Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 912

Rich white people are ruining the planet: How the donor class prevents action on climate change

Although the Paris Climate Deal certainly represents a step forward for the international community, there are still many potential pitfalls to addressing climate change. New data suggest that the overwhelmingly white donor class may be one such obstacle.

Recently, political scientist Brian Schaffner and I wrote a piece in Mother Jones showing that the GOP donor class is both far more likely to deny the reality of climate change and far less likely to support policy proposals to reduce emissions. However, beyond being more conservative than the population in general, the data so far available suggest that the donor class is far whiter than the general population. CCES data suggest that that may well have a major impact on policy.

Using 2012 and 2014 CCES, we can examine divides between white and non-white donors. These divides are large and consistent: white donors are more likely to deny climate change and oppose action to remedy it. CCES asks a series of questions on climate change, and two of them ("Global Climate change has been established as a serious problem, and immediate action is necessary" and "There is enough evidence that climate change is taking place and some action should be taken”) meet scientific muster. However, while 55% of white donors agree, a whopping 71% of non-white donors do. In addition, non-white donors are more supportive of the EPA strengthening enforcement, even it costs jobs (58% to 49%).

The gap on whether states should adopt minimum fuel requirements for renewables is too small to be statistically significant, thought it points in the same direction, however, the gap on car fuel economy standards is larger (70% to 65%). Finally, on the question of whether the EPA should regulate CO2 emissions, there is also a wide divide (71% to 58%).

As Demos has noted before, the donor class is overwhelmingly white. In 2012, more than 90% of federal contributions came from majority white neighborhoods. A recent study by Alex Kotch finds, “95 percent of the largest North Carolina donors to key federal races in the 2014-2016 election cycles were white, while non-Hispanic whites make up 65 percent of the state population.” A study of Seattle’s 2013 election suggests that while Seattle is 67 percent non-Hispanic white, the neighborhoods from which more than half of contributions came from were 80 percent white.

On the other hand, as a recent Ben & Jerry’s post shows, climate change will disproportionately impact people of color. As Lew Daly, the director of Policy and Research at Demos notes, “Currently, public policy in support of residential solar mainly takes the form of tax benefits for homeowners who install solar panels on their homes, as well as net metering policies in some states and cities. But less than half of black Americans and even fewer Latinos own their homes, which means that localized renewable energy for many people of color will require shared energy production or ‘community solar,’ where community-owned installations or small neighborhood power plants serve multiple customers in a community.” The United States faces an enormous challenge fighting global warming: the goal must be to ensure that our policy response doesn’t entrench racial inequity.

The overwhelmingly white donor class shares preferences that diverge widely from non-donors. The increasing power of the donor class entrenches racial inequality, and makes progressive change more difficult. Without political equality, racial equality and climate justice are far more difficult to achieve.

Although the Paris Climate Deal certainly represents a step forward for the international community, there are still many potential pitfalls to addressing climate change. New data suggest that the overwhelmingly white donor class may be one such obstacle.

Recently, political scientist Brian Schaffner and I wrote a piece in Mother Jones showing that the GOP donor class is both far more likely to deny the reality of climate change and far less likely to support policy proposals to reduce emissions. However, beyond being more conservative than the population in general, the data so far available suggest that the donor class is far whiter than the general population. CCES data suggest that that may well have a major impact on policy.

Using 2012 and 2014 CCES, we can examine divides between white and non-white donors. These divides are large and consistent: white donors are more likely to deny climate change and oppose action to remedy it. CCES asks a series of questions on climate change, and two of them ("Global Climate change has been established as a serious problem, and immediate action is necessary" and "There is enough evidence that climate change is taking place and some action should be taken”) meet scientific muster. However, while 55% of white donors agree, a whopping 71% of non-white donors do. In addition, non-white donors are more supportive of the EPA strengthening enforcement, even it costs jobs (58% to 49%).

The gap on whether states should adopt minimum fuel requirements for renewables is too small to be statistically significant, thought it points in the same direction, however, the gap on car fuel economy standards is larger (70% to 65%). Finally, on the question of whether the EPA should regulate CO2 emissions, there is also a wide divide (71% to 58%).

As Demos has noted before, the donor class is overwhelmingly white. In 2012, more than 90% of federal contributions came from majority white neighborhoods. A recent study by Alex Kotch finds, “95 percent of the largest North Carolina donors to key federal races in the 2014-2016 election cycles were white, while non-Hispanic whites make up 65 percent of the state population.” A study of Seattle’s 2013 election suggests that while Seattle is 67 percent non-Hispanic white, the neighborhoods from which more than half of contributions came from were 80 percent white.

On the other hand, as a recent Ben & Jerry’s post shows, climate change will disproportionately impact people of color. As Lew Daly, the director of Policy and Research at Demos notes, “Currently, public policy in support of residential solar mainly takes the form of tax benefits for homeowners who install solar panels on their homes, as well as net metering policies in some states and cities. But less than half of black Americans and even fewer Latinos own their homes, which means that localized renewable energy for many people of color will require shared energy production or ‘community solar,’ where community-owned installations or small neighborhood power plants serve multiple customers in a community.” The United States faces an enormous challenge fighting global warming: the goal must be to ensure that our policy response doesn’t entrench racial inequity.

The overwhelmingly white donor class shares preferences that diverge widely from non-donors. The increasing power of the donor class entrenches racial inequality, and makes progressive change more difficult. Without political equality, racial equality and climate justice are far more difficult to achieve.

Continue Reading...

America’s secret war on ISIL: The African military operation you’ll never hear about

On October 7th, at an “undisclosed location” somewhere in “Southwest Asia,” men wearing different types of camouflage and dun-colored boots gathered before a black backdrop adorned with Arabic script.  They were attending a ceremony that mixed solemnity with celebration, the commemoration of a year of combat that left scores of their enemies slain.  One of their leaders spoke of comraderie and honor, of forging a family and continuing a legacy. While this might sound like the description of a scene from an Islamic State (IS) video or a clip from a militia battling them, it was, in fact, a U.S. Air Force “inactivation ceremony.”  There, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake handed over to Colonel John Orchard the “colors” of his drone unit as it slipped into an ethereal military limbo.  But that doesn’t mean the gathering had no connection to the Islamic State. It did. Within days, Drake was back in the United States surprising his family at a Disney “musical spectacular.”  Meanwhile, his former unit ended its most recent run having been responsible for the “neutralization of 69 enemy fighters,” according to an officer who spoke at that October 7th ceremony.  Exactly whom the unit’s drones neutralized remains unclear, but an Air Force spokesman has for the first time revealed that Drake’s force, based in the Horn of Africa, spent more than a year targeting the Islamic State as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the undeclared war on the militant group in Iraq and Syria.  The Air Force has since taken steps to cover up the actions of the unit. Base-Building in the Horn of Africa From November 20, 2014, until October 7, 2015, Drake commanded the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, a unit operating under the auspices of U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT), which flew MQ-1 Predator drones from Chabelley Airfield in the tiny sun-baked African nation of Djibouti.  For the uninitiated, Chabelley is the other U.S. outpost in that country -- the site of America’s lone avowed “major military facility” in Africa, Camp Lemonnier -- and a key node in an expanding archipelago of hush-hush American outposts that have spread across that continent since 9/11. Last week, in fact, the New York Times reported on new Pentagon plans to counter the Islamic State by creating a hub-and-spoke network of bases and outposts stretching across southern Europe, the Greater Middle East, and Africa by “expanding existing bases in Djibouti and Afghanistan -- and… more basic installations in countries that could include Niger and Cameroon, where the United States now carries out unarmed surveillance drone missions, or will soon.” Weeks earlier, TomDispatch had revealed that those efforts were already well underway, drawing attention to key bases in Spain and Italy as well as 60 U.S. military outposts, port facilities, and other sites dotting the African continent, including those in Djibouti, Niger, and Cameroon.  The Times cited a senior Pentagon official who noted that some colleagues are “advocating a larger string of new bases in West Africa,” a plan TomDispatch had reported on early last year.  The Times didn’t mention Djibouti’s secret drone base by name, but that airfield, Drake’s home for almost a year, is now a crucial site in this expanding network of bases and was intimately involved in the war on the Islamic State a year before the Times took notice. A few years ago, Chabelley was little more than a tarmac in the midst of a desert wasteland, an old French Foreign Legion outpost that had seemingly gone to seed.  About 10 kilometers away, Camp Lemonnier, which shares a runway with the international airport in Djibouti’s capital, was handling America’s fighter aircraft and cargo planes, as well as drones carrying out secret assassination missions in Yemen and Somalia.  By 2012, an average of 16 U.S. drones and four fighter jets were taking off or landing there each day.  Soon, however, local air traffic controllers in the predominantly Muslim nation became incensed about the drones being used to kill fellow Muslims.  At about the same time, those robotic planes taking off from the base began crashing, although the Air Force did not find Djiboutians responsible. In February 2013, the Pentagon asked Congress to provide funding for “minimal facilities necessary to enable temporary operations” at Chabelley.  That June, as the House Armed Services Committee Chabelley Airfield, satellite photo, April 2013. Click here to see a larger version Chabelley Airfield, satellite photo, August 2015. The Djiboutian Solution to the Islamic State As 2014 was coming to a close, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake took command of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron at Chabelley.  Under his watch, the unit reportedly carried out combat operations in support of three combatant commanders.  AFCENT failed to respond to a request for clarification about which commands were involved, but Gettinger speculates that AFRICOM; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for the Greater Middle East; and Special Operations Command were the most likely. Before U.S. drones moved from Camp Lemonnier to Chabelley, according to secret Pentagon documents exposed by the Interceptin October, a Special Operations task force based there conducted a drone assassination campaign in nearby Yemen and Somalia.  Gettinger believes the missions continued after the move.  “We know that MQ-1s have been involved in counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and Predators have for many years been flying missions over Yemen,” he told me recently by phone, noting however that the strikes in Yemen have slowed of late. “There were no U.S. drone strikes reported in Yemen in November, the second calendar month this year without a reported attack,” researchers with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted earlier this month.  After a lull since July, a November drone strike in Somalia killed at least five people, according to local reports.  And just last week, the Pentagon announced that another U.S. strike in Somalia had killed Abdirahman Sandhere, a senior leader of the militant group al-Shabaab. Drake’s 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, however, focused its firepower on another target: the Islamic State.  The unit was “a large contributor to OIR,” according to Major Tim Smith of AFCENT Public Affairs, and “executed combat flight operations for AFCENT in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.” Based in Africa, it was, according to Lieutenant Colonel Kristi Beckman, director of public affairs at the Combined Air Operations Center at al-Udeid air base in Qatar, “a geographically separated unit.”  By the beginning of October 2015, drones flown out of Chabelley had already logged more than 24,000 hours of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), according to the chief of operations analysis and reconstructions of the 380th Expeditionary Operations Group, its parent unit. (In an Air Force news release, that officer was identified only as “Major Kori,” evidently to obscure his identity.)  According to Kori, Chabelley’s drones were also “responsible for the neutralization of 69 enemy fighters, including five high-valued individuals.” AFCENT failed to provide additional details about the missions, those targeted, or that euphemism, “neutralization,” which was once a favored term of the CIA’s often muddled and sometimes murderous Phoenix Program that targeted the civilian “infrastructure” of America’s enemies during the Vietnam War.  Beckman did, however, confirm that “neutralizations” took place in Iraq and/or Syria. Click here to see a larger version A satellite photo of Predator and Reaper drones at Chabelley Airfield during Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake’s time in command of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.    Despite the loss of a unit that had flown tens of thousands of hours of ISR missions and attacked scores of targets, Smith says that America’s war on the Islamic State has not suffered.  “Coalition efforts in the region are not hampered,” he assured me.  “Operation Inherent Resolve has the personnel and assets necessary to continue aerial dominance within the region,” according to Smith.  “Though the squadron isn’t needed anymore, there is sufficient capability within the AOR [area of operations] to ensure the needs of the mission are met.” The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning for Drones in Djibouti? Some commentators have speculated that the transfer of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron’s Predators indicates a possible end to U.S. drone missions from Djibouti.  Others suggest that the move offers a clear indication of demands for the robot aircraft elsewhere in the world. There’s no question about the demand for drones. The Air Force pushed back plans to retire the Predator by a year -- until 2018 -- and began outsourcing combat air patrols to civilian contractors to deal with a paucity of drone pilots at a moment of expanding operations.  Last week, it unveiled a $3 billion plan, which must be approved by Congress, to significantly expand its drone program by doubling the number of pilots, deploying them to more bases, and adding scores of new drones to its arsenal. All of this comes at a time when, according to a top AFRICOM commander, the Islamic State is making inroads in Africa from Nigeria to Somalia, and especially in Libya. "If Raqqa [the “capital” of its caliphate in Syria] is the nucleus, the nearest thing to the divided nucleus is probably Sirte,” said Vice Admiral Michael Franken, the command's deputy for military operations, speaking of a Libyan city in which IS fighters are deeply entrenched. “From there they look to export their terror into Europe and elsewhere.” Dan Gettinger sees no end in sight for the use of the Djiboutian airfield or of American drones flying from there.  “All the signs point to a more permanent installation at Chabelley,” he says, noting a string of construction contracts awarded for the base in recent years.  Indeed, at the end of October, Navy Seabees were constructing another aircraft maintenance pad there.  This month, they are working to extend the apron -- where aircraft can be parked and serviced -- at the drone base.  It’s the Predator that’s on its way out, he tells me. “I think the MQ-1 is becoming old hat at this point.” Like Gettinger, Jack Serle of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism sees the larger, more heavily armed cousins of the Predator, MQ-9 Reapers, as the future of drone operations at the satellite Djiboutian base.  “I don't think this means the Predators the 60th launched and recovered are being retired -- I think they'll have been redeployed,” he told me by email.  “And I don't think this means Chabelley is denuded of drones. I think it means Reapers only will be operating out of there.” “The personnel that were assigned to the 60th were sent back to the states to retrain on other weapon systems and the assets were redistributed to the states, [European Command], and CENTCOM,” AFCENT’s Major Tim Smith told me.  “And this unit has not been replaced with another.”  Military press materials suggest, however, that members of the 870th Air Expeditionary Squadron and the 33rd Expeditionary Special Operations Squadron have recently been operating at Chabelley airfield.  The latter unit has been known to fly Reapers from there. Family Planning U.S. Air Forces Central Command failed to provide additional information in response to multiple requests for clarification about missions carried out by the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.  “Due to force protection concerns and operational security, I cannot discuss further,” Smith explained, although how the security of an inactive unit could be compromised was unclear.  Smith also referred me to AFRICOM for answers.  That command, however, failed to respond to repeated questions about drone operations flown from Chabelley. During the course of my reporting, the Air Force news release about the October 7th inactivation ceremony was removed from the AFCENT website, leaving only an error message -- "404 - Page not found!" -- where an article with minimalist details about the “neutralization” of “enemy fighters” by drones once stood.  AFCENT failed to reply to a request for further information on the reason the story was withdrawn. Nor did the command respond to a request for an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake.  Before he traveled home to surprise his own family, however, Drake spoke of the “family” he had forged as, in the words of Major Kori, he “engaged enemies of the United States from Chabelley Airfield.” “My desire at the beginning was simple: make the squadron a family while still continuing the tradition of excellence the previous commanders already established,” said Drake. “[I]f I took care of the people they took care of the mission... I am most proud of the family this squadron became.” Today, those words, along with photos of the ceremony, have vanished from AFCENT’s website, joining a raft of information about America’s war against the Islamic State, operations in Africa, and drone campaigns that the military has no interest in sharing with the taxpayers who foot the bill for all of it and in whose name it’s carried out. For more than a year, U.S. drones flying out of Djibouti waged a secret war against the Islamic State. For more than a year, it went unreported on the nightly news, in the country’s flagship newspapers, or evidently anywhere else. The New York Times now reports that "the Pentagon has proposed a new plan to the White House to build up a string of military bases in Africa" and beyond, "bring[ing] an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system that would be able to confront regional threats from the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, or other terrorist groups." But the expansion of Chabelley, the far flung network of bases of which it’s a part, and the war on the Islamic State waged from it suggest that there is little "new" about the proposal. The facts on the ground indicate that the Pentagon’s plan has been underway for a long time. What’s new is its emergence from the shadows. On October 7th, at an “undisclosed location” somewhere in “Southwest Asia,” men wearing different types of camouflage and dun-colored boots gathered before a black backdrop adorned with Arabic script.  They were attending a ceremony that mixed solemnity with celebration, the commemoration of a year of combat that left scores of their enemies slain.  One of their leaders spoke of comraderie and honor, of forging a family and continuing a legacy. While this might sound like the description of a scene from an Islamic State (IS) video or a clip from a militia battling them, it was, in fact, a U.S. Air Force “inactivation ceremony.”  There, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake handed over to Colonel John Orchard the “colors” of his drone unit as it slipped into an ethereal military limbo.  But that doesn’t mean the gathering had no connection to the Islamic State. It did. Within days, Drake was back in the United States surprising his family at a Disney “musical spectacular.”  Meanwhile, his former unit ended its most recent run having been responsible for the “neutralization of 69 enemy fighters,” according to an officer who spoke at that October 7th ceremony.  Exactly whom the unit’s drones neutralized remains unclear, but an Air Force spokesman has for the first time revealed that Drake’s force, based in the Horn of Africa, spent more than a year targeting the Islamic State as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the undeclared war on the militant group in Iraq and Syria.  The Air Force has since taken steps to cover up the actions of the unit. Base-Building in the Horn of Africa From November 20, 2014, until October 7, 2015, Drake commanded the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, a unit operating under the auspices of U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT), which flew MQ-1 Predator drones from Chabelley Airfield in the tiny sun-baked African nation of Djibouti.  For the uninitiated, Chabelley is the other U.S. outpost in that country -- the site of America’s lone avowed “major military facility” in Africa, Camp Lemonnier -- and a key node in an expanding archipelago of hush-hush American outposts that have spread across that continent since 9/11. Last week, in fact, the New York Times reported on new Pentagon plans to counter the Islamic State by creating a hub-and-spoke network of bases and outposts stretching across southern Europe, the Greater Middle East, and Africa by “expanding existing bases in Djibouti and Afghanistan -- and… more basic installations in countries that could include Niger and Cameroon, where the United States now carries out unarmed surveillance drone missions, or will soon.” Weeks earlier, TomDispatch had revealed that those efforts were already well underway, drawing attention to key bases in Spain and Italy as well as 60 U.S. military outposts, port facilities, and other sites dotting the African continent, including those in Djibouti, Niger, and Cameroon.  The Times cited a senior Pentagon official who noted that some colleagues are “advocating a larger string of new bases in West Africa,” a plan TomDispatch had reported on early last year.  The Times didn’t mention Djibouti’s secret drone base by name, but that airfield, Drake’s home for almost a year, is now a crucial site in this expanding network of bases and was intimately involved in the war on the Islamic State a year before the Times took notice. A few years ago, Chabelley was little more than a tarmac in the midst of a desert wasteland, an old French Foreign Legion outpost that had seemingly gone to seed.  About 10 kilometers away, Camp Lemonnier, which shares a runway with the international airport in Djibouti’s capital, was handling America’s fighter aircraft and cargo planes, as well as drones carrying out secret assassination missions in Yemen and Somalia.  By 2012, an average of 16 U.S. drones and four fighter jets were taking off or landing there each day.  Soon, however, local air traffic controllers in the predominantly Muslim nation became incensed about the drones being used to kill fellow Muslims.  At about the same time, those robotic planes taking off from the base began crashing, although the Air Force did not find Djiboutians responsible. In February 2013, the Pentagon asked Congress to provide funding for “minimal facilities necessary to enable temporary operations” at Chabelley.  That June, as the House Armed Services Committee Chabelley Airfield, satellite photo, April 2013. Click here to see a larger version Chabelley Airfield, satellite photo, August 2015. The Djiboutian Solution to the Islamic State As 2014 was coming to a close, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake took command of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron at Chabelley.  Under his watch, the unit reportedly carried out combat operations in support of three combatant commanders.  AFCENT failed to respond to a request for clarification about which commands were involved, but Gettinger speculates that AFRICOM; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for the Greater Middle East; and Special Operations Command were the most likely. Before U.S. drones moved from Camp Lemonnier to Chabelley, according to secret Pentagon documents exposed by the Interceptin October, a Special Operations task force based there conducted a drone assassination campaign in nearby Yemen and Somalia.  Gettinger believes the missions continued after the move.  “We know that MQ-1s have been involved in counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and Predators have for many years been flying missions over Yemen,” he told me recently by phone, noting however that the strikes in Yemen have slowed of late. “There were no U.S. drone strikes reported in Yemen in November, the second calendar month this year without a reported attack,” researchers with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted earlier this month.  After a lull since July, a November drone strike in Somalia killed at least five people, according to local reports.  And just last week, the Pentagon announced that another U.S. strike in Somalia had killed Abdirahman Sandhere, a senior leader of the militant group al-Shabaab. Drake’s 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, however, focused its firepower on another target: the Islamic State.  The unit was “a large contributor to OIR,” according to Major Tim Smith of AFCENT Public Affairs, and “executed combat flight operations for AFCENT in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.” Based in Africa, it was, according to Lieutenant Colonel Kristi Beckman, director of public affairs at the Combined Air Operations Center at al-Udeid air base in Qatar, “a geographically separated unit.”  By the beginning of October 2015, drones flown out of Chabelley had already logged more than 24,000 hours of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), according to the chief of operations analysis and reconstructions of the 380th Expeditionary Operations Group, its parent unit. (In an Air Force news release, that officer was identified only as “Major Kori,” evidently to obscure his identity.)  According to Kori, Chabelley’s drones were also “responsible for the neutralization of 69 enemy fighters, including five high-valued individuals.” AFCENT failed to provide additional details about the missions, those targeted, or that euphemism, “neutralization,” which was once a favored term of the CIA’s often muddled and sometimes murderous Phoenix Program that targeted the civilian “infrastructure” of America’s enemies during the Vietnam War.  Beckman did, however, confirm that “neutralizations” took place in Iraq and/or Syria. Click here to see a larger version A satellite photo of Predator and Reaper drones at Chabelley Airfield during Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake’s time in command of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.    Despite the loss of a unit that had flown tens of thousands of hours of ISR missions and attacked scores of targets, Smith says that America’s war on the Islamic State has not suffered.  “Coalition efforts in the region are not hampered,” he assured me.  “Operation Inherent Resolve has the personnel and assets necessary to continue aerial dominance within the region,” according to Smith.  “Though the squadron isn’t needed anymore, there is sufficient capability within the AOR [area of operations] to ensure the needs of the mission are met.” The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning for Drones in Djibouti? Some commentators have speculated that the transfer of the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron’s Predators indicates a possible end to U.S. drone missions from Djibouti.  Others suggest that the move offers a clear indication of demands for the robot aircraft elsewhere in the world. There’s no question about the demand for drones. The Air Force pushed back plans to retire the Predator by a year -- until 2018 -- and began outsourcing combat air patrols to civilian contractors to deal with a paucity of drone pilots at a moment of expanding operations.  Last week, it unveiled a $3 billion plan, which must be approved by Congress, to significantly expand its drone program by doubling the number of pilots, deploying them to more bases, and adding scores of new drones to its arsenal. All of this comes at a time when, according to a top AFRICOM commander, the Islamic State is making inroads in Africa from Nigeria to Somalia, and especially in Libya. "If Raqqa [the “capital” of its caliphate in Syria] is the nucleus, the nearest thing to the divided nucleus is probably Sirte,” said Vice Admiral Michael Franken, the command's deputy for military operations, speaking of a Libyan city in which IS fighters are deeply entrenched. “From there they look to export their terror into Europe and elsewhere.” Dan Gettinger sees no end in sight for the use of the Djiboutian airfield or of American drones flying from there.  “All the signs point to a more permanent installation at Chabelley,” he says, noting a string of construction contracts awarded for the base in recent years.  Indeed, at the end of October, Navy Seabees were constructing another aircraft maintenance pad there.  This month, they are working to extend the apron -- where aircraft can be parked and serviced -- at the drone base.  It’s the Predator that’s on its way out, he tells me. “I think the MQ-1 is becoming old hat at this point.” Like Gettinger, Jack Serle of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism sees the larger, more heavily armed cousins of the Predator, MQ-9 Reapers, as the future of drone operations at the satellite Djiboutian base.  “I don't think this means the Predators the 60th launched and recovered are being retired -- I think they'll have been redeployed,” he told me by email.  “And I don't think this means Chabelley is denuded of drones. I think it means Reapers only will be operating out of there.” “The personnel that were assigned to the 60th were sent back to the states to retrain on other weapon systems and the assets were redistributed to the states, [European Command], and CENTCOM,” AFCENT’s Major Tim Smith told me.  “And this unit has not been replaced with another.”  Military press materials suggest, however, that members of the 870th Air Expeditionary Squadron and the 33rd Expeditionary Special Operations Squadron have recently been operating at Chabelley airfield.  The latter unit has been known to fly Reapers from there. Family Planning U.S. Air Forces Central Command failed to provide additional information in response to multiple requests for clarification about missions carried out by the 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.  “Due to force protection concerns and operational security, I cannot discuss further,” Smith explained, although how the security of an inactive unit could be compromised was unclear.  Smith also referred me to AFRICOM for answers.  That command, however, failed to respond to repeated questions about drone operations flown from Chabelley. During the course of my reporting, the Air Force news release about the October 7th inactivation ceremony was removed from the AFCENT website, leaving only an error message -- "404 - Page not found!" -- where an article with minimalist details about the “neutralization” of “enemy fighters” by drones once stood.  AFCENT failed to reply to a request for further information on the reason the story was withdrawn. Nor did the command respond to a request for an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Drake.  Before he traveled home to surprise his own family, however, Drake spoke of the “family” he had forged as, in the words of Major Kori, he “engaged enemies of the United States from Chabelley Airfield.” “My desire at the beginning was simple: make the squadron a family while still continuing the tradition of excellence the previous commanders already established,” said Drake. “[I]f I took care of the people they took care of the mission... I am most proud of the family this squadron became.” Today, those words, along with photos of the ceremony, have vanished from AFCENT’s website, joining a raft of information about America’s war against the Islamic State, operations in Africa, and drone campaigns that the military has no interest in sharing with the taxpayers who foot the bill for all of it and in whose name it’s carried out. For more than a year, U.S. drones flying out of Djibouti waged a secret war against the Islamic State. For more than a year, it went unreported on the nightly news, in the country’s flagship newspapers, or evidently anywhere else. The New York Times now reports that "the Pentagon has proposed a new plan to the White House to build up a string of military bases in Africa" and beyond, "bring[ing] an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system that would be able to confront regional threats from the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, or other terrorist groups." But the expansion of Chabelley, the far flung network of bases of which it’s a part, and the war on the Islamic State waged from it suggest that there is little "new" about the proposal. The facts on the ground indicate that the Pentagon’s plan has been underway for a long time. What’s new is its emergence from the shadows. 

Continue Reading...

Pathetic, clingy, desperate for approval: Why does the Disney Channel hate moms?

Imagine Disney’s Belle at midlife. Two decades after her film debut in "Beauty and the Beast," where might we find the book-loving heroine who aspired to “more than this provincial life”? At the helm of a publishing company or metropolitan library system? On the board of a research foundation established in memory of her inventor father? Alas, according to Disney’s own storytellers, 2015 finds a grown-up Belle on the sidelines of a school event dancing awkwardly to an a cappella rap version of the song “Be Our Guest.” This is Belle’s future as depicted by the Disney Channel original movie "Descendants." For my sins, I was among the 12.2 million viewers who made "Descendants" this year’s most watched cable TV movie and the #5 cable movie of all time. I tuned into the premiere with my kids, gritting my teeth through the illogical backstory, inane dialogue and incongruous soundtrack. Of all the movie’s faults, I found its portrayal of Belle the beastliest offense of all. Belle may have royal status in "Descendants"—she and King Beast reign over a kingdom called Auradon—but gone is the independence that distinguished her as an animated character. Gone too is the glammed-up Belle made over by the Disney princess marketing machine. Instead, "Descendants" gives us an insipid woman who hangs on her husband’s arm and keeps mum when he jokes about their marriage, “It was either you or a teapot.” She dresses, inexplicably, like a 1960s TV mom, with a flip hairstyle and yellow pleated swing dress. When she hears upsetting news, she falls into a swoon. Even my 12-year-old son, who rarely weighs in on princess matters, said, “Is that supposed to be Belle?” What became of the character reviewers once hailed as “a feminist heroine” and “an icon of self-reliance”? What turned her from bold to blah? What impeded the folks at Disney, a brand synonymous with imagination, from envisioning a future less bland for Belle? In a word: motherhood. On its surface, "Descendants" is a cheesy musical about the teenage children of iconic Disney characters. At its core, it’s about children eclipsing their parents, especially their mothers. The story opens with Belle and Beast’s son, Prince Ben, preparing to ascend the throne. We’re not told why the middle-aged monarchs are abdicating authority to their son. It’s enough to know that Auradon, like the Disney Channel itself, is a kingdom where kids rule. Prince Ben asserts his sovereignty by releasing four junior villains—the offspring of Maleficent, Evil Queen, Cruella de Vil, and Jafar—from the island where they’ve been exiled. The citizens of Auradon are particularly scandalized by the release of Maleficent’s daughter, Mal, because Maleficent is “the worst villain in the land.” The movie’s central question is whether Mal can overcome her mother’s evil legacy. (Spoiler alert: She does. And turns her mother into a newt for good measure.) Belle, meanwhile, defers to her son’s judgment. She approves his proclamation with a “well done” and advises him on his coronation day, “Keep listening to your heart.” Belle’s missing mojo is irrelevant because her primary role is to nurture her son’s aspirations and step aside to let him take his crown. That’s a pretty good summary of the mother’s role in any Disney Channel program. The Disney Channel routinely attracts more viewers than any other cable network, but its comedy lineup is probably under your radar unless you’re parenting a tween, hanging out with tweens, or reliving your own tween years. Having suffered through more Disney sitcoms than I care to admit, I’m confident you’d recognize the formula on which they rely. If you think I’m referring to the traditional family comedy, think again. It’s true that Disney Channel kids often share the screen with their parents and siblings. Yes, moms and dads are recurring characters and sometimes main cast members. Mothers don’t merit top billing, but they are on the scene—which counts as progress in the House of Mouse, where the good mothers of the silver screen are mostly dead. Publications ranging from Time and The Atlantic to Glamour and Entertainment Weekly have noted Disney’s tendency to kill off mothers in its feature films. Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi, Mowgli, Ariel, Belle, Lilo and Nani, Elsa and Anna—all of their mothers are dead. Commentators have attributed this motif to folkloric tradition, Walt Disney’s grief over his own mother’s death, and outright misogyny. Whatever explains the ubiquity of dead matriarchs in Disney films, the Disney Channel looks like a refuge for mothers by comparison. Mothers with prominent roles in Disney Channel comedies include Ellen Jennings (Beth Littleford) in "Dog with a Blog," Amy Duncan (Leigh-Allyn Baker) in "Good Luck Charlie," Karen Rooney (Kali Rocha) in "Liv and Maddie," Kira Cooper (Tammy Townsend) in "K.C. Undercover" and Topanga Matthews (Danielle Fishel) in "Girl Meets World." But the mere presence of a mother on a tweencom is not necessarily worth celebrating. After heaving a sigh of relief that her life has been spared, a Disney Channel mom might observe that the terrain she’s given is a small world after all. She might discover that she is not in a traditional family sitcom (a formula with its own mommy issues) but in a buddy ensemble. She might conclude that her children and their pals are like nothing so much as stunted versions of the cast of "Friends." Here’s a description of any Disney Channel comedy: A tight-knit group of adolescents, some of whom may be siblings, navigate love and life, largely without adult intervention. Disney Channel kids sport trendy wardrobes and hang out in brightly colored snack shops and living spaces reminiscent of Central Perk and Monica Geller’s apartment. They speak a snark dialect worthy of Chandler Bing, their sarcastic comments punctuated by canned laughter at the approximate rate of once every three seconds. Though perhaps more ethnically diverse than the "Friends" ensemble, in the way that stock photography represents diversity, Disney kids remain fundamentally unconcerned with the world outside their circle. That circle does not encompass their mothers. It’s no surprise that mothers are sidelined in shows for tweens. In a sense, the Disney Channel is carrying on a tradition that began with the 1955 debut of "The Mickey Mouse Club," a variety show that excluded parents altogether. But there’s something insidious about bringing a mother onto the stage while her kids command the spotlight. She becomes a device—a punchline reinforcing the supremacy of youth, a symbol of the past against which the present generation defines itself. Put another way, parents embrace the Disney Channel for what it is not. They know what their children will not encounter in a Disney sitcom: sex, violence, profanity, or anything resembling an adult situation. But what happens to adult characters when you wipe away any adult perspective? These characters are simultaneously infantilized and made obsolete. Consider the mother in "Dog with a Blog." Ellen Jennings is portrayed as a buffoon who responds to her own corny jokes with the catchphrase “Good one, Ellen.” A stay-at-home mom whose claim to fame is the odor in her car (the other moms call her “Smellen”), she spends her downtime trying to conquer her fear of cartwheels. In an episode where Ellen’s daughter, Avery, dumps an unpopular friend to protect her spot on the cheerleading squad, Ellen is too busy trying to impress the cheerleaders to set her daughter straight. It’s up to a younger sister and the family’s talking dog to show Avery the error of her ways. Or take "Good Luck Charlie’s" Amy Duncan. Because "Good Luck Charlie" was written to attract adult viewers as well as kids, Amy is afforded more screen time than other Disney Channel moms. In theory this is a boon for momkind, but in practice it means Amy has ample time to make a fool of herself. A nurse turned stay-at-home mom, Amy constantly revisits the glory days of her youth. “I want to show you something exciting from mommy’s past,” she tells her middle child, who replies, “Teddy told me if I ever heard those words, I should just keep walking.” But there’s no escaping Amy’s ridiculous exploits. She recites a poem about her high school locker combination and attends an athletic event dressed as her high school mascot. She’s desperate for applause, taking credit for her child’s artwork and treating a preschool music class to a cabaret performance. On the Disney Channel, mothers are alive but their dreams are dead. For Ellen and Amy and their counterparts across the network, ambition is a tragic flaw. The Disney Channel is quintessentially aspirational—you hear it in the lyrics of "Descendants" songs like “Set It Off” ("I’ll make my own future, ignore the rumors / Show ’em my passion sound") and “Believe” ("Don’t be afraid to be who you are / Just dream out and shout and follow the stars")—but silly mommy, dreams are for kids. With rare exceptions, Disney Channel mothers exist only to support their children’s extravagant lifestyles and, more importantly, their lofty aspirations. This dynamic plays out again and again. In "Liv and Maddie," Karen Rooney helps one of her twin daughters audition for a Hollywood role and the other twin try out for the Junior Olympic basketball team. In "Austin & Ally," a show about teenage pop stars, mothers offer their children career advice and wear fan apparel to their children’s award shows. In "Jessie," fashion mogul Christina Ross abandons her career and becomes a stay-at-home mom so that her children’s nanny can pursue her acting dreams. Disney kids aspire to excel in acting, music, athletics, fashion and other performance-oriented fields. They don’t dream of becoming teachers or service professionals, and they certainly don’t aspire to motherhood. Why would they? According to the Disney Channel, mothers are clueless fossils who have laid aside their aspirations. The mothers who break the ambition rule are either ridiculous—like Ellen Jennings, Amy Duncan, or Karen Rooney, who secretly records her own audition in a Cockney accent—or evil. In "Descendants," Maleficent is the most ambitious mother by far. She plots to overthrow Auradon by instructing Mal and her friends to steal the Fairy Godmother’s wand. As a mother, Maleficent’s most vile act is to impose her personal agenda onto her child, rather than supporting her daughter’s goals. If I’m honest, Disney’s treatment of mothers’ ambitions bugs me because it hits close to home. I grew up on Claire Huxtable and Enjoli commercials, pop culture promises that a woman could have it all. Ask any Gen X mother how that promise panned out. For me, motherhood meant postponing career goals that I now fear I’ve waited too long to achieve. While their mothers are evaluating the trade-offs they’ve made, today’s kids are hearing a different message: Specialize and excel. Find the one thing you do best, and be the best at it. The Disney kids may not be familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, which says that excellence in any field requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, but they are products of the same zeitgeist that popularized Gladwell’s ideas. It’s hard to see how the equation for elite performance accommodates motherhood, unless you’re the mother facilitating your child’s 10,000 hours of practice. (Remember Procter & Gamble’s “Thank You, Mom” commercials, which aired during the 2012 and 2014 Olympics?) Small wonder in our culture of specialization that one-third of millennials don’t want children. Coming of age in their wake, the "Descendants" generation won’t even try to have it all. And given a choice between career aspirations and motherhood, it’s obvious which path the Disney Channel recommends. Time will tell whether tween viewers take this recommendation to heart, but they do seem to be getting the message. A UCLA study found that fame was both the number one value communicated in preteen television and the primary ambition of preteens themselves. My own mother’s observations as a recently retired fifth grade teacher align with the research. In her final years of teaching in a middle-class district that’s about as ethnically homogeneous as the Disney Channel, she noticed a shift in how her students described their goals for the future. Compared to students of previous years, who imagined themselves with everyday careers and families and hobbies, contemporary fifth graders were more likely to dream of becoming famous for their accomplishments and less likely to mention parenthood. I alluded to an exception to the Disney Channel’s diminishment of mothers. In fact, the network currently features two mom characters whose identities are not subsumed by motherhood. One is secret agent Kira Cooper in "K.C. Undercover," the matriarch in a family of spies. Kira is also the only African-American mother in the main cast of a Disney Channel sitcom. Although at risk of being superseded by her genius daughter, K.C.—by the series’ fourth episode, she needs K.C. to rescue her from an evil inventor—she manages to retain both her career and her dignity. The Disney Channel’s greatest credit to motherhood, Topanga Matthews of "Girl Meets World" is not a Disney creation at all. Topanga and her husband, Cory (Ben Savage), first appeared on ABC, as adolescent characters in the 1990s sitcom "Boy Meets World." Young Topanga was an academic standout who, in the final episode of "Boy Meets World," accepted an internship at a prestigious New York City law firm. In "Girl Meets World," Topanga is a practicing attorney and owner of a Ukrainian bakery. "Girl Meets World" is far from perfect, but if you look past the melodramatic situations and relentlessly earnest characters, you’ll find a mother who pursues her passions and earns her children’s respect. I can’t help thinking that Topanga escaped the Disney Channel’s slapstick treatment only because she was a pre-existing character with an established fan base. The initial concept for "Girl Meets World" had Topanga owning a pudding shop. Rewriting her as a lawyer was an apparent concession to disgruntled fans. "Girl Meets World" trades heavily in nostalgia. There are parallels and flashbacks to the original series. There are guest appearances by "Boy Meets World" actors who enter the scene to riotous applause. But the show’s greatest throwback may be its vision of motherhood. The blueprint for Topanga Matthews as a mother resides in the 1990s, in the imaginations of young Topanga and her fans. The imaginations of today’s exceptional Disney kids harbor a different blueprint—one that eschews motherhood altogether.Imagine Disney’s Belle at midlife. Two decades after her film debut in "Beauty and the Beast," where might we find the book-loving heroine who aspired to “more than this provincial life”? At the helm of a publishing company or metropolitan library system? On the board of a research foundation established in memory of her inventor father? Alas, according to Disney’s own storytellers, 2015 finds a grown-up Belle on the sidelines of a school event dancing awkwardly to an a cappella rap version of the song “Be Our Guest.” This is Belle’s future as depicted by the Disney Channel original movie "Descendants." For my sins, I was among the 12.2 million viewers who made "Descendants" this year’s most watched cable TV movie and the #5 cable movie of all time. I tuned into the premiere with my kids, gritting my teeth through the illogical backstory, inane dialogue and incongruous soundtrack. Of all the movie’s faults, I found its portrayal of Belle the beastliest offense of all. Belle may have royal status in "Descendants"—she and King Beast reign over a kingdom called Auradon—but gone is the independence that distinguished her as an animated character. Gone too is the glammed-up Belle made over by the Disney princess marketing machine. Instead, "Descendants" gives us an insipid woman who hangs on her husband’s arm and keeps mum when he jokes about their marriage, “It was either you or a teapot.” She dresses, inexplicably, like a 1960s TV mom, with a flip hairstyle and yellow pleated swing dress. When she hears upsetting news, she falls into a swoon. Even my 12-year-old son, who rarely weighs in on princess matters, said, “Is that supposed to be Belle?” What became of the character reviewers once hailed as “a feminist heroine” and “an icon of self-reliance”? What turned her from bold to blah? What impeded the folks at Disney, a brand synonymous with imagination, from envisioning a future less bland for Belle? In a word: motherhood. On its surface, "Descendants" is a cheesy musical about the teenage children of iconic Disney characters. At its core, it’s about children eclipsing their parents, especially their mothers. The story opens with Belle and Beast’s son, Prince Ben, preparing to ascend the throne. We’re not told why the middle-aged monarchs are abdicating authority to their son. It’s enough to know that Auradon, like the Disney Channel itself, is a kingdom where kids rule. Prince Ben asserts his sovereignty by releasing four junior villains—the offspring of Maleficent, Evil Queen, Cruella de Vil, and Jafar—from the island where they’ve been exiled. The citizens of Auradon are particularly scandalized by the release of Maleficent’s daughter, Mal, because Maleficent is “the worst villain in the land.” The movie’s central question is whether Mal can overcome her mother’s evil legacy. (Spoiler alert: She does. And turns her mother into a newt for good measure.) Belle, meanwhile, defers to her son’s judgment. She approves his proclamation with a “well done” and advises him on his coronation day, “Keep listening to your heart.” Belle’s missing mojo is irrelevant because her primary role is to nurture her son’s aspirations and step aside to let him take his crown. That’s a pretty good summary of the mother’s role in any Disney Channel program. The Disney Channel routinely attracts more viewers than any other cable network, but its comedy lineup is probably under your radar unless you’re parenting a tween, hanging out with tweens, or reliving your own tween years. Having suffered through more Disney sitcoms than I care to admit, I’m confident you’d recognize the formula on which they rely. If you think I’m referring to the traditional family comedy, think again. It’s true that Disney Channel kids often share the screen with their parents and siblings. Yes, moms and dads are recurring characters and sometimes main cast members. Mothers don’t merit top billing, but they are on the scene—which counts as progress in the House of Mouse, where the good mothers of the silver screen are mostly dead. Publications ranging from Time and The Atlantic to Glamour and Entertainment Weekly have noted Disney’s tendency to kill off mothers in its feature films. Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi, Mowgli, Ariel, Belle, Lilo and Nani, Elsa and Anna—all of their mothers are dead. Commentators have attributed this motif to folkloric tradition, Walt Disney’s grief over his own mother’s death, and outright misogyny. Whatever explains the ubiquity of dead matriarchs in Disney films, the Disney Channel looks like a refuge for mothers by comparison. Mothers with prominent roles in Disney Channel comedies include Ellen Jennings (Beth Littleford) in "Dog with a Blog," Amy Duncan (Leigh-Allyn Baker) in "Good Luck Charlie," Karen Rooney (Kali Rocha) in "Liv and Maddie," Kira Cooper (Tammy Townsend) in "K.C. Undercover" and Topanga Matthews (Danielle Fishel) in "Girl Meets World." But the mere presence of a mother on a tweencom is not necessarily worth celebrating. After heaving a sigh of relief that her life has been spared, a Disney Channel mom might observe that the terrain she’s given is a small world after all. She might discover that she is not in a traditional family sitcom (a formula with its own mommy issues) but in a buddy ensemble. She might conclude that her children and their pals are like nothing so much as stunted versions of the cast of "Friends." Here’s a description of any Disney Channel comedy: A tight-knit group of adolescents, some of whom may be siblings, navigate love and life, largely without adult intervention. Disney Channel kids sport trendy wardrobes and hang out in brightly colored snack shops and living spaces reminiscent of Central Perk and Monica Geller’s apartment. They speak a snark dialect worthy of Chandler Bing, their sarcastic comments punctuated by canned laughter at the approximate rate of once every three seconds. Though perhaps more ethnically diverse than the "Friends" ensemble, in the way that stock photography represents diversity, Disney kids remain fundamentally unconcerned with the world outside their circle. That circle does not encompass their mothers. It’s no surprise that mothers are sidelined in shows for tweens. In a sense, the Disney Channel is carrying on a tradition that began with the 1955 debut of "The Mickey Mouse Club," a variety show that excluded parents altogether. But there’s something insidious about bringing a mother onto the stage while her kids command the spotlight. She becomes a device—a punchline reinforcing the supremacy of youth, a symbol of the past against which the present generation defines itself. Put another way, parents embrace the Disney Channel for what it is not. They know what their children will not encounter in a Disney sitcom: sex, violence, profanity, or anything resembling an adult situation. But what happens to adult characters when you wipe away any adult perspective? These characters are simultaneously infantilized and made obsolete. Consider the mother in "Dog with a Blog." Ellen Jennings is portrayed as a buffoon who responds to her own corny jokes with the catchphrase “Good one, Ellen.” A stay-at-home mom whose claim to fame is the odor in her car (the other moms call her “Smellen”), she spends her downtime trying to conquer her fear of cartwheels. In an episode where Ellen’s daughter, Avery, dumps an unpopular friend to protect her spot on the cheerleading squad, Ellen is too busy trying to impress the cheerleaders to set her daughter straight. It’s up to a younger sister and the family’s talking dog to show Avery the error of her ways. Or take "Good Luck Charlie’s" Amy Duncan. Because "Good Luck Charlie" was written to attract adult viewers as well as kids, Amy is afforded more screen time than other Disney Channel moms. In theory this is a boon for momkind, but in practice it means Amy has ample time to make a fool of herself. A nurse turned stay-at-home mom, Amy constantly revisits the glory days of her youth. “I want to show you something exciting from mommy’s past,” she tells her middle child, who replies, “Teddy told me if I ever heard those words, I should just keep walking.” But there’s no escaping Amy’s ridiculous exploits. She recites a poem about her high school locker combination and attends an athletic event dressed as her high school mascot. She’s desperate for applause, taking credit for her child’s artwork and treating a preschool music class to a cabaret performance. On the Disney Channel, mothers are alive but their dreams are dead. For Ellen and Amy and their counterparts across the network, ambition is a tragic flaw. The Disney Channel is quintessentially aspirational—you hear it in the lyrics of "Descendants" songs like “Set It Off” ("I’ll make my own future, ignore the rumors / Show ’em my passion sound") and “Believe” ("Don’t be afraid to be who you are / Just dream out and shout and follow the stars")—but silly mommy, dreams are for kids. With rare exceptions, Disney Channel mothers exist only to support their children’s extravagant lifestyles and, more importantly, their lofty aspirations. This dynamic plays out again and again. In "Liv and Maddie," Karen Rooney helps one of her twin daughters audition for a Hollywood role and the other twin try out for the Junior Olympic basketball team. In "Austin & Ally," a show about teenage pop stars, mothers offer their children career advice and wear fan apparel to their children’s award shows. In "Jessie," fashion mogul Christina Ross abandons her career and becomes a stay-at-home mom so that her children’s nanny can pursue her acting dreams. Disney kids aspire to excel in acting, music, athletics, fashion and other performance-oriented fields. They don’t dream of becoming teachers or service professionals, and they certainly don’t aspire to motherhood. Why would they? According to the Disney Channel, mothers are clueless fossils who have laid aside their aspirations. The mothers who break the ambition rule are either ridiculous—like Ellen Jennings, Amy Duncan, or Karen Rooney, who secretly records her own audition in a Cockney accent—or evil. In "Descendants," Maleficent is the most ambitious mother by far. She plots to overthrow Auradon by instructing Mal and her friends to steal the Fairy Godmother’s wand. As a mother, Maleficent’s most vile act is to impose her personal agenda onto her child, rather than supporting her daughter’s goals. If I’m honest, Disney’s treatment of mothers’ ambitions bugs me because it hits close to home. I grew up on Claire Huxtable and Enjoli commercials, pop culture promises that a woman could have it all. Ask any Gen X mother how that promise panned out. For me, motherhood meant postponing career goals that I now fear I’ve waited too long to achieve. While their mothers are evaluating the trade-offs they’ve made, today’s kids are hearing a different message: Specialize and excel. Find the one thing you do best, and be the best at it. The Disney kids may not be familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, which says that excellence in any field requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, but they are products of the same zeitgeist that popularized Gladwell’s ideas. It’s hard to see how the equation for elite performance accommodates motherhood, unless you’re the mother facilitating your child’s 10,000 hours of practice. (Remember Procter & Gamble’s “Thank You, Mom” commercials, which aired during the 2012 and 2014 Olympics?) Small wonder in our culture of specialization that one-third of millennials don’t want children. Coming of age in their wake, the "Descendants" generation won’t even try to have it all. And given a choice between career aspirations and motherhood, it’s obvious which path the Disney Channel recommends. Time will tell whether tween viewers take this recommendation to heart, but they do seem to be getting the message. A UCLA study found that fame was both the number one value communicated in preteen television and the primary ambition of preteens themselves. My own mother’s observations as a recently retired fifth grade teacher align with the research. In her final years of teaching in a middle-class district that’s about as ethnically homogeneous as the Disney Channel, she noticed a shift in how her students described their goals for the future. Compared to students of previous years, who imagined themselves with everyday careers and families and hobbies, contemporary fifth graders were more likely to dream of becoming famous for their accomplishments and less likely to mention parenthood. I alluded to an exception to the Disney Channel’s diminishment of mothers. In fact, the network currently features two mom characters whose identities are not subsumed by motherhood. One is secret agent Kira Cooper in "K.C. Undercover," the matriarch in a family of spies. Kira is also the only African-American mother in the main cast of a Disney Channel sitcom. Although at risk of being superseded by her genius daughter, K.C.—by the series’ fourth episode, she needs K.C. to rescue her from an evil inventor—she manages to retain both her career and her dignity. The Disney Channel’s greatest credit to motherhood, Topanga Matthews of "Girl Meets World" is not a Disney creation at all. Topanga and her husband, Cory (Ben Savage), first appeared on ABC, as adolescent characters in the 1990s sitcom "Boy Meets World." Young Topanga was an academic standout who, in the final episode of "Boy Meets World," accepted an internship at a prestigious New York City law firm. In "Girl Meets World," Topanga is a practicing attorney and owner of a Ukrainian bakery. "Girl Meets World" is far from perfect, but if you look past the melodramatic situations and relentlessly earnest characters, you’ll find a mother who pursues her passions and earns her children’s respect. I can’t help thinking that Topanga escaped the Disney Channel’s slapstick treatment only because she was a pre-existing character with an established fan base. The initial concept for "Girl Meets World" had Topanga owning a pudding shop. Rewriting her as a lawyer was an apparent concession to disgruntled fans. "Girl Meets World" trades heavily in nostalgia. There are parallels and flashbacks to the original series. There are guest appearances by "Boy Meets World" actors who enter the scene to riotous applause. But the show’s greatest throwback may be its vision of motherhood. The blueprint for Topanga Matthews as a mother resides in the 1990s, in the imaginations of young Topanga and her fans. The imaginations of today’s exceptional Disney kids harbor a different blueprint—one that eschews motherhood altogether.

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The haunting of Carly Simon: “I don’t feel that I’m living in James’s house. But there are constant memories”

Like most artists, Carly Simon is haunted. Throughout her storied, nearly five-decades-long career as one of our finest singer-songwriters, she has often grappled with the specters of memory, family and relationships in songs like “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” You’re So Vain,” “It Happens Everyday,” and even a more obscure tune titled “Haunting.” Backed by a rising cascade of piano, oboe, harps, drums and a gothic choir, Simon sings—both as gently and as fiercely as a ghost itself—“There’s always someone haunting someone haunting someone.” Such piercing poetry, candor and vulnerability have long been the trademarks of Simon’s music, and she brings these qualities to the page in her latest venture, the New York Times bestselling memoir "Boys in the Trees," published last month by Flatiron Books, along with an audiobook read by Simon (with an original score she wrote with composer Teese Gohl) and a companion album titled "Songs from the Trees." A riveting work that stands alongside Patti Smith’s "Just Kids" and Rosanne Cash’s "Composed" as one of the finest music memoirs of the past few years, "Boys in the Trees" chronicles the ghosts that have often acted as both muses and torments for Simon in her creative and personal lives. As the third daughter of four children born to the self-made publishing magnate Richard L. Simon, co-founder of Simon & Schuster, and his wife Andrea, she grew up in comfortable homes in New York City, Connecticut and on Martha’s Vineyard, where her parents’ dinner guests often included the likes of George Gershwin, Benny Goodman and Jackie Robinson. But the façade of a sparkling, creative family papered over tumultuous dynamics at play. In shattering prose, Simon describes her “inability to get and keep Daddy’s attention, and the suspicion that of his four children, I was the one he cared for least.” She recounts feeling inferior to her talented older sisters, of a disturbing early sexual experience with a teenager in the neighborhood, and of her mother’s affair with Ronny—a young man who had been hired as a babysitter for Simon’s younger brother—that created lingering repercussions for the entire family. Simon traces the legacy of those events as she recalls her early musical career—first as one of The Simon Sisters, a promising folk duo with her sister Lucy, and then as a reluctant solo artist climbing the charts with her own confessional hits—and romances with some of the most handsome and creative men of the day, including Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson and Warren Beatty. But much of the memoir is reserved for the love that made the most lasting mark: her marriage to James Taylor, which ended in 1983 following a decade of passion and turbulence that fueled each other’s music and produced two children, Sally and Ben, both singer-songwriters themselves. Throughout the memoir, which concludes with her divorce from Taylor, Simon returns to the story of Orpheus—the mythical musician who attempts to rescue his departed love from the clutches of the Underworld—and applies the shifting meanings of that epic tale to her own life. Although Orpheus was unsuccessful in his quest, Simon triumphs in rescuing her own younger self in a book that haunts the reader “like an echo the wind leaves, unreconciled.” I spoke to Simon last week via telephone from her home on Martha’s Vineyard as she prepared for her holiday celebrations. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. "Boys in the Trees" has made it to number 7 on the New York Times Bestsellers List in Nonfiction. How does that feel, for such an intimate project you’ve worked on for so long, to be finally out there and meeting acclaim? Amazing. I’m still trying to feel how it feels...When I wrote it, I had really no belief that it was going to ever be published, and so that’s why it has such an intimate feel, that’s why it has such a close-to-the-bone sensibility. And then when...there was a decision made that it was going to get published pretty much as-is, I didn’t have time to look back and say, oh, well that’s too personal. So I just went with it. And I just thought, well, the best gift that we human beings have to share is the gift of ourselves and what we have to offer. But it doesn’t make any sense if it’s not honest, if it’s not the real deal. I think a lot of what people are responding to is just the honesty of it. Did you find that prose came naturally to you? Yes. I had kept diaries for years, which is why I have such detail in the book. I mean, it’s lifted pretty much from my diary—not word for word necessarily, even though sometimes it is—but the publisher decided that he wanted me to paraphrase that which was written in diary form to make it less dear diary and more just the feeling and the event right on the page as it happened. So sometimes I feel like I’m lifting from myself. I guess that’s allowed. That’s folk music. That’s folk music. That’s right. [laughs] In the 1980s, your late friend Jacqueline Onassis, who was an editor at Doubleday at the time, contacted you to write your autobiography. You started [writing] but eventually abandoned the project and instead published a number of successful children’s books. Why weren’t you able to complete the [book] then? I only wrote about 80 pages before I realized that the nucleus of the story was going to have to be altered in order to fit the emotions of the time. In other words, I just didn’t feel ready to do it. Now, what I eventually did is not that much different—the only thing is that this time I really didn’t have a choice, because it was now or never, kiddo. But also my mother was alive, and there was a lot that my mother obviously would have been very uncomfortable with. I hope in her current resting place she is not too uncomfortable with it, but—that made a big difference to me at that point. I didn’t want to embrace the material the way I’m embracing it now. But you found that earlier project did influence this one. It only influenced me inasmuch as [Onassis] thought that I had an interesting story to tell. She didn’t even know me at the time—this was the first time that we actually made acquaintance...I mean, can you imagine? I got a call in the middle of the afternoon saying, [imitates Onassis’s distinctive voice] Carly, this is Jacqueline Onassis. And of course I didn’t believe her...But her voice was—it was either her or a very good sound-alike, and so I didn’t make a fool of myself, as I have in the past when I haven’t believed that somebody has been on the phone and it was really them. In talking about "Boys in the Trees," you make a clear distinction between autobiography and memoir, which I think is an important one. How would you describe that difference, and why did you want to write a memoir instead of an autobiography? [In] a memoir...you can pretty much skip around in time. You don’t have to stick to a chronological order. In the end I did end up kind of chronologically, but [with] memoir there’s much more poetry allowed. An autobiography is...a biography of you, written by you...It still relies on chronology and facts and order, and a memoir is more free-form. It was very important to me, that distinction, because I very much wanted to not have to stick to a guideline that was time-dependent. In the first section, the one devoted to your childhood, you write, “The biggest secret and vanity of the Simon family was to insist that nothing was wrong when, in fact, so much was wrong, and neither one of my parents ever owned up to it.” Those are powerful words. Your father died when you were a teenager, but as an adult, were you ever able to have a conversation with your mother in which you directly addressed that? I actually did, and she was still in a state of denial about it. She was still with excuses about why she did this and that, but she never really owned up to the fact that she broke a lot of our hearts when we were very young and vulnerable, as well as my father’s heart, by her decision to allow Ronny into the house and live there for so many years under our gaze and still really denying it the whole time, as if we were seeing something and we were not allowed to know that we were seeing it. We were told that what we saw was a mirage. And that’s a very hard thing to swallow. I think my older sisters...had an easier time with it. My sister Lucy was kind of caught in between, because she was often asked to take my father on trips so as to leave my mother and Ronny alone. But then I was left in the house with my mother and Ronny and my brother, and my elder sister was off at school. And Lucy—who was my father’s favorite and whom my father depended upon...to be his comfort—was really caught in the middle because she wanted to please mother and she knew about the predicament that mother was in. But she didn’t ask as many questions as I would have liked to. I was the one that rebelled...I took to punching who I saw as the interloper, and I just said, Get out of this house, get out of this house, all the time as an 8-year-old. And I had friends come over from school and [try to] beat him up. [laughs] We were all 9-year-old little girls trying to beat up this big man. That’s so much pressure and responsibility for young girls to deal with. Yeah, there was much too much responsibility that was left to us, and I recognize that my mother was in a terrible position herself, and she was miserable in her marriage and she didn’t want to be there, and she felt that her husband wasn’t treating her well... The book originally began with a chapter...where I drove up to see this 92-year-old woman who had been an amore of my father’s while my mother was pregnant with me. And this was always the excuse that my mother used for allowing her lover not only in her heart but into the house. I went up to see [the woman] and asked her whether it was true or not. And that will have to come out later. It wasn’t in the book. It didn’t get in the book because the publishers didn’t feel it was a good beginning. One of the themes of the book is of unresolved relationships—with both your parents, of course, and then with your former husband James Taylor. At this point in your life, are you at peace with all of those relationships? Well, I would say that the relationship is very resolved from James’s point of view, which makes it clearly impossible for me to have a relationship with him because he’s put down an iron curtain, which I think is a very strange thing to do since I never considered myself to be harmful or dangerous, but perhaps he knows something that I don’t know. But it’s been very hard to raise children without having their father to talk to. It’s not as if he’s dead somewhere—he’s living in the Berkshires. So it’s been much more preoccupying to me than if he had been able to be reached. Then it would have been normalized. But being an abnormal situation, one tends to rebel against it. Do you ever see that changing at this point? Well, if you ever see him [laughs], say, what the hell are you doing? I mean, it certainly is very noticeable. It’s highly noticeable to everyone around, and it puts people at an...unrealistic disadvantage because they feel as if they have to take sides still, which is just an absurd notion— Thirty years later. More than that, yeah. So I don’t know how it would [change] because it’s so public now, his disavowal of me...When I wanted to sing at Boston Strong [a concert held in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings], I was told that I couldn’t, and the reason was that he was going to be there. So there are all kinds of not only political but musical events that I’m just not allowed to be a part of because everybody knows James won’t do it if Carly’s there. In spite of all that, I was so struck in reading the book by the generosity with which you write about him. You portray him with tenderness, but you also don’t shy away from confronting the complexities of his character. How did you manage that balancing act? It’s interesting, because I am very—I love him. I love him dearly. But I love him in a vacuum. You know, I love him in the way you would love a god, but maybe a slightly malevolent god. But it is unconditional love, and...I think when I married him and took those vows, I was deeply, deeply serious, and even though our relationship didn’t meet all the standards of the vows that we took, the I will love you forever vow certainly stuck. And I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere there was a complicated feeling in his soul—that that isn’t true of him as well, but it’s too dangerous for him to feel. But I didn’t have a hard time observing him from a very positively subjective point of view—which includes the objective, too. I do love him, and I think he’s fascinating and brilliantly talented. And after all, how could I not love him, because he’s the father of my children. And I just don’t see how that’s possible. I guess some people can do it, but they have a better ability than I do to turn all my feelings off. The house that you built together on the Vineyard is an ever-present character throughout the book, and of course you still live there. Is it hard to live in a place in which so much poignant history is always present, or at this point is there a sweetness to that? Oh, it’s very sweet. I mean, I look at all the strange angles [of the house]. The first parts of the house were all planned by James. And there are these wonderful dormers, very high and pointy, and it’s hard to put pictures anywhere because all the walls are slanted and very cathedral-like. And of course, everybody tells me, The house is yours now—and I do feel that. I don’t feel that I’m living in James’s house. But there are constant memories, because...it’s not that we moved into some place together. We built it together...For the first five years or so [after the divorce] I kept on saying, And this is James’s, this is where he kept his tools—I would take people around as if it was James’s museum. And I don’t do that so much anymore. But even when I did it didn’t seem odd. It just seemed like, that’s the way it is, just the way I would do it if I was living in the house that I was born in. I would say, well, this is my father’s study and this was where my mother used to make curtains and this is where my uncle led the Civil War from. [laughs] Throughout the book you return to the story of Orpheus, in your words, “a mythical god [who] could somehow deliver me from darkness.” I’m wondering where you find Orpheus in your life today? I think I was always trying to get to know Orpheus, and now I realize that Orpheus is music, and it’s the way that music summons me, and it summons me out of pain all the time—it’s the one thing that can constantly do it, it’s listening to music or making music. It reminds me of that scene earlier in the book right after your father has died, and [you and] your sisters sing “The Lord Bless You and Keep You.” Yeah. That was the one in the kitchen where we were having Rice Krispies and singing. The three sisters, we really always sang together...and we always made up three-part harmonies. Our voices were particularly suited for the three parts, because my middle sister Lucy is a soprano, and my elder sister is a mezzo-soprano, and I’m like a tenor—even as a child I was kind of like a baritone-tenor. I always had a very low voice. I heard you say [recently] that you’re starting to lose a bit of your voice, some of the high notes. How is that affecting you, and are you still planning to record? Yes! I want to use what I have, and I want to use it to its best advantage. And it just means that I’ll be singing probably in a lower register—you know, just more of those smoky tones will come out. But it doesn’t limit me. I mean, if I’ve lost a note at the top I’ve gained one at the bottom. It’s the holidays and your album "Christmas is Almost Here" is a perennial favorite of mine, and one song that I always keep coming back to is “Forgive,” which is prayer of sorts [that says] “Help me to make the loving choice.” Has writing this book helped you to reach that goal? That’s very nice of you to bring that up, because...whenever I was tempted to lash out and present a less generous side of my soul, I pulled back and made a decision to make the loving choice. And, you know, sometimes I asked for that help...At times—certainly during the course of the three years [of writing the book]—there were incidences that happened where my hurt seemed very fresh. And when my hurt is fresh I can’t [have] a well-balanced attitude. And so there were temptations to lash out, or to put things in ways that...would have only been true of the moment and not an overall picture. I’d like to bring it back to your father, because so much of the book—and I think so many of the themes of your body of work—refers to him, to your relationship with him. You write very movingly about him and how you never felt pretty enough, talented enough, to gain his attention as a child. But with all that you’ve accomplished today, how do you think he would respond? Do you think he would be proud of you? I think once the relationship is established when you’re that young that there’s a temptation to always make the facts fit the feelings, and I think that I’ve gone through my life looking for men who were similar to my father who would continue to make me feel not as good about myself as I might have if I’d had a different father or if my father had felt differently about me...Father-love is so important, and I think early on it’s extremely important because those patterns are set then. So I think that there were moments that I enjoyed a sense of being really seen by him, but not in the same way, for instance, I feel seen by my children. But it’s been hard for me in my relationship with men because there’s always that temptation, as I say, to continue the pattern. I have to be aware of it all the time and not let that happen.Like most artists, Carly Simon is haunted. Throughout her storied, nearly five-decades-long career as one of our finest singer-songwriters, she has often grappled with the specters of memory, family and relationships in songs like “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” You’re So Vain,” “It Happens Everyday,” and even a more obscure tune titled “Haunting.” Backed by a rising cascade of piano, oboe, harps, drums and a gothic choir, Simon sings—both as gently and as fiercely as a ghost itself—“There’s always someone haunting someone haunting someone.” Such piercing poetry, candor and vulnerability have long been the trademarks of Simon’s music, and she brings these qualities to the page in her latest venture, the New York Times bestselling memoir "Boys in the Trees," published last month by Flatiron Books, along with an audiobook read by Simon (with an original score she wrote with composer Teese Gohl) and a companion album titled "Songs from the Trees." A riveting work that stands alongside Patti Smith’s "Just Kids" and Rosanne Cash’s "Composed" as one of the finest music memoirs of the past few years, "Boys in the Trees" chronicles the ghosts that have often acted as both muses and torments for Simon in her creative and personal lives. As the third daughter of four children born to the self-made publishing magnate Richard L. Simon, co-founder of Simon & Schuster, and his wife Andrea, she grew up in comfortable homes in New York City, Connecticut and on Martha’s Vineyard, where her parents’ dinner guests often included the likes of George Gershwin, Benny Goodman and Jackie Robinson. But the façade of a sparkling, creative family papered over tumultuous dynamics at play. In shattering prose, Simon describes her “inability to get and keep Daddy’s attention, and the suspicion that of his four children, I was the one he cared for least.” She recounts feeling inferior to her talented older sisters, of a disturbing early sexual experience with a teenager in the neighborhood, and of her mother’s affair with Ronny—a young man who had been hired as a babysitter for Simon’s younger brother—that created lingering repercussions for the entire family. Simon traces the legacy of those events as she recalls her early musical career—first as one of The Simon Sisters, a promising folk duo with her sister Lucy, and then as a reluctant solo artist climbing the charts with her own confessional hits—and romances with some of the most handsome and creative men of the day, including Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson and Warren Beatty. But much of the memoir is reserved for the love that made the most lasting mark: her marriage to James Taylor, which ended in 1983 following a decade of passion and turbulence that fueled each other’s music and produced two children, Sally and Ben, both singer-songwriters themselves. Throughout the memoir, which concludes with her divorce from Taylor, Simon returns to the story of Orpheus—the mythical musician who attempts to rescue his departed love from the clutches of the Underworld—and applies the shifting meanings of that epic tale to her own life. Although Orpheus was unsuccessful in his quest, Simon triumphs in rescuing her own younger self in a book that haunts the reader “like an echo the wind leaves, unreconciled.” I spoke to Simon last week via telephone from her home on Martha’s Vineyard as she prepared for her holiday celebrations. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. "Boys in the Trees" has made it to number 7 on the New York Times Bestsellers List in Nonfiction. How does that feel, for such an intimate project you’ve worked on for so long, to be finally out there and meeting acclaim? Amazing. I’m still trying to feel how it feels...When I wrote it, I had really no belief that it was going to ever be published, and so that’s why it has such an intimate feel, that’s why it has such a close-to-the-bone sensibility. And then when...there was a decision made that it was going to get published pretty much as-is, I didn’t have time to look back and say, oh, well that’s too personal. So I just went with it. And I just thought, well, the best gift that we human beings have to share is the gift of ourselves and what we have to offer. But it doesn’t make any sense if it’s not honest, if it’s not the real deal. I think a lot of what people are responding to is just the honesty of it. Did you find that prose came naturally to you? Yes. I had kept diaries for years, which is why I have such detail in the book. I mean, it’s lifted pretty much from my diary—not word for word necessarily, even though sometimes it is—but the publisher decided that he wanted me to paraphrase that which was written in diary form to make it less dear diary and more just the feeling and the event right on the page as it happened. So sometimes I feel like I’m lifting from myself. I guess that’s allowed. That’s folk music. That’s folk music. That’s right. [laughs] In the 1980s, your late friend Jacqueline Onassis, who was an editor at Doubleday at the time, contacted you to write your autobiography. You started [writing] but eventually abandoned the project and instead published a number of successful children’s books. Why weren’t you able to complete the [book] then? I only wrote about 80 pages before I realized that the nucleus of the story was going to have to be altered in order to fit the emotions of the time. In other words, I just didn’t feel ready to do it. Now, what I eventually did is not that much different—the only thing is that this time I really didn’t have a choice, because it was now or never, kiddo. But also my mother was alive, and there was a lot that my mother obviously would have been very uncomfortable with. I hope in her current resting place she is not too uncomfortable with it, but—that made a big difference to me at that point. I didn’t want to embrace the material the way I’m embracing it now. But you found that earlier project did influence this one. It only influenced me inasmuch as [Onassis] thought that I had an interesting story to tell. She didn’t even know me at the time—this was the first time that we actually made acquaintance...I mean, can you imagine? I got a call in the middle of the afternoon saying, [imitates Onassis’s distinctive voice] Carly, this is Jacqueline Onassis. And of course I didn’t believe her...But her voice was—it was either her or a very good sound-alike, and so I didn’t make a fool of myself, as I have in the past when I haven’t believed that somebody has been on the phone and it was really them. In talking about "Boys in the Trees," you make a clear distinction between autobiography and memoir, which I think is an important one. How would you describe that difference, and why did you want to write a memoir instead of an autobiography? [In] a memoir...you can pretty much skip around in time. You don’t have to stick to a chronological order. In the end I did end up kind of chronologically, but [with] memoir there’s much more poetry allowed. An autobiography is...a biography of you, written by you...It still relies on chronology and facts and order, and a memoir is more free-form. It was very important to me, that distinction, because I very much wanted to not have to stick to a guideline that was time-dependent. In the first section, the one devoted to your childhood, you write, “The biggest secret and vanity of the Simon family was to insist that nothing was wrong when, in fact, so much was wrong, and neither one of my parents ever owned up to it.” Those are powerful words. Your father died when you were a teenager, but as an adult, were you ever able to have a conversation with your mother in which you directly addressed that? I actually did, and she was still in a state of denial about it. She was still with excuses about why she did this and that, but she never really owned up to the fact that she broke a lot of our hearts when we were very young and vulnerable, as well as my father’s heart, by her decision to allow Ronny into the house and live there for so many years under our gaze and still really denying it the whole time, as if we were seeing something and we were not allowed to know that we were seeing it. We were told that what we saw was a mirage. And that’s a very hard thing to swallow. I think my older sisters...had an easier time with it. My sister Lucy was kind of caught in between, because she was often asked to take my father on trips so as to leave my mother and Ronny alone. But then I was left in the house with my mother and Ronny and my brother, and my elder sister was off at school. And Lucy—who was my father’s favorite and whom my father depended upon...to be his comfort—was really caught in the middle because she wanted to please mother and she knew about the predicament that mother was in. But she didn’t ask as many questions as I would have liked to. I was the one that rebelled...I took to punching who I saw as the interloper, and I just said, Get out of this house, get out of this house, all the time as an 8-year-old. And I had friends come over from school and [try to] beat him up. [laughs] We were all 9-year-old little girls trying to beat up this big man. That’s so much pressure and responsibility for young girls to deal with. Yeah, there was much too much responsibility that was left to us, and I recognize that my mother was in a terrible position herself, and she was miserable in her marriage and she didn’t want to be there, and she felt that her husband wasn’t treating her well... The book originally began with a chapter...where I drove up to see this 92-year-old woman who had been an amore of my father’s while my mother was pregnant with me. And this was always the excuse that my mother used for allowing her lover not only in her heart but into the house. I went up to see [the woman] and asked her whether it was true or not. And that will have to come out later. It wasn’t in the book. It didn’t get in the book because the publishers didn’t feel it was a good beginning. One of the themes of the book is of unresolved relationships—with both your parents, of course, and then with your former husband James Taylor. At this point in your life, are you at peace with all of those relationships? Well, I would say that the relationship is very resolved from James’s point of view, which makes it clearly impossible for me to have a relationship with him because he’s put down an iron curtain, which I think is a very strange thing to do since I never considered myself to be harmful or dangerous, but perhaps he knows something that I don’t know. But it’s been very hard to raise children without having their father to talk to. It’s not as if he’s dead somewhere—he’s living in the Berkshires. So it’s been much more preoccupying to me than if he had been able to be reached. Then it would have been normalized. But being an abnormal situation, one tends to rebel against it. Do you ever see that changing at this point? Well, if you ever see him [laughs], say, what the hell are you doing? I mean, it certainly is very noticeable. It’s highly noticeable to everyone around, and it puts people at an...unrealistic disadvantage because they feel as if they have to take sides still, which is just an absurd notion— Thirty years later. More than that, yeah. So I don’t know how it would [change] because it’s so public now, his disavowal of me...When I wanted to sing at Boston Strong [a concert held in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings], I was told that I couldn’t, and the reason was that he was going to be there. So there are all kinds of not only political but musical events that I’m just not allowed to be a part of because everybody knows James won’t do it if Carly’s there. In spite of all that, I was so struck in reading the book by the generosity with which you write about him. You portray him with tenderness, but you also don’t shy away from confronting the complexities of his character. How did you manage that balancing act? It’s interesting, because I am very—I love him. I love him dearly. But I love him in a vacuum. You know, I love him in the way you would love a god, but maybe a slightly malevolent god. But it is unconditional love, and...I think when I married him and took those vows, I was deeply, deeply serious, and even though our relationship didn’t meet all the standards of the vows that we took, the I will love you forever vow certainly stuck. And I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere there was a complicated feeling in his soul—that that isn’t true of him as well, but it’s too dangerous for him to feel. But I didn’t have a hard time observing him from a very positively subjective point of view—which includes the objective, too. I do love him, and I think he’s fascinating and brilliantly talented. And after all, how could I not love him, because he’s the father of my children. And I just don’t see how that’s possible. I guess some people can do it, but they have a better ability than I do to turn all my feelings off. The house that you built together on the Vineyard is an ever-present character throughout the book, and of course you still live there. Is it hard to live in a place in which so much poignant history is always present, or at this point is there a sweetness to that? Oh, it’s very sweet. I mean, I look at all the strange angles [of the house]. The first parts of the house were all planned by James. And there are these wonderful dormers, very high and pointy, and it’s hard to put pictures anywhere because all the walls are slanted and very cathedral-like. And of course, everybody tells me, The house is yours now—and I do feel that. I don’t feel that I’m living in James’s house. But there are constant memories, because...it’s not that we moved into some place together. We built it together...For the first five years or so [after the divorce] I kept on saying, And this is James’s, this is where he kept his tools—I would take people around as if it was James’s museum. And I don’t do that so much anymore. But even when I did it didn’t seem odd. It just seemed like, that’s the way it is, just the way I would do it if I was living in the house that I was born in. I would say, well, this is my father’s study and this was where my mother used to make curtains and this is where my uncle led the Civil War from. [laughs] Throughout the book you return to the story of Orpheus, in your words, “a mythical god [who] could somehow deliver me from darkness.” I’m wondering where you find Orpheus in your life today? I think I was always trying to get to know Orpheus, and now I realize that Orpheus is music, and it’s the way that music summons me, and it summons me out of pain all the time—it’s the one thing that can constantly do it, it’s listening to music or making music. It reminds me of that scene earlier in the book right after your father has died, and [you and] your sisters sing “The Lord Bless You and Keep You.” Yeah. That was the one in the kitchen where we were having Rice Krispies and singing. The three sisters, we really always sang together...and we always made up three-part harmonies. Our voices were particularly suited for the three parts, because my middle sister Lucy is a soprano, and my elder sister is a mezzo-soprano, and I’m like a tenor—even as a child I was kind of like a baritone-tenor. I always had a very low voice. I heard you say [recently] that you’re starting to lose a bit of your voice, some of the high notes. How is that affecting you, and are you still planning to record? Yes! I want to use what I have, and I want to use it to its best advantage. And it just means that I’ll be singing probably in a lower register—you know, just more of those smoky tones will come out. But it doesn’t limit me. I mean, if I’ve lost a note at the top I’ve gained one at the bottom. It’s the holidays and your album "Christmas is Almost Here" is a perennial favorite of mine, and one song that I always keep coming back to is “Forgive,” which is prayer of sorts [that says] “Help me to make the loving choice.” Has writing this book helped you to reach that goal? That’s very nice of you to bring that up, because...whenever I was tempted to lash out and present a less generous side of my soul, I pulled back and made a decision to make the loving choice. And, you know, sometimes I asked for that help...At times—certainly during the course of the three years [of writing the book]—there were incidences that happened where my hurt seemed very fresh. And when my hurt is fresh I can’t [have] a well-balanced attitude. And so there were temptations to lash out, or to put things in ways that...would have only been true of the moment and not an overall picture. I’d like to bring it back to your father, because so much of the book—and I think so many of the themes of your body of work—refers to him, to your relationship with him. You write very movingly about him and how you never felt pretty enough, talented enough, to gain his attention as a child. But with all that you’ve accomplished today, how do you think he would respond? Do you think he would be proud of you? I think once the relationship is established when you’re that young that there’s a temptation to always make the facts fit the feelings, and I think that I’ve gone through my life looking for men who were similar to my father who would continue to make me feel not as good about myself as I might have if I’d had a different father or if my father had felt differently about me...Father-love is so important, and I think early on it’s extremely important because those patterns are set then. So I think that there were moments that I enjoyed a sense of being really seen by him, but not in the same way, for instance, I feel seen by my children. But it’s been hard for me in my relationship with men because there’s always that temptation, as I say, to continue the pattern. I have to be aware of it all the time and not let that happen.

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Call it the Cecil effect: America adds lions to its endangered species list

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — When a Minnesota dentist killed a lion named Cecil earlier this year, it sparked outrage around the world. Cecil was beloved, after all, and suffered an unjust demise. But in the end, the man who shot him with a crossbow and tracked the injured cat to his death was found to have had his papers in order. Now, in a move that will make it far tougher for American hunters to bring African lion trophies back home, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is adding lions to its endangered list. This will mean a measure of protection for lions under the Endangered Species Act that hasn't existed previously. The change of status, announced Monday, comes five months after hunter Walter J. Palmer shot Cecil the lion, who had been lured out of Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park by hunting guides and killed despite wearing a tracking collar. Two subspecies of lions will be added to the list. One of them, found in central and West Africa, numbers only about 900 animals and will be classified as endangered, meaning hunters will be prohibited from importing trophies. The other lion subspecies, found in eastern and southern Africa — including Zimbabwe — has an estimated population of 17,000-19,000 and will be listed as threatened. This will mean strict regulations on the import of these lions and their parts, with imports only allowed from countries with good wildlife management programs. “The lion is one of the planet’s most beloved species and an irreplaceable part of our shared global heritage,” said FWS Service Director Dan Ashe. “If we want to ensure that healthy lion populations continue to roam the African savannas and forests of India, it’s up to all of us — not just the people of Africa and India — to take action.” Conservationists have largely praised the decision by the FWS. The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), a conservation group, called it "one we hope will give some relief to Africa’s lions, which face many threats.” The International Fund for Animal Welfare said that while it falls short of a full ban on importing lion trophies, "it is still a huge step in the right direction." Africa’s lion population has dropped to about 20,000 in recent decades, mainly due to habitat destruction, trade in lion parts, trophy hunting, disease and “retaliatory killings” from human-lion conflict. “If we do not act on this crisis now, lions could disappear from the wild in our lifetime, and that would have disastrous consequences,” said Dr. Philip Muruthi, AWF’s vice president of species protection.

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No depression in heaven: The South, race, religion and FDR

My grandmother washed out used paper towels and hung them on the clothesline to use again. She spent painstaking hours piecing quilts of mismatched and worn-out fabric scraps or odds and ends from the knitting mill where she worked because she could not fathom buying new material. “We didn’t know we was poor,” Grandma said nearly every time she told us a story about her childhood. It was not a boast. It was an apology: an apology because she had to quit school after sixth grade and never again felt smart; an apology because she spoke in a mountain accent so thick that my friends from college scarcely understood her; an apology because she was a child of the Great Depression. Those words also acknowledged the still deeper poverty that Grandma knew surrounded her, the real and urgent need for outside help as hunger and despair crept into households once happy and humming. By the twenty-first century, the depression generation would become the Greatest Generation, idealized in the popular consciousness as plucky, selfless, and self-sufficient. They grew their own food. They went to church every Sunday. They helped their neighbors. They defeated Hitler. Maybe they suffered some deprivation during the Great Depression, but that just taught them the value of saving and thrift. “We didn’t know we was poor,” or some variation of it, became a common phrase, a badge of honor that set the Greatest Generation apart from their spoiled offspring, who turned to the government instead of one another when things got rough. This rendering of history erases one of the most traumatic episodes of twentieth-century American life and turns it instead into a morality tale about the value of family and community. There is no room in Great Depression nostalgia for parents forced to abandon their children to orphanages because they would otherwise starve, for communities fractured as their residents fled in the vain hope that any place had to be better than where they were, or for evicted farmers forced out of their homes onto frozen soil. That sanitized narrative of the depression erases the voiced suffering of millions, the murmurs of revolution that swept Franklin Roosevelt into office. That is, in the end, the point of it. This book tells a story that the myth of the redemptive depression obscures. There is truth in the myth, of course: members of families and communities indeed turned to one another in their hardship, and many also turned to their churches for solace, for support, for meaning. Yet that turning together revealed only the inadequacy of families, communities, and churches full of poor people to aid one another in their time of mutual distress. The Great Depression gave lie to the toxic notion that responsibility for poverty lies with the poor rather than with systems of oppression that make a mockery of the American dream. Members of families, communities, and churches turned to one another, and then they turned together to demand more of their political system, more of their federal government. The greatest power of the Greatest Generation was their collective acknowledgment that they could not go it alone.Nowhere was this transformation more dramatic than in the South. For a moment, the southern Protestant establishment faced the suffering that plantation capitalism pushed behind its public image of planters’ hats and hoopskirts and mountains of pure white cotton. When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children, when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, and when visitors claimed that moonshiners did as much as churches to feed the hungry, southern clergy of both races spoke with almost one voice to say that they had done all they could. Their churches and their charities were broke. It was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt. When Roosevelt promised a new deal for the “forgotten man,” Americans cheered, and when he took office, the churches and private agencies gratefully turned much of the responsibility for welfare and social reform over to the state. Yet Roosevelt’s New Deal threatened plantation capitalism even as it bent to it. Black southern churches worked to secure benefits for their own community members, while white churches divided over their loyalties to Roosevelt and Jim Crow. Frustrated by their failure to alleviate the depression and split over the New Deal, leaders in the major white Protestant denominations surrendered their moral authority in the South and then blamed the federal government for its loss. The Great Depression revealed the inability of American religious institutions to care for the needy in the midst of crisis, and it opened new opportunities for the state to take on the burden instead. From the poorest sharecropper in Arkansas to the wealthiest philanthropist in New York, depression-era Americans re-envisioned the relationship between church and state and re-evaluated the responsibilities of each for the welfare of the nation and its people. Yet the Great Depression was a profoundly local experience that affected each region of the nation and its residents in distinct ways. In Memphis and the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta, economic crisis compounded an ongoing agricultural depression and coincided with a devastating drought. Together, Memphis and the Delta make up a single economic and social region—an urban center with a distinct rural periphery). Nowhere did the depression strike more swiftly or more savagely, and nowhere was the wholesale transfer of charity and reform from church to state more complete. The Great Depression and the New Deal remade this southern region, a place with striking religious, ethnic, and political diversity. In 1930, Memphis was the nation’s thirty-sixth largest city and the South’s ninth largest. Home to more than 250,000 people, just over a third of whom were African American, Memphians oriented toward the vast cotton plantations that spread out on both sides of the river south and west of the city, in Arkansas and Mississippi. Delta planters sent their crop to Memphis, an important inland port and the nation’s largest inland cotton market. The predominantly African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers who cultivated the cotton often fled to Memphis as well, either to escape racial violence or to seek work away from the fields. Fierce racial repression and widespread suffering among the poor of both races provided the pillars of the region’s plantation capitalism. After all, given a choice, no one would farm cotton on someone else’s land for pennies a day. Hard times came early to the region, as cotton prices fell after the Great War and a 1927 Mississippi River flood inundated the flat Delta. Memphis and the Delta graphically illustrate the broader transformation of American religion and culture in these turbulent years. A land of extremes, the Delta endured a devastating drought in 1930, before its residents could recover from the flood. The Delta became the locus of national debates about voluntary aid and federal responsibility for the suffering, and its hungry and homeless residents represented the face of rural poverty to millions of distant Americans. The elite white businessmen and religious leaders who both emerged from and reinforced the region’s fierce commitment to white supremacy called for federal aid even as they worked to bend its distribution to the region’s racialized economic system. By 1933, their steady and essential support for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal meant that elites in Memphis and the Delta helped to set the terms and constraints for the transfer of charity and reform from voluntary and religious organizations to the federal government. Religious elites in Memphis and the Delta emerged almost entirely from the southern Protestant establishment, the wealthy and middle-class members of the region’s major denominations. These white Protestant leaders represented a powerful social and political force in Memphis and the Delta, and together with businessmen drawn from their ranks, they shaped the region’s major benevolent and service efforts. Episcopalians represented less than five percent of the region’s churchgoers, but they sat atop the social hierarchy, with influence and wealth disproportionate to their numbers. Methodists followed, with just under a third of all white churchgoers but a larger proportion of the middle class. The Protestant establishment also included wealthy and middle-class Southern Baptists. That denomination claimed more than half the region’s white churchgoers, and its size lent its elites considerable political heft, however powerless and disconnected its largely rural and poor masses might have been. Wealthy and middle-class Disciples of Christ, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists also played an important social role even though together those denominations represented only about ten percent of churchgoers, most of them in Memphis and larger Delta towns. The Protestant establishment faced competition and criticism from within and without. The ethnic and theological diversity of Memphis and the Delta belies stereotypical portrayals of southern homogeneity and regional isolation. Although Jim Crow circumscribed their broader political and social authority, black baptists and Methodists exercised tremendous power within their communities, and their tradition of self-help and social outreach ran far deeper than that of their white counterparts. Memphis and the Delta were also home to the fundamentalist Churches of Christ, a number of pentecostal and holiness denominations, a small but disproportionately influential Jewish community, and a thriving minority of black and white Catholics. The region’s preeminent homegrown denomination, the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)—one of the largest global religious denominations in the twenty-first century—watched the established denominations struggle through the 1930s as its own influence grew. While No Depression in Heaven stresses the power of the Protestant establishment, it also incorporates the beliefs, critiques, and aspirations of those outside the establishment, especially as they took advantage of the establishment’s faltering social power and moral authority in the waning years of the Great Depression. Church records and government files provide the backdrop for interwoven narratives drawn from oral histories, denominational papers, charity files, letters to public officials, union records, songs, social science surveys, and the personal records of the region’s charitable and religious leaders. When the Great Depression began, southern white Protestants stood at the peak of their power. They had spearheaded a drive for national prohibition and concluded that they possessed considerable political clout, at least on moral issues. Southern Protestants believed themselves to be the conservative moral compass of the nation, and they found it natural to take up campaigns for comprehensive education, public health, labor reform, racial reconciliation, and moral legislation. Southern churches were the only source of charity and social services for many rural people and were a significant charitable resource for city dwellers as well. Yet the Great Depression and the New Deal transformed southern Protestantism. Religious leaders struggled to respond to a crisis that no one yet understood. Many staked their hopes at first on a great revival, confident that people chastened for their excesses in better days would turn to the church in their anguish. But the revivals did not come, and the crisis only deepened. Premillennialists declared the end near, radicals called for revolution, and both seemed to have a better grip on the sorrows of their people than did the Protestant establishment. Denominational leaders struggled to keep churches open and charities afloat, turning away many more needy souls than they helped. They clamored for the federal government to intervene. When Franklin Roosevelt took office on the promise of abolishing Prohibition and establishing a social welfare program, southern Protestant leaders recognized the threat to their power. But the magnitude of the economic crisis had overwhelmed their resources and their ability to define poverty as a moral problem. Many remained preoccupied with a futile attempt to salvage Prohibition, but the majority of southern religious leaders praised Roosevelt for alleviating the widespread suffering and easing the burden of charity on struggling churches. Roosevelt’s ability to frame the depression in moral and spiritual terms encouraged them, and many soon claimed the New Deal itself as a religious achievement. Southerners in Congress helped to shape the region’s new federal programs to the contours of Jim Crow, and white Protestant clergy often declared themselves its local guardians. Yet fissures in Jim Crow appeared as black southerners made their own appeals to the state. Black and white people who once had nowhere to turn save the churches could now take their troubles to the federal government instead. White clergy nonetheless expressed enthusiasm for New Deal relief and works programs, and they overwhelmingly endorsed the 1935 Social Security Act. For the time being, most white clergy trusted that they still held enough moral and social authority to guide the course of the New Deal in the South, while black clergy fought to ensure that the New Deal benefited their members as well. The Great Depression and the New Deal fractured the southern Protestant establishment. Many liberals and moderates found a home in the New Deal coalition, often as agents of the state rather than of the church. They helped to shape New Deal policy and in so doing forged tenuous relationships with the region’s displaced black and white sharecroppers and the Christian socialists who publicized their cause. The southern Christian left operated largely outside the region’s churches, but it claimed a hold on the New Deal and pressured the Roosevelt administration to address the region’s deep-seated racial and economic injustices. At the same time, members of the growing Church of God in Christ allied with mainline black activists who also pushed the federal government to address the needs of black southerners. The conservative Democrats who made up the majority of the Protestant establishment could not decide whether the expanded federal government was their partner or their competitor, but by the late 1930s, they began to lean toward the latter. Although they maintained a strong presence in the New Deal coalition, many white baptists and Methodists turned away from reform and instead sought to preserve white supremacy in the region and in their churches. They crafted protests against federal power in terms of religious freedom and surely were surprised to find themselves in agreement with the barbs launched at Roosevelt by their tendentious fundamentalist rivals. By the end of the 1930s, conservative elites within the southern Protestant establishment had already begun to rewrite the story of the Great Depression. No more had their churches faltered in the face of suffering, bewailing a spiritual famine and ignoring a physical one. No more had they cried out, overwhelmed by the sorrows around them, for the federal government to intervene where they could not. No more had they heralded Roosevelt’s New Deal as the embodiment of biblical ideals. Now the New Deal represented a threat to white supremacy, a danger to the very foundation of white southern Christianity. Most white Protestants would not yet abandon the New Deal outright, nor would they pull their churches away from the Democratic Party, in part because their allies in Congress had already begun to gut the New Deal’s works and relief programs to fund the war. But those who suffered the least in the Great Depression’s darkest years chose to pretend that no one had really suffered all that much, that there was no need for the federal government to step into a world so self-sufficient and serene that “we didn’t know we was poor.” Excerpted from "No Depression In Heaven" by Alison Collis Greene. Published by Oxford University Books. Copyright 2015 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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The right-wing beard revolution: Look out, hipsters, here come the counterculture Christians

In the spring of 2013, Rick Warren, the goateed Baptist preacher, invited the men of his twenty-three-thousand-member Saddleback Church in California to grow facial hair and submit photographs of themselves to win a spot in the finals of a beard contest. In July, Warren himself, identified by many as America’s most influential pastor, would hand out hundred-dollar gift certificates to those with “the most magnificent” and “the most pathetic” beards. The occasion for this “Beardup Saddleback” hoopla was a visit by “Duck Commander” Phil Robertson, the heavily bearded patriarch of the hit reality television series Duck Dynasty and a noted proponent of conservative evangelical piety. After that day’s services, church members were treated to a party featuring Cajun food, zydeco music, a crawfish cooking demonstration, and Duck Dynasty prize giveaways, as well as the beard awards. The Southern Baptist tradition, of which both Warren and Robertson are a part, has a long history of resistance to male hair. Now, paradoxically, conservatives were eagerly experimenting with this countercultural style. The simplest explanation for this about-face would be that long hair and beards are no longer considered liberal or rebellious, and that the Saddleback beard contest, like the fulsome beards of the Duck Dynasty men, were more stunt than statement. But that answer would only be partly true. Beards, especially large ones, retain their daring and nonconformist quality, and this is an important part of their appeal to conservative as well as liberal men. A generation ago, conservative evangelicals began appropriating rock music into their worship. Now, finally, it is time for hair. Is it possible to be a conservative rebel? Why not? That is precisely what many young American men aspire to be today. Warren and Robertson have, to a great extent, attained the influence they have by embracing a dynamic and contrarian spirit (along with beards). In the early 1970s, the teenage Rick Warren was the good son of a Baptist preacher who aspired to be a preacher himself, but on his own, decidedly contemporary terms. When he started a Christian club at his high school in 1970, he was guided by the example of the “Jesus Movement,” which adapted the style and expression of the 1960s rock and roll culture to conservative religious sensibilities. Warren looked every bit the Christian John Lennon, long-haired, with wire-rim glasses, soulfully strumming his guitar to contemporary folk rock tunes. His semi-hippie style did not sit well with everyone, however. Still in high school, he appeared before a review committee of his home church to obtain his lay preaching license, the first step toward a career as a Southern Baptist minister. His answers to questions about his salvation experience and doctrinal beliefs were satisfactory, but the senior pastor objected to his appearance. It seemed to him that the gangly young man looked more like a war protester than a Baptist minister. Warren defended himself; his hair was not a political statement, he said, but a youthful style that would help him connect with people his age. The committee saw his point and granted him a license to preach. In later years, Warren remained committed to presenting a modish California appearance. In the 1980s and 1990s, while building his new church in suburban Los Angeles into one of America’s most successful megachurches, he reduced the length of his hair but added a mustache, and later a goatee. In the 2000s, a closet full of Hawaiian shirts further enhanced his presentation as the laid-back man of God. All this was a subtle way of breaking conventional boundaries and suggesting that he and his church would not be bound to outmoded customs. Warren’s approach was well suited to the denizens of southern California’s disconnected maze of colorless subdivisions, cut off from their historical and communal roots. Warren offered a conservative faith that seemed attuned to modern conditions. His choice was not simply a matter of style, nor was it limited to him. Sociologist John D. Boy has incisively observed that a new crop of bearded evangelicals emerged around the turn of the century, eager to exchange the rigid doctrines and codes of the past for uplift and “conversation.” “The goateed proselytizer,” Boy opines, “appears more of an authentic man of God than his well-groomed, overly politicized, GOP-loving forebears.” True to form, Warren has demonstrated less patience with the right-wing fixation on family and sexual morality, and directed more attention to wider social problems such as poverty and global warming. It was this unconventionality that inspired newly elected president Barack Obama to invite Warren to deliver the opening prayer at his 2008 inauguration. Warren and Duck Commander Phil Robertson are not exactly birds of a feather, but they are alike in more than just their affinity for facial hair. In their different ways, both offer resistance to modern, secular culture. Robertson, the camouflaged guru of cornpone wisdom, abandoned the path of conventional respectability as a young man, though his departure from the straight and narrow was, like his beard, more dramatic than Warren’s. Robertson was the star quarterback on the Louisiana Tech football team for two years in the late 1960s, skillful enough to keep future hall-of-famer Terry Bradshaw on the bench. With his square jaw and crew cut, Robertson was the picture of the middle-American ideal, but he quit football because it interfered with what he cared about most: duck hunting. Rejecting the socially approved and richly rewarded model of sporting manliness, he opted instead for the leave-me-alone masculinity of the outdoors. The problem for Robertson was that he let himself get lost in the wilderness, so to speak. Married, with young children, he fell into a self-defeating pattern of carousing and alcoholism, to the point that he abandoned his family for a time. Having hit bottom, he found Jesus and a way back to sobriety and his family. Even then, Robertson refused to be entirely domesticated, holding tenaciously to his hunting lifestyle and his outdoorsman beard. It was a badge of manly independence and defiance that he later turned into marketing magic. The basis of Robertson’s business success was his collection of uniquely successful duck calls, but his real genius was in selling the hunting lifestyle, packaged in clothing, gear, videos, and his own bearded hunter image. When Roberston’s sons, now grown, began running the business, they did not at first emulate their father’s example, believing it was important for businessmen to maintain a clean-cut look. Around 2005, however, they realized that beards made them distinctive and got their company attention. According to son Willie, a long beard was “the best marketing gimmick anybody’s ever thought of and it didn’t cost.” Even so, they tended to grow beards only for sales shows and duck hunting season. Once they hit the big time, however, the sons had an image to protect, and they committed themselves full-time to their patriarchal manes, to the regret of several of their wives. The women endured the change because, in the Duck Dynasty show, the men are the stars, while the women are the support crew. Duck Dynasty’s nostalgic call to the rugged life echoes key themes in the great beard movement of the 1850s, when mountain climbing and big-game hunting also attracted urbanized men worried about the authenticity of their manhood. Phil Robertson and his sons recognized a similar impulse in contemporary society and have, directly and indirectly, addressed the perceived need to strengthen male self-confidence while reinforcing traditional gender roles. Willie Robertson recently contributed a forward to Darrin Patrick’s conservative (though not conservatively titled) The Dude’s Guide to Manhood (2014), in which he declared that he came “from a family who not only have mature facial hair but more importantly are mature men who know how to live life and love their wives and kids. . . . We don’t need more boys, we need real men. Strong, godly, mature men.” Precisely what he meant by this distinction between boys and men is not entirely clear, particularly when he followed his disapproval of “boys” with this appeal: “Oh yeah, and by the way, get to growing those beards out, Boys!!!” The terminology may not have been consistent, but the clear message of the duck hunters to suburban men was to hold fast to their embattled manliness and wear it with defiant pride. The newly sprouted beards of American evangelicals are a social rather than a religious statement. Neither Warren nor the Robertsons have promoted facial hair for specifically biblical or theological reasons. They could hardly do so when, for the vast majority of conservative Christians, short hair and a shaven face remain the conventional signs of moral and religious rectitude. The most dramatic promoter of this attitude is the Mormon church, which generally interprets facial hair as a form of disobedience. Brigham Young University, Mormonism’s flagship university, positively forbids beards for students. A recent study has revealed that, in spite of intense pressure, a small minority of faithful Mormon men maintain mustaches and beards. These men are not reformers or rebels, but their decisions, for whatever personal or psychological reasons, to wear facial hair, forces them into the role of nonconformist. The case of Mormon beards thus demonstrates that beard-wearing can become a defiant act even when that is not the original motivation. Most conservative Christians still view facial hair as discordant with tradition, but for other conservative religious groups in Europe and America, it has precisely the opposite significance, namely, as a sign of religious obedience and group identity. Amish, Orthodox Jewish, and fundamentalist Muslim men rely on beards to affirm and advertise their religious piety and ethnic identity. In these settings, piety and masculine honor are inseparably bound, which makes a beard an especially powerful symbol, as well as a target for those who might wish to do harm. Reprinted with permission from "Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair" by Christopher Oldstone-Moore, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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Bottled air from Canada is selling like crazy in China

If someone told you there is a Silicon Valley startup selling bottled air to China, you would probably think it's a joke. And it is; the startup is actually in Alberta, Canada. Vitality Air produces and sells "hand-bottled" air from Banff and Lake Louise, two Canadian locales known for their Rocky Mountain surroundings and crystal clear bodies of water. More from The Daily Dot: "Mall Santa helps with special moment for grieving family" The startup has been capturing that air in "massive cans" through a clean compression process, which according to Vitality Air, "lock[s] in the pure air without any contamination." The siphoned air is taken back to the company's bottling facility, where "we begin filling our convenient delivery cans to the brim with excellent air." Vitality Air's pitch might read like a throwaway joke on  Silicon Valley , but the company has found a market for their version of Canada Dry. People in smog-filled Chinese cities have been buying up the cans in bulk. More from The Daily Dot: "Twitter gets real about mental health with #WhenIThinkOfMentallIllness" After shipping 500 sample bottles to China, Vitality Air suddenly found itself with an unmatched demand for its product. Currently, the company has a shipment of 4,000 set to make its way to the country, with over 1,000 of them already pre-sold. A study of air quality in China earlier this year produced less than encouraging results; United States-based non-profit organization Berkley Earth found that over 80 percent of Chinese people are exposed to pollution that exceed safe levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It also found that air pollution was responsible for 4,000 deaths each day in the country, accounting for 17 percent of all deaths. Berkeley Earth scientific director Richard Muller compared the air quality in Beijing to smoking one-and-a-half cigarettes per hour, all day long. More from The Daily Dot: "How YouTubers are spreading the word of the Mormon church" Vitality Air hasn't been shy about targeting those in need. On Twitter, the company sent off an onslaught of tweets targeting people in or visiting China. https://twitter.com/vitalityair/statu... https://twitter.com/vitalityair/statu... https://twitter.com/vitalityair/statu... https://twitter.com/vitalityair/statu... Bottled air isn't the first product to unexpectedly catch on in China. Because of the barely breathable air that occupies many of country's major population centers, face masks have become a wildly popular accessory. The product was out of stock in some areas, and Chinese state media reported 217,000 people bought masks from an online retailer over the course of just one week. Air purifiers have also become commonplace, with the industry experiencing a 100 percent growth between 2012 and 2013.

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More GOP madness! Ban Twitter! 5 things we really, really want to happen in 2016

We are, those of us who regularly consume news media, deep into the most hellacious, soul-sucking time of the year. Yes, I’m speaking of the onslaught of the dreaded “Best of Year” lists. All through December, one cannot open a Web browser without stumbling across one clickbait listing or another of the top 10 terrible sports moments of the year or the 25 best "Star Wars" promotional tie-ins of the year, or the top 50 debut pan flute albums of the year. It gets to be a bit much. There are good reasons for this phenomenon, of course. December is generally a slow news month. We’re all distracted by social engagements and gift-shopping. All the sugar we consume turns our brains into sludge. We writers, being naturally slothful, are desperate to get up from our desks, where we have been working in our pajamas, to begin our long vacation lying on our couches binge-watching Netflix, in our pajamas. But the Internet content monster is never satiated, always demanding we shovel more and more hot takes into its gaping maw. So instead of a Best of 2015 list, let’s look ahead to next year, with my "Top 6 Hopes for Politics in 2016." 1) May the GOP presidential field stay crowded with candidates. The field is down to 13 now that Lindsey Graham ended his campaign this week. Of those, the Huffington Post’s national poll tracker has only six of them sitting at 4.6 percent or higher. You wonder how long Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul (2.6 percent each) or Mike Huckabee and John Kasich (2.1 percent each) can keep this going, considering that the number of delegates they will collectively gather could fit around a table at Starbucks. But if they drop out, we might lose their gloriously pathetic efforts at aping front-runner Donald Trump’s schoolyard insults. And that would be a shame. Anyway, I am all in favor of these candidates continuing to show the world that if they won the presidency, the Oval Office would have to have a special chair off in a corner where they could sit for timeouts. Stay in the race until at least June, folks. Hold out for prime-time speeches at the convention. Comedians will appreciate all the material. 2) May people leave politicians’ kids out of it. Seriously, who at the Washington Post thought this was a good idea? Sure, politicians use their kids as props all the time, but it’s something of an inevitable result of our obsession with seeing our political leaders as “normal” people with “normal” family lives that keep them grounded and humble and relatable to your average middle-class schmoe. The kids don’t have a choice in being part of this, and they deserve as much space as we can possibly give them to grow up in as close to normal an environment as our oversaturated media can possibly allow. There is no public interest in splashing them across the front pages. Or the editorial pages, in this case. Besides, Ted Cruz’s kids are already saddled with having Ted Cruz as a father. I wouldn’t wish that on even the worst bullies haunting America’s playgrounds. 3) Speaking of Ted Cruz, may he start wearing clothes that fit. Dude, you’re a senator running for president of the United States. Your wife works for Goldman Sachs. Surely you can afford better than off-the-rack from Ross Dress for Less. 4) May Twitter be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Now, I am admittedly on Twitter a lot, and sometimes it’s great. I have made professional contacts. I have made IRL friends. (That’s "In Real Life," for those of you not hip to the lingo.) It has often been a source of good reading and movie-watching recommendations. And I enjoy the give-and-take with some of the friends and colleagues I have there. Sometimes when I’m preparing to write, I warm up by slinging out some dumb tweets, just to get my brain going. It is a great tool for a writer. That said, the terribleness of it for our political and cultural discourse cannot be understated. It is the go-to province of abusive partisans, racists and misogynists. I come in for occasional abuse for some of my public writing, and that is enervating enough, particularly when some right-wing trolls take offense at something I’ve written. Women in particular have invective and rape and death threats hurled at them at a rate that I cannot even begin to fathom. Twitter is notably horrible at policing this and protecting its users from abuse. All of these complicated issues we have to face in the world today – climate change, gun violence, the quagmire that is the Middle East – and one of the biggest forums for facing them requires us to do so 140 characters at a time, in complete anonymity. That allows people to be unaccountable for their darkest, worst impulses. Which makes it hard to think through a topic, and gets us absolutely nowhere in terms of dialogue to solve problems. Meanwhile, we measure the popularity of positions by how many retweets and likes we get, or how many followers the most retrograde idiots have. It’s an absurd way to go about doing anything. 5) May a Democrat win the presidency next November. The House is likely to stay Republican, and we all know the GOP caucus there is crazy. Even if Democrats recapture the Senate, they will not have the necessary supermajority to keep the Republicans there from gumming up the works. And all the Republicans running for president are nuttier than a Planters factory. Either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton is far preferable to that Murderer’s Row. 6) May we all make it through the next year psychologically unscathed. Seriously, it is going to be an ugly, ugly, ugly campaign. We are going to hear warped perspectives and flat-out lying that will have us screaming at each other. Let us take a moment during these holidays to breathe deeply, hug our loved ones, and maybe consider spending the next year living in caves, high in the mountains, where our iPhones can’t get signals. It may be our only hope of retaining our sanity. Happy holidays, everyone!We are, those of us who regularly consume news media, deep into the most hellacious, soul-sucking time of the year. Yes, I’m speaking of the onslaught of the dreaded “Best of Year” lists. All through December, one cannot open a Web browser without stumbling across one clickbait listing or another of the top 10 terrible sports moments of the year or the 25 best "Star Wars" promotional tie-ins of the year, or the top 50 debut pan flute albums of the year. It gets to be a bit much. There are good reasons for this phenomenon, of course. December is generally a slow news month. We’re all distracted by social engagements and gift-shopping. All the sugar we consume turns our brains into sludge. We writers, being naturally slothful, are desperate to get up from our desks, where we have been working in our pajamas, to begin our long vacation lying on our couches binge-watching Netflix, in our pajamas. But the Internet content monster is never satiated, always demanding we shovel more and more hot takes into its gaping maw. So instead of a Best of 2015 list, let’s look ahead to next year, with my "Top 6 Hopes for Politics in 2016." 1) May the GOP presidential field stay crowded with candidates. The field is down to 13 now that Lindsey Graham ended his campaign this week. Of those, the Huffington Post’s national poll tracker has only six of them sitting at 4.6 percent or higher. You wonder how long Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul (2.6 percent each) or Mike Huckabee and John Kasich (2.1 percent each) can keep this going, considering that the number of delegates they will collectively gather could fit around a table at Starbucks. But if they drop out, we might lose their gloriously pathetic efforts at aping front-runner Donald Trump’s schoolyard insults. And that would be a shame. Anyway, I am all in favor of these candidates continuing to show the world that if they won the presidency, the Oval Office would have to have a special chair off in a corner where they could sit for timeouts. Stay in the race until at least June, folks. Hold out for prime-time speeches at the convention. Comedians will appreciate all the material. 2) May people leave politicians’ kids out of it. Seriously, who at the Washington Post thought this was a good idea? Sure, politicians use their kids as props all the time, but it’s something of an inevitable result of our obsession with seeing our political leaders as “normal” people with “normal” family lives that keep them grounded and humble and relatable to your average middle-class schmoe. The kids don’t have a choice in being part of this, and they deserve as much space as we can possibly give them to grow up in as close to normal an environment as our oversaturated media can possibly allow. There is no public interest in splashing them across the front pages. Or the editorial pages, in this case. Besides, Ted Cruz’s kids are already saddled with having Ted Cruz as a father. I wouldn’t wish that on even the worst bullies haunting America’s playgrounds. 3) Speaking of Ted Cruz, may he start wearing clothes that fit. Dude, you’re a senator running for president of the United States. Your wife works for Goldman Sachs. Surely you can afford better than off-the-rack from Ross Dress for Less. 4) May Twitter be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Now, I am admittedly on Twitter a lot, and sometimes it’s great. I have made professional contacts. I have made IRL friends. (That’s "In Real Life," for those of you not hip to the lingo.) It has often been a source of good reading and movie-watching recommendations. And I enjoy the give-and-take with some of the friends and colleagues I have there. Sometimes when I’m preparing to write, I warm up by slinging out some dumb tweets, just to get my brain going. It is a great tool for a writer. That said, the terribleness of it for our political and cultural discourse cannot be understated. It is the go-to province of abusive partisans, racists and misogynists. I come in for occasional abuse for some of my public writing, and that is enervating enough, particularly when some right-wing trolls take offense at something I’ve written. Women in particular have invective and rape and death threats hurled at them at a rate that I cannot even begin to fathom. Twitter is notably horrible at policing this and protecting its users from abuse. All of these complicated issues we have to face in the world today – climate change, gun violence, the quagmire that is the Middle East – and one of the biggest forums for facing them requires us to do so 140 characters at a time, in complete anonymity. That allows people to be unaccountable for their darkest, worst impulses. Which makes it hard to think through a topic, and gets us absolutely nowhere in terms of dialogue to solve problems. Meanwhile, we measure the popularity of positions by how many retweets and likes we get, or how many followers the most retrograde idiots have. It’s an absurd way to go about doing anything. 5) May a Democrat win the presidency next November. The House is likely to stay Republican, and we all know the GOP caucus there is crazy. Even if Democrats recapture the Senate, they will not have the necessary supermajority to keep the Republicans there from gumming up the works. And all the Republicans running for president are nuttier than a Planters factory. Either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton is far preferable to that Murderer’s Row. 6) May we all make it through the next year psychologically unscathed. Seriously, it is going to be an ugly, ugly, ugly campaign. We are going to hear warped perspectives and flat-out lying that will have us screaming at each other. Let us take a moment during these holidays to breathe deeply, hug our loved ones, and maybe consider spending the next year living in caves, high in the mountains, where our iPhones can’t get signals. It may be our only hope of retaining our sanity. Happy holidays, everyone!We are, those of us who regularly consume news media, deep into the most hellacious, soul-sucking time of the year. Yes, I’m speaking of the onslaught of the dreaded “Best of Year” lists. All through December, one cannot open a Web browser without stumbling across one clickbait listing or another of the top 10 terrible sports moments of the year or the 25 best "Star Wars" promotional tie-ins of the year, or the top 50 debut pan flute albums of the year. It gets to be a bit much. There are good reasons for this phenomenon, of course. December is generally a slow news month. We’re all distracted by social engagements and gift-shopping. All the sugar we consume turns our brains into sludge. We writers, being naturally slothful, are desperate to get up from our desks, where we have been working in our pajamas, to begin our long vacation lying on our couches binge-watching Netflix, in our pajamas. But the Internet content monster is never satiated, always demanding we shovel more and more hot takes into its gaping maw. So instead of a Best of 2015 list, let’s look ahead to next year, with my "Top 6 Hopes for Politics in 2016." 1) May the GOP presidential field stay crowded with candidates. The field is down to 13 now that Lindsey Graham ended his campaign this week. Of those, the Huffington Post’s national poll tracker has only six of them sitting at 4.6 percent or higher. You wonder how long Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul (2.6 percent each) or Mike Huckabee and John Kasich (2.1 percent each) can keep this going, considering that the number of delegates they will collectively gather could fit around a table at Starbucks. But if they drop out, we might lose their gloriously pathetic efforts at aping front-runner Donald Trump’s schoolyard insults. And that would be a shame. Anyway, I am all in favor of these candidates continuing to show the world that if they won the presidency, the Oval Office would have to have a special chair off in a corner where they could sit for timeouts. Stay in the race until at least June, folks. Hold out for prime-time speeches at the convention. Comedians will appreciate all the material. 2) May people leave politicians’ kids out of it. Seriously, who at the Washington Post thought this was a good idea? Sure, politicians use their kids as props all the time, but it’s something of an inevitable result of our obsession with seeing our political leaders as “normal” people with “normal” family lives that keep them grounded and humble and relatable to your average middle-class schmoe. The kids don’t have a choice in being part of this, and they deserve as much space as we can possibly give them to grow up in as close to normal an environment as our oversaturated media can possibly allow. There is no public interest in splashing them across the front pages. Or the editorial pages, in this case. Besides, Ted Cruz’s kids are already saddled with having Ted Cruz as a father. I wouldn’t wish that on even the worst bullies haunting America’s playgrounds. 3) Speaking of Ted Cruz, may he start wearing clothes that fit. Dude, you’re a senator running for president of the United States. Your wife works for Goldman Sachs. Surely you can afford better than off-the-rack from Ross Dress for Less. 4) May Twitter be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Now, I am admittedly on Twitter a lot, and sometimes it’s great. I have made professional contacts. I have made IRL friends. (That’s "In Real Life," for those of you not hip to the lingo.) It has often been a source of good reading and movie-watching recommendations. And I enjoy the give-and-take with some of the friends and colleagues I have there. Sometimes when I’m preparing to write, I warm up by slinging out some dumb tweets, just to get my brain going. It is a great tool for a writer. That said, the terribleness of it for our political and cultural discourse cannot be understated. It is the go-to province of abusive partisans, racists and misogynists. I come in for occasional abuse for some of my public writing, and that is enervating enough, particularly when some right-wing trolls take offense at something I’ve written. Women in particular have invective and rape and death threats hurled at them at a rate that I cannot even begin to fathom. Twitter is notably horrible at policing this and protecting its users from abuse. All of these complicated issues we have to face in the world today – climate change, gun violence, the quagmire that is the Middle East – and one of the biggest forums for facing them requires us to do so 140 characters at a time, in complete anonymity. That allows people to be unaccountable for their darkest, worst impulses. Which makes it hard to think through a topic, and gets us absolutely nowhere in terms of dialogue to solve problems. Meanwhile, we measure the popularity of positions by how many retweets and likes we get, or how many followers the most retrograde idiots have. It’s an absurd way to go about doing anything. 5) May a Democrat win the presidency next November. The House is likely to stay Republican, and we all know the GOP caucus there is crazy. Even if Democrats recapture the Senate, they will not have the necessary supermajority to keep the Republicans there from gumming up the works. And all the Republicans running for president are nuttier than a Planters factory. Either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton is far preferable to that Murderer’s Row. 6) May we all make it through the next year psychologically unscathed. Seriously, it is going to be an ugly, ugly, ugly campaign. We are going to hear warped perspectives and flat-out lying that will have us screaming at each other. Let us take a moment during these holidays to breathe deeply, hug our loved ones, and maybe consider spending the next year living in caves, high in the mountains, where our iPhones can’t get signals. It may be our only hope of retaining our sanity. Happy holidays, everyone!

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Fossil fuels are all but finished: Renewable energies are the future, whether the GOP acknowledges it or not

Historically, the transition from one energy system to another, as from wood to coal or coal to oil, has proven an enormously complicated process, requiring decades to complete. In similar fashion, it will undoubtedly be many years before renewable forms of energy -- wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and others still in development -- replace fossil fuels as the world’s leading energy providers. Nonetheless, 2015 can be viewed as the year in which the epochal transition from one set of fuels to another took off, with renewables making such significant strides that, for the first time in centuries, the beginning of the end of the Fossil Fuel Era has come into sight. This shift will take place no matter how well or poorly the deal just achieved at the U.N. climate summit in Paris is carried out. Although a robust commitment by participating nations to curb future carbon emissions will certainly help speed the transition, the necessary preconditions -- political will, investment capital, and technological momentum -- are already in place to drive the renewable revolution forward. Lending a hand to this transformation will be a sharp and continuing reduction in the cost of renewable energy, making it increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), between now and 2040 global investments in renewable power capacity will total $7 trillion, accounting for 60% of all power plant investment. Fossil fuels will not, of course, disappear during this period.  Too much existing infrastructure -- refineries, distribution networks, transportation systems, power plants, and the like -- are dependent on oil, coal, and natural gas, which means, unfortunately, that these fuels will continue to play a prominent role for decades.  But the primary thrust of new policies, new investment, and new technology will be in the advancement of renewables. Breakthrough Initiatives Two events on the periphery of the Paris climate summit were especially noteworthy in terms of the renewable revolution: the announcement of an International Solar Alliance by India and France, and the launching of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition by Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and a host of other billionaires. As described by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the International Solar Alliance is meant to mobilize private and public funds for the development and installation of affordable solar systems on a global scale, especially in developing countries.  “We intend making joint efforts through innovative policies, projects, programs, capacity-building measures, and financial instruments to mobilize more than 1,000 billion U.S. dollars of investments that are needed by 2030 for the massive deployment of affordable solar energy,” Modi and French President François Hollandeindicated in a joint statement on November 30th. According to its sponsors, the aim of this program is to pool financing from both public and private sources in order to bring down the costs of solar systems even further and speed their utilization, especially in poor tropical countries.  “The vast majority of humans are blessed with sunlight throughout the year,” Modi explained.  “We want to bring solar energy into their lives.” To get the alliance off the ground, the Indian government will commit some $30 billion for the establishment of the alliance’s headquarters in New Delhi.  Modi has also pledged to increase solar power generation in India by 2,500% over the next seven years, expanding output from 4 to 100 gigawatts -- thereby creating a vast new market for solar technology and devices.  “This day is the sunrise of new hope, not just for clean energy, but for villages and homes still in darkness,” he said in Paris, adding that the solar alliance would create “unlimited economic opportunities” for green energy entrepreneurs. The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, reportedly the brainchild of Bill Gates, will seek to channel private and public funds into the development of advanced green-energy technologies to speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.  “Technology will help solve our energy issues,” the project’s website states.  “Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs can invent and scale the innovative technologies that will limit the impact of climate change while providing affordable and reliable energy to everyone.” As Gates imagines it, the new venture will seek to bundle funds from wealthy investors in order to move innovative energy breakthroughs from the laboratory -- where they often languish -- to full-scale development and production.  “Experience indicates that even the most promising ideas face daunting commercialization challenges and a nearly impassable Valley of Death between promising concept and viable product,” the project notes.  “This collective failure can be addressed, in part, by a dramatically scaled-up public research pipeline, linked to a different kind of private investor with a long-term commitment to new technologies who is willing to put truly patient flexible risk capital to work.” Joining Gates and Bezos in this venture are a host of super-rich investors, including Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, the Chinese internet giant; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chairman of Facebook; George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management; and Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of India’s giant Tata Sons conglomerate.  While seeking to speed the progress of green technology, these investors also see a huge potential for future profits in this field and, as the venture claims, “will certainly be motivated partly by the possibility of making big returns over the long-term, but also by the criticality of an energy transition.” While vast in their ambitions, these two schemes are not without their critics.  Some environmentalists worry, for example, that Modi’s enthusiasm for the International Solar Alliance might actually be a public relations device aimed at deflecting criticism from his plans for increasing India’s reliance on coal to generate electricity.  A report by Climate Action Tracker, an environmental watchdog group, noted, for instance, that “the absolute growth in [India’s] coal-powered electric generating capacity would be significantly larger than the absolute increase in renewable/non-fossil generation capacity” in that country between 2013 and 2030.  “Ultimately, this would lead to a greater lock-in of carbon-intensive power infrastructure in India than appears necessary.” The Gates initiative has come under criticism for favoring still-experimental “breakthrough” technologies over further improvements in here-and-now devices such as solar panels and wind turbines.  For example, Joe Romm, a climate expert and former acting assistant secretary of energy, recently wrote at the website Climate Progress that “Gates has generally downplayed the amazing advances we’ve had in the keystone clean technologies,” such as wind and solar, while “investing in new nuclear power, geo-engineering technologies, and off-the-wall stuff.” Despite such criticisms, the far-reaching implications and symbolic importance of these initiatives shouldn’t be dismissed.  By funneling billions -- and in the end undoubtedly trillions -- of dollars into the development and deployment of green technologies, these politicians and plutocrats are ensuring that the shift from fossil fuels to renewables will gain further momentum with each passing year until it becomes unstoppable. The Developing World Goes Green In another sign of this epochal shift, ever more countries in the developing world -- including some oil-producing ones -- are embracing renewables as their preferred energy sources.  According to the IEA, the newly industrialized countries, spearheaded by China and India, will spend $2.7 trillion on renewable-based power plants between 2015 and 2040, far more than the older industrialized nations. This embrace of renewables by the developing world is especially significant given the way the major oil and gas companies -- led by ExxonMobil and BP -- have long argued that cheap fossil fuels provide these countries with the smoothest path to rapid economic development.  Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson has even claimed that there is a “humanitarian imperative” to providing the developing world with cheap fossil fuels in order to save "millions and millions of lives." In accordance with this self-serving rhetoric, Exxon, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and other energy giants have been madly expanding their oil and gas distribution networks in Asia, Africa, and other developing areas. Increasingly, however, the targets of this push are rejecting fossil fuels in favor of renewables. Morocco, for example, has pledged to obtain 42% of its electricity from renewables by 2020, far more than planned by the members of the European Union. Later this month, the country will commence operations at the Ouarzazate solar thermal plant, a mammoth facility capable of supplying electricity to one million homes by relying on an array of revolving parabolic mirrors covering some 6,000 acres. These will concentrate the power of sunlight and use it to produce steam for electricity-generating turbines. Elsewhere in Africa, authorities in Rwanda have commissioned a vast solar array at Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, about 40 miles east of Kigali, the capital. Consisting of 28,360 computer-controlled solar panels, the array can generate 8.5 megawatts of electricity, or about 6% of Rwanda’s capacity. Spread over an undulating hill, the panels are laid out in the shape of the African continent and are meant to be symbolic of solar energy’s importance to that energy-starved continent. “We have plenty of sun,” said Twaha Twagirimana, the plant supervisor.  “Some are living in remote areas where there is no energy.  Solar will be the way forward for African countries.” Even more significant, a number of major oil-producing countries have begun championing renewables, too. On November 28th, for example, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, vice president and ruler of Dubai, launched the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, which aims to make the emirate a global center of green energy.  According to present plans, 25% of Dubai’s energy will come from clean energy sources by 2030 and 75% by 2050.  As part of this drive, solar panels will be made mandatory for all rooftops by 2030.  “Our goal is to become the city with the smallest carbon footprint in the world by 2050,” Sheikh Mohammed said when announcing the initiative. As part of its green energy drive, Dubai is constructing the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, intended to be the world’s largest solar facility.  When completed, around 2030, the giant complex will produce some 5,000 megawatts of energy -- about eight times as much as the Ouarzazate solar plant. Long-Term Prospects Evidence that an accelerating shift to renewables is already underway can also be found in recent studies of the global energy industry, most notably in the IEA’s just-released annual assessment of industry trends, World Energy Outlook 2015.  “There are unmistakable signs that the much needed global energy transition is under way,” the report noted, with “60 cents of every dollar invested in new power plants to 2040 [to be] spent on renewable energy technologies.” The growing importance of renewables, the IEA noted, is especially evident in the case of electricity generation.  As more countries follow the growth patterns seen in China and South Korea, electricity is expected to provide an ever-increasing share of world energy requirements.  Global electricity use, the report says, will grow by 46% between 2013 and 2040; all other forms of energy use, by only 24%.  As a result, the share of total world energy provided by electricity will rise from 38% to 42%. This shift is significant because renewables will provide a greater share of the energy used to generate electricity.  Whereas they contributed only 12% of energy to power generation in 2013, the IEA reports, they are expected to supply 24% in 2040; meanwhile, the shares provided by coal and natural gas will grow by far smaller percentages, and that by oil will actually shrink.  While coal and gas are still likely to dominate the power sector in 2040, the trend lines suggest that they will lose ever more ground to renewables as time goes on. Contributing to the growing reliance on renewables, the IEA finds, is a continuing drop in the cost of deploying these technologies.  Once considered pricey compared to fossil fuels, renewables are beginning to win out on cost alone.  In 2014, the agency noted, “about three-quarters of global renewables-based [power] generation was competitive with electricity from other types of power plants without subsidies,” with large hydropower facilities contributing much of this share. Certainly, renewables continue to benefit from subsidies of various sorts.  In 2014, the IEA reports, governments provided some $112 billion to underwrite renewable power generation.  While this may seem like a significant amount, it is only about a quarter of the $490 billion in subsidies governments offered globally to the fossil fuel industry.  If those outsized subsidies were eliminated and a price imposed on the consumption of carbon, as proposed in many of the schemes to be introduced in the wake of the Paris climate summit, renewables would become instantly competitive without subsidies. Go Green Young Man and Young Woman All this is not to say that the world will be a green-energy paradise in 2030 or 2040.  Far from it.  Barring the unexpected, fossil fuels will continue to rule in many areas, especially transportation, and the resulting carbon emissions will continue to warm the planet disastrously.  By then, however, most new investment in the energy field will, at least, be devoted to renewables and in most places globally there will be rules and regulations aimed at facilitating their installation. As a college professor, I often think about such developments in terms of my students.  When they ask me for career advice these days, I urge them to gear their studies toward some field likely to prosper in exactly this future environment: renewable energy systems, green architecture and city planning, alternative transportation and industrial systems, sustainable development, and environmental law, among others.  And more and more of my students are, in fact, choosing such paths. Likewise, if I were a future venture capitalist, I would follow the lead of Gates, Bezos, and the other tycoons in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition by seeking out the most innovative work in the green energy field.  It offers as close as you can get to a guarantee against failure.  As the consumption of renewable energy explodes, the incentives for power and money-saving technical breakthroughs are only going to grow and the rate of discovery is sure to rise as well, undoubtedly offering enormous payback possibilities for those getting a piece of the action early. Finally, if I were an aspiring politician, whether in this country or elsewhere, I would be spinning plans for my city, state, or nation to take the lead in the green energy revolution.  Once the transition from fossil fuels to renewables gains more momentum, leadership in the development and deployment of green technologies will become a far more popular position, which means it will increase your electability.  This proposition is already beginning to be tested.  For example, the Labor Party candidate for mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is now leading the way by building his campaign around a promise to set that city on course to be 100% powered by renewables by 2050. You’re still going to hear a lot about fossil fuels -- and for good reason -- but make no mistake about it: the future belongs to renewables.  Of course, Big Energy, the giant utilities, and the lobbyists and politicians in their pay, including just about the complete climate-change-denying Republican Party, will do everything in their (not insignificant) power to perpetuate the Fossil Fuel Era.  In the process, they will cause immeasurable harm to the planet and to us all.  They will win some battles.  In the process, they will also be committing some of the great crimes of history.  But the war they are fighting is a losing one. Inevitably, ever more people -- especially the most dynamic and creative of the young -- will be hitching their futures to the coming of a genuinely green civilization, ensuring its ultimate triumph.

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