, finally, to the continent’s end. It was because of this vision of something I sensed but couldn’t see, but which I knew that he saw, that made him a hero to me that afternoon. I saw his faith in a fully realized America, a faith that I and many other black people — certainly all the ones I knew — had put aside long ago, mostly because we felt we had no choice. Obama, on his own, was offering us back that choice. He was a hero not because he was transcendent or prophetic, but precisely because he was none of that, at least not yet. And he might never be; he might fail utterly in this undertaking, I thought. But the undertaking was what mattered. It was what moved me. I also thought that whatever he did from this point on was going to matter terribly to black folks. He was one of us, although he didn’t know that yet; stalking that stage, he didn’t really know what he was setting in motion, and that ignorance moved me too. Obama saw things we didn’t, but we also saw things that he didn’t, and this kind of silent dance was a dynamic between a black figure and his followers that I’d not seen or felt before, a modern romance that I knew right away was going to be the stuff of myth, not just speeches and endorsements and poll numbers. What Obama did was going to matter in a way I never thought any black person in my lifetime could matter. The stakes were too high to even measure. When the rally was over, I didn’t leave the paraphernalia of words on the ground as I ordinarily did. Instead, I was carrying something that excited me, something very physical, which also made me uneasy. I was rattled. Obama had gotten under my skin and into a psyche that belonged to another age, one in which black people followed the fortunes of people like Joe Louis and Malcolm X as if their lives depended on it, because in a way they did. I walked away knowing I would now have to follow Obama like that. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to and doubted that I even had the time, but I had no choice. It was this feeling of surrender, immediate and almost titillating but mostly alarming because I had no idea where this one man would take us and how this quest would end, that made him a folk hero that day. A dangerous one, too, because this Obama, like Malcolm X, had ambition that he saw as perfectly appropriate, even patriotic, but it was going to make him an outlaw. A pariah, a loner. It didn’t matter that Obama, quite unlike Malcolm, appeared utterly mainstream, that he attracted enough admiration and support from white folks to eventually put him into the highest office in the country and arguably in the world; despite that, he was going to be on his own. This isolation was another thing that he didn’t see coming then, but I did. We did. Certainly Malcolm would have seen it. Martin Luther King, despite his own belief in the Beloved Community that had paved the way for Obama, would have seen it too. But Obama had cast his grand vision on an assumption never made by a black figure before: that everybody, black and otherwise, saw things exactly as he did. They, too, saw what had been lost in America and knew what needed to be reclaimed. He wasn’t only a black man arguing a position on our behalf, he was a fellow American steering the way back to an America that had once morally challenged itself on many questions, including the question of race. Obama was appointing himself primary keeper of the American story, not a critic of it, a thoroughly modern vision of black possibility that was going to get him elected, and then reviled, by white folks. Black folks who had always seen the American story for what it was saw it all coming; we would overwhelmingly support Obama and then brace ourselves for the opposition. Our apprehension, as it turns out, has been more than justified. But that doesn’t dim the miracle of Obama, which is simply that his new story, his attempt to not just belong to America but to lead it, is ours. He is ours. The truth of that has been alternately heady, bittersweet and tragic. The story is not over, the meaning of the particulars not sorted out. But it is already legend.
* * *
From the instant he became president, Obama has been a black cultural touchstone like nothing I’ve seen before. His presence has changed everything, realigned our thoughts and arguments about ourselves and our progress and our country, affirming some things and disproving others. As so many people have said to me, his symbolism has been the most influential thing about him. It’s also been the most controversial. As president, he is a black man waging a battle against the racist tendencies of the very system he was elected to lead, fighting daily to effect ideals of unity and common good that were never meant for black people at all. This is the spectacle that black folks have followed anxiously, more so than his policies, many of which have been shaped — not in a good way — by his failure to effect those ideals. The failures, the over-compromises, are Obama’s acknowledgment of defeat; that includes his almost total silence on the subject of blackness itself, which for black folks feels like the worst defeat of all. And yet we watch Obama struggle and sympathize with him, with his thwarted ambitions and his failures, because to be what he’s trying to be — black, idealistic and president — is nothing less than superhuman. A folk hero’s errand for sure. The errand is almost complete. True to what that electric feeling in the park presaged for me in 2007, Obama has been a figure of unprecedented importance for black people. Throughout his turbulent presidency we have anxiously measured the breadth and meaning of every setback and every triumph, though clearcut triumphs have been rare (and even they are cause for a certain anxiety). In the pantheon of black figures and leaders, Obama is unique, a logical extension of King and Malcolm but also detached from them because he has made most of his decisions detached from us; he has us in mind but not at the table. As president he decides things only as himself, not as an agent of other black people, which doesn’t mean that we don’t benefit from his decisions, but we don’t know what he intends for us, if he intends anything. It is a new and strange dynamic that has left us still arguing what Obama’s role as president should be as far as black people are concerned. What I have heard most often is, “He’s not the president of black America, he’s the president of the United States of America!” which to me is a bright red herring, a self-negating posture meant to head off a more troubling discussion about why we as black people have learned so well to have no expectations of anyone who makes any claim to represent our interests, however obliquely. Yet we support Obama because we must; his stature in the world and his still-unfolding battle with the America he claims to love demands our support. He may not actively represent us — the first black leader with that somewhat dubious distinction — but he is ours. He means more to us than anyone has meant in a long time, so even if you have soured on him since 2008, you cannot ignore him, and you especially cannot ignore what he means. As a twice-elected president, he is a towering symbol of previously unimagined black success that has reconfigured all of our conversations about race and racial progress; nobody can talk about either thing anymore without invoking his name or citing what he recently said or what’s been said about him. But his ubiquity is double-edged. In a white America that blacks must still navigate, Obama is both our armor and our Achilles’ heel: on the one hand, his presence in the White House refutes stereotypes of black inferiority and fallibility; on the other, his blunders or failures of nerve confirm them. We largely forgive him the blunders, because that is our job — who else but us will give him the margin of error he needs but is never granted, the margin we seek but rarely find for ourselves? Who else will say he is human? And we forgive him because, towering figure though he is, Obama is one of the family. He is one of our bright young men who made good, the very essence of the talented-tenth vanguard that W.E.B. DuBois imagined would lead the race to new heights and eventually prove to America that equality was not a theory, nor was it some charity dispensed by white folks when it moved them, but a fact, a reality. Obama is our fortunate son who carries the weight of this proof, and we worry for him, like all parents with great expectations worry for their children. We worry not only about how he is faring in his job, but about how he is doing — is he eating right, keeping his head on straight, keeping it together? The front pages of newspapers and websites keep up the purely political narrative — what’s happening in the White House, in the polls — while blacks keep up a parallel but shadow narrative whose core concern is how the political beast that Barack leadsis also trying to eat him alive. This is the battle royale we have been watching, with Barack our accidental folk-hero protagonist fighting an enemy far bigger and more insidious than anything faced by folk heroes such as John Henry, Joe Louis, or Malcolm X. Those men were pitted against a machine, against white men in a boxing ring, against the self-doubt of black people. But Barack is pitted against America itself. America and its entire monstrous history of racism that has been roused anew because he has dared to try and show the country something, dared to be black and chiefly idealistic rather than black and chiefly critical, imploring or righteously angry. For this sin of initiative and imagination he is still being punished, and we are still watching the battle unfold (years later he is still standing tall, but he seems to be losing by degrees, sinking into the ground by quarter inches) in a kind of collective agony and fury that will take many more years to put into words. So much is at stake: If Obama loses his idealism, loses what he began this whole enterprise with, then blacks will have lost, too, even those of us who never believed in the enterprise of One America in the first place. The question about what would happen if there was ever a black president is no longer rhetorical. It is being answered. Yet his presidential record has little to do with his heroism. Years from now, we will tell stories and sing songs about Obama’s great feat of becoming the first black president who did not ultimately change the real world in which we all suffer, who in fact succumbed to the political temptations of that world more than a little. But the feat was that he got to the top on his own volition. He did not get there as a black prop of white ideology, à la Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He succeeded as himself. And himself he has remained: though he lost many ideological skirmishes along the way, Obama the man / hero didn’t unravel or despair on the world stage that he’s occupied every day. Under terrible pressure he has kept his brilliant smile in reserve and his gravitas intact, even flashing the old agitation at times — the promise to use his veto pen in his last years of office, the quick seething at innumerable moments of hysterical opposition by the white right. Through all of it he has been approachable but unflappable and, to the puzzlement of many in the media, emotionally impervious. He bends, compromises, but does not bleed. This is what black folks appreciate and recognize as themselves, that Obama the idealist is also a survivor. He hews to a critical black tradition of forbearance in the face of great, almost inevitable disappointment, of soldiering on in spite of. This is what has endeared him to us, what ensures his place in our still-unresolved history as a hero for the ages; forbearance has already placed his image alongside the images of true freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, as well as folk-tale heroes such as John Henry. Like all of them, Obama risked for the sake of others. He dreamed of a different state of being. He tried. Excerpted from "I Heart Obama" by Erin Aubry Kaplan. Copyright © 2016 by Erin Aubry Kaplan. Published by ForeEdge, an imprint of University Press of New England.
EPA mulls ban on nation’s most heavily used insecticide
Scott Krogstad grows soybeans and sugar beets in the heart of the Red River Valley near Grand Forks, North Dakota. Like most sugar beet farmers in the Midwest, he wages a difficult war with the unpredictable infestations of the sugar beet root maggot. The maggot, the larva of a small two-winged fly, can completely sever the roots from a beet with its hooked mouth. Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in fruit orchards near Provo, Utah, farmer Alan Riley fights off the San Jose scale, an aphid-like insect that sucks sap from his apple, peach, and cherry trees. It can turn apples from red to purple around feeding sites and result in small, deformed fruit. Despite their many miles of separation, Krogstad and Riley have one key thing in common with each other and countless farmers across the country. They view the insecticide chlorpyrifos as indispensable in their respective battles with bugs. So naturally, they, and many other farmers are dismayed with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s recent proposal to ban chlorpyrifos because of the pesticide’s impact on the health of children and farmworkers who come in contact with it. Chlorpyrifos is part of a class of chemicals, known as organophosphates, that was developed before World War II as a nerve gas that could halt neurotransmissions in a soldier’s brain. Chlorpyrifos kills bugs by disrupting their brain functions in a similar way. The ban on the chemical was triggered by a lawsuit filed by NRDC and several other environmental and farmworker organizations. Introduced by Dow Chemical in 1965 as an alternative to DDT, chlorpyrifos usage took off in the years following the EPA’s decision to ban DDT in 1972. It is now the nation’s most heavily used insecticide, and farmers fear a decrease in their incomes and the food supply would occur if the EPA forces them to abandon chlorpyrifos. The most recent government statistics show that American farmers used about 6 million pounds of chlorpyrifos in 2012, according to the USGS. USGS data also show that farmers used about three times as much chlorpyrifos as any other organophosphate pesticide in 2009. California's Department of Pesticide Regulation reports that 1.46 million lbs. were used in that state alone in 2013. In agency speak, the EPA’s proposal would technically “revoke all tolerances” for chlorpyrifos, which means that any use that leaves a residue of chlorpyrifos on food would not be allowed. A public comment period on the proposal expired in early January. If approved, the ban would go into effect in December 2016. In comments submitted to the EPA, Riley said, “Without chlorpyrifos and the early control that it gives us, I'm afraid it will be necessary during the season to use more chemicals such as pyrethroids to get the same control.” Krogstad told Earth Island Journal that he does not use chlorpyrifos every year, and tries to minimize its use. But in his comments to the EPA he said that “removing chlorpyrifos from the market will not reduce society's exposure to pesticides, it will increase it in my area.” He said that without chlorpyrifos, he would have to increase the use of other insecticides on his farm at a higher cost. However, not all farmers are as worried about the ban. Indeed some see it as a welcome move given that the chemical is being identified in several studies as causing, even at very low doses, numerous health problems involving the brain. Jean Edwards, a blueberry grower in Hillsboro, Oregon for instance, cited “several less toxic chemical options” that are available. “Although we struggle with spotted wing drosophila in our fields, and must use pesticides frequently, we prefer to limit EPA approved insecticides to less toxic options than chlorpyrifos for blueberries,” he told EIJ. In a health assessment released in December 2014, the EPA cited three “strong” studies that showed that prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos “likely played a role” in adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in children up to seven years old. If anything, the EPA found that these studies underestimated the risk to children. In aggregate, the EPA said the research shows that chlorpyrifos exposure contributes to: Delays in mental development in infants (24-36 months); Attention problems and pervasive developmental disorders in early childhood; and Intelligence decrements in school age children who were exposed to chlorpyrifos during gestation The most recent of these studies, the University of California-Berkeley’s CHAMACOS study of farmworker children in the state’s Salinas Valley, found “a statistically significant 7 point” reduction in IQ among exposed children. The children were exposed through their diet, inhalation, skin, and “tracking in” of pesticide residues through shoes and clothing, augmented by poor hygiene practices. The other studies were conducted by New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Columbia University. Other parts of young bodies may also be at risk from chlorpyrifos exposure. In December, another CHAMACOS study of farmworker children in the Salinas Valley found that chronic exposure to pesticides can damage a child's lung function by about as much as secondhand cigarette smoke does. The news that the EPA would find that low-level exposure to chlorpyrifos can cause neurological problems in humans comes as no surprise. The agency has a history of questioning the chemical’s safety. In 2000, after exposure to very high doses of chlorpyrifos was found to cause horrific birth defects in children, the EPA banned all in-home uses of the insecticide, including as termite bombs. The EPA is now conducting health assessments for all 22 other registered organophosphates on the market. The agency has already completed preliminary assessments for seven of these pesticides – dimethoate, dicrotophos, chlorpyrifos-methyl, tribufos, terbufos, profenofos, and ethoprop. Each inhibits the action of an important enzyme in human nerve cells. A recent report by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation listed several pyrethroid pesticides that can be used as alternatives to the organosphosphates.. Pryethroids are synthetic compounds related to a natural extract of the chrysanthemum plant. Unsurprisingly, chlorpyrifos manufacturer Dow AgroSciences believes that the EPA could protect the public from the chemical by taking actions that fall far short of a complete ban. “Dow AgroSciences continues to believe that essentially all outstanding EPA regulatory issues relative to chlorpyrifos can be resolved with a more refined analysis of Agency exposure modeling data,” company spokesperson Garry Hamlin said in an email. Meanwhile, food and farming activists in Hawaii fear that Dow and other companies conducting genetically modified seed research on the islands will try to continue using chlorpyrifos in their open-field experiments, given that seed crops are technically not considered food. According to the state Department of Agriculture, 7,282 pounds of chlorpyrifos were sold in Hawaii during 2014. “Dow AgroScience, the largest supplier of chlorpyrifos in Hawaii, has no intention of stopping its use and will be fighting the EPA every step of the way,” said Gary Hooser, a member of the Kauai County Council. But Hamlin said that, “given that EPA has not yet determined what action that it will take regarding chlorpyrifos, any conclusion about what effect that action might have on the use of chlorpyrifos on Hawaii would be entirely speculative.”
My day with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton: Two Iowa rallies explain why Hillary may be about to blow a sure thing
The Iowa Caucuses are the Coachella of politics. There’s nowhere else you can catch so many big names in one afternoon. On Sunday morning, I sat in a coffee shop in Cedar Rapids, eating one of Iowa’s famous boxing-glove-sized cinnamon rolls, and scanning the Des Moines Register, which was cover-to-cover rally reviews. (“Glenn Beck Comes to Iowa to Endorse Cruz”; “Trump: I Could ‘Shoot Somebody’ and Keep Voters.”) Hillary Clinton was in Marion at 12:30, Marco Rubio in Cedar Rapids at 2, Bernie Sanders in Independence at 5:30. I decided to hit all three events. I had woken up as an undecided voter, and I would go to sleep as one, too, but in between, I saw that Clinton and Sanders are appealing to two diametrically opposed impulses in Democratic voters. Clinton’s campaign is based on fear – fear that Republicans will return to power and undo all the progress Obama has made since 2009, just as they undid everything her husband achieved in the 1990s. Sanders, on the other hand, is running on hope – hope for what he calls a “political revolution” that will take power out of the hands of billionaires and restore it to the middle class. When Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus arrived at Vernon Middle School, nearly an hour after her speech’s scheduled start time, the few hundred supporters in the school cafeteria gathered at the windows to see if their candidate would step out into the snow. They only saw a bomb-sniffing dog patrolling the playground. As a former first lady, Clinton is protected by the Secret Service, which is why we’d all had to pass through a metal detector to get into this room. After an introduction by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker – whose grandmother, he mentioned twice, grew up in Des Moines – Clinton got down to her business of scaring people with stories about Republican misrule. It was a message she took across the state, to Marion, West Des Moines and North Liberty. You listen to the Republicans, they want to go right back to failed economic policies,” she said that day. “Honest to goodness, it’s as though evidence, facts, history, mean nothing to them. Back to what wrecked our economy in the George W. Bush administration, and they make no apologies. They want to cut taxes even more on wealthy people; they want to literally turn the clock back.” The last time a Clinton was in the White House, she pointed out, incomes went up, and the budget was balanced. Then, a Republican president screwed it all up. “One of the first things they did was to defang the regulators who were supposed to keep an eye on Wall Street and the financial markets,” Clinton said. “They took their eyes off the financial markets, they took their eyes off the mortgage markets, and we had the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We lost 9 million jobs, 5 million homes, $13 trillion in family wealth.” Clinton does have plans for her presidency: she wants to install 500 million new solar panels by the end of her first term, and supply half the country’s power with clean energy by the end of her second. She wants a Fair Share Surcharge of 4 percent on incomes over $5 million, to pay for parental leave and early childhood education. She wants to raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay for women. But those are incremental proposals of a candidate running to extend Democratic leadership for another four years. Her campaign is not about moving the country forward; it’s about preventing the country from slipping backward. That impulse inspired her attack on Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health care system. “I think we should build on the progress we’ve made,” Clinton said. Under the Affordable Care Act, “we now have 90 percent of Americans covered, and we have the chance to get the costs down, which will be my primary focus. I want to cut out-of-pocket costs and cap prescription drug costs. I don’t want to start over. I don’t want to plunge our country into another contentious debate. I feel if we’re at 90 percent coverage, that it’s a lot easier to get to 100 percent coverage and fix what needs to be fixed than to start all over again and try to go from zero to 100 percent; I just don’t think that’s achievable.” Before taking questions, Clinton gave the microphone to her celebrity endorser: John “Bowzer” Bauman of the neo-doo-wop group Sha Na Na. Bowzer boomed the intro to the Marcels' “Blue Moon,” and promised to flex his arms and open his mouth reeeeal wide if Hillary wins the caucus. (At her next stop, in North Liberty, Clinton ended her “booga-booga” show by promising to stop “the onslaught of our rights: women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, worker’s rights. We gotta stand up against what the Republicans would do. We have to defend Social Security from their continuing efforts to privatize it, hand all that money over to Wall Street.”) North of Marion, past 40 miles of snow-covered corn and soybean fields is the pop. 6,000 village of Independence, where Sanders spoke at the Heartland Acres Agribition Center. It was a smaller town, but a bigger crowd; they stood around the edge of the exhibition hall to hear Sanders, who was five minutes late – shockingly punctual for a presidential candidate. Even though he’s been in Washington since 1991, two years longer than Clinton, and in public office for 33 years, longer than anyone ever elected to the White House, Sanders expends a lot of verbiage trying to convince people he’s not a crank economics professor running a fringe campaign only an alternative weekly would endorse. Disclaimers are necessary when you start your speeches, “By the way, are you guys interested in a political revolution?” Right off the bat, Sanders hit the audience with statistics: the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, owns more wealth than the poorest 40 percent of Americans; Americans work the longest hours of any country on Earth; 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent; there are more Americans in prison than Chinese, even though China is “an authoritarian state four times our size.” Yet the dour New England socialist is the sunny one in this race. Clinton looks back, and is frightened. Sanders looks ahead, and sees the America he’s been trying to build since he moved from Brooklyn to Vermont in the 1960s: an America in which new mothers and fathers will be guaranteed three months of parental leave, the minimum wage will pay $15 an hour, free college tuition will be funded by a tax on financial speculation, and every citizen will be insured by a single-payer health care system. "What this campaign is about is transforming America,” Sanders said. “Nothing that I said to you today is utopian; nothing is radical. Nothing that I have said does not exist in other countries, and nothing I have said to you today is not wanted and supported by the American people. The American people want to raise the minimum wage, they want pay equity, they want to create jobs by building our infrastructure, they want to make colleges and universities tuition free, they want to expand Social Security, not cut Social Security. They want us to deal effectively with climate change. They want to end a corrupt campaign finance system. None of this is radical. None of it is pie in the sky, and I told you how we could pay for each of these programs. The issue is not whether the American people want it; the issue is whether or not we have the courage to take on the greed of the billionaire class, who want it all for themselves. That is what this campaign is about.” Sanders’s kicker reminded me of a quote from Tommy Douglas, who achieved for Canada what Sanders is trying to achieve for the U.S. – a single-payer health care system: “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.” I agreed with everything Sanders said, but still have reservations about his candidacy. Not once did he mention foreign policy, where the president has the most latitude to act. A Republican Congress would reject all his economic proposals. He’d be a symbolic president, whose achievement would be moving the Overton window to the left, introducing radical ideas to public discourse, perhaps to be fulfilled by future administrations. Also, he’s from Vermont, which vies with Utah for Least Typical State. Vermont is America’s version of The Shire, the Hobbit-populated land in "The Lord of the Rings": a green liberal Zion with no cities, no minorities and no urban problems. Yet Sanders is running a better campaign than Clinton, because he understands that liberals are motivated by hope; fear is a conservative thing. Barack Obama understood that, too, which is why he out-hoped Clinton in 2008. Clinton is running the same campaign against Sanders she ran against Obama, right down to the “3 a.m. phone call” trope: she talked extensively about her role in plotting to kill Osama bin Laden, to demonstrate she’s ready to be commander in chief. The latest CNN Poll of Polls shows Sanders leading Clinton in Iowa, 46 percent to 44 percent. The caucuses favor true-believing ideologues with motivated followers. Advantage: Sanders. A win in Iowa, followed by a certain victory in New Hampshire, would give Sanders the credibility to pitch himself to Southern voters. Once again, Hillary Clinton may be on the verge of blowing a sure nomination. Even if she wins, her pessimistic message would not sound appealing against Marco Rubio, who gave his Cedar Rapids audience a sunny vision of capitalism as “the only system that can make poor people richer without making rich people poorer.” The Clinton dynasty began in a town called Hope, Arkansas. Maybe Bill needs to take Hillary back home, to remind her of the message that brought the family to Washington in the first place.The Iowa Caucuses are the Coachella of politics. There’s nowhere else you can catch so many big names in one afternoon. On Sunday morning, I sat in a coffee shop in Cedar Rapids, eating one of Iowa’s famous boxing-glove-sized cinnamon rolls, and scanning the Des Moines Register, which was cover-to-cover rally reviews. (“Glenn Beck Comes to Iowa to Endorse Cruz”; “Trump: I Could ‘Shoot Somebody’ and Keep Voters.”) Hillary Clinton was in Marion at 12:30, Marco Rubio in Cedar Rapids at 2, Bernie Sanders in Independence at 5:30. I decided to hit all three events. I had woken up as an undecided voter, and I would go to sleep as one, too, but in between, I saw that Clinton and Sanders are appealing to two diametrically opposed impulses in Democratic voters. Clinton’s campaign is based on fear – fear that Republicans will return to power and undo all the progress Obama has made since 2009, just as they undid everything her husband achieved in the 1990s. Sanders, on the other hand, is running on hope – hope for what he calls a “political revolution” that will take power out of the hands of billionaires and restore it to the middle class. When Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus arrived at Vernon Middle School, nearly an hour after her speech’s scheduled start time, the few hundred supporters in the school cafeteria gathered at the windows to see if their candidate would step out into the snow. They only saw a bomb-sniffing dog patrolling the playground. As a former first lady, Clinton is protected by the Secret Service, which is why we’d all had to pass through a metal detector to get into this room. After an introduction by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker – whose grandmother, he mentioned twice, grew up in Des Moines – Clinton got down to her business of scaring people with stories about Republican misrule. It was a message she took across the state, to Marion, West Des Moines and North Liberty. You listen to the Republicans, they want to go right back to failed economic policies,” she said that day. “Honest to goodness, it’s as though evidence, facts, history, mean nothing to them. Back to what wrecked our economy in the George W. Bush administration, and they make no apologies. They want to cut taxes even more on wealthy people; they want to literally turn the clock back.” The last time a Clinton was in the White House, she pointed out, incomes went up, and the budget was balanced. Then, a Republican president screwed it all up. “One of the first things they did was to defang the regulators who were supposed to keep an eye on Wall Street and the financial markets,” Clinton said. “They took their eyes off the financial markets, they took their eyes off the mortgage markets, and we had the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We lost 9 million jobs, 5 million homes, $13 trillion in family wealth.” Clinton does have plans for her presidency: she wants to install 500 million new solar panels by the end of her first term, and supply half the country’s power with clean energy by the end of her second. She wants a Fair Share Surcharge of 4 percent on incomes over $5 million, to pay for parental leave and early childhood education. She wants to raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay for women. But those are incremental proposals of a candidate running to extend Democratic leadership for another four years. Her campaign is not about moving the country forward; it’s about preventing the country from slipping backward. That impulse inspired her attack on Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health care system. “I think we should build on the progress we’ve made,” Clinton said. Under the Affordable Care Act, “we now have 90 percent of Americans covered, and we have the chance to get the costs down, which will be my primary focus. I want to cut out-of-pocket costs and cap prescription drug costs. I don’t want to start over. I don’t want to plunge our country into another contentious debate. I feel if we’re at 90 percent coverage, that it’s a lot easier to get to 100 percent coverage and fix what needs to be fixed than to start all over again and try to go from zero to 100 percent; I just don’t think that’s achievable.” Before taking questions, Clinton gave the microphone to her celebrity endorser: John “Bowzer” Bauman of the neo-doo-wop group Sha Na Na. Bowzer boomed the intro to the Marcels' “Blue Moon,” and promised to flex his arms and open his mouth reeeeal wide if Hillary wins the caucus. (At her next stop, in North Liberty, Clinton ended her “booga-booga” show by promising to stop “the onslaught of our rights: women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, worker’s rights. We gotta stand up against what the Republicans would do. We have to defend Social Security from their continuing efforts to privatize it, hand all that money over to Wall Street.”) North of Marion, past 40 miles of snow-covered corn and soybean fields is the pop. 6,000 village of Independence, where Sanders spoke at the Heartland Acres Agribition Center. It was a smaller town, but a bigger crowd; they stood around the edge of the exhibition hall to hear Sanders, who was five minutes late – shockingly punctual for a presidential candidate. Even though he’s been in Washington since 1991, two years longer than Clinton, and in public office for 33 years, longer than anyone ever elected to the White House, Sanders expends a lot of verbiage trying to convince people he’s not a crank economics professor running a fringe campaign only an alternative weekly would endorse. Disclaimers are necessary when you start your speeches, “By the way, are you guys interested in a political revolution?” Right off the bat, Sanders hit the audience with statistics: the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, owns more wealth than the poorest 40 percent of Americans; Americans work the longest hours of any country on Earth; 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent; there are more Americans in prison than Chinese, even though China is “an authoritarian state four times our size.” Yet the dour New England socialist is the sunny one in this race. Clinton looks back, and is frightened. Sanders looks ahead, and sees the America he’s been trying to build since he moved from Brooklyn to Vermont in the 1960s: an America in which new mothers and fathers will be guaranteed three months of parental leave, the minimum wage will pay $15 an hour, free college tuition will be funded by a tax on financial speculation, and every citizen will be insured by a single-payer health care system. "What this campaign is about is transforming America,” Sanders said. “Nothing that I said to you today is utopian; nothing is radical. Nothing that I have said does not exist in other countries, and nothing I have said to you today is not wanted and supported by the American people. The American people want to raise the minimum wage, they want pay equity, they want to create jobs by building our infrastructure, they want to make colleges and universities tuition free, they want to expand Social Security, not cut Social Security. They want us to deal effectively with climate change. They want to end a corrupt campaign finance system. None of this is radical. None of it is pie in the sky, and I told you how we could pay for each of these programs. The issue is not whether the American people want it; the issue is whether or not we have the courage to take on the greed of the billionaire class, who want it all for themselves. That is what this campaign is about.” Sanders’s kicker reminded me of a quote from Tommy Douglas, who achieved for Canada what Sanders is trying to achieve for the U.S. – a single-payer health care system: “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.” I agreed with everything Sanders said, but still have reservations about his candidacy. Not once did he mention foreign policy, where the president has the most latitude to act. A Republican Congress would reject all his economic proposals. He’d be a symbolic president, whose achievement would be moving the Overton window to the left, introducing radical ideas to public discourse, perhaps to be fulfilled by future administrations. Also, he’s from Vermont, which vies with Utah for Least Typical State. Vermont is America’s version of The Shire, the Hobbit-populated land in "The Lord of the Rings": a green liberal Zion with no cities, no minorities and no urban problems. Yet Sanders is running a better campaign than Clinton, because he understands that liberals are motivated by hope; fear is a conservative thing. Barack Obama understood that, too, which is why he out-hoped Clinton in 2008. Clinton is running the same campaign against Sanders she ran against Obama, right down to the “3 a.m. phone call” trope: she talked extensively about her role in plotting to kill Osama bin Laden, to demonstrate she’s ready to be commander in chief. The latest CNN Poll of Polls shows Sanders leading Clinton in Iowa, 46 percent to 44 percent. The caucuses favor true-believing ideologues with motivated followers. Advantage: Sanders. A win in Iowa, followed by a certain victory in New Hampshire, would give Sanders the credibility to pitch himself to Southern voters. Once again, Hillary Clinton may be on the verge of blowing a sure nomination. Even if she wins, her pessimistic message would not sound appealing against Marco Rubio, who gave his Cedar Rapids audience a sunny vision of capitalism as “the only system that can make poor people richer without making rich people poorer.” The Clinton dynasty began in a town called Hope, Arkansas. Maybe Bill needs to take Hillary back home, to remind her of the message that brought the family to Washington in the first place.The Iowa Caucuses are the Coachella of politics. There’s nowhere else you can catch so many big names in one afternoon. On Sunday morning, I sat in a coffee shop in Cedar Rapids, eating one of Iowa’s famous boxing-glove-sized cinnamon rolls, and scanning the Des Moines Register, which was cover-to-cover rally reviews. (“Glenn Beck Comes to Iowa to Endorse Cruz”; “Trump: I Could ‘Shoot Somebody’ and Keep Voters.”) Hillary Clinton was in Marion at 12:30, Marco Rubio in Cedar Rapids at 2, Bernie Sanders in Independence at 5:30. I decided to hit all three events. I had woken up as an undecided voter, and I would go to sleep as one, too, but in between, I saw that Clinton and Sanders are appealing to two diametrically opposed impulses in Democratic voters. Clinton’s campaign is based on fear – fear that Republicans will return to power and undo all the progress Obama has made since 2009, just as they undid everything her husband achieved in the 1990s. Sanders, on the other hand, is running on hope – hope for what he calls a “political revolution” that will take power out of the hands of billionaires and restore it to the middle class. When Hillary Clinton’s campaign bus arrived at Vernon Middle School, nearly an hour after her speech’s scheduled start time, the few hundred supporters in the school cafeteria gathered at the windows to see if their candidate would step out into the snow. They only saw a bomb-sniffing dog patrolling the playground. As a former first lady, Clinton is protected by the Secret Service, which is why we’d all had to pass through a metal detector to get into this room. After an introduction by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker – whose grandmother, he mentioned twice, grew up in Des Moines – Clinton got down to her business of scaring people with stories about Republican misrule. It was a message she took across the state, to Marion, West Des Moines and North Liberty. You listen to the Republicans, they want to go right back to failed economic policies,” she said that day. “Honest to goodness, it’s as though evidence, facts, history, mean nothing to them. Back to what wrecked our economy in the George W. Bush administration, and they make no apologies. They want to cut taxes even more on wealthy people; they want to literally turn the clock back.” The last time a Clinton was in the White House, she pointed out, incomes went up, and the budget was balanced. Then, a Republican president screwed it all up. “One of the first things they did was to defang the regulators who were supposed to keep an eye on Wall Street and the financial markets,” Clinton said. “They took their eyes off the financial markets, they took their eyes off the mortgage markets, and we had the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We lost 9 million jobs, 5 million homes, $13 trillion in family wealth.” Clinton does have plans for her presidency: she wants to install 500 million new solar panels by the end of her first term, and supply half the country’s power with clean energy by the end of her second. She wants a Fair Share Surcharge of 4 percent on incomes over $5 million, to pay for parental leave and early childhood education. She wants to raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay for women. But those are incremental proposals of a candidate running to extend Democratic leadership for another four years. Her campaign is not about moving the country forward; it’s about preventing the country from slipping backward. That impulse inspired her attack on Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health care system. “I think we should build on the progress we’ve made,” Clinton said. Under the Affordable Care Act, “we now have 90 percent of Americans covered, and we have the chance to get the costs down, which will be my primary focus. I want to cut out-of-pocket costs and cap prescription drug costs. I don’t want to start over. I don’t want to plunge our country into another contentious debate. I feel if we’re at 90 percent coverage, that it’s a lot easier to get to 100 percent coverage and fix what needs to be fixed than to start all over again and try to go from zero to 100 percent; I just don’t think that’s achievable.” Before taking questions, Clinton gave the microphone to her celebrity endorser: John “Bowzer” Bauman of the neo-doo-wop group Sha Na Na. Bowzer boomed the intro to the Marcels' “Blue Moon,” and promised to flex his arms and open his mouth reeeeal wide if Hillary wins the caucus. (At her next stop, in North Liberty, Clinton ended her “booga-booga” show by promising to stop “the onslaught of our rights: women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, worker’s rights. We gotta stand up against what the Republicans would do. We have to defend Social Security from their continuing efforts to privatize it, hand all that money over to Wall Street.”) North of Marion, past 40 miles of snow-covered corn and soybean fields is the pop. 6,000 village of Independence, where Sanders spoke at the Heartland Acres Agribition Center. It was a smaller town, but a bigger crowd; they stood around the edge of the exhibition hall to hear Sanders, who was five minutes late – shockingly punctual for a presidential candidate. Even though he’s been in Washington since 1991, two years longer than Clinton, and in public office for 33 years, longer than anyone ever elected to the White House, Sanders expends a lot of verbiage trying to convince people he’s not a crank economics professor running a fringe campaign only an alternative weekly would endorse. Disclaimers are necessary when you start your speeches, “By the way, are you guys interested in a political revolution?” Right off the bat, Sanders hit the audience with statistics: the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, owns more wealth than the poorest 40 percent of Americans; Americans work the longest hours of any country on Earth; 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent; there are more Americans in prison than Chinese, even though China is “an authoritarian state four times our size.” Yet the dour New England socialist is the sunny one in this race. Clinton looks back, and is frightened. Sanders looks ahead, and sees the America he’s been trying to build since he moved from Brooklyn to Vermont in the 1960s: an America in which new mothers and fathers will be guaranteed three months of parental leave, the minimum wage will pay $15 an hour, free college tuition will be funded by a tax on financial speculation, and every citizen will be insured by a single-payer health care system. "What this campaign is about is transforming America,” Sanders said. “Nothing that I said to you today is utopian; nothing is radical. Nothing that I have said does not exist in other countries, and nothing I have said to you today is not wanted and supported by the American people. The American people want to raise the minimum wage, they want pay equity, they want to create jobs by building our infrastructure, they want to make colleges and universities tuition free, they want to expand Social Security, not cut Social Security. They want us to deal effectively with climate change. They want to end a corrupt campaign finance system. None of this is radical. None of it is pie in the sky, and I told you how we could pay for each of these programs. The issue is not whether the American people want it; the issue is whether or not we have the courage to take on the greed of the billionaire class, who want it all for themselves. That is what this campaign is about.” Sanders’s kicker reminded me of a quote from Tommy Douglas, who achieved for Canada what Sanders is trying to achieve for the U.S. – a single-payer health care system: “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.” I agreed with everything Sanders said, but still have reservations about his candidacy. Not once did he mention foreign policy, where the president has the most latitude to act. A Republican Congress would reject all his economic proposals. He’d be a symbolic president, whose achievement would be moving the Overton window to the left, introducing radical ideas to public discourse, perhaps to be fulfilled by future administrations. Also, he’s from Vermont, which vies with Utah for Least Typical State. Vermont is America’s version of The Shire, the Hobbit-populated land in "The Lord of the Rings": a green liberal Zion with no cities, no minorities and no urban problems. Yet Sanders is running a better campaign than Clinton, because he understands that liberals are motivated by hope; fear is a conservative thing. Barack Obama understood that, too, which is why he out-hoped Clinton in 2008. Clinton is running the same campaign against Sanders she ran against Obama, right down to the “3 a.m. phone call” trope: she talked extensively about her role in plotting to kill Osama bin Laden, to demonstrate she’s ready to be commander in chief. The latest CNN Poll of Polls shows Sanders leading Clinton in Iowa, 46 percent to 44 percent. The caucuses favor true-believing ideologues with motivated followers. Advantage: Sanders. A win in Iowa, followed by a certain victory in New Hampshire, would give Sanders the credibility to pitch himself to Southern voters. Once again, Hillary Clinton may be on the verge of blowing a sure nomination. Even if she wins, her pessimistic message would not sound appealing against Marco Rubio, who gave his Cedar Rapids audience a sunny vision of capitalism as “the only system that can make poor people richer without making rich people poorer.” The Clinton dynasty began in a town called Hope, Arkansas. Maybe Bill needs to take Hillary back home, to remind her of the message that brought the family to Washington in the first place.
These are the most murderous cities in the world
LIMA, Peru — Just when Venezuelans thought things couldn’t get worse, that’s exactly what they did. The capital Caracas has now been ranked as the most murderous city on Earth, according to a new study by Mexican think-tank the Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.
The report calculates that Caracas’s 3,946 homicides in 2015 gave it a truly terrifying annual homicide rate of 120 per 100,000 residents.
To put that in context, the United States — easily the most murderous of Western developed nations — has a rate of 4.7, according to the United Nations’ most recent comparative study (page 126) of national homicide levels, from 2013.
Meanwhile, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and most of Western Europe had rates that year of around one murder per 100,000 residents, that UN study shows.
Venezuelans don’t need more bad news. They’re already suffering from economic catastrophe and an authoritarian government that, instead of listening to its many critics, accuses them of “fascism.”
Economic woes include inflation that the IMF predicts will hit 720 percent this year, and widespread shortages of everything from bread to birth control to cancer medicines.
Caracas — and Venezuela generally — has long been a lethal place. The country has a national murder rate of 54, according to the 2013 UN survey, 10 times that of the US.
But US residents have reason to worry, too. Theirs is the only developed nation to have cities featured in the top-50 list, and several of those cities are worse-off this year: St. Louis (No. 15, up four places from 2014), Baltimore (No. 19, up 21 places), Detroit (No. 28, up six) and New Orleans (No. 32, down eight).
The Venezuelan capital ranked as the second most murderous city in the world in the 2014 Mexican study. It rose in 2015 to the top spot largely due to a dip in the bloodshed in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s gang-ravaged second city that was previously the world’s most homicidal.
Overall, Latin America confirmed its statistical reputation as the world’s most violent region; 41 of the 50 cities in the report are in Latin America.
San Pedro Sula’s murder rate was 111 per 100,000, putting it at No. 2 in 2015, while the third ranked city was San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, with 109. Worryingly for tourists, the Mexican beach town of Acapulco came in fourth, with 105, although the victims are overwhelmingly locals rather than visitors.
Twenty-one of the 50 most murderous cities were in Brazil, while eight were in Venezuela, five in Mexico, three in Colombia and two in Honduras. Another four of the cities on the list are in South Africa.
LIMA, Peru — Just when Venezuelans thought things couldn’t get worse, that’s exactly what they did. The capital Caracas has now been ranked as the most murderous city on Earth, according to a new study by Mexican think-tank the Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.
The report calculates that Caracas’s 3,946 homicides in 2015 gave it a truly terrifying annual homicide rate of 120 per 100,000 residents.
To put that in context, the United States — easily the most murderous of Western developed nations — has a rate of 4.7, according to the United Nations’ most recent comparative study (page 126) of national homicide levels, from 2013.
Meanwhile, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and most of Western Europe had rates that year of around one murder per 100,000 residents, that UN study shows.
Venezuelans don’t need more bad news. They’re already suffering from economic catastrophe and an authoritarian government that, instead of listening to its many critics, accuses them of “fascism.”
Economic woes include inflation that the IMF predicts will hit 720 percent this year, and widespread shortages of everything from bread to birth control to cancer medicines.
Caracas — and Venezuela generally — has long been a lethal place. The country has a national murder rate of 54, according to the 2013 UN survey, 10 times that of the US.
But US residents have reason to worry, too. Theirs is the only developed nation to have cities featured in the top-50 list, and several of those cities are worse-off this year: St. Louis (No. 15, up four places from 2014), Baltimore (No. 19, up 21 places), Detroit (No. 28, up six) and New Orleans (No. 32, down eight).
The Venezuelan capital ranked as the second most murderous city in the world in the 2014 Mexican study. It rose in 2015 to the top spot largely due to a dip in the bloodshed in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s gang-ravaged second city that was previously the world’s most homicidal.
Overall, Latin America confirmed its statistical reputation as the world’s most violent region; 41 of the 50 cities in the report are in Latin America.
San Pedro Sula’s murder rate was 111 per 100,000, putting it at No. 2 in 2015, while the third ranked city was San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, with 109. Worryingly for tourists, the Mexican beach town of Acapulco came in fourth, with 105, although the victims are overwhelmingly locals rather than visitors.
Twenty-one of the 50 most murderous cities were in Brazil, while eight were in Venezuela, five in Mexico, three in Colombia and two in Honduras. Another four of the cities on the list are in South Africa.
LIMA, Peru — Just when Venezuelans thought things couldn’t get worse, that’s exactly what they did. The capital Caracas has now been ranked as the most murderous city on Earth, according to a new study by Mexican think-tank the Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.
The report calculates that Caracas’s 3,946 homicides in 2015 gave it a truly terrifying annual homicide rate of 120 per 100,000 residents.
To put that in context, the United States — easily the most murderous of Western developed nations — has a rate of 4.7, according to the United Nations’ most recent comparative study (page 126) of national homicide levels, from 2013.
Meanwhile, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and most of Western Europe had rates that year of around one murder per 100,000 residents, that UN study shows.
Venezuelans don’t need more bad news. They’re already suffering from economic catastrophe and an authoritarian government that, instead of listening to its many critics, accuses them of “fascism.”
Economic woes include inflation that the IMF predicts will hit 720 percent this year, and widespread shortages of everything from bread to birth control to cancer medicines.
Caracas — and Venezuela generally — has long been a lethal place. The country has a national murder rate of 54, according to the 2013 UN survey, 10 times that of the US.
But US residents have reason to worry, too. Theirs is the only developed nation to have cities featured in the top-50 list, and several of those cities are worse-off this year: St. Louis (No. 15, up four places from 2014), Baltimore (No. 19, up 21 places), Detroit (No. 28, up six) and New Orleans (No. 32, down eight).
The Venezuelan capital ranked as the second most murderous city in the world in the 2014 Mexican study. It rose in 2015 to the top spot largely due to a dip in the bloodshed in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s gang-ravaged second city that was previously the world’s most homicidal.
Overall, Latin America confirmed its statistical reputation as the world’s most violent region; 41 of the 50 cities in the report are in Latin America.
San Pedro Sula’s murder rate was 111 per 100,000, putting it at No. 2 in 2015, while the third ranked city was San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, with 109. Worryingly for tourists, the Mexican beach town of Acapulco came in fourth, with 105, although the victims are overwhelmingly locals rather than visitors.
Twenty-one of the 50 most murderous cities were in Brazil, while eight were in Venezuela, five in Mexico, three in Colombia and two in Honduras. Another four of the cities on the list are in South Africa.
January 29, 2016
The “Star Wars” kids aren’t alright: The movie gets millennials right — our fight isn’t with “The Man,” but with each other
A lot has already been written about “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” and its meteoric ascent into the pop-culture canon after the mixed reaction to the prequels. One of the takes I liked best was how the very idea of doing a sequel to “Return of the Jedi” and its splashy happy ending turns the Star Wars saga from fairy tale to something bleaker and more realistic, facing the hard truth that war never really ends and evil is never really defeated. “One Death Star is a horror; two Death Stars and one Starkiller Base... is something more like the inexorable logic of history, grinding us all to dust.” There are many reasons Episode VII feels like a bleaker world than Episode IV--one of them being that the backstory to Episode VII consists of movies we’ve actually seen and characters we already love. It’s one thing to kill off an old man we met in Act I as the climax to Act II; it’s another thing entirely to kill off an old man we got to know and rooted for as a young wisecracking scoundrel over the course of three movies. Similarly, it’s one thing to vaguely imply something about the “Clone Wars” as an old, settled conflict and vaguely posit that that peace somehow led to the war we’re in right now (and to somewhat unsatisfyingly try to fill in the details of that transition with an ill-conceived prequel trilogy). It’s another thing to give us the happy ending we were promised at the end of three movies--celebrating Ewoks, exploding fireworks, our protagonists hugging and laughing and smiling--and then show us that happy ending collapsing into wrack and ruin years later with a new movie and a new war. But there’s one particular thing that I haven’t noticed people talking about that I’ve felt nagging at me ever since watching “The Force Awakens.” Something that seems off compared to the unspoken “rules” of the original trilogy and the prequels, something that deeply undermines its message of hope--and something that’s all too clearly reflected in the real world of 2016. In the new Star Wars, the bad guys are young. In the original Star Wars films, the struggle looked pretty much like an intergenerational struggle--fresh-faced Luke and Leia, barely out of their teen years, and Harrison Ford as Han Solo acting the world-weary cynic at the ripe old age of 35. The good guys, the heroes, were the youth, the new generation who saw the corruption of the system and were moved to stand against it. Hell, the conflict between Luke Skywalker and Uncle Owen in the first movie is a stock theatrical trope, the fiery young man eager to go on a “damn fool crusade” against the wishes of a father figure who wants him to stay home and play it safe. The bad guys, the Empire, are the Establishment, the Man. They’re a bevy of middle-aged white guys with British accents in uniforms who seem in love with bureaucracy and procedure. There’s precious little passion in them, compared to the Rebels; instead they’re driven mostly by an officious sense of duty and sneering contempt for their inferiors. Stormtroopers idly chitchat about nonsense while pulling tedious shifts of guard duty, with no particular emotions about the Rebels except as “scum” to be exterminated. Middle-aged Imperial officers bicker over status at staff meetings, and the only time we see young faces among them it’s as a sight gag--the field-promoted Admiral Piett nervously stepping into the place of his recently Force-choked predecessor, the put-upon, in-over-his-head Moff Jerjerrod--pathetic figures, sellouts, the 1960s stereotype of a gormless milquetoast Young Republican. The figures who were the animating force behind the Empire? The ones with real menace? The gaunt-cheeked elder statesman Grand Moff Tarkin. The terrifyingly decrepit Emperor Palpatine. And, of course, Darth Vader, who is literally Luke and Leia’s domineering dad. The story George Lucas was telling was the story he grew up with, as someone who came of age in the 1960s. It’s a story of youth revolution. Yes, there are wise old mentors among the good guys, too--but the key thing about Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda is that they failed, and now Luke, Leia, Han and the dashing Lando Calrissian have to complete the task they left unfinished. Obi-Wan and Yoda, we eventually learn, are wrong to think that Darth Vader can only be defeated by force; Luke succeeds where they failed through empathy and love. It’s almost unnecessary to point to the cut scenes from “A New Hope” with Luke and his friends hanging out in a small town on Tatooine eerily similar to the Modesto, California in “American Graffiti,” or to the Vietnam parallels in “Return of the Jedi.” Star Wars is about liberals like George Lucas putting their hope in youth and youth culture to do what the New Deal Democrats of the World War II generation could not, to finally defeat bigotry and inequality and redeem the American dream. Star Wars was far from the only franchise from that era with that theme. And even though the 1960s were a high-water mark for Youth Culture as a phenomenon in the 20th century, it’s a narrative that’s been around before and after George Lucas--witness the imagery surrounding the messianic “millennial voter” in 2008’s mass celebration of “Hope.” The problem, of course, is that there’s no guarantee whatsoever that history will progress as progressives wish it would generation by generation, or that youth in and of itself implies virtue. Today’s “The Man” was yesterday’s Angry Young Man; the System started somewhere. The Star Wars prequels famously squandered the opportunity to make that point, manipulating the story so that the bad guys are still malevolent elderly authority figures, the gray-haired Senator Palpatine and Count Dooku, the comically bumbling wizened plutocrats of the “Trade Federation” and the “Banking Clan,” while our good guys are a 14-year-old genius political leader and an adorable kid Jedi who only falls to darkness in the last movie. But look at Episode VII. Yes, there’s the weirdly inhuman Andy-Serkis-portrayed CG character “Supreme Leader Snoke.” But look at the frighteningly intense General Hux, whose impassioned speech against “disorder” makes the First Order feel even more uncomfortably close to the Third Reich than the Empire of the old movies. Look at the Darth Vader wannabe Kylo Ren, who takes Luke’s struggle with the Dark Side and inverts it, with his religious devotion to “darkness” and his stubborn insistence on resisting the “light.” They’re both played by young actors--Domhnall Gleeson and Adam Driver are both 32 but look younger, and are associated in the public consciousness with youth. (Gleeson is probably best known to American audiences for his role as Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter movies and for playing a callow 20-something computer nerd in “Ex Machina.” Driver, of course, is the ur-dudebro boyfriend from “Girls.”) They’re not pawns of older authority figures. The only authority figure above them in the film is Snoke, who’s present only as a hologram; for the bulk of the film Hux and Kylo Ren are the duumvirate directing the First Order’s activities, and they do so with relish. There is still hope, yes. Finn and Rey, our heroes, “awaken” to the war that our former heroes are still fighting 30 years down the line and throw in on the side of freedom and justice. But the story of “The Force Awakens” is a story about a war that’s still going on in the first place because hope in the next generation failed--because young men like Hux were willing to throw all their talent and energy into rebuilding the grinding war machine Luke, Han and Leia destroyed. Because Kylo Ren, né Ben Solo, presumably grew up with the story of Darth Vader’s redemption and return to the light--and somehow rejected it, decided the cause Luke devoted his life to was a mistake and sought to bring back the evil cult Luke’s empathy and love had destroyed. On one level that’s just necessary storytelling in order to give Luke, Han and Leia something to do in this movie besides “live happily ever after.” But on another level, as Gerry Canavan mused on his blog, it’s a message about the world we live in today. Remember all that crap about how the older, racist generation--those wrinkly Grand Moff Tarkins and Emperor Palpatines--would inevitably eventually die out and the “political realignment” brought on by new, PC millennials would change everything? Remember the in hindsight darkly comic handwringing in 2008 about the possibility of a permanent Democratic electoral majority and the possible end of the Republicans as anything more than a regional rump party? Remember how happy the left was on Nov. 5, 2008? Fireworks and dancing Ewoks and playing drums on the desks of ousted Republican congressmen? Well, it turns out that there’s plenty of racism left to go around among the young and up-and-coming. It turns out that the younger generation, if frustrated enough or bored enough or simply contrarian enough, is more than willing to join up with old-fashioned reactionary mobs or create them anew from half-baked Internet philosophizing. It turns out that this generation of young men is just as willing as the past one to commit mass murder over fascist ideology as diseased as General Hux’s and petty projected grievances as disordered as Kylo Ren’s. It’s unsurprising that Kylo Ren almost immediately got a parody Twitter account mocking him as a modern-day performatively angsty self-obsessed teenager. Kylo Ren is a perfect picture of what’s screwed up about too many young men--latching onto bizarre belief systems about racial or sexual superiority in an effort to feel big, to feel like they matter. Look at Kylo Ren staring at Darth Vader’s mask--something he can’t possibly understand the historical context of, a relic of a conflict that ended long before he was born, something that its original owner needed to wear to survive--and deciding that he’s going to make it his symbol, that he, too, will wear a mask just because it’s cool. Much like young edgy American guys online deciding to take up the flag of Rhodesia and pre-apartheid South Africa--because it feels rebellious, transgressive, badass. Comparisons have been made between the Kylo Ren character and the toxic masculinity of geek culture--and those comparisons are worth making. The community that calls themselves “nerds” online hasn’t shown its best face in the past couple of years, and we’ve received vivid demonstration after vivid demonstration that being young, tech-savvy and having all the information of the world at your fingertips does nothing to prevent a person from being a vicious bigot. But it’s not just an “Internet thing” or a “geek culture thing” or a “gamer thing” or a “science fiction fandom thing.” It’s not something we can or should just laugh off. All over the world right now we have people recapitulating the sins of their fathers, signing up for ideological wars they have no direct connection to for petty, stupid reasons. We have the far-right theocrats of Daesh somehow convincing bored kids that religious fundamentalism is “punk rock.” We have young “alt-right” racist xenophobes mocking what was formerly the mainstream Republican platform as “cuckservative” and pining for the red-blooded, openly violent, openly white-supremacist conservatism of yesteryear. We have the young people who run the booming tech industry entertaining thoughts of taking over the status of Gilded Age robber barons, defying or rewriting the law, establishing themselves at the top of society’s pyramid permanently thanks to the accidental confluence of wealth and political influence they find themselves in. We have an abundance of bad ideas from the past that just won’t die, because the human impulses that spawn them haven’t died. As someone just turning 32--the age Domnhall Gleeson and Adam Driver were when they filmed “The Force Awakens”--I’m reminded, looking back over my own short life, how often people declared history to be over, the movie’s plot resolved, roll end credits. It was ridiculous to think that in 1992 and it was just as ridiculous to think so in 2008. I keep hearing from people who want to know when the fight will be over and we can finally rest, when we can drop all this “Social Justice Warrior” nonsense and stop being on the alert for bigotry and hatred in the world. It’s frustrating and exhausting--you can see the weariness on Han and Leia’s faces in “The Force Awakens,” the toll it’s taken on them, living a life of running as hard as they can to stay in the same place. The answer is that, to quote a much bleaker entry in the geek canon than Star Wars, “nothing ever ends.” There is hope, yes--no one has to keep fighting the war by themselves forever. For every Ben Solo who turns to the dark side despite all the hopes and dreams his forebears invested in him, there’s a Rey who seems to appear out of nowhere, bringing the awakening of hope with her. But looking at the dismal statistics about racism and sexism among my own generation, the lesson I keep in mind is the lesson of the character of Finn--that no generation is imbued with virtue or insight simply because of being the ones who come next. Everyone has to ask, regardless of whether they’re following their parents’ values or their peers’, if they’re the stormtroopers and not the good guys, and doing the right thing will always require some measure of courage to fight against the crowd. Our enemies, the ones that matter, aren’t our parents or grandparents--the real enemies will be our classmates, our colleagues, our brothers and sisters, our friends. The real test of our generation won’t be our ability to overthrow the last generation--every generation succeeds at that, in the end, if only through the passage of time. It will be our ability to overcome ourselves.
The evolution of Leo: His punishing, paternal “Revenant” is the penance that will erase his party-boy past
“They bring kids in and portray ’em as the next cute guy,” reflected a feckless Leonardo DiCaprio in an interview following 1993’s “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” “But then what happens to that guy when the next face comes in? What happens to his career?" he asked. "It's more important to be a long-lasting actor than any kind of idol.” Out of the mouths of babes—in this case the unparalleled babe of the late 1990s, the one unironically dubbed “Prince of the City” by columnist Nancy Jo Sales in her seminal 1998 feature for New York Magazine. The one who, in a 2000 cover story for Time, Joel Stein called “so self-aware, it’s paralyzing.” The one whose putative “Pussy Posse” arguably inspired an HBO comedy franchise. The one whose fame outweighed his acting the way his button-down dress shirts swallowed his frame. Of course, Sales’s story wasn’t really about Leo—whom she never actually met during the course of her profile—but rather the cult of Leo, the rampant Leomania that engulfed Manhattan and put off so many parents, teachers and aging politicians. What followed was a time in which many, quite reasonably, did not wish to see the actor as ship-helming king any more. Perhaps it was 9/11 and the newfound solemnity (and sobriety) of the early aughts. Perhaps it was a growing awareness of date-rape culture and a sharper distaste for white-guy misogyny, no matter how cute (or rich or famous) that white guy happened to be (take the infamously unreleased “Don’s Plum” as but one piece of proof). Or perhaps it was simply that Leo’s lifestyle began to resemble a bygone era of go-for-broke bachelorhood—one in which panty-chasing and motorcycling themselves display vocational rigor. Accusations of effeminacy trailed him all the same. And his surefire way to ditch the “androgynous wimp” rep? Star in movies directed by the world’s unwimpiest director: Martin Scorsese. There’s “Gangs of New York,” where Leo robs corpses, starts petty fights and does a lot of killing; “The Aviator,” where he bones movie stars and grapples with OCD; “The Departed,” where he (again) racks up a creative list of assault charges throughout his temp work for the mob; or “Shutter Island,” where (spoiler alert) he turns out to be a patient at a mental hospital, locked up for killing his wife. And then of course there’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” where he trades manipulated stocks, abuses Quaaludes, and ensures the financial solvency of innumerable sex workers. As “wolf” Jordan Belfort, perhaps even more so than in his other roles, Leo was easily misconstrued as just “playing himself,” rather than embodying some indictment of late-century hedonism (“…what these characters represent in this film are ultimately everything that’s wrong with the world we live in,” said DiCaprio after the movie’s release — funny, given how central he himself seemed to be to that very ’90s zeitgeist). Surrounded by his team of loyal, if homely, penny-stock pushers, Belfort calls up memories of Leo’s real-life late-’90s entourage who, as Sales put it, served as “unofficial bodyguards, although it’s unclear sometimes whether this is for his benefit or for theirs.” If art imitates life, DiCaprio’s onscreen oeuvre started to resemble a bloated parody of the cocky A-list lifestyle that he and his hormonal bro-pals once collectively defined. Tie in a string of supermodel girlfriends across a decade (and then half a catwalk across the next), and it’s easy to see how Leo’s acting talent has been outshined by an outsized reputation for cross-continent womanizing, his performances codified into a predictable set of default brow lifts and “pretty crumply cry faces.” Enter Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican writer and director with a knack for lyric gravitas that rivals Scorsese’s grit. For his lead role in “The Revenant” as nineteenth-century fur trapper Hugh Glass, DiCaprio has fetched his fifth nomination for an Oscar (the first was for "Gilbert Grape," at 18), and critics have consistently posited that this could be his year. Hailed by Vulture as a “spittle-speckled, blood-soaked revenge turn that successfully exterminates every last vestige of [DiCaprio’s] teen-dream twinkdom,” the film’s take on vengeance seems less “Cape Fear” than an introspective spiritual pilgrimage (the kind that calls for a whole lot of carnage). It is here that Iñárritu’s advised rejection of irony plays a vital role in bringing out the actor’s best. For all the attention and flak the film has garnered for its “extreme” violence and conditions of filming, Leo’s full-throttle performance is central to the film’s endurability over its 2.5 hours (in a similar way that he has ably carried many an interminable Scorsese feature). “You feel the intimacy of both man and beast, you feel the sweat and the heat coming off of the animal,” the actor has said of the now iconic scene in which Mama Bear makes minestrone out of Glass’s flailing body. It’s as though the nine months the actor suffered through the making of the film proved a penance for his party-boy past—early, ludicrous online rumors that he was “raped” by the bear exposing a collective sadistic appetite for all-out Leo defilement. “I like to do things that scare me,” said DiCaprio 20 years ago, after a scrape with a stubborn parachute over the California desert. In this (natural) light, Glass’s penchant in “The Revenant” for sub-zero wilderness parkour might seem like just another demonstration of the actor’s persistent belief in his own invincibility. “I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I done it already,” grumbles Glass from the depths of a self-cauterized throat, the same channel from which he hocks a loogie of bison liver later in the film. But Iñárritu’s Glass is ultimately a Romantic hero, which makes sense given that the director (unlike Blake before him) claims that “innocence is much more powerful than experience.” Never mind all the swimming upstream in frozen waters or couch-surfing in the carcass of a fallen horse: Leo’s unflappable trapper might reestablish his manhood through Sisyphean feats against nature, but his virtue lies more in an unshakeable, nearly childlike belief that true justice is possible. Here, Leo’s history as pure-of-heart vigilante (think “Titanic” or even Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”) merge with Scorsesean scrap to render a masculine hero appealing to the ethos of 2016. He might not be as pretty—dodging rumors of a flea-invested beard, no less—but in this lack of pulchritude rings a character at once earnest and more profound, a commingling of Leo’s early innocence with a new physiognomic humility, a patent lack of vanity only so impressive because the guy has been feminized for decades. Evidently, in order to drop the sex-idol status once and for all, he needed to star in a film not only absent a real female presence, but ostensibly too “brutal” for women audience members to endure. The difference between big-R and little-r Romantic in this context is paramount: Leo had to lose any remnants of latter in order to be taken seriously as the former (ironically, the best-selling biography of the actor was titled “Leonardo DiCaprio, Romantic Hero” back in 1998, priceless for its paperback cover alone, on which a facial resemblance to a young Jodie Foster is striking). It’s no accident that there is no romantic female costar in “The Revenant” to remind us of his time as Tiger Beat bait; his late wife may haunt him with breathy arboreal adages till the end, but in the few times she appears onscreen, Glass’s behavior toward her (as that toward any female character in the film) is more paternalistic than libidinous. And this turn matters. In prior movies where Leo plays papa (“Inception,” “Shutter Island,” “Revolutionary Road,” “Wolf of Wall Street”), any bond with the wife and kids feels so fraught with either dark pathos or outright apathy that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. By contrast, the first shot of “The Revenant” depicts a sleeping Leo snuggled with wife and son in a hut of mud and twigs. In a tender move minutes before the bear attack, Glass puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and says, “You are my son” (conceivably a manly, 1820s version of “I love you”). Throughout, this abiding loyalty to his family, even after their slaughter, proves the emotional crux of the film; if you don’t buy it, you’re not going to buy the next two hours of plotting (plodding?) revenge. To be seen as a Serious Actor, it can’t hurt to be seen as a Serious Person, and Leo hasn’t fared as well in that department. Among male A-listers today, the actor still seems a touch, well… douchier than the rest. Ryan Gosling’s lukewarm feminist gruel has launched a thousand memes; Matt Damon fêtes his 10-year marriage with a wholesome non-celeb wife and narrates angsty documentaries whilst daddying part-time; Bradley Cooper demands better pay for his (more talented) female costars. As ’90s playboy Brad Pitt grows up to father six kids and produce a cache of socially conscious films, and even Clooney settles down with human rights maverick Amal Alamuddin, DiCaprio has coasted into his forties still unattached and surprisingly reclusive for someone supposedly feening for the public eye. Botching a recent sermon on climate change, the actor’s perpetual arrested development is thrown into starker relief when considering that the rest of his former “posse” (Tobey Maguire, Jay Ferguson, Ethan Suplee, even enfant terrible Harmony Korine) have all settled down, and presumably stopped chasing what made them mildly controversial in the first place. But maybe he’s finally manning up, or, rather, reminding us of what we loved about him long ago. As Leo put it 22 years back when he was cast in “Gilbert Grape”: “They were looking for a kid that was not only vulnerable but confident, you know? I just tried to be myself, ’cause that's what I am—vulnerable, confident." Playing the titular revenant, DiCaprio resurrects that signature blend of fragility and bravado; no more clippy rejoinders, no more overconfident soap-box platitudes. When Leo wins the Oscar this year, let’s hope he drops the insouciant posturing and displays the humility that his “Revenant” role so grippingly nails—to which many of us might respond like Vera Farmiga’s character toward the end of “The Departed,” after a bedraggled Leo shows up at her door desperate for companionship: “I have to say, your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now. Is it real?”“They bring kids in and portray ’em as the next cute guy,” reflected a feckless Leonardo DiCaprio in an interview following 1993’s “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” “But then what happens to that guy when the next face comes in? What happens to his career?" he asked. "It's more important to be a long-lasting actor than any kind of idol.” Out of the mouths of babes—in this case the unparalleled babe of the late 1990s, the one unironically dubbed “Prince of the City” by columnist Nancy Jo Sales in her seminal 1998 feature for New York Magazine. The one who, in a 2000 cover story for Time, Joel Stein called “so self-aware, it’s paralyzing.” The one whose putative “Pussy Posse” arguably inspired an HBO comedy franchise. The one whose fame outweighed his acting the way his button-down dress shirts swallowed his frame. Of course, Sales’s story wasn’t really about Leo—whom she never actually met during the course of her profile—but rather the cult of Leo, the rampant Leomania that engulfed Manhattan and put off so many parents, teachers and aging politicians. What followed was a time in which many, quite reasonably, did not wish to see the actor as ship-helming king any more. Perhaps it was 9/11 and the newfound solemnity (and sobriety) of the early aughts. Perhaps it was a growing awareness of date-rape culture and a sharper distaste for white-guy misogyny, no matter how cute (or rich or famous) that white guy happened to be (take the infamously unreleased “Don’s Plum” as but one piece of proof). Or perhaps it was simply that Leo’s lifestyle began to resemble a bygone era of go-for-broke bachelorhood—one in which panty-chasing and motorcycling themselves display vocational rigor. Accusations of effeminacy trailed him all the same. And his surefire way to ditch the “androgynous wimp” rep? Star in movies directed by the world’s unwimpiest director: Martin Scorsese. There’s “Gangs of New York,” where Leo robs corpses, starts petty fights and does a lot of killing; “The Aviator,” where he bones movie stars and grapples with OCD; “The Departed,” where he (again) racks up a creative list of assault charges throughout his temp work for the mob; or “Shutter Island,” where (spoiler alert) he turns out to be a patient at a mental hospital, locked up for killing his wife. And then of course there’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” where he trades manipulated stocks, abuses Quaaludes, and ensures the financial solvency of innumerable sex workers. As “wolf” Jordan Belfort, perhaps even more so than in his other roles, Leo was easily misconstrued as just “playing himself,” rather than embodying some indictment of late-century hedonism (“…what these characters represent in this film are ultimately everything that’s wrong with the world we live in,” said DiCaprio after the movie’s release — funny, given how central he himself seemed to be to that very ’90s zeitgeist). Surrounded by his team of loyal, if homely, penny-stock pushers, Belfort calls up memories of Leo’s real-life late-’90s entourage who, as Sales put it, served as “unofficial bodyguards, although it’s unclear sometimes whether this is for his benefit or for theirs.” If art imitates life, DiCaprio’s onscreen oeuvre started to resemble a bloated parody of the cocky A-list lifestyle that he and his hormonal bro-pals once collectively defined. Tie in a string of supermodel girlfriends across a decade (and then half a catwalk across the next), and it’s easy to see how Leo’s acting talent has been outshined by an outsized reputation for cross-continent womanizing, his performances codified into a predictable set of default brow lifts and “pretty crumply cry faces.” Enter Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican writer and director with a knack for lyric gravitas that rivals Scorsese’s grit. For his lead role in “The Revenant” as nineteenth-century fur trapper Hugh Glass, DiCaprio has fetched his fifth nomination for an Oscar (the first was for "Gilbert Grape," at 18), and critics have consistently posited that this could be his year. Hailed by Vulture as a “spittle-speckled, blood-soaked revenge turn that successfully exterminates every last vestige of [DiCaprio’s] teen-dream twinkdom,” the film’s take on vengeance seems less “Cape Fear” than an introspective spiritual pilgrimage (the kind that calls for a whole lot of carnage). It is here that Iñárritu’s advised rejection of irony plays a vital role in bringing out the actor’s best. For all the attention and flak the film has garnered for its “extreme” violence and conditions of filming, Leo’s full-throttle performance is central to the film’s endurability over its 2.5 hours (in a similar way that he has ably carried many an interminable Scorsese feature). “You feel the intimacy of both man and beast, you feel the sweat and the heat coming off of the animal,” the actor has said of the now iconic scene in which Mama Bear makes minestrone out of Glass’s flailing body. It’s as though the nine months the actor suffered through the making of the film proved a penance for his party-boy past—early, ludicrous online rumors that he was “raped” by the bear exposing a collective sadistic appetite for all-out Leo defilement. “I like to do things that scare me,” said DiCaprio 20 years ago, after a scrape with a stubborn parachute over the California desert. In this (natural) light, Glass’s penchant in “The Revenant” for sub-zero wilderness parkour might seem like just another demonstration of the actor’s persistent belief in his own invincibility. “I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I done it already,” grumbles Glass from the depths of a self-cauterized throat, the same channel from which he hocks a loogie of bison liver later in the film. But Iñárritu’s Glass is ultimately a Romantic hero, which makes sense given that the director (unlike Blake before him) claims that “innocence is much more powerful than experience.” Never mind all the swimming upstream in frozen waters or couch-surfing in the carcass of a fallen horse: Leo’s unflappable trapper might reestablish his manhood through Sisyphean feats against nature, but his virtue lies more in an unshakeable, nearly childlike belief that true justice is possible. Here, Leo’s history as pure-of-heart vigilante (think “Titanic” or even Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”) merge with Scorsesean scrap to render a masculine hero appealing to the ethos of 2016. He might not be as pretty—dodging rumors of a flea-invested beard, no less—but in this lack of pulchritude rings a character at once earnest and more profound, a commingling of Leo’s early innocence with a new physiognomic humility, a patent lack of vanity only so impressive because the guy has been feminized for decades. Evidently, in order to drop the sex-idol status once and for all, he needed to star in a film not only absent a real female presence, but ostensibly too “brutal” for women audience members to endure. The difference between big-R and little-r Romantic in this context is paramount: Leo had to lose any remnants of latter in order to be taken seriously as the former (ironically, the best-selling biography of the actor was titled “Leonardo DiCaprio, Romantic Hero” back in 1998, priceless for its paperback cover alone, on which a facial resemblance to a young Jodie Foster is striking). It’s no accident that there is no romantic female costar in “The Revenant” to remind us of his time as Tiger Beat bait; his late wife may haunt him with breathy arboreal adages till the end, but in the few times she appears onscreen, Glass’s behavior toward her (as that toward any female character in the film) is more paternalistic than libidinous. And this turn matters. In prior movies where Leo plays papa (“Inception,” “Shutter Island,” “Revolutionary Road,” “Wolf of Wall Street”), any bond with the wife and kids feels so fraught with either dark pathos or outright apathy that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. By contrast, the first shot of “The Revenant” depicts a sleeping Leo snuggled with wife and son in a hut of mud and twigs. In a tender move minutes before the bear attack, Glass puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and says, “You are my son” (conceivably a manly, 1820s version of “I love you”). Throughout, this abiding loyalty to his family, even after their slaughter, proves the emotional crux of the film; if you don’t buy it, you’re not going to buy the next two hours of plotting (plodding?) revenge. To be seen as a Serious Actor, it can’t hurt to be seen as a Serious Person, and Leo hasn’t fared as well in that department. Among male A-listers today, the actor still seems a touch, well… douchier than the rest. Ryan Gosling’s lukewarm feminist gruel has launched a thousand memes; Matt Damon fêtes his 10-year marriage with a wholesome non-celeb wife and narrates angsty documentaries whilst daddying part-time; Bradley Cooper demands better pay for his (more talented) female costars. As ’90s playboy Brad Pitt grows up to father six kids and produce a cache of socially conscious films, and even Clooney settles down with human rights maverick Amal Alamuddin, DiCaprio has coasted into his forties still unattached and surprisingly reclusive for someone supposedly feening for the public eye. Botching a recent sermon on climate change, the actor’s perpetual arrested development is thrown into starker relief when considering that the rest of his former “posse” (Tobey Maguire, Jay Ferguson, Ethan Suplee, even enfant terrible Harmony Korine) have all settled down, and presumably stopped chasing what made them mildly controversial in the first place. But maybe he’s finally manning up, or, rather, reminding us of what we loved about him long ago. As Leo put it 22 years back when he was cast in “Gilbert Grape”: “They were looking for a kid that was not only vulnerable but confident, you know? I just tried to be myself, ’cause that's what I am—vulnerable, confident." Playing the titular revenant, DiCaprio resurrects that signature blend of fragility and bravado; no more clippy rejoinders, no more overconfident soap-box platitudes. When Leo wins the Oscar this year, let’s hope he drops the insouciant posturing and displays the humility that his “Revenant” role so grippingly nails—to which many of us might respond like Vera Farmiga’s character toward the end of “The Departed,” after a bedraggled Leo shows up at her door desperate for companionship: “I have to say, your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now. Is it real?”“They bring kids in and portray ’em as the next cute guy,” reflected a feckless Leonardo DiCaprio in an interview following 1993’s “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” “But then what happens to that guy when the next face comes in? What happens to his career?" he asked. "It's more important to be a long-lasting actor than any kind of idol.” Out of the mouths of babes—in this case the unparalleled babe of the late 1990s, the one unironically dubbed “Prince of the City” by columnist Nancy Jo Sales in her seminal 1998 feature for New York Magazine. The one who, in a 2000 cover story for Time, Joel Stein called “so self-aware, it’s paralyzing.” The one whose putative “Pussy Posse” arguably inspired an HBO comedy franchise. The one whose fame outweighed his acting the way his button-down dress shirts swallowed his frame. Of course, Sales’s story wasn’t really about Leo—whom she never actually met during the course of her profile—but rather the cult of Leo, the rampant Leomania that engulfed Manhattan and put off so many parents, teachers and aging politicians. What followed was a time in which many, quite reasonably, did not wish to see the actor as ship-helming king any more. Perhaps it was 9/11 and the newfound solemnity (and sobriety) of the early aughts. Perhaps it was a growing awareness of date-rape culture and a sharper distaste for white-guy misogyny, no matter how cute (or rich or famous) that white guy happened to be (take the infamously unreleased “Don’s Plum” as but one piece of proof). Or perhaps it was simply that Leo’s lifestyle began to resemble a bygone era of go-for-broke bachelorhood—one in which panty-chasing and motorcycling themselves display vocational rigor. Accusations of effeminacy trailed him all the same. And his surefire way to ditch the “androgynous wimp” rep? Star in movies directed by the world’s unwimpiest director: Martin Scorsese. There’s “Gangs of New York,” where Leo robs corpses, starts petty fights and does a lot of killing; “The Aviator,” where he bones movie stars and grapples with OCD; “The Departed,” where he (again) racks up a creative list of assault charges throughout his temp work for the mob; or “Shutter Island,” where (spoiler alert) he turns out to be a patient at a mental hospital, locked up for killing his wife. And then of course there’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” where he trades manipulated stocks, abuses Quaaludes, and ensures the financial solvency of innumerable sex workers. As “wolf” Jordan Belfort, perhaps even more so than in his other roles, Leo was easily misconstrued as just “playing himself,” rather than embodying some indictment of late-century hedonism (“…what these characters represent in this film are ultimately everything that’s wrong with the world we live in,” said DiCaprio after the movie’s release — funny, given how central he himself seemed to be to that very ’90s zeitgeist). Surrounded by his team of loyal, if homely, penny-stock pushers, Belfort calls up memories of Leo’s real-life late-’90s entourage who, as Sales put it, served as “unofficial bodyguards, although it’s unclear sometimes whether this is for his benefit or for theirs.” If art imitates life, DiCaprio’s onscreen oeuvre started to resemble a bloated parody of the cocky A-list lifestyle that he and his hormonal bro-pals once collectively defined. Tie in a string of supermodel girlfriends across a decade (and then half a catwalk across the next), and it’s easy to see how Leo’s acting talent has been outshined by an outsized reputation for cross-continent womanizing, his performances codified into a predictable set of default brow lifts and “pretty crumply cry faces.” Enter Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican writer and director with a knack for lyric gravitas that rivals Scorsese’s grit. For his lead role in “The Revenant” as nineteenth-century fur trapper Hugh Glass, DiCaprio has fetched his fifth nomination for an Oscar (the first was for "Gilbert Grape," at 18), and critics have consistently posited that this could be his year. Hailed by Vulture as a “spittle-speckled, blood-soaked revenge turn that successfully exterminates every last vestige of [DiCaprio’s] teen-dream twinkdom,” the film’s take on vengeance seems less “Cape Fear” than an introspective spiritual pilgrimage (the kind that calls for a whole lot of carnage). It is here that Iñárritu’s advised rejection of irony plays a vital role in bringing out the actor’s best. For all the attention and flak the film has garnered for its “extreme” violence and conditions of filming, Leo’s full-throttle performance is central to the film’s endurability over its 2.5 hours (in a similar way that he has ably carried many an interminable Scorsese feature). “You feel the intimacy of both man and beast, you feel the sweat and the heat coming off of the animal,” the actor has said of the now iconic scene in which Mama Bear makes minestrone out of Glass’s flailing body. It’s as though the nine months the actor suffered through the making of the film proved a penance for his party-boy past—early, ludicrous online rumors that he was “raped” by the bear exposing a collective sadistic appetite for all-out Leo defilement. “I like to do things that scare me,” said DiCaprio 20 years ago, after a scrape with a stubborn parachute over the California desert. In this (natural) light, Glass’s penchant in “The Revenant” for sub-zero wilderness parkour might seem like just another demonstration of the actor’s persistent belief in his own invincibility. “I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I done it already,” grumbles Glass from the depths of a self-cauterized throat, the same channel from which he hocks a loogie of bison liver later in the film. But Iñárritu’s Glass is ultimately a Romantic hero, which makes sense given that the director (unlike Blake before him) claims that “innocence is much more powerful than experience.” Never mind all the swimming upstream in frozen waters or couch-surfing in the carcass of a fallen horse: Leo’s unflappable trapper might reestablish his manhood through Sisyphean feats against nature, but his virtue lies more in an unshakeable, nearly childlike belief that true justice is possible. Here, Leo’s history as pure-of-heart vigilante (think “Titanic” or even Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”) merge with Scorsesean scrap to render a masculine hero appealing to the ethos of 2016. He might not be as pretty—dodging rumors of a flea-invested beard, no less—but in this lack of pulchritude rings a character at once earnest and more profound, a commingling of Leo’s early innocence with a new physiognomic humility, a patent lack of vanity only so impressive because the guy has been feminized for decades. Evidently, in order to drop the sex-idol status once and for all, he needed to star in a film not only absent a real female presence, but ostensibly too “brutal” for women audience members to endure. The difference between big-R and little-r Romantic in this context is paramount: Leo had to lose any remnants of latter in order to be taken seriously as the former (ironically, the best-selling biography of the actor was titled “Leonardo DiCaprio, Romantic Hero” back in 1998, priceless for its paperback cover alone, on which a facial resemblance to a young Jodie Foster is striking). It’s no accident that there is no romantic female costar in “The Revenant” to remind us of his time as Tiger Beat bait; his late wife may haunt him with breathy arboreal adages till the end, but in the few times she appears onscreen, Glass’s behavior toward her (as that toward any female character in the film) is more paternalistic than libidinous. And this turn matters. In prior movies where Leo plays papa (“Inception,” “Shutter Island,” “Revolutionary Road,” “Wolf of Wall Street”), any bond with the wife and kids feels so fraught with either dark pathos or outright apathy that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. By contrast, the first shot of “The Revenant” depicts a sleeping Leo snuggled with wife and son in a hut of mud and twigs. In a tender move minutes before the bear attack, Glass puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and says, “You are my son” (conceivably a manly, 1820s version of “I love you”). Throughout, this abiding loyalty to his family, even after their slaughter, proves the emotional crux of the film; if you don’t buy it, you’re not going to buy the next two hours of plotting (plodding?) revenge. To be seen as a Serious Actor, it can’t hurt to be seen as a Serious Person, and Leo hasn’t fared as well in that department. Among male A-listers today, the actor still seems a touch, well… douchier than the rest. Ryan Gosling’s lukewarm feminist gruel has launched a thousand memes; Matt Damon fêtes his 10-year marriage with a wholesome non-celeb wife and narrates angsty documentaries whilst daddying part-time; Bradley Cooper demands better pay for his (more talented) female costars. As ’90s playboy Brad Pitt grows up to father six kids and produce a cache of socially conscious films, and even Clooney settles down with human rights maverick Amal Alamuddin, DiCaprio has coasted into his forties still unattached and surprisingly reclusive for someone supposedly feening for the public eye. Botching a recent sermon on climate change, the actor’s perpetual arrested development is thrown into starker relief when considering that the rest of his former “posse” (Tobey Maguire, Jay Ferguson, Ethan Suplee, even enfant terrible Harmony Korine) have all settled down, and presumably stopped chasing what made them mildly controversial in the first place. But maybe he’s finally manning up, or, rather, reminding us of what we loved about him long ago. As Leo put it 22 years back when he was cast in “Gilbert Grape”: “They were looking for a kid that was not only vulnerable but confident, you know? I just tried to be myself, ’cause that's what I am—vulnerable, confident." Playing the titular revenant, DiCaprio resurrects that signature blend of fragility and bravado; no more clippy rejoinders, no more overconfident soap-box platitudes. When Leo wins the Oscar this year, let’s hope he drops the insouciant posturing and displays the humility that his “Revenant” role so grippingly nails—to which many of us might respond like Vera Farmiga’s character toward the end of “The Departed,” after a bedraggled Leo shows up at her door desperate for companionship: “I have to say, your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now. Is it real?”
Someone you love has had an abortion: It’s time to end the silence
As we mark the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade this month, facing increased violence against abortion providers and hateful and misleading political rhetoric about the care they provide, it’s hard to not feel despondent. When I think about the brave women and men who fought for reproductive rights in 1973 and what they sacrificed so we wouldn’t have to face attacks on abortion care in 2016, I wish the world could hear their stories again. But in a nation in which one in three women will get an abortion in her lifetime—including me— chances are that you love someone who has had an abortion, but you might not know about it. With a statistic like that, there’s no shortage of stories about the need for safe, affordable abortion access. We just need to tell them. The past year was particularly difficult for those of us who champion women’s healthcare in this country. The release of the illegal Planned Parenthood videos last summer ignited a harmful blaze of activity unlike anything we’ve seen in years, including a near-government shutdown, the unnecessary interrogation of Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, and, of course, the horrific shooting at a Colorado clinic in November that left three people dead. While it may seem hard to believe, the violent rhetoric surrounding this summer’s videos has done one good thing: Americans are finally thinking seriously about abortion again and realizing that women’s healthcare is being systematically undermined by years of state and national efforts to chip away at abortion rights. Abortion access has quietly and rapidly slid backward at the state level over the past decades. In fact, 51 new abortion restrictions were enacted in the first half of 2015 alone, and 28 states now require a woman to endure a mandatory waiting period before actually having a procedure. The videos released this summer and the violent backlash may have surprised many who assumed that abortion access was equal and fair around the country. But those who oppose the right to choose have been fighting ever since Roe to outlaw abortion and go back to the days when women died from unsafe care. When they lost at the national level in 1973, they switched tactics – to enacting oppressive state-level policies, threatening providers with violence, and shaming women who have had the procedure. If you listen to the antiabortion right, they will claim that abortion is still “legal,” even as they create an atmosphere to make it nearly impossible for women to obtain medical care. This spring, the Supreme Court will consider whether a restrictive Texas abortion law that has forced more than half of the state’s clinics to close violates the Constitution. What makes this case so significant is the importance of personal testimony, since abortion in Texas is still technically legal. The politicians who enacted these restrictions claimed that they were concerned about women’s health and that they were keeping abortion “legal.” But the stories of women forced to drive hundreds of miles, spend multiple nights in hotels, and walk through lines of angry protesters to obtain a common medical procedure calls their motives into question. That’s the piece of this political debate that’s always been missing – the thing that makes this issue so personal for so many of us: our own abortion experiences. When I found myself pregnant, with a 6-month-old baby and my husband having left six weeks earlier after draining our bank account, I realized I could not care for another child and decided to get an abortion. To this day, I am confident it was the most responsible, moral and loving action I could have taken for myself and my son. But for 15 years I kept this story to myself. It wasn’t until a co-worker shared her own abortion story with me that I was inspired to do the same. Fortunately, it’s clear that sharing our stories is changing the culture. In the past few years, numerous celebrities have shared their abortion stories. In the wake of the videos this summer, the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag was born, encouraging a generation of young people to share their stories around abortion, while fall TV in 2015 began to include abortion as regular part of characters’ lives, and not an earth-shattering after-school special. Telling our stories isn’t just an effective response to those who aim to limit access to women’s health services; it’s also a way to connect with and motivate each other. Advocates for Youth’s 1 in 3 Campaign has done this for so many people across the country, working to end the stigma around abortion silence by sharing our personal stories and experiences. We’ve found creative ways to do this through theater – 83 college campuses across the country are now performing or have performed "Out of Silence," a play composed of a series of vignettes based on real abortion stories, and a brand-new abortion play featuring a series of personal experiences will tour this spring. It is essential to center stories of real abortion experiences like mine or those of Texas women in the debate about our country’s abortion policies and keep Americans aware of the mounting attempts to place “undue burdens” on access to abortion care. The Supreme Court justices need to hear the real effects of restrictive abortion laws on women, which is why the campaign shared these stories at a Speakout in Washington, D.C., last week and has already filed 30 stories as part of an amicus brief for the justices to consider. As we prepare for this case, we must continue the momentum we’ve built and ensure stories from the real people facing the kinds of undue burdens central to the case are heard. Rather than making it prohibitively expensive and unduly difficult, we should work to protect safe access to abortion care, so women are able to fully control their healthcare and their own destinies. Deb Hauser is executive director of Advocates for Youth, an organization that champions efforts that help young people make informed and responsible decisions about their reproductive and sexual health.As we mark the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade this month, facing increased violence against abortion providers and hateful and misleading political rhetoric about the care they provide, it’s hard to not feel despondent. When I think about the brave women and men who fought for reproductive rights in 1973 and what they sacrificed so we wouldn’t have to face attacks on abortion care in 2016, I wish the world could hear their stories again. But in a nation in which one in three women will get an abortion in her lifetime—including me— chances are that you love someone who has had an abortion, but you might not know about it. With a statistic like that, there’s no shortage of stories about the need for safe, affordable abortion access. We just need to tell them. The past year was particularly difficult for those of us who champion women’s healthcare in this country. The release of the illegal Planned Parenthood videos last summer ignited a harmful blaze of activity unlike anything we’ve seen in years, including a near-government shutdown, the unnecessary interrogation of Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, and, of course, the horrific shooting at a Colorado clinic in November that left three people dead. While it may seem hard to believe, the violent rhetoric surrounding this summer’s videos has done one good thing: Americans are finally thinking seriously about abortion again and realizing that women’s healthcare is being systematically undermined by years of state and national efforts to chip away at abortion rights. Abortion access has quietly and rapidly slid backward at the state level over the past decades. In fact, 51 new abortion restrictions were enacted in the first half of 2015 alone, and 28 states now require a woman to endure a mandatory waiting period before actually having a procedure. The videos released this summer and the violent backlash may have surprised many who assumed that abortion access was equal and fair around the country. But those who oppose the right to choose have been fighting ever since Roe to outlaw abortion and go back to the days when women died from unsafe care. When they lost at the national level in 1973, they switched tactics – to enacting oppressive state-level policies, threatening providers with violence, and shaming women who have had the procedure. If you listen to the antiabortion right, they will claim that abortion is still “legal,” even as they create an atmosphere to make it nearly impossible for women to obtain medical care. This spring, the Supreme Court will consider whether a restrictive Texas abortion law that has forced more than half of the state’s clinics to close violates the Constitution. What makes this case so significant is the importance of personal testimony, since abortion in Texas is still technically legal. The politicians who enacted these restrictions claimed that they were concerned about women’s health and that they were keeping abortion “legal.” But the stories of women forced to drive hundreds of miles, spend multiple nights in hotels, and walk through lines of angry protesters to obtain a common medical procedure calls their motives into question. That’s the piece of this political debate that’s always been missing – the thing that makes this issue so personal for so many of us: our own abortion experiences. When I found myself pregnant, with a 6-month-old baby and my husband having left six weeks earlier after draining our bank account, I realized I could not care for another child and decided to get an abortion. To this day, I am confident it was the most responsible, moral and loving action I could have taken for myself and my son. But for 15 years I kept this story to myself. It wasn’t until a co-worker shared her own abortion story with me that I was inspired to do the same. Fortunately, it’s clear that sharing our stories is changing the culture. In the past few years, numerous celebrities have shared their abortion stories. In the wake of the videos this summer, the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag was born, encouraging a generation of young people to share their stories around abortion, while fall TV in 2015 began to include abortion as regular part of characters’ lives, and not an earth-shattering after-school special. Telling our stories isn’t just an effective response to those who aim to limit access to women’s health services; it’s also a way to connect with and motivate each other. Advocates for Youth’s 1 in 3 Campaign has done this for so many people across the country, working to end the stigma around abortion silence by sharing our personal stories and experiences. We’ve found creative ways to do this through theater – 83 college campuses across the country are now performing or have performed "Out of Silence," a play composed of a series of vignettes based on real abortion stories, and a brand-new abortion play featuring a series of personal experiences will tour this spring. It is essential to center stories of real abortion experiences like mine or those of Texas women in the debate about our country’s abortion policies and keep Americans aware of the mounting attempts to place “undue burdens” on access to abortion care. The Supreme Court justices need to hear the real effects of restrictive abortion laws on women, which is why the campaign shared these stories at a Speakout in Washington, D.C., last week and has already filed 30 stories as part of an amicus brief for the justices to consider. As we prepare for this case, we must continue the momentum we’ve built and ensure stories from the real people facing the kinds of undue burdens central to the case are heard. Rather than making it prohibitively expensive and unduly difficult, we should work to protect safe access to abortion care, so women are able to fully control their healthcare and their own destinies. Deb Hauser is executive director of Advocates for Youth, an organization that champions efforts that help young people make informed and responsible decisions about their reproductive and sexual health.As we mark the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade this month, facing increased violence against abortion providers and hateful and misleading political rhetoric about the care they provide, it’s hard to not feel despondent. When I think about the brave women and men who fought for reproductive rights in 1973 and what they sacrificed so we wouldn’t have to face attacks on abortion care in 2016, I wish the world could hear their stories again. But in a nation in which one in three women will get an abortion in her lifetime—including me— chances are that you love someone who has had an abortion, but you might not know about it. With a statistic like that, there’s no shortage of stories about the need for safe, affordable abortion access. We just need to tell them. The past year was particularly difficult for those of us who champion women’s healthcare in this country. The release of the illegal Planned Parenthood videos last summer ignited a harmful blaze of activity unlike anything we’ve seen in years, including a near-government shutdown, the unnecessary interrogation of Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, and, of course, the horrific shooting at a Colorado clinic in November that left three people dead. While it may seem hard to believe, the violent rhetoric surrounding this summer’s videos has done one good thing: Americans are finally thinking seriously about abortion again and realizing that women’s healthcare is being systematically undermined by years of state and national efforts to chip away at abortion rights. Abortion access has quietly and rapidly slid backward at the state level over the past decades. In fact, 51 new abortion restrictions were enacted in the first half of 2015 alone, and 28 states now require a woman to endure a mandatory waiting period before actually having a procedure. The videos released this summer and the violent backlash may have surprised many who assumed that abortion access was equal and fair around the country. But those who oppose the right to choose have been fighting ever since Roe to outlaw abortion and go back to the days when women died from unsafe care. When they lost at the national level in 1973, they switched tactics – to enacting oppressive state-level policies, threatening providers with violence, and shaming women who have had the procedure. If you listen to the antiabortion right, they will claim that abortion is still “legal,” even as they create an atmosphere to make it nearly impossible for women to obtain medical care. This spring, the Supreme Court will consider whether a restrictive Texas abortion law that has forced more than half of the state’s clinics to close violates the Constitution. What makes this case so significant is the importance of personal testimony, since abortion in Texas is still technically legal. The politicians who enacted these restrictions claimed that they were concerned about women’s health and that they were keeping abortion “legal.” But the stories of women forced to drive hundreds of miles, spend multiple nights in hotels, and walk through lines of angry protesters to obtain a common medical procedure calls their motives into question. That’s the piece of this political debate that’s always been missing – the thing that makes this issue so personal for so many of us: our own abortion experiences. When I found myself pregnant, with a 6-month-old baby and my husband having left six weeks earlier after draining our bank account, I realized I could not care for another child and decided to get an abortion. To this day, I am confident it was the most responsible, moral and loving action I could have taken for myself and my son. But for 15 years I kept this story to myself. It wasn’t until a co-worker shared her own abortion story with me that I was inspired to do the same. Fortunately, it’s clear that sharing our stories is changing the culture. In the past few years, numerous celebrities have shared their abortion stories. In the wake of the videos this summer, the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag was born, encouraging a generation of young people to share their stories around abortion, while fall TV in 2015 began to include abortion as regular part of characters’ lives, and not an earth-shattering after-school special. Telling our stories isn’t just an effective response to those who aim to limit access to women’s health services; it’s also a way to connect with and motivate each other. Advocates for Youth’s 1 in 3 Campaign has done this for so many people across the country, working to end the stigma around abortion silence by sharing our personal stories and experiences. We’ve found creative ways to do this through theater – 83 college campuses across the country are now performing or have performed "Out of Silence," a play composed of a series of vignettes based on real abortion stories, and a brand-new abortion play featuring a series of personal experiences will tour this spring. It is essential to center stories of real abortion experiences like mine or those of Texas women in the debate about our country’s abortion policies and keep Americans aware of the mounting attempts to place “undue burdens” on access to abortion care. The Supreme Court justices need to hear the real effects of restrictive abortion laws on women, which is why the campaign shared these stories at a Speakout in Washington, D.C., last week and has already filed 30 stories as part of an amicus brief for the justices to consider. As we prepare for this case, we must continue the momentum we’ve built and ensure stories from the real people facing the kinds of undue burdens central to the case are heard. Rather than making it prohibitively expensive and unduly difficult, we should work to protect safe access to abortion care, so women are able to fully control their healthcare and their own destinies. Deb Hauser is executive director of Advocates for Youth, an organization that champions efforts that help young people make informed and responsible decisions about their reproductive and sexual health.
