Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 918

Sword vs. lightsaber: How the Samurai warrior inspired the Jedi Knights

The opening credits of "The Force Awakens," rolling into the infinite distance as usual, remind you that Jedi Knights are down, but not completely out. I had forgotten. In the 30 years since the Empire struck back, much has happened. There’s a new evil empire, a new evil emperor, and an even deadlier death star. But somewhere the Last of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker, is in hiding. Our young heroes of the Resistance must not only defeat Evil, but also find Luke, and re-inspire him. I had a special reason for going to the first showing of the movie in London. In my book "Samurai: The Last Warrior," I looked at the inspiration behind the look of both the Jedi Knights and their opponent, Darth Vader. So much of it derived from samurai traditions: the cloaks, the tunics, Vader’s helmet, the lightsaber. Let’s set them side by side: Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, and also not long ago right here on earth, two warriors prepare for action. The two have much in common. They are expert in the use of swords, despite their ability to call on the most fearsome and destructive of long-distance weapons. One warrior carries a supremely strong yet flexible steel sword known as a katana, which goes through flesh and bone like a kitchen knife through cooked asparagus, yet is flexible enough to deflect similar blades without splintering. The other wields a blade of energy, a lightsaber, which emits an annoying hum and deflects other lightsabers and almost anything else with a crackle, but slices through limbs like a katana when the time is right. Both forgo armor to fight in loose tunics. That is how the Last Samurai, Saigo Takamori, went into battle against the Japanese Empire in 1877; that is how Toshiro Mifune appears in Kurasawa’s film "The Seven Samurai"; that is how young Skywalker, up and coming Jedi, faces up to Vader, the father he has lost to the Dark Side of the Force. Actually, it’s rather more complicated. Vader, though a master, wears samurai-like armor. Why? There are two reasons. First, in a past "Star Wars" episode, he was dismembered, burned beyond recognition, and restored to life inside a special body-suit, helmet and mask. Second, after Japanese unification in 1600, the samurai became redundant, but instead of vanishing they reinvented themselves as vital members of society, adopting ever more extreme armor designs, with overlapping plates, masks with bristling mustaches and helmets with horns, or crab-like extensions (symbols of protection), or rabbits’ ears to suggest longevity. Vader’s headgear is a simplified version of a samurai face-mask and helmet, with neck protection and ear-flaps. Unlike a samurai, though, he does not need a hole in the top of his helmet through which to poke an elaborate top-knot. Would the comparison carry over into the latest epic? Yes, indeed, lightsabers, tunics and even a samurai mask for the new Evil One (though he removes it at crucial moments, which made me wonder why he needed it in the first place). Finn (male, black, beautiful) and Rey (female, white, ditto), both Londoners, I’m happy to say, confront their evil antagonist, all with lightsabers in hand.   The climax in both these cases is about two different views of heroism, the heroism of the loser and that of the winners. But there is something that the two sets of heroes share, and it’s not just the similarities in their hardware. Swords and lightsabers are both symbols of status and power. They are the ultimate McGuffins, as Alfred Hitchcock called the filmic "thing that everyone wants."   The samurais’ attitude to swords had a weird logic. The sword had centuries of tradition. It was, at its best, a treasure occupying worlds of magic, spirituality, chemistry, artistry and skill, with its own arcane vocabulary and frequently a name, like King Arthur’s Excalibur. Minamoto Yorimatsa (944-1021), the first of the Minamotos to become famous, had a sword called Dojigiri, "Monster Slayer." It was one of the "Five Best Swords Under Heaven," the others being the Demon, the Quarter Moon, the Rosary and the Great Tenta, all of which survive in museums. By comparison the lightsaber is somewhat lacking in back-story. Luke’s weapon has magical qualities – it inspires visions when grabbed by the future female Jedi, Rey -- but where is its character? What master made it? Where is its hamon? Where, in the words of a description of a blade by the 14th century smith Masamune, are its "bright varied lines of kinsuji, sunagashi and deep ashi?" No, I don’t know sword-speak either, but the terms hint at the depth of samurai tradition. To samurai, all swords were and are different. By comparison, all lightsabers seem pretty much the same.   Never mind. Stories with swords and lightsabers lead to the same end: the climactic fight that pits Good against Evil, tradition against novelty. They are the ultimate weapons by which great issues are decided. By Saigo’s time, armies had rifles, cannon, even early machine guns. His final battle on the slopes overlooking Kagoshima in Japan’s far south was like the last scene in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," with the odds hopelessly stacked against him, but with no freeze-frame. He knew he was going to die, and in his eyes his death was glorious, struck by bullets and beheaded by his own aide, as the code of seppuku (ritual suicide) dictated. Finn and Rey are also up against fearsome odds. Their opponent commands a weapon that blasts planets apart, and psychokinetic powers that enable him to freeze his prisoners and suck information from their brains. Yet in the end the struggle between Good and Evil, between First Order and Resistance, with interstellar fates in the balance, comes down to lightsabers and single combat and an enigmatic shot of the reclusive Luke and the triumph of Good in a mighty cataclysm. How Evil survived the apocalypse I have no idea, but I bet there’s a clue amid the explosions. In a year or two, we will all be watching Episode whatever to find out what happens next. In the telling and retelling of legends, this is exactly how things should be. I forgot about samurais, and loved it on its own terms, and so did the audience, and so will the world. John Man is a British historian and travel writer with a special interest in Asia. Educated at Oxford and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Man has written acclaimed biographies of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Kublai Khan, as well as "Ninja," a popular account of the legendary Japanese stealth assassins, and "Samurai," a popular history of the legendary elite class of Japanese warrior. In 2007 he was awarded Mongolia's prestigious Friendship Medal. Man lives in England. The opening credits of "The Force Awakens," rolling into the infinite distance as usual, remind you that Jedi Knights are down, but not completely out. I had forgotten. In the 30 years since the Empire struck back, much has happened. There’s a new evil empire, a new evil emperor, and an even deadlier death star. But somewhere the Last of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker, is in hiding. Our young heroes of the Resistance must not only defeat Evil, but also find Luke, and re-inspire him. I had a special reason for going to the first showing of the movie in London. In my book "Samurai: The Last Warrior," I looked at the inspiration behind the look of both the Jedi Knights and their opponent, Darth Vader. So much of it derived from samurai traditions: the cloaks, the tunics, Vader’s helmet, the lightsaber. Let’s set them side by side: Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, and also not long ago right here on earth, two warriors prepare for action. The two have much in common. They are expert in the use of swords, despite their ability to call on the most fearsome and destructive of long-distance weapons. One warrior carries a supremely strong yet flexible steel sword known as a katana, which goes through flesh and bone like a kitchen knife through cooked asparagus, yet is flexible enough to deflect similar blades without splintering. The other wields a blade of energy, a lightsaber, which emits an annoying hum and deflects other lightsabers and almost anything else with a crackle, but slices through limbs like a katana when the time is right. Both forgo armor to fight in loose tunics. That is how the Last Samurai, Saigo Takamori, went into battle against the Japanese Empire in 1877; that is how Toshiro Mifune appears in Kurasawa’s film "The Seven Samurai"; that is how young Skywalker, up and coming Jedi, faces up to Vader, the father he has lost to the Dark Side of the Force. Actually, it’s rather more complicated. Vader, though a master, wears samurai-like armor. Why? There are two reasons. First, in a past "Star Wars" episode, he was dismembered, burned beyond recognition, and restored to life inside a special body-suit, helmet and mask. Second, after Japanese unification in 1600, the samurai became redundant, but instead of vanishing they reinvented themselves as vital members of society, adopting ever more extreme armor designs, with overlapping plates, masks with bristling mustaches and helmets with horns, or crab-like extensions (symbols of protection), or rabbits’ ears to suggest longevity. Vader’s headgear is a simplified version of a samurai face-mask and helmet, with neck protection and ear-flaps. Unlike a samurai, though, he does not need a hole in the top of his helmet through which to poke an elaborate top-knot. Would the comparison carry over into the latest epic? Yes, indeed, lightsabers, tunics and even a samurai mask for the new Evil One (though he removes it at crucial moments, which made me wonder why he needed it in the first place). Finn (male, black, beautiful) and Rey (female, white, ditto), both Londoners, I’m happy to say, confront their evil antagonist, all with lightsabers in hand.   The climax in both these cases is about two different views of heroism, the heroism of the loser and that of the winners. But there is something that the two sets of heroes share, and it’s not just the similarities in their hardware. Swords and lightsabers are both symbols of status and power. They are the ultimate McGuffins, as Alfred Hitchcock called the filmic "thing that everyone wants."   The samurais’ attitude to swords had a weird logic. The sword had centuries of tradition. It was, at its best, a treasure occupying worlds of magic, spirituality, chemistry, artistry and skill, with its own arcane vocabulary and frequently a name, like King Arthur’s Excalibur. Minamoto Yorimatsa (944-1021), the first of the Minamotos to become famous, had a sword called Dojigiri, "Monster Slayer." It was one of the "Five Best Swords Under Heaven," the others being the Demon, the Quarter Moon, the Rosary and the Great Tenta, all of which survive in museums. By comparison the lightsaber is somewhat lacking in back-story. Luke’s weapon has magical qualities – it inspires visions when grabbed by the future female Jedi, Rey -- but where is its character? What master made it? Where is its hamon? Where, in the words of a description of a blade by the 14th century smith Masamune, are its "bright varied lines of kinsuji, sunagashi and deep ashi?" No, I don’t know sword-speak either, but the terms hint at the depth of samurai tradition. To samurai, all swords were and are different. By comparison, all lightsabers seem pretty much the same.   Never mind. Stories with swords and lightsabers lead to the same end: the climactic fight that pits Good against Evil, tradition against novelty. They are the ultimate weapons by which great issues are decided. By Saigo’s time, armies had rifles, cannon, even early machine guns. His final battle on the slopes overlooking Kagoshima in Japan’s far south was like the last scene in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," with the odds hopelessly stacked against him, but with no freeze-frame. He knew he was going to die, and in his eyes his death was glorious, struck by bullets and beheaded by his own aide, as the code of seppuku (ritual suicide) dictated. Finn and Rey are also up against fearsome odds. Their opponent commands a weapon that blasts planets apart, and psychokinetic powers that enable him to freeze his prisoners and suck information from their brains. Yet in the end the struggle between Good and Evil, between First Order and Resistance, with interstellar fates in the balance, comes down to lightsabers and single combat and an enigmatic shot of the reclusive Luke and the triumph of Good in a mighty cataclysm. How Evil survived the apocalypse I have no idea, but I bet there’s a clue amid the explosions. In a year or two, we will all be watching Episode whatever to find out what happens next. In the telling and retelling of legends, this is exactly how things should be. I forgot about samurais, and loved it on its own terms, and so did the audience, and so will the world. John Man is a British historian and travel writer with a special interest in Asia. Educated at Oxford and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Man has written acclaimed biographies of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Kublai Khan, as well as "Ninja," a popular account of the legendary Japanese stealth assassins, and "Samurai," a popular history of the legendary elite class of Japanese warrior. In 2007 he was awarded Mongolia's prestigious Friendship Medal. Man lives in England.

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz must go, and the case Bernie Sanders must make tonight

`Tis nearly the night before Christmas and not a creature is stirring, what with everyone out at a party, multiplex or mall. What better time for a presidential debate? That at least is the view of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Clinton campaign, from which she takes her cues. They wanted the fewest possible voters to see the fewest possible debates. So we went from 26 debates in 2008 to six debates in 2016, three of them on weekends. It’s called the Democratic Party, but no one other than Clinton and Schultz had any say in the matter. On Thursday, the DNC told the press a contractor inadvertently breached a firewall in a software program exposing data files of presidential campaigns and that a Bernie Sanders staffer (Josh Uretsky, with the campaign three months) took the opportunity to sneak a peek at Hillary Clinton’s files. Sanders’ campaign instantly sacked the staffer but Schultz still cut off its access to data, a punishment she seems to have made up on the spot, thus bringing crucial outreach and fundraising efforts to a halt. Schultz didn’t even nod to due process, pronouncing the death penalty without so much as reading Sanders his Miranda rights. On Friday, Sanders’ campaign filed a federal lawsuit alleging breach of contract. It sought a restraining order and money damages that, assuming the facts set forth in the complaint, exceed a million dollars a day. It was a strong case. Uretsky may have behaved unethically but there was no malice aforethought-- the forbidden fruit fell in his lap—and from the moment the campaign learned of his possible malfeasance, it acted honorably and swiftly. Schultz, conversely, appears to have acted without color of authority under law, contract or party rule. The contract required written notice of termination and a 10-day grace period to cure any alleged default. Clearly the DNC was in violation, not Sanders. Because the contract put the onus for securing data on the DNC, it was liable for the breach as well. But the issue was bigger than mere contract law or political dirty tricks. In suspending the vital operations of a presidential campaign, Schultz trespassed on the right of all citizens to free and fair elections. Democrats could ill afford to be seen condoning her actions. Nor could they afford to pay her bills. If she acted without authority she’d be liable for damages, but only if the party was as swift and honorable in dealing with her as Sanders was in dealing with Uretsky. The party also had to ponder the sworn depositions Sanders might now take regarding such delicate matters as who Schultz spoke to about her decision to impale him. The long dormant Democratic base should have stopped her Schultz when she squelched debates. Now party leaders had to, or else hop on board her runaway train. But Thursday and then Friday passed with the leaders silent save for the sound of Schultz spewing venom at Sanders. Then a miracle happened. For the first time since the dawn of the Obama era, and arguably since the end of the Viet Nam War, progressive rose in mass protest of party elites. Petitions poured in to the DNC by the tens of thousands demanding that Sanders access to his data be restored. Shortly after midnight Saturday morning, the DNC caved to the pressure, albeit so gracelessly as to ensure ongoing recriminations. Schultz must go. Her subversion of due process puts one in mind of her fellow Floridian, Katherine Harris, who back in 2000 saw no conflict between her roles as chief state elections officer and campaign chair for George W. Bush. For all her annoying public petulance and backroom double dealing, Schultz has performed a service to her party and her country. She meant to give Hillary an assist by embarrassing and impeding Sanders. Instead she grew the audience for Saturday night’s debate and the traffic on Bernie Sanders’ web site. Thanks to her, this could really be the weekend when the force awakens. But much depends on Sanders, how he performs tonight; how he runs his campaign from her on out. Schultz handed Bernie Sanders a gift, but to put it to its best use he must do three things. All are things he can do but has thus far elected not to do. He can confound the polls and alter the course of this is a gut check. Here’s what I hope his gut is telling him. 1. Clarifying a choice isn’t ‘negative politics.’ This week Sanders pulled an ad that merely said Clinton took money from “big money interests.” In their last debate Clinton made the preposterous claim that her love for Wall Street was somehow connected to 9/11. It fell to Twitter  to challenge her. When Sanders observed that Wall Street was her “major campaign contributor,” Clinton cried foul. He should have looked her in the eye and said he wasn’t calling her corrupt, he was calling the whole system corrupt, that pay to play politics was the cause of the slow death of the American middle class and that the reason he should be president instead of her is that he knew it and she didn’t. It would have been some debate after that. Sanders doesn’t want to be the guy who softened Clinton up for the Republican kill so he keeps hitting his own mute button. Trump threatens to run as an independent if Republicans don’t “treat me fairly.” Sanders gets knifed by Schultz and can’t call for her removal, only an audit of DNC management practices. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel ought to be impeached. Clinton stands by him. Sanders criticizes him, but never by name. He should lead the charge against Schultz and Emmanuel. It isn’t negative politics. It’s a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. 2. Sanders must engage issues of national security more fully and directly.  On the stump and in debate he tends to switch topics. The last debate came on the heels of the Paris attacks. In his opening remarks Sanders devoted all of two sentences to it. Four days later he gave a “major speech” explaining what ‘democratic socialism’ means to him. No one wants ISIS hijack the election, but Sanders must learn what Obama at last seems to grasp. It isn’t only reporters and the fear-mongering Republicans who question our policy. People are scared. And the policy has failed. War is the health of the Republicans, not least because it keeps our minds off other things. Sanders wants to talk about economic issues but to clear the conversational space he must first tell us of how he’d make us safe. There are progressive answers and Clinton sure doesn’t have them. In this week’s Republican debate, she’d have sided with the interventionists against those who question the strategies of regime change she has long championed. In a debate between her and Trump, he’d be the one urging caution on deploying ground troops. Nor can we leave it to Rand Paul to make the progressive case. Bernie Sanders must lay out both the facts and a vision. He must say that nuclear weapons and standing armies won’t defeat terrorism and that it is folly to go on pouring money into them; that we must end the secrecy that enabled politicians to lie their way into the traps of Viet Nam and Iraq; that climate change with all its droughts and disastrous weather events is indeed the greatest threat to our security now, not a hundred years from now; that globalization has spawned a permanent underclass filled with aimless, hopeless men from which both Dylan Roof and Tamerlan Tsarnaev sprang and that economic justice is the long term key to winning the ‘war on terror. He must say that in this ‘post 9/11world’ the United Nations, not the United States, is chiefly responsible for resolving global conflicts, resolution and that if it fails in its job our first job is to help it succeed. 3. Bernie can’t just call his campaign a movement, he must make it one. When I say this I hear from Sanders supporters who tell me it is already a movement and in many respects it is.  But as I often write, the biggest problem in our politics is the absence of a truly independent, progressive political movement, one in which the grass roots really get to shape major decisions; in which, when the campaign ends, the assets revert to the owners; in which there is less control but enough structure for people to organize effectively and for their voices to be heard. With the tumbrils rolling in the streets and the nation sensing itself under siege, the Democrats are preparing to run as the party of the status quo. If polls prove right, the election will offer a stark choice between pay to play politics and what smells like fascism. It isn’t as safe a bet as some seem to think. The politics that spawns fascism may not be the best politics by which to defeat it. We can defeat it. Bernie Sanders can by winning, or by winning enough to build a movement that brings the Democratic Party its first real platform fight in fifty years and that lives on as an independent force for change. Great things have happened for the Sanders campaign. In the teeth of the polls and the media, the Working Families Party and the Communications Workers of America made gutsy endorsements. Then Debbie did her part. You can feel a new energy in the air. It feels like a movement. The force awakens.`Tis nearly the night before Christmas and not a creature is stirring, what with everyone out at a party, multiplex or mall. What better time for a presidential debate? That at least is the view of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Clinton campaign, from which she takes her cues. They wanted the fewest possible voters to see the fewest possible debates. So we went from 26 debates in 2008 to six debates in 2016, three of them on weekends. It’s called the Democratic Party, but no one other than Clinton and Schultz had any say in the matter. On Thursday, the DNC told the press a contractor inadvertently breached a firewall in a software program exposing data files of presidential campaigns and that a Bernie Sanders staffer (Josh Uretsky, with the campaign three months) took the opportunity to sneak a peek at Hillary Clinton’s files. Sanders’ campaign instantly sacked the staffer but Schultz still cut off its access to data, a punishment she seems to have made up on the spot, thus bringing crucial outreach and fundraising efforts to a halt. Schultz didn’t even nod to due process, pronouncing the death penalty without so much as reading Sanders his Miranda rights. On Friday, Sanders’ campaign filed a federal lawsuit alleging breach of contract. It sought a restraining order and money damages that, assuming the facts set forth in the complaint, exceed a million dollars a day. It was a strong case. Uretsky may have behaved unethically but there was no malice aforethought-- the forbidden fruit fell in his lap—and from the moment the campaign learned of his possible malfeasance, it acted honorably and swiftly. Schultz, conversely, appears to have acted without color of authority under law, contract or party rule. The contract required written notice of termination and a 10-day grace period to cure any alleged default. Clearly the DNC was in violation, not Sanders. Because the contract put the onus for securing data on the DNC, it was liable for the breach as well. But the issue was bigger than mere contract law or political dirty tricks. In suspending the vital operations of a presidential campaign, Schultz trespassed on the right of all citizens to free and fair elections. Democrats could ill afford to be seen condoning her actions. Nor could they afford to pay her bills. If she acted without authority she’d be liable for damages, but only if the party was as swift and honorable in dealing with her as Sanders was in dealing with Uretsky. The party also had to ponder the sworn depositions Sanders might now take regarding such delicate matters as who Schultz spoke to about her decision to impale him. The long dormant Democratic base should have stopped her Schultz when she squelched debates. Now party leaders had to, or else hop on board her runaway train. But Thursday and then Friday passed with the leaders silent save for the sound of Schultz spewing venom at Sanders. Then a miracle happened. For the first time since the dawn of the Obama era, and arguably since the end of the Viet Nam War, progressive rose in mass protest of party elites. Petitions poured in to the DNC by the tens of thousands demanding that Sanders access to his data be restored. Shortly after midnight Saturday morning, the DNC caved to the pressure, albeit so gracelessly as to ensure ongoing recriminations. Schultz must go. Her subversion of due process puts one in mind of her fellow Floridian, Katherine Harris, who back in 2000 saw no conflict between her roles as chief state elections officer and campaign chair for George W. Bush. For all her annoying public petulance and backroom double dealing, Schultz has performed a service to her party and her country. She meant to give Hillary an assist by embarrassing and impeding Sanders. Instead she grew the audience for Saturday night’s debate and the traffic on Bernie Sanders’ web site. Thanks to her, this could really be the weekend when the force awakens. But much depends on Sanders, how he performs tonight; how he runs his campaign from her on out. Schultz handed Bernie Sanders a gift, but to put it to its best use he must do three things. All are things he can do but has thus far elected not to do. He can confound the polls and alter the course of this is a gut check. Here’s what I hope his gut is telling him. 1. Clarifying a choice isn’t ‘negative politics.’ This week Sanders pulled an ad that merely said Clinton took money from “big money interests.” In their last debate Clinton made the preposterous claim that her love for Wall Street was somehow connected to 9/11. It fell to Twitter  to challenge her. When Sanders observed that Wall Street was her “major campaign contributor,” Clinton cried foul. He should have looked her in the eye and said he wasn’t calling her corrupt, he was calling the whole system corrupt, that pay to play politics was the cause of the slow death of the American middle class and that the reason he should be president instead of her is that he knew it and she didn’t. It would have been some debate after that. Sanders doesn’t want to be the guy who softened Clinton up for the Republican kill so he keeps hitting his own mute button. Trump threatens to run as an independent if Republicans don’t “treat me fairly.” Sanders gets knifed by Schultz and can’t call for her removal, only an audit of DNC management practices. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel ought to be impeached. Clinton stands by him. Sanders criticizes him, but never by name. He should lead the charge against Schultz and Emmanuel. It isn’t negative politics. It’s a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. 2. Sanders must engage issues of national security more fully and directly.  On the stump and in debate he tends to switch topics. The last debate came on the heels of the Paris attacks. In his opening remarks Sanders devoted all of two sentences to it. Four days later he gave a “major speech” explaining what ‘democratic socialism’ means to him. No one wants ISIS hijack the election, but Sanders must learn what Obama at last seems to grasp. It isn’t only reporters and the fear-mongering Republicans who question our policy. People are scared. And the policy has failed. War is the health of the Republicans, not least because it keeps our minds off other things. Sanders wants to talk about economic issues but to clear the conversational space he must first tell us of how he’d make us safe. There are progressive answers and Clinton sure doesn’t have them. In this week’s Republican debate, she’d have sided with the interventionists against those who question the strategies of regime change she has long championed. In a debate between her and Trump, he’d be the one urging caution on deploying ground troops. Nor can we leave it to Rand Paul to make the progressive case. Bernie Sanders must lay out both the facts and a vision. He must say that nuclear weapons and standing armies won’t defeat terrorism and that it is folly to go on pouring money into them; that we must end the secrecy that enabled politicians to lie their way into the traps of Viet Nam and Iraq; that climate change with all its droughts and disastrous weather events is indeed the greatest threat to our security now, not a hundred years from now; that globalization has spawned a permanent underclass filled with aimless, hopeless men from which both Dylan Roof and Tamerlan Tsarnaev sprang and that economic justice is the long term key to winning the ‘war on terror. He must say that in this ‘post 9/11world’ the United Nations, not the United States, is chiefly responsible for resolving global conflicts, resolution and that if it fails in its job our first job is to help it succeed. 3. Bernie can’t just call his campaign a movement, he must make it one. When I say this I hear from Sanders supporters who tell me it is already a movement and in many respects it is.  But as I often write, the biggest problem in our politics is the absence of a truly independent, progressive political movement, one in which the grass roots really get to shape major decisions; in which, when the campaign ends, the assets revert to the owners; in which there is less control but enough structure for people to organize effectively and for their voices to be heard. With the tumbrils rolling in the streets and the nation sensing itself under siege, the Democrats are preparing to run as the party of the status quo. If polls prove right, the election will offer a stark choice between pay to play politics and what smells like fascism. It isn’t as safe a bet as some seem to think. The politics that spawns fascism may not be the best politics by which to defeat it. We can defeat it. Bernie Sanders can by winning, or by winning enough to build a movement that brings the Democratic Party its first real platform fight in fifty years and that lives on as an independent force for change. Great things have happened for the Sanders campaign. In the teeth of the polls and the media, the Working Families Party and the Communications Workers of America made gutsy endorsements. Then Debbie did her part. You can feel a new energy in the air. It feels like a movement. The force awakens.

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Our new post-Obama “Star Wars”: Race, the Force and the dark side in modern America

J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a fun and exciting film. Older audiences will be pleased as they remember their childhoods of the 1970s and 1980s. A new generation of fans who only know the more recent prequel films -- and were likely left wondering “Why is 'Star Wars' such a big deal?”— will finally begin to understand why "Star Wars" captivated several generations of viewers around the world. "Star Wars" is an example of “the monomyth” — a set of story forms and narrative structures that are common across all cultures and which together form a shared human mythology. As such, J.J. Abrams takes the "Star Wars" formula of a quest — a magical item, family secrets, the coming of age struggle, finding one’s destiny and the battle between good and evil — and continues it in "The Force Awakens." "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is for the most part a remix of "Star Wars: A New Hope." As an example of the monomyth and the subsequent repeated themes present in all the "Star Wars" films, this is to be expected. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" hearkens back to its origins in George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is also grounded firmly in the Age of Obama and a multicultural, “post-racial” present. The original "Star Wars" films created a filmic imaginary galaxy that was almost entirely populated by white people. "Star Wars" had a magical energy field called the Force, sentient droids, bizarre aliens, faster than light travel, lightsabers, and moon-sized battle stations that could destroy a planet with one blast of its laser. Yet there were no black or brown people in Lucas’s original 1977 film. What cultural critic and scholar bell hooks and others have described as “oppositional reading” turned the Star Wars universe upside down: If black and brown folks were not actually in the visual and narrative frame (or if there, depicted in a racist and derogatory manner by the White Gaze), they would imagine themselves still present in the movie. Black audiences would cheer on the “black” character Darth Vader as he killed “white” rebels. And there were no limitations on the racially transgressive act of childhood play where  kids on the ‘res, in black cities such as Chicago, communities like Harlem or in the barrios of Los Angeles would become Luke, Han, Leia or Chewbacca. George Lucas, to his credit, attempted to correct this oversight. He cast Billy Dee Williams, then one of, if not the, most recognizable African-American Hollywood leading man of the era, in "A New Hope’s" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back." Williams’ character would be one of the heroes in the (then) final movie Return of the Jedi. Billy Dee Williams would be joined in that movie by token and largely forgettable black characters -- noticed only because of their conspicuousness -- who were mostly cast in the role of random, nameless starfighter pilots and who died in the final climactic battle. Lucas tried to make a more diverse and representative world in his Star Wars prequels. But again, this well-intentioned effort was overshadowed by the Steppin Fetchit, race minstrel-like character known as Jar-Jar Binks, the Charlie Chan Asian caricatures of the Galactic Trade Federation and Watto, an anti-Semitic stereotype embodied by the greedy, craven, slave master who owned a young Anakin Skywalker on the planet Tatooine. Fortunately, people of color, especially those who are “Millennials” and younger, will not have to read themselves back into "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." The stars of Abrams’ new Star Wars film are a black Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) and a young white woman named “Rey” (Daisy Ridley). They are joined by a charismatic and heroic starfighter pilot named Poe Dameron, who is played by the Latino actor Oscar Isaac. There are people of color and women in almost every scene of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." This extends to the antagonists in Abrams’ new film as well. The newest iteration of the Empire — now known as the First Order — also demonstrates much more racial and gender diversity than its predecessor. In Lucas’s original films, the Empire’s soldiers were all white and male. They were modeled after the Nazis. More than just uniforms and regalia, the Empire possessed a racist, xenophobic and sexist political culture. This is not diversity as racial “tokenism.” The women and people of color who populate Abrams’ "Star Wars" film are present as quotidian fixtures; their existence is not marked by their uniqueness, but rather in how common and mundane humane diversity would be in the fantastical worlds of “a long time ago” and in “a galaxy far, far away.” The diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" has the potential to be remarkably empowering for those black and brown folks, and white viewers too, that see this as the new normal. However, we must be cautious. Celebrating the racial and gender diversity of a movie while not simultaneously understanding how Hollywood, and the mass media more generally, reproduces and reinforces sexism and racism, can also be a distraction from substantive political and social change work. There are of course, white (male) viewers who will be remarkably threatened and angered by how people of color and women are featured in the new Star Wars films. Why? Because for too long, science fiction as a genre, and popular culture more generally, were and remain fantasy play spaces for Whiteness and hegemonic White Masculinity. For that cognitive map, White men were always and naturally to be the center of all things. To disrupt this assumed norm and type of white male privilege in even minor ways is a cause for many of its owners to become panicked and rageful. Films are a society talking to itself about itself while searching its collective subconscious for meaning. Thus, film is an essential text that reveals a great deal about the socio-political moment of its creation. George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy was a response to the worries, depressed economy, malaise, internal strife and sense of American decline in the post-Vietnam years through the early Reagan 1980s. To that end, Lucas created a masterwork intended as a modern day fairy tale that would teach timeless lessons about humanity and justice in the motif of a space opera inspired by the comics and films he loved as a child and young adult. J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a product of a post-9/11 America that has been at perpetual war for more than a decade, a Great Recession/Depression 2.0 that destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation of Americans, obsessions about “Islamic Terrorism,” mass shootings that are a public health crisis, a broken and dying Earth, a society where less than half the population are now “middle class,” a reactionary and revanchist Republican Party, police thuggery against black and brown Americans, demagogues like Donald Trump and an increasing sense of hopeless and desperation among a public that is doing worse economically than their parents and grandparents — and whose children and grandchildren will likely continue this slide of downward mobility. As a whole, the Star Wars universe constitutes a parable that reflects our American (and global) present. In this moment Americans can choose to turn to the light side of the Force -- a progressive, humane and truly democratic and just world. Alternatively, the American people can surrender to the dark side of the Force -- a state of militarism, violence, human misery, immiseration, xenophobia, racism, prejudice, fear, suspicion, hatred, the neoliberal nightmare and the movement conservative war on the poor, people of color, women and any group its agents identify as weak and vulnerable. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is, of course, not perfect. The friendship between Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron feels very rushed and a bit forced in the opening acts of the movie. John Williams’ music has the aesthetic sensibilities and emotion of his earlier "Star Wars" work, but lacks an iconic moment such as the “Duel of the Fates” from "The Phantom Menace" or the main theme from "A New Hope." In what is an otherwise very good performance, John Boyega too often defaults to awkward moments of comic relief. This is a common problem with how black characters are depicted in Hollywood films. Likewise, J.J. Abrams, for all of the great racial (and species) diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," falls back to a tired habit in mainstream American science fiction films where black and brown actors (in this case Maz Kanata, played by Nigerian actress Lupita Nyong’o) are either disguised by prosthetics or transformed into computer generated characters. This is a carryover from classic “golden age” American science fiction where racial erasure was accomplished by turning non-whites into robots and aliens for the purposes of either well-intentioned allegory about the social evils of racism and prejudice or just plain old fashioned, ugly white supremacy. The "Star Wars" prequels were released approximately 20 years after George Lucas’s first "Star Wars" film in 1977. "The Force Awakens" has arrived approximately 20 years after "The Phantom Menace." J.J. Abrams has accomplished something wonderful and admirable with his new "Star Wars" film. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" feels both old and new, familiar and surprising at the same time, connecting generations of fans while wiping away the horrid missteps of the ill-conceived "Star Wars" prequels. One of the strongest criticism leveled at George Lucas’s last "Star Wars" movies was that there were many moments where it felt as though he had forgotten what made "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" so magical and awe-inspiring. In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," J.J. Abrams has not made that mistake. He is a "Star Wars" devotee and it shows in every frame of the film.J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a fun and exciting film. Older audiences will be pleased as they remember their childhoods of the 1970s and 1980s. A new generation of fans who only know the more recent prequel films -- and were likely left wondering “Why is 'Star Wars' such a big deal?”— will finally begin to understand why "Star Wars" captivated several generations of viewers around the world. "Star Wars" is an example of “the monomyth” — a set of story forms and narrative structures that are common across all cultures and which together form a shared human mythology. As such, J.J. Abrams takes the "Star Wars" formula of a quest — a magical item, family secrets, the coming of age struggle, finding one’s destiny and the battle between good and evil — and continues it in "The Force Awakens." "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is for the most part a remix of "Star Wars: A New Hope." As an example of the monomyth and the subsequent repeated themes present in all the "Star Wars" films, this is to be expected. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" hearkens back to its origins in George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is also grounded firmly in the Age of Obama and a multicultural, “post-racial” present. The original "Star Wars" films created a filmic imaginary galaxy that was almost entirely populated by white people. "Star Wars" had a magical energy field called the Force, sentient droids, bizarre aliens, faster than light travel, lightsabers, and moon-sized battle stations that could destroy a planet with one blast of its laser. Yet there were no black or brown people in Lucas’s original 1977 film. What cultural critic and scholar bell hooks and others have described as “oppositional reading” turned the Star Wars universe upside down: If black and brown folks were not actually in the visual and narrative frame (or if there, depicted in a racist and derogatory manner by the White Gaze), they would imagine themselves still present in the movie. Black audiences would cheer on the “black” character Darth Vader as he killed “white” rebels. And there were no limitations on the racially transgressive act of childhood play where  kids on the ‘res, in black cities such as Chicago, communities like Harlem or in the barrios of Los Angeles would become Luke, Han, Leia or Chewbacca. George Lucas, to his credit, attempted to correct this oversight. He cast Billy Dee Williams, then one of, if not the, most recognizable African-American Hollywood leading man of the era, in "A New Hope’s" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back." Williams’ character would be one of the heroes in the (then) final movie Return of the Jedi. Billy Dee Williams would be joined in that movie by token and largely forgettable black characters -- noticed only because of their conspicuousness -- who were mostly cast in the role of random, nameless starfighter pilots and who died in the final climactic battle. Lucas tried to make a more diverse and representative world in his Star Wars prequels. But again, this well-intentioned effort was overshadowed by the Steppin Fetchit, race minstrel-like character known as Jar-Jar Binks, the Charlie Chan Asian caricatures of the Galactic Trade Federation and Watto, an anti-Semitic stereotype embodied by the greedy, craven, slave master who owned a young Anakin Skywalker on the planet Tatooine. Fortunately, people of color, especially those who are “Millennials” and younger, will not have to read themselves back into "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." The stars of Abrams’ new Star Wars film are a black Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) and a young white woman named “Rey” (Daisy Ridley). They are joined by a charismatic and heroic starfighter pilot named Poe Dameron, who is played by the Latino actor Oscar Isaac. There are people of color and women in almost every scene of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." This extends to the antagonists in Abrams’ new film as well. The newest iteration of the Empire — now known as the First Order — also demonstrates much more racial and gender diversity than its predecessor. In Lucas’s original films, the Empire’s soldiers were all white and male. They were modeled after the Nazis. More than just uniforms and regalia, the Empire possessed a racist, xenophobic and sexist political culture. This is not diversity as racial “tokenism.” The women and people of color who populate Abrams’ "Star Wars" film are present as quotidian fixtures; their existence is not marked by their uniqueness, but rather in how common and mundane humane diversity would be in the fantastical worlds of “a long time ago” and in “a galaxy far, far away.” The diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" has the potential to be remarkably empowering for those black and brown folks, and white viewers too, that see this as the new normal. However, we must be cautious. Celebrating the racial and gender diversity of a movie while not simultaneously understanding how Hollywood, and the mass media more generally, reproduces and reinforces sexism and racism, can also be a distraction from substantive political and social change work. There are of course, white (male) viewers who will be remarkably threatened and angered by how people of color and women are featured in the new Star Wars films. Why? Because for too long, science fiction as a genre, and popular culture more generally, were and remain fantasy play spaces for Whiteness and hegemonic White Masculinity. For that cognitive map, White men were always and naturally to be the center of all things. To disrupt this assumed norm and type of white male privilege in even minor ways is a cause for many of its owners to become panicked and rageful. Films are a society talking to itself about itself while searching its collective subconscious for meaning. Thus, film is an essential text that reveals a great deal about the socio-political moment of its creation. George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy was a response to the worries, depressed economy, malaise, internal strife and sense of American decline in the post-Vietnam years through the early Reagan 1980s. To that end, Lucas created a masterwork intended as a modern day fairy tale that would teach timeless lessons about humanity and justice in the motif of a space opera inspired by the comics and films he loved as a child and young adult. J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a product of a post-9/11 America that has been at perpetual war for more than a decade, a Great Recession/Depression 2.0 that destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation of Americans, obsessions about “Islamic Terrorism,” mass shootings that are a public health crisis, a broken and dying Earth, a society where less than half the population are now “middle class,” a reactionary and revanchist Republican Party, police thuggery against black and brown Americans, demagogues like Donald Trump and an increasing sense of hopeless and desperation among a public that is doing worse economically than their parents and grandparents — and whose children and grandchildren will likely continue this slide of downward mobility. As a whole, the Star Wars universe constitutes a parable that reflects our American (and global) present. In this moment Americans can choose to turn to the light side of the Force -- a progressive, humane and truly democratic and just world. Alternatively, the American people can surrender to the dark side of the Force -- a state of militarism, violence, human misery, immiseration, xenophobia, racism, prejudice, fear, suspicion, hatred, the neoliberal nightmare and the movement conservative war on the poor, people of color, women and any group its agents identify as weak and vulnerable. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is, of course, not perfect. The friendship between Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron feels very rushed and a bit forced in the opening acts of the movie. John Williams’ music has the aesthetic sensibilities and emotion of his earlier "Star Wars" work, but lacks an iconic moment such as the “Duel of the Fates” from "The Phantom Menace" or the main theme from "A New Hope." In what is an otherwise very good performance, John Boyega too often defaults to awkward moments of comic relief. This is a common problem with how black characters are depicted in Hollywood films. Likewise, J.J. Abrams, for all of the great racial (and species) diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," falls back to a tired habit in mainstream American science fiction films where black and brown actors (in this case Maz Kanata, played by Nigerian actress Lupita Nyong’o) are either disguised by prosthetics or transformed into computer generated characters. This is a carryover from classic “golden age” American science fiction where racial erasure was accomplished by turning non-whites into robots and aliens for the purposes of either well-intentioned allegory about the social evils of racism and prejudice or just plain old fashioned, ugly white supremacy. The "Star Wars" prequels were released approximately 20 years after George Lucas’s first "Star Wars" film in 1977. "The Force Awakens" has arrived approximately 20 years after "The Phantom Menace." J.J. Abrams has accomplished something wonderful and admirable with his new "Star Wars" film. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" feels both old and new, familiar and surprising at the same time, connecting generations of fans while wiping away the horrid missteps of the ill-conceived "Star Wars" prequels. One of the strongest criticism leveled at George Lucas’s last "Star Wars" movies was that there were many moments where it felt as though he had forgotten what made "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" so magical and awe-inspiring. In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," J.J. Abrams has not made that mistake. He is a "Star Wars" devotee and it shows in every frame of the film.J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a fun and exciting film. Older audiences will be pleased as they remember their childhoods of the 1970s and 1980s. A new generation of fans who only know the more recent prequel films -- and were likely left wondering “Why is 'Star Wars' such a big deal?”— will finally begin to understand why "Star Wars" captivated several generations of viewers around the world. "Star Wars" is an example of “the monomyth” — a set of story forms and narrative structures that are common across all cultures and which together form a shared human mythology. As such, J.J. Abrams takes the "Star Wars" formula of a quest — a magical item, family secrets, the coming of age struggle, finding one’s destiny and the battle between good and evil — and continues it in "The Force Awakens." "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is for the most part a remix of "Star Wars: A New Hope." As an example of the monomyth and the subsequent repeated themes present in all the "Star Wars" films, this is to be expected. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" hearkens back to its origins in George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is also grounded firmly in the Age of Obama and a multicultural, “post-racial” present. The original "Star Wars" films created a filmic imaginary galaxy that was almost entirely populated by white people. "Star Wars" had a magical energy field called the Force, sentient droids, bizarre aliens, faster than light travel, lightsabers, and moon-sized battle stations that could destroy a planet with one blast of its laser. Yet there were no black or brown people in Lucas’s original 1977 film. What cultural critic and scholar bell hooks and others have described as “oppositional reading” turned the Star Wars universe upside down: If black and brown folks were not actually in the visual and narrative frame (or if there, depicted in a racist and derogatory manner by the White Gaze), they would imagine themselves still present in the movie. Black audiences would cheer on the “black” character Darth Vader as he killed “white” rebels. And there were no limitations on the racially transgressive act of childhood play where  kids on the ‘res, in black cities such as Chicago, communities like Harlem or in the barrios of Los Angeles would become Luke, Han, Leia or Chewbacca. George Lucas, to his credit, attempted to correct this oversight. He cast Billy Dee Williams, then one of, if not the, most recognizable African-American Hollywood leading man of the era, in "A New Hope’s" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back." Williams’ character would be one of the heroes in the (then) final movie Return of the Jedi. Billy Dee Williams would be joined in that movie by token and largely forgettable black characters -- noticed only because of their conspicuousness -- who were mostly cast in the role of random, nameless starfighter pilots and who died in the final climactic battle. Lucas tried to make a more diverse and representative world in his Star Wars prequels. But again, this well-intentioned effort was overshadowed by the Steppin Fetchit, race minstrel-like character known as Jar-Jar Binks, the Charlie Chan Asian caricatures of the Galactic Trade Federation and Watto, an anti-Semitic stereotype embodied by the greedy, craven, slave master who owned a young Anakin Skywalker on the planet Tatooine. Fortunately, people of color, especially those who are “Millennials” and younger, will not have to read themselves back into "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." The stars of Abrams’ new Star Wars film are a black Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) and a young white woman named “Rey” (Daisy Ridley). They are joined by a charismatic and heroic starfighter pilot named Poe Dameron, who is played by the Latino actor Oscar Isaac. There are people of color and women in almost every scene of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." This extends to the antagonists in Abrams’ new film as well. The newest iteration of the Empire — now known as the First Order — also demonstrates much more racial and gender diversity than its predecessor. In Lucas’s original films, the Empire’s soldiers were all white and male. They were modeled after the Nazis. More than just uniforms and regalia, the Empire possessed a racist, xenophobic and sexist political culture. This is not diversity as racial “tokenism.” The women and people of color who populate Abrams’ "Star Wars" film are present as quotidian fixtures; their existence is not marked by their uniqueness, but rather in how common and mundane humane diversity would be in the fantastical worlds of “a long time ago” and in “a galaxy far, far away.” The diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" has the potential to be remarkably empowering for those black and brown folks, and white viewers too, that see this as the new normal. However, we must be cautious. Celebrating the racial and gender diversity of a movie while not simultaneously understanding how Hollywood, and the mass media more generally, reproduces and reinforces sexism and racism, can also be a distraction from substantive political and social change work. There are of course, white (male) viewers who will be remarkably threatened and angered by how people of color and women are featured in the new Star Wars films. Why? Because for too long, science fiction as a genre, and popular culture more generally, were and remain fantasy play spaces for Whiteness and hegemonic White Masculinity. For that cognitive map, White men were always and naturally to be the center of all things. To disrupt this assumed norm and type of white male privilege in even minor ways is a cause for many of its owners to become panicked and rageful. Films are a society talking to itself about itself while searching its collective subconscious for meaning. Thus, film is an essential text that reveals a great deal about the socio-political moment of its creation. George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy was a response to the worries, depressed economy, malaise, internal strife and sense of American decline in the post-Vietnam years through the early Reagan 1980s. To that end, Lucas created a masterwork intended as a modern day fairy tale that would teach timeless lessons about humanity and justice in the motif of a space opera inspired by the comics and films he loved as a child and young adult. J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a product of a post-9/11 America that has been at perpetual war for more than a decade, a Great Recession/Depression 2.0 that destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation of Americans, obsessions about “Islamic Terrorism,” mass shootings that are a public health crisis, a broken and dying Earth, a society where less than half the population are now “middle class,” a reactionary and revanchist Republican Party, police thuggery against black and brown Americans, demagogues like Donald Trump and an increasing sense of hopeless and desperation among a public that is doing worse economically than their parents and grandparents — and whose children and grandchildren will likely continue this slide of downward mobility. As a whole, the Star Wars universe constitutes a parable that reflects our American (and global) present. In this moment Americans can choose to turn to the light side of the Force -- a progressive, humane and truly democratic and just world. Alternatively, the American people can surrender to the dark side of the Force -- a state of militarism, violence, human misery, immiseration, xenophobia, racism, prejudice, fear, suspicion, hatred, the neoliberal nightmare and the movement conservative war on the poor, people of color, women and any group its agents identify as weak and vulnerable. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is, of course, not perfect. The friendship between Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron feels very rushed and a bit forced in the opening acts of the movie. John Williams’ music has the aesthetic sensibilities and emotion of his earlier "Star Wars" work, but lacks an iconic moment such as the “Duel of the Fates” from "The Phantom Menace" or the main theme from "A New Hope." In what is an otherwise very good performance, John Boyega too often defaults to awkward moments of comic relief. This is a common problem with how black characters are depicted in Hollywood films. Likewise, J.J. Abrams, for all of the great racial (and species) diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," falls back to a tired habit in mainstream American science fiction films where black and brown actors (in this case Maz Kanata, played by Nigerian actress Lupita Nyong’o) are either disguised by prosthetics or transformed into computer generated characters. This is a carryover from classic “golden age” American science fiction where racial erasure was accomplished by turning non-whites into robots and aliens for the purposes of either well-intentioned allegory about the social evils of racism and prejudice or just plain old fashioned, ugly white supremacy. The "Star Wars" prequels were released approximately 20 years after George Lucas’s first "Star Wars" film in 1977. "The Force Awakens" has arrived approximately 20 years after "The Phantom Menace." J.J. Abrams has accomplished something wonderful and admirable with his new "Star Wars" film. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" feels both old and new, familiar and surprising at the same time, connecting generations of fans while wiping away the horrid missteps of the ill-conceived "Star Wars" prequels. One of the strongest criticism leveled at George Lucas’s last "Star Wars" movies was that there were many moments where it felt as though he had forgotten what made "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" so magical and awe-inspiring. In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," J.J. Abrams has not made that mistake. He is a "Star Wars" devotee and it shows in every frame of the film.J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a fun and exciting film. Older audiences will be pleased as they remember their childhoods of the 1970s and 1980s. A new generation of fans who only know the more recent prequel films -- and were likely left wondering “Why is 'Star Wars' such a big deal?”— will finally begin to understand why "Star Wars" captivated several generations of viewers around the world. "Star Wars" is an example of “the monomyth” — a set of story forms and narrative structures that are common across all cultures and which together form a shared human mythology. As such, J.J. Abrams takes the "Star Wars" formula of a quest — a magical item, family secrets, the coming of age struggle, finding one’s destiny and the battle between good and evil — and continues it in "The Force Awakens." "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is for the most part a remix of "Star Wars: A New Hope." As an example of the monomyth and the subsequent repeated themes present in all the "Star Wars" films, this is to be expected. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" hearkens back to its origins in George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is also grounded firmly in the Age of Obama and a multicultural, “post-racial” present. The original "Star Wars" films created a filmic imaginary galaxy that was almost entirely populated by white people. "Star Wars" had a magical energy field called the Force, sentient droids, bizarre aliens, faster than light travel, lightsabers, and moon-sized battle stations that could destroy a planet with one blast of its laser. Yet there were no black or brown people in Lucas’s original 1977 film. What cultural critic and scholar bell hooks and others have described as “oppositional reading” turned the Star Wars universe upside down: If black and brown folks were not actually in the visual and narrative frame (or if there, depicted in a racist and derogatory manner by the White Gaze), they would imagine themselves still present in the movie. Black audiences would cheer on the “black” character Darth Vader as he killed “white” rebels. And there were no limitations on the racially transgressive act of childhood play where  kids on the ‘res, in black cities such as Chicago, communities like Harlem or in the barrios of Los Angeles would become Luke, Han, Leia or Chewbacca. George Lucas, to his credit, attempted to correct this oversight. He cast Billy Dee Williams, then one of, if not the, most recognizable African-American Hollywood leading man of the era, in "A New Hope’s" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back." Williams’ character would be one of the heroes in the (then) final movie Return of the Jedi. Billy Dee Williams would be joined in that movie by token and largely forgettable black characters -- noticed only because of their conspicuousness -- who were mostly cast in the role of random, nameless starfighter pilots and who died in the final climactic battle. Lucas tried to make a more diverse and representative world in his Star Wars prequels. But again, this well-intentioned effort was overshadowed by the Steppin Fetchit, race minstrel-like character known as Jar-Jar Binks, the Charlie Chan Asian caricatures of the Galactic Trade Federation and Watto, an anti-Semitic stereotype embodied by the greedy, craven, slave master who owned a young Anakin Skywalker on the planet Tatooine. Fortunately, people of color, especially those who are “Millennials” and younger, will not have to read themselves back into "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." The stars of Abrams’ new Star Wars film are a black Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) and a young white woman named “Rey” (Daisy Ridley). They are joined by a charismatic and heroic starfighter pilot named Poe Dameron, who is played by the Latino actor Oscar Isaac. There are people of color and women in almost every scene of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." This extends to the antagonists in Abrams’ new film as well. The newest iteration of the Empire — now known as the First Order — also demonstrates much more racial and gender diversity than its predecessor. In Lucas’s original films, the Empire’s soldiers were all white and male. They were modeled after the Nazis. More than just uniforms and regalia, the Empire possessed a racist, xenophobic and sexist political culture. This is not diversity as racial “tokenism.” The women and people of color who populate Abrams’ "Star Wars" film are present as quotidian fixtures; their existence is not marked by their uniqueness, but rather in how common and mundane humane diversity would be in the fantastical worlds of “a long time ago” and in “a galaxy far, far away.” The diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" has the potential to be remarkably empowering for those black and brown folks, and white viewers too, that see this as the new normal. However, we must be cautious. Celebrating the racial and gender diversity of a movie while not simultaneously understanding how Hollywood, and the mass media more generally, reproduces and reinforces sexism and racism, can also be a distraction from substantive political and social change work. There are of course, white (male) viewers who will be remarkably threatened and angered by how people of color and women are featured in the new Star Wars films. Why? Because for too long, science fiction as a genre, and popular culture more generally, were and remain fantasy play spaces for Whiteness and hegemonic White Masculinity. For that cognitive map, White men were always and naturally to be the center of all things. To disrupt this assumed norm and type of white male privilege in even minor ways is a cause for many of its owners to become panicked and rageful. Films are a society talking to itself about itself while searching its collective subconscious for meaning. Thus, film is an essential text that reveals a great deal about the socio-political moment of its creation. George Lucas’s original "Star Wars" trilogy was a response to the worries, depressed economy, malaise, internal strife and sense of American decline in the post-Vietnam years through the early Reagan 1980s. To that end, Lucas created a masterwork intended as a modern day fairy tale that would teach timeless lessons about humanity and justice in the motif of a space opera inspired by the comics and films he loved as a child and young adult. J.J. Abrams’ "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a product of a post-9/11 America that has been at perpetual war for more than a decade, a Great Recession/Depression 2.0 that destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation of Americans, obsessions about “Islamic Terrorism,” mass shootings that are a public health crisis, a broken and dying Earth, a society where less than half the population are now “middle class,” a reactionary and revanchist Republican Party, police thuggery against black and brown Americans, demagogues like Donald Trump and an increasing sense of hopeless and desperation among a public that is doing worse economically than their parents and grandparents — and whose children and grandchildren will likely continue this slide of downward mobility. As a whole, the Star Wars universe constitutes a parable that reflects our American (and global) present. In this moment Americans can choose to turn to the light side of the Force -- a progressive, humane and truly democratic and just world. Alternatively, the American people can surrender to the dark side of the Force -- a state of militarism, violence, human misery, immiseration, xenophobia, racism, prejudice, fear, suspicion, hatred, the neoliberal nightmare and the movement conservative war on the poor, people of color, women and any group its agents identify as weak and vulnerable. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is, of course, not perfect. The friendship between Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron feels very rushed and a bit forced in the opening acts of the movie. John Williams’ music has the aesthetic sensibilities and emotion of his earlier "Star Wars" work, but lacks an iconic moment such as the “Duel of the Fates” from "The Phantom Menace" or the main theme from "A New Hope." In what is an otherwise very good performance, John Boyega too often defaults to awkward moments of comic relief. This is a common problem with how black characters are depicted in Hollywood films. Likewise, J.J. Abrams, for all of the great racial (and species) diversity in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," falls back to a tired habit in mainstream American science fiction films where black and brown actors (in this case Maz Kanata, played by Nigerian actress Lupita Nyong’o) are either disguised by prosthetics or transformed into computer generated characters. This is a carryover from classic “golden age” American science fiction where racial erasure was accomplished by turning non-whites into robots and aliens for the purposes of either well-intentioned allegory about the social evils of racism and prejudice or just plain old fashioned, ugly white supremacy. The "Star Wars" prequels were released approximately 20 years after George Lucas’s first "Star Wars" film in 1977. "The Force Awakens" has arrived approximately 20 years after "The Phantom Menace." J.J. Abrams has accomplished something wonderful and admirable with his new "Star Wars" film. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" feels both old and new, familiar and surprising at the same time, connecting generations of fans while wiping away the horrid missteps of the ill-conceived "Star Wars" prequels. One of the strongest criticism leveled at George Lucas’s last "Star Wars" movies was that there were many moments where it felt as though he had forgotten what made "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" so magical and awe-inspiring. In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," J.J. Abrams has not made that mistake. He is a "Star Wars" devotee and it shows in every frame of the film.

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Gunfire erupts inside Wisconsin mall on busy shopping day

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Gunfire erupted Saturday inside a large Wisconsin shopping mall on one of the busiest shopping days before Christmas, leaving a man wounded in the leg, police said.

The East Towne Mall in Madison was shut down after the shooting broke out just before 3 p.m. on the Saturday before Christmas. According to a statement posted on its website, Madison police said they were still looking for a suspect.

"This is not an active shooter. This is not an act of terrorism," Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain told The Associated Press.

Witnesses told police that several young men were involved in a "disturbance" in the middle of the mall. One pulled out a handgun and fired at least one round. A 19-year-old man involved in the initial dispute was struck in the leg. He was taken to the hospital with a non-life-threatening injury.

"My understanding is it was a chaotic scene," DeSpain said. He said the mall remained closed late Saturday afternoon.

Police said the mall had been secured by late afternoon.

Photos from the scene showed several police officers and a number of police vehicles outside the mall. A notice on the mall's website said the mall "is temporarily closed due to a safety concern."

East Towne Mall is an 840,000-square-foot shopping center with 110 specialty retailers, according to its website.

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3 scientifically proven ways to be a better gift giver

One of the best gifts I ever received was from my long-distance friend Kelly. When my second daughter arrived and life was thrown into that special brand of chaos that only parents with a toddler plus a newborn can know, a huge box arrived at the door. It wasn't a care package of cashmere onesies or a hand-knitted baby blanket. It was a Styrofoam cooler brimming with everything we needed for three or four meals' worth of Portillo's Chicago-style hot dogs: the tomatoes, the onions, the dill pickles, even the celery salt and the soft, seeded buns. For a ravenous breastfeeding mom and her sleep-deprived, Chicago-native husband, there was nothing we could have wanted more. After looking into the research around gifting (and there's plenty of it), the reasons that cooler was such a home run are clear. Want to become that good a giver? Follow these three evidence-based rules for giving good presents—just in time for the holidays! #1 Simple and practical is good. A 2009 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that although givers tend to think a fancier, expensive gift will be appreciated more, receivers are actually happier with cheaper, more practical presents. In the experiment, friends gave one another a new pen (the pairs were students, for whom pens are always at a premium). The givers thought their friends would prefer a heavy, fancy, special-occasion pen, but the getters in fact preferred the cheaper, lighter, portable one. “You think that things like price and the effort you put into a gift will matter, but the person you're giving it to doesn't see the work that went into it or the price tag—they just have the actual thing to focus on and how it will fit into their life,” says Nathan Novemsky, a professor of marketing at Yale University who has done quite a bit of research on gift giving himself. In one of Novemsky's recent studies, participants filled out a survey in which they imagined either giving or getting a gift certificate to a restaurant. Givers thought people would like a voucher for a five-star place a few towns over—but receivers preferred gift cards for a restaurant that was middle of the road but right around the corner. Both men and women tended to prefer the practical choice. #2 Don't overdo the gift wrap. When Novemsky told me about some research he is doing now that suggests wrapping a present in a plain brown paper bag—or not at all—might be better than something gorgeous and beribboned, I thought, “No way! This is total holiday heresy.” (I spend a couple of hours in Target every December carefully choosing my new palette of Christmas wrapping paper and ribbons.) But it made sense once he explained: pretty wrapping raises expectations for a gift and increases the risk of the receiver being disappointed if the present doesn't live up to them. “It's like giving someone a Sears gift card in a Tiffany box,” he says. So unless you're sure the gift is going to kill—there's a Tiffany ring in that Tiffany box—consider toning down the packaging. #3 Ask what the person wants. I used to think my husband's family was super weird for giving one another gift lists at Christmas and on birthdays. Where's the surprise? The effort? The proof that you know the person so well that you can divine exactly what he or she wants without asking? But there comes a point in your life when you just don't want any more useless—though well-intentioned—junk. So when John asked me what I might like for my birthday last year, I told him exactly what I wanted: a new Roku—a sleek, little box to stream Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime onto our television. He looked at me with crazy eyes. “Electronics? Isn't that kind of … not romantic or heartfelt or something?” I shrugged, “I dunno, maybe”—but I wanted it. When he gave it to me as requested, I was beyond thrilled. Research from Harvard and Stanford business schools published in 2011 found that gift receivers in general are much happier when they're given exactly what they asked for rather than something “thoughtful” that wasn't on their list. This year, instead of filling John's stocking with random stuff I think he'll like, I'm going to ask him to cc me on his Christmas gift e-mail to his mom. And then I'll get him exactly what he wants.

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Republican doom doesn’t equal Democrat victory: Our political chaos could destroy them both

This was a week that featured an epic level of badness and stupidity in America, but those on the leftward half of the political arena – accepting for the moment that the venerable terms “left” and “right” have not been rendered hilarious by historical circumstance – found a silver lining. On closer inspection, however, I’m beginning to suspect it’s a tinfoil hat. We have been told once again, for the 443rd time, that sooner or later all the leathery, old, white Republicans will wither away and Democrats will inherit the earth. Sounds good in theory, but I have two questions: What Democrats? And what earth? There was another insane GOP candidates’ debate, on a night when I was called away to watch the new “Star Wars” movie – which, whatever its flaws, had fewer problems with continuity and clarity. This debate was purportedly about foreign policy, which in Republican-land is a nebulous realm synonymous with one of those horror movies where the killer is inside the house. In all seriousness, when did right-wingers get so damn scared about everything? It would be funny if it weren’t also gruesome and grotesque: Republicans are supposed to be the testosterone party of rugged American individualism, as seen in Chevy Silverado commercials, and what I saw on that stage was not John Wayne facing down two dozen Comanche warriors but a bunch of lardass dudes with boiled-lobster complexions and quivering jowls, terrified of the invisible Muslim mice under the bed. All these debates are unhinged from reality by definition, but this one was special. If Abbott and Costello had dropped acid in the ‘70s and made a film with Bertolucci or Fassbinder – well, it would have been more fun than this. Chris Christie shouted into the camera that he would stand across from King Hussein and vow undying friendship in a way our current president simply cannot. Which is a little bit true, since the longtime ruler of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan departed for other shores in 1999. (Of course I am tempted to crack a joke about the fiery climes where he and Christie will meet one day, but His Late Majesty does not deserve that.) Carly Fiorina continues to make great strides for women, smashing the glass ceiling of mendacity, then Supergluing it back together and smashing it again. Already famous for the gory Planned Parenthood video she apparently saw while on a vision-quest (since it exists not in this world), Fiorina now insists that a general who retired five years before Obama was elected – wait, hang on, a general who retired before Obama was elected to the Senate -- was actually fired for giving the president unwelcome news. “No I wasn’t,” said Gen. Jack Keane, the person in question. “You were, General, you were,” said Morgan le Fay – sorry, Fiorina – weaving ancient, smoky magic with her lithe fingers and flashing eyes. “Enter my castle and I will unbind your tongue.” At least that’s how I heard it – that part admittedly does not show up in the transcript. I'm not sure what Donald Trump said in the debate, because I honestly can’t listen to that guy anymore. But Vladimir Putin has stopped ignoring Trump’s cards and flowers! Cue the violins, because the 21st century’s greatest rom-com is nearing the meet-cute: Trump once called Putin his “stable mate,” and don’t even pretend that’s not hot. I’m sensing a friendly, sweaty wrassle in the hay, where eyes meet and passions can no longer be contained. This week the Russian president described the GOP frontrunner as “a bright and talented person without any doubt,” not to mention “an outstanding and talented personality.” (Translation issues? Or does Putin always sound like a Miss Universe judge?) Were it possible for Trump to blush crimson through the layers of weaponized money applied to his outermost hide, he would have. Asked by Joe Scarborough on MSNBC about Putin’s propensity for eliminating dissidents and invading other countries, Trump responded, “At least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country. Furthermore, Joe, if loving him is wrong, I don’t want to be right.” OK, so that sentence is also absent from the transcript. Just ask Carly – that’s how she heard it! Anyway, I insist on taking some credit here, because I either predicted this glorious bromance or caused it to happen, I’m not sure which. I won’t try to be amusing about the steady drumbeat of cable-news fear-mongering over a perceived terrorist threat that lies somewhere between insignificant and imaginary, but of course that wasn’t limited to this week alone. During that godawful CNN debate, Hugh Hewitt asked Ben Carson whether he had the stones “to kill innocent children by not the scores but the hundreds and the thousands,” in the name of our endless jihad against jihad. Because that’s what presidents do, evidently. Some lady in the Virginia boondocks had a dozen Christian kittens over her kid’s middle-school assignment to transcribe the shahada, or Muslim declaration of faith, in Arabic calligraphy. (Yeah, the teacher could have picked a different text, but we’re still talking Morons Gone Wild here.) Apparently there have been at least 38 hate crimes against Muslims or mosques in the United States since the Paris attacks, triple the normal rate. That brings us back, however reluctantly, to the Democrats, who have hidden away their last pre-Iowa presidential debate on the Saturday night of “Star Wars” weekend. No, I’m not claiming that was part of some brilliant Clintonista master plan – the same one some Republicans discern behind the Trump campaign – but it’s kind of working out that way. In theory, this could or should have been a big week for Bernie Sanders, who received his biggest single endorsement of the campaign from the Communications Workers of America, an activist union with more than 700,000 members. But Sanders only made the front page this week by way of a kerfuffle over a data breach and some proprietary files his workers apparently lifted from the Clinton campaign. So while everybody else was screaming in abject terror, Bernie was depicted as the bush-league socialist version of Richard Nixon. As for Hillary Clinton, her strategy of rope-a-doping her way into the White House by saying and doing as little as possible, while the Republicans set themselves on fire, vow to divert the entire federal budget to the Spanish Inquisition and conjure demons out of Lord Voldemort’s playbook – that’s looking better all the time. In fairness, Clinton has not aided or abetted the rising tide of anti-Muslim vitriol in any way; her messaging on that issue has been consistent and admirable. But Sanders finally raised an urgent point in this week’s big Guardian interview, suggesting that the Obama administration’s reckless “regime change” policies in Libya and Syria, which Clinton personally directed as secretary of state, helped create the current state of chaos and instability whose disastrous ripple effects now extend around the world. One could go a lot further than that. Clinton’s tone and rhetoric have been measured during this campaign, but as Salon’s Bill Curry wrote recently, she remains an unregenerate foreign-policy hawk who shows every sign of yearning to double down on failed military overreach. Whatever you think she may have said, Clinton has absolutely not ruled out sending American troops by the thousands to fight a ground war against the Islamic State. She has called out Republican candidates for their “bluster and bigotry” and rejected talk of a “war on Islam,” which is all to the good. But the policy proposals discernible below her calm and resolute-sounding language over the last month are virtually indistinguishable from those of the non-Trump GOP contenders: More war, more surveillance, less First Amendment. “You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: ‘Freedom of speech,’” she told a Brookings Institution audience on Dec. 6. I know! As if that’s in the Constitution or something! But Hillary Clinton is a symptom of a party that has lost its ideological moorings and more recently been eaten away from below by political termites. She is not the disease itself, and the Hillary vs. Bernie cage match, with its frequently unappetizing gender politics, is not the main event. This week’s report from the Center for American Progress, with its claim that the nation’s shifting demographics overwhelmingly favor the Democrats in 2016 and beyond, was hardly breaking news (least of all to Republican donors and strategists). One of the authors of that study, Ruy Teixeira, co-wrote the biblical text on this topic, "The Emerging Democratic Majority" -- published in 2002. At least he doesn't give up easily. But this time around, the report contains or conceals a grievous epistemological error: It assumes a bipolar universe of Democrats and Republicans, the traditional realm of traditional politics. And in this year of Trump and Sanders and generalized political madness, that universe is imploding around us. Sure, the numbers don’t lie. We just don't understand what they’re telling us. America’s white majority is slowly ebbing away, and the exurban working-class whites who have latterly become the Republican base are declining far more rapidly than that. The GOP has enthusiastically painted itself into a demographic corner, not merely declining to broaden its reach but actively driving away African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT people and pro-choice women. Democrats have won the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections; the sole exception was George W. Bush’s narrow re-election in 2004, when he was hilariously perceived as having won a war. You can bet that Hillary Clinton’s people have crunched this data in thousands of computer simulations. No doubt there are imaginable scenarios where things go badly enough over the next 11 months that she loses to whichever of the lizard-eating freaks is left standing on the other side. That would require an improbable amount of evil mojo, honestly. But we can't get seduced into thinking about 2016 too much. One of the Democratic Party’s biggest problems is its near-exclusive focus on presidential elections, largely because those are the only elections it can win. It is not true that there are no differences between Republicans and Democrats, as this campaign has made abundantly clear. You could say that the Democratic Party has a reasonably clear sensibility, or maybe an ethos; it vaguely stands for the values of people on the coasts and in big cities. But as it was remade by Bill Clinton and stuffed with Wall Street dollars and infused with the neoliberal consensus, the Democratic Party possesses no actual ideology and no actual base, in class or economic terms. It has morphed into a quadrennial symbolic crusade to find a new messiah, a “transformational figure,” ha ha, who can redeem the nation’s failings through sheer force of personality. Hillary Clinton’s symbolic persona is grittier than Obama’s, to be sure. Her appeal is about her pragmatism, her experience, her hard-ass “git ‘er done” political smarts. OK, fine. But President Clinton 2.0, faced with large Republican majorities in Congress and deeply entrenched Republican power at the state and local levels in every region of the country that isn’t the Northeast or the West Coast, is pretty far from being the glorious demographic dawn imagined in the CAP report. It’s probably true that she can get more legislation passed in that context than Obama could. I don’t know how much of it you’re going to like. But again, the admittedly exciting twists and turns of this particular election campaign are not the point. The demographic changes envisioned in that CAP report will take many decades to play out, and if you want to insist that the Democratic glass is half-full, you can see the Sanders 2016 campaign as the beginning of a badly needed internal process of reform or revolution. But all confident predictions of an endless future of Democratic hegemony involve a failure to observe the most obvious facts in American politics: Party identification is dropping to all-time lows, and outside the unique demographic leverage of a presidential election, voting is doing likewise. I have harped on the unmitigated disaster of the 2014 midterms numerous times already. (For the Koch brothers and their oligarchic allies, of course, it was a brilliant strategic breakthrough and a glorious victory.) That election’s 36.6 percent nationwide turnout, the lowest since World War II, might be the most important and most ominous political fact of this century so far. It’s the elephant in the room, ready to sit on the Democrats’ golden demographic sunrise and crush it to death under many tons of apathetic elephant ass. Yes, the Republicans and their supporters engineered that victory. They paralyzed the legislative process throughout Obama’s presidency, found all sorts of ingenious methods to restrict and depress the Democratic vote, and galvanized their own supporters with deranged, apocalyptic and often openly racist rhetoric. Some of those Republicans, surveying the state of their party as it reaps the whirlwind a year later, are beginning to feel less happy about that. I know it’s fun to watch them squirm and all, but it’s not inherently logical to assume that a poisonous political atmosphere will kill off one party but not the other. The Democratic Armageddon of 2014 revealed a party with no fight, no strategy, no ideas and no soul. Its elected officials and Washington apparatchiks whined and wailed, blamed their own voters for accurately perceiving that they were clueless and defeated, and then capitulated and crawled away. That party still hopes to be rescued by the demographic advantage it has been promised for 25 years and counting. But it has done nothing to earn or deserve that advantage, has no idea what to do with it and, absent major change, will be sure to squander it if it ever gets here.

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Ted Cruz accidentally makes a good point: The Democratic Party’s immigration record is atrocious

While it is impossible to determine Ted Cruz's true motivations, his sterling educational pedigree suggests his most horrifically demagogic statements are driven by a cynical quest for power. But at Tuesday's Republican debate, Cruz displayed what must have been sincere confusion when he attacked Marco Rubio's past support for “amnesty” by citing Ronald Reagan's decisiveness. “You know, there was a time for choosing as Reagan put it,” Cruz self-assuredly intoned. “Where there was a battle over amnesty and some chose, like Senator Rubio, to stand with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and support a massive amnesty plan.” Is it possible that Cruz, the son of a Cuban refugee, is not aware that in 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which ultimately legalized the status of 2.7 million people? That wasn't the only odd statement on immigration, which along with terrorism, and immigrant would-be terrorists, dominated much of the debate. Defending his plan to “enforce the law” against immigrants, Cruz cited Bill Clinton's administration. “Do you know how many aliens Bill Clinton deported?” he asked. “12 million. Do you know how many illegal aliens, George W. Bush deported? 10 million.” In fact, Bill Clinton forcefully deported, or removed, just about 681,000 immigrants. Another 9.7 million in the fiscal years covering his presidency were subject to “voluntary returns,” meaning by and large that they were turned back at the border. Cruz's misleading statement, however, is a reminder of a greater truth that both Republicans and Hillary Clinton are doing their best to obscure: Both parties, in recent decades, have often had a pretty horrible record on immigrant rights. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which, among other things, allowed for the automatic removal of many undocumented immigrants without judicial review, mandated further increases in the size of the Border Patrol, and authorized the use of local police to enforce immigration law. “The simple fact is that we must not and we will not surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice,” Clinton proclaimed in 1993—at the very moment he was preparing to open the border wide to business under NAFTA. The militarization of the border under Clinton—including major Border Patrol deployments to the El Paso and San Diego areas in Operations Hold the Line and Gatekeeper—wreaked havoc in binational communities from Texas to California and caused a huge number of migrants forced to cross through dangerous desert climes to die. Deaths along the Southwest Border rose from 263 in 1998 to 380 in 2000, 454 in 2006 and 471 in 2012, according to Border Patrol. Their number of agents grew from 4,139 agents in fiscal year 1992 to 9,212 in 2000 and 21,444 in 2011. It “created,” as Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus attorney Anoop Prasad emailed, “the enormous immigration detention system that we have today and expanded deportation grounds for Lawful Permanent Residents with criminal convictions.” Democratic support for border militarization, says University of California, San Diego sociologist David FitzGerald, was a “response to prop 187 in California,” a measure that would have denied public services, including education, to undocumented immigrants if it hadn't been blocked by the judiciary. Clinton was worried “that the unauthorized immigrant issue was just getting out of control and would come back and reflect poorly on the Democrats.” It was Reagan's IRCA, however, that first laid the foundations for future border militarization and mass deportation. The measure increased the size of the Border Patrol by 50 percent. It also created sanctions for employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers. Rather than dissuading employers from hiring the undocumented, the measure, according to the Migration Policy Institute, gave bosses leverage to use their employees' legal status against them. Reagan's successors from both major parties doubled down. On immigration, George W. Bush was an ally of the Republican business class. He favored legalizing the status of big business' undocumented workers and creating a guest worker program to provide them with a flow of second-class noncitizen labor. And he dramatically stepped up deportations to placate immigration critics on the right. That, of course, didn't work: The right-wing, on immigration as on most any issue, cannot be placated. A Senate measure combining legalization and enforcement passed in 2006. House Republicans passed the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, the so-called Sensenbrenner bill, which would have amongst other harsh enforcement measures criminalized unauthorized presence in the country. It also sparked enormous largest immigrant rights protests. Neither the Senate bill nor Sensenbrenner's made it out of Congress. Another “comprehensive” measure failed to pass out of the Senate in 2007. What did pass, in 2006, was the Secure Fence Act, mandating “at least two layers of reinforced fencing, installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors extending” across at least 700 miles of the 1,969-mile border with Mexico, according to the Washington Office on Latin America. It received support from Democrats like then-Senator Hillary Clinton. (It was opposed by then-Rep. Bernie Sanders.) The fencing was never completed, according to WOLA, because its price tag would have reached an estimated $4.1 billion. After taking office President Obama mostly emulated Bush's approach, offering increased deportation and border militarization in a fruitless effort to win conservatives over. Obama presided over a record number of deportations and the mass conversion of local law enforcement into immigration agents through the Secure Communities program. This was all ostensibly intended to serve the greater purpose of demonstrating enough enforcement bona fides to conservatives that they would be enticed to support so-called “comprehensive” immigration reform, which would include a “path to citizenship” for undocumented people. Obama, says FitzGerald, was “hoping that by ramping up deportations to record levels he could show that he was tough on this issue” and “get some space to push through a grand bargain including legalization.” Obama's security measures worked, however, only in the direct sense that they resulted in mass deportations. They entirely failed to mollify anti-immigrant conservatives whose hostility toward anything smelling of “amnesty” remained firmly in place. “The hardliners on this issue will never accept that they've been given enough,” says FitzGerald. In part, that's because they have been shown again and again that the bipartisan establishment will provide more enforcement without actually ensuring any legalization in exchange. The result has been decades of largely bipartisan support for intense border militarization and mass deportations without any of the legal status that Democrats and establishment conservatives craved. Today, border militarization remains a subject that is rarely discussed amongst Democrats. Republicans just argue for more of it. Border militarization has received so much support from establishment Democrats that its not portrayed as a “partisan” issue—the sort of issues that are mostly likely to garner media attention. If it's not an issue that makes a difference in the election horse race or in daily Capitol Hill acrimony, the commentariat doesn't consider it that interesting. “The border enforcement policy is not really publicly identified with the Clinton Administration even though obviously that's when it began,” says FitzGerald. In the three decades since Reagan signed ICRA, immigration enforcement spending rose from $1.2 billion in 1986 to $18 billion in 2012, according to the Migration Policy Institute. On the visceral level, the message from Republicans is clear: immigrants are not only coming to take our jobs, they are going to kill us all. Meanwhile, Democrats are positioning themselves as the party of multicultural humanity and inclusiveness. Historically, however, the picture for both parties is not only pretty muddled. Towards immigrants, their policies have been profoundly racist and inhumane.While it is impossible to determine Ted Cruz's true motivations, his sterling educational pedigree suggests his most horrifically demagogic statements are driven by a cynical quest for power. But at Tuesday's Republican debate, Cruz displayed what must have been sincere confusion when he attacked Marco Rubio's past support for “amnesty” by citing Ronald Reagan's decisiveness. “You know, there was a time for choosing as Reagan put it,” Cruz self-assuredly intoned. “Where there was a battle over amnesty and some chose, like Senator Rubio, to stand with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and support a massive amnesty plan.” Is it possible that Cruz, the son of a Cuban refugee, is not aware that in 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which ultimately legalized the status of 2.7 million people? That wasn't the only odd statement on immigration, which along with terrorism, and immigrant would-be terrorists, dominated much of the debate. Defending his plan to “enforce the law” against immigrants, Cruz cited Bill Clinton's administration. “Do you know how many aliens Bill Clinton deported?” he asked. “12 million. Do you know how many illegal aliens, George W. Bush deported? 10 million.” In fact, Bill Clinton forcefully deported, or removed, just about 681,000 immigrants. Another 9.7 million in the fiscal years covering his presidency were subject to “voluntary returns,” meaning by and large that they were turned back at the border. Cruz's misleading statement, however, is a reminder of a greater truth that both Republicans and Hillary Clinton are doing their best to obscure: Both parties, in recent decades, have often had a pretty horrible record on immigrant rights. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which, among other things, allowed for the automatic removal of many undocumented immigrants without judicial review, mandated further increases in the size of the Border Patrol, and authorized the use of local police to enforce immigration law. “The simple fact is that we must not and we will not surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice,” Clinton proclaimed in 1993—at the very moment he was preparing to open the border wide to business under NAFTA. The militarization of the border under Clinton—including major Border Patrol deployments to the El Paso and San Diego areas in Operations Hold the Line and Gatekeeper—wreaked havoc in binational communities from Texas to California and caused a huge number of migrants forced to cross through dangerous desert climes to die. Deaths along the Southwest Border rose from 263 in 1998 to 380 in 2000, 454 in 2006 and 471 in 2012, according to Border Patrol. Their number of agents grew from 4,139 agents in fiscal year 1992 to 9,212 in 2000 and 21,444 in 2011. It “created,” as Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus attorney Anoop Prasad emailed, “the enormous immigration detention system that we have today and expanded deportation grounds for Lawful Permanent Residents with criminal convictions.” Democratic support for border militarization, says University of California, San Diego sociologist David FitzGerald, was a “response to prop 187 in California,” a measure that would have denied public services, including education, to undocumented immigrants if it hadn't been blocked by the judiciary. Clinton was worried “that the unauthorized immigrant issue was just getting out of control and would come back and reflect poorly on the Democrats.” It was Reagan's IRCA, however, that first laid the foundations for future border militarization and mass deportation. The measure increased the size of the Border Patrol by 50 percent. It also created sanctions for employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers. Rather than dissuading employers from hiring the undocumented, the measure, according to the Migration Policy Institute, gave bosses leverage to use their employees' legal status against them. Reagan's successors from both major parties doubled down. On immigration, George W. Bush was an ally of the Republican business class. He favored legalizing the status of big business' undocumented workers and creating a guest worker program to provide them with a flow of second-class noncitizen labor. And he dramatically stepped up deportations to placate immigration critics on the right. That, of course, didn't work: The right-wing, on immigration as on most any issue, cannot be placated. A Senate measure combining legalization and enforcement passed in 2006. House Republicans passed the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, the so-called Sensenbrenner bill, which would have amongst other harsh enforcement measures criminalized unauthorized presence in the country. It also sparked enormous largest immigrant rights protests. Neither the Senate bill nor Sensenbrenner's made it out of Congress. Another “comprehensive” measure failed to pass out of the Senate in 2007. What did pass, in 2006, was the Secure Fence Act, mandating “at least two layers of reinforced fencing, installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors extending” across at least 700 miles of the 1,969-mile border with Mexico, according to the Washington Office on Latin America. It received support from Democrats like then-Senator Hillary Clinton. (It was opposed by then-Rep. Bernie Sanders.) The fencing was never completed, according to WOLA, because its price tag would have reached an estimated $4.1 billion. After taking office President Obama mostly emulated Bush's approach, offering increased deportation and border militarization in a fruitless effort to win conservatives over. Obama presided over a record number of deportations and the mass conversion of local law enforcement into immigration agents through the Secure Communities program. This was all ostensibly intended to serve the greater purpose of demonstrating enough enforcement bona fides to conservatives that they would be enticed to support so-called “comprehensive” immigration reform, which would include a “path to citizenship” for undocumented people. Obama, says FitzGerald, was “hoping that by ramping up deportations to record levels he could show that he was tough on this issue” and “get some space to push through a grand bargain including legalization.” Obama's security measures worked, however, only in the direct sense that they resulted in mass deportations. They entirely failed to mollify anti-immigrant conservatives whose hostility toward anything smelling of “amnesty” remained firmly in place. “The hardliners on this issue will never accept that they've been given enough,” says FitzGerald. In part, that's because they have been shown again and again that the bipartisan establishment will provide more enforcement without actually ensuring any legalization in exchange. The result has been decades of largely bipartisan support for intense border militarization and mass deportations without any of the legal status that Democrats and establishment conservatives craved. Today, border militarization remains a subject that is rarely discussed amongst Democrats. Republicans just argue for more of it. Border militarization has received so much support from establishment Democrats that its not portrayed as a “partisan” issue—the sort of issues that are mostly likely to garner media attention. If it's not an issue that makes a difference in the election horse race or in daily Capitol Hill acrimony, the commentariat doesn't consider it that interesting. “The border enforcement policy is not really publicly identified with the Clinton Administration even though obviously that's when it began,” says FitzGerald. In the three decades since Reagan signed ICRA, immigration enforcement spending rose from $1.2 billion in 1986 to $18 billion in 2012, according to the Migration Policy Institute. On the visceral level, the message from Republicans is clear: immigrants are not only coming to take our jobs, they are going to kill us all. Meanwhile, Democrats are positioning themselves as the party of multicultural humanity and inclusiveness. Historically, however, the picture for both parties is not only pretty muddled. Towards immigrants, their policies have been profoundly racist and inhumane.

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“I think it was a significant overreaction”: Inside New York’s ridiculous feud with L.A. over school closures

So what are the families of Los Angles to make of the public lambasting their local officials took from their New York City counterparts over the LA officials’ decision to play it safe and close their city’s schools earlier this week after getting an email that threatened Paris-type terror? Both New York City and Los Angeles received an nearly identical email, which authorities now say was routed through an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany. It threatened to use guns, automatic weapons, nerve gas and explosive devices to wreck havoc on local schools. Outgoing Los Angeles School Superintendent Ramon Cortines, a former New York City Schools Chancellor, consulted with security officials after several school board members received the threat. But exactly who was in the loop is a matter of some controversy. Los Angeles is the nation’s second largest school district and the decision to close the system down was more than a minor inconvenience for the district’s 640,000 students and their parents who had to scramble for day care or had to call out from work. No doubt the threat read differently in Los Angles, where earlier this month,  an hour drive away in San Bernardino, a 29 year old health inspector and his wife lay siege to a facility for the developmentally disabled, killing 14 and wounding 20.  That criminal investigation is still on going. Hours after the Los Angles Schools opted to close, New York City officials held a press conference to offer details on the threat they had received and to say that Los Angeles officials had fallen for an easily discernible hoax, that their West Coast counterparts had played into the hands of the pranksters or terrorists by closing their schools without properly consulting anyone. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, with a second term election still before him, aimed to score a home run: “As leaders, it is our job to protect public order, and to keep things moving forward in this city, and to certainly not aide and abet those who want to sell panic,” said de Blasio. “It’s very important to realize there are people who want us to fundamentally change our lifestyle and our values, and we will never give in to that.” Aide and abet? Sounds like he was inferring that Los Angeles officials should be charged with something because they recklessly varied from the Big Apple’s superior threat-matrix standard. Several times in the press briefing NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who was previously L.A.'s top cop, said the city superintendent had closed the schools without consulting anybody and yet left himself some wiggle room. “To disrupt the daily school schedules of a half million school children, their parents, daycare, busses, based on an anonymous email with no consultation, if, in fact consultation did not occur with law enforcement authorities. I think it was a significant overreaction,” said Bratton. Hmmm. When you put “if” so close to “fact,” and follow it up with such an empirical statement, it leaves room to wonder, did Bratton know for sure that LA Superintendent Cortines was just winging it? Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck fired back, blasting New Yorkers for second guessing his colleagues decision and asserting that the FBI and the local Joint Terrorism Task Force had indeed been alerted after several members of the local school board had gotten the email. “I think its irresponsible based on the facts that are available to criticize that decision at this point,” Beck said. Now with the bi-coastal banter in full lather, the New York Daily News op-ed page had to weigh in. “The closure of the Los Angeles schools on the basis of a bogus threat was an amateurish error that instilled needless fright in children and no doubt, glee in ISIS,” the hometown tabloid declared. LA had been “punked” concluded the Daily News. Nothing like national solidarity in a time of high global anxiety. Commissioner Bratton even went to the unusual length of disclosing how he knew the email was a hoax, by divulging the "tell" that confirmed the author was not an authentic terrorist, because they had failed to use a capital A in spelling "Allah." (Note to next prankster: Always use upper case.) Both jurisdictions confirmed they were unaware the other had been threatened. The New York Daily News reported that New York City shared the email they had received with Los Angeles officials after they had opted to close their schools. In both iterations, the anonymous correspondent complained of being bullied for four years in each school district, a claim that was on its face impossible according to the tabloid’s reporting. So just where was the multi-billion dollar post-9/11 Homeland security apparatus that supposedly has our backs through all of this? In the TV propaganda representation of our national security machine, there is supposed to be a secret command center into which all these regional threats are sent and worked into our national situational awareness. No doubt Congress needs to swear in some witnesses and find out the precise narrative for who was consulted and when in Los Angeles.

* * *

Eugene O’Donnell is a former NYPD officer and prosecutor and professor at John Jay College. He thinks its a mistake for one local jurisdiction to undermine another so publicly. “I don’t think sorting this all out is best done in the media,” says O’Donnell. “Who would want to be the person that kept the schools open and have an attack happened?” (While O’Donnell thought Bratton’s disclosure to the press of the failure to capitalize Allah was very unusual, Casale theorized Bratton was “mocking the sender of the email to tempt him to communicate again so they could apprehend him.”) “Each local school district in cooperation with the local police and the FBI have to make a decision that takes into consideration the regional issues, so no doubt Los Angeles has to be conscious of San Bernardino,” says Nick Casale former NYPD detective and the first first Deputy Director of Security for Counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Sad to say, we live in a time where all of our institutions are struggling to maintain public credibility, not because of some external threat, but because of the accumulated rot of political corruption that undermines them. We live with stories about probes of the IRS and the Secret Service.  Major corporations have to reach non-prosecution agreements and pay millions to settle criminal charges. Churches and local governments shell out millions to resolve civil complaints for bad behavior, while across the country over the years, a steady procession of local, state and federal officials have been taken off to jail. Ironically, the FBI had just paid the Los Angeles School district a visit to seize 20 boxes of evidence as part of a Federal grand jury probe into a $1.3 billion dollar computer upgrade initiated by the current superintendent’s predecessor. That’s the real world context officials have to operate in when they ask us to say something when we see something. So now, if there’s an occasion where L.A. officials have to make a similar tough call in the future, should the public just blow them off as incompetent worry warts and call up the NYPD for threat validation? Sad to say, 14 years after the September 11th attack what we have on display here is a backbiting  “homeland” governed by regional chauvinists and a federal government that keeps its head low to avoid getting hit in a bi-coastal pissing contest.So what are the families of Los Angles to make of the public lambasting their local officials took from their New York City counterparts over the LA officials’ decision to play it safe and close their city’s schools earlier this week after getting an email that threatened Paris-type terror? Both New York City and Los Angeles received an nearly identical email, which authorities now say was routed through an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany. It threatened to use guns, automatic weapons, nerve gas and explosive devices to wreck havoc on local schools. Outgoing Los Angeles School Superintendent Ramon Cortines, a former New York City Schools Chancellor, consulted with security officials after several school board members received the threat. But exactly who was in the loop is a matter of some controversy. Los Angeles is the nation’s second largest school district and the decision to close the system down was more than a minor inconvenience for the district’s 640,000 students and their parents who had to scramble for day care or had to call out from work. No doubt the threat read differently in Los Angles, where earlier this month,  an hour drive away in San Bernardino, a 29 year old health inspector and his wife lay siege to a facility for the developmentally disabled, killing 14 and wounding 20.  That criminal investigation is still on going. Hours after the Los Angles Schools opted to close, New York City officials held a press conference to offer details on the threat they had received and to say that Los Angeles officials had fallen for an easily discernible hoax, that their West Coast counterparts had played into the hands of the pranksters or terrorists by closing their schools without properly consulting anyone. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, with a second term election still before him, aimed to score a home run: “As leaders, it is our job to protect public order, and to keep things moving forward in this city, and to certainly not aide and abet those who want to sell panic,” said de Blasio. “It’s very important to realize there are people who want us to fundamentally change our lifestyle and our values, and we will never give in to that.” Aide and abet? Sounds like he was inferring that Los Angeles officials should be charged with something because they recklessly varied from the Big Apple’s superior threat-matrix standard. Several times in the press briefing NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who was previously L.A.'s top cop, said the city superintendent had closed the schools without consulting anybody and yet left himself some wiggle room. “To disrupt the daily school schedules of a half million school children, their parents, daycare, busses, based on an anonymous email with no consultation, if, in fact consultation did not occur with law enforcement authorities. I think it was a significant overreaction,” said Bratton. Hmmm. When you put “if” so close to “fact,” and follow it up with such an empirical statement, it leaves room to wonder, did Bratton know for sure that LA Superintendent Cortines was just winging it? Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck fired back, blasting New Yorkers for second guessing his colleagues decision and asserting that the FBI and the local Joint Terrorism Task Force had indeed been alerted after several members of the local school board had gotten the email. “I think its irresponsible based on the facts that are available to criticize that decision at this point,” Beck said. Now with the bi-coastal banter in full lather, the New York Daily News op-ed page had to weigh in. “The closure of the Los Angeles schools on the basis of a bogus threat was an amateurish error that instilled needless fright in children and no doubt, glee in ISIS,” the hometown tabloid declared. LA had been “punked” concluded the Daily News. Nothing like national solidarity in a time of high global anxiety. Commissioner Bratton even went to the unusual length of disclosing how he knew the email was a hoax, by divulging the "tell" that confirmed the author was not an authentic terrorist, because they had failed to use a capital A in spelling "Allah." (Note to next prankster: Always use upper case.) Both jurisdictions confirmed they were unaware the other had been threatened. The New York Daily News reported that New York City shared the email they had received with Los Angeles officials after they had opted to close their schools. In both iterations, the anonymous correspondent complained of being bullied for four years in each school district, a claim that was on its face impossible according to the tabloid’s reporting. So just where was the multi-billion dollar post-9/11 Homeland security apparatus that supposedly has our backs through all of this? In the TV propaganda representation of our national security machine, there is supposed to be a secret command center into which all these regional threats are sent and worked into our national situational awareness. No doubt Congress needs to swear in some witnesses and find out the precise narrative for who was consulted and when in Los Angeles.

* * *

Eugene O’Donnell is a former NYPD officer and prosecutor and professor at John Jay College. He thinks its a mistake for one local jurisdiction to undermine another so publicly. “I don’t think sorting this all out is best done in the media,” says O’Donnell. “Who would want to be the person that kept the schools open and have an attack happened?” (While O’Donnell thought Bratton’s disclosure to the press of the failure to capitalize Allah was very unusual, Casale theorized Bratton was “mocking the sender of the email to tempt him to communicate again so they could apprehend him.”) “Each local school district in cooperation with the local police and the FBI have to make a decision that takes into consideration the regional issues, so no doubt Los Angeles has to be conscious of San Bernardino,” says Nick Casale former NYPD detective and the first first Deputy Director of Security for Counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Sad to say, we live in a time where all of our institutions are struggling to maintain public credibility, not because of some external threat, but because of the accumulated rot of political corruption that undermines them. We live with stories about probes of the IRS and the Secret Service.  Major corporations have to reach non-prosecution agreements and pay millions to settle criminal charges. Churches and local governments shell out millions to resolve civil complaints for bad behavior, while across the country over the years, a steady procession of local, state and federal officials have been taken off to jail. Ironically, the FBI had just paid the Los Angeles School district a visit to seize 20 boxes of evidence as part of a Federal grand jury probe into a $1.3 billion dollar computer upgrade initiated by the current superintendent’s predecessor. That’s the real world context officials have to operate in when they ask us to say something when we see something. So now, if there’s an occasion where L.A. officials have to make a similar tough call in the future, should the public just blow them off as incompetent worry warts and call up the NYPD for threat validation? Sad to say, 14 years after the September 11th attack what we have on display here is a backbiting  “homeland” governed by regional chauvinists and a federal government that keeps its head low to avoid getting hit in a bi-coastal pissing contest.So what are the families of Los Angles to make of the public lambasting their local officials took from their New York City counterparts over the LA officials’ decision to play it safe and close their city’s schools earlier this week after getting an email that threatened Paris-type terror? Both New York City and Los Angeles received an nearly identical email, which authorities now say was routed through an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany. It threatened to use guns, automatic weapons, nerve gas and explosive devices to wreck havoc on local schools. Outgoing Los Angeles School Superintendent Ramon Cortines, a former New York City Schools Chancellor, consulted with security officials after several school board members received the threat. But exactly who was in the loop is a matter of some controversy. Los Angeles is the nation’s second largest school district and the decision to close the system down was more than a minor inconvenience for the district’s 640,000 students and their parents who had to scramble for day care or had to call out from work. No doubt the threat read differently in Los Angles, where earlier this month,  an hour drive away in San Bernardino, a 29 year old health inspector and his wife lay siege to a facility for the developmentally disabled, killing 14 and wounding 20.  That criminal investigation is still on going. Hours after the Los Angles Schools opted to close, New York City officials held a press conference to offer details on the threat they had received and to say that Los Angeles officials had fallen for an easily discernible hoax, that their West Coast counterparts had played into the hands of the pranksters or terrorists by closing their schools without properly consulting anyone. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, with a second term election still before him, aimed to score a home run: “As leaders, it is our job to protect public order, and to keep things moving forward in this city, and to certainly not aide and abet those who want to sell panic,” said de Blasio. “It’s very important to realize there are people who want us to fundamentally change our lifestyle and our values, and we will never give in to that.” Aide and abet? Sounds like he was inferring that Los Angeles officials should be charged with something because they recklessly varied from the Big Apple’s superior threat-matrix standard. Several times in the press briefing NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who was previously L.A.'s top cop, said the city superintendent had closed the schools without consulting anybody and yet left himself some wiggle room. “To disrupt the daily school schedules of a half million school children, their parents, daycare, busses, based on an anonymous email with no consultation, if, in fact consultation did not occur with law enforcement authorities. I think it was a significant overreaction,” said Bratton. Hmmm. When you put “if” so close to “fact,” and follow it up with such an empirical statement, it leaves room to wonder, did Bratton know for sure that LA Superintendent Cortines was just winging it? Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck fired back, blasting New Yorkers for second guessing his colleagues decision and asserting that the FBI and the local Joint Terrorism Task Force had indeed been alerted after several members of the local school board had gotten the email. “I think its irresponsible based on the facts that are available to criticize that decision at this point,” Beck said. Now with the bi-coastal banter in full lather, the New York Daily News op-ed page had to weigh in. “The closure of the Los Angeles schools on the basis of a bogus threat was an amateurish error that instilled needless fright in children and no doubt, glee in ISIS,” the hometown tabloid declared. LA had been “punked” concluded the Daily News. Nothing like national solidarity in a time of high global anxiety. Commissioner Bratton even went to the unusual length of disclosing how he knew the email was a hoax, by divulging the "tell" that confirmed the author was not an authentic terrorist, because they had failed to use a capital A in spelling "Allah." (Note to next prankster: Always use upper case.) Both jurisdictions confirmed they were unaware the other had been threatened. The New York Daily News reported that New York City shared the email they had received with Los Angeles officials after they had opted to close their schools. In both iterations, the anonymous correspondent complained of being bullied for four years in each school district, a claim that was on its face impossible according to the tabloid’s reporting. So just where was the multi-billion dollar post-9/11 Homeland security apparatus that supposedly has our backs through all of this? In the TV propaganda representation of our national security machine, there is supposed to be a secret command center into which all these regional threats are sent and worked into our national situational awareness. No doubt Congress needs to swear in some witnesses and find out the precise narrative for who was consulted and when in Los Angeles.

* * *

Eugene O’Donnell is a former NYPD officer and prosecutor and professor at John Jay College. He thinks its a mistake for one local jurisdiction to undermine another so publicly. “I don’t think sorting this all out is best done in the media,” says O’Donnell. “Who would want to be the person that kept the schools open and have an attack happened?” (While O’Donnell thought Bratton’s disclosure to the press of the failure to capitalize Allah was very unusual, Casale theorized Bratton was “mocking the sender of the email to tempt him to communicate again so they could apprehend him.”) “Each local school district in cooperation with the local police and the FBI have to make a decision that takes into consideration the regional issues, so no doubt Los Angeles has to be conscious of San Bernardino,” says Nick Casale former NYPD detective and the first first Deputy Director of Security for Counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Sad to say, we live in a time where all of our institutions are struggling to maintain public credibility, not because of some external threat, but because of the accumulated rot of political corruption that undermines them. We live with stories about probes of the IRS and the Secret Service.  Major corporations have to reach non-prosecution agreements and pay millions to settle criminal charges. Churches and local governments shell out millions to resolve civil complaints for bad behavior, while across the country over the years, a steady procession of local, state and federal officials have been taken off to jail. Ironically, the FBI had just paid the Los Angeles School district a visit to seize 20 boxes of evidence as part of a Federal grand jury probe into a $1.3 billion dollar computer upgrade initiated by the current superintendent’s predecessor. That’s the real world context officials have to operate in when they ask us to say something when we see something. So now, if there’s an occasion where L.A. officials have to make a similar tough call in the future, should the public just blow them off as incompetent worry warts and call up the NYPD for threat validation? Sad to say, 14 years after the September 11th attack what we have on display here is a backbiting  “homeland” governed by regional chauvinists and a federal government that keeps its head low to avoid getting hit in a bi-coastal pissing contest.So what are the families of Los Angles to make of the public lambasting their local officials took from their New York City counterparts over the LA officials’ decision to play it safe and close their city’s schools earlier this week after getting an email that threatened Paris-type terror? Both New York City and Los Angeles received an nearly identical email, which authorities now say was routed through an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany. It threatened to use guns, automatic weapons, nerve gas and explosive devices to wreck havoc on local schools. Outgoing Los Angeles School Superintendent Ramon Cortines, a former New York City Schools Chancellor, consulted with security officials after several school board members received the threat. But exactly who was in the loop is a matter of some controversy. Los Angeles is the nation’s second largest school district and the decision to close the system down was more than a minor inconvenience for the district’s 640,000 students and their parents who had to scramble for day care or had to call out from work. No doubt the threat read differently in Los Angles, where earlier this month,  an hour drive away in San Bernardino, a 29 year old health inspector and his wife lay siege to a facility for the developmentally disabled, killing 14 and wounding 20.  That criminal investigation is still on going. Hours after the Los Angles Schools opted to close, New York City officials held a press conference to offer details on the threat they had received and to say that Los Angeles officials had fallen for an easily discernible hoax, that their West Coast counterparts had played into the hands of the pranksters or terrorists by closing their schools without properly consulting anyone. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, with a second term election still before him, aimed to score a home run: “As leaders, it is our job to protect public order, and to keep things moving forward in this city, and to certainly not aide and abet those who want to sell panic,” said de Blasio. “It’s very important to realize there are people who want us to fundamentally change our lifestyle and our values, and we will never give in to that.” Aide and abet? Sounds like he was inferring that Los Angeles officials should be charged with something because they recklessly varied from the Big Apple’s superior threat-matrix standard. Several times in the press briefing NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who was previously L.A.'s top cop, said the city superintendent had closed the schools without consulting anybody and yet left himself some wiggle room. “To disrupt the daily school schedules of a half million school children, their parents, daycare, busses, based on an anonymous email with no consultation, if, in fact consultation did not occur with law enforcement authorities. I think it was a significant overreaction,” said Bratton. Hmmm. When you put “if” so close to “fact,” and follow it up with such an empirical statement, it leaves room to wonder, did Bratton know for sure that LA Superintendent Cortines was just winging it? Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck fired back, blasting New Yorkers for second guessing his colleagues decision and asserting that the FBI and the local Joint Terrorism Task Force had indeed been alerted after several members of the local school board had gotten the email. “I think its irresponsible based on the facts that are available to criticize that decision at this point,” Beck said. Now with the bi-coastal banter in full lather, the New York Daily News op-ed page had to weigh in. “The closure of the Los Angeles schools on the basis of a bogus threat was an amateurish error that instilled needless fright in children and no doubt, glee in ISIS,” the hometown tabloid declared. LA had been “punked” concluded the Daily News. Nothing like national solidarity in a time of high global anxiety. Commissioner Bratton even went to the unusual length of disclosing how he knew the email was a hoax, by divulging the "tell" that confirmed the author was not an authentic terrorist, because they had failed to use a capital A in spelling "Allah." (Note to next prankster: Always use upper case.) Both jurisdictions confirmed they were unaware the other had been threatened. The New York Daily News reported that New York City shared the email they had received with Los Angeles officials after they had opted to close their schools. In both iterations, the anonymous correspondent complained of being bullied for four years in each school district, a claim that was on its face impossible according to the tabloid’s reporting. So just where was the multi-billion dollar post-9/11 Homeland security apparatus that supposedly has our backs through all of this? In the TV propaganda representation of our national security machine, there is supposed to be a secret command center into which all these regional threats are sent and worked into our national situational awareness. No doubt Congress needs to swear in some witnesses and find out the precise narrative for who was consulted and when in Los Angeles.

* * *

Eugene O’Donnell is a former NYPD officer and prosecutor and professor at John Jay College. He thinks its a mistake for one local jurisdiction to undermine another so publicly. “I don’t think sorting this all out is best done in the media,” says O’Donnell. “Who would want to be the person that kept the schools open and have an attack happened?” (While O’Donnell thought Bratton’s disclosure to the press of the failure to capitalize Allah was very unusual, Casale theorized Bratton was “mocking the sender of the email to tempt him to communicate again so they could apprehend him.”) “Each local school district in cooperation with the local police and the FBI have to make a decision that takes into consideration the regional issues, so no doubt Los Angeles has to be conscious of San Bernardino,” says Nick Casale former NYPD detective and the first first Deputy Director of Security for Counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Sad to say, we live in a time where all of our institutions are struggling to maintain public credibility, not because of some external threat, but because of the accumulated rot of political corruption that undermines them. We live with stories about probes of the IRS and the Secret Service.  Major corporations have to reach non-prosecution agreements and pay millions to settle criminal charges. Churches and local governments shell out millions to resolve civil complaints for bad behavior, while across the country over the years, a steady procession of local, state and federal officials have been taken off to jail. Ironically, the FBI had just paid the Los Angeles School district a visit to seize 20 boxes of evidence as part of a Federal grand jury probe into a $1.3 billion dollar computer upgrade initiated by the current superintendent’s predecessor. That’s the real world context officials have to operate in when they ask us to say something when we see something. So now, if there’s an occasion where L.A. officials have to make a similar tough call in the future, should the public just blow them off as incompetent worry warts and call up the NYPD for threat validation? Sad to say, 14 years after the September 11th attack what we have on display here is a backbiting  “homeland” governed by regional chauvinists and a federal government that keeps its head low to avoid getting hit in a bi-coastal pissing contest.

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It’s the “clock kid” all over again: A 12-year-old Sikh boy is the latest victim of racist terrorism paranoia

Imagine that your twelve-year-old son doesn’t come home one day after school. You’re always worried about him because he’s not even a teenager but has already required three open heart surgeries thanks to a congenital condition. He’s not a tough kid but a “goofball,” and you’ve recently moved from San Antonio to Arlington, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where everything is bigger, including the trouble. Nobody is telling you where he is. Nobody will answer your questions. He’s just…disappeared. School officials aren’t helping. Neither are the police. Eventually, you discover that he’s being held in a juvenile detention center. He’s born and raised in Texas. An American citizen. A kid. Why did the Arlington police hold a twelve-year-old boy with a heart condition for three days without alerting his parents? Why did the school principal call the police in the first place? Because his name is Armaan Singh Sarai, his working-class Indian family is Sikh, and a “bully” at his school accused him of having a bomb in his backpack. According to a Facebook post by Ginee Haer, who identifies herself as his cousin,

"On Friday, December 11th, 2015, my cousin attended school, like any other normal 12 year old child. A bully in class thought it would be funny to accuse him of having a bomb, and so the principal, without any questioning, interrogation, or notification to his parents, called the police. Worried & frightened at home, his family was concerned as to why he had not reached home right after school. They started calling every police department in the area, only to find out he was sent to a Juvenile facility. They kept him held behind bars for three consecutive days, before finally releasing him on Monday, December 15th."

Armaan had carried a "power bag" to school, meaning his backpack has a built-in battery charger for a cell phone. Numerous companies sell these bags, which are not cheap but popular enough to be sold out right now in several styles and categories on Amazon. “The student in front of me, who is the one who made the accusation. . . said that [the backpack] looked like a bomb,” [Armaan] Singh said, per a report in the Washington Post. “Then Friday. . . I came back to that period and he was in front of me again and he said ‘I’m going to go tell on you. I’m going to go tell on you and say all this stuff about you. I’m going to go tell on you.’ Singh said he laughed at the other student, who did the same. But the other student wasn’t joking. He made good on his threat, telling the teacher that Armaan had a bomb. The teacher told the principal, who called the police, which came to school and “grabbed” him. Now at home because he’s been suspended from school, Armaan must wear an ankle monitor as he awaits his court date. Though he is twelve years old, it is currently unclear whether he’ll be tried as a juvenile or an adult, and what charges he will face for the crime of carrying a trendy backpack to school. There are more than a few parallels to “clock kid” Ahmed Mohamed, who was fourteen years old and living with his family in a Dallas suburb when he was accused of bringing a bomb to school. But the specifics of Armaan’s situation more closely resemble the targeting of Veereender Jubbal, a Sikh who was set up to become the face of terrorism after the November 13 Paris attacks. Veerender is not a Muslim or a terrorist. He’s a Canadian. But, like Armaan, Veerender has a goofy sense of humor and loves to play video games, and he was maliciously targeted by racist individuals in the gaming community who knew that he had no involvement whatsoever with Islamic extremism, but went ahead and labeled him a terrorist anyways. Newspapers around the world picked up a doctored image of Veerender which had falsely identified him as one of the 11/13 Paris bombers, thereby placing his life in real danger. Since November 23, after being inundated with vitriol and threats, Veerender turned himself into “Ghost Veerender” and went on a Twitter hiatus. In Armaan’s case, a nameless “bully” targeted the most vulnerable kid in striking range at his school: a boy with a serious heart condition who was not only the new kid but whose race and religion identified him as an outsider. The bully chose his victim well: the police are vociferously defending their actions despite no evidence of any wrongdoing on Armaan’s part. Instead, at every step of the way, the bully’s lie was supported, endorsed, and reinforced by the actions of every adult authority figure who ought to have known better. That they did not is far more troubling than a child acting cruelly. The institutional response is only comprehensible inside a racist framework that makes it seem reasonable to assume that all brown people are Islamic extremists conspiring to blow up white Americans, and presumed to be guilty rather than innocent. “Protect and serve? My ass,” the Sikh bank clerk complains in Spike Lee’s film, “Inside Man,” 2006, about a confounding bank heist where the police are unable to distinguish the hostages from the criminals, and so they treat the victims as if they’re violent felons. “Where’s my turban?” the bank clerk asks angrily. “I’m not talking to anyone without a turban. It’s part of my religion to cover my head as in respect to God. I’m a Sikh. Not an Arab, by the way, like your cops called me outside…First you beat me and now you want my help…Fucking tired of this shit. What happened to my fucking civil rights? Why can’t I go anywhere without being harassed?” It shouldn’t even be relevant that Sikhs are not Muslims, because being mistaken for “an Arab” isn’t the nut of the problem. What’s wrong is being attacked and bullied, period. What's worse is the cultural condoning of such violence. Yet numerous reports have not only been tracking a surge of Islamophobia since 9/11 and the spike of hate crimes against Muslims since 11/13, but also they’ve also repeatedly pointed out--in tones of near despair—that, collectively, white Americans are fine with it. Islamophobia is so thick and pernicious that a shameful number of Republicans (and Democrats) are in favor of bombing Agrabah  just because it's somewhere in "Arabia" — when it's actually the fictional setting of the Disney film "Aladdin." Given the difficulties of countering the Disneyfied geographic imaginary, it shouldn't be too surprising that in Texas, racist paranoia has made it possible for a bully to accuse brown kid of bringing a bomb to school, and the institutions of education and law enforcement rush to validate the accuser, not the victim. In this era of “see something, say something,” an increasingly intolerant political narrative affirms that the bully did the right thing. Things you learn by going today to school and obeying the rules.Imagine that your twelve-year-old son doesn’t come home one day after school. You’re always worried about him because he’s not even a teenager but has already required three open heart surgeries thanks to a congenital condition. He’s not a tough kid but a “goofball,” and you’ve recently moved from San Antonio to Arlington, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where everything is bigger, including the trouble. Nobody is telling you where he is. Nobody will answer your questions. He’s just…disappeared. School officials aren’t helping. Neither are the police. Eventually, you discover that he’s being held in a juvenile detention center. He’s born and raised in Texas. An American citizen. A kid. Why did the Arlington police hold a twelve-year-old boy with a heart condition for three days without alerting his parents? Why did the school principal call the police in the first place? Because his name is Armaan Singh Sarai, his working-class Indian family is Sikh, and a “bully” at his school accused him of having a bomb in his backpack. According to a Facebook post by Ginee Haer, who identifies herself as his cousin,

"On Friday, December 11th, 2015, my cousin attended school, like any other normal 12 year old child. A bully in class thought it would be funny to accuse him of having a bomb, and so the principal, without any questioning, interrogation, or notification to his parents, called the police. Worried & frightened at home, his family was concerned as to why he had not reached home right after school. They started calling every police department in the area, only to find out he was sent to a Juvenile facility. They kept him held behind bars for three consecutive days, before finally releasing him on Monday, December 15th."

Armaan had carried a "power bag" to school, meaning his backpack has a built-in battery charger for a cell phone. Numerous companies sell these bags, which are not cheap but popular enough to be sold out right now in several styles and categories on Amazon. “The student in front of me, who is the one who made the accusation. . . said that [the backpack] looked like a bomb,” [Armaan] Singh said, per a report in the Washington Post. “Then Friday. . . I came back to that period and he was in front of me again and he said ‘I’m going to go tell on you. I’m going to go tell on you and say all this stuff about you. I’m going to go tell on you.’ Singh said he laughed at the other student, who did the same. But the other student wasn’t joking. He made good on his threat, telling the teacher that Armaan had a bomb. The teacher told the principal, who called the police, which came to school and “grabbed” him. Now at home because he’s been suspended from school, Armaan must wear an ankle monitor as he awaits his court date. Though he is twelve years old, it is currently unclear whether he’ll be tried as a juvenile or an adult, and what charges he will face for the crime of carrying a trendy backpack to school. There are more than a few parallels to “clock kid” Ahmed Mohamed, who was fourteen years old and living with his family in a Dallas suburb when he was accused of bringing a bomb to school. But the specifics of Armaan’s situation more closely resemble the targeting of Veereender Jubbal, a Sikh who was set up to become the face of terrorism after the November 13 Paris attacks. Veerender is not a Muslim or a terrorist. He’s a Canadian. But, like Armaan, Veerender has a goofy sense of humor and loves to play video games, and he was maliciously targeted by racist individuals in the gaming community who knew that he had no involvement whatsoever with Islamic extremism, but went ahead and labeled him a terrorist anyways. Newspapers around the world picked up a doctored image of Veerender which had falsely identified him as one of the 11/13 Paris bombers, thereby placing his life in real danger. Since November 23, after being inundated with vitriol and threats, Veerender turned himself into “Ghost Veerender” and went on a Twitter hiatus. In Armaan’s case, a nameless “bully” targeted the most vulnerable kid in striking range at his school: a boy with a serious heart condition who was not only the new kid but whose race and religion identified him as an outsider. The bully chose his victim well: the police are vociferously defending their actions despite no evidence of any wrongdoing on Armaan’s part. Instead, at every step of the way, the bully’s lie was supported, endorsed, and reinforced by the actions of every adult authority figure who ought to have known better. That they did not is far more troubling than a child acting cruelly. The institutional response is only comprehensible inside a racist framework that makes it seem reasonable to assume that all brown people are Islamic extremists conspiring to blow up white Americans, and presumed to be guilty rather than innocent. “Protect and serve? My ass,” the Sikh bank clerk complains in Spike Lee’s film, “Inside Man,” 2006, about a confounding bank heist where the police are unable to distinguish the hostages from the criminals, and so they treat the victims as if they’re violent felons. “Where’s my turban?” the bank clerk asks angrily. “I’m not talking to anyone without a turban. It’s part of my religion to cover my head as in respect to God. I’m a Sikh. Not an Arab, by the way, like your cops called me outside…First you beat me and now you want my help…Fucking tired of this shit. What happened to my fucking civil rights? Why can’t I go anywhere without being harassed?” It shouldn’t even be relevant that Sikhs are not Muslims, because being mistaken for “an Arab” isn’t the nut of the problem. What’s wrong is being attacked and bullied, period. What's worse is the cultural condoning of such violence. Yet numerous reports have not only been tracking a surge of Islamophobia since 9/11 and the spike of hate crimes against Muslims since 11/13, but also they’ve also repeatedly pointed out--in tones of near despair—that, collectively, white Americans are fine with it. Islamophobia is so thick and pernicious that a shameful number of Republicans (and Democrats) are in favor of bombing Agrabah  just because it's somewhere in "Arabia" — when it's actually the fictional setting of the Disney film "Aladdin." Given the difficulties of countering the Disneyfied geographic imaginary, it shouldn't be too surprising that in Texas, racist paranoia has made it possible for a bully to accuse brown kid of bringing a bomb to school, and the institutions of education and law enforcement rush to validate the accuser, not the victim. In this era of “see something, say something,” an increasingly intolerant political narrative affirms that the bully did the right thing. Things you learn by going today to school and obeying the rules.Imagine that your twelve-year-old son doesn’t come home one day after school. You’re always worried about him because he’s not even a teenager but has already required three open heart surgeries thanks to a congenital condition. He’s not a tough kid but a “goofball,” and you’ve recently moved from San Antonio to Arlington, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where everything is bigger, including the trouble. Nobody is telling you where he is. Nobody will answer your questions. He’s just…disappeared. School officials aren’t helping. Neither are the police. Eventually, you discover that he’s being held in a juvenile detention center. He’s born and raised in Texas. An American citizen. A kid. Why did the Arlington police hold a twelve-year-old boy with a heart condition for three days without alerting his parents? Why did the school principal call the police in the first place? Because his name is Armaan Singh Sarai, his working-class Indian family is Sikh, and a “bully” at his school accused him of having a bomb in his backpack. According to a Facebook post by Ginee Haer, who identifies herself as his cousin,

"On Friday, December 11th, 2015, my cousin attended school, like any other normal 12 year old child. A bully in class thought it would be funny to accuse him of having a bomb, and so the principal, without any questioning, interrogation, or notification to his parents, called the police. Worried & frightened at home, his family was concerned as to why he had not reached home right after school. They started calling every police department in the area, only to find out he was sent to a Juvenile facility. They kept him held behind bars for three consecutive days, before finally releasing him on Monday, December 15th."

Armaan had carried a "power bag" to school, meaning his backpack has a built-in battery charger for a cell phone. Numerous companies sell these bags, which are not cheap but popular enough to be sold out right now in several styles and categories on Amazon. “The student in front of me, who is the one who made the accusation. . . said that [the backpack] looked like a bomb,” [Armaan] Singh said, per a report in the Washington Post. “Then Friday. . . I came back to that period and he was in front of me again and he said ‘I’m going to go tell on you. I’m going to go tell on you and say all this stuff about you. I’m going to go tell on you.’ Singh said he laughed at the other student, who did the same. But the other student wasn’t joking. He made good on his threat, telling the teacher that Armaan had a bomb. The teacher told the principal, who called the police, which came to school and “grabbed” him. Now at home because he’s been suspended from school, Armaan must wear an ankle monitor as he awaits his court date. Though he is twelve years old, it is currently unclear whether he’ll be tried as a juvenile or an adult, and what charges he will face for the crime of carrying a trendy backpack to school. There are more than a few parallels to “clock kid” Ahmed Mohamed, who was fourteen years old and living with his family in a Dallas suburb when he was accused of bringing a bomb to school. But the specifics of Armaan’s situation more closely resemble the targeting of Veereender Jubbal, a Sikh who was set up to become the face of terrorism after the November 13 Paris attacks. Veerender is not a Muslim or a terrorist. He’s a Canadian. But, like Armaan, Veerender has a goofy sense of humor and loves to play video games, and he was maliciously targeted by racist individuals in the gaming community who knew that he had no involvement whatsoever with Islamic extremism, but went ahead and labeled him a terrorist anyways. Newspapers around the world picked up a doctored image of Veerender which had falsely identified him as one of the 11/13 Paris bombers, thereby placing his life in real danger. Since November 23, after being inundated with vitriol and threats, Veerender turned himself into “Ghost Veerender” and went on a Twitter hiatus. In Armaan’s case, a nameless “bully” targeted the most vulnerable kid in striking range at his school: a boy with a serious heart condition who was not only the new kid but whose race and religion identified him as an outsider. The bully chose his victim well: the police are vociferously defending their actions despite no evidence of any wrongdoing on Armaan’s part. Instead, at every step of the way, the bully’s lie was supported, endorsed, and reinforced by the actions of every adult authority figure who ought to have known better. That they did not is far more troubling than a child acting cruelly. The institutional response is only comprehensible inside a racist framework that makes it seem reasonable to assume that all brown people are Islamic extremists conspiring to blow up white Americans, and presumed to be guilty rather than innocent. “Protect and serve? My ass,” the Sikh bank clerk complains in Spike Lee’s film, “Inside Man,” 2006, about a confounding bank heist where the police are unable to distinguish the hostages from the criminals, and so they treat the victims as if they’re violent felons. “Where’s my turban?” the bank clerk asks angrily. “I’m not talking to anyone without a turban. It’s part of my religion to cover my head as in respect to God. I’m a Sikh. Not an Arab, by the way, like your cops called me outside…First you beat me and now you want my help…Fucking tired of this shit. What happened to my fucking civil rights? Why can’t I go anywhere without being harassed?” It shouldn’t even be relevant that Sikhs are not Muslims, because being mistaken for “an Arab” isn’t the nut of the problem. What’s wrong is being attacked and bullied, period. What's worse is the cultural condoning of such violence. Yet numerous reports have not only been tracking a surge of Islamophobia since 9/11 and the spike of hate crimes against Muslims since 11/13, but also they’ve also repeatedly pointed out--in tones of near despair—that, collectively, white Americans are fine with it. Islamophobia is so thick and pernicious that a shameful number of Republicans (and Democrats) are in favor of bombing Agrabah  just because it's somewhere in "Arabia" — when it's actually the fictional setting of the Disney film "Aladdin." Given the difficulties of countering the Disneyfied geographic imaginary, it shouldn't be too surprising that in Texas, racist paranoia has made it possible for a bully to accuse brown kid of bringing a bomb to school, and the institutions of education and law enforcement rush to validate the accuser, not the victim. In this era of “see something, say something,” an increasingly intolerant political narrative affirms that the bully did the right thing. Things you learn by going today to school and obeying the rules.Imagine that your twelve-year-old son doesn’t come home one day after school. You’re always worried about him because he’s not even a teenager but has already required three open heart surgeries thanks to a congenital condition. He’s not a tough kid but a “goofball,” and you’ve recently moved from San Antonio to Arlington, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where everything is bigger, including the trouble. Nobody is telling you where he is. Nobody will answer your questions. He’s just…disappeared. School officials aren’t helping. Neither are the police. Eventually, you discover that he’s being held in a juvenile detention center. He’s born and raised in Texas. An American citizen. A kid. Why did the Arlington police hold a twelve-year-old boy with a heart condition for three days without alerting his parents? Why did the school principal call the police in the first place? Because his name is Armaan Singh Sarai, his working-class Indian family is Sikh, and a “bully” at his school accused him of having a bomb in his backpack. According to a Facebook post by Ginee Haer, who identifies herself as his cousin,

"On Friday, December 11th, 2015, my cousin attended school, like any other normal 12 year old child. A bully in class thought it would be funny to accuse him of having a bomb, and so the principal, without any questioning, interrogation, or notification to his parents, called the police. Worried & frightened at home, his family was concerned as to why he had not reached home right after school. They started calling every police department in the area, only to find out he was sent to a Juvenile facility. They kept him held behind bars for three consecutive days, before finally releasing him on Monday, December 15th."

Armaan had carried a "power bag" to school, meaning his backpack has a built-in battery charger for a cell phone. Numerous companies sell these bags, which are not cheap but popular enough to be sold out right now in several styles and categories on Amazon. “The student in front of me, who is the one who made the accusation. . . said that [the backpack] looked like a bomb,” [Armaan] Singh said, per a report in the Washington Post. “Then Friday. . . I came back to that period and he was in front of me again and he said ‘I’m going to go tell on you. I’m going to go tell on you and say all this stuff about you. I’m going to go tell on you.’ Singh said he laughed at the other student, who did the same. But the other student wasn’t joking. He made good on his threat, telling the teacher that Armaan had a bomb. The teacher told the principal, who called the police, which came to school and “grabbed” him. Now at home because he’s been suspended from school, Armaan must wear an ankle monitor as he awaits his court date. Though he is twelve years old, it is currently unclear whether he’ll be tried as a juvenile or an adult, and what charges he will face for the crime of carrying a trendy backpack to school. There are more than a few parallels to “clock kid” Ahmed Mohamed, who was fourteen years old and living with his family in a Dallas suburb when he was accused of bringing a bomb to school. But the specifics of Armaan’s situation more closely resemble the targeting of Veereender Jubbal, a Sikh who was set up to become the face of terrorism after the November 13 Paris attacks. Veerender is not a Muslim or a terrorist. He’s a Canadian. But, like Armaan, Veerender has a goofy sense of humor and loves to play video games, and he was maliciously targeted by racist individuals in the gaming community who knew that he had no involvement whatsoever with Islamic extremism, but went ahead and labeled him a terrorist anyways. Newspapers around the world picked up a doctored image of Veerender which had falsely identified him as one of the 11/13 Paris bombers, thereby placing his life in real danger. Since November 23, after being inundated with vitriol and threats, Veerender turned himself into “Ghost Veerender” and went on a Twitter hiatus. In Armaan’s case, a nameless “bully” targeted the most vulnerable kid in striking range at his school: a boy with a serious heart condition who was not only the new kid but whose race and religion identified him as an outsider. The bully chose his victim well: the police are vociferously defending their actions despite no evidence of any wrongdoing on Armaan’s part. Instead, at every step of the way, the bully’s lie was supported, endorsed, and reinforced by the actions of every adult authority figure who ought to have known better. That they did not is far more troubling than a child acting cruelly. The institutional response is only comprehensible inside a racist framework that makes it seem reasonable to assume that all brown people are Islamic extremists conspiring to blow up white Americans, and presumed to be guilty rather than innocent. “Protect and serve? My ass,” the Sikh bank clerk complains in Spike Lee’s film, “Inside Man,” 2006, about a confounding bank heist where the police are unable to distinguish the hostages from the criminals, and so they treat the victims as if they’re violent felons. “Where’s my turban?” the bank clerk asks angrily. “I’m not talking to anyone without a turban. It’s part of my religion to cover my head as in respect to God. I’m a Sikh. Not an Arab, by the way, like your cops called me outside…First you beat me and now you want my help…Fucking tired of this shit. What happened to my fucking civil rights? Why can’t I go anywhere without being harassed?” It shouldn’t even be relevant that Sikhs are not Muslims, because being mistaken for “an Arab” isn’t the nut of the problem. What’s wrong is being attacked and bullied, period. What's worse is the cultural condoning of such violence. Yet numerous reports have not only been tracking a surge of Islamophobia since 9/11 and the spike of hate crimes against Muslims since 11/13, but also they’ve also repeatedly pointed out--in tones of near despair—that, collectively, white Americans are fine with it. Islamophobia is so thick and pernicious that a shameful number of Republicans (and Democrats) are in favor of bombing Agrabah  just because it's somewhere in "Arabia" — when it's actually the fictional setting of the Disney film "Aladdin." Given the difficulties of countering the Disneyfied geographic imaginary, it shouldn't be too surprising that in Texas, racist paranoia has made it possible for a bully to accuse brown kid of bringing a bomb to school, and the institutions of education and law enforcement rush to validate the accuser, not the victim. In this era of “see something, say something,” an increasingly intolerant political narrative affirms that the bully did the right thing. Things you learn by going today to school and obeying the rules.

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Bernie’s campaign blows it: This is the kind of mistake that can cripple a candidacy (even if it shouldn’t)

The Washington Post revealed on Friday that staffers inside the Bernie Sanders campaign inappropriately accessed private voter data gathered by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The voter records were stored in a database maintained by the Democratic National Committee and an IT vendor called NGP VAN. The information is subsequently leased to the various Democratic presidential campaigns. Reacting to the data breach, the DNC suspended the Sanders campaign's access to the database until the committee has been assured that Sanders staffers have destroyed all of the Clinton files. It's a blunder that could seriously damage the Sanders campaign's efforts to gain ground against the Clinton machine. The national data director for the Sanders campaign was immediately fired by Sanders. There are apparently three other Sanders staffers who accessed the data at the request of Uretsky, who claims that the team was merely determining whether a software glitch in the NGP VAN system would also compromise crucial Sanders voter data. In other words, they claim they were testing to see whether their counterparts in the Clinton camp could exploit the backdoor as well. If Uretsky is to be believed, it sounds like the typical behavior of programmers and IT professionals, malicious or not, who routinely suss out security issues by exploiting them. The other Sanders operatives haven't been fired. There are several layers to this story. 1) Unforced errors kill campaigns. If the data breach was, in fact, a deliberate attempt by the Sanders team to access Clinton's files, it's the sort of thing can could derail any campaign, especially one that's a grassroots effort with very little margin for error. When going up against the Clinton machine, there's no margin for error. Not only that, but no matter how this turns out, it calls negative attention to the Democratic side of the presidential contest and away from the GOP's flailing. 2) What about the vendor? To a certain extent, the IT vendor should've been sanctioned as well, since it was ultimately responsible for the flaw. As of this writing, there's no information leading us to believe the DNC will take its business elsewhere. Why? 3) The punishment outweighs the crime. Suspending Sanders' access to the database doesn't seem like a disproportionate punishment. Yet, should this suspension continue on indefinitely, well after the breach has been sealed and the offending parties have been fired, then it should be relatively clear that the DNC is being overly punitive. By now, it should be obvious to any and all observers that no further hacking of the Clinton data is underway now that the breach has been exposed. The authorizing staffer, Uretsky, is out. The other staffers will likely be fired. So, it seems like the crisis has been contained and muted. Once the glitch is repaired and an audit is conducted, there shouldn't be any reason why the Sanders campaign shouldn't be allowed to access its own paid-for voter information. That last part is perhaps the most salient. There have been more than a few questions circulating about the relationship between the DNC and the Clinton campaign, with some speculating that Wasserman Schultz is working closely with the Clintons to help carry the former Secretary of State to the nomination, while possibly suppressing the Sanders challenge. Now, yes, if I were Hillary Clinton emerging out of the brutal 2008 fracas against Barack Obama, I would never consider running again, especially at age 68, unless I had some assurances that another upstart grassroots candidate wasn't going to turn the whole thing into a sequel of the previous campaign. As such, I'd dedicate the subsequent six years to schmoozing the national committee and gathering the support of as many super-delegates as I could in order to clear the path to the nomination. I'd be utterly shocked if the Clintons didn't do exactly that. It's politics 101, frankly. So, along those lines, why on earth would the DNC schedule not one but two Democratic debates on Saturday nights -- the second one dropping six days before Christmas when very few people are watching television, much less interrupting their holiday weekends for a political debate that doesn't include Donald Trump? It could be that the DNC is deliberately downplaying the visibility of the three candidates so as to focus attention on the GOP's grabassery. But, as some have hypothesized, it's also a possibility that the committee is maintaining a tight lid on Sanders in order to dampen his momentum in support of Clinton. Again, it's politics either way, though the latter possibility is more than a little hinky. It’s also worth noting that Clinton herself demanded as few as four debates, fueling speculation that the Saturday appearances are all about downplaying the Sanders challenge. Furthermore, as Esquire's Charlie Pierce noted Friday, why did the DNC leak this information to The Washington Post in the first place? If the goal of the weirdly-timed Saturday debates, for example, is to maintain a low key primary while the Republicans publicly self-immolate, why did the DNC leak this story, which only serves to embarrass the party and especially Sanders himself who still isn't completely out of the question as a potential nominee? That said, Friday is traditionally take-out-the-trash day, so the story sounds like it was leaked on a day when ugliness is very often dribbled out. But in the digital age, take-out-the-trash day is mostly anachronistic. (It used to be that newspapers would mostly shut down for the weekend when few readers would bother paying attention anyway. Not any more.) Realistically, it would've been smarter to keep the whole thing entirely under wraps to avoid the embarrassment to the party and the second-place contender. Honestly, per something Charlie Pierce wrote, if the roles had been reversed and it had been Clinton's data director who exploited the breach, you can bet the DNC would've pulled out all the stops to making sure it never saw the light of day, given Clinton's ongoing email scandal. Yet it seems like it's okay to go public when the culprit is a non-Clinton. The next several days should decide whether this is a standard punitive action by the DNC or a flagrant attempt to muffle the Sanders campaign going into the holiday break. Ultimately, however, it seems like a series of mistakes by both the Sanders team and the DNC -- mistakes that can only wound the Democrats in the face of an almost suicidal GOP field.

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