Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 899

January 8, 2016

How these 5 little words can jump-start an illicit sexual affair

I can’t say for sure whether I would have fallen in love with my ex if he hadn’t been married at the time, but I do know that his status as taken gave him a unique allure. Unlike other people I’d dated, he wasn’t free—his time was constrained, how we could communicate was constrained, and the extent of how far our relationship, such as it were, could go, was clearly drawn. There was no grand future with him—at least, not the happily ever after, introducing him to my friends, building a life together kind of future. Yet even though there were red flags waving all over the place, I was drawn to him. That was seven years ago, and in hindsight, I know the attraction was based on personal chemistry, whatever mysterious mix of compatibility and connection any two people can share. But the other part was the very thing that might have kept other women away: his marriage. The fact that he could be with his wife—for companionship, for discussion, for dates, for sex—but chose to be with me, brought out something I’m not proud of, but that I can’t deny: it made me feel special. I didn’t call or text him, lest she see our communication, so when his name popped up on my phone, it was even more thrilling because I knew he was alone. I knew he’d taken the time specifically to go wherever he needed to go to get in touch with me. Even while I was jealous over how much time she got to spend with him, it still meant that the time carved away just for me, limited as it was, I valued higher than attention paid to me by those who were totally unencumbered. All this to say: I understand the allure of being pursued by someone who’s taken. On the surface, they’re seemingly off limits; to the wider world, they are officially ensconced in a happy relationship. If you look on their Facebook page, it probably says they’re in a relationship with someone, and photos of the two of them are likely plastered all over it. You might find their wedding announcement in the paper if they’re married, or references to them as a pair, from their friends. Maybe they have a cutesy couple nickname like Kimye, or are simply thought of in one breath, as if they are literally inseparable. They are a unit—yet you are the one who knows something that the rest of the world doesn’t. That’s why the toe sucking in Julia Anne Miller’s recent New York Times Modern Love essay makes perfect sense to me. In it, she writes of sharing a taxi cab with a coworker, who announces that he’s engaged, then confesses to her:
“There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “Yes?” “My fiancée won’t allow it.” “What is it?”
And then he unveiled his heart’s desire: to suck a woman’s toes before he resigned himself to a life without quirk. He spoke of toes in general with reverence and earnest passion. He spoke of my toes in particular: their contours, shapeliness and perfection. She goes on to detail said toe sucking, a blissful, rapturous encounter for him, which didn’t do much for her. What stood out to me was that even though she hardly knew this guy and having him suck “on each toe as if it were the leg of a tiny crustacean and he was after the meat” wasn’t her fetish, she went along with it. Why? Because he played on her heartstrings. He made her feel they had something in common—she was going for what she truly wanted in life by living in her dream city, New York, and so was he, by asking to suck her toes. No, in this case it wasn’t a mad, rip-their-clothes-off attraction, but it was, perhaps, something more universal: that he was misunderstood. His grand erotic dream was being denied at home, but she, out of all the other women in New York, might understand, or at least, not judge. Miller writes of the proposition, “I thought of all the times in my life I had said no. All the roads I had never hitched, all the chances I had never taken, all the lips I had never kissed. And I thought: New York is not about no. New York is about yes!” Miller saw something of herself in her coworker, but to my reading, she also saw herself elevated in his eyes. When he told her of his “one thing I’ve always wanted to do,” he was including her in something that, presumably, was deeply personal, not something he told just anyone (although we find out later in the essay that wasn’t exactly the case). He successfully beckoned her into a seemingly us against them vision of the world, or at least, of their stolen moment in the cab. She alone held the key to giving him what he most wanted in the world; who amongst us wouldn’t feel a rush of pride and power at being presented with such an opportunity? Indeed, Miller states, “I knew that if this were to be his final act, he would die happy.” That’s quite a potent aphrodisiac indeed. He was offering her the power to gift him with a level of erotic fulfillment even the woman he intended to spend his entire life with would not concede to provide. Her decision to let him suck her toes, to be the one to help fulfill his long-time fantasy, is the converse of why those in relationships have affairs—physical or emotional. Betty Andrews detailed her reasons for going on cheating hookup website Ashley Madison as a married woman—and they weren’t about getting laid. The banter she engaged in with someone new led to feeling “little bursts of dopamine activate my neurons during our online chats when I should have been working, playing a game with my son, or going to bed on time.” For her, it wasn’t about sex, but “the novelty of someone else. The intensity. The escape. The possibility. The falling …” She got off, virtually speaking, on the rush of doing something forbidden, and therefore risqué because it was forbidden. Similarly, for me, and I imagine, for Miller, there was an element of being put on some kind of pedestal, especially one I wasn’t, by official standards, supposed to be standing on. There was never a single sex act that drove our affair, or a specific request or action I was told he was being denied in his marriage, but the sensation of feeling gifted with his furtive attention, helped fuel my own perception of myself. Just as Miller’s coworker was choosing her, selecting her out for reasons known only to him, so too was I being chosen. Maybe it sounds obvious to say we all want to feel desired, to feel unique, to feel like we can give our lovers, temporary or permanent, something they can’t get from anyone else. But that doesn’t mean we don’t fall for it, even from someone the world tells us is off limits. (Modern Love spoiler alert ahead.) Why else would the kicker to Miller’s tale be that any lingering sense of specialness wore off the moment she found out that not only did the toe fetishist’s fiancée not exist, but also that he’d gained access to another coworker’s feet to suck on? Even though Miller insists that she didn’t feel duped, that instead, she “felt a tiny bud of admiration bloom in my heart” because he’d been so audacious as to work his lusty line on another woman, this revelation made his con utterly fall apart. In his case, there was no pedestal; but it was a verbal mirage that clearly worked, more than once. He was able to get women who otherwise wouldn’t have been interested to slip off their shoes and slide their feet between his lips because he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: the chance to be the most special woman in his woe-is-me world. I imagine that in the right circumstances, many of us, even those who’d like to think we’d never cheat (or engage with a cheater), would fall for such a plea. New Book Claims Marie Antoinette Had 2 Secret Love Children

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Published on January 08, 2016 14:35

A “Hamilton” miracle: I lost the ticket lottery, but discovered something priceless

It is tempting, when one considers its mechanics, to think of theater as an inherently elitist medium. Where art forms like film and television strive to become cultural phenomena by reaching the widest possible audience, a physical theater can only accommodate so large a crowd, a talented cast and crew only stage so many productions. In order for a Broadway musical to catapult itself to national awareness, it must rely on another asset: scarcity. In the case of a musical that has achieved not only national awareness but universal acclaim, extreme scarcity. Hosting the Kennedy Center Honors Gala last month, Stephen Colbert joked to a crowd that included "Hamilton" creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, “As I stand here humbled by the beautiful John F. Kennedy Center of Performing Arts, surrounded by some of the most influential people in politics and culture, I am inspired to ask, can anyone get me tickets to 'Hamilton'?” So it is especially tempting to question, when one stands shivering on the sidewalk of 46th Street with hundreds of other hopefuls, whether theater might be the precise wrong medium for this show. This show, whose message – embedded deeply in its story of a penniless man's rise to power through sheer force of will (“Just another immigrant,” its lyrics tell us, “comin' up from the bottom”), in the breadth of its cultural allusions, in the diversity of its casting – is the inclusivity of American ideals. If even cultural giants can't get in the door, what chance do us mere mortals have? A minuscule one, perhaps, but not zero. For two hours before every performance, a handful of names are drawn out of a hat, as twenty-one tickets are lotteried away for just $10 apiece, the origin of “#Ham4Ham.” A rapt crowd, which, three times a week, is treated to a free sidewalk show from cast members and special guests, huddles together with crossed fingers. The show launched a digital lottery this week that will take its place for the remainder of winter, with a return to standard practice in spring. The whole process might bring out the worst tendencies of New Yorkers if it weren't so deeply random. And fairness is, perhaps, the best catalyst for camaraderie. Even those of us who pride ourselves on our icy exteriors feel them thawing as the names are called. Lucky winners are told to raise either one or two fingers above their heads to claim the respective number of tickets. More of the former, of course, means more names to be drawn, so those who exhibit restraint are rewarded with ferocious applause. In a city filled with family and friends, I couldn't imagine passing up the chance to bring a guest along. But when the name of an elderly woman from Australia, in town for just one more night, is called, she openly weeps and raises a lone finger, a gesture reminiscent of the show's logo. Soon, she'll be sitting front row during one of the musical's powerhouse songs “The Schuyler Sisters.” “Look around, look around,” its lyrics compel even the rest of us, the members of the slowly dispersing crowd. “History is happening in Manhattan and we just happen to be in the greatest city in the world.

***

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” asks Aaron Burr in the opening lines of "Hamilton." It is a refrain invoked repeatedly throughout the cast recording album, most notably to draw a parallel between Alexander and the nation he played a vital role in founding. (“How does a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower somehow defeat a global superpower?” Burr later asks.) The comparison is one of the most resonant themes of the musical's soundtrack. “I'm just like my country, I'm young, scrappy and hungry,” an eager Alexander tells fellow revolutionaries. We are told often of the dangers of ambition, so much so that the word connotes a sense of pettiness, but in Hamilton it takes on an idealism of sorts. At one point, a smitten Angelica Schuyler, a wealthy aristocrat, transparently asks Alexander, “Where's your family from?” “Unimportant,” he replies. “There's a million things I haven't done. But just you wait, just you wait,” another moving throwback to the opening number. Later, both Alexander and Aaron sing their infant children songs of revolution turned ordinary songs of parenthood. “You will come of age with our young nation. We'll bleed and fight for you, we'll make it right for you. If we lay a strong enough foundation, we'll pass it on to you. We'll give the world to you,” they sing. As the narrative develops, the questions change. Listeners find themselves asking not “How could Alexander build a nation such as this?” but “How could a nation such as this have been built by anyone else?” Miranda, for his part, has strongly resisted comparisons between Hamilton's genius and his own, perhaps because it falsely assigns a sense of ease to his success. “I'm not a fucking genius. I work my ass off. Hamilton could have written what I wrote in about three weeks,” he's said. “It took me a very long time to wrestle this onto the stage, to even be able to understand the worldviews of the characters that inhabit my show, and then be able to distill that.” But that same feverish urge to create is another of compelling theme of the album, a similarity Miranda more readily embraces. “Why do you write like you're running out of time?” Aaron asks Alexander, “Every day you fight like you're running out of time.” Miranda on Twitter, asked how he writes: “like I'm running out of time.” “I don't pretend to know the challenges you're facing, the worlds you keep erasing and creating in your mind,” Alexander's wife sings. Our forefather's revolutions were political, their roles carved out in the country they created. Our generation's revolutions are cultural, the worlds we're creating and finding a place within exist on stage and on screen, world's whose influence are pervasive. “When I get called in for stuff for Hollywood, I get to be the best friend of the Caucasian lead,” Miranda once said. “If I want to play the main guy, I have found, I have to write it.” And who other than Miranda, the son of an immigrant raised in Inwood, could have so deftly crafted and wholly embodied the role? The marriage of personal and political ideals is innovative and fresh from an artistic perspective, but from an immigrant's it is at once natural. Immigrants, after all, in transplanting themselves into unfamiliar worlds necessarily created new ones, carving roles out for themselves and for their children. Their embrace of American values was an active choice, a journey. It is, perhaps, why we speak so often of America as an experience. An exchange. A community. And so it seems that, for a show whose message is the inclusivity of American ideals, theater might be the exact right medium. For just as democratic governments derive their power from the the governed, performance derives its power from the audience. For a few wondrous moments, whole worlds are created. Then erased. Then created anew. There is no physical product, just an experience. An exchange. A community.

***

Look around, look around,” Angelica sings, breathing in the revolution. “New ideas in the air.” She talks of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and of the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I'ma compel him to include women in the sequel.” A remark that could have been delivered as a wry scoff is instead presented joyously, with fervor, a frenetic energy suggesting infinite possibility. Perhaps a lottery lost today, but the promise of another tomorrow. And, in the mean time, a transcendent voice reminding us, “Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

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Published on January 08, 2016 14:27

The GOP’s reign of gubernatorial terror: Here are the small-government zealots who made their states considerably worse

If you caught any of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s press briefing about the Flint water crisis on Thursday morning, you saw a man who looked as if his brain had not yet caught up to his increasingly dire situation. Snyder still appeared to still be processing the fact that his administration’s decision to enact a cost-saving measure forcing the city to use the hideously polluted Flint River as its sole source of drinking water resulted in high levels of toxic lead poisoning of the residents. Oops. The next time some idiot wearing a Donald Trump t-shirt and a sneer tells you that we need leaders who will run the government more like a business, kindly direct their attention to Snyder. A business executive and CPA with no prior experience serving in government, Snyder was elected in the wave election of 2010 that swept Tea Party conservatives into office at the state and federal level. He immediately set about trying to run the state like it was a division of Gateway, the computer company where he was an executive during the 1990s. He crushed unions and made Michigan a right-to-work state, cutting services, and replacing the business tax with a flat tax while eliminating tax breaks on pensions, thus putting more of the state’s tax burden on the poor and working classes. The result? Michigan now ranks a whopping 36th in per capita income and just spent a year and a half poisoning 100,000 people with water so polluted, a local General Motors engine plant stopped using it because it corroded the factory’s machinery. Snyder is not the only Republican governor swept into power during the Tea Party wave of 2009-10 who used his state as a lab experiment for the type of conservative governance the GOP has been pushing for decades – lower regulations, lower taxes, slashing government services, and generally screwing over everyone not in their socio-economic class through austerity budgets and a boneheaded, stubborn refusal to adjust their policies in reaction to changing events. How is that working out for some of the other governors? You're probably already well acquainted with the disasters of the Scott Walker and Chris Christie administrations. But let's review some of the others. Rick Scott – Florida’s answer to the question, “What would happen if you put a giggling, amoral vampire with a checkered career as a business executive and venture capitalist in charge of your state?” The result has been a man who generally looks like he is in way, way over his shiny, clean-shaven head. He has flip-flopped on accepting Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion enough times that Floridians could probably set their watches by it. Job growth has been not bad, but still well below what Scott promised, and many of the jobs created on his watch have been low-paying. The state now ranks 29th in per capita income, which is several slots shy of mediocre. Scott’s crowning achievement might be his continued denial of climate change being a problem that humans might be able to address, even while rising oceans are already beginning to drown parts of the state. I hope Floridians are growing gills. They might need ‘em by the time Scott’s second term is up. Oh, and he hearts Donald Trump. Ladies and gentlemen, your next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Rick Scott. Sam Brownback – What can I say about the Kansas governor’s continuing efforts to turn his state into a post-apocalyptic wasteland that I haven’t already said? Um, the Royals won a World Series and re-signed Alex Gordon. That’s something, I guess. Oh wait, Brownback even screwed up the point he was trying to make about that drama. Paul LePage – Lord, where to even begin with Maine’s embodiment of every terrible stereotype of a slow-witted backwoods resident rocking in a chair on the porch of a country store and warning the protagonists of every Stephen King novel to leave town before nightfall. We could talk about his playing footsie with members of the Sovereign Citizens Movement, his referring to the IRS as “the new Gestapo” over its role in enforcing parts of Obamacare, his attempt to erase the history of the labor movement from the offices of the state’s Department of Labor, his current policy of vetoing every single bill passed by the Democratic-controlled state legislature, regardless of merit, to protest the legislators’ refusal to abolish Maine’s income tax, or his suggestion that the state should loosen up the child-labor laws so twelve-year-olds can get jobs. All of that, and Maine still ranked 47th in GDP growth in 2014. But at least LePage isn’t likely to get impeached. Yet. Mary Fallin – One could say many, many things about the tenure of Oklahoma’s current governor. But I think any conversation about her begins and ends with her unceasing pursuit of making sure her state’s prisoners get put to death regardless of whether the execution method violates the Eighth Amendment. Only a conservative or a sociopath – but I repeat myself – could be so determined to carry out a death sentence that she would essentially approve experimenting with untested execution drugs on the condemned prisoner. Even if Oklahoma was the most economically booming state in all America (it’s not), even if all its residents were the picture of health thanks to robust insurance coverage and care (they’re not), it would not wash away the stain of Fallin’s unnecessary bloodlust. Conservatives love to brag about how many statehouses and governor’s mansions they have captured during the Obama Era. But we could go on and on about the results (the havoc of Scott Walker’s rule in Wisconsin and Chris Christie’s in New Jersey could each take up hundreds of pages) and the bottom line would still be the same. These hard-right governors have been embarrassments and disasters for their states. And yet their constituents keep re-electing them. Forget the presidential election for a minute – liberals need to figure out how to do better at the state level. The sooner the better.If you caught any of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s press briefing about the Flint water crisis on Thursday morning, you saw a man who looked as if his brain had not yet caught up to his increasingly dire situation. Snyder still appeared to still be processing the fact that his administration’s decision to enact a cost-saving measure forcing the city to use the hideously polluted Flint River as its sole source of drinking water resulted in high levels of toxic lead poisoning of the residents. Oops. The next time some idiot wearing a Donald Trump t-shirt and a sneer tells you that we need leaders who will run the government more like a business, kindly direct their attention to Snyder. A business executive and CPA with no prior experience serving in government, Snyder was elected in the wave election of 2010 that swept Tea Party conservatives into office at the state and federal level. He immediately set about trying to run the state like it was a division of Gateway, the computer company where he was an executive during the 1990s. He crushed unions and made Michigan a right-to-work state, cutting services, and replacing the business tax with a flat tax while eliminating tax breaks on pensions, thus putting more of the state’s tax burden on the poor and working classes. The result? Michigan now ranks a whopping 36th in per capita income and just spent a year and a half poisoning 100,000 people with water so polluted, a local General Motors engine plant stopped using it because it corroded the factory’s machinery. Snyder is not the only Republican governor swept into power during the Tea Party wave of 2009-10 who used his state as a lab experiment for the type of conservative governance the GOP has been pushing for decades – lower regulations, lower taxes, slashing government services, and generally screwing over everyone not in their socio-economic class through austerity budgets and a boneheaded, stubborn refusal to adjust their policies in reaction to changing events. How is that working out for some of the other governors? You're probably already well acquainted with the disasters of the Scott Walker and Chris Christie administrations. But let's review some of the others. Rick Scott – Florida’s answer to the question, “What would happen if you put a giggling, amoral vampire with a checkered career as a business executive and venture capitalist in charge of your state?” The result has been a man who generally looks like he is in way, way over his shiny, clean-shaven head. He has flip-flopped on accepting Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion enough times that Floridians could probably set their watches by it. Job growth has been not bad, but still well below what Scott promised, and many of the jobs created on his watch have been low-paying. The state now ranks 29th in per capita income, which is several slots shy of mediocre. Scott’s crowning achievement might be his continued denial of climate change being a problem that humans might be able to address, even while rising oceans are already beginning to drown parts of the state. I hope Floridians are growing gills. They might need ‘em by the time Scott’s second term is up. Oh, and he hearts Donald Trump. Ladies and gentlemen, your next Secretary of Health and Human Services, Rick Scott. Sam Brownback – What can I say about the Kansas governor’s continuing efforts to turn his state into a post-apocalyptic wasteland that I haven’t already said? Um, the Royals won a World Series and re-signed Alex Gordon. That’s something, I guess. Oh wait, Brownback even screwed up the point he was trying to make about that drama. Paul LePage – Lord, where to even begin with Maine’s embodiment of every terrible stereotype of a slow-witted backwoods resident rocking in a chair on the porch of a country store and warning the protagonists of every Stephen King novel to leave town before nightfall. We could talk about his playing footsie with members of the Sovereign Citizens Movement, his referring to the IRS as “the new Gestapo” over its role in enforcing parts of Obamacare, his attempt to erase the history of the labor movement from the offices of the state’s Department of Labor, his current policy of vetoing every single bill passed by the Democratic-controlled state legislature, regardless of merit, to protest the legislators’ refusal to abolish Maine’s income tax, or his suggestion that the state should loosen up the child-labor laws so twelve-year-olds can get jobs. All of that, and Maine still ranked 47th in GDP growth in 2014. But at least LePage isn’t likely to get impeached. Yet. Mary Fallin – One could say many, many things about the tenure of Oklahoma’s current governor. But I think any conversation about her begins and ends with her unceasing pursuit of making sure her state’s prisoners get put to death regardless of whether the execution method violates the Eighth Amendment. Only a conservative or a sociopath – but I repeat myself – could be so determined to carry out a death sentence that she would essentially approve experimenting with untested execution drugs on the condemned prisoner. Even if Oklahoma was the most economically booming state in all America (it’s not), even if all its residents were the picture of health thanks to robust insurance coverage and care (they’re not), it would not wash away the stain of Fallin’s unnecessary bloodlust. Conservatives love to brag about how many statehouses and governor’s mansions they have captured during the Obama Era. But we could go on and on about the results (the havoc of Scott Walker’s rule in Wisconsin and Chris Christie’s in New Jersey could each take up hundreds of pages) and the bottom line would still be the same. These hard-right governors have been embarrassments and disasters for their states. And yet their constituents keep re-electing them. Forget the presidential election for a minute – liberals need to figure out how to do better at the state level. The sooner the better.

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Published on January 08, 2016 13:23

January 7, 2016

Whiteness and “Making a Murderer”: Manitowoc, the “one-branch family tree” and the sinister race science of “degenerate whites”

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Buck v. Bell”

“I don’t want to be a criminal. I want to be normal.” — Steven Avery, “Making a Murderer”

Everyone in the world, it seems, is watching “Making a Murderer,” the Netflix original documentary series about crime, punishment, guilt and innocence. The 10-hour series, which follows the legal drama of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man jailed 18 years for a rape he didn’t commit only to face new charges in a local murder soon after his release, has grabbed viewers with shocking twists and turns, infuriating examples of shoddy police work, and the emotionally wrenching question at its heart: Was an innocent man railroaded twice? Twitter is abuzz. Hollywood has opinions about the case (People magazine quoted tweets from Rainn Wilson, Ricky Gervais and Emmy Rossum, among others). Former prosecutor Ken Kratz has been all over the media lately lambasting the filmmakers, claiming they left out important evidence (the bits he mentioned don’t feel particularly crucial, or even verifiable, and of course his own credibility has been damaged, no matter how you feel about his work on the Avery case, by the allegations he sexually harassed a crime victim in another case, which led to his 2010 resignation). Naturally, there have been think pieces (including Erik Nelson’s sharp cultural analysis on Salon this week). Following the phenomenal success of the podcast “Serial,” it’s pretty clear that “Making a Murderer” comes at a time when we are newly attracted to true crime narratives. More than just a popular entertainment option, “Making a Murderer,” created by filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, is a bona fide cultural event. It’s also one of the whitest things to appear on television lately. Whiter than a Woody Allen movie. Whiter than all the episodes of “Friends” that didn’t costar Aisha Tylor. Whiter than the snow that flurries around Avery, his family and the lawyers in all those scenes set in a brutal Wisconsin winter. So what does “Making a Murderer” have to do with race? A lot, it turns out. As historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote in her 2010 book, “A History of White People,” while much of our nation’s historical interest in race has centered on black and white, there has always been a debate about the terms of whiteness itself. “Rather than a single, enduring definition of whiteness,” Painter writes, “we find multiple enlargements occurring against a backdrop of black/white dichotomy.” These “enlargements” include the gradual, often contested, inclusion of Irish, Italian and other non-Anglo Saxon Europeans into the fold of white America. A century had passed since so-called race scientists had argued that people of different races actually belonged to distinct species. But as the late 19th century ended and the 20th century began, the categorizing of human beings was anything but fading – with the burgeoning of the eugenics movement, scientific racism moved from theory to practice. No longer satisfied with simply studying the differences among people – using calipers to measure head size and shape, assigning labels to skin color and hair texture – now the race scientists turned toward identifying families marred by “defective heredity” and preventing their ranks from reproducing through coerced or forced sterilization. Among the social scientists who created the modern eugenics movement were Richard L. Dugdale, whose study of prisons led him to create a mythical family, the Jukes, whose members form an archetype of the “degenerate white.” As Dugdale wrote, “…fornication, either consanguineous or not, is the backborn of their habits, flanked on one side by pauperism, on the other by crime.” Undereducated, lazy, illegitimate and often afflicted with syphilis, the Jukes represented the weakest branch on the white family tree. Henry H. Goddard, a researcher who worked at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, invented the second great mythical family of eugenics, the Kallikaks, based on a young woman he had studied at Vineland. Although Goddard noted that she was attractive enough to get a man and have babies, the pseudonymous Deborah Kallikak had the mind of a child, and was certain to spawn another generation of mental and moral defectives. His book, “The Kallikak Family,” published in 1912 (“to a fine critical reception,” Painter archly points out), argued that something had to be done to prevent their further spread. “There are Kallikak families all about us,” Goddard wrote; “they are multiplying at twice the rate of the general population.” As Painter notes, many successful whites saw such flawed heredity as “a threat to the welfare of the race.” How can white supremacy stand when some whites are so clearly inferior? Against this history, it’s impossible not to see the Avery family at the center of “Making a Murderer” as a contemporary version of the Kallikaks and the Jukes. In the first episode, Reesa Evans, the public defender assigned to Steven Avery in the 1985 rape case that first sent him to prison, lays out the social structure of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. “Manitowoc County is working class farmers. And the Avery family, they weren’t that,” she says, noting that the Avery business was an auto junkyard, not a farm. “They dealt in junk. … They didn’t dress like everybody else. They didn’t have education like other people. They weren’t involved in all the community activities. I don’t think it ever crossed their mind that they should try to fit into the community. They fit into the community that they had built.” Avery’s cousin Kim Ducat argued that the police prejudged Avery based on his family. “There goes another Avery. They’re all trouble,” was how she characterized the local attitude. Evans agreed. “Sheriff’s department saw [Avery family] as kind of a problem, and definitely undesirable members of the community.” As for Steve, she describes looking at his educational records and seeing that he “barely functioned in school. His IQ was 70.” After Avery was sent away for the 1985 rape conviction, we learn, he was separated from the five children he loved. We see their pictures. They’re pale, with white-blond hair, skinny. One daughter has noticeably asymmetrical eyes (the kind of minor physical disfigurement that figures prominently in early eugenics tracts about hereditary fitness). In later episodes we meet Brendan Dassey, Avery’s nephew, who becomes a key figure in his story. Rough-featured, with a hang-dog expression, Brendan has learning difficulties (a generation younger than Steve, his IQ isn’t part of the record we hear about him). One lawyer calls him “slow.” Another describes him as “intellectually limited.” Another argues, in his defense, “don’t convict him because he couldn’t pick his parents.” I am learning the Avery family history and about each member of the Avery family,” wrote investigator Michael O’Kelly in an email to his employer Len Kachinsky, who served as Brendan Dassey’s first defense attorney (Kachinsky was subsequently decertified by the state public defender’s office from taking homicide cases following news of his actions in the Dassey case). “These are criminals,” the email continued. “There are members engaged in sexual activity with nieces, nephews, cousins, in-laws. … These people are pure evil. A friend of mine suggested, ‘This is a one-branch family tree. Cut this tree down. We need to end the gene pool here.’” That's a familiar call for any student of history. Sterilization was the eugenicist’s tool of choice a century ago, when Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, in a sterilization lawsuit brought by Carrie Buck before the United States Supreme Court, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” All of this helps explain how and why the forces of respectability in Wisconsin – the police officers, private investigators, prosecutors – lined up against the Avery family with such ease, such speed. In their eyes the Avery family wasn’t respectable. They were Jukes, Kallikaks, poor whites, hereditary losers. In this very white corner of the state, with no people of color to treat as second-class citizens, the "degenerate whites" would do just as well. I'm not saying prejudice against poor whites is anywhere near as virulent or damaging as racism against people of color. But it came from the same bad science, crackpot scientists, and inane theories. And it lingers — sometimes invisibly, sometimes making itself clear as it did in Manitowoc County.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Buck v. Bell”

“I don’t want to be a criminal. I want to be normal.” — Steven Avery, “Making a Murderer”

Everyone in the world, it seems, is watching “Making a Murderer,” the Netflix original documentary series about crime, punishment, guilt and innocence. The 10-hour series, which follows the legal drama of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man jailed 18 years for a rape he didn’t commit only to face new charges in a local murder soon after his release, has grabbed viewers with shocking twists and turns, infuriating examples of shoddy police work, and the emotionally wrenching question at its heart: Was an innocent man railroaded twice? Twitter is abuzz. Hollywood has opinions about the case (People magazine quoted tweets from Rainn Wilson, Ricky Gervais and Emmy Rossum, among others). Former prosecutor Ken Kratz has been all over the media lately lambasting the filmmakers, claiming they left out important evidence (the bits he mentioned don’t feel particularly crucial, or even verifiable, and of course his own credibility has been damaged, no matter how you feel about his work on the Avery case, by the allegations he sexually harassed a crime victim in another case, which led to his 2010 resignation). Naturally, there have been think pieces (including Erik Nelson’s sharp cultural analysis on Salon this week). Following the phenomenal success of the podcast “Serial,” it’s pretty clear that “Making a Murderer” comes at a time when we are newly attracted to true crime narratives. More than just a popular entertainment option, “Making a Murderer,” created by filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, is a bona fide cultural event. It’s also one of the whitest things to appear on television lately. Whiter than a Woody Allen movie. Whiter than all the episodes of “Friends” that didn’t costar Aisha Tylor. Whiter than the snow that flurries around Avery, his family and the lawyers in all those scenes set in a brutal Wisconsin winter. So what does “Making a Murderer” have to do with race? A lot, it turns out. As historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote in her 2010 book, “A History of White People,” while much of our nation’s historical interest in race has centered on black and white, there has always been a debate about the terms of whiteness itself. “Rather than a single, enduring definition of whiteness,” Painter writes, “we find multiple enlargements occurring against a backdrop of black/white dichotomy.” These “enlargements” include the gradual, often contested, inclusion of Irish, Italian and other non-Anglo Saxon Europeans into the fold of white America. A century had passed since so-called race scientists had argued that people of different races actually belonged to distinct species. But as the late 19th century ended and the 20th century began, the categorizing of human beings was anything but fading – with the burgeoning of the eugenics movement, scientific racism moved from theory to practice. No longer satisfied with simply studying the differences among people – using calipers to measure head size and shape, assigning labels to skin color and hair texture – now the race scientists turned toward identifying families marred by “defective heredity” and preventing their ranks from reproducing through coerced or forced sterilization. Among the social scientists who created the modern eugenics movement were Richard L. Dugdale, whose study of prisons led him to create a mythical family, the Jukes, whose members form an archetype of the “degenerate white.” As Dugdale wrote, “…fornication, either consanguineous or not, is the backborn of their habits, flanked on one side by pauperism, on the other by crime.” Undereducated, lazy, illegitimate and often afflicted with syphilis, the Jukes represented the weakest branch on the white family tree. Henry H. Goddard, a researcher who worked at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, invented the second great mythical family of eugenics, the Kallikaks, based on a young woman he had studied at Vineland. Although Goddard noted that she was attractive enough to get a man and have babies, the pseudonymous Deborah Kallikak had the mind of a child, and was certain to spawn another generation of mental and moral defectives. His book, “The Kallikak Family,” published in 1912 (“to a fine critical reception,” Painter archly points out), argued that something had to be done to prevent their further spread. “There are Kallikak families all about us,” Goddard wrote; “they are multiplying at twice the rate of the general population.” As Painter notes, many successful whites saw such flawed heredity as “a threat to the welfare of the race.” How can white supremacy stand when some whites are so clearly inferior? Against this history, it’s impossible not to see the Avery family at the center of “Making a Murderer” as a contemporary version of the Kallikaks and the Jukes. In the first episode, Reesa Evans, the public defender assigned to Steven Avery in the 1985 rape case that first sent him to prison, lays out the social structure of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. “Manitowoc County is working class farmers. And the Avery family, they weren’t that,” she says, noting that the Avery business was an auto junkyard, not a farm. “They dealt in junk. … They didn’t dress like everybody else. They didn’t have education like other people. They weren’t involved in all the community activities. I don’t think it ever crossed their mind that they should try to fit into the community. They fit into the community that they had built.” Avery’s cousin Kim Ducat argued that the police prejudged Avery based on his family. “There goes another Avery. They’re all trouble,” was how she characterized the local attitude. Evans agreed. “Sheriff’s department saw [Avery family] as kind of a problem, and definitely undesirable members of the community.” As for Steve, she describes looking at his educational records and seeing that he “barely functioned in school. His IQ was 70.” After Avery was sent away for the 1985 rape conviction, we learn, he was separated from the five children he loved. We see their pictures. They’re pale, with white-blond hair, skinny. One daughter has noticeably asymmetrical eyes (the kind of minor physical disfigurement that figures prominently in early eugenics tracts about hereditary fitness). In later episodes we meet Brendan Dassey, Avery’s nephew, who becomes a key figure in his story. Rough-featured, with a hang-dog expression, Brendan has learning difficulties (a generation younger than Steve, his IQ isn’t part of the record we hear about him). One lawyer calls him “slow.” Another describes him as “intellectually limited.” Another argues, in his defense, “don’t convict him because he couldn’t pick his parents.” I am learning the Avery family history and about each member of the Avery family,” wrote investigator Michael O’Kelly in an email to his employer Len Kachinsky, who served as Brendan Dassey’s first defense attorney (Kachinsky was subsequently decertified by the state public defender’s office from taking homicide cases following news of his actions in the Dassey case). “These are criminals,” the email continued. “There are members engaged in sexual activity with nieces, nephews, cousins, in-laws. … These people are pure evil. A friend of mine suggested, ‘This is a one-branch family tree. Cut this tree down. We need to end the gene pool here.’” That's a familiar call for any student of history. Sterilization was the eugenicist’s tool of choice a century ago, when Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, in a sterilization lawsuit brought by Carrie Buck before the United States Supreme Court, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” All of this helps explain how and why the forces of respectability in Wisconsin – the police officers, private investigators, prosecutors – lined up against the Avery family with such ease, such speed. In their eyes the Avery family wasn’t respectable. They were Jukes, Kallikaks, poor whites, hereditary losers. In this very white corner of the state, with no people of color to treat as second-class citizens, the "degenerate whites" would do just as well. I'm not saying prejudice against poor whites is anywhere near as virulent or damaging as racism against people of color. But it came from the same bad science, crackpot scientists, and inane theories. And it lingers — sometimes invisibly, sometimes making itself clear as it did in Manitowoc County.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Buck v. Bell”

“I don’t want to be a criminal. I want to be normal.” — Steven Avery, “Making a Murderer”

Everyone in the world, it seems, is watching “Making a Murderer,” the Netflix original documentary series about crime, punishment, guilt and innocence. The 10-hour series, which follows the legal drama of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man jailed 18 years for a rape he didn’t commit only to face new charges in a local murder soon after his release, has grabbed viewers with shocking twists and turns, infuriating examples of shoddy police work, and the emotionally wrenching question at its heart: Was an innocent man railroaded twice? Twitter is abuzz. Hollywood has opinions about the case (People magazine quoted tweets from Rainn Wilson, Ricky Gervais and Emmy Rossum, among others). Former prosecutor Ken Kratz has been all over the media lately lambasting the filmmakers, claiming they left out important evidence (the bits he mentioned don’t feel particularly crucial, or even verifiable, and of course his own credibility has been damaged, no matter how you feel about his work on the Avery case, by the allegations he sexually harassed a crime victim in another case, which led to his 2010 resignation). Naturally, there have been think pieces (including Erik Nelson’s sharp cultural analysis on Salon this week). Following the phenomenal success of the podcast “Serial,” it’s pretty clear that “Making a Murderer” comes at a time when we are newly attracted to true crime narratives. More than just a popular entertainment option, “Making a Murderer,” created by filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, is a bona fide cultural event. It’s also one of the whitest things to appear on television lately. Whiter than a Woody Allen movie. Whiter than all the episodes of “Friends” that didn’t costar Aisha Tylor. Whiter than the snow that flurries around Avery, his family and the lawyers in all those scenes set in a brutal Wisconsin winter. So what does “Making a Murderer” have to do with race? A lot, it turns out. As historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote in her 2010 book, “A History of White People,” while much of our nation’s historical interest in race has centered on black and white, there has always been a debate about the terms of whiteness itself. “Rather than a single, enduring definition of whiteness,” Painter writes, “we find multiple enlargements occurring against a backdrop of black/white dichotomy.” These “enlargements” include the gradual, often contested, inclusion of Irish, Italian and other non-Anglo Saxon Europeans into the fold of white America. A century had passed since so-called race scientists had argued that people of different races actually belonged to distinct species. But as the late 19th century ended and the 20th century began, the categorizing of human beings was anything but fading – with the burgeoning of the eugenics movement, scientific racism moved from theory to practice. No longer satisfied with simply studying the differences among people – using calipers to measure head size and shape, assigning labels to skin color and hair texture – now the race scientists turned toward identifying families marred by “defective heredity” and preventing their ranks from reproducing through coerced or forced sterilization. Among the social scientists who created the modern eugenics movement were Richard L. Dugdale, whose study of prisons led him to create a mythical family, the Jukes, whose members form an archetype of the “degenerate white.” As Dugdale wrote, “…fornication, either consanguineous or not, is the backborn of their habits, flanked on one side by pauperism, on the other by crime.” Undereducated, lazy, illegitimate and often afflicted with syphilis, the Jukes represented the weakest branch on the white family tree. Henry H. Goddard, a researcher who worked at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, invented the second great mythical family of eugenics, the Kallikaks, based on a young woman he had studied at Vineland. Although Goddard noted that she was attractive enough to get a man and have babies, the pseudonymous Deborah Kallikak had the mind of a child, and was certain to spawn another generation of mental and moral defectives. His book, “The Kallikak Family,” published in 1912 (“to a fine critical reception,” Painter archly points out), argued that something had to be done to prevent their further spread. “There are Kallikak families all about us,” Goddard wrote; “they are multiplying at twice the rate of the general population.” As Painter notes, many successful whites saw such flawed heredity as “a threat to the welfare of the race.” How can white supremacy stand when some whites are so clearly inferior? Against this history, it’s impossible not to see the Avery family at the center of “Making a Murderer” as a contemporary version of the Kallikaks and the Jukes. In the first episode, Reesa Evans, the public defender assigned to Steven Avery in the 1985 rape case that first sent him to prison, lays out the social structure of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. “Manitowoc County is working class farmers. And the Avery family, they weren’t that,” she says, noting that the Avery business was an auto junkyard, not a farm. “They dealt in junk. … They didn’t dress like everybody else. They didn’t have education like other people. They weren’t involved in all the community activities. I don’t think it ever crossed their mind that they should try to fit into the community. They fit into the community that they had built.” Avery’s cousin Kim Ducat argued that the police prejudged Avery based on his family. “There goes another Avery. They’re all trouble,” was how she characterized the local attitude. Evans agreed. “Sheriff’s department saw [Avery family] as kind of a problem, and definitely undesirable members of the community.” As for Steve, she describes looking at his educational records and seeing that he “barely functioned in school. His IQ was 70.” After Avery was sent away for the 1985 rape conviction, we learn, he was separated from the five children he loved. We see their pictures. They’re pale, with white-blond hair, skinny. One daughter has noticeably asymmetrical eyes (the kind of minor physical disfigurement that figures prominently in early eugenics tracts about hereditary fitness). In later episodes we meet Brendan Dassey, Avery’s nephew, who becomes a key figure in his story. Rough-featured, with a hang-dog expression, Brendan has learning difficulties (a generation younger than Steve, his IQ isn’t part of the record we hear about him). One lawyer calls him “slow.” Another describes him as “intellectually limited.” Another argues, in his defense, “don’t convict him because he couldn’t pick his parents.” I am learning the Avery family history and about each member of the Avery family,” wrote investigator Michael O’Kelly in an email to his employer Len Kachinsky, who served as Brendan Dassey’s first defense attorney (Kachinsky was subsequently decertified by the state public defender’s office from taking homicide cases following news of his actions in the Dassey case). “These are criminals,” the email continued. “There are members engaged in sexual activity with nieces, nephews, cousins, in-laws. … These people are pure evil. A friend of mine suggested, ‘This is a one-branch family tree. Cut this tree down. We need to end the gene pool here.’” That's a familiar call for any student of history. Sterilization was the eugenicist’s tool of choice a century ago, when Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, in a sterilization lawsuit brought by Carrie Buck before the United States Supreme Court, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” All of this helps explain how and why the forces of respectability in Wisconsin – the police officers, private investigators, prosecutors – lined up against the Avery family with such ease, such speed. In their eyes the Avery family wasn’t respectable. They were Jukes, Kallikaks, poor whites, hereditary losers. In this very white corner of the state, with no people of color to treat as second-class citizens, the "degenerate whites" would do just as well. I'm not saying prejudice against poor whites is anywhere near as virulent or damaging as racism against people of color. But it came from the same bad science, crackpot scientists, and inane theories. And it lingers — sometimes invisibly, sometimes making itself clear as it did in Manitowoc County.

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Published on January 07, 2016 15:34

An atmospheric catastrophe: Corporate greed, lax regulations can be blamed for California’s disastrous methane leak

AlterNet If you don't live on the West Coast of the United States, you might not have heard about the massive gas well leak that's been venting natural gas into the atmosphere at a rate of more than 100,000 pounds per hour for more than two months. Infrared video that the Environmental Defense Fund captured in December shows that the natural gas is billowing like a volcano just above Burbank, California, on a hilltop in the Aliso Canyon area. That video was taken over a month after the leak started on October 23, after the well had already ejected an estimated 80,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere. For perspective, 80,000 tons of methane is equal to about a quarter of what the entire state of California—which is the eighth largest economy in the entire world—emitted between October 23 and November 20, 2015. And methane, which is what's mostly in "natural gas," is actually a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 in the short term, during the first 20 years it's in the atmosphere it can be up to 80 times more potent than CO2. According to the Washington Post, the impact of the gases that have already been released from this one volcanic leak is equivalent to the impact, over 20 years, of six coal-fired power plants— or 7 million automobiles. But this leak isn't just a crisis for the climate; it has also forced the evacuation of 1,700 homes in nearby neighborhoods, the closing of two schools and countless residents have reported that the stench has made them ill. So how did all this happen? Engineers are speculating that a seven-inch pipe ruptured about 500 feet below the surface, but they won't know for sure until they are able to seal the well off completely, something the Southern California Gas Company says may not happen until March. But according to a recent report from the Los Angeles Times and a lawsuit from local residents, the initial leak isn't what made this an environmental disaster for the history books. No, the real problem here goes way back to 1979, when the Southern California Gas Company had the original safety valve removed from the gas well, and then simply didn't bother to replace it. Mind you, it's not like the well was new in 1979—it was already a quarter of a century old in 1979—and 36 years after the company cut that corner, the well finally ruptured at 61 years old. A spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times that they didn't replace the safety valve simply because the company wasn't required to by law. So the company simply didn't replace the valve, because the profit motive of a corporation means that it has no incentive—no motivation—to protect anyone or anything that it isn't required to protect by law. Because the company didn't replace the valve, the company estimates that it could be another three months before they can plug the well completely. This is a case where corporate greed and lax regulations have caused a massive disruption in California's energy infrastructure and forced the evacuation of thousands of homes and seriously jeopardized any emissions cuts that California has achieved over the last few years. And none of it would have happened if we hadn't handed the management of our energy infrastructure over to largely deregulated for-profit corporations that only care about their bottom lines. Civics has fallen by the wayside in US education, but this case makes it clear that it's time to have a real civic conversation about private and public goods, and about where private ownership ends and where the public commons begin. This natural gas leak isn't just an environmental disaster; it's an atmospheric catastrophe like we've never really seen before. Thousands of people have been displaced from their homes, their communities forced to scatter and the climate has been put even further in jeopardy, just because a for-profit company wasn't required to replace the safety valve on their aging well. This example proves the importance of treating our nation's energy infrastructure as a part of the commons. To do that, we need strict regulations—including enforcement mechanism including fines and jail for executives—that dissuade corporations from cutting corners at the expense of communities and the environment. And we need to lift the liability cap that allows fossil fuel companies to only pay a fraction of the damages that they cause to communities and to the environment. It's time to start treating the commons as something owned by every taxpayer and to be preserved for future generations, instead of something to be exploited for present private profits and left as trash for the taxpayers to pay for and future generations to clean up. Thom Hartmann is an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is "The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America — and What We Can Do to Stop It."

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Published on January 07, 2016 15:30

David Cross’ cult favorite is finally back: No apocalypse or bad wig can keep “Todd Margaret” down

Tonight on IFC, “The Increasingly Poor Decisions 0f Todd Margaret” returns after a four-year hiatus for a third season that is a more of a dream-state reboot than a sequel. The show—created by David Cross, best known for his turn as Tobias on “Arrested Development”—was, in its first two seasons, the increasingly poor decisions of an American sent to Britain to market an energy drink called Thunder Muscle and ultimately manages to destroy the world with a North Korean nuclear bomb. Along the way, there is a dead Parliamentarian, a bloody rape kit, and Jon Hamm. In its third season, it’s once again about that American, Todd Margaret, but starts again at the beginning, of sorts; the world hasn’t ended, he’s sent on the same assignment to London, and he re-meets his companion Alice Bell (Sharon Horgan), who instead of running the café on the corner is the chef in his hotel. At first, it’s very confusing, but it’s to be expected for “Todd Margaret,” which trades specifically on dry surrealism and Jenga-like structure. Literally everything in the show is ridiculous, in a way that is not even necessarily funny, just confusing; what eventually makes it work is how seamlessly it all fits together, from the cold opens in each episode to the completely absurd situations that Todd gets himself into. It’s hard to say that any particular episode of “Todd Margaret” is brilliant, but the seasons as a whole make for “Benny Hill”-style farcical capering. Each season is just six half-hours, and because the seasons are so circular, they make near-perfect bingeing. IFC is aware of this; unlike the first two seasons, which aired weekly, the third season will air three episodes at a time—meaning that next week, this season will be airing its finale. Which is a long way of saying that even though the third season might seem like it functions as a six-episode standalone, and you can kind of muddle through it not knowing anything, it makes a lot more sense to go all the way back to the start. As this new season goes on, it becomes clear that the events of the first and second season are coming to Todd in extremely detailed dreams, which sort of puts the first, second and third seasons in the same universe, even though Todd now has a bad wig. And in this universe, Brent has gotten deep into a cult that is a kind of Scientology-lite, trying to climb up a metaphorical ladder that costs tens of thousands of pounds. It all fits together, layer on top of layer; whether or not all that structuring pays off depends on how much you like watching David Cross vamp in such an over-the-top and desperate manner, as Todd Margaret, that he puts himself into increasing amounts of trouble. It should be no surprise that a show that ended the world in its second season will be more than prepared to wreak havoc in its third; the finale goes biblical. "Todd Margaret" fits a very specific niche of oddball humor and not-so-stifled ragging on the United Kingdom—but it fits that niche well.

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Published on January 07, 2016 15:28

Don’t blame me for Donald Trump: The liberal “p.c. police” didn’t make this monster

All those who don't themselves support Trump pointing fingers at each other and blaming each other for Donald Trump’s runaway candidacy is the new spectator sport. Normally I wouldn’t find a new column blaming me (or, rather, people like me) for Donald Trump’s existence as a political figure to be remarkable, but Tom Nichols is a fellow “Jeopardy!” champion and that was apparently enough for people to fill my inbox with links to his most recent column. The idea that the left-wing “p.c. police” are somehow responsible for the monstrousness of Trump and his supporters was annoying enough, before Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum jumped in with the remarkable chutzpah to say, as a white male liberal, that he agreed liberals “yell racism a little more than we should” and the “privilege thing gets tiresome.” Follow that up with Jonathan Last in the Weekly Standard claiming that Trump is indeed somehow Obama’s fault for being a high-handed imperial president and that Obama’s most recent speech about gun control is an example of bullying p.c. policing and I, as we p.c. millennials say, can’t even. I find arguments like Nichols’ wearisome because whatever else they pretend to be, at the end of the day they are arguments about tone, and thus end up being self-defeating and hypocritical. Nichols doesn’t like that his opponents condescend to gun owners or bring up Jesus when talking about refugees; in response, he calls his opponents Maoists and Cultural Revolutionaries and says their overly harsh words are basically like being beaten, imprisoned or killed. He mysteriously retains the moral high ground in all this because his own hyperbolic language, of course, does not count. I could point out how laughable it is to blame the left for bringing Jesus into politics — especially when Jesus speaks many times and at length about hospitality in the New Testament and doesn’t mention homosexuality or abortion at all. I could point out the “educated elite vs. rube” condescension occurs on all sides of the political spectrum, and that “rube” describes very well the attitude of fiscal conservatives sneering at those stupid ignorant workers who think their poverty could be solved by anything so simplistic as paying them higher wages. But that’s not what particularly frustrated me; that much I find familiar enough from hypocritical right-wing polemic to roll off my back. What frustrated me was self-identified liberal Kevin Drum taking up the Jonathan Chait banner and arguing that, yes, both sides are guilty of hyperbolic rhetoric but it’s the liberals who’ve driven moderates out of the warm embrace of the left by criminalizing “ordinary language.” He gives as an example of overweening “p.c. gone mad” the idea that you aren’t “allowed” to call a particular behavior “black behavior” and that the correct circumlocution, “behavior stereotypically coded as black,” would never occur to someone outside of the academy. This is nonsense. It is nonsense that “black behavior” means the same thing as “behavior stereotypically coded as black.” It is nonsense that the academy or the activist-y left is the only place where you’d “get in trouble” for treating the two as the same. While I wouldn’t expect everyone to reach for the phrase “stereotypically coded as,” I would expect people who casually say “black behavior” to get corrected, and to replace it with something like “the kind of thing people expect black people to do” or “the kind of thing people think of as black behavior.” I’ve been called on my choice of words casually calling things people do “black” or “white” without using qualifiers — by people with more education and by people with less. It’s worth calling people out on because mistaking “behavior people think of as black” with straight-up “black behavior” is the definition of racial prejudice. It matters, in other words, because words mean things and the way we use words reflects the way we think. That’s not some esoteric concept invented by modern academics, that’s a basic rule of being a human being, which is why you don’t need a Ph.D. to get why it matters that “politically correct” Southerners call black men “sir” and not “boy” nowadays. Donald Trump certainly isn’t fighting for the right to use “ordinary language” instead of academese to express otherwise innocuous concepts. When Donald Trump calls Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, it’s not the tone that’s the problem. The sentiment would not somehow be improved by replacing “rapists” with “sexual offenders” or “people who violate the principle of consent.” It’s the content. Just like Trump calling for a “complete shutdown of Muslims” wasn’t “problematic” because of how bluntly he said it, it was problematic because of what he was saying. Despite Trump getting in the news for his tendency to use blunt, colorful language, it’s the fact that he says terrible things and not the way he says them that’s getting him coverage--which is why his close rival in the polls has been Ben Carson, who in tone is far more soft-spoken and polite but in beliefs is equally if not more deranged. I don’t buy the civility argument based on tone that Nichols lays out. I don’t think anyone really cares about tone; I think it’s always a cheap excuse to use tone to avoid having arguments based on content. The laziest resort of anyone who’s losing an argument--or a culture war--is to resort to the golden mean fallacy, that simply because a position is held by roughly half the population and currently considered “respectable” we are obligated to respect it. I won’t defend the example Nichols brings up about George Takei invoking blackface to describe Clarence Thomas--I am, in fact, a p.c. leftist who thinks words like “blackface” shouldn’t be used lightly about anyone. But I will point out that Takei was reacting to a tendentious argument by Thomas in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hedges arguing that the government had no compelling interest in legalizing same-sex marriage based on “dignity” because government discrimination cannot take dignity away. He used the enslavement of African-Americans and the internment of Japanese-Americans as his two examples. I have little to no respect for any argument that there was “dignity” in slavery, or the related argument that because slavery was explicitly permitted in the Constitution it would’ve been immoral for the courts to overturn it (the argument we now remember as underpinning the Dred Scott decision). The fact that being in favor of slavery was once a widely held, fiercely defended opinion in the United States does not make it “respectable” and does not obligate someone who opposes it to be civil and respectful to slavery apologists. The fact that abolitionists were once considered a scary fringe sect of radical zealots within American politics and electable moderates like Abraham Lincoln had to argue about slavery as a “50-50 issue” doesn’t make slavery any less of a moral atrocity or abolitionism any less the only acceptable position. We don’t chastise the abolitionists for their revolutionary zeal and their willingness to be ugly “bullies” who said nasty things about respectable people that got them caned on the Senate floor. We praise them for it, because they were the ones who moved the Overton window, who took an abominable institution and made it abominated, who took a commonplace atrocity and made it unthinkable. While I’m linking to Louis C.K. bits--Nichols lightly dances over the original “political correctness” of the 1970s, claiming that that political correctness is totally different in character from today’s mean, bullying, aggressive political correctness. He treats yesterday’s political correctness as no big deal, as though everyone simply agreed to be “nice” one day and start saying “he or she” and not saying the N-word and not publicly speculating that black people were the result of “genetic deterioration” out of simple civility. I respect that, although I did win six more games of “Jeopardy!” than he did, Nichols lived through the 1970s and I did not. However, what little I do know of the history of the 1960s and 1970s--i.e., the “New Left” with its panoply of Yippies, hippies, Weathermen and genuine no-kidding Maoists--makes his gloss of 1970s history out to be self-serving nonsense. The culture war was, if anything, more fervent and zealous then than it is now. For better or for worse, the “extreme” left of today is far less extreme; Occupy Wall Street was no Symbionese Liberation Army, and #BlackLivesMatter--which Nichols talks about as some terrifying threat going around silencing people-- is no Black Panther Party. It’s understandable that people my age talk about some unprecedented age of political correctness gone mad because one student strike got one campus president to step down; for a baby boomer it’s ridiculous. But the real kicker is that Nichols can’t delve too deeply into what caused the post-1970s “political correctness” because he’d have to admit that it worked, and was justified. Across the spectrum of people labeled “extremists” and “dangerous radicals” in the 1960s were modern secular saints like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. The man who called the “white moderate” the truest enemy of progress is now genuflected to by white moderates nationwide on his national holiday in January. People in the 1970s who were “attacked” and “bullied” by those activists telling them everything they grew up believing in was wrong were mad, too. They didn’t see why they should be shouted at or made to feel like bad people for believing that black people were naturally inferior, that women’s place was in the home, and that Christianity was the one true religion Americans should be allowed to practice. Norman Lear created the character Archie Bunker in “All in the Family” to satirize the “well-meaning ordinary American” who, with no particular malice in his heart, blithely and casually “speaks his mind” about beliefs that, when put in practice by his elected leaders, caused grievous harm to millions of people. I would hope that Nichols caught the message in “All in the Family” that many of Archie Bunker’s fans missed: that Archie may not feel himself to be a bad person, that he may have good intentions, that it may be possible to empathize with how he feels put upon and attacked by a changing world, but that his beliefs are wrong, and dangerous, and harm innocent people, and need to be stopped. It is, in the end, about content, not tone. There are different ways you can say the same thing--you can be a hectoring bully or you can be piously sanctimonious or you can be drily academic or you can be vulnerably emotional. President Obama, who is not one for launching vitriolic attacks, did that last one with his speech on Tuesday. He did the opposite of a shouting, hectoring, vicious attack on gun owners in order to call them ignorant rubes. He didn’t talk much about gun owners at all. Instead he talked about the victims of gun violence, and he wept. Which “anti-p.c.” gun defenders went ahead and took as an attack anyway, letting fly the barbs exactly as though he had literally looked into the camera and said, “I hate gun owners.” Because, after all, it’s the content that matters. People mad about “p.c.” aren’t mad about the tone in which they’re being told their vile beliefs aren’t acceptable, they’re mad at the simple fact that their vile beliefs aren’t acceptable. They’re using tone as a distraction to argue that the simple fact that they hold an opinion means that opinion ought to be treated with respect--that the simple fact that Brendan Eich’s opinion was commonplace not that long ago means it isn’t offensive, even though William Shockley made the same argument about his belief in degenerate Africans in the 1970s, even though former slaveowners made the same argument during Reconstruction. So they’ll continue to see President Obama expressing what, to the rest of us, is an obvious shocked and aggrieved reaction to the senseless and preventable murder of 20 children as an aggressive “bullying” tactic. They’ll continue responding to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” as though those two ideas are in conflict. They’ll continue talking about the meta ideas of freedom of speech, of civility, of tone, and of the golden mean fallacy that says because their ideas are or were culturally popular we have to be nice about it. But the issue isn’t “p.c.” It’s simply that harmful and wrong beliefs have victims who won’t shut up and be silent about how they’ve been harmed by them, no matter how “respectable” those beliefs are. That’s how cultural change happens--when the silenced start speaking, the formerly acceptable becomes unacceptable. And to every Martin Luther King you’ll get a George Wallace riding the wave of reactionary resentment to notoriety, and you’ll get genteel moderates blaming the revolutionaries for “causing” the reactionaries. Well, if the choice is between things getting hairy and ugly in politics or sitting back and waiting for a more convenient season, I’m with Dr. King. And if the choice is between giving a voice to the marginalized or acceding to the complaints of those who find that voice “tiresome”--even if the individuals who use that voice are sometimes intemperate, or unreasonable, or crude--I know whose side I’m on.All those who don't themselves support Trump pointing fingers at each other and blaming each other for Donald Trump’s runaway candidacy is the new spectator sport. Normally I wouldn’t find a new column blaming me (or, rather, people like me) for Donald Trump’s existence as a political figure to be remarkable, but Tom Nichols is a fellow “Jeopardy!” champion and that was apparently enough for people to fill my inbox with links to his most recent column. The idea that the left-wing “p.c. police” are somehow responsible for the monstrousness of Trump and his supporters was annoying enough, before Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum jumped in with the remarkable chutzpah to say, as a white male liberal, that he agreed liberals “yell racism a little more than we should” and the “privilege thing gets tiresome.” Follow that up with Jonathan Last in the Weekly Standard claiming that Trump is indeed somehow Obama’s fault for being a high-handed imperial president and that Obama’s most recent speech about gun control is an example of bullying p.c. policing and I, as we p.c. millennials say, can’t even. I find arguments like Nichols’ wearisome because whatever else they pretend to be, at the end of the day they are arguments about tone, and thus end up being self-defeating and hypocritical. Nichols doesn’t like that his opponents condescend to gun owners or bring up Jesus when talking about refugees; in response, he calls his opponents Maoists and Cultural Revolutionaries and says their overly harsh words are basically like being beaten, imprisoned or killed. He mysteriously retains the moral high ground in all this because his own hyperbolic language, of course, does not count. I could point out how laughable it is to blame the left for bringing Jesus into politics — especially when Jesus speaks many times and at length about hospitality in the New Testament and doesn’t mention homosexuality or abortion at all. I could point out the “educated elite vs. rube” condescension occurs on all sides of the political spectrum, and that “rube” describes very well the attitude of fiscal conservatives sneering at those stupid ignorant workers who think their poverty could be solved by anything so simplistic as paying them higher wages. But that’s not what particularly frustrated me; that much I find familiar enough from hypocritical right-wing polemic to roll off my back. What frustrated me was self-identified liberal Kevin Drum taking up the Jonathan Chait banner and arguing that, yes, both sides are guilty of hyperbolic rhetoric but it’s the liberals who’ve driven moderates out of the warm embrace of the left by criminalizing “ordinary language.” He gives as an example of overweening “p.c. gone mad” the idea that you aren’t “allowed” to call a particular behavior “black behavior” and that the correct circumlocution, “behavior stereotypically coded as black,” would never occur to someone outside of the academy. This is nonsense. It is nonsense that “black behavior” means the same thing as “behavior stereotypically coded as black.” It is nonsense that the academy or the activist-y left is the only place where you’d “get in trouble” for treating the two as the same. While I wouldn’t expect everyone to reach for the phrase “stereotypically coded as,” I would expect people who casually say “black behavior” to get corrected, and to replace it with something like “the kind of thing people expect black people to do” or “the kind of thing people think of as black behavior.” I’ve been called on my choice of words casually calling things people do “black” or “white” without using qualifiers — by people with more education and by people with less. It’s worth calling people out on because mistaking “behavior people think of as black” with straight-up “black behavior” is the definition of racial prejudice. It matters, in other words, because words mean things and the way we use words reflects the way we think. That’s not some esoteric concept invented by modern academics, that’s a basic rule of being a human being, which is why you don’t need a Ph.D. to get why it matters that “politically correct” Southerners call black men “sir” and not “boy” nowadays. Donald Trump certainly isn’t fighting for the right to use “ordinary language” instead of academese to express otherwise innocuous concepts. When Donald Trump calls Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, it’s not the tone that’s the problem. The sentiment would not somehow be improved by replacing “rapists” with “sexual offenders” or “people who violate the principle of consent.” It’s the content. Just like Trump calling for a “complete shutdown of Muslims” wasn’t “problematic” because of how bluntly he said it, it was problematic because of what he was saying. Despite Trump getting in the news for his tendency to use blunt, colorful language, it’s the fact that he says terrible things and not the way he says them that’s getting him coverage--which is why his close rival in the polls has been Ben Carson, who in tone is far more soft-spoken and polite but in beliefs is equally if not more deranged. I don’t buy the civility argument based on tone that Nichols lays out. I don’t think anyone really cares about tone; I think it’s always a cheap excuse to use tone to avoid having arguments based on content. The laziest resort of anyone who’s losing an argument--or a culture war--is to resort to the golden mean fallacy, that simply because a position is held by roughly half the population and currently considered “respectable” we are obligated to respect it. I won’t defend the example Nichols brings up about George Takei invoking blackface to describe Clarence Thomas--I am, in fact, a p.c. leftist who thinks words like “blackface” shouldn’t be used lightly about anyone. But I will point out that Takei was reacting to a tendentious argument by Thomas in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hedges arguing that the government had no compelling interest in legalizing same-sex marriage based on “dignity” because government discrimination cannot take dignity away. He used the enslavement of African-Americans and the internment of Japanese-Americans as his two examples. I have little to no respect for any argument that there was “dignity” in slavery, or the related argument that because slavery was explicitly permitted in the Constitution it would’ve been immoral for the courts to overturn it (the argument we now remember as underpinning the Dred Scott decision). The fact that being in favor of slavery was once a widely held, fiercely defended opinion in the United States does not make it “respectable” and does not obligate someone who opposes it to be civil and respectful to slavery apologists. The fact that abolitionists were once considered a scary fringe sect of radical zealots within American politics and electable moderates like Abraham Lincoln had to argue about slavery as a “50-50 issue” doesn’t make slavery any less of a moral atrocity or abolitionism any less the only acceptable position. We don’t chastise the abolitionists for their revolutionary zeal and their willingness to be ugly “bullies” who said nasty things about respectable people that got them caned on the Senate floor. We praise them for it, because they were the ones who moved the Overton window, who took an abominable institution and made it abominated, who took a commonplace atrocity and made it unthinkable. While I’m linking to Louis C.K. bits--Nichols lightly dances over the original “political correctness” of the 1970s, claiming that that political correctness is totally different in character from today’s mean, bullying, aggressive political correctness. He treats yesterday’s political correctness as no big deal, as though everyone simply agreed to be “nice” one day and start saying “he or she” and not saying the N-word and not publicly speculating that black people were the result of “genetic deterioration” out of simple civility. I respect that, although I did win six more games of “Jeopardy!” than he did, Nichols lived through the 1970s and I did not. However, what little I do know of the history of the 1960s and 1970s--i.e., the “New Left” with its panoply of Yippies, hippies, Weathermen and genuine no-kidding Maoists--makes his gloss of 1970s history out to be self-serving nonsense. The culture war was, if anything, more fervent and zealous then than it is now. For better or for worse, the “extreme” left of today is far less extreme; Occupy Wall Street was no Symbionese Liberation Army, and #BlackLivesMatter--which Nichols talks about as some terrifying threat going around silencing people-- is no Black Panther Party. It’s understandable that people my age talk about some unprecedented age of political correctness gone mad because one student strike got one campus president to step down; for a baby boomer it’s ridiculous. But the real kicker is that Nichols can’t delve too deeply into what caused the post-1970s “political correctness” because he’d have to admit that it worked, and was justified. Across the spectrum of people labeled “extremists” and “dangerous radicals” in the 1960s were modern secular saints like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. The man who called the “white moderate” the truest enemy of progress is now genuflected to by white moderates nationwide on his national holiday in January. People in the 1970s who were “attacked” and “bullied” by those activists telling them everything they grew up believing in was wrong were mad, too. They didn’t see why they should be shouted at or made to feel like bad people for believing that black people were naturally inferior, that women’s place was in the home, and that Christianity was the one true religion Americans should be allowed to practice. Norman Lear created the character Archie Bunker in “All in the Family” to satirize the “well-meaning ordinary American” who, with no particular malice in his heart, blithely and casually “speaks his mind” about beliefs that, when put in practice by his elected leaders, caused grievous harm to millions of people. I would hope that Nichols caught the message in “All in the Family” that many of Archie Bunker’s fans missed: that Archie may not feel himself to be a bad person, that he may have good intentions, that it may be possible to empathize with how he feels put upon and attacked by a changing world, but that his beliefs are wrong, and dangerous, and harm innocent people, and need to be stopped. It is, in the end, about content, not tone. There are different ways you can say the same thing--you can be a hectoring bully or you can be piously sanctimonious or you can be drily academic or you can be vulnerably emotional. President Obama, who is not one for launching vitriolic attacks, did that last one with his speech on Tuesday. He did the opposite of a shouting, hectoring, vicious attack on gun owners in order to call them ignorant rubes. He didn’t talk much about gun owners at all. Instead he talked about the victims of gun violence, and he wept. Which “anti-p.c.” gun defenders went ahead and took as an attack anyway, letting fly the barbs exactly as though he had literally looked into the camera and said, “I hate gun owners.” Because, after all, it’s the content that matters. People mad about “p.c.” aren’t mad about the tone in which they’re being told their vile beliefs aren’t acceptable, they’re mad at the simple fact that their vile beliefs aren’t acceptable. They’re using tone as a distraction to argue that the simple fact that they hold an opinion means that opinion ought to be treated with respect--that the simple fact that Brendan Eich’s opinion was commonplace not that long ago means it isn’t offensive, even though William Shockley made the same argument about his belief in degenerate Africans in the 1970s, even though former slaveowners made the same argument during Reconstruction. So they’ll continue to see President Obama expressing what, to the rest of us, is an obvious shocked and aggrieved reaction to the senseless and preventable murder of 20 children as an aggressive “bullying” tactic. They’ll continue responding to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” as though those two ideas are in conflict. They’ll continue talking about the meta ideas of freedom of speech, of civility, of tone, and of the golden mean fallacy that says because their ideas are or were culturally popular we have to be nice about it. But the issue isn’t “p.c.” It’s simply that harmful and wrong beliefs have victims who won’t shut up and be silent about how they’ve been harmed by them, no matter how “respectable” those beliefs are. That’s how cultural change happens--when the silenced start speaking, the formerly acceptable becomes unacceptable. And to every Martin Luther King you’ll get a George Wallace riding the wave of reactionary resentment to notoriety, and you’ll get genteel moderates blaming the revolutionaries for “causing” the reactionaries. Well, if the choice is between things getting hairy and ugly in politics or sitting back and waiting for a more convenient season, I’m with Dr. King. And if the choice is between giving a voice to the marginalized or acceding to the complaints of those who find that voice “tiresome”--even if the individuals who use that voice are sometimes intemperate, or unreasonable, or crude--I know whose side I’m on.

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Published on January 07, 2016 15:24

Palin family values: Abstinence mascot Bristol’s baby daddy drama heats up over money

There's no family that can run the "family values" trope right off the rails quite like a prominent Christian conservative one. This week, both Radar and TMZ are reporting that Bristol Palin's former fiancé Dakota Meyer is going after her for child support. And Meyer's almost mother-in-law, is responding in the only logical way a new grandma would — by issuing a statement to "Entertainment Tonight." After a hectic year that included getting engaged, calling off the wedding mere days before it was scheduled, announcing yet another out-of-wedlock pregnancy and spreading misinformation about teen birth control programs, Bristol Palin capped 2015 by welcoming daughter Sailor Grace on December 22. Back in June, Palin insisted, "This pregnancy was actually planned. Everyone knows I wanted more kids, to have a bigger family. Believing I was heading that way, I got ahead of myself. Things didn’t go as planned, but life keeps going." She did not, however — and has not since — named the father of her child. (She has, however, been busy retweeting blog posts asking, "What if the Oregon Ranchers are right?") But soon after the announcement of Sailor Grace's birth, Dakota Meyer took to Twitter to post a photo of the newborn in her mother's arms with the message, "Best Christmas present ever!! I couldn't be more proud of this little blessing."  Now, though, it seems Meyer would like more. TMZ and Radar both reported this week that they have obtained court papers that show the 27 year-old Meyer filed paperwork in Alaska on Monday asserting he is the baby's father, and asking for joint legal and physical custody, as well as child support. Last month, Bristol Palin set a court date with Levi Johnston, the father of her son Tripp, "to arrange a final custody and visitation agreement for residing in the same community and have executed, personally and through their attorneys, a confidential stipulation regarding custody. Therefore, the only pending issue to be addressed by the Court is the matter of past and future child support." Palin, the world's least successful abstinence spokesperson — despite getting a reported $262,500 from the Candies Foundation for her efforts — has in the past few years reportedly commanded lucrative fees for her speaking engagements and starred in her own reality show, "Life's a Tripp." In 2014, her attorney told E! that "Bristol makes a good living, albeit not as much as when she had a more public profile." The details of the arrangement Meyers wants are not yet known. But in a statement to "ET" that I definitely believe Sarah Palin wrote herself, Palin says, "For many months we have been trying to reach out to Dakota Myers [sic] and he has wanted nothing to do with either Bristol's pregnancy or the baby. Paramount to the entire Palin family is the health and welfare of Sailor Grace." She claims Meyers is now coming forward as Sailor's father to "save face." And Bristol's representative, David Martin, also has harsh words for the Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, saying, "My values are such that a real American hero doesn't ask for child support." Interesting, how that presumes that heroism and financial support are independent of each other. And it certainly seems to suggest that a single mother — say, like Bristol Palin, who has asked for child support for her son — would be disqualified from ever being called a hero. Will the family eventually make an amicable arrangement that's actually in the best interests of Baby Sailor? That's yet to see, but whatever happens, we'll no doubt find out via a tweet or a statement to "ET." Sarah Palin Fires Back At Dakota Meyers Over Bristol Palin's DaughterThere's no family that can run the "family values" trope right off the rails quite like a prominent Christian conservative one. This week, both Radar and TMZ are reporting that Bristol Palin's former fiancé Dakota Meyer is going after her for child support. And Meyer's almost mother-in-law, is responding in the only logical way a new grandma would — by issuing a statement to "Entertainment Tonight." After a hectic year that included getting engaged, calling off the wedding mere days before it was scheduled, announcing yet another out-of-wedlock pregnancy and spreading misinformation about teen birth control programs, Bristol Palin capped 2015 by welcoming daughter Sailor Grace on December 22. Back in June, Palin insisted, "This pregnancy was actually planned. Everyone knows I wanted more kids, to have a bigger family. Believing I was heading that way, I got ahead of myself. Things didn’t go as planned, but life keeps going." She did not, however — and has not since — named the father of her child. (She has, however, been busy retweeting blog posts asking, "What if the Oregon Ranchers are right?") But soon after the announcement of Sailor Grace's birth, Dakota Meyer took to Twitter to post a photo of the newborn in her mother's arms with the message, "Best Christmas present ever!! I couldn't be more proud of this little blessing."  Now, though, it seems Meyer would like more. TMZ and Radar both reported this week that they have obtained court papers that show the 27 year-old Meyer filed paperwork in Alaska on Monday asserting he is the baby's father, and asking for joint legal and physical custody, as well as child support. Last month, Bristol Palin set a court date with Levi Johnston, the father of her son Tripp, "to arrange a final custody and visitation agreement for residing in the same community and have executed, personally and through their attorneys, a confidential stipulation regarding custody. Therefore, the only pending issue to be addressed by the Court is the matter of past and future child support." Palin, the world's least successful abstinence spokesperson — despite getting a reported $262,500 from the Candies Foundation for her efforts — has in the past few years reportedly commanded lucrative fees for her speaking engagements and starred in her own reality show, "Life's a Tripp." In 2014, her attorney told E! that "Bristol makes a good living, albeit not as much as when she had a more public profile." The details of the arrangement Meyers wants are not yet known. But in a statement to "ET" that I definitely believe Sarah Palin wrote herself, Palin says, "For many months we have been trying to reach out to Dakota Myers [sic] and he has wanted nothing to do with either Bristol's pregnancy or the baby. Paramount to the entire Palin family is the health and welfare of Sailor Grace." She claims Meyers is now coming forward as Sailor's father to "save face." And Bristol's representative, David Martin, also has harsh words for the Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, saying, "My values are such that a real American hero doesn't ask for child support." Interesting, how that presumes that heroism and financial support are independent of each other. And it certainly seems to suggest that a single mother — say, like Bristol Palin, who has asked for child support for her son — would be disqualified from ever being called a hero. Will the family eventually make an amicable arrangement that's actually in the best interests of Baby Sailor? That's yet to see, but whatever happens, we'll no doubt find out via a tweet or a statement to "ET." Sarah Palin Fires Back At Dakota Meyers Over Bristol Palin's Daughter

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Published on January 07, 2016 14:25